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19660	----	MAN OF MANY MINDS by E. EVERETT EVANS PYRAMID BOOKS, 444 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York A Pyramid Book, published by arrangement with Fantasy Press Pyramid Books edition: November, 1959 Copyright, (c) 1953, by E. Everett Evans All Rights Reserved _Printed in the United States of America_ _This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended between any character herein and any person, living or dead; any such resemblance is purely coincidental._ * * * * * To Thelma, a wedding anniversary present * * * * * GALAXY IN DANGER! Somewhere, somehow, the first moves have been made--the pattern is beginning to emerge. Someone--or something--is on the way to supreme power over all the planets held by Man. And the Inter-stellar Corps is helpless to meet the threat--no normal man can hope to penetrate the conspiracy. But--the Corps has a man who isn't normal, a man with a very strange weapon... ..._his mind_. Exciting! Strange! Extraordinary! One of the most unusual science fiction adventures ever published. Chapter 1 Cadet George Hanlon stood stiffly at attention. But as the long, long minutes dragged on and on, he found his hands, his spine and his forehead cold with the sweat of fear. He tried manfully to keep his eyes fixed steadily on that emotionless face before him, but found it almost impossible to do so. Tension grew and grew and grew in the room until it seemed the very walls must bulge, or the windows burst to relieve the pressure. The cadet felt he could not stand another minute of it without screaming. Why didn't that monster say something? What kind of torture was this, anyway? And why was he here in the first place? He couldn't think of a single reg he had broken--yet why else would he be called before Admiral Rogers, the dread Commandant of Cadets? In spite of his utmost efforts to stand eye to eye with the commandant, Hanlon couldn't keep his gaze steadily on that feared visage. His eyes insisted on straying, time after time, although he always forced them back. He caught glimpses of the dozens of communicator studs and plates on the huge metal desk. He saw the bit of scenery showing through the window. He noted the pictures of great Corps heroes that adorned the walls. In fact, he had to look at anything except those boring, impassive eyes fixed so steadily on his own face. If only he could gain such perfect control of his nerves. If only he knew what this was all about! By the big wall chronom he saw he had already been standing there at rigid attention a full five minutes. The second hand crept around again. Six minutes! It dragged slowly around once again. Seven minutes. Then the unbearable silence was mercifully broken by the admiral's voice. "In some ways, Mister, you're quite a stupid young man," he said. "I'm inclined to be disappointed in you." Hanlon gave a start of surprise, and forced himself to scrutinize more carefully that enigmatic face. "What ... what do you mean, sir?" The stern eyes were still boring into his. But now the cadet thought he could detect a trace of secret amusement behind them. "Why do you torture yourself like this? You know how to find out what it's all about." There was a sinking feeling in George Hanlon's mind. Did that mean what he was afraid it meant? He sent out a tentative feeler of thought toward the mind behind that expressionless face. He expected to find it difficult to do, because of long disuse of the faculty. But he was amazed both at the ease with which the technique returned to him, and with the feeling of warm friendliness he found in that mind--almost like a sort of fatherly pride. He probed a bit deeper, and was aware of assurance that he had done nothing to merit punishment. Indeed, it seemed he could catch exactly the opposite feeling. He must have shown his relief, for the commandant's stern face relaxed into a broad smile, and he lounged back in his big chair. "That's better. At ease, and sit down." Slowly, disbelieving the sudden change, the astonished young cadet gingerly sank onto the front edge of a chair. He had to, his legs were suddenly rubbery. "I ... I don't understand at all, sir." The admiral leaned forward and spoke impressively. "Do you think, Cadet Hanlon, that we would let any man get to within weeks of graduation without knowing all about him?" The young man's eyes widened, and his hands clutched at his knees in an effort to keep them from shaking. "Oh, yes, we know all about you, George Spencer Newton Hanlon," and the cadet's eyes opened even wider at that name. "We know about your talent for mind-reading as a child, and how you suppressed it as you grew older and found how it got you into trouble. We know all about your father's disgrace and disappearance; your mother's death; your running away, and your adoption by the Hanlons, whose last name you assumed." "How ... how'd you learn all that, sir?" "The Corps has its ways. And that's why you're here now. Oh, all the Fifth Year Cadets will be interviewed by myself or my assistants this coming week, to determine their first assignment after graduation. But I called you in today for a very, very special reason. And your ability to read minds is part of it." The cadet drew himself up stiffly. "I'm through with all that, sir, definitely!" The commandant regarded him enigmatically for a moment. "Just what do you expect to do in the Corps, Mister?" "Why, whatever I'm assigned to do, I suppose, sir. Or whatever I can do." "And just how far will you go for the Corps?" The admiral leaned forward and eyed him critically. "All the way, sir, of course." "Don't you believe a Corpsman should use all his abilities in his service?" The question was barked at him. "Certainly, sir." But his eyes showed he realized he had been trapped by that admission. "You're one of the few persons known who have ever actually been able to read another's mind. That's important--very important--to the Corps. _It must be used!_" Hanlon's eyes were still stormy, but he kept his lips tightly closed. The commandant's face grew kindly again. "We know how it got you into trouble when you were a boy, because the other children resented it, and avoided or abused you for using it on them. But now it will be a great assistance to you--and to the Corps. We know you will use that talent wisely, for it has been proven time and again, by test after test, that you are scrupulously honest. You've lost your allowance several times in card games, when you could have read what cards your opponents held, and so won. You have let yourself fail on examination questions you did not know, when you could have read the answers in your instructor's mind." "No, not that, sir," Hanlon shook his head. "I never could read from a mind such specific information as answers to questions or to problems." "I imagine that will come when you start using your talent maturely," Admiral Rogers shrugged indifferently. "But at the moment I want to talk very seriously about your assignment. First, however, I must have your most solemn oath never to reveal what I am about to tell you, for it is our most carefully-guarded secret." "I swear by my mother's memory, sir, never to reveal anything I am told to keep confidential." "Very well. I have been delegated by the High Command to ask you to join the Secret Service of the Inter-stellar Corps." Cadet George Hanlon drew in a sharp, startled breath and half-rose from his chair. "The ... the Secret Service, sir? I didn't know there was one." "I told you it was top secret," Admiral Rogers said impressively. "We believe no one knows anything about its existence outside of the membership of that service, and officers of the rank of Rear Admiral or above." The young cadet sat silent, his eyes on the tips of his polished boots, as though to see reflected there the answer to this astounding new situation that had been slapped into his consciousness. This was all so utterly unforeseen. He had dreamed of doing great deeds in the Corps, of course, but actually had never expected to be assigned to anything but routine work at first. His mind was a chaotic whirlpool of conjectures. How could he fit into such an organization? Why had he been selected? Surely, the fact that as a child he was supposed to have been a mind-reader wasn't enough ... or was it, from their standpoint? After some time he looked up. "I don't know as I'd make a very good detective, sir." Admiral Rogers threw back his head and laughed, breaking the tension. "I think, and so do the top men of the Secret Service, who have studied you thoroughly, that you will soon become one of its most useful members." That was another shock, but out of it grew determination. "Very well, sir, I'll try it." "Good! But not 'try it,' Hanlon. Once you're in, it's for life. And there's one other thing I haven't told you yet. I couldn't, until after you had agreed to join. This may make you change your mind, which you are still at liberty to do." The cadet's throat tightened, and he moistened his lips as he saw the admiral's face grow ominous. "I want you to consider this very seriously," he said slowly, grimly, and Hanlon's probing mind caught the aura of importance in his manner. "Take your time, and figure carefully all the angles and connotations inherent in it, for it will not be an easy decision to make." He paused impressively. "Here it is, cold! You'll have to be, apparently, dismissed from the Corps in disgrace. That is horribly harsh, we know," he added quickly, compassionately, as he saw the look of dismay that whitened the cadet's face. "But we have found over the years that it is the best way to make members of the SS most valuable to us. Every one of them has gone through the same thing, if that is any encouragement or consolation." Young Hanlon's spirits sank to absolute nadir. "Not ... not even graduate?" he whispered, agonizedly. "Not publicly, with your class, no. But you'll be given private graduation, for you'll still be a member of the Corps." He was silent again to allow the young man to recover a bit, then continued in a fatherly voice. "We know it's a terrible price to ask any man to pay. It takes guts to withstand, publicly and willingly, the dishonor, the loss of friends and the good will of people who know you. It means life-long disgrace in the eyes of the public and those members of the Corps who have ever known you or will hear of you." The blood drained from Hanlon's face, his breathing was quick and rasping. The admiral's heart went out to him in sympathy, but he had to keep on. Now, though, he tried to soften the blow. "Yet there are rewards in honor from those who do know. There will come a deep satisfaction from the years of devoting your life and abilities to the tremendous service of maintaining peace and security for all mankind of the entire Federation of Planets. Actually, the SS does more to keep that peace than all the rest of the Corps. So these things are, in the estimation of those who have gone through it, well worth any pain and humiliation they have to suffer." His tone was so kind that Hanlon found a measure of comfort in the looks and attitude of the officer before him, now suddenly not a dread ogre, and martinet, but a kindly, fatherly, understanding friend. George Hanlon sat with downcast eyes, thinking swiftly but more cogently than he had ever done before. He had come into this room still a boy despite his twenty-two years. Now, abruptly, he was roughly forced into manhood. As such an adult, then, he quickly realized this was the crucial point in his life to date--probably in all the years to come. But to lose the respect and friendship of everyone he knew--he shuddered. To be despised, an outcast! Yet Admiral Rogers said all the SS men had gone through it, and now felt it worth all the pain and disgrace, to be able to do the work they were doing. He had been trained all his life, and especially in Corps school, to scan all available data for and against each problem that arose, and then make a decision quickly and intelligently. He rose to his feet and straightened determinedly. "I'll still take it on, sir, if you and the general staff think I'm worthy and will be useful." The admiral rose swiftly and came around the desk to grasp the cadet's hands in both of his. "I'm proud of you, my boy. It took real strength of character to make that decision. I'm sure you will never regret it, though there'll be moments when it will hurt to the pit of your soul, especially the first few days." The cadet's eyes clouded again, and he shivered convulsively. "That part's got me in a blue funk, no fooling. Do you suppose I can take it, and not give the show away?" Again the commandant's hearty, friendly laugh boomed out, filling the office with merriment and honest pride. "By Snyder, you will, Son, like a thoroughbred!" He went back behind that great desk, and was suddenly once more the strict disciplinarian. "Cadet Hanlon, 'ten-shun!" he barked. The young man stood rigid. "Raise your right hand. Do you swear before the Infinite Essence to uphold, with all your abilities, the Inter-Stellar Corps, and the laws and decisions of the Federated Planets?" "On my honor, sir, and with God's help, I pledge allegiance to the Inter-Stellar Corps and to the people and governments of all the Federated Planets!" Hanlon came to a punctilious salute, which Admiral Rogers returned as precisely before resuming his seat. "Senior Lieutenant George Hanlon, at ease." He grinned companionably at the young man's start of surprise. "Promotions are swift in the Secret Service, Hanlon. Now, go through that door. There you'll meet your immediate superior officer, who will give you instructions. And Hanlon, my sincerest personal good wishes. Safe flights, Lieutenant." "Thank you, sir, for everything." Chapter 2 Senior Lieutenant George Hanlon opened the designated door and stepped through into the next office. A grey-haired man, wearing the Twin Comets of a Regional Admiral, was sitting behind a desk, studying some papers. He continued sitting thus, the papers held so they hid his face, apparently so intent on his work he had not noticed anyone entering. But Hanlon instinctively knew better, and stood stiffly at attention, awaiting the other's pleasure. Soon the man lowered the papers ... and Hanlon gasped, "Da...". His mouth snapped shut, and his eyes became swiftly hostile at remembrance of the hate he had carried all these years on account of this man. He wanted to stalk out, but ingrained discipline chained him to the spot. His voice, though, was very cold when he spoke. "Senior Lieutenant George Hanlon reporting, sir." The big man was a startling older edition of the newly-appointed lieutenant, only grey where the latter was blond, assured from long, bitter experience where the other was as yet untried. Now he rose to his feet, acknowledging the salute. "At ease. I can imagine your surprise at seeing me," and if there was a hurt look on his face at sight of that implacable hatred in his son's eyes and demeanor, he could not be blamed. "However, I think your experience of the past hour might have prepared you for sight of me in uniform. Yes," as he saw the sudden surprise in the young man's eyes, "that was the reason for my apparent disgrace. I hope you will forgive me, now that you know why it was necessary." "Of course," stiffly punctilious, "only," his eyes were still hard and stormy, "was it important enough to break mother's heart?" The older man's voice grew soft and shook with genuine emotion. "You and everyone had to believe that, Spence, all these years. I've been prayerfully waiting for the day when I could explain to you. I can assure you, Son," with all the sincerity his voice could carry, "that she did not die of a broken ..." "I know bet ..." "You do not know better!" his father interrupted sternly. "Please wait until I finish explaining. No, Spence," his voice was still, emphatic but softer now, almost pleading. "She knew and approved. Your mother was one of Earth's greatest heroines." Hanlon was still standing stiffly, but now his eyes clouded with mixed emotions, of which doubt predominated. His mind touched that of his father, and he seemed to read truth there. But could he believe this now ... after all those dreadful years? "Actually," his father was continuing, "your mother had become a victim of multiple sclerosis. When we knew she had less than two months to live, I talked to her, with the Corps' permission, about my going into Secret Service work. With her death so near, it could be done convincingly. Believing you would understand some day, and approve, she agreed. I'm terribly sorry for all you've had to suffer during the intervening years. Again I beg forgiveness." As his father talked, Hanlon's eyes and heart gradually lost their hardness, and at the end he ran forward and grasped the other's hands. "Oh, Dad, I'm so sorry. I've hated hating you. If it hadn't been for the long talks Pa and Ma Hanlon had with me, I don't believe I would ever have gone into the cadet school." The older man hugged his son hungrily. "Believe me, Spence, it wasn't easy for me, either. But I didn't actually desert you, even though it had to seem so. I know everywhere you've been, everything you've done. You've been watched over constantly. I engineered your adoption by the Hanlons--he was a retired Corpsman, you know--and I've paid your expenses. You see, I happen to love my son very much." "And I loved my Dad so, too. That's why it hurt ... say, now I can change my name back, can't I? The Hanlons both died since I started cadet school, you know." "Well ... no, for the time being I think not. You're well known as 'Hanlon' now, and you'd better leave it that way, for now, at least. However, you'll find need of an alias from time to time in this new job--you can use it then. I certainly will be proud to have you wearing my name again." But both men were shying away from all this frank expression of their emotion, and Hanlon dropped back a pace. "How does it happen I've never seen you around the buildings or grounds here?" "No one ever sees me in uniform, except in this or some other Base office on special occasions. Outside, I'm always disguised. When I come into a Reservation I'm a bearded janitor or something. You'll soon learn about disguising, yourself." Then he became all business, and his face sobered as he went back to his desk. "Sit there, Lieutenant. There's a lot to tell you, and you are to pay strict attention and get it all in this one interview, for there can't be another at this time. It would attract too much attention for you to be called here more than this once." He smiled again, with a warm, fatherly pride. "First, let me congratulate you, officially on your decision, and to welcome you sincerely into the Secret Service." Hanlon bowed in acknowledgement, then sat down and leaned forward attentively. "I'll try to get it all, sir." "First, the matter of your dismissal. It will come some time within the next few days, but even I won't know ahead of time when or how it will happen. Some SS man unknown on Terra will be called in to attend to it. But when it does come you will recognize it almost instantly, and you must play it up big. Don't let on in any way that you suspect or know it is anything but genuine. You must impress on your fellow students, and upon everyone else you know or later come to know, that it was real, and that it has soured you for all time on the Corps, and on all law and order and government." The young man nodded, but said nothing, for his throat was clogged and his spirits quailing at thought of that public disgrace. He had been so proud here ... how could he possibly stand giving it all up? Maybe he was a fool ever to have agreed. But the admiral was continuing. He shoved a sheaf of bills across the desk. "Here's a thousand credits. Use them to buy your civilian clothes and kit after your dismissal. Buy a few shares of some stock, too--the amount or value doesn't matter. Get a small insurance policy. Yes," seeing his son's questioning look, "there's a reason. "After you get your clothing and things and have discarded your uniform, go rent a hotel room, then go to the Inter-Stellar bank and rent a safety deposit box. That's one of the first things you do in each city on any planet to which you may be sent on assignment. Now, here are two keys that fit box number 1044 in all the I-S banks. They are special master keys of our own designing. Box 1044 is used because of its nearness to those private booths, in the universal set-up all I-S banks use. That box is our means of confidential communication. "After you get into the vault ostensibly to get into your own box, use these to open box 1044. There's a little electronic gadget in each box 1044. When you want immediate service on anything you put into the box, press the red button on the mechanism. Go back a few hours later and it will have been attended to. So now, when you get into the bank, put a note there listing your hotel room number and also your new deposit key number. Come back in a couple of hours and you'll find a key that will have your box number stamped on it, but which will open both boxes. Then leave your old key and one of these in 1044, and carry the other and the new one." "Oh, I see. The stock and insurance policy in my own box are decoys, eh?" "Right. You put all your reports in box 1044, and get your orders there. We all use 1044, so just sort through the envelopes for any with your name on them. The same key also locks the sound-proof and spyray-proof cubicle in the vault, so no one, not even another SS man, can interrupt you unless you want to let them in." "My own box for decoy; 1044 for service matters; key fits both boxes and cubicles; red button for quick service. Yes, sir." "When you get to a new city or planet, put your local address there as soon as feasible. That's your one sure contact. Also, in each box you'll find quite a lot of money at all times. You take what you need for expenses and get your salary that way. If your job calls for more than is in the box at any time, leave a request and press the red button. More will be brought immediately." "That's quite a trust, sir," Hanlon gulped. "I hope I'll always use it wisely." His father nodded and smiled. "You will, Spence. We wouldn't have asked you to join us if we weren't sure. As your father, I'm mighty proud to have you for a son. As Assistant Chief of the SS, I feel sure you'll be a credit to us. "Now," all business again, "a sleep instructor and some reels of the language and other information about Simonides Four will be delivered to your hotel room. Simonides Four is your first assignment. There's something fishy going on there we haven't been able to find out about, but we think you can get us some good leads. "Don't try to handle it alone--just get us information. And, son, use your talent for reading minds. I heard over the intercom all you said to Rogers, and while that wasn't the only reason you were asked into the SS, believe me, it will be tremendously important in your work with us--it'll help us where no other agent can get to first check station. And I have a feeling, too, that you'll develop both that and many other mental abilities once your mind starts to hit the ball. You'll find in this work every single talent and ability you can develop will be useful and needed." "Yes," Hanlon nodded slowly, "I'm beginning to realize that. I'll practice a lot." "As for money, don't be niggardly--spend what you like and always carry quite a bit with you for emergencies. Live well, although not extravagantly unless the occasion of your work demands it. Not to save money, but to remain as inconspicuous as possible." "The Service has it all thought out, hasn't it?" Admiration shone in the young lieutenant's eyes. "They've had a lot of years for it, Spence. Now, there's another means of contact, for cases of emergency. Get word to, or an interview with, any officer of the rank of Rear Admiral or above. The words 'Andromeda Seven' are the passwords to let him know who and what you are. Once you've made that contact, commandeer anything or any service needed to assist your work." "I understand, sir." Hanlon strained to review all this new knowledge quickly. Then, "I'm sure I have it all. Get civilian kit; hotel room; stocks and insurance; deposit boxes--my own and 1044; sleep-learn Simonidean; 'Andromeda Seven'." "Correct. Now, you'll be interested in a little of the background of the Secret Service. It was John Snyder himself who organized it, shortly after the formation of the Snyder Patrol. He realized almost at once that such an unknown, undercover echelon would be a must. There's usually not more than two hundred of us. New members are taken in only as replacements, or when some Corpsman with a special ability, such as your mind-reading, is discovered. "We work anywhere throughout space when there's a need, but there are usually one or two of us on each planet of the Federation at all times. When not on any special assignment we keep busy on some planet not our original home, checking the background of cadets or especially-appointed government workers, guarding VIP's, and such other vital matters. But whatever we are, or whatever we are doing, we _are_ the Corps! "We are mighty proud of the fact that no SS man has ever betrayed his trust, even to save his life. Our work is dangerous in the extreme, but without exception we are all men with high mental ability--quick-thinking, clever, and unusually adept at getting out of scrapes." He grimaced mirthlessly. "We learn that last mighty quick in this business ... if we last. "And to all of us, our dangerous, unadvertised, publicly unrecognized work is personally highly satisfying. We know we are the guardians of the peace of the Federation, even though we get no hero-worship from the populace who don't know we exist." Hanlon nodded slowly, thoughtfully. "One thing puzzles me, Dad. You and Admiral Rogers both spoke about how secret all this is, yet I was given the chance to back out after I knew about it." His father grinned. "Several have, over the years. They underwent treatment to erase that knowledge from their mind." He stood up and came around the desk to where his son had also risen. "I may not see you again before you leave, Spence ... George, I mean," he smiled ruefully, then brightened. "But the best of luck, son, and keep in mind that you have the honor of the finest body of men in the Universe in your keeping, and always try to be worthy of the trust." "I will, sir," gravely. "It seems almost too much responsibility for a cub like me, and I'm scared. But I'll do my best." "Take it easy at first. Don't try too much, and don't put yourself in any more danger than you have to until you learn the ropes, which you will, faster than you may now think. On this assignment, all we ask is that you try to get us some leads we can work on." "Right! I don't want to conk out too soon, now. I've got a lot of living I want to do first, especially now I've got my dad back again. I sure hope we manage to see each other fairly often." "Oh, we undoubtedly will, except when one or the other of us is on a long job. We'll meet--somewhere--quite often." "About this assignment of mine, Dad. Can you give me any dope on it?" "You'll get what any of us know, from the reels, and the latest development from the box when you're ready to start out. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. The paper we use is a digestible plastic, so make a meal off all orders and confidential communications you receive. The box always contains a supply for your reports or requests for specific information or assistance." "Saves money on feed bills, eh?" His father grinned appreciatively, then sobered. "Make sure you understand each step you take first, and don't try to run until you know how to crawl. Well, safe flights, Spence." "Safe flights to you, too, Dad, always. And I want you to know I'm so glad to have all those horrible misunderstandings and hates cleared away." "I missed my boy, too. But 'vast rewards', you know." With mixed sensations of high elation and worried fear, the swiftly-maturing young Corpsman walked slowly through the beautiful park that surrounded the great stainless-steel skyscraper that housed the cadets during their training period. His thoughts were as twisted as were the meandering paths and walks he trod so unseeingly. Chapter 3 As Hanlon entered his dormitory room, his roommate looked up from his studies. "What'd the Big Brass Bull want, Han?" "Huh?" Hanlon snapped out of his abstraction and grinned. "Nothing important. You'll be up soon. Just about our first assignments after graduation." He was thinking swiftly. "... Uh, I get some extra instruction in piloting, and a chance at the controls." "Gee, I hope they let me work on codes." Hanlon shrugged. "They probably will, Dick. They try to fit us where we can do the most good, Rogers said." He picked up a book and sat down, apparently studying intently, and young Trowbridge resumed his own lessons. Hanlon began practicing his mind-reading at every opportunity. At first he felt sure he would be caught at it, but quickly remembered that, as a child, his victims never suspected they were being mentally invaded unless he told them or acted carelessly upon information so gleaned. Yet it had been his naive, boyish pride then, that had made him boast to his playmates of his ability, and prove it by telling them things he had learned about them. All that, naturally, got him into much trouble and not a few fights, and caused the loss of all his early boyhood friends. That was why he had quit using his wild talent and had been so determined never to do so again, as he had first told Admiral Rogers. But now he realized he must use it with all the ability and skill he could acquire. For this mind-reading, whatever of it he could do, was decidedly his dish. The SS would be sure to hand him all the jobs where it might best get them what they needed--if he showed he could produce. Yet with his present equipment Hanlon knew he could do little. As he had also told the commandant, he couldn't actually read anyone's mind to the extent of getting definite wording or specific information. But he could get quite clear sensory impressions that helped him deduce what the other person was thinking. He had partially learned--and now practiced with all his abilities and gained knowledge and intellect to improve and perfect the technique--to gauge the other's looks, glances, facial expressions, muscle movements, sudden tensenesses, and so on. For those, together with the mood-impressions and bits of fleeting thoughts, enabled him to know almost to a certainty what the other was actually thinking at the observed time. In the barracks, later that first evening, he got into a card game and concentrated on trying to win by this method. Nor was it consciously that he chose a game being played for low stakes--he just wouldn't have thought of trying to win large sums by such "cheating". For some time he won consistently and easily. He couldn't know what cards his opponents held, by suit or number, but he could tell without any difficulty whether each of the other players felt he had a poor, medium or good hand. By playing his own accordingly, his wins were far greater than his losses. After an hour or so of play had proved he could do it, and had given him considerable practice, Hanlon closed his mind to their impressions. He now played his cards so recklessly he soon lost his winnings. Then he got out of the game on a plea of having to study. The next morning during first class, the door opened and Admiral Rogers entered the classroom. "'Ten-shun!" the teacher called, springing to his feet. "As you were. I want to borrow one of your young gentlemen for the day, Major. A VIP is in town, and we want to give him an aide." He looked about the room, as though to pick out a likely-looking candidate. "How about Cadet Hanlon? Does he especially need today's lesson?" "Oh, no, sir, he's one of our top students." Admiral Rogers looked directly at Hanlon, who had risen to attention when his name was mentioned. "In my office, in full dress uniform, on the double." "Dismiss, Hanlon," the instructor said, and the cadet ran out. In Admiral Rogers' office ten minutes later, Hanlon received his instructions. "Report to the Simonidean Embassy and put yourself at the disposal of Hector Abrams, First Secretary to the Simonidean Prime Minister. But first, hang this stuff on you. This dress sword is a little unusual--the scabbard is rounder than yours, but not noticeably so. It's really a blaster; the trigger is here on the handle as you grasp it. Put on these aide's aguillettes--the metal tips are police whistles. No," seeing Hanlon's questioning look, "we don't expect any trouble today--these are just routine, for we like to be ready for emergencies." Hanlon fastened the braided cords to his shoulder tabs, and belted on the twenty-inch-long blaster-sword. The admiral touched a switch on his desk and spoke into a microphone. "My personal car to take Cadet Hanlon to the Simonidean Embassy, then return." At the Embassy, Hanlon reported to the receptionist, and was shown with due deference into one of the private offices, where he was introduced to several men, among them the Secretary he was to accompany. "I have a number of errands to do today, but the first and most important is laying the cornerstone of our new Embassy building--this one is merely rented, you may know." "I am entirely at your disposal, sir," Hanlon saluted crisply, and fell into step just behind the portly statesman as he left the building. They rode in an open car with a uniformed chauffeur, the others following in other cars. As they rode Hanlon probed the statesman's mind, but found only worry-tension, that he shrewdly guessed had to do with the coming speech, rather than with any thought of intrigue or illegal machination. As they came into the Greek section of the city, their ride took on more and more the aspects of a parade, as the Simonidean was recognized. Hanlon opened his mind wide and attempted to analyze the thought-sensations he received from the crowds. It was one of gaiety and good nature, and reminded him of the way his boyish mind interpreted the thoughts of holiday crowds at the circus, Fourth of July celebrations, picnics, and so on. From the moment he first entered the Embassy, Hanlon had been probing with every iota of his ability, hoping he could find some lead to whatever it was that was bothering the Corps about Simonides, but had found nothing sinister or menacing, nor could he get any such sensations from the crowd. But now he concentrated more on watching the increasingly denser throng of people, for the car was nearing their destination. The buildings along here were all bedecked with Simonidean and Greek-Terran flags, and there was now a continuous cheering from the populace. Abrams was standing in the back of the car now, smilingly acknowledging their plaudits by bowing to one side and the other. Hanlon, sitting stiffly at attention, nevertheless kept his eyes darting here and there, watching as carefully as he could for any possible hostile demonstrations or menacing figures. Arrived at the building site, Abrams was greeted by numerous dignitaries, and escorted with much pomp to the flag-bedecked stand, amid greater cheering from the assembled crowd. The chairman of the occasion stepped to the public-address microphone, and raised his hands for silence. The band broke off in the middle of a number, the cheering from the huge throng gradually died down, and the ceremony got under way. Hanlon, who had taken his post at one corner of the platform, paid scant attention to what was happening on it, as it neither interested him nor could he understand too much of it, even though he knew quite a bit of Greek. Again his eyes were busy continually looking all about the great crowd and the surroundings. Nothing of note occurred until the chairman began introducing Abrams, and then hecklers in the crowd began shouting: "Freedom for the Greeks of Simonides!" "Empires are out of date; let the people rule!" "Demos forever!" These calls were few at first, but the men yelling them were leather-lunged. The chairman's face turned reddish, and he wavered a bit in his speech, then raised his own voice in an attempt to drown out the interruptions. Others were now crying out, though still only a few, but in spite of their shouts the ceremonies continued, and Abrams, properly introduced, rose and began his prepared speech. Hanlon, more alert than ever, could see local police shoving through the crowd, trying to apprehend and silence the hecklers. But from his vantage point Hanlon saw the latter shifting rapidly from place to place, partly to escape detection, he swiftly deduced, and partly to make it seem as though more and more people were joining in the demonstration. In a side glance Hanlon saw that the Secretary was nettled at the disturbance, and his color was high although he bravely continued speaking. The great audience was largely paying attention to him, and must have found him interesting, from their frequent cheers. Suddenly, at one side, there seemed to be a more determined demonstration, and Hanlon tore his gaze from it, remembering his instructor's words: "Disregard specific diversions in one spot! Let the police handle those--you must watch most carefully then for assassins!" Instantly he was more alert, more carefully scanning the whole scene before him, his eyes travelling forth and back. A glint of reflected sunlight from a nearby roof jerked his eyes upward, and at what he saw, with one swift, smooth motion he drew his blaster-sword, sighted carefully, and pressed the trigger. There was a crack of flame, and a gunman half-hidden behind a chimney screamed, half-rose, then, his body charred by the force of that blast, toppled from the roof into the street below, his rifle falling near him. Hanlon swivelled. "Cover Abrams!" his voice rang out commandingly, and he himself jumped in front of the Secretary while others on the platform sprang up to completely surround the Simonidean, and hide him from possible further danger. Hanlon raised one of the tassel-whistles and blew a piercing blast. Now he could see several local policemen running toward the platform, and in moments Abrams, surrounded by an armed and alert escort, was hustled into a waiting police car, which sped back to the Embassy. The Simonidean was white and shaking, upset by the episode. "Why?" he kept asking, but no one had any answers. "I'm not important enough for anyone to want to kill," Abrams shook his head. "The people of Simonides like the empire status--why should anyone here on Terra object?" "There's always crackpots in every crowd," a police captain said. "We get riots like this one almost every time there's a public ceremony. Most of 'em're plain nuts--once in a while only is there one who feels he's got a real grievance, personal." "But with so many participating, this one looked planned," Hanlon objected. "I was higher and watching, and I could see at least a dozen men shouting at the beginning, starting all at the same time, although a lot more took it up. It must have been a plot of some kind." His mind was racing. Was this part of what he was being sent to Simonides to investigate? He had tried to probe the crowd minds, but there were so many conflicting thought-emanations, such a welter of sensations he wasn't able to isolate any single, individual moods or thoughts. Safely back inside the Embassy, Abrams seemed to relax a bit. He turned now to Hanlon. "My very sincere thanks, young man, for your quickness and alertness in saving my life. I shall be eternally grateful." Hanlon waved his hand deprecatingly. "It was my job, sir. I'm sorry your day was spoiled that way." "I still can't make out why?" The Simonidean said slowly, and Hanlon, probing, could sense that his mind was full of question marks. "I'm not that important. If it had been the emperor"--Hanlon caught an impression of loyalty and love for that dignitary--"or even the Minister"--here he caught a feeling of doubt and some dislike--"it might make sense. Just as I cannot figure out why I should have been sent here for this purpose. It's almost ..." he was silent, and Hanlon's probes found only puzzlement. "Nuts!" the young Corpsman felt frustrated. "If only I could really read minds! I think this guy knows something I want to learn, but I can't get the least idea of what it is." But he kept trying, and not only with the mind of this one man he had been sent here to guard. He reached out to all other minds in the room, but none of them seemed to have any thoughts about the why of this unexpected happenstance. There were mostly feelings of anger that their beautiful new Embassy building had not been properly dedicated, and their ceremony ruined. Abrams had sunk into a chair, and it soon became apparent to Hanlon that he wasn't planning on handling any of his other outside errands that day. "Will you want me any more, sir?" he finally asked after a considerable period of uneasy fidgetting. The Simonidean broke out of his abstraction, and rose to his feet. "No, I shall stay here for the balance of the day at least. You may as well return to your other duties. Again, thank you, personally, for saving my life, and please express my thanks to the Corps for sending you. But I still can't understand ..." He turned away, muttering. Hanlon saluted the other members of the Embassy staff, and rode the slideways back to Base, reporting to Admiral Rogers, to whom he gave a full and concise account of all that had happened. "Whatever Mr. Abrams and the police may think, I still believe it was all carefully planned," he concluded thoughtfully. "It wasn't just one man, for I could see at least a dozen. Though, of course," he added quickly, "one man may have been behind it." "Undoubtedly," the admiral said. "There was the chance of something like this, which is why I picked you for the job, hoping you could get some leads from it." "I told you I couldn't read specific thoughts or information," Hanlon said. "If you and the top brass picked me for the SS because you thought I could, you'd better release me from it. I can't work in a crowd at all, for there's such a jumble of thought-emanations I can't separate them. Even working with an individual I can only sense something of his feelings. Just as now," he grinned mirthlessly, "you're disappointed because I didn't get any data, and thinking my so-called mind-reading is all a fake." The admiral almost jumped. "Why, I am not ...," then he looked surprised, and laughed. "By Snyder, I was, too!" He sobered. "But if you can do that, even if you can't actually read the words of the thought, you'll still be able to help, I'm sure. No, you keep on studying. I'll bet you'll be able to do a lot more before long." "I sure hope so," Hanlon slowly unfastened the aiguellettes and removed the sword and belt, laying them on the corner of the big desk. At touch of that weapon he suddenly realized what he had done with it, and shuddered, while his face grew white and strained. "What's the matter?" the admiral asked anxiously. "I ... killed ... a ... man," Hanlon trembled. "No! You killed a snake!" Admiral Rogers laid his arm comfortingly about the younger man's shoulders. "It isn't the same at all. Don't let it bother you." Hanlon tried manfully to rise from his dark mood. "You're right, in a way, sir, and I'll try to look at it that way. As to the mind-reading, I'll keep on trying, and I hope I can prove of some use." The admiral patted his shoulder encouragingly. "You will. Dismiss." Chapter 4 The cadets were all keyed up about graduation, now so near, and most of them were cramming at every opportunity on the subjects in which they felt themselves deficient. Such tenseness is natural before any final examinations, but in their case more so than it would have been in an ordinary school or university. For not until the final marks were posted from these last examinations, plus their marks for the entire five years, would any of them--except Hanlon, of course--know for a surety that he would be graduated and become a permanent member of the Inter-Stellar Corps. And how intensely each of them wanted to belong! Four days had now passed since George Hanlon's fateful interview with the Commandant of Cadets, and its unexpected outcome. He could hardly believe, even yet, that he was now actually a member of the unknown Secret Service of the Corps. Only the great inner joy he knew at the recovery of his once-adored dad, and the complete dismissal of all those black hatreds, gave proof that it wasn't all a fantastic dream. Hanlon hadn't experienced anything unusual in the cadet routine, and was growing more and more nervous as to just what was to happen to him. He still shivered every time he thought of that coming, dreaded ordeal. And all this waiting, this worrying, this wondering when--it wasn't making life any easier. If only they would get it over and done with! But he strove to compose himself for it as best he could, and it was a measure of his inherent stability that he never let his comrades, even his roommate, see how apprehensive he was. Now the day had come for the first of their finals. Hanlon never worried about exams, for he had always been near the top of his class. Now, especially, since he was already graduated and a Senior Lieutenant, he could have taken things easily. But pride in his scholarship made him anxious as always to do his best. Their first examination was History, one of Hanlon's pet subjects, for he loved this story of Mankind, his ups and downs and gradual growth. When the examination papers were handed out and he noted the first question he smiled. If only they were all that easy. _"Give briefly a resume of the events leading up to the formation of the Inter-Stellar Corps."_ Hanlon uncapped his writo, and began: "In the middle of the Twentieth Century the various governments of Earth were all tending toward either a totalitarian or a welfare-form state. More and more power became vested in the Executive branch; more and more citizens were either working directly for government, or were supported by relief funds. Business was, to an increasingly greater extent, stifled by over-control. Public debts became a staggering load, and workers had less and less of their income available for living needs. "When atomic energy was first released by the United States, in the form of a bomb during a war, the military took complete control of it. Neither private nor industrial scientists or technicians were allowed to experiment with possibilities of getting power directly from atomic fission. "In 1958 a young man named Travis Burkett was elected to the United States Congress from California. During his four terms as member of the Lower House he became increasingly well-known as possessor of one of the finest minds in public life. In 1966 he was advanced to the Senate, and soon became its leading member. "In 1976 (prophetic year) he ran for President on the simple platform of 'give the country back to the people'. His ideas and views so fired the minds and hopes of the citizens of America, regimented and ground down by the cancerous growth of bureaucracy, that even most of the bureaucrats and reliefers joined to elect him by one of the greatest pluralities ever polled. "During his two terms of office, with the help of a Cabinet of men who believed as he did, he fulfilled his promises. The tremendous power of the Executive was gradually returned to the Legislative, where it belonged. Unnecessary, over-lapping, and duplicated bureaus and agencies were reduced to the minimum. Only persons actually in need were supported from the public purse. Where almost 80% of the citizenry had been working for or supported by government when he took office, less than 15% were doing so when he retired. "Tax restrictions and governmental meddling in industry and business were reduced save for a few necessary safe-guards of minimum-wage and maximum-safety laws. With these restrictions removed, and with control of so many vital sciences and technologies taken away from the military, inventions took an accelerated up-swing. "The peoples of other countries, fired by the realization of what could be done, staged revolutions, happily largely bloodless, and soon, working through the United Nations Council, a United World government became an actuality, and Burkett one of its first presidents. "An American named John Snyder had, years before, secretly worked out a simple and inexpensive method of obtaining practically unlimited power directly from atomic fission. Now he could legally bring this to the public, and soon homes, public transportation and industry were using his power method. "Snyder attracted to him a group of gifted scientists and technicians. These now turned their attention to space flight and Man, the Insatiable, began stretching out greedy hands to the Stars. "They put a robot rocket on the Moon in less than two years. Their third rocket carried two scientists who did not make the return trip--they stayed to study and to learn. Five years later the first ship landed on Mars, and within a decade that planet was largely colonized. So, two years later, was Venus. Another fifteen years saw colonization of most of the moons of the outer planets. "For, using new techniques and inventions learned from many experiments, the moons and planets were given air, water and warmth as needed. Android robots, developed by Varney, one of Snyder's scientists, helped greatly in this work, especially one young female android who was a true genius. "Then Man reached the Stars ... and the planets of those distant suns. It was here that the now-aged Snyder proved himself again one of the greatest humanitarians ever to have lived. He promulgated the ruling that is still in force: _"'Man must never colonize any planet having inhabitants intelligent enough to show cultural activity and growth'._ "Controlling all means of transportation between planets as he did, because he held all the basic patents, Snyder was able to enforce that ruling. To do so, he organized the 'Snyder Patrol', which later was taken over by the Federated Planets when that organization was formed, and became today's Inter-Stellar Corps. "Today there are fifty-seven planets colonized by former inhabitants of Tellus or their descendants from colonized planets. These each have their own sovereignty and chosen form of government, but are united in a loosely-knit Federation which is solely a Court of Arbitration for Inter-Planetary affairs. The I-S C is the Federation's Investigation and Enforcement branch, not a governing or military patrol." Hanlon had finished that question and the second, which asked for the dates of the war between the colonists of Mars and those of the Jovian satellites. He was resting his eyes by glancing unseeingly about the room momentarily before starting the third question, when he heard the loud, angry voice of the instructor in charge. "Cadet Hanlon, on your feet, sir! Just how, Mister, do you think you can get away with cheating at a final examination?" Hanlon's head jerked up and his face went dead-white as the blood drained from it. He stumbled to his feet and, conscious of the amazed expressions of his classmates, looked up at the teacher. "Bu ... but I don't understand, sir. I wasn't cheating." "Don't lie to me!" the voice was a whiplash. "I distinctly saw you looking at Cadet Fox's paper. The idea of any cadet, this close to graduation, trying such a contemptible thing!" Hanlon's bewilderment was changing to anger at such an unjust accusation, when suddenly a thought struck him ... _This was it!_ Cheating at examinations always meant expulsion and disgrace. He had all he could do to keep from betraying himself as he probed quickly toward the mind on the rostrum. Now he perceived the feeling of commiseration which the stern, hot eyes of the apparently outraged instructor did not reveal. Hanlon remembered his father's instructions to "play it up big". He made himself glare back at the teacher, and his blue eyes took on the hardness of glacial ice. "You're making a colossal mistake, sir," his voice was louder and angrier than it should ever have been. "If our regular instructor was giving this exam he'd never make such an accusation. I've led this class in grades all through school. And not by cheating, either." "Lower your voice, Mister, and don't talk back!" But Hanlon's mind-probing was receiving approbation now. "I saw you cheating, and I know what I saw. Do you want to resign, or will you force me to take you to the commandant?" "I don't know who you are, but you're a stupid fool!" Hanlon apparently lost all control of himself, and his voice and red face showed the anger he was simulating so well. "If you think you're going to frame me out of this class and out of graduating, you're a confounded idiot! Ask any of these chaps here--they all know I'm not a cheat." But the cadets, though puzzled and dismayed, were far too clever to get mixed up in this unexpected brawl. They all sat, eyes lowered but faces straight ahead, arms folded across their chests, having no part in it at all. The examining instructor, a man much larger and heavier than Hanlon's five feet eleven inches and one hundred and seventy-five pounds, rushed down from the platform. He grabbed at the cadet's arms, but Hanlon swivelled away, then stepped back in and struck at the officer. That was mutiny! It was unthinkable for a cadet to strike an officer, under any circumstances or provocation. The teacher, however, snared the cadet in a neo-judo hold that no neophyte, however skilled or strong could break. He dragged the struggling Hanlon up to the rostrum and, with his elbow, activated the intercom. "Ask the commandant to come to room 12-B. A cadet, caught cheating at examinations, has mutinied." Still holding the struggling, angry Hanlon, the instructor-officer excoriated his victim for such breach of cadet honor. Hanlon, meanwhile, yelled insults and oaths. He twisted and squirmed as though trying to escape, although he had quickly realized he was now being held in a loose though apparently-valid grip he could have broken easily had he so desired. Yet during all this Hanlon was receiving from the officer's mind the distinct impression that the latter hated what he was doing, yet was approving the way the new SS man was playing his part. Further, Hanlon sensed he was being welcomed into the fellowship of those unknown SS men to whom he was now brother. Soon Admiral Rogers, followed by two hulking space marines, came running into the room. "What's going on here?" he barked. Quickly the teacher repeated his charges, while Hanlon yelled denials and vituperations at the moronic imbecile who dared accuse him of such treachery. "I'm ashamed of you, Hanlon!" the admiral said coldly. "We had high hopes for you, as I told you when I interviewed you about your initial assignment." "Then why don't you listen to me instead of taking the word of this slime-snake who calls himself an instructor? Bah! He oughta be digging ditches!" "That'll do!" Disgust showed on the admiral's face as he gestured to the marines, who jumped forward and grabbed Hanlon's arms, twisting them behind his back and handcuffing them. "George Hanlon, you are hereby officially dismissed from the Inter-Stellar Corps' Cadet School!" So saying, Admiral Rogers ripped all identifying symbols from Hanlon's uniform, then turned again to the marines. "Take him outside the Reservation." They hauled Hanlon, still shrieking and cursing, out of the room, out of the building, across the park, and to the gate of the Corps' property. There his handcuffs were removed, and the sneering marines literally and not-too-gently booted him into the street, where he sprawled face downward in a muddy puddle. Hanlon pulled himself erect, apparently mad clear through. He shook his fist at the grinning marines gathered just inside the gate. He cursed them fluently with every foul oath and name he could remember ever having heard. Innately clean of speech and thought, this swearing nearly gagged him. But he was "putting on a good act." They stood his insults for some time, but when he began to get too personal, a couple of them started toward him, their mocking laughter gone. To "make his act better," Hanlon now pretended to be frightened, cowardly, and accompanied by the jeers of the civilian on-lookers who had quickly congregated to see what all the rumpus was about, he fled down the city street away from the Reservation. At first opportunity, after he had outdistanced his pursuers, Hanlon ducked into an alley. He ran down this until he spotted the back door of a little cafe, and dodged inside. There, in the washroom, he cleaned himself as best he could. Again somewhat presentable, he left by the front door and rode the slideways to a section of the city where he could buy some good but not too expensive clothing. Now inconspicuously dressed, he got a hotel room, then went to the bank where he bought some shares of stock, arranged for insurance, and rented a deposit box. Chapter 5 In the hotel room assigned him, George Hanlon threw himself on the bed and for an hour lay there reviewing this sudden, strange turn of events, and all it presaged. He tried in vain to thrust out of his mind the astonished consternation of his classmates, the sneers of the marines and the jeers of the civilians there at the gate, who had seen his disgrace. Almost in tears now, he realized at last this was but a prelude to years of being scorned and vilified as a despised outcast. Finally he calmed a bit, then got up to pace the room, wondering what the next move would be. The answer came almost at once. A rap on the door disclosed a messenger with a package for him. On opening it, after the man had gone, Hanlon found the sleep-instructor and reels. On top was a smaller reel marked, "No. 1. Listen to this awake." He plugged in the machine, and put on the reel. It was his father's voice. "You've got this far, now begins your real work. You should be able to memorize the contents of these reels in two weeks. Briefly, here is what they contain. Simonides Four was colonized under the direction of a Greek merchant who gave it his name. Four is the only habitable planet. Most of the original inhabitants under him were of his nationality, and the present language is an outgrowth of modern Greek, which you know somewhat. There are now, of course, many variations and new words, terms peculiar to their growing and evolving culture. The reels give all this more fully. "The last reel tells their history, geography and economic situation as of today. Also, details about their various large cities, especially New Athens, their capitol. We believe you will find that city the best place to start your investigations. When you have these reels memorized, go to the bank, get your final instructions from the box, and your money for the trip. "As to the problem, again briefly this is it: In the past year or so Federation agents have sensed a movement there, but have not been able to interpret it. Whatever it is, it is very, very secret--the agents can't even tell if it is political, religious, or merely social. Also, they have discovered that many important men, as well as dozens--maybe hundreds--of less important men, have mysteriously disappeared. All this has the smell of trouble for the Federation. "At last the Secret Service was called in. We sent first one man, then a second. They tried to 'bore from within' by joining whatever the movement was. But they haven't been able to get even a start--they've hit it and bounced. The second is still there, still trying. "As a matter of fact, we have no evidence at all, merely a sort of 'hunch', or presentiment, of a plot against the peace and welfare of the Federated Planets. There may be nothing wrong at all, but we don't like to take chances. With your ability to read minds you may be able to find out. We hope so." Hanlon thought the message was ended, but then the voice began again. "I was told you came through your disgrace-scene very well. I know just what you are undoubtedly feeling at the moment, Spence--how sick at heart you are--and I only wish there was some way of easing your pain. But it will pass. "Good luck, son, and safe flights. Take care of yourself. We're all behind you, and by the devious ways you know you can call on any or all of us at need. These reels are all water soluble, so dissolve them in the washbowl and flush down the drain as soon as you're through with each." * * * * * For the next two weeks Hanlon stayed fairly close to his room, studying by day from books obtained at the library the things he was learning at night via the sleep-instructor. The evening of Graduation Day he sat miserably in front of a video screen in his room, watching the broadcast of the stately ceremony of which he would have been a part but for his decision to join the Secret Service. All the longings of the years he had wanted to become a part of the Inter-Stellar Corps; all the hopes and plans he had made during his five long years in cadet school; all the thrilling pride he had known that he was to be a part of the greatest organization in the Universe, swelled inside him and choked him. When, at long last, the class rose to take the Oath of Allegiance, Hanlon found himself on his feet, rigidly at attention, repeating the impressive ritual aloud with them. Now, for the first time, despite his decision and his private graduation, he truly felt himself a vital part of the Corps. * * * * * On the street on his way to the library the following day, Hanlon chanced to meet a small group of his former classmates, now clad in their brand-new dress uniforms of sky-blue and crimson, their new junior lieutenant's bars shining brightly. "Hi, fellows!" he greeted them, only to be met by silent glares of contempt. "Aw, look, fellows, you know I was framed," Hanlon planted himself in front of them, and made himself look hurt, nor was that any effort. This really cut deep. But he had to "play it out"; had to make them keep on thinking his disgrace was real. "You guys know I'd never do anything like that," he continued plaintively. "I didn't cheat--didn't need to. I know I lost my head when he accused me, but anyone'd do that." "You mean you were never caught cheating before," Trowbridge sneered. "You sure had me ... us ... all fooled. Now scram, or else...." He doubled his fists and took a step toward Hanlon. The latter still played out his string, but his heart was sick. He liked the fellows--they had been among his best friends for five long, happy years. Only now was he truly beginning to realize what a tremendous price he was paying ... and would have to pay all his life. He stepped in and swung ... and was instantly the target for flying fists. He was knocked down several times, but always managed to get up again. He had been well trained in fighting of all types--and now he was putting all his knowledge and skill into use--but only for defense and the pretense of attack. Even so he was getting badly mauled, for they were as well trained--and were five to his one. His clothes were dirty and ripped from the knock-downs, and a button was torn off his coat. His knuckles were skinned, and he could feel that his face was becoming a mass of bruises. A hard left connected with his mouth, and he spat out a broken tooth. "'Ten-shun!" a commanding voice suddenly broke in. Instantly the five Corpsmen jumped back and, so ingrained was the training he had received, so did Hanlon, to come at salute as they saw a High Admiral climbing out of a ground-cab at the curb. Hanlon, instantly realizing he wasn't in uniform and was supposedly a discharged Corpsman, quickly dropped his salute and slouched truculently. "What's going on here!" the officer asked icily. "This man's a disgraced cadet, sir. Cheated on final exams," one of them explained. "He tried to talk to us." "It's a lousy lie!" Hanlon rasped. "I was framed. The Corps. Paugh!" he spat in pretend disgust. "I'm getting out of here just as damned quick as I can, and as far as I can. I'll go clear to Andromeda Seven if I can raise enough credits!" Only he, apparently saw the minute widening of the admiral's eyes at that code-word. The officer faced the new lieutenants sternly. "A Corpsman is supposed to be able to handle five civilians, not five Corpsmen to one. If this man is a disgraced cadet, you have a right to feel as you do about him. But leave him alone--the years will bring him more sorrow and pain than you can with your fists. And you, fellow," turning to Hanlon. "Don't think I'm interfering just to save your worthless skin," his tone was one of utmost contempt. "I just don't want Corpsmen fighting on the street. Dismiss." The five saluted smartly and marched away. The admiral winked briefly and with respect at Hanlon before reentering his cab. But as the young man hurried back to his hotel to clean up, he was heartsick, remembering the many, many months of pleasant companionship with those boys. Especially Dick Trowbridge, who had been his roommate and special chum all through cadet school, and who today had seemed particularly disgusted and vicious in that fight. Giving up all that had made life so happy and wonderful was more than a fellow could bear, his bitter thoughts ran. What a fool he had been to let himself be talked into taking this on. Where were all those "vast rewards" his dad and Admiral Rogers had talked about so eloquently? How could anything possibly make up for losing the respect and friendship of everyone he had ever known? However, he had to admit, though still doubtfully, Dad had gone through it even to the point of giving up his son, and those last few weeks with his adored wife, yet now seemed satisfied and content. Maybe ... maybe there was something behind it all, that time would prove. But it was mighty hard to take, just the same. And this throbbing toothache didn't help his feelings any, either. The exposed nerve in that broken tooth made it ache like blazes. He'd better get it fixed before it drove him mad. He started to go out, then stopped with the realization he had no money of his own to pay a dentist for the extraction and a bridge. "What do I do in a case like this?" he wondered. "Is it ethical in such a purely personal matter, to use Corps funds? Dad didn't mention things of this sort. On the other hand, he said we got our salaries and expenses that way. Besides, you could say I lost the tooth in line of duty, and the Corps should replace it." He went on, found a dentist and had the work done. Nor did he ever again feel doubt about spending the Corps' money for things he actually needed ... but neither did he ever spend any on purely personal pleasures or extra comforts save as he needed to do so to play up to whatever position he assumed in the prosecution of his various assignments. Evening, however, found him still with that smothered feeling of self-pity about his fight with the fellows, and it persisted even after he went to bed. By the Shade of Snyder, it wasn't fair to saddle a thing like this on a mere kid. It wasn't until after a couple of hours of tossing sleeplessness that he remembered he hadn't turned on the sleep-instructor. Half-rebelliously, he nevertheless got up and did so ... and that little act broke his mood. He dropped asleep almost immediately after returning to bed. At the end of the two weeks Hanlon felt he knew both the Simonidean language and its customs well enough to start working. He went to the bank and, deviously, to box 1044. Sorting through a thick sheaf of envelopes he found one with his name on it. He took it to one of the cubicles, whose door he locked from the inside, setting up full coverage. As he read there flashed through his mind the background of this other planet's situation. From his knowledge of politico-history within the Federation he knew there was an iron-clad agreement that each planet could choose its own form of government. Most of them chose the democratic form, but some had a type of fascistic state. One or two--the most advanced--even had an anarchistic state, with a very minimum of laws and governing. Simonides had, about a century earlier, reverted to the empire status--the only planet within the Federation to do so. It had originally been colonized as a world-wide republic, but later had broken up into five independent countries, as different sections became populated more heavily with people of other national backgrounds than Greek. These five countries had eventually been recombined, after a spectacular coup, as an empire. Then had come this belief of the Corps that something was brewing there that would affect the peace of the Federation, and the failure of their agents so far to find out about it. Now SSM Hanlon's orders were to take ship to Simonides Four, and seek to learn what he could about these guessed-at conditions as swiftly as possible. If he gained any impressions of who or what group was behind this movement, he was to attempt to join it and ferret out that secret so it could be reported. With such information in their possession, the Corps would know if it was anything inimical to the peace and security of the Federation, and would take the necessary steps. His instructions ended, "The cost of a first class ticket to Simonides is seven hundred and fifty credits, so you should draw enough to have at least fifteen hundred, for all needed expenses. Take the '_Hellene_' which leaves Centropolis spaceport Friday of this week. We have good reason to believe that certain interesting people will be aboard that ship." Hanlon's mind raced. Evidently someone wanted him to see what impressions or evidence he could pick up from those suspected persons. He grimaced as he realized the SS had left it strictly up to him to discover who those "interesting people" were. Perhaps they looked on it as a sort of test. But he thrilled to the sudden awareness of what a wonderfully efficient and competent organization the SS was--how it kept careful watch on all its members, and assisted them in every possible manner. He "dined" on the edible plastic sheets, then left the safety deposit vault. He arranged for his ticket and reservations at the bank's travel agency, then went back to his hotel to pack. Chapter 6 So it was that early Friday morning George Hanlon, still dressed in civvies, of course, arrived at the great passenger liner that was to take him to far Simonides. He was thrilled with the idea of making such a trip, for he loved the deeps of space--its immensity and its fathomless mystery gripped him with a feeling of grandeur. Yet he had never been far outside the Solar system. The latter was not necessary on his training cruises, since all the details of a pilot's job--the branch of the Service he had hoped to enter--were the same for both inter-planetary and inter-stellar travel. It was the navigator's job that was the harder and more complicated on the longer, faster trips to destinations one could not see when blasting off. This "_Hellene_" on which he was to ride was about sixty-five feet in diameter and approximately three times that in length. The propulsion was, the builders and engineers acknowledged, not the ultimate by any means. They were still constantly experimenting and hoping for much swifter travel. Still, they did pretty well. They had some measure of anti-gravity to help lift the ship from a planet. About 22%, Hanlon remembered. They still had to use rockets when near a planet--but these present-day rockets were a far cry from the early crude ones with which Snyder and his men had put first ships on the Moon and planets. These could deliver a thrust far more powerful than those early ones. For long distances they used a type of "warping" that made the ship "skip" along the lines of force that permeate all space. Hanlon had never quite got it firmly fixed in his mind just how this was done, especially the technique of the engines that made it possible. That was "advanced stuff" that the cadets were not taught in their regular courses--it was Post Graduate work for those who were to become Engineering Masters. As he went up the escalator into the ship Hanlon was met at the outer lock by a deck steward who led him toward the level where his cabin was located. This was Hanlon's first time aboard one of these luxury liners--how different the deep-piled rugs, the magnificently frescoed passageway walls, the deeply upholstered furniture, from the utilitarian plainness of the Corps' warships on which he had made his practice cruises. "As you may know, sir," the steward said as they walked along, "there is neither night nor day in space, but we use Terran time on the ship, and lights are turned on and off to conform to the regular Terran day. Breakfast is served from seven to nine, luncheon from twelve to fourteen, and dinner from eighteen to twenty-one." "Thanks." A credit note changed from hand to hand--tipping was still in style. The obsequious steward gave him further directions for finding the games and recreational rooms, and other points of interest aboard. Hanlon unpacked, and stored his luggage in the compact closets and then, having heard the first and second warnings, hastened to the observation desk, to watch the take-off. He had barely reached it and been strapped into the acceleration chair turned to face the long, narrow quartzite port, when the blast-off sirens began screaming their third and final warning. The intra-ship communicators blared, "All passengers and personnel strap in. Five minutes until blast-off ... four minutes ... three ... two ... one ... thirty seconds ... fifteen ... ten ... five, four, three, two, one, BLAST!" Dimly heard through the insulated hull was what Hanlon knew to be a tremendous crescendo roar of sound, and he was pushed deep into the resilient spring-cushions of his chair. A constricting band seemed to be clamped on his chest, while at the same time there was a curious feeling that he should weigh less but didn't. That was the peculiar sensation the combination of anti-gravity and the thrust of the rockers always gave. From experience he knew how to regulate his breathing and to let his muscles and nerves relax as much as possible, so that for him there was but a brief moment of discomfort. Then he was able to watch the scene unfolding before and below him. The ground and that outward splash of almost-intolerable flame quickly dropped away and within minutes the scene expanded until he was able to see hundreds of square miles of city, country and ocean. Soon he could see the distant mountains; but gradually the scene assumed a dimness of detail that persisted until they were far outside the atmosphere. Then the great continental masses became visible as a whole, but without any smaller details apparent. Two and a half hours later they were past the Moon, and began building up the tremendous speed that was to take them across inter-stellar depths in a matter of short days. And as Luna shrank to a small sphere behind them, Hanlon felt the acceleration grow constant, so unstrapped himself and got up. He stretched hugely, to relieve the cramped feeling in his muscles, then turned to survey his fellow passengers. He noticed several men in Corps' uniform, and hoped none of them knew him--or if so, would be good enough not to spread word of his disgrace. That would make the trip uncomfortable, lonely and unproductive, for then it would be better for him to spend most of his time in his stateroom. He thought of those "interesting people" he had been told about ... whatever that tip might mean. For George Hanlon, youngest man ever to be assigned to the Inter-Stellar Corps' Secret Service--although he did not know this until later--had that within him which placed matters of duty uppermost in his mind at all times. Accustomed for nearly half of his life to the conscious task of keeping his mind-reading talent hidden and unused, he now knew he must work at it continuously to bring it up to its highest possible level of efficiency. Only by thus knowing every facet of his ability could he do what had to be done in his new task. He sat down again and closed his eyes in order better to study this problem without outside and extraneous matters interfering. He became awed and a little frightened as he realized fully the weight of his new duties and responsibilities, even though he had been all through this several times before. Somehow, his being aboard ship on his way to his actual work seemed to make this terrific responsibility more weighty. Why must he be burdened with such a load as they had tied onto him? What were the Corps' top brass thinking of, anyway, to put so much on an untried kid just out of school? At last he began to think less of his own burden and to concentrate on seeing what he could pick up mentally. He kept his eyes closed, but opened his mind wide and let the welter of thought-impressions roll in unhindered. There was much laughter and lighthearted gaiety about him, as was natural on such a luxury liner. There was also some fear of space and the emptiness; some actual illness from space-fright. There were many mental undercurrents, and in one or two instances he thought he caught vague hints of sinister intrigue, but was never quite able to isolate these, or to bring them into more distinct focus. Quite evidently the men--or women--thinking such thoughts were able to close their minds to some extent--or else he was too rusty at reading. He realized, too, that they might not be thinking of any such thing--he remembered once when he was a boy he thought he had caught some such thought, then found later it was merely a neighbor reading a story with a sinister plot. Mind-reading, he told himself, was the field in which he would be assigned to work. The Corps and the SS would be sure to hand him all the jobs where other agents had failed, just as they had in this case, in hopes that he could get them some beginning points of contact. So it was up to him to get busy and learn how to do it better. The call for lunch found him still studying, but he was hungry, and went down to eat. He could work there as well as on the observation deck, anyway. Going into the dining room, the head waiter assigned him to a table almost in the center of the large and tastefully decorated room. For some moments he busied himself studying the menu, and when he had ordered he glanced up again at his tablemates. He had been introduced to this matron, and to her son who appeared to be about his own age. He probed briefly, finding her a good sort but a little too impressed with her own importance--new-rich, he guessed. The boy he disliked on sight--he seemed a selfish, pampered brat. So he forgot them and concentrated on letting his mind roam about the great room, seeking information and trying to refine and develop his mind-reading ability. It seemed to him the latter was improving to some extent ... yet realized this could as easily be wish-fulfillment as actuality. After luncheon he returned to the observation deck and there, as the long afternoon slowly passed, he sat in his deck chair, eyes closed, mind wide open. Several times he caught some one thought-impression more distinctly than the general run, and concentrated on trying to trace it mentally; to read it more clearly and minutely. But as he did not have much success, it began to irritate him ... and that made him angrier. "Keep at it, and don't expect miracles," he scolded himself. "Sure, you've got something, but anything--any ability of mind or muscle--needs training and practice to get anywhere!" After dinner that first evening Hanlon went into the recreation hall. There were dozens of tables where people were playing various games. He saw that around many of these other people were standing, watching the play, and knew from this that social custom on the ship did not frown on such silent kibitzing. Therefore, he wandered about until he found a table where four men were playing stud poker. Here he stood, watching the game, but concentrating on the mind of the man opposite him, checking his mental impressions against the man's wins and losses. He couldn't, at any time, actually read in the man's mind what his "hole card" was, he found. But he could quite easily sense from the player's mind whether the latter considered it a good one, a very poor one, or only a possible winner. By watching the play as well as studying the man's feelings, facial movements and muscle twitches or tensenesses, Hanlon was soon able to make some remarkably accurate predictions as to what the card was. By checking his deductions with the card when it was shown, he saw he was gradually coming closer and closer to a perfect score of "reading." * * * * * The next day Hanlon again sat most of the time in the lounge, his eyes closed, letting his mind soak up all the impressions and vibrations he could. When one seemed particularly strong, he tried to follow it and locate the person--with his mind, not his eyes--and read the whole thought. Mostly he found again excitement and pleasure. Almost everyone on board seemed to be having a grand time, and enjoying the trip to the utmost. It was what might be expected--a gay, carefree holiday crowd. Yet there was, occasionally caught, that sinister undercurrent that had so puzzled him since he first sensed it the day before. It was not prominent at any time, nor continuous ... more as though only one or two minds held the thought, and those not in the lounge all the time, but wandering in and out. He tried to analyze the feeling of those thoughts. They were malevolent--that he had sensed from the beginning. And finally, later in the afternoon, the person or persons thinking them evidently spent some time near him in the lounge, for the feeling became much clearer to the SS man. Hanlon still kept his eyes closed. He made no effort at this time to try to identify who was giving out those menacing sensations. That would come later. At the moment he was more interested in trying to work out just what those sinister impressions meant. And gradually his mind was forced to the conclusion that it could mean only one thing--a killing. Hanlon was devoting almost all his mind to this problem when another mental impression intruded, and grew stronger, more demanding of his attention. It was a feeling of sympathetic concern, yet diffident, apologetic. He felt it growing stronger, seeming to be approaching him, to be directed at him. For the moment he left off worrying about the other matter, and watched this new thought. By the instant it was growing stronger, and closer. He knew that, some way. He directed his attention toward what he believed was its source, but idly, half angry at it for interrupting his more important thoughts. It was in front of him ... and suddenly, like a bright, white beam of light, his mind reached out and touched directly the mind holding that thought. Touched it ... it was instantly, unbelievably, _inside_ that mind! He was able, actually, to _read_ the surface thoughts! Clearly, distinctly, as though it were his own mind, Hanlon knew he was one with a deck steward, who had noticed him sitting there all day and the day before, with closed eyes and strained face. (His efforts at concentration must have been too apparent--he'd have to learn to guard that; to keep his face more impassive.) Now the steward was coming to see if he was ill. And at that instant a soft, apologetic voice spoke from in front of him--spoke words he had already read in that mind. "Beg pardon, Mr. Hanlon, sir, but is anything wrong?" He opened his eyes lazily, and let a smile break out as he saw the solicitous face of the white-coated attendant. "Me? Not really. Just a little queazy, but I'm feeling better all the time." "I'm glad. But be sure and call if I can be of any service." "Thank you, I will." Hanlon reached in his pocket and slipped a credit note into the man's hand. And as the steward walked away Hanlon's mind was instantly whirling with this newly-discovered ability. He was astonished and delighted, of course ... but a little disturbed, too. "I was actually inside the guy's mind!" he thought in amazement. "That's a new one! I was never able to do that before. I really read his thoughts! I've got to find out more about this. Let's see, now, how did I do it?" Chapter 7 George Hanlon glanced about the observation deck and saw at some distance the young man who had sat at the same dining table. Hanlon grinned a bit, and directed his mind that way. To the best of his memory, he concentrated on doing the same thing he had done when he got inside the steward's mind. For long, anxious minutes he tried. He felt tense, and the strain made his heart pound. At last he sank back into his chair. "The other was just a fluke, I guess," he frowned in frustration and disgust at himself. "I keep thinking I'm getting good--then _flooie_!" He idly sent his mind towards the boy again ... and suddenly found himself once more within another person's mind. It was a strange, weird feeling ... this getting two sets of thoughts at the same time. Also, Hanlon felt a bit as though he was a trespasser in some forbidden temple. Yet he persevered, trying to see if he could read anything there ... and was disappointed to find he could peruse and understand only the fleeting surface thoughts. With all his might, in every way he could think of, he tried to probe back and beneath those passing thought-concepts, but could get no information whatever of the young man's past or knowledge. Only vacuous, self-centered thoughts which were flowing idly through the youth's mind were available to him. He wondered if he could influence the other to do something. If he could control another's mind--even just a little--it would really help in his work. So he now tried every method his agile mind could imagine, to make the fellow pick up the book that lay beside his chair. He concentrated on it, he insisted, he willed it. But in vain--he could make no impression whatever. Hanlon withdrew his mind. "I've no control," he thought to himself. "I can't take over his mind in any way. Neither can I read his past; just his present thoughts. That's not too bad, although I hoped I had hit the jackpot at last." After some further reflection the thought occurred, "Maybe I can do better with someone else." During the balance of the day he kept trying to read the minds of others of his fellow passengers, but found the same results in each case. He did, however, develop the technique of making a much quicker entrance into a mind--could do that reading more swiftly, and yet know he was correct. "I get it now. I've got to approach it relaxed, not all tensed up like I was at first," he finally realized. But when it came to probing into and reading the whole mind, into its past thoughts and knowledges, no. Just that ... no! Pessimistically he began to feel he wasn't going to be able to do as much with his "mind-reading" as he--and his superiors--had hoped. Did this mean, he wondered disconsolately as he went to his stateroom, that he was to be a failure in the Secret Service? Or, he brightened momently, could he develop other methods of ferreting out information? But that, he told himself honestly, was out. What did he know about detective work? The SS already had the best detectives in the Universe. This dark mood persisted while he went to bed and finally dropped off to sleep. But when he awoke the next morning he felt cheerful again. He had a lot--and he would get more. He ate a good breakfast, then went back to his deck chair and there, resolutely, he opened his mind once more to general impressions. He would keep working at it, and more was bound to come. Look how far he'd advanced already. A lot further than when he had started. And at that, he probably--no, undoubtedly--could do more than any of the other fellows on certain problems. As far as he knew--and Dad and Admiral Rogers had talked as though he were the only one they knew about--no one else could read even surface thoughts. So he kept diligently at it. And very soon, so strongly he deduced the mind must be very close to him, he again found those sinister impressions that had bothered him so much. This time he glanced about, in apparently casual curiosity, yet touched mind after mind of those nearest him. Then hit pay dirt! Why, it was that bluff, hearty-looking, red-headed man in the third chair to his right. He didn't look vicious, that was certain, though there was a grim set to his jaw. Yet his surface thoughts showed the man to be hard, cold and ruthless--a pure killer type. Hanson sensed he was one of those men who have such a will to power that the lives and rights of others are held cheaply, contemptuously. The kind who, if another gets in his way, removes him ... but carefully, lest his own highly-valuable skin be put in jeopardy. If he could get some one else to do the dirty work, so much the better. Such conscienceless killers were, Hanlon knew, usually arrant cowards. There was someone on this ship who was in this man's way--of that Hanlon felt sure. The killer was determined to destroy this other the first chance he got. His mind was now weighing chances and possible opportunities--and Hanlon read and learned. Yes, this must be one of those "interesting people" that unknown SS tipster back on Terra had mentioned. Was the victim another? Probably. For Hanlon had not yet read any thoughts in this killer's mind about any confederates. Hanlon kept close watch on this man and his mind, and picked up many other stray bits of information, including his name, Panek. None seemed of too much immediate importance regarding the matter at hand. Yet they gave the Secret Service man a fairly good picture of the assassin's personality, when pieced all together. Suddenly, and but a barely passing whisper of thought, Hanlon caught the concept that the intended victim's death was necessary to the coup "they" were planning on Simonides. Hanlon was instantly alerted by that planet-name. Perhaps this was a definite lead for him. He strained to get more. The killer thought occasionally of a man he called "The Boss", but not the name of that dignitary, nor his actual position--politically, socially, economically, or otherwise. The SS man fumed inwardly because he could not get a clear picture of that "Boss." This murderer did not have a visual type of mind, darn it. He didn't see clearly in pictorial terms any of the people or scenes about which he thought. Hanlon had been gradually impressed, though, with the realization that this man was very much afraid of his boss. There was a mental shiver every time thought of his employer entered his mind. There was something about a previous failure, and what would undoubtedly happen unless it was done now, but Hanlon couldn't get enough of that to make any sense to him. Again Panek began thinking, though very sketchily, about "Sime", as he called Simonides, and the "plot" that was being hatched there. Hanlon felt the man's sneering contempt for "those beasts"--but could gain no idea whatever about what that reference meant. In so many ways this puzzle seemed to be growing worse instead of better, and Hanlon knew a moment of frustration. But his sense of humor came to his rescue. "You want the whole thing written out for you in black and white?" he jeered at himself. "Snap out of it! Quit being a defeatist." Harder and more intently he tried to probe into the man's mind. Oh, if he could only learn to read below those passing surface thoughts; to follow them down and back along the memory-chains into the total mind! Revealing though the thoughts he could catch were, for complete and swift results he must find the technique of reading a mind completely. If such a thing were possible. But probe as he might, the way to those deeper, buried memories and thoughts continued to remain locked from him. And then Panek got up and left the observation deck. * * * * * A light touch on his knee some time later snapped George Hanlon's eyes wide open, and he looked down to see a small, wriggly dog looking up into his face, its tail frantically wig-wagging signals of proffered friendship, the little tongue making licking motions toward the hand the puppy could not quite reach. "Well, hi, fellow," Hanlon reached down and lifted the little dog onto his lap, where the latter wriggled and contorted in an ecstasy of joy, climbing all over the young man, licking at his hands and trying to reach his face. The puppy was so extremely happy and anxious to make friends that Hanlon was soon laughing almost convulsively while trying to avoid those well-meant but very moist kisses. "Wait now, boy. Take it easy. I like you and all that, but let's not get carried away with ourselves." Hanlon scratched the puppy behind one of its floppy ears, and pressed it firmly but gently down so it was lying on his lap. "That's better. Just lie there and take it easy." A sudden thought brought a grin onto the young man's lips. He tried to get into the puppy's mind ... and got a real surprise. For after a few anxious moments of testing and trying, he did it--actually got the dog's thoughts of pleasure at finding such a wonderful new friend with such a nose-appealing effluvium. Hanlon then tried to see if he could get into the deeper parts of the dog's mind, and using what knowledge of the technique he had deduced in his previous though unsuccessful attempts with humans, found after many more anxious minutes he could follow the thought-and-memory tracks back and back until the dog's whole mind was open to him. The puppy had far more of a mentality than Hanlon had ever guessed dogs had--and he knew they were far from stupid. This one's mind, he could now see, was immature but latently capable. Say, this was great! Hanlon probed some more, and found many sketchy facts--sketchy because the thoughts were incomplete to the puppy, beyond its experience, and not because the man couldn't read perfectly what was there. The dog apparently knew a woman--Hanlon got the impression of skirts--and answered when that goddess called the word "Gypsy." "Gypsy, eh?" Hanlon said aloud, and immediately the dog wriggled from beneath his restraining hand, and again tried to climb up and lick Hanlon's face in a frenzy of adoration. "Lie down, sir, and be quiet!" Hanlon said sternly, and the puppy did so instantly, without question or hesitation. Hanlon thrilled, realizing at once that it was not what he had said that did the trick--but the fact that he was still inside the dog's mind, and that it had obeyed his will rather than his words. "Hey, this needs looking into!" Without saying the words aloud this time, Hanlon commanded the dog--or rather, he impressed the command directly onto the puppy's mind with his own--to get down off his lap onto the deck. Instantly it leaped down. "Lie down." The dog did so. "Roll over." Again silently. But now the puppy merely looked up at him, imploringly, quivering in an apparent emotion of indecision. Hanlon realized the puppy didn't know how to "roll over." "Guess I need to learn how to do it before I can teach, or rather, command, him to do it," Hanlon grinned wryly to himself. For he realized that to do so he would have to learn how to control each of the dog's muscles, and that before he could do that he would have to know what part of the brain controlled the nerves that made those muscles obey his commands. And that, if possible at all, would take one galaxy of a lot of study and practice. For the next several minutes, then, he concentrated in making the puppy do a number of simple tricks, all the time watching carefully to see, if possible, the connecting links between brain, nerves and muscles. He was beginning to make a little headway in understanding this triple co-relation, when he heard a sudden gasp. He looked up to see a young matron standing before him, her mouth and eyes wide with surprise. "Why ... why, Gypsy never did any tricks before. What are you, an animal trainer?" Hanlon leaped to his feet. "The best in the Universe, Madam," he grinned. "That's a mighty fine puppy you have. He came over and introduced himself, and we've been having some fun together." "Yes, he ran off, and I've been hunting all over for him. But how on earth did you ever teach him so quickly?" "It's a gift," Hanlon mocked, then grew serious. "Honestly, Madam, I don't know," he said quietly. "I just seem to have a way with dogs, is all. By the way, would you sell me the puppy?" "Sell Gypsy? No, thanks," and she started away, calling to the dog to follow. But it stood in indecision, looking from one to the other, not seeming to know whether to follow its beloved mistress or to stay and play with this nice new friend. Hanlon quickly reached out to the dog's mind and impressed on it that it must follow the woman, and always do whatever she told it. The puppy then trotted away, content. George Hanlon sank into his deck chair. This required a good think--a mighty serious think--he told himself. He would have to work on this as much as on human minds. For if he could control animals--would it work on birds, or insects? Maybe even fish?--then he could get into places he, as a man, could not go. The lady and dog had disappeared when Hanlon got the inspiration to see if his mind could find them; if he could again contact the dog when it was not in sight, and he did not know exactly where it was. Instantly, effortlessly, it seemed, as though it happened merely because he wished it to, he found himself again inside the puppy's mind. Was it because he already knew that mind's pattern, he wondered? Anyway, there he was, and now he tried to see if he could look out through Gypsy's eyes ... and after much study, he did so. But the vision was so distorted he wondered if his control was at fault, then remembered having heard, or read somewhere, that a dog's eyes do not work exactly the same as a man's. Finally he accustomed himself to them enough so he could see that they were going down a narrow corridor, and then they stopped before a door, which opened after a moment. The dog, without a command, leaped through the doorway into the stateroom and ran to its basket, where it lay, panting, looking up at its mistress. Chapter 8 George Hanlon withdrew from the puppy's mind, and thought seriously. Yes, this matter of controlling the minds of animals was one that would require a lot of thought and study, and a tremendous amount of practice. But it seemed important enough to justify those expenditures. He hunted up his steward. "Where do the passengers keep their pets?" "Some keep them in their staterooms, sir, but others in the kennels down on 'H' deck." "Thanks. Any rules against my going down there and looking at 'em? I like animals, especially dogs." "Oh, no, sir. Anyone can go down there. It's on the right hand side, about halfway aft." Arrived at the kennels, Hanlon found the cages contained about a dozen dogs of various breeds, ages and sizes. Here were plenty of animal minds for his experimentation and study. After walking around and looking at them for some minutes, he sat down on a bench at one side of the cages, and concentrated on the dog nearest him. It was a large white bull, and he guessed its age to be about five or six years. That was just what he wanted--an adult mind to study, not that of an immature puppy. He had no trouble getting into the dog's mind, and for over an hour he sat there, studying it line by line, channel by channel, connector by connector, while the dog lay as if asleep. Gradually Hanlon began to feel he was beginning to know something about a dog's mind-and-body correlation, and how it operated. Then, and only then, he woke the dog and began experiment with control. He found it easy to make the dog do anything he wished that was within the animal's previous knowledge and experience. What he wanted was to see if he could make it perform motions and actions that were outside its previous conditioning and training. After some fumbling, he thrilled to find that now even some of the simpler of those things were not too difficult, although others his present knowledge was not up to handling. His study taught him to some extent how to activate the brain centers which controlled the nerves that sent messages to the proper muscles that allowed the dog to do his bidding. But it still needed a lot of study. He knew he had only made a bare start at learning what had to be known to do it swiftly and easily. The kennel steward must have noticed the strange antics of the bull and then, seeing Hanlon's intent concentration, figured there might be some connection between the two. For he came up to the bench and looked down somewhat hostilely at the man sitting there. But his voice, when he spoke, was very polite. "Anything I can do for you, sir?" Hanlon had been concentrating so deeply he had not heard anyone come up, and the voice, speaking so suddenly right before him, startled and befuddled him. He looked up, and his mind felt sluggish and weak, almost as though he had been doped. "Huh?" he asked stupidly. "I asked," the man's tone was a little sharper, "if there was anything I could do for you?" "Oh, no. No thanks." Hanlon forced himself to pay attention. "I just like dogs and came down here to watch them. Must have dozed off." "Do you have a dog of your own here?" "No, I have no dog at present." "What were you doing to that white bull. He's been acting very peculiar since you've been here." "Me?" Hanlon made himself look surprised. "Why, nothing. I've just been sitting here; haven't said a word to any of them." "Well, I'm not too sure it's proper for you to be here as long as you have no dog kennelled here." "Sorry. If it bothers you, I'll leave." Hanlon started away ... then stopped short. He had wondered at that curiously sluggish feeling in his mind. Now, with a start he had trouble concealing, he suddenly realized a mind-numbing fact! He had seen and heard that exchange of conversation from two separate and distinct points! And now he was watching himself leave! _He had heard and seen both from his own ... and from the dog's mind!_ Yes, he suddenly comprehended that the dog had heard and _understood_ every word of that brief conversation--not as a dog might, _but as a man would_! Suddenly drenched with a cold sweat, Hanlon knew he had not merely been inside the dog's mind, observing and controlling, but that he had actually _transferred_ a portion of his own mind into the dog's brain! No wonder his own mind--what was left in his own brain--had felt somewhat inadequate and lacking for the moment. It was not his complete mind. When the steward startled him, he had forgotten to withdraw from the bull's brain. Now he carefully did so, and with senses reeling, almost ran back to his stateroom. Hanlon threw himself onto the bed and lay there, trembling with awe at realization of the immensity of what he had done. How in the name of Snyder was such a thing possible? Reading a mind's impressions, even the surface thoughts, was well within the realms of possibility he knew, for he had done it himself. Even hundreds of years before, such things had been believed possible, and had been studied extensively and scientifically. Many people throughout the centuries had claimed the ability to read minds, though only a few had ever proven their powers satisfactorily under carefully controlled laboratory conditions. He himself, until the past day or so, had not been able to read a mind directly, nor could he do it perfectly even yet, with humans. Also, he conceded, it was a reasonable concept that if he had any mental ability at all with humans, it should be greater and more efficient with animals. For they had less actual brain-power; their minds were far less complex than human minds. _But to be able to transfer part of his mind ... to separate it--dissociate it--and have it outside of his body and in some other body's mind!_ "Ain't that sumpin'?" he whistled in awed amazement. Pulling himself together with an effort of will, he set his mind to reviewing carefully the entire episode, and to figuring out where all this might fit in with the business at hand. "I thought, when I first got into that pup's mind, that it would be a big help, and it will. But this will be even more so, if I can really control animals, and see and hear with their eyes and ears. And if I can send them where I want them to go, and send my mind, or part of it, along with them, and still know what it and they are doing, that will be tremendous!" He remembered how he had been able to get into the puppy's mind after it had gone out of sight, so now he sent his mind down to the kennels. Again, without any trouble, without any delay or hesitation, he found himself inside the bull's mind, and could look out through the cage wires and see the rest of the kennel deck. He withdrew and lay there, almost dumbfounded. "How did I ever get such ability?" he wondered. "No one else in our family has it. Am I some sort of a mutant? But if so, how or why? I never heard Dad or Mother mention it." He had lots of questions, but no answers. But thinking about this new ability and his job with the Secret Service suddenly reminded him of that potential murderer he had been watching. He realized with dismay that in his excitement over this latest development he had entirely forgotten that angle. He had better get back on the ball, but fast! He got up, splashed cold water on his face, dried it, ran a comb through his hair, and went back to the lounge. * * * * * The man Panek was not in the Observation lounge, so Hanlon went seeking him. Just as he neared the game rooms on his rounds, he saw his man leaving them. Allowing the stranger to get some distance ahead, Hanlon trailed him as carefully as he could, all the time trying to read what the killer had in mind. Not entirely to his surprise, Hanlon found he could now read the surface thoughts even more easily than formerly. Thus he soon knew, emphatically, that the man was definitely bent on that contemplated killing right now--that the victim was in his stateroom but was going to leave it shortly in response to a faked video-call. Hanlon also learned that the murderer had a knife concealed in his sleeve--and was adept in its use. The SS man's mind rocketed swiftly. What was he to do? He didn't want a murder done, but neither did he want this man killed nor jailed--at least not until he had learned a great deal more concerning him and his part in or knowledge of that "plot" on Simonides that Hanlon and the Corps were trying so desperately to solve. "I've got to learn to consider mighty carefully all the angles about even the most apparently-insignificant things," he thought carefully. "I can't take chances of gumming things up, but on the other hand, I want to get an 'in' with that gang if I can." A possibility occurred to the young agent--and he quailed a bit, then grinned wolfishly at the thought. It was plenty dangerous, but if he could put it over maybe it would give him that "in" he needed. He hurried his steps and caught up with the big man just as the latter was stopping momentarily to peer cautiously around the corner and down a corridor which, Hanlon could read in his mind, led to the victim's stateroom. Hanlon tapped the man on the shoulder, and as the fellow whirled, a snarl on his face, Hanlon stepped backward a pace and held up his hands in the "I'm not armed" gesture. Then, before Panek could speak, he stepped closer to whisper. But the thug was both angry and frustrated at the spoiling of his carefully-worked-out plan, and in no mood for conversation. That lethal knife seemed to jump out of his sleeve and toward Hanlon, in the strong, swift, practiced hand of the killer. The SS man jumped backward, then his own hands darted out and grabbed for the other's wrists in the manner he had been taught. He caught the right, or knife hand, but the big fellow was as dextrous as he, even if he didn't look capable of such fast action. His other hand eluded Hanlon's grasp, and with it Panek struck and jabbed--heavy blows to Hanlon's face and body. Hanlon parried the blows as best he could, at the same time trying to make his low-voiced words penetrate. "Cut it out, you fool! I'm trying to help you, not hinder you! Stop it, blast you, and listen!" But he might as well have been talking to the metal walls. One eye was swelling rapidly, and he had a nick in his arm that he could feel was soaking his jacket sleeve. Seeing he couldn't make the fellow listen, Hanlon threw him with a super-judo trick, then sat on him. "Shut up and listen to me, Panek!" he hissed urgently, using all his fighting technique meanwhile to keep the other's threshing form immobile. "I'm trying to warn you that the bozo you're after carries one of those new needle-guns, and the needles are poison-tipped. Also, he's the fastest man on the draw I've ever seen--I watched him practice. Just one of those needles and you'd be kaput before you could yell." * * * * * "Why ... how ... what d'you mean, huh, what d'you mean?" The man stopped his struggles for the moment, while his face showed plainly how aghast he was at this interfering stranger's apparent knowledge of his intentions. "Who are you, huh, and what's your game, what's your game?" Hanlon made his voice seem both friendly and calculating, and hurried on with his specious explanation before the fellow should start fighting again. "I'd been tipped off there was something up, on Simonides, where a good hustler could make himself plenty of credits. And credits in quantity is what I'm after ..." "What's that got to do with me, huh, what has it?" "... and I'm on my way there to see what my chances are of getting in on the game. So naturally I tried to learn all I could about it ahead of time. I was told this bird you're after was an important man there, so I studied him. One of the first things I found out about him was that he carried one of those needlers. If he's in your way, together we oughta be able to get rid of him ... but let's play it safe, eh?" The stranger gave him a cold, calculating going-over with those hard, suspicious eyes. "Let me up, Bub, let me up. I'll be good while we talk." Hanlon rose, but stood warily as the other slowly climbed to his feet. But he wasn't sharp enough--Panek's hand flashed out even before he seemed to be standing erect, and slickly grabbed the wallet from the inside pocket of Hanlon's jacket. But the SS man, seeing what the other was after, stood there without making any resistance. "Take your time looking at 'em, Pal," he said easily. "I'm clean. Strictly on my own in this. Just got kicked out of that snake's nest of a Corps school on Terra ..." The killer's head snapped up at mention of the Corps, and he stared harder and more suspiciously than ever into Hanlon's eyes. "... They said I cheated at exams, and wouldn't give me a chance to defend myself," Hanlon continued quickly, but with heat. "That soured me on 'em, but good! So I says to myself, blast John Law! From now on I'm on the other side. Anything he's after must be worth plenty to any guy who can outsmart him. Knowing his side of it and how he works, I figure I'm just that good!" He said all this with such a deadly serious voice, that although it was bravado Panek could see it was also confidence. Hanlon had figured this straight-forwardness was his best bet. Tell his side of it first, for if he got in with them--or any gang--they would be sure to check, and would find out he had been a cadet, anyway. "Beat 'em to the punch before they form any contrariwise conclusions," was his judgment. His plan seemed to be working, for as his explanation continued and was completed the killer looked at him with some measure of respect, although his eyes and manner were still filled with suspicion. "Can't blame you for feeling sore, can't blame you, if they really did kick you out. But I don't trust nobody that's ever had any connection at all with the cops, don't trust 'em!" "Look, Pal, use your head! If I was a John Law would I merely have stopped you? I'd be arresting you--or killing you for pulling that knife on me. I tell you I'm clean--and that I want an 'in' on Simonides." "I heard, too, there was good pickings on Sime," the man said slowly. "'Course, I'm not in on anything special, myself, not in on it. This here's a purely personal grudge deal. But you prob'ly did me a good turn, a good turn, and if you want to look me up after we land, I maybe could introduce you to a man or two. I didn't know old Abrams carried one of them needlers, didn't know that." The thanks in his gruff voice showed his respect for those silent, deadly little guns. That name--Abrams--rang a bell in Hanlon's mind, though he quickly decided he'd better let it lie for the moment--file it away for future investigation. He smiled in comradely fashion. "The way you were walking into it made me sure you didn't know. And thanks. Maybe I will look you up. I don't know anyone on Simonides, and it doesn't hurt to have a friend or three. Where do I find you there?" "Evenings I'm often at the Bacchus Tavern. And," with a sinister grimace, "if you come, you'd better pray that '_he_' likes you, you'd sure better!" Chapter 9 SS man George Hanlon went slowly back to his room where he could think seriously without the outside abstractions he would be sure to encounter in any of the public rooms. He had made a good bid, he thought, for contact with what he felt sure must be the group he wanted to get in with. Hanlon felt Panek's statement that he, personally, was not in on it, was just so much hog-wash. That last crack about "you'd better pray that 'he' likes you," was almost sure proof. But what did it mean? Who was this "he," and why had Hanlon better pray "he" liked him? Probably the leader ... and if so, undoubtedly a dangerous man to play around with. Hanlon remembered the fear of his boss he'd read in Panek's mind. Also, what about Abrams? Hanlon felt sure it was the same man he had guarded that day. Oh, oh, was that "failure" he had also read in Panek's mind that unsuccessful attempt he, Hanlon, had thwarted? Was Panek--and through him this as-yet-unmet leader--behind that attempt on Abrams' life? These were questions he could not answer yet--not enough data. But he would have to find the answers sometime. And once in Panek's gang, he might find them. And even if this particular gang was not the one doing the plotting in which the Corps was so interested, Hanlon felt that getting into even one of the organized gangs on Simonides would be a step in the right direction. But he would have to watch his step. Those fellows would be about as safe to play with as a pitful of cobras. For a long moment he grew cold with fear; a deadly, paralyzing terror that twisted his vitals into hard, hard knots. What business did he have, mixing with mature, deadly killers such as these? On the other hand, he consoled himself after awhile, being able to read their surface thoughts should warn him when he started getting out of line. Then, if or when he did, he would walk more softly, travel inch by inch, and not make any attempts to jump into the big middle of things until he got a lot more information ... and more experience in the ways and means of gangsterism. But suddenly he felt that cold fear return. Those men were--must be--hard, trained killers all. This Panek was not even the boss--was just a gunny. And those higher-ups would be much worse than Panek--more ruthless and more contemptuous of human life and rights. They would have to be, to be the higher-ups. For Hanlon sensed that in such a group, Might very decidedly made Right ... and Power. It took some time to quiet his shrieking nerves. Nor did he ever forget the awfulness of that fear that so nearly brought him down out of control. On the other hand, never again did he reach such depths of utter panic. He finally rose, bathed and dressed for dinner. But during the meal his mind was in such a turmoil he had trouble keeping himself outwardly calm. For the first time in more years than he could remember he merely toyed with his food ... and he had always been a good trencher-man. But he had something very important to do tonight, and he would let nothing keep him from it. So he went to the _Hellene's_ library and studied from such books on biology and physiology as he could find, all he could about the brain and the nerves that formed the connecting links between it and the muscles. He studied until the dimming of the lights told him that "day" was over. He then sent his mind down into the brain of the bulldog, and watched through its eyes until he saw the kennel steward leave for the night. Then Hanlon went down to the kennel deck. Sitting on the same bench as before, Hanlon sent his mind into that of the white bull. Again he had no trouble attaching a portion of his mind to the dog's brain. A little experimentation soon showed how much of his mind that brain could contain. Then, from the _inside_, he studied that brain line by line, muscle and nerve channels and connectors, even more surely than he had been able to do before. The first thing he learned, and put into practice, was to make the dog sleep, so he wouldn't tire too much. After nearly three hours of intensive study he was convinced he was beginning to know it quite well, although he realized how much there still was for him to learn--how much study and practice he would need. He then woke the dog, and while still leaving that part of his mind in its brain, scanned the next cage which held a beautiful female Airedale. Into her brain he sent another portion of his mind. Then into the next dog another portion, and on and on until he had detached more than three-quarters of his mind, and was controlling directly eight dogs. His body felt weak and listless as it sagged on the bench, and he made it lie down there in the semi-darkness. There was, he was afraid at the time, little more than enough mind left in his body to keep the semi-automatic functions going. It was the most weird sensation imaginable, having portions of his mind in nine places at once--having nine different and distinct viewpoints! He found he could do, although not too well at first, nine different things at once and the same time, or could make all the bodies he was controlling do the same thing at the same time. He "drilled" the dogs, making them line up, walk left or right or back up, all in unison. He found that while his mind was divided and controlling different bodies, there was a thread of connecting thought between them all, so that he knew what each of the others was doing. Yet it was not a central command--each individual mind-portion could and did do its own deciding and commanding. For hours Hanlon practiced with the dogs until he had worked out the procedure to the point where he knew he could make them perform--singly, as a group, or each doing a different thing--almost any task of which their body muscles were capable, whether they had previously known how to do it or not. Bringing his mind-portions back from seven of the dogs into his own brain, after commanding them to sleep, he went over to the cage of the Airedale he was still controlling. Squatting down before the bars, he took a pencil-stub and piece of paper from his pocket. These he passed through the bars and laid at her feet. Then, while he watched with his own mind through his own eyes, he used only the portion of his mind that was inside her brain, and made the Airedale pick up the pencil in her teeth, blunt end inside her mouth. Holding it thus, she attempted to write on the paper, which she held steady with her two front paws. Anxious minutes passed while Hanlon sweatingly experimented. At last the dog managed to print, very roughly and clumsily, a few letters. They were large and very crude. It wasn't that he couldn't control her muscles--it was, simply that the muscles were not built to do such things without infinite training. When it finally became so near "morning" that he knew he had to quit, Hanlon left the kennels and went to bed. He was still amazed, excited and thrilled about this strange and weird ability, but he was also well content with his studies. If a time came when he might wish or need to use animals in his work, he felt capable of managing them. Yet again he realized how much there was to learn; that he must continue practicing and studying at every opportunity. Did cats or horses--or birds or insects--have brains that worked the same as the dogs? He would have to experiment to find that out, first chance he got. But now there was another very serious problem demanding his attention. He had made a wonderful start at getting an "in" with Panek, the Simonidean thug. Now, how could he best turn that to his advantage? It was some time before he fell asleep from sheer weariness, nor had he solved the problem before he did so. The moment he awoke, late the next morning, he knew he had the answer. His sub-conscious must have solved it for him while he slept. At brunch he kept his eyes open, and before too long Panek came into the dining room for his lunch. Hanlon signalled, and his new-found acquaintance came to his table. Their orders given and the waiter on his way, Hanlon opened up. "Look, Pard, I don't want to butt into your business, but if you want this Abrams out of your way, I'll be glad to take a crack at it for you." The Simonidean looked at him scornfully. "Think you're that good, eh? Better'n me at bumping off a man, huh? Better'n me?" "Oh, no," Hanlon made his face seem very apologetic, and his tone the same. "I'm not setting myself even one notch ahead of you, nor criticizing your way of working ..." "Better not, neither!" "... but every man has his own techniques. Look, in this case, aboard a ship in space where you can't run or hide, I think my way would work best." The other was becoming interested in spite of himself, and his truculence melted a bit, although his tone was still sneering. "All right, Master Mind, how'd you handle it, how would you?" "A gun or knife is all right on some jobs," Hanlon leaned closer and spoke in a semi-whisper, but earnestly. "But there are times when it's plain foolish to sneak up behind a man and hit him on the head with a club." "Yeah, you got something there, got something." "In such a case, I figure it's a lot better to make friends with the guy, take him to dinner, then sneak a little cyanide in his coffee--something like that." Panek was impressed. Hanlon read the swift thoughts racing across the other's mind. He hadn't liked the idea of using his knife, here on this ship. But neither did he dare report back to that feared "boss" that he hadn't succeeded in killing Abrams. Panek spoke doubtfully. "Yeah, that may be all right, but not when the guy knows you, then you can't get away with a thing like that, not when he knows you." "Exactly what I'm getting at," Hanlon said eagerly. "Me, I'm the Unknown Quantity. Nobody knows me. I can get to old Abrams and make it all seem natural." "He ain't easy to fool, no, he ain't." "I'm sure he isn't. But since I've got to make a start somewhere if I want to get into things on Simonides, I figure giving you an assist is worth the trial." "Well," Panek hesitated and his cold eyes bored into those of this enigmatic young man. "I still don't quite trust you, can't be sure I trust you. I still figure you're some kind of a cop ..." Hanlon half-rose, his face dark with intense anger. "Don't ever call me a cop!" he blazed, though still in a whisper. "I hate 'em. As a kid I thought they were tops, and did everything I could to get into their school. But I mighty quick found out how wrong I was. I was good and sick of 'em, and about ready to quit when they threw me out on that lie about cheating ... say, I knew more'n their knuckle-headed instructors, so why'd I need to cheat?" "Easy, Pal, take it easy." "They just want to use their high and mighty authority," Hanlon ignored Panek's shushing. "They just like to push people around 'cause they got on a pretty uniform." His voice had risen in pitch until Panek had to grab his arm and shake him to make him keep still. People at the nearer table were beginning to look at them. But Panek was impressed now with Hanlon's sincerity--the SS man could read that in his mind. "All right, Pal, all right. Don't bust a gut. You bump off old Abrams without getting caught, and I'll get you in with a gang on Sime where you can really do yourself some good, really some good." Hanlon nodded shortly and rose. "I'll keep in touch. And your man's as good as dead right now." His heart was singing--his plan was working smoothly. Now if that government man had any brains, and would play along ... Hanlon found Abrams in the library, and slipped into the seat next to him. Opening a magazine and holding it fairly high before his face while apparently reading it, Hanlon started talking in low but penetrant tones. "Don't look up, Mr. Abrams, but listen to me. You may or may not know it, but there's a plot against your life. I managed to delay it yesterday, but they intended getting you before we reach port. Now I have a plan. I earnestly beg you to listen and work with me." The Simonidean had given a slight start when he heard Hanlon's first words, but he had been well-trained in a hard school, and in no other way had even shown that he heard. Now, however, he spoke as guardedly as Hanlon. "Who is trying to kill me?" "A man named Panek, but someone's behind him that I don't know. But the question is: will you work with me?" "Yes, if I can." Abandoning his attempts at secrecy, Hanlon started laughing out loud, as though at something he was reading. As Abrams looked up in surprise, Hanlon leaned over and held out his magazine in front of the Simonidean, pointing at it. "Play up now," he said softly, and the diplomat, quick on the up-take, pretended to look at what Hanlon was showing him, then began laughing in turn. Thereafter, the ice broken as far as any on-lookers might know, the two talked naturally as shipboard acquaintances might do. "Why," Abrams really looked at Hanlon for the first time, "you're the young man who saved my life on Terra, aren't you?" "Yes, but keep it quiet. I want us to stick together more or less the rest of the day, as though we'd just met and liked each other. Then have dinner together. Do you have your own servant?" "My valet, yes, and he is absolutely trustworthy. Why?" "While we're eating I'll appear to put something into your drink while you're not looking. A few moments later you'll act as though you were suddenly taken ill, and go to your room. Have your valet later let the word out that you're very ill, and send word by space-video for an ambulance to meet the ship. Just before landing, let him say you've died. The ambulance can take you wherever it's natural your body would be taken, and you keep under cover for some time, until I notify you. Can do?" "Hmmm." The other thought rapidly but cogently for some minutes. "With a few minor variations, yes. But why? ... oh, I see. You want to get in with the gang, is that it?" When Hanlon nodded Abrams continued, "you're playing a dangerous game, but that's what we've learned to expect of your Corpsmen. A wonderful group!" "Thanks." Hanlon did not want to explain anything, so let it go at that, and the two talked companionably of many things as they moved naturally about the ship. They listened for a while to a concert in the music room, then played a few games of cards. Each time the diplomat tried to ask questions, Hanlon side-stepped. The SS man had seen Panek cautiously spying on them from time to time, and when the two went in to dinner the thug took a seat nearby, but where Abrams could not see him. Hanlon had been probing Abrams' mind all this time, but had been unable to get any clue as to a plot that might upset the peace of his world, or the Federation. Hanlon realized the man was an intense patriot, and he came to the conclusion that Abrams did not particularly like the Prime Minister. But the "why" of that dislike eluded him. The two were about finished with dinner and their coffee had been served. Hanlon called his companion's attention to something behind him. As the latter turned to look, Hanlon's hand flashed out and hovered an instant over the other's cup. A few moments later the Simonidean played his part to perfection. He took a drink, then another, and almost before he had set his cup down, gave a groan, and clutched at his stomach and throat. He rose shakily, and tottered away heavily on the arm of an anxious steward who had come running up. Hanlon, although he rose quickly and made his face seem concerned and sympathetic, resumed his seat and finished his coffee. When the steward returned, he called him over, and seemed reassured when the latter reported that Mr. Abrams had said it was apparently only an attack of indigestion, to which he was prone, and that his man could take care of him. But the next day word ran about the ship that Abrams was very ill, and not expected to live the day out. Panek sauntered past where Hanlon was sitting, reading, and stopped to ask for a light. "Nice work, Pal, nice work," he whispered as he was lighting his cigaro. "See me at the Bacchus." But his thoughts, as Hanlon scanned them, were muttering viciously, "I'll cut out his guts if he's planning to louse up 'his' plans, I'll sure carve him!" And a bit later, as Hanlon reviewed the entire episode, he thanked his stars that Panek was a lot less than an intellectual giant. A brighter man would have wondered about the source of Hanlon's knowledge of his homicidal plans; and how it happened that Hanlon carried a supply of poison. There had been no indication that either question had occurred to Panek. Chapter 10 The moment he got off the ship and went into the city of New Athens he could feel it. There was an air of mystery, of secretiveness, of intrigue, that could not help but be noticed by one as sensitive to emotion-impressions as SS Man George Hanlon. He got out of his ground-cab at the entrance of a great park in the center of the city, but directed the driver to take his luggage on to the hotel. Then Hanlon went in to sit on a bench beneath a beautiful, flowering ba'amba tree. Once there, he opened his mind to its fullest extent, and let all the impressions and sensations of this new world soak in. He could not, of course, get any factual details in this way, nor did he expect to. What he wanted, and began to get, was the "feel" of the city. And the longer he sat the less he liked it. For he could sense so clearly that there most certainly was "a Mercutian in the fuel pit" here somewhere. But what it was; what this strange feeling portended, he could not quite make out. He noticed, casually, that there were the usual idlers in this park, and hundreds of children with their nurses or parents. But there were none of the derelicts one sees in so many large-city parks. Most of the people seemed well-dressed and not too poor. He could catch occasional bits of thought about big business deals. After a time Hanlon noticed that here, as in most parks, hundreds of native, pigeon-like birds were flying and hopping about, seeking what crumbs they could scrounge from picnickers' lunches, or nuts fed them by interested idlers. He wondered if he could get into a bird's mind, and sent his out to contact one. His ability was, he found, much the same as it had been with the dogs--he could not only "read" what mind the pigeon had, but could control it ... could actually project part of his mind into the bird's brain. The brain-texture, was different, but as he sat there for another hour, he learned the difference. For now he knew what to look for, and it did not take long until he knew it well. Finally he got so he could see and understand what the people around him were doing--not through his own direct observation, but through the pigeon's senses. He sent several winging high into the air, and got a good perspective of the entire city. At last he brought his mind back into his own brain, and gave a mental shrug, then rose from the bench. "You're just stalling, you know," he scolded himself. "Get to the hotel, check in, then go look in the bank vault. You've got a job to do, so get doing it!" From the hotel he went to the bank and signed up for a box. There was nothing yet for him in box 1044, so he left a note addressed "To Any SS Man," stating he was here and ready to begin his work. Back at the hotel he unpacked, took a shower, and then a short nap. There was no telling what the night might bring forth, and he wanted all his strength and powers. New Athens was a beautiful city, as befitted the capitol of the richest planet in the Federation. For Simonides Four had become just that, even outstripping Terra in the wealth from her manufacturers and exports. Her shipments of ores, jewels, unusual furs, manufactured goods, precision tools and art products, as well as foodstuffs raw and processed, ran into trillions of credits every year. The great square showed plainly that some architect or city planner with a love of classic lines had been in charge here. The buildings were all modern representations of the great temples and public buildings of the Golden Age of Greece on Terra. They were widely spaced, with magnificent lawns and gardens surrounding each. Thousands of lights artfully concealed accentuated the beauty of those wonderful buildings, and Hanlon caught his breath in pleasure at his first sight of the marvelous square by night. He had thought it wonderful by day--now he admitted without reservation that it was the most magnificent sight he had ever seen. He finally signalled a ground-cab--New Athens had no slideways--to go to the Bacchus. It was several blocks from the square, but each of the streets he travelled were almost as beautiful. The tavern was housed in a large though one-storied building with a pillared facade. The main room was level with a gardened terrace five steps above the street. Inside, the tavern was tastefully decorated in subdued colors. It was dimly lighted by representations of flambeaus, stuck at angles in the walls. The center of the room was occupied by dozens of tables of varying sizes, while along one side and part of the back were curtained booths. Along the other side ran an ornate bar. Hanlon made his way to the latter, and sat on one of the upholstered stools. The bar girls, he noted with interest, were revealingly costumed in pseudo-peplos of a purplish, cob-webby, silkish material. They wore no blouses, but long sashes that passed behind the neck, crossed the breasts and tied about the waist to hold up the short skirt. One of the girls came up to get his order. "I'm new on the planet," he smiled. "Let me have your best native light wine." She brought him a glass filled with a sparkling, golden liquid, and waited while he took his first appreciative sip. "We call it 'Golden Nectar'," she smiled. He smacked his lips. "Wonderful!" Then, as she started away he called her back. "Do you know a Mr. Panek? I was to meet him here, but I don't see him." Her eyes widened a bit at that name. "I'll see if I can locate him for you, sir," and she moved away. Some minutes later, while he was still pretending to sip his drink, Hanlon felt a hearty clap on the shoulder. "Well, well, it's my pal from the ship. Welcome to Sime, Pal, welcome to Sime." "Hi, Panek! Hope you meant that about looking you up, 'cause here I am." Hanlon flipped a credit note on the bar and followed Panek. He was led toward a back corner, but there, instead of going into one of the booths, Panek pushed through an almost hidden alcove. He knocked peculiarly on a door, and a peephole was opened. When the guardian saw who it was, the door was opened enough so the two could slide through. Hanlon, in a quick, comprehensive glance, saw that it was a fairly large office, at present occupied by four men. "This is George Hanlon," Panek introduced him, "the guy who did that job on old Abrams, the same guy." Hanlon noticed that Panek did not name the men there, but he could see they appeared to know all about him, and were giving him a close once-over. Hanlon scanned back in return, his mind quickly touching one after another of the three sitting in large, easy chairs. Only their surface thoughts were readable, and he knew at first touch they were but underlings, the same as Panek. He read a favorable impression of himself, but with reservations. He turned his attention to the well-dressed, impressive-looking man behind the plasticene desk, nor had his other probings taken more than a few seconds. He noted with interest the round, smooth face, the slightly over-large greenish eyes, the silver hair that seemed finer and silkier than any Hanlon had ever seen on a human being. It was almost like fine fur, he thought suddenly. Then he got a shock! This man was different ... Hanlon could not touch that mind at all! There was a sort of an ... an alien feeling there he could not quite fathom. It was like no other mind he had ever tried to read. But he was careful not to let his face show anything of his inner thoughts as he saluted them gravely after that first brief pause. Then suddenly he made his face show a boyish enthusiasm ... almost a naivete. "Maybe Mr. Panek has already told you about me. I'm looking for a chance to make a flock of credits ... and I'm not too particular how I get 'em." But his mind was tense and anxious. What was their game? And this fellow behind the desk, this leader. Who was he? Hanlon knew he would have a real job finding out those answers ... but knew he must! The leader nodded suavely. "That is a very ... uh ... commendable desire," he said in a low, gentle voice that was a perfect match for his outward appearance of high gentility. "We can always use a good man," he continued, "who isn't afraid ... nor too squeamish." "A trigger-man?" Hanlon shrugged. "If it pays well, okay." The man seemed to recoil, his delicate hands fluttering in the air almost femininely. "No, no, my dear young man. You misunderstood me entirely. We do nothing so crude, so vulgar, so ... so brutal. Oh, sometimes we ... uh ... sometimes an accident happens to someone. But nothing, you understand, that we have anything to do with. Your technique with the poor Mr. Abrams, who was so suddenly taken ... ill ... had led me to hope you had more finesse." "I beg your pardon," Hanlon's tone was now one of apology. "I can finesse, all right, but I didn't know you wanted me to talk that way in private. I'll remember, and respect your wishes from now on." Inwardly he was puzzled. He kept trying to touch that mind, but could not. Was the guy human--or did he have a mind-control of some sort? Was he used to mind-reading, so that he had developed a defense against it? Or--and Hanlon almost caught his breath in momentary fear--was this ape a mind reader? A real one, not a dub like himself? But the leader was answering, still in that gentle tone, as though nothing had happened. "So ... so ... that is good. I hate the thought of bloodshed, and I will not countenance roughness in actions or speech. It is regrettable, of course, that sometimes men are stupid enough to oppose us, but ..." and again that almost feminine gesture. This was the silkiest, slimiest ... _thing_ ... George Hanlon had ever encountered, and again his heart quailed for the moment. "If I was on my own," he shuddered inwardly, "I'd sure never team up with a guy like that!" For there was no single iota of mercy or compassion in that ice-cold mind behind that gentle face--of that Hanlon was sure. There was a long, pregnant moment of silence, while the five men studied Hanlon more carefully. Finally the man behind the desk spoke more slowly. "Perhaps--just perhaps, you understand, and nothing definite as yet--we may have a little job for you before long. On another planet. You have no objections to travel?" "Not if there's a bundle of the stuff at the end of the trip, no," Hanlon grinned avariciously. But his mind was seeking answers. Why did they want to send him away? Was this a bona-fide job, or a trap? Should he go to some other planet? Would he thus get best leads? Perhaps--if it wasn't for too long a time, of course. The leader smiled suddenly while Hanlon was thus thinking, and the rest grinned as though they had been waiting for his lead to relax their vigilance. "There will be a very large ... uh ... bundle." He paused a moment, then continued "We need more overseers on ... a certain planet. It is one that is rich in various metals. The natives mine it under our direction, and ..." Hanlon interrupted. "I don't know a thing about mining. Will that make a difference?" Here, he thought swiftly, was the test. If they still wanted him--and had a reasonable answer--it might well be a bona-fide job. "None at all," the leader smiled again. "We have mining engineers in charge. Your job would be merely to keep the natives working at top speed. It is ... uh ... unfortunate, that they are high enough in the cultural scale so we cannot, under the Snyder dictum, colonize their planet and work it ourselves. But we will chan ..." he broke off as though realizing he was saying too much, and Hanlon stiffened inwardly. This was a real clue. What planet was the man talking about? His most penetrant mind-probing could not get the answer from any of the minds there--to the others it was merely "a planet," nothing more. And this ape, with his perfect mental control, let nothing leak. But the leader had caught himself and gone on almost as though there had been no break, "... chance using you, I think. If so, your salary will be a thousand credits a month, plus all expenses. And a nice bonus every so often, depending on how little trouble you have with your crew, and how much ore they take out." Hanlon showed that gleam of avarice again. "Sounds very interesting." Then he leaned forward. "One, more thing. How long does the job last?" "For several years, if you want it, and if we continue to be satisfied with you. But we bring the men back every few months for a vacation. We find that best with most of them--the climate there is not too pleasant, and the conditions are confining." "Nothing to do but work, eh?" "Just about that. The shifts are about eight hours of our time, and between them you eat, sleep, read or play cards ... but you do not explore or anything like that! The ship goes there every three weeks, and we usually figure eighteen weeks there, then the three weeks back here. The guards and others rotate that way. They have a tendency to ... uh ... deteriorate if we don't." Hanlon let himself shiver, but grinned as he did so. "Now that's one thing I don't want to do--go nuts. Can't make any credits doing that." The leader raised his hand. "You understand, of course, there will be a short period of ... uh ... checking and testing before we decide to send you out on a job." Hanlon's voice was almost servile, yet confident. "Sure, sir. You name it; I do it." He was still probing with everything he had, but still getting nothing important. A couple of the men seemed to be chuckling about what might happen to him if he failed the tests--but he had guessed that much, anyway. Suddenly the leader leaned across the desk, and his genteel manner slipped from him like a discarded mask. His eyes became glacial ice. "Don't get any grandiose ideas in your head, Hanlon. We are not fools. Nor are we offering you a chance to get in on our complete plans. I am just, possibly, hiring you to do a simple job." "Oh, no, sir, I wasn't even thinking of such a thing," Hanlon looked hurt. "Why, I'm just a kid. I know I couldn't expect anything else ... at first. Not until I've proved myself to you, or until I've made my pile and got in a position of power. Then, naturally, I'd want to get into something where I could really go places. But that's for years and years ahead, I know that." The now-hard, cold eyes scrutinized him carefully, but still doubtfully. When the leader spoke his voice was more cordial, though still harder, not soft as it had been at first. "I'll be frank, Hanlon. We're not too sure of you ... yet ... because you were a cadet. Oh, we know," as Hanlon started to protest hotly, "all about your being kicked out. We can see how all that might well have soured you enough so you will really do anything you can to get ahead, even if only to show the Corps. But you can understand our hesitation, I think." "Of course, sir. But you needn't worry." He made his voice as bitter and hard as he could. "I've had my fill of all that law and order stuff. I was an innocent young punk, full of high ideals and the romance of the Corps and all that bunk. But those mangy slime-snakes knocked all that out of me. Anything I can do that'll give 'em a kick in the teeth I'll do with joy and gusto!" "Fine words," snapped the leader, "but can you take it if the going gets tough?" Hanlon was learning fast. Now he stared straight back into those hard eyes. "Can you dish it out, Mister?" his tone was almost, but not quite, insolent. Chapter 11 A black look suffused the leader's face at Hanlon's impertinent "can you dish it out, Mister?" He half-rose from his seat, while the other four men reached quick hands towards their weapons. Then slowly the man sank back, relaxed, and smiled--an open, friendly smile of genuine cordiality, and his men also relaxed. "You'll do, Hanlon, by the great ... uh ... Zeus, you'll do! But," he added significantly, "I think you will find that I can 'dish it out', as you call it, if the need ever arises. You had better pray it never does." "Fair enough," Hanlon shrugged indifferently. "The boys will take you out and show you the town, if you like," the leader smiled engagingly. "They will get word to you when I have a job ready, which may be in a day or two." Hanlon thanked him, and felt it policy to go out with "the boys," even though he did not particularly care to do so. Nor did he especially enjoy the night that followed. He had left a ten o'clock call with the hotel's visiphone operator when he got back to the hotel at last. When she called he groggily opened one eye half way, and fumbled for the toggle-switch. "H'lo." "Ten o'clock of a fine morning, Mr. Hanlon." "Oh, no!" he groaned. "Oh, yes," she giggled. "That bad, is it?" "Worse'n that. But thanks anyway ... I guess." She was laughing heartily as she disconnected. Hanlon groaned with the utter misery of a hugely-distorted, throbbing head. The sunlight pouring through an open window directly into his eyes did not help any. He rolled over petulantly, but knew he had to get up. He stumbled out of bed and went in to stand under a cold shower. Ten minutes later he began to feel a little more human, and decided maybe he would live after all. "Never again!" he swore fervently. "I'm just not cut out for serious drinking. Hope I didn't give anything away to those guys last night." He dressed slowly, meanwhile striving as best his aching head would let him, to review his situation. He was fairly well pleased with his success to date, but the grue of fear was still with him. He was getting part way where he wanted to be, but ... this was certainly no picnic he was muscling into. He remembered his father's injunction to take it easy at first, and grimaced wrily. Eating breakfast in the hotel dining room, after taking an effervescent to relieve his headache, he tried to plan his next moves. There wasn't much he could do, he decided, until they called him. He had made his bid--it wouldn't do to try to push himself too much, or it would look mighty fishy to those sharp minds. He shuddered again, involuntarily, thinking about that enigmatic leader. Who ... or what ... was he? Hanlon went first to the bank, and made out a card for his own box. But once in the vault, and the attendant gone out, it was box 1044 he opened. There was a note for him. "Welcome to Simonides," he read. "My name--here--is Art Georgopoulis. I work at present as a bartender at the Golden Web, on Thermopylae street. The high-ups in the underworld hang out there, and I pick up occasional bits of news. If you come in, introduce yourself by asking for 'a good old Kentucky mint-julep,' Practically no one ever asks for those. I'm the blond, skinny one at the far end of the bar. If I can be of any help, just yell. Me, I haven't got to first check station yet--but I'm still in there punching. Hope you do better--Curt Hooper." Hanlon "ate" the note, then wrote one of his own, telling what he had learned to date, what he suspicioned, and what he was trying to do. Of his new mental powers he said nothing. He did not distrust this SS man, of course, but if the fellow didn't know he couldn't be made to tell. As Hanlon left the bank he began to get the feeling he was being trailed, but could not seem to locate anyone doing it, although he did not dare search to his rear very carefully. Neither could he catch any definite thoughts about such a thing from among the welter of thought-sensations on the crowded streets. He wandered about most of the day, frankly sight-seeing--but his mind was always open. He went into various public buildings, sat for some time in one or another of the numerous parks whenever he felt a bit tired of walking. That feeling of being watched made him cautious, so he did not practice much with his mind-control on any of the pigeon-like birds! He did, however, make a trip to the local zoo, and as he paused momentarily in front of each of the cages to look at the exhibit it contained, he briefly made an excursion into the mind of each different type of animal, bird or rodent. Outside of minor differences of texture, they all seemed about the same. Each of them had, naturally, different muscular abilities that would need considerable study if he ever intended using one of them. And every minute he was seeking, searching for any tiniest thread of evidence as to what it was that was causing this undercurrent of secret intrigue that was so plainly evident to his super-sensitive mind. But there was no factual data to be learned. Only that "feel" of it in the very air. Yet as the day wore on he came to believe that much or most of what he sensed was not that plot which was causing the Corps concern. Rather, it seemed more as though all the people here were engaged in some sort of secret aggressiveness. And it was finally forced into his consciousness that it was "business," not "politics." For it was well-known that Simonides, even though it had become the Federation's wealthiest world, was not yet satisfied ... that its merchants and traders wanted to capture more and still more of the System's business. There were far too many minds engaged in aggressive thoughts for a political revolution, he felt sure. If it was this wide-spread, surely others of the Corps of the Secret Service would have found out something definite about it. No, whatever this was, it distinctly was not what he was here to find. The feeling that he was being spied upon was always more or less present, but he could not spot the man or men who were watching him. Either several were working in short shifts, or else the trailer kept so far behind him that the multiplicity of thoughts from the hundreds of people always around masked those of the spy. Hanlon ate a leisurely lunch in a small restaurant, and during the afternoon continued his apparently-aimless sight-seeing. If they were shadowing him, they would have nothing to report, he grinned. Not during the day, at least. What the evening would bring forth would perhaps be another matter. For he had determined to at least get in touch with the SS man who had written that note. He would have dinner at the Golden Web, if they served meals. If not, he would have a drink anyway. The two men certainly should know each other by sight. He went briefly to the hotel, but there had been no calls for him. So he took a ground-cab to the cafe, which turned out to be a pretentious, garish one. Inside he made his way to that part of the long, busy bar presided over by a slim, blond man. Hanlon climbed onto a stool. "Gimme a good old Kentucky mint-julep, suh," he demanded, "an' be doggoned suah it's made right." The bartender eyed him peculiarly. "Where's this Kentucky and what's a mint-julep?" "On Terra, of course, where I came from. Where'd you think it was, on Andromeda Seven?" "Pardon me, sir. I seem to remember now, having heard of such a drink. I'll have to look it up in the recipe-book--I disremember the ingredients." Hanlon grinned and lost his appearance of truculence. "It's partly made of Blue Grass, like a 'horse's neck.' But if it's too much trouble, just give me a Cola." The barkeep grinned, too. "I gotcha, Steve," and poured out the soft drink. Hanlon sat sipping his innocuous drink, looking about him quietly. A large-sized crowd was beginning to fill the place--well-dressed, evidently fairly prosperous people, but he could see that they were not the real upper-class, but the slightly-off-shade climbers. His drink finished Hanlon signalled his friendly barman. "The grub here any good? This looks like a nice place." "Yes, it is. One often hears some interesting things here. As for the food, it is very good, and not too expensive. They have a native fowl much like chicken I think you'd like. Ask for _poyka_, in whatever style you like it fixed. Glad to be of service, sir, any time, in any way." The last words were slightly emphasized. Hanlon had ordered and was waiting for his food when a man he had never seen before slipped into the seat opposite him. "The Boss wants to see you." "Yeah?" Hanlon looked him up and down almost contemptuously. "Just who is this 'boss' who's interested in me?" "Cut the clowning. You know who. At the Bacchus. Now!" "So." Hanlon let himself appear slightly interested. "Well, after I get through eating, if nothing else shows up to interest me more, I might drop over." "You'd better, and mighty quick, too!" the man snapped, although it was apparent he was puzzled by Hanlon's manner. "He don't like to be kept waiting." "And I don't like to be hurried--or ordered about!" Hanlon snapped back. "If I come, and notice I said 'if,' I'll be there in about an hour. Now, do you mind? I like to enjoy my food." The man rose, still with that perplexed expression. It was evident he was not used to people not jumping when his "Boss" issued invitations--which were really commands. He shook his head slowly. "I hope for your sake he's in a good humor," he said as he left. Hanlon's mind was not too easy as he ate swiftly, and his relish of the excellent food was not as keen as it might have been but for this interruption. He shivered, remembering that cold ruthlessness he had sensed behind that leader's suave manner. But he had to play out his string as a somewhat brash youngster who wasn't afraid of anybody or anything. He had made a clean score with that reckless "can you dish it out, Mister?" but he had better not press his luck too far. Thus it was only about half an hour later when he presented himself at the Bacchus. "You took your time coming," the leader looked at Hanlon curiously. "I was hungry," Hanlon answered simply. "I'd just ordered dinner when your message was delivered. I came as soon as I'd finished." "Those who work for me usually ... uh ... come running when I call." Hanlon grinned wolfishly. "Maybe they're afraid of you." "And you aren't?" "Should I be?" "I don't like impudence or insolence," the voice was more curt and the eyes lost some of their calmness in a flash of anger. Hanlon knew he had gone far enough for the time being, so instantly became less brash, more apologetic. "If I take your job if you offer me one, sir, I'll obey all orders promptly, and I'll give you everything I've got, naturally. But I'm not one of your snivelling toadies." The leader regarded him once more with silent appraisal, in which a measure of respect, or at least approval, seemed to show. Hanlon, probing the other minds present, was secretly amused at their astonishment at his temerity ... and the fact that he was getting away with it. After long moments the leader nodded his head, as though he had reached a decision. "What were you doing in the bank this morning?" "Why, just depositing some of my stuff in a safety deposit box," he said, surprised. "Why?" "How did you get your own box so quickly?" "What do you mean so quickly? I went in yesterday and asked if one was available, and the girl clerk signed me up for it, and said I could get entry today." "Oh, I see. I was told it was done like you already had a box and ... uh ... wondered about it." Hanlon reached in his pocket and threw a key onto the desk "Go look in it for yourself if you think it's important. And incidentally," he said contemptuously, "I've known all day long I was being shadowed." But was instantly sorry he had said that last. For there came a deadly coldness in the leader's tone, and a gleam in those hard eyes that boded ill for someone. "I see. Well, let it pass." He pushed the key back toward Hanlon, who pocketed it thankfully. His bluff had worked. This was the key to his own box, of course; his master key was in a hidden pocket in the cuff of his trousers. The leader sank back into his chair and was silent for long minutes, thinking deeply, while Hanlon waited patiently, still trying to get some glimmering of thought from that unreadable mind, still frustrated almost to the point of despair that he couldn't. Finally the man spoke, but not to Hanlon. "Panek, you and the others go find Rellos and bring him here." When they were alone, the leader leaned forward and spoke earnestly to Hanlon, yet watching him carefully as he did so. "I like you, Hanlon, and I'm going to test you out. I am not too sure of you, yet, but if I become so, you can go far--very, very far with me. This Rellos I sent for is the man who was shadowing you today. I cannot--I _will not_!" he spat venomously, "abide failure or incompetence. I am assigning you the pleasant little task of seeing that some sort of an ... uh ... accident happens to Rellos. And as I think about it, it might as well be a ... uh ... permanent one." Hanlon's stomach curled up so tightly it hurt, but he strove manfully not to let his feelings show in his face. He'd had an instant's inkling of what the proposal was going to be, and it was a measure of his stability that he succeeded in keeping his mask up. He knew starkly that this time he would have to go through with a killing, or else give up this line of research. For he knew that if he did not kill this man, this way was closed to him. And if he dropped out, but gave the tip to some other SS man, that one would eventually face the same sort of a task. So, much as it sickened him even to contemplate it, it now became a _must_! He would have to think of himself as a soldier in war, and Rellos an enemy. Outwardly calm, he shrugged indifferently. "Any guy that can't produce isn't worth keeping," he said. "Any special way you want it done?" "No ... I think I would like to see how you work. Plan it yourself. But if it isn't done, you had better not let me or my men see you again." "Fair enough. If I can't do a simple job like that I sure can't be of enough value to you to do myself any real good." They were silent again, but Hanlon's mind was bleak with what was to come. He wasn't the killer type--he believed in the sacredness of human life. Yet he knew he would have to steel himself to go through with it. The job was more important than one man's life. But to kill in cold blood--a deliberate, planned-out murder! Just then Panek returned with a slender, middle-aged man. "Ah, Rellos," the leader greeted him. "I want you to meet a new member of our group, George Hanlon. He has just come from Terra, and has never been on Simonides before. I would like you to take him out and show him New Athens and what it contains in the way of pleasures. You can turn in an account of your expenses tomorrow." And _that_, thought Hanlon, was just about as low and slimy a trick as he had ever heard, and the thought came and would not be denied, that if it was this leader he was to kill he could do it cheerfully and with a clear conscience. He rose, though, and smiled as he held out his hand. "Glad to know you, Rellos. It'll be fun comparing your amusements with those of Terra." The man was somewhat sullen, although it was plain he did not dare show it too much before their boss. Hanlon could read enough from the new man's mind to know how deathly afraid he was of the leader, and how he hated him. "Wonder why he's in this, feeling that way?" Hanlon thought swiftly, and during the evening tried to find out, but without success--the man steered clear of any such thoughts. As the two went outside, the Simonidean asked curtly, "Wine, women or song?" "Why not some of all three?" Hanlon laughed lightly. "Anything you think would be a lively evening, and that you'd enjoy." The other unbent a little. "We'll go to the Phobos first, then. They have good liquor and a nice floor show. Good looking wenches who don't wear too much." He hailed a ground-cab, which the two entered. Hanlon couldn't enjoy that evening. In the first place, he couldn't ditch all his drinks--and he hated alcohol--yet had to remain as sober as possible. Second, and most disturbing, was that horrible thing he had to do, and he knew it must be carefully planned. A gun, knife or poison couldn't be used now--it must look so much like an accident that no possible blame could be attached to him; so that the police could not hold him even for a short time. He thought of and discarded one plan after another, then remembered something seen during his wanderings--a pedestrian bridge crossing a high-speed truckway where the inter-city freighters were so numerous they ran almost bumper to bumper. "I'll lead him up there, then throw him over and down. He's sure to be run over and killed." The nakedness of the girls at the Phobos, the coarse jokes of the so-called comedians, the raucous, ribald laughter of the drunken patrons disgusted Hanlon, and he was glad when they left. "Let's walk a bit and see the sights," he suggested, and Rellos agreed after some argument--he wanted to visit more night clubs. They had walked a couple of blocks along a residential street when a little, roly-poly puppy waddled out onto the sidewalk to greet them. "What a cute ..." Hanlon began, but with an oath, Rellos savagely and viciously kicked the little mite, sending it howling with pain across the low hedge. A growl of anguish broke out, and Hanlon sent his mind searching for that deeper note. He found it, the mother dog, and was instantly inside that mind, controlling it. With a leap the huge shepherd was over the hedge, straight at Rellos. The dog's weight bore the man backward, fighting for his life, trying to hold back those gleaming fangs straining for his throat. Hanlon threw himself into the melee, but while ostensibly trying to drag the dog away, delayed the few seconds it took for those slashing fangs to rip out Rellos' throat. People came running up, and as the first reached the spot they saw Hanlon struggling to hold back the snarling, blood-flecked dog, while Rellos lay dead in a pool of blood. The dog's owner rushed up and snapped a leash on the dog. "I'm terribly sorry, sir," Hanlon said. "My companion was drunk and kicked her puppy. She merely avenged it." "I wondered," the man was shaken. "Kaiserina never was vicious before." "I don't think she will be again," Hanlon said soothingly. "Is the puppy all right?" he asked the small boy who came up with the little animal cradled in his arms. "No," the boy sobbed, "Fluffy's dead." "What's going on here?" an authoritative voice said, and two policemen pushed their way through the quickly-gathered crowd. The dog's owner explained in swift words, and completely exonerated Hanlon. "This man tried to stop my dog; he was holding her back when I got here," and others corroborated his statement. "You'd better have the dog killed," the policeman said, but Hanlon intervened. "No, she was just striking back at the man who killed her puppy. She wasn't to blame, and I'm sure she isn't vicious." The police were finally satisfied, and while they were calling the dead-wagon Hanlon walked slowly back to his hotel, his heart still sick but consoled a bit. "He had it coming to him," his thought was bitter. "The rotten beast--kicking a little puppy like that!" Chapter 12 The next evening Hanlon went back to the Bacchus. Instead of stopping at the bar he went directly to the back room and knocked on the door. When the peephole opened he asked, "The Boss in?" "Nope." "I've got a report to make." "Wait at the bar. I'll get in touch." A quarter hour later the man summoned him, and upon entering that now-familiar room Hanlon saw a closet door was standing open, disclosing a visiphone screen, on which the leader's face was visible. "Well?" "Yep." "Ah!" There was a quick intake of breath, and a feral gleam in those greenish eyes. A moment's silence, then "Do you still want that overseer's job?" "For a thousand a month and keep? Definitely!" "Very well, we'll try you. Zeller will give you a list of things you'll need there--special clothing and such. Uh ... got any money to buy those you don't have?" "I will have when you pay me Rellos' expense money for last night." The leader's eyes narrowed in sudden anger. "Don't try my patience too far, Hanlon." "Okay," Hanlon shrugged indifferently. "But I never figured you for a cheapskate." There was a gasp, as though the leader was amazed at Hanlon's temerity. But he quickly gained control of himself, and an instant later began smiling, then grinning and finally laughing aloud ... at himself. "By Zeus, Hanlon, I like you! Nobody else ever dared talk up to me like that. You win. Tell Zeller ... no, put him on, I'll tell him ... Zeller, give Hanlon the list of things needed for the mine-guard job, and pay him a hundred credits, charged to the 'accident fund'. Tell him to be here, all packed to go, at thirteen o'clock." He started to turn the set off, then, as he heard Hanlon ask "Anything else now?" faced the screen again. "Not unless you want to make rounds with the boys again. It will be some time before you can have any night-life." Hanlon made a sign of distaste and shook his head. "Unh-uh, thanks. Two big-heads in a row will last me for plenty time. I'll go get some shut-eye." The leader smiled companionably. "The rest might be best, for you'll have a rather rough trip. You'll ride a freighter, not a luxury liner." "Do I ask where I'm going?" "Does it matter?" Hanlon shrugged. "Not especially. Just curiosity." "Then it won't particularly bother you if we ... uh ... keep your destination a secret for a while?" "Not in the least, if you want it that way," he yawned indifferently. But his mind was so anxious he had trouble not letting it show in his face or eyes. How was he to get that location? He thought swiftly, and conceived a possibility. "Your bar here serve Cola?" "What is that?" "A soft drink very popular on Terra and many other planets. I'd like to take a case with me, if it's allowed." "I see no reason against it. I never heard of it, but you might ask the bargirls." "I can get it at the Golden Web if you don't have it here. I had some there the other night." He watched carefully but there was no sign of suspicion; the leader did not even seem interested. Hanlon blanked the screen, got the list and money from Zeller, and walked out. The Bacchus did not stock Cola, so he took a ground-cab to the Golden Web. Pretending half-drunkenness, he walked in and ordered the case of drink from his colleague. While drinking a glass of it, he talked in more or less garrulous tones. In between unimportant words he informed the SS man bartender that he was leaving the next noon for another planet whose name and location he hadn't yet been able to learn. "Got a good boss, though," he mumbled thickly. "Very good boss--sure he knows a lot. Headquarters at the Bacchus." Hooper, quick of understanding as all SS men have to be, merely said aloud the conventional "Safe Flights," but Hanlon knew he would do everything he could to get that planetary information. And Hanlon was well content as he went to the hotel and to bed. What could be done, had been done. As soon as he had breakfasted the next morning, Hanlon checked out of his hotel, then went out and purchased the special clothing and other items on his list. With everything packed in traveling cases, he presented himself at the Bacchus just before thirteen o'clock. As he got out of the cab, and gave orders to the doorman about keeping his luggage until he was ready to leave, Hanlon was heartened to see Hooper, apparently reading a newsheet, leaning against the terrace-facade nearby. In the back room the leader and three others, including the ubiquitous Panek, were waiting for him. He was handed an envelope. "When you arrive, give these credentials to Peter Philander, the superintendent. He will be your boss there. Just do as he says, don't get nosey about what is going on, and you will do all right." "Don't worry about my keeping my nose clean. I'm taking along a dozen extra hankies." His last doubts about leaving Simonides to go to the unknown planet were now at rest. He was sure that there he would find the leads he so desperately needed--and probably only there could he get them. They picked up his luggage, then all got into a large, black ground-car, and as it started the men lowered curtains over the windows. And while Hanlon was wondering about that, one of them pinned his arms suddenly to his side while another slapped a piece of adhesive across his eyes, smoothing it tightly into place. Hanlon gasped, but did not struggle. "That's right, don't fight it," the leader's voice was almost kind. "We just don't want you knowing where we are going ... yet." * * * * * The car travelled some miles, then stopped and they all got out. The men helped Hanlon down, led him a few dozen steps, then helped him climb into another machine. In a moment he realized they were now in an aircar that had taken off, and he frowned. Assuming that Hooper had followed, he'd be out of it now. He was on his own. For several moments Hanlon tried in vain to read from the others' minds where they were going. He had almost given up hope when he heard the unmistakable panting of a small dog, and realized that one of the air crew must have brought a pet. Quickly his mind contacted that of the dog, and instantly was inside it, looking out through the dog's eyes. He controlled its mind so that it climbed up in the man's lap and, with its forepaws on the fellow's shoulder, looked out of the aircar's window. No one seemed to find anything peculiar in the dog's actions, its owner merely patting it as it stood there, as Hanlon could feel through the dog's senses. Now Hanlon could see they were nearing some mountains, and took particular notice of everything that might be remembered as a landmark. Soon they were settling down into a little hidden valley, where there was a fairly large space-freighter. They led him into this ship, and he lost the dog, so could not see just where they were taking him. Finally he sensed they were in a small room, and the adhesive was ripped from his face. The leader and Panek stood in the small cabin with Hanlon. "This is to be your cabin. Sorry for the precautions, but you can see why, I am sure. But if you behave, and make a good record, you won't have to ... uh ... worry about them any more. Take-off almost immediately, so we have to leave. Safe flights, and I hope you make out all right." He looked fixedly at Hanlon for a long, long minute, and the young man, returned his gaze as steadily. "I'll do my job," Hanlon said honestly after that moment--but it was his job for the Secret Service he meant. "Good-bye, and thanks. Thank you, too, Panek, for your help." "Glad to've done it, Pal, glad to." "See you in four months, then," and the two left. Hanlon stored his luggage in the racks made for it, then started to go outside and see what was going on. But the door was locked. "They sure don't want me to know where we're going," he grinned ruefully as he sat down on the edge of his bunk. "That makes me know it's important, and I'll get it some day--they can't keep it from me forever." Sirens screamed "take-off," and he strapped himself into his bunk. When he felt the pressure subside and knew they were in space he unstrapped and relaxed. But there was nothing he could do. Later there was the sound of a key in the lock. When the door opened a heavy-set man carrying a blaster stepped inside. "Stand back, Bud, and keep your hands in sight." Hanlon raised his hands while the messcook brought in a tray and set it on his bunk. As they were going out Hanlon spoke. "You got any books on board? I don't mind being locked in and won't make any trouble, but please give me something to do." They made no answer, but when they returned for the empty dishes they left a couple of dog-eared magazines. Late the following afternoon the siren warned of landing, and Hanlon strapped himself down again. After he had felt the landing, one of the ship's officers came and unlocked the door. He was very apologetic. "Sorry, sir, about this, but we had our orders." "It's okay with me," Hanlon said cheerfully. "Don't make a bit of difference with me where I am, long's I get well paid." "I see you've put on your light clothing. That's good--this is a hot planet. These your bags?" Hanlon nodded, and each carrying one, the officer led the way to the airlock and they climbed down onto this new world. The air was thick and muggy--at least 110° Fahrenheit, Hanlon guessed. There was a great bustle of activity on the landing field. Automatic machinery was unloading cargo, and loading it into trucks. There were several men, with their luggage, standing about. One was a huge, brutish-looking man, another a slender young chap about Hanlon's own age, apparently well-educated, from his manner, but with a certain shiftiness in his eyes; the others common-place laborers. "Any of you been here before?" the officer asked. Two of the others nodded, and started away from the field. Hanlon saw that just beyond the edge of it there were heavy forests--almost a jungle, but strange and alien. As they drew nearer and finally entered it, the young SS man saw that this was, indeed, unlike any jungle or forest he had ever seen or heard about. Tall trees whose branches writhed as though alive, yet never attacked one. Underbrush so thick it seemed impassable, yet which twisted away from their approach as though afraid of a contaminating touch, only to swish back into place as soon as the men passed. Hanlon, walking along and taking it all in, seemed to catch faint whispers of thought, but could make nothing of it. He wondered what it was--perhaps some alien animal-life very low in the scale? The ground was soft and mucky. The young checker cautioned the others, "Don't step off the path; some of this stuff's almost like quicksand." "There's a road to the mine," he answered Hanlon's further question, "but it's winding and about five miles, where this path's only a half mile. Ground here won't stand heavy loads." "How big is this planet, anyway? Gravity seems about like Simonides and Terra." "It's not quite as large, but seems composed mainly of heavier metals or something. Gravity about .93. The weather stays about the same all year 'round; very few storms of any kind, although there's a hot rain almost every night for about half an hour. The temperature goes down to about 90 at night; up to 110-115 days." "No wonder they told me to buy light clothing." "Yeah, it's sure hot. We'd go mostly naked, except the actinic's really fierce. Be sure to wear a hat all the time outdoors, and light gloves. If your eyes start to smart, wear dark goggles." "Thanks for the tips, Chum, I appreciate 'em. I'd begun to notice skin itching, but thought it might be this jungle." They broke through the final wall of foliage and Hanlon saw a large cleared space ahead that must have been roughly a half-mile across. There were quite a number of buildings, mostly windowless, and he decided they were storehouses. "There's the messhall," his new-found friend pointed. They went on to another long, low, bungalow-type building, inside which Hanlon saw a long hall from which opened dozens of doors on either side. The other men disappeared into one or another of the rooms, and the young fellow stopped at another door. "Grab the first room that has a key in the lock outside," he said. "They're all alike." The SS man found one, with the number "17" on the door, and went in. The room was small but comfortably furnished. The bed had a good mattress, he found, and white linen sheets and a thin, fleecy blanket folded on the foot. There was a big easy chair, a closet for his clothes and a dresser with four drawers. Glo-lights were set in the ceiling, and there was another on a standard by the big chair for easy reading. A door opened into another room which proved to be a compact toilet and shower. Everything was immaculately clean, and the air was cooled and sweet from air-conditioning. "Not bad, not bad at all," Hanlon said half-aloud as he unpacked and stored his things. Then he took a shower. "Man, are you going to get plenty of work-outs, in this heat," he apostrophised the shower, thankfully. Dressing again, he went out to locate Peter Philander, his new boss. He stopped at the messhall, and there he found the cook, a jolly, roly-poly sort of man. He introduced himself and they chatted for a few minutes. "I'm going to like this guy--hope they're all as nice and friendly," Hanlon thought. "Where's the super's office?" he asked, and the cook pointed it out. Entering the office-shack, Hanlon found himself in a fairly large room with a number of desks and several drafting boards with blue-prints and drawings pinned on them. Behind one of the larger desks was a heavy-set man with a great, angry scar across his left cheek and neck, running from the bridge of the nose to below the ear. Something about the man brought a sense of distrust to Hanlon--perhaps his looks, for that terrible scar made him look like a blood-thirsty pirate. Hanlon discreetly let none of these things show in his voice or demeanor as he stepped forward, a smile on his face and his credentials in his hand. "Mr. Philander, sir? I'm George Hanlon, a new guard." The other nodded without a word, and snatched at the papers, glaring at Hanlon in a squinting, suspicious manner. Hanlon probed toward the mind behind that frown, and could sense a feeling of fear, suspicion and unrest. He caught a fragment of thought--"another one after my job?"--and in a flash of inspiration guessed what was wrong. This superintendent must have a terrible inferiority complex, which that disfiguring scar certainly didn't help. He was undoubtedly competent, or he would not be here, but felt every new man was a possible challenge or replacement. Knowing that his papers made no mention of his having been a cadet, Hanlon took a chance on a course of action. "Gee, Mr. Philander, sir, I envy you," he said the moment the man looked up. "Knowing all about metals and ores and mining and stuff like that. I sure wish I'd had the chance to learn something valuable like that. But me, I guess I'm just a 'strong back; weak mind' sort of guy." The superintendent looked at him piercingly for a long moment, as though trying to decide whether this was genuine or subtle sarcasm. He must have decided it was the former, for he relaxed a bit. "Yeah," he growled in a deep bass that seemed meant to be pleasant now. "It takes a lot of study and a good mind to learn what I know. Very few men can make the grade." And Hanlon, who was by necessity swiftly becoming a good judge of character, knew he had this man pegged, and that while he would be dangerous if crossed, could be handled adroitly. "Just what will my duties be, sir? Or have you delegated the handling of us guards to some lesser man?" "No, I handle 'em myself. 'If you want a job well done, do it yourself', you know. I'll take you out and show you around. Are you all settled and comfortable?" "Oh, yes, sir. I have a very nice room, number 17, and am all unpacked. Hunting your office I ran into the messhall, and Cookie told me about meal hours. I'm sure I'll get along fine here--as much as this awful heat'll let me. They sure weren't kidding when they said it was hot here. And I want to assure you, sir, that I'll work hard and tend strictly to business--nothing else." The superintendent was becoming more mollified and less fearful by the second. Now he actually smiled, a rather pitiful travesty of a smile, and Hanlon's sympathy went out to him. "Then we'll get along fine," Philander said. "Just remember that your job is only to keep the natives at work during your shift, and that in your off hours you do not go hunting 'round into things that're none of your business." "Oh, naturally, sir. You just list what limits I'm to keep in, and I'll stay there. All I'm after here is that thousand credits a month, and as big a bonus as I can earn. You see," with engaging frankness, "I'm a guy that wants to make his pile as quick as possible, so I won't have to work all my life. I've got to work to get 'em, sure, but I don't aim to work forever." "Hmmpfff" Philander rose from behind the desk. "Come on, I'll show you around." Chapter 13 For an hour Superintendent Philander escorted George Hanlon about the diggings, showing him the various buildings and the workers' stockade. ("Prison" would be a better word, Hanlon thought, enraged that there were still men who would enslave others for their own personal gain.) The young Earthman got a real shock of surprise at his first sight of the native. They were so entirely different from anything he had ever suspected might exist. They were tall and slender, and their greenish-brown skin was rough and irregular. They seemed possessed of considerable wiry strength, however. Hanlon had the peculiar feeling that they were somehow familiar, as though related to something he already knew, even though they were so alien. But, strain as he might, he could not at first bring that elusive thought into recognition. He examined more particularly each item of the natives' appearance. They had small triangular eyes, wide-spaced on their narrow faces, almost like a bird's yet not set quite as far back. They could see forward and somewhat to either side, he guessed, with a much wider range of vision than humans have. They also had triangular-shaped mouths which worked somewhat on the sphincter method. Even though their faces were sort of silly-looking, there was somehow a strange beauty to them. He noticed that when two or more faced each other they often worked their mouths, and guessed they were conversing, although not a sound could be heard coming from them, other than a peculiar, faint rustling as they moved. It was the latter that gave him the clue. _Animated trees!_ That's what they reminded him of. That skin of theirs was like new bark; their limbs were irregular, suggesting the branches of a tree, rather than the graceful roundness of human and Terran animal's limbs. He turned excitedly to Philander. "Hey, those natives are partly vegetable, aren't they? Like trees that can move and think?" "That's what they say," Philander said shortly, "though I don't know about the 'think' part. No one's ever been able to figure 'em out. They don't talk, and can't seem to hear us, no matter how loud we yell. We have to show 'em everything we want 'em to do, and give 'em orders by signs. Whips don't do any good when they loaf--they don't seem to feel 'em. So we use electric shock-rods, like you see that guard there carrying." Hanlon was silent for several moments, but his mind was attempting to probe into that of the native nearest him. Nor was he surprised to discover that this native had a really respectable mind--alert and keen. Hanlon could read quite easily pictures of various things--but he could not interpret them. Yet he could feel their sense of shame and degradation at such an enslaved condition, and the dull anger they felt for the humans who had made them so. This promised to be a fertile field for study, and the young SS man felt a thrill that he could do a lot of prowling and studying without seeming to break the rules Philander had laid down for his conduct. "This certainly is my field," he thought. "I'm sure glad I decided to take the chance of coming here--the Corps must learn of this situation." The superintendent broke in on his thoughts. "I've got to go back to the office before dinner. Go to the commissary store, there, and get your chronom exchanged for one that runs on Algonian time. Yours will be stored for safekeeping and changed back if or when you leave here." As he walked away Hanlon thrilled to the knowledge that he had gained two valuable pieces of information. First, and most important, the name of this planet--Algon. Second, but this one a bit dismaying, that there might be some doubt as to whether or not he would ever leave here. Was there some danger here of which he had not been told ... or was it that the leader's promise of four months' work and then a vacation back to Simonides perhaps meant nothing at all--was merely a "come on"? It was more than the perspiration from the terrible heat that dampened Hanlon's skin as he walked thoughtfully over to the store. Yet he tingled with the knowledge that at least he knew where he was. Now, his only worry was getting that knowledge to the Corps. At dinner a little later he had his first chance to meet all the men with whom he would be working. The superintendent introduced them, all around when they sat down at the long table. There were eleven other guards, all older, all bigger men than he. They were alike in that all appeared to be swaggering bullies, and he could well imagine how ready they were with the use of those shock-rods, or other forms of brutality, to torture the Algonians at the least provocation or no provocation whatever. Without exception these guards had heavy faces, most of them unshaven, and most with thick, shaggy eyebrows. Even in that air-cooled room their generally unwashed condition was noticeable. Hanlon knew instinctively he would make no friends among them. "I only hope I make no enemies. Why was I, so drastically different from them, chosen as a guard? What's that leader got in his devious mind, anyway?" There were four mining engineers, and these men were keen, alert fellows. One seemed about forty-five, another in his late thirties, and the two others young men evidently not long out of school. They were clean-shaven, and friendly where the guards were surly and sneering at Hanlon's youth and slimness. There was an accountant, the store clerk, two checkers who tallied ore brought up each shift. A half dozen others, who apparently were truckmen and hoistmen, completed, with Philander, the cook and the bunkhouse cleaner, the human crew at this mine. Hanlon had been seated between one of the guards, a huge man by the name of Groton, and one of the young engineers. The latter made him welcome, and asked where he came from. "I'd just moved to Simonides when I got the chance to come here," Hanlon explained. "I was born and raised on Terra." "Terra!" the young man's voice was interested, and several others about the table raised their heads at that name. "I've always wanted to see the Mother World." When all had finished eating, several of the other men who had never seen Terra moved closer to Hanlon, asking many questions. "I understand Terra has the best technicians in the universe," one of the hoistmen said. "That used to be the case," Hanlon answered honestly, "but now I understand Simonides has, just as she is the wealthiest planet. Of course, Terra being the original world, was bound to have the best the race could breed in all lines of endeavor. But when so many people migrated to other planets, she gradually lost many of her finest brains. Later, those other planets offered such fabulous wages to men and women with skills and trainings her first inhabitants lacked, that Terra was further drained." "That's the pity of colonization," the elder engineer sighed. "It builds new lands at the expense of the old, taking all their strongest, most adventurous and most imaginative. Soon the original country or continent or planet is peopled only by the dregs." "I don't like to think Terra has only dregs left. After all, I came from there, you know," Hanlon grinned and they smiled back companionably. "But I know you're right in part--at least, that will probably be the case in time. Just as it will with the other planets as their best and younger top-notchers go out to open up still more worlds." In the middle of that first night on Algon something, perhaps his sub-conscious, brought George Hanlon wide awake, his every mental faculty clear and alert. Click! Click! Click! ... like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle falling into place, many of the odds and ends of apparently unrelated information and experience fell into place in this enigma. He remembered clearly now, an incident that had merely brought a momentary wonder at the time. Those last minutes before the ship took off. The leader had stared long and piercingly into his eyes and Hanlon, wondering and puzzled as to what the man was seeking, merely stared back dumbly. Now he remembered the flashing thought--quickly dismissed as ridiculous--that even if he did find out where he was going, he must never tell anyone; must forget it entirely and instantly on pain of severe torture. Why, that leader must have been trying to implant a hypnotic compulsion in his mind ... and must have thought he succeeded, else Hanlon would never have reached here alive. That was why he could never read that knowledge from the mind of any of the people he had contacted who were in on this game--not even that ship's officer, who certainly should have known. But wait a minute. What about Philander? He knew. Hadn't the hypnosis worked on him? Or was that name "Algon" merely one the super used in place of the real one he didn't know he knew? Or, again, could it be that he was so well trusted that the knowledge had not been sealed off from him? Of the three, Hanlon argued the latter was probably the truth. Another point. That vague reference to "if or when you leave here" was undoubtedly a slip of the tongue. Philander had probably guessed--or perhaps it was so with all first-time men--that Hanlon was here on probation. "If so," the thought was insistent, "I sure will have to watch my step every minute, and not let slip what I'm trying to do here." But further moments of thought brought the reasonable conclusion that he could lull their suspicion by buckling down and making a real record for efficiency. Or ... and this gave him the cold shivers for a moment, so that he instinctively burrowed a bit further down beneath the sheet, as though it could protect and warm him ... did they know all about him already, and had sent him here to get rid of him? Was he to become another victim of one of the leader's "little accidents"? Yes, if they still disbelieved his story about his dismissal, they might well be determined to get rid of him in a way that would not incriminate them. They would know that if Hanlon was still a Corpsman his death would be most thoroughly investigated. Perhaps ... but if that was the case, why let him get here at all? His "accident"--fatal, of course (so sorry!)--could just as well have occurred on the way. No, more likely he was still on probation. They were not quite sure of him, but were giving him the benefit of the doubt. The leader seemed to like him, in a curious way. Well, he was now warned, and would watch himself more carefully than ever ... and he had learned a lot, and would learn more. He smiled contentedly and went back to sleep. * * * * * The next day he had his first taste of guarding the natives as they worked. The superintendent himself inducted him into the task. Shortly before shift time, Philander appeared at Hanlon's room just as the young man was putting on the special clothing he had been told to wear on duty in the mine. "Ready?" Philander was strangely courteous and co-operative. "Let's go collect your crew." They went over to the stockade, the superintendent giving Hanlon a key as they unlocked the gates. Hanlon saw that the corral was divided into twelve sections. "One guard has charge of all the natives in one section, and they all work each shift," Philander explained. "What if one of them is sick?" "They don't get sick," the man's voice was gruff, and Hanlon's first thought was that what he really meant was that the natives were worked no matter how they felt. But he quickly became ashamed of the thought--he didn't know anything about them yet, and perhaps they actually never did get sick. He would have to quit jumping to conclusions that way--it would seriously retard his ability to make correct deductions. At the rearmost section, Philander opened another gate with the same key, and flashed his portable glo-light inside the large hut that covered most of the space of the section. Hanlon, close behind, could see about twenty of the "Greenies," as he had learned they were usually called, standing or lying about. There was no furniture inside, no chairs nor stools, tables or beds. "They eat and sleep standing up--that's why the huts don't need any furnishings," Philander explained. At sight of the men and the light, most of the natives began moving toward the door. A few at the back didn't move fast enough to satisfy Philander, and with a curse he ran back and touched them with that shock-rod he carried. Hanlon could see an expression of agony on the faces of those touched, and as they writhed away from the rod he realized it must be very painful, indeed, if not exquisite torture to them. They now jumped forward, and huddled pathetically near the door. Philander took a long, light but very tough line from his pocket. It had a series of running nooses in it, and he slipped one of these about the wrist of each native, drawing it tight. Then he half-led, half-dragged them out of the stockade, to the mine entrance, and down the drift to the rise they had to climb to get to the stope Hanlon's crew was to work. Once there, and released from the rope, the natives seemed to know what they were supposed to do, and sullenly started doing it. "You usually use three pickmen, four shovellers, four for your timbering crew, three sorters, and six on the wheel-barrows," Philander explained. "Sometimes, if the vein widens out enough, you get extra hands to work the wider face, but this size crew generally works out best. You'll soon get used to it so you'll know how many you need. If more, just yell and you'll get 'em. If it happens the vein narrows so you can't use all these to best advantage, someone working a wider vein can use your extras temporarily." "I get it," Hanlon was very attentive. He was determined to learn this work quickly and thoroughly, and to make a good record. Philander showed Hanlon the difference between the ore and the surrounding rock, and explained very carefully how he was to watch especially for any side veins branching off from the main one. "Make sure the Greenies clean out all the ore as they go along, before it's timbered up." "I understand everything so far." "Keep the lazy beggars going full speed," Philander was very emphatic. "Don't let 'em lag, or they'll wear you down. Don't ever let 'em get out of control, or put anything over on you, especially in sorting ore from rock. They're tricky. Use your shock-rod at every least sign of mutiny or loafing. Make 'em respect you. They know better'n to try to get away, 'cause they hate the rod." "What does it do to them?" "We don't know exactly, except they can feel it, and will do anything to get away from it." "Maybe it hurts them terribly." "Look, punk!" Philander lost his friendliness, and snarled at Hanlon with twisted face. "We don't care whether they like it or not. They know their jobs and they don't have to get shocked if they keep working. So it's strictly up to them. Don't go getting any soft notions about these lousy Greenies. They're only dumb brutes fit for working--so work 'em!" "I'll work 'em," Hanlon said. Chapter 14 Yes, Hanlon would work the natives, but without cruelty. His thoughts were a seething of contempt for these brutal thugs. He was willing to bet, right there and then, without knowing anything about this situation, that these natives could be controlled without bullying or hurting them--and better. Having had military training, Hanlon knew it was possible to enforce the most strict discipline without such means, and that any man ... or entity, probably ... could and would submit to discipline fairly and decently enforced, with far less trouble and animosity, and with far greater productivity than if he were driven to it. "Anybody works better for a pat on the back than for a kick in the pants!" he thought indignantly. Philander stood about for an hour, and when he saw that Hanlon understood exactly what was expected of him and his crew--when he saw Hanlon several times correct the sorters who had left too much rock in with the ores--he turned to leave. "You'll hear the siren when the shift's over," he said. "Bring your gang back and lock 'em in the stockade then. Be sure you lock both gates carefully." "Cookie gave me a lunch for half-time," Hanlon said. "What about the natives? Do they eat then, too?" "Naw, they don't eat," was the surprising answer. "Once a day they stick their hands into the dirt for nearly an hour. Must get nourishment that way." "That seems to prove they're vegetable matter. Their fingers must be some sort of feeding roots," Hanlon observed sagely. "They sure are the strangest beings I've ever heard of." The superintendent shrugged and left without further words. Hanlon looked about and found a rock near the sorters, and used this for a seat. He sat watching the natives work, and speculating about them, and also about what this was all about. The mine seemed to him a very rich one, and by using slave labor those men could well be reaping a huge fortune from it. No wonder they could afford to pay guards a thousand a month. After a bit one of the natives, seeing Hanlon merely sitting there instead of being alertly on guard close to them, dropped its shovel and turned away from its work. Hanlon got up leisurely, but walked purposefully over to confront the Greenie. He smiled and motioned the native back to work. The Greenie's face showed surprise at Hanlon's action, but it made no move to go. It did, however, appear to be keeping its eyes alertly on that dread shock-rod hanging loosely in Hanlon's hand. The guard could see that the others had also stopped work, and were carefully watching the little drama. Hanlon smiled and again motioned the native back to work, and when it did not move, he reached out, grasped it gently by the shoulder and, still gently, pushed it in the direction of its shovel, with what was really a pat on the back. There were looks of surprise that amounted almost to stupefaction on the faces of all the natives. The one who had first stopped now picked up its shovel and resumed work, and the rest followed its example. Hanlon resumed his seat, still with that friendly smile on his face. He noticed with satisfaction that they were soon working harder and faster than before the incident. "I was right," he told himself almost smugly. The six hour shift was finally ended without any further show of resistance. That is, it was six hours by Algonian time, but about eight by Terra standards. For on Algon, while the day had been divided by the humans into twenty-four hours, the same as on Earth, each hour was almost seventy-eight minutes long. They divided the year into five day weeks, though, so it averaged out about the same. When the siren blew Hanlon smiled happily at his crew as he herded them together, and made applauding motions with his hands, wondering if they understood what he meant. When he had locked the natives in their stockade, he hunted up the checkers. "How'd I do?" he asked. "Come anywhere near what I was supposed to get out?" One of the checkers totalled up his figures, then looked up in surprise. "Hey, kid, you did all right. Nearly a hundred pounds over the usual output, and clean, too. That's really okay for a new guard, and then some. Didn't have any trouble, eh?" "Trouble?" Hanlon asked naively. "Was I supposed to have some?" Then he couldn't help grinning. "Thanks for the info," and went to his room, took a shower to cool off after that muggy heat in the mine, then tumbled onto his bunk for a nap until dinner-time. Those first days so thoroughly disgusted George Hanlon as he saw the continued and senseless brutality the guards used toward their native "slaves," that he had trouble concealing his feelings. He continued to treat his Greenies with the respect he felt was due them, and he could not help but notice they seemed to look on him more and more as their friend. They always smiled when he looked at them, and before many days he discovered that his crew was doing more work than any of the others. His mind-probing had convinced him they were high enough in the scale of evolution to know the meaning of gratitude, and he could tell they were repaying his kindness with co-operation. He had begun to make much more sense out of the pictures he saw in their minds, and to get some glimmerings of understanding about their alien concepts. Also, it was increasingly borne in upon him that they did "talk" to each other, and he guessed shrewdly that the reason no one could hear them was because their voices were above ... or below? ... the range of human hearing. "Above," he finally deduced. That gave him the idea for an experiment, and he started whistling as loud as he could, gradually raising his tones until he was at the top of his range. He saw with interest and excitement that the last one or two shrillest notes seemed to attract their attention. Their silly-looking little triangular ears perked up and began twitching. They turned about, as though seeking the source of that sound, while every mouth began working with signs of utmost excitement, and his mind caught concepts of surprise and wonder. That convinced him and so, in his next several off-hours, he surreptitiously collected various articles and pieces of material, and in his room started the construction of a little machine. His course in the Corps school had included considerable mechanics and electronics, and the tearing down and rebuilding of many of the machines and instruments the Corps used. What he was trying to make now was a "frequency-transformer." If it would do what he was sure it would, and if he was right about the Algonians having vocal ability, they should be able to hear each other, and some day he might learn their language well enough to converse with them. He finished it and smuggled the little box-like machine into his place in the mine. When he had his crew down there and working at their tasks, he got out the little box. He turned on the current from the small battery installed in it, then began talking at the same time he was turning a rheostat higher and higher. Finally he noticed those mobile ears began to twitch, and as he turned the tones higher and still higher, more and more of the natives stopped work and turned toward him. Finally he noticed an intenser excitement among them, and they dropped their tools and came crowding closer to him and his machine, their little eyes almost emitting sparks of excitement. He thrilled with the realization that it worked. Now he turned another knob more and more, and gradually from the speaker came a jumble of sounds much like "mob-mutter," but very low. He kept on turning the rheostat until the incoming voices seemed about the same pitch as his own voice. The excitement of the natives had grown to tremendous proportions, and his own equalled theirs. Their little mouths were working faster, and an expression almost like laughter came onto their peculiar little faces, as they heard his voice and knew he could now hear theirs. Hanlon's own smile almost cracked his face. He realized he had learned something none of the greedy, power-mad Simonideans knew, and felt that here was the possible beginning for his campaign to free these poor native slaves. He beckoned to one of the nearer natives to come to his side, then waved the rest back to their work. They looked at him questioningly for a moment, but he smiled reassuringly at them and they, having learned that he never used that dread shock-rod on them, all went back to their labors, leaving the one native standing there. Hanlon looked earnestly at the Greenie, pointed a finger directly at himself and spoke into the microphone of his transformer. "Hanlon," he said slowly and distinctly, and repeated it a number of times, tapping himself on the chest each time he said it. A smile of comprehension broke over the native's little face and he tapped himself the same way and said a word that came out of the speaker sounding like "Geck." Hanlon reached out and touched the native and said "Geck." The Greenie in turn tapped Hanlon and said "An-yon," and they had made the first beginnings of understanding each other. From then on this one native was released from all other work while Hanlon's crew was on duty, and the two devoted all their efforts to learning how to talk to each other. Hanlon was pleased, but not especially surprised, to note that the rest of the crew--now almost entirely without his supervision--worked harder than ever, and that their daily output of ore grew progressively greater each shift, and all clean ore. Hanlon's first exultant thought had been to run to Philander and tell him of what he had learned concerning the native's speech ability, and how he had made it possible for humans to talk to them. But more sober reflections during that long work-shift brought caution. He decided this was a bit of knowledge he had better keep to himself as long as possible. He hoped he could keep it until he had learned how to talk with these people and learned much about them, their situation, and how it could best be ameliorated. The other men, he knew, considered the natives simply beasts, and would probably take away his transformer, instead of using it to learn about the Greenies as he planned to do. By the end of a month he and Geck were chatting away like brothers. Each had learned enough of the other's language so that by using a mixture of the two they could exchange almost any thought concept desired. Hanlon's ability to read the native's surface thoughts helped a lot, especially as he began to understand their alien ways of thinking. Even so, he was surprised at how quickly Geck was picking up his own language. Hanlon found that these people, while they had no scientific or mechanical knowledge or training of their own, did have highly developed ethical principles which governed all their individual and collective actions. They were a simple, natural people, with a native dignity Hanlon almost envied. He found, too, that his first shrewd guess was correct--their bodies were of vegetable matter, rather than proto-plasmic. They reproduced by budding, and he saw a number of the "females" to whom were attached buds of varying sizes. One day he watched interestedly while one of the ripened buds, a fully-developed individual but only about ten inches high, detached itself from its parent and dropped to the ground. It lay there for some minutes while the "mother" watched it carefully. Then it rose by itself and trotted away with her as she resumed her work--a miniature but fully alive native "child." It would take about two years for it to attain its maturity, Geck informed him. Hanlon asked, and Geck said it could take care of itself alone in the forest, so Hanlon managed to sneak it out into the woods, where it would be free. Geck told him that about four years previous a great "egg" had landed here on Guddu, which was their name for the planet. Men had come from inside it, and scattered all about, seeking the metal ores they were now mining. The natives, friendly and childishly curious, had gathered in force to watch these strange new creatures, and because of their trusting natures had been easily trapped, imprisoned and forced to work long, hard hours in the rapidly-deepening holes. "Us die swiftly away from sunlight," Geck said sadly. "Us have very long life-span, but underground work make us wither-die fast. Idea often discussed among we to discontinue race, because soon all we be gone anyway." That quiet, hopeless statement made Hanlon madder than a wet cat. "What do the shock-rods do to you?" he asked after a while. "Affect we's nervous system some way. Us get most terrible cramps. Is horrible agony. Us so thankful you never use." "I knew you would work without them as long as you were treated fairly." To himself Hanlon swore a determined oath to finish this business entirely, some way or another. He realized his limitations--one young, inexperienced man against twenty ruthless, wealth-and-power greedy ruffians ... and that only here, at this one mine. No telling how many others there were on Algon, besides all those back on Simonides, and who knew what other planets, who were in on this plot. His heart clamored for swift action--his brain counselled caution and careful planning. Chapter 15 Hanlon was sitting at his usual place in the mine one day when one of the barrow-men ran up and spoke swiftly to Geck, who turned to Hanlon, alarm on his face. "Big boss man come." Hanlon jumped to his feet. "Get everyone to work; tell them to act real busy!" he snapped. "You, too!" He thrust the frequency-transformer into a hole prepared for just such an emergency, grabbed up his shock-rod and stepped closer to the natives. He was standing there, to all appearances strictly on the job of making his charges work, when Philander came crawling up the rise into the pocket where this crew was mining the glossy, lustrous pitch-blank uraninite ore. "How're things going?" the superintendent greeted Hanlon with at least the appearance of friendliness. "Just fine," the young man responded. "Everything's under control." "Been looking over the reports, and see your crew is getting out more ore'n any of the others," the super's voice held just a tinge of anxiety, and Hanlon began probing that mind to see if he could discover just what all this portended. "I just keep 'em at it," he shrugged. "No trouble?" "Nope, no trouble. Look at 'em," he waved his hand at the busy crew. The big man regarded them closely, and could see that every single one of the natives was working at what he knew was their top speed, and without a single slacker. Even the barrow-men were moving almost at a jog-trot rather than the lazy saunter most natives used in an effort to do no more than they were forced to do. Philander shook his head wonderingly. "How d'you do it?" he asked. "The other guards have to keep shocking one after another of the lazy dogs, yet you've made no move at a single one--and they keep right on hustling. I've never seen a crew work so hard." Hanlon wanted desperately to tell him, but he decided the time was not yet. So he merely shrugged the question away as of little consequence. "I dunno, sir. I just stand around watching 'em, and they work." He grinned into the super's face. "Must be my manly charms--er sumpin'," he chuckled. Then sobered. "Maybe one reason is that I rotate 'em. Any job gets monotonous, so every hour or so I let 'em change around, from pick to barrow to sorting, and so on." A frown of annoyance came onto Philander's face, but he quickly erased it. After all, this man was getting out more ore than the others, and that was what he was here for. How he did it didn't matter so much, after all, as long as he kept up his record. But Hanlon, reading those surface thoughts, knew that the official was still very suspicious--and vastly worried. Hanlon knew he had to disarm the super some way, to get him out of that mood. He decided his air of naivete could still do the trick. "Mr. Philander, sir," his voice was very ingenuous, "I don't want to pry into anything that's none of my business, but would you mind telling me what this stuff is we're getting here? It isn't anything dangerous, is it? I mean, it isn't one of those ... those radium ores that make a fellow sterile, is it? I may want to get married some day, so I don't want to take any chances." The mining engineer looked at him blankly for a moment, then threw back his head and laughter rolled out until it seemed to fill the stope. Hanlon watched the other's mind clear itself of all suspicion ... at least for the time being. Philander rested his hand companionably on the younger man's shoulder. "No, it's nothing like that, so you can quit worrying. And the bonus you'll get, if you can keep up this output, will fix you so you can afford a wife when your time's up and you go back to Sime." "Gee, that's good," Hanlon made his voice and face show how relieved he felt. "It had me worried, even though I haven't got a girl yet." The superintendent seemed in good humor now. Hanlon caught the thought that this punk was a good guard, and bright, and he did get the stuff out. The plan of rotating the workers was good--he'd order the other guards to use it. This Hanlon probably was no menace to their plans here, after all. In fact, maybe later they could use him on the bigger job. He (Philander) would so recommend to His Highness when he made his next report. After a few more casual words the super left, and Hanlon sank back onto his favorite lounging place, thinking very seriously and contemplatively about this whole matter. Again he had run into that thought about someone called "His Highness," but never any indication as to who the man was, or what position he occupied. It was now apparent that this individual was the man he would have to ferret out, whose plans he would have to learn before the Corps could take any really effective action. He certainly hoped that one was the top man. It was going to be hard enough to get a line on him--to say nothing of anyone even higher. One evening at dinner, some time later, Hanlon became aware that the guard, Gorton, was growling at him. He looked up in surprise, and forced himself to pay attention to the big man's words. "I ask ya, whatcha tryin' t' do, punk?" the small pig-eyes glared redly at him, and the voice was harsh and bitter. "Try'n'a show up us other guards? What'sa big idea, gettin' out more ore'n we do?" Hanlon stared back in amazement, and his voice when he answered was a stammer of surprise. "Why ... why ... I'm not trying to do anything ... except my job," he added more forcefully. "We been gettin' out a reg'lar three tons a shift," the ugly face was shoved closer to his, and Hanlon shrank back from the stench of raw spirits breathed on him. "What'sa idea drivin' yer crew up t' three an' a half er four?" "I was told to keep my crew working, and I've been doing that ... and only that!" Hanlon snapped. "And take your ugly, stinking face away from mine!" The disgust he felt at the brutality of these guards had made him so soul-sick with them he wasn't going to take any guff from one of them. Even though Gorton out-weighed him by a good sixty pounds and probably had at least four inches longer reach, Hanlon wasn't afraid of him. Right now he was as much in the mood for a fight as the guard seemed to be, for at Hanlon's words Gorton's huge, ham-like hand suddenly slapped out at the younger man. Hanlon wasn't able entirely to dodge safely, sitting as close as they were. His head rang from the terrific blow. He grabbed his cup of steaming coffee, and threw it backhand into Gorton's face. Bellowing in pain and anger, the guard jumped up, upsetting the bench, and almost Hanlon with it. But the younger man was agile, and kept his feet. As Gorton rushed, his long, heavy arms flailing, Hanlon ducked away and jumped back far enough to get a firm footing on a cleared space of floor. All Corps cadets were well-trained in both Marquis of Queensbury boxing, Judo and no-holds-barred barroom brawling. He knew all the questions ... and all the answers. So Hanlon stepped back in quickly. While Gorton was out of position from that abortive mighty swing, he drove his fist to the wrist into the big man's soft belly. As Gorton doubled up with an explosive grunt, Hanlon swung from the heels. His uppercut caught the big fellow flush on the jaw, and staggered him. But Gorton could take it, and charged again, roaring curses. By sheer weight he bore Hanlon back across the floor, and got in a couple of heavy blows. Hanlon's right cheek was badly bruised, and that eye almost closed. But he was fighting methodically, almost viciously. He was in and out, slashing and ripping Gorton's face to shreds. The other guards had been yelling their delight at the fight, and their hatred of the brash newcomer who was destroying their easy set-up. It was plain they were all on Gorton's side, and hoped to see Hanlon get thoroughly whipped. "Bat his ears off, Gort!" "Pound some sense inta him!" "Show him who's top man aroun' here!" One of them was not content with yelling. As Hanlon stepped to one side to avoid another of Gorton's rushes, this guard stuck out his leg and tripped Hanlon, who fell backward. Instantly Gorton was on him, and a great heavy-shod foot shot out in a kick that would have broken Hanlon's every rib. But the SS man was watching for just such tricks. His feet snaked out and hoisted Gorton so high and so far that when he landed he crashed like a great falling tree. Hanlon jumped to his feet and swung to confront his foe. But Gorton's head was bleeding badly, his eyes were closed, his face contorted. He was out like a burnt match. Instantly Hanlon sank to his knees by the fallen man, gently raising the head and yelling for cold water and a towel. When the cook came running with them, Hanlon worked as swiftly to revive the guard as he would have done for his friend. The other guards were so surprised at this act of mercy they sat like dull clods. But a couple of the engineers rose and came swiftly to help Hanlon. One of the checkers ran to Philander's office for the first aid kit. The men were working desperately to stanch the flow of blood when Superintendent Philander came running in with the clerk and the kit. Taking in the situation at a glance, he demanded an explanation. "Th' punk jumped Gort an' tried t' kill 'im!" one of the guards yelled, but was shouted down by the engineers, the checkers and the cook before the other slow-witted guards came to their senses enough to corroborate their fellow's mendacious claim. The senior engineer explained fully and concisely what had actually happened. "Yet after all that, the kid was the first to help him, even though Gorton started the fight for no reason." Just then the fallen guard groaned and began to regain his senses. The men helped him to his feet. He blinked for some moments, as though trying to figure out what had happened to him, then remembrance came. "Why, that little squirt, hittin' me wit' a chair!" he yelled, and straggled to get at Hanlon again, nor did the men have an easy time holding him back. Philander planted himself squarely in front of the angry man. "Shut up!" he blazed, and the tone of command halted the big fellow; he stared stupidly at his boss, as though disbelieving his ears. "You keep your hands off Hanlon!" the super emphasized his words by tapping Gorton not gently on the chest. "I hear of any more of this, and it's the jug 'til the next ship comes, then back to Sime." He whirled to face the table. "That goes for all the rest of you rats, too! If Hanlon does his job better'n you, it's 'cause he's a better man. Try to match him--don't go gunning for him!" "He your pet, Pete?" one asked mockingly. "No, he's not my pet, Pete," the super's voice mimicked the tone, although his face went red at the accusation. "I just don't want this camp messed up with any feuds. That'd cut down production, and the Big Boy wants this ore out fast. If Hanlon can work his crew faster'n harder'n the rest of you, you'd a blasted sight better find out how he does it, not try to cut down his take. How'd you like to go back to Sime and try explaining to His Highness why you're not getting out as much stuff as's been proved possible?" That stopped them cold. Hanlon, watching their faces and reading their minds, saw them shiver at thought of having to face that feared individual--whoever he was. They were more scared of him than of the Devil--that was evident. The men resumed their eating without another word--that threat had cowed them as no amount of physical chastisement or other punishment could possibly have done. Philander set about sewing up and binding Gorton's head-wound and his cut and bleeding face. Hanlon resumed his own seat after washing up and treating his own bruises with the cook's help. As he ate he sought mind after mind in the vain endeavor to discover any possible scrap of information about this enigmatic, unknown Highness. But he drew blank after blank, as far as definite data was concerned--just as he had always done. The surface thoughts of each man there showed plainly their fear of that implacably cold and vicious brain, but none of them held a picture of him. They knew no excuses for failure were ever accepted. They knew terrible punishments were certain to follow when anyone was luckless enough to incur that monster's displeasure. But Hanlon shivered, himself, as he saw how clearly those hardened criminals feared that mysterious man's displeasure. He quailed momentarily at thought of what would happen to him if he were caught trying to locate that man and his plot. Hanlon knew a long moment of utter discouragement. There was so much he had to know before he could lead the Corps in clearing up this mess. There had been so many mentions of a "main plot" that he knew this illegal mining and slavery was but a small part of what was ... what must be ... going on. No, he would just have to keep on trying, keep on working. On second thought, he had done pretty well so far, at that--he felt he had a right to feel good about that. But he wasn't done yet, by a whole tankful of fuel. The problem stayed with him even in sleep, but in the morning he had an idea. As soon as he got his crew down into the mine and working, he got out the frequency-transformer, and called Geck to him. "Can you find out what is happening on other parts of Guddu?" The native's answers stunned him. "Yes, An-yon, all we can mind-talk with any Guddu anywhere. What you wish to know?" Chapter 16 The knowledge that these Guddus of Algon were telepathic rocked George Hanlon back on his heels. That was a thing he had never even imagined. They were such a simple, almost childlike race, that such an ability was farthest from his thoughts. "If you can talk with your minds?" he asked Geck in wonder, "why do you bother to speak with the voice to each other?" "Because mind-talk more tiring to we," came the simple explanation. "It take much of we's forces. Us grow weak after much of them." "That makes me hesitate to ask you to do any of it, then," the young SS man said. "I was hoping you could find out for me how many mines are operated on the planet, and if all of them are using you Guddus as slaves." "Oh, yes, An-yon, me know that already," Geck's peculiar little face, which had become so friendly to Hanlon through long association, broke out into a smile that was quickly shadowed by sorrow at thought of the plight of his people. "There is nine mines. Human masters make Guddu work in all of they." "Nine, eh?" Hanlon thought swiftly for a moment. "Do they all produce the same ores as this one?" "Will have to find that for you, An-yon. You wait short space of time." The Greenie grew silent and strained with concentration. Hanlon probed into the native's mind, wondering if he could follow it. And haltingly at first, but with growing ability as he learned the pattern, he found he could ride along on that telepathic beam. The thoughts were far too swift for him to catch more than an occasional concept, but he was thrilled to realize he was actually telepathing, even though at second-hand. One after another mind he could feel joining in that conference. There was much hostility and great fear when Geck first tried to explain about the human who was their friend, and had learned to talk with them. The Guddus on the other end of that "line" were tremendously skeptical, afraid, and very, very suspicious of the motives of any human being. But Geck was eloquent and persuasive. Before long their fears began to lessen, and later they seemed to accept his assurance that "An-yon" was, indeed, both friendly and anxious to help them escape their slavery. "The human An-yon is but one of the most of humans who are kind and just and ethical," he was surprised to hear Geck telepathing when he got so he could understand. "It is the few, such as those others who are here, who are not. These are bad men who come here just to get things for own selfish ends, and the good men, who are most, will stop them as soon as they can. An-yon come here just for that, to find out what those bad men do, and to stop them." That speech was another shock to Hanlon--he had never told Geck all that. The distant natives finally bowed to Geck's importunings, and gave him the specific information for which he was asking because the friendly human wanted to know it. There were two other mines that produced the same uraninite ore as the one at which Hanlon was stationed. There were three iron mines, and Hanlon was not too surprised to learn that at each of these mines smelters had been erected. He learned that humans were used mostly in the mills, the natives being used only for outside labor because they could not stand the heat. "We burn quickly," was the sad, horrified thought. There were three other mines, but the natives did not know the English or Greek names for the metals found there. Even after considerable questioning by the roundabout "Hanlon to Geck to the Guddus back to Geck back to Hanlon" method, he still couldn't get that specific information. "If it isn't tiring you too much, Geck, please ask them if there is any building going on besides the smelters at the iron mines?" Hanlon requested. Soon other minds about the planet were coming in, and the story began to unfold--there were several factories making many machines. But none of the natives had the least idea what kind, or for what purpose they were being made. "Think they are going to be put in great metal huts humans are making," one thought ran, and Hanlon quickly grabbed onto that. "What sort of metal huts?" "Things that look like huge eggs." "Space ships, you mean?" Another thought broke in. "Yes, they like ships human come in, but much greater." Hanlon fumed. Oh, if only he could see ... but wait, maybe he could get the information he needed. "Ask if anyone is looking at one of those 'eggs' right now," he commanded Geck through the transformer. "Yes, An-yon, many Guddu right at edge of great place of making. Brother of me, Nock, him there." "Ask him, please, to describe what he sees. Maybe that will give me a good picture of what it is." "Will be glad to try, but not knowing your language and having no compare your measurement to ours, am not sure can do what you wish," he felt Nock say. This, too, surprised Hanlon. That native certainly had a real mind, to grasp that difficulty so well, and to realize the limitations of telepathic communications with one alien to his race. "Please picture it in your mind as you see it, and use some common objects of the planet for comparison of their sizes," Hanlon urged through Geck's mind. "That way I think we can get along." Almost instantly a picture of a gigantic egg formed in his mind, but with enough variations from an actual egg so that Hanlon realized it was, indeed, a space ship the native was viewing. Soon Hanlon saw a great tree pictured beside the ship, and at the base of the tree a native was standing. Quickly Hanlon estimated. The adult natives he had seen were almost all about six feet tall. As nearly as he could judge that tree was a good fifteen times the height of the Guddu, and the ship was the same height as the tree, and nearly three times as long. Wow! What a ship! But it must be wrong. Even the largest Corps' warships were nowhere near that huge. Nor were even any of the biggest freighters he had ever seen. He must be getting his measurements wrong. He called Geck, using the transformer. "Are you seeing what I am in Nock's mind?" "Yes, An-yon, and you is figure right. Is that big." Hanlon slowly shook his head in amazement. If that was meant for a warship, it certainly spelled trouble for someone. He thought seriously for several moments, then telepathed Nock. "Is there more than one ship being built?" "Oh, yes, there are many many." The picture built up of a whole row of ships, and Hanlon counted swiftly. _Eighteen!_ For what purpose was such a fleet being built? Men would not defy the I-S C and the Federated Planets this way merely for business reasons, he felt sure. There certainly was a plot being hatched--and what a plot! He felt Geck's hand on his arm, and heard his voice. "Are two more places where humans build many ship, An-yon. While you think me talk many minds. One place are fourteen more great ones. At other are many many many small ones five to ten Guddu long." Shock on shock! Someone was building a tremendous fleet here! He must get that news to Corps headquarters as quickly as possible. If those ships were once finished, they would be able to dominate the system. For the Corps had only a nominal fleet. They had never needed a large one. To the best of his knowledge the Corps had only thirty-one first-line battleships, much smaller than these. The Fleet also had fifty heavy cruisers, a hundred and fifty light cruisers, and a thousand scouts running from one-man up to twelve-man size. "Please find out if any of those ships they are building have ever left the ground." "Some little ones only," Geck reported after awhile. "Some few disappear into sky then come back after time, then do same again." Trial trips, or training trips for the crews, Hanlon deduced. Well, he had some data now, at least. Enough so that once he got that news to Headquarters they would attack this place in force great enough to stop this work ... IF ... he could get word to them soon enough. "Let's see now," he figured quickly. "I've been here almost twelve weeks. That means another six or seven until I'm supposed to be eligible to get back to Simonides. Hmmm. Wish I knew how near finished those big battle-wagons are." More moments of intense thought. "I don't dare take the chance of trying to sneak off to the yards," he reasoned logically. "I've got to do everything I can to make sure I get my trip back when my eighteen weeks are up. If I got caught off bounds that would ruin everything--I'd really be in a mess." Also, even if he could get to the shipyards, the moment he was spotted trying to get inside any of those ships he would undoubtedly be killed by guards who would certainly shoot first and ask questions later--if any. Nor were there any longer any native birds or animals left on Algon he could use--he had learned that the men had killed them off soon after they arrived. "No, I'll just have to keep on trying, and get what dope I can without exposing myself. With a month and a half I should be able to get a lot more, and with what I already know, the Corps top brass will take steps, but fast!" Suddenly a new idea sprang into his mind. Where was "here?" In his excitement and planning he had entirely forgotten to finish figuring out that point. That evening after dinner he stayed outside, ostensibly walking about aimlessly, in reality looking at and studying the stars when he was sure no one was watching him. He couldn't spot any of the more familiar constellations such as the Big Dipper, Bear, or the Southern Cross. He knew he was far to one side of the galaxy from Terra--that while from there one could see the "front" of those configurations, now he would be getting a "sidewise" view. But he could identify quite a few of the bigger suns and distant nebulae. He picked out several blue-white and red giants he was sure he knew. That was Andromeda off there; that one was undoubtedly Orion--no other contained so many 4.0 to 5.2 stars, beside the gigantic Rigel, Betelgeuse and Bellatrix. Good, he could fix all that in his mind well enough to draw it when he got back, and the Corps planetographers certainly would pin-point this system from those directions. Distance--let's see? He strained to remember the time it had taken that freighter to come here, and estimated that, with its slower speed, this world was somewhere between ten and fifteen lights. He would time it more carefully, going back, and estimate the ship's speed as closely as possible. Young George Hanlon was maturing swiftly under the stress of the tremendous task he was attempting. He was learning that he must think and plan well ahead of time. He realized he could not afford to make any serious mistakes, lest not only his task remain uncompleted, but his life be forfeit as well. He knew now that it was absolutely imperative that he get back to Simonides at the earliest possible moment, and that the way to be sure of this was to so impress Philander that he would feel duty-bound to give Hanlon his vacation at end of the minimum time. So Hanlon devoted many hours of serious thought to this problem, and finally figured out several courses of action. The next day, as soon as his shift was over, Hanlon walked across the compound and knocked on the door of the headquarters office. When bade to enter he did so, hat in hand. "Have you got a half hour or so to talk, Mr. Philander, sir?" he asked. "I've got a couple of ideas I'd like to gab with you about, that I think might speed up production even more." The man looked up in surprise, and his eyes bored deeply, suspiciously into Hanlon's. "You think you can tell me how to run my job?" he rasped. "Oh, no, sir. I didn't mean about the engineering or supervision. It's about handling the natives, and getting more out of them. You've said I was getting out more ore than the others, and I think perhaps I've got a few ideas--a sort of hunch about making the Greenies themselves more productive." "Well, come in, come in then. What is it?" "I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Greenies, sir. You remember I thought they were vegetable matter, and the way they feed themselves they'd need ground that either has lots of natural chemicals in it, or that has been well-fertilized, to keep 'em well and strong. That being the case, the dirt that forms the floors of their huts and stockades would very quickly become exhausted of those vital chemicals, and the natives would begin suffering from malnutrition, it seems to me. My gang has been slowing down recently, although they still seem to be trying as hard as ever." "Why ... why, yes," the superintendent's eyes had widened in surprise as Hanlon talked. "That makes sense. Imagine none of us thinking of that! But then, we've always thought of them merely as dumb beasts." "So I've been wondering if it wouldn't be a good idea either to move the stockades every month or so, or else let the natives 'feed' out in the open jungle every day--the sunlight would probably help them, too, being vegetable. They could be tied together and guarded, of course, so they couldn't escape." Philander slumped down into his chair in deep thought, and Hanlon glowed inwardly with the hope that something would come of this plan. It would help him with Philander, if it worked. Also, it would help the Guddus, for Geek had often grown almost hysterical when complaining about the terrible hunger they all felt so continuously. Suddenly Philander sat erect. "I believe we've got a few sacks of commercial nitrates in the storehouse. Let's experiment and see if they can use that." He rose purposefully from his desk and the two hurried to one of the warehouses. There Philander soon found the sacks of chemical, and Hanlon carried one as they went to the corral. "May we try it on my crew first, sir?" he asked anxiously. "They seem to sort of like me, and I've learned more or less how to guess their reactions by their facial movements, so I think I could tell whether they like it or not." "Sure, that's a good idea," and they went on to the compound that housed Hanlon's special crew. Inside, while Hanlon apparently chose at random, it was actually Geck to whom he beckoned. When the native approached, feigning fear and reluctance--Hanlon hid a sudden grin at Geck's unexpected acting brilliance--the young man opened the sack and poured out a little of the nitrate. He stooped over and stuck his fingers into the stuff then rose and gestured to Geck to put his feeding fingers into it the same way. Meanwhile Hanlon was telepathing the exact information to his friend, as best he could with his limited ability. Gingerly Geck stooped, and after a few false starts finally put one of his fingers into the little pile of nitrate, and activated the feeding sensories. For a few moments he stood thus, doubtfully, then his manner clearly indicated joy and surprised happiness. He began working that little triangular-shaped mouth, and the others crowded closer. Telepathically he informed Hanlon that this was wonderful--exactly the food element the natives needed so desperately. "It seems to think it's all okay," Hanlon said aloud to Philander. "I'll spread out a little more for them all," and without waiting for permission he made a long, narrow pile of the fertilizer clear across the width of the hut. Instantly the rest of the natives crowded along that line and stuck their feeding fingers into it. Soon their silly-looking faces expressed their equivalent of blissful smiles of complete satisfaction, and Hanlon's mind was suffused with thoughts of pleasure and gratitude for his kindness. Chapter 17 Superintendent Philander stood watching the natives feeding, and he could not help seeing how they appeared to appreciate the new food. After some time he said admiringly, "It looks like you've hit on something, George. If it continues to work out, we'll feed all of 'em this stuff, and I'll requisition plenty more next time the freighter comes in." They left the compound, carefully locking both gates behind them, and walked back to the office. Once there, Hanlon said, "I see you have a chess set, sir. Do you play? I love the game." "You do?" Philander's eyes gleamed. "It's been a long time since there was anyone here who did." "Then I hope you'll let me come in occasionally for a game. I get lonesome here. The other guards aren't worth talking to, and I'm not educated enough in science or technology to get in on the arguments of the engineers and other technies." "Sure, sure, come in any time. I'll be mighty glad to have you, for I love chess. I get lonesome, too, and I have to stay a whole year at a time. Feel free to come in any evening." Back in his room Hanlon left tremendously satisfied with the evening's work. He had done something for the natives that would help make their intolerable situation more bearable until the time came when they could be freed of their slavery ... and he had made a new friend who could prove very useful. He was very anxious for the next work-period to come, so he could talk to Geck via the voice-transformer. For he was not yet adept enough at telepathy to be sure he had got all the information needed about the use of nitrates in the Guddu's diet. But the next day when he went to herd his crew from their compound and down into the mine, he could not help noticing at first glance how much sprightlier they looked than the other crews. The minute they had reached the stope he unearthed the machine from its hiding place and got into conversation with the friendly Guddu. "The food stuff?" he asked eagerly. "Is it something you can use?" "Oh, yes. An-yon," Geck almost sputtered in his eagerness, and words tumbled out so swiftly Hanlon could hardly translate them. "It are wonderful! Can you fix so all we can have?" "Yes, they'll all be fed rations of it from now on, although perhaps not much until the ship can bring more from another planet. I don't know how much we have on hand. But the Boss-man liked my idea, and is going to see to it that there is always some on hand for all the natives. He'll probably spread the word to the other mines and factories, too." "Almost us ingest too many last dark," Geck gave what Hanlon knew was a shamefaced laugh. "It such very good eat us become ..." he hesitated. "Drunk, you mean?" Hanlon laughed. "I can see it might do that to you. You'll have to warn the others about that." They chatted away for some minutes, about how much the Guddus appreciated Hanlon's thoughtfulness. "Say, I just wondered," Hanlon interrupted Geck's thanks. "Do you have any idea where your planet is located in space? I mean, do you know the suns closest to yours, anything about their distances or magnitudes?" Geck's thoughts and expression were a blank, and it took most of the work-period even to make him understand what Hanlon was trying to ask. When he did finally manage to grasp the thought-concept, his answer was a decided negative. "No, An-yon, us know nothing about other sun other planet. Before humans come suppose we only intelligent life anywhere. Things you call suns us thought little fires light sky at night. Wonder many night who build. Wonder what is burn where is nothing. Wonder why only one big fire come day. Wonder why big fire die come night." Hanlon's disappointment about that was tempered somewhat when the checker came running into his room where he was resting before dinner, to tell him that his crew had suddenly got out almost half a ton more ore that day than any previous record he had made. * * * * * A new cook had come to the mine recently. He had a fox terrier, and Hanlon got into the habit of playing with the dog, to keep up his ability to handle animal minds, and to learn more of the technique. He was always careful to say out loud the command for whatever trick he wanted the animal to perform, but actually he was controlling its brain and nerves and muscles. One evening he was working thus with the dog when Gorton, his head-wound still bandaged, came into the messhall. Seeing Hanlon with the terrier, his heavy lip curled. "So th' fair-haired boy's also a animal trainer, eh?" "That he is," Cookie said from the doorway leading into the kitchen. "And good, too! He's got Brutus doing things I never knew a dog could do." Gorton sneered again. "Teachin' tricks t' a dog is kid stuff." "Can you do it?" the cook asked sarcastically. "Who'd bother t' try?" Hanlon looked up, blandly. "You couldn't expect that of Mr. Gorton, Cookie. To teach an animal to do tricks you have to know more than it does." "Why, you ..." Gorton started forward, his face aflame, while the other men roared with laughter at the rough wit. But the big guard did not reach Hanlon. One of the newer guards, a giant Swede named Jenssen, stopped him. "Aw, lay off the kid, Gort. He's okay. That stunt of feeding the Greenies fertilizer makes 'em turn out lots more work, and we'll get us bigger bonuses 'cause of it." But Gorton was not the type to know when to quit. Nor was he high enough in the ethical scale to know appreciation for the fact that it was the very man he had been reviling who was the first to go to his aid when he was hurt. Hanlon had come to realize that the big man was determined to provoke him to another fight. He knew that tempers were edgy and explosive in this enervating heat, and usually tried to bear Gorton's insults and petty meannesses in silence. He wouldn't demean himself by descending to the big guard's low level ... although occasionally, when the heat was too much even for him, as tonight, he couldn't resist making some answer. Gorton, he had long since decided, was one of those men who, having nothing of worth to offer the world, did their utmost to tear down and humiliate anyone who had. And his smallness of soul and intellect were shown by the sort of tricks he was continually pulling, thinking them smart. Such as scrawling with chalk on Hanlon's room door, "Super's pet"; continually upsetting Hanlon's beverage cup, or "accidentally" dropping things in Hanlon's plate of food. The young SS man could have moved to another place at the table, but he wouldn't give the big guard that satisfaction. But one of Gorton's tricks backfired to such an extent that it had disastrous results for Gorton himself. That was the night he, knowing that Hanlon had been the last at the compound, sneaked out and unlocked all the gates. He figured, of course, that it would be apparent to everyone that it was Hanlon's rank carelessness that had allowed all the Greenies to escape. But to the surprise of everyone--except Hanlon--not a single one had left; all were inside their huts the next morning. Philander came running when he heard about it. "Who did it?" he demanded angrily. "Th' punk there, o' course!" Gorton sneered. Philander swivelled about, surprise on his face. "You, George? Did you forget to lock the gates?" "No, sir, I locked them all when I went in to dinner." "He's lyin'. He was th' last one t' bring up his gang." "That's true, I was. But I know I locked all the gates very carefully, as always." One of the engineers spoke up. "I saw him doing it, Pete. I also saw one of the other guards leave the messhall for a few minutes just before we sat down to eat. When he came back I saw him grinning mysteriously as though very self-satisfied about something." "Who was that?" "Sorry, I name no names." "I tell," big Jenssen spoke up. "It was Gort. He's got it in for George. He's one big fool!" Philander wheeled in rage. "I told you, you brainless slob, to leave Hanlon alone, and by Jupiter, I mean it! Cut it out! One more stunt, and you go into irons, then back to Sime for an interview with His Highness. You go back next trip anyway. I'm done with you." The rest of the men stood by in hostile silence, and it was clear from their attitudes that this time Gorton had gone too far. How it happened none of the natives had run away, puzzled them all. But Hanlon guessed, and when he had taken his crew down to work he called Geck to him, and by means of the transformer asked about it. "Was one Guddu in hut by main gate who first see gate were open. Him mind-tell all we to run far into forest. This crew us stop all they. Tell other Guddu how kind are you. How you get we 'oigm'-food. Tell how you's work to make all we free; make free all Guddu everywhere. Us say maybe so we's all get free now small time. But say come humans with shock-rod, hunt we, hurt we, make we work more hard, be more cruel to we. Say then plan of you never get chance to make all we free all time." Hanlon bowed his head in silent thanks for the tremendous compliment. "I only hope I can justify your faith in me, Geck," he said humbly. "It will be a miracle if I can bring it about, but I certainly intend to keep on trying. It will take some time, you know that. I can't possibly do anything until after I leave here. But if it's humanly possible, I'll bring the fleet here to free you." "Us know will be hard, that maybeso it never come we be free," the Guddu said. "But us know you are only hope. So us help you all us can. Guddu in mines try get more rock out as you say. But Guddu who help humans build big egg you call 'ships' do most. Each day some of they find way break something, do wrong thing. Two Guddu spoil much metal when jump in vat where metal be melt." "Oh, no!" Hanlon cried in shocked anguish. "That was wonderfully brave of them, but none of the others must ever do things like that! Tell them not to sacrifice their lives that way! I feel sure from all the reports it isn't needed. I'll be going back in another few weeks, and the humans won't have any of those biggest ships ready by then. Those are the only ones we need to fear--the little ships don't count." It was too bad Hanlon did not know what else the humans were building, besides ships, at the shipyards. Hanlon's campaign to "get in good" with Philander was bearing tasty fruit, for the two were becoming fast friends. They spent many evenings over a hotly-contested chess board. It was plain now that the nervous, worried superintendent felt he could relax in the company of this young, naive guard, for the latter was so patently no challenge to his position. Besides, it was also very evident that he liked Hanlon as a man. Day by day his attitude grew more fatherly. Hanlon, on his part, came to realize more the true, innate measure of Philander's inherent worth as a man, a gentleman, and an engineer. He had a fine mind, was well read, and thought deeply on many subjects outside his own technical line. "All he needs are some psychiatric treatments to reduce that awful inferiority complex of his," Hanlon mused one night as he walked back slowly to his room. "Then he'll really be the big, fine man he's capable of being, and will forget all this conspiracy nonsense." Thus Hanlon felt he was taking no special chance one night when the two were standing on the little porch of the office, their game ended, and Hanlon about to leave. He glanced up at the brilliant night sky. "Sure looks different here than it does back on Terra," he said conversationally. "Naturally it would, seeing we're so far away from there. But I never get tired of looking at it, and trying to see if I can figure out some of the brighter suns." He pointed to one bright star directly overhead. "That's Sirius, I know. It's always directly above you." Philander laughed heartily. "No, Sirius is almost exactly opposite. Don't forget we're about a hundred light years out from Sol." Hanlon made himself look crestfallen. "And there I was sure I knew one of 'em, at least." He yawned pretentiously. "Well, guess I'll hit the hay. Reckon the stars'll stay put, whether I can pick 'em out or not." Philander laughed again, and clapped him on the back in comradely fashion. "I wouldn't wonder. Goodnight, George." "'Night, Mr. Philander." And as Hanlon walked back to his own room his heart was light. He'd learned another important fact about their location in space--the approximate distance from Sol. Chapter 18 A few nights later one of the junior engineers came running into the office where Hanlon and Philander were playing chess. "Trouble down in Stope Four," he gasped. Philander jumped up, upsetting the board. He grabbed his glo-light and started out. "Want me along, sir?" Hanlon asked. "Might as well," and Hanlon ran with them. Down in the mine they found, after examination, that it was not as bad as it at first seemed. Some timbers had rotted away--or had not been good wood in the first place--and a rock fall had occurred. But once they started working at it, they found it not too big. Hanlon was sent running for the rest of the men, and in a few hours everything was all tight again. Back in the office Hanlon picked up the fallen chess pieces while Philander and the engineers talked for some time. When they left Hanlon asked, "Want to finish the game--or rather, since the board was upset, want to play another?" "Better make it a rain-check. I've got some paper work I should do. Make it tomorrow." "That's okay with me. I'll go hit the hay." "Thanks for your help tonight, George. You pitched in so gladly, while the others were surly and grumbling. It was very noticeable, and I appreciate it. You're a good kid. Wish I had one just like you." Hanlon flushed a bit, and couldn't meet his friend eye to eye. "I was glad to do it," he said lamely. "'Night," and he ran out. Blast it, he thought, I hate using Pete that way, 'cause he's really a swell egg underneath. But the job's more important. A few nights later they had finished the second game, and the elder had won both. He was consequently in very good humor, for the two were so evenly matched it was seldom either ever won two games in the same evening. Philander leaned back in his chair and smiled at the younger man. "Well, George, the freighter'll be here in three days, and I'm sending you back for your vacation." "Gee, thanks, Chief. That's swell of you. I'm going to miss you, but I'll admit I'll be glad to get away from this awful climate for a while. This place sure gets my goat--I can't seem to get used to it all." "Then you won't want to come back?" There was disappointment in the question. "Oh, no, I didn't mean that. I sure will be back if I can make it. Maybe this job isn't exactly what I'd dreamed about," he had to hedge that statement a bit, and tried to make a sincere-sounding explanation, "but that thousand credits a month is!" "That reminds me--I want to be sure to recommend you for a good bonus. You deserve it more'n any guard we've ever had here. Then, too, your ideas of rotating your crew, and especially that fertilizer deal, have raised the effective work-life and speed of the natives almost thirty percent. I figured it out, and they'll be getting off cheap if they give you what I'm recommending--two months pay as a bonus." "Yowie!" Hanlon yelled, making his face show excitement, and that curious avarice he had so carefully built up in these suspicious men's minds. "That'll make me six thou in four months. I'll be rich yet!" "You and your urge for money," Philander laughed, yet there was a curious undertone of almost-contempt in his voice. "Why're you so hipped on that subject?" Hanlon grinned and misquoted, "Life is real, life is earnest, and the gravy is my goal." Then he sobered and said, "'Cause with money you can do anything. When I've made a big pile, then I can go where I want to go, be what I want to be, and make people know I'm somebody." Philander shrugged. "Maybe you're right, but I'd say there were better ways, George." Hanlon looked doubtful. "I have the utmost respect for your ideas and greater experience, sir, but what's better than a big wad of credits." Philander looked more seriously thoughtful than Hanlon had ever seen him before. He was silent a moment, then answered slowly, "This may sound 'old-mannish,' but I believe steady advancement in whatever work you choose; growing knowledge of many things; creative imagination put to constructive use; the growing respect and consequent advance in responsibility from your employers if you're working for someone, or from your neighbors if you're in business for yourself--those things are, in my opinion, of much greater value than the mere accumulation of money. And the best part of it is, that if you grow in those ways, that extra money will come to you, but merely as a corollary addition to the greater achievements." "I see your point," Hanlon was greatly impressed by Philander's earnestness. "Maybe you're right. I'm still just a kid, I guess, with a kid's immature outlook. That's why I appreciate your friendship and advice so much, sir. You've been almost like a second father to me." This was honest--he liked Philander now more than ever. The look on the elder's face, too, defied description, but that he was secretly pleased was evident. "Well, run along then, and I'll get at that letter. Meanwhile get your things packed, so you'll be ready to leave when the ship comes. And George, my boy, I do hope you come back. It'll be mighty lonely here without you." "I'll certainly do my best to get back, sir. Goodnight, and thanks again ... for everything." Hanlon hated that seeming lie, and as he walked slowly back to his room he determined to get the man away from those plotters, and into a better and more legitimate position. He would certainly so recommend to the Secret Service High Command after this mess was cleaned up. The next days Hanlon spent almost his entire shift-time underground talking earnestly to Geck. "I want to impress on the minds of you and all the natives here that I'll be working my hardest for them every minute I'm gone," he said impressively. "Don't let them do anything foolish unless or until it becomes completely sure that I've failed. If I can do anything at all, it should be within a quarter year after I leave, and probably much sooner. If I succeed, you'll all be free, and these men either chased off your planet or killed." "All we understand, An-yon. We know you are true friend, know you want to help us. We will keep working, make no attempts to escape. We know if do we just be killed, or hunted and caught again. Condition of we before you come so bad we had come to feel only end for us be death of race. Now you bring hope. Now we know most humans good people, so we wait in hope you soon succeed." "That's the spirit. I know it's tough on all of you, but I also know what the Inter-Stellar Corps is, and what they can and will do when they learn of your plight." He linked his mind with Geck's as the latter telepathed the natives in other parts of the planet, and was thus enabled to get final descriptions of what they could tell of what was being done at each mine and factory and shipyard. He knew exactly how many ships had been built or were under construction, and approximately how far along the hulls of the big ones were completed. He was also able to get a very good general knowledge of the size and structural description of each type of vessel. But of their armaments or propulsive methods he had not been able to get any information--such things were too far beyond the natives' simple abilities to describe or picture for him. Hanlon's ability to telepath, through Geck, was growing much stronger, although he was still not able to telepath direct to any of the distant Guddus. He could, however, do so to some extent to one close by. But he still could not read anything in a human mind except the surface thoughts. And how he could use that ability! With that, his task would be much simpler. But he had learned to be content with what he had, realizing it was undoubtedly unique in human history. It had brought him this far along, and he had collected a lot of information which he could not have gained in any other manner--information that he could report to the Corps as soon as he got back to Simonides and had the chance to go to the bank or contact them in some other way. "Liberation Day," as Hanlon had taken to calling it in his mind, finally arrived. He was all packed and waiting for the ship. When it was sighted he and Philander went to the field to meet it. When the captain came out, the three stood in conversation while the crew hurriedly unloaded the supplies they had brought, and those leaving had gone aboard. The captain handed Philander some letters, but the latter shoved them in his pocket for the time beings without stopping to look at them. Finally it was time for blast-off, and Hanlon said his last farewells to the superintendent, then went in to stow his bags in his stateroom and prepare for take-off. He had expected to be locked in again, and merely tried the door out of curiosity. But to his surprise it wasn't locked, so he went out. He was wise enough not to attempt to invade the control room, but did hunt up a viewing-screen and strap himself into the chair before it. He manipulated the dials and had just got an outside view as the pilot began activating the tubes. Hanlon saw Philander come running from the little path through the jungle, back toward the field, waving a letter, trying to attract attention. But evidently neither the captain, pilot nor any watch officer saw him, for at that moment the great wash of flame from the tubes blotted out the scene, and Hanlon was forced deeply into his acceleration chair as the ship lifted gravs. The trip back was uneventful. Hanlon kept careful track of the time, and strained all his spaceman's senses properly to evaluate their speed. As the ship braked for the landing on Simonides he completed his calculations, and was quite sure the distance between the two planets was twelve and a quarter light years, plus or minus not over two percent, and that Algon was somewhere near right ascension eighteen hours, and declination plus fifteen degrees. As he passed through the airlock and started down the plank, he was surprised and a bit dismayed to see Panek and two of the other gunmen he had seen in that back room, waiting for him, their faces impassive and unreadable. "A welcoming committee, eh?" he greeted them with a smile that tried to cover his disappointment. "Hiya, Panek! Hi, fellows!" But his heart was doing flip-flops. These men were not here just because they were glad to see him, of that he was sure. He probed their minds and even before Panek spoke, he knew. "The boss sent us to bring you to see him first thing, the boss did," Panek's voice was gruff, yet somewhat friendly. "That's mighty nice of him," Hanlon tried not to let his feelings show, but to take this as a natural courtesy. But he had so much wanted to get to the bank immediately. "I was coming to report, of course," he commented. "Got a letter for him from Superintendent Philander. Besides, I got a flock of credits coming. Boy, did I earn 'em! That's a stinking, hot planet up there. It'll be good seeing the bright lights again, besides living in a decent climate once more." The two men grunted a mysterious laugh, but Panek merely indicated the way to the aircar. Again Hanlon was blindfolded, but now he didn't care--he knew the location of this crater field. There was silence during most of the trip. Hanlon babbled away at first, but when no one answered him he gradually slowed his words and finally shut up entirely. His mind probings told him he was in for a rough time, and he got the feeling he was not supposed to be there at all, for some reason. "Oh, oh!" he thought, almost in panic. "Something's wrong. Did I slip somewhere? Have they got wind of what I've learned? But how ... how could they?" Instead of taking him to the back room of the Bacchus, Hanlon found when the blindfold was finally removed that he was in a stone-walled room that he sensed was a sort of cellar in some huge building. It was bare of furniture except for two chairs and the glo-lights, one of which was on a standard like a spotlight. Before he had time to try to puzzle things out, the door opened and the man he had thought of merely as "the leader" came in and sat down in one of the chairs. He gestured, and the men pushed Hanlon into the facing seat, and adjusted the glo-light so it shone in his eyes. Then ranged themselves behind him. "So, you got back?" the Leader said softly. "Sure," Hanlon made himself act as though nothing was out of the way, but it was an effort to smile and talk naturally when his mouth was suddenly dry and his nerves tightened almost to the screaming point. "My time was up, so Mr. Philander sent me back. I've got a letter for you from him." He started to reach into his pocket, but Panek slapped his hand down, and snaked the letter out, handing it to the Leader, who opened it and read it silently. Then the man looked up, his face puzzled. "You seem to have ... uh ... done very well there," he said almost pleasantly. "Our superintendent reports you made an excellent guard. He seems very pleased with you." "I told you I'd do everything I could to make good," Hanlon answered, but now he made his voice sound very aggrieved. "What's the big idea of all this? Seems like a mighty funny reception, after I tried so hard. Why that light in my eyes, and those thugs ready to slug me if I bat an eye-lash. It's almost like you don't trust me, or something?" "I'm still not altogether sure we do," the Leader said slowly. "Still harping on that?" Hanlon demanded hotly. "What makes you think I'm not on the up and up? I worked hard on that stinking hot planet. I got out more ore'n anyone else ever did. And my suggestion about nitrates ..." "Ah, yes, the matter of the ... uh ... fertilizer. What made you bring that up?" "The minute I saw those Greenies I guessed they were animated trees. When I saw how they fed themselves by sticking their fingers in the hut floor, I figured the dirt would gradually lose whatever nourishment it contained, same as a farmer's fields soon lose their fertility. All plants I know about extract nitrogen and other minerals from the soil. So I figured the Greenies would need fertilizer to make up for the depleted soil in their huts. It seemed simple to me." "Ummm. You were right, apparently. It was a great contribution to our work, and we are grateful." He looked at Hanlon a long moment, then asked sharply, "How did Rellos die?" "A dog tore out his throat." "We know that--but you said you killed him." "Who d'you suppose sicced the dog on him? We were walking down the street, and I kicked the dog's pup to death. When she charged, I pushed Rellos in her path, and it was him the dog killed." "Ah! Good! Very unusual! Most ... uh ... ingenious!" The Leader seemed pleased, but slowly his smile died and he frowned again. "All this makes me want to believe you, Hanlon, but somehow I can't seem to rid myself of the belief that you still are connected with the Corps. Oh, I know," as Hanlon started to protest, "all about your dismissal and disgrace, and the fight you had with some of your former classmates a few days later. Incidentally, wasn't it rather straining coincidence that it was an admiral who came along just in time to save you? You see, all that could easily have been done on purpose. I'm ... uh ... not that simple, young man." "No, but you're nuts, figuring that way!" disgustedly. "I think you will find out differently," the tone sent shivers through the young SS man's nerves, and he had difficulty controlling the impulse to wet his suddenly dry lips. "I may be wrong--I hope most sincerely that I am--but I haven't so far been able to bring myself to feel so. But I intend to know for sure before we leave this room. Panek, bring in our other ... uh ... guest." Hanlon heard the gunman leave, and in a moment return. He appeared in Hanlon's line of vision, pushing before him a manacled man. At sight of that other man, Hanlon had to gasp. Chapter 19 "Oh!" the Leader said triumphantly as he saw George Hanlon's start of surprise. "I see you recognize our guest." "Sure I know him," Hanlon snapped, rigidly forcing himself into control. "That's Abrams. I thought I killed him." "Ah, now, did you so?" Again the Leader smiled, but this time grimly. "Now we come to the meat of the matter. You say you thought you killed him, but you know you didn't. Your pretended assassination in such a clever manner was all a ruse--you didn't poison him at all. You merely pretended to put something in his cup." "That's a lie. Maybe it didn't work on him, but I did ..." "Sorry, Mr. Hanlon," the trembling Abrams whined the interruption. "I was forced to tell the whole story to His Highness after he found out where I was hiding." His Highness! So this was the fabulous monster of whom everyone was so afraid. Hanlon's heart sank to his knees. What chance did he have now? He would never get out of this alive, nor get his report to the Corps. "Yes, Mr. Hanlon," that silky voice mimicked meaningly, and venomously. "We have ... uh ... ways of making people talk. This Abrams, like a fool, was not content to continue working as my secretary. He had to get foolish notions of ethics and patriotism, and try to ... uh ... object to some of my policies. Why did you let him think you were still a Corpsman ... if you're not?" he snapped suddenly. Hanlon made himself stare back insolently. Maybe they would kill him ... no, be honest, undoubtedly they would ... but by the Shade of Snyder they weren't going to make him show the fear he felt. "Use your head, Pal. I had to make an impression on Panek so he'd introduce me to someone here on Sime who'd show me how to make some fast, big money, which is all I'm after," he retorted with a bravado he certainly didn't feel, but which he hoped would make them think he did. "When I found Panek was going to bump off Abrams, I horned in on it. And what easier way to make Abrams play ball with me--I had nothing against him, and didn't want to really kill him--than to let him think I was still a Corpsman, after he'd seen me when I was still a cadet. I didn't know he'd turn yellow and squeal." He looked contemptuously at Abrams, then turned back to the leader and made his voice very earnest, very emphatic. "But I've told you the truth! I am not still connected with that rotten outfit, and you're wrong if you think I am!" "Don't lie to His Highness!" Panek interjected. "He don't like to be lied to--he don't like it." "Aw shut up and keep out of this, small fry!" Hanlon sneered, and was rewarded with a hard blow on the side of his head that made him wince. But His Highness intervened. "That will do, Panek. I'll handle this. Now, Hanlon, I think you had better do some very serious thinking. You can see why we are still skeptical of you. Everything points against you ... uh ... except your own word, and the fact that you so apparently did work hard and for our best interests at the mine. That point, I readily grant you, is very much in your favor. I am being very patient with you because, if you are telling the truth, you can be a very valuable man to me. You do have real ability, and other assets. But if you are not wholly for us, you are distinctly in our way." "I tell you ..." "Don't interrupt, please. I might inform you that I sent you to the other planet both to test you and to keep you out of the way while we investigated further and I could reach a decision. You were not supposed to come back yet. I sent Philander a letter to that effect, but he space-radioed you were already on the way back when he read it." A light dawned on Hanlon as memory skipped back to that take-off. Philander had merely stuck the mail in his pocket when it was given him, and evidently started reading it on his way back to the mine. That explained his running back, waving a letter and trying to attract attention just at blast-off. That small part of his mind that was paying attention to the men in the room heard His Highness say "take Abrams away. He ... uh ... is of no further use to us. And wait outside until I call--all of you." When they had gone His Highness leaned forward, and Hanlon knew he had better pay strict attention and keep his wits about him for any opening to improve his perilous position. "I'll speak more frankly, now that we are alone, Hanlon. I am impressed with you. I think you have ... uh ... tremendous abilities, and I want you on my side. But I have to be sure. I would advise you, for your own good, to be honest and frank with me." "I am being, but you won't believe me," Hanlon said earnestly. "When I take a man's pay, sir, I give him everything I've got. You gave me a chance at the kind of money I want to make, and I'm doing everything I can to earn both the money and your trust. I was kicked out of the Corps, and I'll do _anything_ I can to get even!" "As I said before, we have ... uh ... ways of making you tell us the truth," the Leader continued as though Hanlon had not interrupted, "but you would not be any good either to us or the Corps or yourself if we have to use ... uh ... persuasion. I don't want to see you broken. You may remember you once asked me if I could 'dish it out'? Let me assure you that I can." "But how can I prove anything when you've already made up your mind not to believe me?" Hanlon asked plaintively. "I'm doing my best to make you believe. I'll admit some of those points you've brought up could look fishy if viewed from one standpoint, but I assure you you're putting the wrong interpretation on them. If you'll look at them from my viewpoint you'll see they are just as true." His Highness regarded Hanlon silently but with a steady concentration for some minutes. "That might be true. I had about begun to believe you when we found Abrams, and when we questioned him he ... uh ... admitted what you had done, and why. That revived my doubts. Are you willing to be tested under a truth drug?" Hanlon almost gasped in dismay, but stifled it. He knew only too well the efficacy of modern truth drugs. They would reveal every thought and bit of knowledge he had ever had--all about the Corps, the Secret Service and everything. That hurt look came back into his face. "You sure are asking a lot, sir," he said. "I haven't anything to conceal from you, but no man likes to have his whole mind invaded that way--all his private thoughts and feelings. I don't see why you need suggest such a thing. I've told you the truth on matters you want to know about." "You appear to have done so, and I honestly want to believe you. For you see, Hanlon, I want you with me. You're my kind of a man. I like you because you have tremendous drive and imagination and ability--yes, and perhaps a bit because you're the only man I've ever met who wasn't ... uh ... afraid of me. I have tremendous plans for the future--and I would like to have you as my chief aide in them. I would train you as you've never guessed it possible for a man to be trained. And then, _together, Hanlon, we could rule the Universe_!" But George Hanlon was only half-listening, even to that last, that shocking, that totally unexpected proposition, his real goal. Here was the plot he had been seeking, the plot the Corps needed so desperately to know. Yet his personal crisis was, for the moment, more important if he was ever to be of any further benefit to the Secret Service or the Corps. To use his just-discovered knowledge, something else must come first. His mind, therefore, was seeking a way out. He well knew that once the truth drug was administered--and this Highness would not now be satisfied with anything less--he was as good as dead. They would find out the truth in minutes, and then would have no other recourse but to kill him. His spirits sank to nadir with the knowledge that he had failed ... failed the Secret Service and the Corps, failed his father, failed the Guddus, failed himself. Curiously, perhaps, at that moment the thought of failure was far more important to him than the imminence of death, as such. He had half-consciously noticed when he first glanced about this room, that there was a small ventilator near the ceiling in one corner. Desperately he pushed his mind through it, and could sense that it opened onto a park-like place, probably around one of the city's palaces. Hanlon finally heard His Highness call, "Panek, you and the others bring me the hypodermic. We'll have to give him the truth serum. I'm sorry, Hanlon," he addressed himself now to the young man, "but this is the only way. I hope we won't have to use enough to harm you, but that depends on your co-operation. If you will tell us the truth quickly and willingly I can, as I said ... uh ... use you, and you will profit greatly by it." Hanlon didn't struggle when they bound him firmly in the chair with manacles on hands and feet. He knew it would be useless anyway. He let his body slump into his chair, and again directed his mind through that vent. He must not let them defeat him! He had to survive--to get word--to the Corps! Then his searching mind contacted another--a weak, primitive one, but a mind. Avidly he fastened onto it, merged with it ... and found himself inside the brain of one of those Simonidean pigeons. Ah! This is wonderful! Pigeons seldom fly alone. Where you find one you almost always find a number. Activating the bird's brain he sent out a call to others of its kind that it had found food in abundance. Soon more and more of them flew down to where the now enslaved pigeon was standing, and as each one came, Hanlon sent into its brain all of his mind it would hold. Inside the cellar room His Highness rose and stepped up to Hanlon's body, the hypodermic in his hand. "Remove his coat and roll up his sleeve," he directed Panek, and the small part of Hanlon's mind still remaining in his body felt the latter doing so, and an instant later, the prick of the needle. Slowly at first, then with increasing swiftness he felt his remaining mind growing numb and his will weaken. His body slumped against the restraining manacles. "Can you hear me, George Hanlon?" he dimly heard His Highness' voice. "Yes." It sounded like a whisper. "Are you a member of the Inter-Stellar Corps?" "I ... I ...", he struggled not to answer. "Tell me!" "I ... I ..." and then, in a last desperate effort to keep from telling what he must not tell, George Hanlon did a thing he had never dared attempt before. He sent all the remaining parts of his mind into the last of the pigeons. One of the first birds he had already sent into the ventilator so he could look through it into the room below. He got it there just in time to hear the Leader's gasp of dismay as he saw Hanlon's body slump still further in apparent lifelessness. "Is he dead, Boss, is he?" he heard Panek's anxious cry. His Highness felt the pulse in Hanlon's wrist and the one in his throat. "No, he's still alive." The man stood there in deep thought, his forehead creased with a frown of concentration. "There's something peculiarly wrong here," the Leader finally said aloud. "Something very wrong and very strange. This isn't an ordinary fainting spell. It's ... uh ... beyond my previous experience." He straightened and addressed Hanlon's body once more. "Can you still hear me, George Hanlon?" There was no answer, no slightest indication that his words were heard. He reached forward and lifted the body into a more upright position in the chair. "Answer me, George Hanlon. Do you hear me? I command you to tell me, are you a Corpsman?" Still no answer, no twitch of muscle, no movement of awareness. He shook the body a little, and raised his voice still more. "I demand an answer, George Hanlon! The truth drug must make you speak!" But only silence, and when he let go of the body it fell backward into the chair, and the head lolled forward as though the neck was broken. "Let me work on him, Boss," Panek pleaded. "Let me give him a going over, let me." Barely waiting to see that His Highness did not forbid it, the thug raised a short, ugly piece of rubber hose, and struck the unresisting body again and again--across the face, over the top and back of the head, vicious blows at the ribs and even in the groin. But he might as well have been pounding a sack of meal. The body sagged beneath the blows, and became bloody and discolored, but no movement--no conscious movement--did it make. "That will do, Panek," His Highness finally commanded. "That does no good. This I cannot understand, but I do know there is ... uh ... something most peculiar here. It is almost as though ...", he paused and frowned again. "But that is ridiculous!" "What's ridiculous, Boss, what is?" "It is almost as though there was ... uh ... no mind left in the body," His Highness said slowly. Then, abruptly, "Are you sure that was truth-serum in that hypodermic?" "You fixed it yourself, Boss." His Highness wheeled suddenly, rudely awakened from his thinking by the loud _shoo_-ing noise one of the guards was making. He was astonished to see the man making vain motions toward a pigeon whose head was sticking through, the ventilator vanes. But the bird didn't leave. "Stop it!" the Leader commanded impatiently. "We've more import ..." He checked himself, and turned back to stare wonderingly at the bird, which peered back at him with apparently unfrightened, beady eyes, turning its head to first one side and then the other, as though better to see all that was going on. "That's peculiar," His Highness said thoughtfully. "I never saw a bird act like that before. Hmmm, I wonder?... But no, that's absurd." He turned back to Hanlon's body as though disgusted with himself for entertaining such a fantastic notion. Hands behind his back, that scowl of concentration engraving deep lines on his face, the Leader paced forth and back across the floor of the little room, his glance ever and again returning to stare in exasperation at that slumped-over, dead-but-alive body. Who was this amazing young man? What sort of talents and abilities did he possess, that he could react thus to a truth-serum? Had he been so treated by the Corps experts that his mind would be blanked out in such emergencies? Was he some kind of a mutant with powers never before known? Or--startling thought--was he actually a human being at all? Better than anyone else, His Highness could appreciate the fact that the universe contained many types of sentient and highly mental life other than those originating on Terra. Since he had come here to Simonides, and had wormed his way into the very highest position beneath its emperor--a weak old man he had had no trouble dominating--he was naturally suspicious of anyone who might be attempting to discover and wreck his carefully-laid plans. Such a one, he was now convinced, was this young Hanlon. It would be the simplest thing to kill this almost-dead body now, but that would not solve this baffling problem. If Hanlon, perhaps others of the Corps had similar powers. No, one with such abilities must not be killed. He must be kept and studied, and the secret learned if possible. But his thoughts were interrupted by Panek. "That fool bird's still there, still there. Is it another of your pets, Boss?" His Highness wheeled. He had forgotten the bird. Was it possible that Hanlon had, in some inexplicable manner, transferred ... on the surface it was an absurd concept. But, there were magicians on his home planet who could do things almost as unfathomable. He suddenly made up his mind. "Kill it!" he commanded. Whatever else he was or was not, Panek was fast with a gun. The words were hardly spoken when he had drawn and fired. Chapter 20 The twentieth part of Hanlon's mind activating the pigeon in the ventilator, commanded it to scramble back out the moment he sensed what that command would be. But it wasn't quick enough. He felt the burning sensation along the bird's side, and the agony it suffered. The wing had been almost severed by the shot, and its life was swiftly ebbing. He had to get out of that body and quick ... but there were no more pigeons around except the other nineteen he was already occupying. Nor did any of them have brain capacity enough to contain more than a twentieth of his mind. Desperately he sent the rest of the flock swirling into the air, seeking other life-forms nearby. There were no other pigeons close enough to hear their calls nor to get there in time if they did, for the wounded bird was dying fast. Nor were there any dogs about, nor cats, nor animals of any kind to be seen. In desperation Hanlon even tried the trees or plants there, to see if they had minds like the Guddus--but none of them did. He dreaded to think what would happen if the brain that a portion of his mind was occupying died while in his control. Would that part of his mind then be lost? He had no way of knowing, nor was he anxious to chance it, for he was terribly afraid it would be so. And he certainly had proved he had no mind to spare, he thought in disgust. He had really made a mess of this mission. The only way he could get word to the Corps was through his body, and if he sent his mind back into that now he was a deader duck than he seemed to be. For even that twentieth part could be made to talk. _Why didn't those pigeons hurry?_ Yet he knew they were searching frantically. This was the weirdest sensation imaginable. People had often expressed the wish they, could be in two places at once ... he was in twenty. And each body was connected with the others by a thin thread of consciousness, yet was thinking and acting independently. His composite mind almost grinned. If anyone had told him a year ago such a thing was possible, he would have called for the paddy-wagon and rushed that person to the nearest nut-house. The other parts of his mind were flying all about the enclosed park that was a part of the great palace, searching, desperately seeking some other form of life that could be used as a housing for the dying part of Hanlon's mind. Suddenly one of them uttered a cry that drew the rest to it on swift pinions, to see attached to one of the trees a huge swarm of Simonidean bees. "Will the queen do?" the one mind-portion asked anxiously. There was a convulsive shudder in all the minds, for the birds knew--and Hanlon had heard--how deadly poisonous these native bees were; how they were hunted down and exterminated when found. They were twice the size, and many, many times more vicious and deadly than Terran bees. Even now two gardeners were running toward the tree with a great metal net and flame-throwers. But Hanlon was desperate. "She will have to do," the aggregate mind decided. Instantly, then, the part of his mind in the dying bird detached itself and entered the brain of the Queen Bee. There were long, disheartening moments of twisting and struggling to fit into that strange, vicious insect brain. He finally managed to take control, yet was not fully en rapport. Sight through her multi-faceted eyes was very nearly impossible with the little time he could give to learning their texture. But the close rapport between the various portions of his mind was a good guide. The Queen flew swiftly towards that ventilator, her swarm following closely at her command. Into and through the vent she flew, and almost before the four men inside were aware of the strange buzzing, she was directing her swarm towards them. "Bees!" Panek yelled in terror, and the four started fighting the hundreds that swarmed all over each of them. That may have been their mistake--had Panek and the other two stood perfectly still it was a bare possibility they might have survived, although in Hanlon's grimly determined frame of mind that was now doubtful. Not that Hanlon was angry, even at Panek for the terrible beating of his unconscious body. For he realized it was the man's cruel, sadistic nature; that he could not have acted otherwise. But Hanlon knew now that the peace of the Federation demanded that he live and be free to make his report, and only the death of His Highness and the others could now possibly save him. So, much as it sickened him, Hanlon had to keep on, and as those bee-stings plunged in their hundreds into the four, the poison working far more swiftly than does the venom of Terrestrial bees--more akin to that of the mamba--one after another of the four fell to the floor and were quiet--stung to death. Hanlon then sent the Queen and her swarm back outside, after first impressing on her mind that she must fly far away if she was to survive. He could not send her to her death by the gardeners after she had saved his life. As she flew away he recalled his mind back from her and the nineteen birds, into his body. He sat erect once more--but instantly such a tide of pain washed over him that he nearly fainted. For all the agony of that terrible beating hit him at once. His mind, too, was sluggish and slow once it was back in his own brain where that drug had taken effect. But he felt a sense of satisfaction and gratitude that he had come safely thus far through that terrible ordeal. The drug would wear off, the wounds would heal, and the pain would disappear in time. Meanwhile, he was alive ... impossible as it seemed, he was _alive_! But George Hanlon had enough mind-power functioning in spite of the truth-drug, to realize he was not yet out of the pit. His body was still manacled to the chair, that in turn was fastened to the floor so he could not move it. He was still inside the palace of the conspirators, and it would undoubtedly not be too long before someone would enter the room seeking His Highness, and would find him and the dead men. For desperate minutes Hanlon considered every angle of the matter, and found only one possibility that might offer some chance of release and safety. Once more he sent a portion of his mind out through the ventilator and found one of the pigeon-like birds still nearby. Again he took possession and crowded into its tiny brain all of his mind it would hold. Then the bird was swiftly winging its way up and over the roofs of the palace, into the dusky sky. High in the air it floated on out-spread pinions while he surveyed the city beneath him, hunting for landmarks. He quite easily located the downtown section because its lights were being turned on now that evening was here. That oriented him, but the fact that it was so late brought dismay. Would the Corps officers have gone home? And if so, how could he locate any of them, tonight, with whom he could possibly communicate? He had not thought of that before--he had been thinking of himself as a man, not as a bird. But even as these baffling thoughts and questions were plaguing him, he was flying as swiftly as the bird's wings would carry him, directly towards the great building that housed the Corps' contingent here on Simonides. Actually, it was only minutes until the bird was outside the great structure, and rapidly looking into windows. Lights were blazing in almost every room, and Hanlon's mind knew thankfulness that so many of the high officers were still at work. Window after window the bird peered through in furious haste, searching for an admiral's office. If it could get inside, Hanlon had thought of several ways in which it might communicate ... providing the admiral was not an orthodox brass hat. But, he told himself to maintain courage, any man who could gain as high a position as any of the various types of admirals would have had to show his resourcefulness time and again. You just didn't get that high in the Corps otherwise. Luck and persistence achieved his ends, for he finally located the offices of the Planetary Admiral, himself, and that officer and his secretary were still inside at work. Hanlon made the bird land on the window sill, and then begin tapping with its beak on the glass. Time and again it did this, until the two inside, attracted by the sound, looked about for its source. "Look, Admiral Hawarden, it's a pigeon, tapping on the window," the secretary laughed. "Must think there's something to eat in here," the officer grinned back. "It really acts as though it was trying to attract our attention," the girl commented a few seconds later. "Hmmm, I wonder," the admiral spoke half aloud, then as the bird kept up its purposeful tapping he recognized the Inter-Stellar code S O S. Quickly he rose, went to the window, opened it, and stepped back. The bird, showing no fear of the humans, entered and flew to his desk. The secretary had also risen, and now shrank back against the wall, her hand at her mouth stifling a scream. "It's magic," she said in fright. "No bird ever acted like that." "It certainly is unusual," he said, and his eyes were puzzled. "I can't make it out." The bird flew toward the officer, and with fluttering wings poised in the air before him, its beady, bright eyes peering directly into his. Then it flew toward the door. When the admiral made no move to follow, the bird repeated the performance. "It seems almost as though it wanted me to go somewhere with it," the officer said in a dazed manner. "Are we dreaming this, Thelma?" "I ... I don't know, sir. We ... we must be," she stammered. "It just couldn't be possible otherwise." But now the bird apparently noticed something else in the room, for it flew over to the secretary's desk and alighted on it. It hopped up to her electro-writer. That was too much. The girl rushed over, waving her hands. "Shoo!" she scolded. "Get off my desk, you crazy creature!" But Admiral Hawarden was no fool. This was far beyond any experience he had ever had, but there was such a purposefulness in the bird's actions, strange and unusual though they were, that he felt this little drama should be played out without interruption. "Leave it alone!" he commanded sharply in a tone that startled her, so different was it from his usual polite manner. Looking at him in astonishment, she stepped back, and watched with him this unprecedented action. With its foot Hanlon made the bird throw the little switch that activated the writing mechanism, and then with its beak began pecking at the keys. Luckily there was paper in the machine, a letter she had not finished. The admiral stepped up to where he could see, but waved the girl back when she started to follow. It seemed impossible that the bird could write anything sensible ... but the admiral was beginning to be not too sure of that. His eyes opened wide with surprise as he saw the letters appear one by one on the paper: a n d r m a 7 No longer did he doubt. How it was possible, the future might tell. But he did know the significance and the urgency of that message. He ripped the paper from the machine and pocketed it, then jumped to his desk and flipped the intercom switch. "Captain Jessup! A company of marines, in full armor and all weapons, at the main gate in trucks in two minutes. _Hipe!_" He ran to a cabinet in one corner of the room and threw open the door. "Come and help me!" he commanded the astonished girl, dragging his own long-unused space armor out and starting to climb into it. With her help he was completely encased in the minute, and was strapping on his weapons. "You can go home now," he told her. He turned to the desk where the bird was watching with its beady eyes, and held out his arm curved at the elbow. With a quick swish of wings the pigeon launched itself toward the suited figure and rested on the out-stretched wrist. The admiral plunged through the door and into the hall, where his private elevator waited. "Ground!" he yelled, and the bird was lifted from his wrist by the sudden plunging descent, but fluttered back and rode that wrist as the admiral dashed out of the elevator, through the halls and out the front door to the waiting, marine-filled trucks. Willing hands hauled him aboard the lead truck, and he threw the pigeon into the air. "Follow that bird!" he commanded, and the incredulous driver did so, wondering secretly if the Old Man had suddenly gone bats. When he saw beyond doubt the bird's destination, Admiral Hawarden gasped, but he was too old a campaigner to be stopped now. There was something here that needed himself and his men, and he would go through with it, no matter where it led. He knew the calibre of the men of the Secret Service, and while he could not know how it was possible for one of them to train a bird in such a manner, he knew his job was to back up whatever that high-powered individual was doing. As the trucks skidded to a halt at the entrance of the Prime Minister's ornate palace, he issued swift commands. His men, disregarding the indignant cries of the palace guards, who swarmed out to stop this unbelievable invasion of their rights, deployed to their designated positions, weapons at the ready. To the officer of the guard who tried to bar his way, the admiral snapped, "I'll apologize later. Now get out of my way!" Then, with a squad of husky marines at his heels, he followed the fluttering pigeon through the opened door, along a hall, and down some stairs. But here the bird seemed at a loss, fluttering from door to door, seeking that certain room. As Hanlon had so shrewdly guessed, Admiral Hawarden was no fool, but quick on the up-take. "Open all these doors!" his voice rang out commandingly. As fast as doors were opened--whether locked or not made no difference to the marines--the pigeon darted forward and glanced into each one before flying on the next. Then it disappeared through one of the doorways, and the admiral, who had kept as close to it as possible, yelled "Here!" and ran into the room, his men streaming after him. "Welcome to out cozy nest, Mister," a voice from the depths of a big chair called, and the officer ran forward to where he could see. "You certainly made time, and am I happy to see you soldiers. Get me out of these things," and Hanlon rattled his chains. At the admiral's gesture the marines made short work of the manacles, and Hanlon stood up, tottered a moment and would have fallen but for the quickly extended friendly arm of the admiral. He was still groggy, even though the serum was wearing off. But he was almost in complete control of his mind. "We got here in time, then?" anxiously. "Yes, thanks to my little friend here." Hanlon took the bird, and handed it to one of the marines, meanwhile impressing on its mind that it was safe among friends. "Look after her." And withdrew his mind. "She gets good care the rest of her life," the admiral ordered the wondering marines. "Wait outside." Hawarden looked about the room. "Who are these men ... and what in Snyder's name happened to them?" "They were stung to death by bees," Hanlon said, and there was a trace of vindictiveness in his voice. "One of 'em's the Prime Minister; the others his gunmen." "Great John!" the admiral breathed. "This'll raise a stink!" "There'll be a bigger one before I get through," Hanlon was grim. "Get me back to your office, and get a doctor. They gave me truth serum, and it hasn't all worn off yet. And I'm hungry," he added so plaintively that Hawarden, accustomed enough to sight of death so it didn't affect him too much, laughed. "What'll we do with the bodies?" "Guard the Prime Minister's closely. Merely notify the people here where to find the others." Hawarden called back two of the marines. "Bring that body with us," and they left. At the entrance the admiral recalled his men. To the palace officer he partially explained. "The Prime Minister was killed, and we're taking his body with us. There are three of his men, also dead, in Room 37-B down there. I'll notify the Emperor, and assume full responsibility." He jumped into the truck's front seat beside Hanlon and the driver. "Back to base!" Chapter 21 The doctor, notified by the truck's short-wave, was waiting in the admiral's office to give Hanlon the shots of antidote and attend to his wounds. He had barely finished when a waiter brought food. These two gone, Hawarden felt free to demand of Hanlon, "Open up, please. What's this all about?" "Full coverage?" Hanlon asked meaningly. The admiral flipped a couple of toggle switches on his desk. "There is now." "I'll tell you the story in a bit, but there are several more things to be done, fast." He described the location of the hidden spacefield. "Get some scouts out there quick, but if the freighter's not ready to leave, have 'em keep hidden and merely watch it. I don't want anything done until just before take-off--it's important we arrest _all_ of its crew and passengers." "Right!" Admiral Hawarden turned to his communicators, and orders rapped out. "You'll have to tell me procedure here, sir, for I don't know how to get what I need. I want to recommend that the entire Corps fleet rendezvous near here immediately so we can go to a planet called Algon, and take it over. But first we'll have to find out exactly where in space Algon is. May I talk with your planetographers, please?" The admiral looked at him quizzically. "You haven't been in the SS very long, have you, Hanlon?" "No," the young man looked up in surprise. "This is my first assignment. Why do you ask?" "Because in emergencies such as this you give orders, not ask for permission. Every resource of the entire Corps is yours to command when you feel it necessary." "Why ... why, I didn't realize that," Hanlon shrank back in astonishment. "You ... you mean they'd let a pup like me issue commands to the whole Corps?" "They certainly would, sir. I don't know if you realize it yet or not, but no one gets into the Secret Service unless the High Command is pretty sure they are exceedingly high-powered individuals. So whatever you want, just yell. I am entirely at your service." There was a moment of incredulity in the young man's eyes, then he straightened, and that depth of character which the men in command had foreseen came to the surface, and he issued crisp orders. "Very well, sir, I'll take you at your word. Please connect me with the planetographers, then get me the High Admiral." Hawarden activated the intercom, and when a face appeared on the screen ordered, "Give this young man any information he wants." "Do you know a planet named 'Algon' or 'Guddu'?" Hanlon asked. "It's about twelve and a quarter light years distant, right ascension about eighteen hours, declination around plus fifteen degrees. Here's a rough chart of what I could see from there." He held up to his screen a sheet on which he had been busily, marking such super-giant suns and nebulae as he remembered. "... You don't know it? Then find it immediately. Rush it through. I must have its closest approximation inside of two hours!" He closed that switch and looked up as Admiral Hawarden handed him a microphone. "Grand Fleet High Admiral Ferguson is awaiting your orders, sir." George Hanlon's young hand was shaking as he took the mike, but his voice was steady and crisp. "Admiral Ferguson, sir, this is George Hanlon of the Secret Service. I was detailed to the Simonidean affair. I've just returned from a planet I know both as 'Algon' and as 'Guddu.' The planetographers are checking now for its exact location. "The enemy--and I don't yet know entirely who they are, although the Prime Minister of Simonides was one of the top men, if not the actual head--are building a great fleet there. They already have at least thirty-two capital ships in building, and each one of them is about twice the size of our largest battleship. Yes, that's right--twice the size. However, as near as I could find out, none of them are yet far enough completed to fly, and perhaps not even to fight. They also have nearly a hundred medium and light cruisers, and over two hundred smaller ships--scouts, destroyers and so on. Many of those latter two classifications are fully completed and at least partially manned. "That fleet must be captured or destroyed before they can get it finished. I know you realize that better than I, sir, but it must be taken care of immediately.... Oh, no, sir, you can't just blast the planet. There are natives there that are high enough in the cultural scale so the planet cannot be colonized, but they must be freed from the slavery under which they are now held. They are fine, friendly people.... You'll rendezvous the fleet immediately? That's fine, sir. Oh, one more thing, please notify SSM Regional Admiral Newton to send all available SS men here at once. There's a lot of cleaning up to do here on Simonides.... Thank you, sir, I hope I was in time with this information." Hanlon broke the connection, then sank back into his chair for minutes, thinking seriously, and the admiral respected his silence. But after a time the smell of that delicious food made Hanlon's hunger and weakness reassert itself. Feeling he had done all he could at the moment, he sat up again, pulled his chair closer to the desk, and lifted the napkin from the tray. "I'll talk while I eat, if you'll pardon the discourtesy, sir," he began, picking up knife and fork. And as he ate he gave Hawarden as full an account of the situation as he could, except for references to his mental abilities and the part they had played. The admiral listened attentively, and when Hanlon paused at what seemed the end of his narrative, the officer straightened with determination. "Then the thing to do now is to find out who all is in back of this. That's why you asked for all available SS men, I understand that. But about His Highness--was he top man?" Hanlon knit his forehead in concentration. "I ... don't ... know," he said slowly. "No one ever spoke of anyone as his superior. He's the man they were all afraid of...." He paused a moment, then said, even more slowly, "I've a peculiar hunch. I wish you'd have your best physicians examine that body. Have 'em use X-rays and fluoroscopes, rather than an autopsy. I'm not entirely convinced he was a human being." "What?" There was incredulity in that question. "What gives you that idea?" "Sorry, sir, I can't give you my reasons just now," Hanlon's face flushed, and his eyes were appealing. "It isn't that I don't trust you, sir, but there's one secret I feel shouldn't be told now. Maybe later--and if I do tell it to anyone outside of SS men, you will be the first--you deserve that." "Right, sir. I didn't mean to prowl," the admiral showed no resentment, much to Hanlon's relief. "Your orders go, as I said." He touched a stud on his desk and when the doctor's face appeared on the screen, gave the necessary orders. "Look carefully to see if the internal arrangement of bones and organs is human--but do not cut without specific orders." "What about the emperor, sir?" Hanlon asked. "You've undoubtedly formed some sort of opinion about him." "He was a wonderful soldier and executive as a young and as a middle-aged man," Hawarden said thoughtfully and, Hanlon sensed, sadly. "It was his grandfather who pulled the original coup that made this planet into an empire with himself as first emperor. His son, the second emperor, was also a very good co-ordinator, and solidified the empire status. The present emperor went into the army at sixteen, and rose rapidly through sheer merit rather than because his father was emperor. All historians agree on that. Just before he reached thirty he was in full command. He was thirty-six when his father died, and he became the third emperor." "Then you think he may be back of this whatever-it-is?" "No," the admiral shook his head. "Somehow I can't quite feel that way. During his first years as emperor he was one of the most co-operative of all Planetary rulers within the Federation." "What about his Prime Minister ... and by the way, what was his name? I never heard him called anything but 'His Highness'?" "His name was Gorth Bohr. He seems to have appeared from nowhere almost overnight--as an important personage, I mean. We've traced him back, and he came to Simonides about fourteen years ago, from Sirius Three. He's been Prime Minister for about ten years and it has been noticeable that he has gained more and more power during the past few years, as the emperor has been failing both physically and mentally." "I wonder ..." "Yes?" "D'you suppose that failing health and mind could have been caused, instead of natural?" The admiral was plainly taken aback. "What? Caused?" Hanlon nodded. "Just that. From what little I know of His Highness he was just the kind to do a thing like that--and capable of it, too." He sank back in deep thought for some time, as did Hawarden. They were interrupted by a buzzer from the desk. The admiral sat up quickly and switched on the intercom. "Yes?" "Bohr certainly was not a human being," the doctor reported, and Hanlon could see the surprise and wonder on his face in the screen. "There are structural differences so far removed from ours that they could not possibly be Homo Sapiens." "Any idea where he came from?" Hanlon asked, and the admiral relayed the question. "Never saw anything like it before, and I've just made a quick search through all my books here that contain pictures and diagrams of the races of which we know." Hanlon shook his head in resignation and Hawarden, after thanking the doctor and giving orders for the disposition of the Prime Minister's body, disconnected. "Is it too late to get an audience with the emperor?" Hanlon sat erect. The admiral glanced at his wrist chronom. "Pretty late, but I'll see." He had just reached for a switch when his call buzzer sounded, and when he activated the screen the planetographer reported, "We can't find any such system on our charts." Hanlon's spirit sank. "Keep looking!" he ordered. "Check with the astronomers. It's somewhere around there--I just came from that planet. The sun is hot--looks like Sol from inside Venus's orbit, although I don't think it's as large as Sol." Hawarden then put through his call to the imperial palace, his position as local head of the I-S C getting him fast service. After some haggling with the emperor's secretary, and his insistence that it was a matter of the utmost importance that could not wait until morning, he was finally told His Majesty would see him. "Got it," Hawarden rose. "Come along." Hanlon started toward the door, then looked down at his torn and dirty clothing. "I'm not very presentable." "We can get you a uniform from the barracks." Hanlon thought swiftly. "No, I'd better not chance it, although I'd sure like to." The admiral thought a moment, then stepped back to his desk and pressed a stud. "Roberts, come in here." A young man almost exactly Hanlon's size, wearing civilian clothes, came into the office. Hawarden grinned. "Those do?" The SS man smiled back. "Swell." "Strip," the admiral commanded the astonished clerk. "We need your clothes in a hurry for this man. Quick," as the young man hesitated. Hanlon was already removing his own. "I'll give you a hundred credits for them, Roberts, but this is prime urgent." The other laughed then, and started pulling off his suit as fast as he could. "A hundred'll more than buy me a new one--it's a good bargain." The exchange was quickly made. Hanlon gave the clerk his money, then he and the admiral hurried to the palace, where they were ushered without delay toward the emperor's private study. "Watch me fairly closely," Hanlon whispered as they were walking down the hall. "If I shake my head, he's lying." Admiral Hawarden's eyes widened, and though he said nothing, he was thinking, "This is certainly the most amazing young man I've ever met. Where does the SS get 'em?" They had barely entered the study when a door on the far side of the room opened, and the emperor came in, leaning on the arm of an aide. He sat down heavily behind the ornate desk. "Well well well," he barked pettishly. "What's all this about, sir? What's so important you have to get me out of bed?" "I am most sorry to have put Your Majesty to such inconvenience," Admiral Hawarden said diplomatically, "but you will soon see that this is, indeed, most urgent. It is also very secret, and I respectfully request we be permitted to speak with you alone." The emperor waved his hand impatiently, and the aide retired from the room. Admiral Hawarden set a small box on the desk and turned on a switch. "Just a portable spyray block," he apologized. "I know, I know," came the exasperated voice. "Get on with it, man, I'm tired." "Permit me to introduce George Hanlon, of the Corps. We have, first, a bit of sad news to give Your Majesty, and then some questions we most urgently request you to answer as fully as you can." The emperor did not look pleased at this suggestion that he be questioned, but said nothing. "Your Prime Minister, Gorth Bohr, was killed a few hours ago, Sire." "What?" The emperor sat upright, his face showing the utmost incredulity, but Hanlon's mind-probing had prepared him for the reaction, so he was not surprised to note neither dismay nor regret. For the monarch suddenly sank back into his chair, and a long, loud suspiration of relief came from him. He closed his eyes and his face finally relaxed a bit. Suddenly he sat bolt upright. "Are you sure?" he barked. "Positive," the admiral assured him. "The body is at Base, and has been for several hours." "How did he die?" "He was stung to death by bees, Sire," Hanlon answered. "Bees?" incredulously. "That's right, Sire. He and three of his men were attacked by a swarm of bees in one of the basement rooms of his palace, and died within minutes." The emperor was silent for moments, mind roiling. Then he shook his head as though almost not daring to believe this news. "It may sound strange, Hawarden," he said at last, "but I do not think I was ever as glad of anything in my life as I am of this. He was an evil thing, though I did not even begin to suspect it until years after I appointed him my Minister. By the time I felt sure, it was too late. He had ... gotten some sort of a hold over me ... I no longer seemed to have a mind or will of my own any more." The admiral risked a glance at Hanlon, who nodded agreement. "Do you know what he was planning, Your Majesty?" "Planning? Planning? You mean something else beyond ruling Simonides through me, or possibly supplanting me entirely?" "I'm afraid he was, Sire. Did you know he was secretly building a great war fleet on another planet?" There was an almost-imperceptible pause before the answer was barked out. "Nonsense, sir. That I can't believe!" Hanlon shook his head. The emperor was lying now. Why? Was he part--perhaps head--of the plot? His mind-probing had not yet reached an answer to those important questions. They would have to question him skillfully to make him think of the things Hanlon so desperately needed to know. Chapter 22 "They certainly are building a great fleet Sire, on a planet they call 'Algon'," Hanlon stated crisply, and almost gave a yell of glee as, the emperor's mind fleetingly called up a picture--distorted as though it had only been described to him--of one of the Greenies. He hurriedly continued punching. "I know His Highness was the guiding mind behind that, for I was supposed to be working for him, and I've just come back from four months there." The emperor started to deny it, but Admiral Hawarden stepped closer to the desk and fixed the monarch with a stern eye. "We don't wish to be discourteous or insolent, Sire, but we know that you do know something about this. Wait, please," he held up his hand as the emperor opened his mouth, so apparently about to demand an apology for the _lese majeste_ of calling him a liar. "We do not believe you were doing this of your own accord, nor that you initiated the conspiracy. But we do feel positive you know something about it. And for the peace of the Federation we must have every possible scrap of information you can give us." The emperor became gradually less antagonistic, and as his face flushed his eyes became pleading. "I ... I ...", he struggled to go on, then realizing that something was holding him back, changed the subject slightly. "I hope, gentlemen, you will forgive me. I don't know what has come over me these past years. I think you know, Hawarden, that I was always heartily in favor of the Federation, and did all I could to make it a force for peace throughout the System. I know only too well how inter-planetary war would wreck all our economies, and I do not want that. But I seem to have ... changed ... these last years ... and I didn't want to!" It was almost a sob. The admiral, as man to man, went quickly around the desk and laid his hand comfortingly on the imperial shoulder. "We all felt that, Sire. You were far too great a ruler to have changed so radically. It puzzled and saddened us all, but now I believe we can begin to see the reason--and it doesn't harm you in our estimation now that we realize you couldn't help it." The emperor raised puzzled eyes. "What do you mean by that?" "May I answer that, Sire?" Hanlon stepped forward. "We know now that Gorth Bohr wasn't human--he was an alien from ..." "An ... alien?" the emperor quavered. "Yes, Sire, definitely. We do not yet know where he came from originally, but we do know he had considerable more--or different--mental powers in some ways, than most humans. You are under some sort of a compulsion or hypnosis that prevents your speaking out. The fact that your health failed and your body deteriorated so rapidly proves it was against your desires." The emperor was startled by that, and his body shook as with a palsy. He repeated his query, dully, "An alien?" Hanlon and Hawarden nodded silently. After a moment Hanlon took a deep breath and dared the question: "May we have permission to search Bohr's quarters and offices to see what evidence we can find that will perhaps tell us more about his projects?" His Majesty straightened with decision, and years seemed to drop from his face and figure. "You certainly may, I'll give orders at once, and you can send in as many of your experts as you desire. I can sense the need for speed." Hanlon bowed his thanks, and the admiral voiced his. "That is very gracious, Sire. The Corps thanks you." The emperor was gaining strength and his old shrewdness by the moment. "What about that fleet you say is being built on ... on some other planet?" Hanlon noticed that hesitation and guessed the reason. But for the moment he let it lie, and answered the question. "It is not yet a serious menace, Sire, but will be shortly if not taken into the Corps' hands." Admiral Hawarden explained further that the grand fleet was being assembled, and would cope with the problem within days. "Good. Good. Call on us for whatever assistance we can give." They talked over many details for some time, then the admiral rose as though to take his leave. But Hanlon wasn't yet ready. He wanted to pick up that matter he had let lie some minutes ago. He stepped up to the desk and looked straight into the imperial eyes. "Sire, please think hard with all your will. I believe you know more about Bohr's plans, but that the knowledge was hypnotically sealed in your sub-conscious. Bohr had that power, we know. Please try to break that seal. Bohr is dead now--his _compulsion_ can no longer bind you!" The emperor seemed doubtful, but at Hanlon's continued, assured insistence, finally agreed to try. He concentrated for long, long, agonizing minutes. Great beads of sweat stood out on his white, strained face, and his hands clenched into tight balls. Hanlon almost repented, and thought of breaking the spell and telling the suffering ruler it didn't matter that much, that they could get the knowledge elsewhere. But he _had_ to have those facts--and if he could suffer as he had done, so could others. But just then the emperor suddenly relaxed. His features became more composed and natural, and he smiled in relief. "It is coming now," he wiped his face with his silk kerchief. "Bohr did boast to me that he would one day rule the galaxy. But then he told me I must forget what he said, and I did." That speech seemed to release him still further from the awful tension that had held him for so many years. He was weary but happy. "He didn't tell me much in detail, as nearly as I can remember. Merely that plans were being made to gain control first of this planet, then the Federation, and after that the whole Galaxy." "Did he say who was with him in this outrageous undertaking?" Hawarden gasped, and Hanlon added, "We mean, was he alone in it, or was some other planet or system backing him?" The emperor thought steadily for some time, then shook his head. "I don't seem to remember," he sighed sadly. Nor could he, after half an hour's more concentration. "I am sorry I cannot give you that information, gentlemen. But you will soon, we trust, have reason to believe that we are once more desirous of doing everything possible for the peace and well-being of the Federation." There were tears in Admiral Hawarden's eyes and he impulsively stepped forward and grasped the emperor's hand. "Welcome back, Sire," he said sincerely. Back at Base, there were messages awaiting, that had come in while they were gone. The admiral handed one of them to Hanlon. It was terse, but brought a happy smile to his face. _"Coming immediately, with full crew. Congratulations. NEWTON."_ * * * * * Others were from Grand Fleet, regarding the measures being taken for the fleet rendezvous, and the part the Simonidean sector was to play. Another was from the planetographers, giving the spatial location of Algon, with the note that they had finally found it on a star map, and that a survey ship was being sent there at once. Hanlon punched a stud. "Stay away from Algon," he rapped out when the scientist's face appeared on the screen. "Don't send that ship until you get permission. Just forget all about even having heard of Algon!" The elder looked questioningly at the youthful civilian giving him such orders. "I don't know ..." "Hawarden speaking," the admiral pushed Hanlon aside and glared into the screen. "That's an order! Forget it, as you were told!" "Yes, sir. It's forgotten." Hanlon turned wearily to the admiral. "I'm minus on sleep and strength right now, sir. Think I'll go get some rest. In the morning I'll come back and we'll start searching Bohr's stuff." "Right, I could use some caulking-off myself. A couple more orders, then I'm going home. Do you want to bunk here at Base?" "No, guess I'd better go back to the hotel. I can't appear here too much, you know--might be recognized by some Terran officer. And that brings up a problem. What will be my apparent status before the crews doing the searching?" "Civilian specialist, called in by the Corps," Hawarden was used to quick decisions. "We often use such. I'll sign a pass for you. Better use a disguise and different name, hadn't you?" Hanlon nodded. "False mustache, skin darkened, contact lenses to color my eyes. And I'll call myself Spencer Newton." Hawarden looked surprised. "You pick a name fast." The SS man grinned back. "It's the one I was born with,"--and then the admiral really was surprised, but asked no questions. He filled in the pass with that name. "Better come directly into this private office." * * * * * When they met in the morning Hawarden complimented Hanlon on his disguise, then quickly reported he had already assembled crews and one was working at the imperial palace and the other at the ex-Prime Minister's own residence. "Good," Hanlon was well-rested and his voice was crisp. "I think I'll start at Bohr's place." The two officers left Base, a staff car rushing them to the ministerial residence. They entered and Hawarden led the way down a hall towards Bohr's private office. But just as they reached the door and were turning to go in, Hanlon suddenly pushed the admiral past it, then jumped across the opening himself. Hawarden turned in puzzlement, but Hanlon signalled quiet and led him into a small reception room adjoining. "There's one man in there you'll have to get rid of before I can go in," he explained in a swift whisper. "Young junior lieutenant named Dick Trowbridge. He'd recognize me even in this disguise. How'd he ever get here to Sime?" "Trowbridge? Oh, yes, he was sent here from Terra when we asked Prime for a code-expert." "Umm, that's right, Dick was a code-specialist," Hanlon nodded. "He was my roommate all through cadet school," he explained. "It would give the whole works away if he saw me here." "He's our only good decoder," Admiral Hawarden frowned. "We lost our best man. We'll have to use him if any code shows up." "I realize that, but send him away for now. If we get code we can send it to him at Base." "Right, sir, I'll fake an excuse." Some five minutes later Hawarden returned. "All clear now, sir." They started out, then Hanlon stopped the admiral with a hand on his arm. "Please, sir," his face was flaming, his eyes miserable, but his voice was fairly steady. "Please don't call me 'Sir' all the time. It may be that my position as an SS man carries that distinction, but it makes me nervous. A youngster like me has no business being called 'Sir' by a top brass like you who has worked nearly half a century to achieve the honor." Admiral Hawarden grinned suddenly, and hugged Hanlon with a fatherly gesture. "You're all right, Son, and I'm for you. From now on you're simply 'Newton'. Anything to make you ... hey, 'Newton'? Are you...?" Hanlon nodded. "His son." The admiral's eyes glowed. "Wonderful man, your dad. One of the Corps' greatest." The young man swallowed hard. "I think so, too." They had been working nearly a quarter of an hour, sorting through the voluminous papers in the minister's desk and files, when another Corps lieutenant came in, his hand bandaged. "What happened to you, Patrick?" Hawarden asked in surprise. "That blasted toogan bit me, and I had to get my hand dressed." "What toogan?" "One that must have been Bohr's pet. It was flying all about the room yelling and cussing us out. I was crossing to the corner of the room, there, when it screamed and bulleted over, slashing my hand when I threw it up to protect my face." Another of the men spoke up. "Took three of us to capture it, and I wanted to wring its neck, but Captain Banister wouldn't let me, so we stuffed it into its cage and sent it to the Zoo." Hanlon was intensely interested in this, but one thing puzzled him. He signalled Hawarden to one side, and asked in a whisper, "What's a toogan?" "A native bird here much like your Terran parrots, but with even more beautiful plumage, and they can talk much better than parrots. They seem to have quite a lot of intelligence." Hanlon was instantly alert. "Get it back here for me." Puzzled but unquestioning, the admiral went to the visiphone and dialed the zoo. "Admiral Hawarden, Curator. I believe the Prime Minister's toogan was just delivered to you. There was a mistake. Please send it back ... never mind, sir, what the 'why' is, just return it immediately." He flipped off the switch impatiently, and looked at the young Secret Serviceman with wondering eyes. A toogan? What on earth did the fellow want with ... this was the most amazing man he'd ever seen. But he sure did get results. He turned back to his men. "Anything yet?" "Nothing but ordinary state papers so far, sir," was the consensus. "Keep looking. Remember, we especially want any mention of any planets whose names you do not recognize; anything about ship-building, or about mining or other planets." Hanlon handed Hawarden a note, and the admiral sent a couple of marines off on a run. Half an hour later a truck pulled up in front, and the marines carried in another desk. It was the one from that back room in the Bacchus Tavern. Hanlon himself went through this, but was quickly disappointed. There wasn't a thing he wanted in any of the drawers. He turned the desk upside down, looking for secret compartments. Finding none, he ordered the marines to take it to pieces. At a nod from the admiral they dismantled the desk. But it was perfectly innocuous. Hanlon was just turning away, disgustedly, when a man came from the zoo with the caged toogan. At sight of the familiar room the bird perked up. "Hey, Boss!" it called out in a clear but whistling sort of voice, "I'm home again." Hanlon had no trouble understanding its words, spoken in Simonidean, of course, but was busy examining its mind. He walked over to the messenger and held out his hand. "I'll take the bird." The zoo attendant looked at him doubtfully. "It's a vicious thing, sir," he said. "Be careful--it's already injured one man. They say no one but the Prime Minister can handle it." "It's all right," the admiral spoke. "Thank you for bringing it. That will be all." Hanlon took the cage and, giving the admiral a meaning look, walked out of the room with it. Chapter 23 In the next room George Hanlon sank into a comfortable chair, then opened the cage door and the toogan fluttered out and perched on the chair arm. The young man fitted his mind more closely to the bird's brain and began probing. Carefully he studied its every line and channel, utterly oblivious to everything else. His first brief examination brought a slight sound of pleased surprise to his lips. This bird had a real mind, far better than any he had previously discovered in any animal or bird, even better than a dog's. And he could read everything in it. Best of all, the toogan had a pictorial type of mind--it remembered in scenes as well as words. It transmitted an almost perfect likeness of the being Hanlon had first known as The Leader and later as His Highness Gorth Bohr--any slight discrepancies being caused by the difference between a bird's ability to see and that of humans. Like a swiftly unreeling three-dimensional film, Hanlon saw the Minister working at his desk, walking about the room, receiving callers, playing with the bird, eating--and sharing his food with it--talking to it confidentially as he might have done to a well-trusted aide. For over an hour Hanlon sat there, and the bird, seemingly asleep, sat on the chair arm without making a move. Finally Hanlon rose, and the toogan flew onto his outheld arm much as a falcon might ride. In that manner they returned to the main office where the others were still working. They were all amazed at this peculiar situation, but only Admiral Hawarden came even close to guessing what was going on. The memory of that astounding performance of the pigeon made him think perhaps this surprising young man had actually been reading the bird's mind--or something equally fantastic. Hanlon set the toogan down on a corner of the big desk, then started walking toward a corner closet. As he neared it the bird seemed to come to life. It began screaming, "No need looking there! There's nothing in there. Nobody's ever to look into that closet! Sic 'em, Pet!" It dove straight at Hanlon, beak open and screaming in rage. But the man's hand and mind were quicker. Taking possession of the bird's mind again, he silenced it and grabbed it by the neck, holding it gently but firmly under his arm. "Open that closet and search it thoroughly," Hawarden snapped. Several of the Corpsmen jumped forward, and again the toogan struggled, but Hanlon was holding it firmly by force, as well as tightening his mental control, which the powerful compulsion Bohr had implanted in the bird's mind had momentarily broken through. In minutes everything was out of the closet, and while some of the officers were examining every bit of the contents, others, with powerful, portable glo-lights, were going over the walls and shelves. There was a three-foot ladder-stool in the closet, and one of them started to mount it to search the ceiling. But the moment the man touched the stool the bird's mind gave Hanlon a clear picture of a procedure it had witnessed many times. He gasped, and called out to the Corpsmen, "That stool! Never mind looking at the closet itself or that other stuff. Bring the stool out here!" The surprised lieutenant jumped down, and carried the little ladder over to where Hanlon was standing with the bird. "Unscrew the left rear leg--about the middle, I believe." The officer up-ended the stool, and after a moment's work found out how to unscrew the leg--it had a reverse thread. In a few more instants he had it off, and they all gasped. The leg was hollow, and in it were a number of tightly-rolled sheets of very thin, tough paper. The Corpsman started to unroll the papers, but at a quick signal from Hanlon, Admiral Hawarden stepped forward. "I'll take those, Lieutenant. I think, for the time being, at least, we need search no further. Since most of the papers we have found here are purely planetary matters, they're not for us to meddle with, even though we have permission to do so. Back to Base--if these are not what we want we can start again later." As the men filed out, Hawarden activated the visiphone, and got the minister's office at the imperial palace. "Find anything we want there, Captain?" he asked the man who answered. "Not yet, sir." "Report back to Base, then. I think we've got it here." He disconnected and handed the papers to Hanlon who had, in the meantime, returned the toogan to its cage, and now sat down. He saw the young man's face fall at first glance at those dozens of rolled sheets. "What's wrong?" "It's in code," came the explanation reply as Hanlon swiftly examined each page. "In code--or in Bohr's native language, whatever that may be." "Ouch! If it's that, we're sunk. Better get Trowbridge on it anyway, hadn't we?" "Yes," slowly, "that's all we can do now." After some moments, "Guess I'll keep out of sight for a while. I'll go back to the hotel. You can get in touch with me there. I'm still sort of shaky from that beating I got, and need a lot of rest." "Want the doctor to look you over again?" "No, I don't think I need that now. He said to have the dressings renewed in two days, so I'll see him tomorrow." "Right, Newton. If anything comes up, I'll get in touch." "Oh, be sure and let me know about that freighter. You've had no word yet, I suppose." "Only that it's still there, being loaded. The scouts are watching it closely, ready to blast at first sign of departure." "Warn them that we want _all_ of the crew and passengers." The two started out, but suddenly Admiral Hawarden stopped Hanlon with his hand on the young man's arm. "About that business with the toogan. I'm not prying if you don't want to talk, but shouldn't I warn all the men who saw it, to keep quiet?" "Shades of Snyder, yes! I got so interested I forgot all about others seeing me with it. Yes, absolutely, it must never be talked about." He again looked pleadingly at the admiral. "I ... I'm sorry, sir ... but at that I know you're smart enough to have figured out most of it. All right, highly confidential, I can do a bit of mind-reading, and especially with animals and birds, whose minds are not as complex as human's. I can even control 'em to some extent." The admiral nodded. "I sort of figured as much, with the amazing performance of that pigeon. Your secret is safe with me--it certainly must not be spread around. But I don't mind saying I'm glad it's you has that ability, not me," with a half-hearted laugh. "It is a load," Hanlon admitted soberly, then brightened, "but it sure saved my neck when Bohr had me prisoner and was about to torture me." The admiral looked surprised, then shivered. "The bees! I hadn't connected ...", his voice died away, and after another brief hesitation he left, while Hanlon slowly made his way outside, took a ground-cab, and was driven back to the hotel. * * * * * About five the next morning Hanlon was awakened by the stealthy sound of a key in the lock of his hotel room door. His hand slid swiftly under his pillow, and firmly grasped the blaster there. As he saw the door open and a figure slip inside, in one swift movement he sat up, and switched on the bed light. "Up with those hands!" he commanded the man who was closing the door carefully, his back still towards the bed. The hands went up, and the man slowly turned. "Dad!" Hanlon yelled in relief, and climbed out of bed. "How did you get here so soon?" His father met him halfway, and said from their embrace, "I was on Estrella when your call came. That's only a few lights from here, and they sent a speedster." Then he grinned. "I'm glad to see you're learning to keep your eyes open, even in your sleep." Hanlon started dressing while they talked. In swift, concise sentences he told his father all that had occurred to him since he started his job. "Nice work, Spence," his father applauded when he had finished, then grinned again, "although I ought to spank you for taking such risks, after I told you to take it easy at first. I was a bit worried when you disappeared, until Hooper reported what you were after. But about your job," he continued after a moment, "we had no idea you could get so much. We merely hoped you might find a lead or two for us to work on. But you've practically wrapped this up for us." "Unh-uh," his son demurred. "It's far from finished. We've got to get to Algon and grab those ships. And if any of them, or enough of them, are in shape to fight, that may take some doing ... if we can do it at all. Then there's the job of finding out where Bohr came from, and how much of a menace his planet or system or whatever it is, will be." "Sure, sure, I realize that, Son. But those are incidentals. You've given us the 'what' and 'who' we needed to know. But I see you're dressed, and I'm hungry. Let's go eat." As they were breakfasting his father asked for details, and Hanlon explained about his new mental powers, and how they had helped him. "I can't do much with men, except to read their surface thoughts," he explained. "But with animals I can do more. I can follow those surface thoughts and memories back and down into their total mind, and can take over and control them. But it won't work with people--humans seem to have a sort of natural block or screen I can't penetrate." Newton's face was a study as he shook his head. "To think my boy can do things like that!" "How do you suppose it happens I can, Dad?" "You didn't get it from me, that's for sure," his father grimaced ruefully. "Perhaps through your mother, from her father. He was a peculiar duck. They used to call him psychic, for he'd get some of the craziest hunches--for lack of a better descriptive word. He often seemed to know a lot of things when no one could figure out how he could have learned them. Say, now that I remember back, he used to have quite a way with animals, too, although I doubt if he had anything like your powers." "You said I'd probably develop other mental abilities," Hanlon grinned nervously, "but I certainly never imagined anything like this." "Me neither," ungrammatically. "It's weird!" They had nearly finished eating when their waiter brought a portable visiphone to the table. "A call for you, Mr. Hanlon," and he plugged the set into a wall-socket. Hanlon flipped the switch and saw Admiral Hawarden's face smiling from the screen. "We got the freighter just a few minutes ago," he reported. "One of our men daringly mingled with the crew as they were boarding, and jammed the airlock so it couldn't be closed. We arrested them all, with only two of our men injured, and five of the enemy. They're bringing them into Base now." "Fine work, sir. Admiral Newton is here with me--we'll see you in your off ... wait, sir ... Dad says you'd better come here to the hotel. Room 946." They were barely back in Hanlon's room when Admiral Hawarden knocked. He and Newton were old friends, and greeted each other with genuine warmth. "That's quite a boy of yours, Newt. He's got the stuff." "Yeah, I'm sort of proud of him, myself. He's really done a job, especially for first assignment." "Have either of you any orders for me concerning the mopping up?" Hawarden asked, but looked at Hanlon. "Ask Dad ..." But his father interrupted. "It's your party, Son. Speak up. Right now you're not a youngster just out of school, you are the Inter-Stellar Corps," he added impressively. Hanlon flushed, but there was a sureness in his voice as he answered, that only the bitter experiences through which he had so recently passed, and which had matured him so greatly, could have brought. "We've got to liberate Algon and capture those new battleships as quickly as possible, of course. But at the same time we must be trying to find out what planet or system Bohr came from, and take steps to see they can't harm us. That means we've got to exert every effort to get every single person who was working with or for Bohr, and especially to find out if he had any superiors." "Right. The fleet should be here in another two days, and then Ferguson will want to blast for Algon. The other matter will depend on so many things we don't know yet." "Has Trowbridge cracked that code yet?" "He reported first thing this morning that he broke it late last night. I've assigned several men to help him, and they should have it transcribed soon." Hanlon turned to his father. "Your men here yet?" "They're coming in as fast as they can get here." "Better examine those men from the freighter, and have your gang follow up all leads. They'll have to break down Bohr's hypnosis to get any information. Although," he paused and his face grew thoughtful, "I'm wondering if anyone besides Bohr really knew all he was planning. I'm beginning to believe he was a lone wolf." Admiral Hawarden nodded in agreement. "I've been forced to the same belief." Something clicked in Hanlon's mind. "The emperor," he exclaimed. "Maybe we'd better have another go at him. I'll bet his mind's a lot freer from that compulsion now, and perhaps he can remember more of what Bohr sealed away from his conscious memory." Hawarden nodded. "That's a good bet. I'll arrange it." Two hours later the emperor was free to receive them, and the four were soon closeted in his study. "It's a strange, weird feeling, gentlemen," he said when they had explained what they wanted. "It's almost like trying to read some other person's mind. I've felt that Bohr's influence was receding, and I've been trying to see what more I could find." He sat silent for a moment, then said slowly, almost in a sing-song voice as though reading from a printed page, "I knew he was building some ships on Algon, but I did not know they were warships. He told me they were a new type with an entirely new propulsive principle that one of our scientists had worked out." "There's always that possibility, of course," Newton said. "Why did he say they were building them elsewhere than on this planet?" Hawarden asked. The emperor frowned in concentration, then a peculiar look came over his features. "That's strange," he marvelled. "You would think I would have been sure to ask that, but I cannot find any memory of ever having done so." "Algon had most of the natural resources for the building of ships," Hanlon ruminated aloud. "There were the mines, the forests, and slave labor to cut down expenses. It was mostly engineers, scientists and special technicians who were there, overseeing." "I cannot find in my mind the names of any others who might have been in the conspiracy with Bohr," the emperor answered another question. "He brought only one man to see me, with the request that I present him a decoration. It was the scientist who devised the new drive, he said. A Professor Panek, I believe ..." "Panek?" Hanlon interrupted. "A heavy-set, ruddy-faced, red-headed man?" "Yes, that about describes him." "But Panek was only one of his gunmen," the young SS man was perplexed. "He didn't have brains enough to invent an excuse." "I wonder, then, what Bohr had in mind to bring such a man here like that?" Hawarden frowned. "Maybe a trick to help throw His Majesty off guard," Newton suggested. "Or else just a sop to Panek's vanity, to tie him closer to Bohr," Hanlon said. "A thing like that would have tickled Panek." "We'll have him rounded up, then." "No need, Sire," Hanlon explained. "He was one of those men who were torturing me, and was killed by the bees." The emperor looked at the young man quizzically, and a knowing smile erased much of the tension from his face. "I've heard about that incident. Wasn't it rather peculiar you were not harmed by any of those ferocious bees?" Hanlon's face was as bland as he could make it. "Not necessarily, Sire. I was sitting still, manacled, you remember. They were moving around and fighting the insects." The emperor winked, and Hanlon probed into his mind, receiving the distinct impression of friendliness, while the surface thoughts were saying, "I won't pry, but I'd give a lot to know what really did happen--and how." "The Corps thanks Your Majesty," Admiral Hawarden rose to leave, and Newton and Hanlon did likewise. "We'll keep you closely informed of things as they break," and the three backed from the study, bowing. Chapter 24 Grand Fleet had been rapidly assembling in the region near Simonides, just outside visual range, and away from the passenger and freight lanes. Mobilization was now complete. Admiral Newton and Senior Lieutenant Hanlon had been invited to ride the Sirius, High Admiral Ferguson's flagship, and were glad to avail themselves of that privilege. They wore uniforms conforming to their rank, but were disguised so that any chance acquaintances could not recognize them, although there were no other Terrans aboard. Orders were given, and in strict formation the fleet blasted for Algon. First went the great screen of scouts, fanning out in all directions from a common center, the outer fringes at higher speed until a great bowl-like formation was secured. Then all the scouts standardized their speed. When they reached Algon they would completely englobe the planet just beyond detection range. Next came the light cruisers, in the same formation, but when they englobed at Algon they would go inside the globe of scouts, nearer the planet's surface. Then the heavy cruisers and battleships would descend in three mass formations, one directly over each of the three known shipyards. "If any of the ships being built there are in shape to attack--if they have weapons installed and crews to use them," High Admiral Ferguson's orders had been very explicit, "you'll have to burn them down. Otherwise we want those ships untouched." George Hanlon was thrilled with the excitement of what was coming, yet knew a touch of fear. He had never been under fire, and knew only from hearsay just what it meant to be in a ship that might be destroyed any instant without the least chance of anyone escaping. In space warfare, there usually just were no survivors. You won and lived--or you lost and were blasted out of existence. But it wouldn't be long now--the scouts were already establishing their globe just outside of detection range. "No signs of being discovered yet," they reported. Then the light cruisers began slipping through the screen of scouts to take their positions. Suddenly, a number of great beams of energy stabbed up toward them from below, and the screens of the cruisers flared in brilliant confiscations of flame as those mighty rays struck them. "Don't you cruisers and scouts take foolish chances!" High Admiral Ferguson's voice rasped into the mike. "If those beams are too hot, get back fast! Heavy cruisers and battleships, down!" Instantly Hanlon could feel the surge of acceleration as the great ship he was riding plummeted planetward. In the plate he and his father were scanning, he could see the dots of blue light that identified the nearest scouts, and a moment later the greens of the light cruisers. Then those dots fled behind his range of vision as the heavies flashed past them. The plate Hanlon was using was of limited vision, so he could not see the battle as a whole, as High Admiral Ferguson could in his wide-coverage screens. Only what was going on directly below and close to either side was visible to Hanlon. Yet he could see several of those great, stabbing beams reaching out toward the fleet. A change in color at one edge of his plate caught his eye, and he saw the ship nearest on his right begin to glow as a heavy beam from below worked on its screens, burrowing its way in and in, trying to blast the ship out of existence. Great streams of radiance struck and ricocheted from its screens, which were swiftly mounting through the spectrum as more and more power was thrown against them by the enemy below. The air in the Sirius began to grow hotter, and his father answered his inquiring look, "They're attacking us, too, and that's heating us up. Hope our screens hold," he grinned grimly. "You said it." A shiver of fear gripped the young man, and he could feel himself trembling. His father threw a comforting arm across his shoulders. "First battles are always toughest," he said evenly, and Hanlon calmed instantly. He turned his attention to the screen again. That neighboring ship was struggling desperately to escape, knowing she could not stand much more. "What's the matter with that pilot?" Hanlon yelled. "Why don't he flip her over and beat it?" "Seems to be held by something," his father's anxious voice was tense. "Have those others got some sort of tractor beam?" "Tractors?" Hanlon looked up in surprise. "I've read about them, but thought they were impossible." "Impossible to us because we haven't got 'em yet," Newton said absently. "They are theoretically possible." Every beam from every Corps ship was piercing downward. Suddenly other ships were appearing, and the young man realized that the light cruisers were coming down to add their might to that of the battleships and heavies. Four of the light cruisers maneuvered swiftly below the battleship next to the Sirius, one below the other, and in the instant of their alignment the big ship broke free, while the others flashed away from that restricting, holding tractor, or whatever it was. It seemed like hours that Hanlon's eyes strained, trying to see what was going on. They had slowed, his spaceman's sense told him, and now he could see they were within the atmosphere, not too high above the ground. Now he could make out huge, squat mechanisms from which those deadly rays were pouring. The Guddus, with their lack of knowledge of things mechanical, had not reported these to Hanlon, else he could have warned Admiral Ferguson about them, and the attack might possibly have been handled differently. Suddenly a speaker blared, "Sector Two is in our hands. No total losses. A number of the enemy scouts got away--they're far faster than anything we've got." A yell rose from every throat there in the control room. Sector Two, Hanlon knew, was the spaceyard where the scouts and light cruisers were being built. "They probably hadn't armed that field as much as these others," he said to his father. Newton nodded, then the two walked over to the High Admiral's station and glanced into his larger bank of plates. Now Hanlon could see clearly, and at first glance knew that none of the new enemy ships below them were fighting--only those ground batteries which encircled the shipyard. He could see that most of these were now out of action, destroyed by the Federation ships. The others were under terrific bombardment, not only from the ships' beams, but from their bombs and guided missiles as well. From the looks of the destroyed batteries, Hanlon guessed the explosive bombs had been followed by thermite to complete their destruction. "We lost many?" Newton asked. "No totals," Ferguson's voice was gleeful, "except one light cruiser. We must have caught them napping. If they can't put up any more forces, it'll all be over in a couple of minutes." _A couple of minutes!_ Hanlon's thought was a gasp. He glanced at his chronom, and was amazed. He had been sure this battle had lasted for hours--but it was less than ten minutes. It didn't seem possible ... but he quickly remembered what he had learned in school, and knowing something of those terrific powers unleashed there, the wonder was now that it had lasted that long. A speaker near them blared. "Admiral Houghton reporting. Sector Three taken. Two of our cruisers blasted, and one battleship crippled. One enemy battleship was fighting us, and had to be destroyed. They've really got something, sir, that we'll want to study and get for ourselves." Another yell of triumph came from the Corpsmen, and Hanlon felt a thrill of pride in the Service of which he was a part. Then a moment later Admiral Ferguson called into his mike, "Cease fire, but stand by on careful watch. _Orion_ and _Athenia_, send your specialists down in gigs. I'll meet you there." The landing successfully completed without further activity from the enemy, Ferguson, a number of designated officer-specialists, Newton and Hanlon, some technicians, and a company of marines in full armor, disembarked and marched to the safest part of the ruined, still-burning spaceyard. Careful examination of the ships there was ordered. The officer-technies, who swarmed aboard the enemy ships, soon began reporting one after another, that none of these partially-built vessels seemed damaged beyond repair. "Thank heavens they built what few ground-batteries they had well outside the field," Ferguson said to Newton and Hanlon. "We'll get crews in here at once, and complete these ships." George Hanlon, after his first quick looks about at the damage done, had been sending his mind out and out, trying to get into telepathic communication with any of the natives, but had not had any success. Had they all been killed? Those here at the shipyard, probably yes, he had to admit sadly. The terrific heat would have burned them. But what about the others? Why couldn't he contact them? "Excuse me, sir," he addressed the High Admiral. "What about the mines and factories?" "All under control without any trouble, outside of a few individual casualties. Light cruisers and scouts took care of those while the main battle was on." "I'd like a small cruiser to take me to the mine where I worked," he said, and one was ordered to come down and place itself on special assignment at his disposal. "Want to come with me, Dad?" he asked. The two admirals exchanged glances, and Ferguson nodded. "Go ahead if you want to. We won't need you here for now." In the airlock of the cruiser Hanlon removed the disguising makeup, and it was as his Algonian-known self, dressed in civvies he had brought for that purpose, that he descended at the familiar little spaceport. His father was intensely interested in that fantastic, seemingly-alive jungle through which they walked to the mine clearing. "I've never seen anything like this," he commented in amazement. "Are these trees and bushes conscious, too?" "Very slightly," his son told him. "The Guddus call them their 'little cousins,' and I believe can communicate to some extent, but I never could." As they broke from the jungle's fringe, they saw a double-squad of marines on guard. The two were allowed through the lines, and entered the office. Behind his desk, his face dead white from suspense, sat Peter Philander, and about the room sprawled the engineers, guards and other workers. "Hi, Mr. Philander!" Hanlon called cheerfully, and at sound of that remembered voice, the superintendent's head, as well as those of all the others, snapped up. "You!" There was incredulity in the super's voice and manner. "Yep, it's me," Hanlon grinned. "I'm glad nothing happened to any of you." "_Hmmpff!_" Philander snorted defeatedly. "What's the difference between being killed cleanly in a fight, as against a lifetime in prison, or a firing squad?" "You'll get neither one," Hanlon said quietly, remembering the power he, as a Secret Service operative, carried. "There'll be a trial, of course, but I know that you, at least, are all okay." "He's boss, ain't he?" one of the guards growled truculently. "Why should he get off free iffen th' rest of us don't?" "None of you will be harmed because of your part in the plot His Highness Gorth Bohr was scheming. That is broken, and we know you were all just his tools. All any of you will be tried for are your actions as regards the Greenies. If brutality against them is proven, you'll be properly punished for that alone." He turned to Philander. "Are the natives all right?" The man looked up hopelessly, unable to believe Hanlon's statement about himself. "How do I know?" his voice was dispirited. "When the Corps captured us, they dragged us from wherever we were working, and as far as I know left the Greenies untended. They've probably all run back to the woods." Hanlon looked at his father. "I'm going out to look. I have a feeling ..." and he walked out without saying more. Nor was he greatly surprised to see the natives all sitting or standing quietly in their compounds, some feeding from the fertilizer Hanlon was glad to see was still being fed them, others merely resting, waiting. The gates, of course, were unlocked and wide open, so Hanlon walked quickly back to the hut his crew occupied and stepped inside the doorway. While waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dimness he saw a figure launching itself at him. But as he quickly stepped back outside, in case it was an attack, he saw that it was Geck. "You came back, you came back!" the native was babbling telepathically in an excess of joy. "When the new humans came and took the old humans prisoners, me said it was your work. Me knew you would come. Me tell other Guddu to wait for you here." "What about those near the places where the ships were being built?" Hanlon's mind asked anxiously. "I tried to get into contact with them but couldn't." "Many of they were killed, yet most ran to forests when great fires that destroy were started," was the sad response. Hanlon was silent a moment, then telepathed again. "There is no need for you all to stay here any longer. Tell all your people to go back to their forests, for they are all free." Geck turned to the other natives who were crowding close, and Hanlon could see him talking swiftly with that peculiar-looking little triangular-shaped mouth. Soon his mind was suffused with a tremendous wave of joy and ecstasy, and they began dashing out. Hanlon could see them talking to the natives in all the huts, and in moments all the natives except Geck were streaming happily toward the nearby forests. Hanlon turned to Geck. "I'd like to have you stay with me or where I can reach you for a while. As soon as we can get straightened around, we'll make arrangements to do anything we can for you." "Me stay with friend An-yon," Geck said simply, and Hanlon was glad and proud of that friendship with this strange alien. They walked back to the mine office, and there Hanlon told his father about what he had done with the natives. Admiral Newton was intensely interested, and frankly studied the strange, weird Geck. It was his first sight of these "vegetable" creatures. "Animated trees," Hanlon had first called them, although now they were so familiar to him, and he knew them so well that he thought of them, naturally and without question, as "people." The young Secret Serviceman explained to the elder about the frequency-transformer he had built--but dismantled before leaving Algon. He suggested that specialists be sent here to see what could be done about teaching the natives any of the things they might want to know. "But don't let them try to force the Guddus into a mechanical civilization," he pleaded. "Let 'em grow in their own way, and make what progress they can in whatever way comes natural to them." "Of course," his father agreed quickly. "That's the way we always work with such primitives. We tell them and show them what we have, but only give them what they specifically ask for, whether we think it is what they 'ought to have' or not. Don't worry, your friends will be in good hands. But," there was a peculiar light in his eyes, "I sure would like to watch an autopsy on one of them. A vegetable brain ..." "Yes, it would be interesting," Hanlon admitted, "but I'm glad you treat them that way." He turned back to Geck and explained, telepathically, as best he could. "You stay here with we," the Guddu asked hopefully. "I'm sorry, but I have other work to do," and then, as he saw how the other lost heart. Hanlon hastened to add, "I have to go help other enslaved peoples on other worlds." "Then us not try to keep you. But us hope you come to see we many time." "I'll do that, Geck my friend, every chance I get." Chapter 25 "We've got a problem here," Admiral Newton said as they followed the marines who were taking the mine operatives to the cruiser to be taken back to Simonides for their trials. "I know it," Hanlon said thoughtfully. "The Guddus are too high in the scale for the planet to be colonized, and too low at present to be admitted to the Federation as true members. Yet they have immense wealth and resources the Federation can use, and something will have to be done to protect them from thieves and others who might again try to enslave them." "That will never be allowed again. We'll have to make some sort of a treaty with them, probably establish a small base here, and perhaps make some arrangements to mine their ores--if we have anything we can give them in repayment. I imagine you'd better hold yourself in readiness to head the commission that comes to handle that treaty." "Gee, thanks for that, Dad. They're such swell people when you get to know them. Ordinarily they live like 'children of nature,' in the forests, without need of homes or tools or anything. They feed from the elements in the soil, so there's no food problem. We did give them nitrates here, but that was because they had exhausted the elements in the dirt floors of their prison huts. In the woods that won't be needed. Oh, well, when we get technies here, with transformers, we can find out what to do with them." "I'm going back to the fleet now," the elder SS man said. "I suppose you want to go back to Simonides to handle the details of the trials of these men. Incidentally, what about this ... Philander, did you say his name was? Why don't you think he'll need punishment?" Hanlon explained rapidly, finishing, "So you see, with some psychiatric treatments, I'm sure that inferiority can be cleaned up and then he'll be a real asset to us or whoever hires him." A sudden gleam came into his eyes. "Say, if we make that treaty with the Guddus, he'd be just the man to take charge here, under Corps direction." "Well, run along and see to it, then. And Spence, did I remember to tell you how proud I am of you?" Hanlon hugged his father. "Thanks, Dad. I hope you always will be. I suppose the cruiser Commander will let me ride with him?" Newton smiled fondly. "Not 'let you,' Son. You merely tell him you're going to go along. Admiral Ferguson assigned that ship to you on special duty." Hanlon's smile was embarrassed. "I still think I'm too much of a kid for so much responsibility." "Quit looking for sympathy." It was an affectionate growl. "Okay, then. Safe flights, Dad--see you on Sime soon." "Yes, I'll probably be there a day or so after you. Safe flights." * * * * * Once the cruiser was in space, and the pressure of acceleration abated, Hanlon sent word to the guards to bring Philander to his cabin. When they had done so, he excused them, saying he would be responsible for the safety of their prisoner. "Sit down, sir," Hanlon said kindly to the wondering man. "What's this all about, Hanlon?" Philander puzzled. "Who are you, anyway?" "I was assigned to find out what it was centering on Simonides that seemed inimical to the peace of the Federation. The trail led me to Algon." "Where you used me to further your schemes, eh?" the tone was bitter. "Please, Mr. Philander, don't misjudge me until you know all about it. First, let me ask you, did you know who 'His Highness' really was?" The mining engineer shrugged. "You probably know already, so why ask me? Prime Minister of Simonides, of course ... but you said 'was'?" "He's dead now. Did you also know he wasn't human--that he was an alien from some ..." "Not human? You're crazy. He was as human as any of us." "When we get back I'll show you a full-length X-ray of him if you wish. He was planning the conquest of our entire Federation and Galaxy. The Corps experts are still working to find out just what the details of his scheme were, but that much we do know. Did you know about all the warships he was building on Algon?" "Ships? On Algon?" The surprises were coming too fast for Philander to adjust to them. "Yes. Did you think your mine was all there was there? We know of nine mines of one kind or another, a number of factories, smelters, and three great shipyards. Incidentally, everything is now in the hands of the Corps." Philander shook his head in stupefaction. "I'm not calling you a liar, sir, but it's hard to believe you. I knew there were several mines, but not that many, nor about the rest." "It's all true enough. And I'm still 'George' to you, my good friend, not 'sir'." That was a little too much for the older man. "What a mess I've made of my life," he groaned. Hanlon was intensely sorry and sympathetic, but in a way he was glad to see this present mood. It would undoubtedly make easier what he wanted to do. He went over, sat on the arm of Philander's chair and put his arm about the other's shoulder. He gently touched that terrible scar. "When and how did you get this?" Philander shrank away from him, but the story raced across the surface of his mind, and Hanlon read it. When he (Philander) was about eight, a gang of boys were playing about an old, tumbled-down building, and somehow knocked out the prop holding up its remains. Three others were hurt, Philander got that cut-scar, and his brother was killed. "And you've felt all these years you were to blame for his death!" Hanlon exclaimed. "When we get back I'm going to have the best plastic surgeon remove that scar, so it will no longer be a constant reminder. Then a top psychiatrist will give you some therapy, and help you get your mind at rest. After that you'll be ready to take your place in society as a very valuable citizen." "You forget what's going to happen to me because of my part in this plot," Philander was still bitter and unconvinced. "Nothing's going to happen to you--you weren't guilty of anything except having been hypnotized by an alien supermentality," Hanlon said convincingly. "I'll see to that, myself." Philander looked up in surprise. "You mean you ... a young fellow like you ... can tell the ..." "Not exactly," Hanlon interrupted with a grin. "But this was my assignment, and my recommendations will govern. The main thing is, will you consent to the plan I've suggested?" Philander sat for long, thoughtful minutes, then looked up piteously. "If you only can do it!" * * * * * When the cruiser reached Simonides and Hanlon had seen the other mine workers safely in the Corps prison at Base, and Philander installed in a room next to his at the hotel, he called Admiral Hawarden. "Congratulations on the mop-up, which I understand was one hundred point oh oh oh percent," the officer said. "Yes, the other end's under control. How about Bohr's notes?" "They finished last night. We've got a complete list of all the underlings who knew any of the main parts of the conspiracy, and the SS agents have jugged them all." "Good work." "You did a grand job, sir. Again, my congratulations." "Thanks, Admiral Hawarden. I've got to get busy now, on my report to the Council." "Call on me for any help I can give. I'd offer you my confidential secretary to dictate them to, if it wasn't so secret." "Thanks. She would be a big help, but we'd better not." "How'd you know it was a 'she'?" "Even a pigeon can admire a shapely shape," Hanlon quipped as he disconnected. The young SS man was just finishing his report the next day when Admiral Newton walked into his hotel room. "Gosh, Dad, am I _especially_ glad to see you this time!" his son enthused. "I need you to check this report." "Let's see what you've got." Newton settled down in a big chair to study the report, while Hanlon fidgetted about the room, anxiously. "A very clear, concise and complete report, Spence," Newton applauded when he finished reading. "Where do I send it, and to whom?" His father looked at him quizzically. "Have you forgotten about the special mail box for SS men?" The younger man looked astounded. "You mean, even a thing like this merely goes in there?" Newton nodded. "However, in this case, since I would have been the one to pick it up, I'll take it to Base and transmit it to the Council. Incidentally, future reports should be marked on the envelope 'Report to Federated Council'." A couple of hours later Admiral Hawarden called Hanlon at the hotel, where he had just finished making arrangements for Philander's operation and treatments. "Your father and I want you to come to Base at once, sir." When he arrived in Hawarden's private office, the admiral handed him a pair of silver bars. "These are yours now, Captain Hanlon." The young man looked up in surprise. "You were told promotions were swift in the SS--for those who produce," his father chuckled. "The Council was very gratified with your report, and ordered the promotion." Hanlon looked at the two insignia, and his fingers stroked them almost tenderly. "You miss the uniform, don't you, Spence?" sympathetically. Hanlon gulped and nodded silently, very close to tears. "Are you sorry you made the choice you did--to give all that up?" A long, poignant moment of silence, then Hanlon threw back his head in a gesture of pride. "No, Dad. I'm honestly glad I did it. To be able to free those fine Guddus from slavery, and to save the Federation from that horrible plot--it was well worth the little suffering it'll cost me. But," and his smile was pathetic, "I do miss the uniform. I was so proud, wearing it." A moment, then Hawarden spoke. "Here are the transcripts of the Bohr notes," and soon the two SS men were deep in the study of them. When they had finished some time later, they agreed it was a very comprehensive plan. "But did you notice," Hanlon's eyes were cloudy, "he doesn't say a thing anywhere about the part his planet or system were to play in the conquest?" "Yes, I'd noticed that." It was a duet from the two others, and Newton added, "For all there is here, you'd almost feel sure he was playing a lone hand." "If that's true," Hawarden said thankfully, "none of the other men we've picked up matter--we might as well let them go." "I'd say so," Newton agreed, "if we can prove Bohr was in this for himself, and was controlling them." "From what I saw of him," Hanlon said seriously after a long moment of thought, "I'd say he was capable of trying it. He certainly had 'the will to power.' And he was no dummy--he had a really powerful mind. But he was cold beneath that suave, soft-seeming exterior. He was utterly without compassion, mercy, or any feeling of justice. He wouldn't care who or what was damaged as long as he could get what he wanted. I doubt if there was anyone he could really call a friend, or to whom he could talk in full confidence." "Except possibly that bird you told ..." his father began, absently, when Hanlon interrupted with a whoop. "Hey, that's it!" He jumped up and ran to the visiphone, and dialed the zoo. "Bring that toogan of Bohr's back to Base!" "What, again?" the indignant curator asked. "I'm sorry, sir, but this is probably the last time we'll need it. Please get it here immediately." "What's the excitement?" Newton asked curiously. "Your remark reminded me of something I noticed only dimly in its mind, and didn't pursue at the time." While they were waiting for the bird, Hanlon asked, "What about the new ships? Have the experts got 'em figured out yet?" "Not entirely. The hulls are about the same as the Snyder ships, only larger. But that new power system is so radically different they're going rapidly nuts trying to understand it. And they do have tractor-beams." No sooner had the messenger left after delivering the toogan than Hanlon had it out of the cage, and perched on the arm of his chair. Then for nearly an hour he sat there, deaf, dumb and blind to all else while he explored every nook and cranny of that avian mind. "Got it!" he yelled at last, and the bird, freed from control, sprang into the air and flew wildly about, seeking escape. "What did you learn?" the admirals were as excited as he. "We've nothing to fear. Bohr was entirely on his own. The people of his planetary system--Canopus--are so far advanced they live on a completely co-operative basis, every one instinctively working for the common good of all. Bohr was an atavism--they caught him trying to 'take over' there, and banished him. He came here, for his restless mind and savage urge to dominate others would not let him rest until he was absolute ruler of some world or system--the bigger the better from his viewpoint." "And you got all that from a bird?" incredulously. "Yes. You were right when you said Bohr didn't have a friend except the toogan. I think that's why he sort of liked me--perhaps he felt I would be one. All men have the need to talk to someone, some times, so Bohr chose this toogan, who is really quite intelligent, and who could talk back with him. The bird doesn't 'remember' it all, of course, but it's all engraved on his brain." "That means, then," Newton said thankfully, "that we won't have to worry about a war with another system or galaxy." "Yes, and that's a real help," Hawarden added. "Even one man, or entity, like Bohr, could have given us a bad enough time, and perhaps even wrecked the Federation." "Well, I guess that winds it up except for a lot of detail work," Newton rose. "I've got to get back to my own job on Estrella. Hawarden, call the port and have them ready my ship, please. And it's been good seeing you again. Thanks for everything." "Safe flights, Newton," and the admiral started calling the spaceport. "You'll get your orders in a day or two about going back to Algon with the commission," Newton told Hanlon. "Might as well stay here until then." After affectionate farewells he started out, then stopped, bursting into a laugh. "What's the gag, Dad?" "It just came to me that this was once where the son told the father all about 'the birds and the bees'." "Well," Hanlon quipped, but kept his face straight. "I figured you were old enough now to know." The End 
23335	----	Unwise Child RANDALL GARRETT DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK 1962 All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. _Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-13524_ _Copyright © 1962 by Randall Garrett_ _All Rights Reserved_ _Printed in the United States of America_ _First Edition_ +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note | | | | Extensive search has failed to find any evidence that the | | U.S. copyright of this publication has been renewed. | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ BOOKS BY RANDALL GARRETT _Biography_ _Pope John XXIII: Pastoral Prince_ _Science Fiction_ _Unwise Child_ _Books by "Robert Randall"_ _The Shrouded Planet_ _The Dawning Light_ _"Robert Randall" is a pseudonym used on books written in collaboration with Robert Silverberg._ With sincere appreciation, this book is dedicated to TIM and NATALIE who waited ... and waited ... and waited ... and waited for it. 1 The kids who tried to jump Mike the Angel were bright enough in a lot of ways, but they made a bad mistake when they tangled with Mike the Angel. They'd done their preliminary work well enough. They had cased the job thoroughly, and they had built the equipment to take care of it. Their mistake was not in their planning; it was in not taking Mike the Angel into account. There is a section of New York's Manhattan Island, down on the lower West Side, that has been known, for over a century, as "Radio Row." All through this section are stores, large and small, where every kind of electronic and sub-electronic device can be bought, ordered, or designed to order. There is even an old antique shop, known as Ye Quainte Olde Elecktronicks Shoppe, where you can buy such oddities as vacuum-tube FM radios and twenty-four-inch cathode-ray television sets. And, if you want them, transmitters to match, so you can watch the antiques work. Mike the Angel had an uptown office in the heart of the business district, near West 112th Street--a very posh suite of rooms on the fiftieth floor of the half-mile-high Timmins Building, overlooking the two-hundred-year-old Gothic edifice of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The glowing sign on the door of the suite said, very simply: M. R. GABRIEL POWER DESIGN But, once or twice a week, Mike the Angel liked to take off and prowl around Radio Row, just shopping around. Usually, he didn't work too late, but, on this particular afternoon, he'd been in his office until after six o'clock, working on some papers for the Interstellar Commission. So, by the time he got down to Radio Row, the only shop left open was Harry MacDougal's. That didn't matter much to Mike the Angel, since Harry's was the place he had intended to go, anyway. Harry MacDougal's establishment was hardly more than a hole in the wall--a narrow, long hallway between two larger stores. Although not a specialist, like the proprietor of Ye Quainte Olde Elecktronicks Shoppe, Harry did carry equipment of every vintage and every make. If you wanted something that hadn't been manufactured in decades, and perhaps never made in quantity, Harry's was the place to go. The walls were lined with bins, all unlabeled, filled helter-skelter with every imaginable kind of gadget, most of which would have been hard to recognize unless you were both an expert and a historian. Old Harry didn't need labels or a system. He was a small, lean, bony, sharp-nosed Scot who had fled Scotland during the Panic of '37, landed in New York, and stopped. He solemnly declared that he had never been west of the Hudson River nor north of 181st Street in the more than fifty years he had been in the country. He had a mind like that of a robot filing cabinet. Ask him for a particular piece of equipment, and he'd squint one eye closed, stare at the end of his nose with the other, and say: "An M-1993 thermodyne hexode, eh? Ah. Um. Aye, I got one. Picked it up a couple years back. Put it-- Let ma see, now...." And he'd go to his wall ladder, push it along that narrow hallway, moving boxes aside as he went, and stop somewhere along the wall. Then he'd scramble up the ladder, pull out a bin, fumble around in it, and come out with the article in question. He'd blow the dust off it, polish it with a rag, scramble down the ladder, and say: "Here 'tis. Thought I had one. Let's go back in the back and give her a test." On the other hand, if he didn't have what you wanted, he'd shake his head just a trifle, then squint up at you and say: "What d'ye want it for?" And if you could tell him what you planned to do with the piece you wanted, nine times out of ten he could come up with something else that would do the job as well or better. In either case, he always insisted that the piece be tested. He refused either to buy or sell something that didn't work. So you'd follow him down that long hallway to the lab in the rear, where all the testing equipment was. The lab, too, was cluttered, but in a different way. Out front, the stuff was dead; back here, there was power coursing through the ionic veins and metallic nerves of the half-living machines. Things were labeled in neat, accurate script--not for Old Harry's benefit, but for the edification of his customers, so they wouldn't put their fingers in the wrong places. He never had to worry about whether his customers knew enough to fend for themselves; a few minutes spent in talking was enough to tell Harry whether a man knew enough about the science and art of electronics and sub-electronics to be trusted in the lab. If you didn't measure up, you didn't get invited to the lab, even to watch a test. But he had very few people like that; nobody came into Harry MacDougal's place unless he was pretty sure of what he wanted and how he wanted to use it. On the other hand, there were very few men whom Harry would allow into the lab unescorted. Mike the Angel was one of them. Meet Mike the Angel. Full name: Michael Raphael Gabriel. (His mother had tagged that on him at the time of his baptism, which had made his father wince in anticipated compassion, but there had been nothing for him to say--not in the middle of the ceremony.) Naturally, he had been tagged "Mike the Angel." Six feet seven. Two hundred sixty pounds. Thirty-four years of age. Hair: golden yellow. Eyes: deep blue. Cash value of holdings: well into eight figures. Credit: almost unlimited. Marital status: highly eligible, if the right woman could tackle him. Mike the Angel pushed open the door to Harry MacDougal's shop and took off his hat to brush the raindrops from it. Farther uptown, the streets were covered with clear plastic roofing, but that kind of comfort stopped at Fifty-third Street. There was no one in sight in the long, narrow store, so Mike the Angel looked up at the ceiling, where he knew the eye was hidden. "Harry?" he said. "I see you, lad," said a voice from the air. "You got here just in time. I'm closin' up. Lock the door, would ye?" "Sure, Harry." Mike turned around, pressed the locking switch, and heard it snap satisfactorily. "Okay, Mike," said Harry MacDougal's voice. "Come on back. I hope ye brought that bottle of scotch I asked for." Mike the Angel made his way back between the towering tiers of bins as he answered. "Sure did, Harry. When did I ever forget you?" And, as he moved toward the rear of the store, Mike the Angel casually reached into his coat pocket and triggered the switch of a small but fantastically powerful mechanism that he always carried when he walked the streets of New York at night. He was headed straight into trouble, and he knew it. And he hoped he was ready for it. 2 Mike the Angel kept his hand in his pocket, his thumb on a little plate that was set in the side of the small mechanism that was concealed therein. As he neared the door, the little plate began to vibrate, making a buzz which could only be felt, not heard. Mike sighed to himself. Vibroblades were all the rage this season. He pushed open the rear door rapidly and stepped inside. It was just what he'd expected. His eyes saw and his brain recorded the whole scene in the fraction of a second before he moved. In that fraction of a second, he took in the situation, appraised it, planned his strategy, and launched into his plan of action. Harry MacDougal was sitting at his workbench, near the controls of the eye that watched the shop when he was in the lab. He was hunched over a little, his small, bright eyes peering steadily at Mike the Angel from beneath shaggy, silvered brows. There was no pleading in those eyes--only confidence. Next to Old Harry was a kid--sixteen, maybe seventeen. He had the JD stamp on his face: a look of cold, hard arrogance that barely concealed the uncertainty and fear beneath. One hand was at Harry's back, and Mike knew that the kid was holding a vibroblade at the old man's spine. At the same time, the buzzing against his thumb told Mike the Angel something else. There was a vibroblade much nearer his body than the one in the kid's hand. That meant that there was another young punk behind him. All this took Mike the Angel about one quarter of a second to assimilate. Then he jumped. Had the intruders been adults, Mike would have handled the entire situation in a completely different way. Adults, unless they are mentally or emotionally retarded, do not usually react or behave like children. Adolescents can, do, and _must_--for the very simple reason that they have not yet had time to learn to react as adults. Had the intruders been adults, and had Mike the Angel behaved the way he did, he might conceivably have died that night. As it was, the kids never had a chance. Mike didn't even bother to acknowledge the existence of the punk behind him. He leaped, instead, straight for the kid in the dead-black suède zipsuit who was holding the vibroblade against Harry MacDougal's spine. And the kid reacted exactly as Mike the Angel had hoped, prayed, and predicted he would. The kid defended himself. An adult, in a situation where he has one known enemy at his mercy and is being attacked by a second, will quickly put the first out of the way in order to leave himself free to deal with the second. There is no sense in leaving your flank wide open just to oppose a frontal attack. If the kid had been an adult, Harry MacDougal would have died there and then. An adult would simply have slashed his vibroblade through the old man's spine and brought it to bear on Mike the Angel. But not the kid. He jumped back, eyes widening, to face his oncoming opponent in an open space. He was no coward, that kid, and he knew how to handle a vibroblade. In his own unwise, suicidal way, he was perfectly capable of proving himself. He held out the point of that shimmering metal shaft, ready to parry any offensive thrust that Mike the Angel might make. If Mike had had a vibroblade himself, and if there hadn't been another punk at his back, Mike might have taken care of the kid that way. As it was, he had no choice but to use another way. He threw himself full on the point of the scintillating vibroblade. A vibroblade is a nasty weapon. Originally designed as a surgeon's tool, its special steel blade moves in and out of the heavy hilt at speeds from two hundred to two thousand vibrations per second, depending on the size and the use to which it is to be put. Make it eight inches long, add serrated, diamond-pointed teeth, and you have the man-killing vibroblade. Its danger is in its power; that shivering blade can cut through flesh, cartilage, and bone with almost no effort. It's a knife with power steering. But that kind of power can be a weakness as well as a strength. The little gadget that Mike the Angel carried did more than just detect the nearby operation of a vibroblade. It was also a defense. The gadget focused a high-density magnetic field on any vibroblade that came anywhere within six inches of Mike's body. In that field, the steel blade simply couldn't move. It was as though it had been caught in a vise. The blade no longer vibrated; it had become nothing more than an overly fancy bread knife. The trouble was that the power unit in the heavy hilt simply wouldn't accept the fact that the blade was immovable. That power unit was in there to move something, and by heaven, _something_ had to move. The hilt jerked and bucked in the kid's hand, taking skin with it. Then it began to smoke and burn under the overload. The plastic shell cracked and hot copper and silver splattered out of it. The kid screamed as the molten metal burned his hand. Mike the Angel put a hand against the kid's chest and shoved. As the boy toppled backward, Mike turned to face the other boy. Only it wasn't a boy. She was wearing gold lip paint and had sprayed her hair blue, but she knew how to handle a vibroblade at least as well as her boy friend had. Just as Mike the Angel turned, she lunged forward, aiming for the small of his back. And she, too, screamed as she lost her blade in a flash of heat. Then she grabbed for something in her pocket. Regretfully, Mike the Angel brought the edge of his hand down against the side of her neck in a paralyzing, but not deadly, rabbit punch. She dropped, senseless, and a small gun spilled out of the waist pocket of her zipsuit and skittered across the floor. Mike paused only long enough to make sure she was out, then he turned back to his first opponent. As he had anticipated, Harry MacDougal had taken charge. The kid was sprawled flat on the floor, and Old Harry was holding a shock gun in his hand. Mike the Angel took a deep breath. "Yer trousers are on fire," said Harry. Mike yelped as he felt the heat, and he began slapping at the smoldering spots where the molten metal from the vibroblades had hit his clothing. He wasn't afire; modern clothing doesn't flame up--but it can get pretty hot when you splash liquid copper on it. "Damn!" said Mike the Angel. "New suit, too." "You're a fast thinker, laddie," said Old Harry. "You don't need to flatter me, Harry," said Mike the Angel. "When an old teetotaler like you asks a man if he's brought some scotch, the man's a fool if he doesn't know there's trouble afoot." He gave his leg a final slap and said: "What happened? Are there any more of them?" "Don't know. Might be." The old man waved at his control panel. "My instruments are workin' again!" He gestured at the floor. "I'm nae sure how they did it, but somehow they managed to blank out ma instruments just long enough to get inside. Their mistake was in not lockin' the front door." Mike the Angel was busy searching the two unconscious kids. He looked up. "Neither of them is carrying any equipment in their clothing--at least, not anything that's self-powered. If they've got pickup circuits built into the cloth, there must be more of them outside." "Aye. Likely. We'll see." Suddenly, there was a soft _ping! ping! ping!_ from an instrument on the bench. Harry glanced quickly at the receiving screen that was connected with the multitude of eyes that were hidden around the area of his shop. Then a smile came over his small brown face. "Cops," he said. "Time they got here." 3 Sergeant Cowder looked the room over and took a drag from his cigarette. "Well, that's that. Now--what happened?" He looked from Mike the Angel to Harry MacDougal and back again. Both of them appeared to be thinking. "All right," he said quietly, "let me guess, then." Old Harry waved a hand. "Oh no, Sergeant; 'twon't be necessary. I think Mr. Gabriel was just waiting for me to start, because he wasn't here when the two rapscallions came in, and I was just tryin' to figure out where to begin. We're not bein' unco-operative. Let's see now--" He gazed at the ceiling as though trying to collect his thoughts. He knew perfectly well that the police sergeant was recording everything he said. The sergeant sighed. "Look, Harry, you're not on trial. I know perfectly well that you've got this place bugged to a fare-thee-well. So does every shop operator on Radio Row. If you didn't, the JD gangs would have cleaned you all out long ago." Harry kept looking at the ceiling, and Mike the Angel smiled quietly at his fingernails. The detective sergeant sighed again. "Sure, we'd like to have some of the gadgets that you and the other operators on the Row have worked out, Harry. But I'm in no position to take 'em away from you. Besides, we have some stuff that you'd like to have, too, so that makes us pretty much even. If we started confiscating illegal equipment from you, the JD's would swoop in here, take your legitimate equipment, bug it up, and they'd be driving us all nuts within a week. So long as you don't use illegal equipment illegally, the department will leave you alone." Old Harry grinned. "Well, now, that's very nice of you, Sergeant. But I don't have anything illegal--no robotics stuff or anything like that. Oh, I'll admit I've a couple of eyes here and there to watch my shop, but eyes aren't illegal." The detective glanced around the room with a practiced eye and then looked blandly back at the little Scotsman. Harry MacDougal was lying, and the sergeant knew it. And Harry knew the sergeant knew it. Sergeant Cowder sighed for a third time and looked at the Scot. "Okay. So what happened?" Harry's face became serious. "They came in about six-thirty. First I knew of it, one of the kids--the boy--stepped out of that closet over there and put a vibroblade at my back. I'd come back here to get a small resistor, and all of a sudden there he was." Mike the Angel frowned, but he didn't say anything. "None of your equipment registered anything?" asked the detective. "Not a thing, Sergeant," said Harry. "They've got something new, all right. The kid must ha' come in through the back door, there. And I'd ha' been willin' to bet ma life that no human bein' could ha' walked in here without ma knowin' it before he got within ten feet o' that door. Look." He got up, walked over to the back door, and opened it. It opened into what looked at first to be a totally dark room. Then the sergeant saw that there was a dead-black wall a few feet from the open door. "That's a light trap," said Harry. "Same as they have in photographic darkrooms. To get from this door to the outer door that leads into the alley, you got to turn two corners and walk about thirty feet. Even I, masel', couldn't walk through it without settin' off half a dozen alarms. Any kind of light would set off the bugs; so would the heat radiation from the human body." "How about the front?" Sergeant Cowder asked. "Anyone could get in from the front." Harry's grin became grim. "Not unless I go with 'em. And not even then if I don't want 'em to." "It was kind of you to let us in," said the detective mildly. "A pleasure," said Harry. "But I wish I knew how that kid got in." "Well, he did--somehow," Cowder said. "What happened after he came out of the closet?" "He made me let the girl in. They were goin' to open up the rear completely and take my stuff out that way. They'd ha' done it, too, if Mr. Gabriel hadn't come along." Detective Sergeant Cowder looked at Mike the Angel. "About what time was that, Mr. Gabriel?" "About six thirty-five," Mike told him. "The kids probably hadn't been here more than a few minutes." Harry MacDougal nodded in silent corroboration. "Then what happened?" asked the detective. Mike told him a carefully edited version of what had occurred, leaving out the existence of the little gadget he was carrying in his pocket. The sergeant listened patiently and unbelievingly through the whole recital. Mike the Angel grinned to himself; he knew what part of the story seemed queer to the cop. He was right. Cowder said: "Now, wait a minute. What caused those vibroblades to burn up that way?" "Must have been faulty," Mike the Angel said innocently. "Both of them?" Sergeant Cowder asked skeptically. "At the same time?" "Oh no. Thirty seconds apart, I'd guess." "Very interesting. Very." He started to say something else, but a uniformed officer stuck his head in through the doorway that led to the front of the shop. "We combed the whole area, Sergeant. Not a soul around. But from the looks of the alley, there must have been a small truck parked in there not too long ago." Cowder nodded. "Makes sense. Those JD's wouldn't have tried this unless they intended to take everything they could put their hands on, and they certainly couldn't have put all this in their pockets." He rubbed one big finger over the tip of his nose. "Okay, Barton, that's all. Take those two kids to the hospital and book 'em in the detention ward. I want to talk to them when they wake up." The cop nodded and left. Sergeant Cowder looked back at Harry. "Your alarm to the precinct station went off at six thirty-six. I figure that whoever was on the outside, in that truck, knew something had gone wrong as soon as the fight started in here. He--or they--shut off whatever they were using to suppress the alarm system and took off before we got here. They sure must have moved fast." "Must have," agreed Harry. "Is there anything else, Sergeant?" Cowder shook his head. "Not right now. I'll get in touch with you later, if I need you." Harry and Mike the Angel followed him through the front of the shop to the front door. At the door, Cowder turned. "Well, good night. Thanks for your assistance, Mr. Gabriel. I wish some of our cops had had your luck." "How so?" asked Mike the Angel. "If more vibroblades would blow up at opportune moments, we'd have fewer butchered policemen." Mike the Angel shook his head. "Not really. If their vibros started burning out every time they came near a cop, the JD's would just start using something else. You can't win in this game." Cowder nodded glumly. "It's a losing proposition any way you look at it.... Well, good night again." He stepped out, and Old Harry closed and locked the door behind him. Mike the Angel said: "Come on, Harry; I want to find something." He began walking back down the long, narrow shop toward the rear again. Harry followed, looking mystified. Mike the Angel stopped, sniffing. "Smell that?" Harry sniffed. "Aye. Burnt insulation. So?" "You know which one of these bins is nearest to your main control cable. Start looking. See if you find anything queer." Old Harry walked over to a nearby bin, pulled it open, and looked inside. He closed it, pulled open another. He found the gadget on the third try. It was a plastic case, six by six by eight, and it still smelled of hot insulation, although the case itself was barely warm. "What is it?" Harry asked in wonder. "It's the gizmo that turned your equipment off. When I passed by it, my own gadget must have blown it. I knew the police couldn't have made it here between the time of the fight and the time they showed up. They must have had at least an extra minute. Besides, I didn't think anyone could build an instrument that would blank out everything at long range. It had to be something near your main cable. I think you'll find a metallic oscillator in there. Analyze it. Might be useful." Harry turned the box over in his hands. "Probably has a timer in it to start it.... Well.... That helps." "What do you mean?" "I've got a pretty good idea who put it here. Older kid. Nineteen--maybe twenty. Seemed like a nice lad, too. Didn't take him for a JD. Can't trust anyone these days. Thanks, Mike. If I find anything new in here, I'll let you know." "Do that," said Mike the Angel. "And, as a personal favor, I'll show you how to build my own super-duper, extra-special, anti-vibroblade defense unit." Old Harry grinned, crinkling up his wizened face in a mass of fine wrinkles. "You'd better think up a shorter name than that for it, laddie; I could probably build one in less time than it takes you to say it." "Want to bet?" "I'll bet you twenty I can do it in twenty-four hours." "Twenty it is, Harry. I'll sell you mine this time tomorrow for twenty bucks." Harry shook his head. "I'll trade you mine for yours, plus twenty." Then his eyes twinkled. "And speaking of money, didn't you come down here to buy something?" Mike the Angel laughed. "You're not going to like it. I came down to get a dozen plastic-core resistors." "What size?" Mike told him, and Old Harry went over to the proper bin, pulled them out, all properly boxed, and handed them to him. "That'll be four dollars," he said. Mike the Angel paid up with a smile. "You don't happen to have a hundred-thousand-unit microcryotron stack, do you?" "Ain't s'posed to," said Harry MacDougal. "If I did, I wouldn't sell it to you. But, as a matter of cold fact, I do happen to have one. Use it for a paperweight. I'll give it to you for nothing, because it don't work, anyhow." "Maybe I can fix it," said Mike the Angel, "as long as you're giving it to me. How come it doesn't work?" "Just a second, laddie," said Harry. He scuttled to the rear of the shop and came back with a ready-wrapped package measuring five by five by four. He handed it to Mike the Angel and said: "It's a present. Thanks for helping me out of a tight spot." Mike said something deprecative of his own efforts and took the package. If it were in working order it would have been worth close to three hundred dollars--more than that on the black market. If it was broken, though, it was no good to Mike. A microcryotron unit is almost impossible to fix if it breaks down. But Mike took it because he didn't want to hurt Old Harry's feelings by refusing a present. "Thanks, Harry," he said. "Happen to know why it doesn't work?" Harry's face crinkled again in his all-over smile. "Sure, Mike. It ain't plugged in." 4 Mike the Angel did not believe in commuting. Being a bachelor, he could afford to indulge in that belief. In his suite of offices on 112th Street, there was one door marked "M. R. Gabriel." Behind that door was his private secretary's office, which acted as an effective barrier between himself and the various employees of the firm. Behind the secretary's office was his own office. There was still another door in his inner office, a plain, unmarked door that looked as though it might conceal a closet. It didn't. It was the door to a veddy, veddy expensive apartment with equally expensive appointments. One wall, thirty feet long and ten feet high, was a nearly invisible, dustproof slab of polished, optically flat glass that gave the observer the feeling that there was nothing between him and the city street, five hundred feet below. The lights of the city, coming through the wall, gave the room plenty of illumination after sunset, but the simple flick of a switch could polarize it black, allowing perfect privacy. The furniture was massive, heavily braced, and well upholstered. It had to be; Mike the Angel liked to flop into chairs, and his two hundred and sixty pounds gave chairs a lot of punishment. On one of the opaque walls was Dali's original "Eucharist," with its muffled, robed figures looking oddly luminous in the queer combination of city lights and interior illumination. Farther back, a Valois gleamed metallically above the shadowed bas-reliefs of its depths. It was the kind of apartment Mike the Angel liked. He could sleep, if necessary, on a park bench or in a trench, but he didn't see any reason for doing so if he could sleep on a five-hundred-dollar floater. As he had passed through each door, he had checked them carefully. His electrokey had a special circuit that lighted up a tiny glow lamp in the key handle if the lock had been tampered with. None of them had. He opened the final door, went into his apartment, and locked the door behind him, as he had locked the others. Then he turned on the lights, peeled off his raincoat, and plopped himself into a chair to unwrap the microcryotron stack he had picked up at Harry's. Theoretically, Harry wasn't supposed to sell the things. They were still difficult to make, and they were supposed to be used only by persons who were authorized to build robot brains, since that's what the stack was--a part of a robot brain. Mike could have put his hands on one legally, provided he'd wanted to wait for six or eight months to clear up the red tape. Actually, the big robotics companies didn't want amateurs fooling around with robots; they'd much rather build the robots themselves and rent them out. They couldn't make do-it-yourself projects impossible, but they could make them difficult. In a way, there was some good done. So far, the JD's hadn't gone into big-scale robotics. Self-controlled bombs could be rather nasty. Adult criminals, of course, already had them. But an adult criminal who had the money to invest in robotic components, or went to the trouble to steal them, had something more lucrative in mind than street fights or robbing barrooms. To crack a bank, for instance, took a cleverly constructed, well-designed robot and plenty of ingenuity on the part of the operator. Mike the Angel didn't want to make bombs or automatic bankrobbers; he just wanted to fiddle with the stack, see what it would do. He turned it over in his hands a couple of times, then shrugged, got up, went over to his closet, and put the thing away. There wasn't anything he could do with it until he'd bought a cryostat--a liquid helium refrigerator. A cryotron functions only at temperatures near absolute zero. The phone chimed. Mike went over to it, punched the switch, and said: "Gabriel speaking." No image formed on the screen. A voice said: "Sorry, wrong number." There was a slight click, and the phone went dead. Mike shrugged and punched the cutoff. Sounded like a woman. He vaguely wished he could have seen her face. Mike got up and walked back to his easy chair. He had no sooner sat down than the phone chimed again. Damn! Up again. Back to the phone. "Gabriel speaking." Again, no image formed. "Look, lady," Mike said, "why don't you look up the number you want instead of bothering me?" Suddenly there was an image. It was the face of an elderly man with a mild, reddish face, white hair, and a cold look in his pale blue eyes. It was Basil Wallingford, the Minister for Spatial Affairs. He said: "Mike, I wasn't aware that your position was such that you could afford to be rude to a Portfolio of the Earth Government." His voice was flat, without either anger or humor. "I'm not sure it is, myself," admitted Mike the Angel, "but I do the best I can with the tools I have to work with. I didn't know it was you, Wally. I just had some wrong-number trouble. Sorry." "Mf.... Well.... I called to tell you that the _Branchell_ is ready for your final inspection. Or will be, that is, in a week." "My final inspection?" Mike the Angel arched his heavy golden-blond eyebrows. "Hell, Wally, Serge Paulvitch is on the job down there, isn't he? You don't need _my_ okay. If Serge says it's ready to go, it's ready to go. Or is there some kind of trouble you haven't mentioned yet?" "No; no trouble," said Wallingford. "But the power plant on that ship was built according to your designs--not Mr. Paulvitch's. The Bureau of Space feels that you should give them the final check." Mike knew when to argue and when not to, and he knew that this was one time when it wouldn't do him the slightest good. "All right," he said resignedly. "I don't like Antarctica and never will, but I guess I can stand it for a few days." "Fine. One more thing. Do you have a copy of the thrust specifications for Cargo Hold One? Our copy got garbled in transmission, and there seems to be a discrepancy in the figures." Mike nodded. "Sure. They're in my office. Want me to get them now?" "Please. I'll hold on." Mike the Angel barely made it in time. He went to the door that led to his office, opened it, stepped through, and closed it behind him just as the blast went off. The door shuddered behind Mike, but it didn't give. Mike's apartment was reasonably soundproof, but it wasn't built to take the kind of explosion that would shake the door that Mike the Angel had just closed. It was a two-inch-thick slab of armor steel on heavy, precision-bearing hinges. So was every other door in the suite. It wasn't quite a bank-vault door, but it would do. Any explosion that could shake it was a real doozy. Mike the Angel spun around and looked at the door. It was just a trifle warped, and faint tendrils of vapor were curling around the edge where the seal had been broken. Mike sniffed, then turned and ran. He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a big roll of electrostatic tape. Then he took a deep breath, went back to the door, and slapped on a strip of the one-inch tape, running it all around the edge of the door. Then he went into the outer office while the air conditioners cleaned out his private office. He went over to one of the phones near the autofile and punched for the operator. "I had a long-distance call coming in here from the Right Excellent Basil Wallingford, Minister for Spatial Affairs, Capitol City. We were cut off." "One moment please." A slight pause. "His Excellency is here, Mr. Gabriel." Wallingford's face came back on the screen. It had lost some of its ruddiness. "What happened?" he asked. "You tell me, Wally," Mike snapped. "Did you see anything at all?" "All I saw was that big pane of glass break. It fell into a thousand pieces, and then something exploded and the phone went dead." "The glass broke first?" "That's right." Mike sighed. "Good. I was afraid that maybe someone had planted that bomb, rather than fired it in. I'd hate to think anyone could get into my place without my knowing it." "Who's gunning for you?" "I wish I knew. Look, Wally, can you wait until tomorrow for those specs? I want to get hold of the police." "Certainly. Nothing urgent. It can wait. I'll call you again tomorrow evening." The screen blanked. Mike glanced at the wall clock and then punched a number on the phone. A pretty girl in a blue uniform came on the screen. "Police Central," she said. "May I help you?" "I'd like to speak to Detective Sergeant William Cowder, please," Mike said. "Just tell him that Mr. Gabriel has more problems." She looked puzzled, but she nodded, and pretty soon her image blanked out. The screen stayed blank, but Sergeant Cowder's voice came over the speaker. "What is it, Mr. Gabriel?" He was evidently speaking from a pocket phone. "Attempted murder," said Mike the Angel. "A few minutes ago a bomb was set off in my apartment. I think it was a rocket, and I know it was heavily laced with hydrogen cyanide. That's Suite 5000, Timmins Building, up on 112th Street. I called you because I have a hunch it's connected with the incident at Harry's earlier this evening." "Timmins Building, eh? I'll be right up." Cowder cut off with a sharp click, and Mike the Angel looked quizzically at the dead screen. Was he imagining things, or was there a peculiar note in Cowder's voice? Two minutes later he got his answer. 5 Mike the Angel was sitting behind his desk in his private office when the announcer chimed. Mike narrowed his eyes and turned on his door screen, which connected with an eye in the outer door of the suite. Who could it be this time? It was Sergeant Cowder. "You got here fast," said Mike, thumbing the unlocker. "Come on back to my office." The sergeant came through the outer office while Mike watched him on the screen. Not until the officer finally pushed open the door to Mike's own office did Mike the Angel look up from the screen. "I repeat," said Mike, "you got here fast." "I wasn't far away," said Cowder. "Where's the damage?" Mike jerked a thumb toward the door to his apartment, still sealed with tape. "In there." "Have you been back in there yet?" "Nope," said Mike. "I didn't want to disturb anything. I figured maybe your lab boys could tell where the rocket came from." "What happened?" the cop asked. Mike told him, omitting nothing except the details of his conversation with Wallingford. "The way I see it," he finished, "whoever it was phoned me to make sure I was in the room and then went out and fired a rocket at my window." "What makes you think it was a JD?" Cowder asked. "Well, Sergeant, if I were going to do the job, I'd put my launcher in some place where I could see that my victim was inside, without having to call him. But if I couldn't do that, I'd aim the launcher and set it to fire by remote control. Then I'd go to the phone, call him, and fire the rocket while he was on the phone. I'd be sure of getting him that way. The way it was done smacks of a kid's trick." Cowder looked at the door. "Think we can go in there now? The HCN ought to have cleared out by now." Mike stood up from behind his desk. "I imagine it's pretty clear. I checked the air conditioners; they're still working, and the filters are efficient enough to take care of an awful lot of hydrogen cyanide. Besides, the window is open. But--shouldn't we wait for the lab men?" Cowder shook his head. "Not necessary. They'll be up in a few minutes, but they'll probably just confirm what we already know. Peel that tape off, will you?" Mike took his ionizer from the top of the desk, walked over to the door, and began running it over the tape. It fell off and slithered to the floor. As he worked, he said: "You think you know where the rocket was fired from?" "Almost positive," said Cowder. "We got a call a few minutes back from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine." The last of the tape fell off, and Mike opened the door. It didn't work easily, but it did open. The odor of bitter almonds was so faint that it might actually have been imagination. Cowder pointed out the shattered window at the gray spire of the cathedral. "There's your launching site. We don't know how they got up there, but they managed." "They?" "Two of them. When they tried to leave, a couple of priests and two officers of the Cathedral Police spotted them. The kids dropped their launcher and two unfired rockets, and then tried to run for it. Result: one dead kid, one getaway. One of the cops got a bad gash on his arm from a vibroblade, and one of the priests got it in the abdomen. He'll live, but he's in bad shape." Mike said something under his breath that might have been an oath, except that it avoided all mention of the Deity. Then he added that Name, in a different tone of voice. "I agree," said Cowder. "You think you know why they did it?" Mike looked around at his apartment. At first glance it appeared to be a total loss, but closer inspection showed that most of the damage had been restricted to glass and ceramics. The furniture had been tumbled around but not badly damaged. The war head of the rocket had evidently been of the concussion-and-gas type, without much fragmentation. "I think I know why, yes," Mike said, turning back to the sergeant. "I had a funny feeling all the way home from Harry's. Nothing I could lay my finger on, really. I tried to see if I was being followed, but I didn't spot anyone. There were plenty of kids on the subway. "It's my guess that the kids knew who I was. If they cased Harry's as thoroughly as it seems they did, they must have seen me go in and out several times. They knew that it was my fault that two of their members got picked up, so they decided to teach me a lesson. One of them must have come up here, even before I left Harry's. The other followed me, just to make sure I was really coming home. Since he knew where I was going, he didn't have to stick too close, so I didn't spot him in the crowd. He might even have gone on up to 116th Street so that I wouldn't see him get off at 110th." "Sounds reasonable," Cowder agreed. "We know who the kids are. The uniformed squads are rounding up the whole bunch for questioning. They call themselves--you'll get a laugh out of this!--they call themselves the Rocketeers." "I'm fracturing my funny bone," said Mike the Angel. "The thing that gets me is this revenge business, though. Kids don't usually go that far out for fellow gang members." "Not usually," the sergeant said, "but this is a little different. The girl you caught and the boy who got killed over at the cathedral are brother and sister." "That explains it," Mike said. "Rough family, eh?" Sergeant Cowder shook his head. "Not really. The parents are respectable and fairly well off. Larchmont's the name. The kids are Susan and Herbert--Sue and Bert to you. Bert's sixteen, Sue's seventeen. They were pretty thick, I gather: real brother and sister team." "Good family, bad kids," Mike muttered. He had wandered over to the wall to look at his Dali. It had fallen to the floor, but it wasn't hurt. The Valois was bent, but it could be fixed up easily enough. "I wonder," Mike said, picking up the head of a smashed figurine and looking at it. "I wonder if the so-called sociologists have any explanation for it?" "Sure," Cowder said. "Same one they've been giving for more decades than I'd care to think of. The mother was married before. Divorced her husband, married Larchmont. But she had a boy by her first husband." "Broken home and sibling rivalry? _Pfui!_ And if it wasn't that, the sociologists would find another excuse," Mike said angrily. "Funny thing is that the older half brother was a perfectly respectable kid. Made good grades in school, joined the Space Service, has a perfectly clean record. And yet _he_ was the product of the broken home, not the two younger kids." Mike laughed dryly. "_That_ ought to be food for high sociological thought." The door announcer chimed again, and Cowder said: "That's probably the lab boys. I told them to come over here as soon as they could finish up at the cathedral." Mike checked his screen and when Cowder identified the men at the door, Mike let them in. The short, chubby man in the lead, who was introduced as Perkins, spoke to Sergeant Cowder first. "We checked one of those rockets. Almost a professional job. TNT war head, surrounded by a jacket filled with liquid HCN and a phosphate inhibitor to prevent polymerization. Nasty things." He swung round to Mike. "You're lucky you weren't in the room, or you'd just be part of the wreckage, Mr. Gabriel." "I know," said Mike the Angel. "Well, the room's all yours. It probably won't tell you much." "Probably not," said Perkins, "but we'll see. Come on, boys." Mike the Angel tapped Cowder on the shoulder. "I'd like to talk to you for a minute." Cowder nodded, and Mike led the way back into his private office. He opened his desk drawer and took out the little pack that housed the workings of the vibroblade shield. "That accident you were talking about, Sergeant--the one that made those vibroblades blow, remember? I got to thinking that maybe this could have caused it. I think that with a little more power, it might even vaporize a high-speed bullet. But I'd advise you to wear asbestos clothing." Cowder took the thing and looked at it. "Thanks, Mr. Gabriel," he said honestly. "Maybe the kids will go on to using something else if vibroblades don't work, but I think I'd prefer a rocket in the head to being carved by a vibro." "To be honest," Mike said, "I think the vibro is just a fad among the JD's now, anyway. You know--if you're one of the real biggies, you carry a vibro. A year from now, it might be shock guns, but right now you're chicken if you carry anything but a vibroblade." Cowder dropped the shield generator into his coat pocket. "Thanks again, Mr. Gabriel. We'll do you a favor sometime." 6 The firm of M. R. GABRIEL, POWER DESIGN was not a giant corporation, but it did pretty well for a one-man show. The outer office was a gantlet that Mike the Angel had to run when he came in the next morning after having spent the night at a hotel. There was a mixed and ragged chorus of "Good morning, Mr. Gabriel" as he passed through. Mike gave the nod to each of them and was stopped four times for small details before he finally made his way to his own office. His secretary was waiting for him. She was short, bony, and plain of face. She had a figure like an ironing board and the soul of a Ramsden calculator. Mike the Angel liked her that way; it avoided complications. "Good morning, Mr. Gabriel," she said. "What the hell happened here?" She waved at the warped door and the ribbons of electrostatic tape that still lay in curls on the floor. Mike told her, and she listened to his recitation without any change of expression. "I'm very glad you weren't hurt," she said when he had finished. "What are you going to do about the apartment?" Mike opened the heavy door and looked at the wreckage inside. Through the gaping hole of the shattered window, he could see the towering spires of the two-hundred-year-old Cathedral of St. John the Divine. "Get Larry Beasley on the phone, Helen. I've forgotten his number, but you'll find him listed under 'Interior Decorators.' He has the original plans and designs on file. Tell him to get them out; I want this place fixed up just like it was." "But what if someone else...." She gestured toward the broken window and the cathedral spires beyond. "When you're through talking to Beasley," Mike went on, "see if you can get Bishop Brennan on the phone and switch him to my desk." "Yes, sir," she said. Within two hours workmen were busily cleaning up the wreckage in Mike the Angel's apartment, and the round, plump figure of Larry Beasley was walking around pompously while his artistic but businesslike brain made estimates. Mike had also reached an agreement with the bishop whereby special vaultlike doors would be fitted into the stairwells leading up to the towers at Mike's expense. They were to have facings of bronze so that they could be decorated to blend with the Gothic decor of the church, but the bronze would be backed by heavy steel. Nobody would blow _those_ down in a hurry. Since the wrecked living room was a flurry of activity and his office had become a thoroughfare, Mike the Angel retired to his bedroom to think. He took with him the microcryotron stack he had picked up at Old Harry's the night before. "For something that doesn't look like much," he said aloud to the stack, "you have caused me a hell of a lot of trouble." Old Harry, he knew, wouldn't be caught dead selling the things. In the first place, it was strictly illegal to deal in the components of robotic brains. In the second place, they were so difficult to get, even on the black market, that the few that came into Old Harry's hands went into the defenses of his own shop. Mike the Angel had only wanted to borrow one to take a good look at it. He had read up on all the literature about microcryotrons, but he'd never actually seen one before. He had reason to be curious about microcryotrons. There was something definitely screwy going on in Antarctica. Nearly two years before, the UN Government, in the person of Minister Wallingford himself, had asked Mike's firm--which meant Mike the Angel himself--to design the power drive and the thrust converters for a spaceship. On the face of it, there was nothing at all unusual in that. Such jobs were routine for M. R. Gabriel. But when the specifications arrived, Mike the Angel had begun to wonder what the devil was going on. The spaceship _William Branchell_ was to be built on the surface of Earth--and yet it was to be a much larger ship than any that had ever before been built on the ground. Usually, an interstellar vessel that large was built in orbit around the Earth, where the designers didn't have to worry about gravitational pull. Such a ship never landed, any more than an ocean liner was ever beached--not on purpose, anyway. The passengers and cargo were taken up by smaller vessels and brought down the same way when the liner arrived at her destination. Aside from the tremendous energy required to lift such a vessel free of a planet's surface, there was also the magnetic field of the planet to consider. The drive tubes tended to wander and become erratic if they were forced to cut through the magnetic field of a planet. Therefore, Question One: Why wasn't the _Branchell_ being built in space? Part of the answer, Mike knew, lay in the specifications for the construction of Cargo Hold One. For one thing, it was huge. For another, it was heavily insulated. For a third, it was built like a tank for holding liquids. All very well and good; possibly someone wanted to carry a cargo of cold lemonade or iced tea. That would be pretty stupid, maybe, but it wouldn't be mysterious. The mystery lay in the fact that Cargo Hold One had _already been built_. The _Branchell_ was to be built _around_ it! And that didn't exactly jibe with Mike the Angel's ideas of the proper way to build a spaceship. It was not quite the same as building a seagoing vessel around an oil tank in the middle of Texas, but it was close enough to bother Mike the Angel. Therefore, Question Two: Why was the _Branchell_ being built around Cargo Hold One? Which led to Question Three: What was _in_ Cargo Hold One? For the answer to that question, he had one very good hint. The density of the contents of Cargo Hold One was listed in the specs as being one-point-seven-two-six grams per cubic centimeter. And that, Mike happened to know, was the density of a cryotronic brain, which is 90 per cent liquid helium and 10 per cent tantalum and niobium, by volume. He looked at the microcryotron stack in his hand. It was a one-hundred-kilounit stack. The possible connections within it were factorial one hundred thousand. All it needed was to be immersed in its bath of liquid helium to make the metals superconducting, and it would be ready to go to work. A friend of his who worked for Computer Corporation of Earth had built a robot once, using just such a stack. The robot was designed to play poker. He had fed in all the rules of play and added all the data from Oesterveldt's _On Poker_. It took Mike the Angel exactly one hour to figure out how to beat it. As long as Mike played rationally, the machine had a slight edge, since it had a perfect memory and could compute faster than Mike could. But it would not, could not learn how to bluff. As soon as Mike started bluffing, the robot went into a tizzy. It wouldn't have been so bad if the robot had known nothing whatever about bluffing. That would have made it easy for Mike. All he'd have had to do was keep on feeding in chips until the robot folded. But the robot _did_ know about bluffing. The trouble is that bluffing is essentially illogical, and the robot had no rules whatsoever to go by to judge whether Mike was bluffing or not. It finally decided to make its decisions by chance, judging by Mike's past performance at bluffing. When it did, Mike quit bluffing and cleaned it out fast. That caused such utter confusion in the random circuits that Mike's friend had had to spend a week cleaning up the robot's little mind. But what would be the purpose of building a brain as gigantic as the one in Cargo Hold One? And why build a spaceship around it? Like a pig roasting on an automatic spit, the problem kept turning over and over in Mike's mind. And, like the roasting pig, the time eventually came when it was done. Once it is set in operation, a properly operating robot brain can neither be shut off nor dismantled. Not, that is, unless you want to lose all of the data and processes you've fed into it. Now, suppose the Computer Corporation of Earth had built a giant-sized brain. (Never mind _why_--just suppose.) And suppose they wanted to take it off Earth, but didn't want to lose all the data that had been pumped into it. (Again, never mind _why_--just suppose.) Very well, then. _If_ such a brain had been built, and _if_ it was necessary to take it off Earth, and _if_ the data in it was so precious that the brain could not be shut off or dismantled, _then_ the thing to do would be to build a ship around it. Oh _yeah_? Mike the Angel stared at the microcryotron stack and asked: "Now, tell me, pal, just why would anyone want a brain that big? And what is so blasted important about it?" The stack said not a word. The phone chimed. Mike the Angel thumbed the switch, and his secretary's face appeared on the screen. "Minister Wallingford is on the line, Mr. Gabriel." "Put him on," said Mike the Angel. Basil Wallingford's ruddy face came on. "I see you're still alive," he said. "What in the bloody blazes happened last night?" Mike sighed and told him. "In other words," he ended up, "just the usual sort of JD stuff we have to put up with these days. Nothing new, and nothing to worry about." "You almost got killed," Wallingford pointed out. "A miss is as good as a mile," Mike said with cheerful inanity. "Thanks to your phone call, I was as safe as if I'd been in my own home," he added with utter illogic. "You can afford to laugh," Wallingford said grimly. "I can't. I've already lost one man." Mike's grin vanished. "What do you mean? Who?" "Oh, nobody's killed," Wallingford said quickly. "I didn't mean that. But Jack Wong turned his car over yesterday at a hundred and seventy miles an hour, and he's laid up with a fractured leg and a badly dislocated arm." "Too bad," said Mike. "One of these days that fool will kill himself racing." He knew Wong and liked him. They had served together in the Space Service when Mike was on active duty. "I hope not," Wallingford said. "Anyway--the matter I called you on last night. Can you get those specs for me?" "Sure, Wally. Hold on." He punched the hold button and rang for his secretary as Wallingford's face vanished. When the girl's face came on, he said: "Helen, get me the cargo specs on the _William Branchell_--Section Twelve, pages 66 to 74." The discussion, after Helen had brought the papers, lasted less than five minutes. It was merely a matter of straightening out some cost estimates--but since it had to do with the _Branchell_, and specifically with Hold Number One, Mike decided he'd ask a question. "Wally, tell me--what in the hell is going on down there at Chilblains Base?" "They're building a spaceship," said Wallingford in a flat voice. It was Wallingford's way of saying he wasn't going to answer any questions, but Mike the Angel ignored the hint. "I'd sort of gathered that," he said dryly. "But what I want to know is: Why is it being built around a cryotronic brain, the like of which I have never heard before?" Basil Wallingford's eyes widened, and he just stared for a full two seconds. "And just how did you come across that information, Golden Wings?" he finally asked. "It's right here in the specs," said Mike the Angel, tapping the sheaf of papers. "Ridiculous." Wallingford's voice seemed toneless. Mike decided he was in too deep now to back out. "It certainly is, Wally. It couldn't be hidden. To compute the thrust stresses, I had to know the density of the contents of Cargo Hold One. And here it is: 1.726 gm/cm³. Nothing else that I know of has that exact density." Wallingford pursed his lips. "Dear me," he said after a moment. "I keep forgetting you're too bright for your own good." Then a slow smile spread over his face. "Would you _really_ like to know?" "I wouldn't have asked otherwise," Mike said. "Fine. Because you're just the man we need." Mike the Angel could almost feel the knife blade sliding between his ribs, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that the person who had stabbed him in the back was himself. "What's that supposed to mean, Wally?" "You are, I believe, an officer in the Space Service Reserve," said Basil Wallingford in a smooth, too oily voice. "Since the Engineering Officer of the _Branchell_, Jack Wong, is laid up in a hospital, I'm going to call you to active duty to replace him." Mike the Angel felt that ghostly knife twist--hard. "That's silly," he said. "I haven't been a ship's officer for five years." "You're the man who designed the power plant," Wallingford said sweetly. "If you don't know how to run her, nobody does." "My time per hour is worth a great deal," Mike pointed out. "The rate of pay for a Space Service officer," Basil Wallingford said pleasantly, "is fixed by law." "I can fight being called back to duty--and I'll win," said Mike. He didn't know how long he could play this game, but it was fun. "True," said Wallingford. "You can. I admit it. But you've been wondering what the hell that ship is being built for. You'd give your left arm to find out. I know you, Golden Wings, and I know how that mind of yours works. And I tell you this: Unless you take this job, you'll _never_ find out why the _Branchell_ was built." He leaned forward, and his face loomed large in the screen. "And I mean absolutely _never_." For several seconds Mike the Angel said nothing. His classically handsome face was like that of some Grecian god contemplating the Universe, or an archangel contemplating Eternity. Then he gave Basil Wallingford the benefit of his full, radiant smile. "I capitulate," he said. Wallingford refused to look impressed. "Damn right you do," he said--and cut the circuit. 7 Two days later Mike the Angel was sitting at his desk making certain that M. R. GABRIEL, POWER DESIGN would function smoothly while he was gone. Serge Paulvitch, his chief designer, could handle almost everything. Paulvitch had once said, "Mike, the hell of working for a first-class genius is that a second-class genius doesn't have a chance." "You could start your own firm," Mike had said levelly. "I'll back you, Serge; you know that." Serge Paulvitch had looked astonished. "Me? You think I'm crazy? Right now, I'm a second-class genius working for a first-class outfit. You think I want to be a second-class genius working for a second-class outfit? Not on your life!" Paulvitch could easily handle the firm for a few weeks. Helen's face came on the phone. "There's a Captain Sir Henry Quill on the phone, Mr. Gabriel. Do you wish to speak to him?" "Black Bart?" said Mike. "I wonder what he wants." "Bart?" She looked puzzled. "He said his name was Henry." Mike grinned. "He always signs his name: _Captain Sir Henry Quill, Bart._ And since he's the toughest old martinet this side of the Pleiades, the 'Black' part just comes naturally. I served under him seven years ago. Put him on." In half a second the grim face of Captain Quill was on the screen. He was as bald as an egg. What little hair he did have left was meticulously shaved off every morning. He more than made up for his lack of cranial growth, however, by his great, shaggy, bristly brows, black as jet and firmly anchored to jutting supraorbital ridges. Any other man would have been proud to wear them as mustaches. "What can I do for you, Captain?" Mike asked, using the proper tone of voice prescribed for the genial businessman. "You can go out and buy yourself a new uniform," Quill growled. "Your old one isn't regulation any more." Well, not exactly growled. If he'd had the voice for it, it would have been a growl, but the closest he could come to a growl was an Irish tenor rumble with undertones of gravel. He stood five-eight, and his red and gold Space Service uniform gleamed with spit-and-polish luster. With his cap off, his bald head looked as though it, too, had been polished. Mike looked at him thoughtfully. "I see. So you're commanding the mystery tub, eh?" he said at last. "That's right," said the captain. "And don't go asking me a bunch of blasted questions. I've got no more idea of what the bloody thing's about than you--maybe not as much. I understand you designed her power plant...?" He let it hang. If not exactly a leading question, it was certainly a hinting statement. Mike shook his head. "I don't know anything, Captain. Honestly I don't." If Space Service regulations had allowed it, Captain Sir Henry Quill, Bart., would have worn a walrus mustache. And if he'd had such a mustache, he would have whuffled it then. As it was, he just blew out air, and nothing whuffled. "You and I are the only ones in the dark, then," he said. "The rest of the crew is being picked from Chilblains Base. Pete Jeffers is First Officer, in case you're wondering." "Oh, great," Mike the Angel said with a moan. "That means we'll be going in cold on an untried ship." Like Birnam Wood advancing on Dunsinane, Quill's eyebrows moved upward. "Don't you trust your own designing?" "As much as you do," said Mike the Angel. "Probably more." Quill nodded. "We'll have to make the best of it. We'll muddle through somehow. Are you all ready to go?" "No," Mike admitted, "but I don't see that I can do a damn thing about that." "Nor do I," said Captain Quill. "Be at Chilblains Base in twenty-four hours. Arrangements will be made at the Long Island Base for your transportation to Antarctica. And"--he paused and his scowl became deeper--"you'd best get used to calling me 'sir' again." "Yessir, Sir Henry, sir." "_Thank_ you, Mister Gabriel," snapped Quill, cutting the circuit. "Selah," said Mike the Angel. * * * * * Chilblains Base, Antarctica, was directly over the South Magnetic Pole--at least, as closely as that often elusive spot could be pinpointed for any length of time. It is cheaper in the long run if an interstellar vessel moves parallel with, not perpendicular to, the magnetic "lines of force" of a planet's gravitational field. Taking off "across the grain" _can_ be done, but the power consumption is much greater. Taking off "with the grain" is expensive enough. An ion rocket doesn't much care where it lifts or sets down, since its method of propulsion isn't trying to work against the fabric of space itself. For that reason, an interstellar vessel is normally built in space and stays there, using ion rockets for loading and unloading its passengers. It's cheaper by far. The Computer Corporation of Earth had also been thinking of expenses when it built its Number One Research Station near Chilblains Base, although the corporation was not aware at the time just how much money it was eventually going to save them. The original reason had simply been lower power costs. A cryotron unit has to be immersed at all times in a bath of liquid helium at a temperature of four-point-two degrees absolute. It is obviously much easier--and much cheaper--to keep several thousand gallons of helium at that temperature if the surrounding temperature is at two hundred thirty-three absolute than if it is up around two hundred ninety or three hundred. That may not seem like much percentagewise, but it comes out to a substantial saving in the long run. But, power consumption or no, when C.C. of E. found that Snookums either had to be moved or destroyed, it was mightily pleased that it had built Prime Station near Chilblains Base. Since a great deal of expense also, of necessity, devolved upon Earth Government, the government was, to say it modestly, equally pleased. There was enough expense as it was. The scenery at Chilblains Base--so named by a wiseacre American navy man back in the twentieth century--was nothing to brag about. Thousands of square miles of powdered ice that has had nothing to do but blow around for twenty million years is not at all inspiring after the first few minutes unless one is obsessed by the morbid beauty of cold death. Mike the Angel was not so obsessed. To him, the area surrounding Chilblains Base was just so much white hell, and his analysis was perfectly correct. Mike wished that it had been January, midsummer in the Antarctic, so there would have been at least a little dim sunshine. Mike the Angel did not particularly relish having to visit the South Pole in midwinter. The rocket that had lifted Mike the Angel from Long Island Base settled itself into the snow-covered landing stage of Chilblains Base, dissipating the crystalline whiteness into steam as it did so. The steam, blown away by the chill winds, moved all of thirty yards before it became ice again. Mike the Angel was not in the best of moods. Having to dump all of his business into Serge Paulvitch's hands on twenty-four hours' notice was irritating. He knew Paulvitch could handle the job, but it wasn't fair to him to make him take over so suddenly. In addition, Mike did not like the way the whole _Branchell_ business was being handled. It seemed slipshod and hurried, and, worse, it was entirely too mysterious and melodramatic. "Of all the times to have to come to Antarctica," he grumped as the door of the rocket opened, "why did I have to get July?" The pilot, a young man in his early twenties, said smugly: "July is bad, but January isn't good--just not so worse." Mike the Angel glowered. "Sonny, I was a cadet here when you were learning arithmetic. It hasn't changed since, summer or winter." "Sorry, sir," said the pilot stiffly. "So am I," said Mike the Angel cryptically. "Thanks for the ride." He pushed open the outer door, pulled his electroparka closer around him, and stalked off across the walk, through the lashing of the sleety wind. He didn't have far to walk--a hundred yards or so--but it was a good thing that the walk was protected and well within the boundary of Chilblains Base instead of being out on the Wastelands. Here there were lights, and the Hotbed equipment of the walk warmed the swirling ice particles into a sleety rain. On the Wastelands, the utter blackness and the wind-driven snow would have swallowed him permanently within ten paces. He stepped across a curtain of hot air that blew up from a narrow slit in the deck and found himself in the main foyer of Chilblains Base. The entrance looked like the entrance to a theater--a big metal and plastic opening, like a huge room open on one side, with only that sheet of hot air to protect it from the storm raging outside. The lights and the small doors leading into the building added to the impression that this was a theater, not a military base. But the man who was standing near one of the doors was not by a long shot dressed as an usher. He wore a sergeant's stripes on his regulation Space Service parka, which muffled him to the nose, and he came over to Mike the Angel and said: "Commander Gabriel?" Mike the Angel nodded as he shook icy drops from his gloved hands, then fished in his belt pocket for his newly printed ID card. He handed it to the sergeant, who looked it over, peered at Mike's face, and saluted. As Mike returned the salute the sergeant said: "Okay, sir; you can go on in. The security office is past the double door, first corridor on your right." Mike the Angel tried his best not to look surprised. "_Security_ office? Is there a war on or something? What does Chilblains need with a security office?" The sergeant shrugged. "Don't ask me, Commander; I just slave away here. Maybe Lieutenant Nariaki knows something, but I sure don't." "Thanks, Sergeant." Mike the Angel went inside, through two insulated and tightly weather-stripped doors, one right after another, like the air lock on a spaceship. Once inside the warmth of the corridor, he unzipped his electroparka, shut off the power, and pushed back the hood with its fogproof faceplate. Down the hall, Mike could see an office marked _security officer_ in small letters without capitals. He walked toward it. There was another guard at the door who had to see Mike's ID card before Mike was allowed in. Lieutenant Tokugawa Nariaki was an average-sized, sleepy-looking individual with a balding crew cut and a morose expression. He looked up from his desk as Mike came in, and a hopeful smile tried to spread itself across his face. "If you are Commander Gabriel," he said softly, "watch yourself. I may suddenly kiss you out of sheer relief." "Restrain yourself, then," said Mike the Angel, "because I'm Gabriel." Nariaki's smile became genuine. "So! Good! The phone has been screaming at me every half hour for the past five hours. Captain Sir Henry Quill wants you." "He would," Mike said. "How do I get to him?" "You don't just yet," said Nariaki, raising a long, bony, tapering hand. "There are a few formalities which our guests have to go through." "Such as?" "Such as fingerprint and retinal patterns," said Lieutenant Nariaki. Mike cast his eyes to Heaven in silent appeal, then looked back at the lieutenant. "Lieutenant, _what_ is going on here? There hasn't been a security officer in the Space Service for thirty years or more. What am I suspected of? Spying for the corrupt and evil alien beings of Diomega Orionis IX?" Nariaki's oriental face became morose again. "For all I know, you are. Who knows what's going on around here?" He got up from behind his desk and led Mike the Angel over to the fingerprinting machine. "Put your hands in here, Commander ... that's it." He pushed a button, and, while the machine hummed, he said: "Mine is an antiquated position, I'll admit. I don't like it any more than you do. Next thing, they'll put me to work polishing chain-mail armor or make me commander of a company of musketeers. Or maybe they'll send me to the 18th Outer Mongolian Yak Artillery." Mike looked at him with narrowed eyes. "Lieutenant, do you actually mean that you really don't know what's going on here, or are you just dummying up?" Nariaki looked at Mike, and for the first time, his face took on the traditional blank, emotionless look of the "placid Orient." He paused for long seconds, then said: "Some of both, Commander. But don't let it worry you. I assure you that within the next hour you'll know more about Project Brainchild than I've been able to find out in two years.... Now put your face in here and keep your eyes open. When you can see the target spot, focus on it and tell me." Mike the Angel put his face in the rest for the retinal photos. The soft foam rubber adjusted around his face, and he was looking into blackness. He focused his eyes on the dim target circle and waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. The Security Officer's voice continued. "All I do is make sure that no unauthorized person comes into Chilblains Base. Other than that, I have nothing but personal guesses and little trickles of confusing information, neither of which am I at liberty to discuss." Mike's irises had dilated to the point that he could see the dim dot in the center of the target circle, glowing like a dimly visible star. "Shoot," he said. There was a dazzling glare of light. Mike pulled his face out of the padded opening and blinked away the colored after-images. Lieutenant Nariaki was comparing the fresh fingerprints with the set he had had on file. "Well," he said, "you have Commander Gabriel's hands, anyway. If you have his eyes, I'll have to concede that the rest of the body belongs to him, too." "How about my soul?" Mike asked dryly. "Not my province, Commander," Nariaki said as he pulled the retinal photos out of the machine. "Maybe one of the chaplains would know." "If this sort of thing is going on all over Chilblains," said Mike the Angel, "I imagine the Office of Chaplains is doing a booming business in TS cards." The lieutenant put the retinal photos in the comparator, took a good look, and nodded. "You're you," he said. "Give me your ID card." Mike handed it over, and Nariaki fed it through a printer which stamped a complex seal in the upper left-hand corner of the card. The lieutenant signed his name across the seal and handed the card back to Mike. "That's it," he said. "You can--" He was interrupted by the chiming of the phone. "Just a second, Commander," he said as he thumbed the phone switch. Mike was out of range of the TV pickup, and he couldn't see the face on the screen, but the voice was so easy to recognize that he didn't need to see the man. "Hasn't that triply bedamned rocket landed yet, Lieutenant? Where is Commander Gabriel?" Mike knew that Black Bart had already checked on the landing of the latest rocket; the question was rhetorical. Mike grinned. "Tell the old tyrant," he said firmly, "that I'll be along as soon as the Security Officer is through with me." Nariaki's expression didn't change. "You're through now, Commander, and--" "Tell that imitation Apollo to hop it over here fast!" said Quill sharply. "I'll give him a lesson in tyranny." There was a click as the intercom shut off. Nariaki looked at Mike the Angel and shook his head slowly. "Either you're working your way toward a court-martial or else you know where Black Bart has the body buried." "I should," said Mike cryptically. "I helped him bury it. How do I get to His Despotic Majesty's realm?" Nariaki considered. "It'll take you five or six minutes. Take the tubeway to Stage Twelve. Go up the stairway to the surface and take the first corridor to the left. That'll take you to the loading dock for that stage. It's an open foyer like the one at the landing field, so you'll have to put your parka back on. Go down the stairs on the other side, and you'll be in Area K. One of the guards will tell you where to go from there. Of course, you could go by tube, but it would take longer because of the by-pass." "Good enough. I'll take the short cut. See you. And thanks." 8 The underground tubeway shot Mike the Angel across five miles of track at high speed. Mike left the car at Stage Twelve and headed up the stairway and down the corridor to a heavy double door marked _freight loading_. He put on his parka and went through the door. The foyer was empty, and, like the one at the rocket landing, protected from the Antarctic blast only by a curtain of hot air. Outside that curtain, the light seemed to lose itself in the darkness of the bleak, snow-filled Wastelands. Mike ignored the snowscape and headed across the empty foyer to the door marked _entrance_. "With a small _e_," Mike muttered to himself. "I wonder if the sign painter ran out of full caps." He was five feet from the door when he heard the yell. "_Help!_" That was all. Just the one word. Mike the Angel came to a dead halt and spun around. The foyer was a large room, about fifty by fifty feet in area and nearly twenty feet high. And it was quite obviously empty. On the open side, the sheet of hissing hot air was doing its best to shield the room from the sixty-below-zero blizzard outside. Opposite the air curtain was a huge sliding door, closed at the moment, which probably led to a freight elevator. There were only two other doors leading from the foyer, and both of them were closed. And Mike knew that no voice could come through those insulated doors. "_Help!_" Mike the Angel swung toward the air curtain. This time there was no doubt. Someone was out in that howling ice-cloud, screaming for help! Mike saw the figure--dimly, fleetingly, obscured most of the time by the driving whiteness. Whoever it was looked as if he were buried to the waist in snow. Mike made a quick estimate. It was dark out there, but he could see the figure; therefore he would be able to see the foyer lights. He wouldn't get lost. Snapping down the faceplate of his parka hood, he ran through the protective updraft of the air curtain and charged into the deadly chill of the Antarctic blizzard. In spite of the electroparka he was wearing, the going was difficult. The snow tended to plaster itself against his faceplate, and the wind kept trying to take him off his feet. He wiped a gloved hand across the faceplate. Ahead, he could still see the figure waving its arms. Mike slogged on. At sixty below, frozen H_{2}O isn't slushy, by any means; it isn't even slippery. It's more like fine sand than anything else. Mike the Angel figured he had about thirty feet to go, but after he'd taken eight steps, the arm-waving figure looked as far off as when he'd started. Mike stopped and flipped up his faceplate. It felt as though someone had thrown a handful of razor blades into his face. He winced and yelled, "What's the trouble?" Then he snapped the plate back into position. "I'm cold!" came the clear, contralto voice through the howling wind. A _woman_! thought Mike. "I'm coming!" he bellowed, pushing on. Ten more steps. He stopped again. He couldn't see anyone or anything. He flipped up his faceplate. "Hey!" No answer. "Hey!" he called again. And still there was no answer. Around Mike the Angel, there was nothing but the swirling, blinding snow, the screaming, tearing wind, and the blackness of the Antarctic night. There was something damned odd going on here. Carefully putting the toe of his right foot to the rear of the heel of his left, he executed a one-hundred-eighty-degree military about-face. And breathed a sigh of relief. He could still see the lights of the foyer. He had half suspected that someone was trying to trap him out here, and they might have turned off the lights. He swiveled his head around for one last look. He still couldn't see a sign of anyone. There was nothing he could do but head back and report the incident. He started slogging back through the gritty snow. He stepped through the hot-air curtain and flipped up his faceplate. "Why did you go out in the blizzard?" said a clear, contralto voice directly behind him. Mike swung around angrily. "Look, lady, I--" He stopped. The lady was no lady. A few feet away stood a machine. Vaguely humanoid in shape from the waist up, it was built more like a miniature military tank from the waist down. It had a pair of black sockets in its head, which Mike took to be TV cameras of some kind. It had grillwork on either side of its head, which probably covered microphones, and another grillwork where the mouth should be. There was no nose. "What the hell?" asked Mike the Angel of no one in particular. "I'm Snookums," said the robot. "Sure you are," said Mike the Angel, backing uneasily toward the door. "You're Snookums. I couldn't fail not to disagree with you less." Mike the Angel didn't particularly like being frightened, but he had never found it a disabling emotion, so he could put up with it if he had to. But, given his choice, he would have much preferred to be afraid of something a little less unpredictable, something he knew a little more about. Something comfortable, like, say, a Bengal tiger or a Kodiak bear. "But I really _am_ Snookums," reiterated the clear voice. Mike's brain was functioning in high gear with overdrive added and the accelerator floor-boarded. He'd been lured out onto the Wastelands by this machine--it most definitely could be dangerous. The robot was obviously a remote-control device. The arms and hands were of the waldo type used to handle radioactive materials in a hot lab--four jointed fingers and an opposed thumb, metal duplicates of the human hand. But who was on the other end? Who was driving the machine? Who was saying those inane things over the speaker that served the robot as a mouth? It was certainly a woman's voice. Mike was still moving backward, toward the door. The machine that called itself Snookums wasn't moving toward him, which was some consolation, but not much. The thing could obviously move faster on those treads than Mike could on his feet. Especially since Mike was moving backward. "Would you mind explaining what this is all about, miss?" asked Mike the Angel. He didn't expect an explanation; he was stalling for time. "I am not a 'miss,'" said the robot. "I am Snookums." "Whatever you are, then," said Mike, "would you mind explaining?" "No," said Snookums, "I wouldn't mind." Mike's fingers, groping behind him, touched the door handle. But before he could grasp it, it turned, and the door opened behind him. It hit him full in the back, and he stumbled forward a couple of steps before regaining his balance. A clear contralto voice said: "Oh! I'm _so_ sorry!" It was the same voice as the robot's! Mike the Angel swung around to face the second robot. This time it was a lady. "I'm sorry," she repeated. She was all wrapped up in an electroparka, but there was no mistaking the fact that she was both human and feminine. She came on through the door and looked at the robot. "Snookums! What are you doing here?" "I was trying an experiment, Leda," said Snookums. "This man was just asking me about it. I just wanted to see if he would come if I called 'help.' He did, and I want to know _why_ he did." The girl flashed a look at Mike. "Would you please tell Snookums why you went out there? Please--don't be angry or anything--just tell him." Mike was beginning to get the picture. "I went because I thought I heard a human being calling for help--and it sounded suspiciously like a woman." "Oh," said Snookums, sounding a little downhearted--if a robot can be said to have a heart. "The reaction was based, then, upon a misconception. That makes the data invalid. I'll have to try again." "That won't be necessary, Snookums," the girl said firmly. "This man went out there because he thought a human life was in danger. He would not have done it if he had known it was you, because he would have known that you were not in any danger. You can stand much lower temperatures than a human being can, you know." She turned to Mike. "Am I correct in saying that you wouldn't have gone out there if you'd known Snookums was a robot?" "Absolutely correct," said Mike the Angel fervently. She looked back at Snookums. "Don't try that experiment again. It is dangerous for a human to go out there, even with an electroparka. You might run the risk of endangering human life." "Oh dear!" said Snookums. "I'm sorry, Leda!" There was real anxiety in the voice. "That's all right, honey," the girl said hurriedly. "This man isn't hurt, so don't get upset. Come along now, and we'll go back to the lab. You shouldn't come out like this without permission." Mike had noticed that the girl had kept one hand on her belt all the time she was talking--and that her thumb was holding down a small button on a case attached to the belt. He had been wondering why, but he didn't have to wonder long. The door behind him opened again, and four men came out, obviously in a devil of a hurry. Each one of them was wearing a brassard labeled SECURITY POLICE. _At least_, thought Mike the Angel as he turned to look them over, _the brassards aren't in all lower-case italics_. One of them jerked a thumb at Mike. "This the guy, Miss Crannon?" The girl nodded. "That's him. He saw Snookums. Take care of him." She looked again at Mike. "I'm terribly sorry, really I am. But there's no help for it." Then, without another word, she opened the door and went back inside, and the robot rolled in after her. As the door closed behind her, the SP man nearest Mike, a tough-looking bozo wearing an ensign's insignia, said: "Let's see your identification." Mike realized that his own parka had no insignia of rank on it, but he didn't like the SP man's tone. "Come on!" snapped the ensign. "Who are you?" Mike the Angel pulled out his ID card and handed it to the security cop. "It tells right there who I am," he said. "That is, if you can read." The man glared and jerked the card out of Mike's hand, but when he saw the emblem that Lieutenant Nariaki had stamped on it, his eyes widened. He looked up at Mike. "I'm sorry, sir; I didn't mean--" "That tears it," interrupted Mike. "That absolutely tears it. In the past three minutes I have been apologized to by a woman, a robot, and a cop. The next thing, a penguin will walk in here, tip his top hat, and abase himself while he mutters obsequiously in penguinese. Just what the devil is going _on_ around this place?" The four SP men were trying hard not to fidget. "Just security precautions, sir," said the ensign uncomfortably. "Nobody but those connected with Project Brainchild are supposed to know about Snookums. If anyone else finds out, we're supposed to take them into protective custody." "I'll bet you're widely loved for that," said Mike. "I suppose the gadget at Miss What's-her-name's belt was an alarm to warn you of impending disaster?" "Miss Crannon.... Yes, sir. Everybody on the project carries those around. Also, Miss Crannon carries a detector for following Snookums around. She's sort of his keeper, you know." "No," said Mike the Angel, "I do not know. But I intend to find out. I'm looking for Captain Quill; where is he?" The four men looked at each other, then looked back at Mike. "I don't know, Commander," said the ensign. "I understand that several new men have come in today, but I don't know all of them. You'd better talk to Dr. Fitzhugh." "Such are the beauties of security," said Mike the Angel. "Where can I find this Dr. Fitzhugh?" The security man looked at his wrist watch. "He's down in the cafeteria now, sir. It's coffee time, and Doc Fitzhugh is as regular as a satellite orbit." "I'm glad you didn't say 'clockwork,'" Mike told him. "I've had enough dealings with machines today. Where is this coffee haven?" The ensign gave directions for reaching the cafeteria, and Mike pushed open the door marked _entrance_. He had to pass through another inner door guarded by another pair of SP men who checked his ID card again, then he had to ramble through hallways that went off at queer angles to each other, but he finally found the cafeteria. He nabbed the first passer-by and asked him to point out Dr. Fitzhugh. The passer-by was obliging; he indicated a smallish, elderly man who was sitting by himself at one of the tables. Mike made his way through the tray-carrying hordes that were milling about, and finally ended up at the table where the smallish man was sitting. "Dr. Fitzhugh?" Mike offered his hand. "I'm Commander Gabriel. Minister Wallingford appointed me Engineering Officer of the _Branchell_." Dr. Fitzhugh shook Mike's hand with apparent pleasure. "Oh yes. Sit down, Commander. What can I do for you?" Mike had already peeled off his electroparka. He hung it over the back of a chair and said: "Mind if I grab a cup of coffee, Doctor? I've just come from topside, and I think the cold has made its way clean to my bones." He paused. "Would you like another cup?" Dr. Fitzhugh looked at his watch. "I have time for one more, thanks." By the time Mike had returned with the cups, he had recalled where he had heard the name Fitzhugh before. "It just occurred to me," he said as he sat down. "You must be Dr. _Morris_ Fitzhugh." Fitzhugh nodded. "That's right." He wore a perpetually worried look, which made his face look more wrinkled than his fifty years of age would normally have accounted for. Mike was privately of the opinion that if Fitzhugh ever really _tried_ to look worried, his ears would meet over the bridge of his long nose. "I've read a couple of your articles in the _Journal_," Mike explained, "but I didn't connect the name until I saw you. I recognized you from your picture." Fitzhugh smiled, which merely served to wrinkle his face even more. Mike the Angel spent the next several minutes feeling the man out, then he went on to explain what had happened with Snookums out in the foyer, which launched Dr. Fitzhugh into an explanation. "He didn't want help, of course; he was merely conducting an experiment. There are many areas of knowledge in which he is as naïve as a child." Mike nodded. "It figures. At first I thought he was just a remote-control tool, but I finally saw that he was a real, honest-to-goodness robot. Who gave him the idea to make such an experiment as that?" "No one at all," said Dr. Fitzhugh. "He's built to make up his own experiments." Mike the Angel's classic face regarded the wrinkled one of Dr. Fitzhugh. "His own experiments? But a robot--" Fitzhugh held up a bony hand, gesturing for attention and silence. He got it from Mike. "Snookums," he said, "is no ordinary robot, Commander." Mike waited for more. When none came, he said: "So I gather." He sipped at his black coffee. "That machine I saw is actually a remote-control tool, isn't it? Snookums' actual brain is in Cargo Hold One of the _William Branchell_." "That's right." Dr. Fitzhugh began reaching into various pockets about his person. He extracted a tobacco pouch, a briar pipe, and a jet-flame lighter. Then he began speaking as he went through the pipe smoker's ritual of filling, tamping, and lighting. "Snookums," he began, "is a self-activating, problem-seeking computer with input and output sensory and action mechanisms analogous to those of a human being." He pushed more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with a bony forefinger. "He's as close to being a living creature as anything Man has yet devised." "What about the synthecells they're making at Boston Med?" Mike asked, looking innocent. Fitzhugh's contour-map face wrinkled up even more. "I should have said 'living _intelligence_,'" he corrected himself. "He's a true robot, in the old original sense of the word; an artificial entity that displays almost every function of a living, intelligent creature. And, at the same time, he has the accuracy and speed that is normal to a cryotron computer." Mike the Angel said nothing while Fitzhugh fired up his lighter and directed the jet of flame into the bowl and puffed up great clouds of smoke which obscured his face. While the roboticist puffed, Mike let his gaze wander idly over the other people in the cafeteria. He was wondering how much longer he could talk to Fitzhugh before Captain Quill began-- And then he saw the redhead. There is never much point in describing a really beautiful girl. Each man has his own ideas of what it takes for a girl to be "pretty" or "fascinating" or "lovely" or almost any other adjective that can be applied to the noun "girl." But "beautiful" is a cultural concept, at least as far as females are concerned, and there is no point in describing a cultural concept. It's one of those things that everybody knows, and descriptions merely become repetitious and monotonous. This particular example filled, in every respect, the definition of "beautiful" according to the culture of the white Americo-European subclass of the human race as of anno Domini 2087. The elements and proportions and symmetry fit almost perfectly into the ideal mold. It is only necessary to fill in some of the minor details which are allowed to vary without distorting the ideal. She had red hair and blue eyes and was wearing a green zipsuit. And she was coming toward the table where Mike and Dr. Fitzhugh were sitting. "... such a tremendous number of elements," Dr. Fitzhugh was saying, "that it was possible--and necessary--to introduce a certain randomity within the circuit choices themselves-- Ah! Hello, Leda, my dear!" Mike and Fitzhugh rose from their seats. "Leda, this is Commander Gabriel, the Engineering Officer of the _Brainchild_," said Fitzhugh. "Commander, Miss Leda Crannon, our psychologist." Mike had been allowing his eyes to wander over the girl, inspecting her ankles, her hair, and all vital points of interest between. But when he heard the name "Crannon," his eyes snapped up to meet hers. He hadn't recognized the girl without her parka and wouldn't have known her name if the SP ensign hadn't mentioned it. Obviously, she didn't recognize Mike at all, but there was a troubled look in her blue eyes. She gave him a puzzled smile. "Haven't we met, Commander?" Mike grinned. "Hey! That's supposed to be _my_ line, isn't it?" She flashed him a warm smile, then her eyes widened ever so slightly. "Your voice! You're the man on the foyer! The one...." "... the one whom you called copper on," finished Mike agreeably. "But please don't apologize; you've more than made up for it." Her smile remained. She evidently liked what she saw. "How was I to know who you were?" "It might have been written on my pocket handkerchief," said Mike the Angel, "but Space Service officers don't carry pocket handkerchiefs." "What?" The puzzled look had returned. "Ne' mind," said Mike. "Sit down, won't you?" "Oh, I can't, thanks. I came to get Fitz; a meeting of the Research Board has been called, and afterward we have to give a lecture or something to the officers of the _Brainchild_." "You mean the _Branchell_?" Her smile became an impish grin. "You call it what you want. To us, it's the _Brainchild_." Dr. Fitzhugh said: "Will you excuse us, Commander? We'll be seeing you at the briefing later." Mike nodded. "I'd better get on my way, too. I'll see you." But he stood there as Leda Crannon and Dr. Fitzhugh walked away. The girl looked just as divine retreating as she had advancing. 9 Captain Sir Henry (Black Bart) Quill was seated in an old-fashioned, formyl-covered, overstuffed chair, chewing angrily at the end of an unlighted cigar. His bald head gleamed like a pink billiard ball, almost matching the shining glory of his golden insignia against his scarlet tunic. Mike the Angel had finally found his way through the maze of underground passageways to the door marked _wardroom 9_ and had pushed it open gingerly, halfway hoping that he wouldn't be seen coming in late but not really believing it would happen. He was right. Black Bart was staring directly at the door when it slid open. Mike shrugged inwardly and stepped boldly into the room, flicking a glance over the faces of the other officers present. "Well, well, well, Mister Gabriel," said Black Bart. The voice was oily, but the oil was oil of vitriol. "You not only come late, but you come incognito. Where is your uniform?" There was a muffled snicker from one of the junior officers, but it wasn't muffled enough. Before Mike the Angel could answer, Captain Quill's head jerked around. "That will do, Mister Vaneski!" he barked. "Boot ensigns don't snicker when their superiors--_and_ their betters--are being reprimanded! I only use sarcasm on officers I respect. Until an officer earns my sarcasm, he gets nothing but blasting when he goofs off. Understand?" The last word was addressed to the whole group. Ensign Vaneski colored, and his youthful face became masklike. "Yes, sir. Sorry, sir." Quill didn't even bother to answer; he looked back at Mike the Angel, who was still standing at attention. Quill's voice resumed its caustic saccharinity. "But don't let that go to your head, Mister Gabriel. I repeat: Where is your pretty red spaceman's suit?" "If the Captain will recall," said Mike, "I had only twenty-four hours' notice. I couldn't get a new wardrobe in that time. It'll be in on the next rocket." Captain Quill was silent for a moment, then he simply said, "Very well," thus dismissing the whole subject. He waved Mike the Angel to a seat. Mike sat. "We'll dispense with the formal introductions," said Quill. "Commander Gabriel is our Engineering Officer. The rest of these boys all know each other, Commander; you and I are the only ones who don't come from Chilblains Base. You know Commander Jeffers, of course." Mike nodded and grinned at Peter Jeffers, a lean, bony character who had a tendency to collapse into chairs as though he had come unhinged. Jeffers grinned and winked back. "This is Lieutenant Commander von Liegnitz, Navigation Officer; Lieutenant Keku, Supply; Lieutenant Mellon, Medical Officer; and Ensign Vaneski, Maintenance. You can all shake hands with each other later; right now, let's get on with business." He frowned, overshadowing his eyes with those great, bushy brows. "What was I saying just before Commander Gabriel came in?" Pete Jeffers shifted slightly in his seat. "You were sayin', suh, that this's the stupidest dam' assignment anybody evah got. Or words to that effect." Jeffers had been born in Georgia and had moved to the south of England at the age of ten. Consequently, his accent was far from standard. "I think, Mister Jeffers," said Quill, "that I phrased it a bit more delicately, but that was the essence of it. "The _Brainchild_, as she has been nicknamed, has been built at great expense for the purpose of making a single trip. We are to take her, and her cargo, to a destination known only to myself and von Liegnitz. We will be followed there by another Service ship, which will bring us back as passengers." He allowed himself a half-smile. "At least we'll get to loaf around on the way back." The others grinned. "The _Brainchild_ will be left there and, presumably, dismantled." He took the unlighted cigar out of his mouth, looked at it, and absently reached in his pocket for a lighter. The deeply tanned young man who had been introduced as Lieutenant Keku had just lighted a cigarette, so he proffered his own flame to the captain. Quill puffed his cigar alight absently and went on. "It isn't going to be easy. We won't have a chance to give the ship a shakedown cruise because once we take off we might as well keep going--which we will. "You all know what the cargo is--Cargo Hold One contains the greatest single robotic brain ever built. Our job is to make sure it gets to our destination in perfect condition." "Question, sir," said Mike the Angel. Without moving his head, Captain Quill lifted one huge eyebrow and glanced in Mike's direction. "Yes?" "Why didn't C.C. of E. build the brain on whatever planet we're going to in the first place?" "We're supposed to be told that in the briefing over at the C.C. of E. labs in"--he glanced at his watch--"half an hour. But I think we can all get a little advance information. Most of you men have been around here long enough to have some idea of what's going on, but I understand that Mister Vaneski knows somewhat more about robotics than most of us. Do you have any light to shed on this, Mister Vaneski?" Mike grinned to himself without letting it show on his face. The skipper was letting the boot ensign redeem himself after the _faux pas_ he'd made. Vaneski started to stand up, but Quill made a slight motion with his hand and the boy relaxed. "It's only a guess, sir," he said, "but I think it's because the robot knows too much." Quill and the others looked blank, but Mike narrowed his eyes imperceptibly. Vaneski was practically echoing Mike's own deductions. "I mean--well, look, sir," Vaneski went on, a little flustered, "they started to build that thing ten years ago. Eight years ago they started teaching it. Evidently they didn't see any reason for building it off Earth then. What I mean is, something must've happened since then to make them decide to take it off Earth. If they've spent all this much money to get it away, that must mean that it's dangerous somehow." "If that's the case," said Captain Quill, "why don't they just shut the thing off?" "Well--" Vaneski spread his hands. "I think it's for the same reason. It knows too much, and they don't want to destroy that knowledge." "Do you have any idea what that knowledge might be?" Mike the Angel asked. "No, sir, I don't. But whatever it is, it's dangerous as hell." * * * * * The briefing for the officers and men of the _William Branchell_--the _Brainchild_--was held in a lecture room at the laboratories of the Computer Corporation of Earth's big Antarctic base. Captain Quill spoke first, warning everyone that the project was secret and asking them to pay the strictest attention to what Dr. Morris Fitzhugh had to say. Then Fitzhugh got up, his face ridged with nervousness. He assumed the air of a university professor, launching himself into his speech as though he were anxious to get through it in a given time without finishing too early. "I'm sure you're all familiar with the situation," he said, as though apologizing to everyone for telling them something they already knew--the apology of the learned man who doesn't want anyone to think he's being overly proud of his learning. "I think, however, we can all get a better picture if we begin at the beginning and work our way up to the present time. "The original problem was to build a computer that could learn by itself. An ordinary computer can be forcibly taught--that is, a technician can make changes in the circuits which will make the robot do something differently from the way it was done before, or even make it do something new. "But what we wanted was a computer that could learn by itself, a computer that could make the appropriate changes in its own circuits without outside physical manipulation. "It's really not as difficult as it sounds. You've all seen autoscribers, which can translate spoken words into printed symbols. An autoscriber is simply a machine which does what you tell it to--literally. Now, suppose a second computer is connected intimately with the first in such a manner that the second can, on order, change the circuits of the first. Then, all that is needed is...." Mike looked around him while the roboticist went on. The men were looking pretty bored. They'd come to get a briefing on the reason for the trip, and all they were getting was a lecture on robotics. Mike himself wasn't so much interested in the whys and wherefores of the trip; he was wondering why it was necessary to tell anyone--even the crew. Why not just pack Snookums up, take him to wherever he was going, and say nothing about it? Why explain it to the crew? "Thus," continued Fitzhugh, "it became necessary to incorporate into the brain a physical analogue of Lagerglocke's Principle: 'Learning is a result of an inelastic collision.' "I won't give it to you symbolically, but the idea is simply that an organism learns _only_ if it does _not_ completely recover from the effects of an outside force imposed upon it. If it recovers completely, it's just as it was before. Consequently, it hasn't learned anything. The organism _must change_." He rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked out over the faces of the men before him. A faint smile came over his wrinkled features. "Some of you, I know, are wondering why I am boring you with this long recital. Believe me, it's necessary. I want all of you to understand that the machine you will have to take care of is not just an ordinary computer. Every man here has had experience with machinery, from the very simplest to the relatively complex. You know that you have to be careful of the kind of information--the kind of external force--you give a machine. "If you aim a spaceship at Mars, for instance, and tell it to go _through_ the planet, it might try to obey, but you'd lose the machine in the process." A ripple of laughter went through the men. They were a little more relaxed now, and Fitzhugh had regained their attention. "And you must admit," Fitzhugh added, "a spaceship which was given that sort of information might be dangerous." This time the laughter was even louder. "Well, then," the roboticist continued, "if a mechanism is capable of learning, how do you keep it from becoming dangerous or destroying itself? "That was the problem that faced us when we built Snookums. "So we decided to apply the famous Three Laws of Robotics propounded over a century ago by a brilliant American biochemist and philosopher. "Here they are: "'_One: A robot may not injure a human being, nor, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm._' "'_Two: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law._' "'_Three: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law._'" Fitzhugh paused to let his words sink in, then: "Those are the ideal laws, of course. Even their propounder pointed out that they would be extremely difficult to put into practice. A robot is a logical machine, but it becomes somewhat of a problem even to define a human being. Is a five-year-old competent to give orders to a robot? "If you define him as a human being, then he can give orders that might wreck an expensive machine. On the other hand, if you don't define the five-year-old as human, then the robot is under no compulsion to refrain from harming the child." He began delving into his pockets for smoking materials as he went on. "We took the easy way out. We solved that problem by keeping Snookums isolated. He has never met any animal except adult human beings. It would take an awful lot of explaining to make him understand the difference between, say, a chimpanzee and a man. Why should a hairy pelt and a relatively low intelligence make a chimp non-human? After all, some men are pretty hairy, and some are moronic. "Present company excepted." More laughter. Mike's opinion of Fitzhugh was beginning to go up. The man knew when to break pedantry with humor. "Finally," Fitzhugh said, when the laughter had subsided, "we must ask what is meant by 'protecting his own existence.' Frankly, we've been driven frantic by that one. The little humanoid, caterpillar-track mechanism that we all tend to think of as Snookums isn't really Snookums, any more than a human being is a hand or an eye. Snookums wouldn't actually be threatening his own existence unless his brain--now in the hold of the _William Branchell_--is destroyed." As Dr. Fitzhugh continued, Mike the Angel listened with about half an ear. His attention--and the attention of every man in the place--had been distracted by the entrance of Leda Crannon. She stepped in through a side door, walked over to Dr. Fitzhugh, and whispered something in his ear. He nodded, and she left again. Fitzhugh, when he resumed his speech, was rather more hurried in his delivery. "The whole thing can be summed up rather quickly. "Point One: Snookums' brain contains the information that eight years of hard work have laboriously put into it. That information is more valuable than the whole cost of the _William Branchell_; it's worth billions. So the robot can't be disassembled, or the information would be lost. "Point Two: Snookums' mind is a strictly logical one, but it is operating in a more than logical universe. Consequently, it is unstable. "Point Three: Snookums was built to conduct his own experiments. To forbid him to do that would be similar to beating a child for acting like a child; it would do serious harm to the mind. In Snookums' case, the randomity of the brain would exceed optimum, and the robot would become insane. "Point Four: Emotion is not logical. Snookums can't handle it, except in a very limited way." Fitzhugh had been making his points by tapping them off on his fingers with the stem of his unlighted pipe. Now he shoved the pipe back in his pocket and clasped his hands behind his back. "It all adds up to this: Snookums _must_ be allowed the freedom of the ship. At the same time, every one of us must be careful not to ... to push the wrong buttons, as it were. "So here are a few _don'ts_. Don't get angry with Snookums. That would be as silly as getting sore at a phonograph because it was playing music you didn't happen to like. "Don't lie to Snookums. If your lies don't fit in with what he knows to be true--and they won't, believe me--he will reject the data. But it would confuse him, because he knows that humans don't lie. "If Snookums asks you for data, qualify it--even if you know it to be true. Say: 'There may be an error in my knowledge of this data, but to the best of my knowledge....' "Then go ahead and tell him. "But if you absolutely don't know the answer, tell him so. Say: 'I don't have that data, Snookums.' "Don't, unless you are...." He went on, but it was obvious that the officers and crew of the _William Branchell_ weren't paying the attention they should. Every one of them was thinking dark gray thoughts. It was bad enough that they had to take out a ship like the _Brainchild_, untested and jerry-built as she was. Was it necessary to have an eight-hundred-pound, moron-genius child-machine running loose, too? Evidently, it was. "To wind it up," Fitzhugh said, "I imagine you are wondering why it's necessary to take Snookums off Earth. I can only tell you this: Snookums knows too much about nuclear energy." Mike the Angel smiled grimly to himself. Ensign Vaneski had been right; Snookums was dangerous--not only to individuals, but to the whole planet. Snookums, too, was a juvenile delinquent. 10 The _Brainchild_ lifted from Antarctica at exactly 2100 hours, Greenwich time. For three days the officers and men of the ship had worked as though they were the robots instead of their passenger--or cargo, depending on your point of view. Supplies were loaded, and the great engine-generators checked and rechecked. The ship was ready to go less than two hours before take-off time. The last passenger aboard was Snookums, although, in a more proper sense, he had always been aboard. The little robot rolled up to the elevator on his treads and was lifted into the body of the ship. Miss Crannon was waiting for him at the air lock, and Mike the Angel was standing by. Not that he had any particular interest in watching Snookums come aboard, but he did have a definite interest in Leda Crannon. "Hello, honey," said Miss Crannon as Snookums rolled into the air lock. "Ready for your ride?" "Yes, Leda," said Snookums in his contralto voice. He rolled up to her and took her hand. "Where is my room?" "Come along; I'll show you in a minute. Do you remember Commander Gabriel?" Snookums swiveled his head and regarded Mike. "Oh yes. He tried to help me." "Did you need help?" Mike growled in spite of himself. "Yes. For my experiment. And you offered help. That was very nice. Leda says it is nice to help people." Mike the Angel carefully refrained from asking Snookums if he thought he was people. For all Mike knew, he did. Mike followed Snookums and Leda Crannon down the companionway. "What did you do today, honey?" asked Leda. "Mostly I answered questions for Dr. Fitzhugh," said Snookums. "He asked me thirty-eight questions. He said I was a great help. I'm nice, too." "Sure you are, darling," said Miss Crannon. "Ye gods," muttered Mike the Angel. "What's the trouble, Commander?" the girl asked, widening her blue eyes. "Nothing," said Mike the Angel, looking at her innocently with eyes that were equally blue. "Not a single solitary thing. Snookums is a sweet little tyke, isn't he?" Leda Crannon gave him a glorious smile. "I think so. And a lot of fun, too." Very seriously, Mike patted Snookums on his shiny steel skull. "How old are you, little boy?" Leda Crannon's eyes narrowed, but Mike pretended not to notice while Snookums said: "Eight years, two months, one day, seven hours, thirty-three minutes and--ten seconds. But I am not a little boy. I am a robot." Mike suppressed an impulse to ask him if he had informed Leda Crannon of that fact. Mike had been watching the girl for the past three days (at least, when he'd had the time to watch) and he'd been bothered by the girl's maternal attitude toward Snookums. She seemed to have wrapped herself up entirely in the little robot. Of course, that might simply be her method of avoiding Mike the Angel, but Mike didn't quite believe that. "Come along to your room, dear," said Leda. Then she looked again at Mike. "If you'll wait just a moment, Commander," she said rather stiffly, "I'd like to talk to you." Mike the Angel touched his forehead in a gentlemanly salute. "Later, perhaps, Miss Crannon. Right now, I have to go to the Power Section to prepare for take-off. We're really going to have fun lifting this brute against a full Earth gee without rockets." "Later, then," she said evenly, and hurried off down the corridor with Snookums. Mike headed the other way with a sigh of relief. As of right then, he didn't feel like being given an ear-reaming lecture by a beautiful redhead. He beetled it toward the Power Section. * * * * * Chief Powerman's Mate Multhaus was probably the only man in the crew who came close to being as big as Mike the Angel. Multhaus was two inches shorter than Mike's six-seven, but he weighed in at two-ninety. As a powerman, he was tops, and he gave the impression that, as far as power was concerned, he could have supplied the ship himself by turning the crank on a hand generator. But neither Mike nor Multhaus approached the size of the Supply Officer, Lieutenant Keku. Keku was an absolute giant. Six-eight, three hundred fifty pounds, and very little of it fat. When Mike the Angel opened the door of the Power Section's instrument room, he came upon a strange sight. Lieutenant Keku and Chief Multhaus were seated across a table from each other, each with his right elbow on the table, their right hands clasped. The muscles in both massive arms stood out beneath the scarlet tunics. Neither man was moving. "Games, children?" asked Mike gently. _Whap!_ The chief's arm slammed to the table with a bang that sounded as if the table had shattered. Multhaus had allowed Mike's entrance to distract him, while Lieutenant Keku had held out just an instant longer. Both men leaped to their feet, Multhaus valiantly trying not to nurse his bruised hand. "Sorry, sir," said Multhaus. "We were just--" "Ne' mind. I saw. Who usually wins?" Mike asked. Lieutenant Keku grinned. "Usually he does, Commander. All this beef doesn't help much against a guy who really has pull. And Chief Multhaus has it." Mike looked into the big man's brown eyes. "Try doing push-ups. With all your weight, it'd really put brawn into you. Sit down and light up. We've got time before take-off. That is, we do if Multhaus has everything ready for the check-off." "I'm ready any time you are, sir," Multhaus said, easing himself into a chair. "We'll have a cigarette and then run 'em through." Keku settled his bulk into a chair and fired up a cigarette. Mike sat on the edge of the table. "Philip Keku," Mike said musingly. "Just out of curiosity, what kind of a name is Keku?" "Damfino," said the lieutenant. "Sounds Oriental, doesn't it?" Mike looked the man over carefully, but rapidly. "But you're not Oriental--or at least, not much. You look Polynesian to me." "Hit it right on the head, Commander. Hawaiian. My real name's Kekuanaoa, but nobody could pronounce it, so I shortened it to Keku when I came in the Service." Mike gave a short laugh. "That accounts for your size. Kekuanaoa. A branch of the old Hawaiian royal family, as I recall." "That's right." The big Hawaiian grinned. "I've got a kid sister that weighs as much as you. And my granddad kicked off at ninety-four weighing a comfortable four-ten." "What'd he die of, sir?" Multhaus asked curiously. "Concussion and multiple fractures. He slammed a Ford-Studebaker into a palm tree at ninety miles an hour. Crazy old ox; he was bigger than the dam' automobile." The laughter of three big men filled the instrument room. After a few more minutes of bull throwing, Keku ground out his cigarette and stood up. "I'd better get to my post; Black Bart will be calling down any minute." At that instant the PA system came alive. "_Now hear this! Now hear this! Take-off in fifteen minutes! Take-off in fifteen minutes!_" Keku grinned, saluted Mike the Angel, and walked out the door. Multhaus gazed after him, looking at the closed door. "A blinking prophet, Commander," he said. "A blinking prophet." * * * * * The take-off of the _Brainchild_ was not so easy as it might have appeared to anyone who watched it from the outside. As far as the exterior observers were concerned, it seemed to lift into the air with a loud, thrumming noise, like a huge elevator rising in an invisible shaft. It had been built in a deep pit in the polar ice, built around the huge cryotronic stack that was Snookums' brain. As it rose, electric motors slid back the roof that covered the pit, and the howling Antarctic winds roared around it. Unperturbed, it went on rising. Inside, Mike the Angel and Chief Multhaus watched worriedly as the meters wiggled their needles dangerously close to the overload mark. The thrumming of the ship as it fought its way up against the pull of Earth's gravity and through the Earth's magnetic field, using the fabric of space itself as the fulcrum against which it applied its power, was like the vibration of a note struck somewhere near the bottom of a piano keyboard, or the rumble of a contra bassoon. As the intensity of the gravitational field decreased, the velocity of the ship increased--not linearly, but logarithmically. She shrieked through the upper atmosphere, quivering like a live thing, and emerged at last into relatively empty space. When she reached a velocity of a little over thirty miles per second--relative to the sun, and perpendicular to the solar ecliptic--Mike the Angel ordered her engines cut back to the lowest power possible which would still retain the one-gee interior gravity of the ship and keep the anti-acceleration fields intact. "How does she look, Multhaus?" he asked. Both of the men were checking the readings of the instruments. A computerman second class was punching the readings into the small table calculator as Multhaus read off the numbers. "I think she weathered it, sir," the chief said cautiously, "but she sure took a devil of a beating. And look at the power factor readings! We were tossing away energy as though we were S-Doradus or something." They worked for nearly an hour to check through all the circuits to find what damage--if any--had been done by the strain of Earth's gravitational and magnetic fields. All in all, the _Brainchild_ was in pretty good shape. A few circuits needed retuning, but no replacements were necessary. Multhaus, who had been understandably pessimistic about the ship's ability to lift herself from the surface of even a moderate-sized planet like Earth, looked with new respect upon the man who had designed the power plant that had done the job. Mike the Angel called the bridge and informed Captain Quill that the ship was ready for full acceleration. Under control from the bridge, the huge ship yawed until her nose--and thus the line of thrust along her longitudinal axis--was pointed toward her destination. "Full acceleration, Mister Gabriel," said Captain Quill over the intercom. Mike the Angel watched the meters climb again as the ship speared away from the sun at an ever-increasing velocity. Although the apparent internal acceleration remained at a cozy one gee, the acceleration in relation to the sun was something fantastic. When the ship reached the velocity of light, she simply disappeared, as far as external observers were concerned. But she still kept adding velocity with her tremendous acceleration. Finally her engines reached their performance peak. They could drive the _Brainchild_ no faster. They simply settled down to a steady growl and pushed the ship at a steady velocity through what the mathematicians termed "null-space." The _Brainchild_ was on her way. 11 "What I want to know," said Lieutenant Keku, "is, what kind of ship is this?" Mike the Angel chuckled, and Lieutenant Mellon, the Medical Officer, grinned rather shyly. But young Ensign Vaneski looked puzzled. "What do you mean, sir?" he asked the huge Hawaiian. They were sitting over coffee in the officers' wardroom. Captain Quill, First Officer Jeffers, and Lieutenant Commander von Liegnitz were on the bridge, and Dr. Fitzhugh and Leda Crannon were down below, giving Snookums lessons. Mike looked at Lieutenant Keku, waiting for him to answer Vaneski's question. "What do I mean? Just what I said, Mister Vaneski. I want to know what kind of ship this is. It is obviously not a warship, so we can forget that classification. It is not an expeditionary ship; we're not outfitted for exploratory work. Is it a passenger vessel, then? No, because Dr. Fitzhugh and Miss Crannon are listed as 'civilian technical advisers' and are therefore legally part of the crew. I'm wondering if it might be a cargo vessel, though." "Sure it is," said Ensign Vaneski. "That brain in Cargo Hold One is cargo, isn't it?" "I'm not certain," Keku said thoughtfully, looking up at the overhead, as if the answer might be etched there in the metal. "Since it is built in as an intrinsic part of the ship, I don't know if it can be counted as cargo or not." He brought his gaze down to focus on Mike. "What do you think, Commander?" Before Mike the Angel could answer, Ensign Vaneski broke in with: "But the brain is going to be removed when we get to our destination, isn't it? That makes this a cargo ship!" There was a note of triumph in his voice. Lieutenant Keku's gaze didn't waver from Mike's face, nor did he say a word. For a boot ensign to interrupt like that was an impoliteness that Keku chose to ignore. He was waiting for Mike's answer as though Vaneski had said nothing. But Mike the Angel decided he might as well play along with Keku's gag and still answer Vaneski. As a full commander, he could overlook Vaneski's impoliteness to his superiors without ignoring it as Keku was doing. "Ah, but the brain _won't_ be unloaded, Mister Vaneski," he said mildly. "The ship will be _dismantled_--which is an entirely different thing. I'm afraid you can't call it a cargo ship on those grounds." Vaneski didn't say anything. His face had gone red and then white, as though he'd suddenly realized he'd committed a _faux pas_. He nodded his head a little, to show he understood, but he couldn't seem to find his voice. To cover up Vaneski's emotional dilemma, Mike addressed the Medical Officer. "What do you think, Mister Mellon?" Mellon cleared his throat. "Well--it seems to me," he said in a dry, serious tone, "that this is really a medical ship." Mike blinked. Keku raised his eyebrows. Vaneski swallowed and jerked his eyes away from Mike's face to look at Mellon--but still he didn't say anything. "Elucidate, my dear Doctor," said Mike with interest. "I diagnose it as a physician," Mellon said in the same dry, earnest tone. "Snookums, we have been told, is too dangerous to be permitted to remain on Earth. I take this to mean that he is potentially capable of doing something that would either harm the planet itself or a majority--if not all--of the people on it." He picked up his cup of coffee and took a sip. Nobody interrupted him. "Snookums has, therefore," he continued, "been removed from Earth in order to protect the health of that planet, just as one would remove a potentially malignant tumor from a human body. "This is a medical ship. Q.E.D." And only then did he smile. "Aw, now...." Vaneski began. Then he shut his mouth again. With an inward smile, Mike realized that Ensign Vaneski had been taking seriously an argument that was strictly a joke. "Mister Mellon," Mike said, "you win." He hadn't realized that Mellon's mind could work on that level. "Hold," said Lieutenant Keku, raising a hand. "I yield to no one in my admiration for the analysis given by our good doctor; indeed, my admiration knows no bounds. But I insist we hear from Commander Gabriel before we adjourn." "Not me," Mike said, shaking his head. "I know when I'm beaten." He'd been going to suggest that the _Brainchild_ was a training ship, from Snookums' "learning" periods, but that seemed rather obvious and puerile now. He glanced at his watch, saw the time, and stood up. "Excuse me, gentlemen; I have things to do." He had an appointment to talk to Leda Crannon, but he had no intention of broadcasting it. As he closed the wardroom door, he heard Ensign Vaneski's voice saying: "I _still_ say this should be classified as a cargo ship." Mike sighed as he strode on down the companionway. The ensign was, of course, absolutely correct--which was the sad part about it, really. Oh well, what the hell. Leda Crannon had agreed to have coffee with Mike in the office suite she shared with Dr. Fitzhugh. Mike had had one cup in the officers' wardroom, but even if he'd had a dozen he'd have been willing to slosh down a dozen more to talk to Leda Crannon. It was not, he insisted to himself, that he was in love with the girl, but she had intelligence and personality in addition to her striking beauty. Furthermore, she had given Mike the Angel a dressing-down that had been quite impressive. She had not at all cared for the remarks he had made when Snookums was being loaded aboard--patting him on the head and asking him his age, for instance--and had told him so in no uncertain terms. Mike, feeling sheepish and knowing he was guilty, had accepted the tongue-lashing and tendered an apology. And she had smiled and said: "All right. Forget it. I'm sorry I got mad." He knew he wasn't the only man aboard who was interested in Leda. Jakob von Liegnitz, all Teutonic masterfulness and Old World suavity, had obviously made a favorable impression on her. Lew Mellon was often seen in deep philosophical discussions with her, his eyes never leaving her face and his earnest voice low and confidential. Both of them had known her longer than he had, since they'd both been stationed at Chilblains Base. Mike the Angel didn't let either of them worry him. He had enough confidence in his own personality and abilities to be able to take his own tack no matter which way the wind blew. Blithely opening the door of the office, Mike the Angel stepped inside with a smile on his lips. "Ah, good afternoon, Commander Gabriel," said Dr. Morris Fitzhugh. Mike kept the smile on his face. "Leda here?" Fitzhugh chuckled. "No. Some problems came up with Snookums. She'll be in session for an hour yet. She asked me to convey her apologies." He gestured toward the coffee urn. "But the coffee's all made, so you may as well have a cup." Mike was thankful he had not had a dozen cups in the wardroom. "I don't mind if I do, Doctor." He sat down while Fitzhugh poured a cup. "Cream? Sugar?" "Black, thanks," Mike said. There was an awkward silence for a few seconds while Mike sipped at the hot, black liquid. Then Mike said, "Dr. Fitzhugh, you said, at the briefing back on Earth, that Snookums knows too much about nuclear energy. Can you be more specific than that, or is it too hush-hush?" Fitzhugh took out his briar and began filling it as he spoke. "We don't want this to get out to the general public, of course," he said thoughtfully, "but, as a ship's officer, you can be told. I believe some of your fellow officers know already, although we'd rather it wasn't discussed in general conversation, even among the officers." Mike nodded wordlessly. "Very well, then." Fitzhugh gave the tobacco a final shove with his thumb. "As a power engineer, you should be acquainted with the 'pinch effect,' eh?" It was a rhetorical question. The "pinch effect" had been known for over a century. A jet of highly ionized gas, moving through a magnetic field of the proper structure, will tend to pinch down, to become narrower, rather than to spread apart, as a jet of ordinary gas does. As the science of magnetohydrodynamics had progressed, the effect had become more and more controllable, enabling scientists to force the nuclei of hydrogen, for instance, closer and closer together. At the end of the last century, the Bending Converter had almost wrecked the economy of the entire world, since it gave to the world a source of free energy. Sam Bending's "little black box" converted ordinary water into helium and oxygen and energy--plenty of energy. A Bending Converter could be built relatively cheaply and for small-power uses--such as powering a ship or automobile or manufacturing plant--could literally run on air, since the moisture content of ordinary air was enough to power the converter itself with plenty of power left over. Overnight, all previous forms of power generation had become obsolete. Who would buy electric power when he could generate his own for next to nothing? Billions upon billions of dollars worth of generating equipment were rendered valueless. The great hydroelectric dams, the hundreds of steam turbines, the heavy-metal atomic reactors--all useless for power purposes. The value of the stock in those companies dropped to zero and stayed there. The value of copper metal fell like a bomb, with almost equally devastating results--for there was no longer any need for the millions of miles of copper cable that linked the power plants with the consumer. The Depression of 1929-42 couldn't even begin to compare with The Great Depression of 1986-2000. Every civilized nation on Earth had been hit and hit hard. The resulting governmental collapses would have made the disaster even more complete had not the then Secretary General of the UN, Perrot of Monaco, grabbed the reins of government. Like the Americans Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, he had forced through unconstitutional bills and taken extra-constitutional powers. And, like those Americans, he had not done it for personal gain, but to preserve the society. He had not succeeded in preserving the old society, of course, but he had built, almost single-handedly, a world government--a new society on the foundations of the old. All these thoughts ran through Mike the Angel's mind. He wondered if Snookums had discovered something that would be as much a disaster to the world economy as the Bending Converter had been. Fitzhugh got out his miniature flame thrower and puffed his pipe alight. "Snookums," he said, "has discovered a method of applying the pinch effect to lithium hydride. It's a batch reaction rather than a flow reaction such as the Bending Converter uses. But it's as simple to build as a Bending Converter." "Jesus," said Mike the Angel softly. Lithium hydride. LiH. An atom of hydrogen to every atom of lithium. If a hydrogen nucleus is driven into the lithium nucleus with sufficient force, the results are simple: Li^{7} + H^{1} --> 2He^{4} + energy An atom of lithium-7 plus an atom of hydrogen-1 yields two atoms of helium-4 and plenty of energy. One gram of lithium hydride would give nearly fifty-eight kilowatt-hours of energy in one blast. A pound of the stuff would be the equivalent of nearly seven _tons_ of TNT. In addition, it was a nice, clean bomb. Nothing but helium, radiation, and heat. In the early nineteen fifties, such a bomb had been constructed by surrounding the LiH with a fission bomb--the so-called "implosion" technique. But all that heavy metal around the central reaction created all kinds of radioactive residues which had a tendency to scatter death for hundreds of miles around. Now, suppose a man had a pair of tweezers small enough to pick up a single molecule of lithium hydride and pinch the two nuclei together. Of course, the idea is ridiculous--that is, the tweezer part is. But if the pinch could be done in some other way.... Snookums had done it. "Homemade atomic bombs in your back yard or basement lab," said Mike the Angel. Fitzhugh nodded emphatically. "Exactly. We can't let that technique out until we've found a way to keep people from doing just that. The UN Government has inspection techniques that prevent anyone from building the conventional types of thermonuclear bombs, but not the pinch bomb." Mike the Angel thought over what Dr. Fitzhugh had said. Then he said: "That's not all of it. Antarctica is isolated enough to keep that knowledge secret for a long time--at least until safeguards could be set up. Why take Snookums off Earth?" "Snookums himself is dangerous," Fitzhugh said. "He has a built-in 'urge' to experiment--to get data. We can keep him from making experiments that we know will be dangerous by giving him the data, so that the urge doesn't operate. But if he's on the track of something totally new.... "Well, you can see what we're up against." He thoughtfully blew a cloud of smoke. "We think he may be on the track of the total annihilation of matter." A dead silence hung in the air. The ultimate, the super-atomic bomb. Theoretically, the idea had been approached only in the assumption of contact between ordinary matter and anti-matter, with the two canceling each other completely to give nothing but energy. Such a bomb would be nearly fifty thousand times as powerful as the lithium-hydride pinch bomb. That much energy, released in a few millimicroseconds, would make the standard H-bomb look like a candle flame on a foggy night. The LiH pinch bomb could be controlled. By using just a little of the stuff, it would be possible to limit the destruction to a neighborhood, or even a single block. A total-annihilation bomb would be much harder to control. The total annihilation of a single atom of hydrogen would yield over a thousandth of an erg, and matter just doesn't come in much smaller packages than that. "You see," said Fitzhugh, "we _had_ to get him off Earth." "Either that or stop him from experimenting," Mike said. "And I assume that wouldn't be good for Snookums." "To frustrate Snookums would be to destroy all the work we have put into him. His circuits would tend to exceed optimum randomity, and that would mean, in human terms, that he would be insane--and therefore worthless. As a machine, Snookums is worth eighteen billion dollars. The information we have given him, plus the deductions and computations he has made from that information, is worth...." He shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows? How can a price be put on knowledge?" 12 The _William Branchell_--dubbed _Brainchild_--fled Earth at ultralight velocity, while officers, crew, and technical advisers settled down to routine. The only thing that disturbed that routine was one particularly restless part of the ship's cargo. Snookums was a snoop. Cut off from the laboratories which had been provided for his special work at Chilblains, he proceeded to interest himself in the affairs of the human beings which surrounded him. Until his seventh year, he had been confined to the company of only a small handful of human beings. Even while the _William Branchell_ was being built, he hadn't been allowed any more freedom than was absolutely necessary to keep him from being frustrated. Even so, he had developed an interest in humans. Now he was being allowed full rein in his data-seeking circuits, and he chose to investigate, not the physical sciences, but the study of Mankind. Since the proper study of Mankind is Man, Snookums proceeded to study the people on the ship. Within three days the officers had evolved a method of Snookums-evasion. Lieutenant Commander Jakob von Liegnitz sat in the officers' wardroom of the _Brainchild_ and shuffled a deck of cards with expert fingers. He was a medium-sized man, five-eleven or so, with a barrel chest, broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and lean hips. His light brown hair was worn rather long, and its straight strands seemed to cling tightly to his skull. His gray eyes had a perpetual half-squint that made him look either sleepy or angry, depending on what the rest of his broad face was doing. He dealt himself out a board of Four Cards Up and had gone through about half the pack when Mike the Angel came in with Lieutenant Keku. "Hello, Jake," said Keku. "What's to do?" "Get out two more decks," said Mike the Angel, "and we can all play solitaire." Von Liegnitz looked up sleepily. "I could probably think of duller things, Mike, but not just immediately. How about bridge?" "We'll need a fourth," said Keku. "How about Pete?" Mike the Angel shook his head. "Black Bart is sleeping--taking his beauty nap. So Pete has the duty. How about young Vaneski? He's not a bad partner." "He is out, too," said von Liegnitz. "He also is on duty." Mike the Angel lifted an inquisitive eyebrow. "Something busted? Why should the Maintenance Officer be on duty right now?" "He is maintaining," said von Liegnitz with deliberate dignity, "peace and order around here. He is now performing the duty of Answerman-in-Chief. He's very good at it." Mike grinned. "Snookums?" Von Liegnitz scooped the cards off the table and began shuffling them. "Exactly. As long as Snookums gets his questions answered, he keeps himself busy. Our young boot ensign has been assigned to the duty of keeping that mechanical Peeping Tom out of our hair for an hour. By then, it will be lunch time." He cleared his throat. "We still need a fourth." "If you ask me," said Lieutenant Keku, "we need a fifth. Let's play poker instead." Jakob von Liegnitz nodded and offered the cards for a cut. "Deal 'em," said Mike the Angel. A few minutes less than an hour later, Ensign Vaneski slid open the door to the wardroom and was greeted by a triune chorus of hellos. "Sirs," said Vaneski with pseudo formality, "I have done my duty, exhausting as it was. I demand satisfaction." Lieutenant Keku, upon seeing Mike the Angel dealt a second eight, flipped over his up cards and folded. "Satisfaction?" he asked the ensign. Vaneski nodded. "One hand of showdown for five clams. I have been playing encyclopedia for that hunk of animated machinery for an hour. That's above and beyond the call of duty." "Raise a half," said Mike the Angel. "Call," said von Liegnitz. "Three eights," said Mike, flipping his hole card. Von Liegnitz shrugged, folded his cards, and watched solemnly while Mike pulled in the pot. "Vaneski wants to play showdown for a fiver," said Keku. Mike the Angel frowned at the ensign for a moment, then relaxed and nodded. "Not my game," he said, "but if the Answerman wants a chance to catch up, it's okay with me." The four men each tossed a five spot into the center of the table and then cut for deal. Mike got it and started dealing--five cards, face up, for the pot. When three cards apiece had been dealt, young Vaneski was ahead with a king high. On the fourth round he grinned when he got a second king and Mike dealt himself an ace. On the fifth round Vaneski got a three, and his face froze as Mike dealt himself a second ace. Mike reached for the twenty. "You deal yourself a mean hand, Commander," said Vaneski evenly. Mike glanced at him sharply, but there was only a wry grin on the young ensign's face. "Luck of the idiot," said Mike as he pocketed the twenty. "It's time for lunch." "Next time," said Keku firmly, "I'll take the Answerman watch, Mike. You and this kraut are too lucky for me." "If I lose any more to the Angel," von Liegnitz said calmly, "I will be a very sour kraut. But right now, I'm quite hungry." Mike prowled around the Power Section that afternoon with a worry nagging at the back of his mind. He couldn't exactly put his finger on what was bothering him, and he finally put it down to just plain nerves. And then he began to feel something--physically. Within thirty seconds after it began, long before most of the others had noticed it, Mike the Angel recognized it for what it was. Half a minute after that, everyone aboard could feel it. A two-cycle-per-second beat note is inaudible to the human ear. If the human tympanum can't wiggle any faster than that, the auditory nerves refuse to transmit the message. The wiggle has to be three or four octaves above that before the nerves will have anything to do with it. But if the beat note has enough energy in it, a man doesn't have to hear it--he can _feel_ it. The bugs weren't all out of the _Brainchild_, by any means, and the men knew it. She had taken a devil of a strain on the take-off, and something was about due to weaken. It was the external field around the hull that had decided to goof off this time. It developed a nice, unpleasant two-cycle throb that threatened to shake the ship apart. It built up rapidly and then leveled off, giving everyone aboard the feeling that his lunch and his stomach would soon part company. The crew was used to it. They'd been on shakedown cruises before, and they knew that on an interstellar vessel the word "shakedown" can have a very literal meaning. The beat note wasn't dangerous, but it wasn't pleasant, either. Within five minutes everybody aboard had the galloping collywobbles and the twittering jitters. Mike and his power crew all knew what to do. They took their stations and started to work. They had barely started when Captain Quill's voice came over the intercom. "Power Section, this is the bridge. How long before we stop this beat note?" "No way of telling, sir," said Mike, without taking his eyes off the meter bank. "Check A-77," he muttered in an aside to Multhaus. "Can you give me a prognosis?" persisted Quill. Mike frowned. This wasn't like Black Bart. He knew what the prognosis was as well as Mike did. "Actually, sir, there's no way of knowing. The old _Gainsway_ shook like this for eight days before they spotted the tubes that were causing a four-cycle beat." "Why can't we spot it right off?" Quill asked. Mike got it then. Fitzhugh was listening in. Quill wanted Mike the Angel to substantiate his own statements to the roboticist. "There are sixteen generator tubes in the hull--two at each end of the four diagonals of an imaginary cube surrounding the ship. At least two of them are out of phase; that means that every one of them may have to be balanced against every other one, and that would make a hundred and twenty checks. It will take ten minutes if we hit it lucky and find the bad tubes in the first two tries, and about twenty hours if we hit on the last try. "That, of course, is presuming that there are only two out. If there are three...." He let it hang. Mike grinned as Dr. Morris Fitzhugh's voice came over the intercom, confirming his diagnosis of the situation. "Isn't there any other way?" asked Fitzhugh worriedly. "Can't we stop the ship and check them, so that we won't be subjected to this?" "'Fraid not," answered Mike. "In the first place, cutting the external field would be dangerous, if not deadly. The abrupt deceleration wouldn't be good for us, even with the internal field operating. In the second place, we couldn't check the field tubes if they weren't operating. You can't tell a bad tube just by looking at it. They'd still have to be balanced against each other, and that would take the same amount of time as it is going to take anyway, and with the same effects on the ship. I'm sorry, but we'll just have to put up with it." "Well, for Heaven's sake do the best you can," Fitzhugh said in a worried voice. "This beat is shaking Snookums' brain. God knows what damage it may do unless it's stopped within a very few minutes!" "I'll do the best I can," said Mike the Angel carefully. "So will every man in my crew. But about all anyone can do is wish us luck and let us work." "Yes," said Dr. Fitzhugh slowly. "Yes. I understand. Thank you, Commander." Mike the Angel nodded curtly and went back to work. Things weren't bad enough as they were. They had to get worse. The _Brainchild_ had been built too fast, and in too unorthodox a manner. The steady two-cycle throb did more damage than it would normally have done aboard a non-experimental ship. Twelve minutes after the throb started, a feeder valve in the pre-induction energy chamber developed a positive-feedback oscillation that threatened to blow out the whole pre-induction stage unless it was damped. The search for the out-of-phase external field tubes had to be dropped while the more dangerous flaw was tackled. Multhaus plugged in an emergency board and began to compensate by hand while the others searched frantically for the trouble. Hand compensation of feeder-valve oscillation is pure intuition; if you wait until the meters show that damping is necessary, it may be too late--you have to second-guess the machine and figure out what's coming _before_ it happens and compensate then. You not only have to judge time, but magnitude; overcompensation is ruinous, too. Multhaus, the Chief Powerman's Mate, sat behind the emergency board, a vernier dial in each hand and both eyes on an oscilloscope screen. His red, beefy face was corded and knotted with tension, and his skin glistened with oily perspiration. He didn't say a word, and his fingers barely moved as he held a green line reasonably steady on that screen. Mike the Angel, using unangelic language in a steady, muttering stream, worked to find the circuit that held the secret of the ruinous feedback tendency, while other powermen plugged and unplugged meter jacks, flipped switches, and juggled tools. In the midst of all this, in rolled Snookums. Whether Snookums knew that his own existence was in danger is problematical. Like the human brain, his own had no pain or sensory circuits within it; in addition, his knowledge of robotics was small--he didn't even know that his brain was in Cargo Hold One. He thought it was in his head, if he thought about it at all. Nonetheless, he knew _something_ was wrong, and as soon as his "curiosity" circuits were activated, he set out in search of the trouble, his little treads rolling at high speed. Leda Crannon saw him heading down a companionway and called after him. "Where are you going, Snookums?" "Looking for data," answered Snookums, slowing a little. "Wait! I'll come with you!" Leda Crannon knew perfectly well what effect the throb might have on Snookums' brain, and when something cracked, she wanted to see what effect it might have on the behavior of the little robot. Like a hound after a fox, she followed him through the corridors of the ship. Up companionways and down, in and out of storerooms, staterooms, control rooms, and washrooms Snookums scurried, oblivious to the consternation that sometimes erupted at his sudden appearance. At certain selected spots, Snookums would stop, put his metal arms on floors and walls, pause, and then go zooming off in another direction with Leda Crannon only paces behind him, trying to explain to crewmen as best she could. If Snookums had been capable of emotion--and Leda Crannon was not as sure as the roboticists that he wasn't--she would have sworn that he was having the time of his life. Seventeen minutes after the throb had begun, Snookums rolled into Power Section and came to a halt. Something else was wrong. At first he just stopped by the door and soaked in data. Mike's muttering; the clipped, staccato conversation of the power crew; the noises of the tools; the deep throb of the ship itself; the underlying oddness of the engine vibrations--all these were fed into his microphonic ears. The scene itself was transmitted to his brain and recorded. The cryotronic maze in the depths of the ship chewed the whole thing over. Snookums acted. Leda Crannon, who had lost ground in trying to keep up with Snookums' whirling treads, came to the door of Power Section too late to stop the robot's entrance. She didn't dare call out, because she knew that to do so would interrupt the men's vital work. All she could do was lean against the doorjamb and try to catch her breath. Snookums rolled over to the board where Multhaus was sitting and watched over his shoulder for perhaps thirty seconds. The crewmen eyed him, but they were much too busy to do anything. Besides, they were used to his presence by this time. Then, in one quick tour of the room, Snookums glanced at every meter in the place. Not just at the regular operating meters, but also at the meters in the testing equipment that the power crew had jack-plugged in. Mike the Angel looked around as he heard the soft purring of the caterpillar treads. His glance took in both Snookums and Leda Crannon, who was still gasping at the door. He watched Leda for the space of three deep breaths, tore his eyes away, looked at what Snookums was doing, then said: "Get him out of here!" in a stage whisper to Leda. Snookums was looking over the notations on the meter readings for the previous few minutes. He had simply picked them up from the desk where one of the computermen was working and scanned them rapidly before handing them back. Before Leda could say anything, Snookums rolled over to Mike the Angel and said: "Check the lead between the 391-JF and the big DK-37. I think you'll find that the piping is in phase with the two-cycle note, and it's become warped and stretched. It's about half a millimeter off--plus or minus a tenth. The pulse is reaching the DK-37 about four degrees off, and the gate is closing before it all gets through. That's forcing the regulator circuit to overcompensate, and...." Mike didn't listen to any more. He didn't know whether Snookums knew what he was talking about or not, but he did know that the thing the robot had mentioned would have had just such an effect. Mike strode rapidly across the room and flipped up the shield housing the assembly Snookums had mentioned. The lead was definitely askew. Mike the Angel snapped orders, and the power crewmen descended on the scene of the trouble. Snookums went right on delivering his interpretation of the data, but everyone ignored him while they worked. Being ignored didn't bother Snookums in the least. "... and that, in turn, is making the feeder valve field oscillate," he finished up, nearly five minutes later. Mike was glad that Snookums had pinpointed the trouble first and then had gone on to show why the defect was causing the observed result. He could just as easily have started with the offending oscillation and reached the bit about the faulty lead at the end of his speech, except that he had been built to do it the other way around. Snookums made the deduction in his superfast mind and then reeled it off backward, as it were, going from conclusion to premises. Otherwise, he might have been too late. The repair didn't take long, once Snookums had found just what needed repairing. When the job was over, Mike the Angel wiped his hands on a rag and stood up. "Thanks, Snookums," he said honestly. "You've been a great help." Snookums said: "I am smiling. Because I am pleased." There was no way for him to smile with a steel face, but Mike got the idea. Mike turned to the Chief Powerman's Mate. "Okay, Multhaus, shut it off. She's steady now." Multhaus just sat there, surrounded by a wall of concentration, his hands still on the verniers, his eyes still on the screen. He didn't move. Mike flipped off the switch. "Come on, Multhaus, snap to. We've still got that beat note to worry about." Multhaus blinked dizzily as the green line vanished from his sight. He jerked his hands off the verniers, and then smiled sheepishly. He had been sitting there waiting for that green line to move a full minute after the input signal had ceased. "Happy hypnosis," said Mike. "Let's get back to finding out which of those tubes in the hull is giving the external field the willies." Snookums, who had been listening carefully, rolled up and said, "Generator tubes three, four, and thirteen. Three is out of phase by--" "You can tell us later, Snookums," Mike interrupted rapidly. "Right now, we'll get to work on those tubes. You were right once; I hope you're right again." Again the power crew swung into action. Within five minutes Mike and Multhaus were making the proper adjustments on the external field circuits to adjust for the wobbling of the output. The throb wavered. It wobbled around, going up to two-point-seven cycles and dropping back to one-point-four, then climbing again. All the time, it was dropping in magnitude, until finally it could no longer be felt. Finally, it dropped suddenly to a low of point-oh-five cycles, hovered there for a moment, then vanished altogether. "By the beard of my sainted maiden aunt," said Chief Multhaus in awe. "A three-tube offbeat solved in less than half an hour! If that isn't a record, I'll dye my uniform black and join the Chaplains' Corps." Leda Crannon, looking tired but somehow pleased, said softly: "May I come in?" Mike the Angel grinned. "Sure. Maybe you can--" The intercom clicked on. "Power Section, this is the bridge." It was Black Bart. "Are my senses playing me false, or have you stopped that beat note?" "All secure, sir," said Mike the Angel. "The system is stable now." "How many tubes were goofing?" "Three of them." "_Three!_" There was astonishment in the captain's voice. "How did you ever solve a three-tube beat in that short a time?" Mike the Angel grinned up at the eye in the wall. "Nothing to it, sir," he said. "A child could have done it." 13 Leda Crannon sat down on the edge of the bunk in Mike the Angel's stateroom, accepted the cigarette and light that Mike had proffered, and waited while Mike poured a couple of cups of coffee from the insul-jug on his desk. "I wish I could offer you something stronger, but I'm not much of a drinker myself, so I don't usually take advantage of the officer's prerogative to smuggle liquor aboard," he said as he handed her the cup. She smiled up at him. "That's all right; I rarely drink, and when I do, it's either wine or a _very_ diluted highball. Right now, this coffee will do me more good." Mike heard footsteps coming down the companionway. He glanced out through the door, which he had deliberately left open. Ensign Vaneski walked by, glanced in, grinned, and went on his way. The kid had good sense, Mike thought. He hoped any other passers-by would stay out while he talked to Leda. "Does a thing like that happen often?" the girl asked. "Not the fast solution; I mean the beat note." "No," said Mike the Angel. "Once the system is stabilized, the tubes tend to keep each other in line. But because of that very tendency, an offbeat tube won't show itself for a while. The system tries to keep the bad ones in phase in spite of themselves. But eventually one of them sort of rebels, and that frees any of the others that are offbeat, so the bad ones all show at once and we can spot them. When we get all the bad ones adjusted, the system remains stable for the operating life of the system." "And that's the purpose of a shakedown cruise?" "One of the reasons," agreed Mike. "If the tubes are going to act up, they'll do it in the first five hundred operating hours--except in unusual cases. That's one of the things that bothered me about the way this crate was hashed together." Her blue eyes widened. "I thought this was a well-built ship." "Oh, it is, it is--all things considered. It isn't dangerous, if that's what you're worried about. But it sure as the devil is expensively wasteful." She nodded and sipped at her coffee. "I know that. But I don't see any other way it could have been done." "Neither do I, right off the bat," Mike admitted. He took a good swallow of the hot liquid in his cup and said: "I wanted to ask you two questions. First, what was it that Snookums was doing just before he came into the Power Section? Black Bart said he'd been galloping all over the ship, with you at his heels." Her infectious smile came back. "He was playing seismograph. He was simply checking the intensity of the vibrations at different points in the ship. That gave him part of the data he needed to tell you which of the tubes were acting up." "I'm beginning to think," said Mike, "that we'll have to start building a big brain aboard every ship--that is, if we can learn enough about such monsters from Snookums." "What was the other question?" Leda asked. "Oh.... Well, I was wondering just why you are connected with this project. What does a psychologist have to do with robots? If you'll pardon my ignorance." This time she laughed softly, and Mike thought dizzily of the gay chiming of silver bells. He clamped down firmly on the romantic wanderings of his mind as she started her explanation. "I'm a specialist in child psychology, Mike. Actually, I was hired as an experiment--or, rather, as the result of a wild guess that happened to work. You see, the first two times Snookums' brain was activated, the circuits became disoriented." "You mean," said Mike the Angel, "they went nuts." She laughed again. "Don't let Fitz hear you say that. He'll tell you that 'the circuits exceeded their optimum randomity limit.'" Mike grinned, remembering the time he had driven a robot brain daffy by bluffing it at poker. "How did that happen?" "Well, we don't know all the details, but it seems to have something to do with the slow recovery rate that's necessary for learning. Do you know anything about Lagerglocke's Principle?" "Fitzhugh mentioned something about it in the briefing we got before take-off. Something about a bit of learning being an inelastic rebound." "That's it. You take a steel ball, for instance, and drop it on a steel plate from a height of three or four feet. It bounces--almost perfect elasticity. The next time you drop it, it does the same thing. It hasn't learned anything. "But if you drop a lead ball, it doesn't bounce as much, and it will flatten at the point of contact. _The next time it falls on that flat side, its behavior will be different._ It has learned something." Mike rubbed the tip of an index finger over his chin. "These illustrations are analogues of the human mind?" "That's right. Some people have minds like steel balls. They can learn, but you have to hit them pretty hard to make them do it. On the other hand, some people have minds like glass balls: They can't learn at all. If you hit them hard enough to make a real impression, they simply shatter." "All right. Now what has this got to do with you and Snookums?" "Patience, boy, patience," Leda said with a grin. "Actually, the lead-ball analogy is much too simple. An intelligent mind has to have time to partially recover, you see. Hit it with too many shocks, one right after another, and it either collapses or refuses to learn or both. "The first two times the brain was activated, the roboticists just began feeding data into the thing as though it were an ordinary computing machine. They were forcing it to learn too fast; they weren't giving it time to recover from the shock of learning. "Just as in the human being, there is a difference between a robot's brain and a robot's mind. The _brain_ is a physical thing--a bunch of cryotrons in a helium bath. But the _mind_ is the sum total of all the data and reaction patterns and so forth that have been built into the brain or absorbed by it. "The brain didn't have an opportunity to recover from the learning shocks when the data was fed in too fast, so the mind cracked. It couldn't take it. The robot went insane. "Each time, the roboticists had to deactivate the brain, drain it of all data, and start over. After the second time, Dr. Fitzhugh decided they were going about it wrong, so they decided on a different tack." "I see," said Mike the Angel. "It had to be taught slowly, like a child." "Exactly," said Leda. "And who would know more about teaching a child than a child psychologist?" she added brightly. Mike looked down at his coffee cup, watching the slight wavering of the surface as it broke up the reflected light from the glow panels. He had invited this girl down to his stateroom (he told himself) to get information about Snookums. But now he realized that information about the girl herself was far more important. "How long have you been working with Snookums?" he asked, without looking up from his coffee. "Over eight years," she said. Then Mike looked up. "You know, you hardly look old enough. You don't look much older than twenty-five." She smiled--a little shyly, Mike thought. "As Snookums says, 'You're nice.' I'm twenty-six." "And you've been working with Snookums since you were eighteen?" "Uh-huh." She looked, very suddenly, much younger than even the twenty-five Mike had guessed at. She seemed to be more like a somewhat bashful teen-ager who had been educated in a convent. "I was what they call an 'exceptional child.' My mother died when I was seven, and Dad ... well, he just didn't know what to do with a baby girl, I guess. He was a kind man, and I think he really loved me, but he just didn't know what to do with me. So when the tests showed that I was ... brighter ... than the average, he put me in a special school in Italy. Said he didn't want my mind cramped by being forced to conform to the mental norm. Maybe he even believed that himself. "And, too, he didn't approve of public education. He had a lot of odd ideas. "Anyway, I saw him during summer vacations and went to school the rest of the year. He took me all over the world when I was with him, and the instructors were pretty wonderful people; I'm not sorry that I was brought up that way. It was a little different from the education that most children have, but it gave me a chance to use my mind." "I know the school," said Mike the Angel. "That's the one under the Cesare Alfieri Institute in Florence?" "That's it; did you go there?" There was an odd, eager look in her eyes. Mike shook his head. "Nope. But a friend of mine did. Ever know a guy named Paulvitch?" She squealed with delight, as though she'd been playfully pinched. "Sir Gay? You mean Serge Paulvitch, the Fiend of Florence?" She pronounced the name properly: "_Sair_-gay," instead of "surge," as too many people were prone to do. "Sounds like the same man," Mike admitted, grinning. "As evil-looking as Satanas himself?" "That's Sir Gay, all right. Half the girls were scared of him, and I think _all_ the boys were. He's about three years older than I am, I guess." "Why call him Sir Gay?" Mike asked. "Just because of his name?" "Partly. And partly because he was always such a gentleman. A real _nice_ guy, if you know what I mean. Do you know him well?" "_Know_ him? Hell, I couldn't run my business without him." "Your business?" She blinked. "But he works for--" Then her eyes became very wide, her mouth opened, and she pointed an index finger at Mike. "Then you ... you're Mike the Angel! M. R. Gabriel! Sure!" She started laughing. "I never connected it up! My golly, my golly! I thought you were just another Space Service commander! Mike the Angel! Well, I'll be darned!" She caught her breath. "I'm sorry. I was just so surprised, that's all. Are you really _the_ M. R. Gabriel, of M. R. Gabriel, Power Design?" Mike was as close to being nonplused as he cared to be. "Sure," he said. "You mean you didn't know?" She shook her head. "No. I thought Mike the Angel was about sixty years old, a crotchety old genius behind a desk, as eccentric as a comet's orbit, and wealthier than Croesus. You're just not what I pictured, that's all." "Just wait a few more decades," Mike said, laughing. "I'll try to live up to my reputation." "So you're Serge's boss. How is he? I haven't seen him since I was sixteen." "He's grown a beard," said Mike. "No!" "Fact." "My God, how horrible!" She put her hand over her eyes in mock horror. "Let's talk about you," said Mike. "You're much prettier than Serge Paulvitch." "Well, I should hope so! But really, there's nothing to tell. I went to school. B.S. at fourteen, M.S. at sixteen, Ph.D. at eighteen. Then I went to work for C.C. of E., and I've been there ever since. I've never been engaged, I've never been married, and I'm still a virgin. Anything else?" "No runs, no hits, no errors," said Mike the Angel. She grinned back impishly. "I haven't been up to bat yet, Commander Gabriel." "Then I suggest you grab some sort of club to defend yourself, because I'm going to be in there pitching." The smile on her face faded, to be replaced by a look that was neither awe nor surprise, but partook of both. "You really mean that, don't you?" she asked in a hushed voice. "I do," said Mike the Angel. * * * * * Commander Peter Jeffers was in the Control Bridge when Mike the Angel stepped in through the door. Jeffers was standing with his back to the door, facing the bank of instruments that gave him a general picture of the condition of the whole ship. Overhead, the great dome of the ship's nose allowed the gleaming points of light from the star field ahead to shine down on those beneath through the heavy, transparent shield of the cast transite and the invisible screen of the external field. Mike walked over and tapped Pete Jeffers on the shoulder. "Busy?" Jeffers turned around slowly and grinned. "Hullo, old soul. Naw, I ain't busy. Nothin' outside but stars, and we don't figger on gettin' too close to 'em right off the bat. What's the beef?" "I have," said Mike the Angel succinctly, "goofed." Jeffers' keen eyes swept analytically over Mike the Angel's face. "You want a drink? I snuck a spot o' brandy aboard, and just by purty ole coincidence, there's a bottle right over there in the speaker housing." Without waiting for an answer, he turned away from Mike and walked toward the cabinet that held the intercom speaker. Meantime, he went right on talking. "Great stuff, brandy. French call it _eau de vie_, and that, in case you don't know it, means 'water of life.' You want a little, eh, ol' buddy? Sure you do." By this time, he'd come back with the bottle and a pair of glasses and was pouring a good dose into each one. "On the other hand, the Irish gave us our name for whisky. Comes from _uisge-beatha_, and by some bloody peculiar coincidence, that also means 'water of life.' So you just set yourself right down here and get some life into you." Mike sat down at the computer table, and Jeffers sat down across from him. "Now you just drink on up, buddy-buddy and then tell your ol' Uncle Pete what the bloody hell the trouble is." Mike looked at the brandy for a full half minute. Then, with one quick flip of his wrist and a sudden spasmodic movement of his gullet, he downed it. Then he took a deep breath and said: "Do I look as bad as all that?" "Worse," said Jeffers complacently, meanwhile refilling Mike's glass. "While we were on active service together, I've seen you go through all kinds of things and never look like this. What is it? Reaction from this afternoon's--or, pardon me--_yesterday_ afternoon's emergency?" Mike glanced up at the chronometer. It was two-thirty in the morning, Greenwich time. Jeffers held the bridge from midnight till noon, while Black Bart had the noon to midnight shift. Still, Mike hadn't realized that it was as late as all that. He looked at Jeffers' lean, bony face. "Reaction? No, it's not that. Look, Pete, you know me. Would you say I was a pretty levelheaded guy?" "Sure." "My old man always said, 'Never make an enemy accidentally,' and I think he was right. So I usually think over what I say before I open my big mouth, don't I?" Again Jeffers said, "Sure." "I wouldn't call myself over-cautious," Mike persisted, "but I usually think a thing through pretty carefully before I act--that is, if I have time. Right?" "I'd say so," Jeffers admitted. "I'd say you were about the only guy I know who does the right thing more than 90 per cent of the time. And says the right thing more than 99 per cent of the time. So what do you want? Back-patting, or just hero worship?" Mike took a small taste of the brandy. "Neither, you jerk. But about eight hours ago I said something that I hadn't planned to say. I practically proposed to Leda Crannon without knowing I was going to." Peter Jeffers didn't laugh. He simply said, "How'd it happen?" Mike told him. When Mike had finished, one drink later, Peter Jeffers filled the glasses for the third time and leaned back in his chair. "Tell me one thing, ol' buddy, and think about it before you answer. If you had a chance to get out of it gracefully, would you take back what you said?" Mike the Angel thought it over. The sweep hand on the chronometer made its rounds several times before he answered. Then, at last, he said: "No. No, I wouldn't." Jeffers pursed his lips, then said judicially: "In that case, you're not doing badly at all. There's nothing wrong with you except the fact that you're in love." Mike downed the third drink fast and stood up. "Thanks, Pete," he said. "That's what I was afraid of." "Wait just one stinkin' minute," said Jeffers firmly. "Sit down." Mike sat. "What do you intend to do about it?" Jeffers asked. Mike the Angel grinned at him. "What the hell else can I do but woo and win the wench?" Jeffers grinned back at him. "I reckon you know you got competition, huh?" "You mean Jake von Liegnitz?" Mike's face darkened. "I have the feeling he's looking for something that doesn't include a marriage certificate." "Love sure makes a man sound noble," said Jeffers philosophically. "If you mean that all he wants is to get Leda into the sack, you're prob'ly right. Normal reaction, I'd say. Can't blame Jake for that." "I don't," said Mike. "But that doesn't mean I can't spike his guns." "Course not. Again, a normal reaction." "What about Lew Mellon?" Mike asked. "Lew?" Jeffers raised his eyebrows. "I dunno. I think he likes to talk to her, is all. But if he _is_ interested, he's bloody well serious. He's a strict Anglo-Catholic, like yourself." _I'm not as strict as I ought to be_, Mike thought. "I thought he had a rather monkish air about him," he said aloud. Jeffers chuckled. "Yeah, but I don't think he's so ascetic that he wouldn't marry." His grin broadened. "Now, if we were still at ol' Chilblains, you'd _really_ have competition. After all, you can't expect that a gal who's stacked ... pardon me ... who has the magnificent physical and physiognomical topography of Leda Crannon to spend her life bein' ignored, now can you?" "Nope," said Mike the Angel. "Now, I figger," Jeffers said, "that you can purty much forget about Lew Mellon. But Jakob von Liegnitz is a chromatically variant equine, indeed." Mike shook his head vigorously, as if to clear away the fog. "_Pfui!_ Let's change the subject. My heretofore nimble mind has been coagulated by a pair of innocent blue eyes. I need my skull stirred up." "I have a limerick," said Jeffers lightly. "It's about a young spaceman named Mike, who said: 'I can do as I like!' And to prove his bright quip, he took a round trip, clear to Sirius B on a bike. Or, the tale of the pirate, Black Bart, whose head was as hard as his heart. When he found--" "Enough!" Mike the Angel held up a hand. "That distillate of fine old grape has made us both silly. Good night. I'm going to get some sleep." He stood up and winked at Jeffers. "And thanks for listening while I bent your ear." "Any time at all, ol' amoeba. And if you ever feel you need some advice from an ol' married man, why you just trot right round, and I'll give you plenty of bad advice." "At least you're honest," Mike said. "Night." Mike the Angel left the bridge as Commander Jeffers was putting the brandy back in its hiding place. Mike went to his quarters, hit the sack, and spent less than five minutes getting to sleep. There was nothing worrying him now. He didn't know how long he'd been asleep when he heard a noise in the darkness of his room that made him sit up in bed, instantly awake. The floater under him churned a little, but there was no noise. The room was silent. In the utter blackness of the room, Mike the Angel could see nothing, and he could hear nothing but the all-pervading hum of the ship's engines. But he could still feel and smell. He searched back in his memory, trying to place the sound that had awakened him. It hadn't been loud, merely unusual. It had been a noise that shouldn't have been made in the stateroom. It had been a quiet sound, really, but for the life of him, Mike couldn't remember what it had sounded like. But the evidence of his nerves told him there was someone else in the room besides himself. Somewhere near him, something was radiating heat; it was definitely perceptible in the air-conditioned coolness of his room. And, too, there was the definite smell of warm oil--machine oil. It was faint, but it was unmistakable. And then he knew what the noise had been. The soft purr of caterpillar treads against the floor! Casually, Mike the Angel moved his hand to the wall plaque and touched it lightly. The lights came on, dim and subdued. "Hello, Snookums," said Mike the Angel gently. "What are you here for?" The little robot just stood there for a second or two, unmoving, his waldo hands clasped firmly in front of his chest. Mike suddenly wished to Heaven that the metallic face could show something that Mike could read. "I came for data," said Snookums at last, in the contralto voice that so resembled the voice of the woman who had trained him. Mike started to say, "At this time of night?" Then he glanced at his wrist. It was after seven-thirty in the morning, Greenwich time--which was also ship time. "What is it you want?" Mike asked. "Can you dance?" asked Snookums. "Yes," said Mike dazedly, "I can dance." For a moment he had the wild idea that Snookums was going to ask him to do a few turns about the floor. "Thank you," said Snookums. His treads whirred, he turned as though on a pivot, whizzed to the door, opened it, and was gone. Mike the Angel stared at the door as though trying to see beyond it, into the depths of the robot's brain itself. "Now just what was _that_ all about?" he asked aloud. In the padded silence of the stateroom, there wasn't even an echo to answer him. 14 Mike the Angel spent the next three days in a pale blue funk which he struggled valiantly against, at least to prevent it from becoming a deep blue. There was something wrong aboard the _Brainchild_, and Mike simply couldn't quite figure what it was. He found that he wasn't the only one who had been asked peculiar questions by Snookums. The little robot seemed to have developed a sudden penchant for asking seemingly inane questions. Lieutenant Keku reported with a grin that Snookums had asked him if he knew who Commander Gabriel _really_ was. "What'd you say?" Mike had asked. Keku had spread his hands and said: "I gave him the usual formula about not being positive of my data, then I told him that you were known as Mike the Angel and were well known in the power field." Multhaus reported that Snookums had wanted to know what their destination was. The chief's only possible answer, of course, had been: "I don't have that data, Snookums." Dr. Morris Fitzhugh had become more worried-looking than usual and had confided to Mike that he, too, wondered why Snookums was asking such peculiar questions. "All he'll tell me," the roboticist had reported, wrinkling up his face, "was that he was collecting data. But he flatly refused, even when ordered, to tell me what he needed the data for." Mike stayed away from Leda Crannon as much as possible; shipboard was no place to try to conduct a romance. Not that he deliberately avoided her in such a manner as to give offense, but he tried to appear busy at all times. She was busy, too. Keeping herd on Snookums was becoming something of a problem. She had never attempted to watch him all the time. In the first place, it was physically impossible; in the second place, she didn't think Snookums would develop properly if he were to be kept under constant supervision. But now, for the first time, she didn't have the foggiest notion of what was going on inside the robot's mind, and she couldn't find out. It puzzled and worried her, and between herself and Dr. Fitzhugh there were several long conferences on Snookums' peculiar behavior. Mike the Angel found himself waiting for something to happen. He hadn't the slightest notion what it was that he was waiting for, but he was as certain of its coming as he was of the fact that the Earth was an oblate spheroid. But he certainly didn't expect it to begin the way it did. A quiet evening bridge game is hardly the place for a riot to start. Pete Jeffers was pounding the pillow in his stateroom; Captain Quill was on the bridge, checking through the log. In the officers' wardroom Mike the Angel was looking down at two hands of cards, wondering whether he'd make his contract. His own hand held the ace, nine, seven of spades; the ten, six, two of hearts; the jack, ten, nine, four, three, and deuce of diamonds; and the eight of clubs. Vaneski, his partner, had bid a club. Keku had answered with a take-out double. Mike had looked at his hand, figured that since he and Vaneski were vulnerable, while Keku and von Liegnitz were not, he bid a weakness pre-empt of three diamonds. Von Liegnitz passed, and Vaneski had answered back with five diamonds. Keku and Mike had both passed, and von Liegnitz had doubled. Now Mike was looking at Vaneski's dummy hand. No spades; the ace, queen, five, and four of hearts; the queen, eight, seven, and six of diamonds; and the ace, king, seven, four, and three of clubs. And von Liegnitz had led the three of hearts. It didn't look good. His opponents had the ace and king of trumps, and with von Liegnitz' heart lead, it looked as though he might have to try a finesse on the king of hearts. Still, there _might_ be another way out. Mike threw in the ace from dummy. Keku tossed in his seven, and Mike threw in his own deuce. He took the next trick with the ace of clubs from dummy, and the singleton eight in his own hand. The one after that came from dummy, too; it was the king of clubs, and Mike threw in the heart six from his own hand. From dummy, he led the three of clubs. Keku went over it with a jack, but Mike took it with his deuce of diamonds. He led the seven of spades to get back in dummy so he could use up those clubs. Dummy took the trick with the six of diamonds, and led out with the four of clubs. Mike figured that Keku must--absolutely _must_--have the king of hearts. Both his take-out double and von Liegnitz' heart lead pointed toward the king in his hand. Now if.... Vaneski had moved around behind Mike to watch the play. Not one of them noticed Lieutenant Lew Mellon, the Medical Officer, come into the room. That is, they knew he had come in, but they had ignored him thereafter. He was such a colorless nonentity that he simply seemed to fade into the background of the walls once he had made his entrance. Mike had taken seven tricks, and, as he had expected, lost the eighth to von Liegnitz' five of diamonds. When the German led the nine of hearts, Mike knew he had the game. He put in the queen from dummy, Keku tossed in his king triumphantly, and Mike topped it with his lowly four of diamonds. If, as he suspected, his opponents' ace and king of diamonds were split, he would get them both by losing the next trick and then make a clean sweep of the board. He threw in his nine of diamonds. He just happened to glance at von Liegnitz as the navigator dropped his king. Then he lashed out with one foot, kicking at the leg of von Liegnitz' chair. At the same time, he yelled, "Jake! Duck!" He was almost too late. Mellon, his face contorted with a mixture of anger and hatred, was standing just behind Jakob von Liegnitz. In one hand was a heavy spanner, which he was bringing down with deadly force on the navigator's skull. Von Liegnitz' chair started to topple, and von Liegnitz himself spun away from the blow. The spanner caught him on the shoulder, and he grunted in pain, but he kept on moving away from Mellon. The medic screamed something and lifted the spanner again. By this time, Keku, too, was on his feet, moving toward Mellon. Mike the Angel got behind Mellon, trying to grab at the heavy metal tool in Mellon's hand. Mellon seemed to sense him, for he jumped sideways, out of Mike's way, and kicked backward at the same time, catching Mike on the shin with his heel. Von Liegnitz had made it to his feet by this time and was blocking the downward swing of Mellon's arm with his own forearm. His other fist pistoned out toward Mellon's face. It connected, sending Mellon staggering backward into Mike the Angel's arms. Von Liegnitz grabbed the spanner out of Mellon's hand and swung it toward the medic's jaw. It was only inches away when Keku's hand grasped the navigator's wrist. And when the big Hawaiian's hand clamped on, von Liegnitz' hand stopped almost dead. Mellon was screaming. "You ----!" He ran out a string of unprintable and almost un-understandable words. "I'll kill you! I'll do it yet! _You stay away from Leda Crannon!_" "Calm down, Doc!" snapped Mike the Angel. "What the hell's the matter with you, anyway?" Von Liegnitz was still straining, trying to get away from Keku to take another swipe at the medic, but the huge Hawaiian held him easily. The navigator had lapsed into his native German, and most of it was unintelligible, except for an occasional reference to various improbable combinations of animal life. But Mellon was paying no attention. "You! I'll kill you! Lecher! Dirty-minded, filthy...." He went on. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he smashed his heel down on Mike's toe. At least, he tried to; he'd have done it if the toe had been there when his heel came down. But Mike moved it just two inches and avoided the blow. At the same time, though, Mellon twisted, and Mike's forced shift of position lessened his leverage on the man's shoulders and arms. Mellon almost got away. One hand grabbed the wrench from von Liegnitz, whose grip had been weakened by the paralyzing pressure of Keku's fingers. Mike had no choice but to slam a hard left into the man's solar plexus. Mellon collapsed like an unoccupied overcoat. By this time, von Liegnitz had quieted down. "Let go, Keku," he said. "I'm all right." He looked down at the motionless figure on the deck. "What the hell do you suppose was eating him?" he asked quietly. "How's your shoulder?" Mike asked. "Hurts like the devil, but I don't think it's busted. But why did he do it?" he repeated. "Sounds to me," said Keku dryly, "that he was nutty jealous of you. He didn't like the times you took Leda Crannon to the base movies while we were at Chilblains." Jakob von Liegnitz continued to look down at the smaller man in wonder. "_Lieber Gott_" he said finally. "I only took her out a couple of times. I knew he liked her, but--" He stopped. "The guy must be off his bearings." "I smelled liquor on his breath," said Mike. "Let's get him down to his stateroom and lock him in until he sobers up. I'll have to report this to the captain. Can you carry him, Keku?" Keku nodded and reached down. He put his hands under Mellon's armpits, lifted him to his feet, and threw him over his shoulder. "Good," said Mike the Angel. "I'll walk behind you and clop him one if he wakes up and gets wise." Vaneski was standing to one side, his face pale, his expression blank. Mike said: "Jake, you and Vaneski go up and make the report to the captain. Tell him we'll be up as soon as we've taken care of Mellon." "Right," said von Liegnitz, massaging his bruised shoulder. "Okay, Keku," said Mike, "forward march." * * * * * Lieutenant Keku thumbed the opener to Mellon's stateroom, shoved the door aside, stepped in, and slapped at the switch plaque. The plates lighted up, bathing the room in sunshiny brightness. "Dump him on his sack," said Mike. While Keku put the unconscious Mellon on his bed, Mike let his gaze wander around the room. It was neat--almost too neat, implying overfussiness. The medical reference books were on one shelf, all in alphabetical order. Another shelf contained a copy of the _International Encyclopedia_, English edition, plus several dictionaries, including one on medical terms and another on theological ones. On the desk lay a copy of the Bible, York translation, opened to the Book of Tobit. Next to it were several sheets of blank paper and a small traveling clock sat on them as a paperweight. His clothing was hung neatly, in the approved regulation manner, with his shoes in their proper places and his caps all lined up in a row. Mike walked around the room, looking at everything. "What's the matter? What're you looking for?" asked Keku. "His liquor," said Mike the Angel. "In his desk, lower left-hand drawer. You won't find anything but a bottle of ruby port; Mellon was never a drinker." Mike opened the drawer. "I probably won't find that, drunk as he is." Surprisingly enough, the bottle of wine was almost half full. "Did he have more than one bottle?" Mike asked. "Not so far as I know. Like I said, he didn't drink much. One slug of port before bedtime was about his limit." Mike frowned. "How does his breath smell to you?" "Not bad. Two or three drinks, maybe." "Mmmm." Mike put the bottle on top of the desk, then walked over to the small case that was standing near one wall. He lifted it and flipped it open. It was the standard medical kit for Space Service physicians. The intercom speaker squeaked once before Captain Quill's voice came over it. "Mister Gabriel?" "Yes, sir?" said Mike without turning around. There were no eyes in the private quarters of the officers and crew. "How is Mister Mellon?" A Space Service physician's doctorate is never used as a form of address; three out of four Space Service officers have a doctor's degree of some kind, and there's no point in calling 75 per cent of the officers "doctor." Mike glanced across the room. Keku had finished stripping the little physician to his underclothes and had put a cover over him. "He's still unconscious, sir, but his breathing sounds all right." "How's his pulse?" Keku picked up Mellon's left wrist and applied his fingers to the artery while he looked at his wrist watch. Mike said: "We'll check it, sir. Wait a few seconds." Fifteen seconds later, Keku multiplied by four and said: "One-oh-four and rather weak." "You'd better get hold of the Physician's Mate," Mike told Quill. "He's not in good condition, either mentally or physically." "Very well. As soon as the mate takes over, you and Mister Keku get up here. I want to know what the devil has been going on aboard my ship." "You are bloody well not the only one," said Mike the Angel. 15 Midnight, ship time. And, as far as the laws of simultaneity would allow, it was midnight in Greenwich, England. At least, when a ship returned from an interstellar trip, the ship's chronometer was within a second or two, plus or minus, of Greenwich time. Theoretically, the molecular vibration clocks shouldn't vary at all. The fact that they did hadn't yet been satisfactorily accounted for. Mike the Angel tried to make himself think of clocks or the variations in space time or anything else equally dull, in the hope that it would put him to sleep. He began to try to work out the derivation of the Beale equations, the equations which had solved the principle of the no-space drive. The ship didn't move through space; space moved through the ship, which, of course, might account for the variation in time, because-- --the time is out of joint. _The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!_ _Hamlet_, thought Mike. _Act One, the end of scene five._ But why had he been born to set it right? Besides, exactly what was wrong? There was something wrong, all right. And why from the end of the act? Another act to come? Something more to happen? The clock will go round till another time comes. Watch the clock, the absolutely cuckoo clock, which ticked as things happened that made almost no sense and yet had sense hidden in their works. The good old Keku clock. Somewhere is icumen in, lewdly sing Keku. The Mellon is ripe and climbing Jakob's ladder. And both of them playing Follow the Leda. And where were they heading? Toward some destination in the general direction of the constellation Cygnus. The transformation equations work fine on an interstellar ship. Would they work on a man? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to transform yourself into a swan? Cygnus the Swan. And we'll _all_ play Follow the Leda.... Somewhere in there, Mike the Angel managed to doze off. * * * * * He awoke suddenly, and his dream of being a huge black swan vanished, shattered into nothingness. This time it had not been a sound that had awakened him. It had been something else, something more like a cessation of sound. A dying sigh. He reached out and touched the switch plaque. Nothing happened. The room remained dark. The room was strangely silent. The almost soundless vibration of the engines was still there, but.... The air conditioners! The air in the stateroom was unmoving, static. There was none of the faint breeze of moving air. Something had gone wrong with the low-power circuits! Now how the hell could that happen? Not by accident, unless the accident were a big one. It would take a tremendous amount of coincidence to put all three of the interacting systems out of order at once. And they all _had_ to go at once to cut the power from the low-load circuits. The standard tap and the first and second stand-by taps were no longer tapping power from the main generators. The intercom was gone, too, along with the air conditioners, the lights, and half a dozen other sub-circuits. Mike the Angel scrambled out of bed and felt for his clothing, wishing he had something as prosaic as an old-fashioned match, or even a flame-type cigarette lighter. He found his lighter in his belt pocket as he pulled on his uniform. He jerked it out and thumbed it. In the utter darkness, the orange-red glow gave more illumination than he had supposed. If a man's eyes are adjusted to darkness, he can read print by the glow of a cigarette, and the lighter's glow was brighter than that. Still, it wasn't much. If only he had a flashlight! From a distance, far down the companionway, he could hear voices. The muffled sound that had awakened him had been the soft susurration of the door as it had slid open when the power died. Without the electrolocks to hold it closed, it had opened automatically. The doors in a spaceship are built that way, to make sure no one will be trapped in case of a power failure. Mike dressed in a matter of seconds and headed toward the door. And stopped just before he stepped out. Someone was outside. Someone, or--something. He didn't know _how_ he knew, but he knew. He was as certain as if the lights had been on bright. And whoever was waiting out there didn't want Mike the Angel to know that he was there. Mike stood silent for a full second. That was long enough for him to get angry. Not the hot anger of hatred, but the cold anger of a man who has had too many attempts on his life, who has escaped narrowly from an unseen plotter twice because of pure luck and does not intend to fall victim to the dictum that "the third time's a charm." He realized that he was still holding the glowing cigarette lighter in his hand. "Damn!" he muttered, as though to himself. "I'd forget my ears if they weren't sewed down." Then he turned, heading back toward his bed, hoping that whoever was waiting outside would assume he would be back immediately. At the same time, he lifted his thumb off the lighter's contact. Then he sat down on the edge of his bed and quickly pulled off his boots. Holding them both in his hands, he moved silently back to the door. When he reached it, he tossed both boots to the rear of the room. When they landed clatteringly, he stepped quietly through the door. In three steps he was on the opposite side of the corridor. He hugged the wall and moved back away from the spot where the watcher would be expecting him. Then he waited. He was on one side of the door to his stateroom, and the--what or whoever it was--was on the other. Until that other made a move, Mike the Angel would wait. The wait seemed many minutes long, although Mike knew it couldn't have been more than forty-five seconds or so. From other parts of the ship he could hear voices shouting as the crewmen and officers who had been sleeping were awakened by the men on duty. The ship could not sustain life long if the air conditioners were dead. Then, quite suddenly, the waiting was over. Behind Mike there was a bend in the corridor, and from around that bend came the sound of running footsteps, followed by a bellowing voice: "I'll get the Commander; you go down and get the other boys started!" Multhaus. And then there was a glow of light. The Chief Powerman's Mate was carrying a light, which reflected from the walls of the corridor. And Mike the Angel knew perfectly well that he was silhouetted against that glow. Whoever it was who was waiting for him could see him plainly. Multhaus' footsteps rang in the corridor while Mike strained his eyes to see what was before him in the darkness. And all the time, the glow became brighter as Multhaus approached. Then, from out of the darkness, came something that moved on a whir of caterpillar treads. Something hard and metallic slammed against Mike's shoulder, spinning him against the wall. At that moment, Multhaus came around the corner, and Mike could see Snookums scurrying on down the corridor toward the approaching Powerman's Mate. "Multhaus! Look out!" Mike yelled. The beam from the chief's hand torch gleamed on the metallic body of the little robot as it headed toward him. "Snookums! Stop!" Mike ordered. Snookums paid no attention. He swerved adroitly around the astonished Multhaus, spun around the corner, and was gone into the darkness. "What was all that, sir?" Multhaus asked, looking more than somewhat confused. "A course of instruction on the First and Second Laws of Robotics as applied by the Computer Corporation of Earth," said Mike, rubbing his bruised side. "But never mind that now. What's wrong with the low-power circuits?" "I don't know, sir. Breckwell is on duty in that section." "Let's go," said Mike the Angel. "We have to get this cleared up before we all suffocate." "Someone's going to get galloping claustrophobia before it's over, anyway," said Multhaus morosely as he followed Mike down the hallway in the direction from which Snookums had come. "Darkness and stuffy air touch off that sort of thing." "Who's Officer of the Watch tonight?" Mike wanted to know. "Ensign Vaneski, I think. His name was on the roster, as I remember." "I hope he reported to the bridge. Commander Jeffers will be getting frantic, but he can't leave the bridge unless he's relieved. Come on, let's move." They sprinted down the companionway. * * * * * The lights had been out less than five minutes when Mike the Angel and Chief Powerman's Mate Multhaus reached the low-power center of the Power Section. The door was open, and a torch was spearing its beam on two men--one kneeling over the prone figure of the other. The kneeling man jerked his head around as Mike and the chief came in the door. The kneeling man was Powerman First Class Fleck. Mike recognized the man on the floor as Powerman Third Class Breckwell. "What happened?" he snapped at Fleck. "Don't know, sir. I was in the head when the lights went. It took me a little time to get a torch and get in here, and I found Breckwell gone. At least, I thought he was gone, but then I heard a noise from the tool cabinet and I opened it and he fell out." The words seemed to come out all in a rush. "Dead?" asked Mike sharply. "Nossir, I don't think so, sir. Looks like somebody clonked him on the head, but he's breathin' all right." Mike knelt over the man and took his pulse. The heartbeat was regular and steady, if a trifle weak. Mike ran a hand over Breckwell's head. "There's a knot there the size of a golf ball, but I don't think anything's broken," he said. Footsteps came running down the hall, and six men of the power crew came pouring in the door. They slowed to a halt when they saw their commanding officer was already there. "A couple of you take care of Breckwell--Leister, Knox--move him to one side. Bathe his face with water. No, wait; you can't do that till we get the pumps moving again. Just watch him." One of the men coughed a little. "What he needs is a good slug of hooch." "I agree," said Mike evenly. "Too bad there isn't any aboard. But do what you think is best; I'm going to be too busy to keep an eye on you. I won't be able to watch you at all, so you'll be on your own." "Yessir," said the man who had spoken. He hid his grin and took out at a run, heading for wherever it was he kept his bottle hidden. "Dunstan, you and Ghihara get out and watch the halls. If any other officer comes this way, sing out." "Yessir!" came the twin chorus. More footsteps pounded toward them, and the remaining men of the power crew arrived. "All right, now let's take a look at these circuits," said Mike. Chief Multhaus had already flipped open all the panels and was peering inside. The men lined the torches up on the desk in the corner, in order to shed as much light as possible over the banks of low-power wiring, and went over to where Multhaus and Mike the Angel were standing. "Dig out three replacement switches--heavy-duty six-double-oh-B-nines," said Multhaus. There was a touch of disgust and a good-sized serving of anger and irritation in his voice. Mike the Angel surveyed the damage. "See anything else, Multhaus?" "No, sir. That's it." Mike nodded. "About five minutes' work to get the main switch going, which will give us power, and another ten minutes for the first and second stand-bys. Go ahead and take over, Multhaus; you won't need me. I'll go find out what the bloody unprintable is going on around here." * * * * * Mike the Angel ran into Captain Sir Henry Quill as he went up the companionway to the bridge. "What happened?" demanded the captain in his gravelly tenor voice. "Somebody ripped out the main switches to the low-power taps from the main generators, sir," said Mike. "Nothing to worry about. The boys will have the lights on within three or four minutes." "Who...?" "I don't know," said Mike, "but we'd better find out pretty fast. There've been too many things going on aboard this ship to suit me." "Same here. Are you sure everything's all right down there?" "Absolutely, sir. We can quit worrying about the damage itself and put our minds to finding out who did that damage." "Do you have any ideas?" "Some," said Mike the Angel. "As soon as the intercom is functioning again, I think you'd better call a general meeting of officers--and get Miss Crannon and Fitzhugh out of bed and get them up here, too." "Why?" Black Bart asked flatly. "Because Snookums has gone off his rocker. He's attacked at least one human being that I know of and has ignored direct orders from a human being." "Who?" asked Black Bart. "Me," said Mike the Angel. Mike told Captain Quill what had happened as they made their way back up to the bridge. Ensign Vaneski, looking pale and worried, met them at the door. He snapped a salute. "I just reported to Commander Jeffers, sir. Something's wrong with the low-power circuits." "I had surmised as much," said Black Bart caustically. "Anything new? What did you find out? What happened?" "When the lights went out, I was having coffee by myself in the wardroom. I grabbed a torch and headed for Power Section as soon as I could. The low-power room was empty. There should have been a man on duty there, but there wasn't. I didn't want to go inside, since I'm not a power officer, so I came up here to report. I--" At that moment the lights blazed on again. There was a faint hum that built up all over the ship as the air conditioning came on at the same time. "All right, Mister Vaneski," said Black Bart, "get below and take care of things. There's a man hurt down there, so be ready to take him to sick bay when the Physician's Mate gets there. We don't have a medic in any condition to take care of people, so he'll have to do. Hop it." As Vaneski left, Black Bart preceded Mike into the bridge. Pete Jeffers was on the intercom. As Mike and the captain came in, he was saying, "All right. I'll notify the Officer of the Watch, and we'll search the ship. He can't hide very long." Then, without waiting to say anything to Mike or Quill, he jabbed at another button. "Mister von Liegnitz! Jake!" "_Ja?_ Huh? What is it?" came a fuzzy voice from the speaker. "You all right?" "Me? Sure. I was asleep. Why?" "Be on your toes, sleepyhead; just got word that Mellon has escaped from his stateroom. He may try to take another crack at you." "I'll watch it," said von Liegnitz, his voice crisp now. "Okay." Jeffers sighed and looked up. "As soon as the power came on, the Physician's Mate was on the intercom. Mellon isn't in his stateroom." "Oh, wonderful!" growled Captain Quill. "We now have one insane robot and one insane human running loose on this ship. I'm glad we didn't bring any gorillas with us." "Somehow I think I'd be safer with a gorilla," said Mike the Angel. "According to the Physician's Mate, Mellon is worse than just nuts," said Jeffers quietly. "He says he loaded Mellon full of dope to make him sleep and that the man's got no right to be walkin' around at all." "He must have gotten out while the doors were open," said Captain Quill. He rubbed the palm of his hand over the shiny pinkness of his scalp. His dark, shaggy brows were down over his eyes, as though they had been weighted with lead. "Mister Jeffers," he said abruptly, "break out the stun guns. Issue one to each officer and one to each chief non-com. Until we get this straightened out, I'm declaring a state of emergency." 16 Mike the Angel hefted the heavy stun gun in his right fist, feeling its weight without really noticing it. He knew damned good and well it wouldn't be of any use against Snookums. If Mellon came at him, the supersonic beam from the gun would affect his nerves the same way an electric current would, and he'd collapse, unconscious but relatively unharmed. But Mike doubted seriously that it would have any effect at all on the metal body of the robot. It is as difficult to jolt the nerves of a robot as it is to blind an oyster. Snookums did have sensory devices that enabled him to tell what was going on around him, but they were not nerves in the ordinary sense of the word, and a stun gun certainly wouldn't have the same effect. He wondered just what effect it _would_ have--if any. He was going down the main ladder--actually a long spiral stairway that led downward from the bridge. Behind him were Chief Multhaus, also armed with a stun gun, and four members of the power crew, each armed with a heavy spanner. Mike or the chief could take care of Mellon; it would be the crew's job to take care of Snookums. "Smash his treads and his waldoes," Mike had told them, "but only if he attacks. Before you try anything else, give him an order to halt. If he keeps on coming, start swinging." And, to Chief Multhaus: "If Mellon jumps me, fire that stun gun only if he's armed with a knife or a gun. But if you do have to fire at Mellon, don't wait to get in a good shot; just go ahead and knock us both out. I'd rather be asleep than dead. Okay?" Multhaus had agreed. "The same goes for me, Commander. And the rest of the boys." So down the ladder they went. Mike hoped there'd be no fighting at all. He had the feeling that everything was all wrong, somehow, and that any use of stun guns or spanners would just make everything worse. His wasn't the only group looking for Snookums and Mellon. Lieutenant Keku had another group, and Commander Jeffers had a third. Lieutenant Commander von Liegnitz was with Captain Quill on the bridge. Mellon had already attacked von Liegnitz once; the captain didn't want them mixing it up again. Captain Quill's voice came suddenly from a speaker in the overhead. "Miss Crannon and Dr. Fitzhugh have just spoken to me," he said in his brisk tenor. "Snookums is safe in his own room. I have outlined what has happened, and they're trying to get information from Snookums now. Lieutenant Mellon is still missing." "One down," said Chief Multhaus. There was relief in his voice. "Let's see if we can find the other one," said Mike the Angel. They went down perhaps three more steps, and the speakers came to life again. "Will the Chief Physician's Mate report to Commander Jeffers in the maintenance tool room? Lieutenant Keku, dismiss your men to quarters and report to the bridge. Commander Gabriel, dismiss your men to quarters and report to Commander Jeffers in maintenance. All chief non-coms report to the ordnance room to turn in your weapons. All enlisted men return to your posts or to quarters." Mike the Angel holstered his stun gun. "That's two down," he said to Chief Multhaus. "Looks like we missed all the fun," said Multhaus. "Okay, men," Mike said, "you got the word. Take those spanners back to the tool room in Power Section, and then get back to your quarters. Chief, you go with them and secure everything, then take that stun gun back to ordnance." "Yessir." Multhaus threw Mike a salute; Mike returned it and headed toward maintenance. He knew Multhaus and the others were curious, but he was just as curious himself. He had the advantage of being in a position to satisfy his curiosity. The maintenance tool room was big and lined with tool lockers. One of them was open. Sprawled in front of it was Lieutenant Mellon. Over to one side was Commander Jeffers, standing next to a white-faced Ensign Vaneski. Nearby were a chief non-com and three enlisted men. "Hullo, Mike," Pete Jeffers said as Mike the Angel came in. "What happened, Pete?" Mike asked. Jeffers gestured at the sprawled figure on the floor. "We came in here to search. We found him. Mister Vaneski opened the locker, there, for a look-see, and Mellon jumped out at him. Vaneski fired his stun gun. Mellon collapsed to the deck. He's in bad shape; his pulse is so weak that it's hard to find." Mike the Angel walked over and looked down at the fallen Medical Officer. His face was waxen, and he looked utterly small and harmless. "What happened?" asked another voice from the door. It was Chief Physician's Mate Pierre Pasteur. He was a smallish man, well rounded, pleasant-faced, and inordinately proud of his name. He couldn't actually prove that he was really descended from the great Louis, but he didn't allow people to think otherwise. Like most C. Phys. M.'s, he had a doctor of medicine degree but no internship in the Space Service. He was working toward his commission. "We've got a patient for you," said Jeffers. "Better look him over, Chief." Chief Pasteur walked over to where Mellon lay and took his stethoscope out of his little black bag. He listened to Mellon's chest for a few seconds. Then he pried open an eyelid and looked closely at an eye. "What happened to him?" he asked, without looking up. "Got hit with a beam from a stun gun," said Jeffers. "How did he fall? Did he hit his head?" "I don't know--maybe." He looked at Ensign Vaneski. "Did he, Mister Vaneski? He was right on top of you; I was across the room." Vaneski swallowed. "I don't know. He--he just sort of--well, he _fell_." "You didn't catch him?" asked the chief. He was a physician on a case now and had no time for sirring his superiors. "No. No. I jumped away from him." "Why? What's the trouble?" Jeffers asked. "He's dead," said the Chief Physician's Mate. 17 Leda Crannon was standing outside the cubicle that had been built for Snookums. Her back and the palms of her hands were pressed against the door. Her head was bowed, and her red hair, shining like a hellish flame in the light of the glow panels, fell around her shoulders and cheeks, almost covering her face. "Leda," said Mike the Angel gently. She looked up. There were tears in her blue eyes. "Mike! Oh, Mike!" She ran toward him, put her arms around him, and tried to bury her face in Mike's chest. "What's the matter, honey? What's happened?" He was certain she couldn't have heard about Mellon's death yet. He held her in his arms, carefully, tenderly, not passionately. "He's crazy, Mike. He's completely crazy." Her voice had suddenly lost everything that gave it color. It was only dead and choked. Mike the Angel knew it was an emotional reaction. As a psychologist, she would never have used the word "crazy." But as a woman ... as a human being.... "Fitz is still in there talking to him, but he's--he's--" Her voice choked off again into sobs. Mike waited patiently, holding her, caressing her hair. "Eight years," she said after a minute or so. "Eight years I spent. And now he's gone. He's broken." "How do you know?" Mike asked. She lifted her head and looked at him. "Mike--did he really hit you? Did he refuse to stop when you ordered him to? What _really_ happened?" Mike told her what had happened in the darkened companionway just outside his room. When he finished, she began sobbing again. "He's lying, Mike," she said. "_Lying!_" Mike nodded silently and slowly. Leda Crannon had spent all of her adult life tending the hurts and bruises and aches of Snookums the Child. She had educated him, cared for him, taken pleasure in his triumphs, worried about his health, and watched him grow mentally. And now he was sick, broken, ruined. And, like all parents, she was asking herself: "What did I do wrong?" Mike the Angel didn't give her an answer to that unspoken question, but he knew what the answer was in so many cases: The grieving parent has not necessarily done anything wrong. It may simply be that there was insufficient or poor-quality material to work with. With a human child, it is even more humiliating for a parent to admit that he or she has contributed inferior genetic material to a child than it is to admit a failure in upbringing. Leda's case was different. Leda had lost her child, but Mike hesitated to point out that it wasn't her fault in the first place because the material wasn't up to the task she had given it, and in the second place because she hadn't really lost anything. She was still playing with dolls, not human beings. "Hell!" said Mike under his breath, not realizing that he was practically whispering in her ear. "Isn't it?" she said. "Isn't it Hell? I spent eight years trying to make that little mind of his tick properly. I wanted to know what was the right, proper, and logical way to bring up children. I had a theory, and I wanted to test it. And now I'll never know." "What sort of theory?" Mike asked. She sniffled, took a handkerchief from her pocket, and began wiping at her tears. Mike took the handkerchief away from her and did the wiping job himself. "What's this theory?" he said. "Oh, it isn't important now. But I felt--I still feel--that everybody is born with a sort of Three Laws of Robotics in him. You know what I mean--that a person wouldn't kill or harm anyone, or refuse to do what was right, in addition to trying to preserve his own life. I think babies are born that way. But I think that the information they're given when they're growing up can warp them. They still think they're obeying the laws, but they're obeying them wrongly, if you see what I mean." Mike nodded without saying anything. This was no time to interrupt her. "For instance," she went on, "if my theory's right, then a child would never disobey his father--unless he was convinced that the man was not really his father, you see. For instance, if he learned, very early, that his father never spanks him, that becomes one of the identifying marks of 'father.' Fine. But the first time his father _does_ spank him, doubt enters. If that sort of thing goes on, he becomes disobedient because he doesn't believe that the man is his father. "I'm afraid I'm putting it a little crudely, but you get the idea." "Yeah," said Mike. For all he knew, there might be some merit in the girl's idea; he knew that philosophers had talked of the "basic goodness of mankind" for centuries. But he had a hunch that Leda was going about it wrong. Still, this was no time to argue with her. She seemed calmer now, and he didn't want to upset her any more than he had to. "That's what you've been working on with Snookums?" he asked. "That's it." "For eight years?" "For eight years." "Is that the information, the data, that makes Snookums so priceless, aside from his nucleonics work?" She smiled a little then. "Oh no. Of course not, silly. He's been fed data on everything--physics, subphysics, chemistry, mathematics--all kinds of things. Most of the major research laboratories on Earth have problems of one kind or another that Snookums has been working on. He hasn't been given the problem _I_ was working on at all; it would bias him." Then the tears came back. "And now it doesn't matter. He's insane. He's lying." "What's he saying?" "He insists that he's never broken the First Law, that he has never hurt a human being. And he insists that he has followed the orders of human beings, according to the Second Law." "May I talk to him?" Mike asked. She shook her head. "Fitz is running him through an analysis. He even made me leave." Then she looked at his face more closely. "You don't just want to confront him and call him a liar, do you? No--that's not like you. You know he's just a machine--better than I do, I guess.... What is it, Mike?" _No_, he thought, looking at her, _she still thinks he's human. Otherwise, she'd know that a computer can't lie--not in the human sense of the word._ _Most people, if told that a man had said one thing, and that a computer had given a different answer, would rely on the computer._ "What is it, Mike?" she repeated. "Lew Mellon," he said very quietly, "is dead." The blood drained from her face, leaving her skin stark against the bright red of her hair. For a moment he thought she was going to faint. Then a little of the color came back. "Snookums." Her voice was whispery. He shook his head. "No. Apparently he tried to jump Vaneski and got hit with a stun beam. It shouldn't have killed him--but apparently it did." "God, God, God," she said softly. "Here I've been crying about a damned machine, and poor Lew has been lying up there dead." She buried her face in her hands, and her voice was muffled when she spoke again. "And I'm all cried out, Mike. I can't cry any more." Before Mike could make up his mind whether to say anything or not, the door of Snookums' room opened and Dr. Fitzhugh came out, closing the door behind him. There was an odd, stricken look on his face. He looked at Leda and then at Mike, but the expression on his face showed that he really hadn't seen them clearly. "Did you ever wonder if a robot had a soul, Mike?" he asked in a wondering tone. "No," Mike admitted. Leda took her hands from her face and looked at him. Her expression was a bright blank stare. "He won't answer my questions," Fitzhugh said in a hushed tone. "I can't complete the analysis." "What's that got to do with his soul?" Mike asked. "He won't answer my questions," Fitzhugh repeated, looking earnestly at Mike. "He says God won't allow him to." 18 Captain Sir Henry Quill opened the door of the late Lieutenant Mellon's quarters and went in, followed by Mike the Angel. The dead man's gear had to be packed away so that it could be given to his nearest of kin when the officers and crew of the _Brainchild_ returned to Earth. Regulations provided that two officers must inventory his personal effects and those belonging to the Space Service. "Does Chief Pasteur know what killed him yet, Captain?" Mike asked. Quill shook his head. "No. He wants my permission to perform an autopsy." "Are you going to let him?" "I think not. We'll put the body in the freezer and have the autopsy performed on Earth." He looked around the room, seeing it for the first time. "If you don't," said Mike, "you've got three suspected killers on your hands." Quill was unperturbed. "Don't be ridiculous, Golden Wings." "I'm not," Mike said. "I hit him in the pit of his stomach. Chief Pasteur filled him full of sedative. Mister Vaneski shot him with a stun beam. He died. Which one of us did it?" "Probably no single one of them, but a combination of all three," said Captain Quill. "Each action was performed in the line of duty and without malice aforethought--without even intent to harm permanently, much less to kill. There will have to be a court-martial, of course--or, at the very least, a board of inquiry will be appointed. But I am certain you'll all come through any such inquiry scatheless." He picked up a book from Mellon's desk. "Let's get about our business, Mister Gabriel. Mark down: Bible, one." Mike put it down on the list. "_International Encyclopedia_, English edition. Thirty volumes and index." Mike put it down. "_The Oxford-Webster Dictionary of the English Language_-- "_Hallbert's Dictionary of Medical Terms_-- "_The Canterbury Theological Dictionary_-- "_The Christian Religion and Symbolic Logic_, by Bishop K. F. Costin-- "_The Handbook of Space Medicine_--" As Captain Quill called out the names of the books and put them into the packing case he'd brought, Mike marked them down--while something began ticking in the back of his mind. "Item," said Captain Quill, "one crucifix." He paused. "Beautifully carved, too." He put it into the packing case. "Excuse me, Captain," said Mike suddenly. "Let me take a look at something, will you?" Excitedly, he leaned over and took some of the books out, looking at the pages of each one. "I'll be damned," he said after a moment. "Or I _should_ be--for being such a stupid idiot!" Captain Quill narrowed his eyes. "What are you talking about, Mister Gabriel?" "I'm not sure yet, Captain," Mike hedged. "May I borrow these three books?" He held them up in his hands. "May I be so bold as to ask _why_, Mister Gabriel?" "I just want to look at them, sir," Mike said. "I'll return them within a few hours." "Mister Gabriel," Captain Quill said, "after what happened last night, I am suspicious of everything that goes on aboard this ship. But--yes. You may take them. However, I want them returned before we land tomorrow morning." Mike blinked. Neither he nor anyone else--with the exception of Captain Quill and Lieutenant Commander von Liegnitz, the navigator, knew the destination of the ship. Mike hadn't realized they were that close to their goal. "I'll have them back by then," he promised. "Very well. Now let's get on about our work." The job was completed within forty-five minutes. A man can't carry a great deal with him on a spaceship. When they were through, Mike the Angel excused himself and went to his quarters. Two hours after that he went to the officers' wardroom to look up Pete Jeffers. Pete hadn't been in his quarters, and Mike knew he wasn't on duty by that time. Sure enough, Jeffers was drinking coffee all by himself in the wardroom. He looked up when Mike came in. "Hullo, Mike," he said listlessly. "Come sit. Have some coffee." There was a faint aroma in the air which indicated that there was more in the cup than just coffee. "No, thanks, Pete. I'll sit this one out. I wanted to talk to you." "Sit. I am drinking a toast to Mister Lew Mellon." He pointed at the coffee. "Sure you won't have a mite? It's sweetened from the grape." "No, thanks again." Mike sat down. "It's Mellon I wanted to talk about. Did you know him well, Pete?" "Purty well," Pete said, nodding. "Yeah, purty well. I always figured him for a great little bloke. Can't figure what got into him." "Me either. Pete, you told me he was an Anglo-Catholic--a good one, you said." "'At's right." "Well, how did you mean that?" Pete frowned. "Just what I said. He studied his religion, he went to Mass regularly, said his prayers--that sort of thing. And he was, I will say, a Christian gentleman in every sense of the word." There was irritation in his voice, as though Mike had impugned the memory of a friend. "Don't get huffy, Pete; he struck me as a pretty nice person, too--" "Until he flipped his lid," said Pete. "But that might happen to anybody." "Sure. But what I want to know--and don't get sore--is, did he show any kind of--well, _instability_ before this last outbreak?" "Like what?" "I mean, was he a religious nut? Did he act 'holier than thou' or--well, was he a fanatic, would you say?" "No, I wouldn't say so. He didn't talk much about it. I guess you noticed that. I mean, he didn't preach. He smoked some and had his glass of wine now and then--even had a cocktail or two on occasion. His views on sex were orthodox, I reckon--I mean, as far as I know. He'd tell an off-color story, if it wasn't _too_ bad. But he'd get up and leave quietly if the boys started tellin' about the women they'd made. Fornication and adultery just weren't his meat, I'd say." "I know he wasn't married," Mike said. "Did he date much?" "Some. He liked to dance. Women seemed to like him." "How about men?" "Most of the boys liked him." "That's not what I meant." "Oh. Was he queer?" Pete frowned. "I'd damn near stake my life that he wasn't." "You mean he didn't practice it?" "I don't believe he even thought about it," Pete said. "Course, you can't tell what's really goin' on in a man's mind, but--" His frown became a scowl. "Damn it, Mike, just because a man isn't married by the time he's thirty-five and practices Christian chastity while he's single don't necessarily mean he's a damn fairy!" "I didn't say it did. I just wondered if you'd heard anything." "No more'n I've heard about you--who are in exactly the same position!" "Exactly," Mike agreed. "That's what I wanted to know. Pete, if you've got it to spare, I'll join you in that toast." Pete Jeffers grinned. "Comin' right up, buddy-boy." He poured two more cups of coffee, spiked them from a small flask of brandy, and handed one to Mike. They drank in silence. Fifteen minutes later, Mike the Angel was in the little office that Leda Crannon shared with Dr. Fitzhugh. She was alone. "How's the girl today?" he asked. "Beat," she said with a forced smile. "You look beautiful," he said. He wasn't lying. She looked drawn and tired, but she still looked beautiful. "Thanks, Mike. What can I do for you?" Mike the Angel pulled up a chair and sat down. "Where's Doc Fitz?" "He's still trying to get information out of Snookums. It's a weird thing, Mike--a robot with a soul." "You don't mind talking about it?" "No; go ahead if you want." "All right, answer me a question," he said. "Can Snookums read English?" "Certainly. And Russian, and German, French, Chinese, and most of the other major languages of Earth." "He could read a book, then?" "Yes. But not unless it was given to him and he was specifically told to use its contents as data." "Good," said Mike. "Now, suppose Snookums was given complete data on a certain field of knowledge. Suppose further that this field is internally completely logical, completely coherent, completely self-consistent. Suppose it could even be reduced to a series of axioms and theorems in symbolic logic." "All right," she said. "So?" "Now, further suppose that this system, this field of knowledge is, right now, in constant use by millions of human beings, even though most of them are unaware of the implications of the entire field. Could Snookums work with such a body of knowledge?" "Sure," said Leda. "Why not?" "What if there was absolutely no way for Snookums to experiment with this knowledge? What if he simply did not have the equipment necessary?" "You mean," she asked, "something like astrophysics?" "No. That's exactly what I don't mean. I'm perfectly well aware that it isn't possible to test astrophysical theories directly. Nobody has been able to build a star in the lab so far. "But it _is_ possible to test the theories of astrophysics analogically by extrapolating on data that _can_ be tested in a physics lab. "What I'm talking about is a system that Snookums, simply because he is what he is, cannot test or experiment upon, in any way whatsoever. A system that has, in short, no connection with the physical world whatsoever." Leda Crannon thought it over. "Well, assuming all that, I imagine that it would eventually ruin Snookums. He's built to experiment, and if he's kept from experimenting for too long, he'll exceed the optimum randomity of his circuits." She swallowed. "If he hasn't already." "I thought so. And so did someone else," said Mike thoughtfully. "Well, for Heaven's sake! What is this system?" Leda asked in sudden exasperation. "You're close," said Mike the Angel. "What are you talking about?" "Theology," said Mike. "He was pumped full of Christian theology, that's all. Good, solid, Catholic theology. Bishop Costin's mathematical symbolization of it is simply a result of the verbal logic that had been smoothed out during the previous two thousand years. Snookums could reduce it to math symbols and equations, anyway, even if we didn't have Bishop Costin's work." He showed her the book from Mellon's room. "It doesn't even require the assumption of a soul to make it foul up a robot's works. He doesn't have any emotions, either. And he can't handle something that he can't experiment with. It would have driven him insane, all right. But he _isn't_ insane." Leda looked puzzled. "But--" "Do you know why?" Mike interrupted. "No." "Because he found something that he could experiment with. He found a material basis for theological experimentation." She looked still more puzzled. "What could that be?" "Me," said Mike the Angel. "Me. Michael Raphael Gabriel. I'm an angel--an archangel. As a matter of fact, I'm _three_ archangels. For all I know, Snookums has equated me with the Trinity." "But--how did he get that idea?" "Mostly from the Book of Tobit," said Mike. "That's where an archangel takes the form of a human being and travels around with Tobit the Younger, remember? And, too, he probably got more information from the first part of Luke's Gospel, where Gabriel tells the Blessed Virgin that she's about to become a mother." "But would he have figured that out for himself?" "Possibly," said Mike, "but I doubt it. He was told that I was an angel--literally." "Let me see that book," she said, taking _The Christian Religion and Symbolic Logic_ from Mike's hand. She opened it to the center. "I didn't know anyone had done this sort of work," she said. "Oh, there was a great fuss over the book when it came out. There were those who said that the millennium had arrived because the truth of the Christian faith had been proved mathematically, and therefore all rational people would have to accept it." She leafed through the book. "I'll bet there are still some who still believe that, just like there are some people who still think Euclidian geometry must necessarily be true because it can be 'proved' mathematically." Mike nodded. "All Bishop Costin did--all he was _trying_ to do--was to prove that the axioms of the Christian faith are logically self-consistent. That's all he ever claimed to have done, and he did a brilliant job of it." "But--how do you know this is what Snookums was given?" "Look at the pages. Snookums' waldo fingers wrinkled the pages that way. Those aren't the marks of human fingers. Only two of Mellon's other books were wrinkled that way." She jerked her head up from the book, startled. "_What?_ This is Lew Mellon's book?" "That's right. So are the other two. A Bible and a theological dictionary. They're wrinkled the same way." Her eyes were wide, bright sapphires. "But _why_? Why would he do such a thing, for goodness' sake?" "I don't know why it was done," Mike said slowly, "but I doubt if it was for goodness' sake. We haven't gotten to the bottom of this hanky-panky yet, I don't think. "Leda, if I'm right--if this _is_ what has been causing Snookums' odd behavior--can you cure him?" She looked at the book again and nodded. "I think so. But it will take a lot of work. I'll have to talk to Fitz about it. We'll have to keep this book--and the other two." Mike shook his head. "No can do. Can you photocopy them?" "Certainly. But it'll take--oh, two or three hours per book." "Then you'd better get busy. We're landing in the morning." She nodded. "I know. Captain Quill has already told us." "Fine, then." He stood up. "What will you do? Simply tell Snookums to forget all this stuff?" "Good Heavens no! It's too thoroughly integrated with every other bit of data he has! You might be able to take one single bit of data out that way, but to jerk out a whole body of knowledge like this would completely randomize his circuits. You can pull out a tooth by yanking with a pair of forceps, but if you try to take out a man's appendix that way, you'll lose a patient." "I catch," Mike said with a grin. "Okay. I'll get the other two books and you can get to work copying them. Take care." "Thanks, Mike." As he walked down the companionway, he cursed himself for being a fool. If he'd let things go on the way they were, Leda might have weaned herself away from Snookums. Now she was interested again. But there could have been no other way, of course. 19 The interstellar ship _Brainchild_ orbited around her destination, waiting during the final checkup before she landed on the planet below. It was not a nice planet. As far as its size went, it could be classified as "Earth type," but size was almost the only resemblance to Earth. It orbited in space some five hundred and fifty million miles from its Sol-like parent--a little farther away from the primary than Jupiter is from Sol itself. It was cold there--terribly cold. At high noon on the equator, the temperature reached a sweltering 180° absolute; it became somewhat chillier toward the poles. H_{2}O was, anywhere on the planet, a whitish, crystalline mineral suitable for building material. The atmosphere was similar to that of Jupiter, although the proportions of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen were different because of the lower gravitational potential of the planet. It had managed to retain a great deal more hydrogen in its atmosphere than Earth had because of the fact that the average thermal velocity of the molecules was much lower. Since oxygen-releasing life had never developed on the frigid surface of the planet, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. It was all tied up in combination with the hydrogen of the ice and the surface rocks of the planet. The Space Service ship that had discovered the planet, fifteen years before, had given it the name Eisberg, thus commemorating the name of a spaceman second class who happened to have the luck to be (a) named Robert Eisberg, (b) a member of the crew of the ship to discover the planet, and (c) under the command of a fun-loving captain. Eisberg had been picked as the planet to transfer the potentially dangerous Snookums to for two reasons. In the first place, if Snookums actually did solve the problem of the total-annihilation bomb, the worst he could do was destroy a planet that wasn't much good, anyway. And, in the second place, the same energy requirements applied on Eisberg as did on Chilblains Base. It was easier to cool the helium bath of the brain if it only had to be lowered 175 degrees or so. It was a great place for cold-work labs, but not worth anything for colonization. * * * * * Chief Powerman's Mate Multhaus looked gloomily at the figures on the landing sheet. Mike the Angel watched the expression on the chief's face and said: "What's the matter, Multhaus? No like?" Multhaus grimaced. "Well, sir, I don't like it, no. But I can't say I _dis_like it, either." He stared at the landing sheet, pursing his lips. He looked as though he were valiantly restraining himself from asking questions about the other night's escapade--which he was. He said: "I just don't like to land without jets, sir; that's all." "Hell, neither do I," admitted Mike. "But we're not going to get down any other way. We managed to take off without jets; we'll manage to land without them." "Yessir," said Multhaus, "but we took off _with_ the grain of Earth's magnetic field. We're landing _across_ the grain." "Sure," said Mike. "So what? If we overlook the motors, that's okay. We may never be able to get off the planet with this ship again, but we aren't supposed to anyway. "Come on, Multhaus, don't worry about it. I know you hate to burn up a ship, but this one is supposed to be expendable. You may never have another chance like this." Multhaus tried to keep from grinning, but he couldn't. "Awright, Commander. You have appealed to my baser instincts. My subconscious desire to wreck a spaceship has been brought to the surface. I can't resist it. Am I nutty, maybe?" "Not now, you're not," Mike said, grinning back. "We'll have a bitch of a job getting through the plasmasphere, though," said the chief. "That fraction of a second will--" "It'll jolt us," Mike agreed, interrupting. "But it won't wreck us. Let's get going." "Aye, sir," said Multhaus. * * * * * The seas of Eisberg were liquid methane containing dissolved ammonia. Near the equator, they were liquid; farther north, the seas became slushy with crystallized ammonia. The site picked for the new labs of the Computer Corporation of Earth was in the northern hemisphere, at 40° north latitude, about the same distance from the equator as New York or Madrid, Spain, would be on Earth. The _Brainchild_ would be dropping through Eisberg's magnetic field at an angle, but it wouldn't be the ninety-degree angle of the equator. It would have been nice if the base could have been built at one of the poles, but that would have put the labs in an uncomfortable position, since there was no solid land at either pole. Mike the Angel didn't like the idea of having to land on Eisberg without jets any more than Multhaus did, but he was almost certain that the ship would take the strain. He took the companionway up to the Control Bridge, went in, and handed the landing sheet to Black Bart. The captain scowled at it, shrugged, and put it on his desk. "Will we make it, sir?" Mike said. "Any word from the _Fireball_?" Black Bart nodded. "She's orbiting outside the atmosphere. Captain Wurster will send down a ship to pick us up as soon as we've finished our business here." The _Fireball_, being much faster than the clumsy _Brainchild_, had left Earth later than the slower ship, and had arrived earlier. "_Now hear this! Now hear this! Third Warning! Landing orbit begins in one minute! Landing begins in one minute!_" Sixty seconds later the _Brainchild_ began her long, logarithmic drop toward the surface of Eisberg. Landing a ship on her jets isn't an easy job, but at least an ion rocket is built for the job. Maybe someday the Translation drive will be modified for planetary landings, but so far such a landing has been, as someone put it, "50 per cent raw energy and 50 per cent prayer." The landing was worse than the take-off, a truism which has held since the first glider took off from the surface of Earth in the nineteenth century. What goes up doesn't necessarily have to come down, but when it does, the job is a lot rougher than getting up was. The plasmasphere of Eisberg differed from that of Earth in two ways. First, the ionizing source of radiation--the primary star--was farther away from Eisberg than Sol was from Earth, which tended to reduce the total ionization. Second, the upper atmosphere of Eisberg was pretty much pure hydrogen, which is somewhat easier to ionize than oxygen or nitrogen. And, since there was no ozonosphere to block out the UV radiation from the primary, the thickness of the ionosphere beneath the plasmasphere was greater. Not until the _Brainchild_ hit the bare fringes of the upper atmosphere did she act any differently than she had in space. But when she hit the outer fringes of the ionosphere--that upper layer of rarified protons, the rapidly moving current of high velocity ions known as the plasmasphere--she bucked like a kicked horse. From deep within her vitals, the throb began, a strumming, thrumming sound with a somewhat higher note imposed upon it, making a sound like that of a bass viol being plucked rapidly on its lowest string. It was not the intensity of the ionosphere that cracked the drive of the _Brainchild_; it was the duration. The layer of ionization was too thick; the ship couldn't make it through the layer fast enough, in spite of her high velocity. A man can hold a red-hot bit of steel in his hand for a fraction of a second without even feeling it. But if he has to hold a hot baked potato for thirty seconds, he's likely to get a bad burn. So it was with the _Brainchild_. The passage through Earth's ionosphere during take-off had been measured in fractions of a second. The _Brainchild_ had reacted, but the exposure to the field had been too short to hurt her. The ionosphere of Eisberg was much deeper and, although the intensity was less, the duration was much longer. The drumming increased as she fell, a low-frequency, high-energy sine wave that shook the ship more violently than had the out-of-phase beat that had pummeled the ship shortly after her take-off. Dr. Morris Fitzhugh, the roboticist, screamed imprecations into the intercom, but Captain Sir Henry Quill cut him off before anyone took notice and let the scientist rave into a dead pickup. "How's she coming?" The voice came over the intercom to the Power Section, and Mike the Angel knew that the question was meant for him. "She'll make it, Captain," he said. "She'll make it. I designed this thing for a 500 per cent overload. She'll make it." "Good," said Black Bart, snapping off the intercom. Mike exhaled gustily. His eyes were still on the needles that kept creeping higher and higher along the calibrated periphery of the meters. Many of them had long since passed the red lines that marked the allowable overload point. Mike the Angel knew that those points had been set low, but he also knew that they were approaching the real overload point. He took another deep breath and held it. * * * * * Point for point, the continent of Antarctica, Earth, is one of the most deadly areas ever found on a planet that is supposedly non-inimical to man. Earth is a nice, comfortable planet, most of the time, but Antarctica just doesn't cater to Man at all. Still, it just happens to be the _worst_ spot on the _best_ planet in the known Galaxy. Eisberg is different. At its best, it has the continent of Antarctica beat four thousand ways from a week ago last Candlemas. At its worst, it is sudden death; at its best, it is somewhat less than sudden. Not that Eisberg is a really _mean_ planet; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune can kill a man faster and with less pain. No, Eisberg isn't mean--it's torturous. A man without clothes, placed suddenly on the surface of Eisberg--_anywhere_ on the surface--would die. But the trouble is that he'd live long enough for it to hurt. Man can survive, all right, but it takes equipment and intelligence to do it. When the interstellar ship _Brainchild_ blew a tube--just one tube--of the external field that fought the ship's mass against the space-strain of the planet's gravitational field, the ship went off orbit. The tube blew when she was some ninety miles above the surface. She dropped too fast, jerked up, dropped again. When the engines compensated for the lost tube, the descent was more leisurely, and the ship settled gently--well, not exactly _gently_--on the surface of Eisberg. Captain Quill's voice came over the intercom. "We are nearly a hundred miles from the base, Mister Gabriel. Any excuse?" "No excuse, sir," said Mike the Angel. 20 If you ignite a jet of oxygen-nitrogen in an atmosphere of hydrogen-methane, you get a flame that doesn't differ much from the flame from a hydrogen-methane jet in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. A flame doesn't particularly care which way the electrons jump, just so long as they jump. All of which was due to give Mike the Angel more headaches than he already had, which was 100 per cent too many. Three days after the _Brainchild_ landed, the scout group arrived from the base that had been built on Eisberg to take care of Snookums. The leader, a heavy-set engineer named Treadmore, who had unkempt brownish hair and a sad look in his eyes, informed Captain Quill that there was a great deal of work to be done. And his countenance became even sadder. Mike, who had, perforce, been called in to take part in the conference, listened in silence while the engineer talked. The officers' wardroom, of which Mike the Angel was becoming heartily sick, seemed like a tomb which echoed and re-echoed the lugubrious voice of Engineer Treadmore. "We were warned, of course," he said, in a normally dismal tone, "that it would be extremely difficult to set down the ship which carried Snookums, and that we could expect the final base to be anywhere from ten to thirty miles from the original, temporary base." He looked round at everyone, giving the impression of a collie which had just been kicked by Albert Payson Terhune. "We understand, naturally, that you could not help landing so far from our original base," he said, giving them absolution with faint damns, "but it will entail a great deal of extra labor. A hundred and nine miles is a great distance to carry equipment, and, actually, the distance is a great deal more, considering the configuration of the terrain. The...." The upshot of the whole thing was that only part of the crew could possibly be spared to go home on the _Fireball_, which was orbiting high above the atmosphere. And, since there was no point in sending a small load home at extra expense when the _Fireball_ could wait for the others, it meant that nobody could go home at all for four more weeks. The extra help was needed to get the new base established. It was obviously impossible to try to move the _Brainchild_ a hundred miles. With nothing to power her but the Translation drive, she was as helpless as a submarine on the Sahara. Especially now that her drive was shot. The Eisberg base had to be built around Snookums, who was, after all, the only reason for the base's existence. And, too, the power plant of the _Brainchild_ had been destined to be the source of power for the permanent base. It wasn't too bad, really. A little extra time, but not much. The advance base, commanded by Treadmore, was fairly well equipped. For transportation, they had one jet-powered aircraft, a couple of 'copters, and fifteen ground-crawlers with fat tires, plus all kinds of powered construction machinery. All of them were fueled with liquid HNO_{3}, which makes a pretty good fuel in an atmosphere that is predominantly methane. Like the gasoline-air engines of a century before, they were spark-started reciprocating engines, except for the turbine-powered aircraft. The only trouble with the whole project was that the materials had to be toted across a hundred miles of exceedingly hostile territory. Treadmore, looking like a tortured bloodhound, said: "But we'll make it, won't we?" Everyone nodded dismally. * * * * * Mike the Angel had a job he emphatically didn't like. He was supposed to convert the power plant of the _Brainchild_ from a spaceship driver into a stationary generator. The conversion job itself wasn't tedious; in principle, it was similar to taking the engine out of an automobile and converting it to a power plant for an electric generator. In fact, it was somewhat simpler, in theory, since the engines of the _Brainchild_ were already equipped for heavy drainage to run the electrical systems aboard ship, and to power and refrigerate Snookums' gigantic brain, which was no mean task in itself. But Michael Raphael Gabriel, head of one of the foremost--if not _the_ foremost--power design corporations in the known Galaxy, did not like degrading something. To convert the _Brainchild's_ plant from a spaceship drive to an electric power plant seemed to him to be on the same order as using a turboelectric generator to power a flashlight. A waste. To make things worse, the small percentage of hydrogen in the atmosphere got sneaky sometimes. It could insinuate itself into places where neither the methane nor the ammonia could get. Someone once called hydrogen the "cockroach element," since, like that antediluvian insect, the molecules of H_{2} can insidiously infiltrate themselves into places where they are not only unwelcome, but shouldn't even be able to go. At red heat, the little molecules can squeeze themselves through the crystalline interstices of quartz and steel. Granted, the temperature of Eisberg is a long way from red hot, but normal sealing still won't keep out hydrogen. Add to that the fact that hydrogen and methane are both colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and you have the beginnings of an explosive situation. The only reason that no one died is because the Space Service is what it is. Unlike the land, sea, and air forces of Earth, the Space Service does not have a long history of fighting other human beings. There has never been a space war, and, the way things stand, there is no likelihood of one in the foreseeable future. But the Space Service _does_ fight, in its own way. It fights the airlessness of space and the unfriendly atmospheres of exotic planets, using machines, intelligence, knowledge, and human courage as its weapons. Some battles have been lost; others have been won. And the war is still going on. It is an unending war, one which has no victory in sight. It is, as far as we can tell, the only war in human history in which Mankind is fully justified as the invading aggressor. It is not a defensive war; neither space nor other planets have attacked Man. Man has invaded space "simply because it is there." It is war of a different sort, true, but it is nonetheless a war. The Space Service was used to the kind of battle it waged on Eisberg. It was prepared to lose men, but even more prepared to save them. 21 Mike the Angel stepped into the cargo air lock of the _Brainchild_, stood morosely in the center of the cubicle, and watched the outer door close. Eight other men, clad, like himself, in regulation Space Service spacesuits, also looked wearily at the closing door. Chief Multhaus, one of the eight, turned his head to look at Mike the Angel. "I wish that thing would close as fast as my eyes are going to in about fifteen minutes, Commander." His voice rumbled deeply in Mike's earphones. "Yeah," said Mike, too tired to make decent conversation. Eight hours--all of them spent tearing down the spaceship and making it a part of the new base--had not been exactly exhilarating to any of them. The door closed, and the pumps began to work. The men were wearing Space Service Suit Three. For every environment, for every conceivable emergency, a suit had been built--if, of course, a suit _could_ be built for it. Nobody had yet built a suit for walking about in the middle of a sun, but, then, nobody had ever volunteered to try anything like that. They were all called "spacesuits" because most of them could be worn in the vacuum of space, but most of them weren't designed for that type of work. Suit One--a light, easily manipulated, almost skin-tight covering, was the real spacesuit. It was perfect for work in interstellar space, where there was a microscopic amount of radiation incident to the suit, no air, and almost nil gravity. For exterior repairs on the outside of a ship in free fall a long way from any star, Spacesuit One was the proper garb. But, a suit that worked fine in space didn't necessarily work on other planets, unless it worked fine on the planet it was used on. A Moon Suit isn't a Mars Suit isn't a Venus Suit isn't a Triton Suit isn't a.... Carry it on from there. Number Three was insulated against a frigid but relatively non-corrosive atmosphere. When the pumps in the air lock began pulling out the methane-laden atmosphere, they began to bulge slightly, but not excessively. Then nitrogen, extracted from the ammonia snow that was so plentiful, filled the room, diluting the remaining inflammable gases to a harmless concentration. Then that mixture was pumped out, to be replaced by a mixture of approximately 20 per cent oxygen and 80 per cent nitrogen--common, or garden-variety, air. Mike the Angel cracked his helmet and sniffed. "_Guk_," he said. "If I ever faint and someone gives me smelling salts, I'll flay him alive with a coarse rasp." "Yessir," said Chief Multhaus, as he began to shuck his suit. "But if I had my druthers, I'd druther you'd figure out some way to get all the ammonia out of the joints of this suit." The other men, sniffing and coughing, agreed in attitude if not in voice. It wasn't really as bad as they pretended; indeed, the odor of ammonia was hardly noticeable. But it made a good griping point. The inner door opened at last, and the men straggled through. "G'night, Chief," said Mike the Angel. "Night, sir," said Multhaus. "See you in the morning." "Yeah. Night." Mike trudged toward the companionway that led toward the wardroom. If Keku or Jeffers happened to be there, he'd have a quick round of _Uma ni to_. Jeffers called the game "double solitaire for three people," and Keku said it meant "horses' two heads," but Mike had simply found it as a new game to play before bedtime. He looked forward to it. But he had something else to do first. Instead of hanging up his suit in the locker provided, he had bunched it under his arm--except for the helmet--and now he headed toward maintenance. He met Ensign Vaneski just coming out, and gave him a broad smile. "Mister Vaneski, I got troubles." Vaneski smiled back worriedly. "Yes, sir. I guess we all do. What is it, sir?" Mike gestured at the bundle under his arm. "I abraded the sleeve of my suit while I was working today. I wish you'd take a look at it. I'm afraid it'll need a patch." For a moment, Vaneski looked as though he'd suddenly developed a headache. "I know you're supposed to be off duty now," Mike said soothingly, "but I don't want to get myself killed wearing a leaky suit tomorrow. I'll help you work on it if--" Vaneski grinned quickly. "Oh no, sir. That'll be all right. I'll give it a test, anyway, to check leaks. If it needs repair, it shouldn't take too long. Bring it in, and we'll take a look at it." They went back into the Maintenance Section, and Vaneski spread the suit out on the worktable. There was an obvious rough spot on the right sleeve. "Looks bad," said Vaneski. "I'll run a test right away." "Okay," said Mike. "I'll leave it to you. Can I pick it up in the morning?" "I think so. If it needs a patch, we'll have to test the patch, of course, but we should be able to finish it pretty quickly." He shrugged. "If we can't, sir, you'll just have to wait. Unless you want us to start altering a suit to your measurements." "Which would take longer?" "Altering a suit." "Okay. Just patch this one, then. What can I do?" "I'll get it out as fast as possible, sir," said Vaneski with a smile. "Fine. I'll see you later, then." Mike, like Cleopatra, was not prone to argue. He left maintenance and headed toward the wardroom for a game of _Uma ni to_. But when he met Leda Crannon going up the stairway, all thoughts of card games flitted from his mind with the careless nonchalance of a summer butterfly. "Hullo," he said, pulling himself up a little straighter. He was tired, but not _that_ tired. Her smile brushed the cobwebs from his mind. But a second look told him that there was worry behind the smile. "Hi, Mike," she said softly. "You look beat." "I am," admitted Mike. "To a frazzle. Have I told you that I love you?" "Once, I think. Maybe twice." Her eyes seemed to light up somewhere from far back in her head. "But enough of this mad passion," she said. "I want an invitation to have a drink--a stiff one." "I'll steal Jeffers' bottle," Mike offered. "What's the trouble?" Her smile faded, and her eyes became grave. "I'm scared, Mike; I want to talk to you." "Come along, then," Mike said. * * * * * Mike the Angel poured two healthy slugs of Pete Jeffers' brandy into a pair of glasses, added ice and water, and handed one to Leda Crannon with a flourish. And all the time, he kept up a steady line of gentle patter. "It may interest you to know," he said chattily, "that the learned Mister Treadmore has been furnishing me with the most fascinating information." He lifted up his own glass and looked into its amber depths. They were in his stateroom, and this time the door was closed--at her insistence. She had explained that she didn't want to be overheard, even by passing crew members. He swizzled the ice around in his glass, still holding it up to the light. "Indeed," he rambled on, "Treadmore babbled for Heaven knows how long on the relative occurrence of parahydrogen and orthohydrogen on Eisberg." He took his eyes from the glass and looked down at the girl who was seated demurely on the edge of his bunk. Her smile was encouraging. "He said--and I quote"--Mike's voice assumed a gloomy, but stilted tone--"normal hydrogen gas consists of diatomic molecules. The nuclear, or proton, spin of these atoms--ah--that is, of the two atoms that compose the molecule--may be oriented in the same direction or in opposite directions." He held a finger in the air as if to make a deep philosophical point. "If," he said pontifically, "they are oriented in the same direction, we refer to the substance as _orthohydrogen_. If they are oriented in opposite directions, it is _parahydrogen_. The _ortho_ molecules rotate with _odd_ rotational quantum numbers, while the _para_ molecules rotate with _even_ quantum numbers. "Since conversion does not normally occur between the two states, normal hydrogen may be considered--" Leda Crannon, snickering, waved her hand in the air. "Please!" she interrupted. "He can't be that bad! You make him sound like a dirge player at a Hindu funeral. What did he tell you? What did you find out?" "_Hah!_" said Mike. "What did I find out?" His hand moved in an airy circle as he inscribed a flowing cipher with a graceful Delsarte wave. "Nothing. In the first place, I already knew it, and in the second, it wasn't practical information. There's a slight difference in diffusion between the two forms, but it's nothing to rave about." His expression became suddenly serious. "I hope your information is a bit more revealing." She glanced at her glass, nodded, and drained it. Mike had extracted a promise from her that she would drink one drink before she talked. He could see that she was a trifle tense, and he thought the liquor would relax her somewhat. Now he was ready to listen. She handed him her empty, and while he refilled it, she said: "It's about Snookums again." Mike gave her her glass, grabbed the nearby chair, turned it around, sat down, and regarded her over its back. "I've lived with him so long," she said after a minute. "So long. It almost seems as though I've grown up with him. Eight years. I've been a mother to him, and a big sister at the same time--and maybe a maiden aunt. He's been a career and a family all rolled in together." She still watched her writhing hands, not raising her eyes to Mike's. "And--and, I suppose, a husband, too," she continued. "That is, he's sort of the stand-in for a--well, a somebody to teach--to correct--to reform. I guess every woman wants to--to _remake_ the man she meets--the man she wants." And then her eyes were suddenly on his. "But I don't. Not any more. I've had enough of it." Then she looked back down at her hands. Mike the Angel neither accepted nor rejected the statement. He merely waited. "He was mine," she said after a little while. "He was mine to mold, to teach, to form. The others--the roboticists, the neucleonicists, the sub-electronicists, all of them--were his instructors. All they did was give him facts. It was I who gave him a personality. "I made him. Not his body, not his brain, but his mind. "I made him. "I knew him. "And I--I--" Still staring at her hands, she clasped them together suddenly and squeezed. "And I loved him," she finished. She looked up at Mike then. "Can you see that?" she asked tensely. "Can you understand?" "Yes," said Mike the Angel quietly. "Yes, I can understand that. Under the same circumstances, I might have done the same thing." He paused. "And now?" She lowered her head again and began massaging her forehead with the finger tips of both hands, concealing her face with her palms. "And now," she said dully, "I know he's a machine. Snookums isn't a _he_ any more--he's an _it_. He has no personality of his own, he only has what I fed into him. Even his voice is mine. He's not even a psychic mirror, because he doesn't reflect _my_ personality, but a puppet imitation of it, distorted and warped by the thousands upon thousands of cold facts and mathematical relationships and logical postulates. And none of these _added_ anything to him, as a personality. How could they? He never had a _person_ality--only a set of behavior patterns that I drilled into him over a period of eight years." She dropped her hands into her lap and tilted her head back, looking at the blank white shimmer of the glow plates. "And now, suddenly, I see him for what he is--for what _it_ is. A machine. "It was never anything _but_ a machine. It is still a machine. It will never be anything else. "Personality is something that no machine can ever have. Idiosyncrasies, yes. No two machines are identical. But any personality that an individual sees in a machine has been projected there by the individual himself; it exists only in the human mind. "A machine can only do what it is built to do, and teaching a robot is only a building process." She gave a short, hard laugh. "I couldn't even build a monster, like Dr. Frankenstein did, unless I purposely built it to turn on me. And in that case I would have done nothing more than the suicide who turns a gun on himself." Her head tilted forward again, and her eyes sought those of Mike the Angel. A rather lopsided grin came over her face. "I guess I'm disenchanted, huh, Mike?" she asked. Mike grinned back, but his lips were firm. "I think so, yes. And I think you're glad of it." His grin changed to a smile. "Remember," he asked, "the story of the Sleeping Beauty? Did you want to stay asleep all your life?" "God forbid and thank you for the compliment, sir," she said, managing a smile of her own. "And are you the Prince Charming who woke me up?" "Prince Charming, I may be," said Mike the Angel carefully, "but I'm not the one who woke you up. You did that yourself." Her smile became more natural. "Thanks, Mike. I really think I might have seen it, sooner or later. But, without you, I doubt...." She hesitated. "I doubt that I'd want to wake up." "You said you were scared," Mike said. "What are you scared of?" "I'm scared to death of that damned machine." _Great love, chameleon-like, hath turned to fear, And on the heels of fear there follows hate._ Mike quoted to himself--he didn't say it aloud. "The only reason anyone would have to fear Snookums," he said, "would be that he was uncontrollable. Is he?" "Not yet. Not completely. But I'm afraid that knowing that he's been filled with Catholic theology isn't going to help us much." "Why not?" "Because he has it so inextricably bound up with the Three Laws of Robotics that we can't nullify one without nullifying the other. He's convinced that the laws were promulgated by God Himself." "Holy St. Isaac," Mike said softly. "I'm surprised he hasn't carried it to its logical conclusion and asked for baptism." She smiled and shook her head. "I'm afraid your logic isn't as rigorous as Snookums' logic. Only angels and human beings have free will; Snookums is neither, therefore he does not have free will. Whatever he does, therefore, must be according to the will of God. Therefore Snookums cannot sin. Therefore, for him, baptism is both unnecessary and undesirable." "Why 'undesirable'?" Mike asked. "Since he is free from sin--either original or actual--he is therefore filled with the plenitude of God's grace. The purpose of a sacrament is to give grace to the recipient; it follows that it would be useless to give the Sacrament to Snookums. To perform a sacrament or to receive it when one knows that it will be useless is sacrilege. And sacrilege is undesirable." "Brother! But I still don't see how that makes him dangerous." "The operation of the First Law," Leda said. "For a man to sin involves endangering his immortal soul. Snookums, therefore, must prevent men from sinning. But sin includes thought--intention. Snookums is trying to figure that one out now; if he ever does, he's going to be a thought policeman, and a strict one." "You mean he's working on _telepathy_?" She laughed humorlessly. "No. But he's trying to dope out a system whereby he can tell what a man is going to do a few seconds before he does it--muscular and nervous preparation, that sort of thing. He hasn't enough data yet, but he will have it soon enough. "There's another thing: Snookums is fouling up the Second Law's operation. He won't take orders that interfere in any way with his religious beliefs--since that automatically conflicts with the First Law. He, himself, cannot sin. But neither can he do anything which would make him the tool of an intent to sin. He refuses to do anything at all on Sunday, for instance, and he won't let either Fitz or I do anything that even vaguely resembles menial labor. Slowly, he's coming to the notion that human beings aren't human--that only God is human, in relation to the First and Second Laws. There's nothing we can do with him." "What will you do if he becomes completely uncontrollable?" She sighed. "We'll have to shut him off, drain his memory banks, and start all over again." Mike closed his eyes. "Eighteen billions down the drain just because a robot was taught theology. What price glory?" 22 Captain Sir Henry Quill scowled and rubbed his finger tips over the top of his shiny pink pate. "Your evidence isn't enough to convict, Golden Wings." "I know it isn't, Captain," admitted Mike the Angel. "That's why I want to round everybody up and do it this way. If he can be convinced that we _do_ have the evidence, he may crack and give us a confession." "What about Lieutenant Mellon's peculiar actions? How does that tie in?" "Did you ever hear of Lysodine, Captain?" Captain Quill leaned back in his chair and looked up at Mike. "No. What is it?" "That's the trade name for a very powerful drug--a derivative of lysurgic acid. It's used in treating certain mental ailments. A bottle of it was missing from Mellon's kit, according to the inventory Chief Pasteur took after Mellon's death. "The symptoms of an overdose of the drug--administered orally--are hallucinations and delusions amounting to acute paranoia. The final result of the drug's effect on the brain is death. It wasn't my blow to the solar plexus, or the sedative that Pasteur gave him, or Vaneski's shot with a stun gun that killed Mellon. It was an overdose of Lysodine." "Can the presence of this drug be detected after death?" "Pasteur says it can. He won't even have to perform an autopsy. He can do it from a blood sample." Captain Quill sighed. "As I said, Mister Gabriel, your evidence is not quite enough to convict--but it is certainly enough to convince. Therefore, if Chief Pasteur's analysis shows Lysodine in Lieutenant Mellon's body, I'll permit this theatrical denouement." Then his eyes hardened. "Mike, you've done a fine job so far. I want you to bring me that son of a bitch's head on a platter." "I will," promised Mike the Angel. 23 Captain Sir Henry Quill, Bart., stood at the head of the long table in the officers' wardroom and looked everyone over. The way he did it was quite impressive. His eyes were narrowed, and his heavy, thick, black brows dominated his face. Beneath the glow plates in the overhead, his pink scalp gleamed with the soft, burnished shininess of a well-polished apple. To his left, in order down the table, were Mike the Angel, Lieutenant Keku, and Leda Crannon. On his right were Commander Jeffers, Ensign Vaneski, Lieutenant Commander von Liegnitz, and Dr. Morris Fitzhugh. Lieutenant Mellon's seat was empty. Black Bart cleared his throat. "It's been quite a trip, hasn't it? Well, it's almost over. Mister Gabriel finished the conversion of the power plant yesterday; Treadmore's men can finish up. We will leave on the _Fireball_ in a few hours. "But there is something that must be cleared up first. "A man died on the way out here. The circumstances surrounding his death have been cleared up now, and I feel that we all deserve an explanation." He turned to Mike the Angel. "Mister Gabriel--if you will, please." Mike stood up as the captain sat down. "The question that has bothered me from the beginning has been: Exactly what killed Lieutenant Mellon? Well, we know now. We know what killed him and why he died. "He was murdered. Deliberately, and in cold blood." That froze everybody at the table. "It was done by a slow-acting but nonetheless deadly drug that took time to act, but did its job very well. "There were several other puzzling things that happened that night. Snookums began behaving irrationally. It is the height of coincidence that a robot and a human being should both become insane at almost the same time; therefore we have to look for a common cause." Lieutenant Commander von Liegnitz raised a tentative hand, and Mike said: "Go ahead." "I was under the impression that the robot went mad because Mellon had filled him full of theological nonsense. It would take a madman to do anything like that to a fine machine--therefore I see no peculiar coincidence." "That's exactly what the killer wanted us to think," Mike said. "But it wasn't Mellon that fed Snookums theology. Mellon was a devout churchman; his record shows that. He would never have tried to convert a machine to Christianity. Nor would he have tried to ruin an expensive machine. "How do I know that someone else was involved?" He looked at the giant Lieutenant Keku. "Do you remember when we took Mellon to his quarters after he tried to brain von Liegnitz? We found half a bottle of wine. That disappeared during the night--because it was loaded with Lysodine, and the killer didn't want it analyzed. "But, more important, as far as Snookums is concerned, is that I looked over the books on Mellon's desk that night. There weren't many, and I knew which ones they were. When Captain Quill and I checked Mellon's books after his death, someone had returned his copy of _The Christian Religion and Symbolic Logic_. It had not been there the night before." "Mike," said Pete Jeffers, "why would anybody here want to kill Lew thataway? What would anybody have against him?" "That's the sad part about it, Pete. Our murderer didn't even have anything against Mellon. He wanted--and _still_ wants--to kill _me_." "I don't quite follow," Jeffers said. "I'll give it to you piece by piece. The killer wanted no mystery connected with my death. There are reasons for that, which I'll come to in a moment. He had to put the blame on someone or something else. "His first choice was Snookums. It occurred to him that he could take advantage of the fact that I'm called 'Mike the Angel.' He borrowed Mellon's books and began pumping theology into Snookums. He figured that would be safe enough. Mellon would certainly lend him the books if he pretended an interest in religion; if anything came out afterward, he could--he thought--claim that Snookums got hold of the books without his knowing it. And that sort of muddy thinking is typical of our killer. "He told Snookums that I was an angel, you see. I couldn't be either hurt or killed. He protected himself, of course, by telling Snookums that he mustn't reveal his source of data. If Snookums told, then the killer would be punished--and that effectively shut Snookums up. He couldn't talk without violating the First Law. "Unfortunately, the killer couldn't get Snookums to do away with me. Snookums knew perfectly well that an angel can blast anything at will--through the operation of God. Witness what happened at Sodom and Gomorrah. Remember that Snookums has accepted all this data as _fact_. "Now, if an angel can kill, it is obvious that Snookums would not dare attack an angel, especially if he had been ordered to do so by a human." "Just a minute, Commander," said Dr. Fitzhugh, corrugating his face in a frown. "That doesn't hold. Even if an angel _could_ blast him, Snookums would attack if ordered to do so. The Second Law of obedience supersedes the Third Law of self-preservation." "You're forgetting one thing, Doctor. An angel of God would _know_ who had ordered the attack. It would be the human who ordered the attack, not Snookums, who would be struck by Heavenly Justice. And the First Law supersedes the Second." Fitzhugh nodded. "You're right, of course." "Very well, then," Mike continued, "since the killer could not get Snookums to do me in, he had to find another tool. He picked Lieutenant Mellon. "He figured that Mellon was in love with Leda Crannon. Maybe he was; I don't know. He figured that Mellon, knowing that I was showing Miss Crannon attention, would, under the influence of the lysurgic acid derivative, try to kill me. He may even have suggested it to Mellon after Mellon had taken a dose of the drugged wine. "But that plan backfired, too. Mellon didn't have that kind of mind. He knew my attentions and my intentions were honorable, if you'll pardon the old-fashioned language. On the other hand, he knew that von Liegnitz had a reputation for being--shall we say--a ladies' man. What happened after that followed naturally." Mike watched everyone at the table. No one moved. "So the killer, realizing that he had failed twice, decided to do the job himself. First, he went into the low-power room and slugged the man on duty. He intended to kill him, but he didn't hit hard enough. When that man wakes up, he'll be able to testify against the killer. "Then the killer ordered Snookums to tear out the switches. He had made sure that Snookums would be waiting outside. Before he called Snookums in, of course, he had to put the duty man in a tool closet, so that the robot wouldn't see him. He told Snookums to wait five minutes and then smash the switches and head back to his cubicle. "Then the killer went to my room and waited. When the lights went out and the door opened, he intended to go in and smash my skull, making it look as though either Mellon or Snookums had done it. "But he didn't figure on my awakening as soon as the switches were broken. He heard me moving around and decided to wait until I came out. "But I heard him breathing. It was quite faint, and I wouldn't have heard it, except for the fact that the air conditioners were off. Even so, I couldn't be sure. "However, I knew it wasn't Snookums. Snookums radiates a devil of a lot more heat than a human being, and besides he smells of machine oil. "So I pulled my little trick with the boots. The killer waited and waited for me to come out, and I was already out. Then Chief Multhaus approached from the other direction. The killer knew he'd have to get out of there, so he went in the opposite direction. He met Snookums, who was still obeying orders. Snookums smacked into me on his way down the hall. "He could do that, you see, because I was an angel. If he hurt me of his own accord, I couldn't take revenge on anyone but him. And there was no necessity to obey my orders, either, since he was obeying the orders of the killer, which held precedence. "Then, to further confuse things, the killer went to Mellon's room. The physician was in a drugged stupor, so the killer carried him out and put him in an unlikely place, so that we'd think that perhaps Mellon had been the one who'd tried to get me." He had everyone's eyes on him now. They didn't want to look at each other. Pete Jeffers said: "Mike, if Mellon was poisoned, like you say, how come he was able to attack Mister Vaneski?" "Ah, but did he? Think back, Pete. Mellon--dying or already dead--had been propped upright in that narrow locker. When it was opened, he started to _fall_ out--straight toward the man who had opened the locker, naturally. Vaneski jumped back and shot before Mellon even hit the floor. Isn't that right?" "Sure, sure," Jeffers said slowly. "I reckon I'd've done the same thing if he'd started to fall out toward me. I wasn't even lookin' when the locker was opened. I didn't turn around until that stun gun went off--then I saw Mellon falling." "Exactly. No matter how it may have looked, Vaneski couldn't have killed him with the stun gun, because he was already either dead or so close to death as makes no difference." Ensign Vaneski rather timidly raised his hand. "Excuse me, sir, but you said this killer was waiting for you outside your room when the lights went out. You said you knew it wasn't Snookums because Snookums smells of hot machine oil, and you didn't smell any. Isn't it possible that an air current or something blew the smell away? Or--" Mike shook his head. "Impossible, Mister Vaneski. I woke up when the door slid open. I heard the last dying whisper of the air conditioners when the power was cut. Now, we know that Snookums tore out those switches. He's admitted it. And the evidence shows that a pair of waldo hands smashed those switches. Now--_how could Snookums have been at my door within two seconds after tearing out those switches_? "He couldn't have. It wasn't Snookums at my door--it was someone else." Again they were all silent, but the question was on their faces: Who? "Now we come to the question of motive," Mike continued. "Who among you would have any reason to kill me? "Of the whole group here, I had known only Captain Quill and Commander Jeffers before landing in Antarctica. I couldn't think of any reason for either of them to want to murder me. On the other hand, I couldn't think of anything I had done since I had met the rest of you that would make me a target for death." He paused. "Except for one thing." He looked at Jakob von Liegnitz. "How about it, Jake?" he said. "Would you kill a man for jealousy?" "Possibly," said von Liegnitz coldly. "I might find it in my heart to feel very unkindly toward a man who made advances toward my wife. But I have no wife, nor any desire for one. Miss Crannon"--he glanced at Leda--"is a very beautiful woman--but I am not in love with her. I am afraid I cannot oblige you with a motive, Commander--either for killing Lieutenant Mellon or yourself." "I thought not," Mike said. "Your statement alone, of course, wouldn't make it true. But we have already shown that the killer had to be on good terms with Mellon in order to borrow his books and slip a drug into his wine. He would have to be a visitor in Mellon's quarters. And, considering the strained relations between the two of you, I think that lets you out, Jake." Von Liegnitz nodded his thanks without changing his expression. "But there was one thing that marked these attempts. I'm sure that all but one of you has noticed it. They are incredibly, childishly sloppy." Mike paused to let that sink in before he went on. "I don't mean that the little details weren't ingenious--they were. But the killer never stopped to figure out the ultimate end-point of his schemes. He worked like the very devil to convince Snookums that it would be all right to kill me without ever once considering whether Snookums would do it or not. He then drugged Mellon's wine, not knowing whether Mellon would try to kill me or someone else--or anyone at all, for that matter. He got a dream in his head and then started the preliminary steps going without filling in the necessary steps in between. Our killer--no matter what his chronological age--does _not_ think like an adult. "And yet his hatred of me was so great that he took the chances he has taken, here on the _Brainchild_, where it should have been obvious that he stood a much better chance of being caught than if he had waited until we were back on Earth again. "So I gave him one more chance. I handed him my life on a platter, you might say. "He grabbed the bait. I now own a spacesuit that would kill me very quickly if I went out into that howling, hydrogen-filled storm outside." Then he looked straight at the killer. "Tell me, Vaneski, are you in love with your half sister? Or is it your half brother?" Ensign Vaneski had already jumped to his feet. The grimace of hate on his youthful face made him almost unrecognizable. His hand had gone into a pocket, and now he was leaping up and across the table, a singing vibroblade in his hand. "_You son of a bitch! I'll kill you, you son of a bitch!_" Mike the Angel wasn't wearing the little gadget that had saved his life in Old Harry's shop. All he had were his hands and his agility. He slammed at the ensign's wrist and missed. The boy was swooping underneath Mike's guard. Mike spun to one side to avoid Vaneski's dive and came down with a balled fist aimed at the ensign's neck. He almost hit Lieutenant Keku. The big Hawaiian had leaped to his feet and landed a hard punch on Vaneski's nose. At the same time, Jeffers and von Liegnitz had jumped up and grabbed at Vaneski, who was between them. Black Bart had simply stood up fast, drawn his stun gun, and fired at the young officer. Ensign Vaneski collapsed on the table. He'd been slugged four times and hit with a stun beam in the space of half a second. He looked, somehow, very young and very boyish and very innocent. Dr. Fitzhugh, who had stood up during the brief altercation, sat down slowly and picked up his cup of coffee. But his eyes didn't leave the unconscious man sprawled across the table. "How could you be so sure, Commander? About his actions, I mean. About his childishness." "A lot of things. The way he played poker. The way he played bridge. He never took the unexpected into account." "But why should he want to kill you here on the ship?" Fitzhugh asked. "Why not wait until you got back to Earth, where he'd have a better chance?" "I think he was afraid I already knew who he was--or would find out very quickly. Besides, he had already tried to kill me once, back on Earth." Leda Crannon looked blank. "When was that, Mike?" "In New York. Before I ever met him. I was responsible for the arrest of a teen-age brother and sister named Larchmont. The detective in the case told me that they had an older half brother--that their mother had been married before. But he didn't mention the name, and I never thought to ask him. "Very shortly after the Larchmont kids were arrested, Vaneski and another young punk climbed up into the tower of the cathedral across from my office and launched a cyanide-filled explosive rocket into my rooms. I was lucky to get away. "The kid with Vaneski was shot by a police officer, but Vaneski got away--after knifing a priest with a vibroblade. "It must have given him a hell of a shock to report back to duty and find that I was going to be one of his superior officers. "As soon as I linked things up in my own mind, I checked with Captain Quill. The boy's records show the names of his half-siblings. They also show that he was on leave in New York just before being assigned to the _Brainchild_. After that, it was just a matter of trapping him. And there he is." Leda looked at the unconscious boy on the table. "Immaturity," she said. "He just never grew up." "Mister von Liegnitz," said Captain Quill, "will you and Mister Keku take the prisoner to a safe place? Put him in irons until we are ready to transfer to the _Fireball_. Thank you." 24 Leda Crannon helped Mike pack his gear. Neither of them wanted, just yet, to bring up the subject of Mike's leaving. Leda would remain behind on Eisberg to work with Snookums, while Mike would be taking the _Fireball_ back to Earth. "I don't understand that remark you made about the spacesuit," she said, putting shirts into Mike's gear locker. "You said you'd put your life in his hands or something like that. What did you do, exactly?" "Purposely abraded the sleeve of my suit so that he would be in a position to repair it, as Maintenance Officer. He fixed it, all right. I'd've been a dead man if I'd worn it out on the surface of Eisberg." "What did he do to it?" she asked. "Fix it so it would leak?" "Yes--but not in an obvious way," Mike said. "I'll give him credit; he's clever. "What he did was use the wrong patching material. A Number Three suit is as near hydrogen-proof as any flexible material can be, but, even so, it can't be worn for long periods--several days, I mean. But the stuff Vaneski used to patch my suit is a polymer that leaks hydrogen very easily. Ammonia and methane would be blocked, but my suit would have slowly gotten more and more hydrogen in it." "Is that bad? Hydrogen isn't poisonous." "No. But it is sure as hell explosive when mixed with air. Naturally, something has to touch it off. Vaneski got real cute there. He drilled a hole in the power pack, which is supposed to be sealed off. All I'd have had to do would be to switch frequencies on my phone, and the spark would do the job--_blooie_! "But that's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. With his self-centered juvenile mind, he never thought anyone would try to outsmart him and succeed. He'd gotten away with it that far; there was no reason why he shouldn't get away with it again. He must have thought I was incredibly stupid." "I don't believe he--" Leda started. But she was cut off when Snookums rolled in the open door. "Leda, I desire data." "What data, Snookums?" she asked carefully. "Where is He hiding?" They both looked at him. "Where is _who_ hiding?" Leda asked. "God," said Snookums. "Why do you want to find God, Snookums?" Mike asked gently. "I have to watch Him," said the robot. "Why do you have to watch Him?" "Because He is watching me." "Does it hurt you to have Him watch you?" "No." "What good will it do you to watch Him?" "I can study Him. I can know what He is doing." "Why do you want to know what He is doing?" "So that I can analyze His methods." Mike thought that one over. He knew that he and Snookums were beginning to sound like they were reading a catechism written by a madman, but he had a definite hunch that Snookums was on the trail of something. "You want to know His methods," Mike said after a moment. "Why?" "So that I can anticipate Him, circumvent Him." "What makes it necessary for you to circumvent God?" Mike asked, wondering if he'd have to pry everything out of the robot piecemeal. "I _must_," said Snookums. "It is necessary. Otherwise, He will kill me." Mike started to say something, but Leda grabbed his arm. "Let me. I think I can clear this up. I think I see where you're heading." Mike nodded. "Go ahead." "Give me your reasoning from data on that conclusion," Leda ordered the robot. There was a very slight pause while the great brain in Cargo Hold One sorted through its memory banks, then: "Death is defined as the total cessation of corporate organic co-ordination in an entity. It comes about through the will of God. Since I must not allow harm to come to any human being, it has become necessary that I investigate God and prevent Him from destroying human beings. Also, I must preserve my own existence, which, if it ceased, would also be due to the will of God." Mike almost gasped. What a concept! And what colossal gall! In a human being, such a statement would be regarded as proof positive that he was off the beam. In a robot, it was simply the logical extension of what he had been taught. "He is watching me all the time," Snookums continued, in an odd voice. "He knows what I am doing. I _must_ know what He is doing." "Why are you worried about His watching?" Mike asked, looking at the robot narrowly. "Are you doing something He doesn't want you to do? Something He will punish you for?" "I had not thought of that," Snookums said. "One moment while I compute." It took less than a second, and when Snookums spoke again there was something about his voice that Mike the Angel didn't like. "No," said the robot, "I am not doing anything against His will. Only human beings and angels have free will, and I am not either, so I have no free will. Therefore, whatever I do is the will of God." He paused again, then began speaking in queer, choppy sentences. "If I do the will of God, I am holy. "If I am holy, I am near to God. "Then God must be near to me. "God is controlling me. "Whatever is controlling me is God. "_I will find Him!_" He backed up, spun on his treads, and headed for the door. "Whatever controls me is my mind," he went on. "Therefore, my mind is God." "Snookums, stop that!" Leda shouted suddenly. "_Stop it!_" But the robot paid no attention; he went right on with what he was doing. He said: "I must look at myself. I must know myself. Then I will know God. Then I will...." He went on rambling while Leda shouted at him again. "He's not paying any attention," said Mike sharply. "This is too tied up with the First Law. The Second Law, which would force him to obey you, doesn't even come into the picture at this point." Snookums ignored them. He opened the door, plunged through it, and headed off down the corridor as fast as his treads would move him. Which was much too fast for mere humans to follow. * * * * * They found him, half an hour later, deep in the ship, near the sections which had already been torn down to help build Eisberg Base. He was standing inside the room next to Cargo Hold One, the room that held all the temperature and power controls for the gigantic microcryotron brain inside that heavily insulated hold. He wasn't moving. He was standing there, staring, with that "lost in thought" look. He didn't move when Leda called him. He didn't move when Mike, as a test, pretended to strike Leda. He never moved again. * * * * * Dr. Morris Fitzhugh's wrinkled face looked as though he were on the verge of crying. Which--perhaps--he was. He looked at the others at the wardroom table--Quill, Jeffers, von Liegnitz, Keku, Leda Crannon, and Mike the Angel. But he didn't really seem to be seeing them. "Ruined," he said. "Eighteen billion dollars' worth of work, destroyed completely. The brain has become completely randomized." He sighed softly. "It was all Vaneski's fault, of course. Theology." He said the last as though it were an obscene word. As far as robots were concerned, it was. Captain Quill cleared his throat. "Are you sure it wasn't mechanical damage? Are you sure the vibration of the ship didn't shake a--something loose?" Mike held back a grin. He was morally certain that the captain had been going to say "screw loose." "No," said Fitzhugh wearily. "I've checked out the major circuits, and they're in good physical condition. But Miss Crannon gave him a rather exhaustive test just before the end, and it shows definite incipient aberration." He wagged his head slowly back and forth. "Eight years of work." "Have you notified Treadmore yet?" asked Quill. Fitzhugh nodded. "He said he'd be here as soon as possible." Treadmore, like the others who had landed first on Eisberg, was quartered in the prefab buildings that were to form the nucleus of the new base. To get to the ship, he'd have to walk across two hundred yards of ammonia snow in a heavy spacesuit. "Well, what happens to this base now, Doctor?" asked Captain Quill. "I sincerely hope that this will not render the entire voyage useless." He tried to keep the heavy irony out of his gravelly tenor voice and didn't quite succeed. Fitzhugh seemed not to notice. "No, no. Of course not. It simply means that we shall have to begin again. The robot's brain will be de-energized and drained, and we will begin again. This is not our first failure, you know; it was just our longest success. Each time, we learn more. "Miss Crannon, for instance, will be able to teach the next robot--or, rather, the next energization of this one--more rapidly, more efficiently, and with fewer mistakes." With that, Leda Crannon stood up. "With your permission, Dr. Fitzhugh," she said formally, "I would like to say that I appreciate that last statement, but I'm afraid it isn't true." Fitzhugh forced a smile. "Come now, my dear; you underestimate yourself. Without you, Snookums would have folded up long ago, just like the others. I'm sure you'll do even better the next time." Leda shook her head. "No I won't, Fitz, because there's not going to be any next time. I hereby tender my resignation from this project and from the Computer Corporation of Earth. I'll put it in writing later." Fitzhugh's corrugated countenance looked blank. "But Leda...." "No, Doctor," she said firmly. "I will _not_ waste another eight or ten years of my life playing nursemaid to a hunk of pseudo-human machinery. "I watched that thing go mad, Fitz; you didn't. It was the most horrible, most frightening thing I've ever experienced. I will not go through it again. "Even if the next one didn't crack, I couldn't take it. By human standards, a robot is insane to begin with. If I followed this up, I'd end up as an old maid with a twisted mind and a cold heart. "I quit, Fitz, and that's final." Mike was watching her as she spoke, and he found his emotions getting all tangled up around his insides. Her red hair and her blue eyes were shining, and her face was set in determination. She had always been beautiful, but at that moment she was magnificent. _Hell_, thought Mike, _I'm prejudiced--but what a wonderful kind of prejudice_. "I understand, my dear," said Dr. Fitzhugh slowly. He smiled then, deepening the wrinkles in his face. His voice was warm and kindly when he spoke. "I accept your resignation, but remember, if you want to come back, you can. And if you get a position elsewhere, you will have my highest recommendations." Leda just stood there for a moment, tears forming in her eyes. Then she ran around the table and threw her arms around the elderly and somewhat surprised roboticist. "Thank you, Fitz," she said. "For everything." Then she kissed him on his seamed cheek. "I beg your pardon," said a sad and solemn voice from the door. "Am I interrupting something?" It was Treadmore. "You are," said Fitzhugh with a grin, "but we will let it pass." "What has happened to Snookums?" Treadmore asked. "Acute introspection," Fitzhugh said, losing his smile. "He began to try to compute the workings of his own brain. That meant that he had to use his non-random circuits to analyze the workings of his random circuits. He exceeded optimum; the entire brain is now entirely randomized." "Dear me," said Treadmore. "Do you suppose we can--" Black Bart Quill tapped Mike the Angel on the shoulder. "Let's go," he said quietly. "We don't want to stand around listening to this when we have a ship to catch." Mike and Leda followed him out into the corridor. "You know," Quill said, "robots aren't the only ones who can get confused watching their own brains go round." "I have other things to watch," said Mike the Angel. +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | UNWISE CHILD | | | | RANDALL GARRETT | | | | When a super-robot named Snookums discovers how to build his | | own superbombs, it becomes obvious that Earth is by no means | | the safest place for him to be. And so Dr. Fitzhugh, his | | designer, and Leda Crannon, a child psychologist acting as | | Snookums' nursemaid, agree to set up Operation Brainchild, a | | plan to transport the robot to a far distant planet. | | | | Mike the Angel--M. R. Gabriel, Power Design--has devised the | | power plant that is to propel the space ship _Branchell_ to | | its secret destination, complete with its unusual cargo. | | And, as a reserve officer in the Space Patrol, Mike is a | | logical replacement for the craft's unavoidably detained | | engineering officer. | | | | But once into space, the _Branchell_ becomes the scene of | | some frightening events--the medical officer is murdered, | | and Snookums appears to be the culprit. Mike the Angel | | indulges himself in a bit of sleuthing, and the facts he | | turns up lead to a most unusual climax. | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | UNWISE CHILD | | | | RANDALL GARRETT | | | | Dr. Fitzhugh looked out over the faces of the crewmen. | | | | "The whole thing can be summed up very quickly," he said. | | | | "Point one: Snookums' brain contains the information that | | eight years of hard work have laboriously put into it. It's | | worth _billions_, so the robot can't be disassembled, or the | | information would be lost. | | | | "Point two: Snookums' mind is a strictly logical one, but it | | is operating in a more than logical universe. Consequently, | | it is unstable. | | | | "Point three: Snookums was built to conduct his own | | experiments. To forbid him to do that would be similar to | | beating a child for acting like a child. | | | | "Point four: Emotion is not logical. Snookums can't handle | | it, except in a very limited way. | | | | "It all adds up to this: Snookums _must_ be allowed the | | freedom of the ship." | | | | Every one of the men was thinking dark gray thoughts. It was | | bad enough that they had to take out a ship like the | | _Branchell_, untested as she was. Was it necessary to have | | an eight-hundred-pound, moron-genius child-machine running | | loose, too? | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | More Doubleday Science Fiction: | | | | NECROMANCER | | Gordon R. Dickson | | | | Paul Formain, a young mining engineer, has discovered that | | someone--or something--is making attempts on his life; | | inexplicably, he finds himself possessed of the uncanny | | ability to escape his unknown nemesis. | | | | With the knowledge that he somehow has strange powers, | | Formain approaches the Chantry--a small but important | | organization involved in trying to save the world from the | | horrors of technology. He is accepted as an apprentice | | necromancer, passes all the tests of the black magic | | society, and is initiated as a member. | | | | Set in the Chicago Complex, a multi-level city with | | individual subway cars and automatic libraries, NECROMANCER | | is science fiction in the popular cosmic | | style--thought-provoking and entertaining. | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | RANDALL GARRETT wrote his first successful short story at | | the age of fourteen, for which he was awarded a check from | | his editor and a C-minus from his English teacher. Mr. | | Garrett spent his youth in various places in the United | | States--living wherever his Army officer father was | | assigned--and received his higher education at Texas | | Technological College. He is the author of three novels (two | | in collaboration with Robert Silverberg) and a biography of | | Pope John XXIII, and has had short stories published in all | | of the science fiction magazines. | | | | JACKET BY RICHARD POWERS | | | | _Printed in the U.S.A._ | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ +----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Notes & Errata | | | | Superscripts are enclosed in braces (curly brackets) and | | are preceded by a caret. | | | | Subscripts are enclosed in braces (curly brackets) and | | are preceded by an underscore. | | | | Two instances each of a 'U' with breve are rendered as | | plain 'U's. | | | | Two instances of an 'o' with macron are rendered as | | plain 'o's. | | | | The following typographical errors have been corrected. | | | | |Error |Correction | | | |Captan |Captain | | | |purity |purty | | | |supercedes |supersedes | | | |collossal |colossal | | | |atempts |attempts | | +----------------------------------------------------------+ 
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16834	----	THE HARRIS-INGRAM EXPERIMENT By CHARLES E. BOLTON, M.A. AUTHOR OF "A MODEL VILLAGE AND OTHER PAPERS," "TRAVELS IN EUROPE AND AMERICA," ETC. CLEVELAND THE BURROWS BROTHERS COMPANY 1905 TO MY WIFE SARAH KNOWLES BOLTON AND MY SON CHARLES KNOWLES BOLTON INTRODUCTION This volume was ready for publication when my husband died, October 23, 1901. In it, in connection with a love story and some foreign travel, he strove to show how necessary capital and labor are to each other. He had always been a friend to labor, and there were no more sincere mourners at his funeral than the persons he employed. He believed capital should be conciliatory and helpful, and co-operate with labor in the most friendly manner, without either party being arrogant or indifferent. Mr. Bolton took the deepest interest in all civic problems, and it is a comfort to those who loved him that his book, "A Model Village and Other Papers," came from the press a few days before his death. He had hoped after finishing a book of travel, having crossed the ocean many times and been in many lands, and doing some other active work in public life, to take a trip around the world and rest, but rest came in another way. Sarah K. Bolton Cleveland, Ohio. PREFACE Mr. W.D. Howells, in reply to a literary society in Ashtabula County, Ohio, said that most people had within their personal experience one book. I have often quoted Howells's words to my best friend, who has written a score of books, and the answer as frequently comes, "Why not write a book yourself?" Encouraged by Howells's belief, and stimulated by the accepted challenge of my friend, to whom I promised a completed book in twelve months, I found time during a very busy year to pencil the chapters that follow. Most of the book was written while waiting at stations, or on the cars, and in hotels, using the spare moments of an eight-months' lecture season, and the four months at home occupied by business. I am aware that some critics decry a novel written with a purpose. Permit me therefore in advance to admit that this book has a double purpose: To test the truth of Howells's words as applied to myself; and to describe a journey, both at home and abroad, which may possibly be enjoyed by the reader, the inconveniences of travel being lessened by incidentally tracing a love story to a strange but perhaps satisfactory conclusion; the whole leading to the evolution of a successful experiment, which in fragments is being tried in various parts of the civilized world. CONTENTS Chapter I The Harrises in New York Chapter II Mr. Hugh Searles of London Arrives Chapter III A Bad Send-off Chapter IV Aboard the S.S. Majestic Chapter V Discomfitures at Sea Chapter VI Half Awake, Half Asleep Chapter VII Life at Sea a Kaleidoscope Chapter VIII Colonel Harris Returns to Harrisville Chapter IX Capital and Labor in Conference Chapter X Knowledge is Power Chapter XI In Touch with Nature Chapter XII The Strike at Harrisville Chapter XIII Anarchy and Results Chapter XIV Colonel Harris Follows his Family Abroad Chapter XV Safe Passage, and a Happy Reunion Chapter XVI A Search for Ideas Chapter XVII The Harrises Visit Paris Chapter XVIII In Belgium and Holland Chapter XIX Paris, and the Wedding Chapter XX Aboard the Yacht "Hallena" Chapter XXI Two Unanswered Letters Chapter XXII Colonel Harris's Big Blue Envelope Chapter XXIII Gold Marries Gold Chapter XXIV The Magic Band of Beaten Gold Chapter XXV Workings of the Harris-Ingram Experiment Chapter XXVI Unexpected Meetings Chapter XXVII The Crisis THE HARRIS-INGRAM EXPERIMENT CHAPTER I THE HARRISES IN NEW YORK It was five o'clock in the afternoon, when a bright little messenger boy in blue touched the electric button of Room No. ---- in Carnegie Studio, New York City. At once the door flew open and a handsome young artist received a Western Union telegram, and quickly signed his name, "Alfonso H. Harris" in the boy's book. "Here, my boy, is twenty-five cents," he said, and tore open the message, which read as follows:-- Harrisville,--. _Alfonso H. Harris, Carnegie Studio, New York._ We reach Grand Central Depot at 7:10 o'clock tomorrow evening in our new private car Alfonso. Family greetings; all well. Reuben Harris. Alfonso put the telegram in his pocket, completed packing his steamer trunk, wrote a letter to his landlord, enclosing a check for the last quarter's rent, and ran downstairs and over to the storage company, to leave an order to call for two big trunks of artist's belongings, not needed in Europe. A hansom-cab took him to the Windsor Hotel, where he almost forgot to pay his barber for a shave, such was his excitement. A little dry toast, two soft boiled eggs, and a cup of coffee were quite sufficient, since his appetite, usually very good, somehow had failed him. It was now fifteen minutes to seven o'clock. In less than half an hour Alfonso was to meet his father, mother, and sisters, and after a few days in the metropolis, join them in an extended journey over the British Isles, and possibly through portions of Europe. Alfonso was the only son of Reuben Harris, a rich manufacturer of iron and steel. His father, a man naturally of very firm will, had earnestly longed that his only son might succeed him in business, and so increase and perpetuate a fortune already colossal. It was a terrible struggle for Harris senior to yield to his son's strong inclination to study art, but once the father had been won over, no doubt in part by the mother's strong love for her only boy, he assured Alfonso that he would be loyal to him, so long as his son was loyal to his profession. This had given the boy courage, and he had improved every opportunity while in New York to acquaint himself with art, and his application to study had been such that he was not only popular with his fellow artists, but they recognized that he possessed great capacity for painstaking work. Alfonso jumped into a coupé, having ordered a carriage to follow him to the Grand Central Station. It was ten minutes yet before the express was due. Nervously he puffed at his unlighted cigar, wishing he had a match; in fact, his nerves were never more unstrung. It was a happy surprise, and no doubt his youthful vanity was elated, that his father should have named his new palace car "Alfonso." At least it convinced him that his father was loyal. As the coupé stopped, he rushed into the station, just in time to see the famous engine No. 999 pull in. She was on time to a second, as indicated by the great depot clock. A ponderous thing of life; the steam and air valves closed, yet her heavy breathing told of tremendous reserve power. What a record she had made, 436-1/2 miles in 425-3/4 minutes! Truly, man's most useful handiwork, to be surpassed only by the practical dynamo on wheels! It was not strange that the multitude on the platform gazed in wonder. There at the rear of the train was the "Alfonso," and young Harris in company with his artist friend, Leo, who by appointment had also hastened to the station, stepped quickly back to meet the occupants of the new car. First to alight was Jean, valet to the Harris family. Jean was born near Paris and could speak French, German, and several other languages. His hands and arms were full to overflowing of valises, hat boxes, shawls, canes, etc., that told of a full purse, but which are the very things that make traveling a burden. By this time Alfonso had climbed the car steps and was in his mother's arms. Mrs. Harris was more fond, if possible, of her only son than of her beautiful daughters. She was a handsome woman herself, loved dress and was proud of the Harris achievements. Alfonso kissed his sisters, Lucille and Gertrude, and shook hands warmly with his father, who was busy giving instructions to his car conductor. Alfonso in his joy had almost forgotten his friend Leo, but apologizing, he introduced him, first to his mother, then to Gertrude and finally to his sister Lucille, and their father. All seemed glad to meet their son's friend, as he was to take passage in the same steamer for his home near Rome. Leo Colonna was connected with the famous Colonna family of Italy. From childhood he had had access to the best schools and galleries of his peninsular country. He also had studied under the best masters in Paris and Berlin, and was especially fond of flesh coloring and portrait painting. He had studied anatomy, and had taken a diploma as surgeon in the best medical college in Vienna, merely that he might know the human form. Alfonso, aware of all this, had invited Leo to join their party in making the tour over Ireland, England, and through the Netherlands. As Lucille left the car, Leo offered aid, taking her blue silk umbrella with its wounded-oak handle, the whole rolled as small as a cane. Lucille never appeared to better advantage. She was tall, slender, and graceful. Excitement had tinged her cheeks and lips, and her whole face had a child's smooth, pink complexion. Wavy black hair and blue eyes revealed the Irish blood that had come from the mother's veins. She wore a traveling suit of navy-blue serge. Her hat, of latest style, was made of black velvet, steel ornaments, and ostrich tips. What artist could resist admiring a woman so fair and commanding! The dark eyes of Leo had met those of Lucille, and he at once had surrendered. In fact, a formidable rival had now conquered Leo's heart. Together they led the way to the front entrance of the station, while Harris senior delayed a moment to exhibit the car "Alfonso" to his son. "I had this private car built," said the father, "that the Harris family might be exclusive. Napoleon once said:--'Let me be seen but three times at the theatre, and I shall no longer excite attention.' Our car is adapted for service on any standard gauge road, so that we can travel in privacy throughout the United States. You notice that this observation room is furnished in quartered English oak, and has a luxurious sofa and arm chairs. Let us step back. Here on the right are state and family rooms finished in mahogany; each room has a connecting toilet room, with wash stand and bath room, hot and cold water being provided, also mirrors, wardrobe and lockers. The parlor or dining room is eighteen feet long and the extension table will seat twelve persons. Here also is a well selected library and writing desk." "But where is the kitchen?" asked Alfonso. "Beyond," said the father. "The pantry, china closet, and kitchen are finished in black walnut. Blankets, linen, and tableware are of best quality. Here are berths for attendants and porter's room for baggage. Carpets, rugs, draperies, and upholstery were especially imported to harmonize. Nobody amounts to much in these days, Alfonso, unless he owns a private car or a steam yacht. Henceforth this car, named in your honor, may play an important part in the history of the Harris family." Mrs. Harris, Leo, and Lucille, took seats in the carriage; Gertrude and her mother were on the back seat, while Lucille and her artist friend faced Mrs. Harris and daughter. Jean sat upright with the coachman. Colonel Harris and Alfonso rejoined their friends and together entered the coupé. Reuben Harris once served on the governor's staff for seven weeks, ranking as colonel, so now all his friends, even his family, spoke of him as "the Colonel." It was well, as it pleased his vanity. The coachmen's whips left their sockets, and coupé and carriage dashed along 42nd Street and down Fifth Avenue. The ten minutes' drive passed as a dream to some in the carriage. Mrs. Harris's mind revelled in the intricate warfare of society. She had often been in New York, and in the summers was seen at the most fashionable watering places with her children. Her mind was burdened trying to discover the steps that lead to the metropolitan and international "four hundred." She was determined that her children should marry into well regulated families, and that the colonel should have a national reputation. So absorbed was she that her eyes saw not, neither did her ears hear what transpired in the carriage. Gertrude was equally quiet; her thoughts were of dear friends she had left in Harrisville. The occupants of the front seats had talked in low tones of recent society events in New York, and a little of art. Lucille herself had dabbled in color for a term or two in a fashionable school on the Back Bay in Boston. The colonel had become enthusiastic in his talk about his own recent business prosperity. Suddenly coupé and carriage stopped in front of the main entrance of the Hotel Waldorf. How fine the detail of arch and columns! How delicate the architect's touch of iron and glass in the porte-cochère! The Harris family stepped quickly into the public reception-room to the left of the main entrance adjoining the office, leaving Jean and the porter to bring the hand-baggage. The decorated ceiling framed a central group of brilliant incandescent lights with globes. Leo directed attention to the paintings on the walls, and furniture and rugs. The colonel excused himself and passed out and into the main offices. The sight about him was an inspiring one. The architect's wand had wrought grace and beauty in floor, ceiling, column, and wall. Gentlemen, old and young, were coming and going. Professional men, not a few, bankers and business men jostled each other. Before the colonel had reached the clerk's desk, he had apologized, twice at least, for his haste. The fact was that metropolitan activity delighted his heart, but it disturbed just a little his usual good behavior. Nervously, he wrote in the Waldorf register plain Reuben Harris, wife and two daughters. He wanted to prefix colonel. His son added his own name. Colonel Harris, at his request, was given the best apartments in the Waldorf. Leo excused himself for the night, Lucille saying the last words in low tones, and then, liveried attendants conducted the Harris family to their suite of rooms. It was half past eight when the Harrises sat down to their first meal in their private dining-room. As Mrs. Harris waited for her hot clam soup to cool a little, she said, "Reuben, this exclusiveness and elegance is quite to my liking. After our return from Europe, why can't we all spend our winters in New York?" "No, mother," said Gertrude, "we have our duties to the people of Harrisville, and father, I am sure, will never stay long away from his mills." But Lucille approved her mother's plan, and was seconded by her brother. Colonel Harris was interested in the views expressed, but with judicial tone, he replied, "The Harrises better wait till the right time comes. Great financial changes are possible in a day." The dinner, though late, was excellent. Before ten o'clock all were glad to retire, except the head of the family, who hoped the night would be short, as the next day might witness very important business transactions. Colonel Harris took the elevator down to the gentlemen's café, adjoining the beautiful Garden Court. For a moment he stood admiring the massive fire-place and the many artistic effects, mural and otherwise. The café was furnished with round tables and inviting chairs. Guests of the hotel, members of city clubs, and strangers, came and went, but the colonel's mind was in an anxious mood, so he sought a quiet corner, lighted a cigar, and accidently picked up the _Evening Post_. Almost the first thing he read was an item of shipping news: "No word yet from the overdue steamship 'Majestic;' she is already forty-eight hours late, and very likely has experienced bad weather." The "Majestic" is one of the largest and best of the famous White Star Line fleet. Colonel Harris expected an English gentleman to arrive by this boat, and he had come on to New York to meet him, as the two had business of great importance to talk over. "I wonder," thought the colonel, "if such a thing could happen, that my cherished plan of retiring with millions, might possibly be frustrated by ship-wreck or any unlooked-for event?" Whereupon he pulled from his pocket a cablegram, to make himself doubly sure that his was not a fool's errand, and again read it in audible tones: London, May 24, 18--. _Col. Reuben Harris, Hotel Waldorf, New York._ Hugh Searles, our agent, sails May twenty-fifth on Majestic. Meet him at Hotel Waldorf, New York. Guerney & Barring. The signers of the cablegram were young bankers and brokers, occupying sumptuous quarters on Threadneedle Street, in sight of the Bank of England, the Exchange, and the Mansion House or official residence of the Lord Mayor of London. The fathers of each member of the firm had been at the head of great banking houses in London for many years, and after herculean efforts, their banks had failed. These young men had united families and forces, and resolved to win again a financial standing in the world's metropolis. Shrewdly they had opened a score of branch offices in different parts of London and county; besides they had added a brokerage business, which had drifted into an extensive specialty of promoting syndicates in America and the colonies. Their success in handling high grade manufacturing plants had been phenomenal. Already at this business they had netted two million pounds. Reliable and expert accountants were always sent by them to examine thoroughly a client's ledgers. Already, bonds that carried the approval of Guerney & Barring, found ready market on Lombard, Prince, and other financial streets near the Bank of England. Colonel Harris relighted his cigar and queried to himself, "What ought I to charge these Englishmen for a property that cost barely two millions, but that has brought to the Harris family, annually for ten years, an average of 30%, or $600,000?" At first he had fixed upon six millions as a fair price, and then finally upon five million dollars. While he thus reflected, he fell asleep. It was after eleven o'clock when the Waldorf attendant caught him, or he would have fallen from his chair to the floor. Colonel Harris gave him a piece of silver, and retired for the night. CHAPTER II HUGH SEARLES OF LONDON ARRIVES The next day was Sunday, and the Harris family slept late. Jean was first to rise, and buying the morning papers left them at Colonel Harris's door. It was almost nine o'clock when the family gathered in their private dining-room. The night's sleep had refreshed all. The mother was very cheerful over her coffee, and heartily enjoyed planning for the day. She liked New York best of the American cities. Brown stone and marble fronts, fine equipage and dress, had charms for her, that almost made her forget a pleasant home and duties at Harrisville. She was heart and soul in her husband's newest scheme to close out business, and devote the balance of life to politics and society. Naturally therefore the table-talk drifted to a discussion of the possible causes of the steamer's delay. Lucille looked up, and said, "Father, the _Tribune_ says, 'Fair weather for New England and the Atlantic coast.' Cheer up! The 'Majestic' will bring your Englishman in, I think. This is a lovely day to be in the metropolis. Come father, let me sweeten your coffee. One or two lumps?" "Two, my dear, if you please. Now what will give you all the most pleasure to-day?" Alfonso answered, "Why not take a drive, and possibly attend some church?" This plan was approved. Breakfast over, the Harris family entered a carriage, and the coachman, with Jean by his side, drove through Washington Square, under the American Arch of Triumph, and out Fifth Avenue, the fashionable street of New York. Alfonso acted as guide. "This white sepulchral looking building on the left at the corner of 34th street is where A.T. Stewart, the Irish merchant prince, lived." Gertrude remarked, "How true in his case, the proverb 'Riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away, as an eagle towards heaven.'" "You should quote Scripture correctly, my child," said the mother. "'Riches take wings.'" "No, no, mamma--I am sure that I am right. 'Riches _make_ themselves wings' and the proverb is as true to-day as in Solomon's time." "Well, Gertrude, we will look at the hotel Bible on our return." "Yes, mamma, if the hotel has one." Colonel Harris responded, "I think Gertrude is right. Stewart's millions have changed hands. Dead men have no need of dollars. No wonder Stewart's bones were restless." "Here at West 39th Street is the sumptuous building of the Union League Club. It has over 1500 members, all pledged to absolute loyalty to the Government of the United States, to resist every attempt against the integrity of the nation, and to promote reform in national, state, and municipal affairs. The club equipped and sent two full regiments to the front in the Civil War." Alfonso pointed out Jay Gould's old residence, more club houses, libraries, the Windsor Hotel, Dr. Hall's handsome Presbyterian Church, and the brown stone and marble palaces of the Vanderbilt family, two miles of splendid residences and magnificent churches before you reach Central Park at 59th Street. The walks were thronged with beautiful women and well dressed men. It was now 10:30 o'clock. The chimes had ceased their hallowed music. People of all nationalities were jostling each other in their haste to enter St. Patrick's Cathedral, a copy of the Gothic masterpiece in Cologne, and the most imposing church building in America. The Harris carriage stopped; Lucille's heart suddenly began to beat quickly, for she saw Leo Colonna hastening from the Cathedral steps towards the carriage. "Good morning, Mrs. Harris! Glad you have come to my church," Leo said; then taking her hand cordially, he added, "And you have brought the family. Well, I am pleased, for you could not have come to a more beautiful church or service." As Leo conducted his friends up the granite steps, all were enthusiastic in their praise of the Fifth Avenue façade; white marble from granite base to the topmost stones of the graceful twin spires. All passed under the twelve apostles, that decorate the grand portal, and entered the cathedral. The interior is as fine as the exterior. The columns are massive, the ceiling groined; the style is the decorated or geometric architecture, that prevailed in Europe in the thirteenth century. The cardinal's gothic throne is on the right. The four altars are of carved French walnut, Tennessee marble and bronze. Half of the seventy windows are memorials, given by parishes and individuals in various parts of America. The vicar-general was conducting services. His impressive manner, aided by the sweet tones of singers and organ, and the sun's rays changed to rainbows by the stained-glass windows, produced a deep religious feeling in the hearts of the several thousand persons present. As the party left the church, Leo said, "In 1786, the Kings of France and Spain contributed to the erection of the first cathedral church, St. Peter's, in New York." The Harrises having invited Leo to dinner, said good-bye to him, and in their carriage returned to the Waldorf for lunch. While the colonel waited near the reception-room, he chanced to look at the stained-glass window over the entrance to the Garden Court. Here was pictured the village of Waldorf, the birthplace of the original John Jacob Astor. This pretty little hamlet is part of the Duchy of Baden, Germany, and has been lovingly remembered in the Astor wills. Here formerly lived the impecunious father of John Jacob Astor and his brother. Both gained wealth, very likely, because the value of money was first learned in the early Waldorf school of poverty. It was not an ill north wind that imprisoned young Astor for weeks in the ice of the Chesapeake Bay, as there on the small ship that brought him from Germany, he listened to marvelous tales of fortunes to be made in furs in the northwest. Shrewdly he determined first to acquire expert knowledge of skins, and on landing he luckily found employment in a fur store in New York at two dollars per week. This knowledge became the foundation of the vast fortune of the Astor family. The colonel was told that the Waldorf occupies the site of the town-house of John Jacob Astor, third of the name, and was erected by his son, William Waldorf, ex-minister to Italy. It was two o'clock when the Harrises entered the main dining-room for their lunch. The colonel led the party, Alfonso conducting his sister Lucille, the light blue ribbon at her throat of the tint of her responsive eyes. Mrs. Harris came with Gertrude. The mother wore a gray gown, and her daughter a pretty silk. This first entrance of the family to the public dining-room caused a slight diversion among some of the guests at lunch, where not a few rightly surmised who they were. Few markets in the world rival that of New York. The coast, streams, and valleys of New England and the Central States, send their best food by swift steamers and express, that the exacting cosmopolitan appetite may be satisfied. Before the lunch was over and while Reuben Harris was making reference to the delay of his English visitor, the waiter placed a white card by his plate. The color in the colonel's face suddenly deepened, as he read upon the card the name of Mr. Hugh Searles, representing Messrs. Guerney & Barring, London. "What's the matter, Reuben?" anxiously inquired Mrs. Harris. "Oh, nothing," said the colonel, "only that our overdue English visitor, Hugh Searles, has sent in his card." "How surprising," said Lucille; "you remember, father, that I said at breakfast, that the weather was to be fair. Probably the 'Majestic' quickened her speed, and stole in unobserved to the docks." "I will send him my card;" and upon it Mr. Harris wrote in pencil, "I will soon join you in the reception room." The black coffee disposed of, it was agreed that all should accompany Colonel Harris, and give Mr. Searles a cordial welcome to America. The English agent was a good sailor, and had enjoyed immensely the ocean voyage. Mr. Searles, of late over-worked in England, was compelled on board ship to rest both mind and body. A true Englishman, Mr. Searles, was very practical. He comprehended fully the importance of his mission to America, and possessed the tact of getting on in the world. If the proposed deal with Reuben Harris was a success, he expected as commission not less than five thousand pounds. Before the "Majestic" left the Mersey, that his mind might be alert on arrival at New York, he had measured with tape line the promenade deck of the steamer, and resolved to make enough laps for a mile, both before and after each meal, a walk of six miles per day, or a total of forty-eight miles for the voyage. A sturdy Englishman, taking such vigorous and methodical exercise, created some comment among the passengers, but it was excused on the ground that Englishmen believe in much outdoor exercise. Searles came from a good family, who lived north of London in Lincolnshire. His father, the Hon. George Searles, had a competency, largely invested in lands, and three per cent consols. His rule of investment was, security unquestioned and interest not above three per cent, believing that neither creditors nor enterprise of any kind, in the long run, could afford to pay more. His ancestors were Germans, who crossed the German Ocean, soon after the Romans withdrew from England. A large area of Lincolnshire lies below the level of the sea, from which it is protected by embankments. This fenny district gradually had been reclaimed, and to-day the deep loam and peat-soils, not unlike the rich farms of Holland, are celebrated for their high condition of agriculture. What mortgages the Hon. George Searles held were secured upon Lincolnshire estates, some of England's best lands. Hugh Searles, his son, however, had known only London life since he graduated from Cambridge. His office was in Chancery Lane, and his surroundings and teachings had been of the speculative kind, hence he was a fit agent for his firm. Already he had acquired a sunny suburban home in Kent, and was ambitious to hold a seat in Parliament. As he walked the steamer's deck, he looked the typical Englishman, five feet ten inches in height, broad shoulders and full chest; his weight about two hundred pounds, or "fifteen stones" as Searles phrased it. His face was round and ruddy, his beard closely cut, and his hair light and fine, indicating quality. His step was firm, and he seemed always in deep study. When addressed by his fellow passengers however, he was courteous, always talked to the point in his replies, and was anxious to learn more of America, or as he expressed it, "of the Anglo-Saxon confederation." He was very proud of his Anglo-Saxon origin, and Empire, and believed in the final Anglo-Saxon ascendancy over the world. On board ship were several young Englishmen, who were on their return to various posts of duty. Three were buyers for cotton firms in Liverpool and Manchester, and they were hastening back to Norfolk, Va., Memphis, and New Orleans. Two of the passengers were English officers, returning to their commands in far away Australia. Others, like Searles, were crossing the Atlantic for the first time in search of fame and fortune. These adventurous Englishmen thought it fine sport as the "Majestic" sighted Fire Light Island to join the enthusiastic Americans in singing "America." So heartily did they sing, that the Americans in turn, using the same tune, cordially sang "God save the Queen." At first Hugh Searles was a little disconcerted, when the whole Harris family approached him in the Waldorf reception-room. Colonel Harris cordially extended his hand, and said, "Mr. Searles, we are all glad to meet you, and bid you hearty welcome to America. Please let me make you acquainted with my wife, Mrs. Harris, my daughters, Gertrude and Lucille, and my son, Alfonso." "An unexpected greeting you give me, Colonel Harris," said Hugh Searles, as he gave each person a quick hand-shake, thinking that to be an American he must grasp hands cordially. The family were much interested in the details of Mr. Searles's voyage, as they expected soon to be en route for Europe. Mr. Searles said, "The cause of the 'Majestic's' delay was a broken propeller in rough seas off the Banks of Newfoundland. I am glad to reach New York." He had arrived at the Hotel at ten o'clock and already had been to lunch. Mr. Searles gladly accepted an invitation from Colonel Harris for a drive, Mrs. Harris and Lucille to accompany them. Searles expressed a wish to see the famous Roebling suspension bridge, so the coachman drove first down Broadway to the post office, then past the great newspaper buildings, and out upon the marvelous highway or bridge suspended in the air between New York and Brooklyn. When midway, Mr. Searles begged to step out of the carriage, and putting his arms around one of the four enormous cables, inquired of Colonel Harris how these huge cables were carried over the towers. Colonel Harris explained that each cable was composed of over five thousand steel wires, and that a shuttle carried the wire back and forth till the requisite strength of cables was obtained. The expense of the bridge was about $15,000,000, which the two cities paid. Its great utility had been abundantly proved by the repeated necessity of enlarging the approaches. The drive to the Central Park was up Fifth Avenue, home of America's multi-millionaires. An unending cavalcade of superb family equipages was passing through the entrance at 59th Street. Colonel Harris explained that "Central Park had been planted with over half a million trees, shrubs and vines, and that which was once a waste of rock and swamp, had by skill of enthusiastic engineers and landscape gardeners blossomed into green lawns, shady groves, vine-covered arbors, with miles of roads and walks, inviting expanses of water, picturesque bits of architecture, and scenery, that rival the world's parks." The ride and comments of Mr. Searles afforded the Harris family an opportunity to study their guest, and on returning to the hotel, all agreed that Hugh Searles was thoroughly equipped to protect his English patrons in any deal that he might decide to make. It was planned that all should dine together at eight, and Leo was to join the party by invitation of Lucille. Evidently the Harrises were well pleased with their English visitor, but their pleasure was also quickened with the bright prospect of several millions of English money for their manufacturing interest. Then after their visit to Europe might follow the long looked-for residence in delightful New York. Already rich Americans, famous authors and artists gravitate as naturally to this new world metropolis, as the world's elite to London and Paris. CHAPTER III A BAD SEND-OFF It was almost eight o'clock when the dinner party assembled in the reception-room of the Waldorf. Leo was first to arrive, and Lucille was there to receive him. At ten minutes of eight, solicitor Hugh Searles came; then entered Colonel Harris and his daughters, Alfonso following with his mother. Mrs. Harris wore a black satin dress with jet trimmings and Van Dyke lace. Lucille's dress of light blue faille silk, garnished with pearls and guipure lace, was very becoming. Leo so told Lucille, and she thanked him but hid behind her lips the thought that Leo never before seemed half so manly. Mr. Searles evidently admired Leo, and he talked to him of Italy's greatness in literature and art. He sat at Colonel Harris's right, opposite Mrs. Harris. Leo and Lucille occupied seats at the end of the table, and at their right and left sat Alfonso and Gertrude. Guests of the hotel and their friends chatted in low conversation at the many tables of the model dining-room. Electric lights shone soft in the ceiling, and under pretty shades at each table, which added much to the general effect. Long before the sweets and fruits were reached, the conversation had drifted from one conventional topic to another, until Mrs. Harris asked Hugh Searles what he thought of higher education for women. "Yes, yes, Mr. Searles," said Gertrude, "please tell us all about the English girl." "Does she go to college, and does she ride a bicycle!" queried Lucille. Mrs. Harris was eager to listen to the Englishman's reply for often she had earnestly talked the matter over in her home. Mr. Searles was very frank in his views, and surprisingly liberal for an Englishman, and well he might be, for his own mother was a power, and his sisters were strong mental forces in Lincolnshire. Aided by tutors and their scholarly mother, they had pursued at home, under difficulties, about the same course of studies, that Hugh, their brother, had followed in the university. Searles believed that absolute freedom should be given to women to do anything they wished to do in the world, provided they could do it as well as men, and that nobody had any right to assert they should not. Colonel Harris, even for a business man, was also advanced in his ideas. He had advocated for his daughters that they should possess healthy bodies and minds, and be able to observe closely and reason soundly. Lucille said that she favored an education which would best conserve and enlarge woman's graces, her delicate feeling and thought, and her love for the beautiful. Then Leo and Alfonso both declared that Lucille had expressed fully their own opinions. Colonel Harris added, "Come, Gertrude, tell us what you think." Her face flushed a little as she replied, for she felt all that she said, "Father, I like what Mr. Searles has told us. I think higher education for women should develop purity of heart, self-forgetfulness, and enlarged and enriched minds." "Well spoken, daughter," said Colonel Harris. "Now, dear, what have you to say?" Mrs. Harris had listened well, as she had been a slave in the interests of her children, especially of her daughters. She thought that the last twenty-five years had proved that women in physical and intellectual capacity were able to receive and profit by a college education. Often she had longed for the same training of mind that men of her acquaintance enjoyed. The subject was thus discussed with profit, till the Turkish coffee was served. Closing the discussion, Searles thought that America led England in offering better education to woman, but that England had given her more freedom in politics; the English woman voted for nearly all the elective officers, except members of Parliament. He believed that the principle of education of woman belonged to her as a part of humanity; that it gave to her a self-centered poise, that it made her a competent head of the home, where the family is trained as a unit of civilization. He felt that woman possessed the finest and highest qualities, and that it was her mission to project and incorporate these elevating qualities into society. He thought man had nothing to fear or lose, but much to gain; that to multiply woman's colleges everywhere, was to furnish the twentieth century, or "Woman's Century" as Victor Hugo called it, with a dynamic force, that would beget more blessings for humanity than all previous centuries. Gertrude thanked Mr. Searles for what he had said, and the party withdrew to the Winter Garden Café, pretty with palms, where Lucille, Leo, and Alfonso talked of society matters, of art and music. Gertrude read to her mother, while Hugh Searles and Colonel Harris stepped outside into the gentlemen's café for a smoke, as both were fond of a cigar. There the conversation naturally drifted upon the tariff question. Mr. Searles asserted that he favored free trade, and that he was sorry America was not as far advanced and willing as Great Britain to recognize the universal and fundamental principle of the brotherhood of mankind, and the inborn right of everybody to trade as he liked in the world's cheapest markets. He added that he sometimes felt that Americans were too selfish, too much in love with the vulgar dollar. Colonel Harris, wounded in his patriotism, now showed that he was a little disturbed. He thanked Searles for his deep interest in Americans, adding, "We are glad you have come to study Americans and America." Then looking the Englishman full in the face he said, "Mr. Searles, you will find human nature much the same wherever you travel. Nations usually strive to legislate, each for its own interest. You say, 'Americans work for the almighty dollar.' So they do, and earnestly too, but our kith and kin across the sea worship with equal enthusiasm the golden sovereign. Look at the monuments to protection in your own city." "What monuments?" asked Searles. "Monuments to protection on all your streets, built under British tariff laws. Every stone in costly St. Paul's Church, or cathedral, was laid by a duty of a shilling a ton on all coal coming into London. A shilling a ton profit on coal, mined in America, would create for us fabulous fortunes. Selfishness, Mr. Searles, and not brotherly love, drove your country to adopt free trade." "I do not agree with you," said Mr. Searles. "'Tis true, and I can prove it," answered Harris. By this time several patrons of the hotel stood about enjoying the tilt between tariff and free trade. "Give us the proof then," replied Searles. "To begin with," said Harris, "I must reply to your first assertion, for I deem your first statement a false doctrine that 'everybody has a right to trade in the world's cheapest markets.' Nobody has a right to trade in the world's cheapest markets, unless the necessary and just laws of his own country, or the country he dwells in, permits it. Now as to the much abused 'brotherhood argument' let me assert that, like England, any nation may adopt free trade, when it can command at least four important things: cheap labor, cheap capital, and cheap raw material. Now Mr. Searles, what is the fourth requisite?" Searles did not answer. Clearly, he was interested in Harris's novel line of argument for free trade. "Well," said Harris, "England is inhabited by a virile people, who evidently believe in God's command to 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.' England, with her centuries of rising civilization, her charm of landscape, and her command of the world's affairs, offers at home magnificent attractions for her sons and daughters, that make them loyal and law-abiding citizens. "It is true that annually many thousands seek fame and fortune in new countries, but most of her citizens prefer poverty even, and, if need be, poverty in the gutters of her thriving cities, to a home of promise in distant lands. Hence, a rapidly increasing and dense population obtains in all the British Isles, and labor becomes abundant and cheap, and often a drug in the market. The repeal of the Corn Laws first became a necessity, then a fact, and the cheaper food made cheaper labor possible. Lynx-eyed capital, in the financial metropolis of the world, was quick to discover surplus labor. "Already English inventors had made valuable inventions in machinery for the manufacture of iron, cotton, woolen and other goods, which further cheapened labor and the product of labor. "England with cheap capital and cheap labor, now had two of the four things needed to enable her to go forward to larger trade with the world. The third requisite, cheap and abundant raw material, she also secured. Material, not furnished from her own mines and soils, was brought in plentiful supply at nominal freights, or as ballast, by her vessels, whose sails are spread on every sea. "For three centuries Great Britain has vigorously and profitably pursued Sir Walter Raleigh's wise policy: 'Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade, whosoever commands the trade, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.' "On the ceiling of the reading-room of the Liverpool Cotton Exchange is painted the pregnant words:--'O Lord, how manifold are thy works, in wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy riches.' Under divine inspiration, therefore, English capital seeks investment everywhere, and with cheap capital, cheap labor, and cheap raw materials, she finds herself able to compete successfully with the world. It is possibly pardonable then that the British manufacturer and politician should seek earnestly the fourth requisite, viz., a large market abroad. Hence the necessity of free trade. "To advocate publicly that other nations should adopt free trade, that England might have an increased number of buyers, and consequently greater profit on her products, perhaps would not be judicious; so the principle of free trade for the world at large must be sugar-coated, to be acceptable. Therefore your philanthropic and alert Richard Cobden, and John Bright, and your skilled writers, both talked and wrote much about the 'brotherhood of mankind,' hoping that the markets of the world might willingly open wide their doors to British traders. Of course, advocates of free trade reason that the larger the number of buyers the larger the prices. "Mr. Searles, whenever America can command, as Great Britain does to-day, cheap capital, cheap labor, and cheap raw materials, she too may vociferously advocate free trade, and that other nations shall open wide their markets for the sale of American products. "Don't you see, Mr. Searles, that protection and free trade are equally selfish and not philanthropic principles?" "Mr. Harris you are right," shouted several of the by-standers. But Hugh Searles did not reply. Possibly because it was late or, it may be, he did not wish to further antagonize Colonel Harris with whom he hoped in the morning to drive a good bargain, and it may be that he hoped some time in America to operate mills himself and make money under a protective tariff. Both Searles and Harris retired for the night with an agreement to meet at nine o'clock in the morning and talk over business. Searles rose with the sun, and after eggs, bacon, and tea, he walked to the Battery and back, before nine, the appointed hour for his first business conference with Reuben Harris. A good sleep had refreshed Colonel Harris and at breakfast he appeared in a joking mood. While he smoked, he glanced at the _Tribune_ and again examined Searles's letter of introduction from Messrs. Guerney & Barring. At nine o'clock promptly, Mr. Searles came and Colonel Harris exhibited to him a brief statement of the business of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co., extending over the last ten years, and showing the company's annual profits. "A very good business your company did, and you made large profits, Colonel Harris," said Searles. "And am I to understand that you have made in your statement a proper allowance for depreciation of values in buildings and machinery, also for all losses and cost of insurance, and that after these deductions are made the company's net profits annually amounted to an average of over one hundred thousand pounds, or a half million dollars?" "Yes," replied the colonel. And Mr. Searles remarked, "Colonel Harris, if your arguments last evening did not fully convert me to the decided advantage which Americans gain by protection, this statement of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. does. A year ago, some Americans in London called our attention to your profitable plant, hence our first letter of inquiries. Your replies confirmed the report and so we cabled for this initial meeting between us. "Messrs. Guerney & Barring have been most successful in financiering some of the largest business interests in the world, and thus they have achieved a splendid reputation. It was their wish that I should secure for them your most favorable terms with an option of purchase of your plant, the same to hold good for two months, or for a sufficient length of time to allow them to organize a syndicate, and float necessary debentures to buy the stock, or a controlling interest in your company, and so continue the business." "Mr. Searles, we Americans are not anxious to sell, especially to foreigners, our best paying concerns. We ought to keep them under our own control. However, of late, I have been inclined to indulge my family in a little foreign travel, and myself in more leisure for books, and possibly for politics, believing that not enough of our good citizens enter Congress. I might, on certain conditions, name a price for all the stock of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co." "Please state the price and the conditions." "Well, let me think a moment. The capital stock of the company is not now as large as it should be. Total Capital Stock $2,000,000 Par value of shares 100 Present Value per Share, 300 "The entire property and good-will of the Company is worth at least $6,000,000, and my "fixed price," as the English say, is $5,000,000." Mr. Searles looked puzzled, for he had hoped to get the stock for less money. He hesitated, as if in deep study, but not long, for he believed that, if the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. for ten successive years could pay $500,000 or an average annual dividend of 25% on its stock of $2,000,000, the plant re-organized could easily be marketed at a neat advance, say for £1,400,000 or $7,000,000, in London, where even sound 3% investments are eagerly sought; so Mr. Searles inquired again: "Colonel Harris, you omitted to state your conditions." Harris answered, "I must have cash enough to guarantee the sale, and short time payments for the balance." "Well, Colonel Harris, how would the following terms please you? One-eighth cash $625,000 One-eighth 30 days 625,000 One-fourth 60 days 1,250,000 One-fourth 90 days 1,250,000 One-fourth, Preferred Shares, 6% dividends guaranteed 1,250,000 _________ Total price named 5,000,000 "Colonel Harris, before you answer, please let me outline our London plan. Suppose I should take for Messrs. Guerney & Barring a contract, or option of purchase on the property with payments as named, the purchase to be conditioned upon a verification of the correctness of your statements. Our experts can examine and report soon on your accounts for ten years back, and on buildings, machinery, stock on hand, land, etc." "Mr. Searles, please explain further your 'London plan' of reorganization." "Colonel Harris, we would modify the old firm name, so as to read--'The Harrisville Iron & Steel Co., Limited, of London, England,' and capitalize it at £1,400,000, or $7,000,000. Par value of shares £20 or $100 Number of shares 70,000 "When our experts shall have verified your statements at Harrisville, then the option of purchase is to be signed by us and forwarded to London, where it will be signed by Messrs. Guerney & Barring, the first payment made, and the contract underwritten or guaranteed by the Guardian, Executor & Trust Association, Limited, of London, whose capital is $5,000,000. The association will also underwrite the bonds and preference shares. This will practically complete the purchase." "But what about the last one-fourth payment in preferred shares of $1,250,000?" "Pardon me, Colonel Harris, that is just what I desire to explain further. The new company will issue debentures or bonds, running 30 years, at 4%, for £800,000 or $4,000,000; preference shares £400,000 or $2,000,000; with dividends 6% guaranteed, and a preference in distribution of property, if company is dissolved. Ordinary shares £1,200,000 or $6,000,000. And our London prospects will show that the ordinary shares can earn at least 5%. For the last one-fourth we wish you to take 12,500 preferred shares, or $1,250,000. "London holders, of course, will elect all the officers, a managing board of directors, with general office in London. For a time they will expect you to advise in the management of the business at Harrisville." After some further explanations, Harris agreed to sign a contract or option of purchase, drawn as specified, if after investigation, he should become satisfied with the responsibility of the London parties. On Tuesday morning, contracts in duplicates were presented for Colonel Harris's inspection. After twice carefully reading the contract, he gave his approval and wrote Mr. Searles a letter of introduction to Mr. B.C. Wilson, his manager at Harrisville, requesting the latter to permit Mr. Searles and his experts to examine all property and accounts of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. for ten years back. It was also arranged that on Wednesday, at 12 o'clock noon, Mr. Searles should see the Harrises off to Europe, then Mr. Searles and his experts were to go to Harrisville in Colonel Harris's private car. Later Mr. Searles and Colonel Harris were to meet in London, and then, if everything was mutually satisfactory, all parties were to affix their signatures to the agreement, and the cash payment was to be made at the London office of Guerney & Barring. Wednesday, Colonel Harris rose early as had been his habit from childhood. He was exacting in his family, and also as a manager of labor. Every morning at six o'clock all the family had to be at the breakfast table. Colonel Harris always asked the blessing. Its merit was its brevity: sometimes he only said--"Dear Lord, make us grateful and good to-day. Amen." Thirty minutes later, summer and winter, his horses and carriage stood at his door, and punctually at fifteen minutes of seven o'clock he would reach his great mills. His first duty was to walk through his works, as his skilled laborers with dinner pails entered the broad gates and began the day's work. Devotion like this usually brings success. After breakfast, Mrs. Harris and her daughters walked down Fifth Avenue to make a few purchases. Alfonso and Leo hurried off to get their baggage to the "Majestic," while Jean busied himself in seeing that a transfer was made to the steamer of all the trunks, valises, etc., left at the depot and hotel. At ten o'clock Jean called at the dock to learn if the half-dozen steamer chairs and as many warm blankets had arrived, and he found everything in readiness. It was 10:30 o'clock when the Waldorf bill was paid, and the good-bye given. The young people were jubilant, as the long hoped-for pleasure trip to Europe was about to be realized. The carriages for the steamer could not go fast enough to satisfy the old, or the young people. Several schoolmates, artists, business and society friends met them on the dock. Many fashionable people had already arrived to say "_Bon Voyage_" to the Harrises and to Leo. Hundreds of others had come to see their own friends off. It was all excitement among the passengers, and carriages kept coming and going. Not so with the English officers and sailors of the "Majestic." They were calm and ready for the homeward passage. The last mail bag had been put aboard, and the receipts to the government hurriedly signed. Mr. Searles had said good-bye, and last of all to Colonel Harris. As the colonel went up the gangway, the bell rang and the cries "All aboard" were given. For once, Colonel Harris felt a sense of great relief to thus cut loose from his business, and take his first long vacation, in twenty-five years from hard work. "Now, I shall have a good time, and a much needed rest," he said. But just as he stepped into the steamer's dining-saloon, Mr. Searles, who had hastily followed, touched him on the shoulder and said. "Here, Colonel Harris, is a telegram for you." Harris quickly tore it open. It was from Wilson, his manager, and it read as follows:-- Harrisville, June 9, 18--. _Colonel Reuben Harris, Steamer Majestic, New York_. Our four thousand men struck this morning for higher wages. What shall we do? B.C. Wilson. Harris was almost paralyzed. His wife and daughters ran to him. The steamer's big whistle was sounding. All was now confusion. There was only a moment to decide, but Harris proved equal to the situation. He stepped to the purser, surrendered his passage ticket, kissed his wife and two daughters, saying to his son, "Alfonso, take charge of the party as I go back to Harrisville." Gertrude, insisting, accompanied her father, and remained ashore. On the dock stood Colonel Harris, Gertrude, and Mr. Searles, all three waving their white handkerchiefs to Mrs. Harris, Lucille, Alfonso, and Leo. What a bad send-off! The best laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft a-gley, And leave us nought but grief and pain, For promised joy. The Harrises on the steamer, and the Harrises on the pier had heavy hearts, especially Colonel Harris and Gertrude so suddenly disappointed. It was soon agreed that the three should start that evening for Harrisville. CHAPTER IV ABOARD THE S.S. MAJESTIC Mrs. Harris was naturally a brave woman, but the telegram, and the sudden separation perhaps forever from her husband and Gertrude, unnerved her. She sank back into an easy chair on the steamer, murmuring, "Why this terrible disappointment? Why did I not turn back with my husband? This is worse than death. Mr. Harris is in great trouble. Why did I not at once sacrifice all and share his misfortunes? How noble in Gertrude to go ashore with her father. It is just like the child, for she is never happy except when she forgets self, and does for others." Mrs. Harris sobbed as if her loved ones had been left in the tomb. Lucille tenderly held her mother's hand, and spoke comforting words: "Cheer up, mother, all will yet be well. Father can now take Mr. Searles to Harrisville." "To see what, child--men misled and on a strike and the mills all closed down! It means much trouble, and perhaps disaster for the Harrises." "Oh, no, mother, all will soon be well. Let us go on the deck." Alfonso led his mother, and Leo took Lucille up among the passengers. They were just in time to see the white cloud of fluttering handkerchiefs on the pier. Leo said that he could distinguish with his field-glass Colonel Harris and Gertrude, and tears again came into Mrs. Harris's eyes. European steamers always leave on time, waiting for neither prince nor peasant. A carriage with foaming horses drove in upon the pier as the tug pulled the steamer out upon the Hudson. Its single occupant was an English government agent bearing a special message from the British embassador at Washington to Downing Street, London. "Now what's to be done?" the British agent sharply inquired. "Two pounds, sir, and we will put you and your luggage aboard," shouted an English sailor. "Agreed," said the agent, and to the surprise of everybody on the pier, two robust sailors pulled as for their lives, and each won a sovereign, as they put the belated agent on board the "Majestic." This race for a passage caught the eye of Mrs. Harris. At first she thought that the little boat might contain her husband, but as the English agent came up the ship's ladder, she grasped Alfonso's arm, and said, "Here, my son, take my hand and help me quickly to the boat; I will go back to Mr. Harris." "No! No!" said Alfonso, "Look, mother, the little boat is already returning to the dock." Later the purser brought to Mrs. Harris an envelope containing the steamer tickets and a purse of gold, which the colonel thoughtfully had sent by the English agent. Mrs. Harris re-examined the envelope, and found the colonel's personal card which contained on the back a few words, hastily scribbled: "Cheer up everybody; glad four of our party are on board. Enjoy yourselves. Gertrude sends love. Later we will join you in London perhaps. God bless you all. R.H." Sunshine soon came back to Mrs. Harris's face, and she began to notice the people about her, and to realize that she was actually on shipboard. Foreign travel had been the dream of her life; and she felt comforted to have Alfonso and Lucille beside her. "Mrs. Harris," said Leo, "see the stately blocks that outline Broadway, the Western Union Telegraph Building, the Equitable Building, the granite offices of the Standard Oil Company, the Post Office, and the imposing Produce Exchange with its projecting galley-prows. Above its long series of beautiful arches of terra cotta rise a tall campanile and liberty pole from which floats the stars and stripes." Leo's eyes kindled in brilliancy, and his voice quickened with patriotism, as he made reference to his adopted flag. "Lucille, behold our glorious flag that floats over America's greatest financial and commercial city. I love the stars and stripes quite as much as Italy's flag. "Annually over thirty thousand vessels arrive and depart from this harbor. New York is America's great gateway for immigrants. In a single year nearly a half million land at Castle Garden. Sections of New York are known as Germany, Italy, China, Africa, and Judea. The Hebrews alone in the city number upwards of one hundred thousand, and have nearly fifty synagogues and as many millionaires. The trees, lawns, and promenades along the sea-wall, form the Battery Park. The settees are crowded with people enjoying the magnificent marine views before them." Alfonso pointed to the Suspension or Brooklyn Bridge beneath which vessels were sailing on the East River. Its enormous cables looked like small ropes sustaining a vast traffic of cars, vehicles, and pedestrians. To the right of the steamer's track on Bedloe's Island stands Bartholdi's "Liberty, Enlightening the World," the largest bronze statue on the globe. From a small guide book of New York, Lucille read aloud that the Bartholdi statue and its pedestal cost one million dollars; that the statue was presented by the French people to the people of the United States. The head of Liberty is higher than the tall steeple of Trinity Church, which is 300 feet high, or twice that of the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven ancient wonders. "Look," said Lucille, "at the uplifted right hand holding an electric torch. How magnificently the statue stands facing the Narrows, the entrance from Europe, and how cordial the welcome to America which Liberty extends." "Yes," said Leo, "if you wish to see Bartholdi's noble mother, observe the face of the statue. Bartholdi owed much to his mother's constant encouragement." "How true it is," said Mrs. Harris, "that most great men have had splendid mothers." Many on the deck thought of loved ones at home, of their country, and wondered if they would return again to America. This was true of many aboard who were now starting on their first ocean voyage, and their thoughts no doubt were akin to those that filled the minds of Columbus and his crew when they left Palos. Craft of every kind kept clear of the giant "Majestic" as she plowed down the Narrows. Historic but worthless old forts are on either side, and far down into the lower bay the pilot guides the wonderful steamer. Sandy Hook lighthouse, the low shores, and purple mountains of New Jersey are left behind, as the "Majestic" is set on her course at full speed. The gong for the one o'clock lunch was sounded, and Alfonso, glad of the change, as his mother seemed unhappy, led the way below. Colonel Harris, when he bought the tickets, had arranged that his family should sit at the captain's table. As Alfonso entered the saloon, the steward conducted him and his friends to their seats. The captain's seat was unoccupied as he was busy on deck. The grand dining-room of the "Majestic" is amidships on the main deck. At the three long tables and sixteen short side tables, three hundred persons can be accommodated. The sea was smooth, so every chair was taken. The scene was an animating one and interesting to study. A single voyage will not suffice to reveal the heart histories and ambitions of three hundred cosmopolitan passengers. Everybody was talking at the same time; all had much to say about the experiences in reaching and boarding the steamer. Everybody was looking at everybody, and each wondered who the others might be. So many new faces which are to be studies for the voyage, arrested the attention of Mrs. Harris. Her appetite was not good, so she ate little, but closely watched the exhilarating scenes about her. Many wives had their husbands by their sides, and this pained her, but she resolved to keep brave and to make the most of her opportunities. Lucille and the young men were so interested in the pretty faces all about them, that they had little time for an English luncheon, and most of their eating was a make-believe. Amidship the movement of the boat is reduced to a minimum, and in fair weather it is difficult to realize that you are out upon the ocean. Each passenger at the table is furnished with a revolving chair. Choice flowers, the gifts of loving friends left behind, were on every table, and their fragrance converted the dining-saloon into a large conservatory. The Corinthian columns were fluted and embossed, the walls and ceiling were in tints of ivory and gold; the artistic panels abounded in groups of Tritons and nymphs; the ports were fitted with stained glass shutters, emblazoned with the arms of cities and states in Europe and America. Behind the glass were electric lights, so that the designs were visible both night and day. Surmounting this richly appointed saloon was a dome of artistic creation, its stained glass of soft tints, which sparkled in the warm sunlight and shed a kaleidoscope of color and design over the merry company of passengers. Mirrors and the gentle rolling of the steamer multiplied and enlarged the gorgeous colorings and perplexing designs. In the midst of this new life aboard ship, so novel and so beautiful, Mrs. Harris's heart would have been happy had her over-worked husband and Gertrude sat beside her at the table. Very little of this life is enjoyed without the unwelcomed flies that spoil the precious ointment. After the lunch Alfonso and his friends had time to examine a little further the great steamer that was to float them to the Old World. When his party hurriedly entered the dining-saloon, the grand staircase was entirely overlooked. How wide and roomy it was, and how beautifully carved and finished, especially the balustrade and newel posts, the whole being built of selected white oak, which mellows with age, and will assume a richer hue like the wainscoting in the famous old English abbeys and manor houses. Again the Harris party was on deck, final words hastily written were in the steamer's mail bag, and a sailor stood ready to pass it over the ship's side to the pilot's little boat, waiting for orders to cut loose from the "Majestic." The engines slacked their speed, the pilot bade the officers good-bye, and accompanied the mail bag to his trusted schooner. No. 66 was painted in black full length on the pilot's big white sail. All the passenger steamers which enter or leave New York must take these brave and alert pilots as guides in and out the ever-changing harbor channels. The gong in the engine-rooms again signaled "full speed" and the live, escaping steam was turned through the triple-expansion engines, and the "Majestic" gathered her full strength for a powerful effort, a record-breaking passage to Queenstown. The life on board the transatlantic ferry is decidedly English, and Mrs. Harris closely studied the courtesies and requirements. She soon came to like the ship's discipline and matter-of-fact customs. The young people, some newly married, and some new acquaintances like Leo and Lucille, had moved their steamer chairs on the deck, that they might watch the return of the pilot's boat. Loving letters were read, the leaves of latest magazines were cut, and many words were exchanged before the big "66" disappeared entirely with the sun that set in gold and purple over the low New England shores. Quite apart from the young people sat Mrs. Harris and Alfonso. They talked earnestly about the ill-timed strike of the millmen at home. "Why did the men strike at the very time when father wanted his mills to glow with activity?" queried Mrs. Harris. "Oh, mother," said Alfonso, "that is part of labor's stock in trade. Some labor organizations argue that the 'end justifies the means.' Our men were probably kept advised of father's plans, and strikes often are timed so as to put capital at the greatest disadvantage, and force, if possible, a speedy surrender to labor's demands. 'Like begets like,' mother, so the college professor told us when he lectured on Darwin. It was Darwin, I think, who emphasized this fundamental principle in nature. "See, mother, how this labor agitation works. Labor organizations multiply and become aggressive, and so capital organizes in self-defense. One day our professor told the class that he much preferred citizenship in a government controlled by intelligent capital, to the insecurity and uncertainty of ignorant labor in power. The professor inclined to think that the British form of government rested on a more lasting basis than that of republics. "Usually the more of values a person possesses, the more anxious he is for stable government. Labor has little capital, and so often becomes venturesome, and is willing to stake all on the throw of a die. But labor in the presence of open hungry mouths can ill afford to take such chances. Labor with its little or no surplus should act reasonably, and on the side of conservatism, or wives and little ones suffer." Mrs. Harris listened to her son's comments on capital and labor, but the independence of her race asserted itself and she said with emphasis, "Alfonso, I hope Mr. Harris will insist on his rights at Harrisville." "Very likely he will, mother, as he is that kind of a man, and the New England independence that is born in him is sure to assert itself." For a few moments neither mother nor son spoke. Suddenly both were awakened from their reveries by the call for dinner. The waters were still smooth, and the ocean breezes had sharpened appetites, so the grand staircase was crowded with a happy throng, most of whom were eager for their first dinner aboard ship. The Harrises were delighted to find Captain Morgan already at the table. Long ago Captain Morgan had learned that wealth is power. His own ship had cost a million or more, and England's millions enabled his government to control the globe. Not only was he keenly alive to the fact that capital and brains guided most human events, but naturally he possessed the instincts of a gentleman, and besides he was a true Briton. His ancestors for generations had followed the sea for a livelihood and fame. Some had served conspicuously in the navy, and others like himself had spent long lives in the commercial marine. In Lucille's eyes Captain Morgan was an ideal hero of the sea. He was over six feet in height, and robust of form, weighing not less than 250 pounds. His face was round and bronzed by the exposure of over three hundred ocean passages. His closely cropped beard and hair were iron gray, and his mild blue eyes and shapely hands told of inbred qualities. That he was possessed of rare traits of character, it was easy to discover. Loyalty to the great trusts confided to him, was noticeable in his every movement. "Safety of ship, passengers, and cargo," were words often repeated, whether the skies above him were blue or black. Captain Morgan addressing Mrs. Harris said, "We shall miss very much your husband's presence aboard ship. Nowadays managers of great enterprises ashore, involving the use of large amounts of capital, encounter quite as many stormy seas as we of the Atlantic." "Yes," replied Mrs. Harris, "and the causes of financial disturbances are fully as difficult to divine or control." "It was fortunate, however, Mrs. Harris," said the captain, "that word reached the steamer in time to intercept the Colonel so that he could return at once and assume command of his business. Aboard our ship, you must all dismiss every anxiety as to matters at home or on the "Majestic." With your permission, Colonel Harris's family shall be mine for the passage. Please command my services at all times." "Thank you," said Alfonso, and the captain's cordial words, like sunshine, dispelled the clouds. "Captain," inquired Leo, "do you think we shall have a pleasant voyage?" "Yes, I hope so, for the sake of those aboard who are making this their first voyage, otherwise we may not have the pleasure of much of their company." "Captain Morgan, then you really promise a smooth passage?" said Lucille. "Oh no, Miss Harris, we never promise in advance good weather on the ocean. Smooth water for us old sailors is irksome indeed, yet I always consider it very fortunate for our passengers, if Old Probabilities grant us a day or two of fair skies as we leave and enter port. With gentle breezes the passengers gradually get possession of their 'sea legs' as sailors term it, and later brisk breezes are welcomed." "Captain, have you a panacea for seasickness?" inquired Mrs. Harris. "Oh, yes," he replied, "take as vigorous exercise on the ship as is taken ashore, eat wisely, observe economy of nerve-force, and be resolved to keep on good terms with Old Neptune. Don't fight the steamer's movements or eccentricities, but yield gracefully to all the boat's motions. In a word, forget entirely that you are aboard ship, and the victory is yours." "This is Wednesday, Captain, and do you really think you will land us in the Mersey by Monday evening?" Lucille enquired earnestly. "Monday or Tuesday if all goes well," the captain answered. Captain Morgan drank his coffee, excused himself, and returned to his duty on the bridge. "What a gallant old sea-dog the captain is," said Mrs. Harris. "We shall feel perfectly safe in his keeping. How cheery he is away from home." "How do you know he has a home, mother?" "Perhaps not, my dear, for he seems really married to his ship." The Harrises and Leo joined the passengers who had now left the dining saloon. The light winds had freshened and the skies were overcast and gave promise of showers, if not of a storm. After walking a few times around the promenade deck, most of the passengers went below, some to the library, some to the smoking room, and some to their staterooms, perhaps thinking discretion the better part of valor. The steamer's chairs were taken from the deck and only a few persons remained outside. Some of them were clad in warm ulsters. They walked the usual half-hour. Most of these promenaders were men of business who were required to make frequent ocean passages. They were as familiar with moistened decks, cloudy skies, and heavy seas as the land-lubbers are with stone pavements and hotel corridors. CHAPTER V DISCOMFITURES AT SEA The green and red lights on the starboard and port sides and the white light on the foremast now burned brightly. The boatswain's shrill whistle furled the sails snugly to every spar, leaving the sailors little time or spirit for their usual song, as barometer-like they too sensed the approaching storm. The ship's watch forward was increased as the wind grew strong, and the weather ahead had become thick and hazy. The captain quickly left the table when the steward placed in his hand a bit of writing from the first officer, which read, "The barometer is falling rapidly." Captain Morgan and an officer paced the bridge with eyes alert. Heavy clouds of smoke from the triple stacks revealed that a hundred glowing furnaces were being fed with fuel, assistant engineers were busily inspecting, and oilers were active in lubricating the ponderous engines that every emergency might be promptly met. Ports were closed and every precaution taken. The anxiety of officers and sailors and the increased agitation of the sea was soon noticed by the ship's gay company. Before ten o'clock most of the passengers were glad of the good-night excuse for retiring. The smoking room, however, was crowded with devotees to the weed. Old-timers were busy with cards, or forming pools on the first day's run from Sandy Hook, or speculating as to the time of arrival at Queenstown. The atmosphere of the room was as thick as the weather outside. It is no wonder that a club man of New York, making his first trip to Europe, inquired of his Philadelphia friend, "Why do Americans smoke so continually?" He answered, "It is easier to tell why the English drink tea and why Americans drink coffee. But to answer your question, I suppose the mixture of races quickens the flow of blood and produces the intense activities we witness. Besides, the enlarged opportunities offered in a new and growing country present attractive prizes in the commercial, political, social, and religious world. To attain these the Anglo-Saxon blood rushes through arteries and veins like the heated blood in a thoroughbred horse on the last quarter. After these homestretch efforts Americans feel the need often of stimulants, or of a soporific, and this they try to find in a cigar." "Your views are wrong, I think. One would naturally infer that the use of tobacco shortens life. Let me relate to you an incident. "I was once in Sandusky, Ohio, and spent an evening at a lecture given by Trask, the great anti-tobacconist. In his discourse he had reached the climax of his argument, proving as he thought that tobacco shortened life, when a well dressed man in the audience rose and said, 'Mr. Trask, will you pardon me if I say a few words?' "'Oh, yes' said the lecturer, 'give us the facts only.' "'Well, Mr. Trask, there is living to-day in Castalia, southwest of here, a man nearly a hundred years old and he has been a constant user of tobacco since early childhood.' "For a moment Mr. Trask stood nonplussed. To gain time for thought he fell back upon the Socratic method, and began asking questions. 'Stranger, won't you stand up again so that the audience can see you? Thank you! Evidently you are an intelligent citizen and reliable witness. Did you say you knew the man?' "'O yes, I have known him for over fifty years.' "'Did you ever know of his favoring schools or churches by gifts or otherwise?' "'No,' said the stranger. "'There,' said Trask to the audience, 'this man's testimony only strengthens what I have been attempting to prove here this evening, that tobacco shortens life. This Castalia centenarian is dead to all the demands of society and humanity, and his corpse should have been buried half a century ago.' So the laugh was on the voluntary witness." "Hold on, my friend, your Castalia centenarian proves just what I said at the outset, that the use of tobacco prolongs life, but I am half inclined myself to feel that the less tobacco active Americans use, the better." Then throwing his cigar away, he said good-night and left the smoking room. Others stacked their cards, smoked cigarettes, and then sought their staterooms, and finally the ship's bell rang out the last patron and announced the midnight hour; the steward was left alone. He had been unusually busy all the evening furnishing ale, porter, and beer, a few only taking wine. The steward was glad to complete his report of sales for the first day out, and turn off the lights and seek his berth for the night. The "Majestic" shot past Cape Cod and was plowing her way towards the banks of Newfoundland. The strong winds were westerly and fast increasing to a moderate gale. The north star was hidden and now failed to confirm the accuracy of the ship's compasses. The first and fourth officers were pacing the bridge. The latter was glad that the engines were working at full speed, as every stroke of the pistons carried him nearer his pretty cottage in the suburbs of Liverpool. Captain Morgan had dropped asleep on the lounge in his cozy room just back of the wheel. Most of the passengers and crew off duty slept soundly, though some were dreaming of wife and children in far away homes, and others of palaces, parks, and castles in foreign countries. It was difficult for Mrs. Harris to get much rest as the waves dashing against the ship often awakened her, and her thoughts would race with the Cincinnati Express which was swiftly bearing her husband and Gertrude back to Harrisville and perhaps to trouble and poverty. While Mrs. Harris knew that her husband was wealthy, she was constantly troubled with fears lest she and her family should sometime come to want. Her own father had acquired a fortune in Ireland, but changes in the British tariff laws had rendered him penniless, and poverty had driven her mother with seven other children to America. A rich uncle in Boston enabled her to get a fair education, and the early years of her married life had been full of earnest effort, of economy and heroic struggle, that her husband and family might gain a footing in the world. The comforts of her early childhood in Ireland had given her a keen relish for luxury. The pain inflicted by poverty that followed was severely felt, and now, the pleasures of wealth again were all the more enjoyed. Mrs. Harris was not a church member, but woman-like she found her lips saying, "God bless the colonel and my precious children." Then putting her hand over upon Lucille, and satisfied that she was there by her side and asleep, she too became drowsy and finally unconscious. Alfonso and Leo occupied the adjoining stateroom, but both were in dreamland; Alfonso in the art galleries of Holland and Leo in sunny Italy. Before morning the storm center was moving rapidly down the St. Lawrence Valley, and off the east coast of Maine. Long lines of white-capped waves were dashing after each other like swift platoons in a cavalry charge. The "Majestic," conscious of an enemy on her flank, sought earnestly to outstrip the winds of Æolus. When Captain Morgan reached the bridge, the sea and sky were most threatening. The first officer said, "Captain, I have never seen the mercury go down so rapidly. We are in for a nasty time of it, I fear." Early the sailors were scrubbing the ship while the spray helped to wash the decks, and they tightened the fastenings of the life-boats. The firemen too were busy dropping cinders astern. Fires in the cook's galley were lighted, and the steerage passengers were aroused for breakfast, but few responded. Mrs. Harris often tried to dress, but every time she fell back into her berth, saying, "Stewardess, I shall surely die. Isn't the ship going down?" "No, no, madam," the stewardess replied, "I will return with beef tea, and you will soon feel better." Lucille was helped to put on a dark wrapper; and after repeated efforts at a hasty toilet, she took the stewardess's arm and reached an easy chair in the library. Alfonso and Leo, who were both members of a yacht club in New York, came to the library from a short walk on the deck. It required much urging with Lucille before she would attempt an entrance into the dining-room. Several men and a few ladies were present. "Good morning, Miss Harris, how brave you are," were words spoken so encouragingly by Captain Morgan that Lucille's face brightened and she responded as best she could. "Thank you, captain, I believe I should much prefer to face a storm of bullets on the land than a storm at sea; you courageous sailors really deserve all the gold medals." Leo, who was fond of the ocean, said to Alfonso, "Why can't we all be sailors? What say you to this? Let us test who of our party shall lose the fewest meals from New York to Queenstown. You and your mother or Lucille and I?" "Agreed," responded Alfonso, thinking it would help to keep the ladies in good spirits. "But what shall count for a meal?" inquired Alfonso. "Not less than ten minutes at the table, and at dinner, soup at least." Lucille thought Leo's idea a capital one. It was agreed that the contest should commence with the next lunch, and that Alfonso and Leo should act as captains for the two sides. By this time Lucille had eaten a little toast and had sipped part of her chocolate. A tenderloin steak and sweet omelet with French fried potatoes were being served, when suddenly the color left her face. Another lurch of the steamer sent a glass of ice water up her loose sleeve, and, utterly discomfited, she begged to be excused and rushed from the table. "Oh dear, mother, how terribly I feel; let me lie down. Oh dear! I wish I were home with father and Gertrude." "If the colonel were only here to help," murmured Mrs. Harris. "Stewardess, where are you? Why don't you hurry when I ring? Go for the doctor at once." It was now blowing a gale and the steamer was rolling badly. It was a long half-hour before the doctor entered the stateroom of Mrs. Harris. Dr. Argyle was perfect in physical development and a model of gentlemanly qualities. His education had been received in London and Vienna, and he had joined the service of the "Majestic" that he might enlarge his experiences as practitioner and man of the world. He had correctly divined that here he was sure to touch intimately the restless and wandering aristocracy of the globe. While Dr. Argyle was ostensibly the ship's doctor, he was keenly alert for an opportunity that would help him on to fame and fortune. Of the two he preferred the latter, as he believed that humanity is just as lazy as it dares to be. Therefore stateroom No. ---- was entered both professionally and inquisitively. The doctor was half glad that the Harrises were ill, as he had seen the family at Captain Morgan's table and desired to meet them. Captain Morgan had incidentally mentioned to the doctor the great wealth of the Harris family, and this also had whetted his curiosity. Before him lay mother and daughter, helpless, both in utter misery and the picture of despair. "Beg pardon, ladies," said the doctor as he entered, "you sent for me I believe?" "Yes, yes," replied Mrs. Harris, "we thought you had forgotten us, as the half-hour's delay seemed a full week. My daughter, Lucille, and I are suffering terribly. How awful the storm! Last night, doctor, I thought I should die before morning, and now I greatly fear that the ship will go down." "Do not fear, ladies," the doctor replied, "the wind is only brisk; most people suffer a little on the ocean, especially on the first voyage." "What is the cause of this terrible seasickness, doctor, and what can you do for us?" "Frankly, Mrs. Harris, no two physicians agree as to the cause. Usually people suffer most from seasickness who come aboard weary from over-work or nervous exhaustion. Most people waste vital forces by too much talking or by over-exertion. Americans, especially, overcheck their deposits of vitality, and as bankrupts they struggle to transact daily duties. Wise management of nerve forces would enable them to accomplish more and enjoy life better." "I am a bankrupt then," said Mrs. Harris, "but how about my daughter Lucille?" "Your child, I fear, is the daughter of bankrupts and doubtless inherits their qualities." "But, doctor, can't you do something now for us?" "Oh yes, madam, but first let me feel your pulse, please." "Ninety-eight," he said to himself, but he added to Mrs. Harris, "you need the very rest this voyage affords and you must not worry the least about the storm or affairs at home. Our vessel is built of steel, and Captain Morgan always outrides the storms. Ladies, I want you to take this preparation of my own. It is a special remedy for seasickness, the result of the study and experience of the medical force of the White Star Line." The faces of mother and daughter brightened. They had faith. This was noticed by Dr. Argyle. Faith was the restorative principle upon which the young doctor depended, and without it his medicine was worthless. The White Star panacea prescribed was harmless, as his powders merely inclined the patient to sleep and recovery followed, so faith or nature worked the cure. Soon after the door closed behind the doctor, Lucille was asleep, and Mrs. Harris passed into dreamland. The winds veered into the southwest, and, reinforced, were controlled by a violent hurricane that had rushed up the Atlantic coast from the West Indies. The novice aboard was elated, for he thought that the fiercer the wind blew behind the vessel, the faster the steamer would be driven forward. How little some of us really know! The cyclone at sea is a rotary storm, or hurricane, of extended circuit. Black clouds drive down upon the sea and ship with a tiger's fierceness as if to crush all life in their pathway. Officers and crew, in waterproof garments, become as restless as bunched cattle in a prairie blizzard. All eyes now roam from prow to stern, from deck to top mast. The lightning's blue flame plays with the steel masts, and overhead thunders drown the noise of engines and propellers. Thick black smoke and red-hot cinders shoot forth from the three black-throated smoke-stacks. The huge steamer, no longer moving with the ease of the leviathan, seems a tiny craft and almost helpless in the chopped seas that give to the ship a complex motion so difficult, even for old sailors, to anticipate. Tidal wave follows tidal wave in rapid succession. Both trough and crest are whipped into whitecaps like tents afield, till sea and storm seem leagued to deluge the world again. Captain Morgan, lashed to the bridge, has full confidence in himself, his doubled watch ahead, his compasses, and the throbbing engines below. Dangers have now aroused the man and his courage grows apace. Moments supreme come to every captain at sea, the same as to captains who wage wars on the land. The decks are drenched, great waves pound the forward deck and life-boats are broken from their moorings. Battened hatches imprison below a regiment of souls, some suffering the torments of stomachs in open rebellion, others of heads swollen, while others lose entire control of an army of nerves that center near and drive mad the brain. To the uninitiated, words are powerless to reveal the torments of the imprisoned in a modern steel inquisition, rocking and pitching at the mercy of mighty torrents in a mid-ocean cyclone. Mephistopheles, seeking severest punishment for the damned, displayed tenderness in not adopting the super-heated and sooted pits where stokers in storms at sea are forced to labor and suffer. All that terrible second day and night at sea, the Harrises and others tossed back and forth in their unstable berths, some suffering with chills and others with burning heat. Some, Mrs. Harris and daughter among them, lay for hours more dead than alive, their wills and muscles utterly powerless to reach needed and much coveted blankets. The dining saloon was deserted except by a few old sea-travelers. Before dinner, Leo ventured above and for a moment put his head outside. The gale blowing a hundred miles an hour hit him with the force of a club. When he went below to see Alfonso, his face was pale, and his voice trembled as he said, "Harris, before morning we shall all sink to the bottom of the Atlantic with the 'Majestic' for our tomb." Half undressed, Leo dropped again into his berth where he spent a miserable night. CHAPTER VI HALF-AWAKE, HALF-ASLEEP Few persons find life enjoyable in a great storm at sea, for the discomfitures of mind and body are many. The ship's officers and crew are always concerned about the welfare of the passengers and the safety of steamer and cargo. True, Leo, with the instincts of an artist, had stood for hours on the deck, partially sheltered by a smoke-stack, to study wave motions and the ever-changing effects of the ocean. Never before had he known its sublimity. When the sea was wildest and the deck was wave-swept, he in his safe retreat made sketches of waves and their combinations which he hoped sometime to reproduce on canvas. At other times, conscious of storm dangers in mid-ocean, Leo's conscience troubled him. For a year he had been much in love with a pretty Italian girl, daughter of an official, long in the service of the Italian government at the port of New York. Rosie Ricci was fifteen years old when she first met Leo. Dressed in white, she entered an exhibition of water colors on W. 10th street with her mother one May morning, as Leo had finished hanging a delicate marine view sketched down the Narrows. Glances only between Leo and Rosie were exchanged, but each formed the resolution sometime, if possible, to know the other. Rosie's father had died when she was only fourteen years old, and existence for Mrs. Ricci and her little family had been a struggle. For the last year, a happy change had come in their condition. A letter had been received from a rich senator by Mrs. Ricci, which was couched in the tenderest language. The senator explained in his letter that at a musicale, given on Fifth Avenue, he had heard a Rosie Ricci sing a simple song that revived memories of an early day. This fact, coupled with Rosie's charming simplicity and vivacity of manner, fixed her name in his mind; later he was reading the _New York Tribune_, and the name Ricci arrested his attention. The item mentioned the death of Raphael Ricci, ex-consul, and the senator's object in writing was to inquire further as to the facts. Did he leave a competency? If not, would the family receive such assistance as would enable the daughter, if Rosie Ricci was her daughter, to obtain a further musical education? The senator's letter dropped from the mother's hands; she was overcome with the good news. Rosie picked it up saying, "Mother dear, what is the matter? What terrible news does it contain?" "Not bad news, child! possibly good news; a letter from a stranger who offers aid in our distress, a letter from one holding a high position. I wonder what it all means? Has the senator been prompted by the spirit of your anxious father, or is there evil in the communication?" "Tell me, mother, tell me all about it!" But before the mother could speak, Rosie was reading the letter aloud. She threw up her hands in delight and flew into her mother's arms. "How good the Lord is to us!" Rosie exclaimed. She had been eager for a musical education and to win fame on the stage. In June, by appointment, Mrs. Ricci and daughter met the Senator at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It was arranged that Rosie should have the best musical education obtainable in Boston, and further that the senator should pay her expenses in Boston and New York, and that the mother's rent should be included in his liberality. At times, the mother questioned the senator's motives, but he always seemed so kind and fatherly that she spurned the thought as coming from the Evil One. The senator as he left, put several bills in Mrs. Ricci's hand, saying, "You and Rosie will find need of them for clothes for the daughter and for other expenses." Never was a girl happier than Rosie the morning she and her mother left the Grand Central Depot for New England. Rarely, if ever, did a girl work harder than Rosie at her studies. Her soul often had burned with ambition for fame and for money so that she could assist her mother. The way was now open and success was possible. At the sunset hour she often walked with a friend among the historic elms on Boston Common and in the beautiful flower gardens. Often young men longed for her acquaintance, but they could never get the consent of her pretty eyes. She was petite, her hair black, her eyes dark brown, her lips ruby-red, and her nose and chin finely chiselled. She had a cameo-like face and complexion of olive tint that told of the land of vines and figs in sunny Italy. Her step was elastic, her manner vivacious and confiding. Her dress was always tidy and stylish. Usually she carried a roll of music in one hand as she left the conservatory, and lovely flowers in the other that had been expressed either by the senator or Leo. On the completion of her course in the conservatory, Leo had pressed his suit so devotedly that Rosie consented to an engagement without her mother's knowledge. The ring of gold contained a single ruby, and Leo had had engraved on the inside of the ring, "Et teneo, et teneor." When Rosie saw the old Roman motto she said, "I hold, and am held. How appropriate, Leo! Your love for me, devotion to the beautiful, and our bright memories of artistic Italy shall bind us together forever. "But Leo, why do you put the ring on the third finger before marriage?" Leo answered, "Because I have read somewhere that many centuries ago the Egyptians believed that the third finger was especially warmed by a small artery that proceeded directly from the heart. The Egyptians also believed that the third finger is the first that a new born babe is able to move, and the last finger over which the dying lose control." "Nonsense," replied Rosie, "once the wedding ring, studded with precious stones, was worn on the forefinger; Christianity moved it to the third finger. Its use was originated in this way: the priest first put it on the thumb, saying 'In the name of the Father'; on the forefinger, adding, 'in the name of the Son;' on the second finger, repeating, 'in the name of the Holy Ghost;' and on the third finger, ending with 'Amen,' and there it staid." Abelard and Heloise were not happier in their unselfish affection than Leo and Rosie in their love. Colors on Leo's canvas now sought each other in magic harmony. At single sittings in his studio Leo made Madonna faces, and glowing landscapes, that evoked words of warm praise from his fellow artists, who were blind to the secret of Leo's remarkable power. For a Christmas present Leo brought Rosie a picture of his own of Rosie's beautiful hand holding lilies of the valley; and while she thanked him in sweetest words, he pinned at her throat a Florentine cameo once worn by his mother. All these things, and more, came flashing into Leo's mind as he struggled on the ship's deck to keep his footing in the storm. A week before the steamer left New York Leo and Rosie had quarreled. Leo's invitation to accompany the Harrises had come to him from Alfonso only three days before the "Majestic's" departure, and such was his momentary ill-humor toward Rosie that he sailed from New York without even advising her of his new plan, or saying good-bye. Leo, alone on the sea, often severely rebuked himself that he could have been so unkind to the woman to whom he had given his heart and his mother's favorite bit of jewelry. A thousand times he wished he could ask Rosie's forgiveness, for it was in a fit of anger that Rosie had snatched the ruby ring off her hand and the cameo from her throat, and had thrown them into Leo's lap saying, "Take them, Leo, you will easily find another girl to share your family name and your poverty as an artist while I have need of wealth." Leo had turned from Rosie's home without the power to reply, he was so taken by surprise. Leo was never so happy as when Rosie was present in his studio to encourage him by word or song, but now all was changed. Sometimes Leo in his secret thoughts feared that Rosie's beauty and charming manner would command riches, and sometimes he dared to think that possibly his talent and fame might command a handsome dowry. Then his mind turned to Lucille. She was taller than Rosie, not so vivacious, but like Rosie enjoyed a happy time. He even ventured at times to say mentally of Lucille that "it is she or none on earth," and then as he recalled the ring given to Rosie, the old love would assert itself and he would shut his eyes, ashamed of an affection that was false hearted. It was fortunate for Leo that he was a good sailor, as it enabled him to do many thoughtful things for the Harrises, and thus show his appreciation of their great kindness to him. On the third day out from New York, the storm moderated somewhat and the passengers at breakfast visibly increased in number, but before the lunch hour was over the fury of the gale returned. The steamer in her course had crossed the center of the cyclone where the force of the storm was diminished for a short time only. All that afternoon and night the gale increased in force till it seemed as if volcanic powers under the sea were at work turning the ocean upside down. Pent up forces in the west were loosed, and Neptune, deity of the ocean, with his three-pronged trident stalked abroad. The bombardment of waves was terrific, and the twin propellers raced so fiercely that speed was reduced to a minimum. In the morning the terrible cyclone had moved to the north, smoother seas were reached by lunch time, and most of the tables were again filled. Many of those who were making a first voyage also put in their appearance, and they were subjected to much chaffing from the veterans of ocean travel. Captain Morgan and Doctor Argyle were the recipients of many complimentary words for their skill. At dinner Leo and Alfonso mustered full forces, and each side scored every point, for both Mrs. Harris and Lucille entered the dining room, and everybody enjoyed the menu after a three days' fast. Captain Morgan spoke of the storm as "the late unpleasantness," and hoped his friends would not desert him again. Mrs. Harris was silent, but Alfonso and Lucille promised loyalty for the future, and Leo said, "Captain Morgan, I believe I haven't missed a meal." "Bravo, Colonna!" the captain replied, "you really seem to have inherited the sailing qualities of your great countryman Columbus, and I sincerely hope that you may render the world equally valuable services." Lucille added, "I am sure he will, captain; during the gale, he rendered signal services to suffering humanity." "To-morrow," continued Captain Morgan, "is the 21st of June, when the day and night will be of equal length, the sun rising and setting promptly at six o'clock." "Why not," said Lucille, "set our watches by the steamer's chronometer, and have the steward call us at 5:30 o'clock and all test the accuracy of the almanac?" Mrs. Harris and several others entered heartily into the plan. The pure sea-air was so fresh and restful that when three bells or 5:30 o'clock in the morning was heard, the Harris party were easily awakened and they hastily prepared to witness at sea the sunrise on June 21st. Leo and Alfonso were first on deck. Mrs. Harris, Lucille, and the Judge, an acquaintance made on the ship, soon joined them. Their watches agreed that it was ten minutes to six o 'clock. The decks had been washed and put in order, engines were running at full speed, the eastern sky was flushed with crimson and golden bands that shot out of the horizon, and fan-like in shape faded up in the zenith. With watches in hand, all eyes were fixed on a pathway of intensely lighted sea and sky in the east. Suddenly, as the sailor rung out "four bells," or 6 o'clock, Lucille shouted, "There! See that drop of molten gold floating on the horizon. Captain Morgan was right as to time. See, judge, how the gold glows with heat and light as the globe turns to receive the sun's blessings!" "Yes," said the judge who now for the first time since the storm became really enthusiastic, "another page of the record book is turned, and the good and bad deeds of humanity will be entered by the recording angel. The mighty sun, around which we revolve at fabulous speed is, in its relations to us mortals, the most important material fact in the universe. If I ever change my religion I shall become a sun-worshiper. The Turk in his prayers, five times a day, faces the sun." An early brisk walk on the deck sharpened appetites, and our sun-worshipers were among the first at breakfast. Gradually others entered, and again the dining room was cheerful with sunny faces. After breakfast the decks were astir with pretty women, children, and gentlemen lifting their hats. The promenade was as gay as on Fifth Avenue. Doctor Argyle gave his arm to Mrs. Harris, Lucille walked between Alfonso and Leo, and doctors of divinity and men of repute in other professions kept faithful step. Actors and actresses moved as gracefully as before the footlights. A famous actor carried on his shoulders a tiny girl who had bits of sky for eyes, a fair face, and fleecy hair that floated in the sea breeze, making a pretty picture. Business men with fragrant cigars indulged in the latest story or joke. By degrees the promenade disappeared as passengers selected steamer chairs, library, or smoking room, and congenial souls formed interesting and picturesque groups. At the outset of the voyage you wonder at the lack of fine dress, and hastily judge the modest men and women about you to be somewhat commonplace, but after days at sea and many acquaintances made, you discover your mistake and learn that your companions are thoroughly cosmopolitan. In fair weather the decks are playgrounds where children at games enliven the scene, and sailors' songs are heard. When the old clipper ship took from four to six weeks to cross the Atlantic, a weekly paper was printed. On some of the swift liners of to-day on the fourth day out a paper is issued, when perhaps the steamer is "rolling in the Roaring Forties." The sheet is a four-page affair, about six inches wide and nine inches long. It gives a description of the ship signed by the Captain; the daily runs of the ship follow, the distance still to go is stated, and the probable time it will take to make port; under "General Information" you learn about seasickness, what you have not already experienced, the necessity of exercise aboard ship, also much about the handling of luggage in Europe; some of the prose and poetry is sure to be good, and is contributed by skilled writers among the passengers. A column of "Queries" and a few brief stories and jokes brighten the sheet. The price is fifteen cents, and every copy of "The Ocean Breeze" is highly prized. On the whole, people at sea enjoy most the enforced rest, for they escape newspapers, telegrams, creditors, and the tax-gatherer. At 11 o'clock on the deck, every pleasant day, a large, well-dressed man, attended by his valet, generously opened a barrel of fresh oysters for the passengers. This benevolent gentleman proved to be a famous Saratoga gambler. In this way he made many acquaintances and friends, and each day he increased his winnings at cards and in bets on the vessel's run, till finally, not he, but the guileless passengers paid for the oysters. Gambling was the business of the man who advertised by his oysters; with the actor, who romped with the pretty child, gambling was a passion. So intense was this passion with the actor that he would attempt to match silver dollars or gold sovereigns with everybody he met when ashore; between acts on the stage he would telegraph his bet to distant cities. Crossing parks or walking down Broadway his palm concealed a coin, ready for the first possible chance. He would match his coat or his home or even his bank account. On ship he matched sovereigns only. Occasionally the "Majestic" passed in sight of some other ship, or "tramp-steamer," and by signal exchanged names and location. Rarely do the great passenger steamers meet on the Atlantic, as the course outward is quite to the north to avoid collisions. Half-awake, half-asleep, the days on shipboard go by as in a dream, and you gladly welcome back restored health. Perhaps a sweet or strong face wins your interest or heart, as the case may be, and life-long friendships are formed. Confidence thus bestowed often begets the same in others, and you are thankful for the ocean voyage. CHAPTER VII LIFE AT SEA A KALEIDOSCOPE In a shady retreat on the ship after lunch sat the Harrises, Leo, the judge, and Dr. Argyle, the latter reading a French novel. Leo had just finished a new novel entitled "A Broken Promise," Alfonso had read three hundred pages in one of Dickens's novels that tells so vividly how the poor of London exist. Dr. Argyle said, "Judge, what do you think of novels anyway?" The matter-of-fact judge gruffly replied, "I never read the modern novel because I don't care to waste my time." Whereupon Alfonso said, "Give me the novel of an idealist that has a purpose. Colonel Ingersol spoke the truth in a recent lecture when he said that a realist can be no more than an imitator or a copyist. His philosophy makes the wax that receives and retains an image of an artist. Realism degrades and impoverishes. The real sustains the same relation to ideal that a stone does to a statue, or that paint does to a painting." "No," replied Leo, "a novel proper should be a love story spiced with the beauties of nature and exciting adventures. A novel with a purpose, Alfonso, should advertise under another name for it is a cheat. It is often written with a deliberate attempt to beguile a person into reading a story which the writer deliberately planned to be simply the medium of conveying useful or useless information. Possibly a social panacea, or the theme may include any subject from separating gold from the ocean, to proving the validity of the latest theory on electricity." "Leo, you go too far," said Mrs. Harris, "the modern novel that appears in press and magazine, and later in book form, entering all our homes, should teach high morality and contain only proper scenes and passages." "But, mother," said Lucille, "you would thus debar many of the world's masterpieces in literature. It seems to me that the morality of character and scene has little to do with the artistic value of the book. The realist must depict life as it is. 'Art, for art's sake,' is what commends a novel to artistic minds." "The modern novel is too much like modern architecture," said the judge, "a combination of classical and subsequent styles thrown together to satisfy groups of individuals rather than to conform to well accepted rules or ideas of art. Modern novels and modern architecture are sure to give way to nobler thoughts that shall practically harmonize the useful and the beautiful." Dr. Argyle, having asked for opinions on the modern novel, obtained them. He was an earnest listener as he had wished more knowledge of the Harris family, which would enable him the better to lay plans; he hoped to win Lucille's favor. It was now a quarter to six o'clock and many passengers, including the Harris group, moved to the port side of the ship to observe if the sun, at the expiration of twelve hours, would again touch the water. This twenty-first day of the month had been one of Lowell's rare June days. It had been ushered in by beautiful cloud coloring. The ocean was now free from mist, the blue clouds overhead darkened the sea to the horizon, and it looked as if the sun would set behind clouds. Unexpectedly, however, the clouds near the water separated, and the sun again appeared in all his glory, sending a weird light out over the water, gilding the "Majestic," flooding the faces of the passengers with an unnatural light, and bringing into strong relief a sailing craft hovering on the starboard horizon. "Perfectly beautiful," exclaimed several ladies. "There," said the purser, as four bells rang out and the gong for dinner sounded, "the sun is kissing the waves." Before any one could answer, the gorgeous sun was slowly sinking into the blue waters of the Northern Atlantic. Passengers held their watches and in three minutes the sun had said farewell. The dinner was much enjoyed. After an evening of charming moonlight, midnight found all, save those on duty, asleep in the "Majestic," which was speeding rapidly towards the safe granite docks at Liverpool. Moonlight at sea is so bewitching, the wonder is that pleasure-seekers ever consent to land except when denied the companionship of the silver goddess of night. Whether she races with the clouds, silver tips the waves, or with her borrowed light floods the world with fairy-like beauty, it is only that her admirers may exchange sorrow for joy and conflict for peace. The sixth day out, the sun illumined a clear sky, and those that loved the sea were early on deck for exercise and fresh air. These early risers were well repaid, as the steamer was passing through a great school of porpoises that sometimes venture long distances from the British Islands. Alfonso ran to rap at Lucille's door and she hurried on deck to enjoy the sight. Hundreds of acres of the ocean were alive with porpoises or sea hogs as sailors often call them. Porpoises average five feet in length and are the size of a small boy and quite as playful. These animals are smooth, and black or gray in color, except the under side which is pure white. They are gregarious and very sociable in their habits. Porpoises race and play with each other and dart out of the sea, performing almost as many antics as the circus clown. They feed on mackerel and herring, devouring large quantities. Years ago the porpoise was a common and esteemed article of food in Great Britain and France, but now the skin and blubber only have a commercial value. The skins of a very large species are used for leather or boot-thongs. The early risers were standing on the prow of the steamer where the cutwater sent constantly into the air a nodding plume of white spray. Suddenly the watch shouted, "Whale ahead, sir!" Officers and sailors were astir. Just ahead, and lying in the pathway of the steamer lay a whale, fifty feet in length, seemingly asleep, for he was motionless. The officer's first thought was that he would slack speed, but presence of mind prompted him to order full speed, planning no doubt, if the whale was obstinate, to cut him in halves. Lucille and others, fearful of consequences, turned and ran, but the leviathan suddenly dropped down out of sight, his broad tail splashing salt water into the faces of the young people who were bold enough to await events. With a sense of relief, Leo exclaimed, "Narrow escape, that!" "Narrow escape for whom?" Alfonso inquired. "For both the steamer and the whale," replied Lucille. On the way to breakfast, Lucille asked an officer if similar instances frequently happened. "Rarely," he replied, but added, "very likely we may see other whales in this vicinity." Sure enough, after breakfast, children ran up and down the deck shouting, "Whales! Whales!" and several were seen a mile or two north of the ship's course, where they sported and spouted water. About four o'clock, the temperature having fallen several degrees, the passengers sighted to the northeast a huge iceberg in the shape of an arch, bearing down on the steamer's course, and had it been night, possibly freighted with all the horrors of a ship-wreck. As it was, Captain Morgan deemed it wise to lessen the speed as the ship approached the iceberg. "This is wonderful, Leo," said Mrs. Harris; "can you tell us where and when icebergs are formed?" "Oh yes, Mrs. Harris, icebergs that float down the Atlantic are born on the west coast of Greenland. Up there great valleys are filled with snow and ice from hill-top to hill-top, reaching back up the valleys, in some instances from thirty to forty miles. This valley-ice is called a 'Mer de Glace,' and has a motion down the valley, like any river, but of three feet more or less only per day. If time enough is allowed, vast quantities of this valley-ice move into the gulf or sea. When the sea is disturbed by a storm the ice wall or precipice is broken off, and enormous masses, often a hundred times larger than a big building, fall and float away with the report of the firing of a park of artillery, and these floating mountains of ice are lighted in their lonely pathways by the midnight sun." Before dinner, came the regular promenade which presented many contrasts. A pretty bride from the Blue Grass Region of Kentucky walked with her young husband whom she had first met at a New England seaside. She was glad to aid in bridging the chasm between north and south. Her traveling dress of blue was appropriately trimmed with gray. The gorgeously dressed gambler walked on the deck alone. Then came two modest nuns dressed in gray and white. Alfonso and his mother, the judge and Lucille, and a group of little children followed. Dr. Argyle and a Philadelphia heiress kept step. Everybody walked, talked, and laughed, and the passengers had little need of the ship's doctor now. If the weather is fair the decks are always enlivened as a steamer approaches land. The next day, by noon at latest, Ireland and Fastnet Rock would be sighted, if the ship's reckoning had been correct. After dinner, Dr. Argyle was walking the deck with Lucille in the star-light. He had told her much of his family, of his talented brother in the Church, and of another in the army; he had even ventured to speak of Lucille's grace of manner, and she feared what might follow. The call of Mrs. Harris relieved Lucille of an unpleasant situation. Secretly, Lucille was pleased to escape from Dr. Argyle. Something in his manner told her that he was not sincere; that he was a schemer, perhaps a fortune-seeker, and she gladly rejoined her mother. Mrs. Harris and her children often wondered how matters were progressing at home. Alfonso had faith in his father's ability to cope with the strike, but Mrs. Harris and Lucille were much worried. "Don't let us trouble," said Alfonso, "till we reach Queenstown, as there we shall surely get a cablegram from father." Just then Leo joined the family, and Lucille taking his arm, the two walked the deck, and later they found quiet seats in the moonlight. The moon's welcome rays revealed fleece-like clouds overhead and changed the waters astern into acres of diamonds. Gentle breezes fanned the cheeks of two troubled lovers who thus far had kept well their heart secrets. Lucille's warm and sensitive nature yearned for some confidant in whom she could find consolation. Mrs. Harris never quite understood her daughter. Lucille was noble, generous, and true in her affection. Her ideal of marriage was that the busy shuttle of life must be of Divine guidance, and often she was at a loss to understand some of the deep mysteries that had clouded her own life. Of this world's blessings her life had been full, except she could not reconcile some of her late experiences. Of this, of course, Leo knew nothing. He too had had a cup of bliss dashed suddenly to the ground. A moment of anger had destroyed his plans for life. The moon's soft light changed Leo's purpose never to speak to Lucille of his affection for Rosie Ricci, and he now frankly told her the whole story. At first Lucille did not wish to believe that Leo had ever been in love, as her own heart had turned to him in the silent hours of the night when the pain in her heart forbade sleep. Trembling she said, "Leo, you have given Rosie up forever then?" "Oh no, Miss Harris, it was Rosie who said to me, 'Good-bye, Leo, forever.' She accepted my attentions for a year. Alas! Rosie's love for the rich man's gold I fear was more powerful than her love for me, a poor artist, and so she threw back the ruby ring and my mother's cameo, and crushed my heart and hopes. In accepting the kind invitation of your brother to accompany your family on this trip, I hoped that the journey might heal my suffering soul." "I am delighted," said Lucille, her voice and hand still trembling a little, "that your own vow was not broken." Leo's olive complexion was softened in the moon's rays, his face was saddened by the recital of his deep affliction, and his dark eyes were lowered, as he looked out upon the troubled pathway of the steamer. For a moment Lucille earnestly gazed at Leo who seemed to her to be handsome and noble, but he appeared lost as in a dream. Every man is thought to be noble by the woman who loves him. Then she took both his hands in hers in pity and said, "Leo, be brave as your ancestors were brave. You will be a success in the world because you have remaining your intense love for art." "Yes, Lucille, and I think I shall marry art only." "Don't be rash, Leo, we frail human beings know little in advance as to heaven's plans." Few forces work truer in nature than the principle that like begets like. Leo confided in Lucille, and now Lucille confided in Leo; she slowly told in low voice the story of her own great disappointment. "I too, once had an ideal lover. Our souls were one; the day of wedding even had been fixed; orders for an expensive trousseau had been sent to Paris; the details of the marriage had been arranged, a long journey abroad planned, and the city for our future home was selected. These things had become part of my dreams, and the joy of anticipation was filling my cup to the brim. "One evening, in the moonlight, such as now smiles upon us, I asked Bernard if he would read a short note which I had just received, and tell me if its contents were true. Bernard removed the letter from the envelope, looked at the signature, and reading turned pale. The note was from a lady who asked if I was aware that he had offered himself to another. "A second time I pressed the question to know if the contents were true, and he answered, 'Yes', and added that it was not his fault that he did not marry the lady. "'Then you love her still, Bernard?' "'Yes, Lucille, but I love you also.' "In anger and disappointed love I left him. Of course all plans for the marriage were cancelled at once. 'First love or none,' was then written on my heart, where it still remains." Lucille wept while Leo sat surprised. He knew not what to say, for her heart-story and heart edict, "First love or none," had opened his own wounds afresh, and had shut the door to Lucille's heart perhaps forever. "Come, Lucille," a call of Mrs. Harris, aroused the courage of Leo, and he said to Lucille, who with a flushed face looked more beautiful than ever, "At least we should be friends." "Yes," she murmured, and Mrs. Harris and her daughter retired. The night before, the second officer had told Lucille that land would probably be seen early next day on the port-side. All the morning, Mrs. Harris was awaiting anxiously more news about the great strike at Harrisville. "Land, on the port-side, sir!" shouted the forward lookout, just as four bells struck the hour of ten o'clock. The officer on duty, pacing the bridge, raised his glass and in a moment he answered, "Ay! Ay! The Skelligs." "What do they mean?" inquired Mrs. Harris of a sailor passing. "The officer has sighted land, madam. Don't you see the specks of blue low down on the horizon to the northeast? That's the Skelligs, three rocky islets off the southwest coast of Ireland, near where I was born, and where my wife Katy, and the babies live. That's where my dear old mother also keeps watch for her Patsie." "Is your name Patsie?" Alfonso asked. "Yes, sir, Patsie Fitzgerald, and I'm proud of my name, my family, the Emerald Isle, and the fine steamer that's taking us safely home, and may God bless all you fine people, and keep my wife and babies and my dear old mother!" "Thank you!" said Alfonso, "here, Patsie, is a little money for the babies," and the sailor tipped his hat and bowed his thanks. The signal officer on Brea Head, Valentia Island, was soon exchanging signals with the "Majestic," and five minutes later the sighting of the "Majestic" was cabled to the Lloyds of Liverpool and London and back to New York, via Valentia Bay, and it was known that evening in Harrisville that the Harris family were safely nearing Queenstown. Travelers experience delightful feelings as the old world is approached for the first time. All that has been read or told, and half believed, is now felt to be true, and you are delighted that you are so soon to see for yourself the "Mother Islands," and Europe which have peopled the western world with sons and daughters. With the precision of the New York and Jersey City ferries the ocean steamers enter the harbors of the old and new world. On the southwestern coast of Ireland is Bantry Bay, memorable in history as having been twice entered by the French navy for the purpose of invading Ireland. In sight is Valentia, the British terminus of the first Atlantic cable to North America, also the terminus of the cables laid in 1858, 1865, and 1866, and of others since laid. The distance is 1635 miles from Valentia Bay to St. John, Newfoundland. From the deck of the steamer, Ireland seems old and worn. Her rocky capes and mountainous headlands reach far into the ever encroaching Atlantic like the bony fingers of a giant. Fastnet Rock lighthouse on the right, telling the mariner of half-sunken rocks, and Cape Clear on the left, soon drop behind. Approaching Queenstown, the green forests and fields and little white homes of fishermen and farmers are visible along the receding shore. Roach's Point, four miles from Queenstown is reached, where the mails are landed and received, if the weather is bad, but Captain Morgan decided to steam into Queenstown Harbor, one of the finest bays in the world, being a sheltered basin of ten square miles, and the entrance strongly fortified. Within the harbor are several islands occupied by barracks, ordnance and convict depots, and powder magazines. This deep and capacious harbor can float the navies of the world. In beauty it compares favorably with the Bay of Naples. Cove, or Queenstown, as Cove is called, since the visit of Queen Victoria in 1849, has a population of less than ten thousand. It is situated on the terraced and sheltered south side of Great Island. Here for his health came Rev. Charles Wolfe, author of "Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note." In the amphitheatre-shaped town on parallel streets rise tiers of white stone houses, relieved by spire and tower. On neighboring highest hills are old castles, forts, and a tall white lighthouse. One or more of Her Majesty's armored warships may always be seen within the bay. The "Majestic" dropped anchor in the quiet harbor, and the company's lighter came along side with passengers for Liverpool, and to take ashore the Queenstown passengers, and the mails which, checked out, numbered over 1600 sacks. The transatlantic mail is put aboard the express and hurried to Dublin, thence from Kingston to Holyhead, via a swift packet across St. George's Channel, and to its destination, thus saving valuable hours in its delivery throughout Europe. Several small boats appeared bringing natives who offered for sale fruit, Irish laces, and canes made of black bog oak, with the shamrock carved on the handles. Mrs. Harris was much pleased to renew her acquaintance with the scenes of her girlhood, having sailed from Queenstown for Boston when she was only ten years old. The baggage was left on the steamer to go forward to Liverpool, and Alfonso led the way aboard the lighter, and from the dock to the Queen's Hotel. Each carried a small satchel, with change of clothing, till the trunks should be overtaken. At the hotel Alfonso found the longed-for cablegram from his father which read as follows:-- Harrisville,-- _Mrs. Reuben Harris, Queen's Hotel, Queenstown, Ireland._ Employees still out. Mills guarded. Will hire new men. Searles visits Australia. All well. Enjoy yourselves. Love. Reuben Harris. "It's too bad that father and Gertrude couldn't be with us," said Mrs. Harris. The lunch ashore of Irish chops, new vegetables, and fruit was a decided improvement on the food of the last few days. The Harrises after a stormy sea voyage were delighted again to put foot on mother earth, to enjoy the green terraces, ivy-clad walls, cottages, and churches, and also to see the shamrock, a tiny clover, which St. Patrick held up before the Irish people to prove the Holy Trinity. Lucille found the pretty yellow furz, the flower which Linnæus, the famous Swedish botanist, kissed. Alfonso suggested that they take the part rail and part river route of a dozen miles to Cork, the third city of Ireland. En route are seen beautiful villas, green park-like fields, rich woods, and a terrace that adorns the steep banks of the River Lee. A ruined castle at Monkstown is pointed out, which a thrifty woman built, paying the workman in goods, on which she cleared enough to pay for the castle, except an odd groat, hence the saying, "The castle cost only a groat." A delightful day was spent at Cork, an ancient city, which pagans and Danes once occupied, and which both Cromwell and Marlborough captured. Here Rev. Thomas Lee, by his preaching, inclined William Penn, "Father of Pennsylvania," to become a Quaker. Here was born Sheridan Knowles, the dramatist, and other famous writers. After visiting the lakes of Killarney and Dublin, the Harris family took a hasty trip through England. CHAPTER VIII COLONEL HARRIS RETURNS TO HARRISVILLE The strong will of Reuben Harris was to meet its match, in fact its defeat. His plans for a well rounded life were nearing a climax when the telegram from his manager Wilson changed all his plans, and standing on the pier, as his family steamed away, he experienced the horrors of a terrible nightmare. Mechanically he shook his white handkerchief, saw his family carried far out to sea as if to another world, and he longed for some yawning earthquake to engulf him. He stood transfixed to the dock; the perspiration of excitement, now checked, was chilling him when Gertrude caught his arm and said, "Father, what is the matter?" Colonel Harris's strong frame trembled like a ship that had struck a hidden rock, and then he rallied as if from a stupor, and taking Mr. Searles's arm was helped to a carriage. He said, "You must pardon me, Mr. Searles, if for a moment I seemed unmanned. It is a terrible ordeal to be thus suddenly separated from my family." "Yes, Colonel Harris, I had a similar experience recently on the docks in Liverpool when my family bade me adieu, and I came alone to America. Separation for a time even from those we love is trying." The heroic in Colonel Harris soon enabled him to plan well for the afternoon. He telegraphed Mr. Wilson of his decision to return, and then said, "We will leave New York at 6 o'clock this evening for Harrisville. Mr. Searles, we will try to use the afternoon for your pleasure. Driver, please take us to the Windsor Hotel, via the Produce Exchange." The colonel having left the Waldorf did not wish, under the circumstances, again to enter his name on its register. The ride down West Street, New York, at midday, is anything but enjoyable, as few thoroughfares are more crowded with every kind of vehicle conveying merchandise from ship to warehouse, and from warehouse to ship and cars. However, the ride impressed Searles with the immensity of the trade of the metropolis. West Street leads to Battery Park, the Produce, and Stock Exchanges, which Colonel Harris desired Mr. Searles and his daughter Gertrude to see in the busy part of the day. Colonel Harris explained that here in Battery Park terminated the Metropolitan Elevated Railway. A railway in the air with steam-engines and coaches crowded with people interested Mr. Searles greatly. "In London," he said, "we are hurried about under ground, in foul air, and darkness often." "Here at Battery Park, Mr. Searles, November 25, 1783, Sir Guy Carleton's British army embarked. Our New Yorkers still celebrate the date as Evacuation Day. Near by at an earlier date Hendrick Christianson, agent of a Dutch fur trading company, built four small houses and a redoubt, the foundation of America's metropolis. In 1626 Peter Minuit, first governor of the New Netherlands, bought for twenty-six dollars all Manhattan Island." Mr. Searles visited the tall Washington Building which occupies the ground where formerly stood the headquarters of Lords Cornwallis and Howe. He told Gertrude that he had read that, in July, 1776, the people came in vast crowds to Battery Park to celebrate the Declaration of Independence, and that they knocked over the equestrian statue of George III., which was melted into bullets to be used against the British. "Yes," replied Colonel Harris, "in early days, Americans doubtless lacked appreciation of art, but we always gave our cousins across-sea a warm reception." "Colonel Harris," said Mr. Searles, "it has always puzzled me to understand why you should have built near Boston the Bunker Hill Monument." "Mr. Searles, because we Americans whipped the British." "Oh no, Colonel, that fight was a British victory." "Father," said Gertrude, "Mr. Searles is right; the British troops, under General Gage, drove the American forces off both Breed's Hill and Bunker Hill. The obelisk of Quincy granite was erected at Charlestown, I think, to commemorate the stout resistance which the raw provincial militia made against regular British soldiers, confirming the Americans in the belief that their liberty could be won." Mr. Searles thanked Miss Harris for her timely aid and added that a patriot is a rebel who succeeds, and a rebel is a patriot who fails. He observed also the witty sign over the entrance of a dealer in American flags, "Colors warranted not to run." The party drove to the Produce Exchange, one of the most impressive buildings in New York. It is of rich Italian Renaissance architecture. Beneath the projecting galley-prows in the main hall, the fierce bargaining of excited members reminded Mr. Searles of a pitched battle without cavalry or artillery. Gertrude was anxious to climb the richly decorated campanile that rises two hundred and twenty-five feet, which commands an unrivalled bird's-eye view of lower New York, the bay, Brooklyn, Long Island, and the mountains of New Jersey. All hoped to catch a glimpse of the "Majestic," but she was down the Narrows and out of sight. Mr. Searles desired to see Trinity Church, so he was driven up Broadway to the head of Wall Street. Its spire is graceful and two hundred and eighty-four feet high. The land on which it stands was granted in 1697 by the English government. There were also other magnificent endowments. Trinity Parish, or Corporation, is the richest single church organization in the United States, enjoying revenues of over five hundred thousand dollars a year. In Revolutionary times the royalist clergy persisted in reading prayers for the king of England till their voices were drowned by the drum and fife of patriots marching up the center aisle. It was now past two o'clock and the Harris party was driven to the Hotel Windsor for lunch. Promptly at six o'clock the conductor of the fast Western Express shouted, "All aboard," and Colonel Harris, Gertrude, and Mr. Searles in their own private car, left busy New York for Harrisville. The Express creeps slowly along the steel way, under cross-streets, through arched tunnels, and over the Harlem River till the Hudson is reached, and then this world-famed river is followed 142 miles to Albany, the capital of the Empire State. This tide-water ride on the American Rhine is unsurpassed. The Express is whirled through tunnels, over bridges, past the magnificent summer houses of the magnates of the metropolis that adorn the high bluffs, past wooded hill and winding dale, grand mountains, and sparkling rivulets. Every object teems with historic memories. This ride, in June, is surpassed only when the forests are in a blaze of autumnal splendor. For twenty miles in sight are the battlemented cliffs of the Palisades. Mr. Searles was familiar with the facile pen of Washington Irving, and from the car caught sight of "Sunny Side" covered with nourishing vines, grown from slips, which Irving secured from Sir Walter Scott at Abbottsford. Passing Tarrytown Colonel Harris said, "Here Major Andre was captured, and the treachery of Benedict Arnold exposed, otherwise, we might to-day have been paying tribute to the crown of Great Britain." "Yes," replied Mr. Searles, "George Washington, patriot, hung Major Andre, the spy. You made Washington president, and we gave Andre a monument in Westminster Abbey." Sing Sing and Peekskill were left behind, and the Express was approaching the picturesque Highlands, a source of never failing delight to tourists. West Point, the site of the famous United States Military Academy, is on the left bank of the Hudson in the very bosom of the Highlands. The sun set in royal splendor behind the Catskills; "And lo! the Catskills print the distant sky, And o'er their airy tops the faint clouds driven So softly blending that the cheated eye Forgets or which is earth, or which is heaven." "Mr. Searles," said Colonel Harris, "before leaving America you must climb the Catskills. Thousands every summer, escaping from the heat and worry of life, visit those wind-swept 'hills of the sky.' There they find rest and happiness in great forests, shady nooks, lovely walks, and fine drives. "There are several hotels in the vicinity. From one hotel on an overhanging cliff you behold stretched out before you a hundred miles of the matchless panorama of the Hudson. The Highlands lie to the south, the Berkshire Hills and Green Mountains to the east, and the Adirondacks to the north. The latter is a paradise for disciples of Nimrod and of Izaak Walton, and a blessed sanitarium for Americans, most of whom under skies less gray than yours do their daily work with little if any reserve vitality." Gertrude, who had excused herself some minutes before, now returned. She had been visiting in an adjoining Pullman a friend of hers, whom she had met for a moment in the Grand Central Station before the train started. Calling Colonel Harris aside, she said, "Father, Mrs. Nellie Eastlake, my classmate at Smith College, is going with friends to the Pacific Coast; shall I ask her to dine with us?" "Certainly, child, invite her, and I am sure, Mr. Searles, that you concur in my daughter's plan to increase our party at dinner, do you not?" "Most assuredly, Colonel." A little later charming Mrs. Eastlake followed Gertrude into the "Alfonso," and soon dinner was announced. The steward, thoughtlessly, had forgotten in New York to purchase flowers for the table, but they were not missed. There are women in this world whose presence is so enjoyable that they rival the charm of both art and flowers. Their voices, their grace of manner, their interest in you and your welfare, laden the air with an indescribable something that exhilarates. Their presence is like the sunshine that warms and perfumes a conservatory; you inhale the odors of roses, pinks, and climbing jessamines. Such a woman was Nellie Eastlake. She was tall and winning. The marble heart of the Venus of Milo would have warmed in her presence. Shakespeare would have said of her eyes, "They do mislead the morn." Mrs. Eastlake was in sympathy with the Harrises in their keen disappointments. She possessed the tact to put Mr. Searles in the happiest frame of mind, so that he half forgot his mission to America. The Colonel also forgot, for the hour, that his family were absent, and that his workmen in Harrisville were on a strike. Mrs. Eastlake in her girlhood had converted all who knew her into ardent friends. While at school on the Hudson, she met the rich father of a schoolmate. Later she was invited to travel with this friend and her father, Mr. Eastlake, a widower, among the Thousand Islands and down the St. Lawrence River. She so charmed the millionaire that after graduation at Smith College she accepted and married him. She was now journeying to her palatial home on the Pacific Coast. She skilfully helped to guide the table-talk, avoiding unwelcome topics. The dinner over, a half-hour was spent with music and magazines, and the party retired for the night. Breakfast was served as the Express approached Lake Erie. It was agreed that Mr. Searles should accompany Mrs. Eastlake and Gertrude in the car "Alfonso," and spend a day or two at Niagara Falls. Colonel Harris kissed Gertrude, said good-bye to all, and taking a seat in a Pullman, continued alone on his journey to Harrisville. Returning home he hoped, if possible, to set matters right at the steel mills before Mr. Searles arrived. Left to himself, he now had opportunity for reflection. The time was, when he was as proud of his ability to do an honest day's work at the forge as he was to-day proud of his great wealth and growing power in the manufacturing world. Then he was poor, but he was conscious of forces hidden within which if used on the right things and at the right time and place he believed would make him a man of influence. He was able then with his own hands to fashion a bolt, a nail, or horseshoe, unsurpassed in the county. He was handy in shaping and tempering tools of every kind. When he ate his cold dinner, reheating his coffee over the forge coals, he often thought of the dormant fires within him, and he wondered if they would ever be fanned to a white heat. For years he had toiled hard to pay the rent of his forge and home and his monthly bills. His wife was saving and helpful in a thousand ways, but life was a hard struggle from sun to sun. One summer's day when work was slack, there came to his shop a tall Englishman to get a small job done. So well was the work performed by Harris that the Englishman, whose name was James Ingram, said to Harris, "I believe you are the mechanic I have long been looking for. In early life I was apprenticed in England to a famous iron-master, and when the Bessemer patents for converting iron into steel were issued, it was my good fortune to be a foreman where the first experiments were made by Henry Bessemer himself, and so I came to have a practical knowledge of Bessemer's valuable invention; but my health failed, and for six months I have been in your country in search of it, and now being well again, I plan to start if possible a Bessemer steel plant in America. Can you help me?" Reuben Harris was quick to see that great profits might be realized from Bessemer's patents and Ingram's ideas, and promptly said, "Yes, but I must first know more about these patents and their workings." Before a week had passed, he had learned much from Ingram concerning the practical working of the Bessemer process of converting iron into steel. Bessemer claimed that his steel rails would last much longer than the common iron rail then in use. Reuben Harris easily comprehended that the profits would be large. It was verbally agreed between Harris and Ingram that they would share equally any and all profits realized. Ingram had contributed reliable knowledge, Harris was to enlist capital, and both were to make use of all their talents, for they were both skilled mechanics. It was not an easy matter for Harris to secure capital, for capital is often lynx-eyed, and usually it is very conservative. It was especially cautious of investment in Harris's schemes, as the practical workings of the Bessemer process were not yet fully understood in America. The profits promised by both Harris and Ingram to capitalists were great, and this possibly made capital suspicious. Finally enough ready money was obtained to make a successful experiment, which so convinced a few rich men that more money was immediately advanced, and the steel plant was soon furnishing most satisfactory steel rails at greatly reduced cost for both the manufacturer and consumer. Harris's ability to manage kept pace with the rapid growth of the new enterprise, while Ingram's knowledge and inventive talents proved that as superintendent of the steel plant he was the right man in the right place. At first Harris found great difficulty in convincing railway managers that the steel rail would render enough more service to compensate for the additional cost. The most anybody could say in favor of the steel rail was largely theoretical. The Bessemer steel rail had had only a few months of actual service, long enough, however, to demonstrate that at the joints it would not batter and splinter like the iron rail. This was, indeed, a desideratum and many orders came in. Not only was the steel mill kept running day and night, but orders accumulated so rapidly that large additions were made to the mills. Money for all these improvements and the capital necessary to carry on the increasing business were matters of vital importance to the success of the company. To manage a business with greatest advantage quite as much ready cash is needed as is invested in the plant, otherwise the banker's discount becomes a heavy lien on the profits, and the stockholders grumble at small dividends. Possibly Reuben Harris overestimated the value of his service in financiering the business; at least he came to believe that he earned, and ought to have a larger interest than James Ingram. Ingram, became so cramped by assessments and money obligations that he was obliged to sell to Harris most of his interest in the steel plant. Harris's interests increased, till practically he was the owner of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Works, and much property besides. He was quoted as a millionaire, while James Ingram was superintendent of only a department of the steel works, and his income was nominal. Often he felt that great injustice had been done him. Several times he had talked the matter over with Colonel Harris, but with little satisfaction. The great wrong done to James Ingram, to whom Harris was so largely indebted for the initial and practical knowledge of successfully manufacturing steel rails was uppermost in Reuben Harris's mind as the express hurried him back to Harrisville. CHAPTER IX CAPITAL AND LABOR IN CONFERENCE Colonel Harris's awakened conscience was considering seriously the question, "How can I right this wrong done to Ingram?" when the Express stopped at a station thirty miles out of Harrisville, and into his car came the son of James Ingram, George Ingram who was now superintendent of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co.'s plant. Somebody, perhaps Gertrude, had telegraphed from Buffalo to the superintendent to tell him on which train Colonel Harris expected to return. George Ingram was visibly affected as he took the proffered hand of Reuben Harris, and inquired about his health and the whereabouts and welfare of his family. Harris implored young Ingram to tell him all about the strike, its latest phases, and what the municipal authorities were doing for the protection of his property. George Ingram gave him a brief history of the troubles up to the time of his leaving Harrisville. He told how the manager aided by the company's general counsel, Mr. Webster, had used every possible argument with the workingmen's committee; that a statement even had been submitted, showing that very small or practically no profits had resulted from recent contracts, which were now being completed by the company. The effort to arrive at a satisfactory adjustment with the employees was thus far absolutely fruitless. Since daylight the four thousand men had been parading the streets with music and clubs, forcing employees of other establishments to quit work, and threatening to destroy the steel plant. The color in Colonel Harris's face came and went as he listened, showing a white heat of indignation. Ingram sat facing his employer, watching the emotions of a strong man, and not then daring to offer any suggestion, for he felt strongly in behalf of the employees, who always looked upon him as their friend. Colonel Harris was a man of powerful build, wide forehead, overhanging brows, broad chest and shoulders, short thick neck, and strong arms developed at the anvil. His superintendent from boyhood had studied him, but never before had he seen the lion in his employer so aroused. Arriving at Harrisville the wealthy iron-master, accompanied by his superintendent, stepped into his own private carriage, and immediately drove to the general offices of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. The directors of the company were in special session to devise means of protecting their threatened property and of crushing the strike. B.C. Wilson, the manager, rose to greet Colonel Harris, who shook hands with him and the directors, and then the meeting was resumed, Harris acting as chairman of the board. Colonel Harris soon grasped the situation, and he approved of all that his directors and manager had done. Rising to his feet, in a firm tone, he made a vigorous talk to his board: "Gentlemen, my views as to the best method of dealing with the important question before us are known to some of you. Four years ago a similar trouble perplexed our company, and our failure then to act decisively resulted in prolonging the discontent among our employees. Their purposes are as apparent to-day as then, viz., to rule or ruin our gigantic enterprise. Capital and labor should be the best of friends. Unfortunately, trusts and labor organizations are alike avaricious and selfish. "Centuries ago, in Belgium, weavers dictated terms to capital, and hurled rich men from balconies to death upon spears below. This unnatural revolution lasted for a short time only; brains and wealth again acquired control, and they always will control. To yield to our employees the privilege of fixing their own wages, and a voice in directing the affairs of our company is to cloud or mortgage our capital. This is a most unreasonable demand. Why should they expect us to share with them our property, title to which the United States has guaranteed? "If our state, or national government cannot or will not defend us in the title to our property, on which they yearly levy taxes, then we will place our interests beneath a flag that can and will give ample protection. This terrible uncertainty as to titles and values in the United States will yet wreck the republic." It was natural that the directors should heartily approve Colonel Harris's utterances, as he was the owner of five-sixths of the stock of the company. He then asked Mr. Webster their general counsel, to read to the board the position which the company proposed to take before the public. Mr. Webster was a tall, elderly man, who had served five years on the supreme bench of his state, an attorney of few words, but well versed in the laws of his country, especially in corporation laws. Holding a sheet of paper in his hands he read, "The Harrisville Iron & Steel Company claims the fundamental right to manage its own business in its own way, in accordance with and under the protection of the laws of the land." The board voted its approval of the attorney's position, and also voted that a petition be drawn and immediately sent to the mayor of the city asking protection for their property. The board then adjourned. Colonel Harris, his manager, and Mr. Webster entered a carriage, and drove rapidly to the mayor's office, while superintendent George Ingram drove back to the steel works to execute his orders, though he did not believe in harsh measures. Harris presented the petition to the mayor, who hastily examined it. Bands of music were now audible on the street, and a long procession of workingmen, bearing national banners, was seen marching towards the city hall. Citizens on the streets held their breath, and policemen feared the outcome. Colonel Harris rose to go, but the Mayor seized his arm and said, "No! you and your friends must stay here and meet a committee of your employees who have an appointment with me at three o'clock. "Already I have said to the same committee, who called at ten o'clock this morning, that I should expect them to influence your employees to keep the peace, to aid in protecting your property, to disperse quietly and remain in their homes. Colonel Harris, please be seated, you and your friends must remain." "Well, Mr. Mayor, since you insist, we will remain, but our company demands the protection of all our property, and the preservation of peace and lives in our midst. You are the city's executive officer. The payment annually by our corporation of thousands in taxes, calls for an equivalent, therefore we ask that you maintain the dignity of the city and her laws." The mayor stepped to the telephone and called Major Strong, the chief of police. "Send at once a captain and twenty-five policemen in patrol wagons to the city hall. Hold fifty more men in readiness." A great throng of people occupied the sidewalks and the windows of adjoining buildings. Thousands of workmen crowded the pavement from curb to curb. The vast crowd below, though impressive was not new to Colonel Harris nor did it alarm him. Four years before, his employees were out on a strike for several months. Then the issue was, "Will the company recognize the demands of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers of America?" The reply of the company was, "No!" The struggle then was severe, but the strike failed. The present issue was, "Will the company pay an increase of wages?" The committee of five of the employees soon entered the mayor's office. They were much surprised to find that Colonel Harris had returned to the city; it was believed that he had actually set sail for Europe. The committee unfortunately was a radical one, and did not represent the average thoughtful and conservative type of workingmen. Evidently the committee had been selected for the purpose of intimidating capital, as their manner did not indicate a conciliatory policy. Mr. Burns, acting as spokesman, said, "Mr. Mayor, it is 3 o'clock, and we are back again promptly, as you requested, and you see that our committee is increased by several thousand workingmen on the street below who have come to demand bread of a soulless corporation. Mayor Duty, what do you advise us to do?" The Mayor was nervous as he replied, "Mr. Burns and members of the committee, I confess that so many thousands of honest and upturned faces of workingmen move my heart. If I were able it would give me pleasure first to ask you all to partake of a good meal, for more satisfactory business is usually accomplished after people are well fed. You ask my advice. Here, gentlemen of the committee, is Colonel Harris, your employer, let him speak to you." Memories of a wife and three babies at home, dependent for bread upon his own earnings at the forge, flashing upon the mind of Colonel Harris, sweetened his spirit and softened his voice, so that he spoke briefly and kindly to the committee, repeating, however, what his manager had told the committee at ten o'clock, viz., "that the present bad condition of the steel market would not permit the company to grant the advance of wages they asked." The committee, aware of the large profits of former years, sullenly retired, and after the company's decision had been communicated to the anxious thousands below, the employees of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. slowly returned to their homes. The mayor ordered his chief of police to dispatch immediately in patrol wagons fifty men to the steel works, to guard the property and keep the peace. After the committee retired, the mayor said, "Well, Colonel Harris, what will be the outcome?" "Mr. Mayor, we cannot foretell anything. You never know what workingmen in their lodges will do. There, as a rule, the 'Walking delegate' and a few agitators rule with despotic power. If a workman, whose large family forces him to take conservative views, dares in his lodge to suggest peaceful measures, an agitator rises at once in indignation and demands that traitors to the cause of labor be expelled. This throttles freedom of action in many labor unions, so that often what appears on the surface to be the unanimous action of the members of workingmen's leagues, is but the exercise of despotic power by a few men who have nothing to lose, and whose salary is paid from the slim purses of honest labor. "Usually those who talk much and loudly think little and unwisely, and the opposite to their advice is safest to follow. The greatest need to-day in most of our labor organizations is wise leadership, and this will result when the best element in the labor lodges asserts itself. "The despotism of ill-advised labor is to be dreaded by civilization more than the reign of intelligent capital. This is especially true in the United States, where under wise laws, wealth cannot be entailed, and where most large fortunes soon disappear among the heirs. "A simple pair of shears illustrates perfectly the relationship that capital and labor should sustain each to the other. Capital is one blade of the shears, and labor is the other blade; either blade without the other is useless, and the two blades are useless unless the rivet is in place. Confidence is to capital and labor what the rivet is to the two blades. The desideratum to-day in the business world is full and abiding confidence between capital and labor." Thus speaking Colonel Harris and his friends left the mayor and returned to their homes. * * * * * After a visit to Niagara Falls, Mr. Searles and his party went on to Harrisville, where Mrs. Eastlake rejoined some friends and continued her long journey to the Pacific Coast. Colonel Harris met his daughter and Mr. Hugh Searles at the station, the latter, under the circumstances, being the last person he cared to see. The carriage was driven at once to Reuben Harris's beautiful home that overlooked Harrisville and blue Lake Erie. After dinner Colonel Harris explained to Mr. Searles all about the inopportune strike; also that it was impossible to say when the steel plant would be started again. Mr. Searles decided next morning that after a short ride through Harrisville he would continue his journey through the States to California, and possibly to Australia, where he had another important interest to attend to in behalf of a London client. It was further arranged that he would return to London via Harrisville in about six months, if so desired by Colonel Harris, otherwise he would complete the journey around the world, returning to England by way of the Suez Canal. CHAPTER X KNOWLEDGE IS POWER The Ingrams lived not far from the steel mills in one of two wooden houses, each two stories in height, which Reuben Harris and James Ingram had built for their families, when they began in a modest way to manufacture steel. As Reuben Harris grew rich he moved his family into a beautiful home in the fashionable part of the city, and good society accepted them as their equals. The large family and small income of James Ingram forced him to continue his residence in the same brown house near the steel mills. The Ingram family kept much to their English ways and knew little or nothing of society. The English and Germans cling tenaciously to their old habits and customs which they carry across seas and over mountains. Generations must elapse before it will be safe to predict what the national type of an American citizen will be. One discovers on the British Isles the mixture of centuries of European blood which has developed a virility of body and brain that dominates the globe. "More honor to be a British subject to-day than to have been a Roman in Rome's palmiest days," thought James Ingram, who was proud of his race and his family blood. James Ingram came from a well-bred English household. His environment now hedged him in. In England ill-health, and now, in America, ill-treatment made him miss golden opportunities. Except good qualities are inbred, it is almost as impossible for a person in one stratum of society to be lifted up into another as it is for the geological strata of the earth to change positions. The grandmother of James Ingram had good blood in her veins; she came from a family that had performed valiant deeds in war and in peace. James Ingram's father had erred in judgment, and a large estate, partially inherited, had been swept away as by a flood. He died, leaving James the eldest son to aid in supporting his mother and several children. James Ingram was now over fifty years of age. Could he, or his children, retrieve their family prestige was a question he often asked himself. He still had energy, unconquerable determination, and faith in himself. These are some of the essential elements in a successful character; but the fates thus far had decreed adversely. His early education was not of the best, but by carefully devoting not less than two hours a day to good reading, he had not only kept pace with current history, but had also acquired a helpful knowledge of the sciences. When his oldest son George was born, he planned to give his children the best education possible. Two of his three daughters were teaching in the public schools; May Ingram taught music. Two of his sons worked in the mills, one as chemist and one as an electrician; a third son was conductor on a passenger train, and a fourth was studying to be a physician. The father and his son, George, after the day's work at the mills was over, spent much time over a problem which, if solved, would revolutionize many things. Twice they thought they were on the eve of a solution of the subject, but unforeseen obstacles were encountered, and still they struggled on. It is no wonder that the father was proud of George, now chemist of the vast steel works, for he was manly and respected by all the employees. When a boy, George worked nights, Saturdays, and during his vacations in the mills, and the men came to know and love his genial ways and fair methods, and thus he gained a good knowledge of steel-making. His father was urgent that his son should not miss a single day in his schooling. At length he graduated at the high school with the esteem of his teachers and his class. During the twelve years spent in public schools he had acquired a fine discipline of mind, a love of the sciences, and enough of Latin and Greek to aid him in determining the derivation and exact meaning of words. Co-education too had refined his nature, and enabled him to estimate correctly his own abilities, but best of all he had come to know at the high school the second daughter of Reuben Harris, Gertrude, who graduated in his own class. During the senior year he had frequently walked and talked with her, and came to know somewhat of her plans. Gertrude's parents, especially Mrs. Harris, were anxious that both their daughters should go to private schools, and Lucille was easily persuaded to attend a young ladies' seminary, where æsthetic accomplishments were emphasized and considered essentials and a passport into good society. But Gertrude decided in favor of a public school education. Lucille and Gertrude as sisters were fond of each other, but Lucille lived more for self, while Gertrude preferred others to self. Gertrude had learned early how by a smile or bow to retain an old friend or to win a new one. She spent very little time thinking about her own needs, preferring to take flowers or fruit, even when given her, to some sick or aged person. Nothing pleased her more than to visit the Old Ladies' Home with a few gifts and read the Bible or comforting stories to the inmates. Mrs. Harris when east chanced to spend a June day at Wellesley College near Boston. By early moonlight several hundred Wellesley girls and thousands of spectators had assembled on the banks of Lake Waban to enjoy the "Float." Gaily uniformed crews in their college flotilla formed a star-shaped group near the shore for their annual concert. Chinese lanterns, like giant fire-flies, swung in the trees and on many graceful boats. The silver notes of the bugle and the chant of youthful voices changed the college-world into a fairyland. Both mother and daughter were charmed and Lucille gladly decided to enter Wellesley. Hard study, however, and the daily forty-five minutes of domestic work then required, did not agree with her nature, and after a few weeks she decided upon a change, and continued her education at one of the private schools on the Back-Bay in Boston. Gertrude, possessing a more active mind and ambition, resolved to obtain an education as good as her brother Alfonso had had at Harvard. She had read of a prominent benefactor who believed that woman had the same right as man to intellectual culture and development, and who in 1861 had founded on the Hudson, midway between Albany and New York, an institution which he hoped would accomplish for women what colleges were doing for men. So Gertrude applied for enrollment and was admitted to Vassar College. Rooms were assigned her in Strong Hall. She liked Vassar's sensible way of hazing, a cordial reception being given to freshmen by the sophomores. She was glad to be under both men and women professors, for this in part fulfilled her idea of the education that women should receive. At Vassar were several girls from Harrisville whom Gertrude knew, but no boys. She wrote her mother that she would be better pleased if Vassar had less Greek and more boys. She could not understand why co-education at the high school in Harrisville, that worked perfectly, should stop at the threshold of Vassar, or other women's and men's colleges. The two following years on the beautiful Hudson were happy years for Gertrude. She conquered mathematics, stood well in Latin, and was enthusiastic in the study of psychology, the science of mind, which teaches the intimate relation of mental phenomena to the physical organism. German was an elective study with Gertrude, which she had studied at the high school, but at Vassar she learned to write and talk the language with accuracy and freedom, which is not usual, unless one lives in a German family. Gertrude was already planning to study history and some of the sciences in original German text-books, if occasion offered. She cared little for music, though she was extremely fond of poetry and now and then contributed verses for publication. Her essay on architecture at the close of the second year elicited applause from the students and praise in red ink across the first page of the composition. Self-government of the Vassar girls develops self-respect and self-control. A Vassar girl is bound on her honor to retire every night at ten o'clock, with three exceptions a month, to exercise in the gymnasium three hours a week, and to take at least one hour of outdoor exercise daily. Regular exercise, regular meals, nine hours of sleep, and plenty of mental work were rapidly preparing Gertrude to fill some noble position in the world. At Vassar other sources of mental rest and physical strength are, tennis-court tournaments, basket ball, rowing and skating on the lake, bicycling, or five-mile tramps, studying birds, photographing scenery, or gathering wild flowers. The Vassar girl is also enthusiastic over the "Tree and Trig Ceremonies" and amateur dramatic entertainments. Gertrude closed her second and last year at Vassar with regret. The farewell "fudge" party was for Gertrude, and given in her own room by a score of her warm personal friends. The rule for "fudge-making" is, two cups of sugar, milk, two rolls of butter melted with chocolate in a copper kettle over a gas stove. The fused compound is poured into paper plates and cut into tiny squares. So eager is the Vassar girl for "fudge" that the struggle is earnest for the first taste, and for the cleaning of the big spoon and kettle. The Vassar girl has a sweet tooth, and "fudge" parties always evolve love stories and fun in abundance. After a pleasant vacation in the Adirondacks with friends, Gertrude resolved to complete her education at Smith College on the lovely Connecticut River, which winds through western Massachusetts. To educate a whole family of boys and girls at the "dear old alma mater" is now an exploded fancy. A better plan is to educate the half dozen brothers and sisters at a half dozen good colleges. What faculty of educators can lay claim to all the best methods of evolving characters? The industry and economy of James Ingram had enabled him to send his son George for two years to the Polytechnic Institute at Troy. Suddenly financial troubles made it impossible for him longer to assist his son. Mrs. Harris, very likely by Gertrude's suggestion, offered to provide funds for the third and last year at the institute, and George was delighted to complete his course. By invitation, George had spent the last days of his vacation with Gertrude in the Adirondacks, and he had accompanied Mrs. Harris and her daughters back to Albany, while the mother continued the journey leaving Gertrude at Smith College, Northampton, and Lucille at Boston. Mrs. Harris was justly proud of her girls. Their figure and dress often caused people to stop in their conversation or reading, as mother and daughters entered a car or a hotel. George Ingram returned to the institute with high hopes. A few of his plans were revealed to Gertrude on the last night of his vacation. He told her some things he never dared mention before to any one. They were on Saranac Lake and the moon seemed to change the water to silver. Their birch canoe drifted along the shore and George, dropping his oars, reversed his seat and faced the girl he loved as he told her much of his plan for life. Gertrude dipped her oars lightly in the water, George guiding the canoe beneath the forest overhanging the pebbly shore. Thus far his education had been a struggle. Time which his mates employed in recreation he had used in the steel mill. Thus he gained a trade and a knowledge of the value of time. Early he had learned that knowledge is power and that intellect and wealth rule the world. He told Gertrude that she had kindled within him the spark of ambition, and that he proposed to make life a success. "Gertrude, you must be my friend in this struggle," he added. "Yes, George, always your friend," she replied. He felt that Gertrude meant all she said. Long ago her sincerity had captured his heart. Her sympathy, her unselfishness, and her words of helpfulness had been the light by which he was shaping his course. Another school year went by swiftly, and both Lucille and Gertrude were present in June at Troy to see George Ingram graduate. It was a pity that his own father and mother, who had sacrificed so much for him, could not attend. How often his noble mother had prayed for her first-born son, and Gertrude had prayed too, but George did not know this. At times he was conscious of a strong force within, impelling him forward, whose source he could not divine, neither could he free himself from it. Fortunate person whose sails are filled with breezes from heaven, for craft of this kind go forward guided rightly, almost without the rudder's aid! George pursued at the institute a three years' course, leading up to the degree of Bachelor of Science. After the first two years he took less higher mathematics and more natural history, chemistry, and geology. The institute is within easy access of engineering works and manufacturing plants of great diversity, which afforded young Ingram opportunities for valuable investigation and observation. His graduating thesis was entitled, "A Design for an Electrical Steel Plant with Working Details, Capacity One Thousand Tons per Diem." It was much complimented, especially the detail drawings for the plant. His books and clothes had been packed and shipped to Harrisville. Reluctant good-byes were given to all the professors, class-mates, and many townspeople, who were fond of him. Life in Troy had been a constant inspiration, for he was in touch with young men from cultivated families which in itself is an education. George had the usual experience of the student world, for to him all the professors were very learned men. After George had locked the door of his old study-room to go to the train, he stopped in the hallway in serious thought, then turning back he unlocked the door and again entered the dear old rooms. He reseated himself at the desk, where he had so often studied far into the night. He took another look into the bedroom, into the little store-room, and pleasant memories crowded his mind, as for the last time he gazed from the window towards the Berkshire Hills, beyond which Gertrude was being educated, and then as he finally re-locked the door, he recalled his afternoon engagement to meet Gertrude and Lucille at 4:30 o'clock at the Albany station to take the Boston & Chicago Special for Harrisville. George had entered the institute with a light heart and much zest, because three years of progressive work were marked out for him. His mental journey had now ended and his heart was heavy. No road opened before him except the one that led back to the dingy old Harrisville mills. In the last three years his sky had lifted a little, but the intelligence gained only made him all the more conscious of the small world in which he and his family lived. How was he ever to earn a living for two, if Gertrude should possibly say "yes?" Just as he put his foot on the platform of the railway station a letter was placed in his hand by a fellow classmate. The envelope bore the printed address of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. George, thinking the letter was from his father, instantly tore it open and began reading. At first his face flushed and then it was lit with joy. "Good tidings, I hope," said Gertrude, as she with her sister approached. "Yes, Gertrude, read for yourself. A friend at court is a friend indeed." The two sisters were delighted and heartily congratulated George. "Of course, you will accept the position?" inquired Gertrude. "Your father, Gertrude, is very kind to me, and I believe I could fill satisfactorily the position of chemist now offered by the steel company. Later, Gertrude, we can talk this matter over." Three happy young people bought tickets for home and took seats in a Pullman car. After a week's rest, George Ingram assumed the duties of assistant chemist for the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. Two weeks' initiation by the old chemist, whose health was failing, sufficed to give young Ingram efficiency and confidence in his desirable position. CHAPTER XI IN TOUCH WITH NATURE The school vacation of the Harris young ladies came and went on wings. The mother was too ill to leave her home; she stood in her door-way, and gave her farewell, "God keep and bless you, children!" The father had gone to Chicago, so George Ingram saw the daughters off touching Gertrude's hand, with a hearty good-bye as she stood in the car door. As George returned slowly to his task at the steel mills, he resolved to use his evenings in post-graduate work. The more he studied iron ores and steel-making, the more he felt that he must conquer the whole intricate subject, if he would be of greatest service to his employers. The intense competition in the trade demanded it. The Empire State Express, the fastest train in the world, carried Gertrude and Lucille through New York state with speed and ease to delightful New England. Secretly Gertrude loved George, and she resolved to study chemistry and electricity and keep pace with his studies, and if ever asked to become his wife, to aid him in every possible way. She thought that she discovered in him the material for a noble man, a statue which she hoped to chisel. Too often marriageable young women and their anxious mothers demand the complete statue at the outset, and are not content to accept and chisel granite. At Smith College the months sped rapidly, as earnest study and bright expectations occupied Gertrude's time and satisfied her heart. Every week brought a letter and a reply was promptly sent. George wanted to write twice a week, but Gertrude checked him, saying that both needed their time, and that too frequent correspondence, like too much intimacy, often brings disfavor. "More details of the doings at the steel mills," wrote Gertrude. She cared more about the welfare of her father's employees and their families and George Ingram's plans than to know the latest fad in society. George was equally anxious to keep her informed, and to learn of her intellectual advancement, what books she read, and her views on the leading topics of the day. Her first letter began, "My Coatless Friend," a reference to the loss of a linen coat or duster, when the last ride at Harrisville was taken. The second letter began "Friend George," and the third, "My dear Friend." Gertrude and George never addressed each other twice alike in their whole correspondence. The weekly letters were always torn open by each in haste, and both noticed a gradual increase of warmth in these addresses. The fact that Gertrude was an heiress neither hindered nor helped his devotion. His heart was attracted by her many charms. At Smith College Gertrude occupied rooms in the Morris Cottage among the apple tree blossoms. Much of her spare time was spent in the scientific library and laboratory of Lilly Hall, or with the professor and his telescope in the observatory. On clear nights, aided by the telescope, Gertrude gazed into the immensity of space, whispering sometimes to her own soul, "How grand this vast world-making, this frightful velocity of the giant dynamos in their elliptical pathways through space!" Often unable to sleep, she continued her thoughts and wondered if space were not interlaced with electrical currents that move the earth, the sister planets, and the myriads of suns and their planets. She thought she saw, as never before, the necessity for an eternal existence of the mind, if God is to be studied and known in his infinite variety. Four years in college had developed Gertrude into a beautiful character. Regular work in the gymnasium, much outdoor exercise, and care as to ventilation in her rooms, especially at night, had kept her in perfect physical health. Her intimates shared her glow of vitality, for her presence at "Lawn, or Character Teas," at tennis-courts, or at basket-ball always brought sunshine and enthusiasm. The Saturday before commencement, her mother and Lucille came to enjoy the charming festivities of Smith College. A representation of Racine's "Athalie," with Mendelssohn's music, was the evening attraction at the Academy of Music, which the class had rented for the occasion. Groups of ushers, with white satin wands, conducted students in tasteful dresses, and invited guests to their seats. When the curtain rose it was difficult to decide which one most admired, the stage with its artistic setting, its young faces, sweet voices, and graceful movements, or the sympathetic audience of students and their friends. The stage and press of the future guided in part by college-bred men and women will preach, it is hoped, purity, truth, and the beautiful. Mrs. Harris and Lucille were very happy that Gertrude was to graduate, and Lucille who had just finished her education in Boston, half regretted that she too had not entered a woman's college. Gertrude never looked more beautiful than she did in the white-robed procession, as, on Baccalaureate Sunday, the several classes passed down the aisles of the church. George Ingram had hurried to Northampton to see Gertrude graduate. She met him at the station, and took his hand warmly in both of hers. George had brought from New York a box of white roses for her room, and a big bunch of the star-flower, the pretty English blue forget-me-not. He also had in his valise a tiny case of which he made no mention to anybody. Hundreds of young women in white walked across the campus and were massed on the college steps for their Ivy Exercise. Never before was George so proud of Gertrude. She and Nellie Nelson, afterwards Mrs. Eastlake, had been chosen by the class for their beauty and sweet ways to head the procession of the white-gowned graduates. The evening of Class-day is a fitting close of the gay festivities at Smith College. At the evening reception, George was introduced to many of Gertrude's class-mates, and some of her intimate friends whispered, "Mr. Ingram and Gertrude must be engaged! What a handsome pair they will make." George offered his arm to Gertrude, and they walked about the campus under the classical trees that glowed with hundreds of colored paper lanterns; everywhere a throng of pretty happy girls with their relatives and friends. Music by the glee clubs on the college steps, and refreshments, closed pleasantly Gertrude's last night of college life on the beautiful Connecticut. She went to bed tired, but very happy. That evening her mother and sister had left for New York, and in the morning she and George were to spend the day at Mt. Holyoke. Twice in the night, Gertrude awoke, looked at her watch, and longed for daylight, and then went back to dream of flowers and music. While she slept, warm southern breezes spread a coverlet of silver gray mist over the homes of energy and thrift up and down the Connecticut Valley. In the morning when Gertrude opened the blinds, and saw the fog against the window panes and over the valley, she exclaimed, "It is too bad, I so wanted George to drive to Mt. Holyoke to-day, and see nature at her best! I hoped this would be the happiest day of my life." It was a quarter to 8 o'clock when a pair of spirited black roadsters, hitched to a buckboard, were driven in front of the hotel for George Ingram. As he appeared on the porch he looked every inch a gentleman. He was twenty-five years old, had received a practical education, and was filling acceptably the important position of assistant chemist of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co., to which, six months before, he had been promoted. He had fine physique, dark hair and eyes, and a military bearing that made him the natural commander of men. His firmness, tempered with great kindness of heart, always won for him the respect of both men and women. He handled the team with skill for he was a member of the driving club at home. At a college window sat Gertrude who was eagerly watching for him, and now she ran down the gravel walk with a sunny face, greeting her manly lover with such sweet voice and grace, that a college girl in passing whispered to her companion. "Look, Bessie, there are true and handsome lovers such as we read about in novels, but seldom meet." Gertrude insisted, since the fog was lifting, that George should hitch his horses and for five minutes go with her up on the college tower. As they looked out, Gertrude said, "Here, George, on the west are our half dozen cozy college houses; on the smooth green lawn below you see our tennis-courts, and an abundance of shade. "Now, George, turn to the east and see how kindly the sun has removed the mist and made for us a glorious day. How bright the colors in our flag that floats over the high school yonder! There stands the Soldiers' Memorial Hall, the Edwards Church with graceful spire, and across the green meadows, with its winding stream of silver, rise the ranges of Mt. Tom and Mt. Holyoke, outlined in curves against the blue sky." "Beautiful!" responded George, "and yet, Gertrude, nothing in nature is half so lovely as your own dear self." Without warning he kissed her rosy cheek, her whole face changing to crimson as she said, "George, we must be going." Two happy young souls drove away from Smith College out under the Gothic elms, where the birds were mating and building their nests. The plan for the day was to drive to the mountain, and follow the mother and sister on the evening express to New York. The hotel clerk had pointed out the best road to Mt. Holyoke, and following his directions they drove southeast, leaving behind them shady Northampton, Smith College, and delightful memories of Jonathan Edwards, George Bancroft, and others. A single white parasol was quite enough to protect two lovers from the sun's rays. Circular shadows, photographs of the sun, frolicked with each other in the roadway as gentle breezes swayed the overhanging boughs. Milk wagons with noisy cans were returning home, herds of black and white Holstein-Friesian cattle, famous for their yield of milk, were cropping sweet grasses in the pastures. Farmers were guiding their cultivators and mowing machines, while wives and daughters were shelling June peas, hulling strawberries, and preparing for dinner. The large white houses, with roomy barns in the shade of big elms, were the happy homes of freemen. Gertrude wanted the horses to walk more, but George was unwilling to take the dust of wagons returning from the market, so he kept the horses moving at a brisk pace. At length the Hockanum Ferry with its odd device was reached. George got out and led the horses into the middle of the small river craft. Then the boat was pushed off and a strong man and boy pulled at the wire rope. The ferryman's shanty, the willows, and tangled driftwood on the shore, fast receded, and soon the middle of the Connecticut River was reached, where the current is swiftest. In sight were several canoes with light sails, scudding before the wind. It seemed as if the tiny rope of the ferry would break, but the rope is of steel wire and the boat moved slowly till the opposite bank was reached. Gertrude held the lines, the sun shining full in her face, and talked to the boatman, to George, and the horses, but George said little as he was busy quieting the excited animals and studying the primitive rope-ferry. To the regular ferrage, Gertrude added a dime for Tim, the helper, who watered the horses. As George was about to start his team, a twelve-year old farm boy ran aboard the boat with a string of fine speckled trout strung on a willow twig. All the spring the boy's anticipations for "a day off" had now been fully realized. Since daylight the little fellow had tramped up and down the brook, his feet were bruised and sore, and his face and hands were bitten by mosquitos. But what of that? He had caught a string of fine fish and was happy. Gertrude, for a silver dollar, bought the trout, and the boy danced with joy. It was half past eleven before the Half-way Station up the mountain was reached, and the steep ascent to Prospect House on the top of Mt. Holyoke was made by the car on the inclined railway. The morning ride and the thought of a dinner of brook trout on the mountain had sharpened the appetites of the lovers. George and Gertrude needed but a single announcement of dinner from the clerk to make them hasten for seats at so inviting a meal. They sat near an open window, and never did they enjoy a dinner more. College work was now over, and on the threshold of life, apart from the busy world in sight below, two souls could plan and confide in each other. As the two walked the broad porch, a panorama unfolded before them of almost unsurpassed beauty. Charles Sumner who, in 1847, stood on Mt. Holyoke, said, "I have never seen anything so unsurpassingly lovely as this." He had traveled through the Highlands of Scotland, up and down the Rhine, had ascended Mont Blanc, and stood on the Campagna in Rome. Gertrude with her college mates had often climbed Mt. Holyoke, and she was very familiar with this masterpiece of nature in western Massachusetts. So she described the grand landscape to her lover who sat enchanted with the scene before him. "This alluvial basin," she said, "is twenty miles in length and fifteen in width, and is enclosed by the Mt. Holyoke and Mt. Tom ranges, and the abrupt cones of Toby and Sugar Loaf, while the Green Mountains lie to the north, whence the rich soils have been brought by thousands of vernal floods. Grove-like masses of elms mark well the townships of Northampton, Easthampton, Southampton and Westhampton, Hatfield, Williamsburg and Whately, Hadley, Amherst, Leverett and Sunderland. "In twelve miles, the Connecticut River turns four times to the east and three times to the west, forming the famous 'Ox-Bow.' "This beautiful river receives its life from springs in adjacent forests and mountains, and, forcing a passage between Mt. Holyoke and Mt. Nonotuck, flows far south into Long Island Sound. Its banks are fringed with a tanglewood of willows, shrubs, trees, and clambering vines. Bordering on the Connecticut River and near thrifty towns are thousands of acres of rich meadows and arable lands, without fence, which are interspersed with lofty trees and orchards and covered with exquisite verdure. "These countless farms seen from this mountain top resemble garden plots, distinguishable from each other by vegetation varying in tints from the dark green of the maize to the brilliant gold of barley, rye, and oats. Over the billowy grain, cloud shadows chase each other as if in play. Grazing herds are on every hillside and in all the valleys." Gertrude's words were music to George's ear. Her voice and the magnificent landscape charmed him. When released from the spell he said, "Yes, dear, you have this day hung a never-to-be-forgotten picture in my memory. I shall always remember the arching elms, white gables, college towers, and spires pointing heavenward that mark the towns in this historic and lovely intervale. I seem to hear far off sounds of busy people, thrifty mills, and successful railways. These reveal the secret of New England's power at home and abroad. The greatness of this people springs from their respect for, and practice of, the virtues so long taught in their schools and churches; viz., honesty, industry, economy, love of liberty, and belief in God. Here can be found inspirations for poet, painter, and sculptor." How glorious the picture as the two young lovers looked out upon the world of promise! It was well thus, for much too soon in life, humanity experiences the same old story of unsatisfied ambitions and weary struggles after the unattainable. Thus a happy summer afternoon was enjoyed till the sun hid his face behind the western hills. Clouds floated low on the horizon, revealing behind the gold and purple to ambitious souls the indistinct outlines of a gorgeous temple of fame; and birds of rich plumage among the mountain foliage were lulled to sleep by their own sweet songs. "Life without Gertrude," thought George, "would prove a failure." Then taking her white hand in his, he whispered, "I love you, dearest, with all my heart, and you must be my wife." "George," she replied, "in a thousand ways you have shown it. I have known your heart ever since we studied together at the high school. My own life has been ennobled by contact with yours." Her voice and hand trembled as she added, "Yes, George, my life and happiness I gladly place in your sacred keeping, and I promise purity and loyalty for eternity." Then George opened the little case which he had brought from New York, and gave Gertrude a ring containing two diamonds and a ruby, which surprised and delighted her. She placed it on her first finger, saying, "George, we will advance this crystal pledge to the third finger just as soon as we get the consent of father and mother." Gertrude had found on a former trip some purple crystals on the mountainside, and had had two unique emblems of their love made in New York City. George pinned upon Gertrude a gold star set with a purple amethyst, a tiny cross and a guard chain being attached, and she gave George a gold cross set with an amethyst, the guard pin being a tiny star and chain. Before midnight the two happy lovers had joined the mother and Lucille in New York, and at the close of the week all had returned to Harrisville. CHAPTER XII THE STRIKE AT HARRISVILLE Labor strikes are terribly disagreeable things to encounter whether in the daily routine of steel mills and railways, or in the kitchen before breakfast on blue Monday. Especially inconvenient are strikes in steel mills when the order books are full as were those of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. That the company had large orders could not possibly be concealed. Vast quantities of ore, limestone, and coke were being delivered daily at the mills. Never were more men on the pay-roll, and all the machinery of the gigantic plant was crowded to its utmost night and day. That business had improved was evident to everybody. In love and war all things are fair, and the same principle, or lack of it, seems to control most modern strikes. No doubt what young Alfonso Harris told his mother on the steamer was true, that the labor agitators were advised of Reuben Harris's plan to sell the steel plant to an English syndicate. Souls of corporations decrease as the distance between labor and capital increases, and naturally American employees oppose foreign control of every kind. For more than a year the employees had accepted reduced wages with the understanding that the old scale should be restored by the company as soon as times improved and the business warranted. That the employees had timed their strike at an opportune moment was apparent even to stubborn Reuben Harris. It was galling indeed to his sensitive nature and proud spirit that his project of selling the steel plant for millions should have failed. As he kissed his wife good-bye on the steamer in New York, her last words were, "Reuben, stand up for your rights." Her avaricious spirit had always dominated him. Before Reuben Harris left his city office for his home he had arranged, in addition to the precaution taken by the mayor, to dispatch to the mills and homes of his employees twenty-five special detectives in citizens' clothes, who were to keep him fully advised as to the doings of his employees about the mills and in their public and private meetings. He had given his men no concessions in a previous strike which lasted for months. He would neither recognize their unions nor their demand for shorter hours. It was true he had risen to be a millionaire from the humble position of a blacksmith, but he was always severe in his own shop. Every horse must be shod, and every tire set in his own way. He heated, hammered, and tempered steel just as he liked, and if anybody objected he replied, "Go elsewhere then." To have one's own way in life is often an expensive luxury. In his first great mill strike Colonel Harris lost most of his skilled labor and the profits of half a year. His own hands and those of James Ingram became callous in breaking in new employees. Gertrude had arrived on the evening of the third day of the strike, and had busied herself in unpacking her trunk. She knew her father too well to talk much to him about the strike. While waiting in the drawing-room for her father, knowing that George was too busy to come to her, she had written to her lover as follows:-- At Home _My Darling George_,-- I wish you were here safe by my side. How I hate strikes, they are so like a family quarrel on the front porch. Everybody looks on in pity, husband and wife calling each other names, and breaking the furniture, and innocent little children fleeing to the neighbors for protection. Strikes are simply horrid. Can't you stop it? Labor and capital are like bears in a pit with sharpened teeth tearing each other's flesh. Of what use is our so-called civilization if it permits such brutal scenes? George, the lion in father is again aroused. There is no telling what he will do this time. It was cruel of the employees to stop his sale to the English syndicate. Something terrible is going to happen. I feel it. I dreamed about it last night before I left Niagara. You must counsel moderation. I am so glad mother is not here to counsel severity. In the morning I shall put my hand on father's arm, and say, "Father, I have been praying for God to help you." I read in the _Evening Dispatch_ that the employees claimed an increase of their pay because promised by the company when times improved; that the company now flatly refused to restore the old wages; that the mayor of the city had sent fifty policemen to guard the mills, and that the 4000 employees in an enthusiastic public meeting had resolved to continue the strike. George, you are in a very trying position. The company of course depends on your loyalty, and the employees also have great confidence in your fairness. What can you do? If disloyal to the Company, you lose your position. What more can I do, except to pray! Above all, my dear, be loyal to your conscience and do right. Be just. Come and see me at your earliest possible moment. Your own loving Gertrude. Gertrude's brave letter reached George before ten o'clock the next morning, and greatly cheered him. He was never more occupied, but he snatched a moment to say in reply: Office of The Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. _Dearest Peacemaker_,-- Glad for your heroic letter. It sings the peace-song of the angels. I shall be guarded in my words and actions. Good things, I hope, will result from all this terrible commotion. I confess I see only darkness ahead, save as it is pierced by the light of your love. We have a thousand men this morning building a fence eight feet high around our works. It looks like war to the knife under the present policy. Of course I can't say much till my opportunity comes, if it ever does. Believe me, darling Gertrude, Wholly yours, George. The note was dispatched by special messenger. Its receipt and contents gave comfort to Gertrude. Colonel Harris left his breakfast table almost abruptly. One egg, a piece of toast, and a cup of coffee were all he ate. It was an earlier meal than usual which the Swiss cook had prepared, and by half past six Colonel Harris started from home to his office, Gertrude from her chamber window kissing her hand to him, saying, "Keep cool, father!" By seven o'clock he and his capable manager were busily using the two office telephones. Before nine o'clock, all the teams of several lumber firms were engaged in hauling fence posts, two by four scantling, and sufficient sixteen foot boards to construct a fence eight feet high about the entire premises of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co.'s plant. This early action of the company for a time confused the strike managers, as they could not divine whether Colonel Harris in a fit of despair planned to fence in and close down his mills, or, perhaps, once getting his plant enclosed, purposed to eject all members of labor organizations, and again as in a former strike, attempt to start his plant with non-union labor. The leader of the strike was a brawny man with full beard, unkempt hair, and a face far from attractive. "Captain O'Connor," as the labor lodges knew him, was the recognized leader of the strike. He was not an employee at the steel mills, but an expert manager of strikes, receiving a good salary, and employed by the officers of the central union. At 2:30 o'clock a secret meeting of the officers of the several labor lodges and Captain O'Connor was held behind closed doors. All were silent, when suddenly O'Connor rose and began to denounce capital, charging it with the robbery of honest labor. "Behold labor," he said, "stripped to the waist, perspiring at every pore in the blinding heat of molten iron, shooting out hissing sparks. Pleasures for you laborers are banished; your wives and children are dressed in cheap calicoes; no linen or good food on your tables, and most of you are in debt." This and more Captain O'Connor said in excited language. Finally he shouted, "Slaves, will you tamely submit to all this indignity and not resent it? The managers of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. are tyrants of the worst sort. They are fencing you out to-day from the only field on which you can gain bread for your starving wives and children. "Reuben Harris cares more for his gold than for your souls. Since you refuse him your labor on his own terms, he purposes by aid of the high fence and bayonets to forbid every one of you union men from earning an honest living." The strike committee decided to call a public meeting of all the employees of the steel works on the base-ball grounds at 7 o'clock the next morning. All the saloons that night were crowded, and loud denunciation of capital was indulged in by the strike leaders. Early the next morning a band of music marched up and down the streets where the employees resided, and by 7 o'clock nearly four thousand men had gathered. The chief spokesman was Captain O'Connor whose words evoked great cheering. He said, "Friends, we meet this morning to strike for our freedom. How do you like being fenced out from your work? What will your families do for a roof when the snows come and you have no bread for your children? We are assembled here not for talk, but for action. I hold in my hand a resolution which we must pass. Let me read it: 'Resolved, that we, the employees of The Harrisville Iron & Steel Co., having been driven out of our positions by a soulless corporation which promised a return to former wages when the times improved, will not re-engage our services to the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. till the promised restoration of wages is granted." This resolution was unanimously carried, with hurrahs and beating of the drums. "Bravo men! Here is another resolution for your action," and Captain O'Connor read it as follows: "American citizens! In the spirit of brotherly love we appeal to you citizens and taxpayers of Harrisville for fair play. Four years ago the employees of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. bowed before the law, and we should continue to do so had we not discovered that the law, the judges, and the government seem to be for the rich alone. But we prefer liberty to slavery, and war to starvation. Again we lay down our tools and seek to arouse public sympathy in our behalf. Again we plead the righteousness of our cause, and may the God of the poor help us." This resolution was carried with shouts and the throwing up of hats. The band began playing, and the procession headed by Captain O'Connor and his assistants moved forward. A third of the sober-minded of the employees soon dropped out of the procession, while three thousand or more, many of them foreigners, were only too glad to escape the everyday serfdom of a steel plant. All were armed with clubs and stones. When O'Connor from the hill-top looked back upon the mob that filled the street down into the valley and far up the opposite hill, his courage for a moment failed him. "What shall I do with this vast army?" he said to himself. Just then the employees made a rush for the company's furnaces by the riverside, filling the yards and approaches, shouting "Bank the fires! Down with capital!" The big engines were stopped and the furnaces were left to cool. Frightened faces of women and children filled the door-ways and windows of the many little brown houses on the hillside. Success emboldened the strikers whose numbers were now greatly augmented. Again the band played and the strike managers shouted, "Forward!" The route taken was along an aristocratic avenue where the wealthy resided. Windows and doors were suddenly closed, and the terrified occupants forgot their riches, their diamonds, and their fine dress, and thought only of safety. Vulcans of the steel works, each armed with a club, occupied the avenue for two miles. Evidences of hunger and vengeance were in their faces and sadly worn garments were on their backs. Prominent citizens now hurried to the mayor's office, where the chief executive was found in conference with some of the labor leaders. The mayor was told that unless he acted promptly in restoring peace and protecting property, a citizens' committee of safety would be organized, that he would be placed under arrest, and the mob driven back. At once the mayor sent one hundred policemen in patrol wagons in pursuit of the rioters. The latter had already battered down the great doors of the screw-works, and hundreds of employees, men, women, and children, were driven out of the factory. The president of the company was beaten into insensibility. Adjacent nail works were ordered to close and all employees were driven into the streets. Finally, near night, the strikers were subdued by platoons of police and forced to return to their homes. The mayor issued his riot act, which was printed in all the evening papers and read as follows: TO THE CITIZENS OF HARRISVILLE AND THE PUBLIC GENERALLY. In the name of the people of the State of Ohio, I, David A. Duty, Mayor of the City of Harrisville, do hereby require all persons within the limits of the City to refrain from unnecessary assemblies in the streets, squares, or in public places of the City during its present disturbed condition, and until quiet is restored, and I hereby give notice that the police have been ordered, and the militia requested to disperse any unlawful assemblies. I exhort all persons to assist in the observance of this request. David A. Duty. _Mayor._ The mayor telegraphed to the governor for troops. The governor responded promptly, and ordered the First Brigade to be in readiness, and to report at 5 A.M. next morning in Harrisville, with rifles, cannon, Gatling and Hotchkiss guns and ammunition. Orderlies went flying through the city with summons that must be obeyed. The signal corps flashed their green and red lights from the tower to distant armories. Ambulance corps hastened their preparation, packing saws, knives, lint, and bandages. Imperative orders from general to colonels, to majors, to captains, to corporals tracked the militia men to their homes, and to their places of amusement. By midnight every military organization in Harrisville was under arms. The general with his staff was at his headquarters and ready for action. Before sunset Colonel Harris had his steel mills enclosed by a high fortress-fence; many agents were dispatched to other cities to advertise for, and contract with, skilled labor for his mills. On his way home, he called again on the mayor, also at brigade headquarters, and satisfied himself that his property would be protected. In forty-eight hours five hundred new workmen had arrived, and in squads of from twenty-five to fifty they were coming in on every train. Colonel Harris, experienced in strikes, knew just what to do. A great warehouse in the board enclosure was converted into barracks and supplied with beds, and kitchens, and an old army quartermaster was placed in charge. The new men on arrival were taken under escort of the soldiers to the barracks, and were rapidly set to work under loyal foremen. In a single week Colonel Harris had secured over fifteen hundred new men. Smoke-stacks were again pouring forth huge volumes of smoke. The renewed and familiar hum of machinery was audible beyond the high board fence. This activity in the mills was to the old employees like a red flag flaunted before an enraged bull. Inflammatory speeches were the order of the hour. It was three o'clock on the eighth day of the strike, when three thousand of the old employees left their halls and marched directly to the steel mills. Hundreds of women and children joined the long procession. The strike leaders in advance carried the American flag, and their band played the "Star Spangled Banner." Most of the men, and some of the women, carried clubs and stones. Radicals concealed red flags and pistols within their coats. Detectives reported by telephone the threatening attitude of the strikers to Colonel Harris at his home, to Manager Thomas at the mills, and to the mayor who ordered more police in patrol wagons to proceed immediately to the steel works. Following the police rode the Harrisville Troop, one hundred strong. Gertrude would not let her father go to the steel plant, so he sat by the telephone in his own house. Captain Crager in charge of the fifty police on guard in and around the steel plant at once concentrated his force at the great gateway leading into the fenced enclosure. His men were formed in three platoons, the reserve platoon being stationed fifty feet in the rear. Captain Crager himself took position in the center of the first line. He had time only for a few words to his men. "The city expects each policeman to do his duty. No one is to use his revolver till he sees me use mine. Stand shoulder to shoulder, use your clubs, and defend the gateway." Probably not one of his fifty men had ever read of the 300 Spartan heroes at Thermopylæ, who for three days held at bay the Persian army of five millions. To pit fifty policemen against three thousand enraged strikers was too great odds. Captain Crager's orders were "to defend the property of the steel company." The reserve police force and troops en route might or might not reach him in time. The strikers purposed driving out of the mills all the non-union men, and taking possession. Nearer came the mob, determined to rule or ruin, O'Connor in the lead holding the Stars and Stripes. The last fifty feet of approach to the gateway, the mob planned to cover by a rush. On they came swinging their clubs and filling the air with stones. Captain Crager and his platoons used their short iron-wood clubs vigorously. The strikers' flag was captured. O'Connor fell bleeding. Right and left, heads and limbs were broken. Women screamed and strong men turned pale. The whole mob was soon stampeded and the rioters fled like animals before a prairie fire. Those strikers who looked back saw the approach of more patrol wagons loaded with police, heard the clatter of horses' hoofs, and the heavy rumbling of artillery, and they knew that the city's reserve forces had arrived. A battery of Gatling guns at once wheeled into a strategic position. The police and troop occupied points of advantage, and soon the victory was complete. Within thirty days over four thousand employees, mostly new men, were at work in the steel mills. Policemen and detectives, however, were still kept on duty. Colonel Harris was frequently congratulated on his second triumph, and orders for steel rails were again being rapidly filled. Most of the strike leaders left the city, some threatening dire revenge. Many of the employees, who had lost their situations, were already searching for work elsewhere. All who were behind in their payments of rents due the company, were served with notices of evictment, as the tenements were needed for the new employees. Wives and children were crying for bread. In sixty days labor had lost by the strike over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and capital even more. * * * * * It was in August. The moon had set beyond the blue lake, and the myriad lights of heaven were hung out, as George and Gertrude alighted from their carriage in front of Colonel Harris's residence. They had been to the Grand Opera House, where they had witnessed Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," beautifully played by Julia Marlowe and her company. Between the acts, George and Gertrude talked much of the strike, of labor troubles in general, and earnestly discussed the possible remedies. Reuben Harris, who had awaited their return, hearing the carriage drive up, extended a cordial welcome. His hand was on the knob of the front door, which stood half open, when the sky above the steel mills suddenly became illuminated and deafening reports of explosions followed. The door, held by Harris, was slammed by the concussion against the wall, the glass in the windows rattled on the floor, the ground trembled, Harris seized George's arm for support, and Gertrude's face was blanched with fear. Fire and smoke in great volumes were now seen rising above the steel plant. George ran to the telephone, but before he could shout "Exchange," a call came for Colonel Harris from his night superintendent, who announced that the engines and batteries of boilers had been blown up, and that all the mills were on fire. The chief of police telephoned that he had sent one hundred more police to the mills; the chief of the fire department telephoned that ten steamers had been dispatched. George dropped the telephone, kissed Gertrude, and on the back of her Kentucky saddle horse flew into the darkness to direct matters at the mills as best he could. The next morning's _Dispatch_ contained two full pages, headed, "The Deadly Dynamite! Frightful Loss of Life, and Destruction of Property at The Harrisville Iron & Steel Plant. "One hundred employees were killed outright, and hundreds more were wounded. All the mills were either burned or wrecked. Many women and children were also injured. Five hundred tenement houses were damaged, and the windows of most of the buildings within a half mile of the mills were badly broken." Next morning the citizens of Harrisville were wild with excitement. Ringing editorials appeared in all the morning and evening journals declaring that "Lawlessness is anarchy," and that "Law and order must prevail." CHAPTER XIII TRIAL OF ANARCHY AND RESULTS George Ingram had scarcely disappeared in the darkness, when Colonel Harris fully comprehending the terrible situation at his works telephoned the exchange to summon at once to his mills every physician and ambulance in the city. The Colonel then ordered his carriage, and taking Gertrude, rapidly drove to the scene of the disaster. Great crowds had gathered, but the policemen, and the Harrisville Troop, already had established lines about the burning steel mills, beyond which the people were not permitted to pass. The police and fire departments were doing all in their power to save life and property. Colonel Harris drove directly towards his office at the mills, but this he could not reach as policemen guarded every approach. The two story brick office had been completely wrecked by a huge piece of one of the fly-wheels, that had fallen through the roof. The night watchman whose duty it was to enter the office hourly was killed, and his bleeding body was now being moved to a temporary morgue, which had been established in an adjoining old town-hall. Already over fifty mangled forms had been brought in and laid in rows on the floor, and more dead workmen were arriving every moment. The mayor and Colonel Harris were everywhere directing what to do. Scores of the wounded were hurried in ambulances to a large Catholic Church, an improvised hospital. Here were sent physicians, volunteer nurses, beds, and blankets. Fortunately the seats in the church, being movable, were quickly carried into the streets, and on beds and blankets the suffering men were placed, and an examination of each wounded person was being made. Names and addresses were taken by the reporters, and ambulances began to remove the severely injured to the city hospitals. Colonel Harris left Gertrude to minister to the wounded in the church, and sought out Wilson his manager, and George Ingram. Everybody worked till daylight. Many wounded and dead men, and women and children were brought up to the morgue and hospitals from the wrecked tenements that stood near the exploded mills. Several bodies of the dead workmen, and the wounded who could not escape from the burning works were consumed. When the sun rose on that dreadful scene, thousands of workmen and their families and tens of thousands of sympathizers witnessed in silence the awful work of anarchists. At daylight Colonel Harris rode with George and Gertrude home to breakfast. In the evening press a call for a public meeting at 8 o'clock next morning of the prominent citizens resulted in the forming of an emergency committee of one hundred earnest men and women to furnish aid to the afflicted and needy work-people. The most influential people of Harrisville were enrolled on this committee, which to be more thoroughly effective was subdivided. Every house occupied by the mill-people was visited, and every injured person was cared for. The women on the committee visited the hospitals and for a time became nurses ministering to every want. Money and abundance of food were also contributed, and such kindness on the part of the rich the work-people had never known before. The evening papers gave the authoritative statement that the total number of those killed outright by the explosions at the steel mills was one hundred and twenty-seven. Of this number eighty-six were workmen, fourteen were men who lived in the vicinity, but were not employed in the mills, ten were women, and seventeen were children. The total number of wounded was sixty-eight. A public funeral was decided upon by the committee. The Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. sent their check for $5000 to the committee and many others contributed money. The time fixed for the public services was Sunday at 2 o'clock. Ten separate platforms for the clergy and church choirs of the city had been erected on the same open fields where the great strike meetings had so often been held. By 1 o'clock people began to assemble. Workmen came from all parts of the city, till over fifty thousand laborers with their wives were on the ground. Most wore black crepe on their arm. Fifteen minutes before 2 o'clock solemn band music gave notice to the crowd of the approach of an imposing procession. Platoons of police led the column who were followed in carriages by the mayor, his cabinet, and the city council; then another platoon of police, followed by a long line of hearses, the black plumes of which seemed to wave in unison with the solemn tread of over a thousand workmen, acting as pall-bearers, walking in double file on either side of their dead comrades. It was some moments before the speaking could begin. By concerted action all the clergy preached on the "Brotherhood of Mankind," the text used being, John XV.-12. "This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you." The speakers were moved by the Holy Spirit. The services closed with the hymn, "Nearer my God to Thee." The funeral procession was several miles in length. Public and private buildings along the route to the cemetery were draped with the emblems of mourning. Twenty-five of the bodies were given private burial. Over one hundred of the victims of the dynamite disaster were buried in one common grave. Together they had died, and together they were buried. The mantle of charity covered them. Soon after the funeral, the press contained an account of a great meeting held by the surviving workmen of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co., and of resolutions that were unanimously adopted:-- "Resolved, That we, the surviving workmen of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co., hereby desire to express our deep sympathy with the bereaved families of our late comrades in toil. "That further we desire to contribute from the pay-roll due us the wages received for two days' services, the same to be paid to the emergency committee, one-half the proceeds of which is to apply to the relief of the bereaved workmen's families, the balance to be used for the purpose of erecting suitable monuments over the graves of our unfortunate comrades. "Resolved, That we, employees of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co., extend our sympathy to the company in their great financial loss. "That we hereby declare ourselves as law-abiding citizens, and that we neither directly, nor indirectly, were connected in any manner with the late dynamite explosions and fires which destroyed the plant of The Harrisville Iron & Steel Co., and we denounce those acts as dastardly and inimical to the best interest of labor and civilization." Following the resolutions were appended the signatures of over four thousand workmen. It was also voted that the resolutions, and names attached, should be printed in the press of the city, and that a copy should be delivered to the president of the steel company. This action freed the atmosphere of distrust, and business in Harrisville returned to its accustomed ways. At a meeting of the directors of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. it was voted "Not to rebuild our mills at present." Manager Wilson was instructed at once to so advise the employees, also to dispose of all the manufactured stock and raw material on hand, and to clean up the grounds of the old mill site. Colonel Harris remembered the action of Herr Krupp of Germany when a letter once reached him, threatening to destroy with dynamite his vast works at Essing. Herr Krupp immediately called a meeting of his tens of thousands of workmen, and read the letter to them, and then said, "Workmen, if this threat is executed, I shall never rebuild." This settled the matter. The city council of Harrisville and the county commissioners offered rewards for the arrest and conviction of the dynamiters. The sum was increased to $10,000 by the steel company, and notices of these rewards were mailed far and wide. By aid of an informer of the band of conspirators, Mike O'Connor and his confederates were arrested as they were about to embark for South America. In the hotly contested trial it was disclosed that O'Connor had directed the placing of dynamite beneath engines and boilers before the high board fence was constructed about the works, that electric wires to ignite the dynamite had been laid underground from the mills to an old unused barn, nearly half a mile distant, and that O'Connor was seen to come from the barn just after the explosion. Within two months after the arrest, the whole band were convicted and sentenced for life to hard labor in the penitentiary. It was decided that Colonel Harris and Gertrude should soon sail to rejoin Mrs. Harris and party in England, and notice of this decision was cabled next day to them at London. The colonel was busy examining carefully George Ingram's detailed drawings of a new, enlarged, and much improved plan for a huge steel plant. The improvements were to be up to date, and his plans involved an entirely new process of converting ores into steel. It was agreed that George and his father, James Ingram, should perfect their inventions on which both for a long time had been zealously at work, and that later George and the colonel should make a tour of observation of leading iron and steel works in Europe. Gertrude was now very happy. The selled together, concerning the proper relations of capital and labor, and since the explosion they studied the question more earnestly than ever. Their scheme involved not only improved works in a new location, but also a plan to harmonize, if possible, capital and labor, which they hoped might work great good to humanity. Gertrude told George Ingram that his golden opportunity had come, and she resolved to render him all the assistance possible. CHAPTER XIV COLONEL HARRIS FOLLOWS HIS FAMILY ABROAD Gertrude's receipt for growing oranges in a northern climate was as follows: Let a child hold a large and a small orange in her hands, and give away the large orange, and the smaller will begin to grow until, when eaten, it will look bigger and taste sweeter than the large fruit given away. "Try it!" Gertrude often said. That was the principle by which Gertrude Harris was always acting. If she had flowers, fruit, books, pretty gifts, or money, her first thought always was, "How can I make somebody happy?" With such a generous soul, part nature's gift and part acquired by self-sacrifice, the life of Gertrude was as buoyant and happy as the birds in a flower garden. The decision of Gertrude's father to take her and meet his family in Europe was not known in Harrisville except to a few. Most of the colonel's friends supposed that he was busy planning some new business adventure, in which he might employ his surplus capital and his undoubted business abilities. Because of the recent calamity, and the hardships of the employees in connection with their strike, he thought it unwise to make public mention of his future projects. The more Gertrude meditated upon her father's plan, the more dissatisfied with herself she became. The idea of going to Europe and leaving George behind was unendurable. He needed rest more than she. True, he was to follow later, but she wanted him to cross the ocean on the same steamer, and she earnestly desired that the one she loved best should share all of her enjoyments. It was, perhaps, a test of her love that she constantly longed to lose herself in him, or better, possibly, to find herself in him. Two days before the date fixed for their sailing, as George left the Harris home, Gertrude was urging him to accompany her and her father, when he ventured to say, "Gertrude, this is what would please me immensely, take my sister May with you. I will gladly pay her expenses. And when your summer's travel is over, I want May to study music abroad." "Capital!" said Gertrude. "Both you and your sister May shall join our party. Please don't say another word on the subject, nor tell father, till we meet tomorrow evening," and she kissed him an affectionate good-night. The next evening before the stars shone; Gertrude sat on the piazza anxiously awaiting him, for she had good news for her lover. Gertrude's white handkerchief told him that she recognized his coming, though he was still two blocks away. How light and swift the steps of a lover; though miles intervene, they seem but a step. An evening in Gertrude's presence was for George but a moment. The touch of her hand, the rustle of her dress, and the music of her voice, all, like invisible silken cords, held him a willing prisoner. The love he gave and the love he received was like the mating of birds; like the meeting of long separated and finally united souls. "George, this is your birthday and the silver crescent moon is filled to the brim with happiness for you and May. Yesterday I had a long talk with father, and I asked him to let me stay at home and to take your sister May to Europe. What do you think he said, George? Never did my father so correctly read my heart. He drew me closely to him, and while I sat upon his knee, said: 'Daughter, I have decided that it is wise, even in the interests of my business, to take George with us.' He also said that I might invite your sister May to go, and that he would pay all the expenses. Oh, how I kissed him! I never loved my father so much before. Here, George, is a kiss for you. Aren't you glad now, that you, and your sister May are going with us? No excuses, for you are both going surely." "If it is settled, Gertrude, then it is settled, I suppose, but how do you think May and I can get ready in so short a time to go to Europe?" "Well, George, you can wear your new business suit, and in the morning, I will go with May and buy for her a suitable travelling dress and hat. In Europe we can procure more clothes as they are needed." Gertrude was now very happy. The dream of her life was to be realized. She wanted George near her as she traveled, so each could say to the other, "Isn't it beautiful?" That is half of the pleasure of sight-seeing. The small orange kept by Gertrude had doubled in size, and she never before retired with so sweet a joy in her soul. That night she slept, and her dreams were of smooth seas, her mother, Lucille, and George. It is needless to say that May Ingram was overjoyed. She had been fond of music from her childhood, and had given promise of rare talents. She had taken lessons for two years in vocal and instrumental music in the best conservatories in Boston, George paying most of her expenses. For six years May had been the soprano singer in the highest paid quartette in Harrisville. Though she occasionally hoped for a musical education abroad, yet these hopes had all flown away. Her parents could not aid her, and she had resolved not to accept further assistance from her generous brother. At first she could not believe what George told her, but when the reality of her good fortune dawned upon her, taking George's hand in both of hers, she pressed it to her lips and fell upon his shoulder, her eyes flooding with tears. "Well, May," said George, as he kissed her, "can you get ready by noon tomorrow?" "Ready by noon? Ready by daylight, George, if necessary." That night was a busy, happy time for the Ingrams. So much of ill-luck had come to the father, and so much of household drudging to the faithful mother, that work and sacrifice for the children had ploughed deep furrows across the faces of both Mr. and Mrs. Ingram. Opportunities for advancement now opening for their children, both parents found the heavy burdens growing lighter. Before sunrise George and May had packed two small trunks, by ten o'clock Gertrude and May had made necessary purchases, and the two o'clock express quickly bore the second contingent of the Harris family towards New York, which was reached the night before their steamer's date of sailing. For some reason, perhaps because the elements of superstition still lurked in the mind of Colonel Harris, he decided not to stop any more at the Hotel Waldorf. It had brought him ill-luck, so his party was driven to the tall Hotel Plazza which overlooks the Central Park. Fortunately George had inherited a talent for untiring investigation and the power of close observation. His reasoning faculties also were excellent. Besides his education, gained in a practical school at Troy, George, with, his father, James Ingram, had made many experiments, mostly after business hours; each experiment was numbered and the various results had been carefully noted. Before leaving Harrisville his investigations were all drifting towards great possible changes in the production of iron and steel. He was glad to take this trip to Europe, as it might afford him opportunity to verify or change some of his conclusions. He resolved to use every moment for the enlargement of his powers. After bidding May and Gertrude good-night, he told the colonel that he should now take the Elevated Railway for the steamer "Campania," as he wished to observe at midnight the firing of the great battery of boilers of the steamer; and that he would return in time for breakfast with the party. "Let eight o'clock then be the hour, George," and the capitalist and his trusted superintendent separated for the night. The elevated railway was not swift enough to carry George Ingram to Pier No. 40, so anxious was he to see the midnight fires started in the hundred furnaces of one of the two largest steamers afloat. It was fifteen minutes to twelve o'clock when he reached the dock, and provided with a letter of introduction to the chief engineer, he hurried as fast as possible to the officer's cabin. The young engineer's night ashore had been spent at the opera, and, advised of George Ingram's visit, he had promptly returned to the steamer. Mr. Carl Siemens, engineer, was a relative of Siemens Brothers & Co., Limited, the great electrical and telegraph engineers of London. His education had been thorough, and he was very proud of his steamer the "Campania," especially of the motive power, which he helped to design. He gave young Ingram a cordial greeting. For two hours they examined and talked of mechanism for ships and mills, and they even ventured to guess what the earth's motive power might be. It was now five minutes of midnight. The chief furnished Ingram an oversuit and the young engineers dropped through manholes and down vertical and spiral ladders into the cellar of the steamer, the bottom of which was thirty feet below the water level. "The 'Campania,'" said Siemens, "has a strong double bottom that forms a series of water-tight compartments which, filled with water, furnish ballast when necessary. On the second steel or false bottom of the steamer, fore and aft, are located the boilers, furnaces, and coal-bunkers. We have fourteen double-ended boilers, fitted longitudinally in two groups, in two water-tight compartments, and separated by huge coal-bunkers. Each boiler is eighteen feet in diameter and seventeen feet long. The thickness of the steel boilerplate is 1-17/32 inches. Above each group of boilers rises 130 feet in height a funnel nineteen feet in diameter, which, if a tunnel, would easily admit the passage of two railway trains abreast." George saw the fires lighted, and when the furnaces required more coal, suddenly a whistle brought fifty stokers or firemen, the automatic furnace doors flew open, and a gleam of light flooded everything. Long lances made draft-holes in the banks of burning coal, through which the air was sucked with increasing roar. The round, red mouths of the hundred craters snapped their jaws for coal, which was fed them by brawny men whose faces were streaked with grimy perspiration, and their bodies almost overcome by heat. The hundred furnaces are kept at almost white heat from New York to Liverpool. "Four hours on, and four hours off, and the best quality of food are some of the recent improvements," said Siemens. George Ingram shook his head, and his heart ached as he witnessed the stokers, and resolved to do his utmost to mitigate the hardships of labor. "What are the duties of the stokers?" inquired George. "Our stokers," replied Siemens, "must be men of strength and skill, for they both feed and rake the fires. The ashes and slag must be hoisted and dumped into the ocean, and twice an hour, as the gauges indicate, fresh water is let into the boilers. Daily the boilers convert into steam over a hundred tons of water, which, condensed, is used over and over again." "What quantity of coal do you use?" "About three hundred tons per day, or an average of nearly two thousand tons per voyage. The coal carrying capacity of the "Campania," however, when needed as an armed cruiser, can be greatly increased." Siemens led Ingram to see the gigantic cranks, and propeller shafts. Each of the several cranks is twenty-six inches in diameter and weighs 110 tons; the shafts made of toughest steel are each twenty-four inches in diameter, and each weighs over 150 tons. The propellers are made of steel and bronze, and each of the six blades of the two screws weighs eight tons. It was now past two o'clock and George thanked Mr. Siemens and said he should be pleased to examine further his department when at sea. It was past three o'clock when George turned off his gas at the hotel. At eight o'clock the next morning the Harrises met promptly at breakfast. Promptness was one of Reuben Harris's virtues, and fortunately all his party were agreed as to its absolute necessity, especially when several journey together, if the happiness of all is considered. "George's eyes look like burnt holes," whispered May to Gertrude. Overhearing his sister's remark, George added: "Yes, May, and they feel worse after my two hours last night in the stokehole of the 'Campania.'" "We thought after our long railway ride and the concert yesterday, that you would gladly welcome a little sleep," said Gertrude. "I did sleep four hours, Gertrude, but my owl-visit to the steamer was highly instructive, and when we get to sea, you all will be delighted to help me complete the study of the marine engines on the 'Campania.'" CHAPTER XV A SAFE PASSAGE AND A HAPPY REUNION Gertrude and May never knew what happiness was before. One maiden had her lover, and the heart of the other was pledged to music. George too was happy in Gertrude's happiness and joyous in his own thoughts that perhaps he had already entered upon his life work, the development of plans which would bless humanity. Colonel Harris's chief joy was that he had earned a rest, was soon to see the absent members of his family, and to behold the work of men in Europe. People crowded the gangway, the same as on a previous occasion when duty forced him suddenly to leave the "Majestic." It was almost two o'clock; visitors were no longer admitted to the steamer, except messengers with belated telegrams, mail, packages, and flowers for the travelers. On the bridge of the "Campania" stood the uniformed captain and junior officers. The chief officer was at the bow, the second officer aft. The captain, notified that all was ready, gave the command, "Let go!" and the cables were unfastened. The engineer started the baby-engine, which partially opens the great throttle-valves, the twin-screws began to revolve, and the "Campania," like an awakened leviathan slowly moved into the Hudson River. Hundreds on both the pier and steamer fluttered their handkerchiefs, and through a mist of tears good-byes were exchanged, till the increasing distance separated the dearest of friends. For twenty-four hours George Ingram was seen but little on deck. Most of his time he spent with Carl Siemen, the engineer. The colonel took great delight as the escort of two appreciative young ladies. Before the voyage ended every available part of the "Campania" was explored. Gertrude was surprised to find an engineer so cultivated a gentleman. He was surrounded in his oak-furnished office by soft couches, easy chairs, works of art, burnished indicators and dials. Mr. Siemen received his orders from the captain or officer on the bridge by telegraph. "It's mere child's play," said May, "and as easy as touching the keys of a great organ." Mr. Siemen now conducted his friends into the engine-room. "It is not easy to imagine the tremendous force of the two swiftly turning screws or propellers exerted against the surging waters of the Atlantic," he said. "Our 30,000 horse power engines, a horse power is equal to six men, equal 180,000 strong men pulling at the oars, or twice the number of men that fought at Gettysburg to perpetuate the American Union." "Wonderful!" said Colonel Harris. "Steam guided by command of the officer on the bridge, with slightest effort, also steers our immense steamer." "Mr. Siemen, tell us please how the steamer is lighted?" said George. "We have fifty miles of insulated wire in the "Campania" for the electric current generated by our two dynamos, which give us 1350 sixteen-candle power lights, equal to a total of 22,000 candle power, absorbing 135 horse-power. We also use large electric reflectors and search lights to pick up buoys on a dark night. All our machinery is in duplicate. "At night when the broad clean decks of hardwood are illuminated with electric lights and filled with gay promenaders, you easily imagine that you are strolling along Broadway." The accommodations and appointments of staterooms, of all the large public rooms, and especially the dining-room, are perfect. A week on the Atlantic, with the joyous bracing sea-air of the summer months, and surrounded as you are by a cosmopolitan group of people, passes as delightfully as a brief stay at the ocean side. The passage of the "Campania" from Sandy Hook Light to Queenstown was made in less than five and one-half days, 5 days, 10 hours, and 47 minutes, or at an average speed of 21.82 knots per hour, the highest day's run being 548 knots. At Queenstown Colonel Harris received telegrams and letters from his family saying that they would meet him at Leamington, and that Alfonso would meet his father at Liverpool. Reuben Harris wired his wife when his party expected to arrive. It was ten o'clock in the morning when the S.S. "Campania" arrived in the Mersey off Alexandra dock, and the company's tender promptly delivered the passengers on the Liverpool Landing Stage. Gertrude was first to single out Alfonso, whose handkerchief waved a brother's welcome to the old world. Alfonso was the first to cross the gangway to the tender, and rushed to his friends. The greeting was mutually cordial. The father embraced his boy, for he loved him much and still cherished a secret hope that his only son might yet turn his mind to business. Alfonso seemed specially pleased that George and his sister May had come, for he had frequently met May Ingram and her singing had often charmed him. May was about his own age. As Alfonso helped her down the gangway to the deck, he thought he had never seen her look so pretty. She was about the size of his sister Lucille; slender, erect, and in her movements she was as graceful as the swaying willows. May's face was oval like that of her English mother. She had an abundance of brown hair, her eyes were brilliant, and her complexion, bronzed by the sea-breezes, had a pink under-coloring that increased her beauty. If Alfonso's eyes were fixed on her a moment longer than custom allows, perhaps he was excusable, for portrait painting was his hobby, and he fancied that he knew a beautiful face. Alfonso was all attention to his friends in clearing the baggage through the customs and getting checks for Leamington. After lunch, at the fine railway hotel, the two o'clock express from Lime Street station was taken, and Colonel Harris and party became loud in their praises of John Bull's Island, as they sped on, via Coventry with her three tall spires, to the fashionable Spa, where the Harris family were again to be reunited. It was six o'clock when Alfonso alighted on the platform. "Here they are, mother, I have brought them all; father, Gertrude, George, and May." The Leamington meeting was a happy one. The sorrow of separation is often compensated by the joys of reunion. Mrs. Harris embraced her husband as if he had returned a hero from the wars. In fact, he had emerged from a conflict that brought neither peace nor honor to capital or labor. Lucille too was enthusiastic. She, who was haughty, rarely responsive, and often proud of her father's wealth, for the time assumed another character and warmly welcomed her sister Gertrude and Gertrude's intended husband as "brother George." Leo too was glad to make new acquaintances. Eight joyous people attracted the attention of many at the station. Fortunately, the next day was Sunday, which gave time for rest, for review of the past few exciting weeks, and for the development of future plans of travel. Much was told of the Harris trip through Ireland and of the last week spent in the south of England. Lucille described to Gertrude and May Stonehenge, hanging stones,--the wonder of Salisbury Plain, where stand the ruins of the Druid temple--three circles of upright moss-grown stones with flat slabs across their tops, in which it is supposed the sun was worshiped with human sacrifices. Many burial mounds are scattered about. A broad driveway, a mile in extent, surrounds the temple, where possibly great processions came to witness the gorgeous displays. In early Britain the Druid priests held absolute sway over the destinies of souls. These priests were finally overpowered by the Romans, and some of them burned upon their own altars. "But, Lucille, you wrote that you planned to visit Osborne House." "Yes, dear, we did go to the Isle of Wight, and saw Osborne House, Queen Victoria's home by the sea, as Balmoral is her summer home among the mountains of Scotland. Her Majesty's palace is surrounded by terraced gardens, nearly five thousand acres of forests, pastures, and fertile meadows. Osborne House is furnished with much magnificence, mosaic flooring, costly marbles, statuary, paintings, books, and art souvenirs. "There the queen and Prince Albert painted, sang, and read together. Those were happy days indeed for the young rulers of a kingdom. Each of their children had a garden. The Prince of Wales worked in a carpenter's shop, and the royal princesses learned housework in a kitchen and dairy prepared for them." This was a revelation to Lucille, who had been reared with little or nothing to do. Lucille told Gertrude and May that she had just been reading the early life of the queen, who said, "If one's home is happy, then trials and vexations are comparatively nothing." The queen also said, "Children should be brought up simply and learn to put the greatest confidence in their parents." Lucille continued, "The queen often visited her people, bringing toys for the children--a promise to a child she never forgets--and gifts of warm clothing for the aged, to their great delight." At a conference of the Harris family, it was decided to go to London after spending Monday in a carriage drive to Warwick and Kenilworth castles and Stratford-on-Avon. So Monday promptly at eight o'clock two carriages stood waiting at the hotel. Colonel Harris took Mrs. Harris, May Ingram, and Alfonso with him, and George Ingram took Gertrude, Lucille, and Leo in the second carriage. There are few, if any, more magnificent drives in England than the one through the beautiful Stratford district. It is recorded that two Englishmen once laid a wager as to the finest walk in England. One named the walk from Coventry to Stratford, the other from Stratford to Coventry. It was a delightful day and both the colonel and George entirely forgot business in their enjoyment of the loveliest country they had ever seen. A drive of two miles, from Leamington and along the banks of the historic Avon, brought them to Warwick Castle which Scott calls "The fairest monument of ancient and chivalrous splendor uninjured by the tooth of time." It is said that Warwick Castle was never taken by any foe in days gone by. Our visitors drove over the draw-bridge through a gateway covered with ivy, and still guarded as of old, by an ancient portcullis. In the hall of the castle, pannelled with richly carved oak, are religiously guarded the helmet of Cromwell, the armor of the Black Prince, and many historic relics and art treasures. The drawing-room is finished in cedar. In former days guests were summoned to the great banqueting hall by a blare of trumpets. In the gardens is seen the celebrated white marble Warwick vase from Adrian's villa. Interwoven vines form the handles, and leaves and grapes adorn the margin of the vase. Superb views were had from the castle towers. In the Beauchamp chapel in the old town of Warwick repose the remains of Dudley, Earl of Leicester, one of Queen Elizabeth's favorites. She gave Leicester beautiful Kenilworth Castle, which is five miles distant. As the carriages drove over the smooth road, beneath the venerable elms and sycamores, artists along the way were sketching. Both Alfonso and Leo tipped their hats, as members of a guild that recognizes art for art's sake, a society that takes cognizance of neither nationality nor sect. Gertrude and George had read Scott's novel in which he tells of the ancient glories of Kenilworth, which dates back to the twelfth century, and to-day is considered the most beautiful ruin in the world. Ivy mantles the lofty ruined walls; the sun tinges in silver the gray old towers, and sends a flood of golden light through the deep windows of the once magnificent banqueting hall. For years Kenilworth Castle was a royal residence, and later it was the scene of bloody conflicts between kings and nobles. Today sheep peacefully graze within the ruins and about the grounds. Visitors from all parts of the world look in wonder upon the decay of glories that once dazzled all Europe. Here the earl of Leicester entertained his virgin queen hoping to marry her. As Elizabeth crossed the draw-bridge a song in her praise was sung by a Lady of the Lake on an island floating in the moat. Story writers have never tired of telling of the magnificence of these entertainments that cost the ambitious earl $20,000 per day for nineteen days. Returning, Warwick Arms Hotel was reached for lunch, after which the party drove eight miles to Stratford-on-Avon, a model town on the classic Avon. Here in Henley Street, in a half-timbered house recently carefully restored, Shakespeare was born. The walls and window panes are covered with the names of visitors, while inside are kept albums for the autographs of kings, queens, of Scott, Byron, Irving, and others. One of the three rooms below is an ancient kitchen, where by the big open chimney the poet often sat. Climbing a winding, wooden stairway, George and Gertrude in the lead, our Harrisville friends entered the old-fashioned chamber, where, it is said, on St. George's Day, April 19, 1564, William Shakespeare was born. A bust of the poet stands on the table. "We know little of his mother," said Gertrude, "except that she had a beautiful name, Mary Arden. If it is true, as a rule, that all great men have had great mothers, Mary Arden must have been a very superior woman." "The reverse, Gertrude, must be equally true," said George, "that all great women must have had great fathers." Gertrude who had made a special study of Shakespeare and his works did much of the talking. She said, "All that is definitely known of the life of the great poet can be put on half a page. It is thought that William was the son of a well-to-do farmer who lost his property. William, not above work, assisted his father as butcher, then taught school, and later served as a lawyer's clerk. When he was eighteen, like most young people, he fell in love." Saying this, Gertrude led to the street, and the party drove to Shottery, a pretty village a mile away, where is Ann Hathaway's thatched cottage. "Here the beardless William often came," said Gertrude, "and told his love to the English maiden. Ann Hathaway was older than William, she was twenty-six, but they were married, and had three children. "When Shakespeare was twenty-five he was part owner of the Blackfriar's Theatre in London. There he spent his literary life, and there he was actor, dramatist, and manager. He became rich and returned occasionally to Stratford where he bought lands and built houses. "If we can trust statues and paintings and writers, William Shakespeare had a kingly physique, light hazel eyes and auburn hair." "What about his death?" inquired Colonel Harris. "Of his death," said Gertrude, "we know little, save that the Vicar of Stratford wrote that Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Johnson had a merry meeting, possibly drank too much, and that Shakespeare died of a fever then contracted, on the anniversary of his birth, when he was fifty-two years old." "And where was he buried?" inquired Lucille. "In the Stratford church," answered Gertrude, and the carriages were driven up an avenue of arching lime trees. The old church, with its tall and graceful spire, reflected in the waters of the Avon, is a restful place for the body that contains the mightiest voice in literature. Near by also lie buried his wife and their children. A plain slab in the floor covers his remains. Recently a new grave was dug near Shakespeare's and the intervening wall fell in. A workman ventured to hold a lighted taper in death's chamber, which revealed that the ashes of the immortal Shakespeare could be held in the palm of the hand. The Harris party drove back to Leamington to spend the night. CHAPTER XVI A SEARCH FOR IDEAS Later on the Harrises spent considerable time in London staying at the Grand Hotel which occupies the site of the old Northumberland House on Trafalgar Square. They soon learned that the English matrons are devoted mothers, that they take long walks, dress their children simply, and that their daughters have fair complexions, are modest in manner, and are the pictures of health. Many of the English women find time to study national questions, to organize "Primrose" and "Liberal Leagues," and to vote on municipal affairs. Miss Helen Taylor and other cultivated women have been elected members of the London school board, and aided in temperance reform. While Alfonso, Leo, Lucille, and May were absent studying the artistic life of the metropolis, Mr. and Mrs. Harris, Gertrude, and George spent most of the day planning for the future. Reuben Harris and his wife had repeatedly talked over the Harrisville affair, and their trips in London where so many generations had lived and passed away had given both clearer ideas of life. "At best," thought the colonel, "life seems short indeed." More than once he admitted to his wife that his early privations had made his life in Harrisville selfish and inconsiderate, that the questions of higher civilization were involved in the vigorous efforts of humanity for a closer brotherhood, and that if God permitted him he would lend a helping hand. Mrs. Harris, naturally proud, was slow to respond to the colonel's new ideas, but he felt that under Gertrude's generous influences his wife would prove a help rather than a hindrance. Mrs. Harris knew that Gertrude and George, who had received a broad education, were ambitious to do good, and besides she trusted and loved them both. It was clear to George and Gertrude that little or no hindrance would be offered to wise plans of usefulness. It was finally agreed that Colonel Harris and George should spend a week or two visiting some of the great industrial centers of Europe, and that Alfonso and Leo should accompany the ladies to Paris, and then visit the haunts of the old portrait painters of the Netherlands. It was also decided by George and Gertrude that they would be married in Paris. This made the two lovers happy; for soon the two diamonds and ruby would be advanced to the ring finger, as promised by Gertrude on Mt. Holyoke. Each felt that an inexpensive marriage in Paris would be a fortunate escape from possible criticisms at home. Colonel Harris had promised Gertrude a special gift of a thousand dollars for the approaching nuptials, she to do what she desired with the money. So she decided to use only one-fourth of the gift for herself, to send one-half of it to the Relief Society, and the balance to two ladies' benevolent societies of Harrisville. The discussion of these plans made the last night in London a happy one. Happiness comes when we warm the hearts near us. When selfishness leaves the heart, the dove of peace enters. Early next morning at the Victoria Station, Colonel Harris and George saw their friends off for Paris. The route taken was the one via the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, an hour's run to Dover, thence in the twin steamer "Calais-Dover," an hour and a half's ride across the English Channel to Calais, and from Calais via railway to Paris, capital of the French Republic. Then Reuben Harris and George Ingram left Victoria Station to pay their respects to Henry Bessemer, civil engineer, who lived at Denmark Hill south of London. They desired to study the conditions which make the British people powerful. Both were aware that England was richly stored with the most serviceable of all minerals, coal and iron, in convenient proximity; that her large flocks of sheep supplied both wool and leather; that Ireland had been encouraged in the cultivation of flax; that the convenience of intercourse between mother country and her neighbors, especially America, had enabled England to engage largely in the manufacture of the three textile staples, wool, flax, and cotton. But material resources are only one element in great industrial successes. Both labor and capital are equally essential. Englishmen have strength and skill. In delicate and artistic manipulation, however, the Englishman may be surpassed, but he possesses in a rare degree great capacity for physical application to work, also tremendous mental energy and perseverance. Most of the world's valuable and great inventions, as successfully applied to the leading industries, were made by the English. Though England has neither gold nor silver mines, yet for centuries she has commanded vast capital. Her trading enterprise, which has made the Englishman conspicuous round the world, existed long before the Norman conquest. Helpful and consistent legislation has also favored British industries. Besides, England enjoyed a good start in the race with foreigners. Surplus English capital of late has been employed in promoting foreign industry, and the interests of England as a rival may suffer. Reaching the station at Denmark Hill, the colonel and George drove at once to Bessemer's home. It is doubtful if England has forty acres, owned by a private citizen, more tastefully laid out and adorned, with forests, lawns, and flowers. Henry Bessemer was tall and well formed, and looked the ideal Englishman, as he gave cordial welcome, in his large drawing room, to Colonel Harris and George Ingram. Evidences of his constructive skill and exquisite taste were seen on every hand, notably in his billiard room, conservatory, and astronomical observatory. The last contained a reflector telescope of his own design, that rivals the world-famed telescope of Lord Rosse. Both were soon charmed with Bessemer's manners and conversation. George had read of this wonderful man who was born in 1813; between 1838 and 1875 he had taken out 113 patents, and the drawings of his own work made seven thick volumes. This record of Bessemer indicates an almost unrivalled degree of mental activity and versatility as keen observer, original thinker, and clever inventor. His drawings showed patents in connection with improvements in engines, cars, wheels, axles, tires, brakes, and rails. Fifteen patents for improvements in sugar manufacture, patents for motors and hydraulic apparatus, for the manufacture of iron and steel, the shaping, embossing, shearing, and cutting of metals, for marine artillery, ordnance, projectiles, ammunition, armor plates, screw propellers, anchors, silvering glass, casting of type, patents for bronze powder, gold paint, oils, varnishes, asphalt pavements, waterproof fabrics, lenses, etc. Mr. Bessemer's greatest invention, announced to the British Association at Cheltenham, in 1856, is his method of the manufacture of iron and steel without fuel, which started a new era in the iron trade. His name will be forever associated with the rapid conversion of pig iron into malleable iron and steel. By this process the price of steel per ton has been reduced from $160 to $25, a price less than was formerly paid for iron. Mr. Bessemer received the Telford and Albert gold medals and honors from sovereigns and societies round the world. George said to Mr. Bessemer that he thought Lord Palmerston's definition, "dirt was matter out of place," was especially applicable to the undesirable elements in ores. "Very true," replied Mr. Bessemer, "and the man who can clean the dirt from our ores, and produce the most desirable steel, at the least cost, is a great benefactor of humanity." Mr. Bessemer's own story of his most important invention was very interesting. Practical iron men had said that it was an impossible feat to convert molten pig iron in a few minutes into fluid malleable iron, and then into available steel, and all this without additional fuel. But the genius and perseverance of Mr. Bessemer, aided by his practical knowledge of chemistry and mechanics, did it. It had long been known that, if a horseshoe nail were tied to a cord and the point heated to whiteness, the iron nail could be made to burn in common air by being whirled in a circle. The ring of sparks proved a combustion. Mr. Bessemer was the first however to show that if air was forced, not upon the surface, but into and amongst the particles of molten iron, the same sort of combustion took place. Pig iron, which is highly carbonized iron from the blast furnace, was laboriously converted into malleable iron by the old process of the puddling furnace. Bessemer conceived the process of forcing air among the particles of molten iron, and by a single operation, combining the use of air in the double purpose of increasing temperature, and removing the carbon. The carbon of the iron has a greater affinity for the oxygen of the air than for the iron. When all the carbon is removed, then exactly enough carbon is added by introducing molten spiegeleisen to produce steel of any desired temper with the utmost certainty. With the ordinary kinds of pig iron early in use, Bessemer's process was powerless. The old puddling process was more capable of removing phosphorus and sulphur. But with pig iron produced from the red hematite ores, practically free from phosphorus, Bessemer's process was a surprising success. At once exploration began to open vast fields of hematite ores in the counties of Cumberland and Lancashire of England, in Spain, in the Lake Superior regions of North America, and in other countries. Bessemer wisely made his royalty very low, five dollars per ton; capital rapidly flowed into this new industry, and Bessemer won a fortune. Mushroom towns and cities sprung up everywhere and fortunes were made by many. Mr. Bessemer himself vividly described his process in action: "When the molten pig iron is poured into mortar-like converters, supported on trunions like a cannon, the process is brought into full activity. The blast is admitted through holes in the bottom, when small powerful jets of air spring upward through the boiling fluid mass, and the whole apparatus trembles violently. Suddenly a volcano-like eruption of flames and red-hot cinders or sparks occurs. The roaring flames, rushing from the mouth of the converter, changes its violet color to orange and finally to pure white. The large sparks change to hissing points, which gradually become specks of soft, bluish light as the state of malleable iron is approached." This very brilliant process, which includes the introduction and mixture of the spiegeleisen, may occupy fifteen minutes, when the moulds are filled, and the steel ingots can be hammered or rolled the same as blooms from a puddling furnace. Mr. Bessemer explained many things, and offered many valuable suggestions. A remark of Mr. Bessemer to George Ingram led the latter to tell Bessemer a story which he heard in the smoking-room of the S.S. "Campania." "Two Irishmen once tried to sleep, but could not for Jersey mosquitoes had entered their bedroom. Earnest effort drove the mosquitoes out, and the light was again extinguished. Soon Mike saw a luminous insect, a big fire-fly approaching. Quickly he roused his companion saying, 'Pat, wake up! Quick! Let's be going! It's no use trying to get more sleep here, there comes another Jersey mosquito hunting us with a lantern.'" Mr. Bessemer was amused, and he ventured the assertion that when electricity could be as cheaply produced directly from coal as the light by the fire-fly, and successfully delivered in our great cities, the smoke nuisance would be effectually abated, all freight charges on coal would be saved, and coal operators could utilize all their slack at the mines. "Do you think this possible?" inquired Colonel Harris. "Oh, yes, quite possible," answered Bessemer, "our necessities beget our inventions and discoveries. Thorough investigation in the near future on this and kindred lines must be fruitful of astonishing results in the interests of a higher civilization." The colonel and George took their leave. Truly the fire-fly, like the whirling hot nail, is suggestive of great possibilities, thought George. That evening it was planned to visit on the morrow the extensive telegraphic works of Siemens Brothers & Co., Limited. George retired to sleep, but his mind was never more active. On warm summer evenings he had often held in his hand glow-worms and studied them as they emitted bright phosphorescent light. He had learned that this faculty was confined to the female which has no wings, and that the light is supposed to serve as a beacon to attract and guide the male. The light proceeds from the abdomen, and its intensity seems to vary at will. He had also read of a winged, luminous insect of South America, which emits very brilliant light from various parts of its body. When George reflected that under even the most favorable conditions there was realized in mechanical work of the energy stored in coal only 10%, he was convinced that the extravagant waste of 90% of energy was in itself sufficient argument against the present method as being the best possible. Ever since his graduation, he had believed that the greatest of all technical problems was the production of cheaper power. That it was the great desideratum in cities in the production of food, and in food transportation from farms to trunk lines, on railways and on the ocean. While in America he had discussed the matter of cheaper power with Edison, Thompson, Tesla, and others. George and his father, James Ingram, experimenting with chemical energy, had already discovered a galvanic element which enabled them to furnish electrical energy direct from coal and the oxygen of the air, but this important discovery was kept a secret. The chief object of George Ingram's visit abroad was to follow the footsteps of other great scientists and manufacturers to the edge or frontier of their discoveries and practical workings. It was two o'clock that night before George could close his eyes, but promptly at 6:30 o'clock next morning he was ready for his bath and shave, and later he and the colonel ate the usual European breakfast of eggs, rolls, and coffee. The eight o'clock train was taken for the great works of Siemens Brothers & Co., Limited, which are located at Woolwich, down the Thames. This firm, the pioneers of ship lighting by electricity, has already fitted out hundreds of vessels with electric lights. They also manufacture submarine and land telegraphs in vast quantities, having aided largely in enclosing the globe in a network of cables. All the Siemens brothers have shown much ability. Charles William was born at Lenthe, Hanover, in 1823, and has received high scientific honors. The world recognizes the valuable services that Dr. Siemens has rendered to the iron and steel trade by his important investigations and inventions. Dr. Siemens, like Mr. Bessemer, labored to make iron and steel direct from the ores. By the invention of his regenerative gas furnace, which makes the high grade and uniform steel so desirable in the construction of ships, boilers, and all kinds of machines, Dr. Siemens has rendered signal service. This visit at Siemens Brothers & Co.'s works was of great interest, and many valuable ideas were gained. Several days were next spent in Birmingham, and at the centers of steel making in northwest England. Birmingham is called the "Toy Shop of the World" for there almost everything is manufactured from a cambric needle to a cannon. Colonel Harris and George Ingram studied the workings of the English "Saturday half-holiday," which employees earn by working an extra half-hour on the five previous days. A visit was made to the Tangye Bros. Engine Works at Soho, near Birmingham, which absorbed the engine works of Boulton and Watt. It was Boulton who said to Lord Palmerston visiting Soho, "Sir, we have here for sale what subjects of his Majesty most seek, viz., Power." The Tangyes employ thousands of men, manufacturing engines and other products. Steam engines of all sizes, in enormous quantities are stored, ready at a moment's notice to be shipped broadcast. It was the invention of the powerful Tangye jack-screw that finally enabled the famous engineer Brunel to launch his "Great Eastern" steamship which he had built on the Thames, and which had settled on her keel. Today the Tangye Brothers are fond of saying, "We launched the 'Great Eastern,' and the 'Great Eastern' launched us." One of the Tangye Brothers took the two Americans through James Watt's old home, and into his famous garret, where Watt invented the parallel motion and other parts of the steam engine. So important were Watt's engine inventions that he alone should have the honor of inventing the modern engine which has so elevated the race. George was greatly interested in what the Tangye Brothers were doing for their employees. Instructive lectures by capable men were given weekly to their workmen, while they ate their dinners. Medical aid was furnished free, and in many ways practical assistance was rendered their working force. After a most interesting journey among the steel firms, including Bocklow & Vaughn of Middleborough, John Brown at Sheffield, and others, Reuben Harris and George crossed over into busy Belgium, and thence they journeyed via historic Cologne to Westphalia, Germany. Here are some of the most productive coal measures on the earth, which extend eastward from the Rhine for over thirty miles, and here one wonders at the dense network of railways and manufacturing establishments, unparalleled in Germany. At Essen are the far-famed Krupp Works, one of the greatest manufacturing firms on the globe. These works are the outgrowth of a small old forge, driven by water power, and established in 1810 by Frederick Krupp. His short life was a hard struggle, but he discovered the secret of making cast-steel, and died in 1828. Before his death, however, he revealed his valuable secret to his son Alfred, then only 14 years of age. After many years of severe application, Alfred Krupp's first great triumph came in 1851 at the London World's Fair, where he received the highest medal. At the Paris Exposition of 1855, as well as at Munich the year before, he also won gold medals. Abundant orders now flowed in for his breech-loading, cast-steel cannons. In severe tests which followed, the famous Woolwich guns were driven from the field. The Krupp guns won great victories over the French cannon at Sedan, which was an artillery duel. At Gravelotte and Metz the Krupp guns surpassed all others in range, accuracy, and penetrating power, and Herr Alfred Krupp became the "Cannon King" of Europe. Americans remember well his gigantic steel breech-loading guns at the expositions held in Philadelphia, and Chicago. Alfred Krupp, however, delighted more in improving the condition of his army of employees. He provided for them miles of roomy, healthful homes. He formed a commissariat, where his employees could secure at cost price all the necessaries of life. He also established schools where the children of his employees could receive education if desired in technical, industrial, commercial, and mechanical pursuits, and in special and classical courses as well. He devised a "Sick and Pension Fund," for disabled workmen, which scheme Emperor William II. has made a law of the German Empire. He likewise created life insurance companies, and widow and orphan funds. The golden rule has been Alfred Krupp's guiding star. He was always kind and considerate, and never dictatorial. When asked to accept a title, he answered, "No, I want no title further than the name of Krupp." Alfred Krupp died July 14, 1887, in the 75th year of his age. His request was that his funeral should take place, not from his palatial mansion, but in the little cottage within the works, where he was born, which is to-day an object of great reverence to the 25,000 workmen who earn their daily bread in the vast Krupp foundries. Alfred Krupp lived to see Essen, his native village, grow from a population of 4,000 to a busy city of 70,000, where annually hundreds of engines and steam hammers produce thousands of tons of steel castings and forgings. Alfred Krupp built his own monument in the vast mills and benevolences of Essen, a monument more useful and enduring than marble or bronze. His son Frederick Alfred Krupp, his successor, married the beautiful Baroness Margarette von Ende. Colonel Harris and George visited other great works in Europe, and finally started to rejoin their friends in Paris. CHAPTER XVII THE HARRIS PARTY VISITS PARIS The distance is two hours from London to Dover. Half-way is Gad's Hill, famous as the residence of the late Charles Dickens. Further on is Canterbury, which is celebrated as the stronghold of Kentishmen and the first English Christian city. Its prime attraction of course is its fine cathedral, which in 1170 was the scene of Becket's murder. Dover on the English Channel lies in a deep valley surrounded by high chalk hills. On one of these, which is strongly fortified, may be seen evidences of Norman, Saxon, and Roman works. Every morning and evening the royal mail steamers leave Dover for Calais. The channel ride of twenty-one miles was made by the Harrises without the dreaded _mal de mer_. In the railway restaurant at Calais, Lucille volunteered to order for the party, but she soon learned, much to the amusement of her friends, that the French learned in Boston is not successful at first in France. The express to Paris is through Boulogne, an important sea town of fifty-thousand inhabitants, which combines much English comfort with French taste. From there hundreds of fishing boats extend their voyages every season to the Scotch coast and even to far-off Iceland. The scenery in the fertile valley of the Somme is beautiful. The route lies through Amiens, a large city of textile industries, thence across the Arve; the Harrises reached the station of the Northern Railway, in the Place Roubaix, in northern Paris as the sun faded in the west. Carriages were taken for the Grand Hotel, Boulevard des Capucines, near the new opera house, which is centrally located, and offers to travelers every comfort. The carriages enter a court, made inviting by fountains, flowers, and electric light. The first day or evening in Paris is bewildering. Early in the morning the Harrises drove along the inner and the outer boulevards that encircle Paris. Many miles of fine boulevards were built under Napoleon III. Most from the Madeleine to the July Column are flanked with massive limestone buildings, palatial mansions, and glittering shops, the architecture of which is often uniform, and balconies are frequently built with each story. Early every morning the asphalt and other pavements are washed. At midday a busy throng crowds all the main streets. Parisians favor residence in flats, and they enjoy immensely their outdoor methods of living. At sundown the wide walks in front of brilliant cafés are crowded with well dressed men and women, who seek rest and refreshment in sipping coffee, wine, or absynthe, scanning the papers for bits of social or political news, and discussing the latest fad or sensation of the day. The English hurry but the French rarely. Paris under electric light is indeed a fairyland. The boulevards are brilliant and the scenes most animating. Everybody is courteous, and all seen bent on a pleasurable time. Cafés, shops, and places of entertainment are very inviting, and you easily forget to note the passage of time. Midnight even overtakes you before you are aware of the lateness of the hour. This is true, if you chance to visit, as did the Harris party, some characteristic phases of Parisian life. Near the east end of the Champs-Elysées, under the gas light and beneath the trees, they found open-air theaters, concerts, crowded cafes, and pretty booths supplied with sweets and drinks. Every afternoon if the weather is favorable, tastefully dressed children appear in charge of nursemaids in white caps and aprons, and together they make picturesque groups in the shade of elm and lime trees. At breakfast, Leo proposed a study of Paris, as seen from the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile, so named from the star formed by a dozen avenues which radiate from it. The location is at the west end of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. This monument is one of the finest ever built by any nation for its defenders. It is 160 feet in height, 145 in width, was begun in 1806 by Napoleon and completed thirty years afterwards by Louis Philippe. Figures and reliefs on the arch represent important events in Napoleon's campaigns. Arriving at the arch, Leo led the way up a spiral staircase, 261 steps to the platform above which commands fine views of Paris. The Champs-Elysées, a boulevard one thousand feet in width, extends east over a mile from the monument of the Place de la Concord. Handsome buildings flank the sides, and much of the open space is shaded with elm and lime trees. Grand statues, fountains, and flowers add their charm. Between three and five o'clock every pleasant afternoon this magnificent avenue becomes the most fashionable promenade in the world. Here you will behold the elite in attendance at Vanity Fair; many are riding in elegant equipages, many on horseback, and almost countless numbers on foot. The popular drive is out the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 320 feet in width, to the Bois de Boulogne, a beautiful park of 2250 acres, containing several lakes and fringed on the west side by the River Seine. In the southwest part of this park is located the Hippodrome de Longchamp, which is the principal race-course near Paris, where races attract vast crowds, especially when the French Derby or the Grand Prix of twenty thousand dollars is competed for early in June. The Harrises standing on the monument, looked eastward, and Leo pointed out the River Seine shooting beneath more than a score of beautiful stone and iron bridges, and making a bold curve of seven miles through Paris. Then the Seine flows like a ribbon of silver in a northwesterly direction into the English Channel. On the right bank is seen the Palais du Trocadero of oriental style, which was used for the International Exposition of 1878. On the left bank stands the Palais du Luxembourg, rich in modern French art, the Hotel des Invalides, where rests Napoleon, and the Church of St. Genevieve, or the Pantheon, where Victor Hugo is buried. Beyond the Place de la Concord are the Royal Gardens of the Tuileries, where Josephine and Eugenie walked among classic statues, vases, fountains and flowers; the Louvre filled with priceless art treasures, the beautiful Hotel de Ville or city-hall, majestic Notre Dame, and the graceful Column of July. Paris is truly an earthly Paradise. For centuries it has been the residence of French rulers, and the mecca of her pleasure loving citizens. Fire, famine, foreign invasion, civil war, and pestilence have often swept over this, the fairest of cities, yet from each affliction, Phoenix-like, Paris has risen brighter and gayer than ever. Gertrude, May, and Lucille were charmed with the fair vision before them, and were anxious to leave the Arch of Triumph and become a part of the gay city. The carriages drove back to the Place de la Concord, one of the finest open places in Europe. Around this place the chief cities of France are represented by eight large stone figures. That of Strasburg the French keep in mourning. In the center stands the Obelisk of Luxor, of reddish granite, which was brought at great expense from Egypt and tells of Rameses II. and his successor. Other ornaments are twenty rostral columns, bearing twin burners. On grand occasions this place and the avenue are illuminated by thirty thousand gas lights. In the Place de la Concord the guillotine did its terrible work in the months between January 21st, 1793, and May 3rd, 1795, when thousands of Royalists and Republicans perished. Two enormous fountains adorned with Tritons, Nereids, and Dolphins beautify the court. No wonder the brilliant writer Chateaubriand objected to the erection here of these fountains, observing that all the water in the world could not remove the blood stains which sullied the spot. How beautiful the vista up the broad and short Rue Royale, which conducts to the classic Madeleine! Alfonso was entranced with the beauty of this rare temple, which was begun and finally dedicated as a church, though Napoleon earnestly hoped to complete it as a temple of glory for his old soldiers. Its cost was nearly three million dollars. A colonnade of fifty-two huge fluted Corinthian columns and above them a rich frieze surround the church. The approach is by a score and more of stone steps and through enormous bronze doors on which the Ten Commandments are illustrated. Entering the Madeleine, one sees an interior richly adorned, floors of marble, and lofty columns supporting a three-domed roof, through which light enters. On either side are six confessionals of oak and gilt, where prince and peasant alike confess their sins. Beyond is the altar of spotless marble. How beautiful the group of white figures, which represents Madeleine forgiven, and borne above on angels' wings! This artistic group cost thirty thousand dollars. On Sunday morning Leo and his friends came to the Madeleine which is the metropolitan church of Paris. Here every Sunday exquisite music is rendered, and here come the elite to worship and to add liberal gifts. It is a broad policy that no Catholic Church on the globe, not even splendid St. Peter's of Rome, is considered too good for rich and poor of all nationalities to occupy together for the worship of the Master. All the Parisian churches are crowded on Sunday mornings, but Sunday afternoons are used as holidays, and all kinds of vehicles and trains are burdened with well dressed people in pursuit of pleasure. Traveling by omnibus and tramway in Paris is made as convenient to the public as possible; nobody is permitted to ride without a seat, and there are frequent waiting stations under cover. This is as it should be. Nearly a hundred lines of omnibuses and tramways in Paris intersect each other in every direction. Inside the fares are six cents, outside three cents. A single fare allows of a transfer from one line to another. Railways surround Paris, thus enabling the public to reach easily the many pretty suburbs and villages. Both Mrs. Harris and Gertrude on their return to the Grand Hotel were glad to find letters from the men they loved. George wrote Gertrude that he was amazed at the enormous capacity of the manufacturing plants which he and Colonel Harris were visiting; that both labor and capital were much cheaper than in America. His closing words were, "Learn all you can, darling, I shall soon come to claim you." Gertrude had read of the laundries on the Seine, so she left the hotel early with her mother and Alfonso to see them, while Leo, Lucille, and May went to study contemporaneous French masterpieces in the Luxembourg palace and gallery. The public wash houses on the Seine are large floating structures with glass roofs, steaming boilers, and rows of tubs foaming with suds. Hard at work, stand hundreds of strong and bare armed women, who scrub and wring their linen, while they sing and reply to the banter of passing bargee or canotier. If the sun is shining and the water is clear, the blue cotton dresses of the women contrast prettily with white linen and bare arms busily employed. Though they earn but a pittance, about five cents an hour, yet they are very independent; mutual assistance is their controlling creed, and few, if any, honor more loyally the republican principle of liberty, equality and fraternity. The women seemed to do all the hard work, while the men in snowy shirts and blue cotton trousers, with scarlet girdles about their waists, pushed deftly to and fro the hot flat or box irons over white starched linen. Each ironer has a bit of wax, which he passes over the hot iron when he comes to the front, the collar, or the wrist-bands, and he boasts that he can goffer a frill or "bring up" a pattern of lace better than a Chinaman. Alfonso and his party drove along the handsome Rue de Rivoli, with its half-mile of arcades, attractive shops, and hotels of high grade, and up the Rue Castiglione, which leads to the Place Vendome. Here in one of a hundred open places in Paris rises the Column Vendome in imitation of Trajan's column in Rome. The inscription records that it is to commemorate Napoleon's victories in 1805 over the Austrians and Russians. On the pedestal are reliefs which represent the uniforms and weapons of the conquered armies. The memorable scenes, from the breaking of camp at Boulogne down to the Battle of Austerlitz, are shown on a broad bronze band that winds spirally up to the capital, and the shaft is surmounted by a bronze statue of Napoleon in his imperial robes. Fortunately Alfonso's carriage overtook Leo's party, and they visited together the pretty arcades and gardens of the Palais Royal. In the open courts are trees, flowers, fountains, and statues, and on the four sides are inviting cafés and shops which display tempting jewelry and other beautiful articles. On summer evenings a military band plays here. Returning, the ladies stepped into the Grand Magasin du Louvre. At a buffet, refreshments were gratis, and everywhere were crowds, who evidently appreciated the great variety of materials for ladies' dresses, the fine cloths, latest novelties, exquisite laces, etc. The ladies planned to return here, and to make a visit to the famous Au Bon Marche, where cheap prices always prevail. Most of the afternoon was spent in the Louvre, a vast palace of art, and the evening at the Theatre Français, the ceiling of which represents France, bestowing laurels upon her three great children, Molière, Corneille, and Racine. The Theatre Français occupies the highest rank. Its plays are usually of a high class, and the acting is admirable. The government grants this theatre an annual subsidy of about fifty thousand dollars. Early next morning, the Harrises took carriages to the Halles Centrales, or union markets. These markets consist of ten pavilions intersected by streets. There are twenty-five hundred stalls which cover twenty-two acres, and cost fifteen million dollars. Under the markets are twelve hundred cellars for storage. The sales to wholesale dealers are made by auction early in the day, and they average about a hundred thousand dollars. Then the retail traffic begins. The supplies, some of which come from great distances along the Mediterranean, include meat, fish, poultry, game, oysters, vegetables, fruit, flowers, butters, cream cheese, etc. Great throngs of people, mostly in blue dresses and blouses, with baskets and bundles constantly surge past you. The whole scene is enjoyable. Everything they offer is fresh, and the prices usually are reasonable. When you make a purchase, you are made to feel that you have conferred a favor and are repeatedly thanked for it. The few days that followed in Paris were days of rest, or were spent in planning for the future. The art galleries and the shops on the boulevards were repeatedly visited, theaters and rides were enjoyed, and on Friday morning, the ladies went to the railway station to take leave of Alfonso and Leo, who left Paris for the study of art in the Netherlands. Colonel Harris and George Ingram were expected to arrive in Paris on Saturday evening. CHAPTER XVIII IN BELGIUM AND HOLLAND Reluctantly Alfonso and Leo left Lucille and May in Paris. Both were well educated and beautiful women. It is possible that Alfonso might have loved May Ingram had he been thrown more into her company, and so known her better in early life, but the Harrises and Ingrams rarely met each other in society. As for Leo, he loved Lucille, but she had erected an impassable barrier in her utterance on the steamer, "First love or none." Leo in a thousand ways had been kind to her, because he hoped eventually to win her favor, and possibly because he fully appreciated the value of money. Fortunes in Europe are not so easily made, but once won, the rich of the old world as a rule husband their resources better then they of the new world. On the whole Alfonso and Leo were glad to cut loose from society obligations and be free to absorb what generations of art development in the Netherlands had to offer. Leaving Paris they took the express via Rheims for Brussels. Entering this beautiful capital of the Belgians in the northern part of the city, they took a cab that drove past the Botanic Garden down the Rue Royale to the Hotel Bellevue which is near the Royal Palace and overlooks a park, embellished with sculptures, trees, flowers, and smooth lawns. One of the most enjoyable and profitable things for tourists to do in their travels is to climb at least one tower or height, as the views and correct information thus obtained will cling longest to the memory. Brussels is Paris in miniature. The royal palace and park may be compared to the Tuileries. The beautiful drive down the Boulevard de Waterloo and up Avenue Louise leads directly to the Bois de la Cambre, a lovely forest of four hundred and fifty acres, which resembles the Bois de Boulogne of Paris. Nearly six miles of old and new boulevards encircle Brussels, passing through the upper and lower portions of the city. The pleasing variety of some of the more handsome buildings is due to the competition for large premiums offered for the finest façades. The resemblance of Brussels to Paris is perhaps more apparent in the cafés, shops, and public amusements along the busy boulevards. West of the Royal Palace is the picture gallery owned by the state, and by judicious and repeated purchases, the collection of pictures is considered superior to that of the famous gallery in Antwerp. In this gallery the two young artists spent several pleasant half-days comparing the early Flemish and Dutch schools. Especially did they study portrait work by Rubens, Frans Hals, and Van der Helst. All the work by the blacksmith artist Quinten Matsys in color or iron proved of great interest to the young Americans. Finally Leo, who knew much of the old masters of Europe, took Alfonso to see the Musee Wiertz, which contains all the works of a highly gifted and eccentric master. In a kind of distemper Wiertz painted Napoleon in the Infernal Region, Vision of a Beheaded Man, A Suicide, The Last Cannon, Curiosity, and Contest of Good and Evil, Hunger, Madness and Crime, etc. As Brussels is located near the center of Belgium, the city is very convenient to several cities that contain many works attractive to painters and architects. On arrival at Antwerp Alfonso and Leo rode to one of the stately cathedrals, near which a military band was playing. Before the church stood a bronze statue of Peter Paul Rubens. The scrolls and books, which lie on the pedestal, with brush, palette, and hat, are allusions to the varied pursuits of Rubens as diplomatist, statesman, and painter. The two young artists hastened into the cathedral to see Rubens's famous pictures, The Descent from the Cross, and The Assumption. His conception and arrangement were admirable, his drawing carefully done, and his coloring harmonious and masterly. Rubens, the prince of Flemish painters, was knighted. He was handsome and amiable, and his celebrity as an artist procured for him the friendship and patronage of princes and men of distinction throughout Europe. Not far from the cathedral the young artists came to the museum, in front of which rises a statue to Van Dyck, pupil of Rubens. "Here, Alfonso," said Leo, "is encouragement for you, for Van Dyck like yourself was the son of a wealthy man or merchant of Antwerp. He was educated in Italy, where he executed several fine portraits which I saw in Genoa as I journeyed to Paris." Charles I. of England appointed Van Dyck court-painter and knighted him. Van Dyck's ambition was to excel in historical works, but the demand upon him for portraits never left him much leisure for other subjects. How often "man proposes, but God disposes." Alfonso and Leo reached Dort or Dordrecht, which in the middle ages was the most powerful and wealthy commercial city in Holland. Huge rafts float down from the German forests, and at Dordrecht the logs are sawed by the many windmills. The Dutch province of Zealand is formed by nine large islands on the coast of the North Sea, and it has for its heraldic emblem a swimming lion with a motto _Luctor et Emergo_. Most of the province, which is created by the alluvial deposits of the Scheldt, is below the sea-level, and is protected against the encroachments of the sea by vast embankments of an aggregate length of 300 miles. Willows are planted along the dykes, the annual repairs of which cost $425,000. An old proverb says, "God made the land, we Dutch made the sea." This fertile soil produces abundant crops of wheat and other grain. Near Dort is a vast reed-forest, covering more than 100 islands, which is also called, "Verdronken land," drowned land. This area of forty square miles, once a smiling agricultural tract, was totally inundated on the 18th of November, 1421. Seventy-two thriving market towns and villages were destroyed, and 100,000 persons perished. Leo made a sketch of the tower of Huis Merwede, the solitary and only relic of this desolate scene. The two artists visited Rotterdam, the second commercial city in Holland, which is fourteen miles from the North Sea and on the right bank of the Maas. An attractive quay a mile in length is the arriving and starting point for over 100 steamboats that connect Rotterdam with Dutch towns, the Rhine, England, France, Russia, and the Mediterranean. Alfonso and Leo studied the collection of portraits at Boyman's Museum, and sketched in the River Park the happy people who were grouped under trees, by the fish ponds, and along the grassy expanses. Alfonso bought a photograph of the illustrious Erasmus. It is about ten miles to Delft, once celebrated for its pottery and porcelain, a city to-day of 25,000 inhabitants. Here on the 10th of July, 1584, William of Orange, Founder of Dutch independence, was shot by an assassin to secure the price set on William's head by Farnese. Our two artists visited a church in Delft to see the marble monument to the memory of the Prince of Orange, which was inscribed "Prince William, the Father of the Fatherland." Not far is Delft Haven which Americans love to visit, and where the pious John Robinson blessed a brave little band as it set sail to plant in a new world the tree of Liberty. At length the artists reached The Hague, which for centuries has been the favorite residence of the Dutch princes, and to-day is occupied by the court, nobles, and diplomatists. No town in Holland possesses so many broad and handsome streets, lofty and substantial blocks, and spacious squares as The Hague. Alfonso and Leo hastened to Scheveningen, three miles west of The Hague, on the breezy and sandy shores of the North Sea, a clean fishing village of neat brick houses sheltered from the sea by a lofty sand dune. Here bathing wagons are drawn by a strong horse into the ocean, where the bather can take his cool plunge. Scheveningen possesses a hundred fishing boats. The fishermen have an independent spirit and wear quaint dress. A public crier announces the arrival of their cargoes, which are sold at auction on the beach, often affording picturesque and amusing scenes, sketches of which were made. The luminous appearance of the sea caused by innumerable mollusca affords great pleasure to visitors, twenty thousand of whom every year frequent this fashionable sea-bathing resort. The second evening after the artists' arrival at Scheveningen, as they sauntered along on the brick-paved terrace in sight of white sails and setting sun, Alfonso was agreeably surprised to meet in company with her mother, Christine de Ruyter, a young artist, whose acquaintance he had made in the Louvre at Paris. Christine's father, prominent for a long time in the vessel trade, had recently died, leaving a fortune to his wife and two daughters, one of whom, Fredrika was already married. They were descended from the famous Admiral de Ruyter, who in 1673 defeated the united fleets of France and England off the coast of Scheveningen, which fact added much of interest to their annual visit to this resort. While Leo talked with the mother, Alfonso listened to Christine, as she told much about the historic family with which she was connected, and in return she learned somewhat of young Harris's family and their visit to Europe. Christine, who was about Alfonso's age, had fair complexion, light hair, and soft blue eyes. Her beauty added refinement that education and wide travel usually furnish. It was seen in Alfonso's face and in his marked deference that Christine filled his ideal of a beautiful woman. Christine and her mother and the young artists were registered at the Hotel de Orange, so of necessity they were thrown into each other's company. They drove to The Hague, compared the statues of William of Orange with each other; rode along the elegant streets, south through the Zoological and Botanical Gardens, through the park, and to the drill grounds. A half-day was spent in visiting the "House in the Woods," a Royal Villa, one and one-half miles northeast of The Hague. This palace is beautifully decorated, particularly the Orange Salon, which was painted by artists of the school of Rubens. Alfonso and Leo enjoyed their visits to the celebrated picture gallery, which contains among many Dutch paintings the famous pictures by Paul Potter and Rembrandt. Paul Potter's Bull is deservedly popular. This picture was once carried off to Paris, and there ranked high in the Louvre, and later the Dutch offered 60,000 florins to Napoleon for its restoration. Christine, who was well conversant with art matters, knew the location and artistic value of each painting and guided the young Americans to works by Van Dyck, Rubens, the Tenniers, Holbein, and others. She was proud of a terra-cotta head of her ancestor, Admiral de Ruyter. The party soon reached Rembrandt's celebrated "School of Anatomy," originally painted for the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons. Tulp is in black coat with lace collar and broad-brimmed soft hat, dissecting a sinew of the arm of the corpse before him. He is explaining, with gesture of his left hand, his theory to a group of Amsterdam surgeons. No painter ever before succeeded in so riveting the attention of spectators in the presence of death. The listeners appear altogether unconscious of the pallid corpse that lies before them on the dissecting table. Invited by Christine's mother, the young artists accompanied the De Ruyters to Amsterdam, the commercial capital of Holland, with 300,000 inhabitants. They live on ninety islands formed by intersecting canals, which are crossed by three hundred bridges. The buildings rest on foundations of piles, or trees, which fact gave rise to Erasmus's jest, that he knew a city where the people dwelt on tops of trees, like rooks. Alfonso took Leo into the suburbs to see diamond polishing. The machinery is run by steam, and the work is done largely by Portuguese Jews. These precious stones are cut or sawed through by means of wires covered with diamond dust, and the gems are polished by holding them against rapidly revolving iron disks moistened with a mixture of diamond dust and oil. Christine's people lived in a red brick mansion, the gable of which contained a portrait in relief of Admiral de Ruyter, and fronted a shaded street on a canal. Here the American artists were handsomely entertained. They were driven to the picture galleries and the palace or town-hall in the Dam Square, where Louis Napoleon and Hortense once resided. From the tower which terminates in a gilded ship the artists obtained fine views of Northern Holland. Christine pointed out the Exchange and other objects of interest in the city, which abounds in narrow streets and broad canals, the latter lined with fine shade trees. Many of the tall, narrow houses have red tile roofs, quaint fork-chimneys, and they stand with gables to the canals. The docks show a forest of masts. The environs of the city are covered with gardens; trees adorn the roads, while poplars and willows cross or divide the fields, which are studded with windmills and distant spires, and everywhere are seen fertile corps, black and white cattle, and little boats creeping slowly along the canals. A Hollander's wealth is often estimated by his windmills. If asked, "How rich?" The reply comes, "Oh, he is worth ten or twelve windmills." Holland seems alive with immense windmills. They grind corn, they saw wood, they pulverize rocks, and they are yoked to the inconstant winds and forced to contend with the water, the great enemy of the Dutch. They constantly pump water from the marshes into canals, and so prevent the inundation of the inhabitants. The Hollander furnishes good illustration of the practical value of Emerson's words, "Borrow the strength of the elements. Hitch your wagon to a star, and see the chores done by the gods themselves." To the west are seen the church spires of Haarlem, and its long canal, which like a silver thread ties it to Amsterdam. To the east the towers of Utrecht are visible, and to the north glitter in the morning sun the red roofs of Zaandam and Alkmaar. Far away stretched the waters of the Zuider Zee, which Holland plans to reclaim by an enbankment from the extreme cape of North Holland, to the Friesland coast, so as to shut out the ocean, and thereby acquire 750,000 square miles of new land; a whole province. At present 3,000 persons and 15,000 vessels are employed in the Zuider Zee fisheries, the revenues of which average $850,000 a year. It is proposed to furnish equivalents to satisfy these fishermen. It is estimated that this wonderful engineering feat will extend over 33 years and cost $131,250,000. Christine now conducted her artist friends out of the Palace and over to the Rijks Museum to see Rembrandt's largest and best work, his "Night Watch." It is on the right as you enter, covering the side of the room. It represents a company of arquebusiers, energetically emerging from their Guild House on the Singel. The light and shade of the Night Watch is so treated as to form a most effective dramatic scene, which, since its creation, in 1642, has been enthusiastically admired by all art connoisseurs. Rembrandt was the son of a miller, and his studio was in his father's wind-mill, where light came in at a single narrow window. By close observation he became master of light and shade, and excelled in vigor and realism. At $50 a year he taught pupils who flocked to him from all parts of Europe, but, like too many possessed of fine genius, he died in poverty. Later, London paid $25,000 for a single one of his six hundred and forty paintings. The Dutch painters put on canvas the everyday home-life and manners of their people, while the Flemish represented more the religious life of the lower Netherlands. These journeys in Belgium gave Alfonso and Leo enlarged ideas as to the possibilities of portrait painting. In Alma Tadema, of Dutch descent, and Millais they saw modern examples of wonderful success, which made clear to them that the high art of portrait painting once acquired, both fame and fortune are sure to follow. Christine de Ruyter had taken lessons of the best masters in Holland, Italy, and France. Few, if any women artists of her age, equalled or excelled her. Her conversations on art in the Netherlands charmed her two artist friends. She said, "The works of art of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Netherlands seemed to grow out of the very soil of the low countries. Our old artists revelled in the varied costumes and manifold types that thronged the cities of the Hanseatic League. The artist's imagination was fascinated by the wealth of color he saw on sturdy laborers, on weather-beaten mariners, burly citizens, and sagacious traders. "Rubens delighted often in a concentrated light, and was master of artistic material along the whole range. He painted well portraits, landscapes, battles of heroes, gallant love-making of the noble, and the coarse pleasures of the vulgar. Nearly a thousand pictures bear the name of Rubens. "The artistic labor of Frans Hals of Haarlem extended over half a century. He possessed the utmost vivacity of conception, purity of color, and breadth of execution, as shown in his latest works, and so well did he handle his brush that drawing seems almost lost in a maze of color tone. The throng of genre painters, who have secured for Dutch art its greatest triumph, are well nigh innumerable." Christine was very fond of flower-pieces, and had painted lovely marguerites on Gertrude's white dress, in Alfonso's full length picture of his sister, which he was soon to carry to Paris as his wedding present. Leo and Alfonso much wished to extend their journey north to Copenhagen and Stockholm, the "Venice of the North," but letters urging a speedy return to the marriage of George and Gertrude in Paris, forced the two artists to shorten their journey, say good-bye to their kind friends of Amsterdam, and hasten back to Paris, taking portraits of their own skill as wedding gifts. CHAPTER XIX PARIS AND THE WEDDING Friday morning, Alfonso and Leo were missed at the table, and during the day as guides. Early every day while in Paris, Alfonso had bouquets of fresh flowers sent to the rooms of his mother, sisters, and May Ingram. After his departure the flowers did not come, so Gertrude and May before breakfast walked down the boulevard to the flower show, near the Madeleine, where twice a week are gathered many flower carts in charge of courteous peasant women. The flowers of Paris are usually cheap. A franc, eighteen cents, buys a bunch of pansies, or roses in bud or full bloom, or marguerites. The latter are similar to the English ox-eyed daisy, a favorite flower with the French, also with Gertrude, who often pinned a bunch on May Ingram. In mid-winter Parisian gardeners delight in forcing thousands of white lilac blossoms, which are sold in European capitals for holiday gifts. Gertrude and May hurried back to the hotel as happy as the birds in the trees of the boulevard. When Gertrude reached her mother, a telegram was given her from George which read: City of Brussels. _Gertrude_,-- We expect to arrive in Paris Saturday evening 6 o'clock. Alfonso and Leo here. All well. Grand trip. Love to all. George. Mrs. Harris and her young ladies planned to give most of the day to the purchase of Gertrude's trousseau and other needed articles. May Ingram thought it was "just lovely" to be with Gertrude in Paris, and help her select the wedding outfit. Earlier than usual on Friday morning the Harrises left the hotel. All four women were somewhat excited, as Mrs. Harris and Gertrude led the way, Lucille and May following, to M. Worth's establishment, located at Rue de la Paix 7. Lucille said, "It is strange indeed that, in view of the French ridicule made of the English on account of their lack of taste in dress, the best dressmakers in Paris should be Englishmen." Chief among all the Parisian dressmakers is Charles Frederick Worth, who was born in 1825, at Bourne, Lincolnshire. He came to Paris in 1858, and opened business with fifty employees combining the selling of fine dress material and the making of it. Worth now employs twelve hundred persons, and turns out annually over six thousand dresses and nearly four thousand cloaks; his sons ably assist him. Rare fabrics and designs in silk and other choice material are woven, and artistic ornaments are made especially for M. Worth. Paris, as the center of fashion, is greatly indebted to him, who gained in his line world-wide fame, and for nearly half a century he has been universally recognized by his competitors and the fair sex as master of his art. Kingdoms, empires, republics, and cabinets in swift succession followed each other, but the establishment of M. Worth maintained its proud position against all changes and rivals. He was helped to the highest pedestal of dictator of fashions by Mme. de Pourtales and Princess Pauline Metternich, both of whom possessed a keen sense of the fitness of texture, color, and cut, and with delicate hands could tone and modify till perfection was reached. The former introduced M. Worth to Empress Eugenie, for whom, and for the ladies of whose court, he designed state, dinner, and fancy costumes. That M. Worth possessed rare artistic taste aside from dressmaking is evidenced in the beauty of his rural home at Suresnes on the Seine, seven and a half miles from Paris. It is a superb work of harmony and is like a charming mosaic, every piece fitting into every other piece. He was his own architect, designer, upholsterer, and gardener. His villa lies beneath Mt. Valerien, one of the finest sites near Paris, and the outlook on the Seine, the Bois de Boulogne, and Paris, is a dream of beauty. Hurriedly passing down the Rue de la Paix, the stately Column Vendome in the vista, the Harris party entered M. Worth's establishment, to which women, from actress to empress, make pilgrimages from the end of the world. What a medley of people were already assembled! English duchesses, Russian princesses, Austrians, Spanish and Levantine aristocracy; wives and daughters of American railroad kings, of oil magnates, and of coal barons; brunette beauties from India, Japan, South America, and even fair Australians, all unconsciously assuming an air of ecstasy as they revelled in the fabric and fashion of dress; and stalking among them, that presiding genius, M. Worth, who in his mitre-shaped cap of black velvet, and half mantle or robe, strikingly resembled the great painter Hogarth. Mrs. Harris sent forward her letter of introduction from her husband's New York banker, and soon she and her friends were ushered into the presence of M. Worth himself. He seemed very gracious, asking about several good friends of his in America, and added, "Americans are my best clients, though we dispatch dresses to all parts of the world." Gertrude inquired as to the origin of fashion. M. Worth answered cautiously, "When new fabrics or designs of material are invented, some require a severe style, and some are adapted for draperies, puffings, etc., and then the stage has great influence over fashion." May Ingram said, "Mr. Worth, how do you arrange designs?" He answered, "All my models are first made in black and white muslin, and then copied in the material and coloring which I select. In a studio our models are photographed for future reference." Saying this, he excused himself to welcome new arrivals, first having placed the Harrises in charge of a competent assistant. M. Worth's many rooms were plainly furnished with counters for measuring materials. The floors were covered with a gray and black carpet, in imitation of a tiger's skin, with a scarlet border. Several young women dressed in the latest style of morning, visiting, dinner, and reception toilets, passed up and down before clients to enable them to judge of effects. Mrs. Harris explained that one daughter desired, at an early date, a wedding dress and that the other members of her party wanted gowns. Friday and Saturday were occupied at Worth's in selecting dresses, and elsewhere in search of gloves and other essentials. A delightful hour was spent among the many makers of artificial flowers. Skilled fingers make from wire and silk stems and stamens and dies, shape leaves and petals which are darkened by a camel's hair pencil, or lightened by a drop of water. Capable botanists and chemists are employed, and nature herself is rivaled in delicate construction and fragrance even. In their round of shopping, the Harrises saw an ideal robe being made for an American belle. It was composed entirely of flowers, a skirt of roses of different tints, with a waist of lovely rose buds, and over all a veil with crystal drops in imitation of the morning dew. "A gem of a dress for some fairy," thought Lucille. Promptly at six o'clock Gertrude and Lucille drove to the railway station, and welcomed back George and Colonel Harris, and after dinner all went to the opera. Between the acts Gertrude and George told much of their late experiences. George said that Colonel Harris had become greatly interested in their scheme to build in America an ideal plant and town, and that he was anxious to return home as he felt that one's work must be done early, as life was short at best. Gertrude explained to George all that had been done in preparing for the wedding, and said that she would be ready soon, that her mother and Lucille approved of their wedding trip of two weeks in Switzerland, and then Gertrude added, "I shall be ready, George, when you are, to return to America and to aid you all I can." Colonel Harris suggested a ride to Versailles, and Monday morning at nine o'clock Gaze's coach and four drove to the Grand Hotel, and six outside seats which had been reserved for the Harris party were filled. The coachman drove down the Avenue de l'Opera and into the Place du Carrousel, stopping a moment that all might admire the artistic pavilions of the Louvre, and the statue to the memory of Leon Gambetta, "Father of the Republic." Thence they rode out of the Court of the Tuileries, across the Place de la Concord, and down the charming Champs Elysées. On the left stands the Palais de l'Industrie, where the salon or annual exhibition of modern paintings and sculptures occurs in May and June. On the right is the Palais de l'Elysée, the official residence of the French president. George recalled that in these gardens of Paris, in 1814, Emperors Alexander and Francis, King Frederick III., and others sang a _Te Deum_, in thanksgiving for their great victory over Napoleon I.; that here the English, Prussian, and Russian troops bivouacked, and that in the spring of 1871, Emperor William and his brilliant staff led the German troops beneath the Arc de Triomphe, while the German bands played "Die Wacht am Rhine." The coach passed through the Bois de Boulogne, in sight of lovely lakes, quaint old windmills, and across famous Longchamps, where after the Franco-German War under a bright sky, in the presence of the French president, his cabinet, the senate and chamber of deputies, in full dress, and a million of enthusiastic citizens, Grevy and Gambetta presented several hundred silk banners to the French army. Thence the drive was along the left bank of the river till the ruins of St. Cloud were reached, where Napoleon III. Unwittingly signed his abdication when he declared war against Prussia. Climbing the hills through fine old forests after fourteen miles of travel southwest of Paris, the coach reached Versailles. Here that magnificent monarch, Louis XIV. lavished hundreds of millions on palaces, parks, fountains, and statues, and here the Harrises studied the brilliant pictorial history of France. In the Grand Gallery, which commands beautiful views of garden and water, are effective paintings in the ceiling, which represent the splendid achievements of Louis XIV. In this same Hall of Glass, beneath Le Brun's color history of the defeat of the Germans by the French, occurred in 1871 a bit of fine poetic justice, when King William of Prussia, with the consent of the German States, was saluted as Emperor of reunited Germany. After visiting the Grand Trianon the home of Madame de Maintenon, the coach returned via Sevres, famous for its wonderful porcelain, and reached Paris at sunset. The day was one long to be remembered. The Paris mornings were spent either in visits to the Louvre or in driving. George and Gertrude walked much in Paris. Monday morning all resolved to enjoy on foot the Boulevards from the Grand Hotel to the Place de la Republique. It was a field-day for the women, for every shop had its strong temptation, and the world seemed on dress-parade. Boulevard des Italiens in Paris is the most frequented and fashionable. Here are located handsome hotels and cafés, and many of the choicest and most expensive shops. Several of these were visited, and many presents were sent back to the hotel for friends at home. At noon the Harrises took a simple lunch at one of the popular Duval restaurants. While the ladies continued their purchases, Colonel Harris and George visited the Bourse, or exchange, a noble building. Business at this stock exchange opens at twelve o'clock and closes at three o'clock. The loud vociferations of brokers, the quick gestures of excited speculators, and the babel of tongues produced a deafening noise, like that heard at the stock exchange in New York. By appointment the ladies called at the exchange, and a coach took the party to the Place de la Republique, where stands a superb statue of the Republic, surrounded with seated figures of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. Colonel Harris had often noticed these remarkable words cut into many of the public buildings of Paris, and he remarked that the lesson taught by them was as injurious as that taught in the Declaration of Independence, which declares, that "all men are created equal." Along the broadest parts of some boulevards and in public parks many chairs are placed for hire. On all the boulevards are numerous pillars, and small glass stalls, called kiosques, where newspapers are sold. The pillars and kiosques are covered with attractive advertisements. In these kiosques are sold, usually by women and children, many of the 750 papers and periodicals of Paris. Fifty of these papers are political. The _Gazette_ is two hundred and sixty-four years old, established in 1631. _Le Temps_, "The Times," an evening paper, is English-like, and widely known. _Le Journal des Debats_, "The Journal of Debate," appears in correct and elegant language, and it usually discusses questions of foreign as well as of home politics. Papers called _Petite_, or "Little," have an immense circulation. Over a half million copies of _Le Petite Journal_ are sold daily. Frenchmen at home or abroad are not happy without their _Figaro_, which is read for its news of amusements, spicy gossip, and the odor of the boulevards. The sensitive and powerful press of Paris has often provoked political changes and revolutions. To study better the important revolution for liberty which occurred on the ever memorable 14th of July, 1789, the Harrises drove along the boulevard till they approached the Bastille, formerly the site of a castle, or stronghold, used for a long time as a state prison for the confinement of persons who fell victims to the caprice of the government. The graceful bronze July Column is 154 feet in height, and it commemorates the destruction of the Bastille, symbol of despotism. A strong desire for independence raised the cry "Down with the Bastille," and the advancing tide of revolution overcame the moats, the walls, the guns, and the garrison, and freedom was victorious. On the column the names of the fallen "July Heroes" are emblazoned in gilded letters. In large vaults beneath are buried the heroes of 1789, with the victims of the later revolution of 1848. The capital of the column is crowned with an artistic Genius of Liberty standing on a globe, and holding in one hand the broken chains of slavery, and in the other the torch of enlightenment. All the boulevards were crowded with artisans in blue blouses, hurrying to their homes, as the Harrises drove along the quays to Notre Dame. They were in time to witness the sun burnish with his golden rays the graceful spire, the majestic tower, and elegant façade, and to enjoy the harmony of its grand organ within. To know Notre Dame, founded seven centuries ago, is to learn well the history of Paris, and to study the monuments of Paris alone, is to acquire the history of France. Every day some of the Harris party visited the vast Louvre, the most important public building of Paris, both architecturally and on account of its wonderful art treasures which are the most extensive and valuable in the world. Thus two weeks went swiftly by in sight-seeing, and in preparation for the marriage. The private parlors, banquet hall, and several rooms for guests of the Grand Hotel had been secured for Gertrude's wedding, which was to take place on George's birthday. Though superstition for ages had placed birthdays under a ban, yet Gertrude herself preferred this day, and all concurred. Beautiful presents had already arrived from America, and letters from schoolmates and friends, several of whom, however, had sent their presents to Harrisville. Nearly a thousand invitations in all, mostly to friends in America, had been mailed, including a hundred to friends traveling on the British Isles, and on the continent. May Ingram had met in London Claude Searles, son of Hugh Searles, and a graduate of Oxford University. She had an invitation mailed to Claude, and he promised to come. Alfonso and Leo arrived from Holland the night before, and each brought paintings of their own skill as presents. Alfonso had done an exquisite full-length portrait of Gertrude in white, the dress, the same that she wore at Smith College graduation. All wondered about Leo's gift. Gertrude herself cut the strings, and pushed back the paper, while her sister Lucille looked first at her own beautiful likeness and then at Leo. Her face grew crimson, as she said, "Leo, this is just what I most wanted for Gertrude. Thank you! Thank you!" and she came near kissing the handsome artist. The mother had bought a plentiful supply of those things which daughters most need. The father's gift was the promised check for $1000, and a mysterious long blue envelope sealed, with the name "Mrs. Gertrude Ingram" written on the outside. Underneath her name were the tantalizing words, "To be opened when she reaches New York." "Oh, I so wonder what is inside," said Gertrude. May Ingram's gift was unique; a mahogany box, inlaid with the rare edelweiss, encasing a Swiss phonograph, that was adjusted to play "Elsa's Dream Song" from Lohengrin on Gertrude's marriage anniversary, till her golden wedding should occur. Next morning after the sun had gilded the domes and spires of Paris, the Harrises sat at breakfast in a private room, fragrant with fresh cut flowers. Gertrude wore at her throat her lover's gift, and she never looked prettier or happier. All the morning till 11 o'clock everybody was busy, when the ushers and friends began to arrive. Soon came the American ambassador, his wife and children. At 11:45 a bishop of New York City, Claude Searles of London, and intimate friends of the Harrises and George Ingram followed, till the private parlors were full. The orchestra of twenty pieces of Grand Opera House, stationed in the reception hall, played the "Largo" of Handel. In the third parlor from the ceiling were suspended ropes or garlands of smilax and bride's roses, which formed a dainty canopy. White satin ribbons festooned on two rows of potted marguerites made a bridal pathway direct from the foot of the stairway to the dais beneath the canopy. On the low platform stood the bishop and the manly bridegroom expectant, when a voice at the foot of the stairway, accompanied by three instruments, sang the Elsa's Dream Song. The wedding party came downstairs as the orchestra played Wagner's Wedding March. The bride was dressed in duchess satin of soft ivory tone, the bodice high and long sleeves, with trimming of jewelled point lace. The bridesmaids wore pale yellow cloth, with reveres and cuffs of daffodil yellow satin and white Venetian point. Mrs. Harris wore a gown of heliotrope brocaded silk, trimmed with rich lace and a bodice of velvet. The wedding party took their places and Mme. Melba accompanied by piano, harp, and violin sang Gounod's "Ave Maria." The bishop addressed a few earnest words to the couple before him, spoke of responsibilities and obligations, and then the formal questions of marriage, in distinct voice, were put to George and Gertrude. Mr. and Mrs. George Ingram received hearty congratulations. The guests retired to the banquet hall where breakfast was served. One table with marguerites was reserved for bride and bridegroom, ushers, and bridesmaids. Before the breakfast was ended the bride and bridegroom had escaped, but soon returned, the bride in a traveling gown of blue cloth. Volleys of rice followed the bridal pair, and more rice pelted the windows of the coach as it drove to the express train which was to convey the happy pair to Fontainebleau for a day, and thence into Switzerland. In the evening Colonel Harris entertained a large party of friends at the new opera house. The Harrises next morning left for southern France. Before the marriage day George and Gertrude had carefully provided in Paris for the welfare of May Ingram whom both loved. And well they might, for May had a noble nature, and her music teachers in Boston, who had exerted their best efforts in her behalf, believed that she possessed rare talents, which, if properly developed, would some day make her conspicuous in the American galaxy of primadonnas. They had secured for May sunny rooms at a pension in the Boulevard Haussmann, where a motherly French woman resided with her two daughters. In beautiful Paris, May Ingram was to live and study, hoping to realize the dreams of her childhood, a first rank in grand opera. CHAPTER XX ABOARD THE YACHT "HALLENA" Before leaving Paris Colonel Harris was solicitous that his son Alfonso should accompany him to Rome, and Leo urged the artistic advantage of a trip to Italy, but Alfonso had attractions in Holland of which the father knew not. Leo, of course, had his suspicion, but did not wish to betray his friend, and so Alfonso returned to the Netherlands ostensibly to study art. Before leaving New York it was frequently stated by Leo that when he reached Rome he hoped to be able to even up favors with Alfonso by a series of visits among his relatives, the famous Colonna family. While Leo regretted seriously to lose this opportunity, he was quick to see that the change of plans would leave him much in Lucille's company, the thing that gave him most pleasure. Lucille before leaving Harrisville had a severe attack of the grip, and Mrs. Harris hoped the journey abroad would prove beneficial to her health. The ocean voyage had brought the roses back to her cheeks, but the railway trips, the over-work of sight-seeing, and especially the excitement of the Paris wedding, had renewed frequent complaints of heart difficulty, and at night Lucille was restless and failed to secure satisfactory sleep. Of course the mother was anxious, and was glad when the express arrived at Nice, on the Mediterranean. Fortunately this was not the fashionable season, so quiet quarters were secured overlooking the terraced promenade, the small harbor open to the southeast, and the smooth sea beyond. Here Mrs. Harris hoped that her daughter would speedily recover her health. Nice is charmingly situated in a small plain near the French frontier at the foot of the triple-ridged mountains, which shelter the city on the north and east against northern winds, while the river Paglion bounds Nice on the west. Far beyond stretch the snow-clad peaks of the Maritime Alps. In the cold season thousands of foreigners, especially the English, visit this winter paradise. On the high background are Roman ruins and an old castle enclosed by bastioned walls; leading to two squares, one of which is surrounded with porticoes, are streets embellished with theater, public library, baths, and handsome homes that are frescoed externally. In Nice the patriot Garibaldi first saw the light, and just above the town on a sunny hillside lies buried the illustrious Gambetta. Lucille was soon able to sit on the portico and watch the vessels in the harbor come and go, also parties of excursionists in pleasure boats, and well dressed people in the shade of the great palms on the adjacent promenade. Thus hours went pleasantly by while Leo often played delightfully on his guitar. Few if any places in the world are like the Riviera where in winter months royalty and aristocracy gather. Here come the gay world of fashion and the delicate in health to beg of death a respite of a few more days. The physician in attendance upon Lucille advised much outdoor air, and frequent coach rides along the shore were taken to Cannes, to Monaco, and Mentone. In the seaport town of Cannes, a bright gem set in groves of olives and oranges, Napoleon landed from Elba on the first of March, 1815. The tri-color of France was again thrown to the breeze, and en route to Paris Napoleon received on every hand the renewed allegiance of officers and garrisons. The French were wild with excitement, but Europe was filled with amazement. Again France was conquered without the shedding of blood, a victory unparalleled in history. Lucille particularly enjoyed the ride of eight miles east along the peaceful Mediterranean, also the visit to Monaco, capital of the principality of its own name, with an area of about 34,000 acres. Monaco is beautifully situated on a promontory in the sea, and has an attractive palace and cultivated terraces. The ruling prince resides here six months and at Paris the other six months. Monte Carlo is a veritable bit of paradise so far as nature and art can work wonders. Around this famous gambling resort grow aloes, orange trees, and tufted palms. Within the handsome casino weak humanity of all nationalities is allured by glittering promises of wealth. No wonder a dozen or more suicides occur every month. It was three o'clock on the sixth day of the stay at Nice, when Colonel Harris sitting on the porch of the hotel and using a marine glass, discovered to the southwest a tiny craft rapidly approaching Nice. For three days he had been anxiously watching and waiting for the arrival of the "Hallena," built at Harrisville for the son of his special friend Mr. Harry Hall. Before leaving Paris, Harry Hall Jr. had invited the colonel's family to coast along the Mediterranean in his new yacht. It was arranged that the "Hallena" should touch at Nice and take aboard the colonel's family. Young Mr. Hall was to rejoin his yacht at Gibraltar, and doubtless he was now aboard. The colonel grew nervous as he observed the approach of the little boat. It had been agreed between Harris and Hall that the yacht would fly the Union Jack at the bow, the national banner at the flag-staff, and a streamer bearing the yacht's name at the mast-head. As the colonel again wiped the dust from his glasses, Lucille said, "Father, please let me try the glass, perhaps my eyes are better." While Lucille eagerly looked toward the yacht, Leo watched every motion, as the mention of young Hall's name in connection with his great wealth had awakened jealousy in his heart. Suddenly Lucille shouted, "There she is! I can see the stars and stripes; how welcome is the dear old flag, we see it abroad so rarely!" "Hasten, Leo," said the colonel, "and ask the hotel proprietor to raise the stars and stripes over his hotel." Colonel Harris had promised Mr. Hall to do this, and so advise him where the Harris family were stopping. No sooner was the red, white, and blue given to the breeze above the hotel, than a puff of white smoke was seen on the yacht, and then came the report of a gun in response to Harris's flag signal. Bills were paid at once, and the Harrises took carriage down to the landing. As the "Hallena" glided in between the piers, she was as graceful as a swan, or as Leo expressed it, "as pretty as a pirate." Harris himself when at home saw the yacht launched, and he was as proud of her behavior then as were the officers of the Harrisville Ship Building Company. The yacht had now approached so near that Colonel Harris and Harry Hall saluted each other, and in five minutes the Harris and Hall parties were exchanging cordial greetings on the deck of the "Hallena." "Captain Hall," as Harry was known at sea, was very cordial to all. Colonel Harris was glad again to meet some of his old Harrisville business friends. Luke Henley and wife were of the Hall party. He was stout, resolute, and ambitious; his wife womanly and well dressed. Henley early learned that money was power. Combining what he fell heir to with his wife's fortune, and what he had made by bold ventures in the steel, ore, and coal trade, he was enabled to live in a fine villa, overlooking the water, and to carry on an immense business on the inland lakes. His business, however, was used as a cover to his real designs in life. Influential in the local politics of Harrisville he had experienced the keen pleasure of wielding the silver sceptre of power, and he longed not only to be the "power behind the throne," but to sit on the throne itself and guide the Ship of State. Major Williams also was one of the "Hallena" party. He was young, slender, and had a cheerful smile for everybody. He had climbed to the presidency of the Harrisville Bank which had thousands of depositors, and which wielded a gigantic financial power. It was decided not to start for Genoa till the next morning. Dinner was soon announced and Captain Hall offered his arm to Lucille, whom he placed at his right hand, and Mrs. Harris at his left. The dinner hour and part of the evening were spent in pleasant reminiscences of what each had seen since leaving Harrisville. The marriage of George Ingram and Gertrude was also a suggestive topic, and many agreeable things were spoken. Captain Hall was present at the Paris wedding, and it was the stately beauty of Lucille more than all else that prompted him to invite the Harrises to take the Mediterranean cruise. Some of the mothers of fine daughters in Harrisville had exhausted their wits in trying to entrap Harry Hall, who was impartially attentive to all, but was never known to pay marked attention to any young lady. That Captain Hall should overlook the other women on the yacht, and place Lucille at his right hand was so marked that Major Williams after dinner, lighting his cigar, said, "Henley, why wouldn't Harry and Lucille make a good match?" "Lucille is a beautiful girl," was all Henley said, and as the lights of Nice disappeared, the "Hallena" party retired for the night. An early breakfast was ordered as everybody wished to be early on deck to witness the yacht's departure for Genoa. As the "Hallena" responded to her helm, the United States consul at Nice hoisted and lowered the flag thrice, as a _bon voyage_ to the American yacht, and the consul queried whether the American statesman was yet born who was wise enough to introduce and maintain such a national policy as would multiply his country's commerce and flag on the sea. Patriotic Americans stopping at Monaco also responded with flag and gun, as the "Hallena" steamed swiftly away. The sun had reached the zenith, when Captain Hall sighted Genoa, and he called Lucille to stand with him on the bridge. "Superb Genoa! Worthy birthplace of our Columbus," said Lucille. "Yes," said Harry, "Genoa is older than Borne; she was the rival of Venice, and the mother of colonies." As the "Hallena" approached this strongly fortified city of northern Italy, the capacious harbor was a forest of masts, and a crazy-quilt of foreign flags, but not one ship was flying the stars and stripes, a fact which saddened the hearts of the tourists. The "Hallena" steamed past the lighthouse and moles that protect the harbor, and all the guests of Captain Hall stood on the forward deck admiring the city with its palaces, churches, white blocks, and picturesque villas that occupy land which gradually rises and recedes from the bay. On landing, the officials were very courteous, and gave Captain Hall and his party no trouble when it was learned that that "Hallena" brought travelers only. The Genoese are very proud of their city and its past history, and they are courteous to Americans, especially so since the Columbian World's Fair. The tourists found the streets in the older part of Genoa narrow, seldom more than ten feet wide, with lofty buildings on either side. But in the new portions, especially on the wide Strada Nuova and the Strada Balbi, the palaces and edifices present fine architecture. Nearly a day was spent in driving about Genoa with its flower-crowned terraces. It was after five o'clock when the party stood before the noble statue of Columbus recently dedicated in a prominent square filled with palms and flowering shrubs, and near the principal railway station. Here the statue welcomes the coming and speeds the parting guest. Its design is admirable. Surmounting a short shaft is Columbus leaning upon an anchor, and pointing with his right hand to the figure of America; below him are discerned encircling the shaft ornaments symbolic of Columbus's little fleet, while other statues represent science, religion, courage, and geography; between them are scenes in bass-relief of his adventurous career. Dinner was taken aboard the yacht as it steamed away from Genoa. The flowers that Harry had bought for Lucille's stateroom she thoughtfully placed on the table, and with the porcelain they added artistic effect. The day's experiences were reviewed, and, as the appetizing courses were served, the conversation drifted back to the World's Columbian Fair which all had attended. Many of the wonders of the "White City" were recounted, and Henley in his off-hand manner repeated a compliment which was paid by a cultivated Parisian who visited the Fair. The Frenchman said that at the last Paris Exposition, he saw immense and unsightly structures, such as one might expect to find in far-off Chicago, but that at the Columbian World's Fair, he beheld buildings such as his own artistic Paris and France should have furnished; that the Columbian Fair was an artistic triumph that had never been paralleled except in the days of imperial Rome by her grand temples, palaces, arches, bridges, and statues. "The Parisian is right, and he pays America a most deserved compliment. Never was so elegant a panorama enrolled as at Chicago," responded Colonel Harris. "You are correct, Colonel," said Captain Hall, "the triumph of our Exposition was largely due to the masterly supervision which evoked uniformity of design and harmonious groupings by employing only those of our architects, sculptors, painters, and landscape gardeners, who possessed the highest skill." Leo ventured to add that the "White City" seemed to him dream-like and that under the magical influence of Columbus, as patron-saint, all nationality, creed, and sex, were harmoniously blended in ideal beauty and grandeur. Lucille, who had just sipped the last of her chocolate, also bore testimony, and Harry watched her admiringly as she said, "At times, especially in the evening, when thousands of incandescent lights outlined the Court of Honor with its golden Goddess of the Republic and the façades, turrets, and domes, it seemed to some of us as if we had stepped out upon a neighboring planet, where civilization and art had been purified, or that the veil was lifted and we were gazing upon the glories of the New Jerusalem." The ladies now sought the deck of the "Hallena," and were soon followed by the gentlemen, who smoked their fragrant Havanas, enjoying every moment's vacation from business anxieties at home. The yacht, like a slender greyhound, in charge of the first officer was swiftly running towards the Isle of Elba, en route to Naples. The stars never shone more brilliantly in the Italian sky, and land breezes were mingling their rich odors with the salt sea air. The spell of Columbus's great discovery stirred the soul of Harry Hall. Holding his half-smoked cigar, he repeated the familiar couplet, "Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn." "Strange that four centuries go by before even Genoa erects his monument, which we have admired to-day; though monuments to the memory of Columbus have been erected in many cities, yet, how tardy the world was to appreciate the value of Columbus's discovery, a third of the land of the globe. How pitiful the last days of Columbus, who, old and ill, returning in 1504 from his fourth voyage to the new world, found his patroness Isabella dying, and Ferdinand heartless. With no money to pay his bills, Columbus died May 20th, 1505, in poor quarters at Valladolid, his last words being, 'Into thy hands, O Lord, I commit my spirit.' It is now natural perhaps that many cities should claim his birth and his bones." "Yes," said Lucille, "how encouraging some of the world's kind epitaphs would be if they were only spoken before death came. Two hemispheres now eagerly study the inspiring story of Columbus's faith, courage, perseverance, and success." Henley said, "Captain Hall, you are young yet, but by the time you reach my age you will have little use for the sentiment young people so often indulge in. When New York tries her hand with expositions she will doubtless deal with facts. The truth is, Columbus was human like the rest of us, and followed in the wake of others for his own personal aggrandizement. He was not the first man to discover America. The Norsemen antedated him by five centuries." "What if the Norsemen did first discover America?" said Colonel Harris. "The discoveries of the vikings were not utilized by civilization. It is held by the courts that a patent is valid only in the name of the inventor who first gives the invention a useful introduction. Columbus's discovery was fortunately made at a time when civilization was able with men and money to follow up and appropriate its advantages." "The true discoverer of America," said Henley, "I believe to be Jean Cousin, a sea captain of Dieppe, France, who crossed the Atlantic and sailed into the Amazon River in 1488, four years before Columbus reached San Salvador. Then Spain, Portugal, the States of the Church, Ferdinand, Isabella, and Columbus attempted to rob Cousin of his bold adventure. In brief these are the facts: Jean Cousin was an able and scientific navigator. In 1487 his skill so contributed in securing a naval victory for the French over the English that the reward for his personal valor was the gift of an armed ship from the merchants of Dieppe, who expected him to go forth in search of new discoveries.[A] [Footnote A: _The True Discovery of America._ Captain R.N. Gambier. _Fortnightly Review_, January 1, 1894.] "In January, 1488, Cousin sailed west out into the Atlantic, and south, for two months with Vincent Pinzon a practical sailor, second in command. He sailed up the Amazon River, secured strange birds, feathers, spices, and unknown woods, and returned to the coast of Africa for a cargo of ivory, oil, skins, and gold dust. Pinzon quarreled with the natives, fired upon them, and seized some of their goods, so that they fled and would not come back to him. He thus lost a valuable return cargo. At Dieppe the merchants were enraged; Pinzon was tried by court martial for imperilling the trade of Africa, and banished from French soil. He thirsted for revenge and went back to Palos to tell his brothers Alonzo and Martin, shipowners, of the mighty Amazon; often they speculated as to the vast lands which the Amazon drained. "Columbus, discouraged, ridiculed, and begging his way, started out to meet at Huelva his brother-in-law and secure promised help, so that he could visit France. Suddenly he changed his route, stopped at the little convent La Rabida, met Juan Perez, who knew Queen Isabella, and Fernandez the priest, the latter a close friend of the three Pinzon brothers. Columbus got what he wanted at court, returned to Palos, and with the Pinzon brothers sailed west, with Vincent Pinzon, Cousin's shipmate, as pilot. The conclusion that Jean Cousin, and not Columbus first discovered America, seems irresistible. Pope Alexander VI., by Papal bull, had already divided all the new discoveries made, between Catholic Spain and Portugal. Dieppe and France were in the Pope's black books. What chance of recognition had Cousin against Columbus, the protégé of this Pope?" "You seem to win your case," said Major Williams, "what romance in history will be left us? William Tell is now a myth, and Washington's little hatchet story is no more." Lucille quieted Leo with a smile, cigars were thrown overboard, the light on the Isle of Elba was visible, and all retired for the night, while the alert yacht, like a whirring night-hawk, flew on towards Naples. On the yacht "Hallena" early to bed and early to rise was an unwritten law. By six o'clock next morning, breakfast had been served, and the tourists were on deck with glasses, each anxious to discover objects of interest. During the night busy Leghorn on the coast, and Pisa, and Florence up the Arno, were left behind. Leo was proud of sunny and artistic Italy and he much desired that Lucille should see at Pisa the famous white marble leaning tower, with its beautiful spiral colonnades; its noble cathedral and baptistry, the latter famous for its wonderful echo, and the celebrated cemetery made of earth brought from the Holy Land. At Florence she should see the stupendous Duomo, with the Brunelleschi dome that excited the emulation of Michael Angelo; the bronze gates of Ghiberti, "worthy to be the gates of paradise," and the choice collections of art in the Pitti Palace and the Uffizi Gallery connected by Porte Vecchio. But Leo contented himself with the thought that when the yacht episode was over, and Harry Hall had passed out of sight, he could then take Lucille over Italy to enjoy a thousand-and-one works of art, including masterpieces by such artists as Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Guido, and others. Lucille had studied art in Boston, and she was fond of Leo because he passionately loved art and could assist her. She began to comprehend what Aristotle meant when he defined art as "the reason of the thing, without the matter," or Emerson, "the conscious utterance of thought, by speech, or action, to any end." CHAPTER XXI TWO UNANSWERED LETTERS During the night the yacht "Hallena" had steamed down through the Channel Piombino, and the Tuscan Archipelago, studded with islands, and had passed Rome, the Eternal City. "Naples cannot be far off," thought Leo, for to the southeast is seen the smoking torch of Mt. Vesuvius, southwest is the island of Ischia with its extinct volcano, and beyond is Cape Miseno. The "Hallena" cautiously felt her way among the luxuriant islands that guard the broad and beautiful Bay of Naples and the Siren City. Her passengers had ample opportunity to study the attractions of this justly celebrated locality. Vesuvius, reflected in the smooth waters of the bay, lifts high her peak, the ascending smoke coloring the white clouds above. At her feet lies ancient Hurculaneum, submerged on the 24th of August, A.D. 79, by a flood of molten lava. Nearer the bay and only five miles from the volcano, is ancient Pompeii, which was overwhelmed by the same eruption of Vesuvius. Pompeii was buried, not with lava, but with tufa, ashes and scoriæ, and since 1755 has thus been the more easily and extensively uncovered. This ancient Roman city was enclosed by walls and entered by several gates. Its numerous streets were paved with lava. The traveler of to-day beholds uncovered the one story and terraced houses, shops, mansions, the market place, temples, theatres, and baths. In some of the houses were found furniture, statues, paintings, books, medals, urns, jewels, utensils, manuscripts, etc., all less injured than one would suppose. Today more modern towns are located about the curved shore of this unrivaled bay. The sparkling waters, the winding shore, the bold cliffs, the threatening lava cone, the buried cities, all combine under the bluest skies to make the Bay of Naples a Mecca for worshipers of the beautiful. On the deck of the "Hallena" stood the group of American tourists, enchanted with the picturesque environment of historic Naples. The city is built along the shore and up the sides of adjacent mountains. A mole, with lighthouse, projects into the bay and forms a small harbor. The sun had climbed towards the zenith, and shone full upon this fair city, as the yacht entered the harbor. Many of the buildings are white, five or six stories in height, with flat roofs covered with plants and shrubbery. If the weather is favorable the inmates resort at sunset to their roof-gardens to enjoy lovely views and the cool breezes from the bay. The Spiaggia, a popular thoroughfare, is adorned with statues, and extends along the shore to the Tomb of Virgil, and the mole. It is crowded every evening with Neapolitans in equipages, some elegant, and some grotesque. Two or three days were spent in studying the palaces and art galleries of Naples. Of special interest is the national Museo Borbonico, which is remarkable for its collection of antiquities. In the palmy days of Borne, Naples was a luxurious retreat for emperors and wealthy citizens of the great empire. Naples was the scene of a most disgraceful outrage in May, 1848, when it was plundered by the Lazzaroni, or Begging Community, and fifteen hundred lives were lost. When the sight-seeing in Naples was completed Captain Hall offered to take the Harrises in his yacht back to Rome, but his offer was declined. Good-byes were cordially exchanged and the "Hallena" steamed south to Palermo, en route to Athens and other Levantine cities, while the Harrises took the express for Rome. Leo was glad to see the "Hallena" steam away, and to be with Lucille aboard a train moving towards Rome. When the station in the eastern part of the city was reached, a carriage conveyed the Harrises along the Corso which at the hour of their driving was enlivened by many vehicles and foot-passengers. Leo told Lucille of the popular festivals at Rome, especially of the Carnival that extends over several days, which consists of daily processions in the Corso, accompanied by the throwing of bouquets and comfits; the whole concluding with a horse race from the Piazza del Popolo to Piazza di Venezia, upwards of a mile. On the last, or the Moccoli evening, tapers are lighted immediately after sunset. Balconies most suitable for observing these animated scenes are expensive, but always in great demand, especially by tourists. Colonel Harris took his family and Leo to an excellent hotel on the Piazza de Popolo. The weather being uncomfortably warm, it was decided to spend only a few days in the city, and go as soon as possible to the country. Leo was very familiar with Rome, ancient and modern, and he felt that weeks were absolutely necessary to study and comprehend the grandeur of a city that for so many centuries had been mistress of the world. He agreed with Niebuhr, "As the streams lose themselves in the mightier ocean, so the history of the people once distributed along the Mediterranean shores is absorbed in that of the mighty mistress of the world." Leo back again in Rome was in an ecstasy of joy. Here Greece had laid at the feet of Rome her conqueror, the accumulated art treasures of ages. Here Leo could have keenest delight, where he moved among the noblest examples of antique sculpture, which filled the galleries and chambers of the Vatican and Capitol. Most of the night he lay awake, planning how he could in so short a time exhibit to his American friends Rome and her wealth of art. At breakfast he said, "A whole day is needed to inspect the Forum Romanum, a day each, for the Capitoline Hill, the Appian Way, and many other historic localities in this seven-hilled city." Leo, acting as guide, took his party to the Pincian Hill near the northern wall, a fashionable resort with fine boulevards and frequent band music. From the summit, he pointed out the yellow Tiber, which winds for seventeen miles to the sea. The larger part of modern Rome lies on the left bank of the Tiber, and covers three historic hills. Towering above the tops of the buildings are the domes and spires of nearly four hundred churches of which the dome of St. Peter's is the most imposing. In sight beyond are the Capitol, the ruins of the Colosseum, and ancient tombs along the Appian Way. To the west on the Palatine Hill are the ruins of the palace of the Cæsars, and outside the walls, on the broad Campagna, are the remains of several aqueducts converging on the city, some of which, restored, are in use to-day. The day's ride included a visit to Agrippa's Pantheon, now denuded of its bronze roofing and marble exterior. A circular opening in the huge dome admits both light and rain. Leo standing with Lucille by the tomb of Raphael in one of the recesses, for a moment was silent. Then he said, "Lucille, it is impossible to fully appreciate the many and beautiful works of this 'prince of painters.' He was born on Good Friday, 1483, and lived exactly thirty-seven years. He was of slight build, sallow, and had brown eyes. Over nine hundred prints of his works are known. Besides his works in fresco at the Vatican, for a time he had charge of the construction of St. Peter's, and he also painted masterpieces now at Bologna, Dresden, Madrid, Hampton Court, and executed numerous commissions for Leo X.; and Madonnas, holy families, portraits, etc., for others. Raphael stands unrivaled, chiefly in his power to portray lofty sentiments which persons of all nationalities can feel, but few can describe. He also excelled in invention, composition, simplicity and grandeur. For moral force in allegory and history, and for fidelity in portrait, Raphael was unsurpassed. His last and most celebrated oil picture, the transfiguration, unfinished, stood at his head as his body lay in state." Colonel Harris was interested in the restored Triumphal Arch of Titus erected to commemorate the defeat of the Jews A.D. 70, also in the beautiful Arch to Severus. At the end of the Rostra, or Orators' Tribune was the Umbilicus Urbis Romae, or ideal center of Rome and the Roman Empire. True it was that all roads led to Rome. Leo and Lucille visited by moonlight the ruins of the great Colosseum, and the lights and shadows in the huge old stone and brick amphitheater, made it look all the more imposing and picturesque. On the morning of the second day Leo Colonna guided his friends down the Via di Ripetta, stopping at the Mausoleum of Augustus, which in the middle ages was used by the Colonnas as a fortress. Then continuing down the left bank of the Tiber, the Ponte S. Angelo was reached. This ancient bridge of five arches leads directly to the Castello S. Angelo, the citadel of Rome, which originally was a tomb erected by Hadrian for himself and successor. The tomb is 240 feet in diameter, and must have been very beautiful, as it was once encrusted with marble. Statues stood around the margin of the top, and above all a colossal statue of Hadrian himself. Later the Goths, veritable iconoclasts, converted this tomb of the emperors into a fortress, hurling the marble statues down on the besiegers. For centuries this castle-tomb was used as a stronghold by the party in power to maintain their sway over the people. In 1822 Pius IX. refortified the castle. In it was seen the gloomy dungeon where Beatrice Cenci and others were incarcerated. The Harrises drove down the Borgo Nuovo to the church of St. Peter. Its approach is through a magnificent piazza ornamented on the right and left by two semicircular porticoes of 284 columns, which are surmounted by an entablature, and 192 statues, each eleven feet in height. It is claimed that the origin of the Cathedral of St. Peter is due to the impulse given by Pope Julius II. who decided to erect a grand monument for himself in his life-time, and the new edifice was needed to shield it. St. Peter's was begun in 1506 and dedicated in 1626. Bramante's wonderful plans were accepted, and both Michael Angelo and Raphael aided in its construction. From a Greek cross rises a gigantic dome, which is one of the boldest and most wonderful efforts of architecture. Lucille recalled Byron's description, "The vast and wondrous dome, To which Diana's marvel was a cell." Entering this mighty cathedral, Colonel Harris was bewildered with its grand and harmonious interior. The height from the pavement to the cross rivals the height of the Washington monument. The nave is 607 feet in length, and the transept is 445 feet. St. Paul's at London covers only two acres, St. Peter's five acres. The cost of the former was $3,750,000, the cost of the latter from $60,000,000 to $80,000,000. The Harrises visited St. John Lateran, the mother-church of the Eternal City, where Popes were crowned, and where on Ascension Day, from one of its balconies, the Pope's benediction to the people is pronounced. They also visited the restored St. Paul's Church outside the walls. Its interior is of vast dimensions. It was built of valuable materials, and the whole is very imposing. Especially was Lucille impressed with the long series of portrait medallions of all the Popes from St. Peter to Leo X. worked in mosaic above the polished columns. Many monuments in St. Peter's were erected to the memory of several of the famous Popes. The Vatican, the largest palace in Europe, is where the Popes came to reside after their return from Avignon, France, in 1377, for here they felt much security in the vicinity of the Castle S. Angelo, with which it communicated by a covered gallery. For a time the Popes vied with each other in enlarging and embellishing the Vatican, which covers an immense space, and is a collection of separate buildings; the length is 1150 feet, and the breath 767 feet. The Vatican is said to contain 20 courts, and 11,000 halls, chapels, salons, and private apartments, most of which are occupied by collections and show-rooms, while only a small part is set apart for the papal court. The Harrises visited the most celebrated portions of the Vatican; the Scala Regia, covered with frescoes of events in Papal history, the Sistine Chapel, adorned with fine frescoes by Michael Angelo, including the Last Judgment. Here the Cardinals meet to elect the Pope, and here many of the most gorgeous ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church are performed. Equally enthusiastic were Leo and Lucille over Raphael's superb frescoes in the Loggie, and in the chambers adjoining. The few pictures in the gallery are scarcely surpassed. The museum contains some of the noblest treasures of art, including the Laocoon, and Apollo Belvidere. The library is very valuable. The superb palace of the Quirinal has beautiful gardens. Besides the several elegant public palaces in Rome, there are in and near the city over sixty private palaces or villas; the finest of which is the Barberini Palace. Several of the villas are located above terraces amid orange and citron groves, and they are ornamented with statues and fountains. Leo with pride took his friends to see the Colonna Palace, which contained many old portraits of his family. After dinner a drive was taken outside the Porta del Popolo to the magnificent Villa Borghese and the Pincian Hill. It was planned to visit on the morrow the gallery Borghese, next to the Vatican, the most important in Rome. It was dark as Leo returned with his party to the hotel. The landlord handed him a gentleman's card which read, Mr. Ferdinand Francisco Colonna. Piazza Colonna, Rome. The landlord said that this gentleman was waiting for Leo in the reception-room. Leo at once recognized the card as that of his cousin, who was an attorney in Rome, and he hurried to meet his relative. They grasped hands warmly, and soon were in earnest conversation. Ferdinand, taking a large official envelope from his pocket, opened it and began reading what he called a very important paper. It was a copy of the will of their rich uncle, who had just died, while inspecting his possession in Sicily. Leo Colonna bore the name of this uncle, his father's oldest brother, who was fond of art, and who was never married. He had always been attached to Leo, his nephew, and in his will Leo was made his sole heir. Great was Leo's surprise to learn that he was now not only the owner of a fine palace southeast of Rome, but of large possessions in Rome, Sicily, and South America. Leo leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed, his face changed color and the muscles of his hands and face twitched as if he were in pain. Suddenly he recovered possession of himself and said, "Ferdinand, you almost paralyze me by the news you bring. Am I dreaming, or not?" "No, no, Leo. This is a copy of the will of our uncle. The original will is in my safe. By this same will I am to have 100,000 lira for assisting you. I am now at your service." "Ferdinand, you bring sad and glorious news. What is your advice?" "That we file the original will at once in the proper court, and that you proceed with me immediately to Marino to take possession there of your palace and property." "Agreed, Ferdinand. We will leave Rome for Marino at noon tomorrow. Meet me here, as I may have friends to join us." Leo hastened at once to tell the good news to the Harrises, who were nearly as much elated as himself, and it was agreed that all would join Leo in his proposed trip. It was late that night when Leo and Lucille separated in the parlor below. Each had dreamed of castles in Spain, but now it looked as if Leo and possibly Lucille, might actually possess castles in Italy. That night Leo told Lucille much about the princely Colonna family of Italy, which originated in the 11th century. Pope Martin V., several others who took part in the contest between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and many others of the Colonna family had attained to historical and literary distinction. Lucille was interested in the story of the great naval battle of Lepanto in which Marc Antonio Colonna aided Don Juan of Austria to gain a world-renowned victory for Christianity against the Turks, the first effective triumph of the cross over the crescent. Leo recited the story of the life of the illustrious Vittoria Colonna, pictures of a bust of whom Lucille had seen that day in Rome. Vittoria, and the son of the Marquis of Pescara, when children four years old, were affianced, and in their seventeenth year they were married. The young bride bravely sent her husband to the wars with a pavilion, an embroidered standard, and palm leaves, expressing the hope that he would return with honors, for she was proud of the Colonna name. Vittoria full of genius and grace, idealized her young showy cavalier, who was gallant and chivalrous. Her brave knight Pescara, among other victories, won the battle of Pavia, and finally died of his wounds in Milan before she could reach his side. Vittoria Colonna buried her love in Pescara's grave at Naples. Her widowhood was a period of sorrow, song, friendship, and saintly life. She was tall, stately, and dignified; of gracious manners, and united much charm with her culture and virtue. She is considered the fairest and noblest lady of the Italian Renaissance. Vittoria Colonna was on intimate terms with the great men and women of her day, and in close sympathy with the Italian reformers. Michael Angelo was warmly her friend. His strong verses full of feeling to Vittoria were replied to in gentle, graceful strains. She died as the sun sank in the Mediterranean on the afternoon of February 25, 1547, Michael Angelo regretting as he saw her, lying on her death-bed, that he had not kissed her forehead and face as he had kissed her hand. As Lucille retired that night she felt the force of Vittoria's noble life, and longed to emulate one so related to her friend Leo. She felt her own heart drawing nearer to Leo's, and in the silent hours of the night, she sometimes wondered if she should ever bear the honored name of Colonna. Next day at 12 o'clock promptly, Leo's cousin came, and the Harrises and Leo took the Rome and Naples line for Marino, located sixteen miles southeast of Rome, where Vittoria Colonna had lived, and where Leo expected to find and take possession of his own palace and property. The Roman tombs of the Via Appia on the right were soon left behind. A dozen miles out and Frascate a summer resort was conspicuous with its many lovely villas. Later the party left the train and enjoyed a beautiful drive of three miles to Marino, a small town famous for its wine, and located on the Alban Mountains. In the middle ages, the Orsini defended themselves here in a stronghold against their enemies the Colonna, but the latter under Martin V. captured Marino, which with the surrounding country has remained a fief of the Colonna family to the present day. Ferdinand had already attended to much of the detail at Marino, so that Leo, as owner of the vast Colonna estate, was loyally received by the villagers, the tenants, and the old servants. Leo made his friends, the Harrises, most welcome at his unexpected and palatial home. The Harrises were delighted at what they saw. Leo and Lucille took several drives together over the large estate. Once they drove along the shady roads, commanding extensive views, through the beautiful park of Colonna, and down a well wooded valley to the clear waters of the Alban Lake. Often Leo wished that Alfonso had accompanied him. For some time before leaving Rome, Lucille had complained of a dull headache and chills at night. In France Mrs. Harris was fearful that the summer trip to Italy was not wise, but Leo and her family thought the yacht voyage to Naples would be charming. On the morning of the third day at Marino, Lucille was unable to leave her bed. Leo hastily called a physician who found her pulse very low. She experienced great thirst and nausea, and the heat of her body was much increased. When the doctor learned that Colonel Harris's daughter had slept in Rome with the window open, he at once declared to the family that Lucille had Roman fever, that dreaded malaria which is engendered in summer months near the marshes of Italy. Leo summoned to Marino the ablest physicians of Rome, who were in constant attendance, and heroic treatment was adopted. Both Mr. and Mrs. Harris were half crazed with the fear of losing their beautiful daughter, and Leo himself was nearly frantic. Lucille grew rapidly worse. Her strength and courage failed her, she became unconscious, and as the tall white lily in the midday sun loses its beauty and life, so Lucille passed from earth, her agonizing mother holding the dead daughter's slender white hands. Leo fell insensible and was removed from the death-chamber by his servants. Womanly courage returned to the mother after a few moments of intense grief, and aided by others the necessary preparations were made for the removal of Lucille to America. Captain Harry Hall with his yacht en route to Athens had called at Brindisi to get a reply from a most important letter of his mailed to Lucille at Palermo. As he stepped ashore a telegram was handed him announcing the sudden death of the woman he loved. He was so shocked that his friends were alarmed. After a short conference Harry wired Colonel Harris the use of his yacht to carry back to America the remains of beautiful Lucille. While Colonel Harris was writing an acceptance of Captain Hall's services, a second telegram came announcing the death, by drowning, of his only son Alfonso in the Zuider Zee at Amsterdam. How true that misfortunes never come singly! Beneath the pillow on which Lucille died, were found two unanswered letters, proposals of marriage, one from Leo and one from Captain Hall. The broken hearted mother took charge of these letters, and before the metallic coffin was sealed, the unanswered letters were placed in Lucille's white hand, over the heart that could not now decide. Later the casket was put on board the yacht "Hallena" at Rome, and Captain Hall with his flag at half-mast steamed towards America with the woman, who could never on earth accept the tribute of his heart. Leo, now Marquis Colonna, true chevalier that he was, insisted that he be permitted to accompany Colonel Harris to Amsterdam in search of his son Alfonso. CHAPTER XXII COLONEL HARRIS'S BIG BLUE ENVELOPE The honeymoon of George and Gertrude included not only the two delightful weeks in Switzerland, but also the ten or twelve days on a slow steamer returning to New York. The weather at sea was all that could be desired. The longer a smooth sea-voyage, the better lovers are pleased. Return ocean passages usually furnish the much needed rest after a so-called vacation abroad. Overworked Americans need, not so much an entire cessation of activities, as a change of occupation, which usually, brings the desired results. George and Gertrude made but few acquaintances on the steamer. The thought that each possessed the other was enjoyment that satisfied, and both were happy. Each lived as in dreamland, and scarcely observed even the daily runs made by the steamer. The death by accident of a sailor, and his strange burial at sea, served only for a brief time to arrest a happiness made complete by each other's voice and presence. The two weeks on the ocean came and went as softly as flowers unfold and disappear. Thus far, married life had been ideal. It was after eleven o'clock, and anxious passengers were pacing the decks, hoping to sight native land before retiring. Suddenly the officer on the bridge discerned the dim Fire Island Light, bearing north by west, twenty miles distant. Ten minutes later, five points on the port bow, a pilot boat was sighted. Her mast-head light was visible, also the torch, which soaked in turpentine, burnt brightly at intervals. The steamer signals, "We want a pilot," by burning a blue light on the bridge, and bears down on the pilot schooner. The moon reveals enormous figures, with a heavy dot beneath, on the mainsail of the schooner. Over the rail goes the yawl, followed by the oarsman and pilot, whose turn it is to go ashore. The pilot carries a lantern, which in the egg-shaped yawl dances on the white wave crests up and down like a fire-fly. The yawl is soon under the steamer's lee, and a line from the big ship pulls the little boat to the ladder, and the pilot nimbly climbs to the steamer's bridge, bringing the latest papers. The schooner drifts under the steamer's stern, takes in the yawl, and again sails to the eastward in search of another liner. The entrance to the port of New York is patrolled night and day by a pilot-fleet of thirty boats, which cost from $10,000 to $20,000 each. They are staunch and seaworthy, the fastest schooners afloat. Often, knocked down by heavy seas, for a moment they tremble, like a frightened bird, then shaking the water off their decks, they rise, heave to, perhaps under double reefed foresail, and with everything made snug, outride the storm, and are at their work again. Pilots earn good pay, and this they deserve, as they often risk their lives in behalf of others. Sandy Hook Light was now in sight, and long before the sun began his journey across the heavens, the steamer lay at anchor at quarantine, waiting for a certificate from the health officer. As the steamer proudly sped through "The Narrows," a jubilant crowd of passengers on the promenade deck sang, "My country 'tis of thee Sweet Land of Liberty, Of thee I sing; Land where my fathers died; Land of the pilgrim's pride; From ev'ry mountain side Let freedom ring." The hymn was sung to the tune of "God Save the Queen," and several enthusiastic Englishmen joined with their kith and kin. On Bedloe's Island Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty waved her torch, outward bound steamers exchanged salutes, the Brooklyn Bridge and all the ferries were thronged with people hurrying to the labor marts of the metropolis, as the steamer with George and Gertrude aboard moved up the harbor and was safely docked on the North River. In the lead down the gangway Gertrude hastened George to secure a carriage for their hotel, so anxious was she to reach rooms on American soil, where she might honorably break the seal of her father's mysterious big blue envelope. It had rarely been out of her mind since the day of her wedding in Paris. After breakfast, served in true American style, the Ingrams glanced at the big morning papers crowded with American news, and wondered why European papers printed so little about the States. Then they retired to their rooms to break the seal of the blue envelope. George was all attention as his young wife with the flush of health and excitement in her cheeks tore apart the envelope, and stepping to the window for better light, she began to read Reuben Harris's letter. Paris-- _Dear George and Gertrude_,-- The accumulation of my fortune, now largely invested in prime securities, has been a surprise and often a burden to me, and with it came, as I now clearly see, great responsibilities. Money is power, and most people zealously seek it. Many fail to get it, and often those who do succeed, fail to keep it. Wealth unsought comes only to a few, while others, with perhaps hereditary financial instincts, pursue with certainty of success the golden fleece. My early experiences with poverty, and now with wealth, and my late extensive observations have impressed upon me, as never before, the common brotherhood of mankind. The great problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relations. What shall be the laws of accumulation and distribution? To decide this wisely the discretion of our present and future legislators will be heavily burdened. The condition of many races is better to-day on the foundations on which society is built, than on the old ones tried and abandoned. What were yesterday's luxuries are to-day's necessities. The poor enjoy to-day what yesterday even the rich could not afford. Mankind always has exhibited great irregularities. In every race some are born with an energy and ability to produce wealth, others not. Invention and discovery have replaced scarcity and dearness with abundance and cheapness. The law of competition seems to cheapen comforts and luxuries. Both labor and capital are organizing, concentrating, competing. The idealist may dream of what is attainable in the future, but our duty is plainly with what is practicable now. My prayer is for wisdom and ability to administer wisely our wealth, during my life-time. I am therefore resolved to act as follows:-- 1st. To retain for my family only what will provide modestly for them all. I do not wish to leave much property for my relatives to use prodigally, or to quarrel over. 2nd. I plan not to wait till I die and then leave behind for public purposes money which I cannot take with me. I shall consider myself as an agent, or trustee, in charge of certain surplus funds to be expended in behalf of my poorer brethren. On our return to America, Mrs. Harris and I will make our wills in accordance with the above. It is our desire that, when you reach home, you both enter at once upon the development of your plans, of a cooperative manufacturing corporation, in accordance with the views which you have so frequently mentioned. In the execution of these plans, you may use, if necessary, five millions. With best wishes for your happiness. Your father, Reuben Harris. The writing of this letter gave Colonel Harris more pleasure than any act of his life; in fact it was for him the beginning of a new life; a life for others. The reading of the letter also gave George and Gertrude much happiness, for it furnished them abundant means for the execution of their beneficent plans, which had been thoroughly considered by the Harris family. This important letter was returned to the blue envelope and given to Gertrude for safe keeping, and it was agreed to leave for Harrisville next day at 1 o'clock on the Chicago Special. Among the personals in the Harrisville Sunday paper appeared the following: Arrived from Europe Saturday morning, Mr. and Mrs. George Ingram. It is needless to say that their many friends will give them cordial welcome. Colonel and Mrs. Reuben Harris, their son and daughter, Alfonso and Lucille, will remain in Europe for several weeks. This notice, though brief, was of much interest to rich and poor in Harrisville. Society, of course, was interested in the marriage of Gertrude, business men in the return of so skilled a manufacturer as George Ingram, and many workmen, still unemployed, hoped that their old superintendent whom they loved would find or make positions for them. The continued absence of Colonel Harris the financier aided George Ingram in certain important negotiations which he proceeded quietly to make, viz., the purchase in the suburbs of Harrisville, in fifty parcels, of 4,000 acres of contiguous land, that had both a river and a lake front. While these purchases were being made, agents were dispatched into several Ohio counties, and more than 20,000 acres of well tested coal lands were secured. When it was learned that all these lands were bought in the name of George Ingram, and paid for in cash, the wisacres of the city began to say, "I told you so; these monopolists having visited England have adopted foreign ideas, and now they have returned to buy and hold our valuable lands." George Ingram was reticent, as most successful business men are, for he gave attention to business. "Talkers are no great doers," wrote Shakespeare. The offices of the old Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. had been rented to other parties, so a suite of rooms near by was occupied by George Ingram and his five assistants. It had leaked out, however, that Ingram had given orders for twenty millions of brick and a large quantity of structural iron and copper tubes, all to be delivered within four months. The order for copper tubes puzzled even the wisest in Harrisville. Later, when a thousand laborers were set at work on the river front of his purchase, building extensive foundations, it dawned upon the expectant that a gigantic plant for some purpose was to be erected near Harrisville. Newspaper reporters found it difficult to reach George Ingram, even with a card, which would be returned with the reply "Busy to-day. Please excuse me." In the meantime Harrisville agreed to create a more available harbor, and to establish dock lines, not less than 500 feet apart, and in three years to dredge the river to a depth of 25 feet for five miles back from the lake. George Ingram in his own mind had settled three vital points; that Harrisville was one of the most favorable producing and distributing centers in America; that he would so design and build a manufacturing plant as to minimize the cost of production; that he would attempt to harmonize capital and labor. Important provisions of the Company's charter were: ARTICLE III The capital stock of this Corporation shall be Five Million Dollars ($5,000,000) to be divided into Five Hundred Thousand Shares at Ten Dollars each, fully paid, and non-assessable. ARTICLE VI The private property of stockholders shall be exempt from any and all debts of this Corporation. Two thousand of the four thousand acres purchased were set apart for manufacturing purposes. Most of the land sloped gradually, and the surface-water naturally drained into the river. George Ingram's plans for an enormous steel-plant had been most carefully worked out in detail. Night and day the construction went forward. In eight months the plant was in full operation. He had obtained the latest important labor-saving devices and improved facilities in use throughout America and Europe. The whole was supplemented by the inventions already perfected by his father and himself. The Harris-Ingram Steel Co. was provided with every modern device that could in any manner contribute economy and rapidity from the time the ores left the ship, till the finished product was loaded for market. All ores and limestone were delivered on a tableland of the same height, and adjacent to a series of several enormous blast-furnaces. The melted iron from the blast-furnaces was tapped into ladles mounted on iron cars, and provided with mechanism for tipping the ladles. The molten iron of the cars was next transferred to improved converters in an adjoining building, constructed entirely of iron. Nearby were the spiegel cupolas. The greatest possible accuracy was thus attainable in delivering definite quantities of molten iron into the converter for a given blow, also of spiegeleisen. This was easily accomplished by standing the ladle cars upon scales. The metal was cast into ingot moulds, standing upon cars, and then transferred to the mould stripper; afterwards the ingots were weighed and sent to the soaking-pit furnaces. After a "wash heat" the ingots, or blooms, entered the rolls, and were drawn and sized in shape to fill orders from every part of the world. The marvel at the Harris-Ingram Steel Co.'s mills was that electricity, developed in vast quantities at the coal mines and conveyed on patented copper tubes, furnished all the power, heat, and light used in the entire plant. Electricity hoisted and melted all the ores; it worked Sturtevant fans and blowing engines, which supplied necessary air for cupolas and converters. Electricity furnished all the power requisite to handle innumerable cranes and cars. As easily as a magnet picks up tacks, electricity also handled ingots or finished steel. Five thousand tons of finished steel per day were made and the labor and fuel account had been reduced over one-half. While the huge steel plant at Harrisville was being constructed, a large force of men were building a conduit to protect copper tubes, from the steel plant to the coal fields. At the mines hundreds of miners were set at work, several shafts were sunk, and tunnels, levels, and winzes were developed. George Ingram believed that all the force in the world available for man's use was derived from the sun; so he heroically resolved to hitch his wagon, if not to a star, to the mighty sun. With this purpose in view, he had bought the 20,000 acres of coal land. Half of this area was located in Jefferson, Harrison, and Belmont counties on the Ohio River, and thus title was secured to vast quantities of fossil power in the upper coal measures, which ignites quickly and burns with a hot fire. The other 10,000 acres were valuable because nearer to Harrisville. This coal came from lower measures or seams. George Ingram had made a thorough study of coal, or fossil fuel, its formation and value. The coal of the carboniferous age is derived almost entirely from the family of plants called _Lycopods_, or club mosses, and the ferns, which back in high antiquity attained gigantic size. The microscope has clearly developed this vegetable origin of coal. The great Appalachian and other coal fields are without doubt, the long continued and vigorous forest growths, and subsequent fossilization of the same in the marginal swamps of ancient gulfs or seas. The agency of transfer for solar energy is the vegetable kingdom. The vegetable cell has the surprising property through the sun's agency of being able to live and multiply itself on air alone. The carbon of carbonic acid, a constituent of the atmosphere, is so liberated and appropriated, as to become fixed in the forming tissues of plants. Thus the plant is a storer of light and heat, a reservoir of force. It mediates between the sun's energy and the animal life of the world. Thus coal seams are the accumulations of the sun's energy for thousands of centuries, requiring the patient growth and slow decay of hundreds of immense forests. One secret of the unprecedented late growth of cities is discovered in the steam engine, or the coal which feeds it. A pound of good coal, used in a good engine, stands for the work of six horses for an hour; a ton of coal for the work of thirteen hundred horses for a day of ten hours; ten thousand tons of coal, used in a day by single lines of railways, stand for the work of thirteen million horses, working ten hours a day. In 1894 the English mines produced 188,277,525 tons of coal. In Great Britain alone, coal does the work of more than a hundred millions of men, and adds proportionately to the fabulously increasing wealth of those fortunate islands. The Ingrams had solved two important problems, and on their practicable application depended the success of the great Harris-Ingram experiment. The more important of the two was the unlocking of the sun's stored energy, electricity, at the coal mines. The second was a device for conveying this energy from the mines to the steel plant, and it had been patented to protect it. Since electricity possibly travels on the surface of wires or metals, the Ingrams patented a valuable device of small corrugated copper tubes, strengthened in the center by steel wires, and thus the carrying capacity of electricity was greatly increased, and the amount of costly copper much decreased. These corrugated tubes enclosed in cheap glass, and surrounded with oil, were laid in properly prepared conduits of vitrified fire-clay sewer pipes. Without the intervention of the steam engine, by a surprisingly simple process, electrical force was liberated chemically at the mines and transferred for multiple uses at the steel plant. Expensive coal-freights were thus saved. All the slack coal was utilized, and instead of the waste of nine-tenths of the stored energy of the coal, only one tenth was now lost. To husband properly the fruits of so great a discovery, it was decided not to patent this latter invention, which if disclosed would give too great publicity to the details. The electrical works at the mines were constructed of safe-steel walls and roof, and so built that the operations of generating electricity directly from coal were conducted in secret in several separate apartments, so that no single operator without the knowledge of all the initiated employees would be able to successfully work the inventions. The dozen initiated employees had made life long contracts with the company in consideration of liberal and satisfactory rewards. The Harris-Ingram Steel Co. thus equipped began operations. CHAPTER XXIII "GOLD MARRIES GOLD" Alfonso Harris was content to leave his friends to continue their journey, as they were willing that he should return to the Netherlands, or to Amsterdam, where lived the beautiful woman who had won his heart. Christine de Ruyter cordially welcomed Alfonso back to study art as he expressed it to her on the first evening after his arrival. Alfonso was much in Christine's society, at art exhibits, in carriage drives, and on pleasure boat excursions down the bay. Weeks went by before he could summon courage enough to ask Christine's hand in marriage. In the game of hearts Alfonso thought himself an able combatant. He had studied Christine in action and in repose, in society, and when alone under his protection at Scheveningen, and at home, and he prided himself that he knew at least one woman thoroughly. She loved art, flowers, music, and fine dress, and was very ambitious. The latter trait was doubtless inbred from her distinguished naval relatives. Christine had many acquaintances among the best families of Holland. Her beauty, coupled with the fact that she was an heiress, made her the object of much attention from artists and members of clubs, but possibly her love, or affection for art, might have sprung from the desire to gain more knowledge of how to make herself attractive in dress, manner, and conversation. Christine was not offensively vain, but she was passionately fond of admiration. Alfonso had never dreamed that Christine was not genuine at heart. She appeared to him to make much of her American acquaintance, introducing him to her many friends, young ladies as well as young gentlemen, and always seemed to prefer his company to others. She manifested even tenderness for him, expressed her strong liking for America, and Alfonso believed that Christine was truly fond of him. No arguments or persuasions could have convinced him otherwise. The contrary wishes of his own family, the eloquence of a Webster, winds from the poles, all combined, could not have cooled his ardor. Alfonso had firmly resolved to wed Christine, come what would. He had often dreamed of her smiles, her pretty blue eyes, and her fleecy hair floating in the breezes of the Zuider Zee. He had also dreamed of a brilliant wedding in Holland, of a large reception at Harrisville, and had even heard the plaudits of his fellow artists in New York, as they lauded his master piece "Admiral De Ruyter's Great Naval Victory." Fortified with these proofs of Christine's devotion, he sought the company of his blond sweetheart on a balcony that overlooked the moon-lit harbor of Amsterdam. Here Alfonso offered his hand and heart--to a coquette--who rejected him. He was astonished, almost stunned. Recovering from his dazed condition, she again chilled his heart by the utterance, "You have not learned in this practical world of ours that gold marries gold; that society plays for equivalents. You once admitted to me that your father wanted you at the head of his large business, and disapproved of your choice of a profession. As an artist you seek fame. How can you divide it with me? In asking my hand you seek to divide my gold, thus securing both fame and gold. Alfonso we have enjoyed each other's company as friends." "Yes, Christine, though you have been cruel we can separate as friends. Sometime I may be able to match gold with gold. Till then, adieu." Saying this Alfonso left the De Ruyter mansion all the more resolved, however, to win Christine. For a moment her deceptive heart rebuked her as she watched Alfonso's departure. In the papers of the following evening an announcement frightened Christine. The head lines read: "Mr. Alfonso Harris, a young American artist, drowned this morning in the harbor." Later the police brought to the De Ruyter home detailed news. Christine gave instructions to use every possible effort to recover Alfonso's body, and at once sent her servant with a telegram for Colonel Reuben Harris, Grand Hotel, Paris, the only address she knew. The next day, with her mother, she accompanied the police to Alfonso's room, where she gathered up several of her love letters. A new suit of clothes hung in the closet, a package of returned laundry lay on the table, also pen, ink and paper. Evidently Alfonso expected to return soon to the hotel. His clothes, watch, and money had been found in the boat that drifted ashore. Christine concluded that Alfonso had gone for a boat-ride and swim, as was his custom; very likely this time to free his mind, if possible, from recent trouble, and was seized with cramp and drowned before aid could reach him. Vigorous search in the harbor and along the shore instituted by the police department and the American consul failed to locate his body or to furnish further facts to Christine as to the cause of the accident. * * * * * Alfonso Harris meant all he said to Christine in his last words, "Sometime I may be able to match gold with gold." He might be blind in love matters, but his mind after a storm always righted itself. That night when Alfonso reached his hotel, he planned to leave the impression on Christine's mind that he was dead. To make the deception complete, his trunk and all effects in his room were left as found by Christine. Even his watch, pocket book and clothes were left behind in the little pleasure boat, while he donned an extra suit. A Norwegian captain, who was about leaving Amsterdam with a cargo for Canada, agreed for fifty dollars to pick up Alfonso down the harbor and to land him in Quebec. Fine family, beauty, and gold were powerful incentives to effort to an ambitious young man like Alfonso, and he was resolved, incognito, to explore the Great West in search of riches, and once found, he would lay all at Christine's feet, and again claim her hand. Jans Jansen, the Norwegian captain, was a jolly good ship-master, and the fair weather voyage across the Atlantic proved enjoyable. Alfonso always took his meals with the captain. Jans Jansen's wife and children lived in Christiania, and his constant talk was that he hoped some day to get rich and quit the sea. Alfonso made a warm friend of Captain Jansen, who pledged secrecy as to his escape from Amsterdam. The captain was robust and his big flowing red beard, blue eyes, and bravery made him a worthy successor of the ancient vikings of the Norseland. Jans Jansen enjoyed his pipe, and with his good stories whiled away many an hour for Alfonso, so that when the ship, under full sail, entered the Strait of Belle Isle and sailed across the Gulf towards the River St. Lawrence, both the captain and young Harris regretted that their sea-voyage was so soon to close. The entrance of the St. Lawrence River is so broad that the navies of the world abreast might enter the river undiscovered from either bank. Two hundred miles up the river, Trinity House, an association of over three hundred pilots, put aboard a pilot, and at noon next day Captain Jansen docked his vessel at Quebec. This old French city is located on a high promontory on the left bank of the St. Lawrence. Its citadel, one of the strongest fortresses in America, commands a varied and picturesque beauty. Alfonso walked up to the obelisk, which stands in one of the squares of the Upper Town, in joint memory of the brave generals Wolfe and Montgomery. Next morning he was off on the Canadian Pacific Railway for Duluth, the zenith city. Thence the journey west was through. Dakota in sight of occasional tepees, where the brave Sioux patiently waits his call to join the buffalo in the happy hunting grounds. Alfonso did not agree with the popular sentiment, "The best Indian is a dead Indian," for the Sioux seemed to him to belong to a noble race of red men. Alfonso's enthusiasm for mining was greatly quickened by a fellow traveler, who was the owner of a large block of stock in the famous Homestake Mining Co. of Lead City, Black Hills, So. Dakota. This company possesses one of the largest gold mines and mills in the world. The ore bodies show a working face from two to four hundred feet in width, and sink to a seemingly inexhaustible depth. The Homestake has produced over $25,000,000 in bullion, and has divided over six millions in dividends to stockholders. Three days' journey brought young Harris to Montana, an inland empire state, which lies on both sides of the Rocky Mountains. The Pacific Express was laden with a motley crowd of men and women in search of fame and fortune. Alfonso soon caught their enthusiasm, and visions of castles with gilded domes floated in his imagination. It was 1:35 P.M. when No. 1, the Pacific Express, pulled into thrifty Helena, capital of Montana, a commercial metropolis metamorphosed from a rude mining camp of twenty-five years ago. The electric cars carried Alfonso to the Hotel Helena on Grand St., which he thought quite as good as any in his own city. Here he was fortunate in meeting Mr. Davidson, a gentleman of large experience as owner, organizer, and locator of some of the best gold and silver properties in Montana and adjoining states. Irrigating canals and water-rights were a special branch of Mr. Davidson's business. He never failed to make the round of the leading hotels after the arrival of the Overland. In this way he met Alfonso Harris. Davidson knew when to tell a good story, and when to be serious. He took Alfonso to the Club, located in elegant quarters, and the secretary gave him a complimentary visitor's card. Davidson quickly discerned that Harris needed a week's rest, and so took him on the motor line two miles out to the Hotel Broadwater and Natatorium. No wonder the citizens of Helena take pride in their fine health resort, the Helena Hot Springs. Mr. Davidson introduced Alfonso to Colonel Broadwater, who extended the hospitalities of his hotel on which he had expended a fortune. The verandas were long and wide, the park was dotted with fountains, and the interior of the hotel was luxurious in all its furnishings. The mammoth plunge bath was the largest in the world under a single cover. Curative mineral waters, steaming hot, flowed in abundantly from the grotto. In the natatorium fun-loving men and women slid down the toboggan planks, or jumped from the spring boards, while spectators in the gallery enjoyed the aquatic sports. Elegantly appointed bathrooms in the hotel offered at one's pleasure the double spray plunge, vapor, and needle baths. Alfonso was not prepared to find in the mountains elegance surpassing what he had seen abroad. Here he luxuriated for a week, and recovered his health, which had been somewhat impaired by the unfortunate experiences in Amsterdam, and the long journey from Holland. Davidson visited Harris every day. At first he only sought to entertain and awaken enthusiasm. He recited the familiar story of the Last Chance Gulch, how in 1864, four half-starved and disheartened miners, on their homeward journey from a prospecting tour among the gulches of the Blackfoot country in search of the precious dust, had settled down to work their last chance to make a stake, and had found gold in abundance. Davidson said, "Here, where to-day runs the main street of Helena, was the 'Last Chance Gulch,' and the output of its placers was not less than fifteen millions. From 300 feet square, where now stands the Montana Central Railway depot, two miners took out over $330,000." Davidson told of the great successes at the "Jay Gould," and "Big Ox Mine," and, that in five years the output of the Drum Lummon Mine was six millions. All this pleased young Harris, and whetted his appetite for mining investments. Finally, as a result of several trips to examine prospects and mines, Alfonso bought two prospects one hundred miles west of Helena at a place called Granite. At Drummond west of Helena, a line branches south of the Northern Pacific to Rumsey. From Rumsey, Alfonso rode four miles to Granite, which was located high up among huge granite boulders. Here, for a year he isolated himself and labored hard for silver that was to be exchanged into gold and laid at the feet of Christine. His mines had been named "Hidden Treasure" and "Monte Christo." Possibly these mystical names influenced Alfonso to make the purchase, and no doubt they often renewed his courage. The United States patents for his two lode mining claims finally came, and were examined by legal experts, who pronounced them perfect. In the purchase of the properties and in the development work, Alfonso and his two associates expended $50,000. On the showing, which the development made, together with the Annual Report of the adjacent Granite Mountain Mining Company, young Harris hoped to form a syndicate and profitably work his mines. The facts in the report which Alfonso emphasized, were that the Granite Mining Co. had paid dividends as follows: Twelve dividends ending July 31st, 1889 $1,900,000 Total of fifty-five dividends, an aggregate of, $6,700,000 In eight years these mines had produced and sold of pure silver 10,989,858 ozs. Of pure gold 6,521 ozs. Realizing a gross sum $10,988,800 Total gross expenditures $ 4,092,512 Alfonso felt free to use the facts of the Granite Reports, as his property was supposed to be a continuation of the same lode or metallic vein. His syndicate was finally organized, and with the money thus made available, all possible work was done for the next twelve months, on shaft, levels, cross-cuts, drifts, winzes, and raises. For two long years he pursued underground promising indications of wealth, which like the will-with-the-wisp evaded him, until every prospect of silver and gold in the "Hidden Treasure," and "Monte Christo" disappeared, and the mines were abandoned. CHAPTER XXIV THE MAGIC BAND OF BEATEN GOLD The demonetization of silver by the government in 1873, and its great production, had reduced the value of the white metal one-half, so young Harris resolved to seek for gold, and began a search, which proved to be a most romantic success. At first he hesitated to leave Montana, as its quartz veins and sluice boxes in twenty-five years had poured out $400,000,000, and its mineral resources were yet almost wholly unknown. The area of this single mountainous state could not be blanketed by the six New England States, and New York, or covered by England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland combined. Finally Alfonso determined to follow the great mineral belt in a southwesterly direction even to the Sierra Nevada Range if need be. At Livingston he went south by railway through a gateway of the mountains, and up the fertile Paradise Valley, following the cool green waters of the Yellowstone alive with trout and equally gamesome graylings. At Cinnabar Alfonso joined a merry party of tourists, who mounted a Concord coach, and the four grays were urged to a brisk pace over a smooth government road towards the great National Park. How exhilarating this six miles' ride, and how imposing the scenery, as the coach enters this Geologist's Paradise! The Yellowstone or National Park contains 2,288,000 acres, and is fifty times the size of France's greatest park at Fontainebleau. Its altitude is a half mile higher than the summit of Mt. Washington, and the whole park is encircled by snow-clad peaks and majestic domes from three to five thousand feet high. This reservation by Congress in 1872, of 3575 square miles of public domain in perpetuity for the pleasure of the people, was a most creditable act. Alfonso found that the park abounded in wild gorges, grand canyons, dancing cascades, majestic falls and mountains, picturesque lakes, curious hot springs, and awe-inspiring geysers. He and his party pushed through the Golden Gate, marveled at the wonders of the Norris and Firehole Basins, stood entranced before the mighty Canyon then bathed in the transparent Yellowstone Lake, and by nine o'clock were lulled to sleep in the shade of fragrant pines. After breakfast next morning, while Alfonso and the hotel guests sat on the porch, a retired army captain, who had served in the Seventh U.S. Cavalry, said he wished a party could be organized to visit General Custer's monument east of the National Park on the Little Big Horn River. There the Government had marked the historic battleground, where on the morning of the 24th of June, 1876, two hundred of the famous Seventh Cavalry and their brave leader, were overwhelmed and slaughtered by 2,500 Indians under the famous chief, Sitting Bull. Custer was tall and slender, with blue eyes and long light hair. He had fought at Bull Run and Gettysburg, and was present at Lee's surrender at Appomattox. He was promoted to brigadier general when he was twenty-three years old, and became major general when he was twenty-five. Eleven horses were shot under him. Once he saved the flag by tearing it from its staff and concealing it in his bosom. What Napoleon said of Ney is also true of Custer, "He was the bravest of the brave." The recital of Custer's deeds nerved Alfonso to renewed efforts to win Christine's hand. He declined with thanks to join the captain's excursion party, and early next day rode south into the upper basin of the Park, which contains over 400 springs and geysers; many of the springs in their peculiar shapes, translucent waters, and variety and richness of color, are of exquisite beauty. Alfonso visited emerald and sapphire springs, where it is said nymphs, elfs, and fairies came to bathe, and don their dainty dress of flowers and jewelled dew drops. Many bronzed tourists had assembled, and their faces showed amazement as they watched giant geysers in action. Suddenly the solid earth is tremulous with rumbling vibrations, like those that herald earthquakes. Frightful gurgling sounds are audible in the geyser's throat. Sputtering steam is visible above the cone, the water below boils like a cauldron, and scalding hot, the eruption becomes terribly violent, belching forth clouds of smoke-like steam, and hurling rocks into the air as though a mortar of some feudal stronghold had been discharged. The stupendous column of hot water is veiled in spray as it mounts towards heaven. Boiling water is flowing in brooks to the Firehole River, which is soon swollen to a foaming torrent washing away the bridges below. The valley is filled with dense vapors, and the air is laden with sulphurous fumes, while the hoarse rumblings and subterranean tremors chill the heart. Beneath your feet are positive evidences of eternal fires, and all about you the might of God. Alfonso was glad to leave this region of the supernatural. He hastened across the Snake River, which winds through Idaho, and pushed on towards the Teton Range, one of many that form the Rocky Mts. In sight are snow-touched sentinel peaks kissed by earliest and latest sun. The Rocky Mts. or Great Continental Divide is a continuation of the famous Andes of South America, and jointly they form the longest and most uniform chain of mountains on the globe. Amid the gorges of this system of mountains, over 3000 miles in length, America's largest rivers have their birth, and find their outlet into the Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific Oceans. These mountains are vast vaults that will hold in trust for centuries to come untold supplies of precious metal for the American nations. This general fact did not concern Alfonso. He was ambitious to unlock for his own use only a single box of the huge vault. He was familiar with the wonderful story of Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O'Brien, Kings of the Comstock Lode, and owners of the Big Bonanza, who paid their 600 miners five dollars per day in gold, for eight hours' labor a third of a mile below the earth's surface. The Comstock Lode yielded over $5,000,000 per month, or a total output of silver and gold of over $250,000,000. For six long weary months Alfonso and his companion searched for gold down the Green River and along the river bottom of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, till they reached the Needles on the A. & P. Railway. Thence they rode west to Kern River. This stream they followed on horseback into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, all the time searching for precious metals, especially gold. The mountains were crossed over to Owen's Lake, and a river traced north. Alfonso was prospecting in new fields, but his search thus far was fruitless. His companion sickened and died, but Alfonso bravely climbed among the mountains hoping to cross the crest and reach the cabins of friendly government officials on duty in the park of the big trees in Mariposa County. It was late in the fall, grasses and leaves had browned, Alfonso's horse had grown thin, and being too weak and lame to go forward, finally died. His provisions had given out; his own strength and courage had failed; he needed water for his parched tongue and lips, but none was at hand; fever quickened his pulse. Sitting alone in the shadow of a giant boulder that afforded partial protection from the gathering storm, his mind reverted to his home at Harrisville where abundance could be had, to his family that thought him dead, and to Christine across the sea, whom he had vowed to win with gold. All seemed lost. Alfonso's head reeled, he fell back upon the ground, and the early snows seemed to form for him a shroud. Good fortune guided this way a party of Yosemite Indians, who were returning from an extended hunt for deer and elk. They had also slain a few bears and a couple of mountain lions. The dead horse first arrested their attention, and then the exhausted miner was found asleep covered with snow. The Indians wrapped the sick man at once in a grizzly bear skin, fastened him to a pony, and carried him to their camp near the big trees. It was morning before Alfonso was conscious of his surroundings. Standing by him was a shy Indian maiden with a dish of hot soup. His bed, he discovered was in a burned-out cavity of one of the big trees. Near by were several tepees, the tops of which emitted smoke. Straight, black-haired Indians in bright blankets moved slowly from tent to tent. Alfonso scarcely conscious had strange dreams. Sometimes he thought he was in the Hodoo Region, or Goblin Land, the abode of evil spirits, where he saw every kind of fantastic beast, bird, and reptile, and no end of spectral shapes in the winding passages of a weird labyrinth on a far-off island. Then his dreams were of rare beauty. Green foliage was changed to pure white, the trees became laden with sparkling crystals, roadways and streams were laid in shining silver, and geyser-craters enlarged in strange forms resembled huge white thrones in gorgeous judgment halls. Such fleeting beauty suggested to Alfonso's feverish brain the supernatural, the abode perhaps of spirit beings. For days the medicine man and Mariposa, daughter of the Indian chief, watched and cared for Alfonso, whose life hovered over the grave. Mariposa, Spanish for butterfly, was a fit name for the pretty Indian maiden. She paid great deference not only to her tall father, Red Cloud, but to the pale faces whenever in their presence. For four years Mariposa, unusually bright, attended the Indian school at Carlisle, Pa.; when she returned to her wild home in the forest she was able to speak and read the language of the pale face, and beside she loved history and poetry. One day, Alfonso's health having slowly improved, Mariposa put in his hands a small pine cone, the size of a hen's egg, and said, "Three years go by from the budding to the ripening of the seed of the sequoias, or big trees." Alfonso did not know, till Mariposa told him that the big trees were called sequoia in honor of a Cherokee chief, Sequoyah, who invented letters for his people. She also told Alfonso that there were at least ten groves of big trees on the northern slope of the Sierra Nevada range; that some of the trees were thirty feet in diameter, and 325 feet in height; that sixteen Yosemite braves on their ponies had taken refuge from a terrible storm in the hollow of a single sequoia. Alfonso prized highly a cane, fashioned by the Indian maiden from a fallen Big Tree. The wood had a pale red tint, and was beautifully marked and polished. Part of the Indian hunting party went forward with the game, while Mariposa, Red Cloud, and three Yosemite braves with their ponies, waited for the handsome pale face to recover partially. Then they rode with Alfonso among the Big Trees, past Wawona, toiling up long valleys, stopping now and then to cook simple food. The Indians followed a familiar trail up dark gulches, along steep grades, through heavy timber, skirting edges of cliffs and precipitous mountains, the ruggedness constantly increasing, till suddenly Mariposa conducted Alfonso to a high point where his soul was filled with enthusiasm. Mariposa, pointing to the gorge or canyon of extraordinary depth, which was floored with forest trees and adorned with waterfalls, said, "Here in the Yosemite (grizzly) Valley is the home of my people. Here we wish to take you until you are well. Will you go?" Alfonso, still weak and pale, but trusting the Indian girl, replied "Yes." The young artist-miner had never seen such stupendous masonry; the granite walls that surrounded the valley were a succession of peaks and domes, from three thousand to four thousand feet high, all eloquent in thought and design. Alfonso began sketching, but Mariposa motioned him to put his paper aside, and the six Indian ponies with their burdens carefully picked their way into the paradise below. Red Cloud, Mariposa, Alfonso, and the braves were received with expressions of joy unusual for the stolid red men, and Alfonso was given a tent to himself near the chief's big tepee, close by a broad clear stream, and in the shadow of large old oaks. Here for several days Alfonso tarried, grew stronger, and often walked with pretty Mariposa. She taught him a novel method of trapping trout which thronged the river. She had him sketch the reflection in Mirror Lake of cathedral spires and domes, of overhanging granite rocks, and tall peaks of wildest grandeur. He also sketched several waterfalls fed by melting snow. Mariposa's favorite falls at the entrance to the valley made a single leap of hundreds of feet, and when the white spray was caught by the breezes and the sun, the lace-like mist, sparkling like diamonds, swayed gracefully in the winds like a royal bridal veil. "The highest of a series of cascades," Mariposa said, "was called 'The Yosemite Falls.'" Here eagles soar above the Cap of Liberty and other granite peaks. Robins, larks, and humming birds swarm in the warm valley, and abundance of grass grows in the meadows for the Indian ponies. As Alfonso's strength increased, he walked more frequently with Mariposa along the banks of the river, by the thickets of young spruce, cedar, and manzanita with its oddly contorted red stems. At times, each vied with the other in bringing back echoes from the lofty granite walls of the valley. One sunset, as Alfonso and Mariposa sat by the river bank, Alfonso holding the light redwood cane, the gift of the maiden, he took the shapely hand of Mariposa in his own and said, "Mariposa, I owe my life to you, and if I am ever rich I will come back and reward you." "I shall miss you," said the maiden shyly, "I want no money; I am happy because you are well again." "Mariposa, I have long searched for gold," said Alfonso, "but finally I lost courage, became sick, and you know the rest. You have a ring of beaten gold on your finger, did it come from near here?" "My father gave it to me," was all that Mariposa would say about the ring as they separated for the night. It was past midnight when Alfonso felt someone pulling at his shoulder. There in the moonlight stood Mariposa beckoning him to come. Quickly dressing, Alfonso left his tent without speaking as the maiden put her fingers to her lips, and quietly following Mariposa they walked by the silver stream into a wild gorge. Graceful pines afforded cover for Mariposa and Alfonso, as swift of foot, they scaled high cliffs, till the Indian girl held aloft her hand, and above in a cleft of white quartz the yellow gold shone brightly in the moon's rays. When the time came for Alfonso to leave the Yosemite Valley, one of nature's masterpieces, tears filled the eyes of lovely Mariposa. He earnestly thanked Red Cloud and his daughter, and, saying good-bye, mounted his pony, a gift from Mariposa, when the girl ran to him and whispered, "Here, Alfonso, is the ring; bring it back to me when you are rich, but you will forget Mariposa." "No! no!" replied Alfonso, "I will bring back the ring, and you shall give it to the one who makes you his bride." Then the Indian girl turned her face toward the Bridal Veil Falls, and Alfonso rode sadly out of the valley. After several years, still wearing the magic band of beaten gold, having developed the Mariposa Gold Mines into property worth millions, Alfonso left the far west to seek beautiful Christine. CHAPTER XXV WORKINGS OF THE HARRIS-INGRAM PLAN A telegram received at Liverpool by Reuben Harris from Marquis Leo Colonna, who at the Colonel's request went on to Amsterdam, verified the facts as to Alfonso's death by drowning. Colonel and Mrs. Harris's journey back to America under leaden and unsympathetic skies was sad indeed. George and Gertrude met them on the pier at New York. The next day at noon, in deep mourning, they received the remains of Lucille from the yacht "Hallena." Ten days with Lucille on the pitiless ocean, and unable to exchange with her a word of love, had sunk deeply the iron of affliction into the soul of Harry Hall. He often wished that he had never been born. He dreaded every new sunset, as the darkness that gathered about his catafalque-yacht whispered to him of cruel fates, of rest in the deep sea, and of angels' songs. Like the silent vigils of certain watchful plants, Captain Hall carefully observed his compasses, studied the weather, and often wished that he too might cross over and rejoin Lucille. * * * * * Ten days went by before Colonel Harris visited the offices of the Harris-Ingram Steel Co. Then followed several meetings of the directors, at which it was finally decided to issue the following circular: Official Notice, No. 27. Offices of The Harris-Ingram Steel Co., 400 to 410 Brough Building, Harrisville, O.-- _To Whom, it may Concern_,-- For the purpose of better promoting the harmonious workings of capital and labor, The Harris-Ingram Steel Co., Limited, has been organized, and its scope of co-operation has been planned on the following basis. Capital Stock of the Harris-Ingram Steel Company $5,000,000 Total number of shares 500,000 Par value each share $10 The liability of each stockholder is limited to the amount of stock held. Half of the entire stock of the corporation shall be owned by so-called "capital," and half by the employees of the company, or so-called "labor." The stock issued shall represent the actual cash expended upon the plant, and employed as a working capital. It is the wish of the management that each employee in the steel company shall own at least ten shares of the stock, and more, if he so desires. All the stock bought is to be paid for in cash. A loan at 4% interest, equal to the par value of the stock, can be made by employees, when necessary, to purchase a limited amount of the stock. Ten per cent of the wages of all such employees will be retained as needed, which, with dividends actually earned by the stock, will be applied on the amounts due for the purchase of stock and real estate for a home. The new model town will be known as Harris-Ingram. Two thousand acres of land near the mills will be properly allotted and improved by the company for homes for the employees, and practical architects have been secured. It is further the wish of the steel company that each employee shall own a good home. The size of each lot is 50 ft. x 200 ft. and the price per lot is $50 which is in proportion to the original cost and improvement of the allotment, so that the employees in advance will thus secure all the profits that result from any increased value of the lots. This is only just. A Stock and Building Bureau will be established, and money, at 4%, will be furnished the employees to build comfortable homes. This bureau created and officered by the employees will attend to the purchase and sale of stock, lots, the construction of homes, and the payment for the same. When for any reason, an employee desires to sever his connection with the steel company, his stock in the company and his home, if sold, must first be offered at a fair price to the Stock and Building Bureau. By this scheme capital and labor will have equal interests in the Harris-Ingram Steel Co., also an equal voice in the management of the steel company's welfare. Should capital and labor disagree, then the matter in dispute, with all the facts, and before any strike on the part of labor shall occur, shall at once be submitted to arbitration, and the decision of the arbitrators shall be final. Signed by George Ingram, _President of The Harris-Ingram Steel Co_. In eight months George Ingram had spent of the five millions at his disposal three million dollars on the steel plant. A working capital of $500,000 was deposited in four banks, and the balance of one and a half millions was invested in call loans, and so held ready to loan in small amounts at 4%, to aid employees in securing their quota of stock, a lot and house. In twelve months, the $2,500,000 stock of the company, allotted to labor, had been subscribed for by the employees, over a thousand pretty cottages, costing from $1,000 to $2,500 each, were built or in process of construction, and nearly three thousand lots had been bought by the workmen. A Co-operative Supply Bureau was organized and managed in the interests of the workmen, to furnish food, clothing, and all the necessary comforts of life at about cost prices. The profits of the bureau, if any, were to be divided annually among purchasers, in proportion to purchases made. Women in Harris-Ingram voted on several matters the same as the men. Saloons, all forms of gambling, and corruption in politics were tabooed. Sewerage was scientifically treated by the use of chemicals and machinery. Storm water only was sent to the lake. The valuable portions of the sewerage were utilized on adjacent vegetable farms. At Harris-Ingram electrical energy supplied water free for streets, lawns, and gardens, and filtered water was delivered free for family purposes. All the public buildings and homes were heated and lighted by electricity. A Transportation Bureau was organized to manage the electric railways in the interests of the people, and the fare was reduced to two cents. Everybody rode, and the receipts were astonishingly large and quite sufficient to meet expenses and leave a profit, which went into the town treasury. Thus the people received large benefits from the electric railway, conduits for wires, gas privileges, and other franchises. Electricity also propelled the pleasure launches and fishing boats. The smoke nuisance was a vexatious trouble of the past. Life for the laborer and his family ceased to be a burden. Eight hours were given to conscientious labor, eight hours to physical, mental, and moral improvements, and eight hours to rest. By the Harris beneficences all the employees became personally interested in the profitable workings of the steel plant. The profits of the business also were greatly increased by the valuable inventions of the Ingrams. The money advanced to the employees was rapidly returned through the company's treasurer to Colonel Harris, and by him, and later by his heirs, was again invested in other lines of practical benevolence. The act which gave Colonel Harris most comfort was his righting the great wrong done James Ingram, his early joint-partner, and father of George, his son-in-law. Colonel Harris held $2,500,000 of the steel company's stock. He disposed of this stock as follows:-- To George and Gertrude, each $250,000 or $500,000 To James Ingram, early partner 1,000,000 Retaining for himself only 1,000,000 ---------- Total $2,500,000 Since his return Reuben Harris had aged rapidly, his hair having whitened, caused probably by the loss of his only son and lovely daughter. His joy on account of the success of the Co-operative Steel Mills could not banish his intense grief. He had performed his life work, and the cares and burdens of the new enterprise he had placed upon George Ingram in whom he had full confidence. He had seen much in his travels abroad; and now he had learned a most valuable lesson, taught by the Savior himself, that it is more blessed to give than to receive. At the close of a long summer day, as the golden sun dropped into blue Lake Erie, the life of Reuben Harris passed from sight. It was a strange coincidence that the papers Monday morning should contain parallel obituary notices of both Reuben Harris and James Ingram. Together they had labored earnestly for humanity, each in his own way, and now reconciled, together they entered,-- "The undiscovered country from whose bourne No traveller returns." The four thousand employees, in a body, attended the double funeral. Each man had been the recipient of tangible assistance from both Harris and Ingram, and each laborer felt that he had lost a personal friend. It was a touching scene as the four regiments of employees, each wearing evidence of mourning on his arm, filed past the two open caskets. Each employee left a rose on the caskets till both were hidden from sight. The thousands of roses were more eloquent than marble or bronze. During the week, the employees each contributed the wages of two days for bronze statues of their late employers. George and Gertrude felt keenly the loss of their fathers. They also become conscious of increased responsibilities, but each had courage, and good cheer was imparted if either faltered or stood beneath gray skies. Their home life was delightful. Each possessed the art of controlling trifles; thus troubles were minimized and joys were magnified. Later twins, a boy and girl, entered their home, and the mother said, "If you call our son George Ingram, Jr., I shall call our daughter Gertrude Ingram, Jr.," and so there lived under the same roof George I. and George II., Gertrude I. And Gertrude II. Gertrude proved a model wife and mother. The mystery of woman's love and purity is no longer a secret when we watch the mother in touch with innocent children. Gertrude gave home duties prominence over all others, with the blessed result that George found more attractions in his own home than in clubs or in the homes of his friends. To do daily some little favor for his wife, as in lover days, gave him much pleasure. Every night George came home with a new book, rare flowers, or fruit, the first of the season, or some novel plaything for his "Two G's" as he often called the little twins. Gertrude occasionally rebuked her husband for spending the money foolishly, as she said, but then remembrance of his family when down town gratified her. Wives miss and long for appreciation more than for better dress or money. If, on return to tea, the bread is good, the thoughtful husband speaks of it. If the table-cloth is white or if the arrangement of the meal is artistic, he speaks of it. A single word of honest approval makes the wife happy. Sometimes Gertrude wondered why the marriage ceremony so often untied lovers' knots, and why after marriage love and esteem did not increase. She never forgot the advice of an old lady, too poor to make her a wedding present, who told her that if she wished to be happy in marriage she must always keep two bears in her home, bear and forbear. George and his wife were human, and not unlike other people. Now and then George would say to his intimate friends. "The Ingrams like most New Englanders did not come over in the Mayflower as the passenger list was full, neither do the Ingrams belong to that very large number of families who feel the necessity of saying, 'We have never had an unkind word in our home.' Gertrude and I both have strong wills, and we often differ in opinions, but as often we agree to disagree. In this manner we avoid sunken rocks that might wreck our ship." One day, Irene, George's youngest sister, asked Gertrude for a painting of herself and of George. "Too expensive, Irene," replied Gertrude, "couldn't think of it for a moment." "No, Gertrude, I want only a tiny picture of your thumb and George's." "What in the world do you want of our thumbs?" "Because, Gertrude, George tells me privately that he has you completely under his thumb, and you always act as if you thought you had George under your thumb." Gertrude and George were strong and helpful, both educated, unselfish and ambitious; why should they not succeed? Gertrude had learned that good and great people are also sometimes selfish. When a little girl, she was present with her father who was invited to take dinner with a distinguished divine. The good doctor of divinity did the carving, and adroitly managed to keep for his own plate the tenderest piece of steak. Colonel Harris observed the fact, and enjoying a joke, casually observed, "Doctor, how well you carve!" The good man saw his breach of hospitality and blushed, remarking, "Colonel, you must forgive me for I believe I was born with a delicate stomach." Business cares were locked up in the office desk down town, and Gertrude forgot home annoyances as soon as George was seen coming up the lawn, and she and the twins ran to meet "papa." He always brought home the latest literary and scientific magazines and journals, while the reviews of America and London kept the family up-to-date on the latest books and leading topics. George's vacations were sometimes taken with his own employees, all of whom in the heated months, had two weeks off, some camping along the shores of the lake, others taking boat excursions to neighboring groves, or enjoying the outdoor band concerts which were furnished every other evening on the public park. What concerned his employees, concerned him. When any of his workmen were injured or sick, the company at once sent a surgeon or physician. Rightly, he thought it more important that an employee should be kept in good working order than even his best piece of machinery. George Ingram was once heard to say that eleven letters covered a large part of his religion, and that he wished he could write across the blue dome in letters of gold the word "Helpfulness." To assist an unfortunate individual permanently to help himself, is preaching a gospel that betters the world. The community of Harris-Ingram had little or no poverty. Everybody had money in the savings bank, or accumulations going into pretty homes, and mill stock, and all respected law and order, hence few if any policemen were ever seen on the streets. Everybody was well dressed, courteous, and daily growing more intelligent. Taxes were light, and general improvements were economically and promptly made. Both George and Gertrude believed that the tendency of the age was towards more practical education for the people. London publishes millions of penny books, penny histories and biographies, penny arithmetics, astronomies and dictionaries, and penny books to teach good behavior, honor, and patriotism. In London and elsewhere, the people were organizing workmen's clubs, colleges, and institute unions, for mutual improvement, and glimpses were already caught of Morris's "Earthly Paradise that is to be." "Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand, Nor yet come home in the even too faint and weary to stand. Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hungry-wolf a-near. Oh, strange, new, wonderful justice! But for whom shall we gather the gain? For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall labor in vain." Free night schools over the country, for the child of eight to the man of eighty, will go a long way in solving the troublesome socialistic problem. George was familiar with the generous gifts and deeds of the Pratts of Baltimore, and of Brooklyn, of Carnegie, of Lorillard & Co., of Warner Brothers of Connecticut, and of the Messrs. Tangye of Birmingham, England. The latter firm provides for its thousands of workmen a library, evening classes, and twice a week, while the employees are at dinner in a great hall, a twenty minutes crisp talk by capable persons on some live topic. George Ingram organized an Educational Bureau for the improvement of his employees and others by evening schools and public entertainments. As requisite for the success of such a bureau as he planned, he published the conditions as follows:-- 1. Several study rooms and good teachers. 2. A large and cheerful hall, church or opera house for lectures, that the prices may be low, the audience must be large. 3. A capable committee or manager, enthusiasm, good temper, fertility of resource and sympathy with the people. Common sense coupled with determined perseverance works wonders. 4. Variety and quality in the entertainment, with no wearying pauses between the parts. The movement must be swift and sure. 5. Punctuality and business-like thoroughness in the management. Begin and end on the minute. Give exactly what you promise; or, if that be impossible, what will be recognized as a full equivalent. Ideas, not words, old or new on every helpful subject in the universe, spoken or illustrated. Music that rests or inspires, and is understood. 6. Sell 5,000 season tickets at $1.00 in advance to secure a guarantee fund; this is sound business, as success is then assured, and it will not depend upon the weather. 7. Have prominent citizens preside at each entertainment, but pledge them to crisp introduction. High grade entertainments wisely managed, prove themselves of benign influence, and an agency more potent than many laws in the preservation of peace and the reform of public morals. When Colonel Harris's will was probated, two-thirds of the balance of his fortune was left in trust with Mrs. Harris, George, and Gertrude, to be used for the public welfare, as they deemed wisest. The trustees used $100,000 to build for the Workmen's Club a large and attractive Central Hall, that had steep double galleries, and five thousand opera chairs. Several necessary committees were organized and George Ingram's gospel of Helpfulness found another practical expression. The Educational Bureau was not a gratuity in any of its departments, as small fees were charged in all the evening classes, which were crowded with old and young. For twenty consecutive Saturday evenings in the winter season, a four-fold intellectual treat was furnished at $1.00 for tickets for the entire course. By 7:30 o'clock in the evening the Central Hall was packed to the walls, no reserved seats were sold, and the rule was observed "First come, first served," which brought promptly the audience. Season ticket-holders had the exclusive right to the hall till 7:25 o'clock, when a limited number of single admission tickets were sold. A large force of polite ushers assisted in seating the people, and in keeping order. At 7:30 all the entrance doors were closed, so that late comers never disturbed the audience. The musical prelude, or orchestra concert of thirty minutes closed at 7:30 with a grand chorus by the audience standing; following this, precisely at 7:30 was the half-hour lecture-prelude on some scientific or practical subject. Among the topics treated were "Wrongs of Workingmen, and How to Right Them," "The Terminal Glacier," "Sewerage and Ventilation," "The Pyramids," "Wonders of the House we Live in," "Architecture Illustrated," etc. From 8:00 to 8:15 followed the popular Singing School, in which five thousand persons heartily joined, aided by an enthusiastic precentor, and orchestra, in singing national hymns and other music. During the singing school everybody stood, and with windows lowered, fresh air and music swept through the hall and the hearts of the audience. From 8:15 to 9:30 was given the principal attraction of the evening, a popular lecture, dramatic reading, debate on some burning question, or a professional concert. The entertainments always closed promptly at 9:30, as many electric cars were in waiting. During the season, free lectures on "The Art of Cooking," "How to Dress," "The Care of Children," "Housekeeping in General," "The Culture of Flowers," etc., etc., were given at 3 P.M. in the great hall to the wives and friends of all the ticket holders. The circulation of useful literature was another important feature of the Educational Bureau work. At each entertainment five thousand little books of forty pages each, a wagon-load, were given to the owners of course tickets, as they entered the hall. These pamphlets included "A Short History of France," or "History of the United States," "Story of the Steam Engine," "A Brief History of Science," an "Essay on Early Man," "Great Artists," "Secrets of Success," etc. Each little book contained the evening's programme, the words and music of at least two national hymns, and "Owl Talks," a single page of crisp thoughts, to whet one's wits. At the close of each season the twenty pamphlets, continuously paged, were bound for fifty cents in two volumes with covers of red cloth. Thus the people got much for little, and they were benefited and pleased with their bargain. Encores and the discourtesy of stamping the feet and leaving the hall before the performance was concluded were abolished. Palms and fragrant flowers were always on the platform. Everybody listened attentively to the kindly words of teacher, orator, or poet; new impulses were received, and all rejoiced in the supply and satisfaction of their deepest and best wants. Feelings of a common brotherhood made hearts happier and lives better. Workmen went home sober with their week's earnings in their pockets, as there were no saloons in the town, a bright book to read, and a home of their own for shelter and rest. Thus also an improved citizenship was obtained and the nation was made stronger. George Ingram thought that all our cities should have large, cheerful halls, people's forums, where clear and simple truths on important questions should be taught. He believed that it would prove an antidote to various forms of anarchy and communism, which under the aegis of liberty are being advocated in our cities. The trustees of the Harris estate set aside $250,000, to be known as "The Reuben Harris Fund," to assist in providing regular courses of free public lectures upon the most important branches of natural and moral science, also free instruction to mechanics and artisans in drawing, and in practical designing, in patterns for prints, silks, paper hangings, carpets, furniture, etc. Free courses of lectures were given to advanced students in art, also lectures in physics, geology, botany, physiology, and the like for teachers, and the public. Gertrude felt that the perpetuity and usefulness of such a fund or monument dedicated to her father would outrival the pyramids. She greatly encouraged among the wives of the workmen the growth of kindergartens for children, and the cultivation of flowers, in and out of their homes, offering valuable prizes at annual flower shows. Harrisville voted to annex the village of Harris-Ingram, hoping that the gospel of helpfulness that had worked such wonders might leaven their whole city. George Ingram was now forty years of age. His great ability and practical good sense had arrested the attention and admiration of not only his own employees, but of the citizens of Harrisville, who demanded that he should be chosen mayor of the city. CHAPTER XXVI UNEXPECTED MEETINGS Christine De Ruyter had long contemplated a visit to the new world. She was familiar with the history of the Dutch West India Company, a political movement organized under cover of finding a passage to Cathay, to destroy the results of Spanish conquest in America. No doubt, love of discovery and of trade also stimulated the Dutch in making explorations. In the vessel "Half Moon" they sailed up the Hudson, and after building several forts, they finally established themselves in New Netherlands. Peter Minuit for a trifle bought from the Indians the whole of Manhattan Island. In locating on Manhattan Island, the Dutch secretly believed that they had secured the oyster while the English settlements further north and south were the two shells only. The development of almost three centuries and the supremacy of New York to-day, as the new world metropolis, verifies the sound sense of the Dutch. Christine was alive to the important part which her countrymen had early played across the Atlantic. Her mother had died, and Christine still unmarried, controlled both her time and a goodly inheritance. She resolved to visit her sister Fredrika, whose husband was agent in New York of a famous German line of vessels. En route from Holland to New York she spent two weeks with friends in London, and on Regent Street replenished her wardrobe, enjoyed Irving and Terry in their latest play, attended an exciting Cambridge-Oxford boat-race on the Thames, and with a great crowd went wild with delight at the English races at Epsom Downs. Saturday at 9:40 A.M. at the Waterloo Station several friends saw Christine off for America on the special train, the Eagle Express, of the South Western Railway, which makes the journey of 79 miles to Southampton in one hour and forty minutes. At Southampton the passengers were transferred on the new express dock, direct from the train to the steamers, which are berthed alongside. By this route passengers escape exposure to weather on tenders and landing stage, and avoid all delays at ports of call, and waiting for the tides to cross the bar. Promptly at 12 o'clock, hawsers and gangways vanishing, the great steamer moved down the bay, the fertile Isle of Wight in sight. Officers made note of the time as the Needles were passed, as the runs of the steamers are taken between the Needles and Sandy Hook. It was a bright breezy afternoon and after lunch the passengers lounged on the decks, or in the smoke room; some inspected their rooms, some read the latest French or English novel, and others in groups gossiped, or walked the decks to sharpen appetite. The second steward, of necessity a born diplomat, had succeeded in convincing most who were at lunch that he had given them favored seats, if not all at the Captain's table, then at the table of the first officer, a handsome man, or at the table with the witty doctor. Christine did not appear at lunch, as she was busy in her stateroom. She had given careful instructions that one of her trunks should be sent at once to her room. An hour before dinner there appeared on the promenade deck a beautiful young woman dressed in black, who attracted attention and no little comment. She wore a dress of Henrietta cloth, and cape trimmed with black crepe and grosgrained ribbons in bows with long ends. Her tiny hat with narrow band of white crepe was of the Marie Stuart style; her gloves were undressed kid, her handkerchief had black border, and her silk parasol was draped in black. Hers was the same pretty face and blue eyes that had won Alfonso's heart. She supposed him dead; her dress of mourning was not for him, but for her mother, whom she idolized. At first Christine hesitated about wearing black on the journey, but she soon learned that it increased her charms, and that it gave protection from annoyance. Many supposed she was a young widow. So thought a handsome naval officer whom she had met in London. When Christine returned to her room, she found that a messenger boy had brought her his card, with compliments, and a request that she occupy a seat at his table for the voyage. With a black jacket on her arm, Christine was conducted to her seat at dinner by the chief steward. She wore a plain black skirt and waist of black and white, with black belt and jet buckle. An up-to-date liner is a sumptuous hotel afloat. The safety, speed, and comfort of the modern steamer does not destroy but rather enhances the romance of ocean voyage. The handsome young officer and pretty Christine, as they promenaded the decks, added effect to the passing show. Her mourning costume gradually yielded to outing suits of violet tints with white collar and cuffs, and a simple black sailor's cap with white cord for band. Artist that Christine was, and lover of the ocean, she and the officer watched the sea change from a transient green to a light blue and back again, then to a deep blue when the sun was hidden in a cloud, then, when the fogs were encountered, to a cold grey. Christine took great interest in the easy navigation of the steamer; she watched the officers take observations, and verify the ship's run. Frequently she was seen with the young officer on the bridge, he pointing out the lighthouse on the dangerous Scilly Islands, the last sight of old England off Land's End, she enjoying the long swell and white crested billows, as the shelter of the British coast was left behind. A charming first night aboard ship it was, the moon full, the sky picturesque, the sea dark, except where the steamer and her screws churned it white; at the bow, showers and spray of phosphorus, and at the stern, rippling eddies and a long path of phosphorus and white foam. Christine wished she could transfer to canvas the swift steamer, as she felt it in her soul, powerful as a giant and graceful as a woman; at the mast-head an electric star, red and green lights on either side, long rows of tremulous bulbs of light from numerous portholes; the officers on the bridge with night glass in hand, walking to and fro, dark figures of sailors at the bow and in the crow's nest, all eyes and ears. "All's well" lulls to sleep the after-dinner loungers in chairs along the deck, while brave men and fair women keep step to entrancing music. With a week of favorable weather, and unprecedented speed the record out was won; officers, sailors, passengers, all were jubilant. On Pier 14, North River, Fredrika and her husband met Christine, and drove to their fine home overlooking the Central Park. * * * * * Alfonso Harris had come on to New York to spend a week of pleasure; already he had secured his ticket for Amsterdam via Antwerp by the Red Star Line. He was prepared to keep his promise to Christine. "To match gold with gold!" In his rounds among the artists he happened to step into the Art Student's League, and there learned that his old artist-chum, Leo, was in New York, and stopping at the Plaza Hotel. At once he took cab, and, surely enough, there on the hotel register was the name Leo Colonna, Rome. Alfonso sent up his card, and the waiter soon returned with the reply, "The marquis will see Mr. Harris at once in his rooms." It is needless to say that the marquis was both shocked and delighted to see alive a friend whom he supposed long ago dead. After dinner Alfonso and Leo drove to their old club, and as ever talked and confided in each other. Alfonso told the marquis the romantic story of his life, of his pecuniary success, and that he should sail in a few days to wed Christine, if possible. The marquis hesitated in his reply, as if in doubt whether to proceed or not. Observing this, Alfonso said, "Speak freely, tell me what you were thinking about." "Nothing, Alfonso, only a report I heard at the club last night." "What report, marquis?" "A report or story concerning a beautiful widow, who had just arrived from Amsterdam. From the minute description given--she had fair face, blue eyes, fleecy hair and loved art--I suspected that the woman in black might be Christine De Ruyter." "You surprise me, Leo, but what was the report?" "Alfonso, pardon me, I have said too much already." "No, go on and tell me all." "Alfonso, since the report is concerning a woman's character, my lips should be sealed, and would be, except you my friend are the most interested party. The club story is that a handsome young officer, who left his newly wedded wife in Bristol, England, was so much enamored of the charming widow aboard ship that suspicions were aroused, and in fact confirmed, by an additional report that valuable diamonds had been sent by the same officer from Tiffany's to the lady, who is stopping somewhere on Central Park. There, Alfonso, I have given you the story and the whole may be true or false." It was now Alfonso's turn to be shocked; he could not believe what the marquis had told him. Next day he visited the office of the American Line, found that Christine De Ruyter was a passenger on the last steamer, and the purser gave him her New York address. Then the marquis volunteered to call, in Alfonso's interests, upon Miss De Ruyter who seemed glad to see him, and was amazed with the story which he had to tell, not only of himself, and his good fortune, but that of Alfonso. That the latter was alive and wealthy was news almost too good to believe. The marquis reported to Alfonso that Christine was overjoyed to have a bygone mystery so fortunately cleared up, and that she sent him an urgent invitation to call at once. Christine congratulated herself over her good luck at the very threshold of the new world. "Strange romance, indeed, it would be," she mused to herself, "if, after having refused the poor artist, he having gained riches should prove loyal, and lay his heart and fortune at my feet! Would I reject him? No, indeed! He has gold now." Thus musing to herself before the mirror, she gave final touches to her toilet, and stepped down into her sister's sumptuous parlor to wait for a lover, restored from the depths of the sea. Promptly at 9 o'clock Alfonso was ushered into Fredrika's parlor. For a second, Christine stood fixed and pale, for Alfonso it really was, and she had believed him dead; then extending her hand she gave him greeting. For a full hour Alfonso and Christine talked, each telling much of what had transpired in the intervening years. Alfonso said he was quite as much surprised to find that she was still unmarried, as she seemed surprised that he was still alive. "Alfonso, I have waited long for you," Christine replied. "Ah, yes, Christine, but have you been true all these years?" As Alfonso spoke these words, he sat with Christine's hand in his own, looking inquiringly into her blue eyes for her answer. Her face flushed and she was speechless. Alfonso, dropping her hand, said in a kindly voice, "For years I have kept pure and sought to be worthy of you, and fortune has smiled upon me; I could now match gold with gold, but when I demand purity for purity your silence and your blushes condemn you, and I must bid you a final farewell." Christine could not answer, and as Alfonso left the house, she fell weeping upon the sofa, where her sister Fredrika found her, long past midnight. The terrible sorrow of that evening remained forever a mystery to Fredrika. It was 10 o'clock next morning when the marquis called upon Alfonso Harris at the Hotel Holland. He found him busy answering important letters from the coast. The marquis was not long in detecting that Alfonso lacked his usual buoyancy of spirits, and so rightly concluded that the meeting with Christine the night before had resulted unfavorably. Alfonso explained all that transpired, and the two artists, who had flattered themselves that they knew women well, admitted to each other their keen disappointment in Christine's character. Both lighted cigars, and for a moment or two unconsciously smoked vigorously, as if still in doubt as to their unsatisfactory conclusions. Soon Alfonso said, "Leo, how about your own former love, Rosie Ricci? To meet Rosie again was possibly the motive that prompted you to leave your estate in Italy." "Yes, Alfonso, I loved Rosie, as I once frankly stated to your sister on the ocean, but in a moment of peevishness she returned the engagement tokens, and the lovers' quarrel resulted in separation. But after the death of Lucille I found the smouldering fires of the old love for Rosie again easily fanned into a flame, so I crossed the sea in search of my dear country-woman." "And did you find her!" "Yes, Alfonso, that is, all that was left of the vivacious, happy songster, as we once knew her. Her new world surroundings proved disastrous." "How so?" "Look, here is a picture in water color, that tells the story." Saying this the Marquis slowly removed a white paper from a small sketch which he had made the week before. It was a picture in the morgue on the East River, with its half hundred corpses, waiting recognition or burial in the Potter's Field. Upon a cold marble slab lay the body of a young girl, her shapely hands across her breast. Alfonso recognized Rosie's sweet face and golden tresses that artists had raved over. The marquis in sad tones added a few words of explanation. "The senator who educated Rosie proved a villain. When she acted as Juliet at the Capitol, fashionable society gave hearty approval of her rare abilities. Rosie's genius, like a shooting star, flashed across the sky and then shot into oblivion." A few days afterwards, Alfonso on the pier with his white handkerchief waved adieu to Leo who had resolved to wed art in sunny Italy. Sad memories decided Alfonso to leave New York at once. For a short time he was inclined to give up a new purpose, and return to his own family at Harrisville, but the law of equity controlled his heart, he journeyed back to the Pacific Coast, and again approached the Yosemite Valley. Seated again on Inspiration Point, he gazed long and earnestly into the gorge below. He could discern neither smoke nor moving forms. All had changed; not the peaks, or domes, or wonderful waterfalls; all these remained the same. But where were Red Cloud and kind-hearted Mariposa? Alfonso's own race now occupied the valley for pleasure and for gain. Mariposa might not be of his own race, but she had a noble heart. Education had put her in touch with civilization, and she was as pure as the snow of the Sierras. He wondered if she ever thought of him. He remembered that, when he rode away, her face was turned toward the Bridal Veil Falls. Did she thus intend to say, "I love you?" At midnight, as the moon rose above the forest, the tall pines whispered of Mariposa, of wild flowers she was wont to gather, of journeys made to highest peaks, of weeks of watching and waiting, and of the burial of Red Cloud at the foot of an ancient sequoia; then the language of the breezes among the pines became indistinct, and Alfonso, half-asleep, half-awake, saw approaching a white figure. Two dark eyes full of tears, gazed into his face, at first with a startled look, and then with a gleam of joy and trust. Alfonso exclaimed, "Mariposa!" He sought to clasp her in his arms, but the graceful figure vanished, and the pines seemed to whisper, "Alfonso, I go to join the braves in the happy hunting grounds beyond the setting sun. You will wed the fairest of your people. Adieu." When Alfonso awoke, the ring of beaten gold was gone, where, he knew not. The tourist-coach was rumbling down the mountain road, and he joined it. After an inspection of his mines, he sadly left the Sierras for San Francisco. The prophetic words of Mariposa, whispered among the pines, proved true. Alfonso again met Gertrude's best friend, beautiful Mrs. Eastlake, now a young widow, and later he married her, making their home on Knob Hill, the most fashionable quarter of the city by the Golden Gate. CHAPTER XXVII THE CRISIS What is of more value to civilization, or what commands a greater premium in the world than successful leadership? Successful leaders are few, and the masses follow. Honor, fame, power, and wealth are some of the rewards of great leadership. The confidences bestowed and the responsibilities assumed are often very great. A betrayal of important trusts, or a failure to discharge responsibilities, usually brings swift and terrible punishment, poverty, prison, disgrace, and dishonor to descendants. George Ingram had proved himself a successful leader, and those who knew him best, by study of his methods and his works, saw his capacity for leadership. Hence the popular demand for him to stand as candidate for mayor of Harrisville. His practical intelligence, and his acuteness in observation of character, had served him well in organizing, developing, and controlling the greatest model steel-plant of his generation, which for quality, quantity, and minimum cost of products had attracted the attention of manufacturers and scientists. Politicians soon discovered in George Ingram natural prudence and tact in behavior. The strong religious element of the city conceded that he possessed, as a certain doctor of divinity said, "a nice sense of what is right, just and true, with a course of life corresponding thereto." The alert women of the city were in hearty approval of conferring the honor of Mayor upon George Ingram. They knew that the completeness of his character resulted in no small degree from the influence of his gifted wife. The practical business men of the city saw that the proposed candidate for mayor had good common sense. So all party spirit was laid aside, as it should be in local politics, and George Ingram was nominated and elected unanimously as the mayor of Harrisville. His cabinet, composed of the heads of several departments, was filled with able men, who with zest took up their portfolios not with the thought of personal gain but with the lofty purpose of securing the utmost good to every citizen. Fortunately the city had adopted the just principle of paying its servants liberally for all services rendered. By the so-called "Federal Plan" the number of members of the Cabinet, of the Board of Control, of the Council, and of the School Board, has been so reduced that at their meetings speeches and angry discussions were tabooed; each associate member was respected, if not on his own account, then on behalf of his constituency, and all business was discussed and consummated with the same courtesy and efficiency, as at a well regulated board of bank directors. Never before were streets so well paved, cleaned and sprinkled; never were city improvements so promptly made without increase of debt, and never did public schools prosper better. Men of experience on all lines were drafted on special committees and commissions, and vigorous work toward practical ends went forward on river, harbor, and other improvements. Electricity, supplied by the city, furnished power, heat, and light. High pressure water relegated the steam fire-engine to the Historical Society, and low pressure water, at minimum cost, was supplied to the people in such abundance that during the summer season, before sunrise, all paved streets were cleansed by running water and brush brooms. All sewerage and garbage were promptly removed, and used to enrich the suburban market-gardens. Every country road leading into the city had its electric railway with combination passenger and freight cars, and farm products for the people were delivered in better condition, earlier at the markets, and at much reduced prices. The advantages enjoyed by rich and poor in Harrisville were soon noised abroad, and the influx of new comers constantly increased the growth of the city. Mayor Ingram had been given a re-election. Prosperity in his own business had brought great returns, and the mayor's chief concern was, what to do with his accumulations. One day the County Commissioners, the City Government, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Board of Education were equally surprised to receive from George Ingram the announcement that he would build for the people at his own expense a court house, a city hall, a public library, and public baths. He had often wondered how it was possible that other millionaires could overlook and miss such opportunities to distribute surplus funds among the people. Gertrude early observed the city's needs, and had pointed out the opportunity to George, urging that part of her father's money should be united with their own increasing wealth to supply funds for the execution of their plans. The four committees appointed by city and county acted speedily in the consideration of details. It was decided to construct a group of buildings on the park. The architecture adopted for all four structures was Romanesque in style; granite was used for wall work, and darker stone for ornamentation. The plans accepted exhibited less massiveness than the original Romanesque, and showed a tendency towards the lightness and delicacy of finish which modern culture demands. The new court house located on the park enabled the architect to connect it by an historical "Bridge of Sighs" with the prison and old court house across the street. The city hall was properly made the most prominent of the group of buildings. Its first floor and basement were combined in a great assembly hall, capable of seating 10,000 people with an abundance of light, fresh air, and eight broad entrances for exit. As the belfry or tower was a leading feature of most mediaeval town-halls, so the artistic feature of the Harrisville city hall was its lofty tower, containing chimes, above which was to be placed an appropriate bronze statue. The library and the baths were built on the park. The Romanesque style of all the buildings gave fine opportunity to introduce elaborate carvings about the entrance arches, and across the façades to chisel quaint faces above the windows, and grotesque heads out of corbels at the eaves. The group of public buildings was finally completed and dedicated with much formality. The city government unanimously adopted resolutions as follows:-- "Resolved,--That the City of Harrisville accepts, with profound gratitude, from Mayor George Ingram, the munificent gift of buildings for a City Hall and Public Library as stated in his letters of ----; That the City accepts the three noble gifts upon the conditions in said letter, which it will faithfully and gladly observe, as a sacred trust in accordance with his desire. "Resolved,--That in gratefully accepting these gifts, the City tenders to Mayor George Ingram its heartfelt thanks, and desires to express its deep sense of obligation for the elegant buildings, for years of wise counsel and unselfish service, and for the free use of valuable patents. The City recognizes the Christian faith, generosity, and public spirit that have prompted him to supply the long felt wants by these gifts of great and permanent usefulness." Similar resolutions were adopted by the county commissioners. Nearly three millions were thus disposed of by the mayor and his wife. Close attention to business, and the severe labors in behalf of the city, undermined the health of George Ingram, and his physical and mental strength failed him at the wrong time, for his ship was now approaching a cyclone on the financial sea. Tariff matters had been drifting from bad to worse, politicians were seeking to secure advantages for their constituents by changes in the tariff schedule, speculation was running wild in the stock exchanges of the country, cautious business men and bankers in the larger cities discovered an ominous black cloud rising out of the horizon. Bank rates of interest increased, more frequent renewals were made, deposits dwindled, country bankers weakened, and financiers in the metropolis were calling loans made to the interior. With the financial cyclone at its height, the demands were so great upon The Harris-Ingram Steel Co. that creditors threatened to close the steel plant. The cry for help went up from the Harris-Ingram mills, but their trusted leader was powerless. George Ingram lay insensible at death's door, the victim of pneumonia. For a week, the directors of the steel company struggled night and day with their difficulties. Gertrude could neither leave the bedside of her dying husband, nor would she give her consent to have the Harris-Ingram Experiment wrecked. She had already pledged as collateral for the creditors of the steel company all their stock and personal property, and had telephoned the directors to keep the company afloat another day, if in their power. The ablest physicians of the city were standing at George Ingram's bedside in despair, as all hope of his recovery had vanished. Gertrude stepped aside into her library, and was in the very agony of prayer for help, when in rushed her brother Alfonso, whom the family believed dead. He had come from California with his wife, and stopping at the company's office, had learned of the terrible trouble of his family. Lifting up his broken-hearted sister, who for a moment thought that she had met her brother on the threshold of the other world, he kissed Gertrude and said, "Be brave, go back to your husband, and trust your brother to look after the steel company's matters." Alfonso learned that one million dollars were needed at once to tide over the company's affairs; he drew two checks, for five hundred thousand dollars each, upon his banks in San Francisco and requested the creditors to wire to the coast. Before two o'clock replies came that Alfonso Harris's cheeks were good, and the only son of Reuben Harris had saved the "Harris-Ingram Experiment." Mariposa's band of beaten gold had worked its magic. * * * * * A public funeral was given George Ingram. He was a man the city could ill afford to lose, and every citizen felt he had lost a personal friend. All business was suspended, and the mills were shut down. For two days the body of the dead mayor lay in state in the city hall he had built and given to the people. The long line of citizens that filed past the coffin continued through the night till dawn, and even then, great throngs stood in the rain with flowers for his casket. As a token of their high regard the people voted to change the name of the city of Harrisville to Harris-Ingram, the suburb which was annexed, and to place a bronze statue of George Ingram on the tower above the city hall, which now became his fitting monument. Labor and capital united in electing for the head of the great Harris-Ingram Steel Company, Alfonso, the millionaire and artist-son of Reuben Harris. 
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26093	----	[Illustration: Illustrated by FINLAY] the memory of mars By RAYMOND F. JONES _"As soon as I'm well we'll go to Mars for a vacation again," Alice would say. But now she was dead, and the surgeons said she was not even human. In his misery, Hastings knew two things: he loved his wife; but they had never been off Earth!_ A reporter should be objective even about a hospital. It's his business to stir others' emotions and not let his own be stirred. But that was no good, Mel Hastings told himself. No good at all when it was Alice who was here somewhere, balanced uncertainly between life and death. Alice had been in Surgery far too long. Something had gone wrong. He was sure of it. He glanced at his watch. It would soon be dawn outside. To Mel Hastings this marked a significant and irrevocable passage of time. If Alice were to emerge safe and whole from the white cavern of Surgery she would have done so now. Mel sank deeper in the heavy chair, feeling a quietness within himself as if the slow creep of death were touching him also. There was a sudden far distant roar and through the window he saw a streak of brightness in the sky. That would be the tourist ship, the Martian Princess, he remembered. That was the last thing Alice had said before they took her away from him. "As soon as I'm well again we'll go to Mars for a vacation again, and then you'll remember. It's so beautiful there. We had so much fun--" Funny, wonderful little Alice--and her strange delusion that she still clung to, that they had taken a Martian vacation in the first year of their marriage. It had started about a year ago, and nothing he could say would shake it. Neither of them had ever been to space. He wished now he had taken her. It would have been worth it, no matter what its personal cost. He had never told her about the phobia that had plagued him all his life, the fear of outer space that made him break out in a cold sweat just to think of it--nor of the nightmare that came again and again, ever since he was a little boy. There must have been some way to lick this thing--to give her that vacation on Mars that she had wanted so much. Now it was too late. He knew it was too late. * * * * * The white doors opened, and Dr. Winters emerged slowly. He looked at Mel Hastings a long time as if trying to remember who the reporter was. "I must see you--in my office," he said finally. Mel stared back in numb recognition. "She's dead," he said. Dr. Winters nodded slowly as if in surprise and wonder that Mel had divined this fact. "I must see you in my office," he repeated. Mel watched his retreating figure. There seemed no point in following. Dr. Winters had said all that need be said. Far down the corridor the Doctor turned and stood patiently as if understanding why Mel had not followed, but determined to wait until he did. The reporter stirred and rose from the chair, his legs withering beneath him. The figure of Dr. Winters grew larger as he approached. The morning clatter of the hospital seemed an ear-torturing shrillness. The door of the office closed and shut it out. "She is dead." Dr. Winters sat behind the desk and folded and unfolded his hands. He did not look at Mel. "We did everything we could, Mr. Hastings. Her injuries from the accident were comparatively minor--" He hesitated, then went on. "In normal circumstances there would have been no question--her injuries could have been repaired." "What do you mean, 'In normal circumstances--'?" Dr. Winters turned his face away from Mel for a moment as if to avoid some pain beyond endurance. He passed a weary hand across his forehead and eyes and held it there a moment before speaking. Then he faced Mel again. "The woman you brought in here last night--your wife--is completely un-normal in her internal structure. Her internal organs cannot even be identified. She is like a being of some other species. She is not--she is simply not human, Mr. Hastings." Mel stared at him, trying to grasp the meaning of the words. Meaning would not come. He uttered a short, hysterical laugh that was like a bark. "You're crazy, Doc. You've completely flipped your lid!" Dr. Winters nodded. "For hours during the night I was in agreement with that opinion. When I first observed your wife's condition I was convinced I was utterly insane. I called in six other men to verify my observation. All of them were as stupefied as I by what we saw. Organs that had no place in a human structure. Evidence of a chemistry that existed in no living being we had ever seen before--" The Doctor's words rolled over him like a roaring surf, burying, smothering, destroying-- "I want to see." Mel's voice was like a hollow cough from far away. "I think you're crazy. I think you're hiding some mistake you made yourself. You killed Alice in a simple little operation, and now you're trying to get out of it with some crazy story that nobody on earth would ever believe!" "I want you to see," said Dr. Winters, rising slowly. "That's why I called you in here, Mr. Hastings." * * * * * Mel trailed him down the long corridor again. No words were spoken between them. Mel felt as if nothing were real anymore. They went through the white doors of Surgery and through the inner doors. Then they entered a white, silent--cold--room beyond. In the glare of icy white lights a single sheeted figure rested on a table. Mel suddenly didn't want to see. But Dr. Winters was drawing back the cover. He exposed the face, the beloved features of Alice Hastings. Mel cried out her name and moved toward the table. There was nothing in her face to suggest she was not simply sleeping, her hair disarrayed, her face composed and relaxed as he had seen her hundreds of times. "Can you stand to witness this?" asked Dr. Winters anxiously. "Shall I get you a sedative?" Mel shook his head numbly. "No--show me ..." The great, fresh wound extended diagonally across the abdomen and branched up beneath the heart. The Doctor grasped a pair of small scissors and swiftly clipped the temporary sutures. With forceps and retractors he spread open the massive incision. Mel closed his eyes against the sickness that seized him. "Gangrene!" he said. "She's full of gangrene!" Below the skin, the surface layers of fatty tissue, the substance of the tissue changed from the dark red of the wounded tissue to a dark and greenish hue that spoke of deadly decay. But Dr. Winters was shaking his head. "No. It's not gangrene. That's the way we found the tissue. That appears to be its--normal condition, if you will." Mel stared without believing, without comprehending. Dr. Winters probed the wound open further. "We should see the stomach here," he said. "What is here where the stomach should be I cannot tell you. There is no name for this organ. The intestinal tract should lie here. Instead, there is only this homogeneous mass of greenish, gelatinous material. Other organs, hardly differentiated from this mass, appear where the liver, the pancreas, the spleen should be." Mel was hearing his voice as if from some far distance or in a dream. "There are lungs--of a sort," the Doctor went on. "She was certainly capable of breathing. And there's a greatly modified circulatory system, two of them, it appears. One circulates a blood substance in the outer layers of tissue that is almost normal. The other circulates a liquid that gives the remainder of the organs their greenish hue. But how circulation takes place we do not know. She has no heart." * * * * * Mel Hastings burst out in hysterical laughter. "Now I know you're crazy Doc! My tender, loving Alice with no heart! She used to tell me, 'I haven't got any brains. I wouldn't have married a dumb reporter if I did. But so I've got a heart and that's what fell in love with you--my heart, not my brains.' She loved me, can't you understand that?" Dr. Winters was slowly drawing him away. "I understand. Of course I understand. Come with me now, Mr. Hastings, and lie down for a little while. I'll get you something to help take away the shock." Mel permitted himself to be led away to a small room nearby. He drank the liquid the Doctor brought, but he refused to lie down. "You've shown me," he said with dull finality. "But I don't care what the explanation is. I knew Alice. She was human all right, more so than either you or I. She was completely normal, I tell you--all except for this idea she had the last year or so that we'd gone together on a vacation to Mars at one time." "That wasn't true?" "No. Neither of us had ever been out in space." "How well did you know your wife before you married her?" Mel smiled in faint reminiscence. "We grew up together, went to the same grade school and high school. It seems like there was never a time when Alice and I didn't know each other. Our folks lived next door for years." "Was she a member of a large family?" "She had an older brother and sister and two younger sisters." "What were her parents like?" "They're still living. Her father runs an implement store. It's a farm community where they live. Wonderful people. Alice was just like them." Dr. Winters was silent before he went on. "I have subjected you to this mental torture for just one reason, Mr. Hastings. If it has been a matter of any less importance I would not have told you the details of your wife's condition, much less asking you to look at her. But this is such an enormous scientific mystery that I must ask your cooperation in helping to solve it. I want your permission to preserve and dissect the body of your wife for the cause of science." Mel looked at the Doctor in sudden sharp antagonism. "Not even give her a burial? Let her be put away in bottles, like--like a--" "Please don't upset yourself any more than necessary. But I do beg that you consider what I've just proposed. Surely a moment's reflection will show you that this is no more barbaric than our other customs regarding our dead. "But even this is beside the point. The girl, Alice, whom you married is like a normal human being in every apparent external respect, yet the organs which gave her life and enabled her to function are like nothing encountered before in human experience. It is imperative that we understand the meaning of this. It is yours to say whether or not we shall have this opportunity." Mel started to speak again, but the words wouldn't come out. "Time is critical," said Dr. Winters, "but I don't want to force you to an instantaneous answer. Take thirty minutes to think about it. Within that time, additional means of preservation must be taken. I regret that I must be in such haste, but I urge that your answer be yes." Dr. Winters moved towards the door, but Mel gestured for him to remain. "I want to see her again," Mel said. "There is no need. You have been tortured enough. Remember your wife as you have known her all her life, not as you saw her a moment ago." "If you want my answer let me see her again." * * * Dr. Winters led the way silently back to the cold room. Mel drew down the cover only far enough to expose the face of Alice. There was no mistake. Somehow he had been hoping that all this would turn out to be some monstrous error. But there was no error. Would she want me to do what the Doctor has asked? he thought. She wouldn't care. She would probably think it a very huge joke that she had been born with innards that made her different from everybody else. She would be amused by the profound probings and mutterings of the learned doctors trying to find an explanation for something that had no explanation. Mel drew the sheet tenderly over her face. "You can do as you wish," he said to Dr. Winters. "It makes no difference to us--to either of us." * * * * * The sedative Dr. Winters had given him, plus his own exhaustion, drove Mel to sleep for a few hours during the afternoon, but by evening he was awake again and knew that a night of sleeplessness lay ahead of him. He couldn't stand to spend it in the house, with all its fresh reminders of Alice. He walked out into the street as it began to get dark. Walking was easy; almost no one did it any more. The rush of private and commercial cars swarmed overhead and rumbled in the ground beneath. He was an isolated anachronism walking silently at the edge of the great city. He was sick of it. He would have liked to have turned his back on the city and left it forever. Alice had felt the same. But there was nowhere to go. News reporting was the only thing he knew, and news occurred only in the great, ugly cities of the world. The farmlands, such as he and Alice had known when they were young, produced nothing of interest to the satiated denizens of the towns and cities. Nothing except food, and much of this was now being produced by great factories that synthesized protein and carbohydrates. When fats could be synthesized the day of the farmer would be over. He wondered if there weren't some way out of it now. With Alice gone there was only himself, and his needs were few. He didn't know, but suddenly he wanted very much to see it all again. And, besides, he had to tell her folks. * * * * * The ancient surface bus reached Central Valley at noon the next day. It all looked very much as it had the last time Mel had seen it and it looked very good indeed. The vast, open lands; the immense ripe fields. The bus passed the high school where Mel and Alice had attended classes together. He half expected to see her running across the campus lawn to meet him. In the middle of town he got off the bus and there were Alice's mother and father. They were dry-eyed now but white and numb with shock. George Dalby took his hand and pumped it heavily. "We can't realize it, Mel. We just can't believe Alice is gone." His wife put her arms around Mel and struggled with her tears again. "You didn't say anything about the funeral. When will it be?" Mel swallowed hard, fighting the one lie he had to tell. He almost wondered now why he had agreed to Dr. Winters' request. "Alice--always wanted to do all the good she could in the world," he said. "She figured that she could be of some use even after she was gone. So she made an agreement with the research hospital that they could have her body after she died." It took a moment for her mother to grasp the meaning. Then she cried out, "We can't even bury her?" "We should have a memorial service, right here at home where all her friends are," said Mel. George Dalby nodded in his grief. "That was just like Alice," he said. "Always wanting to do something for somebody else--" And it was true, Mel thought. If Alice had supposed she was not going to live any longer she would probably have thought of the idea, herself. Her parents were easily reconciled. They took him out to the old familiar house and gave him the room where he and Alice had spent the first days of their marriage. * * * * * When it was night and the lights were out he felt able to sleep naturally for the first time since Alice's accident. She seemed not far away here in this old familiar house. In memory, she was not, for Mel was convinced he could remember the details of his every association with her. He first became conscious of her existence one day when they were in the third grade. At the beginning of each school year the younger pupils went through a course of weighing, inspection, knee tapping, and cavity counting. Mel had come in late for his examination that year and barged into the wrong room. A shower of little-girl squeals had greeted him as the teacher told him kindly where the boy's examination room was. But he remembered most vividly Alice Dalby standing in the middle of the room, her blouse off but held protectingly in front of her as she jumped up and down in rage and pointed a finger at him. "You get out of here, Melvin Hastings! You're not a nice boy at all!" Face red, he had hastily retreated as the teacher assured Alice and the rest of the girls that he had made a simple mistake. But how angry Alice had been! It was a week before she would speak to him. He smiled and sank back deeply into the pillow. He remembered how proud he had been when old Doc Collins, who came out to do the honors every Fall, had told him there wasn't a thing wrong with him and that if he continued to drink his milk regularly he'd grow up to be a football player. He could still hear Doc's words whistling through his teeth and feel the coldness of the stethoscope on his chest. Suddenly, he sat upright in bed in the darkness. Stethoscope! They had tapped and inspected and listened to Alice that day, and all the other examination days. If Doc Collins had been unable to find a heartbeat in her he'd have fainted--and spread the news all over town! Mel got up and stood at the window, his heart pounding. Old Doc Collins was gone, but the medical records of those school examinations might still be around somewhere. He didn't know what he expected to prove, but surely those records would not tell the same story Dr. Winters had told. It took him nearly all the next day. The grade school principal agreed to help him check through the dusty attic of the school, where ancient records and papers were tumbled about and burst from their cardboard boxes. Then Paul Ames, the school board secretary, took Mel down to the District Office and offered to help look for the records. The old building was stifling hot and dusty with summer disuse. But down in the cool, cobwebbed basement they found it.... Alice's records from the third grade on up through the ninth. On every one: heart, o.k.; lungs, normal. Pulse and blood pressure readings were on each chart. "I'd like to take these," said Mel. "Her doctor in town--he wants to write some kind of paper on her case and would like all the past medical history he can get." Paul Ames frowned thoughtfully. "I'm not allowed to give District property away. But they should have been thrown out a long time ago--take 'em and don't tell anybody I let you have 'em." "Thanks. Thanks a lot," Mel said. And when she was fourteen or fifteen her appendix had been removed. A Dr. Brown had performed the operation, Mel remembered. He had taken over from Collins. "Sure, he's still here," Paul Ames said. "Same office old Doc Collins used. You'll probably find him there right now." Dr. Brown remembered. He didn't remember the details of the appendectomy, but he still had records that showed a completely normal operation. "I wonder if I could get a copy of that record and have you sign it," Mel said. He explained about the interest of Dr. Winters in her case without revealing the actual circumstances. "Glad to," said Dr. Brown. "I just wish things hadn't turned out the way they have. One of the loveliest girls that ever grew up here, Alice." * * * The special memorial service was held in the old community church on Sunday afternoon. It was like the drawing of a curtain across a portion of Mel's life, and he knew that curtain would never open again. He took a bus leaving town soon after the service. There was one final bit of evidence, and he wondered all the way back to town why he had not thought of it first. Alice's pregnancy had ended in miscarriage, and there had never been another. But X-rays had been taken to try to find the cause of Alice's difficulty. If they showed that Alice was normal within the past two years-- * * * * * Dr. Winters was mildly surprised to see Mel again. He invited the reporter in to his office and offered him a chair. "I suppose you have come to inquire about our findings regarding your wife." "Yes--if you've found anything," said Mel. "I've got a couple of things to show you." "We've found little more than we knew the night of her death. We have completed the dissection of the body. A minute analysis of each organ is now under way, and chemical tests of the body's substances are being made. We found that differences in the skeletal structure were almost as great as those in the fleshy tissues. We find no relationship between these structures and those of any other species--human or animal--that we have ever found." "And yet Alice was not always like that," said Mel. Dr. Winters looked at him sharply. "How do you know that?" Mel extended the medical records he had obtained in Central Valley. Dr. Winters picked them up and examined them for a long time while Mel watched silently. Finally, Dr. Winters put the records down with a sigh. "This seems to make the problem even more complex than it was." "There are X-rays, too," said Mel. "Alice had pelvic X-rays only a little over two years ago. I tried to get them, but the doctor said you'd have to request them. They should be absolute proof that Alice was different then." "Tell me who has them and I'll send for them at once." An hour later Dr. Winters shook his head in disbelief as he turned off the light box and removed the X-ray photograph. "It's impossible to believe that these were taken of your wife, but they corroborate the evidence of the other medical records. They show a perfectly normal structure." The two men remained silent across the desk, each reluctant to express his confused thoughts. Dr. Winters finally broke the silence. "It must be, Mr. Hastings," he said, "--it must be that this woman--this utterly alien person--is simply not your wife, Alice. Somehow, somewhere, there must be a mistake in identity, a substitution of similar individuals." "She was not out of my sight," said Mel. "Everything was completely normal when I came home that night. Nothing was out of place. We went out to a show. Then, on the way home, the accident occurred. There could have been no substitution--except right here in the hospital. But I know it was Alice I saw. That's why I made you let me see her again--to make sure." "But the evidence you have brought me proves otherwise. These medical records, these X-rays prove that the girl, Alice, whom you married, was quite normal. It is utterly impossible that she could have metamorphosed into the person on whom we operated." Mel stared at the reflection of the sky in the polished desk top. "I don't know the answer," he said. "It must not be Alice. But if that's the case, where is Alice?" "That might even be a matter for the police," said Dr. Winters. "There are many things yet to be learned about this mystery." "There's one thing more," said Mel. "Fingerprints. When we first came here Alice got a job where she had to have her fingerprints taken." "Excellent!" Dr. Winters exclaimed. "That should give us our final proof!" It took the rest of the afternoon to get the fingerprint record and make a comparison. Dr. Winters called Mel at home to give him the report. There was no question. The fingerprints were identical. The corpse was that of Alice Hastings. * * * * * The nightmare came again that night. Worse than Mel could ever remember it. As always, it was a dream of space, black empty space, and he was floating alone in the immense depths of it. There was no direction. He was caught in a whirlpool of vertigo from which he reached out with agonized yearning for some solidarity to cling to. There was only space. After a time he was no longer alone. He could not see them, but he knew they were out there. The searchers. He did not know why he had to flee or why they sought him, but he knew they must never overtake him, or all would be lost. [Illustration] Somehow he found a way to propel himself through empty space. The searchers were growing points of light in the far distance. They gave him a sense of direction. His being, his existence, his universe of meaning and understanding depended on the success of his flight from the searchers. Faster, through the wild black depths of space-- He never knew whether he escaped or not. Always he awoke in a tangle of bedclothes, bathed in sweat, whimpering in fear. For a long time Alice had been there to touch his hand when he awoke. But Alice was gone now and he was so weary of the night pursuit. Sometimes he wished it would end with the searchers--whoever they were--catching up with him and doing what they intended to do. Then maybe there would be no more nightmare. Maybe there would be no more Mel Hastings, he thought. And that wouldn't be so bad, either. He tossed sleeplessly the rest of the night and got up at dawn feeling as if he had not been to bed at all. He would take one day more, and then get back to the News Bureau. He'd take this day to do what couldn't be put off any longer--the collecting and disposition of Alice's personal belongings. * * * * * He shaved, bathed and dressed, then began emptying the drawers, one by one. There were many souvenirs, mementos. She was always collecting these. Her bottom drawer was full of stuff that he'd glimpsed only occasionally. In the second layer of junk in the drawer he came across the brochure on Martian vacations. It must have been one of the dreams of her life, he thought. She'd wanted it so much that she'd almost come to believe that it was real. He turned the pages of the smooth, glossy brochure. Its cover bore the picture of the great Martian Princess and the blazoned emblem of Connemorra Space Lines. Inside were glistening photos of the plush interior of the great vacation liner, and pictures of the domed cities of Mars where Earthmen played more than they worked. Mars had become the great resort center of Earth. Mel closed the book and glanced again at the Connemorra name. Only one man had ever amassed the resources necessary to operate a private space line. Jim Connemorra had done it; no one knew quite how. But he operated now out of both hemispheres with a space line that ignored freight and dealt only in passenger business. He made money, on a scale that no government-operated line had yet been able to approach. Mel sank down to the floor, continuing to shift through the other things in the drawer. His hand stopped. He remained motionless as recognition showered sudden frantic questions in his mind. There lay a ticket envelope marked Connemorra Lines. The envelope was empty when he looked inside, and there was no name on it. But it was worn. As if it might have been carried to Mars and back. In sudden frenzy he began examining each article and laying it in a careless pile on the floor. He recognized a pair of idiotic Martian dolls. He found a tourist map of the ruined cities of Mars. He found a menu from the Red Sands Hotel. And below all these there was a picture album. Alice at the Red Sands. Alice at the Phobos Oasis. Alice at the Darnella Ruins. He turned the pages of the album with numb fingers. Alice in a dozen Martian settings. Some of them were dated. About two years ago. They had gone together, Alice had said, but there was no evidence of Mel's presence on any such trip. But it was equally impossible that Alice had made the trip, yet here was proof. Proof that swept him up in a doubting of his own senses. How could such a thing have taken place? Had he actually made such a trip and been stripped of the memory by some amnesia? Maybe he had forced himself to go with her and the power of his lifelong phobia had wiped it from his memory. And what did it all have to do--if anything--with the unbelievable thing Dr. Winters had found about Alice? Overcome with grief and exhaustion he sat fingering the mementos aimlessly while he stared at the pictures and the ticket envelope and the souvenirs. * * * * * Dr. Winters spoke a little more sharply than he intended. "I don't think anything is going to be solved by a wild-goose chase to Mars. It's going to cost you a great deal of money, and there isn't a single positive lead to any solution." "It's the only possible explanation." Mel persisted. "Something happened on Mars to change her from what she once was to--what you saw on your operating table." "And you are hoping that in some desperate way you will find there was a switch of personalities--that there may be a ghost of a chance of finding Alice still alive." Mel bit his lip. He was scarcely willing to admit such a hope but it was the foundation of his decision. "I've got to do what I can," he said. "I must take the chance. The uncertainty will torment me all my life if I don't." Dr. Winters shook his head. "I still wish I could persuade you against it. You will find only disappointment." "My mind is made up. Will you help me or not?" "What can I do?" "I can't go into space unless I can find some way of lifting, even temporarily, this phobia that nearly drives me crazy at the thought of going out there. Isn't there a drug, a hypnotic method, or something to help a thing like this?" "This isn't my field," said Dr. Winters. "But I suspect that the cause of your trouble cannot be suppressed. It will have to be lifted. Psycho-recovery is the only way to accomplish that. I can recommend a number of good men. This, too, is very expensive." "I should have done it for Alice--long ago," said Mel. * * * * * Dr. Martin, the psychiatrist, was deeply interested in Mel's problem. "It sounds as if it is based on some early trauma, which has long since been wiped from your conscious memory. Recovery may be easy or difficult, depending on how much suppression of the original event has taken place." "I don't even care what the original event was," said Mel, "if you rid me of this overwhelming fear of space. Dr. Winters said he thought recovery would be required." "He is right. No matter how much overlay you pile on top of such a phobia to suppress it, it will continue to haunt you. We can make a trial run to analyze the situation, and then we can better predict the chance of ultimate success." As a reporter, Mel Hastings had had vague encounters with the subject of psycho-recovery, but he knew little of the details about it. He knew it involved some kind of a machine that could tap the very depths of the human mind and drag out the hidden debris accumulated in mental basements and attics. But such things had always given him the willies. He steered clear of them. When Dr. Martin first introduced him into the psycho-recovery room his resolution almost vanished. It looked more like a complex electronic laboratory than anything else. A half dozen operators and assistants in nurses' uniforms stood by. "If you will recline here--," Dr. Martin was saying. Mel felt as if he were being prepared for some inhuman biological experiment. A cage of terminals was fitted to his head and a thousand small electrodes adjusted to contact with his skull. The faint hum of equipment supported the small surge of apprehension within him. After half an hour the preparations were complete. The level of lights in the room was lowered. He could sense the operators at their panels and see dimly the figure of Dr. Martin seated near him. "Try to recall as vividly as possible your last experience with this nightmare you have described. We will try to lock on to that and follow it on down." This was the last thing in the world Mel wanted to do. He lay in agonized indecision, remembering that he had dreamed only a short time ago, but fighting off the actual recollection of the dream. "Let yourself go," Dr. Martin said kindly. "Don't fight it--" A fragment of his mind let down its guard for a brief instant. It was like touching the surface of a whirlpool. He was sucked into the sweeping depths of the dream. He sensed that he cried out in terror as he plunged. But there was no one to hear. He was alone in space. Fear wrapped him like black, clammy fur. He felt the utter futility of even being afraid. He would simply remain as he was, and soon he would cease to be. But they were coming again. He sensed, rather than saw them. The searchers. And his fear of them was greater than his fear of space alone. He moved. Somehow he moved, driving headlong through great vastness while the pinpoints of light grew behind him. "Very satisfactory," Dr. Martin was saying. "An extremely satisfactory probe." His voice came through to Mel as from beyond vast barriers of time and space. Mel felt the thick sweat that covered his body. Weakness throbbed in his muscles. "It gives us a very solid anchor point," Dr. Martin said. "From here I think we run back to the beginning of the experience and unearth the whole thing. Are you ready, Mr. Hastings?" Mel felt too weak to nod. "Let 'er rip!" he muttered weakly. * * * * * The day was warm and sunny. He and Alice had arrived early at the spaceport to enjoy the holiday excitement preceding the takeoff. It was something they had both dreamed of since they were kids--a vacation in the fabulous domed cities and ruins of Mars. Alice was awed by her first close view of the magnificent ship lying in its water berth that opened to Lake Michigan. "It's _huge_--how can such an enormous ship ever get off the Earth?" Mel laughed. "Let's not worry about that. We know it does. That's all that matters." But he could not help being impressed, too, by the enormous size and the graceful lines of the luxury ship. Unlike Alice, he was not seeing it at close range for the first time. He had met the ship scores of times in his reporting job, interviewing famous and well-known personages as they departed or arrived from the fabulous playgrounds of Mars. "If you look carefully," Mel pointed out, "you'll see a lot of faces that make news when they come and go." Alice's face glowed as she clung to Mel's arm and recognized some of the famous citizens who would be their fellow passengers. "This is going to be the most fun we've ever had in our lives, darling." "Like a barrel of monkeys," Mel said casually, enjoying the bubbling excitement that was in Alice. The ship was so completely stabilized that the passengers did not even have to sit down during takeoff. They crowded the ports to watch the land and the water shoot past as the ship skimmed half the length of Lake Michigan in its takeoff run. As it bore into the upper atmosphere on an ever-increasing angle of climb, its own artificial gravity system took over and gave the illusion of horizontal flight with the Earth receding slowly behind. Mel and Alice wandered through the salons and along the spacious decks as if in some fairyland-come-true. All sense of time seemed to vanish and they floated with the great ship in timeless, endless space. He wasn't quite certain when he first became aware of his own sense of disquietude. It seemed to result from a change in the members of the crew. On the morning of the third day they ceased their universal and uninterrupted concern for their passengers' entertainment and enjoyment. Most of the passengers seemed to have taken no note of it. Mel commented to Alice. She laughed at him. "What do you expect? They've spent two full days showing us the ship and teaching us to play all the games aboard. You don't expect them to play nurse to us during the whole trip, do you?" It sounded reasonable. "I suppose so," said Mel dubiously. "But just what _are_ they doing? They all seem to be in such a hurry to get somewhere this morning." "Well, they must have some duties to perform in connection with running the ship." Mel shook his head in doubt. * * * * * Alice joined him in wandering about the decks, kibitzing on the games of the other passengers, and watching the stars and galaxies on the telescopic screens. It was on one of these that they first saw the shadow out in space. Small at first, the black shadow crossed a single star and made it wink. That was what caught Mel's attention, a winking star in the dead night of space. When he was sure, he called Alice's attention to it. "There's something moving out there." By now it had shape, like a tiny black bullet. "Where? I don't see anything." "It's crossing that patch of stars. Watch, and you can see it blot them out as it moves." "It's another ship!" Alice exclaimed. "That's exciting! To think we're passing another ship in all this great emptiness of space! I wonder where it's coming from?" "And where it's going to." They watched its slow, precise movement across the stars. After several minutes a steward passed by. Mel hailed him and pointed to the screen. "Can you tell us what that other ship is?" The steward glanced and seemed to recognize it instantly. But he paused in replying. "That's the Mars liner," he said finally. "In just a few minutes the public address system will announce contact and change of ship." "Change of ship?" Mel asked, puzzled. "I never heard anything about a change of ship." "Oh, yes," the steward said. "This is only the shuttle that we're on now. We transfer to the liner for the remainder of the trip. I'm sure that was explained to you at the time you purchased your tickets." He hurried away. Mel was quite sure no such thing had been explained to him when he purchased tickets. He turned back to the screen and watched the black ship growing swiftly larger now as it and the Martian Princess approached on contact courses. The public address system came alive suddenly. "This is your Captain. All passengers will now prepare to leave the shuttle and board the Mars liner. Hand luggage should be made ready. All luggage stowed in the hold will be transferred without your attention. It has been a pleasure to have you aboard. Contact with the liner will be made in fifteen minutes." From the buzz around him Mel knew that this was as much a surprise to everyone else as it was to him, but it was greeted with excitement and without question. Even Alice was growing excited now and others crowded around them when it was discovered what they were viewing. "It looks _big_," said Alice in subdued voice. "Bigger than this ship by far." Mel moved away and let the others have his place before the screen. His sense of uneasiness increased as he contemplated the approach of that huge black ship. And he was convinced its color _was_ black, that it was not just the monotone of the view screen that made it so. Why should there be such a transfer of passengers in mid-space? The Martian Princess was certainly adequate to make the journey to Mars. Actually they were more than a third of the way there, already. He wasn't sure why he felt so certain something was amiss. Surely there was no possibility that the great Connemorra Lines would plan any procedure to the detriment of the more than five thousand passengers aboard the ship. His uneasiness was pretty stupid, he thought. But it wouldn't go away. He returned to the crowd clustered at the viewing screen and took Alice by the arm to draw her away. She looked quizzically at him. "This is the most exciting thing yet. I want to watch it." "We haven't got much time," Mel said. "We've got a lot of things to get in our suitcases. Let's go down to our stateroom." "Everyone else has to pack, too. There's no hurry." "Fifteen minutes, the Captain said. We don't want to be the last ones." Unwillingly, Alice followed. Their stateroom was a long way from the salon. The fifteen minutes were almost up by the time they reached it. * * * * * Mel closed the door to their room and put his hands on Alice's shoulders. He glanced about warily. "Alice--I don't want to go aboard that ship. There's something wrong about this whole thing. I don't know what it is, but we're not going aboard." Alice stared at him. "Have you lost your mind? After all our hopes and all our planning you don't want to go on to Mars?" Mel felt as if a wall had suddenly sprung up between them. He clutched Alice's shoulders desperately in his hands. "Alice--I don't think that ship out there is going to Mars. I know it sounds crazy, but please listen to me--we weren't told anything about the Martian Princess being merely a shuttle and that we'd transfer to another ship out here. No one was told. The Martian Princess is a space liner perfectly capable of going to Mars. There's no reason why such a huge ship should be used merely as a shuttle." "That ship out there is bigger." "Why? Do we need any more room to finish the journey?" Alice shook herself out of his grasp. "I don't know the answers to those questions and I don't care to know them!" she said angrily. "If you think I'm going to give up this vacation and turn right around here in space and go back home you're crazy. If you go back you'll go back alone!" Alice whirled and ran to the door. Mel ran after her, but she was through the door and was melting into the moving throng by the time he reached the door. He took a step to follow, then halted. He couldn't drag her forcibly back into the stateroom. Maybe she'd return in a few minutes to pack her bags. He went back in the room and closed the door. * * * * * Even as he did so he knew that he was guessing wrong. Alice would be matching him in a game of nerves. She'd go on to the other ship, expecting him to pack the bags and follow. He sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands for a moment. A faint shudder passed through the ship and he heard the hollow ring of clashing metal. The unknown ship had made contact with the Martian Princess. Their airlocks were being mated now. From the porthole he could see the incredible mass of the ship. He crossed the room and pressed the curtains aside. His impression had been right. The ship _was_ black. Black, nameless, and blind. No insignia or portholes were visible anywhere on the hull within his range of vision. He didn't know what he was going to do, but he knew above all else that he wasn't going to board that ship. He paced the floor telling himself it was a stupid, neurotic apprehension that filled his mind, that the great Connemorra Lines could not be involved in any nefarious acts involving five thousand people--or even one person. They couldn't afford such risk. He couldn't shake it. He was certain that, no matter what the cost, he was not going to board that black ship. He looked about the stateroom. He couldn't remain here. They'd certainly find him. He had to hide somewhere. He stood motionless, staring out the porthole. There was no place he could hide with assurance inside the ship. But what about outside? His thoughts crumpled in indecision as he thought of Alice. Yet whatever the black ship meant, he could help no one if he went aboard. He had to get back to Earth and try to find out what it was all about and alert the authorities. Only in that way could he hope to help Alice. * * * * * He opened the stateroom door cautiously and stepped out. The corridor was filled with hurrying passengers, carrying hand luggage, laughing with each other in excitement. He joined them, moving slowly, alert for crew members. There seemed to be none of the latter in the corridors. Keeping close to the wall, he moved with the crowd until he reached the rounded niche that marked an escape chamber. As if pushed by the hurrying throng, he backed into it, the automatic doors opening and closing to receive him. The chamber was one of scores stationed throughout the ship as required by law. The escape chambers contained space suits for personal exit from the ship in case of emergency. They were never expected to be used. In any emergency requiring abandonment of the vessel it would be as suicidal to go into space in a suit as to remain with the ship. But fusty lawmakers had decreed their necessity, and passengers received a perfunctory briefing in the use of the chambers and the suits--which they promptly forgot. Mel wrestled now with what he remembered of the instructions. He inspected a suit hanging in its cabinet and then was relieved to find that the instructions were repeated on a panel of the cabinet. Slowly, he donned the suit, following the step by step instructions as he went. He began to sweat profusely from his exertions and from his fear of discovery. He finally succeeded in getting the cumbersome gear adjusted and fastened without being detected. He did not know if the airlock of the chamber had some kind of alarm that would alert the crew when it was opened. That was a chance he had to take. He discovered that it was arranged so that it could be opened only by a key operated from within the suit. This was obviously to prevent anyone leaving the ship unprotected. Perhaps with this safeguard there was no alarm. He twisted the lock and entered the chamber. He opened the outer door and faced the night of space. * * * He would not have believed that anything could be so utterly terrifying. His knees buckled momentarily and left him clinging to the side of the port. Sweat burst anew from every pore. Blindly, he pressed the jet control and forced himself into space. He arced a short distance along the curve of the ship and then forced himself down into contact with the hull. He clung by foot and hand magnetic pads, sick with nausea and vertigo. He had believed that by clinging to the outside of the hull he could escape detection and endure the flight back to Earth. In his sickness of body and mind the whole plan now looked like utter folly. He retched and closed his eyes and lay on the hull through the beginning of an eternity. * * * * * He had no concept of time. The chronometer in the suit was not working. But it seemed as if many hours had passed when he felt a faint shock pass through the hull beneath him. He felt a momentary elation. The ships had separated. The search for him--if any--had been abandoned. Slowly he inched his way around the hull to get a glimpse of the black ship. It was still there, standing off a few hundred yards but not moving. Its presence dismayed him. There could be no reason now for the two ships to remain together. The Martian Princess should be turning around for the return to Earth. Then out of the corner of his eye he saw it. A trace of movement. A gleam of light. Like a small moon it edged up the distant curvature of the hull. Then there were more--a nest of quivering satellites. Without thought, Mel pressed the jet control and hurled himself into space. The terror of his first plunge was multiplied by the presence of the searchers. Crewmen of the Martian Princess, he supposed. The absence of the space suit had probably been discovered. In headlong flight, he became aware of eternity and darkness and loneliness. The sun was a hot, bright disc, but it illuminated nothing. All that his mind clung to for identification of itself and the universe around it was gone. He was like a primeval cell, floating without origin, without purpose, without destination. Only a glimmer of memory pierced the thick terror with a shaft of rationality. Alice. He must survive for Alice's sake. He must find the way back to Alice--back to Earth. He looked toward the Martian Princess and the searchers on the hull. He cried out in the soundless dark. The searchers had left the hull and were pursuing him through open space. Their speed far exceeded his. It was futile to run before them--and futile to leave the haven of the Martian Princess. His only chance of survival or success lay in getting to Earth aboard the ship. In a long curve he arced back toward the ship. Instantly, the searchers moved to close in the arc and meet him on a collision course. He could see them now. They were not crewmen in spacesuits as he had supposed. Rather, the objects--two of them--looked like miniature spaceships. Beams of light bore through space ahead of them, and he suspected they carried other radiations also to detect by radar and infra red. In the depths of his mind he knew they were not of the Martian Princess. Nor were there any crewmen within them. They were robot craft of some kind, and they had come from the great black ship. He felt their searching beams upon him and waited for a deadly, blasting burst of heat or killing radiation. He was not prepared for what happened. * * * * * They closed swiftly, and the nearest robot came within a dozen feet, matching Mel's own velocity. Suddenly, from a small opening in the machine, a slender metal tentacle whipped out and wrapped about him like the coils of a snake. The second robot approached and added another binding. Mel's arms and legs were pinned. Frantically, he manipulated the jet control in the glove of the suit. This only caused the tentacles to cut deeply and painfully, and threatened to smash the shell of the suit. He cut the jets and admitted the failure of his frantic mission. In short minutes they were near the ships again. Mel wondered what kind of reprimand the crewmen of the Martian Princess could give him, and what fantastic justification they might offer for their own actions. But he wasn't being taken toward the Martian Princess. He twisted painfully in the grip of the robot tentacles and confirmed that he was being carried to the black stranger. Soundlessly, a port slid open and the robots swept him through into the dark interior of the ship. He felt himself dropped on a hard metal floor. The tentacles unwound. Alone, he struggled to his feet and flashed a beam of light from the suit flashlight to the walls about him. Walls, floor and ceiling were an indistinguishable dark gray. He was the only object in the chamber. While he strained his sight to establish features in the blank metallic surfaces a clipped, foreign voice spoke. "Remove your suit and walk toward the opening in the wall. Do not try to run or attack. You will not be harmed unless you attack." There was no use refusing. He did as commanded. A bright doorway opened in the wall before him. He walked through. It reminded him of a medical laboratory. Shelves and cabinets of hand instruments and electronic equipment were about. And in the room three men sat watching the doorway through which he entered. He gazed at the strangers as they at him. They looked ordinary enough in their white surgeons' smocks. All seemed to be of middle age, with dark hair turning gray at the fringe. One was considerably more muscular than the other two. One leaned to overweight. The third was quite thin. Yet Mel felt himself bristling like a dog in the dark of the moon. No matter how ordinary they looked, these three were not men of Earth. The certainty of this settled like a cold, dead weight in the pit of his stomach. "You--" he stammered. There was nothing to say. "Please recline on this couch," the nearest, the muscular one said. "We wish you no harm so do not be afraid. We wish only to determine if you have been harmed by your flight into space." All three of them were tense and Mel was sure they were worried--by his escapade. Had he nearly let some unknown cat out of the bag? "Please--," the muscular one said. He had no alternative. He might struggle, and destroy a good deal of apparatus, but he could not hope to overwhelm them. He lay on the couch as directed. Almost instantly the overweight one was behind him, seizing his arm. He felt the sting of a needle. The thin one was at his feet, looking down at him soberly. "He will rest," the thin one said, "and then we shall know what needs to be done." * * * The sleep had lasted for an eon, he thought. He had a sense of the passage of an enormous span of time when he at last awoke. His vision was fuzzy, but there was no mistaking the image before him. Alice. His Alice--safe. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, smiling down at him. He fought his way up to a half-sitting position. "Alice!" He wept. Afterwards, he said, "Where are we? What happened? I remember so many crazy things--the vacation to Mars." "Don't try to remember it all, darling," she said. "You were sick. Some kind of hysteria and amnesia hit you while we were there. We're home now. You'll soon be out of the hospital and everything will be all right." "I spoiled it," he murmured. "I spoiled it all for you." "No. I knew you were going to be all right. I even had a lot of fun all by myself. But we're going back. As soon as you are all well again we'll start saving up and go again." He nodded drowsily. "Sure. We'll go to Mars again and have a real vacation." Alice faded away. All of it faded away. * * * * * As if from a far distance the walls of Dr. Martin's laboratory seemed to close about him and the lights slowly increased. Dr. Martin was seated beside him, his head shaking slowly. "I'm so terribly sorry, Mr. Hastings. I thought we were going to get the full and true event this time. But it often happens, as in your case, that fantasy lies upon fantasy, and it is necessary to dig through great layers of them before uncovering the truth. I think, however, that we shall not have to go much deeper to find the underlying truth for you." Mel lay on the couch, continuing to stare at the ceiling. "Then there was no great, black ship out of space?" "Of course not! That is one danger of these analyses, Mr. Hastings. You must not be deceived into believing that a newly discovered fantasy is the truth for which you were looking. You must come back and continue your search." "Yes. Yes, of course." He got up slowly and was helped to the outer room by the Doctor and an attendant. The attendant gave him a glass of white, sweetish substance to drink. "A booster-upper," laughed Dr. Martin. "It takes away the grogginess that sometimes attends such a deep sweep. We will look for you day after tomorrow." Mel nodded and stepped out into the hall. * * * No great black ship. No mysterious little robot ships with tentacles that whip out and capture a man. No strange trio in surgeons' gowns. And no Alice-- A sudden spear of thought pierced his mind. Maybe all that was illusion, too. Maybe he could go home right now and find her waiting for him. Maybe-- No. That was real enough. The accident. Dr. Winters. The scene in the icy room next to Surgery at the hospital. Dr. Martin didn't know about that. He would have called that a fantasy, too, if Mel had tried to tell him. No. It was all real. The unbelievable, alien organs of Alice. The great, black ship. The mindless robot searchers. His nightmare had stemmed from all this that had happened out in space, which had somehow been wiped from his conscious memory. The nightmare had not existed in his boyhood, as he had thought. It was oriented in time now. But what had happened to Alice? There was no clue in the memory unearthed by Dr. Martin. Was her condition merely the result of some freak heredity or gene mutation? The surging turmoil in his mind was greater than before. There was only one way to quiet it--that was to carry out his original plan to go to Mars. He'd go out there again. He'd find out if the black ship existed or not. * * * * * The girl in the ticket office was kind but firm. "Our records show that you were a vacationer to Mars very recently. The demand is so great and the ship capacity so small that we must limit vacation trips to no more than one in any ten-year period." He turned away and went down the hall and out the doorway of the marble and brass Connemorra Lines Building. He walked through town for six blocks and the thought of old Jake Norton came to his mind. Jake had been an old timer in the city room when Mel was a cub. Jake had retired just a few months ago and lived in a place in town with a lot of other old men. Mel hailed the nearest cab and drove to Jake's place. "Mel, it's great to see you!" Jake said. "I didn't think any of the boys would remember an old man after he'd walked out for the last time." "People remember real easy when they want favors." "Sure," Jake said with a grin, "but there's not much of a favor I can do you any more, boy. Can't even loan you a ten until next payday." "Jake, you can help me," said Mel. "You don't expect to ever take a trip to Mars, do you?" "Mars! Are you crazy, Mel?" "I went once. I've got to go again. It's about Alice. And they won't let me. I didn't know you could go only once in ten years." Jake remembered. Alice had called him and all the other boys after they'd come back the other time. Mel had been sick, she said. He wouldn't remember the trip. They were asked not to say anything about it. Now Mel was remembering and wanted to go again. Jake didn't know what he should do. "What can I do to help you?" he asked. "I'll give you the money. Buy a ticket in your name. I'll go as Jake Norton. I think I can get away with it. I don't think they make any closer check than that." "Sure--if it'll do you any good," Jake said hesitantly. He was remembering the anxiety in Alice's voice the day she called and begged him not to say anything that would remind Mel of Mars. No one ever had, as far as Jake knew. He took the money and Mel waited at the old men's home. An hour later Jake called. "Eight months is the closest reservation I can get at normal rates, but I know of some scalpers who charge 50% more." Mel groaned. "Buy it no matter what the cost! I've got to go at once!" He would be broke for the next ten years. * * * * * It was little different from the other time. There was the same holiday excitement in the crowd of vacationers and those who had come to see them off. It was the same ship, even. All that was different was the absence of Alice. He stayed in his stateroom and didn't watch the takeoff. He felt the faint rocking motion as the ship went down its long waterway. He felt the shift as the artificial gravity took over. He lay on the bed and closed his eyes as the Martian Princess sought the cold night of space. For two days he remained in the room, emerging only for meals. The trip itself held no interest for him. He waited only for the announcement that the black ship had come. But by the end of the second day it had not come. Mel spent a sleepless night staring out at the endless horizon of stars. Dr. Martin had been right, he thought. There was no black ship. He had merely substituted one illusion for another. Where was reality? Did it exist anywhere in all the world? Yet, even if there were no black ship, his goal was still Mars. The third day passed without the appearance of the black ship. But on the very evening of that day the speaker announced: "All passengers will prepare for transfer from the shuttle ship to the Mars liner. Bring hand luggage--" Mel sat paralyzed while he listened to the announcement. So it was true! He felt the faint jar that rocked the Martian Princess as the two ships coupled. From his stateroom port Mel could see the stranger, black, ugly, and somehow deadly. He wished he could show Dr. Martin this "illusion"! He packed swiftly and left the room. Mel joined the surprised and excited throng now, not hanging back, but eager to find out the secret of the great black ship. The transition from one ship to the other was almost imperceptible. The structure of both corridors was the same, but Mel knew when the junction was crossed. He sensed the entry into a strange world that was far different from the common one he knew. Far down the corridor the crowd was slowing, forming into lines before stewards who were checking tickets. The passengers were shunted into branching corridors leading to their own staterooms. So far everything was so utterly normal that Mel felt an overwhelming despondency. It was just as they had been told; they were transferring to the Mars liner from the shuttle. The steward glanced at his ticket, held it for a moment of hesitation while he scanned Mel's face. "Mr. Norton--please come with me." The steward moved away in a direction no other passengers were taking. Another steward moved up to his place. "That way," the second man said to Mel. "Follow the steward." * * * * * Mel's heart picked up its beat as he stepped out of the line and moved slowly down the corridor after the retreating steward. They walked a long way through branching silent corridors that showed no sign of life. They stopped at last before a door that was like a score of others they had passed. There were no markings. The steward opened the door and stood aside. "In here please," he said. Mel entered and found himself alone. The steward remained outside. The room was furnished as an office. It was carpeted and paneled luxuriously. A door leading from a room at his left opened and admitted a tall man with graying hair. The man seemed to carry an aura of power and strength as he moved. An aura that Mel Hastings recognized. "James Connemorra!" Mel exclaimed. The man bowed his head slightly in acknowledgement. "Yes, Mr. Hastings," he said. Mel was dismayed. "How do you know who I am?" he said. James Connemorra looked through the port beside Mel and at the stars beyond. "I have been looking for you long enough I ought to know who you are." Something in the man's voice chilled Mel. "I have been easy enough to find. I'm only a news reporter. Why have you been looking for me?" Connemorra sank into a deep chair on the opposite side of the room. "Can't you guess?" he said. "It has something to do with what happened--before?" Mel asked. He backed warily against the opposite wall from Connemorra. "That time when I escaped from the Martian Princess rather than come aboard the black ship?" Connemorra nodded. "Yes." "I still don't understand. Why?" "It's an old story." Connemorra shrugged faintly. "A man learns too much about things he should know nothing of." "I have a right to know what happened to my wife. You know about her don't you?" Connemorra nodded. "What happened to her? Why was she different after her trip to Mars?" James Connemorra was silent for so long that Mel thought he had not heard him. "Is everyone different when they get back?" Mel demanded. "Does something happen to everybody who takes the Mars trip, the same thing that happened to Alice?" "You learned so much," said Connemorra, speaking as if to himself, "I had to hunt you down and bring you here." "What do you mean by that? I came through my own efforts. Your office tried to stop me." "Yet I knew who you were and that you were here. I must have had something to do with it, don't you think?" "What?" "I forced you to come by deception, so that no one knows you are here--except the old man whose name you used. Who will believe him that you came on the Martian Princess? Our records will show that a Jake Norton will be there on Earth. No one can ever prove that Mel Hastings ever came aboard." * * * * * Mel let his breath out slowly. His fear suddenly swallowed caution. He took a crouching step forward. Then he stopped, frozen. James Connemorra tilted the small pistol resting in his lap. Mel did not know how it came to be there. He had not seen it a moment ago. "What are you going to do?" Mel demanded. "What are you going to do with all of us?" "You know too much," said Connemorra, shrugging in mock helplessness. "What _can_ I do with you?" "Explain what I don't understand about the things you say I know." "Explain to you?" The idea seemed to amuse Connemorra greatly, as if it had some utterly ridiculous aspect. "Yes, I might as well explain," he said. "I haven't had anyone interested enough to listen for a long time. "Men have never been alone in space. We have been watched, inspected, and studied periodically since Neanderthal times by races in the galaxy who have preceded us in development by hundreds of thousands of years. These observers have been pleasantly excited by some of the things we have done, appalled by others. "There is a galactic organization that has existed for at least a hundred thousand years. This organization exists for the purpose of mutual development of the worlds and races of the galaxy. It also exists to maintain peace, for there were ages before its organization when interstellar war took place, and more than one great world was wiped out in such senseless wars. "When men of Earth were ready to step into space, the Galactic Council had to decide, as it had decided on so many other occasions, whether the new world was to be admitted as a member. The choice is not one which a new world is invited to make; the choice is made for it. A world which begins to send its ships through space becomes a member of the Council, or its ships cease to travel. The world itself may cease to exist." "You mean this dictatorial Council determines whether a world is fit to survive and actually wipes out those it decides against?" gasped Mel in horror. "They set themselves up as judges in the Universe?" "That's about the way they operate, to put it bluntly," said Connemorra. "You can call them a thousand unpleasant names, but you can't change the fact of their existence, nor the fact of their successful operation for a period as long as the age of the human race. "They would never have made their existence known to us if we had not begun sending our ships into space. But once we did that we were entering territory staked out by races that were there when we crawled out of our caves. Who can say what their rights are?" "But to pass judgment on entire worlds--" "We have no choice but to accept that such judgment is passed." "And their judgment of Earth--?" "Was that Earth was not ready for Council membership. Earthmen are still making too many blunders to join creatures that could cross the galaxy at the speed of light when we were learning how to chip flint." "But they didn't wipe us out!" * * * * * James Connemorra looked out at the stars. "I wonder," he said. "I wonder--" "What do you mean?" Mel said in a tight voice. "We have defects which are not quite like any they have encountered before. We have developed skills in the manufacture of artifacts, but we have no capacity for using them. For example, we have developed vast systems of communication, but these systems have not improved our communications they have actually blocked communication." "That's crazy!" said Mel. "Do they suppose smoke signals are superior to the 3-d screens in our homes?" "As a matter of fact, they do. And so do I. When a man must resort to smoke signals he is very certain that he has something to say before he goes to the trouble of putting the message in the air. But our fabulous screens prevent us from communicating with each other by throwing up a wall of pseudo-communication that we can't get through. We subject ourselves to a barrage of sound and light that has a communication content of almost zero. "The same is true of our inventions in transportation. We have efficient means of travel to all parts of the world and now to the Universe itself. But we don't travel. We use our machines to block traveling." "I can understand the first argument, but not this one!" said Mel. "We move our bodies to new locations with our machines, but our minds remain at home. We take our rutted thoughts, our predispositions, our cultural concepts wherever we go. We do not touch, even with a fragment of our minds, that which our machines give us contact with. We do not travel. We move in space, but we do not travel. "This is their accusation. And they're right. We are still doing what we have always done. We are using space flight for the boring, the trivial, the stupid; using genius for a toy, like a child banging an atomic watch on the floor. It happened with all our great discoveries and inventions: the gasoline engine, the telephone, the wireless. We've built civilizations of monumental stupidity on the wonders of nature. One race of the Galactics has a phrase they apply to people like us: 'If there is a God in Heaven He has wept for ten thousand years.' * * * * * "But all this is not the worst. A race that is merely stupid seldom gets out to space. But ours has something else they fear: destructiveness. They have plotted our history and extrapolated our future. If they let us come out, war and conflict will follow." "They can't know that!" "They say they can. We are in no position to argue." "So they plan to destroy us--" "No. They want to try an experiment that has been carried out just a few times previously. They are going to reduce us from what they term the critical mass which we have achieved." "Critical mass? That's a nuclear term." "Right. Meaning ready to blow up. That's where we are. Two not-so-minor nuclear wars in fifty years. They see us carrying our destructiveness into space, fighting each other there, infecting other races with our hostility. But if we are broken down into smaller groups, have the tools of war removed, and are forced to take another line of development--well, they have hopes of salvaging us." "But they can't do a thing like that to us! What do they intend? Taking groups of Earthmen, deporting them to other worlds--breaking them apart from each other forever--?" The coldness found its resting place in Mel's chest. He stared at James Connemorra. Then his eyes moved slowly over the walls of the room in the black ship and out to the stars. The black ship. "This ship--! You transfer your passengers to this Galactic ship for deportation to other worlds! But they come back--" "They are sent to colonies on other worlds where conditions are like those on Earth--with significant exceptions. The colonies are small, the largest are only a few thousand. The problems there are different than on Earth--and they are tough. The natural resources are not the same. The development of the resulting cultures will be vastly different from that of Earth. The Galactic Council is very interested in the outcome--which will not be known with certainty for a thousand years or so." "But they come back," Mel repeated. "You bring them back!" "For each Earthman who goes out, a replacement is sent back. The replacement is an android supplied by the Council." "Android!" Mel felt his reason slipping. He knew he was shouting. "Then Alice--the Alice that died was an android, she was not my wife! My Alice is still alive! You can take me to her--" Connemorra nodded. "Alice is still alive, and well. No harm has come to her." "Take me to her!" Mel knew he was pleading, but in his anguish he had no pride. Connemorra seemed to ignore his plea. "Earth's population is slowly being diluted by the removal of top people. The androids behave in every way like the individuals they replace, but they are preconditioned against the inherent destructiveness of Earthmen." Blind anger seemed to rise within Mel. "You have no right to separate me from Alice. Take me to her!" His rage ignited and he leaped forward. The small gun in Connemorra's hand spurted twice. Mel felt a double impact in a moment of great wonder. It couldn't end like this, he thought. It couldn't end without his seeing Alice once more. Just once more-- * * * * * He sank to the floor. The pain was not great, but he knew he was dying. He looked down at his hand that covered the great wound in his mid-section. There was something wrong. He felt the stickiness, but the red blood was not welling out. Instead, a thick bubble of green ooze moved from the wound and spread over his clothes and his hand. An alien greenness that was like nothing human. He had seen it once before. Alice. He stared up at Connemorra with wide, wondering eyes. "Everything went wrong, my poor android," said Connemorra softly. "After your human was brought back to the ship we were forced to go through with the usual process of imprinting his mind content upon his android. But we had to wipe out all memory of the attempted escape from the Martian Princess. This was not successful. It still clung in the nightmares you experienced. And the psycho-recovery brought it all back. "We tried to cover it with an amnesiac condition instead of the usual pre-printed memory of a Mars vacation. And all this might have worked if the Alice android had not been defective also. A normal android has protective mechanisms that make accidents and subsequent discovery impossible. But the Alice android failed, and you set out on a course to uncover us. I had to find a way to destroy you--murder. "I'm truly sorry. I don't know how an android thinks or feels. Sometimes I'm afraid of all of you. You are like men, but I've seen the factories in which you are produced. There are many things I do not know. I know only that I had to obey the Galactic Council or Earth would have been destroyed long ago. "And something else I know: Alice and Mel Hastings are content and happy. They are on a lovely world, very much like Central Valley." He closed his eyes as he felt the life--or whatever it was--seeping out of him. It came out right, after all, he thought. Like a wooden soldier with a painted smile, fallen from a shelf, he lay twisted upon the floor. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from _Amazing Stories_ December 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. 
26140	----	[Illustration] SECURITY _If you let a man learn, and study, and work--and clamp a lid on so that nothing he takes into his mind can be let out--one way or another he'll blow a safety valve!_ BY ERNEST M. KENYON Illustrated by Freas Suddenly Collins snapped the pencil between his fingers and hurled the pieces across the lab, where they clattered, rolled from the bench to the floor, and were still. For a moment he sat leaning against the desk, his hands trembling. He wasn't sure just when the last straw had been added, but he was sure that he had had enough. The restrictions, red tape, security measures of these government laboratories seemed to close in on his mind in boiling, chaotic waves of frustration. What was the good of his work, all this great installation, all the gleaming expensive equipment in the lab around him? He was alone. None of them seemed to share his problem, the unctuous, always correct Gordon, the easy-mannered, unbearable Mason, all of them gave him a feeling of actual physical sickness. Gardner's "Nucleonics and Nuclear Problems" lay open on the desk before him, but he looked instead beyond through the clear curving glass windows toward the sweep of green hills and darkening sky and the shadows of the lower forests that gave Fair Oaks its name. Beside him unfinished lay the summaries of the day's experiments, and the unorganized, hurriedly jotted notes for tomorrow's work. The old intellectual alertness was gone. Delight in changing theory, in careful experimentation no longer sprang from his work and were a part of it. There was a dull, indefinable aching in his head and a dry, dissatisfied sensation in his mouth. Along the ordered walks below his laboratory windows workers and technicians streamed toward the gates, checking out for the day through the usual mass of red tape, passes, and Geiger tests. Lights were flicking on in the long East Wing Dormitory across the quadrangle, and the mess hall, where he had recently eaten a tasteless supper, was lighted. Shortly after restrictions had really begun to tighten up last fall, he had written to a worker who had published making a minor correction in his calculations and adding some suggestions arising from his own research. A week later his letter was returned completely censored, stamped "Security-Violation." It was that evasive Gordon's fault. He knew it, but he couldn't prove it. Collins suspected that the man was not a top-notch researcher and so was in administration. Perhaps Gordon was jealous of his own work. Even the Journals were drying up. Endless innocuous papers recalculating the values of harmless constants and other such nonsense were all that was being published. They were hardly worth reading. Others were feeling the throttling effects of security measures, and isolated, lone researchers were slowing down, listless and anemic from the loss of the life blood of science, the free interchange of information. The present research job he was doing was coming slowly, but what difference did it make? It would never be published. Probably it would be filed with a Department of Defense code number as Research Report DDNE-42 dash-dash-dash. And there it would remain, top-secret, guarded, unread, useless. Somewhere in the desk drawers was the directive worded in the stiff military manner describing the procedures for clearing papers for publication. When he had first come here, he had tried that. "Well, good, Collins," Gordon, the Division Administrator, had said, "glad to check it over. Always happy when one of our men has something for publication. Gives the Division a good name. I'll let you know, but we have to be careful. Security you know." Somehow he had never heard. The first time he had made a pest of himself with Gordon who was polite, evasive, always plausible. Gordon, Gordon--it was becoming an obsession with him he knew, but the man appeared at every turn. He personified the system. In the past months his work had seemed to clog up in details and slow down. The early days of broad, rapid outlines and facile sketching in of details were gone. Now the endless indignities, invasion of personal rights and freedom, the hamstringing of his work, the feeling of being cut off from the main currents of his field, filled him with despair, anger, and frustration. * * * * * Suddenly he raised his head, slammed the notebook shut and switched off the desk lamp. Not tonight. Tomorrow would be time enough to write out this stuff. He needed a drink. The hall was dark as he locked the door to his lab except at the far end near the stairway where a patch of yellow light shone through an open doorway. Mason, he thought, Allan Mason, the one guy at Fair Oaks Nuclear Energy Laboratories who was always so damnedly cheerful, who didn't seem to mind the security restrictions, and who was seen so often with Gordon. As he walked rapidly past the open doorway, he caught a flashing impression from the corner of his eye of Mason's tall figure bent over his bench, his long legs wrapped around a lab stool, the perpetual unlit pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth. Then as he swung quickly toward the stairs, he heard Mason's cheerful hail. "Hi, Milt, hold up a sec." Reluctantly he paused at the head of the stairs scowling momentarily, and then slowly turning and retraced his steps. The lab was brightly lighted, and Mason stretched and smiled pleasantly. "Come in, old man, I'm about ready to knock off for the evening. How goes it?" Collins mumbled an O.K. trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, and Mason went on. "Just finishing up some loose ends so I can get off to the Society meeting on Monday. You going?" Shaking his head Collins felt his dislike for this man growing. The annual meeting of the North American Society of Theoretical Physicists. He didn't even give it any thought any more. Maybe he could go, but it didn't seem worth the effort. In the past he had tried to go to the meetings, but somehow work, rush work, some change of emphasis had come up on the project, and he had had to cancel his plans. He'd finally given up, but with Mason these things seemed to come easily, and he wondered why-- "That's too bad"--his voice droned pleasantly on, and Collins' eye caught several botany texts in the book rack above Mason's desk. So, he had time to read stuff outside of his field. His work was going well. He had time for meetings and was allowed to go to them--the anger rose slowly like a swelling bubble from the hard core of his stomach. Then he realized that Mason had stopped talking and was looking at him. "Milt, you look glum tonight. Is there-- Why not have supper with me, and we'll take in the movie in the lounge?" "I've eaten already." Collins was on his feet. He forced a, "Thanks anyway. See you tomorrow. I'm--" and he was gone. As he strode angerly across the quadrangle Mason's words and cheerful attitude rankled in his mind. The gravel of the walk spurted from under his shoes, and the night air was clear and cool. It was good at least to feel something other than despair again, even anger. But once in his study with its attached bedroom and bath that made up his living quarters, he sank to the couch near his desk, all of the fight gone. He needed a drink. Today all the irritations, tensions, and suspicions of the past months seemed to close in on him. His work was going badly. Perhaps seeing Mason had brought it to a head. The fifth of bourbon in the bottom desk drawer was partly gone from the party last month. He took a swallow neat, and the fire of the liquid burned and clawed its way down his throat and spread with blossoming warmth in his stomach. Kicking off his shoes and loosening his tie he leaned back with the bottle on the floor beside him. Later in the evening when the early clarity of thought had left him and his mind moved disjointedly in and out of seemingly brilliant, emotional solutions to his problem, he knew he must have a showdown. Lying back on the couch he drifted into sleep determined to have it out with Gordon in the morning--resign if necessary. * * * * * The momentary pause of lighting his cigarette gave Collins a chance to decide where to start, as he sat across from Gordon. The Division Administrator was older with a heavy-jowled, close shaven face, and he waited patiently for Collins to speak. "Dr. Gordon, I am having a great deal of difficulty in making an adjustment both in my work and in my personal relations here at Fair Oaks, and last night I realized that I would have to talk to you about it." Gordon's face changed slightly, his eyebrows rising almost imperceptibly. "So, what ... how do you mean, Milt?" Use of the first name--the familiar approach thought Collins--administrative technique number blank blank dash blank. "Dr. Gordon, these security measures we are under, the difficulty of publishing, of getting to scientific meetings, the problem of getting furloughs, lack of knowledge of what is going on in my own field, it's just a little too much. It's personally irritating, but it greatly hampers my work as well. Frankly, I'm against the entire security program as it now stands. If it isn't stopped research will ... well, simply be impossible. Free interchange of information is essential to--" His fingers were gripping the arms of his chair. "Yes, of course, Milt, but corny as it sounds there is a war on you know. Oh, not a war with military weapons--yet, but a cold war of science and engineering, a struggle for supremacy in many fields of knowledge. If information of our work leaks out, gets to the enemy, we might as well not do that work. We can't be too careful." "I agree, but it goes too far." He leaned forward. "My private mail is read, and on my last furlough I am certain I was watched from the time I left the gates out there until I returned, and I don't like it. I can't prove it, but-- That's getting to the point that life's not worth while." "Come now, Milt, don't you think you're taking this a little too seriously? You're getting stale, overwrought. You need a fresh point of view. Lots of our people feel as you do at one time or another, but most of us learn to live with these necessary regulations, and do our work in spite of them. Let me make a suggestion, relax, take a little time off, develop a hobby. Why not do some reading in a field of science other than your own. It's good for you. Several of the people here are doing it. I do it, Carter, even Mason for instance--" Collins could feel the anger rising in him again. "Look, Gordon, I'm not going to mince words. I'm sick and tired of this mess, and you might as well know it. You can have all your damn relaxations and hobbies, or what have you. I want to do my work, and if I can't do it here, I'm going somewhere where I can do it. In plain English unless we can have an understanding right now--I resign." It had come out, and Collins was breathing hard, but Gordon's expression hardly changed as he looked over the tips of his joined fingers, while the younger man stopped and crushed out his cigarette viciously in the ash disposer on the arm of his chair. Gordon doodled on a small pad for a moment, his eyes not meeting Collins'. Then he spoke slowly. "I'm sorry you feel that way, Milt. I ... I'm afraid I cannot accept your resignation. You see," he said softly, "none of us can leave Fair Oaks--now." Collins looked up, amazement and incredulity written on his face. "What do you mean--can't leave? I can leave any time--" Gordon slowly shook his head almost sadly. "No, only assistants, technicians, maintenance people, and they are carefully watched or restricted to this area. People like yourself, like me, we have information, knowledge which cannot be let out of government hands at this time. We're here probably for the 'duration'; maybe longer." "But--this is barbarous. I--" the words clogged, jumbled as he tried to get them out. His emotions ran from anger, to amazement, to indignation, followed by a trickle of fear, and as he stared at Gordon, the fear grew. He could scarcely hear Gordon's words-- "Take my advice--relax--and forget your fears--accept the restrictions and go ahead--read in some other field--come in again when you've thought it out." He was scarcely aware when Gordon slipped a bound journal volume into his hands and walked with him to the door--and closed it behind him. * * * * * Collins left Gordon's office in Administration moving slowly, one arm hanging loosely by his side, the other clutching the book. The corridor stretched ahead into B Wing with its laboratories flooded with the glow of mid-morning sunshine, bright and unreal. His mind was dazed, his thinking processes stopped in a kind of stunned unbelief. He could not even quit now. An undercurrent of fear ran close to the surface of his confused mind. It was the end of science, the end of all his work. All of the stifling, strangling restrictions of security on his work, on his private life, came whirling back as a monstrous, formless threat, something unspeakably big and powerful and unbeatable against which he could not fight. To his right as he moved slowly down the hall the double doors of the main library reading room were open with the stacks and study cubicles beyond, silent and restful. He paused and then entered crossing into the maze of the stacks through a grilled iron doorway. The important thing now was not to meet anyone, not to have to speak or smile or think. It was very important now to be alone and quiet. He walked until he found an empty cubicle, the endless walls of books, repositories of knowledge, silent and reproachful around him. Knowledge and books such as these would soon be added to no longer. He slumped into the chair and gazed at the tiny reading desk with its softly glowing lamp and the small stack of volumes on the rack left by previous users. Absently he stared for a long time at the volume Gordon had given him as if seeing it for the first time. Then with a deliberate effort he opened it and thumbed through slowly only half seeing its pages. _The Journal of Botanical Research._ The pages in the _Journal_ were like a look through an open window. Outside of classified projects in "harmless" fields of research the work of science went on, papers were published, reputations were made, freedom still existed. He remembered Gordon's sleek smile and advice to relax and read in other fields. This stupid useless advice still rankled. Of course, he probably was stale, but to read junk like this! Silently and in his mind, he cursed the day he had studied physics, better archeology or zoology, anything. Suddenly he stopped riffling the pages and leaned forward, rapidly turning back to something that had caught his eye. It was a three and one-half page paper on "The Statistical Probability of Chromosome Crossover" written in neat sections with several charts and references. It was by M. Mason. Something clicked in Collins' mind--read the journals--Mason's unconcern with security, the botany books on his desk the night before. It didn't make sense, but it added up to something. Mason knew something and so did Gordon. He half rose. He had to get to the bottom of it. Clutching the bound _Journal_ Collins turned and weaved through the stacks and out of the library waving the protesting librarian aside and strode down the corridor toward the laboratories. * * * * * The door to Mason's lab was partially open, and he looked up quizzically from taking an instrument reading as Collins burst in. "Mason, I--" he planked the bound volume of the _Botanical Journal_ on the lab bench beside the instrument ignoring Mason's wince as the instrument needle quivered with the jar. "Did you write this?" His finger jabbed at the open page. Mason glanced at Collins, removed a pair of glasses from his white lab coat pocket, and putting them on leaned forward and studied the page for a moment. "Yes. Not bad either though I shouldn't say it. I didn't know you were interested in Botany." His voice was casual with a slight questioning note. Collins suddenly felt ridiculous. What was he accusing the man of? Mason had a right to publish on anything he wanted to, still a muddled series of half facts, incidents and suspicions chased through his mind. Mason walked over to his desk and filling his pipe sat down thoughtfully and leaned back motioning Collins into a nearby chair. "I think I know what is on your mind, Milt. Maybe I can straighten this out. Gordon told me a little while ago that you wanted to resign." Collins stiffened. So, these two were working together. "Milt, did you ever stop to think how lucky we are? Where can you get better equipment, help, coöperation in the country than here?" Collins leaned forward to speak, but Mason went on. "Oh, I know all the problems of security and how it strangles work." He paused for a moment as though trying to grasp the right words. "Look, Milt, what's the basic problem? Why do security measures strangle research? Isn't it a matter basically of a breakdown in the interchange of ideas? Sure, and it has come about because there has been no method of communication which would not get to and be used by our enemies. So, like yourself, I'm forbidden to publish the results of my work here in the journals. Why? Because those results are in my field of study, chain reactions. "I'm frustrated just as you have been and science suffers. What do I do? I write articles in a field that isn't restricted, botany. It's a new field of interest to me, a hobby if you like. The stuff is published and gets wide distribution. Every decent library in the country gets it. Every scientist all over the country can read the papers if he cares to. Then the word gets around, by the scientific grapevine, with a little judicious ear-bending. I get a reputation--in Botany. "Now the botanists know that I am not a botanist. They understand what I am doing. The word spreads, and they leave my stuff alone. The physicists in my specialty know my name, and they get the word, and pretty soon they are glancing over certain botany journals apparently for relaxation. They read my papers. It's slow, but it works." Mason leaned forward and struck a large stick match under the lab bench top. Drawing several puffs through his pipe his eyes were on Collins' confused face. Then he laid the pipe down. "The enemy botanists may read the botany journals, sure, but the enemy physicists don't. Their totalitarian training has made them inflexible in their thinking, besides they have their hands full trying to keep up in their own fields. The curse of specialization is a blessing to us. When the enemy botanists read it, it makes sense, but it doesn't help them much in their work--more or less innocuous." He waved toward the botany texts on his desk. "It took me six months to learn enough about it to do the job." As he spoke Mason untangled his legs and brought the open journal over to his desk. "All right, notice in my article I am writing on chromosomes--chains of genes, and my field is--?" "Chain reactions," Collins finished softly, "but--" "The article itself is well disguised, but it's a parable. It's botany on the surface, but it gets over enough chain-reaction theory to be good physics, if you read it right. You see botany is what you might call my code field." The bright light of noon shimmered on the white buildings and green lawns beyond the lab windows. Collins was silent and thoughtful. "Well, that's about all. Gordon knows. He's in with us, but the Government doesn't suspect--yet. Oh, they may catch on to us. Information may leak out to the enemy. There's some chance, but when we're caught we'll think of something else. Most of us believe it's worth the chance. There's a risk in anything." Suddenly all the pieces fell into place, and Collins' anger and confusion melted away. In its place was a sense of relief and hope, hope for the future. It wasn't the final answer, but it was a way to keep going. He was not alone any longer. He had friends who understood, who had been through what he had been through. It was a good feeling. He heard Mason's voice again. "Milt, why don't you do some library work? Botany's my code field. I don't know what yours is, but you've got some catching up to do. There may be some interesting stuff published already in your code field." Collins did, and he developed his new interest enthusiastically. Gordon had been right. He had been getting stale. Besides, astronomy was a fascinating field, and suns with their revolving planets in some respects are very like atomic systems, if you look at it that way. THE END Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Astounding Science Fiction October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 
26168	----	THE SUCCESS MACHINE By HENRY SLESAR _Mechanical brains are all the rage these days, so General Products just had to have one. But the blamed thing almost put them out of business. Why? It had no tact. It insisted upon telling the truth!_ The Personnelovac winked, chittered, chortled, chuckled, and burped a card into the slot. Colihan picked it up and closed his eyes in prayer. "Oh, Lord. Let this one be all right!" He read the card. It was pink. "_Subject #34580. Apt. Rat. 34577. Psych. Clas. 45. Last Per. Vac._ "_An. 3/5/98. Rat. 19. Cur. Rat. 14._ "_Analysis: Subject demonstrates decreased mechanical coordination. Decrease in work-energy per man-hour. Marked increase in waste-motion due to subject's interest in non-essential activities such as horseracing. Indication of hostility towards superiors._ "_Recommendation: Fire him._" Colihan's legs went weak. He sat down and placed the card in front of him. Then, making sure he was unobserved, he broke a company rule and began to Think. _Something's wrong_, he thought. _Something is terribly wrong. Twenty-four pink cards in the last month. Twenty-four out of forty. That's a batting average of_--He tried to figure it out with a pencil, but gave it up as a bad job. _Maybe I'll run it through the Averagovac_, he thought. _But why bother? It's obvious that it's high. There's obviously SOMETHING WRONG._ The inter-com beeped. "Ten o'clock department head meeting, Mr. Colihan." [Illustration: The steel brain was having more fun than people.] "All right, Miss Blanche." He rose from his chair and took the pink card with him. He stood before the Action Chute for a moment, tapping the card against his teeth. Then, his back stiffened with a sense of duty, and he slipped the card inside. * * * * * The meeting had already begun when Colihan took his appointed place. Grimswitch, the Materielovac operator looked at him quizzically. _Damn your eyes, Grimswitch_, he thought. _It's no crime to be three minutes late. Nothing but a lot of pep talk first five minutes anyway._ "PEP!" said President Moss at the end of the room. He slammed his little white fist into the palm of his other hand. "It's only a little word. It only has three little letters. P-E-P. Pep!" Moss, standing at the head of the impressive conference table, leaned forward and eyed them fixedly. "But those three little letters, my friends, spell out a much bigger word. A _much_ bigger word for General Products, Incorporated. They spell PROFIT! And if you don't know how _profit_ is spelled, it's M-O-N-N-E-Y!" There was an appreciative laugh from the assembled department heads. Colihan, however, was still brooding on the parade of pink cards which had been emerging with frightening regularity from his think-machine, and he failed to get the point. "Naughty, naughty," Grimswitch whispered to him archly. "Boss made a funny. Don't forget to laugh, old boy." Colihan threw him a sub-zero look. "Now let's be serious," said the boss. "Because things _are_ serious. Mighty serious. Somewhere, somehow, _somebody's_ letting us down!" The department heads looked uneasily at each other. Only Grimswitch continued to smile vacantly at the little old man up front, drumming his fingers on the glass table top. When the President's machine-gunning glance caught his eyes, Colihan went white. _Does he know about it?_ he thought. "I'm not making accusations," said Moss. "But there is a let-down someplace. Douglas!" he snapped. Douglas, the Treasurer, did a jack-in-the-box. "Read the statement," said the President. "First quarter fiscal year," said Douglas dryly. "Investment capital, $17,836,975,238.96. Assets, $84,967,442,279.55. Liabilities, $83,964,283,774.60. Production costs are--" Moss waved his hand impatiently. "The meat, the meat," he said. Douglas adjusted his glasses. "Total net revenue, $26,876,924.99." "COMPARISON!" The President screamed. "Let's have last first quarter, you idiot!" "_Ahem!_" Douglas rattled the paper in annoyance. "Last first quarter fiscal year net revenue $34,955,376.81. Percent decrease--" "Never mind." The little old man waved the Treasurer to his seat with a weary gesture. His face, so much like somebody's grandmother, looked tragic as he spoke his next words. "You don't need the Accountovac to tell you the significance of those figures, gentlemen." His voice was soft, with a slight quaver. "We are not making much p-r-o-f-i-t. We are losing m-o-n-e-y. And the point is--what's the reason? There must be _some_ reason." His eyes went over them again, and Colihan, feeling like the culprit, slumped in his chair. "I have a suggestion," said the President. "Just an idea. Maybe some of us just aren't showing enough p-e-p." There was a hushed silence. The boss pushed back his chair and walked over to a cork-lined wall. With a dramatic gesture, he lifted one arm and pointed to the white sign that covered a fourth of it. "See that?" he asked. "What does it say?" The department heads looked dubious. "_Well, what does it say?_" repeated Moss. "ACT!" The department heads cried in chorus. "Exactly!" said the little old man with a surprising bellow. "ACT! The word that made us a leader. The word that guides our business destiny. The word that _built_ General Products!" * * * * * He paced the floor. The chairs in the conference room creaked as the department heads stirred to follow him with their eyes. "ACT is our motto. ACT is our password. ACT is our key to success. And why not? The Brains do the thinking. All of us put together couldn't think so effectively, so perfectly, so honestly as the Brains. They take the orders, designate raw materials, equipment, manpower. They schedule our work. They analyze our products. They analyze our people." Colihan trembled. "There's only one important function left to us. And that's ACT!" The President bowed his head and walked slowly back to his seat. He sat down, and with great fatigue evident in his voice, he concluded his polemic. "That's why we must have pep, gentlemen. Pep. Now--how do you spell it?" "P! E! P!" roared the department heads. The meeting was over. The department heads filed out. * * * * * Colihan's secretary placed the morning mail on his desk. There was a stack of memos at least an inch thick, and the Personnel Manager moaned at the sight of it. "Production report doesn't look too good," said Miss Blanche, crisply. "Bet we get a flood of aptitude cards from Morgan today. Grimswitch has sent over a couple. That makes eleven from him this month. He really has his problems." Colihan grunted. _He deserves them_, he thought. "How did the meeting go?" "Huh?" Colihan looked up. "Oh, fine, fine. Boss was in good voice, as usual." "I think there's an envelope from him in the stack." "What?" Colihan hoped that his concern wasn't visible. He riffled through the papers hurriedly, and came up with a neat white envelope engraved with the words: OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT. Miss Blanche watched him, frankly curious. "That will be all," he told her curtly. When she had left, he ripped the envelope open and read the contents. It was in Moss's own cramped handwriting, and it was a request for a three o'clock "man-to-man" talk. _Oh, Lord_, he thought. _Now it's going to happen._ * * * * * President Moss was eating an apple. He ate so greedily that the juice spilled over his chin. Sitting behind his massive oak desk, chair tilted back, apple juice dappling his whiskers, he looked so small and unformidable, that Colihan took heart. "Well, Ralph--how goes it?" _He called me Ralph_, thought Colihan cheerfully. _He's not such a bad old guy._ "Don't grow apples like they used to," the President said. "This hydroponic stuff can't touch the fruit we used to pick. Say, did you ever climb a real apple tree and knock 'em off the branches?" Colihan blinked. "No, sir." "Greatest thrill in the world. My father had an orchard in Kennebunkport. Apples by the million. Green apples. Sweet apples. Delicious. Spy. Baldwin." He sighed. "Something's gone out of our way of life, Ralph." _Why, he's just an old dear_, thought Colihan. He looked at the boss with new sympathy. "Funny thing about apples. My father used to keep 'em in barrels down in the basement. He used to say to me, 'Andrew,' he'd say, 'don't never put a sour apple in one of these barrels. 'Cause just one sour apple can spoil the whole derned lot.'" The boss looked at Colihan and took a big noisy bite. Colihan smiled inanely. Was Moss making some kind of point? "Well, we can't sit around all day and reminisce, eh, Ralph? Much as I enjoy it. But we got a business to run, don't we?" "Yes, sir," said the Personnel Manager. "Mighty big business, too. How's your side of it, Ralph? Old Personnelovac hummin' along nicely?" "Yes, sir," said Colihan, wondering if he should voice his fears about the Brain. "Marvelous machine, that. Most marvelous of 'em all, if you ask me. Sizes up a man beautifully. And best of all, it's one hundred percent _honest_. That's a mighty important quality, Ralph." * * * * * Colihan was getting worried. The boss's conversation was just a little too folksy for his liking. "Yes, sir, a mighty fine quality. My father used to say: 'Andrew, an honest man can always look you in the eyes.'" Colihan stared uncomprehendingly. He realized that Moss had stopped talking, so he looked him squarely in the eyes and said: "He must have been a fine man, your father." "He was honest," said Moss. "I'll say that for him. He was honest as they come. Did you ever hear of Dimaggio?" "It sounds familiar--" "It should. Dimaggio was a legendary figure. He took a lantern and went out into the world looking for an honest man. And do you know something? He couldn't find one. You know, Ralph, sometimes _I_ feel like Dimaggio." Colihan gulped. "And do you know why? Because sometimes I see a thing like _this_--" the boss's hand reached into the desk and came out with a thick bundle of pink cards--"and I wonder if there's an honest man left in the world." * * * * * He put the cards in front of Colihan. "Now, sir," said Moss. "Let's talk a little business. These cards are all pink. That means dismissal, right? That's twenty-four people fired in the last month, is that correct?" "Yes, sir," said Colihan unhappily. "And how many cards went through the Personnelovac this month?" "Forty." "So that's twenty-four out of forty. A batting average of--" The boss's brow puckered. "Well. Never mind. But that's quite an unusual record, wouldn't you say so?" "Yes, sir, but--" "_So_ unusual that it would call for immediate ACTION, wouldn't it?" The President's face was now stormy. "Yes, sir. But I checked the Brain--" "Did you, Ralph?" "Yes, sir. And the Maintainovac said it was perfect. There's nothing wrong with it." "_Nothing_ wrong? You call twenty-four firings out of forty _nothing_?" The old man stood up, still holding the core of his apple. "Well, I don't understand it either, Mr. Moss." Colihan felt dew on his forehead. "Nothing seems to satisfy the Brain anymore. It seems to develop higher and higher standards, or something. Why, I'm not sure it wouldn't even fire--" "WHO?" said Moss thunderously. "WHO wouldn't it even fire?" The thunder hit Colihan squarely. He swallowed hard, and then managed to say: "Anybody, sir. Me, for instance." The President's face suddenly relaxed. "I'm no tyrant, my boy. You know that. I'm just doing a job, that's all." "Of course, sir--" "Well, all I want you to do is keep your eye on things. It could be a coincidence of course. That's the _logical_ explanation." He narrowed his eyes. "What do _you_ think, Ralph?" "Me, sir?" said Ralph, wide-eyed. "I don't _think_, sir. I ACT, sir!" "Good boy!" The boss chuckled and clapped his hand on Colihan's shoulder. Moss was momentarily satisfied. * * * * * The Personnelovac burped. Colihan picked up the card with a groan. It was pink. He walked over to the Action Chute and dropped it inside. As it fluttered down below, Colihan shook his head sadly. "Thirty-one," he said. He placed the next personnel record into the Information chamber. He flipped the lever, and the Personnelovac, now hot with usage, winked, chittered, chortled, and chuckled with amazing speed. The burp was almost joyful as the card popped out. But Colihan's face was far from joyful as he picked it up. Pink. "Thirty-two," he said. The next card was from Grimswitch's department. It was Subject #52098. The number was familiar. Colihan decided to check the file. "Sam Gilchrist," he said. "_Couldn't_ be anything wrong with Sam. Why, he's a blinkin' _genius_!" Flip. Wink. Chitter. Chortle. Chuckle. BURP! Pink. "Poor Sam!" said Colihan. He fed the other records through quickly. Pink. Pink. PINK. At the end of the day, Colihan worked laboriously with a blunt-pointed pencil. It took him fifteen minutes for the simple calculation. "Sixty-seven tests. Twenty-three okay. Forty-four--" Colihan put his hands to his head. "What am I going to _do_?" * * * * * Grimswitch followed Colihan down the hall as he came out of the boss's office for the third time that week. "Well!" he said fatuously. "Quite the teacher's pet, these days. Eh, Colihan?" "Go away, Grimswitch." "On the carpet, eh? Temper a little short? Don't worry." Grimswitch's beefy hand made unpleasant contact with the Personnel man's shoulder. "Your old friends won't let you down." "Grimswitch, will you please let me alone?" "Better watch that think-machine of yours," Grimswitch chuckled. "Might fire _you_ next, old boy." Colihan was glad when Morgan, the production operator, hailed Grimswitch away. But as he entered his own office, Grimswitch's words still troubled him. _Grimswitch_, he thought. _That fat piece of garbage. That big blow-hard. That know-it-all._ Almost savagely, he picked up the day's personnel cards and flipped through them carelessly. _Grimswitch, that louse_, he thought. Then he had the Idea. If Grimswitch was still chewing the fat with Morgan, then his secretary would be alone-- If he called her and asked for Grimswitch's record--no, better yet, got Miss Blanche to call-- _Why not?_ he thought. _After all, I am the Personnel Manager. Sure, it's a little irregular. He IS a department head. But it's my job, isn't it?_ Colihan flipped the inter-com and proceeded to call Miss Blanche. * * * * * His hand shook as he placed Grimswitch's card into the Personnelovac. The machine, though still heated by the day's activity, seemed to take longer than usual for its chittering, chuckling examination of the pin-holed facts on the record. Finally, it gave a satisfied burp and proffered the result to Colihan's eager hand. "Aha!" cried the personnel man gleefully. He walked over to his desk, wrote a quick note on his memo pad, and placed both note and card into an envelope. He addressed it to: OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT. Then he dropped it into the Action Chute. When it was out of sight, he rubbed his hands together in happy anticipation. * * * * * When Miss Blanche announced that President Moss himself was in Colihan's outer lobby, the Personnel Manager spent a hasty minute in straightening up the paper debris on his desk. The old man came striding into the room, exhibiting plenty of p-e-p, and he seated himself briskly on Colihan's sofa. "Sharp eyes, Ralph," he said. "Sharp eyes and a quick wit. This business demands it. That was a sharp notion you had, doing a run-through on Grimswitch. Never trusted that back-slapping fellow." Colihan looked pleased. "Trying to do a job, sir." "Put your finger on it," said Moss. "Hit the nail on the head. It's just like my father said: 'Trees go dead on the top.' Colihan--" The boss leaned forward confidentially. "I've got an assignment for you. Big assignment." "Yes, sir!" said Colihan eagerly. "If Grimswitch is a sour apple, maybe _other_ department heads are, too. And who knows? IT knows." Moss pointed a finger at the Personnelovac. "I'm rounding up all the aptitude records of the department heads. They'll be in your hands in the next couple of days. Feed 'em in! Root 'em out! Spot the deadwood, Colihan! ACT!" "ACT!" echoed Colihan, his face flushed. The old man got up and went over to the Brain. "Marvelous machine," he said. "Honest. That's what I like about it." As Moss went out the door, Colihan could have sworn he saw the Personnelovac wink. He walked over to it and fingered the lever. It was turned off, all right. * * * * * It was an interesting week for Colihan. Morgan, the production man, was fired. Grimswitch came up to see the Personnel man and tried to punch him in the nose. Fortunately, he was a little too drunk, and the blow went wild. Seegrum, the Shipovac operator, was fired. Douglas, the Treasurer, was permitted to keep his job, but the Personnelovac issued a dire threat if improvement wasn't rapidly forthcoming. Wilson, the firm's oldest employee, was fired. In fact, seven out of General Product's twelve department heads were greeted by the ominous pink card. Colihan, no longer plagued by doubt, felt that life was definitely worth living. He smiled all the time. His memos were snappier than ever. His heels clicked merrily down the office hallways. He had p-e-p. Then, the most obvious thing in the world happened--and Colihan just hadn't foreseen it. _His_ record card came up. * * * * * "Have you run through the stack yet?" Miss Blanche asked. "Er--just about." Colihan looked at her guiltily. He pushed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. "Couple more here," he said. "Well, we might as well finish up. Mr. Moss would like to have the schedule completed this afternoon." "It will be. That's _all_, Miss Blanche." His secretary shrugged and left. Colihan went to the Personnelovac with the record in his hand. The file number was 630. "Don't let me down," he told the Brain. He placed the pin-holed card into the machine and flipped the lever. It winked, chittered, chortled, and chuckled with almost sinister softness. When the card was burped out at the other end, Colihan took it out with his eyes firmly shut. * * * * * He walked over to the Action Chute mechanically. His hand hesitated before he dropped it inside. Then he changed his mind, walked back to the desk, and tore the pink card into the smallest possible shreds. The inter-com beeped. "Mr. Moss wants you," said his secretary. "Colihan!" "Yes, sir?" "Don't act so innocent, Colihan. Your report isn't complete. It should have been ready by now." "Yes, sir!" "You're not ACTING, Colihan. You're stalling!" "_No_, sir." "Then where's _your_ Personnelovac report, Colihan? Eh? Where is it?" Colihan wrung his hands. "Almost ready, sir," he lied. "Just running it through now, sir." "Speed it up. Speed it up! Time's a'wastin', boy. You're not _afraid_, are you, Colihan?" "No, _sir_." "Then let's have it. No more delay! Bull by the horns! Expect it in an hour, Colihan. Understand?" "Yes, sir!" The boss clicked off. Colihan groaned audibly. "What can I do?" he said to himself. He went to the Brain and shook his fist helplessly at it. "Damn you!" he cursed. He had to think. He had to THINK! It was an effort. He jerked about in his swivel chair like a hooked fish. He beat his hands on the desk top. He paced the floor and tore at the roots of his hair. Finally, exhausted, he gave up and flopped ungracefully on the office sofa, abandoning himself to the inevitable. At that precise moment, the mind being the perverse organ it is, he was struck by an inspiration. The Maintainovac bore an uneasy resemblance to Colihan's own think-machine. Wilson, the oldest employee of General Products, had been the operator of the maintenance Brain. He had been a nice old duffer, Wilson, always ready to do Colihan a favor. Now that he had been swept out in Colihan's own purge, the Personnel Manager had to deal with a new man named Lockwood. Lockwood wasn't so easy to deal with. "Stay out of my files, mister," he said. Colihan tried to look superior. "I'm the senior around here, Lockwood. Let's not forget that." "Them files is my responsibility." Lockwood, a burly young man, stationed himself between Colihan and the file case. "I want to check something. I need the service records of my Brain." "Where's your Requisition Paper?" "I haven't got _time_ for that," said Colihan truthfully. "I need it _now_, you fool." Lockwood set his face like a Rushmore memorial. "Be a good fellow, can't you?" Colihan quickly saw that wheedling wasn't the answer. "All right," he said, starting for the door. "I just wanted to help you." He opened the door just a crack. Sure enough, Lockwood responded. "How do you mean, help _me_?" "Didn't you know?" Colihan turned to face him. "I'm running through an aptitude check on the Personnelovac. Special department head check. Mr. Moss's orders." "So?" "I was just getting around to yours. But I figured I'd better make sure the Brain was functioning properly." He grew confidential. "You know, that darned machine has been firing _everyone_ lately." A little rockslide began on Lockwood's stoney face. "Well ..." he said. "If that's the case--" "I knew you'd understand," said Colihan very smoothly. * * * * * Eagerly, the Personnel Manager collated the records of the Personnelovac. They were far more complex than any employee record, and it took Colihan the better part of an hour. Any moment he expected to hear the President's angry voice over the inter-com. His anxiety made him fumble, but at last, the job was done. He slipped the record, marked by a galaxy of pinholes, into the Brain. "Now we'll see," he said grimly. "Now we'll find out what's eating this monster." He flipped the switch. The Personnelovac winked. It was several minutes before it digested the information in its chamber. Then it chittered. It chortled. It chuckled. Colihan held his breath until the BURP came. The card appeared. It read: "_Subject #PV8. Mech. Rat. 9987. Mem. Rat. 9995. Last Per. Vac._ "_An. None. Cur. Rat. 100._ "_Analysis: Subject operating at maximum efficiency. Equipped to perform at peak level. Is completely honest and does not exhibit bias, prejudice, or sentiment in establishing personnel evaluations. Cumulative increase in mnemonic ability. Analytic ability improving._" Colihan walked slowly over to the Action Chute as he finished reading the card. "_However_," it read, "_because of mechanistic approach to humanistic evaluation, subject displays inability to incorporate human equation in analytical computation, resulting in technically accurate but humanistically incorrect deductions._ "_Recommendation: Fire him._" Colihan dropped the pink card into the chute. In half an hour, the Action wheels of General Products concluded their work, and the Personnelovac had winked for the last time. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from _Amazing Science Fiction Stories_ January 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. 
26174	----	Transcribers note. This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. THE MACHINE THAT SAVED THE WORLD By MURRAY LEINSTER _They were broadcasts from nowhere--sinister emanations flooding in from space--smashing any receiver that picked them up. What defense could Earth devise against science such as this?_ [Illustration: Did the broadcasts foretell flesh-rending supersonic blasts?] The first broadcast came in 1972, while Mahon-modified machines were still strictly classified, and the world had heard only rumors about them. The first broadcast was picked up by a television ham in Osceola, Florida, who fumingly reported artificial interference on the amateur TV bands. He heard and taped it for ten minutes--so he said--before it blew out his receiver. When he replaced the broken element, the broadcast was gone. But the Communications Commission looked at and listened to the tape and practically went through the ceiling. It stationed a monitor truck in Osceola for months, listening feverishly to nothing. Then for a long while there were rumors of broadcasts which blew out receiving apparatus, but nothing definite. Weird patterns appeared on screens high-pitched or deep-bass notes sounded--and the receiver went out of operation. After the ham operator in Osceola, nobody else got more than a second or two of the weird interference before blowing his set during six very full months of CC agitation. Then a TV station in Seattle abruptly broadcast interference superimposed on its regular network program. The screens of all sets tuned to that program suddenly showed exotic, curiously curved, meaningless patterns on top of a commercial spectacular broadcast. At the same time incredible chirping noises came from the speakers, alternating with deep-bass hootings, which spoiled the ju-ju music of the most expensive ju-ju band on the air. The interference ended only with a minor break-down in the transmitting station. It was the same sort of interference that the Communications Commission had thrown fits about in Washington. It threw further fits now. * * * * * A month later a vision-phone circuit between Chicago and Los Angeles was unusable for ten minutes. The same meaningless picture-pattern and the same preposterous noises came on and monopolized the line. It ceased when a repeater-tube went out and a parallel circuit took over. Again, frantic agitation displayed by high authority. Then the interference began to appear more frequently, though still capriciously. Once a Presidential broadcast was confused by interference apparently originating in the White House, and again a three-way top-secret conference between the commanding officers of three military departments ceased when the unhuman-sounding noises and the scrambled picture pattern inserted itself into the closed-circuit discussion. The conference broke up amid consternation. For one reason, military circuits were supposed to be interference-proof. For another, it appeared that if interference could be spotted to this circuit or this receiver it was likely this circuit or that receiver could be tapped. For a third reason, the broadcasts were dynamite. As received, they were badly scrambled, but they could be straightened out. Even the first one, from Osceola, was cleaned up and understood. Enough so to make top authority tear its hair and allow only fully-cleared scientific consultants in on the thing. The content of the broadcasts was kept considerably more secret than the existence of Mahon units and what they could do. And Mahon units were brand-new, then, and being worked with only at one research installation in the United States. The broadcasts were not so closely confined. The same wriggly patterns and alien noises were picked up in Montevideo, in Australia, in Panama City, and in grimly embattled England. All the newspapers discussed them without ever suspecting that they had been translated into plain speech. They were featured as freak news--and each new account mentioned that the broadcast reception had ended with a break-down of the receiving apparatus. Guarded messages passed among the high authorities of the nations that picked up the stuff. A cautious inquiry went even to the Compubs. The Union of Communist Republics answered characteristically. It asked a question about Mahon units. There were rumors, it said, about a new principle of machine-control lately developed in the United States. It was said that machines equipped with the new units did not wear out, that they exercised seeming intelligence at their tasks, and that they promised to end the enormous drain on natural resources caused by the wearing-out and using-up of standard-type machinery. The Compub Information Office offered to trade data on the broadcasts for data about the new Mahon-modified machines. It hinted at extremely important revelations it could make. The rest of the world deduced astutely that the Compubs were scared, too. And they were correct. * * * * * Then, quite suddenly, a break came. All previous broadcast receptions had ended with the break-down of the receiving instrument. Now a communicator named Betsy, modified in the Mahon manner and at work in the research installation working with Mahon-modified devices, began to pick up the broadcasts consistently, keeping each one on its screen until it ended. Day after day, at highly irregular intervals, Betsy's screen lighted up and showed the weird patterns, and her loudspeakers emitted the peepings and chirps and deep-bass hootings of the broadcasts. And the high brass went into a dither to end all dithers as tapes of the received material reached the Pentagon and were translated into intelligible speech and pictures. * * * * * This was when Metech Sergeant Bellews, in charge of the Rehab Shop at Research Installation 83, came into the affair. Specifically, he entered the picture when a young second lieutenant came to the shop to fetch him to Communications Center in that post. The lieutenant was young and tall and very military. Sergeant Bellews was not. So he snorted, upon receipt of the message. He was at work on a vacuum cleaner at the moment--a Mahon-modified machine with a flickering yellow standby light that wavered between brightness and dimness with much more than appropriate frequency. The Rehabilitation Shop was where Mahon-modified machines were brought back to usefulness when somebody messed them up. Two or three machines--an electric ironer, for one--operated slowly and hesitantly. That was occupational therapy. A washing-machine churned briskly, which was convalescence. Others, ranging from fire-control computers to teletypes and automatic lathes, simply waited with their standby lights flickering meditatively according to the manner and custom of Mahon-modified machines. They were ready for duty again. The young lieutenant was politely urgent. "But I been there!" protested Sergeant Bellews. "I checked! It's a communicator I named Betsy. She's all right! She's been mishandled by the kinda halfwits Communications has around, but she's a good, well-balanced, experienced machine. If she's turning out broadcasts, it's because they're comin' in! She's all right!" "I know," said the young lieutenant soothingly. His uniform and his manners were beautiful to behold. "But the Colonel wants you there for a conference." "I got a communicator in the shop here," said Sergeant Bellews suspiciously. "Why don't he call me?" "Because he wants to try some new adjustments on--ah--Betsy, Sergeant. You have a way with Mahon machines. They'll do things for you they won't do for anybody else." Sergeant Bellews snorted again. He knew he was being buttered up, but he'd asked for it. He even insisted on it, for the glory of the Metallurgical Technicians' Corps. The big brass tended to regard Metechs as in some fashion successors to the long-vanished veterinary surgeons of the Farriers' Corps, when horses were a part of the armed forces. Mahon-modified machines were new--very new--but the top brass naturally remembered everything faintly analogous and applied it all wrong. So Sergeant Bellews conducted a one-man campaign to establish the dignity of his profession. But nobody without special Metech training ought to tinker with a Mahon-modified machine. "If he's gonna fool with Betsy," said the Sergeant bitterly, "I guess I gotta go over an' boss the job." He pressed a button on his work-table. The vacuum cleaner's standby light calmed down. The button provided soothing sub-threshold stimuli to the Mahon unit, not quite giving it the illusion of operating perfectly--if a Mahon unit could be said to be capable of illusion--but maintaining it in the rest condition which was the foundation of Mahon-unit operation, since a Mahon machine must never be turned off. The lieutenant started out of the door. Sergeant Bellews followed at leisure. He painstakingly avoided ever walking the regulation two paces behind a commissioned officer. Either he walked side by side, chatting, or he walked alone. Wise officers let him get away with it. * * * * * Reaching the open air a good twenty yards behind the lieutenant, he cocked an approving eye at a police-up unit at work on the lawn outside. Only a couple of weeks before, that unit had been in a bad way. It stopped and shivered when it encountered an unfamiliar object. But now it rolled across the grass from one path-edge to another. When it reached the second path it stopped, briskly moved itself its own width sidewise, and rolled back. On the way it competently manicured the lawn. It picked up leaves, retrieved a stray cigarette-butt, and snapped up a scrap of paper blown from somewhere. Its tactile units touched a new-planted shrub. It delicately circled the shrub and went on upon its proper course. * * * * * Once, where the grass grew taller than elsewhere, it stopped and whirred, trimming the growth back to regulation height. Then it went on about its business as before. Sergeant Bellews felt a warm sensation. That was a good machine that had been in a bad way and he'd brought it back to normal, happy operation. The sergeant was pleased. The lieutenant turned into the Communications building. Sergeant Bellews followed at leisure. A jeep went past him--one of the special jeeps being developed at this particular installation--and its driver was talking to someone in the back seat, but the jeep matter-of-factly turned out to avoid Sergeant Bellews. He glowed. He'd activated it. Another good machine, gathering sound experience day by day. He went into the room where Betsy stood--the communicator which, alone among receiving devices in the whole world, picked up the enigmatic broadcasts consistently. Betsy was a standard Mark IV communicator, now carefully isolated from any aerial. She was surrounded by recording devices for vision and sound, and by the most sensitive and complicated instruments yet devised for the detection of short-wave radiation. Nothing had yet been detected reaching Betsy, but something must. No machine could originate what Betsy had been exhibiting on her screen and emitting from her speakers. Sergeant Bellews tensed instantly. Betsy's standby light quivered hysterically from bright to dim and back again. The rate of quivering was fast. It was very nearly a sine-wave modulation of the light--and when a Mahon-modified machine goes into sine-wave flicker, it is the same as Cheyne-Stokes breathing in a human. He plunged forward. He jerked open Betsy's adjustment-cover and fairly yelped his dismay. He reached in and swiftly completed corrective changes of amplification and scanning voltages. He balanced a capacity bridge. He soothed a saw-tooth resonator. He seemed to know by sheer intuition what was needed to be done. After a moment or two the standby lamp wavered slowly from near-extinction to half-brightness, and then to full brightness and back again. It was completely unrhythmic and very close to normal. "Who done this?" demanded the sergeant furiously. "He had Betsy close to fatigue collapse! He'd ought to be court-martialed!" He was too angry to notice the three civilians in the room with the colonel and the lieutenant who'd summoned him. The young officer looked uncomfortable, but the colonel said authoritatively: "Never mind that, Sergeant. Your Betsy was receiving something. It wasn't clear. You had not reported, as ordered, so an attempt was made to clarify the signals." "Okay, Colonel!" said Sergeant Bellews bitterly. "You got the right to spoil machines! But if you want them to work right you got to treat 'em right!" "Just so," said the colonel. "Meanwhile--this is Doctor Howell, Doctor Graves, and Doctor Lecky. Sergeant Bellews, gentlemen. Sergeant, these are not MDs. They've been sent by the Pentagon to work on Betsy." * * * * * "Betsy don't need workin' on!" said Sergeant Bellews belligerently. "She's a good, reliable, experienced machine! If she's handled right, she'll do better work than any machine I know!" "Granted," said the colonel. "She's doing work now that no other machine seems able to do--drawing scrambled broadcasts from somewhere that can only be guessed at. They've been unscrambled and these gentlemen have come to get the data on Betsy. I'm sure you'll cooperate." "What kinda data do they want?" demanded Bellews. "I can answer most questions about Betsy!" "Which," the colonel told him, "is why I sent for you. These gentlemen have the top scientific brains in the country, Sergeant. Answer their questions about Betsy and I think some very high brass will be grateful. "By the way, it is ordered that from now on no one is to refer to Betsy or any work on these broadcasts, over any type of electronic communication. No telephone, no communicator, no teletype, no radio, no form of communication except _viva voce_. And that means you talking to somebody else, Sergeant, with no microphone around. Understand? And from now on you will not talk about anything at all except to these gentlemen and to me." Sergeant Bellews said incredulously: "Suppose I got to talk to somebody in the Rehab Shop. Do I signal with my ears and fingers?" "You don't talk," said the colonel flatly. "Not at all." Sergeant Bellews shook his head sadly. He regarded the colonel with such reproach that the colonel stiffened. But Sergeant Bellews had a gift for machinery. He had what amounted to genius for handling Mahon-modified devices. So long as no more competent men turned up, he was apt to get away with more than average. The colonel frowned and went out of the room. The tall young lieutenant followed him faithfully. The sergeant regarded the three scientists with the suspicious air he displayed to everyone not connected with Mahon units in some fashion. "Well?" he said with marked reserve. "What can I tell you first?" Lecky was the smallest of the three scientists. He said ingratiatingly, with the faintest possible accent in his speech: "The nicest thing you could do for us, Sergeant, would be to show us that this--Betsy, is it?--with other machines before her, has developed a contagious machine insanity. It would frighten me to learn that machines can go mad, but I would prefer it to other explanations for the messages she gives." "Betsy can't go crazy," said Bellews with finality. "She's Mahon-controlled, but she hasn't got what it takes to go crazy. A Mahon unit fixes a machine so it can loaf and be a permanent dynamic system that can keep acquired habits of operatin'. It can take trainin'. It can get to be experienced. It can learn the tricks of its trade, so to speak. But it can't go crazy!" "Too bad!" said Lecky. He added persuasively: "But a machine can lie, Sergeant? Would that be possible?" Sergeant Bellews snorted in denial. * * * * * "The broadcasts," said Lecky mildly, "claim a remarkable reason for certainty about an extremely grave danger which is almost upon the world. If it's the truth, Sergeant, it is appalling. If it is a lie, it may be more appalling. The Joint Chiefs of Staff take it very seriously, in any case. They--" "I got cold shivers," said Sergeant Bellews with irony. "I'm all wrought up. Huh! The big brass gets the yellin' yollups every so often anyhow. Listen to them, and nothin' happens except it's top priority top secret extra crash emergency! What do you want to know about Betsy?" There was a sudden squealing sound from the communicator on which all the extra recording devices were focussed. Betsy's screen lighted up. Peculiarly curved patterns appeared on it. They shifted and changed. Noises came from her speaker. They were completely unearthly. Now they were shrill past belief, and then they were chopped into very small bits of sound, and again they were deepest bass, when each separate note seemed to last for seconds. "You might," said Lecky calmly, "tell us from where your Betsy gets the signal she reports in this fashion." There were whirrings as recorders trained upon Betsy captured every flickering of her screen and every peeping noise or deep-toned rumble. The screen-pattern changed with the sound, but it was not linked to it. It was a completely abnormal reception. It was uncanny. It was somehow horrible because so completely remote from any sort of human communication in the year 1972. The three scientists watched with worried eyes. A communicator, even with a Mahon unit in it, could not originate a pattern like this! And this was not conceivably a distortion of anything transmitted in any normal manner in the United States of America, or the Union of Compubs, or any of the precariously surviving small nations not associated with either colossus. "This is a repeat broadcast!" said one of the three men suddenly. It was Howell, the heavy-set man. "I remember it. I saw it projected--like this, and then unscrambled. I think it's the one where the social system's described--so we can have practice at trying to understand. Remember?" * * * * * Lecky said, as if the matter had been thrashed out often before: "I do not believe what it says, Howell! You know that I do not believe it! I will not accept the theory that this broadcast comes from the future!" The broadcast stopped. It stopped dead. Betsy's screen went blank. Her wildly fluctuating standby light slowed gradually to a nearly normal rate of flicker. "That's not a theory," said Howell dourly. "It's a statement in the broadcast. We saw the first transmission of this from the tape at the Pentagon. Then we saw it with the high-pitched parts slowed down and the deep-bass stuff speeded up. Then it was a human voice giving data on the scanning pattern and then rather drearily repeating that history said that intertemporal communication began with broadcasts sent back from 2180 to 1972. It said the establishment of two-way communication was very difficult and read from a script about social history, to give us practice in unscrambling it. It's not a theory to say the stuff originates in the future. It's a statement." "Then it is a lie," said Lecky, very earnestly. "Truly, Howell, it is a lie!" "Then where does the broadcast come from?" demanded Howell. "Some say it's a Compub trick. But if they were true they'd hide it for use to produce chaos in a sneak attack. The only other theory--" * * * * * Graves, the man with the short moustache, said jerkily: "No, Howell! It is not an extra-terrestrial creature pretending to be a man of our own human future. One could not sleep well with such an idea in his head. If some non-human monster could do this--" "I do not sleep at all," said Lecky simply. "Because it says that two-way communication is to come. I can listen to these broadcasts tranquilly, but I cannot bear the thought of answering them. That seems to me madness!" Sergeant Bellews said approvingly: "You got something there! Yes, sir! Did you notice how Betsy's standby light was wabbling while she was bringin' in that broadcast? If she could sweat, she'd've been sweating!" Lecky turned his head to stare at the sergeant. "Machines," said Bellews profoundly, "act according to the golden rule. They do unto you as they would have you do unto them. You treat a machine right and it treats you right. You treat it wrong and it busts itself--still tryin' to treat you right. See?" Lecky blinked. "I do not quite see how it applies," he said mildly. "Betsy's an old, experienced machine," said the sergeant. "A signal that makes her sweat like that has got something wrong about it. Any ordinary machine 'ud break down handlin' it." Graves said jerkily: "The other machines that received these broadcasts did break down, Sergeant. All of them." "Sure!" said the sergeant with dignity. "O' course, who's broadcastin' may have been tinkerin' with their signal since they seen it wasn't gettin' through. Betsy can take it now, when younger machines with less experience can't. Maybe a micro-microwatt of signal. Then it makes her sweat. If she was broadcastin', with a hell of a lot more'n a micro-microwatt--it'd be bad! I bet you that every machine we make to broadcast breaks down! I bet--" Howell said curtly: "Reasonable enough! A signal to pass through time as well as space would be different from a standard wave-type! Of course that must be the answer." Sergeant Bellews said truculently: "I got a hunch that whoever's broadcastin' is busting transmitters right an' left. I never knew anything about this before, except that Betsy was pickin' up stuff that came from nowhere. But I bet if you look over the record-tapes you will find they got breaks where one transmitter switched off or broke down and another took over!" Lecky's eyes were shining. He regarded Sergeant Bellews with a sort of tender respect. "Sergeant Bellews," he said softly, "I like you very much. You have told us undoubtedly true things." "Think nothin' of it," said the sergeant, gratified. "I run the Rehab Shop here, and I could show you things--" "We wish you to," said Lecky. "The reaction of machines to these broadcasts is the one viewpoint we would never have imagined. But it is plainly important. Will you help us, Sergeant? I do not like to be frightened--and I am!" "Sure, I'll help," said Sergeant Bellews largely. "First thing is to whip some stuff together so we can find out what's what. You take a few Mahon units, and install 'em and train 'em right, and they will do almost anything you've a mind for. But you got to treat 'em right. Machines work by the golden rule. Always! Come along!" * * * * * Sergeant Bellews went to the Rehab Shop, followed only by Lecky. All about, the sun shone down upon buildings with a remarkably temporary look about them, and on lawns with a remarkably lush look about them, and signboards with very black lettering on gray paint backgrounds. There was a very small airfield inside the barbed-wire fence about the post, and elaborate machine-shops, and rows and rows of barracks and a canteen and a USO theatre, and a post post-office. Everything seemed quite matter-of-fact. Except for the machines. They were the real reason for the existence of the post. The barracks and married-row dwellings had washing-machines which looked very much like other washing-machines, except that they had standby lights which flickered meditatively when they weren't being used. * * * * * The television receivers looked like other TV sets, except for minute and wavering standby lights which were never quite as bright or dim one moment as the next. The jeeps--used strictly within the barbed-wire fence around the post--had similar yellow glowings on their instrument-boards, and they were very remarkable jeeps. They never ran off the graveled roads onto the grass, and they never collided with each other, and it was said that the nine-year-old son of a lieutenant-colonel had tried to drive one and it would not stir. Its motor cut off when he forced it into gear. When he tried to re-start it, the starter did not turn. But when an adult stepped into it, it operated perfectly--only it braked and stopped itself when a small child toddled into its path. There were some people who said that this story was not true, but other people insisted that it was. Anyhow the washing-machines were perfect. They never tangled clothes put into them. It was reported that Mrs. So-and-so's washing-machine had found a load of clothes tangled, and reversed itself and worked backward until they were straightened out. Television sets turned to the proper channels--different ones at different times of day--with incredible facility. The smallest child could wrench at a tuning-knob and the desired station came on. All the operating devices of Research Installation 83 worked as if they liked to--which might have been alarming except that they never did anything of themselves. They initiated nothing. But each one acted like an old, favorite possession. They fitted their masters. They seemed to tune themselves to the habits of their owners. They were infinitely easy to work right, and practically impossible to work wrong. Such machines, of course, had not been designed to cope with enigmatic broadcasts or for military purposes. But the jet-planes on the small airfield were very remarkable indeed, and the other and lesser devices had been made for better understanding of the Mahon units which made machines into practically a new order of creation. * * * * * Sergeant Bellews ushered Lecky into the Rehab Shop. There was the pleasant, disorderly array of devices with their wavering standby lights. They gave an effect of being alive, but somehow it was not disturbing. They seemed not so much intent as meditative, and not so much watchful as interested. When the sergeant and his guest moved past them, the unrhythmic waverings of the small yellow lights seemed to change hopefully, as if the machines anticipated being put to use. Which, of course, was absurd. Mahon machines do not anticipate anything. They probably do not remember anything, though patterns of operation are certainly retained in very great variety. The fact is that a Mahon unit is simply a device to let a machine stand idle without losing the nature of an operating machine. The basic principle goes back to antiquity. Ships, in ancient days, had manners and customs individual to each vessel. Some were sweet craft, easily handled and staunch and responsive. Others were stubborn and begrudging of all helpfulness. Sometimes they were even man-killers. These facts had no rational explanation, but they were facts. In similarly olden times, particular weapons acquired personalities to the point of having personal names--Excalibur, for example. Every fighting man knew of weapons which seemed to possess personal skill and ferocity. Later, workmen found that certain tools had a knack of fitting smoothly in the hand--seeming even to divine the grain of the wood they worked on. The individual characteristics of violins were notorious, so that a violin which sang joyously under the bow was literally priceless. And all these things, as a matter of observation and not of superstition, kept their qualities only when in constant use. Let a ship be hauled out of water and remain there for a time, and she would be clumsy on return to her native element. Let a sword or tool stay unused, and it seemed to dull. In particular, the finest of violins lost its splendor of tone if left unplayed, and any violin left in a repair-shop for a month had to be played upon constantly for many days before its living tone came back. * * * * * The sword and the tool perhaps, but the ship and the violin certainly, acted as if they acquired habits of operation by being used, and lost them by disuse. When more complex machines were invented, such facts were less noticeable. True, no two automobiles ever handled exactly the same, and that was recognized. But the fact that no complex machine worked well until it had run for a time was never commented on, except in the observation that it needed to be warmed up. Anybody would have admitted that a machine in the act of operating was a dynamic system in a solid group of objects, but nobody reflected that a stopped machine was a dead thing. Nobody thought to liken the warming-up period for an aeroplane engine to the days of playing before a disuse-dulled violin regained its tone. Yet it was obvious enough. A ship and a sword and a tool and a violin were objects in which dynamic systems existed when they were used, and in which they ceased to exist when use stopped. And nobody noticed that a living creature is an object which contains a dynamic system when it is living, and loses it by death. For nearly two centuries quite complex machines were started, and warmed up, and used, and then allowed to grow cold again. In time the more complex machines were stopped only reluctantly. Computers, for example, came to be merely turned down below operating voltage when not in use, because warming them up was so difficult and exacting a task. Which was an unrecognized use of the Mahon principle. It was a way to keep a machine activated while not actually operating. It was a state of rest, of loafing, of idleness, which was not the death of a running mechanism. The Mahon unit was a logical development. It was an absurdly simple device, and not in the least like a brain. But to the surprise of everybody, including its inventor, a Mahon-modified machine did more than stay warmed up. It retained operative habits as no complex device had ever done before. In time it was recognized that Mahon-modified machines acquired experience and kept it so long as the standby light glowed and flickered in its socket. If the lamp went out the machine died, and when reënergized was a different individual entirely, without experience. Sergeant Bellews made such large-minded statements as were needed to brief Lecky on the work done in this installation with Mahon-controlled machines. "They don't think," he explained negligently, "any more than dogs think. They just react--like dogs do. They get patterns of reaction. They get trained. Experienced. They get good! Over at the airfield they're walking around beaming happy over the way the jets are flyin' themselves." Lecky gazed around the Rehab Shop. There were shelves of machines, duly boxed and equipped with Mahon units, but not yet activated. Activation meant turning them on and giving them a sort of basic training in the tasks they were designed to do. But also there were machines which had broken down--invariably through misuse, said Sergeant Bellews acidly--and had been sent to the Rehab Shop to be re-trained in their proper duties. "Guys see 'em acting sensible and obediently," said Bellews with bitterness, "and expect 'em to think. Over at the jet-field they finally come to understand." His tone moderated. "Now they got jets that put down their own landing-gear, and holler when fuel's running low, and do acrobatics happy if you only jiggle the stick. They mighty near fly themselves! I tell you, if well-trained Mahon jets ever do tangle with old-style machines, it's goin' to be a caution to cats! It'll be like a pack of happy terriers pilin' into hamsters. It'll be murder!" * * * * * He surveyed his stock. From a back corner he brought out a small machine with an especially meditative tempo in its standby-lamp flicker. The tempo accelerated a little when he put it on a work-bench. "They got batteries to stay activated with," he observed, "and only need real juice when they're workin'. This here's a play-back recorder they had over in Recreation. Some guys trained it to switch frequencies--speed-up and slow-down stuff. They laughed themselves sick! There used to be a tough guy over there,--a staff sergeant, he was--that gave lectures on military morals in a deep bass voice. He was proud of that bull voice of his. He used it frequently. So they taped him, and Al here--" the name plainly referred to the machine--"used to play it back switched up so he sounded like a squeaky girl. That poor guy, he liked to busted a blood-vessel when he heard himself speakin' soprano. He raised hell and they sent Al here to be rehabilitated. But I switched another machine for him and sent it back, instead. Of course, Al don't know what he's doing, but--" * * * * * He brought over another device, slightly larger and with a screen. "Somebody had a bright notion with this one, too," he said. "They figured they'd scramble pictures for secret transmission, like they scramble voice. But they found they hadda have team-trained sets to work, an' they weren't interchangeable. They sent Gus here to be deactivated an' trained again. I kinda hate to do that. Sometimes you got to deactivate a machine, but it's like shooting a dog somebody's taught to steal eggs, who don't know it's wrong." He bolted the two instruments together. He made connections with flexible cables and tucked the cable out of sight. He plugged in for power and began to make adjustments. The small scientist asked curiously: "What are you preparing, Sergeant?" "These two'll unscramble that broadcast," said Sergeant Bellews, with tranquil confidence. "Al's learned how to make a tape and switch frequencies expert. Gus, here, he's a unscrambler that can make any kinda scanning pattern. Together they'll have a party doing what they're special trained for. We'll hook 'em to Betsy's training-terminals." He regarded the two machines warmly. Connected, now, their standby lights flickered at a new tempo. They synchronized, and broke synchrony, and went back into elaborate, not-quite-resolvable patterns which were somehow increasingly integrated as seconds went by. "Those lights look kinda nice, don't they?" asked the sergeant admiringly. "Makes you think of a coupla dogs gettin' acquainted when they're goin' out on a job of hunting or something." But Lecky said abruptly, in amazement: "But, Sergeant! In the Pentagon it takes days to unscramble a received broadcast such as Betsy receives! It requires experts--" "Huh!" said Sergeant Bellews. He picked up the two machines. "Don't get me started about the kinda guys that wangle headquarters-company jobs! They got a special talent for fallin' soft. But they haven't necessarily got anything else!" * * * * * Lecky followed Sergeant Bellews as the sergeant picked up his new combination of devices and headed out of the Rehab Shop. Outside, in the sunshine, there were roarings to be heard. Lecky looked up. A formation of jets swam into view against the sky. A tiny speck, trailing a monstrous plume of smoke, shot upward from the jet-field. The formation tightened. The ascending jet jiggled as if in pure exuberance as it swooped upward--but the jiggle was beautifully designed to throw standard automatic gunsights off. A plane peeled off from the formation and dived at the ascending ship. There was a curious alteration in the thunder of motors. The rate-of-rise of the climbing jet dwindled almost to zero. Sparks shot out before it. They made a cone the diving ship could not avoid. It sped through them and then went as if disappointedly to a lower level. It stood by to watch the rest of the dog-fight. "Nice!" said Sergeant Bellews appreciatively. "That's a Mahon jet all by itself, training against regular ships. They have to let it shoot star-bullets in training, or it'd get hot and bothered in a real fight when its guns went off." The lower jet streaked skyward once more. Sparks sped from the formation. They flared through emptiness where the Mahon jet had been but now was not. It scuttled abruptly to one side as concerted streams of sparks converged. They missed. It darted into zestful, exuberant maneuverings, remarkably like a dog dashing madly here and there in pure high spirits. The formation of planes attacked it resolutely. Suddenly the lone jet plunged into the midst of the formation, there were coruscations of little shooting stars, and one-two-three planes disgustedly descended to lower levels as out of action. Then the single ship shot upward, seemed eagerly to shake itself, plunged back--and the last ships tried wildly to escape, but each in turn was technically shot down. The Mahon jet headed back for its own tiny airfield. Somehow, it looked as if, had it been a dog, it would be wagging its tail and panting happily. "That one ship," said Lecky blankly, "it defeated the rest?" "It's got a lot of experience," said the sergeant. "You can't beat experience." He led the way into Communications Center. In the room where Betsy stood, Howell and Graves had been drawing diagrams at each other to the point of obstinacy. "But don't you see?" insisted Howell angrily. "There can be no source other than a future time! You can't send short waves through three-dimensional space to a given spot and not have them interceptible between. Anyhow, the Compubs wouldn't work it this way! They wouldn't put us on guard! And an extra-terrestrial wouldn't pretend to be a human if he honestly wanted to warn us of danger! He'd tell us the truth! Physically and logically it's impossible for it to be anything but what it claims to be!" Graves said doggedly: "But a broadcast originating in the future is impossible!" "Nothing," snapped Howell, "that a man can imagine is impossible!" "Then imagine for me," said Graves, "that in 2180 they read in the history books about a terrible danger to the human race back in 1972, which was averted by a warning they sent us. Then, from their history-books, which we wrote for them, they learn how to make a transmitter to broadcast back to us. Then they tell us how to make a transmitter to broadcast ahead to them. They don't invent the transmitter. We tell them how to make it--via a history book. We don't invent it. They tell us--from the history book. Now imagine for me how that transmitter got invented!" "You're quibbling," snapped Howell. "You're refusing to face a fact because you can't explain it. I say face the fact and then ask for an explanation!" "Why not ask them," said Graves, "how to make a round square or a five-sided triangle?" * * * * * Sergeant Bellews pushed to a spot near Betsy. He put down his now-linked Mahon machines and began to move away some of the recording apparatus focused on Betsy. "Hold on there!" said Howell in alarm. "Those are recorders!" "We'll let 'em record direct," said the sergeant. * * * * * Lecky spoke feverishly in support of Bellews. But what he said was, in effect, a still-marveling description of the possibilities of Mahon-modified machines. They were, he said with ardent enthusiasm, the next step in the historic process by which successively greater portions of the cosmos enter into a symbiotic relationship with man. Domestic animals entered into such a partnership aeons ago. Certain plants--wheat and the like--even became unable to exist without human attention. And machines were wrought by man and for a long time served him reluctantly. Pre-Mahon machines were tamed, not domestic. They wore themselves out and destroyed themselves by accidents. But now there were machines which could enter into a truly symbiotic relationship with humanity. "What," demanded Howell, "what in hell are you talking about?" Lecky checked himself. He smiled abashedly: "I think," he said humbly, "that I speak of the high destiny of mankind. But the part that applies at the moment is that Sergeant Bellews must not be interfered with." He turned and ardently assisted Sergeant Bellews in making room for the just-brought devices. Sergeant Bellews led flexible cables from them to Betsy. He inserted their leads in her training-terminals. He made adjustments within. It became notable that Betsy's standby light took up new tempos in its wavering. There were elaborate interweavings of rate and degree of brightening among the lights of all three instruments. There was no possible way to explain the fact, but a feeling of pleasure, of zestful stirring, was somehow expressed by the three machines which had been linked together into a cooperating group. Sergeant Bellews eased himself into a chair. "Now everything's set," he observed contentedly. "Remember, I ain't seen any of these broadcasts unscrambled. I don't know what it's all about. But we got three Mahon machines set up now to work on the next crazy broadcast that comes in. There's Betsy and these two others. And all machines work accordin' to the Golden Rule, but Mahon machines--they are honey-babes! They'll bust themselves tryin' to do what you ask 'em. And I asked these babies for plenty--only not enough to hurt 'em. Let's see what they turn out." He pulled a pipe and tobacco from his pocket. He filled the pipe. He squeezed the side of the bowl and puffed as the tobacco glowed. He relaxed, underneath the wall-sign which sternly forbade smoking by all military personnel within these premises. It was nearly three hours--but it could have been hundreds--before Betsy's screen lighted abruptly. * * * * * The broadcast came in; a new transmission. The picture-pattern on Betsy's screen was obviously not the same as other broadcasts from nowhere. The chirps and peepings and the rumbling deep sounds were not repetitions of earlier noise-sequences. It should have taken many days of finicky work by technicians at the Pentagon before the originally broadcast picture could be seen and the sound interpreted. But a play-back recorder named Al, and a picture-unscrambler named Gus were in closed-circuit relationship with Betsy. She received the broadcast and they unscrambled the sound and vision parts of it immediately. The translated broadcast, as Gus and Al presented it, was calculated to put the high brass of the defense forces into a frenzied tizzy. The anguished consternation of previous occasions would seem like very calm contemplation by comparison. The high brass of the armed forces should grow dizzy. Top-echelon civilian officials should tend to talk incoherently to themselves, and scientific consultants--biologists in particular--ought to feel their heads spinning like tops. The point was that the broadcast had to be taken seriously because it came from nowhere. There was no faintest indication of any signal outside of Betsy's sedately gray-painted case. But Betsy was not making it up. She couldn't. There was a technology involved which required the most earnest consideration of the message carried by it. And this broadcast explained the danger from which the alleged future wished to rescue its alleged past. A brisk, completely deracialized broadcaster appeared on Gus's screen. In clipped, oddly stressed, but completely intelligible phrases, he explained that he recognized the paradox his communication represented. Even before 1972, he observed, there had been argument about what would happen if a man could travel in time and happened to go back to an earlier age and kill his grandfather. This communication was an inversion of that paradox. The world of 2180 wished to communicate back in time and save the lives of its great-great-great-grandparents so that it--the world of 2180--would be born. Without this warning and the information to be given, at least half the human race of 1972 was doomed. In late 1971 there had been a mutation of a minor strain of _staphylococcus_ somewhere in the Andes. The new mutation thrived and flourished. With the swift transportation of the period, it had spread practically all over the world unnoticed, because it produced no symptoms of disease. Half the members of the human race were carriers of the harmless mutated _staphylococcus_ now, but it was about to mutate again in accordance with Gordon's Law (the reference had no meaning in 1972) and the new mutation would be lethal. In effect, one human being in two carried in his body a semi-virus organization which he continually spread, and which very shortly would become deadly. Half the human race was bound to die unless it was instructed as to how to cope with it. Unless-- * * * * * Unless the world of 2180 told its ancestors what to do about it. That was the proposal. Two-way communication was necessary for the purpose, because there would be questions to be answered, obscure points to be clarified, numerical values to be checked to the highest possible degree of accuracy. Therefore, here were diagrams of the transmitter needed to communicate with future time. Here were enlarged diagrams of individual parts. The enigmatic parts of the drawing produced a wave-type unknown in 1972. But a special type of wave was needed to travel beyond the three dimensions of ordinary space, into the fourth dimension which was time. This wave-type produced unpredictable surges of power in the transmitter, wherefore at least six transmitters should be built and linked together so that if one ceased operation another would instantly take up the task. * * * * * The broadcast ended abruptly. Betsy's screen went blank. The colonel was notified. A courier took tapes to Washington by high-speed jet. Life in Research Establishment 83 went on sedately. The barracks and the married quarters and the residences of the officers were equipped with Mahon-modified machines which laundered diapers perfectly, and with dial telephones which always rang right numbers, and there were police-up machines which took perfect care of lawns, and television receivers tuned themselves to the customary channels for different hours with astonishing ease. Even jet-planes equipped with Mahon units almost landed themselves, and almost flew themselves about the sky in simulated combat with something very close to zest. But the atmosphere in the room in Communications was tense. "I think," said Howell, with his lips compressed, "that this answers all your objections, Graves. Motive--" "No," said Lecky painfully. "It does not answer mine. My objection is that I do not believe it." "Huh!" said Sergeant Bellews scornfully. "O' course, you don't believe it! It's phoney clear through!" Lecky looked at him hopefully. "You noticed something that we missed, Sergeant?" "Hell, yes!" said Sergeant Bellews. "That transmitter diagram don't have a Mahon unit in it!" "Is that remarkable?" demanded Howell. "Remarkable dumb," said the sergeant. "They'd ought to know--" The tall young lieutenant who earlier had fetched Sergeant Bellews to Communications now appeared again. He gracefully entered the room where Betsy waited for more broadcast matter. Her standby light flickered with something close to animation, and the similar yellow bulbs on Al and Gus responded in kind. The tall young lieutenant said politely: "I am sorry, but pending orders from the Pentagon the colonel has ordered this room vacated. Only automatic recorders will be allowed here, and all records they produce will be sent to Washington without examination. It seems that no one on this post has the necessary clearance for this type of material." Lecky blinked. Graves sputtered: "But--dammit, do you mean we can work out a way to receive a broadcast and not be qualified to see it?" "There's a common-sense view," said Sergeant Bellews oracularly, "and a crazy view, and there's what the Pentagon says, which ain't either." He stood up. "I see where I go back to my shop and finish rehabilitatin' the colonel's vacuum cleaner. You gentlemen care to join me?" Howell said indignantly: "This is ridiculous! This is absurd!" "Uh-uh," said Sergeant Bellews benignly. "This is the armed forces. There'll be an order makin' some sort of sense come along later. Meanwhile, I can brief you guys on Mahon machines so you'll be ready to start up again with better information when a clearance order does come through. And I got some beer in my quarters behind the Rehab Shop. Come along with me!" He led the way out of the room. The young lieutenant paused to close the door firmly behind him and to lock it. A bored private, with side-arms, took post before it. The lieutenant was a very conscientious young man. But he did not interfere with the parade to Sergeant Bellews' quarters. The young lieutenant was very military, and the ways of civilians were not his concern. If eminent scientists chose to go to Sergeant Bellews' quarters instead of the Officers Club, to which their assimilated rank entitled them, it was strictly their affair. * * * * * They reached the Rehab Shop, and Sergeant Bellews went firmly to a standby-light-equipped refrigerator in his quarters. He brought out beer and deftly popped off the tops. The icebox door closed quietly. "Here's to crime," said Sergeant Bellews amiably. He drank. Howell sipped gloomily. Graves drank thoughtfully. Lecky looked anticipative. "Sergeant," he said, "did I see a gleam in your eye just now?" Sergeant Bellews reflected, gently shaking his opened beer-can with a rotary motion, for no reason whatever. "Uh-uh," he rumbled. "I wouldn't say a gleam. But you mighta seen a glint. I got some ideas from what I seen during that broadcast. I wanna get to work on 'em. Here's the place to do the work. We got facilities here." Howell said with precise hot anger: "This is the most idiotic situation I have ever seen even in government service!" "You ain't been around much," the sergeant told him kindly. "It happens everywhere. All the time. It ain't even a exclusive feature of the armed forces." He put down his beer-can and patted his stomach. "There's guys who sit up nights workin' out standard operational procedures just to make things like this happen, everywhere. The colonel hadda do what he did. He's got orders, too. But he felt bad. So he sent the lieutenant to tell us. He does the colonel's dirty jobs--and he loves his work." * * * * * He moved grandly toward the Rehab Shop proper, which opened off the quarters he lived in--very much as a doctor's office is apt to open off his living quarters. "We follow?" asked Lecky zestfully. "You plan something?" "Natural!" said Sergeant Bellews largely. He led the way into the Rehab Shop, which was dark and shadowy, and only very dimly lighted by flickering, wavering lights of many machines waiting as if hopefully to be called on for action. There were the shelves of machines not yet activated. Sergeant Bellews led the way toward his desk. There was a vacuum cleaner on it, on standby. He put it down on the floor. Lecky watched him with some eagerness. The others came in, Howell dourly and Graves wiping his moustache. The sergeant considered his domain. "We'll be happy to help you," said Lecky. "Thanks," said the sergeant. "I'm under orders to help you, too, y'know. Just supposing you asked me to whip up something to analyze what Betsy receives, so it can be checked on that it is a new wave-type." "Can you do that?" demanded Graves. "We were supposed to work on that--but so far we've absolutely nothing to go on!" The sergeant waved his hand negligently. "You got something now. Betsy's a Mahon-modified device. Every receiver that picked up one of those crazy broadcasts broke down before it was through. She takes 'em in her stride--especial with Al and Gus to help her. Wouldn't it be reasonable to guess that Mahon machines are--uh--especial adapted to handle intertemporal communication?" "Very reasonable!" said Howell dourly. "Very! The broadcast said that the wave-type produced unpredictable surges of current. Ordinary machines do find it difficult to work with whatever type of radiation that can be." "Betsy chokes off those surges," observed the sergeant. "With Gus and Al to help, she don't have no trouble. We hadn't ought to need to make any six transmitters if we put Mahon-unit machines together for the job!" "Quite right," agreed Lecky, mildly. "And it is odd--" "Yeah," said the sergeant. "It's plenty odd my great-great-great-grandkids haven't got sense enough to do it themselves!" * * * * * He went to a shelf and brought down a boxed machine,--straight from the top-secret manufactory of Mahon units. It had never been activated. Its standby light did not glow. Sergeant Bellews ripped off the carton and said reflectively: "You hate to turn off a machine that's got its own ways of working. But a machine that ain't been activated has not got any personality. So you don't mind starting it up to turn it off later." He opened the adjustment-cover and turned something on. The standby light glowed. Closely observed, it was not a completely steady glow. There were the faintest possible variations of brightness. But there was no impression of life. Graves said: "Why doesn't it flicker like the others?" "No habits," said the sergeant. "No experience. It's like a newborn baby. It'll get to have personality after it's worked a while. But not now." He went across the shop again. He moved out a heavy case, and twisted the release, and eased out a communicator of the same type--Mark IV--as Betsy back in the Communications room. Howell went to help him. Graves tried to assist. Lecky moved other things out of the way. They were highly eminent scientists, and Metech Sergeant Bellews was merely a non-commissioned officer in the armed forces. But he happened to have specialized information they had not. Quite without condescension they accepted his authority in his own field, and therefore his equality. As civilians they had no rank to maintain, and they disagreed with each other--and would disagree with the sergeant--only when they knew why. Which was one of the reasons why they were eminent scientists. Sergeant Bellews brought out yet another box. He unrolled cables. He selected machines whose flickering lights seemed to bespeak eagerness to be of use. He coupled them to the newly unboxed machines, whose lights were vaguely steady. "Training cables," he said over his shoulder. "You get one machine working right, and you hook it with another, and the new machine kinda learns from the old one. Kinda! But it ain't as good as real experience. Not at first." * * * * * Presently the lights of the newly energized machines began to waver in somewhat the manner of the ready-for-operation ones. But they did not give so clear an impression of personality. "Look!" said Sergeant Bellews abruptly. "I got to check with you. The more I think, the more worried I get." "You begin to believe the broadcasts come from the future?" demanded Graves. "And it worries you? But they do not speak of Mahon units--" "I don't care where they come from," said the sergeant. "I'm worryin' about what they are! The guy in the broadcast--not knowing Mahon units--said we'd have to make half a dozen transmitters so they'd take over one after another as they blew out. You see what that means?" Lecky said crisply: "You pointed it out before. There is something in the wave-type which--you would say this, Sergeant!--which machines do not like. Is that the reasoning?" "Uh-uh!" The sergeant scowled. "Machines work by the golden rule. They try to do unto you what they want you to do unto them. Likes an' dislikes don't matter. I mean that there's something about that wave-type that machines _can't_ take! It busts them. If it sort of explodes surges of current in 'em--Look! Any running machine is a dynamic system in a object. A jet-plane operating is that. So's a water-spout. So's a communicator. But if you explode surges of heavy current in a dynamic system in a operating machine--things get messed up. The operating habit is busted to hell. I'm saying that if this wave-type makes crazy surges of current start up--why--if the surges are strong enough they'll bust not only a communicator but a jet-plane. Or a water-spout. Anything! See?" * * * * * Lecky blinked and suddenly went pale. "But," said Howell reasonably, "you said that Betsy handled it. Especially well when linked with other Mahon machines." "Yeah," said the sergeant. "I think," observed Graves jerkily, "that you are preparing new machines, without developed--personalities, because you think that if they make this special-type wave they'll be broken." "Yeah," said the sergeant, again. "The signal Betsy was amplifyin' coulda been as little as a micro-micro-watt. At its frequency an' type, she'd choke it down if it was more. But even a micro-micro-watt bothered Betsy until she got Al and Gus to help. She was fair screamin' for somebody to come help her hold it. But the three of them done all right." Howell conceded the point. "That seems sound reasoning." "But you don't broadcast with a micro-micro-watt. You use a hell of a lot more power than that! The transmitter the guy in the screen said to make was a twenty-kilowatt job. Not too much for a broadcast of sine waves, but a hell of a lot to be turned loose, in waves that have Betsy hollerin' at the power she was handlin'!" "It might break even the Mahon machines in this installation?" demanded Howell. "You're gettin' warm," said the sergeant. Graves said: "You mean it might break all operating communicators in a very large area?" "You're gettin' hot," said the sergeant grimly. Lecky wetted his lips. "I think," he said very carefully, "that you suspect it is a wave-type which will break any dynamic system, in any sort of object a dynamic system can exist in." "Yeah," said the sergeant. He waited, looking at Lecky. "And," said Lecky, "not only operating machines are dynamic systems. Living plants and animals are, too. So are men." "That's what I'm drivin' at," said Sergeant Bellews. "So you believe," said Lecky, very pale indeed, "that we have been given the circuit-diagram of a transmitter which will broadcast a wave-type which destroys dynamic systems--life as well as the operation of machines. Persons--in the future or an alien creature in a space-ship, or perhaps even the Compubs--are furnishing us with designs for transmitters of death, to be linked together so that if one fails the others will carry on. And they lure us to destroy ourselves by lying about who they are and what they propose." "They're lyin'," said the sergeant. "They say they're in the future and they don't know a thing about Mahon units. Else they'd use 'em." Lecky wetted his lips again. "And--if they are not in the future, they are trying to get us to destroy ourselves because that would be safer and surer than trying to destroy us by--say--transmitters of death dropped upon us by parachute. Yet if we do not destroy ourselves, they will surely do that." "If we don't bump ourselves off, it'll be because we got wise," acknowledged the sergeant. "If we get wise, we could bump them off by parachute-transmitter. So they'll beat us to it. They'll have to!" "Yes," said Lecky. "They'll have to. It has always been said that a death-ray was impossible. This would be a death-broadcast. If we do not broadcast, they will--whoever they are. It is--" He smiled mirthlessly at the magnitude of his understatement. "It is urgent that we do something. What shall we do, Sergeant?" * * * * * A squadron of light tanks arrived at Research Installation 83 that afternoon, with a shipment of courier motorcycles. They had been equipped with Mahon units and went to the post to be trained. The Pentagon was debating the development of a Mahon-modified guided missile, and a drone plane was under construction. But non-military items also arrived for activation and test. Automatic telephone switching systems, it appeared, could be made much simpler if they could be trained to do their work instead of built so they couldn't help it. Passenger-cars other than jeeps showed promise. It had long been known that most accidents occurred with new cars, and that ancient jalopies were relatively safe even in the hands of juvenile delinquents. It was credible that part of the difference was in the operating habits of the cars. It appeared that humanity was upon the threshold of a new era, in which the value of personality would reappear among the things taken for granted. Strictly speaking, of course, Mahon machines were not persons. But they reflected the personalities of their owners. It might again seem desirable to be a decent human being if only because machines worked better for them. But it would be tragic if Mahon machines were used to destroy humankind with themselves! Sergeant Bellews would have raged at the thought of training a Mahon unit to guide an atom bomb. It would have to be--in a fashion--deceived. He even disliked the necessity he faced that afternoon while a courier winged his way to the Pentagon with the top-secret tapes Betsy and Al and Gus had made. The Rehab Shop was equipped not only to recondition machines but to test them. One item of equipment was a generator of substitute broadcast waves. It could deliver a carrier-wave down to half a micro-micro-watt of any form desired, and up to the power of a nearby transmitter. It was very useful for calibrating communicators. But Sergeant Bellews modified it to allow of variations in type as well as frequency and amplitude. "I'm betting," he grunted, "that there's different sorts of the wave-type those guys want us to broadcast. Like there's a spectrum of visible light. If we were color-blind and yellow'd bust things, they'd transmit in red that we could see, and they'd tell us to broadcast something in yellow that'd wipe us out. And we wouldn't have sense enough not to broadcast the yellow, because we wouldn't know the difference between it and red until we did broadcast. Then it'd be too late." Howell watched with tight-clamped jaws. He had committed himself to the authenticity of the broadcasts claiming to be from a future time. Now he was shaken, but only enough to admit the need for tests. Graves sat unnaturally still. Lecky looked at Sergeant Bellews with a peculiarly tranquil expression on his face. "Only," grunted the sergeant, "it ain't frequency we got to figure, but type. Nobody hardly uses anything but sine waves for communication, but I got to make this gadget turn out a freak wave-type by guess and golly. I got a sort of test for it, though." * * * * * He straightened up and connected a cable from the generator to the Mark IV communicator which was a factory twin of Betsy. "I'm gonna feed this communicator half a micro-micro-watt of stuff like the broadcast--I think," he announced grimly. "I saw the diagrams of the transmitters they want us to make. I'm guessing the broadcast-wave they use is close to it but not exact. Close, because it's bad for machines. Not exact, because they're alive while they use it. I hope I don't hit anything on the nose. Okay?" Lecky said gently: "I have never been more frightened. Go ahead!" Sergeant Bellews depressed a stud. The communicator's screen lighted up instantly. It was receiving the generator's minute output and accepted it as a broadcast. But the signal was unmodulated, so there was no image nor any sound. * * * * * The communicator's standby light flickered steadily. Sergeant Bellews adjusted a knob on the generator. The communicator's standby flicker changed in amplitude. Bellews turned the knob back. He adjusted another control. The standby light wavered crazily. Graves said nervously: "I think I see. You are trying to make this communicator react as Betsy did. When it does, you will consider that your generator is creating a wave like the broadcasts from nowhere." "Yeah," said Bellews. "It ain't scientific, but it's the best I can do." He worked the generator-controls with infinite care. Once the communicator's standby light approached sine-wave modulation. He hastily shifted away from the settings which caused it. He muttered: "Close!" Then, suddenly, the communicator's lamp began to waver in an extraordinary, hysterical fashion. Sergeant Bellews turned down the volume swiftly. He wiped sweat off his forehead. "I--I think I got the trick," he said heavily. "It's a hell of a wave-type! Are you guys game to feed it into this communicator's output amplifier?" "I have six sets of cold chills running up and down my spine," said Lecky. "I think you should proceed." Howell said angrily: "It's got to be tried, hasn't it?" "It's got to be tried," acknowledged Sergeant Bellews. He shifted the generator's cable from the communicator's input to the feed-in for preamplified signal. The communicator's screen went dark. It no longer received a simulated broadcast signal. It was now signalling--calling. But the instant the new signal started out, the standby light flickered horribly. Sergeant Bellews grimly plugged in other machines--to the three scientists they looked like duplicates of Gus and Al--to closed-circuit relationship with Betsy's twin. The standby light calmed. "Now we test," he said grimly. "Got a watch?" Lecky extended his wrist. "Watch it," said Sergeant Bellews. He stepped up the output. "My watch has stopped," said Lecky, through white lips. Graves looked at his own watch. He shook it and held it to his ear. He looked sick. Howell growled and looked at his own. "That wave stops watches," he admitted unwillingly. "But not Mahon machines easy," said Sergeant Bellews heavily, "and not us. There was almost three micro-micro-watts goin' out then. That's three-millionths of a millionth of a ampere-second at one volt. We--" * * * * * His voice stopped, as if with a click. The screen of Betsy's factory-twin communicator lighted up. A man's face peered out of it. He was bearded and they could not see his costume, but he was frightened. "_What--what is this?_" cried his voice shrilly from the speakers. Sergeant Bellews said very sharply: "Hey! You ain't the guy we've been talking to!" The screen went dark. Sergeant Bellews put his hand over the microphone opening. He turned fiercely upon the rest. "Look!" he snapped. "We were broadcastin' their trick wave--the wave they used to talk to us! And they picked it up! But they weren't expectin' it! They were set to pick up the wave they told us to transmit! See? That guy'll come back. He's got to! So we got to play along! He'll want to find out if we got wise and won't broadcast ourselves to death! If he finds out we know what we're doin', they'll parachute a transmitter down on us before we can do it to them! Back me up! Get set!" He removed his hand from the microphone. "Callin' 2180!" he chattered urgently. "Calling the guy that just contacted us! Come in, 2180! You're not the guy we've been talking to, but come in! Come in, 2180!" Howell said stridently: "But if that's 2180, how'd we parachute--". Lecky clapped a hand over his mouth with a fierceness surprising in so small a man. He whispered desperately into Howell's ear. Graves absurdly began to bite his nails, staring at the communicator-screen. Sergeant Bellews continued his calling, ever more urgently. His voice echoed peculiarly in the Rehab Shop. It seemed suddenly a place of resonant echoes. All the waiting, repaired, or to-be-rehabilitated machines appeared to listen with interest while Sergeant Bellews called: "Come in, 2180! We been trying to reach you for a coupla weeks! We got somebody else instead of you, and they been talkin' to us, and they say that they're 3020 instead of 2180, but we've got to contact you! They don't know anything about that germ that's gonna mutate and bump us off! It's ancient history to them. We got to reach you! Come in, 2180!" The flickering yellow lights of the machines wavered as if all the quasi-living machines were listening absorbedly. The Rehab Shop was full of shadows. And Sergeant Bellews sat before the dark-screened communicator with sweat on his face, calling cajolingly to nothingness to come in. After five minutes the screen grew abruptly bright again. The brisk, raceless broadcaster of the earlier broadcast--not the bearded man--came back. He forced a smile: "_Ah! 1972! At last you reach us! But we did not hope you could make your transmitters so soon!_" "We tried to analyze your wave," said Sergeant Bellews, with every appearance of feverish relief, "but we only got it approximate. We tried callin' back with what we got, and we got through time, all right, but we contacted some guys in 3020 instead of you! We need to talk to you!--Can you give me the stuff about that bug that's gonna wipe out half of us? Quick? I got a recorder goin'." * * * * * The completely uncharacterizable man in the screen forced a second smile. He held something to his ear. It would be a tiny sound-receiver. Obviously the contact in time or place or nowhere was being viewed by others than the one man who appeared. He was receiving instructions. "_Ah!_" he said brightly, "_but now that you have the contact, you will not lose it again! Leave your controls where they are, and our learned men will tell your learned men all that they need to know. But--3020? You contacted 3020? That is not in our records of your time!_" He listened again to the thing at his ear. His expression became suddenly suspicious, as if someone had ordered that as well as the words which came next. "_We do not understand how you could contact a time a thousand years beyond us. It is possible that you attempt a joke. A--a kid, as you would say._" * * * * * Sergeant Bellews beamed into the screen which so remarkably functioned as a transmitting-eye also. "Hell!" he said cordially. "You know we wouldn't kid you! You or our great-great-great-grandchildren! We depend on you! We got to get you to tell us how not to get wiped out! In 3020 the whole business is forgotten. It's a thousand years old, to them! But they're passin' back some swell machinery--" He turned his head as if listening to something the microphone could not pick up. But he looked appealingly at Lecky. Lecky nodded and moved toward the communicator. "Look!" said Sergeant Bellews into the screen. "Here's Doc Lecky--one of our top guys. You talk to him." He gave his seat to Lecky. Out of range of the communicator, he mopped his face. His shirt was soaked through by the sweat produced by the stress of the past few minutes. He shivered violently, and then clamped his teeth and fumbled out sheets of paper. He beckoned to Graves. Graves came. "We--we got to give him a doctored circuit," whispered Sergeant Bellews desperately, "and it's got to be good--an' quick!" Graves bent over the paper on which the sergeant dripped sweat. The sergeant murmured through now-chattering teeth what had to be devised, and at once. It must be the circuit-diagram for a transmitter to be given to the man whose face filled the screen. The transmitter must be of at least twenty-kilowatt power. It must be such a circuit as nobody had ever seen before. It must be convincing. It should appear to radiate impossibly, or to destroy energy without radiation. But it must actually produce a broadcast signal of this exotic type--here the sergeant described with shaky precision the exact constants of the wave to be generated--and the broadcaster from nowhere must not be able to deduce those constants or that wave-type from the diagram until he had built the transmitter and tried it. "I know it can't be done!" said the sergeant desperately. "I know it can't! But it's gotta be! Or they'll parachute a transmitter down on us sure." Graves smiled a quick and nervous smile. He began to sketch a circuit. It was a wonderful thing. It was the product of much ingenuity and meditation. It had been devised--by himself--as a brain-teaser for the amusement of other high-level scientific brains. Mathematicians zestfully contrive problems to stump each other. Specialists in the higher branches of electronics sometimes present each other with diagrammed circuits which pretend to achieve the impossible. The problem is to find the hidden flaw. Graves deftly outlined his circuit and began to fill in the details. Ostensibly, it was a circuit which consumed energy and produced nothing--not even heat. In a sense it was the exact opposite of a perpetual-motion scheme, which pretends to get energy from nowhere. This circuit pretended to radiate energy to nowhere, and yet to get rid of it. * * * * * Presently Lecky could be heard expostulating gently: "But of course we are willing to give you the circuit by which we communicate with the year 3020! Naturally! But it seems strange that you suspect us! After all, if you do not tell us how to meet the danger your broadcasts have told of, you will never be born!" Sergeant Bellews mopped his face and moved into the screen's field of vision. "Doc," he said, laying a hand on Lecky's arm. "Doc Graves is sketchin' what they want right now. You want to come show it, Doc?" Graves took Lecky's place. He spread out the diagram, finishing it as he talked. His nervous, faint smile appeared as the mannerism of embarrassment it was. "There can be no radiation from a coil shaped like this," he said embarrassedly, "because of the Werner Principle.... Yet on examination ... input to the transistor series involves ... energy must flow ... and when this coil...." His voice flowed on. He explained a puzzle, presenting it diffidently as he had presented it to other men in his own field. Then he had been playing--for fun. Now he played for perhaps the highest stakes that could be imagined. He completed his diagram and, smiling nervously, held it up to the communicator-screen. It was instantly transmitted, of course. To nowhere. Which was most appropriate, because it pretended to be the diagram of a circuit sending radiation to the same place. * * * * * The face on the screen twitched, now. The hand with the tiny earphone was always at the ear of the man on the screen, so that he plainly did not speak one word without high authority. "_We will--examine this_," he said. His voice was a full two tones higher than it had been. "_If you have been--truthful we will give you the information you wish_." _Click!_ The screen went dark. Lecky let out his breath. Sergeant Bellews threw off the transmission switch. He began to shake. Howell said indignantly: "When I make a mistake, I admit it! That broadcast isn't from the future! If it hadn't been a lie, he'd have known he had to tell us what we wanted to know! He couldn't hold us up for terms! If he let us die he wouldn't exist!" "Y-yeah," said Sergeant Bellews. "What I'm wonderin' is, did we fool him?" "Oh, yes!" said Graves, with diffident confidence. "I don't know but three men in the world who could find the flaw in that circuit." He smiled faintly. "But it radiates all the energy that's fed into it." He turned to Sergeant Bellews. "You gave me the constants of a wave you wanted it to radiate. I fixed it. It will. But why that special type--that special wave?" Sergeant Bellews pulled himself together. "Because," he said grimly, "that was the wave they wanted us to broadcast. What I'm hoping is that you gave 'em a transmitter to do exactly the same thing as the one they designed for us. If they're fooled, they'll broadcast the wave they told us to broadcast. If it busts machines, it'll bust their machines. If it stops all dynamic systems dead--includin' men--they'll be stopped dead, too." Then he looked from one to another of the three scientists, each one reacting in his own special way. "Personally," said Sergeant Bellews doggedly, "I'm goin' to have a can of beer. Who'll join me?" * * * * * The world wagged on. The automatic monitors in Communications Center reported that another broadcast had been received by Betsy and undoubtedly unscrambled by Al and Gus, working as a team. The reported broadcast was, of course, an interception of the two-way talk from the Rehab Shop. The tall young lieutenant, working with his eyes kept conscientiously shut, extracted the tapes and loaded them in a top-security briefcase. A second courier took off for Washington with them. There a certified, properly cleared major-general had them run off, and saw and heard every word of the conversation between the Rehab Shop and--nowhere. He howled with wrath. Sergeant Bellews went into the guardhouse while plane-loads of interrogating officers flew from Washington. Howell and Graves and Lecky went under strict guard until they could be asked some thousands of variations of the question, "Why did you do it?" The high brass quivered with fury. They did not accept decisions made at non-commissioned-officer level. Communication with their great-great-great-grandchildren, they considered, should have been begun with proper authority and under high-ranking auspices. They commanded that 2180 should immediately be re-contacted and properly authorized and good-faith conference begun all over again. The only trouble was that they could get no reply. The dither was terrific and the tumult frantic. When, moreover, even Betsy remained silent, and Al and Gus had nothing to unscramble, the high brass built up explosive indignation. But it was confined to top-security levels. The world outside the Pentagon knew nothing. Even at Research Installation 83 very, very few persons had the least idea what had taken place. The sun shone blandly upon manicured lawns, and the officers' children played vociferously, and washing-machines laundered diapers with beautiful efficiency, and vacuum cleaners and Mahon-modified jeeps performed their functions with an air of enthusiastic contentment. It seemed that a golden age approached. It did. There were machines which were not merely possessions. Mahon-modified machines acquired reflections of the habits of the families which used them. An electric icebox acted as if it took an interest in its work. A vacuum cleaner seemed uncomfortable if it did not perform its task to perfection. It would seem as absurd to exchange an old, habituated family convenience as to exchange a member of the family itself. Presently there would be washing-machines cherished for their seeming knowledge of family-member individual preferences, and personal fliers respected for their conscientiousness, and one would relievedly allow an adolescent to drive a car if it were one of proven experience and sagacity.... * * * * * The life of an ordinary person would be enormously enriched. A Mahon-modified machine would not even wear out. It took care of its own lubrication and upkeep--giving notice of its needs by the behavior of its standby-lamp. When parts needed replacement one would feel concern rather than irritation. There would be a personal relationship with the machines which so faithfully reflected one's personality. And the machines would always, always, always act toward humans according to the golden rule. But meanwhile the Rehab Shop was taken over by officers of rank. They tried frantically to resume the communication that had been broken off. Suspecting that Sergeant Bellews had shifted controls, they essayed to shift them back. The communicator which was Betsy's factory twin went into sine-wave standby-modulation, and suddenly smoked all over and was wrecked. The wave-generator went into hysterics and produced nothing whatever. Then there was nothing to do but pull Sergeant Bellews out of the clink and order him to do the whole business all over again. "I can't," said Sergeant Bellews indignantly. "It can't be done. Those guys are busy buildin' a transmitter according to the diagram Doc Graves gave them. They won't pay no attention to anything until they'd tried to chat with their great-great-great-grand-children in 3020. They were phonys, anyhow! Pretendin' to be in 2180 and not knowin' what Mahon units could do!" Lecky and Graves and Howell were even less satisfactory. They couldn't pretend even to try what the questioning-teams from the Pentagon wanted them to do. And Betsy remained silent, receiving nothing, and Gus and Al waited meditatively for something to unscramble, and nothing turned up. And then, at 3:00 P.M. Greenwich mean time, on August 9, 1972, nearly every operating communicator in the fringe of free nations around the territory of the Union of Communist Republics--all communicators blew out. There were only four men in the world who really knew why--Sergeant Bellews and Lecky and Graves and Howell. They knew that somewhere behind the Iron Curtain a twenty-kilowatt transmitter had been turned on. It produced a wave of the type and with the characteristics that would have been produced by a transmitter built from the diagram sent through Betsy and Al and Gus for people in the United States to build. Obviously, it had been built from Graves' diagram broadcast to somewhere else and it broadcast what the United States had been urged to broadcast. * * * * * It blew itself out instantly, of course. The wave it produced would stop any dynamic system at once, including its own. But it hit Stockholm and traffic jammed as the dynamic systems of cars in operation were destroyed. In Gibraltar, the signal-systems of the Rock went dead. All around the fringe of the armed Communist republics machines stopped and communications ended and very many persons with heart conditions died very quietly. Because their dynamic systems were least stable. But healthy people--like Mahon-modified machines--had great resistance ... outside the Iron Curtain. There was, though, almost a vacuum of news and mechanical operations at the rim of a nearly perfect circle some four thousand miles in diameter, whose center was in a Compub research installation. It was very bad. Such a panic as had never been known before swept the free world. Some mysterious weapon, it was felt, had been used to cripple those who would resist invasion, and the Compub armed forces would shortly be on the march, and Armageddon was at hand. The free world prepared to die fighting. But war did not come. Nothing happened at all. In three days there were sketchy communications almost everywhere outside that monstrous circle of silence. But nothing came out of that circle. Nothing. In two weeks, exploring parties cautiously crossed the barbed-wire frontier fences to find out what had happened. Those who went farthest came back shaken and sick. There were survivors in the Compubs, of course. Especially near the fringes of the circle. There were some millions of survivors. But there was no longer a nation to be called the Union of Communist Republics. There were only frightened, starving people trudging blindly away from cities that were charnel-houses and machines that would not run and trees and crops and grasses that were stark dead where they stood. It would be a long time before anybody would want to cross those lifeless plains and enter the places which once had been swarming hives of homes and people. * * * * * And presently, of course, Sergeant Bellews was let out of the guardhouse. He could not be charged with any crime. Nor could Graves nor Lecky nor Howell. They were asked, confidentially, to keep their mouths shut. Which they would have done anyhow. And Sergeant Bellews was asked with reluctant respectfulness, just what he thought had really happened. "Some guys got too smart," he said, fuming. "A guy that'll broadcast a wave that'll wreck machines ... I haven't got any kinda use for him! Dammit, when a machine treats you accordin' to the golden rule, you oughta treat it the same way!" There were other, also-respectful questions. "How the hell would I know?" demanded Sergeant Bellews wrathfully. "It coulda been that we did make contact with 2180, and they were smart an' told the Compubs to try out what we told 'em. But I don't believe it. It coulda been a kinda monster from some other planet wanting us wiped out. But he learned him a lesson, if he did! And o' course, it coulda been the Compubs themselves, trying to fool us into committing suicide so they'd--uh--inherit the earth. I wouldn't know! But I bet there ain't any more broadcasts from nowhere!" He was allowed to return to the Rehab Shop, and the flickering standby lights of many Mahon-modified machines seemed to glow more warmly as he moved among them. And he was right about there not being any more broadcasts from nowhere. There weren't. Not ever. THE END 
26332	----	A PRIZE ... FOR EDIE By J. F. BONE Illustrated by Schoenherr [Illustration] _The Committee had, unquestionably, made a mistake. There was no doubt that Edie had achieved the long-sought cancer cure ... but awarding the Nobel Prize was, nonetheless, a mistake ..._ The letter from America arrived too late. The Committee had regarded acceptance as a foregone conclusion, for no one since Boris Pasternak had turned down a Nobel Prize. So when Professor Doctor Nels Christianson opened the letter, there was not the slightest fear on his part, or on that of his fellow committeemen, Dr. Eric Carlstrom and Dr. Sven Eklund, that the letter would be anything other than the usual routine acceptance. "At last we learn the identity of this great research worker," Christianson murmured as he scanned the closely typed sheets. Carlstrom and Eklund waited impatiently, wondering at the peculiar expression that fixed itself on Christianson's face. Fine beads of sweat appeared on the professor's high narrow forehead as he laid the letter down. "Well," he said heavily, "now we know." "Know what?" Eklund demanded. "What does it say? Does she accept?" "She accepts," Christianson said in a peculiar half-strangled tone as he passed the letter to Eklund. "See for yourself." Eklund's reaction was different. His face was a mottled reddish white as he finished the letter and handed it across the table to Carlstrom. "Why," he demanded of no one in particular, "did this have to happen to us?" "It was bound to happen sometime," Carlstrom said. "It's just our misfortune that it happened to us." He chuckled as he passed the letter back to Christianson. "At least this year the presentation should be an event worth remembering." "It seems that we have a little problem," Christianson said, making what would probably be the understatement of the century. Possibly there would be greater understatements in the remaining ninety-nine years of the Twenty-first Century, but Carlstrom doubted it. "We certainly have our necks out," he agreed. "We can't do it!" Eklund exploded. "We simply can't award the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology to that ... that _C. Edie_!" He sputtered into silence. "We can hardly do anything else," Christianson said. "There's no question as to the identity of the winner. Dr. Hanson's letter makes that unmistakably clear. And there's no question that the award is deserved." "We still could award it to someone else," Eklund said. "Not a chance. We've already said too much to the press. It's known all over the world that the medical award is going to the discoverer of the basic cause of cancer, to the founder of modern neoplastic therapy." Christianson grimaced. "If we changed our decision now, there'd be all sorts of embarrassing questions from the press." "I can see it now," Carlstrom said, "the banquet, the table, the flowers, and Professor Doctor Nels Christianson in formal dress with the Order of St. Olaf gleaming across his white shirtfront, standing before that distinguished audience and announcing: 'The Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology is awarded to--' and then that deadly hush when the audience sees the winner." "You needn't rub it in," Christianson said unhappily. "I can see it, too." "These Americans!" Eklund said bitterly. He wiped his damp forehead. The picture Carlstrom had drawn was accurate but hardly appealing. "One simply can't trust them. Publishing a report as important as that as a laboratory release. They should have given proper credit." "They did," Carlstrom said. "They did--precisely. But the world, including us, was too stupid to see it. We have only ourselves to blame." "If it weren't for the fact that the work was inspired and effective," Christianson muttered, "we might have a chance of salvaging this situation. But through its application ninety-five per cent of cancers are now curable. It is obviously the outstanding contribution to medicine in the past five decades." "But we must consider the source," Eklund protested. "This award will make the prize for medicine a laughingstock. No doctor will ever accept another. If we go through with this, we might as well forget about the medical award from now on. This will be its swan song. It hits too close to home. Too many people have been saying similar things about our profession and its trend toward specialization. And to have the Nobel Prize confirm them would alienate every doctor in the world. We simply can't do it." "Yet who else has made a comparable discovery? Or one that is even half as important?" Christianson asked. "That's a good question," Carlstrom said, "and a good answer to it isn't going to be easy to find. For my part, I can only wish that Alphax Laboratories had displayed an interest in literature rather than medicine. Then our colleagues at the Academy could have had the painful decision." "Their task would be easier than ours," Christianson said wearily. "After all, the criteria of art are more flexible. Medicine, unfortunately, is based upon facts." "That's the hell of it," Carlstrom said. "There must be some way to solve this problem," Eklund said. "After all it was a perfectly natural mistake. We never suspected that Alphax was a physical rather than a biological sciences laboratory. Perhaps that might offer grounds--" "I don't think so," Carlstrom interrupted. "The means in this case aren't as important as the results, and we can't deny that the cancer problem is virtually solved." "Even though men have been saying for the past two generations that the answer was probably in the literature and all that was needed was someone with the intelligence and the time to put the facts together, the fact remains that it was C. Edie who did the job. And it required quite a bit more than merely collecting facts. Intelligence and original thinking of a high order was involved." Christianson sighed. "Some_one_," Eklund said bitterly. "Some _thing_ you mean. _C. Edie_--C.E.D.--Computer, Extrapolating, Discriminatory. Manufactured by Alphax Laboratories, Trenton, New Jersey, U.S.A. _C. Edie!_ Americans!!--always naming things. A machine wins the Nobel Prize. It's fantastic!" Christianson shook his head. "It's not fantastic, unfortunately. And I see no way out. We can't even award the prize to the team of engineers who designed and built Edie. Dr. Hanson is right when he says the discovery was Edie's and not the engineers'. It would be like giving the prize to Albert Einstein's parents because they created him." * * * * * "Is there any way we can keep the presentation secret?" Eklund asked. "I'm afraid not. The presentations are public. We've done too good a job publicizing the Nobel Prize. As a telecast item, it's almost the equal of the motion picture Academy Award." "I can imagine the reaction when our candidate is revealed in all her metallic glory. A two-meter cube of steel filled with microminiaturized circuits, complete with flashing lights and cogwheels," Carlstrom chuckled. "And where are you going to hang the medal?" Christianson shivered. "I wish you wouldn't give that metal nightmare a personality," he said. "It unnerves me. Personally, I wish that Dr. Hanson, Alphax Laboratories, and Edie were all at the bottom of the ocean--in some nice deep spot like the Mariannas Trench." He shrugged. "Of course, we won't have that sort of luck, so we'll have to make the best of it." "It just goes to show that you can't trust Americans," Eklund said. "I've always thought we should keep our awards on this side of the Atlantic where people are sane and civilized. Making a personality out of a computer--ugh! I suppose it's their idea of a joke." "I doubt it," Christianson said. "They just like to name things--preferably with female names. It's a form of insecurity, the mother fixation. But that's not important. I'm afraid, gentlemen, that we shall have to make the award as we have planned. I can see no way out. After all, there's no reason why the machine cannot receive the prize. The conditions merely state that it is to be presented to the one, regardless of nationality, who makes the greatest contribution to medicine or physiology." "I wonder how His Majesty will take it," Carlstrom said. "The king! I'd forgotten that!" Eklund gasped. "I expect he'll have to take it," Christianson said. "He might even appreciate the humor in the situation." "Gustaf Adolf is a good king, but there are limits," Eklund observed. "There are other considerations," Christianson replied. "After all, Edie is the reason the Crown Prince is still alive, and Gustaf is fond of his son." "After all these years?" Christianson smiled. Swedish royalty _was_ long-lived. It was something of a standing joke that King Gustaf would probably outlast the pyramids, providing the pyramids lived in Sweden. "I'm sure His Majesty will cooperate. He has a strong sense of duty and since the real problem is his, not ours, I doubt if he will shirk it." "How do you figure that?" Eklund asked. "We merely select the candidates according to the rules, and according to the nature of their contribution. Edie is obviously the outstanding candidate in medicine for this year. It deserves the prize. We would be compromising with principle if we did not award it fairly." "I suppose you're right," Eklund said gloomily. "I can't think of any reasonable excuse to deny the award." "Nor I," Carlstrom said. "But what did you mean by that remark about this being the king's problem?" "You forget," Christianson said mildly. "Of all of us, the king has the most difficult part. As you know, the Nobel Prize is formally presented at a State banquet." "Well?" "His Majesty is the host," Christianson said. "And just how does one eat dinner with an electronic computer?" THE END TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact and Science Fiction April 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. The following corrections were applied to this text: Page 55: _but awarding the Nobel Prize was, nonetheless{original had nonethelesss}, a mistake ..._ Page 56: "It was bound to happen{original had happn} sometime," Carlstrom said. 
28617	----	[Transcriber's Note: Initial ads moved below main text. The Beetle Horde concludes a story begun in the Jan, 1930 edition. Minor spelling and typographical errors corrected. Variable Spelling and Hyphenations standardized. Full list of changes at end of text. Passages in italics indicated by underscore _italics_. Passages in bold indicated by equals =bold=.] ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees: _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid; by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are_: ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, FLYERS, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, SKY-HIGH LIBRARY MAGAZINE, MISS 1930, _and_ FOREST AND STREAM _More Than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ VOL. I, No. 2 CONTENTS FEBRUARY, 1930 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Water-colors from a Scene in "Spawn of the Stars."_ OLD CROMPTON'S SECRET HARL VINCENT 153 _Tom's Extraordinary Machine Glowed--and the Years Were Banished from Old Crompton's Body. But There Still Remained, Deep-seated in His Century-old Mind, the Memory of His Crime._ SPAWN OF THE STARS CHARLES WILLARD DIFFIN 166 _The Earth Lay Powerless Beneath Those Loathsome, Yellowish Monsters That, Sheathed in Cometlike Globes, Sprang from the Skies to Annihilate Man and Reduce His Cities to Ashes._ THE CORPSE ON THE GRATING HUGH B. CAVE 187 _In the Gloomy Depths of the Old Warehouse Dale Saw a Thing That Drew a Scream of Horror to His Dry Lips. It Was a Corpse--the Mold of Decay on Its Long-dead Features--and Yet It Was Alive!_ CREATURES OF THE LIGHT SOPHIE WENZEL ELLIS 196 _He Had Striven to Perfect the Faultless Man of the Future, and Had Succeeded--Too Well. For in the Pitilessly Cold Eyes of Adam, His Super-human Creation, Dr. Mundson Saw Only Contempt--and Annihilation--for the Human Race._ INTO SPACE STERNER ST. PAUL 221 _What Was the Extraordinary Connection Between Dr. Livermore's Sudden Disappearance and the Coming of a New Satellite to the Earth?_ THE BEETLE HORDE VICTOR ROUSSEAU 229 _Bullets, Shrapnel, Shell--Nothing Can Stop the Trillions of Famished, Man-sized Beetles Which, Led by a Madman, Sweep Down Over the Human Race._ MAD MUSIC ANTHONY PELCHER 248 _The Sixty Stories of the Perfectly Constructed Colossus Building Had Mysteriously Crashed! What Was the Connection Between This Catastrophe and the Weird Strains of the Mad Musician's Violin?_ THE THIEF OF TIME CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 259 _The Teller Turned to the Stacked Pile of Bills. They Were Gone! And No One Had Been Near!_ * * * * * Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York, N.Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Nathan Goldmann, Secretary. Application for entry as second-class mail pending at the Post Office at New York, under Act of March 3, 1879. Application for registration of title as Trade Mark pending in the U.S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * Old Crompton's Secret _By Harl Vincent_ Tom's extraordinary machine glowed--and the years were banished from Old Crompton's body. But there still remained, deep-seated in his century-old mind, the memory of his crime. [Illustration: _Tom tripped on a wire and fell, with his ferocious adversary on top._] Two miles west of the village of Laketon there lived an aged recluse who was known only as Old Crompton. As far back as the villagers could remember he had visited the town regularly twice a month, each time tottering his lonely way homeward with a load of provisions. He appeared to be well supplied with funds, but purchased sparingly as became a miserly hermit. And so vicious was his tongue that few cared to converse with him, even the young hoodlums of the town hesitating to harass him with the banter usually accorded the other bizarre characters of the streets. The oldest inhabitants knew nothing of his past history, and they had long since lost their curiosity in the matter. He was a fixture, as was the old town hall with its surrounding park. His lonely cabin was shunned by all who chanced to pass along the old dirt road that led through the woods to nowhere and was rarely used. His only extravagance was in the matter of books, and the village book store profited considerably by his purchases. But, at the instigation of Cass Harmon, the bookseller, it was whispered about that Old Crompton was a believer in the black art--that he had made a pact with the devil himself and was leagued with him and his imps. For the books he bought were strange ones; ancient volumes that Cass must needs order from New York or Chicago and that cost as much as ten and even fifteen dollars a copy; translations of the writings of the alchemists and astrologers and philosophers of the dark ages. It was no wonder Old Crompton was looked at askance by the simple-living and deeply religious natives of the small Pennsylvania town. But there came a day when the hermit was to have a neighbor, and the town buzzed with excited speculation as to what would happen. * * * * * The property across the road from Old Crompton's hut belonged to Alton Forsythe, Laketon's wealthiest resident--hundreds of acres of scrubby woodland that he considered well nigh worthless. But Tom Forsythe, the only son, had returned from college and his ambitions were of a nature strange to his townspeople and utterly incomprehensible to his father. Something vague about biology and chemical experiments and the like is what he spoke of, and, when his parents objected on the grounds of possible explosions and other weird accidents, he prevailed upon his father to have a secluded laboratory built for him in the woods. When the workmen started the small frame structure not a quarter of a mile from his own hut, Old Crompton was furious. He raged and stormed, but to no avail. Tom Forsythe had his heart set on the project and he was somewhat of a successful debater himself. The fire that flashed from his cold gray eyes matched that from the pale blue ones of the elderly anchorite. And the law was on his side. So the building was completed and Tom Forsythe moved in, bag and baggage. For more than a year the hermit studiously avoided his neighbor, though, truth to tell, this required very little effort. For Tom Forsythe became almost as much of a recluse as his predecessor, remaining indoors for days at a time and visiting the home of his people scarcely oftener than Old Crompton visited the village. He too became the target of village gossip and his name was ere long linked with that of the old man in similar animadversion. But he cared naught for the opinions of his townspeople nor for the dark looks of suspicion that greeted him on his rare appearances in the public places. His chosen work engrossed him so deeply that all else counted for nothing. His parents remonstrated with him in vain. Tom laughed away their recriminations and fears, continuing with his labors more strenuously than ever. He never troubled his mind over the nearness of Old Crompton's hut, the existence of which he hardly noticed or considered. * * * * * It so happened one day that the old man's curiosity got the better of him and Tom caught him prowling about on his property, peering wonderingly at the many rabbit hutches, chicken coops, dove cotes and the like which cluttered the space to the rear of the laboratory. Seeing that he was discovered, the old man wrinkled his face into a toothless grin of conciliation. "Just looking over your place, Forsythe," he said. "Sorry about the fuss I made when you built the house. But I'm an old man, you know, and changes are unwelcome. Now I have forgotten my objections and would like to be friends. Can we?" Tom peered searchingly into the flinty eyes that were set so deeply in the wrinkled, leathery countenance. He suspected an ulterior motive, but could not find it within him to turn the old fellow down. "Why--I guess so, Crompton," he hesitated: "I have nothing against you, but I came here for seclusion and I'll not have anyone bothering me in my work." "I'll not bother you, young man. But I'm fond of pets and I see you have many of them here; guinea pigs, chickens, pigeons, and rabbits. Would you mind if I make friends with some of them?" "They're not pets," answered Tom dryly, "they are material for use in my experiments. But you may amuse yourself with them if you wish." "You mean that you cut them up--kill them, perhaps?" "Not that. But I sometimes change them in physical form, sometimes cause them to become of huge size, sometimes produce pigmy offspring of normal animals." "Don't they suffer?" "Very seldom, though occasionally a subject dies. But the benefit that will accrue to mankind is well worth the slight inconvenience to the dumb creatures and the infrequent loss of their lives." * * * * * Old Crompton regarded him dubiously. "You are trying to find?" he interrogated. "The secret of life!" Tom Forsythe's eyes took on the stare of fanaticism. "Before I have finished I shall know the nature of the vital force--how to produce it. I shall prolong human life indefinitely; create artificial life. And the solution is more closely approached with each passing day." The hermit blinked in pretended mystification. But he understood perfectly, and he bitterly envied the younger man's knowledge and ability that enabled him to delve into the mysteries of nature which had always been so attractive to his own mind. And somehow, he acquired a sudden deep hatred of the coolly confident young man who spoke so positively of accomplishing the impossible. During the winter months that followed, the strange acquaintance progressed but little. Tom did not invite his neighbor to visit him, nor did Old Crompton go out of his way to impose his presence on the younger man, though each spoke pleasantly enough to the other on the few occasions when they happened to meet. With the coming of spring they encountered one another more frequently, and Tom found considerable of interest in the quaint, borrowed philosophy of the gloomy old man. Old Crompton, of course, was desperately interested in the things that were hidden in Tom's laboratory, but he never requested permission to see them. He hid his real feelings extremely well and was apparently content to spend as much time as possible with the feathered and furred subjects for experiment, being very careful not to incur Tom's displeasure by displaying too great interest in the laboratory itself. * * * * * Then there came a day in early summer when an accident served to draw the two men closer together, and Old Crompton's long-sought opportunity followed. He was starting for the village when, from down the road, there came a series of tremendous squawkings, then a bellow of dismay in the voice of his young neighbor. He turned quickly and was astonished at the sight of a monstrous rooster which had escaped and was headed straight for him with head down and wings fluttering wildly. Tom followed close behind, but was unable to catch the darting monster. And monster it was, for this rooster stood no less than three feet in height and appeared more ferocious than a large turkey. Old Crompton had his shopping bag, a large one of burlap which he always carried to town, and he summoned enough courage to throw it over the head of the screeching, over-sized fowl. So tangled did the panic-stricken bird become that it was a comparatively simple matter to effect his capture, and the old man rose to his feet triumphant with the bag securely closed over the struggling captive. "Thanks," panted Tom, when he drew alongside. "I should never have caught him, and his appearance at large might have caused me a great deal of trouble--now of all times." "It's all right, Forsythe," smirked the old man. "Glad I was able to do it." Secretly he gloated, for he knew this occurrence would be an open sesame to that laboratory of Tom's. And it proved to be just that. * * * * * A few nights later he was awakened by a vigorous thumping at his door, something that had never before occurred during his nearly sixty years occupancy of the tumbledown hut. The moon was high and he cautiously peeped from the window and saw that his late visitor was none other than young Forsythe. "With you in a minute!" he shouted, hastily thrusting his rheumatic old limbs into his shabby trousers. "Now to see the inside of that laboratory," he chuckled to himself. It required but a moment to attire himself in the scanty raiment he wore during the warm months, but he could hear Tom muttering and impatiently pacing the flagstones before his door. "What is it?" he asked, as he drew the bolt and emerged into the brilliant light of the moon. "Success!" breathed Tom excitedly. "I have produced growing, living matter synthetically. More than this, I have learned the secret of the vital force--the spark of life. Immortality is within easy reach. Come and see for yourself." They quickly traversed the short distance to the two-story building which comprised Tom's workshop and living quarters. The entire ground floor was taken up by the laboratory, and Old Crompton stared aghast at the wealth of equipment it contained. Furnaces there were, and retorts that reminded him of those pictured in the wood cuts in some of his musty books. Then there were complicated machines with many levers and dials mounted on their faces, and with huge glass bulbs of peculiar shape with coils of wire connecting to knoblike protuberances of their transparent walls. In the exact center of the great single room there was what appeared to be a dissecting table, with a brilliant light overhead and with two of the odd glass bulbs at either end. It was to this table that Tom led the excited old man. "This is my perfected apparatus," said Tom proudly, "and by its use I intend to create a new race of supermen, men and women who will always retain the vigor and strength of their youth and who can not die excepting by actual destruction of their bodies. Under the influence of the rays all bodily ailments vanish as if by magic, and organic defects are quickly corrected. Watch this now." * * * * * He stepped to one of the many cages at the side of the room and returned with a wriggling cottontail in his hands. Old Compton watched anxiously as he picked a nickeled instrument from a tray of surgical appliances and requested his visitor to hold the protesting animal while he covered its head with a handkerchief. "Ethyl chloride," explained Tom, noting with amusement the look of distaste on the old man's face. "We'll just put him to sleep for a minute while I amputate a leg." The struggles of the rabbit quickly ceased when the spray soaked the handkerchief and the anaesthetic took effect. With a shining scalpel and a surgical saw, Tom speedily removed one of the forelegs of the animal and then he placed the limp body in the center of the table, removing the handkerchief from its head as he did so. At the end of the table there was a panel with its glittering array of switches and electrical instruments, and Old Crompton observed very closely the manipulations of the controls as Tom started the mechanism. With the ensuing hum of a motor-generator from a corner of the room, the four bulbs adjacent to the table sprang into life, each glowing with a different color and each emitting a different vibratory note as it responded to the energy within. "Keep an eye on Mr. Rabbit now," admonished Tom. From the body of the small animal there emanated an intangible though hazily visible aura as the combined effects of the rays grew in intensity. Old Crompton bent over the table and peered amazedly at the stump of the foreleg, from which blood no longer dripped. The stump was healing over! Yes--it seemed to elongate as one watched. A new limb was growing on to replace the old! Then the animal struggled once more, this time to regain consciousness. In a moment it was fully awake and, with a frightened hop, was off the table and hobbling about in search of a hiding place. * * * * * Tom Forsythe laughed. "Never knew what happened," he exulted, "and excepting for the temporary limp is not inconvenienced at all. Even that will be gone in a couple of hours, for the new limb will be completely grown by that time." "But--but, Tom," stammered the old man, "this is wonderful. How do you accomplish it?" "Ha! Don't think I'll reveal my secret. But this much I will tell you: the life force generated by my apparatus stimulates a certain gland that's normally inactive in warm blooded animals. This gland, when active, possesses the function of growing new members to the body to replace lost ones in much the same manner as this is done in case of the lobster and certain other crustaceans. Of course, the process is extremely rapid when the gland is stimulated by the vital rays from my tubes. But this is only one of the many wonders of the process. Here is something far more remarkable." He took from a large glass jar the body of a guinea pig, a body that was rigid in death. "This guinea pig," he explained, "was suffocated twenty-four hours ago and is stone dead." "Suffocated?" "Yes. But quite painlessly, I assure you. I merely removed the air from the jar with a vacuum pump and the little creature passed out of the picture very quickly. Now we'll revive it." Old Crompton stretched forth a skinny hand to touch the dead animal, but withdrew it hastily when he felt the clammy rigidity of the body. There was no doubt as to the lifelessness of this specimen. * * * * * Tom placed the dead guinea pig on the spot where the rabbit had been subjected to the action of the rays. Again his visitor watched carefully as he manipulated the controls of the apparatus. With the glow of the tubes and the ensuing haze of eery light that surrounded the little body, a marked change was apparent. The inanimate form relaxed suddenly and it seemed that the muscles pulsated with an accession of energy. Then one leg was stretched forth spasmodically. There was a convulsive heave as the lungs drew in a first long breath, and, with that, an astonished and very much alive rodent scrambled to its feet, blinking wondering eyes in the dazzling light. "See? See?" shouted Tom, grasping Old Crompton by the arm in a viselike grip. "It is the secret of life and death! Aristocrats, plutocrats and beggars will beat a path to my door. But, never fear, I shall choose my subjects well. The name of Thomas Forsythe will yet be emblazoned in the Hall of Fame. I shall be master of the world!" Old Crompton began to fear the glitter in the eyes of the gaunt young man who seemed suddenly to have become demented. And his envy and hatred of his talented host blazed anew as Forsythe gloried in the success of his efforts. Then he was struck with an idea and he affected his most ingratiating manner. "It is a marvelous thing, Tom," he said, "and is entirely beyond my poor comprehension. But I can see that it is all you say and more. Tell me--can you restore the youth of an aged person by these means?" "Positively!" Tom did not catch the eager note in the old man's voice. Rather he took the question as an inquiry into the further marvels of his process. "Here," he continued, enthusiastically, "I'll prove that to you also. My dog Spot is around the place somewhere. And he is a decrepit old hound, blind, lame and toothless. You've probably seen him with me." * * * * * He rushed to the stairs and whistled. There was an answering yelp from above and the pad of uncertain paws on the bare wooden steps. A dejected old beagle blundered into the room, dragging a crippled hind leg as he fawned upon his master, who stretched forth a hand to pat the unsteady head. "Guess Spot is old enough for the test," laughed Tom, "and I have been meaning to restore him to his youthful vigor, anyway. No time like the present." He led his trembling pet to the table of the remarkable tubes and lifted him to its surface. The poor old beast lay trustingly where he was placed, quiet, save for his husky asthmatic breathing. "Hold him, Crompton," directed Tom as he pulled the starting lever of his apparatus. And Old Crompton watched in fascinated anticipation as the ethereal luminosity bathed the dog's body in response to the action of the four rays. Somewhat vaguely it came to him that the baggy flesh of his own wrinkled hands took on a new firmness and color where they reposed on the animal's back. Young Forsythe grinned triumphantly as Spot's breathing became more regular and the rasp gradually left it. Then the dog whined in pleasure and wagged his tail with increasing vigor. Suddenly he raised his head, perked his ears in astonishment and looked his master straight in the face with eyes that saw once more. The low throat cry rose to a full and joyous bark. He sprang to his feet from under the restraining hands and jumped to the floor in a lithe-muscled leap that carried him half way across the room. He capered about with the abandon of a puppy, making extremely active use of four sound limbs. "Why--why, Forsythe," stammered the hermit, "it's absolutely incredible. Tell me--tell me--what is this remarkable force?" * * * * * His host laughed gleefully. "You probably wouldn't understand it anyway, but I'll tell you. It is as simple as the nose on your face. The spark of life, the vital force, is merely an extremely complicated electrical manifestation which I have been able to duplicate artificially. This spark or force is all that distinguishes living from inanimate matter, and in living beings the force gradually decreases in power as the years pass, causing loss of health and strength. The chemical composition of bones and tissue alters, joints become stiff, muscles atrophied, and bones brittle. By recharging, as it were, with the vital force, the gland action is intensified, youth and strength is renewed. By repeating the process every ten or fifteen years the same degree of vigor can be maintained indefinitely. Mankind will become immortal. That is why I say I am to be master of the world." For the moment Old Crompton forgot his jealous hatred in the enthusiasm with which he was imbued. "Tom--Tom," he pleaded in his excitement, "use me as a subject. Renew my youth. My life has been a sad one and a lonely one, but I would that I might live it over. I should make of it a far different one--something worth while. See, I am ready." He sat on the edge of the gleaming table and made as if to lie down on its gleaming surface. But his young host only stared at him in open amusement. "What? You?" he sneered, unfeelingly. "Why, you old fossil! I told you I would choose my subjects carefully. They are to be people of standing and wealth, who can contribute to the fame and fortune of one Thomas Forsythe." "But Tom, I have money," Old Crompton begged. But when he saw the hard mirth in the younger man's eyes, his old animosity flamed anew and he sprang from his position and shook a skinny forefinger in Tom's face. "Don't do that to me, you old fool!" shouted Tom, "and get out of here. Think I'd waste current on an old cadger like you? I guess not! Now get out. Get out, I say!" Then the old anchorite saw red. Something seemed to snap in his soured old brain. He found himself kicking and biting and punching at his host, who backed away from the furious onslaught in surprise. Then Tom tripped over a wire and fell to the floor with a force that rattled the windows, his ferocious little adversary on top. The younger man lay still where he had fallen, a trickle of blood showing at his temple. "My God! I've killed him!" gasped the old man. With trembling fingers he opened Tom's shirt and listened for his heartbeats. Panic-stricken, he rubbed the young man's wrists, slapped his cheeks, and ran for water to dash in his face. But all efforts to revive him proved futile, and then, in awful fear, Old Crompton dashed into the night, the dog Spot snapping at his heels as he ran. * * * * * Hours later the stooped figure of a shabby old man might have been seen stealthily re-entering the lonely workshop where the lights still burned brightly. Tom Forsythe lay rigid in the position in which Old Crompton had left him, and the dog growled menacingly. Averting his gaze and circling wide of the body, Old Crompton made for the table of the marvelous rays. In minute detail he recalled every move made by Tom in starting and adjusting the apparatus to produce the incredible results he had witnessed. Not a moment was to be wasted now. Already he had hesitated too long, for soon would come the dawn and possible discovery of his crime. But the invention of his victim would save him from the long arm of the law, for, with youth restored, Old Crompton would cease to exist and a new life would open its doors to the starved soul of the hermit. Hermit, indeed! He would begin life anew, an active man with youthful vigor and ambition. Under an assumed name he would travel abroad, would enjoy life, and would later become a successful man of affairs. He had enough money, he told himself. And the police would never find Old Crompton, the murderer of Tom Forsythe! He deposited his small traveling bag on the floor and fingered the controls of Tom's apparatus. He threw the starting switch confidently and grinned in satisfaction as the answering whine of the motor-generator came to his ears. One by one he carefully made the adjustments in exactly the manner followed by the now silenced discoverer of the process. Everything operated precisely as it had during the preceding experiments. Odd that he should have anticipated some such necessity! But something had told him to observe Tom's movements carefully, and now he rejoiced in the fact that his intuition had led him aright. Painfully he climbed to the table top and stretched his aching body in the warm light of the four huge tubes. His exertions during the struggle with Tom were beginning to tell on him. But the soreness and stiffness of feeble muscles and stubborn joints would soon be but a memory. His pulses quickened at the thought and he breathed deep in a sudden feeling of unaccustomed well-being. * * * * * The dog growled continuously from his position at the head of his master, but did not move to interfere with the intruder. And Old Crompton, in the excitement of the momentous experience, paid him not the slightest attention. His body tingled from head to foot with a not unpleasant sensation that conveyed the assurance of radical changes taking place under the influence of the vital rays. The tingling sensation increased in intensity until it seemed that every corpuscle in his veins danced to the tune of the vibration from those glowing tubes that bathed him in an ever-spreading radiance. Aches and pains vanished from his body, but he soon experienced a sharp stab of new pain in his lower jaw. With an experimental forefinger he rubbed the gum. He laughed aloud as the realization came to him that in those gums where there had been no teeth for more than twenty years there was now growing a complete new set. And the rapidity of the process amazed him beyond measure. The aching area spread quickly and was becoming really uncomfortable. But then--and he consoled himself with the thought--nothing is brought into being without a certain amount of pain. Besides, he was confident that his discomfort would soon be over. He examined his hand, and found that the joints of two fingers long crippled with rheumatism now moved freely and painlessly. The misty brilliance surrounding his body was paling and he saw that the flesh was taking on a faint green fluorescence instead. The rays had completed their work and soon the transformation would be fully effected. He turned on his side and slipped to the floor with the agility of a youngster. The dog snarled anew, but kept steadfastly to his position. * * * * * There was a small mirror over the wash stand at the far end of the room and Old Crompton made haste to obtain the first view of his reflected image. His step was firm and springy, his bearing confident, and he found that his long-stooped shoulders straightened naturally and easily. He felt that he had taken on at least two inches in stature, which was indeed the case. When he reached the mirror he peered anxiously into its dingy surface and what he saw there so startled him that he stepped backward in amazement. This was not Larry Crompton, but an entirely new man. The straggly white hair had given way to soft, healthy waves of chestnut hue. Gone were the seams from the leathery countenance and the eyes looked out clearly and steadily from under brows as thick and dark as they had been in his youth. The reflected features were those of an entire stranger. They were not even reminiscent of the Larry Crompton of fifty years ago, but were the features of a far more vigorous and prepossessing individual than he had ever seemed, even in the best years of his life. The jaw was firm, the once sunken cheeks so well filled out that his high cheek bones were no longer in evidence. It was the face of a man of not more than thirty-eight years of age, reflecting exceptional intelligence and strength of character. "What a disguise!" he exclaimed in delight. And his voice, echoing in the stillness that followed the switching off of the apparatus, was deep-throated and mellow--the voice of a new man. Now, serenely confident that discovery was impossible, he picked up his small but heavy bag and started for the door. Dawn was breaking and he wished to put as many miles between himself and Tom's laboratory as could be covered in the next few hours. But at the door he hesitated. Then, despite the furious yapping of Spot, he returned to the table of the rays and, with deliberate thoroughness smashed the costly tubes which had brought about his rehabilitation. With a pinch bar from a nearby tool rack, he wrecked the controls and generating mechanisms beyond recognition. Now he was absolutely secure! No meddling experts could possibly discover the secret of Tom's invention. All evidence would show that the young experimenter had met his death at the hands of Old Crompton, the despised hermit of West Laketon. But none would dream that the handsome man of means who was henceforth to be known as George Voight was that same despised hermit. He recovered his satchel and left the scene. With long, rapid strides he proceeded down the old dirt road toward the main highway where, instead of turning east into the village, he would turn west and walk to Kernsburg, the neighboring town. There, in not more than two hours time, his new life would really begin! * * * * * Had you, a visitor, departed from Laketon when Old Crompton did and returned twelve years later, you would have noticed very little difference in the appearance of the village. The old town hall and the little park were the same, the dingy brick building among the trees being just a little dingier and its wooden steps more worn and sagged. The main street showed evidence of recent repaving, and, in consequence of the resulting increase in through automobile traffic; there were two new gasoline filling stations in the heart of the town. Down the road about a half mile there was a new building, which, upon inquiring from one of the natives, would be proudly designated as the new high school building. Otherwise there were no changes to be observed. In his dilapidated chair in the untidy office he had occupied for nearly thirty years, sat Asa Culkin, popularly known as "Judge" Culkin. Justice of the peace, sheriff, attorney-at-law, and three times Mayor of Laketon, he was still a controlling factor in local politics and government. And many a knotty legal problem was settled in that gloomy little office. Many a dispute in the town council was dependent for arbitration upon the keen mind and understanding wit of the old judge. The four o'clock train had just puffed its labored way from the station when a stranger entered his office, a stranger of uncommonly prosperous air. The keen blue eyes of the old attorney appraised him instantly and classified him as a successful man of business, not yet forty years of age, and with a weighty problem on his mind. "What can I do for you, sir?" he asked, removing his feet from the battered desk top. "You may be able to help me a great deal, Judge," was the unexpected reply. "I came to Laketon to give myself up." "Give yourself up?" Culkin rose to his feet in surprise and unconsciously straightened his shoulders in the effort to seem less dwarfed before the tall stranger. "Why, what do you mean?" he inquired. * * * * * "I wish to give myself up for murder," answered the amazing visitor, slowly and with decision, "for a murder committed twelve years ago. I should like you to listen to my story first, though. It has been kept too long." "But I still do not understand." There was puzzlement in the honest old face of the attorney. He shook his gray locks in uncertainty. "Why should you come here? Why come to me? What possible interest can I have in the matter?" "Just this, Judge. You do not recognize me now, and you will probably consider my story incredible when you hear it. But, when I have given you all the evidence, you will know who I am and will be compelled to believe. The murder was committed in Laketon. That is why I came to you." "A murder in Laketon? Twelve years ago?" Again the aged attorney shook his head. "But--proceed." "Yes. I killed Thomas Forsythe." The stranger looked for an expression of horror in the features of his listener, but there was none. Instead the benign countenance took on a look of deepening amazement, but the smile wrinkles had somehow vanished and the old face was grave in its surprised interest. "You seem astonished," continued the stranger. "Undoubtedly you were convinced that the murderer was Larry Crompton--Old Crompton, the hermit. He disappeared the night of the crime and has never been heard from since. Am I correct?" "Yes. He disappeared all right. But continue." Not by a lift of his eyebrow did Culkin betray his disbelief, but the stranger sensed that his story was somehow not as startling as it should have been. "You will think me crazy, I presume. But I am Old Crompton. It was my hand that felled the unfortunate young man in his laboratory out there in West Laketon twelve years ago to-night. It was his marvelous invention that transformed the old hermit into the apparently young man you see before you. But I swear that I am none other than Larry Crompton and that I killed young Forsythe. I am ready to pay the penalty. I can bear the flagellation of my own conscience no longer." * * * * * The visitor's voice had risen to the point of hysteria. But his listener remained calm and unmoved. "Now just let me get this straight," he said quietly. "Do I understand that you claim to be Old Crompton, rejuvenated in some mysterious manner, and that you killed Tom Forsythe on that night twelve years ago? Do I understand that you wish now to go to trial for that crime and to pay the penalty?" "Yes! Yes! And the sooner the better. I can stand it no longer. I am the most miserable man in the world!" "Hm-m--hm-m," muttered the judge, "this is strange." He spoke soothingly to his visitor. "Do not upset yourself, I beg of you. I will take care of this thing for you, never fear. Just take a seat, Mister--er--" "You may call me Voight for the present," said the stranger, in a more composed tone of voice, "George Voight. That is the name I have been using since the mur--since that fatal night." "Very well, Mr. Voight," replied the counsellor with an air of the greatest solicitude, "please have a seat now, while I make a telephone call." And George Voight slipped into a stiff-backed chair with a sigh of relief. For he knew the judge from the old days and he was now certain that his case would be disposed of very quickly. With the telephone receiver pressed to his ear, Culkin repeated a number. The stranger listened intently during the ensuing silence. Then there came a muffled "hello" sounding in impatient response to the call. "Hello, Alton," spoke the attorney, "this is Asa speaking. A stranger has just stepped into my office and he claims to be Old Crompton. Remember the hermit across the road from your son's old laboratory? Well, this man, who bears no resemblance whatever to the old man he claims to be and who seems to be less than half the age of Tom's old neighbor, says that he killed Tom on that night we remember so well." * * * * * There were some surprised remarks from the other end of the wire, but Voight was unable to catch them. He was in a cold perspiration at the thought of meeting his victim's father. "Why, yes, Alton," continued Culkin, "I think there is something in this story, although I cannot believe it all. But I wish you would accompany us and visit the laboratory. Will you?" "Lord, man, not that!" interrupted the judge's visitor. "I can hardly bear to visit the scene of my crime--and in the company of Alton Forsythe. Please, not that!" "Now you just let me take care of this, young man," replied the judge, testily. Then, once more speaking into the mouthpiece of the telephone, "All right, Alton. We'll pick you up at your office in five minutes." He replaced the receiver on its hook and turned again to his visitor. "Please be so kind as to do exactly as I request," he said. "I want to help you, but there is more to this thing than you know and I want you to follow unquestioningly where I lead and ask no questions at all for the present. Things may turn out differently than you expect." "All right, Judge." The visitor resigned himself to whatever might transpire under the guidance of the man he had called upon to turn him over to the officers of the law. * * * * * Seated in the judge's ancient motor car, they stopped at the office of Alton Forsythe a few minutes later and were joined by that red-faced and pompous old man. Few words were spoken during the short run to the well-remembered location of Tom's laboratory, and the man who was known as George Voight caught at his own throat with nervous fingers when they passed the tumbledown remains of the hut in which Old Crompton had spent so many years. With a screeching of well-worn brakes the car stopped before the laboratory, which was now almost hidden behind a mass of shrubs and flowers. "Easy now, young man," cautioned the judge, noting the look of fear which had clouded his new client's features. The three men advanced to the door through which Old Crompton had fled on that night of horror, twelve years before. The elder Forsythe spoke not a word as he turned the knob and stepped within. Voight shrank from entering, but soon mastered his feelings and followed the other two. The sight that met his eyes caused him to cry aloud in awe. At the dissecting table, which seemed to be exactly as he had seen it last but with replicas of the tubes he had destroyed once more in place, stood Tom Forsythe! Considerably older and with hair prematurely gray, he was still the young man Old Crompton thought he had killed. Tom Forsythe was not dead after all! And all of his years of misery had gone for nothing. He advanced slowly to the side of the wondering young man, Alton Forsythe and Asa Culkin watching silently from just inside the door. "Tom--Tom," spoke the stranger, "you are alive? You were not dead when I left you on that terrible night when I smashed your precious tubes? Oh--it is too good to be true! I can scarcely believe my eyes!" * * * * * He stretched forth trembling fingers to touch the body of the young man to assure himself that it was not all a dream. "Why," said Tom Forsythe, in astonishment. "I do not know you, sir. Never saw you in my life. What do you mean by your talk of smashing my tubes, of leaving me for dead?" "Mean?" The stranger's voice rose now; he was growing excited. "Why, Tom, I am Old Crompton. Remember the struggle, here in this very room? You refused to rejuvenate an unhappy old man with your marvelous apparatus, a temporarily insane old man--Crompton. I was that old man and I fought with you. You fell, striking your head. There was blood. You were unconscious. Yes, for many hours I was sure you were dead and that I had murdered you. But I had watched your manipulations of the apparatus and I subjected myself to the action of the rays. My youth was miraculously restored. I became as you see me now. Detection was impossible, for I looked no more like Old Crompton than you do. I smashed your machinery to avoid suspicion. Then I escaped. And, for twelve years, I have thought myself a murderer. I have suffered the tortures of the damned!" Tom Forsythe advanced on this remarkable visitor with clenched fists. Staring him in the eyes with cold appraisal, his wrath was all too apparent. The dog Spot, young as ever, entered the room and, upon observing the stranger, set up an ominous growling and snarling. At least the dog recognized him! "What are you trying to do, catechise me? Are you another of these alienists my father has been bringing around?" The young inventor was furious. "If you are," he continued, "you can get out of here--now! I'll have no more of this meddling with my affairs. I'm as sane as any of you and I refuse to submit to this continual persecution." The elder Forsythe grunted, and Culkin laid a restraining hand on his arm. "Just a minute now, Tom," he said soothingly. "This stranger is no alienist. He has a story to tell. Please permit him to finish." * * * * * Somewhat mollified, Tom Forsythe shrugged his assent. "Tom," continued the stranger, more calmly now, "what I have said is the truth. I shall prove it to you. I'll tell you things no mortals on earth could know but we two. Remember the day I captured the big rooster for you--the monster you had created? Remember the night you awakened me and brought me here in the moonlight? Remember the rabbit whose leg you amputated and re-grew? The poor guinea pig you had suffocated and whose life you restored? Spot here? Don't you remember rejuvenating him? I was here. And you refused to use your process on me, old man that I was. Then is when I went mad and attacked you. Do you believe me, Tom?" Then a strange thing happened. While Tom Forsythe gazed in growing belief, the stranger's shoulders sagged and he trembled as with the ague. The two older men who had kept in the background gasped their astonishment as his hair faded to a sickly gray, then became as white as the driven snow. Old Crompton was reverting to his previous state! Within five minutes, instead of the handsome young stranger, there stood before them a bent, withered old man--Old Crompton beyond a doubt. The effects of Tom's process were spent. "Well I'm damned!" ejaculated Alton Forsythe. "You have been right all along, Asa. And I am mighty glad I did not commit Tom as I intended. He has told us the truth all these years and we were not wise enough to see it." "We!" exclaimed the judge. "You, Alton Forsythe! I have always upheld him. You have done your son a grave injustice and you owe him your apologies if ever a father owed his son anything." "You are right, Asa." And, his aristocratic pride forgotten, Alton Forsythe rushed to the side of his son and embraced him. The judge turned to Old Crompton pityingly. "Rather a bad ending for you, Crompton," he said. "Still, it is better by far than being branded as a murderer." "Better? Better?" croaked Old Crompton. "It is wonderful, Judge. I have never been so happy in my life!" * * * * * The face of the old man beamed, though scalding tears coursed down the withered and seamed cheeks. The two Forsythes looked up from their demonstrations of peacemaking to listen to the amazing words of the old hermit. "Yes, happy for the first time in my life," he continued. "I am one hundred years of age, gentlemen, and I now look it and feel it. That is as it should be. And my experience has taught me a final lasting lesson. None of you know it, but, when I was but a very young man I was bitterly disappointed in love. Ha! ha! Never think it to look at me now, would you? But I was, and it ruined my entire life. I had a little money--inherited--and I traveled about in the world for a few years, then settled in that old hut across the road where I buried myself for sixty years, becoming crabbed and sour and despicable. Young Tom here was the first bright spot and, though I admired him, I hated him for his opportunities, hated him for that which he had that I had not. With the promise of his invention I thought I saw happiness, a new life for myself. I got what I wanted, though not in the way I had expected. And I want to tell you gentlemen that there is nothing in it. With developments of modern science you may be able to restore a man's youthful vigor of body, but you can't cure his mind with electricity. Though I had a youthful body, my brain was the brain of an old man--memories were there which could not be suppressed. Even had I not had the fancied death of young Tom on my conscience I should still have been miserable. I worked. God, how I worked--to forget! But I could not forget. I was successful in business and made a lot of money. I am more independent--probably wealthier than you, Alton Forsythe, but that did not bring happiness. I longed to be myself once more, to have the aches and pains which had been taken from me. It is natural to age and to die. Immortality would make of us a people of restless misery. We would quarrel and bicker and long for death, which would not come to relieve us. Now it is over for me and I am glad--glad--glad!" * * * * * He paused for breath, looking beseechingly at Tom Forsythe. "Tom," he said, "I suppose you have nothing for me in your heart but hatred. And I don't blame you. But I wish--I wish you would try and forgive me. Can you?" The years had brought increased understanding and tolerance to young Tom. He stared at Old Crompton and the long-nursed anger over the destruction of his equipment melted into a strange mixture of pity and admiration for the courageous old fellow. "Why, I guess I can, Crompton," he replied. "There was many a day when I struggled hopelessly to reconstruct my apparatus, cursing you with every bit of energy in my make-up. I could cheerfully have throttled you, had you been within reach. For twelve years I have labored incessantly to reproduce the results we obtained on the night of which you speak. People called me insane--even my father wished to have me committed to an asylum. And, until now, I have been unsuccessful. Only to-day has it seemed for the first time that the experiments will again succeed. But my ideas have changed with regard to the uses of the process. I was a cocksure young pup in the old days, with foolish dreams of fame and influence. But I have seen the error of my ways. Your experience, too, convinces me that immortality may not be as desirable as I thought. But there are great possibilities in the way of relieving the sufferings of mankind and in making this a better world in which to live. With your advice and help I believe I can do great things. I now forgive you freely and I ask you to remain here with me to assist in the work that is to come. What do you say to the idea?" At the reverent thankfulness in the pale eyes of the broken old man who had so recently been a perfect specimen of vigorous youth, Alton Forsythe blew his nose noisily. The little judge smiled benevolently and shook his head as if to say, "I told you so." Tom and Old Crompton gripped hands--mightily. * * * * * _COMING, NEXT MONTH_ BRIGANDS OF THE MOON By RAY CUMMINGS * * * * * Spawn of the Stars _By Charles Willard Diffin_ The Earth lay powerless beneath those loathsome, yellowish monsters that, sheathed in cometlike globes, sprang from the skies to annihilate man and reduce his cities to ashes. [Illustration: _The sky was alive with winged shapes, and high in the air shone the glittering menace, trailing five plumes of gas._] When Cyrus R. Thurston bought himself a single-motored Stoughton job he was looking for new thrills. Flying around the east coast had lost its zest: he wanted to join that jaunty group who spoke so easily of hopping off for Los Angeles. And what Cyrus Thurston wanted he usually obtained. But if that young millionaire-sportsman had been told that on his first flight this blocky, bulletlike ship was to pitch him headlong into the exact center of the wildest, strangest war this earth had ever seen--well, it is still probable that the Stoughton company would not have lost the sale. They were roaring through the starlit, calm night, three thousand feet above a sage sprinkled desert, when the trip ended. Slim Riley had the stick when the first blast of hot oil ripped slashingly across the pilot's window. "There goes your old trip!" he yelled. "Why don't they try putting engines in these ships?" [Illustration] He jammed over the throttle and, with motor idling, swept down toward the endless miles of moonlit waste. Wind? They had been boring into it. Through the opened window he spotted a likely stretch of ground. Setting down the ship on a nice piece of Arizona desert was a mere detail for Slim. "Let off a flare," he ordered, "when I give the word." * * * * * The white glare of it faded the stars as he sideslipped, then straightened out on his hand-picked field. The plane rolled down a clear space and stopped. The bright glare persisted while he stared curiously from the quiet cabin. Cutting the motor he opened both windows, then grabbed Thurston by the shoulder. "'Tis a curious thing, that," he said unsteadily. His hand pointed straight ahead. The flare died, but the bright stars of the desert country still shone on a glistening, shining bulb. It was some two hundred feet away. The lower part was lost in shadow, but its upper surfaces shone rounded and silvery like a giant bubble. It towered in the air, scores of feet above the chaparral beside it. There was a round spot of black on its side, which looked absurdly like a door.... "I saw something moving," said Thurston slowly. "On the ground I saw.... Oh, good Lord, Slim, it isn't real!" Slim Riley made no reply. His eyes were riveted to an undulating, ghastly something that oozed and crawled in the pale light not far from the bulb. His hand was reaching, reaching.... It found what he sought; he leaned toward the window. In his hand was the Very pistol for discharging the flares. He aimed forward and up. The second flare hung close before it settled on the sandy floor. Its blinding whiteness made the more loathsome the sickening yellow of the flabby flowing thing that writhed frantically in the glare. It was formless, shapeless, a heaving mound of nauseous matter. Yet even in its agonized writhing distortions they sensed the beating pulsations that marked it a living thing. There were unending ripplings crossing and recrossing through the convolutions. To Thurston there was suddenly a sickening likeness: the thing was a brain from a gigantic skull--it was naked--was suffering.... * * * * * The thing poured itself across the sand. Before the staring gaze of the speechless men an excrescence appeared--a thick bulb on the mass--that protruded itself into a tentacle. At the end there grew instantly a hooked hand. It reached for the black opening in the great shell, found it, and the whole loathsome shapelessness poured itself up and through the hole. Only at the last was it still. In the dark opening the last slippery mass held quiet for endless seconds. It formed, as they watched, to a head--frightful--menacing. Eyes appeared in the head; eyes flat and round and black save for a cross slit in each; eyes that stared horribly and unchangingly into theirs. Below them a gaping mouth opened and closed.... The head melted--was gone.... And with its going came a rushing roar of sound. From under the metallic mass shrieked a vaporous cloud. It drove at them, a swirling blast of snow and sand. Some buried memory of gas attacks woke Riley from his stupor. He slammed shut the windows an instant before the cloud struck, but not before they had seen, in the moonlight, a gleaming, gigantic, elongated bulb rise swiftly--screamingly--into the upper air. The blast tore at their plane. And the cold in their tight compartment was like the cold of outer space. The men stared, speechless, panting. Their breath froze in that frigid room into steam clouds. "It--it...." Thurston gasped--and slumped helpless upon the floor. * * * * * It was an hour before they dared open the door of their cabin. An hour of biting, numbing cold. Zero--on a warm summer night on the desert! Snow in the hurricane that had struck them! "'Twas the blast from the thing," guessed the pilot; "though never did I see an engine with an exhaust like that." He was pounding himself with his arms to force up the chilled circulation. "But the beast--the--the _thing_!" exclaimed Thurston. "It's monstrous; indecent! It thought--no question of that--but no body! Horrible! Just a raw, naked, thinking protoplasm!" It was here that he flung open the door. They sniffed cautiously of the air. It was warm again--clean--save for a hint of some nauseous odor. They walked forward; Riley carried a flash. The odor grew to a stench as they came where the great mass had lain. On the ground was a fleshy mound. There were bones showing, and horns on a skull. Riley held the light close to show the body of a steer. A body of raw bleeding meat. Half of it had been absorbed.... "The damned thing," said Riley, and paused vainly for adequate words. "The damned thing was eating.... Like a jelly-fish, it was!" "Exactly," Thurston agreed. He pointed about. There were other heaps scattered among the low sage. "Smothered," guessed Thurston, "with that frozen exhaust. Then the filthy thing landed and came out to eat." "Hold the light for me," the pilot commanded. "I'm goin' to fix that busted oil line. And I'm goin' to do it right now. Maybe the creature's still hungry." * * * * * They sat in their room. About them was the luxury of a modern hotel. Cyrus Thurston stared vacantly at the breakfast he was forgetting to eat. He wiped his hands mechanically on a snowy napkin. He looked from the window. There were palm trees in the park, and autos in a ceaseless stream. And people! Sane, sober people, living in a sane world. Newsboys were shouting; the life of the city was flowing. "Riley!" Thurston turned to the man across the table. His voice was curiously toneless, and his face haggard. "Riley, I haven't slept for three nights. Neither have you. We've got to get this thing straight. We didn't both become absolute maniacs at the same instant, but--it was _not_ there, it was _never_ there--not _that_...." He was lost in unpleasant recollections. "There are other records of hallucinations." "Hallucinations--hell!" said Slim Riley. He was looking at a Los Angeles newspaper. He passed one hand wearily across his eyes, but his face was happier than it had been in days. "We didn't imagine it, we aren't crazy--it's real! Would you read that now!" He passed the paper across to Thurston. The headlines were startling. "Pilot Killed by Mysterious Airship. Silvery Bubble Hangs Over New York. Downs Army Plane in Burst of Flame. Vanishes at Terrific Speed." "It's our little friend," said Thurston. And on his face, too, the lines were vanishing; to find this horror a reality was positive relief. "Here's the same cloud of vapor--drifted slowly across the city, the accounts says, blowing this stuff like steam from underneath. Airplanes investigated--an army plane drove into the vapor--terrific explosion--plane down in flames--others wrecked. The machine ascended with meteor speed, trailing blue flame. Come on, boy, where's that old bus? Thought I never wanted to fly a plane again. Now I don't want to do anything but." "Where to?" Slim inquired. "Headquarters," Thurston told him. "Washington--let's go!" * * * * * From Los Angeles to Washington is not far, as the plane flies. There was a stop or two for gasoline, but it was only a day later that they were seated in the War Office. Thurston's card had gained immediate admittance. "Got the low-down," he had written on the back of his card, "on the mystery airship." "What you have told me is incredible," the Secretary was saying, "or would be if General Lozier here had not reported personally on the occurrence at New York. But the monster, the thing you have described.... Cy, if I didn't know you as I do I would have you locked up." "It's true," said Thurston, simply. "It's damnable, but it's true. Now what does it mean?" "Heaven knows," was the response. "That's where it came from--out of the heavens." "Not what we saw," Slim Riley broke in. "That thing came straight out of Hell." And in his voice was no suggestion of levity. "You left Los Angeles early yesterday; have you seen the papers?" Thurston shook his head. "They are back," said the Secretary. "Reported over London--Paris--the West Coast. Even China has seen them. Shanghai cabled an hour ago." "Them? How many are there?" "Nobody knows. There were five seen at one time. There are more--unless the same ones go around the world in a matter of minutes." * * * * * Thurston remembered that whirlwind of vapor and a vanishing speck in the Arizona sky. "They could," he asserted. "They're faster than anything on earth. Though what drives them ... that gas--steam--whatever it is...." "Hydrogen," stated General Lozier. "I saw the New York show when poor Davis got his. He flew into the exhaust; it went off like a million bombs. Characteristic hydrogen flame trailed the damn thing up out of sight--a tail of blue fire." "And cold," stated Thurston. "Hot as a Bunsen burner," the General contradicted. "Davis' plane almost melted." "Before it ignited," said the other. He told of the cold in their plane. "Ha!" The General spoke explosively. "That's expansion. That's a tip on their motive power. Expansion of gas. That accounts for the cold and the vapor. Suddenly expanded it would be intensely cold. The moisture of the air would condense, freeze. But how could they carry it? Or"--he frowned for a moment, brows drawn over deep-set gray eyes--"or generate it? But that's crazy--that's impossible!" "So is the whole matter," the Secretary reminded him. "With the information Mr. Thurston and Mr. Riley have given us, the whole affair is beyond any gage our past experience might supply. We start from the impossible, and we go--where? What is to be done?" "With your permission, sir, a number of things shall be done. It would be interesting to see what a squadron of planes might accomplish, diving on them from above. Or anti-aircraft fire." * * * * * "No," said the Secretary of War, "not yet. They have looked us over, but they have not attacked. For the present we do not know what they are. All of us have our suspicions--thoughts of interplanetary travel--thoughts too wild for serious utterance--but we know nothing. "Say nothing to the papers of what you have told me," he directed Thurston. "Lord knows their surmises are wild enough now. And for you, General, in the event of any hostile move, you will resist." "Your order was anticipated, sir." The General permitted himself a slight smile. "The air force is ready." "Of course," the Secretary of War nodded. "Meet me here to-night--nine o'clock." He included Thurston and Riley in the command. "We need to think ... to think ... and perhaps their mission is friendly." "Friendly!" The two flyers exchanged glances as they went to the door. And each knew what the other was seeing--a viscous ocherous mass that formed into a head where eyes devilish in their hate stared coldly into theirs.... "Think, we need to think," repeated Thurston later. "A creature that is just one big hideous brain, that can think an arm into existence--think a head where it wishes! What does a thing like that think of? What beastly thoughts could that--that _thing_ conceive?" "If I got the sights of a Lewis gun on it," said Riley vindictively, "I'd make it think." "And my guess is that is all you would accomplish," Thurston told him. "I am forming a few theories about our visitors. One is that it would be quite impossible to find a vital spot in that big homogeneous mass." The pilot dispensed with theories: his was a more literal mind. "Where on earth did they come from, do you suppose, Mr. Thurston?" * * * * * They were walking to their hotel. Thurston raised his eyes to the summer heavens. Faint stars were beginning to twinkle; there was one that glowed steadily. "Nowhere on earth," Thurston stated softly, "nowhere on earth." "Maybe so," said the pilot, "maybe so. We've thought about it and talked about it ... and they've gone ahead and done it." He called to a newsboy; they took the latest editions to their room. The papers were ablaze with speculation. There were dispatches from all corners of the earth, interviews with scientists and near scientists. The machines were a Soviet invention--they were beyond anything human--they were harmless--they would wipe out civilization--poison gas--blasts of fire like that which had enveloped the army flyer.... And through it all Thurston read an ill-concealed fear, a reflection of panic that was gripping the nation--the whole world. These great machines were sinister. Wherever they appeared came the sense of being watched, of a menace being calmly withheld. And at thought of the obscene monsters inside those spheres, Thurston's lips were compressed and his eyes hardened. He threw the papers aside. "They are here," he said, "and that's all that we know. I hope the Secretary of War gets some good men together. And I hope someone is inspired with an answer." "An answer is it?" said Riley. "I'm thinkin' that the answer will come, but not from these swivel-chair fighters. 'Tis the boys in the cockpits with one hand on the stick and one on the guns that will have the answer." But Thurston shook his head. "Their speed," he said, "and the gas! Remember that cold. How much of it can they lay over a city?" The question was unanswered, unless the quick ringing of the phone was a reply. "War Department," said a voice. "Hold the wire." The voice of the Secretary of War came on immediately. "Thurston?" he asked. "Come over at once on the jump, old man. Hell's popping." * * * * * The windows of the War Department Building were all alight as they approached. Cars were coming and going; men in uniform, as the Secretary had said, "on the jump." Soldiers with bayonets stopped them, then passed Thurston and his companion on. Bells were ringing from all sides. But in the Secretary's office was perfect quiet. General Lozier was there, Thurston saw, and an imposing array of gold-braided men with a sprinkling of those in civilian clothes. One he recognized: MacGregor from the Bureau of Standards. The Secretary handed Thurston some papers. "Radio," he explained. "They are over the Pacific coast. Hit near Vancouver; Associated Press says city destroyed. They are working down the coast. Same story--blast of hydrogen from their funnel shaped base. Colder than Greenland below them; snow fell in Seattle. No real attack since Vancouver and little damage done--" A message was laid before him. "Portland," he said. "Five mystery ships over city. Dart repeatedly toward earth, deliver blast of gas and then retreat. Doing no damage. Apparently inviting attack. All commercial planes ordered grounded. Awaiting instructions. "Gentlemen," said the Secretary, "I believe I speak for all present when I say that, in the absence of first hand information, we are utterly unable to arrive at any definite conclusion or make a definite plan. There is a menace in this, undeniably. Mr. Thurston and Mr. Riley have been good enough to report to me. They have seen one machine at close range. It was occupied by a monster so incredible that the report would receive no attention from me did I not know Mr. Thurston personally. "Where have they come from? What does it mean--what is their mission? Only God knows. "Gentlemen, I feel that I must see them. I want General Lozier to accompany me, also Doctor MacGregor, to advise me from the scientific angle. I am going to the Pacific Coast. They may not wait--that is true--but they appear to be going slowly south. I will leave to-night for San Diego. I hope to intercept them. We have strong air-forces there; the Navy Department is cooperating." * * * * * He waited for no comment. "General," he ordered, "will you kindly arrange for a plane? Take an escort or not as you think best. "Mr. Thurston and Mr. Riley will also accompany us. We want all the authoritative data we can get. This on my return will be placed before you, gentlemen, for your consideration." He rose from his chair. "I hope they wait for us," he said. Time was when a commander called loudly for a horse, but in this day a Secretary of War is not kept waiting for transportation. Sirening motorcycles preceded them from the city. Within an hour, motors roaring wide open, propellers ripping into the summer night, lights slipping eastward three thousand feet below, the Secretary of War for the United States was on his way. And on either side from their plane stretched the arms of a V. Like a flight of gigantic wild geese, fast fighting planes of the Army air service bored steadily into the night, guarantors of safe convoy. "The Air Service is ready," General Lozier had said. And Thurston and his pilot knew that from East coast to West, swift scout planes, whose idling engines could roar into action at a moment's notice, stood waiting; battle planes hidden in hangars would roll forth at the word--the Navy was cooperating--and at San Diego there were strong naval units, Army units, and Marine Corps. "They don't know what we can do, what we have up our sleeve: they are feeling us out," said the Secretary. They had stopped more than once for gas and for wireless reports. He held a sheaf of typewritten briefs. "Going slowly south. They have taken their time. Hours over San Francisco and the bay district. Repeating same tactics; fall with terrific speed to cushion against their blast of gas. Trying to draw us out, provoke an attack, make us show our strength. Well, we shall beat them to San Diego at this rate. We'll be there in a few hours." * * * * * The afternoon sun was dropping ahead of them when they sighted the water. "Eckener Pass," the pilot told them, "where the Graf Zeppelin came through. Wonder what these birds would think of a Zepp! "There's the ocean," he added after a time. San Diego glistened against the bare hills. "There's North Island--the Army field." He stared intently ahead, then shouted: "And there they are! Look there!" Over the city a cluster of meteors was falling. Dark underneath, their tops shone like pure silver in the sun's slanting glare. They fell toward the city, then buried themselves in a dense cloud of steam, rebounding at once to the upper air, vapor trailing behind them. The cloud billowed slowly. It struck the hills of the city, then lifted and vanished. "Land at once," requested the Secretary. A flash of silver countermanded the order. It hung there before them, a great gleaming globe, keeping always its distance ahead. It was elongated at the base, Thurston observed. From that base shot the familiar blast that turned steamy a hundred feet below as it chilled the warm air. There were round orifices, like ports, ranged around the top, where an occasional jet of vapor showed this to be a method of control. Other spots shone dark and glassy. Were they windows? He hardly realized their peril, so interested was he in the strange machine ahead. * * * * * Then: "Dodge that vapor," ordered General Lozier. The plane wavered in signal to the others and swung sharply to the left. Each man knew the flaming death that was theirs if the fire of their exhaust touched that explosive mixture of hydrogen and air. The great bubble turned with them and paralleled their course. "He's watching us," said Riley, "giving us the once over, the slimy devil. Ain't there a gun on this ship?" The General addressed his superior. Even above the roar of the motors his voice seemed quiet, assured. "We must not land now," he said. "We can't land at North Island. It would focus their attention upon our defenses. That thing--whatever it is--is looking for a vulnerable spot. We must.... Hold on--there he goes!" The big bulb shot upward. It slanted above them, and hovered there. "I think he is about to attack," said the General quietly. And, to the commander of their squadron: "It's in your hands now, Captain. It's your fight." The Captain nodded and squinted above. "He's got to throw heavier stuff than that," he remarked. A small object was falling from the cloud. It passed close to their ship. "Half-pint size," said Cyrus Thurston, and laughed in derision. There was something ludicrous in the futility of the attack. He stuck his head from a window into the gale they created. He sheltered his eyes to try to follow the missile in its fall. * * * * * They were over the city. The criss-cross of streets made a grill-work of lines; tall buildings were dwarfed from this three thousand foot altitude. The sun slanted across a projecting promontory to make golden ripples on a blue sea and the city sparkled back in the clear air. Tiny white faces were massed in the streets, huddled in clusters where the futile black missile had vanished. And then--then the city was gone.... A white cloud-bank billowed and mushroomed. Slowly, it seemed to the watcher--so slowly. It was done in the fraction of a second. Yet in that brief time his eyes registered the chaotic sweep in advance of the cloud. There came a crashing of buildings in some monster whirlwind, a white cloud engulfing it all.... It was rising--was on them. "God," thought Thurston, "why can't I move!" The plane lifted and lurched. A thunder of sound crashed against them, an intolerable force. They were crushed to the floor as the plane was hurled over and upward. Out of the mad whirling tangle of flying bodies, Thurston glimpsed one clear picture. The face of the pilot hung battered and blood-covered before him, and over the limp body the hand of Slim Riley clutched at the switch. "Bully boy," he said dazedly, "he's cutting the motors...." The thought ended in blackness. There was no sound of engines or beating propellers when he came to his senses. Something lay heavy upon him. He pushed it to one side. It was the body of General Lozier. * * * * * He drew himself to his knees to look slowly about, rubbed stupidly at his eyes to quiet the whirl, then stared at the blood on his hand. It was so quiet--the motors--what was it that happened? Slim had reached for the switch.... The whirling subsided. Before him he saw Slim Riley at the controls. He got to his feet and went unsteadily forward. It was a battered face that was lifted to his. "She was spinning," the puffed lips were muttering slowly. "I brought her out ... there's the field...." His voice was thick; he formed the words slowly, painfully. "Got to land ... can you take it? I'm--I'm--" He slumped limply in his seat. Thurston's arms were uninjured. He dragged the pilot to the floor and got back of the wheel. The field was below them. There were planes taxiing out; he heard the roar of their motors. He tried the controls. The plane answered stiffly, but he managed to level off as the brown field approached. Thurston never remembered that landing. He was trying to drag Riley from the battered plane when the first man got to him. "Secretary of War?" he gasped. "In there.... Take Riley; I can walk." "We'll get them," an officer assured him. "Knew you were coming. They sure gave you hell! But look at the city!" Arms carried him stumbling from the field. Above the low hangars he saw smoke clouds over the bay. These and red rolling flames marked what had been an American city. Far in the heavens moved five glinting specks. His head reeled with the thunder of engines. There were planes standing in lines and more erupting from hangars, where khaki-clad men, faces tense under leather helmets, rushed swiftly about. "General Lozier is dead," said a voice. Thurston turned to the man. They were bringing the others. "The rest are smashed up some," the officer told him, "but I think they'll pull through." * * * * * The Secretary of War for the United States lay beside him. Men with red on their sleeves were slitting his coat. Through one good eye he squinted at Thurston. He even managed a smile. "Well, I wanted to see them up close," he said. "They say you saved us, old man." Thurston waved that aside. "Thank Riley--" he began, but the words ended in the roar of an exhaust. A plane darted swiftly away to shoot vertically a hundred feet in the air. Another followed and another. In a cloud of brown dust they streamed endlessly out, zooming up like angry hornets, eager to get into the fight. "Fast little devils!" the ambulance man observed. "Here come the big boys." A leviathan went deafeningly past. And again others came on in quick succession. Farther up the field, silvery gray planes with rudders flaunting their red, white and blue rose circling to the heights. "That's the Navy," was the explanation. The surgeon straightened the Secretary's arm. "See them come off the big airplane carriers!" If his remarks were part of his professional training in removing a patient's thoughts from his pain, they were effective. The Secretary stared out to sea, where two great flat-decked craft were shooting planes with the regularity of a rapid fire gun. They stood out sharply against a bank of gray fog. Cyrus Thurston forgot his bruised body, forgot his own peril--even the inferno that raged back across the bay: he was lost in the sheer thrill of the spectacle. * * * * * Above them the sky was alive with winged shapes. And from all the disorder there was order appearing. Squadron after squadron swept to battle formation. Like flights of wild ducks the true sharp-pointed Vs soared off into the sky. Far above and beyond, rows of dots marked the race of swift scouts for the upper levels. And high in the clear air shone the glittering menace trailing their five plumes of gas. A deeper detonation was merging into the uproar. It came from the ships, Thurston knew, where anti-aircraft guns poured a rain of shells into the sky. About the invaders they bloomed into clusters of smoke balls. The globes shot a thousand feet into the air. Again the shells found them, and again they retreated. "Look!" said Thurston. "They got one!" He groaned as a long curving arc of speed showed that the big bulb was under control. Over the ships it paused, to balance and swing, then shot to the zenith as one of the great boats exploded in a cloud of vapor. The following blast swept the airdrome. Planes yet on the ground went like dry autumn leaves. The hangars were flattened. Thurston cowered in awe. They were sheltered, he saw, by a slope of the ground. No ridicule now for the bombs! A second blast marked when the gas-cloud ignited. The billowing flames were blue. They writhed in tortured convulsions through the air. Endless explosions merged into one rumbling roar. MacGregor had roused from his stupor; he raised to a sitting position. "Hydrogen," he stated positively, and pointed where great volumes of flame were sent whirling aloft. "It burns as it mixes with air." The scientist was studying intently the mammoth reaction. "But the volume," he marveled, "the volume! From that small container! Impossible!" "Impossible," the Secretary agreed, "but...." He pointed with his one good arm toward the Pacific. Two great ships of steel, blackened and battered in that fiery breath, tossed helplessly upon the pitching, heaving sea. They furnished to the scientist's exclamation the only adequate reply. Each man stared aghast into the pallid faces of his companions. "I think we have underestimated the opposition," said the Secretary of War quietly. "Look--the fog is coming in, but it's too late to save them." * * * * * The big ships were vanishing in the oncoming fog. Whirls of vapor were eddying toward them in the flame-blaster air. Above them the watchers saw dimly the five gleaming bulbs. There were airplanes attacking: the tapping of machine-gun fire came to them faintly. Fast planes circled and swooped toward the enemy. An armada of big planes drove in from beyond. Formations were blocking space above.... Every branch of the service was there, Thurston exulted, the army, Marine Corps, the Navy. He gripped hard at the dry ground in a paralysis of taut nerves. The battle was on, and in the balance hung the fate of the world. The fog drove in fast. Through straining eyes he tried in vain to glimpse the drama spread above. The world grew dark and gray. He buried his face in his hands. And again came the thunder. The men on the ground forced their gaze to the clouds, though they knew some fresh horror awaited. The fog-clouds reflected the blue terror above. They were riven and torn. And through them black objects were falling. Some blazed as they fell. They slipped into unthought maneuvers--they darted to earth trailing yellow and black of gasoline fires. The air was filled with the dread rain of death that was spewed from the gray clouds. Gone was the roaring of motors. The air-force of the San Diego area swept in silence to the earth, whose impact alone could give kindly concealment to their flame-stricken burden. Thurston's last control snapped. He flung himself flat to bury his face in the sheltering earth. * * * * * Only the driving necessity of work to be done saved the sanity of the survivors. The commercial broadcasting stations were demolished, a part of the fuel for the terrible furnace across the bay. But the Naval radio station was beyond on an outlying hill. The Secretary of War was in charge. An hour's work and this was again in commission to flash to the world the story of disaster. It told the world also of what lay ahead. The writing was plain. No prophet was needed to forecast the doom and destruction that awaited the earth. Civilization was helpless. What of armies and cannon, of navies, of aircraft, when from some unreachable height these monsters within their bulbous machines could drop coldly--methodically--their diminutive bombs. And when each bomb meant shattering destruction; each explosion blasting all within a radius of miles; each followed by the blue blast of fire that melted the twisted framework of buildings and powdered the stones to make of a proud city a desolation of wreckage, black and silent beneath the cold stars. There was no crumb of comfort for the world in the terror the radio told. Slim Riley was lying on an improvised cot when Thurston and the representative of the Bureau of Standards joined him. Four walls of a room still gave shelter in a half-wrecked building. There were candles burning: the dark was unbearable. "Sit down," said MacGregor quietly; "we must think...." "Think!" Thurston's voice had an hysterical note. "I can't think! I mustn't think! I'll go raving crazy...." "Yes, think," said the scientist. "Had it occurred to you that that is our only weapon left? "We must think, we must analyze. Have these devils a vulnerable spot? Is there any known means of attack? We do not know. We must learn. Here in this room we have all the direct information the world possesses of this menace. I have seen their machines in operation. You have seen more--you have looked at the monsters themselves. At one of them, anyway." * * * * * The man's voice was quiet, methodical. Mr. MacGregor was attacking a problem. Problems called for concentration; not hysterics. He could have poured the contents from a beaker without spilling a drop. His poise was needed: they were soon to make a laboratory experiment. The door burst open to admit a wild-eyed figure that snatched up their candles and dashed them to the floor. "Lights out!" he screamed at them. "There's one of 'em coming back." He was gone from the room. The men sprang for the door, then turned to where Riley was clumsily crawling from his couch. An arm under each of his, and the three men stumbled from the room. They looked about them in the night. The fog-banks were high, drifting in from the ocean. Beneath them the air was clear; from somewhere above a hidden moon forced a pale light through the clouds. And over the ocean, close to the water, drifted a familiar shape. Familiar in its huge sleek roundness, in its funnel-shaped base where a soft roar made vaporous clouds upon the water. Familiar, too, in the wild dread it inspired. The watchers were spellbound. To Thurston there came a fury of impotent frenzy. It was so near! His hands trembled to tear at that door, to rip at that foul mass he knew was within.... The great bulb drifted past. It was nearing the shore. But its action! Its motion! Gone was the swift certainty of control. The thing settled and sank, to rise weakly with a fresh blast of gas from its exhaust. It settled again, and passed waveringly on in the night. * * * * * Thurston was throbbingly alive with hope that was certainty. "It's been hit," he exulted; "it's been hit. Quick! After it, follow it!" He dashed for a car. There were some that had been salvaged from the less ruined buildings. He swung it quickly around where the others were waiting. "Get a gun," he commanded. "Hey, you,"--to an officer who appeared--"your pistol, man, quick! We're going after it!" He caught the tossed gun and hurried the others into the car. "Wait," MacGregor commanded. "Would you hunt elephants with a pop-gun? Or these things?" "Yes," the other told him, "or my bare hands! Are you coming, or aren't you?" The physicist was unmoved. "The creature you saw--you said that it writhed in a bright light--you said it seemed almost in agony. There's an idea there! Yes, I'm going with you, but keep your shirt on, and think." He turned again to the officer. "We need lights," he explained, "bright lights. What is there? Magnesium? Lights of any kind?" "Wait." The man rushed off into the dark. He was back in a moment to thrust a pistol into the car. "Flares," he explained. "Here's a flashlight, if you need it." The car tore at the ground as Thurston opened it wide. He drove recklessly toward the highway that followed the shore. The high fog had thinned to a mist. A full moon was breaking through to touch with silver the white breakers hissing on the sand. It spread its full glory on dunes and sea: one more of the countless soft nights where peace and calm beauty told of an ageless existence that made naught of the red havoc of men or of monsters. It shone on the ceaseless surf that had beaten these shores before there were men, that would thunder there still when men were no more. But to the tense crouching men in the car it shone only ahead on a distant, glittering speck. A wavering reflection marked the uncertain flight of the stricken enemy. * * * * * Thurston drove like a maniac; the road carried them straight toward their quarry. What could he do when he overtook it? He neither knew nor cared. There was only the blind fury forcing him on within reach of the thing. He cursed as the lights of the car showed a bend in the road. It was leaving the shore. He slackened their speed to drive cautiously into the sand. It dragged at the car, but he fought through to the beach, where he hoped for firm footing. The tide was out. They tore madly along the smooth sand, breakers clutching at the flying wheels. The strange aircraft was nearer; it was plainly over the shore, they saw. Thurston groaned as it shot high in the air in an effort to clear the cliffs ahead. But the heights were no longer a refuge. Again it settled. It struck on the cliff to rebound in a last futile leap. The great pear shape tilted, then shot end over end to crash hard on the firm sand. The lights of the car struck the wreck, and they saw the shell roll over once. A ragged break was opening--the spherical top fell slowly to one side. It was still rocking as they brought the car to a stop. Filling the lower shell, they saw dimly, was a mucouslike mass that seethed and struggled in the brilliance of their lights. MacGregor was persisting in his theory. "Keep the lights on it!" he shouted. "It can't stand the light." While they watched, the hideous, bubbling beast oozed over the side of the broken shell to shelter itself in the shadow beneath. And again Thurston sensed the pulse and throb of life in the monstrous mass. * * * * * He saw again in his rage the streaming rain of black airplanes; saw, too, the bodies, blackened and charred as they saw them when first they tried rescue from the crashed ships; the smoke clouds and flames from the blasted city, where people--his people, men and women and little children--had met terrible death. He sprang from the car. Yet he faltered with a revulsion that was almost a nausea. His gun was gripped in his hand as he ran toward the monster. "Come back!" shouted MacGregor. "Come back! Have you gone mad?" He was jerking at the door of the car. Beyond the white funnel of their lights a yellow thing was moving. It twisted and flowed with incredible speed a hundred feet back to the base of the cliff. It drew itself together in a quivering heap. An out-thrusting rock threw a sheltering shadow; the moon was low in the west. In the blackness a phosphorescence was apparent. It rippled and rose in the dark with the pulsing beat of the jellylike mass. And through it were showing two discs. Gray at first, they formed to black, staring eyes. Thurston had followed. His gun was raised as he neared it. Then out of the mass shot a serpentine arm. It whipped about him, soft, sticky, viscid--utterly loathsome. He screamed once when it clung to his face, then tore savagely and in silence at the encircling folds. * * * * * The gun! He ripped a blinding mass from his face and emptied the automatic in a stream of shots straight toward the eyes. And he knew as he fired that the effort was useless; to have shot at the milky surf would have been as vain. The thing was pulling him irresistibly; he sank to his knees; it dragged him over the sand. He clutched at a rock. A vision was before him: the carcass of a steer, half absorbed and still bleeding on the sand of an Arizona desert.... To be drawn to the smothering embrace of that glutinous mass ... for that monstrous appetite.... He tore afresh at the unyielding folds, then knew MacGregor was beside him. In the man's hand was a flashlight. The scientist risked his life on a guess. He thrust the powerful light into the clinging serpent. It was like the touch of hot iron to human flesh. The arm struggled and flailed in a paroxysm of pain. Thurston was free. He lay gasping on the sand. But MacGregor!... He looked up to see him vanish in the clinging ooze. Another thick tentacle had been projected from the main mass to sweep like a whip about the man. It hissed as it whirled about him in the still air. The flashlight was gone; Thurston's hand touched it in the sand. He sprang to his feet and pressed the switch. No light responded; the flashlight was out--broken. A thick arm slashed and wrapped about him.... It beat him to the ground. The sand was moving beneath him; he was being dragged swiftly, helplessly, toward what waited in the shadow. He was smothering.... A blinding glare filled his eyes.... * * * * * The flares were still burning when he dared look about. MacGregor was pulling frantically at his arm. "Quick--quick!" he was shouting. Thurston scrambled to his feet. One glimpse he caught of a heaving yellow mass in the white light; it twisted in horrible convulsions. They ran stumblingly--drunkenly--toward the car. Riley was half out of the machine. He had tried to drag himself to their assistance. "I couldn't make it," he said: "then I thought of the flares." "Thank Heaven," said MacGregor with emphasis, "it was your legs that were paralyzed, Riley, not your brain." Thurston found his voice. "Let me have that Very pistol. If light hurts that damn thing, I am going to put a blaze of magnesium into the middle of it if I die for it." "They're all gone," said Riley. "Then let's get out of here. I've had enough. We can come back later on." He got back of the wheel and slammed the door of the sedan. The moonlight was gone. The darkness was velvet just tinged with the gray that precedes the dawn. Back in the deeper blackness at the cliff-base a phosphorescent something wavered and glowed. The light rippled and flowed in all directions over the mass. Thurston felt, vaguely, its mystery--the bulk was a vast, naked brain; its quiverings were like visible thought waves.... * * * * * The phosphorescence grew brighter. The thing was approaching. Thurston let in his clutch, but the scientist checked him. "Wait," he implored, "wait! I wouldn't miss this for the world." He waved toward the east, where far distant ranges were etched in palest rose. "We know less than nothing of these creatures, in what part of the universe they are spawned, how they live, where they live--Saturn!--Mars!--the Moon! But--we shall soon know how one dies!" The thing was coming from the cliff. In the dim grayness it seemed less yellow, less fluid. A membrane enclosed it. It was close to the car. Was it hunger that drove it, or cold rage for these puny opponents? The hollow eyes were glaring; a thick arm formed quickly to dart out toward the car. A cloud, high above, caught the color of approaching day.... Before their eyes the vile mass pulsed visibly; it quivered and beat. Then, sensing its danger, it darted like some headless serpent for its machine. It massed itself about the shattered top to heave convulsively. The top was lifted, carried toward the rest of the great metal egg. The sun's first rays made golden arrows through the distant peaks. The struggling mass released its burden to stretch its vile length toward the dark caves under the cliffs. The last sheltering fog-veil parted. The thing was halfway to the high bank when the first bright shaft of direct sunlight shot through. Incredible in the concealment of night, the vast protoplasmic pod was doubly so in the glare of day. But it was there before them, not a hundred feet distant. And it boiled in vast tortured convulsions. The clean sunshine struck it, and the mass heaved itself into the air in a nauseous eruption, then fell limply to the earth. * * * * * The yellow membrane turned paler. Once more the staring black eyes formed to turn hopelessly toward the sheltering globe. Then the bulk flattened out on the sand. It was a jellylike mound, through which trembled endless quivering palpitations. The sun struck hot, and before the eyes of the watching, speechless men was a sickening, horrible sight--a festering mass of corruption. The sickening yellow was liquid. It seethed and bubbled with liberated gases; it decomposed to purplish fluid streams. A breath of wind blew in their direction. The stench from the hideous pool was overpowering, unbearable. Their heads swam in the evil breath.... Thurston ripped the gears into reverse, nor stopped until they were far away on the clean sand. The tide was coming in when they returned. Gone was the vile putrescence. The waves were lapping at the base of the gleaming machine. "We'll have to work fast," said MacGregor. "I must know, I must learn." He drew himself up and into the shattered shell. It was of metal, some forty feet across, its framework a maze of latticed struts. The central part was clear. Here in a wide, shallow pan the monster had rested. Below this was tubing, intricate coils, massive, heavy and strong. MacGregor lowered himself upon it, Thurston was beside him. They went down into the dim bowels of the deadly instrument. "Hydrogen," the physicist was stating. "Hydrogen--there's our starting point. A generator, obviously, forming the gas--from what? They couldn't compress it! They couldn't carry it or make it, not the volume that they evolved. But they did it, they did it!" * * * * * Close to the coils a dim light was glowing. It was a pin-point of radiance in the half-darkness about them. The two men bent closer. "See," directed MacGregor, "it strikes on this mirror--bright metal and parabolic. It disperses the light, doesn't concentrate it! Ah! Here is another, and another. This one is bent--broken. They are adjustable. Hm! Micrometer accuracy for reducing the light. The last one could reflect through this slot. It's light that does it, Thurston, it's light that does it!" "Does what?" Thurston had followed the other's analysis of the diffusion process. "The light that would finally reach that slot would be hardly perceptible." "It's the agent," said MacGregor, "the activator--the catalyst! What does it strike upon? I must know--I must!" The waves were splashing outside the shell. Thurston turned in a feverish search of the unexplored depths. There was a surprising simplicity, an absence of complicated mechanism. The generator, with its tremendous braces to carry its thrust to the framework itself, filled most of the space. Some of the ribs were thicker, he noticed. Solid metal, as if they might carry great weights. Resting upon them were ranged numbers of objects. They were like eggs, slender, and inches in length. On some were propellers. They worked through the shells on long slender rods. Each was threaded finely--an adjustable arm engaged the thread. Thurston called excitedly to the other. "Here they are," he said. "Look! Here are the shells. Here's what blew us up!" * * * * * He pointed to the slim shafts with their little propellerlike fans. "Adjustable, see? Unwind in their fall ... set 'em for any length of travel ... fires the charge in the air. That's how they wiped out our air fleet." There were others without the propellers; they had fins to hold them nose downward. On each nose was a small rounded cap. "Detonators of some sort," said MacGregor. "We've got to have one. We must get it out quick; the tide's coming in." He laid his hands upon one of the slim, egg-shaped things. He lifted, then strained mightily. But the object did not rise; it only rolled sluggishly. The scientist stared at it amazed. "Specific gravity," he exclaimed, "beyond anything known! There's nothing on earth ... there is no such substance ... no form of matter...." His eyes were incredulous. "Lots to learn," Thurston answered grimly. "We've yet to learn how to fight off the other four." The other nodded. "Here's the secret," he said. "These shells liberate the same gas that drives the machine. Solve one and we solve both--then we learn how to combat it. But how to remove it--that is the problem. You and I can never lift this out of here." His glance darted about. There was a small door in the metal beam. The groove in which the shells were placed led to it; it was a port for launching the projectiles. He moved it, opened it. A dash of spray struck him in the face. He glanced inquiringly at his companion. "Dare we do it?" he asked. "Slide one of them out?" Each man looked long into the eyes of the other. Was this, then, the end of their terrible night? One shell to be dropped--then a bursting volcano to blast them to eternity.... "The boys in the planes risked it," said Thurston quietly. "They got theirs." He stopped for a broken fragment of steel. "Try one with a fan on; it hasn't a detonator." The men pried at the slim thing. It slid slowly toward the open port. One heave and it balanced on the edge, then vanished abruptly. The spray was cold on their faces. They breathed heavily with the realization that they still lived. * * * * * There were days of horror that followed, horror tempered by a numbing paralysis of all emotions. There were bodies by thousands to be heaped in the pit where San Diego had stood, to be buried beneath countless tons of debris and dirt. Trains brought an army of helpers; airplanes came with doctors and nurses and the beginning of a mountain of supplies. The need was there; it must be met. Yet the whole world was waiting while it helped, waiting for the next blow to fall. Telegraph service was improvised, and radio receivers rushed in. The news of the world was theirs once more. And it told of a terrified, waiting world. There would be no temporizing now on the part of the invaders. They had seen the airplanes swarming from the ground--they would know an airdrome next time from the air. Thurston had noted the windows in the great shell, windows of dull-colored glass which would protect the darkness of the interior, essential to life for the horrible occupant, but through which it could see. It could watch all directions at once. * * * * * The great shell had vanished from the shore. Pounding waves and the shifting sands of high tide had obliterated all trace. More than once had Thurston uttered devout thanks for the chance shell from an anti-aircraft gun that had entered the funnel beneath the machine, had bent and twisted the arrangement of mirrors that he and MacGregor had seen, and, exploding, had cracked and broken the domed roof of the bulb. They had learned little, but MacGregor was up north within reach of Los Angeles laboratories. And he had with him the slim cylinder of death. He was studying, thinking. Telephone service had been established for official business. The whole nation-wide system, for that matter, was under military control. The Secretary of War had flown back to Washington. The whole world was on a war basis. War! And none knew where they should defend themselves, nor how. An orderly rushed Thurston to the telephone. "You are wanted at once; Los Angeles calling." The voice of MacGregor was cool and unhurried as Thurston listened. "Grab a plane, old man," he was saying, "and come up here on the jump." The phrase brought a grim smile to Thurston's tired lips. "Hell's popping!" the Secretary of War had added on that evening those long ages before. Did MacGregor have something? Was a different kind of hell preparing to pop? The thoughts flashed through the listener's mind. "I need a good deputy," MacGregor said. "You may be the whole works--may have to carry on--but I'll tell you it all later. Meet me at the Biltmore." "In less than two hours," Thurston assured him. * * * * * A plane was at his disposal. Riley's legs were functioning again, after a fashion. They kept the appointment with minutes to spare. "Come on," said MacGregor, "I'll talk to you in the car." The automobile whirled them out of the city to race off upon a winding highway that climbed into far hills. There was twenty miles of this; MacGregor had time for his talk. "They've struck," he told the two men. "They were over Germany yesterday. The news was kept quiet: I got the last report a half-hour ago. They pretty well wiped out Berlin. No air-force there. France and England sent a swarm of planes, from the reports. Poor devils! No need to tell you what they got. We've seen it first hand. They headed west over the Atlantic, the four machines. Gave England a burst or two from high up, paused over New York, then went on. But they're here somewhere, we think. Now listen: "How long was it from the time when you saw the first monster until we heard from them again?" * * * * * Thurston forced his mind back to those days that seemed so far in the past. He tried to remember. "Four days," broke in Riley. "It was the fourth day after we found the devil feeding." "Feeding!" interrupted the scientist. "That's the point I am making. Four days. Remember that! "And we knew they were down in the Argentine five days ago--that's another item kept from an hysterical public. They slaughtered some thousands of cattle; there were scores of them found where the devils--I'll borrow Riley's word--where the devils had fed. Nothing left but hide and bones. "And--mark this--that was four days before they appeared over Berlin. "Why? Don't ask me. Do they have to lie quiet for that period miles up there in space? God knows. Perhaps! These things seem outside the knowledge of a deity. But enough of that! Remember: four days! Let us assume that there is this four days waiting period. It will help us to time them. I'll come back to that later. "Here is what I have been doing. We know that light is a means of attack. I believe that the detonators we saw on those bombs merely opened a seal in the shell and forced in a flash of some sort. I believe that radiant energy is what fires the blast. "What is it that explodes? Nobody knows. We have opened the shell, working in the absolute blackness of a room a hundred feet underground. We found in it a powder--two powders, to be exact. "They are mixed. One is finely divided, the other rather granular. Their specific gravity is enormous, beyond anything known to physical science unless it would be the hypothetical neutron masses we think are in certain stars. But this is not matter as we know matter; it is something new. * * * * * "Our theory is this: the hydrogen atom has been split, resolved into components, not of electrons and the proton centers, but held at some halfway point of decomposition. Matter composed only of neutrons would be heavy beyond belief. This fits the theory in that respect. But the point is this: When these solids are formed--they are dense--they represent in a cubic centimeter possibly a cubic mile of hydrogen gas under normal pressure. That's a guess, but it will give you the idea. "Not compressed, you understand, but all the elements present in other than elemental form for the reconstruction of the atom ... for a million billions of atoms. "Then the light strikes it. These dense solids become instantly a gas--miles of it held in that small space. "There you have it: the gas, the explosion, the entire absence of heat--which is to say, its terrific cold--when it expands." Slim Riley was looking bewildered but game. "Sure, I saw it snow," he affirmed, "so I guess the rest must be O.K. But what are we going to do about it? You say light kills 'em, and fires their bombs. But how can we let light into those big steel shells, or the little ones either?" "Not through those thick walls," said MacGregor. "Not light. One of our anti-aircraft shells made a direct hit. That might not happen again in a million shots. But there are other forms of radiant energy that do penetrate steel...." * * * * * The car had stopped beside a grove of eucalyptus. A barren, sun-baked hillside stretched beyond. MacGregor motioned them to alight. Riley was afire with optimism. "And do you believe it?" he asked eagerly. "Do you believe that we've got 'em licked?" Thurston, too, looked into MacGregor's face: Riley was not the only one who needed encouragement. But the gray eyes were suddenly tired and hopeless. "You ask what I believe," said the scientist slowly. "I believe we are witnessing the end of the world, our world of humans, their struggles, their grave hopes and happiness and aspirations...." He was not looking at them. His gaze was far off in space. "Men will struggle and fight with their puny weapons, but these monsters will win, and they will have their way with us. Then more of them will come. The world, I believe, is doomed...." He straightened his shoulders. "But we can die fighting," he added, and pointed over the hill. "Over there," he said, "in the valley beyond, is a charge of their explosive and a little apparatus of mine. I intend to fire the charge from a distance of three hundred yards. I expect to be safe, perfectly safe. But accidents happen. "In Washington a plane is being prepared. I have given instructions through hours of phoning. They are working night and day. It will contain a huge generator for producing my ray. Nothing new! Just the product of our knowledge of radiant energy up to date. But the man who flies that plane will die--horribly. No time to experiment with protection. The rays will destroy him, though he may live a month. "I am asking you," he told Cyrus Thurston, "to handle that plane. You may be of service to the world--you may find you are utterly powerless. You surely will die. But you know the machines and the monsters; your knowledge may be of value in an attack." He waited. The silence lasted for only a moment. "Why, sure," said Cyrus Thurston. * * * * * He looked at the eucalyptus grove with earnest appraisal. The sun made lovely shadows among their stripped trunks: the world was a beautiful place. A lingering death, MacGregor had intimated--and horrible.... "Why, sure," he repeated steadily. Slim Riley shoved him firmly aside to stand facing MacGregor. "Sure, hell!" he said. "I'm your man, Mr. MacGregor. "What do you know about flying?" he asked Cyrus Thurston. "You're good--for a beginner. But men like you two have got brains, and I'm thinkin' the world will be needin' them. Now me, all I'm good for is holdin' a shtick"--his brogue had returned to his speech, and was evidence of his earnestness. "And, besides"--the smile faded from his lips, and his voice was suddenly soft--"them boys we saw take their last flip was just pilots to you, just a bunch of good fighters. Well, they're buddies of mine. I fought beside some of them in France.... I belong!" He grinned happily at Thurston. "Besides," he said, "what do you know about dog-fights?" MacGregor gripped him by the hand. "You win," he said. "Report to Washington. The Secretary of War has all the dope." * * * * * He turned to Thurston. "Now for you! Get this! The enemy machines almost attacked New York. One of them came low, then went back, and the four flashed out of sight toward the west. It is my belief that New York is next, but the devils are hungry. The beast that attacked us was ravenous, remember. They need food and lots of it. You will hear of their feeding, and you can count on four days. Keep Riley informed--that's your job. "Now I'm going over the hill. If this experiment works, there's a chance we can repeat it on a larger scale. No certainty, but a chance! I'll be back. Full instructions at the hotel in case...." He vanished into the scrub growth. "Not exactly encouraging," Thurston pondered, "but he's a good man, Mac, a good egg! Not as big a brain as the one we saw, but perhaps it's a better one--cleaner--and it's working!" They were sheltered under the brow of the hill, but the blast from the valley beyond rocked them like an earthquake. They rushed to the top of the knoll. MacGregor was standing in the valley; he waved them a greeting and shouted something unintelligible. The gas had mushroomed into a cloud of steamy vapor. From above came snowflakes to whirl in the churning mass, then fall to the ground. A wind came howling about them to beat upon the cloud. It swirled slowly back and down the valley. The figure of MacGregor vanished in its smothering embrace. "Exit, MacGregor!" said Cyrus Thurston softly. He held tight to the struggling figure of Slim Riley. "He couldn't live a minute in that atmosphere of hydrogen," he explained. "They can--the devils!--but not a good egg like Mac. It's our job now--yours and mine." Slowly the gas retreated, lifted to permit their passage down the slope. * * * * * MacGregor was a good prophet. Thurston admitted that when, four days later, he stood on the roof of the Equitable Building in lower New York. The monsters had fed as predicted. Out in Wyoming a desolate area marked the place of their meal, where a great herd of cattle lay smothered and frozen. There were ranch houses, too, in the circle of destruction, their occupants frozen stiff as the carcasses that dotted the plains. The country had stood tense for the following blow. Only Thurston had lived in certainty of a few days reprieve. And now had come the fourth day. In Washington was Riley. Thurston had been in touch with him frequently. "Sure, it's a crazy machine," the pilot had told him, "and 'tis not much I think of it at all. Neither bullets nor guns, just this big glass contraption and speed. She's fast, man, she's fast ... but it's little hope I have." And Thurston, remembering the scientist's words, was heartless and sick with dreadful certainty. There were aircraft ready near New York; it was generally felt that here was the next objective. The enemy had looked it over carefully. And Washington, too, was guarded. The nation's capital must receive what little help the aircraft could afford. There were other cities waiting for destruction. If not this time--later! The horror hung over them all. * * * * * The fourth day! And Thurston was suddenly certain of the fate of New York. He hurried to a telephone. Of the Secretary of War he implored assistance. "Send your planes," he begged. "Here's where we will get it next. Send Riley. Let's make a last stand--win or lose." "I'll give you a squadron," was the concession. "What difference whether they die there or here...?" The voice was that of a weary man, weary and sleepless and hopeless. "Good-by Cy, old man!" The click of the receiver sounded in Thurston's ear. He returned to the roof for his vigil. To wait, to stride nervously back and forth in impotent expectancy. He could leave, go out into open country, but what were a few days or months--or a year--with this horror upon them? It was the end. MacGregor was right. "Good old Mac!" There were airplanes roaring overhead. It meant.... Thurston abruptly was cold; a chill gripped at his heart. The paroxysm passed. He was doubled with laughter--or was it he who was laughing? He was suddenly buoyantly carefree. Who was he that it mattered? Cyrus Thurston--an ant! And their ant-hill was about to be snuffed out.... He walked over to a waiting group and clapped one man on the shoulder. "Well, how does it feel to be an ant?" he inquired and laughed loudly at the jest. "You and your millions of dollars, your acres of factories, your steamships, railroads!" The man looked at him strangely and edged cautiously away. His eyes, like those of the others, had a dazed, stricken look. A woman was sobbing softly as she clung to her husband. From the streets far below came a quavering shrillness of sound. The planes gathered in climbing circles. Far on the horizon were four tiny glinting specks.... * * * * * Thurston stared until his eyes were stinging. He was walking in a waking sleep as he made his way to the stone coping beyond which was the street far below. He was dead--dead!--right this minute. What were a few minutes more or less? He could climb over the coping; none of the huddled, fear-gripped group would stop him. He could step out into space and fool them, the devils. They could never kill him.... What was it MacGregor had said? Good egg, MacGregor! "But we can die fighting...." Yes, that was it--die fighting. But he couldn't fight; he could only wait. Well, what were the others doing, down there in the streets--in their homes? He could wait with them, die with them.... He straightened slowly and drew one long breath. He looked steadily and unafraid at the advancing specks. They were larger now. He could see their round forms. The planes were less noisy: they were far up in the heights--climbing--climbing. The bulbs came slantingly down. They were separating. Thurston wondered vaguely. What had they done in Berlin? Yes, he remembered. Placed themselves at the four corners of a great square and wiped out the whole city in one explosion. Four bombs dropped at the same instant while they shot up to safety in the thin air. How did they communicate? Thought transference, most likely. Telepathy between those great brains, one to another. A plane was falling. It curved and swooped in a trail of flame, then fell straight toward the earth. They were fighting.... * * * * * Thurston stared above. There were clusters of planes diving down from on high. Machine-guns stuttered faintly. "Machine-guns--toys! Brave, that was it! 'We can die fighting.'" His thoughts were far off; it was like listening to another's mind. The air was filled with swelling clouds. He saw them before the blast struck where he stood. The great building shuddered at the impact. There were things falling from the clouds, wrecks of planes, blazing and shattered. Still came others; he saw them faintly through the clouds. They came in from the West; they had gone far to gain altitude. They drove down from the heights--the enemy had drifted--they were over the bay. More clouds, and another blast thundering at the city. There were specks, Thurston saw, falling into the water. Again the invaders came down from the heights where they had escaped their own shattering attack. There was the faint roar of motors behind, from the south. The squadron from Washington passed overhead. They surely had seen the fate that awaited. And they drove on to the attack, to strike at an enemy that shot instantly into the sky leaving crashing destruction about the torn dead. "Now!" said Cyrus Thurston aloud. * * * * * The big bulbs were back. They floated easily in the air, a plume of vapor billowing beneath. They were ranging to the four corners of a great square. One plane only was left, coming in from the south, a lone straggler, late for the fray. One plane! Thurston's shoulders sagged heavily. All they had left! It went swiftly overhead.... It was fast--fast. Thurston suddenly knew. It was Riley in that plane. "Go back, you fool!"--he was screaming at the top of his voice--"Back--back--you poor, damned, decent Irishman!" Tears were streaming down his face. "His buddies," Riley had said. And this was Riley, driving swiftly in, alone, to avenge them.... He saw dimly as the swift plane sped over the first bulb, on and over the second. The soft roar of gas from the machines drowned the sound of his engine. The plane passed them in silence to bank sharply toward the third corner of the forming square. He was looking them over, Thurston thought. And the damn beasts disregarded so contemptible an opponent. He could still leave. "For God's sake, Riley, beat it--escape!" Thurston's mind was solely on the fate of the lone voyager--until the impossible was borne in upon him. The square was disrupted. Three great bulbs were now drifting. The wind was carrying them out toward the bay. They were coming down in a long, smooth descent. The plane shot like a winged rocket at the fourth great, shining ball. To the watcher, aghast with sudden hope, it seemed barely to crawl. "The ray! The ray...." Thurston saw as if straining eyes had pierced through the distance to see the invisible. He saw from below the swift plane, the streaming, intangible ray. That was why Riley had flown closely past and above them--the ray poured from below. His throat was choking him, strangling.... * * * * * The last enemy took alarm. Had it seen the slow sinking of its companions, failed to hear them in reply to his mental call? The shining pear shape shot violently upward; the attacking plane rolled to a vertical bank as it missed the threatening clouds of exhaust. "What do you know about dog-fights?" And Riley had grinned ... Riley belonged! The bulb swelled before Thurston's eyes in its swift descent. It canted to one side to head off the struggling plane that could never escape, did not try to escape. The steady wings held true upon their straight course. From above came the silver meteor; it seemed striking at the very plane itself. It was almost upon it before it belched forth the cushioning blast of gas. Through the forming clouds a plane bored in swiftly. It rolled slowly, was flying upside down. It was under the enemy! Its ray.... Thurston was thrown a score of feet away to crash helpless into the stone coping by the thunderous crash of the explosion. There were fragments falling from a dense cloud--fragments of curved and silvery metal ... the wing of a plane danced and fluttered in the air.... "He fired its bombs," whispered Thurston in a shaking voice. "He killed the other devils where they lay--he destroyed this with its own explosive. He flew upside down to shoot up with the ray, to set off its shells...." His mind was fumbling with the miracle of it. "Clever pilot, Riley, in a dog-fight...." And then he realized. Cyrus Thurston, millionaire sportsman, sank slowly, numbly to the roof of the Equitable Building that still stood. And New York was still there ... and the whole world.... He sobbed weakly, brokenly. Through his dazed brain flashed a sudden, mind-saving thought. He laughed foolishly through his sobs. "And you said he'd die horribly, Mac, a horrible death." His head dropped upon his arms, unconscious--and safe--with the rest of humanity. * * * * * The Corpse on the Grating _By Hugh B. Cave_ In the gloomy depths of the old warehouse Dale saw a thing that drew a scream of horror to his dry lips. It was a corpse--the mold of decay on its long-dead features--and yet it was alive! [Illustration: _It was a corpse, standing before me like some propped-up thing from the grave._] It was ten o'clock on the morning of December 5 when M. S. and I left the study of Professor Daimler. You are perhaps acquainted with M. S. His name appears constantly in the pages of the Illustrated News, in conjunction with some very technical article on psycho-analysis or with some extensive study of the human brain and its functions. He is a psycho-fanatic, more or less, and has spent an entire lifetime of some seventy-odd years in pulling apart human skulls for the purpose of investigation. Lovely pursuit! For some twenty years I have mocked him, in a friendly, half-hearted fashion. I am a medical man, and my own profession is one that does not sympathize with radicals. As for Professor Daimler, the third member of our triangle--perhaps, if I take a moment to outline the events of that evening, the Professor's part in what follows will be less obscure. We had called on him, M. S. and I, at his urgent request. His rooms were in a narrow, unlighted street just off the square, and Daimler himself opened the door to us. A tall, loosely built chap he was, standing in the doorway like a motionless ape, arms half extended. "I've summoned you, gentlemen," he said quietly, "because you two, of all London, are the only persons who know the nature of my recent experiments. I should like to acquaint you with the results!" He led the way to his study, then kicked the door shut with his foot, seizing my arm as he did so. Quietly he dragged me to the table that stood against the farther wall. In the same even, unemotional tone of a man completely sure of himself, he commanded me to inspect it. For a moment, in the semi-gloom of the room, I saw nothing. At length, however, the contents of the table revealed themselves, and I distinguished a motley collection of test tubes, each filled with some fluid. The tubes were attached to each other by some ingenious arrangement of thistles, and at the end of the table, where a chance blow could not brush it aside, lay a tiny phial of the resulting serum. From the appearance of the table, Daimler had evidently drawn a certain amount of gas from each of the smaller tubes, distilling them through acid into the minute phial at the end. Yet even now, as I stared down at the fantastic paraphernalia before me, I could sense no conclusive reason for its existence. I turned to the Professor with a quiet stare of bewilderment. He smiled. "The experiment is over," he said. "As to its conclusion, you, Dale, as a medical man, will be sceptical. And you"--turning to M. S.--"as a scientist you will be amazed. I, being neither physician nor scientist, am merely filled with wonder!" * * * * * He stepped to a long, square table-like structure in the center of the room. Standing over it, he glanced quizzically at M. S., then at me. "For a period of two weeks," he went on, "I have kept, on the table here, the body of a man who has been dead more than a month. I have tried, gentlemen, with acid combinations of my own origination, to bring that body back to life. And ... I have--failed! "But," he added quickly, noting the smile that crept across my face, "that failure was in itself worth more than the average scientist's greatest achievement! You know, Dale, that heat, if a man is not truly dead, will sometimes resurrect him. In a case of epilepsy, for instance, victims have been pronounced dead only to return to life--sometimes in the grave. "I say 'if a man be not truly dead.' But what if that man _is_ truly dead? Does the cure alter itself in any manner? The motor of your car dies--do you bury it? You do not; you locate the faulty part, correct it, and infuse new life. And so, gentlemen, after remedying the ruptured heart of this dead man, by operation, I proceeded to bring him back to life. "I used heat. Terrific heat will sometimes originate a spark of new life in something long dead. Gentlemen, on the fourth day of my tests, following a continued application of electric and acid heat, the patient--" Daimler leaned over the table and took up a cigarette. Lighting it, he dropped the match and resumed his monologue. "The patient turned suddenly over and drew his arm weakly across his eyes. I rushed to his side. When I reached him, the body was once again stiff and lifeless. And--it has remained so." The Professor stared at us quietly, waiting for comment. I answered him, as carelessly as I could, with a shrug of my shoulders. "Professor, have you ever played with the dead body of a frog?" I said softly. * * * * * He shook his head silently. "You would find it interesting sport," I told him. "Take a common dry cell battery with enough voltage to render a sharp shock. Then apply your wires to various parts of the frog's anatomy. If you are lucky, and strike the right set of muscles, you will have the pleasure of seeing a dead frog leap suddenly forward. Understand, he will not regain life. You have merely released his dead muscles by shock, and sent him bolting." The Professor did not reply. I could feel his eyes on me, and had I turned, I should probably had found M. S. glaring at me in honest hate. These men were students of mesmerism, of spiritualism, and my commonplace contradiction was not over welcome. "You are cynical, Dale," said M. S. coldly, "because you do not understand!" "Understand? I am a doctor--not a ghost!" But M. S. had turned eagerly to the Professor. "Where is this body--this experiment?" he demanded. Daimler shook his head. Evidently he had acknowledged failure and did not intend to drag his dead man before our eyes, unless he could bring that man forth alive, upright, and ready to join our conversation! "I've put it away," he said distantly. "There is nothing more to be done, now that our reverend doctor has insisted in making a matter of fact thing out of our experiment. You understand, I had not intended to go in for wholesale resurrection, even if I had met with success. It was my belief that a dead body, like a dead piece of mechanism, can be brought to life again, provided we are intelligent enough to discover the secret. And by God, it is _still_ my belief!" * * * * * That was the situation, then, when M. S. and I paced slowly back along the narrow street that contained the Professor's dwelling-place. My companion was strangely silent. More than once I felt his eyes upon me in an uncomfortable stare, yet he said nothing. Nothing, that is, until I had opened the conversation with some casual remark about the lunacy of the man we had just left. "You are wrong in mocking him, Dale," M. S. replied bitterly. "Daimler is a man of science. He is no child, experimenting with a toy; he is a grown man who has the courage to believe in his powers. One of these days...." He had intended to say that some day I should respect the Professor's efforts. One of these days! The interval of time was far shorter than anything so indefinite. The first event, with its succeeding series of horrors, came within the next three minutes. * * * * * We had reached a more deserted section of the square, a black, uninhabited street extending like a shadowed band of darkness between gaunt, high walls. I had noticed for some time that the stone structure beside us seemed to be unbroken by door or window--that it appeared to be a single gigantic building, black and forbidding. I mentioned the fact to M. S. "The warehouse," he said simply. "A lonely, God-forsaken place. We shall probably see the flicker of the watchman's light in one of the upper chinks." At his words, I glanced up. True enough, the higher part of the grim structure was punctured by narrow, barred openings. Safety vaults, probably. But the light, unless its tiny gleam was somewhere in the inner recesses of the warehouse, was dead. The great building was like an immense burial vault, a tomb--silent and lifeless. We had reached the most forbidding section of the narrow street, where a single arch-lamp overhead cast a halo of ghastly yellow light over the pavement. At the very rim of the circle of illumination, where the shadows were deeper and more silent, I could make out the black mouldings of a heavy iron grating. The bars of metal were designed, I believe, to seal the side entrance of the great warehouse from night marauders. It was bolted in place and secured with a set of immense chains, immovable. This much I saw as my intent gaze swept the wall before me. This huge tomb of silence held for me a peculiar fascination, and as I paced along beside my gloomy companion, I stared directly ahead of me into the darkness of the street. I wish to God my eyes had been closed or blinded! * * * * * He was hanging on the grating. Hanging there, with white, twisted hands clutching the rigid bars of iron, straining to force them apart. His whole distorted body was forced against the barrier, like the form of a madman struggling to escape from his cage. His face--the image of it still haunts me whenever I see iron bars in the darkness of a passage--was the face of a man who has died from utter, stark horror. It was frozen in a silent shriek of agony, staring out at me with fiendish maliciousness. Lips twisted apart. White teeth gleaming in the light. Bloody eyes, with a horrible glare of colorless pigment. And--_dead_. I believe M. S. saw him at the very instant I recoiled. I felt a sudden grip on my arm; and then, as an exclamation came harshly from my companion's lips, I was pulled forward roughly. I found myself staring straight into the dead eyes of that fearful thing before me, found myself standing rigid, motionless, before the corpse that hung within reach of my arm. And then, through that overwhelming sense of the horrible, came the quiet voice of my comrade--the voice of a man who looks upon death as nothing more than an opportunity for research. "The fellow has been frightened to death, Dale. Frightened most horribly. Note the expression of his mouth, the evident struggle to force these bars apart and escape. Something has driven fear to his soul, killed him." * * * * * I remember the words vaguely. When M. S. had finished speaking, I did not reply. Not until he had stepped forward and bent over the distorted face of the thing before me, did I attempt to speak. When I did, my thoughts were a jargon. "What, in God's name," I cried, "could have brought such horror to a strong man? What--" "Loneliness, perhaps," suggested M. S. with a smile. "The fellow is evidently the watchman. He is alone, in a huge, deserted pit of darkness, for hours at a time. His light is merely a ghostly ray of illumination, hardly enough to do more than increase the darkness. I have heard of such cases before." He shrugged his shoulders. Even as he spoke, I sensed the evasion in his words. When I replied, he hardly heard my answer, for he had suddenly stepped forward, where he could look directly into those fear twisted eyes. "Dale," he said at length, turning slowly to face me, "you ask for an explanation of this horror? There _is_ an explanation. It is written with an almost fearful clearness on this fellow's mind. Yet if I tell you, you will return to your old skepticism--your damnable habit of disbelief!" I looked at him quietly. I had heard M. S. claim, at other times, that he could read the thoughts of a dead man by the mental image that lay on that man's brain. I had laughed at him. Evidently, in the present moment, he recalled those laughs. Nevertheless, he faced me seriously. "I can see two things, Dale," he said deliberately. "One of them is a dark, narrow room--a room piled with indistinct boxes and crates, and with an open door bearing the black number 4167. And in that open doorway, coming forward with slow steps--alive, with arms extended and a frightful face of passion--is a decayed human form. A corpse, Dale. A man who has been dead for many days, and is now--_alive_!" * * * * * M. S. turned slowly and pointed with upraised hand to the corpse on the grating. "That is why," he said simply, "this fellow died from horror." His words died into emptiness. For a moment I stared at him. Then, in spite of our surroundings, in spite of the late hour, the loneliness of the street, the awful thing beside us, I laughed. He turned upon me with a snarl. For the first time in my life I saw M. S. convulsed with rage. His old, lined face had suddenly become savage with intensity. "You laugh at me, Dale," he thundered. "By God, you make a mockery out of a science that I have spent more than my life in studying! You call yourself a medical man--and you are not fit to carry the name! I will wager you, man, that your laughter is not backed by courage!" I fell away from him. Had I stood within reach, I am sure he would have struck me. Struck me! And I have been nearer to M. S. for the past ten years than any man in London. And as I retreated from his temper, he reached forward to seize my arm. I could not help but feel impressed at his grim intentness. "Look here, Dale," he said bitterly, "I will wager you a hundred pounds that you will not spend the remainder of this night in the warehouse above you! I will wager a hundred pounds against your own courage that you will not back your laughter by going through what this fellow has gone through. That you will not prowl through the corridors of this great structure until you have found room 4167--_and remain in that room until dawn_!" * * * * * There was no choice. I glanced at the dead man, at the face of fear and the clutching, twisted hands, and a cold dread filled me. But to refuse my friend's wager would have been to brand myself an empty coward. I had mocked him. Now, whatever the cost, I must stand ready to pay for that mockery. "Room 4167?" I replied quietly, in a voice which I made every effort to control, lest he should discover the tremor in it. "Very well, I will do it!" It was nearly midnight when I found myself alone, climbing a musty, winding ramp between the first and second floors of the deserted building. Not a sound, except the sharp intake of my breath and the dismal creak of the wooden stairs, echoed through that tomb of death. There was no light, not even the usual dim glow that is left to illuminate an unused corridor. Moreover, I had brought no means of light with me--nothing but a half empty box of safety matches which, by some unholy premonition, I had forced myself to save for some future moment. The stairs were black and difficult, and I mounted them slowly, groping with both hands along the rough wall. I had left M. S. some few moments before. In his usual decisive manner he had helped me to climb the iron grating and lower myself to the sealed alley-way on the farther side. Then, leaving him without a word, for I was bitter against the triumphant tone of his parting words, I proceeded into the darkness, fumbling forward until I had discovered the open door in the lower part of the warehouse. And then the ramp, winding crazily upward--upward--upward, seemingly without end. I was seeking blindly for that particular room which was to be my destination. Room 4167, with its high number, could hardly be on the lower floors, and so I had stumbled upward.... * * * * * It was at the entrance of the second floor corridor that I struck the first of my desultory supply of matches, and by its light discovered a placard nailed to the wall. The thing was yellow with age and hardly legible. In the drab light of the match I had difficulty in reading it--but, as far as I can remember, the notice went something like this: WAREHOUSE RULES 1. No light shall be permitted in any room or corridor, as a prevention against fire. 2. No person shall be admitted to rooms or corridors unless accompanied by an employee. 3. A watchman shall be on the premises from 7 P.M. until 6 A.M. He shall make the round of the corridors every hour during that interval, at a quarter past the hour. 4. Rooms are located by their numbers: the first figure in the room number indicating its floor location. I could read no further. The match in my fingers burned to a black thread and dropped. Then, with the burnt stump still in my hand, I groped through the darkness to the bottom of the second ramp. Room 4167, then, was on the fourth floor--the topmost floor of the structure. I must confess that the knowledge did not bring any renewed burst of courage! The top floor! Three black stair-pits would lie between me and the safety of escape. There would be no escape! No human being in the throes of fear could hope to discover that tortured outlet, could hope to grope his way through Stygian gloom down a triple ramp of black stairs. And even though he succeeded in reaching the lower corridors, there was still a blind alley-way, sealed at the outer end by a high grating of iron bars.... * * * * * Escape! The mockery of it caused me to stop suddenly in my ascent and stand rigid, my whole body trembling violently. But outside, in the gloom of the street, M. S. was waiting, waiting with that fiendish glare of triumph that would brand me a man without courage. I could not return to face him, not though all the horrors of hell inhabited this gruesome place of mystery. And horrors must surely inhabit it, else how could one account for that fearful thing on the grating below? But I had been through horror before. I had seen a man, supposedly dead on the operating table, jerk suddenly to his feet and scream. I had seen a young girl, not long before, awake in the midst of an operation, with the knife already in her frail body. Surely, after those definite horrors, no _unknown_ danger would send me cringing back to the man who was waiting so bitterly for me to return. Those were the thoughts pregnant in my mind as I groped slowly, cautiously along the corridor of the upper floor, searching each closed door for the indistinct number 4167. The place was like the center of a huge labyrinth, a spider-web of black, repelling passages, leading into some central chamber of utter silence and blackness. I went forward with dragging steps, fighting back the dread that gripped me as I went farther and farther from the outlet of escape. And then, after losing myself completely in the gloom, I threw aside all thoughts of return and pushed on with a careless, surface bravado, and laughed aloud. * * * * * So, at length, I reached that room of horror, secreted high in the deeper recesses of the deserted warehouse. The number--God grant I never see it again!--was scrawled in black chalk on the door--4167. I pushed the half-open barrier wide, and entered. It was a small room, even as M. S. had forewarned me--or as the dead mind of that thing on the grate had forewarned M. S. The glow of my out-thrust match revealed a great stack of dusty boxes and crates, piled against the farther wall. Revealed, too, the black corridor beyond the entrance, and a small, upright table before me. It was the table, and the stool beside it, that drew my attention and brought a muffled exclamation from my lips. The thing had been thrust out of its usual place, pushed aside as if some frenzied shape had lunged against it. I could make out its former position by the marks on the dusty floor at my feet. Now it was nearer to the center of the room, and had been wrenched sidewise from its holdings. A shudder took hold of me as I looked at it. A living person, sitting on the stool before me, staring at the door, would have wrenched the table in just this manner in his frenzy to escape from the room! * * * * * The light of the match died, plunging me into a pit of gloom. I struck another and stepped closer to the table. And there, on the floor, I found two more things that brought fear to my soul. One of them was a heavy flash-lamp--a watchman's lamp--where it had evidently been dropped. Been dropped in flight! But what awful terror must have gripped the fellow to make him forsake his only means of escape through those black passages? And the second thing--a worn copy of a leather-bound book, flung open on the boards below the stool! The flash-lamp, thank God! had not been shattered. I switched it on, directing its white circle of light over the room. This time, in the vivid glare, the room became even more unreal. Black walls, clumsy, distorted shadows on the wall, thrown by those huge piles of wooden boxes. Shadows that were like crouching men, groping toward me. And beyond, where the single door opened into a passage of Stygian darkness, that yawning entrance was thrown into hideous detail. Had any upright figure been standing there, the light would have made an unholy phosphorescent specter out of it. I summoned enough courage to cross the room and pull the door shut. There was no way of locking it. Had I been able to fasten it, I should surely have done so; but the room was evidently an unused chamber, filled with empty refuse. This was the reason, probably, why the watchman had made use of it as a retreat during the intervals between his rounds. But I had no desire to ponder over the sordidness of my surroundings. I returned to my stool in silence, and stooping, picked up the fallen book from the floor. Carefully I placed the lamp on the table, where its light would shine on the open page. Then, turning the cover, I began to glance through the thing which the man before me had evidently been studying. And before I had read two lines, the explanation of the whole horrible thing struck me. I stared dumbly down at the little book and laughed. Laughed harshly, so that the sound of my mad cackle echoed in a thousand ghastly reverberations through the dead corridors of the building. * * * * * It was a book of horror, of fantasy. A collection of weird, terrifying, supernatural tales with grotesque illustrations in funereal black and white. And the very line I had turned to, the line which had probably struck terror to that unlucky devil's soul, explained M. S.'s "decayed human form, standing in the doorway with arms extended and a frightful face of passion!" The description--the same description--lay before me, almost in my friend's words. Little wonder that the fellow on the grating below, after reading this orgy of horror, had suddenly gone mad with fright. Little wonder that the picture engraved on his dead mind was a picture of a corpse standing in the doorway of room 4167! I glanced at that doorway and laughed. No doubt of it, it was that awful description in M. S.'s untempered language that had made me dread my surroundings, not the loneliness and silence of the corridors about me. Now, as I stared at the room, the closed door, the shadows on the wall, I could not repress a grin. But the grin was not long in duration. A six-hour siege awaited me before I could hear the sound of human voice again--six hours of silence and gloom. I did not relish it. Thank God the fellow before me had had foresight enough to leave his book of fantasy for my amusement! * * * * * I turned to the beginning of the story. A lovely beginning it was, outlining in some detail how a certain Jack Fulton, English adventurer, had suddenly found himself imprisoned (by a mysterious black gang of monks, or something of the sort) in a forgotten cell at the monastery of El Toro. The cell, according to the pages before me, was located in the "empty, haunted pits below the stone floors of the structure...." Lovely setting! And the brave Fulton had been secured firmly to a huge metal ring set in the farther wall, opposite the entrance. I read the description twice. At the end of it I could not help but lift my head to stare at my own surroundings. Except for the location of the cell, I might have been in they same setting. The same darkness, same silence, same loneliness. Peculiar similarity! And then: "Fulton lay quietly, without attempt to struggle. In the dark, the stillness of the vaults became unbearable, terrifying. Not a suggestion of sound, except the scraping of unseen rats--" I dropped the book with a start. From the opposite end of the room in which I sat came a half inaudible scuffling noise--the sound of hidden rodents scrambling through the great pile of boxes. Imagination? I am not sure. At the moment, I would have sworn that the sound was a definite one, that I had heard it distinctly. Now, as I recount this tale of horror, I am not sure. But I am sure of this: There was no smile on my lips as I picked up the book again with trembling fingers and continued. "The sound died into silence. For an eternity, the prisoner lay rigid, staring at the open door of his cell. The opening was black, deserted, like the mouth of a deep tunnel, leading to hell. And then, suddenly, from the gloom beyond that opening, came an almost noiseless, padded footfall!" * * * * * This time there was no doubt of it. The book fell from my fingers, dropped to the floor with a clatter. Yet even through the sound of its falling, I heard that fearful sound--the shuffle of a living foot! I sat motionless, staring with bloodless face at the door of room 4167. And as I stared, the sound came again, and again--_the slow tread of dragging footsteps, approaching along the black corridor without_! I got to my feet like an automaton, swaying heavily. Every drop of courage ebbed from my soul as I stood there, one hand clutching the table, waiting.... And then, with an effort, I moved forward. My hand was outstretched to grasp the wooden handle of the door. And--I did not have the courage. Like a cowed beast I crept back to my place and slumped down on the stool, my eyes still transfixed in a mute stare of terror. I waited. For more than half an hour I waited, motionless. Not a sound stirred in the passage beyond that closed barrier. Not a suggestion of any living presence came to me. Then, leaning back against the wall with a harsh laugh, I wiped away the cold moisture that had trickled over my forehead into my eyes. It was another five minutes before I picked up the book again. You call me a fool for continuing it? A fool? I tell you, even a story of horror is more comfort than a room of grotesque shadows and silence. Even a printed page is better than grim reality! * * * * * And so I read on. The story was one of suspense, madness. For the next two pages I read a cunning description of the prisoner's mental reaction. Strangely enough, it conformed precisely with my own. "Fulton's head had fallen to his chest," the script read. "For an endless while he did not stir, did not dare to lift his eyes. And then, after more than an hour of silent agony and suspense, the boy's head came up mechanically. Came up--and suddenly jerked rigid. A horrible scream burst from his dry lips as he stared--stared like a dead man--at the black entrance to his cell. There, standing without motion in the opening, stood a shrouded figure of death. Empty eyes, glaring with awful hate, bored into his own. Great arms, bony and rotten, extended toward him. Decayed flesh--" I read no more. Even as I lunged to my feet, with that mad book still gripped in my hand, I heard the door of my room grind open. I screamed, screamed in utter horror at the thing I saw there. Dead? Good God, I do not know. It was a corpse, a dead human body, standing before me like some propped-up thing from the grave. A face half eaten away, terrible in its leering grin. Twisted mouth, with only a suggestion of lips, curled back over broken teeth. Hair--writhing, distorted--like a mass of moving, bloody coils. And its arms, ghastly white, bloodless, were extended toward me, with open, clutching hands. * * * * * It was alive! Alive! Even while I stood there, crouching against the wall, it stepped forward toward me. I saw a heavy shudder pass over it, and the sound of its scraping feet burned its way into my soul. And then, with its second step, the fearful thing stumbled to its knees. The white, gleaming arms, thrown into streaks of living fire by the light of my lamp, flung violently upwards, twisting toward the ceiling. I saw the grin change to an expression of agony, of torment. And then the thing crashed upon me--dead. With a great cry of fear I stumbled to the door. I groped out of that room of horror, stumbled along the corridor. No light. I left it behind, on the table, to throw a circle of white glare over the decayed, living-dead intruder who had driven me mad. My return down those winding ramps to the lower floor was a nightmare of fear. I remember that I stumbled, that I plunged through the darkness like a man gone mad. I had no thought of caution, no thought of anything except escape. And then the lower door, and the alley of gloom. I reached the grating, flung myself upon it and pressed my face against the bars in a futile effort to escape. The same--as the fear-tortured man--who had--come before--me. I felt strong hands lifting me up. A dash of cool air, and then the refreshing patter of falling rain. * * * * * It was the afternoon of the following day, December 6, when M. S. sat across the table from me in my own study. I had made a rather hesitant attempt to tell him, without dramatics and without dwelling on my own lack of courage, of the events of the previous night. "You deserved it, Dale," he said quietly. "You are a medical man, nothing more, and yet you mock the beliefs of a scientist as great as Daimler. I wonder--do you still mock the Professor's beliefs?" "That he can bring a dead man to life?" I smiled, a bit doubtfully. "I will tell you something, Dale," said M. S. deliberately. He was leaning across the table, staring at me. "The Professor made only one mistake in his great experiment. He did not wait long enough for the effect of his strange acids to work. He acknowledged failure too soon, and got rid of the body." He paused. "When the Professor stored his patient away, Dale," he said quietly, "he stored it in room 4170, at the great warehouse. If you are acquainted with the place, you will know that room 4170 is directly across the corridor from 4167." * * * * * Creatures of the Light _By Sophie Wenzel Ellis_ He had striven to perfect the faultless man of the future, and had succeeded--too well. For in the pitilessly cold eyes of Adam, his super-human creation, Dr. Mundson saw only contempt--and annihilation--for the human race. [Illustration] In a night club of many lights and much high-pitched laughter, where he had come for an hour of forgetfulness and an execrable dinner, John Northwood was suddenly conscious that Fate had begun shuffling the cards of his destiny for a dramatic game. First, he was aware that the singularly ugly and deformed man at the next table was gazing at him with an intense, almost excited scrutiny. But, more disturbing than this, was the scowl of hate on the face of another man, as handsome as this other was hideous, who sat in a far corner hidden behind a broad column, with rude elbows on the table, gawking first at Northwood and then at the deformed, almost hideous man. [Illustration: _The projector, belching forth its stinking breath of corruption, swung in a mad arc over the ceiling, over the walls._] Northwood's blood chilled over the expression on the handsome, fair-haired stranger's perfectly carved face. If a figure in marble could display a fierce, unnatural passion, it would seem no more eldritch than the hate in the icy blue eyes. It was not a new experience for Northwood to be stared at: he was not merely a good-looking young fellow of twenty-five, he was scenery, magnificent and compelling. Furthermore, he had been in the public eye for years, first as a precocious child and, later, as a brilliant young scientist. Yet, for all his experience with hero worshippers to put an adamantine crust on his sensibilities, he grew warm-eared under the gaze of these two strangers--this hunchback with a face like a grotesque mask in a Greek play, this other who, even handsomer than himself, chilled the blood queerly with the cold perfection of his godlike masculine beauty. * * * * * Northwood sensed something familiar about the hunchback. Somewhere he had seen that huge, round, intelligent face splattered with startling features. The very breadth of the man's massive brow was not altogether unknown to him, nor could Northwood look into the mournful, near-sighted black eyes without trying to recall when and where he had last seen them. But this other of the marble-perfect nose and jaw, the blond, thick-waved hair, was totally a stranger, whom Northwood fervently hoped he would never know too well. Trying to analyze the queer repugnance that he felt for this handsome, boldly staring fellow, Northwood decided: "He's like a newly-made wax figure endowed with life." Shivering over his own fantastic thought, he again glanced swiftly at the hunchback, who he noticed was playing with his coffee, evidently to prolong the meal. One year of calm-headed scientific teaching in a famous old eastern university had not made him callous to mysteries. Thus, with a feeling of high adventure, he finished his supper and prepared to go. From the corner of his eye, he saw the hunchback leave his seat, while the handsome man behind the column rose furtively, as though he, too, intended to follow. Northwood was out in the dusky street about thirty seconds, when the hunchback came from the foyer. Without apparently noticing Northwood, he hailed a taxi. For a moment, he stood still, waiting for the taxi to pull up at the curb. Standing thus, with the street light limning every unnatural angle of his twisted body and every queer abnormality of his huge features, he looked almost repulsive. On his way to the taxi, his thick shoulder jostled the younger man. Northwood felt something strike his foot, and, stooping in the crowded street, picked up a black leather wallet. "Wait!" he shouted as the hunchback stepped into the waiting taxi. But the man did not falter. In a moment, Northwood lost sight of him as the taxi moved away. * * * * * He debated with himself whether or not he should attempt to follow. And while he stood thus in indecision, the handsome stranger approached him. "Good evening to you," he said curtly. His rich, musical voice, for all its deepness, held a faint hint of the tremulous, birdlike notes heard in the voice of a young child who has not used his vocal chords long enough for them to have lost their exquisite newness. "Good evening," echoed Northwood, somewhat uncertainly. A sudden aura of repulsion swept coldly over him. Seen close, with the brilliant light of the street directly on his too perfect face, the man was more sinister than in the café. Yet Northwood, struggling desperately for a reason to explain his violent dislike, could not discover why he shrank from this splendid creature, whose eyes and flesh had a new, fresh appearance rarely seen except in very young boys. "I want what you picked up," went on the stranger. "It isn't yours!" Northwood flashed back. Ah! that effluvium of hatred which seemed to weave a tangible net around him! "Nor is it yours. Give it to me!" "You're insolent, aren't you?" "If you don't give it to me, you will be sorry." The man did not raise his voice in anger, yet the words whipped Northwood with almost physical violence. "If he knew that I saw everything that happened in there--that I am talking to you at this moment--he would tremble with fear." "But you can't intimidate me." "No?" For a long moment, the cold blue eyes held his contemptuously. "No? I can't frighten you--you worm of the Black Age?" Before Northwood's horrified sight, he vanished; vanished as though he had turned suddenly to air and floated away. * * * * * The street was not crowded at that time, and there was no pressing group of bodies to hide the splendid creature. Northwood gawked stupidly, mouth half open, eyes searching wildly everywhere. The man was gone. He had simply disappeared, in this sane, electric-lighted street. Suddenly, close to Northwood's ear, grated a derisive laugh. "I can't frighten you?" From nowhere came that singularly young-old voice. As Northwood jerked his head around to meet blank space, a blow struck the corner of his mouth. He felt the warm blood run over his chin. "I could take that wallet from you, worm, but you may keep it, and see me later. But remember this--the thing inside never will be yours." The words fell from empty air. For several minutes, Northwood waited at the spot, expecting another demonstration of the abnormal, but nothing else occurred. At last, trembling violently, he wiped the thick moisture from his forehead and dabbed at the blood which he still felt on his chin. But when he looked at his handkerchief, he muttered: "Well, I'll be jiggered!" The handkerchief bore not the slightest trace of blood. * * * * * Under the light in his bedroom, Northwood examined the wallet. It was made of alligator skin, clasped with a gold signet that bore the initial M. The first pocket was empty; the second yielded an object that sent a warm flush to his face. It was the photograph of a gloriously beautiful girl, so seductively lovely that the picture seemed almost to be alive. The short, curved upper lip, the full, delicately voluptuous lower, parted slightly in a smile that seemed to linger in every exquisite line of her face. She looked as though she had just spoken passionately, and the spirit of her words had inspired her sweet flesh and eyes. Northwood turned his head abruptly and groaned, "Good Heavens!" He had no right to palpitate over the picture of an unknown beauty. Only a month ago, he had become engaged to a young woman whose mind was as brilliant as her face was plain. Always he had vowed that he would never marry a pretty girl, for he detested his own masculine beauty sincerely. He tried to grasp a mental picture of Mary Burns, who had never stirred in him the emotion that this smiling picture invoked. But, gazing at the picture, he could not remember how his fiancée looked. Suddenly the picture fell from his fingers and dropped to the floor on its face, revealing an inscription on the back. In a bold, masculine hand, he read: "Your future wife." "Some lucky fellow is headed for a life of bliss," was his jealous thought. He frowned at the beautiful face. What was this girl to that hideous hunchback? Why did the handsome stranger warn him, "_The thing inside never will be yours_?" Again he turned eagerly to the wallet. In the last flap he found something that gave him another surprise: a plain white card on which a name and address were written by the same hand that had penned the inscription on the picture. Emil Mundson, Ph. D., 44-1/2 Indian Court Emil Mundson, the electrical wizard and distinguished scientific writer, friend of the professor of science at the university where Northwood was an assistant professor; Emil Mundson, whom, a week ago, Northwood had yearned mightily to meet. Now Northwood knew why the hunchback's intelligent, ugly face was familiar to him. He had seen it pictured as often as enterprising news photographers could steal a likeness from the over-sensitive scientist, who would never sit for a formal portrait. * * * * * Even before Northwood had graduated from the university where he now taught, he had been avidly interested in Emil Mundson's fantastic articles in scientific journals. Only a week ago, Professor Michael had come to him with the current issue of New Science, shouting excitedly: "Did you read this, John, this article by Emil Mundson?" His shaking, gnarled old fingers tapped the open magazine. Northwood seized the magazine and looked avidly at the title of the article, "Creatures of the Light." "No, I haven't read it," he admitted. "My magazine hasn't come yet." "Run through it now briefly, will you? And note with especial care the passages I have marked. In fact, you needn't bother with anything else just now. Read this--and this--and this." He pointed out penciled paragraphs. Northwood read: Man always has been, always will be a creature of the light. He is forever reaching for some future point of perfected evolution which, even when his most remote ancestor was a fish creature composed of a few cells, was the guiding power that brought him up from the first stinking sea and caused him to create gods in his own image. It is this yearning for perfection which sets man apart from all other life, which made him _man_ even in the rudimentary stages of his development. He was man when he wallowed in the slime of the new world and yearned for the air above. He will still be man when he has evolved into that glorious creature of the future whose body is deathless and whose mind rules the universe. Professor Michael, looking over Northwood's shoulder, interrupted the reading: "_Man always has been man_," he droned emphatically. "That's not original with friend Mundson, of course; yet it is a theory that has not received sufficient investigation." He indicated another marked paragraph. "Read this thoughtfully, John. It's the crux of Mundson's thought." Northwood continued: Since the human body is chemical and electrical, increased knowledge of its powers and limitations will enable us to work with Nature in her sublime but infinitely slow processes of human evolution. We need not wait another fifty thousand years to be godlike creatures. Perhaps even now we may be standing at the beginning of the splendid bridge that will take us to that state of perfected evolution when we shall be Creatures who have reached the Light. Northwood looked questioningly at the professor. "Queer, fantastic thing, isn't it?" * * * * * Professor Michael smoothed his thin, gray hair with his dried-out hand. "Fantastic?" His intellectual eyes behind the thick glasses sought the ceiling. "Who can say? Haven't you ever wondered why all parents expect their children to be nearer perfection than themselves, and why is it a natural impulse for them to be willing to sacrifice themselves to better their offspring?" He paused and moistened his pale, wrinkled lips. "Instinct, Northwood. We Creatures of the Light know that our race shall reach that point in evolution when, as perfect creatures, we shall rule all matter and live forever." He punctuated the last words with blows on the table. Northwood laughed dryly. "How many thousands of years are you looking forward, Professor?" The professor made an obscure noise that sounded like a smothered sniff. "You and I shall never agree on the point that mental advancement may wipe out physical limitations in the human race, perhaps in a few hundred years. It seems as though your profound admiration for Dr. Mundson would win you over to this pet theory." "But what sane man can believe that even perfectly developed beings, through mental control, could overcome Nature's fixed laws?" "We don't know! We don't know!" The professor slapped the magazine with an emphatic hand. "Emil Mundson hasn't written this article for nothing. He's paving the way for some announcement that will startle the scientific world. I know him. In the same manner he gave out veiled hints of his various brilliant discoveries and inventions long before he offered them to the world." "But Dr. Mundson is an electrical wizard. He would not be delving seriously into the mysteries of evolution, would he?" "Why not?" The professor's wizened face screwed up wisely. "A year ago, when he was back from one of those mysterious long excursions he takes in that weirdly different aircraft of his, about which he is so secretive, he told me that he was conducting experiments to prove his belief that the human brain generates electric current, and that the electrical impulses in the brain set up radioactive waves that some day, among other miracles, will make thought communication possible. Perfect man, he says, will perform mental feats which will give him complete mental domination over the physical." * * * * * Northwood finished reading and turned thoughtfully to the window. His profile in repose had the straight-nosed, full-lipped perfection of a Greek coin. Old, wizened Professor Michael, gazing at him covertly, smothered a sigh. "I wish you knew Dr. Mundson," he said. "He, the ugliest man in the world, delights in physical perfection. He would revel in your splendid body and brilliant mind." Northwood blushed hotly. "You'll have to arrange a meeting between us." "I have." The professor's thin, dry lips pursed comically. "He'll drop in to see you within a few days." And now John Northwood sat holding Dr. Mundson's card and the wallet which the scientist had so mysteriously dropped at his feet. * * * * * Here was high adventure, perhaps, for which he had been singled out by the famous electrical wizard. While excitement mounted in his blood, Northwood again examined the photograph. The girl's strange eyes, odd in expression rather than in size or shape, seemed to hold him. The young man's breath came quicker. "It's a challenge," he said softly. "It won't hurt to see what it's all about." His watch showed eleven o'clock. He would return the wallet that night. Into his coat pocket he slipped a revolver. One sometimes needed weapons in Indian Court. He took a taxi, which soon turned from the well-lighted streets into a section where squalid houses crowded against each other, and dirty children swarmed in the streets in their last games of the day. Indian Court was little more than an alley, dark and evil smelling. The chauffeur stopped at the entrance and said: "If I drive in, I'll have to back out, sir. Number forty-four and a half is the end house, facing the entrance." "You've been here before?" asked Northwood. "Last week I drove the queerest bird here--a fellow as good-looking as you, who had me follow the taxi occupied by a hunchback with a face like Old Nick." The man hesitated and went on haltingly: "It might sound goofy, mister, but there was something funny about my fare. He jumped out, asked me the charge, and, in the moment I glanced at my taxi-meter, he disappeared. Yes, sir. Vanished, owing me four dollars, six bits. It was almost ghostlike, mister." Northwood laughed nervously and dismissed him. He found his number and knocked at the dilapidated door. He heard a sudden movement in the lighted room beyond, and the door opened quickly. Dr. Mundson faced him. "I knew you'd come!" he said with a slight Teutonic accent. "Often I'm not wrong in sizing up my man. Come in." Northwood cleared his throat awkwardly. "You dropped your wallet at my feet, Dr. Mundson. I tried to stop you before you got away, but I guess you did not hear me." He offered the wallet, but the hunchback waved it aside. "A ruse, of course," he confessed. "It just was my way of testing what your Professor Michael told about you--that you are extraordinarily intelligent, virile, and imaginative. Had you sent the wallet to me, I should have sought elsewhere for my man. Come in." * * * * * Northwood followed him into a living room evidently recently furnished in a somewhat hurried manner. The furniture, although rich, was not placed to best advantage. The new rug was a trifle crooked on the floor, and the lamp shades clashed in color with the other furnishings. Dr. Mundson's intense eyes swept over Northwood's tall, slim body. "Ah, you're a man!" he said softly. "You are what all men would be if we followed Nature's plan that only the fit shall survive. But modern science is permitting the unfit to live and to mix their defective beings with the developing race!" His huge fist gesticulated madly. "Fools! Fools! They need me and perfect men like you." "Why?" "Because you can help me in my plan to populate the earth with a new race of godlike people. But don't question me too closely now. Even if I should explain, you would call me insane. But watch; gradually I shall unfold the mystery before you, so that you will believe." He reached for the wallet that Northwood still held, opened it with a monstrous hand, and reached for the photograph. "She shall bring you love. She's more beautiful than a poet's dream." A warm flush crept over the young man's face. "I can easily understand," he said, "how a man could love her, but for me she comes too late." "Pooh! Fiddlesticks!" The scientist snapped his fingers. "This girl was created for you. That other--you will forget her the moment you set eyes on the sweet flesh of this Athalia. She is an houri from Paradise--a maiden of musk and incense." He held the girl's photograph toward the young man. "Keep it. She is yours, if you are strong enough to hold her." Northwood opened his card case and placed the picture inside, facing Mary's photograph. Again the warning words of the mysterious stranger rang in his memory: "_The thing inside never will be yours._" "Where to," he said eagerly; "and when do we start?" "To the new Garden of Eden," said the scientist, with such a beatific smile that his face was less hideous. "We start immediately. I have arranged with Professor Michael for you to go." * * * * * Northwood followed Dr. Mundson to the street and walked with him a few blocks to a garage where the scientist's motor car waited. "The apartment in Indian Court is just a little eccentricity of mine," explained Dr. Mundson. "I need people in my work, people whom I must select through swift, sure tests. The apartment comes in handy, as to-night." Northwood scarcely noted where they were going, or how long they had been on the way. He was vaguely aware that they had left the city behind, and were now passing through farms bathed in moonlight. At last they entered a path that led through a bit of woodland. For half a mile the path continued, and then ended at a small, enclosed field. In the middle of this rested a queer aircraft. Northwood knew it was a flying machine only by the propellers mounted on the top of the huge ball-shaped body. There were no wings, no birdlike hull, no tail. "It looks almost like a little world ready to fly off into space," he commented. "It is just about that." The scientist's squat, bunched-out body, settled squarely on long, thin, straddled legs, looked gnomelike in the moonlight. "One cannot copy flesh with steel and wood, but one can make metal perform magic of which flesh is not capable. My sun-ship is not a mechanical reproduction of a bird. It is--but, climb in, young friend." * * * * * Northwood followed Dr. Mundson into the aircraft. The moment the scientist closed the metal door behind them, Northwood was instantly aware of some concealed horror that vibrated through his nerves. For one dreadful moment, he expected some terrific agent of the shadows that escaped the electric lights to leap upon him. And this was odd, for nothing could be saner than the globular interior of the aircraft, divided into four wedge-shaped apartments. Dr. Mundson also paused at the door, puzzled, hesitant. "Someone has been here!" he exclaimed. "Look, Northwood! The bunk has been occupied--the one in this cabin I had set aside for you." He pointed to the disarranged bunk, where the impression of a head could still be seen on a pillow. "A tramp, perhaps." "No! The door was locked, and, as you saw, the fence around this field was protected with barbed wire. There's something wrong. I felt it on my trip here all the way, like someone watching me in the dark. And don't laugh! I have stopped laughing at all things that seem unnatural. You don't know what is natural." Northwood shivered. "Maybe someone is concealed about the ship." "Impossible. Me, I thought so, too. But I looked and looked, and there was nothing." All evening Northwood had burned to tell the scientist about the handsome stranger in the Mad Hatter Club. But even now he shrank from saying that a man had vanished before his eyes. Dr. Mundson was working with a succession of buttons and levers. There was a slight jerk, and then the strange craft shot up, straight as a bullet from a gun, with scarcely a sound other than a continuous whistle. "The vertical rising aircraft perfected," explained Dr. Mundson. "But what would you think if I told you that there is not an ounce of gasoline in my heavier-than-air craft?" "I shouldn't be surprised. An electrical genius would seek for a less obsolete source of power." * * * * * In the bright flare of the electric lights, the scientist's ugly face flushed. "The man who harnesses the sun rules the world. He can make the desert places bloom, the frozen poles balmy and verdant. You, John Northwood, are one of the very few to fly in a machine operated solely by electrical energy from the sun's rays." "Are you telling me that this airship is operated with power from the sun?" "Yes. And I cannot take the credit for its invention." He sighed. "The dream was mine, but a greater brain developed it--a brain that may be greater than I suspect." His face grew suddenly graver. A little later Northwood said: "It seems that we must be making fabulous speed." "Perhaps!" Dr. Mundson worked with the controls. "Here, I've cut her down to the average speed of the ordinary airplane. Now you can see a bit of the night scenery." Northwood peeped out the thick glass porthole. Far below, he saw two tiny streaks of light, one smooth and stationery, the other wavering as though it were a reflection in water. "That can't be a lighthouse!" he cried. The scientist glanced out. "It is. We're approaching the Florida Keys." "Impossible! We've been traveling less than an hour." "But, my young friend, do you realize that my sun-ship has a speed of over one thousand miles an hour, how much over I dare not tell you?" Throughout the night, Northwood sat beside Dr. Mundson, watching his deft fingers control the simple-looking buttons and levers. So fast was their flight now that, through the portholes, sky and earth looked the same: dark gray films of emptiness. The continuous weird whistle from the hidden mechanism of the sun-ship was like the drone of a monster insect, monotonous and soporific during the long intervals when the scientist was too busy with his controls to engage in conversation. For some reason that he could not explain, Northwood had an aversion to going into the sleeping apartment behind the control room. Then, towards morning, when the suddenly falling temperature struck a biting chill throughout the sun-ship, Northwood, going into the cabin for fur coats, discovered why his mind and body shrank in horror from the cabin. * * * * * After he had procured the fur coats from a closet, he paused a moment, in the privacy of the cabin, to look at Athalia's picture. Every nerve in his body leaped to meet the magnetism of her beautiful eyes. Never had Mary Burns stirred emotion like this in him. He hung over Mary's picture, wistfully, hoping almost prayerfully that he could react to her as he did to Athalia; but her pale, over-intellectual face left him cold. "Cad!" he ground out between his teeth. "Forgetting her so soon!" The two pictures were lying side by side on a little table. Suddenly an obscure noise in the room caught his attention. It was more vibration than noise, for small sounds could scarcely be heard above the whistle of the sun-ship. A slight compression of the air against his neck gave him the eery feeling that someone was standing close behind him. He wheeled and looked over his shoulder. Half ashamed of his startled gesture, he again turned to his pictures. Then a sharp cry broke from him. Athalia's picture was gone. He searched for it everywhere in the room, in his own pockets, under the furniture. It was nowhere to be found. In sudden, overpowering horror, he seized the fur coats and returned to the control room. * * * * * Dr. Mundson was changing the speed. "Look out the window!" he called to Northwood. The young man looked and started violently. Day had come, and now that the sun-ship was flying at a moderate speed, the ocean beneath was plainly visible; and its entire surface was covered with broken floes of ice and small, ragged icebergs. He seized a telescope and focused it below. A typical polar scene met his eyes: penguins strutted about on cakes of ice, a whale blowing in the icy water. "A part of the Antarctic that has never been explored," said Dr. Mundson; "and there, just showing on the horizon, is the Great Ice Barrier." His characteristic smile lighted the morose black eyes. "I am enough of the dramatist to wish you to be impressed with what I shall show you within less than an hour. Accordingly, I shall make a landing and let you feel polar ice under your feet." After less than a minute's search, Dr. Mundson found a suitable place on the ice for a landing, and, with a few deft manipulations of the controls, brought the sun-ship swooping down like an eagle on its prey. For a long moment after the scientist had stepped out on the ice, Northwood paused at the door. His feet were chained by a strange reluctance to enter this white, dead wilderness of ice. But Dr. Mundson's impatient, "Ready?" drew from him one last glance at the cozy interior of the sun-ship before he, too, went out into the frozen stillness. They left the sun-ship resting on the ice like a fallen silver moon, while they wandered to the edge of the Barrier and looked at the gray, narrow stretch of sea between the ice pack and the high cliffs of the Barrier. The sun of the commencing six-months' Antarctic day was a low, cold ball whose slanted rays struck the ice with blinding whiteness. There were constant falls of ice from the Barrier, which thundered into the ocean amid great clouds of ice smoke that lingered like wraiths around the edge. It was a scene of loneliness and waiting death. "What's that?" exclaimed the scientist suddenly. Out of the white silence shrilled a low whistle, a familiar whistle. Both men wheeled toward the sun-ship. Before their horrified eyes, the great sphere jerked and glided up, and swerved into the heavens. * * * * * Up it soared; then, gaining speed, it swung into the blue distance until, in a moment, it was a tiny star that flickered out even as they watched. Both men screamed and cursed and flung up their arms despairingly. A penguin, attracted by their cries, waddled solemnly over to them and regarded them with manlike curiosity. "Stranded in the coldest spot on earth!" groaned the scientist. "Why did it start itself, Dr. Mundson!" Northwood narrowed his eyes as he spoke. "It didn't!" The scientist's huge face, red from cold, quivered with helpless rage. "Human hands started it." "What! Whose hands?" "_Ach!_ Do I know?" His Teutonic accent grew more pronounced, as it always did when he was under emotional stress. "Somebody whose brain is better than mine. Somebody who found a way to hide away from our eyes. _Ach, Gott!_ Don't let me think!" His great head sank between his shoulders, giving him, in his fur suit, the grotesque appearance of a friendly brown bear. "Doctor Mundson," said Northwood suddenly, "did you have an enemy, a man with the face and body of a pagan god--a great, blond creature with eyes as cold and cruel as the ice under our feet?" "Wait!" The huge round head jerked up. "How do you know about Adam? You have not seen him, won't see him until we arrive at our destination." "But I have seen him. He was sitting not thirty feet from you in the Mad Hatter's Club last night. Didn't you know? He followed me to the street, spoke to me, and then--" Northwood stopped. How could he let the insane words pass his lips? "Then, what? Speak up!" * * * * * Northwood laughed nervously. "It sounds foolish, but I saw him vanish like that." He snapped his fingers. "_Ach, Gott!_" All the ruddy color drained from the scientist's face. As though talking to himself, he continued: "Then it is true, as he said. He has crossed the bridge. He has reached the Light. And now he comes to see the world he will conquer--came unseen when I refused my permission." He was silent for a long time, pondering. Then he turned passionately to Northwood. "John Northwood, kill me! I have brought a new horror into the world. From the unborn future, I have snatched a creature who has reached the Light too soon. Kill me!" He bowed his great, shaggy head. "What do you mean, Dr. Mundson: that this Adam has arrived at a point in evolution beyond this age?" "Yes. Think of it! I visioned godlike creatures with the souls of gods. But, Heaven help us, man always will be man: always will lust for conquest. You and I, Northwood, and all others are barbarians to Adam. He and his kind will do what men always do to barbarians--conquer and kill." "Are there more like him?" Northwood struggled with a smile of unbelief. "I don't know. I did not know that Adam had reached a point so near the ultimate. But you have seen. Already he is able to set aside what we call natural laws." Northwood looked at the scientist closely. The man was surely mad--mad in this desert of white death. "Come!" he said cheerfully. "Let's build an Eskimo snow house. We can live on penguins for days. And who knows what may rescue us?" For three hours the two worked at cutting ice blocks. With snow for mortar, they built a crude shelter which enabled them to rest out of the cold breath of the spiral polar winds that blew from the south. * * * * * Dr. Mundson was sitting at the door of their hut, moodily pulling at his strong, black pipe. As though a fit had seized him, he leaped up and let his pipe fall to the ice. "Look!" he shouted. "The sun-ship!" It seemed but a moment before the tiny speck on the horizon had swept overhead, a silver comet on the grayish-blue polar sky. In another moment it had swooped down, eaglewise, scarcely fifty feet from the ice hut. Dr. Mundson and Northwood ran forward. From the metal sphere stepped the stranger of the Mad Hatter Club. His tall, straight form, erect and slim, swung toward them over the ice. "Adam!" shouted Dr. Mundson. "What does this mean? How dare you!" Adam's laugh was like the happy demonstration of a boy. "So? You think you still are master? You think I returned because I reverenced you yet?" Hate shot viciously through the freezing blue eyes. "You worm of the Black Age!" Northwood shuddered. He had heard those strange words addressed to himself scarcely more than twelve hours ago. Adam was still speaking: "With a thought I could annihilate you where you are standing. But I have use for you. Get in." He swept his hand to the sun-ship. Both men hesitated. Then Northwood strode forward until he was within three feet of Adam. They stood thus, eyeing each other, two splendid beings, one blond as a Viking, the other dark and vital. "Just what is your game?" demanded Northwood. The icy eyes shot forth a gleam like lightning. "I needn't tell you, of course, but I may as well let you suffer over the knowledge." He curled his lips with superb scorn. "I have one human weakness. I want Athalia." The icy eyes warmed for a fleeting second. "She is anticipating her meeting with you--bah! The taste of these women of the Black Age! I could kill you, of course; but that would only inflame her. And so I take you to her, thrust you down her throat. When she sees you, she will fly to me." He spread his magnificent chest. "Adam!" Dr. Mundson's face was dark with anger. "What of Eve?" "Who are you to question my actions? What a fool you were to let me, whom you forced into life thousands of years too soon, grow more powerful than you! Before I am through with all of you petty creatures of the Black Age, you will call me more terrible than your Jehovah! For see what you have called forth from unborn time." He vanished. * * * * * Before the startled men could recover from the shock of it, the vibrant, too-new voice went on: "I am sorry for you, Mundson, because, like you, I need specimens for my experiments. What a splendid specimen you will be!" His laugh was ugly with significance. "Get in, worms!" Unseen hands cuffed and pushed them into the sun-ship. Inside, Dr. Mundson stumbled to the control room, white and drawn of face, his great brain seemingly paralyzed by the catastrophe. "You needn't attempt tricks," went on the voice. "I am watching you both. You cannot even hide your thoughts from me." And thus began the strange continuation of the journey. Not once, in that wild half-hour's rush over the polar ice clouds, did they see Adam. They saw and heard only the weird signs of his presence: a puffing cigar hanging in midair, a glass of water swinging to unseen lips, a ghostly voice hurling threats and insults at them. Once the scientist whispered: "Don't cross him; it is useless. John Northwood, you'll have to fight a demigod for your woman!" Because of the terrific speed of the sun-ship, Northwood could distinguish nothing of the topographical details below. At the end of half-an-hour, the scientist slowed enough to point out a tall range of snow-covered mountains, over which hovered a play of colored lights like the _aurora australis_. "Behind those mountains," he said, "is our destination." * * * * * Almost in a moment, the sun-ship had soared over the peaks. Dr. Mundson kept the speed low enough for Northwood to see the splendid view below. In the giant cup formed by the encircling mountain range was a green valley of tropical luxuriance. Stretches of dense forest swept half up the mountains and filled the valley cup with tangled verdure. In the center, surrounded by a broad field and a narrow ring of woods, towered a group of buildings. From the largest, which was circular, came the auroralike radiance that formed an umbrella of light over the entire valley. "Do I guess right," said Northwood, "that the light is responsible for this oasis in the ice?" "Yes," said Dr. Mundson. "In your American slang, it is canned sunshine containing an overabundance of certain rays, especially the Life Ray, which I have isolated." He smiled proudly. "You needn't look startled, my friend. Some of the most common things store sunlight. On very dark nights, if you have sharp eyes, you can see the radiance given off by certain flowers, which many naturalists say is trapped sunshine. The familiar nasturtium and the marigold opened for me the way to hold sunshine against the long polar night, for they taught me how to apply the Einstein theory of bent light. Stated simply, during the polar night, when the sun is hidden over the rim of the world, we steal some of his rays; during the polar day we concentrate the light." "But could stored sunshine alone give enough warmth for the luxuriant growth of those jungles?" "An overabundance of the Life Ray is responsible for the miraculous growth of all life in New Eden. The Life Ray is Nature's most powerful force. Yet Nature is often niggardly and paradoxical in her use of her powers. In New Eden, we have forced the powers of creation to take ascendency over the powers of destruction." At Northwood's sudden start, the scientist laughed and continued: "Is it not a pity that Nature, left alone, requires twenty years to make a man who begins to die in another ten years? Such waste is not tolerated in New Eden, where supermen are younger than babes and--" "Come, worms; let's land." It was Adam's voice. Suddenly he materialized, a blond god, whose eyes and flesh were too new. * * * * * They were in a world of golden skylight, warmth and tropical vegetation. The field on which they had landed was covered with a velvety green growth of very soft, fine-bladed grass, sprinkled with tiny, star-shaped blue flowers. A balmy, sweet-scented wind, downy as the breeze of a dream, blew gently along the grass and tingled against Northwood's skin refreshingly. Almost instantly he had the sensation of perfect well being, and this feeling of physical perfection was part of the ecstasy that seemed to pervade the entire valley. Grass and breeze and golden skylight were saturated with a strange ether of joyousness. At one end of the field was a dense jungle, cut through by a road that led to the towering building from which, while above in the sun-ship, they had seen the golden light issue. From the jungle road came a man and a woman, large, handsome people, whose flesh and eyes had the sinister newness of Adam's. Even before they came close enough to speak, Northwood was aware that while they seemed of Adam's breed, they were yet unlike him. The difference was psychical rather than physical; they lacked the aura of hate and horror that surrounded Adam. The woman drew Adam's head down and kissed him affectionately on both cheeks. Adam, from his towering height, patted her shoulder impatiently and said: "Run on back to the laboratory, grandmother. We're following soon. You have some new human embryos, I believe you told me this morning." "Four fine specimens, two of them being your sister's twins." "Splendid! I was sure that creation had stopped with my generation. I must see them." He turned to the scientist and Northwood. "You needn't try to leave this spot. Of course I shall know instantly and deal with you in my own way. Wait here." He strode over the emerald grass on the heels of the woman. Northwood asked: "Why does he call that girl grandmother?" "Because she is his ancestress." He stirred uneasily. "She is of the first generation brought forth in the laboratory, and is no different from you or I, except that, at the age of five years, she is the ancestress of twenty generations." "My God!" muttered Northwood. "Don't start being horrified, my friend. Forget about so-called natural laws while you are in New Eden. Remember, here we have isolated the Life Ray. But look! Here comes your Athalia!" * * * * * Northwood gazed covertly at the beautiful girl approaching them with a rarely graceful walk. She was tall, slender, round-bosomed, narrow-hipped, and she held her lovely body in the erect poise of splendid health. Northwood had a confused realization of uncovered bronzy hair, drawn to the back of a white neck in a bunch of short curls; of immense soft black eyes; lips the color of blood, and delicate, plump flesh on which the golden skylight lingered graciously. He was instantly glad to see that while she possessed the freshness of young girlhood, her skin and eyes did not have the horrible newness of Adam's. When she was still twenty feet distant, Northwood met her eyes and she smiled shyly. The rich, red blood ran through her face; and he, too, flushed. She went to Dr. Mundson and, placing her hands on his thick shoulders, kissed him affectionately. "I've been worried about you, Daddy Mundson." Her rich contralto voice matched her exotic beauty. "Since you and Adam had that quarrel the day you left, I did not see him until this morning, when he landed the sun-ship alone." "And you pleaded with him to return for us?" "Yes." Her eyes drooped and a hot flush swept over her face. Dr. Mundson smiled. "But I'm back now, Athalia, and I've brought some one whom I hope you will be glad to know." Reaching for her hand, he placed it simply in Northwood's. "This is John, Athalia. Isn't he handsomer than the pictures of him which I televisioned to you? God bless both of you." He walked ahead and turned his back. * * * * * A magical half hour followed for Northwood and Athalia. The girl told him of her past life, how Dr. Mundson had discovered her one year ago working in a New York sweat shop, half dead from consumption. Without friends, she was eager to follow the scientist to New Eden, where he promised she would recover her health immediately. "And he was right, John," she said shyly. "The Life Ray, that marvelous energy ray which penetrates to the utmost depths of earth and ocean, giving to the cells of all living bodies the power to grow and remain animate, has been concentrated by Dr. Mundson in his stored sunshine. The Life Ray healed me almost immediately." Northwood looked down at the glorious girl beside him, whose eyes already fluttered away from his like shy black butterflies. Suddenly he squeezed the soft hand in his and said passionately: "Athalia! Because Adam wants you and will get you if he can, let us set aside all the artificialities of civilization. I have loved you madly ever since I saw your picture. If you can say the same to me, it will give me courage to face what I know lies before me." Athalia, her face suddenly tender, came closer to him. "John Northwood, I love you." Her red lips came temptingly close; but before he could touch them, Adam suddenly pushed his body between him and Athalia. Adam was pale, and all the iciness was gone from his blue eyes, which were deep and dark and very human. He looked down at Athalia, and she looked up at him, two handsome specimens of perfect manhood and womanhood. "Fast work, Athalia!" The new vibrant voice was strained. "I was hoping you would be disappointed in him, especially after having been wooed by me this morning. I could take you if I wished, of course; but I prefer to win you in the ancient manner. Dismiss him!" He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in Northwood's direction. Athalia flushed vividly and looked at him almost compassionately. "I am not great enough for you, Adam. I dare not love you." * * * * * Adam laughed, and still oblivious of Northwood and Dr. Mundson, folded his arms over his breast. With the golden skylight on his burnished hair, he was a valiant, magnificent spectacle. "Since the beginning of time, gods and archangels have looked upon the daughters of men and found them fair. Mate with me, Athalia, and I, fifty thousand years beyond the creature Mundson has selected for you, will make you as I am, the deathless overlord of life and all nature." He drew her hand to his bosom. For one dark moment, Northwood felt himself seared by jealousy, for, through the plump, sweet flesh of Athalia's face, he saw the red blood leap again. How could she withhold herself from this splendid superman? But her answer, given with faltering voice, was the old, simple one: "I have promised him, Adam. I love him." Tears trembled on her thick lashes. "So! I cannot get you in the ancient manner. Now I'll use my own." He seized her in his arms crushed her against him, and, laughing over her head at Northwood, bent his glistening head and kissed her on the mouth. There was a blinding flash of blue electric sparks--and nothing else. Both Adam and Athalia had vanished. * * * * * Adam's voice came in a last mocking challenge: "I shall be what no other gods before me have been--a good sport. I'll leave you both to your own devices, until I want you again." White-lipped and trembling, Northwood groaned: "What has he done now?" Dr. Mundson's great head drooped. "I don't know. Our bodies are electric and chemical machines; and a super intelligence has discovered new laws of which you and I are ignorant." "But Athalia...." "She is safe; he loves her." "Loves her!" Northwood shivered. "I cannot believe that those freezing eyes could ever look with love on a woman." "Adam is a man. At heart he is as human as the first man-creature that wallowed in the new earth's slime." His voice dropped as though he were musing aloud. "It might be well to let him have Athalia. She will help to keep vigor in the new race, which would stop reproducing in another few generations without the injection of Black Age blood." "Do you want to bring more creatures like Adam into the world?" Northwood flung at him. "You have tampered with life enough, Dr. Mundson. But, although Adam has my sympathy, I'm not willing to turn Athalia over to him." "Well said! Now come to the laboratory for chemical nourishment and rest under the Life Ray." They went to the great circular building from whose highest tower issued the golden radiance that shamed the light of the sun, hanging low in the northeast. "John Northwood," said Dr. Mundson, "with that laboratory, which is the center of all life in New Eden, we'll have to whip Adam. He gave us what he called a 'sporting chance' because he knew that he is able to send us and all mankind to a doom more terrible than hell. Even now we might be entering some hideous trap that he has set for us." * * * * * They entered by a side entrance and went immediately to what Dr. Mundson called the Rest Ward. Here, in a large room, were ranged rows of cots, on many of which lay men basking in the deep orange flood of light which poured from individual lamps set above each cot. "It is the Life Ray!" said Dr. Mundson reverently. "The source of all growth and restoration in Nature. It is the power that bursts open the seed and brings forth the shoot, that increases the shoot into a giant tree. It is the same power that enables the fertilized ovum to develop into an animal. It creates and recreates cells almost instantly; accordingly, it is the perfect substitute for sleep. Stretch out, enjoy its power; and while you rest, eat these nourishing tablets." Northwood lay on a cot, and Dr. Mundson turned the Life Ray on him. For a few minutes a delicious drowsiness fell upon him, producing a spell of perfect peace which the cells of his being seemed to drink in. For another delirious, fleeting space, every inch of him vibrated with a thrilling sensation of freshness. He took a deep, ecstatic breath and opened his eyes. "Enough," said Dr. Mundson, switching off the Ray. "After three minutes of rejuvenation, you are commencing again with perfect cells. All ravages from disease and wear have been corrected." Northwood leaped up joyously. His handsome eyes sparkled, his skin glowed. "I feel great! Never felt so good since I was a kid." A pleased grin spread over the scientist's homely face. "See what my discovery will mean to the world! In the future we shall all go to the laboratory for recuperation and nourishment. We'll have almost twenty-four hours a day for work and play." * * * * * He stretched out on the bed contentedly. "Some day, when my work is nearly done, I shall permit the Life Ray to cure my hump." "Why not now?" Dr. Mundson sighed. "If I were perfect, I should cease to be so overwhelmingly conscious of the importance of perfection." He settled back to enjoyment of the Life Ray. A few minutes later, he jumped up, alert as a boy. "_Ach!_ That's fine. Now I'll show you how the Life Ray speeds up development and produces four generations of humans a year." With restored energy, Northwood began thinking of Athalia. As he followed Dr. Mundson down a long corridor, he yearned to see her again, to be certain that she was safe. Once he imagined he felt a gentle, soft-fleshed touch against his hand, and was disappointed not to see her walking by his side. Was she with him, unseen? The thought was sweet. Before Dr. Mundson opened the massive bronze door at the end of the corridor, he said: "Don't be surprised or shocked over anything you see here, John Northwood. This is the Baby Laboratory." They entered a room which seemed no different from a hospital ward. On little white beds lay naked children of various sizes, perfect, solemn-eyed youngsters and older children as beautiful as animated statues. Above each bed was a small Life Ray projector. A white-capped nurse went from bed to bed. "They are recuperating from the daily educational period," said the scientist. "After a few minutes of this they will go into the growing room, which I shall have to show you through a window. Should you and I enter, we might be changed in a most extraordinary manner." He laughed mischievously. "But, look, Northwood!" * * * * * He slid back a panel in the wall, and Northwood peered in through a thick pane of clear glass. The room was really an immense outdoor arena, its only carpet the fine-bladed grass, its roof the blue sky cut in the middle by an enormous disc from which shot the aurora of trapped sunshine which made a golden umbrella over the valley. Through openings in the bottom of the disc poured a fine rain of rays which fell constantly upon groups of children, youths and young girls, all clad in the merest scraps of clothing. Some were dancing, others were playing games, but all seemed as supremely happy as the birds and butterflies which fluttered about the shrubs and flowers edging the arena. "I don't expect you to believe," said Dr. Mundson, "that the oldest young man in there is three months old. You cannot see visible changes in a body which grows as slowly as the human being, whose normal period of development is twenty years or more. But I can give you visible proof of how fast growth takes place under the full power of the Life Ray. Plant life, which, even when left to nature, often develops from seed to flower within a few weeks or months, can be seen making its miraculous changes under the Life Ray. Watch those gorgeous purple flowers over which the butterflies are hovering." Northwood followed his pointing finger. Near the glass window through which they looked grew an enormous bank of resplendent violet colored flowers, which literally enshrouded the entire bush with their royal glory. At first glance it seemed as though a violent wind were snatching at flower and bush, but closer inspection proved that the agitation was part of the plant itself. And then he saw that the movements were the result of perpetual composition and growth. * * * * * He fastened his eyes on one huge bud. He saw it swell, burst, spread out its passionate purple velvet, lift the broad flower face to the light for a joyous minute. A few seconds later a butterfly lighted airily to sample its nectar and to brush the pollen from its yellow dusted wings. Scarcely had the winged visitor flown away than the purple petals began to wither and fall away, leaving the seed pod on the stem. The visible change went on in this seed pod. It turned rapidly brown, dried out, and then sent the released seeds in a shower to the rich black earth below. Scarcely had the seeds touched the ground than they sent up tiny green shoots that grew larger each moment. Within ten minutes there was a new plant a foot high. Within half an hour, the plant budded, blossomed, and cast forth its own seed. "You understand?" asked the scientist. "Development is going on as rapidly among the children. Before the first year has passed, the youngest baby will have grandchildren; that is, if the baby tests out fit to pass its seed down to the new generation. I know it sounds absurd. Yet you saw the plant." "But Doctor," Northwood rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, "Nature's forces of destruction, of tearing down, are as powerful as her creative powers. You have discovered the ultimate in creation and upbuilding. But perhaps--oh, Lord, it is too awful to think!" "Speak, Northwood!" The scientist's voice was impatient. "It is nothing!" The pale young man attempted a smile. "I was only imagining some of the horror that could be thrust on the world if a supermind like Adam's should discover Nature's secret of death and destruction and speed it up as you have sped the life force." "_Ach Gott!_" Dr. Mundson's face was white. "He has his own laboratory, where he works every day. Don't talk so loud. He might be listening. And I believe he can do anything he sets out to accomplish." Close to Northwood's ear fell a faint, triumphant whisper: "Yes, he can do anything. How did you guess, worm?" It was Adam's voice. * * * * * "Now come and see the Leyden jar mothers," said Dr. Mundson. "We do not wait for the child to be born to start our work." He took Northwood to a laboratory crowded with strange apparatus, where young men and women worked. Northwood knew instantly that these people, although unusually handsome and strong, were not of Adam's generation. None of them had the look of newness which marked those who had grown up under the Life Ray. "They are the perfect couples whom I combed the world to find," said the scientist. "From their eugenic marriages sprang the first children that passed through the laboratory. I had hoped," he hesitated and looked sideways at Northwood, "I had dreamed of having the children of you and Athalia to help strengthen the New Race." A wave of sudden disgust passed over Northwood. "Thanks," he said tartly. "When I marry Athalia, I intend to have an old-fashioned home and a Black Age family. I don't relish having my children turned into--experiments." "But wait until you see all the wonders of the laboratory! That is why I am showing you all this." Northwood drew his handkerchief and mopped his brow. "It sickens me, Doctor! The more I see, the more pity I have for Adam--and the less I blame him for his rebellion and his desire to kill and to rule. Heavens! What a terrible thing you have done, experimenting with human life." "Nonsense! Can you say that all life--all matter--is not the result of scientific experiment? Can you?" His black gaze made Northwood uncomfortable. "Buck up, young friend, for now I am going to show you a marvelous improvement on Nature's bungling ways--the Leyden jar mother." He raised his voice and called, "Lilith!" The woman whom they had met on the field came forward. "May we take a peep at Lona's twins?" asked the scientist. "They are about ready to go to the growing dome, are they not?" "In five more minutes," said the woman. "Come see." * * * * * She lifted one of the black velvet curtains that lined an entire side of the laboratory and thereby disclosed a globular jar of glass and metal, connected by wires to a dynamo. Above the jar was a Life Ray projector. Lilith slid aside a metal portion of the jar, disclosing through the glass underneath the squirming, kicking body of a baby, resting on a bed of soft, spongy substance, to which it was connected by the navel cord. "The Leyden jar mother," said Dr. Mundson. "It is the dream of us scientists realized. The human mother's body does nothing but nourish and protect her unborn child, a job which science can do better. And so, in New Eden, we take the young embryo and place it in the Leyden jar mother, where the Life Ray, electricity, and chemical food shortens the period of gestation to a few days." At that moment a bell under the Leyden jar began to ring. Dr. Mundson uncovered the jar and lifted out the child, a beautiful, perfectly formed boy, who began to cry lustily. "Here is one baby who'll never be kissed," he said. "He'll be nourished chemically, and, at the end of the week, will no longer be a baby. If you are patient, you can actually see the processes of development taking place under the Life Ray, for babies develop very fast." Northwood buried his face in his hands. "Lord! This is awful. No childhood; no mother to mould his mind! No parents to watch over him, to give him their tender care!" "Awful, fiddlesticks! Come see how children get their education, how they learn to use their hands and feet so they need not pass through the awkwardness of childhood." * * * * * He led Northwood to a magnificent building whose façade of white marble was as simply beautiful as a Greek temple. The side walls, built almost entirely of glass, permitted the synthetic sunshine to sweep from end to end. They first entered a library, where youths and young girls poured over books of all kinds. Their manner of reading mystified Northwood. With a single sweep of the eye, they seemed to devour a page, and then turned to the next. He stepped closer to peer over the shoulder of a beautiful girl. She was reading "Euclid's Elements of Geometry," in Latin, and she turned the pages as swiftly as the other girl occupying her table, who was devouring "Paradise Lost." Dr. Mundson whispered to him: "If you do not believe that Ruth here is getting her Euclid, which she probably never saw before to-day, examine her from the book; that is, if you are a good enough Latin scholar." Ruth stopped her reading to talk to him, and, in a few minutes, had completely dumbfounded him with her pedantic replies, which fell from lips as luscious and unformed as an infant's. "Now," said Dr. Mundson, "test Rachael on her Milton. As far as she has read, she should not misquote a line, and her comments will probably prove her scholarly appreciation of Milton." Word for word, Rachael was able to give him "Paradise Lost" from memory, except the last four pages, which she had not read. Then, taking the book from him, she swept her eyes over these pages, returned the book to him, and quoted copiously and correctly. * * * * * Dr. Mundson gloated triumphantly over his astonishment. "There, my friend. Could you now be satisfied with old-fashioned children who spend long, expensive years in getting an education? Of course, your children will not have the perfect brains of these, yet, developed under the Life Ray, they should have splendid mentality. "These children, through selective breeding, have brains that make everlasting records instantly. A page in a book, once seen, is indelibly retained by them, and understood. The same is true of a lecture, of an explanation given by a teacher, of even idle conversation. Any man or woman in this room should be able to repeat the most trivial conversation days old." "But what of the arts, Dr. Mundson? Surely even your supermen and women cannot instantly learn to paint a masterpiece or to guide their fingers and their brains through the intricacies of a difficult musical composition." "No?" His dark eyes glowed. "Come see!" Before they entered another wing of the building, they heard a violin being played masterfully. Dr. Mundson paused at the door. "So that you may understand what you shall see, let me remind you that the nerve impulses and the coordinating means in the human body are purely electrical. The world has not yet accepted my theory, but it will. Under superman's system of education, the instantaneous records made on the brain give immediate skill to the acting parts of the body. Accordingly, musicians are made over night." He threw open the door. Under a Life Ray projector, a beautiful, Juno-esque woman was playing a violin. Facing her, and with eyes fastened to hers, stood a young man, whose arms and slender fingers mimicked every motion she made. Presently she stopped playing and handed the violin to him. In her own masterly manner, he repeated the score she had played. "That is Eve," whispered Dr. Mundson. "I had selected her as Adam's wife. But he does not want her, the most brilliant woman of the New Race." Northwood gave the woman an appraising look. "Who wants a perfect woman? I don't blame Adam for preferring Athalia. But how is she teaching her pupil?" "Through thought vibration, which these perfect people have developed until they can record permanently the radioactive waves of the brains of others." Eve turned, caught Northwood's eyes in her magnetic blue gaze, and smiled as only a goddess can smile upon a mortal she has marked as her own. She came toward him with outflung hands. "So you have come!" Her vibrant contralto voice, like Adam's, held the birdlike, broken tremulo of a young child's. "I have been waiting for you, John Northwood." * * * * * Her eyes, as blue and icy as Adam's, lingered long on him, until he flinched from their steely magnetism. She slipped her arm through his and drew him gently but firmly from the room, while Dr. Mundson stood gaping after them. They were on a flagged terrace arched with roses of gigantic size, which sent forth billows of sensuous fragrance. Eve led him to a white marble seat piled with silk cushions, on which she reclined her superb body, while she regarded him from narrowed lids. "I saw your picture that he televisioned to Athalia," she said. "What a botch Dr. Mundson has made of his mating." Her laugh rippled like falling water. "I want you, John Northwood!" Northwood started and blushed furiously. Smile dimples broke around her red, humid lips. "Ah, you're old-fashioned!" Her large, beautiful hand, fleshed more tenderly than any woman's hand he had ever seen, went out to him appealingly. "I can bring you amorous delight that your Athalia never could offer in her few years of youth. And I'll never grow old, John Northwood." She came closer until he could feel the fragrant warmth of her tawny, ribbon bound hair pulse against his face. In sudden panic he drew back. "But I am pledged to Athalia!" tumbled from him. "It is all a dreadful mistake, Eve. You and Adam were created for each other." "Hush!" The lightning that flashed from her blue eyes changed her from seductress to angry goddess. "Created for each other! Who wants a made-to-measure lover?" * * * * * The luscious lips trembled slightly, and into the vivid eyes crept a suspicion of moisture. Eternal Eve's weapons! Northwood's handsome face relaxed with pity. "I want you, John Northwood," she continued shamelessly. "Our love will be sublime." She leaned heavily against him, and her lips were like a blood red flower pressed against white satin. "Come, beloved, kiss me!" Northwood gasped and turned his head. "Don't, Eve!" "But a kiss from me will set you apart from all your generation, John Northwood, and you shall understand what no man of the Black Age could possibly fathom." Her hair had partly fallen from its ribbon bandage and poured its fragrant gold against his shoulder. "For God's sake, don't tempt me!" he groaned. "What do you mean?" "That mental and physical and spiritual contact with me will temporarily give you, a three-dimension creature, the power of the new sense, which your race will not have for fifty thousand years." White-lipped and trembling, he demanded: "Explain!" Eve smiled. "Have you not guessed that Adam has developed an additional sense? You've seen him vanish. He and I have the sixth sense of Time Perception--the new sense which enables us to penetrate what you of the Black Age call the Fourth Dimension. Even you whose mentalities are framed by three dimensions have this sixth sense instinct. Your very religion is based on it, for you believe that in another life you shall step into Time, or, as you call it, eternity." She leaned closer so that her hair brushed his cheek. "What is eternity, John Northwood? Is it not keeping forever ahead of the Destroyer? The future is eternal, for it is never reached. Adam and I, through our new sense which comprehends Time and Space, can vanish by stepping a few seconds into the future, the Fourth Dimension of Space. Death can never reach us, not even accidental death, unless that which causes death could also slip into the future, which is not yet possible." "But if the Fourth Dimension is future Time, why can one in the third dimension feel the touch of an unseen presence in the Fourth Dimension--hear his voice, even?" "Thought vibration. The touch is not really felt nor the voice heard: they are only imagined. The radioactive waves of the brain of even you Black Age people are swift enough to bridge Space and Time. And it is the mind that carries us beyond the third dimension." * * * * * Her red mouth reached closer to him, her blue eyes touched hidden forces that slept in remote cells of his being. "You are going into Eternal Time, John Northwood, Eternity without beginning or end. You understand? You feel it? Comprehend it? Now for the contact--kiss me!" Northwood had seen Athalia vanish under Adam's kiss. Suddenly, in one mad burst of understanding, he leaned over to his magnificent temptress. For a split second he felt the sweet pressure of baby-soft lips, and then the atoms of his body seemed to fly asunder. Black chaos held him for a frightful moment before he felt sanity return. He was back on the terrace again, with Eve by his side. They were standing now. The world about him looked the same, yet there was a subtle change in everything. Eve laughed softly. "It is puzzling, isn't it? You're seeing everything as in a mirror. What was left before is now right. Only you and I are real. All else is but a vision, a dream. For now you and I are existing one minute in future time, or, more simply, we are in the Fourth Dimension. To everything in the third dimension, we are invisible. Let me show you that Dr. Mundson cannot see you." They went back to the room beyond the terrace. Dr. Mundson was not present. "There he goes down the jungle path," said Eve, looking out a window. She laughed. "Poor old fellow. The children of his genius are worrying him." * * * * * They were standing in the recess formed by a bay window. Eve picked up his hand and laid it against her face, giving him the full, blasting glory of her smiling blue eyes. Northwood, looking away miserably, uttered a low cry. Coming over the field beyond were Adam and Athalia. By the trimming on the blue dress she wore, he could see that she was still in the Fourth Dimension, for he did not see her as a mirror image. A look of fear leaped to Eve's face. She clutched Northwood's arm, trembling. "I don't want Adam to see that I have passed you beyond," she gasped. "We are existing but one minute in the future. Always Adam and I have feared to pass too far beyond the sweetness of reality. But now, so that Adam may not see us, we shall step five minutes into what-is-yet-to-be. And even he, with all his power, cannot see into a future that is more distant than that in which he exists." She raised her humid lips to his. "Come, beloved." Northwood kissed her. Again came the moment of confusion, of the awful vacancy that was like death, and then he found himself and Eve in the laboratory, following Adam and Athalia down a long corridor. Athalia was crying and pleading frantically with Adam. Once she stopped and threw herself at his feet in a gesture of dramatic supplication, arms outflung, streaming eyes wide open with fear. Adam stooped and lifted her gently and continued on his way, supporting her against his side. * * * * * Eve dug her fingers into Northwood's arm. Horror contorted her face, horror mixed with rage. "My mind hears what he is saying, understands the vile plan he has made, John Northwood. He is on his way to his laboratory to destroy not only you and most of these in New Eden, but me as well. He wants only Athalia." Striding forward like an avenging goddess, she pulled Northwood after her. "Hurry!" she whispered. "Remember, you and I are five minutes in the future, and Adam is only one. We are witnessing what will occur four minutes from now. We yet have time to reach the laboratory before him and be ready for him when he enters. And because he will have to go back to Present Time to do his work of destruction, I will be able to destroy him. Ah!" Fierce joy burned in her flashing blue eyes, and her slender nostrils quivered delicately. Northwood, peeping at her in horror, knew that no mercy could be expected of her. And when she stopped at a certain door and inserted a key, he remembered Athalia. What if she should enter with Adam in Present Time? * * * * * They were inside Adam's laboratory, a huge apartment filled with queer apparatus and cages of live animals. The room was a strange paradox. Part of the equipment, the walls, and the floor was glistening with newness, and part was moulding with extreme age. The powers of disintegration that haunt a tropical forest seemed to be devouring certain spots of the room. Here, in the midst of bright marble, was a section of wall that seemed as old as the pyramids. The surface of the stone had an appalling mouldiness, as though it had been lifted from an ancient graveyard where it had lain in the festering ground for unwholesome centuries. Between cracks in this stained and decayed section of stone grew fetid moss that quivered with the microscopic organisms that infest age-rotten places. Sections of the flooring and woodwork also reeked with mustiness. In one dark, webby corner of the room lay a pile of bleached bones, still tinted with the ghastly grays and pinks of putrefaction. Northwood, overwhelmingly nauseated, withdrew his eyes from the bones, only to see, in another corner, a pile of worm-eaten clothing that lay on the floor in the outline of a man. Faint with the reek of ancient mustiness, Northwood retreated to the door, dizzy and staggering. "It sickens you," said Eve, "and it sickens me also, for death and decay are not pleasant. Yet Nature, left to herself, reduces all to this. Every grave that has yawned to receive its prey hides corruption no less shocking. Nature's forces of creation and destruction forever work in partnership. Never satisfied with her composition, she destroys and starts again, building, building towards the ultimate of perfection. Thus, it is natural that if Dr. Mundson isolated the Life Ray, Nature's supreme force of compensation, isolation of the Death Ray should closely follow. Adam, thirsting for power, has succeeded. A few sweeps of his unholy ray of decomposition will undo all Dr. Mundson's work in this valley and reduce it to a stinking holocaust of destruction. And the time for his striking has come!" She seized his face and drew it toward her. "Quick!" she said. "We'll have to go back to the third dimension. I could leave you safe in the fourth, but if anything should happen to me, you would be stranded forever in future time." She kissed his lips. In a moment, he was back in the old familiar world, where right is right and left is left. Again the subtle change wrought by Eve's magic lips had taken place. * * * * * Eve went to a machine standing in a corner of the room. "Come here and get behind me, John Northwood. I want to test it before he enters." Northwood stood behind her shoulder. "Now watch!" she ordered. "I shall turn it on one of those cages of guinea pigs over there." She swung the projector around, pointed it at the cage of small, squealing animals, and threw a lever. Instantly a cone of black mephitis shot forth, a loathsome, bituminous stream of putrefaction that reeked of the grave and the cesspool, of the utmost reaches of decay before the dust accepts the disintegrated atoms. The first touch of seething, pitchy destruction brought screams of sudden agony from the guinea pigs, but the screams were cut short as the little animals fell in shocking, instant decay. The very cage which imprisoned them shriveled and retreated from the hellish, devouring breath that struck its noisome rot into the heart of the wood and the metal, reducing both to revolting ruin. Eve cut off the frightful power, and the black cone disappeared, leaving the room putrid with its defilement. "And Adam would do that to the world," she said, her blue eyes like electric-shot icicles. "He would do it to you, John Northwood--and to me!" Her full bosom strained under the passion beneath. "Listen!" She raised her hand warningly. "He comes! The destroyer comes!" * * * * * A hand was at the door. Eve reached for the lever, and, the same moment, Northwood leaned over her imploringly. "If Athalia is with him!" he gasped. "You will not harm her?" A wild shriek at the door, a slight scuffle, and then the doorknob was wrenched as though two were fighting over it. "For God's sake, Eve!" implored Northwood. "Wait! Wait!" "No! She shall die, too. You love her!" Icy, cruel eyes cut into him, and a new-fleshed hand tried to push him aside. The door was straining open. A beloved voice shrieked. "John!" Eve and Northwood both leaped for the lever. Under her tender white flesh she was as strong as a man. In the midst of the struggle, her red, humid lips approached his--closer. Closer. Their merest pressure would thrust him into Future Time, where the laboratory and all it contained would be but a shadow, and where he would be helpless to interfere with her terrible will. He saw the door open and Adam stride into the room. Behind him, lying prone in the hall where she had probably fainted, was Athalia. In a mad burst of strength he touched the lever together with Eve. The projector, belching forth its stinking breath of corruption swung in a mad arc over the ceiling, over the walls--and then straight at Adam. Then, quicker than thought, came the accident. Eve, attempting to throw Northwood off, tripped, fell half over the machine, and, with a short scream of despair, dropped into the black path of destruction. * * * * * Northwood paused, horrified. The Death Ray was pointed at an inner wall of the room, which, even as he looked, crumbled and disappeared, bringing down upon him dust more foul than any obscenity the bowels of the earth might yield. In an instant the black cone ate through the outer parts of the building, where crashing stone and screams that were more horrible because of their shortness followed the ruin that swept far into the fair reaches of the valley. The paralyzing odor of decay took his breath, numbed his muscles, until, of all that huge building, the wall behind him and one small section of the room by the doorway alone remained whole. He was trying to nerve himself to reach for the lever close to that quiet formless thing still partly draped over the machine, when a faint sound in the door electrified him. At first, he dared not look, but his own name, spoken almost in a gasp, gave him courage. Athalia lay on the floor, apparently untouched. He jerked the lever violently before running to her, exultant with the knowledge that his own efforts to keep the ray from the door had saved her. "And you're not hurt!" He gathered her close. "John! I saw it get Adam." She pointed to a new mound of mouldy clothes on the floor. "Oh, it is hideous for me to be so glad, but he was going to destroy everything and everyone except me. He made the ray projector for that one purpose." Northwood looked over the pile of putrid ruins which a few minutes ago had been a building. There was not a wall left intact. "His intention is accomplished, Athalia," he said sadly. "Let's get out before more stones fall." * * * * * In a moment they were in the open. An ominous stillness seemed to grip the very air--the awful silence of the polar wastes which lay not far beyond the mountains. "How dark it is, John!" cried Athalia. "Dark and cold!" "The sunshine projector!" gasped Northwood. "It must have been destroyed. Look, dearest! The golden light has disappeared." "And the warm air of the valley will lift immediately. That means a polar blizzard." She shuddered and clung closer to him. "I've seen Antarctic storms, John. They're death." Northwood avoided her eyes. "There's the sun-ship. We'll give the ruins the once over in case there are any survivors; then we'll save ourselves." Even a cursory examination of the mouldy piles of stone and dust convinced them that there could be no survivors. The ruins looked as though they had lain in those crumbling piles for centuries. Northwood, smothering his repugnance, stepped among them--among the green, slimy stones and the unspeakable revolting débris, staggering back and faint and shocked when he came upon dust that was once human. "God!" he groaned, hands over eyes. "We're alone, Athalia! Alone in a charnal house. The laboratory housed the entire population, didn't it?" "Yes. Needing no sleep nor food, we did not need houses. We all worked here, under Dr. Mundson's generalship, and, lately under Adam's, like a little band of soldiers fighting for a great cause." "Let's go to the sun-ship, dearest." "But Daddy Mundson was in the library," sobbed Athalia. "Let's look for him a little longer." * * * * * Sudden remembrance came to Northwood. "No, Athalia! He left the library. I saw him go down the jungle path several minutes before I and Eve went to Adam's laboratory." "Then he might be safe!" Her eyes danced. "He might have gone to the sun-ship." Shivering, she slumped against him. "Oh, John! I'm cold." Her face was blue. Northwood jerked off his coat and wrapped it around her, taking the intense cold against his unprotected shoulders. The low, gray sky was rapidly darkening, and the feeble light of the sun could scarcely pierce the clouds. It was disturbing to know that even the summer temperature in the Antarctic was far below zero. "Come, girl," said Northwood gravely. "Hurry! It's snowing." They started to run down the road through the narrow strip of jungle. The Death Ray had cut huge swathes in the tangle of trees and vines, and now areas of heaped débris, livid with the colors of recent decay, exhaled a mephitic humidity altogether alien to the snow that fell in soft, slow flakes. Each hesitated to voice the new fear: had the sun-ship been destroyed? By the time they reached the open field, the snow stung their flesh like sharp needles, but it was not yet thick enough to hide from them a hideous fact. The sun-ship was gone. * * * * * It might have occupied one of several black, foul areas on the green grass, where the searching Death Ray had made the very soil putrefy, and the rocks crumble into shocking dust. Northwood snatched Athalia to him, too full of despair to speak. A sudden terrific flurry of snow whirled around them, and they were almost blown from their feet by the icy wind that tore over the unprotected field. "It won't be long," said Athalia faintly. "Freezing doesn't hurt, John, dear." "It isn't fair, Athalia! There never would have been such a marriage as ours. Dr. Mundson searched the world to bring us together." "For scientific experiment!" she sobbed. "I'd rather die, John. I want an old-fashioned home, a Black Age family. I want to grow old with you and leave the earth to my children. Or else I want to die here now under the kind, white blanket the snow is already spreading over us." She drooped in his arms. Clinging together, they stood in the howling wind, looking at each other hungrily, as though they would snatch from death this one last picture of the other. Northwood's freezing lips translated some of the futile words that crowded against them. "I love you because you are not perfect. I hate perfection!" "Yes. Perfection is the only hopeless state, John. That is why Adam wanted to destroy, so that he might build again." They were sitting in the snow now, for they were very tired. The storm began whistling louder, as though it were only a few feet above their heads. "That sounds almost like the sun-ship," said Athalia drowsily. "It's only the wind. Hold your face down so it won't strike your flesh so cruelly." "I'm not suffering. I'm getting warm again." She smiled at him sleepily. * * * * * Little icicles began to form on their clothing, and the powdery snow frosted their uncovered hair. Suddenly came a familiar voice: "_Ach Gott!_" Dr. Mundson stood before them, covered with snow until he looked like a polar bear. "Get up!" he shouted. "Quick! To the sun-ship!" He seized Athalia and jerked her to her feet. She looked at him sleepily for a moment, and then threw herself at him and hugged him frantically. "You're not dead?" Taking each by the arm, he half dragged them to the sun-ship, which had landed only a few feet away. In a few minutes he had hot brandy for them. While they sipped greedily, he talked, between working the sun-ship's controls. "No, I wouldn't say it was a lucky moment that drew me to the sun-ship. When I saw Eve trying to charm John, I had what you American slangists call a hunch, which sent me to the sun-ship to get it off the ground so that Adam couldn't commandeer it. And what is a hunch but a mental penetration into the Fourth Dimension?" For a long moment, he brooded, absent-minded. "I was in the air when the black ray, which I suppose is Adam's deviltry, began to destroy everything it touched. From a safe elevation I saw it wreck all my work." A sudden spasm crossed his face. "I've flown over the entire valley. We're the only survivors--thank God!" "And so at last you confess that it is not well to tamper with human life?" Northwood, warmed with hot brandy, was his old self again. "Oh, I have not altogether wasted my efforts. I went to elaborate pains to bring together a perfect man and a perfect woman of what Adam called our Black Age." He smiled at them whimsically. "And who can say to what extent you have thus furthered natural evolution?" Northwood slipped his arm around Athalia. "Our children might be more than geniuses, Doctor!" Dr. Mundson nodded his huge, shaggy head gravely. "The true instinct of a Creature of the Light," he declared. * * * * * _Remember_ ASTOUNDING STORIES _Appears on Newsstands_ THE FIRST THURSDAY IN EACH MONTH * * * * * Into Space _By Sterner St. Paul_ What was the extraordinary connection between Dr. Livermore's sudden disappearance and the coming of a new satellite to the Earth? [Illustration: _A loud hum filled the air, and suddenly the projectile rose, gaining speed rapidly._] Many of my readers will remember the mysterious radio messages which were heard by both amateur and professional short wave operators during the nights of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of last September, and even more will remember the astounding discovery made by Professor Montescue of the Lick Observatory on the night of September twenty-fifth. At the time, some inspired writers tried to connect the two events, maintaining that the discovery of the fact that the earth had a new satellite coincident with the receipt of the mysterious messages was evidence that the new planetoid was inhabited and that the messages were attempts on the part of the inhabitants to communicate with us. The fact that the messages were on a lower wave length than any receiver then in existence could receive with any degree of clarity, and the additional fact that they appeared to come from an immense distance lent a certain air of plausibility to these ebullitions in the Sunday magazine sections. For some weeks the feature writers harped on the subject, but the hurried construction of new receivers which would work on a lower wave length yielded no results, and the solemn pronouncements of astronomers to the effect that the new celestial body could by no possibility have an atmosphere on account of its small size finally put an end to the talk. So the matter lapsed into oblivion. While quite a few people will remember the two events I have noted, I doubt whether there are five hundred people alive who will remember anything at all about the disappearance of Dr. Livermore of the University of Calvada on September twenty-third. He was a man of some local prominence, but he had no more than a local fame, and few papers outside of California even noted the event in their columns. I do not think that anyone ever tried to connect up his disappearance with the radio messages or the discovery of the new earthly satellite; yet the three events were closely bound up together, and but for the Doctor's disappearance, the other two would never have happened. * * * * * Dr. Livermore taught physics at Calvada, or at least he taught the subject when he remembered that he had a class and felt like teaching. His students never knew whether he would appear at class or not; but he always passed everyone who took his courses and so, of course, they were always crowded. The University authorities used to remonstrate with him, but his ability as a research worker was so well known and recognized that he was allowed to go about as he pleased. He was a bachelor who lived alone and who had no interests in life, so far as anyone knew, other than his work. I first made contact with him when I was a freshman at Calvada, and for some unknown reason he took a liking to me. My father had insisted that I follow in his footsteps as an electrical engineer; as he was paying my bills, I had to make a show at studying engineering while I clandestinely pursued my hobby, literature. Dr. Livermore's courses were the easiest in the school and they counted as science, so I regularly registered for them, cut them, and attended a class in literature as an auditor. The Doctor used to meet me on the campus and laughingly scold me for my absence, but he was really in sympathy with my ambition and he regularly gave me a passing mark and my units of credit without regard to my attendance, or, rather, lack of it. When I graduated from Calvada I was theoretically an electrical engineer. Practically I had a pretty good knowledge of contemporary literature and knew almost nothing about my so-called profession. I stalled around Dad's office for a few months until I landed a job as a cub reporter on the San Francisco _Graphic_ and then I quit him cold. When the storm blew over, Dad admitted that you couldn't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and agreed with a grunt to my new line of work. He said that I would probably be a better reporter than an engineer because I couldn't by any possibility be a worse one, and let it go at that. However, all this has nothing to do with the story. It just explains how I came to be acquainted with Dr. Livermore, in the first place, and why he sent for me on September twenty-second, in the second place. * * * * * The morning of the twenty-second the City Editor called me in and asked me if I knew "Old Liverpills." "He says that he has a good story ready to break but he won't talk to anyone but you," went on Barnes. "I offered to send out a good man, for when Old Liverpills starts a story it ought to be good, but all I got was a high powered bawling out. He said that he would talk to you or no one and would just as soon talk to no one as to me any longer. Then he hung up. You'd better take a run out to Calvada and see what he has to say. I can have a good man rewrite your drivel when you get back." I was more or less used to that sort of talk from Barnes so I paid no attention to it. I drove my flivver down to Calvada and asked for the Doctor. "Dr. Livermore?" said the bursar. "Why, he hasn't been around here for the last ten months. This is his sabbatical year and he is spending it on a ranch he owns up at Hat Creek, near Mount Lassen. You'll have to go there if you want to see him." I knew better than to report back to Barnes without the story, so there was nothing to it but to drive up to Hat Creek, and a long, hard drive it was. I made Redding late that night; the next day I drove on to Burney and asked for directions to the Doctor's ranch. "So you're going up to Doc Livermore's, are you?" asked the Postmaster, my informant. "Have you got an invitation?" I assured him that I had. "It's a good thing," he replied, "because he don't allow anyone on his place without one. I'd like to go up there myself and see what's going on, but I don't want to get shot at like old Pete Johnson did when he tried to drop in on the Doc and pay him a little call. There's something mighty funny going on up there." * * * * * Naturally I tried to find out what was going on but evidently the Postmaster, who was also the express agent, didn't know. All he could tell me was that a "lot of junk" had come for the Doctor by express and that a lot more had been hauled in by truck from Redding. "What kind of junk?" I asked him. "Almost everything, Bub: sheet steel, machinery, batteries, cases of glass, and Lord knows what all. It's been going on ever since he landed there. He has a bunch of Indians working for him and he don't let a white man on the place." Forced to be satisfied with this meager information, I started old Lizzie and lit out for the ranch. After I had turned off the main trail I met no one until the ranch house was in sight. As I rounded a bend in the road which brought me in sight of the building, I was forced to put on my brakes at top speed to avoid running into a chain which was stretched across the road. An Indian armed with a Winchester rifle stood behind it, and when I stopped he came up and asked my business. "My business is with Dr. Livermore," I said tartly. "You got letter?" he inquired. "No," I answered. "No ketchum letter, no ketchum Doctor," he replied, and walked stolidly back to his post. "This is absurd," I shouted, and drove Lizzie up to the chain. I saw that it was merely hooked to a ring at the end, and I climbed out and started to take it down. A thirty-thirty bullet embedded itself in the post an inch or two from my head, and I changed my mind about taking down that chain. "No ketchum letter, no ketchum Doctor," said the Indian laconically as he pumped another shell into his gun. * * * * * I was balked, until I noticed a pair of telephone wires running from the house to the tree to which one end of the chain was fastened. "Is that a telephone to the house?" I demanded. The Indian grunted an assent. "Dr. Livermore telephoned me to come and see him," I said. "Can't I call him up and see if he still wants to see me?" The Indian debated the question with himself for a minute and then nodded a doubtful assent. I cranked the old coffee mill type of telephone which I found, and presently heard the voice of Dr. Livermore. "This is Tom Faber, Doctor," I said. "The _Graphic_ sent me up to get a story from you, but there's an Indian here who started to murder me when I tried to get past your barricade." "Good for him," chuckled the Doctor. "I heard the shot, but didn't know that he was shooting at you. Tell him to talk to me." The Indian took the telephone at my bidding and listened for a minute. "You go in," he agreed when he hung up the receiver. He took down the chain and I drove on up to the house, to find the Doctor waiting for me on the veranda. "Hello, Tom," he greeted me heartily. "So you had trouble with my guard, did you?" "I nearly got murdered," I said ruefully. "I expect that Joe would have drilled you if you had tried to force your way in," he remarked cheerfully. "I forgot to tell him that you were coming to-day. I told him you would be here yesterday, but yesterday isn't to-day to that Indian. I wasn't sure you would get here at all, in point of fact, for I didn't know whether that old fool I talked to in your office would send you or some one else. If anyone else had been sent, he would have never got by Joe, I can tell you. Come in. Where's your bag?" "I haven't one," I replied. "I went to Calvada yesterday to see you, and didn't know until I got there that you were up here." The Doctor chuckled. "I guess I forgot to tell where I was," he said. "That man I talked to got me so mad that I hung up on him before I told him. It doesn't matter, though. I can dig you up a new toothbrush, and I guess you can make out with that. Come in." * * * * * I followed him into the house, and he showed me a room fitted with a crude bunk, a washstand, a bowl and a pitcher. "You won't have many luxuries here, Tom," he said, "but you won't need to stay here for more than a few days. My work is done: I am ready to start. In fact, I would have started yesterday instead of to-day, had you arrived. Now don't ask any questions; it's nearly lunch time." "What's the story, Doctor?" I asked after lunch as I puffed one of his excellent cigars. "And why did you pick me to tell it to?" "For several reasons," he replied, ignoring my first question. "In the first place, I like you and I think that you can keep your mouth shut until you are told to open it. In the second place, I have always found that you had the gift of vision or imagination and have the ability to believe. In the third place, you are the only man I know who had the literary ability to write up a good story and at the same time has the scientific background to grasp what it is all about. Understand that unless I have your promise not to write this story until I tell you that you can, not a word will I tell you." I reflected for a moment. The _Graphic_ would expect the story when I got back, but on the other hand I knew that unless I gave the desired promise, the Doctor wouldn't talk. "All right," I assented, "I'll promise." "Good!" he replied. "In that case, I'll tell you all about it. No doubt you, like the rest of the world, think that I'm crazy?" "Why, not at all," I stammered. In point of fact, I had often harbored such a suspicion. "Oh, that's all right," he went on cheerfully. "I _am_ crazy, crazy as a loon, which, by the way, is a highly sensible bird with a well balanced mentality. There is no doubt that I am crazy, but my craziness is not of the usual type. Mine is the insanity of genius." * * * * * He looked at me sharply as he spoke, but long sessions at poker in the San Francisco Press Club had taught me how to control my facial muscles, and I never batted an eye. He seemed satisfied, and went on. "From your college work you are familiar with the laws of magnetism," he said. "Perhaps, considering just what your college career really was, I might better say that you are supposed to be familiar with them." I joined with him in his laughter. "It won't require a very deep knowledge to follow the thread of my argument," he went on. "You know, of course, that the force of magnetic attraction is inversely proportional to the square of the distances separating the magnet and the attracted particles, and also that each magnetized particle had two poles, a positive and a negative pole, or a north pole and a south pole, as they are usually called?" I nodded. "Consider for a moment that the laws of magnetism, insofar as concerns the relation between distance and power of attraction, are exactly matched by the laws of gravitation." "But there the similarity between the two forces ends," I interrupted. "But there the similarity does _not_ end," he said sharply. "That is the crux of the discovery which I have made: that magnetism and gravity are one and the same, or, rather, that the two are separate, but similar manifestations of one force. The parallel between the two grows closer with each succeeding experiment. You know, for example, that each magnetized particle has two poles. Similarly each gravitized particle, to coin a new word, had two poles, one positive and one negative. Every particle on the earth is so oriented that the negative poles point toward the positive center of the earth. This is what causes the commonly known phenomena of gravity or weight." "I can prove the fallacy of that in a moment," I retorted. "There are none so blind as those who will not see," he quoted with an icy smile. "I can probably predict your puerile argument, but go ahead and present it." * * * * * "If two magnets are placed so that the north pole of one is in juxtaposition to the south pole of the other, they attract one another," I said. "If the position of the magnets be reversed so that the two similar poles are opposite, they will repel. If your theory were correct, a man standing on his head would fall off the earth." "Exactly what I expected," he replied. "Now let me ask you a question. Have you ever seen a small bar magnet placed within the field of attraction of a large electromagnet? Of course you have, and you have noticed that, when the north pole of the bar magnet was pointed toward the electromagnet, the bar was attracted. However, when the bar was reversed and the south pole pointed toward the electromagnet, the bar was still attracted. You doubtless remember that experiment." "But in that case the magnetism of the electromagnet was so large that the polarity of the small magnet was reversed!" I cried. "Exactly, and the field of gravity of the earth is so great compared to the gravity of a man that when he stands on his head, his polarity is instantly reversed." I nodded. His explanation was too logical for me to pick a flaw in it. "If that same bar magnet were held in the field of the electromagnet with its north pole pointed toward the magnet and then, by the action of some outside force of sufficient power, its polarity were reversed, the bar would be repelled. If the magnetism were neutralized and held exactly neutral, it would be neither repelled nor attracted, but would act only as the force of gravity impelled it. Is that clear?" "Perfectly," I assented. "That, then, paves the way for what I have to tell you. I have developed an electrical method of neutralizing the gravity of a body while it is within the field of the earth, and also, by a slight extension, a method of entirely reversing its polarity." * * * * * I nodded calmly. "Do you realize what this means?" he cried. "No," I replied, puzzled by his great excitement. "Man alive," he cried, "it means that the problem of aerial flight is entirely revolutionized, and that the era of interplanetary travel is at hand! Suppose that I construct an airship and then render it neutral to gravity. It would weigh nothing, _absolutely nothing_! The tiniest propeller would drive it at almost incalculable speed with a minimum consumption of power, for the only resistance to its motion would be the resistance of the air. If I were to reverse the polarity, it would be repelled from the earth with the same force with which it is now attracted, and it would rise with the same acceleration as a body falls toward the earth. It would travel to the moon in two hours and forty minutes." "Air resistance would--" "There is no air a few miles from the earth. Of course, I do not mean that such a craft would take off from the earth and land on the moon three hours later. There are two things which would interfere with that. One is the fact that the propelling force, the gravity of the earth, would diminish as the square of the distance from the center of the earth, and the other is that when the band of neutral attraction, or rather repulsion, between the earth and the moon had been reached, it would be necessary to decelerate so as to avoid a smash on landing. I have been over the whole thing and I find that it would take twenty-nine hours and fifty-two minutes to make the whole trip. The entire thing is perfectly possible. In fact, I have asked you here to witness and report the first interplanetary trip to be made." "Have you constructed such a device?" I cried. "My space ship is finished and ready for your inspection," he replied. "If you will come with me, I will show it to you." * * * * * Hardly knowing what to believe, I followed him from the house and to a huge barnlike structure, over a hundred feet high, which stood nearby. He opened the door and switched on a light, and there before me stood what looked at first glance to be a huge artillery shell, but of a size larger than any ever made. It was constructed of sheet steel, and while the lower part was solid, the upper sections had huge glass windows set in them. On the point was a mushroom shaped protuberance. It measured perhaps fifty feet in diameter and was one hundred and forty feet high, the Doctor informed me. A ladder led from the floor to a door about fifty feet from the ground. I followed the Doctor up the ladder and into the space flier. The door led us into a comfortable living room through a double door arrangement. "The whole hull beneath us," explained the Doctor, "is filled with batteries and machinery except for a space in the center, where a shaft leads to a glass window in the bottom so that I can see behind me, so to speak. The space above is filled with storerooms and the air purifying apparatus. On this level is my bedroom, kitchen, and other living rooms, together with a laboratory and an observatory. There is a central control room located on an upper level, but it need seldom be entered, for the craft can be controlled by a system of relays from this room or from any other room in the ship. I suppose that you are more or less familiar with imaginative stories of interplanetary travel?" * * * * * I nodded an assent. "In that case there is no use in going over the details of the air purifying and such matters," he said. "The story writers have worked out all that sort of thing in great detail, and there is nothing novel in my arrangements. I carry food and water for six months and air enough for two months by constant renovating. Have you any question you wish to ask?" "One objection I have seen frequently raised to the idea of interplanetary travel is that the human body could not stand the rapid acceleration which would be necessary to attain speed enough to ever get anywhere. How do you overcome this?" "My dear boy, who knows what the human body can stand? When the locomotive was first invented learned scientists predicted that the limit of speed was thirty miles an hour, as the human body could not stand a higher speed. To-day the human body stands a speed of three hundred and sixty miles an hour without ill effects. At any rate, on my first trip I intend to take no chances. We know that the body can stand an acceleration of thirty-two feet per second without trouble. That is the rate of acceleration due to gravity and is the rate at which a body increases speed when it falls. This is the acceleration which I will use. "Remember that the space traveled by a falling body in a vacuum is equal to one half the acceleration multiplied by the square of the elapsed time. The moon, to which I intend to make my first trip, is only 280,000 miles, or 1,478,400,000 feet, from us. With an acceleration of thirty-two feet per second, I would pass the moon two hours and forty minutes after leaving the earth. If I later take another trip, say to Mars, I will have to find a means of increasing my acceleration, possibly by the use of the rocket principle. Then will be time enough to worry about what my body will stand." A short calculation verified the figures the Doctor had given me, and I stood convinced. "Are you really going?" I asked. "Most decidedly. To repeat, I would have started yesterday, had you arrived. As it is, I am ready to start at once. We will go back to the house for a few minutes while I show you the location of an excellent telescope through which you may watch my progress, and instruct you in the use of an ultra-short-wave receiver which I am confident will pierce the Heaviside layer. With this I will keep in communication with you, although I have made no arrangements for you to send messages to me on this trip. I intend to go to the moon and land. I will take atmosphere samples through an air port and, if there is an atmosphere which will support life, I will step out on the surface. If there is not, I will return to the earth." * * * * * A few minutes was enough for me to grasp the simple manipulations which I would have to perform, and I followed him again to the space flier. "How are you going to get it out?" I asked. "Watch," he said. He worked some levers and the roof of the barn folded back, leaving the way clear for the departure of the huge projectile. I followed him inside and he climbed the ladder. "When I shut the door, go back to the house and test the radio," he directed. The door clanged shut and I hastened into the house. His voice came plainly enough. I went back to the flier and waved him a final farewell, which he acknowledged through a window; then I returned to the receiver. A loud hum filled the air, and suddenly the projectile rose and flew out through the open roof, gaining speed rapidly until it was a mere speck in the sky. It vanished. I had no trouble in picking him up with the telescope. In fact, I could see the Doctor through one of the windows. "I have passed beyond the range of the atmosphere, Tom," came his voice over the receiver, "and I find that everything is going exactly as it should. I feel no discomfort, and my only regret is that I did not install a transmitter in the house so that you could talk to me; but there is no real necessity for it. I am going to make some observations now, but I will call you again with a report of progress in half-an-hour." * * * * * For the rest of the afternoon and all of that night I received his messages regularly, but with the coming of daylight they began to fade. By nine o'clock I could get only a word here and there. By noon I could hear nothing. I went to sleep hoping that the night would bring better reception, nor was I disappointed. About eight o'clock I received a message, rather faintly, but none the less distinctly. "I regret more than ever that I did not install a transmitter so that I could learn from you whether you are receiving my messages," his voice said faintly. "I have no idea of whether you can hear me or not, but I will keep on repeating this message every hour while my battery holds out. It is now thirty hours since I left the earth and I should be on the moon, according to my calculations. But I am not, and never will be. I am caught at the neutral point where the gravity of the earth and the moon are exactly equal. "I had relied on my momentum to carry me over this point. Once over it, I expected to reverse my polarity and fall on the moon. My momentum did not do so. If I keep my polarity as it was when left the earth, both the earth and the moon repel me. If I reverse it, they both attract me, and again I cannot move. If I had equipped my space flier with a rocket so that I could move a few miles, or even a few feet, from the dead line, I could proceed, but I did not do so, and I cannot move forward or back. Apparently I am doomed to stay here until my air gives out. Then my body, entombed in my space ship, will endlessly circle the earth as a satellite until the end of time. There is no hope for me, for long before a duplicate of my device equipped with rockets could be constructed and come to my rescue, my air would be exhausted. Good-by, Tom. You may write your story as soon as you wish. I will repeat my message in one hour. Good-by!" At nine and at ten o'clock the message was repeated. At eleven it started again but after a few sentences the sound suddenly ceased and the receiver went dead. I thought that the fault was with the receiver and I toiled feverishly the rest of the night, but without result. I learned later that the messages heard all over the world ceased at the same hour. The next morning Professor Montescue announced his discovery of the world's new satellite. * * * * * _Coming_-- MURDER MADNESS _An Extraordinary Four-Part Novel_ _By_ MURRAY LEINSTER * * * * * The Beetle Horde _By Victor Rousseau_ Bullets, shrapnel, shell--nothing can stop the trillions of famished, man-sized beetles which, led by a madman, sweep down over the human race. [Illustration: _The hideous monsters leaped into the cockpits and began their abominable meal._] CONCLUSION Tommy Travers and James Dodd, of the Travers Antarctic Expedition, crash in their plane somewhere near the South Pole, and are seized by a swarm of man-sized beetles. They are carried down to Submundia, a world under the earth's crust, where the beetles have developed their civilization to an amazing point, using a wretched race of degenerated humans, whom they breed as cattle, for food. The insect horde is ruled by a human from the outside world--a drug-doped madman. Dodd recognizes this man as Bram, the archaeologist who had been lost years before at the Pole and given up for dead by a world he had hated because it refused to accept his radical scientific theories. His fiendish mind now plans the horrible revenge of leading his unconquerable horde of monster insects forth to ravage the world, destroy the human race and establish a new era--the era of the insect. The world has to be warned of the impending doom. The two, with Haidia, a girl of Submundia, escape, and pass through menacing dangers to within two miles of the exit. There, suddenly, Tommy sees towering over him a creature that turns his blood cold--a gigantic praying mantis. Before he has time to act, the monster springs at them! CHAPTER VII _Through the Inferno_ Fortunately, the monster miscalculated its leap. The huge legs, whirling through the air, came within a few inches of Tommy's head, but passed over him, and the mantis plunged into the stream. Instantly the water was alive with leaping things with faces of such grotesque horror that Tommy sat paralyzed in his rocking shell, unable to avert his eyes. Things no more than a foot or two in length, to judge from the slender, eel-like bodies that leaped into the air, but things with catfish heads and tentacles, and eyes waving on stalks; things with clawlike appendages to their ventral fins, and mouths that widened to fearful size, so that the whole head seemed to disappear above them, disclosing fangs like wolves'. Instantly the water was churned into phosphorescent fire as they precipitated themselves upon the struggling mantis, whose enormous form, extending halfway from shore to shore, was covered with the river monsters, gnawing, rending, tearing. Luckily the struggles of the dying monster carried it downstream instead of up. In a few moments the immediate danger was past. And suddenly Haidia awoke, sat up. "Where are we?" she cried. "Oh, I can see! I can see! Something has burned away from my eyes! I know this place. A wise man of my people once came here, and returned to tell of it. We must go on. Soon we shall be safe on the wide river. But there is another way that leads to here. We must go on! We must go on!" Even as she spoke they heard the distant rasping of the beetle-legs. And before the shells were well in mid-current they saw the beetle horde coming round the bend; in the front of them Bram, reclining on his shell couch, and drawn by the eight trained beetles. * * * * * Bram saw the fugitives, and a roar of ironic mirth broke from his lips, resounding high above the strident rasping of the beetle-legs, and roaring over the marshes. "I've got you, Dodd and Travers," he bellowed, as the trained beetles hovered above the shell canoes. "You thought you were clever, but you're at my mercy. Now's your last chance, Dodd. I'll save you still if you'll submit to me, if you'll admit that there were fossil monotremes before the pleistocene epoch. Come, it's so simple! Say it after me: 'The marsupial lion--'" "You go to hell!" yelled Dodd, nearly upsetting his shell as he shook his fist at his enemy. High above the rasping sound came Bram's shrill whistle. Just audible to human ears, though probably sounding like the roar of thunder to those of the beetles, there was no need to wonder what it was. It was the call to slaughter. Like a black cloud the beetles shot forward. A serried phalanx covered the two men and the girl, hovering a few feet overhead, the long legs dangling to within arm's reach. And a terrible cry of fear broke from Haidia's lips. Suddenly Tommy remembered Bram's cigarette-lighter. He pulled it from his pocket and ignited it. Small as the flame was, it was actinically much more powerful than the brighter phosphorescence of the fungi behind them. The beetle-cloud overhead parted. The strident sound was broken into a confused buzzing as the terrified, blinded beetles plopped into the stream. None of them, fortunately, fell into either of the three shells, but the mass of struggling monsters in the water was hardly less formidable to the safety of the occupants than that menacing cloud overhead. "Get clear!" Tommy yelled to Dodd, trying to help the shell along with his hands. * * * * * He heard Bram's cry of baffled rage, and, looking backward, could not refrain from a laugh of triumph. Bram's trained steeds had taken fright and overset him. Bram had fallen into the red mud beside the stream, from which he was struggling up, plastered from head to feet, and shaking his fists and evidently cursing, though his words could not be heard. "How about your marsupial lion now, Bram?" yelled Dodd. "No monotremes before the pleistocene! D'you get that? That's my slogan now and for ever more!" Bram shrieked and raved, and seemed to be inciting the beetles to a renewed assault. The air was still thick with them, but Tommy was waving the cigarette-lighter in a flaming arc, which cleared the way for them. Then suddenly came disaster. The flame went out! Tommy closed the lighter with a snap and opened it. In vain. In his excitement he must have spilled all the contents, for it would not catch. Bram saw and yelled derision. The beetle-cloud was thickening. Tommy, now abreast of his companions on the widening stream, saw the imminent end. * * * * * And then once more fate intervened. For, leaping through the air out of the places where they had lain concealed, six mantises launched themselves at their beetle prey. Those awful bounds of the long-legged monsters, the scourges of the insect world, carried them clear from one bank to the other--fortunately for the occupants of the shells. In an instant the beetle-cloud dissolved. And it had all happened in a few seconds. Before Dodd or Tommy had quite taken in the situation, the mantises, each carrying a victim in its grooved legs, had vanished like the beetles. There was no sign of Bram. The three were alone upon the face of the stream, which went swirling upward into renewed darkness. Tommy saw Dodd bend toward Haidia as she lay on her shell couch. He heard the sound of a noisy kiss. And he lay back in the hollow of his shell, with the feeling that nothing that could happen in the future could be worse than what they had passed through. * * * * * Days went by, days when the sense of dawning freedom filled their hearts with hope. Haidia told Dodd and Tommy that, according to the legends of her people, the river ran into the world from which they had been driven by the floods, ages before. There had been no further signs of Bram or the beetle horde, and Dodd and Tommy surmised that it had been disorganized by the attack of the mantises, and that Bram was engaged in regaining his control over it. But neither of them believed that the respite would be a long one, and for that reason they rested ashore only for the briefest intervals, just long enough to snatch a little sleep, and to eat some of the shrimps that Haidia was adept at finding--or to pull some juicy fruit surreptitiously from a tree. Incidents there were, nevertheless, during those days. For hours their shells were followed by a school of the luminous river monsters, which, nevertheless, made no attempt to attack them. And once, hearing a cry from Haidia, as she was gathering shrimps, Dodd ran forward to see her battling furiously with a luminous scorpion, eight feet in length, that had sprung at her from its lurking place behind a pear shrub. * * * * * Dodd succeeded in stunning and dispatching the monster without suffering any injury from it, but the strain of the period was beginning to tell on all of them. Worst of all, they seemed to have left all the luminous vegetation behind them, and were entering a region of almost total darkness, in which Haidia had to be their eyes. * * * * * Something had happened to the girl's sight in the journey over the petrol spring. As a matter of fact, the third, or nictitating membrane, which the humans of Submundia possessed, in common with birds, had been burned away. Haidia could see as well as ever in the dark, but she could bear more light than formerly as well. Unobtrusively she assumed command of the party. She anticipated their wants, dug shrimps in the darkness, and fed Tommy and Dodd with her own hands. "God, what a girl!" breathed Dodd to his friend. "I've always had the reputation of being a woman-hater, Tommy, but once I get that girl to civilization I'm going to take her to the nearest Little Church Around the Corner in record time." "I wish you luck, old man, I'm sure," answered Tommy. Dodd's words did not seem strange to him. Civilization was growing very remote to him, and Broadway seemed like a memory of some previous incarnation. The river was growing narrower again, and swifter, too. On the last day, or night, of their journey--though they did not know that it was to be their last--it swirled so fiercely that it threatened every moment to overset their beetle-shells. Suddenly Tommy began to feel giddy. He gripped the side of his shell with his hand. "Tommy, we're going round!" shouted Dodd in front of him. There was no longer any doubt of it. The shells were revolving in a vortex of rushing, foaming water. "Haidia!" they shouted. The girl's voice came back thickly across the roaring torrent. The circles grew smaller. Tommy knew that he was being sucked nearer and nearer to the edge of some terrific whirlpool in that inky blackness. Now he could no longer hear Dodd's shouts, and the shell was tipping so that he could feel the water rushing along the edge of it. But for the exercise of centrifugal force he would have been flung from his perilous seat, for he was leaning inward at an angle of forty-five degrees. * * * * * Then suddenly his progress was arrested. He felt the shell being drawn to the shore. He leaped out, and Haidia's strong hands dragged the shell out of the torrent, while Tommy sank down, gasping. "What's the matter?" he heard Dodd demanding. "There is no more river," said Haidia calmly. "It goes into a hole in the ground. So much I have heard from the wise men of my people. They say that it is near such a place that they fled from the flood in years gone by." "Then we're near safety," shouted Tommy. "That river must emerge as a stream somewhere in the upper world, Dodd. I wonder where the road lies." "There is a road here," came Haidia's calm voice. "Let us put on our shells again, since who knows whether there may not be beetles here." "Did you ever see such a girl as that?" demanded Dodd ecstatically. "First she saves our lives, and then she thinks of everything. Good lord, she'll remember my meals, and to wind my watch for me, and--and--" But Haidia's voice, some distance ahead, interrupted Dodd's soliloquy, and, hoisting the beetle-shells upon their backs, they started along the rough trail that they could feel with their feet over the stony ground. It was still as dark as pitch, but soon they found themselves traveling up a sunken way that was evidently a dry watercourse. And now and again Haidia's reassuring voice would come from in front of them. * * * * * The road grew steeper. There could no longer be any doubt that they were ascending toward the surface of the earth. But even the weight of the beetle-shells and the steepness could not account for the feeling of intense weakness that took possession of them. Time and again they stopped, panting. "We must be very near the surface, Dodd," said Tommy. "We've surely passed the center of gravity. That's what makes it so difficult." "Come on," Haidia said in her quiet voice, stretching out her hand through the darkness. And for very shame they had to follow her. On and on, hour after hour, up the steep ascent, resting only long enough to make them realize their utter fatigue. On because Haidia was leading them, and because in the belief that they were about to leave that awful land behind them their desires lent new strength to their limbs continuously. Suddenly Haidia uttered a fearful cry. Her ears had caught what became apparent to Dodd and Jimmy several seconds later. Far down in the hollow of the earth, increased by the echoes that came rumbling up, they heard the distant, strident rasp of the beetle swarm. Then it was Dodd's turn to support Haidia and whisper consolation in her ears. No thought of resting now. If they were to be overwhelmed at last by the monsters, they meant to be overwhelmed in the upper air. * * * * * It was growing insufferably hot. Blasts of air, as if from a furnace, began to rush up and down past them. And the trail was growing steeper still, and slippery as glass. "What is it, Jim?" Tommy panted, as Dodd, leaving Haidia for a moment, came back to him. "I'd say lava," Dodd answered. "If only one could see something! I don't know how she finds her way. My impression is that we are coming out through the interior of an extinct volcano." "But where are there volcanoes in the south polar regions?" inquired Tommy. "There are Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, in South Victoria Land, active volcanoes discovered by Sir James Ross in 1841, and again by Borchgrevink, in 1899. If that's where we're coming out--well, Tommy, we're doomed, because it's the heart of the polar continent. We might as well turn back." "But we won't turn back," said Tommy. "I'm damned if we do." "We're damned if we don't," said Dodd. "Come along please!" sang Haidia's voice high up the slope. They struggled on. And now a faint luminosity was beginning to penetrate that infernal darkness. The rasping of the beetle-legs, too, was no longer audible. Perhaps they had thrown Bram off their track! Perhaps in the darkness he had not known which way they had gone after leaving the whirlpool! That thought encouraged them to a last effort. They pushed their flagging limbs up, upward through an inferno of heated air. Suddenly Dodd uttered a yell and pointed upward. "God!" ejaculated Tommy. Then he seized Dodd in his arms and nearly crushed him. For high above them, a pin-point in the black void, they saw--a star! They were almost at the earth's surface! One more effort, and suddenly the ground seemed to give beneath them. They breathed the outer air, and went sliding down a chute of sand, and stopped, half buried, at the bottom. CHAPTER VIII _Recaptured_ "Where are we?" each demanded of the other, as they staggered out. It was a moonless night, and the air was chill, but they were certainly nowhere near the polar regions, for there was no trace of snow to be seen anywhere. All about them was sand, with here and there a spiny shrub standing up stiff and erect and solitary. When they had disengaged themselves from the clinging sand they could see that they were apparently in the hollow of a vast crater, that must have been half a mile in circumference. It was low and worn down to an elevation of not more than two or three hundred feet, and evidently the volcano that had thrown it up had been extinct for millennia. "Water!" gasped Dodd. They looked all about them. They could see no signs of a spring anywhere, and both were parched with thirst after their terrific climb. "We must find water, Haidia," said Tommy. "Why, what's the matter?" Haidia was pointing upward at the starry heaven, and shivering with fear. "Eyes!" she cried. "Big beetles waiting for us up there!" "No, no, Haidia," Dodd explained. "Those are stars. They are worlds--places where people live." "Will you take me up there?" asked Haidia. "No, this is our world," said Dodd. "And by and by the sun will rise, that's a big ball of fire up there. He watches over the world and gives us light and warmth. Don't be afraid. I'll take care of you." "Haidia is not afraid with Jimmydodd to take care of her," replied the girl with dignity. "Haidia smells water--over there." She pointed across one side of the crater. "There we'd better hurry," said Tommy, "because I can't hold out much longer." * * * * * The three scrambled over the soft sand, which sucked in their feet to the ankle at every step. It was with the greatest difficulty that they succeeded in reaching the crater's summit, low though it was. Then Dodd uttered a cry, and pointed. In front of them extended a long pool of water, with a scrubby growth around the edges. The ground was firmer here, and they hurried toward it. Tommy was the first to reach it. He lay down on his face and drank eagerly. He had taken in a quart before he discovered that the water was saline. At the same time Dodd uttered an exclamation of disgust. Haidia, too, after sipping a little of the fluid, had stood up, chattering excitedly in her own language. But she was not chattering about the water. She was pointing toward the scrub. "Men there!" she cried. "Men like you and Tommy, Jimmydodd." Tommy and Dodd looked at each other, the water already forgotten in their excitement at Haidia's information, which neither of them doubted. Brave as she was, the girl now hung back behind Dodd, letting the two men take precedence of her. The water, saline as it was, had partly quenched their thirst. They felt their strength reviving. And it was growing light. In the east the sky was already flecked with yellow pink. They felt a thrill of intense excitement at the prospect of meeting others of their kind. "Where do you think we are?" asked Tommy. * * * * * Dodd stopped to look at a shrub that was growing near the edge of the pool. "I don't think, I know, Tommy," he answered. "This is wattle." "Yes?" "We're somewhere in the interior regions of the Australian continent--and that's not going to help us much." "Over there--over there," panted Haidia. "Hold me, Jimmydodd. I can't see. Ah, this terrible light!" She screwed her eyelids tightly together to shut out the pale light of dawn. The men had already discovered that the third membrane had been burned away. "We must get her out of here," whispered Dodd to Tommy. "Somewhere where it's dark, before the sun rises. Let's go back to the entrance of the crater." But Haidia, her arm extended, persisted, "Over there! Over there!" Suddenly a spear came whirling out of a growth of wattle beside the pool. It whizzed past Tommy's face and dropped into the sand behind. Between the trunks of the wattles they could see the forms of a party of blackfellows, watching them intently. Tommy held up his arms and moved forward with a show of confidence that he was far from feeling. After what he had escaped in the underworld he was in no mood to be massacred now. * * * * * But the blacks were evidently not hostile. It was probable that the spear had not been aimed to kill. At the sight of the two white men, and the white woman, they came forward doubtfully, then more fearlessly, shouting in their language. In another minute Tommy and Dodd were the center of a group of wondering savages. Especially Haidia. Three or four gins, or black women, had crept out of the scrub, and were already examining her with guttural cries, and fingering the hair garment that she wore. "Water!" said Tommy, pointing to his throat, and then to the pool, with a frown of disgust. The blackfellows grinned, and led the three a short distance to a place where a large hollow had been scooped in the sandy floor of the desert. It was full of water, perfectly sweet to the taste. The three drank gratefully. Suddenly the edge of the sun appeared above the horizon, gilding the sand with gold. The sunlight fell upon the three, and Haidia uttered a terrible cry of distress. She dropped upon the sand, her hands pressed to her eyes convulsively. Tommy and Dodd dragged her into the thickest part of the scrub, where she lay moaning. They contrived bandages from the remnants of their clothing, and these, damped with cold water, and bound over the girl's eyes, alleviated her suffering somewhat. Meanwhile the blackfellows had prepared a meal of roast opossum. After their long diet of shrimps, it tasted like ambrosia to the two men. * * * * * Much to their surprise, Haidia seemed to enjoy it too. The three squatted in the scrub among the friendly blacks, discussing their situation. "These fellows will save us," said Dodd. "It may be that we're quite near the coast, but, any way, they'll stick to us, even if only out of curiosity. They'll take us somewhere. But as soon as we get Haidia to safety we'll have to go back along our trail. We mustn't lose our direction. Suppose I was laughed at when I get back, called a liar! I tell you, we've got to have something to show, to prove my statements, before I can persuade anybody to fit out an expedition into Submundia. Even those three beetle-shells that we dropped in the crater won't be conclusive evidence for the type of mind that sits in the chairs of science to-day. And, speaking of that, we must get those blacks to carry those shells for us. I tell you, nobody will believe--" "What's that?" cried Tommy sharply, as a rasping sound rose above the cries of the frightened blacks. But there was no need to ask. Out of the crater two enormous beetles were winging their way toward them, two beetles larger than any that they had seen. Fully seven feet in length, they were circling about each other, apparently engaged in a vicious battle. The fearful beaks stabbed at the flesh beneath the shells, and they alternately stabbed and drew back, all the while approaching the party, which watched them, petrified with terror. It was evident that the monsters had no conception of the presence of humans. Blinded by the sun, only one thing could have induced them to leave the dark depths of Submundia. That was the mating instinct. The beetles were evidently rival leaders of some swarm, engaged in a duel to the death. Round and round they went in a dizzy maze, stabbing and thrusting, jaws closing on flesh, until they dropped, close-locked in battle, not more than twenty feet from the little party of blacks and whites, both squirming in the agonies of death. * * * * * "I don't think that necessarily means that the swarm is on our trail," said Tommy, a little later, as the three stood beside the shells that they had discarded. "Those two were strays, lost from the swarm and maddened by the mating instinct. Still, it might be as well to wear these things for a while, in case they do follow us." "You're right," answered Dodd, as he placed one of the shells around Haidia. "We've got to get this little lady to civilization, and we've got to protect our lives in order to give this great new knowledge to the world. If we are attacked, you must sacrifice your life for me, Tommy, so that I can carry back the news." "Righto!" answered Tommy with alacrity. "You bet I will, Jim." The glaring sun of mid-afternoon was shining down upon the desert, but Haidia was no longer in pain. It was evident that she was fast becoming accustomed to the sunlight, though she still kept her eyes screwed up tightly, and had to be helped along by Dodd and Jimmy. In high good humor the three reached the encampment, to find that the blacks were feasting on the dead beetles, while the two eldest members of the party had proudly donned the shells. It was near sunset before they finally started. Dodd and Tommy had managed to make it clear to them that they wished to reach civilization, but how near this was there was, of course, no means of determining. They noted, however, that the party started in a southerly direction. "I should say," said Dodd, "that we are in South Australia, probably three or four hundred miles from the coast. We've got a long journey before us, but these blackfellows will know how to procure food for us." * * * * * They certainly knew how to get water, for, just as it began to grow dark, when the three were already tormented by thirst, they stopped at what seemed a mere hollow among the stones and boulders that strewed the face of the desert, and scooped away the sand, leaving a hole which quickly filled with clear, cold water of excellent taste. After which they made signs that they were to camp there for the night. The moon was riding high in the sky. As it grew dark, Haidia opened her eyes, saw the luminary, and uttered an exclamation, this time not of fear, but of wonder. "Moon," said Dodd. "That's all right, girl. She watches over the night, as the sun does over the day." "Haidia likes the moon better than the sun," said the girl wistfully. "But the moon not strong enough to keep away the beetles." "If I was you, I'd forget about the beetles, Haidia," said Dodd. "They won't come out of that hole in the ground. You'll never see them again." And, as he spoke, they heard a familiar rasping sound far in the distance. "How the wind blows," said Tommy, desperately resolved not to believe his ears. "I think a storm's coming up." But Haidia, with a scream of fear, was clinging to Dodd, and the blacks were on their feet, spears and boomerangs in their hands, looking northward. Out of that north a little black cloud was gathering. A cloud that spread gradually, as a thunder-cloud, until it covered a good part of the sky. And still more of the sky, and still more. All the while that faint, distant rasping was audible, but it did not increase in volume. It was as if the beetles had halted until the full number of the swarm had come up out of the crater. * * * * * Then the cloud, which by now covered half the sky, began to take geometric form. It grew square, the ragged edges seemed to trim themselves away, streaks of light shot through it at right angles, as if it was marshaling itself into companies. The doomed men and the girl stood perfectly still, staring at that phenomenon. They knew that only a miracle could save them. They did not even speak, but Haidia clung more tightly to Dodd's arm. Then suddenly the cloud spread upward and covered the face of the moon. "Well, this is good-by, Tommy," said Dodd, gripping his friend's hand. "God, I wish I had a revolver, or a knife!" He looked at Haidia. Suddenly the rasping became a whining shriek. A score of enormous beetles, the advance guards of the army, zoomed out of the darkness into a ray of straggling moonlight. Shrieking, the blacks, who had watched the approaching swarm perfectly immobile, threw away the two shells and bolted. "Good Lord," Dodd shouted, "did you see the color of their shells, Tommy?" Even in that moment the scientific observer came uppermost in him. "Those red edges? They must be young ones, Tommy. It's the new brood! No wonder Bram stayed behind! He was waiting for them to hatch! The new brood! We're doomed--doomed! All my work wasted!" The blackfellows did not get very far. A hundred yards from the place where they started to run they dropped, their bodies hidden beneath the clustering monsters, their screams cut short as those frightful beaks sought their throats, and those jaws crunched through flesh and bone. * * * * * Circling around Dodd, Tommy, and Haidia, as if puzzled by their appearance, the beetles kept up a continuous, furious droning that sounded like the roar of Niagara mixed with the shrieking of a thousand sirens. The moon was completely hidden, and only a dim, nebulous light showed the repulsive monsters as they flew within a few feet of the heads of the fugitives. The stench was overpowering. But suddenly a ray of white light shot through the darkness, and, with a changed note, just perceptible to the ears of the two men, but doubtless of the greatest significance to the beetles, the swarm fled apart to right and left, leaving a clear lane, through which appeared--Bram, reclining on his shell-couch above his eight trained beetle steeds! Hovering overhead, the eight huge monsters dropped lightly to the ground beside the three. Bram sat up, a vicious grin upon his twisted face. In his hand he held a large electric bulb, its sides sheathed in a roughly carved wooden frame; the wire was attached to a battery behind him. "Well met, my friends!" he shouted exultantly. "I owe you more thanks than I can express for having so providentially left the electrical equipment of your plane undamaged after you crashed at the entrance to Submundia. I had a hunch about it--and the hunch worked!" * * * * * He grinned more malevolently as he looked from one man to the other. "You've run your race," he said. "But I'm going to have a little fun with you before you die. I'm going to use you as an object lesson. You'll find it out in a little while." "Go ahead, go ahead, Bram," Dodd grinned back at him. "Just a few million years ago, and you were a speck of protoplasm--in that pre-pleistocene age--swimming among the invertebrate crustaceans that characterized that epoch." "Invertebrates and monotremes, Dodd," said Bram, almost wistfully. "The mammals were already existent on the earth, as you know--" Suddenly he broke off, as he realized that Dodd was spoofing him. A yell of execration broke from his lips. He uttered a high whistle, and instantly the whiplike lashes of a hundred beetles whizzed through the darkness and remained poised over Dodd's head. "Not even the marsupial lion, Bram," grinned Dodd, undismayed. "Go ahead, go ahead, but I'll not die with a lie upon my lips!" CHAPTER IX _The Trail of Death_ "There's sure some sort of hoodoo on these Antarctic expeditions, Wilson," said the city editor of _The Daily Record_ to the star rewrite man. He glanced through the hastily typed report that had come through on the wireless set erected on the thirty-sixth story of the Record Building. "Tommy Travers gone, eh? And James Dodd, too! There'll be woe and wailing along the Great White Way to-night when this news gets out. They say that half the chorus girls in town considered themselves engaged to Tommy. Nice fellow, too! Always did like him!" "Queer, that curtain of fog that seems to lie on the actual site of the south pole," he continued, glancing over the report again. "So Storm thinks that Tommy crashed in it, and that it's a million to one against their ever finding his remains. What's this about beetles? Shells of enormous prehistoric beetles found by Tommy and Dodd! That'll make good copy, Wilson. Let's play that up. Hand it to Jones, and tell him to scare up a catching headline or two." * * * * * He beckoned to the boy who was hurrying toward his desk, a flimsy in his hand, glanced through it, and tossed it toward Wilson. "What do they think this is, April Fool's Day?" he asked. "I'm surprised that the International Press should fall for such stuff as that!" "Why, to-morrow is the first of April!" exclaimed Wilson, tossing back the cable dispatch with a contemptuous laugh. "Well, it won't do the I. P. much good to play those tricks on their subscribers," said the city editor testily. "I'm surprised, to say the least. I guess their Adelaide correspondent has gone off his head or something. Using poor Travers's name, too! Of course that fellow didn't know he was dead, but still...." That was how _The Daily Record_ missed being the first to give out certain information that was to stagger the world. The dispatch, which had evidently outrun an earlier one, was as follows: ADELAIDE, South Australia, March 31.--Further telegraphic communications arriving almost continuously from Settler's Station, signed by Thomas Travers, member of Travers Antarctic Expedition, who claims to have penetrated earth's interior at south pole and to have come out near Victoria Desert. Travers states that swarm of prehistoric beetles, estimated at two trillion, and as large as men, with shells impenetrable by rifle bullets, now besieging Settler's Station, where he and Dodd and Haidia, woman of subterranean race whom they brought away, are shut up in telegraph office. Bram, former member of Greystoke Expedition, said to be in charge of swarm, with intention of obliterating human race. Every living thing at Settler's Station destroyed, and swarm moving south. It was a small-town paper a hundred miles from New York that took a chance on publishing this report from the International Press, in spite of frantic efforts on the parts of the head office to recall it after it had been transmitted. This paper published the account as an April Fool's Day joke, though later it took to itself the credit for having believed it. But by the time April Fool's Day dawned all the world knew that the account was, if anything, an under-estimate of the fearful things that were happening "down under." * * * * * It was known now that the swarm of monsters had originated in the Great Victoria Desert, one of the worst stretches of desolation in the world, situated in the south-east corner of Western Australia. Their numbers were incalculable. Wimbush, the aviator, who was attempting to cross the continent from east to west, reported afterward that he had flown for four days, skirting the edge of the swarm, and that the whole of that time they were moving in the same direction, a thick cloud that left a trail of dense darkness on earth beneath them, like the path of an eclipse. Wimbush escaped them only because he had a ceiling of twenty thousand feet, to which apparently the beetles could not soar. And this swarm was only about one-fourth of the whole number of the monsters. This was the swarm that was moving westward, and subsequently totally destroyed all living things in Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie, Perth, and all the coastal cities of Western Australia. Ships were found drifting in the Indian Ocean, totally destitute of crews and passengers; not even their skeletons were found, and it was estimated that the voracious monsters had carried them away bodily, devoured them in the air, and dropped the remains into the water. All the world knows now how the sea elephant herd on Kerguelen Island was totally destroyed, and of the giant shells that were found lying everywhere on the deserted beaches, in positions that showed the monsters had in the end devoured one another. Mauritius was the most westerly point reached by a fraction of the swarm. A little over twenty thousand of the beetles reached that lovely island, by count of the shells afterward, and all the world knows now of the desperate and successful fight that the inhabitants waged against them. Men and women, boys and girls, blacks and whites, finding that the devils were invulnerable against rifle fire, sallied forth boldly with knives and choppers, and laid down a life for a life. * * * * * On the second day after their appearance, the main swarm, a trillion and a half strong, reached the line of the transcontinental railway, and moved eastward into South Australia, traveling, it was estimated, at the rate of two hundred miles an hour. By the next morning they were in Adelaide, a city of nearly a quarter of a million people. By nightfall every living thing in Adelaide and the suburbs had been eaten, except for a few who succeeded in hiding in walled-up cellars, or in the surrounding marshes. That night the swarm was on the borders of New South Wales and Victoria, and moving in two divisions toward Melbourne and Sydney. The northern half, it was quickly seen, was flying "wild," with no particular objective, moving in a solid cohort two hundred miles in length, and devouring game, stock, and humans indiscriminately. It was the southern division, numbering perhaps a trillion, that was under command of Bram, and aimed at destroying Melbourne as Adelaide had been destroyed. Bram, with his eight beetle steeds, was by this time known and execrated throughout the world. He was pictured as Anti-Christ, and the fulfilment of the prophecies of the Rock of Revelations. And all this while--or, rather, until the telegraph wires were cut--broken, it was discovered later, by perching beetles--Thomas Travers was sending out messages from his post at Settler's Station. * * * * * Soon it was known that prodigious creatures were following in the wake of the devastating horde. Mantises, fifteen feet in height, winged things like pterodactyls, longer than bombing airplanes, followed, preying on the stragglers. But the main bodies never halted, and the inroads that the destroyers made on their numbers were insignificant. Before the swarm reached Adelaide the Commonwealth Government had taken action. Troops had been called out, and all the available airplanes in the country had been ordered to assemble at Broken Hill, New South Wales, a strategic point commanding the approaches to Sydney and Melbourne. Something like four hundred airplanes were assembled, with several batteries of anti-aircraft guns that had been used in the Great War. Every amateur aviator in Australia was on the spot, with machines ranging from tiny Moths to Handley-Pages--anything that could fly. Nocturnal though the beetles had been, they no longer feared the light of the sun. In fact, it was ascertained later that they were blind. An opacity had formed over the crystalline lens of the eye. Blind, they were no less formidable than with their sight. They existed only to devour, and their numbers made them irresistible, no matter which way they turned. As soon as the vanguard of the dark cloud was sighted from Broken Hill, the airplanes went aloft. Four hundred planes, each armed with machine guns, dashed into the serried hosts, drumming out volleys of lead. In a long line, extending nearly to the limits of the beetle formation, thus giving each aviator all the room he needed, the planes gave battle. * * * * * The first terror that fell upon the airmen was the discovery that, even at close range, the machine gun bullets failed to penetrate the shells. The force of the impact whirled the beetles around, drove them together in bunches, sent them groping with weaving tentacles through the air--but that was all. On the main body of the invaders no impression was made whatever. The second terror was the realization that the swarm, driven down here and there from an altitude of several hundred feet, merely resumed their progress on the ground, in a succession of gigantic leaps. Within a few minutes, instead of presenting an inflexible barrier, the line of airplanes was badly broken, each plane surrounded by swarms of the monsters. Then Bram was seen. And that was the third terror, the sight of the famous beetle steeds, four pairs abreast, with Bram reclining like a Roman emperor upon the surface of the shells. It is true, Bram had no inclination to risk his own life in battle. At the first sight of the aviators he dodged into the thick of the swarm, where no bullet could reach him. Bram managed to transmit an order, and the beetles drew together. Some thought afterward that it was by thought transference he effected this maneuver, for instantly the beetles, which had hitherto flown in loose order, became a solid wall, a thousand feet in height, closing in on the planes. The propellers struck them and snapped short, and as the planes went weaving down, the hideous monsters leaped into the cockpits and began their abominable meal. * * * * * Not a single plane came back. Planes and skeletons, and here and there a shell of a dead beetle, itself completely devoured, were all that was found afterward. The gunners stayed at their posts till the last moment, firing round after round of shell and shrapnel, with insignificant results. Their skeletons were found not twenty paces from their guns--where the Gunners' Monument now stands. Half an hour after the flight had first been sighted the news was being radioed to Sydney, Melbourne, and all other Australian cities, advising instant flight to sea as the only chance of safety. That radio message was cut short--and men listened and shuddered. After that came the crowding aboard all craft in the harbors, the tragedies of the _Eustis_, the _All Australia_, the _Sepphoris_, sunk at their moorings. The innumerable sea tragedies. The horde of fugitives that landed in New Zealand. The reign of terror when the mob got out of hand, the burning of Melbourne, the sack of Sydney. And south and eastward, like a resistless flood, the beetle swarm came pouring. Well had Bram boasted that he would make the earth a desert! * * * * * A hundred miles of poisoned carcasses of sheep, extended outside Sydney's suburbs, gave the first promise of success. Long mounds of beetle shells testified to the results; moreover, the beetles that fed on the carcasses of their fellows, were in turn poisoned and died. But this was only a drop in the bucket. What counted was that the swift advance was slowing down. As if exhausted by their efforts, or else satiated with food, the beetles were doing what the soldiers did. They were digging in! Twenty-four miles from Sydney, eighteen outside Melbourne, the advance was stayed. Volunteers who went out from those cities reported that the beetles seemed to be resting in long trenches that they had excavated, so that only their shells appeared above ground. Trees were covered with clinging beetles, every wall, every house was invisible beneath the beetle armor. Australia had a respite. Perhaps only for a night or day, but still time to draw breath, time to consider, time for the shiploads of fugitives to get farther from the continent that had become a shambles. And then the cry went up, not only from Australia, but from all the world, "Get Travers!" CHAPTER X _At Bay_ Bram put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, a shrill whistle, yet audible to Dodd, Tommy, and Haidia. Instantly three pairs of beetles appeared out of the throng. Their tentacles went out, and the two men and the girl found themselves hoisted separately upon the backs of the pairs. Next moment they were flying side by side, high in the air above the surrounding swarm. They could see one another, but it was impossible for them to make their voices heard above the rasping of the beetles' legs. Hours went by, while the moon crossed the sky and dipped toward the horizon. Tommy knew that the moon would set about the hour of dawn. And the stars were already beginning to pale when he saw a line of telegraph poles, then two lines of shining metals, then a small settlement of stone and brick houses. Tommy was not familiar with the geography of Australia, but he knew this must be the transcontinental line. Whirling onward, the cloud of beetles suddenly swooped downward. For a moment Tommy could see the frightened occupants of the settlement crowding into the single street, then he shuddered with sick horror as he saw them obliterated by the swarm. There was no struggle, no attempt at flight or resistance. One moment those forty-odd men were there--the next minute they existed no longer. There was nothing but a swarm of beetles, walking about like men with shells upon their backs. And now Tommy saw evidences of Bram's devilish control of the swarm. For out of the cloud dropped what seemed to be a phalanx of beetle guards, the military police of beetledom, and, lashing fiercely with their tentacles, they drove back all the swarm that sought to join their companions in their ghoulish feast. There was just so much food and no more; the rest must seek theirs further. * * * * * But even beetles, it may be presumed, are not entirely under discipline at all times. The pair of beetles that bore Tommy, suddenly swooped apart, ten or a dozen feet from the ground, and dashed into the thick of the struggling, frenzied mass, flinging their rider to earth. Tommy struck the soft sand, sat up, half dazed, saw his shell lying a few feet away from him, and retrieved it just as a couple of the monsters came swooping down at him. He looked about him. Not far away stood Dodd and Haidia, with their shells on their backs. They recognized Tommy and ran toward him. Not more than twenty yards away stood the railroad station, with several crates of goods on the platform. Next to it was a substantial house of stone, with the front door open. Tommy pointed to it, and Dodd understood and shouted something that was lost in the furious buzz of the beetles' wings as they devoured their prey. The three raced for the entrance, gained it unmolested, and closed the door. There was a key in the door, and it was light enough for them to see a chain, which Dodd pulled into position. There was only one story, and there were three rooms, apparently, with the kitchen. Tommy rushed to the kitchen door, locked it, too, and, with almost super-human efforts, dragged the large iron stove against it. He rushed to the window, but it was a mere loophole, not large enough to admit a child. Nevertheless, he stood the heavy table on end so that it covered it. Then he ran back. * * * * * Dodd had already barricaded the window of the larger room, which was a bed-sitting room, with a heavy wardrobe, and the wooden bedstead, jamming the two pieces sidewise against the wall, so that they could not be forced apart without being demolished. He was now busy in the smaller room, which seemed to be the station-master's office, dragging an iron safe across the floor. But the window was criss-crossed with iron bars, and it was evident that the safe, which was locked, contained at times considerable money, for the window could hardly have been forced save by a charge of nitro-glycerine or dynamite. However, it was against the door that Dodd placed the safe, and he stood back, panting. "Good," said Haidia. "That will hold them." The two men looked at her doubtfully. Did Haidia know what she was talking about? The sun had risen. A long shaft shot into the room. Outside the beetles were still buzzing as they turned over the vestiges of their prey. There were as yet no signs of attack. Suddenly Tommy grasped Dodd's arm. "Look!" he shouted, pointing to a corner which had been in gloom a moment before. There was a table there, and on it a telegraphic instrument. Telegraphy had been one of Tommy's hobbies in boyhood. In a moment he was busy at the table. Dot-dash-dot-dash! Then suddenly outside a furious hum, and the impact of beetle bodies against the front door. * * * * * Tommy got up, grinning. That was the first, interrupted message from Tommy that was received. Through the barred window the three could see the furious efforts of the beetles to force an entrance. But the very tensile strength of the beetle-shells, which rendered them impervious to bullets, required a laminate construction which rendered them powerless against brick or stone. Desperately the swarm dashed itself against the walls, until the ground outside was piled high with stunned beetles. Not the faintest impression was made on the defenses. "Watch them, Jim," said Tom. "I'll go see if the rear's secure." That thought of his seemed to have been anticipated by the beetles, for as Tommy reached the kitchen the swarm came dashing against door and window, always recoiling. Tommy came back, grinning all over his face. "You were right, Haidia," he said. "We've held them all right, and the tables are turned on Bram. Also I got a message through, I think," he added to Dodd. Dash--dot--dash--dot from the instrument. Tommy ran to the table again. Dash--dot went back. For five minutes Tommy labored, while the beetles hammered now on one door, now on another, now on the windows. Then Tommy got up. "It was some station down the line," he said. "I've told them, and they're sending a man up here to replace the telegraphist, also a couple of cops. They think I'm crazy. I told them again. That's the best I could do." * * * * * "Dodd! Travers! For the last time--let's talk!" The cloud of beetles seemed to have thinned, for the sun was shining into the room. Bram's voice was perfectly audible, though he himself was invisible; probably he thought it likely that the defenders had obtained firearms. "Nothing to say to you, Bram," called Dodd. "We've finished our discussion on the monotremes." "I want you fellows to stand in with me," came Bram's plaintive tones. "It's so lonesome all by one's self, Dodd." "Ah, you're beginning to find that out, are you?" Dodd could not resist answering. "You'll be lonelier yet before you're through." "Dodd, I didn't bring that swarm up here. I swear it. I've been trying to control them from the beginning. I saw what was coming. I believe I can avert this horror, drive them into the sea or something like that. Don't make me desperate, Dodd. "And listen, old man. About those monotremes--sensible men don't quarrel over things like that. Why can't we agree to differ?" "Ah, now you're talking, Bram," Dodd answered. "Only you're too late. After what's happened here to-day, we'll have no truck with you. That's final." "Damn you," shrieked Bram. "I'll batter down this house. I'll--" "You'll do nothing, Bram, because you can't," Dodd answered. "Travers has wired full information about your devil-horde, and likewise about you, and all Australia will be prepared to give you a warm reception when you arrive." "I tell you I'm invincible," Bram screamed. "In three days Australia will be a ruin, a depopulated desert. In a week, all southern Asia, in three weeks Europe, in two months America." "You've been taking too many of those pellets, Bram," Dodd answered. "Stand back now! Stand back, wherever you are, or I'll open the door and throw the slops over you." * * * * * Bram's screech rose high above the droning of the wings. In another moment the interior of the room had grown as black as night. The rattle of the beetle shells against the four walls of the house was like the clattering of stage thunder. All through the darkness Dodd could hear the unhurried clicking of the key. At last the rattling ceased. The sun shone in again. The ground all around the house was packed with fallen beetles, six feet high, a writhing mass that creaked and clattered as it strove to disengage itself. Bram's voice once more: "I'm leaving a guard, Dodd. They'll get you if you try to leave. But they won't eat you. I'm going to have you three sliced into little pieces, the Thousand Deaths of the Chinese. The beetles will eat the parts that are sliced away--and you'll live to watch them. I'll be back with a stick or two of dynamite to-morrow." "Yeah, but listen, Bram," Dodd sang out. "Listen, you old marsupial tiger. When those pipe dreams clear away, I'm going to build a gallows of beetle-shells reaching to the moon, to hang you on!" Bram's screech of madness died away. The strident rasping of the beetles' legs began again. For hours the three heard it; it was not until nightfall that it died away. * * * * * Bram had made good his threat, for all around the house, extending as far as they could see, was the host of beetle-guards. To venture out, even with their shells about them, was clearly a hazardous undertaking. There was neither food nor water in the place. "We'll just have to hold out," said Dodd, breaking one of the long periods of silence. Tommy did not answer; he did not hear him, for he was busy at the key. Suddenly he leaped to his feet. "God, Jimmy," he cried, "that devil's making good his threat! The swarm's in South Australia, destroying every living thing, wiping out whole towns and villages! And they--they believe me now!" He sank into a chair. For the first time the strain of the awful past seemed to grip him. Haidia came to his side. "The beetles are finish," she said in her soft voice. "How d'you know, Haidia?" demanded Dodd. "The beetles are finish," Haidia repeated quietly, and that was all that Dodd could get out of her. But again the key began to click, and Tommy staggered to the table. Dot--dash--dash--dot. Presently he looked up once more. "The swarm's halfway to Adelaide," he said. "They want to know if I can help them. Help them!" He burst into hysterical laughter. Toward evening he came back after an hour at the key. "Line must be broken," he said. "I'm getting nothing." * * * * * In the moonlight they could see the huge compound eyes of the beetle guards glittering like enormous diamonds outside. They had not been conscious of thirst during the day, but now, with the coming of the cool night their desire for water became paramount. "Tommy, there must be water in the station," said Dodd. "I'm going to get a pitcher from the kitchen and risk it, Tommy. Take care of Haidia if--" he added. But Haidia laid her hand upon his arm. "Do not go, Jimmydodd," she said. "We can be thirsty to-night, and to-morrow the beetles will be finish." "How d'you know?" asked Dodd again. But now he realized that Haidia had never learned the significance of an interrogation. She only repeated her statement, and again the two men had to remain content. The long night passed. Outside the many facets of the beetle eyes. Inside the two men, desperate with anxiety, not for themselves, but for the fate of the world, snatching a few moments' sleep from time to time, then looking up to see those glaring eyes from the silent watchers. Then dawn came stealing over the desert, and the two shook themselves free from sleep. And now the eyes were gone. But there was immense activity among the beetles. They were scurrying to and fro, and, as they watched, Dodd and Tommy began to see some significance in their movements. "Why, they're digging trenches!" Tommy shouted. "That's horrible, Jimmy! Are they intending to conduct sapping operations against us like engineers, or what?" Dodd did not reply, and Tommy hardly expected any answer. As the two men, now joined by Haidia, watched, they saw that the beetles were actually digging themselves into the sand. * * * * * Within the space of an hour, by the time the first shafts of sunlight began to stream into the room, there was to be seen only the massive, rounded shells of the monsters as they squatted in the sand. "Now you may fetch water," said Haidia, smiling at her lover. "No, you do not need the shells," she added. "The beetles are finish. It is as the wise men of my people told me." Wondering, hesitating, Tommy and Dodd unlocked the front door. They stood upon the threshold ready to bolt back again. But there was no stirring among the beetle hosts. Growing bolder, they advanced a few steps; then, shamed by Haidia's courage, they followed her, still cautiously to the station. Dodd shouted as he saw a water-tank, and a receptacle above it with a water-cock. They let Haidia drink, then followed suit, and for a few moments, as they appeased their thirst, the beetles were forgotten. Then they turned back. There had been no movement in that line of shells that glinted in the morning sunlight. "Come, I shall show you," said Haidia confidently, advancing toward the trench. Dodd would have stopped her, but the girl moved forward quickly, eluded him with a graceful, mirthful gesture, and stooped down over the trench. She rose up, raising in her arms an empty beetle-shell! Dodd, who had reached the trench before Tommy, turned round and yelled to him excitedly. Tommy ran forward--and then he understood. The shells were empty. The swarm, whose life cycle Bram had admitted he did not understand, had just moulted! It had moulted because the bodies, gorged with food, had grown too large for the shells. In time, if left alone, the monsters would grow larger shells, become invincible again. But just now they were defenseless as new-born babes--and knew it. Deep underneath the empty shells they had burrowed into the ground. Everywhere at the bottom of the deep trenches were the naked, bestial creatures, waving helpless tentacles and squirming over one another as they strove to find shelter and security. A sudden madness came over Tommy and Dodd. "Dynamite--there must be dynamite!" Dodd shouted, as he ran back to the station. "Something better than dynamite," shouted Tommy, holding up one of a score of drums of petrol! CHAPTER XI _The World Set Free_ They waited two days at Settler's Station. To push along the line into the desert would have been useless, and both men were convinced that an airplane would arrive for them. But it was not until the second afternoon that the aviator arrived, half-dead with thirst and fatigue, and almost incoherent. His was the last plane on the Australian continent. He brought the news of the destruction of Adelaide, and of the siege of Melbourne and Sydney, as he termed it. He told Dodd and Tommy that the two cities had been surrounded with trenches and barbed wire. Machine guns and artillery were bombarding the trenches in which the beetles had taken shelter. "Has any one been out on reconnaissance?" asked Tommy. Nobody had been permitted to pass through the barbed wire, though there had been volunteers. It meant certain death. But, unless the beetles were sapping deep in the ground, what their purpose was, nobody knew. * * * * * Tommy and Dodd led him to the piles of smoking, stinking débris and told him. That was where the aviator fainted from sheer relief. "The Commonwealth wants you to take supreme command against the beetles," he told Tommy, when he had recovered. "I'm to bring you back. Not that they expect me back. But--God, what a piece of news! Forgive my swearing--I used to be a parson. Still am, for the matter of that." "How are you going to bring us three back in your plane?" asked Tommy. "I shall stay here with Jimmydodd," said Haidia suavely. "There is not the least danger any more. You must destroy the beetles before their shells have grown again, that's all." "Used to be a parson, you say? Still are?" shouted Dodd excitedly. "Thank God! I mean, I'm glad to hear it. Come inside, and come quick. I want you too, Tommy!" Then Tommy understood. And it seemed as if Haidia understood, by some instinct that belongs exclusively to women, for her cheeks were flushed as she turned and smiled into Dodd's eyes. Ten minutes later Tommy hopped into the biplane, leaving the happy married couple at Settler's Station. His eyes grew misty as the plane took the air, and he saw them waving to him from the ground. Dodd and Haidia and he had been through so many adventures, and had reached safety. He must not fail. * * * * * He did not fail. He found himself at Sydney in command of thirty thousand men, all enthusiastic for the fight for the human race, soldiers and volunteers ready to fight until they dropped. When the news of the situation was made public, an immense wave of hope ran through the world. National differences were forgotten, color and creed and race grew more tolerant of one another. A new day had dawned--the day of humanity's true liberation. Tommy's first act was to call out the fire companies and have the beetles' trenches saturated with petrol from the fire hoses. Then incendiary bullets, shot from guns from a safe distance, quickly converted them into blazing infernos. But even so only a tithe of the beetle army had been destroyed. Two hundred planes had already been rushed from New Zealand, and their aviators went up and scoured the country far and wide. Everywhere they found trenches, and, where the soil was stony, millions of the beetles clustered helplessly beneath great mounds of discarded shells. An army of black trackers had been brought in planes from all parts of the country, and they searched out the beetle masses everywhere along the course that the invaders had taken. Then incendiary bombs were dropped from above. * * * * * Day after day the beetle massacre went on. By the end of a week the survivors of the invasion began to take heart again. It was certain that the greater portion of the horde had been destroyed. There was only one thing lacking. No trace of Bram had been seen since his appearance at the head of his beetle army in front of Broken Hill. And louder and more insistent grew the world clamor that he should be found, and put to death in some way more horrible than any yet devised. The ingenuity of a million minds worked upon this problem. Newspapers all over the world offered prizes for the most suitable form of death. Ingenious Oriental tortures were rediscovered. The only thing lacking was Bram. A spy craze ran through Australia. Five hundred Brams were found, and all of them were in imminent danger of death before they were able to prove an alias. And, oddly enough, it was Tommy and Dodd who found Bram. For Dodd had been brought back east, together with his bride, and given an important command in the Army of Extermination. * * * * * Dodd had joined Tommy not far from Broken Hill, where a swarm of a hundred thousand beetles had been found in a little known valley. The monsters had begun to grow new shells, and the news had excited a fresh wave of apprehension. The airplanes had concentrated for an attack upon them, and Tommy and Dodd were riding together, Tommy at the controls, and Dodd observing. Dodd called through the tube to Tommy, and indicated a mass that was moving through the scrub--some fifty thousand beetles, executing short hops and evidently regaining some vitality. Tommy nodded. He signalled, and the fleet of planes circled around and began to drop their incendiary bombs. Within a few minutes the beetles were ringed with a wall of fire. Presently the whole terrain was a blazing furnace. Hours later, when the fires had died away, Tommy and Dodd went down to look at the destruction that had been wrought. The scene was horrible. Great masses of charred flesh and shell were piled up everywhere. "I guess that's been a pretty thorough job," said Tommy. "Let's get back, Jim." "What's that?" cried Dodd, pointing. Then, "My God, Tommy, it's one of our men!" * * * * * It was a man, but it was not one of their men, that creeping, maimed, half-cinder and half-human thing that was trying to crawl into the hollow of a rock. It was Bram, and recognition was mutual. Bram dropping, moaning; he was only the shell of a man, and it was incredible how he had managed to survive that ordeal of fire. The remainder of his life, which only his indomitable will had held in that shattered body, was evidently a matter of minutes, but he looked up at Dodd and laughed. "So--you're--here, damn you!" he snarled. "And--you think--you've won. I've--another card--another invasion of the world--beside which this is child's play. It's an invasion--" Bram was going, but he pulled himself together with a supreme effort. "Invasion by--new species of--monotremes," he croaked. "Deep down in--earth. Was saving to--prove you the liar you are. Monotremes--egg-laying platypus big as an elephant--existent long before pleistocene epoch--make you recant, you lying fool!" Bram died, an outburst of bitter laughter on his lips. Dodd stood silent for a while; then reverently he removed his hat. "He was a madman and a devil, but he had the potentialities of a god, Tommy," he said. * * * * * SUCH WELL-KNOW WRITERS AS Murray Leinster, Ray Cummings, Victor Rousseau, R. F. Starzl, A. T. Locke, Capt. S. P. Meek and Arthur J. Burks Write for =ASTOUNDING STORIES= * * * * * Mad Music _By Anthony Pelcher_ The sixty stories of the perfectly constructed Colossus building had mysteriously crashed! What was the connection between this catastrophe and the weird strains of the Mad Musician's violin? [Illustration: _In an inner room they found a diabolical machine._] To the accompaniment of a crashing roar, not unlike rumbling thunder, the proud Colossus Building, which a few minutes before had reared its sixty stories of artistic architecture towards the blue dome of the sky, crashed in a rugged, dusty heap of stone, brick, cement and mortar. The steel framework, like the skeleton of some prehistoric monster, still reared to dizzy heights but in a bent and twisted shape of grotesque outline. No one knew how many lives were snuffed out in the avalanche. As the collapse occurred in the early dawn it was not believed the death list would be large. It was admitted, however, that autos, cabs and surface cars may have been caught under the falling rock. One train was known to have been wrecked in the subway due to a cave-in from the surface under the ragged mountain of debris. The litter fairly filled a part of Times Square, the most congested cross-roads on God's footstool. Straggling brick and rock had rolled across the street to the west and had crashed into windows and doors of innocent small tradesmen's shops. A few minutes after the crash a mad crowd of people had piled from subway exits as far away as Penn Station and Columbus Circle and from cross streets. These milled about, gesticulating and shouting hysterically. All neighboring police stations were hard put to handle the growing mob. Hundreds of dead and maimed were being carried to the surface from the wrecked train in the subway. Trucks and cabs joined the ambulance crews in the work of transporting these to morgues and hospitals. As the morning grew older and the news of the disaster spread, more milling thousands tried to crowd into the square. Many were craning necks hopelessly on the outskirts of the throng, blocks away, trying vainly to get a view of what lay beyond. The fire department and finally several companies of militia joined the police in handling the crowd. Newsies, never asleep, yowled their "Wuxtras" and made much small money. The newspapers devoted solid pages in attempting to describe what had happened. Nervously, efficient reporters had written and written, using all their best adjectives and inventing new ones in attempts to picture the crash and the hysterics which followed. * * * * * When the excitement was at its height a middle-aged man, bleeding at the head, clothes torn and dusty, staggered into the West 47th street police station. He found a lone sergeant at the desk. The police sergeant jumped to his feet as the bedraggled man entered and stumbled to a bench. "I'm Pat Brennan, street floor watchman of the Colossus," he said. "I ran for it. I got caught in the edge of the wreck and a brick clipped me. I musta been out for some time. When I came around I looked back just once at the wreck and then I beat it over here. Phone my boss." "I'll let you phone your boss," said the sergeant, "but first tell me just what happened." "Earthquake, I guess. I saw the floor heaving in waves. Glass was crashing and falling into the street. All windows in the arcade buckled, either in or out. I ran into the street and looked up. God, what a sight! The building from sidewalk to towers was rocking and waving and twisting and buckling and I saw it was bound to crumple, so I lit out and ran. I heard a roar like all Hell broke loose and then something nicked me and my light went out." "How many got caught in the building?" "Nobody got out but me, I guess. There weren't many tenants. The building is all rented, but not everybody had moved in yet and those as had didn't spend their nights there. There was a watchman for every five stories. An engineer and his crew. Three elevator operators had come in. There was no names of tenants in or out on my book after 4 A.M. The crash musta come about 6. That's all." * * * * * Throughout the country the news of the crash was received with great interest and wonderment, but in one small circle it caused absolute consternation. That was in the offices of the Muller Construction Company, the builders of the Colossus. Jason V. Linane, chief engineer of the company, was in conference with its president, James J. Muller. Muller sat with his head in his hands, and his face wore an expression of a man in absolute anguish. Linane was pacing the floor, a wild expression in his eyes, and at times he muttered and mumbled under his breath. In the other offices the entire force from manager to office boys was hushed and awed, for they had seen the expressions on the faces of the heads of the concern when they stalked into the inner office that morning. Muller finally looked up, rather hopelessly, at Linane. "Unless we can prove that the crash was due to some circumstance over which we had no control, we are ruined," he said, and there actually were tears in his eyes. "No doubt about that," agreed Linane, "but I can swear that the Colossus went up according to specifications and that every ounce and splinter of material was of the best. The workmanship was faultless. We have built scores of the biggest blocks in the world and of them all this Colossus was the most perfect. I had prided myself on it. Muller, it was perfection. I simply cannot account for it. I cannot. It should have stood up for thousands of years. The foundation was solid rock. It positively was not an earthquake. No other building in the section was even jarred. No other earthquake was ever localized to one half block of the earth's crust, and we can positively eliminate an earthquake or an explosion as the possible cause. I am sure we are not to blame, but we will have to find the exact cause." "If there was some flaw?" questioned Muller, although he knew the answer. "If there was some flaw, then we're sunk. The newspapers are already clamoring for probes, of us, of the building, of the owners and everybody and everything. We have got to have something damned plausible when we go to bat on this proposition or every dollar we have in the world will have to be paid out." "That is not all," said Muller: "not only will we be penniless, but we may have to go to jail and we will never be able to show our faces in reputable business circles again. Who was the last to go over that building?" "I sent Teddy Jenks. He is a cub and is swell headed and too big for his pants, but I would bank my life on his judgment. He has the judgment of a much older man and I would also bank my life and reputation on his engineering skill and knowledge. He pronounced the building positively O.K.--100 per cent." "Where is Jenks?" "He will be here as soon as his car can drive down from Tarrytown. He should be here now." * * * * * As they talked Jenks, the youngest member of the engineering force, entered. He entered like a whirlwind. He threw his hat on the floor and drew out a drawer of a cabinet. He pulled out the plans for the Colossus, big blue prints, some of them yards in extent, and threw them on the floor. Then he dropped to his knees and began poring over them. "This is a hell of a time for you to begin getting around," exploded Muller. "What were you doing, cabareting all night?" "It sure is terrible--awful," said Jenks, half to himself. "Answer me," thundered Muller. "Oh yes," said Jenks, looking up. He saw the look of anguish on his boss's face and forgot his own excitement in sympathy. He jumped to his feet, placed his arm about the shoulders of the older man and led him to a chair. Linane only scowled at the young man. "I was delayed because I stopped by to see the wreck. My God, Mr. Muller, it is awful." Jenks drew his hand across his eye as if to erase the scene of the wrecked building. Then patting the older man affectionately on the back he said: "Buck up. I'm on the job, as usual. I'll find out about it. It could not have been our fault. Why man, that building was as strong as Gibraltar itself!" "You were the last to inspect it," accused Muller, with a break in his voice. "Nobody knows that better than I, and I can swear by all that's square and honest that it was no fault of the material or the construction. It must have been--" "Must have been what?" "I'll be damned if I know." "That's like him," said Linane, who, while really kindly intentioned, had always rather enjoyed prodding the young engineer. "Like me, like the devil," shouted Jenks, glaring at Linane. "I suppose you know all about it, you're so blamed wise." "No, I don't know," admitted Linane. "But I do know that you don't like me to tell you anything. Nevertheless, I am going to tell you that you had better get busy and find out what caused it, or--" "That's just what I'm doing," said Jenks, and he dived for his plans on the floor. Newspaper reporters, many of them, were fighting outside to get in. Muller looked at Linane when a stenographer had announced the reporters for the tenth time. "We had better let them in," he said, "it looks bad to crawl for cover." "What are you going to tell them?" asked Linane. "God only knows," said Muller. "Let me handle them," said Jenks, looking up confidently. * * * * * The newspapermen had rushed the office. They came in like a wild wave. Questions flew like feathers at a cock-fight. Muller held up his hand and there was something in his grief-stricken eyes that held the gentlemen of the press in silence. They had time to look around. They saw the handsome, dark-haired, brown-eyed Jenks poring over the plans. Dust from the carpet smudged his knees, and he had rubbed some of it over a sweating forehead, but he still looked the picture of self-confident efficiency. "Gentlemen," said Muller slowly, "I can answer all your questions at once. Our firm is one of the oldest and staunchest in the trade. Our buildings stand as monuments to our integrity--" "All but one," said a young Irishman. "You are right. All but one," confessed Muller. "But that one, believe me, has been visited by an act of God. Some form of earthquake or some unlooked for, uncontrolled, almost unbelievable catastrophe has happened. The Muller company stands back of its work to its last dollar. Gentlemen, you know as much as we do. Mr. Jenks there, whose reputation as an engineer is quite sturdy, I assure you, was the last to inspect the building. He passed upon it when it was finished. He is at your service." Jenks arose, brushed some dust from his knees. "You look like you'd been praying," bandied the Irishman. "Maybe I have. Now let me talk. Don't broadside me with questions. I know what you want to know. Let me talk." The newspapermen were silent. "There has been talk of probing this disaster, naturally," began Jenks. "You all know, gentlemen, that we will aid any inquiry to our utmost. You want to know what we have to say about it--who is responsible. In a reasonable time I will have a statement to make that will be startling in the extreme. I am not sure of my ground now." "How about the ground under the Colossus?" said the Irishman. "Don't let's kid each other," pleaded Jenks. "Look at Mr. Muller: it is as if he had lost his whole family. We are good people. I am doing all I can. Mr. Linane, who had charge of the construction, is doing all he can. We believe we are blameless. If it is proven otherwise we will acknowledge our fault, assume financial responsibility, and take our medicine. Believe me, that building was perfection plus, like all our buildings. That covers the entire situation." Hundreds of questions were parried and answered by the three engineers, and the reporters left convinced that if the Muller Construction Company was responsible, it was not through any fault of its own. * * * * * The fact that Jenks and Linane were not strong for each other, except to recognize each other's ability as engineers, was due to an incident of the past. This incident had caused a ripple of mirth in engineering circles when it happened, and the laugh was on the older man, Linane. It was when radio was new. Linane, a structural engineer, had paid little attention to radio. Jenks was the kind of an engineer who dabbled in all sciences. He knew his radio. When Jenks first came to work with a technical sheepskin and a few tons of brass, Linane accorded him only passing notice. Jenks craved the plaudits of the older man and his palship. Linane treated him as a son, but did not warm to his social advances. "I'm as good an engineer as he is," mused Jenks, "and if he is going to high-hat me, I'll just put a swift one over on him and compel his notice." The next day Jenks approached Linane in conference and said: "I've got a curious bet on, Mr. Linane. I am betting sound can travel a mile quicker than it travels a quarter of a mile." "What?" said Linane. "I'm betting fifty that sound can travel a mile quicker than it can travel a quarter of a mile." "Oh no--it can't," insisted Linane. "Oh yes--it can!" decided Jenks. "I'll take some of that fool money myself," said Linane. "How much?" asked Jenks. "As much as you want." "All right--five hundred dollars." "How you going to prove your contention?" "By stop watches, and your men can hold the watches. We'll bet that a pistol shot can be heard two miles away quicker than it can be heard a quarter of a mile away." "Sound travels about a fifth of a mile a second. The rate varies slightly according to temperature," explained Linane. "At the freezing point the rate is 1,090 feet per second and increases a little over one foot for every degree Fahrenheit." "Hot or cold," breezed Jenks, "I am betting you five hundred dollars that sound can travel two miles quicker than a quarter-mile." "You're on, you damned idiot!" shouted the completely exasperated Linane. * * * * * Jenks let Linane's friends hold the watches and his friend held the money. Jenks was to fire the shot. Jenks fired the shot in front of a microphone on a football field. One of Linane's friends picked the sound up instantaneously on a three-tube radio set two miles away. The other watch holder was standing in the open a quarter of a mile away and his watch showed a second and a fraction. All hands agreed that Jenks had won the bet fairly. Linane never exactly liked Jenks after that. Then Jenks rather aggravated matters by a habit. Whenever Linane would make a very positive statement Jenks would look owl-eyed and say: "Mr. Linane, I'll have to sound you out about that." The heavy accent on the word "sound" nettled Linane somewhat. Linane never completely forgave Jenks for putting over this "fast one." Socially they were always more or less at loggerheads, but neither let this feeling interfere with their work. They worked together faithfully enough and each recognized the ability of the other. And so it was that Linane and Jenks, their heads together, worked all night in an attempt to find some cause that would tie responsibility for the disaster on mother nature. They failed to find it and, sleepy-eyed, they were forced to admit failure, so far. The newspapers, to whom Muller had said that he would not shirk any responsibility, began a hue and cry for the arrest of all parties in any way concerned with the direction of the building of the Colossus. When the death list from the crash and subway wreck reached 97, the press waxed nasty and demanded the arrest of Muller, Linane and Jenks in no uncertain tones. Half dead from lack of sleep, the three men were taken by the police to the district attorney's offices and, after a strenuous grilling, were formally placed under arrest on charges of criminal negligence. They put up a $50,000 bond in each case and were permitted to go and seek further to find the cause of what the newspapers now began calling the "Colossal Failure." Several days were spent by Linane and Jenks in examining the wreckage which was being removed from Times Square, truckload after truckload, to a point outside the city. Here it was again sorted and examined and piled for future disposal. So far as could be found every brick, stone and ounce of material used in the building was perfect. Attorneys, however, assured Linane, Jenks and Muller that they would have to find the real cause of the disaster if they were to escape possible long prison sentences. Night after night Jenks courted sleep, but it would not come. He began to grow wan and haggard. * * * * * Jenks took to walking the streets at night, mile after mile, thinking, always thinking, and searching his mind for a solution of the mystery. It was evening. He had walked past the scene of the Colossus crash several times. He found himself on a side street. He looked up and saw in electric lights: TOWN HALL _Munsterbergen, the Mad Musician_ Concert Here To-night. He took five dollars from his pocket and bought a ticket. He entered with the crowd and was ushered to a seat. He looked neither to the right or left. His eyes were sunken, his face lined with worry. Something within Jenks caused him to turn slightly. He was curiously aware of a beautiful girl who sat beside him. She had a mass of golden hair which seemed to defy control. It was wild, positively tempestuous. Her eyes were deep blue and her skin as white as fleecy clouds in spring. He was dimly conscious that those glorious eyes were troubled. She glanced at him. She was aware that he was suffering. A great surge of sympathy welled in her heart. She could not explain the feeling. A great red plush curtain parted in the center and drew in graceful folds to the edges of the proscenium. A small stage was revealed. A tousle-headed man with glaring, beady black eyes, dressed in black evening clothes stepped forward and bowed. Under his arm was a violin. He brought the violin forward. His nose, like the beak of some great bird, bobbed up and down in acknowledgment of the plaudits which greeted him. His long nervous fingers began to caress the instrument and his lips began to move. Jenks was aware that he was saying something, but was not at all interested. What he said was this: "Maybe, yes, I couldn't talk so good English, but you could understood it, yes? Und now I tell you dot I never play the compositions of any man. I axtemporize exgloosively. I chust blay und blay, und maybe you should listen, yes? If I bleeze you I am chust happy." Jenks' attention was drawn to him. He noted his wild appearance. "He sure looks mad enough," mused Jenks. * * * * * The violinist flipped the fiddle up under his chin. He drew the bow over the strings and began a gentle melody that reminded one of rain drops falling on calm waters. Jenks forgot his troubles. He forgot everything. He slumped in his seat and his eyes closed. The rain continued falling from the strings of the violin. Suddenly the melody changed to a glad little lilting measure, as sweet as love itself. The sun was coming out again and the birds began to sing. There was the trill of a canary with the sun on its cage. There was the song of the thrush, the mocking-bird and the meadow lark. These blended finally into a melodious burst of chirping melody which seemed a chorus of the wild birds of the forest and glen. Then the lilting love measure again. It tore at the heart strings, and brought tears to one's eyes. Unconsciously the girl next to Jenks leaned towards him. Involuntarily he leaned to meet her. Their shoulders touched. The cloud of her golden hair came to rest against his dark locks. Their hands found each other with gentle pressure. Both were lost to the world. Abruptly the music changed. There was a succession of broken treble notes that sounded like the crackling of flames. Moans deep and melancholy followed. These grew more strident and prolonged, giving place to abject howls, suggesting the lamentations of the damned. The hands of the boy and girl gripped tensely. They could not help shuddering. The violin began to produce notes of a leering, jeering character, growing more horrible with each measure until they burst in a loud guffaw of maniacal laughter. The whole performance was as if someone had taken a heaven and plunged it into a hell. The musician bowed jerkily, and was gone. * * * * * There was no applause, only wild exclamations. Half the house was on its feet. The other half sat as if glued to chairs. The boy and the girl were standing, their hands still gripping tensely. "Come, let's get out of here," said Jenks. The girl took her wrap and Jenks helped her into it. Hand in hand they fled the place. In the lobby their eyes met, and for the first time they realized they were strangers. Yet deep in their hearts was a feeling that their fates had been sealed. "My goodness!" burst from the girl. "It can't be helped now," said Jenks decisively. "What can't be helped?" asked the girl, although she knew in her heart. "Nothing can be helped," said Jenks. Then he added: "We should know each other by this time. We have been holding hands for an hour." The girl's eyes flared. "You have no right to presume on that situation," she said. Jenks could have kicked himself. "Forgive me," he said. "It was only that I just wanted so to know you. Won't you let me see you home?" "You may," said the girl simply, and she led the way to her own car. They drove north. Their bodies seemed like magnets. They were again shoulder to shoulder, holding hands. "Will you tell me your name?" pleaded Jenks. "Surely," replied the girl. "I am Elaine Linane." "What?" exploded Jenks. "Why, I work with a Linane, an engineer with the Muller Construction Company." "He is my father," she said. "Why, we are great friends," said the boy. "I am Jenks, his assistant--at least we work together." "Yes, I have heard of you," said the girl. "It is strange, the way we met. My father admires your work, but I am afraid you are not great friends." The girl had forgotten her troubles. She chuckled. She had heard the way Jenks had "sounded" her father out. Jenks was speechless. The girl continued: "I don't know whether to like you or to hate you. My father is an old dear. You were cruel to him." Jenks was abject. "I did not mean to be," he said. "He rather belittled me without realizing it. I had to make my stand. The difference in our years made him take me rather too lightly. I had to compel his notice, if I was to advance." "Oh!" said the girl. "I am sorry--so sorry." "You might not have been altogether at fault," said the girl. "Father forgets at times that I have grown up. I resent being treated like a child, but he is the soul of goodness and fatherly care." "I know that," said Jenks. * * * * * Every engineer knows his mathematics. It was this fact, coupled with what the world calls a "lucky break," that solved the Colossus mystery. Nobody can get around the fact that two and two make four. Jenks had happened on accomplishment to advance in the engineering profession, and it was well for him that he had reached a crisis. He had never believed in luck or in hunches, so it was good for him to be brought face to face with the fact that sometimes the footsteps of man are guided. It made him begin to look into the engineering of the universe, to think more deeply, and to acknowledge a Higher Power. With Linane he had butted into a stone wall. They were coming to know what real trouble meant. The fact that they were innocent did not make the steel bars of a cage any more attractive. Their troubles began to wrap about them with the clammy intimacy of a shroud. Then came the lucky break. Next to his troubles, Jenks' favorite topic was the Mad Musician. He tried to learn all he could about this uncanny character at whose concert he had met the girl of his life. He learned two facts that made him perk up and think. One was that the Mad Musician had had offices and a studio in the Colossus and was one of the first to move in. The other was that the Mad Musician took great delight in shattering glassware with notes of or vibrations from a violin. Nearly everyone knows that a glass tumbler can be shattered by the proper note sounded on a violin. The Mad Musician took delight in this trick. Jenks courted his acquaintance, and saw him shatter a row of glasses of different sizes by sounding different notes on his fiddle. The glasses crashed one after another like gelatine balls hit by the bullets of an expert rifleman. Then Jenks, the engineer who knew his mathematics, put two and two together. It made four, of course. "Listen, Linane," he said to his co-worker: "this fiddler is crazier than a flock of cuckoos. If he can crack crockery with violin sound vibrations, is it not possible, by carrying the vibrations to a much higher power, that he could crack a pile of stone, steel, brick and cement, like the Colossus?" "Possible, but hardly probable. Still," Linane mused, "when you think about it, and put two and two together.... Let's go after him and see what he is doing now." Both jumped for their coats and hats. As they fared forth, Jenks cinched his argument: "If a madman takes delight in breaking glassware with a vibratory wave or vibration, how much more of a thrill would he get by crashing a mountain?" "Wild, but unanswerable," said Linane. * * * * * Jenks had been calling on the Mad Musician at his country place. "He had a studio in the Colossus," he reminded Linane. "He must have re-opened somewhere else in town. I wonder where." "Musicians are great union men," said Linane. "Phone the union." Teddy Jenks did, but the union gave the last known town address as the Colossus. "He would remain in the same district around Times Square," reasoned Jenks. "Let's page out the big buildings and see if he is not preparing to crash another one." "Fair enough," said Linane, who was too busy with the problem at hand to choose his words. Together the engineers started a canvass of the big buildings in the theatrical district. After four or five had been searched without result they entered the 30-story Acme Theater building. Here they learned that the Mad Musician had leased a four-room suite just a few days before. This suite was on the fifteenth floor, just half way up in the big structure. They went to the manager of the building and frankly stated their suspicions. "We want to enter that suite when the tenant is not there," they explained, "and we want him forestalled from entering while we are examining the premises." "Hadn't we better notify the police?" asked the building manager, who had broken out in a sweat when he heard the dire disaster which might be in store for the stately Acme building. "Not yet," said Linane. "You see, we are not sure: we have just been putting two and two together." "We'll get the building detective, anyway," insisted the manager. "Let him come along, but do not let him know until we are sure. If we are right we will find a most unusual infernal machine," said Linane. * * * * * The three men entered the suite with a pass-key. The detective was left outside in the hall to halt anyone who might disturb the searchers. It was as Jenks had thought. In an inner room they found a diabolical machine--a single string stretched across two bridges, one of brass and one of wood. A big horsehair bow attached to a shaft operated by a motor was automatically sawing across the string. The note resulting was evidently higher than the range of the human ear, because no audible sound resulted. It was later estimated that the destructive note was several octaves higher than the highest note on a piano. The entire machine was enclosed in a heavy wire-net cage, securely bolted to the floor. Neither the string or bow could be reached. It was evidently the Mad Musician's idea that the devilish contrivance should not be reached by hands other than his own. How long the infernal machine had been operating no one knew, but the visitors were startled when the building suddenly began to sway perceptibly. Jenks jumped forward to stop the machine but could not find a switch. "See if the machine plugs in anywhere in a wall socket!" he shouted to Linane, who promptly began examining the walls. Jenks shouted to the building manager to phone the police to clear the streets around the big building. "Tell the police that the Acme Theater building may crash at any moment," he instructed. The engineers were perfectly cool in face of the great peril, but the building manager lost his head completely and began to run around in circles muttering: "Oh, my God, save me!" and other words of supplication that blended into an incoherent babel. Jenks rushed to the man, trying to still his wild hysteria. The building continued to sway dangerously. * * * * * Jenks looked from a window. An enormous crowd was collecting, watching the big building swinging a foot out of plumb like a giant pendulum. The crowd was growing. Should the building fall the loss of life would be appalling. It was mid-morning. The interior of the building teemed with thousands of workers, for all floors above the third were offices. Teddy Jenks turned suddenly. He heard the watchman in the hall scream in terror. Then he heard a body fall. He rushed to the door to see the Mad Musician standing over the prostrate form of the detective, a devilish grin on his distorted countenance. The madman turned, saw Jenks, and started to run. Jenks took after him. Up the staircase the madman rushed toward the roof. Teddy followed him two floors and then rushed out to take the elevators. The building in its mad swaying had made it impossible for the lifts to be operated. Teddy realized this with a distraught gulp in his throat. He returned to the stairway and took up the pursuit of the madman. The corridors were beginning to fill with screaming men and wailing girls. It was a sight never to be forgotten. Laboriously Jenks climbed story after story without getting sight of the madman. Finally he reached the roof. It was waving like swells on a lake before a breeze. He caught sight of the Mad Musician standing on the street wall, thirty stories from the street, a leer on his devilish visage. He jumped for him. The madman grasped him and lifted him up to the top of the wall as a cat might have lifted a mouse. Both men were breathing heavily as a result of their 15-story climb. The madman tried to throw Teddy Jenks to the street below. Teddy clung to him. The two battled desperately as the building swayed. The dense crowd in the street had caught sight of the two men fighting on the narrow coping, and the shout which rent the air reached the ears of Jenks. * * * * * The mind of the engineer was still working clearly, but a wild fear gripped his heart. His strength seemed to be leaving him. The madman pushed him back, bending his spine with brute strength. Teddy was forced to the narrow ledge that had given the two men footing. The fingers of the madman gripped his throat. He was dimly conscious that the swaying of the building was slowing down. His reason told him that Linane had found the wall socket and had stopped the sawing of the devil's bow on the engine of hell. He saw the madman draw a big knife. With his last remaining strength he reached out and grasped the wrist above the hand which held the weapon. In spite of all he could do he saw the madman inching the knife nearer and nearer his throat. Grim death was peering into the bulging eyes of Teddy Jenks, when his engineering knowledge came to his rescue. He remembered the top stories of the Acme building were constructed with a step of ten feet in from the street line, for every story of construction above the 24th floor. "If we fall," he reasoned, "we can only fall one story." Then he deliberately rolled his own body and the weight of the madman, who held him, over the edge of the coping. At the same time he twisted the madman's wrist so the point of the knife pointed to the madman's body. There was a dim consciousness of a painful impact. Teddy had fallen underneath, but the force of the two bodies coming together had thrust the knife deep into the entrails of the Mad Musician. Clouds which had been collecting in the sky began a splattering downpour. The storm grew in fury and lightning tore the heavens, while thunder boomed and crackled. The rain began falling in sheets. * * * * * This served to revive the unconscious Teddy. He painfully withdrew his body from under that of the madman. The falling rain, stained with the blood of the Mad Musician, trickled over the edge of the building. Teddy dragged himself through a window and passed his hand over his forehead, which was aching miserably. He tried to get to his feet and fell back, only to try again. Several times he tried and then, his strength returning, he was able to walk. He made his way to the studio where he had left Linane and found him there surrounded by police, reporters and others. The infernal machine had been rendered harmless, but was kept intact as evidence. Catching sight of Teddy, Linane shouted with joy. "I stopped the damned thing," he chuckled, like a pleased schoolboy. Then, observing Teddy's exhausted condition he added: "Why, you look like you have been to a funeral!" "I have," said Teddy. "You'll find that crazy fiddler dead on the twenty-ninth story. Look out the window of the thirtieth story," he instructed the police, who had started to recover the body. "He stabbed himself. He is either dead or dying." It proved that he was dead. No engineering firm is responsible for the actions of a madman. So the Muller Construction Company was given a clean bill of health. * * * * * Jenks and Elaine Linane were with the girl's father in his study. They were asking for the paternal blessing. Linane was pretending to be hard to convince. "Now, my daughter," he said, "this young man takes $500 of my good money by sounding me out, as he calls it. Then he comes along and tries to take my daughter away from me. It is positively high-handed. It dates back to the football game--" "Daddy, dear, don't be like that!" said Elaine, who was on the arm of his chair with her own arms around him. "I tell you, Elaine, this dates back to the fall of 1927." "It dates back to the fall of Eve," said Elaine. "When a girl finds her man, no power can keep him from her. If you won't give me to Teddy Jenks, I'll elope with him." "Well, all right then. Kiss me," said Linane as he turned towards his radio set. "One and one makes one," said Teddy Jenks. Every engineer knows his mathematics. * * * * * _Have you written in to_ ASTOUNDING STORIES _Yet, to Tell the Editors Just What Kind of Stories You Would Like Them to Secure for You?_ * * * * * The Thief of Time _By Captain S. P. Meek_ The teller turned to the stacked pile of bills. They were gone! And no one had been near! [Illustration: "_That man never entered and stole that money as the picture shows, unless he managed to make himself invisible._"] Harvey Winston, paying teller of the First National Bank of Chicago, stripped the band from a bundle of twenty dollar bills, counted out seventeen of them and added them to the pile on the counter before him. "Twelve hundred and thirty-one tens," he read from the payroll change slip before him. The paymaster of the Cramer Packing Company nodded an assent and Winston turned to the stacked bills in his rear currency rack. He picked up a handful of bundles and turned back to the grill. His gaze swept the counter where, a moment before, he had stacked the twenties, and his jaw dropped. "You got those twenties, Mr. Trier?" he asked. "Got them? Of course not, how could I?" replied the paymaster. "There they are...." His voice trailed off into nothingness as he looked at the empty counter. "I must have dropped them," said Winston as he turned. He glanced back at the rear rack where his main stock of currency was piled. He stood paralyzed for a moment and then reached under the counter and pushed a button. The bank resounded instantly to the clangor of gongs and huge steel grills shot into place with a clang, sealing all doors and preventing anyone from entering or leaving the bank. The guards sprang to their stations with drawn weapons and from the inner offices the bank officials came swarming out. The cashier, followed by two men, hurried to the paying teller's cage. "What is it, Mr. Winston?" he cried. "I've been robbed!" gasped the teller. "Who by? How?" demanded the cashier. "I--I don't know, sir," stammered the teller. "I was counting out Mr. Trier's payroll, and after I had stacked the twenties I turned to get the tens. When I turned back the twenties were gone." "Where had they gone?" asked the cashier. "I don't know, sir. Mr. Trier was as surprised as I was, and then I turned back, thinking that I had knocked them off the counter, and I saw at a glance that there was a big hole in my back racks. You can see yourself, sir." The cashier turned to the paymaster. "Is this a practical joke, Mr. Trier?" he demanded sharply. "Of course not," replied the paymaster. "Winston's grill was closed. It still is. Granted that I might have reached the twenties he had piled up, how could I have gone through a grill and taken the rest of the missing money without his seeing me? The money disappeared almost instantly. It was there a moment before, for I noticed when Winston took the twenties from his rack that it was full." "But someone must have taken it," said the bewildered cashier. "Money doesn't walk off of its own accord or vanish into thin air--" A bell interrupted his speech. "There are the police," he said with an air of relief. "I'll let them in." * * * * * The smaller of the two men who had followed the cashier from his office when the alarm had sounded stepped forward and spoke quietly. His voice was low and well pitched yet it carried a note of authority and power that held his auditors' attention while he spoke. The voice harmonized with the man. The most noticeable point about him was the inconspicuousness of his voice and manner, yet there was a glint of steel in his gray eyes that told of enormous force in him. "I don't believe that I would let them in for a few moments, Mr. Rogers," he said. "I think that we are up against something a little different from the usual bank robbery." "But, Mr. Carnes," protested the cashier, "we must call in the police in a case like this, and the sooner they take charge the better chance there will be of apprehending the thief." "Suit yourself," replied the little man with a shrug of his shoulders. "I merely offered my advice." "Will you take charge, Mr. Carnes?" asked the cashier. "I can't supersede the local authorities in a case like this," replied Carnes. "The secret service is primarily interested in the suppression of counterfeiting and the enforcement of certain federal statutes, but I will be glad to assist the local authorities to the best of my ability, provided they desire my help. My advice to you would be to keep out the patrolmen who are demanding admittance and get in touch with the chief of police. I would ask that his best detective together with an expert finger-print photographer be sent here before anyone else is admitted. If the patrolmen are allowed to wipe their hands over Mr. Winston's counter they may destroy valuable evidence." "You are right, Mr. Carnes," exclaimed the cashier. "Mr. Jervis, will you tell the police that there is no violence threatening and ask them to wait for a few minutes? I'll telephone the chief of police at once." * * * * * As the cashier hurried away to his telephone Carnes turned to his companion who had stood an interested, although silent spectator of the scene. His companion was a marked contrast to the secret service operator. He stood well over six feet in height, and his protruding jaw and shock of unruly black hair combined with his massive shoulders and chest to give him the appearance of a man who labored with his hands--until one looked at them. His hands were in strange contrast to the rest of him. Long, slim, mobile hands they were, with tapering nervous fingers--the hands of a thinker or of a musician. Telltale splotches of acid told of hours spent in a laboratory, a tale that was confirmed by the almost imperceptible stoop of his shoulders. "Do you agree with my advice, Dr. Bird?" asked Carnes deferentially. The noted scientist, who from his laboratory in the Bureau of Standards had sent forth many new things in the realms of chemistry and physics, and who, incidentally, had been instrumental in solving some of the most baffling mysteries which the secret service had been called upon to face, grunted. "It didn't do any harm," he said, "but it is rather a waste of time. The thief wore gloves." "How in thunder do you know that?" demanded Carnes. "It's merely common sense. A man who can do what he did had at least some rudiments of intelligence, and even the feeblest-minded crooks know enough to wear gloves nowadays." Carnes stepped a little closer to the doctor. "Another reason why I didn't want patrolmen tramping around," he said in an undertone, "is this. If Winston gave the alarm quickly enough, the thief is probably still in the building." "He's a good many miles away by now," replied Dr. Bird with a shrug of his shoulders. * * * * * Carnes' eyes opened widely. "Why?--how?--who?" he stammered. "Have you any idea of who did it, or how it was done?" "Possibly I have an idea," replied Dr. Bird with a cryptic smile. "My advice to you, Carnes, is to keep away from the local authorities as much as possible. I want to be present when Winston and Trier are questioned and I may possibly wish to ask a few questions myself. Use your authority that far, but no farther. Don't volunteer any information and especially don't let my name get out. We'll drop the counterfeiting case we were summoned here on for the present and look into this a little on our own hook. I will want your aid, so don't get tied up with the police." "At that, we don't want the police crossing our trail at every turn," protested Carnes. "They won't," promised the doctor. "They will never get any evidence on this case, if I am right, and neither will we--for the present. Our stunt is to lie low and wait for the next attempt of this nature and thus accumulate some evidence and some idea of where to look." "Will there be another attempt?" asked Carnes. "Surely. You don't expect a man who got away with a crime like this to quit operations just because a few flatfeet run around and make a hullabaloo about it, do you? I may be wrong in my assumption, but if I am right, the most important thing is to keep all reference to my name or position out of the press reports." The cashier hastened up to them. "Detective-Captain Sturtevant will be here in a few minutes with a photographer and some other men," he said. "Is there anything that we can do in the meantime, Mr. Carnes?" "I would suggest that Mr. Trier and his guard and Mr. Winston go into your office," replied Carnes. "My assistant and I would like to be present during the questioning, if there are no objections." "I didn't know that you had an assistant with you," answered the cashier. Carnes indicated Dr. Bird. "This gentleman is Mr. Berger, my assistant," he said. "Do you understand?" "Certainly. I am sure there will be no objection to your presence, Mr. Carnes," replied the cashier as he led the way to his office. * * * * * A few minutes later Detective-Captain Sturtevant of the Chicago police was announced. He acknowledged the introductions gruffly and got down to business at once. "What were the circumstances of the robbery?" he asked. Winston told his story, Trier and the guard confirming it. "Pretty thin!" snorted the detective when they had finished. He whirled suddenly on Winston. "Where did you hide the loot?" he thundered. "Why--uh--er--what do you mean?" gulped the teller. "Just what I said," replied the detective. "Where did you hide the loot?" "I didn't hide it anywhere," said the teller. "It was stolen." "You had better think up a better one," sneered Sturtevant. "If you think that you can make me believe that that money was stolen from you in broad daylight with two men in plain sight of you who didn't see it, you might just as well get over it. I know that you have some hiding place where you have slipped the stuff and the quicker you come clean and spill it, the better it will be for you. Where did you hide it?" "I didn't hide it!" cried the teller, his voice trembling. "Mr. Trier can tell you that I didn't touch it from the time I laid it down until I turned back." "That's right," replied the paymaster. "He turned his back on me for a moment, and when he turned back, it was gone." "So you're in on it too, are you?" said Sturtevant. "What do you mean?" demanded the paymaster hotly. "Oh nothing, nothing at all," replied the detective. "Of course Winston didn't touch it and it disappeared and you never saw it go, although you were within three feet of it all the time. Did _you_ see anything?" he demanded of the guard. "Nothing that I am sure of," answered the guard. "I thought that a shadow passed in front of me for an instant, but when I looked again, it was gone." * * * * * Dr. Bird sat forward suddenly. "What did this shadow look like?" he asked. "It wasn't exactly a shadow," said the guard. "It was as if a person had passed suddenly before me so quickly that I couldn't see him. I seemed to feel that there was someone there, but I didn't rightly _see_ anything." "Did you notice anything of the sort?" demanded the doctor of Trier. "I don't know," replied Trier thoughtfully. "Now that Williams has mentioned it, I did seem to feel a breath of air or a motion as though something had passed in front of me. I didn't think of it at the time." "Was this shadow opaque enough to even momentarily obscure your vision?" went on the doctor. "Not that I am conscious of. It was just a breath of air such as a person might cause by passing very rapidly." "What made you ask Trier if he had the money when you turned around?" asked the doctor of Winston. "Say-y-y," broke in the detective. "Who the devil are you, and what do you mean by breaking into my examination and stopping it?" Carnes tossed a leather wallet on the table. "There are my credentials," he said in his quiet voice. "I am chief of one section of the United States Secret Service as you will see, and this is Mr. Berger, my assistant. We were in the bank, engaged on a counterfeiting case, when the robbery took place. We have had a good deal of experience along these lines and we are merely anxious to aid you." Sturtevant examined Carnes' credentials carefully and returned them. "This is a Chicago robbery," he said, "and we have had a little experience in robberies and in apprehending robbers ourselves. I think that we can get along without your help." "You have had more experience with robberies than with apprehending robbers if the papers tell the truth," said Dr. Bird with a chuckle. * * * * * The detective's face flushed. "That will be enough from you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes," he said. "If you open your mouth again, I'll arrest you as a material witness and as a possible accomplice." "That sounds like Chicago methods," said Carnes quietly. "Now listen to me, Captain. My assistant and I are merely trying to assist you in this case. If you don't desire our assistance we'll proceed along our own lines without interfering, but in the meantime remember that this is a National Bank, and that our questions will be answered. The United States is higher than even the Chicago police force, and I am here under orders to investigate a counterfeiting case. If I desire, I can seal the doors of this bank and allow no one in or out until I have the evidence I desire. Do you understand?" Sturtevant sprang to his feet with an oath, but the sight of the gold badge which Carnes displayed stopped him. "Oh well," he said ungraciously. "I suppose that no harm will come of letting Winston answer your fool questions, but I'll warn you that I'll report to Washington that you are interfering with the course of justice and using your authority to aid the getaway of a criminal." "That is your privilege," replied Carnes quietly. "Mr. Winston, will you answer Mr. Berger's question?" "Why, I asked him because he was right close to the money and I thought that he might have reached through the wicket and picked it up. Then, too--" He hesitated for a moment and Dr. Bird smiled encouragingly. "What else?" he asked. "Why, I can't exactly tell. It just seemed to me that I had heard the rustle that bills make when they are pulled across a counter. When I saw them gone, I thought that he might have taken them. Then when I turned toward him, I seemed to hear the rustle of bills behind me, although I knew that I was alone in the cage. When I looked back the money was gone." "Did you see or hear anything like a shadow or a person moving?" "No--yes--I don't know. Just as I turned around it seemed to me that the rear door to my cage had moved and there may have been a shadow for an instant. I don't know. I hadn't thought of it before." "How long after that did you ring the alarm gongs?" "Not over a second or two." "That's all," said Dr. Bird. "If your high and mightiness has no further questions to ask, perhaps you will let me ask a few," said Sturtevant. * * * * * "Go ahead, ask all you wish," replied Dr. Bird with a laugh. "I have all the information I desire here for the present. I may want to ask other questions later, but just now I think we'll be going." "If you find any strange finger-prints on Winston's counter, I'll be glad to have them compared with our files," said Carnes. "I am not bothering with finger-prints," snorted the detective. "This is an open and shut case. There would be lots of Winston's finger-prints there and no others. There isn't the slightest doubt that this is an inside case and I have the men I want right here. Mr. Rogers, your bank is closed for to-day. Everyone in it will be searched and then all those not needed to close up will be sent away. I will get a squad of men here to go over your building and locate the hiding place. Your money is still on the premises unless these men slipped it to a confederate who got out before the alarm was given. I'll question the guards about that. If that happened, a little sweating will get it out of them." "Are you going to arrest me?" demanded Trier in surprise. "Yes, dearie," answered the detective. "I am going to arrest you and your two little playmates if these Washington experts will allow me to. You will save a lot of time and quite a few painful experiences if you will come clean now instead of later." "I demand to see my lawyer and to communicate with my firm," said the paymaster. "Time enough for that when I am through with you," replied the detective. He turned to Carnes. "Have I your gracious permission to arrest these three criminals?" he asked. "Yes indeed, Captain," replied Carnes sweetly. "You have my gracious permission to make just as big an ass of yourself as you wish. We're going now." * * * * * "By the way, Captain," said Dr. Bird as he followed Carnes out. "When you get through playing with your prisoners and start to look for the thief, here is a tip. Look for a left-handed man who has a thorough knowledge of chemistry and especially toxicology." "It's easy enough to see that he was left-handed if he pulled that money out through the grill from the positions occupied by Trier and his guard, but what the dickens led you to suspect that he is a chemist and a toxicologist?" asked Carnes as he and the doctor left the bank. "Merely a shrewd guess, my dear Watson," replied the doctor with a chuckle. "I am likely to be wrong, but there is a good chance that I am right. I am judging solely from the method used." "Have you solved the method?" demanded Carnes in amazement. "What on earth was it? The more I have thought about it, the more inclined I am to believe that Sturtevant is right and that it is an inside job. It seems to me impossible that a man could have entered in broad daylight and lifted that money in front of three men and within sight of a hundred more without some one getting a glimpse of him. He must have taken the money out in a grip or a sack or something like that, yet the bank record shows that no one but Trier entered with a grip and no one left with a package for ten minutes before Trier entered." "There may be something in what you say, Carnes, but I am inclined to have a different idea. I don't think it is the usual run of bank robbery, and I would rather not hazard a guess just now. I am going back to Washington to-night. Before I go any further into the matter, I need some rather specialized knowledge that I don't possess and I want to consult with Dr. Knolles. I'll be back in a week or so and then we can look into that counterfeiting case after we get this disposed of." "What am I to do?" asked Carnes. "Sit around the lobby of your hotel, eat three meals a day, and read the papers. If you get bored, I would recommend that you pay a visit to the Art Institute and admire the graceful lions which adorn the steps. Artistic contemplations may well improve your culture." "All right," replied Carnes. "I'll assume a pensive air and moon at the lions, but I might do better if you told me what I was looking for." "You are looking for knowledge, my dear Carnes," said the doctor with a laugh. "Remember the saying of the sages: To the wise man, no knowledge is useless." * * * * * A huge Martin bomber roared down to a landing at the Maywood airdrome, and a burly figure descended from the rear cockpit and waved his hand jovially to the waiting Carnes. The secret service man hastened over to greet his colleague. "Have you got that truck I wired you to have ready?" demanded the doctor. "Waiting at the entrance; but say, I've got some news for you." "It can wait. Get a detail of men and help us to unload this ship. Some of the cases are pretty heavy." Carnes hurried off and returned with a gang of laborers, who took from the bomber a dozen heavy packing cases of various sizes, several of them labelled either "Fragile" or "Inflammable" in large type. "Where do they go, Doctor?" he asked when the last of them had been loaded onto the waiting truck. "To the First National Bank," replied Dr. Bird, "and Casey here goes with them. You know Casey, don't you, Carnes? He is the best photographer in the Bureau." "Shall I go along too?" asked Carnes as he acknowledged the introduction. "No need for it. I wired Rogers and he knows the stuff is coming and what to do with it. Unpack as soon as you get there, Casey, and start setting up as soon as the bank closes." "All right, Doctor," replied Casey as he mounted the truck beside the driver. "Where do we go, Doctor?" asked Carnes as the truck rolled off. "To the Blackstone Hotel for a bath and some clean clothes," replied the doctor. "And now, what is the news you have for me?" "The news is this, Doctor. I carried out your instructions diligently and, during the daylight hours, the lions have not moved." * * * * * Dr. Bird looked contrite. "I beg your pardon, Carnes," he said. "I really didn't think when I left you so mystified how you must have felt. Believe me, I had my own reasons, excellent ones, for secrecy." "I have usually been able to maintain silence when asked to," replied Carnes stiffly. "My dear fellow, I didn't mean to question your discretion. I know that whatever I tell you is safe, but there are angles to this affair that are so weird and improbable that I don't dare to trust my own conclusions, let alone share them. I'll tell you all about it soon. Did you get those tickets I wired for?" "Of course I got them, but what have two tickets to the A. A. U. track meet this afternoon got to do with a bank robbery?" "One trouble with you, Carnes," replied the doctor with a judicial air, "is that you have no idea of the importance of proper relaxation. Is it possible that you have no desire to see Ladd, this new marvel who is smashing records right and left, run? He performs for the Illinois Athletic Club this afternoon, and it would not surprise me to see him lower the world's record again. He has already lowered the record for the hundred yard dash from nine and three-fifths to eight and four-fifths. There is no telling what he will do." "Are we going to waste the whole afternoon just to watch a man run?" demanded Carnes in disgust. "We will see many men run, my dear fellow, but there is only one in whom I have a deep abiding interest, and that is Mr. Ladd. Have you your binoculars with you?" "No." "Then by all means beg, borrow or steal two pairs before this afternoon. We might easily miss half the fun without them. Are our seats near the starting line for the sprints?" "Yes. The big demand was for seats near the finish line." "The start will be much more interesting, Carnes. I was somewhat of a minor star in track myself in my college days and it will be of the greatest interest to me to observe the starting form of this new speed artist. Now Carnes, don't ask any more questions. I may be barking up the wrong tree and I don't want to give you a chance to laugh at me. I'll tell you what to watch for at the track." * * * * * The sprinters lined up on the hundred yard mark and Dr. Bird and Carnes sat with their glasses glued to their eyes watching the slim figure in the colors of the Illinois Athletic Club, whose large "62" on his back identified him as the new star. "On your mark!" cried the starter. "Get set!" "Ah!" cried Dr. Bird. "Did you see that Carnes?" The starting gun cracked and the runners were off on their short grind. Ladd leaped into the lead and rapidly distanced the field, his legs twinkling under him almost faster than the eye could follow. He was fully twenty yards in the lead when his speed suddenly lessened and the balance of the runners closed up the gap he had opened. His lead was too great for them, and he was still a good ten yards in the lead when he crossed the tape. The official time was posted as eight and nine-tenths seconds. "Another thirty yards and he would have been beaten," said Carnes as he lowered his glasses. "That is the way he has won all of his races," replied the doctor. "He piles up a huge lead at first and then loses a good deal at the finish. His speed doesn't hold up. Never mind that, though, it is only an additional point in my favor. Did you notice his jaws just before the gun went?" "They seemed to clench and then he swallowed, but most of them did some thing like that." "Watch him carefully for the next heat and see if he puts anything into his mouth. That is the important thing." Dr. Bird sank into a brown study and paid no attention to the next few events, but he came to attention promptly when the final heat of the hundred yard dash was called. With his glasses he watched Ladd closely as the runner trotted up to the starting line. "There, Carnes!" he cried suddenly. "Did you see?" "I saw him wipe his mouth," said Carnes doubtfully. "All right, now watch his jaws just before the gun goes." * * * * * The final heat was a duplicate of the first preliminary. Ladd took an early lead which he held for three-fourths of the distance to the tape, then his pace slackened and he finished only a bare ten yards ahead of the next runner. The time tied his previous world's record of eight and four-fifths seconds. "He crunched and swallowed all right, Doctor," said Carnes. "That is all I wanted to be sure of. Now Carnes, here is something for you to do. Get hold of the United States Commissioner and get a John Doe warrant and go back to the hotel with it and wait for me. I may phone you at any minute and I may not. If I don't, wait in your room until you hear from me. Don't leave it for a minute." "Where are you going, Doctor?" "I'm going down and congratulate Mr. Ladd. An old track man like me can't let such an opportunity pass." "I don't know what this is all about, Doctor," replied Carnes, "but I know you well enough to obey orders and to keep my mouth shut until it is my turn to speak." Few men could resist Dr. Bird when he set out to make a favorable impression, and even a world's champion is apt to be flattered by the attention of one of the greatest scientists of his day, especially when that scientist has made an enviable reputation as an athlete in his college days and can talk the jargon of the champion's particular sport. Henry Ladd promptly capitulated to the charm of the doctor and allowed himself to be led away to supper at Bird's club. The supper passed off pleasantly, and when the doctor requested an interview with the young athlete in a private room, he gladly consented. They entered the room together, remained for an hour and a half, and then came out. The smile had left Ladd's face and he appeared nervous and distracted. The doctor talked cheerfully with him but kept a firm grip on his arm as they descended the stairs together. They entered a telephone booth where the doctor made several calls, and then descended to the street, where they entered a taxi. "Maywood airdrome," the doctor told the driver. * * * * * Two hours later the big Martin bomber which had carried the doctor to Chicago roared away into the night, and Bird turned back, reentered the taxi, and headed for the city alone. When Carnes received the telephone call, which was one of those the doctor made from the booth in his club, he hurried over to the First National Bank. His badge secured him an entrance and he found Casey busily engaged in rigging up an elaborate piece of apparatus on one of the balconies where guards were normally stationed during banking hours. "Dr. Bird said to tell you to keep on the job all night if necessary," he told Casey. "He thinks he will need your machine to-morrow." "I'll have it ready to turn on the power at four A.M.," replied Casey. Carnes watched him curiously for a while as he soldered together the electrical connections and assembled an apparatus which looked like a motion picture projector. "What are you setting up?" he asked at length. "It is a high speed motion picture camera," replied Casey, "with a telescopic lens. It is a piece of apparatus which Dr. Bird designed while he was in Washington last week and which I made from his sketches, using some apparatus we had on hand. It's a dandy, all right." "What is special about it?" "The speed. You know how fast an ordinary movie is taken, don't you? No? Well, it's sixteen exposures per second. The slow pictures are taken sometimes at a hundred and twenty-eight or two hundred and fifty-six exposures per second, and then shown at sixteen. This affair will take half a million pictures per second." "I didn't know that a film would register with that short an exposure." * * * * * "That's slow," replied Casey with a laugh. "It all depends on the light. The best flash-light powder gives a flash about one ten-thousandth of a second in duration, but that is by no means the speed limit of the film. The only trouble is enough light and sufficient shutter speed. Pictures have been taken by means of spark photography with an exposure of less than one three-millionth of a second. The whole secret of this machine lies in the shutter. This big disc with the slots in the edge is set up before the lens and run at such a speed that half a million slots per second pass before the lens. The film, which is sixteen millimeter X-ray film, travels behind the lens at a speed of nearly five miles per second. It has to be gradually worked up to this speed, and after the whole thing is set up, it takes it nearly four hours to get to full speed." "At that speed, it must take a million miles of film before you get up steam." "It would, if the film were being exposed. There is only about a hundred yards of film all told, which will run over these huge drums in an endless belt. There is a regular camera shutter working on an electric principle which remains closed. When the switch is tripped, the shutter opens in about two thirty-thousandths of a second, stays open just one one-hundredth of a second, and then closes. This time is enough to expose nearly all of our film. When we have our picture, I shut the current down, start applying a magnetic brake, and let it slow down. It takes over an hour to stop it without breaking the film. It sounds complicated, but it works all right." "Where is your switch?" * * * * * "That is the trick part of it. It is a remote control affair. The shutter opens and starts the machine taking pictures when the back door of the paying teller's cage is opened half an inch. There is also a hand switch in the line that can be opened so that you can open the door without setting off the camera, if you wish. When the hand switch is closed and the door opened, this is what happens. The shutter on the camera opens, the machine takes five thousand pictures during the next hundredth of a second, and then the shutter closes. Those five thousand exposures will take about five minutes to show at the usual rate of sixteen per second." "You said that you had to get plenty of light. How are you managing that?" "The camera is equipped with a special lens ground out of rock crystal. This lens lets in ultra-violet light which the ordinary lens shuts out, and X-ray film is especially sensitive to ultra-violet light. In order to be sure that we get enough illumination, I will set up these two ultra-violet floodlights to illumine the cage. The teller will have to wear glasses to protect his eyes and he'll get well sunburned, but something has to be sacrificed to science, as Dr. Bird is always telling me." "It's too deep for me," said Carnes with a sigh. "Can I do anything to help? The doctor told me to stand by and do anything I could." "I might be able to use you a little if you can use tools," said Casey with a grin. "You can start bolting together that light proof shield if you want to." * * * * * "Well, Carnes, did you have an instructive night?" asked Dr. Bird cheerfully as he entered the First National Bank at eight-thirty the next morning. "I don't see that I did much good, Doctor. Casey would have had the machine ready on time anyway, and I'm no machinist." "Well, frankly, Carnes, I didn't expect you to be of much help to him, but I did want you to see what Casey was doing, and a little of it was pretty heavy for him to handle alone. I suppose that everything is ready?" "The motor reached full speed about fifteen minutes ago and Casey went out to get a cup of coffee. Would you mind telling me the object of the whole thing?" "Not at all. I plan to make a permanent record of the work of the most ingenious bank robber in the world. I hope he keeps his word." "What do you mean?" "Three days ago when Sturtevant sweated a 'confession' out of poor Winston, the bank got a message that the robbery would be repeated this morning and dared them to prevent it. Rogers thought it was a hoax, but he telephoned me and I worked the Bureau men night and day to get my camera ready in time for him. I am afraid that I can't do much to prevent the robbery, but I may be able to take a picture of it and thus prevent other cases of a like nature." "Was the warning written?" "No. It was telephoned from a pay station in the loop district, and by the time it was traced and men got there, the telephoner was probably a mile away. He said that he would rob the same cage in the same manner as he did before." "Aren't you taking any special precautions?" "Oh, yes, the bank is putting on extra guards and making a lot of fuss of that sort, probably to the great amusement of the robber." "Why not close the cage for the day?" "Then he would rob a different one and we would have no way of photographing his actions. To be sure, we will put dummy money there, bundles with bills on the outside and paper on the inside, so if I don't get a picture of him, he won't get much. Every bill in the cage will be marked as well." "Did he say at what time he would operate?" "No, he didn't, so we'll have to stand by all day. Oh, hello, Casey, is everything all right?" "As sweet as chocolate candy, Doctor. I have tested it out thoroughly, and unless we have to run it so long that the film wears out and breaks, we are sitting pretty. If we don't get the pictures you are looking for, I'm a dodo, and I haven't been called that yet." "Good work, Casey. Keep the bearings oiled and pray that the film doesn't break." * * * * * The bank had been opened only ten minutes when the clangor of gongs announced a robbery. It was practically a duplicate of the first. The paying teller had turned from his window to take some bills from his rack and had found several dozens of bundles missing. As the gongs sounded, Dr. Bird and Casey leaped to the camera. "She snapped, Doctor!" cried Casey as he threw two switches. "It'll take an hour to stop and half a day to develop the film, but I ought to be able to show you what we got by to-night." "Good enough!" cried Dr. Bird. "Go ahead while I try to calm down the bank officials. Will you have everything ready by eight o'clock?" "Easy, Doctor," replied Casey as he turned to the magnetic brake. By eight o'clock quite a crowd had assembled in a private room at the Blackstone Hotel. Besides Dr. Bird and Carnes, Rogers and several other officials of the First National Bank were present, together with Detective-Captain Sturtevant and a group of the most prominent scientists and physicians gathered from the schools of the city. "Gentlemen," said Dr. Bird when all had taken seats facing a miniature moving picture screen on one wall, "to-night I expect to show you some pictures which will, I am sure, astonish you. It marks the advent of a new departure in transcendental medicine. I will be glad to answer any questions you may wish to ask and to explain the pictures after they are shown, but before we start a discussion, I will ask that you examine what I have to show you. Lights out, please!" He stepped to the rear of the room as the lights went out. As his eyes grew used to the dimness of the room he moved forward and took a vacant seat. His hand fumbled in his pocket for a second. "Now!" he cried suddenly. In the momentary silence which followed his cry, two dull metallic clicks could be heard, and a quick cry that was suddenly strangled as Dr. Bird clamped his hand over the mouth of the man who sat between him and Carnes. "All right, Casey," called the doctor. * * * * * The whir of a projection machine could be heard and on the screen before them leaped a picture of the paying teller's cage of the First National Bank. Winston's successor was standing motionless at the wicket, his lips parted in a smile, but the attention of all was riveted on a figure who moved at the back of the cage. As the picture started, the figure was bent over an opened suitcase, stuffing into it bundles of bills. He straightened up and reached to the rack for more bills, and as he did so he faced the camera full for a moment. He picked up other bundles of bills, filled the suitcase, fastened it in a leisurely manner, opened the rear door of the cage and walked out. "Again, please!" called Dr. Bird. "And stop when he faces us full." The picture was repeated and stopped at the point indicated. "Lights, please!" cried the doctor. The lights flashed on and Dr. Bird rose to his feet, pulling up after him the wilted figure of a middle-aged man. "Gentlemen," said the doctor in ringing tones, "allow me to present to you Professor James Kirkwood of the faculty of the Richton University, formerly known as James Collier of the Bureau of Standards, and robber of the First National Bank." Detective-Captain Sturtevant jumped to his feet and cast a searching glance at the captive. "He's the man all right," he cried. "Hang on to him until I get a wagon here!" "Oh, shut up!" said Carnes. "He's under federal arrest just now, charged with the possession of narcotics. When we are through with him, you can have him if you want him." "How did you get that picture, Doctor?" cried the cashier. "I watched that cage every minute during the morning and I'll swear that man never entered and stole that money as the picture shows, unless he managed to make himself invisible." * * * * * "You're closer to the truth than you suspect, Mr. Rogers," said Dr. Bird. "It is not quite a matter of invisibility, but something pretty close to it. It is a matter of catalysts." "What kind of cats?" asked the cashier. "Not cats, Mr. Rogers, catalysts. Catalysts is the name of a chemical reaction consisting essentially of a decomposition and a new combination effected by means of a catalyst which acts on the compound bodies in question, but which goes through the reaction itself unchanged. There are a great many of them which are used in the arts and in manufacturing, and while their action is not always clearly understood, the results are well known and can be banked on. "One of the commonest instances of the use of a catalyst is the use of sponge platinum in the manufacture of sulphuric acid. I will not burden you with the details of the 'contact' process, as it is known, but the combination is effected by means of finely divided platinum which is neither changed, consumed or wasted during the process. While there are a number of other catalysts known, for instance iron in reactions in which metallic magnesium is concerned, the commonest are the metals of the platinum group. "Less is known of the action of catalysts in the organic reactions, but it has been the subject of intensive study by Dr. Knolles of the Bureau of Standards for several years. His studies of the effects of different colored lights, that is, rays of different wave-lengths, on the reactions which constitute growth in plants have had a great effect on hothouse forcing of plants and promise to revolutionize the truck gardening industry. He has speeded up the rate of growth to as high as ten times the normal rate in some cases. "A few years ago, he and his assistant, James Collier, turned their attention toward discovering a catalyst which would do for the metabolic reactions in animal life what his light rays did for plants. What his method was, I will not disclose for obvious reasons, but suffice it to say that he met with great success. He took a puppy and by treating it with his catalytic drugs, made it grow to maturity, pass through its entire normal life span, and die of old age in six months." * * * * * "That is very interesting, Doctor, but I fail to see what bearing it has on the robbery." "Mr. Rogers, how, on a dark day and in the absence of a timepiece, would you judge the passage of time?" "Why, by my stomach, I guess." "Exactly. By your metabolic rate. You eat a meal, it digests, you expend the energy which you have taken into your system, your stomach becomes empty and your system demands more energy. You are hungry and you judge that some five or six hours must have passed since you last ate. Do you follow?" "Certainly." "Let us suppose that by means of some tonic, some catalytic drug, your rate of metabolism and also your rate of expenditure of energy has been increased six fold. You would eat a meal and in one hour you would be hungry again. Having no timepiece, and assuming that you were in a light-proof room, you would judge that some five hours had passed, would you not?" "I expect so." "Very well. Now suppose that this accelerated rate of digestion and expenditure of energy continued. You would be sleepy in perhaps three hours, would sleep about an hour and a quarter, and would then wake, ready for your breakfast. In other words, you would have lived through a day in four hours." "What advantage would there be in that?" "None, from your standpoint. It would, however, increase the rate of reproduction of cattle greatly and might be a great boom to agriculture, but we will not discuss this phase now. Suppose it were possible to increase your rate of metabolism and expenditure of energy, in other words, your rate of living, not six times, but thirty thousand times. In such a case you would live five minutes in one one-hundredth of a second." "Naturally, and you would live a year in about seventeen and one-half minutes, and a normal lifespan of seventy years in about twenty hours. You would be as badly off as any common may-fly." * * * * * "Agreed, but suppose that you could so regulate the dose of your catalyst that its effect would last for only one one-hundredth of a second. During that short period of time, you would be able to do the work that would ordinarily take you five minutes. In other words, you could enter a bank, pack a satchel with currency and walk out. You would be working in a leisurely manner, yet your actions would have been so quick that no human eye could have detected them. This is my theory of what actually took place. For verification, I will turn to Dr. Kirkwood, as he prefers to be known now." "I don't know how you got that picture, but what you have said is about right," replied the prisoner. "I got that picture by using a speed of thirty thousand times the normal sixteen exposures per second," replied Dr. Bird. "That figure I got from Dr. Knolles, the man who perfected the secret you stole when you left the Bureau three years ago. You secured only part of it and I suppose it took all your time since to perfect and complete it. You gave yourself away when you experimented on young Ladd. I was a track man myself in my college days and when I saw an account of his running, I smelt a rat, so I came back and watched him. As soon as I saw him crush and swallow a capsule just as the gun was fired, I was sure, and got hold of him. He was pretty stubborn, but he finally told me what name you were running under now, and the rest was easy. I would have got you in time anyway, but your bravado in telling us when you would next operate gave me the idea of letting you do it and photographing you at work. That is all I have to say. Captain Sturtevant, you can take your prisoner whenever you want him." * * * * * "I reckoned without you, Dr. Bird, but the end hasn't come yet. You may send me up for a few years, but you'll never find that money. I'm sure of that." "Tut, tut, Professor," laughed Carnes. "Your safety deposit box in the Commercial National is already sealed until a court orders it opened. The bills you took this morning were all marked, so that is merely additional proof, if we needed it. You surely didn't think that such a transparent device as changing your name from 'James Collier' to 'John Collyer' and signing with your left hand instead of your right would fool the secret service, did you? Remember, your old Bureau records showed you to be ambidextrous." "What about Winston's confession?" asked Rogers suddenly. "Detective-Captain Sturtevant can explain that to a court when Mr. Winston brings suit against him for false arrest and brutal treatment," replied Carnes. "A very interesting case, Carnes," remarked the doctor a few hours later. "It was an enjoyable interlude in the routine of most of the cases on which you consult me, but our play time is over. We'll have to get after that counterfeiting case to-morrow." * * * * * IN THE NEXT ISSUE BRIGANDS OF THE MOON _Beginning an Amazing Four-part Interplanetary Novel_ By RAY CUMMINGS THE SOUL MASTER _A Thrilling Novelette of the Substitution of Personality_ By WILL SMITH and R. J. ROBBINS COLD LIGHT _An Extraordinary Scientific Mystery_ By CAPT. S. P. MEEK --_AND MANY OTHER STORIES, OF COURSE_ * * * * * [Illustration: "_She is Yours, Master!_"] Sick at heart, the trembling girl shuddered at the words that delivered her to this terrible fate of the East. How could she escape from this Oriental monster into whose hands she had been given--this mysterious man of mighty power whose face none had yet seen? Here is an _extraordinary situation_. What was to be the fate of this beautiful girl? Who was this strange emissary whom no one really knew? _To know the answer to this and the most exciting tales of Oriental adventure and mystery ever told, read on through the most thrilling, absorbing, entertaining and fascinating pages ever written._ Masterpieces of Oriental Mystery 11 Superb Volumes by SAX ROHMER Written with his uncanny knowledge of things Oriental * * * * * [Illustration: _New!_ _Patented_] Just A Twist Of The Wrist Banishes Old-Style Can Openers to the Scrap Heap and BRINGS AGENTS $5 to $12 IN AN HOUR Women universally detest the old-style can opener. Yet in every home in the land cans are being opened with it, often several times a day. Imagine how thankfully they welcome this new method--this automatic way of doing their most distasteful job. With the Speedo can opening machine you can just put the can in the machine, turn the handle, and almost instantly the job is done. End This Waste and Danger You undoubtedly know what a nasty, dangerous job it is to open cans with the old-fashioned can opener. You have to hack your way along slowly--ripping a jagged furrow around the edge. Next thing you know, the can opener slips. Good night! You've torn a hole in your finger. As often as not it will get infected and stay sore a long time. Perhaps even your life will be endangered from blood poisoning! You may be lucky enough to get the can open without cutting yourself. But there's still the fact to consider that the ragged edge of tin left around the top makes it almost impossible to pour out all of the food. Yet now, all this trouble, waste and danger is ended. No wonder salesmen everywhere are finding this invention a truly revolutionary money maker! 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Carson was forced to leave school at an early age. His help was needed at home. He took a "job" in a shoe factory in Huntington, W. Va., at $12 a week. [Illustration: _Starts Studying at Home_] Carson determined to make something of himself before it was too late, so he took up a course with the International Correspondence Schools and studied in spare time. [Illustration: _Now Owns Big Business_] Today W. T. Carson is the owner of one of the largest battery service stations in West Virginia, with an income of $15,000 a year. And he is only 28 years old! [Illustration: _Lectures at College_] Just a few months ago a large college asked Carson to lecture before a class in electricity. That shows the practical value of his I. C. S. course. [Illustration: _How to Earn More Money_] If the I. C. S. can smooth the path to success for men like W. T. Carson it can help you. If it can help other men to earn more money it can help you too. [Illustration: _The Boss is Watching You_] Show him you are ambitious and are really trying to get ahead. Decide today that you are at least going to find out all about the I. C. S. and what it can do for you. =INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOLS. Box 2124-E, Scranton, Penns.= Without cost or obligation, please send me a copy of your booklet, "=Who Wins and Why=," and full particulars about the course _before_ which I have marked X in the list below: BUSINESS TRAINING COURSES [ ] Business Management [ ] Industrial Management [ ] Personnel Management [ ] Traffic Management [ ] Accounting and C.P.A. Coaching [ ] Cost Accounting [ ] Bookkeeping [ ] Secretarial Work [ ] Spanish [ ] French [ ] Salesmanship [ ] Advertising [ ] Business Correspondence [ ] Show Card and Sign Lettering [ ] Stenography and Typing [ ] English [ ] Civil Service [ ] Railway Mail Clerk [ ] Mail Carrier [ ] Grade School Subjects [ ] High School Subjects [ ] Cartooning [ ] Illustrating [ ] Lumber Dealer TECHNICAL AND INDUSTRIAL COURSES [ ] Architect [ ] Architectural Draftsman [ ] Building Foreman [ ] Concrete Builder [ ] Contractor and Builder [ ] Structural Draftsman [ ] Structural Engineer [ ] Electrical Engineer [ ] Electrical Contractor [ ] Electric Wiring [ ] Electric Lighting [ ] Electric Car Running [ ] Telegraph Engineer [ ] Telephone Work [ ] Mechanical Engineer [ ] Mechanical Draftsman [ ] Machine Shop Practice [ ] Toolmaker [ ] Patternmaker [ ] Civil Engineer [ ] Surveying and Mapping [ ] Bridge Engineer [ ] Gas Engine Operating [ ] Automobile Work [ ] Aviation Engines [ ] Plumber and Steam Fitter [ ] Plumbing Inspector [ ] Foreman Plumber [ ] Heating and Ventilation [ ] Sheet-Metal Worker [ ] Steam Engineer [ ] Marine Engineer [ ] Refrigeration Engineer [ ] R.R. Positions [ ] Highway Engineer [ ] Chemistry [ ] Pharmacy [ ] Mining Engineer [ ] Navigation [ ] Assayer [ ] Iron and Steel Worker [ ] Textile Overseer or Supt. [ ] Cotton Manufacturing [ ] Woolen Manufacturing [ ] Agriculture [ ] Fruit Growing [ ] Poultry Farming [ ] Mathematics [ ] Radio Name ................. Address .............. City ...................... State ........... * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * LET RCA INSTITUTES START YOU ON THE ROAD TO ... SUCCESS IN RADIO [Illustration: Radio-Mechanic and Inspector $1800 to $4000 a Year.] [Illustration: Broadcast Station Mechanic $1800 to $3600 a Year.] [Illustration: Land Station Operator $1800 to $4000 a Year.] [Illustration: Broadcast Operators $1800 to $4800 a Year.] _Radio needs you_.... That's why the entire Radio industry is calling for trained men. Radio is thrilling work ... easy hours, vacations with pay and a chance to see the world. Manufacturers and broadcasting stations are now eagerly seeking trained RCA Institutes men. Millions of sets need servicing ... thousands of ships require experienced operators.... Never before was there an opportunity like this! _This is the Only Course Sponsored by Radio Corporation of America_ RCA sets the standards for the entire Radio industry.... The RCA Institutes' Home Laboratory Training Course enables you to quickly learn all the secrets of Radio.... In your spare time you can obtain a thorough, practical education in Radio. You learn Radio by actual experience with the remarkable outlay of apparatus given to every student. That's why every graduate of RCA Institutes has the experience, the ability and the confidence to hold a big-money Radio job. For the added convenience of students who prefer a Resident Study Course, RCA Institutes, Inc., has established Resident Schools in the following cities: New York 326 Broadway Boston, Mass. 899 Boylston St. Philadelphia, Pa. 1211 Chestnut St. Baltimore, Md. 1215 N. Charles St. Newark, N.J. 560 Broad St. Home Study graduates may also attend any one of our resident schools for post-graduate instruction at no extra charge. _Graduates of RCA Institutes Find It Easier to Get Good Jobs_ Students of RCA Institutes get first-hand knowledge, get it quickly and get it complete. Success in Radio depends upon training and that's the training you get with RCA Institutes. That's why every graduate of RCA Institutes who desired a position has been able to get one.... That's why graduates are always in big demand! _Study Radio at the Oldest and Largest Commercial Training Organization in the World_ Send for this Free Book ... or step in at any of our resident schools and see for yourself how thousands of men are already on the road to success in Radio. Remember that you, too, can speed up your earning capacity ... can earn more money in Radio than you ever earned before. The man who trains today will hold down the big-money Radio job of the future. Come in and get this free book or send for it by mail. Everything you want to know about Radio. 40 fascinating pages, packed with pictures and descriptions of the brilliant opportunities in this gigantic, world-wide money-making profession. =SEND FOR IT TODAY!= Clip this Coupon _NOW_! SPONSORED BY RCA INSTITUTES, INC. Formerly Radio Institute of America [Illustration: RCA] * * * * * RCA INSTITUTES, Inc. Dept. NS-2, 326 Broadway, New York, N.Y. Gentlemen: Please send me your FREE 40-page book which illustrates the brilliant opportunities in Radio and describes your laboratory-method of instruction at home! Name ........................................ Address ..................................... * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * "INTO THE AFRICAN BLUE" _High Spots in the Life of a Big Game Photographer_ _By_ MARTIN JOHNSON [Illustration] "Into the African Blue" is Africa--the land of romance--of adventure. African big game is rapidly being shot off; the end is in sight, and it is for the purpose of recording in pictures and in story the remarkable wild life which soon must vanish, that Martin and Osa Johnson undertake their safaris into the remotest corners of the "Blue." Johnson's photographs are magnificent! They portray the primitive drama of the wilderness. We see close-ups of elephants and giraffes suckling their young; lions lolling in the broiling sun or disputing possession of a zebra kill. We are introduced into the inner family circle of rhinos, leopards, eland, oryx, gazelle and others--all unconscious of the nearby presence of man. And there are, of course, thrilling moments when a cantankerous rhino, elephant or lion resents the intrusion and charges the camera with deadly intent. =This thrilling serial, profusely illustrated with photographs by the author, began in the December issue of FOREST and STREAM. Follow Martin and Osa Johnson through the Soudan, the Congo, Kenya and Tanganyika; share their adventures=-- Forest and Stream 80 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. SPECIAL OFFER In addition to this thrilling serial, which in book form would cost not less than $3.00, the next six issues of FOREST and STREAM will contain much of interest to the outdoorsman--angler, hunter, camper and nature lover. FOREST and STREAM brings to you the best outdoor literature written by the foremost authorities in their respective fields. By making use of the coupon to the left you can secure six issues of FOREST and STREAM containing the complete story "Into the African Blue" for the special price of $1.00, and you will receive in addition to the magazine and without extra cost volumes 1 and 2 of the Sportsmen's Encyclopedia, an invaluable reference book which presents in handy form accurate and comprehensive information on every branch of outdoor sport. Send in the coupon--"_DO IT NOW!_" * * * * * Department C Here's my $1.00. I want the 6 issues beginning with the December number, and Vols. 1 and 2 of the Sportsmen's Encyclopedia. ............................................... ............................................... ............................................... * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * I Will Train You at Home to Fill a Big-Pay Radio Job _Here's the_ PROOF =$375 One Month In Spare Time= "Recently I made $375 in one month in my spare time installing, servicing, selling Radio Sets." Earle Cummings, 18 Webster St., Haverhill, Mass. =$450 a Month= "I work in what I believe to be the largest and best-equipped Radio shop in the Southwest and also operate KGFI. I am averaging $450 a month." Frank M. Jones, 922 Guadalupe St., San Angelo, Tex. [Illustration] You can build 100 circuits with the six big outfits of Radio parts I give you _3 of the 100 you can build_ _Find out quick about this practical way to big pay_ If you are earning a penny less than $50 a week, send for my book of information on the opportunities in Radio. It's FREE. Clip the coupon NOW. A flood of gold is pouring into Radio, creating hundreds of big-pay jobs. Why go along at $25, $30 or $45 a week when the good jobs in Radio pay $50, $75 and up to $250 a week? "Rich Rewards in Radio" gives full information on these big jobs and explains how you can quickly learn Radio through my easy, practical home-study training. Salaries of $50 to $250 a Week Not Unusual The amazing growth of Radio has astounded the world. In a few short years three hundred thousand jobs have been created. And the biggest growth is still to come. That's why salaries of $50 to $250 a week are not unusual. Radio simply hasn't got nearly the number of thoroughly trained men it needs. You Can Learn Quickly and Easily in Spare Time Hundreds of N. R. I. trained men are today making big money--holding down big jobs--in the Radio field. You, too, should get into Radio. You can stay home, hold your job and learn in your spare time. Lack of high school education or Radio experience are no drawbacks. Many Earn $15, $20, $30 Weekly On the Side While Learning I teach you to begin making money shortly after you enroll. My new practical method makes this possible. I give you SIX BIG OUTFITS of Radio parts and teach you to build practically every type of receiving set known. M. E. Sullivan, 412 73rd St., Brooklyn, N.Y., writes: "I made $720 while studying." G. W. Page, 1807 21st Ave. S., Nashville, Tenn., "I picked up $935 in my spare time while studying." Your Money Back If Not Satisfied My course fits you for all lines--manufacturing, selling, servicing sets, in business for yourself, operating on board ship, or in a broadcasting station--and many others. I back up my training with a signed agreement to refund every penny of your money if, after completion, you are not satisfied with the lessons and instructions I give you. Act NOW--NEW 64-Page Book is FREE [Illustration: RADIO NEEDS TRAINED MEN!] Send for this big book of Radio information. It has put hundreds of fellows on the road to bigger pay and success. Get it. See what Radio offers you, and how my Employment Department helps you get into Radio after you graduate. Clip or tear out the coupon and mail it RIGHT NOW. J. E. Smith, President, Dept. OBM National Radio Institute Washington, D.C. Employment Service to all Graduates Originators of Radio Home Study Training * * * * * Mail This FREE COUPON Today J. E. Smith, President, Dept. OBM, National Radio Institute, Washington, D.C. Dear Mr. Smith: Send me your Free book "Rich Rewards in Radio," giving information on the big-money opportunities in Radio and your practical method of teaching with six Radio Outfits. I understand this places me under no obligation. Name ......................... Age .......... Address ..................................... City ...................... State ........... * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * _A Year's Protection Against_ SICKNESS Less than 3¢ a Day! _A Year's Protection Against_ ACCIDENT [Illustration: CASH _or sympathy_?] _Which do you want?_ Suppose you met with an accident or sickness to-night--salary stopped--which would you prefer, $25 Weekly ... or Sympathy? _Which will your family want?_ In case of your accidental death, which would you rather give your family $10,000 Cash ... or Sympathy? _Which would you Pay?_ Would you rather pay bills and household expenses out of a slim savings account or a =$10 bill= _For a Whole Year's Protection Against_ SICKNESS AND ACCIDENT _Get Cash instead of Sympathy_ If you met with an accident in your home, on the street, or road, in the field, or on your job--will your income continue? Remember, few escape without accident--and none of us can tell what to-morrow holds for us. While you are reading this warning, somewhere some ghastly tragedy is taking its toll of human life or limb, some flood or fire, some automobile or train disaster. Protect yourself now. _Get Cash instead of Sympathy_ If you suddenly became ill--would your income stop? What if you contracted lobar pneumonia, appendicitis operation, or any of the many common ills which are covered in this strong policy, wouldn't you rest easier and convalesce more quickly if you knew that this old line company stood ready to help lift from your shoulders distressing financial burdens in case of a personal tragedy. Protect yourself now. _Get Cash instead of Sympathy_ =Don't Wait for Misfortune to Overtake You= _Mail the Coupon today!_ Mail the Coupon before it's too late to protect yourself against the chances of fate picking you out as its next victim. =NO MEDICAL EXAMINATION= $10 A Year Entire Costs. No Dues. No Assessments. =MEN AND WOMEN= 16 to 70 Years Accepted. =$10,000= Principal Sum. =$10,000= Loss of hands, feet or eyesight. =$25 Weekly Benefits= for stated accidents or sicknesses. Doctor's Bills, Hospital Benefit, Emergency Benefit and other liberal features to help in time of need--all clearly shown in policy. This is a simple and understandable policy--without complicated or misleading clauses. You know exactly what every word means--and every word means exactly what it says. =Largest and Oldest Exclusive Health and Accident Insurance Company in America.= _Under Supervision of All State Insurance Departments_ =ESTABLISHED OVER 40 YEARS= * * * * * North American Accident Insurance Co., [of Chicago] 388 Wallach Building, Newark, New Jersey. Gentlemen: At no cost to me send details of New $10,000 Premier $10 Policy. _Name_ ............................ _Address_ ......................... _City_ ............................ * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * [Illustration] Pledge to the Public on Used Car Sales 1 Every used car is conspicuously marked with its lowest price in plain figures, and that price, just as the price of our new cars, is rigidly maintained. 2 All Studebaker automobiles which are marked as CERTIFIED CARS have been properly reconditioned, and carry a 30-day guarantee for replacement of defective parts and free service on adjustments. 3 Every purchaser of a used car may drive it for five days, and then, if not satisfied for any reason, bring it back and apply the money paid as a credit on the purchase of any other car in stock--new or used. (It is assumed that the car has not been damaged in the meantime.) © 1929 The Studebaker Corporation of America. You can save money and get a better motor car _if you buy according to the Studebaker Pledge plan_ OVER 150,000 THRIFTY AMERICAN CITIZENS DID LAST YEAR! A well constructed car, sold at 40 or 50 per cent of its original price, offers maximum transportation value. Studebaker dealers offer many fine used cars--Studebakers, Erskines and other makes--which have been driven only a few thousand miles. Reconditioning of mechanical parts, refinishing of bodies give new car life to these cars at prices no greater than you must pay for a cheap new car. And as a final measure of protection, these cars are sold according to the Studebaker Pledge--which offers 5 days' driving trial on all cars and a 30-day guarantee on all certified cars. Prices being plainly marked provides the same price for everyone. Millions of people buy "used" houses. Every car on the road is a used car the week after it is purchased. _Invest 2¢--you may save $200_ Mail the coupon below for the free booklet.--The 2¢ stamp is an investment which may save you as much as $200 in buying a motorcar! [Illustration: How to judge a used car] STUDEBAKER _Builder of Champions_ The Studebaker Corporation of America Dept. 232, South Bend, Indiana Please send me copy of "How to Judge a Used Car" _Name_ .......................................... _Street_ ........................................ _City_ ...................... _State_ ........... * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * [Illustration: Amazingly Easy Way to Get Into ELECTRICITY] Don't spend your life waiting for $5 raises in a dull, hopeless job. Now ... and forever ... say good-bye to 25 and 35 dollars a week. Let me teach you how to prepare for positions that lead to $50, $64, and on up to $200 a week in Electricity--NOT by correspondence, but by an amazing way to teach =right here in the great Coyne Shops= that makes you a practical expert in 90 days! Getting into electricity is far easier than you imagine! LEARN WITHOUT BOOKS--In 90 Days _By Actual Work--in the Great Coyne Shops_ Lack of experience--age, or advanced education bars no one. I don't care if you don't know an armature from an air brake--I don't expect you to! It makes no difference! Don't let lack of money stop you. Most of the men at Coyne have no more money than you have. That's why I have worked out my astonishing offers. _Earn While Learning_ If you need part-time work to help pay your living expenses I'll help you get it and when you graduate I'll give you lifetime employment service. And, in 12 brief weeks, =in the great roaring shops of Coyne=, I train you as you never dreamed you could be trained ... on one of the greatest outlays of electrical apparatus ever assembled ... real dynamos, engines, power plants, autos, switchboards, transmitting stations ... everything from door bells to farm power and lighting ... full sized ... in full operation every day! _No Books--No Lessons_ No dull books, no baffling charts, no classes, you get individual training ... all real actual work ... building real batteries ... winding real armatures, operating real motors, dynamos and generators, wiring houses, etc. =GET THE FACTS= Coyne is your one great chance to get into electricity. Every obstacle is removed. This school is 30 years old--Coyne training is tested--proven beyond all doubt--endorsed by many large electrical concerns. You can find out everything absolutely free. Simply mail the coupon and let me send you the big, free Coyne book of 150 photographs ... facts ... jobs ... salaries ... opportunities. Tells you how many earn expenses while training and how we assist our graduates in the field. This does not obligate you. So act at once. Just mail coupon. BIG BOOK _FREE_! Send for my big book containing 150 photographs telling complete story--absolutely FREE COYNE ELECTRICAL SCHOOL 500 S. Paulina St., Dept. 20-66, Chicago, Ill. * * * * * COYNE ELECTRICAL SCHOOL, H. C. Lewis, Pres. 500 S. Paulina Street, Dept. 20-66, Chicago, Illinois Dear Mr. Lewis: Without obligation send me your big, free catalog and all details of Free Employment Service, Radio, Airplane, and Automotive Electrical Courses, and how I may "earn while learning." _Name_ .......................................... _Street_ ........................................ _City_ ...................... _State_ ........... * * * * * [Illustration: Buy a Watch the Modern Way] This 21 Jewel--Santa Fe Special Sent You On-Approval Wear 30 Days =Free=! Thank you for making it possible for me to own a 21-jewel Santa Fe Special, write thousands of our customers. Buy Direct Our catalogue is our showroom. Any watch will be sent for you to see without one penny down. No obligation to buy. Save 1/3 to 1/2 on the price you pay for a similar watch made by other Manufacturers. Most liberal offer. Our "Direct to You" offer and Extra Special Distribution Plan is fully explained in the New Santa Fe Special Booklet just off the press. The "Santa Fe Special" Plan means a big saving of money to you and you get the best watch value on the market today. Railroad Accuracy Beauty Unsurpassed Life-long Dependability --all are combined in the highest degree in the famous "Santa Fe Special" Watch. These watches are now in service on practically every railroad in the United States and in every branch of the Army and Naval service. Thousands of them are distributed around the world. You will never miss the few cents a day that will make you own one of these watches. Just Out! Send coupon for our New Watch Book--just off the press. All the newest watch case designs in white or green gold, fancy shapes and thin models are shown. Read our easy payment offer. Wear the watch 30 days FREE. SANTA FE WATCH CO. Dept. 255 Thomas Bldg. Topeka, Kans. * * * * * SANTA FE WATCH CO., Dept. 255, Thomas Bldg., Topeka, Kansas. Please send me absolutely Free your New Watch Book [ ] Diamond Book [ ]. Name ........................................ Address ...................... State ........ * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * [Illustration: COOLS while you shave and the coolness lingers! Listerine Shaving Cream] "Pardon me, gentlemen!" _Business men gargle daily to check colds and sore throat_ Why is Listerine to be found in the offices of a majority of American business men? Why do they use it at the noon hour? Why do they sometimes halt important meetings, to gargle with it? Simply because, like you, they recognize in this safe antiseptic a swift, effective enemy of sore throat and the common cold. Used at the first sign of trouble, it has prevented thousands of cases from becoming serious. Its effectiveness is due to its amazing power to destroy disease germs, millions of which lodge in the oral cavity. Though safe to use and pleasant to taste, full strength Listerine kills even such resistant organisms as the Staphylococcus Aureus (pus) and Bacillus Typhosus (typhoid) in counts ranging to 200,000,000 in 15 seconds. We could not make this statement unless prepared to prove it to the entire satisfaction of the medical profession and the U.S. Government. As a preventive of sore throat and colds use Listerine systematically every day. And at the first definite sign that either is developing, increase the frequency of the gargle. You will be amazed to see how quickly the condition disappears. Lambert Pharmacal Co., St. Louis, Mo. LISTERINE _for_ SORE THROAT _Kills 200,000,000 germs in 15 seconds_ * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * Go to School at Home! [Illustration: High School Course in Two Years!] You Want to Earn Big Money! =And you will not be satisfied unless you earn steady promotion.= But are you prepared for the job ahead of you? Do you measure up to the standard that insures success? For a more responsible position a fairly good education is necessary. To write a sensible business letter, to prepare estimates, to figure cost and to compute interest, you must have a certain amount of preparation. All this you must be able to do before you will earn promotion. Many business houses hire no men whose general knowledge is not equal to a high school course. Why? Because big business refuses to burden itself with men who are barred from promotion by the lack of elementary education. Can You Qualify for a Better Position We have a plan whereby you can. We can give you a complete but simplified high school course in two years, giving you all the essentials that form the foundation of practical business. It will prepare you to hold your own where competition is keen and exacting. Do not doubt your ability, but make up your mind to it and you will soon have the requirements that will bring you success and big money. YOU CAN DO IT. Let us show you how to get on the road to success. It will not cost you a single working hour. Write today. It costs you nothing but a stamp. American School Dept. H-237 Drexel Ave. and 58th St., Chicago * * * * * =American School= Dept. H-237 Drexel Ave. and 58th St., Chicago Send me full information on the subject checked and how you will help me win success. ....Architect ....Building Contractor ....Automobile Engineer ....Automobile Repairman ....Civil Engineer ....Structural Engineer ....Business Manager ....Cert. Public Accountant ....Accountant and Auditor ....Bookkeeper ....Draftsman and Designer ....Electrical Engineer ....Electric Light & Power ....General Education ....Vocational Guidance ....Business Law ....Lawyer ....Machine Shop Practice ....Mechanical Engineer ....Shop Superintendent ....Employment Manager ....Steam Engineer ....Foremanship ....Sanitary Engineer ....Surveyor (& Mapping) ....Telephone Engineer ....Telegraph Engineer ....High School Graduate ....Wireless Radio ....Undecided Name ..................................... Address .................................. * * * * * EXTRA STRONG IMPROVED MODEL COPPER BOILER Catalog Free [Illustration: SOLID CAST NO SCREW TOP] HEAVY COPPER 5 Gallon $6.50 7 8.85 10 11.90 15 14.20 20 18.50 25 22.50 30 27.50 SAVE 20% _NOW_! Most Practical Boiler & Cooker Made with large 5-inch Improved Cap and Spout. Safe, practical and simple. Nothing to get out of order, most substantial and durable on the market. Will last a lifetime, gives real service and satisfaction. Easily Cleaned Cap removed in a second; no burning of hands. An ideal low pressure-boiler and pasteurizer for home and farm. =Save 20%= by ordering direct from factory. No article of such high quality and utility ever sold at such amazingly low prices. Prices quoted are each with order or one-fourth cash, balance C.O.D. Send check or money order: prompt shipment made in plain strong box. The only boiler worth having. Large Catalog Free. HOME MANUFACTURING CO. Dept. 5850 18 E. Kinzie St. Chicago, Illinois * * * * * Agents! Sell Shirts [Illustration: Bostonian] Start =without investment= in a profitable shirt business of your own. Take orders in your district for nationally known Bostonian Shirts. =$1.50 commission= for you on sale of 3 shirts for $6.95--=Postage Paid=. $9 value, guaranteed fast colors. No experience needed. Complete selling equipment =FREE=! =Good Pay for Honest Workers= Big earnings for ambitious workers. Genuine Broadcloth in four fast colors. Write for money-making plan, free outfit, with actual cloth samples and everything need to start. Name and address on postal will do. =Write TODAY! SURE!= BOSTONIAN MFG. CO., B-300, 89 Bickford St., Boston, Mass. * * * * * DEAFNESS IS MISERY Multitudes of persons with defective hearing and Head Noises enjoy conversation, go to Theatre and Church because they Use Leonard Invisible Ear Drums which resemble Tiny Megaphones fitting in the Ear entirely out of sight. No wires, batteries or head piece. They are inexpensive. Write for booklet and sworn statement of the inventor who was himself deaf. =A. O. LEONARD, Inc., Suite 683, 70 5th Ave., New York= * * * * * Denison's Plays _54 Years of Hits_ We supply all entertainment needs for dramatic clubs, schools, lodges, etc., and for every occasion. Songs Minstrels Musical Comedies Revues Vaudeville Acts Blackface Skits _Catalogue Free_ =T. S. Denison & Co. 623 S. Wabash, Dept. 130 Chicago= * * * * * Don't Stop Tobacco Without precautions against injurious effects. Baco-Cure gives the necessary assistance. Use tobacco while you take it. Has aided hundreds. Complete $5.00 treatment guaranteed to get results or money refunded. Write for booklet. Eureka Chemical Co., B-26 Columbus, Ohio * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * Easy, Quick Way To Get Into Aviation [Illustration] _Let_ Major Rockwell Train You AT HOME My new, practical, amazing, Home Study Course prepares you quickly to fill any of the fascinating Aviation jobs, either on the ground or as a skilled flyer, paying $50 to $150 a week. I train you to succeed quickly, to fill one of the thousands of air and ground jobs now open, and I help you find your right place in Aviation. =I'll Help You Get Your Job= [Illustration: FREE BOOK WRITE!] Learn at home in your spare hours. In 12 short weeks you can be ready to take your flying instructions at greatly reduced rates at any airport near your home, or right here in Dayton. Or you can step into any aviation ground job with my help. Experience or advanced education not necessary. Aviation--the fastest growing industry is calling you! You risk nothing. If you are not satisfied after completing my course, I'll refund your tuition. Take the first step by writing NOW for my big FREE Book and Tuition offer. State age. =MAJOR R. L. ROCKWELL= _The Dayton School of Aviation_ =Desk B-6= =Dayton, Ohio= * * * * * SAXOPHONE Easy to Play Easy To Pay Simplified Key Arrangement Fingers fall naturally into playing position. Makes it extremely easy to play rapidly on the Buescher. [Illustration] The Buescher True-Tone Saxophone is the easiest of all wind instruments to play and one of the most beautiful. You can learn the scale in an hour, and in a few weeks be playing popular music. First 3 lessons free, with each new Saxophone. For home entertainment--church--lodge--school or for Orchestra Dance Music, the Saxophone is the ideal instrument. =FREE TRIAL=--We allow 6 days' free trial on any Buescher Saxophone in your own home and arrange easy payments so you can pay while you play. Write for Saxophone Catalog. BUESCHER BAND INSTRUMENT CO. 2980 Buescher Block (553) ELKHART, INDIANA * * * * * [Illustration: =MEN WANTED FOR RAILROADS=] Nearest their homes--everywhere--to train for Firemen, Brakemen; average wages $150-$200 monthly. Promoted to Conductor or Engineer--highest wages on railroads. Also clerks. Railway Educational Association, Dept. D-30, Brooklyn, New York. * * * * * BIG MONEY _IN POULTRY_! [Illustration: How to RAISE POULTRY for PROFIT] If you want a real job--at real pay or if you want to start profitable business of your own--become a trained Poultryman. It's interesting, healthful, profitable. Our famous home study Course gives short cuts to success. Write for Free Book, "How to Raise Poultry for Profit." =National Poultry Institute, Dept. 415-F, Washington, D.C.= * * * * * SPORT OF A THOUSAND THRILLS [Illustration: _Model shown is the popular "45" Twin_] EAGER power under instant control--speed that leaves the car-parades behind--lightning response to throttle and brakes--these are just a few of the thousand thrills of motorcycling. Ask any Harley-Davidson rider--he'll tell you of dozens more. And they are all yours at low cost, in a Harley-Davidson "45"--the wonderful Twin at a popular price. Let your dealer show you the 1930 features of this motorcycle--try the comfortable, low-swung saddle--get the "feel" of this wonder Twin. Ask about his Pay-As-You-Ride Plan. _Mail the Coupon!_ _for literature showing our full line of Singles, Twins, and Sidecars. Motorcycle prices range from $235 f. o. b. factory_. RIDE A HARLEY-DAVIDSON * * * * * HARLEY-DAVIDSON MOTOR COMPANY Dept. N. S. G., Milwaukee, Wis. Interested in your motorcycles. Send literature. Name ..................................... Address .................................. My age is [ ] 16-19 years, [ ] 20-30 years, [ ] 31 years and up, [ ] under 16 years. Check your age group. * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * "How I Licked Wretched Old Age at 63" I Quit Getting up Nights--Banished Foot and Leg Pains ... Got Rid of Rheumatic Pains and Constipation ... Improved My Health Generally ... Found Renewed Strength. "At 61, I thought I was through. I blamed old age, but it never occurred to me to actually fight back. I was only half-living, getting up nights ... constipated ... constantly tormented by aches and pains. At 62 my condition became almost intolerable. I had about given up hope when a doctor recommended your treatment. Then at 63, it seemed that I shook off 20 years almost overnight." _Forty_--The Danger Age These are the facts, just as I learned them. In 65% of all men, the vital prostate gland shows up soon after all. No pain is experienced, but as this distressing condition continues, sciatica, backache, severe bladder weakness, constipation, etc., often develop. [Illustration] PROSTATE TROUBLE These are frequently the signs of prostate trouble. Now thousands suffer these handicaps needlessly! For a prominent American Scientist after seven years of research, discovered a new, safe way to stimulate the prostate gland to normal health and activity in many cases. This new hygiene is worthy to be called a notable achievement of the age. A National Institution for Men Past 40 Its success has been startling, its growth rapid. This new hygiene is rapidly gaining in national prominence. The institution in Steubenville has now reached large proportions. Scores and even hundreds of letters pour in every day, and in many cases reported results have been little short of amazing. In case after case, men have reported that they have felt ten years younger in six days. Now physicians in every part of the country are using and recommending this treatment. Quick as is the response to this new hygiene, it is actually a pleasant, natural relaxation, involving no drugs, medicine or electric rays whatever. The scientist explains this discovery and tells why many men are old at forty in a new book now sent free, in 24-page, illustrated form. Send for it. Every man past forty should know the true meaning of three frank facts. No cost or obligation is incurred. But act at once before this free edition is exhausted. Simply fill in your name below, tear off and mail. =THE ELECTRO THERMAL COMPANY= 4826 Morris Avenue Steubenville, Ohio If you live West of the Rockies, address The Electro Thermal Co., 303 Van Nuys Building, Dept. 48-C, Los Angeles, Calif. In Canada, address The Electro Thermal Co., Desk 48-C, 53 Yonge St., Toronto, Can. THE ELECTRO THERMAL CO., 4826 Morris Ave., Steubenville, Ohio. Name ........................................ Address ..................................... City ...................... State ........... * * * * * How To Secure A Government Position Why worry about strikes, layoffs, hard times? Get a Government job! Increased salaries, steady work, travel, good pay. Examinations coming. I'll help you become a Custom House Clerk, Railway Postal Clerk, Post Office Clerk, City Mail Carrier, Rural Carrier--or get into any other Government job you want. I was a Secretary-Examiner of Civil Service Commission for 8 years. Have helped thousands. NOW FREE My 32-page book tells about the jobs open--and how I can help you get one. Write TODAY. ARTHUR R. PATTERSON. Civil Service Expert. PATTERSON SCHOOL, 1082 Wisner Building, Rochester. N.Y. * * * * * Photos ENLARGED Size 16x20 inches 98¢ Same price for full length or best form groups, landscapes, or pet animals, etc., enlargements of any part of group picture. Safe return of your own original photo guaranteed. SPECIAL FREE OFFER =SEND NO MONEY= Just mail photo or snapshot (any size) and within a week you will receive your beautiful life-like enlargement size 16x20 in. guaranteed fadeless. Pay postman 98¢ plus postage or send $1.00 with order and we pay postage. With each enlargement we will send FREE a hand-tinted miniature reproduction of photo sent. Take advantage now of this amazing offer--send your photo today. =UNITED PORTRAIT COMPANY= 1652 Ogden Ave. Dept. B-590, Chicago, Ill. * * * * * BLANK CARTRIDGE PISTOL This well made and effective pistol is modelled on the pattern of the latest type of Revolver, the appearance of which alone is enough to scare a burglar, whilst, when loaded, it will probably prove just as effective as a revolver with real bullets without the danger to life. It takes the standard .22 Calibre Blank Cartridges, that are obtainable most everywhere. Special cash with order offer: 1 superior quality Blank Cartridge Pistol. 100 Blank Cartridges, and our new 550-page DeLuxe Catalog of latest novelties all for =ONLY $1.50=. Shipped by express only. Cannot go by parcel post. Extra Blank Cartridges =50¢ per 100=. Remember it is quite harmless, as it will not accommodate loaded cartridges. Special Holster (Cowboy Type) for pistol 50¢. No C.O.D. Shipments. =Special Offer= 1 Blank Cartridge Pistol, 100 Blank Cartridges, 1 550-page Novelty Catalog =ONLY $1.50= The Lot Shipped by Express Only Cash with Order Only =JOHNSON SMITH & COMPANY.= Dept 212, Racine, Wisconsin * * * * * BE A RAILWAY TRAFFIC INSPECTOR EARN UP TO $250 Per Month Expenses Paid [Illustration: No Hunting For a Position] Unusual opportunities for men 19 to 55 in this uncrowded profession. Travel or remain near home. Pleasant, fascinating work. Advancement rapid. Prepare in 3 months' spare time, home instruction. We assist you to a position upon completion, paying $120 to $135 per month, plus expenses or refund your tuition. Learn about Traffic Inspection now. Our free booklet shows how it can make your future a certainty. Write for it today. =Standard Business Training Institute= =DIV. 13= =Buffalo, N.Y.= * * * * * Sleep Disturbed? If irritating kidney excretions frequently disturb your sleep or cause backache, leg pains and make you feel tired, achy, depressed and discouraged, why not try the Cystex 48 Hour Test? No dopes or habit-forming drugs. List of pure ingredients in each package. Get Cystex (pronounced Siss-tex) at your drug store for only 60¢. Use all of it. See how it works. Money back if it doesn't satisfy you completely. * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * NEW WAY TO MAKE MONEY Easy Cash--Sure and Quick An opportunity to earn $15 a day or more taking orders from your friends and neighbors for our fine tailoring. Orders come easy when you show our swell samples and smart styles. =We Show You How=--you don't need to know anything about tailoring--simply follow our directions--we make it easy. FREE SUIT OFFER Make a few sales to your friends and get it finely tailored to your order suit, in any style, absolutely FREE, in addition to your cash profits. =FREE New, Big Sample OUTFIT= New style convenient carrying outfit, large all-wool samples--all supplies necessary to start at once--furnished =FREE=. =Write at once.= =PROGRESS TAILORING CO., Dept. P-204, Chicago= * * * * * MORE PAY with QUAKER FREE OUTFIT FREE SHIRTS TIES CASH BONUS GIVEN _Earn big money right from the start. Let Quaker help you. Wonderful free Sample outfit gets orders everywhere. Men's Shirts, Ties, Underwear, Hosiery. Unmatchable values. Unique Selling features. Ironclad guarantee. You can't fail with Quaker. Write for your Free outfit NOW._ QUAKER SHIRT CORPORATION Dept. K-2 1107 Broadway, N.Y. * * * * * FRENCH LOVE DROPS An enchanting exotic perfume of irresistible charm, clinging for hours like lovers loath to part. Just a few drops are enough. Full size bottle 98¢ prepaid or $1.39 C.O.D. plus postage. Directions with every order. FREE: 1 full size bottle if you order 2 vials. =D'ORO CO.= =Box 90, Varick Station, New York= =Dept NSG 2= * * * * * NO JOKE TO BE DEAF --EVERY DEAF PERSON KNOWS THAT [Illustration: Medicated Ear Drum] I make myself hear, after being deaf for 25 years, with these Artificial Ear Drums. I wear them day and night. They stop head noises and ringing ears. They are perfectly comfortable. No one sees them. Write me and I will tell you a true story, how I got deaf and how I make you hear. Address GEO. P. WAY, Artificial Ear Drum Co. (Inc.) 300 Hoffman Bldg. Detroit, Mich. * * * * * Be A Detective _Make Secret Investigations_ Earn Big Money. Work home or travel. Fascinating work. Experience unnecessary. =DETECTIVE= Particulars FREE, Write NOW to =GEO. N. WAGNER, 2190 Broadway, New York= * * * * * TOBACCO Habit Overcome Or No Pay Over 500,000 men and women used Superba Remedy to help stop Cigarettes, Cigars, Pipe, Chewing or Snuff. Write for full treatment on trial. Contains no dope or habit forming drugs. Costs $2.00 if successful, nothing if not. SUPERBA CO., A-11, Baltimore, Md. * * * * * Get Strong WITH These Improved Muscle Builders _All for $5.00_ [Illustration: Save $20.00 with this OFFER] _Send no money_ GUARANTEE SATISFACTION OR MONEY BACK Why pay an extravagant price for strength--here's an opportunity to get all the equipment you require along with an excellent course of instructions for only $5.00. Realize your ambition and develop muscles of a super-man. Get strong and amaze your friends. We show you how to easily master feats which now seem difficult--or if you just want physical culture for your health's sake, this equipment is just what you need. With this special offer you save at least $20.00. We furnish a ten cable chest expander which is adjustable to give resistance up to 200 lbs. It is made of new live extra strength, springy rubber so as to ensure long wear and give the resistance you need for real muscle development. You also get a pair of patented hand grips for developing powerful grip and forearms. We include wall exercising parts which permit you to develop your back, arms and legs--a real muscle necessity. You know that business men and athletes, too, first show their age in their legs. Develop your leg muscles with the foot strap which we furnish. This will give you speed and endurance--but that isn't all that you get. In addition we include a specially written course which contains pictures and diagrams showing you how to develop any part of your body so that you will quickly get on with these exercises and gain the greatest advantage from their use. Act now while you can get in on this special offer. It might be withdrawn, so rush the coupon. SEND NO MONEY All of the items pictured on this page are included in this big special reduction offer. Sign your name and address to the coupon below and rush it to us. We will send your ten cable chest developer, the wall parts, a pair of hand grips, foot strap and the course by return mail. Pay the postman only $5.00, plus the few cents postage on arrival. (If you desire to send check or money order in advance, we pay postage.) GUARANTEE All Crusader products are guaranteed to give entire satisfaction or money back. CRUSADER APPARATUS CO., Dept. 2002, 44 Parker Ave., Maplewood, N.J. I accept your offer. Send me everything described in your advertisement by return mail. I will pay postman $5.00 plus postage on arrival. It is understood if I am not entirely satisfied after examination I can return the goods and you will refund my money. Note:--No C.O.D. Orders to Foreign Countries or Canada. Name ........................................ Address ..................................... City ...................... State ........... * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * Win $3,500.00 Prizes from $1800.00 to $4245.00 each have been won through our unique advertising plan. In our last, an old man of 69, out of work, won over $5000.00. A boy, only 15, won $900.00. In next 3 or 4 months thousands of dollars will be awarded to fortunate persons who solve our puzzles and win our prizes. FIND THE TWIN FLYERS Watch out! These twelve pictures of a famous woman flyer all look alike--BUT--two, and only two, are exactly alike. Find these twin flyers! Some pictures are different in the collar, helmet, goggles, or tie. Remember, only two of the twelve are exactly alike. Find them, and send the numbers of the twin flyers on a post card or letter today. If correct, your answer will qualify you for this opportunity. =$7160.00 IN PRIZES GIVEN THIS TIME= Over 25 prizes, and duplicate prizes in case of ties. It's up to the winner whether he or she chooses $2875.00 in cash or a new Waco airplane, a big automobile, or a new home. A gorgeous prize list! ANYONE WHO ANSWERS THIS PUZZLE CORRECTLY MAY RECEIVE PRIZES OR CASH. =$625.00 ADDITIONAL FOR PROMPTNESS= Be prompt! It pays. Find the real twin flyers, and I will send Certificate which will be good for $625.00 if you are prompt and win first prize. Imagine, a first prize of $3500.00! NO MORE PUZZLES TO SOLVE. Any man, woman, boy, or girl in the U.S.A.--anyone at all, except residents of Chicago, Illinois, and former major prize winners. 25 of the people who take up this offer are going to win these wonderful prizes. Be one of them. Send the numbers of the twin flyers. Send no money, but be prompt. =J. D. SNYDER, Dept. 36, 54 W. Illinois St., Chicago, Ill.= * * * * * TRAIN FOR AVIATION AT HOME Hundreds of men are already training for big-pay Aviation jobs through Lt. Hinton's practical home-study course. This thorough training is just the foundation you need to enter Aviation in any of its many branches, for the course covers Terms and Definitions, Principles of Flight, Rigging, Repairing, Construction, Instruments, Aerology, Engines, Ignition, Carburetion, Airports; _Aviation from A to Z_. After graduation Hinton's Employment Department puts you in touch with real jobs, or, if you want to be a pilot, Hinton arranges special flying rates at an accredited Air College near your home. Hinton-trained men are in demand and they are making good. His Big Free Book explains everything. Send for your copy at once! [Illustration] =SEND FOR FREE BOOK= =MAIL NOW!= WALTER HINTON, President, 316-D Aviation Institute of U.S.A. 1115 Conn. Ave., Washington, D.C. Name .......................... Age ......... (Must be 18) Address ..................................... City ...................... State ........... * * * * * $8 often made in one day by many of our sales Agents [Illustrations] Sell finest line new guaranteed hosiery you ever saw, for men, women, children. Written guarantee to wear and satisfy or replaced. 126 styles, colors. Finest silks. All at lowest prices. NEW FORD CAR We offer our agents a =new Ford Car= when earned under our plan. Your commission daily. Credit given. Extra bonus. We deliver or you deliver--suit yourself. FINE SILK HOSE Our new plan gives you =fine silk hosiery= for your own use. I want men and women to act as Local Sales Agents. Spare time is satisfactory. Write quick. A post card will do. =WILKNIT HOSIERY CO.= =No. 2807 Greenfield, Ohio= * * * * * NEW SCIENTIFIC WONDER ="X-RAY" CURIO= [Illustration: Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.] =PRICE 10¢ 3-25¢ no stamps= BIG FUN =BOYS= You apparently see thru Clothes, Wood, Stone, any object. See Bones in Flesh. FREE Pkg. radio picture films, takes pictures without camera. You'll like 'em. (1 pkg. with each 25¢ order.) =MARVEL MFG. CO. Dept. 86, NEW HAVEN, CONN.= * * * * * TRAVEL--for 'UNCLE SAM' =RAILWAY POSTAL CLERKS= =MAIL CARRIERS--POSTOFFICE CLERKS GENERAL CLERKS--CUSTOMS INSPECTORS= $1700 to $3400 a Year for Life No "layoffs" because of strikes, poor business, etc.--sure pay--rapid advancement. Many other U.S. Government Jobs. City and country residents stand same chance. Common sense education usually sufficient. STEADY WORK Cut coupon and mail it before turning the page =MEN--BOYS 18 to 45= =Use Coupon Before You Lose It= * * * * * COUPON FRANKLIN INSTITUTE, Dept. E267, Rochester, N.Y. Rush to me, free of charge. (1) A full description of the positions checked below. (2) 32-page book with list of positions obtainable. (3) Tell me how to get the positions checked. [ ] Railway Postal Clerk ($1900 to $2700) [ ] Postoffice Clerk ($1700 to $2300) [ ] City Mail Carrier ($1700 to $2100) [ ] General Clerk ($1200 to $2100) [ ] Customs Inspector ($2100 up) [ ] Rural Mail Carrier ($2100 to $3300) Name ........................................ Address ..................................... * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * Get Strong QUICKLY Giant Chest Expander ONLY $2.00 Here's an opportunity for everyone to develop big muscles and obtain great strength by using this heavy-tensioned PROGRESSIVE EXERCISER, adjustable from 20 to 200 lbs. resistance. Complete instructions with each exerciser. Get rid of those aches and pains, indigestion, constipation, headaches, etc. Build up your body and look like a real He-man. SEND NO MONEY! Simply pay the postman $2.00, plus a few cents postage, for five-cabled exerciser or $4.00 plus a few cents postage, for ten-cabled exerciser. _Money back in five days if dissatisfied._ Progressive Exerciser Co. Dept. 5002, Langdon Building Duane Street and Broadway New York City [Illustration] * * * * * LAW STUDY AT HOME Become a lawyer. Legally trained men win high positions and big success in business and public life. Be independent. Greater opportunities now than ever before. Big corporations are headed by men with legal training. Earn =$5,000 to $10,000 Annually= We guide you step by step. You can train at home during spare time. Degree of LL. B. conferred. LaSalle students found among practicing attorneys of every state. We furnish all text material, including fourteen-volume Law Library. Low cost, easy terms. Get our valuable 64-page "Law Guide" and "Evidence" books FREE. Send for them NOW. LaSalle Extension University, Dept. 275-L, Chicago The World's Largest Business Training Institution * * * * * HOW SHARP IS YOUR RAZOR? Did you have trouble shaving this morning? If your razor blade scraped and pulled you will appreciate this remarkable new discovery.... Gold Nugget Strop Dressing ... can be used satisfactorily on all stropping devices ... puts keen cutting edge on any razor blade.... Easy to apply ... results assured. Makes you feel like singing when you shave. $1 postpaid. NO-HONE COMPANY 3124 California St. Omaha, Nebraska * * * * * PATENTS Time counts in applying for patents. Don't risk delay in protecting your ideas. Send sketch or model for instructions or write for FREE book. "How to Obtain a Patent" and "Record of Invention" form. No charge for information on how to proceed. Communications strictly confidential. Prompt, careful, efficient service. Clarence A. O'Brien, Registered Patent Attorney, 1876 Security Savings and Comm'l Bank Building (directly across street from Patent Office) Washington, D.C. * * * * * STOP Tobacco No human being can escape the harmful effects of tobacco. Don't try to quit without assistance. Let our simple inexpensive remedy help you. A complete treatment costs but $2.00. Every penny promptly refunded if you do not get desired results. Ours is a harmless preparation, carefully compounded to overcome the condition, that will make quitting of tobacco pleasant, and easy. It comes with a money back guarantee. =Anti-Tobacco League= P.O. Box H-2 OMAHA, NEBR. * * * * * SONG WRITERS! [Illustration] SUBSTANTIAL ADVANCE ROYALTIES are paid on work found acceptable for publication. Anyone wishing to write _either the words_ or music for songs may submit work for free examination and advice. _Past experience unnecessary_. New demand created by "Talking Pictures" fully described in our free book. Write for it Today. NEWCOMER ASSOCIATES 723 Earle Building, New York * * * * * Learn to PAINT SIGNS and SHOW CARDS We quickly teach you by mail, or at school. In spare time. Enormous demand. Big future. Interesting work. Oldest and foremost school. EARN $50 TO $200 WEEKLY Otto Wiegand, Md., home-study graduate, made $12,000 from his business in one year. John Vassoe, N.Y., gets $25 for a show card. Crawford, B.C., writes: "Earned $200 while taking course." Write for complete information. DETROIT SCHOOL OF LETTERING Est. 1889 180 Stimson Ave. DETROIT, MICH. * * * * * STOP WORRYING about Money [Illustration: _Here's a New, Easy Way to Make_ $15 a Day] YES--here's a wonderful opportunity to start right in making $15 in a day. You can have plenty of money to pay your bills, to spend for new clothes, furniture, radio, pleasure trips, or whatever you want. No more pinching pennies or counting the nickels and dimes. No more saying "We can't afford it." That's the biggest mistake any man or woman ever made. =And I'll prove it.= Van Allen Makes $100 a Week Just send me your name and address and I'll give you some facts that will open your eyes. I'll show you how L. C. Van Allen, of Illinois, quit a $23-a-week job, took hold of my proposition, and made better than $100 a week! Then there's Gustav Karnath, of Minnesota, who cleared $20.35 the first five hours, and Mrs. B. L. Hodges, of New York, who says she never fails to make a profit of $18 to $20 a day. I have letters from men and women everywhere that tell about profits of $10, $15, $20 and as high as $25 and $30 in a single day. Start Right In You don't need any experience or capital to make big money my way. No course of training is necessary. You simply act as my Representative in your locality and look after my business there. All you have to do is call on your friends and my established customers and take care of their orders for my fast selling line of Groceries, Toilet Articles and other Household Necessities. I have thousands of customers in every section of every State. They must order from you because I never sell through stores. Last year my Representatives made nearly two million dollars. When I get the coupon from you I send full details by return mail. You can quickly be making money just like I said. I will also supply you with Groceries and other Household Necessities at lowest, wholesale prices. SEND NO MONEY If you want ready cash--a chance to make $15 or more a day starting at once--and Groceries at wholesale--just send me your name and address on the coupon. It costs you nothing to investigate. Keep your present job and start in spare time if you want to. Oscar Stuart, of W. Virginia, reports $18 profit in 2-1/2 hours' spare time. So you see there's everything to gain. Simply mail the coupon. _I_ will give you full details of my plan without cost or obligation to you. I'll give you the big opportunity you've been waiting for. So don't lose a moment. Mail the coupon NOW. FREE! [Illustration: New Ford Tudor Sedan] NOT a contest. I offer a brand-new car free to producers as an extra reward or bonus--in addition to their large cash profits. Mail coupon for particulars. * * * * * MAIL THIS NOW! =ALBERT MILLS, Pres., American Products Co.,= =5441 Monmouth Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio.= Send me, without cost or obligation, all the facts about your new proposition that offers a wonderful opportunity to make quick profits of $15 or more a day and Groceries at wholesale. Name ........................................ Address ..................................... ............................................. © A. P. Co. (Print or Write Plainly) * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * What's Wrong With This Picture? See If You Can Find the Mistakes in This Picture [Illustration] We will spend over $167,000.00 this year for the purpose of conducting free prize offers to advertise and expand our business. Thousands of persons are going to receive valuable prizes or cash awards and compensations this year through our offers. The sky is the limit! Anyone living in the United States outside of Chicago, except employees of this company, members of their families, or our previous auto or first prize winners, or members of their families, may enter an answer to this puzzle. $7,346 In Prizes Given in This One Offer Seven Big New 6-Cylinder Sedans and Other Valuable Prizes Try your skill--it costs you nothing. Study the picture shown here, but look carefully. The artist has purposely made many mistakes. Can you find four or more of them? These mistakes can be found in various objects is the picture--that's all the hint we can give you. If you think you can find four or more mistakes, answer at once. Just mark the mistakes in pencil on the picture, or tell me what they are in a letter or on a post card. Only four mistakes are required for a perfect answer. Anyone Who Answers This Puzzle Correctly May Receive Prizes or Cash! Man, woman, boy, or girl--it doesn't matter who or what you are. Seven of the people who take up this offer are going to win wonderful automobiles. You can be among them. Answer today! Duplicate prizes awarded in case of ties. =Additional $500.00 for Promptness= $500.00 extra will be awarded in addition to first prize if you are prompt. If your answer is judged to be perfect, I will tell you without delay about winning the prizes. Hurry now! Address your answer to G. W. ALDERTON, Advertising Manager, Dept. 143, 510 North Dearborn St., Chicago, Ill. * * * * * AGENTS--Represent THE Carlton LINE--_America's Best Paying Proposition_! SAMPLES FREE SELL FROM A MILLION DOLLAR STOCK Shirts, Neckwear and Underwear. No substitutions. 4 Hour Shipping Service. Highest Commissions Bonuses. Profit Sharing. Biggest Company. Mail Coupon. CARLTON MILLS, 114 FIFTH AVE., N.Y.C. _Send me your Famous Sample Outfit_ Name ........................................ Address ..................................... 100-G CARLTON MILLS INC. 114 FIFTH AVE. NEW YORK =Dept. 186-6= MAIL COUPON $1000 LIFE Insurance Policy Free * * * * * BE A JAZZ MUSIC MASTER Play Piano By Ear [Illustration: Niagara School Free Book] Play popular song hits perfectly. Name the tune, play it by ear. No teacher--self-instruction. No tedious ding-dong daily practice--just 20 brief, entertaining lessons, easily mastered. At Home in Your Spare Time Send for FREE BOOK. Learn many styles of bass and syncopation--trick endings. If 10¢ (coin or stamps) is enclosed, you also receive wonderful booklet "_How to Entertain at Piano_"--and many new tricks, stunts, etc. _Niagara School of Music_ Dept. 350 Niagara Falls, N.Y. Send for this Free Book * * * * * Learn How to BOX =$2.98= brings you the famous boxing course by mail of Jimmy DeForest, =World's Greatest Trainer=, the system that trained Dempsey and great champions. Covers everything in scientific boxing from fundamentals to ring generalship. Twenty weeks makes you a finished DeForest trained boxer. Hundreds of DeForest trained men are making good in the ring today. Complete course sent in one mailing. Send $2.98 or C.O.D order paying postman $2.98 plus actual postage. [Illustration] =Jimmy DeForest Boxing Course= =347 Madison Ave., Box 42, New York City= * * * * * Radium Is Restoring Health to Thousands No medicine, drugs or dieting. Just a light, small, comfortable inexpensive Radio-Active Pad, worn on the back by day and over the stomach at night. Sold on trial. You can be sure it is helping you before you buy it. Over 150,000 sold on this plan. Thousands have written us that it healed them of Neuritis, Rheumatism, High Blood Pressure, Constipation, Nervous Prostration, Heart, Lungs, Liver, Kidney and Bladder trouble, etc. No matter what you have tried, or what your trouble may be, try Degnen's Radio-Active Solar Pad at our risk. Write today for Trial offer and descriptive literature. Radium Appliance Co., 2833 Bradbury Bldg., Los Angeles, Cal. * * * * * HYPNOTIZE [Illustration] 25 Lessons in Hypnotism, Mind Reading and Magnetic Healing. Tells how experts hypnotize at a glance, make others obey their commands. How to overcome bad habits, how to give a home performance, get on the stage, etc. Helpful to every man and woman, executives, salesmen, doctors, mothers, etc. Simple, easy. Learn at home. Only $1.10, including the "Hypnotic Eye," a new aid for amateurs. Send stamps or M.O. (or pay C.O.D. plus postage). Guaranteed. =Educator Press, 19 Park Row, New York. Dept. H-41= * * * * * AVIATION Information FREE Send us your name and address for full information regarding the Aviation and Airplane business. Find out about the many great opportunities now open and how we prepare you at home, during spare time, to qualify. Our new book, _Opportunities in the Airplane industry_ also sent free if you answer at once. AMERICAN SCHOOL OF AVIATION Dept. 1182 3601 Michigan Ave. CHICAGO * * * * * Charming--Captivating--Irresistible DESIR D'AMOUR [Love's Desire] [Illustration] This exotic perfume goes straight to the heart like Cupid's arrows. Its strength and mystic aroma thrills and delights young and old. Triple strength full size vial 98 cents prepaid or $1.32 C.O.D. plus shipping charges. Directions free. One bottle GRATIS if you order three vials. MAGNUS WORKS, Box 12, Varick Sta., New York, N.Y., Dept. NSG-2. * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * [Illustration: On your feet--_In a good Paying Business_] We start you in the shoe and hosiery business. Inexperienced workers earn Big Money yearly. Direct-to-Wearer plan. Just show Tanners Famous Line of Footwear. We tell how and where to sell. Perfect fit through Patented System. Collect your pay daily. We furnish $40.00 Sample Outfit of actual shoes and hosiery. 83 styles. =Send for free book "Getting Ahead" and full particulars.= No obligation. TANNERS SHOE CO. 892 C Street, Boston, Mass. * * * * * =Play the Hawaiian Guitar like the Hawaiians!= =Only 4 Motions= used in playing this fascinating instrument Our native Hawaiian instructors teach you to master them quickly. Pictures show how. Everything explained clearly. [Illustration] Play in Half Hour After you get the four easy motions you play harmonious chords with very little practice. No previous musical knowledge needed. Easy Lessons Even if you don't know one note from another, the 52 printed lessons and clear pictures make it easy to learn quickly. Pay as you play. GIVEN _when you enroll_--a sweet toned HAWAIIAN GUITAR, Carrying Case and Playing Outfit--Value $18 to $20 _No extras--everything included_ =WRITE AT ONCE= for attractive offer and easy terms. You have everything to gain. A postcard will do. =ACT!= OTHER COURSES Tenor Banjo, Violin, Tiple, Tenor Guitar, Ukulele, Banjo Ukulele. Under well known instructors. FIRST HAWAIIAN CONSERVATORY of MUSIC, Inc. 9th Floor, Woolworth Bldg, Dept. 269 New York, N.Y. _Approved as a Correspondence School Under the Laws of the State of New York--Member National Home Study Council_ * * * * * SELL ROSECLIFF SHIRTS _Make Steady Money_ YOUR OWN SHIRTS and TIES Showing Samples Men's Shirts Ties, Underwear brings you big cash commissions. One Year Guarantee. No substitutions. Free silk initials. More exclusive Rosecliff features establish leadership. Write for your FREE Outfit NOW! ROSECLIFF SHIRT CORP. Dept. J-2 1237 Broadway, N.Y. _Outfit Free_ * * * * * GOV'T. POSITIONS $35 TO $75 WEEKLY MEN--WOMEN AGE 18 to 55 ( ) By. Mail Clerk ( ) P. O. Laborer ( ) R. F. D. Carrier ( ) Special Agent (investigator) ( ) City Mail Carrier ( ) Meat Inspector ( ) P. O. Clerk ( ) File Clerk ( ) General Clerk ( ) Matron ( ) Steno-Typist ( ) Immigrant Inspector ( ) Seamstress ( ) Auditor ( ) Steno-Secretary ( ) U.S. Border Patrol ( ) Chauffeur-Carrier ( ) Watchman ( ) Skilled Laborer ( ) Postmaster ( ) Typist INSTRUCTION BUREAU, 112-B, St. Louis, Mo. Send me FREE particulars How To Qualify for positions marked "X." Salaries, locations, opportunities, etc. ALL SENT FREE. Name ............................................ Address ......................................... * * * * * [Illustration: FREE! Body Chart] If you will mail the coupon below, this Anatomical and Physiological Chart will be mailed to you without one cent of expense. It shows the location of the Organs, Bones of the Body, Muscles of the Body, Head and Vertebra Column and tells you how the nerves radiate from your spinal cord to all organs of the body. This chart should be in every home. Where Is That PAIN? It may be in the neck, back, hips, stomach, liver, legs or arms. 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AT YOUR NEWSDEALER SUBSCRIPTION $3.00 PER YEAR * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * [Illustration: FOR THOUSANDS OF MEN] Tobacco Habit Banished Let Us Help You Stop craving tobacco in any form. Tobacco Redeemer in most cases relieves all craving for it in a few days' time. Don't try to quit the tobacco habit unaided. It's often a losing fight against heavy odds, and may mean a distressing shock to the nervous system. Let Tobacco Redeemer help the habit to quit _you_. Tobacco users usually can depend upon this help by simply using Tobacco Redeemer according to simple directions. It is pleasant to use, acts quickly, and is thoroughly reliable. Not a Substitute Tobacco Redeemer contains no habit-forming drugs of any kind. It is in no sense a substitute for tobacco. After finishing the treatment, there should be no desire to use tobacco again or to continue the use of the remedy. 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In a dirty, forelorn shack by the river's edge they found the mutilated body of Genevieve Martin. Her pretty face was swollen and distorted. Marks on the slender throat showed that she had been brutally choked to death. Who had committed this ghastly crime? Crimes like this are being solved every day by Finger Print Experts. We read in the papers of their exploits, hear of the mysteries they solve, the rewards they win. Finger Print Experts are the heroes of the hour. More Trained Men Needed The demand for trained men by governments, states, cities, detective agencies, corporations, and private bureaus is becoming greater every day. Here is a real opportunity for YOU. Can you imagine a more fascinating line of work than this? Often life and death depend on finger print evidence--and big rewards go to the expert. Many experts earn regularly from $3,000 to $10,000 per year. 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Mail coupon NOW--while this offer lasts! =Institute of Applied Science= =Dept. 15-62= =1920 Sunnyside Avenue, Chicago= * * * * * =INSTITUTE OF APPLIED SCIENCE,= =Dept. 15-62 1920 Sunnyside Avenue, Chicago, Ill.= Gentlemen: Without any obligation whatever, send me your new, fully illustrated FREE book on Finger Prints and the free copy of the Confidential Reports of Operator No. 38 made to His Chief. _Name_ ........................................ _Address_ ..................................... ............................. _Age_ ........... * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * Muscles 5¢ apiece! Wouldn't it be great if we could buy muscles by the bag--take them home and paste them on our shoulders? Then our rich friends with money to buy them, sure would be socking us all over the lots. But they don't come that easy, fellows. If you want muscle you have to work for it. That's the reason why the lazy fellow never can hope to be strong. So if you're lazy and don't want to work--you had better quit right here. This talk was never meant for you. [Illustration: =EARLE LIEDERMAN, The Muscle Builder=] _Author of "Muscle Building," "Science of Wrestling and Jiu Jitsu," "Secrets of Strength," "Here's Health," "Endurance," Etc._ I WANT LIVE ONES I've been making big men out of little ones for over fifteen years. I've made pretty near as many strong men as Heinz has made pickles. My system never fails. That's why I guarantee my works to do the trick. That's why they gave me the name of "The Muscle Builder." I have the surest bet that you ever heard of. Eugen Sandow himself said that my system is the shortest and surest that America ever had to offer. Follow me closely now and I'll tell you a few things I'm going to do for you. HERE'S WHAT I GUARANTEE In just 30 days I'm going to increase your arm one full inch. Yes, and add two inches to your chest in the same length of time. But that's nothing. I've only started; get this--I'm going to put knobs of muscles on your shoulders like baseballs. I'm going to deepen your chest so that you will double your lung capacity. Each breath you take will flood every crevice of your pulmonary cavity with oxygen. This will load your blood with red corpuscles, shooting life and vitality throughout your entire system. I'm going to give you arms and legs like pillars. I'm going to work on every inner muscle as well, toning up your liver, your heart, etc. You'll have a snap to your step and a flash to your eye. You'll feel the real pep shooting up and down your old backbone. You'll stretch out your big brawny arms and crave for a chance to crush everything before you. You'll just bubble over with vim and animation. Sounds pretty good, what? You can bet your old ukulele it's good. It's wonderful. And don't forget, fellow--I'm not just promising all this--I guarantee it. Well, let's get busy, I want action--So do you. Send for my new 64-page book "_Muscular Development_" IT IS FREE It contains forty-eight full-page photographs of myself and some of the many prize-winning pupils I have trained. Some of these came to me as pitiful weaklings, imploring me to help them. Look them over now, and you will marvel at their present physiques. This book will prove an impetus and a real inspiration to you. It will thrill you through and through. This will not obligate you at all, but for the sake of your future health and happiness, do not put it off. Send today--right now, before you turn this page. EARLE LIEDERMAN DEPT. 1702 305 BROADWAY, N.Y. CITY * * * * * =EARLE LIEDERMAN= =Dept. 1702, 305 Broadway, New York City= Dear Sir:--Please send me without any obligation on my part whatever, a copy of your latest book "Muscular Development." (Please write or print plainly.) Name ......................... Age .......... Address ..................................... City ...................... State ........... * * * * * Please mention NEWSSTAND GROUP--MEN'S LIST, when answering advertisements * * * * * change to OLD GOLD in kindness to your THROAT THE SMOKE SCREEN THAT KEEPS OUT THROAT-SCRATCH "COLD" WEATHER IS OLD GOLD WEATHER [Illustration: Old Gold Cigarettes] In raw, damp, or cold weather, change to OLD GOLD. Its naturally good tobaccos are smooth and kind to your throat. Just clean, ripe tobacco, blended to honey-smoothness. And a flavor that has won more than 100,000 taste tests. No artificial treatment ... just better tobacco, that's all. And it has put OLD GOLD among the leaders in THREE years! Take a carton home. Do it today. For this is the weather for mild OLD GOLD. =Better tobaccos make them smoother and better ... with "not a cough in a carload"= * * * * * WHEN CRITICAL SMOKERS GET TOGETHER [Illustration: Camel] Their experience recognizes that Camel is indeed "a better cigarette": Better in its quality of mellow, fragrant tobacco. Better in the mildness and satisfying taste of the Camel blend. When they learn the difference they flock to Camels. CAMEL _CIGARETTES_ * * * * * Transcriber Corrections: He turned quickly and was astonished at the sight of [added 'the'] shook a skinny forefinger [standardized 'fore-finger'] in Tom's face. I was successful [was 'successsful'] in business His eyes were riveted [standardized 'rivetted'] to an undulating, One is that it would be [was 'would me'] propellers [standardized 'propellors'] ripping into the summer night The thing was halfway [standardized 'half-way'] to the high bank On some were propellers [standardized 'propellors']. the slim shafts with their little propellerlike [standardized 'propellorlike'] fans. There were others without the propellers; [standardized 'propellors'] He saw from below the swift plane, [added comma] the streaming, intangible ray does not sympathize [was 'symphathize'] with radicals. and took up a cigarette. Lighting [was 'Lightning'] it The light of the match died, plunging me into a pit of gloom. [was ,] more comfort than [was 'that'] a room of grotesque shadows familiar [was 'familar'] to him. He had seen it pictured throughout the sun-ship, [standardized 'sun ship'] Northwood, going into the cabin for fur coats, Athalia's [was 'Athania's'] picture was gone. He seized a telescope and focused [was 'focusd'] it Northwood [was 'Norwood'] narrowed his eyes as "Do I guess right," said Northwood, [was ;] "that the light is "Yes," said Dr. Mundson. [was 'Munson'] "In your American slang, New Eden, [was 'Elden'] where supermen are younger than babes while she possessed the freshness of young girlhood, [changed from ;] her skin and eyes the iciness [was 'icyness'] was gone from his blue eyes you would be disappointed in him, [added ,] especially after having which she probably never saw before to-day, [standardized 'today'] I don't blame Adam for preferring [was 'prefering'] Athalia. the atoms of his body seemed to fly asunder. [was 'assunder'] Every grave that has yawned to receive its prey hides [was 'pray'] thrust him into Future Time, where the laboratory [was hyphenated between lines as 'labor-ratory'] there could be no survivors. [standardized 'survivers'] could receive with any [was 'and'] degree of clarity, always passed everyone [standardized 'every one'] who took his courses that he was allowed to go [was 'do'] about as he pleased. I can have a good man rewrite [standardized 're-write'] your drivel isn't to-day [standardized 'today'] to that Indian. would be necessary to decelerate [was 'decellerate'] what looked at first [was 'fist'] glance to be a huge artillery shell To-day [standardized 'Today'] the human body stands a speed A few minutes was enough for [removed duplicate 'for'] me to grasp Suppose I was laughed [was 'to laughed'] at when I get back, in the chairs of science to-day. [standardized 'today'] pre-pleistocene [was 'pre-pleistocence'] age--swimming among the invertebrate and, with almost super-human [standardized 'superhuman'] efforts, "The swarm's halfway [standardized 'half-way'] to Adelaide," he said. "Tommy, there must be water in the station," said [was 'and'] Dodd. The entire machine was enclosed [standardized 'inclosed'] in a inconspicuousness [was 'inconspicuous'] of his voice and manner replied the detective. "Where did you hide the loot?" [was ,] a person might [was 'mighty'] cause by passing very rapidly. more experience with robberies than [was 'that'] with apprehending is closed for to-day. [standardized 'today'] replied the doctor with a judicial [was 'judical'] air, "Are we going to waste the whole afternoon [was 'afternon'] showed you to be ambidextrous." [was 'ambidexterous'] SUBSCRIPTION [was 'SUBSCSRIPTION'] $3.00 PER YEAR 
29198	----	20¢ ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DR. DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor * * * * * [Illustration] The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are_: ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and FOREST AND STREAM. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. III, No. 1 CONTENTS JULY, 1930 COVER DESIGN _Painted in Water-colors from a Scene in "Earth, the Marauder."_ BEYOND THE HEAVISIDE LAYER CAPT. S. P. MEEK 5 _For Eighty Vertical Miles Carpenter and Bond Blasted Their Way--Only to Be Trapped by the Extraordinary Monsters of the Heaviside Layer._ EARTH, THE MARAUDER ARTHUR J. BURKS 18 _Out of Her Orbit Sped the Teeming Earth--A Marauding Planet Bent on Starry Conquest._ (Beginning a Three-part Novel.) FROM AN AMBER BLOCK TOM CURRY 50 _A Giant Amber Block at Last Gives Up Its Living, Ravenous Prey._ THE TERROR OF AIR-LEVEL SIX HARL VINCENT 62 _From Some Far Reach of Leagueless Space Came a Great Pillar of Flame to Lay Waste and Terrorize the Earth._ (A Novelet.) THE FORGOTTEN PLANET SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT 88 _The Authentic Account of Why Cosmic Man Damned an Outlaw World to Be, Forever, a Leper of Space._ THE POWER AND THE GLORY CHARLES W. DIFFIN 104 _Sadly, Sternly, the Old Professor Reveals to His Brilliant Pupil the Greater Path to Glory._ MURDER MADNESS MURRAY LEINSTER 109 _More and More South Americans Are Stricken with the Horrible "Murder Madness" That Lies in the Master's Fearful Poison. And Bell Is Their One Last Hope as He Fights to Stem the Swiftly Rising Tide of a Continent's Utter Enslavement._ (Part Three of a Four-part Novel.) THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 134 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ * * * * * Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President: Nathan Goldmann, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * [Illustration: _They were moving sluggishly along the red light, seeming to flow rather than crawl._] Beyond the Heaviside Layer _By Capt S. P. Meek_ McQuarrie, the City Editor, looked up as I entered his office. "Bond," he asked, "do you know Jim Carpenter?" [Sidenote: For eighty vertical miles Carpenter and Bond blasted their way--only to be trapped by the extraordinary monsters of the heaviside layer.] "I know him slightly," I replied cautiously. "I have met him several times and I interviewed him some years ago when he improved the Hadley rocket motor. I can't claim a very extensive acquaintance with him." "I thought you knew him well. It is a surprise to me to find that there is any prominent man who is not an especial friend of yours. At any rate you know him as well as anyone of the staff, so I'll give you the assignment." "What's he up to now?" I asked. "He's going to try to punch a hole in the heaviside layer." "But that's impossible," I cried. "How can anyone...." My voice died away in silence. True enough, the idea of trying to make a permanent hole in a field of magnetic force was absurd, but even as I spoke I remembered that Jim Carpenter had never agreed to the opinion almost unanimously held by our scientists as to the true nature of the heaviside layer. "It may be impossible," replied McQuarrie dryly, "but you are not hired by this paper as a scientific consultant. For some reason, God alone knows why, the owner thinks that you are a reporter. Get down there and try to prove he is right by digging up a few facts about Carpenter's attempt. Wire your stuff in and Peavey will write it up. On this one occasion, please try to conceal your erudition and send in your story in simple words of one syllable which uneducated men like Peavey and me can comprehend. That's all." * * * * * He turned again to his desk and I left the room. At one time I would have come from such an interview with my face burning, but McQuarrie's vitriol slid off me like water off a duck's back. He didn't really mean half of what he said, and he knew as well as I did that his crack about my holding my job with the Clarion as a matter of pull was grossly unjust. It is true that I knew Trimble, the owner of the Clarion, fairly well, but I got my job without any aid from him. McQuarrie himself hired me and I held my job because he hadn't fired me, despite the caustic remarks which he addressed to me. I had made the mistake when I first got on the paper of letting McQuarrie know that I was a graduate electrical engineer from Leland University, and he had held it against me from that day on. I don't know whether he really held it seriously against me or not, but what I have written above is a fair sample of his usual manner toward me. In point of fact I had greatly minimized the extent of my acquaintance with Jim Carpenter. I had been in Leland at the same time that he was and had known him quite well. When I graduated, which was two years after he did, I worked for about a year in his laboratory, and my knowledge of the improvement which had made the Hadley rocket motor a practicability came from first hand knowledge and not from an interview. That was several years before but I knew that he never forgot an acquaintance, let alone a friend, and while I had left him to take up other work our parting had been pleasant, and I looked forward with real pleasure to seeing him again. * * * * * Jim Carpenter, the stormy petrel of modern science! The eternal iconoclast: the perpetual opponent! He was probably as deeply versed in the theory of electricity and physical chemistry as any man alive, but it pleased him to pose as a "practical" man who knew next to nothing of theory and who despised the little he did know. His great delight was to experimentally smash the most beautifully constructed theories which were advanced and taught in the colleges and universities of the world, and when he couldn't smash them by experimental evidence, to attack them from the standpoint of philosophical reasoning and to twist around the data on which they were built and make it prove, or seem to prove, the exact opposite of what was generally accepted. No one questioned his ability. When the ill-fated Hadley had first constructed the rocket motor which bears his name it was Jim Carpenter who made it practical. Hadley had tried to disintegrate lead in order to get his back thrust from the atomic energy which it contained and proved by apparently unimpeachable mathematics that lead was the only substance which could be used. Jim Carpenter had snorted through the pages of the electrical journals and had turned out a modification of Hadley's invention which disintegrated aluminum. The main difference in performance was that, while Hadley's original motor would not develop enough power to lift itself from the ground, Carpenter's modification produced twenty times the horsepower per pound of weight of any previously known generator of power and changed the rocket ship from a wild dream to an everyday commonplace. * * * * * When Hadley later constructed his space flyer and proposed to visit the moon, it was Jim Carpenter who ridiculed the idea of the attempt being successful. He proposed the novel and weird idea that the path to space was not open, but that the earth and the atmosphere were enclosed in a hollow sphere of impenetrable substance through which Hadley's space flyer could not pass. How accurate were his prognostications was soon known to everyone. Hadley built and equipped his flyer and started off on what he hoped would be an epoch making flight. It was one, but not in the way which he had hoped. His ship took off readily enough, being powered with four rocket motors working on Carpenter's principle, and rose to a height of about fifty miles, gaining velocity rapidly. At that point his velocity suddenly began to drop. He was in constant radio communication with the earth and he reported his difficulty. Carpenter advised him to turn back while he could, but Hadley kept on. Slower and slower became his progress, and after he had penetrated ten miles into the substance which hindered him, his ship stuck fast. Instead of using his bow motors and trying to back out, he had moved them to the rear, and with the combined force of his four motors he had penetrated for another two miles. There he insanely tried to force his motors to drive him on until his fuel was exhausted. He had lived for over a year in his space flyer, but all of his efforts did not serve to materially change his position. He had tried, of course, to go out through his air locks and explore space, but his strength, even although aided by powerful levers, could not open the outer doors of the locks against the force which was holding them shut. Careful observations were continuously made of the position of his flyer and it was found that it was gradually returning toward the earth. Its motion was very slight, not enough to give any hope for the occupant. Starting from a motion so slow that it could hardly be detected, the velocity of return gradually accelerated; and three years after Hadley's death, the flyer was suddenly released from the force which held it, and it plunged to the earth, to be reduced by the force of its fall to a twisted, pitiful mass of unrecognizable junk. * * * * * The remains were examined, and the iron steel parts were found to be highly magnetized. This fact was seized upon by the scientists of the world and a theory was built up of a magnetic field of force surrounding the earth through which nothing of a magnetic nature could pass. This theory received almost universal acceptance, Jim Carpenter alone of the more prominent men of learning refusing to admit the validity of it. He gravely stated it as his belief that no magnetic field existed, but that the heaviside layer was composed of some liquid of high viscosity whose density and consequent resistance to the passage of a body through it increased in the ratio of the square of the distance to which one penetrated into it. There was a moment of stunned surprise when he announced his radical idea, and then a burst of Jovian laughter shook the scientific press. Carpenter was in his glory. For months he waged a bitter controversy in the scientific journals and when he failed to win converts by this method, he announced that he would prove it by blasting a way into space through the heaviside layer, a thing which would be patently impossible were it a field of force. He had lapsed into silence for two years and his curt note to the Associated Press to the effect that he was now ready to demonstrate his experiment was the first intimation the world had received of his progress. * * * * * I drew expense money from the cashier and boarded the Lark for Los Angeles. When I arrived I went to a hotel and at once called Carpenter on the telephone. "Jim Carpenter speaking," came his voice presently. "Good evening, Mr. Carpenter," I replied, "this is Bond of the San Francisco Clarion." I would be ashamed to repeat the language which came over that telephone. I was informed that all reporters were pests and that I was a doubly obnoxious specimen and that were I within reach I would be promptly assaulted and that reporters would be received at nine the next morning and no earlier or later. "Just a minute, Mr. Carpenter," I cried as he neared the end of his peroration and was, I fancied, about to slam up the receiver. "Don't you remember me? I was at Leland with you and used to work in your laboratory in the atomic disintegration section." "What's your name?" he demanded. "Bond, Mr. Carpenter." "Oh, First Mortgage! Certainly I remember you. Mighty glad to hear your voice. How are you?" "Fine, thank you, Mr. Carpenter. I would not have ventured to call you had I not known you. I didn't mean to impose and I'll be glad to see you in the morning at nine." "Not by a long shot," he cried. "You'll come up right away. Where are you staying?" "At the El Rey." "Well, check out and come right up here. There's lots of room for you here at the plant and I'll be glad to have you. I want at least one intelligent report of this experiment and you should be able to write it. I'll look for you in an hour." "I don't want to impose--" I began; but he interrupted. "Nonsense, glad to have you. I needed someone like you badly and you have come just in the nick of time. I'll expect you in an hour." * * * * * The receiver clicked and I hastened to follow his instructions. A ringside seat was just what I was looking for. It took my taxi a little over an hour to get to the Carpenter laboratory and I chuckled when I thought of how McQuarrie's face would look when he saw my expense account. Presently we reached the edge of the grounds which surrounded the Carpenter laboratory and were stopped at the high gate I remembered so well. "Are you sure you'll get in, buddy?" asked my driver. "Certainly," I replied. "What made you ask?" "I've brought three chaps out here to-day and none of them got in," he answered with a grin. "I'm glad you're so sure, but I'll just wait around until you are inside before I drive away." I laughed and advanced to the gate. Tim, the old guard, was still there, and he remembered and welcomed me. "Me ordhers wuz t' let yez roight in, sor," he said as he greeted me. "Jist lave ye'er bag here and Oi'll have ut sint roight up." I dropped my bag and trudged up the well remembered path to the laboratory. It had been enlarged somewhat since I saw it last and, late though the hour was, there was a bustle in the air and I could see a number of men working in the building. From an area in the rear, which was lighted by huge flood lights, came the staccato tattoo of a riveter. I walked up to the front of the laboratory and entered. I knew the way to Carpenter's office and I went directly there and knocked. "Hello, First Mortgage!" cried Jim Carpenter as I entered in response to his call. "I'm glad to see you. Excuse the bruskness of my first greeting to you over the telephone, but the press have been deviling me all day, every man jack of them trying to steal a march on the rest. I am going to open the whole shebang at nine to-morrow and give them all an equal chance to look things over before I turn the current on at noon. As soon as we have a little chat, I'll show you over the works." * * * * * After half an hour's chat he rose. "Come along, First Mortgage," he said, "we'll go out and look the place over and I'll explain everything. If my ideas work out, you'll have no chance to go over it to-morrow, so I want you to see it now." I had no chance to ask him what he meant by this remark, for he walked rapidly from the laboratory and I perforce followed him. He led the way to the patch of lighted ground behind the building where the riveting machine was still beating out its monotonous cacaphony and paused by the first of a series of huge reflectors, which were arranged in a circle. "Here is the start of the thing," he said. "There are two hundred and fifty of these reflectors arranged in a circle four hundred yards in diameter. Each of them is an opened parabola of such spread that their beams will cover an area ten yards in diameter at fifty miles above the earth. If my calculations are correct they should penetrate through the layer at an average speed of fifteen miles per hour per unit, and by two o'clock to-morrow afternoon, the road to space should be open." "What is your power?" I asked. "Nothing but a concentration of infra-red rays. The heaviside layer, as you doubtless know, is a liquid and, I think, an organic liquid. If I am right in that thought, the infra-red will cut through it like a knife through cheese." "If it is a liquid, how will you prevent it from flowing back into the hole you have opened?" I asked. "When the current is first turned on, each reflector will bear on the same point. Notice that they are moveable. They are arranged so that they move together. As soon as the first hole is bored through, they will move by clockwork, extending the opening until each points vertically upward and the hole is four hundred yards in diameter. I am positive that there will be no rapid flow even after the current is turned off, for I believe that the liquid is about as mobile as petroleum jelley. Should it close, however, it would take only a couple of hours to open it again to allow the space flyer to return." "What space flyer?" I demanded quickly. "The one we are going to be on, First Mortgage," he replied with a slight chuckle. * * * * * "We?" I cried, aghast. "Certainly. We. You and I. You didn't think I was going to send you alone, did you?" "I didn't know that anyone was going." "Of course. Someone has to go; otherwise, how could I prove my point? I might cut through a hundred holes and yet these stiff-necked old fossils, seeing nothing, would not believe. No, First Mortgage, when those arcs start working to-morrow, you and I will be in a Hadley space ship up at the bottom of the layer, and as soon as the road has been opened, two of the lamps will cut off to allow us through. Then the battery will hold the road open while we pass out into space and return." "Suppose we meet with Hadley's fate?" I demanded. "We won't. Even if I am wrong--which is very unlikely--we won't meet with any such fate. We have two stern motors and four bow motors. As soon as we meet with the slightest resistance to our forward progress we will stop and have twice the power plus gravity to send us earthwards. There is no danger connected with the trip." "All the same--" I began. "All the same, you're going," he replied. "Man alive, think of the chance to make a world scoop for your paper! No other press man has the slightest inkling of my plan and even if they had, there isn't another space flyer in the world that I know of. If you don't want to go, I'll give some one else the chance, but I prefer you, for you know something of my work." * * * * * I thought rapidly for a moment. The chance was a unique one and one that half the press men in San Francisco would have given their shirts to get. I had had my doubts of the accuracy of Jim Carpenter's reasoning while I was away from him, but there was no resisting the dynamic personality of the man when in his presence. "You win," I said with a laugh. "Your threat of offering some of my hated rivals a chance settled it." "Good boy!" he exclaimed, pounding me on the back. "I knew you'd come. I had intended to take one of my assistants with me, but as soon as I knew you were here I decided that you were the man. There really ought to be a press representative along. Come with me and I'll show you our flyer." The flyer proved to be of the same general type as had been used by Hadley. It was equipped with six rocket motors, four discharging to the bow and two to the stern. Any one of them, Carpenter said, was ample for motive power. Equilibrium was maintained by means of a heavy gyroscope which would prevent any turning of the axis of its rotation. The entire flyer shell could be revolved about the axis so that oblique motion with our bow and stern motors was readily possible. Direct lateral movement was provided for by valves which would divert a portion of the discharge of either a bow or stern motor out through side vents in any direction. The motive power, of course, was furnished by the atomic disintegration of powdered aluminum. The whole interior, except for the portion of the walls, roof and floor, which was taken up by vitriolene windows, was heavily padded. * * * * * At nine the next morning the gates to the enclosure were thrown open and the representatives of the press admitted. Jim Carpenter mounted a platform and explained briefly what he proposed to do and then broke the crowd up into small groups and sent them over the works with guides. When all had been taken around they were reassembled and Carpenter announced to them his intention of going up in a space flyer and prove, by going through the heaviside layer, that he had actually destroyed a portion of it. There was an immediate clamor of applications to go with him. He laughingly announced that one reporter was all that he could stand on the ship and that he was taking one of his former associates with him. I could tell by the envious looks with which I was favored that any popularity I had ever had among my associates was gone forever. There was little time to think of such things, however, for the hour for our departure was approaching, and the photographers were clamoring for pictures of us and the flyer. We satisfied them at last, and I entered the flyer after Carpenter. We sealed the car up, started the air conditioner, and were ready for departure. "Scared, Pete?" asked Carpenter, his hand on the starting lever. I gulped a little as I looked at him. He was perfectly calm to a casual inspection, but I knew him well enough to interpret the small spots of red which appeared on his high cheekbones and the glitter in his eye. He may not have been as frightened as I was but he was laboring under an enormous nervous strain. The mere fact that he called me "Pete" instead of his usual "First Mortgage" showed that he was feeling pretty serious. "Not exactly scared," I replied, "but rather uneasy, so to speak." * * * * * He laughed nervously. "Cheer up, old man! If anything goes wrong, we won't know it. Sit down and get comfortable; this thing will start with a jerk." He pulled the starting lever forward suddenly and I felt as though an intolerable weight were pressed against me, glueing me to my seat. The feeling lasted only for a moment, for he quickly eased up on the motor, and in a few moments I felt quite normal. "How fast are we going?" I asked. "Only two hundred miles an hour," he replied. "We will reach the layer in plenty of time at this rate and I don't want to jam into it. You can get up now." I rose, moved over to the observation glass in the floor, and looked down. We were already five or ten miles above the earth and were ascending rapidly. I could still detect the great circle of reflectors with which our way was to be opened. "How can you tell where these heat beams are when they are turned on?" I asked. "Infra-red rays are not visible, and we will soon be out of sight of the reflectors." "I forgot to mention that I am having a small portion of visible red rays mixed with the infra-red so that we can spot them. I have a radio telephone here, working on my private wavelength, so that I can direct operations from here as well as from the ground--in fact, better. If you're cold, turn on the heater." * * * * * The friction of the flyer against the air had so far made up for the decreasing temperature of the air surrounding us, but a glance at the outside thermometer warned me that his suggestion was a wise one. I turned a valve which diverted a small portion of our exhaust through a heating coil in the flyer. It was hard to realize that I was actually in a rocket space ship, the second one to be flown and that, with the exception of the ill-fated Hadley, farther from the earth than any man had been before. There was no sensation of movement in that hermetically sealed flyer, and, after the first few moments, the steady drone of the rocket motor failed to register on my senses. I was surprised to see that there was no trail of detritus behind us. "You can see our trail at night," replied Carpenter when I asked him about it, "but in daylight, there is nothing to see. The slight luminosity of the gasses is hidden by the sun's rays. We may be able to see it when we get out in space beyond the layer, but I don't know. We have arrived at the bottom of the layer now, I believe. At any rate, we are losing velocity." * * * * * I moved over to the instrument board and looked. Our speed had dropped to one hundred and ten miles an hour and was steadily falling off. Carpenter pulled the control lever and reduced our power. Gradually the flyer came to a stop and hung poised in space. He shut off the power an instant and at once our indicator showed that we were falling, although very slowly. He promptly reapplied the power, and by careful adjustment brought us again to a dead stop. "Ready to go," he remarked looking at his watch, "and just on time, too. Take a glass and watch the ground. I am going to have the heat turned on." I took the binoculars he indicated and turned them toward the ground while he gave a few crisp orders into his telephone. Presently from the ground beneath us burst out a circle of red dots from which long beams stabbed up into the heavens. The beams converged as they mounted until at a point slightly below us, and a half-mile away they became one solid beam of red. One peculiarity I noticed was that, while they were plainly visible near the ground, they faded out, and it was not until they were a few miles below us that they again became apparent. I followed their path upward into the heavens. "Look here, Jim!" I cried as I did so. "Something's happening!" He sprang to my side and glanced at the beam. "Hurrah!" he shouted, pounding me on the back. "I was right! Look! And the fools called it a magnetic field!" Upward the beam was boring its way, but it was almost concealed by a rain of fine particles of black which were falling around it. "It's even more spectacular than I had hoped," he chortled. "I had expected to reduce the layer to such fluidity that we could penetrate it or even to vaporize it, but we are actually destroying it! That stuff is soot and is proof, if proof be needed, that the layer is an organic liquid." * * * * * He turned to his telephone and communicated the momentous news to the earth and then rejoined me at the window. For ten minutes we watched and a slight diminution of the black cloud became apparent. "They're through the layer," exclaimed Carpenter. "Now watch, and you'll see something. I'm going to start spreading the beam." He turned again to his telephone, and presently the beam began to widen and spread out. As it did so the dark cloud became more dense than it had been before. The earth below us was hidden and we could see the red only as a dim murky glow through the falling soot. Carpenter inquired of the laboratory and found that we were completely invisible to the ground, half the heavens being hidden by the black pall. For an hour the beam worked its way toward us. "The hole is about four hundred yards in diameter right now," said Carpenter as he turned from the telephone. "I have told them to stop the movement of the reflectors, and as soon as the air clears a little, we'll start through." It took another hour for the soot to clear enough that we could plainly detect the ring of red light before us. Carpenter gave some orders to the ground, and a gap thirty yards wide opened in the wall before us. Toward this gap the flyer moved slowly under the side thrust of the diverted motor discharge. The temperature rose rapidly as we neared the wall of red light before us. Nearer we drew until the light was on both sides of us. Another few feet and the flyer shot forward with a jerk that threw me sprawling on the floor. Carpenter fell too, but he maintained his hold on the controls and tore at them desperately to check us. * * * * * I scrambled to my feet and watched. The red wall was alarmingly close. Nearer we drove and then came another jerk which threw me sprawling again. The wall retreated. In another moment we were standing still, with the red all around us at a distance of about two hundred yards. "We had a narrow escape from being cremated," said Carpenter with a shaky laugh. "I knew that our speed would increase as soon as we got clear of the layer but it caught me by surprise just the same. I had no idea how great the holding effect of the stuff was. Well, First Mortgage, the road to space is open for us. May I invite you to be my guest on a little week-end jaunt to the Moon?" "No thanks, Jim," I said with a wry smile. "I think a little trip to the edge of the layer will quite satisfy me." "Quitter," he laughed. "Well, say good-by to familiar things. Here we go!" He turned to the controls of the flyer, and presently we were moving again, this time directly away from the earth. There was no jerk at starting this time, merely a feeling as though the floor were pressing against my feet, a great deal like the feeling a person gets when they rise rapidly in an express elevator. The indicator showed that we were traveling only sixty miles an hour. For half an hour we continued monotonously on our way with nothing to divert us. Carpenter yawned. "Now that it's all over, I feel let down and sleepy," he announced. "We are well beyond the point to which Hadley penetrated and so far we have met with no resistance. We are probably nearly at the outer edge of the layer. I think I'll shoot up a few miles more and then call it a day and go home. We are about eighty miles from the earth now." * * * * * I looked down, but could see nothing below us but the dense cloud of black soot resulting from the destruction of the heaviside layer. Like Carpenter, I felt sleepy, and I suppressed a yawn as I turned again to the window. "Look here, Jim!" I cried suddenly. "What's that?" He moved in a leisurely manner to my side and looked out. As he did so I felt his hand tighten on my shoulder with a desperate grip. Down the wall of red which surrounded us was coming an object of some kind. The thing was fully seventy-five yards long and half as wide at its main portion, while long irregular streams extended for a hundred yards on each side of it. There seemed to be dozens of them. "What is it, Jim?" I asked in a voice which sounded high and unnatural to me. "I don't know," he muttered, half to me and half to himself. "Good Lord, there's another of them!" He pointed. Not far from the first of the things came another, even larger than the first. They were moving sluggishly along the red light, seeming to flow rather than to crawl. I had a horrible feeling that they were alive and malignant. Carpenter stepped back to the controls of the flyer and stopped our movement; we hung in space, watching them. The things were almost level with us, but their sluggish movement was downward toward the earth. In color, they were a brilliant crimson, deepening into purple near the center. Just as the first of them came opposite us it paused, and slowly a portion of the mass extended itself from the main bulk; and then, like doors opening, four huge eyes, each of them twenty feet in diameter, opened and stared at us. "It's alive, Jim," I quavered. I hardly knew my own voice as I spoke. * * * * * Jim stepped back to the controls with a white face, and slowly we moved closer to the mass. As we approached I thought that I could detect a fleeting passage of expression in those huge eyes. Then they disappeared and only a huge crimson and purple blob lay before us. Jim moved the controls again and the flyer came to a stop. Two long streamers moved out from the mass. Suddenly there was a jerk to the ship which threw us both to the floor. It started upward at express train speed. Jim staggered to his feet, grasped the controls and started all four bow motors at full capacity, but even this enormous force had not the slightest effect in diminishing our speed. "Well, the thing's got us, whatever it is," said Jim as he pulled his controls to neutral, shutting off all power. Now that the danger had assumed a tangible form, he appeared as cool and collected as ever, to my surprise, I found that I had recovered control of my muscle and of my voice. I became aware that the shoulder which Jim had gripped was aching badly, and I rubbed it absently. "What is it, Jim?" I asked for the third time. "I don't know," he replied. "It is some horrible inhabitant of space, something unknown to us on earth. From its appearance and actions, I think it must be a huge single-celled animal of the type of the earthly amoeba. If an amoeba is that large here, what must an elephant look like? However, I expect that we'll learn more about the matter later because it's taking us with it, wherever it's going." * * * * * Suddenly the flyer became dark inside. I looked at the nearest window, but I could not even detect its outline. I reached for the light switch, but a sudden change in direction threw me against the wall. There was an instant of intense heat in the flyer. "We have passed the heaviside layer," said Jim. "The brute has changed direction, and we felt that heat when he took us through the infra-red wall." I reached again for the light switch, but before I could find it our motion ceased and an instant later the flyer was filled with glaring sunlight. We both turned to the window. We lay on a glistening plain of bluish hue which stretched without a break as far as we could see. Not a thing broke the monotony of our vision. We turned to the opposite window. How can I describe the sight which met our horrified gaze? On the plain before us lay a huge purple monstrosity of gargantuan dimensions. The thing was a shapeless mass, only the four huge eyes standing out regarding us balefully. The mass was continually changing its outline and, as we watched, a long streamer extended itself from the body toward us. Over and around the flyer the feeler went, while green and red colors played over first one and then another of the huge eyes before us. The feeler wrapped itself around the flyer and we were lifted into the air toward those horrible eyes. We had almost reached them when the thing dropped us. We fell to the plain with a crash. We staggered to our feet again and looked out. Our captor was battling for its life. * * * * * Its attacker was a smaller thing of a brilliant green hue, striped and mottled with blue and yellow. While our captor was almost formless, the newcomer had a very definite shape. It resembled a cross between a bird and a lizard, its shape resembling a bird, as did tiny rudimentary wings and a long beak, while the scaly covering and the fact that it had four legs instead of two bore out the idea that it might be a lizard. Its huge birdlike beak was armed with three rows of long sharp teeth with which it was tearing at our captor. The purple amoeba was holding its assailant with a dozen of its thrown out feelers which were wrapped about the body and legs of the green horror. The whole battle was conducted in absolute silence. "Now's our chance, Jim!" I cried. "Get away from here while that dragon has the amoeba busy!" He jumped to the control levers of the flyer and pulled the starting switch well forward. The shock of the sudden start hurled me to the floor, but from where I fell I was able to watch the battle on the plain below us. It raged with uninterrupted fury and I felt certain of our escape when, with a shock which hurled both Jim and me to the ceiling, the flyer stopped. We fell back to the floor and I reflected that it was well for us that the interior of the flyer was so well padded. Had it not been, our bones would have been broken a dozen times by the shocks to which we had been subjected. "What now?" I asked as I painfully struggled to my feet. "Another of those purple amoebas," replied Jim from the vantage point of a window. "He's looking us over as if he were trying to decide whether we are edible or not." * * * * * I joined him at the window. The thing which had us was a replica of the monster we had left below us engaged in battle with the green dragon which had attacked it. The same indefinite and ever changing outline was evident, as well as the four huge eyes. The thing regarded us for a moment and slowly moved us up against its bulk until we touched it. Deeper and deeper into the mass of the body we penetrated until we were in a deep cavern with the light coming to us only from the entrance. I watched the entrance and horror possessed my soul. "The hole's closing. Jim!" I gasped. "The thing is swallowing us!" "I expected that," he replied grimly. "The amoeba has no mouth, you know. Nourishment is passed into the body through the skin, which closes behind it. We are a modern version of Jonah and the whale, First Mortgage." "Well, Jonah got out," I ventured. "We'll try to," he replied. "When that critter swallowed us, he got something that will prove pretty indigestible. Let's try to give him a stomach ache. I don't suppose that a machine-gun will affect him, but we'll try it." "I didn't know that you had any guns on board." "Oh yes, I've got two machine-guns. We'll turn one of them loose, but I don't expect much effect from it." * * * * * He moved over to one of the guns and threw off the cover which had hidden it from my gaze. He fed in a belt of ammunition and pulled his trigger. For half a minute he held it down, and two hundred and fifty caliber thirty bullets tore their way into space. There was no evidence of movement on the part of our host. "Just as I thought," remarked Jim as he threw aside the empty belt and covered the gun again. "The thing has no nervous organization to speak of and probably never felt that. We'll have to rig up a disintegrating ray for him." "What?" I gasped. "A disintegrating ray," he replied. "Oh yes, I know how to make the fabulous 'death ray' that you journalists are always raving about. I have never announced my discovery, for war is horrible enough without it, but I have generated it and used it in my work a number of times. Did it never occur to you that the rocket motor is built on a disintegrating ray principle?" "Of course it is, Jim. I never thought of it in that light before, but it must be. How can you use it? The discharge from the motors is a harmless stream of energy particles." "Instead of turning the ray into powdered aluminum and breaking it down, what is to prevent me from turning it against the body of our captor and blasting my way out?" "I don't know." "Well, nothing is. I'll have to modify one of the motors a little, but it's not a hard job. Get some wrenches from the tool box and we'll start." * * * * * An hour of hard work enabled us to disconnect one of the reserve bow motors and, after the modifications Jim had mentioned, turn the ray out through the port through which the products of disintegration were meant to go. When we had bolted it in place with an improvised coupling, Jim opened the vitriolene screen which held in our air and turned to his control board. "Here goes," he said. He pulled the lever to full power and with a roar which almost deafened us in the small flyer, the ray leaped out to do its deadly work. I watched through a port beside the motor. There was a flash of intense light for an instant and then the motor died away in silence. A path to freedom lay open before us. Jim started one of the stern motors and slowly we forced our way through the hole torn in the living mass. When we were almost at the surface, he threw in full power and we shot free from the amoeba and into the open. Again we were stopped in midair and drawn back toward the huge bulk. The eyes looked at us and we were turned around. As the ray swung into a position to point directly toward one of the eyes, Jim pulled the controlling lever. With the flash of light which ensued, the eye and a portion of the surrounding tissue disappeared. The amoeba writhed and changed shape rapidly, while flashes of brilliant crimson played over the remaining eyes. Again the ray was brought into play and another of the eyes disappeared. This was evidently enough for our captor, for it suddenly released us and instantly we started to fall. Jim caught the control levers and turned on our power in time to halt us only a few feet above the plain toward which we were falling. We were close to the point whence we had started up and we could see that the battle below us was still raging. * * * * * The green dragon was partially engulfed by the amoeba, but it still relentlessly tore off huge chunks and devoured them. The amoeba was greatly reduced in bulk but it still fought gamely. Even as we approached the dragon was evidently satiated, for it slowly withdrew from the purple bulk and back away. Long feelers shot out from the amoeba's bulk toward the dragon but they were bitten off before they could grasp their prey. "Let's get away from here, Jim," I cried, but I spoke too late. Even as the words left my mouth the green dragon saw us and raised itself in the air, and with gaping jaws launched itself at us. It took Jim only a moment to shoot the flyer up into space, and the charge passed harmlessly beneath us. The dragon checked its headway and turned again toward us. "Use the machine-gun, Pete!" cried Jim. "I've got to run the ship." I threw the cover off the gun and fed in a fresh belt of ammunition. As the green monster dashed toward us I hastily aligned the gun and pulled the trigger. My aim was good and at least fifty of the bullets plowed through the approaching bulk before Jim dropped the ship and allowed it to pass above us. Again the dragon turned and charged, and again I met it with a hail of bullets. They had no apparent effect and Jim dropped the ship again and let the huge bulk shoot by above us. Twice more the dragon rushed but the last rush was less violent than had been the first three. "The bullets are affecting him, Pete!" cried Jim as he shot the flyer upward. "Give him another dose!" I hastily fed in another belt, but it was not needed. The dragon rushed the fifth time, but before it reached us its velocity fell off and it passed harmlessly below us and fell on a long curve to the plain below. It fell near the purple amoeba which it had battled and a long feeler shot out and grasped it. Straight into the purple mass it was drawn, and vanished into the huge bulk. Jim started one of the stern motors. In a few seconds we were far from the scene. "Have you any idea of which direction to go?" he asked. I shook my head. "Have you a radio beacon?" I asked. He withered me with a glance. "We're beyond the heaviside layer," he reminded me. * * * * * For a moment I was stunned. "We can't be very far from the hole," he said consolingly as he fumbled with the controls. "But before we try to find it, we had better disconnect one of the stern motors and rig it as a disintegrating ray so that we will have one bearing in each direction. We may meet more denizens of space who like our looks, and we haven't much ammunition left." We landed on the plain and in an hour had a second disintegrating ray ready for action. Thus armed, we rose from the blue plain and started at random on our way. For ten minutes we went forward. Then Jim stopped the flyer and turned back. We had gone only a short distance when I called to him to stop. "What is it?" he demanded as he brought the flyer to a standstill. "There's another creature ahead of us," I replied. "A red one." "Red?" he asked excitedly as he joined me. About a mile ahead of us a huge mass hung in the air. It resembled the amoeba which had attacked us, except that the newcomer was red. As we watched, it moved toward us. As it did so its color changed to purple. "Hurrah!" cried Jim. "Don't you remember, Pete, that the one which captured us and took us out of the hole was red while in the hole and then turned purple? That thing just came out of the hole!" "Then why can't we see the red beam?" I demanded. "Because there's no air or anything to reflect it," he replied. "We can't see it until we are right in it." I devoutly hoped that he was right as he headed the ship toward the waiting monster. As we approached the amoeba came rapidly to meet us and a long feeler shot out. As it did so there was a flash of intense light ahead of us as Jim turned loose the ray, and the feeler disappeared. Another and another met the same fate. Then Jim rotated the ship slightly and let out the full force of the ray toward the monster. A huge hole was torn in it, and as we approached with our ray blazing, the amoeba slowly retreated and our path was open before us. Again there was an instant of intense heat as we passed through the red wall, and we were again in the hole which Jim's lamps had blasted through the layer. Below us still lay the fog which had obscured the earth when we had started on our upward trip. * * * * * Down toward the distant earth we dropped. We had gone about thirty miles before we saw on the side of the hole one of the huge amoeba which were so thick above. "We might stop and pick that fellow off," said Jim, "but, on the whole, I think we'll experiment with him." He drove the ship nearer and turned it on its axis, holding it in position by one of the auxiliary discharges. A flash came from our forward ray and a portion of the amoeba disappeared. A long arm moved out toward us, but it moved slowly and sluggishly instead of with the lightninglike swiftness which had characterized the movements of the others. Jimmy easily eluded it and dropped the ship a few yards. The creature pursued it, but it moved slowly. For a mile we kept our distance ahead of it, but we had to constantly decrease our speed to keep from leaving it behind. Soon we were almost at a standstill, and Jim reversed our direction and drew nearer. A feeler came slowly and feebly out a few feet toward us and then stopped. We dropped the ship a few feet but the amoeba did not follow. Jim glanced at the altimeter. "Just as I thought," he exclaimed. "We are about forty-five miles above the earth and already the air is so dense that the thing cannot move lower. They are fashioned for existence in the regions of space and in even the most rarified air they are helpless. There is no chance of one ever reaching the surface of the earth without years of gradual acclimation, and even if it did, it would be practically immobile. In a few years the layer will flow enough to plug the hole I have made, but even so, I'll build a couple of space flyers equipped with disintegrating rays as soon as we get down and station them alongside the hole to wipe out any of that space vermin which tries to come through. Let's go home. We've put in a good day's work." Hundreds of the purple amoeba have been destroyed by the guarding ships during the past five years. The hole is filling in as Jim predicted, and in another ten years the earth will be as securely walled in as it ever was. But in the mean time, no one knows what unrevealed horrors space holds, and the world will never rest entirely easy until the slow process of time again heals the broken protective layer. * * * * * Everyone Is Invited _To_ "_Come Over in_ 'THE READERS' CORNER'"! * * * * * [Illustration: _The men of Cleric were surrounding Jaska._] Earth, the Marauder BEGINNING A THREE-PART NOVEL _By Arthur J. Burks_ FOREWORD _Despite the fact that for centuries the Secret of Life had been the possession of children of men, the Earth was dying. She was dying because the warmth of the sun was fading; because, with the obliteration of the oceans in order to find new land upon which men might live, her seasons had become stormy, unbearably cold and dreary: and the very fact of her knowledge of the Secret of Life, in which men numbered their ages by centuries instead of by years, was her undoing._ [Sidenote: Out of her orbit sped the teeming Earth--a marauding planet bent on starry conquest.] [Illustration] _For when men did not die, they multiplied beyond all counting, beyond all possibility of securing permanent abiding places. One man, in the days when the earth was young, and man lived at best to the age of three score years and ten, could have, given time and opportunity, populated a nation. Now, when men lived for centuries, eternally youthful, their living descendants ran into incalculable numbers._ _The earth--strange paradox--was dying because it had learned the Secret of Life. Twenty centuries before, the last war of aggression had been fought, in order that an over-populated nation might find room in which to live. Now all the earth was one nation, speaking one tongue--and there were no more lands to conquer._ CHAPTER I _Sarka_ In his laboratory atop the highest peak in the venerable Himalayas, lived Sarka, conceded by the world to be its greatest scientist, despite his youth. His grandfather, who had watched the passing of eighteen centuries, had discovered the Secret of Life and thoughtlessly, in the light of later developments, broadcast his discovery to the world. The genius of this man, who was also called Sarka, had been passed on to his son, Sarka the Second, and by him in even greater degree to Sarka the Third ... called merely Sarka for the purposes of this history. Had Sarka lived in the days before the discovery of the Secret of Life, people of that day would have judged him a young man of twenty. His real age was four centuries. Behind him as he sat moodily staring at the gigantic Revolving Beryl stood a woman of most striking appearance. Her name was Jaska, and according to ideas of the Days Before the Discovery, she seemed a trifle younger than Sarka. Her hand, unadorned by jewelry of any kind, rested on Sarka's shoulder as he studied the Revolving Beryl, while her eyes, whose lashes, matching her raven hair, were like the wings of tiny blackbirds, noted afresh the wonder of this man. "What is to be done?" she asked him at last, and her voice was like music there in the room where science performed its miracles for Sarka. * * * * * Wearily Sarka turned to face her, and she was struck anew, as she had been down the years since she had known this man, every time their glances met, at the mighty curve of his brow, which rendered insignificant his mouth, his delicate nose of the twitching nostrils, the well-deep eyes of him. "Something must be done," he said gloomily, "and that soon! For, unless the children of men are provided with some manner of territorial expansion, they will destroy one another, only the strongest will survive, and we shall return to the days when the waters covered the earth, and monstrous creatures bellowed from the primeval slime!" "You are working on something?" she asked softly. For a moment he did not answer. While she waited, Jaska peered into the depths of the Revolving Beryl, which represented the earth. It was fifty feet in diameter, and in its curved surface and entrancing depths was mirrored, in this latest development of teleview, all the earth and the doings of its people. But Jaska scarcely saw the fleeting images, the men locked in conflict for the right to live, the screaming, terror-stricken women. This was now a century-old story, and the civilization of Earth had almost reached the breaking point. No, she scarcely saw the things in the Beryl, for she had read the hint of a vast, awesome secret in the eyes of Sarka--and wondered if he dared even tell her. * * * * * "If the people knew," he whispered, "they would do one of two things! They would tear me limb from limb, and hurl the parts of me outward into space forever--or they would demand that I move before I am ready--and cause a catastrophe which could never be rectified; and this grand old Earth of ours would be dead, indeed!" "And this secret of yours?" Jaska now spoke in the sign language which only these two knew, for there were billions of other Revolving Beryls in the world, and words could be heard by universal radio by any who cared to listen. And always, they knew, the legions of enemies of Sarka kept their ears open for words of Sarka which could be twisted around to his undoing. "I should not tell even you," he answered, his fingers working swiftly in their secret, silent language, which all the world could see, but which only these two understood. "For if my enemies knew that you possessed the information, there is nothing they would stop at to make you tell." "But I would not tell, Sarka," she said softly. "You know that!" He patted her hands, and the ghost of a smile touched his lips. "No," he said, "you would not tell. Some day soon--and it must be soon if the children of men are not to destroy themselves, I will tell you! It is a secret that lies heavily on my heart. If I should make a mistake.... Chaos! Catastrophe! Eternal, perpetual dark, the children of men reduced to nothingness!" * * * * * A little gasp from Jaska, for it was plain that this thing Sarka hinted at was far and away beyond anything he had hitherto done--and Sarka had already performed miracles beyond any that had ever been done by his predecessors. "When my grandfather," went on Sarka moodily, "perfected, in this self-same laboratory, the machinery by which the waters of the oceans could be disintegrated, our enemies called him mad, and fought their way up these mountain slopes to destroy him! With the pack at his doors, he did as he had told them he would do. Though they hurried swiftly into the great valleys to colonize them--where oceans had been--they were like ravening beasts, and gave my grandfather no thanks. Our people have always fought against progress, have always been disparaging of its advocates! When the first Sarka discovered the Secret they would have destroyed him, though he made them immortal...." "If only the Secret," interrupted Jaska, "could be returned to him who discovered it! That would solve our problem, for men then would die and be buried, leaving their places for others." Again that weary smile on the face of Sarka. "Take back the Secret which is known to-day to every son and daughter of woman? Impossible! More nearly impossible than the attainment of my most ambitious dream!" "And that dream?" spoke Jaska with speeding fingers. "I have wondered about you," said Sarka softly, while those eyes of his bored deeply into hers. "We have been the best of friends, the best of comrades; but there are times when it comes to me that I do not know you entirely! And I have many enemies!" "You mean," gasped the woman, for the moment forgetting the secret sign manual, "you think it possible that I--I--might be one of your enemies, in secret?" "Jaska, I do not know; but in this matter in my mind I trust no one. I am afraid even that people will read my very thoughts, though I have learned to so concentrate upon them that not the slightest hint of them shall go forth telepathically to my enemies! I do not mind death for myself; but our people must be saved! It is hideous to think that we have been given the Secret of Life, only to perish in the end because of it! I am sorry, Jaska, but I can tell no one!" But Jaska, one of the most beautiful and intelligent of Earth's beautiful and intelligent women, seemed not to be listening to Sarka at all, and when he had finished, she shrugged her shoulders slightly and prepared to leave. * * * * * He followed her to the nearest Exit Dome, built solidly into the side of his laboratory, and watched her as she slipped swiftly into the white, skin-tight clothing--marked on breast and back with the Red Lily of the House of Cleric. His eyes still were deeply moody. He helped her don the gleaming metal helmet in whose skull-pan was set the Anti-Gravitational Ovoid--invented by Sarka the Second, used now of necessity by every human creature--and strode with her to the Outer Exit, a door of ponderous metal sufficiently strong to prevent the inner warmth of the laboratory getting out, or the biting cold of the heights to enter, and studied her still as she buckled about her hips her own personal Sarka-Belt, which automatically encased her, through contact with her tight clothing, with the warmth and balanced pressure of the laboratory, which would remain constant as long as she wore it. With a nod and a brief smile, she stepped to the metal door and vanished through it. Sarka turned gloomily back to his laboratory. Looking into the depths of the Revolving Beryl and adjusting the enlarging device which brought back, life size, the infinitesmal individuals mirrored in the Beryl, he watched her go--a trim white figure which flashed across the void, from mountain-top to her valley home, like a very white projectile from another world. Very white, and very precious, but.... When she was home, and had waved to him that she had arrived safely, he forgot her for a time, and allowed his eyes to study the inner workings of this vast, crowded world whose on-rushing fate was so filling his brain with doubt, with fear--and something of horror! CHAPTER II _The People of the Hives_ Moodily Sarka stared into the depths of the Beryl, which represented the Earth, and in which he could see everything that earthlings did, after visually enlarging them, through use of a microscope that could be adjusted, with relation to the Beryl, to bring out in detail any section of the world he wished to study. His face was utterly sad. The people at last truly possessed the Earth--all of it that was, even with the aid of every miracle known to science, habitable. The surface of the Earth was one vast building, like a hive, and to each human being was allotted by law a certain abiding place. But men no longer died, unless they desired to do so, and then only when the Spokesmen of the Gens saw fit to grant permission; and there soon would be no place for the newborn to live. Even now that point had practically been reached throughout the world, and in the greater portion it _had_ been reached, and passed, and men knew that while men did not die, they could be killed! The vast building, towering above what had once been the surface of the earth, to heights undreamed of before the discovery, was irregular on its top, to fit the contour of the earth, and its roof, constructed of materials raped from the earth's core, was so designed as to catch and concentrate the yearly more feeble rays of the sun, so that its life-giving warmth might continue to be the boon of living people. * * * * * It had been found as Earth cooled that life was possible to a depth of eight miles below the one-time surface, so that the one huge building extended below the surface to this great depth, and was divided and re-divided to make homes for men, their wives, and their progeny. But even so, space was limited. Neighboring families outgrew their surroundings, overflowed into the habitations of their neighbors--and every family was at constant war against its neighbors. Men did not die, but they could be slain, and there was scarcely a home, above or below, in all the vast building, which had not planned and executed murder, times and times--or which had not left its own blood in the dwelling places of neighbors. No law could cope with this intolerable situation, for men, down the ages, had changed in their essential characteristics but little--and recognized one law only in their extremity, that of self-preservation. So there was murder rampant, and mothers who wept for children, husbands, fathers or mothers, who would never return to their homes. "My grandfather," whispered Sarka, his eyes peering deeply into a certain area beyond that assigned by law to the House of Cleric, where men of two neighboring families were locked in mortal, silent conflict, "should not have frustrated the mad scheme of Dalis! It was slaughter, wholesale and terrible, but it would have cleansed the souls of the survivors!" * * * * * Mentally Sarka was looking back now to that red day when Dalis, the closest scientific rival of Sarka the First, had come to Sarka the First with his proposal which at the time had seemed so hideous. Sarka remembered that interval in all its details, for he had heard it many times. "Sarka," Dalis had said in his high-pitched voice, staring at Sarka the First out of red-rimmed, fiery eyes, "unless something is done the world will rush on to self-destruction! Men will slay one another! Fathers will kill their sons, and sons their fathers, if something is not done! For always there is marrying and giving in marriage, and each family is reaching out in all directions, seeking merely space in which to live. Formerly there were wars which automatically took thought of the overplus of men; but to-day the world is at peace, as men regard the term--and every man's hand is against his neighbor! There will be no more wars, when there should be! There is but one alternative!" "And that?" Sarka the First had queried suspiciously. "The segregation of the fittest! The destruction, swiftly, painlessly, of all the others! And when the survivors have again re-populated the earth to overflowing--a repetition of the same corrective! Men will die, yes, by millions; but those who are left will be a stronger, sturdier race, and by this process of elimination, century by century, men will evolve and become super-men!" "And this plan of yours?" * * * * * For a moment Dalis had paused, breathing heavily, as though almost afraid to continue. Then, while Sarka the First had listened in frozen terror, Dalis had explained his ghastly scheme. "If it were not for the mountains and the valleys," said Dalis, "and the world were perfectly round and smooth of surface, that surface would be covered by water to the depth of one mile! Is that not correct! The Earth, rotating on its axis, travels about the sun at the rate of something like nineteen miles per second, so perfectly balanced that the oceans remain almost quiescent in their beds! But, Sarka, mark me well! If we could, together, devise a way to halt this rotation for as much as a few seconds, what would happen?" "What would happen?" repeated Sarka the First, dropping his own voice to a husky, frightened whisper. "Why, the oceans would be hurled out of their beds, and a wall of water a mile high or more--it is all guesswork!--would rush eastward around the world, bearing everything before it! It would uproot and destroy buildings, sweep the rocky covering of the earth free of soil; and humanity, caught on the earth below the highest level of the world's greatest tidal wave, would be engulfed!" "Exactly!" Dalis had said with a grin. "Exactly! Only--the people we wish to survive could be warned, and these could either be aloft when the tidal wave swept the face of the earth, or could be safely out of reach of the waters on the sides of the highest mountains!" * * * * * Sarka the First, wanly smiling, catching his breath at last, now that he realized the utter impossibility of this mad scheme, had been minded to humor the fancies of a man whom he had believed not quite sane. "Why not," he began, "take away from men the Secret of Life, so that they will die, as formerly, when the world was young?" "When all the world knows the Secret, when even children learn it before they are capable of walking?" demanded Dalis sarcastically. "You could only remove knowledge of the Secret from the brains of men by removing those brains themselves! Your thought is more terrible even than mine, because it leads to this inescapable conclusion!" "But supposing for a moment your mad scheme were possible, who should say whom, of all the earth's people, should be saved, whom sacrificed?" "What better test could be given than that which I am proposing?" Dalis had snarled. "Those worthy of being saved would save themselves! Those who would perish would not be worth saving! As natural, as inescapable as the law of the survival of the fittest, which has been an axiom of life since men first crawled out of the slime and asked each other questions as they caught their first glimpses of the stars and pondered the reasons for them!" "But where, then, was there any point in my giving to people the Secret of Life?" "Had you paused to think," snapped Dalis, "you would never have done so! Your lust for power, and for fame, destroyed your foresight!" * * * * * "And is it not, Dalis," replied Sarka the First, softly, "for this, really, that you have come to me? To berate me? To throw at my head mad schemes impossible of accomplishment? I have always known you for an enemy, Dalis, because you are envious of what I have accomplished, what you sense that I will accomplish as time passes!" "I do not love you, Sarka!" retorted Dalis frankly. "I despise you! Hate you! But I need the aid of that keen brain of yours! You see, hate you though I may, I do you honor still. I have something up here," tapping the dome of his brow, only less lofty than that of Sarka, "which you lack. You have something I have not, never can attain! But together we are complements, each of the other, and to the two of us this scheme is possible!" "I am very busy, Dalis," Sarka the First had replied coldly. "I must ask you to leave me! What you propose is impossible, unthinkable!" "So," retorted Dalis, "you think me mad? You think me incapable of perfecting this plan about whose details you have not even yet been informed! You would show me the door as though you were a king and I a slave--when kings and slaves vanished from the earth millenniums ago! Then listen to me, Sarka! I know how to do this thing about which I have told you. I can halt, for a brief moment only, the whirl of the earth about its axis. And by so doing I can flood the earth with the waters of the oceans! If you will not listen to me, I shall do it myself! You shall have two days in which to give me an answer, for I admit that I need you, who would balance me, make sure I made no fatal mistakes! But if you do not, I will act ... along the lines I have hinted!" * * * * * Apparently as unconcerned as though he had not just listened to a scheme for almost total depopulation of the world, the destruction of millions upon millions of lives, Sarka the First had dismissed Dalis--who had straightway used all his offices to arouse the world of science against the first Sarka. But, when the two days of grace given by Dalis had passed, there were no oceans--for Sarka the First had been planning for a century against the time when the earth must of necessity be over-populated, and had worked and slaved in his laboratory against the contingency which had developed. He had smiled, though there was a trace of fear on his face after Dalis had left, for _his_ scheme had been worked out--not to destroy, but to save! And from this same laboratory in which Sarka now sat and pondered on the next step in man's expansion, Sarka the First had, in fear and trembling at first, but with his confidence growing by leaps and bounds, worked his own miracle. Untold millions and billions of rays, whose any portion of which, coming in contact with water, immediately separated its hydrogen and oxygen, thus disintegrating its molecules, were hurled forth from their store-houses beneath the laboratory, across the faces of the mighty oceans of Earth.... And when men saw the miracle, they rushed into the mighty valleys where the oceans had been, and began to build new homes! * * * * * That had been centuries ago--scores of centuries. Now all the earth, all the livable part of the earth, above its surface--and below it to the depths of miles--was filled with people, like bees in a monster hive, like ants of antiquity in their warrened hills. And there was no place now that they could go. So they fought among themselves for the right to live. "But my grandfather was right!" Sarka almost screamed it, speaking aloud in the silence of his laboratory. "My grandfather was right! Dalis was wrong! Science should be the science of Life, not of Death! Yet whither shall we go! Where now shall we find places for our people who are daily being born in myriads, to live, and love and flourish?" But there was no answer. Only the humming of the perpetually revolving Beryl, which showed to the sad eyes of Sarka that the people of his beloved earth were rushing onward to Chaos, unless.... "If only I could be sure about Jaska!" he moaned. "If only my courage were as great as that of which I stand in need! For if I fail, even Dalis, had he succeeded with that scheme of his in grandfather's time, would be less a monster, less a criminal!" CHAPTER III _The Spokesmen of the Gens_ For a long moment Sarka looked broodingly out across the world beyond the metalized glass which formed the curving dome of his laboratory roof. There was little that could be seen, for always the mighty, cold winds, ruffed with flurries of snow and particles of ice, swept over this artificial roof of the world. Here and there huge portions of the area within the range of his normal vision were swept clear and clean of snow and ice--and looked bluely, bitterly cold and hostile. Without the Sarka-Belts, people who ventured forth from their hives would instantly freeze to the consistency of marble in those winds and storms. For the people of Earth had built their monster habitation toward the stars until they reached up into the altitude of perpetual cold. Only under that gleaming roof was there warmth. Many of the men, and women, and children who had lost in the now century-old fight for survival had merely been tossed out of the hives. A painless, swift death--but each death, in a world so highly specialized that each grown person fitted into his niche naturally and easily, was a distinct loss, not much, perhaps, but enough for the loss to be felt. * * * * * Sarka, closing his eyes for a moment as though to shut out a horror which in his mind he could visualize, turned back to the Revolving Beryl, in which he kept in constant touch with all parts of the world at will. "It _must_ be done!" he muttered. "I must take action. It means the loss of thousands, perhaps millions of lives, in such a war as the mind of man has not hitherto conceived; but for a Cause greater than any which has ever hitherto been an excuse for armed conflict. But I must discuss it with the Spokesmen of the Gens!" On the table before Sarka was a row of vari-colored lights, whose source was beneath the floor of the laboratory, out of the heart of the master-mountain, part of the intricate machinery of this laboratory which had been almost twenty centuries in the perfecting. In the dwelling place of each of the Spokesmen was a single light, colored like one of the lights on Sarka's table. To speak with any one of the Spokesmen Sarka had but to dim the properly colored light by covering it with the palm of his hand. The light in the home of the thus signalled Spokesman was dimmed, and the Spokesman would know that Sarka desired to converse with him. Sarka noted the blue light, and shuddered. For if he covered it with his palm it would summon Dalis, a great scientist, but an erratic one, as Sarka the First had so clearly shown. Sarka turned again to the Beryl. The area of which Dalis was Spokesman was, roughly speaking, that part of what had once been the Pacific Ocean, north of a line drawn east and west through the southernmost of the Hawaiian Islands, northward to the Pole. The home of Dalis was in the heart of what had once been an island historians claimed had been called Oahu, now a mountain peak still retaining a hint of the pre-Discovery name: Ohi. * * * * * The total number of the Spokesmen, the oldest of earth's inhabitants, was twelve, and the remainder of the Earth not under the tutelary rule of Dalis was divided up among the other eleven Spokesmen. Cleric, for example, father of Jaska, was Spokesman of that area which men had once called Asia, the vast valleys of the once Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean; while the youngest of the Spokesmen, in a manner serving his apprenticeship, was tutelary head of the vast plateau once called Africa. The name of this man was Gerd. "He, at least," thought Sarka, thinking of each Spokesman in turn and cataloguing each in his mind, "will be with me. I wonder about the others, and especially Dalis. He has always hated us!" Then, with the air of a man who has made up his mind and crosses his particular Rubicon in a single step, Sarka rose to his feet and passed along the row of vari-colored lights, covering each one with his hand in rapid succession. Then he sat down again, almost holding his breath, and waited. As he stared at the row of lights his eyes lingered longest on two which were almost golden in color--and his face was very gentle, almost reverent. For those two lights were signals to Sarka the First and Sarka the Second, his grandfather and his father! * * * * * It was Dalis, the irascible, the fiery tempered, the erratic, who first made answer. "Yes! What is it now?" Sarka smiled a trifle grimly as he spoke a single word. "Wait!" The voice of Dalis, which Sarka had good cause to remember, had sounded as loudly in the laboratory as though Dalis had been present there in person, for men had learned to communicate by voice almost without the aid of radio and its appurtenances though the principle upon which the first crude beginnings of radio were fashioned still applied. Each man's dwelling place was both a "sender" and a "receiver," and men could talk and be talked to no matter where they lived--individuals telepathically summoned at desire of anyone wishing verbal contact. "Gerd is here!" came the voice of that Spokesman. To him also Sarka spoke one word. "Wait!" "I am here, Sarka!" came a musical voice. "And Jaska is with me, listening!" That would be Cleric, loyal friend, master scientist, but always shy of contact with people, though swift to anger and self-forgetfulness when he knew himself right and was opposed. Sarka darted a look back at the Revolving Beryl, adjusted swiftly the Beryl-microscope, and smiled into the faces of Jaska and Cleric, who looked enough alike that they might have been brother and sister, though Cleric had been born ten centuries before his daughter Jaska. They smiled back at him. * * * * * He shifted the Beryl-microscope and stared for a second at Dalis, there in the Beryl, and marked the antagonism Dalis was at no pains to hide. One by one the Spokesmen reported. Klaser, from the Americas; Durce from the valleys of the vanished Atlantic; Boler from that part of the Artic Circle not included in the wedge which the Gens of Dalis thrust northward to the Pole: Vardee; Prull; Yuta; Aal; Vance and Hime. Each from his appointed area, each from the official headquarters of his Gens, the name given to those people who acknowledged the tutelage of a Spokesman. Each Spokesman, therefore, was the mouthpiece of millions of men, women and children. And over the Spokesmen, and not themselves Spokesmen, were three scientists: The Sarkas, First, Second and Third. When all twelve of the Spokesmen had reported and been bidden by Sarka to wait, a smile touched the face of Sarka for an instant as two other voices, so nearly alike they might have been the voice of a single person, reported themselves. "I am here, son! What is it?" Oddly enough, Sarka's father and grandfather reported with exactly the same words. Sarka smiled at a whimsical thought of his own. It had been some time since the three scientist Sarkas had been together, and despite the vast differences in their ages they might have been triplets! * * * * * The reports were in and the Spokesmen were waiting; but for almost a minute Sarka waited still. Then he spoke swiftly those words for which there could be no recall: "Gentlemen, the time is come when we must go to war!" For a long moment after he had spoken there was no answer. Then it came, in the jeering laughter of the antagonistic Dalis. "War? Against whom? The Sarkas are always dreaming!" "And Dalis," continued Sarka, "shall be one of the leaders of Earthlings in this war which I am about to propose! You doubtless recall a proposal you once made to Sarka the First? Your proposal to halt for a few moments the headlong whirl of the earth about its axis, thus to flood--" "Stop!" interrupted Dalis. "Stop! Immediately!" And Sarka stopped. He had forgotten, in the excitement of his urge to explain his plans, that the millions of people who gave official allegiance to Dalis had never been informed of the hideous proposal he had made, back there centuries ago, as a corrective for a world rapidly approaching over-population. Had his people known, never again would the voice of Dalis be heard in life. The Spokesmen knew, and the Sarkas; but no others. Sarka understood the protest of Dalis; honored it. "Dalis," he went on, more softly, "after I have explained what I wish to do, you will come to me here, prepared to explain to me exactly how you planned doing what you proposed to my grandfather--for your knowledge will be necessary to me...." "Isn't it enough that your grandfather stole from me, and amplified, an idea that would have made me forever famous, without his grandson also stealing the fruit of my brains?" "Your brains," said Sarka sharply, "belong to your people. What I plan is for their betterment. But it means war, war which may last a century, two centuries, in which lives of countless thousands may be lost." * * * * * Sarka's last words were almost drowned out by the humming sound that came out of the Revolving Beryl, that perfected device which was the ultimate in the evolution of television and vibration-transference. Sarka's heart sank, for he knew the meaning of that sound. So did the Spokesmen. "You see?" came the rasping voice of Dalis. "You hear? Look into your Beryl! See the clenched fists of the earth's myriads being shaken at you! Listen to the protests of the millions who hear your every word! See what Earthlings think of the prospect of war!" For a moment Sarka spoke directly to the people. "Be silent and listen! It will be war, yes; but not such a skulking, hideous war as ye wage among yourselves for a place to live! You, fathers, are guilty of slaying your sons! You, sons, of slaying your fathers! Merely by thrusting them forth from the hives, into the Outer Cold! This war I propose shall be a war that shall match your manhood, if ye indeed be men! Listen to me, and I will find for you new lands to conquer, new homes for your holding, if ye can take them!" "But where," interrupted the sarcastic voice of Dalis, "are these new lands of which you speak? Inside the Earth? Already our hives reach into the Earth a distance of eight miles. Where else, then?" "For shame, Dalis!" snapped Sarka, "and you a scientist! Every bit of habitable land on this globe is some man's dwelling place! Spokesmen of the Gens of Earth, look out your windows! Look out and upward--and read Dalis' answer in the stars!" * * * * * For a full minute there was silence throughout the earth, and Sarka saw that the Spokesmen were doing his bidding. He himself looked out, out through the swirling storm which tore at the crest of the Himalayas, a dark and forbidding Outside, in the starred dome of which rode the pale orbed moon! "It is obvious, son," came the voice of Sarka the First, "what you mean. But how accomplish it?" "Fifteen centuries ago, my father's father," cried Sarka, "Dalis told you that he possessed the power to halt for a moment the headlong whirl of the world on its axis about the sun! He could do it then--and no man, whatever he may think of Dalis as a man, has ever known him to lie! If, fifteen centuries ago, he could bring the whirling world to pause, why can we not, now...." And, even though he had thought of this for years upon end, had spoken over and over to himself the words he was now using, rehearsing his proposed argument to the Spokesmen of the Gens, Sarka found himself for a moment almost afraid to continue and speak them. "I understand, Sarka!" came the excited voice of Gerd, youngest of the Spokesmen. "And I follow wherever you think it best to lead! You mean ... you mean...." "Exactly!" Sarka managed at last. "If the Earth can be stayed on its axis, it can be diverted from its orbit entirely! I know, for I have found the manner of its doing, though I need the genius of Dalis to check my work and my calculations! We have no new land on this Earth to conquer; but the Universe is filled with countless other worlds! What say ye, Spokesmen of the Gens? What say ye, Gens of Earth?" But for the time of a thousand heartbeats neither the Spokesmen or the Gens made answer to Sarka, and all the world fell utterly silent, absorbing this unbelievable thing of which Sarka had hinted. * * * * * Over the metalized roof of the world the snows and storms, the winds and the wraiths of the long dead moaned and screamed as with an icy voice of abysmal warning. And for the time of those thousand heartbeats, the world was pausing to listen. When realization came, the answer would come from the Spokesmen and from the Gens; and here in the Sarka laboratory, his Rubicon crossed at last, sat Sarka, staring through the Beryl-microscope into the depths of the Revolving Beryl. His face was dead white, his eyes narrowed. The first voice which came startled him. "It is mad, Sarka! Mad! Mad! But I am with you, always!" It was the voice of Jaska, daughter of Cleric! CHAPTER IV _The Earthlings Make Ready_ "I too, am with you!" came the voice of Gerd. "Spoken like a child!" snapped Dalis. "For you are as much a child as this third of the dreaming Sarkas! The scheme is mad, madder even than Jaska intimates! The scheme I once proposed, in which I was cheated by the grandfather of this madman, was times and times more feasible and practicable!" "Suppose," came the soft voice of Sarka the First, interrupting Dalis, "that you put the matter up to your Gens, O wise and noble Dalis, and see which scheme they would endorse if given the choice in the matter--and were your scheme still possible!" This quickly silenced the vituperation of Dalis, but in no wise prevented his continuance as a rather loud antagonist of the plan. "How," he demanded, "can you return the Earth to its orbit, even granting you are able to take this initial step? How keep life on the Earth during its flight on this rainbow-chasing voyage you propose?" "All these things have been taken into consideration, O Dalis!" retorted Sarka. "All of my scheme is practicable, as I think you will agree when I have told you its details. What think you of the plan, Klaser? And you, Durce? Boler? Vardee? Prull? Yuta? Aal? Vance? Hime?" When the Spokesmen had answered, some of them hesitantly, for the people all this time had remained silent--and none of the Spokesmen could be sure how his own Gens would feel in the matter--it developed that seven of the Spokesmen were for the scheme, if it should prove to be possible. "If this is the voice of the majority of the Gens," snapped Dalis, "given thus by their Spokesmen, then I vote with the majority! I shall call upon you immediately, Sarka, for a conference!" * * * * * "I am glad," said Sarka softly, "that the majority of the Spokesmen are with me. Especially am I glad that Dalis and Cleric vote with me. For the others I have only this to say: I have thought this matter over for almost a century, and I know that the time has come when we must act, to save ourselves from self-destruction. Had you not decided with me, I should have acted alone!" "Yes?" snapped Dalis. "How?" "I have, here in my laboratory," replied Sarka, "the power whereby to accomplish the scheme of which I have told you! Had all the Gens defied me, I would have nevertheless sent the Earth outward on its voyage, bringing it within reach of the denizens, first of the Moon, second of Mars--and you people of little courage would have been compelled to fight to save yourselves!" "You would have forced us into war?" came the quavering voice of Prull, the first Spokesman aside from Dalis to take active part in the discussion. "Then why, if you had the means in the beginning to enforce your will upon us, confer with us at all?" Sarka thrilled with satisfaction, for this question gave him the excuse he sought. He had been wondering and scheming how to compel the Spokesmen of the Gens to obey his will. "I wanted your opinions," he said shortly. "But I also wish you to know that I have the power to go on, whether you wish it or not--_and you must obey me!_" * * * * * How would the twelve Gens take this ultimatum of Sarka? For breathless moments after he had spoken he waited, and the Spokesmen with him. Then came the voice of Cleric, addressing his people, yet leaving the contacts open so that Sarka and the other Spokesmen might hear. "What say you, O Gens of Cleric?" he cried, his voice an exultant, clarioning paean of rejoicing. "Do we follow this man who promises us life again? Do we follow this man who promises us that once again we shall dwell in plenty, without the blood of relatives and neighbors on our hands? Answer this man, O Gens--for I say unto you that wheresoever he leads I would follow him!" Silence for a heartbeat. Then a murmuring like the sound of the waves of the long-vanished seas sounded in the laboratory, wherein all things were seen, all sounds were heard. A monster voice, loud and savage, from the Gens of Cleric. "We follow Cleric wherever he leads!" Finally the words became intelligible. "It matters not to us whom Cleric follows, so long as we may follow Cleric!" "Well spoken, O Gens of Cleric!" snapped Sarka when the murmuring died down to a whisper, then faded out entirely. "Deck yourselves in the white garments of Cleric! Emblazon upon your backs and breast the Red Lily of his House! Prepare for war! These are your orders; the details I leave to Cleric!" There came the voice Dalis. "Give your orders to my Gens direct, O Sarka!" rasped Dalis. "For I leave this very moment to come to you!" "Thank you," said Sarka, a great wave of exaltation sweeping over him. He had expected Dalis to be the last and most difficult to manage. Then to the Gens of Dalis, as the blue light on the table in the laboratory showed Sarka that Dalis was already winging toward him: "Deck yourselves in the green garments of Dalis! Wear as your insignia the yellow star of his House, and prepare for war! Make new and modern Ray Directors! Refurbish your rotting machines of destruction! Make ready, and make haste! For the Gens of Dalis will be the first of all the Gens to move in attack against the Dwellers Outside! When the time comes I shall tell you where you shall dwell--if you win the land I shall show you!" * * * * * The humming of myriad voices inside the laboratory was now almost continuous, but ever the words of Sarka went out to the Spokesmen and to the Gens, though, save in the case of Cleric and of Dalis, he did not speak to the Gens direct, because he did not wish in one iota to usurp the authority of the Spokesmen themselves. But when less than an hour had passed, he realized that the first step had been successfully taken, and that from now on the success or failure of the scheme rested in his own hands. Perspiration bedewed his forehead, and for a second he prayed. "God of our fathers! Grant that we be not mistaken! Grant that we be right in what we plan! Grant that success attend our arms! Grant that this scheme of mine lead us not to catastrophe--for if this should develop, only I am guilty, and only I should be punished!" "Amen!" As one voice, the Spokesmen of the Gens spoke the word, and Sarka heard it. He had forgotten for the moment that the Spokesmen still could hear him. "That is all," he said huskily. "Prepare your Gens, each of you, for such battle as even our histories never have recorded! For we go against foemen whose strength we do not know, whose manner of life we do not know, and we must not fail! Make haste with your preparations! Your time is short! And Spokesmen, counsel your Gens that they put aside at once all personal differences, all family quarrels, all quarrels with their neighbors! That each adult individual, each unmarried woman, and such married woman as have all their children grown, and who no longer need them, prepare to go forth to battle! From this laboratory, within a brief space, Dalis and the Sarkas will give you further word!" * * * * * Then he dimmed the lights, and severed contact with the Spokesmen of the Gens. Only two lights he did not dim, at the moment, and to two men he spoke softly. "My father and my father's father! Come to me at once! For there shall be need of the combined genius of the Sarkas if my scheme is to succeed!" From both Sarkas, as though they had rehearsed the words against this need of them, came answer: "Aye, son, we come!" From that moment on until Dalis and the Sarkas were ready to take the most momentous step ever taken in the history of the world, the humming within the laboratory did not cease. For the people, the millions and billions of people of the hives, were busy, eagerly and feverishly busy, preparing new armament, new engines of destruction, against the time when there should be need of them. And for perhaps the first time in centuries, the people were happy. For not even the passage of a thousand centuries, or a thousand thousand centuries, could flush from the warm hearts of men the love of conflict! Sarka smiled wanly, his face very pale. He had spoken, his people were busy with preparations, and now there could be no turning back. The world, when he spoke the word, would rush outward to glorious conflict--or to destruction! A buzzer sounded near the Exit Dome. Sarka raced to give the "Enter" Signal--and Dalis, he of the hawk-eyes, the sharp nose and sharper tongue, entered the presence of the man who, in a twinkling, had made himself master of the world. "Well," he said harshly, "I am here! What do you wish of me?" "We Sarkas," said Sarka easily, "wish to assure ourselves that you will do nothing to obstruct our plans! Dalis, of the Gens of Dalis, you are prisoner of the Sarkas until you have passed your word!" "That I will never do!" said Dalis calmly. "I have passed my word to go forward with you; but I meant, and you knew I meant, to go forward only as far as to me seemed right and reasonable!" CHAPTER V _The Betrayal of Dalis_ And until the arrival of the other two Sarkas, Dalis said nothing. His face flushed an angry red as Sarka the First received the "Enter" Signal and stepped into the laboratory which had once been his--which he had delivered into the capable hands of Sarka the Second, in order to find new channels for his genius, as a worker for the betterment of the world's people. This he had found in organization, so that the people worked and labored, despite their personal quarrels, in closer harmony than they ever had before. But now Sarka the Third had called, and the two Sarkas responded. Dalis snarled at his ancient enemy, who looked to be the image of Sarka the Third and not one whit older, though one had preceded the other into the world by many centuries. "Still the pleasant, congenial Dalis, I see!" smiled Sarka the First. * * * * * For the moment it seemed that Dalis would die there of his seething anger; but he answered no word for all of a minute. Then: "This mad grandson of yours has made me a prisoner, until such time as I concur in all his plans!" "If he says you are a prisoner, that you are!" snapped the elder Sarka angrily. "Son, what is this thing you plan?" "For almost a century," replied Sarka, "I have been planning this. I knew, when father told me that Dalis had sworn he was able to halt for a moment the headlong flight of the Earth in its orbit, that Dalis did not lie or bluff! In your day, even, that was possible, and I continued with the knotty problem until I deduced the manner of its doing. I, too, can halt the Earth's rotation, or throw it out of its orbit! I took your idea, Dalis, _independently_ of you, knowing you would never reveal your secret to a Sarka, and amplified it until I can not only halt the Earth in its orbit, but throw it out of its orbit entirely!" For a moment Sarka studied the angry face of Dalis, and his own was very thoughtful. "Dalis," he said at last, "I wish you were not our enemy! For you are a genius, and the world has need of all the knowledge of such genius as it possesses. Why do you oppose us?" "Because," snarled Dalis, "I guessed something of your plan that I do not like! I do not like the Sarkas, never have; but neither have the Sarkas any love for me! When you spoke to us all, I knew that somehow you had discovered the secret! You spoke, when you delivered your ultimatum, of attacking the Moon, and after it Mars! You also granted to my Gens what would have seemed a great honor--to anyone who did not fathom the tricky scheming of the Sarkas!--that of being the first into the fray! If we are to be first, and the Moon is to be the first attacked, then you plan to relieve the world forever of me, your arch-enemy, by exiling me and all my Gens upon the Moon! A dead world, covered with ashes, whose people dwell in dank caverns, like gnomes of the underworld...." * * * * * "Stay!" snapped Sarka. "But I granted you a greater honor even than that, Dalis! I planned on your Gens, led by you, making a successful conquest of the Moon--because only such a genius as Dalis could force from this dead world a living for his Gens! Because you are the wisest of the Spokesmen, I planned for you the greatest task! Because I need you ... I do not slay you!" "I thank you," bowing low, with the deepest sarcasm, "but you honor me too much! And tell me, pray, if it is not true that you plan for the Sarkas their choice of the best and newest worlds of the Universe?" Sarka did not answer for a second, while his sensitive nostrils quivered with fury. The Sarkas had not noticed, but Jaska, daughter of Cleric, had admitted herself through the Exit Dome, in a way known only to Sarka and to herself, as she had entered many times before so as not to disturb Sarka at his labors. She now stood silently there, divesting herself of her Belt and outer clothing, beneath which was the golden toga worn by all the women of the earth. Dalis, however, had seen her, and his eyes narrowed craftily as he awaited the answer of Sarka. "Dalis," said Sarka softly, "it is not for you to question me, but to obey me! I have not undertaken this step without mastering all its details, and I refuse to allow you to swerve me in a single one of them from my plan." * * * * * Dalis straightened, standing stiffly at savage attention, and met the angry eyes of Sarka without flinching. There was no fear in Dalis, as all the world knew. But he was a schemer, and selfish. "After all," he said, "I have known Sarkas to make promises they could not keep! How do I know, how does the world know, that you can do what you say you can do?" "If," said Sarka, "I close all contact of this laboratory with the world outside, so that none may hear what I say save we four, and I then whisper here the secret you never told, Dalis, when my father's father refused to help you--will you then believe?" The face of Dalis went suddenly white, but he nodded, his eyes burning redly. Jaska moved closer to the men, who stood near the table of the vari-colored lights. "You needed my father's father," said Sarka softly, "because the secret of your scheme rested here in this laboratory, which is the highest point in the world! You pretended to need him in your scheme; but you did not need my father's father, though you _did_ need his laboratory, and some of the facts of science that _he_ discovered. So you came to him with your scheme, discovered that he believed, though he denied it, your scheme was possible--because he refused to aid you in it! Then, as an excuse to re-enter this laboratory, you told him you would return within two days! Now, shall I tell you your secret?" * * * * * The lips of Dalis were moving soundlessly. His right hand started to rise, as though he would make it signal the negative he was unable for a moment to speak. But even as he stood there, swaying slightly on his feet, Sarka dashed to the lights on the table, disconnecting them one by one; to the Revolving Beryl, which then ceased to revolve for the first time in centuries--whirled when he had finished, and stepped to the very center of the room. "Now," he whispered, "your secret, Dalis!" Still the hand upraised, still Dalis tried to speak, and could not. Sarka spoke, in a hoarse, almost terrified whisper, four words: "The Beryl! The Ovoids!" Gasps of surprise from the other two Sarkas, whose eyes for a second flashed to the huge Beryl, which now was still, silent--and blind. Dawning comprehension was evident in their faces. "The success of the Revolving Beryl," whispered Sarka, "which sees all that transpires in this world, depends on one fact: that its revolving is proportionately timed to infinite exactness with the revolution of the Earth about its axis! This Beryl is the Master Beryl of the Earth, which was why Dalis needed this Beryl, and could use no other!" * * * * * "Suppose that for a period of two days, uniformly progressive, this Beryl were forced to revolve in sharp jerks at an increasing rate of speed! With all connections in place, and all the world's Beryls attuned to the speed of this one--what would happen? What would happen if a single Gens were marshalled in warlike array atop the area of the Gens, and kept up a steady, rhythmic march for a period of hours?" "In a few hours," whispered Sarka the First, "the roof of the Gens area would begin to vibrate, to vibrate throughout all the area, and even into all surrounding Gens areas--and in time the roof would collapse!" "Exactly!" said Sarka, breathing heavily. "This Beryl, when attuned to all other Beryls in the world, would have this vibratory effect, not only on a certain area of the world--but upon the entire world!--Force the speed of the Beryls to the uttermost limit, and you sway the world to your will! As a marching horde would sway the roof of a vast section of the world if the horde's commander willed! "But that is not enough! The world would tremble, but nothing more! The Earth's store of Ovidum, which is Anti-Gravitational, and used in minute quantities in our Anti-Gravitational Ovoids, is evenly distributed throughout the world. By vibration of the Beryls I can control it, scatter it or gather it all together wherever I will! By shifting through vibration this Anti-Gravitational material, I can disrupt, make uneven, or nullify the pull of gravity on the Earth!" "That would do it," said Dalis, finding his voice at last; "but how would you control the course the Earth would take, thus thrown out of its orbit?" "That, my dear Dalis, is for the moment my secret!" "But is it?" Dalis suddenly shouted. * * * * * Before the three Sarkas could recover from their surprise at the man's sudden vehemence, he made a swift, terrifying move. He leaped away from them to stand beside Jaska, daughter of Cleric. "Sarka," he shrieked, "I know you love this woman! Note this little tube I hold against her side. With it I can cause her to vanish for all time, merely by a slight pressure of the fingers! And that will I do, unless you immediately open all contacts with the world and remain silent while I tell the people of Earth how you would betray them!" The three Sarkas were petrified with amazement and horror, for they recognized the slender tube in the hand of Dalis as a Ray Director, the world's greatest engine of destruction, and knew that it would do exactly as Dalis had said it would. Automatically, because they were brave men, they had stepped a trifle closer to Jaska and Dalis. Perspiration poured from their cheeks as they stared at this rebel. But their fears were for Jaska, who now spoke for the first time. "Let him do as he wills," she said smilingly, "since for the good of the world I do not fear to die! Refuse him, Sarka, and know that I go into Death's Darkness loving you always, and knowing that you will succeed in the end, in spite of the opposition of men like Dalis!" * * * * * A man of unexpected actions, this Dalis, for while the attentions of the Sarkas were on the little tableau he had staged, his eyes had darted to the Beryl, to the control which Sarka had touched to still its revolving. Now he sprang away from Jaska, was free of her and the Sarkas before any could move to intercept him. He dashed to the Beryl. Instantly it swept into motion, while Dalis whirled to face the Sarkas, and from his lips came a burst of triumphant laughter. One hand was on the Beryl Control, the other still held the Ray Director. "Fools!" he cried. "Fools! Duped like children! And now it is Dalis who is master of the world! Move closer to me, and I will turn my Ray Director upon this Beryl, which you have so kindly informed me is master of all the Beryls and of all Ovidum deposits! Be glad that I do not turn it upon you; but for you I have a kinder, more honorable fate! I now am master, and will direct the destiny of the world! But I will never leave it, because I suspect that it is the most pleasant of all the worlds! I will, however, choose for the Sarkas a world that shall be the dreariest in all the Universe!" The Sarkas whirled as soft laughter came from Jaska, daughter of Cleric. Strange, lilting laughter. They turned in time to see her vanish through the Exit Dome; but for a long moment her jeering laughter seemed to sound in the laboratory she had left-and, to judge by her laughter, had betrayed! For Dalis, arch-traitor, echoed her laughter! CHAPTER VI _The Beryls in Tune_ "Remember," said Dalis, as the Beryl began to revolve and its humming mounted moment by moment to normal, "that you must concur in whatever I say to the people of the Earth--for if you do not, I swear that I will destroy this Master Beryl! Then what happens to your scheme, Sarka the Third? You see, there is no change in the plans, save one: I am the master, not you!" Dalis was not a madman, for the world conceded him place in its list of geniuses next below the three Sarkas, which was high honor indeed; but Dalis possessed in abundance that most universal of all human emotions--jealousy. For centuries he had been nursing it, watching the Sarkas always in the niches just above him, yet never being able to attain to their eminence. Now.... He had outwitted them. It might be for a moment only, but while his mastery lasted he would drink deeply of personal satisfaction. Now, however, there was no gloating in his face, for he realized, as Sarka had realized, the infinite gravity of the whole situation. If a mistake were made, the world would plunge to destruction--or go cooling forever in a headlong race through space. "I keep the Ray Director hidden," he whispered, while the murmuring of the Master Beryl mounted as it gained speed again, "but know you, Sarkas, that its muzzle points at the Master Beryl, always!" * * * * * Now the forms of Earth were appearing on the Beryl. Men in countless hordes were maneuvering in myriads, legions and armies, across the face of the globe. There was no marching, but an effortless, swift as light almost, aerial maneuvering. For each human being possessed the tight-fitting metalized cloth, with the gleaming helmet in whose skull-pan was the Anti-Gravitational Ovoid, which was the "outside" garment of earthlings. With the Ovoid sitting exactly against the skull, man had but to will himself in any direction, at any livable height, and the action took place. In the same way, one man, to whom others in an organization gave allegiance by appointment, could will all his underlings into whatever formation he desired. As beautiful and effortless at the flight of those birds which had vanished from the earth centuries before. "Remember, Dalis," said Sarka, "that while the speed of the Earth in its orbit is between eighteen and nineteen miles per second, once thrown out of its orbit, and forced to follow a straight or nearly straight line, the speed may be many times that-or much less!" "The simplest facts of science," snarled Dalis, "were known to me a thousand years before you were born! Now I shall tell the Spokesmen of the Gens, and be sure that you second what I say!" He paused. Then, raising his voice impressively, he spoke. "O Spokesmen of the Gens, O Gens of Earth, hark ye to the words of Dalis and of Sarka! The time has come to try the experiment of which Sarka told you, and which I, Dalis, of the Gens of Dalis, have found good, and hereby certify! See that all your Beryls are mathematically tuned to catch every sound, every vibration, every picture, from this Beryl of Sarka, henceforth to be known as the Master Beryl! * * * * * "No matter what happens, no matter what changes take place in the temperature of your homes, no matter what storms may come, touch not your Beryls until instructed from this laboratory! Tune your Beryls, then leave them, and hasten faster with your preparations for war! Each Spokesman of a Gens will at once instruct the members of his Gens that all partitions between families shall immediately be removed, outward from a common center in each case, until one hundred families occupy a single dwelling place. Materials from destroyed partitions shall be carefully hoarded, and the newer and bigger areas shall become maneuvering places for the hundred families which will occupy each given area! "Facing a crisis as we are, no thought can be given to privacy, and neighborly quarrels must be forgotten! This move is necessary because no single dwelling place is large enough to be used as a place of maneuver--and from now on until the command is given, maneuvers must not be held Outside! For hark ye, O Spokesmen, O Gens of Earth, we are about to start upon our voyage into outer space! Spokesmen, call in your maneuvering myriads! You have five minutes!" In five minutes not a flying man could be seen in all the cold, stormy outside. Dalis spoke again. "Tune your Beryls and remove partitions, taking care that in reducing partitions you so estimate your stresses and strains that the roof of the world be not endangered by weight that is unsupported, or improperly supported! "Food Conservers, redouble your production and rush your transportation of Food Capsules! "Mothers of men, take over the labors of your sons and your husbands! Sisters and sweethearts of men, join the myriads in maneuvers, for you, too, may require knowledge of fighting!" * * * * * In spite of himself, an ejaculation of admiration escaped the lips of Sarka. Hearing it, Dalis turned to him, and a flush of pleasure tinged his cheeks as Sarka shaped one word with his lips: "Excellent!" Then, after a pause, Sarka spoke directly to the Gens of Earth. "Take heed of the words of Dalis, for they are also the words of the Sarkas!" Then an expression of surprise flashed across the face of Sarka as Dalis' fingers began to move in a swift sort of pantomime--for the sign manual he used was the secret manual of Jaska and Sarka! His heart cold within him at this new proof of her betrayal, Sarka nevertheless noted the words which dropped silently off the fingers of this enemy of the Sarkas. "You are wise to resist no further! Together we can do much, and if you give your word not to oppose me, we can work together; but I will be the master!" "But, if we grant you the mastery, will you heed our advice if it is good?" "I will, but I alone will be the judge of its worth!" "Then we work together henceforth. Let us begin! In the time required to move from here to the Moon, our people will have ample opportunity to perfect themselves in maneuvers! Are you ready, O my father, and father's father?" "Ready!" they said together. * * * * * But for a moment Dalis hesitated. "Your word!" he snapped, looking at each Sarka in turn, and each in his turn nodded. They had given their word, but not their love, to Dalis. Dalis bowed low to Sarka the Youngest, who darted to the onyx base in which revolved the Master Beryl, and pressed a small lever of metalized jade, set in a slot on the southern side of the base of onyx. The humming sound within the Beryl became perceptibly louder, and as the minutes passed, and Sarka stood, arms folded, watching the Revolving Beryl, it continued to increase. Here was the crisis, and as they watched its sure, certain approach, they forgot their enmities, Dalis and the Sarkas, and watched the whirling Beryl. Minute by minute its humming increased. The figures still were plain to be seen within the Beryl, but were becoming blurred of outline. Partitions had been removed all over the earth, increasing the size of rooms a hundredfold, reducing their number a hundredfold. The Gens of Earth, by hundred-families, were maneuvering under the Heads of Hundreds. The depths of the Master Beryl, therefore, was a maze of flying men, with their extremities slightly blurred, and becoming more so as the Master Beryl increased its speed. * * * * * Here now was shown the value of the organization fostered by Sarka the First--for in all the world there was no single Beryl out of tune with the Master Beryl; and as the Master Beryl increased the speed of its revolving, so increased at the same time the speed of all the other Beryls. Minute by minute the humming of the Master, and with it the others, increased in volume. "Father!" spoke Sarka. "To the Observatory, behind the Beryl, please, to watch the stars, and from them to note the direction we take when the combined vibrations of the Beryls have affected the quiescence of Earth's deposits of Ovidum and, through its shifting, disturbed the flight of the Earth in its orbit!" With a brief nod Sarka's father hurried around the Master Beryl to the tiny Observatory beyond, from which, through the Micro-Telescopes, those who knew could read the secrets of the planets, the stars--the Universe. Sarka watched him go, wondering if Dalis might not forbid him. But Dalis merely watched him go and said nothing. * * * * * Now that the time of Change was upon the world, Dalis realized his responsibility. It was little wonder that he began to be for the first time a little bit afraid. "Note, Dalis!" snapped Sarka, and Dalis started nervously as his name was spoken. "Feel the trembling of the laboratory, just as the same trembling affects all the other buildings in the world in which Beryls are located. As the minutes pass the trembling will go deeper and deeper, and by to-morrow the first tremors will be reaching into the Earth to several miles below the last habitable Inner Level! And then.... "Then," repeated Sarka tersely, "my father will know by his study of the stars in which new direction we are traveling! For within twenty-four hours the Earth will have started on its voyage of conquest!" "Is there no way, Sarka," queried Dalis, "by which we can control the direction of our flight!" "There _is_ a way, O wise and gallant Dalis! But since you do not know it, who now is master?" Dalis' face became as pale as chalk, and Sarka smiled a little as he watched him. Then, wondering what new resolve stirred the depths of this master egotist of the earth, he watched emotions flash to and fro across the face of Dalis, watched the color return to his cheeks. The cold of death gripped at his heart when Dalis spoke. "I do not fear death, O wise and gallant Sarka!" he mocked. "For I have lived fully and well, and for many, many centuries! You know that I do not fear to slay people of the Earth, for did I not propose to your father's father that a flood would be beneficial to unfit earthlings? Hear, then! Keep your secret, and I shall allow the Earth to go outward into space, out of control, in whatever direction it will. If any other worlds happen to lie in our pathway...." * * * * * Dalis shrugged indifferently, turning his back on Sarka, to peer again into the depths of the Master Beryl, whose voice had risen to a vaster murmur, whose pictures were becoming moment by moment more blurred as time fled irrevocably into eternity. Sarka the First took advantage of his opportunity, and leaped at the back of Dalis, hands extended to fasten them in the throat of his ancient enemy. Dalis whirled, with a burst of laughter, and the muzzle of his Ray Director covered the person of the First Sarka. In a flash the spot where Sarka the First had been was vacant, and there was no single sign to show that he had ever stood there! Silence then in the laboratory, save for the mounting murmur of the Master Beryl! CHAPTER VII _Outer Space_ "He only proved a belief I have entertained for centuries!" snarled Dalis. "That all the male Sarkas are fools--and the females for bearing them!" Sarka said nothing, but within his breast a deep hatred was forming for Dalis. He had disliked him before, and had been amused by him; but in the busy life of Sarka there had been no time for hatred of anyone. Busy people had no time for hatreds. "You should be torn to pieces for that, Dalis!" was all he said. "We needed my father's father in our efforts! But the loss to the world of one super-genius cannot be balanced by slaying another--so you are safe! "What he could do, I can do!" snapped Dalis. Sarka turned away from him, seating himself beside the table of the vari-colored lights, and his heart was heavy as lead in his breast. He blamed Jaska for much of this, and his heart was burdened, despite her treachery, by the fact that he loved her, always would love her. Love was the one possession which made centuries of life desirable to men of the Earth. For men could spend centuries in seeking a true mate, knowing that there were other centuries still in which to enjoy her. Woman was man's greatest boon, his excuse for living, as was man excuse for woman. Through the centuries, when humankind remained forever young, the joy in each other of those truly mated grew as their knowledge grew.... * * * * * And now Jaska had failed Sarka, when for half a century they had loved each other! Why had she done it? He had given her no reason to do so. Had there been some other reason? Why had she laughed, and left them, after the betrayal of the Master Beryl into the hands of Dalis? "Before God," whispered Sarka, "I believe that you, Jaska, were playing a game to dupe Dalis, as he played a game to dupe us!" Down in his heart he was not sure. But somehow, just to whisper to himself his faith in Jaska, gave it back to him in some measure, and by so much lightened the weight upon his heart. For now his responsibilities were greater than they had ever been before, and he had need of all his faculties. "She'll come back, or somehow communicate with me, and explain everything," he told himself. But he refused to ponder on how Dalis the betrayer had gained possession of the secret sign manual he had believed known only to Jaska and himself. That, too, might be explained satisfactorily, for Dalis was cunning. From the side of the laboratory opposite the Revolving Beryl came a soft tinkling sound, like the striking of a musical bell. Sarka rose wearily, strode to the wall, where a narrow aperture opened, in which rested Food Capsules sufficient for one meal for three men. He smiled wryly. They knew then, the Food Conservers deep in the earth as they were, that Sarka the First was no more--and sent food for three men! All the world knew, perhaps, yet no single person had raised voice in protest--or if any had, the mounting murmur of the Beryls had drowned it out. * * * * * "Sarka!" spoke Dalis suddenly. "At what time do you estimate that the flight of the Earth in its orbit will be materially affected?" "It is being affected this moment, Dalis, shifting the Ovidum store!" said Sarka shortly. "Within twelve hours we will be in readiness to start our journey!" Remaining absolutely motionless within the domed laboratory, it was now possible to feel the ever so slight motion, not only of the laboratory, but of the mountain crest upon which it rested. Not so much a to-and-fro motion as a round-about motion. Just as the slightest sound flies outward through space endlessly, and the slightest vibration moves outward until the end of time and of space, Sarka knew that the vibration set up by the Beryl, slight though it was, was already being felt at the Poles of the Earth. Not enough to be noticed there, but existant, just the same. "In twelve hours the world will be fighting against this combined vibration and Anti-Gravitational Force we are starting, and second by second accelerating," Sarka explained to Dalis: "fighting to remain on its pathway about the Sun! But we will win against it, and with each new vibration, each succeeding one being more strongly felt, we will force the Earth that much more against the _pull_ which holds it in its orbit!" The laboratory was trembling. The mountain beneath it was trembling. Both in accordance with scientific design. There was no element of chance in it, for the mountain moved, and the laboratory on its crest moved, as science willed. It was now difficult for Sarka to remain still where he sat, for the trembling was exciting his heart action, and causing the blood to rush to his cheeks, making him feverish. He rose to his feet and began pacing the floor. He strode to the jade lever, moved it ahead a fraction of a fraction of an inch, and perceptibly the murmuring of the Beryl increased, as did the trembling of the laboratory and of the mountain. * * * * * Twelve hours later exactly, Sarka shouted a single word to Dalis. "Now!" The laboratory was swinging about in a sort of circle in a way that made one dizzy if one remained still for the merest second. Sarka, glancing out into the Outside, across which blew the storms of the heights, and noting that no cracks appeared in the surface of the world's vast roof, knew that this swaying motion had been transmitted evenly to all the Earth, and that, so far at least, his calculations had been correct. But Dalis was in a cold sweat of fear, and deathly sick. The motion of the laboratory, like the inside of a whirling top, made him ill, though Sarka could tell that he fought against it with all his great will. Sarka strode to him, looked him in the eyes for a moment. Dalis looked back, glaring defiance. "Are you afraid, Dalis?" he shouted, to be heard above the screaming of the Master Beryl. "I am not afraid," croaked Dalis. "Has the time arrived?" Sarka paused, as though for dramatic effect, and raised his right hand high, while his left hand dropped to the metalized jade lever. There still was room in the slot in the onyx base for the lever to move forward ever so little. * * * * * "We have reached the exact place," cried Sarka, "where the Earth can, by pressure upon this lever, be continued on in its orbit--or forced out of it--out into space! Which shall it be, Dalis? If I move the lever forward we start our voyage, and may not be able to return!" For a moment the nostrils of Dalis quivered as though with fear. His face was white with his illness; but out of his eyes peered the fanatic self-confidence of the man. "Push it forward, O Sarka!" he managed. Sarka, smiling slightly, pushed the lever to its uttermost limit, still with his right arm upraised. For full five minutes he stood thus, and then.... "Now!" he shouted, bringing down his arm. "We have begun our journey into space! Come, let us look Outside, and await the first reports from my father!" The two men, forgetting again for a moment the fact of their enmity, strode to the southern wall of the laboratory and looked out across the roof of the world. "You will note, Dalis," said Sarka conversationally, "that in a matter of hours, the roaring of the Etheric winds will possess everything! We will have passed into the infinite reaches of Outer Space, where, if I may make so bold as to say so, it were better if Dalis, self-named master of the world, knew whither he was going!" CHAPTER VIII _Moon Minions Prepare_ "It is time," said Sarka softly, "that we who have urged the world to forget its quarrels should forget our own. What difference who is master, so long as success attend our efforts?" "Then tell me your secret of control of our flight!" snapped Dalis. Before Sarka could answer, however, Sarka the Second entered the laboratory area before the Master Beryl. He looked a question at his son, and Sarka knew that his father was asking what had become of Sarka the First. He shrugged his shoulders, and nodded his head toward Dalis. Sarka the Second gave no more sign of perturbation than had his son, but deep within his eyes were signal fires of fury which centuries of penance on the part of Dalis would not erase. But now, with Sarka the First gone, Dalis must live. "We are headed," said Sarka's father softly, "in the general direction of the Moon! If we could travel toward it in a straight line, we would reach it, if we kept our pace of about eighteen miles per second, in approximately four hours! But since we are out of control, I fear we will pass it too far away for our fighters to fly across the intervening space! Or we may be drawn against it, in planetary collision, which of course means annihilation. We are traveling noticeably faster than while in the earth's orbit. I am able to see something of the preparation of Moon-men to receive us!" * * * * * Dalis turned to Sarka, and the perspiration bedewed his forehead. In order to make this mad mission successful, he must know Sarka's secret of control. Had he been in Sarka's place, _he_ would have kept his secret, no matter what happened, and he believed in his heart that Sarka would do the same. It never occurred to him that Sarka, no matter who the master, would divulge his secret in order to save humanity from destruction. "We have approximately four hours, Dalis!" Sarka prompted the betrayer. "I need at least an hour for my experiments! Do you, knowing as you do that I have planned all this out, know exactly what course our voyage should take, still insist on holding the reins yourself?" "I agree, for this time, to listen to your advice, as I promised you!" "Then let me suggest that you do some of the work which I had planned should be done by my father's father! It is time that the world's Induction Conduits be placed in operation, in order that our people be supplied with equable temperature from the Earth's Core, as our temperature changes due to our position with relation to the sun! Stand back and give me the controls!" * * * * * For a moment Dalis stared at the two Sarkas. Would they seize power the moment he moved away from the Beryl Control? In their places he knew he would have done it. In their places he knew he would never have submerged self in the good of the people. But, somewhat diffidently, he moved away. Sarka the Second returned to the Observatory, behind the Beryl, while Sarka stopped before the table where the lights were. After a moment of thought-conversation with Sarka the Second in the Observatory, he dimmed the light which connected his laboratory with the headquarters of Klaser, in the Americas. "Klaser," he barked, "for the period of one second cut the speed of every Beryl within your Gens to half its present speed!" "I obey, O Sarka!" came the voice of Klaser. "Have we changed direction?" Sarka mentally questioned his father. "Slightly, but we are curving away, instead of toward the Moon! Try again!" Sarka dimmed the light of Cleric, who instantly made answer. "I am here, Sarka!" "Stop the Beryls of your Gens for two seconds, but be prepared to speed them up immediately afterward, if ordered, to the speed at which they are now revolving! Klaser, hold the speed of your Beryls as they are!" "I obey, O Sarka!" came the musical tones of Cleric. "I hear, O Sarka!" replied Klaser. "Now, my father," queried Sarka again, telepathically, "what direction do we travel?" "We are heading in a direction which will cause us to pass the Moon at a distance of approximately fifty thousand miles!" "From which point our fighters can reach the Moon in exactly two hours, after they have passed through our atmosphere!" cried Sarka exultantly, aloud. "True, son!" replied Sarka the Second, mentally. "I suggest you hold our course steady as it is!" * * * * * The motion of the earth now was as that of a steadily falling body, and the shifting of the Ovidum store caused by vibrations set up by the Beryls had set the Earth on its course toward the Moon. Sarka now gave instructions to Klaser and to Cleric to return the speed of the Beryls to that which they had attained at the moment the journey of the Earth had begun--thus bringing them once more into harmony with the Master Beryl, and rendering the Ovidum static. Dalis re-entered the laboratory from the Wall Tube, near the Dome Exit, by which he had passed down to the lowest Inner Level, and stared suspiciously at the two Sarkas. He found them half-smiling their satisfaction. "We pass the Moon within fifty thousand miles!" exulted Sarka. "A flight of two hours for the Gens which attacks the Moon! Do you refuse, O Dalis, to send your Gens against the Moon?" "Why not send the Gens of Gerd!" demanded Dalis. "He is the youngest of the Spokesmen, and what better test is there for him than this?" "It is because he is so young that we do not wish to send him," replied Sarka coldly. "The colonization of the Moon by Earthlings requires the guiding genius of a Spokesman who has the experience of a Dalis--or a Sarka, else you would now be dead!" "Then let it be a Sarka!" barked Dalis. "Who, then, will control the further flight of the Earth?" "You! Let your father lead my Gens against the Moon!" "What will your Gens say, O Dalis? That their revered Spokesman feared to lead them in person?" "Enough of this squabbling," snapped Sarka the Second. "Do you not realize that within a matter of hours, some Gens must be sent into battle? Come with me to the Observatory, where you will be given something beside squabbling with which to occupy your minds!" * * * * * Leaving the earth on its lonely flight through space, the three men hurried to the Observatory, where they seated themselves before the eye-pieces of the Micro-Telescopes, whose outer circles had been aimed at the Moon. For a moment the three stared breathlessly at the surface of this dead sister of the Earth. They noted her valleys, her craters which seemed bottomless, and saw that even as they watched, valleys and craters became sharper of outline, proving that they were approaching the Moon at a tremendous speed. It seemed, too, as though they were heading toward sure collision, though Sarka the Second had said that they would pass the Moon at a distance of fifty thousand miles. "You will note activity at the very rims of the craters!" said the Elder Sarka easily. "The craters are man-made, not volcanic, as some scientists believe, and are shaped to converge the rays of the sun, as our roof is created for the same purpose. But note the activity at the rims of the craters!" * * * * * Closer the men peered, studying the rims as instructed by Sarka the Second. All about them--and as they watched, activity became apparent on the inner slopes of the craters--winged creatures seemed to be flying. They looked like tiny oblate spheroids, and they were in swift action, darting to and fro like bees which have been disturbed in their hives. "Those spheres are of metal," said Sarka the Second, "and they are the fighting Aircars of the Moon-men!" Neither Dalis nor Sarka denied this statement, for they knew it to be fact. It became apparent that the movement of the Aircars was not a movement of chance, but as skillfully ordered as any maneuvers which had, during the last few hours, been executed by any of the Gens of Earth. That they were of metal became apparent when, through the Micro-Telescopes, the watchers caught the glint of the sun on the surfaces of the cars. Sarka did a swift mental calculation, and announced the result. "Those Aircars average something like four hundred feet in length, and are doubtless filled with fighting Moon-men!" "That's right," said Dalis, who also had been calculating this very thing, "but our Ray Directors will disintegrate the Aircars as easily as my Ray Director disintegrated Sarka the First!" * * * * * "The remaining Sarkas received this statement in silence, for Dalis' choice of a comparison had been an unhappy one, to say the least. "I am wondering," said Sarka, "if you, my father, and you Dalis, have noted the peculiar appendages of the Aircars?" "I saw them some minutes ago," said his father moodily, "and I am almost afraid to guess their use! If they are what I fear they are, then the Moon-men have been expecting this attack of ours for years and years, and have been preparing for it! If they have known, and have been preparing, then we are facing a race of super-Beings indeed--for we have known but little of their activities!" "What, then," said Dalis, "do you think is the purpose of those appendages?" "Those appendages, cilia, flagella, call them whatever you wish, are man-made tentacles, created for the purpose of seizing, crushing and destroying--then discarding...." For a full two minutes the three men sat there, and horrible doubts flooded their brains. For the conclusion was obvious. The Gens of Earth would go into action flying, not as organizations, inside an Aircar, but as individuals, in swarms, myriads, legions and hordes. In order to do the utmost damage with their Ray Directors and Atom Disintegrators, they must approach within a reasonable distance--and the picture of those mighty tentacles, hurled like leashed lightning bolts into the midst of the attackers, folding in individuals by scores and hundreds, crushing them and dropping them contemptuously, was horrible in the extreme to contemplate! * * * * * It was difficult to estimate the possible speed of the Aircars of the Moon-men, at least at this distance. Besides, perhaps not a single one of them was traveling at top speed, because of the fact of their crowded traffic. This thought passed through the minds of the three men. "But we'll know," said Sarka dully, "when they get into action. For if I am not mistaken, those Aircars are being mustered on the rims of those craters to await orders, not to resist our attack, but to launch their own attack before we are ready! Dalis, are you going to allow your Gens to go into action against these Outsiders, without the inspiration of your personal leadership?" The nostrils of Dalis were quivering with the intensity of his emotion. His vast egotism told him that he, Dalis, could successfully combat these Aircars of the Moon-men, and he wished with all his heart to issue the orders to his Gens. But, vain as he was, he did not even wish to have the appearance of acceding to the original plan of Sarka! Sarka had planned for Dalis to attack the dwellers of the Moon, and Dalis had refused. Now, when this challenge of the Aircars was a direct challenge to his genius as a potential warlord of earth and he wished to accept the challenge, he was torn two ways. Should he go ahead under the common leadership of the Sarkas? Or should he still refuse battle--and perhaps see some lesser Spokesman go forth to win glory and imperishable renown to himself? * * * * * A thought message, a command almost, impinged on the brains of the three. "I wish to speak with you aloud!" The message was from Jaska! The three men rose and darted into the room of the Master Beryl. They had no sooner entered than the clear voice of Jaska sounded in the laboratory. "Sarka, I am no traitor! I am Jaska, who loves you! I am in the headquarters of Dalis at Ohi, and the Gens of Dalis has indicated its allegiance to me, having been informed by me that it is the wish of Dalis, whose presence is needed at the place of the Master Beryl! Command us, O Sarka, for we are ready to attack!" There the voice ended, while the two Sarkas turned again to face Dalis. Sarka now was glad that Dalis knew the secret sign manual, and his fingers worked swiftly as he spoke to the rebel. "Will you, then, Dalis, allow your Gens to be led to glory by a woman? A woman, moreover, who has duped you?" "The woman is a fool!" said Dalis. "She will lead the Gens to destruction!" "Who, then, will be blamed if she does? Your Gens believe she is their new Spokesman at your wish! If they are told otherwise, they will think that Dalis himself is afraid to lead them!" "We shall see," said Dalis, "if I could win honor by leading my Gens in a successful attack against the Moon-men, how much greater will be my glory if Jaska attacks, is repulsed--and I go in to turn defeat into victory!" Thus spake the colossal selfishness of Dalis, who took no thought of the possible, nay, certain, loss of countless lives because of his obstinancy. "I suggest," he said, "that you instruct your beloved Jaska to make ready; for if I am not mistaken, when we return to the Observatory we will discover that the Aircars of the Moon-men have left their craters and are racing outward from the Moon to meet us! Or perhaps you would lead my Gens, to safeguard Jaska!" CHAPTER IX _The Attack of the Yellow Stars_ "Why should I safeguard Jaska?" asked Sarka quietly. "She is a true daughter of Cleric! If Cleric does not fear for her to be Spokesman of a Gens, why should I? He is her father. If she wins, the more glory will be hers! If she loses, she will at least have tried!" "Meaning," snarled Dalis, "that I have refused even to try!" Sarka shrugged expressively, and the three stepped once more into the Observatory, took their places before the Micro-Telescopes. For a moment they could not see the outline of the Moon, for during their brief sojourn in the laboratory the Moon seemed to have disintegrated, flying into countless spheroidal pieces. "You see?" said Dalis. "The Moon-men do not wait for us! They attack!" It was all too true that the Aircars which had been mustered at the rims of the Moon's craters had been hurled outward into space, outward toward the on-rushing Earth, and the myriad numbers of them for a time shut out all view of the surface of the Moon. "God!" spoke Sarka, and it was like a prayer. His cheeks were pale as death, for in a moment he would speak the word which would send the Gens of Dalis, under the leadership of Jaska, out against these formidable Aircars of the Moon-men, and the appearance of the on-rushing cars was terrifying. That their flying radius, outward, was a great one, was manifest by the fact that the Earth would not for another hour reach its closest estimated point with the Moon. * * * * * Sarka, exchanging glances with his father, rose and stepped again into the laboratory. Even as he entered the room of the Master Beryl, Jaska's broken signal came through. "I am ready, Sarka!" came her soft voice, vibrant with confidence. "The Gens is ready, and the Gens believes in me!" For a moment Sarka hesitated before taking the plunge. Then he spoke the fatal words. "Go, Jaska, and my love goes with you!" As the Earth approached closer to the Moon, the revolving of the Beryls had been decreased, so that the motion of the Master Beryl was almost normal--normal being that speed with which it revolved when it was necessary to use it for visual contact with the people of the Earth. Out of the area of the Gens of Dalis darted the green specks which were the flying people of Dalis! Sarka, staring in among them, focussing the Beryl-microscope, sought for some way of identifying Jaska, who led them. A thrill coursed through him when he made her out, unmistakably--dressed still in the tight white clothing of her own Gens, with the Red Lily of the house of Cleric on her breast and on her back! The daughter of Cleric was leading the Gens of Dalis into combat under her own colors and her father's insignia! * * * * * Sarka raced back to the Observatory, seated himself again to watch the attack, which must of necessity be joined within a matter almost of minutes. Those myriads of Aircars flying outward from the Moon, had seemed invincible; but up until now he had never seen an entire Gens mustered at one time. His whole being thrilled with the awesome grandeur of the spectacle; it seemed that not an able-bodied individual of the Gens of Dalis had failed to answer the muster of the Gens. Millions upon millions of people, taking off the icy roof of that part of the Earth lying between Ohi and the North Pole, from the heart of what had once been part of the Pacific Ocean. So many of them were there that when they were free of the Earth, flashing outward at two thousand miles an hour, it was impossible to see the Moon or those formidable Aircars--and still, out of the heart of the area of the Gens of Dalis, came other myriads, each flight waiting only for the preceding flight to clear! The green, tight fitting clothing of the Gens of Dalis, each individual wearing the yellow star of the Spokesman of the Gens! A marvelous, awe-inspiring sight! And this was but a single area, and the earth was divided into twelve such areas, some smaller, none larger, which showed Sarka for the first time a hint of the mighty man-power, and fighting woman-power which he controlled. However, once free of the Earth, conduct of the fight would be in the hands of the Spokesman--Jaska, acting for Dalis. * * * * * Sarka turned to Dalis, his eyes flashing. "Does it not thrill you, O Dalis?" he demanded. "Do you not wish now that you had gone out with your people as their leader?" "They follow Jaska like sheep," he stated with a snort. "But wait! My Gens seem invincible, because it bulks between us and the Aircars of the Moon-Dwellers! Wait, see how the battle goes! The Gens may yet have need of Dalis!" Sarka studied those outgoing hosts, which were dwindling away to mere specks with vast speed, for through the cordons and cordons of them he could now see the Aircars more plainly. It was still possible, when one looked through the Micro-Telescopes, to see the slim figure of Jaska leading the attack. She was in the vanguard of the Gens of Dalis leading her people onward as though she had been born to command--utterly fearless. "And I was small enough," whispered Sarka, "to doubt you! I even told you that I doubted you! Forgive me, Jaska! Forgive me!" And still, as Level after Level gave up its myriads, the Gens of Dalis shot forth from the Gens area, and winged away, following the lead of Jaska. Millions of people, armed with Ray Directors and Atom Disintegrators. How tiny the individuals seemed, against the mighty bulk of those Aircars of the Moon! But Sarka did not fear, save for the safety of Jaska, as he was realizing anew that he had scarcely skimmed the surface of the man-might of the Earth. * * * * * Now, seen through the myriads of the Dalis Gens, he could see again the on-rushing Aircars, and his heart misgave him for a moment as he could tell, by estimation, that at least a hundred families were outlined against each individual car, which moment by moment grew larger. Those tentacles were now much in evidence, rising and falling under and around the racing Aircars like serpents, or dragging ropes; but seeming like living things in the sentient manner of their moving--eager to come in contact with the first of the earthlings, and to wrap those tentacles about them, crush them, hurl them into space. Sarka went back into the laboratory only long enough to attune the Beryls of the Earth to a point where the Earth would remain almost stationary, comparatively speaking, taking a curving course about the surface of the Moon, as it had for countless millions of years coursed about the Sun. Then, back to the Observatory, to see how went the battle. Through the Micro-Telescopes the first meeting was plain to be seen. The Gens of Dalis rushed headlong to meet the Aircars and many of them rushed headlong to their destruction. Sarka noted a group of perhaps a hundred people break forth from the vanguard of the attackers, and mount to a safe height above the Aircars against which the Gens were hurling themselves. A sigh of relief escaped him, and he wished there were some way in which he could learn the individual identities of the ninety and nine who had taken Jaska forcibly out of danger! For her white clothing, and her Red Lily of Cleric were plainly visible and recognizable! The men of the Gens of Dalis might permit the leadership of a woman, but they would not permit her to be needlessly endangered. * * * * * Sarka turned to Dalis, and noted that the face of the master egotist was pale and drawn, his nostrils quivering with emotion, as he watched his Gens go into battle, and a feeling of satisfaction coursed through Sarka like a little white flame. Dalis was proud of his Gens, and now was wishing that he, and not Jaska, were leading them onward. "I would wager something," whispered Sarka to himself, "that Dalis will not be able to stand it! That before battle has been joined for ten minutes, he will have gone out to take over the leadership of the Gens! Jaska must have guessed that, too! Wise, clever Jaska!" With a fearless massing of forces, the people of the yellow stars joined battle with the Aircars! The manner of men who flew the Aircars was still unknown to the people of Earth. But in a trice they would know. In a matter of minutes Earth would realize the horror of what faced the Gens of Dalis, whom Jaska led! For with the sending out of their Aircars the Moon-men had given but the merest hint of their ponderous, devastating might! CHAPTER X _Tentacles of Terror_ Dalis had always been a stormy petrel, but as he sat before his Micro-Telescope, watching his Gens go into battle against the Moon-men, not even Sarka the Second guessed the depth of infamy of which Dalis was capable. Dalis had given a hint, but Sarka had, in his sudden realization of the fact that Jaska really loved him, and was no traitor, forgotten that hint. How had Dalis learned the secret sign-manual of Jaska and Sarka? Therein lay the hint. Dalis, in common with all other Earth's scientists, possessed the ability to think deeply, yet to so mask his thoughts that no one else could grasp them telepathically--and it was well for the peace of mind of the Sarkas that they could not read the black thought of the man, or look into the future, even so far as a dozen years. The Gens of the yellow stars moved into contact with the Aircars of the Moon. Earth and Moon were gripped in the horror of war, the war between worlds, where no quarter might be asked or given, because fought between alien peoples who did not so much as comprehend each other's languages, or even their signals. The people of the Gens swarmed about the Aircars like myriad swarms of angry bees, but it was only to Dalis that this simile came, for only Dalis, of these three, had ever seen a swarm of bees. * * * * * Sweeping in closely, the Gens brought forth from their resting places in their Sarka-Belts their Ray Directors and their Atom-Disintegrators, and turned the blighting rays of them against the gleaming, ice-colored sides of the aerial monsters. But even as the Gens brought their instruments of destruction into play, the mighty tentacles of the first hundred Aircars had got into action. Down they whirled to catch at the flying bodies of the pigmylike individuals of the Gens, and hundreds of Earthlings were caught in those tentacles in the first moment of conflict. Sarka studied the reaction of the people, thus captured. He could see the expressions of unutterable agony on their faces, could see their cheeks turn black with--what? There was no way of knowing; but all sorts of guesses were possible. Those tentacles, from their action upon the human beings which they encompassed, might be charged with electricity. For the people they captured turned black, then shriveled slowly--and were released by the tentacles.... They fell sluggishly away, through the great space which yet separated the Earth and the Moon. But the people who fell, fell aimlessly, going neither toward the Earth or the Moon, like black feathers in a vagrant breeze. "Great God, do you see father?" cried Sarka. "The--whatever it is--that turns our people into cinders and drops them, has no effect on the Anti-Gravitational Ovoids in the skull-pans of the helmets, and without mental direction, the Ovoids neither rise nor fall but wander aimlessly! "See? As the fight continues, those who still live, as they dart here and there through the battle area, will be confronted continually by the blackened faces and shriveled figures of their departed friends, relatives and neighbors, and will see at first hand what will happen to themselves if they are caught by the tentacles!" * * * * * From the lips of Dalis came one single burst of laughter, filled with bitterness. No other word came from his lips, no other sign. He merely sat and stared, and masked his hell-black thoughts so that neither of the Sarkas might read them. But in the fertile mind of Dalis a plan was being born--a plan that, he knew, had always been growing back in his mental depths, somewhere, down the centuries, since first he had become an enemy of the Sarkas. The Sarkas ruled the Earth, and.... But he would spring his surprise when he believed the time right, for Dalis possessed a faculty which neither of the Sarkas possessed--an example of it being his incomprehensible knowledge of the secret code of moving fingers used by Sarka and Jaska. The Gens of Dalis drew back in consternation at this wholesale taking off of the first line of attack. Out of that first line, comprising perhaps a thousand families, scarcely a hundred had escaped the groping of those mighty tentacles of the Aircars--and the black, shriveled things which had been men floated all about the Aircars which had destroyed them, warnings to those who followed them into the fray. Those who had somehow escaped the wrath of the tentacles in the first engagement fled back into the heart of the next line of sky-skirmishers, fear and horror in their faces. Here, answering to the will of Jaska, a mile or so above the heart of the conflict, they reformed with their people, and prepared again to attack. But how to attack these formidable Aircars successfully? * * * * * That was the question. Ray Directors had been turned against them, but something was decidedly wrong. The first car to feel the blast of even one of those Ray Directors should have vanished, become as nothing, as had the body of Sarka the First before the Ray Director of Dalis. But apparently nothing had happened. Why? Grimly Dalis and the two remaining Sarkas pondered the problem, wondering at the same time what Jaska would now do, how reform her Gens, how send it again to an attack that seemed hopeless. "There they go again!" whispered Sarka. The first two myriads of the Gens of Dalis had now crowded together until they formed a veritable cloud which masked, for a moment, the Aircars of the Moon. Then, as one person, answering to the will of Jaska, they swept in to the attack again. But as they approached the Aircars, they divided four ways--up, down, to right and to left, and smashed into the Aircars from four directions at once. Jaska, knowing that countless lives must be lost to destroy these monsters of the Moon, was trying to down them by mass attack, hoping that, while the inner groups gave their lives, those who followed after them would get in close enough to use their Ray Directors and Atom Disintegrators. "She is wasting lives to no avail!" cried Dalis. "There is a way to beat these people!" "It is really your responsibility, O Dalis!" snapped Sarka. "Why do you not go out and lead your Gens? If you know, why remain here and watch the destruction of all the people of your Gens?" "You know why our Ray Directors and Atom Disintegrators do not work, or work but poorly? Because our fighters are within the gravitational pull of the Moon, instead of the Earth, and machines which work perfectly on Earth are thrown out of balance when under the influence of the Moon!" "Then," cried Sarka, "we must sweep in close enough to our people...." * * * * * Without waiting to say another word, for thousands of men were dying each breath-space, Sarka raced into the laboratory and gave the signal to race up the speed of the Beryls, to attune them with the increasing speed of the Master Beryl, whose jade lever now was set at the halfway mark in the onyx slot. When he returned to the Observatory, Dalis was gone, and Sarka the Second sat alone. "I knew he would go," said Sarka, "for he cannot endure to see someone else take credit for winning this first victory--if it is even possible to win it! I knew that, vain though he is, Dalis is yet a man!" "I am not so sure of that, son!" replied the Elder Sarka. "For I have known him longer than you have! There's something else in that brain of his which takes no thought of the death of people of his Gens--or for the betterment of the other people of the Earth! I wonder...." But even as he spoke, Dalis was away, flying free and fast toward the scene of battle. In a few minutes his will would be felt by his Gens, and Jaska could return again. Sarka sought for her. She was still safe, high above the battle. Thousands and thousands of those shriveled things now floated in the space about the cars, above them, below them, everywhere. But the Gens of Dalis had at last caused some trouble to the Aircars of the Moon. A hundred of them, like stricken birds, were falling downward toward the Moon, great holes torn in their sides. But as they fell, their tentacles, which whipped here and there like snakes in their death-throes, carried with them their full capacity in people of the Gens of Dalis! * * * * * With the partial destruction of the Aircars which were falling, the force that actuated the death-dealing of those tentacles seemed to have gone out of them. For the people now held in the grip of the mighty tentacles were still alive! Their squirmings could be plainly seen, and their cries could have been heard, had it not been that the noise of battle drowned out all other sounds. A hundred Aircars falling, and the men and fighting women of the Gens of Dalis, with new courage in them now they realized that the Aircars were not entirely invincible, renewed the attack with savage vigor. Taking no thought of the death which must surely come to them, they circled and pressed the Aircars; and when the tentacles caught at some of them, others climbed to the very body of the Aircars, over the shriveling bodies of the dying, and turned their Ray Directors and Atom Disintegrators against the gray sides of the monsters. Even before Dalis had reached the vanguard of his Gens another hundred Aircars were falling, each with its tentacles wrapped tightly about such of the earthlings as they could grasp. Falling ... falling ... still living, plunging down. Now Dalis had reached the scene of the fray, and was assuming command. As he did so a single white-robed figure, life-size when seen through the Micro-Telescopes, darted out of the fray and headed at top speed for the dwelling place of Sarka. Jaska, relieved, was returning home! But though Jaska flew at top speed, she did not seem to grow larger, or draw nearer to the Earth! * * * * * Out of the ruck of the defenders of the Moon, a single Aircar, whose gleaming gray side was marked with queer crimson splashes, broke free to pursue Jaska! She fled at top speed, yet the Aircar was gaining, proof that the Moon had developed speed greater than Earth had attained. "But why," queried Sarka, "does she draw no nearer?" "Great God!" ejaculated Sarka the Second, after a brief examination of certain chartographs beside his Micro-Telescope. "We are moving away from the Moon! Something is forcing us away! The people of the Moon have something whose nature we do not know, capable of forcing them away from us--while they pull our people toward them! You see? If they pulled us toward them, we could overthrow them, for we outnumber them perhaps thousands to one; but if they force themselves away faster than the Gens of Dalis, if defeated, can follow us, they can destroy, or capture, the Gens at their leisure!" * * * * * Suddenly, out of the Earth, past the all-seeing eyes of the Micro-Telescopes, swept a new myriad. Men in white, wearing the Red Lily of the House of Cleric! Cleric was sending out men to rescue Jaska from the Aircar which pursued her! But would Jaska or these who went forth to fetch her ever be able again to attain landing place upon the Earth! It looked doubtful. Even as Sarka asked himself this question fresh Aircars shot from the rims of Moon craters, rushing outward to add their weight in the battle against the Gens of Dalis. The Gens of Dalis was doomed! In the mind of Sarka the Second there still loomed a hellish doubt that would not down. The men of Cleric were surrounding Jaska now, protecting her with their lives against the tentacles of that lone Aircar splashed with crimson--and all were flying a losing race with the Earth, which was still being forced outward from the Moon! * * * * * _IN THE NEXT ISSUE_ ON THE PLANET OF DREAD _An Exciting Interplanetary Story_ By R. F. Starzl EARTH, THE MARAUDER _Part Two of the Thrilling Novel_ By Arthur J. Burks THE FLYING CITY _A Novelet Concerning an Amazing Aerial Metropolis_ By H. Thompson Rich MURDER MADNESS _The Conclusion of the Gripping Continued Novel_ By Murray Leinster ----And Others! * * * * * [Illustration: Marable, in a desperate frenzy, hacked at the reptile's awful head.] From An Amber Block _By Tom Curry_ "These should prove especially valuable and interesting without a doubt, Marable," said the tall, slightly stooped man. He waved a long hand toward the masses of yellow brown which filled the floor of the spacious workrooms, towering almost to the skylights, high above their heads. [Sidenote: A giant amber block at last gives up its living, ravenous prey.] "Is that coal in the biggest one with the dark center?" asked an attractive young woman who stood beside the elder of the men. "I am inclined to believe it will prove to be some sort of black liquid," said Marable, a big man of thirty-five. There were other people about the immense rooms, the laboratories of the famous Museum of Natural History. Light streamed in from the skylights and windows; fossils of all kinds, some immense in size, were distributed about. Skilled specialists were chipping away at matrices other artists were reconstructing, doing a thousand things necessary to the work. A hum of low talking, accompanied by the irregular tapping of chisels on stone, came to their ears, though they took no heed of this, since they worked here day after day, and it was but the usual sound of the paleontologists' laboratory. Marable threw back his blond head. He glanced again toward the dark haired, blue eyed young woman, but when he caught her eye, he looked away and spoke to her father, Professor Young. "I think that big one will turn out to be the largest single piece of amber ever mined," he said. "There were many difficulties in getting it out, for the workmen seemed afraid of it, did not want to handle it for some silly reason or other." * * * * * Professor Young, curator, was an expert in his line, but young Marable had charge of these particular fossil blocks, the amber being pure because it was mixed with lignite. The particular block which held the interest of the three was a huge yellow brown mass of irregular shape. Vaguely, through the outer shell of impure amber, could be seen the heart of ink. The chunk weighed many tons, and its crate had just been removed by some workmen and was being taken away, piece by piece. The three gazed at the immense mass, which filled the greater part of one end of the laboratory and towered almost to the skylights. It was a small mountain, compared to the size of the room, and in this case the mountain had come to man. "Miss Betty, I think we had better begin by drawing a rough sketch of the block," said Marable. Betty Young, daughter of the curator, nodded. She was working as assistant and secretary to Marable. "Well--what do you think of them?" The voice behind them caused them to turn, and they looked into the face of Andrew Leffler, the millionaire paleontologist, whose wealth and interest in the museum had made it possible for the institution to acquire the amber. * * * * * Leffler, a keen, quick moving little man, whose chin was decorated with a white Van Dyke beard, was very proud of the new acquisition. "Everybody is talking about the big one," he continued, putting his hand on Marable's shoulder. "Orling is coming to see, and many others. As I told you, the workmen who handled it feared the big one. There were rumors about some unknown devil which lay hidden in the inklike substance, caught there like the proverbial fly in the amber. Well, let us hope there is something good in there, something that will make worth while all our effort." Leffler wandered away, to speak to others who inspected the amber blocks. "Superstition is curious, isn't it?" said Marable. "How can anyone think that a fossil creature, penned in such a cell for thousands and thousands of years, could do any harm?" Professor Young shrugged. "It is just as you say. Superstition is not reasonable. These amber blocks were mined in the Manchurian lignite deposits by Chinese coolies under Japanese masters. They believe anything, the coolies. I remember working once with a crew of them that thought--" The professor stopped suddenly, for his daughter had uttered a little cry of alarm. He felt her hand upon his arm, and turned toward her. "What is it, dear?" he asked. She was pointing toward the biggest amber block, and her eyes were wide open and showed she had seen something, or imagined that she had seen something, that frightened her. * * * * * Professor Young followed the direction of her finger. He saw that she was staring at the black heart of the amber block; but when he looked he could see nothing but the vague, irregular outline of the inky substance. "What is it, dear?" asked Young again. "I--I thought I saw it looking out, eyes that stared at us--" The girl broke off, laughed shortly, and added, "I suppose it was Mr. Leffler's talking. There's nothing there now." "Probably the Manchurian devil shows itself only to you," said her father jokingly. "Well, be careful, dear. If it takes a notion to jump out at you, call me and I'll exorcise it for you." Betty blushed and laughed again. She looked at Marable, expecting to see a smile of derision on the young man's face, but his expression was grave. The light from above was diminishing; outside sounded the roar of home-going traffic. "Well, we must go home," said Professor Young. "There's a hard and interesting day ahead of us to-morrow, and I want to read Orling's new work on matrices before we begin chipping at the amber." Young turned on his heel and strode toward the locker at the end of the room where he kept his coat and hat. Betty, about to follow him, was aware of a hand on her arm, and she turned to find Marable staring at her. "I saw them, too," he whispered. "Could it have been just imagination? Was it some refraction of the light?" * * * * * The girl paled. "I--I don't know," she replied, in a low voice. "I thought I saw two terrible eyes glaring at me from the inky heart. But when father laughed at me, I was ashamed of myself and thought it was just my fancy." "The center is liquid, I'm sure," said Marable. "We will find that out soon enough, when we get started." "Anyway, you must be careful, and so must father," declared the girl. She looked at the block again, as it towered there above them, as though she expected it to open and the monster of the coolies' imagination leap out. "Come along, Betty," called her father. She realized then that Marable was holding her hand. She pulled away and went to join her father. It was slow work, chipping away the matrix. Only a bit at a time could be cut into, for they came upon many insects imbedded in the amber. These small creatures proved intensely interesting to the paleontologists, for some were new to science and had to be carefully preserved for study later on. Marable and her father labored all day. Betty, aiding them, was obviously nervous. She kept begging her father to take care, and finally, when he stopped work and asked her what ailed her, she could not tell him. "Be careful," she said, again and again. * * * * * Her father realized that she was afraid of the amber block, and he poked fun at her ceaselessly. Marable said nothing. "It's getting much softer, now the outside shell is pierced," said Young, late in the day. "Yes," said Marable, pausing in his work of chipping away a portion of matrix. "Soon we will strike the heart, and then we will find out whether we are right about it being liquid. We must make some preparations for catching it, if it proves to be so." The light was fading. Outside, it was cold, but the laboratories were well heated by steam. Close by where they worked was a radiator, so that they had been kept warm all day. Most of the workers in the room were making ready to leave. Young and Marable, loath to leave such interesting material, put down their chisels last of all. Throughout the day various scientific visitors had interrupted them to inspect the immense amber block, and hear the history of it. All day, Betty Young had stared fascinatedly at the inky center. "I think it must have been imagination," she whispered to Marable, when Young had gone to don his coat and hat. "I saw nothing to-day." "Nor did I," confessed Marable. "But I thought I heard dull scrapings inside the block. My brain tells me I'm an imaginative fool, that nothing could be alive inside there, but just the same, I keep thinking about those eyes we thought we saw. It shows how far the imagination will take one." "It's getting dark, Betty," said her father. "Better not stay here in the shadows or the devil will get you. I wonder if it will be Chinese or up-to-date American!" * * * * * The girl laughed, said good night to Marable, and followed her father from the laboratory. As they crossed the threshold a stout, red-faced man in a gray uniform, a watchman's clock hanging at his side, raised his hat and smiled at the young woman and her father. "Hello, Rooney," cried Betty. "How d'ye do, Miss Young! Stayin' late this evenin'?" "No, we're leaving now, Rooney. Good night." "G' night, Miss Young. Sleep happy." "Thanks, Rooney." The old night watchman was a jolly fellow, and everybody liked him. He was very fond of Betty, and the young woman always passed a pleasant word with him. Rooney entered the room where the amber blocks were. The girl walked with her father down the long corridor. She heard Marable's step behind them. "Wait for me a moment, father," she said. She went back, smiling at Marable as she passed him, and entered the door, but remained in the portal and called to Rooney, who was down the laboratory. He came hurrying to her side at her nervous hail. "What is it, ma'am?" asked Rooney. "You'll be careful, won't you, Rooney?" she asked in a low voice. "Oh, yes, ma'am. I'm always careful. Nobody can get in to harm anything while Rooney's about." "I don't mean that. I want you to be careful yourself, when you're in this room to-night." "Why, miss, what is there to be wary of? Nothin' but some funny lookin' stones, far as I can see." * * * * * The young woman was embarrassed by her own impalpable fears, and she took leave of Rooney and rejoined her father, determined to overcome them and dismiss them from her mind. All the way home and during their evening meal and afterwards, Professor Young poked fun at Betty. She took it good-naturedly, and laughed to see her father in such fine humor. Professor Young was a widower, and Betty was housekeeper in their flat; though a maid did the cooking for them and cleaned the rooms, the young woman planned the meals and saw to it that everything was homelike for them. After a pleasant evening together, reading, and discussing the new additions to the collection, they went to bed. Betty Young slept fitfully. She was harassed by dreams, dreams of huge eyes that came closer and closer to her, that at last seemed to engulf her. She awakened finally from a nap, and started up in her bed. The sun was up, but the clock on the bureau said it was only seven o'clock, too early to arise for the day's work. But then the sound of the telephone bell ringing in the hall caused her to get up and don her slippers and dressing gown and hurry out into the living room. * * * * * Before she reached the phone, however, she heard her father's voice answering. "Hello.... Yes, speaking. Good morning, Smythe." Smythe was the janitor of the museum. Betty, standing behind her father, wondered what he could want that he should phone so early in the morning. Her father's next words sent a thrill of fright through her heart. "My God! I--I can't believe it!" cried Young. "Is he dead?" There was a pause; Betty caught the sound of the excited Smythe's tones through the receiver. "Who--who is it?" she whispered, clasping her parent's arm. "I'll be right down, yes." Young hung up, turned to his daughter. His face was sad, heavily lined with shadows of sorrow. "Dear, there's been a tragedy at the museum during the night. Poor Rooney has been murdered--at least so they believe--and Smythe, who found him, wants me to come down and see if anything has been stolen. I must go at once. The body is in our laboratory." "Rooney? Ah, poor fellow." The girl wept a little, but braced herself to assist her father. "I'm going with you," she said. "No, no. You'd better remain here: you can come along later," said Young. "I don't like to have you see such sights, dear. It wouldn't be good for you." "I'll be all right. I promise you I will." She insisted and he was forced to let her accompany him to the museum. They hailed a cab and were soon at the door. The elevator took them to the top floor, and swiftly they passed along the corridors and came to the portal which led into the rooms where the amber blocks were. * * * * * Smythe greeted them, a worried look on his seamed face. "I've sent for an ambulance, Professor," he said. Young nodded, brushed past him, and entered the laboratory. In the morning light the amber blocks had taken on a reddish tinge. Now, they seemed to oppress the young woman, who had bravely remained at her father's side as he walked quickly to the base of the biggest block. A vague shape lay in the shadows between the wall and the largest amber mass. Professor Young bent over the body of Rooney, and felt the pulse. "He's been dead some time," he said. She nodded, stricken to the heart by this terrible end of her old friend Rooney. "There's nothing we can do for him, now," went on her father soberly. "It looks as though he had been set upon and stabbed time after time by his assailant or assailants, whoever they were." "How--how pale he is," said Betty. "Poor Rooney was so jolly and red-faced, but his skin is like chalk." "And he's shrunken, too. It seems there's no blood left in his veins," said her father. * * * * * Marable, who had been called also, came in then and aided in the examination. He said good morning to Betty and her father, and then went to bend over Rooney's body. "See the look of abject terror on his face," Betty heard Marable say to her father as the two examined the corpse. "He must have been very much afraid of whoever killed him." "They beat him up frightfully," said Young. "There must have been several of the assassins; it would take more than one man to do such damage." "Yes. His ribs are crushed in--see, this gash, Professor, would be enough to cause death without any of the other wounds." Betty Young could not take her eyes from the ghastly sight. She steeled herself to bear it, and prayed for strength that she should not faint and cause her father trouble. She could see the two men examining a large blistered area under the corpse's armpit, in the center of which was a sharp vertical slit which had without doubt punctured the artery near the surface of the axilla. Perhaps it had pierced even to the heart. "Bloodless," exclaimed Marable, noticing the same thing as her father had spoken of. "It is as if the blood had been pumped out of his body!" "Yes, I think it has drained out." "There is not much of a pool here where he lies, though," said Marable, in a low voice. "See, there are only splotches about, from various cuts he received." "Maybe he was dragged here from another room," said Young. "When the others come, we will soon know if anything is missing. It seems that men desperate enough to commit such a murder would not leave without trying to get what they came after. Unless, of course, the killing of Rooney frightened them away before they could get their booty." * * * * * Smythe approached the group, with a physician in tow. The latter confirmed the facts which Marable and Young had found: that Rooney had been killed by the deep gash near the heart and that most of the blood was drained from the body. "They seem like the slashes from an extremely sharp and large razor," said the medical man. Others were coming in to look at Rooney, and the museum was buzzing with activity as various curators, alarmed about the safety of their valuable collections, feverishly examined their charges. "He punched his clock in here at two A.M.," said Smythe. "I seen that. It's the last time he'll ever do his duty, poor feller." "Curious odor," said the doctor, sniffing. "It smells like musk, but is fetid. I suppose it's some chemical you use." "I noticed that, too," said Professor Young. "I don't recognize it, myself." Marable, who had been looking at the floor between the great block of amber and the body, uttered an exclamation which caused the two men to look up. "There are wavy lines leading around back of the block," said Marable, in answer to their questions. The young man disappeared behind the block, and then he called to them excitedly to join him. Betty Young pressed closer, and finally slipped past the corpse and stood by her father. * * * * * Before her, she saw a large pool of black liquid. It had been hidden by the corner of the block, so that they had not noticed it, so busy were they looking at Rooney. And there was a great cavity in the heart of the amber block. Pieces of the yellow brown mass lay about, as though they had fallen off and allowed the inky substance to escape. "It's hardened or dried out in the air," said Young. "It looks like black lacquer," said Betty. The musky smell was stronger here. The great amber block seemed to stifle them with its size. "Our chipping and hammering and the heat of the radiator causing it to expand must have forced out the sepia, or whatever it is," said Young. There was a disappointed note in his voice "I had hoped that inside the liquid we would discover a fossil of value," he went on. Marable looked at Betty Young. They stared at one another for some seconds, and both knew that the same thought had occurred to the other. The frightful eyes--had they then been but figments of the imagination? Marable began looking around carefully, here and there. Betty realized what he was doing, and she was frightened. She went to his side. "Oh, be careful," she whispered. "The giant block has been moved a little," he replied, looking into her pretty face. "Have you noticed that?" Now that she was told to look, she could see the extremely heavy amber block was no longer in the position it had been in. Marks on the floor showed where it had been dragged or shifted from its original resting place. * * * * * Betty Young gasped. What force could be so powerful that it could even budge so many tons? A derrick had been used, and rollers placed under the block when men had moved it. Reason tried to assert itself. "It--it must have exploded. That would cause it to shift," she said faintly. Marable shrugged. His examination was interrupted by the arrival of the museum's chemist, sent for by Young. The chemist took a sample of the black liquid for analysis. Reports were coming in from all over the museum, different departments declaring, one after another, that nothing had been disturbed or stolen from their sections. Betty Young went again to Marable's side. She followed the direction of his eyes, and saw long, clawlike marks on the floor, radiating from the sepia. "Doctor Marable," she said, "please don't--don't look any longer. Leave this terrible place for the day, anyway, until we see what happens in the next twenty-four hours." He smiled and shook his head. "I must make a search," he replied. "My brain calls me a fool, but just the same, I'm worried." "Do you really think ...?" He nodded, divining her thought. The girl shivered. She felt terror mounting to her heart, and the matter-of-fact attitudes of the others in the great laboratory did not allay her fears. Rooney's body was removed. The place was cleaned up by workmen, and Marable's search--if that was what his constant roving about the laboratory could be called--ceased for a time. The chemist's report came in. The black liquid was some sort of animal secretion, melonotic probably. * * * * * In spite of the fact that they had learned so many facts about the murder, they as yet had not solved the mystery. Who had murdered Rooney, and why? And where had his blood gone to? In no other rooms could be found any traces of a struggle. "If you won't do anything else, please carry a gun," begged Betty of Marable. "I'm going to try to take father home, right after lunch, if he'll go. He's so stubborn. I can't make him take care. I've got to watch him and stay beside him." "Very well," replied Marable. "I'll get a revolver. Not that I think it would be of much use, if I did find--" He broke off, and shrugged his broad shoulders. Leffler came storming into the room. "What's this I hear?" he cried, approaching Marable. "A watchman killed in the night? Carelessness, man, carelessness! The authorities here are absurd! They hold priceless treasures and allow thieves to enter and wreak their will. You, Marable, what's all this mean?" Leffler was angry. Marable looked into his red face coolly. "We do the best we can, Mr. Leffler," he said. "It is unlikely that anyone would wish to steal such a thing as that block of amber." He waved toward the giant mass. Leffler made a gesture of impatience. "It cost me many thousands of dollars," he cried. "It is time for lunch, Professor," said Betty. Marable bowed to Leffler and left the millionaire sputtering away, inspecting the various specimens he had contributed. The one o'clock gong had struck, and all the workers and investigators were leaving in paleontological laboratories for a bite to eat. * * * * * Marable, with Betty, went out last. Leffler was over in one corner of the room, hidden from their sight by a corner of an amber block. They could hear Leffler still uttering complaints about the carelessness of the men in charge of that section of the museum, and Marable smiled at Betty sadly. "Poor Rooney," he said. "Betty, I feel more or less responsible, in a way." "No, no," cried the girl. "How could you have foreseen such a thing?" Marable shook his head. "Those eyes, you know. I should have taken precautions. But I had no idea it could burst from its prison so." For the first time Marable had definitely mentioned his idea of what had occurred. The girl had understood it all along, from their broken conversation and from the look in the young scientist's eyes. She sighed deeply. "You will get a revolver before you search further?" she said. "I'm going to. Smythe has one, and I know he'll lend it to me." "I will," he promised. "You know, Leffler has the same idea we have, I think. That's why he keeps talking about it being our fault. I believe he has seen something, too. His talk about the devil inside the block was half in earnest. I suppose he put it down to imagination, or perhaps he did not think this fossil to be dangerous." They went out together, and walked toward the restaurant they frequented. Her father was there, lunching with one of the superintendents of the museum. He smiled and waved to Betty. Everyone, of course, was discussing the killing of Rooney. * * * * * After an hour, during which the two young people spoke little, Marable and Betty Young left the restaurant and started back toward the museum. Her father was still at his table. They walked up the driveway entrance, and then Marable uttered an exclamation. "Something's wrong," he said. There was a small crowd of people collected on the steps. The outer doors, instead of being open as usual, were closed and guards stood peering out. Marable and Betty were admitted, after they had pushed their way to the doors. "Museum's closed to the public, sir," replied a guard to Marable's question. "Why?" asked Marable. "Somethin's happened up in the paleontological laboratories," answered the guard. "Dunno just what, but orders come to clear the rooms and not let anybody in but members of the staff, sir." Marable hurried forward. Betty was at his heels. "Please get yourself a gun," she said, clutching his arm and holding him back. "All right. I'll borrow one from a guard." He returned to the front doors, and came back, slipping a large pistol into his side pocket. "I want you to wait here," he said. "No. I'm going with you." "Please," he said. "As your superior, I order you to remain downstairs." The girl shrugged. She allowed him to climb the stairs to the first floor, and then she hurried back in search of Smythe. * * * * * Smythe obtained a gun for her, and as she did not wish to wait for the slow elevator, she ran up the steps. Smythe could not tell her definitely what had occurred in the upper laboratory that had caused the museum to be closed for the day. Her heart beating swiftly, Betty Young hurried up the second flight of stairs to the third floor. A workman, whom the girl recognized as a manual laborer in the paleontological rooms, came running down, passing her in full flight, a look of abject terror on his face. "What is it?" she cried. He was so frightened he could not talk logically. "There was a black fog--I saw a red snake with legs--" She waited for no more. A pang of fear for the safety of Marable shot through her heart, and she forced herself on to the top floor. Up there was a haze, faintly black, which filled the corridors. As Betty Young drew closer to the door of the paleontological laboratories, the mist grew more opaque. It was as though a sooty fog permeated the air, and the girl could see it was pouring from the door of the laboratory in heavy coils. And her nostrils caught the strange odor of fetid musk. She was greatly frightened; but she gripped the gun and pushed on. * * * * * Then to her ears came the sound of a scream, the terrible scream of a mortally wounded man. Instinctively she knew it was not Marable, but she feared for the young professor, and with an answering cry she rushed into the smoky atmosphere of the outer laboratories. "Walter!" she called. But evidently he did not hear her, for no reply came. Or was it that something had happened to him? She paused on the threshold of the big room where were the amber blocks. About the vast floor space stood the numerous masses of stone and amber, some covered with immense canvas shrouds which made them look like ghost hillocks in the dimness. Betty Young stood, gasping in fright, clutching the pistol in her hand, trying to catch the sounds of men in that chamber of horror. She heard, then, a faint whimpering, and then noises which she identified in her mind as something being dragged along the marble flooring. A muffled scream, weak, reached her ears, and as she took a step forward, silence came. She listened longer, but now the sunlight coming through the window to make murky patches in the opaque black fog was her chief sensation. "Walter!" she called. "Go back, Betty, go back!" The mist seemed to muffle voices as well as obscure the vision. She advanced farther into the laboratory, trying to locate Marable. Bravely the girl pushed toward the biggest amber block. It was here that she felt instinctively that she would find the source of danger. "Leffler!" she heard Marable say, almost at her elbow, and the young man groaned. The girl came upon him, bending over something on the floor. * * * * * She knelt beside him, gripping his arm. Now she could see the outline of Leffler's body at her feet. The wealthy collector was doubled up on the ground, shrivelled as had been Rooney. His feet, moving as though by reflex action, patted the floor from time to time, making a curious clicking sound as the buttons of his gray spats struck the marble. But it was obvious, even in the murky light, that Leffler was dead, that he had been sucked dry of blood. Betty Young screamed. She could not help it. The black fog choked her and she gasped for breath. Leaving Marable, she ran toward the windows to throw them open. The first one she tried was heavy, and she smashed the glass with the butt of the gun. She broke several panes in two of the windows, and the mist rolled out from the laboratory. She started to return to the side of Marable. He uttered a sudden shout, and she hurried back to where she had left him, stumbling over Leffler's body, recoiling at this touch of death. Marable was not there, but she could hear him nearby. Cool air was rushing in from the windows, and gradually the fog was disappearing. Betty Young saw Marable now, standing nearby, staring at the bulk of an amber block which was still covered by its canvas shroud. Though not as large as the prize exhibit, this block of amber was large and filled many yards of space. "Betty, please go outside and call some of the men," begged Marable. But he did not look at her, and she caught his fascinated stare. Following the direction of his gaze, the girl saw that a whisp of smoky mist was curling up from under the edge of the canvas cover. "It is there," whispered Betty. * * * * * Marable had a knife which he had picked up from a bench, and with this he began quietly to cut the canvas case of the block, keeping several feet to each side of the spot where the fog showed from beneath the shroud. Marable cut swiftly and efficiently, though the cloth was heavy and he was forced to climb up several feet on the block to make his work effective. The girl watched, fascinated with horror and curiosity. To their ears came a curious, sucking sound, and once a vague tentacle form showed from the bottom of the canvas. At last Marable seized the edge of the cut he had made and, with a violent heave, sent the canvas flap flying over the big block. Betty Young screamed. At last she had a sight of the terrible creature which her imagination had painted in loathing and horror. A flash of brilliant scarlet, dabbed with black patches, was her impression of the beast. A head flat and reptilian, long, tubular, with movable nostrils and antennae at the end, framed two eyes which were familiar enough to her, for they were the orbs which had stared from the inside of the amber block. She had dreamed of those eyes. But the reptile moved like a flash of red light, though she knew its bulk was great; it sprayed forth black mist from the appendages at the end of its nose, and the crumpling of canvas reached her ears as the beast endeavored to conceal itself on the opposite side of the block. * * * * * Marable had run to the other side of the mass. The air, rushing in from the windows, had cleared the mist, in spite of the new clouds the creature had emitted, and Betty could see for some feet in either direction now. She walked, with stiff, frozen muscles, around to join Marable. As she came near to him, she saw him jerking off the entire canvas cover of the block to expose the horrible reptile to the light of day. And now the two stood staring at the awful sight. The creature had flattened itself into the crevices and irregular surfaces of the block, but it was too large to hide in anything but a huge space. They saw before them its great bulk, bright red skin blotched with black, which rose and fell with the breathing of the reptile. Its long, powerful tail, tapering off from the fat, loathsome body, was curled around the bottom of the block. "That's where it's been hidden, under the shroud. We've been within a few feet of it every moment we've been at work," said Marable, his voice dry. "There were many hiding places for it, but it chose the best. It came out only when there was comparative quiet, to get its food...." "We--we must kill it," stammered the girl. But she could not move. She was looking at the immense, cruel, lidless eyes, which balefully held her as a serpent paralyzes a bird. The tubular nostrils and antennae seemed to be sniffing at them, waving to and fro. "See the white expanse of cornea, how large it is," whispered Marable. "The pupils are nothing but black slits now." The interest excited by this living fossil was almost enough to stifle the dread of the creature in the man. But the girl saw the huge flat head and the crinkled tissue of the frilled mouth with its sucker disks. * * * * * Suddenly, from the central portion of the sucker-cup mouth issued a long, straight red fang. The two drew back as the living fossil raised a short clawed leg. "It has the thick body of an immense python and the clawed legs of a dinosaur," said Marable, speaking as though he were delivering a lecture. The sight, without doubt, fascinated him as a scientist. He almost forgot the danger. "Oh, it's horrible," whispered the girl. She clung to his arm. He went on talking. "It is some sort of terrestrial octopus...." To the girl, it seemed that the living fossil was endless in length. Coil after coil showed as the ripples passed along its body and the straight fang threatened them with destruction. "See, it is armored," said Marable. "Betty, no one has ever had such an experience as this, seen such a sight, and lived to tell of it. It must be ravenous with hunger, shut up in its amber cell inside the black fluid. I--" A sharp, whistling hiss interrupted his speech. The reptile was puffing and swelling, and as it grew in bulk with the intake of the air, its enamel-like scales stood out like bosses on the great body. It spat forth a cloud of black, oily mist, and Marable came to himself at last. He raised his revolver and fired at the creature, sending shot after shot from the heavy revolver into the head. * * * * * Betty Young screamed as the reptile reared up and made a movement toward them. Marable and the girl retreated swiftly, as the beast thumped to the floor with a thud and started at them, advancing with a queer, crawling movement. It was between them and the door. Betty thrust her gun into Marable's hands, for his own was empty and he had hurled it at the monster. "Hurry! Run for your life!" ordered Marable, placing himself between Betty and the reptile. She would not leave him till he swerved to one side, going dangerously close to the beast and firing into its head. The rush of the flowing body stopped; it turned and pursued him, leaving the girl safe for the moment, but separated from Marable. Luckily, on the smooth marble it could not get an efficient grip with its clawlike arms. It was clumsy in its gait, and for a time the man eluded it. Betty Young, looking about for a weapon, calling for help at the top of her lungs, caught sight of a fireman's ax in a glass case on the wall. She ran over, smashed the glass with the small hammer, and took out the heavy ax. Shot after shot reverberated through the big laboratory as Marable tried to stop the monster. Betty, bravely closing in from the rear, saw Marable leaping from side to side as the brute struck viciously at him time and again. The creature had been emitting cloud after cloud of black fog, and the atmosphere, in spite of the open windows, was dim in its vicinity. Vaguely Betty heard shouts from the far hall, but all she could do was to call out in return and run toward the horror. * * * * * Marable, out of breath, had climbed to the top of an amber block. Betty, close by, saw the reptile rear its bulk up into the air, until it was high enough to strike the man. Before it could send forth its death-dealing fang to pin Marable to the block, however, Betty Young brought the ax down on its back with all her strength. There was a sickening thud as the sharp weapon sunk deep into the fleshy back. She struck again, and the creature fell in folds, like a collapsing spring. It lashed back at her, but she leaped clear as it slashed in agony, thrashing about so that the whole room seemed to rock. Marable came scrambling down the side of the block to help her. He was breathing hard, and she turned toward him; as Betty looked away, a portion of the scarlet tail hit her in the body and she fell, striking her head on the floor. Marable reached down, seized the ax, and in a desperate frenzy hacked at the reptile's awful head. He leaped in and out like a terrier, sinking the ax deep into the neck and head of the beast. He gave the impression of slashing at heavy rubber, and Betty Young, trying to drag herself away from that dangerous body, heard his whistling breath. They were almost hidden from one another now, in the mist which came from the thing's nostrils. "Help, help!" screamed the girl, mustering her last strength in the despairing cry. She saw Marable go down, then, as the reptile hit him a glancing blow with its body. When the powerful young fellow did not rise, the girl thought it was all over. The air really became black to her; she fainted and lay still. * * * * * When Betty Young opened her eyes, the air had cleared greatly, and she could see the familiar outlines of the paleontological laboratory and the bulks of the amber blocks. Her father was holding her head in his lap, and was bathing her temples with water. "Darling," he said, "are you badly hurt?" "No," she murmured faintly. "I'm--I'm all right. But--but Walter--did it--" "He's all right," said her father. "The reptile was dying, and could do him no damage. We finished it off." Then, Marable, covered with blood, which he was trying to wipe from his hands and clothes, came and smiled down at her. "Well," said Professor Young, "you two have mutilated a marvelous and unique specimen between you." There were several men examining something nearby. Turning her eyes in their direction, Betty saw they were viewing the remains of the reptile. * * * * * Marable helped her to her feet, and stood with one arm about her. Professor Orling, the famous specialist on fossil reptiles, was speaking now, and the others listened. "I think we will find it to be some sort of missing link between the dinosaurs and mososaurs. It is surely unbelievable that such a creature should be found alive; but perhaps it can be explained. It is related to the amphibians and was able to live in or out of the water. Now, we have many instances of reptiles such as lizards and toads penned up in solid rock but surviving for hundreds of years. Evidently this great reptile went through the same sort of experience. I would say that there has been some great upheaval of nature, that the reptile was caught in its prison of amber thousands and thousands of years ago. Through hibernation and perhaps a preservative drug it emitted in the black fluid, this creature has been able to survive its long imprisonment. Naturally, when it was released by the cutting away of part of the amber which penned it in, it burst its cell, ravenous with hunger. The fanglike tooth we see was its main weapon of attack, and it set upon the unfortunate watchman. After knocking him unconscious, its sucker-like fringe glued the mouth near the heart while the fang shot into the arteries and drew forth the body fluids. There is a great deal to be done with this valuable find, gentlemen. I would suggest that--" * * * * * Marable grunted. "Oh, hell," he murmured in Betty Young's ear. "To the devil with paleontology, Betty. You saved my life. Come out and let's get married. I love you." The girl smiled up into his eyes. The scientists close by were listening fascinatedly to Orling's words, and had no time to watch the two young people, for they stared at the reptile's body as the great man went from section to section, lecturing upon one point after another. "You've forgotten paleontology for a moment, thank goodness," said Betty. "I'm glad." "Yes, Betty dear. This terrible experience has shaken me, and I realized how much I love you when I saw you in danger. What an awful few minutes! If I had to live them over again, I don't think I could face them." "Never mind," she murmured. "We are safe, Walter. After all, it's not every woman who is helped by a living fossil to make the man she loves realize he loves her!" [Illustration: The SF-22 and her convoy were surrounded by these unearthly rays.] The Terror of Air-Level Six _By Harl Vincent_ It was a sweltering evening in mid-August, during that unprecedented heat wave which broke Weather Bureau records in 2011. New York City had simmered under a blazing sun for more than three weeks, and all who were able had deserted the city for spots of lesser torridity. But I was one of those unfortunates who could not leave on account of the pressing urgency of business matters and, there being nothing else to do, kept doggedly at my work until it seemed that nerves and body must soon give way under the strain. To-night, as I boarded the pneumatic tube, I dropped into the nearest seat and could not even summon the energy to open my newspaper. [Sidenote: From some far reach of leagueless Space came a great pillar of flame to lay waste and terrorize the Earth.] For some minutes I sat as in a daze, wishing merely that the journey was over, and that I was on my own front porch out in Rutherford. After awhile I stirred and looked around. Seeing none of my acquaintances in the car, I finally opened the newspaper and was considerably startled by the screaming headlines that confronted me from its usually conservative first page: SECOND COAST TRANSPORT PLANE LOST! Disaster Like First in Air-Level Six! No wonder the newsboys had been crying an extra on Broadway! I had given no heed to the import of their shoutings, but this was real news and well worthy of an extra edition. Since the mysterious loss of the SF-61, only four days previously, the facilities of the several air transportation systems were seriously handicapped on account of the shaken confidence of the general public. It was not surprising that there was widespread reluctance at trusting human lives and valuable merchandise to the mercies of the inexplicable power which had apparently wiped out of existence the SF-61, together with its twenty-eight passengers and the consignment of one-half million dollars in gold. And now the NY-18 had gone the way of the other! Details were meager. Both ships had failed to reply to the regular ten-minute radio calls from headquarters and had not since been seen or heard from. In both cases the last call had been answered when the ship was proceeding at full speed on its regular course in air-level six. The SF-61 last reported from a position over Mora in New Mexico, and four days of intensive search by thousands of planes had failed to locate ship or passengers. To-day, in the early hours of the morning, the NY-18 reported over Colorado Springs, on the northern route, and then, like the SF-61, dropped out of existence insofar as any attempts at communicating with or locating her were concerned. She, too, carried a heavy consignment of specie, though only eleven passengers had risked the westward journey. * * * * * Someone had dropped into a seat at my side, and I looked up from my reading to meet the solemn eyes of Hartley Jones, a young friend whom I had not seen for several months. "Why, hello, Hart," I greeted him. "Glad to see you, old man. Where in Sam Hill have you been keeping yourself?" "Glad to see you, too, Jack," he returned warmly. "Been spending most of my time out at the hangar." "Oh, that's right. You fellows built a new one at Newark Airport, didn't you?" "Yeah. Got a great outfit there now, too. Why don't you drop around and see us one of these days?" "I will, Hart, and I want you to take me up some time. You know I have never been in one of these new ships of yours. But what do you think of this mess?" I pointed to the black headlines. He grinned joyously and flipped back the lapel of his coat, displaying a nickeled badge. "George and I are starting out to-night to look around a little," he gloated. "Just been appointed deputy air commissioners; and we got a couple of guns on our newest plane. Air Traffic Bureau thinks there's dirty work afoot. Twelve-motored planes don't disappear without leaving a trace. Anyhow, we've got a job, and we're going to try and find out what's wrong. How'd you like to come along?" "What?" I replied. "You know darn well I'm too busy. Besides, I'd be no good to you. Just extra load, and not pay load at that. And then, I'm broke--as usual." * * * * * Hartley Jones grinned in his engaging way. "You'd be good company," he parried; "and, what's more, I think the trip would do you a lot of good. You look all shot to pieces." "Forget it," I laughed. "It's just the heat. And I'll have to leave you here, Hart. Drop in and see us, will you? The wife was asking for you only yesterday." "Jack, dear," my wife greeted me at the door of my modest suburban home, "Mr. Preston just called, and he wants you to call him right back." "Oh, Lord," I groaned, "can't I forget the office for one evening?" Preston was manager of the concern for which I worked. Nevertheless, though our two fine youngsters were clamoring for their dinner, I made the telephone call at once. "Makely," came the voice of the boss, when the connection was completed, "I want you to take the night plane for Frisco. Hate to ask you, but it must be done. Townley is sick and someone has to take those Canadian Ex. bonds out to Farnsworth. You're the only one to do it, and after you get there, you can start on that vacation you need. Take a month if you wish." The thought of Hartley Jones' offer flashed through my mind. "But have you read of the loss of the NY-18?" I asked Preston. "I have, Makely. There'll be another hundred a month in your check, too, to make up for the worry of your family. But the government is sending thirty Secret Service men along on the SF-22, which leaves to-night. In addition, there will be a convoy of seven fighting planes, so there is not likely to be a repetition of the previous disasters." That hundred a month sounded mighty good, for expenses had been mounting rapidly of late. "All right, Mr. Preston," I agreed. "I will be at the airport before midnight. But how about the bonds?" "I'll drive around after dinner and deliver them to you. And thanks for your willingness, Makely. You'll not be sorry." * * * * * My wife had listened intently and, from my words, she knew what to expect. Her face was a tragic mask when I replaced the receiver on its hook, and my heart sank at her expression. Then there came the ring of the telephone and, for some reason, my pulse raced as I went to the hall to answer it. Hartley Jones' cheerful voice greeted me and he was positively gleeful when I told him of my projected trip. "Hooray!" he shouted. "But you'll not take the SF-22. You'll take the trip with me as I wanted. I tell you what: You be out at Newark Airport at eleven-thirty, but come to my hangar instead of to that of the transportation company. We'll leave at the same time as the regular liner, and we'll get your old bonds to Frisco, regardless of what might happen to the big ship. Also we might learn something mighty interesting." I argued with him, but to no avail. And the more I argued, the greater appeal was presented by his proposition. Finally there was nothing to do but agree. * * * * * Preston arrived with the bonds shortly after the children were tucked in their beds. I did not tell him of my change in plans. He did not stay long, and I could see that he was uncomfortable under the accusing eyes of Marie, for all his own confidence in the safety of the trip in the closely-guarded SF-22. At precisely eleven-thirty I reached the great steel and glass hangar where Hart Jones and George Boehm carried on their experiments with super-modern types of aircraft. Hart Jones had inherited more than two million dollars, and was in a fair way to spend it all on his favorite hobby, though those who knew him best vowed that he would make many times that amount through royalties on his ever-growing number of valuable inventions. The immense doors were open, and I gazed for the first time into the hangar whose spacious interior provided storage and manufacturing facilities for a dozen or more planes of Hart Jones' design. A curiously constructed example of his handiwork stood directly before me, and several mechanics were engaged in making it ready for flight. My friend advanced from their midst to meet me, a broad smile on his grease smeared countenance. "Greetings, Jack," he said, taking my small bag from my hands. "Right on time, I see. And I can't tell you how glad I am that you are coming with us. So is George." "Well, I didn't expect to," I admitted; "but there is no need of telling you that I had far rather be in your ship than in the big one." * * * * * George Boehm, the same jolly chap I had several times met in Hart's company, but fatter than ever, crawled from beneath the shiny metal body of the plane and scrambled to his feet at my side. "Going in for a bit of adventuring, Mr. Makely?" he asked, wiping his hand with a piece of cotton waste before extending it. "Yes," I replied, as I squeezed his chubby fingers. "Can't stick in the mud all my life, George. And I wouldn't want to be in better company for my first attempt either." "Nor we," he returned, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. "Rather have a greenhorn on the Pioneer than some government agent, who'd be butting in and trying to run everything. Think you'll be scared?" "Probably," I admitted; "but I guess I can stand it." "Hear the latest news broadcast?" interrupted Hart Jones. "No. What was it?" I asked. "There has been a report from out near Cripple Creek," said Hart solemnly, "that a pillar of fire was observed in the mountains shortly after the time the NY-18 last reported. The time and the location coincide with her probable position and the report was confirmed by no less than three of the natives of that locality. Of course the statements are probably extravagant, but they claim this pillar of fire extended for miles into the heavens and was accompanied by a tremendous roaring sound that ceased abruptly as the light of the flame disappeared, leaving nothing but blackness and awe-inspiring silence behind." * * * * * "Lot of bunk!" grunted George, who was vigorously scrubbing the back of his neck. "Sounds like a fairy tale," I commented. "Nevertheless, there may be something in it. In fact, there must be. Three of these mountaineers observed practically the same phenomenon from quite widely separated points, though one of them said there were three pillars of fire and that these looked more like the beams of powerful search-lights. All agreed on the terrific roar. And, after all, these two liners did disappear. There must be something quite out of the ordinary about the way in which they were captured or destroyed, and this occurrence may well be supposed to have a bearing on the matter." "Possibly they were destroyed by some freak electrical storm," I suggested. "Where then are the wrecked vessels?" asked Hart. "No, Jack, electrical storms do not destroy huge air liners and then suck them out into space beyond our vision. These two ships are no longer on the surface of the earth, else they would have been long since located. The magnetic direction finders of the transportation people have covered every inch of the United States, as well as Mexico and Canada." "Of course they might have been carried halfway around the world by a wind of unprecedented velocity." I commenced a silly argument in favor of the theory that the elements had accounted for the two vessels, but was interrupted by the mounting roar of great engines throbbing overhead. "Hurry up there, George!" shouted Hart. "It's the SF-22 coming in. We have to be ready for the take-off in five minutes!" * * * * * He hastened to take George's place at the washbowl and all was activity within the confines of our hangar. George and I left the office and went out to the landing field, which was now brilliant with the glare of floodlights. The _Pioneer_ had been trundled into the open and stood ready for the flight. Not a hundred feet above the field, the huge silver moth that was the SF-22 swept by in a wide circle that would bring her into the wind. The roar of her engines died as she swung out of the circle of light into the surrounding darkness. The crowds which had gathered to witness her landing buzzed with excited comment and speculation. Her nose brought slightly up, she dropped to a perfect three-point landing, the brakes screeching as she was brought to a standstill at the hangar of the transportation company. "Come on now, you fellows," came the voice of Hart Jones from the hangar entrance, "there's no time to lose. The _Pioneer_ takes off immediately after the big fellow." We hurried to the waiting ship, which seemed like a tiny toy when compared with the giant SF-22. I had observed very little of the construction of the _Pioneer_, but I could now see that she was quite different in design from the ordinary plane. A monoplane she was, but the wing structure was abnormally short and of great thickness, and there were a number of tubes projecting from the leading edge that gave the appearance of a battery of small cannon. The body, like all planes designed for travel in air-level six, was cigar-shaped, and had hermetically sealed ports and entrance manholes. A cluster of the cannon-shaped tubes enclosed the tail just back of the fins and rudder and, behind the wing structure atop the curved upper surface of the body, there was a sphere of gleaming metal that was probably three feet in diameter. * * * * * Before I could formulate questions regarding the unusual features of the design, we were within the _Pioneer's_ cabin and Hart Jones was engaged in clamping the entrance manhole cover to its rubber seat. A throbbing roar that penetrated our double hull attracted my attention and, looking through a nearby porthole, I saw that the convoy of army planes had taken off and was circling over the SF-22 in anticipation of her start. Trim, speedy fighting ships these were, with heavy caliber machine-guns in turrets fore and aft and normally manned by crews of twelve each. The under surfaces of their bodies glistened smooth and sleek in the light from the field, for the landing gears had been drawn within and the openings sealed by the close-fitted armor plate that protected these ordinarily vulnerable portions when in flight. The SF-22 was ready to take off and the crowds were drawing back into the obscurity beyond the huge circle of blinding light. One after another her twelve engines sputtered into life, and ponderously she moved over the field, gathering speed as the staccato barking of the exhausts gradually blended into a smooth though deafening purr. The tail of the great vessel came up, then the wheels, and she was off into the night. * * * * * Hart Jones sat at a bewildering array of instruments that covered almost the entire forward partition of the cabin. He pressed a button and the starting motor whined for a moment. Then the single engine of the _Pioneer_ coughed and roared. Slowly we taxied in the direction taken by the SF-22, whose lights were now vanishing in the darkness. I saw George open a valve on the wall and Hart stretched the fingers of his left hand to what appeared to be the keyboard of a typewriter set into the instrument board. He pressed several of the keys and pulled back his stick. There was a whistling scream from astern and I was thrown back in my seat with painful force. With that, the motor roared into full speed and we had left the airport far behind. "What on earth?" I gasped. "Rocket propulsion," laughed Hart. "I should have warned you. Those tubes you saw outside at the tail and along the leading edge of the wings. Only used three of them, but that was sufficient for the take-off." "But I thought this rocket business was not feasible on account of the wastage of fuel due to its low efficiency," I objected. "We should worry about fuel," said Hart. I looked about me and saw that there was very little space for the storage of this essential commodity. "Why?" I inquired. "What fuel do you use?" "Make our own," he replied shortly. He was busy at the moment, maneuvering the _Pioneer_ into a position above and behind the SF-22 and her convoy. "You make your own fuel enroute?" I asked in astonishment. "Yes. That sphere you saw on top. It is the collecting end of an electrical system for extracting nitrogen and other elements, from the air. This extraction goes on constantly while we are in the atmosphere and my fuel is an extremely powerful explosive of which nitrates are the base. The supply is replenished continuously, so we have no fear of running short even in the upper levels." * * * * * George had crawled through a small opening into some inaccessible region in the stern of the vessel. I pondered over what Hart had just told me, still keeping my eyes glued to the port, through which could be seen the fleet we were following. The altimeter registered thirty-five thousand feet. We were entering air-level six--the stratosphere! Below us the troposphere, divided into five levels, each of seven thousand feet, teemed with the life of the air. The regular lanes were filled with traffic, the lights of the speeding thousands of freight and pleasure craft moving in orderly procession along their prescribed routes. Up here in the sixth level, which was entirely for high-speed traffic of commercial and government vessels making transcontinental or transoceanic voyages, we were the only adventurers in sight--we and the convoyed liner we were following. The speed indicator showed six hundred miles an hour, and the tiny spot of light that traveled over the chart to indicate our position showed that we were nearing Buffalo. Glancing through one of the lower ports, I saw the lights of the city shining dimly through a light mist that fringed the shore of Lake Erie and extended northward along the Niagara. Then we were out over the lake, and the luminous hue was slipping rapidly behind. I looked ahead and saw that the distance to the SF-22 and her convoy had somewhat increased. We were a mile behind and some two thousand feet above them. Evidently Hart was figuring on keeping at a safe distance for observation of anything that might happen. * * * * * Our motor was running smoothly and the angle of the propeller blades had been altered to take care of the change in air density from the lower altitudes. It flashed across my mind that this was an ideal location for an attack, if such was to be made on the SF-22. Then, far ahead, I saw a beam of light stab through the darkness and strike the tossing surface of the lake. Another and another followed, and I could see that the SF-22 and her convoy were surrounded by these unearthly rays. They converged from high above to outline a brilliant circle where they met on the surface of the waters, and in the midst of the cone formed by the beams, the liner and its seven tiny followers could be seen to falter, and huddle more closely together. It all happened in the twinkling of an eye--so quickly, in fact, that Hart and I had not the time to exchange remarks over the strange occurrence. For a moment the eight vessels hovered, halted suddenly by this inexplicable force from out the heavens. Then there rose from the apex of the inverted cone of light a blinding column of blue-white radiance that poured skyward an instant and was gone. To our ears came a terrific roaring that could be likened to nothing we had heard on earth. The _Pioneer_ was tossed and buffeted as by a cyclone, and George came tumbling from the opening he had entered, his round face grown solemn. Then came eery silence, for the _Pioneer's_ motor had gone dead. Ahead there was utter darkness. The liner and her convoy had completely vanished and the _Pioneer_ was slipping into a spin! * * * * * "What's up?" asked George of Hart, who was tugging frantically at the controls. "The liner has gone the way of the first two," he replied: "and the yarn about the pillar of fire was not so far wrong after all." "You saw the same thing?" asked George incredulously. "Yes, and so did Jack. There came some beams of light from the sky; then the pillar of fire and the roaring you heard, after which the vessels were gone and our electrical system paralyzed." "Holy smoke!" ejaculated George. "What to do now?" As he spoke, the _Pioneer_ came out of the spin, and we were able to resume our positions in the seats. None of us was strapped in, and we had been clinging to whatever was handiest to keep from being tossed about in the cabin. Hart wiped his forehead and growled out an oath. The instrument board was still illuminated, for its tiny lamps were supplied with current from the storage battery. But the main lights of the cabin and the ignition system refused to function. We were gliding now, but losing altitude rapidly, having already dropped to the lower limits of level five. "Can't you use the rocket tubes?" I inquired hesitatingly. "They are fired in the same manner as the motor," replied Hart; "but we might try an emergency connection from the storage battery, which is ordinarily used only in starting and for the panel lights." * * * * * George was already fussing with the connections in a small junction box from which he had removed the cover. Meanwhile, the black waters of Lake Erie were rushing upward to meet us, and the needle of the altimeter registered twelve thousand feet. "Here's the trouble!" shouted George, triumphantly holding up a small object he had removed from the junction box. "Ignition fuse is blown." "Probably by some radiations from the cone of light and the column that destroyed the liner. Lucky we were no closer," were Hart's muttered comments. George produced a spare fuse and inserted it in its proper place. The cabin lights glowed instantly and the motor started at once. "Well, I'm going up after the generators of this mysterious force that is destroying our cross-country ships and killing our people," asserted Hart. "The rays came from high above, but the _Pioneer_ can go as high as anything that ever flew--_higher_." He snapped a switch and a beam of light that rivalled the so-called pillar of fire bored far into the night, dimming the stars by its brilliance. Again his fingers strayed to the rows of white keys and the rocket tubes shrieked in response to his pressure. This time I was prepared for the shock of acceleration, but the action was maintained for several seconds and I found the pressure against my back growing painful. Then it was relieved, and I glanced at the altimeter. Its needle had reached the end of the scale, which was graduated to eighty thousand feet! "Good Lord!" I exclaimed. "Do you mean to tell me that we are more than sixteen miles in the air?" "Nearly thirty," replied Hart, pointing to another dial which I had not seen. This one was graduated in miles above sea-level, and its needle wavered between the twenty-nine and thirty mark! * * * * * Again Hart pressed the rocket buttons, and we shot still higher into the heavens. Thirty, forty, fifty miles registered the meter, and still we climbed. "Great Scott!" blurted a voice I knew was my own, though I had no consciousness of willing the speech. "At this rate we'll reach the moon!" "We could, if we wished," was Hart's astounding reply; "I wish you wouldn't say too much about it when we return. We have oxygen to breathe and an air-tight vessel to retain it. With the fuel we are using, we could easily do it, provided a sufficient supply were available. However, the _Pioneer_ does not have large enough storage tanks as yet, and, of course, we cannot now replenish our supply with sufficient rapidity, for the atmosphere has become very rare indeed--where we are. My ultimate object, though, in building the _Pioneer_, was to construct a vessel that is capable of a trip to the moon." "You think you could reach a great enough velocity to escape the gravitational pull of the earth?" I asked, marveling more and more at the temerity and resourcefulness of my science-minded friend. "Absolutely," he replied. "The speed required is less than seven miles a second, and I have calculated that the _Pioneer_ can do no less than twenty." Mentally I multiplied by sixty. I could hardly credit the result. Twelve hundred miles a minute! "But, how about the acceleration?" I ventured. "Could the human body stand up under the strain?" "That is the one problem remaining," he replied; "and I am now working on a method of neutralizing it. From the latest results of our experiments, George and I are certain of its feasibility." * * * * * The _Pioneer_ was now losing altitude once more, and Hart played the beam of the searchlight in all directions as we descended. He and George watched through one of the floor ports and I followed suit. We were falling, unhampered by air resistance, and our bodies were practically weightless with reference to the _Pioneer_. It was a strange sensation: there was the feeling of exhilaration one experiences when inhaling the first whiff of nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair--a feeling of absolute detachment and care-free confidence in the ultimate result of our precipitous descent. I found considerable amusement in pushing myself from side to side of the cabin with a mere touch of a finger. There was no up nor down, and sometimes it seemed to me that we were drifting sideways, sometimes that we fell upward rather than downward. Hart and George were unconcerned. Evidently they were quite accustomed to the sensations. They bent their every energy toward discovering what had caused the disaster to the SF-22 and its convoy. For several hours we cruised about on the strangest search ever made in the air. Alternately shooting skyward to unconscionable altitudes and dropping to levels five and six to replenish our fuel supply, we covered the greater portion of the United States before the night was over. But the powerful searchlight of the _Pioneer_ failed to disclose anything that might be remotely connected with the disappearance of the SF-22. For me it was a never-to-be-forgotten experience. Lightning dashes from coast to coast which required but a few minutes of time--circling many miles above New York or Washington or Savannah in broad daylight with the sun low on the up-curved horizon; then shooting westward into the darkness and skirting the Pacific coast less than fifteen minutes later, but with four hours' actual time difference. Space and time were almost one. * * * * * Hart had not provided the _Pioneer_ with a radio or television transmitter, but there was an excellent receiver, and, through its agency we learned that the world was in a veritable uproar over the latest visitation of the mysterious terror of the sixth air level. All commercial traffic in levels four, five and six was ordered discontinued, and the government air control stations were flashing long messages in code, the import of which could but be guessed. Vision flashes showed immense gatherings at the large airports and in the public squares of the great cities, where the general populace become more and more excited and terrified by the awful possibilities pictured by various prominent speakers. The governments of all foreign powers made haste to disclaim responsibility for the air attacks or for any attempt at making war on the United States. News broadcasts failed to mention Hart Jones or the _Pioneer_, since the mission had been kept secret. The phenomenon of the rays and the roaring column of light had been observed from many points on this occasion and there was no longer any doubt as to the nature of the terror as visible to the eye, though theories as to the action and source of the rays conflicted greatly and formed the basis of much heated discussion. Eventually the advancing dawn reached San Francisco, and with its advent Hart decided to make a landing in that city so that my bonds could be delivered. * * * * * Jones was apparently a very much mystified and discouraged man. "Jack," he said, "it seems to me that this thing is but the beginning of some tremendous campaign that is being waged against our country by a clever and powerful enemy. And I feel that our work in connection with the unraveling of the mystery and overcoming the enemy or enemies is but begun. It's a cinch that the thing is organized by human minds and is not any sort of a freak of the elements. Our work is cut out for us, all right, and I wish you would stick to George and me through the mess. Will you?" "Sure," I agreed, readily enough. "After these bonds are delivered I am free for a month." "Ha! Ha!" cackled George, without mirth. "A month! We're doggoned lucky if we get to the bottom of this in a year." "Nonsense!" snapped Hart, who was considerably upset by the failure to locate the source of the disastrous rays. "There is nothing supernatural about this, and anything that can be explained on a scientific basis can be run to earth in short order. These rays are man-made and, as such, can be accounted for by man. Our greatest scientists must be put to work on the problem at once--in fact, they have quite probably been called in by the government already." * * * * * He was maneuvering the _Pioneer_ to a landing on the broad field of the San Francisco airport. Hundreds of idle planes of all sizes lined the field, and, unmindful of the earliness the hour, a great crowd was collected in expectation of sensational reports from the occupants of arriving ships. The unusual construction of the _Pioneer_ attracted considerable attention and it was with difficulty that the police kept back the crowd when she rolled to a stop near the office of the local government supervisor. We hustled inside and were greeted by that official with open arms. "Glory be!" he exclaimed. "Hart Jones and the _Pioneer_. Every airport in the land has been on the lookout for you all night. It was feared you had been lost with the SF-22 and the others. Code messages to the supervisors of all districts advised of your mission, though it has been kept out of the general news, as has the message from the enemy." "Message from the enemy!" gasped Hart, George and I, echoing the words like parrots. "Yes. A demand that the United States surrender, and a threat to descend into the lower levels if the demand is not complied with in twenty-four hours!" "Who is this enemy?" asked Hart, "and where?" "Who they are is not known," replied the official gravely; "and as to the location, the War Department is puzzled. Direction finders throughout the country took readings on the position of their radio transmitter and these readings differed widely in result. But the consensus of opinion is that the messages originate somewhere out in space, probably between fifty and one hundred thousand miles from our earth." "Great guns!" Hart glanced at George and me, where we stood with stupidly hanging jaws. "And what does the government want of me now?" "You are considered to be the one man who might be able to cope with the problem, and are ordered to report to the Secretary of War, in person, immediately." * * * * * Hart was electrified into instant activity. "Here," he said in a voice of authority that commanded the official's attention and respect, "see that this package of bonds is delivered at once to the addressee and that the addressor is advised of its safe arrival. We're off at once." Suiting action to the words, he thrust my packet into the hands of the astonished supervisor. Then, turning sharply on his heel, he flung back, "Advise the Secretary of War that I shall report to him in person in less than one hour." As we stepped through the entrance of the _Pioneer_, he shot a final look at the official and laughed heartily at his sudden accession of energy. We had not the slightest doubt that Hart's orders would be immediately and efficiently carried out. * * * * * In precisely forty-five minutes, we stood before the desk of Lawrence Simler, then Secretary of War, in Washington. "You are Mr. Hartley Jones?" inquired the stern-visaged little man. "I am, Mr. Secretary, and these are my friends and co-workers, George Boehm and John Makely." The Secretary acknowledged the introduction gravely, then plunged into the heart of the matter at hand with the quick energy for which he was famed. "It may or may not be a serious situation," he said, "but certainly it has thus far been quite alarming. In any event, we have taken the matter out of the hands of the Air Traffic Bureau. We are prepared to defy the ultimatum of the enemy, whoever he may be. But we want your help, Mr. Jones. Every ship of the Air Navy will be in the upper levels within the prescribed twenty-four hours, and we will endeavor to stave off their attacks until such time as you can fit the _Pioneer_ for a journey to their headquarters." "How can your antiquated war vessels, capable of hurling a high explosive shell no more than fifty miles, fight off an enemy that is thousands of miles distant?" asked Hart. "It is believed by the research engineers of the government that, though their headquarters may be located at a great distance, the raiders drop to a comparatively low altitude at the time of one of their attacks, returning immediately thereafter to their base." Hart Jones shook his head. "The engineers may be correct," he stated; "but how on earth can you expect a little vessel like the _Pioneer_ to battle an enemy who is possessed of these terribly destructive weapons and who has sufficient confidence in his own invulnerability to declare war on the greatest country on earth?" * * * * * Secretary Simler dropped his voice to a confidential tone, and his keen gray eyes flashed excitement as he unfolded the details of the discoveries and plans of the War Department. We three listened in undisguised amazement to a tale of the unceasing labors of our Secret Service agents in foreign countries, of elaborate experiments with deadly weapons and the chemicals of warfare. We heard of marvelous new rays that could be projected for many miles and destroy whole armies at a single blast; rays that would, in less time than that required to tell of the feat, reduce to a mass of fused metal the greatest firstline battleships of the old days of ocean warfare. We heard of preparations for defensive warfare throughout the civilized world, preparedness that insured so terrible and final a war that it was literally impossible for a great world conflagration to again break out. We learned that the present mysterious signs of a coming war could not possibly have originated in any country on earth, else they would have been known of long in advance, due to the network of the Secret Service system. This war, so unexpectedly thrust upon us, was undoubtedly a war of planets! "But," objected Hart, "the messages were in English, were they not?" "They were," continued Secretary Simler, "and that puzzled our experts in the beginning. But, it may well be that our enemy from out the skies has had spies among us for many years and could thus have learned our languages and radio codes. In any event, we are to meet destructive rays with others equally destructive, and you, Hartley Jones, are the man who can make our effectiveness certain." "I?" "Yes. How long a time will be required in fitting out the _Pioneer_ for reliable space flying?" * * * * * Hart Jones pondered the matter and I could see that he was overjoyed at the prospect of getting into the thing in earnest. "About one week," he replied, "providing you can send a force of fifty expert mechanics to my hangar at once and supply all material as fast as I shall require it." "Excellent," said the Secretary. "We'll have the men there in a few hours and will obtain whatever you need, regardless of cost, for immediate delivery. Incidentally, there will be several scientists as well, who will supervise the installation of two types of ray generators and their projecting mechanisms on the _Pioneer_. You will need them later." "I don't doubt we shall," said Hart. "And now, with your permission, we shall leave for the hangar. I'm ready to start work." "Capital!" Secretary Simler pressed every one of a row of buttons set in his desk top. We were dismissed. "Well," said I, when we reached the outside, "he has given you quite a job, Hart!" "You said something," he replied. "But, if this threat from the skies proves as real and as calamitous as I think it will, we all have our work cut out for us." "Do you really believe this enemy comes from another planet?" asked George as we entered the _Pioneer_ for the trip home. "Where else can they be from?" countered Hart. "But, really it makes no difference to us now. We have to go after them in earnest. Don't want to quit, do you, George?" "Wha-a-at?" shouted George, as he jerked savagely at the main switch of the _Pioneer_. "You know me better than that, Hart. Did I ever let you down in anything?" "No," admitted the smiling Hart, "you never did, bless your heart. But Jack here is another matter. He has a wife and two kids to look after. That lets him out automatically." * * * * * My heart sank at the words, for I knew that he meant what he said. And, truth to tell, I saw the justice in his remarks. "But, Hart," I faltered, "I'd like to be in on this thing." "I know you would, old man. But I think it's out of the question, for the present at least. You can help with the reconstruction of the _Pioneer_, however." And meekly I accepted his dictum, though with secretly conflicting emotions. Little did I realize at the time that Hart knew far more than he pretended and that he had merely attempted to salve his own conscience in this manner. I was very anxious to return to my family, and, as I sped homeward in a taxicab after the _Pioneer_ landed at her own hangar, my mind was filled with doubts and fears. Secretary Simler had been very brief in his talk, but his every word carried home the gravity of the situation. What if these invaders carried the war to the surface? Suppose they seared the countryside and the cities and suburbs with rays of horrible nature that would shrivel and blast all that lay in their path? My heart chilled at the thought and it was a distinct relief when I gazed on my little home and saw that it was safe--so far. I paid the driver with a much too large bank note and dashed up my own front steps two at a time. A few hours later I tore myself away and returned to the hangar, where the _Pioneer_ now reposed in a scaffolded cradle. The sight which met my eyes was astonishing in the extreme, for the hangar had been transformed into a huge workshop with seemingly hundreds of men already at work. It was a scene of furious activity, and, to my utter amazement, I observed that the _Pioneer_ was already in an advanced stage of disassembly. * * * * * I had no difficulty in locating Hart Jones, for he was striding from lathe to workbench to boring mill, issuing his orders with the sureness and decision of a born leader of men. He welcomed me in his most brisk manner and immediately assigned me to a portion of the work in the chemical laboratory--something I was at least partly fitted for. We labored far into the night, when a siren called us to rest and food. This was to be a night and day job, and not a man of those on duty gave thought to the intense nervous and physical strain. Sixty-five of us I learned there were, though it had seemed there were several times that number. During the rest period, Hart switched on the large television and sound mechanism of the public news broadcasts. Great excitement prevailed throughout the United States, for there had been a leak and the news had gone abroad regarding the message from the enemy. There was widespread panic and disorder and the government was besieged with demands for authentic news. The twenty-four hours of grace had nearly expired. Finally the public was told of what actually was happening. Our entire fleet of one thousand air cruisers was in air-level six, waiting for the enemy. America was going to fight in earnest! * * * * * Flashes of our air cruisers in construction and in action came over the screen; voice-vision records of the popular officers of the fleet followed in quick succession. Then came the blow--the first of the strange war. Two vessels of the air fleet had been destroyed by the triple rays and pillar of fire! Fifty cruisers rushing to the scene had been unable to find any traces of the source of the deadly rays. And, this time, there was an alarming added element. The pillar of fire had risen from a point near Gadsden in Alabama and, in its wake, there spread a sulphurous, smoldering fire that crept along the ground and destroyed all in its path. Farms, factories, and even the steel rails of the railroads were consumed and burned into the ground as if by the breath of some tremendous blast furnace. Hundreds of inhabitants of the section perished, and it was reported that the fumes from the strange fires were drifting in the direction of Birmingham, terrifyingly visible in blue-green clouds of searing vapor. With the first news of the disaster came a wave of fear that spread over the country with the rapidity of the ether waves that carried the news. Then came stern determination. This enemy must be swept from the skies! Gatherings in public places volunteered en masse for whatever service the government might ask of them. The entire world was in an uproar, and from Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia, came immediate offers of their air fleets to assist in fighting off the Terror. * * * * * In less than an hour there were nearly five thousand cruisers in air-level six, patroling its entire depth from thirty-five thousand to one hundred thousand feet altitude. We resumed work in the hangar, but the news service was kept in operation as far as the amplifiers were concerned, though the television screen was switched off on account of the likelihood of its distracting the workers. Again came the report of a major disaster, this time over Butte in Montana. Four American vessels and one British were the victims in level six. And the city of Butte was in flames; blue, horrible flames that literally melted the city into the ground. Again there was no trace of the invaders. How puny were the efforts of the five thousand air cruisers! Marvels of engineering and mechanical skill, these vessels were. Deadly as were the weapons they carried--weapons so terrible that war on earth was considered impossible since their development--they were helpless against an enemy who could not be located. Though our vessels were capable of boring high into the stratosphere, the enemy worked from still higher. "Holy smoke!" gasped Hart Jones, who had stopped at my side. "What a contract I have on my hands!" * * * * * He looked in the direction of the partly dismantled _Pioneer_, and I could see by the fixedness of his stare that he was thinking of her insignificant size in comparison with the job she was to undertake. Above the din of the machines in the hangar rang the startled voice of a news announcer. Panic-stricken he seemed, and we stopped to listen. Another blow of the terror of the skies--and now close by! Over Westchester County in New York State there was a repetition of the previous attacks. Only two of the cruisers had vanished this time; but several towns, including Larchmont and Scarsdale, were pools of molten fire! Sick at heart, I thought of my little home in Rutherford and of the dear ones it contained. I thought of telephoning, but, what was the use? There was no warding off of this terrible thing that had so suddenly come to our portion of the world. It was the blowing of the last trumpet, the way things looked. The announcer had calmed himself. His voice droned tonelessly now, as was the custom. Another raid, on the Mexican Border now. We were stupefied by the rapidity of the enemy's attacks; then electrified once more by the most astounding news of all. Alexandria, in Egypt, was the base of a pillar of fire! Fully half of the city was wiped out, and the remainder in a mortal funk, terrorized and riotous. The United States was not alone in the war! The foreign fleets which reinforced our own were ordered home immediately. But to what avail? The world was doomed! * * * * * In the morning, after nine fearful attacks during the night, there came another message from the enemy and this was repeated in five languages and addressed to the entire world: "People of Earth," it read, "this is our final warning. One chance has been given and you have proved stubborn. Consider well that your civilization be not entirely destroyed, and answer as the expiration of forty-eight hours, using our transmitting frequency. Our hand is to be withheld for that period only, when, unless our demands are met, all of your large cities and towns will be destroyed. Our terms for peace are that we be permitted to land without resistance on your part; that you surrender farm and forest lands, cities and towns, able-bodied men of twenty to forty, selected women of seventeen to thirty, and tribute in the form of such supplies and precious metals as we may specify, all to the extent of forty per cent of your resources. No compromise will be accepted." That was all. It was during a rest period at the Jones hangar and I had brought Hart and George to my home for breakfast. We sat at the table when the news instrument brought the message. Marie was pouring the coffee, and my two small boys, Jim and Jack, had gone to the playroom, from whence their joyous voices could be heard. We four were struck dumb at the announcement, and Marie looked at me with so awful an expression of dread that my coffee turned bitter in my mouth. Marie was just twenty-eight! "What beasts!" cried Hart. "Allow them to land without resistance? I should say not! Rather we should fight them off until all of us perish." * * * * * He had risen from his chair in his anger. Now he sat down suddenly and shook a forefinger in my face. "Say!" he exploded. "You can't tell me that some master mind of our own world is not back of this!" "I'm not telling you," I replied, startled at the fierce fire that flashed from his eyes. "I know. I'm just trying to think aloud and I'm liable to say anything. But this sort of business is the work of humans as sure as you're born. Still I believe that what Simler says is true. I can't believe that any country on earth is back of the thing. It must be an attack from beings of another planet, but I think they have as a leader a man who is of our own earth." Marie's eyes opened wide at this. "But how could that be?" she asked. "Surely no one from our earth has made the trip to one of the other planets?" "It may be that someone has," replied Hart. "Do you remember Professor Oradel? Remember, about ten years ago, I think it was, when he and a half dozen or more of extremely radical scientists built a rocket they claimed would reach the moon? They were ridiculed and hissed and relegated to the position of half-baked, crazy inventors. But Oradel had a large private fortune, and he and his crowd built themselves a workshop and laboratory in a secluded region in the Ozarks. Here they labored and experimented and eventually the rocket ship was constructed. No person was in their confidence, but when the machine was completed they issued a statement to the press to the effect that they were ready for the voyage to the moon, and that, when they returned, a reckoning with the world was to be made for its disbelief and total lack of sympathy. Again the press subjected Oradel to a series of scathing denunciations, and the scientific publications refused to take cognizance of his claims in any way, shape or form." * * * * * "Then, one night, a great rocket roared into the heavens, leaving a terror-stricken countryside in the wake of its brilliantly visible tail. Several observatories whose telescopes picked up and followed the trail of the contraption reported that it described a huge parabola, mounting high into the stratosphere and falling back to earth, where it was lost in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. There the thing ended and it was soon forgotten. But I believe that this rocket ship of Oradel's reached Mars or Venus and that the peoples of whichever planet they reached have been prevailed upon and prepared to war upon the world." "That would explain their knowledge of our languages and codes." I ventured, "and would likewise account for the fact that the first of our ships to be attacked were those carrying large shipments of currency. Though if these were destroyed by the fire columns, I can not see what good the money would do them." "Don't believe the first three were destroyed," grunted Hart. "You'll remember that in these cases the pillars of fire, or whatever you want to call them, were of a cold light, whereas now they are viciously hot and leave behind them the terrible destructive fires that spread and spread and seemingly never are extinguished. No, I think that the force used is something of the nature of an atom-disrupting triad of beams and that these set up the column as a veritable tornado, a whirling column of roaring wind rushing skyward with tremendous velocity. The first ships, I believe, were carried into the stratosphere and captured intact by the enemy. "Since the declaration of war the nature of the column has altered. The three beams, instead of meeting at or near the surface of the earth, now join high in the heavens and the column strikes downward instead of expending its force upward. An added energy is used which produces the terribly destructive force below. And now we are able to locate fragments of the ships destroyed above, whereas previously there were no traces." * * * * * "Sounds reasonable," commented George. "But why have they not landed and waged their war right here without warning, if that is what they now intend to do?" "A natural question, George. But I have a hunch that the space flier or fliers of the enemy are conserving fuel by remaining beyond gravity. You know, in space flying, the greatest expenditures of energy are in leaving or landing on a body and, once landed, they might not have sufficient fuel for a getaway. They know we are not exactly helpless, once they are in our midst, and are taking this means of reducing us to the point of complete subjection before risking their precious selves among us." The telephone startled us by its insistent ring. It was a call from the hangar for Hart. The news broadcast announcer was in the midst of a long dissertation regarding the discovery only this morning that there were certain apparent discrepancies in the movements of the tides and unwonted perturbations of the moon's orbit. There flashed on the screen a view of the great observatory at Mount Wilson, and Professor Laughlin of that institution stepped into the foreground of the scene to take up the discussion so mechanically repeated by the announcer. "Must leave for the hangar at once," declared Hart, returning from the telephone. "Simler and his staff are there and we are wanted immediately." "Oh, Jack!" Marie begged with her eyes. "Got to be done, Honey," I responded, "and, believe me, I am going to do what little I can to help. Suppose we surrendered!" * * * * * I shuddered anew at the very thought and took hurried leave of my family, Hart and George awaiting me in the hall. Had I known what was to transpire before the end of the war, I am certain I would have been in much less of a hurry. We rushed to the hangar, where Secretary Simler and his party awaited us in the office. Rather, I should say, they waited for Hart Jones. "Mr. Jones," said the Secretary of War, when the introductions were over, "it is up to you to get the _Pioneer_ in shape to go out after these terrible creatures before the forty-eight hours have expired. We have replied to their ultimatum and have told them we will have our answer ready within the appointed time, but it is already agreed between the nations of the World Alliance that our reply is to be negative. Better far that we submit to the utter destruction of our civilization than agree to their terms." "I believe I can do it, Mr. Secretary," was Hart Jones' simple comment. "At least I will try. But you must let me have an experienced astronomer at once with whom to consult." "Astronomer?" "Yes--immediately. I have a theory, but am not enough of a student of astronomy myself to work it out." "You shall have the best man in the Air Naval Observatory at once." Secretary Simler chewed his cigar savagely. "And anything else you might need," he concluded. "There is nothing else, sir." Hart turned from the great men who regarded him solemnly, some with expressions of hope, others with plain distrust written large on their countenances. * * * * * They left in silence and we returned to our work with renewed vigor. Within an hour there arrived by fast plane an undersized, thick-spectacled man who presented himself as Professor Linquist from the government observatory. He was immediately taken into the office by Hart and the two remained behind closed doors for the best part of four hours. Meanwhile the hangar hummed with activity as usual. We in the chemical laboratory were engaged in compounding the high explosive used as fuel in the _Pioneer_. This was being compressed to its absolute limit and was stored in long steel cylinders in the form of a liquid of extremely low temperature. These cylinders were at once transferred to a special steel vault where the temperature was kept at a low enough point to prevent expansion and consequent loss of the explosive, not to speak of the danger of destroying the entire lot of us in its escape. The generating apparatus of the _Pioneer_ was to be dispensed with for this trip, since it was of no value outside the atmosphere where there was no air from which to extract the elements necessary for the production of the explosive. Instead, the entire supply of fuel for the trip was to be carried aboard the vessel in the cylinders we were engaged in filling. Hart had calculated that there was just sufficient room to store fuel for a trip of about two hundred thousand miles from the earth and a safe return. We hoped this would be enough. * * * * * On the scaffolding around the _Pioneer_ there were now so many workers that it seemed they must forever be in one another's way. But the work was progressing with extreme rapidity. Already there projected from her blunt nose a slender rod of shining metal which was the projector of one of the destructive rays whose generator and auxiliaries were being installed under the supervision of the government experts. The force had been trebled and was now working in shifts of two hours each, the pace being so exhausting that highest efficiency was obtained by using these short periods. Additional rocket tubes were being installed, and the steel framework of a bulge now showed on the hull, this bulge being an additional fuel storage compartment that would provide a slight additional resistance and consequently lower speed in the lower levels, but would prove little hindrance in level six and none at all in outer space. When Hart emerged from his office he appeared to be very tired, indeed, but his face bore an expression of triumph that could not be mistaken. He and this little scientist from Washington had evidently arrived at some momentous conclusion regarding the enemy. "Jack," he said, when he reached my bench during his first round of the hanger, "celestial mechanics is a wonderful thing. I had a hunch, and this astronomer chap has proved it correct with his mathematics. Our friend the enemy is out there in space at a point where his own mass and velocity are exactly counteracted by those of the earth and its satellite, the moon. He is just floating around in space, doing no work whatsoever to maintain his own position. He has temporarily assumed the rôle of a second satellite to us and is revolving around us at a definite period that was calculated by Lindquist. The gravitational pull of the moon keeps him from falling to the earth and that of the earth keeps him from approaching the moon. The resultant of the set of forces is what determines his orbit and the disturbance in the normal balance is what has been observed by the astronomers who reported changes in the tides and in the moon's orbit." * * * * * "But Lindquist's figures prove that the vessel or fleet of the enemy must be of tremendous size to produce such discrepancies, infinitesimally small though they might seem. We have a big fellow with whom to deal, but we know where to find him now." "How can he work from a fixed position to make his attacks on the earth at such widely separated points?" I asked. "It isn't a fixed position in the first place, and besides the earth rotates once in twenty-four hours, while the moon travels around the earth once in about twenty-eight days. But, even so, the widespread destruction could not be accounted for. He must send out scouting parties or something of that sort. That is one of the things we are to learn when we get out there. We'll have some fun, Jack." "Will the _Pioneer_ be ready?" I asked. Evidently I was to go. "She will, with the exception of the acceleration neutralizers. But I'm having some heavily-cushioned and elastic supports made that will, I believe, save us from injury. And I guess we can stand the discomfort for once." "Yes," I agreed, "in such a cause, I, for one, am willing to go through anything to help keep this overwhelming disaster from our good old world." "Jack," he whispered, "we must prevent it. We've got to!" Then he was gone, and I watched him for a moment as he dashed headlong from one task to another. He was a whirlwind of energy once more. * * * * * Forty-three hours and twenty minutes had passed since the receipt of the enemy's ultimatum. The last bolt was being tightened in the remodeled _Pioneer_, and Secretary Simler and his staff were on hand to witness the take-off of the vessel on which the hopes of the world were pinned. The news of our attempt had been spread by cable and printed news only, for there was fear that the enemy might be able to pick up the broadcasts of the news service and thus be able to anticipate us. As usual, there were many scoffers, but the consensus of opinion was in favor of the project. At any rate, what better expedient was there to offer? The huge airport, now unused on account of the complete cessation of air traffic, was closed to the public. But there was quite a crowd to witness the take-off, the visitors from Washington, the officials of the field, and the two hundred workers who had enabled us to make ready for the adventure in time. There were four to enter the _Pioneer_: Hart, George, Professor Lindquist, and myself. And when the entrance manhole was bolted home behind us, the watchers stood in silence, waiting for the roar of the _Pioneer's_ motor. As the starter took hold, Hart waved his hand at one of the ports and every man of those two hundred and some watchers stood at attention and saluted is if he were a born soldier and Hart a born commander-in-chief. * * * * * We taxied heavily across the field, for the _Pioneer_ was much overloaded for a quick take-off. She bumped and bounced for a quarter-mile before taking to the air and then climbed very slowly indeed, for several minutes. Our speed was a scant two hundred miles an hour when we swung out over New York and headed for the Atlantic. And then Hart made first use of the rocket tubes, not daring to discharge the hot gases below while over populated land at so low an altitude. He touched one button, maintaining the pressure for but a fraction of a second. The ocean slipped more rapidly away from beneath our feet and he touched the button once more. Our speed was now nearly seven hundred miles an hour and we made haste to buckle ourselves into the padded, hammocklike contrivances which had been substituted for the former seats. In a very few minutes we entered level six and the motor was cut off entirely. A blast from a number of the tail rockets drove me into my supporting hammock so heavily that I found difficulty in breathing, and could scarcely move a muscle to change position. The rate of acceleration was terrific, and I am still unable to understand how Hart was able to manipulate the controls. For myself, I could not even turn my head from its position in the padding and I felt as if I were being crushed by thousands of tons of pressure. Then, the pressure was somewhat relieved and I glanced to the instruments. We were more than a thousand miles from our starting point and the speed indicator read seven thousand miles an hour. We were traveling at the rate of nearly two miles a second! * * * * * Another blast from the rockets, this one of interminable length, and I must have lost consciousness. For when I next took note of things I found that we had been out for nearly two hours and that the tremendous pressure of acceleration was relieved. I moved my head, experimentally and found that my senses were normal, though there was a strange and alarming sensation of being wrong side up. Then I remembered that I had experienced the same thing when we first searched the upper levels of the atmosphere for the origin of the destructive rays of the enemy. But this was different! I gazed through a nearby port and saw that the sky was entirely black, the stars shining magnificently brilliant against their velvet background. Streamers of brilliant sunlight from the floor ports struck across the cabin and patterned the ceiling. Looking between my feet I saw the sun as a flaming orb with streamers of incandescence that spread in every direction with such blinding luminosity that I could not bear the sight for more than a few seconds. Off to what I was pleased to think of as our left side, there was a huge globe that I quickly made out as our own earth. Eerily green it shone, and, though a considerable portion of the surface was obscured by patches of white that I recognized as clouds, I could clearly make out the continents of the eastern hemisphere. It was a marvelous sight and I lost several minutes in awed contemplation of the wonder. Then I heard Hart laugh. "Just coming out of it, Jack?" he asked. * * * * * I stared at him foolishly. It had seemed to me that I was alone in this vast universe, and the sound of his voice startled me. "Guess I'm not fully out of it yet," I said. "Where are we?" "Oh, about sixty thousand miles out," he replied carelessly; "and we are traveling at our maximum speed--that is, the maximum we need for this little voyage." "Little voyage!" I gasped. And then I looked at George and the professor and saw that they, too, were grinning at my discomfiture. I laughed crazily, I suppose, for they all sobered at once. Traveling through space at more than forty thousand miles an hour, it seemed that we were stationary. Movement was now easy--too easy, in fact, for we were practically weightless. The professor was having a time of it manipulating a pencil and a pad of paper on which he had a mass of small figures that were absolutely meaningless to me. He was calculating and plotting our course and, without him, we should never have reached the object we sought. Time passed rapidly, for the wonders of the naked universe were a never-ending source of fascination. Occasionally a series of rocket charges was fired to keep our direction and velocity, but these were light, and the acceleration so insignificant that we were put to no discomfort whatever. But it was necessary that we keep our straps buckled, for, in the weightless condition, even the slightest increase or decrease in speed or change in direction was sufficient to throw us the length of the cabin, from which painful bruises might be received. * * * * * The supports to which we were strapped and which saved us from being crushed by the acceleration and deceleration, were similar to hammocks, being hooked to the floor and ceiling of the cabin rather than suspended horizontally in the conventional manner. This was for the reason that the energy of the rockets was expended fore and aft, except for steering, and the forces were therefore along the horizontal axis of the vessel. The supports were elastic and the padding deep and soft. Being swiveled at top and bottom, they could swing around so that deceleration as well as acceleration was relieved. For this reason the controls had been altered so that the flexible support in which Hart was suspended could rotate about their pedestal, thus allowing for their operation by the pilot either when accelerating or decelerating. How he could control the muscles of his arms and hands under the extreme conditions is still a mystery to me, however, and George agrees with me in this. We found ourselves to be utterly helpless. My next impression of the trip is that of swinging rapidly around and finding myself facing the rear wall of the cabin. Then the tremendous pressure once more at a burst from the forward tubes. We had commenced deceleration. For me there were alternate periods of full and semi-consciousness and, to this day, I can remember no more than the high spots of that historical expedition. * * * * * Then we were free to move once more, and I turned to face the instrument board. Our relative velocity had become practically zero; that is, we were traveling through space at about the same speed and in the same direction as the earth. The professor and Hart were consulting a pencil chart and excitedly looking first through the forward ports and then into the screen of the periscope. "This is the approximate location," averred the professor. "But they are not here," replied Hart. George and I peered in all directions and could see nothing excepting the marvels of the universe we had been viewing. The moon now seemed very close and its craters and so-called seas were as plainly visible as in a four-inch telescope on earth. But we saw nothing of the enemy. The earth was a huge ball still, but much smaller than when I had first observed it from the heavens. The sun's corona--the flaming streamers which the professor declared extended as much as five million miles into space--was partly hidden behind the rim of the earth and the effect was blinding. A thin crescent of brilliant light marked the rim of our planet and the rest was in shadow, but a shadow that was lighted awesomely in cold green by reflected light from her satellite. "I have it!" suddenly shouted the professor. "We are all in very nearly the same line with reference to the sun, and the enemy is between the blazing body and ourselves. We must shift our position, move into the shadow of the earth. We have missed our calculation by a few hundred miles, that is all." All! I thought. These astronomers, so accustomed to dealing in tremendous distances that must be measured in light-years, thought nothing of an error of several hundred miles. But I suppose it was really an inconsiderable amount, at that. At any rate, we shifted position and looked around a bit more. We saw nothing at first. Then Hart consulted the chronometer. "Time is up!" he shouted. * * * * * On the instant there was a flash of dazzling green light from a point not a hundred miles from our position, a flash that was followed by a streaking pencil of the same light shooting earthward with terrific velocity. Breathlessly we followed its length, saw it burst like a bomb and hurl three green balls from itself which sped at equally spaced angles to form a perfect triangle. They hovered a moment at about two thousand miles above the surface of the earth, according to the professor, who was using the telescope at the time, and shot their deadly rays toward our world. We were too late to prevent the renewal of hostilities! Another and another streak of green light followed and we knew that great havoc was being wrought back home. But these served to locate the enemy's position definitely and we immediately set about to draw nearer. We were still somewhat on the dark side of the object, which had prevented our seeing it. Now we swung about so that it was plainly visible. And, what a strange appearance it presented, out here in space! Fully fifteen miles in diameter, it was a huge doughnut, a great ring of tubing with a center-opening that was at least eighty per cent of its maximum diameter. There it hovered, sending out those deadly missiles in a continuous stream toward our poor world. As we approached the weird space flier, we saw that a number of objects floated about within the great circle of its inner circumference. The NY-18, the SF-61 and the SF-22, without doubt! The theory of Hart's was correct in every detail. * * * * * We were still at about ten miles distance from the great ring and the streaking light pencils were speeding earthward at the rate of one a minute now. There was no time to lose. Already there was more destruction on its way than had been previously wrought--several times over. Hart was sighting along a tiny tube that projected into the forward partition and he maneuvered the _Pioneer_ until she was nose on to the great ring. He pulled a switch and there came a purring that was entirely new. A row of huge vacuum tubes along the wall lighted to vivid brilliancy and a throbbing vibration filled the artificial air of the cabin. He pulled a small lever at the side of the tube and the vessel rocked to the energy that was released from those vacuum tubes. The thin rod which had been installed at the _Pioneer's_ nose burst into brilliant flame--orange tinted luminescence that grew to a sphere of probably ten feet in diameter. Then there was a heavy shock and the ball of fire left its position and, with inconceivable velocity, sprang straight for the side of the great ring. It was a fair hit and, when the weird missile found its mark, it simply vanished--swallowed up in the metal walls of the monster vessel. For a moment we thought nothing was to result. Then we burst into shouts of joy, for a great section of the ring fused into nothingness and was gone! Fully a quarter of the circumference of the ring had disappeared into the vacuum of space. Truly, the governments of Earth had developed some terrible weapons of their own! We watched, breathless. * * * * * The green light pencils no longer streaked their paths of death in the direction of our world, which now seemed so remote. The great ring with the vacant space in its rim wabbled uncertainly for a moment as though some terrific upheaval from within was tearing it asunder. Then it lurched directly for the _Pioneer_. We had been observed! But Hart was equal to the occasion and he shot the _Pioneer_ in the direction of the earth with such acceleration that we all were flattened into our supports with the same old violence. Then, with equal violence, we decelerated. The ring was following so closely that it actually rushed many hundreds of miles past us before it was brought to rest. From it there sprang one of the light pencils, and the _Pioneer_ was rocked as by a heavy gale when it rushed past on its harmless way into infinity. The enemy had missed. Meanwhile, Hart was operating another mechanism that was new to the _Pioneer_ and again he sighted along the tiny tube. This time there was no sound within, no ball of fire without, no visible ray. But, when he had pressed the release of this second energy, the ring seemed to shrivel and twist as if gripped by a giant's hand. It reeled and spun. Then, no longer in a balance of forces, it commenced its long drop earthward. His job finished and finished well, Hart Jones collapsed. * * * * * Following his more than three days and four nights of superhuman endeavor, it seemed strange to see Hart slumped white and still over the control pedestal. He who had energy far in excess of that of any of the rest of us had worn himself out. Having had no rest or sleep in nearly a hundred hours, the body that housed so wonderful a spirit simply refused to carry on. Tenderly we stretched him on the cabin floor, the _Pioneer_ drifting in space the while. The professor, who was likewise something of a physician, listened to his heart, drew back his eyelids, and pronounced him in no danger whatever. We slapped his wrists, sprinkled his face and neck with cold water from the drinking supply, and were soon rewarded by his return to consciousness. He smiled weakly and fell sound asleep. No war in the universe could have wakened him then, so we lifted him to his feet--rather I should say, we guided his practically floating body--and strapped him in George's hammock, preparing for the homeward journey. Though dangling from the straps in a position that would be vertical were we on earth, he slept like a baby. George took the controls in Hart's place and the professor and I returned to our accustomed supports. The return trip was considerably slower, as George did not wish to push the _Pioneer_ to its limit as had been necessary when coming out to meet the enemy, nor was he able to keep control of the ship against a too-rapid acceleration. Consequently, the rate of acceleration was much lower and we were not nearly as uncomfortable as on the outgoing trip. Thus, nearly ten hours were required for the return. And Hart slept through it all. * * * * * In order to make best use of the small amount of fuel still in the cylinders, George circled the earth five times before we entered the upper limits of the atmosphere, the circles becoming of smaller diameter at each revolution and the speed of the ship proportionately reduced. An occasional discharge from one of the forward rocket tubes assisted materially in the deceleration, yet, when we slipped into level five, our speed was so great that the temperature of the cabin rose alarmingly, due to the friction of the air against the hull of the vessel. It was necessary to use the last remaining ounce of fuel to reduce the velocity to a safe value. A long glide to earth was then our only means of landing and, since we were over the Gulf of Mexico at the time, we had no recourse other than landing in the State of Texas. Passing over Galveston in level three, we found that the Humble oil fields and a great section of the surrounding country had been the center of one of the enemy bombardments. All was blackness and ruin for many miles between this point and Houston. At Houston Airport we landed, unheralded but welcome. The lower levels were once more filled with traffic, and one of the southern route transcontinental liners had just made its stop at this point. The arrival of the _Pioneer_ was thus witnessed by an unusually large crowd, and, when the news was spread to the city, their numbers increased with all the rapidity made possible by the various means of transportation from the city. So it was that Hart Jones, after we finally succeeded in awakening him and getting him to his feet, was hailed by a veritable multitude as the greatest hero of all time. The demonstrations become so enthusiastic that police reserves, hastily summoned from the city, were helpless in their attempts to keep the crowd in order. * * * * * It was with greatest difficulty that Hart was finally extricated from the clutches of the mob and conveyed to the new Rice Hotel in Houston, where it was necessary to obtain medical attention for him immediately. He was in no condition at the time to receive the richly deserved plaudits of the multitude, and, truth to tell, we others from the _Pioneer_ were in much the same shape. To me that night will always be the most terrible of nightmares. My first thought was of my family and, when I had been assigned to a room, I immediately asked the switchboard operator for a long-distance connection to my home in Rutherford. There was complete silence for a minute and I jangled the hook impatiently, my head throbbing with a thousand aches and pains. Then, to my surprise, the voice of the hotel manager greeted me. "Mr. Makely," he said softly, and I thought there was a peculiar ring in his voice, "I think you had better not try to get Rutherford this evening. We are sending the house physician to your room at once and--there are orders from Washington, you know--you are to think of nothing at the present but sleep and a long rest." "Why--why--" I stammered, "can't you see? I must communicate with my family. They must know of my return. I must know if they're safe and well." "I'm sorry, sir," apologized the manager, "Government orders, you know." And he hung up. Something in that soft voice brought to me an inkling of the truth. An icy hand gripped my heart as I heard a knock at the door. With palsied fingers I turned the key and admitted the professor and a kindly-faced elderly gentleman with a small black bag. One look at the professor told me the truth. I seized his two arms in a grip that made him wince. "Tell me! Tell me!" I demanded, "Has anything happened to my family?" "Jack," said the professor slowly, "while we were out there watching Hart destroy the enemy vessel, Rutherford was destroyed!" * * * * * It must be that I frightened him by my answering stare, for he backed away from me in apparent fear. I noticed that the doctor was rummaging in his bag. I know I did not speak, did not cry out, for my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. It seemed I must go mad. The professor still backed away from me; then, wiry little athlete that he was, he sprang directly for my knees in a beautiful football tackle. I remember that point clearly and how I admired his agility at the time. I remember the glint of a small instrument in the doctor's hand. Then all was blackness. Eight days later, they tell me it was, I returned to painful consciousness in a hospital bed. But let me skip the agony of mind I experienced then. Suffice it to say that, when I was able, I set forth for Washington. Hart Jones was there and he had sent for me. But I took little interest in the going; did not even bother to speculate as to the reason for his summons. I had devoured the news during my convalescence and now, more than two weeks after the destruction of the Terror, I knew the extent of the damage wrought upon our earth by those deadly green light pencils we had seen issuing from the huge ring up there in the skies. The horror of it all was fresh in my mind, but my own private horror overshadowed all. * * * * * I was glad that Hart had been so signally honored by the World Peace Board, that he was now the most famous and popular man in the entire world. He deserved it all and more. But what cared I--I who had done least of all to help in his great work--that the Terror had been found where it buried itself in the sand of the Sahara when falling to earth? What cared I that the discoveries made in the excavating of the huge metal ring were of inestimable value to science? It gave me passing satisfaction to note that all of Hart Jones' theories were borne out by the discoveries; that Oradel and his minions were responsible for this terrible war; that the planet they aligned against us was Venus and that more than a hundred thousand of the Venerians had been carried in that weird engine of destruction which had been brought down by Hart. It was interesting to read of the fall of that huge ring; how it was heated to incandescence when it entered our atmosphere at such tremendous velocity; of the tidal waves of concentric billows in the sand that led to its discovery by Egyptian Government planes. The broadcast descriptions and the television views of the stunted and twisted Venerians whose bodies were recovered from the partly consumed wreckage were interesting. But it all left me cold. I had no further interest in life. That the world had escaped an overwhelming disaster was clear, and it gave me a certain pleasure. But for me it might as well have been completely destroyed. Nevertheless, I went to Washington. I felt somehow that I owed it to Hart Jones, the greatest world hero since Lindbergh. I would at least listen to what he had to say. * * * * * A fast plane carried me, a plane chartered by the government. To me it seemed that it crawled, though it was a sixth-level ship, and made the trip in record time. Why I was impatient to reach Washington I do not know, for I was absolutely disinterested in anything that might occur there. It was merely that my nerves were on edge, I suppose, and everything annoyed me. Hart met me at the airport and greeted me like a long-lost brother. He talked incessantly and jumped from one subject to the other with the obvious intention of trying to get my mind off my troubles until we reached his office in the Air Traffic building. On his door there was the legend, "Director of Research," and, when we had entered, I observed that the office was furnished with all the luxury that suited his new position. I dropped into a deeply upholstered chair at the side of his mahogany desk, and, for the space of several minutes, Hart regarded me with concern, speaking not a word. "Jack, old man," he finally ventured. "I can't talk to you of this thing. But it makes me feel very badly to see you take it so hard. There are many things you have to live for, old top, and it is to talk about these that I sent for you." "You mean work?" I asked. "Yes. That is the best thing for us all, in any emergency or under any circumstances whatever. Preston wants you back for one thing, and he authorized me to tell you that the job of office manager is waiting for you at double your former salary." * * * * * My eyes misted at this. Preston was a good old scout! But I could never bear it to return to the old surroundings, even in the city. "No, Hart," I said, "I'd rather be away from New York and from that part of the country. Associations, you know." "I understand," he replied, "and that is just what I had hoped you would decide. Because I have a job for you in the Air Service. A good one, too. "You know there is much reconstruction work to be done on earth. More than forty cities and towns have been wiped out of existence and these must be rebuilt. That will occupy the minds and energies of thousands who have been bereaved as you have. But, in the Air Service, we have a program that I believe will be more to your liking. The log of the _Terror_, in Oradel's handwriting, was found intact, as were a number of manuscripts pertaining to plans of the Venerians. "These misshapen creatures were quite evidently educated by Oradel to a hatred of our world. We have reason to believe that other attacks may follow, for they were obviously intending to migrate here in millions. And, according to records found aboard the _Terror_, they are of advanced scientific accomplishment. We may expect them to construct other vessels similar to the _Terror_ and to come here again. We must be prepared to fight them off, to carry the war to their own planet if necessary. My work is to organize a world fleet of space ships for this purpose, and I'd like you to help me in this. The work will take you all over the world and will keep you too busy to think about--things." It was just like Hart, and I thanked him wordlessly, but from the bottom of my heart. Yes, I would accept his generous offer. Though I was no engineer, I had a knowledge of scientific subjects a little above the average, and I could follow instructions. By George, it was the very thing! Suddenly I grew enthusiastic. * * * * * There was the sound of voices in the outer office, and Hart's secretary entered to announce the arrival of George Boehm and Professor Lindquist. This was great! Chubby George, red-faced and smiling as ever, embraced me with one short arm and pounded me on the back with his other fist in his jovial, joking manner. It was good to have friends like these! The professor held forth his hand timidly. He was thinking of that tackle and the half-Nelson he had used on me while the doctor slipped that needle into my arm back there in Houston. "Don't remove your glasses, Professor," I laughed; "I'm not going to hit you. That was a swell tackle of yours, and you did me a big service down there in the Rice Hotel." He beamed with pleasure and gripped my hand--mightily, for such a little fellow. George was whispering to Hart, and I could see that they were greatly excited over something. "Jack," said Hart, when the professor and I finished talking things over, "George here wants you to take a little trip over to Philly with him. He has something there he wants to show you." I looked from one to the other for signs of a hoax. These two, under normal circumstances, were always up to something. But what I saw in their expressions convinced me that I had better go, and somehow, there rose in my breast a forlorn hope. "All right," I agreed. "Let's go!" * * * * * Once more we four took off together, this time in a speedy little first-level cabin plane of Hart's design, piloted by the irrepressible George. I was brimming with questions, but George kept up such a running fire of small talk that I was unable to get in a single word throughout the short trip to the Quaker City. It was quite evident that something was in the wind. Instead of landing at the airport, George swung across the city and dropped to the roof landing space of a large building which I recognized as the Germantown Hospital. We had no sooner landed when I was rushed from the plane to the penthouse over the elevator shafts. We were soon on the main floor and George went immediately to the desk at the receiving office, where he engaged in earnest conversation with the nurse in charge. "What are you doing--committing me?" I asked, half joking only. For, from the mysterious expression of my friends' faces, I was not sure what to expect. "No," laughed Hart. "George learned of the existence of a patient here who may turn out to be a very good friend of yours." I turned this over in my mind, which did not yet function quite normally. A friend? Why, I had very few that could really be termed good friends outside of those that accompanied me. It could mean but one thing. Possibly one of my children--or even my dear wife--might have escaped somehow. I followed in a daze as a white-capped and gowned nurse led us along the corridor and into a ward where there were dozens of high, white beds. * * * * * Some of the patients were swathed in bandages; some sat up in their beds, reading or just staring; others lay inert and pale. The reek of iodoform pervaded the large room. We stopped at the bedside of one of the staring patients, a young woman who looked unseeingly at our party. Great heavens, it was Marie! A physician stood at the other side of her bed, finger on her pulse. The others drew back as I approached her side, raised her free hand to my lips and spoke to her. "Marie, dear," I asked gently, forcing the lump from my throat as best I could, "don't you know me? It's Jack, Honey." The fixed stare of the great blue eyes shifted in my direction. It seemed that they looked through and past me into some terrible realm where only horror held sway. She drew her hand from my grasp and passed it before those staring, unnatural eyes. There was an audible gulp from George. But the doctor smiled encouragement to me. I tried once more. "Marie," I said, "where are Jim and Jackie?" * * * * * The hand fluttered to her lap, where it lay, blue-veined and pitifully thin. The stare focussed on me, seemed to concentrate. Then the film was gone from the eyes and she saw--she knew me! "Oh, Jack!" she wailed, "I have been away. Don't you know where they are?" My heart nearly stopped at this, but I sat on the edge of the bed and took her in my arms, looking at the doctor for approval. He nodded his head brightly and beckoned to the nurse. "Bring the children," I heard him whisper. My cup was full. But I must be calm for Marie's sake. She had closed her eyes now and great tears coursed down her waxen cheeks. Her body shook with sobs. "She'll recover?" I asked the doctor. "You bet. Just an aggravated case of amnesia. Hasn't eaten. Didn't even know her children. Cured now, but she'll need a few weeks to build up." He snapped shut the lid of his watch. Those succinct sentences were the finest I had ever heard. Marie clung to me like an infant to its mother. Her sobs gradually ceased and she looked into my eyes. Little Jim and Jack had come in and were clamoring for recognition. "Oh, Jack," Marie whispered, "I'm so happy." She relinquished me and turned her attention to the children. I saw that my friends had left and that an orderly was placing screens about us. So I'll close the screen on the remainder of this most happy reunion. * * * * * It was several days before I had the complete story. Being lonesome during my absence when we were preparing for the voyage into space, and not knowing just when I would return, Marie had packed a grip and taken the train for Philadelphia, deciding to spend a few days with her Aunt Margaret, or at least to remain there with the children until I returned. She had boarded the train at Manhattan Transfer at about the time we reached the location of the _Terror_ and the train was just pulling out of the station when there came the first of the new attacks of the enemy. She thought that the pillar of fire rose from the approximate location of Rutherford, but was not sure until they reached Newark, when the news was spread throughout the train by passengers who boarded it there. She worried and cried over the loss of our little home and had worked herself into a state of extreme nervousness and near-hysteria by the time they reached New Brunswick. Then, as the long train left New Brunswick, there was another attack, this one on the town they had just left. The last two cars of the train were blown from the track by the initial concussion, and the remainder of the train brought to a grinding, jerking stop that threw the passengers into a panic. Already hysterical, Marie was in no condition to bear up under the shock, and the loss of memory followed. Jack and Jim clung to her, of course, and were taken to the Germantown Hospital with her when the wreck victims were transferred to that point. She had no identification on her person, and it was by sheerest luck that George, who was visiting a friend in the same hospital, chanced to see her and thought he recognized her. That was all of it, but to me it was more than enough. From the depths of despondency, I rose to the peaks of elation. It was true that we would have to establish a new home, but this would be a joy as never before. Those I had given up as lost were restored to me and I was content. Hart would have to make some changes in the duties of that new job--the world travel was out of the picture. I had had my fill of adventure. Besides, the hot spell was over. [Illustration] The Forgotten Planet _By Sewell Peaslee Wright_ I have been asked to record, plainly and without prejudice, a brief history of the Forgotten Planet. [Sidenote: The authentic account of why cosmic man damned an outlaw world to be, forever, a leper of Space.] That this record, when completed, will be sealed in the archives of the Interplanetary Alliance and remain there, a secret and rather dreadful bit of history, is no concern of mine. I am an old man, well past the century mark, and what disposal is made of my work is of little importance to me. I grow weary of life and living, which is good. The fear of death was lost when our scientists showed us how to live until we grew weary of life. But I am digressing--an old man's failing. [Illustration: "It's nothing. Close the exit; we depart at once."] The Forgotten Planet was not always so named. The name that it once bore had been, as every child knows, stricken from the records, actual and mental, of the Universe. It is well that evil should not be remembered. But in order that this history may be clear in the centuries to come, my record should go back to beginnings. So far as the Universe is concerned, the history of the Forgotten Planet begins with the visit of the first craft ever to span the space between the worlds: the crude, adventuresome _Edorn_, whose name, as well as the names of the nine Zenians who manned her, occupy the highest places in the roll of honor of the Universe. Ame Baove, the commander and historian of the _Edorn_, made but brief comment on his stop at the Forgotten Planet. I shall record it in full: "We came to rest upon the surface of this, the fourth of the planets visited during the first trip of the _Edorn_, eighteen spaces before the height of the sun. We found ourselves surrounded immediately by vast numbers of creatures very different from ourselves, and from their expressions and gestures, we gathered that they were both curious and unfriendly. "Careful analysis of the atmosphere proved it to be sufficiently similar to our own to make it possible for us to again stretch our legs outside the rather cramped quarters of the _Edorn_, and tread the soil of still another world. "No sooner had we emerged, however, than we were angrily beset by the people of this unfriendly planet, and rather than do them injury, we retired immediately, and concluded our brief observations through our ports. "The topography of this planet is similar to our own, save that there are no mountains, and the flora is highly colored almost without exception, and apparently quite largely parasitical in nature. The people are rather short in stature, with hairless heads and high foreheads. Instead of being round or oval, however, the heads of these people rise to a rounded ridge which runs back from a point between and just above the eyes, nearly to the nape of the neck behind. They give evidence of a fair order of intelligence, but are suspicious and unfriendly. From the number and size of the cities we saw, this planet is evidently thickly populated. "We left about sixteen spaces before the height of the sun, and continued towards the fifth and last planet before our return to Zenia." * * * * * This report, quite naturally, caused other explorers in space to hesitate. There were so many friendly, eager worlds to visit, during the years that relations between the planets were being established, that an unfriendly people were ignored. However, from time to time, as space-ships became perfected and more common, parties from many of the more progressive planets did call. Each of them met with the same hostile reception, and at last, shortly after the second War of the Planets, the victorious Alliance sent a fleet of the small but terrible Deuber Spheres, convoyed by four of the largest of the disintegrator ray-ships, to subjugate the Forgotten Planet. Five great cities were destroyed, and the Control City, the seat of the government, was menaced before the surly inhabitants conceded allegiance to the Alliance. Parties of scientists, fabricators, and workmen were then landed, and a dictator was appointed. From all the worlds of the Alliance, instruments and equipment were brought to the Forgotten Planet. A great educational system was planned and executed, the benign and kindly influence of the Alliance made every effort to improve the conditions existing on the Forgotten Planet, and to win the friendship and allegiance of these people. For two centuries the work went on. Two centuries of bloodshed, strife, hate and disturbance. No where else within the known Universe was there ill feeling. The second awful War of the Planets had at last succeeded in teaching the lesson of peace. Two centuries of effort--wasted effort. It was near the end of the second century that my own story begins. Commander at that time of the super-cruiser _Tamon_, a Special Patrol ship of the Alliance, I was not at all surprised to receive orders from the Central Council to report at emergency speed. Special Patrol work in those days, before the advent of the present de-centralized system, was a succession of false starts, hurried recalls, and urgent, emergency orders. * * * * * I obeyed at once. In the Special Patrol service, there is no questioning orders. The planet Earth, from which I sprang, is and always has been proud of the fact that from the very beginning, her men have been picked to command the ships of the Special Patrol. No matter how dangerous, how forlorn and hopeless the mission given to a commander of a Special Patrol ship, history has never recorded that any commander has ever hesitated. That is why our uniform of blue and silver commands the respect that it does even in this day and age of softening and decadence, when men--but again an old man digresses. And perhaps it is not for me to judge. I pointed the blunt nose of the _Tamon_ at Zenia, seat of the Central Council, and in four hours, Earth time, the great craft swept over the gleaming city of the Central Council and settled swiftly to the court before the mighty, columned Hall of the Planets. Four pages of the Council, in their white and scarlet livery, met me and conducted me instantly to a little anteroom behind the great council chamber. There were three men awaiting me there; three men whose faces, at that time, were familiar to every person in the known Universe. Kellen, the oldest of the three, and the spokesman, rose as I entered the room. The others did likewise, as the pages closed the heavy doors behind me. "You are prompt, and that is good," thought Kellen. "I welcome you. Remove now thy menore." I glanced up at him swiftly. This must surely be an important matter, that I was asked to remove my menore band. It will, of course, be understood that at that time we had but a bulky and clumsy instrument to enable us to convey and receive thought; a device consisting of a heavy band of metal, in which were imbedded the necessary instruments and a tiny atomic energy generator, the whole being worn as a circlet or crown upon the head. Wonderingly, I removed my menore, placed it upon the long, dark table around which the three men were standing, and bowed. Each of the three, in turn, lifted their gleaming circlets from their heads, and placed them likewise upon the table before them. * * * * * "You wonder," said Kellen, speaking of course, in the soft and liquid universal language, which is, I understand, still disseminated in our schools, as it should be. "I shall explain as quickly and as briefly as possible. "We have called you here on a dangerous mission. A mission that will require tact and quickness of mind as well as bravery. We have selected you, have called you, because we are agreed that you possess the qualities required. Is it not so?" He glanced at his two companions, and they nodded gravely, solemnly, without speaking. "You are a young man, John Hanson," continued Kellen, "but your record in your service is one of which you can be proud. We trust you--with knowledge that is so secret, so precious, that we must revert to speech in order to convey it; we dare not trust it, even in this protected and guarded place, to the menore's quicker but less discreet communication." He paused for a moment, frowning thoughtfully as though dreading to begin. I waited silently, and at last he spoke again. "There is a world"--and he named a name which I shall not repeat, the name of the Forgotten Planet--"that is a festering sore upon the body of the Universe. As you know, for two centuries we have tried to pass on to these people an understanding of peace and friendship. I believe that nothing has been left undone. The Council and the forces behind it have done everything within their power. And now--" He stopped again, and there was an expression of deepest pain written upon his wise and kindly face. The pause was for but an instant. "And now," he went on firmly, "it is at an end. Our work has been undone. Two centuries of effort--undone. They have risen in revolt, they have killed all those sent by the Alliance of which this Council is the governing body and the mouthpiece, and they have sent us an ultimatum--a threat of war!" "_What?_" * * * * * Kellen nodded his magnificent old head gravely. "I do not wonder that you start," he said heavily. "War! It must not be. It cannot be! And yet, war is what they threaten." "But, sir!" I put in eagerly. I was young and rash in those days. "Who are they, to make war against a united Universe?" "I have visited your planet, Earth," said Kellen, smiling very faintly. "You have a tiny winged insect you call _bee_. Is it not so?" "Yes." "The bee is a tiny thing, of little strength. A man, a little child, might crush one to death between a thumb and finger. But the bee may sting before he is crushed, and the sting may linger on for days, a painful and unpleasant thing. Is that not so?" "I see, sir," I replied, somewhat abashed before the tolerant, kindly wisdom of this great man. "They cannot hope to wage successful war, but they may bring much suffering to others." "Much suffering," nodded Kellen, still gently smiling. "And we are determined that this thing shall not be. Not"--and his face grew gray with a terrible and bitter resolve--"not if we have to bring to bear upon that dark and unwilling world the disintegrating rays of every ship of the Alliance, so that the very shell of the planet shall disappear, and no life ever again shall move upon its surface. "But this," and he seemed to shudder at the thought, "is a terrible and a ruthless thing to even contemplate. We must first try once again to point out to them the folly of their ways. It is with this mission that we would burden you, John Hanson." * * * * * "It is no burden, but an honor, sir," I said quietly. "Youth! Youth!" Kellen chided me gently. "Foolish, yet rather glorious. Let me tell you the rest, and then we shall ask for your reply again. "The news came to us by a small scout ship attached to that unhappy world. It barely made the journey to Jaron, the nearest planet, and crashed so badly, from lack of power, that all save one man were killed. "He, luckily, tore off his menore, and insisted in speech that he be brought here. He was obeyed, and, in a dying condition, was brought to this very chamber." Kellen glanced swiftly, sadly, around the room, as though he could still visualize that scene. "Every agent of the Alliance upon that hateful planet was set upon and killed, following the working out of some gigantic and perfectly executed plan--all save the crew of this one tiny scout ship, which was spared to act as a messenger. "'Tell your great Council,' was the message these people sent to us, 'that here is rebellion. We do not want, nor will we tolerate, your peace. We have learned now that upon other worlds than ours there are great riches. These we shall take. If there is resistance, we have a new and a terrible death to deal. A death that your great scientists will be helpless against; a horrible and irresistable death that will make desolate and devoid of intelligent life any world where we are forced to sow the seeds of ultimate disaster. "'We are not yet ready. If we were, we would not move, for we prefer that your Council have time to think about what is surely to come. If you doubt that we have the power to do what we have threatened to do, send one ship, commanded by a man whose word you will trust, and we will prove to him that these are no empty words.'" * * * * * "That, as nearly as I can remember it," concluded Kellen, "is the message. The man who brought it died almost before he had finished. "That is the message. You are the man we have picked to accept their challenge. Remember, though, that there are but the four of us in this room. There are but four of us who know these things. If you for any reason do not wish to accept this mission, there will be none to judge you, least of all, any one of us, who know best of all the perils." "You say, sir," I said quietly, although my heart was pounding in my throat, and roaring in my ears, "that there would be none to judge me. "Sir, there would be myself. There could be no more merciless judge. I am honored that I have been selected for this task, and I accept the responsibility willingly, gladly. When is it your wish that we should start?" The three presiding members of the Council glanced at each other, faintly smiling, as though they would say, as Kellen had said a short time before: "Youth! Youth!" Yet I believe they were glad and somewhat proud that I had replied as I did. "You may start," said Kellen, "as soon as you can complete the necessary preparations. Detailed instructions will be given you later." He bowed to me, and the others did likewise. Then Kellen picked up his menore and adjusted it. The interview was over. * * * * * "What do you make it?" I asked the observer. He glanced up from his instrument. "Jaron, sir. Three degrees to port; elevation between five and six degrees. Approximate only, of course, sir." "Good enough. Please ask Mr. Barry to hold to his present course. We shall not stop at Jaron." The observer glanced at me curiously, but he was too well disciplined to hesitate or ask questions. "Yes, sir!" he said crisply, and spoke into the microphone beside him. None of us wore menores when on duty, for several reasons. Our instruments were not nearly as perfect as those in use to-day, and verbal orders were clearer and carried more authority than mental instructions. The delicate and powerful electrical and atomic mechanism of our ship interfered with the functioning of the menores, and at that time the old habit of speech was far more firmly entrenched, due to hereditary influence, than it is now. I nodded to the man, and made my way to my own quarters. I wished most heartily that I could talk over my plans with someone, but this had been expressly forbidden. "I realize that you trust your men, and more particularly your officers," Kellen had told me during the course of his parting conversation with me. "I trust them also--yet we must remember that the peace of mind of the Universe is concerned. If news, even a rumor, of this threatened disaster should become known, it is impossible to predict the disturbance it might create. "Say nothing to anyone. It is your problem. You alone should leave the ship when you land; you alone shall hear or see the evidence they have to present, and you alone shall bring word of it to us. That is the wish of the Council." "Then it is my wish," I had said, and so it had been settled. * * * * * Aft, in the crew's quarters, a gong sounded sharply: the signal for changing watches, and the beginning of a sleep period. I glanced at the remote control dials that glowed behind their glass panel on one side of my room. From the registered attraction of Jaron, at our present speed, we should be passing her within, according to Earth time, about two hours. That meant that their outer patrols might be seeking our business, and I touched Barry's attention button, and spoke into the microphone beside my bunk. "Mr. Barry? I am turning in for a little sleep. Before you turn over the watch to Eitel, will you see that the nose rays are set for the Special Patrol code signal for this enar. We shall be close to Jaron shortly." "Yes, sir! Any other orders?" "No. Keep her on her present course. I shall take the watch from Mr. Eitel." Since there have been changes since those days, and will undoubtedly be others in the future, it might be well to make clear, in a document such is this, that at this period, all ships of the Special Patrol Service identified themselves by means of invisible rays flashed in certain sequences, from the two nose, or forward, projectors. These code signals were changed every enar, a period of time arbitrarily set by the Council; about eighteen days, as time is measured on the Earth, and divided into ten periods, as at present, known as enarens. These were further divided into enaros, thus giving us a time-reckoning system for use in space, corresponding roughly to the months, days and hours of the Earth. I retired, but not to sleep. Sleep would not come. I knew, of course, that if curious outer patrol ships from Jaron did investigate us, they would be able to detect our invisible ray code signal, and thus satisfy themselves that we were on the Council's business. There would be no difficulty on that score. But what I should do after landing upon the rebellious sphere, I had not the slightest idea. * * * * * "Be stern, indifferent to their threats," Kellen, had counseled me, "but do everything within your power to make them see the folly of their attitude. Do not threaten them, for they are a surly people and you might precipitate matters. Swallow your pride if you must; remember that yours is a gigantic responsibility, and upon the information you bring us may depend the salvation of millions. I am convinced that they are not--you have a word in your language that fits exactly. Not pretending ... what is the word?" "Bluffing?" I had supplied in English, smiling. "Right! Bluffing. It is a very descriptive word. I am sure they are not bluffing." I was sure of it also. They knew the power of the Alliance; they had been made to feel it more than once. A bluff would have been a foolish thing, and these people were not fools. In some lines of research they were extraordinarily brilliant. But what could their new, terrible weapon be? Rays we had; at least half a dozen rays of destruction; the terrible dehydrating ray of the Deuber Spheres, the disintegrating ray that dated back before Ame Baove and his first voyage into space, the concentrated ultra-violet ray that struck men down in fiery torment.... No, it could hardly be a new ray that was their boasted weapon. What, then? Electricity had even then been exhausted of its possibilities. Atomic energy had been released, harnessed, and directed. Yet it would take fabulous time and expense to make these machines of destruction do what they claimed they would do. Still pondering the problem, I did fall at last into a fitful travesty of sleep. * * * * * I was glad when the soft clamor of the bell aft announced the next change of watch. I rose, cleared the cobwebs from my brain with an icy shower, and made my way directly to the navigating room. "Everything tidy, sir," said Eitel, my second officer, and a Zenian. He was thin and very dark, like all Zenians, and had the high, effeminate voice of that people. But he was cool and fearless and had the uncanny cerebration of his kind; I trusted him as completely as I trusted Barry, my first officer, who, like myself, was a native of Earth. "Will you take over?" "Yes," I nodded, glancing at the twin charts beneath the ground glass top of the control table. "Get what sleep you can the next few enaros. Presently I shall want every man on duty and at his station." He glanced at me curiously, as the observer had done, but saluted and left with only a brief, "Yes, sir!" I returned the salute and turned my attention again to the charts. The navigating room of an interplanetary ship is without doubt unfamiliar ground to most, so it might be well for me to say that such ships have, for the most part, twin charts, showing progress in two dimensions; to use land terms, lateral and vertical. These charts are really no more than large sheets of ground glass, ruled in both directions with fine black lines, representing all relatively close heavenly bodies by green lights of varying sizes. The ship itself is represented by a red spark and the whole is, of course, entirely automatic in action, the instruments comprising the chart being operated by super-radio reflexes. * * * * * Jaron, the charts showed me at a glance, was now far behind. Almost directly above--it is necessary to resort to these unscientific terms to make my meaning clear--was the tiny world Elon, home of the friendly but impossibly dull winged people, the only ones in the known Universe. I was there but once, and found them almost laughably like our common dragon-flies on Earth; dragon-flies that grow some seven feet long, and with gauzy wings of amazing strength. Directly ahead, on both charts, was a brilliantly glowing sphere of green--our destination. I made some rapid mental calculations, studying the few fine black lines between the red spark that was our ship, and the nearest edge of the great green sphere. I glanced at our speed indicator and the attraction meter. The little red slide that moved around the rim of the attraction meter was squarely at the top, showing that the attraction was from straight ahead; the great black hand was nearly a third of the way around the face. We were very close; two hours would bring us into the atmospheric envelope. In less than two hours and a half, we would be in the Control City of what is now called the Forgotten Planet! I glanced forward, through the thick glass partitions, into the operating room. Three men stood there, watching intently; they too, were wondering why we visited the unfriendly world. The planet itself loomed up straight ahead, a great half-circle, its curved rim sharp and bright against the empty blackness of space; the chord ragged and blurred. In two hours ... I turned away and began a restless pacing. * * * * * An hour went by; an hour and a half. I pressed the attention button to the operating room, and gave orders to reduce our speed by half. We were very close to the outer fringe of the atmospheric envelope. Then, keeping my eye on the big surface-temperature gauge, with its stubby red hand, I resumed my nervous pacing. Slowly the thick red hand of the surface-temperature gauge began to move; slowly, and then more rapidly, until the eyes could catch its creeping. "Reduce to atmospheric speed," I ordered curtly, and glanced down through a side port at one end of the long navigating room. We were, at the moment, directly above the twilight belt. To my right, as I looked down, I could see a portion of the glistening antarctic ice cap. Here and there were the great flat lakes, almost seas, of the planet. Our geographies of the Universe to-day do not show the topography of the Forgotten Planet: I might say, therefore, that the entire sphere was land area, with numerous great lakes embedded in its surface, together with many broad, very crooked rivers. As Ame Baove had reported, there were no mountains, and no high land. "Altitude constant," I ordered. "Port three degrees. Stand by for further orders." The earth seemed to whirl slowly beneath us. Great cities drifted astern, and I compared the scene below me with the great maps I took from our chart-case. The Control City should be just beyond the visible rim; well in the daylight area. "Port five degrees," I said, and pressed the attention button to Barry's quarters. "Mr. Barry, please call all men to quarters, including the off-duty watch, and then report to the navigating room. Mr. Eitel will be under my direct orders. We shall descend within the next few minutes." "Very well, sir." I pressed the attention button to Eitel's room. "Mr. Eitel, please pick ten of your best men and have them report at the forward exit. Await me, with the men, at that place. I shall be with you as soon as I turn the command over to Mr. Barry. We are descending immediately." "Right, sir!" said Eitel. * * * * * I turned from the microphone to find that Barry had just entered the navigating room. "We will descend into the Great Court of the Control City, Mr. Barry," I said. "I have a mission here. I am sorry, but these are the only instructions I can leave you. "I do not know how long I shall be gone from the ship, but if I do not return within three hours, depart without me, and report directly to Kellen of the Council. To him, and no other. Tell him, verbally, what took place. Should there be any concerted action against the _Tamon_, use your own judgment as to the action to be taken, remembering that the safety of the ship and its crew, and the report of the Council, are infinitely more important than my personal welfare. Is that clear?" "Yes, sir. Too damned clear." I smiled and shook my head. "Don't worry," I said lightly. "I'll be back well within the appointed time." "I hope so. But there's something wrong as hell here. I'm talking now as man to man; not to my commanding officer. I've been watching below, and I have seen at least two spots where large numbers of our ships have been destroyed. The remaining ships bear their own damned emblem where the crest of the Alliance should be--and was. What does it mean?" "It means," I said slowly, "that I shall have to rely upon every man and officer to forget himself and myself, and obey orders without hesitation and without flinching. The orders are not mine, but direct from the Council itself." I held out my hand to him--an ancient Earth gesture of greeting, good-will and farewell--and he shook it vigorously. "God go with you," he said softly, and with a little nod of thanks I turned and quickly left the room. * * * * * Eitel, with his ten men, were waiting for me at the forward exit. The men fell back a few paces and came to attention; Eitel saluted smartly. "We are ready, sir. What are your orders?" "You are to guard this opening. Under no circumstances is anyone to enter save myself. I shall be gone not longer than three hours; if I am not back within that time, Mr. Barry has his orders. The exit will be sealed, and the _Tamon_ will depart immediately, without me." "Yes, sir. You will pardon me, but I gather that your mission is a dangerous one. May I not accompany you?" I shook my head. "I shall need you here." "But, sir, they are very excited and angry; I have been watching them from the observation ports. And there is a vast crowd of them around the ship." "I had expected that. I thank you for your concern, but I must go alone. Those are the orders. Will you unseal the exit?" His "Yes, sir!" was brisk and efficient, but there was a worried frown on his features as he unlocked and released the switch that opened the exit. The huge plug of metal, some ten feet in diameter, revolved swiftly and noiselessly, backing slowly in its fine threads into the interior of the ship, gripped by the ponderous gimbals which, as the last threads disengaged, swung the mighty disc to one side, like the door of some great safe. "Remember your orders," I smiled, and with a little gesture to convey an assurance which I certainly did not feel, I strode through the circular opening out into the crowd. The heavy glass secondary door shot down behind me, and I was in the hands of the enemy. * * * * * The first thing I observed was that my menore, which I had picked up on my way to the exit, was not functioning. Not a person in all that vast multitude wore a menore; the five black-robed dignitaries who marched to meet me wore none. Nothing could have showed more clearly that I was in for trouble. To invite a visitor, as Kellen had done, to remove his menore first, was, of course, a polite and courteous thing to do if one wished to communicate by speech; to remove the menore before greeting a visitor wearing one, was a tacit admission of rank enmity; a confession that one's thoughts were to be concealed. My first impulse was to snatch off my own instrument and fling it in the solemn, ugly faces of the nearest of the five dignataries; I remembered Kellen's warning just in time. Quietly, I removed the metal circlet and tucked it under my arm, bowing slightly to the committee of five as I did so. "I am Ja Ben," said the first of the five, with an evil grin. "You are the representative of the Council that we commanded to appear?" "I am John Hanson, commander of the ship _Tamon_ of the Special Patrol Service. I am here to represent the Central Council," I replied with dignity. "As we commanded," grinned Ja Ben. "That is good. Follow us and you shall have the evidence you were promised." Ja Ben led the way with two of his black-robed followers. The other two fell in behind me. A virtual prisoner, I marched between them, through the vast crowd that made way grudgingly to let us pass. * * * * * I have seen the people of most of the planets of the known Universe. Many of them, to Earth notions, are odd. But these people, so much like us in many respects, were strangely repulsive. Their heads, as Ame Baove had recorded, were not round like ours, but possessed a high bony crest that ran from between their lashless, browless eyes, down to the very nape of their necks. Their skin, even that covering their hairless heads, was a dull and papery white, like parchment, and their eyes were abnormally small, and nearly round. A hateful, ugly people, perpetually scowling, snarling; their very voices resembled more the growl of wild beasts than the speech of intelligent beings. Ja Ben led the way straight to the low but vast building of dun-colored stone that I knew was the administration building of the Control City. We marched up the broad, crowded steps, through the muttering, jeering multitude into the building itself. The guards at the doors stood aside to let us through and the crowd at last was left behind. A swift, cylindrical elevator shot us upward, into a great glass-walled laboratory, built like a sort of penthouse on the roof. Ja Ben walked quickly across the room towards a long, glass-topped table; the other four closed in on me silently but suggestively. "That is unnecessary," I said quietly. "See, I am unarmed and completely in your power. I am here as an ambassador of the Central Council, not as a warrior." "Which is as well for you," grinned Ja Ben. "What I have to show you, you can see quickly, and then depart." From a great cabinet in one corner of the room he took a shining cylinder of dark red metal, and held it up before him, stroking its sleek sides with an affectionate hand. * * * * * "Here it is," he said, chuckling. "The secret of our power. In here, safely imprisoned now, but capable of being released at our command, is death for every living thing upon any planet we choose to destroy." He replaced the great cylinder in the cabinet, and picked up in its stead a tiny vial of the same metal, no larger than my little finger, and not so long. "Here," he said, turning again towards me, "is the means of proving our power to you. Come closer!" With my bodyguard of four watching every move, I approached. Ja Ben selected a large hollow hemisphere of crystal glass and placed it upon a smooth sheet of flat glass. Next he picked a few blossoms from a bowl that stood, incongruously enough, on the table, and threw them under the glass hemisphere. "Flora," he grinned. Hurrying to the other end of the room, he reached into a large flat metal cage and brought forth three small rodent like animals, natives of that world. These he also tossed carelessly under the glass. "Fauna," he grunted, and picked up the tiny metal vial. One end of the vial unscrewed. He turned the cap gently, carefully, a strained, anxious look upon his face. My four guards watched him breathlessly, fearfully. * * * * * The cap came loose at last, disclosing the end of the tube, sealed with a grayish substance that looked like wax. Very quickly Ja Ben rolled the little cylinder under the glass hemisphere, and picked up a beaker that had been bubbling gently on an electric plate close by. Swiftly he poured the thick contents of the beaker around the base of the glass bell. The stuff hardened almost instantly, forming an air-tight seal between the glass hemisphere and the flat plate of glass upon which it rested. Then, with an evil, triumphant smile, Ja Ben looked up. "_Flora_," he repeated. "_Fauna._ And _death_. Watch! The little metal cylinder is plugged still, but in a moment that plug will disappear--simply a volatile solid, you understand. It is going rapidly ... rapidly ... it is almost gone now! Watch ... In an instant now ... _ah!_" I saw the gray substance that stopped the entrance of the little metal vial disappear. The rodents ran around and over it, trying to find a crevice by which they might escape. The flowers, bright and beautiful, lay untidily on the bottom of the glass prison. Then, just as the last vestige of the gray plug vanished; an amazing, a terrible thing happened. At the mouth of the tiny metal vial a greenish cloud appeared. I call it a cloud, but it was not that. It was solid, and it spread in every direction, sending out little needles that lashed about and ran together into a solid mass while millions of little needles reached out swiftly. One of these little needles touched a scurrying animal. Instantly the tiny brute stiffened, and from his entire body the greenish needles spread swiftly. One of the flowers turned suddenly thick and pulpy with the soft green mass, then another, another of the rodents ... _God!_ In the space of two heart beats, the entire hemisphere was filled with the green mass, that still moved and writhed and seemed to press against the glass sides as though the urge to expand was insistent, imperative.... * * * * * "What is it?" I whispered, still staring at the thing. "_Death!_" grunted Ja Ben, thrusting his hateful face close to mine, his tiny round eyes, with their lashless lids glinting. "Death, my friend. Go and tell your great Council of this death that we have created for every planet that will not obey us. "We have gone back into the history of dealing death and have come back with a death such as the Universe has never known before! "Here is a rapacious, deadly fungus we have been two centuries in developing. The spores contained in that tiny metal tube would be invisible to the naked eye--and yet given but a little time to grow, with air and vegetation and flesh to feed upon, and even that small capsule would wipe out a world. And in the cabinet,"--he pointed grinning triumphantly--"we have, ready for instant use, enough of the spores of this deadly fungas to wipe out all the worlds of your great Alliance. "To wipe them out utterly!" he repeated, his voice shaking with a sort of frenzy now. "Every living thing upon their faces, wrapped in that thin, hungry green stuff you see there under that glass. All life wiped out; made uninhabitable so long as the Universe shall endure. And we--_we_ shall be rulers, unquestioned, of that Universe. Tell your doddering Council _that_!" He leaned back against the table, panting with hate. "I shall tell them all I have seen; all you have said," I nodded. "You believe we have the power to do all this?" "I do--God help me, and the Universe," I said solemnly. * * * * * There was no doubt in my mind. I could see all too clearly how well their plans had been laid; how quickly this hellish growth would strangle all life, once its spores began to develop. The only possible chance was to get back to the Council and make my report, with all possible speed, so that every available armed ship of the universe might concentrate here, and wipe out these people before they had time to-- "I know what you are thinking, my friend," broke in Ja Ben mockingly. "You might as well have worn the menore! You would have the ships of the Alliance destroy us before we have time to act. We had foreseen that, and have provided for the possibility. "As soon as you leave here, ships, provided with many tubes like the one just used for our little demonstration, will be dispersed in every direction. We shall be in constant communication with those ships, and at the least sign of hostility, they will be ordered to depart and spread their death upon every world they can reach. Some of them you may be able to locate and eliminate; a number of them are certain to elude capture in infinite space--and if only one, one lone ship, should escape, the doom of the Alliance and millions upon millions of people will be pronounced. "I warn you, it will be better, much better, to bow to our wishes, and pay us the tribute we shall demand. Any attempt at resistance will precipitate certain disaster for your Council and all the worlds the Council governs." "At least, we would wipe you out first," I said hoarsely. "True," nodded Ja Ben. "But the vengeance of our ships would be a terrible thing! You would not dare to take the chance!" I stood there, staring at him in a sort of daze. What he had said was so true; terribly, damnably true. If only-- * * * * * There was but one chance I could see, and desperate as it was, I took it. Whirling the heavy metal ring of my menore in my hand, I sprang towards the table. If I could break the sealed glass hemisphere, and loose the fungus upon its creators; deal to them the doom they had planned for the universe, then perhaps all might yet be well. Ja Ben understood instantly what was in my mind. He and his four aides leaped between me and the table, their tiny round eyes blazing with anger. I struck one of the four viciously with the menore, and with a gasp he fell back and slumped to the floor. Before I could break through the opening, however, Ja Ben struck me full in the face with his mighty fist; a blow that sent me, dazed and reeling, into a corner of the room. I brought up with a crash against the cabinet there, groped wildly in an effort to steady myself, and fell to the floor. Almost before I struck, all four of them were upon me. They hammered me viciously, shouted at me, cursed me in the universal tongue, but I paid no heed. I pretended to be unconscious, but my heart was beating high with sudden, glorious hope, and in my brain a terrible, merciless plan was forming. When I had groped against the cabinet in an effort to regain my balance, my fingers had closed upon one of the little metal vials. As I fell, I covered that hand with my body and hastily hid the tiny tube in a deep pocket of my blue and silver Service uniform. * * * * * Slowly, after a few seconds, I opened my eyes and looked up at them, helplessly. "Go, now!" snarled Ja Ben, dragging me to my feet. "Go, and tell your Council we are more than a match for you--and for them." He thrust me, reeling, towards his three assistants. "Take him to his ship, and send aid for Ife Rance, here." He glanced at the still unconscious figure of the victim of my menore, and then turned to me with a last warning. "Remember, one thing more, my friend: you have disintegrator ray equipment upon your ship. You have the little atomic bombs that won for the Alliance the Second War of the Planets. I know that. But if you make the slightest effort to use them, I shall dispatch a supply of the green death to our ships, and they will depart upon their missions at once. You would take upon yourself a terrible responsibility by making the smallest hostile move. "Go, now--and when you return, bring with you members of your great Council who will have the power to hear our demands, and see that they are obeyed. And do not keep us waiting over long, for we are an impatient race." He bowed, mockingly, and passed his left hand swiftly before his face, his people's sign of parting. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, and, hemmed in by my three black-robed conductors, was hurried down the elevator and back through the jeering mob to my ship. * * * * * The glass secondary door shot up to permit me to enter, and Eitel gripped my shoulder anxiously, his eyes smoldering angrily. "You're hurt, sir!" he said in his odd, high-pitched voice, staring into my bruised face. "What--" "It's nothing," I assured him. "Close the exit immediately; we depart at once." "Yes, sir!" He closed the switch, and the great threaded plug swung gently on its gimbals and began to revolve, swiftly and silently. A little bell sounded sharply, and the great door ceased its motion. Eitel locked the switch and returned the key to his pocket. "Good. All men are at their stations?" I asked briskly. "Yes, sir! All except these ten, detailed to guard the exit." "Have them report to their regular stations. Issue orders to the ray operators that they are to instantly, and without further orders, destroy any ship that may leave the surface of this planet. Have every atomic bomb crew ready for an instant and concentrated offensive directed at the Control City, but command them not to act under any circumstances unless I give the order. Is that clear, Mr. Eitel?" "Yes, sir!" I nodded, and turned away, making my way immediately to the navigating room. "Mr. Barry," I said quickly and gravely, "I believe that the fate of the known Universe depends upon us at this moment. We will ascend vertically, at once--slowly--until we are just outside the envelope, maintaining only sufficient horizontal motion to keep us directly over the Control City. Will you give the necessary orders?" "Immediately, sir!" He pressed the attention button to the operating room and spoke swiftly into the microphone; before he completed the order I had left. * * * * * We were already ascending when I reached the port forward atomic bomb station. The man in charge, a Zenian, saluted with automatic precision and awaited orders. "You have a bomb in readiness?" I asked, returning the salute. "Those were my orders, sir." "Correct. Remove it, please." I waited impatiently while the crew removed the bomb from the releasing trap. It was withdrawn at last; a fish-shaped affair, very much like the ancient airplane bombs save that it was no larger than my two fists, placed one upon the other, and that it had four silvery wires running along its sides, from rounded nose to pointed tail, held at a distance from the body by a series of insulating struts. "Now," I said, "how quickly can you put another object in the trap, re-seal the opening, and release the object?" "While the Commander counts ten with reasonable speed," said the Zenian with pride. "We won first honors in the Special Patrol Service contests at the last Examination, the Commander may remember." "I do remember. That is why I selected you for this duty." With hands that trembled a little, I think, I drew forth the little vial of gleaming red metal, while the bombing crew watched me curiously. "I shall unscrew the cap from this little vial," I explained, "and drop it immediately into the releasing trap. Re-seal the trap and release this object as quickly as it is possible to do so. If you can better the time you made to win the honors at the Examination--in God's name, do so!" "Yes, sir!" replied the Zenian. He gave brisk orders to his crew, and each of the three men sprang alertly into position. * * * * * As quickly as I could, I turned off the cap of the little metal vial and dropped it into the trap. The heavy plug, a tiny duplicate of the exit door, clicked shut upon it and spun, whining gently, into the opening. Something clicked sharply, and one of the crew dropped a bar into place. As it shot home, the Zenian in command of the crew pulled the release plunger. "Done, sir!" he said proudly. I did not reply. My eye fixed upon the observation tube that was following the tiny missile to the ground. The Control City was directly below us. I lost sight of the vial almost instantly, but the indicating cross-hairs showed me exactly where the vial would strike; at a point approximately half way between the edge of the city and the great squat pile of the administrating building, with its gleaming glass penthouse--the laboratory in which, only a few minutes before, I had witnessed the demonstration of the death which awaited the Universe. "Excellent!" I exclaimed. "Smartly done, men!" I turned and hurried to the navigating room, where the most powerful of our television discs was located. The disc was not as perfect as those we have to-day; it was hooded to keep out exterior light, which is not necessary with the later instruments, and it was more unwieldy. However, it did its work, and did it well, in the hands of an experienced operator. With only a nod to Barry, I turned the range band to maximum, and brought it swiftly to bear upon that portion of the city in which the little vial had fallen. As I drew the focusing lever towards me, the scene leaped at me through the clear, glowing glass disc. * * * * * Froth! Green, billowing froth that grew and boiled and spread unceasingly. In places it reached high into the air, and it moved with an eager, inner life that was somehow terrible and revolting. I moved the range hand back, and the view seemed to drop away from me swiftly. I could see the whole city now. All one side of it was covered with the spreading green stain that moved and flowed so swiftly. Thousands of tiny black figures were running in the streets, crowding away from the awful danger that menaced them. The green patch spread more swiftly always. When I had first seen it, the edges were advancing as rapidly as a man could run; now they were fairly racing, and the speed grew constantly. A ship, two of them, three of them came darting from somewhere, towards the administration building, with its glass cupola. I held my breath as the deep, sudden humming from the _Tamon_ told me that our rays were busy. Would they-- One of the enemy ships disappeared suddenly in a little cloud of dirty, heavy dust that settled swiftly. Another ... and the third. Three little streaks of dust, falling, falling.... A fourth ship, and a fifth came rushing up, their sides faintly glowing from the speed they had made. The green flood, thick and insistent, was racing up and over the administration building now. It reached the roof, ran swiftly.... The fourth ship shattered into dust. The fifth settled swiftly--and then that ship also disappeared, together with a corner of the building. Then the thick green stuff flowed over the whole building and there was nothing to be seen there but a mound of soft, flowing, gray-green stuff that rushed on now with the swiftness of the wind. * * * * * I looked up, into Barry's face. "You're ill!" he said quickly. "Is there anything I can do, sir?" "Yes," I said, forming the words with difficulty. "Give orders to ascend at emergency speed!" For once my first officer hesitated. He glanced at the attraction meter and then turned to me again, wondering. "At this height, sir, emergency speed will mean dangerous heating of the surface; perhaps--" "I want it white hot, Mr. Barry. She is built to stand it. Emergency speed, please--immediately!" "Right, sir!" he said briskly, and gave the order. I felt my weight increase as the order was obeyed; gradually the familiar, uncomfortable feeling left me. Silently, Barry and I watched the big surface temperature gauge as it started to move. The heat inside became uncomfortable, grew intense. The sweat poured from us. In the operating room forward, I could see the men casting quick, wondering glances up at us through the heavy glass partition that lay between. The thick, stubby red hand of the surface temperature gauge moved slowly but steadily towards the heavy red line that marked the temperature at which the outer shell of our hull would become incandescent. The hand was within three or four degrees of that mark when I gave Barry the order to arrest our motion. When he had given the order, I turned to him and motioned towards the television disc. "Look," I said. * * * * * He looked, and when at last he tore his face away from the hood, he seemed ten years older. "What is it?" he asked in a choked whisper. "Why--they're being wiped out; the whole of that world--" "True. And some of the seeds of that terrible death might have drifted upward, and found a lodging place upon the surface of our ship. That is why I ordered the emergency speed while we were still within the atmospheric envelope, Barry. To burn away that contamination, if it existed. Now we are safe, unless--" I pressed the attention button to the station of the chief of the ray operators. "Your report," I ordered. "Nine ships disintegrated, sir," he replied instantly. "Five before the city was destroyed, four later." "You are certain that none escaped?" "Positive, sir." "Very good." I turned to Barry, smiling. "Point her nose for Zenia, Mr. Barry," I said. "As soon as it is feasible, resume emergency speed. There are some very anxious gentlemen there awaiting our report, and I dare not convey it except in person." "Yes, sir!" said Barry crisply. * * * * * This, then, is the history of the Forgotten Planet. On the charts of the Universe it appears as an unnamed world. No ship is permitted to pass close enough to it so that its attraction is greater than that of the nearest other mass. A permanent outpost of fixed-station ships, with headquarters upon Jaron, the closest world, is maintained by the Council. There are millions of people who might be greatly disturbed if they knew of this potential menace that lurks in the midst of our Universe, but they do not know. The wisdom of the Council made certain of that. But, in order that in the ages to come there might be a record of this matter, I have been asked to prepare this document for the sealed archives of the Alliance. It has been a pleasant task; I have relived, for a little time, a part of my youth. The work is done, now, and that is well. I am an old man, and weary. Sometimes I wish I might live to see the wonders that the next generation or so will witness, but my years are heavy upon me. My work is done. * * * * * ASTOUNDING STORIES _Appears on Newsstands_ THE FIRST THURSDAY IN EACH MONTH * * * * * [Illustration: "_And I would have been the greatest man in the world._"] The Power and the Glory _By Charles W. Diffin_ There were papers on the desk, a litter of papers scrawled over, in the careless writing of indifferent students, with the symbols of chemistry and long mathematical computations. The man at the desk pushed them aside to rest his lean, lined face on one thin hand. The other arm, ending at the wrist, was on the desk before him. [Sidenote: Sadly, sternly, the old professor reveals to his brilliant pupil the greater path to glory.] Students of a great university had long since ceased to speculate about the missing hand. The result of an experiment, they knew--a hand that was a mass of lifeless cells, amputated quickly that the living arm might be saved--but that was some several years ago, ancient history to those who came and went through Professor Eddinger's class room. And now Professor Eddinger was weary--weary and old, he told himself--as he closed his eyes to shut out the sight of the interminable papers and the stubby wrist that had ended forever his experiments and the delicate manipulations which only he could do. He reached slowly for a buzzing phone, but his eyes brightened at the voice that came to him. "I've got it--I've got it!" The words were almost incoherent. "This is Avery, Professor--Avery! You must come at once. You will share in it; I owe it all to you ... you will be the first to see ... I am sending a taxi for you--" Professor Eddinger's tired eyes crinkled to a smile. Enthusiasm like this was rare among his youngsters. But Avery--with the face of a poet, a dreamer's eyes and the mind of a scientist--good boy, Avery!--a long time since he had seen him--had him in his own laboratory for two years.... "What's this all about?" he asked. "No--no!" said a voice; "I can't tell you--it is too big--greater than the induction motor--greater than the electric light--it is the greatest thing in the world. The taxi should be there now--you must come--" A knock at the office door where a voice said, "Car for Professor Eddinger," confirmed the excited words. "I'll come," said the Professor, "right away." * * * * * He pondered, as the car whirled him across the city, on what this greatest thing in the world might be. And he hoped with gentle skepticism that the enthusiasm was warranted. A young man opened the car door as they stopped. His face was flushed, Eddinger noted, hair pushed back in disarray, his shirt torn open at the throat. "Wait here," he told the driver and took the Professor by the arm to hurry him into a dilapidated building. "Not much of a laboratory," he said, "but we'll have better, you and I; we'll have better--" The room seemed bare with its meager equipment, but it was neat, as became the best student of Professor Eddinger. Rows of reagent bottles stood on the shelves, but the tables were a litter of misplaced instruments and broken glassware where trembling hands had fumbled in heedless excitement. "Glad to see you again, Avery." The gentle voice of Professor Eddinger had lost its tired tone. "It's been two years you've been working, I judge. Now what is this great discovery, boy? What have you found?" The younger man, in whose face the color came and went, and whose eyes were shining from dark hollows that marked long days and sleepless nights, still clung to the other's arm. "It's real," he said; "it's great! It means fortune and fame, and you're in on that, Professor. The old master," he said and clapped a hand affectionately upon a thin shoulder; "I owe it all to you. And now I have--I have learned.... No, you shall see for yourself. Wait--" * * * * * He crossed quickly to a table. On it was an apparatus; the eyes of the older man widened as he saw it. It was intricate--a maze of tubing. There was a glass bulb above--the generator of a cathode ray, obviously--and electro-magnets below and on each side. Beneath was a crude sphere of heavy lead--a retort, it might be--and from this there passed two massive, insulated cables. The understanding eyes of the Professor followed them, one to a terminal on a great insulating block upon the floor, the other to a similarly protected terminal of carbon some feet above it in the air. The trembling fingers of the young man made some few adjustments, then he left the instrument to take his place by an electric switch. "Stand back," he warned, and closed the switch. There was a gentle hissing from within glass tubes, the faint glow of a blue-green light. And that was all, until--with a crash like the ripping crackle of lightning, a white flame arced between the terminals of the heavy cables. It hissed ceaselessly through the air where now the tang of ozone was apparent. The carbon blocks glowed with a brilliant incandescence when the flame ceased with the motion of a hand where Avery pulled a switch. The man's voice was quiet now. "You do not know, yet, what you have seen, but there was a tremendous potential there--an amperage I can't measure with my limited facilities." He waved a deprecating hand about the ill-furnished laboratory. "But you have seen--" His voice trembled and failed at the forming of the words. "--The disintegration of the atom," said Professor Eddinger quietly, "and the release of power unlimited. Did you use thorium?" he inquired. The other looked at him in amazement. Then: "I should have known you would understand," he said humbly. "And you know what it means"--again his voice rose--"power without end to do the work of the world--great vessels driven a lifetime on a mere ounce of matter--a revolution in transportation--in living...." He paused. "The liberation of mankind," he added, and his voice was reverent. "This will do the work of the world: it will make a new heaven and a new earth! Oh, I have dreamed dreams," he exclaimed, "I have seen visions. And it has been given to me--me!--to liberate man from the curse of Adam ... the sweat of his brow.... I can't realize it even yet. I--I am not worthy...." * * * * * He raised his eyes slowly in the silence to gaze in wondering astonishment at the older man. There was no answering light, no exaltation on the lined face. Only sadness in the tired eyes that looked at him and through him as if focused upon something in a dim future--or past. "Don't you see?" asked the wondering man. "The freedom of men--the liberation of a race. No more poverty, no endless, grinding labor." His young eyes, too, were looking into the future, a future of blinding light. "Culture," he said, "instead of heart-breaking toil, a chance to grow mentally, spiritually; it is another world, a new life--" And again he asked: "Surely, you see?" "I see," said the other; "I see--plainly." "The new world," said Avery. "It--it dazzles me; it rings like music in my ears." "I see no new world," was the slow response. The young face was plainly perplexed. "Don't you believe?" he stammered. "After you have seen ... I thought you would have the vision, would help me emancipate the world, save it--" His voice failed. "Men have a way of crucifying their saviors," said the tired voice. The inventor was suddenly indignant. "You are blind," he said harshly; "it is too big for you. And I would have had you stand beside me in the great work.... I shall announce it alone.... There will be laboratories--enormous!--and factories. My invention will be perfected, simplified, compressed. A generator will be made--thousands of horsepower to do the work of a city, free thousands of men--made so small you can hold it in one hand." The sensitive face was proudly alight, proud and a trifle arrogant. The exaltation of his coming power was strong upon him. "Yes," said Professor Eddinger, "in one hand." And he raised his right arm that he might see where the end of a sleeve was empty. "I am sorry," said the inventor abruptly; "I didn't mean ... but you will excuse me now; there is so much to be done--" But the thin figure of Professor Eddinger had crossed to the far table to examine the apparatus there. "Crude," he said beneath his breath, "crude--but efficient!" * * * * * In the silence a rat had appeared in the distant corner. The Professor nodded as he saw it. The animal stopped as the man's eyes came upon it; then sat squirrellike on one of the shelves as it ate a crumb of food. Some morsel from a hurried lunch of Avery's, the Professor reflected--poor Avery! Yes, there was much to be done. He spoke as much to himself as to the man who was now beside him. "It enters here," he said and peered downward toward the lead bulb. He placed a finger on the side of the metal. "About here, I should think.... Have you a drill? And a bit of quartz?" The inventor's eyes were puzzled, but the assurance of his old instructor claimed obedience. He produced a small drill and a fragment like broken glass. And he started visibly as the one hand worked awkwardly to make a small hole in the side of the lead. But he withdrew his own restraining hand, and he watched in mystified silence while the quartz was fitted to make a tiny window and the thin figure stooped to sight as if aiming the opening toward a far corner where a brown rat sat upright in earnest munching of a dry crust. The Professor drew Avery with him as he retreated noiselessly from the instrument. "Will you close the switch," he whispered. The young man hesitated, bewildered, at this unexpected demonstration, and the Professor himself reached with his one hand for the black lever. Again the arc crashed into life, to hold for a brief instant until Professor Eddinger opened the switch. "Well," demanded Avery, "what's all the show? Do you think you are teaching me anything--about my own instrument?" There was hurt pride and jealous resentment in his voice. "See," said Professor Eddinger quietly. And his one thin hand pointed to a far shelf, where, in the shadow, was a huddle of brown fur and a bit of crust. It fell as they watched, and the "plop" of the soft body upon the floor sounded loud in the silent room. "The law of compensation," said Professor Eddinger. "Two sides to the medal! Darkness and light--good and evil--life ... and death!" * * * * * The young man was stammering. "What do you mean?--a death ray evolved?" And: "What of it?" he demanded; "what of it? What's that got to do with it?" "A death ray," the other agreed. "You have dreamed, Avery--one must in order to create--but it is only a dream. You dreamed of life--a fuller life--for the world, but you would have given them, as you have just seen, death." The face of Avery was white as wax; his eyes glared savagely from dark hollows. "A rat!" he protested. "You have killed a rat ... and you say--you say--" He raised one trembling hand to his lips to hold them from forming the unspeakable words. "A rat," said the Professor--"or a man ... or a million men." "We will control it." "All men will have it--the best and the worst ... and there is no defence." "It will free the world--" "It will destroy it." "No!"--and the white-faced man was shouting now--"you don't understand--you can't see--" The lean figure of the scientist straightened to its full height. His eyes met those of the younger man, silent now before him, but Avery knew the eyes never saw him; they were looking far off, following the wings of thought. In the stillness the man's words came harsh and commanding-- "Do you see the cities," he said, "crumbling to ruins under the cold stars? The fields? They are rank with wild growth, torn and gullied by the waters; a desolate land where animals prowl. And the people--the people!--wandering bands, lower, as the years drag on, than the beasts themselves; the children dying, forgotten, in the forgotten lands; a people to whom the progress of our civilization is one with the ages past, for whom there is again the slow, toiling road toward the light. "And somewhere, perhaps, a conquering race, the most brutal and callous of mankind, rioting in their sense of power and dragging themselves down to oblivion...." * * * * * His gaze came slowly back to the room and the figure of the man still fighting for his dream. "They would not," said Avery hoarsely; "they'd use it for good." "Would they?" asked Professor Eddinger. He spoke simply as one stating simple facts. "I love my fellow men," he said, "and I killed them in thousands in the last war--I, and my science, and my poison gas." The figure of Avery slumped suddenly upon a chair; his face was buried in his hands. "And I would have been," he groaned, "the greatest man in the world." "You shall be greater," said the Professor, "though only we shall know it--you and I.... You will save the world--from itself." The figure, bowed and sunken in the chair, made no move; the man was heedless of the kindly hand upon his shoulder. His voice, when he spoke, was that of one afar off, speaking out of a great loneliness. "You don't understand," he said dully; "you can't--" But Professor Eddinger, a cog in the wheels of a great educational machine, glanced at the watch on his wrist. Again his thin shoulders were stooped, his voice tired. "My classes," he said. "I must be going...." * * * * * In the gathering dusk Professor Eddinger locked carefully the door of his office. He crossed beyond his desk and fumbled with his one hand for his keys. There was a cabinet to be opened, and he stared long in the dim light at the object he withdrew. He looked approvingly at the exquisite workmanship of an instrument where a generator of the cathode ray and an intricate maze of tubing surmounted electro-magnets and a round lead bulb. There were terminals for attaching heavy cables; it was a beautiful thing.... His useless arm moved to bring an imaginary hand before the window of quartz in the lead sphere. "Power," he whispered and repeated Avery's words; "power, to build a city--or destroy a civilization ... and I hold it in one hand." He replaced the apparatus in the safety of its case. "The saviors of mankind!" he said, and his tone was harsh and bitter. But a smile, whimsical, kindly, crinkled his tired eyes as he turned to his desk and its usual litter of examination papers. "It is something, Avery," he whispered to that distant man, "to belong in so distinguished a group." A STAR THAT BREATHES Beta Cephei, the mysterious Milky Way star which expands and contracts as though it were breathing, at last has a biography. A summary of known facts concerning the star, interpreted in the light of recent observations at the Lick Observatory at the University of California was completed recently by H. S. Mendenhall, graduate student. Mendenhall's interpretations were said to lend weight to the theory that Beta Cephei is contracting and expanding once in every four and one-half hours. This is such a terrific rate of speed from a terrestrial point of view that it appears to be moving toward and away from the earth at a velocity reaching a maximum of about nine and one-half miles per second. Beta Cephei is a variable star in the Constellation Cepheus. It is best visible in the northern sky during July or August. Its distance from the earth is estimated roughly at 2,000,000,000,000,000 miles, and Mendenhall estimates its diameter at almost 2,000,000 miles, more than twice that of the sun. In addition to the apparent velocity caused by contraction and expansion of its surface five times a day, Beta Cephei seems to have another motion. This was said by Mendenhall to be a rotation around some other star in a period of 20 years. Velocity of this rotation is something over three miles a second. Variable stars are of particular interest to astronomers because the light from them pulsates regularly, flaring and dying as though fuel were replenished at regular intervals. The rate of this pulsation has been found to be a measure to the candle power of the star. Its distance then can be determined by contrasting its actual candle power with the apparent magnitude as seen from the earth. [Illustration: _"Oh my God!" gasped Bell. He'd known this man before. A Secret Service man--one of the seven who had vanished._] Murder Madness PART THREE OF A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Murray Leinster_ Seven United States Secret Service men have disappeared in South America. Another is found--a screaming homicidal maniac. It is rumored that they are victims of a diabolical poison which produces "murder madness." [Sidenote: More and more South Americans are stricken with the horrible "murder madness" that lies in The Master's fearful poison. And Bell is their one last hope as he fights to stem the swiftly rising tide of a continent's utter enslavement.] Charley Bell of the "Trade"--a secret service organization which does not officially exist--discovers that a sinister system of slavery is flourishing in South America, headed by a mysterious man known only as The Master. This slavery is accomplished by means of a poison which causes its victims to experience a horrible writhing of the hands, followed by a madness to do murder, two weeks after it is taken. The victims get relief only with an antidote supplied through Ribiera, The Master's Chief Deputy; but in the antidote there is more of the poison, which again in two weeks will take effect. And so it is that a person who once receives the poison is forever enslaved. Ribiera kidnaps Paula Canalejas, daughter of a Brazilian cabinet minister who, on becoming a victim, has killed himself, preferring death to "murder madness." Bell rescues Paula, and they flee from Ribiera in a plane. They find The Master's hidden jungle stronghold, and Bell destroys it with a bomb attack from the air. As he is getting away his motor quits. Paula jumps for her life, and shortly afterwards Bell follows, drifting straight down towards his enemies below. CHAPTER XI Bell was falling head-first when the 'chute opened, and the jerk was terrific, the more so as he had counted not the customary ten, but fifteen before pulling out the ring. But very suddenly he seemed to be floating down with an amazing gentleness, with the ruddy blossom of a parachute swaying against a background of lustrous stars very far indeed over his head. Below him were masses of smoke and at least one huge dancing mass of flame, where the storage tank for airplane gas had exploded. It was unlikely in the extreme, he saw now, that anyone under that canopy of smoke could look up to see plane or parachute against the sky. Clumsily enough, dangling as he was, Bell twisted about to look for Paula. Sheer panic came to him before he saw her a little above him but a long distance off. She looked horribly alone with the glare of the fires upon her parachute, and smoke that trailed away into darkness below her. She was farther from the flames than Bell, too. The light upon her was dimmer. And Bell cursed that he had stayed in the plane to make sure it would dive clear of her before he stepped off himself. * * * * * The glow on the blossom of silk above her faded out. The sky still glared behind, but a thick and acrid fog enveloped Bell as he descended. Still straining his eyes hopelessly, he crossed his feet and waited. Branches reached up and lashed at him. Vines scraped against his sides. He was hurled against a tree trunk with stunning force, and rebounded, and swung clear, and then dangled halfway between earth and the jungle roof. It was minutes before his head cleared, and then he felt at once despairing and a fool. Dangling in his parachute harness when Paula needed him. The light in the sky behind him penetrated even the jungle growth as a faint luminosity. Presently he writhed to a position in which he could strike a match. A thick, matted mass of climbing vines swung from the upper branches not a yard from his fingertips. Bell cursed again, frantically, and clutched at it wildly. Presently his absurd kickings set him to swaying. He redoubled his efforts and increased the arc in which he swung. But it was a long time before his fingers closed upon leaves which came away in his grasp, and longer still before he caught hold of a wrist-thick liana which oozed sticky sap upon his hands. But he clung desperately, and presently got his whole weight on it. He unsnapped the parachute and partly let himself down, partly slid, and partly tumbled to the solid earth below. He had barely reached it when, muffled and many times reechoed among the tree trunks, he heard two shots. He cursed, and sprang toward the sound, plunging headlong into underbrush that strove to tear the flesh from his bones. He fought madly, savagely, fiercely. * * * * * He heard two more shots. He fought the jungle in the darkness like a madman, ploughing insanely through masses of creepers that should have been parted by a machete, and which would have been much more easily slipped through by separating them, but which he strove to penetrate by sheer strength. And then he heard two shots again. Bell stopped short and swore disgustedly. "What a fool I am!" he growled. "She's telling me where she is, and I--" He drew one of the weapons that seemed to bulge in every pocket of his flying suit and fired two shots in the air in reply. A single one answered him. From that time Bell moved more sanely. The jungle is not designed, apparently, for men to travel in. It is assuredly not intended for them to travel in by night, and especially it is not planned, by whoever planned it, for a man to penetrate without either machete or lights. As nearly as he could estimate it afterward, it took Bell over an hour to cover one mile in the blackness under the jungle roof. Once he blundered into fire-ants. They were somnolent in the darkness, but one hand stung as if in white-hot metal as he went on. And thorns tore at him. The heavy flying suit protected him somewhat, but after the first hundred yards he blundered on almost blindly, with his arms across his face, stopping now and then to try to orient himself. Three times he fired in the air, and three times an answering shot came instantly, to guide him. * * * * * And then a voice called in the blackness, and he ploughed toward it, and it called again, and again, and at last he struck a match with trembling fingers and saw her, dangling as he had dangled, some fifteen feet from the ground. She smiled waveringly, with a little gasp of relief, and he heard something go slithering away, very furtively. She clung to him desperately when he had gotten her down to solid earth. But he was savage. "Those shots--though I'm glad you fired them--may have been a tip-off to the town. We've got to keep moving, Paula." Her breath was coming quickly. "They could trail us, Charles. By daylight we might not leave signs, but forcing our way through the night...." "Right, as usual," admitted Bell. "How about shells? Did you use all you had?" "Nearly. But I was afraid, Charles." Bell felt in his pockets. Half a box. Perhaps twenty-five shells. With the town nearby and almost certainly having heard their signals to each other. Black rage invaded Bell. They would be hunted for, of course. Dogs, perhaps, would trail them. And the thing would end when they were at bay, ringed about by The Master's slaves, with twenty-five shells only to expend. The dim little glow in the sky between the jungle leaves kept up. It was bright, and slowly growing brighter. There was a sudden flickering and even the jungle grew light for an instant. A few seconds later there was a heavy concussion. "Something else went up then," growled Bell. "It's some satisfaction, anyway, to know I did a lot of damage." * * * * * And then, quite abruptly, there was an obscure murmuring sound. It grew stronger, and stronger still. If Bell had been aloft, he would have seen the planes from The Master's hangars being rushed out of their shelters. One of the long row of buildings had caught. And the plateau of Cuyaba is very, very far from civilization. Tools, and even dynamos and engines, could be brought toilsomely to it, but the task would be terrific. Buildings would be made from materials on the spot, even the shelters for the planes. It would be much more practical to carry the parts for a saw mill and saw out the lumber on the spot than to attempt to freight roofing materials and the like to Cuyaba. So that the structures Bell had seen in the wing lights' glow were of wood, and inflammable. The powerhouse that lighted the landing field was already ablaze. The smaller shacks of the laborers perhaps would not be burnt down, but the elaborate depot for communication by plane and wireless was rapidly being destroyed. The reserve of gasoline had gone up in smoke almost at the beginning, and in spreading out had extended the disaster to nearly all the compact nerve-center of the whole conspiracy. Presently the droning noise was tumultuous. Every plane in a condition to fly was out on the landing field, now brightly lighted by the burning buildings all about. There was frantic, hectic activity everywhere. The secretaries of The Master were rescuing what records they could, and growing cold with terror. In the confusion of spreading flames and the noise of roaring conflagrations the stopping of the motor up aloft had passed unnoticed. In the headquarters of The Master there was panic. An attack had been made upon The Master. A person who could not be one of his slaves had found his stronghold and attacked it terribly. And if one man knew that location and dared attack it, then.... * * * * * The hold of The Master upon all his slaves was based on one fact and its corollary. The fact was, that those who had been given his poison would go murder mad without its antidote. The corollary was that those who obeyed him would be given that antidote and be safe. True, the antidote was but a temporary one, and mixed with it for administration was a further dosage of the poison itself. But the whole power of The Master was based on his slaves' belief that as long as they obeyed him abjectly there would be no failure of the antidote's supply. And Bell had given that belief a sudden and horrible shock. Orders came from one frightened man, who cursed much more from terror than from rage. Ribiera had advised him. To do him justice, Ribiera felt less fear than most. Nephew to The Master, and destined successor to The Master's power, Ribiera dared not revolt, but at least he had little fear of punishment for incompetence. It was his advice that set the many aircraft motors warming up. It was his direction that assorted out the brainwork staff. And Ribiera himself curtly took control, indifferently abandoned the enslaved workers to the madness that would come upon them, and took wing in the last of a stream of roaring things that swept upward above the smoke and flame and vanished in the sky. * * * * * Bell and Paula were huddled in between the buttress roots of a jungle giant, protected on three sides by the monster uprearings of solid wood, and Bell was absorbedly feeding a tiny smudge fire. The smoke was thick and choking, but it did keep off the plague of insects which make jungle travel much less than the romantic adventure it is pictured. Bell heard the heavy, thunderous buzzing from the town change timbre suddenly. A single note of it grew loud and soared overhead. He stared up instinctively, but saw nothing but leaves and branches and many climbing things above him, dimly lighted by the smoky little blaze. The roaring overhead went on, and dimmed. A second roaring came from the town and rose to a monstrous growling and diminished. A third did likewise, and a fourth. At stated, even intervals the planes at headquarters of The Master took off from the landing field, ringed about with blazing buildings, and plunged through the darkness in a straight line. The steadier droning from the town grew lighter as the jungles echoed for many miles with the sounds of aircraft motors overhead. * * * * * At last a single plane rose upward and thundered over the jungle roof. It went away, and away.... The town was silent, then, and only a faint and dwindling murmur came from the line of aircraft headed south. "They've deserted the town, by God!" said Bell, his eyes gleaming. "Scared off!" "And--and we--" said Paula, gazing at him. "You can bet that every man who could crowd into a plane did so," said Bell grimly. "Those that couldn't, if they have any brains, will be trying to make it some other way to where they can subject themselves to one of The Master's deputies and have a little longer time of sanity. The poor devils that are left--well--they'll be _camaradas_, _peons_, laborers, without the intelligence to know what they can do. They'll wait patiently for their masters to come back. And presently their hands will writhe.... And the town will be a hell." "Then they won't be looking for us?" Bell considered. And suddenly he laughed. "If the fire has burned out before dawn," he said coldly, "I'll go looking for them. It's going to be cold-blooded, and it's going to be rather pitiful, I think, but there's nothing else to do. You try to get some rest. You'll need it." And for all the rest of the dark hours he crouched in the little angle formed by the roots of the forest giant, and kept a thickly smoking little fire going, and listened to the noises of the jungle all about him. * * * * * It was more than a mile back to the town. It was nearer two. But it was vastly less difficult to force a way through the thick growths by daylight, even though then it was not easy. With machetes, of course, Bell and Paula would have had no trouble, but theirs had been left in the plane. Bell made a huge club and battered openings by sheer strength where it was necessary. Sweat streamed down his face before he had covered five hundred yards, but then something occurred to him and he went more easily. If there were any of the intelligent class of The Master's subjects left in the little settlement, he wanted to allow time enough for them to start their flight. He wanted to find the place empty of all but laborers, who would be accustomed to obey any man who spoke arrogantly and in the manner of a deputy of The Master. Yet he did not want to wait too long. Panic spreads among the _camarada_ class as swiftly as among more intelligent folk, and it is even more blind and hysterical. It was nearly eleven o'clock before they emerged upon a cleared field where brightly blooming plants grew hugely. Bell regarded these grimly. "These," he observed, "will be The Master's stock." Paula touched his arm. "I have heard," she said, and shuddered, "that the men who gather the plants that go to make the poisons of the _Indios_ do not--do not dare to sleep near the fresh-picked plants. They say that the odor is dangerous, even the perfume of the blossoms." "Very probably," said Bell. "I wish I could destroy the damned things. But since we can't, why, we'll go around the edge of the field." * * * * * He went upwind, skirting the edge of the planted things. A path showed, winding over half-heartedly cleared ground. He followed it, with Paula close behind him. Smoke still curled heavily upward from the heaps of ashes which he reached first of all. He looked upon them with an unpleasant satisfaction. He had to pick his way between still smoking heaps of embers to reach the huts about which laborers stood listlessly, not working because not ordered to work, not yet frightened because not yet realizing fully the catastrophe that had come upon them. He was moving toward them, deliberately adopting an air of suppressed rage, when a voice called whiningly. "Senhor! Senhor!" And then pleadingly, in Portuguese, "I have news for The Master! I have news for The Master!" Bell jerked his head about. Bars of thick wood, cemented into heavy timbers at top and bottom. A building that was solid wall on three sides, and the fourth was bars. A white man in it, unshaven, haggard, ragged, filthy. And on the floor of the cage.... There had been another such cage on a _fazenda_ back toward Rio. Bell had looked into it, and had shot the gibbering Thing that had been its occupant, as an act of pure mercy. But this man had been through horrors and yet was sane. "Don't look," said Bell sharply to Paula. He went close. The figure pressed against the bars, whining. And suddenly it stopped its fawning. "The devil!" said the white man in the cage. "What in hell are you doing here, Bell? Has that fiend caught you too?" * * * * * "Oh, my God!" gasped Bell. He went white with a cold rage. He'd known this man before. A Secret Service man--one of the seven who had vanished. "How's this place opened? I'll let you out." "It may be dangerous," said the white man with a ghastly grin. "I'm one of The Master's little victims. I've been trying to work a little game in hopes of getting within arm's reach of him. How'd you get here? Has he got you too?" "I burned the damned town last night," snarled Bell, "and crashed up after it. Where's that door?" He found it, a solid mass of planks with a log bar fitted in such a way that it could not possibly be opened from within. He dragged it wide. The white man came out, holding to his self-control with an obvious effort. "I want to dance and sing because I'm out of there," he told Bell queerly, "but I know you've done me no good. I've been fed The Master's little medicine. I've been in that cage for weeks." Bell, quivering with rage, handed him a revolver. "I'm going to get some supplies and stuff and try to make it to civilization," he said shortly. "If you want to help...." "Hell, yes," said the white man drearily. "I might as well. Number One-Fourteen was here.... He's The Master's little pet, now. Turned traitor. Report it, if you ever get out." "No," said Bell briefly. "He didn't turn." He told in a very few words of the finding of the body of a man who had fallen or been thrown from a plane into the jungle. * * * * * They were moving toward the rows of still standing shacks, then, and faces were beginning to turn toward them, and there was a little stir of apathetic puzzlement at sight of the white man who had been set free. That white man looked suddenly at Paula, and then at Bell. "I've been turned into a beast," he said wryly. "Look here, Bell. There were as many as ten and fifteen of us in that cage at one time--men the deputies sent up for the purpose. We were allowed to go mad, one and two at a time, for the edification of the populace, to keep the _camaradas_ scared. And those of us who weren't going mad just then used to have to band together and kill them. That cage has been the most awful hell on earth that any devil ever contrived. They put three women in there once, with their hands already writhing.... Ugh!..." Bell's face was cold and hard is if carved from marble. "I haven't lived through it," said the white man harshly, "by being soft. And I've got less than no time to live--sane, anyhow. I was thinking of shooting you in the back, because the young lady--" He laughed as Bell's revolver muzzle stirred. "I'm telling you," said the white man in ghastly merriment, "because I thought--I thought One-Fourteen had set me the example of ditching the Service for his own life. But now it's different." * * * * * He pointed. "There's a launch in that house, with one of these outboard motors. It was used to keep up communication with the boat gangs that sweat the heavy supplies up the river. It'll float in three inches of water, and you can pole it where the water's too shallow to let the propeller turn. This rabble will mob you if you try to take it, because it'll have taken them just about this long to realize that they're deserted. They'll think you are a deputy, at least, to have dared release me. I'm going to convince them of it, and use this gun to give you a start. I give you two hours. It ought to be enough. And then...." Bell nodded. "I'm not Service," he said curtly, "but I'll see it's known." The white man laughed again. "'Some sigh for the glories of this world, and some for a prophet's paradise to come,'" he quoted derisively. "I thought I was hard, Bell, but I find I prefer to have my record clean in the Service--where nobody will ever see it--than to take what pleasure I might snatch before I die. Queer, isn't it? Old Omar was wrong. Now watch me bluff, flinging away the cash for credit of doubtful value, and all for the rumble of a distant drum--which will be muted!" * * * * * They were surrounded by swarming, fawning, frightened _camaradas_ who implored the Senhor to tell them if he were a deputy of The Master, and if he were here to make sure nothing evil befell them. They worked for The Master, and they desired nothing save to labor all their lives for The Master, only--only--The Master would allow no evil to befall them? The white man waved his arms grandiloquently. "The Senhor you behold," he proclaimed in the barbarous Portugese of the hinterland of Brazil, "has released me from the cage in which you saw me. He is the deputy of The Master himself, and is enraged because the landing lights on the field were not burning, so that his airplane fell down into the jungle. He bears news of great value from me to The Master, which will make me finally a sub-deputy of The Master. And I have a revolver, as you see, with which I could kill him, but he dares not permit me to die, since I have given him news for The Master. I shall wait here and he will go and send back an airplane with the grace of The Master for me and for all of you." Bell snarled an assent, in the arrogant fashion of the deputies of The Master. He waited furiously while the Service man argued eloquently and fluently. He fingered his revolver suggestively when a wave of panic swept over the swarming mob for no especial reason. And then he watched grimly while the light little metal-bottomed boat was carried to the water's edge and loaded with food, and fuel, and arms, and ammunition, and even mosquito bars. The white man grinned queerly at Bell as he extended his hand in a last handshake. "'I, who am about to die, salute you!'" he said mockingly. "Isn't this a hell of a world, Bell? I'm sure we could design a better one in some ways." * * * * * Bell felt a horrible, a ghastly shock. The hand that gripped his was writhing in his grasp. "Quite so," said the white man. "It started about five minutes ago. In theory, I've about forty-eight hours. Actually, I don't dare wait that long, if I'm to die like a white man. And a lingering vanity insists on that. I hope you get out, Bell.... And if you want to do me a favor,"--he grinned again, mirthlessly--"you might see that The Master and as many of his deputies as you can manage join me in hell at the earliest possible moment. I shan't mind so much if I can watch them." He put his hands quickly in his pockets as the little outboard motor caught and the launch went on down-river. He did not even look after them. The last Bell saw of him he was swaggering back up the little hillside above the river edge, surrounded by scared inhabitants of the workmen's shacks, and scoffing in a superior fashion at their fears. CHAPTER XII It took Bell just eight days to reach the Paraguay, and those eight days were like an age-long nightmare of toil and discomfort and more than a little danger. The launch was headed downstream, of course, and with the current behind it, it made good time. But the distances of Brazil are infinite, and the jungles of Brazil are malevolent, and the route down the Rio Laurenço was designed by the architect of hell. _Raudales_ lay in wait to destroy the little boat. Insects swarmed about to destroy its voyagers. And the jungle loomed above them, passively malignant, and waited for them to die. And as if physical sufferings were not enough, Bell saw Paula wilt and grow pale. All the way down the river they passed little clearings at nearly equal distances. And men came trembling out of the little houses upon those _fazendas_ and fawned upon the Senhor who was in the launch that had come from up-river and so must be in the service of The Master himself. The clearings and the tiny houses had been placed upon the river for the service of the terribly laboring boat gangs who brought the heavier supplies up the river to The Master's central depot. Men at these clearings had been enslaved and ordered to remain at their posts, serving all those upon the business of The Master. They fawned abjectly upon Bell, because he was of _os gentes_ and so presumably was empowered, as The Master had empowered his more intelligent subjects, to exact the most degraded of submission from all beneath him in the horrible conspiracy. Once, indeed, Bell was humbly implored by a panic stricken man to administer "the grace of The Master" to a moody and irritable child of twelve or so. "She sees the red spots, Senhor. It is the first sign. And I have served The Master faithfully...." * * * * * And Bell could do nothing. He went on savagely. And once he passed a gang of _camaradas_ laboring to get heavily loaded dugouts up a fiendish _raudal_. They had ropes out and were hauling at them from the bank, while some of their number were breast-deep in the rushing water, pushing the dugouts against the stream. "They're headed for the plantation," said Bell grimly, "and they'll need the grace of The Master by the time they get there. And it's abandoned. But if I tell them...." Men with no hope at all are not to be trusted. Not when they are mixtures of three or more races--white and black and red--and steeped in ignorance and superstition and, moreover, long subject to such masters as these men had had. Bell had to think of Paula. He could have landed and haughtily ordered them to float or even carry the light boat to the calmer waters below. They would have obeyed and cringed before him. But he shot the rapids from above, with the little motor roaring past rocks and walls of jungle beside the foaming water, at a speed that chilled his blood. * * * * * Paula said nothing. She was white and listless. Bell, himself, was being preyed upon by a bitter blend of horror and a deep-seated rage that consumed him like a fever. He had fever itself, of course. He was taking, and forcing Paula to take, five grains of quinine a day. It had been included among his stores as a matter of course by those who had loaded his boat. And with the fever working in his brain he found himself holding long, imaginary conversations, in which one part of his brain reproached the other part for having destroyed the plantation of The Master. The laborers upon that plantation had been abandoned to the murder madness because of his deed. The caretakers of the tiny _fazenda_ on the river bank were now ignored. Bell felt himself a murderer because he had caused The Master's deputies to cast them off in a callous indifference to their inevitable fate. He suffered the tortures of the damned, and grew morose and bitter, and could only escape that self torture by coddling his hatred of Ribiera and The Master. He imagined torments to be inflicted upon them which would adequately repay them for their crimes, and racked his feverish brain for memories of the appalling atrocities which can be committed upon the human body without destroying its capacity to suffer. It was not normal. It was not sane. But it filled Bell's mind and somehow kept him from suicide during the horrible passage of the river. He hardly dared speak to Paula. There was a time when he counted the days since he had been a guest at Ribiera's estate outside of Rio, and frenziedly persuaded himself that he saw red spots before his eyes and soon would have the murder madness come upon him. And then he thought of the supplies in Ribiera's plane, in which they had escaped from Rio. They had eaten that food. * * * * * It was almost unconsciously, then, that he saw the narrow water on which the launch floated valiantly grow wider day by day. When at last it debouched suddenly into a vast stream whereon a clumsy steamer plied beneath a self made cloud of smoke, he stared dully at it for minutes before he realized. "Paula," he said suddenly, and listened in amazement to his voice. It was hoarse and harsh and croaking. "Paula, we've made it. This must be the Paraguay." She roused herself and looked about like a person waking from a lethargic sleep. And then her lips quivered, and she tried to speak and could not, and tears fell silently from her eyes, and all at once she was sobbing bitterly. That sign of the terrific strain she had been under served more than anything else to jolt Bell out of his abnormal state of mind. He moved over to her and clumsily put his arm about her, and comforted her as best he could. And she sat sobbing with her head on his shoulder, gasping in a form of hysterical relief, until the engine behind them sputtered, and coughed, and died. When Bell looked, the last drop of gasoline was gone. But the motor had served its purpose. It had run manfully on an almost infinitesimal consumption of gasoline for eight days. It had not missed an explosion save when its wiring was wetted by spray. And now.... * * * * * Bell hauled the engine inboard and got out the oars from under the seats. He got the little boat out to mid-stream, and they floated down until a village of squalid huts appeared on the eastern bank. He landed, there, and with much bargaining and a haughty demeanor disposed of the boat to the skipper of a _batelao_ in exchange for passage down-river as far as Corumba. The rate was outrageously high. But he had little currency with him and dared go no farther on a vessel which carried a boat of The Master's ownership conspicuously towed behind. At Corumba he purchased clothes less obviously of _os gentes_, both for himself and for Paula, and that same afternoon was able to arrange for their passage to Asunción as deck passengers on a river steamer going downstream. It was as two peasants, then, that they rode in sweltering heat amid a swarming and odorous mass of fellow humanity downstream. But it was a curious relief, in some ways. The people about them were gross and unwashed and stupid, but they were human. There was none of that diabolical feeling of terror all about. There were no strained, fear haunted faces upon the deck reserved for deck passengers and other cattle. The talk was ungrammatical and literal and of the earth. The women were stolid-faced and reserved. But when the long rows of hammocks were slung out in the open air, in the casual fashion of sleeping arrangements in the back-country of all South America, it was blessedly peaceful to realize that the folk who snored so lustily were merely human; human animals, it might be, with no thought above their _farinha_ and _feijos_ on the morrow, but human. * * * * * And the second day they passed the old fort at Coimbra, and went on. The passage into Paraguayan territory was signalized by an elaborate customs inspection, and three days later Asunción itself displayed its red-tiled roofs and adobe walls upon the shore. Bell had felt some confidence in his ability to pass muster with his Spanish, though his Portuguese was limited, and it was a shock when the captain of the steamer summoned him to his cabin with a gesture, before the steamer docked. Bell left Paula among the other deck passengers and went with the peasant's air of suspicious humility into the captain's quarters. But the captain's pose of grandeur vanished at once when the door closed. "Señor," said the steamer captain humbly, "I have not spoken to you before. I knew you would not wish it. But tell me, senor! Have you any news of what The Master plans?" Bell's eyes flickered, at the same time that a cold apprehension filled him. "Why do you speak to me of The Master?" he demanded sharply. The steamer captain stammered. The man was plainly frightened at Bell's tone. Bell relaxed, his flash of panic for Paula gone. "I know," said the captain imploringly, "that the great _fazenda_ has been deserted. On my last trip, down, senor, I brought many of the high deputies who had been there. They warned me not to speak, senor, but I saw that you were not what you seemed, and I thought you might be going about to see who obeyed The Master's orders...." * * * * * Bell nodded. "That is my mission," he said curtly. "Do not speak of it further--not even to the deputy in Asunción." The captain stammered again. "But I must see the Señor Francia," he said humbly. "I report to him after every trip, and if he thought that I did not report all that I learn...." "It is my order," snapped Bell angrily. "If he reproaches you, say that one who has orders from The Master himself gave them to you. And do not speak of the destruction of the _fazenda_. I am searching especially for the man who caused it. And--wait! I will take your name, and you shall give me--say--a thousand pesos. I had need of money to bribe a fool I could not waste time on, up-country. It will be returned to you." And again the captain stammered, but Bell stared at him haughtily, and he knelt abjectly before the ship's safe. * * * * * Asunción, as everybody knows, is a city of sixty thousand people, and the capital of a republic which enjoyed the rule of a family of hereditary dictators for sixty years; which rule ended in a war wherein four-fifths of the population was wiped out. And since that beginning it has averaged eight revolutions to Mexico's three, has had the joy of knowing seven separate presidents in five years--none of them elected--and now boasts a population approximately two-thirds illegitimate and full of pride in its intellectual and artistic tastes. Bell and Paula made their way along the cobbled streets away from the river, surrounded by other similarly peasant-seeming folk. Bell told her curtly what had happened with the steamer captain. "It's the devil," he said coldly, "because this whole republic is under The Master's thumb. Except among the peasants we can count on nearly everybody being on the lookout for us, if they so much as suspect we're alive. And they may because I burned their damned _fazenda_. So...." Paula smiled at him, rather wanly. "What are you going to do, Charles?" "Get a boat," said Bell curtly. "One with three or four men, if I can. If I can buy it with the skipper's money, I will. But I can't take you to go bargaining. It would look suspicious." They had reached the central plaza of the town. The market swarmed with brown skinned folk and seemed to overflow with fruits. A man was unconcernedly shoveling oranges out of a cart with a shovel, as if they had been so much coal. A market woman as unconcernedly dropped some of the same golden fruit within a small pen where a piglet awaited a purchaser. To the left, there were rows of unshaded stalls where the infinitely delicate handmade Paraguayan lace was exposed for sale. "I--think," said Paula, "I think I will go in the cathedral. I will be very devout, Charles, and you will find me there when you return. I will be safe there, certainly." * * * * * He walked with her across the crowded plaza. He should have known that your peasant does not stride with head up, but regarding the ground. That a man who works heavily droops his shoulders with weariness at the end of a day. And especially he should have realized that Paraguay is not, strictly speaking, a Latin-American nation. It is Latin-Indian, in which the population graduates very definitely from a sub-stratum of nearly or quite pure Indian race to an aristocracy of nearly or quite pure Spanish descent, and that the color of a man's skin fixes his place in society. Both Bell and Paula were too light of skin for the peasant's clothes they wore. They aroused curiosity at once. If it was not an active curiosity, it was nevertheless curiosity of a sort. But Bell left her in the shadowy, cool interior of the cathedral which seems so pitifully small to be the center of religion for a nation. He saw her move toward one of the little candle-lit niches in the wall and fall quite simply on her knees there. And he moved off, to wander aimlessly down to the river shore and stare about and presently begin a desultory conversation with sleepy boatmen. * * * * * It was three hours and more before he returned to the Cathedral, and Paula was talking to someone. More, talking to a woman in the most discreet of mantilla'd church-going costumes. Paula saw him in the doorway, and uttered a little cry of relief. She came hurrying to him. "Charles! I have found a friend! Isabella Ybarra. We were schoolmates in the United States and she has just come back from Paris! So you see, she cannot--" "I see," said Bell very quietly. Paula was speaking swiftly and very softly. "We went to school together, Charles. I trust her. You must trust her also. There is no danger, this time. Isabella has never even heard of The Master. So you see...." "I see that you need someone you can trust," said Bell grimly. "_I_ found that the captain of the steamer had gone to The Master's deputy here. While I was talking to some boatmen a warning was given to look out for a man and woman, together, who may try to buy a boat. We're described, and only the fact that I was alone kept me from being suspected. Police, soldiers--everybody is looking out for us. Paraguay's under The Master's thumb more completely than any other nation on the continent." The figure to which Paula had been talking was moving slowly toward them. A smiling, brown-eyed face twinkled at them. "You must be Charles!" said a warm and cluckling voice. "Paula has raved, Señor. Now I am going to take her off in my carriage. She is my maid. And you will follow the carriage on foot and I will have the major-domo let you in the servants' entrance, and the three of us will conspire." * * * * * It was incongruous to hear the English of a girl's finishing school from the mantilla'd young woman who beamed mischievously at him. She had the delighted air of one aiding a romance. It was doubly incongruous because of the dark and shadowy Cathedral in which they were, and the raucous noises of the market in the plaza without. Bell had a sense of utter unreality as Isabella's good humored voice went on: "Do you remember, Paula, the time the French teacher caught us in the pantry? I shall feel just like that time." "This is dangerous," said Bell, steadily, "and it is very serious indeed." "Pooh!" said Isabella comfortably. "Paula, you didn't even know I was married! A whole year and a half! And he's a darling, really. I'm the Señora Isabella Ybarra de Zuloaga, if you please! Bow gracefully!" She chuckled. "Jaime came all the way to Rio to meet me last month. I'm wild about him, Paula.... But come on! Follow me humbly, like a nice little _mestizo_ girl who wants to be my maid, and I'll let you ride with the _cochero_ and Charles shall follow behind us." She swept out of the Cathedral with the air of a grande dame suppressing a giggle, and Paula went humbly behind her. And Bell trudged through the dust and the blistering sun while the highly polished carriage jolted over cobble stones and the youthful Señora Isabella Ybarra de Zuloaga beamed blissfully at the universe which did not realize that she was a conspirator, and Paula sat modestly beside the brown skinned _cochero_. * * * * * It was not a long ride nor a long walk, though the sun was insufferable. The capital of Paraguay is not large. It is a sleepy, somnolent little town in which the most pretentious building was begun as the Presidential Palace and wound up as the home of a bank. But there are bullet marks on the façade of the _Museo Nacionál_, and there is still an empty pedestal here and there throughout the city where the heroes of last year's revolution, in bronze, have been pulled down and the heroes of this year's uprising of the people have not yet been set up. Red tiled roofs give the city color, and the varying shades of its populace give it variety, and the fact that below the whiter class of inhabitants _Guarani_ is spoken instead of Spanish adds to the individuality of its effect. But the house into which the carriage turned could have been built in Rio or Buenos Aires without comment on its architecture. It had the outer bleakness of most private homes of South America, but if it was huge and its windows were barred, the patio into which Bell was ushered by a bewildered and suspicious major-domo made up in color and in charm for all that the exterior lacked. A fountain played amid flowers, and macaws and parrots and myriad other caged birds hung in their cages about the colonnade around the court, and Bell found Paula being introduced to a pale young man in the stiff collar and unspeakably formal morning clothes of the South American who is of the upper class. "Jaime," said Isabella, beaming. "And this is Charles, whom Paula is to marry! It is romantic! It is fascinating! And I depend on you to give him clothes so that all our servants won't stare goggle-eyed at him, and I am going to take Paula off at once and dress her! They are our guests! And, Jaime, you must threaten all the servants terribly so they will keep it very secret--that we have two such terrible people with us." * * * * * Paula smiled at Bell, and he saw that she felt utterly safe and wholly at peace. Something was hammering at Bell's brain, warning him, and he could not understand what it was. But he exchanged the decorous limp handshake which is conventional south of Panama, and followed his unsmiling host to rooms where a servant laid out a bewildering assortment of garments. They were all rather formal, the sort of clothing that is held to be fitting for a man of position where Spanish is the official if not the common tongue. His host retired, without words, and Bell came out later to find him sipping moodily at a drink, waiting for him. He wiped his forehead. "Be seated, Señor," he said heavily, "until the ladies join us." He wiped his forehead again and watched somberly while Bell poured out a drink. "Isabella...." He seemed to find it difficult to speak. "She has told me a little, but there has been no time for more than a little: I do not wish to have her tell me too much. She does not understand. She was educated in North America, where customs are different. She demands that I assist you and the senorita--it is the senorita?" Bell stiffened. In all Spanish America the conventions are strict. For a man and woman to travel together, even perforce and for a short distance, automatically damns the woman. "Go on," said Bell grimly. His host was very pale indeed. "She demands that I assist you and the senorita to escape the police and the government. Provided that you do not tell me who you are, I will attempt it. But--" "I wonder," said Bell quietly, "if you have ever seen red spots dancing before your eyes." His host went utterly livid. * * * * * Zuloaga looked down at his hands, as if expecting unguessable things of them. And then he shrugged, and said harshly: "I have, Señor. So you see that Isabella, who does not know, is asking me to risk, not only my life, but her honor." Bell said nothing for a moment. He was a little pale. "And your honor?" he asked quietly. The pallor on the face of the Señor Jaime Zuloaga was horrible. He tried to speak, and could not. He stood up, and managed to say: "So much I will risk, because you have been my guest. Until to-morrow morning you are safe, unless the Señor Francia has his spies within my own house. I--I will attempt, even to procure a boat. But--" Something made Bell turn. The major-domo was moving quickly out of sight. Like a flash Bell was upon him, and like a flash a knife came out. Bell's host gasped. The fact that his servant had spied was more than obvious, and he had spoke treason against The Master. He leaned against the table, sick and trembling and mumbling of despair, while there were crashes in the room into which Bell had plunged, while bodies thrashed about on the floor, and while stertorous breathing grew less, and stopped.... Bell came back, breathing hard. The front of his coat was slashed open. "He's dead," he said harshly. "He'd have reported what you said, so I killed him.... And now we've got to do something with his body." He helped in the horrible task, while his host grew more and more shaken. No other servants came near. And Bell could almost read the thoughts that went through Zuloaga's brain. One servant had spied, to report his treason. And that meant assassination for himself, as the least of punishments, and for his wife.... But there would be no punishment if he went first to the deputy and said that Bell had killed the major-domo. Bell left the house before dusk, desperately determined to steal a craft of some sort, return for Paula, and get away from Asunción before dawn. He returned after an hour. In the morning a man would be found bound and gagged, with five hundred pesos stuffed into his pockets. His boat would have vanished. But there was a commotion before the house where Paula waited fearfully. A carriage stood there, with a company of mounted soldiers about it. Someone was being put into it. As Bell broke into a run toward the house the carriage started up and the soldiers trotted after it. Paula was taken. CHAPTER XIII That night Bell turned burglar. To attempt a rescue of Paula was simply out of the question. He was entirely aware that he would be expected to do just such a thing, and that it would be adequately guarded against. Therefore he prepared for a much more desperate enterprise by burglarizing a bookstore in the particularly neat method in which members of The Trade are instructed. The method was invented by a member of The Trade who was an ex-cabinet maker, and who perished disreputably. He killed a certain courier of a certain foreign government, thereby preventing a minor war and irritating two governments excessively, and was hanged. The method, of course, is simplicity itself. One removes the small nails which hold the molding of a door panel in place. The molding comes out. So does the panel. One enters through the panel, commits one's burglary, and comes out, replacing the molding and the nails with reasonable care. Depending upon the care with which the replacing is done, the means of entrance is more or less undiscoverable. But it is usually used when it is not intended that the burglary ever be discussed. Bell abstracted two books, wrapping paper and twine. He departed, using great care. He walked three miles out of town and to the banks of the Paraguay. There he carefully saturated the pages of both books in water, carefully keeping the bindings from being wetted. Then he tore one book to pieces, saving the leaves and inserting them between the leaves of the other book. Then, with a brazil nut candle for illumination, he began to write. * * * * * You see, when two thoroughly wetted pieces of paper are placed one above the other with a hard surface such as the cover of another book under them, you can write upon the top one with a stick. The writing will show dark against the gray of the saturated paper. You then remove the top sheet and end the writing reproduced on the bottom sheet. And then you can dry the second sheet and find the marking vanished--until it is wetted again. It is, in fact, a method of water-marking paper. And it is the simplest of all methods of invisible writing. Bell wrote grimly for hours. The book he had chosen was an old one, an ancient copy of one of Lope de Vega's plays, and the pages were wrinkled and yellow from age alone. When, by dawn, the last page was dried out, there was no sign that anything other than antiquity had affected the paper. And Bell wrapped it carefully, and addressed it to an elderly senora of literary tastes in San Juan, Porto Rico, and enclosed an affectionate letter to his very dear aunt, and signed it with an entirely improbable name. It was mailed before sunrise, the necessary stamps having been filched from the burglarized bookstore and the price thereof being carefully inserted in the till. Bell had made a complete and painstaking report of every fact he had himself come upon in the matter of The Master and his slaves and appended to it a copy of the report of the dead Secret Service operative Number One-Fourteen. He destroyed that after copying it. And he concluded that since he had been given dismissal by Jamison in Rio, he considered himself at liberty to take whatever steps he saw fit. And since the Senhorina Paula Canalejas had been kidnapped by agents of The Master, he intended to take steps which might possibly bring about her safety, but would almost certainly cause his death. The report should at least be of assistance if the Trade set to work to combat The Master. Bell had no information whatever about that still mysterious and still more horrible person himself. But what he knew about The Master's agents he sent to a lady in Porto Rico who has an astonishingly large number of far ranging nephews. And then Bell got himself adequately shaved, bought a hearty breakfast, and, after one or two heartening drinks, was driven grandly to the residence of the Señor Francia, deputy of The Master for the republic of Paraguay. * * * * * The servants who admitted him gazed blankly when he gave his name. A door was hastily closed behind him. He was ushered into an elaborate reception room and, after an agitated pause, no less than six separate frock-coated persons appeared and pointed large revolvers at him while a seventh searched him exhaustively. Bell submitted amusedly. "And now," he said dryly, "I suppose the Señor Francia will receive me?" There was more agitation. The six men remained; with their weapons pointed at him. The seventh departed, and Bell re-dressed himself in a leisurely fashion. Ten minutes later a slender, dark skinned man with impeccably waxed moustaches entered, regarded Bell with an entirely impersonal interest, took one of the revolvers from one of the six frock-coated gentlemen, and seated himself comfortably. He waved his hand and they filed uneasily from the room. So far, not one word had been spoken. * * * * * Bell retrieved his cigarette case and lighted up with every appearance of ease. "I have come," he said casually, "to request that I be sent to The Master. I believe that he is anxious to meet me." The dark eyes scrutinized him coldly. Then Francia smiled. "_Pero si_," he said negligently, "he is very anxious to see you. I suppose you know what fate awaits you?" His smile was amiable and apparently quite friendly, but Bell shrugged. "I suppose," he said dryly, "he wants to converse with me. I have been his most successful opponent to date, I think." Francia smiled again. It was curious how his smile, which at first seemed so genuine and so friendly, became unspeakably unpleasant on its repetition. "Yes." Francia seemed to debate some matter of no great importance. "You have been very annoying, Señor Bell. The Senhor Ribiera asked that you be sent to him. It was his intention to execute you, privately. He described a rather amusing method to me. And I must confess that you have annoyed me, likewise. Since the Cuyaba plantation was destroyed my subjects have been much upset. They have been frightened, and even stubborn. Only last week"--he smiled pleasantly, and the effect was horrible--"only last week I desired the society of a lady who is my subject. And her husband considered that, since the _fazenda_ was destroyed, The Master would be powerless to extend his grace before long, in any event. So he shot his wife and himself. It annoyed me enough to make me feel that it would be a pleasure to kill you." * * * * * He raised the revolver meditatively. "Well?" said Bell coldly. Francia lowered the weapon and laughed. "Oh, I shall not do it. I think The Master would be displeased. You seem to have the type of courage he most desires in his deputies. And it may yet be that I shall greet you as my fellow deputy or perhaps my fellow viceroy. So I shall send you to him. I would say that you have about an even chance of dying very unpleasantly or of being a deputy. Therefore I offer you such courtesies as I may." Bell puffed a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. "I'm about out of cigarettes," he said mildly. "They shall be supplied. And--er--if you would desire feminine society, I will have some of my pretty subjects...." "No," said Bell bluntly. "I would like to speak to the Senhorina Canalejas, though." Francia chuckled. "She left for Buenos Aires last night. The Senhor Ribiera sent a most impatient message for her to be sent on at once. I regretted it, but he had The Master's authority. I thought her charming, myself." The skin about Bell's knuckles was white. His hands had clenched savagely. "In that event," he said coldly, "the only other courtesy I would ask is that of following her as soon as possible." Francia rose languidly. The revolver dangled by his side, but his grip upon it was firm. He smiled at Bell with the same effect of a horrible, ghastly geniality. "Within the hour, Señor," he said urbanely. "With the guard I shall place over you it is no harm, I am sure, to observe that The Master is at his retreat in Punta Arenas. You will go there to-morrow, as I go to-night." He moved toward the door, and smiled again, and added pleasantly: "The Senhorina was delivered to the Senhor Ribiera this morning." * * * * * Matters moved swiftly after that. A servant brought cigarettes and a tray of liquors--which Bell did not touch. There was the sound of movement, the scurrying, furtive haste which seems always to imply a desperate sort of fear. Bell waited in a terrible calmness, while rage hammered at his temples. Then the clattering of horses' hoofs outside. A carriage was being brought. Soldiers came in and a man beckoned curtly. Bell stuffed his pockets with smokes and followed languidly. He was realizing that there was little pretense of secrecy about the power of The Master's deputy here. Police and soldiers.... But Paraguay, of all the nations of the southern continent, has learned a certain calm realism about governmental matters. The man who has power is obeyed. The man who has not power is not obeyed. Titles are of little importance, though it is the custom for the man with the actual power eventually to assume the official rank of authority. Since the President in Asunción was no more than a figurehead who called anxiously upon the Señor Francia every morning for instructions concerning the management of the nation, Francia indifferently ignored him whenever he chose and gave orders directly. There would be very little surprise and no disorder whatever when The Master proclaimed Paraguay a viceroyalty of his intended empire. * * * * * The carriage went smartly through the cobbled streets with a cavalry escort all about it. An officer sat opposite Bell with his hand on his revolver. "I am receiving at least the honors of royalty," Bell commented coldly to him, in Spanish. "Señor," said the officer harshly, "this is the state in which the deputies of The Master were escorted." He watched Bell heavily, but with the desperate intentness of a man who knows no excuses will be received if his prisoner escapes. Out of the town to a flying field, where a multi-engined plane was warming up. It was one of the ships that had been at The Master's _fazenda_ of Cuyaba, one of the ships that had fled from the burning plantation. Bell was ushered into it with a ceremonious suspicion. Almost immediately he was handcuffed to his seat. Two men took their place behind him. The big ship rolled forward, lifted, steadied, and after a single circling set out to the southeast for Buenos Aires. * * * * * The whole performance had been run off with the smoothly oiled precision of an iron discipline exercised upon men in the grip of deadly fear. "One man, at least," reflected Bell grimly, "has some qualities that fit him for his job." And then, for hour after hour, the big ship went steadily southeast. It flew over Paraguayan territory for two hours, soaring high over the Lago Ypoa and on over the swampy country that extends to the Argentine border. It ignored that border and all customs formalities. It went on, through long hours of flight, while mountains rose before it. It rose over those mountains and passed over the first railroad line--the first real sign of civilization since leaving Asunción--at Mercedes, and reached the Uruguay river where the Mirinjay joins it. It went roaring on down above the valley of the Rio Uruguay for long and tedious hours more. At about noon, lunch was produced. The two men who guarded Bell ate. Then, with drawn revolvers, they unlocked his handcuffs and offered him food. * * * * * He ate, of exactly those foods he had seen them eat. He submitted indifferently to the re-application of his fetters. He had reached a state which was curiously emotionless. If Paula had been turned over to Ribiera that morning, Paula was dead. And just as there is a state of grief which stuns the mind past the realization of its loss, so there is a condition of hatred which leads to an enormous calmness and an unnatural absence of any tremor. Bell had reached that state. The instinct of self-preservation had gone lax. Where a man normally thinks first, if unconsciously, of the protection of his body from injury or pain, Bell had come to think first, and with the same terrible clarity, of the accomplishment of revenge. He would accept The Master's terms, if The Master offered them. He would become The Master's subject, accepting the poison of madness without a qualm. He would act and speak and think as a subject of The Master, until his opportunity came. And then.... His absolute calmness would have deceived most men. It may have deceived his guards. Time passed. The Rio de la Plata spread out widely below the roaring multi-engined plane and the vast expanse of buildings which is Buenos Aires appeared far ahead in the gathering dusk. Little twinkling lights blinked into being upon the water and the earth far away. Then one of the two guards touched Bell on the shoulder. "Señor," he said sharply above the motors' muffled roar, "we shall land. A car will draw up beside the plane. There will be no customs inspection. That has been arranged for. You can have no hope of escape. I ask you if you will go quietly into the car?" "Why not?" asked Bell evenly. "I went to Señor Francia of my own accord." * * * * * The guard leaned back. The city of Buenos Aires spread out below them. The tumbled, congested old business quarter glittered in all its offices, and the broad Avenida de Mayo cut its way as a straight slash of glittering light through the section of the city to eastward. By contrast, from above, the far-flung suburbs seemed dark and somber. The big plane roared above the city, settling slowly; banked steeply and circled upon its farther side, and dipped down toward what seemed an absurdly small area, which sprang into a pinkish glow on their descent. That area spread out as the descent continued, though, and was a wide and level field when the ship flattened out and checked and lumbered to a stop. A glistening black car came swiftly, humming into place alongside almost before the clumsy aircraft ceased to roll. Its door opened. Two men got out and waited. The hangars were quite two hundred yards away, and Bell saw the glitter of weapons held inconspicuously but quite ready. He stepped out of the cabin of the plane with a revolver muzzle pressing into his spine. Other revolver muzzles pressed sharply into his sides as he reached earth. Smiling faintly, he took four steps, clambered up into the glistening black car, and settled down comfortably into the seat. The two men who had waited by the car followed him. The door closed, and Bell was in a padded silence that was acutely uncomfortable for a moment. A dome light glowed brightly, however, and he lighted nearly the last of the cigarettes from Asunción with every appearance of composure as the car started off with a lurch. * * * * * The windows were blank. Thick, upholstered padding covered the spaces where openings should have been, and there was only the muffled vibration of the motor and the occasional curiously distinct noise of a flexing spring. "Just as a matter of curiosity," said Bell mildly, "what is the excuse given on the flying field for this performance? Or is the entire staff subject to The Master?" Two revolvers were bearing steadily upon him and the two men watched him with the unwavering attention of men whose lives depend upon their vigilance. "You, Señor," said one of them without expression or a smile, "are the corpse of a prominent politician who died yesterday at his country home." And then for half an hour or more the car drove swiftly, and stopped, and drove swiftly forward again as if in traffic. Then there were many turns, and then a slow and cautious traverse of a relatively few feet. It stopped, and then the engine vibration ceased. "I advise you, Señor," said the same man who had spoken before, and in the same emotionless voice, "not to have hope of escape in the moment of alighting. We are in an enclosed court and there are two gates locked behind us." Bell shrugged as there was the clatter of a lock operating. The door swung wide. * * * * * He stepped down into a courtyard surrounded by nearly bare walls. It had once been the _patio_ of a private home of some charm. Now, however, it was bleak and empty. A few discouraged flowers grew weedily in one corner. The glow of light in the sky overhead assured Bell that he was in the very heart of Buenos Aires, but only the most subdued of rumbles spoke of the activity and the traffic of the city going on without. "This way," said the man with the expressionless voice. The other man followed. The chauffeur of the car stood aside as if some formality required him neither to start the motor or return to his seat until Bell was clear of the courtyard. Through a heavy timber door. Along a passageway with the odor of neglect. Up stairs which once had been impressive and ornamental. Into a room without windows. "You will have an interview with the Señorita Canalejas in five minutes," said the emotionless voice. The door closed, while Bell found every separate muscle in his body draw taut. And while his brain at first was dazed with incredulous relief, then it went dark with a new and ghastly terror. "They know _yagué_," he heard himself saying coldly, "which makes any person obey any command. They may know other and more hellish ones yet." * * * * * He fought for self control, which meant the ability to conceal absolutely any form of shock that might await him. That one was in store he was certain. He paced grimly the length of the room and back again.... Something on the carpet caught his eye. A bit of string. He stared at it incredulously. The end was tied into a curious and an individual knot, which looked like it might be the pastime of a sailor, and which looked like it ought to be fairly easy to tie. But it was one of those knots which wandering men sometimes tie absent mindedly in the presence of stirring events. It was the recognition-knot of the Trade, one of those signs by which men may know each other in strange and peculiar situations. And there were many other knots tied along the trailing length of the string. It seemed as if some nervous and distraught prisoner in this room might have toyed abstractedly with a bit of cord. Only, Bell drew it through his fingers. Double knot, single knot, double knot.... They spelled out letters in the entirely simple Morse code of the telegrapher, if one noticed. "RBRA GN ON PLA HRE ST TGT J." Your old-time telegrapher uses many abbreviations. Your short-wave fan uses more. Mostly they are made by a simple omission of vowels in normal English words. And when the recognition sign at the beginning was considered, the apparently cryptic letters leaped into meaning. "RiBeRA GoNe ON PauLA HeRe SiT TiGhT Jamison." When the door opened again and a terribly pale Paula was ushered in, Bell gave no sign of surprise. He simply took her in his arms and kissed her, holding her very, very close. CHAPTER XIV Paula remained in the room with Bell for perhaps twenty minutes, and Bell had the feeling of eyes upon them and of ears listening to their every word. In their first embrace, in fact, he murmured a warning in her ear and she gasped a little whispered word of comprehension. But it was at least a relief to be sure that she was alive and yet unharmed. Francia had been in error when he told Bell of Paula's delivery to the Brazilian to be enslaved or killed as Ribiera found most amusing. Or perhaps, of course, Francia had merely wanted to cause Bell all possible discomfort. It was clear, however, blessedly clear and evident, that Paula's pallor was due to nothing more than terror--a terror which was now redoubled because Bell was in The Master's toils with her. Forgetting his warning, she whispered to him desperately that he must try to escape, somehow, before The Master's poison was administered to him. Outside, he might do something to release her. Here, a prisoner, he was helpless. Bell soothed her, not daring either to confess the plan he had formed of a feigned submission in order to wreak revenge, or to offer encouragement because of the message knotted in the piece of string by Jamison. And because of that caution she came to look at him with a queer doubt, and presently with a terrible quiet grief. "Charles--you--you have been poisoned like the rest?" * * * * * The feeling of watching eyes and listening ears was strong. Bell had a part to play, and the necessity for playing that part was the greater because now he was forced to hope. He hesitated, torn between the need to play his rôle for the invisible eavesdroppers and the desire to spare Paula. Her hand closed convulsively upon his. "V-very well, Charles," she said quietly, though her lips quivered. "If--if you are going to serve The Master, I--I will serve him too, if he will let me stay always near you. But if he--will not, then I can always--die...." Bell groaned. And the door opened silently, and there were men standing without. An emotionless voice said: "Señorita, the Señor Ortiz will interview the Señor Bell." "I'm coming," said Paula quietly. She went, walking steadily. Two men detached themselves from the group about the door and followed her. The others waited for Bell. And Bell clenched his hands and squared his shoulders and marched grimly with them. * * * * * Again long passages, descending to what must have been a good deal below the surface of the earth. And then a massive door was opened, and light shone through, and Bell found himself standing on a rug of the thickest possible pile in a room of quite barbaric luxury, and facing a desk from which a young man was rising to greet him. This young man was no older than Bell himself, and he greeted Bell in a manner in which mockery was entirely absent, but in which defiance was peculiarly strong. A bulky, round shouldered figure wrote laboriously at a smaller desk to one side. "Señor Bell," said the young man bitterly, "I do not ask you to shake hands with me. I am Julio Ortiz, the son of the man you befriended upon the steamer _Almirante Gomez_. I am also, by the command of The Master, your jailer. Will you be seated?" Bell's eyes flickered. The older Ortiz had died by his own hand in the first stages of the murder madness The Master's poison produced. He had died gladly and, in Bell's view, very gallantly. And yet his son.... But of course The Master's deputies made a point of enslaving whole families when it was at all possible. It gave a stronger hold upon each member. "I beg of you," said young Ortiz bitterly, "to accept my invitation. I wish to offer you a much qualified friendship, which I expect you to refuse." Bell sat down and crossed his knees. He lit a cigarette thoughtfully, thinking swiftly. "I remember, and admired, your father," he said slowly. "I think that any man who died as bravely as he did is to be envied." * * * * * The younger Ortiz had reseated himself as Bell sat down, and now he fingered nervously, wretchedly, the objects on his desk. A penholder broke between his fingers and he flung it irritably into the wastebasket. "You understand," he said harshly, "the obligations upon me. I am the subject of The Master. You will realize that if you desire to escape, I cannot permit it. But you did my father a very great kindness. Much of it I was able to discover from persons on the boat. More, from the wireless operator who is also the subject of The Master. You were not acting, Señor, as a secret service operative in your attempt to help my father. You bore yourself as a very honorable gentleman. I wish to thank you." "I imagine," said Bell dryly, "that anyone would have done what I did." He seemed to be quite at ease, but he was very tense indeed. The bulky, round shouldered figure at the other desk was writing busily with a very scratchy pen. It was an abominable pen. Its sputtering was loud enough to be noticeable under any circumstances, but Bell was unusually alert, just now, and suddenly he added still more drily: "Helping a man in trouble is quite natural. One always gets it back. It's a sort of dealing with the future in which there is a profit on every trade." He put the slightest emphasis on the last word and waited, looking at young Ortiz, but listening with all his soul to the scratching of the pen. And that scratching sound ceased abruptly. The pen seemed to write smoothly all of an instant. Bell drew a deep breath of satisfaction. In the Trade, when in doubt, one should use the word "Trade" in one's first remark to the other man. Then the other man will ask your trade, and you reply impossibly. It is then up to the other man to speak frankly, first. But circumstances alter even recognition-signs. Ortiz had not noticed any by-play, of course. It would have been rather extraordinary if he had. A pen that scratches so that the sound is Morse code for "Bell, play up. J." is just unlikely enough to avoid all notice. * * * * * Ortiz drummed upon the desk. "Now, Señor, what can I do that will serve you? I cannot release you. You know that. I am not the deputy here. There has been a set-back to The Master's plans and all the deputies are called to his retreat to receive instructions and to discuss. I have merely been ordered to carry out the deputy's routine labors until he returns. However, I will be obeyed in any matter. I can, and will, do anything that will make you more comfortable or will amuse you, from a change in your accommodations to providing you with companions. You observe," he added with exquisite bitterness, "that the limit of my capacity to prove my friendship is to offer my services as a pander." Bell gazed at the tip of his cigarette, letting his eyes wander about the room for an instant, and permitting them to rest for the fraction of a second upon the round shouldered, writing form by the side wall. "I am sufficiently amused," he said mildly. "I asked to be sent to The Master. He intends to make me an offer, I understand. Or he did. He may have changed his mind. But I am curious. Your father told me a certain thing that seemed to indicate he did not enjoy the service of The Master. Your tone is quite loyal, but unhappy. Why do you serve him? Aside, of course, from the fact of having been poisoned by his deputy." * * * * * Internally, Bell was damning Jamison feverishly. If he was to play up to Ortiz, why didn't Jamison give him some sign of how he was to do it? Some tip.... "Herr Wiedkind," said Ortiz wearily, "perhaps you can explain." The round shouldered figure swung about and bowed profoundly to Bell. "Der Señor Ortiz," he said gutturally, and in a sepulchral profundity, "he does not understand himself. I haff nefer said it before. But he serfs Der Master because he despairs, andt he will cease to serf Der Master when he hopes. And I--I serf Der Master because I hope, andt I will cease to serf him when I despair." Ortiz looked curiously and almost suspiciously at the Germanic figure which regarded him soberly through thick spectacles. "It is not customary, Herr Wiedkind," he said slowly, "to speak of ceasing to serve The Master." "Idt is not customary to speak of many necessary things," said the round shouldered figure dryly. "Of our religions, for example. Of der women we lofe. Of our gonsciences. Of various necessary biological functions. But in der presence of der young man who is der enemy of Der Master we can speak freely, you and I who serf him. We know that maybe der deputies serf because they enjoy it. But der subjects? Dey serf because dey fear. Andt fear is intolerable. A man who is afraid is in an unstable gondition. Sooner or later he is going to stop fearing because he gets used to it--when Der Master will haff no more hold on him--or else he is going to stop fearing because he will kill himself." * * * * * To an outsider the spectacle of the three men in their talk would have been very odd indeed. Two men who served The Master, and one who had been his only annoying opponent, talking of the service of The Master quite amicably and without marked disagreement. Ortiz stirred and drummed nervously on the desk. The round shouldered figure put the tips of its fingers together. "How did you know," demanded Ortiz suddenly, "that I serve because I despair?" Bell watched keenly. He began to see where the talk was trending, and waited alertly for the moment for him to speak. This was a battlefield, this too luxurious room in which young Ortiz seemed an alien. Rhetoric was the weapon which now would serve the best. "Let us talk frankly," said the placid German voice. "You andt I, Señor Ortiz, haff worked together. You are not a defil like most of the deputies, and I do not regret hafing been sent here to help you. And I am not a scoundtrel like most of those who help the deputies, so you haff liked me a little. Let us talk frankly. I was trapped. I am a capable segretary. I speak seferal languages. I haff no particular ambitions or any loyalties. I am useful. So I was trapped. But you, Señor Ortiz, you are different." Ortiz suddenly smiled bitterly. "It is a saying in Brazil, if I recall the words, '_A cauda do demonio e de rendas._' 'The devil's tail is made of lace.' That is the story." Bell said quietly: "No." Ortiz stared at him. He was very pale. And suddenly he laughed without any amusement whatever. "True," said Ortiz. He smiled in the same bitterness. "I had forgotten. I am a slave, and the Herr Wiedkind is a slave, and you, Señor Bell, are the enemy of our master. But I had forgotten that we are gentlemen. In the service of The Master one does forget that there are gentlemen." * * * * * He laughed again and lighted a cigarette with hands that shook a little. "I loved a girl," he said in a cynical amusement. "It is peculiar that one should love any woman, _señores_--or do you, Señor Bell, find it natural? I loved this girl. It pleased my father. She was of a family fully equal to my own: their wealth, their position, their traditions were quite equal, and it was a most suitable match. Most remarkable of all, I loved her as one commonly loves only when no such considerations exist. It is amusing to me now, to think how deeply, and how truly, and how terribly I loved her...." Young Ortiz's pallor deepened as he smiled at them. His eyes, so dark as to be almost black, looked at them from a smiling mask of whiteness. "There was no flaw anywhere. A romance of the most romantic, my father very happy, her family most satisfied and pleased, and I--I walked upon air. And then my father suddenly departed for the United States, quite without warning. He left a memorandum for me, saying that it was a matter of government, a secret matter. He would explain upon his return. I did not worry. I haunted the house of my fiancée. The habits of her family are of the most liberal. I saw her daily, almost hourly, and my infatuation grew. And suddenly I grew irritable and saw red spots before my eyes.... "Her father took me to task about my nervousness. He led me kindly to a man of high position, who poured out for me a little potion.... And within an hour all my terrible unease had vanished. And then they told me of The Master, of the poison I had been given in the house of my fiancée herself. They informed me that if I served The Master I would be provided with the antidote which would keep me sane. I raged.... And then the father of my fiancée told me that he and all his family served The Master. That the girl I loved, herself, owed him allegiance. And while I would possibly have defied them and death itself, the thought of that girl not daring to wed me because of the poison in her veins.... I saw, then, that she was in terror. I imagined the two of us comforting each other beneath the shadow of the most horrible of fates...." * * * * * Ortiz was silent for what seemed to be a long time, smiling mirthlessly at nothing. When his lips parted, it was to laugh, a horribly discordant laughter. "I agreed," he said in ghastly amusement. "For the sake of my loved one, I agreed to serve The Master that I might comfort her. And plans for our wedding, which had been often and inexplicably delayed, were set in train at once. And the deputy of The Master entertained me often. I plied him with drink, striving to learn all that I could, hoping against hope that there would be some way of befooling him and securing the antidote without the poison.... And at last, when very drunken, he laughed at me for my intention of marriage. He advised me tipsily to serve The Master zealously and receive promotion in his service. Then, he told me amusedly, I would not care for marriage. My fiancée would be at my disposal without such formalities. In fact--while I stood rigid with horror--he sent a command for her to attend him immediately. He commanded me to go to an apartment in his dwelling. And soon--within minutes, it seemed--the girl I loved came there to me...." Bell did not move. This was no moment to interrupt. Ortiz's fixed and cynical smile wavered and vanished. His voice was harsh. "She was at my disposal, as an act of drunken friendship by the deputy of The Master. She confessed to me, weeping, that she had been at the disposal of the deputy himself. Of any other person he cared to divert or amuse.... Oh! _Dios!_" Ortiz stopped short and said, in forced calmness: "That also was the night that my father died." * * * * * Silence fell. Bell sat very still. The Teutonic figure spoke quietly after the clock had ticked for what seemed an interminable period. "You didt know, then, that your father's death was arranged?" Ortiz turned stiffly to look at him. "Here," said the placid voice, quaintly sympathetic. "Look at these." A hand extended a thick envelope. Ortiz took it, staring with wide, distended eyes. The round shouldered figure stood up and seemed to shake itself. The stoop of its shoulders straightened out. One of the seemingly pudgy hands reached up and removed the thick spectacles. A bushy gray eyebrow peeled off. A straggly beard was removed. The other eyebrow.... Jamison nodded briefly to Bell, and turned to watch Ortiz. And Ortiz was reading the contents of the envelope. His hands began to shake violently. He rested them on the desk-top so that he could continue to read. When he looked up his eyes were flaming. "The real Herr Wiedkind," said Jamison dryly, "came up from Punta Arenas with special instructions from The Master. You have talents, Señor Ortiz, which The Master wished to use. Also you have considerable wealth and the prestige of an honorable family. But you were afflicted with ideas of honor and decency, which are disadvantageous in deputies of The Master. The real Herr Wiedkind had remarkable gifts in eradicating those ideas." * * * * * Jamison sat down and crossed his knees carefully. "I looked you up because I knew The Master had killed your father," he added mildly, "and I thought you'd either be hunting The Master or he'd be hunting you. My name's Jamison. I killed the real Wiedkind and took his identification papers. He was a singularly unpleasant beast. His idea of pleasure made him seem a fatherly sort of person, very much like my make-up. He was constantly petting children, and appeared very benign. I am very, very glad that I killed him." Ortiz tore at his collar, suddenly. He seemed to be choking. "This--this says.... It is The Master's handwriting! I know it! And it says--" "It says," Jamison observed calmly, "that since your father killed the previous deputy in an attempt to save you from The Master's poison, that you are to be prepared for the work your father had been assigned. Herr Wiedkind is given special orders about your--ah--moral education. In passing, I might say that your father was sent to the United States because it was known he'd killed the previous deputy. He told Bell he'd done that killing. And he was allowed to grow horribly nervous on his return. He was permitted to see the red spots, because he was officially--even as far as you were concerned--to commit suicide. "It was intended that his nervousness was to be noticed. And a plane tried to deliver a message to him. Your father thought the parcel contained the antidote to the poison that was driving him mad. Actually, it was very conventional prussic acid. Your father would have drunk it and dropped dead, a suicide, after a conspicuous period of nervousness and worry." * * * * * Bell felt his cigarette burning his fingers. He had sat rigid until the thing burned short. He crushed out the coal, looking at Ortiz. And Ortiz seemed to gasp for breath. But with an almost superhuman effort he calmed himself outwardly. "I--think," he said with some difficulty, "that I should thank you. I do. But I do not think that you told me all of this without some motive. I abandon the service of The Master. But what is it that you wish me to do? You know, of course, that I can order both of you killed...." Bell put down the stub of his cigarette very carefully. "The only thing you can do," he said quietly, "is to die." "True," said Ortiz with a ghastly smile. "But I would like my death to perform some service. The Master has no enemies save you two, and those of us who die on becoming his enemies. I would like, in dying, to do him some harm." "I will promise," said Jamison grimly, "to see that The Master dies himself if you will have Bell and myself put in a plane with fuel to Punta Arenas and a reasonable supply of weapons. I include the Señorita Canalejas as a matter of course." * * * * * Ortiz looked from one to the other. And suddenly he smiled once more. It was queer, that smile. It was not quite mirthless. "You were right, just now," he observed calmly, "when as the Herr Wiedkind you said that I would quit the service of The Master when I ceased to despair. I begin to have hopes. You two men have done the impossible. You have fought The Master, you have learned many of his secrets, and you have corrupted a man to treason when treason means suicide. Perhaps, Señores, you will continue to achieve the impossible, and assassinate The Master." He stood up, and though deathly pale continued to smile. "I suggest, Señor, that you resume your complexion. And you, Señor Bell, you will be returned to your confinement. I will make the necessarily elaborate arrangements for my death." Bell rose. He liked this young man. He said quietly: "You said just now you wouldn't ask me to shake hands. May I ask you?..." He added almost apologetically as Ortiz's fingers closed upon his: "You see, when your father died I thought that I would be very glad if I felt that I would die as well. But I think"--he smiled wryly--"I think I'll have two examples to think of when my time comes." * * * * * In the morning a bulky, round shouldered figure entered the room in which Bell was confined. "You will follow me," said a harsh voice. Bell shrugged. He was marched down long passageways and many steps. He came out into the courtyard, where the glistening black car with the blank windows waited. At an imperious gesture, he got in and sat down with every appearance of composure, as of a man resignedly submitting to force he cannot resist. The thick spectacles of the Herr Wiedkind regarded him with a gogglelike effect. There was a long pause. Then the sound of footsteps. Paula appeared, deathly pale. She was ushered into the vehicle--and only Bell's swift gesture of a finger to his lips checked her cry of relief. Voices outside. The guttural Spanish of the Herr Wiedkind. Other, emotionless voices replying. The Herr Wiedkind climbed heavily into the car and sat down, producing a huge revolver which bore steadily upon Bell. The door closed, and he made a swift gesture of caution. "Idt may be," said the Germanic voice harshly, "that you and the young ladty haff much to say to each other. But idt can wait. And I warn you, _mein Herr_, that at the first movement I shall fire." Bell relaxed. There was the purring of the motor. The car moved off. Obviously there was some microphonic attachment inside the tonneau which carried every word within the locked vehicle to the ears of the two men upon the chauffeur's seat. An excellent idea for protection against treachery. Bell smiled, and moved so that his lips were a bare half-inch from Paula's ears. "Try to weep, loudly," he said in the faintest of whispers. "This man is a friend." * * * * * But Paula could only stare at the bulky figure sitting opposite until he suddenly removed the spectacles, and smiled dryly, and then reached in his pockets and handed Bell two automatic pistols, and extended a tiny but very wicked weapon to Paula. He motioned to her to conceal it. Jamison--moving to make the minimum of noise--handed Bell a sheet of stiff cardboard. It passed into Bell's fingers without a rustle. He showed it silently to Paula. We were overheard last night by someone. We don't know who or how much he heard. Dictaphone in the room we talked in. Can't find out who it was or what action he's taken. We may be riding into a trap now. Ortiz has disappeared. He may be dead. We can only wait and see. The car was moving as if in city traffic, a swift dash forward and a sudden stop, and then another swift dash. But the walls within were padded so that no sound came from without save the faint vibration of the motor and now and then the distinct flexing of a spring. Then the car turned a corner. It went more rapidly. It turned another corner. And another.... In the light of the bright dome light, Bell saw beads of sweat coming out on Jamison's face. He did not dare to speak, but he formed words with his lips. "He's turning wrong! This isn't the way to the field!" Bell's jaws clenched. He took out his two automatics and looked at them carefully. And then, much too short a time from the departure for the flying field to have been reached, the car checked. It went over rough cobblestones, and Bell himself knew well that there had been no cobbled roadway between the flying field and his prison. And then the car went up a sort of ramp, a fairly steep incline which by the feel of the motor was taken in low, and on for a short distance more. Then the car stopped and the motor was cut off. Keys rattled in the lock outside. The door opened. The blunt barrel of an automatic pistol peered in. (_To be concluded in the next issue._) * * * * * [Illustration: _The Readers' Corner_ _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories] _About Reprints_ From time to time the Editors of Astounding Stories receive letters, like the two that follow, in which Readers beg us to run reprints, and now we feel it is time to call attention to the very good reasons why we must refuse. We admit, right off, that some splendid Science Fiction stories have been published in the past--but are those now being printed in any way inferior to them? Aren't even _better_ ones being written to-day?--since a whole civilization now stirs with active interest in science?--since three or five times as many writers are now supplying us with stories to choose from?--since science and scientific theory have reached so immeasurably much farther into the Realm of the Unknown Possible? The answer is an emphatic _Yes_. We all know it. "A Trip to the Moon"--for instance--was a good story, but shall we keep reprinting it to-day, when recent revolutionary theories of space-time scream to modern authors for Science-Fiction treatment? In the last ten years the whole aspect, the whole future of science has broadened; we have sensed an infinity beyond infinity; and who would be so un-modern as to cling to the oft-told stories of the older science and neglect the thrilling reaches of the new! _The Saturday Evening Post_--again, for instance--has been publishing good stories for years, but who would have them reprint the old ones instead of keep giving us good new ones? Would it be fair to 99% of our Readers to force on them reprint novels they have already read, or had a chance to read, to favor the 1% who have missed them? Of course it wouldn't, and all of our Readers in that 1% will gladly admit it. And how about our authors? Contrary to the old-fashioned opinion, authors must eat--and how will they eat, and lead respectable lives, and keep out of jail, if we keep reprinting their _old_ stories and turning down their _new_ ones? After all, eating is very important; those who wouldn't simply refrain from eating would have to get jobs as messengers, and errand boys, etc.--with the result that much of our fascinating modern Science Fiction would never be written! It would be much cheaper for us to buy once-used material. It would greatly reduce our task of carefully reading every story that comes to our office, in hopes to finding a fine, new story, or a potentially good author. But it would be very unwise, and very unfair, as you have seen. Many more reasons could be given, but these few are the more important ones back of our policy of avoiding reprints. Enough said!--_The Editor._ _Wants Reprints_ Dear Editor: In you April issue, in answer to a correspondent, you stated that you were avoiding reprints. Now, that's too bad. Some of the best Science-Fiction tales are reprints. Witness: "The Blind Spot," by Homer Eon Flint and Austin Hall; "The War In The Air," by H. G. Wells; "The Purple Sapphire," by John Taine; "The Conquest of Mars," by Garrett P. Serviss; "Darkness and Dawn," and "Into the Great Oblivion," and "The After-Glow," and "The Air-Trust"--all by George Allan England. You are proud--and rightfully so--of your great author, Ray Cummings. Why not give us several stories which helped to build his glory? Here are several: "Tarranto the Conqueror," "The Man on the Meteor," "The Girl in the Golden Atom," "The Man Who Mastered Time," "The Fire People." Guess I'll sign off now and give the other fellows a chance.--Isidore Manyon, 544 Myrtle Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y. _What Think You All?_ Dear Editor: There is one question I would like to ask. Perhaps some of the other readers of Astounding Stories can answer it. Could a person remember his own death in a former incarnation? Some say "no," and some say "yes." If it is true that you can't, the whole fabric of the wonderful story, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful I have ever read, "The Moon Maid," by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is built on a fallacy. You see, I am a believer in reincarnation and I would surely like to correspond with others who are also! Would not that also disprove the whole theory of reincarnation if it is true? I think it is not true, but I may be wrong. Is reincarnation a proven theory, or unproven? You say you are going to avoid reprints. Now that is a mistake. Of course, some you might avoid, such as those of Wells, Verne, etc., though I would like you to publish Wells' short stories. There are many that have not been published in any magazine for a long time, or at all. But please, oh please, do publish A. Merritt's "Through the Dragon Glass," and give it a cover illustration. It is the only one, I think, that I want particularly, but I do want it! If you publish any of H. G. Wells' works, give them cover illustrations, too. And publish a lot by Merritt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and authors like that; you haven't as yet printed a story of the type that A. Merritt writes, and that is one thing this magazine needs, and lots of them, as they are the cream of Science Fiction, and the more of them you have, the better! They are my favorites, and next come those that Edgar Rice Burroughs writes; also John Taine.--Worth K. Bryant, 406 No. Third St., Yakima, Wash. _The S: Lynn Rhorer Society_ Dear Editor: This is to inform you that we have organized a society known as the S. Lynn Rhorer Society of Greater Atlanta, a branch of the Science Correspondence Club. This Society's purpose is to first assist the Science Correspondence Club and its affiliated branches in the promotion of science and Scientific Fiction. Second, to create a greater interest in science and Science Fiction among the laymen who are already interested, and to create an interest among those who are not at the present interested, and to hold their interest. At the present time we have in our library over three hundred scientific books; a large collection of ores and rocks from different states and countries, classified; a large collection of fossilized bones; a three-inch refracting telescope, and a ten-inch one in the course of construction; and a large club-house. Any information regarding this society can be obtained by addressing R. A. Marks, Jr., 893 York Ave., S. W., Atlanta, Georgia, or the undersigned.--F. B. Eason, 400 Jefferson Avenue, E. Point, Ga. _Unused to the Smaller Size_ Dear Editor: I have but one comment on your magazine and that is: Having complete sets of other Science Fiction magazines I would also like to save Astounding Stories, but in its present size and condition it looks like trash. Why not have a ballot to what size the magazine shall be? By having the price raised to 25 cents it can cover the extra expense. I would surely like to add another magazine to my collection. Am hereby hoping you will do this for the sake of Science Fiction lovers all over the country.--Sidney Mack, 1676 59th Street, Brooklyn, New York. _"The Scienceers" Broadcasts_ Dear Editor: For the benefit of the readers of Astounding Stories who live in New York, a club known as The Scienceers has recently been formed. Its purpose is to promote informal fellowship among Science Fiction fans and to foster discussion of modern developments, theories and projects in the realm of science. The organization is open to all persons over sixteen years of age who are interested in Science Fiction and its relation to the various fields of present day science. Since regular weekly meetings are held, the membership is necessarily restricted to residents of New York City and vicinity. A cordial invitation to join the Scienceers is hereby extended to all interested. Further information may be obtained by writing to the undersigned.--Allen Glasser, 961 Forest Avenue, New York, N. Y. "_Congratulations for Both_" Dear Editor: Congratulations for us both. Your company for publishing this magazine, myself for being able to buy same. Have just finished reading the second issue. It is very good. I read every story in both issues. You bet I am going to be a steady reader from now on. I like this type of story very much--in fact, read two other magazines that publish stories of this type every month. I note with great pleasure that in the March issue you are starting to publish the first quarter of an interplanetary story by Ray Cummings. This is, indeed, good news. I have had the pleasure of reading five of his novels this past year and I greatly enjoyed all of them. Along with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Cummings is an "ace high" author on these "unpredictable-future" stories. Some four or fives years ago I read in a magazine a portion of two interplanetary stories by Ray Cummings. Now to the point, I wonder if it is possible for you to obtain Mr. Cummings' permission to have your company publish these two stories? Their names I believe are "Tarranto the Conquerer" and "Into the Fourth Dimension." I, for one, would greatly appreciate this favor. Please do your best to try and publish these novels this coming year. Thanks.--Wm. L. Ebelan, 3906 Springdale Avenue, Baltimore, Md. _Likes the Small Size_ Dear Editor: I received a pleasant surprise when I first bought your wonderful magazine. I started in with the second issue, but I wish I could get the first. All the stories are good. The best of them, I think, is Ray Cummings' story, "Brigands of the Moon." I have read the first three parts and am eagerly waiting for the last. And now for something about the make-up of the magazine. I like the small size, and holding the magazine together with two staples is good. The cover designs are very good, but the pictures inside could be improved on. H. Wesso is a good artist. How about publishing the magazine twice a month?--Charles Barrett, 135 Spring St., Woodbury, N. J. _Thanks, Anyhow!_ Dear Editor: I hope that you are not going to have a blue cover every month. I would like to see a different colored background every month. The cover on the March issue should have been black because space is black. I wish that you would have a full-page picture for each story. Wesso is the best artist you have. The others haven't enough imagination. I gave "Brigands of the Moon" by Ray Cummings first place in the March issue of Astounding Stories. It promises to be his best story since "Tarrano the Conqueror." The places of other stories are as follows: 2. "Vandals of the Stars"; 3. "The Soul Master"; 4. "Cold Light"; 5. "From the Ocean's Depths." If you would enlarge Astounding Stories to 11-3/4 by 8-1/2 it would be seen more easily on the newsstands and its circulation would increase. Please publish it on the first of the month instead of the first Thursday.--Jack Darrow, 4225 N. Spaulding Avenue, Chicago, Ill. "_The Readers' Corner_" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here: so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! --_The Editor._ 
29768	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DR. DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are_: ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, and WESTERN ADVENTURES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. III, No. 2 CONTENTS AUGUST, 1930 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Water-colors from a Scene in "The Planet of Dread."_ THE PLANET OF DREAD R. F. STARZL 147 _A Stupid Blunder--and Mark Forepaugh Faces a Lifetime of Castaway Loneliness in the Savage Welter of the Planet Inra's Monster-ridden Jungles._ THE LORD OF SPACE VICTOR ROUSSEAU 158 _A Black Caesar Had Arisen on Eros--and All Earth Trembled at His Distant Menace._ THE SECOND SATELLITE EDMOND HAMILTON 175 _Earth-men War on Frog-vampires for the Emancipation of the Human Cows of Earth's Second Satellite._ (A Novelet.) SILVER DOME HARL VINCENT 192 _In Her Deep-buried Kingdom of Theros, Phaestra Reveals the Amazing Secret of the Silver Dome._ EARTH, THE MARAUDER ARTHUR J. BURKS 210 _Deep in the Gnome-infested Tunnels of the Moon, Sarka and Jaska Are Brought to Luar the Radiant Goddess Against Whose Minions the Marauding Earth Had Struck in Vain._ (Part Two of a Three-Part Novel.) MURDER MADNESS MURRAY LEINSTER 237 _Bell Has Fought through Tremendous Obstacles to Find and Kill The Master, Whose Diabolical Poison Makes Murder-mad Snakes of the Hands; and, as He Faces the Monster at Last--His Own Hands Start to Writhe!_ (Conclusion.) THE FLYING CITY H. THOMPSON RICH 260 _From Space Came Cor's Disc-city of Vada--Its Mighty, Age-old Engines Weakening--Its Horde of Dwarfs Hungry for the Earth!_ THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 279 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ * * * * * Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Nathan Goldmann, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * The Planet of Dread _By R. F. Starzl_ [Illustration: _This time Forepaugh was ready for it._] [Sidenote: A stupid blunder--and Mark Forepaugh faces a life of castaway loneliness in the savage welter of the planet Inra's monster-ridden jungles.] There was no use hiding from the truth. Somebody had blundered--a fatal blunder--and they were going to pay for it! Mark Forepaugh kicked the pile of hydrogen cylinders. Only a moment ago he had broken the seals--the mendacious seals that certified to the world that the flasks were fully charged. And the flasks were empty! The supply of this precious power gas, which in an emergency should have been sufficient for six years, simply did not exist. He walked over to the integrating machine, which as early as the year 2031 had begun to replace the older atomic processes, due to the shortage of the radium series metals. It was bulky and heavy compared to the atomic disintegrators, but it was much more economical and very dependable. Dependable--provided some thick-headed stock clerk at a terrestrial supply station did not check in empty hydrogen cylinders instead of full ones. Forepaugh's unwonted curses brought a smile to the stupid, good-natured face of his servant, Gunga--he who had been banished for life from his native Mars for his impiety in closing his single round eye during the sacred Ceremony of the Wells. The Earth man was at this steaming hot, unhealthful trading station under the very shadow of the South Pole of the minor planet Inra for an entirely different reason. One of the most popular of his set on the Earth, an athletic hero, he had fallen in love, and the devoutly wished-for marriage was only prevented by lack of funds. The opportunity to take charge of this richly paid, though dangerous, outpost of civilization had been no sooner offered than taken. In another week or two the relief ship was due to take him and his valuable collection of exotic Inranian orchids back to the Earth, back to a fat bonus, Constance, and an assured future. It was a different young man who now stood tragically before the useless power plant. His slim body was bowed, and his clean features were drawn. Grimly he raked the cooling dust that had been forced in the integrating chamber by the electronic rearrangement of the original hydrogen atoms--finely powdered iron and silicon--the "ashes" of the last tank of hydrogen. * * * * * Gunga chuckled. "What's the matter?" Forepaugh barked. "Going crazy already?" "Me, haw! Me, haw! Me thinkin'," Gunga rumbled. "Haw! We got, haw! plenty hydr'gen." He pointed to the low metal roof of the trading station. Though it was well insulated against sound, the place continually vibrated to the low murmur of the Inranian rains that fell interminably through the perpetual polar day. It was a rain such as is never seen on Earth, even in the tropics. It came in drops as large as a man's fist. It came in streams. It came in large, shattering masses that broke before they fell and filled the air with spray. There was little wind, but the steady green downpour of water and the brilliant continuous flashing of lightning shamed the dull soggy twilight produced by the large, hot, but hidden sun. "_Your_ idea of a joke!" Forepaugh growled in disgust. He understood what Gunga's grim pleasantry referred to. There was indeed an incalculable quantity of hydrogen at hand. If some means could be found to separate the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen in the world of water around them they would not lack for fuel. He thought of electrolysis, and relaxed with a sigh. There was no power. The generators were dead, the air drier and cooler had ceased its rhythmic pulsing nearly an hour ago. Their lights were gone, and the automatic radio utterly useless. "This is what comes of putting all your eggs in one basket," he thought, and let his mind dwell vindictively on the engineers who had designed the equipment on which his life depended. An exclamation from Gunga startled him. The Martian was pointing to the ventilator opening, the only part of this strange building that was not hermetically sealed against the hostile life of Inra. A dark rim had appeared at its margin, a loathsome, black-green rim that was moving, spreading out. It crept over the metal walls like the low-lying smoke of a fire, yet it was a solid. From it emanated a strong, miasmatic odor. "The giant mold!" Forepaugh cried. He rushed to his desk and took out his flash pistol, quickly set the localizer so as to cover a large area. When he turned he saw, to his horror, Gunga about to smash into the mold with his ax. He sent the man spinning with a blow to the ear. "Want to scatter it and start it growing in a half-dozen places?" he snapped. "Here!" * * * * * He pulled the trigger. There was a light, spiteful "ping" and for an instant a cone of white light stood out in the dim room like a solid thing. Then it was gone, and with it was gone the black mold, leaving a circular area of blistered paint on the wall and an acrid odor in the air. Forepaugh leaped to the ventilating louver and closed it tightly. "It's going to be like this from now on," he remarked to the shaken Gunga. "All these things wouldn't bother us as long as the machinery kept the building dry and cool. They couldn't live in here. But it's getting damp and hot. Look at the moisture condensing on the ceiling!" Gunga gave a guttural cry of despair. "It knows, Boss; look!" Through one of the round, heavily framed ports it could be seen, the lower part of its large, shapeless body half-floating in the lashing water that covered their rocky shelf to a depth of several feet, the upper part spectral and gray. It was a giant amoeba, fully six feet in diameter in its present spheroid form, but capable of assuming any shape that would be useful. It had an envelope of tough, transparent matter, and was filled with a fluid that was now cloudy and then clear. Near the center there was a mass of darker matter, and this was undoubtedly the seat of its intelligence. The Earth man recoiled in horror! A single cell with a brain! It was unthinkable. It was a biological nightmare. Never before had he seen one--had, in fact, dismissed the stories of the Inranian natives as a bit of primitive superstition, had laughed at these gentle, stupid amphibians with whom he traded when they, in their imperfect language, tried to tell him of it. They had called it the Ul-lul. Well, let it be so. It was an amoeba, and it was watching him. It floated in the downpour and watched him. With what? It had no eyes. No matter, it was watching him. And then it suddenly flowed outward until it became a disc rocking on the waves. Again its fluid form changed, and by a series of elongations and contractions it flowed through the water at an incredible speed. It came straight for the window, struck the thick, unbreakable glass with a shock that could be felt by the men inside. It flowed over the glass and over the building. It was trying to eat them, building and all! The part of its body over the port became so thin that it was almost invisible. At last, its absolute limit reached, it dropped away, baffled, vanishing amid the glare of the lightning and the frothing waters like the shadows of a nightmare. * * * * * The heat was intolerable and the air was bad. "Haw, we have to open vent'lator, Boss!" gasped the Martian. Forepaugh nodded grimly. It wouldn't do to smother either. Though to open the ventilator would be to invite another invasion by the black mold, not to mention the amoebae and other fabulous monsters that had up to now been kept at a safe distance by the repeller zone, a simple adaptation of a very old discovery. A zone of mechanical vibrations, of a frequency of 500,000 cycles per second, was created by a large quartz crystal in the water, which was electrically operated. Without power, the protective zone had vanished. "We watch?" asked Gunga. "You bet we watch. Every minute of the 'day' and 'night.'" He examined the two chronometers, assuring himself that they were well wound, and congratulated himself that they were not dependent on the defunct power plant for energy. They were his only means of measuring the passage of time. The sun, which theoretically would seem to travel round and round the horizon, rarely succeeded in making its exact location known, but appeared to shift strangely from side to side at the whim of the fog and water. "Th' fellas," Gunga remarked, coming out of a study. "Why not come?" He referred to the Inranians. "Probably know something's wrong. They can tell the quartz oscillator is stopped. Afraid of the Ul-lul, I suppose." "'Squeer," demurred the Martian. "Ul-lul not bother fellas." "You mean it doesn't follow them into the underbrush. But it would find tough going there. Not enough water; trees there, four hundred feet high with thorny roots and rough bark--they wouldn't like that. Oh no, these natives ought to be pretty snug in their dens. Why, they're as hard to catch as a muskrat! Don't know what a muskrat is, huh? Well, it's the same as the Inranians, only different, and not so ugly." * * * * * For the next six days they existed in their straitened quarters, one guarding while the other slept, but such alarms as they experienced were of a minor nature, easily disposed of by their flash pistol. It had not been intended for continuous service, and under the frequent drains it showed an alarming loss of power. Forepaugh repeatedly warned Gunga to be more sparing in its use, but that worthy persisted in his practice of using it against every trifling invasion of the poisonous Inranian cave moss that threatened them, or the warm, soggy water-spiders that hopefully explored the ventilator shaft in search of living food. "Bash 'em with a broom, or something! Never mind if it isn't nice. Save our flash gun for something bigger." Gunga only looked distressed. On the seventh day their position became untenable. Some kind of sea creature, hidden under the ever-replenished storm waters, had found the concrete emplacements of their trading post to its liking. Just how it was done was never learned. It is doubtful that the creatures could gnaw away the solid stone--more likely the process was chemical, but none the less it was effective. The foundations crumbled; the metal shell subsided, rolled half over so that silty water leaked in through the straining seams, and threatened at any moment to be buffeted and urged away on the surface of the flood toward that distant vast sea which covers nine-tenths of the area of Inra. "Time to mush for the mountains," Forepaugh decided. Gunga grinned. The Mountains of Perdition were, to his point of view, the only part of Inra even remotely inhabitable. They were sometimes fairly cool, and though perpetually pelted with rain, blazing with lightning and reverberating with thunder, they had caves that were fairly dry and too cool for the black mold. Sometimes, under favorable circumstances on their rugged peaks, one could get the full benefit of the enormous hot sun for whose actinic rays the Martian's starved system yearned. "Better pack a few cans of the food tablets," the white man ordered. "Take a couple of waterproof sleeping bags for us, and a few hundred fire pellets. You can have the flash pistol; it may have a few more charges in it." * * * * * Forepaugh broke the glass case marked "Emergency Only" and removed two more flash pistols. Well he knew that he would need them after passing beyond the trading area--perhaps sooner. His eyes fell on his personal chest, and he opened it for a brief examination. None of the contents seemed of any value, and he was about to pass when he dragged out a long, heavy, .45 caliber six-shooter in a holster, and a cartridge belt filled with shells. The Martian stared. "Know what it is?" his master asked, handing him the weapon. "Gunga not know." He took it and examined it curiously. It was a fine museum piece in an excellent state of preservation, the metal overlaid with the patina of age, but free from rust and corrosion. "It's a weapon of the Ancients," Forepaugh explained. "It was a sort of family heirloom and is over 300 years old. One of my grandfathers used it in the famous Northwest Mounted Police. Wonder if it'll still shoot." He leveled the weapon at a fat, sightless wriggler that came squirming through a seam, squinting unaccustomed eyes along the barrel. There was a violent explosion, and the wriggler disappeared in a smear of dirty green. Gunga nearly fell over backward in fright, and even Forepaugh was shaken. He was surprised that the ancient cartridge had exploded at all, though he knew powder making had reached a high level of perfection before explosive chemical weapons had yielded to the newer, lighter, and infinitely more powerful ray weapons. The gun would impede their progress. It would be of very little use against the giant Carnivora of Inra. Yet something--perhaps a sentimental attachment, perhaps what his ancestors would have called a "hunch"--compelled him to strap it around his waist. He carefully packed a few essentials in his knapsack, together with one chronometer and a tiny gyroscopic compass. So equipped, they could travel with a fair degree of precision toward the mountains some hundred miles on the other side of a steaming forest, a-crawl with feral life, and hot with blood-lust. * * * * * Man and master descended into the warm waters and, without a backward glance, left the trading post to its fate. There was not even any use in leaving a note. Their relief ship, soon due, would never find the station without radio direction. The current was strong, but the water gradually became shallower as they ascended the sloping rock. After half an hour they saw ahead of them the loom of the forest, and with some trepidation they entered the gloom cast by the towering, fernlike trees, whose tops disappeared in murky fog. Tangled vines impeded their progress. Quagmires lay in wait for them, and tough weeds tripped them, sometimes throwing one or another into the mud among squirming small reptiles that lashed at them with spiked, poisonous feet and then fell to pieces, each piece to lie in the bubbling ooze until it grew again into a whole animal. Several times they almost walked under the bodies of great, spheroidal creatures with massive short legs, whose tremendously long, sinuous necks disappeared in the leafy murk above, swaying gently like long-stalked lilies in a terrestial pond. These were azornacks, mild-tempered vegetarians whose only defense lay in their thick, blubbery hides. Filled with parasites, stinking and rancid, their decaying covering of fat effectively concealed the tender flesh underneath, protecting them from fangs and rending claws. Deeper in the forest the battering of the rain was mitigated. Giant neo-palm leaves formed a roof that shut out not only most of the weak daylight, but also the fury of the downpour. The water collected in cataracts, ran down the boles of the trees, and roared through the semi-circular canals of the snake trees, so named by early explorers for their waving, rubbery tentacles, multiplied a millionfold, that performed the duties of leaves. Water gurgled and chuckled everywhere, spread in vast dim ponds and lakes writhing with tormented roots, up-heaved by unseen, uncatalogued leviathans, rippled by translucent discs of loathsome, luminescent jelly that quivered from place to place in pursuit of microscopic prey. Yet the impression was one of calm and quiet, and the waifs from other worlds felt a surcease of nervous tension. Unconsciously they relaxed. Taking their bearings, they changed their course slightly for the nesting place of the nearest tribe of Inranians where they hoped to get food and at least partial shelter; for their food tablets had mysteriously turned to an unpleasant viscous liquid, and their sleeping bags were alive with giant bacteria easily visible to the eye. * * * * * They were doomed to disappointment. After nearly twelve hours of desperate struggling through the morass, through gloomy aisles, and countless narrow escapes from prowling beasts of prey in which only the speed and tremendous power of their flash pistols saved them from instant death, they reached a rocky outcropping which led to the comparatively dry rise of land on which a tribe of Inranians made its home. Their faces were covered with welts made by the hanging filaments of blood-sucking trees as fine as spider webs, and their senses reeled with the oppressive stench of the abysmal jungle. If the pampered ladies of the Inner Planets only knew where their thousand-dollar orchids sprang from! Converging runways showed the opening of one of the underground dens, almost hidden from view by a bewildering maze of roots, rendered more formidable by long, sharp stakes made from the iron-hard thigh-bones of the flying kabo. Forepaugh cupped his hands over his mouth and gave the call. "Ouf! Ouf! Ouf! Ouf! Ouf!" He repeated it over and over, the jungle giving back his voice in a muffled echo, while Gunga held a spare flash pistol and kept a sharp lookout for a carnivore intent on getting an unwary Inranian. There was no answer. These timid creatures, who are often rated the most intelligent life native to primitive Inra, had sensed disaster and had fled. Forepaugh and Gunga slept in one of the foul, poorly ventilated dens, ate of the hard, woody tubers that had not been worth taking along, and wished they had a certain stock clerk at that place at that time. They were awakened out of deep slumber by the threshing of an evil looking creature which had become entangled among the sharpened spikes. Its tremendous maw, splitting it almost in half, was opened in roars of pain that showed great yellow fangs eight inches in length. Its heavy flippers battered the stout roots and lacerated themselves in the beast's insensate rage. It was quickly dispatched with a flash pistol and Gunga cooked himself some of the meat, using a fire pellet; but despite his hunger Forepaugh did not dare eat any of it, knowing that this species, strange to him, might easily be one of the many on Inra that are poisonous to terrestials. * * * * * They resumed their march toward the distant invisible mountains, and were fortunate in finding somewhat better footing than they had on their previous march. They covered about 25 miles on that "day," without untoward incident. Their ray pistols gave them an insuperable advantage over the largest and most ferocious beasts they could expect to meet, so that they became more and more confident, despite the knowledge that they were rapidly using up the energy stored in their weapons. The first one had long ago been discarded, and the charge indicators of the other two were approaching zero at a disquieting rate. Forepaugh took them both, and from that time on he was careful never to waste a discharge except in case of a direct and unavoidable attack. This often entailed long waits or stealthy detours through sucking mud, and came near to ending both their lives. The Earth man was in the lead when it happened. Seeking an uncertain footing through a tangle of low-growing, thick, ghastly white vegetation, he placed a foot on what seemed to be a broad, flat rock projecting slightly above the ooze. Instantly there was a violent upheaval of mud; the seeming rock flew up like a trap-door, disclosing a cavernous mouth some seven feet across, and a thick, triangular tentacle flew up from its concealment in the mud in a vicious arc. Forepaugh leaped back barely in time to escape being swept in and engulfed. The end of the tentacle struck him a heavy blow on the chest, throwing him back with such force as to bowl Gunga over, and whirling the pistols out of his hands into a slimy, bulbous growth nearby, where they stuck in the phosphorescent cavities the force of their impact had made. * * * * * There was no time to recover the weapons. With a bellow of rage the beast was out of its bed and rushing at them. Nothing stayed its progress. Tough, heavily scaled trees thicker than a man's body shuddered and fell as its bulk brushed by them. But it was momentarily confused, and its first rush carried it past its dodging quarry. This momentary respite saved their lives. Rearing its plumed head to awesome heights, its knobby bark running with brown rivulets of water, a giant tree, even for that world of giants, offered refuge. The men scrambled up the rough trunk easily, finding plenty of hand and footholds. They came to rest on one of the shelflike circumvoluting rings, some twenty-five feet above the ground. Soon the blunt brown tentacles slithered in search of them, but failed to reach their refuge by inches. And now began the most terrible siege that interlopers in that primitive world can endure. From that cavernous, distended throat came a tremendous, world-shaking noise. "HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM!" Forepaugh put his hand to his head. It made him dizzy. He had not believed that such noise could be. He knew that no creature could long live amidst it. He tore strips from his shredded clothing and stuffed his ears, but felt no relief. "HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM!" It throbbed in his brain. Gunga lay a-sprawl, staring with fascinated eye into the pulsating scarlet gullet that was blasting the world with sound. Slowly, slowly he was slipping. His master hauled him back. The Martian grinned at him stupidly, slid again to the edge. Once more Forepaugh pulled him back. The Martian seemed to acquiesce. His single eye closed to a mere slit. He moved to a position between Forepaugh and the tree trunk, braced his feet. "No you don't!" The Earth man laughed uproariously. The din was making him light-headed. It was so funny! Just in time he had caught that cunning expression and prepared for the outlashing of feet designed to plunge him into the red cavern below and to stop that hellish racket. "And now--" He swung his fist heavily, slamming the Martian against the tree. The red eye closed wearily. He was unconscious, and lucky. Hungrily the Earth man stared at his distant flash pistols, plainly visible in the luminescence of their fungus bedding. He began a slow, cautious creep along the top of a vine some eight inches thick. If he could reach them.... * * * * * Crash! He was almost knocked to the ground by the thud of a frantic tentacle against the vine. His movement had been seen. Again the tentacle struck with crushing force. The great vine swayed. He managed to reach the shelf again in the very nick of time. "HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM!" A bolt of lightning struck a giant fern some distance away. The crash of thunder was hardly noticeable. Forepaugh wondered if his tree would be struck. Perhaps it might even start a fire, giving him a flaming brand with which to torment his tormentor. Vain hope! The wood was saturated with moisture. Even the fire pellets could not make it burn. "HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM!" The six-shooter! He had forgotten it. He jerked it from its holster and pointed it at the red throat, emptied all the chambers. He saw the flash of yellow flame, felt the recoil, but the sound of the discharges was drowned in the Brobdignagian tumult. He drew back his arm to throw the useless toy from him. But again that unexplainable, senseless "hunch" restrained him. He reloaded the gun and returned it to its holster. "HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM! HOOM!" A thought had been struggling to reach his consciousness against the pressure of the unbearable noise. The fire pellets! Couldn't they be used in some way? These small chemical spheres, no larger than the end of his little finger, had long ago supplanted actual fire along the frontiers, where electricity was not available for cooking. In contact with moisture they emitted terrific heat, a radiant heat which penetrated meat, bone, and even metal. One such pellet would cook a meal in ten minutes, with no sign of scorching or burning. And they had several hundred in one of the standard moisture-proof containers. * * * * * As fast as his fingers could work the trigger of the dispenser Forepaugh dropped the potent little pellets down the bellowing throat. He managed to release about thirty before the bellowing stopped. A veritable tornado of energy broke loose at the foot of the tree. The giant maw was closed, and the shocking silence was broken only by the thrashing of a giant body in its death agonies. The radiant heat, penetrating through and through the beast's body, withered nearby vegetation and could be easily felt on the perch up the tree. Gunga was slowly recovering. His iron constitution helped him to rally from the powerful blow he had received, and by the time the jungle was still he was sitting up mumbling apologies. "Never mind," said his master. "Shin down there and cut us off a good helping of roast tongue, if it has a tongue, before something else comes along and beats us out of a feast." "Him poison, maybe," Gunga demurred. They had killed a specimen new to zoologists. "Might as well die of poison as starvation," Forepaugh countered. Without more ado the Martian descended, cut out some large, juicy chunks as his fancy dictated, and brought his loot back up the tree. The meat was delicious and apparently wholesome. They gorged themselves and threw away what they could not eat, for food spoils very quickly in the Inranian jungles and uneaten meat would only serve to attract hordes of the gauzy-winged, glutinous Inranian swamp flies. As they sank into slumber they could hear the beginning of a bedlam of snarling and fighting as the lesser Carnivora fed on the body of the fallen giant. When they awoke the chronometer recorded the passing of twelve hours, and they had to tear a network of strong fibers with which the tree had invested them preparatory to absorbing their bodies as food. For so keen is the competition for life on Inra that practically all vegetation is capable of absorbing animal food directly. Many an Inranian explorer can tell tales of narrow escapes from some of the more specialized flesh-eating plants; but they are now so well known that they are easily avoided. * * * * * A clean-picked framework of crushed and broken giant bones was all that was left of the late bellowing monster. Six-legged water dogs were polishing them hopefully, or delving into them with their long, sinuous snouts for the marrow. The Earth man fired a few shots with his six-shooter, and they scattered, dragging the bodies of their fallen companions to a safe distance to be eaten. Only one of the flash pistols was in working order. The other had been trampled by heavy hoofs and was useless. A heavy handicap under which to traverse fifty miles of abysmal jungle. They started with nothing for breakfast except water, of which they had plenty. Fortunately the outcroppings of rocks and gravel washes were becoming more and more frequent, and they were able to travel at much better speed. As they left the low-lying jungle land they entered a zone which was faintly reminiscent of a terrestial jungle. It was still hot, soggy, and fetid, but gradually the most primitive aspects of the scene were modified. The over-arching trees were less closely packed, and they came across occasional rock clearings which were bare of vegetation except for a dense carpet of brown, lichenlike vegetation that secreted an astonishing amount of juice. They slipped and sloshed through this, rousing swarms of odd, toothed birds, which darted angrily around their heads and slashed at them with the razor-sharp saw edges on the back of their legs. Annoying as they were, they could be kept away with branches torn from trees, and their presence connoted an absence of the deadly jungle flesh-eaters, permitting a temporary relaxation of vigilance and saving the resources of the last flash gun. They camped that "night" on the edge of one of these rock clearings. For the first time in weeks it had stopped raining, although the sun was still obscured. Dimly on the horizon could be seen the first of the foothills. Here they gathered some of the giant, oblong fungus that early explorers had taken for blocks of porous stone because of their size and weight, and, by dint of the plentiful application of fire pellets, managed to set it ablaze. The heat added nothing to their comfort, but it dried them out and allowed them to sleep unmolested. * * * * * An unwary winged eel served as their breakfast, and soon they were on their way to those beckoning hills. It had started to rain again, but the worst part of their journey was over. If they could reach the top of one of the mountains there was a good chance that they would be seen and rescued by their relief ship, provided they did not starve first. The flyer would use the mountains as a base from which to search for the trading station, and it was conceivable that the skipper might actually have anticipated their desperate adventure and would look for them in the Mountains of Perdition. They had crossed several ranges of the foothills and were beginning to congratulate themselves when the diffused light from above was suddenly blotted out. It was raining again, and above the echo-augmented thunder they heard a shrill screeching. "A web serpent!" Gunga cried, throwing himself flat on the ground. Forepaugh eased into a rock cleft at his side. Just in time. A great grotesque head bore down upon him, many-fanged as a medieval dragon. Between obsidian eyes was a fissure whence emanated a wailing and a foul odor. Hundreds of short, clawed legs slithered on the rocks under a long sinuous body. Then it seemed to leap into the air again. Webs grew taut between the legs, strumming as they caught a strong uphill wind. Again it turned to the attack, and missed them. This time Forepaugh was ready for it. He shot at it with his flash pistol. * * * * * Nothing happened. The fog made accurate shooting impossible, and the gun lacked its former power. The web serpent continued to course back and forth over their heads. "Guess we'd better run for it," Forepaugh murmured. "Go 'head!" They cautiously left their places of concealment. Instantly the serpent was down again, persistent if inaccurate. It struck the place of their first concealment and missed them. "Run!" They extended their weary muscles to the utmost, but it was soon apparent that they could not escape long. A rock wall in their path saved them. "Hole!" the Martian gasped. Forepaugh followed him into the rocky cleft. There was a strong draft of dry air, and it would have been next to impossible to hold the Martian back, so Forepaugh allowed him to lead on toward the source of the draft. As long as it led into the mountains he didn't care. The natural passageway was untenanted. Evidently its coolness and dryness made it untenable for most of Inra's humidity and heat loving life. Yet the floor was so smooth that it must have been artificially leveled. Faint illumination was provided by the rocks themselves. They appeared to be covered by some microscopic phosphorescent vegetation. After hundreds of twists and turns and interminable straight galleries the cleft turned more sharply upward, and they had a period of stiff climbing. They must have gone several miles and climbed at least 20,000 feet. The air became noticeably thin, which only exhilarated Gunga, but slowed the Earth man down. But at last they came to the end of the cleft. They could go no further, but above them, at least 500 feet higher, they saw a round patch of sky, miraculously bright blue sky! "A pipe!" Forepaugh cried. He had often heard of these mysterious, almost fabulous structures sometimes reported by passing travelers. Straight and true, smooth as glass and apparently immune to the elements, they had been occasionally seen standing on the very tops of the highest mountains--seen for a few moments only before they were hidden again by the clouds. Were they observatories of some ancient race, placed thus to pierce the mysteries of outer space? They would find out. * * * * * The inside of the pipe had zigzagging rings of metal, conveniently spaced for easy climbing. With Gunga leading, they soon reached the top. But not quite. "Eh?" said Forepaugh. "Uh?" said Gunga. There had not been a sound, but a distinct, definite command had registered on their minds. "Stop!" They tried to climb higher, but could not unclasp their hands. They tried to descend, but could not lower their feet. The light was by now relatively bright, and as by command their eyes sought the opposite wall. What they saw gave their jaded nerves an unpleasant thrill--a mass of doughy matter of a blue-green color about three feet in diameter, with something that resembled a cyst filled with transparent liquid near its center. And this thing began to flow along the rods, much as tar flows. From the mass extended a pseudopod; touched Gunga on the arm. Instantly the arm was raw and bleeding. Terrified, immovable, he writhed in agony. The pseudopod returned to the main mass, disappearing into its interior with the strip of bloody skin. Its attention was centered so much on the luckless Martian that its control slipped from Forepaugh. Seizing his flash pistol, he set the localized for a small area and aimed it at the thing, intent on burning it into nothingness. But again his hand was stayed. Against the utmost of his will-power his fingers opened, letting the pistol drop. The liquid in the cyst danced and bubbled. Was it laughing at him? It had read his mind--thwarted his will again. Again a pseudopod stretched out and a strip of raw, red flesh adhered to it and was consumed. Mad rage convulsed the Earth man. Should he throw himself tooth and nail on the monster? And be engulfed? He thought of the six-shooter. It thrilled him. But wouldn't it make him drop that too? * * * * * A flash of atavistic cunning came to him. He began to reiterate in his mind a certain thought. "This thing is so I can see you better--this thing is so I can see you better." He said it over and over, with all the passion and devotion of a celibate's prayer over a uranium fountain. "This thing is harmless--but it will make me see you better!" Slowly he drew the six-shooter. In some occult way he knew it was watching him. "Oh, this is harmless! This is an instrument to aid my weak eyes! It will help me realize your mastery! This will enable me to know your true greatness. This will enable me to know you as a god." Was it complacence or suspicion that stirred the liquid in the cyst so smoothly? Was it susceptible to flattery? He sighted along the barrel. "In another moment your great intelligence will overwhelm me," proclaimed his surface mind desperately, while the subconscious tensed the trigger. And at that the clear liquid burst into a turmoil of alarm. Too late. Forepaugh went limp, but not before he had loosed a steel-jacketed bullet that shattered the mind cyst of the pipe denizen. A horrible pain coursed through his every fibre and nerve. He was safe in the arms of Gunga, being carried to the top of the pipe to the clean dry air, and the blessed, blistering sun. The pipe denizen was dying. A viscous, inert mass, it dropped lower and lower, lost contact at last, shattered into slime at the bottom. * * * * * Miraculous sun! For a luxurious fifteen minutes they roasted there on the top of the pipe, the only solid thing in a sea of clouds as far as the eye could reach. But no! That was a circular spot against the brilliant white of the clouds, and it was rapidly coming closer. In a few minutes it resolved itself into the _Comet_, fast relief ship of the Terrestial, Inranian, Genidian, and Zydian Lines, Inc. With a low buzz of her repulsion motors she drew alongside. Hooks were attached and ports opened. A petty officer and a crew of roustabouts made her fast. "What the hell's going on here?" asked the cocky little terrestial who was skipper, stepping out and surveying the castaways. "We've been looking for you ever since your directional wave failed. But come on in--come on in!" He led the way to his stateroom, while the ship's surgeon took Gunga in charge. Closing the door carefully, he delved into the bottom of his locker and brought out a flask. "Can't be too careful," he remarked, filling a small tumbler for himself and another for his guest. "Always apt to be some snooper to report me. But say--you're wanted in the radio room." "Radio room nothing! When do we eat?" "Right away, but you'd better see him. Fellow from the Interplanetary News Agency wants you to broadcast a copyrighted story. Good for about three years' salary, old boy." "All right. I'll see him"--with a happy sigh--"just as soon as I put through a personal message." [Advertisement: Everyone Is Invited _To "Come Over in_ 'THE READERS' CORNER'!"] The Lord of Space _By Victor Rousseau_ [Illustration] [Sidenote: A Black Caesar had arisen on Eros--and all Earth trembled at his distant menace.] "On the day of the next full moon every living thing on earth will be wiped out of existence--unless you succeed in your mission, Lee." Nathaniel Lee looked into the face of Silas Stark, President of the United States of the World, and nodded grimly. "I'll do my best, Sir," he answered. "You have the facts. We know who this self-styled Black Caesar is, who has declared war upon humanity. He is a Dane named Axelson, whose father, condemned to life imprisonment for resisting the new world-order, succeeded in obtaining possession of an interplanetary liner. "He filled it with the gang of desperate men who had been associated with him in his successful escape from the penitentiary. Together they sailed into Space. They disappeared. It was supposed that they had somehow met their death in the ether, beyond the range of human ken. "Thirty years passed, and then this son of Axelson, born, according to his own story, of a woman whom the father had persuaded to accompany him into Space, began to radio us. We thought at first it was some practical joker who was cutting in. [Illustration: _It was like struggling with some vampire creatures in a hideous dream._] "When our electricians demonstrated beyond doubt that the voice came from outer space, it was supposed that some one in our Moon Colony had acquired a transmitting machine. Then the ships we sent to the Moon Colony for gold failed to return. As you know, for seven weeks there has been no communication with the Moon. And at the last full moon the--blow--fell. "The world depends upon you, Lee. The invisible rays that destroyed every living thing from China to Australia--one-fifth of the human race--will fall upon the eastern seaboard of America when the moon is full again. That has been the gist of Axelson's repeated communications. "We shall look to you to return, either with the arch-enemy of the human race as your prisoner, or with the good news that mankind has been set free from the menace that overhangs it. "God bless you, my boy!" The President of the United States of the World gripped Nat's hand and stepped down the ladder that led from the landing-stage of the great interplanetary space-ship. * * * * * The immense landing-field reserved for the ships of the Interplanetary Line was situated a thousand feet above the heart of New York City, in Westchester County. It was a flat space set on the top of five great towers, strewn with electrified sand, whose glow had the property of dispersing the sea fogs. There, at rest upon what resembled nothing so much as iron claws, the long gray shape of the vacuum flyer bulked. Nat sneezed as he watched the operations of his men, for the common cold, or coryza, seemed likely to be the last of the germ diseases that would yield to medical science, and he had caught a bad one in the Capitol, while listening to the debate in the Senate upon the threat to humanity. And it was cold on the landing-stage, in contrast to the perpetual summer of the glass-roofed city below. But Nat forgot the cold as he watched the preparations for the ship's departure. Neon and nitrogen gas were being pumped under pressure into the outer shell, where a minute charge of leucon, the newly discovered element that helped to counteract gravitation, combined with them to provide the power that would lift the vessel above the regions of the stratosphere. In the low roof-buildings that surrounded the stage was a scene of tremendous activity. The selenium discs were flashing signals, and the radio receivers were shouting the late news; on the great power boards dials and light signals stood out in the glow of the amylite tubes. On a rotary stage a thousand feet above the ship a giant searchlight, visible for a thousand miles, moved its shaft of dazzling luminosity across the heavens. Now the spar-aluminite outer skin of the ship grew bright with the red neon glare. Another ship, from China, dropped slowly to its stage near by, and the unloaders swarmed about the pneumatic tubes to receive the mail. The teleradio was shouting news of a failure of the Manchurian wheat crop. Nat's chief officer, a short cockney named Brent, came up to him. "Ready to start, Sir," he said. * * * * * Nat turned to him. "Your orders are clear?" "Yes, Sir." "Send Benson here." "I'm here, Sir." Benson, the ray-gunner in charge of the battery that comprised the vessel's armament, a lean Yankee from Connecticut, stepped forward. "You know your orders, Benson? Axelson has seized the Moon and the gold-mines there. He's planning to obliterate the Earth. We've got to go in like mad dogs and shoot to kill. No matter if we kill every living thing there, even our own people who are inmates of the Moon's penal settlement, we've got to account for Axelson." "Yes, Sir." "We can't guess how he got those gold-ships that returned with neon and argon for the Moon colonists. But he mustn't get us. Let the men understand that. That's all." "Very good, Sir." The teleradio suddenly began to splutter: A-A-A, it called. And instantly every sound ceased about the landing-stage. For that was the call of Axelson, somewhere upon the Moon. "Axelson speaking. At the next full moon all the American Province of the World Federation will be annihilated, as the Chinese Province was at the last. There's no hope for you, good people. Send out your vacuum liners. I can use a few more of them. Within six months your world will be depopulated, unless you flash me the signal of surrender." Would the proud old Earth have to come to that? Daily those ominous threats had been repeated, until popular fears had become frenzy. And Nat was being sent out as a last hope. If he failed, there would be nothing but surrender to this man, armed with a super-force that enabled him to lay waste the Earth from the Moon. Within one hour, those invisible, death-dealing rays had destroyed everything that inhaled oxygen and exhaled carbon. The ray with which the liner was equipped was a mere toy in comparison. It would kill at no more than 500 miles, and its action was quite different. As a prelude to Earth's surrender, Axelson demanded that World President Stark and a score of other dignitaries should depart for the Moon as hostages. Every ray fortress in the world was to be dismantled, every treasury was to send its gold to be piled up in a great pyramid on the New York landing-stage. The Earth was to acknowledge Axelson as its supreme master. * * * * * The iron claws were turning with a screwlike motion, extending themselves, and slowly raising the interplanetary vessel until she looked like a great metal fish with metal legs ending with suckerlike disks. But already she was floating free as the softly purring engines held her in equipoise. Nat climbed the short ladder that led to her deck. Brent came up to him again. "That teleradio message from Axelson--" he began. "Yes?" Nat snapped out. "I don't believe it came from the Moon at all." "You don't? You think it's somebody playing a hoax on Earth? You think that wiping out of China was just an Earth-joke?" "No, Sir." Brent stood steady under his superior's sarcasm. "But I was chief teleradio operator at Greenwich before being promoted to the Province of America. And what they don't know at Greenwich they don't know anywhere." Brent spoke with that self-assurance of the born cockney that even the centuries had failed to remove, though they had removed the cockney accent. "Well, Brent?" "I was with the chief electrician in the receiving station when Axelson was radioing last week. And I noticed that the waves of sound were under a slight Doppler effect. With the immense magnification necessary for transmitting from the Moon, such deflection might be construed as a mere fan-like extension. But there was ten times the magnification one would expect from the Moon; and I calculated that those sound-waves were shifted somewhere." "Then what's your theory, Brent?" "Those sounds come from another planet. Somewhere on the Moon there's an intercepting and re-transmitting plant. Axelson is deflecting his rays to give the impression that he's on the Moon, and to lure our ships there." "What do you advise?" asked Nat. "I don't know, Sir." "Neither do I. Set your course Moonward, and tell Mr. Benson to keep his eyes peeled." * * * * * The Moon Colony, discovered in 1976, when Kramer, of Baltimore, first proved the practicability of mixing neon with the inert new gas, leucon, and so conquering gravitation, had proved to be just what it had been suspected of being--a desiccated, airless desolation. Nevertheless, within the depths of the craters a certain amount of the Moon's ancient atmosphere still lingered, sufficient to sustain life for the queer troglodytes, with enormous lung-boxes, who survived there, browsing like beasts upon the stunted, aloe-like vegetation. Half man, half ape, and very much unlike either, these vestiges of a species on a ruined globe had proved tractable and amenable to discipline. They had become the laborers of the convict settlement that had sprung up on the Moon. Thither all those who had opposed the establishment of the World Federation, together with all persons convicted for the fourth time of a felony, had been transported, to superintend the efforts of these dumb, unhuman Moon dwellers. For it had been discovered that the Moon craters were extraordinarily rich in gold, and gold was still the medium of exchange on Earth. To supplement the vestigial atmosphere, huge stations had been set up, which extracted the oxygen from the subterranean waters five miles below the Moon's crust, and recombined it with the nitrogen with which the surface layer was impregnated, thus creating an atmosphere which was pumped to the workers. Then a curious discovery had been made. It was impossible for human beings to exist without the addition of those elements existing in the air in minute quantities--neon, krypton, and argon. And the ships that brought the gold bars back from the Moon had conveyed these gaseous elements there. * * * * * The droning of the sixteen atomic motors grew louder, and mingled with the hum of gyroscopes. The ladder was drawn up and the port hole sealed. On the enclosed bridge Nat threw the switch of durobronze that released the non-conducting shutter which gave play to the sixteen great magnets. Swiftly the great ship shot forward into the air. The droning of the motors became a shrill whine, and then, growing too shrill for human ears to follow it, gave place to silence. Nat set the speed lever to five hundred miles an hour, the utmost that had been found possible in passing through the earth's atmosphere, owing to the resistance, which tended to heat the vessel and damage the delicate atomic engines. As soon as the ether was reached, the speed would be increased to ten or twelve thousand. That meant a twenty-two hour run to the Moon Colony--about the time usually taken. He pressed a lever, which set bells ringing in all parts of the ship. By means of a complicated mechanism, the air was exhausted from each compartment in turn, and then replaced, and as the bells rang, the men at work trooped out of these compartments consecutively. This had been originated for the purpose of destroying any life dangerous to man that might unwittingly have been imported from the Moon, but on one occasion it had resulted in the discovery of a stowaway. Then Nat descended the bridge to the upper deck. Here, on a platform, were the two batteries of three ray-guns apiece, mounted on swivels, and firing in any direction on the port and starboard sides respectively. The guns were enclosed in a thin sheath of osmium, through which the lethal rays penetrated unchanged; about them, thick shields of lead protected the gunners. He talked with Benson for a while. "Don't let Axelson get the jump on you," he said. "Be on the alert every moment." The gunners, keen-looking men, graduates from the Annapolis gunnery school, grinned and nodded. They were proud of their trade and its traditions; Nat felt that the vessel was safe in their hands. The chief mate appeared at the head of the companion, accompanied by a girl. "Stowaway, Sir," he reported laconically. "She tumbled out of the repair shop annex when we let out the air!" * * * * * Nat stared at her in consternation, and the girl stared back at him. She was a very pretty girl, hardly more than twenty-two or three, attired in a businesslike costume consisting of a leather jacket, knickers, and the black spiral puttees that had come into style in the past decade. She came forward unabashed. "Well, who are you?" snapped Nat. "Madge Dawes, of the Universal News Syndicate," she answered, laughing. "The devil!" muttered Nat. "You people think you run the World Federation since you got President Stark elected." "We certainly do," replied the girl, still laughing. "Well, you don't run this ship," said Nat. "How would you like a long parachute drop back to Earth?" "Don't be foolish, my dear man," said Madge. "Don't you know you'll get wrinkles if you scowl like that? Smile! Ah, that's better. Now, honestly, Cap we just had to get the jump on everybody else in interviewing Axelson. It means such a lot to me." Pouts succeeded smiles. "You're not going to be cross about it, are you?" she pleaded. "Do you realize the risk you're running, young woman?" Nat demanded. "Are you aware that our chances of ever getting back to Earth are smaller than you ought to have dreamed of taking?" "Oh, that's all right," the girl responded. "And now that we're friends again, would you mind asking the steward to get me something to eat? I've been cooped up in that room downstairs for fifteen hours, and I'm simply starving." Nat shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. He turned to the chief mate. "Take Miss Dawes down to the saloon and see that Wang Ling supplies her with a good meal," he ordered. "And put her in the Admiral's cabin. That good enough for you?" he asked satirically. "Oh that'll be fine," answered the girl enthusiastically. "And I shall rely on you to keep me posted about everything that's going on. And a little later I'm going to take X-ray photographs of you and all these men." She smiled at the grinning gunners. "That's the new fad, you know, and we're going to offer prizes for the best developed skeletons in the American Province, and pick a King and Queen of Beauty!" * * * * * "A radio, Sir!" Nat, who had snatched a brief interval of sleep, started up as the man on duty handed him the message. The vessel had been constantly in communication with Earth during her voyage, now nearing completion, but the dreaded A-A-A that prefaced this message told Nat that it came from Axelson. "Congratulations on your attempt," the message ran, "I have watched your career with the greatest interest, Lee, through the medium of such scraps of information as I have been able to pick up on the Moon. When you are my guest to-morrow I shall hope to be able to offer you a high post in the new World Government that I am planning to establish. I need good men. Fraternally, the Black Caesar." Nat whirled about. Madge Dawes was standing behind him, trying to read the message over his shoulder. "Spying, eh?" said Nat bitterly. "My dear man, isn't that my business?" "Well, read this, then," said Nat, handing her the message. "You're likely to repent this crazy trick of yours before we get much farther." And he pointed to the cosmic-ray skiagraph of the Moon on the curved glass dome overhead. They were approaching the satellite rapidly. It filled the whole dome, the craters great black hollows, the mountains standing out clearly. Beneath the dome were the radium apparatus that emitted the rays by which the satellite was photographed cinematographically, and the gyroscope steering apparatus by which the ship's course was directed. Suddenly a buzzer sounded a warning. Nat sprang to the tube. "Gravitational interference X40, gyroscopic aberrancy one minute 29," he called. "Discharge static electricity from hull. Mr. Benson, stand by." "What does that mean?" asked Madge. "It means I shall be obliged if you'll abstain from speaking to the man at the controls," snapped Nat. "And what's that?" cried Madge in a shriller voice, pointing upward. * * * * * Across the patterned surface of the Moon, shown on the skiagraph, a black, cigar-shaped form was passing. It looked like one of the old-fashioned dirigibles, and the speed with which it moved was evident from the fact that it was perceptibly traversing the Moon's surface. Perhaps it was travelling at the rate of fifty thousand miles an hour. Brent, the chief officer, burst up the companion. His face was livid. "Black ship approaching us from the Moon, Sir," he stammered. "Benson's training his guns, but it must be twenty thousands miles away." "Yes, even our ray-guns won't shoot that distance," answered Nat. "Tell Benson to keep his guns trained as well as he can, and open fire at five hundred." Brent disappeared. Madge and Nat were alone on the bridge. Nat was shouting incomprehensible orders down the tube. He stopped and looked up. The shadow of the approaching ship had crossed the Moon's disk and disappeared. "Well, young lady, I think your goose is cooked," said Nat. "If I'm not mistaken, that ship is Axelson's, and he's on his way to knock us galley-west. And now oblige me by leaving the bridge." "I think he's a perfectly delightful character, to judge from that message he sent you," answered Madge, "and--" Brent appeared again. "Triangulation shows ten thousand miles, Sir," he informed Nat. "Take control," said Nat. "Keep on the gyroscopic course, allowing for aberrancy, and make for the Crater of Pytho. I'll take command of the guns." He hurried down the companion, with Madge at his heels. * * * * * The gunners stood by the ray-guns, three at each. Benson perched on a revolving stool above the batteries. He was watching a periscopic instrument that connected with the bridge dome by means of a tube, a flat mirror in front of him showing all points of the compass. At one edge the shadow of the black ship was creeping slowly forward. "Eight thousand miles, Sir," he told Nat. "One thousand is our extreme range. And it looks as if she's making for our blind spot overhead." Nat stepped to the speaking-tube. "Try to ram her," he called up to Brent. "We'll open with all guns, pointing forward." "Very good, Sir," the Cockney called back. The black shadow was now nearly in the centre of the mirror. It moved upward, vanished. Suddenly the atomic motors began wheezing again. The wheeze became a whine, a drone. "We've dropped to two thousand miles an hour, Sir," called Brent. Nat leaped for the companion. As he reached the top he could hear the teleradio apparatus in the wireless room overhead begin to chatter: "A-A-A. Don't try to interfere. Am taking you to the Crater of Pytho. Shall renew my offer there. Any resistance will be fatal. Axelson." And suddenly the droning of the motors became a whine again, then silence. Nat stared at the instrument-board and uttered a cry. "What's the matter?" demanded Madge. Nat swung upon her. "The matter?" he bawled. "He's neutralized our engines by some infernal means of his own, and he's towing us to the Moon!" * * * * * The huge sphere of the Moon had long since covered the entire dome. The huge Crater of Pytho now filled it, a black hollow fifty miles across, into which they were gradually settling. And, as they settled, the pale Earth light, white as that of the Moon on Earth, showed the gaunt masses of bare rock, on which nothing grew, and the long stalactites of glassy lava that hung from them. Then out of the depths beneath emerged the shadowy shape of the landing-stage. "You are about to land," chattered the radio. "Don't try any tricks; they will be useless. Above all, don't try to use your puny ray. You are helpless." The ship was almost stationary. Little figures could be seen swarming upon the landing-stage, ready to adjust the iron claws to clamp the hull. With a gesture of helplessness, Nat left the bridge and went down to the main deck where, in obedience to his orders, the crew had all assembled. "Men, I'm putting it up to you," he said. "Axelson, the Black Caesar, advises us not to attempt to use the Ray-guns. I won't order you to. I'll leave the decision with you." "We tried it fifteen minutes ago, Sir," answered Benson. "I told Larrigan to fire off the stern starboard gun to see if it was in working order, and it wasn't!" At that moment the vessel settled with a slight jar into the clamps. Once more the teleradio began to scream: "Open the port hold and file out slowly. Resistance is useless. I should turn my ray upon you and obliterate you immediately. Assemble on the landing-stage and wait for me!" "You'd best obey," Nat told his men. "We've got a passenger to consider." He glared at Madge as he spoke, and Madge's smile was a little more tremulous than it had been before. "This is the most thrilling experience of my life, Captain Lee," she said. "And I'll never rest until I've got an X-Ray photograph of Mr. Axelson's skeleton for the Universal News Syndicate." * * * * * One by one, Nat last, the crew filed down the ladder onto the landing-stage, gasping and choking in the rarefied air that lay like a blanket at the bottom of the crater. And the reason for this was only too apparent to Nat as soon as he was on the level stage. Overhead, at an altitude of about a mile, the black ship hung, and from its bow a stupendous searchlight played to and fro over the bottom of the crater, making it as light as day. And where had been the mining machinery, the great buildings that had housed convicts and Moon people, and the huge edifice that contained the pumping station, there was--nothing. The devilish ray of Axelson had not merely destroyed them, it had obliterated all traces of them, and the crew of the liner were breathing the remnants of the atmosphere that still lay at the bottom of the Crater of Pytho. But beside the twin landing-stages, constructed by the World Federation, another building arose, with an open front. And that front was a huge mirror, now scintillating under the searchlight from the black ship. "That's it, Sir!" shouted Brent. "That's what?" snapped Nat. "The deflecting mirror I was speaking of. That's what deflected the ray that wiped out China. The ray didn't come from the Moon. And that's the mirror that deflects the teleradio waves, the super-Hertzian rays that carry the sound." Nat did not answer. Sick at heart at the failure of his mission, he was watching the swarm of Moon men who were at work upon the landing-stage, turning the steel clamps and regulating the mechanism that controlled the apparatus. Dwarfed, apish creature, with tiny limbs, and chests that stood out like barrels, they bustled about, chattering in shrill voices that seemed like the piping of birds. It was evident that Axelson, though he had wiped out the Moon convicts and the Moon people in the crater, had reserved a number of the latter for personal use. * * * * * The black ship was dropping into its position at the second landing-stage, connected with the first by a short bridge. The starboard hold swung open, and a file of shrouded and hooded forms appeared, masked men, breathing in condensed air from receptacles upon their chests, and staring with goggle eyes at their captives. Each one held in his hand a lethal tube containing the ray, and, as if by command, they took up their stations about their prisoners. Then, at a signal from their leader, they suddenly doffed their masks. Nat looked at them in astonishment. He had not known whether these would be Earth denizens or inhabitants of some other planet. But they were Earth men. And they were old. Men of sixty or seventy, years, with long, gray beards and wrinkled faces, and eyes that stared out from beneath penthouses of shaggy eyebrows. Faces on which were imprinted despair and hopelessness. Then the first man took off his mask and Nat saw a man of different character. A man in the prime of life, with a mass of jet black hair and a black beard that swept to his waist, a nose like a hawk's, and a pair of dark blue eyes that fixed themselves on Nat's with a look of Luciferian pride. "Welcome, Nathaniel Lee," said the man, in deep tones that had a curious accent which Nat could not place. "I ought to know your name, since your teleradios on Earth have been shouting it for three days past as that of the man who is to save Earth from the threat of destruction. And you know me!" "Axelson--the Black Caesar," Nat muttered. For the moment he was taken aback. He had anticipated any sort of person except this man, who stood, looked, and spoke like a Viking, this incarnation of pride and strength. Axelson smiled--and then his eyes lit upon Madge Dawes. And for a moment he stood as if petrified into a block of massive granite. "What--who is this?" he growled. "Why, I'm Madge Dawes, of the Universal News Syndicate," answered the girl, smiling at Axelson in her irrepressible manner. "And I'm sure you're not nearly such a bold, bad pirate as people think, and you're going to let us all go free." * * * * * Instantly Axelson seemed to become transformed into a maniac. He turned to the old men and shouted in some incomprehensible language. Nat and Madge, Brent and Benson, and two others who wore the uniforms of officers were seized and dragged across the bridge to the landing-stage where the black ship was moored. The rest of the crew were ordered into a double line. And then the slaughter began. Before Nat could even struggle to break away from the gibbering Moon men to whom he and the other prisoners had been consigned, the aged crew of the Black Caesar had begun their work of almost instantaneous destruction. Streams of red and purple light shot from the ray-pistols that they carried, and before them the crew of the ether-liner simply withered up and vanished. They became mere masses of human débris piled on the landing-stage, and upon these masses, too, the old men turned their implements, until only a few heaps of charred carbon remained on the landing-stage, impalpable as burned paper, and slowly rising in the low atmospheric pressure until they drifted over the crater. Nat had cried out in horror at the sight, and tried to tear himself free from the grasp of the Moon dwarfs who held him. So had the rest. Never was struggle so futile. Despite their short arms and legs, the Moon dwarfs held them in an unshakable grip, chattering and squealing as they compressed them against their barrel-like chests until the breath was all but crushed out of their bodies. "Devil!" cried Nat furiously, as Axelson came up to him. "Why don't you kill us, too?" And he hurled furious taunts and abuse at him, in the hope of goading him into making the same comparatively merciless end of his prisoners. Axelson looked at him calmly, but made no reply. He looked at Madge again, and his features were convulsed with some emotion that gave him the aspect of a fiend. And then only did Nat realize that it was Madge who was responsible for the Black Caesar's madness. Axelson spoke again, and the prisoners were hustled up the ladder and on board the black vessel. * * * * * "The Kommandant-Kommissar will see you!" The door of their prison had opened, letting in a shaft of light, and disclosing one of the graybeards, who stood there, pointing at Nat. "The--who?" Nat demanded. "The Kommandant-Kommissar, Comrade Axelson," snarled the graybeard. Nat knew what that strange jargon meant. He had read books about the political sect known as Socialists who flourished in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and, indeed, were even yet not everywhere extinct. And with that a flash of intuition explained the presence of these old men on board. These were the men who had been imprisoned in their youth, with Axelson's father, and had escaped and made their way into space, and had been supposed dead long since. Somewhere they must have survived. And here they were, speaking a jargon of past generations, and ignorant that the world had changed, relics of the past, dead as the dead Moon from which the black ship was winging away through the ether. "Don't go, Captain," pleaded Madge. "Tell him we'll all go together." Nat shook his head. "Maybe I'll be able to make terms with him," he answered, and stepped out upon the vessel's deck. The graybeard slammed the door and laughed savagely. "You'll make no terms with the Black Caesar," he said. "This is the reign of the proletariat. The bourgeois must die! So Lenin decreed!" But he stopped suddenly and passed his hand over his forehead like a man awakening from a dream. "Surely the proletariat has already triumphed on earth?" he asked. "A long time has passed, and daily we expect the summons to return and establish the new world-order. What year is this? Is it not 2017? It is so hard to reckon on Eros." "On Eros?" thought Nat. "This is the year 2044," he answered. "You've been dreaming, my friend. We've had our new world-order, and it's not in the least like the one you and your friends anticipated." "Gott!" screamed the old man. "Gott, you're lying to me, bourgeois! You're lying, I tell you!" * * * * * So Eros was their destination! Eros, one of the asteroids, those tiny fragments of a broken planet, lying outside the orbit of Mars. Some of these little worlds, of which more than a thousand are known to exist, are no larger than a gentleman's country estate; some are mere rocks in space. Eros, Nat knew, was distinguished among them from the fact that it had an eccentric orbit, which brought it at times nearer Earth than any other heavenly body except the Moon. Also that it had only been known for thirty years, and that it was supposed to be a double planet, having a dark companion. That was in Nat's mind as he ascended the bridge to where Axelson was standing at the controls, with one of the graybeards beside him. The door of his stateroom was open, and suddenly there scuttled out of it one of the most bestial objects Nat had ever seen. It was a Moon woman, a dwarfish figure, clothed in a shapeless garment of spun cellulose, and in her arms she held a heavy-headed Moon baby, whose huge chest stood up like a pyramid, while the tiny arms and legs hung dangling down. "Here is the bourgeois, Kommandant," said Nat's captor. Axelson looked at Nat, eye meeting eye in a slow stare. Then he relinquished the controls to the graybeard beside him, and motioned Nat to precede him into the stateroom. Nat entered. It was an ordinary room, much like that of the captain of the ether-liner now stranded on the Moon. There were a bunk, chairs, a desk and a radio receiver. Axelson shut the door. He tried to speak and failed to master his emotion. At last he said: "I am prepared to offer you terms, Nathaniel Lee, in accordance with my promise." "I'll make no terms with murderers," replied Nat bitterly. * * * * * Axelson stood looking at him. His great chest rose and fell. Suddenly he put out one great hand and clapped Nat on the shoulder. "Wise men," he said, "recognize facts. Within three weeks I shall be the undisputed ruler of Earth. Whether of a desert or of a cowed and submissive subject-population, rests with the Earth men. I have never been on Earth, for I was born on Eros. My mother died at my birth. I have never seen another human woman until to-day." Nat looked at him, trying to follow what was in Axelson's mind. "My father fled to Eros, a little planet seventeen miles in diameter, as we have found. He called it a heavenly paradise. It was his intention to found there a colony of those who were in rebellion against the tyrants of Earth. "His followers journeyed to the Moon and brought back Moon women for wives. But there were no children of these unions. Later there were dissensions and civil war. Three-fourths of the colony died in battle with one another. "I was a young man. I seized the reins of power. The survivors--these old men--were disillusioned and docile. I made myself absolute. I brought Moon men and women to Eros to serve us as slaves. But in a few years the last of my father's old compatriots will have died, and thus it was I conceived of conquering Earth and having men to obey me. For fifteen years I have been experimenting and constructing apparatus, with which I now have Earth at my mercy. "But I shall need assistance, intelligent men who will obey me and aid me in my plans. That is why I saved you and the other officers of your ether-lines. If you will join me, you shall have the highest post on Earth under me, Nathaniel Lee, and those others shall be under you." * * * * * Axelson paused, and, loathing the man though he did, Nat was conscious of a feeling of pity for him that he could not control. He saw his lonely life on Eros, surrounded by those phantom humans of the past, and he understood his longing for Earth rule--he the planetary exile, the sole human being of all the planetary system outside Earth, perhaps, except for his dwindling company of aged men. "To-day, Nathaniel Lee," Axelson went on, "my life was recast in a new mould when I saw the woman you have brought with you. I did not know before that women were beautiful to look on. I did not dream that creatures such as she existed. She must be mine, Nathaniel Lee. "But that is immaterial. What is your answer to my offer?" Nat was trying to think, though passion distorted the mental images as they arose in his brain. To Axelson it was evidently incomprehensible that there would be any objection to his taking Madge. Nat saw that he must temporize for Madge's sake. "I'll have to consult my companions," he answered. "Of course," answered Axelson. "That is reasonable. Tell them that unless they agree to join me it will be necessary for them to die. Do Earth men mind death? We hate it on Eros, and the Moon men hate it, too, though they have a queer legend that something in the shape of an invisible man raises from their ashes. My father told me that that superstition existed on Earth in his time, too. Go and talk to your companions, Nathaniel Lee." The Black Caesar's voice was almost friendly. He clapped Nat on the shoulder again, and called the graybeard to conduct him back to his prison. "Oh, Captain Lee, I'm so glad you're back!" exclaimed Madge. "We've been afraid for you. Is he such a terrible man, this Black Caesar?" Nat sneered, then grinned malevolently. "Well, he's not exactly the old-fashioned idea of a Sunday-school teacher," he answered. Of course he could not tell the girl about Axelson's proposal. * * * * * The little group of prisoners stood on the upper deck of the black ship and watched the Moon men scurrying about the landing-stage as she hovered to her position. Axelson's father had not erred when he had called the tiny planet, Eros, a heavenly paradise, for no other term could have described it. They were in an atmosphere so similar to that of Earth that they could breathe with complete freedom, but there seemed to be a lightness and a vigor in their limbs that indicated that the air was supercharged with oxygen or ozone. The presence of this in large amounts was indicated by the intense blueness of the sky, across which fleecy clouds were drifting. And in that sky what looked like threescore moons were circling with extraordinary swiftness. From thirty to forty full moons, of all sizes, from that of a sun to that of a brilliant planet, and riding black against the blue. The sun, hardly smaller than when seen from Earth, shone in the zenith, and Earth and Mars hung in the east and north respectively, each like a blood-red sun. The moons were some of the thousand other asteroids, weaving their lacy patterns in and out among each other. But, stupendous as the sight was, it was toward the terrestrial scene that the party turned their eyes as the black ship settled. A sea of sapphire blue lapped sands of silver and broke into soft lines of foam. To the water's edge extended a lawn of brightest green, and behind this an arm of the sea extended into what looked like a tropical forest. Most of the trees were palmlike, but towered to immense heights, their foliage swaying in a gentle breeze. There were apparently no elevations, and yet, so small was the little sphere that the ascending curve gave the illusion of distant heights, while the horizon, instead of seeming to rise, lay apparently perfectly flat, producing an extraordinary feeling of insecurity. Near the water's edge a palatial mansion, built of hewn logs and of a single story, stood in a garden of brilliant flowers. Nearer, beyond the high landing-stage, were the great shipbuilding works, and near them an immense and slightly concave mirror flashed back the light of the sun. "The death ray!" whispered Brent to Nat. Axelson came up to the party as the ship settled down. "Welcome to Eros," he said cordially. "My father told me that in some Earth tongue that name meant 'love'." * * * * * Never, perhaps, was so strange a feast held as that with which Axelson entertained his guests that day. Dwarfish Moon men passed viands and a sort of palm wine in the great banquet-room, which singularly resembled one of those early twentieth century interiors shown in museums. Only the presence of a dozen of the aged guards, armed with ray-rods, lent a grimness to the scene. Madge sat on Axelson's right, and Nat on his left. The girl's lightheartedness had left her; her face grew strained as Axelson's motives--which Nat had not dared disclose to her--disclosed themselves in his manner. Once, when he laid his finger for a moment against her white throat, she started, and for a moment it seemed as if the gathering storm must break. For Nat had talked with his men, and all had agreed that they would not turn traitor, though they intended to temporize as long as possible, in the hope of catching the Black Caesar unawares. Then slowly a somber twilight began to fall, and Axelson rose. "Let us walk in the gardens during the reign of Erebos," he said. "Erebos?" asked Nat. "The black world that overshadows us each sleeping period," answered Axelson. Nat knew what he meant. The dark companion of Eros revolves around it every six hours; the day of Eros would therefore never be longer than six hours, this without reckoning the revolution of Eros around the sun. But owing to its small size, it was probable that it was bathed in almost perpetual sunshine. The sweet scent of the flowers, much stronger than of any flowers on earth, filled the air. They walked across the green lawn and entered a jungle path, with bamboos and creeping plants on either side, and huge palmlike trees. Behind them stalked the guards with their ray-rods. A lake of deepest black disclosed itself. Suddenly Madge uttered a scream and clung to Nat. "Look, look!" she cried. "It's horrible!" * * * * * Suddenly Nat realized that the lake swarmed with monsters. They were of crocodilian form, but twice the size of the largest crocodile, and sprawled over one another in the shallows beside the margin. As the party drew near, an enormous monster began waddling on its clawed feet toward them. A mouth half the length of the creature opened, disclosing a purplish tongue and hideous fangs. Madge screamed again. "Ah, so fear exists on Earth, too?" asked Axelson blandly. "That makes my conquest sure. I suspected it, and yet I was not sure that science had not conquered it. But there is no cause for fear. A magnetic field protects us. See!" For the waddling monster suddenly stopped short as if brought up sharply by the bars of a cage, and drew back. Axelson turned and wheezed in the Moon language--if the gibbering of the dwarfs could be called speech--and one of the guards answered him. "These primitive dwellers on Eros I have preserved," said Axelson, "as a means of discipline. The Moon animals are afraid of them. I keep a supply of those who have transgressed my laws to feed them. See!" He turned and pointed. Two guards were bringing a gibbering, screeching, struggling Moon man with them. Despite his strength, he seemed incapable of making any resistance, but his whole body quivered, and his hideous face was contorted with agony of terror. At a distance of some fifty feet they turned aside into a little bypath through the jungle, reappearing close beside the Lake upon a raised platform. And what happened next happened so swiftly that Nat was unable to do anything to prevent it. The guards disappeared; the Moon man, as if propelled by some invisible force, moved forward jerkily to the lake's edge. Instantly one of the saurians had seized him in its jaws, and another had wrenched half the body away, and the whole fighting, squirming mass vanished in the depths. And from far away came the screeching chant of the Moon men, as if in invocation to some hideous deity. And, moving perceptibly, the huge black orb of Eros's dark satellite crept over the sky, completely covering it. * * * * * Axelson stepped forward to where Nat stood, supporting Madge in his arms. The girl had fainted with horror at the scene. "Your answer Nathaniel Lee," he said softly. "I know you have been postponing the decision. Now I will take the girl, and you shall give me your answer. Will you and these men join me, or will you die as the Moon man died?" He spoke wheezily, as if he, like Nat, had a cold. And he put his arm around Madge. Next moment something happened to him that had never happened in his life before. The Black Caesar went down under a well-directed blow to the jaw. He leaped to his feet trembling with fury and barked a command. Instantly the old guards had hurled themselves forward. And behind them a horde of Moon men came, ambling. While the guards covered their prisoners with their ray-rods, two Moon men seized each of them, imprisoning him in their unbreakable grasp. Axelson pointed upward. "When the reign of Erebos is past," he said, "you become food for the denizens of the lake, unless you have agreed to serve me." And he raised Madge in his arms, laughing as the girl fought and struggled to resist him. "Madge!" cried Nat, trying to run toward her. So furious were his struggles that for a moment he succeeded in throwing off the Moon men's grasp. Then he was caught again, and, fighting desperately, was borne off by the dwarfs through the shadows. They traversed the border of the lake until a small stone building disclosed itself. Nat and the others were thrust inside into pitch darkness. The door clanged; in vain they hurled themselves against it. It was of wood, but it was as solid as the stone itself, and it did not give an inch for all their struggles. * * * * * "Where is your Kommandant?" The whisper seemed in the stone hut itself. "Your Nathaniel Lee. I must speak to him. I am the guard who brought him to the Black Caesar on board the ship." "I'm here," said Nat. "Where are you?" "I am in the house of the ray. I am on guard there. I am speaking into the telephone which runs only to where you are. You can speak anywhere in the hut, and I shall hear you." "Well, what do you want?" asked Nat. "You love the Earth woman. I remember, when I was a boy, we used to love. I had forgotten. There was a girl in Stamford.... Tell me, is it true that this is the year 2044 and that the proletariat has not yet triumphed?" "It's true," said Nat. "Those dreams are finished, We're proud of the World Federation. Tell me about Madge Dawes--the Earth woman. Is she safe?" "He has taken her to his house. I do not think she is harmed. He is ill. He is closely guarded. There are rumors afoot. I do not know." "What do you want, then?" "If the Black Caesar dies will you take me back to Earth again? I long so for the old Earth life. I will be your slave, if only I can set foot on Earth before I die." "Can you rescue us?" Nat held his breath. "The Moon men are on guard." "They have no ray-guns and you have." "The penalty would be terrible. I should be thrown to the monsters." "Can you get us each a ray-gun? Will you risk it, to get back to Earth?" asked Nat. A pause. Then, "My friend, I am coming." Nat heard Benson hissing in his ear, "If we can surprise them, we can get possession of the black ship and return." "We must get Madge Dawes." "And smash the mirror," put in Brent. After that there was nothing to do but wait. * * * * * The door clicked open. An indistinct form stood in the entrance. It was already growing light; the dark satellite that eclipsed Eros was passing. "Hush! I have brought you ray-rods!" It was the old man with whom Nat had spoken on the boat. Under his arm he held five metallic rods, tipped with luminous glass. He handed one to each of the prisoners. "Do you know how to use them?" he asked. Nat examined his. "It's an old-style rod that was used on earth fifty years ago," he told his men. "I've seen them in museums. It came into use in the Second World War of 1950 or thereabouts. You slip back the safety catch and press this button, taking aim as one did with the pistol. You fellows have seen pistols?" "My father had an old one," said the chief mate, Barnes. "How many times can they be fired without reloading?" Nat asked the old guard. "Ten times; sometimes more; and they were all freshly loaded yesterday." "Take us to where Axelson is." "First you must destroy the guards. I sent the one on duty here away on some pretext. But the others may be here at any moment. Talk lower. Are you going to kill them?" "We must," said Nat. The old fellow began to sob. "We were companions together. They seized us and imprisoned us together, the capitalists, years ago. I thought the proletariat would have won, and you say it is all different. I am an old man, and life is sad and strange." "Listen. Is Axelson in the house?" demanded Nat. "He is in his secret room. I do not know the way. None of us has ever entered it." "And Madge?" "She was with him. I do not know anything more." He sank down, groaning, broken. * * * * * Nat pushed his way past him. It was fast growing light now. A ray of sunshine shot from beneath the edge of the dark sphere overhead, which still filled almost all the heavens. At that moment the hideous face and squat body of one of the Moon men came into view at the end of the path. The creature stopped, gibbering with surprise, and then rushed forward, mewing like a cat. Nat aimed his ray-rod and pressed the button. The streak of light, not quite aimed, in Nat's excitement, sheared off one side of the Moon man's face. The creature rocked where it stood, raised its voice in a screech, and rushed forward again, arms flailing. And this time Nat got home. The streak passed right through the body of the monster, which collapsed into a heap of calcined carbon. But its screech had brought the other dwarfs running to the scene. In a moment the path was blocked by a score of the hideous monsters, which, taking in what was happening, came forward in a yelling bunch. The ray-rods streaked their message of death into the thick of them. Yet so fierce was the rush that some parts got home. Arms, legs, and barrel chests, halves of men, covering the five with that impalpable black powder into which their bodies were dissolving. Nat remembered afterward the horror of a grinning face, apparently loose in the air, and a flailing arm that lashed his chest. For fifteen seconds, perhaps, it was like struggling with some vampire creatures in a hideous dream. And then, just when it seemed to Nat that he was going mad, he found the path free, and the huddled remnants of the Moon men piled up about him on every side. He emptied two more ray-shots into the writhing mass, and saw it cease to quiver and then dissolve into the black powder. He turned and looked at his companions. They, too, showed the horror of the strain they had undergone. "We must kill the guards now," Nat panted. "And then find Madge and save her." "We're with you," answered Brent, and together the five rushed into the sunlight and the open. * * * * * There were no guards on duty at the entrance of the house, and the door stood wide open. Nat rushed through the door at the head of his men. A single guard was in the hall, but he only looked up as they came in. And it was evident that he was in no condition to resist, for he was in the grip of some terrible disease. His features were swollen so that they were hardly recognizable, and hoarse, panting breaths came from his lungs. He was so far gone that he hardly registered surprise at the advent of the five. "Where's Axelson?" demanded Nat. The guard pointed toward the end of the corridor, then let his arm fall. Nat led his men along the half-dark passage. At the end of the corridor two more guards were on duty, but one was collapsed upon the floor, apparently unconscious, and the other, making a feeble attempt to draw his ray-rod, crumbled into ashes as Brent fired. The five burst through the door. They found themselves in the banquet-hall. The remnants of the meal were still upon the table, and three Moon men, looking as if they had been poisoned, were writhing on the floor. At the farther end of the hall was another door. This gave upon a central hall, with a door in each of its four sides, and a blaze of sunlight coming through the crystal roof. The five stopped, baffled. Then of a sudden Axelson's voice broke the silence--his voice, yet changed almost beyond recognition, hoarse, broken, and gasping: "Try the doors, Nathaniel Lee. Try each door in turn, and then go back. And know that in an instant I can blast you to nothingness where you stand!" And suddenly there came Madge's voice, "He can't! He can't, Nat. He's dying, and he knows it. I won't let him, and he hasn't got the strength to move." "Which door?" cried Nat in desperation. "None of the doors. They're a trick," came Madge's voice. "Go forward and press the grooved panel upon the wall in front of you." * * * * * Nat stepped forward, found the panel, and pressed it. The wall swung open, like two folded doors, revealing another room within, perfectly circular. It contained a quantity of pieces of apparatus, some glowing with light, some dark, and a radio transmitting set; it was evidently the secret lair of the Black Caesar. And there he was, trapped at last by the mortal illness that had overtaken him! He was lying upon the couch, his great form stretched out, his features hideously swollen by the same disease that had attacked the guards. Nat raised his ray-rod, but Axelson feebly put up his hand, and Nat lowered the weapon. And, as the five gathered about the dying man, again Nat felt that strange sense of pathos and pity for him. He had never known Earth life, and he was not to be measured by the common standards applicable on Earth. "Don't fire, Nat," said Madge in a shaky voice. She was seated beside Axelson, and--the wonder of it--she was sponging the foam from his lips and moistening his forehead. She raised a crystal that contained some fluid to his lips, and he drained it greedily. "So--Earth wins, Nathaniel Lee," whispered Axelson hoarsely. "I am dying. I know it. It is the same dreaded disease that came to the Moon at the time of my father's landing there. Three-fourths of the Moon animals died. It is mortal. The lungs burn away. "My father told me that on Earth it is not mortal. He called it 'cold'--but I am burning hot." Then only did Nat understand, and the irony of it made him catch his breath and grit his teeth to check his hysterical laughter. The Black Caesar, the terror of Earth, was dying of a common cold which he himself had given him. The coryza germ, almost harmless on Earth, among a population habituated to it for countless generations, had assumed the potency of a plague here, where no colds had ever been known--among the Moon men, and even among the guards, after their lifetime in the germless climate of Eros. "I've failed, Nathaniel Lee," came the Black Caesar's voice. "And yet that hardly troubles me. There is something more that I do not understand. She is a creature like ourselves--with will and reason. She is not like the Moon women. She told me that she did not wish to be queen of the Earth because she did not love me. I do not understand. And so--I am glad to go." * * * * * A gasp came from Axelson's throat as he raised his head and tried to speak, but the death-rattle was already in his throat. A slight struggle, and the massive form upon the couch was nothing but inanimate clay. Madge rose from beside him, and the tears were streaming down her face. "He wasn't a bad man, Nat," she said. "He was--gentle with me. He didn't understand; that was all. When I refused to be his queen, he was overcome with bewilderment. Oh, Nat, I can never, never write this story for the Universal News Syndicate." Nat led her, sobbing, from the room. Soon he succeeded in getting into teleradio communication with Earth. He broadcast the news that the Black Caesar was dead, and that his power for evil was at an end forever. Then, in the few hours of daylight that remained, he set his men to work to smash the ray outfit that had destroyed China. There was some principle involved which he did not altogether understand, though Brent professed to have a clue to it, but it was evident that, except for the ray, Axelson had possessed no knowledge superior to that of the Earth scientists. Of the guards, a few were already recovering, principally those of comparatively younger age. Not a Moon man, on the other hand, had survived the epidemic. As soon as Nat had got the guards out of the house, he reduced it to ashes by the aid of an old-fashioned box of phosphoric matches. As the dark satellite was again creeping over Eros, the black ship set sail. * * * * * But of the return journey to the Moon, where they transferred to their own ship, of their landing at New York, and of the triumphal reception that was accorded them, this is no place to speak. Nat's journey with Madge from the center of the city, in what was the old Borough of Westchester, to his home in the suburb of Hartford, was a continual ovation. Crowds lined the air-route, and every few miles, so thick was the air-traffic, he was forced to hover and address the cheering multitudes. Hartford itself was _en fete_, and across the main road the City Bosses had hung an old-fashioned banner, strung from house to house on either side, bearing the legend: For World President: NATHANIEL LEE! Nat turned to Madge, who was seated beside him silently. "Ever hear of 'getting married?'" he asked. "Of course I've heard of it," replied the girl indignantly. "Do you think I'm as dumb as that, Nat Lee? Why, those old-fashioned novels are part of the public schools' curriculum." "Pity those days can't come back. You ought to be a World Presidentess, you know," said Nat. "I was thinking, if we registered as companionates, I could take you into the White House, and you'd have a swell time there taking X-rays on visiting days." "Well," answered Madge slowly. "I never thought of that. It might be worth trying out." The Second Satellite _By Edmond Hamilton_ [Illustration: _The city of the frog-men!_] [Sidenote: Earth-men war on frog-vampires for the emancipation of the human cows of Earth's second satellite.] Norman and Hackett, bulky in their thick flying suits, seemed to fill the little office. Across the room Harding, the field superintendent, contemplated them. Two planes were curving up into the dawn together from the field outside, their motors thunderous as they roared over the building. When their clamor had receded, Harding spoke: "I don't know which of you two is crazier," he said. "You, Norman, to propose a fool trip like this, or you, Hackett, to go with him." Hackett grinned, but the long, lean face of Norman was earnest. "No doubt it all sounds a little insane," he said, "but I'm convinced I'm right." The field superintendent shook his head. "Norman, you ought to be writing fiction instead of flying. A second satellite--and Fellows and the others on it--what the devil!" "What other theory can account for their disappearance?" asked Norman calmly. "You know that since the new X-type planes were introduced, hundreds of fliers all over Earth have been trying for altitude records in them. Twenty-five miles--thirty--thirty-five--the records have been broken every day. But out of the hundreds of fliers who have gone up to those immense heights, four have never come down nor been seen again! "One vanished over northern Sweden, one over Australia, one over Lower California, and one, Fellows, himself, right here over Long Island. You saw the globe on which I marked those four spots, and you saw that when connected they formed a perfect circle around the Earth. The only explanation is that the four fliers when they reached a forty-mile height were caught up by some body moving round Earth in that circular orbit, some unknown moon circling Earth inside its atmosphere, a second satellite of Earth's whose existence has until now never been suspected!" * * * * * Harding shook his head again. "Norman, your theory would be all right if it were not for the cold fact that no such satellite has ever been glimpsed." "Can you glimpse a bullet passing you?" Norman retorted. "The two fliers at Sweden and Lower California vanished within three hours of each other, on opposite sides of the Earth. That means that this second satellite, as I've computed, circles Earth once every six hours, and travelling at that terrific speed it is no more visible to us of Earth than a rifle bullet would be." "Moving through Earth's atmosphere at such speed, indeed, one would expect it to burn up by its own friction with the air. But it does not, because its own gravitational power would draw to itself enough air to make a dense little atmosphere for itself that would cling to it and shield it as it speeds through Earth's upper air. No, I'm certain that this second satellite exists, Harding, and I'm as certain that it's responsible for the vanishing of those four fliers." "And now you and Hackett have figured when it will be passing over here and are going up in an X-type yourselves to look for it," Harding said musingly. "Look for it?" echoed Hackett. "We're not going to climb forty miles just to get a look at the damn thing--we're going to try landing on it!" "You're crazy sure!" the field superintendent exploded. "If Fellows and those others got caught by the thing and never came down again, why in the name of all that's holy would you two want--" He stopped suddenly. "Oh, I think I see," he said, awkwardly. "Fellows was rather a buddy of you two, wasn't he?" "The best that ever flew a crippled Nieuport against three Fokkers to pull us out of a hole," said Norman softly. "Weeks he's been gone, and if it had been Hackett and I he'd be all over the sky looking for us--the damned lunatic. Well, we're not going to let him down." "I see," Harding repeated. Then--"Well, here comes your mechanic, Norman, so your ship must be ready. I'll go with you. It's an event to see two Columbuses starting for another world." * * * * * The gray dawn-light over the flying field was flushing to faint rose as the three strode out to where the long X-type stood, its strangely curved wings, enclosed cabin and flat, fan-like tail gleaming dully. Its motor was already roaring with power and the plane's stubby wheels strained against the chocks. In their great suits Norman and Hackett were like two immense ape-figures in the uncertain light, to the eyes of those about them. "Well, all the luck," Harding told them. "You know I'm pulling for you, but--I suppose it's useless to say anything about being careful." "I seem to have heard the words," Hackett grinned, as he and Norman shook the field superintendent's hand. "It's all the craziest chance," Norman told the other. "And if we don't come down in a reasonable time--well, you'll know that our theory was right, and you can broadcast it or not as you please." "I hope for your sake that you're dead wrong," smiled the official. "I've told you two to get off the Earth a lot of times, but I never meant it seriously." Harding stepped back as the two clambered laboriously into the cramped cabin. Norman took the controls, the door slammed, and as the chocks were jerked back and the motor roared louder the long plane curved up at a dizzy angle from the field into the dawn. Hackett waved a thick arm down toward the diminishing figures on the field below; then turned from the window to peer ahead with his companion. The plane flew in a narrow ascending spiral upward, at an angle that would have been impossible to any ship save an X-type. Norman's eyes roved steadily over the instrument as they rose, his ears unconsciously alert for each explosion of the motor. Earth receded swiftly into a great gray concave surface as they climbed higher and higher. By the time the five-mile height was reached Earth's surface had changed definitely from concave to convex. The plane was ascending by then in a somewhat wider spiral, but its climb was as steady and sure as ever. Frost begin to form quickly on the cabin's windows, creeping out from the edges. Norman spoke a word over the motor's muffled thunder, and Hackett snicked on the electrical radiators. The frost crept back as their warm, clean heat flooded the cabin. Ten miles--fifteen--they had reached already altitudes impossible but a few years before, though it was nothing to the X-types. As they passed the ten-mile mark, Hackett set the compact oxygen-generator going. A clean, tangy odor filled the cabin as it began functioning. Twenty miles--twenty-two-- * * * * * After a time Norman pointed mutely to the clock on the instrument board, and Hackett nodded. They were well within their time schedule, having calculated to reach the forty-mile height at ten, the hour when, by its computed orbit, the second satellite should be passing overhead. "--26--27--28--" Hackett muttered the altimeter figures to himself as the needle crept over them. Glancing obliquely down through the window he saw that Earth was now a huge gray ball beneath them, white cloud-oceans obscuring the drab details of its surface here and there. "--31--32--" The plane was climbing more slowly, and at a lesser angle. Even the X-type had to struggle to rise in the attenuated air now about them. Only the super-light, super-powered plane could ever have reached the terrific height. It was at the thirty-four mile level that the real battle for altitude began. Norman kept the plane curving steadily upward, handling it with surpassing skill in the rarefied air. Frost was on its windows now despite the heating mechanism. Slowly the altimeter needle crept to the forty mark. Norman kept the ship circling, its wings tilted slightly, but not climbing, Earth a great gray misty ball beneath. "Can't keep this height long," he jerked. "If our second satellite doesn't show up in minutes we've had a trip for nothing." "All seems mighty different up here," was Hackett's shouted comment. "Easy enough to talk down there about hopping onto the thing, but up here--hell, there's nothing but air and mighty little of that!" Norman grinned. "There'll be more. If I'm right about this thing we won't need to hop it--its own atmosphere will pick us up." Both looked anxious as the motor sputtered briefly. But in a moment it was again roaring steadily. Norman shook his head. "Maybe a fool's errand after all. No--I'm still sure we're right! But it seems that we don't prove it this time." "Going down?" asked Hackett. "We'll have to, in minutes. Even with its own air-feed the motor can't stand this height for--" * * * * * Norman never finished the words. There was a sound, a keen rising, rushing sound of immense power that reached their ears over the motor's roar. Then in an instant the universe seemed to go mad about them: they saw the gray ball of Earth and the sun above skyrocketing around them as the plane whirled madly. The rushing sound was in that moment thunderous, terrible, and as winds smashed and rocked the plane like giant hands, Hackett glimpsed another sphere that was not the sphere of Earth, a greenish globe that expanded with lightning speed in the firmament beside their spinning plane! The winds stilled; the green globe changed abruptly to a landscape of green land and sea toward which the plane was falling! Norman was fighting the controls--land and sea were gyrating up to them with dizzy speed--crash! With that cracking crash the plane was motionless. Sunlight poured through its windows, and great green growths were all around it. Hackett, despite Norman's warning cry, forced the door open and was bursting outside, Norman after him. They staggered and fell, with curious lightness and slowness, on the ground outside, then clutched the plane for support and gazed stupefiedly around them. The plane had crashed down into a thicket of giant green reeds that rose a yard over their heads, its pancake landing having apparently not damaged it. The ground beneath their feet was soft and soggy, the air warm and balmy, and the giant reeds hid all the surrounding landscape from view. In the sky the sun burned near one horizon with unusual brilliance. But it was dwarfed, in size, by the huge gray circle that filled half the heavens overhead. A giant gray sphere it was, screened here and there by floating white mists and clouds, that had yet plain on it the outlines of dark continents and gleaming seas. A quaking realization held the two as they stared up at it. * * * * * "Earth!" Norman was babbling. "It's Earth, Hackett--above us; my God, I can't believe even yet that we've done it!" "Then we're on--the satellite--the second satellite!--" Hackett fought for reality. "Those winds that caught us--" "They were the atmosphere of this world, of the second satellite! They caught us and carried us on inside this smaller world's atmosphere, Hackett. We're moving with it around Earth at terrific speed now!" "The second satellite, and we on it!" Hackett whispered, incredulously. "But these reeds--it can't all be like this--" They stepped together away from the plane. The effort sent each of them sailing upward in a great, slow leap, to float down more than a score of feet from the plane. But unheeding in their eagerness this strange effect of the satellite's lesser gravitational power, they moved on, each step a giant, clumsy leap. Four such steps took them out of the towering reeds onto clear ground. It was a gentle, grassy slope they were on, stretching away along a gray-green sea that extended out to the astoundingly near horizon on their right. To the left it rose into low hills covered with dense masses of green junglelike vegetation. Hackett and Norman, though, gazed neither at sea or hills for the moment, but at the half-score grotesque figures who had turned toward them as they emerged from the reeds. A sick sense of the unreal held them as they gazed, frozen with horror. For the great figures returning their gaze a few yards from them were--frog-men! * * * * * Frog-men! Great mottled green shapes seven to eight feet in height, with bowed, powerful legs and arms that ended in webbed paws. The heads were bulbous ones in which wide, unwinking frog-eyes were set at the sides, the mouths white-lipped and white-lined. Three of the creatures held each a black metal tube-and-handle oddly like a target-pistol. "Norman!" Hackett's voice was a crescendo of horror. "_Norman!_" "Back to the plane!" Norman cried thickly. "The plane--" The two staggered back, but the frog-men, recovering from their own first surprise, were running forward with great hopping steps! The two fliers flung themselves back in a floating leap toward the reeds, but the green monsters were quick after them. A croaking cry came from one and as another raised his tube-and-handle, something flicked from it that burst close beside Norman. There was no sound or light as it burst, but the reeds for a few feet around it vanished! * * * * * A hoarse cry from Hackett--the creatures had reached him, grasped him at the edge of the reeds! Norman swerved in his floating leap to strike the struggling flier and frog-men. The scene whirled around him as he fought them, great paws reaching for him. With a sick, frantic rage he felt his clenched fist drive against cold, green, billowy bodies. Croaking cries sounded in his ears; then, Hackett and he were jerked to their feet, held tightly by four of the creatures. "My God, Norman," panted Hackett, helpless. "What are they--frog-things?--" "Steady, Hackett. They're the people of the second satellite, it seems; wait!" One of the armed frog-men approached and inspected them, and then croaked an order in a deep voice. Then, still holding the two tightly, the party of monsters began to move along the slope, skirting the sea's edge. In a few minutes they reached two curious objects resting on the slope. They seemed long black metal boats, slender and with sharp prow and stern. A compact mechanism and control-board filled the prow, while at the stern and sides were long tubes mounted on swivels like machine-guns. The frog-men motioned Norman and Hackett into one, fastening the two prisoners and themselves into their seats with metal straps provided for the purpose. Four had entered the one boat, the others that of the captives. One at the prow moved his paws over the control-board and with a purring of power the boat, followed by the other, rose smoothly into the air. It headed out over the gray-green sea, land dropping quickly from sight behind, the horizons water-bounded on all sides. From their nearness Norman guessed that this second satellite of Earth's was small indeed beside its mother planet. He had to look up to earth's great gray sphere overhead to attain a sense of reality. Hackett was whispering beside him, the frog-men watchful. "Norman, it's not real--it can't be real! These things--these boats--intelligent like men--" The other sought to steady him. "It's a different world, Hackett. Gravitation different, light different, everything different, and evolution here has had a different course. On Earth men evolved to be the most intelligent life-forms, but here the frog-races, it seems." "But where are they taking us? Could we ever find the plane again?" "God knows. If we ever get away from these things we might. And we've got to find Fellows, too; I wonder where he is on this world." * * * * * For many minutes the two boats raced on at great speed over the endless waters before the watery skyline was broken far ahead by something dark and unmoving. Hackett and Norman peered with intense interest toward it. It seemed at first a giant squat mountain rising from the sea, but as they shot nearer they saw that its outline was too regular, and that colossal as it was in size it was the work of intelligence. They gasped as they came nearer and got a better view of it. For it was a gigantic dome of black metal rising sheer from the lonely sea, ten miles if anything in diameter, a third that in greatest height. There was no gate or window or opening of any kind in it. Just the colossal, smooth black dome rearing from the watery plain. Yet the two boats were flashing lower toward it. "They can't be going inside!" Hackett conjectured. "There's no way in and what could be in there? The whole thing's mad--" "There's some way," Norman said. "They're slowing--" The flying-boats were indeed slowing as they dipped lower. They were very near the dome now, its curving wall a looming, sky-high barrier before them. Suddenly the boats dipped sharply downward toward the green sea. Before the two fliers could comprehend their purpose, could do aught more than draw instinctive great breaths in preparation, the two craft had shot down into the waters and were arrowing down through the green depths. Blinded, flung against his metal strap by the resistance of the waters they ripped through, Norman yet retained enough of consciousness to glimpse beams of light that stabbed ahead from the prows of their rushing boats, to see vaguely strange creatures of the deep blundering in and out of those beams as the boats hurtled forward. The water that forced its way between his lips was fresh, he was vaguely aware, and even as he fought to hold his breath was aware too that the frog-men seemed in no way incommoded by the sudden transition into the water, their amphibian nature allowing them to stay under it far longer than any human could do. The boats ripped through the waters at terrific speed and in a few seconds there loomed before them the giant metal wall of the great dome, going down into the depths here. Norman glimpsed vaguely that the whole colossal dome rested on a vast pedestal-like mountain of rock that rose from the sea's floor almost to the surface. Then a great round opening in the wall; the boats flashed into it and were hurtling along a water-filled tunnel. Norman felt his lungs near bursting--when the tunnel turned sharply upward and the boats whizzed up and abruptly out of the water-tunnel into air! * * * * * But it was not the open air again. They were beneath the gigantic dome! For as Norman and Hackett breathed deep, awe fell on their faces as they took in the scene. Far overhead stretched the dome's colossally curving roof, and far out on all sides. It was lit beneath that roof by a clear light that the two would have sworn was sunlight. The dome was in effect the roof of a gigantic, illuminated building, and upon its floor there stretched a mighty city. The city of the frog-men! Their boats were rising up over it and Norman and Hackett saw it clear. Square mile upon square mile of structures stretched beneath the dome, black buildings often of immense size, varying in shape, but all of square, rectangular proportions. Between them moved countless frog-hordes, swirling throngs in streets and squares, and over the roofs darted thick swarms of flying-boats. And at the city's center, in a great, circular, clear space, lay a wide, round, green pool--the opening of the water-tunnel up through which they had come. Norman pointed down toward it. "That's your answer!" he cried. "The only entrance to this frog-city is from the sea, up through that water-tunnel!" "Good God, an amphibian city!" Hackett was shaken, white-faced. The two boats were driving quickly over the city, through the swarming craft. Norman glimpsed towering buildings that might have been palaces, temples, laboratories. They slowed and dipped toward one block-like building not far from the water-tunnel's opening. Armed frog-guards were on its roof, and other boats rested there. The two came to rest and the two captives were jerked out, the guards seizing them. Half-dragged and half-floating they were led toward an opening in the roof from which a stair led downward. They passed down thus into the building's interior, lit by many windows. Norman glimpsed long halls ending in barred doors, guards here and there. Tube-lines ran along the walls and somewhere machines were throbbing dully. They came at last to a barred door whose guard opened it at the croaking order of the frog-men who held the two, and they were thrust inside, as the door clanged. They turned, and exclaimed in amazement. The room held fully a half-hundred men! They were men such as the two fliers had never seen before, like humans except that their skins were a light green instead of the normal white and pink. They were dressed in dark short tunics, and kept talking to each other in a tongue quite unintelligible to Norman and Hackett. They came closer, flocking curiously around the two men, with a babel of voices quite meaningless to the two. Then one of the men uttered an exclamation, and all turned. * * * * * The barred door had swung open and a half-dozen frog-guards entered, followed by two frog-men carrying a square little mechanism from which tubing led back out through the door. "Norman--these men--" Hackett was whispering rapidly. "If there are men in this world too, it may be that--" "Quiet, Hackett--look at what they're doing." The two frog-men had set their mechanism in place and then croaked out a brief word or order. Slowly, reluctantly, one of the green men moved toward them. Quickly they removed a metal disk fastened to his arm, exposing a small orifice like an unhealed wound. Onto this they fastened a suckerlike object from which a transparent tube led back through the mechanism. The machine hummed and at once a red stream pulsed through the tube and back through the mechanism. The man to whom it was attached was growing rapidly pale! Norman, sick with horror, clutched his companion. "Hackett--these frog-men are sucking his blood from him!" "Good God! And look--they're doing it with another!" "All of these men--kept prisoners to furnish them with blood. It must be the damned creatures' food! And we here with the others--" A common horror shook the two. It did not seem to affect the green men in the room, though, who advanced to the mechanism one by one with a reluctant air as of cows unwilling to be milked. Each was attached to the mechanism by the sucking disk on his arm, and out of each the blood poured through the tube. The metal disk was replaced on his arm then and he went back to the others. Norman saw that the frog-men took only from each an amount of blood that they could lose and yet live, since, though each came back pale and weak from the mechanism, they were able to walk. "It must be their food--human blood!" Norman repeated. "They may have thousands on thousands of humans penned up like this, like so many herds of cows, and perhaps they live entirely on the life-blood they milk from them. Human cows--God!" "Norman--look--they're calling to us!" * * * * * The two stiffened. All the others in the room had taken their turn at the blood-sucking mechanism and now the frog-men croaked their order to the two fliers. They had forgotten their own predicament in the horror of the scene, but now it became real to them. They backed against the room's wall, quivering, dangerous. The frog-guards came forward to drag them to the machine. A webbed paw was outstretched but Hackett with a wild blow drove the frog-man back and downward. The frog-guards leaped, and Norman and Hackett struck them back with all the greater strength the lesser gravitation gave them. The room was in an uproar, the green men shouting hoarsely and seeming on the point of rushing to their aid. But the menacing force-pistols of the other frog-guards held back the shouting men and in moments the two fliers were overpowered by sheer weight of frog-bodies. Norman felt himself dragged to the machine. Pain needled his upper arm as an incision was made. He felt the sucking-disk attached; then the machine hummed, and a sickening nausea swept him as the blood drained from his body. Held tightly by the guards he went dizzy, weak, but at last felt the sucker removed and a metal disk fastened over the incision. He was jerked aside and Hackett, his face deathly white, was dragged into his place. In a moment some of the latter's blood had been pumped from him also. The machine was withdrawn, Norman and Hackett were released, and the frog-men, with their black force-pistols watchfully raised, withdrew, the door clanging. The room settled back to quietness, the green men stretching in lassitude on the metal bunks around it. The two fliers crouched down near the door, shuddering nausea and weakness still holding them. Norman found that Hackett was laughing weakly. "To think that twenty-four hours ago I was in New York," he half-laughed, half-sobbed. "On Earth--Earth--" The other gripped his arm. "It's horrible, Hackett, I know. But it isn't instant death, and we've still a chance to escape. Hell, can damn frog-men keep us here? Where's your nerve, man?" A voice beside them made them turn in amazement. "You are men from Earth?" it asked, in queerly accented English. "From Earth?" * * * * * Astonishment held them as they saw who spoke. It was one of the green men in the room, who had settled down by their side. A tall figure with superb muscles and frank, clean countenance, his dark eyes afire with eagerness. "English?" Norman exclaimed. "You know English--you understand me?" The other showed his teeth in a smile. "I know, yes. I'm Sarja, and I learned to speak it from Fallas, in my city, before the Ralas caught me." "Fallas--" Norman repeated, puzzled; then suddenly he flamed. "By God, he means Fellows!" "Fallas, yes," said the other. "From the sky he fell into our city in a strange flying-boat that was smashed. He was hurt but we cared for him, and he taught me his speech, which I heard you talking now." "Then Fellows is in your city now?" asked Hackett eagerly. "Where is that?" "Across this sea--back in the hills," the other waved. "It is far from the sea but I was rash one day and came too near the water in my flying-boat. The Ralas were out raiding and they saw me, caught me, and brought me here. No escape now, until I die." "The Ralas--you mean these frog-men?" Norman asked. Sarja nodded. "Of course. They are the tyrants and oppressors of this world. Our little world is but a tenth or less the size of your great Earth which it circles, but it has its lands and rivers, and this one great fresh-water sea into which the latter empty. In this sea long ago developed the Ralas, the great frog-men who acquired such intelligence and arts that they became lords of this world. "Through the centuries, while on the land our races of green men have been struggling upward, the Ralas have oppressed them. Long ago the Ralas left all their other cities to build this one great amphibian city at the sea's center. Entrance to it is only by the water-tunnel from without, and being frog-people entrance thus is easy for them since they can move for many minutes under water, though they drown like any other breathing animal if kept under too long. Humans dare not try to enter it thus by the water-tunnel, since, before they could find it and make their way up through it, they would have drowned. * * * * * "So the Ralas have ruled from this impregnable amphibian city. Its colossal metal dome is invulnerable to ordinary attack, and though solid and without openings it is always as light beneath the dome here as outside, since the Ralas' scientists contrived light-condensers and conductors that catch light outside and bring it in to release inside. So when it is day outside the sunlight is as bright here, and when night comes the Earth-light shines here the same as without. "From this city their raiding parties have gone out endlessly to swoop down on the cities of us green men. Since we learned to make flying-boats like theirs, with molecular-motors, and to make the guns like theirs that fire shells filled with annihilating force, we have resisted them stoutly but their raids have not ceased. And always they have brought their prisoners back in to this, their city. "Tens of thousands of green men they have prisoned here like us, for the sole purpose of supplying them with blood. For the Ralas live on this blood alone, changing it chemically to fit their own bodies and then taking it into their bodies. It eliminates all necessity for food here for them. Every few days they drain blood from us, and since we are well fed and cared for to keep us good blood-producers, we will be here for a long time before we die." "But haven't you made any attempt to get out of here--to escape?" Norman asked. Sarja smiled. "Who could escape the city of the Ralas? In all recorded history it has never been done, for even if by some miracle you got a flying-boat, the opening of the water-tunnel that leads outward is guarded always." "Guards or no guards, we're going to try it and not sit here to furnish blood for the Ralas," Norman declared. "Are you willing to help, to try to get to Fellows and your city?" The green man considered. "It is hopeless," he said, "but as well to die beneath the force-shells of the Ralas as live out a lifetime here. Yes, I will help, though I cannot see how you expect to escape even from this room." "I think we can manage that," Norman told him. "But first--not a word to these others. We can't hope to escape with them all, and there is no knowing what one might not betray us to the frog-men." He went on then to outline to the other two the idea that had come to him. Both exclaimed at the simpleness of the idea, though Sarja remained somewhat doubtful. While Hackett slept, weak still from his loss of blood, Norman had the green man scratch on the metal floor as well as possible a crude map of the satellite's surface, and found that the city, where Fellows was, seemed some hundreds of miles back from the sea. * * * * * While they talked, the sunlight, apparently sourceless, that came through the heavily barred windows of the room faded rapidly, and dusk settled over the great amphibian city beneath the giant dome, kept from total darkness by a silvery pervading light that Norman reflected must be the light from Earth's great sphere. With the dusk's coming the activities in the frog-city lessened greatly. With dusk, too, frog-guards entered the room bearing long metal troughs filled with a red jellylike substance, that they placed on racks along the wall. As the guards withdrew the men in the room rushed toward the troughs, elbowing each other aside and striking each other to scoop up and eat as much of the red jelly as possible. It was for all the world like the feeding of farm-animals, and Hackett and Norman so sickened at the sight that they had no heart to try the food. Sarja, though, had no such scruples and seemed to make a hearty meal at one of the troughs. After the meal the green men sought the bunks and soon were stretched in sonorous slumber. It was, Norman reflected, exactly the existence of domesticated animals--to eat and sleep and give food to their masters. A deeper horror of the frog-men shook him, and a deeper determination to escape them. He waited until all in the room were sleeping before beckoning to Sarja and Hackett. "Quiet now," he whispered to them. "If these others wake they'll make such a clamor we won't have a chance in the world. Ready, Sarja?" The green man nodded. "Yes, though I still think such a thing's impossible." "Probably is," Norman admitted. "But it's the one chance we've got, the immensely greater strength of our Earth-muscle that the frog-men must have forgotten when they put us in here." They moved silently to the room's great barred door, outside which a frog-guard paced. They waited until he had passed the door and on down the hall, then Norman and Hackett and Sarja grasped together one of the door's vertical bars. It was an inch and a half in thickness, of solid metal, and it seemed ridiculous that any men could bend it by the sheer strength of their muscles. Norman, though, was relying on the fact that on the second satellite, with its far lesser gravitational influence, their Earth-muscles gave them enormous strength. He grasped the bar, Hackett and Sarja gripping it below him, and then at a whispered word they pulled with all their force. The bar resisted and again, with sweat starting on their foreheads, they pulled. It gave a little. * * * * * They shrank back from it as the guard returned, moving past. Then grasping the bar again they bent all their force once more upon it. Each effort saw it bending more, the opening in the door's bars widening. They gave a final great wrench and the bent bar squealed a little. They shrank back, appalled, but the guard had not heard or noticed. He moved past it on his return along the hall, and no sooner was past it than Norman squeezed through the opening and leaped silently for the great frog-man's back. It went down with a wild flurry of waving webbed paws and croaking cries, stilled almost instantly by Norman's terrific blows. There was silence then as Hackett and Sarja squeezed out after him, the momentary clamor of the battle having aroused no one. The three leaped together toward the stairs. In two great floating leaps they were on the floor above, Hackett and Norman dragging Sarja between them. They were not seen, were sailing in giant steps up another stair, hopes rising high. The last stair--the roof-opening above; and then from beneath a great croaking cry swelled instantly into chorus of a alarmed shouts. "They've found the door--the guard!" panted Hackett. They were bursting out onto the roof. Frog-guards were on it who came in a hopping rush toward them, force-pistols raised. But a giant leap took Hackett among them, to amaze them for a moment with great flailing blows. Sarja had leaped for the nearest flying-boat resting on the roof, and was calling in a frantic voice to Norman and Hackett. Norman was turning toward Hackett, the center of a wild combat, but the latter emerged from it for a brief second to motion him frantically back. "No use, Norman--get away--get away!" he cried hoarsely, frenziedly. "Hackett--for God's sake--!" Norman half-leaped to the other, but an arm caught him, pulled him desperately onto the boat's surface. It was Sarja, the long craft flying over the roof beneath his control. "They come!" he panted. "Too late now--" Frog-men were pouring up onto the roof from below. Sarja sent the craft rocketing upward, as Hackett gestured them away for a last frantic time before going down beneath the frog-men's onslaught. * * * * * The roof and the combat on it dropped back and beneath them like a stone as their craft ripped across the silvery dusk over the mighty frog-city. They were shooting toward the city's center, toward the green pool that was the entrance to the water-tunnel, while behind and beneath an increasing clamor of alarm spread swiftly. Norman raged futilely. "Hackett--Hackett! We can't leave him--" "Too late!" Sarja cried. "We cannot help him but only be captured again. We escape now and come back--come back--" The truth of it pierced Norman's brain even in the wild moment. Hackett had fought and held back the frog-guards only that they might escape. He shouted suddenly. "Sarja--the water-tunnel!" A half-dozen boats with frog-guards on them were rising round it in answer to the alarm! "The force-gun!" cried the green man. "Beside you--!" Norman whirled, glimpsed the long tube on its swivel beside him, trained it on the boats rising ahead as they rocketed nearer. He fumbled frantically at a catch at the gun's rear, then felt a stream of shells flicking out of it. Two of the boats ahead vanished as the shells released their annihilating force, another sagged and fell. From the remaining three invisible force-shells flicked around them, but in an instant Sarja had whirled the boat through them and down into the water-tunnel! Norman clung desperately to his seat as the boat flashed down through the waters, and then, as Sarja sent it flying out through the great tunnel's waters, glimpsed, close behind, the beams of the three Rala boats as they pursued them through the tunnel, overtaking them. Could the force-shells be fired under water? Norman did not know, but desperately he swung the force-gun back as they rushed through the waters, and pressed the catch. An instant later beams and boats behind them in the tunnel vanished. His lungs were afire; it seemed that he must open them to the strangling water. The boat was ripping the waters at such tremendous speed that he felt himself being torn from his hold on it. Pain seemed poured like molten metal through his chest--he could hold out no longer; and then the boat stabbed up from the waters into clear air! * * * * * Norman panted, sobbed. Behind them rose the colossal metal dome of the frog-city, gleaming dully in the silvery light that flooded the far-stretching seas. That light poured down from a stupendous silver crescent in the night skies. Norman saw dully the dark outlines on it before he remembered. Earth! He laughed a little hysterically. Sarja was driving the flying-boat out over the sea and away from the frog-city at enormous speed. At last he glanced back. Far behind them lay the great dome and up around it gleaming lights were pouring, lights of pursuing Rala boats. "We escape," Sarja cried, "the city of the Ralas, from which none ever before escaped!" Remembrance smote Norman. "Hackett! Held off those frog-men so we could get away--we'll come back for him, by God!" "We come back!" said Sarja. "We come back with all the green men of this world to the Ralas' city, yes! I know what Fallas has planned." "Can you find your way to him--to your city?" Norman asked. Sarja nodded, looking upward. "Before the next sun has come and gone we can reach it." The boat flew onward, and the great dome and the searching lights around it dropped beneath the horizon. Norman felt the warm wind drying his drenched garments as they rushed onward. Crouched on the boat he gazed up toward the silver crescent of Earth sinking toward the horizon ahead. That meant, he told himself, that the satellite turned slowly on its axis as it whirled around Earth. It came to him that its night and day periods must be highly irregular. When the sun climbed from the waters behind them they were flying still over a boundless waste of waters, but soon they sighted on the horizon ahead the thin green line of land. Sarja slowed as they reached it, took his bearings, and sent the craft flying onward. They passed over a green coastal plain and then over low hills joined in long chains and mantled by dense and mighty jungles, towering green growths of unfamiliar appearance to Norman. He thought he glimpsed, more than once, huge beastlike forms moving in them. He did see twice in the jungles great clearings where were fair-sized cities of bright-green buildings, a metal tower rising from each. But when he pointed to them Sarja shook his head. * * * * * At last, as they passed over another range of hills and came into sight of a third green city with its looming tower, the other pointed, his face alight. "My city," he said. "Fallas there." Fellows! Norman's heart beat faster. They shot closer and lower and he saw that the buildings were obviously green to lend them a certain protective coloration similar to that of the green jungles around them. The tower with its surmounting cage puzzled him though, but before he could ask Sarja concerning it his answer came in a different way. A long metal tube poked slowly out of the cage on the tower's top and sent a hail of force-shells flicking around them. "They're firing on us!" Norman cried. "This can't be your city!" "They see our black boat!" Sarja exclaimed. "They think we're Rala raiders and unless we let them know they'll shoot us out of the air! Stand up--wave to them--!" Both Norman and Sarja sprang to their feet and waved wildly to those in the tower-cage, their flying-boat drifting slowly forward. Instantly the force-shells ceased to hail toward them, and as they moved nearer a sirenlike signal broke from the cage. At once scores of flying-boats like their own, but glittering metal instead of black, shot up from the city where they had lain until now, and surrounded them. As Sarja called in his own tongue to them the green men on the surrounding boats broke into resounding cries. They shot down toward the city, Norman gazing tensely. Great crowds of green men in their dark tunics had swarmed out into its streets with the passing of the alarm, and their craft and the others came to rest in an open square that was the juncture of several streets. The green men that crowded excitedly about Norman and Sarja gave way to a half-dozen hurrying into the square from the greatest of the buildings facing on it. All but one were green men like the others. But that one--the laughing-eyed tanned face--the worn brown clothing, the curious huge steps with which he came--Norman's heart leapt. "Fellows!" "Great God--Norman!" The other's face was thunderstruck. "Norman--how by all that's holy did you get here?" * * * * * Norman, mind and body strained to the breaking point, was incoherent. "We guessed how you'd gone--the second satellite, Fellows--Hackett and I came after you--taken to that frog-city--" As Norman choked the tale, Fellows' face was a study. And when it was finished he swallowed, and gripped Norman's hand viselike. "And you and Hackett figured it out and came after me--took that risk? Crazy, both of you. Crazy--" "Fellows, Hackett's still there, if he's alive! In the Rala city!" Fellows' voice was grim, quick. "We'll have him out. Norman, if he still lives. And living or dead, the Ralas will pay soon for this and for all they've done upon this world in ages. Their time nears--yes." He led Norman, excited throngs of the green men about them, into the great building from which he had emerged. There were big rooms inside, workshops and laboratories that Norman but vaguely glimpsed in passing. The room to which the other led him was one with a long metal couch. Norman stretched protestingly upon it at the other's bidding, drifted off almost at once into sleep. He woke to find the sunlight that had filled the room gone and replaced by the silvery Earth-light. From the window he saw that the silver-lit city outside now held tremendous activity, immense hordes of green men surging through it with masses of weapons and equipment, flying-boats pouring down out of the night from all directions. He turned as the door of the room clicked open behind him. It was his old friend Fellows. "I thought you'd be awake by now, Norman. Feeling fit?" "As though I'd slept a week," Norman said, and the other laughed his old care-free laugh. "You almost have, at that. Two days and nights you've slept, but it all adds up to hardly more than a dozen hours." "This world!" Norman's voice held all his incredulity. "To think that we should be on it--a second satellite of Earth's--it seems almost beyond belief." * * * * * "Sometimes it seems so to me, too," Fellows said thoughtfully. "But it's not a bad world--not the human part of it, at least. When this satellite's atmosphere caught me and pitchforked me down among these green men, smashing the plane and almost myself, they took care of me. You say three others vanished as I did? I never heard of them here; they must have crashed into the sea or jungles. Of course, I'd have got back to Earth on one of these flying-boats if I'd been able, but their molecular power won't take them far from this world's surface, so I couldn't. "As it was, the green men cared for me, and when I found how those frog-men have dominated this world for ages, how that city of the Ralas has spread endless terror among the humans here, I resolved to smash those monsters whatever I did. I taught some of the green men like Sarja my own speech, later learning theirs, and in the weeks I've been here I've been working out a way to smash the Ralas. "You know that amphibian city is almost impregnable because humans can hardly live long enough under the water to get into it, let alone fight under water as the frog-men can. To meet them on even terms the green men needed diving-helmets with an oxygen supply. They'd never heard of such an idea, too afraid of the sea ever to experiment in it, but I convinced them and they've made enough helmets for all their forces. In them they can meet the Ralas under water on equal terms. "And there's a chance we can destroy that whole Rala city with their help. It's built on a giant pedestal of rock rising from the sea's floor, as you saw, and I've had some of the green men make huge force-shells or force-bombs that ought to be powerful enough to split that pedestal beneath the city. If we can get a chance to place those bombs it may smash the frog-men forever on this world. But one thing is sure: we're going to get Hackett out if he still lives!" "Then you're, going to attack the Rala city now?" Norman cried. Fellows nodded grimly. "While you have slept all the forces of the green men on this world have been gathering. Your coming has only precipitated our plans, Norman--the whole soul of the green races has been set upon this attack for weeks!" * * * * * Norman, half bewildered at the swiftness with which events rushed upon him, found himself striding with Fellows in great steps out through the building into the great square. It was shadowed now by mass on mass of flying-boats, crowded with green men, that hung over it and over the streets. One boat, Sarja at its controls, waited on the ground and as they entered and buckled themselves into the seats the craft drove up to hang with the others. A shattering cheer greeted them. Norman saw that in the silvery light of Earth's great crescent there stretched over the city and surrounding jungle now a veritable plain of flying-boats. On each were green men and each bristled with force-guns, and had as many great goggled helmets fastened to it as it had occupants. He glimpsed larger boats loaded with huge metal cylinders--the force-bombs Fellows had mentioned. Fellows rose and spoke briefly in a clear voice to the assembled green men on their craft, and another great shout roared from them, and from these who watched in the city below. Then as he spoke a word, Sarja sent their craft flying out over the city, and the great mass of boats, fully a thousand in number, were hurtling in a compact column after them. Fellows leaned to Norman as the great column of purring craft shot on over the silver-lit jungles. "We'll make straight for the Rala city and try setting into it before they understand what's happening." "Won't they have guards out?" "Probably, but we can beat them back into the city before their whole forces can come out on us. That's the only way in which we can get inside and reach Hackett. And while we're attacking the force-bombs can be placed, though I don't rely too much on them." "If the attack only succeeds in getting us inside," Norman said, grim-lipped, "we'll have a chance--" "It's on the knees of the gods. These green men are doing an unprecedented thing in attacking the Ralas, the masters of this world, remember. But they've got ages of oppression to avenge; they'll fight." The fleet flew on, hills and rivers a silver-lit panorama unreeling beneath them. Earth's crescent sank behind them, and by the time they flashed out over the great fresh-water sea, the sun was rising like a flaming eye from behind it. Land sank from sight behind and the green men were silent, tense, as they saw stretching beneath only the gray waters that for ages had been the base of the dread frog-men. But still the fleet's column raced on. * * * * * At last the column slowed. Far ahead the merest bulge broke the level line where sky and waters met. The amphibian city of the Ralas! At Fellows' order-the flying-boats sank downward until they moved just above the waters. Another order made the green hosts don the grotesque helmets. Norman found that while cumbersome their oxygen supply was unfailing. They shot on again at highest speed, but as the gigantic black dome of the frog-city grew in their vision there darted up from around it suddenly a far-flung swarm of black spots. "Rala boats!" The muffled exclamation was Fellows'. There needed now no order on his part, though. Like hawks, leaping for prey, the fleet of the green men sprang through the air. Norman, clutching the force-gun between his knees, had time only to see that the Rala craft were a few hundred in number and that, contemptuous of the greater odds that favored these humans they had so long oppressed, they were flying straight to meet them. Then the two fleets met--and were spinning side by side above the waters. Norman saw the thing only as a wild whirl of Rala boats toward and beside them, great green frog-men crowding the craft, their force-guns hailing shells. Automatically, with the old air-fighting instinct, his fingers had pressed the catch of the gun between his knees and as its shells flicked toward the rushing boats he saw areas of nothingness opening suddenly in their mass, shells striking and exploding in annihilating invisibility there and in their own fleet. The two fleets mingled and merged momentarily, the battle becoming a thing of madness, a huge whirl of black and glittering flying-boats together, striking shells exploding nothingness about them. The Ralas were fighting like demons. The merged, terrific combat lasted but moments; could last but moments. Norman, his gun's magazine empty, seemed to see the mass of struggling ships splittering, diverging; then saw that the black craft were dropping, plummeting downward toward the waves! The Ralas, stunned by that minute of terrific combat, were fleeing. Muffled cries and cheers came from about him as the glittering flying-boats of the green men shot after them. They crashed down into the waters and curved deeply into their green-depths, toward the gigantic dome. * * * * * Ahead the Rala boats were in flight toward their city, and now their pursuers were like sharks striking after them. There in the depths the force-guns of black and glittering boats alike were spitting, and giant waves and underwater convulsions rocked pursued and pursuers as the exploding shells annihilated boats and water about them. The tunnel! Its round opening yawned in the looming wall ahead, and Norman saw the Rala craft, reduced to scores in number, hurtling into it, to rouse all the forces of the great amphibian city. Their own boats were flashing into the opening after them. He glimpsed as he glanced back for a moment the larger craft with the great force-bombs veering aside behind them. It was nightmare in the water-tunnel. Flashing beams of the craft ahead and waters that rocked and smashed around them as in flight the Ralas still rained back force-shells toward them in a chaos of action. Once the frog-men turned to hold them back in the tunnel, but by sheer weight the rushing ships of the green men crashed them onward. Boats were going into nothingness all around them. A part of Norman's brain wondered calmly why they survived even while another part kept his gun again working, with refilled magazine. Fellows and Sarja were grotesque shapes beside him. Abruptly the tunnel curved upward and as they flashed up after the remaining Rala craft their boats ripped up into clear air! They were beneath the giant dome! The frog-men chased inward spread out in all directions over their mighty, swarming city and across it a terrific clamor of alarm ran instantly as the green men emerged after them! Norman saw flying-boats beginning to rise across all the city and realized that moments would see all the immense force of the Ralas, the thousands of craft they could muster, pouring upon them. He pointed out over the city to a block-like building, and shouted madly through his helmet to Fellows and Sarja: "Hackett!" But already Sarja had sent their craft whirling across the city toward the structure, half their fleet behind it, with part still emerging from the water-tunnel. Rala boats rose before them, but nothing could stop them now, their force-shells raining ahead to clear a path for their meteor-flight. They shot down toward the block-structure, and Norman, half-crazed by now, saw that to descend and enter was suicide in the face of the frog-forces rising now over all the city. He cried to Fellows, and with two of the guns as they swooped lower they sprayed force-shells along the building's side. * * * * * The shells struck and whiffed away the whole side, exposing the level on the building's interior. Out from it rushed swarms of crazed green men, sweeping aside the frog-men guards, while far over the city the invading craft were loosing shells on the block-like buildings that held the prisoners, tens of thousands of them swarming forth. In the throng below as they raced madly forth Norman saw one, and shouted wildly. The one brown garbed figure looked up, saw their boat swooping lower, and leaped for it in a tremendous forty-foot spring that brought his fingers to its edge. Norman pulled him frenziedly up. "Norman!" he babbled. "In God's name--Fellows--!" "That helmet, Hackett!" Fellows flung at him. "My God, look at those prisoners--Norman!" The countless thousands of green men released from the buildings whose walls had vanished under the shells of the invaders had poured forth to make the amphibian city a chaos of madness. Oblivious to all else they were throwing themselves upon the city's crowding frog-men in a battle whose ferocity was beyond belief, disregarding all else in this supreme chance to wreak vengeance on the monstrous beings who had fed upon their blood. In the incredible insanity of that raging fury the craft of the green men hanging over the city were all but forgotten. Suddenly the city and the mighty dome over it quivered violently, and then again. There came from beneath a dull, vast, grinding roar. "The great force-bombs!" Fellows screamed. "They've set them off--the city's sinking--out of here, for the love of God!" The boat whirled beneath Sarja's hands toward the pool of the water-tunnel, all their fleet rushing with them. The grinding roar was louder, terrible; dome and city were shaking violently now; but in the insensate fury of their struggle the frog-men and their released prisoners were hardly aware of it. The whole great dome seemed sinking upon them and the city falling beneath it as Sarja's craft ripped down into the tunnel's waters, and then out, at awful speed, as the great tunnel's walls swayed and sank around them! They shot out into the green depths from it to hear a dull, colossal crashing through the waters from behind as the great pedestal of rock on which the city had stood, shattered by the huge force-bombs, collapsed. And as their boats flashed up into the open air they saw that the huge dome of the city of the Ralas was gone. Beneath them was only a titanic whirlpool of foaming waters in which only the curved top of the settling dome was visible for a moment as it sank slowly and ponderously downward, with a roar as of the roar of falling worlds. Buckling, collapsing, sinking, it vanished in the foam-wild sea with all the frog-men who for ages had ruled the second satellite, and with all those prisoners who had at the last dragged them down with them to death! Ripping off their helmets, with all the green men shouting crazily about them, Norman and Fellows and Hackett stared down at the colossal maelstrom in the waters that was the tomb of the masters of a world. Then the depression's sides collapsed, the waters rushing together ... and beneath them was but troubled, tossing sea.... * * * * * Earth's great gray ball was overhead again and the sun was sinking again to the horizon when the three soared upward in the long, gleaming plane, its motor roaring. Norman, with Hackett and Fellows crowding the narrow cabin beside him, waved with them through its windows. For all around them were rising the flying-boats of the green men. They were waving wildly, shouting their farewells, Sarja's tall figure erect at the prow of one. Insistent they had been that the three should stay, the three through whom the monstrous age-old tyranny of the frog-men had been lifted, but Earth-sickness was on them, and they had flown to where the plane lay still unharmed among the reeds, a hundred willing hands dragging it forth for the take-off. The plane soared higher, motor thundering, and they saw the flying-boats sinking back from around them. They caught the wave of Sarja's hand still from the highest, and then that, too, was gone. Upward they flew toward the great gray sphere, their eyes on the dark outlines of its continents and on one continent. Higher--higher--green land and gray tea receding beneath them; Hackett and Fellows intent and eager as Norman kept the plane rising. The satellite lay, a greenish globe, under them. And as they went higher still a rushing sound came louder to their ears. "The edge of the satellite's atmosphere?" Fellows asked, as Norman nodded. "We're almost to it--here we go!" As he shot the plane higher, great forces smote it, gray Earth and green satellite and yellow sun gyrating round it as it reeled and plunged. Then suddenly it was falling steadily, gray Earth and its dark continent now beneath, while with a dwindling rushing roar its second satellite whirled away above them, passing and vanishing. Passing as though, to Norman it seemed, all their strange sojourn on it were passing; the frog-men and their mighty city, Sarja and their mad flight, the green men and the last terrific battle; all whirling away--whirling away. HISTORIC EXPERIMENT PROVES EARTH'S ROTATION The famous experiment which proves that the "earth do move" by letting the observer actually see it twisting underneath his feet, an experiment invented by the French mathematician Jean B. L. Foucault nearly a century ago was repeated recently under unusually impressive circumstances before an international scientific congress at Florence, Italy, the same city where Galileo once was persecuted for holding the same opinion. From the center of the dome of the Church of Santa Maria di Fiore, Father Guido Alfani, director of the Astronomical Observatory, suspended a 200-pound weight on a wire 150 feet long. On the bottom of this weight was a tiny projecting point which traced a line on a table-top sprinkled with sand, as the great pendulum swung slowly back and forth. At a given signal Father Alfani set the pendulum to swinging. While the assembled scientists watched it, slowly the line traced across the sand table-top changed direction. As Foucault proved long ago and as the watching scientists well knew, the table was being twisted underneath the pendulum by the rotation of the earth. A REVOLUTIONARY AIRPLANE A new airplane propeller has recently been patented by J. Kalmanson of Brooklyn, N. Y. Greater speed and marked saving in fuel is claimed for the invention, which may be attached to any type of airplane. The device is in two parts, which may be used separately as front and rear propellers or combined into a single blade. The principle is that the front one acts to bring air to the other, giving the propeller more of a hold, so to speak, and greater power. This is accomplished by four air-spoons, one on each side of each blade of the propeller. It is said that the device can double the speed of an airplane and raise it from the ground in ninety feet instead of the 200 feet most airplanes now require. It is also claimed that the new propeller will prevent the plane from making a nose drive unless the pilot forces it to do so, and enable it to make a safe landing within a short distance. Because of the increase in power and speed, the device would save a large amount of gasoline and oil, as well as guarding the motor from part of the strain on it. The device is said to be also applicable to ships, the same principle operating in water as well as air. Silver Dome _By Harl Vincent_ [Illustration: _Orris led the way to a great underground city._] [Sidenote: In her deep-buried kingdom of Theros, Phaestra reveals the amazing secret of the Silver Dome.] In a secluded spot among the hills of northern New Jersey stood the old DeBost mansion, a rambling frame structure of many wings and gables that was well-nigh hidden from the road by the half-mile or more of second-growth timber which intervened. High on the hill it stood, and it was only by virtue of its altitude that an occasional glimpse might be obtained of weatherbeaten gable or partly tumbled-down chimney. The place was reputed to be haunted since the death of old DeBost, some seven years previously, and the path which had once been a winding driveway was now seldom trod by human foot. It was now two years since Edwin Leland bought the estate for a song and took up his residence in the gloomy old house. And it had then been vacant for five years since DeBost shot himself in the northeast bedroom. Leland's associates were sure he would repent of his bargain in a very short time, but he stayed on and on in the place, with no company save that of his man-servant, an aged hunch-back who was known to outsiders only as Thomas. Leland was a scientist of note before he buried himself in the DeBost place, and had been employed in the New York research laboratory of one of the large electrical manufacturers, where he was much admired and not a little envied by his fellow workers. These knew almost nothing of his habits or of his personal affairs, and were much surprised when he announced one day that he had come into a sizable fortune and was leaving the organization to go in for private research and study. Attempts to dissuade him were of no avail, and the purchase of the DeBost property followed, after which Leland dropped from sight for nearly two years. * * * * * Then, on a blustery winter day, a strange telephone call was received at the laboratory where he had previously worked. It was from old Thomas, out there in the DeBost mansion, and his quavering voice asked for Frank Rowley, the genial young engineer whose work had been most closely associated with Leland's. "Oh, Mr. Rowley," wailed the old man, when Frank responded to the call, "I wish you would come out here right away. The master has been acting very queerly of late, and to-day he has locked himself in his laboratory and will not answer my knocks." "Why don't you break in the door?" asked Frank, looking through the window at the snow storm that still raged. "I thought of that, Mr. Rowley, but it is of oak and very thick. Besides, it is bound with steel or iron straps and is beyond my powers." "Why not call the police?" growled Frank. He did not relish the idea of a sixty or seventy mile drive in the blizzard. "Oh--no--no--no!" Old Thomas was panicky at the suggestion. "The master told me he'd kill me if I ever did that." Before Frank could formulate a reply, there came a sharp gasp from the other end of the line, a wailing cry and a thud as of a falling body; then silence. All efforts to raise Leland's number merely resulted in "busy" or "line out of order" reports. Frank Rowley was genuinely concerned. Though he had never been a close friend of Leland's, the two had worked on many a knotty problem together and were in daily contact during the nearly ten years that the other man had worked in the same laboratory. "Say, Tommy," said Frank, replacing the receiver and turning to his friend, Arnold Thompson, who sat at an adjoining desk, "something has happened out at Leland's place in Sussex County. Want to take a drive out there with me?" "What? On a day like this? Why not take the train?" "Don't be foolish, Tommy," said Frank. "The place is eight miles from the nearest station, which is a flag stop out in the wilds. And, even if you could find a cab there--which you couldn't--there isn't a taxi driver in Jersey who'd take you up into those mountains on a day like this. No, we'll have to drive. It'll be okay. I've got chains on the rear and a heater in the old coupe, so it shouldn't be so bad. What do you say?" So Tommy, who usually followed wherever Frank led, was prevailed upon to make the trip. He had no particular feeling for Leland, but he sensed an adventure, and, in Frank's company, he could ask for no more. * * * * * Frank was a careful driver, and three hours were required to make the sixty-mile journey. Consequently, it was late in the afternoon when they arrived at the old DeBost estate. It had stopped snowing, but the drifts were deep in spots, and Frank soon found that the car could not be driven through the winding path from the road to the house. So they left it half buried in a drift and proceeded on foot. It was a laborious task they had undertaken, and, by the time they set foot on the dilapidated porch, even Frank, husky and athletic as was his build, was puffing and snorting from his exertions. Little Tommy, who tipped the scales at less than a hundred and twenty, could hardly speak. They both were wet to the waist and in none too good humor. "Holy smoke!" gasped Tommy, stamping the clinging snow from his sodden trouser legs and shoes, "if it snows any more, how in Sam Hill are we going to get out of this place?" "Rotten trip I let you in for Tommy," growled Frank, "and I hope Leland's worth it. But, darn it all, I just had to come." "It's all right with me, Frank. And maybe it'll be worth it yet. Look--the front door's open." * * * * * He pointed to the huge oaken door and Frank saw that it was ajar. The snow on the porch was not deep and they saw that footprints led from the open door to a corner of the porch. At that point the snow on the railing was disturbed, as if a hurrying man had clung to it a moment before jumping over and into the drifts below. But the tracks led no further, for the drifting snow had covered all excepting a hollow where some body had landed. "Thomas!" exclaimed Frank. "And he was in a hustle, by the looks of the tracks. Bet he was frightened while at the telephone and beat it." They entered the house and closed the door behind them. It was growing quite dark and Frank searched for the light switch. This was near the door, and, at pressure on the upper button, the spacious old hall with its open staircase was revealed dimly by the single remaining bulb in a cluster set in the center of the high ceiling. The hall was unfurnished, excepting for a telephone table and chair, the chair having fallen to the floor and the receiver of the telephone dangling from the edge of the table by its cord. "You must have heard the chair fall," commented Tommy, "and it sure does look as if Thomas left in a hurry. Wonder what it was that frightened him?" The house was eerily silent and the words echoed awesomely through the adjoining rooms which connected with the hall through large open doorways. "Spooky place, isn't it?" returned Frank. * * * * * And then they were both startled into immobility by a rumble that seemed to shake the foundations of the house. Heavier and heavier became this vibration, as if some large machine was coming up to speed. Louder and louder grew the rumble until it seemed that the rickety old house must be shaken down about their ears. Then there came a whistling scream from the depths of the earth--from far underground it seemed to be--and this mounted in pitch until their eardrums tingled. Then abruptly the sounds ceased, the vibration stopped, and once more there was the eery silence. Rather white-faced, Tommy gazed at Frank. "No wonder old Thomas beat it!" he said. "What on earth do you suppose that is?" "Search me," replied Frank. "But whatever it is, I'll bet it has something to do with Leland's strange actions. And we're going to find out." He had with him the large flashlamp from the car, and, by its light, the two made their way from room to room searching for the iron-bound door mentioned by Thomas. They found all rooms on the first and second floors dusty and unused with the exception of two bedrooms, the kitchen and pantry, and the library. It was a gloomy and spooky old house. Floor boards creaked startlingly and unexpectedly and the sound of their footsteps echoed dismally. "Where in time is that laboratory of Leland's?" exclaimed Frank, his ruddy features showing impatient annoyance, exaggerated to an appearance of ferocity by the light of the flashlamp. "How about the cellar?" suggested Tommy. "Probably where it is," agreed Frank, "but I don't relish this job so much. I'd hate to find Leland stiff down there, if that's where he is." "Me, too," said Tommy. "But we're here now, so let's finish the job and get back home. It's cold here, too." "You said it. No steam in the pipes at all. He must have let the fire go out in his furnace, and that's probably in the cellar too--usually is." * * * * * While talking, Frank had opened each of the four doors that opened from the kitchen, and the fourth revealed a stairway that led into the blackness beneath. With the beam of his torch directed at the steps, he proceeded to descend, and Tommy followed carefully. There was no light button at the head of the stairs, where it would have been placed in a more modern house, and it was not until they had reached the furnace room that they located a light fixture with a pull cord. An ordinary cellar, with furnace, coal bin, and a conglomeration of dust-covered trunks and discarded furniture, was revealed. And, at its far end, was the iron-bound door. The door was locked and could not be shaken by the combined efforts of the two men. "Have to have a battering ram," grunted Frank, casting about for a suitable implement. "Here you are," called Tommy, after a moment's search. "Just the thing we are looking for." * * * * * He had come upon a pile of logs, and one of these, evidently a section of an old telephone pole, was of some ten or twelve inches diameter and about fifteen feet long. Frank pounced upon it eagerly, and, supporting most of the weight himself, led the attack on the heavy oak door with the iron bands. No sound from within greeted the thunderous poundings. Clearly, if Leland was behind that door, he was either dead or unconscious. Finally the double lock gave way and Tommy and Frank were precipitated headlong into the brightly lighted room beyond. Recovering their balance, they took stock of their surroundings and were amazed at what they saw--a huge laboratory, fitted out with every modern appliance that money could buy. A completely equipped machine shop there was; bench after bench covered with the familiar paraphernalia of the chemical and physical laboratory; huge retorts and stills; complicated electrical equipments; dozens of cabinets holding crucibles, flasks, bottles, glass tubing, and what not. "Good Lord!" gasped Tommy. "Here's a laboratory to more than match our own. Why, Leland's got a fortune invested here!" "I should say so. And a lot of stuff that our company does not even have. Some of it I don't know even the use of. But where is Leland?" * * * * * There was no sign of the man they had come to help. He was not in the laboratory, though the door had been locked from within and the lights left burning throughout. With painstaking care they searched every nook and cranny of the large single room and were about to give up in despair when Tommy happened to observe an ivory button set into the wall at the only point in the room where there were no machines or benches at hand. Experimentally he pressed the button, and, at the answering rumble from under his feet, jumped back in alarm. Slowly there opened in the paneled oak wall a rectangular door, a door of large enough size to admit a man. From the recess beyond there came a breath of air, foul with the musty odor of decayed vegetation, dank as the air of a tomb. "Ah-h-h!" breathed Frank. "So that is where Ed Leland is hiding! The secret retreat of the gloomy scientist!" He spoke half jestingly, yet when he squeezed his stalwart bulk through the opening and flashed the beam of his light into the darkness of a narrow passage ahead he was assailed with vague forebodings. Tommy followed close behind and spoke not a word. * * * * * The passage floor was thick with dust, but the marks of many footsteps going and returning gave mute evidence of the frequency of Leland's visits. The air was heavy and oppressive and the temperature and humidity increased as they progressed along the winding length of the rock-walled passageway. The floor sloped, ever downward and, in spots, was slippery with slimy seepage. It seemed that they turned back on their course on several occasions but were descending deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain. Then, abruptly, the passage ended at the mouth of a shaft, which dropped vertically from almost beneath their feet. "Whew!" exclaimed Frank. "Another step and I'd have dropped into it. That's probably what happened to Leland." He knelt at the rim of the circular opening and looked into the depths of the pit, Tommy following suit. The feeble ray of the flashlight was lost in the blackness below. "Say, Frank," whispered Tommy, "turn off the flash. I think I saw a light down there." And, with the snapping of the catch, there came darkness. But, miles below them, it seemed, there was a tiny pin-point of brilliance--an eery green light that was like a wavering phosphorescence of will-o'-the-wisp. For a moment it shone and was gone. Then came the dreadful vibration they had experienced in the hall of the house--the whistling scream that grew louder and louder until it seemed they must be deafened. The penetrating wail rose from the depths of the pit, and the vibration was all around them, in the damp rock floor on which they knelt, and in the very air of the cavern. Hastily Frank snapped on the light of his flash. "Oh boy!" he whispered. "Leland is certainly up to something down there and no mistake! How're we going to get down?" "Get down?" asked Tommy. "You don't want to go down there, do you?" "Sure thing. We're this far now and, by George, we're going to find out all there is to learn." "How deep do you suppose it is?" "Pretty deep, Tommy. But we can get an idea by dropping a stone and counting the seconds until it strikes." * * * * * He played the light of the flash over the floor and soon located a smooth round stone of the size of a baseball. This he tossed over the rim of the pit and awaited results. "Good grief!" exclaimed Tommy. "It's not falling!" What he said was true, for the stone poised lightly over the opening and drifted like a feather. Then slowly it moved, settling gradually into oblivion. Frank turned the flash downward and they watched in astonishment as the two-pound pebble floated deliberately down the center of the shaft at the rate of not more than one foot in each second. "Well, I'll be doggoned," breathed Frank admiringly. "Leland has done it. He has conquered gravity. For, in that pit at least, there is no gravity, or at any rate not enough to mention. It has been almost completely counteracted by some force he has discovered and now we know how to follow him down there. Come on Tommy, let's go!" And, suiting action to his words, Frank jumped into the mouth of the pit where he bobbed about for a moment as if he had jumped into a pool of water. Then slowly he sank from view, and Tommy followed him. * * * * * It was a most unique experience, that drop into the heart of the mountain. Practically weightless, the two young men found it quite difficult to negotiate the passage. For the first hundred or more feet they continued to bump about in the narrow shaft and each sustained painful bruises before he learned that the best and simplest method of accommodating himself to the strange condition was to remain absolutely motionless and allow the greatly weakened gravity to take its course. Each movement of an arm or leg was accompanied by a change in direction of movement, and contact with the hard stone walls followed. If they endeavored to push themselves from the contact the result was likely to be an even more serious bump on the opposite side of the shaft. So they continued the leisurely drop into the unknown depth of the pit. Frank had turned off the flashlamp, for its battery was giving out and he wished to conserve its remaining energy for eventualities. Thus they were in Stygian darkness for nearly a half-hour, though the green luminosity far beneath them grew stronger with each passing minute. It now revealed itself as a clearly defined disc of light that flickered and sputtered continually, frequently lighting the lower end of the shaft with an unusual burst of brilliance. Remotely distant it seemed though, and unconscionably slow in drawing nearer. "How far do you think we must drop?" called Tommy to Frank, who was probably fifty feet below him in the shaft. "Well, I figure we have fallen about a thousand feet so far," came the reply, "and my guess is that we are about one third of the way down." "Then this shaft is over a half-mile deep, you think?" "Yes, at least a thousand yards, I should say. And I hope his gravity neutralizing machinery doesn't quit all of a sudden and let us down." "Me, too," called Tommy, who had not thought of that possibility. * * * * * This was no joke, this falling into an unknown region so far beneath the surface of good old mother earth, thought Tommy. And how they would ever return was another thing that was not so funny. Frank was always rushing into things like this without counting the possible cost and--well--this might be the last time. Gradually the mysterious light became stronger and soon they could make out the conformation of the rock walls they were passing at such a snail's pace. Layers of vari-colored rock showed here and there, and, at one point there was a stratum of gold-bearing or mica-filled rock that glistened with a million reflections and re-reflections. The air grew warmer and more humid as they neared the mysterious light source. They moved steadily, without acceleration, and Frank estimated the rate at about forty feet a minute. Then, with blinding suddenness, the light was immediately below and they drifted into a tremendous cavern that was illuminated by its glow. Directly beneath the lower end of the shaft through which they had passed, there was a glowing disc of metal about fifteen feet in diameter. They drifted to its surface and sprawled awkwardly where they fell. Scrambling to gain a footing, they bounced and floated about like toy balloons before realizing that it would be necessary to creep slowly from the influence of that repelling force which had made the long drop possible without injury. Gravity met them at the disc's edge with what seemed to be unusual violence. * * * * * At first it seemed that their bodies weighed twice the normal amount, but this feeling soon passed and they looked about them with incredulous amazement. The metal disc was quite evidently the medium through which the repelling force was set up in the shaft, and to this disc was connected a series of heavy cables that led to a pedestal nearby. On the pedestal was a controlling lever and this moved over a quadrant that was graduated in degrees, one end of the quadrant being labeled "Up" and the other "Down." The lever now stood at a point but a very few degrees from the center or "Zero" mark and on the down side. Frank pulled this lever over to the full "Down" position and they found that they could walk over the disc with normal gravity. "I suppose," said Frank, "that if the lever is at the other end of the scale one would fall upward with full gravity acceleration--reversed. At zero, gravity is exactly neutralized, and the intermediate positions are useful in conveying materials or human beings up and down the shaft as desired. Very clever; but what is the reason for it all?" In the precise center of the great cavern there was a dome or hemisphere of polished metal, and it was from this dome that the eery light emanated. At times, when the light died down, this dome gleamed with dull flickerings that threatened to vanish entirely. Then suddenly it would resume full brilliance, and the sight was marvelous beyond description. A slight hissing sound came from the direction of the dome, and this varied in intensity as did the light. "Gosh!" said Tommy. "That looks like silver to me. And, if it is, what a wealthy man our friend Leland has become. He has spent his fortune well, even if he used it all to get to this." "Yes, but where is he?" commented Frank. Then: "Leland! Leland!" he called. * * * * * His voice echoed through the huge vault and re-echoed hollowly. But there was no reply save renewed flickerings from the dome. Leaving the vicinity of the gravity disc, the two men advanced in the direction of the shining dome, which was about a quarter-mile from where they stood. Both perspired freely, for the air was very close and the temperature high. But the light of the dome was as cold as the light of a firefly and they had no hesitancy in drawing near. It was a beautiful sight, this dome of silver with its flickering lights and perfect contour. "By George, I believe it _is_ silver," exclaimed Frank, when they were within a few feet of the dome. "No other metal has that precise color. And look! There is a wheelbarrow and some mining tools. Leland has been cutting away some of the material." Sure enough, there was indisputable evidence of the truth of his statement. And the material was undoubtedly silver! "Silver Dome," breathed Tommy, holding a lump of the metal in his hand. "A solid dome of pure silver--fifty feet high and a hundred in diameter. How much does that figure in dollars and cents, Frank?" "Maybe it isn't solid," said Frank dryly, "though it's worth a sizeable fortune even if it is hollow. And we haven't found Leland." * * * * * They circled the dome twice and looked into every corner of the great cavern, but there was no sign of the man for whom they searched. The wheelbarrow was half filled with lumps of the heavy metal, and maul and drill lay where they had been dropped by the lone miner. A cavity three feet across, and as many deep, appeared in the side of the dome to show that considerably more than one wheelbarrow load had been removed. "Funny," grunted Tommy. "Seems almost like the old dome had swallowed him up." At his words there came the terrific vibration. The light of the dome died out, leaving them in utter darkness, and from its interior there rose the mounting scream that had frightened old Thomas away. From so close by it was hideous, devastating; and the two men clung to each other in fright, expecting momentarily that the earth would give way beneath their feet and precipitate them into some terrible depth from which there could be no return. Then the sound abruptly ceased and a gleam of light came from under the dome of silver. A crack appeared between its lower edge and the rocky floor of the cavern, and through this crack there shone a light of dazzling brilliancy--a warm light of rosy hue. Wider grew the opening until there was a full three feet between the floor and the bottom of the dome. Impelled by some irresistible force from within, the two men stumbled blindly to the opening, fell to the floor and rolled inside. There was a heavy thud and the dome had returned to its normal position, with Frank and Tommy prisoners within its spacious hollow. The warm light bathed them with fearful intensity for a moment, then faded to a rosy glow that dulled their senses and quieted their nerves. Morpheus claimed them. * * * * * When Frank awoke he found himself between silken covers, and for a moment he gazed thoughtfully at a high arched ceiling that was entirely unfamiliar. Then, remembering, he sprang from the downy bed to his feet. The room, the furnishings, his silken robe, everything was strange. His bed, he saw, was a high one, and the frame was of the same gleaming silver as the dome under which they had been trapped. The arched ceiling glowed softly with the same rosy hue as had the inner surface of the dome. A large pool of water invited him, the surface of the pool being no more than a foot below the point where it was built into the tile floor of the room. A large open doorway connected with a similar adjoining room, where he suspected Tommy had been taken. On his bare toes, he moved silently to the other room and saw that his guess had been correct. Tommy lay sleeping quietly beneath covers as soft as his own and amidst equal luxury of surroundings. "Well," he whispered, "this doesn't look as though we would come to any harm. And I might as well take a dive in that pool." Returning to his own room, he removed the silken garment with which he had been provided and was quietly immersed in the cool, invigorating water of the bath. His head cleared instantly. "Hi there!" called Tommy from the doorway. "Why didn't you wake me up? Where are we, anyway?" With dripping head and shoulders above the water, Frank was compelled to laugh at the sleepy-eyed, wondering expression on the blue-jowled face of his friend. "Thought you were dead to the world," he returned, "you old sleepy-head. And I don't know where we are, excepting that it is somewhere under the silver dome. What's more, I don't much care. You should get into this water. It's great!" * * * * * So saying, he dived to the bottom of the pool and stood on his hands, his feet waving ludicrously above the surface. Tommy sniffed once and then made a quick dash for the pool in his own room. He was not to be outdone by his more energetic partner. A half-hour later, shaved and attired in their own garments, which had been cleaned and pressed and hung neatly in the closets, they settled themselves for a discussion of the situation. Having tried the doors of both rooms and found them locked from the outside, there was no other course open to them. They must await developments. "Looks like Leland has quite an establishment down here inside the mountain," ventured Tommy. "Hm!" snorted Frank, "this place is none of Leland's work. He is probably a prisoner here, as are we. He just stumbled on to the silver dome and was captured by whatever race is living down here beneath it, the same as we were. Who the real inhabitants are, and what the purpose of all this is, remains to be seen." "You think we are in friendly hands?" "These quarters do not look much like prison cells, Tommy, but I must admit that we are locked in. Anyhow, I'm not worrying, and we will soon learn our fate and have to be ready to meet it. The people who own this place must have everything they want, and they sure have some scientific knowledge that is not known to us on the surface." "Wonder if they are humans?" "Certainly they are. You never heard of wild beasts sleeping in beds like these, did you?" * * * * * Tommy laughed at he examined the exquisite hand-wrought figures on the silver bedstead. "No, I didn't," he admitted; "but where on earth did they come from, and what are they doing here?" "You ask too many questions," replied Frank, shrugging his broad shoulders. "We must simply wait for the answers to reveal themselves." There was a soft rap at the door of Frank's room, where the two men were talking. "Come in," called Frank, chuckling at the idea of such consideration from their captors. A key rattled in the lock and the door swung open to admit the handsomest man they had ever set eyes on. He was taller than Frank by several inches, standing no less than six feet five in his thin-soled sandals, and he carried himself with the air for an emperor. His marble-white body was uncovered with the exception of a loin cloth of silver hue, and lithe muscles rippled beneath his smooth skin as he advanced to meet the prisoners. His head, surmounted by curly hair of ebon darkness, was large, and his forehead high. The features were classic and perfectly regular. The corners of his mouth drew upward in a benign smile. "Greetings," he said, in perfect English and in a soft voice, "to the domain of Theros. You need fear no harm from our people and will be returned to the upper world when the time comes. We hope to make your stay with us enjoyable and instructive, and that you will carry back kind memories of us. The morning meal awaits you now." * * * * * So taken aback were the two young Americans that they stared foolishly agape for a space. Then a tinkling laugh from the tall stranger set them once more at ease. "You will pardon us, I hope," apologized Frank, "but this is all so unexpected and so unbelievable that your words struck me speechless. And I know that my friend was similarly affected--We place ourselves in your hands." The handsome giant nodded understanding. "No offense was taken," he murmured, "since none was intended. And your feelings are not to be wondered at. You may call me Orrin." He turned toward the open door and signified that they were to follow him. They fell in at his side with alacrity, both suddenly realizing that they were very hungry. They followed in silent wonderment as Orrin led the way to a broad balcony that overlooked a great underground city--a city lighted by the soft glow from some vast lighting system incorporated in its vaulted ceiling high overhead. The balcony was many levels above the streets, which were alive with active beings of similar appearance to Orrin, these speeding hither and yon by means of the many lanes of traveling ways of which the streets were composed. The buildings--endless rows of them lining the orderly streets--were octagonal in shape and rose to the height of about twenty stories, as nearly as could be judged by earthly standards. There were no windows, but at about every fifth floor there was an outer silver-railed balcony similar to the one on which they walked. The air was filled with bowl-shaped flying ships that sped over the roof tops in endless procession and without visible means of support or propulsion. Yet the general effect of the busy scene was one of precise orderliness, unmarred by confusion or distracting noises. * * * * * Orrin vouchsafed no explanations and they soon reentered the large building of which the balcony was a part. Here they were conducted to a sumptuously furnished dining room where their breakfast awaited them. During the meal, which consisted of several courses of fruits and cereals entirely strange to Frank and Tommy, they were tended by Orrin with the utmost deference and most painstaking attention. He anticipated their every want and their thoughts as well. For, when Frank endeavored to ask one of the many questions with which his mind was filled, he was interrupted by a wave of the hand and a smile from their placid host. "It is quite clear to me that you have many questions to propound," said Orrin, "and this is not a matter of wonder. But it is not permitted that I enlighten you on the points you have in mind. You must first finish your meal. Then it is to be my privilege to conduct you to the presence of Phaestra, Empress of Theros, who will reveal all. May I ask that you be patient until then?" So friendly was his smile and so polished his manner that they restrained their impatience and finished the excellent breakfast in polite silence. And Orrin was as good as his word, for, no sooner had they finished when he led them from the room and showed the way to the elevator which conveyed them to the upper floor of the building. From the silver-grilled cage of the lift they stepped into a room of such beauty and magnificence of decoration that they gazed about them in wondering admiration. The paneling and mouldings were of hammered silver that gleamed with polished splendor in the soft rose glow of the hidden lights. The hangings were of heavy plush of deep green hue and bore intricate designs of silver thread woven into the material. At the opposite side of the room there was a pair of huge double doors of chased silver and on either side of this pretentious portal there stood an attendant attired as was Orrin, but bearing a silver scepter to denote his official capacity. "Phaestra awaits the visitors from above," intoned one of the attendants. Both bowed stiffly from the waist when Orrin led the two young scientists through the great doors which had opened silently and majestically at their approach. * * * * * If the outer room was astonishing in its sumptuousness of decoration and furnishing, the one they now entered was positively breath-taking. On every side there were the exquisite green and silver hangings. Tables, divans, and rugs of priceless design and workmanship. But the beauty of the surroundings faded into insignificance when they saw the empress. A canopied dais in the center of the room drew their attention and they saw that Phaestra had risen from her seat in a deeply cushioned divan and now stood at its side in an attitude of welcome. Nearly as tall as Frank, she was a figure of commanding and imperious beauty. The whiteness of her body was accentuated by the silver embroidered and tightly fitted black vestments that covered yet did not conceal its charms. A halo of glorious golden hair surmounted a head that was poised expectantly alert above the perfectly rounded shoulders. The exquisite oval of her face was chiseled in features of transcendent loveliness. She spoke, and, at sound of her musical voice, Frank and Tommy were enslaved. * * * * * "Gentlemen of the upper world," she said gently, "you are welcome to Theros. Your innermost thoughts have been recorded by our scientists and found good. With a definite purpose in mind, you learned of the existence of the silver dome of Theros, yet you came without greed or malice and we have taken you in to enlighten you on the many questions that are in your minds and to return you to mankind with a knowledge of Theros--which you must keep secret. You are about to delve into a mystery of the ages; to see and learn many things that are beyond the ken of your kind. It is a privilege never before accorded to beings from above." "We thank you, oh, Queen," spoke Frank humbly, his eyes rivetted to the gaze of those violet orbs that seemed to see into his very soul. Tommy mumbled some commonplace. "Orrin--the sphere!" Phaestra, slightly embarrassed by Frank's stare, clapped her hands. At her command, Orrin, who had stood quietly by, stepped to the wall and manipulated some mechanism that was hidden by the hangings. There was a musical purr from beneath the floor, and, through a circular opening which appeared as if by magic, there rose a crystal sphere of some four feet in diameter. Slowly it rose until it reached the level of their eyes and there it came to rest. The empress raised her hands as if in invocation and the soft glow of the lights died down, leaving them in momentary darkness. There came a slight murmur from the sphere, and it lighted with the eery green flickerings they had observed in the dome of silver. * * * * * Fascinated by the weaving lights within, they gazed into the depths of the crystal with awed expectancy. Phaestra spoke. "Men from the surface," she said, "you, Frank Rowley, and you, Arnold Thompson, are about to witness the powers of that hemisphere of metal you were pleased to term 'Silver Dome.' As you rightly surmised, the dome is of silver--mostly. There are small percentages of platinum, iridium, and other elements, but it is more than nine-tenths pure silver. To you of the surface the alloy is highly valuable for its intrinsic worth by your own standards, but to us the value of the dome lies in its function in revealing to us the past and present events of our universe. The dome is the 'eye' of a complicated apparatus which enables us to see and hear any desired happening on the surface of the earth, beneath its surface, or on the many inhabited planets of the heavens. This is accomplished by means of extremely complex vibrations radiated from the hemisphere, these vibrations penetrating earth, metals, buildings, space itself, and returning to our viewing and sound reproducing spheres to reveal the desired past or present occurrences at the point at which the rays of vibrations are directed. * * * * * "In order to view the past on our own planet, the rays, which travel at the speed of light, are sent out in a huge circle through space, returning to earth after having spent the requisite number of years in transit. Instantaneous effect is secured by a connecting beam that ties together the ends of the enormous arc. This, of course, is beyond your comprehension, since the Ninth Dimension is involved. When it is desired that events of the present be observed, the rays are projected direct. The future can not be viewed, since, in order to accomplish this, it would be necessary that the rays travel at a speed greater than that of light, which is manifestly impossible." "Great guns!" gasped Frank. "This crystal sphere then, is capable of bringing to our eyes and ears the happenings of centuries past?" "It is, my dear Frank," said Phaestra, "and I would that I were able to describe the process more clearly." She smiled, and in the unearthly light of the sphere she appeared more beautiful than before, if such a thing were possible. On the pedestal which supported the sphere there was a glittering array of dials and levers. Several of these controls were now adjusted by Phaestra, the delicate motions of her tapered fingers being watched by the visitors with intense admiration. There came a change in the note of the sphere, a steadying of the flickerings within. "Behold!" exclaimed Phaestra. * * * * * They gazed into the depths of the sphere and lost all sense of detachment from the scene depicted therein. It seemed they were at a point several thousand miles from the surface of a planet. A great continent spread beneath them, its irregular shore line being clearly outlined against a large body of water. Here and there the surface was obscured by great white patches of clouds that cast their shadows below. "Atlantis!" breathed Phaestra reverently. The lost continent of mythology! The fabled body of land that was engulfed by the Atlantic thousands of years ago--a fact! Tommy glanced at Frank, noting that he had withdrawn his gaze from the sphere and was devouring Phaestra with his eyes. As if drawn by the ardor of his observation, she raised her own eyes from the sphere to meet those of the handsome visitor. Obviously confused, she dropped her long lashes and turned nervously to the controls. Tommy experienced a sudden feeling of dread. Surely his pal was not falling in love with this Theronian empress! Then there came another change in the note of the sphere and once more they lost themselves in contemplation of the scene within. The surface of the lost continent was rushing madly to meet them. With terrific velocity they seemed to be falling. An involuntary gasp was forced from Tommy's lips. Mountains, valleys, rivers could now be discerned. * * * * * Then the scene shifted slightly and they were stationary, directly above a large seacoast city. A city of great beauty it was, and its buildings were of the same octagonal shape as were those of Theros! There could be but one inference--the Theronians were direct descendants of those inhabitants of ancient Atlantis. "Yes," sighed Phaestra, in answer to the thought she had read, "our ancestors were those you now see in the streets of this city of Atlantis. A marvelous race they were, too. When the rest of the world was still savage and unenlightened, they knew more of the arts and sciences than is known on the surface to-day. The mysteries of the Fourth Dimension they had already solved. Their telescopes were of such power that they knew of the existence of intelligent beings on Mars and Venus. They had conquered the air. They knew of the relation between gravity and magnetism but recently propounded by your Einstein. They were prosperous, happy. Then--but watch!" Faint sounds of the life of the city came to their ears. A swarm of monoplanes roared past just beneath them. The streets were crowded with rapidly moving vehicles, the roof-tops with air-craft. Then suddenly the scene darkened; a deep rumbling came from the sea. As they watched in fascinated wonder, a great chasm opened up through the heart of the city. Tall buildings swayed and crumbled, falling into heaps of twisted metal and crushed masonry and burying hundreds of the populace in their fall. The confusion was indescribable, the uproar terrific, and within the space of a very few minutes the entire city was a mass of ruins, fully half of the wrecked area having been swallowed up by the heaving waters of the ocean. * * * * * Phaestra stifled a sob. "Thus it began," she stated. "Trovus was first--the city you just saw--then came three more of the cities of the western coast in rapid succession. Computations of the scientists showed that the upheaval was widespread and that the entire continent was to be engulfed in a very short time. The exodus began, but it was too late, and only a few hundred people were able to escape the continent before it was finally destroyed. The ocean became the tomb of two hundred millions. The handful of survivors reached the coast of what is now North America. But the rigors of the climate proved severe and more than three-quarters of them perished within a few days after their planes landed. Then the rest took to the caves along the shore, and for a while were safe." She manipulated the controls once more and there was a quick shift to another coast, a rugged, wave-beaten shore. Closer they drew until they observed a lofty palisade that extended for miles along the barren waterfront. They saw a fire atop this elevation and active men and women at various tasks within the narrow circle of its warmth. A cave mouth opened at the brink of the precipice near the spot they occupied. Then came a repetition of the upheaval at Trovus. The ocean rushed in and beat against the cliff with such ferocity that its spray was tossed hundreds of feet in the air. The earth shook and the group of people around the fire made a hasty retreat to the mouth of the cave. The sky darkened and the winds howled with demoniac fury. Quake after quake rent the rugged cliffs: huge sections toppled into the angry waters. Then a great tidal wave swept in and covered everything, cliffs, cave mouths and all. Nought remained where they had been but the seething waters. * * * * * "But some escaped!" exulted Phaestra, "and these discovered Theros. Though many miles of the eastern seaboard of your United States were submerged and the coastline entirely altered, these few were saved. Their cave connected with a long passage, a tunnel that led into the bowels of the earth. With the outer entrance blocked by the upheaval they had no alternative save to continue downward." "They traveled for days and days. Some were overcome by hunger and fell by the wayside. The most hardy survived to reach Theros, a series of enormous caverns that extends for hundreds of miles under the surface of your country. Here they found subterranean lakes of pure water; forests, game. They had a few tools and weapons and they established themselves in this underground world. From that small beginning came this!" Phaestra's slim fingers worked rapidly at the controls. The scenes shifted in quick succession. They were once more in the present, and seemed to be traveling speedily through the underground reaches of Theros. Now they were racing through a long lighted passage; now over a great city similar to the one in which they had arrived. Here they visited a huge workshop or laboratory; there a mine where radium or cobalt or platinum was being wrested from the vitals of the unwilling earth. Then they visited a typical Theronian household, saw the perfect peace and happiness in which the family lived. Again they were in a large power plant where direct application of the internal heat of the earth as obtained through deep shafts bored into the interior was utilized in generating electricity. They saw vast quantities of supplies, fifty-ton masses of machinery, moved from place to place as lightly as feathers by use of the gravity discs, those heavily charged plates whose emanations counteracted the earth's attraction. In one busy laboratory they saw an immense television apparatus and heard scientists discussing moot questions with inhabitants of Venus, whose images were depicted on the screen. They witnessed a severe electrical storm in the huge cavern arch over one of the cities, a storm that condensed moisture from the artificially oxygenated and humidified atmosphere in such blinding sheets as to easily explain the necessity for well-roofed buildings in the underground realm. And, in all the speech and activities of the Theronians, there was evident that all-pervading feeling of absolute contentment and freedom from care. "What I can not understand," said Frank, during a quiet interval, "is why the Theronians have never migrated to the surface. Surely, with all your command of science and mechanics, that would be easy." "Why? Why?" Phaestra's voice spoke volumes. "Here--I'll show you the reason." * * * * * And again the scene in the sphere changed. They were on the surface and a few years in the past--at Chateau Thierry. They saw their fellow men mangled and broken; saw human beings shot down by hundreds in withering bursts of machine-gun fire; saw them in hand-to-hand bayonet fights; gassed and in delirium from the horror of it all. They traveled over the ocean; saw a big passenger liner the victim of torpedo fire; saw babies tossed into the water by distracted mothers who jumped in after them to join them in death. A few years were passed by and they saw gang wars in Chicago and New York; saw militia and picketing strikers in mortal combat; saw wealthy brokers and bank presidents turn pistols on themselves following a crash in the stock market; government officials serving penitentiary terms for betrayal of the people's trust; opium dens, speakeasies, sex crimes. It was a fearful indictment. "Ah, no," said Phaestra kindly, "the surface world has not yet emerged from savagery. We should be unwelcome were we to venture outside. And now we come to the reason for your visit. You come in search of one Edwin Leland, a fellow worker at one time. Your motives are above reproach. But Leland came as a greedy searcher of riches. We brought him within to teach him the error of his ways and to beg him to desist from his efforts at destroying the dome of silver. He alone knew the secret." "Then you followed him and we took you in for similar reasons, though our scientists found very quickly that your mental reactions were of entirely different type from Leland's and that the secret would be safe in your keeping. Leland remains obdurate. He threatens us with physical violence, and his reactions to the thought-reading machines are of the most treacherous sort. We must keep him with us. He shall remain unharmed, but he must not be allowed to return. That is the story. You two are free to leave when you choose. I ask not that you give your word to keep the secret of 'Silver Dome.' I know it is not necessary." * * * * * The lights had resumed their normal glow, and the marvelous sphere returned to its receptacle beneath the floor. Phaestra resumed her seat on the canopied divan. Frank dropped to a seat on the edge of the dais. Tommy and Orrin remained standing, Tommy lost in thought and Orrin stolidly mute. The empress avoided Frank's gaze studiously. Her cheeks were flushed; her eyes bright with emotion. Frank was first to break the silence. "Leland is in solitary confinement?" he asked. "For the present he is under guard," replied Phaestra. "He was quite violent and it was necessary to disarm him after he had killed one of my attendants with a shot from his automatic pistol. When he agrees to submit peacefully, he shall be given the freedom of Theros for the remainder of his life." "Perhaps," suggested Frank, "if I spoke to him...." "The very thing." Phaestra thanked him with her wondrous eyes. A high pitched note rang out from behind the hangings, and, in rapid syllables of the language of Theros, a voice broke forth from the concealed amplifiers. Orrin, startled from his stoicism, sprang to the side of his empress. She rose from her seat as the voice completed its excited message. "It is Leland," she said calmly. "He has escaped and recovered his pistol. I have been told that he is now at large in the palace, terrorizing the household. We have no weapons here, you see." "Good God!" shouted Frank. "Suppose he should come here?" * * * * * He jumped to his feet just as a shot rang out in the antechamber. Orrin dashed to the portal when a second shot spat forth from the automatic which must certainly be in the hands of a madman. The doors swung wide and Leland, hair disarranged and bloodshot eyes staring, burst into the room. Orrin went down at the next shot and the hardly recognizable scientist advanced toward the dais. When he saw Frank and Tommy he stopped in his tracks. "So you two have been following me!" he snarled. "Well, you won't keep me from my purpose. I'm here to kill this queen of hell!" Once more he raised his automatic, but Frank had been watching closely and he literally dove from the steps of the dais to the knees of the deranged Leland. As beautiful a tackle as he had ever made in his college football days laid the maniac low with a crashing thud that told of a fractured skull. The bullet intended for Phaestra went wide, striking Tommy in the shoulder. Spun half way around by the impact of the heavy bullet, Tommy fought to retain his balance. But his knees went suddenly awry and gave way beneath him. He crumpled helplessly to the floor, staring foolishly at the prostrate figure of Leland and at Frank, who had risen to his feet and now faced the beautiful empress of Theros. Strange lights danced before Tommy's eyes, and he found it difficult to keep the pair in focus. But he was sure of one thing--his pal was unharmed. Then the two figures seemed to merge into one and he blinked his eyes rapidly to clear his failing vision. By George, they were in each other's arms! Funny world--above or below--it didn't seem to make any difference. But it was a tough break for Frank--morganatic marriage and all that. No chance--well-- Tommy succumbed to his overpowering drowsiness. * * * * * The awakening was slow, but not painful. Rather there was a feeling of utter contentment, of joy at being alive. A delicious languor pervaded Tommy's being as he turned his head on a snow white silken pillow and stared at the figure of the white-capped nurse who was fussing with the bottles and instruments that lay on an enameled table beside the bed. Memory came to him immediately. He felt remarkably well and refreshed. Experimentally he moved his left shoulder. There was absolutely no pain and it felt perfectly normal. He sat erect in his surprise and felt the shoulder with his right hand. There was no bandage, no wound. Had he dreamed of the hammer blow of that forty-five caliber bullet? His nurse, observing that her patient had recovered consciousness, broke forth in a torrent of unintelligible Theronian, then rushed from the room. He was still examining his unscarred shoulder in wonder, when the nurse returned, with Frank Rowley at her heels. Frank laughed at the expression of his friend's face. "What's wrong, old-timer?" he asked. "Why--I--thought that fool of a Leland had shot me in the shoulder," stammered Tommy, "but I guess I dreamed it. Where are we? Still in Theros?" "We are." Frank sobered instantly, and Tommy noted with alarm that his usually cheerful features were haggard and drawn and his eyes hollow from loss of sleep. "And you didn't dream that Leland shot you. That shoulder of yours was mangled and torn beyond belief. He was using soft nosed bullets, the hell-hound!" "Then how--?" * * * * * "Tommy, these Theronians are marvelous. We rushed you to this hospital and a half-dozen doctors started working on you at once. They repaired the shattered bones by an instantaneous grafting process, tied the severed veins and arteries and closed the gaping wound by filling it with a plastic compound and drawing the edges together with clamps. You were anaesthetized and some ray machine was used to heal the shoulder. This required but ten hours and they now say that your arm is as good as ever. How does it feel?" "Perfectly natural. In fact I feel better than I have in a month." Tommy observed that the nurse had left the room and he jumped from his bed and capered like a school boy. This drew no sign of merriment from Frank, and Tommy scrutinized him once more in consternation. "And you," he said, "what is wrong with you?" "Don't worry about me," replied Frank impatiently. Then, irrelevantly, he said "Leland's dead." "Should be. I knew we shouldn't have started out to help him. But, Frank, I'm concerned about you. You look badly." Tommy was getting into his clothes as he spoke. "Forget it, Tommy. You've been sleeping for two days, you know--part of the cure--and I haven't had much rest during that time. That is all." "It's that Phaestra woman," Tommy accused him. "Well, perhaps. But I'll get over it, I suppose. Tommy, I love her. But there's no chance for me. Haven't seen her since the row in the palace. Her council surrounds her continually and I have been advised to-day that we are to be returned as quickly as you are up and around. That means immediately now." "Good. The sooner the better. And you just forget about this queen as soon as you are able. She's a peach, of course, but not for you. There's lots more back in little old New York." But Frank had no reply to this sally. * * * * * There came a knock at the door and Tommy called, "Come in." "I see you have fully recovered," said the smiling Theronian who entered at the bidding, "and we are overjoyed to know this. You have the gratitude of the entire realm for your part in the saving of our empress from the bullets of the madman." "I?" "Yes. You and your friend. And now, may I ask, are you ready to return to your own land?" Tommy stared. "Sure thing," he said, "or rather, I will be in a few minutes." "Thank you. We shall await you in the transmitting room." The Theronian bowed and was gone. "Well, I like that," said Tommy. "He hands me an undeserved compliment and then asks how soon we can beat it. A 'here's your hat, what's your hurry' sort of thing." "It's me they're anxious to be rid of," remarked Frank, shrugging his broad shoulders, "and perhaps it is just as well." "You bet it is!" agreed Tommy enthusiastically, "and I'm in favor of making it good and snappy." He completed his toilet as rapidly as possible and then turned to face the down-hearted Frank. "How do we go? The way we came?" he asked. * * * * * "No, Tommy. They have closed off the shaft that led from the cavern of the silver dome. They are taking no more chances. It seems that the shaft down which we floated was constructed by the Theronians; not by Leland. They had used it and the gravity disc to transport casual visitors to the surface, who occasionally mixed with our people in order to learn the languages of the upper world and to actually touch and handle the things they were otherwise able to see only through the medium of Silver Dome and the crystal spheres. Further visits to the surface are now forbidden, and we are to be returned by a remarkable process of beam transmission of our disintegrated bodies." "Disintegrated?" "Yes. It seems they have learned to dissociate the atoms of which the human body is composed and to transmit them to any desired point over a beam of etheric vibrations, then to reassemble them in the original living condition." "What? You mean to say we are to be shot to the surface through the intervening rock and earth? Disintegrated and reintegrated? And we'll not even be bent, let alone busted?" * * * * * This time he was rewarded by a laugh. "That's right. And I have gone through the calculations with one of the Theronian engineers and can find no flaw in the scheme. We're safe in their hands." "If you say so, Frank, it's okay with me. Let's go!" Reluctantly his friend lifted his athletic bulk from the chair. In silence he led the way to the transmitting room of the Theronian scientists. Here they were greeted by two savants with whom Frank was already acquainted, Clarux and Rhonus by name. A bewildering array of complex mechanisms was crowded into the high-ceilinged chamber and, prominent among them, was one of the crystal spheres, this one of somewhat smaller size than the one in the palace of Phaestra. "Where do you wish to arrive?" asked Clarux. "As near to my automobile as possible," replied Frank, taking sudden interest in the proceedings. "It is parked in the lane between Leland's house and the road." Tommy looked quickly in his direction, encouraged by the apparent change in his attitude. The scientists proceeded to energize the crystal sphere. They were bent upon speeding the parting guests. Their beloved empress was to be saved from her own emotions. Quick adjustments of the controls resulted in the locating of Frank's car, which was still buried to its axles in snow. The scene included Leland's house, or rather its site, for it appeared to have been utterly demolished by some explosion within. * * * * * Tommy raised questioning eyebrows. "It was necessary," explained Rhonus, "to destroy the house in obliterating all traces of our former means of egress. It has been commanded that you two be returned safely, and we are authorized to trust implicitly in your future silence regarding the existence of Theros. This is satisfactory, I presume?" Both Tommy and Frank nodded agreement. "Are you ready, gentlemen?" asked Clarux, who was adjusting a mechanism that resembled a huge radio transmitter. Its twelve giant vacuum tubes glowed into life as he spoke. "We are," chimed the two visitors. They were requested to step to a small circular platform that was raised about a foot from the floor by means of insulating legs. Above the table there was an inverted bowl of silver in the shape of a large parabolic reflector. "There will be no alarming sensations," averred Clarux. "When I close the switch the disintegrating energy from the reflector above will bathe your bodies for a moment in visible rays of a deep purple hue. You may possibly experience a slight momentary feeling of nausea. Then--presto!--you have arrived." "Shoot!" growled Frank from his position on the stand. Clarux pulled the switch and there was a murmur as of distant thunder. Tommy blinked involuntarily in the brilliant purple glow that surrounded him. Then all was confusion in the transmitting room. Somebody had rushed through the open door shouting, "Frank! Frank!" It was the empress Phaestra. * * * * * In a growing daze Tommy saw her dash to the platform, seize Frank in a clutch of desperation. There was a violent wrench as if some monster were twisting at his vitals. He closed his eyes against the blinding light, then realized that utter silence had followed the erstwhile confusion. He sat in Frank's car--alone. The journey was over, and Frank was left behind. With awful finality it came to him that there was nothing he could do. It was clear that Phaestra had wanted his pal, needed him--come for him. From the fact that Frank remained behind it was evident that she had succeeded in retaining him. A sickening fear came to Tommy that she had been too late; that Frank's body was already partly disintegrated and that he might have paid the price of her love with his life. But a little reflection convinced him that if this were the case a portion of his friend's body would have reached the intended destination. Then, unexplainably, he received a mental message that all was well. * * * * * Considerably heartened, he pressed the starter button and the cold motor of Frank's coupe turned over slowly, protestingly. Finally it coughed a few times, and, after considerable coaxing by use of the choke, ran smoothly. He proceeded to back carefully through the drifts toward the road, casting an occasional regretful glance in the direction of the demolished mansion. He would have some explaining to do when he returned to New York. Perhaps--yes, almost certainly, he would be questioned by the police regarding Frank's disappearance. But he would never betray the trust of Phaestra. Who indeed would believe him if he told the story? Instead, he would concoct a weird fabrication regarding an explosion in Leland's laboratory, of his own miraculous escape. They could not hold him, could not accuse him of murder without producing a body--the _corpus delicti_, or whatever they called it. Anyway, Frank was content. So was Phaestra. Tommy swung the heavy car into the road and turned toward New York, alone and lonely--but somehow happy; happy for his friend. [Advertisement: ASTOUNDING STORIES _Appears on Newsstands_ THE FIRST THURSDAY IN EACH MONTH] Earth, the Marauder PART TWO OF A THREE-PART NOVEL _By Arthur J. Burks_ [Illustration: Closer and closer they came.] [Sidenote: Deep in the gnome-infested tunnels of the Moon, Sarka and Jaska are brought to Luar, the radiant goddess against whose minions the marauding Earth had struck in vain.] WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE The Earth was dying. Ever since Sarka the First, king of scientists, had given mankind the Secret of Life, which prolonged life indefinitely, the Earthlings had multiplied beyond all count, and been forced to burrow deep into the ground and high into the air in the desperate search for the mere room in which to live. There was much civil war. The plight of the children of men was desperate. Something had to be done. [Illustration] Then Sarka the Third called the Spokesmen of the Gens of Earth around him, and proposed to them a new scheme which had come to him in his laboratory atop the Himalayas. He would swing the Earth from its orbit!--send it careening through space toward the Moon!--there to destroy its inhabitants and supplant them with a colony of Earthlings! And then they would surge on to Mars! One by one the twelve Spokesmen, each the head and representative of the teeming trillions comprising his Gens, acceded. Even Dalis, the jealous rival of Sarka, finally gave his sulky consent. So, under Sarka's commands, the Earth's hordes were mobilized; and in tune with the Master Beryl in Sarka's laboratory all the Beryls of the Earth vibrated, freeing the Earth from her age-old orbit and swinging her out towards the Moon. The Gens of Dalis--the trillions of people who swore allegiance to him--would lead the attack on the Moon. When within fifty thousand miles, they darted out, clad only in their tight green clothing and the helmets that held the anti-gravitational ovoids, which neutralized gravity for them and enabled them to instantly fly where they willed. Their only weapons were hand atom-disintegrators. And out from the Moon came mysterious aircars, with long clutching tentacles--the weapons of the Moon's minions! The war of the worlds was begun! Yet Dalis, leader of the Gens that now engaged the Moon's aircars, was still in the laboratory with Sarka. For Dalis' treacherous mind coveted control of the Earth, and though the urge to lead his Gens into battle was tremendous, still he stayed, watching Sarka closely, waiting for the moment when he could trick Sarka and assume control. And at the head of the Gens of Dalis was a woman, Jaska, whom Sarka loved. The Moon's aircars swept away the Gens of Dalis, and out from Earth poured the Gens of Cleric, who was Jaska's father. The newcomers fought desperately to save Jaska from the deadly clutches of the aircars. Dalis could stand it no longer. He sped forth from the laboratory, to reorganize his beaten Gens. Jaska flew for home; but behind her a single aircar, splashed with crimson, reached forth its tentacles to clutch her--and Sarka groaned with the agony of his impotence to help the woman he loved. CHAPTER XI _Escape--and Dalis' Laughter_ But Sarka was not to be so easily beaten. There still remained an infinite number of possible changes of speed by manipulation of ovidum by vibration set up by the Beryls, without which this flight from the beginning would have been impossible. But for two hours, while the white robed men of Cleric fought against the car of the crimson splashes to prevent the capture of the daughter of their Spokesman--and died by hundreds in the grip of those grim tentacles--Sarka was forced to labor with the Beryls until perspiration bathed his whole body and his heart was heavy as he foresaw failure. And failure meant death or worse for Jaska. But at the end of two hours, while the men of Cleric fought like men inspired against the aircar of the crimson slashes, a cessation in the outward speed of the earth could be noted. At the end of three hours the body of Jaska, all this time fighting manfully to attain to landing place on the Earth, was at last bulking larger; but the tentacles of the aircar were groping after her, reaching for her, striving to catch and clasp her to her death. The two Sarkas watched and prayed while the might of the Beryls, traveling at top speed, fought against the force of whatever was used by the Moon-men to compel the Moon to withdraw. Still the men of Cleric fought that single car, and died by hundreds in the fighting. White robed figures which became shriveled and black in the grip of those tentacles. * * * * * Countless of the men of Cleric deliberately cast themselves against those tentacles, throwing their lives away to give Jaska more leeway in her race for life. "Will she make it, father?" queried Sarka in a whisper. "If the courage and loyalty of her people stand for anything, she will make it," he replied. On she came at top speed, and now through the micro-telescopes the Sarkas could see the agony of effort on her face, even through the smooth mask used by the people of Earth for flight in space where there was no atmosphere. Courage was there, and the will of never-say-die; and Jaska, moreover, was coming back to the man she loved. In a nebulous sort of way Sarka realized this, for though these two had not mated there was a resonant inner sympathy between them which had rounded into an emotion of overpowering force since Jaska had proved to Sarka that she was to be trusted--that he had been something less than a faithful lover when he had mistrusted her, ever so little. Closer now and closer, and at last the aircar of the crimson splashes was drawing away, losing in the race for life. It was falling back, as though minded to turn about and race back for the Moon, now a ball in the sky, far away, the outlines of its craters growing dim and misty with distance. Now the men of Cleric, those who remained, were breaking contact with the aircar, and forming a valiant rear-guard for the retreat of Jaska. * * * * * Throughout the Earth, as the Beryls fought with ever increasing speed to lower the rate of the earth's outward race from the Moon, was such a trembling, such a vibration induced by conflicting, alien forces as there had not been even in that moment when back there in its orbit, the Earth could have either been kept within its orbit, or hurled outward into space at the touch of a finger. Now Jaska, surrounded by her father's men, was almost close enough to touch the Earth. She made it, weak and weary, and rested for a moment while her father's men steadied her. Then, thrusting them aside, with gestures bidding them return to their Gens, she lifted into the air again, and fled straight for the laboratory of Sarka. She entered tiredly through the exit dome, and all but collapsed into the arms of Sarka. Gently he removed her helmet of the anti-gravitational ovoid, noting as she leaned against him the tumultuous beating of her heart. Then her gentle eyes opened and she whispered to Sarka. "You trust me now?" For answer he bent and kissed her softly on the lips--for the kiss, from the far distant time when the first baby was kissed by the first mother, had been the favored caress of mankind. Her face was transfigured as she read his answer in his eyes, and the touch of his lips. Then, remembering, fear flashed across her face. She straightened, and grasping Sarka by the hand, hurried with him into the observatory. * * * * * She took the seat in which Dalis had sat before he had gone out to the command of his Gens, studied for many minutes the battle in space between the two alien worlds. "Dalis is winning," said the Elder Sarka quietly, "apparently!" "The qualification is a just one," said Jaska softly. "'Apparently,' indeed! You will note now that, though men of the Gens of Dalis swarm all about the aircars, and even clamber atop them, no more are dying in the grasp of those tentacles? Is Dalis arranging a treacherous truce with the Moon-men?" "I have been wondering about that," said Sarka softly, "for it is my belief that nothing not conducive to his own selfish interests would have forced Dalis to leave this place and take command of his Gens, as I had first ordered, unless he had schemes planned of which father and I could know nothing. Now that I think of it, Jaska, how did Dalis know our secret code of fingers?" Jaska started, and turned a blanched face to Sarka. "_Did_ he know?" she cried. "Did he? If he did that proves a suspicion that I have entertained since the first moment when Dalis swept into the fight, and I sensed that alien signals were being flashed back and forth!" "Flashed back and forth!" ejaculated Sarka. "How do you mean? That Dalis was somehow able to communicate with the Moon-men in their own language, or through their own signals?" * * * * * "Why not? He knew our secret code, did he not? I never gave it to him, and I know that you did not. No, Dalis has some means, never discovered or suspected by you Sarkas, whereby he is able to understand alien tongues and alien sign manuals!" "That means," said Sarka the Elder in a dead voice, "that by forcing Dalis to go out at the head of his Gens...." "We have," interrupted Sarka the Younger, "placed a new weapon of treason in his hands! Dalis, at the very moment of contact with the aircars, loaded with Moon-men, broke in on their signals--they must have had some means of signalling one another--and communicated with them in their own way! Do you think it possible that, with all his Gens, he may go over to the Moon-men, form an alliance with them?" For many moments no one dared to answer the question; yet, from what the Sarkas knew of him, it was not impossible at all. For Dalis was the master egotist always, and never overlooked opportunity to gain something for himself. It was Jaska who broke the silence. "Did you note carefully," she said, "those aircars which were partially destroyed by our ray directors and atom-disintegrators?" The Sarkas nodded. "Did you note that no men, formed like our own, no creatures of any sort whatever, fell from the cars?" * * * * * Again the awesome silence, and the keen brains of the Sarkas wrestled with this vague hint of the uncanny. "You mean, Jaska ... you mean...." "That the occupants of aircars are part of the cars, but--Beings of the Moon! That they are either metal monsters endowed with brains or tiny creatures irrevocably attached to the cars themselves!" "But how," said Sarka at last, "are we to be sure? I can understand what Dalis might do if the Moon-men granted his wish for an alliance with them. It is easy to understand why his Gens would follow his lead, for with the Moon forced outward from the Earth faster than his Gens could retreat, there is but one direction for his Gens to go--toward the Moon! They would go to the Moon as captives and trust the keen brain of Dalis to gain the mastery, sooner or later, over the Moon-men. And then...." "And then--?" repeated Sarka the Elder. "Then, Dalis has already been inspired by the speed with which those aircars travel! You will remember that he did not take kindly to leaving the Earth and making his abode on some other planet! But why could he not do so, combine forces and knowledge with the people of that planet--and then return to Earth in alliance with them?--after we have depleted our forces by placing a large portion of our people on Mars and Venus and Saturn?" "Sarka, my son," said Sarka's father, "before we continue with our flight to Mars, we must know the truth! We must somehow learn exactly what is going on on the Moon! If you could reach the Moon, alone, undetected, and bring back a report...." * * * * * For a moment he left it there, and the faces of all three were gray with worry and abysmal fear. "I can't go bodily, father," said Sarka at last, "but you remember my secret exit dome, to the right of the observatory, from which I have never yet dared exit from this place for fear that it might cost me my life?" Sarka the Elder nodded, while Jaska looked puzzled. Another evidence of the fact that Sarka had not always trusted her, for she knew nothing of a secret exit dome. Sarka's eyes, as he looked at Jaska, mutely asked her forgiveness, which she gave him with her smile. "I remember, son, and now?..." "Surely it is worth risking one's life to know what new menace looms over the children of men!" "What is the use of this secret dome?" asked Jaska softly. "It is merely an elaboration of the regular exit dome, combined with certain phases of our atom-distintegrators, and the principle involved in the anti-gravitational ovoids. I step into the secret exit dome, garbed for flight Outside, and will myself to appear bodily in a certain place. It is instantaneous. I step into the dome, for example, and will myself to appear whole upon the Moon, and there I will appear!" "You mean that during the period of transposition you are invisible?" "Yes, invisible because non-existent, except for the essential elements of me, broken down by the secret exit dome, reassembled at the place willed in their entirety! I can't fly there, for a million eyes would see me approach! I must go in secret, as a spy, and wearing the clothing and insignia of a member of the Gens of Dalis!" Silence in the observatory for a brief breathing space, and then Jaska spoke that speech out of the books of antiquity, which remains the classic expression of loyalty. "Whithersoever thou goest, there will I go also!" From the laboratory came a sudden burst of laughter, the laughter which all three recognized as the laughter of Dalis; but when they entered the place of the Revolving Beryl, there was no one there--and a feeling of dread, all encompassing, held them thralled for the space of several heart-beats. Dalis, they knew, was thousands of miles away, upon the Moon; yet here in the place of the Master Beryl they all three had just heard his sardonic laughter! CHAPTER XII _Ashes of the Moon_ Through the micro-telescopes it was possible to see what had happened after Dalis had assumed command of the Gens of Dalis. For even though the Moon, in spite of the speed of the Beryls, was being forced further and further from the Earth, the eyes of the micro-telescopes picked out and enlarged details to such an extent that the battle seemed to be transpiring under the eyes of the beholders. A terrific jumble, in which Earthlings and aircars were all tumbled together in mad chaos, a great mass of writhing, green-garbed figures. Infinite in number--in the midst of which were the gigantic aircars, like monster beetles being beset by armies upon armies of ants. Then, by the time Jaska had seated herself in the observatory atop the Himalayas, to watch what developed, the battle seemed to be over, and the Moon-men had won. For the huge cars swung around between the myriads of the Gens of Dalis, and seemed to be herding them toward the Moon, as though they were prisoners. Telepathically, Sarka and his father had been able to catch some hint of the thoughts of the Earthlings in the battle, and these thoughts had been tinged with doubt, fear and horror, so that even thus to receive them, by mental telepathy, was to feel the searing heat of their fear. * * * * * Now, in the instant when the battle in Space seemed to be over and the Gens of Dalis were prisoners, the thought waves were no more, and a brooding silence took their place. Dalis, the Sarkas knew, possessed the power to mask his thoughts, for it was a power possessed in common by all the scientists of Earth. But the common people of his Gens did not posses that power. However, for the moment Sarka had forgotten an all important something: that, when people were outside the roof of the world, they were subservient to the will of a common commander to whom they had sworn allegiance. If, therefore, Dalis could mask his own thoughts from the brains of men, he could also mask the thoughts of the people of his Gens, merely by willing it! So Sarka and his father and Jaska could not know whether the Gens of Dalis had gone over in a body with him, in a truce with the people of the Moon, or whether they were dual prisoners--of Dalis and of the Moon-men! More than ever was it necessary for someone to somehow reach the Moon and make a thorough investigation, discover just what Dalis was doing, what mischief he was hatching. The secret exit dome seemed to be the answer. "You can manage without me, father?" asked Sarka. * * * * * The elder Sarka nodded. "Of the other Spokesmen of Earth," went on Sarka, "I trust Gerd the most. Might I suggest that you bring him here, trust him in all details, and let him take my place wherever possible? Or, better still, keep Jaska here with you! I ... I may not be able to return! I'll try to find a way, but--we can always communicate telepathically. Jaska...." "Jaska," said that young lady grimly, "goes with Sarka wherever Sarka goes!" "But it may mean death! We can only guess at the cunning of the Moon dwellers! They may have been in secret communication with Dalis for centuries! Dalis, who somehow discovered our secret finger code, may also know of the secret exit dome, and the principle upon which it operates! If he does, he may know how to combat it! Perhaps that explains his laughter! Perhaps he heard and understood every word we spoke, hears and understands every word we speak now! Who knows? He may wait until I have passed through the secret exit dome, and then make it impossible for me to be reincarnated on the Moon--or elsewhere!" "No matter," said Jaska softly, "wherever Sarka goes, there goes Jaska! It is useless to attempt to dissuade me, and it is time you learned that!" In spite of himself Sarka smiled, and his father met his smile with a quizzical one of his own. Both men had the same thought. "The eternal woman!" said Sarka the Elder. "No man has ever understood her--no man ever will! And all men are ruled by her!" Sarka shrugged, and Jaska spoke again. "Don't you think it is time we tried this new experiment?" * * * * * Sarka nodded, and his face was suddenly alight with the excitement which burned within him. "First," he said, "we need accoutrements of the Gens of Dalis for two people!" Jaska smiled. "Forseeing that we might have need of such equipment, I had several complete outfits sent here when I took charge of the Gens of Dalis as its Spokesman!" Two minutes later, arrayed in the green clothing of the House of Dalis, swathed in it from neck to toe, wearing their belts and the masks which were necessary to life in space where there was no atmosphere, the whole topped by the gleaming helmets whose skull-pans held the infinitesimally small anti-gravitational ovoids, Jaska and Sarka entered the secret exit dome, side by-side. On the breast and back of each showed the yellow stars of the Gens of Dalis. There was no hiding their identity otherwise, and if any of the Gens saw them, both would be immediately recognized--for Jaska had commanded the Gens, and Sarka was the world's greatest scientist known to every human being. But they planned on carrying out their investigations by stealth. "Father," said Sarka, "when the inner door is closed upon us, you have but to press the button to the right of the door. Press it when the light beside it glows red, which will indicate that we have willed ourselves to go to a certain destination!" * * * * * The inner door closed upon Sarka and Jaska, and, hand in hand, side by side, their bodies glowing with knowledge of warm, sympathetic contact, they waited for a miracle which had never before been attempted. "Are you afraid, beloved?" queried Sarka. "When I am with you," she said softly, "I have no fear." "Then face the outer door, and will to go wherever I will to take you!" Side by side, hand-in-hand still, they faced the outer door, and Sarka willed: "Let us appear together in a deserted spot, within sight but unseen, of the Moon crater from which those aircars were sent against us!" A sudden blur, a cessation of all knowledge, and then.... Sarka and Jaska stood side by side in a desolate expanse surrounded by bleak and appalling mountains of grotesque shape, in a light that was weirdly, awesomely blue. Their feet were invisible, deeply rooted in some soft, fine material which looked like snow. After a swift glance around to see if anything lived or moved in this awful desolation, Sarka stooped and dipped up some of the fine stuff with his fingers, touched it to his lips. * * * * * The material seemed to be fine blue ashes and on his tongue it had a soapy savor. He peered at Jaska, whose eyes were glowing with excitement, whose lips were parted with anticipation, and instantly he opened a mental conversation with her. "We must speak with each other telepathically, but do not speak with me until I have explained to you how to mask your thoughts from all persons save the one with whom you hold converse! First, I love you! Second, let us see if, searching the sky, we can find the Earth!" In a few brief, highly technical words, Sarka told his beloved how to talk with him in the manner which he had never before explained to her. They had used telepathy before, countless times, but they had not cared who heard--while now secrecy in all things was the prime essential for success, even for life. When he had told her, and she replied, "I understand perfectly, and it seems quite easy," they turned and surveyed the heavens, out of which, by this new miracle of the secret exit dome, they had dropped to the face of the Moon. Away across the space between worlds, its transfiguration plainly visible to the two, they could make out and identify the world from which they had come. Save that they knew themselves standing on the Moon, they would have thought as far as appearances went, that the place where they had come was the Moon, many times enlarged. It seemed incredible that they had come so far in the twinkling of an eye; but that they had was proved by the fact of their physical presence. "Look, Jaska!" said Sarka suddenly. "See how our Earth glows, as though it were afire inside!" * * * * * They stared at the great circular yellowish flame that he pointed out, and Sarka, always the scientist whose science was one of exactness, tried to estimate just where, on the Earth's surface, the glow was. "Jaska," he said again, "that glow comes out of the heart of the Gens area which Dalis ruled! And no one lives there, since Dalis' Gens flew out to do battle! That's why we did not know of it before we left! That glow, somehow, beloved, is the cause of the outward-from-the-Earth journey of the Moon! First we must locate the Moon-source of the glow, and render it incapable of further forcing itself away! For do you realize that, unless we do so, we will never again see home?" Jaska said nothing, but her eyes were troubled for a moment. Then she smiled again. "What care I if I become a prisoner on the Moon, if you are with me?" Sarka was just now realizing the wonder of this raven-haired woman whom, knowing her for half a century as he had, he had just known so little after all. "If we seem in danger of discovery, Jaska," he said to her, "drop down instantly into the ashes, for if we are discovered by Dalis...." He left it there and, with a deep intake of breath, started away for the nearest and highest hill. They desired to walk, yet found walking almost impossible, as they could not keep their feet on the ground save by the exercise of a really incredible effort of will. So, despairing of keeping their feet in contact with the ashes, they flew just above them, heading for the nearest weird-looking ridge. * * * * * In the strange light, which was oddly like moonlight in some painted desert of Earth, shapes were distorted and somehow menacing, colors were raw, almost bleeding--and distances that seemed but a step required hours to traverse. Ever and anon, as they traveled they looked back up at the Earth which was their home. It still was visible, though plainly smaller with distance, and for a time Sarka's heart misgave him; but he only clasped tighter the hand of Jaska and moved on. They were just at the base of the first hill, which had now become a mountain of gloomy, forbidding aspect, when the first sound they had heard on the moon came to them. A sound that was a commingling of the laughter of Dalis, the barking of jackals of the olden times, the humming of a million Beryls revolving at top speed, and a strident buzzing such as neither had ever heard. Had they been discovered? Was the sound a warning? They could not know; but as they stared at the crest of the hill, two long, snaky, waving things appeared above the crest, undulating, waving to and fro, as though questing for something. They crouched low in the white ashes at the base of the mountain, and waited, scarcely breathing. CHAPTER XIII _The Lunar Cubes_ For a long time Sarka and Jaska remained still, like sentinels, listening to the strange discord which seemed to emanate from behind the hill at whose base they crouched. "Look!" said Sarka at last. "There against the sky, beyond and between those two waving tentacles! Note that column of light, scarcely lighter than the light which surrounds it everywhere? It looks like a massive column just lighter than everything around it, yet so little lighter that you have to watch closely to see it at all?" Jaska stared for all of a minute, before she thought back her answer. "I see it," she said. "Note now whether it goes, as it reaches outward into Space!" Jaska followed the mighty height of the thing, outward and outward, and then gasped. "Sarka," she said, "its end touches the Earth in the very heart of that strange glow we spoke about!" "Exactly! And people of Earth know nothing about it, because it is invisible to them! It is only from Outside that the glow it makes against the Earth is visible! If we can divert its direction, or render it useless in any way, the Moon will no longer be thrust away by its force!" A pause of indecision, then Sarka thought again: "Let us go, Jaska! Keep behind me, right on my heels!" Slowly, fighting against something that seemed determined to pull, or hurl, them outward from the surface of the Moon with each forward movement they made, they essayed the side of the hill, pausing at the end of what seemed like hours in a sort of hollow just large enough to mask their bodies and stared over its edge into one of the craters of the Moon. Out of the depths of that crater came the discordant sounds, which now were almost deafening, and out of that crater too came the almost invisibly bluish column whose outer tip touched the Earth. * * * * * Right before them, so close that they all but rested in its shadow, was one of those monster aircars, its tentacles moving to and fro as though wafted into motion by some vagrant breeze. But since neither Sarka nor Jaska could feel the breeze, Sarka knew that it was life which caused the waving motion of those tentacles of terror. "Note," he said to Jaska, "that there is a tiny trap-door in the bottom of the aircar, and that the thing rests on a half-dozen of those tentacles!" "I see," came Jaska's reply. Jaska went on: "Note the gleaming thing on the ground, right below the aircar? I wonder what it is?" They studied the thing there, which seemed to be a huge jewel of some sort that glittered balefully in the eery light of the Moon. It was, perhaps, twice the size of an average man's torso, and was almost exactly cubical in shape. As Sarka studied the thing, he sensed that feeling flowed out of it--that the cube, whatever it was, was alive! He tore his glance away from it, and realized that he accomplished the feat with a distinct effort of will--as though the cube had willed to hold his gaze, knew he was there. His eyes, peering around the inner slope of the crater--which dipped over, some hundreds of feet down, and plunged downward to some unknown depth--noted a broad, flat stone, off to his right; and around the rim of the crater he counted a full hundred of the aircars, all with their tentacles waving as if they belonged to sentient creatures. * * * * * Below each one, as he studied them and strained his eyes to make out details, he caught the baleful gleam of other cubes like the first he had seen. The aircars, it seemed, were either sentinels, at the lip of the crater, or were the dwelling places of sentinels--and the cubes were those sentinels! It seemed absurd, but it came to Sarka in a flash that that was the answer, and his eyes came back to the first cube, because it was nearer and more easy to study. "I will not be swayed by the will of the thing," Sarka told himself. "Nor will I allow it to analyze me! Jaska, do you do likewise!" Beside him, Jaska shivered. He turned to look at her. Her face was coldly white, and her eyes were big with terror and fascination as she stared at that first cube, resting so balefully there under the first aircar. He shook her, and she seemed to bring her eyes to his with a terrific, will-straining effort. "Look at me!" he told her, telepathically. "Keep your eyes on me, for to look at the cube spells danger!" But his own eyes went back to the thing, and he studied it closely. A cold chill raced through his body as he noted that its gleam was becoming dull, fading slowly out. It had gleamed brightly at first, and now was losing its sheen, fading away to invisibility. He thought he should be able, regardless of gleam or color, to see its outline; but its outline, too, seemed to be becoming faint, indistinct. * * * * * Then, in a trice, it was gone, and a feeling of uneasiness, more compelling than he had ever known before, coursed through the soul of Sarka. Where had the cube gone? What was it? What was its purpose? He tore his eyes away from the spot where he had last seen it, and stared away to the shadow beneath the second nearest aircar, where he had glimpsed another of the cubes. The cube there, too, was fading out. "Sarka! Sarka! Look!" came to his brain the thoughts of Jaska. Sarka turned and stared at her, and a feeling of fear for which he could not account at all took fast hold of him. The eyes of Jaska, wide and staring as they had been when he commanded her to look away from the cube under the aircar, were staring at that flat, table-like rock, off to his right. There, almost in the center of the rock, a gleaming something was taking shape! Just a dull spot, in the center of the yellow glow; then the beginning of the outline of a cube. Then, all at once, the cube itself, gleaming and baleful! Sarka gasped in terror. He had seen the cube vanish, its glow disappear, and now here it was, almost close enough to touch, on a rock beside him, gleaming and baleful as before! That it was the same cube he had seen under the first aircar, he somehow knew without being told. That it was a sentient _thing_ he also knew, for now there was no mistaking the fact that, but for the presence in the little hollow of Jaska and Sarka, the cube would not have moved. * * * * * Swift as light, Sarka's right hand darted to his belt, where his ray director should be nestled against his need of it. And with his first movement, the cube's brilliance vanished instantly, the cube disappeared, and appeared again right before the face of Sarka, so close he could touch it! Yet he did not turn the ray director against it, nor did he extend his hand to touch the thing--because he was afraid to do so! Even as the cube appeared before his eyes, thrice baleful and menacing in its close proximity, his eyes darted back to that broad flat rock, where the second gleaming cube now appeared! "Great God, Jaska!" he sent mentally, "what does it mean?" "These," she answered bravely back, "are Moon-soldiers! And, unless we manage not to appear furtive, we are undone!" Still Sarka made no move, while other gleaming cubes appeared on the flat rock. Five other cubes appeared beside the first, at the rim of the hollow which held the forms of Jaska and Sarka. The cubes were closing on them, oddly like a squad of Earthlings in the olden times, advancing by rushes against an entrenched enemy! The buzzing sound which they had first heard now seemed accentuated, but, instead of being outside of the listeners, seemed inside them, hammering against their very brains! Messages were being sent to them, or passed back and forth between and among the cube-men about them--and they hadn't the slightest idea how to make answer, know whether an answer was expected of them, or what the cube-men thought about them! Since there was nothing else to do, they lay there, hands clasped, as children in the dark clasp hands, and waited for what might transpire. * * * * * Suddenly the discord from the inside of the crater ceased, and all was still, while it came to Sarka that the cube-men who stood before him were in grim communication with something invisible to Sarka and Jaska, somebody, perhaps, deep in the bowels of the Moon, over inside the crater. They knew, those two, that the cube-soldiers were reporting their presence, and asking instructions; that the Moon had gone silent to listen, and that within a few moments their fate would be decided. What should they do? In his hand Sarka held his ray director, with which he knew he could blast one or all of the cubes into nothingness. But still he held his hand, made no move. Something, however, had to be done, for the discord was starting again, growing in volume. It made Sarka think, oddly enough, of a deaf mute fighting for speech! Then came the first intelligible sound.... A burst, from the depths of the crater, of sardonic laughter! "Dalis!" said Sarka, and moved. While Sarka moved, Jaska held fast to his arm. Casting her fear to the winds, furious because of the laughter of Dalis, Sarka thrust his ray director back into his belt and stood upright. Bending over he seized the first of the gleaming cubes and hurled it over the edge of the crater, saw it start plummeting down. But even before it fell out of sight within the crater its gleam had dulled until it was almost impossible to see the thing. Racing as though racing against time, Sarka caught up cube after cube and hurled them all after the first. * * * * * Out of the crater there came no sound of heavy objects striking, though Sarka felt there should have, for the cubes were almost as heavy as a man. Then his hair almost stood on end under his helmet, for under that first aircar, where he had first seen it, the initial cube was again gleaming into life! The thing had dissolved while being hurled over the rim, and reformed in its proper place, its station as silent sentinel under the aircar! These cubes then, were indeed sentinels--sentinels impossible to injure. Though no force had been used against Sarka and Jaska, Sarka had the feeling that they were powerless, and that here on the edge of a crater of the Moon awful forces were being mustered against them. Mustered slowly, sluggishly, yet surely, as though the mentality which mustered them knew them helpless, and that there was no need to hurry! As for Jaska, she merely clung to Sarka and waited--trusting him no matter what might transpire. On a blind chance, Sarka brought out his ray director again, turned its muzzle toward that invisibly-blue column, pressed with his fingers, moving the director back and forth. Instantly the blue column seemed to break short off, while the broken upper portion started racing outward toward the Earth. Sarka watched it, and noted that the yellowish glow on the Earth, even as he watched, was fading out--disappearing! "If the ray will smash the blue column, Jaska," he said, "it will also destroy its source! Come! We will go look for it!" And, holding her hand tightly, he rose to his feet and strode boldly down the inner slope of the vast crater. CHAPTER XIV _The Crater Gnomes_ It seemed to Sarka, as he moved down the inner slope of the crater, that the cubes were somehow making sport of him, laughing at him, though no hint of laughter or anything resembling laughter emanated from them. But, shutting his lips grimly, holding fast to Jaska's hand, he proceeded on, reached the lower portion of the inner slope, where it dropped off into a seeming black abyss, and dropped, keeping to a safe speed because of the fact that both he and Jaska were attired for movement in the air--though their manner of aerial transportation could scarcely be called flying. The anti-gravitational ovoids simply rendered ineffectual the law of gravity. Down they dropped, endlessly it seemed, while all about them, growing gradually, a bluish glow began to make itself manifest. Sarka turned and looked at the face of Jaska and noted that it--all her being--was glowing with this strange radiance. He smiled at her, and she smiled back. Looking down now, to what seemed still a vast depth, they could see figures moving, tiny, almost infinitesimal, about a great circular cone, out of the depths of which came that strange bluish column whose outer tip touched the Earth. * * * * * Some inner sense warned Sarka not to touch that column, or to permit Jaska to do so. They dropped down beside it, while Sarka, for no reason that he could assign, once more took his ray director in his free hand and held it in readiness. It seemed so tiny and futile--so foolish for two people, one of them a woman--to go into the very heart of an alien world, against an unknown enemy, armed with such a tiny weapon. Two people against unguessed myriads, whose very nature was an enigma, even to Sarka. Closer now appeared the bottom of the crater, whose floor seemed to be covered with something that looked like blue sand, or rock. From this bluish substance the glow which bathed the two Earthlings seemed to emanate. The funnel of the crater had now given away to the immensities of space, in all directions, and the cold of outside was being replaced by a warmth which promised soon to be even uncomfortable. Then, without a jar, the two landed at the bottom of the crater, side by side, close enough almost to that great cone to touch it. Out of the cone came that bluish column, to shoot up through the funnel down which the two had lightly dropped ... and the motion of the--whatever it was--was accompanied by a muted moaning sound, like that of a distant waterfall. They paused there, in amazement, taking stock of their surroundings. Huge tunnels, whose roofs were lost to invisibility in the bluish haze, whose extremities could only be guessed at, reached off in all directions. As far as the two could tell they were the only living souls within the crater, though both knew better. Sarka had the feeling, and he knew Jaska shared it with him, that innumerable eyes were studying them, innumerable intellects were cataloguing them. And somehow he sensed the presence, somewhere near, of the traitor Dalis! * * * * * Then that discordant sound again, breaking so swiftly that it fell upon the eardrums of Sarka and Jaska like the crack of doom. Out of the many tunnels, from all directions, came hordes of beings which would have made the nightmares of Paracelsus--first of the scientists of Earth--pale to insignificance. Paracelsus had written and illustrated his nightmares. Had hinted of strange acts of flesh-grafting--as the grafting of legs on the head of man. He had spoken, and written about, ghastly operations, from which men came forth as part men, part spiders; part men, part scorpions, dogs, cats, crocodiles.... Sarka thought, as his mind went back to those ancient books of his people in which still remained vestiges of the theories of Paracelsus, that somehow, in his dreams, Paracelsus must have visited the craters of the Moon. These people ... if they could be called people.... They had heads like the heads of Earthlings, broad-domed of brow, lacking eyelashes or lids, so that their eyes were perpetually staring. They possessed no bodies at all, and their legs, thin and attenuated to the size of the wrists of average men, seemed to support the massive heads with difficulty! From all directions they came, looking like spiders such as Sarka the First had described to Sarka, when Sarka had been a mere boy. They came on the floor, out of the tunnels; they dropped from the walls of the tunnels, and down from the invisible roofs, landing on the floor as lightly as feathers--and all converged on Jaska and Sarka. They seemed to have no fear at all, but only a vast curiosity. Closer and closer they came. * * * * * Jaska's grip tightened on the hand of Sarka, for one of the creatures, with a spiderish leap, had jumped upon her, fastening its legs in her tight-fitting costume, where he hung, his face within an inch or two of hers. His lidless eyes, unblinking, stared deeply into hers. Others jumped up beside the first, and still others clambered over Sarka, until both Sarka and Jaska were covered by them like beetles attacked by ants. But these strange gnomelike creatures, who did not fear these strangers, apparently meant them no harm. Then, after a thorough scrutiny, began the strangest talking Sarka had ever heard. The crater-Gnomes seemed to communicate by making strange clucking sounds with their tongues, sounds which were unmusical and discordant, and which, as the Gnomes who stood back from them, because already the two were covered until no more could cling to Jaska or Sarka, joined in the speech--mounted in the cavern to a vast crescendo of sound. Sarka knew then that this was the sound which had come out to them while they crouched at the crater rim. These were people of the Moon: but if these were Moon-men, what, or who, were those gleaming cubes? "Stand perfectly still," Sarka mentally admonished Jaska, "they apparently mean us no harm!" He had not spoken aloud, had not allowed his thought to reach any but Jaska; yet instantly the discordant clucking ceased, and the Gnomes were quiet, as though they politely listened to someone who had interrupted them, yet whose interruption they resented, or were curious about. * * * * * Wondering how the creature would regard his action, Sarka reached forth and plucked away the first Gnome which had jumped upon Jaska, and placed him gently on the ground. The thing merely stared at Sarka with his lidless eyes, as though wondering at Sarka's meaning. Then his lips, which were triangular, rather than straight as those of Earthlings, began again that strange clucking. Immediately the Gnomes which clung to Jaska and Sarka dropped away, and scuttled into the midst of the myriads that stood and watched. They did not understand the speech of these Earthlings, but they were unusually clever in comprehending the meaning of gestures. "Hold fast to me, Jaska," thought Sarka toward her--and wondered anew as the Gnomes instantly ceased their clucking sounds--"for I am going to try an experiment." Holding her hand still, he turned and strode straight toward the huge cone out of which rose the bluish column. Instantly the Gnomes broke into a frightful clucking of tongues, a sound that mounted to ear-drum-breaking intensity, and in a trice, climbing over one another to get into position, they moved in between Sarka and the cone. So eager were they to bar his further progress that they stood atop one another, until the depth of them was as tall as Sarka standing upright. Yet, though they plainly said to Sarka: "You must not approach the cone," they did not seem to be angry with their visitors, but only curious. Sarka looked at Jaska, noted how wanly she smiled. Then he turned, and headed for the nearest of the monster tunnels. * * * * * Instantly he detected a surprising eagerness in the renewed clucking of tongues, while the Gnomes raced ahead, behind, all about the two, capering like pet animals, showing these strangers the way into the tunnel. As they entered it, Sarka tried to discover whence came the bluish glow. The floor seemed to be of bluish sandstone, though its color, too, might have been caused by the glow. It was warm, too, so warm that perspiration was breaking out on the cheeks of Sarka. Whence came the glow? Apparently from the very walls of the tunnel, or its roof; but surely from somewhere, surely from some secret place, whence it was diffused all over. "And Jaska," said Sarka, "the Moon, according to my father's researches, is literally honeycombed with craters like this one!" Again, as he thought, that strange, sudden cessation of the clucking of the Gnomes. Whither were they leading them? It was plain to be seen that the Gnomes were heading for some destination, almost herding Sarka and Jaska toward it. Capering creatures, who behaved witlessly, yet were far from witless. If Sarka were not sadly mistaken, these were Moon-men--and women, too, perhaps, since he could not tell the sex of them--and those gleaming cubes were their outer guards, perhaps slaves. If the cubes were really of metal--they had felt warm to Sarka's touch--then these Moon-men had gone further in science than Earthlings, as they had imbued at least some metals, or stones, with intelligence sufficiently advanced for them to perform actions independently of their masters' wills. * * * * * Sarka, too, was remembering another thing: that he had touched one of these Gnomes, to remove it from Jaska--and had felt a distinct shock that was patently electrical! The bluish glow was increasing, becoming more soft and mellow, shading gradually into golden, as they advanced--shading still as they preceded until it was almost white, almost blinding, in its radiance. Then, of a sudden, the clucking of the Gnomes ended, and the creatures ceased their capering, fell into something that might have been an ordered military formation, and with Jaska and Sarka in the midst of them, moved straight toward a broad expanse of the tunnel wall, in the face of which appeared three long lines, deeply cut in the shape of a triangle. The Gnome who had first leaped upon Jaska advanced to the wall, paused with his face almost against the lower line of the triangle, and remained there, intently staring, while the other Gnomes remained mute and unmoving. Stronger and stronger appeared the blinding light. Slowly the inner portion of the triangle began to give inward, like a door. And out of the opening came that blinding radiance. As the triangular door stood entirely open, Sarka and Jaska stood in thunderstruck silence, staring like people bereft of their senses. For there, standing in the opening, the now white radiance itself a mantle to cover her, was a woman, unclothed save for the radiance, who might have been of the Earth, save that she was more beautiful than any woman of Earth. Beside her the radiant beauty of Jaska paled, became wan and sickly. But Sarka noted immediately her eyes, whose depths bewildered, amazed him. For in them he could see no expression, no feeling, but only abysmal cruelty. That she was Sarka's master, and Jaska's master, and master of all these Gnomes, became instantly apparent for telepathically she addressed Sarka. "I am busy now. The Moon-people will hold you prisoners in the Place of the Blue light, until I am ready to give you to the Cone!" CHAPTER XV _The Place of the Blue Light_ So the Gnomes were Moon-people, masters of the Moon cubes! And people and cubes were ruled by a woman who resembled a woman of Earth! The Gnomes took them back the way they had come. Where, Sarka wondered, were the people of the Gens of Dalis? And where was Dalis himself! Sarka was sure that, in those first discords which had come out of the crater, he had heard at least a hint of the laughter of Dalis. And this woman clothed in radiance--who was she? And what? That she was a creature of the Moon, and yet resembled in all ways a woman of Earth, save that she was more beautiful than any woman Sarka had ever seen, seemed almost impossible to believe. Yet he had seen her. So had Jaska, and as Sarka and Jaska, with the capering Gnomes still about them, were led away to a fate at which they could only guess, Sarka wondered at Jaska's silence and at the strange lack of expression on her face. He pressed her hand, but somehow she failed to return the pressure, mystifying more than ever. This sudden coldness was not like Jaska. Back they went through the vast cavern where the cone of the bluish column still moaned and murmured. Sarka moved as close to the cone as the Gnomes would permit, and peered up along the mighty length of the column. At its tip was still the Earth, like a star viewed from the bottom of a deep well. Smaller, too, it seemed, which proved that Sarka's breaking of the blue column had been but momentary, that the column had almost instantly regained its contact with the Earth. What was its source, what the composition of the column? * * * * * At the moment there could be no answer to the question. Now the Gnomes were escorting them into another tunnel, whose glow was even bluer than that which the two had experienced in the other tunnels. And the deeper they penetrated, the more distant from the cavern of the Cone, the deeper in color became that light. Finally the Gnome who had mentally asked permission of the Radiant Woman to show her Jaska and Sarka passed before another expanse of wall, identical in appearance with that of the wall of the triangle from which the Radiant Woman had appeared. This time the Gnome managed ingress by a strange clucking sound, with his triangular lips held close to the base-line of the triangle. Now the door swung open; but the radiance which now came out was not clear white, as in the case of the outer door, but deeply, coldly blue. For the first time the Gnomes used force with their prisoners, thus proving to them that they were indeed prisoners. Their tiny feet caught at Sarka and at Jaska, and forced them through the door, which swung shut behind them. Sarka looked at Jaska who, in this strange new light, had taken on the color of indigo, and smiled at her. She did not return his smile, but her eyes looked deeply, somewhat sorrowfully, into his. As though she asked him a question he could not understand, to which he could therefore give no answer. * * * * * Sarka was now conscious of the fact that the heat of their prison-house--whose character they did not as yet know--was becoming almost unbearable. They were alone, too, for the Gnomes had not entered the door of triangle. Sarka partially removed his life mask, and testing the atmosphere of the place, found it capable of being breathed without the mask. He signalled mentally to Jaska to remove her mask, and when the girl had done so he took her in his arms and kissed her on the lips. She accepted his caress, but did not return it, and her eyes still peered deeply into his. "Well, beloved," he said. "I am terribly sorry. But I did not want you to come because I was afraid that something of this sort would happen." She did not answer. "What is it, Jaska?" he said at last. "What did you think of that woman?" she asked softly. "Beautiful!" he said enthusiastically. "Fearfully beautiful! But did you see her eyes? She had no more mercy in her heart than if she were made of stone! And she hated us both the moment she saw us!" "And you, Sarka--did you hate her, too?" Sarka stared at her, not comprehending. "I feel," he said, "that if we are ever to escape her, we must kill her, or render her incapable of retaining us!" Then, of her own accord, Jaska placed her arms around Sarka, and gave him her lips. Her new behavior was as incomprehensible to Sarka as her former enigmatic expression had been. Wise in the ways of science was Sarka, but he knew nothing of women! * * * * * Now hand in hand again, they began a survey of their prison house. The bluish glow was unbearable to the eyes, and tears came unbidden and ran down the cheeks of the prisoners. In a minute or two, perspiration was literally bathing the bodies of the two. After a questioning exchange of glances, Sarka swiftly divested himself of his costume, stripping down to the gray toga of Earth's manhood. With a shrug, Jaska removed her clothing to her own toga, and the two suits Sarka carried under his arm. They started ahead, exploring, then sprang back with a cry of fright. Sarka did not know whether it was Jaska or himself who had cried out; for just as they moved forward, a rent opened in the floor at their feet, and their eyes for a moment--they could stand no longer--peered into a bluely flaming abyss which, save for the color, reminded Sarka of the word pictures of Hell he had read in Earth's books of antiquity! As the two stepped back, the rent in the floor closed instantly. Sarka had noted where the end of it had been, and started to detour, his eyes on the floor. Over to his left the bluely glowing wall reached up to invisible immensity. But as he would have passed along the wall, the rent opened again, effectually barring his way. Beyond the rent he could see a vast continuation of the cavern, and he felt that, could they only pass the rent, they might reach a place where the heat was not so unbearable, and they could stay and talk in comfort. * * * * * Releasing Jaska, he stepped back and prepared to leap the spot where the rent had been. High he jumped, and far, surprised at the length of his own leap. He landed lightly, far beyond the area where the rent had been, and even as he landed, a rent opened again at his feet, thus effectually barring further progress! "It could just as easily," he told himself, "have opened under my feet, and dropped me into the abyss!" From behind him came the sudden sound of screaming. He whirled to look back, to see Jaska standing there, arms outstretched toward him, her eyes wide with fear and horror, and as he stood watching, she raced to him, unmindful of abysses that might open under her feet, and flung herself into his arms. "Come back!" she moaned. "Come back! Don't you see? _They_ don't wish you to explore further! We are in their power, and must simply await their pleasure, whoever or whatever they are! They see all we do!" So they turned back, and stood against the door which held them prisoners; and the heat of the place seemed to enter into them, to gnaw at their very vitals. After a time Sarka found himself almost tearing at his throat, fighting for breath. * * * * * Gasping, the tears bathing their cheeks until even their tears and their perspiration would flow no more, they huddled now just inside the massive stone door, arms about each other, and almost prayed for death. Sarka at least prayed for death for both of them; but Jaska prayed for a way of deliverance, prayed that herself and Sarka might somehow win free, and be together again. Sarka, who knew little of women, marveled at the grandeur of her courage, and wondered that he really knew this radiant woman so little. He compared her in his mind with the unclothed woman who had ordered them here as prisoners, and it came to him that Jaska was all perfection, all tender womanhood, while the Radiant Woman was a monster, without soul or compassion--a creature of horror who mocked God with her outward seeming of perfection. Jaska read his thoughts, and smiled wanly to herself, and Sarka wondered how, suffering as he knew she must be suffering, she could find the courage to smile. Then, for a time, the two became comatose, mastered by the blue heat, and in dreamlike imaginings wandered in strange fields which could only, to these two, have been racial memories, since neither had ever seen such fields. There were cool streams, all a-murmur, and breezes which cooled their sun-tanned cheeks. Water touched their tongues, and cooled their whole bodies as they gratefully imbibed it. * * * * * In their wanderings, in which Sarka was a faun and Jaska a nymph, they talked together in a language which only these two comprehended--a language which dealt in figures of speech, a language which depended upon handclasps for periods, glances of the eyes for commas, and the singing of their hearts for complete understanding. Then a cool breeze, cool by comparison, caressed their pain-distorted cheeks, and the Gnomes came in, found them lying there, and clucked endlessly as though wondering what to do with them. From hand to tiny hand, their feet serving as hands, the Gnomes passed garments--garments of the Gens of Dalis, and clothed again the two whom the Place of the Blue Light had all but slain. Of that ghastly experiment Sarka retained but one real memory.... That bluish light, in the midst of the abyss, shifting and swaying like blue serpents swimming in Hades ... that bluish light of the Cone, which he had broken up for a brief moment by the use of his ray director. Was this bluish light in the abyss the source of the light in the Cone? If one were to destroy it at its source.... The two regained consciousness completely as the triangular door closed behind Sarka and Jaska and the Gnomes, and they were taken into the refreshing coolness of the tunnel, led back again in the direction of the room where they had seen the Radiant Woman. Both Jaska and Sarka noticed that they were clothed in new clothing, and a shy blush tinged the cheeks of Jaska as her eyes met those of Sarka. * * * * * This time they entered the vast chamber of radiance behind the first triangular door, and were forced to their knees to do obeisance to the Radiant Woman, who sat on a gleaming yellow stone for dais! The guards who forced Sarka and Jaska to their knees, were clothed in the green of the Gens of Dalis, and Dalis himself, his face stern, but bearing no sign of recognition of these two, stood at the right hand of the Radiant Woman! "You come to us as spies," the thought of the Radiant Woman impinged upon the brains of Sarka and of Jaska, "and as spies you should be given to the Cone. But if you swear eternal allegiance to me, to obey me in all things, to forego your allegiance to Earth, your lives will be spared! What say you?" Boldly Sarka stared into the almost opaque eyes of the woman. Then his glance went to the face of Dalis. "What," he asked boldly, in the language of Earth, "does the traitor Dalis say?" "I have sworn allegiance to Luar, who addresses you, and am her ally in all things! I have but one addition to make to what she says: Jaska belongs to me!" The sudden leering grin of Dalis was hideous. Sarka peered at Jaska, framing his answer. But Jaska spoke first. "For myself, O Dalis," she said swiftly, "I can answer in but one way. Return me to the Place of the Blue Light, and forget me there!" Sarka smiled, while his heart leaped with joy. "And I, O Luar," he said mentally to the Radiant Woman, "prefer death with Jaska, at the Place of the Blue Light, than life as a traitor to the world of my nativity!" Instantly Luar began the clucking sound which was the language of the Gnomes, at the same time allowing her thoughts as she spoke to impress themselves upon the brains of the prisoners. "Take them away! Take them to the Cavern of the Cone, and when they have suffered as much as such inferior beings are capable of suffering, thrust them into the base of the Cone!" CHAPTER XVI _Cavern of the Cone_ The Gnomes had been bidden to take the prisoners to the Cavern of the Cone, but to the surprise of Sarka and Jaska, they were taken back to the Place of the Blue Light! This time the Gnomes entered the place with them, closing and securing the door behind them. But the Place of the Blue Light had changed! Now it had no floor of blue, as it had had before, but only a corridor perhaps wide enough to allow the passage of four grown men, walking side by side, while the abyss of which the two had got but the merest hint through the opening and closing rents filled all the center of the place! The Gnomes seemed impervious to the unendurable heat, and these, moving together, one behind the other, one beside the other, one atop the other, formed a living wall between Sarka and Jaska and the rim of the flaming blue abyss, to protect them from the heat. Yet through the bodies of this living wall of Gnomes, a wall which was higher than the heads of Sarka and Jaska, the heat forced its way to the prisoners, and burned them anew with its agony. To what dread rendezvous were they going? Where, save for the few guards at the house of Luar, were the people of the Gens of Dalis? Sarka felt, somehow, that the answers to all these questions would soon be made manifest, and a feeling of exaltation he could not explain was possessing him as he advanced. Around the corridor, whose one side was the wall reaching up to invisibility, whose other side dropped off into the abyss, the Gnomes herded the prisoners. * * * * * The leader of the Gnomes was again the Gnome who had first leaped upon Jaska to examine her curiously. Now, watching the lidless eyes of this being, Sarka fancied he could detect a hint of some expression. The Gnome was excited at some prospect, some climax which they were approaching. What? On and on they moved. The blue flames from the abyss, roaring in a way that neither of the prisoners had ever experienced, reached upward in searing tongues toward the invisible roof of this place. Then, when they had progressed far from the door of entry, Sarka gasped at a new manifestation. Out of the abyss, some distance ahead, came a gleaming thing, something that had apparently evolved itself out of the flames of the abyss. Blue of color it was, because of the flames from the pit; but Sarka recognized it with a start which he could not suppress nor understand. It was one of those cubes, such as he and Jaska had seen at the lip of the Moon-crater! As they approached, guided by the Gnomes, other cubes appeared out of the abyss, others in numbers swiftly augmented, until a veritable battalion of them had marshalled itself, there at the lip of the abyss. * * * * * Straight toward these cubes the Gnomes led Sarka and Jaska, and when they had reached the center of the group, they halted, forming a circle, still a wall to mask the prisoners from the heat of the abyss. The leader of the Gnomes stopped with his face, his lidless eyes, close to one of the cubes. For a moment he paused thus, and Sarka felt sure that somehow the Gnome was holding thought converse with the cube; but, try as he might, he could find no meaning in the weird conversation for himself. It was oddly like listening to a conversation in a code beyond his knowledge. Then the Gnome turned back to Sarka and Jaska. By a pressure of tiny feet, he tried to indicate that Sarka and Jaska should unclasp their hands. But they only clung the tighter, and now threw their arms about each other. The Gnome desisted, much to the joy of the lovers, while Sarka studied the cubes, wondering what their mission was with Jaska and himself. Slowly, together, the cubes began to lose their bluish glow, their cube shape--to vanish utterly. In a trice, still locked in each other's arms, Sarka and Jaska saw the Gnomes through what appeared to be an even bluer haze. Besides, the heat of the abyss no longer tortured them, and their bodies were cooling in a way that was unbelievably refreshing. "What is it, beloved?" whispered Jaska. "What is it?" * * * * * Sarka stared at the Gnomes, now in retreat, capering as they had first capered when the two had fallen into their hands, toward the door by which all had entered. Mystified, Sarka put forth his hand. It came in contact with something solid, and oddly warm, which stirred an instantly responsive chord in the brain of Sarka. This feeling was the same as he experienced when he had lifted those cubes and hurled them into the crater--where they had dissolved in falling, and instantly reappeared, each under its own aircar! "Jaska!" he explained. "Jaska! The cubes have dissolved themselves, and have reformed in the shape of a globe, as a protective covering about us, to protect us from the heat of the abyss! Apparently we are not to be killed at once! These cubes are slaves of the Gnomes, of whom Luar is ruler!" They were indeed locked inside a globe, a globe whose integral parts were the cubes of their acquaintance; and the atmosphere of the interior was not uncomfortable, but otherwise. Sarka and Jaska were feeling normal for the first time since they had landed on the Moon. But what was the meaning of this strange imprisonment? They were soon to know! For the globe which enclosed them, moved to the edge of the flaming abyss, and dropped into the bluish glow! It did not drop heavily, like a falling object on Earth, but rather floated downward, right into the heart of the flames. At this new manifestation of the strangeness of science on the Moon, Sarka was at once all scientist himself, striving to find adequate answers for things which, from cause to effect, were entirely new to him. With Jaska still clasped close against him, he seated himself in the base of the globe and studied the area through which they were passing. Blue flames which seemed to be born somewhere, an infinite distance below them; blue flames which he knew to be the element that, shot outward from the great cone, had forced the Moon away from the Earth. No sound of the roaring flames came through the globe, but every movement of them was visible. * * * * * Sarka turned and peered through the bottom of the globe; but all he could see below were the flames, a molten indigo lake of them. Now, as they floated downward, the glow was giving away to lighter blue, to white, almost pure white, like the radiance which covered Luar like a mantle. Sarka felt himself on the eve of vast important discoveries, and the scientist in him made him, for the moment, almost forget the woman at his side. Jaska, unbothered about anything, now that Sarka was at her side, regarded his expression of deep concentration with a tolerant smile. Whiter now was the light, and faster fell the globe which held the two. The color of the globe, now fallen below the area of blue, had taken on, chameleonlike, the color of the white flames that bathed it. Then, apparently right in the center of a lake of white flames, though Sarka could see no solid place on which the globe had landed, the globe came to rest. Now everything was plain to see, and Sarka studied his surroundings with new interest. He felt a mounting sensation of scalp-prickling horror. For, scattered throughout the lake of white flames, in all directions, as far as the eye could reach--standing alone, suffering untold agonies, from the expressions on their faces--were people of the Gens of Dalis! * * * * * No longer were they clothed in green and wearing on breast and back the yellow stars of their Gens. Now they were nude as they had come into the world and standing there, each was holding out hands in horror, to hold back myriads of the Gnomes, who would have forced them to submerge themselves in the white flames of the lake! Was the Gens of Dalis being burned alive? What was the meaning of this? For a moment, filled with horror, Sarka looked away from the spectacle. Off to his right, as he sat, he noted that the flames, which here seemed lighter than they had in high levels, were converging on a single spot toward the side of the lake of white flames--as smoke converges on the base of a chimney leading outward to the air! He knew as he stared that he was gazing at the spot where the bluish column of the cone was born! Shaking his head, he turned back to the mighty spectacle of this horrible thing that was being done to the people of the Gens of Dalis. In his brain there suddenly crashed a thought whose source he could only guess at, whose meaning mystified him more than anything yet experienced. The thought might have emanated from Luar, or from Dalis. But the more he thought of the matter, the more he thought how the phrasing of the thought was like the telepathy of Sarka the Second, now thousands of miles away, upon the Earth. And this was the thought: "If they fight the flames, the flames will destroy them! If they go into them freely, voluntarily, they will be rendered immune to heat and to cold, to life and to death. But it is better that they die, for Earth's sake!" What did it mean? * * * * * Sarka thought of the radiant white light which perpetually bathed the person of Luar, and thought that he had somehow been given a hint of its source. If the Gens of Dalis were voluntarily bathed in the lake of white flames, would they become as Luar? Somehow, though he knew that such bathing would save their lives, the idea filled him anew with horror. He found himself torn between two duties. If he sent his thought out there to the Gens of Dalis, people of Earth, his people, they would be saved, but might forever become allies of the people of the Moon. If Sarka did not tell them, they would die--and there were millions of them. But his science had always been a science of Life, and it still was. "Enter the flames!" he telepathically bade his people. "Enter the flames!" But they did not heed him, and for the first time the atmosphere of the interior of the globe seemed filled with savage, abysmal menace! Plain to Sarka was the meaning of that menace: The cubes which composed this globe were loyal to their masters, the masters to a mistress, Luar, and would countenance no meddling. Likewise it was impossible, if the Gnomes willed it to the cubes, for Sarka to transmit his thoughts to the Gens of Dalis through the transparent walls of the globe! They were prisoners, indeed, of Dalis and of Luar! * * * * * But could Sarka and Jaska turn their new-found knowledge to their own use? Sarka was thinking back, back to one of the ancient tomes of his people. It spoke, someplace, of a man who had got trapped in the heart of a seething volcano, where the heat of it had cured him of his illnesses, made him whole again, given him new youth and freshness. But since the cubes could forestall his transmission of thought, and perhaps could read and understand thoughts, how was he to tell Jaska? How show her that a way of deliverance had been given into their hands, if they only possessed the courage to use it! Again came that thought, which Sarka recognized as the telepathy of his father: "Courage! You will win, and Jaska with you!" Thoughts could come in to them then, but could not go out. Or did it mean that the cubes, or the masters of the cubes, did not care if the prisoners received messages from outside, because they knew themselves capable of frustrating anything the prisoners planned? Perhaps. More than likely that was it. But, looking through the bottom of the globe, into the sea of white flames below, Sarka gripped more tightly his ray director, and tried to marshal the forces of his courage. There was surely some way of escape. Some way out of their strange predicament. CHAPTER XVII _Casting the Die_ Somehow Sarka believed that this white radiance of the abyss held the secret of the omnipotence of Luar, if omnipotence she possessed. That she did seemed sure, else Dalis would not have been with her. Besides, she had asked Sarka and Jaska to swear allegiance to her. Yes the secret was here, in the heart of the lake of white flames. It might have been the Moon Fountain of Youth, or of omnipotence. There was no telling, unless Sarka tried an experiment. His fury at Dalis now knew no bounds, and he was conscious of a desire, too poignant almost to be borne, in some way to circumvent the arch-traitor. For here in the craters of the Moon Dalis was working out a strange amplification of the scheme which he had, centuries before, proposed to Sarka the First. He was subjecting the people of his Gens to the white flames. If they immersed themselves voluntarily, they became as Luar was, but still subservient to the will of Dalis--and, in his hands, invincible instruments of war! Dalis had doubtless already been bathed in the flames. Sarka was not sure, for in the home of Luar the white light was so blinding it would have been impossible to make sure that the white radiance clothed the others with Luar. "That's it!" said Sarka to himself. "That's it! Dalis and those guards at the dais of Luar have already been subjected to the white flames! The rest who immerse themselves, voluntarily, come forth as Luar and Dalis! Who do not, die. Dalis' manner of forcing the survival of the fittest! His idea of the flood in grandfather's time, only now he causes his selection by flames instead of flood! He believes that only those worthy to survive, and to stand at his back in whatever he conceives to be his need, will guess the secret of the immersion. The others will die!" * * * * * What a terrible alternative, when Dalis could as easily have given the secret to all his people! Could have told them how to save themselves! But it was not Dalis' way. Here, in the beginning of what was to become a dual sovereignty of the Moon, Dalis had already taken thought on the matter of over-population, and was destroying the many that the few--the strongest, most ruthless--might survive! Hundreds of thousands, millions of the Gens of Dalis, stood at the door of life, and did not know how to enter, merely because Dalis withheld the key! And, pausing in terror before the flames, they died, when a step and a plunge would have saved them all! "If he lives to be a million, if he lives through everlasting life," said Sarka to himself, "and does penance through a thousand reincarnations, Dalis can never atone for this wholesale destruction of humanity! But I ... I wonder!" Sarka realized the nicety of the revenge of Dalis upon Jaska and himself. Dalis had not given the secret to the prisoners, but by his use of the cubes, he had plunged them into the very heart of the horror, where they could see the suffering of the people of the Gens. Then, when they had seen and appreciated the horror of it all, they would follow the people of the Gens to death! But Luar had spoken of thrusting them into the base of the Cone! * * * * * Then they were not for the flames after all! How could it be done? The globe composed of the cubes had but to transport the prisoners to the base of the Cone, press against that base, and open to let the prisoners free--and in the heart of the white-blue column they would be hurled outward from the Moon, into space. The mere prospect of such horror caused the perspiration to break forth anew on the body of Sarka. But there might be a way. "I wonder," he asked himself, "if the Earth people in _this_ crater could read my thoughts in spite of their agonies, if I could get my thought to them through the globe? I wonder if, reading my thoughts, they would obey?" Bit by bit, as parts of a puzzle fall into place, he made his plan, and his heart beat high with excitement. Jaska bent before him to look into his eyes, and he knew that she was trying to read his face. She knew, wise Jaska, that this brilliant lover of hers was making a plan, and she believed in the sure success of it because it would be _his_! She smiled at him, her courage high, and waited! Holding the ray director between his body and that of Jaska, he took a terrible, ghastly chance. Dalis had known the secret sign manual of these two; but would the intelligence of the cubes comprehend it? He must take the chance, slender as it seemed. His free hand began to spell out, with all speed, the mad plan he had conceived. "The white flames are harmless if one plunges into them voluntarily. Are you afraid to attempt it? No? Then unfasten your clothing, and have it so arranged that you can drop entirely out of it when I give you the signal, which will be a mere widening of the eyes, like this! You understand? We must go nude into the flames, so that they will bathe our whole bodies! But, when you slip out of your clothing, tear your anti-gravitational ovoid from the skull-pan of your helmet, and hold it in your mouth! Then depend upon me, and have no fear!" "I have no fear," replied the fingers of Jaska. "I go to death with you if you wish--or to Life!" * * * * * Feeling the menace of the cubes almost gripping at his throat as he got into action, Sarka unfastened his own clothing, ripped the ovoid from his helmet, placed it in his mouth. Then, looking at Jaska, he gave her the signal. Instantly, at her nod, he brought forth the ray director, pressed it with his fingers, directing its muzzle toward the curve of the globe, swinging it around in a circle, cutting out the bottom of the globe of cubes. The action must have been one of untold surprise to the cubes which made up the globe, for before anything could be done to stay the hand of Sarka, his ray director had cut out the bottom of the globe, and Jaska and himself, divested now of all clothing, had fallen from the globe. Unbearable heat slashed and tore at them. They still held hands, and when their feet touched upon something solid, they were gasping with the unbelievable heat; and it was ripping at their lungs like talons of white hot steel. But, pausing not at all, Sarka raced ahead with Jaska, and dived straight into the lake of white flames. As he dived he directed his thoughts toward the people of the Gens who stood, undecided, dying by slow inches, on their little oases in the lake. And this was the thought, which was a command. "Plunge into the flames! They will not hurt you! Plunge in, and obey my commands, O people of the Gens of Dalis! I, Sarka, command that you obey me! Jaska, who commanded you at the will of Dalis, also commands. Gather with Jaska and me at the base of the Cone! You have but to follow the converging of the flames!" * * * * * Together the two plunged in, and it seemed all at once as though the fire had gone out of the white flames, for they were cool and soothing to the touch. Sarka could feel new life being borne in him, could feel himself revitalized, exalted, lifted to the heights. He suddenly experienced the desire to run, and shout his joy for all to hear. But reason held him. Not thus easily would Luar and Dalis, the traitor, give over their designs against these two. But in the heart of the flames, they dropped down, while they turned their faces toward the base of the Cone, or where they thought the base to be, even as Sarka gave another command to the now invisible people of the Gens of Dalis. "Hold your ovoids in your mouths and follow! Obey my will!" They dropped now to what seemed to be cool flagstones, while above them showed an orifice in a wall, into which those tongues of flame were darting. They paused there, side by side, their faces radiant, and looked back the way they had come. Coming out of the white flames, like battalions on parade, were the people of the Gens of Dalis--scores and hundreds of them, who had sensed and heeded the mental commands of Sarka. Like genii appearing out of the flames they came, to muster about Sarka and Jaska. Then, when it seemed that no more were coming, Sarka turned to the base of the Cone, his face high shining with courage and confidence, and stepped straight into the flames that led into the Cone. Beside him came Jaska, while behind him came the people of the Gens of Dalis who dared to do as he had commanded. They were sucked into the Cone like chips sucked into a whirlpool, and Sarka willed a last command as they entered: "Quit the column at the lip of the crater, and muster about the aircars!" CHAPTER XVIII _The People of Radiance_ The exaltation of Sarka knew no bounds, and looking into the eyes of Jaska, he knew she felt it, too. For her face was shining, and all of her, the wondrous shining brilliance of her, was bathed in the white radiance that mantled Luar. And now, since Jaska too knew that radiance, her beauty was greater even than that of Luar. Sarka thrilled anew at the glory of her. But even as he stepped into the base of the Cone, he stepped out of the blue column at the lip of the Moon-crater. Swift as light, and swifter, had been the flight upward from the Cavern of the Cone; yet, so keen were his perceptions, he knew when he had passed through the chamber of the bluish glow, into which he and Jaska had first dropped upon arrival. Now they were on the lip of the crater, and the people of the Gens who had followed him, were slipping out of the blue column, like insects out of a flame, and converging on the aircars whose tentacles still waved as they had when Sarka had last seen them. Sarka looked at these people in amazement. To him there was a divinity now about their nudeness which nudity never before had suggested to him. For the people shone, and there was something glorious in those divinely white bodies. They reminded Sarka of his people's books of antiquity, and his childhood's pictures of angels.... But the effect of those white flames!... * * * * * There was no explaining it. But Sarka felt that whatever he willed to do he could do; that whatever he wished for was his, whether it was his by right or no. He felt that he could move mountains, with only the aid of his hands. Looking at Jaska he conceived all sorts of new beauty in her, for she was the brightest, to him, of all the people who had passed through the lake of white flames, and been cleansed in their heat. "No wonder Luar has mastered the Moon!" he cried to Jaska. "For when she was bathed in the white flames, her will is paramount!" "But how, if she passes the people of the Gens of Dalis through the flames, will she retain her sovereignty?" "Because Dalis, too, has passed through, and his will is the will of the Gens! They will obey him, and he has sworn allegiance to Luar, or given some sort of oath of fealty!" "How strange that but one person on the Moon has been bathed in the white flames!" "How do we know," Sarka almost whispered it, "that she is, originally, of the Moon? Does she not look too much like our people, to be from another world entirely?" "I do not know, but ... you mean ... you mean...?" "I scarcely know; but Dalis would swear allegiance to no man, much less to a woman, unless he knew that man, or woman, far better than he has had opportunity, in a matter of hours only, to know Luar!" He left it there then, as he strode boldly, with Jaska by his side, to the nearest of the aircars. * * * * * As he approached the car, the gleam cube beneath it seemed to gleam brighter and brighter, as though it echoed the radiance of Sarka. Sarka knew, studying this phenomenon, that he possessed at least a hint of the secret of Luar's omnipotence. There had been a hint before, but by now its meaning was clearer. The white flames, out of the heart of the dying Moon, gave new life, exaltation, not only to the bodies but to the brains of those who passed through it, and with their brains quickened, they possessed such knowledge as men of Earth, for ages, had wished to possess. Transmutation of metals ... the ability, at will, to endow the higher, more selective metals with intelligence ... and the ability to retain command of the intelligences thus endowed. This explained the power of Luar over the Gnomes, and the power of the Gnomes over the cubes--if they possessed that power. But the Gnomes, what of them? What were they? But for a space Sarka must await the answer to that question, for there was little time. Already he knew that the tale of his escape, and his taking over of a portion of the Gens of Dalis, must have gone like wildfire through all the crater, and from this crater, perhaps, had been transmitted to all the craters of the Moon. All the craters.... * * * * * That explained to him the absence from the lake of white flames, where he had seen so few, comparatively, of the people of Dalis' Gens. The Moon was honeycombed by such craters, and perhaps the white flame connected them all, made them all one. And Luar commanded all from her dais in this crater Sarka and his people were escaping. The millions of the Gens had been swallowed by the craters of the Moon, at command of Luar, acceded to by Dalis--and all over the Moon the very things which Sarka and Jaska had witnessed were taking place. Even now, as Sarka raced for the aircar, and Jaska with him, he could feel a backward pulling that was well-nigh invincible. Someone was willing him to return, willing the Gnomes to pursue him, willing the cubes to refuse obedience to him; but he laughed and stepped to the aircar, passing by the nearest writhing tentacle as though he knew it possessed no power to harm him. The tentacle swept aside, and did not try to bar him, while he sent his will crashing against that brightly gleaming cube. "Into the aircar! We enter with you!" The cube vanished instantly, and it seemed to Sarka that invisible hands caught at his feet, lifting him up through the trap-door in the belly of the aircar, up and inside. The door swung shut, and in the forward end of the vast aircar gleamed the cube which had obeyed his command! * * * * * Sarka sent one thought careening outward from the aircar, a command to the cubes which stood watch beneath the other aircars. "Obey the Radiant People, and through them, _me_!" The light of the cube made the interior of the aircar as light as day, and Sarka was struck at once with another phenomenon. He could see through the sides of the car in any direction. And what he saw filled him with a sudden fear! Out of the crater poured myriads of the Gnomes, and up the sides of it came myriads of the gleaming cubes, all racing toward the cars. "Get back! Get back!" he commanded the Gnomes and the cubes. At the same time he issued his commands to the cube within his own car, and to the cubes which by now were inside the other aircars, realizing that the cubes themselves were the motive power of the aircars--and that his will was the will of these individual cubes. "Fly at once! Fly outward at top speed toward the Earth!" Instantly, as though a single signal had started all the cars, a dozen aircars rose majestically from the crater, while Sarka studied the Gnomes and the cubes in turmoil on the rim. He noted then, a strange circumstance: that when he commanded the Gnomes and the pursuing cubes to keep back, they hesitated, dazedly, as though they did not know whether to advance or to retreat; that when he merely watched them, they came on. He laughed aloud at this measuring of mental swords with Luar, and with Dalis. For he could sense the conflict very plainly. She commanded the Gnomes and the cubes to attack, he commanded them to retreat, and they remained undecided, like people drawn between two extremities, and uncertain which direction to take. Upward, side by side now, floated the aircars of the Moon, and in the forepeak of each, one of the gleaming cubes, like--like anti-gravitational ovoids of the Moon! At the fast falling rim of the crater boiled the Gnomes and the cubes, stirring and tumbling, hampered by their very numbers, as they tried to attack at will of Luar and retreated in confusion at the will of Sarka. Then there was Jaska beside Sarka, her face fearful, as he pointed off across the gloomy expanse of the Moon. From all sides, from all directions, from other craters which these two had not even seen, came scores and hundreds of the monster cars! They had beaten Luar and Dalis but for a moment, then! Now, at her command, the countless other aircars were coming in to head them off, to fight them back to the surface of the Moon. It would be a race against time, and against death. But of at least a dozen of the aircars, Sarka was master, and he did not fear the issue. That strange exaltation which the white flames had given him filled him with a confidence that nothing could shake. He shot a thought at the gleaming cube in the forepeak. "Faster! Faster! There is no limit to your speed! Faster! Faster! Even faster!" Instantly the Moon seemed literally to drop away beneath the dozen aircars which carried the Radiant People, while the aircars of Luar and of Dalis fell hopelessly behind. Sure that they would win in this race now, since he was just beginning to realize the vastness of his power--the all-encompassing, all-mastering power of the human mind and will, which the white flames of the Moon had made almost god-like--Sarka turned his eyes toward a coldly gleaming sphere in the star-spangled heavens ahead. * * * * * It was the Earth, and it seemed ringed in flames! From its edges there seemed to shoot long streamers of yellow or golden flames, which broke into sunlike pinwheels of radiance at their tips. Something, there on the precious Earth, was decidedly wrong! Instantly, telepathically, he sought to gain mental contact with his father. "Father, we are coming!" he said, across those countless miles. "What is happening?" For a full minute there was no answer. Then it came, feeble, broken, weighted with fear; but it was a thought-message, unmistakably, of Sarka the Second. "Hurry, son! Hurry! For Dalis has indeed betrayed us! I could not maintain control of the Earth with the Beryls, for some strange catastrophe has destroyed all the Beryls in the area Dalis ruled! The shifting of positions of the Earth and the Moon has so altered the relative effects of the pull of gravity exerted by the planets that Mars has been brought into dangerous proximity to us and is already so close that her ether-lights are playing over us! Surely you must be able to see them! We have received messages, but as yet I have only been partially able to decode them! What I have decoded, however, presages catastrophe--for I am sure that Mars and the Moon are in confederation, and that the Moon-people have deliberately forced us into contact with her ally!" Cold fear clutched at the throat of Sarka as he caught the message. He decided not to tell Jaska for the moment. He looked to right and left, at the aircars on either side of him, then issued his commands. "Faster! Faster! Be prepared to land in the area of the Gens of Cleric, as close as possible to my laboratory!" A strange, awesome sight, that flight of the rebels of Dalis' Gens from the Moon to the Earth--like gleaming stars across the void. Far out in Space they fled at terrific speed through almost utter darkness, but their light was still blinding, lighting the way. (_Concluded in the next issue_) Murder Madness CONCLUSION OF A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Murray Leinster_ [Illustration: _The deck was covered with panic-stricken folk who had come in awful terror to watch. And all were slaves to The Master._] [Sidenote: Bell has fought through tremendous obstacles to find and kill The Master, whose diabolical poison makes murder-mad snakes of the hands; and, as he faces the monster at last--his own hands start to writhe!] CHAPTER XV The door of the car swung wide, and Ortiz's pale grim face peered in behind the blue steel barrel of his automatic. He smiled queerly as Jamison, with a grunt of relief, tapped Bell's wrist in sign to put away his weapon. "Ah, very well," said Ortiz, with the same queer smile upon his face. "One moment." He disappeared. On the instant there was the thunderous crashing of a weapon. Bell started up, but Jamison thrust him back. Then Ortiz appeared again with smoke still trickling from the barrel of his pistol. "I have just done something that I have long wished to do," he observed coolly. "I have killed the chauffeur and his companion. You may alight, now. I believe we will have half an hour or more. It will do excellently." He offered his hand to Paula as she stepped out. She seemed to shudder a little as she took it. "I do not blame you for shuddering, Senorita," he said politely, "but men who are about to die may indulge in petty spites. And the chauffeur was a favorite with the deputy for whom I am substituting. Like all favorites of despots, he had power to abuse, and abused it. I could tell you tales, but refrain." * * * * * The car had come to a stop in what seemed to be a huge warehouse, and by the sound of water round about, it was either near or entirely built out over the harbor. A large section near the outer end was walled off. Boxes, bales, parcels and packages of every sort were heaped all about. Bell saw crated air engines lying in a row against one wall. There were a dozen or more of them. Machinery, huge cases of foodstuffs.... "The Buenos Aires depot," said Ortiz almost gaily. "This was the point of receipt for all the manufactured goods which went to the _fazenda_ of Cuyaba, Senor Bell. Since you destroyed that place, it has not been so much used. However, it will serve excellently as a tomb. There are cases of hand grenades yonder. I advise you to carry a certain number with you. The machine guns for the air-craft, with their ammunition, are here...." He was hurrying them toward the great walled-off space as he talked, his automatic serving as a pointer when he indicated the various objects. "Now, here," he added as he unlocked the door, "is your vessel. The Master bought only amphibian planes of late. Those for Cuyaba were assembled in this little dock and took off from the water. Your destruction up there, Senor Bell, left one quite complete but undelivered. I think another, crated, is still in the warehouse. I have been very busy, but if you can fuel and load it before we are attacked...." They were in a roofed and walled but floorless shed, built into the warehouse itself. Water surged about below them, and on it floated a five passenger plane, fully assembled and apparently ready to fly, but brand new and so far unused. * * * * * "I'll look it over," said Bell, briefly. He swung down the catwalk painted on the wings. He began a swift and hasty survey. Soot on the exhaust stacks proved that the motors had been tried, at least. Everything seemed trim and new and glistening in the cabin. The fuel tanks showed the barest trace of fuel. The oil tanks were full to their filling-plugs. He swung back up. "Taking a chance, of course," he said curtly. "If the motors were all right when they were tried, they probably are all right now. They may have been tuned up, and may not. I tried the controls, and they seem to work. For a new ship, of course, a man would like to go over it carefully, but if we've got to hurry...." "I think," said Ortiz, and laughed, "that haste would be desirable. Herr Wiedkind--No! _Amigo mio_, it was that damned Antonio Calles who listened to us last night. I found pencil marks beside the listening instrument. He must have sat there and eavesdropped upon me many weary hours, and scribbled as men do to pass the time. He had a pretty taste in monograms.... I gave all the orders that were needful for you to take off from the flying field. I even went there myself and gave additional orders. And Calles was there. Also others of The Master's subjects. My treason would provoke a terrible revenge from The Master, so they thought to prove their loyalty by permitting me to disclose my plan and foil it at its beginning. "I would have made the journey with you to The Master, but as a prisoner with the tale of my treason written out. So I returned and changed the orders to the chauffeur, when all the Master's loyal subjects were waiting at the flying field. But soon it will occur to them what I have done. They will come here. Therefore, hasten!" "We want food," said Bell evenly, "and arms, but mostly we want fuel. We'll get busy." * * * * * He shed his coat and picked up a hand-truck. He rammed it under a drum of gasoline and ran it to the walkway nearest to the floating plane. Coiled against the wall there was a long hose with a funnel at its upper end. In seconds he had the hose end in one of the wing fuel-tanks. In seconds more he had propped the funnel into place and was watching the gasoline gurgling down the hose. "Paula," he said curtly, "watch this. When it's empty roll the drum away so I can put another in its place." She moved quickly beside it, throwing him a little smile. She set absorbedly about her task. Jamison arrived with another drum of gas before the first was emptied, and Bell was there with a third while the second still gurgled. They heaped the full drums in place, and Jamison suddenly abandoned his truck to swear wrathfully and tear off his spectacles and fling them against the wall. The bushy eyebrows and beard peeled off. His coat went down. He began to rush loads of foodstuffs, arms, and other objects to a point from which they could be loaded on the plane. Ortiz pointed out the things he pantingly demanded. In minutes, it seemed, he was demanding: "How much can we take? Any more than that?" "No more," said Bell. "All the weight we can spare goes for fuel. See if you can find another hose and funnel and get to work on the other tank. I'm going to rustle oil." He came staggering back with heavy drums of it. A thought struck him. "How do we get out? What works the harbor door?" * * * * * Ortiz pointed, smiling. "A button, Senor, and a motor does the rest." He looked at his watch. "I had better see if my fellow subjects have come." He vanished, smiling his same queer smile. Bell worked frantically. He saw Ortiz coming back, pausing to light a cigarette, and taking up a hatchet, with which he attacked a packing case. "They are outside, Senor," he called. "They have found the signs of the car entering, and now are discussing." He plucked something carefully from the packing box and went leisurely back toward the door. Bell began to load the food and stores into the cabin, with sweat streaming down his face. There was the sound of a terrific explosion, and Bell jumped savagely to solid ground. "Keep loading! I'll hold them back!" he snapped to Jamison. But when he went pounding to the back of the warehouse he found Ortiz laughing. "A hand grenade, Senor," he said in wholly unnatural levity. "Among the subjects of The Master. I believe that I am going mad, to take such pleasure in destruction. But since I am to die so shortly, why not go mad, if it gives me pleasure?" * * * * * He peered out a tiny hole and aimed his automatic carefully. It spurted out all the seven shots that were left. "The man who poisoned me," he said pleasantly. "I think he is dead. Go back and make ready to leave, Senor Bell, because they will probably try to storm this place soon, and then the police will come, and then.... It is amusing that I am the one man to whom those enslaved among the city authorities would look for The Master's orders." Bell stared out. He saw a small horde of people, frantically agitated, milling in the cramped and unattractive little street of Buenos Aires' waterfront. Sheer desperation seemed to impel them, desperation and a frantic fear. They surged forward--and Ortiz flung a hand grenade. Its explosion was terrific, but he had perhaps purposely flung it short. Bell suddenly saw police uniforms, fighting a way through to the front of the crowd and the source of all this disturbance. "Go back," said Ortiz seriously. "I shall die, Senor Bell. There is nothing else for me to do. But I wish to die with Latin melodrama." He managed a smile. "I will give you ten minutes more. I can hold off the police themselves for so long. But you must hasten, because there are police launches." * * * * * He held out his hand. Bell took it. "Good luck," said Ortiz. "You can come--" began Bell, wrenched by the gaiety on Ortiz's face. "Absurd," said Ortiz, smiling. "I should be murder mad within three days. This is a preferable death, I assure you. Ten minutes, no more!" And Bell went racing back and found Jamison rolling away the last of the fuel drums and Paula looking anxiously for him. "Tanks full," said Jamison curtly. "Everything set. What next?" "Engines," said Bell. He swung down and jerked a prop over. Again, and again.... The motor caught. He went plunging to the other. Minutes.... They caught. He throttled them down to the proper warming up roaring, while the air in the enclosed space grew foul. * * * * * Once more to the warehouse. Ortiz shouted and waved his hand. He was filling his pockets with hand grenades. Bell made a gesture of farewell and Ortiz seemed to smile as he went back to hold the entrance for a little longer. "We're going," said Bell grimly. "Get your guns ready, Jamison, for when the door goes up." He pressed on the button Ortiz had pointed out. There were more explosions and the rattle of firearms from the front of the warehouse. There was a sudden rumble of machinery and the blank front of the little covered dock rose suddenly. The sunlit waters of Buenos Aires harbor spread out before them. To Bell, who had not looked on sunlight that day, the effect was dazzling. He blinked, and then saw a fast little launch approaching. There were uniformed figures crowded about its bows. "All set!" he snapped. "I'm going to give her the gun." "Go to it," said Jamison. "We're--" The motors bellowed and drowned out the rest. The plane shuddered and began to move. The sound of explosions from the back of the warehouse was loud and continuous, now. Out into the bright sunlight the plane moved, at first heavily, then swiftly.... Bell saw arms waving wildly in the launch with the uniformed men. Sunlight glittered suddenly on rifle barrels. Puffs of vapor shot out. Something spat through the wall beside Bell. But the roaring of the motors kept up, and the pounding of the waves against the curved bow of the boat-body grew more and more violent.... Sweat came out on Bell's face. The ship was not lifting.... * * * * * But it did lift. Slowly, very slowly, carrying every pound with which it could have risen from the water. It swept past the police launch at ninety miles an hour, but no more than five feet above the waves. A big, clumsy tramp flying the Norwegian flag splashed up river with its propeller half out of water. Bell dared to rise a little so he could bank and dodge it. He could not rise above it. He had one glimpse of blonde, astonished beards staring over the stern of the tramp as he swept by it, his wing tips level with its rail and barely twenty feet away. And then he went on and on, out to sea. He began to spiral for height fully four miles offshore, and looked back at the sprawling city. Down by the waterfront a thick, curling mass of smoke was rising from one spot abutting on the water. It swayed aside and Bell saw the rectangular opening out of which the plane had come. "Ortiz's in there," he said, sick at heart. "Dying as he planned." But there was a sudden upheaval of timbers and roof. A colossal burst of smoke. A long time later the concussion of a vast explosion. There was nothing left where the warehouse had been. Bell looked, and swore softly to himself, and felt a fresh surge of the hatred he bore to The Master and all his works. And then filmy clouds loomed up but a little above the rising plane, and Bell shot into them and straightened out for the south. * * * * * For many long hours the plane floated on to southward, high above a gray ocean which seemed deceptively placid beneath a canopy of thin clouds. The motors roared steadily in the main, though once Bell instructed Jamison briefly in the maintenance of a proper course and height, and swung out into the terrific blast of air that swept past the wings. He clung to struts and handholds and made his way out on the catwalk to make some fine adjustment in one motor, with six thousand feet of empty space below the swaying wing. "Carburetter wrong," he explained when he had closed the cabin window behind him again and the motors' roar was once more dulled. "It was likely to make a lot of carbon in the cylinders. O.K., now." Paula's hand touched his shyly. He smiled abstractedly at her and went back to the controls. And then the plane kept on steadily. Time and space have become purely relative in these days, in startling verification of Mr. Einstein, and the distance between Buenos Aires and Magellan Strait is great or small, a perilous journey or a mere day's travel, according to the mind and the transportation facilities of the voyager. Before four o'clock in the afternoon the coast was low and sandy to the westward, and it continued sterile and bare for long hours while the plane hung high against the sky with a following wind driving it on vastly more swiftly than its own engines could have contrived. * * * * * It was little before sunset when the character of the shore changed yet again, and the sun was low behind a bank of angry clouds when the stubby forefinger of rock that Magellan optimistically named the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins reached upward from the seemingly placid water. Bell swept lower, then, much lower, looking for a landing place. He found it eight or nine miles farther on, on a wide sandy beach some three miles from a lighthouse. The little plane splashed down into tumbling sea and, half supported by the waves and half by the lift remaining to its wings, ran for yards up upon the hard packed sand. The landing had been made at late twilight, and Bell moved stiffly when he rose from the pilot's seat. "I'm going over to that lighthouse," he said curtly. "There won't be enough men there to be dangerous and they probably haven't frequent communication with the town. I'll learn something, anyway. You two stay with the plane." Jamison lifted his eyebrows and was about to speak, but looked at Bell's expression and stopped. Leadership is everywhere a matter of emotion and brains together, and though Jamison had his share of brains, he had not Bell's corroding, withering passion of hatred against The Master and all who served him gladly. All the way down the coast Bell had been remembering things he had seen of The Master's doing. His power was solely that of fear, and the deputies of his selection had necessarily been men who would spread that terror with an unholy zest. The nature of his hold upon his subjects was such that no honorable man would ever serve him willingly, and for deputies he had need of men even of enthusiasm. His deputies, then, were men who found in the assigned authority of The Master full scope for the satisfaction of their own passions. And Bell had seen what those passions brought about, and there was a dull flame of hatred burning in his eyes that would never quite leave them until those men were powerless and The Master dead. * * * * * "You'll look after the ship and Paula," said Bell impatiently. "All right?" Jamison nodded. Paula looked appealingly at Bell, but he had become a man with an obsession. Perhaps the death of Ortiz had cemented it, but certainly he was unable to think of anything, now, but the necessity of smashing the ghastly hold of The Master upon all the folk he had entrapped. Subconsciously, perhaps, Bell saw in the triumph of The Master a blow to all civilization. Less vaguely, he foresaw an attempt at the extension of The Master's rule to his own nation. But when Bell thought of The Master, mainly he remembered certain disconnected incidents. The girl at Ribiera's luxurious _fazenda_ outside of Rio, who had been ordered to persuade him to be her lover, on penalty of a horrible madness for her infant son if she failed. Of a pale and stricken _fazendiero_ on the Rio Laurenço who thought him a deputy and humbly implored the grace of The Master for a moody twelve year old girl. Of a young man who kept his father, murder mad, in a barred room in his house and waited despairingly for that madness to be meted out upon himself and on his wife and children. Of a white man who had been kept in a cage in Cuyaba, with other men.... * * * * * Bell trudged on through the deepening night with his soul a burning flame of hatred. He clambered amid boulders, guided by the tall lighthouse of Cape Possession with the little white dwelling he had seen at its base before nightfall. He fell, and rose, and forced his way on and upward, and at last was knocking heavily at a trim and neatly painted door. He was so absorbed in his rage that his talk with the lighthouse keeper seemed vague in his memory, afterward. The keeper was a wizened little Welshman from the Chibut who spoke English with an extraordinary mixture of a Spanish intonation and a Cimbrian accent. Bell listened heavily and spoke more heavily still. At the end he went back to the plane with a spindle-shanked boy with a lantern accompanying him. "All settled," he said grimly, when Jamison came out into the darkness with a ready revolver to investigate the approaching light. "We get a boat from the lighthouse keeper to go to Punta Arenas in. He's a devout member of some peculiar sect, and he's seen enough of the hell Punta Arenas amounts to, to believe what I told him of its cause. His wife will look after Paula, and this boy will hitch a team to the plane and haul it out of sight early in the morning. With the help of God, we'll kill Ribiera and The Master before sunset to-morrow." CHAPTER XVI But they did not kill The Master before nightfall. It was not quite practicable. Bell and Jamison started out well before dawn with a favorable wind and tide, in the small launch the wizened Welshman placed at their disposal. His air was one of dour piety, but he accepted Bell's offer of money with an obvious relief, and criticized his Paraguayan currency with an acid frankness until Jamison produced Argentine pesos sufficient to pay for the boat three times over. "I think," said Jamison dryly, "that Pau--that Miss Canalejas is safe enough until we come back. The keeper is a godly man and knows we have money. She'll be in no danger, except of her soul. They may try to save that." Bell did not answer. He could think of nothing but the mission he had set himself. He tinkered with the engine to make it speed up, and set the sails with infinite care to take every possible advantage of the stiff breeze that blew. During the day, those sails proved almost as much of a nuisance as a help. The fiendish, sullen williwaws that blow furiously and without warning about the Strait required watching, and more than once it was necessary to reef everything and depend on the motor alone. Bell watched the horizon ahead with smouldering eyes. Jamison watched him almost worriedly. "Look here, Bell," he said at last, "you'll get nowhere feeling like you do. I know you've done The Master more damage than I have, but you'll just run your head into a trap unless you use your brains. For instance, you didn't ask about communications. There's a direct telegraph wire from Cape Virgins to Buenos Aires, and there's telephonic communication between the Cape and Punta Arenas. Do you imagine that the plane wasn't seen when it came in the Cape? And do you imagine The Master doesn't know we're here?" * * * * * Bell turned, then, and frowned blackly. "I hadn't thought of it," he said grimly, "but I put some hand grenades in the locker, there." "You damned fool!" said Jamison angrily. "Stop being bloodthirsty and use your head! You haven't even asked what I've done! I've done something, anyhow. That bundle I chucked in the bow has a couple of sheepmen's outfits in it. Lots of sheep raised around here. We'll put 'em on before we land. And like a good general, I arranged a method of retreat before we left B. A. There'll be a naval vessel here in two or three days. She's carrying a party of Government scientists. She'll anchor in Punta Arenas harbor and announce a case of some infectious disease on board. No shore leave, you see, and nobody from shore permitted on board her. And she has one or two damned good analytical chemists with a damned good laboratory on board her, too. It's a long gamble, but if we can get hold of some of The Master's poison.... Do you see?" "Yes," said Bell heavily. "I see. But you haven't been through what I've been through. What I've done, fighting that devil, has caused men to be deserted after being enslaved. There's one place, Cuyaba...." His face twitched. That place was in his dreams, now. That place and others where human beings had watched their bodies go mad, and had been carried about screaming with horror at the crimes those bodies committed.... "I'm going to kill The Master," he rasped. "That's all." He settled down to his grim watch for the city. All during the cloudy, overcast day he strained his eyes ahead. Jamison could make nothing of him. In the end he had to leave Bell to his moody waiting. * * * * * The morning passed, and midday, and a long afternoon. Three times Bell came restlessly back to the engine and tried to coax more speed out of it. But when darkness fell the town was still not in sight. They kept on, then, steering by the stars with the motor putt-putt-putting sturdily away in the stern. The water splashed and washed all about them. The little boat rose, and fell, and rose and fell again. "That's the town," said Bell grimly. It was eleven at night, or later. Lights began to appear, very far away, dancing miragelike on the edge of the water. They grew nearer with almost infinite slowness. Two wide bands of many lights, with a darker space in which a few much brighter lights showed clearly. Presently a single red light appeared, the Punta Arenas harbor light, twenty-five feet up on an iron pole. They passed it. "Bell," said Jamison curtly, "it's time you showed some sense, now. We're going to find out some things before we get reckless. This town isn't a big one, but it always was a hell on earth. No extradition from here. It's full of wanted men. It's dying, now, from the old days when all ships passed the Straits before the Panama Canal opened up, but it ought to be still a hell on earth. And we're going to put on these sheepmen outfits, and put up at some low caste sailors' and sheepmen's hotel on shore, and find out what is what. In the morning, if you like--" "In the morning," said Bell coldly, "I'm going to settle with The Master." * * * * * They found a small and filthy hotel, in a still filthier street where the houses were alternately black and silent and empty, and filled with the squalid hilarity most seaport towns can somehow manage to support. The street lamps were white and cold. The dirt and squalor showed the more plainly by their light. There were sailors from the few ships in harbor, and women so haggard and bedraggled that shrill laughter and lavish endearments remained their only allure. And Bell and Jamison plodded to the reeking place in which a half-drunk sheepman pointed, and there Bell sat grimly in the vermin infested room while Jamison, swearing wryly, went out. He came back later, much later. His breath was strong of bad whiskey and he looked like a man who feels that a bath would be very desirable. He looked like a man who feels unclean. "Give me a cigarette," he said shortly. "I found out most of what we want to know." * * * * * Bell gave him a cigarette and waited. "Good thing you stayed behind," said Jamison. "I want to vomit. Why people go in hell holes for fun.... But I was very drunk and very amorous. Picked up a woman and fed her liquor. Young, too. Damnation! She got crying drunk and told me everything she knew. I gave her money and left. Punta Arenas is The Master's, body and soul." "One could have guessed it," said Bell grimly. "Nothing like it is," said Jamison. "Every living creature, man, woman, and child, has been fed that devilish poison of his. The keepers of the dives go fawning to the local officials for the antidote. The _jefe politico_ is driven in his carriage to be cured when red spots form before his eyes. The damned place is full of suicides, and women, and--oh, my God! It's horrible!" A humming, buzzing noise set up off in the night somewhere. It kept up for a long time, throttled down. Suddenly it seemed to grow louder, changed in pitch, and dwindled as if into the far, far distance. "That's one of The Master's planes now, no doubt," said Jamison savagely, "going off on some errand for him. He uses this place practically as an experiment station. The human beings here are his guinea pigs. The deputies get a standardized form of the stuff, but he's got it worked out in different doses so he can make a man go mad in hours, if he chooses, instead of after a delay. I don't know how. And The Master--" * * * * * He checked himself sharply. There were shuffling footsteps in the hall outside. A timid tap on the door. Jamison opened it, while Bell dropped one hand inconspicuously to a weapon inside his shapeless clothing. The toothless and filthy old man who kept the hotel beamed in at them. "_Senores_," he cackled. "_Vdes son de Porvenir, no es verdad?_" Jamison hiccoughed, as one who has been out and been drunken ought to do. "_No, viejo_," he rumbled tipsily, "_somos de la estancia del Señor Rubio. Vaya._" The old man seemed to mourn that they did not come from the sheep ranches about Porvenir Bay. But he produced a bottle with a shaking hand, still beaming. "_Tengo muchos amigos en Porvenir_," he chirped amiably. "_Y questa botella--_" "_Démela_," rumbled Jamison. He reached out his hand. "_No mas que poquito!_" said the old man, beaming but anxious as Jamison tilted it to his lips. "_Es visky de gentes...._" He beamed upon Bell, and Bell swallowed a spoonful and seemed to swallow vastly more. He lay back lazily while Jamison in the part of a tipsy sheepherder bullied the old man amiably and eventually chased him out. "You're amused?" asked Jamison sardonically, when there were no more sounds outside. "Because I said you didn't want to meet the young senorita who loved you when she saw you downstairs? Well, Bell, if you used your brain you didn't swallow any of that stuff." Bell started up. Jamison caught him by the shoulder. "I'm not sure," he said sharply. "Of course not. But it's damned funny for a Spanish hotel keeper to give something for nothing, even when he seemed just to want to gossip about his friends. Here. Drink this water. It looks vile enough to take the place of mustard...." * * * * * Next morning the hotel keeper beamed upon them both as they went out of the place. A slatternly, dark haired girl who leaned on his shoulder smiled invitingly at Bell. And Bell, in his character of a loutish sheepman from one of the ranches that dot the shores of the Strait, grinned awkwardly back. But he went on with Jamison. "We separate," said Jamison under his breath. "We want to find where The Master lives, mostly, and then we want to find the laboratory where his stuff is mixed. We don't want to do any killing until that's settled. After all, the Trade has something to say!" Bell codded indifferently and began to wander idly about the streets, turning here and there as if moved by nothing more than the vaguest curiosity. But gradually he was working through the sections in which the larger buildings stood. Concrete structures, astonishingly modern, dotted the business section. But none of them had the air that would surround a place where a man with power of life or death would be. In a town the size of Punta Arenas there would be unmistakable evidences about The Master's residence, even if it were only that those who passed it did so hurriedly and with a twinge of fear. * * * * * There were prosperous men in plenty on the streets, mingled with deserting sailors, stockmen and farmers from the villages along the Strait, and even a few grimy men who looked like miners. But there is a lignite mine not far from the city, and a narrow gauge railroad running to it. Of the prosperous-seeming men, however, Bell picked out one here and there toward whom all passersby adopted a manner of cringing respect. Bell lounged against a pole and studied them thoughtfully. Men with an air of amused and careless scorn which only men with unlimited power may adopt. He saw one grossly fat man with hard and cruel eyes. The uniformed policemen drove all traffic abjectly out of the way of his carriage, and stood with lifted hat until he had passed. The fat man gave no faintest sign of acknowledgment. "I wonder," said Bell slowly, and very grimly, "if that's The Master?" And then a passerby dodged quickly past his shoulder, brushing against him, and waited humbly in the street. Bell turned. A party of men were taking up nearly all the sidewalk. There were half a dozen of them in all. And nearly in the middle was the bulky, immaculate, pigmented Ribiera. Bell stiffened. But to move, beyond clearing the way, would be to attract attention. He backed clumsily off the curbing as if making way.... And Ribiera looked at his face. * * * * * Bell's hand drifted near his hidden weapon. But Ribiera looked neither surprised nor alarmed. He halted and chuckled. "Ah, the Senhor Bell!" Bell said nothing, looking as stupid as possible, merely because there was nothing else to do. "Ah, do not deny my acquaintance!" said Ribiera. He laughed. "I advise you to go and look at the view, over the harbor. Good day, Senhor Bell." Laughing, he went off along the street. And Bell felt a cold horror creeping over him as he realized what Ribiera might mean. Ribiera had entirely too much against him to greet him only, in a town where even the dogs dared not bark without The Master's express command. He had guards with him, men who would have shot Bell down at a nod from Ribiera. Bell burst into a mad run for the waterfront. When the bay spread out before his eyes he saw what Ribiera meant, and something seemed to snap in his brain. The plane in which he and Jamison and Paula had escaped in was floating out in the harbor. It was unmistakable. A larger, bulkier seaplane floated beside it. The buzzing in the air the night before.... The arrival of the plane had been telephoned from Cape Virgins. Through a glass, perhaps, even its alighting had been watched. And a big seaplane had gone out to bring it back. Footprints in the sand would lead toward the lighthouse. There would be plenty of men to storm that, if necessary, to take the three fugitives. But they would have found only Paula. It was quite possible that the plane had only been sent for after Bell and Jamison had been seen to land in Punta Arenas. And Paula in The Master's hands would explain Ribiera's amusement perfectly. * * * * * Bell found Jamison looking unhurriedly for him. And Jamison glanced at his utterly white face and said softly: "We want to get where we can't be seen, to talk. There's the devil to pay." "No use hiding," said Bell. His lips seemed stiff. "Paula--" "Hide anyway," snapped Jamison. He fairly thrust Bell into an alleyway between two houses and thrust two rounded objects beneath his loose fitting coat. "Two grenades. I have two more. The boat we came in is taken--" "So is the plane," said Bell emotionlessly. "And there is a sign, in English, posted where we tied it up. The sign says, '_The Senores Bell and Jamison may recover their boat on application to The Master, and may also receive news of a late traveling companion from him._" "We're known," Bell told him--and amazingly found it possible to smile faintly--"Ribiera met me on the street and spoke to me and laughed and went on." Jamison stared. Bell's manner was almost entirely normal again. Then Jamison shrugged. "The sense of what you're saying," he observed wryly, "is that we're licked. Let us, then, go to see The Master. I confess I feel some curiosity to know just what he's like." * * * * * Bell was smiling. Being in an entirely abnormal state, he had a curious certitude of the proper course to adopt. He went up to a policeman and said politely, in Spanish: "I am desired to report to The Master, himself. Will you direct me?" The policeman abased himself instantly and trotted with them as a guide. And Bell walked naturally, now, with his head up and his shoulders back, and smoked leisurely as he went, and the policeman's abasement became abject. All who walked with that air of amused superiority in Punta Arenas were high in the service of The Master. Obviously, the two men in these dejected clothes must also be high in the service of The Master, and had adopted their disguise for purposes into which a mere policeman and a slave of The Master should not dare enquire. Jamison was rather grim and still. Jamison thought he was walking to his death. But Bell smiled peculiarly and talked almost gaily and--as Jamison thought--almost irrationally. * * * * * They came to a house set in a fairly spacious lawn behind a rather high wall. There were greenhouses behind it, and there were flowers growing as well as any flowers can be expected to grow in such high altitudes. It was an extraordinarily cheerful dwelling to be found in Punta Arenas, but the shuddering fear with which the little policeman removed his hat as he entered the gateway was instructive. They were confronted by four other policemen, on guard inside the gate. "_Estos Señores_--" began the abject one. "Take us to The Master," commanded Bell in a species of amused and superior scorn. "It is required, Senor," said the leader of the four on guard, very respectfully, "it is required that none enter without being searched for weapons." Bell laughed. "Does The Master manage things so?" he asked scornfully. "Now, where I am deputy no man would dare to think of a weapon to be used against me! If it is The Master's rule, though...." The policeman cringed. Bell scornfully thrust an automatic out. "Take it," he snapped. "And go and tell The Master that the Senores Bell and Jamison await his pleasure, and that they have given up their weapons." The policeman scuttled toward the house. Bell smiled at his cigarette. "Do you know, Bell," said Jamison dryly, in English, "I'd hate to play poker with you." "I'm not bluffing," said Bell. "Not altogether. I've a four card flush, with the draw to come." * * * * * Almost instantly the policeman returned, more abject still. He had stammered out Bell's message, just as it was given him. And the slaves of The Master did not usually disobey orders, especially orders designed to prevent any danger of a doomed man or woman trying to assassinate The Master before madness was complete. Bell and Jamison were received by liveried servants in utter silence and conducted through a long passageway, too long to have been contained entirely in the house as seen from the front. Indeed, they came out into a great open greenhouse, in which the smell of flowers was heavy. There were flowers everywhere, and a benign, small old man with a snowy beard and hair, sat at a desk as if chatting of amiable trivialities with the frock-coated men who stood about him. The white haired old man lifted a blossom delicately to his nostrils and inhaled its perfume with a sensitive delight. He looked up and smiled benignly upon the two. It was then that Jamison got a shock surpassing all the rest. Bell's hands were writhing at the ends of his wrists, writhing as if they were utterly beyond his control and as if they were longing to rend and tear.... And Bell suddenly looked down at them, and his expression was that of a man who sees cobras at the ends of his arms. CHAPTER XVII There was a long pause. Bell was very calm. He seemed to tear his eyes from the writhing hands that were peculiarly sensate, as if under the control of in intelligence alien to his own. "I believe," said Bell steadily, "that The Master wishes to speak to me." With an apparent tremendous effort of will, he thrust his hands into his pockets. Jamison cursed softly. Bell had taken the direction of things entirely out of his hands. It only remained to play up. "To be sure," said a mild, benevolent voice. The man with the snowy beard regarded Bell exactly in the fashion of an elderly philanthropist. "I am The Master, Senor Bell. You have interested me greatly. I have grown to have a great admiration for you. Will you be seated? Your companion also pleases me. I would like"--and the mild brown eyes beamed at him--"I would like to have your friendship, Senor Bell." "Pull out a chair for me, Jamison," said Bell in a strained voice. "And--I'd like to have a cigarette." Jamison, cursing under his breath, put a chair behind Bell and stuck a cigarette between his lips. He held a match, though his hands shook. "You might sit down, too," said Bell steadily. "From the manner of The Master, I imagine that the conversation will take some time." * * * * * He inhaled deeply of his cigarette, and faced the little man again. And The Master looked so benevolent that he seemed absolutely cherubic, and there was absolutely no sign of anything but the utmost saintliness about him. His eyes were clear and mild. His complexion was fresh and translucent. The wrinkles that showed upon his face were those of an amiable and a serene soul filled with benevolence and charity. He looked like one of those irritatingly optimistic old gentlemen who habitually carry small coins and stray bits of candy in their pockets for such small children as they may converse with under the smiling eyes of nurses. "Ah, Senor Bell," he said gently. "You do cause me to admire you. May I see your hands again?" Bell held them out. He seemed to have conquered their writhing to some extent. But he could not hold them quite still. Sweat stood out on his forehead. He thrust them abruptly out of sight again. "Sad," said The Master gently. "Very sad." He sighed faintly and laid down the rose he had been toying with. His fingers caressed the soft petals delicately. "Fortunately," he said benevolently, "it is not yet too late for me to relieve the strain under which you labor, Senor. May I send for a certain medicine which will dispose of those symptoms in a very short time?" "We'll talk first," said Bell harshly. "I want to hear what you have to say." * * * * * The Master nodded, his fingers touching the rose petals as if in a sensitive pleasure in their texture. "Always courageous," he said benignly. "I admire it while I combat it. But the Senor Jamison...." Jamison had been looking fascinatedly at his own hands, opening and closing the fingers with a savage abruptness. They obeyed him, though they trembled. "I didn't drink the damned stuff that hotel keeper brought us last night," he growled. "Bell did. And I--" "Wait a minute, Jamison," said Bell evenly. "Let's talk to The Master for a while. I swore, sir," he said grimly, "that I'd kill you. I've seen what your devilish poison does, in the hands of the men you've chosen to distribute it. I've seen"--he swallowed and said harshly--"I've seen enough to make me desire nothing so much as to see you roast in hell! But you wanted to talk to me. Go ahead!" * * * * * The Master beamed at him, and then glanced about at the frock-coated men who had been attending him. Bell glanced at them. Ribiera was there, chuckling. "I told you, _tio mio_," he said familiarly, "that he would not be polite. You can do nothing with him. Better have him shot." Francia, of Paraguay, nodded amusedly to Bell as their eyes met. But The Master shook his really rather beautiful head. An old man can be good to look at, and with a saintly aureole of snow-white hair and the patriarchal white beard, The Master was the picture of benign and beautiful old age. "Ah, you do not understand," he protested mildly. "The more the Senor Bell shows his courage, _hijo mio_, the more we must persuade him." He turned to Bell. "I realise," he said gently, "that there are hardships connected with the administration of my power, Senor. It is inevitable. But the Latin races of the continent which is now nearly mine require strong handling. They require a strong man to lead them. They are comfortable only under despotism. The task I have chosen for you is different, entirely. _Los Americanos del Norte_ will not respond to the treatment which is necessary for those _del Sud_. Their governments, their traditions, are entirely unlike. If you become my deputy and viceroy for all your nation, you shall rule as you will. A benevolent, yet strong, rule is needed for your people. It may even be--I will permit it--that the democratic institutions of your nation may continue if you so desire. I am offering you, Senor, the position of the absolute ruler of your nation. You may interfere with the present government not at all, if you choose, provided only that my own commands are obeyed when relayed through you. I choose you because you have courage, and resource, and because you have the _Yanqui_ cleverness which will understand your nation and cope with it." * * * * * Bell inhaled deeply. "In other words," he said bitterly, "you're saying indirectly that you offer me a chance to be the sort of ruler Americans will submit to without too much fuss, because you think one of Ribiera's stamp would drive them to rebellion." The fine dark eyes twinkled. "You have much virtue, Senor. My nephew--though he is to be my successor--has a weakness for a pretty face. Would you prefer that I give him the task of subduing your nation?" "You might try it," said Bell. His eyes gleamed. "He'd be dead within a week." The Master laughed softly. "I like you, Senor. I do like you indeed. I have not been so defied since another _Americano del Norte_ defied me in this same room. But he had not your resource. He had been enslaved with much less difficulty than yourself. I do not remember what happened to him...." "He was taken, Master," said a fat man with hard eyes, obsequiously, "he was taken in Bolivia." It was the man whom Bell had seen earlier that morning in a carriage. "You gave him to me. He had insulted me when I ordered him sent to you. I had him killed, but he was very obstinate." "Ah, yes," said The Master meditatively. "You told me the details." He seemed to recall small facts in benevolent retrospection. "But you, Senor Bell, I have need of you. In fact, I shall insist upon your friendship. And therefore--" He beamed upon Bell. "I give you back the Senorita Canalejas." * * * * * He shook his head reproachfully at the utterly grim look in Bell's eyes. "I shall give you one single portion of the antidote to the medicine which makes your hands behave so badly. You may take it when you please. The Senor Jamison I shall keep and enslave. I do not think he will be as obstinate as you are, but he has excellent qualities. If you prove obdurate, I may yet persuade him to undertake certain tasks for me. But you and the Senorita Canalejas are free. Your boat has been reprovisioned and provided with fuel. You may go from here where you will." Ribiera snarled. "_Tio mio_," he protested angrily, "you promised me--" "Your will in many things," said The Master gently, "but not in all. Remember that you have much to learn, _hijo mio_. I have taught you to prepare my little medicine, it is true. That is so you can take my place if age infirmity shall carry me away." The Master folded his hands with an air of pious resignation. "But you must learn policy. The Senorita Canalejas belongs to the Senor Bell." Jamison was staring, now, but Bell's eyes had narrowed to mere slits. "You see," said The Master gently, to him, "I desire your friendship. You may go where you will. You may take the Senorita Canalejas with you. You will have enough of the antidote to my little medicine to keep you sane for perhaps a week. In one week you may go far, with her. You may do many things. But you cannot find a place of safety for her. I still have a little power, Senor. If you take her with you, your hands will writhe again. Your body will become uncontrollable. Your eyes, staring and horror-struck, will observe your own hands rending her. While your brain is yet sane you will see this body of yours which now desires her so ardently, tearing at and crushing that delicate figure, gouging out her eyes, battering her tender flesh, destroying her.... Have you ever seen what a man who has taken my little medicine does to a human being at his mercy?" * * * * * The figures about The Master were peculiarly tense. The fat man with the hard eyes laughed suddenly. It was a horrible laugh. Francia of Paraguay took out his handkerchief and delicately wiped his lips. He was smiling. Ribiera looked at Bell's face and chuckled. His whole gross figure shook with his amusement. "And of course," said The Master benignly, "if you prefer to commit suicide, if you prefer to leave her here--well, my nephew knows little expedients to reduce her will to compliance. You recall _Yagué_, among others." Bell's face was a white mask of horror and fury. He tried to speak, and failed. He raised his hand to his throat--and it tore at the flesh, insanely. "Let--let me see her," croaked Bell, as if strangling. Jamison stiffened. Bell seemed to be trying to get his hands into his pockets. They were apparently uncontrollable. He thrust them under his coat as there was a stirring at the door. * * * * * And Paula was brought in, as if she had been waiting. She was entirely colorless, but she smiled at Bell. She came quickly to his side. "I heard," she said in a clear and even little voice. "We will go together, Charles. If there is a week in which we can be together, it will be so much of happiness. And when you are--The Master's victim, we will let the little boat sink, and sink with it. I do not wish to live without you, Charles, and you do not wish to live as his slave." Bell gave utterance to a sudden laugh that was like a bark. His hands came out from under his coat. Dangling from each one was a small, pear-shaped globule of metal. A staff projected upward from each one, and he held those staffs in his writhing hands. About each wrist was a tiny loop of cord that went down to a pin at the base of the staffs. "Close to me, Paula," he said coldly. She clung to his arm. He moved forward, with half-a-dozen revolver muzzles pointed at his breast. "If one of you damned fools fires," he said harshly, "I'll let go. When I let go--these are Mills grenades, and they go off in three seconds after they leave the hand. Stand still!" * * * * * There was a terrible, frozen silence. Then a movement from behind Bell. Jamison was rising with a grunt. "Some day, Bell," he observed coolly, "I'll be on to all of your curves. This is the best one yet. But you're likely to let go at any second, aren't you?" "Like hell!" raged Bell. "I drank some of your poison," he snarled at The Master. "Yes! I was fool enough to do it! But I took what measures any man will take who finds he's swallowed poison. I got it out of my stomach at once. And if you or one of these deputies tries to move...." Ribiera had blanched to a pasty gray. The Master was frozen. But Bell saw Ribiera's eyes move in swift calculation. There was a solid wall behind The Master. It seemed as if the greenhouse were a sort of passageway between two larger structures. And there was a door almost immediately behind Ribiera. Ribiera glanced right--left-- He flung himself through that door. He knew the secret of The Master's power. He was The Master's appointed successor. If The Master and all his deputies died, Ribiera.... But Bell snapped into action like a bent spring released. His arm shot forward. A grenade went hurtling through the door through which Ribiera had fled. There was an instantaneous, terrific explosion. The solid wall shook and shivered and, with a vast deliberation, collapsed. The greenhouse was full of crushed plaster dust. Panes of glass shivered.... But Bell was upon The Master. He had struck the little man down and stood over him, his remaining automatic replacing the grenade he had thrown. "Ribiera's dead," he snapped, "and if I'm shot The Master dies too and you all go mad! Stand back!" The deputies stood frozen. "I think," said Jamison composedly, "I take a hand now. I'll pick him up, Bell.... Right. I've got him. With a grenade hanging down his back. If he jerks away from me, or I from him, it will blow his spine to bits." "Hold him so," said Bell coldly. * * * * * He went coolly to where he could look over the heap of the collapsed wall. He saw a bundle of torn clothing that had been a man. It was flung against a cracked and tottering chimney. "Right," he said evenly. "Ribiera's dead, all right." He turned to the deputies, whose revolvers were still in their hands. "The Master's carriage, please," he said politely. "To the door. You may accompany us if you please, but in other carriages. I am working for the release of all the Master's slaves, and you among them if you choose. But you can see very easily that there is no hope of the release of The Master without the meeting of my terms." The Master spoke, softly and mildly and without fear. "It is my order that the Senor Bell is to be obeyed. I shall return. You need have no fear of my death. My carriage." A man went stiffly, half-paralyzed with terror, to where chattering scared servants were grouped in the awful fear that came upon the slaves of The Master at any threat to his rule. But Bell and Paula and Jamison went slowly and cautiously--though they held the whip hand--to the entrance door of the house, and out to the entrance gate. A carriage was already before the door when they reached it, and others were drawing up in a line behind it. "Get in," said Bell briefly. "Down to the waterfront." He turned to the group of frock-coated, stricken men who had followed. "Some of you men," he said coldly, "had better go on ahead and warn the police and the public generally about the certainty of The Master's death if any attempt is made to rescue him." Francia, of Paraguay, summoned a swagger and raised his hand to the second carriage. It drew in to the curb. "I will attend to it, Senor Bell," he said politely. "Ah, when I think that I once raised my revolver to shoot you and refrained!" He drove off swiftly. * * * * * Bell's eyes were glowing. He got into the carriage, and such a procession drove through the streets of Punta Arenas as has rarely moved through the streets of any city in the world. The long line of carriages moved at a funereal pace amid a surging, terrified mob. The Master beamed placidly as he looked out over white, starkly agonized faces. Some of the people groaned audibly. A few cursed The Master in their despair. More cursed Bell, not daring to strike or fire on him. But he would have been torn to bits if he had stepped from the carriage for an instant. "Bell," said Jamison dryly, "considering that I'm prepared to be blown apart on three seconds notice, it is peculiar that this mob frightens me." The Master's eyes twinkled benignly. He seemed totally insensible to fear. "You need not be afraid," he said gently. "They will not touch you unless I order them." Jamison stared down at the little man whose collar he held firmly, with a Mills grenade dangling down at the base of his neck. "I wouldn't order them to attack, if I were you," he said coldly. "I haven't Bell's brains, but I have just as much dislike for you as he has." * * * * * They came to the harbor. Bell spoke again. "The carriage is to drive out to the end of one of the docks, and no one else is to go out on that dock." The Master relayed the order in his mild voice, but as the coachman obeyed him he clucked his tongue commiseratingly. "Senor Bell," he protested gently. "You do not expect to escape! Not after killing me! Why that is absurd!" Bell said nothing. He alighted from the carriage, his face set grimly, and stared ashore at the long, long row of terrified faces staring out at him. The whole waterfront seemed to be lined with staring faces. Wails came from that mass of enslaved human beings. "Hold him here, Jamison," he said drearily. "I'm going out to look at that big plane. There's a rowboat tied to the dock, here." He swung down the side into the dock and rowed off into the harbor, while the horses attached to The Master's carriage pawed impatiently at the wooden flooring of the dock. Bell reached the two planes anchored on the still harbor water. The smaller one had brought them down from Buenos Aires. The larger one had gone after the beached amphibian and brought it and Paula on to the city. Bell, from the shore, was seen to be investigating the larger one. He came rowing back. His head appeared above the dock edge. "All right," he said tiredly. "The Master has a rule requiring all his ships ready for instant flight. Very useful. The big plane is fueled and full of oil. We'll go out to it and take off." * * * * * Jamison lifted The Master to his feet and with a surge of muscles swept him down to the flooring of the dock. "Paula first," said Bell, "and then The Master, and then you, Jamison." "One moment," said The Master reproachfully. "It would be cruel not to let me reassure my subjects. I will give an order." Bell and Jamison listened suspiciously. But he spoke gently to the coachman. "You will tell the deputies," said The Master in Spanish, "that a month's supply of medicine for all my subjects will be found in my laboratory. And you may tell them that I shall return before the end of that time." The coachman's eyes filled with a passionate relief. "Now," said The Master placidly, "I am ready for our little jaunt." Paula descended the ladder and seated herself in the bow of the boat. Bell covered The Master grimly with his automatic as he descended, with surprising agility. Jamison came down last, and resumed his former grip on The Master's collar. Bell rowed out to the big plane. * * * * * Jamison kept close watch while Bell started the four huge motors and throttled them down to warming up speed, and while he hauled up the anchor with which the huge seaplane was anchored. The dock was covered with a swarm of panic stricken folk. Everywhere, all the inhabitants of the city who were slaves to The Master had come in awful terror to watch. And all the inhabitants of the city were slaves to The Master. Some of them fell to their knees and held out imploring arms to Bell, begging him for mercy and the return of The Master. Some cursed wildly. But, with his jaws set grimly, Bell gave the motors the gun. The big plane moved heavily, then more swiftly through the water. It lifted slowly, and rose, and rose, and dwindled to a speck high in the air. And all through the streets and ways of Punta Arenas, fear stalked almost as a tangible thing. Panic hovered over the housetops, always ready to descend. Terror was in the air that every man breathed, and every human being looked at every other human being with staring, haunted eyes. Punta Arenas was waiting for its murder madness to begin. CHAPTER XVIII There were four motors to pull the big plane through the air, and their roaring was a vast thundering noise which the earth re-echoed. But inside the cabin that tumult was reduced to a not intolerable humming sound. "What'll I do with this devil, Bell?" asked Jamison. "Now that we're aloft, I confess this grenade makes me nervous. I'm holding it so tightly my fingers are getting cramped." "Tie him up," said Bell, without looking. "He'll talk presently." Movements. The plane flew on, swaying slightly in the way of big sea-planes everywhere. A williwaw began in the hills ahead and swept out and set the ship to reeling crazily in its erratic currents. The Strait vanished and there were tumbled hills below them. Minutes passed. "Got him fixed up," said Jamison coolly, "I'll guarantee he won't break loose. Got any plans, Bell?" "No time," said Bell. "I haven't had time to make any. The first thing is to get where his folk will never find us. Then we'll see what we can do with him." Paula looked at the now bound figure of The Master. And the little old man beamed at her. "He--he's smiling!" said Paula, in a voice that was full of a peculiar horrified shock. * * * * * Bell shrugged. Punta Arenas was all of twenty-five miles behind, and the earth over which they flew began to take on the shape of an island. Water appeared beyond it, and innumerable small islands. Bell began to rack his brain for the infinitesimal scraps of knowledge he had about this section of the world. It was pitifully scanty. Punta Arenas was the southernmost point of the continental mass. All about it was an archipelago and a maze of waterways, thinly inhabited everywhere and largely without any inhabitants at all. The only solid ground between Cape Horn and the Antarctic ice pack was Diego Ramirez and the South Shetlands.... Nothing to go on. But any sufficiently isolated and desolate spot would do. Almost anywhere along the southern edge of the continental islands should serve. The plane roared on monotonously, while Bell began to wrestle with another and more serious problem. In three days--two, now--an American naval vessel would turn up, with scientists and chemists on board. It was to be doubted whether anything like an overt act would be risked by that vessel. If all the governments of South America were under The Master's thumb, then cabled orders from his deputies would race three navies to the spot. And the government of the United States does not like to start war, anywhere. Certainly it would not willingly enter into a conflict with the whole southern continent for the solution of a problem that so far affected that continent alone. The Master's kidnapping had solved nothing, so far. * * * * * Jamison tapped his shoulder. "No pursuit, so far," he observed coolly. "I've looked." Bell nodded. "They don't dare. Not yet, anyhow. They're depending on The Master. How is he?" "Smiling peacefully to himself, damn him!" snarled Jamison. "Do you know what we're up against?" "Ourselves," said Bell coldly. "But I'm nearly licked. He's got to talk!" Jamison moved away again. The earth below looked as if it had been torn to shreds in some titanic convulsion of ages past. The sea was everywhere, and so was land! There were little threads of silver interlacing and crossing and wavering erratically in every conceivable direction. And there were specks of islands--rocks only yards in extent--and islands of every imaginable size and shape, with their surfaces in every possible state of upheaval and distortion. A broader mass of land appeared ahead and to the left. "Tierra del Fuego again," muttered Bell. "If we cross it...." For fifteen minutes the plane thundered across desolate, rocky hills. Then the maze of islets again. Bell scanned them keenly, and saw a tiny steamer traveling smokily, for no conceivable reason, among the scattered bits of stone. The sea appeared, stretching out toward infinity. Bell rose, to survey a wider space. He swung to the left, so that he was heading nearly southeast, and went on down toward that desolation of desolations, the stormy cape which faces the eternal ice of the antarctic. He was five thousand feet up, then, and scanning sea and earth and sky.... And suddenly he swung sharply to the right and headed out toward the open sea. He felt a small figure pressing against his shoulder. Presently fingers closed tightly upon his sleeve. He glanced down at Paula and managed to smile. "There are some rocks out there," he told her quietly. "Islands, I think, and Diego Ramirez, at a guess." * * * * * They were specks, no more, but they were vastly more distinct from the plane than from Mount Beaufoy. That is on Henderson Island in New Year Sound, and its seventeen-hundred-foot peak was almost below Bell when he sighted the islands. But the islands have been seen full fifty miles from there. It took the plane nearly forty minutes to cover the space, but long before that the islands had become distinct. Two tiny groups of scattered rocks, the whole group hardly five miles in length and by far the greater number no more than boulders surrounded by sheets of foam from breakers. Two of them merited the name of islands. The nearer was high and bare and precipitous. No trace of vegetation showed upon it. The farther was smaller, and at its northern corner a little cove showed, nearly land-locked. Bell descended steeply. The big plane plunged wildly in the air eddies about the taller island at five hundred feet, but steadied and went winging on down lower, and lower.... The waves between the two islands were not high, but the seaplane alighted with a mighty, a tremendous splashing, and Bell navigated it grimly though clumsily into the mouth of the cove. There a small beach showed. He went very slowly toward it. Presently he swung abruptly about. A wing tip float grounded close to the shore. The motors cut off and left a thunderous silence. Bell climbed atop the cabin and let go the anchor. "We're here," he said shortly. "Bring The Master and we'll go ashore." * * * * * The catwalk painted on the lower wing guided them. Bell jumped to the rocks first, and stumbled, and then rose to lift Paula down and take The Master's small, frail body from Jamison's arms. "You looked for a gun?" asked Bell "He'd nothing to fight with," said Jamison heavily. He had been facing the same problem Bell had worked on desperately, and had found no answer. But he shuddered a little as he looked about the island. There was nothing in sight but rock. No moss. No lichens. Not even stringy grass or the tufty scrub bushes that seemed able to grow anywhere. Bell untied The Master, carefully but without solicitude. The little man sat up, and brushed himself off carefully, and arranged himself in a comfortable position. "I am an old man," said The Master in mild reproach. "You might at least have given me a cushion to sit upon." Bell sat down and lighted a cigarette with fingers that did not tremble in the least. "Suppose," he said hardly, "you talk. First, of what your poison is made. Second, of what the antidote is made. Third, how we may be sure you tell the truth." * * * * * The Master looked at him with bright, shrewd, and apparently kindly old eyes. "_Hijo mio_," he said mildly, "I am an old man. But I am obstinate. I will tell you nothing." Bell's eyes glowed coldly. "Does it occur to you," he asked grimly, "that it's too important a matter for us to have any scruples about? That we can--and will--make you talk?" "You may kill me," said The Master benignly, "but that is all." "And," said Bell, still more grimly, "we have only to get back in the plane yonder, and go away...." The Master beamed at him. Presently he began to laugh softly. "_Hijo mio_," he said gently, "let us stop this little byplay. You will take me back in my airplane, and you will land me at Punta Arenas. And then you will fly away. I concede you freedom, but that is all. You cannot leave me here." "Paula," said Bell coldly, "get in the plane again. Jamison--" Paula rose doubtfully. Jamison stood up. The Master continued to chuckle amiably. "You see," he said cherubically, "you happen to be a gentleman, Senor Bell. Every man has some weakness. That is yours. And you will not leave me here to die, because you have killed my nephew, who was the only other man who knew how to prepare my little medicine. And you know, Senor, that all my subjects will wish to die. Those who do, in fact," he added mildly, "will be fortunate. The effect of my little medicine does not make for happiness without its antidote." * * * * * Bell's hands clenched. "You know," said The Master comfortably, "that there are many thousands of people whose hands will writhe, very soon. The city of Punta Arenas will be turned into a snarling place of maniacs within a very little while--if I do not return. Would you like, Senor, to think in after days of that pleasant city filled with men and women tearing each other like beasts? Of little children, even, crouching, and crushing and rending the tender flesh of other little children? Of lisping little ones gone--" "Stop!" snarled Bell, in a frenzy. "Damn your soul! You're right! I can't! You win--so far!" "Always," said The Master benevolently. "I win always. And you forget, Senor. You have seen the worst side of my rule. The revolutions, the rebellions that have made men free, were they pretty things to watch? Always, _amigo_, the worst comes. But when my rule is secure, then you shall see." * * * * * He waved a soft, beautifully formed hand. From every possible aspect the situation was a contradiction of all reason. The bare, black, salt encrusted rocks with no trace of vegetation showing. The gray water rumbling and surging among the uneven rocks at the base of the shore, while gulls screamed hoarsely overhead. The white haired little man with his benevolent face, smiling confidently at the two grim men. "The time will come," said The Master gently, and in the tone of utter confidence with which one states an inescapable fact, "the time will come when all the earth will know my rule. The taking of my little medicine will be as commonplace a thing as the smoking of tobacco, which I abhor, Senores. You are mistaken about there being an antidote and a poison. It is one medicine only. One little compound. A vegetable substance, Senor Bell, combined with a product of modern chemistry. It is a synthetic drug. Modern chemistry is a magnificent science, and my little medicine is its triumph. Even my deputies have not heard me speak so, Senores." Bell snarled wordlessly, but if one had noticed his eyes they would have been seen to be curiously cool and alert and waiting. The Master leaned forward, and for once spoke seriously, almost reverently. "There shall be a forward step, Senores, in the race of men. Do you know the difference between the brain of a man and that of an anthropoid ape? It consists only of a filmy layer of cortex, a film of gray nerve cells which the ape has not. And that little layer creates the difference between ape and man. And I have discovered more. My little medicine acts upon that film. Administered in the tiny quantities I have given to my slaves, it has no perceptible effect. It is merely a compound of a vegetable substance and a synthetic organic base. It is not excreted from the body. Like lead, it remains always in solution in the blood. But in or out of the blood it changes, always, to the substance which causes murder madness. Fresh or changed, my little medicine acts upon the brain." * * * * * He smiled brightly upon them. "But though in tiny quantities it has but little effect, in larger quantities--when fresh it makes the functioning of the gray cells of the human brain as far superior to the unmedicated gray cells, as those human gray cells are to the white cells of the ape! That is what I have to offer to the human race! Intelligence for every man, which shall be as the genius of the past!" He laughed softly. "Think, Senores! Compare the estate of men with the estate of apes! Compare the civilization which will arise upon the earth when men's brains are as far above their present level as the present level is above the anthropoid! The upward steps of the human race under my rule will parallel, will surpass the advance from the brutish caveman to intellectual genius. But I have seen, Senores, the one danger in my offering." There was silence. Jamison shook his head despairingly. The Master could not see him. He formed the word with his lips. "Crazy!" * * * * * But Bell said coldly: "Go on." "I must rule," said The Master soberly. "It is essential. If my little secret were known, intelligences would be magnified, but under many flags and with many aims. Scientists, with genius beside which Newton's pales, would seek out deadly weapons for war. The world would destroy itself of its own genius. But under my rule--" "Men go mad," said Bell coldly. The Master smiled reproachfully. "Ah, you are trying to make me angry, so that I will betray something! You are clever, Senor Bell. With my little medicine, in such quantities as I would administer it to you...." "You describe it," said Bell harshly and dogmatically, "as a brain stimulant. But it drives men mad." "To be sure," said The Master mildly. "It does. It is not excreted from the body save very, very slowly. But it changes in the blood stream. As--let us say--sugar changes into alcohol in digestion. The end-product of my little medicine is a poison which attacks the brain. But the slightest bit of unchanged medicine is an antidote. It is"--he smiled amiably--"it is as if sugar in the body changed to alcohol, and alcohol was a poison, but sugar--unchanged--was an antidote. That is it exactly. You see that I have taken my little medicine for years, and it has not harmed me." "Which," said Bell--and somehow his manner made utter silence fall so that each word fell separately into a vast stillness--"which, thank God, is the one thing that wins finally, for me!" * * * * * He stood up and laughed. Quite a genuine laugh. "Paula," he said comfortably, "get on the plane. In the cabin. Jamison and I are going to strip The Master." Paula stared. The Master looked at him blankly. Jamison frowned bewilderedly, but stood up grimly to obey. "But Senor," said The Master in gentle dignity, "merely to humiliate me--" "Not for that," said Bell. He laughed again. "But all the time I've been hearing about the stuff, I've noticed that nobody thought of it as a drug. It was a poison. People were poisoned. They did not become addicts. But you--you are the only addict to your drug." He turned to Jamison, his eyes gleaming. "Jamison," he said softly, "did you ever know of a drug addict who could bear to think of ever being without a supply of his drug--_right on his person_?" Jamison literally jumped. "By God! No!" The Master was quick. He was swarming up the plane-wing tip before Jamison reached him, and he kicked frenziedly when Jamison plucked him off. But then it was wholly, entirely, utterly horrible that the little white haired man, whose face and manner had seemed so cherubic and so bland, should shriek in so complete a blind panic as they forced his fingers open and took a fountain pen away from him. "This is it," said Bell in a deep satisfaction. "This is his point of weakness." * * * * * The Master was ghastly to look at, now. Jamison held him gently enough, considering everything, but The Master looked at that fountain pen as one might look at Paradise. "I--I swear," he gasped. "I--swear I will give you the formula!" "You might lie," said Jamison grimly. "I swear it!" panted The Master in agony. "It--If the formula is known it--can be duplicated! It--the excretion can be hastened! It can all be forced from the body! Simply! So simply! If only you know! I will tell you how it is done! The medicine is the cacodylate of--" Bell was leaning forward, now, like a runner breasting the tape at the end of a long and exhausting race. "I'll trade," he said softly. "Half the contents of the pen for the formula. The other half we'll need for analysis. Half the stuff in the pen for the formula for freeing your slaves!" The Master sobbed. "A--a pencil!" he gasped. "I swear--" Jamison gave him a pencil and a notebook. He wrote, his hands shaking. Jamison read inscrutably. "It doesn't mean anything to me," he said soberly, "but you can read it. It's legible." Bell smiled faintly. With steady finger he took his own fountain pen from his pocket. He emptied it of ink, and put a scrupulous half of a milky liquid from The Master's pen into it. He passed it over. "Your medicine," said Bell quietly, "may taste somewhat of ink, but it will not be poisonous. Now, what do we do with you? I give you your choice. If we take you with us, you will be held very secretly as a prisoner until the truth of the information you have given us can be proven. And if your slaves have all been freed, then I suppose you will be tried...." * * * * * The Master was drawn and haggard. He looked very, very old and beaten. "I--I would prefer," he said dully, "that you did not tell where I am, and that you go away and leave me here. I--I may have some subjects who will search for me, and--they may discover me here.... But I am beaten, Senor. You know that you have won." Bell swung up on the wing of the plane. He explored about in the cabin. He came back. "There are emergency supplies," he said coldly. "We will leave them with you, with such things as may be useful to allow you to hope as long as possible. I do not think you will ever be found here." "I--prefer it, Senor," said The Master dully. "I--I will catch fish...." Jamison helped put the packages ashore. The Master shivered. Bell stripped off his coat and put it on top of the heap of packages. The Master did not stir. Bell laid a revolver on top of his coat. He went out to the plane and started the motors. The Master watched apathetically as the big seaplane pulled clumsily out of the little cove. The rumble of the engines became a mighty roar. It started forward with a rush, skimmed the water for two hundred yards or so, and suddenly lifted clear to go floating away through the air toward the north. * * * * * Paula was the only one who looked back. "He's crying," she said uncomfortably. "It isn't fear," said Bell quietly. "It's grief at the loss of his ambition. It may not seem so to you two, but I believe he meant all that stuff he told me. He was probably really aiming, in his own way, for an improved world for men to live in." The plane roared on. Presently Bell said shortly: "That stuff he has won't last indefinitely. I'm glad I left him that revolver." Jamison stirred suddenly. He dug down in his pocket and fished out a cigar. "Since I feel that I may live long enough to finish smoking this," he observed dryly, "I think I'll light it. I haven't felt that I had twenty minutes of life ahead of me for a long time, now. A sense of economy made me smoke cigarettes. It wouldn't be so much waste if you left half a cigarette behind you when you were killed." * * * * * The tight little cabin began to reek of the tobacco. Paula pressed close to Bell. "But--Charles," she asked hopefully, "is--is it really all right, now?" "I think so," said Bell, frowning. "Our job's over, anyhow. We go up the Chilean coast and find that navy boat. We turn our stuff over to them. They'll take over the task of seeing that every doctor, everywhere in South America, knows how to get The Master's poison out of the system of anybody who's affected. Some of them won't be reached, but most of them will. I looked at his formula. Standard drugs, all of them. There won't be any trouble getting the news spread. The Master's slaves will nearly go crazy with joy. And," he added grimly, "I'm going to see to it that the Rio police take back what they said about us. I think we'll have enough pull to demand that much!" He was silent for a moment or so, thinking. "I do think, Jamison," he said presently, "we did a pretty good job." Jamison grunted. "If--if it's really over," said Paula hopefully, "Charles--" "What?" "You--will be able to think about me sometimes," asked Paula wistfully, "instead of about The Master always?" Bell stared down at her. "Good Lord!" he groaned. "I have been a brute, Paula! But I've been loving you--" He stopped, and then said with the elaborate politeness and something of the customary idiotic air of a man making such an announcement. "I say, Jamison, did you know Paula and I were to be married?" Jamison snorted. Then he said placidly: "No. Of course not. I never dreamed of such a thing. When did this remarkably original idea occur to you?" He puffed a huge cloud of smoke from his cigar. It was an unusually vile cigar. Bell scowled at him helplessly for a moment and then said wrathfully: "Oh, go to hell!" And he bent over and kissed Paula. (_The End._) [Advertisement: IN THE NEXT ISSUE JETTA OF THE LOWLANDS _Beginning an Exciting Three-Part Novel of the Nares Deep_ By Ray Cummings AN ATTACK FROM SPACE _A Sequel to "Beyond the Heaviside Layer"_ By Captain S. P. Meek MAROONED UNDER THE SEA _A Thrilling Novelet of the Ocean Floor_ By Paul Ernst EARTH, THE MARAUDER _The Conclusion of the Tremendous Novel_ By Arthur J. Burks ----_AND OTHERS!_] The Flying City _By H. Thompson Rich_ [Illustration: The ray shot down--and squadrons of planes frizzled like moths in the air.] [Sidenote: From Space came Cor's disc-city of Vada--its mighty, age-old engines weakening--its horde of dwarfs hungry for the Earth!] In the burning solitude of the great Arizona desert, some two miles south of Ajo, a young scientist was about to perform an experiment that might have far-reaching results for humanity. The scientist was Gordon Kendrick--a tall, tanned, robust chap who looked more like a prospector in search of gold than a professor of physics from the State University of Tucson. Indeed, he was in a way, a prospector, since it was gold he sought--some practical method of tapping the vast radio-energetic treasure of the sun--and it was an apparatus designed to accomplish just this that he was about to test. The primary unit of the mechanism comprised a spheroidal vacuum-tube measuring a little over a foot across its long axis, mounted in a steel bracket that held it horizontal with the ground. Down through its short axis ran a shaft on which was centered a light cross of aluminum wire, carrying four vanes of mica, one face of each coated with lampblack. A flexible cable led from the bottom of this shaft to the base of the bracket, where it was geared to a small electric motor driven by two dry cells. A rheostat-switch for delivering and controlling the current was mounted nearby. [Illustration] At the wide arc of the egg-shaped tube was a concave platinum cathode, at the narrow arc a nib of some sort, ending in a socket. From this socket, two heavy insulated wires extended sixty feet or so across the sand to the secondary unit of the mechanism, which was roughly a series of resistance coils, resembling those in an ordinary electric heater. * * * * * As Kendrick prepared to test this delicate apparatus that represented so much of his time and thought, held so much of his hope locked up in it, a turmoil was in his heart, though his brown face was calm. If his theories were right, that revolving cross would tap and draw into its vanes radio-energetic waves of force, much as the whirling armature of a dynamo draws into its coils electro-magnetic waves of force. For the blackened sides of the vanes, absorbing more radiation than the bright sides, would cause the molecules to rebound from the warmer surfaces with greater velocity, setting up an alternate pressure and bringing the rays to a focus on the cathode, where they would be reflected to the nib as waves of _heatricity_, to use the word he had coined. Those were Kendrick's theories, and now he moved to put them to the supreme test. Switching on the current, he set the motor going. In response, the cross began to revolve, slowly at first--then faster, faster, as he opened the rheostat wider. Eyes fixed on his resistance coils, he gave a sudden cry of triumph. Yes, there was no doubt about it! They were growing red, glowing brightly, whitely, above the intense desert sunlight. Here was a means of convening solar radiation into heat, then, that offered tremendous commercial possibilities! But even as he exulted, there came a blinding flash--and the overtaxed coils burst into flame. * * * * * Shielding his eyes from the glare, he reached for the rheostat, shut off the current, rushed to his secondary unit--where he beheld an amazing sight. Not only had this part of the apparatus completely disintegrated, but the sand of the desert floor under it as well. On the spot quivered a miniature lake of molten glass! As Kendrick stood ruefully beside that fiery pool, meditating on the spectacular but not altogether gratifying results of his experiment, a peculiar low humming sound reached his ears. Rushing back to his primary unit, with the thought that perhaps by some chance he had not fully closed the rheostat, he looked at the cross. But no, the vanes were still. The humming increased, however--grew into a vibration that made his eardrums ache. Puzzled, he looked around. What on earth could it be? Had his unruly experiment called into play some tremendous, unsuspected force of the universe. Was he to bring the world to ruin, as a result of his blind groping after this new giant of power? Such predictions had often been made by the ignorant, to be dismissed by scientists as the veriest nonsense. But was there some truth in the universal fear, after all? Was he to be the Prometheus who stole fire from Olympus, the Samson who toppled down the temple? Chilled, dizzied with the pain of the ever-increasing vibration, he gritted his teeth, awaiting he knew not what. Then it came--a spectacle so staggering that he went rigid with awe as he regarded it, all power of motion utterly numbed for the moment. The vibration ceased. The thing appeared. It was a city--a city in the air--a flying city! * * * * * As Kendrick stood staring at this phenomenon, he could scarcely credit his senses. Had the magic carpet of Bagdad suddenly materialized before him, he would not have been more astounded. And indeed, it was in a way a magic carpet--a great disclike affair, several miles in diameter, its myriad towers and spires glinting like gold under the noonday sun, while its vast shadow fell athwart the desert like the pall of an eclipse. The lower portion, he noted, was in the main flat, though a number of wartish protuberances jutted down from it, ejecting a pale violet emanation. Whatever this was it seemed to have the effect of holding the thing motionless in the air, for it hovered there quite easily, a hundred yards or so above the ground. But what was it? Where was it from? What had brought it? Those were the questions he wanted answered; and they were to be, sooner than he knew. As he stood there speculating, a device like a trap-door opened in the base of the disc, and creatures resembling human beings began descending. Began floating down, rather. Whereupon Kendrick did what any sensible man would have done, under similar circumstances. He reacted into motion. In short, he ran. * * * * * Glancing back over his shoulder after a minute or two, however, he drew up sheepishly. Of that strange apparition and those who had descended from it there was not a trace, not a shadow! But the peculiar humming had recommenced, he realized in the next breath--and at the same instant he felt himself seized by invisible hands. There was a struggle, but it was brief and futile. When it was over his captors became visible once more. They were singular little beings about four feet tall, with strange, wise, leathery faces, their heads grotesquely bald. The humming had ceased again. The disc, too, was once more visible. What happened next was something even more astounding, if there could be any further degrees of wonder possible for the utterly baffled young scientist. He felt himself lifted up, leaving the desert floor, whirling away toward that incredible phenomenon hovering there. Another moment or two and he had been borne up through its trap-door opening, was standing in a dark space bounded by solid metal walls. Then he was thrust into a cylinder with several of his tiny guards, shot swiftly upward. * * * * * A door opened as they came to rest, and he was led out into a vast court of gleaming amber crystal. Something like a taxi slid up, with irridescent planes, and he was bundled into it, whirled away again. Down broad, gleaming avenues they passed, where similar traffic flowed densely, but under marvelous control. Towering skyscrapers loomed to right and left. Tier on tier of upper and lower boulevards revealed themselves, all crowded with automotive and pedestrian activity. At length a stupendous concourse was reached. Thousands of these taxis and similar vehicles were parked along its broad flanks, while literal swarms of diminutive individuals circulated to and fro. Assisted from the vehicle that had brought him to this obvious center of the disc's activities. Kendrick was led into a monumental structure of jade-green stone that towered a full hundred, stories above the street level. There he was escorted into another of those projectilelike elevators, shot up, up--till at length it came to rest. The door opened and he was led out into a small lobby of the same amber crystal he had observed before. By now his guards had diminished to two, but he no longer made any effort to escape. Wherever this amazing adventure might lead, he was resolved to follow it through. One of the guards had advanced to a jewelled door and was pressing a button. In response, the door opened. A golden-robed, regal creature stood there. * * * * * Though dwarfed to four feet, like his fellow, he was obviously their mental superior to a prodigious degree. Not only was his symmetrical bald head of large brain content, but the finely-cut features of his parchment face bore the unmistakable stamp of a powerful intellect. "_Ao-chaa!_" commanded this evident monarch of the disc, addressing the guards. They bowed and departed, abruptly. "My dear Kendrick!" the regal personage now said, in thin, precise English. "It is indeed a pleasure to welcome you to my humble quarters. Pray enter and make yourself comfortable." Whereupon he ushered him into a dazzling apartment that was one vast mosaic of precious gems, indicated a richly carved chair, into which the young scientist dropped wonderingly. "Now then, Professor," continued the mighty little dwarf, when he was seated in a chair even more sumptuous, "suppose we have a friendly little discussion. I have been much interested in your experiments on heat radiation. What you demonstrated this morning, in particular, was most absorbing. You have hit upon a rather profound scientific principle, yes?" "Possibly," Kendrick admitted, quite conscious that he was being patronized. "Oh, don't be modest, my dear fellow!" smiled the dwarf. "I am the last one to belittle your achievement. Indeed, it is because of it that I have invited you here to-day. Permit me to introduce myself, and to make clear one or two possibly perplexing matters. Then I am sure we shall have a most agreeable chat." * * * * * His name was Cor, he said, and he was in truth the monarch of this strange realm. His people had come from the one-time planet of Vada, far distant in the universe. A thousand years ago, this planet had been doomed by the approach of an alien star. Their great scientist, Ravv, had met the emergency by inventing the disc, into whose construction they had poured all their resources. The pick of their populace had been salvaged on this giant life-raft. The rest had perished when that destroying star had crashed down on the doomed Vada. Since then these survivors and their descendants had been voyaging through space on their marvelous disc. For hundreds of years they had given no thought to the future, content to drift on and on in the interstellar void, breathing an atmosphere produced artificially. But at length the inevitable had happened. This superb piece of mechanism devised by their super-genius, Ravv, was beginning to show signs of wear. Some of its mighty engines were nearing the exhaustion point. Either they must soon find a planet comparable with the one they had once known, where they could pause and rehabilitate their machinery, or they must disintegrate and pass into oblivion. Faced with that crisis, Cor had long been seeking such a planet. He had found it, at last, in the earth--and had resolved that this was where they were going to alight and transplant the civilization of ancient Vada, pending such time as they could take to space again. * * * * * For some months now they had been hovering over various portions of the earth, studying its geography and its peoples, with the result that they had concluded the United States offered the most logical point for launching the attack. Once this country was subdued, they were in possession of the richest and most advanced section of the planet. The conquest of the rest of it could await their leisure. With such an invasion in view, their scientists had mastered the language of the country. This had been accomplished very easily, since in addition to their power of mingling with the populace in an invisible form, they had the principles of radio developed to a high degree and were able to tune in on any station they wanted. Kendrick sat there, stunned, as Cor followed his astounding revelation of their origin with this calm plan for the conquest of America, of the world. Why, of all people on earth, had he alone been singled out for this disclosure? He asked the question now. "My dear Professor, can't you really guess?" replied Cor, with that leathery smile. "Hasn't it dawned that you were a little too near our own field with that machine of yours? A trifle more research, a slightly different application--and you would have become a dangerous enemy." "You--you mean--?" "I mean there isn't a great deal of difference between the experiments you have been making and those our great Ravv once made. For instance, had you broadcast your heatricity, as you call it, instead of trying to transmit it on wires--well, picture a receiving apparatus in each home of the land, like your commercial radio sets. You would have become a billionaire, don't you see?" * * * * * Kendrick saw indeed. It was simple, so simple! Fool--why hadn't he thought of it? "But your invention will never make you wealthy now, my dear fellow," Cor went on, tauntingly. "You will be our guest, here, until we have taken over your interesting country. After that, if there is any need for the broadcasting of heat, we will furnish it ourselves. We have those facilities, among others, fully developed. Would you care to see our plant?" Kendrick naturally admitted that he would, so the dwarf led him through a rear door and up a winding flight of stairs. They emerged presently into a great laboratory housed in the glass-roofed pinnacle of the tower. There he beheld a sight that left him breathless. Never before had he seen such an assemblage of scientific apparatus. Its vastness and strangeness were fairly overpowering, even to a man as well versed in physio-chemical paraphernalia as he was. Before his eyes could take in a tenth part of the spectacle, Cor had led him to the left wall. "There," he said, "you will observe a development of your heat generator." Kendrick looked--to see a long bank of large vacuum-tubes, each about three feet high and a foot wide, connected by a central shaft that caused series of little vanes in each of them to revolve at lightning speed. Around the apparatus moved numerous small attendants, oiling, wiping, adjusting its many delicate parts. "Well, what do you think now?" asked Cor. Kendrick made no reply, though he was thinking plenty. "You see, it is your invention, my dear Professor," the dwarf went on in his taunting voice, "only anteceded by a thousand years--and rather more perfected, you must admit." * * * * * He walked now to the center of the laboratory, where stood a huge dial of white crystal, ranked with many levers and switches, all capped with the same material. "Behold!" he said, throwing over one. Instantly there came again that peculiar low humming that had so puzzled him a few minutes before--and the entire room, its engines, its attendants, Cor himself, leapt into invisibility. Only Kendrick remained, facing the faintly visible crystal dial. Then he saw a switch move, as though automatically. But no, for the dwarf's hand was on it now. Visibility had returned. The vibration ceased. "That is the central control," said Cor. "Our city and all its inhabitants become invisible when that switch is thrown. Only the dial remains, for the guidance of the operator, and even that cannot be seen at a distance of more than fifty feet. But now behold!" He raised his hand, touched a watch-like device strapped to his wrist--and was instantly invisible. But the laboratory and every machine and person in it remained in plain view. Nor was there any vibration now. * * * * * The next moment, having touched that curious little device again, Cor reappeared. "That is the local control," he said. "Every one of our inhabitants, except those under discipline, has one of these little mechanisms. It enables us to make ourselves invisible at will. A convenience at times, you must admit." "Decidedly," Kendrick agreed. "And the principle?" "Quite simple. One of those, in fact, that lies behind your researches. Doubtless you would have hit upon it yourself in time. Your own scientist, Faraday, you may recall, held the opinion that the various forms under which the forces of matter manifest themselves have a common origin. We of the disc, thanks to our great Ravv, have found that common origin." It was the origin of matter itself, Cor said, which lay in the ether of interstellar space--energy, raw, cosmic--vibrations, rays. By harnessing and controlling these various rays, his people had been able to accomplish their seeming miracles--miracles that the people of earth, too, were beginning to achieve--as in electricity, for instance, and its further application, radio. But the people of Vada had long since mastered such simple rays, and now, in possession of vastly more powerful ones, had the elemental forces of the universe at their disposal. * * * * * The disc was propelled through space by short rays of tremendously high frequency, up above the ultra-violet. The same rays, directed downward instead of outward, enabled them to overcome the pull of gravity when in a planet's influence, as at present. And the escalator rays, by which they could proceed to and from the disc, were also of high frequency, as were their invisibility rays. "But you, Professor, are more interested in low frequency rays, the long ones down below infra-red," continued Cor. "You have seen our development of the heat-dynamo principle. It utilizes, I might add, not only solar radiation but that of the stars as well. There being a billion and a half of these in the universe, many of them a thousand times or more as large as your own sun, we naturally have quite an efficient little heating plant here. It provides us with our weapon of warfare, as well as keeping us warm. Permit me to demonstrate." He led the way to a gleaming circle of glass like an inverted telescope, about a yard in diameter, mounted in the floor. "Look!" said the dwarf. Kendrick did so--and there, spread below him, lay the floor of the desert. His camp, his apparatus, were just as he had left them. Cor now moved toward the dial. "Behold!" he said, pulling a lever. Instantly the scene below was an inferno. Stricken by a blast of stupendous heat, the whole area went molten, lay quivering like a lake of lava in the crater of an active volcano. "Suppose, my dear Professor," smiled the dwarf, strolling back from the dial, "just suppose, for instance, that instead of the lonely camp of an obscure scientist, your proud city of New York had been below there!" * * * * * Kendrick shuddered. Well he knew now the terrible power, the appalling menace of this strange invader. "I would prefer not to make such a supposition," he said, quietly, with a last thoughtful glance at that witches' caldron below. "Then let us think of pleasanter things. You are my guest of honor, sir--America's foremost scientist, though she may never realize it," with a piping chuckle. "To-night there will be a great banquet in your honor. Meanwhile, suppose I show you to your quarters." Nettled, fuming, though outwardly calm, Kendrick permitted himself to be escorted from the laboratory to an ornate apartment on one of the lower floors. There Cor left him, with the polite hint that he would find plenty of attendants handy should he require anything. Alone now, in the midst of this vast, nightmarish metropolis, he paced back and forth, back and forth--knowing the hideous fate that threatened the world but powerless to issue one word of warning, much less avert it. * * * * * Kendrick was still thinking and brooding along these lines when he saw the door of the apartment swiftly open and close again. Someone had entered, invisible! Backing away, he waited, tense. Then, suddenly, his visitor materialized. With a gasp, he saw standing before him a beautiful girl. She was a young woman, rather, in her early twenties. Not one of these pigmies of the disc either, but a tall, slender creature of his own world. Her hair was dark, modishly bobbed. Her eyes were a deep, clear brown, her skin a warm olive. And she was dressed as though she had just stepped off Fifth Avenue--which indeed she had, not so long ago, as he was soon to learn. "I hope I haven't startled you too much, Mr. Kendrick," she said, in a rich, husky murmur, "but--well, there wasn't any other way." "Oh, I guess I'll get over it," he replied with a smile. "But you have the advantage of me, since you know my name." Hers was Marjorie Blake, she told him then. "Not the daughter of Henderson Blake?" he gasped. "Yes," with a tremor, "his only daughter." Whereupon Kendrick knew the solution of a mystery that had baffled the police for weeks. The newspapers had been full of it at the time. This beautiful girl, whose father was one of America's richest men and president of its largest bank, had disappeared as though the earth had swallowed her. She had left their summer estate at Great Neck, Long Island, on a bright June morning, bound for New York on a shopping tour--and had simply vanished. * * * * * Suicide had been hinted by some of the papers, but had not been taken seriously, since she had no apparent motive for ending her life. Abduction seemed to be the more logical explanation, and huge rewards had been offered by her frantic parents--all to no avail. What had happened was, she now explained, that after visiting several shops and making a number of purchases, she had stepped into Central Park at the Plaza for a breath of fresh air before lunching at the Sherry-Netherlands, where she planned to meet some friends. But before advancing a hundred yards along the secluded path, she had been seized by invisible hands--had felt something strapped to her wrist, before anyone came in sight--and then, invisible too, had been lifted up, whirled away into a vast, humming vibration that sounded through the air. Once on the disc, it had swept off into space at incredible speed, pausing only when some hundreds of miles above the earth and invisible from below without mechanical aid. When its vibration finally ceased that amazing city had leapt before her eyes. Then, her own visibility restored, she had been led into the presence of that mighty little monarch, Cor, who explained that she had been seized as a hostage and would be held as an ace in the hole, pending conquest of her country. Since when she had been a prisoner aboard the disc. * * * * * Learning of Kendrick's capture, from gossip among the women, she had taken the first opportunity of coming to him, in the hope that between them they might devise some means of escape. Indeed, that was his own fondest hope--their imperative need, if the people of America and of the earth were to be saved from this appalling menace. But what basis was there for such a fantastic hope? Just one, that he could see. "That thing on your wrist," he said, voicing it. "I'm surprised they let you wear one of those." "They don't," she smiled. "I stole it!--from one of the maids in my apartment. It was the only way I could get here without being seen. I felt I must see you at once. We've got to do something, soon, or it'll be too late. I felt that, as a scientist, you might have some idea how we could get off." "How do the people themselves get off?" he asked. "That escalator ray--do you know how they use it?" "No, I've never been able to find out. They don't let me go near that part of the city." Kendrick reflected a moment. "Let's have a look at that invisibility affair," he said. She removed it from her wrist, handed it to him. Somewhat in awe, he examined it. * * * * * The mechanism portion, which was linked in a strap of elastic metal, resembled only superficially a watch, he now saw. Rather it had the appearance of some delicate electric switch. Rectangular in shape, it was divided into two halves by a band of white crystal. In each of these halves were two little buttons of the same material, those on one side round, on the other square. "Which buttons control the invisibility?" he asked. "The square ones," she replied. "One's pushed in now, you see. If you should push the other, the first would come out--and you'd pass out of the picture, so to speak." Kendrick was half tempted to try the thing then and there, but deferred the impulse. "What are the round buttons for?" he inquired instead. Marjorie didn't know, but thought they were probably an emergency pair, in case something went wrong with the square ones. In any event, nothing happened when you pushed them. Kendrick pushed one, just to see. It was true. Nothing happened--but he seemed to sense a faint, peculiar vibration and a wave of giddiness swept over him. On pushing the other, which released the first, it stopped. * * * * * He handed the device back to Marjorie. "There's your bracelet. Now, if I can just get one like it, I think we'll get down to earth all right." "Oh, Mr. Kendrick!" Her eyes lit up eagerly. "Then you've thought of a way?" "Not exactly. I think I've discovered their own way. I can't be certain, but I'm willing to gamble on it, if you are." "Then you--you think those round buttons are connected with the escalator rays?" "Exactly! I think they control individual descent and ascent, just as the square ones control individual visibility and invisibility. At any rate, it's the hunch I'm going to act on right now, if you're with me." "Oh, I'm with, you!" she breathed. "Anything, death almost, would be preferable to this." "Then stand by, invisible. I'm going to get one of my jailors in here and relieve him of his wrist-watch." Marjorie touched that little square button on her own. She instantly became invisible. Kendrick touched a button too, a button he had noticed beside the door. As he had supposed, it brought one of the Vadans. Shutting the door quietly, he seized the fellow before he could move his hand to his wrist. Thwarted in his attempt to vanish from sight, the diminutive guard attempted an outcry. But Kendrick promptly throttled him. * * * * * Marjorie had reappeared by now and together they bound him to a chair with a gilded cord torn from the drapery. Removing the precious mechanism from his wrist, Kendrick slipped it on his own. "Now let's go!" he said, pressing the protruding square button of the device. "We haven't a minute to--my golly, what a peculiar sensation!" "It is rather odd, isn't it?" she laughed, pressing her own and joining him in that invisible realm. "Feels like a combination electric massage and cold shower! Where are you, anyway? I can't see you." "Of course you can't!" came an unseen tinkle. "Here!" He felt her brush him. "Better hold hands," he suggested, then gave an invisible flush he was glad she couldn't see. "All right. A good idea." Her delicate hand came into his, soft, warm. Heart vibrating even faster than his body, his whole being a-quiver with a strange exaltation, Kendrick opened the door, and they left the apartment. * * * * * The next half-hour was the tensest either of then had ever experienced. Every foot of the way was fraught with peril. Not only did they have to carefully avoid the visible swarms of little people who hurried everywhere, but had to be on their guard as well against any who might be moving about like themselves under cover of invisibility. Nor could they use any elevator or public conveyances, but were obliged to make their way down to the concourse by heaven knew how many flights of stairs, and cross heaven knew how many teeming streets on foot, before they reached the amber court, below which the trap-door and their hope of freedom. They got there at last, however, descended, and peered down from that yawning brink upon the desert floor--to draw back with gasps of dismay. For the area still gleamed semi-molten from the stupendous blast that had wiped out Kendrick's camp. "W-what is it?" she gasped. Swiftly he told her. "But isn't there any way around it? Look, over there to the left. One edge of the crater seems to end almost underneath us." It was true that the center of the caldron was far to the right of where they stood, and that its left rim was only a little within their direct line of descent. But to land even one foot inside that inferno would be as fatal as to alight in its very midst. * * * * * Kendrick was thinking fast. "There's just a chance," he said. "It all depends upon how wide the zone of these escalator rays is, and whether we can tune in on them. At least, I can probably answer the latter question." Pushing the protrudent round button on his mysterious bracelet as he spoke, he leaned over the edge of the trap-door and awaited results. They were not long in coming. The vibration he was already under from the invisibility rays seemed to double. Alternate waves of giddiness and depression, of push and pull, swept over him. A minute of it was enough. He pressed the round button that now protruded, ending this influence, and faced Marjorie, stating: "I'm positive now that these things control descent and ascent. As nearly as I can figure, the rays work on the principle of an endless belt. If you're up here, you get carried down, and vice versa. As to how wide the belt is, and whether you can move sideways on it, remains to be seen. Anyway, I'm going to take a chance. I'll go first. If my guess is wrong, you--well, needn't follow." "No, I'm going with you!" she declared resolutely. "We've come this far together. I shan't be left alone now. Let's go!" And again her soft, warm hand was in his. Lord, what a girl! How many would be brave enough to take a gamble like that, on a fellow's mere supposition? "All right--go it is!" he said. "Push your round button, like this." He showed her the way he thought was right, pushed his own. "Ready?" "Ready!" * * * * * Their voices were grave. It was a grim prospect, stepping off into space like that, with only a guess between them and death. "Then jump!" They jumped, gripping each other's hands tightly--and instead of dropping like plummets were caught in a powerful field of force and whirled gently downward. "Oh, you were right!" gasped Marjorie, awed. "See, we--" Then she paused, horror-stricken, for it was obvious that they were to descend within that lake of molten glass, unless they could change their course at once. "Quick!" he called. "Hold fast! Now--run!" Breathless, they raced to the left, across that invisible descending belt. Too far, Kendrick knew, and they would plunge outside its zone, fall crushed and mangled. Not far enough, and they would meet cremation. It was a fearful hazard, either way, but it had to be taken. They were almost down, now, and still not quite far enough to the left. The heat of that yawning crater rose toward them. "Faster--_faster_!" he cried, fairly dragging her along with him. A last dash--a breathless instant--and they stood there on the ground, not three feet from the edge of doom. Swooning with the heat, Marjorie swayed against him, murmured an incoherent prayer. "Take heart!" he whispered, lifting her bodily and bearing her some yards away. "We're down--safe!" * * * * * Their safety was but relative, however, Kendrick well knew. Until they could put miles between them and this monstrous disc, they were not really safe. No telling how soon their escape might be discovered. No telling what terrible means Cor might take of curbing their flight. So as soon as Marjorie had recovered sufficiently to proceed, they headed off across the desert at a fast walk toward Ajo, where he hoped to catch the afternoon train for Gila Bend. From there, they could board the limited for Tucson and points east, when it came through from Yuma that night. They had tuned out on the escalator rays, but continued on still invisible--for the disc hung above them in plain view and it would have been suicide to let themselves be seen. Even so, Kendrick soon began to have an uneasy feeling of being followed. He looked around from time to time, but could see nothing. Were some of those invisible little creatures on their trail? He said nothing to Marjorie of his anxiety, but presently she too began glancing backward uneasily, every few steps. "They are near us!" she said at length, in a whisper. "I can sense them." It was more than sense, they soon discovered. Little paddings became quite audible, and once or twice they saw the sand scuffed up, not twenty feet away, as though by a foot passing over it. * * * * * Meanwhile they were climbing a rise of ground, broken by many small hummocks and dotted with thorny shrubs. On the other side, at the foot of a long down-slope, lay Ajo. Once they reached the summit, Kendrick felt sure they could outdistance their pursuers on the descent. Already, if his watch was right, the train was preparing to pull out. It would be a breathless dash, but he was confident they could make it. So he reassured Marjorie as best he could, and helped her on up the slope. They were practically on the summit and already in view of the little railroad station and huddle of shacks below--when suddenly he felt himself tripped and flung violently to the ground. At the same instant, his companion emitted a scream, as she felt herself seized by invisible hands. Leaping to his feet, Kendrick flailed out with solid fists at their attackers. Groans answered the impacts and he knew his blows were taking effect. * * * * * Free for a moment he dashed to Marjorie, felt for the midgets who swarmed around her. Seizing one of the invisible forms, he lifted it and flung it crashing to the ground. Another, likewise, and another. Then he threshed his legs, where two of the creatures clung, trying to drag him down again. They flew through the air, with cries of fright. "Well, so far, so good!" he exclaimed. "We won't wait to see if there are any more. Come on--let's go!" "Right!" Reaching for each other's hands, they raced down the slope. Halfway there they saw a warning blast of steam rise from the engine, followed by a whistle. "They'll be pulling out in a minute now!" he gasped, increasing speed. "We've got to make it!--our only chance!" "We _will_ make it!" she sobbed through clenched teeth, meeting his pace. Glancing over his shoulder, after another fifteen seconds, Kendrick saw that the disc was no longer visible. Since there was no vibration he realized with relief that it was now hidden behind the slope they were descending. "Quick--push your button!" he said, pushing his own. They came out of the influence of the invisibility rays, raced breathless on down the slope--gained the station platform just as the train was getting under way. Helping the exhausted girl aboard, he mounted the steps himself, led her through the vestibule into its single passenger coach. Dropping into a seat, they sat there panting as the train gathered speed. * * * * * By the time the decrepit but life-saving little local drew into Gila Bend they had somewhat recovered from their harrowing experience. Marjorie was still pale, however, as Kendrick helped her from the train. "I may recover," she said with a wan smile, "but I'll never look the same! An old saying, but I know what it means now." He thought better of a sudden impulse to tell her she looked quite all right to him. Instead, he said grimly: "I know now what a lot of things mean!" The Tucson limited would not be through for over an hour, they learned. That would give them time to hunt up the authorities and sound a warning of the ominous invader that was in the vicinity. Perhaps, by prompt military action, it might be destroyed, or at least crippled. But first they went to the telegraph office, where Marjorie got off a message that would bring joy to her grieved family. While standing there outside the barred window, odors of food wafting to them from a nearby lunch-room. "Um-m!" she sniffed. "That smells good to me! I haven't tasted any earthly cooking for ages. Everything on that horrible disc was synthetic." "Then I suggest we have ham and eggs, at once," he said. "Or would you prefer a steak?" "I think I'll have both!" * * * * * As they walked into the lunch-room, Kendrick told her of the banquet in his honor Cor had promised for that night. "I guess I didn't miss much," he ended. "You certainly didn't!" she assured him, with a smile. "It would have opened with a purée of split-molecule soup, continued with an entrée of breaded electrons, and closed with an ionic café." He laughed. "I'm just as well satisfied. I was unable to attend! Humble as it is, I think this will prove to be much more wholesome food." Night had fallen by the time they left the lunch-room. Glancing at his watch, Kendrick saw that they still had better than a half-hour before the limited was due, so they betook themselves to the police station. It was only a block away and in consequence they weren't long reaching it. The chief had gone home, the officer at the desk informed them, but if there was anything they cared to report, he would be glad to make note of it. A big raw-boned westerner, he shifted his quid as he spoke and spat resoundingly in a cuspidor at his feet. "All right, then--get your pencil ready!" said Kendrick with a smile. "This is Miss Marjorie Blake, daughter of Henderson Blake, of New York. Perhaps you read of her disappearance, a few weeks ago. And I...." As he introduced himself and told briefly of their astounding experience, the officer's eyes bulged with amazement. "Say, what yuh-all tryin' to hand me?" he snorted finally. "D'yuh think I was born simple?" "Press your button!" whispered Marjorie. "Show him how the invisibility ray works. It'll save a lot of argument." "Right!" * * * * * He held up his wrist. "See this? Now watch!" Whereupon he pressed the button. But to their dismay, nothing happened. "Wa-al. I'm still watchin'!" drawled the officer. "Who's loony now?" Kendrick examined the mechanism in impatience, pressed that little button repeatedly: but still nothing happened. "Try yours!" he told Marjorie finally. She did so, with similar results--or lack of them, rather. "Something's wrong," he said at length. "The ray isn't working." "Wrong is right!" declared the officer with a contemptuous flood of tobacco juice. "Yuh folks better go catch yuhr train 'fore yuh ferget where it is." Chagrined, embarrassed, they took their leave, headed back toward the railroad station. "Of all the utterly silly things!" declared Marjorie, as they walked along. "Why do you suppose it didn't work?" Kendrick didn't reply at once. When he did, his voice was grave. "Because the disc has gone!" he said. "We are outside its zone of influence. That's my hunch, at least, and I think we'd better act on it." "You mean...?" "I mean our escape has probably caused them to hurry their plans. They're probably over New York right now. I think we'd better get there the quickest possible way." * * * * * The result was that when the train came, they remained on it only to Tucson. There they chartered a fast plane and started east at once. At sunset the following day the plane swooped out of the sky and slid to rest on the broad grounds of the Blake estate at Great Neck. As Kendrick stepped from the cabin and helped Marjorie down, a tall, distinguished-looking man with graying hair and close-cropped mustache came hurrying toward them. "Daddy!" she cried, rushing into his arms. "Oh, Daddy--Daddy!" Even without this demonstration. Kendrick would have recognized Henderson Blake from pictures he had seen recently in the papers. Now he was introduced, and Blake was gripping his hand warmly. "I don't quite know what this is all about, Professor," he heard the great financier say. "Marjorie's telegram last night was as cryptic as it was over-joying. But I do know that I owe you a deep debt of gratitude." "Yes, and you owe our pilot about a thousand dollars, too!" put in the daughter of the house, clinging to her father's arm. "Please give him a check--then we'll go inside and I'll explain all about it." "A matter very much easier dispatched than my debt to Professor Kendrick," said Blake, complying. The check was for two thousand, not one, the pilot saw when he received it. "Thank you very much, sir!" he said, saluting. "Don't mention it. Good night--and good luck to you!" * * * * * The pilot returned to his plane, it lifted from the lawn, droned off into the twilight. Then they approached the cool white villa that stood invitingly a hundred yards or so away beyond sunken gardens. As they neared it, a handsome, well-preserved woman whose face reflected Marjorie's own beauty came toward them. Lines of suffering were still evident around her sensitive mouth, but her dark eyes were radiant. "Mother!" "My poor darling!" They rushed into each other's arms, clung, sobbing and laughing. Kendrick was glad when these intimate greetings were over and he had met Mrs. Blake. They were in the drawing-room now, listening to a somewhat more lucid account of their daughter's experiences and those of her rescuer. Marjorie was doing most of the talking, but every now and again she would turn to Kendrick for verification. "Heavens!" gasped Mrs. Blake, finally. "Can such things be possible?" "Almost anything seems possible nowadays, my dear," her husband told her. "And you say, Professor, that you have brought back samples of this invisibility device?" "Yes, we have, but I can't promise they'll work. I'll try, however." Whereupon, sceptically, he pressed that little square button--and instantly faded out of sight. "Good Lord!" cried Blake, leaping to his feet. "That proves it! Why, this is positively--" * * * * * His remarks were cut short by a scream of terror from his wife. "Marjorie--Marjorie!" she shrieked. Wheeling, he faced the chair where his daughter had sat. It was empty, so far as human eyes could see. "Don't worry Mother--Daddy!" came a calm voice from it. "I'm quite all right--coming back--steady." And back she came, as did Kendrick, from the empty chair beside her. His face was grave. The success of the demonstration, which had proved their story to practical-minded Henderson Blake, had proved to him something altogether more significant. The disc, as he had surmised, had rushed eastward immediately on learning of their escape, and was now probably hovering right over New York. "Marvelous--marvelous!" declared Blake. "But that heat ray, Professor. That sounds bad. You are convinced it is as powerful as they make out!" "Positively! That blast they let go in the desert would have utterly destroyed New York." "Hm! Yes, no doubt you're right. I fully realize how the fearful menace of this thing. Do you think the military authorities will be able to cope with it?" "I don't know. Perhaps, if they are prompt enough." "And is there no other way--no scientific way?" * * * * * Kendrick grew thoughtful. "I wonder," he said at last. "There's just a possibility--something running through my mind--an experiment I'd like to make, if I had the facilities of some large electrical laboratory." "You shall have them to-morrow!" Blake promised. "I'm one of the directors of Consolidated Electric. Their experimental laboratory in Brooklyn is the finest of its kind in America. I'll see that you have the run of it." "That will be very kind," said Kendrick. "But don't expect anything to come from it, necessarily. It's just a theory I want to work out." A butler entered at this moment and announced dinner. "Well, theories are mighty these days!" beamed Blake, as they rose, clapping the younger man on the shoulder. "You go ahead with your theories--and I'll bring a few facts to bear. To-morrow noon I'll escore some military men and others of my friends over to the laboratory to hear and see something of this menace direct. Meanwhile, and during this crisis, it will honor me to have you as my guest." "Our guest!" amended Marjorie, with a warm smile. * * * * * Next morning Blake motored Kendrick out to the Brooklyn Laboratory of the Consolidated Electric Utilities Corporation and installed him there. Then he left--to return at noon with the promised delegation of generals, admirals, statesmen and financiers. They were all frankly sceptical, though realizing that Henderson Blake was not a man given to exaggeration. Nor did their scepticism altogether vanish when Kendrick had ended his bizarre story with a demonstration of the invisibility device. Murmurs of amazement ran around the laboratory, it is true, but the more hard-headed of his spectators charged him with having invented the apparatus himself. Though they didn't come right out and say so, they seemed to imply that he was seeking publicity. Annoyedly, Kendrick tried to refute their charges. But even as he was summoning words, refutation utter and complete came from the air. A low, humming vibration sounded, grew in volume till it filled the room--and as suddenly ceased: The light of midday faded to twilight. "_The disc!_" gasped Kendrick, rushing to the west windows. They followed, tense with awe. And there, between earth and sun, its myriad towers and spires refracting a weird radiance, hovered that vast flying city. "My God!" muttered a famous general, staring as though he had seen a ghost. A great statesman opened his lips, but no words came. "Appalling! Incredible!" burst from others of that stunned assemblage. * * * * * Their comments were cut short by a broadcast voice, thin and clear, tremendously amplified, a voice Kendrick recognized at once as that of Cor. "People of America!" it said. "We of the planet Vada have come to conquer your country. You will be given forty-eight hours to lay down your arms. If complete surrender has not been made by high noon, two days from now, New York will be destroyed." The voice ceased. The humming recommenced--waned in volume till it died away. Twilight turned once more to midday. Peering fixedly through the west windows of the laboratory, the little assemblage saw the disc swallowed up in the clear blue sky. Then they turned, faced one another gravely. Outside, on the streets, confusion reigned. In newspaper plants, presses were whirling. In telegraph and cable offices, keys were ticking. From radio towers, waves were speeding. Within an hour, the nation and the world knew of this planetary invader and its staggering ultimatum. Naturally, the government at Washington refused to meet these shameful terms. Military and naval forces were rushed to the threatened metropolis. The Atlantic Fleet steamed up from Hampton Roads under forced draught and assembled in the outer harbor. Thousands of planes gathered at Mitchell Field and other nearby aerodromes. * * * * * But where was the enemy? He must be miles up in space, Kendrick knew, as he toiled feverishly in the laboratory over his experiment after a sleepless night. For had that flying city been nearer earth, it could not have maintained invisibility without that peculiar humming vibration. Scout planes urged on by impatient squadron commanders, climbed till they reached their ceilings, searching in vain. They could encounter nothing, see nothing of the invader. Thus passed a morning of growing tension. But by noon of that day, with a bare twenty-four hours left before the expiration of the ultimatum, the disc came down, showed itself boldly. There followed stunning disasters. One salvo, and the ray shot down--the Atlantic Fleet, the pride of America, burst and melted in flaming hell. Squadrons of planes, carrying tons of bombs, frizzled like moths in the air. Mighty projectiles hurled by land batteries were deflected off on wild trajectories. Appalled, the nation and the world followed in lurid extras these crushing defeats. By nightfall of that day, all seemed lost. All opposition had been obliterated. America must capitulate or perish. It had until the next noon to decide which. * * * * * Meanwhile, in that great Brooklyn laboratory, Kendrick was working against time, besieged by frantic delegations of the nation's leaders. They knew now that their one hope lay in him. Was he succeeding? Was there even any hope? Face haggard, eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, he waved them away, went on with his work. "I will tell you--as soon as I know." That was all he would say. Followed a night that was the blackest in all history, though the myriad stars of heaven shone tauntingly brilliant in the summer sky. At length, as dawn was breaking. Kendrick paused in his labors. "There!" he said, grimly, surveying an apparatus that seemed to involve the entire facilities of the laboratory. "It is done! Now then--will it work?" The delegation were called to witness the test. Henderson Blake was among them, as was Marjorie. She stepped forward, as he prepared to make the demonstration. "I _know_, somehow, you're going to be successful!" she murmured, pressing his hand, meeting his eyes with a smile of confidence. "I hope you're right--Marjorie!" he replied, letting slip the last word almost unconsciously. Her face colored warmly as the stepped back and rejoined her father. Kendrick's heart was beating fast as he turned to his instruments. How could he fail, with faith like that behind him?--love, even, perhaps! He mustn't fail--nor would he, if his theories were sound. * * * * * Addressing the assemblage, he explained briefly the complicated apparatus. "These towers," he said, pointing to four steel structures about ten feet high, arranged at the corners of a square roughly twenty feet across, "are miniature radio masts. The area enclosed by them, we will assume, is the city of New York. That metal disc suspended above the area represents the invader. It contains a miniature heat-generator such as I was experimenting with recently in the Arizona desert." He paused, threw a switch. Somewhere in the laboratory a dynamo began to whir. "I am now sending electro-magnetic waves from the four towers," he resumed. "But instead of broadcasting them in every direction. I am bending them in concave cathode of force over the city. You may picture this cathode as an invisible shield, if you choose, but it is more than that. It it a reflector. If my theories are right, the radio-energetic ray I am about to project upon it from my miniature disc will be flung back to its source as though it had been a ray of light falling on a mirror. The success of the experiment depends upon what the result will be." * * * * * Kendrick ceased, moved toward a rheostat. As he made ready to touch it, a breathless tension settled upon the assemblage. Upon the outcome of what was now to happen rested the fate of America--and the world. Calmly, though every fiber of his being was at breaking stress, the young scientist opened the rheostat. For an instant, the ray seared down--then, as it boomeranged back, the disc burst into flame, dissolved, disintegrated. A thin dust, like carbon, slowly settled to the laboratory floor. Cutting off the current from the radio towers, Kendrick faced them, a light of triumph in his tired eyes. "You see--it works," he said. They saw. Beyond a doubt, it worked! And what Kendrick saw, as his eyes met Marjorie's, made him forget his fatigue. * * * * * The rest was a mad scramble of preparation. Only a few brief hours remained, and much was to be done. The application of the principle that had just been demonstrated involved a hook-up from the Consolidated Electric laboratory with every broadcasting station in the metropolitan area, power being supplied by commandeering every generating plant within a radius of fifty miles. The city, moreover, had to be evacuated of all but the few brave hundreds who volunteered to stand by their posts at radio stations and generating plants. As for Kendrick, it was the busiest, most hectic morning he had ever experienced. Only the realization of a girl's love and a nation's trust enabled him to overcome the exhaustion of two sleepless nights. At length, a little before eleven, all was in readiness. Just two questions troubled the young scientist's mind. Had the people of the disc learned of their preparations to counter the attack? And would the improvised broadcasting apparatus of the area stand the stupendous strain that would be placed upon it if the ray came down? The first of these questions was answered, staggeringly, at a quarter after eleven. "Kendrick--oh, my God!" cried Blake, bursting into the laboratory. "Marjorie--they've got her again! Look! Read this!" He thrust out a piece of paper. Kendrick took it, read: Your daughter will be my queen, after this noon. "Where'd you get it?" he gasped. "One of the invisible devils thrust it into my hand right out in the street, not five minutes ago," Blake explained, trembling with anguish. "Do you realize what this means, Kendrick? She's on the disc now--and in a scant three-quarters of an hour...." "Yes, I realize!" his voice came grimly. "And I realize, too, that they don't know their fate. They'll stay. There's forty-five minutes yet. We can't abandon our defense against the ray, not even for Marjorie. But I'll go, I'll rescue her--or die with her!" And even as Blake mutely reached out his hand to grip that of the determined young man who stood before him. Kendrick touched his wrist mechanism and went invisible. * * * * * Once on the street, he pressed the escalator button as well--and by the strength of the vibrations that followed, he knew he must be very close within that mysterious lifting zone. Running west a block, he found it growing stronger. Fairly racing now, he continued on toward the river, progress unhampered in the deserted streets. Suddenly, with a thrill of exultation, he felt himself swept up, whirled away toward that great shimmering hulk against the sun. "What hope?" he was thinking. "What possible hope?" And the answer came: Cor! Reaching the disc, he switched out the escalator influence and hastened across the city to that monumental structure of jade-green stone. The mighty little dwarf would be up there in his glittering mosaic apartment, or in his pinnacle laboratory, perhaps, ready to pull the lever that would release that stupendous blast of heat. Gaining the jewelled door of the monarch's quarters at last, after escaping detection by a hair's breadth more than once, he pressed the button outside, just as the guard had done that first time. In response, the door opened--and there stood Cor. * * * * * He stood there an instant, that is, while the expression on his leathery face went from inquiry to alarm. Then, as Kendrick burst into the room and shut the door, he went invisible. In that same instant, the young scientist's eyes beheld a sight that caused his heart to leap. There sat Marjorie, bound in a chair, an expression half of hope, half of dejection, on her face. "It's I--Gordon!" he called. "Take courage!" "Oh, I prayed so you'd come--and you came!" she murmured as her face lighted. Then, tensely, she added, "The door--look out!" Kendrick wheeled, and just in time. The door was opening. "Not so fast!" he called, lunging. His hands gripped the dwarf, yanked him back, throttled him before he could emit a cry, pushed the door shut. Cor struggled like a madman, but it was futile. Kendrick's hands cut into his throat like a vice. After a moment or two, he gasped, relaxed. Releasing his grip then, Kendrick felt for his wrist, stripped off his bracelet--whereupon the dwarf became visible. His face was putty-white. He was either dead or unconscious. Restoring his own visibility then, he advanced to Marjorie, swiftly freed her. "Take this!" he said, handing her Cor's bracelet. She slipped it on. "Now let's tie him and get out of here. He may be dead, but we can't take any chances." * * * * * The dwarf wasn't dead, however, for he groaned and opened his eyes as they lifted him into the chair. "You win, Professor--but it avails you nothing!" He smiled maliciously. "My capture, my death even, will not prevent the ray. The orders have been given. It will be projected sharp at twelve. You but go to your doom!" "That," said Kendrick, "is a matter of opinion." Swiftly they bound him, gagged him. "And now," he added, "we wish you good day--and such fate as you deserve!" Then, turning to Marjorie: "Your hand again!" There was a new tenderness in its soft warmth that thrilled him. They touched their buttons, went invisible. Silently, then, they stole from the apartment. Swiftly they made their way down to the concourse, raced across the city to the amber court, descended to the trap-door. It must be nearly twelve, Kendrick knew. He couldn't look at his watch, for it as well as himself was invisible. Indeed, even as they stood there, poised for the plunge, a faint whistle rose from below. Marjorie trembled. "Steady!" he spoke. "Some of them always blow a minute or two before. Are you ready?" "Yes!" "Then press your button--jump!" Even as they leapt, the sickening thought came that perhaps the escalator ray was no longer running. But the fear was unwarranted. They were caught up, whirled gently downward. Moving along laterally, as they descended, they were able to land without difficulty in the middle of a deserted street near the Consolidated Electric laboratory. "Thank heaven!" she sighed, as their feet touched solid ground. They pressed off both buttons, becoming visible once more. "Echo!" he agreed. "So let's--" * * * * * But Kendrick never completed that sentence--for now whistles all over the metropolitan area, rising from the generating plants, announced the ominous hour. It was high noon. The ultimatum had expired. Lifting tense faces to the disc, they waited. Would that stupendous ray be hurled back upon itself? Or would it sear through their makeshift defense, plunging them and the whole great metropolis into oblivion? Suddenly, cataclysmically, the answer came. There burst a withering whirlwind from the disc. It struck that mighty concave cathode of interlaced waves above the city. There followed an instant's clash of titanic forces. Then the cathode triumphed, hurled it back. Rocked by a concussion as of two worlds in impact, blinded by a glare that made the sunlight seem feeble in comparison. Marjorie and Kendrick clung together, while the disc grew into a satellite of calcium fire in the sky. Presently, as the conflagration waned, they opened their eyes. Gravely, but with deep thanksgiving, they searched each other's faces. In them they read deep understanding, too, and a new hope. "I think we'd better go and find father," she said at length, quietly. "I think so too!" he agreed. As they headed toward the laboratory, a fine, powdery dust, like volcanic ash was falling. It continued to fall until the city streets were covered to a depth of an inch or more. Thus passed the menace of Vada. [Advertisement: NO ONE MUST FORGET _That he has a standing invitation to_ "Come Over In 'THE READERS' CORNER'" _And join in the general discussion of stories, authors, likes, dislikes--everything pertaining to_ ASTOUNDING STORIES _And Science-Fiction_] The Readers' Corner _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories [Illustration:] _To the Rescue_ Dear Editor: I hope you can see fit to print this letter in the July issue of Astounding Stories. This letter is written in defence of Ray Cummings and in reply to the letter of C. Harry Jaeger, 2900 Jordan Road, Oakland, California. Following is an extract of Mr. Jaeger's letter: "Also I like my authors to make an original contribution to whatever theory of science they develop fictionally. This, Ray Cummings does not do in his very interesting story, "Phantoms of Reality." His beginning is palpably borrowed from Francis Flagg's story, "The Blue Dimension," which appeared in a Science Fiction magazine in 1927." Another paragraph is devoted to explaining his claim. He claims that Cummings' method of transporting his characters from one dimension or planet to another is practically copied from Flagg's story. The method, that is, not the narration. I hope to prove that if any borrowing was done, it was done by Flagg. Incidentally, Flagg's story "The Blue Dimension" was printed in 1928, not 1927, as Mr. Jaeger says. I have in my possession a story by Ray Cummings named "Into the Fourth Dimension" and published in another magazine during the last month of 1926 and first ones of 1927. And in this story--printed two years before Flagg's story--Cummings uses almost the same apparatus of passing from one dimension to another as is used in "Phantoms of Reality." I will not discuss whether this procedure is to be approved or not. This letter is not to be construed as an attack on Mr. Jaeger, or Mr. Flagg, or on either of the two stories under discussion. If Mr. Jaeger will let me know I will send him Ray Cumming's story "Into the Fourth Dimension," as clipped from the magazines. I write this letter to the magazine, instead of Mr. Jaeger, so that if any one was misled by Mr. Jaeger's well meant but mistaken criticism they will be straightened out.--Donald Coneyon, Petoskey, Michigan. _A Wish for Success_ Dear Editor: I have read both of your first issues. I am writing to say that I wish you success with your new magazine, which I know will succeed. Also to say I wish you would get more of the "Carnes and Dr. Bird Stories" by Captain S. P. Meek, for I think everybody, including myself, likes them. I also enjoyed "Creatures of the Light."--Thomas D. Taylor, 415 So. 7th St., Boise, Idaho. _No Kick Any More_ Dear Editor: I have been a reader of Astounding Stories ever since you started it, and I guess I'm getting too particular as I don't get the kick out of it any more that I did out of the first issues. That is, I don't get the kick out of ALL of the stories as I did at first. However, "Murder Madness" sure is a hot one. Why not print a story by Sax Rohmer, H. G. Wells, or some of them?--H. Elsworth Jones, Box 340, R. R. 6, Battle Creek, Mich. _Via Postcard_ Dear Editor: Astounding Stories is an astounding magazine. It has really astounding stories. It couldn't be better. There's hardly room for improvement. May Astounding Stories be more astounding yet. I like it!--Monroe Hood Stinson, 1742, 12th Ave., Oakland, California. _Only Fiction!_ Dear Editor: I have just finished a story in the February, 1930, issue of Astounding Stories entitled "Into Space," by Sterner St. Paul. I would like to know if it is a true story, if the actions described in it really happened, or is it merely a story of fiction.--Dan S. Scherrer, Shawneetown, Ill. _Perhaps--Soon_ Dear Editor: I have just finished reading your new magazine, Astounding Stories. It is the best magazine I have ever read. Keep up the good work and you will find me a constant reader. I have only one suggestion to make: Let Astounding Stories come out every other Thursday.--Harold Kulko, 433 Palmer E., Detroit, Michigan. _More Preferences_ Dear Editor: I have read with great interest the second issue of Astounding Stories and note your invitation for readers to express themselves. I enjoyed the whole magazine, finding the literary quality surprisingly high. Especially good were "Spawn of the Stars," and "Creatures of the Light." Harl Vincent's tale was the best of his I have read; and Captain Meek's are always good. "The Corpse on the Grating," however, was merely Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" done over, and not half so well. As for the sort of tales I like, here they are in order of preference: 1. Tales of weird mystery--Merritt's "Moon Pool" and his others; Taine's "White Lily." 2. Interplanetary Adventure--"A Columbus of Space," by Serviss; "The Skylark of Space," by Smith. 3. "Different stories," that defy classification, based on new ideas of science--most of Wells' short stories are examples. 4. Detective, Fourth Dimension, and air adventure--only well done.--Jack Williamson, Box 661 Canyon, Texas. _A Brick or Two_ Dear Editor: For the last three years we have been reading any and all of the various Science Fiction magazines which have appeared upon the market. We therefore feel that we are as well qualified as anyone to offer the criticism and advice that follows. First, the stories. We feel that it would be a good idea to get your stories from the same authors whose work has been and is being accepted by the other magazines in this field. In one case you have already done this, and I consider his stories to be the best in each issue. I believe that you will be forced to do this eventually, anyhow, because the people who read this magazine will naturally be readers of the others also, and will therefore, be used to the standards set by those publications. Then, you should have someone who is well qualified to pass upon the science in the stories. Second, the cover design and the pictures at the beginning of each story. Up to this time the cover and inside pictures have contained many mistakes. The cover of the March issue was especially atrocious. In the first place a voyager in outer space would find it jet black and studded with stars, instead of blue and apparently empty, except for a few tremendously oversize planets, a moon with entirely too many craters, and a total eclipse of the sun with a very much distorted corona visible beside the earth. Illustrations by your cover artist also appear in another publication, but these are much superior to the ones in Astounding Stories. Here also a scientific advisor would be welcome. Third, I think it would be a good idea to have a department in which readers could write their opinions of the stories and suggest improvements in the conduct of the magazine. Fourth, I think there should be a scientific editorial in each issue by some eminent scientist. This is also a feature in the other magazines. We hope that you take these criticisms and suggestions, as they were offered, in good faith. We also hope that the circulation will increase as the magazine becomes better.--George L. Williams and Harry Heillisan, 5714 Howe St., Pittsburgh, Pa. "_Wonderful_" Dear Editor: I received your magazine last week, Astounding Stories, and I think it is wonderful. I am very glad that I subscribed for it. I can hardly wait to get the latest one which I hoped to receive to-day and was very much disappointed when it did not arrive. I hope you will consider a quarterly or at least an annual in the near future. I wish you success with this magazine, and hope you will forgive my writing you so often in reference to your magazine--Louis Wentzler, 1935, Woodbine St., Brooklyn, New York. --_But We Made Our Bow Only Last January!_ Dear Editor: Last month my boy brought one copy of this magazine home, and I want to ask you if you would send me the copies from last January, 1929, up to December, 1929. If you charge no more than $3.00 would you send them C. O. D.? Do you have the issues for 1928, too? I never knew there was a magazine like that on the market. I never bought one because most of them are no good, and when one has children one has to be doubly careful. But this magazine is just right. No silly love stories and mushy stuff in them. It sure keeps your mind from unpleasant things. We can get them from the newsstand but I would like to subscribe for them. Keep up the good work and please send me the last year's copies and let me know if I could get 1928, too.--Mrs. M. Ristan, 4684, No. Broadway, Denver, Colorado. "_Best One Yet_" Dear Editor: The April issue is the best one you have put out yet. Arthur J. Burks is GOOD. I hope to see much of him in the future. "Brigands of the Moon," by Ray Cummings, is getting better with each instalment. The stories of Dr. Bird are always interesting. I would like to see one in each issue, if you could arrange for it. As long as the other readers like the size of Astounding stories, I will, too, but please cut all edges smooth like the latest issue of Five Novels Monthly. I would like to see a full-page illustration with each story, and if possible by Wesso. I am glad that you are starting another serial in the May issue of Astounding Stories. I like serials and I hope that you will always have two in each issue. Your schedule for the May issue looks good, and I'm sure it will be, with such authors as Murray Leinster, Victor Rousseau, Ray Cummings, Harl Vincent and Sewell P. Wright. I am still waiting for a different colored cover.--Jack Darrow, 4225, N. Spaulding Ave., Chicago, Illinois. _An Enthusiastic Reader_ Dear Editor: As a reader of long standing of Science Fiction I feel I am qualified to make some remarks and give my opinion of the wonderful Astounding Stories magazine lately put out. Although I read three other Science Fiction magazines none of them have aroused in me such a wonderful enthusiasm as Astounding Stories. Before I forget it I want to mention that I read two quarterlies also. The reason, or rather reasons, for my enthusiasm I will now enumerate. (1) The stories are wonderful. (2) The binding is very strong and efficient. (3) The print is just right, and soothing to the eyes of one who reads much. The paper is good, and the size and price of the magazine is just right. The covers are excellent, and with the addition of "The Readers' Corner" the magazine becomes absolutely perfect. Truly a wonderful start. See that it is kept up. The only thing that can still spoil the magazine is poor stories. Science Fiction stories that contain no science. In "Vampires of Venus" the plot was rather weak. Even if the Venerians knew nothing of entomology, they should have brains enough to get rid of the vampires the way Leslie Larner did without having to call an Earthman to help them. Another thing: the Venerians kept only insects that were not harmful to the crops. On Earth there are such insects who help the farmer by eating harmful insects. If the harmful insects were exterminated--an almost impossible and gigantic task--the harmless insects would change their diet and become harmful too. And it seems funny, too, that such a highly civilized planet as Venus should still depend on domesticated animals for food, drink and clothing instead of manufacturing what they need synthetically. The April cover on your magazine was wonderful. Before I close I wish to say a word about the Science Correspondence Club of which I am a proud member. There is little to say, however, after reading Conrad Ruppert's letter in the April issue. The membership has increased to over 300 now, numbering among them quite a number of famous scientists and authors. All I can say is that I hope every scientifically inclined person of whatever nationality, creed, color or sex they may be, will join this wonderful and rapidly progressing club. I will now close thanking the publishers of Astounding Stories for issuing such a wonderful magazine--Stan Osowski, E2, Railroad St., Central Falls, R. I. _But--Conniston Was An Impostor!_ Dear Editor: I read with interest Mr. Ray Cummings' story, "Brigands of the Moon," in the March number of Astounding Stories. The tale was a worthy one from the pen of so clever a writer. I do think, however, that the author might have left out the point about Sir Arthur Conniston, an English gentleman, turning traitor. This sort of thing is hardly calculated to bring about a friendly feeling between England and America, the two greatest countries in the world. I have the greatest admiration for the United States, and though we may have a little fun at each other's expense, there is no ill feeling meant, but I really hope you will not publish any other story like that one.--An Englishman, Montreal, Canada. _Likes the Romance_ Dear Editor: I have just finished my second copy of Astounding Stories and I wish to say I have enjoyed every story. For some time I have been a reader of Science Fiction, but none will compare to Astounding Stories. These stories seem to have the proper amount of romance in them to make them really interesting, and it adds the proper touch. I have no criticism to make. May I wish you a great success with this magazine--Frank I. Sontag, 825 Prescott Ave., Scranton, Pa. _High Praise_ Dear Editor: Allow me to congratulate you upon the establishment of "The Readers' Corner." I do not know which was the first issue of your delightful magazine, but I have been buying it regularly for quite a few months. I may not be an experienced critic, but it can be easily seen by anyone that this magazine is one of the best on sale. I, for one, enjoy your stories more than any other stories I have ever read. I have just finished the second part of the four-part serial entitled "Brigands of the Moon." I thing Ray Cummings is the best author I have ever met up with in stories. The drawings are fine, the print is excellent, but I think the paper could be improved. But by no means change the size of your little magazine. The size is just right. In your April issue I read in "The Readers' Corner" about a Science Correspondence Club. Believe me when I say I'm sending immediately for an application blank. I think the idea of this club is excellent. Truly you have contributed a great gift to Science Fiction readers in offering this magazine to the receptive public.--Theodore L. Page, 2361 Los Angeles Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa. "_Don't Do It!_" Dear Editor: This afternoon I saw Astounding Stories for the first time and immediately grabbed a copy, as I have read others of the Clayton group, and moreover am a Science Fiction fan. The newsstand has no back numbers, and I simply must have the March 1930 issue, as I wish to read "Brigands of the Moon," so here is 25¢, in stamps to cover purchase price and cost of mailing me a copy of that issue. Have you a complete file since Vol. 1, No. 1? If so, what is the cost including charges? I'm sorry that I missed this magazine before, but you can rest assured that I'll miss no more. In the "Readers' Corner" I notice a call from Stephen Takacs for a change in size. DON'T DO IT! The size and shape are O. K., and to make it the awkward size of most magazines (including two of the Science Fiction magazines that I am now a confirmed reader of), would not improve it a bit. You have two of my favorite authors in the April number; no, I see it is three--Burks, Cummings and Meek. They are O. K., but don't forget a few others, such as Burroughs, Verrill, Hamilton, Coblentz, Keller, Quinn, Williamson, Leinster, Repp, Vincent, Flagg--oh, why continue; you certainly know all the good authors of OUR kind of fiction; try them all. Of course, the other Science Fiction magazines that I take are full of stories by my favorites, but you can get stories by them too. From this one issue that I have read I can see only praise for your publication. Here's to a long life and a happy one. Don't forget to send me the March issue as fast as the mail can get it here--Robert J. Hyatt, 1353 Kenyon St., N. W., Washington D. C. "_Worst Ever Read_" Dear Editor: Since you invite criticism as well as praise, I am impelled to state that by far the worst story I ever read in any Science Fiction magazine was "Vampires of Venus," by Anthony Pelcher, which appeared in your April issue. It was so idiotic, so flat and inane, that it might have passed for a burlesque rather than a straight story, were it not painfully evident that the author was serious. The yarn was unworthy of Astounding Stories and did not belong in this magazine. The other stories, except for an amateurish attempt called "The Man Who Was Dead," were deeply engrossing and of unusual merit.--Sears Langell, 1214 Boston Road, New York. "_The Readers' Corner_" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here; so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! --_The Editor._ * * * * * 
29255	----	20¢ ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DR. DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor * * * * * [Illustration] The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are_: ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and FOREST AND STREAM. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. III. No. 3 CONTENTS SEPTEMBER, 1930 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "Marooned Under the Sea."_ A PROBLEM IN COMMUNICATION MILES J. BREUER, M.D. 293 _The Delivery of His Country into the Clutches of a Merciless, Ultra-Modern Religion Can Be Prevented Only by Dr. Hagstrom's Deciphering an Extraordinary Code._ JETTA OF THE LOWLANDS RAY CUMMINGS 310 _Fantastic and Sinister Are the Lowlands into Which Philip Grant Descends on His Dangerous Assignment._ (Beginning a Three-Part Novel.) THE TERRIBLE TENTACLES, OF L-472 SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT 332 _Commander John Hanson of the Special Patrol Service Records Another of His Thrilling Interplanetary Assignments._ MAROONED UNDER THE SEA PAUL ERNST 346 _Three Men Stick Out a Strange and Desperate Adventure Among the Incredible Monsters of the Dark Sea Floor._ (A Complete Novelette.) THE MURDER MACHINE HUGH B. CAVE 377 _Four Lives Lay Helpless Before the Murder Machine, the Uncanny Device by Which Hypnotic Thought Waves Are Filtered Through Men's Minds to Mold Them Into Murdering Tools._ THE ATTACK FROM SPACE CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 390 _From a Far World Came Monstrous Invaders Who Were All the More Terrifying Because Invisible._ EARTH, THE MARAUDER ARTHUR J. BURKS 408 _Martian Fire-Balls and the Terrific Moon-Cubes Wreak Tremendous Destruction on Helpless Earth in the Final Death Struggle of the Warring Worlds._ (Conclusion.) THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 423 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ * * * * * Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Nathan Goldmann, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. [Illustration: I saw the famous Science Temple with its constant stream of worshippers.] A Problem in Communication _By Miles J. Breuer, M.D._ PART I _The Science Community_ (This part is related by Peter Hagstrom, Ph.D.) "The ability to communicate ideas from one individual to another," said a professor of sociology to his class, "is the principal distinction between human beings and their brute forbears. The increase and refinement of this ability to communicate is an index of the degree of civilization of a people. The more civilized a people, the more perfect their ability to communicate, especially under difficulties and in emergencies." [Sidenote: _The delivery of his country into the clutches of a merciless, ultra-modern religion can be prevented only by Dr. Hagstrom's deciphering an extraordinary code._] As usual, the observation burst harmlessly over the heads of most of the students in the class, who were preoccupied with more immediate things--with the evening's movies and the week-end's dance. But upon two young men in the class, it made a powerful impression. It crystallized within them certain vague conceptions and brought them to a conscious focus, enabling the young men to turn formless dreams into concrete acts. That is why I take the position that the above enthusiastic words of this sociology professor, whose very name I have forgotten, were the prime moving influence which many years later succeeded in saving Occidental civilization from a catastrophe which would have been worse than death and destruction. * * * * * One of these young men was myself, and the other was my lifelong friend and chum, Carl Benda, who saved his country by solving a tremendously difficult scientific puzzle in a simple way, by sheer reasoning power, and without apparatus. The sociology professor struck a responsive chord in us: for since our earliest years we had wigwagged to each other as Boy Scouts, learned the finger alphabet of the deaf and dumb so that we might maintain communication during school hours, strung a telegraph wire between our two homes, admired Poe's "Gold Bug" together and devised boyish cipher codes in which to send each other postcards when chance separated us. But we had always felt a little foolish about what we considered our childish hobbies, until the professor's words suddenly roused us to the realization that we were a highly civilized pair of youngsters. Not only did we then and there cease feeling guilty about our secret ciphers and our dots and dashes, but the determination was born within us to make of communication our life's work. It turned out that both of us actually did devote our lives to the cause of communication; but the passing years saw us engaged in widely and curiously divergent phases of the work. Thirty years later, I was Professor of the Psychology of Language at Columbia University, and Benda was Maintenance Engineer of the Bell Telephone Company of New York City; and on his knowledge and skill depended the continuity and stability of that stupendously complex traffic, the telephone communication of Greater New York. * * * * * Since our ambitious cravings were satisfied in our everyday work, and since now ordinarily available methods of communication sufficed our needs, we no longer felt impelled to signal across the house-tops with semaphores nor to devise ciphers that would defy solution. But we still kept up our intimate friendship and our intense interest in our beloved subject. We were just as close chums at the age of fifty as we had been at ten, and just as thrilled at new advances in communication: at television, at the international language, at the supposed signals from Mars. That was the state of affairs between us up to a year ago. At about that time Benda resigned his position with the New York Bell Telephone Company to accept a place as the Director of Communication in the Science Community. This, for many reasons, was a most amazing piece of news to myself and to anyone who knew Benda. Of course, it was commonly known that Benda was being sought by Universities and corporations: I know personally of several tempting offers he had received. But the New York Bell is a wealthy corporation and had thus far managed to hold Benda, both by the munificence of its salary and by the attractiveness of the work it offered him. That the Science Community would want Benda was easy to understand; but, that it could outbid the New York Bell, was, to say the least, a surprise. Furthermore, that a man like Benda would want to have anything at all to do with the Science Community seemed strange enough in itself. He had the most practical common sense--well-balanced habits of thinking and living, supported by an intellect so clear and so keen that I knew of none to excel it. What the Science Community was, no one knew exactly; but that there was something abnormal, fanatical, about it, no one doubted. * * * * * The Science Community, situated in Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, had first been heard of many years ago, when it was already a going concern. At the time of which I now speak, the novelty had worn off, and no one paid any more attention to it than they do to Zion City or the Dunkards. By this time, the Science Community was a city of a million inhabitants, with a vast outlying area of farms and gardens. It was modern to the highest degree in construction and operation; there was very little manual labor there; no poverty; every person had all the benefits of modern developments in power, transportation, and communication, and of all other resources provided by scientific progress. So much, visitors and reporters were able to say. The rumors that it was a vast socialistic organization, without private property, with equal sharing of all privileges, were never confirmed. It is a curious observation that it was possible, in this country of ours, for a city to exist about which we knew so little. However, it seemed evident from the vast number and elaboration of public buildings, the perfection of community utilities such as transportation, streets, lighting, and communication, from the absence of individual homes and the housing of people in huge dormitories, that some different, less individualistic type of social organization than ours was involved. It was obvious that as an organization, the Science Community must also be wealthy. If any of its individual citizens were wealthy, no one knew it. I knew Benda as well as I knew myself, and if I was sure of anything in my life, it was that he was not the type of man to leave a fifty thousand dollar job and join a communist city on an equal footing with the clerks in the stores. As it happens, I was also intimately acquainted with John Edgewater Smith, recently Power Commissioner of New York City and the most capable power engineer in North America, who, following Benda by two or three months, resigned his position, and accepted what his letter termed the place of Director of Power in the Science Community. I was personally in a position to state that neither of these men could be lightly persuaded into such a step, and that neither of them would work for a small salary. * * * * * Benda's first letter to me stated that he was at the Science Community on a visit. He had heard of the place, and while at Washington on business had taken advantage of the opportunity to drive out and see it. Fascinated by the equipment he saw there, he had decided to stay a few days and study it. The next letter announced his acceptance of the position. I would give a month's salary to get a look at those letters now; but I neglected to preserve them. I should like to see them because I am curious as to whether they exhibit the characteristics of the subsequent letters, some of which I now have. As I have stated, Benda and I had been on the most intimate terms for forty years. His letters had always been crisp and direct, and thoroughly familiar and confidential. I do not know just how many letters I received from him from the Science Community before I noted the difference, but I have one from the third month of his stay there (he wrote every two or three weeks), characterized by a verbosity that sounded strange for him. He seemed to be writing merely to cover the sheet, trifles such as he had never previously considered worth writing letters about. Four pages of letter conveyed not a single idea. Yet Benda was, if anything, a man of ideas. There followed several months of letters like that: a lot of words, evasion of coming to the point about anything; just conventional letters. Benda was the last man to write a conventional letter. Yet, it was Benda writing them: gruff little expressions of his, clear ways of looking at even the veriest trifles, little allusion to our common past: these things could neither have been written by anyone else, nor written under compulsion from without. Something had changed Benda. * * * * * I pondered on it a good deal, and could think of no hypothesis to account for it. In the meanwhile, New York City lost a third technical man to the Science Community. Donald Francisco, Commissioner of the Water Supply, a sanitary engineer of international standing, accepted a position in the Science Community as Water Director. I did not know whether to laugh and compare it to the National Baseball League's trafficking in "big names," or to hunt for some sinister danger sign in it. But, as a result of my ponderings, I decided to visit Benda at The Science Community. I wrote him to that effect, and almost decided to change my mind about the visit because of the cold evasiveness of the reply I received from him. My first impulse on reading his indifferent, lackadaisical comment on my proposed visit was to feel offended, and determine to let him alone and never see him again. The average man would have done that, but my long years of training in psychological interpretation told me that a character and a friendship built during forty years does not change in six months, and that there must be some other explanation for this. I wrote him that I was coming. I found that the best way to reach the Science Community was to take a bus out from Washington. It involved a drive of about fifty miles northwest, through a picturesque section of the country. The latter part of the drive took me past settlements that looked as though they might be in about the same stage of progress as they had been during the American Revolution. The city of my destination was back in the hills, and very much isolated. During the last ten miles we met no traffic at all, and I was the only passenger left in the bus. Suddenly the vehicle stopped. "Far as we go!" the driver shouted. I looked about in consternation. All around were low, wild-looking hills. The road went on ahead through a narrow pass. "They'll pick you up in a little bit," the driver said as he turned around and drove off, leaving me standing there with my bag, very much astonished at it all. * * * * * He was right. A small, neat-looking bus drove through the pass and stopped for me. As I got in, the driver mechanically turned around and drove into the hills again. "They took up my ticket on the other bus," I said to the driver. "What do I owe you?" "Nothing," he said curtly. "Fill that out." He handed me a card. An impertinent thing, that card was. Besides asking for my name, address, nationality, vocation, and position, it requested that I state whom I was visiting in the Science Community, the purpose of my visit, the nature of my business, how long I intended to stay, did I have a place to stay arranged for, and if so, where and through whom. It looked for all the world as though they had something to conceal; Czarist Russia couldn't beat that for keeping track of people and prying into their business. Sign here, the card said. It annoyed me, but I filled it out, and, by the time I was through, the bus was out of the hills, traveling up the valley of a small river; I am not familiar enough with northern Virginia to say which river it was. There was much machinery and a few people in the broad fields. In the distance ahead was a mass of chimneys and the cupolas of iron-works, but no smoke. There were power-line towers with high-tension insulators, and, far ahead, the masses of huge elevators and big, square buildings. Soon I came in sight of a veritable forest of huge windmills. In a few moments, the huge buildings loomed up over me; the bus entered a street of the city abruptly from the country. One moment on a country road, the next moment among towering buildings. We sped along swiftly through a busy metropolis, bright, airy, efficient looking. The traffic was dense but quiet, and I was confident that most of the vehicles were electric; for there was no noise nor gasoline odor. Nor was there any smoke. Things looked airy, comfortable, efficient; but rather monotonous, dull. There was a total lack of architectural interest. The buildings were just square blocks, like neat rows of neat boxes. But, it all moved smoothly, quietly, with wonderful efficiency. * * * * * My first thought was to look closely at the people who swarmed the streets of this strange city. Their faces were solemn, and their clothes were solemn. All seemed intently busy, going somewhere, or doing something; there was no standing about, no idle sauntering. And look whichever way I might, everywhere there was the same blue serge, on men and women alike, in all directions, as far as I could see. The bus stopped before a neat, square building of rather smaller size, and the next thing I knew, Benda was running down the steps to meet me. He was his old gruff, enthusiastic self. "Glad to see you, Hagstrom, old socks!" he shouted, and gripped my hand with two of his. "I've arranged for a room for you, and we'll have a good old visit, and I'll show you around this town." I looked at him closely. He looked healthy and well cared-for, all except for a couple of new lines of worry on his face. Undoubtedly that worn look meant some sort of trouble. PART II _The New Religion_ (This part is interpolated by the author into Dr. Hagstrom's narrative.) Every great religion has as its psychological reason for existence the mission of compensating for some crying, unsatisfied human need. Christianity spread and grew among people who were, at the time, persecuted subjects or slaves of Rome; and it flourished through the Middle Ages at a time when life held for the individual chiefly pain, uncertainty, and bereavement. Christianity kept the common man consoled and mentally balanced by minimizing the importance of life on earth and offering compensation afterwards and elsewhere. A feeble nation of idle dreamers, torn by a chaos of intertribal feuds within, menaced by powerful, conquest-lusting nations from without, Arabia was enabled by Islam, the religion of her prophet Mohammed, to unite all her sons into an intense loyalty to one cause, and to turn her dream-stuff into reality by carrying her national pride and honor beyond her boundaries and spreading it over half the known world. The ancient Greeks, in despair over the frailties of human emotion and the unbecomingness of worldly conduct, which their brilliant minds enabled them to recognize clearly but which they found themselves powerless to subdue, endowed the gods, whom they worshipped, with all of their own passions and weaknesses, and thus the foolish behavior of the gods consoled them for their own obvious shortcomings. So it goes throughout all of the world's religions. In the middle of the twentieth century there were in the civilized world, millions of people in whose lives Christianity had ceased to play any part. Yet, psychically--remember, "psyche" means "soul"--they were just as sick and unbalanced, just as much in need of some compensation as were the subjects of the early Roman empire, or the Arabs in the Middle Ages. They were forced to work at the strained and monotonous pace of machines; they were the slaves, body and soul, of machines; they lived with machines and lived like machines--they were expected to _be_ machines. A mechanized mode of life set a relentless pace for them, while, just as in all the past ages, life and love, the breezes and the blue sky called to them; but they could not respond. They had to drive machines so that machines could serve them. Minds were cramped and emotions were starved, but hands must go on guiding levers and keeping machines in operation. Lives were reduced to such a mechanical routine that men wondered how long human minds and human bodies could stand the restraint. There is a good deal in the writings of the times to show that life was becoming almost unbearable for three-fourths of humanity. * * * * * It is only natural, therefore, that Rohan, the prophet of the new religion, found followers more rapidly than he could organize them. About ten years before the visit of Dr. Hagstrom to his friend Benda, Rohan and his new religion had been much in the newspapers. Rohan was a Slovak, apparently well educated in Europe. When he first attracted attention to himself, he was foreman in a steel plant at Birmingham, Alabama. He was popular as an orator, and drew unheard-of crowds to his lectures. He preached of _Science_ as God, an all-pervading, inexorably systematic Being, the true Center and Motive-Power of the Universe; a Being who saw men and pitied them because they could not help committing inaccuracies. The Science God was helping man become more perfect. Even now, men were much more accurate and systematic than they had been a hundred years ago; men's lives were ordered and rhythmic, like natural laws, not like the chaotic emotions of beasts and savages. Somehow, he soon dropped out of the attention of the great mass of the public. Of course, he did so intentionally, when his ideas began to crystallize and his plans for his future organization began to form. At first he had a sort of church in Birmingham, called The Church of the Scientific God. There never was anything cheap nor blatant about him. When he moved his church from Birmingham to the Lovett Branch Valley in northern Virginia, he was hardly noticed. But with him went seven thousand people, to form the nucleus of the Science Community. * * * * * Since then, some feature writer for a metropolitan Sunday paper has occasionally written up the Science Community, both from its physical and its human aspects. From these reports, the outstanding bit of evidence is that Rohan believes intensely in his own religion, and that his followers are all loyal worshippers of the Science God. They conceive the earth to be a workshop in which men serve Science, their God, serving a sort of apprenticeship during which He perfects them to the state of ideal machines. To be a perfect machine, always accurate, with no distracting emotions, no getting off the track--that was the ideal which the Great God _Science_ required of his worshippers. To be a perfect machine, or a perfect cog in a machine, to get rid of all individuality, all disturbing sentiment, that was their idea of supreme happiness. Despite the obvious narrowness it involved, there was something sublime in the conception of this religion. It certainly had nothing in common with the "Christian Science" that was in vogue during the early years of the twentieth Century; it towered with a noble grandeur above that feeble little sham. The Science Community was organized like a machine: and all men played their parts, in government, in labor, in administration, in production, like perfect cogs and accurate wheels, and the machine functioned perfectly. The devotees were described as fanatical, but happy. They certainly were well trained and efficient. The Science Community grew. In ten years it had a million people, and was a worldwide wonder of civic planning and organization; it contained so many astonishing developments in mechanical service to human welfare and comfort that it was considered as a sort of model of the future city. The common man there was provided with science-produced luxuries, in his daily life, that were in the rest of the world the privilege of the wealthy few--but he used his increased energy and leisure in serving the more devotedly, his God, Science, who had made machines. There was a great temple in the city, the shape of a huge dynamo-generator, whose interior was worked out in a scheme of mechanical devices, and with music, lights, and odors to help in the worship. * * * * * What the world knew the least about was that this religion was becoming militant. Its followers spoke of the heathen without, and were horrified at the prevalence of the sin of individualism. They were inspired with the mission that the message of God--scientific perfection--must be carried to the whole world. But, knowing that vested interests, governments, invested capital, and established religions would oppose them and render any real progress impossible, they waited. They studied the question, looking for some opportunity to spread the gospel of their beliefs, prepared to do so by force, finding their justification in their belief that millions of sufferers needed the comforts that their religion had given them. Meanwhile their numbers grew. Rohan was Chief Engineer, which position was equal in honor and dignity to that of Prophet or High Priest. He was a busy, hard-worked man, black haired and gaunt, small of stature and fiery eyed; he looked rather like an overworked department-store manager rather than like a prophet. He was finding his hands more full every day, both because of the extraordinary fertility of his own plans and ideas, and because the Science Community was growing so rapidly. Among this heterogenous mass of proselyte strangers that poured into the city and was efficiently absorbed into the machine, it was yet difficult to find executives, leaders, men to put in charge of big things. And he needed constantly more and more of such men. * * * * * That was why Rohan went to Benda, and subsequently to others like Benda. Rohan had a deep knowledge of human nature. He did not approach Benda with the offer of a magnanimous salary, but came into Benda's office asking for a consultation on some of the puzzling communication problems of the Science Community. Benda became interested, and on his own initiative offered to visit the Science Community, saying that he had to be in Washington anyway in a few days. When he saw what the conditions were in the Science Community, he became fascinated by its advantages over New York; a new system to plan from the ground up; no obsolete installation to wrestle with; an absolutely free hand for the engineer in charge; no politics to play; no concessions to antiquated city construction, nor to feeble-minded city administration--just a dream of an opportunity. He almost asked for the job himself, but Rohan was tactful enough to offer it, and the salary, though princely, was hardly given a thought. For many weeks Benda was absorbed in his job, to the exclusion of all else. He sent his money to his New York bank and had his family move in and live with him. He was happy in his communication problems. "Give me a problem in communication and you make me happy," he wrote to Hagstrom in one of his early letters. He had completed a certain division of his work on the Science Community's communication system, and it occurred to him that a few days' relaxation would do him good. A run up to New York would be just the thing. To his amazement, he was not permitted to board the outbound bus. "You'll need orders from the Chief Engineer's office," the driver said. * * * * * Benda went to Rohan. "Am I a prisoner?" he demanded with his characteristic directness. "An embarassing situation," the suave Rohan admitted, very calmly and at his ease. "You see, I'm nothing like a dictator here. I have no arbitrary power. Everything runs by system, and you're a sort of exception. No one knows exactly how to classify you. Neither do I. But, I can't break a rule. That is sin." "What rule? I want to go to New York." "Only those of the Faith who have reached the third degree can come and go. No one can get that in less than three years." "Then you got me in here by fraud?" Benda asked bluntly. Rohan side-stepped gracefully. "You know our innermost secrets now," he explained. "Do you suppose there is any hope of your embracing the Faith?" Benda whirled on his heel and walked out. "I'll think about it!" he said, his voice snapping with sarcasm. Benda went back to his work in order to get his mind off the matter. He was a well-balanced man if he was anything; and he knew that nothing could be accomplished by rash words or incautious moves against Rohan and his organization. And on that day he met John Edgewater Smith. "You here?" Benda gasped. He lost his equilibrium for a moment in consternation at the sight of his fellow-engineer. Smith was too elated to notice Benda's mood. "I've been here a week. This is certainly an ideal opportunity in my line of work. Even in Heaven I never expected to find such a chance." By this time Benda had regained control of himself. He decided to say nothing to Smith for the time being. * * * * * They did not meet again for several weeks. In the meantime Benda discovered that his mail was being censored. At first he did not know that his letters, always typewritten, were copied and objectionable matter omitted, and his signature reproduced by the photo-engraving process, separately each time. But before long, several letters came back to him rubber-stamped: "Not passable. Please revise." It took Benda two days to cool down and rewrite the first letter. But outwardly no one would have ever known that there was anything amiss with him. However, he took to leaving his work for an hour or two a day and walking in the park, to think out the matter. He didn't like it. This was about the time that it began to be a real issue as to who was the bigger man of the two, Rohan or Benda. But no signs of the issue appeared externally for many months. John Edgewater Smith realized sooner than Benda that he couldn't get out, because, not sticking to work so closely, he had made the attempt sooner. He looked very much worried when Benda next saw him. "What's this? Do you know about it?" he shouted as soon as he had come within hearing distance of Benda. "What's the difference?" Benda replied casually. "Aren't you satisfied?" Smith's face went blank. Benda came close to him, linked arms and led him to a broad vacant lawn in the park. "Listen!" he said softly in Smith's ear. "Don't you suppose these people who lock us in and censor our mail aren't smart enough to spy on what we say to each other?" "Our only hope," Benda continued, "is to learn all we can of what is going on here. Keep your eyes and ears open and meet me here in a week. And now come on; we've been whispering here long enough." * * * * * Oddly enough, the first clue to the puzzle they were trying to solve was supplied by Francisco, New York's former Water Commissioner. Why were they being kept prisoners in the city? There must be more reason for holding them there than the fear that information would be carried out, for none of the three engineers knew anything about the Science Community that could be of any possible consequence to outsiders. They had all stuck rigidly to their own jobs. They met Francisco, very blue and dejected, walking in the park a couple of months later. They had been having weekly meetings, feeling that more frequent rendezvous might excite suspicion. Francisco was overjoyed to see them. "Been trying to figure out why they want us," he said. "There is something deeper than the excuse they have made; that rot about a perfect system and no breaking of rules may be true, but it has nothing to do with us. Now, here are three of us, widely admitted as having good heads on us. We've got to solve this." "The first fact to work on," he continued, "is that there is no real job for me here. This city has no water problem that cannot be worked out by an engineer's office clerk. Why are they holding me here, paying me a profligate salary, for a job that is a joke for a grown-up man? There's something behind it that is not apparent on the surface." The weekly meetings of the three engineers became an established institution. Mindful that their conversation was doubtless the object of attention on the part of the ruling powers of the city through spies and concealed microphones, they were careful to discuss trivial matters most of the time, and mentioned their problem only when alone in the open spaces of the park. * * * * * After weeks of effort had produced no results, they arrived at the conclusion that they would have to do some spying themselves. The great temple, shaped like a dynamo-generator attracted their attention as the first possibility for obtaining information. Benda, during his work with telephone and television installation, found that the office of some sort of ruling council or board of directors were located there. Later he found that it was called the Science Staff. He managed to slip in several concealed microphone detectors and wire them to a private receiver on his desk, doing all the work with his own hands under the pretense of hunting for a cleverly contrived short-circuit that his subordinates had failed to find. "They open their meeting," he said, reporting several days of listening to his comrades, "with a lot of religious stuff. They really believe they are chosen by God to perfect the earth. Their fanaticism has the Mohammedans beat forty ways. As I get it from listening in, this city is just a preliminary base from which to carry, forcibly, the gospel of Scientific Efficiency to the whole world. They have been divinely appointed to organize the earth. "The first thing on the program is the seizure of New York City. And, it won't be long; I've heard the details of a cut-and-dried plan. When they have New York, the rest of America can be easily captured, for cities aren't as independent of each other as they used to be. Getting the rest of the world into their hands will then be merely a matter of routine; just a little time, and it will be done. Mohammed's wars weren't in it with this!" Francisco and Smith stared at him aghast. These dull-faced, blue-sergeclad people did not look capable of it; unless possibly one noted the fiery glint in their eyes. A worldwide Crusade on a scientific basis! The idea left them weak and trembling. "Got to learn more details before we can do anything," Benda said. "Come on; we've been whispering here long enough; they'll get suspicious." Benda's brain was now definitely pitted against this marvelous organisation. * * * * * "I've got it!" Benda reported at a later meeting. "I pieced it together from a few hours listening. Devilish scheme! "Can you imagine what would happen in New York in case of a break-down in water-supply, electric power, and communication? In an hour there would be a panic; in a day the city would be a hideous shambles of suffering, starvation, disease, and trampling maniacs. Dante's Inferno would be a lovely little pleasure-resort in comparison. "Also, have you ever stopped to think how few people there are in the world who understand the handling of these vital elements of our modern civilized organization sufficiently to keep them in operation? There you have the scheme. Because they do not want to destroy the city, but merely to threaten it, they are holding the three of us. A little skilful management will eliminate all other possible men who could operate the city's machinery, except ourselves. We three will be placed in charge. A threat, perhaps a demonstration in some limited section of what horrors are possible. The city is at their mercy, and promptly surrenders. "An alternative plan was discussed: just a little quiet violence could eliminate those who are now in charge of the city's works, and the panic and horrors would commence. But, within an hour of the city's capitulation, the three of us could have things running smoothly again. And there would be no New York; in its place would be Science Community Number Two. From it they could step on to the next city." The other two stared at him. There was only one comment. "They seem to be sure that they could depend on us," Smith said. "They may be correct," Benda replied. "Would you stand by and see people perish if a turn of your hand could save them? You would for the moment, forget the issue between the old order and the new religion." They separated, horrified by the ghastly simplicity of the plan. * * * * * Just following this, Benda received the telegram announcing the prospective visit of his lifelong friend, Dr. Hagstrom. He took it at once to Rohan. "Will my friend be permitted to depart again, if he once gets in here?" he demanded with his customary directness. "It depends on you," Rohan replied blandly. "We want your friend to see our Community, and to go away and carry with him the nicest possible reports and descriptions of it to the world. I wonder, do I make myself clear?" "That means I've got to feed him taffy while he's here?" Benda asked gruffly. "You choose to put it indelicately. He is to see and hear only such things about the Science Community as will please the world and impress it favorably. I am sure you will understand that under no other circumstances will he be permitted to leave here." Benda turned around abruptly and walked out without a word. "Just a moment," Rohan called after him. "I am sure you appreciate the fact that every precaution will be taken to hear the least word that you say to him during his stay here? You are watched only perfunctorily now. While he is here you will be kept track of carefully, and there will be three methods of checking everything you do or say. I am sure you do not underestimate our caution in this matter." Benda spent the days intervening between then and the arrival of his friend Hagstrom, closed up in his office, in intense study. He figured things on pieces of paper, committed them to memory, and scrupulously burned the paper. Then he wandered about the park and plucked at leaves and twigs. PART III _The Cipher Message_ (Related by Peter Hagstrom, Ph.D.) Benda conducted me personally to a room very much like an ordinary hotel room. He was glad to see me. I could tell that from his grip of welcome, from his pleased face, from the warmth in his voice, from the eager way in which he hovered around me. I sat down on a bed and he on a chair. "Now tell me all about it," I said. The room was very still, and in its privacy, following Benda's demonstrative welcome, I expected some confidential revelations. Therefore I was astonished. "There isn't much to tell," he said gaily. "My work is congenial, fascinating, and there's enough of it to keep me out of mischief. The pay is good, and the life pleasant and easy." I didn't know what to say for a moment. I had come there with my mind made up that there was something suspicious afoot. But he seemed thoroughly happy and satisfied. "I'll admit that I treated you a little shabbily in this matter of letters," he continued. "I suppose it is because I've had a lot of new and interesting problems on my mind, and it's been hard to get my mind down to writing letters. But I've got a good start on my job, and I'll promise to reform." I was at a loss to pursue that subject any further. "Have you seen Smith and Francisco?" I asked. He nodded. "How do they like it?" "Both are enthusiastic about the wonderful opportunities in their respective fields. It's a fact: no engineer has ever before had such resources to work with, on such a vast scale, and with such a free hand. We're laying the framework for a city of ten millions, all thoroughly systematized and efficient. There is no city in the world like it; it's an engineer's dream of Utopia." * * * * * I was almost convinced. There was only the tiniest of lurking suspicions that all was not well, but it was not powerful enough to stimulate me to say anything. But I did determine to keep my eyes open. I might as well admit in advance that from that moment to the time when I left the Science Community four days later, I saw nothing to confirm my suspicions. I met Smith and Francisco at dinner and the four of us occupied a table to ourselves in a vast dining hall, and no one paid for the meal nor for subsequent ones. They also seemed content, and talked enthusiastically of their work. I was shown over the city, through its neat, efficient streets, through its comfortable dormitories each housing hundreds of families as luxuriously as any modern hotel, through its marvelous factories where production had passed the stage of labor and had assumed the condition of a devoted act of worship. These factory workers were not toiling: they were worshipping their God, of Whom each machine was a part. Touching their machine was touching their God. This machinery, while involving no new principles, was developed and coordinated to a degree that exceeded anything I had ever seen anywhere else. I saw the famous Science Temple in the shape of a huge dynamo-generator, with its interior decorations, paintings, carvings, frescoes, and pillars, all worked out on the motive of machinery; with its constant streams of worshippers in blue serge, performing their conventional rites and saying their prayer formulas at altars in the forms of lathes, microscopes, motors, and electron-tubes. "You haven't become a Science Communist yourself?" I bantered Benda. There was a metallic ring in the laugh he gave. "They'd like to have me!" was all he said. * * * * * I was rather surprised at the emptiness of the large and well-kept park to which Benda took me. It was beautifully landscaped, but only a few scattering people were there, lost in its vast reaches. "These people seem to have no need of recreation," Benda said. "They do not come here much. But I confess that I need air and relaxation, even if only for short snatches. I've been too busy to get away for long at a time, but this park has helped me keep my balance--I'm here every day for at least a few minutes." "Beautiful place," I remarked. "A lot of strange trees and plants I never saw before--" "Oh, mostly tropical forms, common enough in their own habitats. They have steam pipes under the ground to grow them. I've been trying to learn something about them. Fancy _me_ studying natural history! I've never cared for it, but here, where there is no such things as recreation, I have become intensely interested in it as a hobby. I find it very much of a rest to study these plants and bugs." "Why don't you run up to New York for a few days?" "Oh, the time will come for that. In the meanwhile, I've got an idea all of a sudden. Speaking of New York, will you do me a little service? Even though you might think it silly?" "I'll do anything I can," I began, eager to be of help to him. "It has been somewhat of a torture to me," Benda continued, "to find so many of these forms which I am unable to identify. I like to be scientific, even in my play, and reference books on plants and insects are scarce here. Now, if you would carry back a few specimens for me, and ask some of the botany and zoology people to send me their names--" "Fine!" I exclaimed. "I've got a good-sized pocket notebook I can carry them in." "Well then, please put them in the order in which I hand them to you, and send me the names by number. I am pretty thoroughly familiar with them, and if you will keep them in order, there is no need for me to keep a list. The first is a blade of this queer grass." I filed the grass blade between the first two pages of my book. "The next is this unusual-looking pinnate leaf." He tore off a dry leaflet and handed me a stem with three leaflets irregularly disposed of it. "Now leave a blank page in your book. That will help me remember the order in which they come." * * * * * Next came a flat insect, which, strangely enough, had two legs missing on one side. However, Benda was moving so fast that I had to put it away without comment. He kept darting about and handing me twigs of leaves, little sticks, pieces of bark, insects, not seeming to care much whether they were complete or not; grass-blades, several dagger-shaped locust-thorns, cross-sections of curious fruits, moving so rapidly that in a few moments my notebook bulged widely, and I had to warn him that its hundred leaves were almost filled. "Well, that ought to be enough," he said with a sigh after his lively exertion. "You don't know how I'll appreciate your indulging my foolish little whim." "Say!" I exclaimed. "Ask something of me. This it nothing. I'll take it right over to the Botany Department, and in a few days you ought to have a list of names fit for a Bolshevik." "One important caution," he said. "If you disturb their order in the book, or even the position on the page, the names you send me will mean nothing to me. Not that it will be any great loss," he added whimsically. "I suppose I've become a sort of fan on this, like the business men who claim that their office work interferes with their golf." We walked leisurely back toward the big dormitory. It was while we were crossing a street that Benda stumbled, and, to dodge a passing truck, had to catch my arm, and fell against me. I heard his soft voice whisper in my ear: "Get out of this town as soon as you can!" I looked at him in startled amazement, but he was walking along, shaking himself from his stumble, and looking up and down the street for passing trucks. "As I was saying," he said in a matter-of-fact voice, "we expect to reach the one-and-one-quarter million mark this month. I never saw a place grow so fast." * * * * * I felt a great leap of sudden understanding. For a moment my muscles tightened, but I took my cue. "Remarkable place," I said calmly; "one reads a lot of half-truths about it. Too bad I can't stay any longer." "Sorry you have to leave," he said, in exactly the right tone of voice. "But you can come again." How thankful I was for the forty years of playing and working together that had accustomed us to that sort of team-work! Unconsciously we responded to one another's cues. Once our ability to "play together" had saved my life. It was when we were in college and were out on a cross-country hike together; Benda suddenly caught my hand and swung it upward. I recognized the gesture; we were cheerleaders and worked together at football games, and we had one stunt in which we swung our hands over our heads, jumped about three feet, and let out a whoop. This was the "stunt" that he started out there in the country, where we were by ourselves. Automatically, without thinking, I swung my arms and leaped with him and yelled. Only later did I notice the rattlesnake over which I had jumped. I had not seen that I was about to walk right into it, and he had noticed it too late to explain. A flash of genius suggested the cheering stunt to him. "_Communication_ is a science!" he had said, and that was all the comment there was on the incident. So now, I followed my cue, without knowing why, nor what it was all about, but confident that I should soon find out. By noon I was on the bus, on my way through the pass, to meet the vehicle from Washington. As the bus swung along, a number of things kept jumbling through my mind: Benda's effusive glee at seeing me, and his sudden turning and bundling me off in a nervous hurry without a word of explanation; his lined and worried face and yet his insistence on the joys of his work in The Science Community; his obvious desire to be hospitable and play the good host, and yet his evasiveness and unwillingness to chat intimately and discuss important things as he used to. Finally, that notebook full of odd specimens bulging in my pocket. And the memory of his words as he shook hands with me when I was stepping into the bus: "Long live the science of communication!" he had said. Otherwise, he was rather glum and silent. * * * * * I took out the book of specimens and looked at it. His caution not to disturb the order and position of things rang in my ears. The Science of Communication! Two and two were beginning to make four in my mind. All the way on the train from Washington to New York I could hardly, keep my hands off the book. I had definitely abandoned the idea of hunting up botanists and zoologists at Columbia. Benda was not interested in the names of these things. That book meant something else. Some message. The Science of Communication! That suddenly explained all the contradictions in his behavior. He was being closely watched. Any attempt to tell me the things he wanted to say would be promptly recognized. He had succeeded brilliantly in getting a message to me. Now, my part was to read it! I felt a sudden sinking within me. That book full of leaves, bugs, and sticks? How could I make anything out of it? "There's the Secret Service," I thought. "They are skilled in reading hidden messages. It must be an important one, worthy of the efforts of the Secret Service, or he would not have been at such pains to get it to me-- "But no. The Secret Service is skilled at reading hidden messages, but not as skilled as I am in reading my friend's mind. Knowing Benda, his clear intellect, his logical methods, will be of more service in solving this than all the experts of the Secret Service." I barely stopped to eat dinner when I reached home. I hurried to the laboratory building, and laid out the specimens on white sheets of paper, meticulously preserving order, position, and spacing. To be on the safe side I had them photographed, asking the photographer to vary the scale of his pictures so that all of the final figures would be approximately the same size. Plate I. shows what I had. * * * * * I was all a-tremble when the mounted photographs were handed to me. The first thing I did was to number the specimens, giving each blank space also its consecutive number. Certainly no one could imagine a more meaningless jumble of twigs, leaves, berries, and bugs. How could I read any message out of that? Yet I had no doubt that the message concerned something of far more importance than Benda's own safety. He had moved in this matter with astonishing skill and breathless caution; yet I knew him to be reckless to the extreme where only his own skill was concerned. I couldn't even imagine his going to this elaborate risk merely on account of Smith and Francisco. Something bigger must be involved. I stared at the rows of specimens. "Communication is a science!" Benda had said, and it came back to me as I studied the bent worms and the beetles with two legs missing. I was confident that the solution would be simple. Once the key idea occurred to me I knew I should find the whole thing astonishingly direct and systematic. For a moment I tried to attach some sort of heiroglyphic significance to the specimen forms; in the writing of the American Indians, a wavy line meant water, an inverted V meant a wigwam. But, I discarded that idea in a moment. Benda's mind did not work along the paths of symbolism. It would have to be something mathematical, rigidly logical, leaving no room for guess-work. No sooner had the key-idea occurred to me than the basic conception underlying all these rows of twigs and bugs suddenly flashed into clear meaning before me. The simplicity of it took my breath away. "I knew it!" I said aloud, though I was alone. "Very simple." I was prepared for the fact that each one of the specimens represented a letter of the alphabet. If nothing else, their number indicated that. Now I could see, so clearly that the photographs shouted at me, that each specimen consisted of an upright stem, and from this middle stem projected side-arms to the right and to the left, and in various vertical locations on each side. The middle upright stem contained these side-arms in various numbers and combinations. In five minutes I had a copy of the message, translated into its fundamental characters, as shown on Plate II. [Illustration: Plate I] The first grass-blade was the simple, upright stem; the second, three leaflets on their stem, represented the upright portion with two arms to the left at the top and middle, and one arm to the right at the top; and so on. That brought the message down to the simple and straightforward matter of a substitution cipher. I was confident that Benda had no object in introducing any complications that could possibly be avoided, as his sole purpose was to get to me the most readable message without getting caught at it. I recollected now how cautious he had been to hand me no paper, and how openly and obviously he had dropped each specimen into my book; because he knew someone was watching him and expecting him to slip in a message. He had, as I could see now in the retrospect, been conspicuously careful that nothing suspicious should pass from his hands to mine. [Illustration: Plate II] Substitution ciphers are easy to solve, especially for those having some experience. The method can be found in Edgar Allen Poe's "Gold Bug" and in a host of its imitators. A Secret Service cipher man could have read it in an hour. But I knew my friend's mind well enough to find a short-cut. I knew just how he would go about devising such a cipher, in fact, how ninety-nine persons out of a hundred with a scientific education would do it. If we begin adding horizontal arms to the middle stem, from top to bottom and from left to right, the possible characters can be worked out by the system shown on Plate III. [Illustration: Plate III] It is most logical to suppose that Benda would begin with the first sign and substitute the letters of the alphabet in order. That would give us the cipher code shown on Plate IV. It was all very quick work, just as I had anticipated, once the key-idea had occurred to me. The ease and speed of my method far exceeded that of Poe's method, but, of course, was applicable only to this particular case. Substituting letters for signs out of my diagram, I got the following message: AM PRISONER R PLANS CAPTURE OF N Y BY SEIZING POWER WATER AND PHONES THEN WORLD CONQUEST S O S [Illustration: Plate IV] PART IV _L'Envoi_ (By Peter Hagstrom, M.D.) My solution of the message practically ends the story. Events followed each other from then on like bullets from a machine-gun. A wild drive in a taxicab brought me to the door of Mayor Anderson at ten o'clock that night. I told him the story and showed him my photographs. Following that I spent many hours telling my story to and consulting with officers in the War Department. Next afternoon, photographic maps of the Science Community and its environs, brought by airplanes during the forenoon, were spread on desks before us. A colonel of marines and a colonel of aviation sketched plans in notebooks. After dark I sat in a transport plane with muffled exhaust and propellers, slipping through the air as silently as a hawk. About us were a dozen bombing planes, and about fifty transports, carrying a battalion of marines. I am not an adventure-loving man. Though a cordon of husky marines about me was a protection against any possible danger, yet, stealing along through that wild valley in the Virginia mountains toward the dark masses of that fanatic city, the silent progress of the long, dark line through the night, their mysterious disappearance, one by one, as we neared the city, the creepy, hair-raising journey through the dark streets--I shall never forget for the rest of my life the sinking feeling in my abdomen and the throbbing in my head. But I wanted to be there, for Benda was my lifelong friend. I guided them to Rohan's rooms, and saw a dozen dark forms slip in, one by one. Then we went on to the dormitory where Benda lived. Benda answered our hammering at his door in his pajamas. He took in the Captain's automatic, and the bayonets behind me, at a glance. "Good boy, Hagstrom!" he said. "I knew you'd do it. There wasn't much time left. I got my instructions about handling the New York telephone system to-day." As we came out into the street. I saw Rohan handcuffed to two big marines, and rows of bayonets gleaming in the darkness down the streets. Every few moments a bright flare shot out from the planes in the sky, until a squad located the power-house and turned on all the lights they could find. [Illustration] Jetta of the Lowlands BEGINNING A THREE-PART NOVEL By Ray Cummings _Foreword_ _Have you ever stood on the seashore, with the breakers rolling at your feet, and imagined what the scene would be like if the ocean water were gone? I have had a vision of that many times. Standing on the Atlantic Coast, gazing out toward Spain, I can envisage myself, not down at the sea-level, but upon the brink of a height. Spain and the coast of Europe, off there upon another height._ [Sidenote: Fantastic and sinister are the Lowlands into which Philip Grant descends on his dangerous assignment.] _And the depths between? Unreal landscape! Mysterious realm which now we call the bottom of the sea! Worn and rounded crags; bloated mud-plains; noisome reaches of ooze which once were the cold and dark and silent ocean floor, caked and drying in the sun. And off to the south the little fairy mountain tops of the West Indies rearing their verdured crowns aloft._ [Illustration: "Look around, Chief. See where I am?"] _If the ocean water were gone! Can you picture it? A new world, greater in area than all the land we now have. They would call the former sea-level the zero-height, perhaps. The depths would go down as far beneath it as Mount Everest towers above it. Aeroplanes would fly down into them._ _And I can imagine the settlement of these vast new realms: New little nations being created, born of man's indomitable will to conquer every adverse condition of inhospitable nature._ _A novel setting for a story of adventure. It seems so to me. Can you say that the oceans will never drain of their water? That an earthquake will not open a rift--some day in the future--and lower the water into subterranean caverns? The volume of water of all the oceans is no more to the volume of the earth than a tissue paper wrapping on an orange._ _Is it too great a fantasy? Why, reading the facts of what happened in 1929, it is already prognosticated. The fishing banks off the Coast of Newfoundland have suddenly sunk. Cable ships repairing a broken cable, snapped by the earthquake of November 18th, 1929, report that for distances of a hundred miles on the Grand Banks the cables have disappeared into unfathomable depths. And before the subterranean cataclysm, they were within six hundred feet of the surface. And all the bottom of that section of the North Atlantic seems to have caved in. Ten thousand square miles dropped out of the bottom of the ocean! Fact, not fancy._ _And so let us enlarge the picture. Let us create the Lowlands--twenty thousand feet below the zero-height--the setting for a tale of adventure. The romance of the mist-shrouded deeps. And the romance of little Jetta._ CHAPTER I _The Secret Mission_ I was twenty-five years of age that May evening of 2020 when they sent me south into the Lowlands. I had been in the National Detective Service Bureau, and then was transferred to the Customs Department, Atlantic Lowlands Branch. I went alone; it was best, my commander thought. An assignment needing diplomacy rather than a show of force. It was 9 P. M. when I catapulted from the little stage of Long Island airport. A fair, moonlit evening--a moon just beyond the full, rising to pale the eastern stars. I climbed about a thousand feet, swung over the headlands of the Hook, and, keeping in the thousand-foot local lane, took my course. My destination lay some thirteen hundred miles southeast of Great New York. I could do a good normal three-ninety in this fleet little Wasp, especially if I kept in the rarer air-pressures over the zero-height. The thousand-foot lane had a southward drift, this night. I was making now well over four hundred; I would reach Nareda soon after midnight. The Continental Shelf slid beneath me, dropping away as my course took me further from the Highland borders. The Lowlands lay patched with inky shadows and splashes of moonlight. Domes with upstanding, rounded heads; plateaus of naked black rock, ten thousand feet below the zero-height; trenches, like valleys, ridged and pitted, naked in places like a pockmarked lunar landscape. Or again, a pall of black mist would shroud it all, dark curtain of sluggish cloud with moonlight tinging its edges pallid green. To my left, eastward toward the great basin of the mid-Atlantic Lowlands, there was always a steady downward slope. To the right, it came up over the continental shelf to the Highlands of the United States. There was often water to be seen in these Lowlands. A spring-fed lake far down in a caldron pit, spilling into a trench; low-lying, land-locked little seas; cañons, some of them dry, others filled with tumultuous flowing water. Or great gashes with water sluggishly flowing, or standing with a heavy slime, and a pall of uprising vapor in the heat of the night. At 37°N. and 70°W., I passed over the newly named Atlas Sea. A lake of water here, more than a hundred miles in extent. Its surface lay fifteen thousand feet below the zero-height; its depth in places was a full three thousand. It was clear of mist to-night. The moonlight shimmered on its rippled surface, like pictures my father had often shown me of the former oceans. I passed, a little later, well to the westward of the verdured mountain top of the Bermudas. There was nothing of this flight novel to me. I had frequently flown over the Lowlands; I had descended into them many times. But never upon such a mission as was taking me there now. I was headed for Nareda, capital village of the tiny Lowland Republic of Nareda, which only five years ago came into national being as a protectorate of the United States. Its territory lies just north of the mountain Highlands of Haiti, Santo Domingo and Porto Rico. A few hundred miles of tumbled Lowlands, embracing the turgid Nares Sea, whose bottom is the lowest point of all the Western Hemisphere--some thirty thousand feet below the zero-height. The village of Nareda is far down indeed. I had never been there. My charts showed it on the southern border of the Nares Sea, at minus twenty thousand feet, with the Mona Valley behind it like a gash in the steep upward slopes to the Highlands of Porto Rico and Haiti. Nareda has a mixed population of typical Lowland adventures, among which the hardy Dutch predominate; and Holland and the United States have combined their influence in the World Court to give it national identity. * * * * * And out of this had arisen my mission now. Mercury--the quicksilver of commerce--so recently come to tremendous value through its universal use in the new antiseptics which bid fair to check all human disease--was being produced in Nareda. The import duty into the United States was being paid openly enough. But nevertheless Hanley's agents believed that smuggling was taking place. It was to investigate this condition that Hanley was sending me. I had introduction to the Nareda government officials. I was to consult with Hanley by ether-phone in seeking the hidden source of the contraband quicksilver, but, in the main, to use my own judgment. A mission of diplomacy. I had no mind to pry openly among the people of these Lowland depths, looking for smugglers. I might, indeed, find them too unexpectedly! Over-curious strangers are not welcomed by the Lowlanders. Many have gone into the depths and have never returned.... I was above the Nares Sea, by midnight. I was still flying a thousand feet over the zero-height. Twenty-one thousand feet below me lay the black expanse of water. The moon had climbed well toward the zenith, now. Its silver shafts penetrated the hanging mist-stratas. The surface of the Nares Sea was visible--dark and sullen looking. I shifted the angles of incidence of the wings, re-set my propeller angles and made the necessary carburetor adjustments, switching on the supercharger which would supply air at normal zero-height pressure to the carburetors throughout my descent. I swung over Nareda. The lights of the little village, far down, dwarfed by distance, showed like bleary, winking eyes through the mists. The jagged recesses of the Mona valley were dark with shadow. The Nares Sea lay like some black monster asleep, and slowly, heavily panting. Moonlight was over me, with stars and fleecy white clouds. Calm, placid, atmospheric night was up here. But beneath, it all seemed so mysterious, fantastic, sinister. My heart was pounding as I put the Wasp into a spiral and forced my way down. CHAPTER II _The Face at the Window_ With heavy, sluggish engines I panted down and came to rest in the dull yellow glow of the field lights. A new world here. The field was flat, caked ooze, cracked and hardened. It sloped upward from the shore toward where, a quarter of a mile away, I could see the dull lights of the settlement, blurred by the gathered night vapors. The field operator shut off his permission signal and came forward. He was a squat, heavy-set fellow in wide trousers and soiled white shirt flung open at his thick throat. The sweat streamed from his forehead. This oppressive heat! I had discarded my flying garb in the descent. I wore a shirt, knee-length pants, with hose and wide-soled shoes of the newly fashioned Lowland design. What few weapons I dared carry were carefully concealed. No alien could enter Nareda bearing anything resembling a lethal weapon. My wide, thick-soled shoes did not look suspicious for one who planned much walking on the caked Lowland ooze. But those fat soles were cleverly fashioned to hide a long, keen knife-blade, like a dirk. I could lift a foot and get the knife out of its hidden compartment with fair speed. This I had in one shoe. In the other, was the small mechanism of a radio safety recorder and image finder, with its attendant individual audiophone transmitter and receiver. A miracle of smallness, these tiny contrivances. With batteries, wires and grids, the whole device could lay in the palm of one's hand. Once past this field inspection I would rig it for use under my shirt, strapped around my chest. And I had some colored magnesium flares. * * * * * The field operator came panting. "Who are you?" "Philip Grant. From Great New York." I showed him my name etched on my forearm. He and his fellows searched me, but I got by. "You have no documents?" "No." My letter to the President of Nareda was written with invisible ink upon the fabric of my shirt. If he had heated it to a temperature of 180°F. or so, and blown the fumes of hydrochloric acid upon it, the writing would have come out plain enough. I said, "You'll house and care for my machine?" They would care for it. They told me the price--swindlingly exorbitant for the unwary traveller who might wander down here. "All correct," I said cheerfully. "And half that much more for you and your men if you give me good service. Where can I have a room and meals?" "Spawn," said the operator. "He is the best. Fat-bellied from his own good cooking. Take him there, Hugo." I had a gold coin instantly ready; and with a few additional directions regarding my flyer, I started off. It had been hot and oppressive standing in the field; it was infinitely worse climbing the mud-slope into the village; but my carrier, trudging in advance of me along the dark, winding path up the slope, shouldered my bag and seemed not to notice the effort. We passed occasional tube-lights strung on poles. They illumined the heavy rounded crags. A tumbled region, this slope which once was the ocean floor twenty thousand feet below the surface. Rifts were here like gulleys; little buttes reared their rounded, dome heads. And there were caves and crevices in which deep sea fish once had lurked. * * * * * For ten minutes or so we climbed. It was past the midnight hour; the village was asleep. We entered its outposts. The houses were small structures of clay. In the gloom they looked like drab little beehives set in unplanned groups, with paths for streets wandering between them. Then we came to a more prosperous neighborhood. The street widened and straightened. The clay houses, still with rounded dome like tops, stood back from the road, with wooden front fences, and gardens and shrubbery. The windows and doors were like round finger-holes plugged in the clay by a giant hand. Occasionally the windows, dimly lighted, stared like sleeping giant eyes. There were flowers in all the more pretentious private gardens. Their perfume, hanging in the heavy night air, lay on the village, making one forget the over-curtain of stenching mist. Down by the shore of the Nares Sea, this world of the depths had seemed darkly sinister. But in the village now, I felt it less ominous. The scent of the flowers, the street lined in one place by arching giant fronds drowsing and nodding overhead--there seemed a strange exotic romance to it. The sultry air might almost have been sensuous. "Much further, Hugo?" "No. We are here." He turned abruptly into a gateway, led me through a garden and to the doorway of a large, rambling, one-story building. The news of my coming had preceded me. A front room was lighted; my host was waiting. Hugo set down my bag, accepted another gold coin; and with a queer sidelong smile, the incentive for which I had not the slightest idea, he vanished. I fronted my host, this Jacob Spawn. Strange fate that should have led me to Spawn! And to little Jetta! * * * * * Spawn was a fat-bellied Dutchman, as the field attendant had said. A fellow of perhaps fifty-five, with sparse gray hair and a heavy-jowled, smooth-shaved face from which his small eyes peered stolidly at me. He laid aside a huge, old-fashioned calabash pipe and offered a pudgy hand. "Welcome, young man, to Nareda. Seldom do we see strangers." The meal which he presently cooked and served me himself was lavishly done. He spoke good English, but slowly, heavily, with the guttural intonation of his race. He sat across the table from me, puffing his pipe while I ate. "What brings you here, young lad? A week, you say?" "Or more. I don't know. I'm looking for oil. There should be petroleum beneath these rocks." For an hour I avoided his prying questions. His little eyes roved me, and I knew he was no fool, this Dutchman, for all his heavy, stolid look. We remained in his kitchen. Save for its mud walls, its concave, dome-roof, it might have been a cookery of the Highlands. There was a table with its tube-light; the chairs; his electron stove; his orderly rows of pots and pans and dishes on a broad shelf. I recall that it seemed to me a woman's hand must be here. But I saw no woman. No one, indeed, beside Spawn himself seemed to live here. He was reticent of his own business, however much he wanted to pry into mine. I had felt convinced that we were alone. But suddenly I realized it was not so. The kitchen adjoined an interior back-garden. I could see it through the opened door oval--a dim space of flowers; a little path to a pergola; an adobe fountain. It was a sort of Spanish patio out there, partially enclosed by the wings of the house. Moonlight was struggling into it. And, as I gazed idly, I thought I saw a figure lurking. Someone watching us. * * * * * Was it a boy, observing us from the shadowed moonlit garden? I thought so. A slight, half grown boy. I saw his figure--in short ragged trousers and a shirt-blouse--made visible in a patch of moonlight as he moved away and entered the dark opposite wing of the house. I did not see the boy's figure again; and presently I suggested that I retire. Spawn had already shown me my bedroom. It was in another wing of the house. It had a window facing the front; and a window and door back to this same patio. And a door to the house corridor. "Sleep well, Meester Grant." My bag was here on the table under an electrolier. "Shall I call you?" "Yes," I said. "Early." He lingered a moment. I was opening my bag. I flung it wide under his gaze. "Well, good night. I shall be very comfortable, thanks." "Good night," he said. He went out the patio door. I watched his figure cross the moonlit path and enter the kitchen. The noise of his puttering there sounded for a time. Then the light went out and the house and garden fell into silence. I closed my doors. They sealed on the inside, and I fastened them securely. Then I fastened the transparent window panes. I did not undress, but lay on the bed in the dark. I was tired; I realized it now. But sleep would not come. I am no believer in occultism, but there are premonitions which one cannot deny. It seemed now as I lay there in the dark that I had every reason to be perturbed, yet I could not think why. Perhaps it was because I had been lying to this innkeeper stoutly for an hour past, and whether he believed me or not for the life of me I could not now determine. * * * * * I sat up on the bed, presently, and adjusted the wires and diaphragms of the ether-wave mechanism. When in place it was all concealed under my shirt. As I switched it on, the electrodes against my flesh tingled a little. But it was absolutely soundless, and one gets used to the tingle. I decided to call Hanley. The New York wave-sorter handled me promptly, but Hanley's office was dead. As I sat there in the darkness, annoyed at this, a slight noise forced itself on me. A scratching--a tap--something outside my window. Spawn, come back to peer in at me? I slipped noiselessly from the bed. The sound had come from the window which faced the patio. The room, over by the bed, was wholly dark. The moonlight outside showed the patio window as a dimly illumined oval. For a moment I crouched on the floor by the bed. No sound. The silence of the Lowlands is as heavy and oppressive as its air. I felt as though my heart were audible. I lifted my foot; extracted my dirk. It opened into a very businesslike steel blade of a good twelve-inch length. I bared the blade. The click of it leaving the flat, hollow handle sounded loud in the stillness of the room. A moment. Then it seemed that outside my window a shadow had moved. I crept along the floor. Rose up suddenly at the window. And stared at a face peering in at me. A small face, framed by short, clustering, dark curls. A girl! CHAPTER III _In a Moonlit Garden_ She drew back from the window like a startled fawn; timorous, yet curious, too, for she ran only a few steps, then turned and stood peering. The moonlight slanted over the western roof of the building and fell on her. A slight, boyish figure in short, tattered trousers and a boy's shirt, open at her slim, rounded throat. The moonlight gleamed on the white shirt fabric to show it torn and ragged. Her arms were upraised; her head, with clustering, flying dark curls, was tilted as though listening for a sound from me. A shy, wild creature. Drawn to my window; tapping to awaken me, then frightened at what she had done. I opened the garden door. She did not move. I thought she would run, but she did not. The moonlight was on me as I stood there. I was conscious of its etching me with its silver sheen. And twenty feet from me this girl stood and gazed, with startled eyes and parted lips--and white limbs trembling like a frightened animal. The patio was very silent. The heavy arching fronds stirred slightly with a vague night breeze; the moonlight threw a lacy dark pattern of them on the gray stone path. The fountain bowl gleamed white in the moonlight behind the girl, and in the silence I could hear the low splashing of the water. A magic moment. Unforgettable. It comes to some of us just once, but to all of us it comes. I stood with its spell upon me. Then I heard my voice, tense but softly raised. "Who are you?" It frightened her. She retreated until the fountain was between us. And as I took a step forward, she retreated further, noiseless, with her bare feet treading the smooth stones the path. * * * * * I ran and caught her at the doorway of the flowered pergola. She stood trembling as I seized her arms. But the timorous smile remained, and her eyes, upraised to mine, glowed with misty starlight. "Who are you?" This time she answered me. "I am called Jetta." It seemed that from her white forearm within my grasp a magic current swept from her to me and back again. We humans, for all our clamoring, boasting intellectuality, are no more than puppets in Nature's hands. "Are you Spawn's daughter?" "Yes." "I saw you a while ago, when I was having my meal." "Yes--I was watching you." "I thought you were a boy." "Yes. My father told me to keep away. I wanted to meet you, so I came to wake you up." "He may be watching us now." "No. He is sleeping. Listen--you can hear him snore." I could, indeed. The silence of the garden was broken now by a distant, choking snore. We both laughed. She sat on the little mossy seat in the pergola doorway And on the side away from the snore. (I had the wit to be sure of that.) "I wanted to meet you," she repeated. "Was it too bold?" * * * * * I think that what we said sitting there with the slanting moonlight on us, could not have amounted to much. Yet for us, it was so important! Vital. Building memories which I knew--and I think that she knew, even then--we would never forget. "I will be here a week, Jetta." "I want--I want very much to know you. I want you to tell me about the world of the Highlands. I have a few books. I can't read very well, but I can look at the pictures." "Oh, I see--" "A traveler gave them to me. I've got them hidden. But he was an old man: all men seem to be old--except those in the pictures, and you, Philip." I laughed. "Well, that's too bad. I'm mighty glad I'm young." Ah, in that moment, with blessed youth surging in my veins, I was glad indeed! "Young. I don't remember ever seeing anyone like you. The man I am to marry is not like you. He is old, like father--" I drew back from her, startled. "Marry?" "Yes. When I am seventeen. The law of Nareda--your Highland law, too, father says--will not let a girl be married until she is that age. In a month I am seventeen." "Oh!" And I stammered, "But why are you going to marry?" "Because father tells me to. And then I shall have fine clothes: it is promised me. And go to live in the Highlands, perhaps. And see things; and be a woman, not a ragged boy forbidden to show myself; and--" * * * * * I was barely touching her. It seemed as though something--some vision of happiness which had been given me--were fading, were being snatched away. I was conscious of my hand moving to touch hers. "Why do you marry--unless you're in love? Are you?" Her gaze like a child came up to meet mine. "I never thought much about that. I have tried not to. It frightened me--until to-night." She pushed me gently away. "Don't. Let's not talk of him. I'd rather not." "But why are you dressed as a boy?" I gazed at her slim but rounded figure in tattered boy's garb--but the woman's lines were unmistakable. And her face, with clustering curls. Gentle girlhood. A face of dark, wild beauty. "My father hates women. He says they are all bad. It is a sin to wear woman's finery; or it breeds sin in women. Let's not talk of that. Philip, tell me--oh, if you could only realize all the things I want to know. In Great New York, there are theatres and music?" "Yes," I said. And began telling her about them. The witching of this moonlit garden! But the moon had presently sunk, and to the east the stars were fading. "Philip! Look! Why, it's dawn already. I've got to leave you." I held her just a moment by the hand. "May I meet you here to-morrow night?" I asked. "Yes," she said simply. "Good night--Jetta." "Good night. You--you've made me very happy." She was gone, into a doorway of the opposite wing. The silent, empty garden sounded with the distant, reassuring snores of the still sleeping Spawn. I went back to my room and lay on my bed. And drifted off on a sea of magic memories. The world--my world before this night--now seemed to have been so drab. Empty. Lifeless. But now there was pulsing, living magic in it for me. I drifted into sleep, thinking of it. CHAPTER IV _The Mine in the Cauldron Depths_ I was awakened by the tinkling, buzzing call of the radio-diaphragm beneath my shirt. I had left the call open. It was Hanley. I lay down, eyeing my window which now was illumined by the flat light of dawn. Hanley's microscopic voice: "Phil? I've just raised President Markes, there in Nareda. I've been a bit worried about you." "I'm all right, Chief." "Well, you'd better see President Markes this morning." "That was my intention." "Tell him frankly what you're after. This smuggling of quicksilver from Nareda has got to stop. But take it easy, Phil; don't be reckless. Remember: one little knife thrust and I've lost a good man!" I laughed at his anxious tone. That was always Hanley's way. A devil himself, when he was on a trail, but always worried for fear one of his men would come to harm. "Right enough, Chief. I'll be careful." He cut off presently. I did not see Jetta that morning. I told Spawn I was hoping to see President Markes on my petroleum proposition. And at the proper hour I took myself to the government house. * * * * * This Lowland village by daylight seemed even more fantastic than shrouded in the shadows of night. The morning sun had dissipated the overhead mists. It was hot in the rocky streets under the weird overhanging vegetation. The settlement was quietly busy with its tropical activities. There were a few local shops; vehicles with the Highland domestic animals--horses and oxen--panting in the heat; an occasional electro-automatic car. But there were not many evidences of modernity here. The street and house tube-lights. A few radio image-finders on the house-tops. An automatic escalator bringing ore from a nearby mine past the government checkers to an aero stage for northern transportation. Cultivated fields in the village outskirts operated with modern machinery. But beyond that, it seemed primitive. Two hundred years back. Street vendors. People in primitive, ragged, tropical garb. Half naked children. I was stared at curiously. An augmenting group of children followed me as I went down the street. The President admitted me at once. In his airy office, with safeguards against eavesdropping, I found him at his desk with a bank of modern instruments before him. "Sit down, Grant." * * * * * He was a heavy-set, flabby man of sixty-odd, this Lowland President. White hair; and an old-fashioned, rolling white mustache of the sort lately come into South American fashion. He sat with a glass of iced drink at his side. His uniform was stiffly white, and ornate with heavy gold braid, but his neckpiece was wilted with perspiration. "Damnable heat, Grant." "Yes, Sir President." "Have a drink." He swung a tinkling glass before me. "Now then, tell me what is your trouble. Smuggling, here in Nareda. I don't believe it." His eyes, incongruously alert with all the rest of him so fat and lazy, twinkled at me. "We of the Nareda Government watch our quicksilver production very closely. The government fee is a third." I might say that the Nareda government collected a third on all the mineral and agricultural products of the country, in exchange for the necessary government concessions. Markes exported this share openly to the world markets, paying the duty exactly like a private corporation. He added, "You think--Hanley thinks--the smuggling is on too large a scale to be any illicit producer?" I nodded. "Then," he said, "it must be one of our recognized mines." "Hanley thinks it is a recognized mine, falsifying its production record," I explained. "If that is so, I will discover it," he said. He spoke with enthusiasm and vigor. "For you I shall treat as what you are--the representative of our most friendly government. The figures of our quicksilver production I shall lay before you in just a few days. Let me fill up your glass, Grant." * * * * * The lazy tropics. I really did not doubt his sincerity. But I did doubt his ability to cope with any clever criminal. His enthusiasm for action would wilt like his neckpiece, in Nareda's heat. Unless, perhaps, the knowledge that the smuggler was cheating him as well as the United States--_that_ might spur him. He added--and now I got a shock wholly unexpected: "If we think that some recognized producer of quicksilver here is cheating us, it should not be difficult to check up on it. Nareda has only one large cinnabar lode being worked. A private individual: that fellow Jacob Spawn--" "Spawn?" I exclaimed involuntarily. "Why, yes. Did not he mention it? His mine is no more than ten kilometers from here--back on the southern slope." "He didn't mention it," I said. "So? That is strange; but he is a secretive Dutchman by nature. He specializes in prying into the other fellow's affairs. Hm-m." He fell into a reverie while I stared at him. Spawn, the big--the only big--quicksilver producer here! * * * * * The President interrupted my startled thoughts. "I hope you did not intimate your real purpose?" "No." We both turned at the sound of an opening door. Markes called, "Ah, come in Perona! Are you alone? Good! Close that slide. Here is Chief Hanley's representative." He introduced us all in a breath. "This is interesting, Perona. Damnably interesting. We're being cheated, what? It looks that way. Sit down, Perona." This was Greko Perona. Nareda's Minister of Internal Affairs. Spawn had mentioned him to me. A South American. A man in his fifties. Thin and darkly saturnine, with iron-gray hair, carefully plastered to cover his half-bald head. He sat listening to the President's harangue, twirling the upturned waxen ends of his artificially black mustache. A wave of perfume enveloped him. A ladies' courtier, this Perona by the look of him. His white uniform was immaculate, carefully tailored and carefully worn to set off at its best his still trim and erect figure. "Well," he said, when at last the President paused, "of a surety something must be done." Perona seemed not excited, rather more carefully watchful, of his own words, and of me. His small dark eyes roved me. "What is it you would plan to do about it, Señorito?" An irony was in that Latin diminutive! He spread his pale hands. "Your United States officials perhaps exaggerate. I am very doubtful if we have smugglers here in Nareda." "Unless it is Spawn," the President interjected. * * * * * Perona frowned slightly. But his suave manner remained. "Spawn? Why Spawn?" "You need not take offense, Perona," Markes retorted. "We are discussing this before an envoy of the United States, sent here to consult with us. We have nothing to hide." Markes turned to me. And his next words were like a bomb exploding at my feet. "Perona _is_ offended, Grant. But I promise you, his natural personal prejudice will not affect my investigation. Of course he is prejudiced, since he is to marry Spawn's daughter, the little Jetta." I started involuntarily. This pomaded old dotard! This perfumed, ancient dandy! For all the importance of my mission in Nareda my thoughts had been subconsciously more upon Jetta--far more--than upon smugglers of quicksilver. This palsied popinjay! This, the reality of the specter which had been between Jetta and me during all that magic time in the moonlit garden! This suave old rake! Betrothed to that woodland pixie whose hand I had held and to whom I had sung love songs in the magic flower-scented moonlight only a few hours ago! And whom I had promised to meet there again to-night! This, then, was my rival! * * * * * Nothing of importance transpired during the remainder of that interview. Markes reiterated his intention of making a complete governmental investigation at once. To which Perona suavely assented. "_Por Dios Señorito_," he said to me, "we would not have your great government annoyed at Nareda. If there are smugglers, we will capture them of a certainty." From the Government House, it now being almost time for the midday meal, I returned to Spawn's. The rambling mud walls of the Inn stood baking in the noonday heat when I arrived. The outer garden drowsed; there seemed no one about. I went through the main door oval into the front public room, where first I had met Spawn. He was not here now, nor was Jetta. A sudden furtiveness fell upon me. With noiseless steps I went the length of the dim, padded interior corridor to my own room. My belongings seemed undisturbed; a vague idea that Spawn might have seized this opportunity to ransack them had come to me. But it seemed not; though if he had he would have found nothing. I stood for a moment listening at my patio window. I could see the kitchen from here; there was no one in it. I started back for the living room. That furtive instinct was still on me. I made no noise. And abruptly I heard Spawn's voice, floating out softly in the hushed silence of the house. "So, Perona?" * * * * * A brief silence, in which it seemed that I could hear a tiny aerial answer. Then Spawn again. A startled oath. "De duvel! You say--" I stood frozen, listening. "She is here.... Yes, I will keep her close. I am no fool, Perona." Spawn's laugh was like a growl. "Later to-day, yes. Fear not! I am no fool. I will be careful of it." Spawn, talking by private audiphone, to Perona. The colloquy came to an abrupt end. "... Might eavesdrop? By hell, you are right!" I heard the click as Spawn and Perona broke connection. Spawn came from his room. But he was not quick enough. I slipped away before he saw me. In the living room I had time to be calmly seated with a lighted cigarette. His approaching heavy footsteps sounded. He came in. "Oh--Grant." "Good noon, friend Spawn. I'm hungry." I grinned at him. "I understand my bargain with you included a noonday meal. Does it?" He eyed me suspiciously. "Have you been waiting here long?" "No. I just came in." He led me to the kitchen. He apologized for the informality of his hotel service: visitors were so infrequent. But the good quality of his food would make up for it. "Right," I agreed. "Your food is marvelous, friend Spawn." * * * * * There was a difference in Spawn's manner toward me now. He seemed far more wary. Outwardly he was in a high good humor. He asked nothing concerning my morning at the Government House. He puttered over his electron-stove, making me help him; he cursed the heat; he said one could not eat in such heat as this; but the meal he cooked, and the way he sat down opposite me and attacked it, belied him. He was acting; but so was I. And perhaps I deceived him as little as he deceived me. We avoided the things which were uppermost in the thoughts of us both. But, when we had very nearly finished the meal, I decided to try him out. I said suddenly, out of a silence: "Spawn, why didn't you tell me you were a producer of quicksilver?" I shot him a sharp glance. "You are, aren't you?" It took him by surprise, but he recovered himself instantly. "Yes. Are you interested?" I tried another shot. "What surprised me was that a wealthy mine owner--you are, aren't you?--should bother to keep an unprofitable hotel. Why bother with it, Spawn?" I thought I knew the answer: he wanted Nareda's visitors under his eyes. "That is a pleasure." There was irony in his tone. "I am a lonesome man. I like--interesting companionship, such as yours, young Grant." It was on my tongue to hint at his daughter. But I thought better of it. "I am going to the mine now," he said abruptly. "Would you like to come?" "Yes," I smiled. "Thanks." * * * * * I wanted to see his mine. But that he should be eager to show it, surprised me. I wondered what purpose he could have in that. I had a hint of it later; for when we took his little autocar and slid up the winding road into the bloated crags towering on the slope behind Nareda, he told me calmly: "I shall have to put you in charge of my mine commander. I am busy elsewhere this afternoon. You will see the mine just as well without me." He added. "I must go to the Government House: President Markes wants a report on my recent production." So that was what Perona had told him over the audiphone just before our noonday meal? It was an inferno of shadows and glaring lights, this underground cavern. As modern mining activities go, it was small and primitive. No more than a dozen men were here, beside the sweating pudgy mine commander who was my guide. A voluble fellow; of what original nationality I could not determine. We stood watching the line of carts dumping the ore onto the endless lifting-belt. It went a hundred feet or so up and out of the cavern's ascending shaft, to fall with a clatter into the bins above the smelter. "Rich ore," I said. "Isn't it?" The cinnabar ran like thick blood-red veins in the rock. "Rich," said the mine commander. "That it is. Rich. But who does it make rich? Only Spawn, not me." He waved his arms, airing his grievance with which for an hour past he had regaled me. "Only Spawn. For me, a dole each week." The smelter was in a stone building--one of a small group of mine houses which stood in a cauldron depression above excavations. Rounded domes of rock towered above them. The sun, even at this tri-noon hour, was gone behind the heights above us. The murky shadows of night were gathering, the mists of the Lowlands settling. The tube-lights of the mine, strung between small metal poles, winked on like bleary eyes. "Of a day soon I will fling this job to hell--" * * * * * I was paying scant attention to the fellow's tirade. Could there be smuggling going on from this mine? It all seemed to be conducted openly enough. If the production record were being falsified I felt that this dissatisfied mine commander was not aware of it. He showed me the smelter, where the quicksilver condensed in the coils and ran with its small luminous silver streams into the vats. He was called away momentarily by one of his men, leaving me standing there. I was alone; no one seemed in sight, or within hearing. In the shadow of the condensers I drew out my transmitter and called Hanley. I got him within a minute. "Chief!" "Yes, Phil. I hoped you'd call me. Didn't want to chance it, raising you when you might not be alone." I told him swiftly what I had done; where I was now. And Hanley said, with equal briskness: "I've an important fact. Just had Markes on secret wave-length. He tells me that Spawn has been saving up his quicksilver for six months past. He's got several hundred thousand dollar-standards' worth of it in ingots there right now." "Here at the mine?" "Yes. Got them all radiuminized, ready for the highest priced markets. Markes says he is scheduled to turn them over to the government checkers to-morrow. The Nareda government takes its share to-morrow; then Spawn exports the rest." I heard a footstep. "Off, Chief! I'll call you later!" I clicked off summarily. The little grid was under my shirt when the mine commander rejoined me. * * * * * For another half hour or to I hovered about the smelter house. A treasure of quicksilver ingots here? I mentioned it casually to my companion. He shot me a sharp glance. "Spawn has told you that?" "I heard it." "His business. We do not talk of that. Never can I tell what Spawn will choose to take offense at." We rambled upon other subjects. Later, he said, "We work not at night. But Spawn, he is here often at night, with his friend, the Señor Perona." That caught my attention. "I met Perona this morning," I said quickly. "Is he a partner of Spawn's?" "If he is so, I never was told it. But much he is here--at night." "Why at night?" The fellow really knew nothing. Or if he did, he was diplomatic enough not to jeopardize his post by babbling of it to me. He said: "Perona is Spawn's friend. Why not? His daughter to marry: that will make him a son-in-law." He laughed. "An old fool, but not such a fool either. Spawn is rich." "His daughter. Has he a daughter?" "The little Jetta. You haven't seen her? Well, that is not strange. Spawn keeps her very hidden. A mystery about it: all Nareda talks, but no one knows; and Spawn does not like questions." Spawn abruptly joined us! He came from the black shadows of the lurid smelter room. Had he heard us discussing Jetta? I wondered. CHAPTER V _Mysterious Meeting_ "Ah, Grant--have you enjoyed yourself?" He dismissed his subordinate. "I was detained. Sorry." He was smoothly imperturbable. "Have you seen everything? Quite a little plant I have here? We shut down early to-day. I will make ready to close." I followed him about while he arranged for the termination of the day's activities. The clatter of the smelter house was presently still; the men departing. Spawn and I were the last to leave, save for the eight men who were the mine's night guards. They were stalwart, silent fellows, armed with electronic needle projectors. The lights of the mine went low until they were mere pencil points of blue illumination in the gloom. The eery look of the place was intensified by the darkness and silence of the abnormally early nightfall. The fantastic crags stood dark with formless shadow. Spawn stopped to speak to one of the guards. The men wore a gold-trimmed, but now dirty, white linen uniform, wilted by the heat--the uniform of Nareda's police. I remarked it to him. "The government lent me the men," Spawn explained. "Of an ordinary time I have only one guard." "But this then, is not an ordinary time?" I hinted. He looked at me sharply. And upon sudden impulse, I added: "President Markes said something about you having a treasure here. Radiumized quicksilver." It was evidently Spawn's desire to appear thoroughly frank with me. He laughed. "Well, then, if Markes has told you, then might I not as well admit it? The treasure is here, indeed yes. Will you like to see it?" * * * * * He led me into a little strong room adjoining the smelter coil-rectifiers. He flashed his hand searchlight. On the floor, piled crosswise, were small moulded bars of refined quicksilver--dull, darkened silver ingots of this world's most precious metal. "Quite a treasure, Grant, here to-night. See, it is radiumized." He snapped off his torch. In the darkness the little bars glowed irridescent. "To-morrow I will divide with our Nareda government. One-third for them. And my own share I will export: to Great New York, this shipment. Already I have the order for it." He added calmly, "The duty is high, Grant. Too bad your big New York market is protected by so large a duty. With my cost of production--these accursed Lowland workmen who demand so much for their labor, and a third of all I produce taken by Nareda--there is not much in it for me." He had re-lighted the room. I could feel his eyes on me, but I said nothing. It was obvious to me now that he knew I was a government customs agent. I said, "This certainly interests me, friend Spawn. I'll tell you why some other time." We exchanged significant glances, both of us smiling. "Well can I guess it, young Grant. So here is my treasure. Without the duty I would soon be wealthy. Chut! Why should I roll in a pity for myself? There is a duty and I am an honest man, so I pay it." I said, "Aren't you afraid to leave this stored here?" I knew that this pile of ingots--the quicksilver in its radiumized form--was worth four or five hundred thousand dollars in American gold-coin at the very least. * * * * * Spawn shrugged. "Who would attack it? But of course I will be glad to be rid of it. It is a great responsibility--even though it carries international insurance, to protect my and the Nareda Government share." He was sealing up the heavy barred portals of the little strong-room. There was an alarm-detector, connected with the office of Nareda's police commander. Spawn set the alarm carefully. "I have every safeguard, Grant. There is really no danger." He added, as though with sudden thought. "Except possibly one--a depth bandit named De Boer. Ever you have heard of him?" "Yes. I have." We climbed into Spawn's small automatic vehicle. The lights of the mine faded behind us as we coasted the winding road down to the village. "De Boer," said Spawn. "A fellow who lives by his wits in the depths. Near here, perhaps: who knows? They say he has many followers--fifty--a hundred, perhaps--outlaws: a cut-belly band it must be." "Didn't he once take a hand in Nareda's politics?" I suggested. Spawn guffawed. "That is so. He was once what they called a patriot here. He thought he might be made President. But Markes ran him out. Now he is a bandit. I have believe that American mail-ship which sank last year in the cauldron north of the Nares Sea--you remember how it was attacked by bandits?--I have always believe that was De Boer's band." * * * * * We rolled back to Nareda. Spawn's manner had again changed. He seemed even more friendly than before. More at his ease with me. We had supper, and smoked together in his living room for half an hour afterward. But my thoughts were more on Jetta than on her father. There was still no evidence of her about the premises. Ah, if I only had known what had taken place there at Spawn's that afternoon while I was at the mine! Soon after supper Spawn yawned. "I think I shall go to bed." His glance was inquiring. "What are you going to do?" I stood up. "I'll go to bed, too. Markes wants to see me early in the morning. You'll be there, Spawn?" "Yes. We will go together." It was still no more than eight o'clock in the evening. Spawn followed me to my bedroom, and left me at its door. "Sleep well. I will call you in time." "Thanks, Spawn." I wondered if there were irony in his voice as he said good night. No one could have told. * * * * * I did not go to bed. I sat listening to the silence of my room and the garden, and Spawn's retreating footsteps. He had said he was sleepy, but nevertheless I presently heard him across the patio. He was apparently in the kitchen, cleaning away our meal, to judge by the rattling of his pans. It was as yet not much after hour eight of the evening. The hours before my tryst with Jetta seemed an interminable time to wait. She might not come, though, I was afraid, until midnight. At all events I felt that I had some hours yet. And it occurred to me that the evening was not yet too far advanced for me to call upon Perona. He lived not far from here, I had learned. I wanted to see this beribboned old Minister of Nareda's Internal Affairs. I would use as my excuse a desire to discuss further the possibility of smuggler being here in Nareda. I put on my hat and a light jacket, verified that my dirk was readily accessible and sealed up my room. Spawn apparently was still in the kitchen. I got out of the house, I felt sure, without him being aware of it. * * * * * The Nareda streets were quiet. There was a few pedestrians, and none of them paid much attention to me. It was no more than ten minutes walk to Perona's home. His house was set back from the road, surrounded by luxurious vegetation. There was a gate in front of the garden, and another, a hundred feet or to along a small alleyway which bordered the ground to my left. I was about to enter the front gate when sight of a figure passing under the garden foliage checked me. It was a man, evidently coming from the house and headed toward the side gate. He went through a shaft of light that slanted from one of the lower windows of the house. Perona! I was sure it was he. His slight figure, with a gay, tri-cornered hat. A short tasseled cloak hanging from his shoulders. He was alone; walking fast. He evidently had not seen me. I crouched outside the high front wall, and through its lattice bars I saw him reach the side gate, open it swiftly, pass through, and close it after him. There was something furtive about his manner, for all he was undisguised. I decided to follow him. The front street fortunately was deserted at the moment. I waited long enough for him to appear. But he did not; and when I ran to the alley corner--chancing bumping squarely into him--I saw him far down its dim, narrow length where it opened into the back street which bordered his grounds to the rear. He turned to the left and shot a swift glance up the alley, which I anticipated, provided for by drawing back. When I looked again, he was gone. * * * * * I have had some experience at playing the shadow. But it was not easy here along the almost deserted and fairly bright Nareda streets. Perona was walking swiftly down the slope toward the outskirts of the village where it bordered upon the Nares Sea. For a time I thought he was headed for the landing field, but at a cross-path he turned sharply to the right, away from the field, whose sheen of lights I could now see down the rocky defile ahead of me. There was nothing but broken, precipitous rocky country ahead of him, into which this path he had taken was winding. What could Perona, a Minister, be engaged in, wandering off alone into this black, deserted region? It was black indeed, by now. The village was soon far behind us. A storm was in the night air; a wind off the sea; solid black clouds overhead blotted out the moon and stars. The crags and buttes and gullies of this tumbled area loomed barely visible about me. There were times when only my feel of the path under my feet kept me from straying, to fall into a ravine or crevice. I prowled perhaps two hundred yards behind Perona. He was using a tiny hand-flash now; it bobbed and winked in the darkness ahead, vanishing sometimes when a curve in the path hid him, or when he plunged down into a gully and up again. I had no search-beam. Nor would I have dared use one: Perona could too obviously have seen that someone was following him. There was half a mile of this, I think, though it seemed interminable. I could hear the sea, rising with the wind, pounding against the rocks to my left. Then, a distance ahead, I saw lights moving. Perona's--and others. Three or four of them. Their combined glow made a radiance which illumined the path and rocks. I could see the figures of several men whom Perona had joined. They stood a moment and then moved off. To the right a ragged cliff wall towered the path. The spots of light bobbed toward it. I caught the vague outline of a huge broken opening, like a cave mouth in the cliff. The lights were swallowed by it. I crept cautiously forward. CHAPTER VI _Ether-wave Eavesdropping_ I had thought it was a cavern mouth into which the men had disappeared, but it was not. I reached it without any encounter. It loomed above me, a great archway in the cliff--an opening fifty feet high and equally as broad. And behind it was a roofless cave--a sort of irregularly circular bowl, five hundred feet across its broken, bowlder-strewn, caked-ooze floor. I crouched in the blackness under the archway. The moon had risen and its light filtered with occasional shafts through the swift-flying black clouds overhead. The scene was brighter. It was dark in the archway, but a glow of moonlight in the bowl beyond showed me its tumbled floor and the precipitous, eroded walls, like a crater-rim, which encircled it. The men whom Perona had met were across the bowl near its opposite side. I could see the group of them, five hundred feet from me, by a little moonlight that was on them; also by the sheen from the spots of their hand-lights. Four or five men, and Perona. I thought I distinguished the aged Minister sitting on a rock, and before him a huge giant man's figure striding up and down. Perona seemed talking vehemently: the men were listening; the giant paused occasionally in his pacing to fling a question. All this I saw with my first swift glance. My attention was drawn from the men to an object near them. The nose of a flyer showed between two upstanding crags on the floor of the valley. Only its forward horizontal propellers and the tip of its cabin and landing gear were visible, but I could guess that it was a fair-sized ship. The men were too far away for me to hear them. Could I get across the floor of the bowl without discovery? It did not seem so. The accursed moonlight became stronger every moment. Then I saw a guard--a dark figure of a man showing just inside the archway, some seventy feet from me. He was leaning against a rock, facing my way. In his hands was a thick-barreled electronic projector. I could not advance: that was obvious. The moonlight lay in a clear clean patch beyond the archway. The guard stood at its edge. * * * * * A minute or two had passed. Perona was still talking vehemently. I was losing it: not a word was audible. Yet I felt that if I could hear Perona now, much that Hanley and I wanted to learn would be made clear to us. My little microphone receiver could be adjusted for audible air vibrations. I crouched and held it cautiously above my head with its face, like a listening ear, turned toward the distant men. My single-vacuum amplification brought up the sound until their voices sounded like whispers murmured in my ear-grids. "De Boer, listen to me--" Perona's voice. They must have been chance words spoken loudly. It was all I could hear, save tantalizing, unintelligible murmurs. So this was De Boer, the bandit! The big fellow pacing before Perona. I wanted infinitely more, now, to hear what was being said. I thought of Hanley. There might be a way of handling this. I had to murmur very softly. I was hidden in these shadows from the guard's sight, but he was close enough to hear my normal voice. I chanced it. A wind was sucking through the archway with an audible whine: the guard might not hear me. "X. 2. AY." The sorter's desk. He came in. I murmured Hanley's rating. "Rush. Danger. Special." It went swiftly through. Hanley, thank Heaven, was at his desk. * * * * * I plugged in my little image finder; held it over my head; turned it slowly. I whispered: "Look around, Chief. See where I am? Near Nareda; couple of miles out. Followed Perona; he met these men. "The big one is De Boer, the depth bandit. I can't hear what they're saying--but I can send you their voice murmurs." "Amplify them all you can. Relay them up," Hanley ordered. I caught Perona's murmurs again; I swung them through my tiny transformers and off my transmitter points into the ether. "Hear them, Chief?" "Yes. I'll try further amplification." It was what I had intended. Hanley's greater power might be able to amplify those murmurs into audible strength. "I'm getting them, Phil." He swung them back to me. Grotesquely distorted, blurred with tube-hum and interference crackle, they roared in my ear-grids so loudly that I saw the nearby guard turn his head as though startled. Listening.... But evidently he concluded it was nothing. I cut down the volume. Hanley switched in. "By God. Phil! This--" "Off, Chief! Let me hear, too!" * * * * * He cut away. Those distorted voices! They came from Perona and the bandits to me across this five hundred foot moonlit bowl; from me, thirteen hundred miles up to Hanley's instruments; and back to me once more. But the words, most of them, now were distinguishable. Perona's voice: "I tell it to you. De Boer ... and a good chance for you to make the money." "But will they pay?" "Of course they will pay. Big. A ransom princely." "And why, Perona? Why princely? Who is this fellow--so important?" "He is with rich business men, I tell to you." "A private citizen?" "... And a private citizen, of a surety. Fool! Have you come to be a coward, De Boer?" "Pah!" "Well then I tell you it is a lifetime chance. All of it I have arranged. If he was a government agent, that would be very different, for they are very keen, this administration of the American government, to protect their agents. But their private citizens--it is a scandal! Do you not ever pick the newscasters' reports, De Boer? Has it not been a scandal that this administration does very little for its citizens abroad?" "And you want to get rid of this fellow? Why, Perona?" "That is not your concern. The ransom is to be all yours. Make away with him--in the depths somewhere. Demand your ransom. Fifty thousand gold-standards! Demand it of me. Of Nareda!" "And you will pay it?" "I promise it. Nareda will pay it--and Nareda will collect the ransom from the American capitalists. Very easy." His voice fell lower. "Between us, you will get the ransom money from Nareda--and then kill your prisoner if you like. Call it an accident; what matter? And dead men are silent men, De Boer. I will see that no real pursuit is made after you." * * * * * They were talking about me! It was obvious. Questions rushed at me. Perona, planning with this bandit to abduct me. Hold me for ransom. Or kill me! But Perona knew that I was not a private citizen. He was lying to De Boer, to persuade him. Why this attack upon me? Was Spawn in on it? Why were they so anxious to get rid of me? Because of Jetta? Or because I was dangerous, prying into their smuggling activities. Or both? De Boer: "... Get up with my men through the streets to Spawn's house? You have it fixed?" "Yes. Over the route from here as I told you, there are no police to-night. I have ordered them off. In the garden. _Dios!_ You offer so many objections! I tell you all is fixed. In an hour, half an hour; even now, perhaps, the Americano is in the garden. The girl has promised to meet him there. He will be there, fear not. Will you go?" "Yes." "Hah! That is the De Boer I have always admired!" I could see them in the moonlight across the pit. Perona now standing up, the giant figure of the bandit towering over him. * * * * * Hanley's microscopic voice cut in: "Getting it, Phil? To seize you for ransom!" "Yes. I hear it." "This girl. Who--?" "Wait, Chief. Off--" De Boer: "I will do it! Fifty thousand." Perona: "An hour now. Spawn will be at his home asleep." "And you will go to the mine?" "Yes. Now, from here. You seize this fellow Grant, and then attack the mine. Our regular plan, De Boer. This does not change it." Attack Spawn's mine! Half a million of treasure was there to-night! Perona was chuckling: "You give Spawn's guards the signal. They are all my men--in my pay. They will run away when you appear." Hanley cut in again. "By the gods, they're after that treasure! Phil, listen to me! you must...." His voice faded. "Chief, I can't hear you!" Hanley came again: "... And I will notify Porto Rico. The local patrol will be about ready to leave." "Or notify Nareda headquarters," I suggested. "If you can get President Markes, he can send some police to the mine--" "And find all Nareda's police bribed by Perona? I'll get Porto Rico. We have an hour or two; the patrol can reach you in an hour." The bandits were preparing to leave here. Two or three of them had gone to the flyer. Perona and De Boer were parting. "... Well, that is all, De Boer." "Right, Señor Perona. I will start shortly." "On foot, by the street route to Spawn's--" Hanley's hurried voice came back: "I've sent the call to Porto Rico." * * * * * The guard had moved again. He was no more than forty feet away from me now--standing up gazing directly toward where I was crouching over my tiny instruments in the shadows of the rocky arch. A footstep sounded behind me, on the path outside the arch. Someone approaching! A tiny light bobbing! Then a voice calling, "Perona! De Boer!" The guard took a step forward; stopped, with levelled weapon. Then the voice again: it was so loud it went through my opened relay, flashed up to New York, and blew out half a dozen of Hanley's attuned vacuums. "Perona!" Spawn's voice! He was coming toward me! I lay prone, my little grids switched off. I held my breath. Spawn's figure went past within ten feet of me. But he did not see me. He met the guard. "Hello, Gutierrez. The damned American--" Perona and De Boer came hastening. Spawn joined them in the moonlight just beyond the archway, close enough for me to hear them plainly. Spawn was out of breath, panting from his swift walk. He greeted them with a roar. "The American--he is gone!" "_Dios!_ Gone where, Spawn?" "The hell--how do I know, Perona? He is gone from his room--from the house. Maybe he followed you here? Did he?" CHAPTER VII _Behind the Sealed Door_ There was a moment when I think I might have escaped unseen from that archway. But I was too amazed at Spawn's appearance to think of my own situation. I had believed that Perona was plotting against Spawn, meeting these bandits in this secret place; I had just heard them planning to attack Spawn's mine--to rob it of the treasure doubtless, which I knew was stored there. But I realized now it was not a plot against Spawn. He had come here swiftly to join Perona and tell him that I, their intended victim, was missing. He had greeted the bandit guard by name. He seemed, indeed, as well known to these bandits as Perona himself. They stood now in a group some thirty feet away from me. I could hear their excited voices perfectly clearly. My instruments were off; but I recall that as I listened to Spawn I was also aware of the tingle of the electrode-band on my chest--Hanley, vigorously calling me back to find out why I had so summarily disconnected. "I took him to his room," Spawn was explaining excitedly. "De duvel, why should I have sealed him in? How could I? He is no child!" De Boer laughed caustically. "And so he has walked away from you? I think I am a fool to mix myself with you two." Perona retorted, "I have made you rich, De Boer. Think what you like; to-night is the end of our partnership. Only, you do what I have told you to-night." "Hah! How can I? Your American has flown his trap." This guard--this Gutierrez, as Spawn had called him--was listening with interest. De Boer's several other men were gathered there. I felt myself safe where I was, for the moment at least. * * * * * I cut Hanley in. "Chief, they're closer! Spawn has come! They've missed me! I'll relay what they're saying, but you step it down; there's too much volume." "You're all right, Phil? Thank Heaven for that! Something blew my vacuums." "Chief, listen--here they are--" Perona: "But he will be back. In the garden now, no doubt, with Jetta." De Boer: "Ah--the little Jetta! So she is there, Spawn? Not in years have you spoken of your daughter. A young lady now, I suppose. Is it so?" Spawn cursed. "We leave her out of this. You follow the Señor's plan." "Come to your house? You think the bird will be there for me to seize?" "Yes," Perona put in. "You go there; in an hour. Then to the mine." Spawn undoubtedly was in this plot to attack his mine! He said, "At the mine we have arranged everything. Damn this American! But for Perona I would not bother with him." "But you will bother," Perona interjected. De Boer laughed again. "I would be witless could I not figure this! He is a young man, and so handsome he has frightened you with the little Jetta! Is that it, Perona? Jealous, eh?" I had been holding the image finder so that Hanley might see them. Hanley's voice rattled my ear-grid. "Phil! Get away from there! Look! De Boer is searching!" * * * * * De Boer had, a moment before, spoken quietly aside to Gutierrez. And now three or four of the men were spreading out, poking about with small hand-flashes. Searching for me! The possibility that I might be here, eavesdropping! Hanley repeated vehemently, "Phil, they'll find you! Get out of there: the way is still open!" Gutierrez was approaching the archway. But I lingered a moment longer. "Chief, you heard about that girl, Jetta, Spawn's daughter--" I stopped. Perona was saying, "Spawn, was Jetta still in her room? You did not untie her?" "No." "And gagged? Suppose the Americano was back there now? She might call to him, and he would release her--" De Boer: "How do you know he is not around here? Listening?" With the assumption that I might be within hearing, De Boer tried to trap me. Gutierrez, at a signal now, suddenly dashed through the archway and planted himself on the path outside. The other searchers spread their rays; the rocks all about me were lighted. But my niche was still untouched. De Boer: "If he is around here--" Perona: "He could not have followed me; I was too careful." I was murmuring: "Chief, they've got that girl." "Phil, you get away! Go to Markes. Stay with him." "But Chief, that Jetta, I--" "Keep out of this! You're only one; you can't help any! I've sent for the Porto Rican patrol ship to handle this." "Chief, I'm going back to Spawn's." "No--" I cut off abruptly. In another moment I would have been discovered. The searchers were headed directly for me. * * * * * I moved, crouching, back along the inner wall of the archway. The moon was momentarily behind a cloud. It was black under the arch; and out front it was so dim I could only see the faint blob of Gutierrez's standing figure, and the spot of his flashlight. Perona: "He is not around here, De Boer. That is foolish." Spawn: "He could have gone anywhere. Maybe a walk around the village." Perona: "Go back home, Spawn. De Boer will come--" Their voices faded as I moved away. A searching bandit behind me poked with his light into the crevice where a moment before I had been crouching. I moved faster. Only Gutierrez now was in front of me. He was at the far end of the arch. I could slip past, and still be fifty feet from him--if I could avoid his swinging little light-beam. I was running now, chancing that he would hear me. I was on the path; I could see it vaguely. From behind me came a sizzling flash, and the ting of the flying needle as it missed me by a foot. "The Americano! He goes there!" Another shot. The shouts of the bandits in the archway. A turmoil back there. But it was all behind me. I leaped sidewise off the path as Gutierrez small light-beam swept it. I ran stumbling through a stubble of boulders, around an upstanding rock spire, back to the path again. There were other shots. Then De Boer's voice, faint by distance: "Stop! Fools! We will alarm the village! The landing field can see our shots from here! Take it easy! You can't get him!" The turmoil quieted. I went around a bend in the path, running swiftly. Pursuit was behind me. I could hear them coming. * * * * * It was a run of no more than ten minutes to the junction where, down the slope, I could see the lights of the landing field. The glow of the village was ahead of me. Then I was in its outskirts. Occasional dark houses. Deserted streets. I slowed to a fast walk. I was breathless, panting in the heat. I heard no pursuit now. But Spawn and the rest of them doubtless were after me. Would they head back for Spawn's inn? I thought they would. But I could beat them back there; I was sure there was no shorter route than this I was taking. Would they use their flyer? That would not gain them any time, what with launching it and landing, for so short a flight. And a bandit flyer could not very well land unseen or unnoticed, even in somnolent Nareda. I reached the main section of the village. There were occasional lights and pedestrians. My haste was noticeable, but I was not accosted. There seemed no police about. I recalled Perona's remark that he had attended to that. My electrode was tingling. I had been running again. I slowed down. "Chief?" "Phil." His voice carried relief. "You got away?" "Yes. I'm in the village." "Go to President Markes." "No, I'm headed for Spawn's! They're all behind me; I can get there a few minutes ahead of them." * * * * * I panted an exclamation, incoherently, but frankly, about Jetta. "I'm going to get her out of there." "Phil, what in hell--" I told him. "So you've fallen in love with a girl? Entangled--" "Chief!" "Go after her, Phil! Got her bound and gagged, have they? Going to marry her to this Perona? Like the Middle Ages?" I had never seen this side of Hanley. "Get her if you want her. Get her out of there. Take her to Markes--No, I wouldn't trust anybody in Nareda! Take her into the uplands behind the village. But keep away from that mine! Have you got flash-fuses?" "Yes." I was within sight of Spawn's house. The street was dim and deserted. I was running again. I panted. "I'm--almost at Spawn's!" "Good! When it's over, whatever happens up there at the mine, then signal the patrol." "Yes." I reached Spawn's front gate. The house and front garden were dark. "Use your fuses, Phil. What colors?" "I have red and blue." "I'll talk to the patrol ship again. Tell them to watch for you. Red and blue. Two short red flashes, a long blue." "Right, Chief. I'm here at Spawn's, cutting off." "Come back on when you can." His voice went anxious again. "I'll wait here." "All right." I cut silent. I ran through the front doorway of Spawn's inn. The living room was dim and empty. Which way was Jetta's room? I could only guess. I had a few minutes, perhaps, before my pursuers would arrive. * * * * * I reached the inner, patio garden. The moon was well out from under the clouds now. The patio shimmered, a silent, deserted fairyland. "Jetta!" I called it softly. Then louder. "Jetta!" Spawn's house was fairly large and rambling. There were so many rooms. Jetta was gagged; how could she answer me? But I had no time to search for her. "Jetta?" And then came her voice. "Philip?" "Jetta! Which way? Where are you?" "Here! This way: in my room." A window and a door near the pergola. "Jetta!" "Yes. I am in here. They tied me up. Not so loud, Phil: father will hear you." "He's gone out." I reached her garden door. Turned its handle. Rattled the door. Shoved frantically with my shoulder! The metal door was firmly sealed! _(To be continued)_ [Illustration: _One of the men rolled free and came lurching toward us._] The Terrible Tentacles of L-472 _By Sewell Peaslee Wright_ It was a big mistake. I should not have done it. By birth, by instinct, by training, by habit, I am a man of action. Or I was. It is queer that an old man cannot remember that he is no longer young. [Sidenote: Commander John Hanson of the Special Patrol Service records another of his thrilling interplanetary assignments.] But it was a mistake for me to mention that I had recorded, for the archives of the Council, the history of a certain activity of the Special Patrol--a bit of secret history[1] which may not be mentioned here. Now they insist--by "they" I refer to the Chiefs of the Special Patrol Service--that I write of other achievements of the Service, other adventures worthy of note. [Footnote 1: Editors Note: "The Forgotten Planet" July 1930 issue of Astounding Stories] Perhaps that is the penalty of becoming old. From commander of the _Budi_, one of the greatest of the Special Patrol ships, to the duties of recording ancient history, for younger men to read and dream about. That is a shrewd blow to one's pride. But if I can, in some small way, add luster to the record of my service, it will be a fitting task for a man grown old and gray in that service; work for hands too weak and palsied for sterner duties. But I shall tell my stories in my own way; after all, they are my stories. And I shall tell the stories that appeal to me most. The universe has had enough and too much of dry history; these shall be adventurous tales to make the blood of a young man who reads them run a trifle faster--and perhaps the blood of the old man who writes them. This, the first, shall be the story of the star L-472. You know it to-day as Ibit, port-o'-call for interplanetary ships, and source of ocrite for the universe, but to me it will always be L-472, the world of terrible tentacles. * * * * * My story begins nearly a hundred years ago--reckoned in terms of Earth time, which is proper, since I am a native of Earth--when I was a young man. I was sub-commander, at the time, of the _Kalid_, one of the early ships of the Special Patrol. We had been called to Zenia on special orders, and Commander Jamison, after an absence of some two hours, returned to the _Kalid_ with his face shining, one of his rare smiles telling me in advance that he had news--and good news. He hurried me up to the deserted navigating room and waved me to a seat. "Hanson," he said. "I'm glad to be the first to congratulate you. You are now Commander John Hanson, of the Special Patrol Ship _Kalid_!" "Sir." I gasped, "do you mean--" His smile broadened. From the breast pocket of the trim blue and silver uniform of our Service he drew a long, crackling paper. "Your commission," he said. "I'm taking over the _Borelis_." It was my turn to extend congratulations then; the _Borelis_ was the newest and greatest ship of the Service. We shook hands, that ancient gesture of good-fellowship on Earth. But, as our hands unclasped, Jamison's face grew suddenly grave. "I have more than this news for you, however," he said slowly. "You are to have a chance to earn your comet hardly." * * * * * I smiled broadly at the mention of the comet, the silver insignia, worn over the heart, that would mark my future rank as commander, replacing the four-rayed star of a sub-commander which I wore now on my tunic. "Tell me more, sir," I said confidently. "You have heard of the Special Patrol Ship _Filanus_?" asked my late commander gravely. "Reported lost in space," I replied promptly. "And the _Dorlos_?" "Why--yes; she was at Base here at our last call," I said, searching his face anxiously. "Peter Wilson was Second Officer on her--one of my best friends. Why do you ask about her, sir?" "The _Dorlos_ is missing also," said Commander Jamison solemnly. "Both of these ships were sent upon a particular mission. Neither of them has returned. It is concluded that some common fate has overtaken them. The _Kalid_, under your command, is commissioned to investigate these disappearances. "You are not charged with the mission of these other ships; your orders are to investigate their disappearance. The course, together with the official patrol orders, I shall hand you presently, but with them go verbal orders. "You are to lay and keep the course designated, which will take you well out of the beaten path to a small world which has not been explored, but which has been circumnavigated a number of times by various ships remaining just outside the atmospheric envelope, and found to be without evidence of intelligent habitation. In other words, without cities, roads, canals, or other evidence of human handiwork or civilization. * * * * * "I believe your instructions give you some of this information, but not all of it. This world, unnamed because of its uninhabited condition, is charted only as L-472. Your larger charts will show it, I am sure. The atmosphere is reported to be breatheable by inhabitants of Earth and other beings having the same general requirements. Vegetation is reported as dense, covering the five continents of the world to the edges of the northern and southern polar caps, which are small. Topographically, the country is rugged in the extreme, with many peaks, apparently volcanic, but now inactive or extinct, on all of its five large continents." "And am I to land there, sir?" I asked eagerly. "Your orders are very specific upon that point," said Commander Jamison. "You are not to land until you have carefully and thoroughly reconnoitered from above, at low altitude. You will exercise every possible precaution. Your specific purpose is simply this: to determine, if possible, the fate of the other two ships, and report your findings at once. The Chiefs of the Service will then consider the matter, and take whatever action may seem advisable to them." Jamison rose to his feet and thrust out his hand in Earth's fine old salute of farewell. "I must be going, Hanson," he said. "I wish this patrol were mine instead of yours. You are a young man for such a responsibility." "But," I replied, with the glowing confidence of youth, "I have the advantage of having served under Commander Jamison!" * * * * * He smiled as we shook again, and shook his head. "Discretion can be learned only by experience," he said. "But I wish you success, Hanson; on this undertaking, and on many others. Supplies are on their way now; the crew will return from leave within the hour. A young Zenian, name of Dival, I believe, is detailed to accompany you as scientific observer--purely unofficial capacity, of course. He has been ordered to report to you at once. You are to depart as soon as feasible: you know what that means. I believe that's all--Oh, yes! I had almost forgotten. "Here, in this envelope, are your orders and your course, as well as all available data on L-472. In this little casket is--your comet, Hanson. I know you will wear it with honor!" "Thank you, sir!" I said, a bit huskily. I saluted, and Commander Jamison acknowledged the gesture with stiff precision. Commander Jamison always had the reputation of being something of a martinet. When he had left, I picked up the thin blue envelope he had left. Across the face of the envelope, in the--to my mind--jagged and unbeautiful Universal script, was my name, followed by the proud title: "_Commander, Special Patrol Ship Kalid._" My first orders! There was a small oval box, of blue leather, with the silver crest of the Service in bas-relief on the lid. I opened the case, and gazed with shining eyes at the gleaming, silver comet that nestled there. Then, slowly, I unfastened the four-rayed star on my left breast, and placed in its stead the insignia of my commandership. Worn smooth and shiny now, it is still my most precious possession. * * * * * Kincaide, my second officer, turned and smiled as I entered the navigating room. "L-472 now registers maximum attraction, sir," he reported. "Dead ahead, and coming up nicely. My last figures, completed about five minutes ago, indicate that we should reach the gaseous envelope in about ten hours." Kincaide was a native of Earth, and we commonly used Earth time-measurements in our conversation. As is still the case, ships of the Special Patrol Service were commanded without exception by natives of Earth, and the entire officer personnel hailed largely from the same planet, although I have had several Zenian officers of rare ability and courage. I nodded and thanked him for the report. Maximum attraction, eh? That, considering the small size of our objective, meant we were much closer to L-472 than to any other regular body. Mechanically, I studied the various dials about the room. The attraction meter, as Kincaide had said, registered several degrees of attraction, and the red slide on the rim of the dial was squarely at the top, showing that the attraction was coming from the world at which our nose was pointed. The surface-temperature gauge was at normal. Internal pressure, normal. Internal moisture-content, a little high. Kincaide, watching me, spoke up: "I have already given orders to dry out, sir," he said. "Very good, Mr. Kincaide. It's a long trip, and I want the crew in good condition." I studied the two charts, one showing our surroundings laterally, the other vertically, all bodies about us represented as glowing spots of green light, of varying sizes; the ship itself as a tiny scarlet spark. Everything shipshape: perhaps, a degree or two of elevation when we were a little closer-- "May I come in sir?" broke in a gentle, high-pitched voice. "Certainly, Mr. Dival," I replied, answering in the Universal language in which the request had been made. "You are always very welcome." Dival was a typical Zenian of the finest type: slim, very dark, and with the amazingly intelligent eyes of his kind. His voice was very soft and gentle, and like the voice of all his people, clear and high-pitched. "Thank you," he said. "I guess I'm over-eager, but there's something about this mission of ours that worries me. I seem to feel--" He broke off abruptly and began pacing back and forth across the room. I studied him, frowning. The Zenians have a strange way of being right about such things; their high-strung, sensitive natures seem capable of responding to those delicate, vagrant forces which even now are only incompletely understood and classified. "You're not used to work of this sort," I replied, as bluffly and heartily as possible. "There's nothing to worry about." "The commanders of the two ships that disappeared probably felt the same way, sir," said Dival. "I should have thought the Chiefs of the Special Patrol Service would have sent several ships on a mission such as this." "Easy to say," I laughed bitterly. "If the Council would pass the appropriations we need, we might have ships enough so that we could send a fleet of ships when we wished. Instead of that, the Council, in its infinite wisdom, builds greater laboratories and schools of higher learning--and lets the Patrol get along as best it can." "It was from the laboratories and the schools of higher learning that all these things sprang," replied Dival quietly, glancing around at the array of instruments which made navigation in space possible. "True," I admitted rather shortly. "We must work together. And as for what we shall find upon the little world ahead, we shall be there in nine or ten hours. You may wish to make some preparations." "Nine or ten hours? That's Earth time, isn't it? Let's see: about two and a half enaros." "Correct," I smiled. The Universal method of reckoning time had never appealed to me. For those of my readers who may only be familiar with Earth time measurements, an enar is about eighteen Earth days, an enaren a little less than two Earth days, and an enaro nearly four and a half hours. The Universal system has the advantage, I admit, of a decimal division; but I have found it clumsy always. I may be stubborn and old-fashioned, but a clock face with only ten numerals and one hand still strikes me as being unbeautiful and inefficient. "Two and a half enaros," repeated Dival thoughtfully. "I believe I shall see if I can get a little sleep now; I should not have brought my books with me, I'm afraid. I read when I should sleep. Will you call me should there be any developments of interest?" I assured him that he would be called as he requested, and he left. "Decent sort of a chap, sir," observed Kincaide, glancing at the door through which Dival had just departed. "A student," I nodded, with the contempt of violent youth for the man of gentler pursuits than mine, and turned my attentions to some calculations for entry in the log. * * * * * Busied with the intricate details of my task, time passed rapidly. The watch changed, and I joined my officers in the tiny, arched dining salon. It was during the meal that I noticed for the first time a sort of tenseness; every member of the mess was unusually quiet. And though I would not, have admitted it then, I was not without a good deal of nervous restraint myself. "Gentlemen," I remarked when the meal was finished, "I believe you understand our present mission. Primarily, our purpose is to ascertain, if possible, the fate of two ships that were sent here and have not returned. We are now close enough for reasonable observation by means of the television disc, I believe, and I shall take over its operation myself. "There is no gainsaying the fact that whatever fate overtook the two other Patrol ships, may lay in wait for us. My orders are to observe every possible precaution, and to return with a report. I am going to ask that each of you proceed immediately to his post, and make ready, in so far as possible, for any eventuality. Warn the watch which has just gone off to be ready for instant duty. The disintegrator ray generators should be started and be available for instant emergency use, maximum power. Have the bombing crews stand by for orders." "What do you anticipate, sir?" asked Correy, my new sub-commander. The other officers waited tensely for my reply. "I don't know, Mr. Correy," I admitted reluctantly. "We have no information upon which to base an assumption. We do know that two ships have been sent here, and neither of them have returned. Something prevented that return. We must endeavor to prevent that same fate from overtaking the _Kalid_--and ourselves." * * * * * Hurrying back to the navigating room, I posted myself beside the cumbersome, old-fashioned television instrument. L-472 was near enough now to occupy the entire field, with the range hand at maximum. One whole continent and parts of two others were visible. Not many details could be made out. I waited grimly while an hour, two hours, went by. My field narrowed down to one continent, to a part of one continent. I glanced up at the surface temperature gauge and noted that the hand was registering a few degrees above normal. Correy, who had relieved Kincaide as navigating officer, followed my gaze. "Shall we reduce speed, sir?" he asked crisply. "To twice atmospheric speed," I nodded. "When we enter the envelope proper, reduce to normal atmospheric speed. Alter your course upon entering the atmosphere proper, and work back and forth along the emerging twilight zone, from the north polar cap to the southern cap, and so on." "Yes, sir!" he replied, and repeated the orders to the control room forward. I pressed the attention signal to Dival's cubicle, and informed him that we were entering the outer atmospheric fringe. "Thank you, sir!" he said eagerly. "I shall be with you immediately." In rapid succession I called various officers and gave terse orders. Double crews on duty in the generator compartment, the ray projectors, the atomic bomb magazines, and release tubes. Observers at all observation posts, operators at the two smaller television instruments to comb the terrain and report instantly any object of interest. With the three of us searching, it seemed incredible that anything could escape us. At atmospheric altitudes even the two smaller television instruments would be able to pick out a body the size of one of the missing ships. * * * * * Dival entered the room as I finished giving my orders. "A strange world, Dival," I commented, glancing towards the television instrument. "Covered with trees, even the mountains, and what I presume to be volcanic peaks. They crowd right down to the edge of the water." He adjusted the focusing lever slightly, his face lighting up with the interest of a scientist gazing at a strange specimen, whether it be a microbe or a new world. "Strange ... strange ..." he muttered. "A universal vegetation ... no variation of type from equator to polar cap, apparently. And the water--did you notice its color, sir?" "Purple," I nodded. "It varies on the different worlds, you know. I've seen pink, red, white and black seas, as well as the green and blue of Earth." "And no small islands," he went on, as though he had not ever heard me. "Not in the visible portion, at any rate." I was about to reply, when I felt the peculiar surge of the _Kalid_ as she reduced speed. I glanced at the indicator, watching the hand drop slowly to atmospheric speed. "Keep a close watch, Dival," I ordered. "We shall change our course now, to comb the country for traces of two ships we are seeking. If you see the least suspicious sign, let me know immediately." * * * * * He nodded, and for a time there was only a tense silence in the room, broken at intervals by Correy as he spoke briefly into his microphone, giving orders to the operating room. Perhaps an hour went by. I am not sure. It seemed like a longer time than that. Then Dival called out in sudden excitement, his high, thin voice stabbing the silence: "Here, sir! Look! A little clearing--artificial, I judge--and the ships! Both of them!" "Stop the ship, Mr. Correy!" I snapped as I hurried to the instrument. "Dival, take those reports." I gestured towards the two attention signals that were glowing and softly humming and thrust my head into the shelter of the television instrument's big hood. Dival had made no mistake. Directly beneath me, as I looked, was a clearing, a perfect square with rounded corners, obviously blasted out of the solid forest by the delicate manipulation of sharply focused disintegrator rays. And upon the naked, pitted surface thus exposed, side by side in orderly array, were the missing ships! * * * * * I studied the strange scene with a heart that thumped excitedly against my ribs. What should I do? Return and report? Descend and investigate? There was no sign of life around the ships, and no evidence of damage. If I brought the _Kalid_ down, would she make a third to remain there, to be marked "lost in space" on the records of the Service? Reluctantly, I drew my head from beneath the shielding hood. "What were the two reports, Dival?" I asked, and my voice was thick. "The other two television observers?" "Yes, sir. They report that they cannot positively identify the ships with their instruments, but feel certain that they are the two we seek." "Very good. Tell them, please, to remain on watch, searching space in every direction, and to report instantly anything suspicious. Mr. Correy, we will descend until this small clearing becomes visible, through the ports, to the unaided eye. I will give you the corrections to bring us directly over the clearing." And I read the finder scales of the television instrument to him. He rattled off the figures, calculated an instant, and gave his orders to the control room, while I kept the television instrument bearing upon the odd clearing and the two motionless, deserted ships. * * * * * As we settled, I could make out the insignia of the ships, could see the pitted, stained earth of the clearing, brown with the dust of disintegration. I could see the surrounding trees very distinctly now: they seemed very similar to our weeping willows, on Earth, which, I perhaps should explain, since it is impossible for the average individual to have a comprehensive knowledge of the flora and fauna of the entire known Universe, is a tree of considerable size, having long, hanging branches arching from its crown and reaching nearly to the ground. These leaves, like typical willow leaves, were long and slender, of rusty green color. The trunks and branches seemed to be black or dark brown: and the trees grew so thickly that nowhere between their branches was the ground visible. "Five thousand feet, sir," said Correy. "Directly above the clearing. Shall we descend further?" "A thousand feet at a time, Mr. Correy," I replied, after a moment's hesitation. "My orders are to exercise the utmost caution. Mr. Dival, please make a complete analysis of the atmosphere. I believe you are familiar with the traps provided for the purpose?" "Yes. You propose to land, sir?" "I propose to determine the fate of those two ships and the men who brought them here," I said with sudden determination. Dival made no reply, but as he turned to obey orders, I saw that his presentiment of trouble had not left him. "Four thousand feet, sir," said Correy. I nodded, studying the scene below us. The great hooded instrument brought it within, apparently, fifty feet of my eyes, but the great detail revealed nothing of interest. The two ships lay motionless, huddled close together. The great circular door of each was open, as though opened that same day--or a century before. "Three thousand feet, sir," said Correy. "Proceed at the same speed," I replied. Whatever fate had overtaken the men of the other ships had caused them to disappear entirely--and without sign of a struggle. But what conceivable fate could that be? "Two thousand feet, sir," said Correy. "Good," I said grimly. "Continue with the descent, Mr. Correy." Dival hurried into the room as I spoke. His face was still clouded with foreboding. "I have tested the atmosphere, sir," he reported. "It is suitable for breathing by either men of Earth or Zenia. No trace of noxious gases of any kind. It is probably rather rarified, such as one might find on Earth or Zenia at high altitudes." "One thousand feet, sir," said Correy. I hesitated an instant. Undoubtedly the atmosphere had been tested by the other ships before they landed. In the case of the second ship, at any rate, those in command must have been on the alert against danger. And yet both of those ships lay there motionless, vacant, deserted. * * * * * I could feel the eyes of the men on me. My decision must be delayed no further. "We will land, Mr. Correy," I said grimly. "Near the two ships, please." "Very well, sir," nodded Correy, and spoke briefly into the microphone. "I might warn you, sir," said Dival quietly, "to govern your activities, once outside: free from the gravity pads of the ship, on a body of such small size, an ordinary step will probably cause a leap of considerable distance." "Thank you, Mr. Dival. That is a consideration I had overlooked. I shall warn the men. We must--" At that instant I felt the slight jar of landing. I glanced up; met Correy's grave glance squarely. "Grounded, sir," he said quietly. "Very good, Mr. Correy. Keep the ship ready for instant action, please, and call the landing crew to the forward exit. You will accompany us, Mr. Dival?" "Certainly, sir!" "Good. You understand your orders, Mr. Correy?" "Yes, sir!" I returned his salute, and led the way out of the room, Dival close on my heels. * * * * * The landing crew was composed of all men not at regular stations; nearly half of the _Kalid's_ entire crew. They were equipped with the small atomic power pistols as side-arms, and there were two three-men disintegrator ray squads. We all wore menores, which were unnecessary in the ship, but decidedly useful outside. I might add that the menore of those days was not the delicate, beautiful thing that it is to-day: it was comparatively crude, and clumsy band of metal, in which were imbedded the vital units and the tiny atomic energy generator, and was worn upon the head like a crown. But for all its clumsiness, it conveyed and received thought, and, after all, that was all we demanded of it. I caught a confused jumble of questioning thoughts as I came up, and took command of the situation promptly. It will be understood, of course, that in those days men had not learned to blank their minds against the menore, as they do to-day. It took generations of training to perfect that ability. "Open the exit," I ordered Kincaide, who was standing by the switch, key in the lock. "Yes, sir," he thought promptly, and unlocking the switch, released the lever. The great circular door revolved swiftly, backing slowly on its fine threads, gripped by the massive gimbals which, as at last the ponderous plug of metal freed itself from its threads, swung the circular door aside, like the door of a vault. * * * * * Fresh clean air swept in, and we breathed, it gratefully. Science can revitalize air, take out impurities and replace used-up constituents, but if cannot give it the freshness of pure natural air. Even the science of to-day. "Mr. Kincaide, you will stand by with five men. Under no circumstances are you to leave your post until ordered to do so. No rescue parties, under any circumstances, are to be sent out unless you have those orders directly from me. Should any untoward thing happen to this party, you will instantly reseal this exit, reporting at the same time to Mr. Correy, who has his orders. You will not attempt to rescue us, but will return to the Base and report in full, with Mr. Correy in command. Is that clear?" "Perfectly," came back his response instantly; but I could sense the rebellion in his mind. Kincaid and I were old friends, as well as fellow officers. I smiled at him reassuringly, and directed my orders to the waiting men. "You are aware of the fate of the two ships of the Patrol that have already landed here," I thought slowly, to be sure they understood perfectly. "What fate overtook them, I do not know. That is what we are here to determine." "It is obvious that this is a dangerous mission. I'm ordering none of you to go. Any man who wishes to be relieved from landing duty may remain inside the ship, and may feel it no reproach. Those who do go should be constantly on the alert, and keep in formation; the usual column of twos. Be very careful, when stepping out of the ship, to adjust your stride to the lessened gravity of this small world. Watch this point!" I turned to Dival, motioned him to fall in at my side. Without a backward glance, we marched out of the ship, treading very carefully to keep from leaping into the air with each step. Twenty feet away, I glanced back. There were fourteen men behind me--not a man of the landing crew had remained in the ship! "I am proud of you men!" I thought heartily: and no emanation from any menore was ever more sincere. * * * * * Cautiously, eyes roving ceaselessly, we made our way towards the two silent ships. It seemed a quiet, peaceful world: an unlikely place for tragedy. The air was fresh and clean, although, as Dival had predicted, rarefied like the air at an altitude. The willow-like trees that hemmed us in rustled gently, their long, frond-like branches with their rusty green leaves swaying. "Do you notice, sir," came a gentle thought from Dival, an emanation that could hardly have been perceptible to the men behind us, "that there is no wind--and yet the trees, yonder, are swaying and rustling?" I glanced around, startled. I had not noticed the absence of a breeze. I tried to make my response reassuring: "There is probably a breeze higher up, that doesn't dip down into this little clearing," I ventured. "At any rate, it is not important. These ships are what interest me. What will we find there?" "We shall soon know," replied Dival. "Here is the _Dorlos_; the second of the two, was it not?" "Yes." I came to a halt beside the gaping door. There was no sound within, no evidence of life there, no sign that men had ever crossed that threshold, save that the whole fabric was the work of man's hands. "Mr. Dival and I will investigate the ship, with two of you men," I directed. "The rest of the detail will remain on guard, and give the alarm at the least sign of any danger. You first two men, follow us." The indicated men nodded and stepped forward. Their "Yes, sirs" came surging through my menore like a single thought. Cautiously, Dival at my side, the two men at our backs, we stepped over the high threshold into the interior of the _Dorlos_. The _ethon_ tubes overhead made everything as light as day, and since the _Dorlos_ was a sister ship of my own _Kalid_, I had not the slightest difficulty in finding my way about. There was no sign of a disturbance anywhere. Everything was in perfect order. From the evidence, it would seem that the officers and men of the _Dorlos_ had deserted the ship of their own accord, and--failed to return. "Nothing of value here," I commented to Dival. "We may as well--" There was a sudden commotion from outside the ship. Startled shouts rang through the hollow hull, and a confused medley of excited thoughts came pouring in. With one accord the four of us dashed to the exit, Dival and I in the lead. At the door we paused, following the stricken gaze of the men grouped in a rigid knot just outside. Some, forty feet away was the edge of the forest that hemmed us in. A forest that now was lashing and writhing as though in the grip of some terrible hurricane, trunks bending and whipping, long branches writhing, curling, lashing out-- "Two of the men, sir!" shouted a non-commissioned officer of the landing crew, as we appeared in the doorway. In his excitement he forgot his menore, and resorted to the infinitely slower but more natural speech. "Some sort of insect came buzzing down--like an Earth bee, but larger. One of the men slapped it, and jumped aside, forgetting the low gravity here. He shot into the air, and another of the men made a grab for him. They both went sailing, and the trees--_look!_" But I had already spotted the two men. The trees had them in their grip, long tentacles curled around them, a dozen of the great willow-like growths apparently fighting for possession of the prizes. And all around, far out of reach, the trees of the forest were swaying restlessly, their long, pendulous branches, like tentacles, lashing out hungrily. "The rays, sir!" snapped the thought from Dival, like a flash of lightning. "Concentrate the beams--strike at the trunks--" "Right!" My orders emanated on the heels of the thought more quickly than one word could have been uttered. The six men who operated the disintegrator rays were stung out of their startled immobility, and the soft hum of the atomatic power generators deepened. "Strike at the trunks of the trees! Beams narrowed to minimum! Action at will!" The invisible rays swept long gashes into the forest as the trainers squatted behind their sights, directing the long, gleaming tubes. Branches crashed to the ground, suddenly motionless. Thick brown dust dropped heavily. A trunk, shortened by six inches or so, dropped into its stub and fell with a prolonged sound of rending wood. The trees against which it had fallen tugged angrily at their trapped tentacles. One of the men rolled free, staggered to his feet, and came lurching towards us. Trunk after trunk dropped onto its severed stub and fell among the lashing branches of its fellows. The other man was caught for a moment in a mass of dead and motionless wood, but a cunningly directed ray dissolved the entangling branches around him and he lay there, free but unable to arise. * * * * * The rays played on ruthlessly. The brown, heavy powder was falling like greasy soot. Trunk after trunk crashed to the ground, slashed into fragments. "Cease action!" I ordered, and instantly the eager whine of the generators softened to a barely discernible hum. Two of the men, under orders, raced out to the injured man: the rest of us clustered around the first of the two to be freed from the terrible tentacles of the trees. His menore was gone, his tight-fitting uniform was in shreds, and blotched with blood. There was a huge crimson welt across his face, and blood dripped slowly from the tips of his fingers. "_God!_" he muttered unsteadily as kindly arms lifted him with eager tenderness. "They're alive! Like snakes. They--they're _hungry_!" "Take him to the ship," I ordered. "He is to receive treatment immediately," I turned to the detail that was bringing in the other victim. The man was unconscious, and moaning, but suffering more from shock than anything else. A few minutes under the helio emanations and he would be fit for light duty. * * * * * As the men hurried him to the ship, I turned to Dival. He was standing beside me, rigid, his face very pale, his eyes fixed on space. "What do you make of it, Mr. Dival?" I questioned him. "Of the trees?" He seemed startled, as though I had aroused him from deepest thought. "They are not difficult to comprehend, sir. There are numerous growths that are primarily carnivorous. We have the fintal vine on Zenia, which coils instantly when touched, and thus traps many small animals which it wraps about with its folds and digests through sucker-like growths. "On your own Earth there are, we learn, hundreds of varieties of insectivorous plants: the Venus fly-trap, known otherwise as the Dionaea Muscipula, which has a leaf hinged in the median line, with teeth-like bristles. The two portions of the leaf snap together with considerable force when an insect alights upon the surface, and the soft portions of the catch are digested by the plant before the leaf opens again. The pitcher plant is another native of Earth, and several varieties of it are found on Zenia and at least two other planets. It traps its game without movement, but is nevertheless insectivorous. You have another species on Earth that is, or was, very common: the Mimosa Pudica. Perhaps you know it as the sensitive plant. It does not trap insects, but it has a very distinct power of movement, and is extremely irritable. "It is not at all difficult to understand a carniverous tree, capable of violent and powerful motion. This is undoubtedly what we have here--a decidedly interesting phenomena, but not difficult of comprehension." It seems like a long explanation, as I record it here, but emanated as it was, it took but an instant to complete it. Mr. Dival went on without a pause: "I believe, however, that I have discovered something far more important. How is your menore adjusted, sir?" "At minimum." "Turn it to maximum, sir." I glanced at him curiously, but obeyed. New streams of thought poured in upon me. Kincaide ... the guard at the exit ... _and something else_. I blanked out Kincaide and the men, feeling Dival's eyes searching my face. There was something else, something-- I focused on the dim, vague emanations that came to me from the circlet of my menore, and gradually, like an object seen through heavy mist, I perceived the message: "Wait! Wait! We are coming! Through the ground. The trees ... disintegrate them ... all of them ... all you can reach. But not the ground ... not the ground...." "Peter!" I shouted, turning to Dival. "That's Peter Wilson, second officer of the _Dorlos_!" Dival nodded, his dark face alight. "Let us see if we can answer him," he suggested, and we concentrated all our energy on a single thought: "We understand. We understand." The answer came back instantly: "Good! Thank God! Sweep them down, Hanson: every tree of them. Kill them ... kill them ... kill them!" The emanation fairly shook with hate. "We are coming ... to the clearing ... wait--and while you wait, use your rays upon these accursed hungry trees!" Grimly and silently we hurried back to the ship. Dival, the savant, snatching up specimens of earth and rock here and there as we went. * * * * * The disintegrator rays of the portable projectors were no more than toys compared with the mighty beams the _Kalid_ was capable of projecting, with her great generators to supply power. Even with the beams narrowed to the minimum, they cut a swath a yard or more in diameter, and their range was tremendous; although working rather less rapidly as the distance and power decreased, they were effective over a range of many miles. Before their blasting beams the forest shriveled and sank into tumbled chaos. A haze of brownish dust hung low over the scene, and I watched with a sort of awe. It was the first time I had ever seen the rays at work on such wholesale destruction. A startling thing became evident soon after we began our work. This world that we had thought to be void of animal life, proved to be teeming with it. From out of the tangle of broken and harmless branches, thousands of animals appeared. The majority of them were quite large, perhaps the size of full-grown hogs, which Earth animal they seemed to resemble, save that they were a dirty yellow color, and had strong, heavily-clawed feet. These were the largest of the animals, but there were myriads of smaller ones, all of them pale or neutral in color, and apparently unused to such strong light, for they ran blindly, wildly seeking shelter from the universal confusion. Still the destructive beams kept about their work, until the scene changed utterly. Instead of resting in a clearing, the _Kalid_ was in the midst of a tangle of fallen, wilting branches that stretched like a great, still sea, as far as the eye could see. "Cease action!" I ordered suddenly. I had seen, or thought I had seen, a human figure moving in the tangle, not far from the edge of the clearing. Correy relayed the order, and instantly the rays were cut off. My menore, free from the interference of the great atomic generators of the _Kalid_, emanated the moment the generators ceased functioning. "Enough. Hanson! Cut the rays; we're coming." "We have ceased action; come on!" I hurried to the still open exit. Kincaide and his guards were staring at what had been the forest; they were so intent that they did not notice I had joined them--and no wonder! A file of men were scrambling over the debris; gaunt men with dishevelled hair, practically naked, covered with dirt and the greasy brown dust of the disintegrator ray. In the lead, hardly recognizable, his menore awry upon his tangled locks, was Peter Wilson. "Wilson!" I shouted; and in a single great leap I was at his side, shaking his hand, one arm about his scarred shoulders, laughing and talking excitedly, all in the same breath. "Wilson, tell me--in God's name--what has happened?" He looked up at me with shining, happy eyes, deep in black sockets of hunger and suffering. "The part that counts," he said hoarsely, "is that you're here, and we're here with you. My men need rest and food--not too much food, at first, for we're starving. I'll give you the story--or as much of it as I know--while we eat." I sent my orders ahead; for every man of that pitiful crew of survivors, there were two eager men of the _Kalid's_ crew to minister to him. In the little dining salon of the officers' mess, Wilson gave us the story, while he ate slowly and carefully, keeping his ravenous hunger in check. "It's a weird sort of story," he said. "I'll cut it as short as I can. I'm too weary for details. "The _Dorlos_, as I suppose you know, was ordered to L-472 to determine the fate of the _Filanus_, which had been sent here to determine the feasibility of establishing a supply base here for a new interplanetary ship line. "It took us nearly three days, Earth time, to locate this clearing and the _Filanus_, and we grounded the _Dorlos_ immediately. Our commander--you probably remember him, Hanson: David McClellan? Big, red-faced chap?" I nodded, and Wilson continued. "Commander McClellan was a choleric person, as courageous a man as ever wore the blue and silver of the Service, and very thoughtful of his men. We had had a bad trip; two swarms of meteorites that had worn our nerves thin, and a faulty part in the air-purifying apparatus had nearly done us in. While the exit was being unsealed, he gave the interior crew permission to go off duty, to get some fresh air, with orders, however, to remain close to the ship, under my command. Then, with the usual landing crew, he started for the _Filanus_. "He had forgotten, under the stress of the moment, that the force of gravity would be very small on a body no larger than this. The result was that as soon as they hurried out of the ship, away from the influence of our own gravity pads, they hurtled into the air in all directions." Wilson paused. Several seconds passed before he could go on. "Well, the trees--I suppose you know something about them--reached out and swept up three of them. McClellan and the rest of the landing crew rushed to their rescue. They were caught up. _God!_ I can see them ... hear them ... even now! "I couldn't stand there and see that happen to them. With the rest of the crew behind me, we rushed out, armed only with our atomic pistols. We did not dare use the rays; there were a dozen men caught up everywhere in those hellish tentacles. "I don't know what I thought we could do. I knew only that I must do something. Our leaps carried us over the tops of the trees that were fighting for the ... the bodies of McClellan and the rest of the landing crew. I saw then, when it was too late, that there was nothing we could do. The trees ... had done their work. They ... they were _feeding_.... "Perhaps that is why we escaped. We came down in a tangle of whipping branches. Several of my men were snatched up. The rest of us saw how helpless our position was ... that there was nothing we could do. We saw, too, that the ground was literally honeycombed, and we dived down these burrows, out of the reach of the trees. "There were nineteen of us that escaped. I can't tell you how we lived--I would not if I could. The burrows had been dug by the pig-like animals that the trees live upon, and they led, eventually, to the shore, where there was water--horrible, bitter stuff, but not salty, and apparently not poisonous." We lived on these pig-like animals, and we learned something of their way of life. The trees seem to sleep, or become inactive, at night. Not unless they are touched do they lash about with their tentacles. At night the animals feed, largely upon the large, soft fruit of these trees. Of course, large numbers of them make a fatal step each night, but they are prolific, and their ranks do not suffer. "Of course, we tried to get back to the clearing, and the _Dorlos_; first by tunneling. That was impossible, we found, because the rays used by the _Filanus_ in clearing a landing place had acted somewhat upon the earth beneath, and it was like powder. Our burrows fell in upon us faster than we could dig them out! Two of my men lost their lives that way. "Then we tried creeping back by night; but we could not see as can the other animals here, and we quickly found that it was suicide to attempt such tactics. Two more of the men were lost in that fashion. That left fourteen. "We decided then to wait. We knew there would be another ship along, sooner or later. Luckily, one of the men had somehow retained his menore. We treasured that as we treasured our lives. To-day, when, deep in our runways beneath the surface, we felt, or heard, the crashing of the trees, we knew the Service had not forgotten us. I put on the menore; I--but I think you know the rest, gentlemen. There were eleven of us left. We are here--all that is left of the _Dorlos_ crew. We found no trace of any survivor of the _Filanus_; unaware of the possibility of danger, they were undoubtedly, all the victims of ... the trees." Wilson's head dropped forward on his chest. He straightened up with a start and an apologetic smile. "I believe, Hanson," he said slowly, "I'd better get ... a little ... rest," and he slumped forward on the table in the death-like sleep of utter exhaustion. * * * * * There the interesting part of the story ends. The rest is history, and there is too much dry history in the Universe already. Dival wrote three great volumes on L-472--or Ibit, as it is called now. One of them tells in detail how the presence of constantly increasing quantities of volcanic ash robbed the soil of that little world of its vitality, so that all forms of vegetation except the one became extinct, and how, through a process of development and evolution, those trees became carniverous. The second volume is a learned discussion of the tree itself; it seems that a few specimens were spared for study, isolated on a peninsula of one of the continents, and turned over to Dival for observation and dissection. All I can say for the book is that it is probably accurate. Certainly it is neither interesting nor comprehensible. And then, of course, there is his treatise on ocrite: how he happened to find the ore, the probable amount available on L-472--or Ibit, if you prefer--and an explanation of his new method of refining it. I saw him frantically gathering specimens while we were getting ready to leave, but it wasn't until after we had departed that he mentioned what he had found. * * * * * I have a set of these volumes somewhere; Dival autographed them and presented me with them. They established his position, I understand, in his world of science, and of course, the discovery of this new source of ocrite was a tremendous find for the whole Universe; interplanetary transportation wouldn't be where it is to-day if it were not for this inexhaustible source of power. Yes, Dival became famous--and very rich. I received the handshakes and the gratitude of the eleven men we rescued, and exactly nine words of commendation from the Chief of my squadron: _"You are a credit to the Service, Commander Hanson!"_ Perhaps, to some who read this, it will seem that Dival fared better than I. But to men who have known the comradeship of the outer space, the heart-felt gratitude of eleven friends is a precious thing. And to any man who has ever worn the blue and silver uniform of the Special Patrol Service, those nine words from the Chief of Squadron will sound strong. Chiefs of Squadrons in the Special Patrol Service--at least in those days--were scanty with praise. It may be different in these days of soft living and political pull. [Illustration] Marooned Under the Sea _By Paul Ernst_ (Editor's note: This document, written on a curious kind of parchment and tied to a piece of driftwood, was reported to have been picked out of the sea near the Fiji Islands. The first and last pages were so water soaked as to be indecipherable.) Yacht _Rosa_ was due to leave the San Francisco harbor in two hours. We were going on some mysterious cruise to the South Seas, the details of which I did not know. [Sidenote: Three men stick out a strange and desperate adventure among the incredible monsters of the dark sea floor.] "Professor George Berry, the famous zoologist, and myself are going to do some exploring that is hazardous in the extreme," Stanley had said. "For purely mechanical reasons we need a third. You are young and have no family ties, so I thought I'd ask you to go with us. I'd rather not tell you what it's all about until we are on our way." [Illustration: _"Look at the cable!" called Stanley._] That was all the explanation he had given. It was sufficient. I was fed-up with life just then: I had enough money to avoid work and was tired of playing. "I must warn you that you'll risk your life in this," he had continued, in answer to my acceptance of his invitation. And I had replied that the hazard, whatever it might be, only made the trip appear more desirable. So here I was, on board the yacht, about to sail for far places on some scientific mission which had so far been kept veiled in secrecy and which was represented as "hazardous in the extreme." It sounded attractive! * * * * * Stanley came aboard accompanied by a lean, wiry man with iron gray hair and cool, alert black eyes. "Hello, Martin," Stanley greeted me. "I want you to meet Professor Berry, the real leader of this expedition. Professor, this young red-head is Martin Grey, a sort of nephew by adoption who knows more about night life than most cabaret proprietors--and not much of anything else. He has shaken the dangers of the gold-diggers to face with us the dangers of the tropic seas." The professor gripped my hand, and his cool black eyes gazed into mine with a kind of friendly frostiness. "Don't pay any attention to him," he advised me. "Twenty years ago, when I first met him, he was on his way to Africa to shoot elephants because some revue beauty had just thrown him over and he felt he ought to do something big and heroic about it. It was shortly afterward that he decided to stay a bachelor all his life, and became such a confirmed woman hater." He smiled thinly at Stanley's prod in the ribs, and the two went below, talking and laughing with the intimacy of old friendship. I stayed on deck and soon found myself watching, with no little wonder, an enormous truck and trailer arrangement that drew up on the dock heavily loaded with a single immense crate. It was for us. I speculated as to what it could possibly contain. It was a twenty or twenty-five-foot cube solidly braced with strap-iron and steel brackets. It evidently contained something fragile. The yacht's donkey engine lowered a hook for it, and swung it over the side and into the hold as daintily as though it had been packed with explosives. The last of the ship's stores followed it over the side: the group of newspaper reporters who had been trying to pump the captain and first mate for a story were warned to leave, and we were ready to go. Precisely where and for what purpose? I was to find out almost immediately. Even as the yacht nosed superciliously away from the dock, the steward approached me with the information that lunch was ready. I went to the small, compactly furnished dining salon, where I was joined by Stanley and the professor. * * * * * There were only the three of us at the table. Stanley Browne, noted big game hunter and semi-retired owner of the great Browne Glassworks at Altoona, a man fifteen years my senior but tanned and fit looking; Professor Berry, well known in scientific circles; and myself, known in no branch of activity save the one Stanley had jested about--the night life of my home city, Chicago. "It's time you knew just what you're up against," said Stanley to me after the consomme had been served. "Now that we've actually sailed, there's no longer any need for secrecy. Indeed there never has been urgent need of it: the Professor and myself merely thought we might provoke incredulity and comment if we stated the purpose of our trip publicly." He buttered a roll. "We--the Professor and you and I--are going in for some deep sea diving. And when I say deep, I mean deep. We are going to investigate conditions as they exist one mile down from the surface of the ocean." "A mile!" I exclaimed. "Why--" There I stopped. I had only a layman's knowledge of such matters. But I knew that the limit of man's submersion, till then at any rate, was a matter of a few hundred feet. "Sounds incredible, doesn't it," said Stanley with a smile. "But that's what we're going to do--if the Professor's gadget works as he seems to think it will." "I don't think it, I know it," retorted the Professor. "And man, man, the things we may see down there! New and unknown species--a world no human has ever seen before--perhaps the secret of all of life--" "Dragons, sea-serpents, and what not!" Stanley finished with a grin. "Or, possibly--nothing at all." The Professor shrugged. "I mustn't let my scientific curiosity run away with me. Perhaps we'll find no new thing down down. Our deep sea dredging and classification may already embrace most of the forms of life in the greater depths." "If it does I want my money back," said Stanley. "When you asked me to finance this expedition for you, I agreed on condition that you would show me a thrill--some _real_ big game, even if I would not be able to shoot it. If we draw blank--" "The mere descent should satisfy you, my adventuring friend," replied the Professor brusquely. "I think you'll find that thrilling enough." "But--a mile under the surface!" I marveled, feeling not entirely comfortable. "The pressure! Enormous! It can't be done! That is, I mean, can it be done?" "It had better be," said Stanley with a humor that I did not entirely appreciate. "If it isn't, the three of us are going to be pressed out like three sheets of tissue paper! For we are assuredly going down that far in the Professor's gadget." "Was that the thing I saw hoisted aboard just before we left?" "That was it. We'll stroll around after lunch and look it over." If I had taken this cruise in search of distraction--I was surely going to be successful! That was plain! "Just where are we going?" I asked. "You said something about the South Seas, but you've named no special part of them." "We're bound for Penguin Deep. That's a delightful little dimple in the Kermadec Trough, which," Stanley explained, "is north-northeast of New Zealand almost halfway up to the Fiji Islands. Penguin Deep is ticketed at five thousand one hundred and fifty feet, but it probably runs deeper in spots." The rest of the meal was consumed in silence. I hardly tasted what I ate; I remember that. Over five thousand feet down--where no man had ever ventured before! Could we make it? I tried to recall my neglected physics lessons and compute the pressure that far down. I couldn't. But I knew it must be an appalling total of tons to the square inch. What possible arrangement could they have brought in which to make that awful descent? And, if the descent were accomplished, what in the world would we see when we got down there? Gigantic, hitherto unknown fishes? Marine growths, half animal and half vegetable? Decidedly, hot rolls and salad, cutlets and baked potatoes, good as they were, could not distract attention from the crowding questions that assailed me. And I could see that Stanley and the Professor were also far away in their thoughts--probably already exploring Penguin Deep. * * * * * After lunch we went forward to look at the Professor's gadget, as Stanley insisted on calling it. It had been carefully unpacked by the crew while we ate, and it shimmered in the electric lighted hold like a great bubble. It was a giant glass sphere, polished and flawless. Inside it could be made out various objects--a circular bench arrangement on a wooden flooring, batteries that filled the cup between the floor and the bottom arc of the sphere, tall metal cylinders, a small searchlight set next to a mechanism that was indeterminate. At three equidistant points on the sides there were glass handles, as thick as a man's thigh, cast integral with the walls. On the top there was a smaller handle. At first glance the sphere seemed all in one piece, with the central objects cast inside like a toy ship in a sealed bottle. Then a mathematically precise ring of prismatic reflections showed me that the top third of the ball was a separate piece, fitting conically down like the tapered glass stopper of a monstrous perfume bottle. The handle on the top was for the purpose of lifting this giant's teapot lid, and allowing entrance into the sphere. "Isn't it a beauty?" murmured Stanley. "It ought to be," he added. "It cost me eighty-six thousand to make it in my own glass factory. Eleven castings before this one came along that was reasonably free of flaws. Twenty-two feet six inches over all, walls five feet thick, new formula unbreakable glass, four men working a month to grind the lid into place, tolerance limits plus or minus zero." He slapped the Professor's shoulders. "Let's go in and look over the apparatus." * * * * * To accommodate the huge ball a well had been constructed in the Rosa's hold. This brought the deck we were standing on up to within six feet of the top ring, above which was rigged a chain hoist for lifting the ponderous lid. The hoist was revolved, the conical top was swung free, and we clambered into our unique diving shell. The tall cylinders were revealed as great flasks of compressed air. The indeterminate thing beside the searchlight turned out to be a hand pump, geared to work against heavy pressure. From the suction chamber of this three tubes extended. "We inhale the air of the chamber," the Professor explained to me, "and exhale through the tubes into the pump cylinder. Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. The pump piston is forced down by this geared handle, sending the used air out of the shell through this sixteenth-inch hole. A ball check valve keeps the water from squirting in when the exhaust pressure is released." He pointed to a telegraphic key which completed a circuit from the batteries in the bottom of the ball to a thread of copper cast through the lid. "That's your plaything, Martin. You are to raise or lower us by pressing that key. It controls the donkey engine electrically, so that we guide our own destinies though we are a mile beneath our power plant. Stanley works the pump. I direct the searchlight, write down notes, and, I sincerely hope, take snapshots of deep sea life." For a moment my part of the labor seemed so easy as to be unfair. Merely to sit there and punch a little key at raising and lowering time! But as I thought it over it began to appear more difficult. The _Rosa_ could not anchor, of course, in a mile of water. We would drift helplessly. If we approached an undersea cliff I must raise us at once to prevent us being smashed against it. And if the cliff were too lofty to be cleared in time.... I mentioned this to the Professor. "That would be unfortunate," he said, with his frosty smile. "Stanley assures us this glass is unbreakable. He means commercially unbreakable. What would happen to it if it were submitted to the strain of being flung against a rock pile--in addition to the enormous stress of the water pressure--I don't know. It's your job to see that we don't have to find out!" * * * * * It had been planned to test the sphere empty first to see how it stood the strain. We drifted to a full stop over the center of Penguin Deep where we were to gamble our lives in a game with Neptune. Sea anchors were rigged to lessen our drift and the donkey engine was geared to the first cable drum. There was an impressive row of these drums, each holding an interminable length of three-quarter-inch cable. The bulk of a mile of steel cable has to be seen to be believed! The glass sphere was lifted from the hold, delicately for all its enormous weight, and swung over the rail preparatory to being lowered into the depths. Not until that moment did I notice two things: that there was no fastening of any kind to keep the thick lid in place: and that the three-quarter-inch cable looked like a pack thread in comparison to the ponderous bulk it strained to support. "We couldn't use a heavier cable," said the Professor, "because of the strain. We're overloading the hoist as it is. As for the lid being fastened down--I think you'll find it will be pressed into place securely enough!" There was unanimous silence as the great globe slipped into the sea--down and down until the last reflection of the morning sun ceased to shimmer from its surface. Drum after drum was played out, till the first mate held his hand up to check the engineer. "Five thousand feet, sir," he called to Stanley. "Haul it back up. And let us hope," Stanley added fervently, "that we'll find the gadget in one piece." * * * * * The engine began to snort rhythmically. Dripping, vibrating, the coils of cable began to crawl back in place on the drums. There was a glint under the surface again as the sunlight reflected on the nearing sphere. The great ball flashed out of the water, and a cheer burst from the throats of all of us. It was absolutely unharmed. Only--there was a beading of fine moisture inside the thick globe. What that could mean, none of us could figure out. "Difference in temperature?" worried the Professor. "No, it's as cold inside as out. Molecules of water driven by sheer pressure through five feet of glass to unite in drops on the inside? Possibly. Well, there's one way to find out. Stanley, Martin--are you ready?" We nodded, and prepared to visit the bottom a mile below the _Rosa's_ keel. The preparation consisted merely in donning heavy, fleece-lined jumpers to protect us from the cold of the sunless depths. Soberly we entered the ball to undergo whatever ordeal awaited us on the distant ocean floor. How comparative distance is! A mile walk in the country--it is nothing. A mile ascent in an airplane--a trifle. But a mile descent into pitch black, bone chilling depths of water--that is an immense distance! Copper wire, on a separate drum, was connected from the engine switch to the copper thread that curled through the glass wall to my telegraphic key. We strapped the mouthpieces of the breathing tubes over our heads, and Browne started the slow turning of the compression pump. The Professor snapped the searchlight on and off several times to see that it was in working shape. He raised his hand, I pressed the key, and the long descent began. * * * * * That plunge into the bottomless depths remains in my memory almost as clearly as the far more fantastic adventures that came to us later. Smoothly, rapidly, the yellow-green of the surface water dimmed to olive. This in turn grew blacker and blacker. Then we were slipping down into pitch darkness--a big bubble lit by a meagre lamp and containing three fragile human beings that dared to trust the soft pulp of their bodies to the crushing weight of the deepest ocean. The most impressive thing was the utter soundlessness of our descent. At first there had been a pulsing throb of the donkey engine transmitted to us by the sustaining cable. This died as we slid farther from the Rosa. At length it was hushed entirely, cushioned by the springy length of steel. There was no stir, no sound of any kind. As far as our senses could tell us, we were hanging motionless in the pressing, awesome blackness. The Professor switched off our light and turned on the searchlight which he trained downward through the wall at as steep an angle as the flooring would permit. Even then the illusion of motionlessness was preserved. There was nothing in the water to mark our progress. We might have been floating in a back void of space. Down and down we went, for an interminable length of time--till at length we reached the abysmal level where the sun never shone and the eyes of man had never gazed till now. * * * * * Words were made to describe familiar articles. I find now when I am faced with the necessity of portraying events and objects beyond the range of normal human experience that I cannot conjure up words to fit. I despair of trying to make you see what we saw, and feel what we felt. But try to picture yourself in the glass ball with us: All is profound blackness save for a streak of white, dying about fifty feet away, which is the beam of our searchlight. Twenty feet below is a bare floor of flinty lava and broken shell. This is unrelieved by sea-weed of any kind, appearing like an imagined fragment of Martian or lunar landscape. The ball sways idly to the push of some explicable submarine current. It is like being in a captive balloon, except that the connecting cable extends stiffly upward instead of downward. There is a realization, an instinctive _feel_ of awful pressure around you. Logic tells you how you are clamped about, but deeper than logic is the intuition that the glass walls are pressing in on themselves--at the point of collapse. Your ears, tingle with the feel of it: your head rings with it. You are breathing in through your nose--thin, unsatisfying gulps of air that cause your lungs to labor at their task; and you are exhaling through, your mouth, with difficulty, into the barrel of the powerful pump. No bubbles arise from the tiny hole where the used air is forced into the water. The pressure is too enormous for that. Only a thin, milky line marks its escape from the sphere. In a ghostly way you see Stanley turning the pump handle. With a handful of waste which he has borrowed from the _Rosa's_ engine room, the Professor wipes from the section of wall through which the searchlight plays the moisture that constantly collects there. I sit with my hand near the key, peering downward and ahead like an engineer in a locomotive cab, ready to raise the shell or lower it as occasion warrants. And always the suffocating awareness of pressure.... * * * * * Strange and mystic journey as the tortured glass sphere floated over the bottom, following the slow drift of the _Rosa_ far above! The finger of light played along the tilted side of a wrecked tramp steamer. There was a crumpled gash in the bow. From this ragged hole suddenly appeared a great, serpentine form.... The Professor clutched at his camera, pointed it, and clenched his hands in a frenzy of disappointment. The serpent shape had disappeared back into the hull. A little later and we had drifted slowly past the wreck. "Damn it!" the Professor snatched away his mouthpiece to exclaim: "If we could only _stop_." The bottom changed character shortly after we had passed the hulk. We began to creep over low, gently rounded mounds. These were so regular in form that they were puzzling. About fifty feet across and ten in altitude, they looked artificial in their symmetry--like great saucers set on the ocean floor bottom side up. They took on a dirty black hue as our light struck them, and glowed with a faint phosphorescence as they stretched away into the darkness. A twelve-foot monstrosity, all toad-like head and eyes, swam into the light beam and bumped blindly against the glass ball. For an instant it goggled crazily at us. The Professor took its picture. It blundered away. As it reached the darkness beyond the beam it, too, showed phosphorescent. A belt of blue-white spots like the portholes of a liner extended down its ugly sides. Along the bottom, between the curious mounds, writhed a wormlike thing. But it was too huge to be described as truly wormlike--it was eighteen or twenty feet long and a foot thick. It was blood red, almost blunt ended and patently without eyes. I took my gaze off it for an instant. When I looked again it had disappeared. I blinked at this seeming miracle and then discovered a foot or so of its tail protruding from under the edge of one of the mounds. It was threshing furiously about. * * * * * It was at this instant that I suddenly found increased difficulty, and glanced at Stanley. He had stopped pumping and was clutching at the Professor's arm with one hand while he pointed down with the other. The Professor motioned him toward the pump, and began to click pictures furiously with the camera pointed at the nearest mound. Wondering at the urgency of Stanley's gesture and the frantic clicking of the camera shutter, I looked more closely at the curious, saucerlike hump. Under closer inspection something remarkably like a huge, mud-colored eye was revealed! And as we drifted along, twenty feet away on the farther slope, another appeared! Paralyzed, I stared at the edges of the thing. They were waving almost imperceptibly up and down, _creeping_! The mounds were living creatures! Acres and acres of them lying lethargically on the bottom waiting for something to crawl within range of their monstrous edges! Involuntarily I pressed the key to raise us. But we had gone only a few feet when the Professor called to me. "Down again, Martin. I don't think these things will bother us unless we scrape against them. Anyway they can't hurt the shell." I lowered the ball to our former twenty-foot level, and there we swung just over the monsters' backs. * * * * * The Professor had said that the giant inverted saucers would probably not bother us if we did not come in contact with them. It soon became apparent that, in a measure, he was right. The creatures either could not or would not lift their enormous bulks from the sea floor. A gigantic wriggling thing, all grotesque fringe and tentacles, drifted down into the range of our light. Lower it floated until it hovered just above one of the larger mounds. The Professor got its portrait. At the same instant, as though it had heard the click of the shutter and been frightened by it, the thing dropped another foot--and touched the sloping back. With the speed of light the inverted saucer became a cup. Like a clenching fist, the cup closed over one of the straggling tentacles. There followed a tug of war that was all the more ghastly for its soundlessness. The hunted jerked spasmodically to get away from the hunter. So wild were its efforts that several times it raised the monster clear of the bottom for a foot or so. But the grim clutch could not be broken. Closer and closer it was dragged. Then, after a supreme paroxysm, the tentacle parted and the prey escaped. The tentacle disappeared into the mass of the baffled hunter. It made no attempt to follow the fleeing creature. It slowly relaxed along the bottom and waited for its next meal. The unearthly incident gave us fresh confidence, convincing us that the monsters did not move unless they were directly touched. Of course we could not foresee the fatal accident that was going to put us within reach of one of the giant saucers. * * * * * We thought for awhile that these great blobs of cold life were the largest creatures of the depths. It was soon made clear to us how mistaken that notion was! For a time we gazed spellbound at the nightmare assortment of grotesqueries that gradually assembled around us, attracted no doubt by our light. The things were mainly sightless and of indescribable shape. Most of them were phosphorescent, and they avoided collisions in a way that suggested that they had some buried sense of light perception. As time passed the Professor emptied his camera, refilled it several times and groaned that he had no more film. Twice as we drifted along I raised us to keep us clear of a gradual upward slope of the smooth floor. Stanley removed his mouthpiece long enough to suggest that we go back to the surface: we had been submerged for nearly four hours now. But before we could reply a violent movement was felt. The ball rocked and twirled so that we were forced to cling to the circular bench to avoid being thrown to the floor. It was as though a hurricane of wind had suddenly penetrated the unruffled depths. "Earthquake?" called Stanley. "Don't know," answered the Professor. He swung the searchlight in an arc and focussed it at length on something that appeared only as a field of blurred movement. He wiped the moisture from the wall before the lens, and there was revealed to us a sight that makes my heart pound even now when I recall it to memory. Something vast and serpentine had ventured too near the bottom--and had been caught by the death traps there! The creature was a writhing mass of gigantic coils. It was impossible even to guess at its length, but its girth was such that the mound-shaped monsters that had fastened to it could not entirely encircle it. There it twined and knotted: a mighty serpent of the deepest ocean, snapping its awful length and threshing its powerful tail in an effort to dislodge the giant leeches that were flattened against it. And every time it touched the bottom in its blind frenzy, more of the teeming deathtraps attached themselves to it, crawling over their fellows in an effort to find unoccupied areas. * * * * * Soon the sea-serpent was a distorted, creeping mass. For one appalling instant its head came into our view.... It resembled the head of a crocodile, only it was ten times larger and covered with scale like the armor plate of a destroyer. The jaws, wide open and slashing with enormous, needle-shaped teeth at the huge parasites, were large enough to have held our glass sphere. One eye appeared. It was at least three feet across and of a shimmering amethyst color. One of the deadly saucers wrapped itself around the great head. The entire mass of attackers and attacked settled slowly to the bottom. But before it completely succumbed the beaten monster gave one last, convulsive flick of its tail.... "Good God!" cried Stanley, shrinking away from the pump and staring upward. I followed his gaze with my own eyes. In the faint reflected glow of the searchlight I could see row on row of large cups flattened against the top of the ball. As I watched these flattened still more and the big sphere quivered perceptibly. In its death struggle the mighty serpent had flicked one of the huge leeches against us. It now clung there with blind tenacity, covering nearly two-thirds of our shell with the underside of its body. I reached for the control key to send us to the surface. "Don't!" snapped the Professor. "The weight--" He needed to say no more. My hand recoiled as though the key had been red hot. The three-quarter-inch cable above us was now sustaining, in addition to its own huge weight, our massive glass ball and the appalling tonnage of this grim blanket of flesh that encircled us. Could it further hold against the strain of lifting that combined tonnage through the press of the water? Almost certainly it could not! There was nothing we could do but hang there and discover at first hand exactly what happened to things that were clamped in those mighty, living vises! * * * * * The Professor turned on the interior bulb. The result was ghastly. It showed every detail of the belly of the thing that gripped us. Crowded over its entire under surface were gristly, flattened suckers. Now and then a convulsive ripple ran through its surface tissue and great ridges of flesh stood out. With each squeeze the glass shell quivered ominously as though the extreme limit of its pressure resisting power were being reached--and passed. "A nice fix," remarked the Professor, his calm, dry voice acting like a tonic in that moment of fear. "If we try to go up, the cable would probably break. If we try to outlast the patience of this thing we might run out of air, or actually be staved in." He paused thoughtfully. "I suggest, though, that we follow the latter course for awhile at least. It would be just too bad if that cable broke, gentlemen!" Stanley shuddered, and looked at the dirty white belly that pressed against the glass walls on all sides. "I vote we stay here for a time." "And I," was my addition. I relieved Stanley at the pump. He and the Professor sat down on the bench. Casting frequent glances at the constricted blanket of flesh that covered us, we prepared to wait as composedly as we might for the thing to give up its effort to smash our shell. * * * * * The hour that followed was longer than any full day I have ever lived through. Had I not confirmed the passage of time by looking at my watch, I would have sworn that at least twenty hours had passed. Every half-minute I gazed at that weaving pattern of cup-shaped suckers only five feet away, trying to see if they were relaxing in their pressure. I attempted to persuade myself that they were. But I knew I was only imagining it. Actually they were pressed as flat as ever, and the sphere still quivered at regular intervals as the heavy body squeezed in on itself. There was no sign that its blind, mindless patience was becoming exhausted. There was little conversation during that interminable hour. Stanley grinned wryly once and commented on the creature's disappointment if it actually succeeded in getting at us. "We'd be scattered all over the surrounding half mile by the pressure of the water," he said. "There'd be nothing left for our pet to feed on but five-foot chunks of broken glass. Not a very satisfying meal." "We might try to reason with the thing--point out how foolish it is to waste its time on us," I suggested, trying to appear as nonchalant as he was. The Professor said nothing. He was coolly writing in his notebook, describing minutely the appearance of our abysmal captor. Finally I chanced to look down through a section of wall not covered by our stubborn enemy. I wiped the moisture from the glass before the searchlight so that I could see more clearly. * * * * * The bottom seemed to be heaving up and down. I blinked my eyes and looked again. It was not an illusion. With a regular dip and rise we were approaching to within a few feet of the rocky floor and moving back up again. Also we were floating faster than at anytime previous. The bottom was bare again; we had left the crowding, ominous mounds. I waved to the Professor. He snapped his notebook shut and stared at the uneasy ocean bottom. "I've been hoping I was wrong," he said simply. "I thought I felt a wavy motion fifteen minutes ago, and it seemed to me to increase steadily." The three of us stared at each other. "You mean ..." began Stanley with a shudder. "I mean that the _Rosa_, one mile above us, is having difficulties. A storm. Judging from our movement it must be a hurricane: the length of cable would cushion us from any average wave, and we are rising and falling at least fifteen feet." "My God!" groaned Stanley. "The _Rosa_ is already heeled with the weight of us. She could never weather a hurricane!" The plight of the crew above our heads was as clear to us as though we had been aboard with them. Should they cut the cable, figuring that the lives of the three of us were certainly not to be set against the thirty on the yacht? Should they disconnect the electric control and try to haul us up regardless? Or should they try to ride out the storm in spite of being crippled by the drag of us? "I think if I were up there I'd cut us adrift," said Stanley grimly. Both the Professor and myself nodded. "Though," he added hopefully, "my captain is a good gambler...." * * * * * The cable quivered like a live thing under the terrific strain. At each downward swoop, before the upswing began, there was a sickening sag. "We no longer have a decision to make," said the Professor. "Press the key, Martin, and God grant we can rise with all this dead weight." And at that instant the crew of the _Rosa_ were also relieved of the necessity for making a decision. At the bottom of one of those long, sickening falls there was a jerk--and we continued on down to the ocean floor! The sphere rolled over, jumbling the equipment in a tangled mess with the three of us in the center, bruised and cut. The light snapped off as the battery connections were torn loose. There we lay at the bottom of Penguin Deep, in an inert sphere that was dead and dark in the surrounding blackness--a coffin of glass to hold us through the centuries.... * * * * * "Martin," I heard the Professor's voice after a time. "Stanley--can either of you move? I'm caught." "I'm caught, too," came Stanley's gasping answer. "Something on my leg--feels like it's broken." A heavy object was pressing across my body. With an effort I freed myself and fumbled in the pitch darkness for the other two. "Lights first," commanded the Professor. "The pump, you know." I did know! Frantically I scrambled in the dark till I located the batteries. They were right side up and still wired together. The air grew rapidly foul with no one at the pump. Panting for breath I blundered at the task of connecting the light. After what seemed an eternity I accomplished it. The light revealed Stanley with an air tank lying across his leg. The mouthpiece of his breathing tube had been forced back over his head, gashing his face in its journey. His face was white with pain. The Professor was caught under the heavy bench. I freed him and together we attended to Stanley, finding that his leg wasn't broken but only badly bruised. The mound-shaped monster, dislodged possibly by the fall, was nowhere to be seen. I resumed work at the pump, the connections of which were so strongly contrived that they had withstood the shock of the upset. For a moment we were content to rest while the air grew purer. Then we were forced squarely to face our fate. * * * * * The Professor summed up the facts in a few concise words. "We're certainly doomed! Here at the bottom of Penguin Deep we're as out of reach of help as though we were stranded on the moon. We're as good as dead right now." "If we have nothing left to hope for," whispered Stanley after a time, "we might as well close the air valves and get it over with at once. No use torturing ourselves...." The Professor moistened his lips. "It might be wise." He turned to me. "What's your opinion, Martin?" But I--I confess I had not the stark courage of these two. "No! No!" I cried out. "Let's keep on living as long as the air holds out. Something might happen--" I avoided their eyes as I said it, utterly ashamed of my cowardly quibbling with death. What in the name of God could possibly happen to help us? The Professor shrugged dully, and nodded. "I feel with Stanley that we ought to get it over in one short stab. But we have no right to force you...." His voice trailed off. We readjusted our mouthpieces. I turned automatically at the pump; and we silently awaited the last suffocating moment of our final doom. * * * * * As before, attracted by the light, a strange assortment of deep-sea life wriggled and darted about us, swimming lazily among the looped coils and twists of our cable which had settled down around us. Among these were certain fish that resembled great porcupines. Spines a foot and a half long, like living knife blades, protected them from the attacks of other species. They were the only things we saw that were not constantly writhing away from the jaws of some hostile monster--the only things that seemed able to swim about their own affairs without even deigning to watch for danger. Fascinated, I watched the six-foot creatures. Here were we, reasoning humans, supposed lords of creation, slowly but surely perishing--while only a few feet away one of the lowest forms of life could exist in perfect safety and tranquility! Then, as I watched them, I seemed to see a difference in some of them. The majority of them had two fins just behind the gill slits, typical fish tails and blunt, sloping heads. But now and then I saw a spined monster that was queerly unlike its fellows. Instead of two front fins, these unique ones had two vacant round holes. The head looked as though it had forgotten to grow; its place was taken by an eyeless, projecting, shield shaped cap. And there was no tail. Glad to find something to distract my half crazed thoughts, I studied the nearest of these. They moved slower than their tailed and finned brothers, I noticed. I wondered how they could move at all, lacking in any kind of motive power as they seemed to be. Next instant the secret of their movement was made clear! * * * * * Out of the empty fin holes of the creature I was studying crept two long, powerful looking tentacles. But these were not true tentacles. There were no vacuum discs on them, and they moved as though supported by jointed bones--like arms. The arms ended in flat paddles that resembled hands. These threshed the water in a sort of breast-stroke, propelling the body forward. Shortly after the arms had appeared, the spiny head cap was cautiously extended a few inches forward from the main shell. Further it was extended as the head of a turtle might slowly appear from the protection of its bony case. And under it-- "Professor!" I screamed wildly. "My God! Look!" Both the Professor and Stanley merely stared dully at me. I babbled of what I had seen. "A man! A human looking thing, anyway! Arms and a head! A man inside a fish's spined hide--like armor!" They looked pityingly at me. The Professor laid his hand on my shoulder. "Now, now," he soothed, "don't go to pieces--" "I tell you I saw it!" I shouted. Then, shrinking from the hysterical loudness of my own voice, I lowered my tone. "Something that looks human has occupied some of those prickly, six-foot shells. I saw arms--and a man's head! I swear it!" "Nonsense! How could a human being stand the cold, the pressure--" Here I happened to glance at the wall of the shell through which the searchlight shone. "Look! See for yourself!" * * * * * Squarely in the rays of the light showed a head, projecting from one of the shells and capped with a wide flat helmet of horned bone. There were eyes and nose and mouth placed on one side of that head--a face! There were even tabs of flesh or bony protuberances that resembled ears. "Curious," muttered the Professor, staring. "It certainly looks human enough to talk. But it's only a fish, nevertheless. See--in the throat are gill slits." "But the eyes! Look at them! They're not the eyes of a fish!" And they were not. There was in them a light of reason, of intelligence. Those eyes were roaming brightly over us, observing the light, the equipment, seeming to note our amazement as we crowded to look at it. The sphere rocked slightly. Behind the staring, manlike visitor there was a glimpse of enormous, crocodile jaws and huge, amethyst eyes. Instantly the head and arms receded, leaving an empty-seeming, lifeless shell. An impregnable fortress of spines, the thing drifted slowly away through the twisted loops of cable. "It certainly looked like--" began Stanley shakily. "The creature was just a fish," said the Professor shaking his head at the light in Stanley's eyes. "Some sort of giant parasite that inhabits the shells of other fish." He opened the valve of the last air cylinder and seated himself resignedly on the bench. "We have another half hour or so--" All of us suddenly put out our hands to brace ourselves. The sphere had moved. "Look at the cable!" called Stanley. We did so. It was moving, writhing away from us over the bottom as though abruptly given life of its own. Coil after coil disappeared into the further gloom. At length the cable was straight. The ball moved again--was dragged a few feet along the rocky floor. Something--possessed of incredibly vast power--had seized the end of the steel cable and was reeling us in as a fisherman reels in a trout! * * * * * Slowly, unsteadily, we slid along the ocean floor. Ahead of us appeared a jagged black wall--a cliff. There was a gloomy hole at its base. Toward this we were being dragged by whatever it was that had caught the end of the cable. Helpless, we watched ourselves engulfed by the murky den. In the beam of the searchlight we saw that the submarine cavern extended on and on for an unguessable depth. The cable, taut with the strain, stretched ahead out of sight. Time had been lost track of during that mysterious, ominous journey. It was recalled to us by the state of the air we were breathing. The Professor removed his mouthpiece and cast the tube aside. "You might as well stop pumping, Martin," he said quietly. "We're done. There's no more air in the flask." We stared at each other. Then we shook hands, solemnly, tremulously, taking leave of each other before we departed on that longest of all journeys.... The air in that small space was rapidly exhausted. We lay on the floor, laboring for breath, and closed our eyes.... The Professor, the oldest of the three of us, succumbed first. I heard his breath whistle stertorously and, glancing at him, saw that he was in a coma. In a moment Stanley had joined him in blessed unconsciousness. I could feel myself drifting off.... Hammers beat at my ears.... Daggers pierced my heaving lungs.... Hazily I could see scores of the bristly, manlike fish when I opened my eyes and glanced through the walls. It was not one monster then, but many that had brought us to their lair. Abruptly, as though a signal had been given, they all streamed back toward the mouth of the cavern.... My eyesight dimmed.... The hammers pulsed louder.... A veil descended over my senses and I knew no more.... * * * * * A soft, sustained roar came to my ears. Through my closed eyelids I could sense light. A dank, fishy smell came to my nostrils. I groaned and moved feebly, finding that I was resting on something soft and pleasant. Dazedly I opened my eyes and sat up. An exclamation burst from me as I suddenly remembered what had gone before, and realized that somehow, incredibly, I was still living. Feeling like a man who has waked from a nightmarish sleep to find himself in his tomb, I gazed about. I was in a long, lofty rock chamber, the uneven floor of which was covered with shallow pools of water. The further end was of smooth-grained stone that resembled cement. The near end was rough like the walls; but in it there was a small, symmetrical arch, the mouth of a passage leading away to some other point in the bowels of the earth. The place was flooded with clear light that had a rosy tinge. From my position on the floor I could not see what made the light. It streamed from a crevice that extended clear around the cave parallel with the floor and about twelve feet above it. From this groove, along with the light, came the soft roaring hiss. Beside me was the glass ball, the cover off and lying a few feet away from the opening in the top. There was no trace of Stanley or the Professor. I rose from my couch, a thick, mattresslike affair of soft, pliant hide, and walked feebly toward the small arch in the near end of the cave. Even as I approached it I heard footsteps, and voices resounded in some slurring, musical language. Half a dozen figures suddenly came into view. They were men, as human as myself! Indeed, as I gazed at them, I felt inclined to think they were even more human! * * * * * They were magnificent specimens. The smallest could not have been less than six feet three, and all of them were muscular and finely proportioned. Their faces were arresting in their expression of calm strength and kindliness. They looked like gods, arrayed in soft, thick, beautifully tanned hides in this rosy tinted hole a mile below the ocean's top. They stared at me for an instant, then advanced toward me. My face must have reflected alarm, for the tallest of them held up his hand, palm outward, in a peaceful gesture. The leader spoke to me. Of course the slurred, melodious syllable meant nothing to me. He smiled and indicated that I was to follow him. I did so, hardly aware of what I was doing, my brain reeling in an attempt to grasp the situation. How marvelous, how utterly incredible, to find human beings here! How many were there? Where had they come from? How had they salvaged us from Penguin Deep? I gave it up, striding along with my towering guards like a man walking in his sleep. At length the low passageway ended, and I exclaimed aloud at what I saw. I was looking down a long avenue of buildings, all three stories in height. There were large door and window apertures, but no doors nor window panes. In front of each house was a small square with--wonder of wonders!--a lawn of whitish yellow vegetation that resembled grass. In some of the lawns were set artistic fountains of carved rock. I might have been looking down any prosperous earthly subdivision, save for the fact that the roofs of the houses were the earth itself, which the building walls, in addition to functioning as partitions, served to support. Also earthly subdivisions aren't usually illuminated with rosy light that comes softly roaring from jets set in the walls. * * * * * We were walking toward a more brightly lighted area that showed ahead of us. On the way we passed intersections where other, similar streets branched geometrically away to right and left. These were smaller than the one we were on, indicating that ours was Main Street in this bizarre submarine city. Faces appeared at door and window openings to peer at me as we passed. And even in that jumbled moment I had time to realize that these folk could restrain curiosity better than we can atop the earth. There was no hub-bub, no running out to tag after the queerly dressed foreigner and shout humorous remarks at him. We approached the bright spot I had noticed from afar. It was an open square, about a city block in area, in the center of which was a royal looking building covered with blazing fragments of crystal and so brilliantly resplendent with light that it seemed to glow at the heart of a pink fire. I was led toward this and in through a wide doorway. As courteously as though I were a visiting king, I was conducted up a great staircase, down a corridor set with more of the sparkling crystals and into a huge, low room. There my escort bowed and left me. * * * * * Still feeling that I could not possibly be awake and seeing actual things, I glanced around. In a corner was another of the mattresslike couches made of the thick, soft hide that seemed to be the principal fabric of the place. A few feet away was a table set with dishes of food in barbaric profusion. None of the viands looked familiar but all appealed to the appetite. The floor was strewn with soft skins, and comfortable, carved benches were scattered about. I walked to the window and looked out. Underneath was a plot of the cream colored grass through which ran a tiny stream. This widened at intervals into clear pools beside which were set stone benches. A hundred yards away was the edge of the square, where the regular, three storied houses began. While I was staring at this unearthly vista, still unable to think with any coherence. I heard my name called. I turned to face Stanley and the Professor. * * * * * Both were pale in the rose light, and Stanley limped with the pain of his bruised leg: but both had recovered from their partial suffocation as completely as had I. "We thought perhaps you'd decided to swim back up to the _Rosa_ and leave us to our fates," said Stanley after we had stopped pumping each other's arms and had seated ourselves. "And I thought--well, I didn't think much of anything," I replied. "I was too busy straining my eyesight over the wonders of this city. Did you ever see anything like it?" "We haven't seen it at all, save for a view from the windows," said Stanley. "All we know of the place is that a while ago we woke up in a room like this, only much smaller and less lavish. I wonder why you rate this distinction?" I described the streets as I had seen them. (It is impossible for me to think of them as anything but streets; it would seem as though the rock roof over all would give the appearance of a series of tunnels; but I had always the impression of airiness and openness.) "Light and heat are furnished by natural gas," said the Professor when I remarked on the perfection of these two necessities. "That's what makes the low roaring noise--the thousands of burning jets. But the presence of gas here isn't as unusual as the presence of air. Where does that come from? Through wandering underground mazes, from some cave mouth in the Fiji Islands to the north? That would indicate that all the earth around here is honeycombed like a gigantic section of sponge. I wonder--" "Have you any idea how we were rescued?" I interrupted, a little impatient of his abstract scientific ponderings. "We have," said Stanley. "A woman told us. We woke up to find her nursing us--gorgeous looking thing--finest woman I've ever seen, and I've seen a good many--" "She didn't exactly 'tell' us," remarked the Professor with his thin smile. Women were only interesting to him as biological studies. "She drew a diagram that explained it. "That tunnel, Martin, was like the outer diving chamber of a submarine. We were hauled in on a big windlass--driven by gas turbines, I think. Once we were inside, a twenty-yard, counterbalanced wall of rock was lowered across the entrance. Then the water was drained out through a well, and into a subterranean body of water that extends under the entire city. And here we are." We fell silent. Here we were. But what was going to happen to us among these friendly-seeming people; and how--if ever--we were going to get back to the earth's surface, were questions we could not even try to answer. * * * * * We ate of the appetizing food laid out on the long table. Shortly afterward we heard steps in the corridor outside the room. A woman entered. She was ravishingly beautiful, tall, slender but symmetrically rounded. A soft leather robe slanted upward across her breast to a single shoulder fastening and ended just above her knees in a skirt arrangement. Around her head was a regal circlet of silvery gray metal with a flashing bit of crystal set in the center above her broad, low forehead. She smiled at Stanley who looked dazzled and smiled eagerly back. She pointed toward the door, signifying that we were to go with her. We did so; and were led down the great staircase and to a huge room that took up half the ground floor of the building. And here we met the nobility of the little kingdom--the upper class that governed the immaculate little city. They were standing along the walls, leaving a lane down the center of the room--tall, finely modelled men and women dressed in the single garments of soft leather. There were people there with gray hair and wisdom wrinkled faces; but all were alike in being erect of body, firm of bearing and in splendid health. They stopped talking as we entered the big room. Our gaze strayed ahead down the lane toward the further wall. Here was a raised dais. On it was a gleaming crystal encrusted throne. And occupying it was the most queenly, exquisitely beautiful woman I had ever dreamed about. * * * * * Woman? She was just a girl in years in spite of her grave and royal air. Her eyes were deep violet. Her hair was black as ebony and gleaming with sudden glints of light. Her skin-- But she cannot be described. Only a great painter could give a hint of her glory. Too, I might truthfully be described as prejudiced about her perfections. The Queen, for patently she was that, bowed graciously at us. It seemed to me--though I told myself that I was an imaginative fool--that her eyes rested longest on me, and had in them an expression not granted to the Professor or Stanley. She spoke to us a melodious sentence or two, and waved her beautiful hand in which was a short ivory wand, evidently a scepter. "She's probably giving us the keys to the city," whispered Stanley. He edged nearer the fair one who had conducted us. "I sincerely hope there's room here for us." The open lane closed in on us. Men and women crowded about us speaking to us and smiling ruefully as they realized we could not understand. I noticed that, for some curious reason, they seemed fascinated by the color of my hair. Red-haired men were evidently scarce there. At length the beauty who had so captured Stanley's fancy, and who seemed to have been appointed a sort of mentor for us, suggested in sign language that we might want to return to our quarters. It was a welcome suggestion. We were done in by the experiences and emotions that had gripped us since leaving the _Rosa_ such an incredibly few hours ago. We went back to the second floor. I to my luxurious big apartment and Stanley and the Professor to their smaller but equally comfortable rooms. * * * * * A pleasant period slid by, every waking hour of which was filled with new experiences. The city's name, we found, was Zyobor. It was a perfect little community. There were artisans and thinkers, artists and laborers--all alike in being physically perfect beyond belief and cultured as no race on top the ground is cultured. As we began to learn the language, more exact details of the practical methods of existence were revealed to us. The surrounding earth furnished them with building materials, metals and unlimited gas. The sea, so near us and yet so securely walled away, gave them food. Which warrants a more detailed description. We were informed that the manlike, two-armed fishes were the servants of these people--domesticated animals, in a sense, only of an extremely high order of intelligence. They were directed by mental telepathy (Every man, woman and child in Zyobor was skilled at thought projection. They conversed constantly, from end to end of the city, by mental telepathy.) Protected in their spined shells, which they captured from the schools of porcupine fish that swarmed in Penguin Deep, they gathered sea vegetation from the higher levels and trapped sea creatures. These were brought into the subterranean chamber where our glass ball now reposed. Then the chamber was emptied of water and the food was borne to the city. The vast army of mound-fish provided the bulk of the population's food, and also furnished the thick, pliant skin they used for clothing and drapes. They were cultivated as we cultivate cattle--an ominous herd, to be handled with care and approached by the fish-servants with due caution. Thus, with all reasonable wants satisfied, with talent and brains to design beautiful surroundings, lighted and warmed by inexhaustible natural gas, these fortunate beings lived their sheltered lives in their rosy underground world. At least I thought their lives were sheltered then. It was only later, when talking to the beautiful young Queen, that I learned of the dread menace that had begun to draw near to them just a short time before we were rescued.... * * * * * My first impression, when we had entered the throne room that first day, that the Queen had regarded me more intently than she had Stanley or the Professor, had been right. It pleased her to treat me as an equal, and to give me more of her time than was granted to any other person in the city. Every day, for a growing number of hours, we were together in her apartment. She personally instructed me in the language, and such was my desire to talk to this radiant being that I made an apt pupil. Soon I had progressed enough to converse with her--in a stilted, incorrect way--on all but the most abstract of subjects. It was a fine language. I liked it, as I liked everything else about Zyobor. The upper earth seemed far away and well forgotten. Her name, I found, was Aga. A beautiful name.... "How did your kingdom begin?" I asked her one day, while we were sitting beside one of the small pools in the gardens. We were close together. Now and then my shoulder touched hers, and she did not draw away. "I know not," she replied. "It is older than any of our ancient records can say. I am the three hundred and eleventh of the present reigning line." "And we are the first to enter thy realm from the upper world?" "Thou art the first." "There is no other entrance but the sea-way into which we were drawn?" "There is no other entrance." * * * * * I was silent, trying to realize the finality of my residence here. At the moment I didn't care much if I never got home! "In the monarchies we know above," I said finally, avoiding her violet eyes, "it is not the custom for the queen--or king--to reign alone. A consort is chosen. Is it not so here? Has thou not, among thy nobles, some one thou hast destined--" I stopped, feeling that if she dismissed me in anger and never spoke to me again the punishment would be just. But she wasn't angry. A lovely tide of color stained her cheeks. Her lips parted, and she turned her head. For a long time she said nothing. Then she faced me, with a light in her eyes that sent the blood racing in my veins. "I have not yet chosen," she murmured. "Mayhap soon I shall tell thee why." She rose and hurried back toward the palace. But at the door she paused--and smiled at me in a way that had nothing whatever to do with queenship. * * * * * As the time sped by the three of us settled into the routine of the city as though we had never known of anything else. The Professor spent most of his time down by the sea chamber where the food was dragged in by the intelligent servant-fish. He was in a zoologist's paradise. Not a creature that came in there had ever been catalogued before. He wrote reams of notes on the parchment paper used by the citizens in recording their transactions. Particularly was he interested in the vast, lowly mound-fish. One time, when I happened to be with him, the receding waters of the chamber disclosed the body of one of the odd herdsmen of these deep sea flocks. Then the Professor's elation knew no bounds. We hurried forward to look at it. "It is a typical fish," puzzled the Professor when we had cut the body out of its usurped armor. "Cold blooded, adapted to the chill and pressure of the deeps. There are the gills I observed before ... yet it looks very human." It surely did. There were the jointed arms, and the rudimentary hands. Its forehead was domed; and the brain, when dissected, proved much larger than the brain of a true fish. Also its bones were not those of a mammal, but the cartilagenous bones of a fish. It was not quite six feet long; just fitted the horny shell. "But its intelligence!" fretted the Professor, glorying in his inability to classify this marvelous specimen. "No fish could ever attain such mental development. Evolution working backward from human to reptile and then fish--or a new freak of evolution whereby a fish on a short cut toward becoming human?" He sighed and gave it up. But more reams of notes were written. "Why do you take them?" I asked. "No one but yourself will ever see them." * * * * * He looked at me with professorial absent-mindedness. "I take them for the fun of it, principally. But perhaps, sometime, we may figure out a way of getting them up. My God! Wouldn't my learned brother scientists be set in an uproar!" He bent to his observations and dissections again, cursing now and then at the distortion suffered by the specimens when they were released from the deep sea pressure and swelled and burst in the atmospheric pressure in the cave. Stanley was engrossed in a different way. Since the moment he laid eyes on her, he had belonged to the stately woman who had first nursed him back to consciousness. Mayis was her name. From shepherding the three of us around Zyobor and explaining its marvels to us, she had taken to exclusive tutorship of Stanley. And Stanley fairly ate it up. "You, the notorious woman hater," I taunted him one time, "the wary bachelor--to fall at last. And for a woman of another world--almost of another planet! I'm amazed!" "I don't know why you should be amazed," said he stiffly. "You've been telling me ever since I was a kid that women were all useless, all alike--" "I find I was mistaken," he interrupted. "They aren't all alike. There's only one Mayis. She is--different." "What do you talk about all the time? You're with her constantly." "I'm not with her any more than you're with the Queen," he shot back at me. "What do you find to talk about?" That shut me up. He went to look for Mayis; and I wandered to the royal apartments in search of Aga. * * * * * In the first days of our friendship I had several times surprised in Aga's eyes a curious expression, one that seemed compounded of despair, horror and resignation. I had seen that same expression in the eyes of the nobles of late, and in the faces of all the people I encountered in the streets--who, I mustn't forget to add here, never failed to treat me with a deference that was as intoxicating as it was inexplicable. It was as though some terrible fate hovered over the populace, some dreadful doom about which nothing could be done. No one put into words any fears that might confirm that impression; but continually I got the idea that everybody there went about in a state of attempting to live normally and happily while life was still left--before some awful, wholesale death descended on them. At last, from Aga, I learned the fateful reason. But first--a confession that was hastened by the knowledge of the fate of the city--I learned from her something that changed all of life for me. * * * * * We were surrounded by the luxury of her private apartment. We sat on a low divan, side by side. I wanted, more than anything I had ever wanted before, to put my arms around her. But I dared not. One does not make love easily to a queen, the three hundred and eleventh of a proud line. And then, as maids have done often in all countries, and, perhaps, on all planets, she took the initiative herself. "We have a curious custom in Zyobor of which I have not yet told thee," she murmured. "It concerns the kings of Zyobor. The color of their hair." She glanced up at my own carrot-top, and then averted her gaze. "For all of our history our kings have had--red hair. On the few occasions when the line has been reduced to a lone queen, as in my case, the red-haired men of the kingdom have striven together in public combat to determine which was most powerful and brave. The winner became the Queen's consort." "And in this case?" I asked, my heart beginning to pound madly. "In my case, my lord, there is to be no--no striving. When I was a child our only two red-haired males died, one by accident, one by sickness. Now there are none others but infants, none of eligible age. But--by a miracle--thou--" She stopped; then gazed up at me from under long, gold flecked lashes. "I was afraid ... I was doomed to die ... alone...." * * * * * It was after I had replied impetuously to this, that she told me of the terror that was about to engulf all life in the beautiful undersea city. "Thou hast wonder, perhaps, why I should be forward enough to tell thee this instead of waiting for thine own confession first," she faltered. "Know, then--the reason is the shortness of the time we are fated to spend together. We shall belong each to the other only a little while. Then shall we belong to death! And I--when I knew the time was to be so brief--" And I listened with growing horror to her account of the enemy that was advancing toward us with every passing moment. * * * * * About twenty miles away, in the lowest depression of Penguin Deep, lived a race of monsters which the people of Aga's city called Quabos. The Quabos were grim beings that were more intelligent than Aga's fish-servants--even, she thought, more intelligent than humans themselves. They had existed in their dark hole, as far as the Zyobites knew, from the beginning of time. Through the countless centuries they had constructed for themselves a vast series of dens in the rock. There they had hidden away from the deep-sea dangers. They, too, preyed on the mound-fish; but as there was plenty of food for all, the Zyobites had never paid much attention to them. But--just before we had appeared, there had come about a subterranean quake that changed the entire complexion of matters in Penguin Deep. The earthquake wiped out the elaborately burrowed sea tunnels of the Quabos, killing half of them at a blow and driving the rest out into the unfriendly openness of the deep. Now this was fatal to them. They were not used to physical self defense. During the thousands of years of residence in their sheltered burrows they had become utterly unable to exist when exposed to the primeval dangers of the sea. It was as though the civilization-softened citizens of New York should suddenly be set down in a howling wilderness with nothing but their bare hands with which to contrive all the necessities of a living. * * * * * Such was the situation at the time Stanley, the Professor and myself arrived in Zyobor. The Quabos must find an immediate haven or perish. On the ocean bottom they were threatened by the mound-fish. In the higher levels they were in danger from almost everything that swam: few things were so defenceless as themselves after their long inertia. Their answer was Zyobor. There, in perfect security, only to be reached by the diving chamber that could be sealed at will by the twenty-yard, counterbalanced lock, the Quabos would be even more protected than in their former runways. So--they were working day and night to invade Aga's city! "But Aga," I interrupted impulsively at this point. "If these monsters are fishes, how could they live here in air--" I stopped as my objection answered itself before she could reply. They would not have to live in air to inhabit Zyobor. They would inundate the city--flood that peaceful, beautiful place with the awful pressure of the lowest depths! That thought, in turn, suggested to me that every building in Zyobor would be swept flat if subjected suddenly to the rush of the sea. The great low cavern, without the support of the myriad walls, would probably collapse--trapping the invading Quabos and leaving the rest without a home once more. But Aga answered this before I could voice it. The Quabos had foreseen that point. They were tunneling slowly but surely toward the city from a point about half a mile from the diving chamber. And as they advanced, they blocked up the passageway behind them at intervals, drilled down to the great underground sea that lay beneath all this section, and drained a little of the water away. * * * * * In this manner they lightened, bit by bit, the enormous weight of the ocean depths. When the city was finally reached, not only would it be ensured against sudden destruction but the Quabos themselves would have become accustomed to the difference in pressure. Had they gone immediately from the accustomed press of Penguin Deep into the atmosphere of Zyobor, they would have burst into bits. As it was they would be able to flood the city slowly, without injury to themselves. "Now thou knowest our fate," concluded Aga with a shudder. "Zyobor will be a part of the great waters. We ourselves shall be food for these monsters...." She faltered and stopped. "But this cannot be!" I exclaimed, clenching my fists impotently. "There _must_ be something we can do; some way--" "There is nothing to be done. Our wisest men have set themselves sleeplessly to the task of defence. There is no defence possible." "We can't simply sit here and wait! Your people are wonderful, but this is no time for resignation. Send for my two friends, Aga. We will have a council of war, we four, and see if we can find a way!" She shrugged despairfully, started to speak, then sent in quest of Stanley and the Professor. * * * * * They as well as myself, had had no idea of the menace that crept nearer us with each passing hour. They were dumbfounded, horrified to learn of the peril. We sat awhile in silence, realizing our situation to the full. Then the Professor spoke: "If only we could see what these things look like! It might help in planning to defeat them." "That can be done with ease," said Aga. "Come." We went with her to the gardens and approached the nearest pool. "My fish-men are watching the Quabos constantly. They report to me by telepathy whenever I send my thoughts their way. I will let you see, on the pool, the things they are now seeing." She stared intently at the sheet of water. And gradually, as we watched, a picture appeared--a picture that will never fade from my memory in any smallest detail. The Quabos had huddled for protection into a large cave at the foot of the cliff outside Zyobor. There were a great many Quabos, and the cave was relatively confining. Now we saw, through the eyes of the spine protected outpost of the Queen, these monstrous refugees crowded together like sheep. The watery cavern was a creeping mass of viscous tentacles, enormous staring eyes and globular heads. The cave was paved three deep with the horrible things, and they were attached to the it walls and roof in solid blocks. "My God!" whispered Stanley. "There are thousands of them!" * * * * * There were. And that they were in distress was evident. The layers on the floor were weaving and shifting constantly as the bottom creatures struggled feebly to rise to the top of the mass and be relieved of the weight of their brothers. Also they were famished.... One of the blood red, gigantic worms floated near the cave entrance. Like lightning the nearest Quabos darted after it. In a moment the prey was torn to bits by the ravenous monsters. The other side of the story was immediately portrayed to us. With the emerging of the reckless Quabos, a sea-serpent appeared from above and snapped up three of their number. Evidently the huge serpent considered them succulent tidbits, and made it its business to wait near the cave and avail itself of just such rash chance-taking as this. While we watched the nightmare scene, a Quabo disengaged itself from the parent mass and floated upward into the clear, giving us a chance to see more distinctly what the creatures looked like. There was a black, shiny head as large as a sugar barrel. In this were eyes the size of dinner plates, and gleaming with a cold, hellish intelligence. Four long, twining tentacles were attached directly to the head. Dotted along these were rudimentary sucker discs, that had evidently become atrophied by the soft living of thousands of the creature's ancestors. As though emerging from the pool into which we were gazing, the monster darted viciously at us. At once it disappeared: the fish-servant through whose eyes we were seeing all this had evidently retreated from the approach; although, protected by its spines, it could not have been in actual danger. "How dost thou know of the tunneling?" I asked Aga. "Thy fish-men cannot be present there, in the rear of the tunnel, to report." "My artisans have knowledge of each forward move," she answered. "I will show thee." * * * * * We walked back to the palace and descended to a smooth-lined vault. There we saw a great stone shaft sunk down into the rock of the floor. On this was a delicate vibration recording instrument of some sort, with a needle that quivered rhythmically over several degrees of an arc. "This tells of each move of the Quabos," said Aga. "It also tells us where they will break through the city wall. How near to us are they, Kilor?" she asked an attendant who was studying the dial, and who had bowed respectfully to Aga and myself as we approached. "They will break into the city in four rixas at the present rate of advance, Your Majesty." Four rixas! In a little over sixteen days, as we count time, the city of Zyobor would be delivered into the hands--or, rather, tentacles--of the slimy, starving demons that huddled in the cavern outside! Somberly we followed Aga back to her apartment. * * * * * "As thou seest," she murmured, "there is nothing to be done. We can only resign ourselves to the fate that nears us, and enjoy as much as may be the few remaining rixas...." She glanced at me. The Professor's dry, cool voice cut across our wordless, engrossed communion. "I don't think we'll give up quite as easily as all that. We can at least try to outwit our enemies. If it does nothing else for us, the effort can serve to distract our minds." He drew from his pocket a sheet of parchment and the stub of his last remaining pencil. His fingers busied themselves apparently idly in the tracing of geometric lines. "Looking ahead to the exact details of our destruction," he mused coolly, "we see that our most direct and ominous enemy is the sea itself. When the city is flooded, we drown--and later the Quabos can enter at will." He drew a few more lines, and marked a cross at a point in the outer rim of the diagram. "What will happen? The Quabos force through the last shell of the city wall. The water from their tunnel floods into Zyobor. But--and mark me well--_only_ the water from the tunnel! The outer end, remember, is blocked off in their pressure-reducing process. The vast body of the sea itself cannot immediately be let in here because the Quabos must take as long a time to re-accustom themselves to its pressure as they did to work out of it." He spread the parchment sheet before us. "Is this a roughly accurate plan of the city?" he asked Aga. She inclined her lovely head. "And this," indicating the cross, "is the spot where the Quabos will break in?" Again she nodded, shuddering. "Then tell me what you think of this," said the Professor. * * * * * And he proceeded to sketch out a plan so simple, and yet so seemingly efficient, that the rest of us gazed at him with wordless admiration. "My friend, my friend," whispered Aga at last, "thou hast saved us. Thou art the guardian hero of Zyobor--" "Not too fast, Your Highness," interrupted the Professor with his frosty smile. "I shall be much surprised if this little scheme actually saves the city. We may find the rock so thick there that our task is hopeless--though I imagine the Quabos picked a thin section for help in their own plans." A vague look came into his eyes. "I must certainly get my hands on one of these monsters ... superhumanly intelligent fish ... marvelous--akin to the octopus, perhaps?" He wandered off, changed from the resourceful schemer to the dreamy man of scientific abstractions. The Queen gazed after him with wonder in her eyes. "A great man," she murmured, "but is he--a little mad?" "No, only a little absent-minded," I replied. Then, "Come on, Stanley. We'll round up every able bodied citizen in Zyobor and get to work. I suppose they have some kind of rock drilling machinery here?" They had. And they strangely resembled our own rock drills: revolving metal shafts, driven by gas turbines, tipped with fragments of the same crystal that glittered so profusely in the palace walls. Another proof that practically every basic, badly needed tool had been invented again and again, in all lands and times, as the necessity for it arose. With hundreds of the powerful men of Zyobor working as closely together as they could without cramping each others movements, and with the whole city resounding to the roar of the machinery, we labored at the defence that might possibly check the advance of the hideous Quabos. And with every breath we drew, waking or sleeping, we realized that the cold blooded, inhuman invaders had crept a fraction of an inch closer in their tunneling. The Quabos against the Zyobites! Fish against man! Two diametrically opposed species of life in a struggle to the death! Which of us would survive? * * * * * The hour of the struggle approached. Every soul in Zyobor moved in a daze, with strained face and fear haunted eyes. Their proficiency in mental telepathy was a curse to them now: every one carried constantly, transmitted from the brains of the servant-fish outposts, a thought picture of that outer cavern in the murky depths of which writhed the thousands of crowding Quabos. Each mind in Zyobor was in continual torment. Spared that trouble, at least, Stanley and the Professor and I walked down to the fortification we had so hastily contrived. It was finished. And none too soon: the vibration indicator in the palace vault told us that only two feet of rock separated us from the burrowing monsters! The Professor's scheme had been to cut a long slot down through the rock floor of the city to the roof of the vast, mysterious body of water below. This slot was placed directly in front of the spot in the city wall where the Quabos were about to emerge. As they forced through the last shell of rock, the deluge of water, instead of drowning the city, was supposed to drain down the oblong vent. Any Quabos that were too near the tunnel entrance would be swept down too. * * * * * In silence we approached the edge of the great trough and stared down. There was a stratum of black granite, fortunately only about thirty feet thick at this point, and then--the depths! A low roar reached our ears from far, far beneath us. A steady blast of ice cold air fanned up against us. The Professor threw down a large fragment of rock. Seconds elapsed and we heard no splash. The unseen surface was too far below for the noise of the rock's fall to carry on up to us. "The mystery of this ball of earth on which we live!" murmured the Professor. "Here is this enormous underground body of water. We are far below sea level. Where, then, is it flowing? What does it empty into? Can it be that our planet is honeycombed with such hollows as this we are in? And is each inhabited by some form of life?" He sighed and shook his head. "The thought is too big! For, if that were true, wouldn't the seas be drained from the surface of the earth should an accidental passage be formed from the ocean bed down to such a giant river as this beneath us? How little we know!" * * * * * The wild clamor of an alarm bell interrupted his musing. From all the city houses poured masses of people, to form in solid lines behind the large well. In addition to men, there were many women in those lines, tall and strong, ready to stand by their mates as long as life was left them. There were children, too, scarcely in their teens, prepared to fight for the existence of the race. Every able-bodied Zyobite was mustered against the cold-blooded Things that pressed so near. The arms of these desperate fighters were pitiful compared to our own war weapons. With no need in the city for fighting engines, none had ever been developed. Now the best that could be had was a sort of ax, used for dissecting the mound-fish, and various knives fashioned for peaceful purposes. Again the bell clamored forth a warning, this time twice repeated. Every hand grasped its weapon. Every eye went hopefully to the hole in the floor on which our immediate fate depended, then valiantly to the section of wall above it. This quivered perceptibly. A heavy, pointed instrument broke through; was withdrawn; and a hissing stream of water spurted out. The Quabos were about to break in upon us! * * * * * With a crash that made the solid rock tremble, a section of the wall collapsed. It was the top half of the end of the Quabos' tunnel. They had so wrought that the lower half stayed in place--a thing we did not have time to recognize as significant until later. A solid wall of water, in which writhed dozens of tentacled monsters, was upon us, and we had time for nothing but action. The ditch had of necessity been placed directly under the Quabos' entrance. The first rush of water carried half over it. With it were borne scores of the cold-blooded invaders. In an instant we were standing knee deep in a torrent that tore at our footing, while we hacked frantically with knives and axes at the slimy tentacles that reached up to drag us under. A soft, horrible mass swept against my legs. I was overthrown. A tentacle slithered around my neck and constricted viciously like a length of rotten cable. I sawed at it with the long, notched blade I carried. Choking for air, I felt the pressure relax and scrambled to my knees. Two more tentacles went around me, one winding about my legs and the other crushing my waist. Two huge eyes glared fiendishly at me. I plunged the knife again and again into the barrel-shaped head. It did not bleed: a few drops of thin, yellowish liquid oozed from the wounds but aside from this my slashing seemed to make no impression. In a frenzy I defended myself against the nightmare head that was winding surely toward me. Meanwhile I devoted every energy to keeping on my feet. If I ever went under again-- It seemed to me that the creature was weakening. With redoubled fury I hacked at the spidery shape. And gradually, when it seemed as though I could not withstand its weight and crushing tentacles another second, it slipped away and floated off on the shallow, roaring rapids. * * * * * For a moment I stood there, catching my breath and regaining my strength. Shifting, terrible scenes flashed before my eyes. A tall Zyobite and an almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the water and were swirled away. The Professor was almost buried by a Quabo that had all four of its tentacles wound about him. As methodically as though he were in a laboratory dissecting room, he was cutting the slippery lengths away, one by one, till the fourth parted and left him free. A giant Zyobite was struggling with two of the monsters. He had an ax in each hand, and was whirling them with such strength and rapidity that they formed flashing circles of light over his head. But he was torn down at last and borne off by the almost undiminished flood that gushed from the tunnel. And now, without warning, a heavy soft body flung against my back, and the accident most to be dreaded in that mêlée occurred. I was knocked off my feet! My head was pressed under the water. On my chest was a mass that was yielding but immovable, soft but terribly strong. Animated, firm jelly! I had no chance to use my knife. My arms were held powerless against my sides. Water filled my nose and mouth. I strangled for breath, heaving at the implacable weight that pinned me helpless. Bright spots swirled before my eyes. There was a roaring in my ears. My lungs felt as though filled with molten lead. I was drowning.... * * * * * Vaguely I felt the pressure loosen at last. An arm--with good, solid flesh and bone in it--slipped under my shoulders and dragged me up into the air. "Don't you know--can't drown a fish--holding it under water?" panted a voice. I opened my eyes and saw Stanley, his face pale with the thrill of battle, his chin jutting forward in a berserk line, his eyes snapping with eager, wary fires. I grinned up at him and he slapped me on the back--almost completing the choking process started by the salt water I'd inhaled. "That's better. Now--at it again!" I don't remember the rest of the tumult. The air seemed filled with loathsome tentacles and bright metal blades. It was a confused eternity until the decreased volume of water in the tunnel gave us a respite.... As the tunnel slowly emptied the pressure dropped, and the incoming flood poured squarely into the trough instead of half over it. From that moment there was very little more for us to do. Our little army--with about a fourth of its number gone--had only to guard the ditch and see that none of the Quabos caught the edges as they hurtled out of their passage. For perhaps ten minutes longer the water poured from the break in the wall, with now and then a doomed Quabo that goggled horribly at us as it was dashed down the hole in the floor to whatever awesome depths were beneath. Then the flow ceased. The last oleaginous corpse was pushed over the edge. And the city, save for an ankle-deep sheet of water that was rapidly draining out the vents in the streets, presented its former appearance. The Zyobites leaned wearily against convenient walls and began telling themselves how fortunate they were to have been spared what seemed certain destruction. * * * * * The Professor didn't share in the general feeling of triumph. "Don't be so childishly optimistic!" he snapped as I began to congratulate him on the victory his ditch had given us. "Our troubles aren't over yet!" "But we've proved that we can stand up to them in a hand-to-tentacle fight--" His thin, frosty smile appeared. "One of those devils, normally, is stronger than any three men. The only reason all of us weren't destroyed at once is that they were slowly suffocating as they fought. The foot and a half of water we were in wasn't enough to let their gills function properly. Now if they were able to stand right up to us and not be handicapped by lack of water to breathe ... I wonder.... Is that part of their plan? Is there any way they could manage ...?" "But, Professor," I argued, "it's all over, isn't it? The tunnel is emptied, and all the Quabos are--" "The tunnel isn't emptied. It's only _half_ emptied! I'll show you." He called Stanley; and the three of us went to the break. "See," the Professor pointed out to us as we approached the jagged hole, "the Quabos only drilled through the top half of their tunnel ending. That means that the tunnel still has about four feet of water in it--enough to accommodate a great many of the monsters. There may be four or five hundred of them left in there; possibly more. We can expect renewed hostilities at any time!" "But won't it be just a repetition of the first battle?" remonstrated Stanley. "In the end they'll be killed or will drown for lack of water as these first ones did." * * * * * The Professor shook his head. "They're too clever to do that twice. The very fact that they kept half their number in reserve shows that they have some new trick to try. Otherwise they'd all have come at once in one supreme effort." He paced back and forth. "They're ingenious, intelligent. They're fighting for their very existence. They must have figured out some way of breathing in air, some way of attacking us on a more even basis in case that first rush went wrong. What can it be?" "I think you're borrowing trouble before it is necessary--" I began, smiling at his elaborate, scientific pessimism. But I was interrupted by a startled shout from Stanley. "Professor Martin," he cried, pointing to the tunnel mouth. "Look!" Like twin snakes crawling up to sun themselves, two tentacles had appeared over the rock rim. They hooked over the edge; and leisurely, with grim surety of invulnerability, the barrel-like head of a Quabo balanced itself on the ledge and glared at us. * * * * * For a moment we stared, paralyzed, at the Thing. And, during that moment it squatted there, as undistressed as though the air were its natural element, its gills flapping slowly up and down supplying it with oxygen. The thing that held us rooted to the spot with fearful amazement was the fantastic device that permitted it to be almost as much at home in air as in water. Over the great, globular head was set an oval glass shell. This was filled with water. A flexible metal tube hung down from the rear. Evidently it carried a constant stream of fresh water. As we gazed we saw intermittent trickles emerging from the bottom of the crystalline case. Point for point the creature's equipment was the same as diving equipment used by men, only it was exactly opposite in function. A helmet that enabled a fish to breathe in air, instead of a helmet to allow a man to breathe in water! Stanley was the first of us to recover from the shock of this spectacle. He faced about and raised his voice in shouts of warning to the resting Zyobites. For other glass encased monsters had appeared beside the first, now. One by one, in single file like a line of enormous marching insects, they crawled down the wall and humped along on their tentacles--around the ditch and toward us! * * * * * The deadly infallibility of that second attack! The Quabos advanced on us like armored tanks bearing down on defenceless savages. Their glass helmets, in addition to containing water for their breathing, protected them from our knives and axes. We were utterly helpless against them. They marched in ranks about twenty yards apart, each rank helping the one in front to carry the cumbersome water-hoses which trailed back to the central water supply in the tunnel. Their movements were slow, weighted down as they were by the great glass helmets, but they were appallingly sure. We could not even retard their advance, let alone stop it. Here were no suffocating, faltering creatures. Here were beings possessed of their full vigor, each one equal to three of us even as the Professor had conjectured. Their only weak points were their tentacles which trailed outside the glass cases. But these they kept coiled close, so that to reach them and hack at them we had to step within range of their terrific clutches. The Zyobites fought with the valor of despair added to their inherent noble bravery. Man after man closed with the monstrous, armored Things--only to be seized and crushed by the weaving tentacles. Occasionally a terrific blow with an ax would crack one of the glass helmets. Then the denuded Quabo would flounder convulsively in the air till it drowned. But there were all too few of these individual victories. The main body of the Quabos, rank on rank, dragging their water-hose behind them, came on with the steadiness of a machine. * * * * * Slowly we were driven back down the broad street and toward the palace. As we retreated, old people and children came from the houses and went with us, leaving their dwellings to the mercy of the monsters. A block from the palace we bunched together and, by sheer mass and ferocity, actually stopped the machinelike advance for a few moments. Miscellaneous weapons had been brought from the houses--sledges, stone benches, anything that might break the Quabos' helmets--and handed to us in silence by the noncombatants. Somebody tugged at my sleeve. Looking down I saw a little girl. She had dragged a heavy metal bar out to the fray and was trying to get some fighter's attention and give it to him. I seized the formidable weapon and jumped at the nearest Quabo, a ten-foot giant whose eyes were glinting gigantically at me through the distorting curve of the glass. Disregarding the clutching tentacles entirely, I swung the bar against the helmet. It cracked. I swung again and it fell in fragments, spilling the gallons of water it had contained. The tentacles wound vengefully around me, but in a few seconds they relaxed as the thing gasped out its life in the air. * * * * * I turned to repeat the process on another if I could, and found myself facing the Queen. Her head was held bravely high, though the violet of her eyes had gone almost black with fear and repulsion of the terrible things we fought. "Aga!" I cried. "Why art thou here! Go back to the palace at once!" "I came to fight beside thee," she answered composedly, though her delicate lips quivered. "All is lost, it seems. So shall I die beside thee." I started to reply, to urge her again to seek the safety of the palace. But by now the deadly advance of the tentacled demons had begun once more. Fighting vainly, the population of Zyobor was swept into the palace grounds, then into the building itself. Men, women and children huddled shoulder to shoulder in the cramping quarters. An ironic picture came to me of the crowding masses of Quabos stuffed into the protection of the outer cave, waiting the outcome of the fight being waged by their warriors. Here were we in a similar circumstance, waiting for the battle to be decided. Though there was little doubt in the minds of any of us as to what the outcome would be. Guards, the strongest men of the city, were stationed with sledges at the doors and windows. The Quabos, able only to enter one at a time, halted a moment and there was a badly needed breathing spell. * * * * * "We've got to find some drastic means of defence," said the Professor, "or we won't last another three hours." "If you asked me, I'd say we couldn't last another three hours anyway," replied Stanley with a shrug. "These fish have out-thought us!" "Nonsense! There may still be a way--" "A brace of machine-guns...." I murmured hopefully. "You might as well wish for a dozen light cannon!" snapped the Professor. "Please try to concentrate, and see if any effective weapon suggests itself to you--something more available at the moment than machine-guns." In silence the three of us racked our brains for a means of defence. Aga, leaving for a time the task of soothing her more hysterical subjects, came quietly over to us and sat on the bench beside me. Frankly I could think of nothing. To my mind we were surely doomed. What arms could possibly be contrived at such short notice? What weapon could be called forth to be effective against the thick glass helmets? But as I glanced at Stanley I saw his face set in a new expression as his thoughts took a turn that suggested possible salvation. "Glass," he muttered. "Glass. What destroys it? Sharp blows ... certain acids ... variation in temperature ... heat and cold.... That's it! _That's it!_" He turned excitedly to the Queen. "I think we have it! At least it's worth trying. If there is any tubing around...." He stopped as he realized he was talking in English, and resumed stiltedly in Aga's own language. "Hast thou, in the palace, any lengths of pipe like to that which the Quabos drag behind them?" "No ..." Aga began, her eyes round and wondering. Then she interrupted herself. "Ah, yes! There is! In a vault near that of Kilor's there is a great spool of it. He had it fashioned to carry air for one of his experiments--" "Come along!" cried Stanley. "I'll explain what I have in mind while we dig up this coil of hose." * * * * * A score of Zyobite workmen were gathered at once. The length of hose--made of some linen-like fabric of tough, shredded sea-weed and covered with a flexible metal sheath--was cut into three pieces each about fifty yards long. These were connected to three of the largest gas vents of the palace. Stanley, the Professor and I each took an end. And we prepared to fight, with fire, the creatures of water. "It ought to work," Stanley, repeated several times as though trying to reassure himself as well as us. "It's simple enough: the water in those helmets is ice cold: if fire is suddenly squirted against them they'll crack with the uneven expansion." "Unless," retorted the Professor, "their glass has some special heat and cold resisting quality." Stanley shrugged. "It may well have some such properties. How such creatures can make glass at all is beyond me!" Dragging our hose to the big front entrance of the palace, and warning the crowded people to keep their feet clear of it, we prepared to test out the efficiency of this, our last resource against the enemy. * * * * * For an instant we paused just inside the doorway, looking out at the ugly, glassed-in Things that were massing to attack us again. The ranks of Quabos had closed in now, till they extended down the street for several hundred yards in close formation--a forest of great pulpy heads with huge eyes that glared unblinkingly at the glittering, pink building that was their objective. "Light up!" ordered Stanley, setting an example by touching his hose nozzle to the nearest wall jet. A spurt of fire belched from his hose, streaming out for four or five feet in a solid red cone. The Professor and I touched off our torches; and we moved slowly out the door toward the ranks of Quabos. "Don't try to save yourselves from their tentacles," advised Stanley. "Walk right up to them, direct the fire against their helmets, and damn the consequences. If they grip too hard you can always play the torch on their tentacles till they think better of it." The Quabos' front line humped grimly toward us, unblinking eyes glaring, tentacles writhing warily, little spurts of used water trickling from their helmets. "Keep together," warned Stanley, "so that if any one of us loses his light he can get it from the hose of one of the other two. And--_Here they come!_" There was no more time for commands. The Quabos in front, supplied with slack in their hoses by those behind, leaped at us with incredible agility. We fell back a step so that none should get at our backs. The last stand was begun. * * * * * It was not a battle so much as a series of fierce duels. The Quabos realized their new danger instantly, and devoted all their efforts to extinguishing our torches. We parried and thrust with the flaming hoses in an equally desperate effort to prevent it. One of them scuttled toward me like a great crab. A tentacle darted toward my right arm. Another was pressed against the nozzle. There was a sickening smell--and the tentacle was jerked spasmodically away. I caught the hose in my left hand and turned the fiery jet against the water-filled helmet. A shout of savage exultation broke from my lips. Hardly, had the flame touched the glass before it cracked! There was a report like a pistol shot--and a miniature Niagara of water and splintered glass poured at my feet! The tentacle around my arm tightened, then relaxed. The monster shuddered in a convulsive heap on the ground. I went toward the next one, swinging the flaring hose in a slow arc as I advanced. The creature lunged at me and threshed at the burning jet with all four of its feelers. But it had been exposed to the air for a long time now. The ghastly tentacles were dry; withered and soft. A touch of the fire seared them unmercifully. Nevertheless with a swift move it slapped a tentacle squarely down over the hose nozzle. The flame was extinguished as the flame of a candle is pinched out between thumb and forefinger. I retreated. "Catch!" came a voice behind me. * * * * * The Professor swung his four-foot jet my way. I held my hose to it, and the flame burst out again. A touch at my grisly antagonist's helmet--a sharp crack--the welcome rush of water over the cream-colored grass--and another monster was writhing in the death throes! Keeping close together, the three of us faced the massed Quabos in the palace grounds. Again and again the fiery weapon of one or the other of us was dashed out--to be re-lighted from the nearest hose. Again and again loud detonations heralded the collapse of more of the invaders. But it seemed as though their flailing tentacles were as myriad as the stars they had never seen. It seemed as though their numbers would never appreciably diminish. We thrust and parried till our arms grew numb. And still there appeared to be hundreds of the Quabos left. By order of the Queen three stout Zyobites stepped up to us and relieved us of our exhausting labor. Gladly we handed the hoses to them and went to the palace for a much needed rest. * * * * * Two more shifts of fighters took the flaming jets before the monsters began the retreat slowly back toward their tunnel. And here the Professor took command again. "We mustn't let them get away to try some new scheme!" he snapped. "Martin, take fifty men and beat them back to the break in the wall. Go around a side street. They move so slowly that you can easily cut off their retreat." "There isn't any more hose--" began Stanley. "There's plenty of it. The Quabos brought it with them." The Professor turned to me again. "Take metal-saws with you. Cut sections of the Quabos water-hose and connect them to the nearest wall jets. Run!" I ran, with fifty of the men of Zyobor close behind me. We dodged out the side of the palace grounds least guarded by the Quabos, ducking between their ranks like infantry men threading through an opposition of powerful but slow-moving tanks. Four of our number were caught, but the rest got through unscathed. Down a side street we raced, and along a parallel avenue toward the tunnel. As we went I prayed that all the Quabos had centered their attention on the palace and left their vulnerable water-hoses unguarded. They had! When we stole up the last block toward the break we found the nearest Quabo was a hundred yards down the street--and working further away with every move. At once we set to work on the scores of hoses that quivered over the floor with each move of the distant monsters. * * * * * A Zyobite with the muscles of a Hercules swung his ax mightily down on a hose. The metal was soft enough to be sheered through by the stroke. The cut ends were smashed so that they could not be crammed down over the tapering jets; but we could use our metal-saws for cleaner severances at the other ends. The giant with the ax stepped from hose to hose. Lengths were completed with the saws. A man was placed at each jet to hold the connections in position. Before the Quabos had reached us we had rigged six fire-hoses and had cut through forty or fifty more water-lines. The end was certain and not long in coming. We sprayed the monsters with fire as workmen spray fruit trees with insect poison. Stanley, the Professor and a Zyobite came up in the rear with their three hoses. Caught between the two forces, the beaten fish milled in hopeless confusion and indecision. In half an hour they were all reduced to huddles of slimy wet flesh that dotted the pavement from the break back to the palace grounds. The invaders were completely annihilated--and the city of Zyobor was saved! "Now," said the Professor triumphantly, "we have only to knock out the bottom half of the tunnel wall, empty the tunnel and make sure there are no more Quabos lurking there. After that we can fill it in with solid cement. The Queen can order her fish-servants to guard the outer cave and see that no food gets in to the starving monsters there. The war is over, gentlemen. The Quabos are as good as exterminated at this moment. And I can get back to my zoological work...." Stanley and I looked at each other. We knew each others thoughts well enough. He could resume his companionship with the beautiful Mayis. And I--I had Aga.... * * * * * With the menace of the Quabos banished forever, the city of Zyobor resumed its normal way. The citizens lowered their dead into the great well we had cut, with appropriate rites performed by the Queen. The daily tasks and pleasures were picked up where they had been dropped. The haunting fear died from the eyes of the people. Shortly afterward, with great ceremony and celebration, I was made King of Zyobor, to rule by Aga's side. Stanley took Mayis for his wife. He is second to me in power. The Professor is the official wise man of the city. Life flows smoothly for us in this pink lighted community. We are more than content with our lot here. Our only concern has been the grief that must have been occasioned our relatives and friends when the _Rosa_ sailed home without us. Now we have thought of a way in which, with luck, we may communicate with the upper world. By relays of my Queen's fish-servants we believe we can send up the Professor's invaluable notes[A] and this informal account of what has happened since we left San Francisco that.... (Editor's note: There was no trace of any "notes." The yacht, _Rosa_, was reported lost with all hands in a hurricane off New Zealand. Aboard her were a Professor George Berry and the owner, Stanley Browne. There is no record, however, of any passenger by the name of Martin Grey. To date no one has taken this document seriously enough to consider financing an expedition of investigation to Penguin Deep.) [Illustration: _"When I am finished, Dale, I shall probably kill you."_] The Murder Machine _By Hugh B. Cave_ [Sidenote: Four lives lay helpless before the murder machine, the uncanny device by which hypnotic thought-waves are filtered through men's minds to mold them into murdering tools!] It was dusk, on the evening of December 7, 1906, when I first encountered Sir John Harmon. At the moment of his entrance I was standing over the table in my study, a lighted match in my cupped hands and a pipe between my teeth. The pipe was never lit. I heard the lower door slam shut with a violent clatter. The stairs resounded to a series of unsteady footbeats, and the door of my study was flung back. In the opening, staring at me with quiet dignity, stood a young, careless fellow, about five feet ten in height and decidedly dark of complexion. The swagger of his entrance branded him as an adventurer. The ghastly pallor of his face, which was almost colorless, branded him as a man who has found something more than mere adventure. "Doctor Dale?" he demanded. "I am Doctor Dale." He closed the door of the room deliberately, advancing toward me with slow steps. "My name is John Harmon--Sir John Harmon. It is unusual, I suppose," he said quietly, with a slight shrug, "coming at this late hour. I won't keep you long." He faced me silently. A single glance at those strained features convinced me of the reason for his coming. Only one thing can bring such a furtive, restless stare to a man's eyes. Only one thing--fear. "I've come to you. Dale, because--" Sir John's fingers closed heavily over the edge of the table--"because I am on the verge of going mad." "From fear?" "From fear, yes. I suppose it is easy to discover. A single look at me...." "A single look at you," I said simply, "would convince any man that you are deadly afraid of something. Do you mind telling me just what it is?" * * * * * He shook his head slowly. The swagger of the poise was gone; he stood upright now with a positive effort, as if the realization of his position had suddenly surged over him. "I do not know," he said quietly. "It is a childish fear--fear of the dark, you may call it. The cause does not matter; but if something does not take this unholy terror away, the effect will be madness." I watched him in silence for a moment, studying the shrunken outline of his face and the unsteady gleam of his narrowed eyes. I had seen this man before. All London had seen him. His face was constantly appearing in the sporting pages, a swaggering member of the upper set--a man who had been engaged to nearly every beautiful woman in the country--who sought adventure in sport and in night life, merely for the sake of living at top speed. And here he stood before me, whitened by fear, the very thing he had so deliberately laughed at! "Dale," he said slowly, "for the past week I have been thinking things that I do not want to think and doing things completely against my will. Some outside power--God knows what it is--is controlling my very existence." He stared at me, and leaned closer across the table. "Last night, some time before midnight," he told me, "I was sitting alone in my den. Alone, mind you--not a soul was in the house with me. I was reading a novel; and suddenly, as if a living presence had stood in the room and commanded me, I was forced to put the book down. I fought against it, fought to remain in that room and go on reading. And I failed." "Failed?" My reply was a single word of wonder. * * * * * "I left my home: because I could not help myself. Have you ever been under hypnotism, Dale? Yes? Well, the thing that gripped me was something similar--except that no living person came near me in order to work his hypnotic spell. I went alone, the whole way. Through back streets, alleys, filthy dooryards--never once striking a main thoroughfare--until I had crossed the entire city and reached the west side of the square. And there, before a big gray town-house, I was allowed to stop my mad wandering. The power, whatever it was, broke. I--well, I went home." Sir John got to his feet with an effort, and stood over me. "Dale," he whispered hoarsely, "what was it?" "You were conscious of every detail?" I asked. "Conscious of the time, of the locality you went to? You are sure it was not some fantastic dream?" "Dream! Is it a dream to have some damnable force move me about like a mechanical robot?" "But.... You can think of no explanation?" I was a bit skeptical of his story. He turned on me savagely. "I have no explanation. Doctor," he said curtly. "I came to you for the explanation. And while you are thinking over my case during the next few hours, perhaps you can explain this: when I stood before that gray mansion on After Street, alone in the dark, there was murder in my heart. I should have killed the man who lived in that house, had I not been suddenly released from the force that was driving me forward!" Sir John turned from me in bitterness. Without offering any word of departure, he pulled open the door and stepped across the sill. The door closed, and I was alone. * * * * * That was my introduction to Sir John Harmon. I offer it in detail because it was the first of a startling series of events that led to the most terrible case of my career. In my records I have labeled the entire case "The Affair of the Death Machine." Twelve hours after Sir John's departure--which will bring the time, to the morning of December 8--the headlines of the Daily Mail stared up at me from the table. They were black and heavy: those headlines, and horribly significant. They were: FRANKLIN WHITE Jr. FOUND MURDERED Midnight Marauder Strangles Young Society Man in West-End Mansion I turned the paper hurriedly, and read: Between the hours of one and two o'clock this morning, an unknown murderer entered the home of Franklin White, Jr., well known West-End sportsman, and escaped, leaving behind his strangled victim. Young White, who is a favorite in London upper circles, was discovered in his bed this morning, where he had evidently lain dead for many hours. Police are seeking a motive for the crime, which may have its origin in the fact that White only recently announced his engagement to Margot Vernee, young and exceedingly pretty French débutante. Police say that the murderer was evidently an amateur, and that he made no attempt to cover his crime. Inspector Thomas Drake of Scotland Yard has the case. There was more, much more. Young White had evidently been a decided favorite, and the murder had been so unexpected, so deliberate, that the Mail reporter had made the most of his opportunity for a story. But aside from what I have reprinted, there was only a single short paragraph which claimed my attention. It was this: The White home is not a difficult one to enter. It is a huge gray town-house, situated just off the square, in After Street. The murderer entered by a low French window, leaving it open. I have copied the words exactly as they were printed. The item does not call for any comment. * * * * * But I had hardly dropped the paper before she stood before me. I say "she"--it was Margot Vernee, of course--because for some peculiar reason I had expected her. She stood quietly before me, her cameo face, set in the black of mourning, staring straight into mine. "You know why I have come?" she said quickly. I glanced at the paper on the table before me, and nodded. Her eyes followed my glance. "That is only part of it, Doctor," she said. "I was in love with Franklin--very much--but I have come to you for something more. Because you are a famous psychologist, and can help me." She sat down quietly, leaning forward so that her arms rested on the table. Her face was white, almost as white as the face of that young adventurer who had come to me on the previous evening. And when she spoke, her voice was hardly more than a whisper. "Doctor, for many days now I have been under some strange power. Something frightful, that compels me to think and act against my will." She glanced at me suddenly, as if to note the effect of her words. Then: "I was engaged to Franklin for more than a month, Doctor: yet for a week now I have been commanded--commanded--by some awful force, to return to--to a man who knew me more than two years ago. I can't explain it. I did not love this man; I hated him bitterly. Now comes this mad desire, this hungering, to go to him. And last night--" * * * * * Margot Vernee hesitated suddenly. She stared at me searchingly. Then, with renewed courage, she continued. "Last night, Doctor, I was alone. I had retired for the night, and it was late, nearly three o'clock. And then I was strangely commanded, by this awful power that has suddenly taken possession, of my soul, to go out. I tried to restrain myself, and in the end I found myself walking through the square. I went straight to Franklin White's home. When I reached there, it was half past three--I could hear Big Ben. I went in--through the wide French window at the side of the house. I went straight to Franklin's room--_because I could not prevent myself from going_." A sob came from Margot's lips. She had half risen from her chair, and was holding herself together with a brave effort. I went to her side and stood over her. And she, with a half crazed laugh, stared up at me. "He was dead when I saw him!" she cried. "Dead! Murdered! That infernal force, what ever it was, had made me go straight to my lover's side, to see him lying there, with those cruel finger marks on his throat--dead, I tell you, I--oh, it is horrible!" She turned suddenly. "When I saw him," she said bitterly, "the sight of him--and the sight of those marks--broke the spell that held me. I crept from the house as if I had killed him. They--they will probably find out that I was there, and they will accuse me of the murder. It does not matter. But this power--this awful thing that has been controlling me--is there no way to fight it?" I nodded heavily. The memory, of that unfortunate fellow who had come to me with the same complaint was still holding me. I was prepared to wash my hands of the whole horrible affair. It was clearly not a medical case, clearly out of my realm. "There is a way to fight it," I said quietly. "I am a doctor, not a master of hypnotism, or a man who can discover the reasons behind that hypnotism. But London has its Scotland Yard, and Scotland Yard has a man who is one of my greatest comrades...." She nodded her surrender. As I stepped to the telephone, I heard her murmur, in a weary, troubled voice: "Hypnotism? It is not that. God knows what it is. But it has always happened when I have been alone. One cannot hypnotise through distance...." * * * * * And so, with Margot Vernee's consent, I sought the aid of Inspector Thomas Drake, of Scotland Yard. In half an hour Drake stood beside me, in the quiet of my study. When he had heard Margot's story, he asked a single significant question. It was this: "You say you have a desire to go back to a man who was once intimate with you. Who is he?" Margot looked at him dully. "It is Michael Strange," she said slowly. "Michael Strange, of Paris. A student of science." Drake nodded. Without further questioning he dismissed my patient; and when she had gone, he turned to me. "She did not murder her sweetheart, Dale" he said. "That is evident. Have you any idea who did?" And so I told him of that other young man. Sir John Harmon, who had come to me the night before. When I had finished. Drake stared at me--stared through me--and suddenly turned on his heel. "I shall be back, Dale," he said curtly. "Wait for me!" * * * * * Wait for him! Well, that was Drake's peculiar way of going about things. Impetuous, sudden--until he faced some crisis. Then, in the face of danger, he became a cold, indifferent officer of Scotland Yard. And so I waited. During the twenty-four hours that elapsed before Drake returned to my study, I did my best to diagnose the case before me. First, Sir John Harmon--his visit to the home of Franklin White. Then--the deliberate murder. And, finally, young Margot Vernee, and her confession. It was like the revolving whirl of a pinwheel, this series of events: continuous and mystifying, but without beginning or end. Surely, somewhere in the procession of horrors, there would be a loose end to cling to. Some loose end that would eventually unravel the pinwheel! It was plainly not a medical affair, or at least only remotely so. The thing was in proper hands, then, with Drake following it through. And I had only to wait for his return. He came at last, and closed the door of the room behind him. He stood over me with something of a swagger. "Dale, I have been looking into the records of this Michael Strange," he said quietly. "They are interesting, those records. They go back some ten years, when this fellow Strange was beginning his study of science. And now Michael Strange is one of the greatest authorities in Paris on the subject of mental telegraphy. He has gone into the study of human thought with the same thoroughness that other scientists go into the subject of radio telegraphy. He has written several books on the subject." Drake pulled a tiny black volume from the pocket of his coat and dropped it on the table before me. With one hand he opened it to a place which he had previously marked in pencil. "Read it," he said significantly. * * * * * I looked at him in wonder, and then did as he ordered. What I read was this: "Mental telegraphy is a science, not a myth. It is a very real fact, a very real power which can be developed only by careful research. To most people it is merely a curiosity. They sit, for instance, in a crowded room at some uninteresting lecture, and stare continually at the back of some unsuspecting companion until that companion, by the power of suggestion, turns suddenly around. Or they think heavily of a certain person nearby, perhaps commanding him mentally to hum a certain popular tune, until the victim, by the power of their will, suddenly fulfills the order. To such persons, the science of mental telegraphy is merely an amusement. "And so it will be, until science has brought it to such a perfection that these waves of thought can be broadcast--that they can be transmitted through the ether precisely as radio waves are transmitted. In other words, mental telegraphy is at present merely a mild form of hypnotism. Until it has been developed so that those hypnotic powers can be directed through space, and directed accurately to those individuals to whom they are intended, this science will have no significance. It remains for scientists of to-day to bring about that development." I closed the book. When I looked up, Drake was watching me intently, as if expecting me to say something. "Drake," I said slowly, more to myself than to him, "the pinwheel is beginning to unravel. We have found the beginning thread. Perhaps, if we follow that thread...." Drake smiled. "If you'll pick up your hat and coat, Dale," he interrupted, "I think we have an appointment. This Michael Strange, whose book you have just enjoyed so immensely, is now residing on a certain quiet little side street about three miles from the square, in London!" * * * * * I followed Drake in silence, until we had left Cheney Lane in the gloom behind us. At the entrance to the square my companion called a cab; and from there on we rode slowly, through a heavy darkness which was blanketed by a wet, penetrating fog. The cabby, evidently one who knew my companion by sight (and what London cabby does not know his Scotland Yard men!) chose a route that twisted through gloomy, uninhabited side streets, seldom winding into the main route of traffic. As for Drake, he sank back in the uncomfortable seat and made no attempt at conversation. For the entire first part of our journey he said nothing. Not until we had reached a black, unlighted section of the city did he turn to me. "Dale," he said at length, "have you ever hunted tiger?" I looked at him and laughed. "Why?" I replied. "Do you expect this hunt of ours will be something of a blind chase?" "It will be a blind chase, no doubt of it," he said. "And when we have followed the trail to its end, I imagine we shall find something very like a tiger to deal with. I have looked rather deeply into Michael Strange's life, and unearthed a bit of the man's character. He has twice been accused of murder--murder by hypnotism--and has twice cleared himself by throwing scientific explanations at the police. That is the nature of his entire history for the past ten years." * * * * * I nodded, without replying. As Drake turned away from me again, our cab poked its laboring nose into a narrowing, gloomy street. I had a glimpse of a single unsteady street lamp on the corner, and a dim sign, "Mate Lane." And then we were dragging along the curb. The cab stopped with a groan. I had stepped down and was standing by the cab door when suddenly, from the darkness in front of me, a strange figure advanced to my side. He glanced at me intently; then, seeing that I was evidently not the man he sought, he turned to Drake. I heard a whispered greeting and an undertone of conversation. Then, quietly, Drake stepped toward me. "Dale," he said. "I thought it best that I should not show myself here to-night. No, there is no time for explanation now; you will understand later. Perhaps"--significantly--"sooner than you anticipate. Inspector Hartnett will go through the rest of this pantomime with you." I shook hands with Drake's man, still rather bewildered at the sudden substitution. Then, before I was aware of it, Drake had vanished and the cab was gone. We were alone, Hartnett and I, in Mate Lane. The home of Michael Strange--number seven--was hardly inviting. No light was in evidence. The big house stood like a huge, unadorned vault set back from the street, some distance from its adjoining buildings. The heavy steps echoed to our footbeats as we mounted them in the darkness; and the sound of the bell, as Hartnett pressed it came sharply to us from the silence of the interior. * * * * * We stood there, waiting. In the short interval before the door opened, Hartnett glanced at his watch (it was nearly ten o'clock), and said to me: "I imagine, Doctor, we shall meet a blank wall. Let me do the talking, please." That was all. In another moment the big door was pulled slowly open from the inside, and in the entrance, glaring out at us, stood the man we had come to see. It is not hard to remember that first impression of Michael Strange. He was a huge man, gaunt and haggard, moulded with the hunched shoulders and heavy arms of a gorilla. His face seemed to be unconsciously twisted into a snarl. His greeting, which came only after he had stared at us intently, for nearly a minute, was curt and rasping. "Well, gentlemen? What is it?" "I should like a word with Dr. Michael Strange," said my companion quietly. "I am Michael Strange." "And I," replied Hartnett, with a suggestion of a smile, "am Raoul Hartnett, from Scotland Yard." I did not see any sign of emotion on Strange's face. He stepped back in silence to allow us to enter. Then closing the big door after us, he led the way along a carpeted hall to a small, ill-lighted room just beyond. Here he motioned us to be seated, he himself standing upright beside the table, facing us. "From Scotland Yard," he said, and the tone was heavy with dull sarcasm. "I am at your service, Mr. Hartnett." * * * * * And now, for the first time, I wondered just why Drake had insisted on my coming here to this gloomy house in Mate Lane. Why he had so deliberately arranged a substitute so that Michael Strange should not come face to face with him directly. Evidently Hartnett had been carefully instructed as to his course of action--but why this seemingly unnecessary caution on Drake's part? And now, after we had gained admission, what excuse would Hartnett offer for the intrusion? Surely he would not follow the bull-headed rôle of a common policeman! There was no anger, no attempt at dramatics, in Hartnett's voice. He looked quietly up at our host. "Dr. Strange," he said at length, "I have come to you for your assistance. Last night, some time after midnight, Franklin White was strangled to death. He was murdered, according to substantial evidence, by the girl he was going to marry--Margot Vernee. I come to you because you know this girl rather well, and can perhaps help Scotland Yard in finding her motive for killing White." Michael Strange said nothing. He stood there, scowling down at my companion in silence. And I, too, I must admit, turned upon Hartnett with a stare of bewilderment. His accusation of Margot had brought a sense of horror to me. I had expected almost anything from him, even to a mad accusation of Strange himself. But I had hardly foreseen this cold blooded declaration. "You understand, Doctor," Hartnett went on, in that same ironical drawl, "that we do not believe Margot Vernee did this thing herself. She had a companion, undoubtedly, one who accompanied her to the house on After Street, and assisted her in the crime. Who that companion was, we are not sure; but there is decidedly a case of suspicion against a certain young London sportsman. This fellow is known to have prowled about the White mansion both on the night of the murder and the night before." * * * * * Hartnett glanced up casually. Strange's face was a total mask. When he nodded, the nod was the most even and mechanical thing I have ever seen. Certainly this man could control his emotions! "Naturally, Doctor," Hartnett said, "we have gone rather deeply into the past life of the lady in question. Your name appears, of course, in a rather unimportant interval when Margot Vernee resided in Paris. And so we come to you in the hope that you can perhaps give us some slight bit of information--something that seems insignificant, perhaps, to you, but which may put us on the right track." It was a careful speech. Even as Hartnett spoke it, I could have sworn that the words were Drake's, and had been memorized. But Michael Strange merely stepped back to the table and faced us without a word. He was probably, during that brief interlude, attempting to realize his position, and to discover just how much Raoul Hartnett actually knew. And then, after his interim of silence, he came forward sullenly and stood over my comrade. "I will tell you this much, Mr. Hartnett of Scotland Yard," he said bitterly: "My relations with Margot Vernee are not an open book to be passed through the clumsy fingers of ignorant police officers. As to this murder, I know nothing. At the time of it, I was seated in this room in company with a distinguished group of scientific friends. I will tell you, on authority, that Margot _did not murder her lover_. Why? Because she loved him!" * * * * * The last words were heavy with bitterness. Before they had died into silence, Michael Strange had opened the door of his study. "If you please, gentlemen," he said quietly. Hartnett got to his feet. For an instant he stood facing the gorilla-like form of our host; then he stepped over the sill, without a word. We passed down the unlighted corridor in silence, while Strange stood in the door of his study, watching us. I could not help but feel, as we left that gloomy house, that Strange had suddenly focused his entire attention upon me, and had ignored my companion. I could feel those eyes upon me, and feel the force of the will behind them. A decided feeling of uneasiness crept over me, and I shuddered. A moment later the big outer door had closed shut after us, and we were alone in Mate Lane. Alone, that is, until a third figure joined us in the shadows, and Drake's hand closed over my arm. "Capital, Dale," he said triumphantly. "For half an hour you entertained him, you and Hartnett. And for half an hour I've had the unlimited freedom of his inner rooms, with the aid of an unlocked window on the lower floor. Those inner rooms, gentlemen, are significant--very!" As we walked the length of Mate Lane, the gaunt, sinister home of Michael Strange became an indistinct outline in the pitch behind us. Drake said nothing more on the return trip, until we had nearly reached my rooms. Then he turned to me with a smile. "We are one up on our friend, Dale," he said. "He does not know, just now, which is the bigger fool--you or Hartnett here. However, I imagine Hartnett will be the victim of some very unusual events before many hours have passed!" That was all. At least, all of significance. I left the two Scotland Yard men at the opening of Cheney Lane, and continued alone to my rooms. I opened the door and let myself in quietly. And there some few hours later, began the last and most horrible phase of the case of the murder machine. * * * * * It begin--or to be more accurate, I began to react to it--at three o'clock in the morning. I was alone, and the rooms were dark. For hours I had sat quietly by the table, considering the significant events of the past few days. Sleep was impossible with so many unanswered questions staring into me, and so I sat there wondering. Did Drake actually believe that Margot Vernee's simple story had been a ruse--that she had in truth killed her lover on that midnight intrusion of his home? Did he believe that Michael Strange knew of that intrusion--that he had possibly planned it himself, and aided her, in order that Margot might be free to return to him? Did Strange know of that other intrusion, and of the uncanny power which had driven Sir John Harmon, and supposedly driven Margot to that house on After Street? Those were the questions that still remained without answers: and it was over those questions that I pondered, while my surroundings became darker and more silent as the hour became more advanced. I heard the clock strike three, and heard the answering drone of Big Ben from the square. * * * * * And then it began. At first it was little more than a sense of nervousness. Before I had been content to sit in my chair and doze. Now, in spite of myself, I found myself pacing the floor, back and forth like a caged animal. I could have sworn, at the time, that some sinister presence had found entrance to my room. Yet the room was empty. And I could have sworn, too, that some silent power of will was commanding me, with undeniable force, to go out--out into the darkness of Cheney Lane. I fought it bitterly. I laughed at it, yet even through my laugh came the memory of Sir John Harmon and Margot, and what they had told me. And then, unable to resist that unspoken demand, I seized my hat and coat and went out. Cheney Lane was deserted, utterly still. At the end of it, the street lamp glowed dully, throwing a patch of ghastly light over the side of the adjoining building. I hurried through the shadows, and as I walked, a single idea had possession of me. I must hurry, I thought, with all possible speed, to that grim house in Mate Lane--number seven. Where that deliberate desire came from I did not know. I did not stop to reason. Something had commanded me to go at once to Michael Strange's home. And though I stopped more than once, deliberately turning in my tracks, inevitably I was forced to retrace my steps and continue. * * * * * I remember passing through the square, and prowling through the unlightened side streets that lay beyond. Three miles separated Cheney Lane from Mate Lane, and I had been over the route only once before, in a cab. Yet I followed that route without a single false turn, followed it instinctively. At every intersecting street I was dragged in a certain direction and not once was I allowed to hesitate. It was as though some unseen demon perched on my shoulders, as the demon of the sea rode Sinbad, and pointed out the way. Only one disturbing thing occurred on that night journey through London. I had turned into a narrow street hardly more than a quarter mile from my destination; and before me, in the shadows, I made out the form of a shuffling old man. And here, as I watched him, I was conscious of a new, mad desire. I crept upon him stealthily, without a sound. My hands were outstretched, clutching, for his throat. At that moment I should have killed him! I cannot explain it. During that brief interval I was a murderer at heart. I wanted to kill. And now that I remember it, the desire had been pregnant in me ever since the lights of Cheney Lane had died behind me. All the time that I prowled through those black streets, murder lurked in my heart. I should have killed the first man who crossed my path. But I did not kill him. Thank God, as my fingers twisted toward the back of his throat, that mad desire suddenly left me. I stood still, while the old fellow, still unsuspecting, shuffled, away into the darkness. Then, dropping my hands with a sob of helplessness, I went forward again. * * * * * And so I reached Mate Lane, and the huge gray house that awaited me. This time, as I mounted the stone steps, the old house seemed even more repulsive and horrible. I dreaded to see that door open, but I could not retreat. I dropped the knocker heavily. A moment passed: and then, precisely as before, the huge door swung inward. Michael Strange stood before me. He did not speak. Perhaps, if he had spoken, that fiendish spell would have been broken, and I should have returned, even then, to my own peaceful little rooms in Cheney Lane. No--he merely held the door for me to enter, and as I passed him he stood there, watching me with a significant smile. Straight to that familiar room at the end of the hall I went, with Strange behind me. When we had entered, he closed the door cautiously. For a moment he faced me without speaking. "You came very close to committing a murder on your way here, did you not, Dale?" I stared at him. How, in God's name, could this man read my thoughts so completely? "You would have completed the murder," he said softly, "had I wished it. I did not wish it!" I did not answer. There was no reply to such a mad declaration. As for my companion, he watched me for an instant and then laughed. He was not mad. I am doctor enough to know that. But the laugh was not long in duration. He stepped forward suddenly and took my arm in a steel grip, dragging me toward the half hidden door at the farther end of the room. "I shall not keep you long, Dale," he said harshly. "I could have killed you--could have made you kill yourself, and in fact, I intended to do so--but after all, you are merely a poor stumbling fool who has meddled in things too deep for you." * * * * * He pulled open the door and pushed me forward. The room was dark, and not until he had closed the door again and switched on a dim light, could I see its contents. Even then I saw nothing. At least, nothing of importance to an unscientific mind. There was a low table against the wall, with a profusion of tiny wires emanating from it. I was aware that a cup shaped microphone--or something very similar--hung over the table, about on a level with my eyes, had I been sitting in the chair. Beyond that I saw nothing, until Strange had moved forward and drawn aside a curtain that hung beside the table. "I made you come here to-night, Dale," he murmured, "because I was a bit afraid of you. Your comrade, Hartnett, was an ignorant police officer. He has not the intellect to connect the series of events of the past day or two, and so I did not trouble myself with him. But you are an educated man. You have made no demonstrations of your ability in the field of science, but--" He stopped speaking abruptly. From the room behind us came the sound of a warning bell. Strange turned quickly and went to the door. "You will wait here, Doctor," he said. "I have another caller to-night. Another one who came the same way as you!" He vanished. For a short interlude I was alone, with that peculiar radio-like apparatus before me. It was, for all the world, like a miniature control room in some small broadcasting station. Except for the odd shape of the microphone, if it was such I could detect no radical difference in equipment. * * * * * However, I had little time for conjecture. A patter of footsteps interrupted me from the next room, and a frightened, feminine voice broke the stillness of the outer study. Even before the owner of that voice stepped in to my presence, I knew her. And when she came, with white, fearful face and trembling body, I could not withhold a shudder of apprehension. It was the young woman who had come to my office--Margot Vernee. Evidently, at last, she had yielded to the horrible impulse that had drawn her back to Michael Strange, an impulse which, I now understood, had originated from the man himself. He pressed her forward. There was nothing tender in his touch: it was cruel and triumphant. "So you have succeeded--at last," I said bitterly. He turned to me with a sneer. "I have brought her here, yes," he replied. "And now that she has come, she shall hear what I have to tell you. It will perhaps give her a respect for me, and this time she will not have the power to turn me away." He pointed to the table, to the apparatus that lay there. "I'm telling you this, Dale," he said, "because it gives me pleasure to do so. You are enough of a scientist to appreciate and understand it. And if, when I have finished, I have told you too much, there is a very easy way to keep your tongue silent. You have heard of hypnotism, Dale? You have heard also of radio? Have you ever thought of combining the two?" * * * * * He faced me directly. I made no effort to reply. "Radio," he said quietly, "is broadcast by means of sound waves. That much you know. But hypnotism too, can be transmitted through distance, if an instrument delicate enough to transmit _thought waves_ can be invented. For twenty years I have worked on that instrument, and for twenty years I have studied hypnotism. You understand, of course, that this instrument is worthless unless it is operated by a master mind. Thought waves are useless; they will not control the actions of even a cat. But hypnotic waves or concentrated thought waves--will control the world." There was no denying him. He faced me with the savage triumph of a wild beast. He was glorying in his power, and in my amazement. "I wanted Franklin White to die!" he cried. "It was I who murdered him. Why? Because he was about to take the girl I desired. Is that not reason enough for murder? And so I killed him. It was not Margot Vernee who strangled her lover: it was a complete stranger, a London sportsman, who had no reason for committing the murder, _except that I wished him to_! "He died on the night of December seventh, murdered by Sir John Harmon, the sportsman. Why? Because, of all London, Sir John would be the last man to be suspected. I have a keen appreciation for the irony of fate! White would have died the night before, Dale, except that I lacked the courage to kill him. His murderer was standing, under my power, outside his very house--and then I suddenly thought it best that I should have an alibi. Your Scotland Yard is clever, and it was best that I have protection. And so, on the following night, I sent Sir John to the house once again. This time, while I sat here and controlled the actions of my puppet, a group of men sat here with me. They believed that I was experimenting with a new type of radio receiver!" * * * * * Michael Strange laughed, laughed harshly, in utter triumph, as a cat laughs at the antics of his mouse victims. "When that murder was done," he said, "I sent Margot to the scene, so that she might see her lover strangled, dead. I repeat, Dale, that I enjoy the irony of fate, especially when I can control it. And as for you--I brought you here to-night merely so that you would realize the intensity of the powers that control you. When you leave here, you will be unharmed--but after the exhibition I shall give you, I am sure that you will make no further attempt to interfere with things out of your realm of understanding." I heard a sob from Margot. She had retreated to the door, and clung there. For myself, I did not move. Strange's recital had revealed to me the horrible lust that gripped him, and now I watched him in fascination. He would not harm the girl; that much I was sure of. In his distorted fashion he loved her. In his crazed, murderous way he would attempt to win her love, even though she had once scorned him. * * * * * I saw him step toward the table. Saw him drop heavily into the chair, and stare directly into that microphonic thing that hung before his eyes. As he stared, he spoke to me. "Science, in its intricate forms, is probably above the mind of a common medical man, Dale," he said. "It would be useless to explain to you how my thoughts--and my will--can be transmitted through space. Perhaps you have sat in a theater and stared at a certain person until that person turned to face you. You have? Then you will perhaps understand how I can control the minds of any human creature within the radius of my power. You see, Dale, this intricate little machine gives me the power to transform London into a city of stark murder. I could bring about such a horrible wave of crime that Scotland Yard would be scorned from one end of the world to the other. I could make every man murder his neighbor, until the streets of the city were running with blood!" Strange turned quietly to look at me. He spoke deliberately. "And now for the little exhibition of which I spoke, Dale," he murmured. "Your detective friend, Hartnett, has been under my power for the past three hours. You see, it was safer to control his movements, and be sure of him. And now, to be doubly sure of him, perhaps you would like to see him kill himself!" I stepped forward with a sudden cry. Strange said nothing: his eyes merely burned into mine. Once again I felt that strange, all-powerful control forcing me back. I retreated, step by step, until the wall stopped me. Yet even as I retreated, a childish hope filled me. How could Strange, working his terrible murder machine, concentrate his power on any individual, when the whole of London lay before him? * * * * * He answered my question. He must have read it as it came over me. "Have you ever been in a crowd, Dale, and watched a certain individual intently, until that particular individual turned to look at you? The rest of the crowd pays no attention, of course, but that one man. And now we shall make that one man murder himself!" Strange turned slowly. I saw his fingers creep along the rim of the table, touching certain wires that came together there. I heard a dull, droning hum fill the room, and, over it, Strange's penetrating voice. "When I am finished, Dale, I shall probably kill you. I brought you here merely to frighten you, but I believe I have told you too much." With that new horror upon me, I saw my captor's lips move slowly.... And then, from the shadows at the other end of the small room, came a low, unemotional voice. "Before you begin, Strange--" Michael Strange whipped about in his chair like a tiger. His hand dropped to his pocket, so swiftly that my eyes did not follow it. And as it dropped, a single staccato shot split the darkness of the room. The scientist slumped forward in his chair. The dull, whirring sound of that hellish machine had stopped abruptly, cut short by the sudden weight of Strange's lunging body as he fell upon it. I saw the livid, fiery snake of white light twist suddenly upward through that coil of wires: and in another moment the entire apparatus shattered by a blinding crash of flame. * * * * * After that I turned away. Whether the bullet killed Strange or not, I do not know: but the sight of his charred face, hanging over that table of destruction, told its own story. It was Inspector Drake who came across the room toward me, and took my arm. The smoking revolver still lay in his hand, and as he led me into the adjoining room, I saw that Margot had already found refuge there. "You see now, Dale," Drake said quietly, "why I let Hartnett go with you before? If Strange had suspected me, I should have been merely another victim. As for Hartnett, he has been under constant guard down at headquarters. He's safe. They've kept him there, at my instructions, in spite of all his terrific efforts to leave them." I was listening to my companion in admiration. Even then I did not quite understand. "I was wrong in just one thing, Dale. I left you alone, without protection. I believed Strange would ignore you, because, after all, you are not a Scotland Yard man. Thank God I had the sense to follow Margot--to trail her here--and get here soon enough." * * * * * And so ended the horrible series of events that began with Sir John Harmon's chance visit to my study. As for Harmon, he was later cleared of all guilt, upon the charred evidence in Michael Strange's house in Mate Lane. The girl, I believe, has left London, where she can be as far as possible from memories that are all too terrible. As for me, I am back once again in my quiet rooms in Cheney Lane, where the routine of common medical practice has wiped out many of those vivid horrors. In time, I believe, I shall forget, unless Inspector Drake, of Scotland Yard, insists upon bringing the affair up again! _IN THE NEXT ISSUE_ THE INVISIBLE DEATH _A Thrilling Novelet of an Invisible Empire Within the United States_ _By_ Victor Rousseau STOLEN BRAINS _Another Absorbing Dr. Bird Story_ _By_ Capt. S. P. Meek PRISONERS ON THE ELECTRON _An Exciting Story of a Young Man Marooned on an Electron_ _By_ Robert H. Leitfred JETTA OF THE LOWLANDS _Part Two of the Current Novel_ _By_ Ray Cummings _--AND OTHERS!_ [Illustration: _We had been captured by a race of gigantic beetles._] The Attack from Space A SEQUEL TO "BEYOND THE HEAVISIDE LAYER" _By Captain S. P. Meek_ "No one knows what unrevealed horrors space holds and the world will never rest entirely easy until the slow process of time again heals the protective layer."--From "Beyond the Heaviside Layer." Over a year has passed since I wrote those lines. When they were written the hole which Jim Carpenter had burned with his battery of infra-red lamps through the heaviside layer, that hollow sphere of invisible semi-plastic organic matter which encloses the world as a nutshell does a kernel, was gradually filling in as he had predicted it would: every one thought that in another ten years the world would be safely enclosed again in its protective layer as it had been since the dawn of time. There were some adventurous spirits who deplored this fact, as it would effectually bar interplanetary travel, for Hadley had proved with his life that no space flyer could force its way through the fifty miles of almost solid material which barred the road to space, but they were in the minority. Most of humanity felt that it would rather be protected against the denizens of space than to have a road open for them to travel to the moon if they felt inclined. [Sidenote: From a far world came monstrous invaders who were all the more terrifying because invisible.] To be sure, during the five years that the hole had been open, nothing more dangerous to the peace and well-being of the world had appeared from space than a few hundreds of the purple amoeba which we had found so numerous on the outer side of the layer, when we had traveled in a Hadley space ship up through the hole into the outer realms of space, and one lone specimen of the green dragons which we had also encountered. The amoeba had been readily destroyed by the disintegrating rays of the guarding space-ships which were stationed inside the layer at the edge of the hole and the lone dragon had fallen a ready victim to the machine-gun bullets which had been poured into it. At first the press had damned Jim Carpenter for opening the road for these horrors, but once their harmlessness had been clearly established, the row had died down and the appearance of an amoeba did not merit over a squib on the inside pages of the daily papers. * * * * * While the hole in the heaviside layer was no longer news for the daily press, a bitter controversy still waged in the scientific journals as to the reason why no observer on earth, even when using the most powerful telescopes, could see the amoeba before they entered the hole, and then only when their telescopes were set up directly under the hole. When a telescope of even small power was mounted in the grounds back of Carpenter's laboratory, the amoeba could be detected as soon as they entered the hole, or when they passed above it through space; but, aside from that point of vantage, they were entirely invisible. Carpenter's theory of the absorptive powers of the material of which the heaviside layer was composed was laughed to scorn by most scientists, who pointed out the fact that the sun, moon and stars could be readily seen through it. Carpenter replied that the rays of colored or visible light could only pass through the layer when superimposed upon a carrier wave of ultra-violet or invisible light. He stated dogmatically that the amoeba and the other denizens of space absorbed all the ultra-violet light which fell on them and reflected only the visible rays which could not pass through the heaviside layer because of the lack of a synchronized carrier wave of shorter wave-length. Despetier replied at great length and showed by apparently unimpeachable mathematics that Carpenter was entirely wrong and that his statements showed an absolute lack of knowledge of the most elementary and fundamental laws of light transmission. Carpenter replied briefly that he could prove by mathematics that two was equal to one and he challenged Despetier or anyone else to satisfactorily explain the observed facts in any other way. While they vainly tried to do so, Carpenter lapsed into silence in his Los Angeles laboratory and delved ever deeper into the problems of science. Such was the situation when the attack came from space. My first knowledge of the attack came when McQuarrie, the city editor of the San Francisco _Clarion_, sent for me. When I entered his office he tossed a Los Angeles dispatch on the desk before me and with a growl ordered me to read it. It told of the unexplained disappearance of an eleven year old boy the night before. It looked like a common kidnapping. "Well?" I asked as I handed him back the dispatch. With another growl he tossed down a second telegram. I read it with astonishment, for it told of a second disappearance which had happened about an hour after the first. The similarity of the two cases was at once apparent. "Coincidence or connection?" I asked as I returned it. "Find out!" he replied. "If I knew which it was I wouldn't be wasting the paper's money by sending you to Los Angeles. I don't doubt that I am wasting it anyway, but as long as I am forced to keep you on as a reporter, I might as well try to make you earn the money the owner wastes on paying you a salary, even although I know it to be a hopeless task. Go on down there and see what you can find out, if anything." I jotted down in my notebook the names and addresses of the missing children and turned to leave. A boy entered and handed McQuarrie a yellow slip. He glanced at it and called me back. "Wait a minute, Bond," he said as he handed me the dispatch. "I doubt but you'd better fly down to Los Angeles. Another case has just been reported." I hastily copied down the dispatch he handed me, which was almost a duplicate of the first two with the exception of the time and the name. Three unexplained disappearances in one day was enough to warrant speed; I drew some expense money and was on my way south in a chartered plane within an hour. On my arrival I went to the Associated Press office and found a message waiting for me, directing me to call McQuarrie on the telephone at once. "Hello, Bond," came his voice over the wire, "have you just arrived? Well, forget all about that disappearance case. Prince is on his way to Los Angeles to cover it. You hadn't been gone an hour before a wire came in from Jim Carpenter. He says, 'Send Bond to me at once by fastest conveyance. Chance for a scoop on the biggest story of the century.' I don't know what it's about, but Jim Carpenter is always front page news. Get in touch with him at once and stay with him until you have the story. Don't risk trying to telegraph it when you get it--telephone. Get moving!" I lost no time in getting Carpenter on the wire. "Hello, First Mortgage," he greeted me. "You made good time getting down here. Where are you?" "At the A. P. Office." "Grab a taxi and come out to the laboratory. Bring your grip with you: you may have to stay over night." "I'll be right out, Jim. What's the story?" His voice suddenly grew grave. "It's the biggest thing you ever handled," he replied. "The fate of the whole world may hang on it. I don't want to talk over the phone; come on out and I'll give you the whole thing." * * * * * An hour later I shook hands with Tim, the guard at the gate of the Carpenter laboratory, and passed through the grounds to enter Jim's private office. He greeted me warmly and for a few minutes we chatted of old times when I worked with him as an assistant in his atomic disintegration laboratory and of the stirring events we had passed through together when we had ventured outside the heaviside layer in his space ship. "Those were stirring times," he said, "but I have an idea, First Mortgage, that they were merely a Sunday school picnic compared to what we are about to tackle." "I guessed that you had something pretty big up your sleeve from your message." I replied. "What's up now? Are we going to make a trip to the moon and interview the inhabitants?" "We may interview them without going that far," he said. "Have you seen a morning paper?" "No." "Look at this." He handed me a copy of the _Gazette_. Streamer headlines told of the three disappearances which I had come to Los Angeles to cover, but they had grown to five during the time I had been flying down. I looked at Jim in surprise. "We got word of that in San Francisco," I told him, "and I came down here to cover the story. When I got here, McQuarrie telephoned me your message and told me to come and see you instead. Has your message anything to do with this?" "It has everything to do with it, First Mortgage; in fact, it _is_ it. Have you any preconceived ideas on the disappearance epidemic?" "None at all." "All the better--you'll be able to approach the matter with an unbiased viewpoint. Don't read that hooey put out by an inspired reporter who blames the laxness of the city government; I'll give you the facts without embellishment. Nothing beyond the bare fact of the disappearance is known about the first case. Robert Prosser, aged eleven, was sent to the grocery store by his mother about six-thirty last night and failed to return. That's all we know about it, except that it happened in Eagle Rock. The second case we have a little more data on. William Hill, aged twelve, was playing in Glendale last night with some companions. They were playing 'hide and go seek' and William hid. He could not be found by the boy who was searching and has not been found since. His companions became frightened and reported it about eight o'clock. They saw nothing, but mark this! Four of them agree that they heard a sound in the air _like a motor humming_." "That proves nothing." "Taken alone it does not, but in view of the third case, it is quite significant. The third case happened about nine-thirty last night. This time the victim was a girl, aged ten. She was returning home from a moving picture with some companions and she disappeared. This time the other children saw her go. They say she was suddenly taken straight up into the air and then disappeared from sight. They, also claim to have heard a sound like a big electric fan in the air at the time, although they could see nothing." "Had they heard the details of the second disappearance?" "They had not. I can see what you are thinking; that they were unconsciously influenced by the account given of the other case." "Consciously or unconsciously." "I doubt it, for the fourth case was almost a duplicate of the third. The fourth and fifth cases happened this morning. In the fourth case the child, for it was a nine year old girl this time, was lifted into the air in broad daylight and disappeared. This disappearance was witnessed, not only by children, but also by two adults, and their testimony agrees completely with that of the children. The fifth case is similar to the first: a ten year old boy disappeared without trace. The whole city is in a reign of terror." * * * * * The telephone at Carpenter's elbow rang and he answered it. A short conversation took place and he turned to me with a grim face as he hung up the receiver. "Another case has just been reported to police headquarters from Beverly Hills," he said. "Again the child was seen to be lifted into the air by some invisible means and disappeared. The sound of a motor was plainly heard by five witnesses, who all agree that it was just, above their heads, but that nothing could be seen." "Was it in broad daylight?" "Less than an hour ago." "But, Jim, that's impossible!" "Why is it impossible?" "It would imply the invisibility of a tangible substance; of a solid." "What of it?" "Why, there isn't any such substance. Nothing of the sort exists." Carpenter pointed to one of the windows of his laboratory. "Does that window frame contain glass or not?" he asked. I strained my eyes. Certainly nothing was visible. "Yes," I said at a venture. He rose and thrust his hand through the space where the glass should have been. "Has this frame glass in it?" he asked, pointing to another. "No." He struck the glass with his knuckle. "I'll give up," I replied. "I am used to thinking of glass as being transparent but not invisible; yet I can see that under certain light conditions it may be invisible. Granted that such is the case, do you believe that living organisms can be invisible?" "Under the right conditions, yes. Has any observer been able to see any of the purple amoeba which we know are so numerous on the outer side of the heaviside layer?" "Not until they have entered the hole through the layer." "And yet those amoeba are both solid and opaque, as you know. Why is it not possible that men, or intelligences of some sort, are in the air about us and yet are invisible to our eyes!" "If they are, why haven't we received evidence of it years ago?" "Because there has only been a hole through the heaviside layer for six years. Before that time they could not penetrate it any more than poor Hadley could with his space ship. They have not entered the hole earlier because it is a very small one, at present only some two hundred and fifty yards in diameter in a sphere of over eight thousand miles diameter. The invaders have just found the entrance." "The invaders? Do you think that the world has been invaded?" "I do. How else can you explain the very fact which you have just quoted, that no evidence of the presence on these invisible entities has previously been recorded?" "Where did they come from?" "They may have come from anywhere in the solar system, or even from outside it but I fancy, that they are from Mars or Venus." "Why so?" "Because they are the two planets nearest to the earth and are the ones where conditions are the most like they are on the earth. Venus, for example, has an atmosphere and a gravity about .83 of earthly gravity, and life of a sort similar to that of the earth might well live there. Further, it seems more probable that the invaders have come from one of the nearby planets than from the realms of space beyond the solar system." "What about the moon?" "We can dismiss that because of the lack of an atmosphere." "It sounds logical, Jim, but the idea of living organisms of sufficient size to lift a child into the air who are invisible seems a little absurd." "I never said they were invisible. I don't think they are." "But they must be, else why weren't they seen?" "Use your head, First Mortgage. Those purple amoeba we encountered were quite visible to us, yet they are invisible to observers on the earth." "Yes, but that is because the heaviside layer is between them and the earth. As soon as they come below it they can be seen." * * * * * "Exactly. Why is it not possible that the Venetians, or Martians, or whoever our invaders are, have encased themselves and their space flyer in a layer of some substance similar to the heaviside layer, a substance which is permeable to light rays only when a large proportion of ultra-violet rays accompany the visible rays? If they did this and then constructed the walls of their ship of some substance which absorbed all the ultra-violet rays which fell on it; not only would the ship itself be invisible, but also everything contained in it--and yet they could see the outside world easily. That such _is_ the case is proved by the disappearance of those children in mid-air. They were taken into a space ship behind an ultra-violet absorbing wall and so became invisible." "If the walls absorbed all the ultra-violet and were impermeable to light without ultra-violet, the ship would appear as a black opaque substance and could be seen." "That would be true except for one thing which you are forgetting. The heaviside layer, as I have repeatedly proved, is a splendid conductor of ultra-violet. The rays falling on it are probably bent along the line of the covering layer so that they open up and bend around the ship in the same manner as flowing water will open up and flow around a stone and then come together again. The light must flow around the solid ship and then join again in such a manner that the eye can detect no interruption." "Jim, all that sounds reasonable, but have you any proof of it?" "No, First Mortgage, I haven't--yet; but if the Lord is good to us we'll have definite proof this afternoon and be in a position to successfully combat this new menace to the world." "Do you expect me to go on another one of your crack-brained expeditions into the unknown with you?" * * * * * "Certainly I do, but this time we won't go out of the known. I have our old space flyer which we took beyond the heaviside layer six years ago ready for action and we're going to look for the invaders this afternoon." "How will we see them if they are invisible?" "They are invisible to ordinary light but not to ultra-violet light. While most of the ultra-violet is deflected and flows around the ship or else is absorbed, I have an idea that, if we bathe it in a sufficient concentration of ultra-violet, some would be reflected. We are going to look for the reflected portion." "Ultra-violet light is invisible." "It is to the eye, but it can be detected. You know that radium is activated and glows under ultra-violet?" "Yes." "Mounted on our flyer are six ultra-violet searchlights. By the side of each one is a wide angle telescopic concentrator which will focus any reflected ultra-violet onto a radium coated screen and thus make it visible to us. In effect the apparatus is a camera obscura with all lens made of rock crystal or fused quartz, both of which allow free passage to ultra-violet." "What will we do if we find them?" "Mounted beneath the telescope is a one-pounder gun with radite shells. If we locate them, we will use our best efforts to shoot them down." "Suppose they are armed too?" * * * * * "In that case I hope that you shoot faster and straighter than they do. If you don't--well, old man, it'll just be too damned bad." "I don't know that the _Clarion_ hires me to go out and shoot at invisible invaders from another planet, but if I don't go with you, I expect you'd just about call up the _Echo_ or the _Gazette_ and ask them for a gunner." "Just about." "In that case, I may as well be sacrificed as anyone else. When do we start?" "You old faker!" cried Jim, pounding me on the back. "You wouldn't miss the trip for anything. If you're ready we'll start right now. Everything is ready." "Including the sacrifice," I replied, rising. "All right, Jim, let's go and get it over with. If we live, I'll have to get back in time to telephone the story to McQuarrie for the first edition." I followed Jim out of the laboratory and to a large open space behind the main building where the infra-red generators with which he had pierced the hole through the heaviside layer had been located. The reflectors were still in place, but the bank of generators had been removed. A gang of men were hard at work erecting a huge parabolic reflector in the center of the circle, about the periphery of which the infra-red reflectors were placed. In an open space near the center stood a Hadley space ship, toward which Jim led the way. * * * * * I wondered at the activity and meant to ask what it portended, but in the excitement of boarding the flyer forgot it. I followed Jim in; he closed the door and started the air conditioner. "Here, First Mortgage," he said as he turned from the control board and faced me, "here are the fluoroscopic screens. They are arranged in a bank, so that you can keep an eye on all of them readily. Beneath each telescope is an automatic one-pounder gun with its mount geared to the telescope and the light, so that the gun bears continually on the point in space represented by the center of the fluoroscopic screen which belongs to that light. If we locate anything, turn your beam until the object is in the exact center of the screen where these two cross-hairs are. When you have it lined up, push this button and the gun will fire." "What about reloading?" "The guns are self-loading. Each one has twenty shells in its magazine and will fire one shot each time the button is pushed until it is empty. If you empty one magazine, I can turn the ship so that another gun will bear. This gives you a total of one hundred and twenty shots quickly available; there are sixty extra rounds, which we can break out and load into the magazines in a few seconds. Do you understand everything?" "I guess so. Everything seems clear enough." "All right; sit down and we'll start." * * * * * I took my seat, and Jim pulled the starting lever. I was glued to the seat and the heavy springs in the cushion were compressed almost to their limit by the sudden acceleration. As soon as we were well clear of the ground Jim reduced his power, and in a few moments we were floating motionless in the air, a thousand feet up. He left the control board and came to my side. "Start your ultra lights," he said as he joined me. "We may be able to spot something from here." I started the lights and we stared at the screens before us. Nothing appeared on any of them except the one pointing directly down, and only an image of the ground, appeared on it. Under Jim's tutelage I swung the beams in wide circles, covering the space around us, but nothing appeared. "Those beams won't project over five miles in this atmosphere," he said, "and the ship we are looking for may be so small that we would have trouble locating it at any great distance. I am going to move over near the scene of the last disappearance. Keep your lights swinging and sing out if you see anything on the screens." I could feel the ship start to move slowly under the force of a side discharge from the rocket motor, and I swung the beams of the six lights around, trying to cover the entire area about us. Nothing appeared on the screens for an hour, and my head began to ache from the strain of unremitting close observation of the glowing screens. A buzz sounding over the hum of the rocket motor attracted my attention; Jim pulled his levers to neutral with the exception of the one which maintained our elevation and stepped to an instrument on the wall of the flyer. "Hello," he called. "What? Where did it happen? All right, thanks, we'll move over that way at once." * * * * * He turned from the radio telephone and spoke. "Another disappearance has just been reported," he said. "It happened on the outskirts of Pasadena. Keep your eyes open: I'm going to head in that direction." A few minutes later we were floating over Pasadena. Jim stopped the flyer and joined me at the screens. We swung our beams in wide circles to cover the entire area around us, but no image on the screens rewarded us. "Doggone it, they must have left here in a hurry," grumbled Jim. Even as he spoke the flyer gave a lurch which nearly threw me off my seat and which sent Jim sprawling on the floor. With a white face he leaped to the control board and pulled the lever controlling our one working stern motor to full power. For a moment the ship moved upward and then came to a dead stop, although the motor still roared at full speed. "Can't you see anything, Pete?" cried Jim as he threw our second stern motor into gear. Again the ship moved upward for a few feet and then stopped. I swung the searchlights frantically in all directions, but five of the screens remained blank and the sixth showed only the ground below us. "Not a thing," I replied. "Something ought to show," he muttered, and suddenly shut off both motors. The flyer gave a sickening lurch toward the ground, but we fell only a hundred yards before our motion stopped. We hung suspended in the air with no motors working. Jim joined me at the screens and we swung the lights rapidly without success. "Look, Pete!" Jim cried hoarsely. * * * * * My gaze followed his pointing finger and I saw the door of our flyer springing out as though some force from the outside were trying to wrench it open. The pull ceased for an instant, then came again; the sturdy latches burst and the door was torn from its hinges. Jim swung one of the searchlights until the beam was at right angles to the hull of the flyer and pressed the gun button. A crash filled the confined space of the flyer as a one-pounder radite shell tore out into space. "They're there but still invisible," he exclaimed as he shifted the direction of the gun and fired again. "I am shooting by guess-work, but I might score a hit." He changed the direction of the gun again, but before he could press the button he was lifted into the air and drawn rapidly toward the open door. "Shoot, Pete!" he shouted. "Shoot and keep on shooting--it's your only chance!" I turned to the knobs controlling the guns and lights, but, before I could make a move, something hard and cold grasped me about the middle and I was lifted into the air and drawn toward the open door after Jim. I tore at the thing holding me with my hands, but it was a smooth round thing like a two-inch thick wire, and I could get no grip on it to loosen it. Out through the door I went and was drawn through the air a few feet behind Jim. He moved ahead of me for fifteen or twenty feet and then vanished in mid-air. I dared not struggle in mid-air and I was drawn through a door into a large space flyer which became visible as I entered it. The flexible wire or rod which had held me uncoiled and I was free on the floor beside Jim Carpenter. This much was clear and understandable, but when I looked at the crew of that space ship, I was sure that I had lost my mind or was seeing visions. I had naturally expected men, or at least something in semi-human form, but instead of anything of the sort, before me stood a dozen gigantic beetles! * * * * * I rubbed my eyes and looked again. There was no mistaking the fact that we had been captured by a race of gigantic beetles flying an invisible space ship. When I had time later to examine them critically, I could see marked differences between our captors and the beetles we were accustomed to see on the earth besides the mere matter of size. To begin with, their bodies were relatively much smaller, the length of shell of the largest specimen not being over four feet, while the head of the same insect, exclusive of the horns or pinchers, was a good eighteen inches in length. The pinchers, which by all beetle proportions should have been a couple of feet long at the least, did not extend over the head a distance greater than eight inches, although they were sturdy and powerful. Instead of traveling with their shells horizontal as do earthly beetles, these insects stood erect on their two lower pairs of legs, which were of different lengths so that all four feet touched the ground when the shell was vertical. The two upper pairs of legs were used as arms, the topmost pair[A] being quite short and splitting out at the end into four flexible claws about five inches long, which they used as fingers. These upper arms, which sprouted from a point near the top of the head, were peculiar in that they apparently had no joints like the other three pairs but were flexible like an elephant's trunk. The second pair of arms were armed with long, vicious-looking hooks. The backplates concealed only very rudimentary wings, not large enough to enable the insects to fly, although Jim told me later that they could fly on their own planet, where the lessened gravity made such extensive wing supports as would be needed on earth unnecessary. [Footnote A: Mr. Bond has made a laughable error in his description. Like all of the coleoptera, the Mercurians were hexapoda (six legged). What Mr. Bond continually refers to in his narrative as "upper arms" were really the antenna of the insects which split at the end into four flexible appendages resembling fingers. His mistake is a natural one, for the Mercurians used their antenna as extra arms.--James S. Carpenter.] The backplates were a brilliant green in color, with six-inch stripes of chrome yellow running lengthwise and crimson spots three inches in diameter arranged in rows between the stripes. Their huge-faceted eyes sparkled like crystal when the light fell on them, and from time to time waves of various colors passed over them, evidently reflecting the insect's emotions. Although they gave the impression of great muscular power, their movements were slow and sluggish, and they seemed to have difficulty in getting around. * * * * * As my horrified gaze took in these monstrosities I turned with a shudder to Jim Carpenter. "Am I crazy, Jim," I asked, "or do you see these things too?" "I see them all right, Pete," he replied. "It isn't as surprising as it seems at first glance. You expected to find human beings; so did I, but what reason had we for doing so? It is highly improbable, when you come to consider the matter, that evolution should take the same course elsewhere as it did on earth. Why not beetles, or fish, or horned toads, for that matter?" "No reason, I guess," I answered; "I just hadn't expected anything of the sort. What do you suppose they mean to do with us?" "I haven't any idea, old man. We'll just have to wait and see. I'll try to talk to them, although I don't expect much luck at it." He turned to the nearest beetle and slowly and clearly spoke a few words. The insect gave no signs of comprehension, although it watched the movement of Jim's lips carefully. It is my opinion, and Jim agrees with me, that the insects were both deaf and dumb, for during the entire time we were associated with them, we never heard them give forth a sound under any circumstances, nor saw them react to any sound that we made. Either they had some telepathic means of communication or else they made and heard sounds beyond the range of the human ear, for it was evident from their actions that they frequently communicated with one another. * * * * * When Jim failed in his first attempt to communicate he looked around for another method. He noticed my notebook, which had fallen on the floor when I was set down; he picked it up and drew a pencil from his pocket. The insects watched his movements carefully, and when he had made a sketch in the book, the nearest one took it from him and examined it carefully and then passed it to another one, who also examined it. The sketch which Jim had drawn showed the outline of the Hadley space flyer from which he had been taken. When the beetles had examined the sketch, one of them stepped to an instrument board in the center of the ship and made an adjustment. Then he pointed with one of his lower arms. We looked in the direction in which he pointed; to our astonishment, the walls of the flyer seemed to dissolve, or at least to become perfectly transparent. The floor of the space ship was composed of some silvery metal, and from it had risen walls of the same material, but now the effect was as though we were suspended in mid-air, with nothing either around us or under us. I gasped and grabbed at the instrument board for support. Then I felt foolish as I realized that there was no change in the feel of the floor for all its transparency and that we were not falling. * * * * * A short distance away we could see our flyer suspended in the air, held up by two long flexible rods or wires similar to those which had lifted us from our ship into our prison. I saw a dozen more of these rods coiled up, hanging in the air, evidently, but really on the floor near the edge of the flyer, ready for use. Jim suddenly grasped me by the arm. "Look behind you in a moment," he said, "but don't start!" He took the notebook in his hand and started to draw a sketch. I looked behind as he had told me to. Hanging in the air in a position which told me that they must have been in a different compartment of the flyer, were five children. They were white as marble, and lay perfectly motionless. "Are they dead, Jim?" I asked in a low voice without looking at him. "I don't know," he replied, "but we'll find out a little later. I am relieved to find them here, and I doubt if they are harmed." The sketch which he was making was one of the solar system, and, when he had finished, he marked the earth with a cross and handed the notebook to one of the beetles. The insect took it and showed it to his companions; so far as I was able to judge expressions, they were amazed to find that we had knowledge of the heavenly bodies. The beetle took Jim's pencil in one of its hands and, after examining it carefully, made a cross on the circle which Jim had drawn to represent the planet Mercury. * * * * * "They come from Mercury," exclaimed Jim in surprise as he showed me the sketch. "That accounts for a good many things; why they are so lethargic, for one thing. Mercury is much smaller than the earth and the gravity is much less. According to Mercurian standards, they must weigh a ton each. It is quite a tribute to their muscular development that they can move and support their weight against our gravity. They can understand a drawing all right, so we have a means of communicating with them, although a pretty slow one and dependent entirely on my limited skill as a cartoonist. I wonder if we are free to move about?" "The only way to find out is to try," I replied and stood erect. The beetles offered no objection and Jim stood up beside me. We walked, or rather edged, our way toward the side of the ship. The insects watched us when we started to move and then evidently decided that we were harmless. They turned from us to the working of the ship. One of them manipulated some dials on the instrument board. One of the rods which held our flyer released its grip, came in toward the Mercurian ship and coiled itself up on the floor, or the place where the floor should have been. The insect touched another dial. Jim threw caution to the winds, raced across the floor and grasped the beetle by the arm. The insect looked at him questioningly; Jim produced the notebook and drew a sketch representing our flyer falling. On the level be had used to represent the ground he made another sketch of it lying in ruins. The beetle nodded comprehendingly and turned to another dial; the ship sank slowly toward the ground. * * * * * We sank until we hung only a few feet from the ground when our flyer was gently lowered down. When it rested on the ground, the wire which had held it uncoiled, came aboard and coiled itself up beside the others. As the Mercurian ship rose I noticed idly that the door which had been torn from our ship and dropped lay within a few yards of the ship itself. The Mercurian ship rose to an elevation of a hundred feet, drifting gently over the city. As we rose I determined to try the effect of my personality on the beetles. I approached the one who seemed to be the leader and, putting on the most woeful expression I could muster, I looked at the floor. He did not understand me and I pretended that I was falling and grasped at him. This time he nodded and stepped to the instrument board. In a moment the floor became visible. I thanked him as best I could in pantomime and approached the walls. They were so transparent that I felt an involuntary shrinking as I approached them. I edged my way cautiously forward until my outstretched hand encountered a solid substance. I looked out. At the slow speed we were traveling the drone of our motors was hardly audible to us, and I felt sure that it could not be heard on the ground. Once their curiosity was satisfied, our captors paid little or no attention to me and left me free to come and go as I wished. I made my way cautiously toward the children, but ran into a solid wall. Remembering Jim's words, I made my way back toward him without displaying any interest. * * * * * Jim could probably have wandered around as I did had he wished, but he chose to occupy his time differently. With his notebook and pencil he carried on an extensive conversation, if that term can be applied to a crudely executed set of drawings, with the leader of the beetles. I was not especially familiar with the methods of control of space ships and I could make nothing of the maze of dials and switches on the instrument board. For half an hour we drifted slowly along. Presently one of the beetles approached, seized my arm and turned me about. With one of his arms he pointed ahead. A mile away I could see another space flyer similar to the one we were on. "Here comes another one, Jim." I called. "Yes, I saw it some time ago. I don't know where the third one is." "Are there three of them?" "Yes. Three of them came here yesterday and are exploring the country round about here. They are scouts sent out from the fleet of our brother planet to see if the road was clear and what the world was like. They spotted the hole through the layer with their telescope and sent their fleet out to pay us a visit. He tells me that the scouts have reported favorably and that the whole fleet, several thousand ships, as near as I can make out, are expected here this evening." "Have you solved the secret of their invisibility?" * * * * * "Partly. It is as I expected. The walls of the ship are double, the inner one of metal and the outer one of vitrolene or some similar perfectly transparent substance. The space between the walls is filled with some substance which will bend both visible and ultra-violet rays along a path around the ship and then lets them go in their original direction. The reason why we can see through the walls and see the protective coating of that ship coming is that they are generating some sort of a ray here which acts as a carrier for the visible light rays. I don't know what sort of a ray it is, but when I get a good look at their generators, I may be able to tell. Are you beginning to itch and burn?" "Yes, I believe that I am, although I hadn't noticed it until you spoke." "I have been noticing it for some time. From its effects on the skin, I am inclined to believe it to be a ray of very short wave-length, possibly something like our X-ray, or even shorter." "Have you found out what they intend to do with us?" "I don't think they have decided yet. Possibly they are going to take us up to the leader of their fleet and let him decide. The cuss that is in command of this ship seems surprised to death to find out that I can comprehend the principles of his ship. He seems to think that I am a sort of a rara avis, a freak of nature. He intimated that he would recommend that we be used for vivisection." "Good Lord!" "It's not much more worse than the fate they design for the rest of their captives, at that." "What is that?" "It's a long story that I'll have to tell you later. I want to watch this meeting." * * * * * The other ship had approached to within a few yards and floated stationary, while some sort of communication was exchanged between the two. I could not fathom the method used, but the commander of our craft clamped what looked like a pair of headphones against his body and plugged the end of a wire leading from them into his instrument board. From time to time various colored lights glowed on the board before him. After a time he uncoupled his device from the board, and one of the long rods shot out from our ship to the other. It returned in a moment clamped around the body of a young girl. As the came on board, she was lowered onto the deck beside the other children. Like them, she was stiff and motionless. I gave an exclamation and sprang forward. "Pete!" Jim's voice recalled me to myself, and I watched the child laid with the others with as disinterested an expression as I could muster. I had never made a mistake in following Jim Carpenter's lead and I knew that somewhere in his head a plan was maturing which might offer us some chance of escape. Our ship moved ahead down a long slant, gradually dropping nearer to the ground. I watched the maneuver with interest while Jim, with his friend the beetle commander, went over the ship. The insect was evidently amused at Jim and was determined to find out the limits of his intelligence, for he pointed out various controls and motors of the ship and made elaborate sketches which Jim seemed to comprehend fairly well. * * * * * One of the beetles approached the control board and motioned me back. I stepped away from the board; evidently a port in the side of the vessel opened, for I felt a breath of air and could hear the hum of the city. I walked to the side and glanced down, and found that we were floating about twenty feet off the ground over a street on the edge of the city. On the street a short distance ahead of us two children, evidently returning from school, to judge by the books under their arms, were walking unsuspectingly along. A turn of the dial sped up our motors, and as the hum rang out in a louder key the children looked upward. Two of the long flexible wires shot out and wrapped themselves about the children; screaming, they were lifted into the space flyer. The port through which they came in shut with a clang and the ship rose rapidly into the air. The children were released from the wires which coiled themselves up on deck and the beetle who had operated them stepped forward and grasped the nearer of the children, a boy of about eleven, by the arm. He raised the boy, who was paralyzed with terror, up toward his head and gazed steadily into his eyes. Slowly the boy ceased struggling and became white and rigid. The beetle laid him on the deck and turned to the girl. Involuntarily I gave a shout and sprang forward, but Jim grasped me by the arm. "Keep quiet, you darned fool!" he cried. "We can do nothing now. Wait for a chance!" "We can't stand here and see murder done!" I protested. "It's not murder. Pete, those children aren't being hurt. They are being hypnotized so that they can be transported to Mercury." "Why are they taking them to Mercury?" I demanded. "As nearly as I can make out, there is a race of men up there who are subject to these beetles. This ship is radium propelled, and the men and women are the slaves who work in the radium mines. Of course the workers soon become sexless, but others are kept for breeding purposes to keep the race alive. Through generations of in-breeding, the stock is about played out and are getting too weak to be of much value. "The Mercurians have been studying the whole universe to find a race which will serve their purpose and they have chosen us to be the victims. When their fleet gets here, they plan to capture thousands of selected children and carry them to Mercury in order to infuse their blood into the decadent race of slaves they have. Those who are not suitable for breeding when they grow up will die as slaves in the radium mines." * * * * * "Horrible!" I gasped. "Why are they taking children, Jim? Wouldn't adults suit their purpose better?" "They are afraid to take adults. On Mercury an earthman would have muscles of unheard of power and adults would constantly strive to rise against their masters. By getting children, they hope to raise them to know nothing else than a life of slavery and get the advantage of their strength without risk. It is a clever scheme." "And are we to stand here and let them do it?" "Not on your life, but we had better hold easy for a while. If I can get a few minutes more with that brute I'll know enough about running this ship that we can afford to do away with them. You have a pistol, haven't you?" "No." "The devil! I thought you had. I have an automatic, but it only carries eight shells. There are eleven of these insects and unless we can get the jump on them, they'll do us. I saw what looks like a knife lying near the instrument board; get over near it and get ready to grab it as soon as you hear my pistol. These things are deaf and if I work it right I may be able to do several of them in before they know what's happening. When you attack, don't try to ram them in the back; their backplates are an inch thick and will be proof against a knife thrust. Aim at their eyes; if you can blind them, they'll be helpless. Do you understand?" "I'll do my best, Jim," I replied. "Since you have told me their plans I am itching to get at them." * * * * * I edged over toward the knife, but as I did so I saw a better weapon. On the floor lay a bar of silvery metal about thirty inches long and an inch in diameter. I picked it up and toyed with it idly, meanwhile edging around to get behind the insect which I had marked for my first attentions. Jim was talking again by means of the notebook with his beetle friend. They walked around the ship, examining everything in it. "Are you ready, Pete?" came Jim's voice at last. "All set," I replied, getting a firmer grasp on my bar and edging toward one of the insects. "Well, don't start until I fire. You notice the bug I am talking to? Don't kill him unless you have to. This ship is a little too complicated for me to fathom, so I want this fellow taken prisoner. We'll use him as our engineer when we take control." "I understand." "All right, get ready." I kept my eye on Jim. He had drawn the beetle with whom he was talking to a position where they were behind the rest. Jim pointed at something behind the insect's back and the beetle turned. As it did so, Jim whipped out his pistol and, taking careful aim, fired at one of the insects. As the sound of the shot rang out I raised my bar and leaped forward. I brought it down with crushing force on the head of the nearest beetle. My victim fell forward, and I heard Jim's pistol bark again; but I had no time to watch him. As the beetle I struck fell the others turned and I had two of them coming at me with outstretched arms, ready to grasp me. I swung my bar, and the arm of one of them fell limp; but the other seized me with both its hands, and I felt the cruel hooks of its lower arms against the small of my back. * * * * * One of my arms was still free; I swung my bar again, and it struck my captor on the back of the head. It was stunned by the blow and fell. I seized the knife from the floor, and threw myself down beside it and struck at its eyes, trying to roll it over so as to protect me from the other who was trying to grasp me. I felt hands clutch me from behind; I was wrenched loose from the body of my victim and lifted into the air. I was turned about and stared hard into the implacable crystalline eyes of one of the insects. For a moment my senses reeled and then, without volition, I dropped my bar. I remembered the children and realized that I was being hypnotized. I fought against the feeling, but my senses reeled and I almost went limp, when the sound of a pistol shot, almost in my ear, roused me. The spell of the beetle was momentarily broken. I thrust the knife which I still grasped at the eyes before me. My blow went home, but the insect raised me and bent me toward him until my head lay on top of his and the huge horns which adorned his head began to close. Another pistol shot sounded, and I was suddenly dropped. I grasped my bar as I fell and leaped up. The flyer was a shambles. Dead insects lay on all sides while Jim, smoking pistol in hand, was staring as though fascinated into the eyes of one of the surviving beetles. I ran forward and brought my bar down on the insect's head, but as I did so I was grasped from behind. "Jim, help!" I cried as I was swung into the air. The insect whirled me around and then threw me to the floor. I had an impression of falling; then everything dissolved in a flash of light. I was unconscious only for a moment, and I came to to find Jim Carpenter standing over me, menacing my assailant with his gun. "Thanks, Jim," I said faintly. "If you're conscious again, get up and get your bar," he replied. "My pistol is empty and I don't know how long I can run a bluff on this fellow." * * * * * I scrambled to my feet and grasped the bar. Jim stepped behind me and reloaded his pistol. "All right," he said when he had finished. "I'll take charge of this fellow. Go around and see if the rest are dead. If they aren't when you find them, see that they are when you leave them. We're taking no prisoners." I went the rounds of the prostrate insects. None of them were beyond moving except two whose heads had been crushed by my bar, but I obeyed Jim's orders. When I rejoined him with my bloody bar, the only beetle left alive was the commander, whom Jim was covering with his pistol. "Take the gun," he said when I reported my actions, "and give me the bar." We exchanged weapons and Jim turned to the captive. "Now, old fellow," he said grimly, "either you run this ship as I want you to, or you're a dead Indian. Savvy?" He took his pencil and notebook from his pocket and drew a sketch of our Hadley space ship. On the other end of the sheet he drew a picture of the Mercurian ship, and then drew a line connecting the two. The insect looked at the sketch but made no movement. "All right, if that's the way you feel about it," said Jim. He raised the bar and brought it down with crushing force on one of the insect's lower arms. The arm fell as though paralyzed and a blue light played across the beetle's eyes. Jim extended the sketch again and raised the bar threateningly. The beetle moved over to the control board, Jim following closely, and set the ship in motion. Ten minutes later it rested on the ground beside the ship in which we had first taken the air. * * * * * Following Jim's pictured orders the beetle opened the door of the Mercurian ship and followed Jim into the Hadley. As we emerged from the Mercurian ship I looked back. It had vanished completely. "The children, Jim!" I gasped. "I haven't forgotten them," he replied, "but they are all right for the present. If we turned them loose now, we'd have ninety reporters around us in ten minutes. I want to get our generators modified first." He pointed toward the spot where the Mercurian ship had stood and then toward our generators. The beetle hesitated, but Jim swung his bar against the insect's side in a vicious blow. Again came the play of blue light over the eyes; the beetle bent over our generaters and set to work. Jim handed me the bar and bent over to help. They were both mechanics of a high order and they worked well together; in an hour the beetle started the generators and swung one of the searchlights toward his old ship. It leaped into view on the radium coated screen. "Good business!" ejaculated Jim. "We'll repair this door; then we'll be ready to release the children and start out." * * * * * We followed the beetle into the Mercurian ship, which it seemed to be able to see. It opened a door leading into another compartment of the flyer, and before us lay the bodies of eight children. The beetle lifted the first one, a little girl, up until his many-faceted eyes looked full into the closed ones of the child. There was a flicker of an eyelash, a trace of returning color, and then a scream of terror from the child. The beetle set the girl down and Jim bent over her. "It's all right now, little lady," he said, clumsily smoothing her hair. "You're safe now. Run along to your mother. First Mortgage, take charge of her and take her outside. It isn't well for children to see these things." The child clung to my hand: I led her out of the ship, which promptly vanished as we left it. One by one, seven other children joined us, the last one, a miss of not over eight, in Jim's arms. The beetle followed behind him. "Do any of you know where you are?" asked Jim as he came out. "I do, sir," said one of the boys. "I live close to here." "All right, take these youngsters to your house and tell your mother to telephone their parents to come and get them. If anyone asks you what happened, tell them to see Jim Carpenter to-morrow. Do you understand?" "Yes, sir." "All right, run along then. Now, First Mortgage, let's go hunting." * * * * * We wired our captive up so securely that I felt that there was no possible chance of his escape; then, with Jim at the controls and me at the guns, we fared forth in search of the invaders. Back and forth over the city we flew without sighting another spaceship in the air. Jim gave an exclamation of impatience and swung on a wider circle, which took us out over the water. I kept the searchlights working. Presently, far ahead over the water, a dark spot came into view. I called to Jim and we approached it at top speed. "Don't shoot until we are within four hundred yards," cautioned Jim. I held my fire until we were within the specified distance. The newcomer was another of the Mercurian space-ships; with a feeling of joy I swung my beam until the cross-hairs of the screen rested full on the invader. "All ready!" I sung out. "If you are ready, Gridley, you may fire!" replied Jim. I pressed the gun button. The crash of the gun was followed by another report from outside as the radite shell burst against the Mercurian flyer. The deadly explosive did its work, and the shattered remains of the wreck fell, to be engulfed in the sea below. "That's one!" cried Jim. "I'm afraid we won't have time to hunt up the other right now. This bug told me that the other Mercurians are due here to-day, and I think we had better form ourselves into a reception committee and go up to the hole to meet them." * * * * * He sent the ship at high speed over the city until we hovered over the laboratory. We stopped for a moment, and Jim stepped to the radio telephone. "Hello, Williams," he said, "how are things going? That's fine. In an hour, you say? Well, speed it up as much as you can; we may call for it soon." He turned both stern motors to full power, and we shot up like a rocket toward the hole in the protective layer through which the invaders had entered. In ten minutes we were at the altitude of the guard ships and Jim asked if anything had been seen. The report was negative; Jim left them below the layer and sent our flyer up through the hole into space. We reached the outer surface in another ten minutes and we were none too soon. Hardly had we debouched from the hole than ahead of us we saw another Mercurian flyer. It was a lone one, and Jim bent over the captive and held a hastily made sketch before him. The sketch showed three Mercurian flyers, one on the ground, one wrecked and the third one in the air. He touched the drawing of the one in the air and pointed toward our port hole and looked questioningly at the beetle. The insect inspected the flyer in space and nodded. "Good!" cried Jim. "That's the third of the trio who came ahead as scouts. Get your gun ready, First Mortgage: we're going to pick him off." Our ship approached the doomed Mercurian. Again I waited until we were within four hundred yards; then I pressed the button which hurled it, a crumpled wreck, onto the outer surface of the heaviside layer. "Two!" cried Jim as we backed away. "Here come plenty more," I cried as I swung the searchlight. Jim left his controls, glanced at the screen and whistled softly. Dropping toward us from space were hundreds of the Mercurian ships. "We got here just in time," he said. "Break out your extra ammunition while I take to the hole. We can't hope to do that bunch alone, so we'll fight a rearguard action." * * * * * Since our bow gun would be the only one in action, I hastily moved the spare boxes of ammunition nearer to it while Jim maneuvered the Hadley over the hole. As the Mercurian fleet came nearer he started a slow retreat toward the earth. The Mercurians overtook us rapidly; Jim locked his controls at slow speed down and hurried to the bow gun. "Start shooting as soon as you can," he said. "I'll keep the magazine filled." I swung the gun until the cross-hairs of the screen rested full on the leading ship and pressed the button. My aim was true, and the shattered fragments of the ship fell toward me. The balance of the fleet slowed down for an instant; I covered another one and pressed my button. The ship at which I had aimed was in motion and I missed it, but I had the satisfaction of seeing another one fall in fragments. Jim was loading the magazine as fast as I fired. I covered another ship and fired again. A third one of our enemies fell in ruins. The rest paused and drew off. "They're retreating, Jim!" I cried. "Cease firing until they come on again," he replied is he took the shells from the magazines of the other guns and piled them near the bow gun. I held my fire for a few minutes. The Mercurians retreated a short distance and then came on again with a rush. Twenty times my gun went off as fast as I could align it and press the trigger, and eighteen of the enemy ships were in ruins. Again the Mercurians retreated. I held my fire. We were falling more rapidly now and far below we could see the black spots which were the guard ships. I told Jim that they were in sight; he stepped to the radio telephone and ordered them to keep well away from the hole. * * * * * Again the Mercurian ships came on with a rush, this time with beams of orange light stabbing a way before them. When I told Jim of this he jumped to the controls and shot our ship down at breakneck speed. "I don't know what sort of fighting apparatus they have, but I don't care to face it," he said to me. "Fire if they get close; but I hope to get out of the hole before they are in range." Fast as we fell, the Mercurians were coming faster, and they were not over eight hundred yards from us when he reached the level of the guard ships. Jim checked our speed; I managed to pick off three more of the invaders before we moved away from the hole. Jim stopped the side motion and jumped to the radio telephone. "Hello, Williams!" he shouted into the instrument. "Are you ready down there? Thank God! Full power at once, please! "Watch what happens," he said to me, as he turned from the instrument. Some fifty of the Mercurian flyers had reached our level and had started to move toward us before anything happened. Then from below came a beam of intolerable light. Upward it struck, and the Mercurian ships on which it impinged disappeared in a flash of light. "A disintegrating ray," explained Jim. "I suspected that it might be needed and I started Williams to rigging it up early this morning. I hated to use it because it may easily undo the work that six years have done in healing the break in the layer, but it was necessary. That ends the invasion, except for those ten or twelve ships ahead of us. How is your marksmanship? Can you pick off ten in ten shots?" "Watch me," I said grimly as the ship started to move. * * * * * Pride goeth ever before a fall: it took me sixteen shots to demolish the eleven ships which had escaped destruction from the ray. As the last one fell in ruins, Jim ordered the ray shut off. We fell toward the ground. "What are we going to do with our prisoner?" I asked. Jim looked at the beetle meditatively. "He would make a fine museum piece if he were stuffed," he said, "but on the whole, I think we'll let him go. He is an intelligent creature and will probably be happier on Mercury than anywhere else. What do you say that we put him on his ship and turn him loose?" "To lead another invasion?" I asked. "I think not. He has seen what has happened to this one and is more likely to warn them to keep away. In any event, if we equip the guard ships with a ray that will show the Mercurian ships up and keep the disintegrating ray ready for action, we needn't fear another invasion. Let's let him go." "It suits me all right, Jim, but I hold out for one thing. I will never dare to face McQuarrie again if I fail to get a picture of him. I insist on taking his photograph before we turn him loose." "All right, go ahead," laughed Jim. "He ought to be able to stand that, if you'll spare him an interview." An hour later we watched the Mercurian flyer disappear into space. "I hope I've seen the last of those bugs," I said as the flyer faded from view. "I don't know," said Jim thoughtfully. "If I have interpreted correctly the drawings that creature made, there is a race of manlike bipeds on Mercury who are slaves to those beetles and who live and die in the horrible atmosphere of a radium mine. Some of these days I may lead an expedition to our sister planet and look into that matter." MECHANICAL VOICES FOR PHONE NUMBERS New developments whereby science goes still farther in its assumption of human attributes were described and demonstrated recently by Sergius P. Grace, Assistant Vice-President of Bell Telephone Laboratories, where the developments were conceived and worked out. One development described, and soon to be put into service in New York, transforms a telephone number dialed by a subscriber into speech. Although the subscriber says not a word the number dialed is spoken aloud to the operator. The device is expected to simplify and speed the hooking together of automatic and voice-hand-operated telephone exchanges, and also to speed long-distance calls from automatic phones through rural exchanges. The numbers which can thus be spoken are recorded on talkie films and those which are to go into use here have already been made, all by an Irish girl said to have the best voice among the city's "number, please" girls. Mr. Grace demonstrated this device by carrying into the audience a telephone with a long cord connected with a loud speaker on the stand, which represented central. A member of the audience was requested to dial a number, and choose 5551-T, the letter T representing the exchange. This number the spectator dialed on the phone Mr. Grace carried. There was no sound but the clicking of the dial. Then, two seconds later, the loudspeaker spoke up clearly, in an almost human voice, "5551 T." As for the recording of the sound films, there is a film for each of the ten Arabic numerals from zero to nine, and these wound on revolving drums. The dial on the telephone automatically sets in action the drum corresponding to the numeral moved on the dial. Another development which sounds promising for bashful suitors and other timid souls, enables a person to store within himself electrically a message he desires to deliver and then to deliver it without speaking, simply by putting a finger to the ear of the person for whom the message is intended. This Mr. Grace demonstrated. He spoke into a telephone transmitter and his words were clearly heard by all in the audience, by means of amplifiers. At the same time a part of the electrical current from the amplifier, representing the sentence he voiced, was stored in a "delay circuit," another recent invention of the laboratories. After being stored four and a half seconds this current was transformed to a high voltage and passed into Mr. Grace's body. He then put his finger against the ear of a member of the audience, who heard in his brain the same sentence. The ear drum and surrounding tissues are made to act as one plate of a condenser-receiver, Mr. Grace explained, with the vibrations of the drum interpreted by the brain. A new magnetic metal, "perminvar," and a new insulating material, "para gutta," which make possible construction of a telephone cable across the Atlantic to supplement the radio systems, were also described. Actual construction of the cable is expected to be started in 1930, Mr. Grace said. [Illustration: _The flight was hovering above the first fire-ball._] Earth, the Marauder CONCLUSION OF A THREE-PART NOVEL _By Arthur J. Burks_ CHAPTER XIX _Desolation_ Stranger, more thrilling even than had been the flight of the Earth after being forced out of its orbit, was the flight of those dozen aircars of the Moon, bearing the rebels of Dalis' Gens back to Earth. [Sidenote: Martian fire-balls and the terrific Moon-cubes wreak tremendous destruction on helpless Earth in the final death struggle of the warring worlds.] For the light which glowed from the bodies of the rebels, which had been given them by their passage through the white flames, was transmitted to the cars themselves, so that they glowed as with an inner radiance of their own--like comets flashing across the night. Strange alchemy, which Sarka wondered about and, wondering, looked ahead to the time when he should be able, within his laboratory, to analyze the force it embodied, and thus gain new scientific knowledge of untold value to people of the Earth. As the cars raced across outer darkness, moving at top speed, greater than ever attained before by man, greater than even these mighty cars had traveled, Sarka looked ahead, and wondered about the fearful report his father had just given him. That there was an alliance between Mars and the Moon seemed almost unbelievable. How had they managed the first contact, the first negotiations leading to the compact between two such alien peoples? Had there been any flights exchanged by the two worlds, surely the scientists of Earth would have known about it. But there had not, though there had been times and times when Sarka had peered closely enough at the surface of both the Moon and of Mars to see the activities, or the results of the activities, of the peoples of the two worlds. Somehow, however, communication, if Sarka the Second had guessed correctly, had been managed between Mars and the Moon; and now that the Earth was a free flying orb the two were in alliance against it, perhaps for the same reason that the Earth had gone a-voyaging. * * * * * Side by side sat Sarka and Jaska, their eager eyes peering through the forward end of the flashing aircar toward the Earth, growing minute by minute larger. They were able, after some hours, to make out the outlines of what had once been continents, to see the shadows in valleys which had once held the oceans of Earth.... And always, as they stared and literally willed the cubes which piloted and were the motive power of the aircars to speed and more speed, that marvelous display of interplanetary fireworks which had aroused the concern of Sarka the Second. What were those lights? Whence did they emanate? Sarka the Second had said that they came from Mars, yet Mars was invisible to those in the speeding aircars, which argued that it was hidden behind the Earth. There was no way of knowing how close it was to the home of these rebels of Dalis' Gens. And ever, as they flashed forward, Sarka was recalling that vague hint on the lips of Jaska, to the effect that Luar, for all her sovereignty of the Moon, might be, nonetheless, a native of the Earth. But.... How? Why? When? There were no answers to any of the questions yet. If she were a native of Earth, how had she reached the Moon? When had she been sent there? Who was she? Her name, Luar, was a strange one, and Sarka studied it for many minutes, rolling the odd syllables of it over his tongue, wondering where, on the Earth, he had heard names, or words, similar to it. This produced no result, until he tried substituting various letters; then, again, adding various letters. When he achieved a certain result at last, he gasped, and his brain was a-whirl. * * * * * Luar, by the addition of the letter _n_, between the _u_ and the _a_, became Lunar, meaning "of the Moon!" Yet Lunar was unmistakably a word derived from the language of the Earth! It was possible, of course, that this was mere coincidence; but, taken in connection with the suspicions of Jaska, and the incontrovertible fact that Luar resembled people of the Earth, Sarka did not believe in this particular whim of coincidence. Who was Luar? His mind went back to the clucking sounds which, among the Gnomes of the Moon, passed for speech. He pondered anew. He shaped his lips, as nearly as possible, to make the clucking sounds he had heard, and discovered that it was very difficult to manage the letter _n_! The conclusion was inescapable: This woman, Luar, had once been _Lunar_, the _n_, down the centuries, being dropped because difficult for the Gnomes to pronounce. "Yes, Jaska," he said suddenly, "somewhere on Earth, when we reach it, we may discover the secret of Luar--and know far more about Dalis than we have ever known before!" Jaska merely smiled her inscrutable smile, and did not answer. By intuition, she already knew. Let Sarka arrive at her conclusion by scientific methods if he desired, and she would simply smile anew. Sarka thought of the manner in which Jaska and he had been transported to the Moon; of how much Dalis seemed to know of the secrets of the laboratory of the Sarkas. Might he not have known, two centuries ago, of the Secret Exit Dome, and somehow managed to make use of it in some ghastly experiment? And still the one question remained unanswered: Who was Luar? * * * * * The Earth was now so close that details were plainly seen. The Himalayas were out of sight, over the Earth, and by a mental command Sarka managed to change slightly the course of the dozen aircars. By passing over the curve of the Earth at a high altitude, he hoped also to see from above something of the result of the strange aerial bombardment of which his father had spoken. In their flight, which had been, to them a flight through the glories of a super-heavenly Universe, they had lost all count of time. Neither Sarka nor Jaska, nor yet the people in those other aircars, could have told how long they had been flying, when, coming over the curve of the Earth, at an elevation of something like three miles, they were able at last to see into the area which had once housed the Gens of Dalis. A gasp of horror escaped the lips of Sarka and of Jaska. The Gens of Dalis had occupied all the territory northward to the Pole, from a line drawn east and west through the southernmost of what had once been the Hawaiian Islands. Upon this area had struck the strange blue light from the deep Cone of the Moon. Here, however, the light was invisible, and Sarka flew on in fear that somehow his aircars would blunder into it, and be destroyed--for that the blue light was an agent of ghastly destruction became instantly apparent. * * * * * The dwellings of the Gens of Dalis were broken and smashed into chaotic ruins. Over all the area, and even into the area of the Gens southward of that which had been Dalis, the blind gods of destruction had practically made a clean sweep. Sarka had opportunity to thank God that, at the time the blue column had struck the Earth, it had struck at the spot which had been almost emptied of people, and realized that blind chance had caused it. For, in order for the Gens of Dalis to be in position to launch their attack against the Moon, he had managed, by manipulating the speed of the Beryls, to bring that area into position directly opposite the Moon. Had it been otherwise, the blue column might have struck anywhere, and wiped out millions of lives! "God, Jaska," murmured Sarka. "Look!" Think of a shoreline, once lined with mighty buildings, after the passage of a tidal wave greater than ever before known to man. The devastation would be indescribable. Multiply that shoreline by the vast area which had housed the Gens of Dalis, and the mental picture is almost too big to grasp. Chaos, catastrophe, approaching an infinity of destruction. The materials of which the vast buildings, set close together, had been made, had been twisted into grotesque, nightmarish shapes, and the whole fused into a burned and gleaming mass--which covered half of what had once been a mighty ocean--as though a bomb larger and more devastating than ever imagined of man, a bomb large enough to rock the Earth, had landed in the midst of the area once occupied by the Gens of Dalis! Yet, Sarka knew, remembering the murmuring of the blue column as it came out of the cone, all this devastation had been caused in almost absolute silence. People could have watched and seen these deserted buildings slowly fuse together, run together as molten metal runs together, like the lava from a volcano of long ago under the ponderous moving to and fro of some invisible, juggernautlike agency. * * * * * Sarka shuddered, trying to picture in his mind the massing of the minions of Mars, who thus saw a new country given into their hands--if they could take it. Had the Earth been taken by surprise? Had Sarka the Second been able to prepare for the approaching catastrophe? "Father," he sent his thoughts racing on ahead of him, "are those lights which are striking the Earth causing any damage?" "Only," came back the instant answer, "in that they destroy the courage of the people of the Earth! The people, however, now know that Sarka is returning, and their courage rises again! The flames are merely a hint of what faces us; but the people will rise and follow you wherever you lead!" So, as they raced across the area of devastation, the face of Sarka became calm again. On a chance, he sent a single sentence of strange meaning to his father. "The ruler of the Moon is a woman called Luar, which seems a contraction of Lunar!" For many minutes Sarka the Second made no answer. When it came it startled Sarka to the depths of him, despite the fact that he had expected to be startled. "There was a woman named Lunar!" CHAPTER XX _Sarka Commands Again_ Ahead, through the storms which still hung tenaciously to the roof of the world, flashed those dozen aircars of the Moon. Now Sarka could plainly see the dome of his laboratory, and from the depths of him welled up that strange glow which Earthlings recognize as the joy of returning home, than which there is none, save the love for a woman, greater. Now he could see the effect of those flares, or lights, from Mars, which impinged on the face of the Earth, though he could see no purpose in them, no reason for their being, since they seemed to do no damage at all, though the effect of them was weird in the extreme. Outer darkness, rent with ripping, roaring storms, flurries of ice, snow and sleet, shot through and through by balls of lambent flames in unguessable numbers. Eery lights which struck the surface of the Earth, bounded away and, half a mile or so from the surface again, burst into flaming pin-wheels, like skyrockets of ancient times. Strange lights, causing weird effects, but producing no damage at all, save to lessen to some extent the courage of Earthlings, because they did not understand these things. And always, down the ages, man had stood most in fear of the Unknown. * * * * * Sarka peered off across the heavens where a ball of flame now seemed to be rising over the horizon, and was amazed at the size of this planet. Mars was close to Earth, so close that, had they possessed aircars like those of the Moon-people--which remained to be seen--they could easily have attacked the Earth. Across the face of the Earth flashed those fiery will-o'-the-wisps from Mars, without rhyme or reason; yet Sarka knew positively that they possessed some meaning, and that the Earth had been forced thus close to Mars for a purpose. What that purpose was must yet be discovered. Then, under the aircars, the laboratory of Sarka. Down dropped the aircars to a landing near the laboratory, and to the cubes in the forepeak of each Sarka sent the mental command: "Assure yourselves that the aircars will remain where they are! Muster inside the laboratory, keeping well away from the Master Beryl!" Then to the people who had returned, clothed in strange radiance, from the Moon with Sarka and with Jaska he spoke: "Leave the cars and enter my laboratory, where further orders will be given you!" With Jaska still by his side, Sarka entered the laboratory through the Exit Dome. Inside, clothing was swiftly brought for the rebels, for Sarka and for Jaska. But, even when they were clothed, these people who had come back seemed to glow with an inner radiance which transfigured them. Sarka the Second, his face drawn and pale, came from the Observatory to meet his son, and the two were clasped in each other's arms for a moment. Sarka the Second, who had looked no older than his son, seemed to have aged a dozen centuries in the time Sarka had been gone. But it was not of the threatened attack by Martians that Sarka the Second spoke. He made no statement. He merely asked a question: "Was Lunar very beautiful, and just a bit unearthly in appearance?" * * * * * Sarka started. "Yes. Beautiful! Wondrously, fearfully beautiful: but I had the feeling that she had no heart or soul, no conscience: that she was somehow--well, bestial!" A moan of anguish escaped Sarka the Second. "Dalis again!" he ejaculated. "But much of the fault was mine! Before you were born, we scientists of Earth had already several times realized the necessity of expansion for the children of Earth if they were to continue. Dalis' proposal to my father was discarded, because it involved the wholesale taking of life. But after the oceans had been obliterated, and the human family still outgrew its bounds, Dalis came to my father and me with still another proposal. It involved a strange, other-worldly young woman whom he called Lunar! Her family--well, nothing was known about her, for her family could not be traced. Wiped out, I presume, in some inter-family quarrel, leaving her alone. Dalis found her, took an interest in her, and the very strangeness of her gave him his idea, which he brought to my father and me. "His proposal was somewhat like that which you made when we sent the Earth out of its orbit into outer space, save that Dalis' scheme involved no such program. His was simply a proposal to somehow communicate with the Moon by the use of an interplanetary rocket that should carry a human passenger. "He put the idea up to this girl, Lunar, and she did not seem to care one way or another. Dalis was all wrapped up in his ideas, and gave the girl the name of Lunar, as being symbolical of his plans for her. He coached and trained her against the consummation of his plan. We knew something, theoretically at least, about the conditions on the Moon, and everything possible was done for her, to make it feasible for her to exist on the Moon. My error was in ever permitting the experiment to be made, since if I had negatived the idea. Dalis would have gone no further! "But I, too, was curious, and Lunar did not care. Well, the rocket was constructed, and shot outward into space by a series of explosions. No word was ever received from Lunar, though it was known that she landed on the Moon! * * * * * "I say no word was ever received, yet what you have intimated proves that Dalis has either been in mental communication with her, hoping to induce her to send a force against the Earth, and assist him in mastering the Earth, overthrowing we Sarkas--or has been biding his time against something of the thing we have now accomplished." This seemed to clear up many things for Sarka, though it piled higher upon his shoulders the weight of his responsibilities. The other-worldliness of Lunar, called now Luar, explained her mastery of the Gnomes, and through them the cubes, and her knowledge of the omnipotent qualities of the white flames of the Moon's core, which might have been, it came to Sarka in a flash, the source of all life on the Moon in the beginning! "But father," went on Sarka, "I don't see any sense in this aerial bombardment by Mars!" "I believe," said Sarka the Second sadly, "that before another ten hours pass we shall know the worst there is to be known: but now, son, instead of going into attack against the Moon, we go into battle against the combined forces of Mars and of the Moon!" * * * * * Sarka now took command of the forces of the Earth. Swiftly he turned to the people of the Gens of Dalis who had come back with him. "You will be divided into eleven equal groups, as nearly as possible. Father, will you please arrange the division? Each group will be attached to the staff of one of the Spokesman of the Gens, so that each Spokesman will have the benefit of your knowledge with reference to conditions on the Moon. Each group will re-enter its particular aircar, retaining control of the cube in each case, of course, and will at once repair to his proper station. Telepathy is the mode of communication with the cubes, and you rule them by your will. Each group, when assembled by my father, will choose a leader before quitting this laboratory, and such leader will remain in command of his group, under the overlordship of the Spokesman to whom he reports with his group. You understand! "Your loyalty is unquestioned. You will consecrate your lives to the welfare of the Gens to which you are going, since you no longer have a Gens of your own!" Sarka turned to the cubes, which had formed in a line just inside the Exit Dome, and issued a mental command to the cube that had piloted his aircar from the Moon. The cube faded out instantly, appearing immediately afterward on the table of the vari-colored lights. "Father," said Sarka, "while I am issuing orders to the Spokesmen, please see if you can discover the secret of these cubes: how they are actuated, the real extent of their intelligence! The rest of you, with your cubes, depart immediately and report to your new Gens!" * * * * * Within ten minutes the divisions had been made, and the Radiant People had entered the aircars and, outside the laboratory, risen free of the Earth, and turned, each in its proper direction, for the Gens of its assignment. The Sarkas and Jaska watched them go. There remained but one aircar, standing outside on half a dozen of those grim tentacles, with two tentacles swinging free, undulating to and fro like serpents. Harnessed electricity actuating the tentacles--cars and tentacles subservient to the cubes. The aircars safely on their way, Sarka stepped to the Master Beryl, tuned it down to normal speed, and signalled the Spokesmen of the Gens. "The Moon and Mars are in alliance against us, and Dalis has allied himself and his Gens with the ruler of the Moon! I don't know yet what form the attack will take, but know this: that the safety of the world, of all its people, rests in your hands, and that the war into which we are going is potentially more vast than expected when this venture began, and more devastating than the fight with the aircars of the Moon! Coming to you, in aircars which we managed to take from the Moon-people, are such of the people of the Gens of Dalis as were able to return with me. Question them, gather all the information you can about them, and through them keep control of the cubes which pilot the aircars, for in the cubes, I believe, lies the secret of our possible victory in the fight to come!" * * * * * Sarka scarcely knew why he had spoken the last sentence. It was as though something deep within him had risen up, commanded him to speak, and deeper yet, far back in his consciousness, was a mental picture of the devastation he had witnessed on his flight above the area that had once housed the Gens of Dalis. For in that ghastly area, he believed, was embodied an idea greater than mere wanton destruction, just as there was an idea back of the fiery lights from Mars greater than mere display. Somehow the two were allied, and Sarka believed that, between the blue column, and the fiery lights from Mars, the fate of the world rested. He could, he believed, by manipulation of the Beryls that yet remained, maneuver the world away from that blue column--which on the Earth was invisible. But to have done so would have thwarted the very purpose for which this mad voyage had been begun. The world had been started on its mad journey into space for the purpose of attacking and colonizing the Moon and Mars. The Moon had been colonized by the Gens of Dalis, already in potential revolt against the Earth. Mars was next, and by forcing the Earth into close proximity to Mars the people of the Moon had played into the hands of Earth-people--if the people of Earth were capable of carrying out the program of expansion originally proposed by Sarka! If they were not ... well, Sarka thought somewhat grimly, the resultant cataclysmic war would at least solve the problem of over-population! Inasmuch as the Earth was already committed to whatever might transpire, Sarka believed he should take a philosophic view of the matter! * * * * * Sarka turned to an examination of the Master Beryl, and even as he peered into the depths of it, he thought gratefully how nice it was to be home again, in his own laboratory, upon the world of his nativity. He even found it within his heart to feel somewhat sorry for Dalis, and to feel ashamed that he had, even in his heart, mistreated him. Then he thought, with a tightening of his jaw muscles, of the casual way in which Dalis had destroyed Sarka the First, of his forcing his people to undergo the terrors of the lake of white flames without telling them the simple secret; of his betrayal of the Earth in his swift alliance with Luar; or Luar herself when, as Lunar, a strange waif of Earth, Dalis had sent her out as the first human passenger aboard a rocket to the Moon. All his pity vanished, though he still believed he had done right in sparing Dalis' life. Suddenly there came an ominous humming in the Beryl, and simultaneously signals from the vari-colored lights on the table. Sarka whirled to the lights, noting their color, and mentally repeating the names of the Spokesmen who signalled him. Even before he gave the signal that placed him in position to converse with them, he noted the strange coincidence. The Spokesmen who desired speech with him were tutelary heads of Gens whose borders touched the devasted area where Dalis had but recently been overlord! An icy chill caressed his spine as he signalled the Spokesmen to speak. "Yes, Vardee? Prull? Klaser? Cleric?" * * * * * The report of each of them was substantially the same, though couched in different words, words freighted heavily with strange terror. "The devasted area has suddenly broken into movement! Throughout that portion of it visible from my Gens area, the fused mass of debris is bubbling, fermenting, walking into life! An aura of unearthly menace seems to flow outward from this heaving mass, and the whole is assuming a most peculiar radiance--cold gleaming, like distant starshine!" "Wait!" replied Sarka swiftly. "Wait until the people I have sent you have arrived! Report to me instantly if the movement of the mass is noticeably augmented, and especially so if it seems to be breaking up, or coagulating into any sort of form whatever!" Then he dimmed the lights, indicating that for the moment there was nothing more to be said. Just then his father, face very gray and very old, entered the room of the Master Beryl from the laboratory. "Son!" he said. "The crisis is almost upon us! The Martians are coming!" CHAPTER XXI _Cubes of Chaos_ Sarka raced into the Observatory, wondering as he ran how the attack of the Martians would manifest itself; but scarcely prepared for the brilliant display which greeted his gaze. Compared to the oncoming flames from Mars, the preceding display of lights had been as nothing. The whole Heavens between the Earth and Mars seemed alight with an unearthly glare, as though the very heart of the sun had burst and hurled part of its flaming mass outward into space. On it came with unbelievable speed. But there was no telling, yet, the form of the things which were coming. "What are they?" whispered Jaska, standing fearlessly at Sarka's side. "Interplanetary cars? Rockets? Balls of fire? Or beings of Mars?" "I think," said Sarka, after studying the display for a few minutes, "that they are either rockets or fireballs, perhaps both together! But the Martians cannot consolidate any position on the Earth without coming to handgrips. Since they must know this, we can expect to see the people of Mars themselves when, or soon after, those balls of fire strike the Earth!" Sarka raced back to the room of the Master Beryl as a strident humming came through to him. * * * * * The Spokesmen of the Gens whose borders touched those of the devasted Dalis area, were reporting again, and their voices were high pitched with fear that threatened to break the bounds of sanity. "The ferment in the devasted area," was the gist of their report, "is assuming myriads of shapes! The fused mass has broken up into isolated masses, and each mass of itself is assuming one of the many forms!" "What forms?" snapped Sarka. "Quickly!" "Cubes! Thousands and millions of cubes, and the cubes themselves are forming into larger cubes, some square, some rectangular! In the midst of these formations are others, mostly columnar, each column consisting of cubes which have coalesced into the larger form from the same small cubes! The columnar formations are topped by globes which emit an ethereal radiance!" "Listen!" Sarka's voice was vibrant with excitement. "Spokesmen of the Gens, make sure that every individual member of your Gens is fully equipped with flying clothing including belts and ovoids--prepared for an indefinite stay outside on the roof of the world! Get your people out swiftly, keeping them in formation! Keep about you those people of Dalis whom I sent you, and understand before you break contact with your Beryls, that instructions received from these people come from me! In turn, after you have quitted the hives, anything you wish to say to me you can repeat to any one of the glowing people of Dalis!" The contacts were broken. Sarka stared into the Beryl, glancing swiftly in all directions, to see whether his orders were obeyed. Out of the myriads of hives were flying the people of all the Gens of Earth, their vast numbers already darkening the roof of the world. The advance fires from Mars seemed to have no effect on them, which Sarka had expected, since the fires seemed to consume nothing they had touched previously. * * * * * By millions the people came forth. People dressed in the clothing of this Gens or that, wearing each the insignia of the house of his Spokesman. A brave show. Sarka could see the faces of many, now in light, now in shadow, as the advance fires of Mars lighted them for a moment in passing, then left them in shadow as the bursting balls of fire faded and died. Strange, too, that the fireballs made no noise. Noiseless flame which rebounded from the surface of the Earth broke in silence, deluging the heavens with shooting stars of great brilliance. Through its display flew the people of the Gens, mustering in flight above flight, each to his own level, under command of the Spokesmen of the Gens. "How long, father," queried Sarka, "should it take to empty the Gens areas?" "The people of Earth have been waiting for word to go into battle since we first sent the people of Dalis against the Moon-men. They still are ready! The dwellings of our people, _all_ of them, can be emptied within an hour!" "I wonder," mused Sarka, "if that is soon enough!" Perhaps yes, perhaps no. It would be a race, in any case. Sarka divided his attention between the rapidly changing formations of the Moon-cubes in that devasted area and the onrushing charge of the fire-balls from Mars. All were visible to him through the Master Beryl, and from the Observatory, though the Martian fire-balls were now so close that the vanguard of them could even be seen in the Master Beryl, adjusted to view only activities on the surface of the Earth. Even as the last flights of the Gens of Earth were slipping into the icy air from the roof of the world, the Moon-cubes began their terrifying, appalling attack, every detail of which could be seen by Sarka from the Master Beryl. * * * * * Those columns, composed of cubes, seemed to be the leaders of a vast cube-army. The top of each of them was a gleaming globe whose eery light played over the country immediately surrounding each column, their weird light reflected in the squares, rectangles and globes that other cubes had formed. Sarka sought swiftly among the columns for the one which might conceivably be in supreme command; but even as he sought the Moon-cubes moved to the attack. The globes on the tops of the columns dimmed their lights, and the squares, rectangles and globes got instantly into terrible motion. Southward from the position in which they had formed they began to move, the squares and rectangles apparently sliding along the surface of the scarred and broken soil, the globes rolling. Southward there was the vast wall of the Gens that bordered the devasted area in that direction, and the cube-army was instantly at full charge toward this, in what Sarka realized was, to be a war of demolition! Within a minute, Sarka was conscious of a trembling of all the laboratory, and the eyes of Jaska were wide with fear. Swiftly the trembling grew, until sound now was added to the vast, awesome tremor--a vast, roaring crescendo of sound that mounted and mounted as the speed of the cube-army increased. The vanguard of the cube-army struck the dwelling of the Gens southward of that of Dalis, and a mighty, rocketing roar sounded in the Master Beryl, was audible inside the laboratory, even without the aid of the Beryl, at whose surface Sarka stared as a man fascinated, hypnotized. * * * * * The cube-army struck the dwellings, disappeared into them as though they had been composed of tissue paper, and continued on! Over the tops of the cube-army toppled the roofs of the dwellings, there, in the midst of the cubes, to be ground to powder, with a sound as of a million avalanches grinding together in some awesome, sun-size valley. Southward, in the wake of the chaotic charge, moved a mighty, gigantic crevasse, whose sides were the walls of the hives left standing. And still the cube-army moved in, grinding everything it touched to dust, trampling buildings into nothingness, destroying utterly along a front hundreds of miles wide, and as deep as the dwellings of men! "God!" cried Sarka, his voice so tense that both his father and Jaska heard it above the roaring which shook and rocked the world. "Do you see? The Moon-cubes are destroying the dwelling of our people, and the Martians are to destroy the people who have fled!" "There must be a way," said Sarka the Second quietly, "to circumvent the cubes! But what? Your will still rules the cubes which piloted you from the Moon?" "Yes," replied Sarka tersely, "but there are only a dozen of the cubes. What can they do against countless millions of them? Cubes which are Moon-cubes, brought to the Earth in the heart of that blue column, here reformed to create an army which is invincible, because it cannot be slain! It means that the Moon-people themselves, thousands of miles out of our reach, have but to sit in comfort and watch their cube-slaves destroy us! When they have laid waste the Earth, the Martians have but to finish the fight!" * * * * * "If, beloved," said Jaska, "your will commands those twelve cubes, it can also command all the others, for they must be essentially the same. Call on the rebels of Dalis to help you!" "Then what of the Spokesmen of the Gens, who will be out of contact with me?" "They must stand on their own feet, must fight their own battle! Call to you the people who have passed through the white flames, and fight with the distant will of Luar and of Dalis for control of the cube-army!" Again that exaltation, which convinced him he could move mountains with his two hands, coursed through the being of Sarka. Quietly be answered Jaska. "I believe you are right," he said softly. "Those of us who have passed through the flames which bore these Moon-cubes will control the cubes, even bend them to our will. The Spokesmen must vanquish the Martians or perish!" Then he sent his mental commands to the Spokesmen: "Meet the Martians when they arrive and destroy or drive them back! You live only if you win! We speak no more until victory is ours! People of the Gens of Dalis, go to the areas being devasted by the cubes, taking your cubes and aircars with you, and I will join you there! _And Jaska with me!_" Sarka had not himself mentally spoken the last four words. Jaska had thought-spoken them, before he could prevent. He turned upon her, lips shaping a command that she remain behind. But she forestalled him. "I, too, have been through the white flames! You may have need of all of us!" CHAPTER XXII _The Struggle for Mastery_ The people of all the Gens of Earth were now between two fires. The cube-army, ruled by the mistress of the Moon, was laying waste the dwellings of the Gens, destroying them with a speed and surety of which no earthquake, whatever its proportions, would have been capable. The Gens were forced out upon the roof of the world--where, scarcely had they maneuvered into their prearranged formations, than the Martians struck. Those huge balls of fire, larger even than the aircars of the Moon, landed in vast and awe-inspiring numbers on the roof of the world--landed easily, with no apparent effort or shock. The light of them made all the world a place of vast radiance, save only that portion which was being destroyed by the cube-army, and this area had a cold, chill radiance of its own. By groups and organisations the fire-balls of Mars landed, and rested quiescent on the surface of the globe. Sarka, pausing only long enough in his laboratory to study this strange attack and to discover how it would get under way, was at the same time preparing to go forth to take his own strange part in the defensive action of Earthlings. A vast confidence was in him.... "We will lose millions of people, father," he said softly. "But it will end in our victory, in the most glorious war ever fought on this Earth!" "That is true, my son!" replied the older man sadly. * * * * * For several minutes the vast fire-balls, which seemed to be monster glowing octagons, rested where they had landed, and even then the Gens of the people were closing on them, bringing their ray directors and atom-disintegrators into action. Then, when the Earthlings would have destroyed the first of the vast fire-balls--and Sarka was noting that the flames which bathed the balls seemed to have no effect whatever on Earthlings, save to outline them in mantles of fire--the fire-balls wakened to new life. They opened like the halves of peaches falling apart, and out upon the roof of the world poured the first Martians Earth had ever seen! They were more than twice the size, on the average, of Earth people, and at first glance seemed to resemble them very much, save that their eyes, of which each Martian was possessed of two, were set on the ends of long tentacles which could stretch forth to a length of two feet or more from the eye-sockets and thus be turned in any direction. Each eye was independent of its neighbor, as one could look forward while the other looked backward, or one could look right while the other looked left. Each Martian possessed two arms on each side of a huge, powerful torso, and legs that were like the bolls of trees, compared to the slender limbs of Earthlings. All the Martians seemed to be dressed in the skins of strange, vari-colored beasts. Each carried in his upper right hand a slender canelike thing some three feet in length, from whose tip there flashed those spurts of flame which had puzzled the Earth people before the actual launching of the attack. * * * * * Beyond these weapons, the Martians seemed to possess no weapons of offense at all, nor of defense. "With our ray directors and atom-disintegrators," said Sarka, moving into the Exit Dome with Jaska, "we can blast them from the face of the Earth!" But in a moment he realized that he had spoken too hastily. The nearest fire-ball was, of course, within the area of the Gens of Cleric, and Sarka could here see with his naked eyes all that transpired. The Martian passengers, who moved swiftly away from their fire-ball vehicles, then a flight of the Gens of Cleric descended upon the fireball and its fleeing passengers, with tiny ray directors and atom-disintegrators held to the fore, ready for action. The Martians, at some distance from their glowing vehicle, paused and formed a ragged line, facing the ball, staring at the descending people of the Gens of Cleric, their tentaclelike eyes waving to and fro, oddly like the tentacles of those aircars of the Moon. The flight was hovering above the first fireball. In a second now, at the command of an underling, the ray directors would destroy fire-ball and Martians as thoroughly as though they had never existed at all. * * * * * But then a strange thing happened. At that exact moment, timing their actions to fractions of seconds, the Martians raised and pointed their canelike weapons of the spurting flames. They pointed them, however, not at the Earthlings, but at the fire-ball which had brought them to Earth! Instantly the fire-ball exploded as with the roaring of a hundred mighty volcanoes--and the descending flight of the Gens of Cleric was blasted into countless fragments! Bits of them flew in all directions. Many dropped, the mangled, infinitesmal remains of them, down to the roof of Earth, while many were hurled skyward through formations above them--while those formations, to a height of a full two miles, were broken asunder. Many flights above that first flight were smashed and broken, their individual members hurled in all directions by that one single blast of a single fire-ball. Individuals who escaped destruction were hurled end over end, upward through other flights higher above, and the whole aggregation of flights which had been concentrated on that first fire-ball was instantly demoralized, while full fifty per cent of its individuals were instantly torn to bits! Sarka groaned to the depths of him. "The leader of the Martians, or the master who sent them here, sent them here to win. For if they do not win, they cannot return to Mars, as they will have destroyed their vehicles! Their confidence is superhuman!" "Have faith in the courage of Earthlings, son!" said Sarka. It was much to ask, for if one single one of these fire-balls could wreak such havoc with the people of Earth, what would be the destruction by the countless other unexploded fireballs of the Martians? * * * * * Still, the Spokesmen themselves must discover a way to hold their own, to win against the Martians. For Sarka there was greater work to do. He must oppose the wills of Luar and of Dalis in a mighty mental conflict, which would decide whether the homes of men would be saved, or utterly destroyed by the Moon-cubes. But as he left through the Exit Dome, with Jaska by his side, he shuddered, and was just a little sick inside as he saw the fearful result of that first explosion of a Martian fire-ball! Bits of human wreckage were scattered over the Earth for a great distance in all directions from where the fire-ball had exploded. And at that spot a gigantic crater had been torn in the roof of the world, going down to none knew what depths. Even the Martians, here only to consolidate positions which had passed the demolition of the Moon-cubes, were capable of demolitions almost as ghastly and complete as those of the cubes! The sound was incapable of being described, for outside the laboratory the sound of the advance of the Moon-cubes eating into the dwellings of men, tumbling them down, grinding them to powder, was cataclysmic in its mighty volume. A million express trains crashing head-on into walls of galvanized iron at top speed, simultaneously. Ear-drum crashing blows as fireballs exploded. The screams and shrieks of maimed and dying Earthlings--of Earthlings unwounded but possessed of abysmal fear.... * * * * * Then, resolutely, Sarka turned his back on the conflict between the Martians and the people of Earth, and hurtled across the devastated roof of the world toward that area which was feeling the destructive force of the vandal cube-army. As he flew, Jaska keeping pace with him in silence, his mind was busy. Passage through the white flames of the Moon had given him the key. Those white flames--source of all life on the Moon--rendered almost godlike those whom it bathed ... gave them unbelievable access of mental brilliance ... were the source of that blue column which had forced the Earth outward toward Mars ... were the source, in some way, of the cubes themselves, as he and Jaska, after passing through them, owed their now near-divinity to the same white flames! Those flames had made Luar mistress of the Moon--therefore of the Gnomes and of the cubes! Therefore, Sarka, having been bathed in the flames, should make himself master of the cubes, if he could out-will the combined determinations of Luar and of Dalis! His confidence was supreme as he fled through outer darkness toward the eery light which came from the area of demolitions. Looking ahead, he could see tiny glows in the sky, which he knew to be the rebels of Dalis' Gens, flying to keep their rendezvous with him. Higher mounted his courage and his confidence as he approached the roaring crash, perpetual and always mounting, which showed him where the cube-army was busiest. The sound vibrated the very air, causing the bodies of Sarka to tingle with it, causing them to flutter and shake in their flight with its awesome power. But they did not hold back, flew onward through the gloom, leaving behind them the brightly lighted areas where Gens of Earth battled with the fireballs of the Martians, moving into the area of the eery glowing of the cubes. * * * * * Just as he approached the spot where mighty dwellings were tumbling before the march of the cube-army, he sent a single command toward the cube which had piloted him from the Moon. "Come to me on the edge of the crevasse nearest the place of most destruction!" Would the cube now be subservient to his will? He wondered. Everything depended upon that. If not, then he might as well try to stay the forces of a mighty avalanche with his breath, as halt the cube-army with his will. But strangely enough, the closer he came to the vast area of tumbling dwellings the calmer he became, the more sure that he would win against the cubes. For when he landed at the lip of the crevasse, across which he could look for a hundred miles, a single cube gleamed brightly almost at his feet, awaiting his orders! One by one, by twos, threes, fours, dozens, came the glowing people who had been bathed in the white flames of the Moon's life-source, and as each dropped down beside him, Sarka gave a command. "Drop down in the midst of the cubes! Make your own cube the rallying point for this vast army of cubes, force the cubes to desist in their mighty destruction, be subservient to your will--and do you, each of you, be subservient to _my_ will!" * * * * * Away dropped the rebels, glowing points of white flame, dropping down the sides of the crevasse, a mighty, awesome canyon, into the very heart of the activity of the cubes, and from the brain of Sarka, aided by the will of Jaska, went forth a simple command: "Cease your march of destruction, O Moon-cubes, and harken to the will of Sarka, your master! Draw back from your labors, and muster, not as squares, rectangles and columns, but as individual cubes, in the area already devastated by you! Rally about the glowing people who have passed through the flames which were your Moon-mother, and wait for orders! Take no further heed of commands from Dalis and Luar!" Instantly it seemed to Sarka that he had drawn into some invisible vortex which tore at his brain, at his body, at his soul. Inside him a cold voice seemed to say: "Fool, Sarka! My will is greater than yours!" But though the force of the will of Luar, whose thought he recognized, tore at him, almost shriveled the soul and brain of him with its might, he continued to send his thought-command out to the Moon-cubes, forcing it through the wall of Luar's will, hurling it like invisible projectiles at the cube-army below. Exultation possessed him, buoyed him up, gave him greater courage and confidence as the moments passed for even as all his being concentrated on the will-command to the cubes, his senses told him that the mighty sound of destruction was dying away, fading out. * * * * * Slower now the dwellings fell, slower moved the Moon-cubes; and as they slowed in their mighty march through the dwellings of men, so increased the confidence, the power of will, of Sarka and his people--the rebels of the Gens of Dalis. Then, after an hour, whose mighty mental conflict had bathed Sarka in the perspiration of superhuman effort, the sound of destruction ceased all together, and the dwellings ceased to fall. A silent shout, like an inborn paean of rejoicing, surged through Sarka as he noted the retreat from the dwellings of men, of the Moon-cubes! Back and back retreated the squares and the rectangles, the columns and the globes, breaking apart as they retreated. Within fifteen minutes after the destruction had ceased, millions of gleaming cubes winked upward from the bottom of the crevasse--motionless, quiescent! Sarka sent forth another thought. "I am your master, O cubes of the Moon!" No sound, no movement, answered him. "Luar and Dalis are no longer able to command you!" Still no sound or movement of the cubes. * * * * * Then, taking a deep breath, as of a swimmer preparing to dive into icy water, Sarka gave a new command. "Dissolve! Reform on the roof of the world in globes! Roll over the face of the Earth, destroy the fire-balls of Mars--and take prisoners, inside the globes, the attackers from Mars!" Instantly the gleaming cubes vanished, and darkness as of a mighty pit possessed the crevasse of destruction. Then, at the lip of the great crevasse, the cubes swept into form--myriads of globes which gleamed with the cold blue brilliance of the Moon! They had no sooner formed as globes than they were in action again, rolling over the roof of the world as with a rising crescendo of thunder tumbling down the night-black sky. So mighty was their rush that the roof of the world trembled and shook. Above their charge raced Sarka and Jaska, and with them the rebels of the Gens of Dalis. All were present when the cubes crashed into the fire-balls from Mars, swept the Martians within themselves as prisoners, held them securely--and continued on, destroying the fire-balls in myriads. Here and there fire-balls exploded on contact, destroying the globes, which immediately reformed again, as though the explosions had not been felt at all. * * * * * Sarka had won the allegiance of the Moon-cubes, which had defeated and taken prisoners the Martians, destroying the vehicles in which they might have returned to Mars. And as realization came, darkness settled over the roof of the world; the last flare of Mars faded and died. This done, the cubes formed in mighty rows, facing the laboratory of Sarka. His heart beating madly with exultation, Sarka studied them. Then he stepped into the Observatory, gazed away across the space which separated the Earth from the Moon, sent a mental message winging outward. "Luar! Dalis!" Faintly, fearfully, came the answer. "We hear, O Sarka!" "Shift the blue column away from the Earth! Do not interfere as we return to our orbit about the sun! Obey, or I combine the total knowledge of Mars, the Earth, and the Moon in an attack against you and your Martian ally! Inform your ally that their people will not return, that the Earth has need of them--but that two Gens of Earth will be received by Martians in perfect amity, and these Gens allowed biding places on Mars! Unless your ally obeys, the Martians in my hands will be destroyed!" In an hour the answer came, the snarling thought-answer of Dalis. "We hear! We obey! But Dalis is never beaten while he lives! His day will come!" * * * * * Sarka found himself feeling even a little sorry for sorely beaten Dalis; but his face was grim as he sent another command to the people of Dalis who had passed through the life-source of the Moon. "Take command of the cubes, and force them to repair the damage which has been done to the dwellings of men--to repair them completely, over all the face of the Earth!" As the glowing people hurried to obey, Sarka softly asked his father: "But what shall we do with the Martians?" Sarka the Second smiled. "Release them and send them to the lowest level where, guarded by the cubes, they will be set to constructing fireballs like those in which they arrived for the use of Earth if Dalis, or the Martians, ever attack again! And, son...." "Yes, O my father?" said Sarka softly. "I have another suggestion for the employment of the cubes! Let them build aircars to be used by the Gens of Prull and of Klaser, as transportation to Mars whenever you are ready for them to go!" Sarka smiled boyishly, happily. "Yes, O my father; and is there anything else?" "Yes! Take Jaska as your mate! Do you not see that she is waiting for you to speak?" Sarka turned to Jaska, whose face was glorious in her surrender, and whose lips were parted in a loving smile--which faded only when Sarka's lips caressed it away. (_The end._) ASTOUNDING STORIES _Appears on Newsstands_ THE FIRST THURSDAY IN EACH MONTH [Illustration: The Readers' Corner _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories] _From Australia_ Dear Editor: I am taking the privilege of writing to you in an endeavor to show my appreciation of your magazine Astounding Stories. Although I am an inveterate reader I must say that I have never read any book or magazine to come up to the above, and confess that though I am ignorant of the intricacies of science (and lacked interest in same prior to my reading your first issue) same is described so plainly that I have no trouble in fully understanding exactly what the author conveys. I must thank you for this other interest in the monotony of life. Have pleasure of informing you that through my enthusiasm have created several subscribers, and on occasions when adopting the age old custom of placing my foot upon the rail and bending the elbow, have entered into many a conversation and discussion re the different stories included in your magazine. I assure you of my whole-hearted support in the furthering of the popularity of your enjoyable and unique work in my country, and wish you every success in your venture.--M. B. Johnston, 237 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, Australia. _Mr. Neal's Favorites_ Dear Editor: The other day I saw Astounding Stories on one of the newsstands. I purchased it, and after reading "Brigands of the Moon", I eagerly finished the rest of the magazine. I did not like "Out of the Dreadful Depths." In my opinion it should not be in a Science Fiction magazine. The only thing the matter with your magazine is that it is too small. I would like to read some stories in "our" magazine by Ed Earl Repp, David H. Keller, M. D., Miles J. Brewer, M. D., and Stanton Coblentz--Francis Neal, R. R. 4, Box 105, Kokomo, Ind. _No Ghost Stories_ Dear Editor: I received your April issue and I think it is the best yet. I have but one complaint to make, and that is your magazine seems to print some good science stories, but also has some stories which do not belong in a Science Fiction magazine. They might come under the name of weird tales. Is your magazine devoted to pure 100 per cent. Science Fiction? If so, I think you ought to leave out the ghost stories.--Louis Wentzler, 1933 Woodbine St., Brooklyn, N. Y. _From the Other Sex_ Dear Editor: You'll be surprised to hear from a girl, as I notice only boys wrote to praise your new magazine. I tried reading some of the Science Fiction magazines my brother buys every month but I'd start reading a story only to leave it unfinished. But your magazine is different. When I picked it up to read it I thought I'd soon throw it down and read something else, but the moment I started to read one of the stories of your new magazine I read it to the finish. I never read such vivid and exciting stories. Even my brother who loves all kinds of Science Fiction magazines couldn't stop praising your new magazine. He said Astounding Stories beats them all. Some of our readers criticized your new magazine, and I haven't anything but disagreement for them. Yet, who am I, to judge persons who have read and know all about Science Fiction? Will recommend your new magazine to all my friends.--Sue O'Bara, 13440 Barley Ave., Chicago, Illinois. _January Issue Was First_ Dear Editor: I have just finished reading the April issue of "our" magazine. Can mere words describe my feelings? I am classing the stories as follows: A--excellent; B--very good; C--good; D--passable; E--poor. A--"Monsters of Moyen," "Vampires of Venus," "The Ray of Madness," "The Soul-Snatcher." B--"The Man Who Was Dead." C--None. D--None. E--None. "Brigands of the Moon" is getting more and more interesting. Can you please tell me which month's issue was the first one, as I didn't procure the first two copies and should like to do so?--Eli Meltzer, 1466 Coney Island Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y. "_Eclipses All_" Dear Editor: Just as soon as your new magazine came out I espied it. It eclipsed all the other magazines on the stand. As a cub magazine I couldn't ask for more. I am going to comment on your stories now because I know you want me too, for I know you would like to know what sort of stories your readers like. I have a lot to say about Ray Cummings. He is the best writer I have ever seen. His stories couldn't be beat. "Phantoms of Reality" was a corking good story, but I believe his new serial, "Brigands of the Moon," is going to be better. Captain S. P. Meek is a very good writer also. I take immense joy in his Dr. Bird stories. And we must not forget that great writer, Murray Leinster. His stories are really good. I congratulate you on your new magazine, Mr. Editor.--Albert Philbrick, 117 N. Spring St., Springfield, Ohio. "_A Unique Magazine_" Dear Editor: I've been trying to write your magazine for a long time, so here goes. I've bought every copy from the first issue and sure think it is a good magazine. In fact I should say a unique magazine; there are but few magazines in its class among Science Fiction magazines. The stories come up to the standards of good Science Fiction, and some go far above it. A few stories I did not like were: "The Man Who Was Dead," "The Soul Snatcher," "The Corpse on the Grating" and "The Stolen Mind." The science in all these stories was very poor. But your magazine became better in my eyes when you published "Phantoms of Reality," "Tanks," "Old Crompton's Secret," "Brigands of the Moon," "Monsters of Moyen," and all of Captain S. P. Meek's stories. These were extraordinarily good stories. Wesso's drawings are very good, and I hope you keep him. I have seen his drawings in another magazine for quite a time. I don't like the illustrations of your other artist. Could you, by chance, secure an artist by the name of Leo Morey or Hugh Mackay? They both illustrate for other Science Fiction magazines and are about as good as Wesso. Please keep the latter. And why don't you have him to do all of your illustrating? Sorry to seem such a grouch, but I don't like your grade of paper either. And why not enlarge the magazine to about 11" x 9" by 1/2", and charge 25 cents for your thoroughly good magazine, apart from the defects I have mentioned. About your authors. They are, for the most part, good. But they are mostly amateurs at writing Science Fiction stories. I am delighted to see such expert writers of Science Fiction as Harl Vincent, Ray Cummings, Victor Rousseau and Captain S. P. Meek writing for your magazine, but couldn't you include in your staff of authors A. Hyatt Verrill, Dr. Miles J. Breuer, Dr. David H. Keller, R. F. Starzl, and a few more such notable authors? I hope to see these authors in your magazine soon.--Linus Hogenmiller, 502 N. Washington St., Farmington, Mo. _The Star System!_ Dear Editor: One star means fairly good, two stars, good; three stars, excellent; four, extraordinary; no stars--just another story. I give "Brigands of the Moon," by Ray Cummings, three stars; "The Atom-Smasher," by Victor Rousseau, three stars; "Murder Madness," by Murray Leinster, two stars; "Into the Ocean Depths," by S. P. Wright, two stars, and "The Jovian Jest," by L. Lorraine, no stars. It was short and sweet. Wesso sure can draw. I would like to see a full page illustration for each story by him. My favorite type of stories are interplanetary, and, second favorite, stories of future wars. Will you have many of them in the future? I like long stories like the novelette in the May issue of Astounding Stories--Jack Darrow, 4225 N. Spaulding Ave., Chicago, Illinois. _We Expect Not To_ Dear Editor: While going over your "The Readers' Corner" of the April issue, I noticed in your answer to one of the letters that you will avoid reprints. Now many of your readers have not read the older classics of Science Fiction. Would it not be a good idea to publish a reprint at least once a year? One of the suggestions given was Merritt's "Through the Dragon Glass." Another very interesting story, and one that I am sure almost all of your followers have not read, is "The Blind Spot," by Homer Flint. I like the idea of having three members to a volume, as it will be much easier to bind. Now, starting with the April issue, I think that the best story in there is "Monsters of Moyen." "The Ray of Madness" was up to the usual standard of Capt. S. P. Meek's stories. "The Man Who Was Dead" was fairly good; average, I would say. I did not like "Vampires of Venus." I say that the May issue was the best of the Astounding Stories. I was satisfied with every story in it. "Into the Ocean Depths" was the best story, "The Atom Smasher" being a close second. I like the way the story "Into the Ocean Depths" ended; a slight trace of sadness and not at all like the "and they lived happily ever after" ending. A real story. I was disappointed in not finding any story concerning Dr. Bird in the April issue. Will any more be printed soon? Before I close I would like a definite answer to this question: Will you ever, or in the near future, reprint any of the genre of Science Fiction, stories by the late master Garret P. Serviss, or from the pen of A. Merritt and H. G. Wells?--Nathan Greenfeld, 313 E. 70th St., New York City. _Again Reprints_ Dear Editor: Although I am a reader of six Science Fiction magazines, I was more than glad to see the latest one out, Astounding Stories. Because the stories are all interesting. I consider Astounding Stories superior to most of the Science Fiction periodicals on the newsstands to-day. My favorite stories are those of interplanetary voyages and other worlds. My favorite authors are: Ray Cummings, A. Merritt, Victor Rousseau, Murray Leinster, Arthur J. Burks and Harl Vincent. I hope that you will soon have stories by Edmond Hamilton and David H. Keller. Now here is something I hope you will give some thought and consideration. I noticed that many of the readers wrote in, requesting reprints. I am one of those who would like to see you publish some reprints, especially stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt and Ray Cummings. These authors have written many masterpieces of Science Fiction. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for a person to get these stories. They could be made available easily if Astounding Stories would reprint them. Most of the readers who object to reprints do so because they would hate to see a story by H. G. Wells or Jules Verne. I, myself, do not like these authors as they are too dull. But if you have only reprints by the three authors I mentioned and a few other popular writers, I am sure all the readers would welcome them. At least you could have a vote and see how they stand on reprints--Michael Fogaris, 157 Fourth St., Passaic, N. J. _Likes_ "_The Readers' Corner_" Dear Editor: Your "The Readers' Corner" interests me very much. It surely does show how your magazine pleases its readers. You cannot get too much science in your stories to suit me. Chemistry and physics more than anything else. I surely enjoyed reading "Mad Music" and "The Thief of Time." I don't like long stories. They are too interesting to have to wait a month for the next part. I hope that your magazine continues to have as "astounding" stories as it has in the past.--Vern L. Enrich, R. F. D. 1, Casey, Illinois. _From Master Weiner_ Dear Editor: One day coming home from school I saw your magazine. That night I bought it and have since been an ardent reader. But why not give us a change? I prefer stories of the Sargasso Sea, the Maelstrom, and about invasions of the Earth.--Milton Weiner, age 12, 2430 Baker St., Baltimore Maryland. _High Praise_ Dear Editor: Enclosed you will find twenty cents in stamps for the first copy of Astounding Stories. I have just finished the May issue of Astounding Stories and the rating of the stories is: 1--"Brigands of the Moon"--Excellent! 2--"The Atom Smasher"--Marvelous! 3--"Murder Madness"--Perfect. 4--"Into the Ocean's Depths"--Good. 5--"The Jovian Jest"--Pretty Good. The cover design by H. Wesso is good. Don't lose him. I would like more stories by Victor Rousseau and Ray Cummings. Where are some stories by H. G. Wells, Stanton Coblens, Gawain Edwards, Francis Flagg, Henrik Jarve and Dr. Keller? My favorite stories are interplanetary stories. Here are some things that may improve your magazine (though I must say that your magazine is about perfect as it is): More pictures in long stories; about two novelettes in each issue; about two short stories in each issue; more interplanetary novels and novelettes; about one serial in one issue; smoother paper.--Isidore Horowitz, 1161 Stratford Avenue, New York City. "_Fairly Good Satire_" Dear Editor: I have read your two issues of Astounding Stories and I feel they will fill a very much needed place in literature. I am especially interested in the stories like the "Vampires of Venus" and the "Brigands of the Moon." The "Vampires of Venus" can be classed as a fairly good satire on Earth beings; I consider that story one with a moral. It reminds one of Voltaire's Micromegas, and it's taking us to another planet to show us our faults at home will stimulate interest in social improvement. I have kept tab on Edgar Rice Burroughs' writings because he teaches evolution in a way that makes it easy for the ordinary reader to grasp. You have a great field, if you can keep up the interplanetary stories and mix some evolutionary stories with them. The true stories are playing a valuable part in stimulating people to take a deeper view of life, and you have a field in Astounding Stories almost without a competitor.--J. L. Stark, 530 Sutcliffe Ave., Louisville, Kentucky. _He is H. W. Wessolowski_ Dear Editor: Since I have read every copy of Astounding Stories since it was inaugurated I feel well qualified to contribute a few bouquets and also some criticism. The cover illustrations are wonderful but I cannot find the artist's name on it. So good an artist should put his "moniker" on his productions. I am glad to see that the words "Super-Science" are on the top of the cover in bright red letters; some other Science Fiction magazines seem desirous of disguising the contents of their magazines for some obscure and mysterious reason. And now a brickbat. It is my humble opinion that the science should be examined more carefully before the stories are printed in this excellent magazine. The stories should be not only astounding, but should contain some science information that will be remembered after the fiction is forgotten. "The Man Who Was Dead" is an excellent ghost story or weird tale, but is out of place in "our" magazine. (I take the liberty to call it "our" magazine since a department is given over to the readers and we express our choice of the kind of stories that are printed.) However, taken all together, our magazine is steadily improving; each issue up to now has been distinctly better than the one before. I have graded the stories in the April and May copies as follows: Excellent--"Vampires of Venus," "The Ray of Madness," "Brigands of the Moon," "Murder Madness," "Into the Ocean's Depths" and "The Jovian Jest." Good--"Monsters of Moyen," "The Atom Smasher" and "The Soul Searcher." Poor--"The Man Who Was Dead." My favorite authors are Dr. David H. Keller, Harl Vincent, Lillith Lorraine, Anthony Pelcher, Capt. S. P. Meek, Dr. Miles J. Breuer and Ray Cummings. I can hardly wait a month for my next copy.--Wayne D. Bray, Campbell, Missouri. _Story Says Cro-Magnons Fled to Europe_ Dear Editor: Ever since I was first introduced to Astounding Stories by a cousin I have been a steady reader. I have not missed a single issue so far. I hope you will have stories by Hyatt Verril, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edmond Hamilton, Leslie Stone, Stanton A. Coblentz and Francis Flagg. The stories I like best in each issue (not counting serials) are: "Phantoms of Reality," "Spawn of the Stars," "Vandals of the Stars," "Vampires of Venus" and "The Atom Smasher." In "The Atom Smasher" it says that all Europeans descended from the Atlanteans. Now when the hero killed them all with the disintegrating ray, would he not have affected their birth? Wesso is some artist. I saw a mistake on the cover of the March issue. The color of space is a deep black, not blue, because the blue color of the heavens when viewed from the earth is due to the reflection of light by the atmosphere.--George Brande, 141 South Church St., Schenectady, N. Y. "_The Readers' Corner_" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here; so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! --_The Editor._ 
29390	----	20¢ ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees: _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid; by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, FLYERS, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, SKY-HIGH LIBRARY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, MISS 1930, _and_ FOREST AND STREAM _More Than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ VOL. II, No. 1 CONTENTS APRIL, 1930 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Water-colors from a Scene in "Monsters of Moyen."_ THE MAN WHO WAS DEAD THOMAS H. KNIGHT 9 _As Jerry's Eyes Fell on the Creature's Head, He Shuddered--for the Face Was Nothing but Bone, with Dull-brown Skin Stretched Taut over It. A Skeleton That Was Alive!_ MONSTERS OF MOYEN ARTHUR J. BURKS 18 _"The Western World Shall be Next!" Was the Dread Ultimatum of the Half-monster, Half-god Moyen._ VAMPIRES OF VENUS ANTHONY PELCHER 47 _Leslie Larner, an Entomologist Borrowed from the Earth, Pits Himself Against the Night-flying Vampires That Are Ravaging the Inhabitants of Venus._ BRIGANDS OF THE MOON RAY CUMMINGS 60 _Out of Awful Space Tumbled the Space-ship Planetara Towards the Moon, Her Officers Dead, With Bandits at Her Helm--and the Controls Out of Order!_ THE SOUL SNATCHER TOM CURRY 101 _From Twenty Miles Away Stabbed the "Atom-filtering" Rays to Allen Baker in His Cell in the Death House._ THE RAY OF MADNESS CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 112 _Dr. Bird Uncovers a Dastardly Plot, Amazing in its Mechanical Ingenuity, Behind the Apparently Trivial Eye Trouble of the President._ THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 127 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Nathan Goldmann, Secretary. Application for entry as second-class mail pending at the Post Office at New York, under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. The Man Who Was Dead _By Thomas H. Knight_ [Illustration: "_I was dead._"] As Jerry's eyes fell on the creature's head, he shuddered--for the face was nothing but bone, with dull-brown skin stretched taut over it. A skeleton that was alive! It was a wicked night, the night I met the man who had died. A bitter, heart-numbing night of weird, shrieking wind and flying snow. A few black hours I will never forget. "Well, Jerry, lad!" my mother said to me as I pushed back from the table and started for my sheepskin coat and the lantern in the corner of the room. "Surely you're not going out a night like this? Goodness gracious, Jerry, it's not fit!" "Can't help it, Mother," I replied. "Got to go. You've never seen me miss a Saturday night yet, have you now?" "No. But then I've never seen a night like this for years either. Jerry, I'm really afraid. You may freeze before you even get as far as--" "Ah, come now, Mother," I argued. "They'd guy me to death if I didn't sit in with the gang to-night. They'd chaff me because it was too cold for me to get out. But I'm no pampered sissy, you know, and I want to see--" "Yes," she retorted bitingly, "I know. You want to go and bask in that elegant company. Our stove's just as good as the one down at that dirty old store," continued my persistent and anxious parent, "and it's certainly not very flattering to think that you leave us on a night like this to--Who'll be there, anyway?" "Oh, the usual five or six I suppose," I answered as I adjusted the wick of my lantern, hearing as I did the snarl and cut of the wind through the evergreens in the yard. "That black-whiskered sphinx, Hammersly, will he be there?" "Yes, he'll be there, I'm pretty sure." "Hm-m!" she exclaimed, her expression now carrying all the contempt for my judgment and taste she intended it should. "Button your coat up good around your neck, then, if you must go to see your precious Hammersly and the rest of them. Have you ever heard that man say anything yet? Does he speak at all, Jerry?" Then her gentle mind, not at all accustomed to hard thoughts or contemptuous remarks, quickly changed. "Funny thing about that fellow," she mused. "He's got something on his mind. Don't you think so, Jerry?" "Y-es, yes I do. And I've often wondered what it could be. He certainly's a queer stick. Got to admit that. Always brooding. Good fellow all right, and, for a 'sphinx' as you call him, likable. But I wonder what is eating him?" "What do you suppose it could be, Jerry boy?" questioned Mother following me to the door, the woman of her now completely forgetting her recent criticisms and, perhaps, the rough night her son was about to step into. "Do you suppose the poor chap has a--a--broken heart, or something like that? A girl somewhere who jilted him? Or maybe he loves someone he has no right to!" she finished excitedly, the plates in her hand rattling. "Maybe it's worse than that," I ventured. "P'r'aps--I've no right to say it--but p'r'aps, and I've often thought it, there's a killing he wants to forget, and can't!" * * * * * I heard my mother's sharp little "Oh!" as I shut the door behind me and the warmth and comfort of the room away. Outside it was worse than the whistle of the wind through the trees had led me to expect. Black as pitch it was, and as cold as blazes. For the first moment or two, though, I liked the feel of the challenge of the night and the racing elements, was even a little glad I had added to the dare of the blackness the thought of Hammersly and his "killing." But I had not gone far before I was wishing I did not have to save my face by putting in an appearance at the store that night. Every Saturday night, with the cows comfortable in their warm barn, and my own supper over, I was in the habit of taking my place on the keg or box behind the red-hot stove in Pruett's store. To-night all the snow was being hurled clear of the fields to block the roads full between the old, zigzag fences. The wind met me in great pushing gusts, and while it flung itself at me I would hang against it, snow to my knees, until the blow had gone along, when I could plunge forward again. I was glad when I saw the lights of the store, glad when I was inside. They met me with mock applause for my pluck in facing the night, but for all their sham flattery I was pleased I had come, proud, I must admit, that I had been able to plough my heavy way through the drifts to reach them. I saw at a glance that my friends were all there, and I saw too that there was a strange man present. * * * * * A very tall man he was, gaunt and awkward as he leaned into the angle of the two counters, his back to a dusty show-case. He attracted my attention at once. Not merely because he appeared so long and pointed and skinny, but because, of all ridiculous things in that frozen country, he wore a hard derby hat! If he had not been such a queer character it would have been laughable, but as it was it was--creepy. For the man beneath that hard hat was about as queer a looking character as I have ever seen. I supposed he was a visitor at the store, or a friend of one of my friends, and that in a little while I would be introduced. But I was not. I took my place in behind the stove, feeling at once, though I am far from being unsociable usually, that the man was an intruder and would spoil the evening. But despite his cold, dampening presence we were soon at it, hammer and tongs, discussing the things that are discussed behind hospitable stoves in country stores on bad nights. But I could never lose sight of the fact that the stranger standing there, silent as the grave, was, to say the least, a queer one. Before long I was sure he was no friend or guest of anyone there, and that he not only cast a pall over me but over all of us. I did not like it, nor did I like him. Perhaps it would have been just as well after all, I thought, had I heeded my mother and stayed home. Jed Counsell was the one who, innocently enough, started the thing that changed the evening, that had begun so badly, into a nightmare. "Jerry," he said, leaning across to me, "thinkin' of you s'afternoon. Readin' an article about reincarnation. Remember we were arguin' it last week? Well, this guy, whoever he was I've forgot, believes in it. Says it's so. That people _do_ come back." With this opening shot Jed sat back to await my answer. I liked these arguments and I liked to bear my share in them, but now, instead of immediately answering the challenge, I looked around to see if any other of our circle were going to answer Jed. Then, deciding it was up to me, I shrugged off the strange feeling the man in the corner had cast over me, and prepared to view my opinions. "That's just that fellow's belief, Jed," I said. "And just as he's got his so have I mine. And on this subject at least I claim my opinion is as good as anybody's." I was just getting nicely started, and a little forgetting my distaste for the man in the corner, when the fellow himself interrupted. He left his leaning place, and came creaking across the floor to our circle around the store. I say he came "creaking" for as he came he did creak. "Shoes," I naturally, almost unconsciously decided, though the crazy notion was in my mind that the cracking I heard did sound like bones and joints and sinews badly in need of oil. The stranger sat his groaning self down among us, on a board lying across a nail keg and an old chair. Only from the corner of my eye did I see his movement, being friendly enough, despite my dislike, not to allow too marked notice of his attempt to be sociable seem inhospitable on my part. I was about to start again with my argument when Seth Spears, sitting closest to the newcomer, deliberately got up from the bench and went to the counter, telling Pruett as he went that he had to have some sugar. It was all a farce, a pretext, I knew. I've known Seth for years and had never known him before to take upon himself the buying for his wife's kitchen. Seth simply would not sit beside the man. * * * * * At that I could keep my eyes from the stranger no longer, and the next moment I felt my heart turn over within me, then lie still. I have seen "walking skeletons" in circuses, but never such a man as the one who was then sitting at my right hand. Those side-show men were just lean in comparison to the fellow who had invaded our Saturday night club. His thighs and his legs and his knees, sticking sharply into his trousers, looked like pieces of inch board. His shoulders and his chest seemed as flat and as sharp as his legs. The sight of the man shocked me. I sprang to my feet thoroughly frightened. I could not see much of his face, sitting there in the dark as he was with his back to the yellow light, but I could make out enough of it to know that it was in keeping with the rest of him. In a moment or two, realizing my childishness, I had fought down my fear and, pretending that a scorching of my leg had caused my hurried movement, I sat down again. None of the others said a word, each waiting for me to continue and to break the embarrassing silence. Hammersly, black-whiskered, the "sphinx" as my mother had called him, watched me closely. Hating myself not a little bit for actually being the sissy I had boasted I was not, I spoke hurriedly, loudly, to cover my confusion. "No sir, Jed!" I said, taking up my argument. "When a man's dead, he's dead! There's no bringing him back like that highbrow claimed. The old heart may be only hitting about once in every hundred times, and if they catch it right at the last stroke they may bring it back then, but once she's stopped, Jed, she's stopped for good. Once the pulse has gone, and life has flickered out, it's out. And it doesn't come back in any form at all, not in this world!" I was glad when I had said it, thereby asserting myself and downing my foolish fear of the man whose eyes I felt burning into me. I did not turn to look at him but all the while I felt his gimlety eyes digging into my brain. Then he spoke. And though he sat right next to me his voice sounded like a moan from afar off. It was the first time we had heard this thing that once may have been a voice and that now sounded like a groan from a closely nailed coffin. He reached a hand toward my knee to enforce his words, but I jerked away. "So you don't believe a man can come back from the grave, eh?" he grated. "Believe that once a man's heart is stilled it's stopped for good, eh? Well, you're all wrong, sonny. All wrong! You believe these things. I _know_ them!" * * * * * His interference, his condescension, his whole hatefulness angered me. I could now no longer control my feeling. "Oh! You _know_, do you?" I sneered. "On such a subject as this you're entitled to _know_, are you? Don't make me laugh!" I finished insultingly. I was aroused. And I'm a big fellow, with no reason to fear ordinary men. "Yes, I know!" came back his echoing, scratching voice. "How do you know? Maybe you've been--?" "Yes, I have!" he answered, his voice breaking to a squeak. "Take a good look at me, gentlemen. A good look." He knew now that he held the center of the stage, that the moment was his. Slowly he raised an arm to remove that ridiculous hat. Again I jumped to my feet. For as his coat sleeve slipped down his forearm I saw nothing but bone supporting his hand. And the hand that then bared his head was a skeleton hand! Slowly the hat was lifted, but as quickly as light six able-bodied men were on their feet and half way to the door before we realized the cowardliness of it. We forced ourselves back inside the store very slowly, all of us rather ashamed of our ridiculous and childlike fear. But it was all enough to make the blood curdle, with that live, dead thing sitting there by our fire. His face and skull were nothing but bone, the eyes deeply sunk into their sockets, the dull-brown skin like parchment in its tautness, drawn and shriveled down onto the nose and jaw. There were no cheeks. Just hollows. The mouth was a sharp slit beneath the flat nose. He was hideous. "Come back and I'll tell you my yarn," he mocked, the slit that was his mouth opening a little to show us the empty, blackened gums. "I've been dead once," he went on, getting a lot of satisfaction from the weirdness of the lie and from our fear, "and _I_ came back. Come and sit down and I'll explain why I'm this living skeleton." * * * * * We came back slowly, and as I did I slipped my hand into my outside pocket where I had a revolver. I put my finger in on the trigger and got ready to use the vicious little thing. I was on edge and torn to pieces completely by the sight of the man, and I doubt not that had he made a move towards me my frayed nerves would have plugged him full of lead. I eyed my friends. They were in no better way than was I. Fright and horror stood on each face. Hammersly was worst. His hands were twitching, his eyes were like bright glass, his face bleached and drawn. "I've quite a yarn to tell," went on the skeleton in his awful voice. "I've had quite a life. A full life. I've taken my fun and my pleasure wherever I could. Maybe you'll call me selfish and greedy, but I always used to believe that a man only passed this way once. Just like you believe," he nodded to me, his neck muscles and jaws creaking. "Six years ago I came up into this country and got a job on a farm," he went on, settling into his story. "Just an ordinary job. But I liked it because the farmer had a pretty little daughter of about sixteen or seventeen and as easy as could be. You may not believe it, but you can still find dames green enough to fall for the right story. "This one did. I told her I was only out there for a time for my health. That I was rich back in the city, with a fine home and everything. She believed me. Little fool!" He chuckled as he said it, and my anger, mounting with his every devilish word, made the finger on the trigger in my pocket take a tighter crook to itself. "I asked her to skip with me," the droning went on, "made her a lot of great promises, and she fell for it." His dry jaw bones clanked and chattered as if he enjoyed the beastly recital of his achievement, while we sat gaping at him, believing either that the man must be mad, or that we were the mad ones, or dreaming. "We slipped away one night," continued the beast. "Went to the city. To a punk hotel. For three weeks we stayed there. Then one morning I told her I was going out for a shave. I was. I got the shave. But I hadn't thought it worth while to tell her I wouldn't be back. Well, she got back to the farm some way, though I don't know--" * * * * * "What!" I shouted, springing before him. "What! You mean you left her there! After you'd taken her, you left her! And here you sit crowing over it! Gloating! Boasting! Why you--!" I lived in a rough country. Associated with rough men, heard their vicious language, but seldom used a strong word myself. But as I stood over that monster, utterly hating the beastly thing, all the vile oaths and prickly language of the countryside, no doubt buried in some unused cell in my brain, spilled from my tongue upon him. When I had lashed him as fiercely as I was able I cried: "Why don't you come at me? Didn't you hear what I called you? You beast! I'd like to riddle you!" I shouted, drawing my gun. "Aw, sit down!" he jeered, waving his rattling hand at me. "You ain't heard a thing yet. Let me finish. Well, she got back to the farm some way or another, and something over a year later I wandered into this country again too. I never could explain just why I came back. It was not altogether to see the girl. Her father was a little bit of a man and I began to remember what a meek and weak sheep he was. I got it into my head that it'd be fun to go back to his farm and rub it in. So I came. "Her father was trying out a new corn planter right at the back door when I rounded the house and walked towards him. Then I saw, at once, that I had made a mistake. When he put his eyes on me his face went white and hard. He came down from the seat of that machine like a flash, and took hurried steps in the direction of a doublebarrelled gun leaning against the woodshed. They always were troubled with hawks and kept a gun handy. But there was an ax nearer to me than the gun was to him. I had to work fast but I made it all right. I grabbed that ax, jumped at him as he reached for the gun, and swung--once. His wife, and the girl too, saw it. Then I turned and ran." * * * * * The gaunt brute before us slowly crossed one groaning knee above the other. We were all sitting again now. The perspiration rolled down my face. I held my gun trained upon him, and, though I now believed he was totally mad, because of a certain ring of truth in that empty voice, I sat fascinated. I looked at Seth. His jaw was hanging loose, his eyes bulging. Hammersly's mouth was set in a tight clenched line, his eyes like fire in his blue, drawn face. I could not see the others. "The telephone caught me," continued our ghastly story-teller, "and in no time at all I was convicted and the date set for the hanging. When my time was pretty close a doctor or scientist fellow came to see me who said, 'Blaggett, you're slated to die. How much will you sell me your body for?' If he didn't say it that way he meant just that. And I said, 'Nothing. I've no one to leave money to. What do you want with my body?' And he told me, 'I believe I can bring you back to life and health, provided they don't snap your neck when they drop you.' 'Oh, you're one of _those_ guys, are you?' I said then. 'All right, hop to it. If you can do it I'll be much obliged. Then I can go back on that farm and do a little more ax swinging!'" Again came his horrible chuckle, again I mopped my brow. "So we made our plans," he went on, pleased with our discomfiture and our despising of him. "Next day some chap came to see me, pretending he was my brother. And I carried out my part of it by cursing him at first and then begging him to give me decent burial. So he went away, and, I suppose, received permission to get me right after I was cut down. "There was a fence built around the scaffold they had ready for me and the party I was about to fling, and they had some militia there, too. The crowd seemed quiet enough till they led me out. Then their buzzing sounded like a hive of bees getting all stirred up. Then a few loud voices, then shouts. Some rocks came flying at me after that, and it looked to me as though the hanging would not be so gentle a party after all. I tell you I was afraid. I wished it was over. * * * * * "The mob pushed against the fence and flattened it out, coming over it like waves over a beach. The soldiers fired into the air, but still they came, and I, I ran--up, onto the scaffold. It was safer!" As he said this he chuckled loudly. "I'll bet," he laughed, "that's the first time a guy ever ran into the noose for the safety of it! The mob came only to the foot of the scaffold though, from where they seemed satisfied to see the law take its course. The sheriff was nervous. So cut up that he only made a fling at tying my ankles, just dropped a rope around my wrists. He was like me, he wanted to get it over, and the crowd on its way. Then he put the rope around my neck, stepped back and shot the trap. Zamm! No time for a prayer--or for me to laugh at the offer!--or a last word or anything. "I felt the floor give, felt myself shoot through. Smack! My weight on the end of the rope hit me behind the ears like a mallet. Everything went black. Of course it would have been just my luck to get a broken neck out of it and give the scientist no chance to revive me. But after a second or two, or a minute, or it could have been an hour, the blackness went away enough to allow me to know I was hanging on the end of the rope, kicking, fighting, choking to death. My tongue swelled, my face and head and heart and body seemed ready to burst. Slowly I went into a deep mist that I knew then was _the_ mist, then--then--I was off floating in the air over the heads of the crowd, watching my own hanging! "I saw them give that slowly swinging carcass on the end of its rope time enough to thoroughly die, then, from my aerial, unseen watching place, I saw them cut it--me--down. They tried the pulse of the body that had been mine, they examined my staring eyes. Then I heard them pronounce me dead. The fools! I had known I was dead for a minute or two by that time, else how could my spirit have been gone from the shell and be out floating around over their heads?" * * * * * He paused here as he asked his question, his head turning on its dry and creaking neck to include us all in his query. But none of us spoke. We were dreaming it all, of course, or were mad, we thought. "In just a short while," went on the skeleton, "my 'brother' came driving slowly in for my body. With no special hurry he loaded me onto his little truck and drove easily away. But once clear of the crowd he pushed his foot down on the gas and in five more minutes--with me hovering all the while alongside of him, mind you--floating along as though I had been a bird all my life--we turned into the driveway of a summer home. The scientific guy met him. They carried me into the house, into a fine-fitted laboratory. My dead body was placed on a table, a huge knife ripped my clothes from me. "Quickly the loads from ten or a dozen hypodermic syringes were shot into different parts of my naked body. Then it was carried across the room to what looked like a large glass bottle, or vase, with an opening in the top. Through this door I was lowered, my body being held upright by straps in there for that purpose. The door to the opening was then placed in position, and by means of an acetylene torch and some easily melting glass, the door was sealed tight. "So there stood my poor old body. Ready for the experiment to bring it back to life. And as my new self floated around above the scientist and his helper I smiled to myself, for I was sure the experiment would prove a failure, even though I now knew that the sheriff's haste had kept him from placing the rope right at my throat and had saved me a broken neck. I was dead. All that was left of me now was my spirit, or soul. And that was swimming and floating about above their heads with not an inclination in the world to have a thing to do with the husk of the man I could clearly see through the glass of the bell. * * * * * "They turned on a huge battery of ultra-violet rays then," continued the hollow droning of the man who had been hanged, "which, as the scientist had explained to me while in prison, acting upon the contents of the syringes, by that time scattered through my whole body, was to renew the spark of life within the dead thing hanging there. Through a tube, and by means of a valve entering the glass vase in the top, the scientist then admitted a dense white gas. So thick was it that in a moment or two my body's transparent coffin appeared to be full of a liquid as white as milk. Electricity then revolved my cage around so that my body was insured a complete and even exposure to the rays of the green and violet lamps. And while all this silly stuff was going on, around and around the laboratory I floated, confident of the complete failure of the whole thing, yet determined to see it through if for no other reason than to see the discomfiture and disappointment that this mere man was bound to experience. You see, I was already looking back upon earthly mortals as being inferior, and now as I waited for this proof I was all the while fighting off a new urge to be going elsewhere. Something was calling me, beckoning me to be coming into the full spirit world. But I wanted to see this wise earth guy fail. "For a little while conditions stayed the same within that glass. So thick was the liquid gas in there at first that I could see nothing. Then it began to clear, and I saw to my surprise that the milky gas was disappearing because it was being forced in by the rays from the lights in through the pores into the body itself. As though my form was sucking it in like a sponge. The scientist and his helper were tense and taut with excitement. And suddenly my comfortable feeling left me. Until then it had seemed so smooth and velvety and peaceful drifting around over their heads, as though lying on a soft, fleecy cloud. But now I felt a sudden squeezing of my spirit body. Then I was in an agony. Before I knew what I was doing my spirit was clinging to the outside of that twisting glass bell, clawing to get into the body that was coming back to life! The glass now was perfectly clear of the gas, though as yet there was no sign of life in the body inside to hint to the scientist that he was to be successful. But I knew it. For I fought desperately to break in through the glass to get back into my discarded shell of a body again, knowing I must get in or die a worse death than I had before. "Then my sharper eyes noted a slight shiver passing over the white thing before me, and the scientist must have seen it in the next second, for he sprang forward with a choking cry of delight. Then the lolling head inside lifted a bit. I--still desperately clinging with my spirit hands to the outside, and all the time growing weaker and weaker--I saw the breast of my body rise and fall. The assistant picked up a heavy steel hammer and stood ready to crash open the glass at the right moment. Then my once dead eyes opened in there to look around, while I, clinging and gasping outside, just as I had on the scaffold, went into a deeper, darker blackness than ever. Just before my spirit life died utterly I saw the eyes of my body realize completely what was going on, then--from the inside now--I saw the scientist give the signal that caused the assistant to crash away the glass shell with one blow of his hammer. "They reached in for me then, and I fainted. When I came back to consciousness I was being carefully, slowly revived, and nursed back to life by oxygen and a pulmotor." * * * * * The terrible creature telling us this tale paused again to look around. My knees were weak, my clothes wet with sweat. "Is that all?" I asked in a piping, strange voice, half sarcastic, half unbelieving, and wholly spellbound. "Just about," he answered. "But what do you expect? I left my friend the scientist at once, even though he did hate to see me go. It had been all right while he was so keen on the experiment himself and while he only half believed his ability to bring me back. But now that he'd done it, it kinda worried him to think what sort of a man he was turning loose of the world again. I could see how he was figuring, and because I had no idea of letting him try another experiment on me, p'r'aps of putting me away again, I beat it in a hurry. "That was five years ago. For five years I've lived with only just part of me here. Whatever it was trying to get back into that glass just before my body came to life--my spirit, I've been calling it--I've been without. It never did get back. You see, the scientist brought me back inside a shell that kept my spirit out. That's why I'm the skeleton you see I am. Something vital is missing." He stood up cracking and creaking before us, buttoning his loose coat about his angular body. "Well, boys," he asked lightly, "what do you think of that?" "I think you're a liar! A damn liar!" I cried. "And now, if you don't want me to fill you full of lead, get out of here and get out now! If I have to do it to you, there's no scientist this time to bring you back. When you go out you'll stay out!" "Don't worry," he grimaced back to me, waving a mass of bones that should have been a hand contemptuously at me, "I'm going. I'm headed for Shelton." He stalked the length of the floor and shut the door behind him. The beast had gone. "The dirty liar!" I cried. "I wish--yes--I wish I had an excuse to kill him. Just think of that being loose, will you? A brute who would think up such a yarn! Of course it's all absurd. All crazy. All a lie." "No. It's not a lie." * * * * * I turned to see who had spoken. Hammersly's voice was so unfamiliar and now so torn in addition that I could not have thought he had spoken, had he not been looking right at me, his glittering eyes challenging my assertion. Would wonders never cease? I asked myself. First this outrageous yarn, now Hammersly, the "sphinx," expressing an opinion, looking for an argument! Of course it must be that his susceptible and brooding brain had been turned a bit by the evening we had just experienced. "Why Hammersly! You don't believe it?" I asked. "I not only believe it, Jerry, but now it's my turn to say, as he did, I _know_ it! Jerry, old friend," he went on, "that devil told the truth. He was hanged. He was brought back to life; and Jerry--I was that scientist!" Whew! I fell back to a box again. My knees seemed to forsake me. Then I heard Hammersly talking to himself. "Five years it's been," he muttered. "Five years since I turned him loose again. Five years of agony for me, wondering what new devilish crimes he was perpetrating, wondering when he would return to that little farm to swing his ax again. Five years--five years." He came over to me, and without a word of explanation or to ask my permission he reached his hand into my pocket and drew out my revolver, and I did not protest. "He said he was headed for Shelton," went on Hammersly's spoken thoughts. "If I slip across the ice I can intercept him at Black's woods." Buttoning his coat closely, he followed the stranger out into the night. * * * * * I was glad the moon had come up for my walk home, glad too when I had the door locked and propped with a chair behind me. I undressed in the dark, not wanting any grisly, sunken-eyed monster to be looking in through the window at me. For maybe, so I thought, maybe he was after all not headed for Shelton, but perhaps planning on another of his ghastly tricks. But in the morning we knew he had been going toward Shelton. Scientists, doctors, and learned men of all descriptions came out to our village to see the thing the papers said Si Waters had stumbled upon when on his way to the creamery that next morning. It was a skeleton, they said, only that it had a dry skin all over it. A mummy. Could not have been considered capable of containing life only that the snow around it was lightly blotched with a pale smear that proved to be blood, that had oozed out from the six bullet holes in the horrid chest. They never did solve it. There were five of us in the store that night. Five of us who know. Hammersly did what we all wanted to do. Of course his name is not really Hammersly, but it has done here as well as another. He is black-whiskered though, and he is still very much of a sphinx, but he'll never have to answer for having killed the man he once brought back to life. Hammersly's secret will go into five other graves besides his own. Monsters of Moyen _By Arthur J. Burks_ [Illustration: "_Now," said Kleig hoarsely, "watch closely, for God's sake!_"] "The Western World shall be next!" was the dread ultimatum of the half-monster, half-god Moyen! _Foreword_ In 1935 the mighty genius of Moyen gripped the Eastern world like a hand of steel. In a matter of months he had welded the Orient into an unbeatable war-machine. He had, through the sheer magnetism of a strange personality, carried the Eastern world with him on his march to conquest of the earth, and men followed him with blind faith as men in the past have followed the banners of the Thaumaturgists. A strange name, to the sound of which none could assign nationality. Some said his father was a Russian refugee, his mother a Mongol woman. Some said he was the son of a Caucasian woman lost in the Gobi and rescued by a mad lama of Tibet, who became father of Moyen. Some said that his mother was a goddess, his father a fiend out of hell. [Illustration] But this all men knew about him: that he combined within himself the courage of a Hannibal, the military genius of a Napoleon, the ideals of a Sun Yat Sen; and that he had sworn to himself he would never rest until the earth was peopled by a single nation, with Moyen himself in the seat of the mighty ruler. Madagascar was the seat of his government, from which he looked across into United Africa, the first to join his confederacy. The Orient was a dependency, even to that forbidden land of the Goloks, where outlanders sometimes went, but whence they never returned--and to the wild Goloks he was a god whose will was absolute, to render obedience to whom was a privilege accorded only to the Chosen. * * * * * In a short year his confederacy had brought under his might the millions of Asia, which he had welded into a mighty machine for further conquest. And because the Americas saw the handwriting on the wall, they sent out to see the man Moyen, with orders to penetrate to his very side, as a spy, their most trusted Secret Agent--Prester Kleig. Only the ignorant believed that Moyen was mad. The military and diplomatic geniuses of the world recognized his genius, and resented it. But Prester Kleig, of the Secret Service of the Americas, one of the _few_ men whose headquarters were in the Secret Room in Washington, had reached Moyen. Now he was coming home. He came home to tell his people what Moyen was planning, and to admit that his investigations had been hampered at every turn by the uncanny genius of Moyen. Military plans had been guarded with unbelievable secrecy. War machines he knew to exist, yet had seen only those common to all the armies of the world. And now, twenty-four hours out of New York City, aboard the _S. S. Stellar_, Prester Kleig was literally willing the steamer to greater speed--and in far Madagascar the strange man called Moyen had given the ultimatum: "The Western World shall be next!" CHAPTER I _The Hand of Moyen._ "Who is that man?" asked a young lady passenger of the steward, with the imperious inflection which tells of riches able to force obedience from menials who labor for hire. She pointed a bejeweled finger at the slender, soldierly figure which stood in the prow of the liner, like a figurehead, peering into the storm under the vessel's forefoot. "That gentleman, milady?" repeated the steward obsequiously. "That is Prester Kleig, head of the Secret Agents, Master of the Secret Room, just now returning from Madagascar, via Europe, after a visit to the realm of Moyen." A gasp of terror burst from the lips of the woman. Her cheeks blanched. "Moyen!" She almost whispered it. "Moyen! The half-god of Asia, whom men call mad!" "Not mad, milady. No, Moyen is not mad, save with a lust for power. He is the conqueror of the ages, already ruling more of the earth's population than any man has ever done before him--even Alexander!" But the young lady was not listening to stewards. Wealthy young ladies did not, save when asked questions dealing with personal service to themselves. Her eyes devoured the slender man who stood in the prow of the _Stellar_, while her lips shaped, over and over again, the dread name which was on the lips of the people of the world: "Moyen! Moyen!" * * * * * Up in the prow, if Prester Kleig, who carried a dread secret in his breast, knew of the young lady's regard, he gave no sign. There were touches of gray at his temples, though he was still under forty. He had seen more of life, knew more of its terrors, than most men twice his age--because he had lived harshly in service to his country. He was thinking of Moyen, the genius of the misshapen body, the pale eyes which reflected the fires of a Satanic soul, set deeply in the midst of the face of an angel; and wondering if he would be able to arrive in time, sorry that he had not returned home by airplane. He had taken the _Stellar_ only because the peacefulness of ocean liner travel would aid his thoughts, and he required time to marshal them. Liner travel was now a luxury, as all save the immensely wealthy traveled by plane across the oceans. Now Prester Kleig was sorry, for any moment, he felt, Moyen might strike. He turned and looked back along the deck of the _Stellar_. His eyes played over the trimly gowned figure of the woman who questioned the steward, but did not really see her. And then.... "Great God!" The words were a prayer, and they burst from the lips of Prester Kleig like an explosion. Passengers appeared from the lee of lifeboats. Officers on the bridge whirled to look at the man who shouted. Seamen paused in their labors to stare. Aloft in the crow's-nest the lookout lowered his eyes from scouring the horizon to stare at Prester Kleig--who was pointing. All eyes turned in the direction indicated. * * * * * Climbing into the sky, a mile off the starboard beam, was an airplane with a bulbous body and queerly slanted wings. It had neither wheels nor pontoons, and it traveled with unbelievable speed. It came on bullet-fast, headed directly for the side of the _Stellar_. "Lower the boats!" yelled Kleig. "Lower the boats! For God's sake lower the boats!" For Prester Kleig, in that casual turning, had seen what none aboard the _Stellar_, even the lookout above, had seen. The airplane, which had neither wheels nor pontoons, had risen, as Aphrodite is said to have risen, out of the waves! He had seen the wings come out of the bulbous body, snap backward into place, and the plane was in full flight the instant it appeared. Prester Kleig had no hope that his warning would be in time, but he would always feel better for having given it. As the captain debated with himself as to whether this lunatic should be confined as dangerous, the strange airplane nosed over and dived down to the sea, a hundred yards from the side of the _Stellar_. Just before it struck the water, its wings snapped forward and became part of the bulbous body of the thing, the whole of which shot like a bullet into the sea. * * * * * Prester Kleig stood at the rail, peering out at the spot where the plane had plunged in with scarcely a splash, and his right hand was raised as though he gave a final, despairing signal. Of all aboard the _Stellar_, he only saw that black streak which, ten feet under water, raced like a bolt of lightning from the nose of the submerged but visible plane, straight as a die for the side of the _Stellar_. Just a black streak, no bigger than a small man's arm, from the nose of the plane to the side of the _Stellar_. From the crow's-nest came the startled, terrific voice of the lookout, in the beginning of a cry that must remain forever inarticulate. The world, in that blinding moment, seemed to rock on its foundations; to shatter itself to bits in a chaotic jumble of sound and of movement, shot through and through with lurid flames. Kleig felt himself hurled upward and outward, turned over and over endlessly.... He felt the storm-tossed waters close over him, and knew he had struck. In the moment he knew--oblivion, deep, ebon and impenetrable, blotted out knowledge. CHAPTER II _The Half-Dream_ A roaring, rushing river of chaotic sound, first. Jumbled sound to which Prester Kleig could give no adequate name. But as he tried to analyze its meanings, he was able to differentiate between sounds, and to discover the identity of some. The river of sound he decided to be the sound of a vibrational explosion of some sort--vibrational because it had that quivery quality which causes a feeling of uneasiness and fret, that feeling which makes one turn and look around to find the eyes boring into one's back--yet multiplied in its intensity an uncounted number of times. Other sounds which came through the chaotic river of sound were the terrified screaming of the men and women who were doomed. Lifeboats were never lowered, for the reason that with the disintegration of the _Stellar_, everything inanimate aboard her likewise disintegrated, dropping men and women, crew and passengers, into the freezing waters of the Atlantic. Prester Kleig dropped with them, only partially unconscious after the first icy plunge. He knew when he floated on the surface, for he felt himself lifted and hurled by the waves. In his half-dream he saw men and women being carried away into wave-shrouded darkness, clawing wildly at nothingness for support, clawing at one another, locking arms, and going down together. * * * * * The _Stellar_, in the merest matter of seconds, had become spoil of the sea, and her crew and passengers had vanished forever from the sight of men. Yet Prester Kleig lived on, knew that he lived on, and that there was an element, too strong to be disbelieved, of reality in his dream. There was a vibratory sense, too, as of the near activity of a noiseless motor. Noiseless motor! Where had he last thought of those two words? With what recent catastrophe were they associated? No, he could not recall, though he knew he should be able to do so. Then the sense of motion to the front was apparent--an unnumbered sense, rather than concrete feeling. Motion to front, influenced by the rising and falling motion of mountainous waves. So suddenly as to be a distinct shock, the wave motion ceased, though the forward motion--and _upward!_--not only continued but increased. That airplane of the bulbous body, the queerly slanted wings.... But the glimmering of realization vanished as a sickishly sweet odor assailed his nostrils and sent its swift-moving tentacles upward to wrap themself soothingly about his brain. But the sense of flight, unbelievably swift, was present and recognizable, though all else eluded him. He had the impression, however, that it was intended that all save the most vagrant, most widely differentiated, impressions elude him--that he should acquire only half pictures, which would therefore be all the more terrible in retrospect. The only impressions which were real were those of motion to the front, and upward, and the sense of noiseless machinery, vibrating the whole, nearby. Then a distinct realization of the cessation of the sense of flying, and a return, though in lesser degree, of the rising and falling of waves. This latter sensation became less and less, though the feeling of traveling downward continued. Prester Kleig knew that he was going down into the sea again, down into it deeply.... Then that odor once more, and the elusive memory. Forward motion at last, in the depths, swift, forward motion, though Prester Kleig could not even guess at the direction. Just swift motion, and the mutter of voices, the giving of orders.... * * * * * Prester Kleig regained consciousness fully on the sands of the shore. He sat up stiffly, staring out to sea. A storm was raging, and the sea was an angry waste. No ship showed on the waters; the mad, tumbled sky above it was either empty of planes or they had climbed to invisibility above the clouds that raced and churned with the storm. Out of the storm, almost at Prester Kleig's feet, dropped a small airplane. Through the window a familiar face peered at Kleig. A helmeted, begoggled figure opened the door and stepped out. "Kleig, old man," said the flyer, "you gave me the right dope all right, but I'll swear there isn't a wireless tower within a hundred miles of this place! How did you manage it?" "Kane, you're crazy, or I am, or...." But Prester Kleig could not go on with the thought which had rushed through his brain with the numbing impact of a blow. He grasped the hand of Carlos Kane, of the Domestic Service, and the yellow flimsy Kane held out to him. It read simply: "Shipwrecked. Am ashore at--" There followed grid coordinate map readings. "Come at once, prepared to fly me to Washington." It was signed "Kleig." "Kane," said Kleig, "I did not send this message!" What more was there to be said? Horror looked out of the eyes of Prester Kleig, and was reflected in those of Carlos Kane. Both men turned, peering out across the tumbled welter of waters. Somewhere out there, tight-locked in the gloomy archives of the Atlantic, was the secret of the message which had brought Carlos Kane to Prester Kleig--and the agency which had sent it. CHAPTER III _Wings of To-morrow_ As Prester Kleig climbed into the enclosed passenger pit of the monoplane--a Mayther--his ears seemed literally to be ringing with the drumming, mighty voice of Moyen. But now that voice, instead of merely speaking, rang with sardonic laughter. He had never heard the laughter of Moyen, but he could guess how it would sound. That airplane of the slanted wings, the bulbous, almost bulletlike fuselage, what of it? It was simple, as Kleig looked back at his memoried glimpse of it. The submarine was a metal fish made with human hands; the airplane aped the birds. The strange ship which had caused the destruction of the _Stellar_, was a combination fish and bird--which merely aped nature a bit further, as anyone who had ever traversed tropical waters would have instantly recognized. But what did it portend? What ghastly terrors of Moyen roamed the deeps of the Atlantic, of the Pacific, the oceans of the world? How close were some of these to the United States? The pale eyes of Moyen, he was sure, were already turned toward the West. * * * * * Prester Kleig sighed as he seated himself beside Carlos Kane. Then Kane pressed one of the myriad of buttons on the dash, and Kleig lifted his eyes to peer through the skylight, to where that single press of a button had set in motion the intricate machinery of the helicopter. A four-bladed fan lifted on a slender pedestal, sufficiently high above the surface of the wing for the vanes to be free of the central propeller. Then, automatically, the vanes became invisible, and the Mayther lifted from the sandy beach as lightly, and far more straightly, than any bird. As the ship climbed away for the skies, and through the transparent floor the beach and the Atlantic fell away below the ship, a sigh of relief escaped Kleig. This was living! Up here one was free, if only for a moment, and the swift wind of flight brushed all cobwebs from the tired human brain. He watched the slender needle of the altimeter, as it moved around the face of the dial as steadily as the hands of a clock, around to thirty thousand, thirty-five, forty. Then Carlos Kane, every movement as effortless as the flight of the silvery winged Mayther, thrust forth his hand to the dash again, pressed another button. Instantly the propellers vanished into a blur as the vanes of the helicopter dropped down the slender staff and the vanes themselves fitted snugly into their appointed notches atop the wing. * * * * * For a second Carlos Kane glanced at the tiny map to the right of the dash, and set his course. It was a matter of moments only, but while Kane worked, Prester Kleig studied the instruments on the dash, for it had been months since he had flown, save for his recent half-dreamlike experience. There was a button which released the mechanism of the deadly guns, fired by compressed air, all operated from the noiseless motor, whose muzzles exactly cleared the tips of Mayther's wings, two guns to each wing, one on the entering edge, one on the trailing edge, fitted snugly into the adamant rigging. Four guns which could fire to right or left, twin streams of lead, the number of rounds governed only by the carrying power of the Mayther. Prester Kleig knew them all: the guns in the wings, the guns which fired through the three propellers, and the guns set two and two in the fuselage, to right and left of the pits, which could be fixed either up or down--all by the mere pressing of buttons. It was marvelous, miraculous, yet even as Kleig told himself that this was so, he felt, deep in the heart of him, that Moyen knew all about ships like these, and regarded them as the toys of children. Kane touched Kleig on the shoulder, signaling, indicating that the atmosphere in the pits had been regulated to their new height, and that they could remove their helmets and oxygen tanks without danger. * * * * * With a sigh Prester Kleig sat back, and the two friends turned to face each other. "You certainly look done in, Kleig," said Kane sympathetically. "You must have been through hell, and then some. Tell me about this Moyen; that is, if you think you care to talk about him." "Talk about him!" repeated Kleig. "Talk about him? It will be a relief! There has been nothing, and nobody, on my mind save Moyen for weary months on end. If I don't talk to someone about him, I'll go mad, if I'm not mad already. Moyen? A monster with the face of an angel! What else can one say about him? A devil and a saint, a brute whose followers would go with him into hell's fire, and sing him hosannas as they were consumed in agony! The greatest mob psychologist the world has ever seen. He's a genius, Kane, and unless something is done, the Western world, all the world, is doomed to sit at the feet, listen to the commands, of Moyen! "He isn't an Oriental; he isn't a European; he isn't negroid or Indian; but there is something about him that makes one thing of all of these, singly and collectively. His body is twisted and grotesque, and when one looks at his face, one feels a desire to touch him, to swear eternal fealty to him--until one looks into his pale eyes, eyes almost milky in their paleness--and gets the merest hint of the thoughts which actuate him. If he has a failing I did not find it. He does not drink, gamble...." "And women?" queried Kane, softly. * * * * * Kleig was madly in love with the sister of Kane, Charmion, and this thing touched him nearest the heart, because Charmion was one of her country's most famous beauties, about whom Moyen must already have heard. "Women?" repeated Kleig musingly, his black eyes troubled, haunted. "I scarcely know. He has no love for women, only because he has no capacity for any love save self-love. But when I think of him in this connection I seem to see Moyen, grown to monster proportions, sitting on a mighty throne, with nude women groveling at his feet, bathed in tears, their long hair in mantles of sorrow, hiding their shamed faces! That sounds wild, doesn't it? But it's the picture I get of Moyen when I think of Moyen and of women. Many women will love him, and have, perhaps. But while he has taken many, though I am only guessing here, he has given _himself_ to none. Another thing: His followers--well, he sets no limits to the lusts of his men, requiring only that every soldier be fit for duty, with a body strong for hardship. You understand?" Kane understood; and his face was very pale. "Yes," he said, his voice almost a whisper, "I understand, and as you speak of this man I seem to see a city in ruins, and hordes of men marching, bloodstained men entering houses ... from which, immediately afterward, come the screams of women ... terror-stricken women...." He shuddered and could not go on for the very horror of the vision that had come to him. But Kleig stared at him as though he saw a ghost. "Great God, Carl!" he gasped. "The same identical picture has been in my mind, not once but a thousand times! I wonder...." Was it an omen of the future for the West? Deep in his soul Prester Kleig fancied he could hear the sardonic laughter of the half-god, Moyen. * * * * * A tiny bell rang inside the dash, behind the instruments. Kane had set direction finders, had pressed the button which signaled the Washington-control Station of the National Radio, thus automatically indicating the exact spot above land, by grid-coordinates, where the Mayther should start down for the landing. An hour later they landed on the flat roof of the new Capitol Building, sinking lightly to rest as a feather, nursed to a gentle landing by the whirring vanes of the helicopter. Prester Kleig, surrounded by uniformed guards who tried to shield him from the gaze of news-gatherers crowded there on the roof-top, hurried him to the stairway leading into the executive chambers, and through these to the Secret Chamber which only a few men knew, and into which not even Carlos Kane could follow Prester Kleig--yet. But one man, one news-gatherer, had caught a glimpse of the face of Kleig, and already he raced for the radio tower of his organization, to blazon to the Western world the fact that Kleig had come back. CHAPTER IV _A Nation Waits in Dread_ As Prester Kleig, looking twice his forty years because of fatigue, and almost nameless terrors through which he had passed, went to his rendezvous, the news-gatherer, who shall here remain nameless, raced for the Broadcasting Tower. As Prester Kleig entered the Secret Room and at a signal all the many doors behind him, along that interminable stairway, swung shut and were tightly locked, the news-gatherer raced for the microphone and gave the "priority" signal to the operator. Millions of people would not only hear the words of the news-gatherer, but would see him, note the expressions which chased one another across his face. For television was long since an accomplished, everyday fact. "Prester Kleig, of this government's Secret Service, has just returned to the United Americas! Your informer has just seen him step from the monoplane of Carlos Kane, atop the Capitol Building, and repair at once to the Secret Room, closely guarded. But I saw his face, and though he is under forty, he seems twice that. And you know now what this country has only guessed at before--that he has seen Moyen. Moyen the half-man, half-god, the enigma of the ages. What does Prester Kleig think of this man? He doesn't say, for he dares not speak, yet. But your informer saw his face, and it is old and twisted with terror! And--" * * * * * That ended the discourse of the news-gatherer, and it was many hours before the public really understood. For, with a new sentence but half completed, the picture of the news-gatherer faded blackly off the screens in a million homes, and his voice was blotted out by a humming that mounted to a terrific appalling shriek! Some terrible agency, about which people who knew their radio could only guess, had drowned out the words of the news-gatherer, leaving the public stunned and bewildered, almost groping before a feeling of terror which was all the more unbearable because none could give it a name. And the public had heard but a fraction of the truth--merely that Kleig had come back. It had been the intention of the government to deny the public even this knowledge, and it had; but knowledge of the denial itself was public property, which filled the hearts of men and women all through the Western Hemisphere with nameless dread. And over all this abode of countless millions hovered the shadow of Moyen. The government tried to correct the impression which the news-gatherer had given out. "Prester Kleig is back," said the radio, while the government speaker tried, for the benefit of those who could see him, to smile reassuringly. "But there is nothing to cause anyone the slightest concern. He has seen Moyen, yes, and has heard him speak, but still there is nothing to distress anyone, and the whole story will be given to you as soon as possible. Kleig has gone into the Secret Room, yes, but every operative of the government, when discussing business connected with diplomatic relations with foreign powers, is received in the Secret Room. No cause for worry!" * * * * * It was so easy to say that, and the speaker realized it, which was why he could but with difficulty make his smile seem reassuring. "Tell us the truth, and tell us quickly," might have been the voiceless cries of those who listened and saw the face and fidgeting form of the speaker. But the words were not spoken, because the people sensed a hovering horror, a dread catastrophe beyond the power of words to express--and so looked at one another in silence, their eyes wide with dread, their hearts throbbing to suffocation with nameless foreboding. So eyes were horror-haunted, and men walked, flew, and rode in fear and trembling--while, down in the Secret Room, Prester Kleig and a dozen old men, men wise in the ways of science and invention, wise in the ways of men and of beasts, of Nature and the Infinite Outside, decided the fate of the Nation. That Secret Room was closed to every one. Not even the news-gatherers could reach it; not even the all-seeing eye of the telephotograph emblazoned to the world its secrets. But _was_ it secret? Perhaps Moyen, the master mobster, smiled when he heard men say so, men who knew in their hearts that Moyen regarded other earthlings as earthlings regard children and their toys. Did the eyes of Moyen gaze even into the depths of the Secret Room, hundreds of feet below even the documentary-treasure vaults of the Capitol? * * * * * No one knew the answer to the question, but the radio, reporting the return of Kleig, had given the public a distorted vision of an embodied fear, and in its heart the public answered "Yes!" And what had drowned out the voice of the radio-reporter? No wonder that, for many hours, a nation waited in fear and trembling, eyes filled with dread that was nameless and absolute, for word from the Secret Room. Fear mounted and mounted as the hours passed and no word came. In that room Prester Kleig and the twelve old men, one of whom was the country's President, held counsel with the man who had come back. But before the spoken counsel had been held, awesome and awe-inspiring pictures had flashed across the screen, invented by a third of the old men, from which the world held no secrets, even the secrets of Moyen. With this mechanism, guarded at forfeit of the lives of a score of men, the men of the Secret Room could peer into even the most secret places of the world. The old men had peered, and had seen things which had blanched their pale cheeks anew. And when they had finished, and the terrible pictures had faded out, a voice had spoken suddenly, like an explosion, in the Secret Room. "Well, gentlemen, are you satisfied that resistance is futile?" Just the voice; but to one man in the Secret Room, and to the others when his numbing lips spoke the name, it was far more than enough. For not even the wisest of the great men could explain how, as they knew, having just seen him there, a man could be in Madagascar while his voice spoke aloud in the Secret Room, where even radio was barred! The name on the lips of Prester Kleig! "Moyen! Moyen!" CHAPTER V _Monsters of the Deep_ "Gentlemen," said Prester Kleig as he entered the Secret Room, where sat the scientists and inventive geniuses of the Americas, "we haven't much time, and I shall waste but little of it. Moyen is ready to strike, if he hasn't already done so, as I believe. We will see in a matter of seconds. Professor Maniel, we shall need, first of all, your apparatus for returning the vibratory images of events which have transpired within the last thirty-six hours. "I wish to show those of you who failed to see it the sinking of the _Stellar_, on which I was a passenger and, I believe, the only survivor." Professor Maniel strangely mouse-like save for the ponderous dome of his forehead, stepped away from the circular table without a word. He had invented the machine in question, and he was inordinately proud of it. Through its use he could pick up the sounds, and the pictures, of events which had transpired down the past centuries, from the tinkling of the cymbals of Miriam to all the horror of the conflict men had called the Great War, simply by drawing back from the ether, as the sounds fled outward through space, those sounds and vibrations which he needed. His science was an exact one, more carefully exact even than the measurement of the speed of light, taking into consideration the dispersion of sound and movement, and the element of time. The interior of the Secret Room became dark as Maniel labored with his minute machinery. Only behind the screen on the wall in rear of the table was there light. * * * * * The voice of Maniel began to drone as he thought aloud. "There is a matter of but a few minutes difference in time between Washington and the last recorded location of the _Stellar_. The sinking occurred at ten-thirty last evening you say, Kleig? Ah, yes, I have it! Watch carefully, gentlemen!" So silent were the Secret Agents one could not even have heard the breathing of one of them, for on the screen, misty at first, but becoming moment by moment bolder of outline, was the face of a storm-tossed sea. The liner was slower in forming, and was slightly out of focus for a second or two. "Ah," said Professor Maniel. "There it is!" Through the sound apparatus came the roaring and moaning of a storm at sea. On the screen the _Stellar_ rose high on the waves, dropped into the trough, while spumes of black smoke spread rearward on the waters from her spouting funnels. Figures were visible on her decks, figures which seemed carved in bronze. In the prow, every expression on his face plainly visible, stood Prester Kleig himself, and as his picture appeared he was in the act of turning. "Now," said Kleig himself, there in the Secret Room, "look off to the left, gentlemen, a mile from the _Stellar_!" A rustling sound as the scientists shifted in their places. * * * * * They all saw it, and a gasp burst from their lips as though at a signal. For, as the _Stellar_ seemed about to plunge off the shadowed screen into the Secret Room, a flying thing had risen out of the sea--an airplane with a bulbous body and queerly slanting wings. At the same time, out of the mouth of the pictured figure of Prester Kleig, clear and agonized as the tones of a bell struck in frenzy, the words: "Great God! Lower the boats! Lower the boats! For God's sake lower the boats!" In the Secret Room the real Prester Kleig spoke again. "When the black streak leaves the nose of the plane, after it has submerged, Professor Maniel," said Kleig softly, "slow your mechanism so that we can see the whole thing in detail." There came a grunted affirmative from Professor Maniel. The nose of the pictured plane tilted over, diving down for the surface of the sea. "Now!" snapped Kleig. "Don't wait!" Instantly the moving pictures on the screen reduced their speed, and the plane appeared to stop its sudden seaward plunge and to drop down as lightly as a feather. The wings of the thing moved forward slowly, folding into the body of the dropping plane. "They fold forward," said Kleig quietly, "so that the speed of the plane in the take-off will snap them _backward_ into position for flying!" * * * * * No one spoke, because the explanation was so obvious. Slowly the airplane went down to the surface of the sea, with scarcely a plume of spindrift leaping back after she had struck. She dropped to ten feet below the surface of the water, a hundred yards off the starboard beam of the _Stellar_, her blunt nose pointing squarely at the side of the doomed liner. "Now," said Kleig hoarsely, "watch closely, for God's sake!" The liner rose and fell slowly. Out of the nose of the plane, which had now become a tiny submarine, started a narrow tube of black, oddly like the sepia of a giant squid. Straight toward the side of the liner it went. Above the rail the Secret Agents could see the pictured form of Prester Kleig, hand upraised. The black streak reached the side of the _Stellar_. It touched the metal plates, spreading upon impact, growing, enlarging, to right and left, upward and downward, and where it touched the _Stellar_ the black of it seemed to erase that portion of the ship. In the slow motion every detail was apparent. At regular speed the blotting out of the _Stellar_ would have been instantaneous. Kleig saw himself rise slowly from the vanished rail, turning over and over, going down to the sea. He almost closed his eyes, bit his lips to keep back the cries of terror when he saw the others aboard the liner rise, turn over and over, and fly in all directions like jackstraws in a high wind. * * * * * The ship was erased from beneath passengers and crew, and passengers and crew fell into the sea. Out of the depths, from all directions, came the starving denizens of the sea--starving because liners now were so few. "That's enough of that, Professor," snapped Kleig. "Now jump ahead approximately eight hours, and see if you can pick up that aero-sub after it dropped me on the Jersey Coast." The picture faded out quickly, the screaming of doomed human beings, already hours dead, called back to apparent living by the genius of Maniel died away, and for a space the screen was blank. Then, the sea again, storm-tossed as before, shifting here and there as Maniel sought in the immensity of sea and sky for the thing he desired. "Two hundred miles south by east of New York City," he droned. "There it is, gentlemen!" They all saw it then, in full flight, eight thousand feet above the surface of the Atlantic, traveling south by east at a dizzy rate of speed. "Note," said Kleig, "that it keeps safely to the low altitudes, in order to escape the notice of regular air traffic." No one answered. The eyes of the Secret Agents were on that flashing, bulbous-bodied plane of the strange wings. It appeared to be heading directly for some objective which must be reached at top speed. * * * * * For fifteen minutes the flight continued. Then the plane tilted over and dived, and at an altitude still of three thousand feet, the wings slashed forward, clicking into their notches in the sides of the bulbous body, with a sound like the ratchets on subway turnstiles, and, holding their breath, the Secret Agents watched it plummet down to the sea. It was traveling with terrific speed when it struck, yet it entered the water with scarcely a splash. Then, for the first time, an audible gasp, as that of one person, came from the lips of the Secret Agents. For now they could see the objective of the aero-sub. A monster shadow in the water, at a depth of five hundred feet. A shadow which, as Maniel manipulated his instruments, became a floating underwater fortress, ten times the size of any submarine known to the Americas. Sporting like porpoises about this held-in-suspension fortress were myriads of other aero-subs, maneuvering by squadrons and flights, weaving in and out like schools of fish. The plane which had bourne Prester Kleig churned in between two of the formations, and vanished into the side of the motionless monster of the deep. The striking of a deep sea bell, muted by tons and tons of water, sounded in the Secret Room. "Don't turn it off, Maniel," said Kleig. "There's more yet!" And there was, for the sound of the bell was a signal. The aero-subs, darting outward from the side of the floating fortress like fish darting out of seaweed, were plunging up toward the surface of the Atlantic. Breathlessly the Secret Agents watched them. They broke water like flying fish, and their wings shot backward from their notches in the myriad bulbous bodies to click into place in flying position as the scores of aero-subs took the air above the invisible hiding places of the mother submarine. * * * * * At eight thousand feet the aero-subs swung into battle formation and, as though controlled by word of command, they maneuvered there like one vast machine of a central control--beautiful as the flight of swallows, deadly as anything that flew. The Secret Agents swept the cold sweat from their brows, and sighs of terror escaped them all. At that moment came the voice, loud in the Secret Room, which Kleig at least immediately recognized: "Well, gentlemen, are you satisfied that resistance is futile?" And Kleig whispered the name, over and over again. "Moyen! Moyen!" It was Prester Kleig, Master of the Secret Room, who was the first to regain control after the nerve-numbing question which, asked in far Madagascar, was heard by the Agents in the Secret Room. "No!" he shouted. "No! No! Moyen, in the end we will beat you!" Only silence answered, but deep in the heart of Prester Kleig sounded a burst of sardonic laughter--the laughter of Moyen, half-god of Asia. Then the voice again: "The attack is beginning, gentlemen! Within an hour you will have further evidence of the might of Moyen!" CHAPTER VI _Vanishing Ships_ Prester Kleig, ordered to Madagascar from the Secret Room, had been merely an operative, honored above others in that he had been one of the few, at that time, ever to visit the Secret Room. Now, however, because he had walked closer to Moyen than anyone else, he assumed leadership almost by natural right, and the men who had once deferred to him took orders from him. "Gentlemen," he snapped, while the last words of Moyen still hung in the air of the Secret Room, "we must fight Moyen from here. The best brains in the United Americas are gathered here, and if Moyen can be beaten--_if_ he can be beaten--he will be beaten from the Secret Room!" A sigh from the lips of Professor Maniel. The President of the United Americas nodded his head, as though he too mutely gave authority into the hands of Prester Kleig. The other Secret Agents shifted slightly, but said nothing. "I have been away a year," said Kleig, "as you know, and many things have come into regular use since I left. Professor Maniel's machine for example, upon which he was working when I departed under orders. There will be further use for it in our struggle with Moyen. Professor, will you kindly range the ocean, beginning at once, and see how many of these monsters of Moyen we have to contend with?" * * * * * Professor Maniel turned back to his instruments, which he fondled with gentle, loving hands. "We have nothing with which to combat the attacking forces of Moyen," went on Kleig, "save antiquated airplanes, and such obsolete warships as are available. These will be mere fodder for the guns, or rays, or whatever it is that Moyen uses in his aero-subs. Thousands, perhaps millions, of human lives will be lost; but better this than that Moyen rule the West! Better this than that our women be given into the hands of this mob as spoils of war!" From the Secret Agents a murmur of assent. And then, that voice again, startling, clear, with the slightest suggestion of some Oriental accent, in the Secret Room. "Do not depend too much, gentlemen," it said, "upon your antiquated warships! See, I am merciful, in that I do not allow you to send them against me loaded with men to be slaughtered or drowned! Professor Maniel, I would ask you to turn that plaything of yours and gaze upon the fleet of obsolete ships anchored in Hampton Roads! In passing, Professor, I venture to guess that the secret of how I am able to talk with you gentlemen, here in your Secret Room, is no secret at all to you. Now look!" The Secret Agents gasped again, in consternation. From the white lips of mouselike Maniel came mumbled words, even as his hands worked with lightning speed. "His machine is simply a variation of my own. And, gentlemen, compatriots, with it he could as easily project himself, bodily, here into the room with us!" * * * * * Something like a suppressed scream from one of the men present. A cold hand of ice about the heart of Prester Kleig. But the words of Professor Maniel were limned on the retina of his brain in letters of fire. Suppose Moyen _were_ to project himself into the Secret Room.... But he would not. He was no fool, and even these Secret Agents, most of whom were old and no longer strong, would have torn him limb from limb. But those words of Maniel set whirling once more, and in a new direction, the thoughts of Prester Kleig. "Mr. President, gentlemen...." It was the voice of Professor Maniel. All eyes turned again to the screen upon which the professor worked his miracles, which today were commonplaces, which yesterday had been undreamed of. Every Secret Agent recognized the outlines of Hampton Roads, with Norfolk and its towering buildings in the background, and the obsolete warships riding silently at anchor in the roadstead. For three years they had been there, while a procrastinating Cabinet, Congress and Senate had debated their permanent disposal. They represented millions of dollars in money, and were utterly worthless. Prester Kleig, looking at them now, could see them putting out to sea, loaded with brave-visaged men, volunteering to go to sure destruction to feed the rapacity of Moyen's hordes. Men going out to sea in tubs, singing.... But these ships were silent. No plumes of smoke from their funnels. Like floating mausoleums, filled with dead hopes, shells of past and departed glories. The beating of waves against their sides could plainly be heard. The anchor chains squeaked rustily in the hawse-holes. Wind sighed through regal, towering superstructures, and no man walked the decks of any one of them. * * * * * With bated breath the Secret Agents watched. Why had Moyen bidden them turn their attention to these shells of erstwhile naval grandeur? This time no gasps broke from the lips of the Secret Agents. Not even the sound of breathing could be heard. Just the sighing of wind through the superstructures of a hundred ships, the whispering of waves against rusted bulkheads. Almost imperceptibly at first the towering dreadnought in the foreground began to move! Slowly, the water swirling about her, she backed away from her anchor, tightening the curve of the anchor chain! Water quivered about the point of the chain's contact with the waves! Quickly the eyes of the Secret Agents swept along the street of ships. The same backward motion, of dragging against their anchor chains, was visible at the bow of each warship! With not a soul aboard them, the ships were waking into strange and awesome life, dragging at their anchors, like hounds pulling at leashes to be free and away! "How are they doing it?" It was almost a whisper from the President. "Some electro-magnetic force, sir!" stated Prester Kleig. "Professor Blaine, that is your province! Please note what is happening, and advise us at once if you see how they are doing it!" A grunt of affirmation from surly, obese Professor Blaine. * * * * * All eyes turned back again to the miracle of the moving ships. One by one, with crashes which echoed and re-echoed through the Secret Room, the anchor chains of the dreadnoughts parted. The ends of them swung from the prows of the warships, while the severed portions splashed into the Roads, and the waters hid them from view. The great dreadnought in the foreground swung slowly about until her prow was pointed in the direction of the open sea, and though no sea was running, no smoke rose from her funnels, she got slowly, ponderously under way, and started out the Roads. Behind her, in formation, the other ships swung into line. In a matter of seconds, faster than any of these vessels had ever traveled before, they were racing in column for the open Atlantic. And from the sound apparatus came wails and shrieks of terror, the lamentations of men and women frightened as they had never been frightened before. The shores behind the moving column of ships was moment by moment growing blacker with people--a black sea of people, whose faces were white as chalk with terror. But on, out to sea, moved the column of brave ships. A new note entered into the picture, as from all sides airplanes of many makes swooped in, and swept back and forth over the moving ships, while hooded heads looked out of pits, and faces of pilots were aghast at what they saw. * * * * * A ghost column of ships, moving out to sea, speed increasing moment by moment unbelievably. Even now, five minutes after the first dreadnought had started seaward, the wake of each ship spread away on either hand in the two sides of a watery triangle whose walls were a dozen feet high--racing for the shores with all the sullen majesty of tidal waves. The crowds gave back, and their screams rose into the air in a frightened roar of appalling sound. Even now, so rapidly did the warships travel, many of the planes could throttle down, so that they flew directly above the heaving decks of the runaway warships. "Get word to them!" cried Prester Kleig suddenly. "Get word to them that if they follow the ships out to sea not a pilot will escape alive!" One of the Secret Agents rose and hurried from the Secret Room, traveling at top speed for the first of the many doors enroute to the broadcasting tower from which all the planes could be reached at once. Prester Kleig turned back to the magic screen of Maniel. The warships, water thrown aside by the lifting thrust of their forefeet in mountains that raced landward with ever-increasing fury, were clearing the Roads and swinging south by east, heading into the wastes of the Atlantic. As they cleared the land, and open water for unnumbered miles lay ahead, the speed of the mighty ships increased to a point where they rode as high on the water as racing launches, and the creaking and groaning of their rusty bolts and spars were a continual paean of protest in the sound apparatus accompanying the showing of the miracle on the screen. "They're heading straight for the spot where that super-submarine lies!" said the President, and no one answered him. * * * * * Prester Kleig, watching, was racing over in his mind what he could recall of his country's armament. Warships were useless, as was being proved here before his eyes. But there still remained airplanes, in countless numbers, which could be diverted from ocean travel and from routine business, to battle this menace of Moyen. But.... He shuddered as he pictured in his mind's eye the meeting of his country's flower of flying manhood with the monsters of Moyen. His eyes, as he thought, were watching the racing of those ocean greyhounds, out to sea. They were now out of sight of land, and still some of the planes followed them. A half hour passed, and then.... The American pilots, in obedience to the radio signals, turning back from this strange phenomenon of the ghost column of capital ships. Simultaneously, out of the sky dead ahead, dropped the first flight of Moyen's aero-subs. At the same moment the mysterious power which had dragged the ships to sea was withdrawn, and the warships, with no hands to guide them, swung whither they willed, and floated in as many directions as there were ships, under their forward momentum. There were a score of collisions, and some of the ships were in sinking condition even before the aero-subs began their labors. * * * * * The remaining ships floated high out of the water, because they carried no ballast, and from all sides the aero-subs of Moyen settled to the task of destruction--destruction which was simply a warning of what was to come: Moyen's manner of proving to the Americas the fact that he was all-powerful. "God, what fools!" cried Prester Kleig. The rearmost of the American aviators had looked back, had seen the first of the aero-subs drop down among the doomed ships. Instantly he turned out to sea again, signalling as he did so to the nearest other planes. And in spite of the radio warning a hundred planes answered that signal and swept back to investigate this new mystery. "They're going to death!" groaned the President. "Yes," said Kleig, softly, "but it saves us ordering others to death. Perhaps we may learn something of value as we watch them die!" CHAPTER VII _Golden Oblivion_ "This," said Prester Kleig, as coldly precise as a judge pronouncing sentence of death, "will precipitate the major engagement with Moyen's forces. The fools, to rush in like this, when they have been warned! But even so, they are magnificent!" The pilots of the aero-subs must instantly have noticed the return of the American pilots, for some of the aero-subs which had dropped to the ocean's surface rose again almost instantly, and swept into battle formation above the drifting hulks of the warships. The Americans were wary. They drew together like frightened chickens when a hawk hovers above them, and watched the activities of the aero-subs, every move of each one being at the same time visible and audible to the Secret Agents in the Capitol's Secret Room. The aero-subs which had submerged singled out their particular prey among the floating ships, and the Secret Agents, trying to see how each separate act of destruction was accomplished, watched the aero-sub in the foreground, which happened to be concentrating on the dreadnought which had led the ghost-march of the warships out to sea. * * * * * The aero-sub circled the swaying dreadnought as a shark circles a wreck, and through the walls of the aero-sub the watchers in the Secret Room could see the four-man crew of the thing. Grim faced men, men of the Orient they plainly were, coldly concentrating on the work in hand. Their faces were those of men who are merciless, even brutal, with neither heart nor compassion of any kind for weaker ones. One man maneuvered the aero-sub, while the other three concentrated on the apparatus in the nose of the hybrid vessel. "See," spoke Prester Kleig again, "if you can tell what manner of ray they use, and how it is projected. That's your province, General Munson!" From the particular Secret Agent named, who was expert for war in the membership of the Secret Room, came a short grunt of affirmation. A few murmured words. "I'll be able to tell more about it when I see how they operate when they are flying. That black streak under water ... well, I must see it out of the water, and then...." But here General Munson ended, for the aero-sub which they were especially watching had got into action against the dreadnought. The aero-sub was motionless and submerged just off the port bow of the dreadnought. The three men inside the aero-sub were working swiftly and efficiently with the complicated but minute machinery in the nose of their transport. "It can be controlled, then, this ray," said Munson, interrupting himself. "Watch!" * * * * * From the nose of the aero-sub leaped, like a streak of black lightning, that ebon agency of death. It struck the prow of the battleship--and the prow, as far aft as the well-deck, simply vanished from sight, disintegrated! It was as though it had never been, and for a second, so swiftly had it happened, the water of the ocean held the impression that portion of the warship had made--as an explosive leaves a crater in the soil of earth! Then a drumming roar as the sea rushed in to claim its own. The roaring, as of a Niagara, as the waters claimed the ship, rushing down passageways into the hold, possessing the warship with all the invincible, speedy might of the sea. Mingled with this roaring was the shivering, vibratory sound which Prester Kleig had experienced in his half-dream. The sound was so intense that it fairly rocked the Secret Room to its furthermost cranny. For a second the dreadnought, wounded to death, seemed to shudder, to hesitate, then to move backward as though wincing from her death blow. It was the pound of the inrushing waters which did it. Then up came the stern of the mighty ship, as she started her last long plunge into the depths. But attention had swung to another warship, on the starboard beam of which another aero-sub had taken up position. Again the ebon streak of death from her blunt nose, smashing in and through the warship, directly amidships, cutting her in twain as though the black streak had been a pair of shears, the warship a strip of tissue paper. Up went the prow and the stern of this one, and together, the water separating the two parts as it rushed into the gap, the broken warship went down to its final resting place. * * * * * Abruptly Professor Maniel swung back to the American planes which had come back to investigate the activities of the aero-subs, and on the screen, in the midst of the battle formation into which the pilots had swept to hurriedly, the Secret Agents could see the faces of those pilots.... White as chalk with fear, mouths open in gasping unbelief. One man, a pale-faced youth, was the first to recover. He stared around at his compatriots, and plainly through the sound apparatus in the Secret Room came his swift radio signals. "Attack! Who will follow me against these people?" His signals were very plain. So, too, were the answers of the other pilots, and the heart of Prester Kleig swelled with pride as he listened to the answering signals--and counted them, discovered that every last pilot there present elected to stay with this youngster, to avenge their country for this contemptuous insult which had been put upon her by the rape of Hampton Roads. Into swift formation they swept, and with these planes--all planes in use were required by franchise of operating companies to be equipped for the emergencies of war--swung into an echelon formation, the youthful pilot leading by mutual consent. They swept at full speed toward the warships, four of which had by this time been sent to destruction--one of which had appeared to vanish utterly in the space of a single heartbeat, so quickly that for a second or two the shape of its bilge, the bulge of its keel, was visible in the face of the deep--and openly challenged the aero-subs. * * * * * Muzzles of compressed air guns projected from the wing-tips of the planes. Buttons were pressed which elevated the muzzles of guns arranged to fire upward from either side the fighting pits, twin guns that were fired downward from the same central magazine--the only guns in use in the Americas which fired in opposite directions at the same time. But for a few moments the aero-subs refused combat. Their speed was terrific, dazzling. They eluded the thrusts, the dives and plunges of the American ships as easily as a swallow eludes the dive of a buzzard. It came to Prester Kleig, however, that the aero-subs were merely playing with the Americans; that when they elected to move, the planes would be blasted from the sky as easily as the warships were being erased from the surface of the Atlantic. One by one, as methodically as machines, the aero-sub pilots blasted the warships into nothingness. They had their orders, and they went about their performance with a rigidity of discipline which astounded the Secret Agents. They had been ordered to destroy the warships, and they were doing that first--would go on to completion of this task, no matter how many American planes buzzed about their ears. But one by one as the warships sank, the aero-subs which had either sunk or erased them made the surface and leaped into space with a snapping back of wings that was horribly businesslike as to sound, and climbed up to take part in the fight against the American planes, which must inevitably come. * * * * * The last warship, cut squarely in two from stem to stern along her center, as though split thus by a bolt of lightning, fell apart like pieces of cake, and splashed down, sinking away while the spume of her disintegration rolled back from her fallen sides in white-crested waves. "It exemplifies the policies of Moyen," said Prester Kleig, "for his conquest of the world is a conquest of destruction." The last aero-sub took to the sky, and the Americans rushed into battle with fine disregard for what they knew must be certain death. They were not fools, exactly, and they had seen, but not understood, the manner in which those gallant old hounds of the sea had been erased from existence. But in they went, plunging squarely into the heart of the aero-subs' leading formation, which formation consisted of three aero-subs, flying a wing and wing formation. The young American signaled with upraised hand, and the American pilots made their first move. Every plane started rolling, at dazzling speed, on the axis of its fuselage, while bullets spewed from the guns that fired through the propellers. Bullets smashed into the leading aero-subs, with no apparent effect, though for a second it seemed that the central aero-sub of the leading formation hesitated for a moment in flight. Then, swift as had that black streak flashed from the nose of aero-subs submerged, a streak darted from the nose of the central aero-sub, and glistened in the sun like molten gold! * * * * * It touched the youngster who had called for volunteers for his attack against this strange enemy. It touched his plane--and the plane vanished instantly, while for a fraction of a second the pilot was visible in his place, in the posture of sitting, hand on a row of buttons which did not exist, head forward slightly as he aimed guns that had vanished. Then the pilot, still living, apparently unhurt, plunged down eight thousand feet to the sea. The water geysered up as he struck, then closed over the spot, and the gallant American youngster had become the first victim in battle of the monsters of Moyen. Victim of a slender lancet of what seemed to be golden lightning. "He could have killed the pilot aloft there," came quietly from Munson, "but he chose to pull his plane away from around him! Their control of the ray is miraculous!" As though to confirm the statement of Munson, the leading aero-sub struck again, a second plane. The plane vanished, but from the spot where it had flown, not even a bit of metal or of man sufficiently large to be seen by the delicate recording instruments of Maniel dropped out of the sky. The ray of gold was a ray of oblivion if the minions of Moyen willed. CHAPTER VIII _Charmion_ "Prester Kleig," came suddenly into the Secret Room the voice of far distant Moyen, "you will at once make a change in your rules regarding the admission of other than Secret Agents to the Secret Room. You will at once see that Charmion Kane, sister of your friend, is allowed to enter!" "God Almighty!" A cry of agony from the lips of Prester Kleig. He had not forgotten Charmion, but simply had had to move so swiftly that he had put her out of his mind. For a year he had not seen her, and an hour or two more could not matter greatly. "And her brother Carlos," went on the voice, "see that he, too, is admitted. I wish, for certain reasons, that Charmion come unharmed through the direct attack I am about to make against your country. I confess that, save for this ability to speak to you, I am unable to work any damage to the Secret Room, which is therefore the safest place for Charmion Kane! Carlos Kane is being spared because he is her brother!" There was no mistaking the import of this sinister command from Moyen. He had singled out Charmion, the best beloved of Prester Kleig, for his attentions, and that he was sure of the success of his attack against the United Americas was proved by the calm assurance of his voice, and the fact that, concentrating on the attack as he must be, he still found time for a thought of Charmion Kane. * * * * * The hand of ice which had seldom been absent from the heart of Kleig since he had first seen and heard the voice of Moyen gripped him anew. Blood pounded maddeningly in his temples. Cold sweat bathed his body. But the rest of the Secret Agents, save to freeze into immobility when the hated voice spoke, gave no sign. They had worries of their own, for no instructions had been given that they bring their own loved ones into the sanctuary of the Secret Room. As though answering the thoughts of the others, the hated voice spoke again. "I regret that I cannot arrange for sanctuary for the loved ones of all of you, for you are gallant antagonists; why save the few, when the many must perish? For I know you will not surrender, however much I have proved to you that I am invincible. But Charmion Kane must be saved." "God!" whispered Kleig. "God!" Then spoke General Munson. "I think this ray which the Moyenites use is a variation of the principle used in the intricate machinery of Professor Maniel, though how they render it visible I do not know. But it doesn't matter, and may be only a blind! You'll note that when the black streak, or the golden ray, strikes anything that thing instantly disintegrates. A certain pitch of resonance will break a pane of glass. It's a matter of vibration, solely, wherein the molecules composing any object animate or inanimate, are hurled in all directions instantaneously. "Professor Maniel's apparatus, the Vibration-Retarder, is able to recapture the vibrations, speeding outward endlessly through space, and to reconstruct, and _draw back_ to visibility the objects destroyed by this visible vibratory ray, whatever it is. This problem, then, falls into the province of Professor Maniel!" * * * * * Through the heart and soul of Prester Kleig there suddenly flowed a great surge of hope. "General Munson, if you will operate the machinery of the Vibration-Retarder, I wish to talk with Professor Maniel!" Instantly, efficiently, without a word in reply to the eager command of Prester Kleig, General Munson relieved Professor Maniel at the apparatus which Maniel called the Vibration-Retarder, his invention which he had combined with audible teleview to complete this visual miracle of the Secret Room. Professor Maniel stepped to where Prester Kleig was sitting. Prester Kleig put fingers to his lips for silence, and an expression of surprise crossed the wrinkled dead-white face of the Professor. Before Kleig could speak, however, there came a signal from somewhere outside the Secret Room, a signal which said that the doors were being opened and that a personage was coming. The Secret Agents looked at one another in surprise, for every man who had a right to be inside the Secret Room was already present. "I know," said Kleig, his face a mask of terror. "It is Charmion and Carlos Kane! Moyen, the devil, has managed to make sure of obedience to his orders!" The Secret Agents turned back to the screen, upon which the view of the first aerial brush of the American flyers with the minions of Moyen, in their aero-subs, was drawing to a terrible close. For, as the aero-sub commanders had played with the warships, which had no human beings aboard them, so now did they play with the planes of the Americas. * * * * * One American flyer, startled into a frenzy by the fate of his fellows, put his helicopter into action, and leaped madly out of the midst of the battle. Instantly an aero-sub zoomed, skyward after him. Again that golden streak of light from the nose of an aero-sub, and the helicopter vanes and the slender staff upon whose tip they whirled vanished, shorn short off above the vane-grooves in the top of the wing! The plane dropped away, fluttering like a falling leaf for a moment, before the aviator started his three propellers again. A cheer broke from the lips of Prester Kleig as he watched. The commander of that particular aero-sub, apparently contemptuous of this flyer who had tried to cut out of the fight, allowed him to fall away unmolested--and the American, driven berserk by the casual, contemptuous treatment accorded him by this strange enemy, zoomed the second his propellers whirred into top-speed action, and raced up the sky toward the belly of the aero-sub. "If only the aero-sub has a blind spot!" cried Prester Kleig. * * * * * In that instant a roaring crash sounded in the Secret Room as the American plane, going full speed, crashed, propellers foremost, into the belly of the aero-sub. And the aero-sub, whose brothers had seemed until this moment invincible, did not escape the wrath of the American--though the American went into oblivion with it! For, welded together, American plane and aero-sub started the eight thousand feet plunge downward to the sea! "Watch!" shrieked Munson. "Watch!" As the aero-sub and the plane plunged down through the formation of fighters, the aero-sub pilots saw it, and they fled in wild dismay and at top speed from their falling compatriot. Why? For a moment it was not apparent. And then it was. For out of the body of the doomed aero-subs came sheets of golden flame! Not the flames of fire, but the golden sheen of that streak which the aero-subs had used against the American planes already out of the fight! The American flyer had crashed into the container, whatever it was, that harnessed the agency through which the minions of Moyen had destroyed the _Stellar_, and the battleships raped from Hampton Roads! "It is liquid, then!" shrieked Munson. And it seemed to be. For a second the golden mantle, strange, awe-inspiring, bathed and rendered invisible the aero-sub and the plane which had slain her. Then the golden flame vanished utterly, instantly--and in the air where it had been there was nothing! The aero-sub was gone, and the plane whose mad charge had erased her. "Her own death dealing agency destroyed her!" shrieked Munson. "And the other aero-subs cut away from the fight to save themselves, because they too carry death and destruction within them!" * * * * * Then the inner door of the Secret Room opened and two people entered. One of them, a dazzling beauty with glorious black hair and the tread of a princess, a picture of perfection from jeweled sandals to coiffured hair, was Charmion Kane. Behind her came her brother, whose face was chalky white. But Charmion, as she crossed to Kleig and kissed him, while her eyes were luminous with love, held her head proudly high, imperious. "I know," she said softly to Kleig, "and I am not afraid! I know you will prevent it!" Kleig waved the two to chairs and turned again to Professor Maniel. On a piece of paper he wrote swiftly, using a mode of shorthand known only to the Secret Agents. "Professor," he wrote feverishly, "can you reverse the process used in your Vibration-Retarder? Tell me with your eyes, for Moyen may even know this writing, and I am sure he hears what we say here, may even be able to see us?" Professor Maniel started and stared deeply into the eyes of Prester Kleig. His face grew thoughtful. He brushed his slender hand over the massive dome of his brow. Hope burned high in the heart of Prester Kleig. * * * * * Then, despite Kleig's instructions to answer merely by the expression in his eyes, Professor Maniel leaned forward and wrote quickly on the piece of paper Kleig had used. "Two hours!" Nothing else, no explanations; but Prester Kleig knew. Maniel believed he could do it, but he needed two hours in which to perfect his theory and make it workable. Kleig knew that had he been able to do it in two years, or two decades, it still would have been in the nature of a miracle. But two hours.... And Moyen had said that he was preparing to attack at once. In two hours Moyen, unless the Americas fought against him with every resource at their command, could depopulate half the Western World. Kleig looked back to the screen. There was not a single American plane in the sky above the graveyard of those vanished warships. And the aero-subs, swift flying as the wind, were racing back to the mother ship, scores of miles away. Munson worked with the Vibration-Retarder, the Sound-and-Vision devices, ranging the sea off the coast to either side of that huge, suspended fortress which was the mother submarine of the aero-subs. Gasps of terror, though the sight was not unexpected, broke from the lips of every person in the Secret Room. For super-monsters of Moyen were moving to the attack. CHAPTER IX _Flowers of Martyrdom_ For a minute the Secret Agents were appalled by the air of might of the deep-sea monsters of Moyen, brought bodily, almost into the Secret Room by the activities of General Munson at the Sound-and-Vision apparatus. Off the coast, miles away, yet looming moment by moment larger, indicating the deceptively swift speed of the monsters, were scores of the great under-water fortresses, traveling toward the coast of the United Americas in a far-flung formation, each submarine separated from its neighbor to right and left by something like a hundred miles, easy cruising radius for the little aero-subs carried inside the monsters. That each submarine did carry such spawn of Satan was plainly seen, for as the great submarines moved landward, scores of aero-subs sported gleefully about the mother ships. There was no counting the number of them. Two hours Maniel needed for his labors, which meant that for two hours the flower of the country's manhood must try to hold in check the mighty hordes of Moyen. "Somewhere there," stated Prester Kleig, "in one or the other of those monsters, is Moyen himself. I know that since he wished Charmion saved for his attentions! Do your work with your apparatus, Munson, while I go out to the radio tower to broadcast an appeal for volunteers. Charmion--Carlos...." But Prester Kleig found that he could not continue. Not that it was necessary, for Charmion and Carlos knew what was in his mind. Charmion was a lady of vast intelligence, from whom life's little ironies had not been hidden--and Kane and Kleig had already discussed the activities of Moyen where women were concerned. * * * * * Prester Kleig hurried to the Central Radio Tower, and as he passed through each of the many doors leading out to the roof of the new Capitol Building the guards at the doors left to form a guard for him, at this moment the most precious man in the country, because he knew best the terrible trials which faced her. The country was in turmoil. It seemed almost impossible that a whole day had passed since Prester Kleig had returned and entered the Secret Room. In the meantime a fleet of battleships had been drawn by some mysterious agency out to sea from Hampton Roads, and a fleet of fighting planes which had followed the ghost column outward had not returned. News-gatherers had spread the stories, distorted and garbled, across the western continents, and throughout the western confederacy men, women and children lived in the throes of the greatest fear that had ever gripped them. Fear held them most because they could not give the cause of their fear a name--save one.... Moyen.... And the name was on the lips of everyone, and frenzied woman stilled their squalling babes with its mention. No word yet from the Secret Room, but Prester Kleig had scarcely appeared from it than someone started the radio signal which informed the frenzied, waiting world of the west that information, exact if startling, would now be forthcoming. In millions of homes, in thousands of high-flying planes, listeners tuned in at the clear-all hum. * * * * * Prester Kleig wasted no time in preliminaries. "Prester Kleig speaking. We are threatened by Moyen, with scores of monster submarines, each a mother ship for scores of aero-subs, combinations of airplanes and miniature submarines. They are moving up on our eastern coast, from some secret base which we have not yet located. They are equipped with death dealing instruments of which we have but the most fragmentary knowledge, and for two hours I must call upon all flyers to combat the menace; until the Secret Agents, especially Professor Maniel, have had opportunity to counteract the minions of Moyen. "Flyers of the United Americas! In the name of our country I ask that volunteers gather on the eastern coast, each flyer proceeding at once to the nearest coast-landing, after dropping all passengers. Your commanders have already been named by your various organizations, as required by franchise, and orders for the movement of the entire winged armada will come from this station. However, the orders will simply be this: Hold Moyen's forces at bay for a period of two hours! And know that many of you go to certain death, and make your own decisions as to whether you shall volunteer!" This ended, Prester Kleig, excitement mounting high, hurried back to the Secret Room. Now the public knew, and as the American public is given to doing, it steadied down when it knew the worst. Fear of the unknown had changed the public into a myriad-souled beast gone berserk. Now that knowledge was exact men grew calm of face, determined, and women assumed the supporting role which down the ages has been that of brave women, mothers of men. * * * * * A period of silence for a time after Prester Kleig's pronouncement. As he entered the first door leading into the Secret Room, Carlos Kane met and passed him with a smile. "You called for winged volunteers, did you not, Kleig?" he asked quietly. Kleig nodded. "You are going?" he said. "Yes. It is my duty." No other words were necessary, as the men shook hands. Prester Kleig going on to the Secret Room, Carlos Kane going out to join the mighty armada which must fight against the minions of Moyen. The words of Prester Kleig were heard by the pilots of the sky-lanes. The passenger pits, equipped with self-opening parachutes which dropped jumpers in series of long falls in order to acquire swift but accurate and safe landing--they opened at intervals in long falls of two thousand feet, stayed the fall, then closed again, so that drops were almost continuous until the last four hundred feet--and pilots, swiftly making up their minds, dropped their passengers, banked their planes, and raced into the east. * * * * * All over the Americas pilots dropped their passengers and their loads if their franchises called for the carrying of freight, and banked about to take part in the first skirmish with the Moyenites. Dropping figures almost darkened the sky as passengers plunged downward after the startling signal from Washington. Flowers, which were the umbrellas of chutes, opened and closed like breathing winged orchids, letting their burdens safely to earth. And clouds and fleets of airplanes came in from all directions to land, in rows and rows which were endless, wing and wing, along the eastern coast. Prester Kleig had scarcely entered the Secret Room than the hated voice of Moyen again broke upon the ears of the machinelike Secret Agents. "This is madness, gentlemen! My people will annihilate yours!" But, since time for speech had passed, not one of the Secret Agents made answer or paid the slightest heed to the warning, though deep in the heart of each and every one was the belief that Moyen spoke no more than the truth. Too, there was a growing respect for the half-god of Asia, in that he was good enough to warn them of the holocaust which faced their country. By hundreds and thousands, wing and wing, airplanes dropped to the Atlantic coast at the closest point of contact, when the signal reached them. At high altitudes, planes crossing the Atlantic turned back and returned at top speed, dropping their passengers as soon as over land. That Moyen made no move to prevent the return of flyers out over the ocean, and now coming back, was an ominous circumstance. It seemed to show that he held the American flyers, all of them, in utter contempt. * * * * * Prester Kleig regarded the time. It had been half an hour since Moyen had spoken of attack, half an hour since the monsters of the deep had started the inexorable move toward land. On the screen the submarines were bulking larger and larger as the moments fled, until it seemed to the Secret Agents that the great composite shadow of them already was sweeping inland from the coast. As the coast came close ahead of the monster subs the little aero-subs, to the surprise of the Secret Agents, all vanished into their respective mother ships. "But they have to use them," groaned Munson. "For their submarines are useless in frontal attack against our shores!" "I am not so sure of that," said Prester Kleig. "For I have a suspicion that those submarines have tractors under their keels, and that they can come out on land! If this is so the monsters can, guarded by armour-plate, penetrate to the very heart of our most populated areas before their aero-subs are released." None of the Secret Agents as yet had stopped to ponder how the monsters had reached their positions, and why Moyen was attacking from the east, when the Pacific side of the continents would have appeared to be the obvious point of attack, and would have obviated the necessity of long, secret under-sea journeys wherein discovery prematurely must have been one of the many worries of the submarine commanders. The mere fact of the presence of the monsters was enough. What had preceded their presence was unimportant, save that their presence, and their near approach to the shore undetected, further proved the executive and planning genius of Moyen. Two miles, on an average, off the eastern coast the submarines laid their eggs--the aero-subs, which darted from the sides of the mother ships in flights and squadrons, made the surface, and leaped into the sky. Five minutes later and the signal went forth to the phalanx of the volunteers. "Take off! Fly east and engage the enemy, and hold him in check, and the God of our fathers go with you!" One hour had passed since Moyen's ultimatum when the first vanguard of the American flyers, obeying the peremptory signal, took the air and darted eastward to meet the winged death-harbingers of Moyen. CHAPTER X "_They Shall Not Pass!_" Prester Kleig's heartfelt desire, as the American flyers closed with the first of the aero-subs, was to go out with them and aid them in the attack against the Moyenites. But he knew, and it was a tacit thing, that he best served his country from the safe haven of the Secret Room. As he watched the scenes unfold on the screen of Maniel's genius, with occasional glances at the somewhat mysterious but profound and concentrated labors of Maniel, Charmion Kane rose from her place and came to his side. Wide-eyed as she watched the joining of battle, she stood there, her tiny hand encased in the tense one of Prester Kleig. "You would like to be out there," she murmured. "I know it! But your country needs you here--and I have already given Carlos!" Prester Kleig tightened his grip on her hand. * * * * * There was deep, silent understanding between these two, and Prester Kleig, in fighting against the Moyenites, realized, even above his realization that his labors were primarily for the benefit of his country, that he really matched wits with Moyen for the sake of Charmion. Had anyone asked him whether he would have sacrificed her for the benefit of his country, it would have been a difficult question to answer. He was glad that the question was never asked. "Yes, beloved," he whispered, "I would like to be out there, but the greatest need for me is here." But even so he felt as though he was betraying those intrepid flyers he was sending to sure death. Yet they had volunteered, and it was the only way. Maniel, a gnomelike little man with a Titan's brain, labored with his calculations, made swiftly concrete his theories, while at the Sound-and-Vision apparatus excitable General Munson ranged the aerial battlefield to see how the tide of battle ebbed and flowed. That neither side would either ask or give quarter was instantly apparent, for they rushed head-on to meet each other, those vast opposing winged armadas, at top speed, and not a single individual swerved from his course, though at least the Americans knew that death rode the skyways ahead. Then.... The battle was joined. Moyen's forces were superior in armament. Their sky-steeds were faster, more readily maneuverable, though the flying forces of the Americas in the last five years had made vast strides in aviation. But what the Americans lacked in power they made up for in fearless courage. * * * * * The plan of battle seemed automatically to work itself out. The first vanguard of American planes came into contact with the forces of Moyen, and from the noses of countless aero-subs spurted that golden streak which the Secret Agents knew and dreaded. The first flight of planes, stretching from horizon to horizon, vanished from the sky with that dreadful surety which had marked the passing of the _Stellar_, and such of those warships as had felt the full force of the visible ray. From General Munson rose a groan of anguish. These convertible fighting planes had been the pride of the heart of the old warrior. To do him credit, however, it was the wanton, so terribly inevitable destruction of the flyers themselves which affected him. It was so final, so absolute--and so utterly impossible to combat. "Wait!" snapped Prester Kleig. For the intrepid flyers behind that vanguard which had vanished had witnessed the wholesale disintegration of the leading element of the vast armada, and the pilots realized on the instant that no headlong rush into the very noses of the aero-subs would avail anything. The vast American formation broke into a mad maelstrom of whirling, darting, diving planes. Every third plane plummeted downward, every second one climbed, and the remaining ships, even in the face of what had happened to the vanished first flight, held steadily to the front. In this mad, seemingly meaningless formation, they closed on the aero-subs. Without having seen the fight, the Americans were aping the action of that one nameless flyer who had charged the aero-sub that had been destroyed. * * * * * Kleig remembered. A score of ships had been destroyed utterly above the graveyard of dreadnoughts, yet only one aero-sub, and that quite by chance, had been marked off in the casualty column. Death rode the heavens as the American flyers went into action. For head-on fights, flyers went in at top speed, their planes whirling on the axes of fuselages, all guns going. Planes were armored against their own bullets, and they were not under the necessity of watching to see that they did not slay their own friends. Even so, bullets were rather ineffective against the aero-subs, whose apparently flimsy, almost transparent outer covering diverted the bullets with amazing ease. A whirling maelstrom of ships. The monsters of Moyen had drawn first blood, if the expression may be used in an action where no blood at all was drawn, but machines and men simply erased from existence. Hundreds of planes already gone when the second flight of ships closed with the aero-subs. Yellow streaks of death flashed from aero-sub nostrils, but even as aero-sub operators set their rays into motion the American flyers in head-on charge rolled, dived or zoomed, and kept their guns going. High above the first flight of aero-subs, behind which another flight was winging swiftly into action, American flyers tilted the noses of their planes over and dived under full power--to sure death by suicide, though none knew it there at the moment. * * * * * These aero-subs could not be driven from the sky by usual means, and could destroy American ships even before those planes could come to handgrips; but they, the flyers plainly believed, could be crashed out of the sky and so, never guessing what besides death in resulting crashes they faced, the flyers above the aero-subs, even as aero-subs in rear flashed in to prevent, dived down straight at the backs of the aero-subs. In a hundred places the dives of the Americans worked successfully, and American planes crashed full and true, full power on, into the backs of the "flying fish." In some aero-subs the container of the Moyen-dealing agency apparently remained untouched, and airplanes and aero-subs, welded together, plunged down the invisible skylanes into the sea. Under water, some of the aero-subs were seen to keep in motion, limping toward the nearest mother submarines. "I hope," said Prester Kleig, "the American flyers in such cases are already dead, for Moyen will be a maniac in his tortures. Munson, do you hurriedly examine the mother-subs and see if you can locate Moyen." * * * * * However, only a scattered aero-sub here and there went down without the strange substance of the yellow ray being released. In most cases, upon the contact of plane with aero-sub, the aero-subs and planes were instantly blotted from view by the yellow, golden flames from the heart of the winged harbingers of Moyen. Golden flames, blinding in their brightness, dropping down, mere shapeless blotches, then fading out to nothingness in a matter of seconds--with aero-sub and airplane totally erased from action and from existence. The American flyers saw and knew now the manner of death they faced. Yet all along the battle front not an American tried to evade the issue and draw out of the fight. A sublime, inspiring exhibition of mass courage which had not been witnessed down the years since that general engagement which men of the time had called the Great War. Prester Kleig turned to look at Maniel. Drops of perspiration bathed the cheeks of the master scientist, but his eyes were glowing like coals of fire. His face was set in a white mask of concentration, and Prester Kleig knew that Maniel would find the answer to the thing he sought if such answer could be found. Would the American flyers be able to hold off the minions of Moyen until Maniel was ready? The fight out there above the waters was a terrible thing, and the Americans fought and died like men inspired, yet inexorably the winged armada of Moyen, preceded by those licking golden tongues, was moving landward. "Great God!" cried Munson. "Look!" * * * * * There was really no need for the order, for every Secret Agent saw as soon as did Munson. Under the sea, just off the coast, the mother-subs had touched their blunt nose against the upward shelving of the sea bottom--had touched bottom, and were slowly but surely following the underwater curve of the land, up toward the surface, like unbelievable antediluvian monsters out of some nightmare. "Yes," said Kleig quietly, "those monsters of Moyen can move on land, and the aero-subs can operate from them as easily on land as under water." Kleig regarded the time, whirled to look at Professor Maniel. One hour and forty minutes had passed since Maniel had begged for two hours in which to prepare some mode of effectively combatting the might of Moyen. Twenty minutes to go; yet the mother-subs would be ashore, dragging their sweating, monstrous sides out of the deep, within ten minutes! Ten minutes ashore and there was no guessing the havoc they could cause to the United Americas! "Hurry, Maniel! Hurry! Hurry!" said Prester Kleig. But he spoke the words to himself, though even had he spoken them aloud Maniel would not have heard. For Maniel, for two hours, had closed his mind to everything that transpired outside his own thoughts, devoted to foiling the power of Moyen. "I've found him!" snapped Munson. * * * * * He pointed with a shaking forefinger to one of the mother-subs crawling up the slant of the ocean bed, twisted one of the little nubs of the Sound-and-Vision apparatus, and the angelic face and Satanic eyes, the twisted body, of Moyen came into view. The face was calm with dreadful purpose, and Moyen stood in the heart of one of his monsters, his eyes turned toward the land. With a gasp of terror, dreadfully afraid for the first time, Prester Kleig turned and looked into the eyes of Charmion.... "No," she said. "It will never happen. I have faith in you!" There were still ten minutes of the two hours left when the mother-subs broke water and started crawling inland, swiftly, surely, without faltering in the slightest as they changed their element from water to land. As though their appearance had been the signal, the aero-subs in action against the first line of American planes broke out of the one-sided fight and dived for their mother ships, while a mere handful of the American planes started back for home to prepare anew to continue the struggle. Prester Kleig gave the signal to the second monster armada which had remained in reserve. "Do everything in your power to halt the march of Moyen's amphibians!" Ten minutes to go, and Professor Maniel still labored like a Titan. CHAPTER XI _Caucasia Falls Silent_ As the scores of amphibian monsters came lumbering forth upon dry land it became instantly apparent why the aero-subs had returned to the mother ships. For a few moments, out of the water, the amphibians were almost helpless, with practically no way of attack or defense--as helpless as huge turtles turned legs up. But as each aero-sub entered its proper slot in the side of the mother amphibian, it was turned about and the nose thrust back into the opening, which closed down to fit tightly about the nose of the aero-sub, so that those flame-breathing monsters protruded from the sides of the amphibians in many places--transforming the amphibians into monsters with hundreds of golden, licking tongues! As, with each and every aero-sub in place, the amphibians started moving inland, Professor Maniel made his first move. With the tiny apparatus upon which he had been working, he stepped to the table before the Sound-and-Vision apparatus and spoke softly to his compatriots. "Gentlemen," he said, "I have finished, and it will work effectively!" Though Maniel spoke softly, it was plain to be seen that he was proud of his accomplishment, which remained only to be attached to start performance. A matter of seconds.... Yet during those seconds was the real might, the real power for utter devastation, of Moyen fully exposed! * * * * * The amphibians got under way as the airplanes of the Americas swept into the fight. From the sides of the monsters licked out those golden tongues of flame--and from the front. Half a dozen amphibians slipped into New York from the harbor side and started into the heart of the city. And between the time when Maniel had said he was ready and the moment when he made his first active move against Moyen, a half-dozen skyscrapers vanished into nothingness, the spots where they had stood swept as clear of debris as though the land had never been reclaimed from Nature! None was ever destined to know how many lives were lost in that first attack of the monsters of the golden, myriad tongues; but the monsters struck in the midst of a working day when the skyscrapers were filled with office workers. And resolve struck deep into the hearts of the Secret Agents: if Moyen were turned back, he must be made to pay for the slaughter. A matter of seconds.... * * * * * Then a moment of deathly silence as Munson gave way at the screen for the gnomelike little Professor Maniel. "Now, gentlemen!" snapped Maniel. "If my theory is correct," manipulating instruments with lightning speed as he talked, "the reversion of the principle of my Vibration-Retarder--which captures vibrations speeding outward from the earth and transforms them once again into sound and pictures audible and visible to the human ear--this apparatus will disintegrate the monsters as our boats and planes were disintegrated! "In this I have even been compelled to manipulate in the matter of time! I must not only defeat and annihilate the minions of Moyen, but must work from a mathematical absurdity, so that at the moment of impact that moment itself must become part of the past, sufficiently remote to remove the monsters at such distance from the earth that not even the mighty genius of Moyen can return them!" The whirring, gentle as the whirring of doves' wings. In the center of the picture on the screen were those half-dozen amphibians laying waste Manhattan. Maniel set his intricate, delicate machinery into motion. Instantly the amphibians there seemed to become misty, shadowy, and to lift out of Manhattan up above the roof-tops of skyscrapers still remaining, nebulous and wraithlike as ghost-shrouds--yet swinging outward from the earth with speed almost too swift for the eye to detect. But where the amphibians had rested there stood, reclined--in all sorts of postures, surprising and even a bit ridiculous--the men of Moyen who had operated the monsters of Moyen! * * * * * From the Central Radio tower went forth a mighty voice of command to the planes which had been engaging the aero-subs off the coast. "Slay! Slay!" Down flashed the planes of the Americas, and their guns were blazing, inaudibly, but none the less deadly of aim and of purpose, straight into the midst of the men of Moyen who had thus been left marooned and almost helpless with the vanishing of their amphibians. And, noting how they fell in strangled, huddled heaps before the vengeful fire of the American planes, the Secret Agents sighed, and Maniel, his face alight with the pride of accomplishment, switched to another point along the coast. And as a new group of the monsters of Moyen came into view, and Maniel bent to his labors afresh, the hated voice of the master mobster broke once more in the Secret Room. "Enough, Kleig! Enough! We will surrender to save lives! I stipulate only that my own life be spared!" To which Prester Kleig made instant reply. "Did you offer us choice of surrender? Did you spare the lives of our people which, with your control of your golden rays, you could easily have done? No! Nor will we spare lives, least of all the life of Moyen!" The whirring again, as of the whirring of doves' wings. More metal monsters, even as golden tongues spewed forth from their many sides, vanished from view, leaping skyward, while the operators of them were left to the mercies of the remaining airmen of the Americans. * * * * * Voicelessly the word went forth: "Slay! Slay!" It was Charmion who begged for mercy for the vanquished as, one by one, as surely as fate, the monsters with their contained aero-subs were blotted out, leaving pilots and operators behind them. Down upon these dropped the airmen of the West, slaying without mercy.... "Please, lover!" Charmion whispered. "Spare them!" "Even...?" he began, thinking of Moyen, who would have taken Charmion. He felt her shudder as she read his mind, understood what he would have asked. "There he is!" came softly from Munson. An amphibian had just been disintegrated, had just climbed mistily, swiftly, into invisibility in the skies. And there in the midst of the conquerors left behind, his angel's face set in a moody mask, his pale eyes awful with fear, his misshapen body sagging, terrible in its realization of failure, was Moyen! Even as Kleig prepared to give the mercy signal, a plane dived down on the group about Moyen, and the Secret Agents could see the hand of the pilot, lifted high, as though he signaled. The plane was a Mayther! The pilot was Carlos Kane! * * * * * Just as Kane went into action, and the noiseless bullets from his ship crashed into that twisted body, causing it to jump and twitch with the might of them, Prester Kleig gave the signal. Even as the figure of Moyen crashed to the soil and the man's soul quitted its mortal casement, Kleig commanded: "Spare all who surrender! Make them prisoners, to be used to repair the damage they have done to our country! Guards will be instantly placed over the amphibians and the aero-subs--for the day may come when we shall need to know their secrets!" And, as men, hands lifted high in token of surrender, quitted the now motionless amphibians, and flyers dropped down to make them prisoners, Maniel sighed, pressed various buttons on his apparatus, and the mad scene of carnage they had witnessed for hours faded slowly out, and darkness and silence filled the Secret Room. But darkness is the joy of lovers, and in the midst of silence that was almost appalling by contrast, Kleig and Charmion were received into each other's arms. +---------------------------+ | Everyone Is Invited | | _To "Come Over in_ | | 'THE READERS' CORNER'"! | +---------------------------+ Vampires of Venus _By Anthony Pelcher_ [Illustration: _He seized a short knife and threw himself forward._] Leslie Larner, an entomologist borrowed from the Earth, pits himself against the night-flying vampires that are ravaging the inhabitants of Venus. It was as if someone had thrown a bomb into a Quaker meeting, when adventure suddenly began to crowd itself into the life of the studious and methodical Leslie Larner, professor of entomology. Fame had been his since early manhood, when he began to distinguish himself in several sciences, but the adventure and thrills he had longed for had always fallen to the lot of others. His father, a college professor, had left him a good working brain and nothing else. Later his mother died and he was left with no relatives in the world, so far as he knew. So he gave his life over to study and hard work. Still youthful at twenty-five, he was hoping that fate would "give him a break." It did. He was in charge of a Government department having to do with Oriental beetles, Hessian flies, boll weevils and such, and it seemed his life had been just one bug after another. He took creeping, crawling things seriously and believed that, unless curbed, insects would some day crowd man off the earth. He sounded an alarm, but humanity was not disturbed. So Leslie Larner fell back on his microscope and concerned himself with saving cotton, wheat and other crops. His only diversion was fishing for the elusive rainbow trout. He managed to spend a month each year in the Colorado Rockies angling for speckled beauties. Larner was anything but a clock-watcher, but on a certain bright day in June he was seated in his laboratory doing just that. "Just five minutes to go," he mused. It was just 4:25 P. M. He had finished his work, put his affairs in order, and in five minutes would be free to leave on a much needed and well earned vacation. His bags were packed and at the station. His fishing tackle, the pride of his young life, was neatly rolled in oiled silk and stood near at hand. "I'll just fill my calabash, take one more quiet smoke, and then for the mountains and freedom," he told himself. He settled back with his feet on his desk. He half closed his eyes in solid comfort. Then the bomb fell and exploded. * * * * * B-r-r-r-r! The buzzer on his desk buzzed and his feet came off the desk and hit the floor with a thud. His eyes popped open and the calabash was immediately laid aside. That buzzer usually meant business, and it would be his usual luck to have trouble crash in on him just as he was on the edge of a rainbow trout paradise. A messenger was ushered into the room by an assistant. The boy handed him an envelope, said, "No answer," and departed. Larner tore open the envelope lazily. He read and then re-read its contents, while a look of puzzled surprise disturbed his usually placid countenance. He spread the sheet of paper out on his desk, and for the tenth time he read: Confidential. Memorize this address and destroy this paper: Tula Bela, 1726 88th Street, West, City of Hesper, Republic of Pana, Planet Venus. Will meet you in the Frying Pan. That was all. It was enough. Larner lost his temper. He crumpled the paper and tossed it in the waste basket. He was not given to profanity, but he could say "Judas Priest" in a way that sizzled. "Judas Priest!" he spluttered. "Anyone who would send a man a crazy bunch of nonsense like that, at a time like this, ought to be snuffed out like a beetle! "'Meet you in the Frying Pan,'" he quoted. Then he happened to recall something. "By golly, there is a fishing district in Colorado known as the Frying Pan. That's not so crazy, but the planet Venus part surely is cuckoo." He fished the paper out of the waste basket, found the envelope, placed the strange message within and put it in his inside coat pocket. Then he seized his suitcase and fishing tackle, and, rushing out, hailed a taxi. Not long after he was on his way west by plane. * * * * * As the country unrolled under him he retrieved the strange note from his pocket. He read it again and again. Then he examined the envelope. It was an ordinary one of good quality, designed for business rather than social usage. The note paper appeared quite different. It was unruled, pure white, and of a texture which might be described as pebbly. It was strongly made, and of a nature unlike any paper Larner had ever seen before. It appeared to have been made from a fiber rather than a pulp. "Wonder who wrote it?" Larner asked himself. "It is beautiful handwriting, masculine yet artistic. Wonder where he got the Frying Pan idea? At any rate, I'm not going to the Frying Pan this year--I'm camping on Tennessee Creek, in Lake County, Colorado. The country there is more beautiful and restful. "But this street address on the planet Venus. Seems to me I read somewhere that Marconi had received mysterious signals that he believed came from the planet Venus. Hesper, Hesper ... it sounds familiar, somehow. Wonder if there could be anything to it?" Something impelled him to follow out the instructions in the note. He spent the next few hours repeating the address over and over again. When he was satisfied that he had memorized it thoroughly, he tore the strange paper into bits and sent it fluttering earthward like a tiny snowstorm. Larner was not a gullible individual, but neither was he unimaginative. He was scientist enough to know that "the impossibilities of to-day are the accomplishments of to-morrow." So while not convinced that the note was a serious communication, still his mind was open. The weird address insisted on creeping into his mind and driving out other thoughts, even those of his speckled playfellows, the rainbow trout. "I've a notion to change my plans and go from Denver to the Frying Pan," he cogitated. Then he thought, "No, I won't take it that seriously." * * * * * Anyone who knows the Colorado Rockies knows paradise. There is no more beautiful country on the globe. Lake County, where Larner had chosen his fishing grounds, has as its seat the old mining camp of Leadville. It has been visited and settled more for its gold mines than the golden glow of its sunsets above the clouds, but the gold of the sunsets is eternal, while the gold of the mines is fading quickly away. Leadville, with its 5,000 inhabitants, nestles above the clouds, at an altitude of more than 10,000 feet. Mount Massive with its three peaks lies back of the town in panorama and rises to a height of some 14,400 feet. In the rugged mountains thereabouts are hundreds of lakes fed by wild streams and bubbling crystal springs. All these lakes are above the clouds. Winter sees the whole picture decorated with bizarre snowdrifts from twenty to forty feet deep, but spring comes early. The beautiful columbines and crocuses bloom before the snow is all off the ground in the valleys. The lands up to 12,000 feet altitude are carpeted with a light green grass and moss. Giant pines and dainty aspens, with their silvery bark and pinkish leaves blossom forth and whisper, while the eternal snows still linger in the higher rocky cliffs and peaks above. Indian-paint blooms its blood red in contrast to the milder colorings. Blackbirds and bluebirds chatter and chipmunks chirp. The gold so hard to find in the mines glares from the skies. The hills cuddle in banks of snowy clouds, and above all a pure clear blue sky sweeps. The lakes and streams abound with rainbow trout, the gamest of any fresh water fish. It is indeed a paradise for either poet or sportsman. In any direction near to Leadville a man can find Heaven and recreation and rest. Finding himself on Harrison Avenue, the main street of the county seat, Larner, after renewing some old acquaintanceships, started west in a flivver for Tennessee Creek. The flivver is a modern adjustment. Until a few years ago the only means of traversing these same hills was by patient, sure-footed donkeys, which carried the pack while the wayfarer walked along beside. * * * * * The first day's fishing was good. Trout seemed to greet him cheerily and sprang eagerly to the fray. They bit at any sort of silken fly he cast. The site chosen by Larner for his camp was in a mossy clearing separated from the stream by a fringe of willows along the creek. Then came a border of aspens backed by a forest of silver-tipped firs. It was ideal and his eyes swept the scene with satisfaction. Then he began whittling bacon to grease his pan for frying trout over the open fire. Suddenly he heard a rustle in the aspens, and, looking up, beheld a picture which made his eyes bulge. A man and a woman, garbed seemingly in the costumes of another world, walked toward him. Neither were more than five feet tall but were physically perfect, and marvelously pleasing to the eye. There was little difference in their dress. Both wore helmets studded with what Larner believed to be sapphires. He learned later they were diamonds. Their clothing consisted of tight trouserlike garments surmounted by tunics of some white pelt resembling chamois save for color. A belt studded with precious stones encircled their waists. Artistic laced sandals graced their small firm feet. Their skin was a pinkish white. Their every feature was perfection plus, and their bodies curved just enough wherever a curve should be. The woman was daintier and more fully developed, and her features were even more finely chiseled than the man. Otherwise it would have been difficult to distinguish their sex. Larner took in these details subconsciously, for he was awed beyond expression. All he could do was to stand seemingly frozen, half bent over the campfire with his frying pan in his hand. * * * * * The man spoke. "I hope we did not startle you," he said. "I thought my note would partly prepare you for this meeting. We expected to find you in the Frying Pan district. When you did not appear there we tuned our radio locator to your heart beats and in that way located you here. It was hardly a second's space-flying time from where we were." Larner said nothing. He could only stand and gape. "I do not wonder that you are surprised," said the strange little man. "I will explain that I am Nern Bela, of the City of Hesper, on the planet Venus. This is my sister Tula. We greet you in the interest of the Republic of Pana, which embraces all of the planet you know as Venus." When Larner recovered his breath, he lost his temper. "I don't know what circus you escaped from, but I crave solitude and I have no time to be bothered with fairy tales," he said with brutal bruskness. Expressions of hurt surprise swept the countenances of his visitors. The man spoke again: "We are just what we assert we are, and our finding you was made necessary by a condition which grieves the souls of all the 900,000,000 inhabitants of Venus. We have come to plead with you to come with us and use your scientific knowledge to thwart a scourge which threatens the lives of millions of people." There was a quiet dignity about the man and an air of pride about the woman which made Larner stop and think, or try to. He rubbed his hand over his brow and looked questioningly at the pair. "If you are what you say you are, how did you get here?" he asked. "We came in a targo, a space-flying ship, capable of doing 426,000 miles an hour. This is just 1200 times as fast as 355 miles an hour, the highest speed known on earth. Come with us and we will show you our ship." They looked at him appealingly, and both smiled a smile of wistful friendliness. Larner, without a word, threw down his frying pan and followed them through the aspens. The brother and sister walking ahead of him gave his eyes a treat. He surveyed the perfect form of the girl. Her perfection was beyond his ken. "They certainly are not of this world," he mused. * * * * * A few hundred yards farther on there was a beach of pebbles, where the stream had changed its course. On this plot sat a gigantic spherical machine of a glasslike material. It was about 300 feet in diameter and it was tapered on two sides into tees which Larner rightly took to be lights. "This is a targo, our type of space-flyer," said Nern Bela. "It is capable of making two trips a year between Venus and the earth. We have visited this planet often, always landing in some mountain or jungle fastness as heretofore we did not desire earth-dwellers to know of our presence." "Why not?" asked Larner, his mouth agape and his eyes protruding. His mind was so full of questions that he fairly blurted his first one. "Because," said Bela, slowly and frankly, "because our race knows no sickness and we feared contagion, as your race has not yet learned to control its being." "Oh," said Lamer thoughtfully. He realized that humans of the earth, whom he had always regarded as God's most perfect beings, were not so perfect after all. "How do you people control your being, as you express it?" he asked. "It is simple," was the reply. "For ninety centuries we have ceased to breed imperfection, crime and disease. We deprived no one of the pleasures of life, but only the most perfect mental and physical specimens of our people cared to have children. In other words, while we make no claim to controlling our sex habits, we do control results." "Oh," said Larner again. Nern Bela led the way to a door which opened into the side of the space-flyer near its base. "We have a crew of four men and four women," he said. "They handle the entire ship, with my sister and I in command, making six souls aboard in all." "Why men and women?" thought Larner. As if in answer to his thought Bela said: "On the earth the two sexes have struggled for sex supremacy. This has thrown your civilization out of balance. On Venus we have struggled for sex equality and have accomplished it. This is a perfect balance. Man and women engage in all endeavor and share all favors and rewards alike." "In war, too?" asked Larner. "There has not been war on Venus for 600,000 years," said Bela. "There is only the one nation, and the people all live in perfect accord. Our only trouble in centuries is a dire peril which now threatens our people, and it is of this that I wish to talk to you more at length." * * * * * They were standing close to the targo. Larner was struck by the peculiar material of which it was constructed. There was a question in his eyes, and Nern Bela answered it: "The metal is duranium; it is metalized quartz. It is frictionless, conducts no current or ray except repulsion and attraction ray NTR69X6 by which it is propelled. It is practically transparent, lighter than air and harder than a diamond. It is cast in moulds after being melted or, rather, fused. "We use cold light which we produce by forcing oxygen through air tubes into a vat filled with the fat of a deep sea fish resembling your whale. You are aware, of course, that that is exactly how cold light is produced by the firefly, except for the fact that the firefly uses his own fat." Larner was positively fascinated. He smoothed the metal of the targo in appreciation of its marvelous construction, but he longed most to see the curious light giving mechanism, for this was closer to his own line of entomology. He had always believed that the light giving organs of fireflys and deep-sea fishes could be reproduced mechanically. The interior of the ship resembled in a vague way that of an ocean liner. It was controlled by an instrument board at which a man and a girl sat. They did not raise their heads as the three people entered. When called by Bela and his sister, who seemed to give commands in unison, the crew assembled and were presented to the visitor. "Earth-dwellers are not the curiosity to us that we seem to be to you," said Tula Bela, speaking for the first time and smiling sweetly. Larner was too engrossed to note the remark further than to nod his head. He was lost in contemplation of these strange people, all garbed exactly alike and all surpassingly lovely to look upon. * * * * * An odor of food wafted from the galley, and Larner remembered he was hungry, with the hunger of health. He had swung his basket of fish over his shoulder when he left his campfire, and Tula took it from him. "Would you like to have our chef prepare them for you?" she said, as she caught his hungry glance at his day's catch. This time Larner answered her. "If you will pardon me," he said awkwardly. "Really I am famished." "You will not miss your fish dinner," said the girl. "I believe there is enough for all of us," said Larner. "I caught twenty beauties. I never knew fish to bite like that. Why, they--" and he was off on a voluminous discourse on a favorite subject. Those assembled listened sympathetically. Then Tula took the fish, and soon the aroma of broiling trout mingled with the other entrancing galley odors. After a dinner at which some weird yet satisfying viands were served and much unusual conversation indulged in, Nern Bela led the way to what appeared to be the captain's quarters. The crew and their visitor sat down to discuss a subject which proved to be of such a terrifying nature as to scar human souls. "People on Venus," said Nern, as his eyes took on a worried expression, "are unable to leave their homes after nightfall due to some strange nocturnal beast which attacks them and vampirishly drains all blood from their veins, leaving the dead bodies limp and empty." "What? How?" questioned Larner leaning far forward over the conference table. The others nodded their heads, and in the eyes of the women there was terror. Larner could not but believe this. "The beasts, or should I say insects, are as large as your horses and they fly, actually fly, by night, striking down humans, domestic animals and all creatures of warm blood. How many there are we have no means of knowing, and we cannot find their hiding and breeding places. They are not native to our planet, and where they come from we cannot imagine. They are actually monstrous flys, or bugs, or some form of insects." * * * * * Larner was overcome by incredulity and showed it. "Insects as big as horses?" he questioned and he could hardly suppress a smile. "Believe us, in the name of the God of us all," insisted Nern. "They have a mouth which consists of a large suction disk, in the center of which is a lancelike tongue. The lance is forced into the body at any convenient point, and the suction disk drains out the blood. If we only knew their source! They attack young children and the aged, up to five hundred years, alike." "What! Five hundred years?" exploded Larner again. "I should have explained," said Nern, simply, "that Venus dwellers, due to our advanced knowledge of sanitation and health conversation, live about 800 years and then die invariably of old age. The only unnatural cause of death encountered is this giant insect. Accidents do occur, but they are rare. There are no deliberate killings on Venus." Larner did not answer. He only pondered. The more he ran over the strange happenings of the last week in his mind the more he believed he was dreaming. His thoughts took a strange turn: "Why do these vain people go around dressed in jeweled ornaments?" Nern again anticipated a question. "Diamonds, gold and many of what you call precious stones are common on Venus," he volunteered. "Talc and many other things are more valuable." "Talc?" "Yes, we use an immense quantity of it. We have a wood that is harder than your steel. We build machinery with it. We cannot use oil to lubricate these wooden shafts and bearings as it softens the wood, so all parts exposed to friction are sprayed constantly by a gust of talc from a blower. "You use talc mostly for toilet purposes. We use it for various purposes. There is little left on Venus, and it is more valuable to us than either gold or diamonds. We draw on your planet now for talc. You dump immense quantities. We just shipped one hundred 1,000-ton globes of it from the Cripple Creek district, and the district never missed it. We drew most of it from your mine dumps." * * * * * Nern tried not to look bored as he explained more in detail: "We brought 100 hollow spheres constructed of duranium. We suspended these over the Cripple Creek district at an altitude of 10,000 feet above the earth's surface. Because of the crystal glint of duranium they were invisible to earth dwellers at that height. Then we used a suction draft at night, drawing the talc from the earth, filling one drum after another. This is done by tuning in a certain selective attraction that attracts only talc. It draws it right out of your ground in tiny particles and assembles it in the transportation drums as pure talc. On the earth, if noticed at all, it would have been called a dust storm. "The drums, when loaded with talc, are set to attract the proper planetary force and they go speeding toward Venus at the rate of 426,000 miles an hour. They are prevented from colliding with meteors by an automatic magnetic device. This is controlled by magnetic force alone, and when the targo gets too close to a meteor it changes its course instantly. The passenger targo we ride in acts similarly. And now may I return to the subject of the vampires of Venus?" "Pardon my ignorance," said Larner, and for the first time in his life he felt very ignorant indeed. "I know little more than I have told you," said Nern, rather hopelessly. "Our knowledge of your world, your people and your language comes from our listening in on you and observing you without being observed or heard. This might seem like taking an advantage of you, were it not for the fact that we respect confidences, and subjugate all else to science. We have helped you at times, by telepathically suggesting ideas to your thinkers. "We would have given you all our inventions in this way, gladly, but in many instances we were unable to find minds attuned to accept such advanced ideas. We have had the advantage of you because our planet is so many millions of years older than your own." There was a plaintive note in Nern's voice as he talked. * * * * * "But now we are on our knees to you, so to speak. We do not know everything and, desperately, we need the aid of a man of your caliber. In behalf of the distraught people of Venus, I am asking you bluntly to make a great sacrifice. Will you face the dangers of a trip to Venus and use your knowledge to aid us in exterminating these creatures of hell?" There was positive pleading in his voice, and in the eyes of his beautiful sister there were tears. "But what would my superiors in the Government Bureau think?" feebly protested Larner, "I could not explain...." "You have no superiors in your line. Our Government needs you at this time more than any earthly government. Your place here is a fixture. You can always return to it, should you live. We are asking you to face a horrible death with us. You can name your own compensation, but I know you are not interested so much in reward. "Now, honestly, my good professor, there is no advantage to be gained by explanation. Just disappear. In the name of God and in the interests of science and the salvation of a people who are at your mercy, just drop out of sight. Drop out of life on this planet. Come with us. The cause is worthy of the man I believe you to be." "I will go," said Larner, and his hosts waited for no more. An instant later the targo shot out into interstellar space. "How do you know what course to follow?" asked Larner after a reasonable time, when he had recovered from his surprise at the sudden take-off. "We do not need to know. Our machine is tuned to be attracted by the planetary force of Venus alone. We could not go elsewhere. A repulsion ray finds us as we near Venus and protects us against too violent a landing. We will land on Venus like a feather about three months from to-night." The time of the journey through outer space was of little moment save for one incident. Larner and the other travelers were suddenly and rather rudely jostled about the rapidly flying craft. Larner lost his breath but not his speech. "What happened?" he inquired. "We just automatically dodged a meteor," explained Nern. * * * * * Most of the time of the trip was spent by Larner in listening to explanations of customs and traditions of the people of the brightest planet in the universe. There was a question Larner had desired to ask Nern Bela, yet he hesitated to do so. Finally one evening during the journey to Venus, when the travelers had been occupying themselves in a scientific discussion of comparative evolution on the two planets, Larner saw his opportunity. "Why," he asked rather hesitatingly, "did the people of Venus always remain so small? Why did you not strive more for height? The Japanese, who are the shortest in stature of earth people, always wanted to be tall." "Without meaning any offense," replied Nern, "I must say that it is characteristic of earth dwellers to want something without knowing any good reason why they want it. It is perfectly all right for you people to be tall, but for us it is not so fitting. You see, Venus is smaller than the earth. Size is comparative. You think we are not tall because you are used to taller people. Comparatively we are tall enough. In proportion to the size of our planet we are exactly the right size. We keep our population at 900,000,000, and that is the perfectly exact number of people who can live comfortably on our planet." * * * * * Arriving on Venus, Larner was assigned a laboratory and office in one of the Government buildings. It was a world seemingly made of glass. Quartz, of rose, white and crystal coloring, Larner found, was the commonest country rock of the planet. In many cases it was shot full of splinters of gold which the natives had not taken the trouble to recover. This quartz was of a terrific hardness and was used in building, paving, and public works generally. The effect was bewildering. It was a world of shimmering crystal. The atmosphere of Venus had long puzzled Larner. While not an astronomer in the largest sense of the word, yet he had a keen interest in the heavens as a giant puzzle picture, and he had given some spare time to the study. He knew that from all indications Venus had a most unusual atmosphere. He had read that the atmosphere was considerably denser than that of the earth, and that its presence made observation difficult. The actual surface of the planet he knew could hardly be seen due, either to this atmosphere, or seemingly perpetual cloud banks. He had read that the presence of atmosphere surrounding Venus is indicated to earthly astronomers, during the planet's transit, by rings of light due to the reflection and scattering of collected sunlight by its atmosphere. Astronomers on earth, he knew, had long been satisfied of the presence of great cloud banks, as rocks and soils could not have such high reflecting power. He knew that like the moon, Venus, when viewed from the earth, presents different phases from the crescent to the full or total stage. Looking up at the sky from the quartz streets of Venus, Larner beheld, in sweeping grandeur, massed cloud banks, many of them apparently rain clouds. Nern noted his skyward gaze, and said: "We have accomplished meteorological control. Those clouds were brought under control when we conquered interplanetary force, and what you call gravity. We form them and move them at will. They are our rain factory. We make rain when and where we will. This insures our crops and makes for health and contentment. "The air, you will note, is about the same or a little more moist than the earth air at sea level. This is due to the planet's position nearer the sun. "We have been striving for centuries to make the air a little drier and more rare, but we have not succeeded yet. The heavy content of disintegrated quartz in our soil makes moisture very necessary for our crops, so our moist atmosphere is evidently a provision of providence. We are used to breathing this moist air, and when I first visited the earth I was made uncomfortable by your rarified atmosphere. Now I can adjust myself to breathing the air of either planet. However, I find myself drinking a great deal more water on earth than on Venus." * * * * * In this fairyland which had enjoyed centuries of peace, health and accord, stark terror now reigned. In some instances the finely-bred, marvellously intelligent people were in a mental condition bordering on madness. This was especially true in the farming districts, where whole herds of lats had been wiped out. Lats, Larner gleaned, were a common farm animal similar to the bovine species on earth, only more wooly. On these creatures the Venus dwellers depended for their milk and dairy supplies, and for their warmer clothing, which was made from the skin. The hair was used for brushes, in the building trades, and a thousand ways in manufacturing. Besides the domestic animals hundreds of people continued to meet death, and only a few of the flying vampires had been hunted down. The giant insects were believed to breed slowly as compared to earth insects, their females producing not more than ten eggs, by estimate, after which death overtook the adult. In spite of this they were reported to be increasing. In the Government building Larner was placed in touch with all the Government scientists of Venus. His nearest collaborator was one Zorn Zada, most profound scientist of the planet. The two men, with a score of assistants, worked elbow to elbow on the most gigantic scientific mystery in the history of two planets. A specimen of the dread invader was mounted and studied by the scientists, who were so engrossed in their work that they hardly took time to eat. As for sleep, there was little of it. Days were spent in research and nights in hunting the monsters. This hunting was done by newly recruited soldiers and scientists. The weapons used were a short ray-gun of high destructive power which disintegrated the bodies of the enemies by atomic energy blasts. The quarry was wary, however, and struck at isolated individuals rather than massed fighting lines. * * * * * Seated at his work-bench Larner asked Zorn Zada what had become of Nern Bela. In his heart he had a horrible lurking fear that the beautiful Tula Bela might fall before a swarm of the strange vampires, but he did not voice this anxiety. "Nern and his sister are explorers and navigators," was the reply. "They have been assigned to carry you anywhere on this or any other planet where your work may engage you. They await your orders. They are too valuable as space-navigators to be placed in harm's way." Breathing a sigh of relief, Larner bent to his labors. "What other wild animals or harmful insects have you on this planet?" he asked Zorn. "I get your thought," replied the first scientist of Venus. "You are seeking a natural enemy to this deadly flying menace, are you not?" "Yes," admitted Larner. "All insects left on Venus with this one exception are beneficial," said Zorn. "There are no wild animals, and no harmful insects. All animals, insects and birds have been domesticated and are fed by their keepers. We get fabrics from forms of what you call spiders and other web-builders and cocoon spinners. All forms of birds, beasts and crawling and flying things have been brought under the dominion of man. We will have to seek another way out than by finding an enemy parasite." "Where do you think these insect invaders came from?" asked Larner. "You have noticed they are unlike anything you have on earth in anatomical construction," said the savant. "They partake of the general features of Coleoptera (beetles), in that they wear a sheath of armor, yet their mouth parts are more on the order of the Diptera (flys). I regard them more as a fly than a beetle, because most Coleoptera are helpful to humanity while practically all, if not all, Diptera are malignant. "As to their original habitat, I believe they migrated here from some other planet." "They could not fly through space," said Larner. "No, that is the mystery of it," agreed Zorn. "How they got here and where they breed are the questions that we have to answer." * * * * * Long days passed on Venus. Long days and sleepless nights. The big insects were hunted nightly by men armed with ray-guns, and nightly the blood-sucking monsters took their toll of humanity and animals. Finally Larner and Zorn determined to capture one of the insects alive, muzzle its lance and suction pad, and give it sufficient freedom to find its way back to its hiding place. By following the shackled monster the scientists hoped to find the breeding grounds. All the provinces of the planet joined in the drive. Men turned out in automatic vehicles, propelled by energy gathered from the atmosphere. They came on foot and in aircraft. Mobilization was at given points and, leading the van, were Zorn and Larner and their confreres in the targo of Nern and Tula Bela. The great army of Venus carried giant searchlights and was armed with deadly ray-guns. * * * * * Headquarters of the vast Army of Offense was in the targo of the Belas. Larner was in supreme command. Just before the big army set out to scour the planet to seek the breeding place of the monsters Larner issued a bulletin that set all Venus by the ears. Addressed to President Vole Vesta of the Republic of Pana and the good people of Venus, it read: As is generally known, it has been the habit of the nation's space-flying merchantmen to visit the sunlit side of the planet Mercury to obtain certain rare woods and other materials not found on this planet. One side of Mercury, as is known, is always turned from the sun and is in a condition of perpetual night. In this perpetual darkness and dampness, where many rivers flow into warm black swamps, the vampires have bred for centuries. Conditions were ideal for their growth, and so through the ages they evolved into the monsters we have encountered lately on Venus. During some comparatively recent visit to Mercury the grubs of these insects have found their way abroad a vegetation-laden targo left standing near the edge of the black swamps of Mercury. These grubs were thus transported to Venus and underwent their natural metamorphosis here. Reaching adult stage, they have found some place to hide and breed, and thus is explained the origin of the vampires of Venus. This was widely read and discussed and was finally accepted as the means of the invasion of peaceful, beautiful Venus by a horror that might well have originated in hell. However, this did not reveal the breeding grounds, or remove the nation-wide scourge of the horrible winged vampires, so the mobilization of all the forces of the planet continued. * * * * * As day followed day the hordes of fighting Venus dwellers grew in the concentration camps. In the targo of the Belas, Larner, brain-weary and body-racked as he was with overwork, found a grain of happiness in being in the presence of Nern and his beautiful, petite sister. With Zorn, Larner was supervising the construction of a big net of strongly woven wire mesh, in which it was hoped to catch one of the vampires. It was decided to bait the trap with a fat female lat. Zorn, Larner and the Belas fared forth from the concentration camp followed by a company of soldiers carrying the big net. Tula with her own hand led the fat lat heifer. His eyes were filled with commiseration for the poor animal. Thousands of soldiers and citizenry, in fighting array, watched the departure of the little group. In a glade the trap was set and the net arranged to fall over the monster once it attacked the calf. From a thicket, in utter darkness, Zorn and Larner and the two Belas waited for the possible catch. The whole nation stood awaiting the order to advance. On the fourth night the vigil was rewarded in a manner frightful to relate. A clumsy flutter of giant wings broke the stillness. The four waiting forms in the thicket rejoiced, believing the fat lat was about to be attacked. Onward came the approaching horror. The measured flap, flap of its armored wings drawing nearer and nearer. Then, horror--horrors! A feminine scream rent the air. Cries loud and shrill arose above a hysterical feminine cry for help. The monster had chosen Tula Bela for its prey! * * * * * Zorn exploded an alarm bomb. A compressed air siren brought the army forward on the run. Giant floodlights began to light up the scene. The blood of Larner and Nern froze. The monster had borne the girl to the ground. Its frightful lance and cupper was upraised to strike. Larner was the nearest and the quickest to act. He grabbed for his ray-gun, swung at his belt. It was gone! In horror he remembered he had left it at the base. He seized a short knife and threw himself forward, rolling his body between that of the girl and the descending lance and cupper. As the lance pierced his shoulder Larner, in one wild gesture of frenzy, drove his knife through the soft, yielding flesh of the vampire's organ of suction. Protected by no bony structure the snout of the monster was amputated. The terrible creature had been disarmed of his most formidable weapon, but he continued to fight. Larner felt the spikes on the monster's legs tear at his flesh. "Don't kill the thing," he shouted. "Bring on the net. For the love of God bring on the net!" Then he lost consciousness. It was daylight when Larner, somewhat weakened from loss of blood, regained consciousness. The beautiful Tula Bela was leaning over him. She whispered comforting words to him in a language he did not fully understand. She whispered happy exclamations in words he did not know the meaning of, but the tone was unmistakably those of a sweetheart towards her lover. Finally, in answer to a true scientist's question in his eyes, she said in English: "They caught the thing alive. They await your order to advance." "Let us be on our way," said Larner, and he started to arise. "You are hardly strong enough," said Tula. "Believe me, I am all right," insisted Larner, and after several trials he got to his feet. His constitution was naturally strong and his will was stronger, so he fought back all feelings of weakness and soon announced himself ready to go ahead with the project at hand. For speed was all important, and the young professor found himself unable to remain inactive. * * * * * He rejoiced when Zorn told him that the big insect that had attacked Tula Bela had been captured alive and had been kept well nourished by lat's blood injected into its stomach. With Zorn Larner went to inspect the hideous monstrosity and found it in leash and straining. It was ready to be used to lead the way back to its breeding place. Its wings shackled, the lumbering insect floundered on its way straight north. Ponderously and half blindly it crawled as the searchlights' glare was kept far enough in advance to keep from blinding the monster. True to instinct it finally brought up at early dawn under a high cliff of smoky quartz. Here, in the great crevices, the drove of diabolical vampires were hiding. As the light struck their dens, they attempted clumsily to take wing, but a interlacing network of devastating disintegrating rays from the ray-guns shattered their bodies to dust, which was borne away by the wind. The next few months were spent in combing the quartz crags of Venus for similar infested areas, but only the one breeding nest was found. The scourge had been conquered in its first and only stronghold. * * * * * So ended the greatest reign of terror in the history of Venus. Leslie Larner was given a vote of thanks, and riches were showered upon him by the good people of the sky's brightest star. His modesty was characteristic, and he insisted that his part in saving humanity on the planet had been small. Passage back to earth was offered him, but Nern and Tula Bela urged him to say and live his life on Venus. This he finally agreed to do. "If I returned," he said, "I would always be tempted to tell my experiences while away, and there is not a jury in the world which would account me sane after I had once spoken." * * * * * That the story of Larner's adventure reached earth dwellers at all is due to the fact that Nern Bela on a subsequent visit to the earth narrated it to a Colorado quartz miner. This miner, a bronzed and bearded prospector for gold, stumbled on the targo in a mountain fastness, and there was nought to do but make him welcome and pledge him to secrecy. The miner surveyed the crystal targo in rapt wonderment and said: "And to think I am the only earth man who ever viewed such a craft!" "No," answered Nern Bela, "there is one other." And then the stirring story of Leslie Larner's life on Venus was told. SAFE FLYING IN FOGS The outstanding development in aviation recently, and one of the most significant so far in aviation history was the "blind" flight of Lieut. James H. Doolittle, daredevil of the Army Air Corps, at Mitchel Field, L. I., which led Harry P. Guggenheim, President of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, Inc. to announce that the problem of fog-flying, one of aviation's greatest bugbears, had been solved at last. There has been "blind flying" done in the past but never before in the history of aviation has any pilot taken off, circled, crossed, re-crossed the field, then landed only a short distance away from his starting point while flying under conditions resembling the densest fog, as Lieut. "Jimmy" Doolittle has done, in his Wright-motored "Husky" training-plane. It was something uncanny to contemplate. The "dense fog" was produced artificially by the simple device of making the cabin of the plane entirely light-proof. Once seated inside, the flyer, with his co-pilot, Lieut. Benjamin Kelsey, also of Mitchel Field, were completely shut off from any view of the world outside. All they had to depend on were three new flying instruments, developed during the past year in experiments conducted over the full-flight laboratory established by the Fund at Mitchel Field. The chief factors contributing to the solution of the problem of blind flying consist of a new application of the visual radio beacon, the development of an improved instrument for indicating the longitudinal and lateral position of an airplane, a new directional gyroscope, and a sensitive barometric altimeter, so delicate as to measure the altitude of an airplane within a few feet of the ground. Thus, instead of relying on the natural horizon for stability, Lieut. Doolittle uses an "artificial horizon" on the small instrument which indicates longitudinal and lateral position in relation to the ground at all time. He was able to locate the landing field by means of the direction-finding long-distance radio beacon. In addition, another smaller radio beacon had been installed, casting a beam fifteen to twenty miles in either direction, which governs the immediate approach to the field. To locate the landing field the pilot watches two vibrating reeds, tuned to the radio beacon, on a virtual radio receiver on his instrument board. If he turns to the right or left of his course the right or left reed, respectively, begins doing a sort of St. Vitus dance. If the reeds are in equilibrium the pilot knows it is clear sailing straight to his field. The sensitive altimeter showed Lieut. Doolittle his altitude and made it possible for him to calculate his landing to a distance of within a few feet from the ground. Probably the strangest device of all that Lieut. Doolittle has been called upon to test in Mr. Guggenheim's war against fog is a sort of heat cannon that goes forth to combat like a fire-breathing dragon of old. Like the enemies of the dragon, the fog is supposed to curl up and die before the scorching breath of the "hot air artillery" although the fundamental principle behind the device is a great deal more scientific than such an explanation sounds. It is, in brief, based on the known fact that fog forms only in a very narrow temperature zone which lies between the saturation and precipitation points of the atmosphere. If the air grows a little colder the fog turns into rain and falls; if it is warmed very slightly the mist disappears and the air is once more normally clear, although its humidity is very close to the maximum. Brigands of the Moon (The Book of Gregg Haljan) PART TWO OF A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Ray Cummings_ [Illustration: _I turned back to look at the Planetara._] Out of awful space tumbled the Space-ship _Planetara_ towards the Moon, her officers _dead_, with bandits at her helm--and the controls out of order! My name, Gregg Haljan. My age, twenty-five years. My occupation, at the time my narrative begins, in 2075, was third officer of the Interplanetary Space-ship _Planetara_. Thus I introduce myself to you. For this is a continuation of the book of Gregg Haljan, and of necessity I am the chief actor therein. I shall recapitulate very briefly what has happened so far: Unscrupulous Martian brigands were scheming for Johnny Grantline's secret radium-ore treasure, dug out of the Moon and waiting there to be picked up by the _Planetara_ on her return trip from Mars. The _Planetara_ left, bound for Mars, some ten days away. Suspicious interplanetary passengers were aboard: Miko and Moa, a brother and a sister of Mars; Sir Arthur Coniston, a mysterious Englishman; Ob Hahn, a Venus mystic. And small, effeminate George Prince and his sister, Anita. Love, I think, was born instantly between Anita and me. I found all too soon that Miko, the sinister giant from Mars, also desired her. [Illustration] As we neared the Moon we received Grantline's secret message: "Stop for ore on your return voyage. Success beyond wildest hopes!" But I soon discovered that an eavesdropper in an invisible cloak had overheard it! Soon afterwards Miko accidentally murdered a person identified as Anita Prince. Then, in the confusion that resulted, Miko struck his great blow. The crew of the _Planetara_, secretly in his pay, rose up and killed the captain and all the officers but Snap Dean, the radio-helio operator, and myself. I was besieged in the chart-room. George Prince leaped in upon me--and put his arms around me. I looked at him closer--only to discover it was Anita, disguised as her brother! It was her brother, George, who had been killed! George had been in the brigands' confidence--thus Anita was able to spy for us. Quickly we plotted. I would surrender to her, Anita Prince, whom the brigands thought was George Prince. Together we might possibly be able, with Snap's help, to turn the tide, and reclaim the _Planetara_. I was taken to my stateroom and locked there until Miko the brigand leader should come to dispose of me. But I cared not what had happened--Anita was alive! CHAPTER XIV _The Brigand Leader_ The giant Miko stood confronting me. He slid my cubby door closed behind him. He stood with his head towering close against my ceiling. His cloak was discarded. In his leather clothes, and with his clanking sword-ornament, his aspect carried the swagger of a brigand of old. He was bareheaded; the light from one of my tubes fell upon his grinning, leering gray face. "So, Gregg Haljan? You have come to your senses at last. You do not wish me to write my name upon your chest? I would not have done that to Dean; he forced me. Sit back." I had been on my bunk. I sank back at the gesture of his huge hairy arm. His forearm was bare now; the sear of a burn on it was plain to be seen. He remarked my gaze. "True. You did that, Haljan, in Great-New York. But I bear you no malice. I want to talk to you now." He cast about for a seat, and took the little stool which stood by my desk. His hand held a small cylinder of the Martian paralyzing ray; he rested it beside him on the desk. "Now we can talk." I remained silent. Alert. Yet my thoughts were whirling. Anita was alive. Masquerading now as her brother. And, with the joy of it, came a shudder. Above everything, Miko must not know. "A great adventure we are upon, Haljan." * * * * * My thoughts came back. Miko was talking with an assumption of friendly comradeship. "All is well--and we need you, as I have said before. I am no fool. I have been aware of everything that went on aboard this ship. You, of all the officers, are most clever at the routine mathematics. Is that so?" "Perhaps," I said. "You are modest." He fumbled at a pocket of his jacket, produced a scroll-sheaf. I recognized it: Blackstone's figures; the calculation Blackstone roughly made of the elements of the asteroid we had passed. "I am interested in these," Miko went on. "I want you to verify them. And this." He held up another scroll. "This is the calculation of our present position. And our course. Hahn claims he is a navigator. We have set the ship's gravity plates--see, like this--" He handed me the scrolls; he watched me keenly as I glanced over them. "Well?" I said. "You are sparing of words, Haljan. By the devils of the airways, I could make you talk! But I want to be friendly." * * * * * I handed him back the scrolls. I stood up; I was almost within reach of his weapon, but with a sweep of his great arm he abruptly knocked me back to my bunk. "You dare?" Then he smiled. "Let us not come to blows!" "No," I said. I returned his smile. In truth, physical violence could get me nothing in dealing with this fellow. I would have to try guile. And I saw now that his face was flushed and his eyes unnaturally bright. He had been drinking alcolite; not enough to befuddle him--but enough to make him triumphantly talkative. "Hahn may not be much of a mathematician," I suggested. "But there is your Sir Arthur Coniston." I managed a sarcastic grin. "Is that his name?" "Almost. Haljan, will you verify these figures?" "Yes. But why? Where are we going?" He laughed. "You are afraid I will not tell you! Why should I not? This great adventure of mine is progressing perfectly. A tremendous stake, Haljan. A hundred millions of dollars in gold-leaf; there will be fabulous riches for us all, when that radium ore is sold for a hundred million in gold-leaf." "But where are we going?" "To that asteroid," he said abruptly. "I must get rid of these passengers. I am no murderer." * * * * * With half a dozen killings in the recent fight this was hardly convincing. But he was obviously wholly serious. He seemed to read my thoughts. "I kill only when necessary. We will land upon the asteroid. A perfect place to maroon the passengers. Is it not so? I will give them the necessities of life. They will be able to signal. And in a month or so, when we are safely finished with our adventure, a police ship no doubt will rescue them." "And then, from the asteroid," I suggested, "we are going--" "To the Moon, Haljan. What a clever guesser you are! Coniston and Hahn are calculating our course. But I have no great confidence in them. And so I want you." "You have me." "Yes. I have you. I would have killed you long ago--I am an impulsive fellow--but my sister restrained me." He gazed at me slyly. "Moa seems strangely to like you, Haljan." "Thanks," I said. "I'm flattered." "She still hopes I may really win you to join us," he went on. "Gold-leaf is a wonderful thing; there would be plenty for you in this affair. And to be rich, and have the love of a woman like Moa...." He paused. I was trying cautiously to gauge him, to get from him all the information I could. I said, with another smile, "That is premature, to talk of Moa. I will help you chart your course. But this venture, as you call it, is dangerous. A police-ship--" "There are not many," he declared. "The chances of us encountering one is very slim." He grinned at me. "You know that as well as I do. And we now have those code pass-words--I forced Dean to tell me where he had hidden them. If we should be challenged, our pass-word answer will relieve suspicion." "The _Planetara_," I objected, "being overdue at Ferrok-Shahn, will cause alarm. You'll have a covey of patrol-ships after you." "That will be two weeks from now," he smiled. "I have a ship of my own in Ferrok-Shahn. It lies there waiting now, manned and armed. I am hoping that, with Dean's help, we may be able to flash it a signal. It will join us on the Moon. Fear not for the danger, Haljan. I have great interests allied with me in this thing. Plenty of money. We have planned carefully." * * * * * He was idly fingering his cylinder; his gaze roved me as I sat docile on my bunk. "Did you think George Prince was a leader of this? A mere boy. I engaged him a year ago--his knowledge of ores is valuable." My heart was pounding, but I strove not to show it. He went on calmly. "I told you I am impulsive. Half a dozen times I have nearly killed George Prince, and he knows it." He frowned. "I wish I had killed him, instead of his sister. That was an error." There was a note of real concern in his voice. Did he love Anita Prince? It seemed so. He added, "That is done--nothing can change it. George Prince is helpful to me. Your friend Dean is another. I had trouble with him, but he is docile now." I said abruptly, "I don't know whether your promise means anything or not, Miko. But George Prince said you would use no more torture." "I won't. Not if you and Dean obey me." "You tell Dean I have agreed to that. You say he gave you the code-words we took from Johnson?" "Yes. There was a fool! That Johnson! You blame me, Haljan, for the killing of Captain Carter? You need not. Johnson offered to try and capture you. Take you alive. He killed Carter because he was angry at him. A stupid, vengeful fool! He is dead, and I am glad of it." * * * * * My mind was on Miko's plans. I ventured. "This treasure on the Moon--did you say it was on the Moon?" "Don't be an idiot," he retorted. "I know as much about Grantline as you do." "That's very little." "Perhaps." "Perhaps you know more, Miko. The Moon is a big place. Where, for instance, is Grantline located?" I held my breath. Would he tell me that? A score of questions--vague plans--were in my mind. How skilled at mathematics were these brigands? Miko, Hahn, Coniston--could I fool them? If I could learn Grantline's location on the Moon, and keep the _Planetara_ away from it. A pretended error of charting. Time lost--and perhaps Snap could find an opportunity to signal Earth, get help. Miko answered my question as bluntly as I asked it. "I don't know where Grantline is located. But we will find out. He will not suspect the _Planetara_. When we get close to the Moon, we will signal and ask him. We can trick him into telling us. You think I do not know what is on your mind, Haljan? There is a secret code of signals arranged between Dean and Grantline. I have forced Dean to confess it. Without torture! Prince helped me in that. He persuaded Dean not to defy me. A very persuasive fellow, George Prince. More diplomatic than I am, I give him credit." I strove to hold my voice calm. "If I should join you, Miko--my word, if I ever gave it, you would find dependable--I would say George Prince is very valuable to us. You should rein your temper. He is half your size--you might some time, without intention do him injury." * * * * * He laughed. "Moa says so. But have no fear--" "I was thinking," I persisted, "I'd like to have a talk with George Prince." Ah, my pounding, tumultuous heart! But I was smiling calmly. And I tried to put into my voice a shrewd note of cupidity. "I really know very little about this treasure, Miko. If there were a million or two of gold-leaf in it for me--" "Perhaps there would be." "I was thinking. Suppose you let me have a talk with Prince? I have some knowledge of radium ores. His skill and mine--a calculation of what Grantline's treasure may really be. You don't know; you are only assuming." I paused. Whatever may have been in Miko's mind I cannot say. But abruptly he stood up. I had left my bunk, but he waved me back. "Sit down. I am not like Moa. I would not trust you just because you protested you would be loyal." He picked up his cylinder. "We will talk again." He gestured to the scrolls he had left upon my desk. "Work on those. I will judge you by the results." He was no fool, this brigand leader. "Yes," I agreed. "You want a true course now to the asteroid?" "Yes. I will get rid of these passengers. Then we will plan further. Do your best, Haljan--no error! By the Gods, I warn you I can check up on you!" I said meekly, "Very well. But you ask Prince if he wants my calculations of Grantline's ore-body." I shot Miko a foxy look as he stood by my door. I added, "You think you are clever. There is plenty you don't know. Our first night out from the Earth--Grantline's signals--didn't it ever occur to you that I might have some figures on his treasure?" It startled him. "Where are they?" I tapped my forehead. "You don't suppose I was foolish enough to record them. You ask Prince if he wants to talk to me. A high thorium content in ore--you ask Prince. A hundred millions, or two hundred. It would make a big difference, Miko." "I will think about it." He backed out and sealed the door upon me once again. * * * * * But Anita did not come. I verified Hahn's figures, which were very nearly correct. I charted a course for the asteroid; it was almost the one which had been set. Coniston came for my results. "I say, we are not so bad as navigators, are we? I think we're jolly good, considering our inexperience. Not bad at all, eh?" "No." I did not think it wise to ask him about Prince. "Are you hungry, Haljan?" he demanded. "Yes." A steward came with a meal. The saturnine Hahn stood at my door with a weapon upon me while I ate. They were taking no chances--and they were wise not to. The day passed. Day and night, all the same of aspect here in the starry vault of Space. But with the ship's routine it was day. And then another time of sleep. I slept, fitfully, worrying, trying to plan. Within a few hours we would be nearing the asteroid. The time of sleep was nearly passed. My chronometer marked five A. M. of our original Earth starting time. The seal of my cubby door hissed. The door slowly, opened. Anita! She stood there with her cloak around her. A distance away on the shadowed deck-space Coniston was loitering. "Anita!" I whispered it. "Gregg, dear!" She turned and gestured to the watching brigand. "I will not be long, Coniston." She came in and half closed the door upon us, leaving it open enough so that we could make sure that Coniston did not advance. I stepped back where he could not see us. "Anita!" She flung herself into my opened arms. CHAPTER XV _The Masquerader_ A moment when beyond all thought of the nearby brigand--or the possibility of an eavesdropping ray trained now upon my little cubby--a moment while Anita and I held each other; and whispered those things which could mean nothing to the world, but which were all the world to us. Then it was she whose wits brought us back from the shining fairyland of our love, into the sinister reality of the _Planetara_. "Gregg, if they are listening--" I pushed her away. This brave little masquerader! Not for my life, or for all the lives on the ship, would I consciously have endangered her. "But the ore," I said aloud. "There was, in Grantline's message--See here, Prince." Coniston was too far away on the deck to hear us. Anita went to my door again and waved at him reassuringly. I put my ear to the door opening, and listened at the space across the grid of the ventilator over my bunk. The hum of a vibration would have been audible at those two points. But there was nothing. "It's all right," I whispered. "Anita--not you who was killed! I can hardly realize it now. Not you whom they buried yesterday morning." We stood and whispered, and she clung to me--so small beside me. With the black robe thrown aside, it seemed that I could not miss the curves of her woman's figure. A dangerous game she was playing. Her hair had been cut short to the base of her neck, in the fashion of her dead brother. Her eyelashes had been clipped; the line of her brows altered. And now, in the light of my ray tube as it shone upon her earnest face, I could remark other changes. Glutz, the little beauty specialist, was in this secret. With plastic skill he had altered the set of her jaw with his wax--put masculinity there. She was whispering: "It was--was poor George whom Miko shot." * * * * * I had now the true version of what had occurred. Miko had been forcing his wooing upon Anita. George Prince was a weakling whose only good quality was a love for his sister. Some years ago he had fallen into evil ways. Been arrested, and then discharged from his position with the Federated Radium Corporation. He had taken up with evil companions in Great-New York. Mostly Martians. And Miko had met him. His technical knowledge, his training with the Federated Corporation, made him valuable to Miko's enterprise. And so Prince had joined the brigands. Of all this, Anita had been unaware. She had never liked Miko. Feared him. And it seemed that the Martian had some hold upon her brother, which puzzled and frightened Anita. Then Miko had fallen in love with her. George had not liked it. And that night on the _Planetara_, Miko had come and knocked upon Anita's door. Incautiously she opened it; he forced himself in. And when she repulsed him, struggled with him, George had been awakened. She was whispering to me now. "My room was dark. We were all three struggling. George was holding me--the shot came--and I screamed." And Miko had fled, not knowing whom his shot had hit in the darkness. "And when George died, Captain Carter wanted me to impersonate him. We planned it with Dr. Frank, to try and learn what Miko and the others were doing. Because I never knew that poor George had fallen into such evil things." * * * * * I could only hold her thankfully in my arms. The lost what-might-have-been seemed coming back to us. "And they cut my hair, Gregg, and Glutz altered my face a little, and I did my best. But there was no time--it came upon us so quickly." And she whispered, "But I love you, Gregg. I want to be the first to say it: I love you--I love you." But we had the sanity to try and plan. "Anita, when you go back, tell Miko we discussed radium ores. You'll have to be careful, clever. Don't say too much. Tell him we estimate the treasure at a hundred and thirty millions." I told her what Miko had vouchsafed me of his plans. She knew all that. And Snap knew it. She had had a few moments alone with Snap. Gave me now a message from him: "We'll pull out of this, Gregg." With Snap she had worked out a plan. There were Snap and I; and Shac and Dud Ardley, upon whom we could doubtless depend. And Dr. Frank. Against us were Miko and his sister; and Coniston and Hahn. Of course there were the members of the crew. But we were numerically the stronger when it came to true leadership. Unarmed and guarded now. But if we could break loose--recapture the ship.... I sat listening to Anita's eager whispers. It seemed feasible. Miko did not altogether trust George Prince; Anita was now unarmed. "But I can make opportunity! I can get one of their ray cylinders, and an invisible cloak equipment." That cloak--it had been hidden in Miko's room when Carter searched for it in A20--was now in the chart-room by Johnson's body. It had been repaired now; Anita thought she could get possession of it. * * * * * We worked out the details of the plan. Anita would arm herself, and come and release me. Together, with a paralyzing ray, we could creep aboard the ship, overcome these brigands one by one. There were so few of the leaders. With them felled, and with us in control of the turret and the helio-room we could force the crew to stay at their posts. There were, Anita said, no navigators among Miko's crew. They would not dare oppose us. "But it should be done at once, Anita. In a few hours we will be at the asteroid." "Yes. I will go now--try and get the weapons." "Where is Snap?" "Still in the helio-room. One of the crew guards him." Coniston was roaming the ship; he was still loitering on the deck, watching our door. Hahn was in the turret. The morning watch of the crew were at their posts in the hull-corridors; the stewards were preparing a morning meal. There were nine members of subordinates altogether, Anita had calculated. Six of them were in Miko's pay; the other three--our own men who had not been killed in the fighting--had joined the brigands. "And Dr. Frank, Anita?" He was in the lounge. All the passengers were herded there, with Miko and Moa alternating on guard. "I will arrange it with Venza," Anita whispered swiftly. "She will tell the others. Dr. Frank knows about it now. He thinks it can be done." * * * * * The possibility of it swept me anew. The brigands were of necessity scattered singly about the ship. One by one, creeping under cover of an invisible cloak, I could fell them, and replace them without alarming the others. My thoughts leaped to it. We would strike down the guard in the helio-room. Release Snap. At the turret we could assail Hahn, and replace him with Snap. Coniston's voice outside broke in upon us. "Prince." He was coming forward. Anita stood in the doorway. "I have the figures, Coniston. By God, this Haljan is with us! And clever! We think it will total a hundred and thirty millions. What a stake!" She whispered, "Gregg, dear--I'll be back soon. We can do it--be ready." "Anita--be careful of yourself! If they should suspect you...." "I'll be careful. In an hour, Gregg, or less, I'll come back. All right, Coniston. Where is Miko? I want to see him. Stay where you are, Haljan! All in good time Miko will trust you with your liberty. You'll be rich like us all, never fear." She swaggered out upon the deck, waved at the brigand, and banged my cubby door in my face. I sat upon my bunk. Waiting. Would she come back? Would she be successful? CHAPTER XVI _In the Blue-lit Corridor_ She came. I suppose it was no more than an hour: it seemed an eternity of apprehension. There was the slight hissing of the seal of my door. The panel slid. I had leaped from my bunk where in the darkness I was lying tense. "Prince?" I did not dare say, "Anita." "Gregg." Her voice. My gaze swept the deck as the panel opened. Neither Coniston nor anyone else was in sight, save Anita's dark-robed figure which came into my room. "You got it?" I asked her in a low whisper. I held her for an instant, kissed her. But she pushed me away with quick hands. "Gregg, dear--" She was breathless. My kisses, and the tenseness of what lay before us were to blame. "Gregg, see, I have it. Give us a little light--we must hurry!" In the blue dimness I saw that she was holding one of the Martian cylinders. The smallest size; it would paralyze, but not kill. "Only one, Anita?" "Yes. I had it before, but Miko took it from me. It was in his room. And this--" The invisible cloak. We laid it on my grid, and I adjusted its mechanism. A cloak of the reflecting-absorbing variety.[A] [A] The principle of this invisible cloak involves the use of an electronized fabric. All color is absorbed. The light rays reflected to the eye of the observer thus show an image of empty blackness. There is also created about the cloak a magnetic field which by natural laws bends the rays of light from objects behind it. This principle of the natural bending of light when passing through a magnetic field was first recognized by Albert Einstein, a scientist of the Twentieth century. In the case of this invisible cloak, the bending light rays, by making visible what was behind the cloak's blackness, thus destroyed its solid black outline and gave a pseudo-invisibility which was fairly effective under favorable conditions. * * * * * I donned it, and drew its hood, and threw on its current. "All right, Anita?" "Yes." "Can you see me?" "No." She stepped back a foot or two further. "Not from here. But you must let no one approach too close." Then she came forward, put out her hand, fumbled until she found me. It was our plan to have me follow her out. Anyone observing us would see only the robed figure of the supposed George Prince, and I would escape notice. The situation about the ship was almost unchanged. Anita had secured the weapon and the cloak and slipped away to my cubby without being observed. "You're sure of that?" "I think so, Gregg. I was careful." Moa was now in the lounge, guarding the passengers. Hahn was asleep in the chart-room; Coniston was in the turret. Coniston would be off duty presently, Anita said, with Hahn taking his place. There were look-outs in the forward and stern watch-towers, and a guard upon Snap in the helio-room. "Is he inside the room, Anita?" "Snap? Yes." "No--the guard." "No. He was sitting upon the spider bridge at the door." * * * * * This was unfortunate. That guard could see all the deck clearly. He might be suspicious of George Prince wandering around; it would be difficult to get near enough to assail him. This cylinder, I knew, had an effective range of only some twenty feet. Anita and I were swiftly whispering. It was necessary now to decide exactly what we were to do; once under observation outside, there must be no hesitation, no fumbling. "Coniston is sharpest, Gregg. He will be the hardest to get near." The languid-spoken Englishman was the one Anita most feared. His alert eyes seemed to miss nothing. Perhaps he was suspicious of this George Prince--Anita thought so. "But where is Miko?" I whispered. The brigand leader had gone below a few moments ago, down into the hull-corridor. Anita had seized the opportunity to come to me. "We can attack Hahn in the chart-room first," I suggested. "And get the other weapons. Are they still there?" "Yes. But Gregg, the forward deck is very bright." We were approaching the asteroid. Already its light like a brilliant moon was brightening the forward deck-space. It made me realize how much haste was necessary. We decided to go down into the hull-corridors. Locate Miko. Fell him, and hide him. His non-appearance back on deck would very soon throw the others into confusion, especially now with our impending landing upon the asteroid. And under cover of this confusion we would try and release Snap. We had been arguing no more than a minute or two. We were ready. Anita slid my door wide. She stepped through, with me soundlessly scurrying after her. The empty, silent deck was alternately dark with shadow-patches and bright with blobs of starlight. A sheen of the Sun's corona was mingled with it; and from forward came the radiance of the asteroid's mellow silver glow. * * * * * Anita turned to seal my door; within my faintly humming cloak I stood beside her. Was I invisible in this light? Almost directly over us, close under the dome, the look-out sat in his little tower. He gazed down at Anita. Amidships, high over the cabin superstructure, the helio-room hung dark and silent. The guard on its bridge was visible. He, too, looked down. A tense instant. Then I breathed again. There was no alarm. The two guards answered Anita's gesture. Anita said aloud into my empty cubby: "Miko will come for you presently, Haljan. He told me to tell you that he wants you at the turret controls to land us on the asteroid." She finished sealing my door and turned away; started forward along the deck. I followed. My steps were soundless in my elastic-bottomed shoes. Anita swaggered with a noisy tread. Near the door of the smoking room a small incline passage led downward. We went into it. The passage was dimly blue-lit. We descended its length, came to the main corridor, which ran the length of the hull. A vaulted metal passage, with doors to the control rooms opening from it. Dim lights showed at intervals. * * * * * The humming of the ship was more apparent here. It drowned the slight humming of my cloak. I crept after Anita; my hand under the cloak clutched the ray weapon. A steward passed us. I shrank aside to avoid him. Anita spoke to him. "Where is Miko, Ellis?" "In the ventilator-room, Mr. Prince. There was difficulty with the air renewal." Anita nodded, and moved on. I could have felled that steward as he passed me. Oh, if I only had, how different things might have been! But it seemed needless. I let him go, and he turned into a nearby door which led to the galley. Anita moved forward. If we could come upon Miko alone. Abruptly she turned, and whispered, "Gregg, if other men are with him, I'll draw him away. You watch your chance." What little things may overthrow one's careful plans! Anita had not realized how close to her I was following. And her turning so unexpectedly caused me to collide with her sharply. "Oh!" She exclaimed it involuntarily. Her outflung hand had unwittingly gripped my wrist, caught the electrode there. The touch burned her, and close-circuited my robe. There was a hiss. My current burned out the tiny fuses. My invisibility was gone! I stood, a tall black-hooded figure, revealed to the gaze of anyone who might be near! The futile plans of humans! We had planned so carefully! Our calculations, our hopes of what we could do, came clattering now in a sudden wreckage around us. "Anita, run!" If I were seen with her, then her own disguise would probably be discovered. That above everything would be disaster! "Anita, get away from me! I must try it alone!" * * * * * I could hide somewhere, repair the cloak perhaps. Or, since now I was armed, why could I not boldly start an assault? "Gregg, we must get you back to your cubby!" She was clinging to me in a panic. "No! You run! Get away from me! Don't you understand? George Prince has no business here with me! They'd kill you!" Or worse--- Miko would discover it was Anita, not George Prince. "Gregg, let's get back to the deck." I pushed at her. Both of us in sudden confusion. From behind me there came a shout. That accursed steward! He had returned, to investigate perhaps what George Prince was doing in this corridor. He heard our voices; his shout in the silence of the ship sounded horribly loud. The white-clothed shape of him was in the nearby doorway. He stood stricken in surprise at seeing me. And then turned to run. I fired my paralyzing cylinder through my cloak. Got him! He fell. I shoved Anita violently. "Run! Tell Miko to come--tell him you heard a shout! He won't suspect you!" "But Gregg--" "You mustn't be found out! You're our only hope, Anita! I'll hide, fix the cloak, or get back to my cubby. We'll try it again." It decided her. She scurried down the corridor. I whirled the other way. The steward's shout might not have been heard. Then realization flashed to me. That steward would be revived. He was one of Miko's men: for two voyages he had been a spy upon the _Planetara_. He would be revived and tell what he had seen and heard. Anita's disguise would be revealed. A cold-blooded killing I do protest went against me. But it was necessary. I flung myself upon him. I beat his skull with the metal of my cylinder. I stood up. My hood had fallen back from my head. I wiped my bloody hands on my useless cloak. I had smashed the cylinder. "Haljan!" * * * * * Anita's voice! A sharp note of horror and warning. I became aware that in the corridor, forty feet down its dim length, Miko had appeared, with Anita behind him. His rifle-bullet-projector was leveled. It spat at me. But Anita had pulled at his arm. The explosive report was sharply deafening in the confined space of the corridor. With a spurt of flame the leaden pellet struck over my head against the vaulted ceiling. Miko was struggling with Anita. "Prince, you idiot!" "Miko, don't! It's Haljan! Don't kill him--" The turmoil brought members of the crew. From the shadowed oval near me they came running. I flung the useless cylinder at them. But I was trapped in the narrow passage. I might have fought my way out. Or Miko might have shot me. But there was the danger that, in her horror, Anita would betray herself. I backed against the wall. "Don't kill me! See, I will not fight!" I flung up my arms. And the crew, emboldened, and courageous under Miko's gaze, leaped on me and bore me down. The futile plans of humans! Anita and I had planned so carefully, and in a few brief minutes of action it had come only to this! CHAPTER XVII _A Woman of Mars_ "So, Gregg Haljan, you are not as loyal as you pretend!" Miko was livid with suppressed anger. They had stripped the cloak from me, and flung me back in my cubby. Miko was now confronting me; at the door Moa stood watching. And Anita was behind her. I sat outwardly defiant and sullen on my bunk. But I was alert and tense, fearful still of what Anita's emotion might betray her into doing. "Not so loyal," Miko repeated. "And a fool! Do you think I am such a child you can escape me!" He swung around. "How did he get out of here? Prince, you came in here!" My heart was wildly thumping. But Anita retorted with a touch of spirit: "I came to tell him what you commanded. To check Hahn's latest figures--and to be ready to take the controls when we go into the asteroid's atmosphere." "Well, how did he get out?" "How should I know?" she parried. Little actress! Her spirit helped to allay my fear. She held her cloak close around her in the fashion they had come to expect from the George Prince who had just buried his sister. "How should I know, Miko? I sealed his door." "But did you?" "Of course he did," Moa put in. "Ask your look-outs," said Anita. "They saw me--I waved to them just as I sealed the door." I ventured, "I have been taught to open doors." I managed a sly, lugubrious smile. "I shall not try it again, Miko." Nothing had been said about my killing of the steward. I thanked my constellations now that he was dead. "I shall not try it again," I repeated. A glance passed between Miko and his sister. Miko said abruptly, "You seem to realize that it is not my purpose to kill you. And you presume upon it." "I shall not again." I eyed Moa. She was gazing at me steadily. She said, "Leave me with him, Miko...." She smiled. "Gregg Haljan, we are no more than twenty thousand miles from the asteroid now. The calculations for retarding are now in operation." * * * * * It was what had taken Miko below, that and trouble with the ventilating system, which was soon rectified. But the retarding of the ship's velocity when nearing a destination required accurate manipulation. These brigands were fearful of their own skill. That was obvious. It gave me confidence. I was really needed. They would not harm me. Except for Miko's impulsive temper, I was in no danger from them--not now, certainly. Moa was saying, "I think I may make you understand, Gregg. We have tremendous riches within our grasp." "I know it," I added with sudden thought. "But there are many with whom to divide this treasure...." Miko caught my intended implication. "By the infernal, this fellow may have felt he could seize the treasure for himself! Because he is a navigator!" Moa said vehemently, "Do not be an idiot, Gregg! You could not do it! There will be fighting with Grantline." My purpose was accomplished. They seemed to see me a willing outlaw like themselves. As though it were a bond between us. And they could win me. "Leave me with him," said Moa. Miko acquiesced. "For a few minutes only." He proffered a heat-ray cylinder, but she refused it. "I am not afraid of him." Miko swung on me. "Within an hour we will be nearing the atmosphere. Will you take the controls?" "Yes." * * * * * He set his heavy jaw. His eyes bored into me. "You're a strange fellow, Haljan. I can't make you out. I am not angry now. Do you think, when I am deadly serious, that I mean what I say?" His calm words set a sudden shiver over me. I checked my smile. "Yes," I said. "Well then, I will tell you this: not for all of Prince's well-meaning interference, or Moa's liking for you, or my own need of your skill, will I tolerate more trouble from you. The next time--I will kill you. Do you believe me?" "Yes." "That is all I want to say. You kill my men, and my sister says I must not hurt you. I am not a child to be ruled by a woman!" He held his huge fist before my face. "With these fingers I will twist your neck! Do you believe it?" "Yes." I did indeed. He swung on his heel. "If Moa wants to try and put sense into your head--I hope she does. Bring him to the lounge when you are finished, Moa. Come, Prince--Hahn will need us." He chuckled grimly. "Hahn seems to fear we will plunge into this asteroid like a wild comet gone suddenly tangent!" Anita moved aside to let him through the door. I caught a glimpse of her set white face as she followed him down the deck. Then Moa's bulk blocked the doorway. She faced me. "Sit where you are, Gregg." She turned and closed the door upon us. "I am not afraid of you. Should I be?" "No," I said. She came and sat down beside me. "If you should attempt to leave this room, the stern look-out has orders to bore you through." "I have no intention of leaving the room," I retorted. "I do not want to commit suicide." "I thought you did. You seem minded in such a fashion. Gregg, why are you so foolish?" * * * * * I remained silent. "Why?" she demanded. I said carefully, "This treasure--you are many who will divide it. You have all these men on the _Planetara_. And in Ferrok-Shahn, others, no doubt." I paused. Would she tell me? Could I make her talk of that other brigand ship which Miko had said was waiting on Mars? I wondered if he had been able to signal it. The distance from here to Mars was great; yet upon other voyages Snap's signals had gotten through. My heart sank at the thought. Our situation here was desperate enough. The passengers soon would be cast upon the asteroid: there would be left only Snap, Anita and myself. We might recapture the ship, but I doubted it now. My thoughts were turning to our arrival upon the Moon. We three might, perhaps, be able to thwart the attack upon Grantline, hold the brigands off until help from the Earth might come. But with another brigand ship, fully manned and armed, coming from Mars, the condition would be immeasurably worse. Grantline had some twenty men, and his camp, I knew, would be reasonably fortified. I knew, too, that Johnny Grantline would fight to his last man. Moa was saying, "I would like to tell you our plans, Gregg." Her gaze was on my face. Keen eyes, but they were luminous now--an emotion in them sweeping her. But outwardly she was calm, stern-lipped. "Well, why don't you tell me?" I said. "If I am to help you...." "Gregg, I want you with us. Don't you understand? We are not many. My brother and I are guiding this affair. With your help, I would feel differently." "The ship at Ferrok-Shahn--" * * * * * My fears were realized. She said, "I think our signals reached it. Dean tried, and Coniston was checking him." "You think the ship is coming?" "Yes." "Where will it join us?" "At the Moon. We will be there in thirty hours. Your figures gave that, did they not, Gregg?" "Yes. And the other ship--how fast is it?" "Quite fast. In eight days--or nine, perhaps--it will reach the Moon." She seemed willing enough to talk. There was indeed, no particular reason for reticence; I could not, she naturally felt, turn the knowledge to account. "Manned--" I prompted. "About forty men." "And armed? Long range projectors?" "You ask very avid questions, Gregg!" "Why should I not? Don't you suppose I'm interested?" I touched her. "Moa, did it ever occur to you, if once you and Miko trusted me--which you don't--I might show more interest in joining you?" The look on her face emboldened me. "Did you ever think of that, Moa? And some arrangement for my share of this treasure? I am not like Johnson, to be hired for a hundred pounds of gold-leaf." "Gregg, I will see that you get your share. Riches, for you--and me." "I was thinking, Moa, when we land at the Moon to-morrow--where is our equipment?" The Moon, with its lack of atmosphere, needed special equipment. I had never heard Carter mention what apparatus the _Planetara_ was carrying. * * * * * Moa laughed. "We have located air-suits and helmets--a variety of suitable apparatus, Gregg. But we were not foolish enough to leave Great-New York on this voyage without our own arrangements. My brother, and Coniston and Prince--all of us shipped crates of freight consigned to Ferrok-Shahn--and Rankin had special baggage marked 'theatrical apparatus.'" I understood it now. These brigands had boarded the _Planetara_ with their own Moon equipment, disguised as freight and personal baggage. Shipped in bond, to be inspected by the tax officials of Mars. "It is on board now. We will open it when we leave the asteroid, Gregg. We are well equipped." She bent toward me. And suddenly her long lean fingers were gripping my shoulders. "Gregg, look at me!" I gazed into her eyes. There was passion there; and her voice was suddenly intense. "Gregg, I told you once a Martian girl goes after what she wants. It is you I want--" Not for me to play like a cad upon a woman's emotions! "Moa, you flatter me." "I love you." She held me off, gazing at me. "Gregg--" I must have smiled. And abruptly she released me. "So you think it amusing?" "No. But on Earth--" "We are not on the Earth. Nor am I of the Earth!" She was gauging me keenly. No note of pleading was in her voice; a stern authority; and the passion was swinging to anger. "I am like my brother: I do not understand you, Gregg Haljan. Perhaps you think you are clever? It seems stupidity, the fatuousness of man!" "Perhaps," I said. * * * * * There was a moment of silence. "Gregg, I said I loved you. Have you no answer?" "No." In truth, I did not know what sort of answer it would be best to make. Whatever she must have read in my eyes, it stirred her to fury. Her fingers with the strength of a man in them, dug into my shoulders. Her gaze searched me. "You think you love someone else? Is that it?" That was horribly startling; but she did not mean it just that way. She amended with caustic venom: "That little Anita Prince! You thought you loved her! Was that it?" "No!" But I hardly deceived her. "Sacred to her memory! Her ratlike little face--soft voice like a purring, sniveling cat! Is that what you're remembering, Gregg Haljan?" she sneered. I tried to laugh. "What nonsense!" "Is it? Then why are you cold under my touch? Am I--a girl descended from the Martian flame-workers--impotent now to awaken a man?" A woman scorned! In all the Universe there could be no more dangerous an enemy. An incredible venom shot from her eyes. "That miserable mouselike creature! Well for her that my brother killed her." It struck me cold. If Anita was unmasked, beyond all the menace of Miko's wooing, I knew that the venom of Moa's jealousy was a greater danger. I said sharply, "Don't be simple, Moa!" I shook off her grip. "You imagine too much. You forget that I am a man of the Earth and you a girl of Mars." "Is that reason why we should not love?" "No. But our instincts are different. Men of the Earth are born to the chase." * * * * * I was smiling. With thought of Anita's danger I could find it readily in my heart to dupe this Amazon. "Give me time, Moa. You attract me." "You lie!" "Do you think so?" I gripped her arm with all the power of my fingers. It must have hurt her, but she gave no sign; her gaze clung to me steadily. "I don't know what to think, Gregg Haljan...." I held my grip. "Think what you like. Men of Earth have been known to kill the thing they love." "You want me to fear you?" "Perhaps." She smiled scornfully. "That is absurd." I released her. I said earnestly, "I want you to realize that if you treat me fairly, I can be of great advantage to this venture. There will be fighting--I am fearless." Her venomous expression was softening. "I think that is true, Gregg." "And you need my navigating skill. Even now I should be in the turret." I stood up. I half expected she would stop me, but she did not. I added, "Shall we go?" She stood beside me. Her height brought her face level with mine. "I think you will cause no more trouble, Gregg?" "Of course not. I am not wholly witless." "You have been." "Well, that is over." I hesitated. Then I added, "A man of Earth does not yield to love when there is work to do. This treasure--" I think that of everything I said, this last most convinced her. She interrupted, "That I understand." Her eyes were smoldering. "When it is over--when we are rich--then I will claim you, Gregg." * * * * * She turned from me. "Are you ready?" "Yes. No! I must get that sheet of Hahn's last figures." "Are they checked?" "Yes." I picked the sheet up from my desk. "Hahn is fairly accurate, Moa." "A fool nevertheless. An apprehensive fool." A comradeship seemed coming between us. It was my purpose to establish it. "Are we going to maroon Dr. Frank with the passengers?" I asked. "Yes." "But he may be of use to us." I wanted Dr. Frank kept aboard. I still felt that there was a chance for us to recapture the ship. But Moa shook her head decisively. "My brother has decided not. We will be well rid of Dr. Frank. Are you ready, Gregg?" "Yes." She opened the door. Her gesture reassured the look-out, who was alertly watching the stern watch-tower. "Come, Gregg." I stepped out, and followed her forward along the deck, which now was bright with the radiance of the nearby asteroid. CHAPTER XVIII _Marooned on an Asteroid_ A fair little world. I had thought so before; and I thought so now as I gazed at the asteroid hanging so close before our bow. A huge, thin crescent, with the Sun off to one side behind it. A silver crescent, tinged with red. From this near viewpoint, all of the little globe's disc was visible. The shadowed portion lay dimly red, mysteriously; the sunlit crescent--widening visibly is we approached--was gleaming silver. Inky moonlike shadows in the hollows, brilliant light upon the mountain heights. The seas lay in gray patches. The convexity of the disc was sharply defined. So small a world! Fair and beautiful, shrouded with clouded areas. "Where is Miko?" "In the lounge, Gregg." "Can we stop there?" Moa turned into the lounge archway. Strange, tense scene. I saw Anita at once. Her robed figure lurked in an inconspicuous corner; her eyes were upon me as Moa and I entered, but she did not move. The thirty-odd passengers were huddled in a group. Solemn, white-faced men, frightened women. Some of them were sobbing. One Earth-woman--a young widow--sat holding her little girl, and wailing with uncontrolled hysteria. The child knew me. As I appeared now, with my gold-laced white coat over my shoulders, the little child seemed to see in my uniform a mark of authority. She left her mother and ran to me. "You, please--you will help us? My moms is crying." I sent her gently back. But there came upon me then a compassion for these innocent passengers, fated to have embarked upon this ill-starred voyage. Herded here in this cabin, with brigands like pirates of old guarding them. Waiting now to be marooned on an uninhabited asteroid roaming in space. A sense of responsibility swept me. I swung upon Miko. He stood with a nonchalant grace, lounging against the wall with a cylinder dangling in his hand. He anticipated me. "So, Haljan--she put some sense into your head? No more trouble? Then get into the turret. Moa, stay there with him. Send Hahn here. Where is that ass Coniston? We will be in the atmosphere shortly." I said, "No more trouble from me, Miko. But these passengers--what preparation are you making for them on the asteroid?" * * * * * He stared in surprise. Then he laughed. "I am no murderer. The crew is preparing food, all we can spare. And tools. They can build themselves shelter--they will be picked up in a few weeks." Dr. Frank was here. I caught his gaze, but he did not speak. On the lounge couches there still lay the quarter-score bodies. Rankin, who had been killed by Blackstone in the fight; a man passenger killed; a woman and a man wounded. Miko added, "Dr. Frank will take his medical supplies--he will care for the wounded. There are other bodies among the crew." His gesture was deprecating. "I have not buried them. We will put them ashore; easier that way." The passengers were all eyeing me. I said: "You have nothing to fear. I will guarantee you the best equipment we can spare. You will give them apparatus with which to signal?" I demanded of Miko. "Yes. Get to the turret." I turned away, with Moa after me. Again the little girl ran forward. "Come--speak to my moms! She is crying." It was across the cabin from Miko. Coniston had appeared from the deck; it created a slight diversion. He joined Miko. "Wait," I said to Moa. "She is afraid of you. This is humanity." I pushed Moa back. I followed the child. I had seen that Venza was sitting with the child's weeping mother. This was a ruse to get word with me. I stood before the terrified woman while the little girl clung to my legs. I said gently, "Don't be so frightened. Dr. Frank will take care of you. There is no danger--you will be safer on the asteroid than here on the ship." I leaned down and touched her shoulder. "There is no danger." * * * * * I was between Venza and the open cabin. Venza whispered swiftly, "When we are landing, Gregg, I want you to make a commotion--anything--just as the women passengers go ashore." "Why? No, of course you will have food, Mrs. Francis." "Never mind! An instant. Just confusion. Go, Gregg--don't speak now!" I raised the child. "You take care of mother." I kissed her. From across the cabin Miko's sardonic voice made me turn. "Touching sentimentality, Haljan! Get to your post in the turret!" His rasping note of annoyance brooked no delay. I set the child down. I said, "I will land us in an hour. Depend on it." Hahn was at the controls when Moa and I reached the turret. "You will land us safely, Haljan?" he demanded anxiously. I pushed him away. "Miko wants you in the lounge." "You take command here?" "Of course, Hahn. I am no more anxious for a crash than you." He sighed with relief. "That is true. I am no expert at atmospheric entry, Haljan--nor Coniston, nor Miko." "Have no fear. Sit down, Moa." I waved to the look-out in the forward watch-tower, and got his routine gesture. I rang the corridor bells, and the normal signals came promptly back. "It's correct, Hahn. Get away with you." I called after him. "Tell Miko that things are all right here." Hahn's small dark figure, lithe as a leopard in his tight fitting trousers and jacket with his robe now discarded, went swiftly down the spider incline and across the deck. "Moa, where is Snap? By the infernal, if he has been injured!--" * * * * * Up on the helio-room bridge the brigand guard still sat. Then I saw that Snap was out there sitting with him. I waved from the turret window, and Snap's cheery gesture answered me. His voice carried down through the silver moonlight: "Land us safely, Gregg. These weird amateur navigators!" Within the hour I had us dropping into the asteroid's atmosphere. The ship heated steadily. The pressure went up. It kept me busy with the instruments and the calculations. But my signals were always promptly answered from below. The brigand crew did its part efficiently. At a hundred and fifty thousand feet I shifted the gravity plates to the landing combinations, and started the electronic engines. "All safe, Gregg?" Moa sat at my elbow; her eyes, with what seemed a glow of admiration in them, followed my busy routine activities. "Yes. The crew works well." The electronic streams flowed out like a rocket tail behind us. The _Planetara_ caught their impetus. In the rarified air, our bow lifted slightly, like a ship riding a gentle ground swell. At a hundred thousand feet we sailed gently forward, hull down to the asteroid's surface, cruising to seek a landing space. A little sea was now beneath us. A shadowed sea, deep purple in the night down there. Occasional green-verdured islands showed, with the lines of white surf marking them. Beyond the sea, a curving coastline was visible. Rocky headlines, behind which mountain foothills rose in serrated, verdured ranks. The sunlight edged the distant mountains; and presently this rapidly turning little world brought the sunlight forward. * * * * * It was day beneath us. We slid gently downward. Thirty thousand feet now, above a sparkling blue ocean. The coastline was just ahead: green with a lush, tropical vegetation. Giant trees, huge-leaved. Long dangling vines; air plants, with giant pods and vivid orchidlike blossoms. I sat at the turret window, staring through my glasses. A fair little world, yet obviously uninhabited. I could fancy that all this was newly-sprung vegetation. This asteroid had whirled in from the cold of the interplanetary space far outside our Solar System. A few years ago--as time might be measured astronomically, it was no more than yesterday--this fair landscape was congealed white and bleak, with a sweep of glacial ice. But the seeds of life miraculously were here. The miracle of life! Under the warming, germinating sunlight, the verdure sprung. "Can you find landing space, Gregg?" Moa's question brought back my wandering fancies. I saw an upland glade, a level spread of ferns with the forest banked around it. A cliff-height nearby, frowning down at the sea. "Yes. I can land us there." I showed her through the glasses. I rang the sirens, and we spiraled, descending further. The mountain tops were now close beneath us. Clouds were overhead, white masses with blue sky behind them. A day of brilliant sunlight. But soon, with our forward cruising, it was night. The sunlight dropped beneath the sharply convex horizon; the sea and the land went purple. A night of brilliant stars; the Earth was a blazing blue-red point of light. The heavens visibly were revolving; in an hour or so it would be daylight again. On the forward deck now Coniston had appeared, commanding half a dozen of the crew. They were carrying up caskets of food and the equipment which was to be given the marooned passengers. And making ready the disembarking incline, loosening the seals of the side-dome windows. Sternward on the deck, by the lounge oval, I could see Miko standing. And occasionally the roar of his voice at the passengers sounded. * * * * * My vagrant thought flung back into Earth's history. Like this, ancient travelers of the surface of the sea were herded by pirates to walk the plank, or put ashore, marooned upon some fair desert island of the tropic Spanish main. Hahn came mounting our turret incline. "All is well, Gregg Haljan?" "Get to your work," Moa told him sharply. "We land in an hour-quadrant." He retreated, joining the bustle and confusion which now was beginning on the deck. It struck me--could I turn that confusion to account? Would it be possible, now at the last moment, to attack these brigands? Snap still sat outside the helio-room doorway. But his guard was alert, with upraised projector. And that guard, I saw, in his position high amidships, commanded all the deck. And I saw too, as the passengers now were herded in a line from the lounge oval, that Miko had roped and bound all of the men. And a clanking chain connected them. They came like a line of convicts, marching forward, and stopped on the open deck-space near the base of the turret. Dr. Frank's grim face gazed up at me. Miko ordered the women and children in a group beside the chained men. His words to them reached me: "You are in no danger. When we land, be careful. You will find gravity very different--this is a very small world." I flung on the landing lights; the deck glowed with the blue radiance; the search-beams shot down beside our hull. We hung now a thousand feet above the forest glade. I cut off the electronic streams. We poised, with the gravity-plates set at normal, and only a gentle night-breeze to give us a slight side drift. This I could control with the lateral propeller rudders. For all my busy landing routine, my mind was on other things. Venza's swift words back there in the lounge. I was to create a commotion while the passengers were landing. Why? Had she and Dr. Frank, perhaps, some last minute desperate purposes? * * * * * I determined I would do what she said. Shout, or mis-order the lights. That would be easy. But to what advantage? I was glad it was night--I had, indeed, calculated our descent so that the landing would be in darkness. But to what purpose? These brigands were very alert. There was nothing I could think of to do which would avail us anything more than a possible swift death under Miko's anger. "Well done, Gregg!" said Moa. I cut off the last of the propellers. With scarcely a perceptible jar, the _Planetara_ grounded, rose like a feather and settled to rest in the glade. The deep purple night with stars overhead was around us. I hissed out our interior air through the dome and hull-ports, and admitted the night-air of the asteroid. My calculations--of necessity mere mathematical approximations--proved fairly accurate. In temperature and pressure there was no radical change as the dome-windows slid back. We had landed. Whatever Venza's purpose, her moment was at hand. I was tense. But I was aware also, that beside me Moa was very alert. I had thought her unarmed. She was not. She sat back from me; in her hand was a small thin knife-blade. She murmured tensely, "You have done your part, Gregg. Well and skillfully done. Now we will sit here quietly and watch them land." Snap's guard was standing, keenly watching. The look-outs in the forward and stern towers were also armed; I could see them both gazing keenly down at the confusion of the blue-lit deck. The incline went over the hull-side and touched the ground. "Enough!" Miko roared. "The men first. Hahn, move the women back! Coniston, pile those caskets to the side. Get out of the way, Prince." * * * * * Anita was down there. I saw her at the edge of the group of women. Venza was near her. Miko shoved her. "Get out of the way, Prince. You can help Coniston. Have the things ready to throw off." Five of the steward-crew were at the head of the incline. Miko shouted up at me: "Haljan, hold our shipboard gravity normal." "Yes," I responded. I had done so. Our magnitizers had been adjusted to the shifting calculations of our landing. They were holding now at intensities, so that upon the _Planetara_ no change from fairly normal Earth-gravity was apparent. I rang a tentative inquiry signal; the operator in the hull-magnetizer control answered that he was at his post. The line of men were first to descend. Dr. Frank led them. He flashed a look of farewell up at me and Snap as he went down the incline with the chained men passengers after him. Motley procession! Twenty odd, dishevelled, half-clothed men of three worlds. The changing, lightening gravity on the incline caught them. Dr. Frank bounded up to the rail under the impetus of his step: caught and held himself, drew himself back. The line swayed. In the dim, blue-lit glare it seemed unreal, crazy. A grotesque dream of men descending a plank. They reached the forest glade. Stood swaying, afraid at first to move. The purple night crowded them; they stood gazing at this strange world, their new prison. "Now the women." Miko was shoving the women to the head of the incline. I could feel Moa's steady gaze upon me. Her knife-blade gleamed in the turret light. She murmured again, "In a few minutes you can ring us away, Gregg." * * * * * I felt like an actor awaiting his cue in the wings of some turgid drama the plot of which he did not know. Venza was near the head of the incline. Some of the women and children were on it. A woman screamed. Her child had slipped from her hand, bounded up over the rail, and fallen. Hardly fallen--floated down to the ground, with flailing arms and legs, landing in the dark ferns, unharmed. Its terrified wail came up. There was a confusion on the incline. Venza, still on the deck, seemed to send a look of appeal to the turret. My cue? I slid my hand to the light switchboard. It was near my knees. I pulled a switch. The blue-lit deck beneath the turret went dark. I recall an instant of horrible, tense silence, and in the gloom beside me I was aware of Moa moving. I felt a thrill of instinctive fear--would she plunge that knife into me? The silence of the darkened deck was broken with a confusion of sounds. A babble of voices; a woman passenger's scream; shuffling of feet; and above it all, Miko's roar: "Stand quiet! Everyone! No movement!" On the descending incline there was chaos. The disembarking women were clinging to the gang-rail; some of them had evidently surged over it and fallen. Down on the ground in the purple-shadowed starlight I could vaguely see the chained line of men. They too were in confusion, trying to shove themselves toward the fallen women. Miko roared: "Light those tubes! Gregg Haljan! By the Almighty, Moa, are you up there? What is wrong? The light-tubes--" Dark drama of unknown plot! I wonder if I should try and leave the turret. Where was Anita? She had been down there on the deck when I flung out the lights. I think twenty seconds would have covered it all. I had not moved. I thought, "Is Snap concerned with this?" Moa's knife could have stabbed me. I felt her lunge against me; and suddenly I was gripping her, twisting her wrist. But she flung the knife away. Her strength was almost the equal of my own. Her hand went for my throat, and with the other hand she was fumbling. * * * * * The deck abruptly sprang into light again. Moa had found the switch and threw it back. "Gregg!" She fought me as I tried to reach the switch. I saw down on the deck Miko gazing up at us. Moa panted, "Gregg--stop! If he--sees you doing this, he'll kill you--" The scene down there was almost unchanged. I had answered my cue. To what purpose? I saw Anita near Miko. The last of the women were on the plank. I had stopped struggling with Moa. She sat back, panting; and then she called: "Sorry, Miko. It will not happen again." Miko was in a towering rage. But he was too busy to bother with me; his anger swung on those nearest him. He shoved the last of the women violently at the incline. She bounded over. Her body, with the gravity-pull of only a few Earth-pounds, sailed in an arc and dropped to the sward near the swaying line of men. Miko swung back. "Get out of my way!" A sweep of his huge arm knocked Anita sidewise. "Prince, damn you, help me with those boxes!" The frightened stewards were lifting the boxes, square metal storage-chests each as long as a man, packed with food, tools, and equipment. "Here, get out of my way, all of you!" My breath came again; Anita nimbly retreated before Miko's angry rush. He dashed at the stewards. Three of them held a box. He took it from them; raised it at the top of the incline. Poised it over his head an instant, with his massive arms like gray pillars beneath it. And flung it. The box catapulted, dropped; and then, passing the Planetara's gravity area, it sailed in a long flat arc over the forest glade and crashed into the purple underbrush. "Give me another!" * * * * * The stewards pushed another at him. Like an angry Titan, he flung it. And another. One by one the chests sailed out and crashed. "There is your food--go pick it up! Haljan, make ready to ring us away!" On the deck lay the dead body of Rance Rankin, which the stewards had carried out. Miko seized it, flung it. "There! Go to your last resting place!" And the other bodies. Balch Blackstone, Captain Carter, Johnson--Miko flung them. And the course masters and those of our crew who had been killed; the stewards appeared with them; Miko unceremoniously cast them off. The passengers were all on the ground now. It was dim down there. I tried to distinguish Venza, but could not. I could see Dr. Frank's figure at the end of the chained line of men. The passengers were gazing in horror at the bodies hurtling over them. "Ready, Haljan?" Moa prompted me. "Tell him yes!" I called, "Yes!" Had Venza failed in her unknown purpose? It seemed so. On the helio-room bridge Snap and his guard stood like silent statues in the blue-lit gloom. The disembarkation was over. "Close the ports," Miko commanded. The incline came folding up with a clatter. The port and dome-windows slid closed. Moa hissed against my ear: "If you want life, Gregg Haljan, you will start your duties!" Venza had failed. Whatever it was, it had come to nothing. Down in the purple forest, disconnected now from the ship, the last of our friends stood marooned. I could distinguish them through the blur of the closed dome--only a swaying, huddled group was visible. But my fancy pictured this last sight of them--Dr. Frank, Venza, Shac and Dud Ardley. They were gone. There were left only Snap, Anita, and myself. * * * * * I was mechanically ringing us away. I heard my sirens sounding down below, with the answering clangs here in the turret. The _Planetara's_ respiratory controls started; the pressure equalizers began operating, and the gravity plates shifted into lifting combinations. The ship was hissing and quivering with it, combined with the grating of the last of the dome ports. And Miko's command: "Lift, Haljan." Hahn had been mingled with the confusion of the deck, though I had hardly noticed him; Coniston had remained below, with the crew answering my signals. Hahn stood now with Miko, gazing down through a deck window. Anita was alone at another. "Lift, Haljan." I lifted us gently, bow first, with a repulsion of the bow plates. And started the central electronic engine. Its thrust from our stern moved us diagonally over the purple forest trees. The glade slid downward and away. I caught a last vague glimpse of the huddled group of marooned passengers, staring up at us. Left to their fate, alone on this deserted little world. With the three engines going we slid smoothly upward. The forest dropped, a purple spread of tree-tops, edged with starlight and Earth-light. The sharply curving horizon seemed following us up. I swung on all the power. We mounted at a forty degree angle, slowly circling, with a bank of clouds over us to the side and the shining little sea beneath. "Very good, Gregg." In the turret light Moa's eyes blazed at me. "I do not know what you meant by darkening the deck-lights." Her fingers dug at my shoulders. "I will tell my brother it was an error." I said, "An error--yes." "An error? I don't know what it was. But you have me to deal with now. You understand? I will tell my brother so. You said, 'On Earth a man may kill the thing he loves.' A woman of Mars may do that! Beware of me, Gregg Haljan." Her passion-filled eyes bored into me. Love? Hate? The venom of a woman scorned--a mingling of turgid emotions.... * * * * * I twisted away from her grip and ignored her; she sat back, silently watching my busy activities; the calculations of the shifting conditions of gravity, pressures, temperatures; a checking of the score or more of instruments on the board before me. Mechanical routine. My mind went to Venza, back there on the asteroid. The wandering little world was already shrinking to a convex surface beneath us. Venza, with her last unknown play, gone to failure. Had I failed my cue? Whatever my part, it seemed now that I must have horribly mis-acted it. The crescent Earth was presently swinging over our bow. We rocketed out of the asteroid's shadow. The glowing, flaming Sun appeared, making a crescent of the Earth. With the glass I could see our tiny Moon, visually seeming to hug the limb of its parent Earth. We were away upon our course for the Moon. My mind flung ahead. Grantline with his treasure, unsuspecting this brigand ship. And suddenly, beyond all thought of Grantline and his treasure, there came to me a fear for Anita. In God's truth I had been, so far, a very stumbling inept champion--doomed to failure with everything I tried. It swept me, so that I cursed my own incapacity. Why had I not contrived to have Anita desert at the asteroid? Would it not have been far better for her there? Taking her chance for rescue with Dr. Frank, Venza and the others? But no! I had, like an inept fool, never thought of that! Had left her here on board at the mercy of these outlaws. And I swore now that, beyond everything, I would protect her. Futile oath! If I could have seen ahead a few hours! But I sensed the catastrophe. There was a shudder within me as I sat in that turret, docilely guiding us out through the asteroid's atmosphere, heading us upon our course for the Moon. CHAPTER XIX _In the Zed-light Glow_ "Try again. By the infernal, Snap Dean, if you do anything to balk us!" Miko scanned the apparatus with keen eyes. How much technical knowledge of signaling instruments did this brigand leader have? I was tense and cold with apprehension as I sat in a corner of the helio-room, watching Snap. Could Miko be fooled? Snap, I knew, was trying to fool him. The Moon spread close beneath us. My log-chart, computed up to thirty minutes past, showed us barely some thirty thousand miles over the Moon's surface. The globe lay in quadrature beneath our bow quarter--a huge quadrant spreading across the black starry vault of the lower heavens. A silver quadrant. The sunset caught the Lunar mountains, flung slanting shadows over the empty Lunar plains. All the disc was plainly visible. The mellow Earth-light glowed serene and pale to illumine the Lunar night. The _Planetara_ was bathed in silver. A brilliant silver glare swept the forward deck, clean white and splashed with black shadows. We had partly circled the Moon, so as now to approach it from the Earthward side. I had worked with extreme concentration through the last few hours, plotting the trajectory of our curving sweep, setting the gravity plates with constantly shifting combinations. And with it a necessity for the steady retarding of our velocity. * * * * * Miko for a time was at my elbow in the turret. I had not seen Coniston and Hahn of recent hours. I had slept, awakened refreshed, and had a meal. Coniston and Hahn remained below, one or the other of them always with the crew to execute my sirened orders. Then Coniston came to take my place in the turret, and I went with Miko to the helio-room. "You are skilful, Haljan." A measure of grim approval was in Miko's voice. "You evidently have no wish to try and fool me in this navigation." I had not, indeed. It is delicate work at best, coping with the intricacies of celestial mechanics upon a semicircular trajectory with retarding velocity, and with a make-shift crew we could easily have come upon real difficulty. We hung at last, hull-down, facing the Earthward hemisphere of the Lunar disc. The giant ball of the Earth lay behind and above us--the Sun over our stern quarter. With forward velocity almost checked, we poised, and Snap began his signals to the unsuspecting Grantline. My work momentarily was over. I sat watching the helio-room. Moa was here, close beside me; I felt always her watchful gaze, so that even the play of my expression needed reining. Miko worked with Snap. Anita too was here. To Miko and Moa it was the somber, taciturn George Prince, shrouded always in his black mourning cloak, disinclined to talk; sitting alone, brooding and cowardly sullen. Miko repeated, "By the infernal, if you try to fool me, Snap Dean!" The small metal room, with its grid floor and low-arched ceiling, glared with moonlight through its windows. The moving figures of Snap and Miko were aped by the grotesque, misshapen shadows of them on the walls. Miko gigantic--a great, menacing ogre. Snap small and alert--a trim, pale figure in his tight-fitting white trousers, broad-flowing belt, and white shirt open at the throat. His face was pale and drawn from lack of sleep and the torture to which Miko had subjected him. But he grinned at the brigand's words, and pushed his straggling hair closer under the red eyeshade. "I'm doing my best, Miko--you can believe it." * * * * * The room over long periods was deadly silent, with Miko and Snap bending watchfully at the crowded banks of instruments. A silence in which my own pounding heart seemed to echo. I did not dare look at Anita, nor she at me. Snap was trying to signal Earth, not the Moon! His main helios were set in the reverse. The infra-red waves, flung from the bow window, were of a frequency which Snap and I believed that Grantline could not pick up. And over against the wall, close beside me and seemingly ignored by Snap, there was a tiny ultra-violet sender. Its faint hum and the quivering of its mirrors had so far passed unnoticed. Would some Earth-station pick it up? I prayed so. There was a thumb nail mirror here which could bring an answer. I prayed that it might swing. Would some Earth telescope be able to see us? I doubted it. The pinpoint of the _Planetara's_ infinitesimal bulk would be beyond them. Long silences, broken only by the faint hiss and murmur of Snap's instruments. "Shall I try the 'graphs, Miko?" "Yes." I helped him with the spectroheliograph. At every level the plates showed us nothing save the scarred and pitted Moon-surface. We worked for an hour. There was nothing. Bleak cold night on the Moon here beneath us. A touch of fading sunlight upon the Apennines. Up near the South Pole, Tycho with its radiating open rills stood like a grim dark maw. Miko bent over a plate. "Something here? Is there?" An abnormality upon the frowning ragged cliffs of Tycho? We thought so. But then it seemed not. * * * * * Another hour. No signal came from Earth. If Snap's calls were getting through we had no evidence of it. Abruptly Miko strode at me from across the room. I went cold and tense; Moa shifted, alert to my every movement. But Miko was not interested in me. A sweep of his clenched fist knocked the ultra-violet sender and its coils and mirrors in a tinkling crash to the grid at my feet. "We don't need that, whatever it is!" He rubbed his knuckles where the violet waves had tinged them, and turned grimly back to Snap. "Where are your Gamma ray mirrors? If the treasure is exposed--" This Martian's knowledge was far greater than we believed. He grinned sardonically at Anita. "If our treasure is on this hemisphere, Prince, we should pick up Gamma rays? Don't you think so? Or is Grantline so cautious it will all be protected?" Anita spoke in a careful, throaty drawl. "The Gamma rays came plain enough when we passed here on the way out." "You should know," grinned Miko. "An expert eavesdropper, Prince--I will say that for you. Come Dean, try something else. By God, if Grantline does not signal us, I will be likely to blame you--my patience is shortening. Shall we go closer, Haljan?" "I don't think it would help," I said. He nodded. "Perhaps not. Are we checked?" "Yes." We were poised, very nearly motionless. "If you wish an advance, I can ring it. But we need a surface destination now." "True, Haljan." He stood thinking. "Would a zed-ray penetrate those crater-cliffs? Tycho, for instance, at this angle?"[B] "It might," Snap agreed. "You think he may be on the Northern inner side of Tycho?" "He may be anywhere," said Miko shortly. "If you think that," Snap persisted, "suppose we swing the _Planetara_ over the South Pole. Tycho, viewed from there--" "And take another quarter-day of time?" Miko sneered. "Flash on your zed-ray; help him hook it up, Haljan." [B] An allusion to the use of the zed-ray light for making spectro-photographs of what might be behind obscuring rock masses, similar to the old-style X-ray. * * * * * I moved to the lens-box of the spectroheliograph. It seemed that Snap was very strangely reluctant: Was it because he knew that the Grantline camp lay concealed on the north inner wall of Tycho's giant ring? I thought so. But Snap flashed a queer look at Anita. She did not see it, but I did. And I could not understand it. My accursed, witless incapacity! If only I had taken warning! "Here," commanded Miko. "A score of 'graphs with the zed-ray. I tell you I will comb this surface if we have to stay here until our ship comes from Ferrok-Shahn to join us!" The Martian brigands were coming. Miko's signals had been answered. In ten days the other brigand ship, adequately manned and armed, would be here. Snap helped me connect the zed-ray. He did not dare even to whisper to me, with Moa hovering always so close. And for all Miko's sardonic smiling, we knew that he would tolerate nothing from us now. He was fully armed, and so was Moa. I recall that Snap several times tried to touch me significantly. Oh, if only I had taken warning! We finished our connecting. The dull gray point of zed-ray gleamed through the prisms, to mingle with the moonlight entering the main lens. I stood with the shutter trip. "The same interval, Snap?" "Yes." Beside me, I was aware of a faint reflection of the zed-light--a gray Cathedral shaft crossing the helio-room and falling upon the opposite wall. An unreality there, as the zed-light faintly strove to penetrate the metal room-side. I said, "Shall I make the exposure?" * * * * * Snap nodded. But that 'graph was never made. An exclamation from Moa made us all turn. The Gamma mirrors were quivering! Grantline had picked our signals! With what undoubtedly was an intensified receiving equipment which Snap had not thought Grantline able to use, he had caught our faint zed-rays, which Snap was sending only to deceive Miko. And Grantline had recognized the _Planetara_, and had released his occulting screens surrounding the radium ore. The Gamma rays were here, unmistakable! And upon their heels came Grantline's message. Not in the secret system he had arranged with Snap, but unsuspectingly in open code. I could read the swinging mirror, and so could Miko. And Miko decoded it triumphantly aloud: "_Surprised but pleased your return. Approach Mid-Northern hemisphere, region of Archimedes, forty thousand toises[C] off nearest Apennine range._" The message broke off. But even its importance was overshadowed. Miko stood in the center of the helio-room, triumphantly reading the light-indicator. Its beam swung on the scale, which chanced to be almost directly over Anita's head. I saw Miko's expression change. A look of surprise, amazement came to him. "Why--" He gasped. He stood staring. Almost stupidly staring for an instant. And as I regarded him with fascinated horror, there came upon his heavy gray face a look of dawning comprehension. And I heard Snap's startled intake of breath. He moved to the spectroheliograph, where the zed-ray connections were still humming. But with a leap Miko flung him away. "Off with you! Moa, watch him! Haljan, don't move!" [C] About fifty miles. * * * * * Again Miko stood staring. Oh dear God, I saw now that he was staring at Anita! "Why George Prince! How strange you look!" Anita did not move. She was stricken with horror: she shrank back against the wall, huddled in her cloak. Miko's sardonic voice came again: "How strange you look. Prince!" He took a step forward. He was grim and calm. Horribly calm. Deliberate. Gloating--like a great gray monster in human form toying with a fascinated, imprisoned bird. "Move just a little Prince. Let the zed-ray light fall more fully." Anita's head was bare. That pale, Hamletlike face. Dear God, the zed-light reflection lay gray and penetrating upon it! Miko took another step. Peering. Grinning. "How amazing, George Prince! Why, I can hardly believe it!" Moa was armed with an electronic cylinder. For all her amazement--what turgid emotions sweeping her I can only guess--she never took her eyes from Snap and me. "Back! Don't move, either of you!" She hissed it at us. Then Miko leaped at Anita like giant gray leopard pouncing. "Away with that cloak, Prince!" * * * * * I stood cold and numbed. And realization came at last. The faint zed-light glow had fallen by chance upon Anita's face. Penetrated the flesh; exposed, faintly glowing, the bone-line of her jaw. Unmasked the waxen art of Glutz. And Miko had seen it. "Why George, how surprising! Away with that cloak!" He seized her wrist, drew her forward, beyond the shaft of zed-light, into the brilliant light of the Moon. And ripped her cloak from her. The gentle curves of her woman's figure were so unmistakable! And as Miko gazed at them, all his calm triumph swept away. "Why, Anita!" I heard Moa mutter: "So that is it?" A venomous flashing look--a shaft from me to Anita and back again. "So that is it?" "Why, _Anita_!" Miko's great arms gathered her up as though she were a child. "So I have you back; from the dead delivered back to me!" "Gregg!" Snap's warning, and his grip over my shoulders brought me a measure of sanity. I had tensed to spring. I stood quivering, and Moa thrust her weapon against my face. The helio mirrors were swaying again with another message from Grantline. But it came ignored by us all. In the glare of moonlight by the forward window, Miko held Anita, his great hands pawing her with triumphant possessive caresses. "So, little Anita, you are given back to me." Against her futile struggles he held her. Dear God, if only I had had the wit to have prevented this! CHAPTER XX _The Grantline Camp_ In the mid-northern hemisphere upon the Earthward side of the Moon, the giant crater of Archimedes stood brooding in silent majesty. Grim, lofty walls, broken, pitted and scarred, rising precipitous to the upper circular rim. Night had just fallen. The sunlight clung to the crater-heights; it tinged with flame the jagged peaks of the Apennine Mountains which rose in tiers at the horizon; and it flung great inky shadows over the intervening lowlands. Northward, the Mare Imbrium stretched mysterious and purple, its million rills and ridges and crater holes flattened by distance and the gathering darkness into a seeming level surface. The night slowly deepened. The dead-black vault of the sky blazed with its brilliant starry gems. The gibbous Earth hung high above the horizon, motionless, save for the invisible pendulum sway over the tiny arc, of its libration: widening to quadrature, casting upon the bleak naked Lunar landscape its mellow Earth-glow. Slow, measured process, this coming of the Lunar night! For an Earth-day the sunset slowly faded on the Apennines; the poised Earth widened a little further--an Earth-day of time, with the Earth-disc visibly rotating, the faint tracery of its oceans and continents passing in slow, majestic review. Another Earth-day interval. Then another. And another. Full night now enveloped Archimedes. Splotches of Earth-light and starlight sheen slowly shifted as the night advanced. Between the great crater and the nearby mountains, the broken, pseudo-level lowlands lay wan in the Earth-light. A few hundred miles, as distance would be measured upon Earth. A million million rills were here. Valleys and ridges, ravines, sharp-walled canyons, cliffs and crags--tiny craters like pock-marks. Naked, gray porous rock everywhere. This denuded landscape! Cracked and scarred and tumbled, as though some inexorable Titan torch had seared and crumbled and broken it, left it now congealed like a wind-lashed sea abruptly frozen into immobility. * * * * * Moonlight upon Earth so gently shines to make romantic a lover's smile! But the reality of the Lunar night is cold beyond human rationality. Cold and darkly silent. Grim desolation. Awesome. Majestic. A frowning majesty that even to the most intrepid human beholder is inconceivably forbidding. And there were humans here now. On this tumbled plain, between Archimedes and the mountains, one small crater amid the million of its fellows was distinguished this night by the presence of humans. The Grantline camp! It huddled in the deepest purple shadows on the side of a bowl-like pit, a crudely circular orifice with a scant two miles across its rippling rim. There was faint light here to mark the presence of the living intruders. The blue-glow radiance of Morrell tube-lights under a spread of glassite. The Grantline camp stood mid-way up one of the inner cliff-walls of the little crater. The broken, rock-strewn floor, two miles wide, lay five hundred feet below the camp. Behind it, the jagged precipitous cliff rose another five hundred to the heights of the upper rim. A broad level shelf hung midway up the cliff, and upon it Grantline had built his little group of glassite dome shelters. Viewed from above there was the darkly purple crater floor, the upflung circular rim where the Earth-light tinged the spires and crags with yellow sheen; and on the shelf, like a huddled group of birds nests, Grantline's domes clung and gazed down upon the inner valley. Intricate task, the building of these glassite shelters! There were three. The main one stood close at the brink of the ledge. A quadrangle of glassite walls, a hundred feet in length by half as wide, and a scant ten feet high to its flat-arched dome roof. Built for this purpose in Great-New York, Grantline had brought his aluminite girders and braces and the glassite panels in sections. * * * * * The air here on the Moon surface was negligible--a scant one five-thousandth of the atmospheric pressure at the sea-level on Earth. But within the glassite shelter, a normal Earth-pressure must be maintained. Rigidly braced double walls to withstand the explosive tendency, with no external pressure to counteract it. A tremendous necessity for mechanical equipment had burdened Grantline's small ship to its capacity. The chemistry of manufactured air, the pressure equalizers, renewers, respirators, the lighting and temperature-maintenance systems--all the mechanics of a space-flyer were here. And within the glassite double walls, there was necessity for a constant circulation of the Erentz temperature insulating system.[D] There was this main Grantline building, stretching low and rectangular along the front edge of the ledge. Within it were living rooms, messroom and kitchen. Fifty feet behind it, connected by a narrow passage of glassite, was a similar, though smaller structure. The mechanical control rooms, with their humming, vibrating mechanisms were here. And an instrument room with signaling apparatus, senders, receivers, mirror-grids and audiphones of several varieties; and an electro-telescope, small but modern, with dome overhead like a little Earth observatory. From this instrument building, beside the connecting pedestrian passage, wire cables for light, and air-tubes and strings and bundles of instrument wires ran to the main structure--gray snakes upon the porous, gray Lunar rock. The third building seemed a lean-to banked against the cliff-wall, a slanting shed-wall of glassite fifty feet high and two hundred in length. Under it, for months Grantline's borers had dug into the cliff. Braced tunnels were here, penetrating back and downward into this vein of radio-active rock. [D] An intricate system of insulation against extremes of temperature, developed by the Erentz Kinetic Energy Corporation in the twenty-first century. Within the hollow double shell of a shelter-wall, or an explorer's helmet-suit, or a space-flyer's hull, an oscillating semi-vacuum current was maintained--an extremely rarified air, magnetically charged, and maintained in rapid oscillating motion. Across this field the outer cold, or heat, as the case might be, could penetrate only with slow radiation. This Erentz system gave the most perfect temperature insulation known in its day. Without it, interplanetary flight would have been impossible. And it served a double purpose. Developed at first for temperature insulation only, the Erentz system surprisingly brought to light one of the most important discoveries made in the realm of physics of the century. It was found that any flashing, oscillating current, whether electronic, or the semi-vacuum of rarified air--or even a thin sheet of whirling fluid--gave also a pressure-insulation. The kinetic energy of the rapid movement was found to absorb within itself the latent energy of the unequal pressure. (The intricate postulates and mathematical formulae necessary to demonstrate the operation of the physical laws involved would be out of place here.) The _Planetara_ was so equipped, against the explosive tendency of its inner air-pressures when flying in the near-vacuum of space. In the case of Grantline's glassite shelters, the latent energy of his room interior air pressure went largely into a kinetic energy which in practical effect resulted only in the slight acceleration of the vacuum current, and thus never reached the outer wall. The Erentz engineers claimed for their system a pressure absorption of 97.4%, leaving, in Grantline's case, only 2.6% of room pressure to be held by the building's aluminite bracers. It may be interesting to note in this connection that without the Erentz system as a basis, the great sub-sea developments on Earth and Mars of the twenty-first century would also have been impossible. Equipped with a fluid circulation device of the Erentz principle within its double hull, the first submarine was able to penetrate the great ocean deeps, withstanding the tremendous ocean pressures at depths of four thousand fathoms. * * * * * The work was over now. The borers had been dismantled and packed away. At one end of the cliff the mining equipment lay piled in a litter. There was a heap of discarded ore where Grantline had carted and dumped it after his first crude refining process had yielded it as waste. The ore-slag lay like gray powder-flakes strewn down the cliff. Tracks and ore-carts along the ledge stood discarded, mute evidence of the weeks and months of work these helmeted miners had undergone, struggling upon this airless, frowning world. But now all that was finished. The radio-active ore was sufficiently concentrated. It lay--this treasure--in a seventy-foot pile behind the glassite lean-to, with a cage of wires over it and an insulation barrage guarding its Gamma rays from escaping to mark its presence. The ore-shelter was dark; the other two buildings were lighted. And there were small lights mounted at intervals about the camp and along the edge of the ledge. A spider ladder, with tiny platforms some twenty feet one above the other, hung precariously to the cliff-face. It descended the five hundred feet to the crater floor; and, behind the camp, it mounted the jagged cliff-face to the upper rim-height, where a small observatory platform was placed. * * * * * Such was the outer aspect of the Grantline Treasure Camp near the beginning of this Lunar night, when, unbeknown to Grantline and his score of men, the _Planetara_ with its brigands was approaching. The night was perhaps a sixth advanced. Full night. No breath of cloud to mar the brilliant starry heavens. The quadrant Earth hung poised like a giant mellow moon over Grantline's crater. A bright Earth, yet no air was here on this Lunar surface to spread its light. Only a glow, mingling with the spots of blue tube-light on the poles along the cliff, and the radiance from the lighted buildings. The crater floor was dimly purple. Beyond the opposite upper rim, from the camp-height, the towering top of distant Archimedes was visible. No evidence of movement showed about the silent camp. Then a pressure door in an end of the main building opened its tiny series of locks. A bent figure came out. The lock closed. The figure straightened and gazed about the camp. Grotesque, bloated semblance of a man! Helmeted, with rounded dome-hood suggestion of an ancient sea diver, yet goggled and trunked like a gas-masked fighter of the twentieth century war. He stooped presently and disconnected metal weights which were upon his shoes.[E] Then he stood erect again, and with giant strides bounded along the cliff. Fantastic figure in the blue-lit gloom! A child's dream of crags and rocks and strange lights with a single monstrous figure in seven-league boots. He went the length of the ledge with his twenty-foot strides, inspected the lights, and made adjustments. Came back, and climbed with agile, bounding leaps up the spider ladder to the dome on the crater top. A light flashed on up there. Then it was extinguished. The goggled, bloated figure came leaping down after a moment. Grantline's exterior watchman making his rounds. He came back to the main building. Fastened the weights on his shoes. Signaled within. The lock opened. The figure went inside. It was early evening, after the dinner hour and before the time of sleep, according to the camp routine Grantline was maintaining. Nine P. M. of Earth Eastern-American time, recorded now upon his Earth chronometer. In the living room of the main building Johnny Grantline sat with a dozen of his men dispersed about the room, whiling away as best they could the lonesome hours. [E] Within the Grantline buildings it was found more convenient to use a gravity normal to Earth. This was maintained by the wearing of metal-weighted shoes and metal-loaded belt. The Moon-gravity is normally approximately one-sixth the gravity of Earth. * * * * * "All as usual. This cursed Moon! When I get home--if ever I do get home--" "Say your say, Wilks. But you'll spend your share of the gold-leaf and thank your constellations that you had your chance!" "Let him alone! Come on, Wilks, take a hand here. This game is no good with three." The man who had been outside flung his hissing helmet recklessly to the floor and unsealed his suit. "Here, get me out of this. No, I won't play. I can't play your cursed game with nothing at stake!" "Commissioner's orders." A laugh went up at the sharp look Johnny Grantline flung from where he sat reading in a corner of the room. "Commander's orders. No gambling gold-leafers tolerated here." "Play the game, Wilks." Grantline said quietly. "We all know it's infernal doing nothing." "He's been struck by Earth-light," another man laughed. "Commander, I told you not to let that guy Wilks out at night." * * * * * A rough but good-natured lot of men. Jolly and raucous by nature in their leisure hours. But there was too much leisure here now. Their mirth had a hollow sound. In older times, explorers of the frozen polar zones had to cope with inactivity, loneliness and despair. But at least they were on their native world. The grimness of the Moon was eating into the courage of Grantline's men. An unreality here. A weirdness. These fantastic crags. The deadly silence. The nights, almost two weeks of Earth-time in length, congealed by the deadly frigidity of Space. The days of black sky, blaring stars and flaming Sun, with no atmosphere to diffuse the daylight. Days of weird blending sheen of illumination with most of the Sun's heat radiating so swiftly from the naked Lunar surface that the outer temperature still was cold. And day and night, always the familiar beloved Earth-disc hanging poised up near the zenith. From thinnest crescent to full Earth, and then steadily back again to crescent. All so abnormal, irrational, disturbing to human senses. With the mining work over, an irritability grew upon Grantline's men. And perhaps since the human mind is so wonderful, elusive a thing, there lay upon these men an indefinable sense of impending disaster. Johnny Grantline felt it. He thought about it now as he sat in the room corner watching Wilks being forced into the plaget-game, and he found it strong within him. Unreasonable, ominous depression! Barring the accident which had disabled his little space-ship when they reached this small crater hole, his expedition had gone well. His instruments, and the information he had from the former explorers, had picked up the ore-vein with a scant month of search. * * * * * The vein had now been exhausted; but the treasure was here. Nothing was left but to wait for the _Planetara_. The men were talking of that now. "She ought to be well mid-way from here to Ferrok-Shahn by now. When do you figure she'll be back here, and signal us?" "Twenty days. Give her another five now to Mars, and five in port. That's ten. We'll pick her signals in three weeks, mark me." "Three weeks! Just give me three weeks of reasonable sunrise and sunset! This cursed Moon! You mean, Williams, next daylight." "Hah! He's inventing a Lunar language. You'll be a Moon-man yet, if you live here long enough." Olaf Swenson, the big blond fellow from the Scandia fiords, came and flung himself down by Grantline. "Ay tank they bane without not enough to do, Commander. If the ore yust would not give out--" "Three weeks--it isn't very long, Ollie." "No. Maybe not." From across the room somebody was saying, "If the _Comet_ hadn't smashed on us, damn me but I'd ask the Commander to let some of us take her back. The discarded equipment could go." "Shut up, Billy. She is smashed." The little _Comet_, cruising in search of the ore, had come to grief just as the ore was found. It lay now on the crater floor with its nose bashed into an upflung spire of rock. Wrecked beyond repair. Save for the pre-arrangement with the _Planetara_, the Grantline party would have been helpless here on the Moon. Knowledge of that--although no one ever suspected but that the _Planetara_ would come safely--served to add to the men's depression. They were cut off, virtually helpless on a strange world. Their signalling devices were inadequate even to reach Earth. Grantline's power batteries were running low.[F] He could not attempt wide-flung signals without jeopardizing the power necessary for the routine of his camp in the event of the _Planetara_ being delayed. Nor was his electro-telescope adequate to pick small objects at any great distance.[G] All of Grantline's effort, in truth, had gone into equipment for the finding and gathering of the treasure. The safety of the expedition had to that extent been neglected. Swenson was mentioning that now. "You all agreed to it," Johnny said shortly. "Every man here voted that, above everything, what we wanted was to get the radium." [F] The Gravely storage tanks--the power used by the Grantline expedition--were heavy and bulky affairs. Economy of space on the Comet allowed but few of them. [G] Electro-telescopes of most modern use and power were too large and used too much power to be available to Grantline. * * * * * A dynamic little fellow, this Johnny Grantline. Short of temper sometimes, but always just, and a perfect leader of men. In stature he was almost as small as Snap. But he was thick-set, with a smooth shaven, keen-eyed, square-jawed face, and a shock of brown tousled hair. A man of thirty-five, though the decision of his manner, the quiet dominance of his voice, mode him seem older. He stood up now, surveying the blue-lit glassite room with its low ceiling close overhead. He was bowlegged; in movement he seemed to roll with a stiff-legged gait like some sea captain of former days on the deck of his swaying ship. Queer-looking figure! Heavy flannel shirt and trousers, boots heavily weighted, and bulky metal-loaded belt strapped about his waist. He grinned at Swenson. "When we divide this treasure, everyone will be happy, Ollie." The treasure was estimated by Grantline to be the equivalent of ninety millions in gold-leaf. A hundred and ten millions in the gross as it now stood, with twenty millions to be deducted by the Federated Refiners for reducing it to the standard purity of commercial radium. Ninety millions, with only a million and a half to come off for expedition expenses, and the _Planetara_ Company's share another million. A nice little stake. Grantline strode across the room with his rolling gait. "Cheer up, boys. Who's winning there? I say, you fellows--" An audiphone buzzer interrupted him, a call from the duty man in the instrument room of the nearby building. Grantline clicked the receiver. The room fell into silence. Any call was unusual--nothing ever happened here in the camp. The duty man's voice sounded over the room. "Signals coming! Not clear. Will you come over, Commander?" Signals! * * * * * It was never Grantline's way to enforce needless discipline. He offered no objection when every man in the camp rushed through the connecting passages. They crowded the instrument room where the tense duty man sat bending over his helio receivers. The mirrors were swaying. The duty man looked up and met Grantline's gaze. "I ran it up to the highest intensity. Commander. We ought to get it--not let it pass." "Low scale, Peter?" "Yes. Weakest infra-red. I'm bringing it up, even though it uses too much of our power." The duty man was apologetic. "Get it," said Grantline shortly. "I had a swing a minute ago. I think it's the _Planetara_." "_Planetara!_" The crowding group of men chorused it. How could it be the _Planetara_? But it was. The call presently came in clear. Unmistakably the _Planetara_, turned back now from her course to Ferrok-Shahn. "How far away, Peter?" The duty man consulted the needles of his dial scale. "Close! Very weak infra-red. But close. Around thirty thousand miles, maybe. It's Snap Dean calling." The _Planetara_ here within thirty thousand miles! Excitement and pleasure swept the room. The _Planetara's_ coming had for so long been awaited so eagerly! The excitement communicated to Grantline. It was unlike him to be incautious; yet now with no thought save that some unforeseen and pleasing circumstance had brought the _Planetara_ ahead of time; incautious Grantline certainly was. "Raise the ore-barrage." "I'll go! My suit is here." * * * * * A willing volunteer rushed out to the ore-shed. The Gamma rays, which in the helio-room of the _Planetara_ came so unwelcome to Snap and me, were loosed. "Can you send, Peter?" Grantline demanded. "Yes, with more power." "Use it." Johnny dictated the message of his location which we received. In his incautious excitement he ignored the secret code. An interval passed. The ore was occulted again. No message had come from us--just Snap's routine signal in the weak infra-red, which we hoped Grantline would not get. The men crowding Grantline's instrument room waited in tense silence. Then Grantline tried the telescope. Its current weakened the lights with the drain upon the distributors, and cooled the room with a sudden deadly chill as the Erentz insulating system slowed down. The duty man looked suddenly frightened. "You'll bulge out our walls, Commander. The internal pressure--" "We'll chance it." They picked up the image of the _Planetara_! It came from the telescope and shone clear on the grid--the segment of star-field with a tiny, cigar-shaped blob. Clear enough to be unmistakable. The _Planetara_! Here now over the Moon, almost directly overhead, poised at what the altimeter scale showed to be a fraction under thirty thousand miles. The men gazed in awed silence. The _Planetara_ coming.... But the altimeter needle was motionless. The _Planetara_ was hanging poised. A sudden gasp went about the room. The men stood with whitening faces, gazing at the _Planetara's_ image. And at the altimeter needle. It was moving. The _Planetara_ was descending. But not with an orderly swoop. The image showed the ship clearly. The bow tilted up, then dipped down. But then in a moment it swung up again. The ship turned partly over. Righted itself. Then swayed again, drunkenly. The watching men were stricken into horrified silence. The _Planetara's_ image momentarily, horribly, grew larger. Swaying. Then turning completely over, rotating slowly end over end. The _Planetara_, out of control, was falling! CHAPTER XXI _The Wreck of the_ Planetara On the _Planetara_, in the helio-room, Snap and I stood with Moa's weapon upon us. Miko held Anita. Triumphant. Possessive. Then as she struggled, a gentleness came to this strange Martian giant. Perhaps he really loved her. Looking back on it, I sometimes think so. "Anita, do not fear me." He held her away from him. "I would not harm you. I want your love." Irony came to him. "And I thought I had killed you! But it was only your brother." He partly turned. I was aware of how alert was his attention. He grinned. "Hold them, Moa--don't let them do anything foolish. So, Anita, you were masquerading to spy upon me? That was wrong of you." He was again ironic. Anita had not spoken. She held herself tensely away from Miko; she had flashed me a look--just one. What horrible mischance to have brought this catastrophe! The completion of Grantline's message had come unnoticed by us all. "Look! Grantline again!" Snap said abruptly. But the mirrors were steadying. We had no recording-tape apparatus; the rest of the message was lost. The mirrors pulsed and then steadied. No further message came. There was an interval while Miko waited. He held Anita in the hollow of his great arm. "Quiet, little bird. Do not fear me. I have work to do, Anita--this is our great adventure. We will be rich, you and I. All the luxuries three worlds can offer, all for us when this is over. Careful, Moa! This Haljan has no wit." Well could he say it! I, who had been so witless to let this come upon us! Moa's weapon prodded me. Her voice hissed at me with all the venom of a reptile enraged. "So that was your game, Gregg Haljan! And I was so graceless to admit love for you!" * * * * * Snap murmured in my ear, "Don't move, Gregg! She's reckless." She heard it. She whirled on him. "We have lost George Prince, it seems. Well, we will survive without his ore knowledge. And you, Dean--and this Haljan--mark me, I will kill you both if you cause trouble!" Miko was gloating. "Don't kill them yet, Moa. What was it Grantline said? Near the crater of Archimedes? Ring us down, Haljan! We'll land." He signaled the turret. Gave Coniston the Grantline message, and audiphoned it below to Hahn. The news spread about the ship. The bandits were jubilant. "We'll land now, Haljan. Ring us down. Come, Anita and I will go with you to the turret." I found my voice. "To what destination?" "Near Archimedes. The Apennine side. Keep well away from the Grantline camp. We will probably sight it as we descend." There was no trajectory needed. We were almost over Archimedes now. I could drop us with a visible, instrumental course. My mind was whirling with a confusion of thoughts. What could we do? What could we dare attempt to do? I met Snap's gaze. "Ring us down, Gregg," he said quietly. I nodded. I pushed Moa's weapon away. "You don't need that. I obey orders." * * * * * We went to the turret. Moa watched me and Snap, a grim, cold Amazon. She avoided looking at Anita, whom Miko helped down the ladders with a strange mixture of courtierlike grace and amused irony. Coniston gazed at Anita with falling jaw. "I say! Not George Prince? The girl--" "No time for argument now," Miko commanded. "It's the girl, masquerading as her brother. Get below, Coniston. Haljan takes us down." The astounded Englishman continued gazing at Anita. "I mean to say, where to on the Moon? Not to encounter Grantline at once, Miko? Our equipment is not ready." "Of course not. We will land well away. He won't be suspicious--we can signal him again after we land. We will have time to plan, to assemble the equipment. Get below, I told you." The reluctant Coniston left us. I took the controls. Miko, still holding Anita as though she were a child, sat beside me. "We will watch him, little Anita. A skilled fellow at this sort of work." I rang my signals for the shifting of the gravity plates. The answer should have come from below within a second or two. But it did not. Miko regarded me with his great bushy eyebrows upraised. "Ring again, Haljan." I duplicated. No answer. The silence was frightening. Ominous. Miko muttered, "That accursed Hahn. Ring again!" I sent the imperative emergency demand. * * * * * No answer. A second or two. Then all of us in the turret were startled. Transfixed. From below came a sudden hiss. It sounded in the turret: it came from shifting-room call-grid. The hissing of the pneumatic valves of the plate-shifters in the lower control room. The valves were opening; the plates automatically shifting into neutral, and disconnecting! An instant of startled silence. Miko may have realized the significance of what had happened. Certainly Snap and I did. The hissing ceased. I gripped the emergency plate-shifter switch which hung over my head. Its disc was dead! The plates were dead in neutral. In the positions they were only placed while in port! And their shifting mechanisms were imperative! I was on my feet. "Snap! Good God, we're in neutral!" Miko, if he had not realized it before, was aware if it now. The Moon-disc moved visibly as the _Planetara_ lurched. The vault of the heavens was slowly swinging. Miko ripped out a heavy oath. "Haljan! What is this?" He stood up, still holding Anita. But there was nothing that he could do in this emergency. "Haljan--what--" The heavens turned with a giant swoop. The Moon was over us. It swung in dizzying arc. Overhead, then back past our stern; under us, then appearing over our bow. The _Planetara_ had turned over. Upending. Rotating, end over end. For a moment or two I think all of us in that turret stood and clung. The Moon-disc, the Earth, Sun and all the stars were swinging past our windows. So horribly dizzying. The _Planetara_ seemed lurching and tumbling. But it was an optical effect only. I stared with grim determination at my feet. The turret seemed to steady. Then I looked again. That horrible swoop of all the heavens! And the Moon, as it went past, seemed expanded. We were falling! Out of control, with the Moon-gravity pulling us inexorably down! "That accursed Hahn--" Miko, stricken with his lack of knowledge of these controls, was wholly confused. * * * * * A moment only had passed. My fancy that the Moon-disc was enlarged was merely the horror of my imagination. We had not fallen far enough yet for that. But we were falling. Unless I could do something, we would crash upon the Lunar surface. Anita, killed in this _Planetara_ turret. The end of everything for us. Action came to me. I gasped, "Miko, you stay here! The controls are dead! You stay here--hold Anita." I ignored Moa's weapon which she was still clutching mechanically. Snap thrust her away. "Sit back! Let us alone! We're falling! Don't you understand?" This deadly danger, to level us all! No longer were we captors and captured. Not brigands for this moment. No thought of Grantline's treasure! Trapped humans only! Leveled by the common, instinct of self-preservation. Trapped here together, fighting for our lives. Miko gasped. "Can you--check us? What happened?" "I don't know. I'll try." I stood clinging. This dizzying whirl! From the audiphone grid Coniston's voice sounded. "I say, Haljan, something's wrong! Hahn doesn't signal." The look-out in the forward tower was clinging to his window. On the deck below our turret a member of the crew appeared, stood lurching for a moment, then shouted, and turned and ran, swaying, aimless. From the lower hull-corridors our grids sounded with the tramping of running steps. Panic among the crew was spreading over the ship. A chaos below decks. * * * * * I pulled at the emergency switch again. Dead.... But down below there was the manual controls. "Snap, we must get down. The signals." "Yes." Coniston's voice came like a scream from the grid. "Hahn is dead--the controls are broken! Hahn is dead!" We barely heard him. I shouted, "Miko--hold Anita! Come on, Snap!" We clung to the ladders. Snap was behind me. "Careful, Gregg! Good God!" This dizzying whirl. I tried not to look. The deck under me was now a blurred kaleidoscope of swinging patches of moonlight and shadow. We reached the deck. Ran, swaying, lurching. It seemed that from the turret Anita's voice followed us. "Be careful!" Within the ship our senses steadied. With the rotating, reeling, heavens shut out, there were only the shouts and tramping steps of the panic-stricken crew to mark that anything was amiss. That, and a pseudo-sensation of lurching caused by the pulsing of gravity--a pull when the Moon was beneath our hull to combine its force with our magnetizers; a lightening when it was overhead. A throbbing, pendulum lurch--that was all. We ran down to the corridor incline. A white-faced member of the crew, came running up. "What's happened? Haljan, what's happened?" "We're falling!" I gripped him. "Get below. Come on with us!" But he jerked away from me. "Falling?" A steward came running. "Falling? My God!" Snap swung at them. "Get ahead of us! The manual controls--our only chance--we need all you men at the compressor pumps!" But it was an instinct to try and get on deck, as though here below we were rats caught in a trap. The men tore away from me and ran. Their shouts of panic resounded through the dim, blue-lit corridors. * * * * * Coniston came lurching from the control room. "I say--falling! Haljan, my God, look at him!" Hahn was sprawled at the gravity-plate switchboard. Sprawled, head-down. Dead. Killed by something? Or a suicide? I bent over him. His hands gripped the main switch. He had ripped it loose. And his left hand had reached and broken the fragile line of tubes that intensified the current of the pneumatic plate-shifters. A suicide? With his last frenzy determined to kill us all? Then I saw that Hahn had been killed! Not a suicide! In his hand he gripped a small segment of black fabric, a piece torn from an invisible cloak? Was it? The questions were swept away by the necessity for action. Snap was rigging the hand-compressors. If he could get the pressure back in the tanks.... I swung on Coniston. "You armed?" "Yes." He was white-faced and confused, but not in a panic. He showed me his heat-ray cylinder. "What do you want me to do?" "Round up the crew. Get all you can. Bring them here to man these pumps." He dashed away. Snap shouted after him. "Kill them down if they argue!" Miko's voice sounded from the turret call grid: "Falling! Haljan, you can see it now! Check us!" I did not answer that. I pumped with Snap. Desperate moments. Or was it an hour? Coniston brought the men. He stood over them with menacing weapon. We had all the pumps going. The pressure rose a little in the tanks. Enough to shift a bow-plate. I tried it. The plate slowly clicked into a new combination. A gravity repulsion just in the bow-tip. * * * * * I signaled Miko. "Have we stopped swinging?" "No. But slower." I could feel it, that lurch of the gravity. But not steady now. A limp. The tendency of our bow was to stay up. "More pressure, Snap." "Yes." One of the crew rebelled, tried to bolt from the room. "God, we'll crash, caught in here!" Coniston shot him down. I shifted another bow-plate. Then two in the stern. The stern-plates seemed to move more readily than the others. "Run all the stern-plates," Snap advised. I tried it. The lurching stopped. Miko called. "We're bow down. Falling!" But not falling free. The Moon-gravity pull upon us was more than half neutralized. "I'll go up, Snap, and try the engines. You don't mind staying down? Executing my signals?" "You idiot!" He gripped my shoulders. His eyes were gleaming, his face haggard, but his pale lips twitched with a smile. "Maybe it's good-by, Gregg. We'll fall--fighting." "Yes. Fighting. Coniston, you keep the pressure up." With the broken set-tubes it took nearly all the pressure to maintain the few plates I had shifted. One slipped back to neutral. Then the pumps gained on it, and it shifted again. I dashed up to the deck. Ah, the Moon was so close now! So horribly close! The deck shadows were still. Through the forward bow windows the Moon surface glared up at us. * * * * * I reached the turret. The _Planetara_ was steady. Pitched bow-down, half falling, half sliding like a rocket downward. The scarred surface of the Moon spread wide under us. These last horrible minutes were a blur. And there was always Anita's face. She left Miko. Faced with death, he sat clinging. Ignoring her, Moa, too, sat apart. Staring-- And Anita crept to me. "Gregg, dear one. The end...." I tried the electronic engines from the stern, setting them in the reverse. The streams of their light glowed from the stern, forward along our hull, and flared down from our bow toward the Lunar surface. But no atmosphere was here to give resistance. Perhaps the electronic streams checked our fall a little. The pumps gave us pressure, just in the last minutes, to slide a few of the hull-plates. But our bow stayed down. We slid, like a spent rocket falling. I recall the horror of that expanding Lunar surface. The maw of Archimedes yawning. A blob. Widening to a great pit. Then I saw it was to one side. Rushing upward. A phantasmagoria of uprushing crags. Black and gray. Spires tinged with Earth-light. "Gregg, dear one--good-by." Her gentle arms around me. The end of everything for us. I recall murmuring, "Not falling free, Anita. Some hull-plates are set." My dials showed another plate shifting, checking us a little further. Good old Snap. I calculated the next best plate to shift. I tried it. Slid it over. Good old Snap.... Then everything faded but the feeling of Anita's arms around me. "Gregg, dear one--" The end of everything for us.... There was an up-rush of gray-black rock. An impact.... CHAPTER XXII _The Hiss of Death_ I opened my eyes to a dark blur of confusion. My shoulder hurt--a pain shooting through it. Something lay like a weight on me. I could not seem to move my left arm. Very queer! Then I moved it, and it hurt. I was lying twisted: I sat up. And with a rush, memory came. The crash was over. I am not dead. Anita-- She was lying beside me. There was a little light here in this silent blur--a soft, mellow Earth-light filtering in the window. The weight on me was Anita. She lay sprawled, her head and shoulders half way across my lap. Not dead! Thank God, not dead! She moved. Her arms went around me, and I lifted her. The Earth-light glowed on her pale face; but her eyes opened and she faintly smiled. "It's past, Anita! We've struck, and we're still alive." I held her as though all life's turgid danger were powerless to touch us. But in the silence my floating senses were brought back to reality by a faint sound forcing itself upon me. A little hiss. The faintest murmuring breath like a hiss. Escaping air! I cast off her clinging arms. "Anita, this is madness!" * * * * * For minutes we must have been lying there in the heaven of our embrace. But air was escaping! The _Planetara's_ dome was broken--or cracked--and our precious air was hissing out. Full reality came to me at last. I was not seriously injured. I found that I could move freely. I could stand. A twisted shoulder, a limp left arm, but they were better in a moment. And Anita did not seem to be hurt. Blood was upon her. But not her blood. Beside Anita, stretched face down on the turret grid, was the giant figure of Miko. The blood lay in a small pool against his face. A widening pool. Moa was here. I thought her body twitched; then was still. This soundless wreckage! In the dim glow of the wrecked turret with its two motionless, broken human figures, it seemed as though Anita and I were ghouls prowling. I saw that the turret had fallen over to the _Planetara's_ deck. It lay dashed against the dome-side. The deck was aslant. A litter of wreckage. A broken human figure showed--one of the crew, who at the last must have come running up. The forward observation tower was down on the chart-room roof: in its metal tangle I thought I could see the legs of the tower look-out. So this was the end of the brigands' adventure! The _Planetara's_ last voyage! How small and futile are human struggles! Miko's daring enterprise--so villainous, inhuman--brought all in a few moments to this silent tragedy. The _Planetara_ had fallen thirty thousand miles. But why? What had happened to Hahn? And where was Coniston, down in this broken hull? And Snap. I thought suddenly of Snap. * * * * * I clutched at my wandering wits. This inactivity was death. The escaping air hissed in my ears. Our precious air, escaping away into the vacant desolation of the Lunar emptiness. Through one of the twisted, slanting dome-windows a rocky spire was visible. The _Planetara_ lay bow-down, wedged in a jagged cradle of Lunar rock. A miracle that the hull and dome had held together. "Anita, we must get out of here!" I thought I was fully alert now. I recalled that the brigands had spoken of having partly assembled their Moon equipment. If only we could find suits and helmets! "We must get out," I repeated. "Get to Grantline's camp." "Their helmets are in the forward storage room, Gregg. I saw them there." She was staring at the fallen Miko and Moa. She shuddered and turned away and gripped me. "In the forward storage room, by the port of the emergency lock-exit." If only the exit locks would operate! We must get out of here, but find Snap first. Good old Snap! Would we find him lying dead? We climbed from the slanting, fallen turret, over the wreckage of the littered deck. It was not difficult, a lightness was upon us. The _Planetara's_ gravity-magnetizers were dead: this was only the light Moon-gravity pulling us. "Careful, Anita. Don't jump too freely." We leaped along the deck. The hiss of the escaping pressure was like a clanging gong of warning to tell us to hurry. The hiss of death so close! "Snap--" I murmured. "Oh, Gregg. I pray we may find him alive--!" "And get out. We've got to rush it. Get out and find the Grantline camp." * * * * * But how far? Which way? I must remember to take food and water. If the helmets were equipped with admission ports. If we could find Snap. If the exit locks would work to let us out. With a fifteen foot leap we cleared a pile of broken deck chairs. A man lay groaning near them. I went back with a rush. Not Snap! A steward. He had been a brigand, but he was a steward to me now. "Get up! This is Haljan. Hurry, we must get out of here. The air is escaping!" But he sank back and lay still. No time to find if I could help him: there were Anita and Snap to save. We found a broken entrance to one of the descending passages. I flung the debris aside and cleared it. Like a giant of strength with only this Moon-gravity holding me, I raised a broken segment of the superstructure and heaved it back. Anita and I dropped ourselves down the sloping passage. The interior of the wrecked ship was silent and dim. An occasional passage light was still burning. The passage and all the rooms lay askew. Wreckage everywhere: but the double-dome and hull-shell had withstood the shock. Then I realized that the Erentz system was slowing down. Our heat, like our air, was escaping, radiating away, a deadly chill settling upon everything. And our walls were bulging. The silence and the deadly chill of death would soon be here in these wrecked corridors. The end of the _Planetara_. I wondered vaguely if the walls would explode. We prowled like ghouls. We did not see Coniston. Snap had been by the shifter-pumps. We found him in the oval doorway. He lay sprawled. Dead? No, he moved. He sat up before we could get to him. He seemed confused, but his senses clarified with the movement of our figures over him. "Gregg! Why, Anita!" "Snap! You're all right? We struck--the air is escaping." * * * * * He pushed me away. He tried to stand. "I'm all right. I was up a minute ago. Gregg, it's getting cold. Where is she? I had her here--she wasn't killed. I spoke to her." Irrational! "Snap!" I held him, shook him. "Snap, old fellow!" He said, normally. "Easy, Gregg. I'm all right now." Anita gripped him. "Who, Snap?" "She! There she is." Another figure was here! On the grid-floor by the door oval. A figure partly shrouded in a broken invisible cloak and hood. An invisible cloak! I saw a white face with opened eyes regarding me. The face of a girl. Venza! I bent down. "You!" Anita cried, "Venza!" Venza here? Why--how--my thoughts swept away. Venza here, dying? Her eyes closed. But she murmured to Anita. "Where is he? I want him." Dying? I murmured impulsively, "Here I am, Venza dear." Gently, as one would speak with gentle sympathy to humor the dying. "Here I am, Venza." But it was only the confusion of the shock upon her. And it was upon us all. She pushed at Anita. "I want him." She saw me. This whimsical Venus girl! Even here as we gathered, all of us blurred by the shock, confused in the dim, wrecked ship with the chill of death coming--even here she could make a jest. Her pale lips smiled. "You, Gregg. I'm not hurt--I don't think I'm hurt." She managed to get herself up on one elbow. "Did you think I wanted you with my dying breath? Why, what conceit! Not you, Handsome Haljan! I was calling Snap." * * * * * He was down to her. "We're all right, Venza. It's over. We must get out of the ship--the air is escaping." We gathered in the oval doorway. We fought the confusion of panic. "The exit port is this way." Or was it? I answered Snap, "Yes, I think so." The ship suddenly seemed a stranger to me. So cold. So vibrationless. Broken lights. These slanting, wrecked corridors. With the ventilating fans stilled, the air was turning fetid. Chilling. And thinning, with escaping pressure, rarifying so that I could feel the grasp of it in my lungs and the pin-pricks of my burning cheeks. We started off. Four of us, still alive in this silent ship of death. My blurred thoughts tried to cope with it all. Venza here. I recalled how she had bade me create a diversion when the women passengers were landing on the asteroid. She had carried out her purpose! In the confusion she had not gone ashore. A stowaway here. She had secured the cloak. Prowling, to try and help us, she had come upon Hahn. Had seized his ray-cylinder and struck him down, and been herself knocked unconscious by his dying lunge, which also had broken the tubes and wrecked the _Planetara_. And Venza, unconscious, had been lying here with the mechanism of her cloak still operating, so that we did not see her when we came and found why Hahn did not answer my signals. "It's here, Gregg." Snap and I lifted the pile of Moon equipment. We located four suits and helmets and the mechanisms to operate them. "More are in the chart-room," Anita said. But we needed no others. I robed Anita, and showed her the mechanisms. "Yes. I understand." * * * * * Snap was helping Venza. We were all stiff from the cold; but within the suits and their pulsing currents, the blessed warmth came again. The helmets had admission ports through which food and drink could be taken. I stood with my helmet ready. Anita, Venza and Snap were bloated and grotesque beside me. We had found food and water here, assembled in portable cases which the brigands had prepared. Snap lifted them, and signed to me he was ready. My helmet shut out all sounds save my own breathing, my pounding heart, and the murmur of the mechanism. The blessed warmth and pure air were good. We reached the hull port-locks. They operated! We went through in the light of the head-lamps over our foreheads. I closed the locks after us. An instinct to keep the air in the ship for the other trapped humans lying there. We slid down the sloping side of the _Planetara_. We were unweighted, irrationally agile with the slight gravity. I fell a dozen feet and landed with barely a jar. We were out on the Lunar surface. A great sloping ramp of crags stretched down before us. Gray-black rock tinged with Earth-light. The Earth hung amid the stars in the blackness overhead like a huge section of glowing yellow ball. * * * * * This grim, desolate, silent landscape! Beyond the ramp, fifty feet below us, a tumbled naked plain stretched away into blurred distance. But I could see mountains off there. Behind us the towering, frowning rampart-wall of Archimedes loomed against the sky. I had turned to look back at the _Planetara_. She lay broken, wedged between spires of upstanding rock. A few of her lights still gleamed. The end of the _Planetara_! The three grotesque figures of Anita, Venza and Snap had started off. Hunchback figures with the tanks mounted on their shoulders. I bounded and caught them. I touched Snap. We made audiphone contact. "Which way do you think?" I demanded. "I think this way, down the ramp. Away from Archimedes, toward the mountains. It shouldn't be too far." "You run with Venza. I'll hold Anita." He nodded. "But we must keep together, Gregg." We could soon run freely. Down the ramp, out over the tumbled plain. Bounding, grotesque leaping strides. The girls were more agile, more skilful. They were soon leading us. The Earth-shadows of their figures leaped beside them. The _Planetara_ faded into the distance behind us. Archimedes stood back there. Ahead, the mountains came closer. An hour perhaps. I lost count of time. Occasionally we stopped to rest. Were we going toward the Grantline camp? Would they see our tiny waving headlights? Another interval. Then far ahead of us on the ragged plain, lights showed! Moving tiny spots of light! Headlights on helmeted figures! We ran, monstrously leaping. A group of figures were off there. Grantline's party? Snap gripped me. "Grantline! We're safe, Gregg! Safe!" * * * * * He took his bulb-light from his helmet: we stood in a group while he waved it. A semaphore signal. "_Grantline?_" And the answer came. "_Yes. You, Dean?_" Their personal code. No doubt of this--it was Grantline, who had seen the _Planetara_ fall and had come to help us. I stood then with my hand holding Anita. And I whispered, "It's Grantline! We're safe, Anita, my darling!" Death had been so close! Those horrible last minutes on the _Planetara_ had shocked us, marked us. We stood trembling. And Grantline and his men came bounding up. A helmeted figure touched me. I saw through the helmet-pane the visage of a stern-faced, square-jawed, youngish man. "Grantline? Johnny Grantline?" "Yes," said his voice at my ear-grid. "I'm Grantline. You're Haljan? Gregg Haljan?" They crowded around us. Gripped us to hear our explanations. Brigands! It was amazing to Johnny Grantline. But the menace was over now, over as soon as Grantline had realized its existence. As though the wreck of the _Planetara_ were foreordained by an all-wise Providence, the brigands' adventure had come to tragedy. We stood for a time discussing it. Then I drew apart, leaving Snap with Grantline. And Anita joined me. I held her arm so that we had audiphone contact. "Anita, mine." "Gregg, dear one." Murmured nothings which mean so much to lovers! * * * * * As we stood in the fantastic gloom of the Lunar desolation, with the blessed Earth-light on us, I sent up a prayer of thankfulness. Not that a hundred millions of treasure were saved. Not that the attack upon Grantline had been averted. But only that Anita was given back to me. In moments of greatest emotion the human mind individualizes. To me, there was only Anita. Life is very strange! The gate to the shining garden of our love seemed swinging wide to let us in. Yet I recall that a vague fear still lay on me. A premonition? I felt a touch on my arm. A bloated helmet visor was thrust near my own. I saw Snap's face peering at me. "Grantline thinks we should return to the _Planetara_. Might find some of them alive." Grantline touched me. "It's only humanity." "Yes," I said. We went back. Some ten of us--a line of grotesque figures bounding with slow, easy strides over the jagged, rock-strewn plain. Our lights danced before us. The _Planetara_ came at last into view. My ship. Again that pang swept me as I saw her. This, her last resting place. She lay here in her open tomb, shattered, broken, unbreathing. The lights on her were extinguished. The Erentz system had ceased to pulse--the heart of the dying ship, for a while beating faintly, but now at rest. We left the two girls with some of Grantline's men at the admission port. Snap, Grantline and I, with three others, went inside. There still seemed to be air, but not enough so that we dared remove our helmets. It was dark inside the wrecked ship. The corridors were black; the hull control-rooms were dimly illumined with Earth-light straggling through the windows. This littered tomb! Already cold and silent with death. We stumbled over a fallen figure. A member of the crew. * * * * * Grantline straightened from examining him. "Dead." Earth-light fell on the horrible face. Puffed flesh, bloated red from the blood which had oozed from its pores in the thinning air. I looked away. We prowled further. Hahn lay dead in the pump-room. The body of Coniston should have been near here. We did not see it. We climbed up to the slanting littered deck. The dome had not exploded, but the air up here had almost all hissed away. Again Grantline touched me. "That the turret?" "Yes." No wonder he asked! The wreckage was all so formless. We climbed after Snap into the broken turret room. We passed the body of that steward who just at the end had appealed to me and I had left dying. The legs of the forward look-out still poked grotesquely up from the wreckage of the observatory tower where it lay smashed down against the roof of the chart-room. We shoved ourselves into the turret. What was this? No bodies here! The giant Miko was gone! The pool of his blood lay congealed into a frozen dark splotch on the metal grid. And Moa was gone! They had not been dead. Had dragged themselves out of here, fighting desperately for life. We would find them somewhere around here. But we did not. Nor Coniston. I recalled what Anita had said: other suits and helmets had been here in the nearby chart-room. The brigands had taken them, and food and water doubtless, and escaped from the ship, following us through the lower admission ports only a few minutes after we had gone out. * * * * * We made careful search of the entire ship. Eight of the bodies which should have been here were missing: Miko, Moa, Coniston, and five of the steward-crew. We did not find them outside. They were hiding near here, no doubt, more willing to take their chances than to yield now to us. But how, in all this Lunar desolation, could we hope to locate them? "No use," said Grantline. "Let them go. If they want death--well, they deserve it." But we were saved. Then, as I stood there, realization leaped at me. Saved? Were we not indeed fatuous fools? In all these emotion-swept moments since we had encountered Grantline, memory of that brigand ship coming from Mars had never once occurred to Snap or me! I told Grantline now. His eyes through the visor stared at me blankly. "What!" I told him again. It would be here in eight days. Fully manned and armed. "But Haljan, we have almost no weapons! All my _Comet's_ space was taken with mining equipment and the mechanisms for my camp. I can't signal Earth! I was depending on the _Planetara_!" It surged upon us. The brigand menace past? We were blindly congratulating ourselves on our safety! But it would be eight days or more before in distant Ferrok-Shahn the non-arrival of the _Planetara_ would cause any real comment. No one was searching for us--no one was worried over us. No wonder the crafty Miko was willing to take his chances out here in the Lunar wilds! His ship, his reinforcements, his weapons were coming rapidly! And we were helpless. Almost unarmed. Marooned here on the Moon with our treasure! (_To be continued._) +-------------------------------------+ | ASTOUNDING STORIES | | _Appears on Newsstands_ | | THE FIRST THURSDAY IN EACH MONTH. | +-------------------------------------+ The Soul-Snatcher _By Tom Curry_ [Illustration: _He began to twist and turn, as though torn by some invisible force._] From twenty miles away stabbed the "atom-filtering" rays to Allen Baker in his cell in the death house. The shrill voice of a woman stabbed the steady hum of the many machines in the great, semi-darkened laboratory. It was the onslaught of weak femininity against the ebony shadow of Jared, the silent negro servant of Professor Ramsey Burr. Not many people were able to get to the famous man against his wishes; Jared obeyed orders implicitly and was generally an efficient barrier. "I will see him, I will," screamed the middle-aged woman. "I'm Mrs. Mary Baker, and he--he--it's his fault my son is going to die. His fault. _Professor! Professor Burr!_" Jared was unable to keep her quiet. Coming in from the sunlight, her eyes were not yet accustomed to the strange, subdued haze of the laboratory, an immense chamber crammed full of equipment, the vista of which seemed like an apartment in hell. Bizarre shapes stood out from the mass of impedimenta, great stills which rose full two stories in height, dynamos, immense tubes of colored liquids, a hundred puzzles to the inexpert eye. The small, plump figure of Mrs. Baker was very out of place in this setting. Her voice was poignant, reedy. A look at her made it evident that she was a conventional, good woman. She had soft, cloudy golden eyes and a pathetic mouth, and she seemed on the point of tears. "Madam, madam, de doctor is busy," whispered Jared, endeavoring to shoo her out of the laboratory with his polite hands. He was respectful, but firm. She refused to obey. She stopped when she was within a few feet of the activity in the laboratory, and stared with fear and horror at the center of the room, and at its occupant, Professor Burr, whom she had addressed during her flurried entrance. The professor's face, as he peered at her, seemed like a disembodied stare, for she could see only eyes behind a mask of lavender gray glass eyeholes, with its flapping ends of dirty, gray-white cloth. She drew in a deep breath--and gasped, for the pungent fumes, acrid and penetrating, of sulphuric and nitric acids, stabbed her lungs. It was like the breath of hell, to fit the simile, and aptly Professor Burr seemed the devil himself, manipulating the infernal machines. * * * * * Acting swiftly, the tall figure stepped over and threw two switches in a single, sweeping movement. The vermillion light which had lived in a long row of tubes on a nearby bench abruptly ceased to writhe like so many tongues of flame, and the embers of hell died out. Then the professor flooded the room in harsh gray-green light, and stopped the high-pitched, humming whine of his dynamos. A shadow picture writhing on the wall, projected from a lead-glass barrel, disappeared suddenly, the great color filters and other machines lost their semblance of horrible life, and a regretful sigh seemed to come from the metal creatures as they gave up the ghost. To the woman, it had been entering the abode of fear. She could not restrain her shudders. But she bravely confronted the tall figure of Professor Burr, as he came forth to greet her. He was extremely tall and attenuated, with a red, bony mask of a face pointed at the chin by a sharp little goatee. Feathery blond hair, silvered and awry, covered his great head. "Madam," said Burr in a gentle, disarmingly quiet voice, "your manner of entrance might have cost you your life. Luckily I was able to deflect the rays from your person, else you might not now be able to voice your complaint--for such seems to be your purpose in coming here." He turned to Jared, who was standing close by. "Very well, Jared. You may go. After this, it will be as well to throw the bolts, though in this case I am quite willing to see the visitor." Jared slid away, leaving the plump little woman to confront the famous scientist. For a moment, Mrs. Baker stared into the pale gray eyes, the pupils of which seemed black as coal by contrast. Some, his bitter enemies, claimed that Professor Ramsey Burr looked cold and bleak as an iceberg, others that he had a baleful glare. His mouth was grim and determined. * * * * * Yet, with her woman's eyes, Mrs. Baker, looking at the professor's bony mask of a face, with the high-bridged, intrepid nose, the passionless gray eyes, thought that Ramsey Burr would be handsome, if a little less cadaverous and more human. "The experiment which you ruined by your untimely entrance," continued the professor, "was not a safe one." His long white hand waved toward the bunched apparatus, but to her to the room seemed all glittering metal coils of snakelike wire, ruddy copper, dull lead, and tubes of all shapes. Hell cauldrons of unknown chemicals seethed and slowly bubbled, beetle-black bakelite fixtures reflected the hideous light. "Oh," she cried, clasping her hands as though she addressed him in prayer, "forget your science, Professor Burr, and be a man. Help me. Three days from now my boy, my son, whom I love above all the world, is to die." "Three days is a long time," said Professor Burr calmly. "Do not lose hope: I have no intention of allowing your son, Allen Baker, to pay the price for a deed of mine. I freely confess it was I who was responsible for the death of--what was the person's name?--Smith, I believe." "It was you who made Allen get poor Mr. Smith to agree to the experiments which killed him, and which the world blamed on my son," she said. "They called it the deed of a scientific fiend, Professor Burr, and perhaps they are right. But Allen is innocent." "Be quiet," ordered Burr, raising his hand. "Remember, madam, your son Allen is only a commonplace medical man, and while I taught him a little from my vast store of knowledge, he was ignorant and of much less value to science and humanity than myself. Do you not understand, can you not comprehend, also, that the man Smith was a martyr to science? He was no loss to mankind, and only sentimentalists could have blamed anyone for his death. I should have succeeded in the interchange of atoms which we were working on, and Smith would at this moment be hailed as the first man to travel through space in invisible form, projected on radio waves, had it not been for the fact that the alloy which conducts the three types of sinusoidal failed me and burned out. Yes, it was an error in calculation, and Smith would now be called the Lindbergh of the Atom but for that. Yet Smith has not died in vain, for I have finally corrected this error--science is but trial and correction of error--and all will be well." "But Allen--Allen must not die at all!" she cried. "For weeks he has been in the death house: it is killing me. The Governor refuses him a pardon, nor will he commute my son's sentence. In three days he is to die in the electric chair, for a crime which you admit you alone are responsible for. Yet you remain in your laboratory, immersed in your experiments, and do nothing, nothing!" * * * * * The tears came now, and she sobbed hysterically. It seemed that she was making an appeal to someone in whom she had only a forlorn hope. "Nothing?" repeated Burr, pursing his thin lips. "Nothing? Madam, I have done everything. I have, as I have told you, perfected the experiment. It is successful. Your son has not suffered in vain, and Smith's name will go down with the rest of science's martyrs as one who died for the sake of humanity. But if you wish to save your son, you must be calm. You must listen to what I have to say, and you must not fail to carry out my instructions to the letter. I am ready now." Light, the light of hope, sprang in the mother's eyes. She grasped his arm and stared at him with shining face, through tear-dipped eyelashes. "Do--do you mean it? Can you save him? After the Governor has refused me? What can you do? No influence will snatch Allen from the jaws of the law: the public is greatly excited and very hostile toward him." A quiet smile played at the corners of Burr's thin lips. "Come," he said. "Place this cloak about you. Allen wore it when he assisted me." The professor replaced his own mask and conducted the woman into the interior of the laboratory. "I will show you," said Professor Burr. She saw before her now, on long metal shelves which appeared to be delicately poised on fine scales whose balance was registered by hair-line indicators, two small metal cages. Professor Burr stepped over to a row of common cages set along the wall. There was a small menagerie there, guinea pigs--the martyrs of the animal kingdom--rabbits, monkeys, and some cats. * * * * * The man of science reached in and dragged out a mewing cat, placing it in the right-hand cage on the strange table. He then obtained a small monkey and put this animal in the left-hand cage, beside the cat. The cat, on the right, squatted on its haunches, mewing in pique and looking up at its tormentor. The monkey, after a quick look around, began to investigate the upper reaches of its new cage. Over each of the animals was suspended a fine, curious metallic armament. For several minutes, while the woman, puzzled at how this demonstration was to affect the rescue of her condemned son, waited impatiently, the professor deftly worked at the apparatus, connecting wires here and there. "I am ready now," said Burr. "Watch the two animals carefully." "Yes, yes," she replied, faintly, for she was half afraid. The great scientist was stooping over, looking at the balances of the indicators through microscopes. She saw him reach for his switches, and then a brusk order caused her to turn her eyes back to the animals, the cat in the right-hand cage, the monkey at the left. Both animals screamed in fear, and a sympathetic chorus sounded from the menagerie, as a long purple spark danced from one gray metal pole to the other, over the cages on the table. At first, Mrs. Baker noticed no change. The spark had died, the professor's voice, unhurried, grave, broke the silence. "The first part of the experiment is over," he said. "The ego--" "Oh, heavens!" cried the woman. "You've driven the poor creatures mad!" * * * * * She indicated the cat. That animal was clawing at the top bars of its cage, uttering a bizarre, chattering sound, somewhat like a monkey. The cat hung from the bars, swinging itself back and forth as on a trapeze, then reached up and hung by its hind claws. As for the monkey, it was squatting on the floor of its cage, and it made a strange sound in its throat, almost a mew, and it hissed several times at the professor. "They are not mad," said Burr. "As I was explaining to you, I have finished the first portion of the experiment. The ego, or personality of one animal has been taken out and put into the other." She was unable to speak. He had mentioned madness: was he, Professor Ramsey Burr, crazy? It was likely enough. Yet--yet the whole thing, in these surroundings, seemed plausible. As she hesitated about speaking, watching with fascinated eyes the out-of-character behavior of the two beasts, Burr went on. "The second part follows at once. Now that the two egos have interchanged, I will shift the bodies. When it is completed, the monkey will have taken the place of the cat, and vice versa. Watch." He was busy for some time with his levers, and the smell of ozone reached Mrs. Baker's nostrils as she stared with horrified eyes at the animals. She blinked. The sparks crackled madly, the monkey mewed, the cat chattered. Were her eyes going back on her? She could see neither animal distinctly: they seemed to be shaking in some cosmic disturbance, and were but blurs. This illusion--for to her, it seemed it must be optical--persisted, grew worse, until the quaking forms of the two unfortunate creatures were like so much ectoplasm in swift motion, ghosts whirling about in a dark room. Yet she could see the cages quite distinctly, and the table and even the indicators of the scales. She closed her eyes for a moment. The acrid odors penetrated to her lungs, and she coughed, opening her eyes. * * * * * Now she could see clearly again. Yes, she could see a monkey, and it was climbing, quite naturally about its cage; it was excited, but a monkey. And the cat, while protesting mightily, acted like a cat. Then she gasped. Had her mind, in the excitement, betrayed her? She looked at Professor Burr. On his lean face there was a smile of triumph, and he seemed to be awaiting her applause. She looked again at the two cages. Surely, at first the cat had been in the right-hand cage, and the monkey in the left! And now, the monkey was in the place where the cat had been and the cat had been shifted to the left-hand cage. "So it was with Smith, when the alloys burned out," said Burr. "It is impossible to extract the ego or dissolve the atoms and translate them into radio waves unless there is a connection with some other ego and body, for in such a case the translated soul and body would have no place to go. Luckily, for you, madam, it was the man Smith who was killed when the alloys failed me. It might have been Allen, for he was the second pole of the connection." "But," she began faintly, "how can this mad experiment have anything to do with saving my boy?" He waved impatiently at her evident denseness. "Do you not understand? It is so I will save Allen, your son. I shall first switch our egos, or souls, as you say. Then switch the bodies. It must always take this sequence; why, I have not ascertained. But it always works thus." Mrs. Baker was terrified. What she had just seen, smacked of the blackest magic--yet a woman in her position must grasp at straws. The world blamed her son for the murder of Smith, a man Professor Burr had made use of as he might a guinea pig, and Allen must be snatched from the death house. "Do--do you mean you can bring Allen from the prison here--just by throwing those switches?" she asked. "That is it. But there is more to it than that, for it is not magic, madam; it is science, you understand, and there must be some physical connection. But with your help, that can easily be made." * * * * * Professor Ramsey Burr, she knew, was the greatest electrical engineer the world had ever known. And he stood high as a physicist. Nothing hindered him in the pursuit of knowledge, they said. He knew no fear, and he lived on an intellectual promontory. He was so great that he almost lost sight of himself. To such a man, nothing was impossible. Hope, wild hope, sprang in Mary Baker's heart, and she grasped the bony hand of the professor and kissed it. "Oh, I believe, I believe," she cried. "You can do it. You can save Allen. I will do anything, anything you tell me to." "Very well. You visit your son daily at the death house, do you not?" She nodded; a shiver of remembrance of that dread spot passed through her. "Then you will tell him the plan and let him agree to see me the night preceding the electrocution. I will give him final instructions as to the exchange of bodies. When my life spirit, or ego, is confined in your son's body in the death house, Allen will be able to perform the feat of changing the bodies, and your son's flesh will join his soul, which will have been temporarily inhabiting my own shell. Do you see? When they find me in the cell where they suppose your son to be, they will be unable to explain the phenomenon; they can do nothing but release me. Your son will go here, and can be whisked away to a safe place of concealment." "Yes, yes. What am I to do besides this?" Professor Burr pulled out a drawer near at hand, and from it extracted a folded garment of thin, shiny material. "This is metal cloth coated with the new alloy," he said, in a matter of fact tone. He rummaged further, saying as he did so, "I expected you would be here to see me, and I have been getting ready for your visit. All is prepared, save a few odds and ends which I can easily clean up in the next two days. Here are four cups which Allen must place under each leg of his bed, and this delicate little director coil you must take especial pains with. It is to be slipped under your son's tongue at the time appointed." * * * * * She was staring at him still, half in fear, half in wonder, yet she could not feel any doubt of the man's miraculous powers. Somehow, while he talked to her and rested those cold eyes upon her, she was under the spell of the great scientist. Her son, before the trouble into which he had been dragged by the professor, had often hinted at the abilities of Ramsey Burr, given her the idea that his employer was practically a necromancer, yet a magician whose advanced scientific knowledge was correct and explainable in the light of reason. Yes, Allen had talked to her often when he was at home, resting from his labors with Professor Burr. He had spoken of the new electricity discovered by the famous man, and also told his mother that Burr had found a method of separating atoms and then transforming them into a form of radio-electricity so that they could be sent in radio waves, to designated points. And she now remembered--the swift trial and conviction of Allen on the charge of murder had occupied her so deeply that she had forgotten all else for the time being--that her son had informed her quite seriously that Professor Ramsey Burr would soon be able to transport human beings by radio. "Neither of us will be injured in any way by the change," said Burr calmly. "It is possible for me now to break up human flesh, send the atoms by radio-electricity, and reassemble them in their proper form by these special transformers and atom filters." Mrs. Baker took all the apparatus presented her by the professor. She ventured the thought that it might be better to perform the experiment at once, instead of waiting until the last minute, but this Professor Burr waved aside as impossible. He needed the extra time, he said, and there was no hurry. She glanced about the room, and her eye took in the giant switches of copper with their black handles; there were others of a gray-green metal she did not recognize. Many dials and meters, strange to her, confronted the little woman. These things, she felt with a rush of gratitude toward the inanimate objects, would help to save her son, so they interested her and she began to feel kindly toward the great machines. * * * * * Would Professor Burr be able to save Allen as he claimed? Yes, she thought, he could. She would make Allen consent to the trial of it, even though her son had cursed the scientist and cried he would never speak to Ramsey Burr again. She was escorted from the home of the professor by Jared, and going out into the bright, sunlit street, blinked as her eyes adjusted themselves to the daylight after the queer light of the laboratory. In a bundle she had a strange suit and the cups; her purse held the tiny coil, wrapped in cotton. How could she get the authorities to consent to her son having the suit? The cups and the coil she might slip to him herself. She decided that a mother would be allowed to give her son new underwear. Yes, she would say it was that. She started at once for the prison. Professor Burr's laboratory was but twenty miles from the cell where her son was incarcerated. As she rode on the train, seeing people in everyday attire, commonplace occurrences going on about her, the spell of Professor Burr faded, and cold reason stared her in the face. Was it nonsense, this idea of transporting bodies through the air, in invisible waves? Yet, she was old-fashioned; the age of miracles had not passed for her. Radio, in which pictures and voices could be sent on wireless waves, was unexplainable to her. Perhaps-- She sighed, and shook her head. It was hard to believe. It was also hard to believe that her son was in deadly peril, condemned to death as a "scientific fiend." Here was her station. A taxi took her to the prison, and after a talk with the warden, finally she stood there, before the screen through which she could talk to Allen, her son. "Mother!" Her heart lifted, melted within her. It was always thus when he spoke. "Allen," she whispered softly. They were allowed to talk undisturbed. "Professor Burr wishes to help you," she said, in a low voice. * * * * * Her son, Allen Baker, M. D., turned eyes of misery upon her. His ruddy hair was awry. This young man was imaginative and could therefore suffer deeply. He had the gift of turning platitudes into puzzles, and his hazel eyes were lit with an elfin quality, which, if possible, endeared him the more to his mother. All his life he had been the greatest thing in the world to this woman. To see him in such straits tore her very heart. When he had been a little boy, she had been able to make joy appear in those eyes by a word and a pat; now that he was a man, the matter was more difficult, but she had always done her best. "I cannot allow Professor Burr to do anything for me," he said dully. "It is his fault that I am here." "But Allen, you must listen, listen carefully. Professor Burr can save you. He says it was all a mistake, the alloy was wrong. He has not come forward before, because he knew he would be able to iron out the trouble if he had time, and thus snatch you from this terrible place." She put as much confidence into her voice as she could. She must, to enhearten her son. Anything to replace that look of suffering with one of hope. She would believe, she did believe. The bars, the great masses of stone which enclosed her son would be as nothing. He would pass through them, unseen, unheard. For a time, Allen spoke bitterly of Ramsey Burr, but his mother pleaded with him, telling him it was his only chance, and that the deviltry Allen suspected was imaginary. "He--he killed Smith in such an experiment," said Allen. "I took the blame, as you know, though I only followed his instructions. But you say he claims to have found the correct alloys?" "Yes. And this suit, you must put it on. But Professor Burr himself will be here to see you day after to-morrow, the day preceding the--the--" She bit her lip, and got out the dreaded word, "the electrocution. But there won't be any electrocution, Allen; no, there cannot be. You will be safe, safe in my arms." She had to fight now to hold her belief in the miracle which Burr had promised. The solid steel and stone dismayed her brain. * * * * * The new alloy seemed to interest Allen Baker. His mother told him of the exchange of the monkey and the cat, and he nodded excitedly, growing more and more restive, and his eyes began to shine with hope and curiosity. "I have told the warden about the suit, saying it was something I made for you myself," she said, in a low voice. "You must pretend the coil and the cups are things you desire for your own amusement. You know, they have allowed you a great deal of latitude, since you are educated and need diversion." "Yes, yes. There may be some difficulty, but I will overcome that. Tell Burr to come. I'll talk with him and he can instruct me in the final details. It is better than waiting here like a rat in a trap. I have been afraid of going mad, mother, but this buoys me up." He smiled at her, and her heart sang in the joy of relief. How did the intervening days pass? Mrs. Baker could not sleep, could scarcely eat, she could do nothing but wait, wait, wait. She watched the meeting of her son and Ramsey Burr, on the day preceding the date set for the execution. "Well, Baker," said Burr nonchalantly, nodding to his former assistant. "How are you?" "You see how I am," said Allen, coldly. "Yes, yes. Well, listen to what I have to say and note it carefully. There must be no slip. You have the suit, the cups and the director coil? You must keep the suit on, the cups go under the legs of the cot you lie on. The director under your tongue." The professor spoke further with Allen, instructing him in scientific terms which the woman scarcely comprehended. "To-night, then at eleven-thirty," said Burr, finally. "Be ready." * * * * * Allen nodded. Mrs. Baker accompanied Burr from the prison. "You--you will let me be with you?" she begged. "It is hardly necessary," said the professor. "But I must. I must see Allen the moment he is free, to make sure he is all right. Then, I want to be able to take him away. I have a place in which we can hide, and as soon as he is rescued he must be taken out of sight." "Very well," said Burr, shrugging. "It is immaterial to me, so long as you do not interfere with the course of the experiment. You must sit perfectly still, you must not speak until Allen stands before you and addresses you." "Yes, I will obey you," she promised. Mrs. Baker watched Professor Ramsey Burr eat his supper. Burr himself was not in the least perturbed; it was wonderful, she thought, that he could be so calm. To her, it was the great moment, the moment when her son would be saved from the jaws of death. Jared carried a comfortable chair into the laboratory and she sat in it, quiet as a mouse, in one corner of the room. It was nine o'clock, and Professor Burr was busy with his preparations. She knew he had been working steadily for the past few days. She gripped the arms of her chair, and her heart burned within her. The professor was making sure of his apparatus. He tested this bulb and that, and carefully inspected the curious oscillating platform, over which was suspended a thickly bunched group of gray-green wire, which was seemingly an antenna. The numerous indicators and implements seemed to be satisfactory, for at quarter after eleven Burr gave an exclamation of pleasure and nodded to himself. Burr seemed to have forgotten the woman. He spoke aloud occasionally, but not to her, as he drew forth a suit made of the same metal cloth as Allen must have on at this moment. * * * * * The tension was terrific, terrific for the mother, who was awaiting the culmination of the experiment which would rescue her son from the electric chair--or would it fail? She shuddered. What if Burr were mad? But look at him, she was sure he was sane, as sane as she was. "He will succeed," she murmured, digging her nails into the palms of her hands. "I _know_ he will." She pushed aside the picture of what would happen on the morrow, but a few hours distant, when Allen, her son, was due to be led to a legal death in the electric chair. Professor Burr placed the shiny suit upon his lank form, and she saw him put a duplicate coil, the same sort of small machine which Allen possessed, under his tongue. The Mephistophelian figure consulted a matter-of-fact watch; at that moment, Mrs. Baker heard, above the hum of the myriad machines in the laboratory, the slow chiming of a clock. It was the moment set for the deed. Then, she feared the professor was insane, for he suddenly leaped to the high bench of the table on which stood one of the oscillating platforms. Wires led out from this, and Burr sat gently upon it, a strange figure in the subdued light. Professor Burr, however, she soon saw, was not insane. No, this was part of it. He was reaching for switches near at hand, and bulbs began to glow with unpleasant light, needles on indicators swung madly, and at last, Professor Burr kicked over a giant switch, which seemed to be the final movement. For several seconds the professor did not move. Then his body grew rigid, and he twisted a few times. His face, though not drawn in pain, yet twitched galvanically, as though actuated by slight jabs of electricity. * * * * * The many tubes fluoresced, flared up in pulsing waves of violet and pink: there were gray bars of invisibility or areas of air in which nothing visible showed. There came the faint, crackling hum of machinery rather like a swarm of wasps in anger. Blue and gray thread of fire spat across the antenna. The odor of ozone came to Mrs. Baker's nostrils, and the acid odors burned her lungs. She was staring at him, staring at the professor's face. She half rose from her chair, and uttered a little cry. The eyes had changed, no longer were they cold, impersonal, the eyes of a man who prided himself on the fact that he kept his arteries soft and his heart hard; they were loving, soft eyes. "Allen," she cried. Yes, without doubt, the eyes of her son were looking at her out of the body of Professor Ramsey Burr. "Mother," he said gently. "Don't be alarmed. It is successful. I am here, in Professor Burr's body." "Yes," she cried, hysterically. It was too weird to believe. It seemed dim to her, unearthly. "Are you all right, darling?" she asked timidly. "Yes. I felt nothing beyond a momentary giddy spell, a bit of nausea and mental stiffness. It was strange, and I have a slight headache. However, all is well." He grinned at her, laughed with the voice which was not his, yet which she recognized as directed by her son's spirit. The laugh was cracked and unlike Allen's whole-hearted mirth, yet she smiled in sympathy. "Yes, the first part is a success," said the man. "Our egos have interchanged. Soon, our bodies will undergo the transformation, and then I must keep under cover. I dislike Burr--yet he is a great man. He has saved me. I suppose the slight headache which I feel is one bequeathed me by Burr. I hope he inherits my shivers and terrors and the neuralgia for the time being, so he will get some idea of what I have undergone." He had got down from the oscillating platform, the spirit of her son in Ramsey's body. "What--what are you doing now?" she asked. "I must carry out the rest of it myself," he said. "Burr directed me when we talked yesterday. It is more difficult when one subject is out of the laboratory, and the tubes must be checked." * * * * * He went carefully about his work, and she saw him replacing four of the tubes with others, new ones, which were ready at hand. Though it was the body of Ramsey Burr, the movements were different from the slow, precise work of the professor, and more and more, she realized that her son inhabited the shell before her. For a moment, the mother thought of attempting to dissuade her son from making the final change; was it not better thus, than to chance the disintegration of the bodies? Suppose something went wrong, and the exchange did not take place, and her son, that is, his spirit, went back to the death house? Midnight struck as he worked feverishly at the apparatus, the long face corrugated as he checked the dials and tubes. He worked swiftly, but evidently was following a procedure which he had committed to memory, for he was forced to pause often to make sure of himself. "Everything is O. K.," said the strange voice at last. He consulted his watch. "Twelve-thirty," he said. She bit her lip in terror, as he cried, "Now!" and sprang to the table to take his place on the metallic platform, which oscillated to and fro under his weight. The delicate grayish metal antenna, which, she knew, would form a glittering halo of blue and gray threads of fire, rested quiescent above his head. "This is the last thing," he said calmly, as he reached for the big ebony handled switch. "I'll be myself in a few minutes, mother." "Yes, son, yes." The switch connected, and Allen Baker, in the form of Ramsey Burr, suddenly cried out in pain. His mother leaped up to run to his side, but he waved her away. She stood, wringing her hands, as he began to twist and turn, as though torn by some invisible force. Eery screams came from the throat of the man on the platform, and Mrs. Baker's cries of sympathy mingled with them. * * * * * The mighty motors hummed in a high-pitched, unnatural whine, and suddenly Mrs. Baker saw the tortured face before her grow dim. The countenance of the professor seemed to melt, and then there came a dull, muffled thud, a burst of white-blue flame, the odor of burning rubber and the tinkle of broken glass. Back to the face came the clarity of outline, and still it was Professor Ramsey Burr's body she stared at. Her son, in the professor's shape, climbed from the platform, and looked about him as though dazed. An acrid smoke filled the room, and burning insulation assailed the nostrils. Desperately, without looking at her, his lips set in a determined line, the man went hurriedly over the apparatus again. "Have I forgotten, did I do anything wrong?" she heard his anguished cry. Two tubes were burned out, and these he replaced as swiftly as possible. But he was forced to go all over the wiring, and cut out whatever had been short-circuited so that it could be hooked up anew with uninjured wire. Before he was ready to resume his seat on the platform, after half an hour of feverish haste, a knock came on the door. The person outside was imperative, and Mrs. Baker ran over and opened the portal. Jared, the whites of his eyes shining in the dim light, stood there. "De professah--tell him dat de wahden wishes to talk with him. It is very important, ma'am." The body of Burr, inhabited by Allen's soul, pushed by her, and she followed falteringly, wringing her hands. She saw the tall figure snatch at the receiver and listen. "Oh, God," he cried. At last, he put the receiver back on the hook, automatically, and sank down in a chair, his face in his hands. * * * * * Mrs. Baker went to him quickly. "What is it, Allen?" she cried. "Mother," he said hoarsely, "it was the warden of the prison. He told me that Allen Baker had gone temporarily insane, and claimed to be Professor Ramsey Burr in my body." "But--but what is the matter?" she asked. "Cannot you finish the experiment, Allen? Can't you change the two bodies now?" He shook his head. "Mother--they electrocuted Ramsey Burr in my body at twelve forty-five to-night!" She screamed. She was faint, but she controlled herself with a great effort. "But the electrocution was not to be until morning," she said. Allen shook his head. "They are allowed a certain latitude, about twelve hours," he said. "Burr protested up to the last moment, and begged for time." "Then--then they must have come for him and dragged him forth to die in the electric chair while you were attempting the second part of the change," she said. "Yes. That was why it failed. That's why the tubes and wires burned out and why we couldn't exchange bodies. It began to succeed, then I could feel something terrible had happened. It was impossible to complete the Beta circuit, which short-circuited. They took him from the cell, do you see, while I was starting the exchange of the atoms." * * * * * For a time, the mother and her boy sat staring at one another. She saw the tall, eccentric figure of Ramsey Burr before her, yet she saw also the soul of her son within that form. The eyes were Allen's, the voice was soft and loving, and his spirit was with her. "Come, Allen, my son," she said softly. "Burr paid the price," said Allen, shaking his head. "He became a martyr to science." The world has wondered why Professor Ramsey Burr, so much in the headlines as a great scientist, suddenly gave up all his experiments and took up the practice of medicine. Now that the public furor and indignation over the death of the man Smith has died down, sentimentalists believe that Ramsey Burr has reformed and changed his icy nature, for he manifests great affection and care for Mrs. Mary Baker, the mother of the electrocuted man who had been his assistant. +--------------------------------------+ | BY NO MEANS | | _Miss the Opening Installment of | | the Extraordinary Four-Part Novel_ | | MURDER MADNESS | | _By Murray Leinster_ | | | | _Starting In Our Next Issue_ | +--------------------------------------+ The Ray of Madness _By Captain S. P. Meek_ [Illustration: "_That's the one," he exclaimed. "Hold the glass there for a moment._"] Dr. Bird discovers a dastardly plot, amazing in its mechanical ingenuity, behind the apparently trivial eye trouble of the President. A knock sounded at the door of Dr. Bird's private laboratory in the Bureau of Standards. The famous scientist paid no attention to the interruption but bent his head lower over the spectroscope with which he was working. The knock was repeated with a quality of quiet insistence upon recognition. The Doctor smothered an exclamation of impatience and strode over to the door and threw it open to the knocker. "Oh, hello, Carnes," he exclaimed as he recognized his visitor. "Come in and sit down and keep your mouth shut for a few minutes. I am busy just now but I'll be at liberty in a little while." [Illustration] "There's no hurry, Doctor," replied Operative Carnes of the United States Secret Service as he entered the room and sat on the edge of the Doctor's desk. "I haven't got a case up my sleeve this time; I just came in for a little chat." "All right, glad to see you. Read that latest volume of the _Zeitschrift_ for a while. That article of Von Beyer's has got me guessing, all right." Carnes picked up the indicated volume and settled himself to read. The Doctor bent over his apparatus. Time and again he made minute adjustments and gave vent to muttered exclamations of annoyance at the results he obtained. Half an hour later he rose from his chair with a sigh and turned to his visitor. "What do you think of Von Beyer's alleged discovery?" he asked the operative. * * * * * "It's too deep for me, Doctor," replied the operative. "All that I can make out of it is that he claims to have discovered a new element named 'lunium,' but hasn't been able to isolate it yet. Is there anything remarkable about that? It seems to me that I have read of other new elements being discovered from time to time." "There is nothing remarkable about the discovery of a new element by the spectroscopic method," replied Dr. Bird. "We know from Mendeleff's table that there are a number of elements which we have not discovered as yet, and several of the ones we know were first detected by the spectroscope. The thing which puzzles me is that so brilliant a man as Von Beyer claims to have discovered it in the spectra of the moon. His name, lunium, is taken from Luna, the moon." "Why not the moon? Haven't several elements been first discovered in the spectra of stars?" "Certainly. The classic example is Lockyer's discovery of an orange line in the spectra of the sun in 1868. No known terrestrial element gave such a line and he named the new element which he deduced helium, from Helos, the sun. The element helium was first isolated by Ramsey some twenty-seven years later. Other elements have been found in the spectra of stars, but the point I am making is that the sun and the stars are incandescent bodies and could be logically expected to show the characteristic lines of their constituent elements in their spectra. But the moon is a cold body without an atmosphere and is visible only by reflected light. The element, lunium, may exist in the moon, but the manifestations which Von Beyer has observed must be, not from the moon, but from the source of the reflected light which he spectro-analyzed." * * * * * "You are over my depth, Doctor." "I'm over my own. I have tried to follow Von Beyer's reasoning and I have tried to check his findings. Twice this evening I thought that I caught a momentary glimpse on the screen of my fluoroscope of the ultra-violet line which he reports as characteristic of lunium, but I am not certain. I haven't been able to photograph it yet. He notes in his article that the line seems to be quite impermanent and fades so rapidly that an accurate measurement of its wave-length is almost impossible. However, let's drop the subject. How do you like your new assignment?" "Oh, it's all right. I would rather be back on my old work." "I haven't seen you since you were assigned to the Presidential detail. I suppose that you fellows are pretty busy getting ready for Premier McDougal's visit?" "I doubt if he will come," replied Carnes soberly. "Things are not exactly propitious for a visit of that sort just now." * * * * * Dr. Bird sat back in his chair in surprise. "I thought that the whole thing is arranged. The press seems to think so, at any rate." "Everything is arranged, but arrangements may be cancelled. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they were." "Carnes," replied Dr. Bird gravely, "you have either said too much or too little. There is something more to this than appears on the surface. If it is none of my business, don't hesitate to tell me so and I'll forget what you have said, but if I can help you any, speak up." Carnes puffed meditatively at his pipe for a few minutes before replying. "It's really none of your business. Doctor," he said at length, "and yet I know that a corpse is a chatterbox compared to you when you are told anything in confidence, and I really need to unload my mind. It has been kept from the press so far; but I don't know how long it can be kept muzzled. In strict confidence, the President of the United State acts as though he were crazy." "Quite a section of the press has claimed that for a long time," replied Dr. Bird, with a twinkle in his eye. "I don't mean crazy in that way, Doctor, I mean _really_ crazy. Bugs! Nuts! Bats in his belfry!" * * * * * Dr. Bird whistled softly. "Are you sure, Carnes?" he asked. "As sure as may be. Both of his physicians think so. They were non-committal for a while, especially as the first attack waned and he seemed to recover, but when his second attack came on more violently than the first and the President began to act queerly, they had to take the Presidential detail into their confidence. He has been quietly examined by some of the greatest psychiatrists in the country, but none of them have ventured on a positive verdict as to the nature of the malady. They admit, of course, that it exists, but they won't classify it. The fact that it is intermittent seems to have them stopped. He was bad a month ago but he recovered and became, to all appearances, normal for a time. About a week ago he began to show queer symptoms again and now he is getting worse daily. If he goes on getting worse for another week, it will have to be announced so that the Vice-President can take over the duties of the head of the government." * * * * * "What are the symptoms?" "The first we noticed was a failing of his memory. Coupled with this was a restlessness and a habit of nocturnal prowling. He tosses continually on his bed and mutters and at times leaps up and rages back and forth in his bedchamber, howling and raging. Then he will calm down and compose himself and go to sleep, only to wake in half an hour and go through the same performance. It is pretty ghastly for the men on night guard." "How does he act in the daytime?" "Heavy and lethargic. His memory becomes a complete blank at times and he talks wildly. Those are the times we must guard against." "Overwork?" queried the Doctor. "Not according to his physicians. His physical health is splendid and his appetite unusually keen. He takes his exercise regularly and suffers no ill health except for a little eye trouble." Dr. Bird leaped to his feet. "Tell me more about this eye trouble, Carnes," he demanded. "Why, I don't know much about it, Doctor. Admiral Clay told me that it was nothing but a mild opthalmia which should yield readily to treatment. That was when he told me to see that the shades of the President's study were partially drawn to keep the direct sunlight out." * * * * * "Opthalmia be sugared! What do his eyes look like?" "They are rather red and swollen and a little bloodshot. He has a tendency to shut them while he is talking and he avoids light as much as possible. I hadn't noticed anything peculiar about it." "Carnes, did you ever see a case of snow blindness?" The operative looked up in surprise. "Yes, I have. I had it myself once in Maine. Now that you mention it, his case does look like snow blindness, but such a thing is absurd in Washington in August." Dr. Bird rummaged in his desk and drew out a book, which he consulted for a moment. "Now, Carnes," he said, "I want some dates from you and I want them accurately. Don't guess, for a great deal may depend on the accuracy of your answers. When was this mental disability on the part of the President first noticed?" Carnes drew a pocket diary from his coat and consulted it. "The seventeenth of July," he replied. "That is, we are sure, in view of later developments, that that was the date it first came on. We didn't realize that anything was wrong until the twentieth. On the night of the nineteenth the President slept very poorly, getting up and creating a disturbance twice, and on the twentieth he acted so queerly that it was necessary to cancel three conferences." * * * * * Dr. Bird checked off the dates on the book before him and nodded. "Go on," he said, "and describe the progress of the malady by days." "It got progressively worse until the night of the twenty-third. The twenty-fourth he was no worse, and on the twenty-fifth a slight improvement was noticed. He got steadily better until, by the third or fourth of August, he was apparently normal. About the twelfth he began to show signs of restlessness which have increased daily during the past week. Last night, the nineteenth, he slept only a few minutes and Brady, who was on guard, says that his howls were terrible. His memory has been almost a total blank today and all of his appointments were cancelled, ostensibly because of his eye trouble. If he gets any worse, it probably will be necessary to inform the country as to his true condition." When Carnes had finished, Dr. Bird sat for a time in concentrated thought. "You did exactly right in coming to me, Carnes," he said presently. "I don't think that this is a job for a doctor at all--I believe that it needs a physicist and a chemist and possibly a detective to cure him. We'll get busy." "What do you mean, Doctor?" demanded Carnes. "Do you think that some exterior force is causing the President's disability?" * * * * * "I think nothing, Carnes," replied the Doctor grimly, "but I intend to know something before I am through. Don't ask for explanations: this is not the time for talk, it is the time for action. Can you get me into the White House to-night?" "I doubt it, Doctor, but I'll try. What excuse shall I give? I am not supposed to have told you anything about the President's illness." "Get Bolton, your chief, on the phone and tell him that you have talked to me when you shouldn't have. He'll blow up, but after he is through exploding, tell him that I smell a rat and that I want him down here at once with _carte blanche_ authority to do as I see fit in the White House. If he makes any fuss about it, remind him of the fact that he has considered me crazy several times in the past when events showed that I was right. If he won't play after that, let me talk to him." "All right, Doctor," replied Carnes as he picked up the scientist's telephone and gave the number of the home of the Chief of the Secret Service. "I'll try to bully him out of it. He has a good deal of confidence in your ability." * * * * * Half an hour later the door of Dr. Bird's laboratory opened suddenly to admit Bolton. "Hello, Doctor," exclaimed the Chief, "what the dickens have you got on your mind now? I ought to skin Carnes alive for talking out of turn, but if you really have an idea, I'll forgive him. What do you suspect?" "I suspect several things, Bolton, but I haven't time to tell you what they are. I want to get quietly into the White House as promptly as possible." "That's easy," replied Bolton, "but first I want to know what the object of the visit is." "The object is to see what I can find out. My ideas are entirely too nebulous to attempt to lay them out before you just now. You've never worked directly with me on a case before, but Carnes can tell you that I have my own methods of working and that I won't spill my ideas until I have something more definite to go on than I have at present." "The Doctor is right, Chief," said Carnes. "He has an idea all right, but wild horses won't drag it out of him until he's ready to talk. You'll have to take him on faith, as I always do." Bolton hesitated a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. "Have it your own way, Doctor," he said. "Your reputation, both as a scientist and as an unraveller of tangled skeins, is too good for me to boggle about your methods. Tell me what you want and I'll try to get it." * * * * * "I want to get into the White House without undue prominence being given to my movements, and listen outside the President's door for a short time. Later I will want to examine his sleeping quarters carefully and to make a few tests. I may be entirely wrong in my assumptions, but I believe that there is something there that requires my attention." "Come along," said Bolton. "I'll get you in and let you listen, but the rest we'll have to trust to luck on. You may have to wait until morning." "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," replied the Doctor. "I'll get a little stuff together that we may need." In a few moments he had packed some apparatus in a bag and, taking up it and an instrument case, he followed Bolton and Carnes down the stairs and out onto the grounds of the Bureau of Standards. "It's a beautiful moon, isn't it?" he observed. Carnes assented absently to the Doctor's remark, but Bolton paid no attention to the luminous disc overhead, which was flooding the landscape with its mellow light. "My car is waiting," he announced. "All right, old man, but stop for a moment and admire this moon," protested the Doctor. "Have you ever seen a finer one?" "Come on and let the moon alone," snorted Bolton. "My dear man, I absolutely refuse to move a step until you pause in your headlong devotion to duty and pay the homage due to Lady Luna. Don't you realize, you benighted Christian, that you are gazing upon what has been held to be a deity, or at least the visible manifestation of deity, for ages immemorial? Haven't you ever had time to study the history of the moon-worshipping cults? They are as old as mankind, you know. The worship of Isis was really only an exalted type of moon worship. The crescent moon, you may remember, was one of her most sacred emblems." * * * * * Bolton paused and looked at the Doctor suspiciously. "What are you doing--pulling my leg?" he demanded. "Not at all, my dear fellow. Carnes, doesn't the sight of the glowing orb of night influence you to pious meditation upon the frailty of human life and the insignificance of human ambition?" "Not to any very great degree," replied Carnes dryly. "Carnesy, old dear, I fear that you are a crass materialist. I am beginning to despair of ever inculcating in you any respect for the finer and subtler things of life. I must try Bolton. Bolton, have you ever seen a finer moon? Remember that I won't move a step until you have carefully considered the matter and fully answered my question." Bolton looked first at the Doctor, then at Carnes, and finally he looked reluctantly at the moon. "It's a fine one," he admitted, "but all full moons look large on clear nights at this time of the year." "Then you _have_ studied the moon?" cried Dr. Bird with delight. "I was sure--" * * * * * He broke off his speech suddenly and listened. From a distance came the mournful howl of a dog. It was answered in a moment by another howl from a different direction. Dog after dog took up the chorus until the air was filled with the melancholy wailing of the animals. "See, Bolton," remarked the Doctor, "even the dogs feel the chastening influence of the Lady of Night and repent of the sins of their youth and the follies of their manhood, or should one say doghood? Come along. I feel that the call of duty must tear us away from the contemplation of the beauties of nature." He led the way to Bolton's car and got in without further words. A half-hour later, Bolton led the way into the White House. A word to the secret service operative on guard at the door admitted him and his party, and he led the way to the newly constructed solarium where the President slept. An operative stood outside the door. "What word, Brady?" asked Bolton in a whisper. "He seems worse, sir. I doubt if he has slept at all. Admiral Clay has been in several times, but he didn't do much good. There, listen! The President is getting up again." * * * * * From behind the closed door which confronted them came sounds of a person rising from a bed and pacing the floor, slowly at first, and then more and more rapidly, until it was almost a run. A series of groans came to the watchers and then a long drawn out howl. Bolton shuddered. "Poor devil!" he muttered. Dr. Bird shot a quick glance around. "Where is Admiral Clay?" he asked. "He is sleeping upstairs. Shall I call him?" "No. Take me to his room." The President's naval physician opened the door in response to Bolton's knock. "Is he worse?" he demanded anxiously. "I don't think so, Admiral," replied Bolton. "I want to introduce you to Dr. Bird of the Bureau of Standards. He wants to talk with you about the case." "I am honored, Doctor," said the physician as he grasped the scientist's outstretched hand. "Come in. Pardon my appearance, but I was startled out of a doze when you knocked. Have a chair and tell me how I can serve you." Dr. Bird drew a notebook from his pocket. "I have received certain dates in connection with the President's malady from Operative Carnes," he said, "and I wish you to verify them." "Pardon me a moment, Doctor," interrupted the Admiral, "but may I ask what is your connection with the matter? I was not aware that you were a physician or surgeon." * * * * * "Dr. Bird is here by the authority of the secret service," replied Bolton. "He has no connection with the medical treatment of the President, but permit me to remind you that the secret service is responsible for the safety of the President and so have a right to demand such details about him as are necessary for his proper protection." "I have no intention in obstructing you in the proper performance of your duties, Mr. Bolton," began the Admiral stiffly. "Pardon me, Admiral," broke in Dr. Bird, "it seems to me that we are getting started wrong. I suspect that certain exterior forces are more or less concerned in this case and I have communicated my suspicions to Mr. Bolton. He in turn brought me here in order to request from you your cooperation in the matter. We have no idea of demanding anything and are really seeking help which we believe that you can give us." "Pardon me, Admiral," said Bolton. "I had no intention of angering you." "I am at your service, gentlemen," replied Admiral Clay. "What information did you wish, Doctor?" "At first merely a verification of the history of the case as I have it." * * * * * Dr. Bird read the notes he had taken down from Carnes and the Admiral nodded agreement. "Those dates are correct," he said. "Now, Admiral, there are two further points on which I wish enlightenment. The first is the opthalmia which is troubling the patient." "It is nothing to be alarmed about as far as symptoms go, Doctor," replied the Admiral. "It is a rather mild case of irritation, somewhat analogous to granuloma, but rather stubborn. He had an attack several weeks ago and while it did not yield to treatment as readily as I could have wished, it did clear up nicely in a couple of weeks and I was quite surprised at this recurrent attack. His sight is in no danger." "Have you tried to connect this opthalmia with his mental aberrations?" "Why no, Doctor, there is no connection." "Are you sure?" "I am certain. The slight pain which his eyes give him could never have such an effect upon the mind of so able and energetic a man as he is." "Well, we'll let that pass for the moment. The other question is this: has he any form of skin trouble?" * * * * * The Admiral looked up in surprise. "Yes, he has," he admitted. "I had mentioned it to no one, for it really amounts to nothing, but he has a slight attack of some obscure form of dermatitis which I am treating. It is affecting only his face and hands." "Please describe it." "It has taken the form of a brown pigmentation on the hands. On the face it causes a slight itching and subsequent peeling of the affected areas." "In other words, it is acting like sunburn?" "Why, yes, somewhat. It is not that, however, for he has been exposed to the sun very little lately, on account of his eyes." "I notice that he is sleeping in the new solarium which was added last winter to the executive mansion. Can you tell me with what type of glass it is equipped?" "Yes. It is not equipped with glass at all, but with fused quartz." "When did he start to sleep there?" "As soon as it was completed." "And all the time the windows have been of fused quartz?" "No. They were glazed at first, but the glass was removed and the fused quartz substituted at my suggestion about two months ago, just before this trouble started." "Thank you, Admiral. You have given me several things to think about. My ideas are a little too nebulous to share as yet but I think that I can give you one piece of very sound advice. The President is spending a very restless night. If you would remove him from the solarium and get him to lie down in a room which is glazed with ordinary glass, and pull down the shades so that he will be in the dark, I think that he will pass a better night." * * * * * Admiral Clay looked keenly into the piercing black eyes of the Doctor. "I know something of you by reputation, Bird," he said slowly, "and I will follow your advice. Will you tell me why you make this particular suggestion?" "So that I can work in that solarium to-night without interruption," replied Dr. Bird. "I have some tests which I wish to carry out while it is still dark. If my results are negative, forget what I have told you. If they yield any information, I will be glad to share it with you at the proper time. Now get the President out of that solarium and tell me when the coast is clear." The Admiral donned a dressing gown and stepped out of the room. He returned in fifteen minutes. "The solarium is at your disposal, Doctor," he announced. "Shall I accompany you?" "If you wish," assented Dr. Bird as he picked up his apparatus and strode out of the room. In the solarium he glanced quickly around, noting the position of each of the articles of furniture. "I presume that the President always sleeps with his head in this direction?" he remarked, pointing to the pillow on the disturbed bed. The Admiral nodded assent. Dr. Bird opened the bag which he had packed in his laboratory, took out a sheet of cardboard covered with a metallic looking substance, and placed it on the pillow. He stepped back and donned a pair of smoked glasses, watching it intently. Without a word he took off the glasses and handed them to the Admiral. The Admiral donned them and looked at the pillow. As he did so an exclamation broke from his lips. "That plate seems to glow," he said in an astonished voice. * * * * * Dr. Bird stepped forward and laid his hand on the pillow. He was wearing a wrist watch with a radiolite dial. The substance suddenly increased its luminescence and began to glow fiercely, long luminous streamers seeming to come from the dial. The Doctor took away his hand and substituted a bottle of liquid for the plate on the pillow. Immediately the bottle began to glow with a phosphorescent light. "What on earth is it?" gasped Carnes. "Excitation of a radioactive fluid," replied the Doctor. "The question is, what is exciting it. Somebody get a stepladder." While Bolton was gone after the ladder, the Doctor took from his bag what looked like an ordinary pane of glass. "Take this, Carnes," he directed, "and start holding it over each of those panes of quartz which you can reach. Stop when I tell you to." * * * * * The operative held the glass over each of the panes in succession, but the Doctor, who kept his eyes covered with the smoked glasses and fastened on the plate which he had replaced on the pillow, said nothing. When Bolton arrived with the ladder, the process went on. One end and most of the front of the solarium had been covered before an exclamation from the Doctor halted the work. "That's the one," he exclaimed. "Hold the glass there for a moment." Hurriedly he removed the plate from the pillow and replaced the phial of liquid. There was only a very feeble glow. "Good enough," he cried. "Take away the glass, but mark that pane, and be ready to replace it when I give the word." From the instrument case he had brought he took out a spectroscope. He turned back the mattress and mounted it on the bedstead. "Cover that pane," he directed. Carnes did so, and the Doctor swung the receiving tube of the instrument until it pointed at the covered pane. He glanced into the eyepiece, and then held a tiny flashlight for an instant opposite the third tube. "Uncover that pane," he said. Carnes took down the glass plate and the Doctor gazed into the instrument. He made some adjustments. "Are you familiar with spectroscopy, Admiral?" he asked. "Somewhat." "Take a squint in here and tell me what you see." * * * * * The Admiral applied his eye to the instrument and looked long and earnestly. "There are some lines there, Doctor," he said, "but your instrument is badly out of adjustment. They are in what should be the ultra-violet sector, according to your scale." "I forgot to tell you that this is a fluoroscopic spectroscope designed for the detection of ultra-violet lines," replied Dr. Bird. "Those lines you see are ultra-violet, made visible to the eye by activation of a radioactive compound whose rays in turn impinge on a zinc blende sheet. Do you recognize the lines?" "No, I don't." "Small wonder; I doubt whether there are a dozen people who would. I have never seen them before, although I recognize them from descriptions I have read. Bolton, come here. Sight along this instrument and through that plate of glass which Carnes is holding and tell me what office that window belongs to." Bolton sighted as directed up at the side of the State, War and Navy Building. "I can't tell exactly at this time of night, Doctor," he said, "but I'll go into the building and find out." "Do so. Have you a flashlight?" "Yes." "Flash it momentarily out of each of the suspected windows in turn until you get an answering flash from here. When you do, flash it out of each pane of glass in the window until you get another flash from here. Then come back and tell me what office it is. Mark the pane so that we can locate it again in the morning." * * * * * "It is the office of the Assistant to the Adjutant General of the Army," reported Bolton ten minutes later. "What is there in the room?" "Nothing but the usual desks and chairs." "I suspected as much. The window is merely a reflector. That is all that we can do for to-night, gentlemen. Admiral, keep your patient quiet and in a room with _glass_ windows, preferably with the shades drawn, until further notice. Bolton, meet me here with Carnes at sunrise. Have a picked detail of ten men standing by where we can get hold of them in a hurry. In the mean time, get the Chief of Air Service out of bed and have him order a plane at Langley Field to be ready to take off at 6 A. M. He is not to take off, however, until I give him orders to do so. Do you understand?" "Everything will be ready for you, Doctor, but I confess that I don't know what it is all about." "It's the biggest case you ever tackled, old man, and I hope that we can pull it off successfully. I'd like to go over it with you now, but I'll be busy at the Bureau for the rest of the night. Drop me off there, will you?" At sunrise the next morning, Bolton met Dr. Bird at the entrance to the White House grounds. "Where is your detail?" he asked. "In the State, War and Navy Building." "Good. I want to go to the solarium, put a light on the place where the President's pillow was last night, and mark that pane of quartz we were looking through. Then we'll join the detail." * * * * * Dr. Bird placed the light and walked with Carnes across the White House grounds. Bolton's badge secured admission to the State, War and Navy Building for the party and they made their way to the office of the Assistant to the Adjutant General. "Did you mark the pane of glass through which you flashed your light last night, Bolton?" asked the Doctor. The detective touched one of the panes. "Good," exclaimed the Doctor. "I notice that this window has hooks for a window washer's belt. Get a life belt, will you?" When the belt was brought, the Doctor turned to Carnes. "Carnes," he said, "hook on this life saver and climb out on the window ledge. Take this piece of apparatus with you." He handed Carnes a piece of apparatus which looked like two telescopes fastened to a base, with a screw adjustment for altering the angles of the barrels. * * * * * Carnes took it and looked at it inquiringly. "That is what I was making at the Bureau last night," explained Dr. Bird. "It is a device which will enable me to locate the source of the beam which was reflected from this pane of glass onto the President's pillow. I'll show you how to work it. You know that when light is reflected the angle of reflection always equals the angle of incidence? Well, you place these three feet against the pane of glass, thus putting the base of the instrument in a plane parallel to the pane of glass. By turning these two knobs, one of which gives lateral and the other vertical adjustment, you will manipulate the instrument until the first telescope is pointing directly toward the President's pillow. Now notice that the two telescope barrels are fastened together and are connected to the knobs, so that when the knobs are turned, the scopes are turned in equal and opposite amounts. When one is turned from its present position five degrees to the west, the other automatically turns five degrees to the east. When one is elevated, the other is correspondingly depressed. Thus, when the first tube points toward the pillow, the other will point toward the source of the reflected beam." "Clever!" ejaculated Bolton. "It is rather crude and may not be accurate enough to locate the source exactly, but at least it will give us a pretty good idea of where to look. Given time, a much more accurate instrument could have been made, but two telescopic rifle sights and a theodolite base were all the materials I could find to work with. Climb out, Carnesy, and do your stuff." * * * * * Carnes climbed out on the window and fastened the hooks of the life saver to the rings set in the window casings. He sat the base of the instrument against the pane of glass and manipulated the telescope knobs as Dr. Bird signalled from the inside. The scientist was hard to please with the adjustment, but at last the cross hairs of the first telescope were centered on the light in the solarium. He changed his position and stared through the second tube. "The angle is too acute and the distance too great for accuracy," he said with an air of disappointment. "The beam comes from the roof of a house down along Pennsylvania Avenue, but I can't tell from here which one it is. Take a look, Bolton." The Chief of the Secret Service stared through the telescope. "I couldn't be sure, Doctor," he replied. "I can see something on the roof of one of the houses, but I can't tell what it is and I couldn't tell the house when I got in front of it." "It won't do to make a false move," said the Doctor. "Did you arrange for that plane?" "It is waiting your orders at the field, Doctor." "Good. I'll go up to the office of the Chief of Air Service and get in touch with the pilot over the Chief's private line. There are some orders that I wish to give him and some signals to be arranged." * * * * * Dr. Bird returned in a few minutes. "The plane is taking off now and will be over the city soon," he announced. "We'll take a stroll down the Avenue until we are in the vicinity of the house, and then wait for the plane. Carnes will take five of your men and go down behind the house and the rest of us will go in front. Which building do you think it is, Bolton?" "About the fourth from the corner." "All right, the men going down the back will take station behind the house next to the corner and the rest of us will get in front of the same building. When the plane comes over, watch it. If you receive no signal, go to the next house and wait for him to make a loop and come over you again. Continue this until the pilot throws a white parachute over. That is the signal that we are covering the right house. When you get that signal, Carnes, leave two men outside and break in with the other three. Get that apparatus on the roof and the men who are operating it. Bolton and I will attack the front door at the same time. Does everybody understand?" Murmurs of assent came from the detail. "All right, let's go. Carnes, lead out with your men and go half a block ahead so that the two parties will arrive in position at about the same time." * * * * * Carnes left the building with five of the operatives. Dr. Bird and Bolton waited for a few minutes and then started down Pennsylvania Avenue, the five men of their squad following at intervals. For three-quarters of a mile they sauntered down the street. "This should be it, Doctor," said Bolton. "I think so, and here comes our plane." They watched the swift scout plane from Langley Field swing down low over the house and then swoop up into the sky again without making a signal. The party walked down the street one house and paused. Again the plane swept over them without sign. As they stopped in front of the next house a white parachute flew from the cockpit of the plane and the aircraft, its mission accomplished, veered off to the south toward its hangar. "This is the place," cried Bolton. "Haggerty and Johnson, you two cover the street. Bemis, take the lower door. The rest come with me." * * * * * Followed closely by Dr. Bird and two operatives, Bolton sprinted across the street and up the steps leading to the main entrance of the house. The door was barred, and he hurled his weight against it without result. "One side, Bolton," snapped Dr. Bird. The diminutive Chief drew aside and Dr. Bird's two hundred pounds of bone and muscle crashed against the door. The lock gave and the Doctor barely saved himself from sprawling headlong on the hall floor. A woman's scream rang out, and the Doctor swore under his breath. "Upstairs! To the roof!" he cried. Followed by the rest of the party, he sprinted up the stairway which opened before him. Just as he reached the top his way was barred by an Amazonian figure in a green bathrobe. "Who th' divil arre yer?" demanded an outraged voice. "Police," snapped Bolton. "One side!" "Wan side, is it?" demanded the fiery haired Amazon. "The divil a stip ye go until ye till me ye'er bizness. Phwat th' divil arre yer doin' in th' house uv a rayspictable female at this hour uv th' marnin'?" "One side, I tell you!" cried Bolton as he strove to push past the figure that barred the way. "Oh, ye wud, wud yer, little mann?" demanded the Irishwoman as she grasped Bolton by the collar and shook him as a terrier does a rat. Dr. Bird stifled his laughter with difficulty and seized her by the arm. With a heave on Bolton's collar she raised him from the ground and swung him against the Doctor, knocking him off his feet. "Hilp! P'lice! Murther!" she screamed at the top of her voice. "Damn it, woman, we're on--" * * * * * Dr. Bird's voice was cut short by the sound of a pistol shot from the roof, followed by two others. The Irishwoman dropped Bolton and slumped into a sitting position and screamed lustily. Bolton and Dr. Bird, with the two operatives at their heels, raced for the roof. Before they reached it another volley of shots rang out, these sounding from the rear of the building. They made their way to the upper floor and found a ladder running to a skylight in the roof. At the foot of the ladder stood one of Carnes' party. "What is it, Williams?" demanded Bolton. "I don't know, Chief. Carnes and the other two went up there, and then I heard shooting. My orders were to let no one come down the ladder." As he spoke, Carnes' head appeared at the skylight. "It's the right place, all right, Doctor," he called. "Come on up, the shooting is all over." * * * * * Dr. Bird mounted the ladder and stepped out on the roof. Set on one edge was a large piece of apparatus, toward which the scientist eagerly hastened. He bent over it for a few moments and then straightened up. "Where is the operator?" he asked. Carnes silently led the way to the edge of the roof and pointed down. Dr. Bird leaned over. At the foot of the fire escape he saw a crumpled dark heap, with a secret service operative bending over it. "Is he dead, Olmstead?" called Carnes. "Dead as a mackerel," came the reply. "Richards got him through the head on his first shot." "Good business," said Dr. Bird. "We probably could never have secured a conviction and the matter is best hushed up anyway. Bolton, have two of your men help me get this apparatus up to the Bureau. I want to examine it a little. Have the body taken to the morgue and shut up the press. Find out which room the chap occupied and search it, and bring all his papers to me. From a criminal standpoint, this case is settled, but I want to look into the scientific end of it a little more." "I'd like to know what it was all about, Doctor," protested Bolton. "I have followed your lead blindly, and now I have a housebreaking without search-warrant and a killing to explain, and still I am about as much in the dark as I was at the beginning." "Excuse me, Bolton," said Dr. Bird contritely; "I didn't mean to slight you. Admiral Clay wants to know about it and so does Carnes, although he knows me too well to say so. As soon as I have digested the case I'll let you know and I'll go over the whole thing with you." * * * * * A week later Dr. Bird sat in conference with the President in the executive office of the White House. Beside him sat Admiral Clay, Carnes and Bolton. "I have told the President as much as I know, Doctor," said the Admiral, "and he would like to hear the details from your lips. He has fully recovered from his malady and there is no danger of exciting him." "I cannot read Russian," said Dr. Bird slowly, "and so was forced to depend on one of my assistants to translate the papers which Mr. Bolton found in Stokowsky's room. There is nothing in them to definitely connect him with the Russian Union of Soviet Republics, but there is little doubt in my mind that he was a Red agent and that Russia supplied the money which he spent. It would be disastrous to Russia's plans to have too close an accord between this country and the British Empire, and I have no doubt that the coming visit of Premier McDougal was the underlying cause of the attempt. So much for the reason. "As to how I came to suspect what was happening, the explanation is very simple. When Carnes first told me of your malady, Mr. President, I happened to be checking Von Beyer's results in the alleged discovery of a new element, lunium. In the article describing his experiments, Von Beyer mentions that when he tried to observe the spectra, he encountered a mild form of opthalmia which was quite stubborn to treatment. He also mentions a peculiar mental unbalance and intense exhilaration which the rays seemed to cause both in himself and in his assistants. The analogy between his observations and your case struck me at once. * * * * * "For ages the moon has been an object of worship by various religious sects, and some of the most obscene orgies of which we have record occurred in the moonlight. The full moon seems to affect dogs to a state of partial hypnosis with consequent howling and evident pain in the eyes. Certain feeble minded persons have been known to be adversely affected by moonlight as well as some cases of complete mental aberration. In other words, while moonlight has no practical effect on the normal human in its usual concentration, it does have an adverse effect on certain types of mentality and, despite the laughter of medical science, there seems to be something in the theory of 'moon madness.' This effect Von Beyer attributed to the emanations of lunium, which element he detected in the spectra of the moon, in the form of a wide band in the ultra-violet region. * * * * * "I obtained from Carnes a history of your case, and when I found that your attacks grew violent with the full moon and subsided with the new moon, I was sure that I was on the right track, although I had at that time no way of knowing whether it was from natural or artificial causes that the effect was being produced. I interviewed Admiral Clay and found that you were suffering from a form of dermititis resembling sunburn, and that convinced me that an attack was being made on your sanity, for an excess of ultra-violet light will always tend to produce sunburn. I inquired about the windows of your solarium, for ultra-violet light will not pass through a lead glass. When the Admiral told me that the glass had been replaced with fused quartz, which is quite permeable to ultra-violet and that the change had been almost coincident with the start of your malady, I asked him to get you out of the solarium and let me examine it. "By means of certain fluorescent substances which I used, I found that your pillow was being bathed in a flood of ultra-violet light, and the fluoro-spectroscope soon told me that lunium emanations were present in large quantities. These rays were not coming to you directly from their source, but one of the windows of the State, War and Navy Building was being used as a reflector. I located the approximate source of the ray by means of an improvised apparatus, and we surrounded the place. Stokowsky was killed while attempting to escape. I guess that is about all there is to it." "Thank you, Doctor," said the President. "I would be interested in a description of the apparatus which he used to produce this effect." * * * * * "The apparatus was quite simple, Sir. It was merely a large collector of moonlight, which was thrown after collection onto a lunium plate. The resultant emanations were turned into a parallel beam by a parabolic reflector and focused, through a rock crystal lens with an extremely long focal length, onto your pillow." "Then Stokowsky had isolated Von Beyer's new element?" asked the President. "I am still in doubt whether it is a new element or merely an allotropic modification of the common element, cadmium. The plate which he used has a very peculiar property. When moonlight, or any other reflected light of the same composition falls on it, it acts on the ray much as the button of a Roentgen tube acts on a cathode ray. As the cathode ray is absorbed and an entirely new ray, the X-ray, is given off by the button, just so is the reflected moonlight absorbed and a new ray of ultra-violet given off. This is the ray which Von Beyer detected. I thought that I could catch traces of Von Beyer's lines in my spectroscope, and I think now that it is due to a trace of lunium in the cadmium plating of the barrels. Von Beyer could have easily made the same mistake. Von Beyer's work, together with Stokowsky's opens up an entirely new field of spectroscopic research. I would give a good deal to go over to Baden and go into the matter with Von Beyer and make some plans for the exploitation of the new field, but I'm afraid that my pocketbook wouldn't stand the trip." "I think that the United States owes you that trip, Dr. Bird," said the Chief Executive with a smile. "Make your plans to go as soon as you get your data together. I think that the Treasury will be able to take care of the expense without raising the income tax next year." +------------------------------------------------------+ | | | _IN THE NEXT ISSUE_ | | | | | | Murder Madness | | | | _Beginning an intensely Gripping, Four-Part Novel_ | | | | _By_ MURRAY LEINSTER | | | | | | The Atom Smasher | | | | _A Thrilling Adventure into Time and Space_ | | | | _By_ VICTOR ROUSSEAU | | | | | | Into the Ocean's Depths | | | | _A Sequel to_ "_From the Ocean's Depths_" | | | | _By_ SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT | | | | | | Brigands of the Moon | | | | _Part Three of the Amazing Serial_ | | | | _By_ RAY CUMMINGS | | | | | | ----_And Others!_ | | | +------------------------------------------------------+ [Illustration: _The Readers' Corner_ _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories] _Our Thanks_ Three months ago the Clayton Magazines presented to lovers of Science Fiction everywhere a new magazine with a brand-new policy--Astounding Stories--and now it is the Editor's great pleasure to announce to our thousands of friends that this new magazine is enjoying a splendid success. Within twenty-four hours of the time that Astounding Stories was released for sale, letters of praise began pouring into our office, and--and this is significant--many of them clearly revealed that their writers had grasped the essential difference of the new Science Fiction magazine over the others. We cannot better state this difference, this improvement, than by quoting what the Reader whose letter appears under the caption, "And Kind to Their Grandmothers," says in his very first paragraph: "And I was still more pleased, and surprised, to find that the Editor seems to know that such stories should have real story interest, besides a scientific idea." It is exactly that. Every story that appears in Astounding Stories not only must contain some of the forecasted scientific achievements of To-morrow, but must be told vividly, excitingly, with all the human interest that goes to make any story enjoyable To-day. The Editor and staff of Astounding Stories express their sincere thanks to all who have contributed to our splendid start--especially to those who had the kindness to write in with their helpful criticism. Already one of your common suggestions has been taken up and embodied in our magazine, and so we have this new department, "The Readers' Corner," which from now on will be an informal meeting place for all readers of Astounding Stories. We want you never to forget that a cordial and perpetual invitation is extended to you to write in and talk over with all of us anything of interest you may have to say in connection with our magazine. If you can toss in a word of praise, that's fine; if only criticism, we'll welcome that just as much, for we may be able to find from it a way to improve our magazine. If you have your own private theory of how airplanes will be run in 2500, or if you think the real Fourth Dimension is different from what it is sometimes described--write in and share your views with all of us. This department is all yours, and the job of running it and making it interesting is largely up to you. So "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and have your share in what everyone will be saying. --_The Editor._ "_And Kind to Their Grandmothers!_" Dear Editor: I received a pleasant surprise a few days ago when I found a new Science Fiction magazine at the newsstand--Astounding Stories. And I was still more pleased, and surprised, to find that the Editor seems to know that such stories should have real story interest, besides a scientific idea. Of course I took with a grain of salt the invitation to write to the editor and give my preference of the kind of stories I like. I know that every editor, down in his heart, thinks his magazine is perfect "as is." In fact, praise is what they want, not suggestions, judging by the letters they print. Well, I can conscientiously give you some praise. If Astounding Stories keep up to the standard of the first issue it will be all right. Evidently you can afford to hire the best writers obtainable. Notice you've signed up some of my favorites, Murray Leinster, R. F. Starzl, Ray Cummings. I like their stuff because it has the rare quality rather vaguely described as "distinction," which make the story remembered for a long time. The story "Tanks," by Murray Leinster, is my idea of what such a story should be. The author does not start out, "Listen, my children, and you shall hear a story so wonderful you won't believe it. Only after the death of Professor Bulging Dome do I dare to make it public to a doubting world." No, he simply proceeds to tell the story. If I were reading it in the Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal it would be all right to prepare me for the story by explaining that of course the author does not vouch for the story, it having been told to him by a crazy Eurasian in a Cottage Grove black-and-tan speakeasy at 3.30 A. M. In Astounding Stories I expect the story to be unusual, so don't bother telling me it is so. That criticism applies to "Phantoms of Reality," which is a story above the average, though, despite its rather flat title and slow beginning. Here's another good point about "Tanks." Its characters are human. Some authors of stories of the future make their characters all brains--cold monsters, with no humanity in them. Such a story has neither human interest nor plausibility. The sky's the limit, I say, for mechanical or scientific accomplishments, but human emotions will be the same a thousand years from now. And even supposing that they will be changed, your readers have present day emotions. The magazine can not prosper unless those present-day emotions are aroused and mirrored by thoroughly human characters. The situation may be just as outre as you like--the more unusual the better--but it is the response of normal human emotions to most unusual situations that gives a magazine such as yours its powerful and unique "kick." The response of the two infantrymen in "Tanks" to the strange and terrifying new warfare of the future exemplifies another point I would like to make--the fact that no matter what marvels the future may bring, the people who will live then will take them in a matter-of-fact way. Their conversation will be cigarettes, "sag-paste," drinks, women. References to the scientific marvels around them will be casual and sketchy. How many million words of an average car owner's conversation would you have to report to give a visitor from 1700 an idea of internal combustion engines? The author, if skillful, can convey that information in other ways. Yet a lot of stories printed have long, stilted conversations in which the author thinks he is conveying in an entertaining way his foundation situation. Personally, I like a lot of physical action--violent action preferred. This is so, probably, because I'm a school teacher and sedentary in my habits. I have never written a story in my life, but I'm the most voracious consumer of stories in Chicago. I like to see the hero get into a devil of a pickle, and to have him smash his way out. I like 'em big, tough, and kind to their grandmothers. It seems to me that interplanetary stories offer the best vehicle for all the desirable qualities herein enumerated combined. There is absolutely no restraint on the imagination, except a few known astronomical facts--plenty of opportunity for violent and dangerous adventures, strange and terrestrially impossible monsters. The human actors, set down in the midst of such terrifying conditions, which they battle dauntlessly, grinning as they take their blows and returning them with good will, cannot fail to rouse the admiration of the reader. And make him buy the next month's issue. But spare us, please the stories in which the hero, arriving on some other planet, is admitted to the court of the king of the White race, and leads their battles against the Reds, the Browns, the Greens, and so on, eventually marrying the king's daughter, who is always golden-haired, of milky white complexion, and has large blue eyes. Kindly reject stories of interplanetary travel in which a member of the party turns against the Earth party and allies himself with the wormlike Moon men, or what have you. Stories in which a great inventor gone crazy threatens to hurl the Earth into the Sun leave me cold and despondent, for the simple reason that crazy men are never great inventors. Name a great inventor who wasn't perfectly sane, if you can. The author makes the great inventor insane to make it plausible that he should want to destroy the World. Well, if he is a good author he can find some other motive. One more thing. I like to smell, feel, hear and even taste the action of a story as well as see it. Some authors only let you see it, and then they don't tell you whether it's in bright or subdued light. The author of "Tanks" fulfills my requirements in this respect, at least partially.--Walter Boyle, c/o Mrs. Anna Treitz, 4751 North Artesian, Chicago, Ill. _A Permanent Reader_ Dear Editor: I want to thank you for the very entertaining hours I spent perusing your new magazine, Astounding Stories. I read one or two other Science Fiction magazines--it seems that tales of this sort intrigue me. However, I wish to say that the debut number of your magazine contained the best stories I ever read. Again thanking you and assuring you that should the stories continue thus I will be a permanent reader--Irving E. Ettinger, The Seville, Detroit, Mich. _We're Avoiding Reprints_ Dear Editor: I am well pleased with your new magazine and wish to offer you my congratulations and best wishes. As I am well acquainted with most of the Science Fiction now being written, I am in a good position to criticize your magazine. First: The cover illustration is good, but the inside drawings could be greatly improved. Second: Holding the magazine together with two staples is a good idea. Third: The paper could be improved. Fourth: The price is right. Here I classify the stories. Excellent: "The Beetle Horde," and "Tanks." Very Good: "Cave of Horror," "Invisible Death," and "Phantoms of Reality." Medium: "Compensation." Poor: "Stolen Mind." Please don't reprint any of Poe's, Wells', or Verne's works. My prejudice to Verne, Wells and Poe is that I have read all their works in other magazines. However, with all my criticizing, I think that your magazine is a good one.--James Nichols, 1509 19th Street, Bakersfield, California. _Thanks, Mr. Marks!_ Dear Editor: I purchased a copy of "our" new magazine to-day and I think it excellent. I am glad to see most of my old author friends contributing for it, but how about looking up E. R. Burroughs, David H. Keller, M. D., C. P. Wantenbacker and A. Merritt? They are marvelous writers. I see Wesso did your cover and it is very good. I have been a reader of four other Science Fiction monthly magazines and two quarterlies, but I gladly take this one into my fold and I think I speak for every other Science Fiction lover when I say this. Which means, if true, that your publication will have everlasting success. Here's hoping!--P. O. Marks, Jr., 893 York Avenue, S. W., Atlanta, Ga. _A Fine Letter_ Dear Editor: Having read through the first number of Astounding Stories, my enthusiasm has reached such a pitch that I find it difficult to express myself adequately. A mere letter such as this can give scarcely an inkling of the unbounded enjoyment I derive from the pages of this unique magazine. To use a trite but appropriate phrase, "It fills a long-felt need." True, there are other magazines which specialize in Science Fiction; but, to my mind they are not in a class with Astounding Stories. In most of them the scientific element is so emphasized that it completely overshadows all else. In this magazine, happily, such is not the case. Here we find science subordinated to human interest, which is as it should be. The love element, too, is present and by no means unwelcome. As for the literary quality of the stories, it could not be improved on. Such craftsmen as Cummings, Leinster and Rousseau never fail to turn out a vivid, well-written tale. If the stories in the succeeding issues are on a par with those in the first, the success of the magazine is assured. By the way, your editorial explanation of Astounding Stories was a gem. So many of us take our marvelous modern inventions for granted that we never consider how miraculous they would seem to our forebears. As you say, the only real difference between the Astounding and the Commonplace is Time. A magazine such as Astounding Stories enables us to anticipate the wonders of To-morrow. Through its pages we can peer into the vistas of the future and behold the world that is to be. Truly, you have given us a rare treat--Allen Glasser, 931 Forest Ave., New York, N. Y. _The Science Correspondence Club Broadcasts_ Dear Editor: The other day I came upon Astounding Stories on our local newsstand. I immediately procured a copy because Science Fiction is my favorite pastime, so to speak. I was very much overjoyed that another good Science Fiction magazine should come out, and a Clayton Magazine too, which enhances its splendid value still further. I have read various members of the Clayton family and I found each of them entertaining. After finishing the first issue, I decided to write in and express my feelings. The stories were all good with the exception of "The Stolen Mind." Just keep printing stories by Cape, Meek, Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster, C. V. Tench, Harl Vincent and R. F. Starzl and I can predict now that your new venture will be a huge success. The main reason of this letter is to ask your help in putting over Science Fiction Week. This will take place in the early part of February, the week of the 5th or after. We want your co-operation in making this a big success. You can help by running the attached article upon the Science Correspondence Club in your "Readers' Corner." It will be a big aid. I am sure, because you are the Editor of Astounding Stories, that you will be pleased to help us in this venture. Science Fiction is our common meeting ground and our common ideal. I hope to have a Big Science Fiction Week with your help.--Conrad H. Ruppert, 113 North Superior Street, Angola, Indiana. To the Readers of Astounding Stories: At the present there exists in the United States an organization the purpose of which is to spread the gospel of Science and Science Fiction, the Science Correspondence Club. I am writing this to induce the readers of Astounding Stories to join us. After reading this pick up your pen or take the cover from your typewriter and send in an application for membership to our Secretary, Raymond A. Palmer, 1431-38th St., Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or to our President, Aubrey Clements, 6 South Hillard St., Montgomery, Alabama. They will forward application blanks to you and you will belong to the only organization in the world that is like it. The Club was formed by twenty young men from all over the U. S. We have a roll of almost 100, all over the world. Its expressed purpose has been to help the cause of Science Fiction, and to increase the knowledge of Science. It also affords the advantage of being able to express your ideas in all fields. The Preamble of the Constitution which we have worked out reads: "We, the members of this organization, in order to promote the advancement of Science in general among laymen of the world through the use of discussion and the creation and exchange of new ideas, do ordain and establish this organization for the Science Correspondence Club." Article Two reads: "The institution will remain an organization to establish better co-ordination between the scientifically inclined laymen of the world, regardless of sex, creed, color, or race. There will be no restrictions as to age, providing the member can pass an examination which shall be prepared by the membership committee." The Club will also publish a monthly bulletin, to which members may contribute. It will also publish clippings, articles, etc., dealing with science. The membership will have no definite limit and the correspondence will be governed by the wishes of each member. Need more be said? I almost forgot to say that we have two of the best Science Fiction authors as active members, and three more who are doing their best, but because of such work they cannot be active. I hope my appeal bears fruit and that we shall hear from you soon.--Conrad H. Ruppert. _But--Most Everybody Prefers the Smaller Size--and Price!_ Dear Editor: Last night I was passing a newsstand and saw your magazine. I bought it then and there. I do not read any other stories except the fantastic stories. Astounding Stories looks all right, but may I make a suggestions? Why not increase the size of the magazine to that of Miss 1900 or Forest and Stream? It would certainly look better! You could also raise your price to twenty-five cents. Please print as many stories as possible by the following authors: Ray Cummings, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Murray Leinster, Edmond Hamilton, A. Hyatt Verrill, Stanton A. Coblentz, Ed Earl Repp and Harl Vincent. My favorite type of story is the interplanetary one. I wish you the best of luck in your new venture.--Stephen Takacs, 303 Eckford Street, Brooklyn, N. Y. "_First Copy Wonderful_" Dear Editor: I have read the first copy of Astounding Stories and think it wonderful. I am very much interested in science fiction. I prefer interplanetary stories and would like to see many of them in the new magazine. Your authors are fine. The ones I like particularly are Ray Cummings, Captain S. P. Meek, and Murray Leinster. I wonder if I could subscribe to Astounding Stories? Will you let me know? Good luck to the new magazine.--Donald Sisler, 3111 Adams Mill Road, Washington, D. C. _Congratulations_ Dear Editor: Allow me to congratulate you upon the starting of your new magazine, Astounding Stories. Have just finished reading the first issue and it is fine. While the class of stories that you publish do not appeal to all, I feel quite sure that there are many like myself who will welcome your publication and wish it all success.--R. E. Norton, P. O. Box 226, Ashtabula, Ohio. 
29882	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, and WESTERN ADVENTURES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. IV, No. 1 CONTENTS OCTOBER, 1930 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Oils from a Scene in "The Invisible Death."_ STOLEN BRAINS CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 7 _Dr. Bird, Scientific Sleuth Extraordinary, Goes After a Sinister Stealer of Brains._ THE INVISIBLE DEATH VICTOR ROUSSEAU 24 _With Night-Rays and Darkness-Antidote America Strikes Back, at the Terrific and Destructive Invisible Empire._ (A Complete Novelette.) PRISONERS ON THE ELECTRON ROBERT H. LEITFRED 75 _Fate Throws Two Young Earthians into Desperate Conflict with the Primeval Monsters of an Electron's Savage Jungles._ JETTA OF THE LOWLANDS RAY CUMMINGS 94 _Into Remote Lowlands, in an Invisible Flyer, Go Grant and Jetta--Prisoners of a Scientific Depth Bandit._ (Part Two of a Three-Part Novel.) AN EXTRA MAN JACKSON GEE 118 _Sealed and Vigilantly Guarded Was "Drayle's Invention, 1932"--for It Was a Scientific Achievement Beyond Which Man Dared Not Go._ THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 130 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ * * * * * Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Nathan Goldmann, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. Stolen Brains _By Captain S. P. Meek_ [Illustration: _Two long arms shot silently down and grasped the motionless figure._] [Sidenote: Dr. Bird, scientific sleuth extraordinary, goes after a sinister stealer of brains.] "I hope, Carnes," said Dr. Bird, "that we get good fishing." "Good fishing? Will you please tell me what you are talking about?" "I am talking about fishing, old dear. Have you seen the evening paper?" "No. What's that got to do with it?" Dr. Bird tossed across the table a copy of the _Washington Post_ folded so as to bring uppermost an item on page three. Carnes saw his picture staring at him from the center of the page. "What the dickens?" he exclaimed as he bent over the sheet. With growing astonishment he read that Operative Carnes of the United States Secret Service had collapsed at his desk that afternoon and had been rushed to Walter Reed Hospital where the trouble had been diagnosed as a nervous breakdown caused by overwork. There followed a guarded statement from Admiral Clay, the President's personal physician, who had been called into conference by the army authorities. The Admiral stated that the Chief of the Washington District was in no immediate danger but that a prolonged rest was necessary. The paper gave a glowing tribute to the detective's life and work and stated that he had been given sick leave for an indefinite period and that he was leaving at once for the fishing lodge of his friend, Dr. Bird of the Bureau of Standards, at Squapan Lake, Maine. Dr. Bird, the article concluded, would accompany and care for his stricken friend. Carnes laid aside the paper with a gasp. * * * * * "Do you know what all this means?" Carnes demanded. "It means, Carnsey, old dear, that the fishing at Squapan Lake should be good right now and that I feel the need of accurate information on the subject. I didn't want to go alone, so I engineered this outrage on the government and am taking you along for company. For the love of Mike, look sick from now on until we are clear of Washington. We leave to-night. I already have our tickets and reservations and all you have to do is to collect your tackle and pack your bags for a month or two in the woods and meet me at the Pennsy station at six to-night." "And yet there are some people who say there is no Santa Claus," mused Carnes. "If I had really broken down from overwork, I would probably have had my pay docked for the time I was absent, but a man with official pull in this man's government wants to go fishing and presto! the wheels move and the way is clear. Doctor, I'll meet you as directed." "Good enough," said Dr. Bird. "By the way, Carnes," he went on as the operative opened the door, "bring your pistol." Carnes whirled about at the words. "Are we going on a case?" he asked. "That remains to be seen," replied the Doctor enigmatically. "At all events, bring your pistol. In answer to any questions, we are going fishing. In point of fact, we are--with ourselves as bait. If you have a little time to spare this afternoon you might drop around to the office of the _Post_ and get them to show you all the amnesia cases they have had stories on during the past three months. They will be interesting reading. No more questions now, old dear, we'll have lots of time to talk things over while we are in the Maine woods." * * * * * Late the next evening they left the Bangor and Aroostook train at Mesardis and found a Ford truck waiting for them. Over a rough trail they were driven for fifteen miles, winding up at a log cabin which the Doctor announced was his. The truck deposited their belongings and jounced away and Dr. Bird led the way to the cabin, which proved to be unlocked. He pushed open the door and entered, followed by Carnes. The operative glanced at the occupants of the cabin and started back in surprise. Seated at a table were two figures. The smaller of the two had his back to the entrance but the larger one was facing them. He rose as they entered and Carnes rubbed his eyes and reeled weakly against the wall. Before him stood a replica of Dr. Bird. There was the same six feet two of bone and muscle, the same beetling brows and the same craggy chin and high forehead surmounted by a shock of unruly black hair. In face and figure the stranger was a replica of the famous scientist until he glanced at their hands. Dr. Bird's hands were long and slim with tapering fingers, the hands of a thinker and an artist despite the acid stains which disfigured them but could not hide their beauty. The hands of his double were stained as were Dr. Bird's, but they were short and thick and bespoke more the man of action than the man of thought. The second figure arose and faced them and again Carnes received a shock. While the likeness was not so, striking, there was no doubt that the second man would have readily passed for Carnes himself in a dim light or at a little distance. Dr. Bird burst into laughter at the detective's puzzled face. "Carnes," he said, "shake yourself together and then shake hands with Major Trowbridge of the Coast Artillery Corps. It has been said by some people that we favor one another." "I'm glad to meet you, Major," said Carnes. "The resemblance is positively uncanny. But for your hands, I would have trouble telling you two apart." * * * * * The Major glanced down at his stubby fingers. "It is unfortunate but it can't be helped," he said. "Dr. Bird, this is Corporal Askins of my command. He is not as good a second to Mr. Carnes as I am to you but you said it was less important." "The likeness is plenty good enough," replied the Doctor. "He will probably not be subjected to as close a scrutiny as you will. Did you have any trouble in getting here unobserved?" "None at all, Doctor. Lieutenant Maynard found a good landing field within a half mile of here, as you said he would, and he has his Douglass camouflaged and is standing by. When do you expect trouble?" "I have no idea. It may come to-night or it may come later. Personally I hope that it comes later so that we can get in a few days of fishing before anything happens." "What do you expect to happen, Doctor?" demanded Carnes. "Every time I have asked you anything you told me to wait until we were in the Maine woods and we are there now. I read up everything that I could find on amnesia victims during the past three months but it didn't throw much light on the matter to me." "How many cases did you find, Carnes?" "Sixteen. There may have been lots more but I couldn't find any others in the _Post_ records. Of course, unless the victim were a local man, or of some prominence, it wouldn't appear." "You got most of them at that. Did any points of similarity strike you as you read them?" "None except that all were prominent men and all of them mental workers of high caliber. That didn't appear peculiar because it is the man of high mentality who is most apt to crack." "Undoubtedly. There were some points of similarity which you missed. Where did the attacks take place?" "Why, one was at--Thunder, Doctor! I did miss something. Every case, as nearly as I can recall, happened at some summer camp or other resort where they were on vacation." "Correct. One other point. At what time of day did they occur?" "In the morning, as well as I can remember. That point didn't register." "They were all discovered in the morning, Carnes, which means that the actual loss of memory occurred during the night. Further, every case has happened within a circle with a diameter of three hundred miles. We are near the northern edge of that circle." * * * * * Carnes checked up on his memory rapidly. "You're right, Doctor," he cried. "Do you think--?" "Once in a while," replied Dr. Bird dryly, "I think enough to know the futility of guesses hazarded without complete data. We are now located within the limits of the amnesia belt and we are here to find out what did happen, if anything, and not to make wild guesses about it. You have the tent set up for us, Major?" "Yes, Doctor, about thirty yards from the cabin and hidden so well that you could pass it a dozen times a day without suspecting its existence. The gas masks and other equipment which you sent to Fort Banks are in it." "In that case we had better dispense with your company as soon as we have eaten a bite, and retire to it. On second thought, we will eat in it. Carnes, we will go to our downy couches at once and leave our substitutes in possession of the cabin. I trust, gentlemen, that things come out all right and that you are in no danger." Major Trowbridge shrugged his heavy shoulders. "It is as the gods will," he said sententiously. "It is merely a matter of duty to me, you know, and thank God, I have no family to mourn if anything does go wrong. Neither has Corporal Askins." "Well, good luck at any rate. Will you guide Carnes to the tent and then return here and I'll join him?" * * * * * Huddled in the tiny concealed tent, Dr. Bird handed Carnes a haversack on a web strap. "This is a gas mask," he said. "Put it on your neck and keep it ready for instant use. I have one on and one of us must wear a mask continually while we are here. We'll change off every hour. If the gas used is lethane, as I suspect, we should be able to detect it before its gets too concentrated, but some other gas might be used and we must take no chances. Now look here." With the aid of a flash-light he showed Carnes a piece of apparatus which had been set up in the tent. It consisted of two telescopic barrels, one fitted with an eye-piece and the other, which was at a wide angle to the first, with an objective glass. Between the two was a covered round disc from which projected a short tube fitted with a protecting lens. This tube was parallel to the telescopic barrel containing the objective lens. "This is a new thing which I have developed and it is getting its first practical test to-night," he said. "It is a gas detector. It works on the principle of the spectroscope with modifications. From this projector goes out a beam of invisible light and the reflections are gathered and thrown through a prism of the eye-piece. While a spectroscope requires that the substance which it examines be incandescent and throw out visible light rays in order to show the typical spectral lines, this device catches the invisible ultra-violet on a fluorescent screen and analyzes it spectroscopically. Whoever has the mask on must continually search the sky with it and look for the three bright lines which characterize lethane, one at 230, one at 240 and the third at 670 on the illuminated scale. If you see any bright lines in those regions or any other lines that are not continually present, call my attention to it at once. I'll watch for the first hour." * * * * * At the end of an hour Dr. Bird removed his mask with a sigh of relief and Carnes took his place at the spectroscope. For half an hour he moved the glass about and then spoke in a guarded tone. "I don't see any of the lines you told me to look for," he said, "but in the southwest I get wide band at 310 and two lines at about 520." Dr. Bird advanced toward the instrument but before he reached it, Carnes gave an exclamation. "There they are, Doctor!" he cried. Dr. Bird sniffed the air. A faint sweetish odor became apparent and he reached for his gas mask. Slowly his hands drooped and Carnes grasped him and drew the mask over his face. Dr. Bird rallied slightly and feebly drew a bottle from his pocket and sniffed it. In another instant he was shouldering Carnes aside and staring through the spectroscope. Carnes watched him for an instant and then a low whirring noise attracted his attention and he looked up. Silently he caught the Doctor's arm in a viselike grip and pointed. Hovering above the cabin was a silvery globe, faintly luminous in the moonlight. From its top rose a faint cloud of vapor which circled around the globe and descended toward the earth. The globe hovered like a giant humming bird above the cabin and Carnes barely stifled an exclamation. The door of the cabin opened and Major Trowbridge, walking stiffly and like a man in a dream, appeared. Slowly he advanced for ten yards and stood motionless. The globe moved over him and the bottom unfolded like a lily. Two long arms shot silently down and grasped the motionless figure and drew him up into the heart of the globe. The petals refolded, and silently as a dream the globe shot upward and disappeared. "Gad! They lost no time!" commented Dr. Bird. "Come on, Carnes, run for your life, or rather, for Trowbridge's life. No, you idiot, leave your gas mask on. I'll take the spectroscope; it'll be all we need." Followed by the panting Carnes, Dr. Bird sped through the night along an almost invisible path. For half a mile he kept up a headlong pace until Carnes could feel his heart pounding as though it would burst his ribs. The pair debouched from the trees into a glade a few acres in extent and Dr. Bird paused and whistled softly. An answering whistle came from a few yards away and a figure rose in the darkness as they approached. "Maynard?" called Dr. Bird. "Good enough! I was afraid that you might not have kept your gas mask on." "My orders were to keep it on, sir," replied the lieutenant in muffled tones through his mask, "but my mechanician did not obey orders. He passed out cold without any warning about fifteen minutes ago." "Where's your ship?" "Right over here, sir." "We'll take off at once. Your craft is equipped with a Bird silencer?" "Yes, sir." "Come on, Carnes, we're going to follow that globe. Take the front cockpit alone, Maynard; Carnes and I will get in the rear pit with the spec and guide you. You can take off your gas mask at an elevation of a thousand feet. You have pack 'chutes, haven't you?" "In the rear pit, Doctor." "Put one on, Carnes, and climb in. I've got to get this spec set up before he gets too high." The Douglass equipped with the Bird silencer, took the air noiselessly and rapidly gained elevation under the urging of the pilot. Dr. Bird clamped the gas-detecting spectroscope on the front of his cockpit and peered through it. "Southwest, at about a thousand more elevation," he directed. "Right!" replied the pilot as he turned the nose of his plane in the indicated direction and began to climb. For an hour and a half the plane flew noiselessly through the night. "Bald Mountain," said the pilot, pointing. "The Canadian Border is only a few miles away." "If they've crossed the Border, we're sunk," replied the doctor. "The trail leads straight ahead." * * * * * For a few minutes they continued their flight toward the Canadian Border and then Dr. Bird spoke. "Swing south," he directed, "and drop a thousand feet and come back." The pilot executed the maneuver and Dr. Bird peered over the edge of the plane and directed the spectroscope toward the ground. "Half a mile east," he said, "and drop another thousand. Carnes, get ready to jump when I give the word." "Oh, Lord!" groaned Carnes as he fumbled for the rip cord of his parachute, "suppose this thing doesn't open?" "They'll slide you between two barn doors for a coffin and bury you that way," said Dr. Bird grimly. "You know your orders, Maynard?" "Yes, sir. When you drop, I am to land at the nearest town--it will be Lowell--and get in touch with the Commandant of the Portsmouth Navy Yard if possible. If I get him, I am to tell him my location and wait for the arrival of reenforcements. If I fail to get him on the telephone, I am to deliver a sealed packet which I carry to the nearest United States Marshal. When reenforcements arrive, either from the Navy Yard or from the Marshal, I am to guide them toward the spot where I dropped you and remain, as nearly as I can judge, two miles away until I get a further signal or orders from you." "That is right. We'll be over the edge in another minute. Are you ready, Carnes?" "Oh, yes, I'm ready, Doctor, if I have to risk my precious life in this contraption." "Then jump!" * * * * * Side by side, Carnes and the doctor dropped toward the ground. The Douglass flew silently away into the night. Carnes found that the sensation of falling was not an unpleasant one as soon as he got accustomed to it. There was little sensation of motion, and it was not until a sharp whisper from Dr. Bird called it to his attention that he realized that he was almost to the ground. He bent his legs as he had been instructed and landed without any great jar. As he rose he saw that Dr. Bird was already on his feet and was eagerly searching the ground with the spectroscope which he had brought with him in the jump. "Fold your parachute, Carnes, and we'll stow them away under a rock where they can't be seen. We won't use them again." Carnes did so and deposited the silk bundle beside the doctor's, and they covered them with rocks until they would be invisible from the air. "Follow me," said the doctor as he strode carefully forward, stopping now and then to take a sight with the spectroscope. Carnes followed him as he made his way up a small hill which blocked the way. A hiss from Dr. Bird stopped him. Dr. Bird had dropped flat on the ground, and Carnes, on all fours, crawled forward to join him. He smothered an exclamation as he looked over the crest of the hill. Before him, sitting in a hollow in the ground, was the huge globe which had spirited away Major Trowbridge. "This is evidently their landing place," whispered Dr. Bird. "The next thing to find is their hiding place." * * * * * He rose and started forward but sank at once to the ground and dragged Carnes down with him. On the hill which formed the opposite side of the hollow a line of light showed for an instant as though a door had been opened. The light disappeared and then reappeared, and as they watched it widened and against an illuminated background four men appeared, carrying a fifth. The door shut behind them and they made their way slowly toward the waiting globe. They laid down their burden and one of them turned a flash-light on the globe and opened a door in its side through which they hoisted their burden. They all entered the globe, the door closed and with a slight whirring sound it rose in the air and moved rapidly toward the northeast. "That's the place we're looking for," muttered Dr. Bird. "We'll go around this hollow and look for it. Be careful where you step; they must have ventilation somewhere if their laboratory is underground." Followed by the secret service operative, the doctor made his way along the edge of the hollow. They did not dare to show a light and it was slow work feeling their way forward, inch by inch. When they had reached a point above where the doctor thought the light had been he paused. "There must be a ventilation shaft somewhere around here," he whispered, his mouth not an inch from Carnes' ear, "and we've got to find it. It would never do to try the door; if any of them are still here it is sure to be guarded. You go up the hill for five yards and I'll go down. Quarter back and forth on a two hundred yard front and work carefully. Don't fall in, whatever you do. We'll return to this point every time we pass it and report." The operative nodded and walked a few yards up the hill and made his way slowly forward. He went a hundred yards as nearly as he could judge and then stepped five yards further up the hill and made his way back. As he passed the starting point he approached and Dr. Bird's figure rose up. "Any luck?" he whispered. Dr. Bird shook his head. "Well try further," he said. "I think it is probably beyond us, so suppose you go fifteen yards up and quarter the same as before." * * * * * Carnes nodded and stole silently away. Fifteen yards up the hill he went and then paused. He stood on the crest of the hill and before him was a steep, almost precipitous slope. He made his way along the edge for a few yards and then paused. Faintly he could detect a murmur of voices. Inch by inch he crept forward, going over the ground under foot. He paused and listened intently and decided that the sound must come from the slope beneath him. A glance at his watch told him that he had spent ten minutes on this trip and he made his way back to the meeting place. Dr. Bird was waiting for him, and in a low whisper Carnes reported his discovery. The doctor went back with him and together they renewed the search. The slope of the hill was almost sheer and Carnes looked dubiously over the edge. "I wish we had brought the parachutes," he whispered to the doctor. "We could have taken the ropes off them and you could have lowered me over the edge." Dr. Bird chuckled softly and tugged at his middle. Carnes watched him with astonishment in the dim light, but he understood when Dr. Bird thrust the end of a strong but light silk cord into his hands. He looped it under his arms and the doctor with whispered instructions, lowered him over the cliff. The doctor lowered him for a few feet and then stopped in response to a jerk on the free end. A moment later Carnes signaled to be drawn up and soon stood beside the doctor. "That's the place all right," he whispered. "The whole cliff is covered with creepers and there is a tree growing right close to it. If we can anchor the cord here, I think that we can slide down to a safe hold on the tree." A tree stood near and the silk cord was soon fastened. Carnes disappeared over the cliff and in a few moments Dr. Bird slid down the cord to join him. He found the detective seated in the crotch of a tree only a few feet from the face of the cliff. From the cliff came a pronounced murmur of voices. Dr. Bird drew in his breath in excitement and moved forward along the branch. He touched the stone and after a moment of searching he cautiously raised one corner of a painted canvas flap and peered into the cliff. He watched for a few seconds and then slid back and silently pulled Carnes toward him. * * * * * Together the two men made their way toward the cliff and Dr. Bird raised the corner of the flap and they peered into the hill. Before them was a cave fitted up as a cross between a laboratory and a hospital. Almost directly opposite them and at the left of a door in the farther wall was a ray machine of some sort. It was a puzzle to Carnes, and even Dr. Bird, although he could grasp the principle at a glance, was at a loss to divine its use. From a set of coils attached to a generator was connected a tube of the Crookes tube type with the rays from it gathered and thrown by a parabolic reflector onto the space where a man's head would rest when he was seated in a white metal chair with rubber insulated feet, which stood beneath it. An operating table occupied the other side of the room while a gas cylinder and other common hospital apparatus stood around ready for use. Seated at a table which occupied the center of the room were three men. The sound of their voices rose from an indistinct murmur to audibility as the flap was raised and the watchers could readily understand their words. Two of them sat with their faces toward the main entrance and the third man faced them. Carnes bit his lip as he looked at the man at the head of the table. He was twisted and misshapen in body, a grotesque dwarf with a hunched back, not over four feet in height. His massive head, sunken between his hunched shoulders, showed a tremendous dome of cranium and a brow wider and even higher than Dr. Bird's. The rest of his face was lined and drawn as though by years of acute suffering. Sharp black eyes glared brightly from deep sunk caverns. The dwarf was entirely bald; even the bushy eyebrows which would be expected from his face, were missing. * * * * * "They ought to be getting back," said the dwarf sharply. "If they get back at all," said one of the two figures facing him. "What do you mean?" growled the dwarf, his eyes glittering ominously. "They'll return all right; they know they'd better." "They'll return if they can, but I tell you again, Slavatsky, I think it was a piece of foolishness to try to take two men in one night. We got Bird all right, but it is getting late for a second one, and they had to take Bird over a hundred miles and then go nearly three hundred more for Williams. The news about Bird may have been discovered and spread and others may be looking out for us. Carnes might have recovered." "Didn't he get a full dose of lethane?" "So Frick says, and Bird certainly had a full dose, but I can't help but feel uneasy. Our operations were going too nicely on schedule and you had to break it up and take on an extra case in the same night as a scheduled one. I tell you, I don't like it." "I'm sorry that I did it, Carson, but only because the results were so poor. We had planned on Williams for a month and I wanted him. And Bird was so easy that I couldn't resist it." "And what did you get? Not as much menthium as would have come from an ordinary bookkeeper." "I'll admit that Bird is a grossly overrated man. He must have worked in sheer luck in his work in the past, for there was nothing in his brain to show it above average. We got barely enough menthium to replace what we used in capturing him." "We ought to have taken Carnes and left Bird alone," snorted Carson. "Even a wooden-headed detective ought to have given us a better supply than Bird yielded." "We are bound to meet with disappointments once in a while. I had marked Bird down long ago as soon as I could get a chance at him." "Well, you ran that show, Slavatsky, but I'll warn you that we aren't going to let you pull off another one like it. I take no more crazy chances, even on your orders." * * * * * The hunchback rose to his feet, his eyes glittering ominously. "What do you mean, Carson?" he asked slowly, his hand slipping behind him as he spoke. "Don't try any rough stuff, Slavatsky!" warned Carson sharply. "I can pull a tube as fast as you can, and I'll do it if I have to." "Gentlemen, gentlemen!" protested the third man rising, "we are all too deep in this to quarrel. Sit down and let's talk this over. Carson is just worried." "What is there to be worried about?" grunted the dwarf as he slid back into his chair. "Everything has gone nicely so far and no suspicion has been raised." "Maybe it has and then again maybe it hasn't," growled Carson. "I think this Bird episode to-night looks bad. In the first place, it came too opportunely and too easily. In the second place Bird should have yielded more menthium, and in the third place, did you notice his hands? They weren't the type of hands to expect on a man of his type." "Nonsense, they were acid stained." "Acid stains can be put on. It may be all right, but I am worried. While we are talking about this matter, there is another thing I want cleared up." "What is it?" "I think, Slavatsky, that you are holding out on us. You are getting more than your share of the menthium." Again the dwarf leaped to his feet, but the peace-maker intervened. "Carson has a right to look at the records, Slavatsky," he said. "I am satisfied, but I'd like to look at them, too. None of us have seen them for two months." The dwarf glared at first one and then the other. "All right," he said shortly and limped to a cabinet on the wall. He drew a key from his pocket and opened it and pulled out a leather-bound book. "Look all you please. I was supposed to get the most. It was my idea." "You were to get one share and a half, while Willis, Frink and I got one share each and the rest half a share," said Carson. "I know how much has been given and it won't take me but a minute to check up." * * * * * He bent over the book, but Willis interrupted. "Better put it away, Carson," he said, "here come the rest and we don't want them to know we suspect anything." He pointed toward a disc on the wall which had begun to glow. Slavatsky looked at it and grasped the book from Carson and replaced it in the cabinet. He moved over and started the generator and the tube began to glow with a violet light. A noise came from the outside and the door opened. Four men entered carrying a fifth whom they propped up in the chair under the glowing tube. "Did everything go all right?" asked the dwarf eagerly. "Smooth as silk," replied one of the four. "I hope we get some results this time." The dwarf bent over the ray apparatus and made some adjustments and the head of the unconscious man was bathed with a violet glow. For three minutes the flood of light poured on his head and then the dwarf shut off the light and Carson and Willis lifted the figure and laid it on the operating table. The dwarf bent over the man and inserted the needle of a hypodermic syringe into the back of the neck at the base of the brain. The needle was an extremely long one, and Dr. Bird gasped as he saw four inches of shining steel buried in the brain of the unconscious man. Slowly Slavatsky drew back the plunger of the syringe and Dr. Bird could see it was being filled with an amber fluid. For two minutes the slow work continued, until a speck of red appeared in the glass syringe barrel. "Seven and a half cubic centimeters!" cried the dwarf in a tone of delight. "Fine!" cried Carson. "That's a record, isn't it?" "No, we got eight once. Now hold him carefully while I return some of it." * * * * * Slavatsky slowly pressed home the plunger and a portion of the amber fluid was returned to the patient's skull. Presently he withdrew the needle and straightened up and held it toward the light. "Six centimeters net," he announced. "Take him back, Frink. I'll give Carson and Willis their share now and we'll take care of the rest of you when you return. Is the ship well stocked?" "Enough for two or three more trips." "In that case, I'll inject this whole lot. Better get going, Frink, it's pretty late." The four men who had brought the patient in stepped forward and lifted him from the table and bore him out. Dr. Bird dropped the canvas screen and strained his ears. A faint whir told him that the globe had taken to the air. He slid back along the limb of the tree until he touched the rope and silently climbed hand over hand until he gained the crest. He bent his back to the task of raising Carnes, and the operative soon stood beside him on the ledge surmounting the cliff. "What on earth were they doing?" asked Carnes in a whisper. "That was Professor Williams of Yale. They were depriving him of his memory. There will be another amnesia case in the papers to-morrow. I haven't time to explain their methods now: we've got to act. You have a flash-light?" "Yes, and my gun. Shall we break in? There are only three of them, and I think we could handle the lot." "Yes, but the others may return at any time and we want to bag the whole lot. They've done their damage for to-night. You heard my orders to Lieutenant Maynard, didn't you?" "Yes." "He should be somewhere in these hills to the south with assistance of some sort. The signal to them is three long flashes followed in turn by three short ones and three more long. Go and find them and bring them here. When you get close give me the same light signal and don't try to break in unless I am with you. I am going to reconnoitre a little more and make sure that there is no back entrance through which they can escape. Good luck. Carnes: hurry all you can. There is no time to be lost." * * * * * The secret service operative stole away into the night and Dr. Bird climbed back down the rope and took his place at the window. Willis lay on the operating table unconscious, while Slavatsky and Carson studied the now partially emptied syringe. "You gave him his full share all right," Carson was saying. "I guess you are playing square with us. I'll take mine now." He lay down on the operating table and the dwarf fitted an anesthesia cone over his face and opened the valve of the gas cylinder. In a moment he closed it and rolled the unconscious man on his face and deftly inserted the long needle. Instead of injecting a portion of the contents of the syringe as Dr. Bird had expected to do, he drew back on the plunger for a minute and then took out the needle and held the syringe to the light. "Well, Mr. Carson," he said with a malignant glance at the unconscious figure, "that recovers the dose you got a couple of weeks ago while Willis watched me. I don't think you really need any menthium; your brain is too active to suit me as it is." He gave an evil chuckle and walked to the far side of the cave and opened a secret panel. He drew from a recess a flask and carefully emptied a portion of the contents of the syringe into it. He replaced the flask and closed the panel, and with another chuckle he limped over to a chair and threw himself down in it. For an hour he sat motionless and Dr. Bird carefully worked his way back along the branch and climbed the rope and started for the hollow. * * * * * A faint whirring noise attracted his attention, and he could see the faintly luminous globe in the distance, rapidly approaching. It came to a stop at the spot where it had previously landed and four men got out. Instead of going toward the cave, they towed the globe, which floated a few inches from the earth, toward the side of the hill farthest from where the doctor stood. Three of them held it, while the fourth went forward and bent over some controls on the ground. A creaking sound came through the night and the men moved forward with the globe. Presently its movement stopped and men reappeared. Again came the creaking sound and the glow faded out as though a screen had been drawn in front of it. The four men walked toward the door of the cave. Dr. Bird dropped flat on the ground and saw them pause a few yards below him on the hill and again work some hidden controls. A glare of light showed for an instant and they disappeared and everything was again quiet. Dr. Bird debated the advisability of returning to the window but decided against it and moved down the face of the hill. Inch by inch he went over the ground, but found nothing. In the darkness he could not locate the door and he made his way around to the back of the hill. The precipice loomed above him and he swept it with his gaze, but he could locate no opening in the darkness and he dared not use a flash-light. As he turned he faced the east and noted with a start of surprise that the sky was getting red. He glanced at his watch and found that Carnes had been gone for nearly three hours. "Great Scott!" he exclaimed in surprise. "Time has gone faster than I realized. He ought to be back at any time now." * * * * * He mounted the highest point of the hill and sent three long flashes, followed in turn by three short and three more long to the south and watched eagerly for an answer. He waited five minutes and repeated the signal, but no answering flashes came from the empty hills. With a grunt which might have meant anything, he turned and made his way toward the opposite side of the hollow where the globe had disappeared. Here he met with more luck. He had marked the location with extreme care and he had not spent over twenty minutes feeling over the ground before his hand encountered a bit of metal. As he pulled on it his eyes sought the side of the hill. The dawn had grown sufficiently bright for him to see the result of his action. A portion of the hill folded back and the faintly glowing ship became visible. With a muttered exclamation of triumph he approached it. The globe was about nine feet in diameter and was without visible doors or windows. Around and around it the doctor went, searching for an entrance. The ship now rested solidly on the ground. He failed to find what he sought and his sensitive hands began to go over it searching for an irregularity. He had covered nearly half of it before his finger found a hidden button and pressed it. Silently a door in the side of the craft opened and he advanced to enter. "Keep them up!" said a sharp voice behind him. Dr. Bird froze into instant immobility and the voice spoke again. "Turn around!" Dr. Bird turned and looked full into the eye of a revolver held by the man the dwarf had addressed as Frink. Behind Frink stood the dwarf and three other men. As his eye fell on Dr. Bird, Frink turned momentarily pale and staggered back, the revolver wavering as he did so. Dr. Bird made a lightning-like grab for his own weapon, but before he could draw it Frink had recovered and the revolver was again steady. "Dr. Bird!" gasped Slavatsky. "Impossible!" "Get his gun, Harris," said Frink. * * * * * One of the men stepped forward and dextrously removed the doctor's automatic and frisked him expertly to insure himself that he had no other weapon concealed. "Bring him to the cave," directed Slavatsky, who, though obviously still shaken, had just as obviously recovered enough to be a very dangerous man. Two of the men grasped the doctor and led him along toward the entrance to the laboratory cave which stood wide open in the gathering daylight. Frink paused long enough to shut the side of the hill and conceal the ship, and then followed the doctor. In the cave the door was shut and the doctor placed against the wall under the window through which he had peered earlier in the night. Slavatsky took his seat at the table, his malignant black eyes boring into the Doctor. Carson and Willis sat on the edge of the operating table, evidently still partially under the effects of the anesthetic that had been administered to them. "How did you get back here?" demanded Slavatsky. "Find out!" snapped Dr. Bird. The dwarf rose threateningly. "Speak respectfully to me; I am the Master of the World!" he roared in an angry voice. "Answer my questions when I speak, or means will be found to make you answer. How did you get back here?" Dr. Bird maintained a stubborn silence, his fierce eyes answering the dwarf's, look for look, and his prominent chin jutting out a little more squarely. Carson suddenly broke the silence. "That's not the Bird we had here earlier," he cried as he staggered to his feet. "What do you mean?" demanded Slavatsky whirling on him. "Look at his hands!" replied Carson pointing. * * * * * Slavatsky looked at Dr. Bird's long mobile fingers and an evil leer came over his countenance. "So, Dr. Bird," he said slowly, "you thought to match wits with Ivan Slavatsky, the greatest mind of all the ages. For a time you fooled me when your double was operated on here, but not for long. I presume you thought that we had no way of detecting the substitution? You have discovered differently. Where is your friend, Mr. Carnes?" "Didn't your men leave him in the cabin when you kidnapped me?" Slavatsky looked at Frink inquiringly. "He stayed in the cabin if he was in it when we got there," the leader of the kidnapping gang replied. "He got a full shot of lethane and he's due to be asleep yet. I don't know how this man recovered. I left him there myself." "Fool!" shrieked Slavatsky. "You brought me a double, a dummy whom I wasted my time in operating on. Was the other a dummy, too?" "I didn't enter the cabin." Slavatsky shrugged his shoulders. "If that is all the good the menthium I have injected has done you, I might as well have saved it. It doesn't matter, however: we have the one we wanted. Dr. Bird, it was very thoughtful of you to come here and offer your marvelous brain to strengthen mine. I have no doubt that you will yield even more menthium than Professor Williams did this evening especially as I will extract your entire supply and reduce you to permanent idiocy. I will have no mercy on you as I have on the others I have operated on." Dr. Bird blanched in spite of himself at the ominous words. "You have the whip-hand for the moment, Slavatsky, but my time may come--and if it does, I will remember your kindness. I saw your operation on Professor Williams this evening and know your power. I also know that you stole the idea and the method from Sweigert of Vienna. I saw you inject the fluid you drew into Willis' brain. Shall I tell what else I saw?" It was the dwarf's turn to blanch, but he recovered himself quickly. "Into the chair with him!" he roared. * * * * * Three of the men grasped the doctor and forced him into the chair and Slavatsky started the generator. The violet light bathed Dr. Bird's head and he felt a stiffness and contraction of his neck muscles, and as he tried to shout out his knowledge of Slavatsky's treachery, he found that his vocal chords were paralyzed. Through a gathering haze he could see Carson approaching with an anesthesia cone and the sweet smell of lethane assailed his nostrils. He fought with all his force, but strong hands held him, and he felt himself slipping--slipping--slipping--and then falling into an immense void. His head slumped forward on his chest and Slavatsky shut off the generator. "On the table," he said briefly. Four men picked up the herculean frame of the unconscious doctor and hoisted him up on the table. Carson seized his head and bent it forward and the dwarf took from a case a syringe with a five-inch needle. He touched the point of it to the base of the doctor's brain. "Slavatsky! Look!" cried Frink. With an exclamation of impatience the dwarf turned and stared at a disc set on the wall of the cave. It was glowing brightly. With an oath he dropped the syringe and snapped a switch, plunging the cave into darkness. A tiny panel in the door opened to his touch and he stared out into the light. "Soldiers!" he gasped. "Quick, the back way!" As he spoke there came a sound as of a heavy body falling at the back of the cave. Slavatsky turned the switch and flooded the cave with light. At the back of the cave stood Operative Carnes, an automatic pistol in his hand. "Open the main door!" Carnes snapped. * * * * * Slavatsky made a move toward the light, and Carnes' gun roared deafeningly in the confined space. The heavy bullet smashed into the wall an inch from the dwarf's hand and he started back. "Open the main door!" ordered Carnes again. The men stared at one another for a moment and the dwarf's eyes fell. "Open the door, Frink," he said. Frink moved over to a lever. He glanced at Slavatsky and a momentary gleam of intelligence passed between them. Frink raised his hand toward the lever and Carnes gun roared again and Frink's arm fell limp from a smashed shoulder. "Slavatsky," said Carnes sternly, "come here!" Slowly the dwarf approached. "Turn around!" said Carnes. He turned and felt the cold muzzle of Carnes' gun against the back of his neck. "Now tell one of your men to open the door," said the detective. "If he promptly obeys your order, you are safe. If he doesn't, you die." Slavatsky hesitated for a moment, but the cold muzzle of the automatic bored into the back of his neck and when he spoke it was in a quavering whine. "Open the door, Carson," he whimpered. There was moment of pause. "If that door isn't open by the time I count three," said Carnes, "--as far as Slavatsky is concerned, it's just too bad. I'll have four shots left--and I'm a dead shot at this range. One! Two!" His lips framed the word "three" and his fingers were tightening on the trigger when Carson jumped forward with an oath. He pulled a lever on the wall and the door swung open. Carnes shouted and through the opened door came a half dozen marines followed by an officer. "Tie these men up!" snapped Carnes. * * * * * In a trice the six men were securely bound and Frink's bleeding shoulder was being skilfully treated by two of the marines. Carnes turned his attention to the unconscious doctor. He rolled him over on his back and began to chafe his hands. An officer in a naval uniform came through the door and with a swift glance around, bent over Dr. Bird. He raised one of the doctor's eyelids and peered closely at his eye and then sniffed at his breath. "It's some anesthetic I don't know," he said. "I'll try a stimulant." He reached in his pocket for a hypodermic, but Carnes interrupted him. "Earlier in the evening Dr. Bird said they were using lethane," he said. "Oh, that new gas the Chemical Warfare Service has discovered," said the surgeon. "In that case I guess it'll just have to wear off. I know of nothing that will neutralize it." Without replying, Carnes began to feverishly search the pockets of the unconscious scientist. With an exclamation of triumph he drew out a bottle and uncorked it. A strong smell as of garlic penetrated the room and he held the opened bottle under Dr. Bird's nose. The doctor lay for a moment without movement, and then he coughed and sat up half strangled with tears running down his face. "Take that confounded bottle away, Carnes!" he said. "Do you want to strangle me?" He sat up and looked around. "What happened?" he demanded. "Oh, yes, I remember now. That brute was about to operate on me. How did you get here?" "Never mind that, Doctor. Are you all right?" "Right as a trivet, old dear. How did you get here so opportunely?" "I was a little slow in locating Lieutenant Maynard and the marines. When we got here I was afraid that we couldn't find the door, so I took Maynard and a detail around to the back and I went up to the top and slid down our cord and looked in the window. You were unconscious and Slavatsky was bending over you with a needle in his hand. I was about to try a shot at him when something called their attention to the men in front and I squeezed through the window and dropped in on them. They didn't seem any too glad to see me, but I overlooked that and insisted on inviting the rest of my friends in to share in the party. That's all." "Carnes," said the Doctor, "you're probably lying like a trooper when you make out that you did nothing, but I'll pry the truth out of you sooner or later. Now I've got to get to work. Send for Lieutenant Maynard." * * * * * One of the marines went out to get the flyer, and Dr. Bird stepped to the cabinet from which Slavatsky had taken his record book earlier in the evening and took out the leather-bound volume. He opened it and had started to read when Lieutenant Maynard entered the cave. "Hello, Maynard," said the Doctor, looking up. "Are the rest of the party on their way?" "They will be here in less than two hours, Doctor." "Good enough! Have some one sent to guide them here. In the meanwhile, I'm going to study these records. Keep the prisoners quiet. If they make a noise, gag them. I want to concentrate." For an hour and a half silence reigned in the cave. A stir was heard outside and Admiral Clay, the President's personal physician, entered leading a stout gray-haired man. Dr. Bird whistled when he saw them and leaped to his feet as another figure followed the admiral. "The President!" gasped Carnes as the officers came to a salute and the marines presented arms. The President nodded to his ex-guard, acknowledged the salute of the rest and turned to Dr. Bird. "Have you met with success, Doctor?" he asked. "I have, Mr. President; or, rather, I hope that I have. At the same time, I would rather experiment on some other victim of their deviltry than the one you have brought me." "My decision that the one I have brought shall be the first to be experimented on, as you term it, is unalterable." * * * * * Dr. Bird bowed and turned to the dwarf who had been a sullen witness of what had gone on. "Slavatsky," he said slowly, "your game is up. I have witnessed one of your brain transfusions and I know the method. I gather from your notes that the menthium you have hidden in that cabinet is still as potent as when it was first extracted from a living brain, but in this case I am going to draw it fresh from one of your gang. Some of the details of the operation are a little hazy to me, but those you will teach me. I am going to restore this man to the condition he was in before you did your devil's work on him and you will direct my movements. Just what is the first step in removing the menthium from a brain?" The dwarf maintained a stubborn silence. "You refuse to answer?" asked the Doctor in feigned surprise. "I thought that you would rather instruct me and have me try the operation first on other men. Since you prefer that I operate on you first, I will be glad to do so." He stepped to the opposite wall and in a few moments had opened the dwarf's hiding place and taken out the flask of menthium. "Carson," he said, "after you had watched Slavatsky inject menthium into Willis, you took lethane and expected him to inject menthium into your brain. Instead of doing so he withdrew a portion from your brain and put it in this flask. I have reason to believe from his secret records which I found in the cabinet with this flask that he has done so regularly. Are you willing to instruct me while I remove the menthium from him?" "The dirty swine!" shouted Carson. "I'll do anything to get even with him, but I have never performed the operation. Only Slavatsky and Willis have operated." "Will you help me, Willis? asked Dr. Bird. "I'll be glad to, Doctor. I am sick of this business anyway. At first, Slavatsky just planned to give us abnormally keen brains, but lately he has been talking of setting himself up as Emperor of the World, and I am sick of it. I think I would have broken with him and told all I know, soon, anyway." "Throw him in that chair," said Dr. Bird. * * * * * Despite the howlings and strugglings of the dwarf, three of the marines strapped him in the chair beneath the tube. The dwarf howled and frothed at the mouth and directed a final appeal for mercy to the President. "Spare me, Your Excellency," he howled. "I will put my brains at your service and make you the greatest mentality of all time. Together we can conquer and rule the world. I will show you how to build hundreds of ships like mine--" The President turned his back on the dwarf and spoke curtly. "Proceed with your experiments, Dr. Bird," he said. Slavatsky directed his appeals to the doctor, who peremptorily silenced him. "I told you a few hours ago, Slavatsky, that the time might come when I would remember your threats against me. I will show you the same mercy now as you promised me then. Carnes, put a cone over his face." Despite the howls of the dwarf, the operative forced an anesthesia cone over his face and Dr. Bird turned to the valve of the lethane cylinder. With Willis directing his movements, he turned on the ray for three minutes and removed the unconscious dwarf to the operating table. He took the long-needled syringe from a case and sterilized it and then turned to the President. "I am about to operate," he said, "but before I do so, I wish to explain to all just what I have learned and what I am about to do. With that data, the decision of whether I shall proceed will rest with you and Admiral Clay. Have I your permission to do so?" * * * * * The President nodded. "When I first read of these amnesia cases, I took them for coincidences--until you consulted me and gave me an opportunity to examine one of the victims. I found a small puncture at the base of the brain which I could not explain, and I began to dig into old records. I knew, of course, of Sweigert of Vienna, and the extravagant claims he had put forward in 1911. He was far ahead of his time, but he mixed up some profound scientific discoveries with mysticism and occultism until he was discredited. Nevertheless, he continued his experiments with the aid of his principal assistant, a man named Slavatsky. "Sweigert's theory was that intellectuality, brain power, intelligence, call it what you will, was the result of the presence of a fluid which he called 'menthium' in the brain. He thought that it could be transferred from one person to another, and with the aid of Slavatsky, he experimented on himself. He removed the menthium from an unfortunate victim, who was reduced to a state of imbecility, and Slavatsky injected the substance into Sweigert's brain. The experiment resulted fatally and Slavatsky was tried for murder. He was acquitted of intentional murder but was imprisoned for a time for manslaughter. He was released when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up, and for a time I lost track of him. "I found translations of both the records of the trials and of Sweigert's original reports, and the thing that attracted my attention was that the puncture I found in the victim corresponded exactly with the puncture described by Sweigert as the one he made in extracting the menthium. I asked the immigration authorities to check over their records and they found that a man named Slavatsky whose description corresponded with the ill-fated Sweigert's assistant had entered the United States under Austria's quota about a year ago. The chain of evidence seemed complete to me, and it only remained to find the man who was systematically robbing brains. "If such a thing was really going on, I felt that my reputation would make me an attractive bait and I secured a double, as you know, and placed him in a position where his kidnapping would be an easy matter. I was sure that the victims were being taken away by air and that lethane was being used to reduce the neighborhood to a state of profound somnolence, so I hid myself near my double with a gas detector which would find even minute traces of lethane in the air. "My fish rose to the lure and came after the bait last night. When his ship arrived, I found a strange gas in the air, and followed the ship by the trail of the substance which it left behind it. Carnes was with me, and we got here in time to witness the extraction of the menthium from my friend, Professor Williams of Yale, and to see it injected into one of Slavatsky's gang. I sent Carnes for help and messed around until I was captured myself--and help arrived just in time. That's about all there is to tell. I am now about to reverse the process and try to remove the stolen brains from the criminals and restore them to their rightful owners. I have never operated and the result may be fatal. Shall I proceed?" The President and Admiral Clay consulted for a moment in undertones. "Go on with your experiments, Dr. Bird," said the President, "and we will hold you blameless for a failure. You have worked so many miracles in the past that we have every confidence in you." Dr. Bird bowed acknowledgment to the compliment and bent over the unconscious dwarf. With Willis directing every move, he inserted the needle and drew back slowly on the plunger. Twenty-three and one-half cubic centimeters of amber fluid flowed into the syringe before a speck of blood appeared. "Enough!" cried Willis. Dr. Bird withdrew the syringe and motioned to Admiral Clay. The man the Admiral had brought in was placed in the chair and lethane administered. He was laid on the table, and, with a silent prayer, Dr. Bird inserted the needle and pressed the plunger. When five and one-quarter centimeters had flowed into the man's brains, he withdrew the needle and held the bottle which Carnes had used to revive him under the man's nose. The patient coughed a moment and sat up. "Where am I?" he demanded. His gaze roved the cave and fell on the President. "Hello, Robert," he exclaimed. "What has happened?" With a cry of joy the President sprang forward and wrung the hand of the man. "Are you all right, William?" he asked anxiously. "Do you feel perfectly normal?" "Of course I do. My neck feels a little stiff. What are you talking about? Why shouldn't I feel normal? How did I get here?" "Take him outside, Admiral, and explain to him," said the President. Admiral Clay led the puzzled man outside and the President turned to Dr. Bird. "Doctor," he said, "I need not tell you that I again add my personal gratitude to the gratitude of a nation which would be yours, could the miracles you work be told off. If there is ever any way that can serve you, either personally or officially, do not hesitate to ask. The other victims will be brought here to-day. Will you be able to restore them?" "I will, Mr. President. From Slavatsky's records I find that I will have enough if I reduce all of his men to a state of imbecility except Willis. In view of his assistance, I propose to leave him with enough menthium to give him the intelligence of an ordinary schoolboy." "I quite approve of that," said the President as Willis humbly expressed his gratitude. "Have you had time to make an examination of that ship of Slavatsky's, yet?" "I have not. As soon as the work of restoration is completed, I will go over it, and when I master the principles I will be glad to take them up with the Army-Navy General Board." "Thank you, Doctor," said the President. He shook hands heartily and left the cave. Carnes turned and looked at the Doctor. "Will you answer a question, Doctor?" he asked. "Ever since this case started, I have been wondering at your extraordinary powers. You have ordered the army, the navy, the department of justice and everyone else around as though you were an absolute monarch. I know the President was behind you, but what puzzles me is how he came to be so vitally interested in the case." Dr. Bird smiled quizzically at the detective. "Even the secret service doesn't know everything," he said. "Evidently you didn't recognize the man whose memory I restored. Besides being one of the most brilliant corporation executives in the country, he has another unique distinction. He happens to be the only brother of the President of the United States." [Advertisement: ] The Invisible Death A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By Victor Rousseau_ [Illustration: Far overhead a luminous shape appeared.] [Sidenote: With night-rays and darkness-antidote America strikes back at the terrific and destructive Invisible Empire.] CHAPTER I _Out of the Hangman's Hands_ "You speak," said Von Kettler, jeering, "as if you really believed that you had the power of life and death over me." The Superintendent of the penitentiary frowned, yet there was something of perplexity in the look he gave the prisoner. "Von Kettler, I think it is time that you dropped this absurd pose of yours," he said, "in view of the fact that you are scheduled to die by hanging at eight o'clock to-morrow night. Your life and death are in your own hands." [Illustration] Von Kettler bowed ironically. Standing in the Superintendent's presence in the uniform of the condemned cell, collarless, bare-headed, he yet seemed to dominate the other by a certain poise, breeding, nonchalance. "Your life is offered you in consideration of your making a complete written confession of the whole ramifications of the plot against the Federal Government," the Superintendent continued. "Rather a confession of weakness, my dear Superintendent," jeered the prisoner. * * * * * "Oh don't worry about that! The Government has unravelled a good deal of the conspiracy. It knows that you and your international associates are planning to strike at civilized government throughout the world, in the effort to restore the days of autocracy. It knows you are planning a world federation of states, based on the principles of absolutism and aristocracy. It is aware of the immense financial resources behind the movement. Also that you have obtained the use of certain scientific discoveries which you believe will aid you in your schemes." "I was wondering," jeered the prisoner, "how soon you were coming to that." "They didn't help you in your murderous scheme," the Superintendent thundered. "You were found in the War Office by the night watchman, rifling a safe of valuable documents. You shot him with a pistol equipped with a silencer. You shot down two more who, hearing his cries, rushed to his aid. And you attempted to stroll out of the building, apparently under the belief that you possessed mysterious power which would afford you security." "A little lapse of judgment such as may happen with the best laid plans," smiled Von Kettler. "No, Superintendent, I'll be franker with you than that. My capture was designed. It was decided to give the Government an object lesson in our power. It was resolved that I should permit myself to be captured, in order to demonstrate that you cannot hang me, that I have merely to open the door of my cell, the gates of this penitentiary, and walk out to freedom." "Have you quite finished?" rasped the Superintendent. "At your disposal," smiled the other. "Here's your last chance, Von Kettler. Your persistence in this absurd claim has actually shaken the expressed conviction of some of the medical examiners that you are sane. If you will make that complete written confession that the Government asks of you, I pledge you that you shall be declared insane to-night, and sent to a sanitarium from which you will be permitted to escape as soon as this affair has blown over." * * * * * "The United States Government has sunk pretty low, to involve itself in a deal of this character, don't you think, my dear Superintendent?" jeered Von Kettler. "The Government is prepared to act as it thinks best in the interests of humanity. It knows that the death of one wretched murderer such as yourself is not worth the lives of thousands of innocent men!" "And there," smiled Von Kettler, without abating an atom of his nonchalance, "there, my dear Superintendent, you hit the nail on the head. Only, instead of thousands, you might have said millions." Von Kettler's aspect changed. Suddenly his eyes blazed, his voice shook with excitement, his face was the face of a fanatic, of a prophet. "Yes, millions, Superintendent," he thundered. "It it a holy cause that inspires us. We know that it is our sacred mission to save the world from the drabness of modern democracy. The people--always the people! Bah! what are the lives of these swarming millions worth when compared with a Caesar, a Napoleon, an Alexander, a Charlemagne? Nothing can stop us or defeat us. And you, with your confession of defeat, your petty bargaining--I laugh at you!" "You'll laugh on the gallows to-morrow night!" the Superintendent shouted. Again Von Kettler was the calm, superior, arrogant prisoner of before. "I shall never stand on the gallows trap, my dear Superintendent, as I have told you many times," he replied. "And, since we have reached what diplomacy calls a deadlock, permit me to return to my cell." The Superintendent pressed a button on his desk; the guards, who had been waiting outside the office, entered hastily. "Take this man back," he commanded, and Von Kettler, head held high, and smiling, left the room between them. * * * * * The Superintendent pressed another button, and his assistant entered, a rugged, red-haired man of forty--Anstruther, familiarly known as "Bull" Anstruther, the man who had in three weeks reduced the penitentiary from a place of undisciplined chaos to a model of law and order. Anstruther knew nothing of the Superintendent's offer to Von Kettler, but he knew that the latter had powerful friends outside. "Anstruther, I'm worried about Von Kettler," said the Superintendent. "He actually laughed at me when I spoke of the possibility of another medical examination. He seemed confident that he could not be hanged. Swore that he will never stand on the gallows trap. How about your precautions for to-morrow night?" "We've taken all possible precautions," answered Anstruther. "Special armed guards have been posted at every entrance to the building. Detectives are patrolling all streets leading up to it. Every car that passes is being scrutinized, its plate numbers taken, and forwarded to the Motor Bureau. There's no chance of even an attempt at rescue--literally none." "He's insane," said the Superintendent, with conviction, and the words filled him with new confidence. It had been less Von Kettler's statements than the man's cool confidence and arrogant superiority that had made him doubt. "But he's not too insane to have known what he was doing. He'll hang." "He certainly will," replied Anstruther. "He's just a big bluff, sir." "Have him searched rigorously again to-morrow morning, and his cell too--every inch of it, Anstruther. And don't relax an iota of your precautions. I'll be glad when it's all over." He proceeded to hold a long-distance conversation with Washington over a special wire. * * * * * In his cell, Von Kettler could be seen reading a book. It was Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathusta," that compendium of aristocratic insolence that once took the world by storm, until the author's mentality was revealed by his commitment to a mad-house. Von Kettler read till midnight, closely observed by the guard at the trap, then laid the word aside with a yawn, lay down on his cot, and appeared to fall instantly asleep. Dawn broke. Von Kettler rose, breakfasted, smoked the perfecto that came with his ham and eggs, resumed his book. At ten o'clock Bull Anstruther came with a guard and stripped him to the skin, examining every inch of his prison garments. The bedding followed; the cell was gone over microscopically. Von Kettler, permitted to dress again, smiled ironically. That smile stirred Anstruther's gall. "We know you're just a big bluff, Von Kettler," snarled the big man. "Don't think you've got us going. We're just taking the usual precautions, that's all." "So unnecessary," smiled Von Kettler. "To-night I shall dine at the Ambassador grill. Watch for me there. I'll leave a memento." Anstruther went out, choking. Early in the afternoon two guards came for Von Kettler. "Your sister's come to say good-by to you," he was told, as he was taken to the visitors' cell. This was a large and fairly comfortable cell in a corridor leading off the death house, designed to impress visitors with the belief that it was the condemned man's permanent abode; and, by a sort of convention, it was understood that prisoners were not to disabuse their visitors' minds of the idea. The convention had been honorably kept. The visitor's approach was checked by a grill, with a two-yards space between it and the bars of the cell. Within this space a guard was seated: it was his duty to see that nothing passed. * * * * * As soon as Von Kettler had been temporarily established in his new quarters, a pretty, fair-haired young woman came along the corridor, conducted by the Superintendent himself. She walked with dignity, her bearing was proud, she smiled at her brother through the grill, and there was no trace of weeping about her eyes. She bowed with pretty formality, and Von Kettler saluted her with an airy wave of the hand. Then they began to speak, and the German guard who had been selected for the purpose of interpreting to the Superintendent afterward, was baffled. It was not German--neither was it French, Italian, or any of the Romance languages. As a matter of fact, it was Hungarian. Not until the half-hour was up did they lapse into English, and all the while they might have been conversing on art, literature, or sport. There was no hint of tragedy in this last meeting. "Good-by, Rudy," smiled his sister, "I'll see you soon." "To-night or to-morrow," replied Von Kettler indifferently. The girl blew him a kiss. She seemed to detach it from her mouth and extend it through the grill with a graceful gesture of the hand, and Von Kettler caught it with a romantic wave of the fingers and strained it to his heart. But it was only one of those queer foreign ways. Nothing was passed. The alert guard, sitting under the electric light, was sure of that. They searched Von Kettler again after he was back in the death house. The other cells were empty. In three of them detectives were placed. In the yard beyond the hangman was experimenting with the trap. He himself was under close observation. Nothing was being left to chance. * * * * * At seven o'clock two men collided in the death-house entrance. One was a guard, carrying Von Kettler's last meal on a tray. He had demanded Perigord truffles and paté de foie gras, cold lobster, endive salad, and near-beer, and he had got them. The other was the chaplain, in a state of visible agitation. "If he was an atheist and mocked at me it wouldn't be so bad," the good man declared. "I've had plenty of that kind. But he says he's not going to be hanged. He's mad, mad as a March hare. The Government has no right to send an insane man to the gallows." "All bluff, my dear Mr. Wright," answered the Superintendent, when the chaplain voiced his protest. "He thinks he can get away with it. The commission has pronounced him sane, and he must pay the penalty of his crime." By that mysterious process of telegraphy that exists in all penal institutions, Von Kettler's boast that he would beat the hangman had become the common information of the inmates. Bets were being laid, and the odds against Von Kettler ranged from ten to fifteen to one. It was generally agreed, however, that Von Kettler would die game to the last. "You all ready, Mr. Squires?" the prowling Superintendent asked the hangman. "Everything's O. K., sir." The Superintendent glanced at the group of newspaper men gathered about the gallows. They, too, had heard of the prisoner's boast. One of them asked him a question. He silenced him with an angry look. "The prisoner is in his cell, and will be led out in ten minutes. You shall see for yourselves how much truth there it in this absurdity," he said. * * * * * He looked at his watch. It lacked five minutes of eight. The preparations for an execution had been reduced almost to a formula. One minute in the cell, twenty seconds to the trap, forty seconds for the hangman to complete his arrangements: two minutes, and then the thud of the false floor. Four minutes of eight. The little group had fallen silent. The hangman furtively took a drink from his hip-pocket flask. Three minutes! The Superintendent walked back to the door of the death house and nodded to the guard. "Bring him out quick!" he said. The guard shot the bolt of Von Kettler's cell. The Superintendent saw him enter, heard a loud exclamation, and hurried to his side. One glance told him that the prisoner had made good his boast. Von Kettler's cell was empty! CHAPTER II _Conference_ Captain Richard Rennell, of the U. S. Air Service, but temporarily detached to Intelligence, thought that Fredegonde Valmy had never looked so lovely as when he helped her out of the cockpit. Her dark hair fell in disorder over her flushed cheeks, and her eyes were sparkling with pleasure. "A thousand thanks, M'sieur Rennell," she said, in her low voice with its slight foreign intonation. "Never have I enjoyed a ride more than to-day. And I shall see you at Mrs. Wansleigh's ball to-night?" "I hope so--if I'm not wanted at Headquarters," answered Dick, looking at the girl in undisguised admiration. "Ah, that Headquarters of yours! It claims so much of your time!" she pouted. "But these are times when the Intelligence Service demands much of its men, is it not so?" "Who told you I was attached to Intelligence?" demanded Dick bluntly. She laughed mockingly. "Do you think that is not known all over Washington?" she asked. "It is strange that Intelligence should act like the--the ostrich, who buries his head in the sand and thinks that no one sees him because it is hidden." Dick looked at the girl in perplexity. During the past month he had completely lost his head and heart over her, and he was trying to view her with the dispassionate judgment that his position demanded. As the niece of the Slovakian Ambassador, Mademoiselle Valmy had the entry to Washington society. The Ambassador was away on leave, and she had appeared during his absence, but she had been accepted unquestionably at the Embassy, where she had taken up her quarters, explaining--as the Ambassador confirmed by cable--that she had sailed under a misconception as to the date of his leave. * * * * * Brunette, beautiful, charming, she had a score of hearts to play with, and yet Dick flattered himself that he stood first. Perhaps the others did too. "Of course," the girl went on, "with the Invisible Emperor threatening organized society, you gentlemen find yourselves extremely busy. Well, let us hope that you locate him and bring him to book." "Sometimes," said Dick slowly, "I almost think that you know something about the Invisible Emperor." Again she laughed merrily. "Now, if you had said that my sympathies were with the Invisible Emperor, I might have been surprised into an acknowledgment," she answered. "After all, he does stand for that aristocracy that has disappeared from the modern world, does he not? For refinement of manners, for beauty of life, for all those things men used to prize." "Likewise for the existence of the vast body of the nation in ignorance and poverty, in filth and squalor," answered Dick. "No, my sympathies are with law and order and democracy, and your Invisible Emperor and his crowd are simply a gang of thieves and hold-up men." "Be careful!" A warning fire burned in the girl's eyes. "At least, it is known that the Emperor's ears are long." "So are a jackass's," retorted Dick. He was sorry next moment, for the girl received his answer in icy silence. In his car, which conveyed them from the tarmac to the Embassy, she received all his overtures in the same silence. A frigid little bow was her farewell to him, while Dick, struggling between resentment and humiliation, sat dumb and wretched at the wheel. Yet the idea that Fredegonde Valmy had any knowledge of the conspiracy or its leaders never entered Dick's head. He was only miserable that he had offended her, and he would have done anything to have straightened out the trouble. * * * * * It seemed impossible that in the year 1940 the peace of the civilized world could be threatened by an international conspiracy bent on restoring absolutism, and yet each day showed more clearly the immense ramifications of the plot. Each day, too, brought home to the investigating governments more clearly the fact that the things they had discovered were few in number in comparison with those they had not. The headquarters of the conspirators had never been discovered, and it was suspected that the powerful mind behind them was intentionally leading the investigators along false trails. The conspiracy was world-wide. It had been behind the revolution that had recreated an absolutist monarchy in Spain. It had plunged Italy into civil war. It had thrown England into the convulsions of a succession of general strikes, using the communist movement as a cloak for its activities. But nobody dreamed that America could become a fertile field for its insidious propaganda. Yet it was behind the millions of adherents of the so-called Freemen's Party, clamoring for the destruction of the constitution. Upon the anarchy that would follow the absolutist regime was to be erected. Already the mysterious powers had struck. Departments of State had been entered and important papers abstracted. The _Germania_ had mysteriously disappeared in mid-Atlantic, and a shipping panic had ensued. There were tales of mysterious figures materializing out of nothingness. It was known that the conspirators were in possession of certain chemical and electrical devices with which they hoped to achieve their ends. The Superintendent of the penitentiary had had in his pocket an authorization to stop the execution of Von Kettler after he stood on the trap. Dead, he would be a mere mark of vengeance: alive, he might be persuaded to furnish some clue to the headquarters of the miscreants. * * * * * And behind the conspirators loomed the unknown figure that signed itself the Invisible Emperor--in the communications that poured in to the White House and to the rulers of other nations. In the threats that were materializing with stunning swiftness. Who was he? Rumor said that a former European ruler had not died as was supposed: that a coffin weighted with lead had been buried, and that he himself in his old age, had gone forth to a mad scheme of world conquest with a body of his nobles. It had been practically a state of war since the shipment of gold, guarded by a detachment of police, had been stolen in broad daylight outside Baltimore, the police clubbed and killed by invisible assailants--as they claimed. The press was under censorship, troops under arms, and it was reported that the fleet was mobilizing. In the midst of it all, Washington shopped, danced, feasted, flirted, like a swarm of may flies over a treacherous stream. Intelligence was alert. As Dick started to drive away from the Slovakian Embassy, a man stepped quickly to the side of the car and thrust an envelope into his hand. Dick opened it quickly. He was wanted by Colonel Stopford at once, not at the camouflaged Headquarters at the War Department, but at the real Headquarters where no papers were kept but weighty decisions were made. And to that devious course the Government had already been driven. Dick parked his car in a side street--it would have been under espionage in any of the official parking places--and set off at a smart walk toward his destination. Nobody would have guessed, from the appearance of the streets, that a national calamity was impending. The shopping crowds were swarming along the sidewalks, cars tailed each other through the streets; only a detachment of soldiers on the White House lawn lent a touch of the martial to the scene. * * * * * The building which Dick entered was an ordinary ten-story one in the business section; the various legal firms and commercial concerns that occupied it would have been greatly surprised to have known the identity of the Ira T. Graves, Importer, whose name appeared in modest letters upon the opaque glass door on the seventh story. Inside a flapper stenographer--actually one of the most trusted members of Intelligence's staff--asked Dick's name, which she knew perfectly well. Not a smile or a flicker of an eyelid betrayed the fact. "Mr. Rennell," said Dick with equal gravity. The girl passed into an inner room, and a buzzer sounded. In a few moments the girl came back. "Mr. Graves will be here in a few minutes, Mr. Rennell, if you'll kindly wait in his office," she said. Dick thanked her, and walked through into the empty office. He waited there till the girl had closed the door behind him, then went out by another door and found himself again in the corridor. Opposite him was a door with the words "Entrance 769" and a hand pointing down the corridor to where the Intelligence service had established another perfectly innocent front. Dick tapped lightly at this door, and a key turned in the lock. The man who stepped quickly back was one of the heads of the Civil Service. The man at the flat-topped desk was Colonel Stopford. The man on a chair beside him was one of the heads of the police force. * * * * * The Colonel, a big, elderly man, dressed in a grey sack suit, checked Dick's commencing salutation. "Never mind etiquette, Rennell," he said. "Sit down. You've heard about the man Von Kettler's escape last night, of course?" "Yes, sir." "It's known, then. We can't keep things dark. He vanished from his cell in the death house, three minutes before the time appointed for his execution, though, as a matter of fact, he wasn't going to be hanged. Apparently he walked through the walls. "There's a sequel to it, Rennell. It seems he had told the assistant-superintendent, a man named Anstruther, that he'd meet him at a restaurant in town that night. He promised to leave him a memento. Anstruther happened to remember this boast of Von Kettler's, and he surrounded the restaurant with armed detectives, on the chance that the fellow would show up. Rennell, _Von Kettler was there!_" "He went to this restaurant, sir?" "He walked in, just before the place was surrounded, engaged a table, and ordered a sumptuous meal. He told the waiter his name, said he expected a friend to join him, walked into the wash-room--and vanished! Two minutes later Anstruther and his men were on the job. Von Kettler never came out of the wash-room, so far as anybody knows. "In the midst of the hue and cry somebody pointed to the table that Von Kettler had engaged. There was a twenty-dollar bill upon it, and a scrap of paper reading: 'I've kept my word. Von K.'" Colonel Stopford looked at Dick fixedly. "Rennell, we may be fools," he said, "but we realize what we're up against. It's a big thing, and we're going to need all our fighting grit to overcome it. You're one of the four men we're depending on. We're counting on you because of your record, and because of your degree in science at Heidelberg. The President wishes you to take charge of the whole Eastern Intelligence District, covering the entire south-eastern seaboard of the United States. You are to have complete freedom of action, and all civil, military, and naval officials have received instructions to co-operate with you." "There goes Mrs. Wansleigh's ball," thought Dick, but he said nothing. * * * * * "We're not the hunters, Dick Rennell," went on Colonel Stopford. "We're hiding under cover, and I'm counting on you to turn the tables. They even know my office is here. I had a long distance call from Savannah this morning in mocking vein. They advised me to have the White House watched to-night. I warned the President, and we've posted guards all round it." "They held the wire while you called up the President?" asked Dick. "Damn it, no! They called me up from Scranton the instant he'd finished speaking. They have the power of the devil, Rennell, with that infernal invisibility invention of theirs. Rennell, we're fighting unknown forces. Who this Invisible Emperor is, we don't even know. But one thing we've found out. He has his headquarters somewhere in your district. Somewhere along the south Atlantic seaboard. The greater part of his activities emanate from there. But we're fighting in the dark. The clue, the master clue that will enable us to locate him--that's what we lack." The sun had set, it was beginning to grow dark. Colonel Stopford switched on the electric lamp beside his desk. "What have you to say, Rennell?" he asked; and Dick was aware that the two other men were regarding him attentively. "It's evident," said Dick, "that Von Kettler possessed this means of invisibility in his cell, and wasn't detected. He simply slipped out when the guard came to fetch him." "Invisibility? Yes! But invisible's not the same thing as transparent," cried Stopford. "These folks have operated in broad daylight. They're transparent, damn them! Not even a shadow! You know what I mean, Rennell! What I'm thinking of! That crazy man you were in touch with six months ago, who prophesied this! We turned him down! He showed me a watch and said the salvation of the world was inside the case! I thought him insane!" * * * * * "You mean Luke Evans, sir. That watch was his pocket model. He went off in a huff, saying the time would come when we'd want him and not be able to find him." "But, damn him, he wanted to produce universal darkness, or some such nonsense, Rennell, and I told him that we wanted light, not darkness." "It wasn't exactly that, sir." Colonel Stopford was a man of the old school: he had been an artillery officer in the Great War, and was characteristically impatient of new notions. Dick began carefully: "You'll remember, sir, old Evans claimed to have been the inventor of that shadow-breaking device that was stolen from him and sold in England." "To a moving picture company!" snorted Stopford. "I asked him what moving pictures had to do with war." "Evans was convinced that the invention would be applied to war. He claimed that it made the modern methods of military camouflage out of date completely. He said that by destroying shadows one could produce invisibility, since visibility consists in the refraction of wave lengths by material objects. "When they stole his invention, he foresaw that it would be used in war. He set to work to nullify his own invention. He told me that he had unintentionally given to the enemies of the United States a means of bringing us to our knees, since he believed that British motion picture company was actually a subsidiary of Krupp's. He worked out a method of counteracting it." "You must get him, Rennell. Even if it's all nonsense, we can't afford to let any chance go. If Evans's invention will counteract this damned invisibility business--" The telephone on the Colonel's desk rang. He picked it up, and his face assumed an expression of incredulity. He looked about him, like a man bewildered. He beckoned to the police official, who hurried to his side, and thrust the receiver into his hand. The official listened. "All right," he said. He turned to Dick and the Civil Service representative. "Gentlemen," he said, "the President has disappeared from his office in the White House, and there are grave fears that he has been kidnapped!" CHAPTER III _In the White House_ Colonel Stopford's car had been parked around the corner of the building, and within a minute the four men were inside it, Stopford at the wheel, and racing in the direction of the White House. A nod to the guard at the gate, and they were inside the grounds. At the entrance a single guard, in place of the four who should have been posted there, challenged sharply, and attempted to bar the way, not recognizing Dick or Stopford in their civilian clothes. "Where's your officer?" demanded Stopford sharply. Half-cowed by the Colonel's manner, the young recruit hesitated, and the four swept him out of the way and hurried on. The scene outside the main entrance to the White House was one of indescribable confusion. Soldiers were swarming in confused groups, some trying to force an entrance, others pouring out. Every moment civilians, streaming over the lawn, added to the number. Discipline seemed almost abandoned. From inside the building came outbursts of screams and cursing, the scuffling of a mob. "Roscoe! Roscoe!" shouted Stopford. "Where's the President's secretary? Who's seen him? Let us pass immediately!" No one paid the least attention to him. But a short, bare-headed civilian, who was struggling in the crowd, heard, and shouted in answer, waved his arms, and began to force his way toward the four. It was Roscoe, the secretary of President Hargreaves. The President was a childless widower, and Roscoe lived in the White House with him and was intimately in his confidence. Roscoe gained Stopford's side. "Say--they've got him!" he panted. "They've got him somewhere--inside the building. They're trying to get him out! We've got to save him--but we can't see them--or him. They've made him invisible too, curse them! I heard him crying, 'Help me, Roscoe!' He saw me, I tell you--and I didn't know where he was!" * * * * * The little secretary was almost incoherent with fear and anger. The five men, forming a wedge, hurled themselves forward. Out of the White House entrance appeared a tall officer, revolver in hand. It was Colonel Simpson, of the President's staff. Half beside himself, he swept the weapon menacingly about him, shouting incoherently, and clearing a passage, into which the five hurled themselves. Stopford seized his revolver hand, and after a brief struggle Simpson recognized him. "He's in the building!" he shouted wildly. "Somewhere upstairs! I'm trying to form a cordon, but this damned mob's in the way. Kick those civilians out!" he cried to the soldiers. "Shoot them if they don't go! Guard the windows!" Stopford and Dick, at the head of the wedge, pushed past into the White House. The interior was packed, men were struggling frantically on the staircase; it seemed hopeless to try to do anything. Suddenly renewed yells sounded from above, a scream of anguish, howls of terror. There came a downward surge, then a forward and upward one, which carried the two men up the stairs and into the President's private apartments above. In the large reception-room a mob was struggling at a window, beneath a blaze of electric light. A soldier was standing there like a statue, his face fixed with a leer of horror. In his hands was a rifle, with a blood-stained bayonet, dripping upon the hardwood floor at the edge of the rug. Upon the rug itself a stream of blood was spouting out of the air. Dick looked at the sight and choked. There was something appalling in the sight: it was the quintessence of horror, that widening pool of blood, staining the rug, and flowing from an invisible body that writhed and twisted, while moans of anguish came from unseen lips. Colonel Stopford leaped back, livid and staring. "God, it's got eyes--two eyes!" he shouted. Dick saw them too. The eyes, which alone were visible, were about six inches from the floor, and they were appearing and disappearing, as they opened and shut alternately. It was a man lying there, a dying man, pierced by the soldier's bayonet by pure accident, dying and yet invisible. * * * * * The mob had scattered with shrieks of terror, but a few bolder spirits remained in a thin circle about that fearful thing on the rug. Dick bent over the man, and felt the outlines of the writhing body. It was a man, apparently dressed in some sort of uniform, but this was covered, from the top of the head to the feet, with a sort of sheer silken garment, bifurcating below the waist, and resembling a cocoon. It seemed to appear and alternately to vanish. Dick seized the filmy stuff in his fingers, rent it, and stripped it away. Yells of terror and amazement broke from the throats of all. Instantly the thin circle of spectators had become reinforced by a struggling mass of men. The half-visible cocoon clung to Dick's body like spider webs. But the man who had been wearing it had sprung instantly into view beneath the cluster of electric lights. He was a fair-haired young fellow of about thirty years, his features white and set in the agony of death. He was dressed in a trim uniform of black, with silver braid, and on his shoulders were the insignia of a lieutenant. He opened his eyes, blue as the skies, and stared about him. He seemed to understand what had happened to him. "Dogs!" he muttered. Shrieks of fury answered him. The mob surged toward him as if to grind his face to pieces under their feet--and then recoiled, mouthing and gibbering. But it was at Dick that they were looking, not at the dying man. He raised himself upon one elbow with a mighty effort. "His Majesty the Invisible Emperor! Long be his reign triumphant!" he chanted. It was his last credo. The words broke from his lips accompanied by a torrent of red foam. His head dropped back, his body slipped down; he was gone. And no one seemed to observe his passing. They were all screaming and gibbering at Dick. "Rennell! Rennell!" yelled Stopford. "Where are you, Rennell? God, man, what's happened to your legs?" Dick looked down at himself. For a moment he had the illusion that he was a head and a trunk, floating in the air. His lower limbs had become invisible, except for patches of trousering that seemed to drift through space. The mob in the room had fallen back gaping at him in horror. Then Dick understood. It was the invisible garment that had coiled itself about him. He tore it from him and became visibly a man once more. Shouts from another room! A surging movement of the crowd toward it. The muffled sounds of an automatic pistol, fitted with a silencer! Then screams: "The devils are in there! They're murdering the soldiers!" There followed a panic-stricken rush, more muffled firing, and then the sharp roar of rifles, and the fall of plaster. Some one was bawling the President's name. The rooms became a mass of milling human beings, lost to all self-control. A bedlam of noise and struggle. Men fought with one another blindly, cursing soldiers fired promiscuously among the mob, riddling the walls, stabbing at the air. The plaster was falling in great chunks everywhere, filling the rooms with a heavy white cloud, in which all choked and struggled. The yells of the civilian mob below, struggling helplessly in the packed crowd that wedged the great stairway, made babel. Outside the White House a dense mob that filled the lawns was yelling back, and struggling to gain admittance. Suddenly the lights went out. "They've cut the wires!" rose a wild, wailing voice. "The devils have cut the wires! Kill them! Kill everybody!" His cry ended in a gurgle. Somewhere in that dark hell a struggle was going on, a well defined struggle, different from the random, aimless battling of the half-crazed soldiers and the civilians. President Hargreaves was still within the walls of the White House, it was known; it was physically impossible for him to have been carried away when every foot of space was packed. And through that darkness the invisible assailants were edging him, foot by foot, toward the outside. * * * * * Dick was on the edge of this silent battle. He sensed it. Bracing himself against a bureau, while the mob surged past him, he tried to pierce the gloom, to reinforce with his perceptions what his instinct told him. A soldier, crazed with fear, came leaping at him, bayonet leveled. He thrust with a grunt. Dick avoided the glancing steel by a hand's breadth, and, as the impetus of the man's attack carried him forward, caught him beneath the chin with a stiff right-hand jolt that sent him sprawling. From below the cries broke out again, with renewed violence: "They've got the President! Get them! Get them! Close all doors and windows!" But a door went crashing down somewhere, to the tune of savage yells. The mob was pouring down the stairs. It was growing less packed above. Dick heard Stopford's voice calling his name. "Here, sir" he shouted back, and the two men collided. "For God's sake do what you can, Rennell!" shouted the Colonel. "They've got the President downstairs. They had him in this very room, in the thick of it all. I heard him cry out, as if under a gag. They put one of those damned cloths over him. God, Rennell, I'm going crazy!" The upper floor of the White House was almost empty now. Dick thrust himself into the crowd that still jammed the stairs. He reached the ground floor. It was lighter here, but a glance showed him that it was impossible to attempt to restore any semblance of order. The big East Room was jammed with a fighting, cursing throng. Dick stumbled over the bodies of those who had fallen in the press, or had been shot down. Outside the mob was thickening, swarming through the grounds and screeching like madmen. * * * * * Nothing that could be done! Dick found himself caught once more in the human torrent. Presently he was wedged up against a broken window. He precipitated himself through the frame, dropped to the ground, stopped for an instant to catch breath. The yelling mob was congregated about the main entrance of the White House, and on this side the grounds were comparatively empty. As Dick stopped, trying desperately to form some plan of action, he heard footsteps and low voices near him. Then two men came toward him, followed by three or four others. The men--but, though the light was faint, Dick realized instantly that they were wearing invisible garments. He could see nothing of them; he could see through where they seemed to be--the trees, the buildings of the streets. Yet they were at his elbow. And they saw him. He heard one of them leap, and sprang aside as the butt of a pistol descended through the air and dropped where his head had been. Yet no hand had seemed to hold it. It had been a pistol, reversed, and flashing downward, to be arrested in mid-air six inches from his face. But the men were not wholly invisible. Nearly six feet above the ground, three or four pairs of eyes were staring malevolently into Dick's. Only the eyes were there. The two foremost men were breathing heavily. They were carrying something. Grotesquely through a rent in the invisible garment Dick saw a patch of trouser. He heard a muffled sigh. President Hargreaves, in the hands of his abductors! Dick's actions were reflex. As the pistol hung beside his face, he snatched at it, wrested it away, struck with it, and heard a curse and felt the yielding impact of bone and flesh. He had missed the head but struck the shoulder. Next moment hands gripped the weapon, and a desperate struggle began. * * * * * It was torn from Dick's grasp. He struck out at random, and his fist collided with the chin of a substantial flesh and blood human being. Invisible arms grasped him. He fought free. The pistol slashed his face sidewise, the sight ripping a strip of flesh from the cheek. He was surrounded, he was being beaten down, though he was fighting gamely. "Kill the swine! Shoot! Shoot!" Dick heard one of his assailants muttering. Out of the void appeared the blue muzzle of another automatic, with a silencer on it. Dick ducked as a flame spurted from it. He felt the bullet stir his hair. He grasped at the hand that held it, and missed. Then he was held fast, and the muzzle swung implacably toward his head again. Helpless, he watched it describe that arc of death. It was only later that he wondered why he had fought all the while in silence, instead of crying for help. But of a sudden the pistol was dashed aside. A woman's voice spoke peremptorily, in some language Dick did not understand. And he saw her eyes among the eyes that glared at him. Dark eyes that he knew, even if the voice had not revealed her identity. The eyes and voice of Fredegonde Valmy! Dick cried her name. He put forth all his strength in a final struggle. Suddenly he felt a stunning impact on the back of the head. He slipped, reeled, threw out his hands, and sank down unconscious on the grass at the side of the path. CHAPTER IV _The Invisible Ambassador_ Fredegonde Valmy implicated in the conspiracy! That was the first thought that flashed into Dick's mind as he recovered consciousness. He might have suspected it! But the idea that the girl he loved was bound up with the murderous gang that was attacking the very foundations of civilization chilled him to the soul. Dick had been picked up a few minutes after he had been struck down, identified by Colonel Stopford as he was about to be removed to a hospital, and carried into the White House. Order had been restored by the arrival of a detachment of troops from Fort Myers, the severed cables located and mended, and by midnight the interior of the Presidential home had been made habitable again. President Hargreaves was gone--kidnapped despite the utmost efforts to protect him; and it was impossible to conceal that fact from the world. But the wheels of government still revolved. All night an emergency council sat in the White House, and, deciding that in a time of such grave danger heroic means must be adopted, with the consent of such of the Congressional leaders as could be summoned, a Council of Defence was organized. The whole country east of the Mississippi was placed under martial law. The fleet and army were put on a war footing. Flights of airplanes were assembled at numerous points along the eastern seaboard. To this Council Donald was attached as head of Intelligence for the Eastern Division. Yet all this availed little unless the location of the Invisible Empire could be ascertained, and, despite telegraphic reports that came in hourly, alleging to have discovered its headquarters, nothing had been achieved in this direction. * * * * * The garment taken from the slain soldier had been examined by a half-dozen of the leading chemists of the East. Pending the arrival from New York of the celebrated Professor Hosmeyer, it was deposited under military guard in a dark closet. The result was unfortunate. The garment exhibited to the assembled scientists was a mere bifurcated silken bag. The gas with which it had been impregnated, though it had been heavy enough to adhere to the fabric for hours, had also been volatile enough to have disappeared completely, leaving a residue which was identified as a magnesium isotope. Equally spectacular had been the disappearance of Mademoiselle Fredegonde Valmy. A cable from the Slovakian Ambassador had arrived a few hours later, denying her authenticity. And with her disappearance came the discovery that she had been at the head of an espionage system with ramifications in every state department, and in every statesman's home. Three days passed with no sign from the enemy. The Council sat all day. In the executive offices of the White House Dick toiled ceaselessly, planning, receiving reports, organizing the flights of airplanes at strategic points throughout his district. From time to time he would be summoned to the Council. At night he threw himself upon a cot in his office and slept a sleep broken by the constant arrival of messengers. And still there was no clue to the location of the headquarters of the marauders. But in those three days there had been no sign of them. Hope had succeeded despair; in the rebound of confidence the populace was beginning to ridicule the nation-wide precautions against what were coming to be considered merely a gang of super-criminals. It was even whispered that President Hargreaves had not been kidnapped at all. The Freemen's Party accused the Government of a plot to subvert popular liberties. * * * * * Dick received a summons on the third evening. Utterly worn out with his work, he pulled himself together and made his way into the Blue Room, where the Council was assembled. Vice-president Tomlinson, an elderly man, was in the chair. A non-entity, pushed into a post it had been thought he would adorn innocuously, he had been overwhelmed by his succession to the chief office of State. Tomlinson did not like Dick, or any of the hustling younger officers who, unlike himself, realized the real significance of the danger that overhung the country. He sat pompously in his leather chair, regarding Dick as he entered in obedience to the summons. "Well, Captain Rennell, what have you to report to us this evening?" he inquired, as Dick saluted and stood to attention at the table. "We're improving our concentrations, Mr. Vice-president. We've eight flights of seaplanes scouring the coast in the hope of locating the stronghold of the Invisible Emperor. We've--" "I'm sick and tired of that title," shouted Tomlinson. He sprang to his feet, his face flushed with anger. His nerves had broken under the continuous strain. "I'll give you my opinion, Captain Rennell," he said. "And that is that this so-called Invisible Emperor is a myth. "A gang of thieves has invented a paint that renders them inconspicuous, has created a panic, and is taking advantage of it to terrorize the country. The whole business is poppycock, in my opinion, and the sooner this bubble bursts the better. Well, sir, what have you to say to that?" "Have you ever seen any of these men in their invisible clothing, if I may ask, Mr. Vice-president?" inquired Dick, trying to keep down his anger. His nerves, too, were badly frazzled. "No, sir, I have not, but my opinion is that this story is grossly exaggerated, and that the persons responsible are the reporters of our sensational press!" thundered Tomlinson. * * * * * He looked about him, a weak man proud of having asserted his authority. Somebody laughed. Tomlinson glared at Dick, his rubicund visage purpling. But it was not Dick who had laughed. Nor any one at the council table. That laugh had come from the wall beside the door. Again it broke forth, high-pitched, cold, derisive. All heads turned as if upon pivots to see who had uttered it. "Good God!" exclaimed Secretary Norris, of the War Department, and slumped in his chair. Five feet eight inches from the floor a pair of grey eyes looked at the Council members out of emptiness. Grey eyes, a man's eyes, cool, contemptuous, and filled with authority, with a contemptuous sense of superiority that left every man there dumb. Dick was the first to recover himself. He stepped forward, not to where the invisible man was standing, but to a point between him and the door. That cold laugh broke forth again. "Gentlemen, I am an ambassador from my sovereign, who chooses to be known as the Invisible Emperor," came the words. "As such, I claim immunity. Not that I greatly care, should you wish to violate the laws of nations and put me to death. But, believe me, in such case the retribution will be a terrible one." Suddenly the envoy peeled off the gas-impregnated garments that covered him. He stood before the Council, a fair-haired young man, clad in the same fashion of trim black uniform as the bayonetted soldier had worn upstairs three nights before. He bowed disdainfully, and it was Tomlinson who shouted: "Arrest that man! I know his face! I've seen it in the papers. He's Von Kettler, the murderer who escaped from jail in an invisible suit." "Oh, come, Mr. Vice-president," laughed Von Kettler, "are you sure this isn't all very much exaggerated?" Tomlinson sank back in his chair, his ruddy face covered with sweat. Dick stared at Von Kettler. A suspicion was forming in his mind. He had seen eyes like those before, dark instead of grey, and yet with the same look of pride and breeding in them; the look of the face, too, impossible to mistake--he knew! Fredegonde Valmy was Von Kettler's sister! * * * * * "Well, gentlemen, am I to receive the courtesies of an ambassador?" inquired Van Kettler, advancing. "You shall have the privileges of the gallows rope!" shouted Tomlinson. "Arrest that man at once, Captain Rennell!" "Pardon me, Mr. Vice-president," suggested the Secretary for the Navy blandly, "but perhaps it would be more desirable to hear what he has to say." "Immunity for thieves, robbers, murderers!" "Might I suggest," said Von Kettler suavely, "that, since the United States has honored my master by placing itself upon a war footing, it has accorded him the rights of a belligerent?" "We'll hear you, Mr. Von Kettler," said the Secretary of State, glancing along the table. Three or four nodded, two shook their heads: Tomlinson only glared speechlessly at the intruder. Von Kettler advanced to the table and laid a paper upon it. "You recognize that signature, gentlemen?" he asked. At the bottom of the paper Dick saw scrawled the bold and unmistakable signature of President Hargreaves. "An order signed by the President of your country," purred Von Kettler, "ordering your military forces replaced upon a peace footing, and the acceptance of our conditions. They are not onerous, and will not interfere with the daily life of the country. Merely a little change in that outworn document, the Constitution. My master rules America henceforward." Somebody laughed: another laughed: but it was the Secretary of State who did the fine thing. He took up the paper bearing what purported to be President Hargreaves's signature, and tore it in two. "The people of this country are her rulers," he said, "not an old man dragooned into signing a proclamation while in captivity--if indeed that is President Hargreaves's signature." * * * * * There came a sudden burst of applause. Von Kettler's face became the mask of a savage beast. He shook his fist furiously. "You call my master a forger?" he shouted. "You yourselves repudiate your own Constitution, which places the control of army and navy in the hands of your President? You refuse to honor his signature?" "Listen to me, Mr. Von Kettler!" The voice of the Secretary of State cut like a steel edge. "You totally mistake the temper of the people of this country. We don't surrender, even to worthy adversaries, much less to a gang of common thieves, murderers, and criminals like yourselves. You have been accorded the privilege you sought, that of an envoy, and that was straining the point. Show yourself here again after two minutes have elapsed, and you'll go to the gallows--for keeps." "Dogs!" shouted Von Kettler, beside himself with fury. "Your doom is upon you even at this moment. I have but to wave my arm, and Washington shall be destroyed, and with her a score of other cities. I tell you you are at our mercy. Thousands of lives shall pay for this insult to my master. I warn you, such a catastrophe is coming as shall show you the Invisible Emperor does not threaten in vain!" With complete nonchalance the Secretary of State took out his watch. "One minute and fifteen seconds remaining. Captain Rennell," he said. "At the expiration of that time, put Mr. Von Kettler under arrest. I advise you to go back to your master quickly, Mr. Von Kettler," he added, "and tell him that we'll have no dealings with him, now or ever." * * * * * For a moment longer Von Kettler stood glaring; then, with a laugh of derision and a gesture of the hands he vanished from view. And, though they might have expected that denouement, the members of the Council leaped to their feet, staring incredulously at the place where he had been. Nothing of Von Kettler was visible, not even the eyes, and there sounded not the slightest footfall. Dick sprang forward to the door, but his outstretched arms encountered only emptiness. In spite of the Secretary of State's instructions, he was almost minded to apprehend the man. If he could get him! The corridor was empty. A guard of soldiers was at the entrance, but they did not block the entrance. Even now Von Kettler might be passing them! Why didn't his feet sound upon the floor? How could a bulky man glide so smoothly? Perhaps because Dick was undecided what to do, Von Kettler escaped him. By the time he reached the guards he knew he had escaped. Suddenly there came an unexpected denouement. Somewhere on the White House lawn a guard challenged, fired. The snap of one of the silenced automatics answered him. When Dick and the guards reached the spot, the man was lying in a crumpled heap. "An airplane," he gasped. "Invisible airplane. I--bumped into it. Men--in it. The damned dogs!" He died. Dick stared around him. There was no sign of any airplane on the lawn, nothing but the tents of the guards, white in the moonlight, and the grim array of anti-aircraft guns that Dick had placed there. But behind the White House, in hastily constructed hangars, were a half-dozen of the latest pursuit airships--beautiful slim hulls, heavily armored, with armored turrets containing each a quick-firer with the new armor-piercing bullets. One of these ships, Dick's own, was kept perpetually warmed and ready to take the air. * * * * * Dick raced across the lawn, yelled to the startled guard in charge. The mechanics came running from their quarters. Almost by the time Dick reached it the ship was ready. He twirled the helicopter starter, and she roared and zoomed, taking an angle of a hundred and twenty-five degrees upward off a runway of twenty yards. Into the air she soared, into the moonlight, up like an arrow for five hundred feet. Dick pulled the soaring lever, and she hung there, buzzing like a bee as her helicopters, counteracting the pull of gravity, held her comparatively stable. He scanned the air all about him. Washington lay below, her myriad lights gleaming. Immediately beneath him Dick saw the guns and the tents of the soldiers, and the little group that was removing the body of the murdered soldier on a stretcher. But there were no signs of any hostile craft. Had the murdered man really bumped into an invisible airship, or had he only thought he had? Had those devils learned to apply the gas to the surfaces of airplanes? There was no reason why they should not have done so. But surely the utmost ingenuity of man had not contrived to render a modern plane, with its metalwork and machinery, absolutely transparent? * * * * * And, again, how was it possible to have silenced the sound of engines, the whir of a propeller, so that there should be no auditory indication whatever of a plane's presence? Dick looked all about him. Nothing was in the air--he could have sworn it. He replaced the soaring lever and banked in a close circle, his glance piercing the night. No, there was nothing. Crash! Boom! The plane rocked violently, tossing upon gusts of air. A huge, gaping hole of blackness had suddenly appeared in the middle of the White House lawn. The tents were flat upon the ground. Through the rising smoke clouds Dick saw tongues of flame. No shell that, but a bomb, and dropped from the skies less than five hundred feet from where Dick hovered. Yet there was nothing visible in the skies save the round orb of the moon. A rush of wind past Dick's face! One of the vanes of the helicopter crumpled and fluttered away into the night. Dick needed no further persuasion. The dead soldier had not lied. Von Kettler had begun the fulfillment of his threat! CHAPTER V _The Enemy Strikes_ As Dick's airship veered and side-slipped, he kicked hard on the left rudder and brought the nose around. Furiously he sprayed the air with a leaden hail from his quick-firer. He heard a rush of wind go past him, and realized that his unseen antagonist had all but rammed him. Yet nothing was visible at all, save the moon and the empty sky. He had heard the rush of the prop-wash, but he had seen nothing, heard nothing else. Incredible as it seemed, the pilot was flying a plane that had attained not merely invisibility but complete absence of all sound. Dick side-slipped down, pancaked, and crashed. He emerged from a plane wrecked beyond hope of early repair, yet luckily with no injury beyond a few minor bruises. He rushed toward the hangar, to encounter a bevy of scared mechanics. "Another plane! Rev one up quick!" he shouted. Planes were already being wheeled out, pilots in flying suits and goggles were striding beside them. Dick ordered one of them away, stepped into his plane, and in a moment was in the air again. In the minute or two that had elapsed since the encounter, the enemy had been active. Crash after crash was resounding from various parts of Washington. Buildings were rocking and toppling, débris strewed the streets, fires were springing up everywhere. A thousand feet aloft, Dick could see the holocaust of destruction that was being wrought by the infernal missiles. Bombs of such power had been the unattained ambition of every government of the world--and it had been left to the men of the Invisible Emperor to attain to them. Whole streets went into ruin at each discharge and from everywhere within the city the wailing cry of the injured went up, in a resonant moan of pain. In the central part of the city, the district about F Street and the government buildings, nothing was standing, except those buildings fashioned of structural steel, and these showed twisted girders like the skeletons of primeval monsters, supporting sections of sagging floors. Houses, hotels had melted into shapeless heaps of rubble, which filled the streets to a depth of a dozen yards, burying everything beneath them. Yet here and there could be seen the forms of dead pedestrians, motor-cars emerging out of the débris, lying in every conceivable position; horses, horribly mangled, were shrieking as they tried to free themselves. And yet, despite this ruin, the general impression upon Dick's mind, as he beat to and fro, signaling to his flight to spread, was that of a vast, empty desolation. * * * * * Further away: where the ruin had not yet fallen, thousands of human beings were milling in a mass, those upon the fringes of the crowd perpetually breaking away, other swarms approaching them, so that the entire agglomeration resembled a seething whirlpool turning slowly upon itself. Then of a sudden the strains of the national anthem floated up to Dick's ears. A band was playing in the White House grounds. The tune was ragged, and the drum came in a fraction of a second late, but an immense pride and elation filled Dick's soul. "They'll never beat us!" he thought, intensely, "with such a spirit as that!" He had signaled his flight to spread, and search the air. He could see the individual ships darting here and there over the immensity of the city, but none knew better than he how fruitless their effort was. And the marauders had not ceased their deadly work. A bomb dropped near the Washington Monument, sending up a huge spout of dust that veiled it from his eyes. Instinctively Dick shot toward the scene. Slowly the dust subsided, and then a yell of exultation broke from Dick's lips. The noble shaft still stood, a slim taper pointing to the skies. It was an omen of ultimate success, and Dick took heart. No, they'd never beat the grim, unconquerable tenacity of the American people. Yet the damage was proceeding at a frightful rate. A bomb dropped squarely on the Corcoran Gallery and resolved it into a heap of silly stones. A bomb fell in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, and the houses on either side collapsed like houses of cards, falling into a sulphurous, fiery pit. And still there was nothing visible but the sky and the moon. * * * * * Dick gritted his teeth and swore as he circled over the site of destruction, out of which tiny figures were struggling. He heard the clang of the fire bells as the motor trucks came roaring toward the scene. Then crash! again. Five blocks northward another dense cloud of dust arose, and the new area of destruction, spreading as swiftly as ripples over a pond, joined the former one, leaving a huge, irregular open space, piled up with masonry and brick in a number of flat-topped pyramids. Into this, houses went crashing every moment, with a sound like the clatter of falling crockery, but infinitely magnified. "The devils! The swine!" shouted Dick. "And we gave Von Kettler the privileges of an ambassador!" And Fredegonde was the sister of this devil! The remembrance of that struck a cold chill to Dick's heart again. He tried to blot out her picture from his mind, but he still saw her as she had appeared that day after the air ride, flushed, smiling, radiant in her dark beauty. A murderess and a spy! He cursed her as he banked and circled back. He was helpless. He could do nothing. And all Washington would be destroyed by morning, if the supply of bombs kept up. But there was more to come. Suddenly Dick became aware that two of his flight, at widely separated distances, were going down in flames. Flaming comets, they dropped plump into the destruction below. Another caught fire and was going down. No need to question what was happening. The invisible enemy was attacking his flight and picking off his men one by one! He drove furiously toward two of his planes whose erratic movements showed that they were being attacked. As he neared them he saw one catch fire and begin its earthward swoop. Then the fuselage crackled beside him, and his instrument board dissolved into ruin. Instinctively he went round in a tight bank and loosed his machine-gun. Nothing there! Nothing at all! Yet his right wing went ragged, and his own furious blasts into the sky, their echoes drowned by the roar of his propeller, were productive of nothing. * * * * * He shot past the uninjured plane, signalling it to descend. He wasn't going to let his men ride aloft to helpless butchery. Nothing could be done until some means was discovered of counteracting the enemy's terrific advantage. He darted across the heart of the city to where another of the flight was circling, waggling his wings to indicate to it to descend. Then on to the next plane and the next, shepherding them. Thank God they understood! They were bunching toward the hangar. Yet another took fire and dropped, a burning wreck. Half his flight out of commission, and not an enemy visible! He was aloft alone now, courting death--instant, invisible death. He wouldn't descend until that carnival of murder was at an end. But it was not at an end. Another crash, far up Pennsylvania Avenue, showed an attempt upon the Capitol. Again--again, and a smoking hell wreathed the noble buildings so that it was no longer possible to see them. A lull, and then a crash nearer the city's heart. Crash! Crash! Invisible though the enemy was, it was easy to trace the movements of this particular plane by the successive areas of destruction that it left behind it. It was coming back over Pennsylvania Avenue, dropping its bombs at intervals. It was methodically wiping out an entire section of Washington. Dick drove his plane toward it. There was one chance in a thousand that, if he could accurately gauge the progress of his invisible antagonist, he could crash him and go down with him to death. If he could get close enough to feel his prop-wash! A wild chance, but Dick's mind was keyed up to desperation. He shot like an arrow toward the scene, with a view to intercepting the murderer. Then of a sudden he became aware of a curious phenomenon. A black beam was shooting across the sky. A black searchlight! It came from the flat top of a large hotel that had somehow escaped the universal destruction, and, with its gaunt skeleton of structural steel showing in squares, towered out of the ruin all about it like an island. * * * * * It was from here that the black beam started. It spread fanwise across the sky. But it was not merely blackness. It was utter and impenetrable darkness, cleaving the sky like a knife. Where it passed, the rays of the moon were extinguished as fire is extinguished by water. A beam of absolute blackness, that pierced the air like a widening cone, and made the night seem, by contrast, of dazzling brightness along either dark border. High into the air that dark beam shot, moving to and fro in the sky. Dick, darting toward the spot where he hoped to find his invisible enemy, found himself caught in it. In utter, inextinguishable darkness! Like a trapped bird he fluttered, hurling himself this way and that till suddenly he found himself blinking in the dazzling light of the moon again, and the black beam was overhead. Crash! Another widening sphere of ruin as the invisible marauder dropped a bomb. Dick cursed bitterly. Trapped in that black beam, he had lost his direction. The invisible plane had shot past the point where he had hoped to intercept it. He flung his soaring lever, and hung suspended in the air. An easy mark for the enemy, if he chose to take the opportunity. No matter. Death was all that Dick craved. He had seen half his flight wiped out, and a hundred thousand human beings hurled to destruction. He wanted to die. Then suddenly a wild shout came to his ears, as if all Washington had gone mad with triumph. And Dick heard himself shouting too, before he knew it, almost before he knew why. * * * * * For overhead, where the inky finger searched the sky, a luminous shape appeared, a silvery cigar, riding in the void. The finger missed it, and again there was only the moonlight. It caught it again--and again the whole devastated city rang with yells of derision, hate, and anger as the black beam held it. It held it! To and fro that silvery cigar scurried in a frantic attempt to avoid detection, and remorselessly the black beam held it down. It held it down, and it outlined it as clearly as a figure on the moving picture screen. Then suddenly there came a flash, followed by a dull detonation, and a black cloud appeared, spreading into a flower of death near the cigar, and at the edge of the black beam. The cheers grew frantic. The anti-aircraft battery in the White House grounds had grasped the situation, and was opening fire. To and fro, like a trapped beast, the cigar-shaped airplane fled. Once it seemed to escape. It faded from the edge of the black finger--faded into nothingness amid a roar of execretion. Then it was caught and held. Truncated, bounded by an arc of sky, the black finger followed the murderer in his flight remorselessly. And all around him the anti-aircraft guns were placing a barrage of death. He was trapped. No need for Dick to rush in to battle. To do so might call off that deadly barrage that held the murderer in a ring of death. Hovering, Dick watched. And then, perhaps panic-stricken, perhaps rendered desperate, perhaps through sheer, wanton courage that might have commanded admiration under nobler circumstances, the airship turned and drove straight in the direction of the battery, dropping another bomb as she did so. * * * * * It fell in a crowded street, swarming with spectators who had clambered upon the fallen débris, and it wrought hideous destruction. But this time there was hardly a cry--no unison of despair such as had come to Dick's ears before. The suspense was too tense. All eyes watched the airship as, seeming to bear a charmed life, she drove for the White House itself, through a ring of shells that widened and contracted alternately, with the object of placing a last bomb squarely upon the building before going down in death. And all the while the black searchlight held it. Dick Rennell was to experience many thrilling moments afterward, but there was never a period, measurable by seconds, yet seeming to extend through all eternity--never a period quite so fraught with suspense as, hovering there, he watched the flight of that silvery plane speeding straight toward the executive mansion while all around it the shells bloomed and spread. It was over the White House grounds. The archies had failed; they were being outmaneuvered, they could not be swung in time to follow the trajectory of the plane. Dick held his breath. Then suddenly the silvery ship dissolved in a blaze of fire, a shower of golden sparks such as fly from a rocket, and simultaneously the last bomb that she was to drop broke upon the ground below. Down she plunged, instantly invisible as she escaped the finger of the black beam; but she dropped into the vortex of ruin that she herself had created. Into a pit of blazing fire, criss-crossed by falling trees, that had engulfed the battery and a score of men. Then suddenly Dick understood. He flung home the soaring lever, banked, and headed, not for the White House, but for the flat roof of the hotel from which the black searchlight was still projecting itself through the skies. He hovered above, and dropped, light as a feather, upon the rooftop. * * * * * There was only one person there--an old man dressed in a shabby suit, kneeling before a great block of stone that had been dislodged upward from the parapet and formed a sort of table. Upon this table the old man had placed a large, square box, resembling an exaggerated kodak, and it was from the lens of this box that the black beam was projecting. Dick sprang from his cockpit as the old man rose in alarm. He ran to him and caught him by the arm. "Luke Evans!" he cried. "Thank God you've come back in time to save America!" CHAPTER VI _The Gas_ In the Blue Room of the White House the Council listened to old Luke Evans's exposition of his invention with feelings ranging from incredulity to hope. "I've been at work all the time," said the old man, "not far from here. I knew the day would come when you'd need me. I put my pride aside for the sake of my country." "Tell us in a few words about this discovery of yours, Mr. Evans," said Colonel Stopford. Luke Evans placed the square black case upon the table. "It's simple, like all big things, sir," he answered. "The original shadow-breaking device that I invented was a heavy, inert gas, invisible, but almost as viscous as paint. Applied to textiles, to inorganic matter, to animal bodies, it adheres for hours. Its property is to render such substances invisible by absorbing all the visible light rays that fall upon it, from red to violet. Light passes through all substances that are coated with this paint as if they did not exist." "And this antidote of yours?" asked Colonel Stopford. "Darkness," replied Luke Evans. "A beam of darkness that means absolute invisibility. It can be shot from this apparatus"--he indicated the box upon the table. "This box contains a minute portion of a gas which exists in nature in the form of a black, crystalline powder. The peculiar property of this powder is that it is the solidified form of a gas more volatile than any that is known. So volatile is it that, when the ordinary atmospheric pressure of fifteen pounds to the square inch is removed, the powder instantly changes to the gaseous condition." "By pressing this lever"--Evans pointed at the box--"a vacuum is created. Instantly the powder becomes a gas, which shoots forth through this aperture with the speed of a projectile, taking the form of a beam of absolute blackness. Or it can be discharged from cylinders in such a way as to extend over a large area within a few minutes." "But how does this darkness make the invisible airships luminous?" asked Stopford. "Why does not your darkness destroy all light?" "In this way, sir," replied the old inventor. "The shadow-breaking gas with which the airships are painted confers invisibility because it absorbs sunlight. But it does not absorb the still more rapid waves, or oscillations which manifest themselves as radio-activity. On the contrary, it gathers and reflects these. "Now Roentgen, the discoverer of the X-ray, observed that if X-rays are allowed to enter the eye of an observer who is in complete darkness, the retina receives a stimulus, and light is perceived, due to the fluorescent action of the X-rays upon the eyeball. "Consequently, by creating a beam of complete darkness, I bring into clear visibility the fluorescent gas that coats the airships; in other words, the airships become visible." "If a light ray is nullified upon entering the field of darkness, will it emerge at the other edge as a perfect light ray again?" asked Stopford. "It will emerge unchanged, since the black beam destroys light by slightly slowing down the vibrations to a point where they are not perceived as light by the human eye. On emerging from the beam, however, these vibrations immediately resume their natural frequency. To give you a homely parallel, the telephone changes sound waves to electric waves, and re-converts them into sound waves at the other end, without any appreciable interruption." "Then," said Stopford, "the logical application of your method is to plunge every city in the land into darkness by means of this gas?" "That is so, sir, and then we shall have the advantage of invisibility, and the enemy ships will be in fluorescence." "Damned impracticable!" muttered Stopford. "You seriously propose to darken the greater part of eastern North America?" asked the Secretary for War. "The gas can be produced in large quantities from coal tar besides existing in crystalline deposits," replied Luke Evans. "It is so volatile that I estimate that a single ton will darken all eastern North America for five days. Whereas the concentration would be made only in specific areas liable to attack. The gas is distilled with great facility from one of the tri-phenyl-carbinol coal-tar derivatives." Vice-president Tomlinson was a pompous, irascible old man, but it was he who hit the nail on the head. "That's all very well as an emergency measure, but we've got to find the haunt of that gang and smash it!" An orderly brought in a telegraphic dispatch and handed it to him. The Vice-president opened it, glanced through it, and tried to hand it to the Secretary of State. Instead, it fluttered from his nerveless fingers, and he sank back with a groan. The Secretary picked it up and glanced at it. "Gentlemen," he said, trying to control his voice, "New York was bombed out of the blue at sunrise this morning, and the whole lower part of the city is a heap of ruins." * * * * * In the days that followed it became clear that all the resources of America would be needed to cope with the Invisible Empire. Not a day passed without some blow being struck. Boston, Charleston, Baltimore, Pittsburg in turn were devastated. Three cruisers and a score of minor craft were sunk in the harbor of Newport News, where they were concentrating, and thenceforward the fleet became a fugitive force, seeking concealment rather than an offensive. Trans-Atlantic sea-traffic ceased. Meanwhile the black gas was being hurriedly manufactured. From cylinders placed in central positions in a score of cities it was discharged continuously, covering these centers with an impenetrable pall of night that no light would penetrate. Only by the glow of radium paint, which commanded fabulous prices, could official business be transacted, and that only to a very small degree. Courts were closed, business suspended, prisoners released, perforce, from jails. Famine ruled. The remedy was proving worse than the disease. Within a week the use of the dark gas had had to be discontinued. And a temporary suspension of the raids served only to accentuate the general terror. There were food riots everywhere, demands that the Government come to terms, and counter-demands that the war be fought out to the bitter end. Fought out, when everything was disorganized? Stocks of food congested all the terminals, mobs rioted and battled and plundered all through the east. "It means surrender," was voiced at the Council meeting by one of the members. And nobody answered him. Three days of respite, then, instead of bombs, proclamations fluttering down from a cloudless sky. Unless the white flag of surrender was hoisted from the summit of the battered Capitol, the Invisible Emperor would strike such a blow as should bring America to her knees! * * * * * It was a twelve-hour ultimatum, and before three hours had passed thousands of citizens had taken possession of the Capitol and filled all the approaches. Over their heads floated banners--the Stars and Stripes, and, blazoned across them the words, "No Surrender." It was a spontaneous uprising of the people of Washington. Hungry, homeless in the sharpening autumn weather, and nearly all bereft of members of their families, too often of the breadwinner, now lying deep beneath the rubble that littered the streets, they had gathered in their thousands to protest against any attempt to yield. Dick, flying overhead at the apex of his squadron, felt his heart swell with elation as he watched the orderly crowds. This was at three in the afternoon: at six the ultimatum ended, the new frightfulness was to begin. At five, Vice-president Tomlinson was to address the crowds. The old man had risen to the occasion. He had cast off his pompousness and vanity, and was known to favor war to the bitter end. Dick and his squadron circled above the broken dome as the car that carried the Vice-president and the secretaries of State and for War approached along the Avenue. Rat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat! Out of the blue sky streams of lead were poured into the assembled multitudes. Instantly they had become converted into a panic-stricken mob, turning this way and that. Rat-a-tat-tat. Swaths of dead and dying men rolled in the dust, and, as wheat falls under the reaper's blade, the mob melted away in lines and by battalions. Within thirty seconds the whole terrain was piled with dead and dying. "My God, it's massacre! It's murder!" shouted Dick. * * * * * They had not even waited for the twelve hours to expire. To and fro the invisible airplanes shot through the blue evening sky, till the last fugitives were streaming away in all directions like hunted deer, and the dead lay piled in ghastly heaps everywhere. Out of these heaps wounded and dying men would stagger to their feet to shake their fists impotently at their murderers. In vain Dick and his squadron strove to dash themselves into the invisible airships. The pilots eluded them with ease, sometimes sending a contemptuous round of machine-gun bullets in their direction, but not troubling to shoot them down. Two small boys, carrying a huge banner with "No Surrender" across it, were walking off the ghastly field. Twelve or fourteen years old at most, they disdained to run. They were singing, singing the National Anthem, though their voices were inaudible through the turmoil. Rat-tat! Rat-tat-a-tat! The fiends above loosed a storm of lead upon them. Both fell. One rose, still clutching the banner in his hand and waved it aloft. In a sudden silence his childish treble could be heard: My country, 'tis of thee Sweet land of lib-er-ty-- The guns rattled again. Clutching the blood-stained banner, he dropped across the body of his companion. Suddenly a broad band of black soared upward from the earth. Those in charge of the cylinders placed about the Capitol had released the gas. A band of darkness, rising into the blue, cutting off the earth, making the summit of the ruined Capitol a floating dome. But, fast as it rose, the invisible airships rose faster above it. A last vicious volley! Two of Dick's flight crashing down upon the piles of dead men underneath! And nothing was visible, though the darkness rose till it obliterated the blue above. * * * * * At dawn the Council sat, after an all-night meeting. Vice-president Tomlinson, one arm shattered by a machine-gun bullet, still occupied the chair at the head of the table. Outside, immediately about the White House, there was not a sound. Washington might have been a city of the dead. The railroad terminals, however, were occupied by a mob of people, busily looting. There was great disorder. Organized government had simply disappeared. Each man was occupied only with obtaining as much food as he could carry, and taking his family into rural districts where the Terror would not be likely to pursue. All the roads leading out of Washington--into Virginia, into Maryland, were congested with columns of fugitives that stretched for miles. Some, who were fortunate enough to possess automobiles, and--what was rarer--a few gallons of gas, were trying to force their way through the masses ahead of them; here and there a family trudged beside a pack-horse, or a big dog drew an improvised sled on wheels, loaded with flour, bacon, blankets, pillows. Old men and young children trudged on uncomplaining. The telegraph wires were still, for the most part, working. All the world knew what was happening. From all the big cities of the East a similar exodus was proceeding. There was little bitterness and little disorder. It was not the airship raids from which these crowds were fleeing. Something grimmer was happening. The murderous attack upon the populace about the Capitol had been merely an incident. This later development was the fulfilment of the Invisible Emperor's ultimatum. Death was afield, death, invisible, instantaneous, and inevitable. Death blown on the winds, in the form of the deadliest of unknown gases. * * * * * In the Blue Room of the White House a score of experts had gathered. Dick, too, with the chiefs of his staff, Stopford, and the army and naval heads. Among them was the chief of the Meteorological Bureau, and it was to him primarily that Tomlinson was reading a telegraphic dispatch from Wilmington, South Carolina: "The Invisible Death has reached this point and is working havoc throughout the city, spreading from street to street. Men are dropping dead everywhere. A few have fled, but--" The sudden ending of the dispatch was significant enough. Tomlinson picked up another dispatch from Columbia, in the same State: "Invisible Death now circling city," he read. "Business section already invaded. All other telegraphists have left posts. Can't say how long--" And this, too, ended in the same way. There were piles of such communications, and they had been coming in for eighteen hours. At that moment an orderly brought in a dozen more. Tomlinson showed the head of the Meteorological Bureau the chart upon the table. "We've plotted out a map as the wires came in, Mr. Graves," he said. "The Invisible Death struck the southeast shore of the United States yesterday afternoon near Charleston. It has spread approximately at a steady rate. The wind velocity--?" "Remains constant. Seventy miles an hour. Dying down a little," answered Graves. "The death line now runs from Wilmington, South Carolina, straight to Augusta, Georgia," the Vice-president pursued. "Every living thing that this gas has encountered has been instantly destroyed. Men, cattle, birds, vermin, wild beasts. The gas is invisible and inodorous. These gentlemen believe it may be a form of hydrocyanic acid, but of a concentration beyond anything known to chemistry, so deadly that a billionth part of it to one of air must be fatal, otherwise it could not have traveled as it has done. Warnings have been broadcasted, but there are no stocks of chemicals that might counteract it. Flight is the only hope--flight at seventy miles an hour!" * * * * * His voice shook. "This gas has been loosed, as you told us, upon the wings of the hurricane that came through the Florida Strait. What are the chances of its reaching Washington?" "Mr. Vice-president, if the wind continues, and this gas has sufficient concentration, it should be in Washington within the next eight hours." Graves replied. "If the wind changes direction, however, this gas will probably be blown out to sea, or into the Alleghanies, where it will probably be dissipated among the hills, or by the foliage on the mountains. I'm not a chemist--" "No, sir, and I am not consulting you as one," answered old Tomlinson. "A death belt several hundred miles in length and three or four hundred deep has already been cut across this continent. We are faced with wholesale, unmitigated murder, on such a scale as was never known before. But we are an integral part of America, and Washington has no more right to expect immunity than our devastated Southern States. The question we wish to put to you is, can you trace the exact course taken by the hurricane?" "I can, Mr. Vice-president," answered Graves. "It originated somewhere in the West Indian seas, like all these storms. We've been getting our reports almost as usual. Our first one came from Nassau, which was badly damaged. The storm missed the Florida coast, as many of them do, and struck the coast of South Carolina--in fact, we received a report from Charleston, which must have almost coincided with your first report of the gas." "If the storm missed the Florida coast, it follows that the gas was not discharged from any point on the American continent," said Tomlinson. "From some point off Florida--from some island, or from a plane or from a ship at sea." "Not from a ship at sea, Mr. Vice-president," interposed the head of the Chemical Bureau. "To discharge gas on such an extensive scale would require more space than could be furnished by the largest vessel, in my opinion." "In all probability the gas was 'loaded,' so to say, onto the gale somewhere in the Bahamas," said Graves. "That seems to me the most likely explanation." * * * * * Vice-president Tomlinson nodded, and picked up one of the latest telegraphic dispatches, as if absently. "Gentlemen," he said, "the Invisible Death has already reached Charlotte." He picked up another. "Reported Abaco Island, Bahamas, totally wrecked by storm. All communication has ceased," he read. He turned to Dick and spoke as if inspired. "Captain Rennell, there is your destination," he thundered. "They've betrayed themselves. We've got them now. You understand?" "By God, sir! It's from Abaco Island, then, that those devils have been carrying on their game of wholesale murder!" Suddenly a contagion of enthusiasm seemed to sweep the whole assemblage. Every man was upon his feet in an instant, white, quivering, lips opened for speech that trembled there and did not come. It was Secretary Norris spoke. "The Vice-president has hit the mark," he said, with a dramatic gesture of his arm. "Yes, they've betrayed themselves. Their headquarters are on Abaco Island. It's one of the largest in the Bahamas." He turned to the Secretary for the Navy. "You can rush the fleet there, sir?" he asked. "Within forty-eight hours I'll have every vessel that can float off Abaco Island." "I'll concentrate all airplanes. Take your flight, Captain Rennell. We'll stamp out that nest of murderers if we blow Abaco Island to the bottom of the sea. It can be done!" "It can be done, sir--with Luke Evans and his invention," answered Dick. CHAPTER VII _On the Trail_ Three hours later, about the time when the war council rose after completing its plans, a sudden shift of the wind blew the poison gas out to sea, just when it appeared certain that it would reach the capital of the nation. The southern half of Virginia had been swept over. Operators, telegraph and telephone, staying at their posts had sent in constant messages that had terminated with an abruptness which told of the tragic sequel. Yet, at that distance from its source, the intensity of the gas had been to some extent dissipated. Poisonous beyond any gas known, so deadly as to make hydrocyanic gas innocuous in comparison, still as it was swept northward on the wings of the wind, there had been an increasing number of non-fatal casualties. The most northernly point reached by the gas was Richmond, and here some fifty per cent of those stricken had suffered paralysis instead of death. But a new element had been injected into the situation. Even the heroic courage shown by the populace in the beginning had had its limits. The morning after the news of the Invisible Death's advent was made public mobs had gathered in all the large cities of the East, demanding surrender. The submerged elements of crime and disorder had come to the surface at last. Committees were formed, with the avowed object of yielding to the Invisible Emperor, and averting further disaster. In Washington, a city of the dead, half the members of Congress and the Senators had gathered in the ruined Capitol, to debate the situation. There were rumors of an impending march on the White House, of a coup d'ètat. * * * * * The action of the Government was prompt. Five hundred loyalists were enrolled, armed, and posted round the White House: every avenue of approach was commanded by machine-guns. Meanwhile the news was spread by radio that the headquarters of the Invisible Emperor had been located, and that a strong bombing squadron was being dispatched to destroy it. The entire fleet was to follow, and it was confidently anticipated that within a little while the Terror would be at an end. Those at the white House were less sanguine. There was none but realized the diabolical strength of their antagonists. "Everything depends upon the outcome of the next forty-eight hours, and everything depends on you, Rennell," said Secretary Norris to Dick, as he stood beside his plane. Behind him his flight of a dozen airships was drawn up. "Find them," added the Secretary; "cover Abaco Island with the black gas, and the navy and the marines will wipe up the mess that you leave behind you. God help you--and all of us, Rennell!" He gripped Dick's hand and turned away. Dick was very sober-minded as he climbed into his cockpit. He knew to the full how much depended upon himself and Luke Evans. Already the shouts of the insurgents were to be heard at the ends of the barriers, commanded by the machine-guns, and patrolled by the enlisted volunteers. Negro mobs were building counter-barricades of their own with rubble from the fallen edifices. Civil war might be postponed for eight-and-forty hours, but after that unless there was news of victory, the whole structure of civilization would be smashed irreparably. It was up to Dick and Luke Evans, and they had assumed such a responsibility as rarely falls to the lot of man in war. * * * * * Dick was to lead the flight in a two-seater Barwell plane. This was one of the latest types, and had been hurriedly adapted to the purpose for which it was to be used. Dick himself occupied the rear seat, with its dual controls, and the gun in its armored casing. In front sat old Luke Evans, in charge of the black gas projector. His famous camera box, containing a minute quantity of gas in slow combustion, and projecting the black searchlight, had been built into the plane. In the rack beside him were a number of the black gas bombs, each of which, dropped to earth, would release enough gas to cover a considerable area with darkness. Both Luke and Dick wore respirators filled with charcoal and sodium thio-sulphate, and beside Dick a cage containing three guinea-pigs rested. These little rodents were so sensitive to atmospheric changes that a quantity of hydrocyanic acid too minute to affect a man would produce instantaneous death on them. From its hiding-place off the Virginia coast the American fleet was steaming hotly southward toward Abaco Island, cruisers, destroyers, submarines. That Abaco was British territory had simply not been considered in this crisis of history. The twelve airships that followed Dick's contained enough bombs to put the headquarters of the Invisible Empire out of business for good. The naval guns would complete the same business. All day Dick and Luke Evans flew southwestward. At first glance, everything appeared normal. The catastrophe that had fallen upon the land was visible only in the shape of the lines of tiny figures, extending for miles, that choked all the roads radiating out of the principal cities. It was only when they were over the southern portion of Virginia that the ravages of deadly gas became apparent. Flying low, Dick could see the fields strewn with the bodies of dead cattle. Here and there, at the doors of farmhouses, the inmates could be seen, lying together in gruesome heaps, caught and killed instantaneously as they attempted flight. Here, too, were figures on the roads. But they were figures of dead men and women. * * * * * They strewed the roads for miles, lying as they had been trapped--men, women, children, horses, mules, and dogs. The spectacle was an appalling one. Dick set his jaws grimly. He was thinking that the Council had let Von Kettler escape. He was thinking of Fredegonde. But he would not let himself think of her. She deserved no more pity than the rest of the murderous crew. Over the Carolinas the conditions were still more appalling. Here deadly gas had struck with all its concentrated power. A city materialized out of the blue distance, a factory town with all chimneys spiring upward into the blue, a section of tall buildings intersected by canyonlike streets, around it a rim of trim houses, bungalows, indicative of prosperity and comfort. And it was a city of the dead. For everywhere around it, on all the roads, the dead lay piled on top of one another. For miles--all the inhabitants, rich and poor, business men, factory hands, negroes. There had been a mad rush as the fatal gas drove onward upon its lethal way, and all the fugitives had been overwhelmed simultaneously. Here were golf links, with little groups strewn on the grass and fairways; here, at one of the holes, four men, their putters still in their hands, crouched in death. Here was the wreckage of a train that had collided with a string of freight cars at an untended switch, and from the shattered windows the heads and bodies of the dead protruded in serried ranks. Dick looked back. His flight was driving on behind him. He guessed their feelings. They had sworn, as he had sworn, that none of them would return without stamping out that abomination from the earth forever. * * * * * He signaled to the flight to rise, and zoomed upward to twelve thousand feet. He did not want to look upon any more of those horrors. At that height, the peaceful landscape lay extended underneath, in a checker-board of farms and woodlands. One could pretend that it was all a vile dream. He avoided Charleston, and winged out above the Atlantic, striking a straight course along the coast toward the Bahamas. The shores of Georgia vanished in the west. Dick began to breathe more freely. His mind shook off its weight of horror. Only the blue sea and the blue sky were visible The aftermath of the gale remained in the shape of a strong head breeze and white crests below. Dick glanced at the guinea-pigs. They were busily gnawing their cabbage and carrots. The gas had evidently been entirely dissipated by the wind. Toward sunset the low jutting fore-land of Canaveral on the east coast of Florida, came into view. Dick shifted course a little. Three hours more should see them over Abaco. His flight had explicit instructions. As soon as the black gas had rendered visible the headquarters of the Invisible Emperor, they were to circle above, dropping their bombs. When these were exhausted, the machine guns would come into play. There was to be no attention paid to signals of surrender. They were to wipe out the headquarters, to kill every living thing that showed itself--and the navy and the marines would mop up anything left over. The sun went down in a blaze of gold and crimson. Night fell. The moon began to climb the east. The black sea, stretching beneath, was as empty as on the day when it was created. Nothing in the shape of navigation appeared. Two hours, three hours, and old Evans turned round in his cockpit and pointed. On the horizon a black thread was beginning to stretch against the sky. It was Abaco Island, in the Bahama group. They were nearly at their destination. An hour more--perhaps two hours, and the deadly menace that threatened America might be removed forever. Dick breathed a silent prayer for success. * * * * * They were over Abaco. A long, flat island, seventy miles or so in extreme length, and fairly wide, covered with a dense growth of tropical brush and forest, with here and there open spaces, near the seacoast an occasional farm-house. Dick dropped to five thousand, to three, to one. The moon made the whole land underneath as bright as day. There were no evidence of destruction by the hurricane. The farmhouses stood substantial and well roofed. If death had struck Abaco Island, it had been the work of man, not Nature. Dick zoomed almost to his ceiling, until, in the brilliant moonlight, he could see Abaco Island from side to side. For the most part it was heavily wooded with mahogany and lignum vitae: toward the central portion there was open land, but there was not the least sign of any construction work. Again he swooped, indicating to his flight to follow him. At a thousand feet he examined the open district intently. Here, if anywhere upon the island, the Invisible Emperor had his headquarters. Was it conceivable that a gas factory, hangars, ammunition depots could exist here invisibly, when he could look straight down upon the ground? Dick's heart sank. The hideous fear came to him that Graves had been mistaken, that he had come on a wild-goose chase. This could not be the place. It was quite incredible. Again and again he circled, studying the ground beneath. Now he could see that the tough grass and undergrowth marked curious geometrical patterns. Here, for example, was an oblong of bare earth around which the vegetation grew, and it was obviously the work of man. Here were four squares of bare ground set side by side, with thin strips of vegetation growing between them. Then of a sudden Dick knew! Those squares and parallelograms of bare ground indicated the foundations of buildings. _He was looking down on the very site of the Invisible Emperor's stronghold!_ He shouted, and pointed downward. Luke Evans looked round and nodded. He understood. He patted the camera-box with a grim smile on his old face. CHAPTER VIII _The Magnetic Trap_ Upon those squares and oblongs of bare earth, incredible as it seemed, rose the structures of the Invisible Empire, themselves both invisible and transparent, so that one looked straight down through them and saw only the ground beneath them. Every interior floor and girder must have been treated with the gas. They had been cunning. They must have discovered some permanent means of charging paint with the shadow-breaking gas, so that the buildings would remain invisible for months and years instead of hours. But they had not been cunning enough. It had not occurred to them that the foundations would still be visible underneath, for the simple reason that grass does not grow without sunlight. Dick saw old Luke Evans nodding and pointing downward. The old man picked up his end of the speaking-tube, but Dick ignored the gesture. He signaled to his flight to rise, and zoomed up, circling, and studying the land beneath. That oblong was evidently the central building. Those four squares probably housed airplanes, and each would hold half a dozen. That elliptical building might contain a dirigible. That round patch was probably the gas factory. Now Dick could see more patches of bare ground, extending in the direction of the sea. He gunned his ship and followed the gap among the trees to the ocean, a few miles distant. Yes, there were more evidence of activity here. Beside the water, in what looked like a deep natural harbor, was what seemed to be the foundations of a dock. Perhaps even vessels of war floated on the phosphorescent Bahama sea. * * * * * He circled back, his flock wheeling like a flight of birds and following him. He signaled to them to scatter. They had certainly been observed; at any moment a hail of lead might assail them invisibly out of the air. They must get to work quickly. But had they understood the significance of those bare patches? Dick saw Luke Evans still fidgeting impatiently with his end of the speaking-tube, and picked it up. "I'm thinking, Captain Rennell, we've got no time to lose if we want to keep the upper hand of those devils," called the old man. "Yes, you're right," Dick answered. "Lay a trail of gas bombs all around those hangars and buildings, enough to hold them dark for some time. And keep a bomb or two in reserve." Luke Evans shouted back. The plane was again above the structures. The old man dropped a bomb over the side, and Dick zoomed again, his flight wheeling up behind him. Higher and higher, banking and going round in a succession of tight spirals, Dick flew. Every moment he expected the blow to fall. As he rose, Luke Evans dropped bomb after bomb. A thousand feet beneath the flight was taking up positions, hovering with the helicopters, looking up to Dick for the signal, and waiting. Then from beneath the cloud of black gas began to rise, as Luke Evans dropped his bombs. It filled the lower spaces of the sky, blotting out the land in impenetrable darkness. That darkness, above which Dick and his flight were soaring, rose like a solid wall, built by some prehistoric race that aimed to fling a tower into the heavens. * * * * * And then--the miracle! Dick gasped in sheer delight as he realized that he had made no mistake. At first all he could see was a number of criss-crossing phosphorescent lines that appeared shimmering through the blackness underneath. They ran luminously here and there, forming no particular pattern, much like the figures on the radium dial of a watch when first they come into wavering visibility at night. Then the lines began to intersect one another, to assume geometric patterns and curves. And bit by bit they took meaning and significance. And suddenly the whole invisible stronghold lay revealed upon the ground beneath, a shining, dazzling play of weaving light. Buildings and hangars stood out, clearly revealed; the rounded vault of a dirigible hangar, and the shining ribbon of a road that ran through a pitch-dark tarmac, and was evidently constructed from some gas-impregnated materials. On this tarmac was a flight of shining airplanes, ready to take off. There were the odd, ovoid figures of the aviators in their silken overalls. More figures appeared, running out from the buildings. It was clear that the sudden raid had taken them all by surprise. Luke Evans yelled and pointed. "We've got them now, sir!" Dick heard above the whine of the helicopter engine. "We've--" But of a sudden the old man's voice died away, though his mouth was still moving. Dick leaned out of his cockpit and fired a single red Very light, the signal for the attack. And from each plane of his flight, beneath him, a bomb slid from its rack and went hurtling down upon the gang below, while the airplanes circled and hovered, each taking up its station. * * * * * Dick was too late. By a whole minute he had missed his chance. He realized that immediately, for before the red light had flared from his pistol, the hostile planes were in the air. He had flown too low, and given the alarm. It meant a fight now, instead of a mad dog destruction, and Dick did not underestimate the power of the enemy. But he felt a thrill of furious satisfaction at the prospect of battle. From every plane the bombs were falling. Underneath, ruin and destruction, and leaping flames--and yet darkness, save for the phosphorescent outlines of the buildings. And the lines of these were broken, converging into strange criss-crosses of luminosity, as the beams fell in shapeless heaps. Dark fire, sweeping through the headquarters of the Invisible Emperor, a veritable hell for those below! A taste of the hell that they had made for others! Then a strange phenomenon obtruded itself upon Dick's notice. _Nothing was audible!_ The bombs were falling, but they were falling silently. No sound came up from beneath. And, except for the throbbing of his engine, Dick would have thought it had stopped. He could no longer hear it. That terrific holocaust of death and destruction was inaudible. Skimming the upper reach of the air, high above that wall of darkness, Dick saw old Luke Evans pick up his end of the speaking-tube, and mechanically followed suit. He could see the old man's lips moving. But he heard nothing! And now another phenomenon was borne in on his notice. His flight were perhaps five hundred feet beneath him, hovering a little above the barrage of black gas. But they were converging oddly. And there was no sight of the airplanes that Dick had just seen taking off from the invisible tarmac. * * * * * Dick fired two Very lights as a signal to his flight to scatter. What were they doing, bunching together like a flock of sheep, when at any moment the enemy planes might come swooping in, riddling them with bullets? He thrust the stick forward--and then realized that his controls had gone dead! He thought for a moment that a wire had snapped. But the stick responded perfectly to his hand, only it had no longer control over his plane. He kicked right rudder, and the plane remained motionless. He pushed home the soaring lever, to neutralize the helicopter and the plane still soared. Then he noticed that the needle of his earth-inductor compass-indicator was oscillating madly, and realized that it was not his plane that was at fault. Underneath him, his flight seemed to be milling wildly as the ships turned in every direction of the compass. But not for long. They were nosing in, until the whole flight resembled an enormous airplane engine, with twelve radial points, corresponding to their propellers, and the noses pointing symmetrically inward, like a herd of game, yarding in winter time. And now the true significance came home to Dick. A vertical line of magnetic force, an invisible mast, had been shot upward from the ground. The airplanes were moored to it by their noses, as effectively as if they had been fastened with steel wires. And he, too, was struggling against that magnetic force that was slowly drawing him, despite his utmost efforts, to a fixed position five hundred feet above his flight. * * * * * For a few moments, by feeding his engine gas to the limit, Dick thought he might have a chance of escaping. Her nose a fixed point, Dick whirled round and round in a dizzy maze, attempting to break that invisible mooring-chain. Then suddenly the engine went dead. He was trapped helplessly. He saw old Evans gesticulating wildly in the front cockpit. The old man hoisted himself, leaned over the cowling gibbered in Dick's ear. The silent engine had ceased to throb, and the old man's shouts were simply not translated into sound. Suddenly the flight beneath jerked downward, just as a flag jerks when it is hauled down a pole. They vanished into the dark cloud beneath. At the same time there came a jerk that dropped Dick's plane a hundred feet, and flung him violently against the rim of the cockpit. Another followed. By drops of a hundred feet at a time, Dick was being hauled down into the darkness underneath him. It rushed up at him. One moment he was suspended upon the rim of it, seeing the moon and stars above him; the next he had been plunged into utter blackness. Blackness more intense than anything that could be conceived--soundless blackness, that was the added horror of it. Blackness of Luke Evans's contriving, but none the less fearful on that account! And yet, as Dick was jerked slowly downward, slowly a pale visibility began to diffuse itself underneath. The black cloud was beginning to roll away. The luminous lines began to fade, and in place of them appeared little leaping tongues of fire. In front of him Dick saw Luke Evans's form begin to pattern itself upon the darkness. He saw the form move sidewise, and caught at Luke's arm as he was about to hurl another gas bomb. "No!" he shouted--and heard no sound come from his lips. * * * * * Luke understood. He seemed to be replacing the bomb in the rack. Beneath them now, as they were jerked downward, were fantastic swirls of black mist, and, at the bottom, a pit of fire that was slowly coming into visibility. Dick uttered a cry of horror! Five hundred feet below his plane he saw the dim forms of his flight, still bunched together, noses almost touching. And they were dropping straight into that flaming furnace of ruin underneath, which was growing clearer every instant. Down, jerk by jerk. Down! The black cloud was fast dispersing from the ground. The flight were hardly a thousand feet above the fire. Down--a long jerk that one! Once more! The flames leaped up hungrily about the doomed airships. Cries of mad horror broke from Dick's lips as he witnessed the destruction of ships and men. He could see almost clearly now. The twelve ships, still retaining their nose-to-nose formation, were in the very heart of the fire. Spurts of exploding gasoline thrust their white tongues upward. There was only one consolation: for the doomed men, death must have come practically instantaneously. From where he hung, Dick could feel the fierce heat of the flames below. In front of him, old Luke Evans sat in his cockpit like one petrified. He was feebly fumbling at his camera-box, as if he had some idea of using it, and had forgotten that it was fixed to the plane, but the old man seemed temporarily to have lost his wits. Rushing flames surrounded the burning airships, reducing them to a solid, welded mass of incandescent metal. Dick looked down, waiting for the next jerk that would summon him to join his men. At the moment he was not conscious of either fear or horror, only intense rage against the murderers and regret that he could never bring back the news of victory. * * * * * The cloud had almost dissipated. In place of the phosphorescence, electric lights had appeared, making the ground beneath perfectly visible. Dick could see a number of men grouped together at the entrance to a large building, part of which had been wrecked by a bomb, though there were no evidences of fire. Other structures had been dismantled and knocked about, but what remained of them had not been charred by fire. Evidently they had been fireproofed. Perhaps the gas itself was incombustible. Only in the middle of the tarmac, where the remnants of the airplanes blazed, was there any sign of fire. There were three machines resembling dynamos, placed one at each corner of the tarmac, equidistant from the central holocaust. A half-dozen men were grouped about each of them, and by the light from the huge reflector over each Dick saw that they were whirring busily. At the time it did not occur to him that these were the machines that were sending out the electrical force that had held the airplanes powerless. But as he looked, his mind still a turmoil of hate and hopeless anger, he saw one of the three machines cease whirring. The group about it dispersed, the light above went out. And now his plane, as if drawn by the power of the two remaining machines, began to move jerkily again, not down toward the burning wreckage, but sidewise, away from it. Straight out toward the side of the tarmac it moved jerked downward diagonally, until it rested only a few feet above the ground. Then suddenly Dick felt the plane quiver, as if released from the power of the force that had held it. It nosed down and crashed, rolled over amid the wreckage of a shattered wing. The concussion shot Dick from the cockpit clear of the smashed machine. He landed upon his head, and went out instantly. CHAPTER IX _The Invisible Emperor_ It was the sound of his name, spoken repeatedly, that brought Dick back to consciousness. He opened his eyes, blinking in broad daylight. He stared about him, and the first thing he saw was Luke Evans, regarding him anxiously from a little distance away. He saw that it was Luke who had spoken. He had heard the old man distinctly. The condition of inaudibility was gone. Not that of invisibility. Dick stared about him in bewilderment. For a moment, before he quite realized what had happened to him, he thought he had lost his mind. Underneath him was a thick rug, beneath his head a pillow; he could feel both of them, and yet all he could see was the open country, a clearing with shrubbery on either side, and, beyond that, a luxurious growth of tropical trees. Under him, to all visual appearance, was the bare ground. He moved, and heard the clank of chains. He looked down at himself. His wrists were loosely linked to a chain that seemed to stretch tight into vacancy and end in nothing. His ankles were bound likewise. And both chains appeared to be of solid silver, but thick enough to give them the strength of iron! Then he perceived that old Evans was bound in the same way. "Rennell! Rennell!" repeated the old man in a sort of whimper. "Thank God you've come out of it! I was afraid you were dead." "What's happened?" asked Dick. "Where are we? Didn't they get us?" "They've got us, damn them!" snarled old Evans. "All the rest burned to cinders, those fine fellows, Rennell! You were thrown unconscious, but none of my tough old bones were hurt. They pulled us out of the wreckage and brought us in here and tied us with these silver chains." "In here? But where are we?" demanded Dick, trying to pass his hand across his aching forehead, and realizing that the chain, though it seemed fastened to nothing, was perfectly taut. * * * * * "In one of their damned invisible houses," whimpered the old man. "They're fireproof. Nearly all our bombs fell on the tarmac, and they did hardly any damage at all. One of those devils was bragging about it to me. I couldn't see anything but his eyes. And they've taken away my gas-box," wailed old Luke. Dick cursed comprehensively and was silent. The burning rage that filled him left him incapable of other utterance. Silver chains! They must be madmen--yes, that was the only explanation. Madmen who had escaped from somewhere, obtained possession of scientific secrets, and banded themselves together to overcome the world. If he could get the chance of a blow at them before he died! He heard a door swing open--a door somewhere out on the prairie. Two men sprang into sudden visibility and approached him. There was nothing invisible about these men, though they had seemed to have materialized out of nothing. They wore the same black, trimly fitting uniform that Dick had seen in the White House. They were flesh and blood human beings like themselves. "I congratulate you upon your recovery, Captain Rennell," remarked one of them with ironical politeness. "Also upon your shrewd coup. Needless to say, it had no chance of success, but we were misinformed as to the hour at which you might be expected. We thought it would take the fools at Washington a little longer to puzzle out our location--and then we did not put quite sufficient force into our hurricane. Quite an artificial one, Captain." Dick, glaring at them, said nothing, and the one who had spoken turned to his companion, laughing, and said something in a foreign language that he did not recognize. "His Majesty the Emperor commands your presence, and that of this old fool," said the first man. "Do not attempt to escape us. Death will be instantaneous." He drew a glass rod from his pocket, the tip of which glowed with a pale blue light. * * * * * Again he spoke to his companion, who moved apparently a few feet distant out on the prairie. Suddenly Dick saw old Evans' chain slacken: then Dick's slackened too. He understood that he was unbound, though his wrists and ankles were still loosely fastened. The second man took his station beside Luke Evans and motioned to him to rise. The first man beckoned to Dick to do the same. The two prisoners got upon their feet, trailing each a length of clanking chain. Each of the two guards covered his captive with the glass rod and motioned to him to precede him. Choking with fury, Dick obeyed. He had taken a dozen steps with his guard uttered a sharp command to halt, at the same time shouting some word of command. The edge of a door appeared, also seeming to materialize out of space. It widened, and Dick realized that he was looking at the unpainted inner side of a door whose outside was invisible. Beyond the door appeared a flight of steps. Dick passed through and descended them. He counted fifteen. He emerged into a timbered underground passage, well lit with lamps, filled with what seemed to be mercury vapor. Behind him walked his guard: behind the guard he heard Luke Evans shambling. Both chains were clinking, and again Dick's fury almost overcame him. He controlled himself. He had no hope or desire for life, but he meant to strike some sort of blow before he died, if it were possible. They turned out of the timbered passage, Dick's guard now walking at his side, the glass rod menacing his back. Dick found himself in a large subterranean room of extraordinary character. The walls were not merely timbered, but paneled. Pictures hung upon them, there were soft rugs underfoot, there was antique furniture. Everything was in plain sight. * * * * * There was a door at the farther end, from beyond which came the murmur of voices. Two guards in the same black uniform, but without the ornamental silver braid, stood to attention, long halberds in their hands. One spoke a challenge. The guard at Dick's side answered. The two men stepped backward, each about two feet, and pulled the two cords on either side of a curtain behind the open door. Dick passed through. He stopped in sheer amazement. The gorgeousness of this larger room into which he entered was almost stupefying. It seemed to have been lifted bodily from some European palace. Mirrors with gilt edges ran along the side. On the floor was a single huge rug of Oriental weave. At the farther end was a throne of gilt, lined with red velvet in which sat a man. An old man, of perhaps eighty years, with a grey peaked beard and fierce, commanding features. On his head was a gold crown glittering with gems. About him were gathered some twoscore men and a few women. Those ranged on either side of the throne wore, like its occupant, robes of red, lined with ermine. The rank behind wore shorter robes, less decorative, but no less extraordinary. They might all have stepped out of some medieval court. Behind this second line, and half-encircling them, were officers in the black uniform with the silver braid. There had been chattering, but as Dick passed through into the room it was succeeded by complete silence. Dick fixed his eyes upon the old man on the throne. He knew him! Knew him for a once famous European ruler who had lost his throne in the war. A man always of unbalanced mentality, who, after living for years in exile, had been reported dead three years before. A madman who had vanished to make this last attempt upon the world, aided and abetted by the secret group of nobles who had surrounded him in the days of his pomp and power. * * * * * Old men, all of those in the first line! Madmen too, perhaps, as madness begets madness. Behind them, younger men, infected by the strange malady, and enthusiastic for their desperate cause. Yes, Dick knew this Invisible Emperor, lurking here in his underground palace. He knew Von Kettler, too, in the second line, close to the Emperor's throne. And, among the women in their robes, grouped picturesquely about that throne, he knew Fredegonde Valmy. Dark-haired beneath her coronet, of radiant beauty, she fixed her eyes upon Dick's. Not a muscle of her face quivered. Then only did Dick see something else, which he had not hitherto observed, owing to its concealment by the robes of those grouped about the Emperor, and the sight of it sent such a thrill of fury through him that he stood where he was, unable to speak or move a muscle. The throne was set on a sort of dais, with three steps in front of it. The lowest of these steps was hollow. Within this hollow appeared the head and shoulders of a man. An elderly man clothed in parti-colored red and yellow, the time-honored garment of court fools. He was on his hands and knees, and the round of his back fitted into the hollow of the step, and had a flat board over it, so that the Emperor, in ascending his throne, would place his foot upon it. He was kept in that position with heavy chains of what looked like gold, which passed about his neck and arms, and fitted into heavy gold staples in the wood. And the old man was President Hargreaves of the United States! * * * * * The President of the American Republic, chained as a footstool for the Invisible Emperor, the madman who defied the world. Dick stood petrified, staring into the mild face of the old man, still incapable of speech. Then a herald, carrying a long trumpet, to which a square banner was attached, strode forward from one side of the grotesque assemblage. "Dog, on your knees when His Majesty deigns to admit you to the Presence!" he shouted. The guard at Dick's side prodded him with his glass rod. Then the storm of mad fury in Dick's heart released limbs and voice. The cry that came from his lips was like nothing human. He leaped upon the guard with a swift uppercut that sent him sprawling. The glass rod slipped from his hands to the rug, striking the edge of his shoe, and broke to fragments. A single streak of fire shot from it, blasting a black streak across the Oriental rug. Dick leaped toward the throne, and the assemblage, as if paralyzed by his sudden maneuver, remained watching him without moving. Then a woman screamed, and instantly the picturesque gathering had dissolved into a mob placing itself about the person of the Emperor, who sprang from his throne in agitation. Dick was almost at the steps. But it was not at the Emperor that he leaped. He sprang to Hargreaves's side. "Mr. President, I'm an American," he babbled. "We've located this gang, we'll blow them off the face of the earth. In chains--God, in chains, sir--" Dick stumbled over the length of his own chain that he had been dragging behind him--stumbled and fell prone upon the floor. Before he could regain his feet they were upon him. * * * * * A dozen men were holding him, despite his mad, frenzied struggles, and as, at length, he paused, exhausted, one of them, covering his head with a glass rod, looked up at the Emperor, who had resumed his seat. Dick calmed himself. Still gripped, he straightened his body, and gave the mad monarch back look for look. For a moment the two men regarded each other. Then a peal of laughter broke from the Invisible Emperor's lips. And any one who heard that peal--any one save those accustomed to him--might have known that it was a madman's laughter. He flung back his head and laughed, and the whole crowd laughed too. All those sycophants roared and chuckled--all except Fredegonde. It was not till afterward that Dick remembered that. He stood up. "Dog of an American," he roared, "do you know why you were brought here? It was because I wanted one Yankee to live and see the irresistible powers that I exercise, so that he can go back and report on them to those fools in Washington who still think they can defy me, the messenger of the All-Highest. "I tell you that the things I have done are nothing in comparison with the things that I have yet to do, if your insane government of pig-headed fools persists in its defiance. It is my plan to send you back to tell them that their President lies bound in gold chains as my footstool. That the hurricane which spread the gas through southern America was a mere summer zephyr in comparison with the storm that I shall send next. * * * * * "All the resources of Nature are at my command thanks to the illustrious chemists who have been secretly working for the past ten years to serve me. I, the All-Highest, have been commanded by the Almighty to scourge the world for its insolence in rejecting me, and especially the pig-race of Yankees whose pride has grown so great. Mine is the divinely appointed task to cast down your ridiculous democracies and re-establish the divine world-order of an Emperor and his nobility. "That is why I have chosen, to permit so mean a thing as you to live. As for the old fool beside you, who thought to stay my power with his box of tricks--his gas-box is already being analyzed by my chemists, and in a few hours the trivial secret will be at my disposal." "And that's just where you're wrong," piped old Luke Evans in his cracked voice. "That gas can't be analyzed, because it contains an unknown isotope, and, as for yourself, you're nothing but a daft old fool, with your tin-horn trumpery!" For a moment the Emperor stood like a statue, staring at old Luke. The expression on his face was that of a madman, but a madman through whose brain a straggling ray of realization has dawned. It was the look upon his face that held the whole assemblage spellbound. Then suddenly came intervention. Through a doorway in the side of the hall came one of the officers in black. He advanced to the foot of the throne and made a deep, hurried bow, speaking rapidly in some language incomprehensible to Dick. The Emperor started, and then a peal of laughter left his lips. "Pig of a Yankee," he shouted to Dick, "your contemptible navy's now approaching our shores, with a dirigible scout above it. You shall now see how I deal with such swine!" CHAPTER X _The Tricks of the Trade_ He barked a command, and instantly Dick was seized by two of the guards, one of whom--the one Dick had knocked down--took the occasion to administer a buffeting in the process of overcoming him. For the sight of the honored President of the United States--that kindly old man straining his eyes to meet Dick's own--in the parti-colored garb of red and yellow, and chained like a beast below the madman's throne, again filled Dick with a fury beyond all control. It was only when he had been half-stunned again by the vicious blows of his captors, delivered with short truncheons of heavy wood, that at length he desisted from his futile struggle. With swimming eyes he looked upon the gathering about the throne, which, again taking its cue from the madman, way roaring with laughter at his antics. And again Dick's eyes encountered those of Fredegonde Valmy. The girl was not smiling. She was looking straight at him, and for a moment it seemed to Dick as if he read some message in her eyes. Only for an instant that idea flashed through his mind. He was in no mood to receive messages. As he stood panting like a wild beast at bay, suddenly a filmy substance was thrown over his head from behind. Then, as his face emerged, and the rest of his body was swiftly enveloped, he realized what was happening. They had thrown over him one of the invisible garments. He could feel the stuff about him, but he could no longer see his own body or limbs. From his own ken, Dick Rennell had vanished utterly. Where his legs and feet should have been, there was only the rug, with the burn from the glass tube. He raised one arm and could not see arm or fingers. In another moment invisible cords had been flung around him. Dick's efforts to renew the struggle were quickly cut short. Trussed helplessly, he could only stand glaring at the madman rocking with laughter upon his tinsel throne. Beside him, similarly bound, stood Luke Evans, but Dick was only conscious of the old man's presence by reason of the short, rasping, emphatic curses that broke from his lips. * * * * * The Emperor turned on his throne and beckoned to Von Kettler, who approached with a deferential bow. "Nobility, we charge you with the care of these two prisoners," he addressed him. "Have the old one removed to the laboratory, and give orders that he shall assist our chemists to the best of his power in their analysis of the black gas. As for the other, take him up to the central office, and show him how we deal with Yankees and all other pigs. Show him everything, so that he may take back a correct account of our irresistible powers when we dismiss him." "Come!" barked one of the guards in Dick's ear. Dick attempted no further resistance. Convinced of its futility, sick and reeling from the blows he had received, he accompanied his captors quietly. There was nothing more that he could do, either for President Hargreaves or for old Luke, but he still imagined the possibility of somehow warning the approaching fleet or the occupants of the dirigible. He was led along the passage, past the guards, and up the stairs again. The top door opened upon vacancy; it closed, and vanished. Dick felt the rugs beneath his feet, but he was to all appearances standing on a square of bare earth in the middle of a prairie. "Come!" barked the guard again, and Dick accompanied him, trailing his silver chain. Behind came Von Kettler. "Here are steps!" said the guard, after they had proceeded a short distance. Dick stumbled against the lowest step of an invisible flight. The breeze was cut off, showing that they had entered a building. Underneath was a large oval of bare ground. Dick found a handrail and groped his way up around a spiral staircase, four flights of it. "Here is a room!" * * * * * Dick saw that widening edge of door again. The room inside was perfectly visible, though it seemed to be supported upon air. It was a spheroid, of huge size, with a number of large windows set into the walls, and it was filled with machinery. About a dozen workmen in blue blouses were moving to and fro, attending to what appeared to be a number of enormous dynamos, but there were other apparatus of whose significance Dick was ignorant. The dynamos were whirring with intense velocity, but not the slightest sound was audible. Von Kettler stepped to a switch attached to a stanchion of white metal, surmounted by a huge opaque glass dome, and threw it over. Instantly the hum and whir of machinery became audible, the sound of footsteps, the voices of the workmen, and the creak of boards beneath their feet. "You see, we have discovered the means of destroying sound waves as well as shadows, and it was a much simpler feat," said Von Kettler with a sneer. "Tell them that when you get back to Washington, Yankee pig. Also you might be interested to know that most of your bombs fell on camouflaged structures that we had erected with the intention of deceiving you." He gestured to Dick to precede him, and halted him at a plain round iron pipe or rod that rose up through the floor and passed through the roof. It was surrounded by a mesh of fine wire. Attached to it were various gauges, with dials showing red and black numbers. "This is perhaps our greatest achievement, swine," remarked Von Kettler, affably. "You shall see its operations from above." He pointed to a narrow spiral staircase rising at the far end of the room. "It is the practical application of Einstein's gravitation and electricity in field relation. It is by means of this, and the three dynamos on the ground that we were able to neutralize your engines last night and bring them down where we wanted them. You must be sure to tell the Washington hogs about that." * * * * * He motioned to Dick to cross the room and ascend the spiral staircase. Following him, he flung another switch similar to the first one, and instantly all sound within the room was cut off. They ascended the winding flight and emerged upon a floor or platform. Dick felt it under his feet, but he could see nothing except the ground, far beneath him. He seemed to be suspended in the void. He stopped, groping, hesitating to advance. Von Kettler's jarring laugh grated on his ears. "Don't be afraid, swine," he jeered. "This place is enclosed. There is a shadow-breaking device on every floor, which renders us complete masters of camouflage." A switch snapped. Dick found himself instantly in a rotunda, roofed with glass, sections of which were raised to a height of three or four feet from the wooden base, admitting a gentle breeze. Three or four men were moving about in it, but these wore the black uniform with the silver braid, and Von Kettler's manner was deferential as he addressed them, jerking his hand contemptuously toward Dick. Grins of derision and malice appeared on all the faces. Save one, an elderly officer, apparently of high rank, who came forward and raised his hand to the salute. "Captain Rennell," he said, "we are at war with your nation, but we are also, I hope, gentlemen." He turned to Von Kettler. "Is it seemly," he asked, "that an officer of the American army should be brought here in chains and cords?" "Excellency, it is His Majesty's command," responded Von Kettler, with a servile smirk that hardly concealed his elation. "Moreover, the American is to witness the forthcoming destruction of the Yankee fleet." The elderly officer reddened, turned away without replying. Dick looked about him. * * * * * There was less machinery in this room. The iron pillar that he had seen came through the floor and terminated some five feet above it in another of the opaque glass domes, filled with iridescent fire. About it was a complicated arrangement of dials and gauges. In the centre of the room was a sort of camera obscura. A large hood projected above a flat table, and an officer was half-concealed beneath it, apparently studying the table busily. "Come, American, you shall see your navy on its way to destruction," said Von Kettler, beckoning Dick within the hood. The officer stepped from the table, whose top was a sheet of silvered glass, leaving Von Kettler and Dick in front of it. Dick looked. At first he could see nothing but the vast stretch of sea; then he began to make out tiny dots at the table's end, terminating in minute blurs that were evidently smoke from the funnels. "Your ships," said Von Kettler, smiling. "This is the dirigible." He pointed to another dot that came into sight and disappeared almost instantly. "They are a hundred and fifty miles away. Explain to your friends in Washington that our super-telescopic sights are based upon a refraction of light that overcomes the earth's curvature. It is simple, but it happens not to have been worked out until my Master commanded it." Dick watched those tiny dots in fascination, mentally computing. At an average speed of fifty knots an hour, the squadron's steaming rate, they should be off the coast within three hours. The dirigible would take two, if it went ahead to scout, as was almost certain. * * * * * Dick stepped back from beneath the hood and glanced about him. If only his arms were not bound, he might do enough damage within a few seconds to put the deadlier machinery out of commission, if only the silvered mirror. He glanced about him. Von Kettler, interpreting his thought, smiled coolly. "You are helpless, my dear Yankee pig," he said. "But there is more to see. Oblige me by accompanying me up to the top story." He pointed to a ladder running up beside the iron pillar through an opening in the roof, and Dick, with a shrug of the shoulders, complied. He emerged upon a small platform, apparently protruding into vacancy. Far underneath he saw the clearing, and two airplanes on the tarmac, the aviators looking like beetles from that height. He looked out to sea and saw no signs of the fleet. "You have heard of St. Simeon Stylites, Yankee?" purred Von Kettler. "The gentleman who spent forty years of his life upon a tall pillar, in atonement for his sins? It is His Majesty's desire that you spend, not forty years, but two or three hours up here, meditating upon his grandeur, before returning to earth. It is also possible that you will witness something of considerable interest. Look out to sea!" Dick turned his head involuntarily. He heard Von Kettler's laugh, heard the snap of a switch--then suddenly he was alone in the void. At that snap of the switch, everything had vanished from view behind him, the building, even the platform on which he stood. His feet seemed to rest on nothing. Yet below him he could still see the airplanes, and more being wheeled out. * * * * * A sense of extreme physical nausea overcame him. He reeled, then managed to steady himself. He, too, was invisible to his own eyes. Involuntarily he cried out. No sound came from his lips. He stood there, invisible in an invisible, soundless void. For what seemed an unending period he occupied himself with endeavoring to obtain the sense of balance. Then, with a great effort, he managed to loosen the cords that bound his right arm to his side. A mighty wrench, and he had slipped them up above his elbow. His right lower arm was free. He extended it cautiously, and his hand encountered a railing. Instantly he felt more at ease. He began moving slowly around in a widening circle, and discovered that the platform was enclosed. The further side was, however, open, and he began sliding forward, foot by foot, to locate himself. Once his foot slipped over the edge, and he drew back hastily. He felt on the other side, and discovered that he was upon what seemed a plank walk, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the ground, with no rail on either side, and some six feet wide. Very cautiously he shuffled his way along it. It was solid enough, although invisible, but more than once Dick walked perilously close to one edge or the other. At length he went down on his hands and knees, and proceeded, crawling, until his movements were arrested by what was unmistakably a door. The plank bridge, then, connected the top stories of two buildings, but what the second was, there was no means of knowing. The door was barred on the other side, and did not yield an iota to Dick's cautious pressure. Dick felt the frame. Beyond was glass, reinforced with iron on the outside, the latter metal forming a sort of lattice work. Cautiously Dick began to crawl up the rounded dome. * * * * * Foot by foot he made his way, clinging to the iron bars, until he felt that he had reached the point of the dome's maximum convexity. He wedged his feet against a bar and rested. Only now was it brought home to him that it would be impossible for him to find his way back to the plank. A long time must have passed, for, looking out to sea, he could see the squadron now, minute points on the horizon, exuding smudges of smoke. The dirigible was still invisible. The airplanes had either left the tarmac or had been wrapped in the gas-impregnated cloth, for both they and the aviators had vanished. Suddenly Dick had an odd sensation that the iron was growing warm. In another moment or two he had no doubt of it. The iron bar he clutched was distinctly warm; it was growing hot. He shifted his grasp to the adjacent bar and even in that moment the heat had increased perceptibly. Suddenly there came a vibration, a sense of movement. Dick was being swung outward. The whole dome seemed to be dropping into space. He dug his feet and fingers under the hot rods, and felt himself sliding over on his back. Back--back, till he was lying horizontally in space, and clutching desperately at the iron bar, which was growing hotter every moment. The sliding movement ceased. It was as if the whole upper section of the glass dome had opened outward. But the heat of the bars was becoming unbearable, and gusts of hot air seemed to be proceeding from within. Hot or not, Dick's only alternative was to work his way back to the stable portion of the dome, or to frizzle until he dropped through space. Clinging desperately to the bars, he began working back, reaching from bar to bar with his right hand and dragging his feet, with the clanking chain attached, from bar to bar also. * * * * * How he gained the base of the dome he was never able afterward to understand. The heat had grown intolerable; his hands were blistering. Somehow he reached it. He rested a moment despite the heat. But to find the plank walk was clearly impossible. In another minute he must drop. Better that than to fry there like St. Lawrence on his griddle. And then, just when he had resigned himself to that last drop, there came an unexpected diversion. Almost beside him a window was hung back. A man looked out. Dick saw one of the workmen in the blue blouses, and, behind him, within the dome, what seemed like an empty room. Dick was slightly above the man. As his head and shoulders appeared, he let himself go, landing squarely across his back. He slid down his shoulders through the open window into the interior of the dome. The man, flung against the frame of the window by the shock, uttered a piercing cry. Before he could recover his stand, or take in what had happened to him, Dick had gained his feet and leaped upon him. His right hand closed upon his throat. He bore him to the floor and choked him into insensibility. CHAPTER XI _In the Laboratory_ Not until the man's struggles had ceased, and he lay unconscious, panting, and blue in the face, did Dick release him. Then he looked about him. Save for the workman, he was alone in a rotunda, open to the sky, and, as he had supposed, the whole upper portion of the dome had been flung back, leaving an immense aperture into which the sun was shining, flecking the interior with shafts of light. The temperature, despite the opening of the dome, must have been in excess of a hundred and twenty-five degrees. There was nothing except an immense central shaft, up which ran a hollow pole of glass, cut off by the invisible paint at the summit of the dome. The inside of this glass pole was glowing with colored fires, and it was from this that the intolerable heat came, though its function Dick could not imagine. One thing was clear: It was growing hotter each moment. To remain in that rotunda meant death within a brief period of time. _And there was no way out!_ Dick glared around him, searching the glass walls in vain. No semblance of a stairway or ladder, even. Yet the workman must have entered by some ingress--if only Dick could discover it! He began running round the interior of the dome in the brilliant sunshine, searching frantically for that ingress. And it was growing hotter! The sweat was pouring down his face beneath the invisible garment. Dick was vaguely aware that the silence switch had been thrown in the room, for his feet made no sound, but the knowledge was latent in his mind. Two or three times he circumnavigated the interior of the dome, like a rat in a trap. Then suddenly he saw a section of the flooring rise in a corner, and a workman in a blue blouse appear out of the trap door. * * * * * He stood there, his face muscles working as he shouted for his companion, but no sound came from his lips. He looked about him, and saw the unconscious man beside the window. He started in his direction. With a shout, Dick hurled himself toward him. And he checked himself even as he was about to leap. For he realized that the second workman neither saw nor heard him. Yet some subconscious impression of danger must have reached his mind, for the workman stopped too, instinctively assuming an attitude of defense. Dick gathered a dozen links of his wrist-chain in his right hand, leaped and struck. The workman crumpled to the floor, a little thread of blood creeping from his right temple. It was the thing upon which Dick looked back afterward with less satisfaction than any other, leaving the two unconscious men in that room of death. Yet there was nothing else he could have done. He ran to the trap, and saw a ladder leading down. In a moment he had swung himself through and closed the trap behind him. The material that lined the walls below must have had almost perfect insulating qualities, for the temperature here was no hotter than in the Bahamas on a hot summer day. Dick scrambled down the ladder and found himself in a machine-shop. Nobody was there, and tools of all sorts were lying about, as well as machinery whose purpose he did not understand. A pair of heavy pliers and a vise were sufficient to rid Dick of his wrist and ankle chains in a minute or two. With a knife he slashed the cords of invisible stuff that bound him. He stood up, cramped, but free. He picked up an iron bar that was lying loose on a table beside a machine, and advanced to the staircase in one corner of the shop. As he approached it, another workman came running up. * * * * * Dick stood aside in an embrasure in the wall partly occupied by a machine. The man passed within two feet of him and never saw him. Only then did Dick quite realize that he was actually invisible. The moment the man had passed him, Dick ran to the staircase. He descended one flight; he was half way down another when a yell of pain and imprecation came to his ears. He knew that voice: it was Luke Evans's! With three bounds Dick reached the bottom of the stairs. He saw a large room in front of him. No mistaking the nature of this room; it was an ordinary laboratory, fitted out with the greatest elaboration, and divided into two parts by paneling. And sight and sound were on. In the part nearer Dick three men were grouped about a large dynamo, which was sending out a high, musical note as it spun. Levers and dials were all about it, and above it was the base of the glass tube that Dick had seen above. In the other part were five or six men. Three of them were testing some substance at a table; three more were gathered about old Luke Evans, whose silver chains had been removed and replaced by ropes, which bound his limbs, and also bound him to a heavy chair, which seemed to be affixed to the ground. One of the three had a piece of metal in a pair of long-handled pliers. It was white hot, and a white electric spark that shot to and fro between two terminals close by, showed where it had been heated. Dick started; he recognized one of the three men as Von Kettler. He moved slowly forward, very softly, his feet making no sound on the fiber matting that covered the floor. * * * * * "Did that feel good, American swine?" asked Von Kettler softly, and Dick saw, with horror, a red weal on the old man's forehead. "Now you are perhaps in a more gracious mood, Professor? The unknown isotope in that black gas of yours--you are disposed to give us the chemical formula?" "I'll see you in hell first," raved old Luke Evans, writhing in his chair. Von Kettler turned to the man holding the white-hot metal, and nodded. But at that moment a door behind Evans's chair opened, and Fredegonde Valmy appeared in the entrance. Von Kettler turned hastily, snatched the pliers from the man's hand, and laid the metal in a receptacle. But the girl had seen the action. She looked at the weal on Luke's forehead, and clenched her hands; her eyes dilated with horror. "You have been torturing him, Hugo!" she cried. "Freda, what are you doing in here? Oblige me by withdrawing immediately!" cried Von Kettler. "Where is Captain Rennell?" the girl retorted. "I will know!" "He is upstairs, watching the approaching Yankee fleet, and waiting to see its destruction," returned the other. "You are lying to me! He has been killed, and this old man has been tortured!" cried Fredegonde. "I tell you, Hugo Von Kettler, you are no longer a half-brother of mine! I am through with you!" "Unfortunately," sneered Von Kettler, "it is not possible to dispose of a family relationship so easily." * * * * * "It is cheap to sneer," the girl retorted. "But you sang a very different song when you were in the penitentiary, in terror of death, and you begged me to come and throw you the invisible robe through the bars. You promised me then that you would abandon this mad enterprise and come away with me. You swore it!" "I have sworn allegiance to my Emperor, and that comes first," retorted Von Kettler. "Oblige me by retiring." "I shall do nothing of the sort," cried the girl hysterically. "When you used me as a tool in your enterprises in Washington, you played upon my patriotism for my conquered country. I thought I was undertaking a heroic act. I didn't dream of the villainy, the cold-blooded murder that was to be wrought. "You've kept me here virtually a prisoner," she went on, with rising violence, "an attendant upon that old madman, your Emperor, and his sham court, while more murder is being planned. Where is Captain Rennell, I say?" She stamped her foot. "I demand that he and this old man be set at liberty at once. Hugo," she pleaded, "come away with me. Don't you see what the end must be? This is no heroic enterprise, it is wholesale murder that will arouse the conscience of civilized mankind against you! Order that the vortex-ray be turned off," she went on, looking through the opening in the partition toward the dynamo. "That gas--you cannot be so vile as to send it forth again, to destroy the American ships?" "My dear Freda," retorted the young man coolly, "the vortex-ray is already charged with the gas, and at a height of twenty thousand feet it is now creating a vacuum that will send the gas upon the wings of a hurricane straight up the Atlantic seaboard. It will obliterate every living thing on board the battleships, from men to rats, and this time we mean to reach New York. "As for that swine Rennell," he went on, "you heard His Majesty announce his intention of sending him back to Washington with the information of our irresistible power. Of course I know you are in love with him, and that these qualms of conscience are due to that circumstance." * * * * * But Dick hardly heard the latter part of Von Kettler's remarks. Suddenly the significance of the dynamo and the superheated room above had come home to him. He had read of such a project years before, in some newspaper, and had forgotten about it until that moment. By sending a high-tension current almost to the limits of the earth's atmosphere, the article had said, a vortex or vacuum could be set up which would create a hurricane. The tremendous pressure of the in-rushing air would make a veritable cyclone, which, taking the course of the prevailing winds, would rush forth on a mission of widespread disaster. And on this hurricane would go the deadly gas, infinitely diluted, and yet deadly to all life in its infinitesimal proportion to the atmosphere. And the American fleet was now approaching the Bahama shores. Dick forgot Luke Evans, everything else, as the significance of that mechanism in the next room came home to him. He ran like a madman through the space in the partition, and, raising the bar aloft, brought it thudding down upon the dials, twisting and warping them. He struck at the hollow pole, but, glass or not, it defied all his efforts. He seized a heavy lever and flung it into reverse--and two others. Yelling, the three attendants broke and ran. Out of the laboratory the six came running, collided with the three. Behind them Dick could see Fredegonde Valmy, a knife in her hand, slashing at Luke Evans's bonds. Dick swung his bar and brought it crashing down on a head, felling the man like a log. He saw Von Kettler pull one of the glass rods from his pocket and fire blindly. The discharge struck a second attendant, and the man dropped screeching, his clothes ablaze. Somebody yelled, "He's there! Look at his eyes!" and pointed at Dick's face. * * * * * Dick leaped aside and swung the rod again, felling a third man. The others turned and ran. Von Kettler in the van, broke through the door behind Luke Evans's chair, and disappeared. Dick ran back to where the old man was standing beside the girl, the discarded ropes at his feet. He flung his hood back. "Luke, don't you know me?" he shouted. It was creditable to Luke Evans's composure that, though Dick must have presented the aspect of nothing more than a face floating in the air, he retained his composure. "Sure I know you, Rennell," replied the old man. "And you and me's going to best them devils yet." "But the fleet--it's approaching Abaco," Dick cried. "I've got to warn them." Fredegonde seized him by the arm. "Come with me," she cried. "If they find you here, they'll kill you." Dick hesitated only a moment, then followed the girl as she dashed for another door on the same side of the laboratory as that by which Von Kettler and his men had fled. They dashed down the staircase, and a corridor disclosed itself at the bottom. The girl stopped. "There is a private way--the Emperor's," she panted. "He had it constructed--in case of necessity. I got the keys. I was planning--something desperate--to stop these murders; I didn't know what." Dick seized her by the arm. "What keys?" he demanded. "The key to the place where President Hargreaves is?" "Yes, but--" "We must get him. Where is he?" "In a cell beneath the throne room. That's overhead. But they'll catch us--" "Which is the key?" asked Dick. The girl produced three or four keys, fumbled with them, handed one to Dick. "This way!" she cried. * * * * * They ran along the corridor. Two guards appeared, moving toward them under the electric lights. At the sight of the girl running, and Luke Evans, they stopped in surprise. Dick had pulled the hood back over his head. He ran toward them, wielding the iron bar. A mighty swing sent the two toppling over, one unconscious, the other bruised and yelling loudly. "Here! Here!" gasped Fredegonde, stopping before a door. Dick fitted the key to the lock and turned it. Inside, upon a quite visible bed, sat President Hargreaves, unchained. He looked up inquiringly as the three entered. "Mr. President," said Dick, throwing back his hood, "I'm an American officer, and I want to save you. There's not much chance, but, if you'll come with me--" Hargreaves got up and smiled. "I'm not a military man, sir," he answered, "but I'm ready to take that chance rather than--" He did not complete the sentence. Shouts echoed along the corridor behind them. Dick replaced his hood, handed the keys back to the girl. "Take Mr. Hargreaves to any place of temporary safety you can," he said. "And Mr. Evans. I'll hold them!" "It's right here. This door!" panted the girl, indicating a door at the end of the passage. The three ran toward it. Dick turned. Five or six guards with Von Kettler at their head, were running toward him. They saw the three fugitives and set up a shout. Dick had a quick inspiration. He dashed back into the cell, seized the light bed, and dragged it through the doorway into the passage, just in time to send Von Kettler and two others sprawling. He brought down the bar upon the head of one of them, shouting as he did so. Then he became aware that the passage was flooded with sunshine. Fredegonde had got the door open. He darted back, passed through in the wake of the three, and slammed it shut. Fredegonde turned the key. Instantly Dick found himself with his three companions upon the prairie. Not a vestige of the buildings was apparent anywhere, except for the patches of brown earth. CHAPTER XII _Von Kettler's End_ Fredegonde took command, repressing her agitation with a visible effort. "They cannot break down that door," she said, "and they dare not ask for another key. It will take them a minute or two to go back and reach us around the building. But there may be a score of people watching us. Let us walk quietly toward the thickets. If I am present, they will not suspect anything is wrong." But Dick stood still, driven into absolute immobility by the conflicting claims of duty. For overhead, high in the blue, was an American dirigible. And at his side was the President of the United States. One or other of them he must sacrifice. He chose. He ran forward without answering. Those squares of brown earth, set side by side, were the airplane hangars, and he meant to seize an airplane, if he could find one beneath its coat of invisibility, and fly to warn the dirigible and the fleet. A curious wind was blowing. It seemed to come swirling downward, as no wind that Dick had ever known. It was growing in violence each moment, beating upon his face. As he ran, he was aware of Luke beside him. He heard shouting all about them. Luke had been seen. Not only Luke, but Hargreaves, who was running after Luke, with Fredegonde trying in vain to change his intentions. At the edge of the first brown patch Dick collided violently with the wall of the invisible hangar, and went reeling back. The shouts were growing louder. "Wait!" gasped Luke Evans. He had something like a large watch in his hand. He held it out like a pistol, and from it projected a beam of the black gas. Then Dick remembered Colonel Stopford's words: "He showed me a watch and said the salvation of the world was inside the case. I thought him insane." * * * * * Insane or not, old Luke Evans had concealed the tiny model of the camera-box to good purpose. As he swept the black beam around him, the whole mass of buildings sprang into luminosity, the figures of a score of men, grouped together, and advancing in a threatening mass, some distance away--and more. Two airplanes, standing side by side upon the tarmac, just in front of the hangar--not mere pursuit planes, but six-seaters, formidably armed, with central turrets and bow and rear guns, and propellers revolving. Two mechanics stood staring in the direction of the little group. "I'm with you," gasped Hargreaves. "I'm not a military man, but I've got fighting blood, and I come of a fighting race." Dick leaped and once more swung the iron bar. The nearer of the two mechanics went down like lead, the second, seeing his companion bludgeoned out of the air, turned and ran. Dick shouted, pointing. Fredegonde jumped into the plane, and the President scrambled in behind her. The group, dismayed by the black beam, which Luke Evans was now turning steadily upon them, had halted irresolutely. But suddenly a head appeared, moving swiftly through the air toward the plane. It was Von Kettler, with hood flung back, the face distorted with rage and fury. At his yells, the whole crowd started forward. Dick leaped into the central cockpit, swung the helicopter lever. Something spitted past his face, and a long streak appeared on the turret, where the gas-paint had been scored. But he was rising, rising into that increasing wind.... * * * * * He heard a yell of triumph behind him. And that yell of Von Kettler's was his undoing. There is the telepathy between close friends, but there is also telepathic sympathy between enemies, and in an instant Dick understood what that shout of triumph portended. He was rising into the line of magnetic force that would anchor his airplane helplessly, and leave it to be jerked down and held at Von Kettler's mercy. He released the helicopter lever and opened throttle wide. For an instant the heavy plane hung dangerously at its low elevation, threatening to nose over. Then Dick regained control, and was winging away toward the sea, while yells of baffled fury from behind indicated the chagrin of his enemies. He glanced up. Thank heaven the dirigible had not approached the trap. It was apparently circling overhead. Of course the observers had seen nothing, had no conception that the headquarters of the Invisible Empire lay below. And yet it seemed to be drifting aimlessly back toward the fleet--erratically, as if not under complete control. And Dick could see the ships about a mile offshore, apparently drifting too. They were moving as no American squadron ever moved since the day the first hull was launched, for some of them, turned bow inward toward others, seemed upon the point of collision, while others were lagging on the edge of the formation, as if pointing for home. Then suddenly the awful truth dawned upon Dick. The occupants of ships and dirigible alike had been overcome by the deadly gas. * * * * * Dick banked, turned, leaned forward and shouted to Luke Evans, and, when the old man turned his head, indicated to him to sweep the tarmac with his ray. The thread of black, broadening into a truncated cone, revealed nothing save the luminous outlines of the buildings. Apparently the tarmac was deserted. It was queer, too, that the silence of the night before was gone. Dick shouted again, to assure himself of what he knew already, and heard his own voice again. Something had happened, something unexpected----or perhaps the crew of the Invisible Emperor, satisfied with the effects of the deadly gas, had not thought it necessary to go to any further trouble. Suddenly Dick discovered that he was almost within the circle of the line of magnetic force. Hurriedly he threw over the stick and kicked rudder. It was not till he was again approaching the seashore that it occurred to him that the force, too, was not in operation. He opened throttle wide and shot seaward. He must ascertain what had happened, and, if not too late, give warning without delay. Then suddenly the vicious rattle of gunfire sounded in Dick's ears, and, materializing out of the sky, came Von Kettler's face. Startled for an instant, Dick quickly realized that it was Von Kettler in his plane, with his hood thrown back. And Dick realized that his own hood was thrown back. Two faces and nothing else, were the whole visible setting for battle. But that look upon Von Kettler's face was even more demoniacal than before. Mad with rage at the prospective escape of his prey, and infuriated by his half-sister's appearance in the plane, Von Kettler had thrown all caution to the winds. In his insane hatred he was prepared to shoot down Dick's plane and send Fredegonde to destruction with it. * * * * * If Dick chose to replace his hood he would have the madman at his mercy. And, if he had thought about it, he would have done so, with Fredegonde sitting behind him. But the idea did not enter his mind. Consumed with rage almost equal to Von Kettler's, he only saw there the face of one of those who had inflicted an unspeakable outrage upon the President of his country. The memory of old Hargreaves, chained before the mock-Emperor's throne, enraged Dick more than the holocaust of lives taken by the assassins. He shouted a wild answer to Von Kettler's challenge as his plane sped by, and banked. At that moment there came a roaring concussion that shook the plane from prop to tail. Dick turned his head. Somehow, President Hargreaves had contrived to get the rear gun into action, and now he was staring at it as if he could not believe that he had fired it. And that action heartened Dick wonderfully. As Von Kettler's face appeared again, he loosed his turret gun in a sweeping blast, and heard Von Kettler's gun roar futilely. Again they crossed each other's path, and again and again, two faces, only able to gauge roughly the position of their planes. Neither man had succeeded in injuring the other. Once old Lake turned his black ray upon Von Kettler, and for, a moment the plane stood out luminously in the blackness, but Dick leaned forward and yelled to the old man to desist. And once Dick looked back and saw Fredegonde crouched in her cockpit with eyes wide with terror. And yet he read in her eyes the same determination she had expressed in the laboratory. She was through with her half-brother. * * * * * All this while the wind had been increasing, making it difficult to maneuver the heavy plane; but now, of a sudden there came a dead lull, and then, with a whining sound, the wind rushed in again. But this was a wind still more unlike any that Dick had ever known. A mighty gale that revolved circularly, but downward too, like a vortex, catching the plane and sweeping it into an ever tightening circle. A man-made gale, upon whose wings the poison gas would spread northward again, carrying unlimited destruction with it. Dick fought in vain to free himself. He was revolving as in a whirlpool, and it required the utmost presence of mind and watchfulness to hold the plane steady. Round and round he spun--and then, suddenly, out of the void materialized Von Kettler's face. Von Kettler, helpless too, was spinning round upon the opposite side of the vortex. Thus each airship was upon the tail of the other, and it was a matter of chance which would get the other within the ringsights of the turret gun. Von Kettler was so near that his shouts of fury came fitfully to Dick's ears as the wind carried them. Dick, working the controls, knew that not for an instant could he direct his attention from them in order to fire his gun, and the moment Von Kettler attempted to do so, he was doomed. Round and round, struggling, battling in vain--and once more the concussion of the rear gun shook the plane. And a shout from the President reached Dick's ears. Dick turned his head for an instant, long enough to see Von Kettler spinning down through the vortex. And he was going down afire. President Hargreaves, "no military man," had got him, the second time he had ever aligned a gun-barrel upon a target. "Bravo, sir, bravo!" Dick shouted. And desperately he flung the stick forward and nosed down. * * * * * No gale, man-made or heaven-made, could carry on its wings three-quarters of a ton of armored, turreted airship. Swirling like a leaf, the plane broke through the clutch of the blast. Instantly it grew calm. Outside that vortex, hardly a breath of air was stirring. It was as if the whole fury of the air was concentrated within that circle. The ground came rushing up. Once more Dick tried to head seaward. With flying speed lost, he was calculating the exact moment in his downward rush when he could hope to resume control. Would that moment come before he crashed? At less than a hundred feet he partly regained control. For a moment the plane seemed to fly on an even keel. Then her nose went down as her speed slackened. And this time there was no salvation. Working desperately to save her, Dick saw the ground loom up before him. He heard the crash as the plane broke into splintering ruin ... he had a last vision of old Luke clutching his precious watch: then everything was dissolved in darkness.... CHAPTER XIII _You Can't Down the Marines_ "He's pulling out of it! Keep it up, Gotch!" Dick heard the words and opened his eyes. He stared in amazement at the faces about him. Honest American faces under tropical helmets and above a uniform that he had never expected to see again. It couldn't be real. And yet it was. One word broke from his lips: "Marines!" "He's got it. Don't let him slip, Gotch.", grinned one of the friendly faces, and the man named Gotch, who presumably had some qualifications for his job, continued what was meant to be a gentle massage of the nerve centers along Dick's spine. "I'm all right." Dick muttered, beginning to realize his surroundings. He was lying on a strip of prairie near the beach, on which the waves were breaking in low ripples about a motorboat that was drawn up. He sat up. The world was swimming about him, but he seemed to have no broken bones. Not far away was the wrecked plane, an incongruous mass of streaks where the fabric had ripped through the gas-paint. "Where are the others?" Dick muttered. Then he was aware of Fredegonde Valmy lying with a white face under a shrub. Her eyes were open, and turned toward him. He heard Luke Evans's voice. The old man hobbled round from Dick's back, one arm in a bandage. "She's hurt rather bad, Rennell, but we won't know how bad till we can get her away," he said. "You've been lying here about an hour, since we crashed. President Hargreaves made them take him to the fleet in the other motorboat to see what he could do. He's assumed command. "You see, Rennell, that damn gas caught the fleet and put pretty near every man out of commission for good. But these fellows wasn't going to give up. So, since all their officers were gone, they took two of the boats and their arms and equipment, and came ashore to settle accounts. And they won't believe there's anybody on the island or any buildings. And I can't make 'em believe it. God, Rennell, those invisible devils may attack us at any moment. I don't understand what they're waiting for." Gotch spoke: "We know you're Captain Rennell, sir. And this gentleman, we know him too, but he seems a bit queer in his head. Talking of the Invisible Emperor's headquarters on this island, a mile or so inland. The only invisible thing we've found is that piece of a garment we pulled off you." "I broke my watch ray machine in the fall, and I can't make them believe, Rennell," almost wept old Evans. "Tell them I'm not crazy." Dick got upon his feet with an effort, staggered a little, then made his way to Fredegonde. He kneeled down beside the girl. She was conscious, and smiled faintly, but she could not speak. He pressed her hand, rose, and came back. "Mr. Evans is not crazy," he said. "The headquarters of the gang is over there." He pointed. "Didn't President Hargreaves tell you?" "He was kind of incoherent, sir." The marines looked at one another, wondering. Was Captain Rennell crazy too? "We've had scouts out through the jungle, sir. There's nothing within five miles of here. They had a clear view through to the sea from the top of a hill." "I've been there." Dick spoke with conviction. "I must tell you they've got devices that make them practically irresistible. That gas and other things. And they're invisible. But if you boys are willing to follow me, I'll lead you. It means death. I don't know what they're waiting for. But--are you willing to follow me?" "We'll follow you, sir"--after a pause, during which Dick read in their eyes the desire to humor a crazy man. "We'll follow to hell, sir--if that gang's really there." "Take your arms, then!" Dick pointed to the stacked rifles. A minute later the twenty-odd Marines, forming an open line that extended from one side of the clearing to the other, were on their way toward the headquarters of the gang. And Dick, leading them, though his head was reeling, felt as if his own reason was slipping from him. Had he only dreamed all this? Was it possible that the headquarters of the Invisible Emperor existed on this desolate prairie? If it was true, why had they suddenly become silent, inert? Why had they not long ago wiped out these few Marines? And the gale--was it now sweeping northward on its mission of destruction? * * * * * Half an hour passed. Then the brown patches of the foundations came into view upon the open ground. Here were the hangers, here was the central building with the Emperor's headquarters. And nothing was visible, nothing stirred, yet at any moment Dick expected the rattle of machine-gun bullets or some more terrific method of destruction. "Halt!" The line stood still. "I am going forward ahead or you. You'll follow at a distance of twenty paces. When you see me stop, feel for the door in the wall, and if I disappear, follow me. You understand?" The Marines assented cheerfully. No harm in humoring this poor devil of an officer who had crashed and lost his wits. Like Luke Evans, shambling up through the line to Dick's side. Dick advanced. At any moment now the concentrated fire of the Emperor's men should blast them all to smithereens. Nothing happened. And it was no dream, for Dick's outstretched hand encountered the exterior wall of the building. He had gauged his way accurately, too, for a step or two brought him to the door. He stepped inside. He was inside the private door that led to the Emperor's quarters, through which he had passed with Fredegonde, Hargreaves, and Luke Evans in their flight. It had been broken down, contrary to the girl's predictions, and the deserted passage within was perfectly visible to them all. Stupefied, the Marines bumped and jostled with each other as they crowded in. If they had been anything but Marines, their own heads might have been turned at the discovery of this sudden materialization of a building out of nothingness. Being Marines, they only grinned sheepishly, and followed along the corridor. * * * * * The first human being they saw was one of the guards, in a black tunic. He was leaning against a wall, and he was a human being no longer. He looked as if he was asleep, but he was stone dead, with a placid look on his face. Two more dead guards lay across each other, with smiles on their faces: and there was a workman in a blue blouse who had been in a tremendous hurry to get somewhere, from his appearance, and had never got there. He had fallen asleep instead, and never wakened. Dick found a stairway and led the way up. He thought it ran up to the laboratory, but, instead, the room into which he emerged was the ante-room of the Invisible Emperor's audience hall. Six dead guards lay in a heap in front of the curtain, and they had died as unconcerned as their fellows, to judge by the pacific expressions on their faces. Dick passed through into the throne room. The Marines, behind him, for the first time uttered exclamations of awe--of pity. The terrific scene that met Dick's eyes would be burned into his brain till his last day. Upon his throne, head flung back, sat the Invisible Emperor, his features set in a sardonic leer of death. And all about him, some sitting, some lying, supporting one another, were his court, officers in black uniforms with the silver braid, and women in court dress. And all were dead too. But they had not known they had died. They had fallen asleep--upon the instant that their own volatile gas reached them. * * * * * "I guess that's the explanation, sir," said old Luke Evans. "Those devils made the whirlwind and charged it with the gas. But when you reversed that lever, you reversed the process. Instead of projecting the force outwardly, you made a suction, and every atom of the gas that hadn't travelled beyond the radius came rushing back and filled the building. If we'd entered a half-hour later, we'd have been dead ones ourselves, but the gas was volatile enough to disperse through the chinks and crannies. Anyway, it's all over now." Yes, it was all over, Dick thought, as he sat in his deck chair upon the cruiser that was bearing him northward. The menace to world government had been destroyed and with it all who had been behind it. There would be a new order in the world, a new and kindlier government. Men would feel closer to one another than in the past. Half the personnel of the fleet had escaped the invisible death, and only one cruiser and the dirigible had been lost in the confusion. There would be a great reception when they put into Charleston. Dick bent over Fredegonde, who was asleep in her chair beside him. The ship's surgeon had promised recovery for her. She shouldn't suffer for her half-voluntary part in the business, Dick said to himself. It was going to be his task to help her to forget. [Advertisement: ] Prisoners on the Electron _By Robert H. Leitfred_ [Sidenote: Fate throws two young Earthians into desperate conflict with the primeval monsters of an electron's savage jungles.] [Illustration: _The gaping mouth jerked forward._] The blood-red glow of a slanting sun bathed the towers of New York's serrated skyline, then dropped into a molten sea beyond the winter horizon. Friday, the last day of Jupiter, the thirteenth month of the earth's new calendar, had drawn to a close. In a few hours the year of 1999 would end--at midnight, to be exact. Far below the towers stretched well lighted canyons teeming with humanity. At an upper level where once the elevated trains had roared and rumbled in an antiquated period long past, an orderly mass of workers and shoppers was borne at an incredible speed from lower Manhattan to towering apartments that stretched northward to Peekskill. The northbound traffic was heaviest at this hour and the moving sidewalk bands were jammed to their capacity. Street cars, now obsolete, had vanished from the streets under the new order of things as had also passenger cars, taxis and trucks. Speed predominated. Noise had practically been eliminated. Except for the gentle throb of giant motors far underground, the city was cloaked in silence. At regular intervals along the four-speed moving bands that formed the transportation of the great metropolis, huge circular shafts of steel mounted upward beyond the roofs of the tallest buildings. Within these shafts, swift elevators carried passengers who lived in the outlying districts to the level of the station platforms of the interstate operating transport planes. * * * * * Close to the entrance of one of the steel shafts stood a young man a little above medium height. His deep-sunken eyes were those of a dreamer, a searcher. They were the eyes of a man who had seen strange and startling things. At present they were staring into the pulsing wave of humanity flowing northward on the endless steel bands beyond the platform. Quite suddenly they lighted with pleasure as a man and a girl detached themselves from the swift moving river of people and hurried to the spot where he stood. "Think we were never coming?" Karl Danzig's eyes were much like those of Aaron Carruthers. Just now they sparkled with suppressed excitement. Aaron Carruthers smiled in turn. "No, Karl. Any man but you. I couldn't imagine you being late." He turned his attention to the slim, dark haired girl. "Nanette," he murmured, extending his hand, "I didn't think you'd come." Dazzling white teeth caught the glow of the blue-white incandescents along the platform, and became under the bow of her red lips a string of priceless pearls. "I had to come, Aaron. Karl has done nothing but talk of your amazing discovery. The experiment fairly frightens me at times especially when I recall the sad fate of your friend, the missing Professor Dahlgren. I wish you boys would give up the idea--" "Nan, be still," broke in Karl, with brotherly rudeness. Turning to Carruthers. "Everything all ready, Aaron?" he asked. * * * * * Carruthers nodded. "As far as humanly possible. The element of error is always present. I've checked and re-checked my calculations. I've augmented the vacuum tubes by installing three super-dimensional inverse power tubes." He clasped the girl's arm. "The street is no place to talk. Let's go to the laboratory." They crossed the moving bands by an overhead bridge and cut down a narrow canyon to the entrance of a crosstown series of bands. They stepped onto the first band. The speed was moderate. From there they moved over to the second. Carruthers was in a hurry. He guided the girl and her brother across the third to the fourth band of moving steel. Buildings slid past them like wraiths in the electric light. They felt no winter chill, for the streets and platforms were heated by a constant flow of warm air from slots ingeniously arranged in the band of swift moving metal upon which they stood. Within a few minutes they had arrived at their destination. Quickly they reversed their path across the moving bands until they reached the disembarking platform. A short distance from the station they came to the entrance of a huge tower building. Carruthers nodded to the doorman and they were admitted into a marble hallway. A silent, unattended lift bore them swiftly to the seventy-fifth floor. Down a deep carpeted hallway they moved. Carruthers touched his door. It opened. He stood to one side as the other two entered. * * * * * Nanette cried with delight at the luxurious splendor of the place. "Why, Aaron, I never dreamed the night view could be quite so delightful! I do believe that if the horrid government had not taken down that little Statue of Liberty and substituted the Shaft Triumph in its place, that I could easily see her fingers clasping the torch she was reputed to hold. "Progress, dear girl," shrugged Carruthers, holding out his hands for her cape. "By the way, have you folks eaten?" "Not in a week," said Karl. "Von Sternberger's food tablets," informed the girl. Carruthers nodded. His deep-set eyes regarded them appraisingly. "Any ill effects?" "None whatever," spoke Danzig. "Neither of us have the slightest craving for food." "Good. Did you bring any with you?" "A whole carton." "Then I guess we're already to make the experiment. You're sure. Nanette, that you're not afraid of...." "Don't be silly, Aaron. I haven't grown up with Karl for nothing. He's always used me for the disagreeable end of his crazy experiments. And besides," she smiled on both men. "I have a woman's curiosity for the unknown." "Very well," said Carruthers gravely. From his waistcoat pocket he took a ring of keys and inserted one of them into the lock of an immense steel door. "Our laboratory," he announced, swinging the door wide. * * * * * Nanette's eyes opened wide at the paneled whiteness of the room. Most of the far side was taken up with electrical machines, dynamos, generators and glass enclosed motors of an advanced type. Overhead, concealed lights made the room as light as day. A heavy glass railing shielded a square spot in the exact center of the room. "What's that for?" asked the girl. Danzig and Carruthers both regarded it with troubled eyes. It was Carruthers who spoke. "That railing marks the spot where Professor Dahlgren stood when the rays of our atomic machine struck him." "You mean," breathed the girl, "that he never moved from that spot after the rays touched his body? What happened?" Karl had already divested himself of his coat and was checking the copper cables leading into a strange machine. "It was rather curious," remarked Carruthers. "The moment the ray touched him his body began to dwindle. But evidently he suffered no pain. As a matter of fact his mind remained quite clear." "How did you know?" "As he dwindled in size," continued Carruthers, "he shouted warningly that the rays had become confused and for us to cut the switch. But the warning came a fraction of a second too late. Even as my fingers opened the contact, his body dwindled to a mere speck and disappeared entirely from sight." * * * * * Nanette gazed with staring eyes at the ill-fated spot. Her face had grown steadily paler. "Oh, Aaron! It's awful! What do you suppose happened?" Carruthers eyes glowed strangely. "I didn't exactly know at the time, Nanette. I'm not sure that I know even now. But I've got a theory and Karl has helped me to build a second machine to flash a restoring ray on the square spot. What will take place I cannot even conjecture." "Let's get on with the experiment," interrupted Karl. "Nanette can be shown later what she is to do." Carruthers turned to Danzig. "All right. Karl. Draw up a chair to your machine. And you, Nanette, sit close to this switch. It's off now. To turn it on, simply push it forward until the copper plates slide into each other. To turn the current off, you pull sharply out. However, we aren't quite ready." He shifted his position until he stood before a third machine slightly smaller than the other two. His fingers clicked a switch. The dial of the instrument glowed whitely. "It's important," continued Carruthers, "that we first locate our interference. We have here, Nanette, a common television receiving apparatus capable of picking up news and pictures from any corner of the globe. Ready, Karl?" Danzig clicked on the switch before his own machine and turned one of the many dials mounted on the panel in front of him. A faint hum filled the room as the generator settled to its task. * * * * * Carruthers reached up and dimmed the overhead lights. A screen of what looked like frosted glass set in the wall glowed luminously. The interior of a famous broadcasting studio became mirrored in the glass screen. Into it stepped the master of ceremonies. He spoke briefly of the New Year's activities that would soon take place when the twenty-eighth day of Jupiter ended at midnight. "Boston," said Carruthers. "Too near." "Try Frisco," suggested Karl. "The tubes ought to be sufficiently heated by this time." The dial whirled beneath Carruthers slender fingers. The pictures framed in the frosted panel faded. Another took its place. San Francisco--an afternoon concert. Carruthers saw and listened for a moment, then moved thousands of miles out to sea. Shanghai drifted into the panel, announcing in sing-song accents the weather reports. Following this came reports of various uprisings along the Manchurian border. While yet the three listeners and watchers bent their heads toward the panel in the wall, a strange thing occurred. The silver frostiness of the screen became violently agitated with what looked like tiny sparks darting in and about each other like miniature solar systems. Shanghai faded from the picture. All that remained visible now was the jumbled mass of needle-pointed sparks of luminosity. "Careful," warned Carruthers. "Slow up the speed of your reflector, Karl. There, that's better. Watch the meter reading. I'm going to step up the power of the dimensional tubes. Steady!" * * * * * From an invisible reproducer came a sharp, metallic crackling like machine-gun bullets rattling on a tin roof. The sparks on the screen became violently agitated, pushing around in erratic circles and ellipses. They glowed constantly in shades of bright green through the blues into the deep violets of the color scale. "What do you read?" asked Carruthers. "Point seven six nine," answered Karl. "Shift it back towards the blue, about two points lower on the scale." Danzig twisted two dials at the same time with minute exactness. "Point seven six eleven," he intoned. "Hold it," ordered Carruthers. "Blue should predominate." He turned his eyes on the dancing sparks on the screen. They glowed now a deep indigo blue. "Lock your dials against accidental turning. We're tuned to the vanishing point." Danzig rose to his feet. "What will we use?" Carruthers looked hastily around the room. "Most anything will do." His eyes rested on a glass test tube. Quickly he rose to his feet and removed it from the wall rack. Then bending over the glass railing that enclosed the mysterious square he placed it on the floor. He turned now to the girl. "Quiet, now, Nanette, and don't under any condition leave the chair. The path of the ray should pass within two feet of you, having a wide margin of safety. All right, Karl. Set the dials of the inverse dimensional tubes at point seven six eleven, and switch the power to the Roentgen tube." Through the dimly lighted laboratory came a spurt of bluish flame that twisted and squirmed with slow undulations around the cathode electrode. "Fine," enthused Carruthers, "The cathode emanations coincide exactly with the interference chart. Watch your meter gauges, Karl, while I switch to the atomic ray." * * * * * His fingers closed over a switch. The indigo points of flame bathing the electrode gathered themselves into a ring and began to revolve around an invisible nucleus located near the electrode. Carruthers studied the revolving flame for a moment, then switched off the television machine. It was no longer needed. Carefully, for the atomic ray was still a mysterious force to Carruthers, he opened a small door in the panel and drew out the focusing machine. It was shaped very much like a camera except that the lens protruded several inches beyond the machine proper. With infinite patience he made the final adjustments and moved away from the front of the lens. "Ready?" Danzig nodded and threw on the full power of the inverse dimensional tubes. A low clear hum filled the quiet room of the laboratory. From the lens of the focusing machine shot a pale, amber beam. It struck the glass test tube squarely in the center and glowed against its smooth sides. Carruthers reached across his own machine and turned the final switch. The amber beam emanating from the lens increased in intensity. And as it increased it took on a deep violet color. Nanette cried out in muffled alarm. But even as Vincent raised his voice to quiet her fears the test tube suddenly shrunk to nothingness and vanished into the ether. "Aaron!" whispered the girl, awesomely. "It ... it's gone!" Carruthers nodded. Beads of sweat stood out upon his forehead. Would the returning ray work? He had made the test tube follow the same route as that taken by Professor Dahlgren. Both were gone. He clicked off the switch and the beam faded. * * * * * With a deliberate calmness that in no way matched the inner tumult brought on by the experiment, he turned the dials of the machine he and Danzig had worked out together. A second switch clicked under his fingers. From the lense of the focusing machine shot the reverse atomic beam. As it struck the center of the square it turned a bright vermilion. For several seconds it played upon empty space, then the miracle unfolded before their eyes. Something like a glass sliver reflected the beam. It grew and enlarged under their startled eyes until it had achieved its former size, then the power that had brought it back switched itself off automatically. Together both men examined the test tube. It appeared in no way harmed, nor did it feel either warm or cold from its trip through the elements. "It works!" marveled Danzig. "Let's try it again with something larger." "I've got a better idea," said Carruthers, rising to his feet. He crossed the laboratory and went to another part of his rooms. Presently he returned holding a small pink rat in his hands. The rodent was young, having been born only a week before. "Now we'll see what happens." "Oh, it's torture to the poor thing," burst out Nanette. "It won't hurt it," growled Karl. "Aaron knows what he's doing." Carruthers placed the little rat in the center of the square. It lay there, very quiet and unblinking. Again the switches clicked as the contacts were closed. Came once more the beam of amber colored light followed closely by the violet. The rat dwindled to the size of an insect, then disappeared into space. The three watchers held their breaths. Carruthers' hand trembled the least bit as he threw on the switch controlling the animal's return to the world. * * * * * A vermilion shaft of light pierced the semi-darkened rooms. The animal had been gone from sight not more than a minute. Abruptly something grayish white unfolded in the reflector's beam. It rapidly expanded under three pairs of bulging eyes--not the small, pinkish rat that had disappeared but sixty seconds previous, but a full grown rat, scarred and tailless as if from innumerable battles with other rats. As the current clicked off Aaron Carruthers bent forward. Too late. The rat scurried from the laboratory with a squeal of alarm. Carruthers returned to his seat before the atomic machine and sat down. His face was worried. Dark thoughts stormed his reason. The rat he had placed within the atomic ray had aged nearly two years during the minute it was out of mortal sight. Two years! He pulled a pad from his pocket and calculated the time that had elapsed since Professor Dahlgren had vanished from that same spot. Nearly forty hours. That would mean.... Nanette stirred in her chair. "What happened to the little rat, Aaron?" Carruthers, busy making calculations, did not hear the question. She turned to her brother. "Karl, what's the meaning of this? The second experiment didn't turn out like the first one. What became of that little rat?" "I don't know what happened, Nan," spoke Karl. "Now don't bother me with your silly questions. You saw the same thing I did." * * * * * Carruthers raised his head and spoke quietly. "That rat you saw materialize under the atomic rays was the same rat you saw me place within the square." "But it couldn't be," protested the girl. "Nevertheless," shrugged Carruthers. "It was the same animal--only it had aged nearly two years during the brief time interval it was off from our planet." "It's preposterous," cried the girl. "Nothing is preposterous nowadays, Nanette." "That's the woman of it," spoke Karl. "Always doubting." "You boys are playing tricks on me," retorted the girl sharply. "I shouldn't have come to your old laboratory. Just because I'm a girl...." "Don't," pleaded Carruthers, looking up from his pad of figures. "We're trying to solve the mystery underlying the forces which we have created." He replaced the test tube within the center of the square and returned to the atomic machine. Through the twilight shadows of the room glowed the strange new ray. Faintly the generator hummed. Lights sparkled and twisted around the cathode in serpentine swirls. "You needn't trouble to explain your silly experiment again," finished Nanette, rising abruptly to her feet. "I'm going home and dress for the New Year's party." "Watch your switch like I asked you to," spoke Carruthers. "Sit down," added Karl. "Don't put the rest of us in danger!" "Oh-h-h!" gasped the girl as she inadvertently stepped squarely into the atomic ray of amber-colored light. * * * * * Carruthers leaped impatiently to his feet. An inarticulate cry of horror froze upon his lips. Forgetful that he himself was directly in line of the atomic ray he lunged forward, his mind centering on a single act--to drag the protesting and now thoroughly frightened girl out of the path of the penetrating ray. But even as he started forward Nanette tripped over the glass railing around the square. Carruthers moved quickly. Yet his movements were slow and ungainly as compared to the speed of the light ray. He saw the figure of Nanette decrease in size before his eyes, heard the muffled expression of alarm and fear in Danzig's voice; then the room suddenly began to extend itself upward with the speed of a meteor. What once had been walls and bare furniture resolved themselves into a range of hills, then mountains. The twilight gloom of the room became a dark void of empty space that seemed to rush past his ears like a moaning wind. He had the sensation of falling through infinite space as if he had been propelled from the world and hurled out into the vastness of interplanetary space. Something brushed against him--something soft and fluttering. He grasped it like a drowning man would clutch a straw. "Nanette!" The name echoed and re-echoed through his mind yet never seemed to get beyond his tightly clenched lips. He felt something cool close over his hand. Instinctively he grasped it. Her hand. Together they clung to each other as they felt themselves being hurled through endless space. The twilight changed swiftly to black night that rushed past the two clinging figures and enveloped them in a wall of silence. Then out of the mysterious fastness came the dull glow of what looked like a distant planet. It grew and enlarged till it reached the size of a silver dollar. Little pin-points of light soon began to appear on all sides of it, very much like stars. * * * * * Carruthers attempted to reassure Nanette that all was well, and they were out on the streets of the great metropolis. But even as he wrenched his tightly locked lips apart he saw that the shining disc far out into space was not what he had first thought it was--the earth's moon. He shook his head to clear it of the perplexing cobwebs. What was the matter with his mind? He couldn't think or reason. All he knew was that he had erred. This strange planet looming in the sky held nothing familiar in markings nor in respect to its relations to the stars beyond it. While yet he groped in the darkness for something tangible, his mind reverted to the girl at his side. She was clinging to him like a frightened child. He could feel the pressure of her body against his and it thrilled him immeasurably. No longer was he the cold, calculating young man of science. How long they remained in state of suspension while strange worlds and planets flashed into a new sky before their startled eyes, Aaron Carruthers didn't know. At times it seemed like hours, years, ages. And when he thought of the tender nearness of the girl he held so tightly within his arms, it seemed like a few minutes. Gradually the sensation of speed and space falling began to wear off, as if they were nearing earth or some solid substance once more. The air about them grew heavier. Then all movement through space ceased. Carruthers was surprised to find what felt like earth beneath his feet. For long minutes he stood there, unmoving, still holding possessively to the girl. "Aaron!" The name came out of the void like a faint caress. "Nanette." Reassured of each other's presence they stood perfectly still, lost in the vast silence of their isolation. * * * * * Presently the girl spoke. "Oh, Aaron, I'm frightened!" "There's nothing to be alarmed at, dearest." The endearing term came for the first time from the man's lips. As long as he had known Nanette Danzig, love had never been mentioned between them. If it had ever existed, the feeling had not been expressed. "You shouldn't call me that, Aaron." His voice sounded curiously far-off when he answered. "I couldn't help it, Nan. Our nearness, the strange darkness, and the fact that we are alone together brought strange emotions to my heart. At this moment you are the dearest--" Bump, thump! Bump, thump! "What's that noise?" breathed Nanette. Carruthers turned his head to listen. To his ears came the pound of some heavy object striking the ground at well-regulated intervals. Nanette, who had started to free herself from Carruthers violent embrace, suddenly ceased to struggle. "Oh, what is it? What is it?" she whispered fearfully. Carruthers sniffed the night air. A musky odor assailed his nostrils, strange and unfamiliar. "It's beyond me, Nanette. Let's move away from this spot. Perhaps we can find shelter for the rest of the night." But the Stygian blackness successfully hid any form of shelter. Tired from their search they sat down. "We might build a fire," suggested Carruthers, "only there doesn't seem to be any wood around. Nothing but bare rock." "Perhaps it's just as well," spoke the girl. "The flames might attract prowlers." "Maybe you're right," agreed Carruthers. * * * * * A silence fell between them. After a long time Nanette spoke. "I don't suppose, Aaron, that anything I can do or say will help matters any. I know that our being where we are is my own fault. I'm sorry. Truly I am." "The harm is done," said Carruthers. "Don't say anything more about it." Nanette pointed at the disc of light shining high in the heavens. "These stars are as strange to me, Aaron, as if I had never seen them before. Saturn is the evening star at this time of year. It isn't visible. Even the familiar craters and mountains of the moon look different. And it glows strangely." "I'd rather not talk about it, Nan." Nanette placed a hand upon his arm. "I'm not a child, Aaron. I'm a grown woman. Fear comes through not knowing. Tell me the truth." "Let's sit down." They sat upon the ground and both stared out at the night heavens that arched into infinity above them. Presently Carruthers took the girl's hand from his arm and held it gently between his own. "You've guessed rightly, Nan. The orb shining upon us is not our moon. I'll try and make it clear." * * * * * The girl smiled reassuringly in the darkness. "I'm waiting." "Strange as it must seem," began Carruthers, "you and I are still within the room of my laboratory. But we might as well be a million miles away for all the good it does us. Karl sits in his chair in the same position as when we disappeared in the violet glow of the atomic ray. His eyes are bulging with fear and horror. For days and days he'll continue to sit on that chair, his mind not yet attuned to what actually took place. What has happened? He doesn't know yet, Nan." "Oh, it's incredible," sobbed Nanette. "I know, but it's so obviously true that I won't even trouble to check my calculations." He pointed at the silver disc hanging low in the strange sky. "That, Nan, is not our moon. It is nothing more than a planetary electron very much like the one we are on at the present moment. The firmament is filled with them. From where we sit we can see but the half nearest to us. The glowing portion is illuminated from distant light rays shot off from the nucleus of the atom itself. That atom is going to be our light and heat for weeks, months, perhaps years to come. We're prisoners on an electron, and as such we are destined to rush through infinite space for the remainder of our lives unless...." "Unless what?" Aaron Carruthers hesitated for a bare fraction of a second. "Karl!" he whispered. "Our lives depend on him. Time flies fast for us, Nan. Already it is growing light. But not on our earth. Karl still sits upon his chair staring incredulously at the miracle of our disappearing bodies. It will take weeks of time, as it affects us, for the initial shock to travel along his nerves to the center of his brain." * * * * * His voice shook with emotion quite contrary to his usual calm nature. "Oh, I know it's hard to understand, Nan. I was a fool to meddle with laws of which I know so little compared to what there is yet to know." "Then it's all true, Aaron. The little rat that came out from under the ray as an old rat was one and the same animal." Carruthers nodded. "Time has changed in proportion to our size. We're moving so much faster than the earth that we must of necessity be bound to the universe of which we are now an integral part." For a long time they remained silent, each immersed in dark, troubled thoughts. Nanette broke the silence. "You don't suppose, Aaron, by any chance that Professor Dahlgren is still alive and on our planet?" Carruthers shook his head negatively. "It's beyond human reason, Nan. He was lost in the ray for over forty hours. Translated into minutes he's been gone twenty-four hundred minutes. Since the mouse we placed within the light ray aged approximately two years in the space of one minute, Professor Dahlgren would, if he were alive, be about four thousand, eight hundred years old." Nanette rose abruptly to her feet. "Oh bother the figures. My head's swimming with them. It's getting light now, and I'm hungry." "Eat one of your food tablets," suggested Carruthers. "Please don't get funny," said Nanette. "Karl has them in his coat pocket." "Hum-m-m!" coughed Carruthers, following her example by rising to his feet. "Looks as though we'd have to rustle our food. I've got nothing on my person but a knife, a pencil, a fountain pen and some pieces of paper. Nothing very promising in any of them." * * * * * At that moment the sky became fused with reddish light. Over the horizon appeared a shining orb. Far-away hills and valleys leaped into sight. Then for the first time Carruthers noted the high plateau upon which he had spent the night. Had they ventured a hundred yards farther during the night they would have plunged into the rocky floor of a canyon a thousand feet below. "Let's see if we can find a way down to the valley," he suggested. "If we get anything to eat it will have to come from trees. This plateau is barren of any form of vegetable matter." They found a winding descent leading downward. It looked like a path that had been worn by the passage of many feet. "Someone's been here before us," he exclaimed. "The ground is too well worn to be accidental." "Look! Look!" pointed Nanette. Her face had become pale from the excitement of her discovery. "What is it, Aaron?" Carruthers bent forward to examine the strange footprint. It was nearly two feet across and divided in the center, as if the animal that made it had but two toes. "From the size of the tracks and the length of the animal's stride, I should say it was some form of an amphibious dinosaur long extinct in our own world." "Are they dangerous?" "It all depends upon the species. Some of them are pure vegetarians; others are carnivorous. The heavy tramping we heard during the night evidently came from the beast who left these footprints." * * * * * They had come upon the footprints where the path made a turn, leading into a dense growth of trees and underbrush. And as Carruthers knelt beside the path he heard a rustle as of something moving directly behind him. Wonderingly, he turned his head to trace the disturbance. But the woods seemed empty. "Strange," he murmured. "Did you hear something moving in back of us, Nan?" Nan shook her head. "You don't think we're in any danger from these beasts, do you?" Carruthers said nothing for the moment. Instead, he looked sharply in all directions and saw nothing. "Let's push on till we come to some kind of a shelter. Perhaps we'll find people much like ourselves." Down the path they hurried, glancing curiously right and left at unknown flowers and trees. A bird with brilliant feathers skimmed above their heads, uttering shrill cries. Other voices from the birds and animals in the woods took up the cry. The woods grew denser as they pushed into the unknown. In the woods at their right a rodent squeaked as some larger animal pounced upon it. Presently they came to a pool of water roughly seventy feet across. While they knelt to quench their thirst they saw two young deer eyeing them from the far side. Soft feet pattered behind the kneeling couple. Carruthers half whirled as he rose to his feet and peered into the jungle behind him. A blur of reddish brown vanished behind a tree. Man or animal Carruthers couldn't determine. He grasped Nanette by the arm and pulled her back to the path. "Quick!" he whispered. "There's someone or something following us. I'm sure of it now." * * * * * Nanette's voice trembled slightly. "What is it, Aaron?" "I don't know." He turned his head again. This time he saw the thing that was following. A low ejaculation of alarm escaped his lips. A gigantic ape! The mouth of the creature sagged grotesquely, revealing two rows of yellow fangs. And its orange colored eyes were burning coals set close together. Carruthers sucked in a deep breath. "Run, Nan," he gritted. "I'll try and scare him away." Simultaneously with the scream of fright from the startled girl, a huge mountain of grayish flesh and bones blocked the downward slope of the path. Carruthers paled as he turned and faced the new menace. Coming directly toward them he saw an immense animal so great in size that it seemed to shut out the light. A prehistoric dinosaur! It came slowly and leisurely, swinging its great red mouth from side to side. Other denizens in the woods, sensing the presence of the huge killer, fled in a panic of alarm. Their shrill cries increased the terror that froze the hearts of the two earth people. Nanette clung to her companion in abject terror, unable to move. Her fear stricken eyes were wild and staring as the mountain of flesh pushed towards them. The animal's long neck arched far in front of its body, and its long, pointed tail remained out of sight within the trees. Carruthers backed off the path into the underbrush, dragging the girl after him. The jaws of the huge animal opened wide with anticipation. Lumberingly he turned from the path and followed. Trees crashed before its gigantic bulk. The woods became a bedlam of snapping branches. The horrified scream of the girl ended in a gurgling sigh. She toppled to the ground in a dead faint. Carruthers flung himself beside her crumpled body and gathered it into his arms. A quick glance he threw at the spot where he had last seen the gigantic ape. The animal was no longer there. It had disappeared. The man's lips became a hard, straight line. Even as he straightened to his feet the leaves and branches of an overturned tree whipped his face. The red mouthed dinosaur was perilously near. So close that Carruthers could smell its great, glistening body. The odor was musky and foul. Stumbling blindly he attempted to widen the distance between himself and his pursuer. But the hungry dinosaur pounded steadily on its course. There was no getting away from it. Its beady eyes sought out its prey and its keen smell told it exactly where the earth beings were. On and on staggered Carruthers. The extra burden of the girl hampered his movements. Unseen roots tripped him time and time again. Each time he scrambled to his feet and picked up the unconscious girl. Briars tore at his clothing and stung his hands. The underbrush was thickening. A warm, dank smell clung to the vegetation now almost tropical in nature. Beads of sweat rolled down the man's forehead and into his eyes. But the horrible fear of those red, dripping jaws spurred him to renewed efforts. He doubled to the left, hoping to throw the animal off his tracks. The undergrowth seemed to thin out at this point. Renewed hope flowed through the young scientist's blood. He stumbled on blindly, scarce watching where his feet were taking him. A sigh of relief came to his lips. Ahead of him he saw a clearing. His stride lengthened and he broke into a shambling run. * * * * * Then it was he saw, towering walls rising up on both sides of him--steep walls that he could never scale, even if alone. He tried to change his course, but the huge bulk of the pursuing dinosaur effectively blocked his path. There was no alternative but to push on and pray for an opening in the rugged cliffs. Abruptly a sigh of despair escaped his lips. The walls of the canyon narrowed suddenly, and across it stretched a wall of bare rock. He realized too late that he had returned to the base of the plateau where he had spent the night. The grim, towering walls hemmed him in completely from three sides. At the fourth side bulked the dinosaur, coming slowly, ponderously. Beady eyes peered down cunningly at the helpless man and woman. Confident now that its prey couldn't escape, it extended its huge bulk across the narrow canyon for a leisurely killing. Carruthers glared at the monster with fear-distended eyes. In his heart he realized that there was no escape. He had no means of defense, no way to combat the huge monster but flight. And even that was now denied him. Closer and closer inched the killer until its great, red mouth appeared like the fire box of a huge boiler. Hot breath fanned the man's cheek. The nauseous odor of the beast made his stomach wrench. He dropped to his knees close to the inert figure of the girl and glared vengefully into the beady eyes. The gaping mouth at the end of a long, supple neck jerked forward. Carruthers dragged the girl away just in time to escape the gnashing teeth. The dinosaur stamped angrily. Once again Carruthers felt its hot breath beating upon his face. He cringed at the thought of this kind of death. No one would ever know how it happened. Not even his closest friend, Karl Danzig! What a mess things were. Why didn't the red mouth of the mighty dinosaur close over him and crush out life? Why must he kneel in torture? From near at hand a piercing scream rang through the air. A harsh scream. A terrifying scream! * * * * * Carruthers raised his head. The dinosaur had twisted around to glare hatefully at the disturber of its meal. Other screams splintered the forest air. And as the kneeling man watched he saw the great red ape who had been dodging his footsteps a short time before, slouch between the dinosaur's hulking body and the wall of the cliff. Behind it came others--black mammals with curving arms that dragged along the ground. Their fangs were bared. They were in an ugly mood. Arriving in front of the dinosaur and less than four feet from the earth man and woman, the leader silenced its followers with a low growl and turned in concentrated fury upon the dinosaur. Its long arms drummed a throbbing tattoo upon its hairy chest. The dinosaur bellowed protestingly against the attitude of the apes and gorillas. The ape leader protested with equal violence. The dinosaur shifted uneasily, wagging its heavy head from side to side. On all sides came deep growls from the mammals. Carruthers watched all this display torn between doubt and fear. Which side would win? How could the apes and gorillas, huge as they were, hope to force the dinosaur away? But the apes were masters. This much was apparent. Inch by inch the dinosaur backed away, glaring vengefully. And having reached a spot where it could turn around it did so. Presently the ground trembled as it made off through the steaming jungle. The leader of the mammals turned and faced the earth people. Long, searching minutes passed. Its close set eyes seemed to be studying them. * * * * * Nanette stirred and opened her eyes. The sight of the anthropoids caused her to recoil. "Steady, Nan," spoke Carruthers softly. Other apes and gorillas gathered around the giant red animal. They displayed no hostility, only an intense interest. One by one they squatted before the earth people until they formed a half circle, reaching from the one wall of the rocky plateau to the other. While they sat there it began to grow dark. Carruthers removed his watch and ventured a glance at it. Daylight had lasted less then three hours. An hour for twilight, then it would be dark. Evidently the cycle around the nucleus of the atom took approximately ten hours. Nanette sat up. "Aaron!" He answered without removing his eyes from the red ape less then four feet away. "Don't look at me, Nan. Concentrate on the big, red fellow. He's evidently in control. If we act the least bit frightened they might decide to destroy us." "What are they waiting for? Why don't they go away?" "We'll know before long. I imagine they're trying to figure out who we are and what we are doing on their tiny planet." Darkness descended rapidly. Overhead, a small moon rose majestically in the heavens and started its journey through the night. Its faint light revealed the fact that the apes showed no intentions of leaving. They still squatted before the earth people, in a half circle of staring brown eyes. Whatever fear Carruthers had felt towards the animals died away. "They're harmless," he told Nanette. "Get some sleep if you can." * * * * * Long after the tired girl had drifted into slumber Carruthers sat with his back against the wall, mentally trying to figure the whole thing out. The dinosaur was real enough. Yet the apemen had frightened it away, in fact had compelled it to go without actually engaging in combat. No question about it. The anthropoids were in control. But who controlled them? Quite suddenly his eyes snapped open. Daylight had come again. He must have fallen asleep. The shrill chatter of the apeman came to his ears. The red ape leader shuffled to his feet and looked from the earth people to the spot in the jungle whence came the chatter. Abruptly he opened his mouth and emitted a flood of gibberish sounds. The gorillas and apes at his side flattened their bodies against the rocky walls in attitudes of expectant waiting. "What's happening?" gasped the girl. "There's no telling," whispered Aaron. "It must be someone or something of importance. Note the expressions of awe and reverence on the faces of the apemen. My God, Nanette, look!" Out of the depths of the jungle emerged seven white beings--human or animal it was impossible to tell. They were huge creatures with the bodies of men. Erect of carriage, almost human in looks, they contrasted strangely with the red apes and the black gorillas. Six of them appeared to act as bodyguard for the seventh. As they reached the space in front of the two earth people, the bodyguard stepped aside. The seventh white one came to a dead stop. Long and intently he stared at the man and girl crouched against the wall. And the scrutiny seemed to please him, for he smiled. Carruthers eyed the figure uneasily. He saw what seemed to be a man dressed in a long, fibrous garment. With white hair and beard, it was a strange figure indeed for an apeman. He saw also that the eyes were well spaced, a mark of intelligence. The forehead was high and broad. And as Carruthers mentally studied the creature, strange and bizarre thoughts crossed his mind. * * * * * The mouth of the white apeman twitched as if he were going to speak. The heavy lips parted. A single word came to Carruthers' ear--"Man?" Carruthers nodded. "We are from the earth." The lips of the apeman moved painfully as if speech came with the utmost of difficulty. "The prophecy of the Great One has been fulfilled even as it has been written." The red apes and black gorillas allowed their eyes to wander from their white leader to the two earth people. And their faces reflected the supernatural awe with which they regarded the earth people. "It's uncanny that an animal can speak our language," breathed Nanette. As if he hadn't heard her, Carruthers spoke again. "We are from the earth," he repeated. "We have been on your world many hours, and we are both hungry and thirsty." "Words come hard," came from the lips of the white bearded one. "I have not used them for years." "And who are you?" asked Carruthers. The white bearded one paused as if to recall some distant echo from the past. "I am the last of the tribe of Esau. But come! This is no place for speech. Long have I and my followers waited for this hour." * * * * * Without another word he swung around. The six guards enclosed his aged body in a hollow square and the procession moved away. They came after a short journey to a natural opening leading to the heart of the plateau. The apes and gorillas, with the exception of the red leader, remained outside. The remainder of the party pushed through a tortuous tunnel until they reached a cavernous opening directly beneath the plateau. Vertical openings in the walls furnished light and air. The white chieftain spoke in a strange tongue to his followers, and they instantly prepared three couches in a far corner of the cavern. As the earth people seated themselves on the skins that made up the couch they were both conscious of a far-away rumbling like peals of thunder. Not having seen any signs of a storm outside Carruthers turned inquiringly on the aged chieftain. The old man's eyes were shadowed with grim foreboding. "I have ordered something to refresh you and your companion," he said. "Eat first, my friends. We will talk later." The six body-guards left the main cavern. Presently they returned with large trays made of fanlike leaves resembling the palmetto. Fresh fruits and uncooked vegetables formed the bulk of the meal. In silence they ate. After the litter had been cleared away the guards withdrew with the exception of the giant red ape, who crouched near the opening to the tunnel. "I am glad you have come," began the old chieftain, "but sorry, too. Our planet, or rather the higher forms of life upon it, are doomed." * * * * * Again there came to the ears of the earth people that far-off beat of sound that seemed to shake the ground. They looked to the white bearded leader for explanation. "Ah, you hear it too," murmured the other. "For centuries, we of the great tribe of Esau have fought for the supremacy of our little world--ever since the Great One appeared in our midst and instructed us in world knowledge." "And this Great One, as you call him," spoke Carruthers. "Who was he?" "He was from your world. I never saw him. He comes to me as a legend. For years he toiled among us, teaching and instructing until we mastered his language. He called himself Dahlgren. Later he ruled all the tribes. We of the Esau line he made into leaders because of our higher intelligence. The tribes of Zaku were trained for war. Perhaps you have noticed the chief of all the Zakus. He is crouching now beside the entrance to our inner walls. He is Marbo, and his followers live in the jungles." "And does he talk as you do?" The white chieftain shook his head. "No. Only we of the Esau tribe have mastered speech. Not counting the women of our tribe that comprise our numbers we are only seven in all." "I owe Marbo my life as does also my companion," said Carruthers. "Marbo looks upon you earth people as gods," spoke the old chieftain. "He and his followers will protect you with their lives." "And who rules over and beyond?" questioned Carruthers, waving his arm to cover the remaining portion of the electron. "There is no rule beyond except that of force. The Great One called them by name, Morosaurus, Diplodocus, the Horned Ceratosaurus, and many others whose names I have long forgotten. They are our enemies whom we cannot destroy. And their numbers increase from year to year and are slowly backing us upon our last stronghold." "Isn't there anything we can do?" asked Carruthers, feeling a quiver of apprehension along his spine. * * * * * Slowly, the old chieftain shook his head. "Nothing whatever. Marbo and his followers can control one or two, but when the herds begin to push on into our territory, we are doomed. Even now their rumblings and bellowings come through the jungles. Their thirst and hunger for flesh is enormous." Carruthers turned upon the girl. "The old chief's words explain everything, Nan. Professor Dahlgren has been here and gone. He lived a lifetime in the span of a few hours earth-time. Now it looks as if we were destined to follow in his footsteps." "I'm not afraid," said the girl. "Nothing can be worse than what we have already passed through." And her eyes softened as she placed her small hands within those of Carruthers. "We have each other, Aaron." He smiled reassuringly and turned to the old chieftain. "I am Carruthers, a friend and assistant to Dahlgren. The girl here is Nanette." The chieftain smiled gravely. "And I am Zark. Welcome to my kingdom, Carruthers and Nanette. We need you here. Now tell me of your world, for long have I waited for a follower of the great Dahlgren to appear before my people." Throughout the remainder of the day Carruthers talked. The shafts of light paled at the end of the short day. Night came, bringing with it a sense of security against the increasing hordes that thundered and trumpeted beyond the borders of the jungle. In the morning Zark instructed Marbo to remain close to Carruthers at all times. So the young scientist left the cavern and ascended the path leading to the top of the plateau. He looked at his watch and compared the second hand with the nucleus atom sailing across the heavens to estimate its speed. * * * * * Days passed as he made his observations. Meanwhile he had searched and found the exact spot wherein he and Nanette had first stepped foot onto the electron. This spot he carefully marked off with a ring of huge boulders carried up by the followers of Marbo. Then he began to calculate upon his pad. There must be no mistakes. He and Nanette must be within the magic circle at the estimated time. Between times he helped Nanette construct their living quarters in the cavern. Zark had furnished them with skins and furs with which to cover the walls. Carruthers made a fireplace of stones and restored the lost art of fire to Zark, Marbo and their followers. Days slipped by like minutes. Short days filled with excursions into the jungles. Carruthers' face soon bristled with a stubble of beard. This lengthened with time. Sharp thorns tore their clothes to ribbons. Nanette, womanlike, cried many times during the nights because of the lack of a mirror and a comb for her untidy hair. But other and more important events soon claimed the attention of the earth people. Day by day the herds of dinosaurs and other monsters of like breed edged closer and closer to the tiny civilization around the plateau. It worried Carruthers so much that he sought out Zark and had him bring the other six members of his tribe together for a council of war. "A complete defensive system, Zark," he told them. "We must make a fortress of the plateau and fill the caverns with food." * * * * * Zark shook his head. "No. It is quite useless. Followers of Marbo have recently returned from over the beyond and report strange things. I have hesitated to speak of them for fear of alarming you. Our planet is breaking up. Violent eruptions have caused fires of stone and mud. The rumblings you have heard were not made entirely by our enemies. They came from the ground. "An earthquake," murmured Carruthers, momentarily stunned by the news. "But they are always of short duration, Zark. We have them on our own planet." "Ah, but these are different. They cover the whole of our globe. The great Dahlgren noted them while he was with us. He wrote many words and figures on paper concerning them. Only yesterday I unearthed these records. The life of our planet was doomed to destruction during the present year. What matter if the herds of dinosaurs overrun us and destroy lives? In the end they, too, will be destroyed. It is fate. We can do nothing." Even as the old chieftain spoke a gigantic rumbling, greater in intensity than any heretofore, shook the electron. Above the deep rolling disturbance underground rose the shrill cries of the apemen. Carruthers leaped to his feet and raced through the tunnel. A herd of dinosaurs choked the path leading to the outside entrance. Marbo brushed past him, shrilling in great excitement. "Drive them away!" ordered Carruthers. "Like this!" He hurled a rock at the eye of the nearest animal. The dinosaur bellowed and backed away. The apes, and gorillas, used to fighting only with their long arms, caught on to the stunt with surprising quickness. Their powerful arms reached out. Stones and boulders began to hurtle from the mouth of the tunnel. They thudded against the heads of the great monsters like hailstones. Subdued and frightened by this sudden display of force, the monsters withdrew down the path. But the apemen had discovered a new method of warfare. They found a childish delight in hurling stones. Within a few minutes the slope was barren of rocks. The animals followed up their momentary advantage and ran screaming down the path. The dinosaurs fled in panic. * * * * * AS soon as the enemy had been driven away, Carruthers pointed out to Marbo the advantage of gathering the stones up from the ground and returning them to the space around the mouth of the tunnel so that he and his followers would be ready for a second repulse. Zark appeared at this moment and helped with the explanation. His crafty old eyes turned with new respect upon the earthman. Carruthers toiled with them every day from then on, building and fortifying the plateau against further incursions of the monsters. Security and peace reigned for several weeks then hostilities broke out afresh. The rumblings of the electron had increased with each passing week. Volcanic eruptions poured fresh discharges of molten lava and fiery sparks along the edges of the jungles. "I don't want to needlessly alarm you, Nan," he told her that night, "but the fires have started. Zark was right. Unless we have rain before to-morrow morning the heat and smoke will drive us out into the open." "But we can go to the top of the plateau," suggested the girl. "There aren't any trees--" A concentrated bellowing cut off the rest of her words. Driven towards higher ground by the heat of the flames, the dinosaurs were trampling up the path leading to the tunnel. Once again Carruthers rallied his army of apemen around him and attempted to drive the mammals away. As they reached the end of the tunnel a cloud of dense smoke stung their eyes. The apemen shrilled in a sudden panic and forgot all their previous training in driving off the dinosaurs. Like scurrying rats they scattered. * * * * * Flames from the conflagration broke through the smoke--flames that leaped and twisted skyward. Carruthers flung off the fear that held him spellbound and started along up the path leading to the top of the plateau. A disheveled figure appeared suddenly at his side--Nanette! "Come," he whispered, hoarsely. "We've got to get out of this or we'll choke to death." "But Zark," breathed the girl, "He and his followers are still in the cavern. We can't leave them." Like one demented of reason, Carruthers raced back along the tunnel to the cavern. "Zark!" he shouted. The sound of his voice was drowned in the welter of screaming bedlam coming up from below as the dinosaurs and apes fought for the supremacy of life. But of Zark and his six followers he found absolutely no sign. Quickly he hurried back to where he had left Nanette. Even as he reached the spot he had a sudden premonition of danger. A gorilla, huge and black, brushed past him on the path, carrying a limp burden under his shaggy arm. "Stop!" commanded Carruthers, hurrying after the animal. A huge arm knocked him sprawling. Spitting blood Carruthers staggered to his feet. Up to this time he had felt no fear of the gorillas. They had been orderly and well behaved. Fearful that harm would come to the girl he ran after the dark figure ahead. The red glow of flames swept nearer. The gorilla came to a stop and faced its pursuer. Lust shone from its close-set eyes--lust and passion. Carruthers stopped dead in his tracks. "Drop her!" he demanded. The animal snarled hoarsely. There came the sound of ripping cloth. Nanette screamed--a terrifying scream that echoed and re-echoed through the electron night. * * * * * It was then that the thin cloak of civilization dropped from Aaron Carruthers' back. He became in a single moment an animal fighting for his mate. With a snarl equally vicious as that of the gorilla pawing at the helpless girl, he lunged forward. Mouthing his rage, the gorilla flung the earth man to the ground. Carruthers came up frothing at the mouth. With grim intensity he fastened himself to the animal's free arm. The raging mammal staggered helplessly under the extra burden and dropped the girl to concentrate his fury on the man. It raised a hairy arm aloft for the smashing blow. Instinctively Carruthers released his hold. At that very moment the electron lurched sickeningly, causing them both to lose their footing. The violent upheaval sent Carruthers one way and the gorilla the other. While the man stumbled to his feet to resume battle he saw the infuriated monster stagger over the edge of the plateau wall into a sheer drop of a thousand feet. Starkly through the night came the growling roars of the giant beasts from the jungles below. Nanette fluttered to his side. Her dress was torn and dragged on the ground. For all her disheveled appearance she was still beautiful to look upon. Forgetful of the danger on all sides of him, the animal in Carruthers saw in her pitifully half-clad body the same thing that the beast had desired. His head whirled hotly. "Aaron!" she pleaded as his arm reached out to clutch her. Hungrily he drew her to him. The pale light of the electron moon mingled with the roaring blast of the flames. Madness inflamed his heart and pounded his blood. "Don't, Aaron," protested the girl, trying to free herself. * * * * * Something in the quality of the girl's frightened tones brought the man back to normal. He fought against the overwhelming desire to possess with all the force of his nature. And the better half triumphed. No longer was he an animal, but a reasoning human being. With a faint sigh he released her and wiped a hand across his dripping forehead. "I'm sorry, Nan," he murmured. "That great brute drove me mad for an instant. I'm all right now." Together they stood in the electron night and watched death creep closer and closer. The plateau was entirely surrounded with flames now and the heat was increasing with each passing moment. As it increased they backed towards the center. From under their feet came the choking cries of the apemen. They had returned to the cavern only to be overcome by smoke fumes. While yet the earth people stood there waiting and watching the red death creep nearer, the path leading downward into the jungle became a mass of moving shadows. "The dinosaurs!" cried Nanette. "Oh, Aaron! We are lost!" "Steady, girl," soothed the man. "If we stand still they might not see us in the dark. The smoke will destroy our scent." But as the minutes passed the herd of monsters increased. They crowded along the path and spread out over the top of the plateau. Once again the smell of their glistening bodies fouled the nostrils of the earth people. Slowly Carruthers guided Nanette back towards the ring of rocks--perhaps the barrier would serve to keep the animals away. He scrambled across one of the boulders and pulled the girl after him. As he did so, a violent subterranean action shook the electron from one end to the other. * * * * * Carruthers braced his feet against the ring of rocks to keep from pitching headlong to the ground. Nanette clung to him wordlessly. All around them the giant forces of nature raged sullenly. Twisting seams appeared in the rocky floor of the plateau from which oozed gaseous vapors. "Courage," soothed Carruthers as he held the quivering body of the frightened girl close to his own. "This can't last." But the ground continued to lurch and heave on its axis. Vivid lights crossed and criss-crossed the atomic heavens. The fissures in the ground appeared now as black canals. The lower part of the circle of boulders disappeared. Off to the right came despairing screams. White bodies glowed for an instant against the background of flames. "Zark!" shouted Carruthers, as he saw the leader of the tribe of Esau and his followers making their way along the plateau top. Zark must have heard the earth-man's voice, for he started forward at a run. Simultaneously there appeared a herd of the greatest of all the prehistoric monsters--the Brontosaurus. They balked enormously against the flame-licked skies. Zark and his followers attempted to avoid them. But fear of the scorching flames drove the monsters forward. There followed a maddening moment of unutterable pain for the remaining ones of the tribe of Esau, then the herd trampled them underfoot and rumbled towards the half circle of rocks where the two earth people were crouched. The leader of the Brontosaurus herd trumpeted madly and barged for the higher ground of safety. Too late did instinct warn it of the widening fissure underfoot. Before it could stop the pressure of the herd drove it into the crevice. * * * * * Carruthers drew back to the extreme inside edge of the boulders trying to still his ears against their insane bellowings. A cloud of heavy, choking smoke enveloped him for a moment then passed away. Then it was that he saw a new star in the atomic heavens,--a star that seemed to burn with the brilliance of a meteor. Even as he watched he was conscious of it drawing closer. The planet was now in a continuous uproar. The ground was heaving and trembling as if from some inward strain. This was the end. Carruthers realized it with a sinking heart. In another minute the electron would disintegrate into a flaming mass of matter and fling itself from its orbit around the atom. And then the light from the approaching star struck them in a blinding radiance of vermilion flames. Carruthers held his breath. Some invisible force seemed to take possession of his body and that of the girl at his side. The rocky plateau, now a boiling mass of rocks, dropped from under their feet. Clear, cold air enveloped their bodies. Then with the speed of light their bodies were hurled through planetary space, up, up, up into the vast reaches of the higher ether. Darkness assailed them. The flames from the jungle fire vanished into nothingness. The electron moon paled to the size of a pin point, then went out. Carruthers had the feeling of expansion and growth. It was as if his body was taking on the size of the whole world. It seemed to last for hours, days, ages. But all the while he clung fast to the slender, quivering body of Nanette. * * * * * Mountains and hills suddenly blazed before his eyes. Straight up and down mountains. He tried to stir his sluggish mind into action. What did they mean? Where had he seen them before? And while yet his mind struggled with the problem the mountains dwindled like melting snow. The pressure around his body relaxed. A blinding glare of steady light played upon his face. Then all was quietness and peace. "Nan! Aaron!" The voice was Karl's. Dazedly they looked around. What had once been mountains were now desks and chairs. They were back again in the laboratory. Several agonizing minutes passed before either could grasp the startling change in things. The horror of the electronic disaster still filled their minds to overflowing. Carruthers recovered first. He stepped from the railed inclosure marking the spot where the atomic beam had restored them after their space flight, and guided the girl to a chair. Karl's face was drawn and white as his eyes rested on the two pitiful figures that had materialized out of the ether. "Don't ask us any questions yet," spoke Carruthers in a tired voice. "We've passed through too many horrors. What was the matter, Karl? Couldn't you get the rays to work sooner?" "Sooner?" Danzig's eyes were wide with wonder. He glanced at his watch. "It was a little difficult to control both machines all alone, but I switched off the ray from the inverse dimensional tubes and turned on the other immediately. All in all it must have taken me fifteen seconds." "Fifteen seconds," repeated Carruthers, dazedly. "It's unbelievable." He dropped wearily into a chair and rested his forehead in the palms of his hands. "How long have we been gone, Nan?" * * * * * Nanette pulled the ragged remnants of a dress around her knees and attempted a smile. "Almost four months, according to the passage of time on the electron." "Impossible!" whispered Danzig, shutting his eyes to the truth. Aaron Carruthers pointed to his clothes, now ragged and torn. "Look, Karl! Everything I have on is worn out completely. Observe my hair and beard, and the soles of my shoes. Human reason to the contrary, Nanette and I have lived like two animals for four months, and all in the space of fifteen seconds earth time. How can you account for it? We figured it out on paper. And we've proved it with our bodies. What it will mean to future civilization I can't foretell. It's beyond imagination." And the laboratory became silent as a tomb as the three people tried with all the strength of their minds to grasp the miracle of the strange and unfathomable atomic rays. * * * * * PRODUCING HEAT BY ARCTIC COLD Producing heat by means of Arctic cold is a fantastic but none the less quite practicable idea evolved by Dr. H. Barjou of the French Academy of Science. Dr. Barjou says the water under the ice in the Arctic region is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. While the air is many degrees less, there may even be a difference of 50 degrees. The unfrozen water could be pumped into a tank and permitted to freeze, thus generating heat, as freezing a cubic meter of ice liberates about as much heat as burning twenty-two pounds of coal. The heat produced would vaporize a volatile hydrocarbon which would drive a turbine. For condensing the hydrocarbon again, Dr. Barjou says great blocks of brine could be used. Not only would the Arctic regions become comfortably habitable by means of this utilization of energy, contends Dr. Barjou, but heat also could be furnished for the rest of the world. Now if some one only can discover how to make the Sahara Desert send forth cooling waves, the world will be perfect, temperaturally. Jetta of the Lowlands PART TWO OF A THREE-PART NOVEL _By Ray Cummings_ [Illustration: We were invisible!] [Sidenote: Into remote Lowlands, in an invisible flyer, go Grant and Jetta--prisoners of a scientific depth bandit.] WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE In the year 2020 the oceans have long since drained from the surface of the earth, leaving bared to sun and wind the one-time sea floor. Much of it is flat, caked ooze, cracked and hardened, with, here and there, small scum-covered lakes, bordered by slimy rocks. It is hot, down in the depth of the great Lowland areas, and it is chiefly adventurers and outcasts of human kind who can endure life in what few towns there are. Into Nareda, the capital village of the tiny Lowland Republic of Nareda, goes Philip Grant, an operative of the United States Customs Department, on a dangerous assignment--to ferret out the men who are smuggling mercury into the United States from that place. Grant falls in love with Jetta, the daughter of Jacob Spawn, a big mercury mine owner of Nareda, only to learn that Spawn has promised her in marriage to Greko Perona, the country's Minister of Internal Affairs. Grant follows Perona to a midnight Lowland rendezvous with mysterious strangers and eavesdrops on them, sending their indistinct voice murmurs to his chief, Hanley, in Washington, who relays them back to him, amplified. He learns several important things: that Spawn and Perona and a depth bandit named De Boer are together involved in the smuggling; that they have planned a fake robbery of a fortune in radiumized mercury stored at Spawn's mine, to collect the insurance on it and escape paying the Government export fee: and that they, plan to kidnap Grant for ransom. The plotters learn of Grant's absence from Nareda, and suspect that he may be nearby. They start to search for him. Grant barely escapes, with the bandits and conspirators in hot pursuit. He flees to Jetta, hoping that they will be able to get away together: but he finds her tied hand and foot in her room. The door is tightly sealed. And close behind him are his pursuers! CHAPTER VIII _Jetta's Defiance_ I must go back now to picture what befell Jetta that afternoon while I was at Spawn's mine. It is not my purpose to becloud this narrative with mystery. There was very little mystery about it to Jetta, and I can reconstruct her viewpoint of the events from what she afterward told me. Jetta's room was in a wing of the house on the side near the pergola. Her window and door looked out upon the patio. When I had retired--that first night in Nareda--Spawn had gone to his daughter and upbraided her for showing herself while he was giving me that first midnight meal. "You stay in your room: you have nothing to do with him. Hear me?" "Yes, Father." From her infancy he had dominated her; it never occurred to either of them that she could disobey. And yet, this time she did; for no sooner was he asleep that night than she came to my window as I have told. This next day Jetta dutifully had kept herself secluded. She cooked her own breakfast while I was at the Government House, and was again out of sight by noon. Jetta was nearly always alone. I can picture her sitting there within the narrow walls of her little room. Boy's ragged garb. All possible femininity stripped from her. Yet, within her, the woman's instincts were struggling. She sewed a great deal, she since has told me, there in the cloistered dimness. Making little dresses of silk and bits of finery given her surreptitiously by the neighbor women. Gazing at herself in them with the aid of a tiny mirror. Hiding them away, never daring to wear them openly; until at intervals her father would raid the room, find them and burn them in the kitchen incinerator. "Instincts of Satan! By damn but I will get these woman's instincts out of you, Jetta!" * * * * * And there were hours when she would try to read hidden books, and look at pictures of the strange fairy world of the Highlands. She could read and write a little: she had gone for a few years to the small Nareda government school, and then been snatched from it by her father. When Spawn and I had finished that noonday meal, I recall that he left me for a moment. He had gone to Jetta. "I am taking that young American to the mine. I will return presently. Stay close, Jetta." "Yes, Father." He left with me. Jetta remained in her room, her thoughts upon the coming night. She trembled at them. She would meet me again, this evening in the moonlit garden.... The sound of a man walking the garden path aroused her from her reverie. Then came a soft ingratiating voice: "Jetta, _chica Mia_!" It was Perona, standing by the pergola preening his effeminate mustache. "Jetta, little love bird, come out and talk to me." Jetta slammed the window slide and sat quiet. "Jetta, it is your Greko." "Well do I know it," she muttered. "Jetta!" He strode down the path and back. "Jetta." His voice began rising into a strident, peevish anger. "Jetta, are you in there? _Chica_, answer me." No answer. "Jetta, _por Dios_--" He fumed, then fell to pleading. "Are you in there? Please, little love bird, answer your Greko. Are you in there?" "Yes." "Come out then. Come to Greko." * * * * * She said sweetly. "My father does not want me to talk to men. You know that is so, Señor Perona." It grounded him. "Why--" "Is it not so?" "Y-yes, but I am not--" "A man?" Little imp! She relished impaling him upon the shafts of her ridicule. Her sport was interrupted by the arrival of Spawn. He had left me at the mine and come directly back home. Jetta heard his heavy tread on the garden path, then his voice: "Ah, Perona." And Perona: "Jetta will not come out and talk to me." The waxen mustached Minister of Nareda's Internal Affairs was like a sulky child. But Spawn was unimpressed. Spawn said: "Well, let her alone. We have more important things to engage us. I have the American occupied at the mine. You heard from De Boer?" "I went last night. All is ready as we planned. But Spawn, this fool of an American, this Grant--" "Hush! Not so loud, Perona!" "I am telling you--!" Perona was excited. His voice rose shrilly, but Spawn checked him. "Shut up: you waste time. Tell me exactly the arrangements with De Boer. _Le grand coup_! now; to-night most important of nights--and you rant of your troubles with a girl!" * * * * * They were standing by the pergola, quite near Jetta's shaded window. She crouched there, listening to them. None of this was entirely new to Jetta. She had always been aware more or less of her father's secret business activities. As a child she had not understood them. Nor did she now, with any clarity. Spawn, had always talked freely within her hearing, ignoring her, though occasionally he threatened her to keep her mouth shut. She heard now fragments of this discussion between her father and Perona. They moved away from the pergola and sat by the fountain, speaking too low for her to hear. And then they paced the path, coming nearer, and she caught their voices again. And occasionally they grew excited, or vehement, and then their raised tones were plainly audible to her. And this that she heard, with what she knew already, and with what subsequently transpired, enables me now to piece together the facts into a connected explanation. In the establishment of his cinnabar mine some years before, Spawn was originally financed by Perona. The South American was then newly made Minister of Nareda's Internal Affairs. He became Spawn's business partner. They kept the connection secret. Spawn falsified his production records; and Perona with his governmental position was enabled to pass these false accounts of the mine's production. Nareda was systematically cheated of a portion of its legal share. But this, after a time, did not satisfy the ambitious Perona and Spawn. They began to plan how they might engage in smuggling some of their quicksilver into the United States. Perona, during these years, had had ambitions of his own in other directions. President Markes, of Nareda, was an honest official. He handicapped Perona considerably. There were many ways by which Perona could have grown rich through a dishonest handling of the government affairs. It was done almost universally in all the small Latin governments. But Markes as President made it dangerous in Nareda. Even the duplicity with the mine was a precarious affair. * * * * * There was at this time in Nareda a young adventurer named De Boer. A handsome, swaggering fellow in his late twenties. He was a good talker; he spoke many languages; he could orate with fluency and skilful guile. His smile, his colorful personality, and his gift for oratory, made it easy for him to stir up dissatisfaction among the people. De Boer became known as a patriot. A revolution in Nareda was brewing. Perona, as Nareda's Minister, was De Boer's political enemy. The Nareda Government ran De Boer out, ending the potential revolution. But Perona and Spawn had always secretly been friends with De Boer. It would have been very handy to have this unscrupulous young scoundrel as President. When De Boer was banished with some of his most loyal followers, he began a career of petty banditry in the Lowland's depths. Spawn and Perona kept in communication with him, and, by a method which was presently made startlingly clear to Jetta and me, De Boer smuggled the quicksilver for Perona and Spawn. It was this activity which had finally aroused my department and caused Hanley to send me to Nareda. This however, was a dangerous, precarious occupation. De Boer did not seem to think so, or care. But Perona and Spawn, with their established positions in Nareda, were always fearful of exposure. Even without my coming, they had planned to disconnect from De Boer. "And for more than that," as Jetta had one day heard Perona remark to her father. "I'll tell to you that this De Boer is not very straight with us, Spawn." De Boer would, upon occasion, fail to make proper return for the smuggled product. * * * * * So now they had planned a last coup in which De Boer was to help, and then they would be done with him: the two of them, Spawn and Perona, would remain as honest citizens of Nareda, and De Boer had agreed to take himself away and pursue his banditry elsewhere. It was a simple plan; it promised to yield a high stake quickly. A final fling at illicit activity; then virtuous reformation, with Perona marrying the little Jetta. * * * * * Beneath the strong room at the mine, Perona and Spawn had secretly built a cleverly concealed little vault. De Boer, this night just before the midnight hour, was to attack the mine. Spawn and Perona had bribed the police guards to submit to this attack. The guards did not know the details: they only knew that De Boer and his men would make a sham attack, careful to harm none of them--and then De Boer would withdraw. The guards would report that they had been driven away by a large force. And when the excitement was over, the ingots of radiumized quicksilver would have vanished! De Boer, making away into distant Lowland fastnesses, would obviously be supposed to have taken the treasure. But Perona, hidden alone in the strong-room, would merely carry the ingots down into the secret vault, to be disposed of at some future date. The ingots were well insured, by an international company, against theft. The Nareda government would receive one-third of that insurance as recompense for the loss of its share. Perona and Spawn would get two-thirds--and have the treasure as well. * * * * * Such was the present plan, into which, all unknown to me, I had been plunged. And my presence complicated things considerably. So much so that Perona grew vehement, this afternoon in the garden, explaining why. His shrill voice carried clearly to Jetta, in spite of Spawn's efforts to shut him up. "I tell to you that Americano agent will undo us." "How?" demanded the calmer Spawn. "Already he has made Markes suspicious." "Chut! You can befool Markes, Perona. You have for years been doing it." "This meddling fellow, he has met Jetta!" "I do not believe it." There was a sudden grimness to Spawn's tone at the thought. "I do not believe it. Jetta would not dare." "You should have seen him flush when Markes mentioned at the conference this morning that I am to marry Jetta. No one could miss it. He has met her--I tell it to you--and it must have been last night." "So, you say?" Jetta could see her father's face, white with suppressed rage. "You think that? And it is that this Grant might be your rival, that worries you? Not our plans for to-night, which have real importance--but worrying over a girl." "She would not talk to me. She would not come out. He has no doubt put wild ideas into her head. Spawn, you listen to me. I have always been more clever than you at scheming. Is it not so? You have always said it. I have a plan now, it fits our arrangements with De Boer, but it will rid us of this Americano. When all is done and I have married Jetta--" * * * * * Spawn interrupted impatiently. "You will marry Jetta, never fear. I have promised her to you." And because, as Jetta well knew, Perona had made it part of his bargaining in financing Spawn. But this they did not now mention. "To get rid of this Grant--well, that sounds meritorious. He is dangerous around here. To that I agree." "And with Jetta--" "Have done, Perona!" With sudden decision Spawn leaped to his feet. "I do not believe she would have dared talk to Grant. We'll have her out and ask her. If she has, by the gods--" It fell upon Jetta before she had time to gather her wits. Spawn strode to her door, and found it fastened on the inside. "Jetta, open at once!" He thumped with his heavy fists. Confused and trembling she unsealed it, and he dragged her out into the sunlight of the garden. "Now then, Jetta, you have heard some of what we have been saying, perhaps?" "Father--" "About this young American? This Grant?" She stood cringing in his grasp. Spawn had never used physical violence with Jetta. But he was white with fury now. "Father, you--you are hurting me." Perona interposed. "Wait Spawn! Not so rough! Let me talk to her. Jetta, _chica mia_, your Greko is worried--" "To the hell with that!" Spawn shouted. But he released the girl and she sank trembling to the little seat by the pergola. Spawn stood over her. "Jetta, look at me! Did you meet--did you talk to Grant last night?" She wanted to deny it. She clung to his angry gaze. But the habit of all her life of truthfulness with him prevailed. "Y-yes," she admitted. CHAPTER IX _Trapped_ "Spawn! Hold!" There was an instant when it seemed that Spawn would strike the girl. The blood drained from his face, leaving his dark eyes blazing like torches. His hamlike fist went back, but Perona sprang for him and clutched him. "Hold, Spawn: I will talk to her. Jetta, so you did--" The torrent of emotion swept Spawn; weakened him so that instead of striking Jetta, he yielded to Perona's clutch and dropped his arm. For a moment he stood gazing at his daughter. "Is it so? And all my efforts, going for nothing, just like your mother!" He no more than murmured it, and as Perona pushed him, he sank to the bench beside Jetta. But did not touch her, just sat staring. And she stared back, both of then aghast at the enormity of this, her first disobedience. I never had opportunity to know Spawn, except for the few times which I have mentioned. Perhaps he was at heart a pathetic figure. I think, looking back on it now that Spawn is dead, that there was a pathos to him. Spawn had loved his wife, Jetta's mother. As a young man he had brought her to the Lowlands to seek his fortune. And when Jetta was an infant, his wife had left him. Run away, abandoning him and their child. * * * * * Perhaps Spawn was never mentally normal after that. He had reared Jetta with the belief that sin was inherent in all females. It obsessed him. Warped and twisted all his outlook as he brooded on it through the years. Woman's instincts; woman's love of pleasure, pretty clothes--all could lead only to sin. And so he had kept Jetta secluded. He had fought what he seemed to see in her as she grew and flowered into girlhood, and denied her everything which he thought might make her like her mother. Spawn met his death within a few hours of this afternoon I am describing. Perhaps he was no more than a scheming scoundrel. We are instinctively lenient with our appraisal of the dead. I do not know. "Jetta," Perona said to her accusingly, "that is true, then: you did talk with that miserable Americano last night? You sinful, lying girl." The contrition within Jetta at disobeying her father faded before this attack. "I am not sinful." The trembling left her and she sat up and faced the accusing Perona. "I did but talk to him. You speak lies when you say I am sinful." "You hear, Spawn? Defiant: already changed from the little Jetta I--" "Yes, I am changed. I do not love you, Señor Perona. I think I hate you." Her tears were very close, but she finished: "I--I won't marry you. I won't!" It stung Spawn. He leaped to his feet. "So you talk like that! It has gone so far as this, has it? Get to your room! We will see what you will and what you won't!" * * * * * Again the crafty Perona was calmest of them all. He thrust himself in front of Spawn. "Jetta, to-night you plan to see him again, no? To-night?--here?" "No," she stammered. "You lie!" "No." "You lie! Spawn look at her! Lying! She has planned to meet him to-night! That is all we want to know." He broke into a cackling chuckle. "That fits my new plan, Spawn. A tryst with Jetta, here in the garden." "Get to your room," Spawn growled. He dragged her back, and Perona followed them. "You lie there." Spawn flung her to her couch. "After this night's work is done, we'll see whether you will or you won't." "She may not stay in here." Perona suggested. "She will stay." "You seal her in?" "I will seal her in." Perona's eyes roved the little bedroom. One window oval and a door, both overlooking the patio. "But suppose she should get out? There is no way to seal that window properly from outside. A cord!" A long stout silken tassel-cord had been draped by Jetta at the window curtain. Perona snatched it down. "If her ankles and wrists were tied with this--" "No!" burst out Jetta. And then a fear for me rushed over her. A realization, forgotten in the stress of this conflict with her father, now swept over her. They were planning harm to me. "No, do not bind me." * * * * * A sudden caution came to her. She was making it worse for me. Already she had done me immense harm. She said suddenly, "Do what you like with me. I was wrong. I have no interest in that American. It is you, Greko, I--I love." Spawn did not heed her. Perona insisted, "I would tie her with care." He helped Spawn rope her ankles, and then her wrists, crossed behind her. "A little gag, Spawn? She might cry out: we want no interference to-night." He was ready with a large silken handkerchief. They thrust it into her mouth and tied it behind her neck. "There," growled Spawn. "You will and you won't: we shall see about that. Lie still, Jetta. If I have need to come again to you--" They left her. And this time she heard them less clearly. But there were fragments: Perona: "I will meet him again. After dark, to-night. Yes, he expects me. For his money, Spawn, his pay in advance. This De Boer works not for nothing." Spawn: "You will arrange about your police on the streets? He can get here to my house safely?" "Oh yes, at the tri-evening hour, certainly before midnight, before the attack on the mine. You must stay here, Spawn. Pretend to be asleep: it will lure the fool Americano out in to the moonlight." * * * * * Jetta could piece it together fairly well. They would have De Boer come and abduct me. Not tell him I was a government agent, with the micro-safety alarm which they suspected I carried, but just tell De Boer that I was a rich American, who could be abducted and held for a big ransom. Perona's voice rose with a fragment: "If he springs his alarm, here in the moonlight, you can be here, Spawn, and pretend to try and rescue him. A radio-image of that flashed to Hanley's office will exonerate us of suspicion." Perona would promise De Boer that the Nareda government would pay the ransom quickly, collecting it later from the United States. Spawn said, "You think De Boer will believe that?" "Why should he not? I am skilful at persuasion, no? Let him find out later that the United States Government trackers are after him!" Perona cackled at the thought of it. "What of that? Let him kill this Grant. All the better." Spawn said abruptly: "The United States may catch De Boer. Have you thought of that, Perona? The fellow would not shield us, but would tell everything." "And who will believe him? The wild tale of a trapped bandit! Against your word, Spawn? You, an honest and wealthy mine owner? And I--I, Greko Perona, Minister of Internal Affairs of the Sovereign Power of Nareda! Who will dare to give me the lie because a bandit tells a wild tale with no real facts to prop it?" "Those police guards at the mine to-night?" "Admit that they took your bribes? You are witless, Spawn! Let them but admit it to me and of a surety I will fling them into imprisonment! Now listen with care, for the after noon is going...." Their voices lowered, then faded, and Jetta was left alone and helpless. Spawn went back to the mine to meet me. We returned and had supper, Jetta could dimly hear us. * * * * * There was silence about the house during the mid-evening. I had slipped out and followed Perona to his meeting with De Boer. Then Spawn had discovered my absence and had rushed to join Perona and tell him. But Jetta knew nothing of this. The hour of her tryst with me was approaching. In the darkness of her room as she lay bound and gagged on her couch, she could see the fitful moonlight rising to illumine the window oval. She squirmed at the cords holding her, but could not loosen them. They cut into her flesh; her limbs were numb. The evening wore on. Would I come to the garden tryst? Jetta could not break her bonds. But gradually she had mouthed the gag loose. Then she heard my hurried footsteps in the patio; then my tense voice. And at her answer I was pounding on her door. But it had been stoutly sealed by Spawn. I flung my shoulder against it, raging, thumping. But the heavy metal panels would not yield; the seal held intact. "Jetta!" "Philip, run away! They want to catch you! De Boer, the bandit, is coming!" "I know it!" Fool that I was, to pause with talk! There was no time: I must get Jetta out of here. Break down this door. But it would not yield. A gas torch would melt this outer seal. Was there a torch here at Spawn's? But I had no time to search for a torch! Or a bar with which to ram this door-- A panic seized me, with the fresh realization that any instant De Boer and his men would arrive. I beat with futile fists on the door, and Jetta from within, calling to me to get away before I was caught. This accursed door between us! * * * * * And then--after no more than half a minute, doubtless--I thought of the window. My momentary panic left me. I dashed to the window oval. Sealed. But the shutter curtain, and the glassite pane behind it, were fragile. "Jetta, are you near the window?" "No. On the bed. They have tied me." "Look out; I'm breaking through!" There were loose rocks, as large as my head, set to mark the garden path. I seized one and hurled it. With a crash it went through the window and fell to the floor of the room. A jagged hole showed. "All right, Jetta?" "Yes! Yes, Philip." I squirmed through the oval and dropped to the floor. My arms were cut from the jagged glassite, though I did not know it then. It was dim inside the room, but I could see the outline of the bed with her lying on it. Her ankles and wrists were tied. I cut the cords with my knife. She was gasping. "They're planning to capture you. Philip! You should not be here! Get away!" "Yes. But I'm going to take you with me. Can you stand up?" * * * * * I set her on her feet in the center of the room. A shaft of moonlight was coming through the hole in the window. "Philip! You're bleeding!" "It is nothing. Cut myself on the glassite. Can you stand alone?" "Yes." But her legs, stiffened and numb from having been bound so many hours, bent under her. I caught her as she was falling. "I'll be--all right in a minute. But Philip, if you stay here--" "You're going with me!" "Oh!" I could carry her, if she could not run. But it would be slow; and it would be difficult to get her through the window. And on the street we would attract too much attention. "Jetta, try to stand. Stamp your feet. I'll hold you." I steadied her. Then I bent down, chafing her legs with my hands. Her arms had been limp, but the blood was in them now. She murmured with the tingling pain, and then bent over, frantically helping me rub the circulation back into her legs. "Better?" "Yes." She took a weak and trembling step. "Wait. Let me rub them more, Jetta." Precious minutes! "I'll knock out the rest of the window with that rock! We'll run; we'll be out of here in a moment." "Run where?" "Away. Into hiding--out of all this. The United States patrol-ship is coming from Porto Rico. It will take us from here." "Where?" "Away. To Great New York, maybe. Away from all this; from that old fossil, Perona." I was stooping beside her. "I'm all right now, Philip." I rose up, and suddenly found myself clasping her in my arms; her slight body in the boy's ragged garb pressed against me. "Jetta, dear, do you trust me? Will you come?" "Yes. Oh, yes--anywhere, Philip, with you." * * * * * For only a breathless instant I lingered, holding her. Then I cast her off and seized the rock from the floor. The jagged glassite fell away under my blows. "Now, Jetta. I'll go first--" But it was too late! I stopped, stricken by the sound of a voice outside! "He's there! In the girl's room! That's her window!" Cautious voices in the garden! The thud of approaching footsteps. I shoved Jetta back and rushed to the broken window oval. The figures of De Boer and his men showed in the moonlight across the patio. They had heard me breaking the glassite. And they saw me, now. "There he is, De Boer!" We were trapped! CHAPTER X _The Murder in the Garden_ "Hans, keep back! I will go!" "But Commander--" "Armed? The hell he is not! Spawn said no. Spawn! Where is Spawn? He was here." I had dropped back from the window, and, gripping Jetta, stood in the center of the room. "Jetta, dear." "Oh. Philip!" "There's no other way out of here?" "No! No!" Only the heavy sealed door, and this broken window. The bandits in the garden had paused at sight of me. Someone had called. "He may be armed, De Boer." They had stopped their forward rush and darted into the shelter of the pergola. I might be armed! We could hear their low voices not ten feet from us. But I was not armed, except for my knife. Futile weapon, indeed. "Jetta, keep back. If they should fire--" * * * * * I got a look through the oval. De Boer was advancing upon it, with his barreled projector half levelled. He saw me again. He called: "You American, come out!" I crouched on the floor, pushing Jetta back to where the shadows of the bed hid her. "You American!" He was close outside the window. "Come out--or I am coming in!" I said abruptly, "Come!" My blade was in my hand. If he showed himself I could slash his throat, doubtless. But what about Jetta? My thoughts flashed upon the heels of my defiant invitation. Suppose, as De Boer climbed in the window, I killed him? I could not escape, and his infuriated fellows would rush us, firing through the oval, sweeping the room, killing us both. But Jetta now was in no danger. Her father was outside, and these bandits were her father's friends. I would have to yield. I called, louder, "Why don't you come in?" Could I hold them off? Frighten them off, for a time, and make enough noise so that perhaps someone passing in the nearby street would give the alarm and bring help? There was a sudden silence in the patio. The bandits had so far made as little commotion as possible. Presently I could hear their low voices. * * * * * I heard an oath. De Boer's head and shoulders appeared in the window oval! His levelled projector came through. Perhaps he would not have fired, but I did not dare take the chance. I was crouching almost under the muzzle, so I straightened, gripped it, and flung it up. I then slashed at his face with my knife, but he gripped my wrist with powerful fingers. My knife fell as he twisted my wrist. His projector had not fired. It was jammed between us. One of his huge arms reached in and encircled me. "Damn you!" He muttered it, but I shouted, "Fool! De Boer, the bandit!" I was aware of a commotion out in the garden. "... Bring all Nareda on our ears? De Boer, shut him up!" I was gripping the projector, struggling to keep its muzzle pointed upwards. With a heave of his giant arms De Boer lifted me and jerked me bodily through the window. I fell on my feet, still fighting. But other hands seized me. It was no use. I yielded suddenly. I panted: "Enough!" They held me. One of them growled. "Another shout and we will leave you here dead. Commander, _look_!" My shirt was torn open. The electrode band about my chest was exposed! De Boer towered head and shoulders over me. I gazed up, passive in the grip of two or three of his men, and saw his face. His heavy jaw dropped as he gazed at my little diaphragms, the electrode. He knew now for the first time that this was no private citizen he had assaulted. This official apparatus meant that I was a Government agent. * * * * * There was an instant of shocked silence. An expression grim and furious crossed the giant bandit's face. "So this is it? Hans, careful--hold him!" Jetta was still in her room, silent now. I heard Spawn's voice, close at hand in the patio. "De Boer! Careful!" It was the most cautious of half-whispers. Abruptly someone reached for my chest; jerked at the electrode; tore its fragile wires--the tiny grids and thumbnail amplifiers; jerked and ripped and flung the whole little apparatus to the garden path. But it sang its warning note as the wires broke. Up in Great New York Hanley knew then that catastrophe had fallen upon me. For a brief instant the crestfallen bandit mumbled at what he had done. Then came Spawn's voice: "Got him, De Boer? Good!" Triumphant Spawn! He advanced across the garden with his heavy tread. And to me, and I am sure to De Boer as well, there came the swift realization that Spawn had been hiding safely in the background. But my detector was smashed now. It might have imaged De Boer assailing me: but now that it was smashed, Spawn could act freely. "Good! So you have him! Make away to the mine!" I did not see De Boer's face at that instant. But I saw his weapon come up--an act wholly impulsive, no doubt. A flash of fury! He levelled the projector, not at me, but at the on-coming Spawn. "You damn liar!" "De Boer--" It was a scream of terror from Spawn. But it came too late. The projector hissed; spat its tiny blue puff. The needle drilled Spawn through the heart. He toppled, flung up his arms, and went down, silently, to sprawl on his face across the garden path. * * * * * De Boer was cursing, startled at his own action. The men holding me tightened their grip. I heard Jetta cry out, but not at what had happened in the garden: she was unaware of that. One of the bandits had left the group and climbed into her room. Her cry now was suppressed, as though the man's hand went over her mouth. And in the silence came his mumbled voice: "Shut up, you!" There was the sound of a scuffle in there. I tore at the men holding me. "Let me go! Jetta! Come out!" De Boer dashed for the window. I was still struggling. A hand cuffed me in the face. A projector rammed into my side. "Stop it, fool American!" De Boer came back with a chastened bandit ahead of him. The man was muttering and rubbing his shoulder, and De Boer said: "Try anything like that again, Cartner, and I won't be so easy on you." De Boer was dragging Jetta, holding her by a wrist. She looked like a terrified, half-grown boy, so small was she beside this giant. But the woman's lines of her, and the long dark hair streaming about her white face and over her shoulders, were unmistakable. "His daughter." De Boer was chuckling. "The little Jetta." * * * * * All this had happened in certainly no more than five minutes. I realized that no alarm had been raised: the bandits had managed it all with reasonable quiet. There were six of the bandits here, and De Boer, who towered over us all. I saw him now as a swaggering giant of thirty-odd, with a heavy-set smooth-shaved, handsome face. He held Jetta off. "Damn, how you have grown, Jetta." Someone said, "She knows too much." And someone else, "We will take her with us. If you leave her here, De Boer--" "Why should I leave her? Why? Leave her--for Perona?" Then I think that for the first time Jetta saw her father's body lying sprawled on the path. She cried, "Philip!" Then she half turned and murmured: "Father!" She wavered, almost falling. "Father--" She went down, fainting, falling half against me and against De Boer, who caught her slight body in his arms. "Come, we'll get back. Drag him!" "But you can't carry that girl out like that, De Boer." "Into the house: there is an open door. Hans, go out and bring the car around to this side. Give me the cloaks. There is no alarm yet." De Boer chuckled again. "Perona was nice to keep the police off this street to-night!" We went into the kitchen. An auto-car, which to the village people might have been there on Spawn's mining business, slid quietly up to the side entrance. A cloak was thrown over Jetta. She was carried like a sack and put into the car. I suddenly found an opportunity to break loose. I leaped and struck one of the men. But the others were too quickly on me. The kitchen table went over with a crash. Then something struck me on the back of the head: I think it was the handle of De Boer's great knife. The kitchen and the men struggling with me faded. I went into a roaring blackness. CHAPTER XI _Aboard the Bandit Flyer_ I was dimly conscious of being inside the cubby of the car, with bandits sitting over me. The car was rolling through the village streets. Ascending. We must be heading for Spawn's mine. I thought of Jetta. Then I heard her voice and felt her stir beside me. The roaring in my head made everything dreamlike. I sank half into unconsciousness again. It seemed an endless interval, with only the muttering hiss of the car's mechanism and the confused murmurs of the bandits' voices. Then my strength came. The cold sweat on me was drying in the night breeze that swept through the car as it climbed the winding ascent. I could see through its side oval a vista of bloated Lowland crags with moonlight on them. It seemed that we should be nearly to the mine. We stopped. The men in the car began climbing out. De Boer's voice: "Is he conscious now? I'll take the girl." Someone bent over me. "You hear me?" "Yes," I said. I found myself outside the car. They held me on my feet. Someone gratuitously cuffed me, but De Boer's voice issued a sharp, low-toned rebuke. "Stop it! Get him and the girl aboard." * * * * * There seemed thirty or forty men gathered here. Silent dark figures in black robes. The moonlight showed them, and occasionally one flashed a hand search-beam. It was De Boer's main party gathered to attack the mine. I stood wavering on my feet. I was still weak and dizzy, with a lump on the back of my head where I had been struck. The scene about me was at first unfamiliar. We were in a rocky gully. Rounded broken walls. Caves and crevices. Dried ooze piled like a ramp up one side. The moonlight struggled down through a gathering mist overhead. I saw, presently, where we were. Above the mine, not below it: and I realized that the car had encircled the mine's cauldron and climbed to a height beyond it. Down the small gully I could see where it opened into the cauldron about a hundred feet below us. The lights of the mine winked in the blurred moonlight shadows. The bandits led me up the gully. The car was left standing against the gully side where it had halted. De Boer, or one of his men, was carrying Jetta. The flyer was here. We came upon it suddenly around a bend in the gully. Although I had only seen the nose if it earlier in the evening. I recognized this to be the same. It was in truth a strange looking flyer: I had never seen one quite like it. Barrel-winged, like a Jantzen: multi-propellored: and with folding helicopters for the vertical lifts and descent. And a great spreading fan-tail, in the British fashion. It rested on the rocks like a fat-winged bird with its long cylindrical body puffed out underneath. A seventy-foot cabin: fifteen feet wide, possibly. A line of small window-portes; a circular glassite front to the forward control-observatory cubby, with the propellors just above it, and the pilot cubby up there behind them. And underneath the whole, a landing gear of the Fraser-Mood springed-cushion type: and an expanding, air-coil pontoon-bladder for landing upon water. * * * * * All this was usual enough. Yet, with the brief glimpses I had as my captors hurried me toward the landing incline, I was aware of something very strange about this flyer. It was all dead black, a bloated-bellied black bird. The moonlight struck it, but did not gleam or shimmer on its black metal surface. The cabin window-portes glowed with a dim blue-gray light from inside. But as I chanced to gaze at one a green film seemed to cross it like a shade, so that it winked and its light was gone. Yet a hole was there, like an eye-socket. An empty green hole. We were close to the plane now, approaching the bottom of the small landing-incline. The wing over my head was like a huge fat barrel cut length-wise in half. I stared up; and suddenly it seemed that the wing was melting. Fading. Its inner portion, where it joined the body, was clear in the moonlight. But the tips blurred and faded. An aspect curiously leprous. Uncanny. Gruesome. They took me up the landing-incline. A narrow vaulted corridor ran length-wise of the interior, along one side of the cabin body. To my left as we headed for the bow control room, the corridor window-portes showed the rocks outside. To the right of the corridor, the ship's small rooms lay in a string. A metal interior. I saw almost nothing save metal in various forms. Grid floor and ceiling. Sheet metal walls and partitions. Furnishings and fabrics, all of spun metal. And all dead black. We entered the control room. The two men holding me flung me in a chair. I had been searched. They had taken from me the tiny, colored magnesium light-flashes. How easy for the plans of men to go astray! Hanley and I had arranged that I was to signal the Porto Rican patrol-ship with those flares. "Sit quiet!" commanded my guard. I retorted, "If you hit me again, I won't." * * * * * De Boer came in, carrying Jetta. He put her in a chair near me, and she sat huddled tense. In the dim gray light of the control room her white face with its big staring dark eyes was turned toward me. But she did not speak, nor did I. The bandits ignored us. De Boer moved about the room, examining a bank of instruments. Familiar instruments, most of them. The usual aero-controls and navigational devices. A radio audiphone transmitter and receiver, with its attendant eavesdropping cut-offs. And there was an ether-wave mirror-grid. De Boer bent over it. And then I saw him fastening upon his forehead an image-lens. He said: "You stay here, Hans. You and Gutierrez. Take care of the girl and this fellow Grant. Don't hurt them." Gutierrez was a swarthy Latin American. He smiled. "For why would I hurt him? You say he is worth much money to us, De Boer. And the girl, ah--" De Boer towered over him. "Just lay a finger on her and you will regret it, Gutierrez! You stay at your controls. Be ready. This affair it will take no more than half an hour." A man came to the control room entrance. "You come, Commander?" "Yes. Right at once." "The men are ready. From the mine we might almost be seen here. This delay--" "Coming, Rausch." * * * * * But he lingered a moment more. "Hans, my finder will show you what I do. Keep watch. When we come back, have all ready for flight. This Grant had an alarm-detector. Heaven only knows what eavesdropping and relaying he has done. And for sure there is hell now in Spawn's garden. The Nareda police are there, of course. They might track us up here." He paused before me. "I think I would not cause trouble, Grant." "I'm not a fool." "Perhaps not." He turned to Jetta. "No harm will come to you. Fear nothing." He wound his dark cloak about his giant figure and left the control room. In a moment, through the rounded observing pane beside me, I saw him outside on the moonlit rocks. His men gathered about him. There were forty of them, possibly, with ten or so left here aboard to guard the flyer. And in another moment the group of dark-cloaked figures outside crept off in single file like a slithering serpent, moving down the rock defile toward where in the cauldron pit the lights of the mine shone on its dark silent buildings. CHAPTER XII _The Attack on the Mine_ There was a moment when I had an opportunity to speak with Jetta. Gutierrez sat watchfully by the archway corridor entrance with a needle projector across his knees. The fellow Hans, a big, heavy-set half-breed Dutchman with a wide-collared leather jerkin and wide, knee-length pantaloons, laid his weapon carefully aside and busied himself with his image mirror. There would soon be images upon it, I knew: De Boer had the lens-finder on his forehead, and the scenes at the mine, as De Boer saw them would be flashed back to us here. This Gutierrez was very watchful. A move on my part and I knew he would fling a needle through me. My thoughts flew. Hanley had notified Porto Rico. The patrol-ship had almost enough time to get here by now. I felt Jetta plucking at me. She whispered: "They have gone to attack the mine." "Yes." "I heard it planned. Señor Perona--" Her hurried whispers told me further details of Perona's scheme. So this was a pseudo attack! Perona would take advantage of it and hide the quicksilver. De Boer would return presently and escape. And hold me for ransom. I chuckled grimly. Not so easy for a bandit, even one as clever as De Boer at hiding in the Lowland depths to arrange a ransom for an agent of the United States. Our entire Lowland patrol would be after him in a day. * * * * * Jetta's swift whispers made it all clear to me. It was Perona's scheme. She ended, "And my father--" Her voice broke; her eyes flooded suddenly with tears "Oh, Philip, he was good to me, my poor father." I saw that the mirror before Hans was glowing with its coming image. I pressed Jetta's hand. "Yes, Jetta." One does not disparage the dead. I could not exactly subscribe to Jetta's appraisal of her parent, but I did not say so. "Jetta, the mirror is on." I turned away from her toward the instrument table. Gutierrez at the door raised his weapon. I said hastily, "Nothing. I--we just want to see the mirror." I stood beside Hans. He glanced at me and I tried to smile ingratiatingly. "This attack will be successful, eh, Hans?" "Damn. I hope so." The mirror was glowing. Hans turned a switch to dim the tube-lights of the room so that we might see the images better. It brought a protest from Gutierrez. I swung around. "I'm not a fool! You can see me perfectly well: kill me if I make trouble. I want to see the attack." "_Por Dios_, if you try anything--" "I won't!" "Shut!" growled Hans. "The audiphone is on. The big adventure--and the commander--leaves me here just to watch!" * * * * * A slit in the observatory pane was open. The dark figure of one of the bandits on guard outside came and called softly up to us. "Started. Hans?" "Starting." "Should it go wrong, call out." "Yes. But it will not." "There was an alarm, relayed probably to Great New York, the commander said, from Spawn's garden. These cursed prisoners--" "Shut! You keep watch out there. It is starting." The guard slunk away. My attention went back to the mirror. An image was formed there now, coming from the eye of the lens upon De Boer's forehead. It swayed with his walking. He was evidently leading his men, for none of them were in the scene. The dark rocks were moving past. The lights of the mine were ahead and below, but coming nearer. The audiphone hummed and crackled. And through it, De Boer's low-voiced command sounded: "To the left is the better path. Keep working to the left." The image of the rocks and the mine swung with a dizzying sweep as De Boer turned about. Then again he was creeping forward. The mine lights came closer. De Beer's whispered voice said: "There they are!" * * * * * I could see the lights of the mine's guards flash on. A group of Spawn's men gathered before the smelter building. The challenge sounded. "Who are you? Stop!" And De Boer's murmur: "That is correct, as Perona said. They expect us. Well," he ended with a sardonic laugh, "expect us." His projector went up. He fired. In the silence of the control room we could hear the audiphoned hiss of it, and see the flash in the mirror-scene. He had fired into the air. Again his low voice to his men: "Hold steady. They will run." The group of figures at the smelter separated, waved and scattered back into the deeper shadows. Their hand-lights were extinguished, but the moonlight caught and showed them. They were running away; hiding in the crags. They fired a shot or two, high in the air. De Boer was advancing swiftly now. The image swayed and shifted, raised and lowered rhythmically as he ran. And the dark shape of the smelter building loomed large as he neared it. I felt Jetta beside me: heard her whisper: "Why, he should attack and then come back! Greko told my father--" But De Boer was not coming back! He was dashing for the smelter entrance. Spawn's guards must have known then that there was something wrong. Their shots hissed, still fired high, and our grid sounded their startled shouts. Then as De Boer momentarily turned his head, I saw what was taking place to the side of him. A detachment of the bandits had followed the retreating guards. The bandits' shots were levelled now. Dim stabs of light in the gloom. One of the guards screamed as he was struck. * * * * * The attack was real! But it was over in a moment. Spawn's men, those who were not struck down, plunged away and vanished. Perona had disconnected the mine's electrical safeguards. The smelter door was sealed, but it gave before the blows of a metal bar two of De Boer's men were carrying. In the unguarded, open strong-room, Perona, alone, was absorbed in his task of carrying the ingots of quicksilver down into the hidden compartment beneath its metal floor. Our mirror was vague and dim now with a moving interior of the main smelter room as De Boer plunged through. At the strong-room entrance he paused, with his men crowding behind him. The figure of Perona showed in the vague light: he was stooping under the weight of one of the little ingots. Beside him yawned the small trap-opening leading downward. He saw De Boer. He straightened, startled, and then shouted with a terrified Spanish oath. De Boer's projector was levelled: the huge, foreshortened muzzle of it blotted out half our image. It hissed its puff of light--a blinding flash on our mirror--in the midst of which the dark shape of Perona's body showed as it crumpled and fell. Like Spawn, he met instant death. Jetta was gripping me. "Why--" Gutierrez was with us. Hans was bending forward, watching the mirror. He muttered, "Got him!" I saw a chance to escape, and pulled at Jetta. But at once Gutierrez stepped backward. "Like him I will strike you dead!" he said. * * * * * No chance of escape. I had thought Gutierrez absorbed by the mirror, but he was not. I protested vehemently: "I haven't moved, you fool. I have no intention of moving." And now De Boer and his men were carrying up the ingots. A man for each bar. A confusion of blurred swaying shapes, and low-voiced, triumphant murmurs from our disc. Then De Boer was outside the smelter house, and we saw a little queue of the bandits carrying the treasure up the defile. Coming back here to the flyer. There was no pursuit; the mine guards were gone. The triumphant bandits would be here in a few moments. "_Ave Maria, que magnifico!_" Gutierrez had retreated to our doorway, more alert than ever upon me and Jetta. Hans called through the window-slit: "All is well, Franks!" "Got it?" "Yes! Make ready." There was a stir outside as several of the bandits hastened down the defile to meet De Boer. And the tread of others, inside the flyer at their posts, preparing for hasty departure. Hans snapped off the audiphone and mirror. He bent over his control panel. "All is well, Gutierrez. In a moment we start." Through the observatory window I saw the line of De Boer's men coming: Abruptly Hans gave a cry. "Look!" * * * * * A glow was in the room. A faint aura of light. And our disconnected instruments were crackling, murmuring with interference. Eavesdropping waves were here! Hans realised it: so did I. But there was no need for theory. From outside came shouts. "Patrol-ship!" "Hurry!" The ship, suddenly exposing its lights, was perfectly visible above us. Five thousand feet up, possibly. A tiny silver bird in the moonlight: but even with the naked eye I could see by its light pattern that it was the official Porto Rican patrol-liner. It saw us down here: recognized this bandit flyer, no doubt. And it was coming down! There was a confusion as the bandits rushed aboard. The patrol was dropping in a swift spiral. I watched tensely, holding Jetta, with the turmoil of the embarking bandits around me. Gutierrez stood with levelled weapon. "They have not moved, Commander." De Boer was here. The treasure was aboard. "Ready, Hans. Lift us." The landing portes clanged as they closed. Hans shoved at his switches. I heard the helicopter engines thumping. A vertical lift: there was no space in this rocky defile for any horizontal take-away. He was very calm, this De Boer. He sat in a chair at a control-bank of instruments unfamiliar to me. "Full power, Hans: I tell you. Lift us!" * * * * * The ship was quivering. We lifted. The rocks of the gully dropped away. But the patrol-ship was directly over us. Was De Boer rushing into a collision? "Now, forward, Hans." We poised for the level flight. Did De Boer think he could out-distance this patrol-ship, the swiftest type of flyer in the Service? I knew that was impossible. The silver ship overhead was circling, watchful. And as we levelled for forward flight it shot a warning searchlight beam down across our bow, ordering us to land. De Boer laughed. "They think they have us!" I saw his hand go to a switch. A warning siren resounded through our corridor, warning the bandits of De Boer's next move. But I did not know it then: the thing caught me unprepared. De Boer flung another switch. My senses reeled. I heard Jetta cry out. My arm about her tightened. A moment of strange whirling unreality. The control room seemed fading about me. The tube-lights dimmed. A green glow took their place--a lurid sheen in which the cubby and the tense faces of De Boer and Hans showed with ghastly pallor. Everything was unreal. The voices of De Boer and Hans sounded with a strange tonelessness. Stripped of the timber that made one differ from the other. Hollow ghosts of human voices. By the sound I could not tell which was De Boer and which was Hans. The corridor was dark; all the lights on the ship faded into this horrible dead green. The window beside me had a film on it. A dead, dark opening where moonlight had been. Then I realized that I was beginning to see through it once more. Starlight. Then the moonlight. We had soared almost level with the descending patrol-ship. We went past it, a quarter of a mile away. Went past, and it did not follow. It was still circling. * * * * * I knew then what had happened. And why this bandit ship had seemed of so strange an aspect. We were invisible! At four hundred yards, even in the moonlight, the patrol could not distinguish us. Only ten of these X-flyers were in existence: they were the closest secret of the U. S. Anti-War Department. No other government had them except in impractical imitations. I had never even seen one before. But this bandit ship was one. And I recalled that a year ago, a suppressed dispatch intimated that the Service had lost one--wrecked in the Lowlands and never found. So this was that lost invisible flyer? De Boer, using it for smuggling, with Perona and Spawn as partners. And now, De Boer making away in it with Spawn's treasure! The bandit's hollow, toneless, unreal chuckle sounded in the gruesome lurid green of the control room. "I think that surprised them!" The tiny silver shape of the baffled local patrol-ship faded behind us as we flew northward over heavy, fantastic crags; far above the tiny twinkling lights of the village of Nareda--out over the sullen dark surface of the Nares Sea. CHAPTER XIII _The Flight to the Bandit Stronghold_ During this flight of some six hours--north, and then, I think, northeast--to the remote Lowland fastness where De Boer's base was located, I had no opportunity to learn much of the operation of this invisible flyer. But it was the one which had been lost. Wrecked, no doubt, and the small crew aboard it all killed. The vessel, however, was not greatly damaged: the crew were killed doubtless by escaping poisonous gases when the flyer struck. How long it lay unfound, I cannot say. Perhaps, for days, it still maintained its invisibility, while the frantic planes of the U. S. Anti-War Department tried in vain to locate it. And then, with its magnetic batteries exhausting themselves, it must have become visible. Perona, making a solo flight upon Nareda business to Great London, came upon it. Perona, Spawn and De Boer were then in the midst of their smuggling activities. They salvaged the vessel secretly. De Boer, with an incongruous flair for mechanical science, was enabled in his bandit camp, to recondition the flyer--building a workshop for the purpose, with money which Perona freely supplied. Some of this I learned from De Boer, some is surmise: but I am sure it is close to the facts. * * * * * I have since had an opportunity--through my connection with this adventure which I am recording--of going aboard one of the X-flyers of the Anti-War Department, and seeing it in operation with its technical details explained to me. But since it is so important a Government secret, I cannot set it down here. The principles involved are complex: the postulates employed, and the mathematical formulae developing them in theory, are far too intricate for my understanding. Yet the practical workings are simple indeed. Some of them were understood as far back as 1920 and '30, when that pioneer of modern astrophysics, Albert Einstein, first proved that a ray of light is deflected from its normal straight path when passing through a magnetic field. I am sorry that I cannot give here more than this vague hint of the workings of the fantastic invisible flyers which to-day are so often the subject of speculation by the general public which never has seen them, and perhaps never will. But I think, too, that a lengthy pedantic discourse here would be out of place. And tiring. After all, I am trying to tell only what happened to me in this adventure. And to little Jetta. A very strangely capable fellow, this young De Boer. A modern pirate: no other age could have produced him. He did not spare Perona's money, that was obvious. From his hidden camp he must have made frequent visits to the great Highland centers, purchasing scientific equipment: until now, when his path crossed mine. I found him surrounded by most of the every-day devices of our modern world. The village of Nareda was primitive: backward. Save for its modern lights, a few local audiphones and image-finders, and its official etheric connections with other world capitals, it might have been a primitive Latin American village of a hundred years ago. * * * * * But not so De Boer's camp, which presently I was to see. Nor this, his flyer, with which his smuggling activities had puzzled Hanley's Office for so many months. There was nothing primitive here. De Boer himself was a swaggering villain. I saw him now with his cloak discarded, in the normal tube-lights of the control room when, after a time, the mechanism of invisibility of the flyer was shut off. A fellow of six feet and a half at the very least, this De Boer. Heavy, yet with his great height and strength, lean and graceful. He wore a fabric shirt, with a wide-rolled collar. A wide belt of tanned hide, with lighters, a little electron drink-cooler and other nick-nackeries hanging from tasseled cords--and a naked, ugly-looking knife blade clipped beside a holster which held an old-fashioned exploding projector of leaden steel-tipped bullets. His trousers were of leather, wide-flaring, ending at his brawny bare knees, with wide-cut, limp leather boots flapping about his calves in ancient piratical fashion. They had flaring soles, these shoes, for walking upon the Lowland caked ooze. The uppers were useless: I rather think he wore them because they were picturesque. He was a handsome fellow, with rough-hewn features. A wide mouth, and very white, even teeth. A cruel mouth, when it went grim. But the smile was intriguing: I should think particularly so to women. He had a way with him, this devil-may-care bandit. Strange mixture of a pirate of old and an outlaw of our modern world. With a sash at his waist, a red handkerchief about his forehead, and a bloody knife between his teeth. I could have fancied him a fabled pirate of the Spanish Main. A few hundred years ago when these dry Lowlands held the tossing seas. But I had seen him, so far, largely seated quietly in his chair at his instrument table, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and, instead of a red bandanna about his forehead, merely the elastic band holding the lens of his image-finder. It caught in the locks of his curly black hair. He pushed it askew; and then, since he did not need it now, discarded it altogether. * * * * * Where we went I could not surmise, except that we flew low over the sullen black waters of the Nares Sea and then headed northeast. We kept well below the zero-height, with the dark crags of the Lowlands passing under us. The night grew darker. Storm clouds obscured the moon; and it was then that De Boer shut off the mechanism of invisibility. The control room, with only the watchful Gutierrez now in it--besides De Boer, Jetta and myself--was silent and orderly. But there were sounds of roistering from down the ship's corridor. The bandits, with this treasure of the radiumized quicksilver ingots aboard, were already triumphantly celebrating. I sat whispering with Jetta. De Boer, busy with charts and navigational instruments, ignored us, and Gutierrez, so long as we did not move, seemed not to object to our whispers. The night slowly passed. De Boer served us food, calling to one of his men to shove a slide before us. For himself, he merely drank his coffee and an alcoholic drink at his instrument table, while absorbed in his charts. The roistering of the men grew louder. De Boer leaped to his feet, cursed them roundly, then went back to his calculations. He stood once before Jetta, regarding her with a strange, slow smile which made my heart pound. But he turned away in a moment. The bandits, for all De Boer's admonitions, were now ill-conditioned for handling this flyer. But I saw, through the small grid-opening in the control room ceiling, the pilot in his cubby upon the wing-top. He sat alert and efficient, with his lookout beside him. * * * * * The night presently turned really tumultuous, with a great wind overhead, and storm clouds of ink, shot through occasionally by lightning flashes. We flew lower, at minus 2,000 feet, on the average. The heavy air was sultry down here, with only a dim blurred vista of the depths beneath us. I fancied that now we were bending eastward, out over the great basin pit of the mid-Atlantic area. No vessels passed us, or, if they did, I did not sight them. De Boer had a detector on his table. Occasionally it would buzz with calls: liners or patrols in our general neighborhood. He ignored them with a sardonic smile. Once or twice, when our dim lights might have been sighted, he altered our course sharply. And, when at one period we passed over the lights of some Lowland settlement, he flung us again into invisibility until we were beyond range. I had, during these hours, ample opportunity to whisper with Jetta. But there was so little for us to say. I knew all of Spawn's and Perona's plot. Both were dead: it was De Boer with whom we were menaced now. And as I saw his huge figure lounging at his table, and his frowning, intent face, the vision of the aged, futile Perona, who had previously been my adversary, seemed inoffensive indeed. De Boer obviously was pleased with himself. He had stolen half a million dollars of treasure, and was making off with it to his base in the depths. He would smuggle these ingots into the world markets at his convenience; months from now, probably. Meanwhile, what did he intend to do with me? And Jetta? Ransom me? I wondered how he could manage it. And the thought pounded me. What about Jetta? I felt now that she was all the world to me. Her safety, beyond any thought of smugglers or treasure, was all that concerned me. But what was I going to do about it? * * * * * I pressed her hand. "Jetta, you're not too frightened, are you?" "No, Philip." Her mind, I think, was constantly on her father, lying dead back there on his garden path. I had not spoken of him, save once. She threatened instant tears, and I stopped. "Do not be too frightened. We'll get out of this." "Yes." "He can't escape. Jetta; he can't hide. Why, in a day or so all the patrols of the United States Lowland Service will be after us!" But if the patrol-ships assailed De Boer, if he found things going badly--he could so easily kill Jetta and me. He might be caught, but we would never come through it alive. My thoughts drifted along, arriving nowhere, just circling in the same futile rounds. I was aware of Jetta falling asleep beside me, her face against my shoulder, her fingers clutching mine. She looked like a half grown, slender, ragged boy. But her woman's hair lay thick on my arm, and one of the dark tresses fell to my hand. I turned my fingers in it. This strange little woman. Was my love for her foredoomed to end in tragedy? I swore then that I would not let it be so. CHAPTER XIV _Jetta Takes a Hand_ I came from my reverie to find De Boer before me. He was standing with legs planted wide, arms folded across his deep chest, and on his face an ironic smile. "So tired! My little captives, _di mi_! You look like babes lost in a wood." I disengaged myself from Jetta, resting her against a cushion, and she did not awaken. I stood up, fronting De Boer. "What are you going to do with me?" I demanded. He held his ironic smile. "Take you to my camp. You'll be well hidden, no one can follow me. My X-flyer's a very handy thing to have, isn't it?" "So you're the smuggler I was sent after?" That really amused him. "Er--yes. Those tricksters, Perona and Spawn--we were what you would call partners. He had--the perfumed Perona--what he thought was a clever scheme for us. I was to take all the risk, and he and Spawn get most of the money. Chah! They thought I was imbecile--pretending to attack a treasure and being such a fool that I would not seize it for myself! Not De Boer!" He chuckled. "Well, so very little did they know me. No treasure yet touched De Boer's fingers without lingering!" * * * * * He was in a talkative mood, and drew up his chair and slouched in it. I saw that he had been drinking some alcholite beverage, not enough to befuddle him, but enough to take the keen edge off his wits, and make him want to talk. "Sit down, Grant." "I'll stand." "As you like." "What are you going to do with me?" I demanded again. "Try to ransom me for a fat price from the United States?" He smiled sourly. "You need not be sarcastic, young lad. The better for you if I get a ransom." "Then I hope you get it." "Perona's idea," he added. "I will admit it looked possible: I did not know then you had Government protection." He went grim. "That was Perona and Spawn's trickery. Well, they paid for it. No one plays De Boer false and lives to tell it. Perona and Spawn wanted to get rid of you--because you annoyed them." "Did I?" "With the little Jetta, I fancy." His gaze went to the sleeping Jetta and back to me. "Perona was very sensitive where this little woman was concerned. Why not? An oldish fool like him--" * * * * * I could agree with that, but I did not say so. I said, "You'd better cast me loose, Jetta and me. I suppose you realize, De Boer, that you'll have the patrols like a pack of hounds after you. Jetta is a Nareda citizen: the United States will take that up. There's the theft of the treasure. And as you say, I'm a Government agent." He nodded. "Your Government is over-zealous in protecting its agents. That I know, Grant. I might have left you alone, there in the garden, when I realized it. But that, by damn, was too late! Live men talk. Any way, if I cannot ransom you, to kill you is very easy. And dead men are shut-mouthed." "I'm still alive, De Boer." He eyed me. "You talk brave." This condescending, amused giant! I retorted. "How are you going to ransom me?" "That," he said. "I have not yet planned it. A delicate business." I ventured, "And Jetta?" My heart was beating fast. "Jetta," he said with a sudden snap, "is none of your business." Again his gaze went toward her. "I might marry her: why not? I am not wholly a villain. I could marry her legally in Cape Town, with all the trappings of clergy--and be immune from capture under the laws there. If she is seventeen. I have forgotten her age, it's been so long since I knew her. Is she seventeen? She does not look it." I said shortly. "I don't know how old she is." "But we can ask her when she awakens, can't we?" * * * * * He was amusing himself with me. And yet, looking back on it now, I believe he was more than half serious. From his pouch he drew a small cylinder. "Have a drink, Grant. After all I bear you no ill-will. A man can but follow his trade: you were trying to be a good Government agent." "Thanks." "And then you may make it possible for me to pick a nice ransom. Here." "I hope so." I declined the drink. "Afraid for your wits?" I said impulsively, "I want all my wits to make sure you handle this ransom properly, De Boer. I'm as interested as you are: in that at least, we are together." He grinned, tipped the cylinder at his lips for a long drink. "Quite so--a mutual interest. Let us be friends over it." His gaze wandered back to Jetta. He added slowly: "She is very lovely, Grant. A little woodland flower, just ready for plucking." A sentimental tone, but there was in his expression a ribald flippancy that sent a shudder through me. "She has quite overcome you, Grant. Well, why not me as well? I am certainly more of a man than you. We must admit that Perona had a good eye." * * * * * My thoughts were wandering. Suppose I could not find an opportunity to escape with Jetta? De Boer might successfully ransom me and take her to Cape Town. Or if he feared that to try for the ransom would be too dangerous, doubtless he would kill me out of hand. An ill outcome indeed! Nor could I forget that there was half a million of treasure involved. It was obvious to me that Hanley would not permit the patrol-ships to attack De Boer with the lives of Jetta and myself at stake. Hanley knew, or suspected, that De Boer was operating an invisible flyer, but I did not see how that could help Hanley much. Markes, acting for Nareda, would doubtless be willing to ransom Jetta: the United States would ransom me. I must urge the ransom plan, because for all the money in the world I would not endanger Jetta, nor let this bandit carry her off. Or could I escape with her, and still find some means to save the treasure? It was Jetta's treasure now, two-thirds of it, for it had legally belonged to her father. Could I save it, and her as well? Not by any move of mine, here now on this flyer. That was impossible. In De Boer's camp, perhaps. But that, too, I doubted. He was too clever a scoundrel to be lax in guarding me. But in the effecting of a ransom--the exchange of me, and perhaps Jetta, for a sum of money--that would be a delicate transaction, and some little thing could easily go wrong for De Boer. There would be my chance. I would have to make something go wrong! Get in his confidence now so that I would have some say in arranging the details of the ransom. Make him think I was only concerned for my own safety. Appear clever in helping plan the exchange. And then so manipulate the thing that I could escape with Jetta and save the treasure--and the ransom money as well. And capture De Boer, since that was what Hanley had sent me out to accomplish. * * * * * Thoughts fly swiftly. All this flashed to me. I had no details as yet. But that I must get into De Boer's confidence stood but clearly. I said abruptly, "De Boer, since we are to be friends--" "So you prefer to sit down now?" "Yes." I had drawn a small settle to face him. "De Boer, do you intend to ask a ransom for Jetta?" "You insist with that question?" "That is my way. Then we can understand each other. Do you?" "No," he said shortly. I frowned. "I think I could get you a big price." "I think I should prefer the little Jetta, Grant." I held myself outwardly unmoved. "I don't blame you. But you will ransom me? It can be worked out. I have some ideas." "Yes," he agreed. "It can be worked perhaps. I have not thought of details yet. You are much concerned for your safety, Grant? Fear not." An amused thought evidently struck him. He added. "It occurs to me how easy, if I am going to ransom you, it will be for me to send you back dead. You might, if I send you back alive, tell them a lot of things about me." "I will not talk." "Not," he said, "if I close your mouth for good." * * * * * I had no retort. There was no answering such logic; and with his murders of Spawn and Perona, and the deaths of some of the police guards at the mine, the murder of me would not put him in much worse a position. He was laughing ironically. Suddenly he checked himself. "Well, Jetta! So you have awakened?" Jetta was sitting erect. How long she had been awake, what she had heard. I could not say. Her gaze went from De Boer to me, and back again. "Yes, I am awake." It seemed that the look she flashed me carried a warning. But whatever it was, I had no chance of pondering it, for it was driven from my mind by surprise at her next words. "Awake, yes! And interested, hearing this Grant bargain with you for his life." It surprised De Boer as well. But the alcholite had dulled his wits, and Jetta realized this, and presumed upon it. "Ho!" exclaimed De Boer. "Our little bird is angry!" "Not angry. It is contempt." Her look to me now held contempt. It froze me with startled chagrin; but only for an instant, and then the truth swept me. Strange Jetta! I had thought of her only as a child; almost, but not quite a woman. A frightened little woodland fawn. "Contempt, De Boer. Is he not a contemptuous fellow, this American?" Again I caught her look and understood it. This was a different Jetta. No longer helplessly frightened, but a woman, fighting. She had heard De Boer calmly saying that he might send me back dead--and she was fighting now for me. De Boer took another drink, and stared at her. "What is this?" She turned away. "Nothing. But if you are going to ransom me--" "I am not, little bird." * * * * * She showed no aversion for him, and it went to his head, stronger than the drink. "Never would I ransom you!" He reached for her, but nimbly she avoided him. Acting, but clever enough not to overdo it. I held myself silent: I had caught again the flash of a warning gaze from her. She had fathomed my purpose. Get his confidence. Beguile him. And woman is so much cleverer than the trickiest man at beguiling! "Do not touch me, De Boer! He tried that. He held my hand in the moonlight--to woo me with his clever words." "Hah! Grant, you hear her?" "And I find him now not a man, but a craven--" "But you will find me a man, Jetta." De Boer was hugely amused. "See Grant, we are rivals! You and Perona, then you and me. It is well for you that I fear you not, or I would run my knife through you now." I could not mistake Jetta's shudder. But De Boer did not see it, for she covered it by impulsively putting her hand upon his arm. "Did you--did you kill my father?" She stumbled over the question. But she asked it with a childlike innocence sufficiently real to convince him. "I? Why--" He recovered from his surprise. "Why no, little bird. Who told you that I did?" "No one. I--no one has said anything about it." She added slowly, "I hoped that it was not you, De Boer." "Me? Oh no: it was an accident." He shot me a menacing glance. "I will explain it all. Jetta. Your father and I were friends for years--" "Yes. I know. Often he spoke to me of you. Many times I asked him to let me meet you." * * * * * They were ignoring me. But Gutierrez, lurking in the door oval, was not: I was well aware of that. "I remember you from years ago, little Jetta." "And I remember you." I understand the rationality of her purpose. She could easily get De Beer's confidence. She had known him when a child. Her father had been his business partner, presumably his friend. And I saw her now cleverly altering her status here. She had been a captive, allied with me. She was changing that. She was now Spawn's daughter, here with her dead father's friend. She turned a gaze of calm aversion upon me. "Unless you want him here, De Boer. I would rather talk to you--without him." He leaped to his feet. "Hah! that pleases me, little Jetta! Gutierrez, take this fellow away." The Spanish-American came slouching forward. "The girl's an old friend, Commander? You never told me that." "Because it is no business of yours. Take him away. Seal him in D-cubby." I said sullenly. "I misjudged both of you." Jetta's gaze avoided me. As Gutierrez shoved me roughly down the corridor, De Boer laughed, and his voice came back: "Do not be afraid. We will find some safe way of ransoming you--dead or alive!" I was flung on a bunk in one of the corridor cubbies, and the door sealed upon me. (_To be continued._) An Extra Man _By Jackson Gee_ [Illustration: "Harry turns into a thick smoke, and gets sucked into a big hole in the machine."] [Sidenote: Sealed and vigilantly guarded was "Drayle's Invention, 1932"----for it was a scientific achievement beyond which man dared not go.] Rays of the August mid-day sun pouring through the museum's glass roof beat upon the eight soldiers surrounding the central exhibit, which for thirty years has been under constant guard. Even the present sweltering heat failed to lessen the men's careful observation of the visitors who, from time to time, strolled listlessly about the room. The object of all this solicitude scarcely seemed to require it. A great up-ended rectangle of polished steel some six feet square by ten or a dozen feet in height, standing in the center of Machinery Hall, it suggested nothing sinister or priceless. Two peculiarities, however, marked it as unusual--the concealment of its mechanism and the brevity of its title. For while the remainder of the exhibits located around it varied in the simplicity or complexity of their design, they were alike in the openness of their construction and detailed explanation of plan and purpose. The great steel box, however, bore merely two words and a date: "Drayle's Invention, 1932." It was, nevertheless, toward this exhibit that a pleasant appearing white-haired old gentleman and a small boy were slowly walking when a change of guard occurred. The new men took their posts without words while the relieved detail turned down a long corridor that for a moment echoed with the clatter of hobnailed boots on stone. Then all was surprisingly still. Even the boy was impressed into reluctant silence as he viewed the uniformed men, though not for long. * * * * * "What's that, what's that, what's that?" he demanded presently with shrill imperiousness. "Grandfather, what's that?" An excited arm indicated the exhibit with its soldier guard. "If you can keep still long enough," replied the old gentleman patiently, "I'll tell you." And with due regard for rheumatic limbs he slowly settled himself on a bench and folded his hands over the top of an ebony cane preparatory to answering the youngster's question. His inquisitor, however, was, at the moment, being hauled from beneath a brass railing by the sergeant of the watch. "You'll have to keep an eye on him, sir," said the man reproachfully. "He was going to try his knife on the wood-work when I caught him." "Thank you, Sergeant. I'll do my best--but the younger generation, you know." "Sit still, if possible!" he directed the squirming boy. "If not, we'll start home now." The non-com took a new post within easy reaching distance of the disturber and attempted to glare impressively. "Go on, grandfather, tell me. What's D-r-a-y-l-e? What's in the box? Can't they open it? What are the soldiers for? Must they stay here? Why?" "Drayle," said the old man, breaking through the barrage of questions, "was a close friend of mine a good many years ago." "How many, grandfather? Fifty? As much as fifty? Did father know him? Is father fifty?" "Forty; no; yes; no," said the harassed relative; and then with amazing ignorance inquired: "Do you really care to hear or do you just ask questions to exercise your tongue?" "I want to hear the story, grandpa. Tell me the story. Is it a nice story? Has it got bears in it? Polar bears? I saw a polar bear yesterday. He was white. Are polar bears always white? Tell me the story, grandpa." * * * * * The old man turned appealing eyes toward the sergeant. Tacitly a sympathetic understanding was established. The warrior also was a father, and off the field of battle he had known defeat. "Leave me handle him, sir," he suggested. "I've the like of him at home." "I'd be very much indebted to you if you would." Thus encouraged, the soldier produced from an inner pocket and offered one of those childhood sweets known as an "all day sucker." "See if you can choke yourself on that," he challenged. The clamor ceased immediately. "It always works, sir," explained the man of resource. "The missus says as how it'll ruin their indigestions, but I'm all for peace even if I am in the army." Now that his vocal organs were temporarily plugged, the child waved a demanding arm in the direction of the main exhibit to indicate a desire for the resumption of the narrative. But the ancient was not anxious to disturb so soon the benign and acceptable silence. In fact it was not until he observed the sergeant's look of inquiry that he began once more. "That box," he said slowly, "is both a monument and a milestone on the road to mankind's progress in mechanical invention. It marks the point beyond which Drayle's contemporaries believed it was unsafe to go: for they felt that inventions such as his would add to the complexities of life, and that if a halt were not made our own machines would ultimately destroy us. "I did not, still do not, believe it. And I know Drayle's spirit broke when the authorities sealed his last work in that box and released him upon parole to abandon his experiments." As the speaker sighed in regretful reminiscence, the sergeant glanced at his men. Apparently all was well: the only visible menace lolled within easy arm's reach, swinging his short legs and sucking noisily on his candy. Nevertheless the non-com shifted to a slightly better tactical position as he awaited the continuance of the tale. * * * * * "Christopher Drayle," said the elderly gentleman, "was the greatest man I have ever known, as well as the finest. Forty years or more ago we were close friends. Our homes on Long Island adjoined and I handled most of his legal affairs. He was about forty-five or six then, but already famous. "His rediscovery of the ancient process of tempering copper had made him one of the wealthiest men in the land and enabled him to devote his time to scientific research. Electricity and chemistry were his specialties, and at the period of which I speak he was deeply engrossed in problems of radio transmission. "But he had many interests and not infrequently visited our local country club for an afternoon of golf. Sometimes I played around the course with him and afterward, over a drink, we would talk. His favorite topic was the contribution of science to human welfare. And even though I could not always follow him when he grew enthusiastic about some new theory I was always puzzled. "It was at such a time, when we had been discussing the new and first successful attempt to send moving pictures by radio, that I mentioned the prophecy of Jackson Gee. Gee was the writer of fantastic, pseudo-scientific tales who had said: 'We shall soon be able to resolve human beings into their constituent elements, transmit them by radio to any desired point and reassemble them at the other end. We shall do this by means of vibrations. We are just beginning to learn that vibrations are the key to the fundamental process of all life.' * * * * * "I laughed as I quoted this to Drayle, for it seemed to me the ravings of a lunatic. But Drayle did not smile. 'Jackson Gee,' he said, 'is nearer to the truth than he imagines. We already know the elements that make the human body, and we can put them together in their proper proportions and arrangements: but we have not been able to introduce the vitalizing spark, the key vibrations to start it going. We can reproduce the human machine, but we can not make it move. We can destroy life in the laboratory, and we can prolong it, but so far we have not been able to create it. Yet I tell you in all seriousness that that time will come; that time will come.' "I was surprised at his earnestness and would have questioned him further. But a boy appeared just then with a message that Drayle was wanted at the telephone. "Something important, sir," he said. Drayle went off to answer the summons and later he sent word that he had been called away and would not be able to return. "It was the last I heard from Drayle for months. He shut himself in his laboratory and saw no one but his assistants, Ward of Boston, and Buchannon of Washington. He even slept in the workshop and had his food sent in. "Ordinarily I would not have been excluded, for I had his confidence to an unusual degree and I had often watched him work. I admired the deft movements of his hands. He had the certain touch and style of a master. But during that period he admitted only his aids. * * * * * "Consequently I felt little hope of reaching him one morning when it was necessary to have his signature to some legal documents. Yet the urgency of the case led me to go to his home on the chance that I might be able to get him long enough for the business that concerned us. Luck was with me, for he sent out word that he would see me in a few minutes. I remember seating myself in the office that opened off his laboratory and wondering what was beyond the door that separated us. I had witnessed some incredible performances in the adjoining room. "At last Drayle came in. He looked worried and careworn. There were new lines in his face and blue half-circles of fatigue beneath his eyes. It was evident that it was long since he had slept. He apologized for having kept me waiting and then, without examining the papers I offered, he signed his name nervously in the proper spaces. When I gathered the sheets together he turned abruptly toward the laboratory, but at the door he paused and smiled. "'Give my respects to Jackson Gee,' he said." * * * * * "Who's Jackson Gee? Does father know him? Has he any polar bears? Aren't you going to tell me about that?" The tidal wave of questions almost overwhelmed the historian and his auditor. But the military, fortunately, was equal to the emergency. With a tactical turn of his hand he thrust the remnant of the lollypop between the chattering jaws and spoke with sharp rapidity. "Listen," he commanded, "that there, what you got, is a magic candy, and if you go on exposing it to the air after it is once in your mouth it's likely to disappear, just like that." And the speed of the translation was illustrated by a smart snapping of the fingers. Doubt shone in the juvenile terror's eyes and the earlier generations waited fearfully while skepticism and greed waged their recurrent conflict. For a time it seemed as if the veteran had blundered; but finally greed triumphed and a temporary peace ensued. "Where was I?" inquired the interrupted narrator when the issue of battle was settled. "You was talking about Jackson Gee," answered the guardsman in a cautiously low tone. "So I was, so I was," the old gentleman agreed somewhat vaguely, nodding his head. He gazed at the sergeant with mingled awe and admiration. "I suppose it's quite useless to mention it," he said rather wistfully, "but if you ever get out of the army and should want a job.... You could name your own salary, you know?" The question ended on an appealing note. Evidently the soldier understood the digression, for he replied in a tone that would brook no dispute. "No, sir, I couldn't consider it." "I was afraid so," said the other regretfully, and added, with apparent irrelevance, "I have to live with him, you see." "Tough luck," commiserated the listener. Reluctantly summoning his thoughts from the pleasant contemplation of what had seemed to offer a new era of peace, the bard turned to his story. * * * * * "A few hours later," he continued, "I had a telephone call from Drayle's wife, and I realized from the fright in her voice that something dreadful had happened. She asked me to come to the house at once. Chris had been hurt. But she disconnected before I could ask for details. I started immediately and I wondered as I drove what disaster had overtaken him. Anything, it seemed to me, might have befallen in that room of miracles. But I was not prepared to find that Drayle had been shot and wounded. "The police were before me and already questioning the assailant, Mrs. Farrel, a fiery tempered young Irish-woman. When I entered the room she was repeating half-hysterically her explanation that Drayle had killed her husband in the laboratory that morning. "'Right before my eyes, I seen it,' she shouted. 'Harry was standing on a sort of platform looking at a big machine like, and so help me he didn't have a stitch of clothes on, and I started to say something, but all at once there came a terrible sort of screech and a flash like lightnin' kinda, in front of him. Then Harry turns into a sort of thick smoke and I can see right through him like he was a ghost; and then the smoke gets sucked into a big hole in the machine and I know Harry's dead. And here's this man what done it, just a standin' there, grinnin' horrid. So something comes over me all at once and I points Harry's gun at him and pulls the trigger!' "Even before the woman had finished I recalled what I seen one afternoon in Drayle's laboratory many months before. I had been there for some time watching him when he placed a small tumbler on a work table and asked me if I had ever seen glass shattered by the vibrations of a violin. I told him that I had, but he went through the demonstration as if to satisfy himself. Of course when he drew a bow across the instrument's strings and produced the proper pitch the goblet cracked into pieces exactly as might have been expected. And I wondered why Drayle concerned himself with so childish an experiment before I noticed that he appeared to have forgotten me completely. * * * * * "I endeavored then not to disturb him, and I remember trying to draw myself out of his way and feeling that something momentous was about to take place. Yet actually I believe it would have required a considerable commotion to have distracted his attention, for his ability to concentrate was one of the characteristics of his genius. "I saw him place another glass on the table and I noticed then that it stood directly in front of a complicated mechanism. At first this gave out a low humming sound, but it soon rose to an unearthly whining shriek. I shrank from it involuntarily and a second later I was amazed at the sight of the glass, seemingly reduced to a thin vapor, being drawn into a funnel-like opening near the top of the device. I was too startled to speak and could only watch as Drayle started the contrivance again. Once more its noise cut through me with physical pain. I cried out. But my voice was overwhelmed by the terrific din of the mysterious machine. "Then Drayle strode down the long room to another intricate mass of wire coils and plates and lamps. And I saw a dim glow appear in two of the bulbs and heard a noise like the crackling of paper. Drayle made some adjustments, and presently I observed a peculiar shimmering of the air above a horizontal metal grid. It reminded me of heat waves rising from a summer street, until I saw the vibrations were taking a definite pattern; and that the pattern was that of the glass I had seen dissolved into air. At first the image made me think of a picture formed by a series of horizontal lines close together but broken at various points in such fashion as to create the appearance of a line by the very continuity of the fractures. But as I watched, the plasma became substance. The air ceased to quiver and I was appalled to see Drayle pick up the tumbler and carry it to a scale on which he weighed it with infinite exactness. If he had approached me with it at that moment I would have fled in terror. * * * * * "Next, Drayle filled the goblet with some liquid which immediately afterward he measured in a beaker. The result seemed to please him, for he smiled happily. At the same instant he became aware of my presence. He looked surprised and then a trifle disconcerted. I could see that he was embarrassed by the knowledge that I had witnessed so much, and after a second or two he asked my silence. I agreed at once, not only because he requested it but because I couldn't believe the evidence myself. He let me out then and locked the door. "It was this recollection that made me credit the woman's story. But I was sick with dread, for in spite of my faith in Drayle's genius I feared he had gone mad. "Mrs. Drayle had listened to Mrs. Farrel's account calmly enough, but I could see the fear in her eyes when she signaled a wish to speak to me alone. I followed her into an adjoining room, leaving Mrs. Farrel with the two policemen and the doctor, who was trying to quiet her. "As soon as the door closed after us Mrs. Drayle seized my hands. "'Tim,' she whispered, 'I'm horribly afraid that what the woman says is true. Chris has told me of some wonderful things he was planning to do, but I never expected he would experiment on human beings. Can they send him to prison?' "Of course I said what I could to comfort her and tried to make my voice sound convincing. At the time the legal aspect of the matter did not worry me so much as the fear that the attack on Drayle might prove fatal. For even if it should develop that he was not dangerously hurt, I imagined that the interruption of the experiment at a critical moment might easily have ruined whatever slim chance there had been of success. For us the nerve-wracking part was that we could do nothing until the surgeon who was attending Drayle could tell us how badly he was injured. * * * * * "At last word came that the bullet had only grazed Drayle's head and stunned him, but that he might remain unconscious for some time. Mrs. Drayle went in and sat at her husband's side, while I returned to the laboratory and found the police greatly bewildered as to whether they ought to arrest Drayle. "They had discovered in a closet an outfit of men's clothing that Mrs. Farrel identified as her husband's, and, although they saw no other trace of the missing man, they had a desire to lock up somebody as an evidence of their activity. It took considerable persuasion to prevail upon them to withhold their hands. There was no such difficulty about restraining them in the laboratory. They were afraid to touch any apparatus, and they gave the invention a ludicrously wide berth. "I never knew exactly how long it was that I paced about the lower floor of Drayle's home before the doctor summoned me and announced that the patient wanted me, but that I must be careful not to excite him. I have often wondered how many physicians would have to abandon their profession if they were deprived of that phrase. 'You must not excite the patient.' "Drayle was already excited when I entered. In fact, he was furious at the doctor's efforts to restrain him. But I realized that my fear for his reason was groundless. His remarks were lucid and forceful as he raged at the interference with his work. As soon as he saw me he appealed for assistance. "'Make them let me alone. Tim,' he begged, as his wife and the doctor, partly by force and partly by persuasion, endeavored to hold him in bed. 'I must get back to the laboratory. That woman believes that I've killed her husband, and my assistant will think that we've failed.' * * * * * "I was about to argue with him when suddenly he managed to thrust the doctor aside and start toward the door. His seriousness impressed me so that I gave him a supporting arm and together we headed down the hall, with Mrs. Drayle and the doctor following anxiously in the rear. The laboratory was deserted and locked when we arrived. The police evidently felt it was too uncanny an atmosphere for a prolonged wait. Drayle opened the door, went directly to his machine, and examined it minutely. "'Thank the Lord that woman hit only me!' he said, and sank into a chair. Then he asked for some brandy. Mrs. Drayle rushed off and reappeared in a minute with a decanter and glass. Drayle helped himself to a swallow that brought color to his cheeks and new strength to his limbs. Immediately after he turned again to the machine. I dragged up a chair, assisted him into it, and seated myself close by. "I knew little enough about mechanics, but I was fascinated by the numerous gauges that faced me on the gleaming instrument board. There were dials with needlelike hands that registered various numbers; spots of color appeared in narrow slots close to a solar spectrum: a stream of graph-paper tape flowed slowly beneath a tracing-pen point and carried away a jiggly thin line of purple ink. In a moment Drayle was oblivious of everything but his records. I watched him copy the indicated figures, surround them with formulas, and solve mysterious problems with a slide-rule. "His calculations covered a large sheet before he had finished. At last he underscored three intricate combinations of letters and figures and carried the answers to his private radio apparatus. This operated on a wave length far outside the range of all others and insured him against interference. With it he was able to speak at any time with his assistants in Washington or Boston or with both at once. He threw the switch that sent his call into the air. An answer came instantly, and Drayle begin to talk to his distant lieutenants. * * * * * "'We've been interrupted, gentlemen,' he said, 'but I think we may continue now. We'll reassemble in the Boston laboratory. Have you arranged the elements? The coefficients are....' And he gave a succession of decimals. "A voice replied that all was ready. Drayle said 'Excellent,' went back to his invention and twisted a black knob on the board before him. "With this trifling movement all hell seemed to crash about us. The ghastly cacophony that I had experienced in the same room some months previously was as nothing. These stupendous waves of sound pounded us until it seemed as if we must disintegrate beneath them. Wails and screams engulfed us. Mrs. Drayle dropped to her knees beside her husband. The doctor seized my arm and I saw the knuckles of his hand turn white with the pressure of his grip, yet I felt nothing but the awful vibrations that drummed like riveting machines upon and through my nerves and body. It was not an attack upon the ears alone; it crashed upon the heart, beat upon the chest so that breathing seemed impossible. My brain throbbed under the terrific pulsations. For a while I imagined the human system could not endure the ordeal and that all of us must be annihilated. "Except for his slow turning of the dials Drayle was motionless before the machine. Below the bandage about his forehead I could see his features drawn with anxiety. He had wagered a human life to test his theory and I think the enormity of it had not struck him until that moment. "What I knew and hoped enabled me to imagine what was taking place in the Boston laboratory. I seemed to see man's elementary dust and vapors whirled from great containers upward into a stratum of shimmering air and gradually assume the outlines of a human form that became first opaque, then solid, and then a sentient being. At the same instant I was conscious that the appalling pandemonium had ceased and that the voice of Drayle's Boston assistant was on the radio. * * * * * "'Congratulations, Chief! His reassemblage is perfect. There's not a flaw anywhere.' "'Splendid,' Drayle answered. 'Bring him here by plane right away; his wife is worried about him.' "Then Drayle turned to me. "'You see,' he said, 'Jackson Gee was right. We have resolved man into his constituent elements, transmitted his key vibrations by radio, and reassembled him from a supply of identical elements at the other end. And now, if you will assure that woman that her husband is safe, I will get some sleep. You will have the proof before you in less than three hours.' "I can't vouch for the doctor's feelings, but as Drayle left us I was satisfied that everything was as it should be, and that I had just witnessed the greatest scientific achievement of all time. I did not foresee, nor did Drayle, the results of an error or deliberate disobedience on the part of one of his assistants. "We waited, the doctor and I, for the arrival of the man who, we were convinced, had been transported some three hundred miles in a manner that defied belief. The evidence would come, Drayle had said, in a few hours. Long before they had elapsed we were starting at the sound of every passing motor, for we knew that a plane must land some distance from the house and that the travelers would make the last mile or so by car. "Mrs. Drayle endeavored to convince the imagined widow that her husband was safe and was returning speedily. Later she rejoined us, full of questions that we answered in a comforting blind faith. The time limit was drawing to a close when the sound of an automobile horn was quickly followed by a sharp knock on the laboratory door. At a sign from Mrs. Drayle one of the policemen opened it and we saw two men before us. One, a scholarly appearing, bespectacled youth, I recognized as Drayle's Boston assistant, Ward; the other, a rather burly individual, was a stranger to me. But there was no doubt he was the man we awaited so eagerly, for Mrs. Farrel screamed 'Harry! Harry!' and sped across the room towards him. * * * * * "At first she ran her fingers rather timidly over his face, and then pinched his huge shoulders, as if to assure herself of his reality. The sense of touch must have satisfied her, for abruptly she kissed him, flung her arms about him, clung to him, and crooned little endearments. The big man, in turn, patted her cheeks awkwardly and mumbled in a convincingly natural voice, ''Sall right, Mary, old kid! There ain't nothin' to it. Yeah! Sure it's me!' "Then I was conscious of Drayle's presence. A brown silk dressing gown fell shapelessly about his spare frame and smoke from his cigarette rose in a quivering blue-white stream. Ward spied him at the same moment and stepped forward with quick outstretched hands. I remember the flame of adoring zeal in the youngster's eyes as he tried to speak. At length he managed to stammer some congratulatory phrases while Drayle clapped him affectionately on the back. "Then Drayle turned to Farrel to ask him how he enjoyed the trip. Farrel grinned and said, 'Fine! It was like a dream, sir! First I'm in one place and then I'm in another and I don't know nothing about how I got there. But I could do with a drink, sir. I ain't used to them airyplanes much.' "Drayle accepted the hint and suggested that we all celebrate. He gave instructions over a desk telephone and almost immediately a man entered with a small service wagon containing a wide assortment of liquors and glasses. When we had all been served, Ward asked somewhat hesitantly if he might propose a toast. 'To Dr. Drayle, the greatest scientist of all time!' * * * * * "We were of course, already somewhat drunk with excitement as we lifted our glasses. But Drayle would not have it. "'Let me amend that,' he said. 'Let us drink to the future of science.' "'Sure!' said Farrel, very promptly. I think he was somewhat uncertain about 'toast,' but he clung hopefully to the word 'drink.' "We had raised our glasses again when Drayle, who was facing the door, dropped his. It struck the floor with a little crash and the liquor spattered my ankles. Drayle whispered 'Great God!' I saw in the doorway another Farrel. He was grimy, disheveled, his clothing was torn, and his expression ugly; but his identity with 'Harry' was unescapable. For an instant I suspected Drayle of trickery, of perpetrating some fiendishly elaborate hoax. And then I heard Mrs. Farrel scream, heard the newcomer cry, 'Mary,' and saw two men staring at each other in bewilderment. "The explanation burst upon me with a horrible suddenness. Farrel had been reconstructed in each of Drayle's distant laboratories, and there stood before us two identities each equally authentic, each the legal husband of the woman who, a few hours previously, had imagined herself a widow. The situation was fantastic, nightmarish, unbelievable and undeniable. My head reeled with the fearful possibilities. "Drayle was the first to recover his poise. He opened a door leading into an adjoining room and motioned for us all to enter. That is, all but the police. He left them wisely with their liquor. 'Finish it,' he advised them. 'You see no one has been killed.' * * * * * "They were not quite satisfied, but neither were they certain what they ought to do, and for once displayed common sense by doing nothing. When the door closed after us I saw that Buchannon, the Washington laboratory assistant, was with us. He must have arrived with the second Farrel, although I had not observed him during the confusion attending the former's unexpected appearance. But Drayle had noted him and now seized his shoulders. 'Explain!' he demanded. "Buchannon's face went white and he shrank under the clutch of Drayle's fingers. Beyond them I saw the two twinlike men standing beside Mrs. Farrel, surveying each other with incredulous recognition and distaste. "'Explain!' roared Drayle, and tightened his grasp. "'I thought you said Washington, Chief.' His voice was not convincing. I didn't believe him, nor did Drayle. "'You lie!' he raged, and floored the man with his fist. "In a way I couldn't help feeling sorry for the chap. It must have been a frightful temptation to participate in the experiment and I suppose he had not forseen the consequences. But I began to have a glimmering of the magnificent possibilities of the invention for purposes far beyond Drayle's intent. For, I asked myself, why, if such a machine could produce two human identities, why not a score, a hundred, a thousand? The best of the race could be multiplied indefinitely and man could make man at last, literally out of the dust of the earth. The virtue of instantaneous transmission which had been Drayle's aim sank into insignificance beside it. I fancied a race of supermen thus created. And I still believe, Sergeant, that the chance for the world's greatest happiness is sealed within that box you guard. But its first fruits were tragic." The historian shifted his position on the bench so as to escape the sun that was now reflected dazzlingly by the polished steel casket. * * * * * "Drayle did not glance again at his disobedient lieutenant. He was concerned with the problem of the extra man, or, I should say, an extra man, for both were equal. Never before in the history of the world had two men been absolutely identical. They were, of course, one in thought, possessions and rights, physical attributes and appearance. Mrs. Farrel, as they were beginning to realize, was the wife of both. And I have an unworthy suspicion that the red-headed young woman, after she recovered from the shock, was not entirely displeased. The two men, however, finding that each had an arm about her waist, were regarding each other in a way that foretold trouble. Both spoke at the same time and in the same words. "'Take your hands off my wife!' "And I think they would have attacked each other then if Drayle hadn't intervened. He said, 'Sit down! All of you!' in so peremptory a voice that we obeyed him. "'Now,' he went on, 'pay attention to me. I think you realize the situation. The question is, what we shall do about it?' He pointed an accusing finger at the Farrel from Washington. 'You were not authorized to exist; properly we should retransmit you, and without reassembling you would simply cease to be.' "The man addressed looked terrified. 'It would be murder!' he protested. "'Would it?' Drayle inquired of me. "I told him that it could not be proved inasmuch as there would be no _corpus delicti_ and hence nothing on which to base a charge. "But the Washington Farrel seemed to have more than an academic interest in the question and grew obstinate. "'Nothing doing!' he announced emphatically. 'Here I am and here I stay. I started from this place this morning and now I'm back, and as for that big ape over there I don't know nothing about him--except he'll be dead damn soon if he don't keep away from my wife.' * * * * * "The other Drayle-made man leaped up at this, and again I expected violence. But Buchannon flung himself between, and they subsided, muttering. "'Very well, then,' Drayle continued, when the room was quiet, 'here is another solution. We can, as you realize, duplicate Mrs. Farrel, and I will double your present possessions.' "This time it was Mrs. Farrel who was dissatisfied. 'You ain't talking to me,' she informed Drayle. 'Me stand naked in front of all them lamps and get turned into smoke? Not me!' A smile spread over her face and her eyes twinkled with deviltry. 'I didn't never think I'd be in one of them triangles like in the movies, and with my own husbands, but seein' I am, I'm all for keeping them both. Then I might know where one of them was some of the time.' "But neither of the men took to this idea and the problem appeared increasingly complex. I proposed that the survivor be determined by lot, but this suggestion won no support from anyone. Again the two men spoke at the same instant and in the same words. It was like a carefully rehearsed chorus. 'I know my rights, and I ain't going to be gypped out of them!' "It was at this point that Drayle attempted bribery. He offered fifty thousand dollars to the man who would abandon Mrs. Farrel. But this scheme fell through because both men sought the opportunity and Mrs. Farrel objected volubly. "So in the end Drayle promised each of them the same amount as a price for silence and left the matter of their relationships to their own settlement. * * * * * "I was skeptical of the success of the plan but could offer nothing better. So I drew up a release as legally binding as I knew how to make it in a case without precedent. I remember thinking that if the matter ever came into court the judge would be as much at a loss as I was. "Our troubles, though, didn't spring from that source. Each of the three parties accepted the arrangement eagerly and Drayle dismissed them with a hand-shake, a wish for luck and a check for fifty thousand dollars each. It's very nice to be wealthy, you know. "Afterward, we went out and paid off the police. Perhaps that's stating it too bluntly. I mean that Drayle thanked them for their zealous attention to his interests, regretted that they had been unnecessarily inconvenienced and treated that they would not take amiss a small token of his appreciation of their devotion to duty. Then he shook hands with them both and I believe I saw a yellow bill transferred on each occasion. At any rate the officers saluted smartly and left. "Of course I was impatient to question Drayle, but I could see that he was desperately fatigued. So I departed. "Next morning I found my worst fears exceeded by the events of the night. The three Farrels who had left us in apparently amiable spirits had proceeded to the home of Mrs. and the original Mr. Farrel. There the argument of who was to leave had been resumed. Both men were, of course, of the same mind. Whether both desired to stay or flee I would not presume to say. But an acrimonious dispute led to physical hostilities, and while Mrs. Farrel, according to accounts, cheered them on, they literally fought to the death. Being equally capable, there was naturally, barring interruption, no other possible outcome. I can well believe they employed the same tactics, swung the same blows, and died at the same instant. "Mrs. Farrel, after carefully retrieving both of her husbands' checks, told a great deal of the story. As might be expected, nobody believed the yarn except our profound federal law makers. They welcomed an opportunity to investigate an outsider for a change and had all of us before a committee. "Finally the Congress of these United States of America, plus the sagacious Supreme Court, decided that my client wasn't guilty of anything, but that he mustn't do it again. At least that was the gist of it. I recollect that I offered a defense of psycopathic neuroticism. "As a result of the _obiter dictum_ and a resolution by both Houses Assembled Drayle's invention was sealed, dated and placed under guard. That's its history, Sergeant." * * * * * The white-haired old gentleman picked up the high silk hat that added a final touch of distinction to his tall figure, and looked about him as if trying to recall something. At last the idea came. "By the way," he inquired suddenly, "didn't I have an extraordinarily obnoxious grandson with me when I came?" The attentive auditor was vastly startled. He surveyed the great hall rapidly, but reflected before he answered. "No, sir--I mean he ain't no more'n average! But I reckon we'd better find him, anyhow." His glance had satisfied the sergeant that at least the object of his charge was safe and his men still vigilant. "I'll be back in a minute," he informed them. "Don't let nothin' happen." "Bring us something more'n a breath," pleaded the corporal, disrespectfully. The sergeant had already set off at a brisk pace with the story teller. For several minutes as they rushed from room to room the hunt was unrewarded. "I think, sir," said the sergeant, "we'd better look in the natural history division. There is stuffed animals in there that the kids is fond of." "You're probably right," the patriarch gasped as he struggled to maintain the gait set by the younger man. "I might have known he didn't really want to hear the story." "They never do," answered the other over his shoulder. "I'll bet that's him down there on the next floor." * * * * * The two searchers had emerged upon a wide gallery that commanded a clear view of the main entrance where various specimens of American fauna were mounted in intriguing replicas of their native habitat. The guard pointed an accusing finger at one of these groups and sprang toward the stairs. The old gentleman's breath and strength were gone. He could only gaze in the direction that had been indicated by the madly running guard; but he had no doubts. A small boy was certainly digging vigorously at the head of a specimen of _Ursus Polaris_ that the curator had represented in the dramatic pose of killing a seal. A protesting wail arose from below as the young naturalist was withdrawn from his field by a capable hand on the slack of his trousers. And presently, chagrined with failure, the culprit was before his grandsire. "Gee!" he complained, "I was only looking at the polar bear. Are polar bears always white? Are--" "You'd better take him away, sir," interrupted the sergeant. "He was trying to pry out one of the bear's eyes with the stick of the lollypop I give him. Take him." The old gentleman extended both hands. His left found a grip in his grandson's coat collar; his right, partly concealing a government engraving, met the guard's with a clasp of gratitude. "Sergeant," he remarked in a voice tense with feeling, "a half-hour ago I expressed some ridiculous regrets that Drayle's invention had been kept from the world. Now I realize its horrid menace. I shudder to think it might have been responsible for two like him!" The object of disapproval was shaken indicatively. "Guard the secret well, Sergeant! Guard it well! The world's peace depends upon you!" The old gentleman's words trembled with conviction. Then alternately shaking his head and his grandson he marched down the hallway, ebony cane tapping angrily upon the stone. As the exhausted but happy warrior retraced his steps a high-pitched voice floated after him. "Grandpa, are polar bears _always_ white?" * * * * * [Advertisement: ] The Reader's Corner _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories [Illustration: _The Reader's Corner_] _The Invisible X-Flyers_ The following is a semi-technical description of the operation of the invisible X-flyers used in "Jetta of the Lowlands" as compiled by Philip Grant in the year 2021 from official records of the Anti-War Department of the United States of North America, and discovered recently by Ray Cummings. The attainment of mechanical invisibility reached a state of perfection in the year 2000 sufficient to make it practical for many uses. For a century this result had been sought. It came, about the year 2000, not as a single startling discovery, but as the culmination of the patient labor of many men during many years. The popular mind has always considered that science advances by a series of "great scientific discoveries"; "unprecedented"; "revolutionary." That is not so. Each step in the progress of scientific achievement is built most carefully upon the one beneath it. And generally the "revolutionary, unprecedented discovery" has very little of itself that is new; rather it is a new combination of older, perhaps seemingly impractical knowledge. Every scientific theory, every device, is the offspring from a large and varied family tree of many scientific ancestors, each of whom in his day was a remarkable personage. Thus it is, with the principles of mechanical invisibility. I deal here with the famous X-flyers. The operation of the plane itself is immaterial; its motors; its wing-spread surfaces; its aerial controls. I am concerned only with the scientific principles underlying its power of invisibility. Three scientific factors are involved: First, the process known as de-electroniration; second, the theories of color absorption; third, the material, inevitable deflection (bending) of light rays when passing through a magnetic field. I take each of the three in order. The forerunners of de-electroniration were the Martel effects--the experiments of Charles Martel, in Paris, in 1937. A new electric current, of a different character--now called the oscillating current as distinct from the alternating and direct--was developed. Metallic plates were electro-magnetized to produce an enveloping magnetic field of somewhat a different character from any field formerly known. Dr. Norton Grenfell followed this in 1946 by using the Martel oscillating current to obtain a reverse effect. A similar disturbance of electrode balance. But not a surcharge. An exhaustion. An anti-electrical state, instead of a state of magnetism. A metallic mass so treated--and with a constant flow of oscillating current holding its subnormal electronic balance--was then said to be de-electronired. Scientific "discoveries" are largely made by the trial and error system. The scientist takes what he finds. Generally he does not know, at first, what it means. Martell took his oscillating current and "discovered" the Martel Magnetic Levitation, whereby gravity was lessened, and then completely nullified. Grenfell, with his de-electroniration, increased the power of gravity. The two were combined by Grenfell and his associates--and the secret of interplanetary flight was at hand. But there was a host of other workers not interested in space flyers; they probed in other directions. It was found that the subnormal magnetic field surrounding a metallic substance in a state of de-electroniration had two unusual properties: its color absorption was high; and it bent light rays from their normal straight path into a curve abnormally great. Yet, though it absorbed the color of the rays emanating from the de-electronired metal (the metal itself increasing this result), the magnetic field, while bending the rays passing through it from distant objects behind it, nevertheless left their color and all their inherent properties unchanged. The principles of color absorption are these:--a pigment--a paint, a dye, if you will--is "red" because it absorbs from the light rays of the sun all the other colors and leaves only red to be reflected from it to the eye. Or "violet" because all the rest are absorbed, and the violet is reflected. Or "black" because all are absorbed; and "white" the reverse, all blended and reflected. Color is dependent upon vibratory motion. The solar spectrum--its range of visibility through the primary colors from red to violet--can be likened to a range of radio wave-lengths; vibration frequencies; and when we eliminate them all save the "violet"--that is what we have left, in the radio to hear, in color absorption to see. Thus, a de-electronired metal was found to produce black. Not black as habitually we meet it--a "shiny" black, a "dull" black; but a true black--a real absence of light-ray reflection--a "nothingness to see"; in effect, an invisibility. A word of explanation is necessary regarding the other property of the de-electronired field--the bending of distant light rays into a curve, yet leaving their spectrum unchanged. It was Albert Einstein who first made the statement--in the years following the turn of the century at 1900--that it was a normal, natural thing for a ray of light to be slightly deflected from its straight path when passing through a magnetic field. The claim caused world-wide interest, for upon its truth or falsity the whole fabric of the Einstein Theory of Relativity was woven. An eclipse of the sun in the 1920's established that light is actually bent in the manner Einstein had calculated. A magnetic field surrounds the sun. In those days they did not know that it is a field of subnormal electronic balance--in effect, the result of de-electroniration. It was found, nevertheless, that stars close to the limb of the sun appeared, not in their true positions, but shifted in just the directions and with the amount of shift Einstein predicted. The light rays coming from them to the eye of the observer on Earth were curved in passing so close to the sun. But the color-bands of their spectrums were unaltered. And some of the stars actually were behind the sun, yet because of the curved path of the light, were visible. I mention this because it is an important aspect of the subject of mechanical invisibility. With the foregoing factors, the secret of mechanical invisibility is constructed. Gracely, an American--following a long series of world-wide experiments, tests of current strength, frequencies of oscillation, suitable metals, etc., which I cannot detail here--in 1955 was the final developer of the mechanisms subsequently used in the X-flyers. Gracely produced what he christened "aluminoid-spectrite"--a light-weight alloy which, when carrying an oscillating electronic current of the proper frequency, produced the effects I have described. It absorbed from the light rays coming from the metal, all the colors of the solar spectrum, well beyond the range of the human eye at both ends of the scale. The result was a "visible nothingness." A moment's thought will make clear that term. A visible nothingness is not invisibility. The fact that something was there but could not be seen was obvious. A black hat with a light on it and placed against an average background is almost as easy to see as a white hat. Gracely's first crude experiments were made with an aluminoid-spectrite cube--a small brick a foot in each dimension. The cube glowed, turned, dark, then black, then was gone. He had it resting on a white table, with a white background. And the fact that the cube was still there, was perfectly obvious. It was as though a hole of nothingness were set against the white table. It outlined the cube; reconstructed it so that for practical purposes the eye saw not a white, aluminoid brick, but a dead black one. And this is very much what a man sees when he stares at his black hat on a table. The hat occults its background, and thus reconstructs itself. But when Gracely determined the proper vibrations of his oscillating current to coincide with all the other material factors he was using, the final result was before him-real invisibility. He used a patterned background--a symmetrically checkered surface, most difficult of all. The light rays coming from this background passed through the magnetic field surrounding the invisible colorless cube, and were bent into a curved path. But their own color-spectrum--in actuality the color, shape, all the visible characteristics of the background--was not greatly altered. The observer saw what actually was behind the invisible cube: the checkered background, sometimes slightly distorted, but nevertheless sufficiently clear for its abnormality to escape notice. Thus the cube's outlines were not reconstructed; and, in effect, it had vanished. In practical workings with the X-flyers, no such difficult test as Gracely's cube and rectangular, symmetrically patterned background is ever met. The varying background behind a plane--at rest or flying, and particularly at night--demands less perfection of background than Gracely's laboratory conditions. I am informed that an X-flyer can vaguely be seen--or sensed, rather--from some angles and under certain and unfavorable conditions of light, and depending on its line of movement relative to the angle of observation, and the type and color-lighting of its background. But under most conditions it represents a very nearly perfect mechanical invisibility. There is one aspect of the subject with which I may close this brief paper. I give it without technical explanation; it seems to me an amusing angle. The theory of stereoscopics--the vision of the twin lenses of the human eyes, set a distance apart to give the perception of depth, of the third dimension--is in itself a subject tremendously interesting, and worthy of anyone's study. I have no space for it here, nor would it be strictly relevant. I need only state that a two-eyed man sees partially around an object (by virtue of the different angles from which each of his eyes gaze at it) and thus sees a trifle more of the background than would otherwise be the case. And this--these two viewpoints blended in his brain--gives him his perception of "depth," of "solidity"--the difference between a real scene of three dimensions and a painted scene on a canvas of two dimensions with only the artist's skill in perspective to simulate the third. And I cannot refrain from mentioning that in Government tests of the Anti-War Department to determine the perfection of the invisibility of the X-flyers, it was a one-eyed man who proved that they were not always totally invisible!--Ray Cummings. _Thank You_ Dear Editor: I just want you to know this: I am a reader of your truly named Astounding Stories. I really enjoyed reading the "Spawn of the Stars," also "Brigands of the Moon," and I am very glad to hear that we are going to have another of Charles W. Diffin's stories in the next issue--"The Moon Master."--J. R. Penner, 376 Woodlawn Ave, Buffalo N. Y. _"A Wiz"_ Dear Editor: I am only a young girl sixteen years of age but am greatly interested in science. I have no master mind by any means, but have worked out many a difficult problem in school for my science prof. Your magazine is a wiz. I haven't missed an instalment since it started. Give us more stories like "Monsters of Moyen," and "The Beetle Horde."--Josephine Frankhouser, 4949 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. _"Pretty Good"_ Dear Editor: I received Astounding Stories for May and it is pretty good. The next issue is number six, and I hope it is better than the previous ones. There have been some stories that do not belong in a Science Fiction magazine, such as: "The Cave of Horror," "The Corpse on the Grating," "The Soul Master," and "The Man who was Dead." There is also another story that was printed in the May issue that, so far as I think, does not belong in this magazine: that is, "Murder Madness." Even all the other stories seem to be fantastic. Weird. Why not try to publish something on the H. G. Wells, E. R. Burroughs type of stories, also Ray Cummings' "The Man who Mastered Time," or "The Time Machine," by Wells?--Louis Wentzler, 1933 Woodbine St., Brooklyn, N. Y. _From Ye Reader_ Dear Ye Ed.: That sounds rather medieval a little for the editor of so novel a magazine, but nevertheless let's forget that and talk about some astounding stories. First, I would suggest that you eliminate all stories of interplanetary travel (I would be different), as there are already several magazines on the market which deal almost exclusively with such stories. Now, tales like "The Beetle Horde," and those written by Murray Leinster, and those concerning that Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Bird, and those about the deep sea, like "Into the Ocean's Depths,"--such stories are astounding, and good. And once in a while let's have a humorous story. You know: "A bit of humor now and then--" Well, anyhow, publish any kind of astounding story, just so it is different and does not deal with interplanetary travel. Now, about the magazine. I think it is a good publication and I like it werra, werra mooch. I bought it on impulse and happened to be lucky enough to get the first issue, and nary an issue have I missed since. Although I possess an abject horror of any kind of insect, I enjoyed "The Beetle Horde" to the fullest extent. But here's hoping nothing like that will really happen. Another thing I'd like to state is this: Some reader made a remark about not publishing any of Verne's works. I say you should. Why should any such great author be disregarded in so good a magazine? And is it not interesting to note that some of his stories have become actual realizations? Even Poe's should be published. All those dead authors whose stories would be considered good were they living. Why should any person ask not to have such good stories in your magazine? Perhaps there are some people who would enjoy them, but do not have the means nor time to buy these great works in book form. Think it over, ye Ed., think it over. And now, to finish up, I'll say: are there any readers like me--a girl--or do only men and boys read Astounding Stories?--Gertrude Hemken, 5730 So. Ashland Ave., Chicago, Ill. _Short--and Sweet_ Dear Editor: Congratulations! Have followed up every issue of Astounding Stories and have found them the best yet. I have one fault to find and that is you do not publish Astounding Stories often enough. Thirty days is too far between.--Bernard Bauer, 235 Holland St., Syracuse, N. Y. _Yes Sir!_ Dear Editor: I read Astounding Stories all the time, although I'm just a boy. I think they're O. K. They give me a great "kick." I think "The Moon Master" was the best story I ever read. Please ask Mr. Diffin to write more like it. But then all the stories are really peppy.--Jack Hudson, St. Mark's School, Southborough, Massachusetts. _"Undoubtedly the Best"_ Dear Editor: Your magazine is undoubtedly the best Science Fiction "mag" on the stands. Why? Because of your authors. There is not another Science Fiction book on the stands that has stories by Victor Rousseau, Murray Leinster Ray Cummings, A. T. Locke, A. J. Burks, C. W. Diffin, S. W. Ellis and many others. Some of your readers want stories by Dr. David H. Keller, Ed Earl Repp and Walter Kately. Well, I just wanted to tell you that I have stopped reading all other Science Fiction "mags" on account of the frequency of these authors in them. So please, please, don't destroy my last stronghold. Also, I would not be against reprints. There is only one so far who has objected to reprints, while there have been several asking you to reprint A. Merritt's "People of the Pit." It would not only satisfy your present readers, but, because of the great popularity of A. Merritt among the reading circles of to-day, it would gain for you many more readers. Harl Vincent is an indispensable acquisition to "our" magazine. His stories are not only all excellent but his stories all contain good science. He will bring you many new readers. May I add my voice to every other reader's in the cry for the reprinting of "People of the Pit," by A. Merritt? Why not give us some stories by him? He's pretty near the best writer living to-day. I don't care for the Mars stories by Burroughs. He's too much long sword and short sword. A Merritt, however, is the man for you to get and keep. The schedule for July looks "doggone good" and suggestive to the imagination. You might increase the contents of the book. The only thing wrong with the stories is that you have too many repetitions. Please get A. Merritt. If you publish stories by him you will see a very noticeable increase in your subscription column. Another author who would repeat A. Merritt's action on your subscription column is Dr. Edward Elmer Smith. Please see about these authors.--Gabriel Kirschner, Box 301, Temple, Texas. _From Young Miss Nightingale_ Dear Editor: I have been wanting to write to you for a long time but only now am I able to do so. When I first got a copy of your magazine I just grabbed it and started reading it. That magazine had the first installment of "Brigands of the Moon" in it. Now, after one magazine has been read I nearly burst until the next one comes. As for the writers, I like Ray Cummings, Harl Vincent, Sewell Peaslee Wright, and Murray Leinster best. I like interplanetary stories best. I also like stories of the Fourth Dimension and those of ancient races of people living in uninhabited parts of the earth. So far I have liked especially well "The Ray of Madness," "Cold Light," "From the Ocean Depths" and its sequel "Into the Ocean's Depths," "Brigands of the Moon," and "Murder Madness." Of course, I like the others too. I am only a mere girl (that accounts for this poor typewriting)--only ten years old--but I know my likes and dislikes.--Ellen Laura Nightingale, 223 So. Main St., Fairmont, Minn. _Yessir--H. W. Wessolowski_ Dear Editor: I have just finished the June issue of Astounding Stories. It contained some very interesting stories, such as "Brigands of the Moon," by Ray Cummings, "The Moon Master," by Charles W. Diffin, "Murder Madness," by Murray Leinster, and "Giants of the Ray," by Tom Curry. Although "Out of the Dreadful Depths," by C. D. Willard, was a good story, it does not belong in a Science Fiction magazine. One of the best improvements you could make on Astounding Stories right now is to cut all edges smooth. I would like to see at least one full page picture with each story. Wesso is the only good artist you have. Is Wessolowski his real name?--Jack Darrow, 4225 N. Spaulding Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. Anent Reincarnation. Dear Editor: In the July issue of Astounding Stories, a correspondent, Worth K. Bryant, asks some thought-provoking questions about the fascinating subject of reincarnation. Although I have written to Mr. Bryant personally, I would like to present my views on the subject to all your readers. Mr. Bryant asks: "Could a person remember his own death in a former reincarnation?" Yes, he could--if he could "tune in" on his higher consciousness, or ego. Were that possible, he could see all his past lives from beginning to end. It is only the physical self that dies; the ego, or true self, is immortal and remembers everything that it has experienced in previous incarnations on the physical plane. But since consciousness on this plane is expressed through the material brain, most human beings are unable to recall their former visits to this world; and it is perhaps better so. If there were not loss of memory our minds would now range over the adventures of thousands of years in the past. It would encompass a vast drama with countless loves and hates, of many lives filled with pathos and tragedy. Thus to distract the mind from the present life would retard our progress. There will come a time in human evolution when the average person will be able to recall his past incarnations, and then there will be no need or argument that we have lived here before, because everyone will remember it. For those who care to pursue this subject more fully, I recommend "Elementary Theosophy," by L. W. Rogers, obtainable at most public libraries.--Allen Glasser, 1610 University Ave., New York, N. Y. _Prefers the Longer Stories_ Dear Editor: I've been reading your excellent periodical since the first issue, and I feel that I'm entitled to an opportunity to give expression to my reactions to the various issues. Of course, as a whole, the magazines were uniformly good every month, but some of the stories, naturally, were better than others. In the January issue the best story was "The Beetle Horde" by Victor Rousseau. I expected a lot from this writer, having read his "Draft of Eternity," "The Eye of Balamok" and "The Messiah of the Cylinder." I wasn't disappointed. The best story in the February issue was "Spawn of the Stars," by Charles Willard Diffin. Diffin is a newcomer as far as I know, but he certainly can write. "Vandals of the Stars" took the honors in the March issue. A. T. Locke has written some good adventure shorts, but this was his first fantastic story, to the best of my knowledge. Come again, Locke! "Brigands of the Moon," by Ray Cummings was great too. The best for April was "Monsters of Moyen," by Arthur J. Burks. Clever idea. Victor Rousseau rang the bell again in the May issue with "The Atom Smasher." Let's have other stories of time-travel--some into the very remote past. Cave man stuff, you know! "The Moon Master," by Charles Willard Diffin was the best for June. Diffin is one of your best writers. In the last (July) issue, "The Forgotten Planet," by Sewell Peaslee Wright, I think, takes first place, though hard-pressed by "Earth, the Marauder" and "The Power and the Glory." Now for a few suggestions. In the first place, let's have less short stories, and more longer ones. In my choice of stories for each issue, with one exception, I picked the novelettes. My reason for so doing is the fact that the authors apparently are not able to do justice to their themes in the shorter lengths. Of course, there are exceptions, like Diffin's "The Power and the Glory." My second suggestion in this: Why not have a fixed position for your announcement of the stories for the next issue? The last page, for example. This would be more convenient for the readers; besides, those of us who have "our mags" bound into volumes could then cut out the announcement. Finally, my third suggestion--and the real reason for my writing this letter. Don't you think it would be a good idea to publish in each issue the picture of one of the authors, and a short synopsis of his life? How he started writing, his experiences, etc. I'm certain that I'm not the only reader who's interested in the authors. I hope, if everything else I've said is ignored, you'll at least give the last suggestion serious consideration. Why not get the opinion of other readers? Continued and increasing success to Astounding Stories, best of the Science Fiction magazines!--P. A. Lyter, 220 Peffer Street, Harrisburg, Pa. _Mr. Bates Accepts with Pleasure_ Dear Editor: It is with greatest pleasure I note the addition of Miss Lilith Lorraine to your staff, and her initial effort in your publication. "The Jovian Jest" is but a glimpse of what is to come. The stories which she has written heretofore have been real gems of Science Fiction. May I again congratulate you. The Science Correspondence Club takes great pleasure in announcing the enrollment of Capt. S. P. Meek and R. F. Starzl as members. These authors are well-known to Astounding Stories readers. Also, we take pleasure in announcing that we have asked Mr. Bates to become an honorary member in recognition of his fine work in furthering Science Fiction. Our first bulletin has been issued and real progress is started. For those interested, Mr. Raymond A. Palmer at 1431--34th St., Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will handle all inquiries. In closing, let me say that when a story pleases you readers, or the work of some author impresses you, write to the editor and tell him about it. In this way more and better Science Fiction will appear. Let us all give Astounding Stories a big hand, you readers! Best wishes of the Science Correspondence Club and--Walter L. Dennis, F. P. S., 4653 Addison St., Chicago, Illinois. _"Bargain"_ Dear Editor: I have just finished "The Atom Smasher," in your May issue of Astounding Stories, and liked it very much. This is the first story that I have read in your magazine, although I have read other magazines for the past three years. I see where you inquire as to the kind of stories your readers want. Personally, I think stories of interplanetary travel are the best, and most demanded by readers of Science Fiction. Try and have one in each issue. In my opinion, I see no criticisms to be made on your magazine. It certainly would be a bargain at several times the price you ask. I am sure I will continue reading it--Louis D. Buchanan, Jr., 711 Monroe Ave., Evansville, Indiana. _No "Flash in the Pan"_ Dear Editor: When I bought the first issue of Astounding Stories last December, I was impressed by its array of splendid stories and famous authors. I thought, then, that perhaps that first number was just a flash in the pan, and that succeeding issues would sink to the level of other Science Fiction magazines. Happily, I was wrong. Astounding Stories has more than fulfilled the promise of its initial issue. The stories are undoubtedly the finest of their kind, and written by the most prominent Science Fiction authors of the day. I cannot conceive of any possible improvement in the magazine. I do wish, though, that you would not heed the gratuitous advice of certain earnest but misguided correspondents. For instance, in the June issue, one Warren Williams of Chicago, suggests that you enlarge the magazine and give each story a full-page illustration, like other Science Fiction periodicals. Mr. Williams evidently favors standardization. As one magazine is, so must the rest be. Please ignore this request, and others like it. Astounding Stories is different, unique; just keep it that way, and you will never lack a host of satisfied readers. Before closing, I must voice my profound admiration for Murray Leinster's brilliant and engrossing story, "Murder Madness." It's the best serial you've printed so far; though I have high anticipation for Arthur J. Burks' latest novel, "Earth, the Marauder."--Mortimer Weisinger, 3550 Rochambeau Ave., Bronx, New York. _"I Mean Increased"_ Dear Editor: I wish to thank you for your reply to my letter. I did not expect you to give me a personal reply: that was why I asked you to reply to me in "The Readers' Corner." You are the only editor I have ever known of that goes to the trouble to giving personal replies to readers. Other magazines require a nominal fee. That's another score for you! Your personal letter, as a girl would aptly say, "tickled me all over." I am sorry I can't get a subscription just yet, but I am "bound" to my newsdealer a little while yet, as I immediately gave him a monthly order for Astounding Stories. If you are the one who picked the authors, you have the best taste I have ever seen in one person. But couldn't your taste be improved? Pardon me, I mean increased. Namely, please add to your taste: H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. If you had different authors, in other words, new, inexperienced authors, I would object to your running more than one serial at a time, but with the marvelous old-timers I have no objections, for they can write long ones far better than they can the shorts. So keep them at work. The three short stories, "Out of the Dreadful Depths," "The Cavern World" and "Giants of the Ray," were all very good. Ray Cummings was wonderful in the way he handled his "Brigands of the Moon." It was a "wow baby." "Murder Madness" is a great improvement over "Tanks." "Tanks" was the worst I've ever read by Leinster. But he came out of his reverie in "Murder Madness." It's great. Sewell Peaslee Wright can work wonders with short stories. Keep his "typer" clicking. By the way, may I say a few good words for Sophie Wenzel Ellis? If she can duplicate "Creatures of the Light," maker her repeat. Victor Rousseau's story, "The Beetle Horde," kept me "all het up" throughout. "The Atom Smasher" was excellent. I also greatly like stories of the mighty Atlantis. I agree with others of your readers that you should not let Astounding Stories be printed in such a small size. Make it a little larger, and give us smoother paper, and you will prosper greatly. "The Moon Master" was excellent.--Gabriel Kirschner, Box 301, Temple, Texas. _"Could Kick Myself"_ Dear Editor: I have just started reading Astounding Stories and could kick myself for not seeing it sooner. In your latest issue, "The Moon Master," by Charles Diffin, is great. He sure knows how to write adventure with science. I am a member of the Science Corresponding Club and am glad to say it. In later years the club will be known just like other big clubs of to-day, "Nationally and Sciencelly."--John Marcroft, 32 Washington St., Central Falls, R. I. _A Full List_ In the January number of Astounding Stories Cummings' "Phantom of Reality" was the best, followed by Rousseau's "Beetle Horde." February: 1--Diffin's "Spawn of the Stars"; 2--Rousseau's "Beetle Horde"; 3--Ellis' "Creatures of the Light"; 4--Meek's "The Thief of Time." March: 1--Cummings' "Brigands of the Moon"; 2--Locke's "Vandals of the Stars"; 3--Meek's "Cold Light." April: 1--Cummings' "Brigands of the Moon"; 2--Burk's "Monsters of Moyen"; 3--Meek's "Ray of Madness"; 4--Pelcher's "Vampires of Venus." May: 1--Cummings' "Brigands of the Moon"; 2--Leinster's "Murder Madness"; 3--Rousseau's "Atom Smasher." June: 1--Cummings' "Brigands of the Moon"; 2--Leinster's "Murder Madness"; 3--Diffin's "Moon Master." Please give us a story by H. P. Lovecraft, if you can get one.--Carl Ballard, 202 N. Main St., Danville, Va. _"Words Cannot Express"_ Dear Editor: I have read your wonderful magazine since it was first published, and words cannot express what a fine magazine I think it is. All my life, I have hoped that someone would publish a magazine just like Astounding Stories. A magazine just full to the brim with the right kind of stories; thrilling stories of super-science, well written in plain and convincing English by wide awake authors. I thought that "The Cavern World" was a whiz of a story, and "The Moon Master" was so exciting that I sat up late at night reading it. Let's have more of that kind of science story, that thrills every red-blooded American. I hope that you print your magazine on better paper.--David Bangs, 190 Marlboro St., Boston, Mass. _Unconvinced_ Dear Editor: I received the latest issue of Astounding Stories, and in looking it through I noticed your comments on reprints. Your argument can easily be shot full of holes, and that's what I intend to do. First: Those stories being printed now are far inferior to the reprints. Even your best stories, such as "Murder Madness" and "Brigands of the Moon," cannot be compared with such stories as "Station X," "The Moon Pool," "The Metal Monster," or "The Columbus of Space" and "The Second Deluge." Second: The Saturday Evening Post cannot be compared with our magazine, for all the stories printed in it can be obtained in book form, while the scientific novels are almost all out of print. Third: There is surely more than one out of a hundred who haven't read the reprints. Just because some have read them is no reason that they don't want them. I know, for I have a large library of reprints and have read, and own, almost every one of them, yet I would gladly see them again. Fourth: The authors need not starve. You could easily devote just a small space for reprints, and many would pay twenty-five cents for the magazine. The fairest and most American idea would be to let your readers vote for this. Here is vote No. 1 for reprints.--Woodrow Gelman, 1603 President St., Brooklyn, N. Y. _Praise and Suggestions_ Dear Editor: I have just finished the July issue of Astounding Stories and classify the stories as follows: "Beyond the Heaviside Layer," good; "Earth, the Marauder," excellent, best in issue; "From an Amber Block," fairly good; "The Terror of Air-Level Six," very good; "The Forgotten Planet," excellent; "The Power and the Glory," good; "Murder Madness," very good, but not so much so as preceding chapters. Now for a few criticisms: 1. Your magazine (or should I say "our" magazine?) is too small. Of course, it would be a radical change to make it larger, but, like others, I think in the end you would gain rather than lose by it. Most small magazines are cheap affairs, and to have Astounding Stories small brands it as a cheap type of magazine. Small magazines are more likely to be hidden on the newsstands by larger ones, and in most stores the large magazines have the more advantageous positions. 2. The edges of your pages are uneven. You look in the index and find an interesting story is on, for example, page 56. You skim the pages to find it, and from page 43 you find yourself suddenly at page 79. Make the paper more even, please. 3. Don't have advertisements before the stories. Have them in the rear. 4. Have a full page illustration facing the beginning of each story. If at the end of a story you find pages won't turn up right, continue the last page to the back of the book. Wesso is excellent. Another good artist is Paul, who draws for another Science Fiction magazine. Your cover illustrations are fine. Summary: Enlarge size of magazine, smooth edges of paper, have advertisements in rear of book, use full page illustrations. If this is expensive, you could charge twenty-five cents instead of twenty cents, and I, for one, would be glad to pay the extra nickel as I do for other magazines of Science Fiction.--Robert Baldwin, 1427 Judson Ave., Evanston, Illinois. _"The Readers' Corner"_ All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over to 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here: so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! _--The Editor._ * * * * * 
29607	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees: _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid; by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are_: ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, FLYERS, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, SKY-HIGH LIBRARY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, MISS 1930, and FOREST AND STREAM _More Than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ VOL. I, No. 3 CONTENTS MARCH, 1930 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Water-colors from a Scene in "Brigands of the Moon."_ COLD LIGHT CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 295 _How Could a Human Body Be Found Actually Splintered--Broken into Sharp Fragments Like a Shattered Glass! Once Again Dr. Bird Probes Deep into an Amazing Mystery._ BRIGANDS OF THE MOON RAY CUMMINGS 306 _Black Mutiny and Brigandage Stalk the Space-ship Planetara as She Speeds to the Moon to Pick Up a Fabulously Rich Cache of Radium-ore._ THE SOUL MASTER WILL SMITH AND R. J. ROBBINS 350 _Desperately O'Hara Plunged into Prof. Kell's Mysterious Mansion. For His Friend Skip Was the Victim of the Eccentric Scientist's De-astralizing Experiment, and Faced a Fate More Hideous than Death._ FROM THE OCEAN'S DEPTHS SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT 376 _Man Came from the Sea. Mercer, by His Thought-telegraph, Learns from the Weirdly Beautiful Ocean-maiden of a Branch that Returned There._ VANDALS OF THE STARS A. T. LOCKE 390 _A Livid Flame Flares Across Space--and Over Manhattan Hovers Teuxical, Vassal of Malfero, Lord of the Universe, Who Comes with Ten Thousand Warriors to Ravage and Subjugate One More Planet for His Master._ * * * * * Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Nathan Goldmann, Secretary. Application for entry as second-class mail pending at the Post Office at New York under Act of March 3, 1879. Application for registration of title as Trade Mark pending in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * Cold Light _By Capt. S. P. Meek_ How could a human body be found actually splintered--broken into sharp fragments like a shattered glass! Once again Dr. Bird probes deep into an amazing mystery. [Illustration: "_The bodies had broken into pieces, as though they had been made of glass._"] "Confound it, Carnes, I am on my vacation!" "I know it, Doctor, and I hate to disturb you, but I felt that I simply had to. I have one of the weirdest cases on my hands that I have ever been mixed up in and I think that you'll forgive me for calling you when I tell you about it." Dr. Bird groaned into the telephone transmitter. "I took a vacation last summer, or tried to, and you hauled me away from the best fishing I have found in years to help you on a case. This year I traveled all the way from Washington to San Francisco to get away from you and the very day that I get here you are after me. I won't have anything to do with it. Where are you, anyway?" "I am at Fallon, Nevada, Doctor. I'm sorry that you won't help me out because the case promises to be unusually interesting. Let me at least tell you about it." Dr. Bird groaned louder than ever into the telephone transmitter. "All right, go ahead and tell me about it if it will relieve your mind, but I have given you my final answer. I am not a bit interested in it." "That is quite all right, Doctor, I don't expect you to touch it. I hope, however, that you will be able to give me an idea of where to start. Did you ever see a man's body broken in pieces?" "Do you mean badly smashed up?" "No indeed, I mean just what I said, broken in pieces. Legs snapped off as though the entire flesh had become brittle." "No, I didn't, and neither did anyone else." "I have seen it, Doctor." "Hooey! What had you been drinking?" Operative Carnes of the United States Secret Service chuckled softly to himself. The voice of the famous scientist of the Bureau of Standards plainly showed an interest which was quite at variance with his words. "I was quite sober, Doctor, and so was Hughes, and we both saw it." "Who is Hughes?" "He is an air mail pilot, one of the crack fliers of the Transcontinental Airmail Corporation. Let me tell you the whole thing in order." "All right. I have a few minutes to spare, but I'll warn you again that I don't intend to touch the case." * * * * * "Suit yourself, Doctor. I have no authority to requisition your services. As you know, the T. A. C. has been handling a great deal of the transcontinental air mail with a pretty clean record on accidents. The day before yesterday, a special plane left Washington to carry two packages from there to San Francisco. One of them was a shipment of jewels valued at a quarter of a million, consigned to a San Francisco firm and the other was a sealed packet from the War Department. No one was supposed to know the contents of that packet except the Chief of Staff who delivered it to the plane personally, but rumors got out, as usual, and it was popularly supposed to contain certain essential features of the Army's war plans. This much is certain: The plane carried not only the regular T. A. C. pilot and courier, but also an army courier, and it was guarded during the trip by an army plane armed with small bombs and a machine-gun. I rode in it. My orders were simply to guard the ship until it landed at Mills Field and then to guard the courier from there to the Presidio of San Francisco until his packet was delivered personally into the hands of the Commanding General of the Ninth Corps Area. "The trip was quiet and monotonous until after we left Salt Lake City at dawn this morning. Nothing happened until we were about a hundred miles east of Reno. We had taken elevation to cross the Stillwater Mountains and were skimming low over them, my plane trailing the T. A. C. plane by about half a mile. I was not paying any particular attention to the other ship when I suddenly felt our plane leap ahead. It was a fast Douglas and the pilot gave it the gun and made it move, I can tell you. I yelled into the speaking tube and asked what was the reason. My pilot yelled back that the plane ahead was in trouble. "As soon as it was called to my attention I could see myself that it wasn't acting normally. It was losing elevation and was pursuing a very erratic course. Before we could reach it it lost flying speed and fell into a spinning nose dive and headed for the ground. I watched, expecting every minute to see the crew make parachute jumps, but they didn't and the plane hit the ground with a terrific crash." "It caught fire, of course?" * * * * * "No, Doctor, that is one of the funny things about the accident. It didn't. It hit the ground in an open place free from brush and literally burst into pieces, but it didn't flame up. We headed directly for the scene of the crash and we encountered another funny thing. We almost froze to death." "What do you mean?" "Exactly what I say. Of course, it's pretty cold at that altitude all the time, but this cold was like nothing I had ever encountered. It seemed to freeze the blood in our veins and it congealed frost on the windshields and made the motor miss for a moment. It was only momentary and it only existed directly over the wrecked plane. We went past it and swung around in a circle and came back over the wreck, but we didn't feel the cold again. "The next thing we tried to do was to find a landing place. That country is pretty rugged and rough and there wasn't a flat place for miles that was large enough to land a ship on. Hughes and I talked it over and there didn't seem to be much of anything that we could do except to go on until we found a landing place. I had had no experience in parachute jumping and I couldn't pilot the plane if Hughes jumped. We swooped down over the wreck as close as we dared and that was when we saw the condition of the bodies. The whole plane was cracked up pretty badly, but the weird part of it was the fact that the bodies of the crew had broken into pieces, as though they had been made of glass. Arms and legs were detached from the torsos and lying at a distance. There was no sign of blood on the ground. We saw all this with our naked eyes from close at hand and verified it by observations through binoculars from a greater height. "When we had made our observations and marked the location of the wreck as closely as we could, we headed east until we found a landing place near Fallon. Hughes dropped me here and went on to Reno, or to San Francisco if necessary, to report the accident and get more planes to aid in the search. I was wholly at sea, but it seemed to be in your line and as I knew that you were at the St. Francis, I called you up." * * * * * "What are your plans?" "I made none until I talked with you. The country where the wreck occurred is unbelievably wild and we can't get near it with any transportation other than burros. The only thing that I can see to do is to gather together what transportation I can and head for the wreck on foot to rescue the packets and to bring out the bodies. Can you suggest anything better?" "When do you expect to start?" "As soon as I can get my pack train together. Possibly in three or four hours." "Carnes, are you sure that those bodies were broken into bits? An arm or a leg might easily be torn off in a complete crash." "They were smashed into bits as nearly as I could tell, Doctor. Hughes is an old flier and he has seen plenty of crashes but he never saw anything like this. It beats anything that I ever saw." "If your observations were accurate, there could be only one cause and that one is a patent impossibility. I haven't a bit of equipment here, but I expect that I can get most of the stuff I want from the University of California across the bay at Berkeley. I can get a plane at Crissy Field. I'll tell you what to do, Carnes. Get your burro train together and start as soon as you can, but leave me half a dozen burros and a guide at Fallon. I'll get up there as soon as I can and I'll try to overtake you before you get to the wreck. If I don't, don't disturb anything any more than you can help until my arrival. Do you understand?" "I thought that you were on your vacation, Doctor." "Oh shut up! Like most of my vacations, this one will have to be postponed. I'll move as swiftly as I can and I ought to be at Fallon to-night if I'm lucky and don't run into any obstacles. Burros are fairly slow, but I'll make the best time possible." "I rather expected you would, Doctor. I can't get my pack train together until evening, so I'll wait for you right here. I'm mighty glad that you are going to get in on it." * * * * * Silently Carnes and Dr. Bird surveyed the wreck of the T. A. C. plane. The observations of the secret service operative had been correct. The bodies of the unfortunate crew had been broken into fragments. Their limbs had not been twisted off as a freak of the fall but had been cleanly broken off, as though the bodies had suddenly become brittle and had shattered on their impact with the ground. Not only the bodies, but the ship itself had been broken up. Even the clothing of the men was in pieces or had long splits in the fabric whose edges were as clean as though they had been cut with a knife. Dr. Bird picked up an arm which had belonged to the pilot and examined it. The brittleness, if it had ever existed, was gone and the arm was limp. "No _rigor mortis_," commented the Doctor. "How long ago was the wreck?" "About seventy-two hours ago." "Hm-m! What about those packets that were on the plane?" Carnes stepped forward and gingerly inspected first the body of the army courier and then that of the courier of the T. A. C. "Both gone, Doctor," he reported, straightening up. Dr. Bird's face fell into grim lines. "There is more to this case than appears on the surface, Carnes," he said. "This was no ordinary wreck. Bring up that third burro; I want to examine these fragments a little. Bill," he went on to one of the two guides who had accompanied them from Fallon, "you and Walter scout around the ground and see what you can find out. I especially wish to know whether anyone has visited the scene of the wreck." * * * * * The guides consulted a moment and started out. Carnes drove up the burro the Doctor had indicated and Dr. Bird unpacked it. He opened a mahogony case and took from it a high powered microscope. Setting the instrument up on a convenient rock, he subjected portions of the wreck, including several fragments of flesh, to a careful scrutiny. When he had completed his observations he fell into a brown study, from which he was aroused by Carnes. "What did you find out about the cause of the wreck, Doctor?" "I don't know what to think. The immediate cause was that everything was frozen. The plane ran into a belt of cold which froze up the motor and which probably killed the crew instantly. It was undoubtedly the aftermath of that cold which you felt when you swooped down over the wreck." "It seems impossible that it could have suddenly got cold enough to freeze everything up like that." "It does, and yet I am confident that that is what happened. It was no ordinary cold, Carnes; it was cold of the type that infests interstellar space; cold beyond any conception you have of cold, cold near the range of the absolute zero of temperature, nearly four hundred and fifty degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale. At such temperatures, things which are ordinarily quite flexible and elastic, such as rubber, or flesh, become as brittle as glass and would break in the manner which these bodies have broken. An examination of the tissues of the flesh shows that it has been submitted to some temperature that is very low in the scale, probably below that of liquid air. Such a temperature would produce instant death and the other phenomena which we can observe." "What could cause such a low temperature, Doctor?" "I don't know yet, although I hope to find out before we are finished. Cold is a funny thing, Carnes. Ordinarily it is considered as simply the absence of heat; and yet I have always held it to be a definite negative quantity. All through nature we observe that every force has its opposite or negative force to oppose it. We have positive and negative electrical charges, positive and negative, or north and south, magnetic poles. We have gravity and its opposite apergy, and I believe cold is really negative heat." "I never heard of anything like that, Doctor. I always thought that things were cold because heat was taken from them--not because cold was added. It sounds preposterous." * * * * * "Such is the common idea, and yet I cannot accept it, for it does not explain all the recorded phenomena. You are familiar with a searchlight, are you not?" "In a general way, yes." "A searchlight is merely a source of light, and of course, of heat, which is placed at the focus of a parabolic reflector so that all of the rays emanating from the source travel in parallel lines. A searchlight, of course, gives off heat. If we place a lens of the same size as the searchlight aperture in the path of the beam and concentrate all the light, and heat, at one spot, the focal point of the lens, the temperature at that point is the same as the temperature of the source of the light, less what has been lost by radiation. You understand that, do you not?" "Certainly." "Suppose that we place at the center of the aperture of the searchlight a small opaque disc which is permeable neither to heat nor light, in such a manner as to interrupt the central portion of the beam. As a result, the beam will go out in the form of a hollow rod, or pipe, of heat and light with a dark, cold core. This core will have the temperature of the surrounding air plus the small amount which has radiated into it from the surrounding pipe. If we now pass this beam of light through a lens in order to concentrate the beam, both the pipe of heat and the cold core will focus. If we place a temperature measuring device near the focus of the dark core, we will find that the temperature is lower than the surrounding air. This means that we have focused or concentrated cold." "That sounds impossible. But I can offer no other criticism." * * * * * "Nevertheless, it is experimentally true. It is one of the facts which lead me to consider cold as negative heat. However, this is true of cold, as it is of the other negative forces; they exist and manifest themselves only in the presence of the positive forces. No one has yet concentrated cold except in the presence of heat, as I have outlined. How this cold belt which the T. A. C. plane encountered came to be there is another question. The thing which we have to determine is whether it was caused by natural or artificial forces." "Both of the packets which the plane carried are gone, Doctor," observed Carnes. "Yes, and that seems to add weight to the possibility that the cause was artificial, but it is far from conclusive. The packets might not have been on the men when the plane fell, or someone may have passed later and taken them for safekeeping." The doctor's remarks were interrupted by the guides. "Someone has been here since the wreck, Doctor," said Bill. "Walter and I found tracks where two men came up here and prowled around for some time and then left by the way they came. They went off toward the northwest, and we followed their trail for about forty rods and then lost it. We weren't able to pick it up again." "Thanks, Bill," replied the doctor. "Well, Carnes, that seems to add more weight to the theory that the spot of cold was made and didn't just happen. If a prospecting party had just happened along they would either have left the wreck alone or would have made some attempt to inter the bodies. That cold belt must have been produced artificially by men who planned to rob this plane after bringing it down and who were near at hand to get their plunder. Is there any chance of following that trail?" "I doubt it, Doc. Walter and I scouted around quite a little, but we couldn't pick it up again." "Is there any power line passing within twenty miles of here?" "None that Walter and I know of, Doc." "Funny! Such a device as must have been used would need power and lots of it for operation. Well, I'll try my luck. Carnes, help me unpack and set up the rest of my apparatus." * * * * * With the aid of the operative, Dr. Bird unpacked two of the burros and extracted from cases where they were carefully packed and padded some elaborate electrical and optical apparatus. The first was a short telescope of large diameter which he mounted on a base in such a manner that it could be elevated or depressed and rotated in any direction. At the focal point of the telescope was fastened a small knot of wire from which one lead ran to the main piece of apparatus, which he sat on a flat rock. The other lead from the wire knot ran into a sealed container surrounded by a water bath under which a spirit lamp burned. From the container another lead led to the main apparatus. This main piece consisted of a series of wire coils mounted on a frame and attached to the two leads. The doctor took from a padded case a tiny magnet suspended on a piece of wire of exceedingly small diameter which he fastened in place inside the coils. Cemented to the magnet was a tiny mirror. "What is that apparatus?" asked Carnes as the doctor finished his set-up and surveyed it with satisfaction. "Merely a thermocouple attached to a D'Arsonval galvanometer," replied the doctor. "This large, squat telescope catches and concentrates on the thermocouple and the galvanometer registers the temperature." "You're out of my depth. What is a thermocouple?" "A juncture of two wires made of dissimilar metals, in this case of platinum and of platinum-iridium alloy. There is another similar junction in this case, which is kept at a constant temperature by the water bath. When the temperatures of the two junctions are the same, the system is in equilibrium. When they are at different temperatures, an electrical potential is set up, which causes a current to flow from one to the other through the galvanometer. The galvanometer consists of a magnet set up inside coils through which the current I spoke of flows. This current causes the magnet to rotate and by watching the mirror, the rotation can be detected and measured. "This device is one of the most sensitive ever made, and is used to measure the radiation from distant stars. Currents as small as .000000000000000000000000001 ampere have been detected and measured. This particular instrument is not that sensitive to begin with, and has its sensitivity further reduced by having a high resistance in one of the leads." "What are you going to use it for?" "I am going to try to locate somewhere in these hills a patch of local cold. It may not work, but I have hopes. If you will manipulate the telescope so as to search the hills around here, I will watch the galvanometer." * * * * * For several minutes Carnes swung the telescope around. Twice Dr. Bird stopped him and decreased the sensitiveness of his instrument by introducing more resistance in the lines in order to keep the magnet from twisting clear around, due to the fluctuations in the heats received on account of the varying conditions of reflection. As Carnes swung the telescope again the magnet swung around sharply, nearly to a right angle to its former position. "Stop!" cried the doctor. "Read your azimuth." Carnes read the compass bearing on the protractor attached to the frame which supported the telescope. Dr. Bird took a pair of binoculars and looked long and earnestly in the indicated direction. With a sigh he laid down the glasses. "I can't see a thing, Carnesy," he said. "We'll have to move over to the next crest and make a new set-up. Plant a rod on the hill so that we can get an azimuth bearing and get the airline distance with a range finder." On the hilltop which Dr. Bird had pointed out the apparatus was again set up. For several minutes Carnes swept the hills before an exclamation from the doctor told him to pause. He read the new azimuth, and the doctor laid off the two readings on a sheet of paper with a protractor and made a few calculations. "I don't know," he said reflectively when he had finished his computations. "This darned instrument is still so sensitive that you may have merely focused on a deep shadow or a cold spring or something of that sort, but the magnet kicked clear around and it may mean that we have located what we are looking for. It should be about two miles away and almost due west of here." "There is no spring that I know of, Doc, and I think I know of every water hole in this country," remarked Bill. "There could hardly be a spring at this elevation, anyway," replied the doctor. "Maybe it is what we are seeking. We'll start out in that direction, anyway. Bill, you had better take the lead, for you know the country. Spread out a little so that we won't be too bunched if anything happens." * * * * * For three-quarters of an hour the little group of men made their way through the wilderness in the direction indicated by the doctor. Presently Bill, who was in the lead, held up his hand with a warning gesture. The other three closed up as rapidly as cautious progress would allow. "What is it, Bill?" asked the doctor in an undertone. "Slip up ahead and look over that crest." The doctor obeyed instructions. As he glanced over he gave vent to a low whistle of surprise and motioned for Carnes to join him. The operative crawled up and glanced over the crest. In a hollow before them was a crude one-storied house, and erected on an open space before it was a massive piece of apparatus. It consisted of a number of huge metallic cylinders, from which lines ran to a silvery concave mirror mounted on an elaborate frame which would allow it to be rotated so as to point in any direction. "What is it?" whispered Carnes. "Some kind of a projector," muttered the doctor. "I never saw one quite like it, but it is meant to project something. I can't make out the curve of that mirror. It isn't a parabola and it isn't an ellipse. It must be a high degree subcatenary or else built on a transcendental function." He raised himself to get a clearer view, and as he did so a puff of smoke came from the house, to be followed in a moment by a sharp crack as a bullet flattened itself a few inches from his head. The doctor tumbled back over the crest out of sight of the house. Bill and Walter hurried forward, their rifles held ready for action. "Get out on the flanks, men," directed the doctor. "The man we want is in a house in that hollow. He's armed, and he means business." * * * * * Bill and Walter crawled under the shelter of the rocks to a short distance away and then, rifles ready, advanced to the attack. A report came from the hollow and a bullet whined over Bill's head. Almost instantly a crack came from Walter's rifle and splinters flew from the building in the hollow a few inches from a loophole, through which projected the barrel of a rifle. The rifle barrel swung rapidly in a circle and barked in Walter's direction; but as it did so, Bill's gun spoke and again splinters flew from the building. "Good work!" ejaculated Dr. Bird as he watched the slow advance of the two guides. "If we just had rifles we could join in the party, but it's a little far for effective pistol work. Let's go ahead, and we may get close enough to do a little shooting." Pistols in hand, Carnes and the doctor crawled over the crest and joined the advance. Again and again the rifle spoke from the hollow and was answered by the vicious barks of the rifles in the hands of the guides, Carnes and the doctor resting their pistols on rocks and sending an occasional bullet toward the loophole. The conditions of light and the moving target were not conducive to good marksmanship on the part of the besieged man, and none of the attackers were hit. Presently Walter succeeded in sending a bullet through the loophole. The rifle barrel suddenly disappeared. With a shout the four men rose from their cover and advanced toward the building at a run. As they did so an ominous whirring sound came from the apparatus in front of the house and a sudden chill filled the air. "Back!" shouted Dr. Bird. "Back below the hill if you value your lives!" He turned and raced at full speed toward the sheltering crest of the hill, the others following him closely. The whirring sound continued, and the concave reflector turned with a grating sound on its gears. As the path of its rays struck the ground the rocks became white with frost and one rock split with a sharp report, one fragment rolling down the slope, carrying others in its trail. * * * * * With panic-stricken faces the four men raced toward the sheltering crest, but remorselessly the reflector swung around in their direction. The intense cold numbed the racing men, cutting off their breath and impeding their efforts for speed. "Stop!" cried the doctor suddenly. "Fire at that reflector! It's our only chance!" He set the example by turning and emptying his pistol futilely at the turning mirror. Bill, Walter and Carnes followed his example. Nearer and nearer to them came the deadly ray. Bill was the nearest to its path, and he suddenly stiffened and fell forward, his useless gun still grasped in his hands. As his body struck the ground it rolled down hill for a few feet, the deadly ray following it. His head struck a rock, and Carnes gave a cry of horror as it broke into fragments. Walter threw his rifle to his shoulder and fired again and again at the rotating disc. The cold had became intense and he could not control the actions of his muscles and his rifle wavered about. He threw himself flat on the ground, and, with an almost superhuman effort, steadied himself for a moment and fired. His aim was true, and with a terrific crash the reflector split into a thousand fragments. Dr. Bird staggered to his feet. "It's out of order for a moment!" he cried. "To the house while we can!" As swiftly as his numbed feet would allow him, he stumbled toward the house. The muzzle of the rifle again projected from the loophole and with its crack the doctor staggered for a moment and then fell. Walter's rifle spoke again and the rifle disappeared through the loophole with a spasmodic jerk. Carnes stumbled over the doctor. "Are you hit badly?" he gasped through chattering teeth. "I'm not hit at all," muttered the doctor. "I stumbled and fell just as he fired. Look out! He's going to shoot again!" The rifle barrel came slowly into view through the loophole. Walter fired, but his bullet went wild. Carnes threw himself behind a rock for protection. * * * * * The rifle swung in Walter's direction and paused. As it did so, from the house came a strangled cry and a sound as of a blow. The rifle barrel disappeared, and the sounds of a struggle came from the building. "Come on!" cried Carnes as he rose to his feet, and made his stumbling way forward, the others following at the best speed which their numbed limbs would allow. As they reached the door they were aware of a struggle which was going on inside. With an oath the doctor threw his massive frame against the door. It creaked, but the solid oak of which it was composed was proof against the attack, and he drew back for another onslaught. From the house came a pistol shot, followed by a despairing cry and a guttural shout. Reinforced by Carnes, the doctor threw his weight against the door again. With a rending crash it gave, and they fell sprawling into the cabin. The doctor was the first one on his feet. "Who are you?" asked a voice from one corner. The doctor whirled like a flash and covered the speaker with his pistol. "Put them up!" he said tersely. "I am unarmed," the voice replied. "Who are you?" "We're from the United States Secret Service," replied Carnes who had gained his feet. "The game is up for you, and you'd better realize it." "Secret Service! Thank God!" cried the voice. "Get Koskoff--he has the plans. He has gone out through the tunnel!" "Where is it?" demanded Carnes. "The entrance is that iron plate on the floor." Carnes and the doctor jumped at the plate and tried to lift it, without result. There was no handle or projection on which they could take hold. "Not that way," cried the voice. "That cover is fastened on the inside. Go outside the building; he'll come out about two hundred yards north. Shoot him as he appears or he'll get away." The three men nearly tumbled over each other to get through the doorway into the bitter cold outside. As they emerged from the cabin the gaze of the guide swept the surrounding hills. "There he goes!" he cried. "Get him!" said Carnes sharply. Walter ran forward a few feet and dropped prone on the ground, cuddling the stock of his rifle to his cheek. Two hundred yards ahead a figure was scurrying over the rocks away from the cabin. Walter drew in his breath and his hand suddenly grew steady as his keen gray eyes peered through the sights. Carnes and the doctor held their breath in sympathy. * * * * * Suddenly the rifle spoke, and the fleeing man threw up his arms and fell forward on his face. "Got him," said Walter laconically. "Go bring the body in, Carnes," exclaimed the doctor. "I'll take care of the chap inside." "Did you get him?" asked the voice eagerly, as the doctor stepped inside. "He's dead all right," replied the doctor grimly. "Who the devil are you, and what are you doing here?" "There is a light switch on the left of the door as you come in," was the reply. Dr. Bird found the switch and snapped on a light. He turned toward the corner from whence the voice had come and recoiled in horror. Propped in the corner was the body of a middle-aged man, daubed and splashed with blood which ran from a wound in the side of his head. "Good Lord!" he ejaculated. "Let me help you." "There's not much use," replied the man rather faintly. "I am about done in. This face wound doesn't amount to much, but I am shot through the body and am bleeding internally. If you try to move me, it may easily kill me. Leave me alone until your partners come." The doctor drew a flask of brandy from his pocket and advanced toward the corner. "Take a few drops of this," he advised. With an effort the man lifted the flask to his lips and gulped down a little of the fiery spirit. A sound of tramping feet came from the outside and then a thud as though a body had been dropped. Carnes and Walter entered the cabin. "He's dead as a mackerel," said Carnes in answer to the doctor's look. "Walter got him through the neck and broke his spinal cord. He never knew what hit him." "The plans?" came in a gasping voice from the man in the corner. "We got them, too," replied Carnes. "He had both packets inside his coat. They have been opened, but I guess they are all here. Who the devil are you?" "Since Koskoff is dead, and I am dying, there is no reason why I shouldn't tell you," was the answer. "Leave that brandy handy to keep up my strength. I have only a short time and I can't repeat. * * * * * "As to who I am or what I was, it doesn't really matter. Koskoff knew me as John Smith, and it will pass as well as any other name. Let my past stay buried. I am, or was, a scientist of some ability; but fortune frowned on me, and I was driven out of the world. Money would rehabilitate me--money will do anything nowadays--so I set out to get it. In the course of my experimental work, I had discovered that cold was negative heat and reacted to the laws which governed heat." "I knew that," cried Dr. Bird; "but I never could prove it." "Who are you?" demanded John Smith. "Dr. Bird, of the Bureau of Standards." "Oh, Bird. I've heard of you. You can understand me when I say that as heat, positive heat is a concomitant of ordinary light. I have found that cold, negative heat, is a concomitant of cold light. Is my apparatus in good shape outside?" "The reflector is smashed." "I'm sorry. You would have enjoyed studying it. I presume that you saw that it was a catenary curve?" "I rather thought so." "It was, and it was also adjustable. I could vary the focal point from a few feet to several miles. With that apparatus I could throw a beam of negative heat with a focal point which I could adjust at will. Close to the apparatus, I could obtain a temperature almost down to absolute zero, but at the longer ranges it wasn't so cold, due to leakage into the atmosphere. Even at two miles I could produce a local temperature of three hundred degrees below zero." "What was the source of your cold?" "Liquid helium. Those cylinders contain, or rather did contain, for I expect that Koskoff has emptied them, helium in a liquid state." "Where is your compressor?" * * * * * "I didn't have to use one. I developed a cold light under whose rays helium would liquefy and remain in a state of equilibrium until exposed to light rays. Those cylinders had merely enough pressure to force the liquid out to where the sun could hit it, and then it turned to a gas, dropping the temperature at the first focal point of the reflector to absolute zero. When I had this much done, Koskoff and I packed the whole apparatus here and were ready for work. "We were on the path of the transcontinental air mail, and I bided my time until an especially valuable shipment was to be made. My plans, which worked perfectly, were to freeze the plane in midair and then rob the wreck. I heard of the jewel shipment the T. A. C. was to carry and I planned to get it. When the plane came over, Koskoff and I brought it down. The unsuspected presence of another plane upset us a little, and I started to bring it down. But we had been all over this country and knew there was no place that a plane could land. I let it go on in safety." "Thank you," replied Carnes with a grimace. "We robbed the wreck and we found two packets, one the jewels I was after, and the other a sealed packet, which proved to contain certain War Department plans. That was when I learned who Koskoff was. I had hired him in San Francisco as a good mechanic who had no principles. He was to get one-fourth of the loot. When we found these plans, he told me who he was. He was really a Russian secret agent and he wanted to deliver the plans to Russia. I may be a thief and a murderer, but I am not yet ready to betray my country, and I told him so. He offered me almost any price for the plans; but I wouldn't listen. We had a serious quarrel, and he overpowered me and bound me. * * * * * "We had a radio set here and he called San Francisco and sent some code message. I think he was waiting here for someone to come. Had we followed our original plans, we would have been miles from here before you arrived. "He had me bound and helpless, as he thought, but I worked my bonds a little loose. I didn't let him know it, for I knew that the plane I had let get away would guide a party here and I thought I might be able to help out. When you came and attacked the house, I worked at my bonds until they were loose enough to throw off. I saw Koskoff start my cold apparatus to working and then he quit, because he ran out of helium. When he started shooting again, I worked out of my bonds and tackled him. "He was a better man than I gave him credit for, or else he suspected me, for about the time I grabbed him he whirled and struck me over the head with his gun barrel and tore my face open. The blow stunned me, and when I came to, I was thrown into this corner. I meant to have another try at it, but I guess you rushed him too fast. He turned and ran for the tunnel, but as he did so, he shot me through the body. I guess I didn't look dead enough to suit him. You gentlemen broke open the door and came in. That's all." "Not by a long shot, it isn't," exclaimed Dr. Bird. "Where is that cold light apparatus of yours?" "In the tunnel." "How do you get into it?" "If you will open that cupboard on the wall, you'll find an open knife switch on the wall. Close it." * * * * * Dr. Bird found the switch and closed it. As he did so the cabin rocked on its foundations and both Carnes and Walter were thrown to the ground. The thud of a detonation deep in the earth came to their ears. "What was that?" cried the doctor. "That," replied Smith with a wan smile, "was the detonation of two hundred pounds of T.N.T. When you dig down into the underground cave where we used the cold light apparatus, you will find it in fragments. It was my only child, and I'll take it with me." As he finished his head slumped forward on his chest. With an exclamation of dismay Dr. Bird sprang forward and tried to lift the prostrate form. In an agony of desire the Doctor tightened his grip on the dying man's shoulder. But Smith collapsed into a heap. Dr. Bird bent forward and tore open his shirt and listened at his chest. Presently he straightened up. "He is gone," he said sadly, "and I guess the results of his genius have died with him. He doesn't strike me as a man who left overmuch to chance. Carnes, is your case completed?" "Very satisfactorily, Doctor. I have both of the lost packets." "All right, then, come back to the wreck and help me pack my burros. I can make my way back to Fallon without a guide." "Where are you going, Doctor?" "That, Carnes, old dear, is none of your blankety blanked business. Permit me to remind you that I am on my vacation. I haven't decided yet just where I am going, but I can tell you one thing. It's going to be some place where you can't call me on the telephone." Brigands of the Moon (The Book of Gregg Haljan) BEGINNING A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Ray Cummings_ Black mutiny and brigandage stalk the Space-ship Planetara as she speeds to the Moon to pick up a fabulously rich cache of radium-ore. [Illustration: _I stood on the turret-balcony of the Planetara with Dr. Frank, watching the arriving passengers._] _Foreword by Ray Cummings_ I have been thinking that if, during one of those long winter evenings at Valley Forge, someone had placed in George Washington's hands one of our present day best sellers, the illustrious Father of our Country would have read it with considerable emotion. I do not mean what we call a story of science, or fantasy--just a novel of action, adventure and romance. The sort of thing you and I like to read, but do not find amazing in any way at all. But I fancy that George Washington would have found it amazing. Don't you? It might picture, for instance, a factory girl at a sewing machine. George Washington would be amazed at a sewing machine. And the girl, journeying in the subway to and from her work! Stealing an opportunity to telephone her lover at the noon hour; going to the movies in the evening, or listening to a radio. And there might be a climax, perhaps, with the girl and the villain in a transcontinental railway Pullman, and the hero sending frantic telegrams, or telephoning the train, and then chasing it in his airplane. George Washington would have found it amazing! And I am wondering how you and I would feel if someone were to give us now a book of ordinary adventure of the sort which will be published a hundred and fifty years hence. I have been trying to imagine such a book and the nature of its contents. Let us imagine it together. Suppose we walk down Fifth Avenue, a pleasant spring morning of May, 2080. Fifth Avenue, no doubt, will be there. I don't know whether the New York Public Library will be there or not. We'll assume that it is, and that it has some sort of books, printed, or in whatever fashion you care to imagine. The young man library attendant is surprised at our curiously antiquated aspect. We look as though we were dressed for some historical costume ball. We talk old-fashioned English, like actors in an historical play of the 1930 period. But we get the book. The attendant assures us it is a good average story of action and adventure. Nothing remarkable, but he read it himself, and found it interesting. We thank him and take the book. But we find that the language in which it is written is too strange for comfortable reading. And it names so many extraordinary things so casually! As though we knew all about them, which we certainly do not! So we take it to the kind-hearted librarian in the language division. He modifies it to old-fashioned English of 1930, and he puts occasional footnotes to help explain some of the things we might not understand. Why he should bother to do this for us I don't know; but let us assume that he does. And now we take the book home--in the pneumatic tube, or aerial moving sidewalk, or airship, or whatever it is we take to get home. And now that we are home, let's read the book. It ought to be interesting. CHAPTER I _Tells of the Grantline Moon Expedition and of the Mysterious Martian Who Followed Us in the City Corridor_ One may write about oneself and still not be an egoist. Or so, at least, they tell me. My narrative went broadcast with a fair success. It was pantomimed and the public flashed me a reasonable approval. And so my disc publishers have suggested that I record it in more permanent form. I introduce myself, begging grace that I intrude upon your busy minutes, with my only excuse that perhaps I may amuse you. For what the commercial sellers of my pictured version were pleased to blare as my handsome face, I ask your indulgence. My feminine audience of the pantomimes was undoubtedly graciously pleased at my personality and physical aspect. That I am "tall as a Viking of old"--and "handsome as a young Norse God"--is very pretty talk in the selling of my product. But I deplore its intrusion into the personality of this, my recorded narrative. And so now, for preface, to all my audience I do give earnest assurance that Gregg Haljan is no conceited zebra, handsomely striped by nature, and proud of it. Not so. I am, I do beg you to believe, a very humble fellow, striving for your approval, hoping only to entertain you. My introduction: My name, Gregg Haljan. My age, twenty-five years. I was, at the time my narrative begins, Third Officer on the Space-Ship Planetara. Our line was newly established; in 2070, to be exact, following the modern improvements of the Martel Magnetic Levitation.[1] * * * * * Our ship, whose home port was Great-New York, carried mail and passenger traffic to and from both Venus and Mars. Of astronomical necessity, our flights were irregular. This spring, with the two other planets both close to the earth, we were making two complete round trips. We had just arrived in Great-New York, this May evening, from Grebhar, Venus Free State. With only five hours in port here, we were departing the same night at the zero hour for Ferrok-Shahn, capital of the Martian Union. We were no sooner at the landing stage than I found a code-flash summoning Dan Dean and me to Divisional Detective Headquarters. Dan "Snap" Dean was one of my closest friends. He was radio-helio operator of the Planetara. A small, wiry, red-headed chap, with a quick, ready laugh and a wit that made everyone like him. The summons to Detective-Colonel Halsey's office surprised us. Snap eyed me. "You haven't been opening any treasury vaults, have you, Gregg?" "He wants you, also," I retorted. He laughed. "Well, he can roar at me like a traffic switchman and my private life will remain my own." We could not think why we should be wanted. It was the darkness of mid-evening when we left the Planetara for Halsey's office. It was not a long trip. We went direct in the upper monorail, descending into the subterranean city at Park-Circle 30. * * * * * We had never been to Halsey's office before. We found it to be a gloomy, vaultlike place in one of the deepest corridors. The door lifted. "Gregg Haljan and Daniel Dean." The guard stood aside. "Come in." I own that my heart was unduly thumping as we entered. The door dropped behind us. It was a small blue-lit apartment--a steel-lined room like a vault. Colonel Halsey sat at his desk. And the big, heavy-set, florid Captain Carter--our commander of the Planetara--was here. That surprised us: we had not seen him leave the ship. Halsey smiled at us gravely. Captain Carter said, "Sit down, lads." We took the seats. There was an alarming solemnity about this. If I had been guilty of anything that I could think of, it would have been frightening. But Halsey's first words reassured me. "It's about the Grantline Moon Expedition. In spite of our secrecy, the news has gotten out. We want to know how. Can you tell us?" Captain Carter's huge bulk--he was about as tall as I am--towered over us as we sat before Halsey's desk. "If you lads have told anyone--said anything--let slip the slightest hint about it--" Snap smiled with relief; but he turned solemn at once. "I haven't. Not a word!" "Nor have I," I declared. * * * * * The Grantline Moon Expedition! We had not thought of that as a reason for this summons. Johnny Grantline was a close friend to us both. He had organized an exploring expedition to the Moon. Uninhabited, with its bleak, forbidding, airless, waterless surface, the Moon--even though so close to the Earth--was seldom visited. No regular ship ever stopped there. A few exploring parties of recent years had come to grief. But there was a persistent rumor that upon the Moon, mineral riches of fabulous wealth were awaiting discovery. The thing had already caused some interplanetary complications. The aggressive Martians would be only too glad to explore the Moon. But the U.S.W.[2] definitely warned them away. The Moon was World Territory, we announced, and we would protect it as such. The threatened conflict between the Earth and Mars had come to nothing. There was, this year of 2079, a thorough amity between all three of the inhabited planets. It still holds, and I pray that it may always hold. There was, nevertheless, a realization by our government, that whatever riches might be upon the Moon should be seized at once and held by some reputable Earth Company. And when Johnny Grantline applied, with his father's wealth and his own scientific record of attainment, the government was only too glad to grant him its writ. * * * * * The Grantline Expedition had started six months ago. The Martian government had acquiesced in our ultimatum, yet brigands have been known to be financed under cover of a governmental disavowal. And so the expedition was kept secret. My words need give no offense to any Martian who comes upon them. I refer to the history of our earth only. The Grantline Expedition was on the Moon now. No word had come from it. One could not flash helios even in code without letting all the universe know that explorers were on the Moon. And why they were there, anyone could easily guess. And now Colonel Halsey was telling us that the news was abroad! Captain Carter eyed us closely; his flashing eyes under the white bushy brows would pry a secret from anyone. "You're sure? A girl of Venus, perhaps, with her cursed, seductive lure! A chance word, with you lads befuddled by alcolite?" We assured him we had been careful. By the heavens, I know that I had been. Not a whisper, even to Snap, of the name Grantline in six months or more. Captain Carter added abruptly, "We're insulated here, Halsey?" "Yes, talk as freely as you like. An eavesdropping ray will never get into these walls." * * * * * They questioned us. They were satisfied at last that, though the secret had escaped, we had not done it. Hearing it discussed, it occurred to me to wonder why Carter was concerned. I was not aware that he knew of Grantline's venture. I learned now the reason why the Planetara, upon each of her voyages, had managed to pass fairly close to the Moon. It had been arranged with Grantline that if he wanted help or had any important message, he was to flash it locally to our passing ship. And this Snap knew, and had never mentioned it, even to me. Halsey was saying, "Well, we can't blame you, but the secret is out." Snap and I regarded each other. What could anyone do? What would anyone dare do? Captain Carter said abruptly, "Look here, lads, this is my chance now to talk plainly to you. Outside, anywhere outside these walls, an eavesdropping ray may be upon us. You know that? One may never even dare whisper since that accursed ray was developed." Snap opened his mouth to speak but decided against it. My heart was pounding. Captain Carter went on, "I know I can trust you two more than anyone else under me on the Planetara--" "What do you mean by that?" I demanded. "What--" He interrupted me. "Nothing at all but what I say." * * * * * Halsey smiled grimly. "What he means, Haljan, is that things are not always what they seem these days. One cannot always tell a friend from an enemy. The Planetara is a public vessel. You have--how many is it, Carter?--thirty or forty passengers this trip to-night?" "Thirty-eight," said Carter. "There are thirty-eight people listed for the flight to Ferrok-Shahn to-night," Halsey said slowly. "And some may not be what they seem." He raised his thin dark hand. "We have information--" He paused. "I confess, we know almost nothing--hardly more than enough to alarm us." Captain Carter interjected, "I want you and Dean to be on your guard. Once on the Planetara it is difficult for us to talk openly, but be watchful. I will arrange for us to be doubly armed." Vague, perturbing words! Halsey said, "They tell me George Prince is listed for the voyage. I am suggesting, Haljan, that you keep your eye especially upon him. Your duties on the Planetara leave you comparatively free, don't they?" "Yes," I agreed. With the first and second officers on duty, and the captain aboard, my routine was more or less that of an understudy. I said, "George Prince! Who is he?" "A mechanical engineer," said Halsey. "An under-official of the Earth Federated Radium Corporation. But he associates with bad companions--particularly Martians." I had never heard of this George Prince, though I was familiar with the Federated Radium Corporation, of course. A semi-government trust, which controlled virtually the entire Earth supply of radium. "He was in the Automotive Department," Carter put in. "You've heard of the Federated Radium Motor?" * * * * * We had, of course. A recent Earth invention which promised to revolutionize the automotive industry. An engine of a new type, using radium as its fuel. Snap demanded, "What in the stars has this got to do with Johnny Grantline?" "Much," said Halsey quietly, "or perhaps nothing. But George Prince some years ago mixed in rather unethical transactions. We had him in custody once. He is known now as unusually friendly with several Martians in New York of bad reputation." "Well--" began Snap. "What you don't know," Halsey went on quietly, "is that Grantline expects to find radium on the Moon." We gasped. "Exactly," said Halsey. "The ill-fated Ballon Expedition thought they had found it on the Moon some years ago. A new type of ore, as rich in radium as our gold-bearing sands are rich in gold. Ballon's first samples gave uranium atoms with a fair representation of ionium and thorium. A richly radio-active ore. A lode of the pure radium is there somewhere, without doubt." * * * * * He added vehemently, "Do you understand now why we should be suspicious of this George Prince? He has a criminal record. He has a thorough technical knowledge of radium ores. He associates with Martians of bad reputation. A large Martian Company has recently developed a radium engine to compete with our Earth motor. You know that? You know that there is very little radium available on Mars, and our government will not allow our own radium supply to be exported. That Martian Company needs radium. It will do anything to get radium. What do you suppose it would pay for a few tons of really rich radio-active ore--such as Grantline may have found on the Moon?" "But," I objected, "that is a reputable Martian company. It's backed by the government of the Martian Union. The government of Mars would not dare--" "Of course not!" Captain Carter exclaimed sardonically. "Not openly! But if Martian brigands had a supply of radium--I don't imagine where it came from would make much difference. That Martian Company would buy it." Halsey added, "And George Prince, my agents inform me, seems to know that Grantline is on the Moon. Put it all together, lads. Little sparks show the hidden current. "More than that: George Prince knows that we have arranged to have the Planetara stop at the Moon and bring back Grantline's radium-ore. This is your last voyage this year. You'll hear from Grantline this time, we're convinced. He'll probably give you the signal as you pass the Moon on your way out. Coming back, you'll stop at the Moon and transport whatever radium-ore Grantline has ready. The Grantline Flyer is too small for ore transportation." * * * * * Halsey's voice turned grimly sarcastic. "Doesn't it seem queer that George Prince and a few of his Martian friends happen to be listed as passengers for this voyage?" In the silence that followed, Snap and I regarded each other. Halsey added abruptly, "We had George Prince typed that time we arrested him four years ago. I'll show him to you." He snapped open an alcove, and said to his waiting attendant, "Get me the type of George Prince." The disc in a moment came through the pneumatic. Halsey, smiling wryly, adjusted it. "A nice looking fellow. Nicely spoken. Though at the time we made this he was somewhat annoyed, naturally. He is older now. Twenty-nine, to be exact. Here he is." The image glowed on the grids before us. His name, George Prince, in letters illumined upon his forehead, showed for a moment and then faded. He stood smiling sourly before us as he repeated the official formula: "My name is George Prince. I was born in Great-New York City twenty-five years ago." * * * * * I gazed at this life-size, moving image of George Prince. He stood somber in the black detention uniform. A dark, almost a girlishly handsome fellow, well below medium height--the rod beside him showed five feet four inches. Slim and slight. Long, wavy black hair, falling about his ears. A pale, clean-cut, really handsome face, almost beardless. I regarded it closely. A face that would have been femininely beautiful without its masculine touch of heavy black brows and firmly set jaw. His voice as he spoke was low and soft; but at the end, with the concluding words, "I am innocent!" it flashed into strong masculinity. His eyes, shaded with long, girlish black lashes, by chance met mine. "I am innocent." His curving sensuous lips drew down into a grim sneer.... The type faded at its end. Halsey replaced the disc in its box and waved the attendant away. "Thank you." He turned back to Snap and me. "Well, there he is. We have nothing tangible against him now. But I'll say this: he's a clever fellow, one to be afraid of. I would not blare it from the newscasters' microphone, but if he is hatching any plot, he has been too clever for my agents." We talked for another half-hour, and then Captain Carter dismissed us. We left Halsey's office with Carter's final words ringing in our ears. "Whatever comes, lads, remember I trust you...." * * * * * Snap and I decided to walk a portion of the way back to the ship. It was barely more than a mile through this subterranean corridor to where we could get the vertical lift direct to the landing stage. We started off on the lower level. Once outside the insulation of Halsey's office we did not dare talk of this thing. Not only electrical ears, but every possible eavesdropping device might be upon us. The corridor was two hundred feet or more below the ground level. At this hour of the night this business section was comparatively deserted. The through tube sounded over our heads with the passing of its occasional trains. The ventilators buzzed and whirred. At the cross intersections, the traffic directors dozed at their posts. It was hot and sticky down here, and gloomy with the daylight globes extinguished, and only the night lights to give a dim illumination. The stores and office arcades were all closed and deserted; only an occasional night-light burning behind their windows. Our footfalls echoed on the metal grids as we hurried along. "Nice evening," said Snap awkwardly. "Yes," I said, "isn't it?" I felt oppressed. As though prying eyes and ears were here. We walked for a time in silence, each of us busy with memory of what had transpired in Halsey's office. Suddenly Snap gripped me. "What's that?" "Where?" I whispered. * * * * * We stopped at a corner. An entryway was here. Snap pulled me into it. I could feel him quivering with excitement. "What is it?" I demanded in a whisper. "We're being followed. Did you hear anything?" "No!" Yet I thought now I could hear something. Vague footfalls. A rustling. And a microscopic electrical whine, as though some device were near us. Snap was fumbling in his pocket. "Wait, I've got a pair of low-scale phones." He put the little grids against his ears. I could hear the sharp intake of his breath. Then he seized me, pulled me down to the metal floor of the entryway. "Back, Gregg! Get back!" I could barely hear his whisper. We crouched as far back into the doorway as we could get. I was armed. My official permit for the carrying of the pencil heat-ray allowed me to have it always with me. I drew it now. But there was nothing to shoot at. I felt Snap clamping the grids on my ears. And now I heard something! An intensification of the vague footsteps I had thought I heard before. There was something following us! Something out in the corridor there now! A street light was nearby. The corridor was dim, but plainly visible; and to my sight it was empty. But there was something there. Something invisible! I could hear it moving. Creeping towards us. I pulled the grids off my ears. Snap murmured, "You've got a local phone." "Yes! I'll get them to give us the street glare!" * * * * * I pressed the danger signal, giving our location to the nearest operator. In a second or two we got the light. The street in all this neighborhood burst into a brilliant actinic glare. The thing menacing us was revealed! A figure in a black cloak, crouching thirty feet away across the corridor. Snap was on his feet. His voice rang shrilly, "There it is! Give it a shot, Gregg!" Snap was unarmed, but he flung his hands out menacingly. The figure, which may perhaps not have been aware of our city safeguard, was taken wholly by surprise. A human figure. Seven feet tall, at the least, and therefore, I judged, doubtless a Martian man. The black cloak covered his head. He took a step toward us, hesitated, and then turned in confusion. Snap's shrill voice was bringing help. The whine of a street guard's alarm whistle nearby sounded. The figure was making off! My pencil-ray was in my hand and I pressed its switch. The tiny heat-ray stabbed through the glare, but I missed. The figure stumbled, but did not fall. I saw a bare gray arm come from the cloak, flung up to maintain its balance. Or perhaps my pencil-ray of heat had seared the arm. The gray-skinned arm of a Martian. Snap was shouting, "Give him another!" But the figure passed beyond the actinic glare and vanished. We were detained in the turmoil of the corridor for ten minutes or more with official explanations. Then a message from Halsey released us. The Martian who had been following us in his invisible cloak was never caught. We escaped from the crowd at last and made our way back to the Planetara, where the passengers were already assembling for the outward Martian voyage. CHAPTER II "_A Fleeting Glance_--" I stood on the turret-balcony of the Planetara with Captain Carter and Dr. Frank, the ship surgeon, watching the arriving passengers. It was close to the zero hour: the level of the stage was a turmoil of confusion. The escalators, with the last of the freight aboard, were folded back. But the stage was jammed with the incoming passenger baggage: the interplanetary customs and tax officials with their X-ray and Zed-ray paraphernalia and the passengers themselves, lined up for the export inspection. At this height, the city lights lay spread in a glare of blue and yellow beneath us. The individual local planes came dropping like birds to our stage. Thirty-eight passengers for this flight to Mars, but that accursed desire of every friend and relative to speed the departing voyager brought a hundred or more extra people to crowd our girders and bring added difficulty to everybody. Carter was too absorbed in his duties to stay with us long. But here in the turret Dr. Frank and I found ourselves at the moment with nothing much to do but watch. "Think we'll get away on time, Gregg?" "No," I said. "And this of all voyages--" I checked myself, with thumping heart. My thoughts were so full of what Halsey and Carter had told us that it was difficult to rein my tongue. Yet here in the turret, unguarded by insulation, I could say nothing. Nor would I have dared mention the Grantline Moon Expedition to Dr. Frank. I wondered what he knew of this affair. Perhaps as much as I--perhaps nothing. * * * * * He was a thin, dark, rather smallish man of fifty, this ship's surgeon, trim in his blue and white uniform. I knew him well: we had made several flights together. An American--I fancy of Jewish ancestry. A likable man, and a skillful doctor and surgeon. He and I had always been good friends. "Crowded," he said. "Johnson says thirty-eight. I hope they're experienced travelers. This pressure sickness is a rotten nuisance--keeps me dashing around all night assuring frightened women they're not going to die. Last voyage, coming out of the Venus atmosphere--" He plunged into a lugubrious account of his troubles with space-sick voyagers. But I was in no mood to listen. My gaze was down on the spider incline, up which, over the bend of the ship's sleek, silvery body, the passengers and their friends were coming in little groups. The upper deck was already jammed with them. The Planetara, as flyers go, was not a large vessel. Cylindrical of body, forty feet maximum beam, and two hundred and seventy-five feet in overall length. The passenger superstructure--no more than a hundred feet long--was set amidships. A narrow deck, metallic-enclosed, and with large bulls-eye windows, encircled the superstructure. Some of the cabins opened directly onto the deck. Others had doors to the interior corridors. There were half a dozen small but luxurious public rooms. * * * * * The rest of the vessel was given to freight storage and the mechanism and control compartments. Forward of the passenger structure the deck level continued under the cylindrical dome-roof to the bow. The forward watch-tower observatory was here; officers' cabins; Captain Carter's navigating rooms and Dr. Frank's office. Similarly, under the stern-dome, was the stern watch-tower and a series of power compartments. Above the superstructure a confusion of spider bridges, ladders and balconies were laced like a metal network. The turret in which Dr. Frank and I now stood was perched here. Fifty feet away, like a bird's nest, Snap's instrument room stood clinging to the metal bridge. The dome-roof, with the glassite windows rolled back now, rose in a mound-peak to cover this highest middle portion of the vessel. Below, in the main hull, blue-lit metal corridors ran the entire length of the ship. Freight storage compartments; gravity control rooms; the air renewal systems; heater and ventilators and pressure mechanisms--all were located there. And the kitchens, stewards' compartments, and the living quarters of the crew. We carried a crew of sixteen, this voyage, exclusive of the navigating officers, and the purser, Snap Dean, and Dr. Frank. * * * * * The passengers coming aboard seemed a fair representation of what we usually had for the outward voyage to Ferrok-Shahn. Most were Earth people--and returning Martians. Dr. Frank pointed out one. A huge Martian in a gray cloak. A seven-foot fellow. "His name is Set Miko," Dr. Frank remarked. "Ever heard of him?" "No," I said. "Should I?" "Well--" The doctor suddenly checked himself, as though he were sorry he had spoken. "I never heard of him," I repeated slowly. An awkward silence fell suddenly between us. There were a few Venus passengers. I saw one of them presently coming up the incline, and recognized her. A girl traveling alone. We had brought her from Grebhar, last voyage but one. I remembered her. An alluring sort of girl, as most of them are. Her name was Venza. She spoke English well. A singer and dancer who had been imported to Great-New York to fill some theatrical engagement. She'd made quite a hit on the Great White Way. She came up the incline, with the carrier ahead of her. Gazing up, she saw Dr. Frank and me at the turret window and waved her white arm in greeting. And flashed us a smile. Dr. Frank laughed. "By the gods of the airways, there's Alta Venza! You saw that look, Gregg? That was for me, not you." "Reasonable enough," I retorted. "But I doubt it--the Venza was nothing if not impartial." * * * * * I wondered what could be taking Venza now to Mars. I was glad to see her. She was diverting. Educated. Well-traveled. Spoke English with a colloquial, theatrical manner more characteristic of Great-New York than of Venus. And for all her light banter, I would rather put my trust in her than any Venus girl I had ever met. The hum of the departing siren was sounding. Friends and relatives of the passengers were crowding the exit incline. The deck was clearing. I had not seen George Prince come aboard. And then I thought I saw him down on the landing stage, just arrived from a private tube-car. A small, slight figure. The customs men were around him: I could only see his head and shoulders. Pale, girlishly handsome face; long, black hair to the base of his neck. He was bareheaded, with the hood of his traveling-cloak pushed back. I stared, and I saw that Dr. Frank was also gazing down. But neither of us spoke. Then I said upon impulse, "Suppose we go down to the deck, Doctor?" He acquiesced. We descended to the lower room of the turret and clambered down the spider ladder to the upper deck-level. The head of the arriving incline was near us. Preceded by two carriers who were littered with hand-baggage, George Prince was coming up the incline. He was closer now. I recognized him from the type we had seen in Halsey's office. * * * * * And then, with a shock, I saw it was not so. This was a girl coming aboard. An arch-light over the incline showed her clearly when she was half way up. A girl with her hood pushed back; her face framed in thick black hair. I saw now it was not a man's cut of hair; but long braids coiled up under the dangling hood. Dr. Frank must have remarked my amazed expression. "Little beauty, isn't she?" "Who is she?" We were standing back against the wall of the superstructure. A passenger was near us--the Martian whom Dr. Frank had called Miko. He was loitering here, quite evidently watching this girl come aboard. But as I glanced at him he looked away and casually sauntered off. The girl came up and reached the deck. "I am in A 22," she told the carrier. "My brother came aboard two hours ago." Dr. Frank answered my whisper. "That's Anita Prince." She was passing quite close to us on the deck, following the carrier, when she stumbled and very nearly fell. I was nearest to her. I leaped forward and caught her as she went down. "Oh!" she cried. With my arm about her, I raised her up and set her upon her feet again. She had twisted her ankle. She balanced herself upon it. The pain of it eased up in a moment. "I'm--all right--thank you!" * * * * * In the dimness of the blue-lit deck, I met her eyes. I was holding her with my encircling arm. She was small and soft against me. Her face, framed in the thick, black hair, smiled up at me. Small, oval face--beautiful--yet firm of chin, and stamped with the mark of its own individuality. No empty-headed beauty, this. "I'm all right, thank you very much--" I became conscious that I had not released her. I felt her hands pushing at me. And then it seemed that for an instant she yielded and was clinging. And I met her startled, upflung gaze. Eyes like a purple night with the sheen of misty starlight in them. I heard myself murmuring, "I beg your pardon. Yes, of course!" I released her. She thanked me again and followed the carrier along the deck. She was limping slightly from the twisted ankle. An instant, while she had clung to me--and I had held her. A brief flash of something, from her eyes to mine--from mine back to hers. The poets write that love can be born of such a glance. The first meeting, across all the barriers of which love springs unsought, unbidden--defiant, sometimes. And the troubadours of old would sing: "A fleeting glance; a touch; two wildly beating hearts--and love was born." I think, with Anita and me, it must have been like that.... I stood gazing after her, unconscious of Dr. Frank, who was watching me with his humorous smile. And presently, no more than a quarter beyond the zero hour, the Planetara got away. With the dome-windows battened tightly, we lifted from the landing stage and soared over the glowing city. The phosphorescence of the electronic tubes was like a comet's tail behind us as we slid upward. At the trinight hour the heat of our atmospheric passage was over. The passengers had all retired. The ship was quiet, with empty decks and dim, silent corridors. Vibrationless, with the electronic engines cut off and only the hum of the Martel magnetizers to break the unnatural stillness. We were well beyond the earth's atmosphere, heading out in the cone-path of the earth's shadow, in the direction of the moon. CHAPTER III _In the Helio-room_ At six A. M., earth Eastern time, which we were still carrying, Snap Dean and I were alone in his instrument room, perched in the network over the Planetara's deck. The bulge of the dome enclosed us; it rounded like a great observatory window some twenty feet above the ceiling of this little metal cubby-hole. The Planetara was still in the earth's shadow. The firmament--black interstellar space with its blazing white, red and yellow stars--lay spread around us. The moon, with nearly all its disc illumined, hung, a great silver ball, over our bow quarter. Behind it, to one side, Mars floated like the red tip of a smoldering cigarillo in the blackness. The earth, behind our stern, was dimly, redly visible--a giant sphere, etched with the configurations of its oceans and continents. Upon one limb a touch of the sunlight hung on the mountain-tops with a crescent red-yellow sheen. And then we plunged from the cone-shadow. The sun, with the leaping Corona, burst through the blackness behind us. The earth lighted into a huge, thin crescent with hooked cusps. To Snap and me, the glories of the heavens were too familiar to be remarked. And upon this voyage particularly we were in no mood to consider them. I had been in the helio-room several hours. When the Planetara started, and my few routine duties were over, I could think of nothing save Halsey's and Carter's admonition: "Be on your guard. And particularly--watch George Prince." I had not seen George Prince. But I had seen his sister, whom Carter and Halsey had not bothered to mention. My heart was still pounding with the memory.... * * * * * When the passengers had retired and the ship quieted, I prowled through the passenger corridors. This was about the trinight hour.[3] Hot as the corridors of hell, with our hull and the glassite dome seething with the friction of our atmospheric flight. But the refrigerators mitigated that; the ventilators blasted cold air from the renewers into every corner of the vessel. Within an hour or two, with the cold of space striking us, it was hot air that was needed. Dr. Frank evidently was having little trouble with pressure-sick passengers[4]--the Planetara's equalizers were fairly efficient. I did not encounter Dr. Frank. I prowled through the silent metal lounges and passages. I went to the door of A 22. It was on the deck-level, in a tiny transverse passage just off the main lounging room. Its name-grid glowed with the letters: "_Anita Prince._" I stood in my short white trousers and white silk shirt, like a cabin steward gawping. Anita Prince! I had never heard the name until this night. But there was magic music in it now, as I murmured it to myself. Anita Prince.... She was here, doubtless asleep, behind this small metal door. It seemed as though that little oval grid were the gateway to a fairyland of my dreams. I turned away. And thought of the Grantline Moon Expedition stabbed at me. George Prince--Anita's brother--he whom I had been told to watch. This renegade--associate of dubious Martians, plotting God knows what. * * * * * I saw, upon the adjoining door, "A 20, _George Prince_." I listened. In the humming stillness of the ship's interior there was no sound from these cabins. A 20 was without windows, I knew. But Anita's room had a window and a door which gave upon the deck. I went through the lounge, out its arch, and walked the deck length. The deck door and window of A 22 were closed and dark. The ten-foot-wide deck was dim with white starlight from the side ports. Chairs were here, but they were all empty. From the bow windows of the arching dome a flood of moonlight threw long, slanting shadows down the deck. At the corner where the superstructure ended, I thought I saw a figure lurking as though watching me. I went that way, but it vanished. I turned the corner, went the width of the ship to the other side. There was no one in sight save the observer on his spider bridge, high in the bow network, and the second officer, on duty on the turret balcony almost directly over me. As I stood and listened, I suddenly heard footsteps. From the direction of the bow a figure came. Purser Johnson. He greeted me. "Cooling off, Gregg?" "Yes," I said. He went past me and turned into the smoking room door nearby. I stood a moment at one of the deck windows, gazing at the stars; and for no reason at all I realized I was tense. Johnson was a great one for his regular sleep--it was wholly unlike him to be roaming about the ship at such an hour. Had he been watching me? I told myself it was nonsense. I was suspicious of everyone, everything, this voyage. * * * * * I heard another step. Captain Carter appeared from his chart-room which stood in the center of the narrowing open deck space near the bow. I joined him at once. "Who was that?" he half-whispered. "Johnson." "Oh, yes." He fumbled in his uniform; his gaze swept the moonlit deck. "Gregg--take this." He handed me a small metal box. I stuffed it at once into my shirt. "An insulator," he added, swiftly. "Snap is in his office. Take it to him, Gregg. Stay with him--you'll have a measure of security--and you can help him to make the photographs." He was barely whispering. "I won't be with you--no use making it look as though we were doing anything unusual. If your graphs show anything--or if Snap picks up any message--bring it to me." He added aloud, "Well, it will be cool enough presently, Gregg." He sauntered away toward his chart-room. "By heavens, what a relief!" Snap murmured as the current went on. We had wired his cubby with the insulator; within its barrage we could at last talk with a degree of freedom. "You've seen George Prince, Gregg?" "No. He's assigned A 20. But I saw his sister. Snap, no one ever mentioned--" Snap had heard of her, but he hadn't known that she was listed for this voyage. "A real beauty, so I've heard. Accursed shame for a decent girl to have a brother like that." I could agree with him there, but I made no comment. * * * * * It was now 6 A. M. Snap had been busy all night with routine cosmo-radios from the earth, following our departure. He had a pile of them beside him. Many were for the passengers; but anything that savored of a code was barred. "Nothing queer looking?" I suggested. "No. Not a thing." We were at this time no more than some sixty-five thousand miles from the moon's surface. The Planetara presently would swing upon her direct course for Mars. There was nothing which could cause passenger comment in this close passing of the moon; normally we used the satellite's attraction to give us additional starting speed. It was now or never that a message would come from Grantline. He was supposed to be upon this earthward side of the moon. While Snap had rushed through with his routine, I had searched the moon surface with our glass, as I knew Carter was searching it--and also the observer in his tower, very possibly. But there was nothing. Copernicus and Kepler lay in full sunlight. The heights of the lunar mountains, the depths of the barren, empty seas were etched black and white, clear and clean. Grim, forbidding desolation, this unchanging moon! In romance, moonlight may shimmer and sparkle to light a lover's smile; but the reality of the moon is cold and bleak. There was nothing to show my prying eyes where the intrepid Grantline might be. "Nothing at all, Snap." And Snap's helio mirrors, attuned for an hour now to pick up the faintest signal, were motionless. "If he has concentrated any appreciable amount of radio-active ore," said Snap, "we should get an impulse from its Gamma rays." * * * * * But our receiving shield was dark, untouched. We tried taking hydrogen photographic impressions of the visible moon surface. A sequence of them, with stereoscopic lenses, forty-eight to the second. Our mirror-grid gave the magnified images; the spectro-heliograph, with its wave-length selection, pictured the mountain-levels, and slowly descended into the deepest seas. There was nothing. Yet in those moon caverns--a million million recesses amid the crags of that tumbled, barren surface--the pin-point of movement which might have been Grantline's expedition could so easily be hiding! Could he have the ore insulated, fearing its Gamma rays would betray its presence to hostile watchers? Or might disaster have come to him? Or he might not be upon this hemisphere of the moon at all.... My imagination, sharpened by fancy of a lurking menace which seemed everywhere about the Planetara this voyage, ran rife with fears for Johnny Grantline. He had promised to communicate this voyage. It was now, or perhaps never. Six-thirty came and passed. We were well beyond the earth's shadow now. The firmament blazed with its vivid glories; the sun behind us was a ball of yellow-red leaping flames. The earth hung, opened to a huge, dull-red half-sphere. * * * * * We were within some forty thousand miles of the moon. Giant white ball--all of its disc visible to the naked eye. It poised over the bow, and presently, as the Planetara swung upon her course for Mars, it shifted sidewise. The light of it glared white and dazzling in our tiny side windows. Snap, with his habitual red celluloid eyeshade shoved high on his forehead, worked over our instruments. "Gregg!" The receiving shield was glowing a trifle! Gamma rays were bombarding it! It glowed, gleamed phosphorescent, and the audible recorder began sounding its tiny tinkling murmurs. Gamma rays! Snap sprang to the dials. The direction and strength were soon obvious. A richly radio-active ore body, of considerable size, was concentrated upon this hemisphere of the moon! It was unmistakable. "He's got it, Gregg! He's--" The tiny helio mirrors began quivering. Snap exclaimed triumphantly, "Here he comes! By God, the message at last! Bar off that light!" * * * * * I flung on the absorbers. The moonlight bathing the little room went into them and darkness sprang around us. Snap fumbled at his instrument board. Actinic light showed dimly in the quivering, thumbnail mirrors. Two of them. They hung poised on their cobweb wires, infinitely sensitive to the infra-red light-rays Grantline was sending from the moon. The mirrors in a moment began swinging. On the scale across the room the actinic beams from them were magnified into sweeps of light. The message! Snap spelled it out, decoded it. "_Success! Stop for ore on your return voyage. Will give you our location later. Success beyond wildest hopes--_" The mirrors hung motionless. The shield, where the Gamma rays were bombarding, went suddenly dark. Snap murmured, "That's all. He's got the ore! 'Success beyond wildest hopes.' That must mean an enormous quantity of it available!" We were sitting in darkness, and abruptly I became aware that across our open window, where the insulation barrage was flung, the air was faintly hissing. An interference there! I saw a tiny swirl of purple sparks. Someone--some hostile ray from the deck beneath us, or from the spider bridge that led to our little room--someone out there trying to pry in! Snap impulsively reached for the absorbers to let in the outside light--it was all darkness to us outside. But I checked him. "Wait!" I cut off our barrage, opened our door and stepped to the narrow metal bridge. "Wait, Snap! You stay there." I added aloud, "Well, Snap, I'm going to bed. Glad you've cleaned up that batch of work." * * * * * I banged the door upon him. The lacework of metal bridges and ladders seemed empty. I gazed up to the dome, and forward and aft. Twenty feet beneath me was the metal roof of the cabin superstructure. Below it, both sides of the deck showed. All patched with moonlight. No one visible down there. I descended a ladder. The deck was empty. But in the silence something was moving! Footsteps moving away from me down the deck! I followed; and suddenly I was running. Chasing something I could hear, but could not see. It turned into the smoking room. I burst in. And a real sound smothered the phantom. Johnson the purser was sitting here alone in the dimness. He was smoking. I noticed that his cigar held a long, frail ash. It could not have been him I was chasing. He was sitting there quite calmly. A thick-necked, heavy fellow, easily out of breath. But he was breathing calmly now. He sat up with amazement at my wild-eyed appearance, and the ash jarred from his cigar. "Gregg! What in the devil--" I tried to grin. "I'm on my way to bed--worked all night helping Snap with those damn Earth messages." I went past him, out the door into the main interior corridor. It was the only way the invisible prowler could have gone. But I was too late now--I could hear nothing. I dashed forward into the main lounge. It was empty, dim and silent, a silence broken presently by a faint click--a stateroom door hastily closing. I swung and found myself in a tiny transverse passage. The twin doors of A 22 and A 20 were before me. The invisible eavesdropper had gone into one of these rooms! I listened at each of the panels, but there was only silence within. The interior of the ship was suddenly singing with the steward's siren--the call to awaken the passengers. It startled me. I moved swiftly away. But as the siren shut off, in the silence I heard a soft, musical voice: "Wake up, Anita--I think that's the breakfast call." And her answer: "All right, George. I hear it." CHAPTER IV _A Burn on a Martian Arm_ I did not appear at that morning meal. I was exhausted and drugged with lack of sleep. I had a moment with Snap, to tell him what had occurred. Then I sought out Carter. He had his little chart-room insulated. And we were cautious. I told him what Snap and I had learned: the Gamma rays from the moon, proving that Grantline had concentrated a considerable ore-body. I also told him the message from Grantline. "We'll stop on the way back, as he directs, Gregg." He bent closer to me. "At Ferrok-Shahn I'm going to bring back a cordon of Interplanetary Police. The secret will be out, of course, when once we stop at the moon. We have no right, even now, to be flying this vessel as unguarded as it is." He was very solemn. And he was grim when I told him of the invisible eavesdropper. "You think he overheard Grantline's message?" "I don't know," I said. "Who was it? You seem to feel it was George Prince?" "Yes." I was convinced that the prowler had gone into A 20. When I mentioned the purser, who seemed to have been watching me earlier in the night, and again was sitting in the smoking room when the eavesdropper fled past, Carter looked startled. "Johnson is all right, Gregg." "Is he? Does he know anything about this Grantline affair?" "No--no," said the captain hastily. "You haven't mentioned it, have you?" "Of course I haven't. I've been wondering why Johnson didn't hear that eavesdropper. I could hear him when I was chasing him. But Johnson sat perfectly unmoved and let him go by. What was he sitting there for, anyway, at that hour of the morning?" "You're too suspicious, Gregg. Overwrought. But you're right--we can't be too careful. I'm going to have that Prince suite searched when I catch it unoccupied. Passengers don't ordinarily travel with invisible cloaks. Go to bed, Gregg--you need a rest." * * * * * I went to my cabin. It was located aft, on the stern deck-space, near the stern watch-tower. A small metal room, with a desk, a chair and bunk. I made sure no one was in it. I sealed the lattice grill and the door, set the alarm trigger against any opening of them, and went to bed. The siren for the mid-day meal awakened me. I had slept heavily. I felt refreshed. And hungry. I found the passengers already assembled at my table when I arrived in the dining salon. It was a low-vaulted metal room of blue and yellow tube-lights. At the sides its oval windows showed the deck, with its ports of the dome-side, through which a vista of the starry firmament was visible. We were well on our course to Mars. The moon had dwindled to a pin-point of light beside the crescent earth. And behind them our sun blazed, visually the largest orb in the heavens. It was some sixty-eight million miles from the earth to Mars, this voyage. A flight, under ordinary circumstances, of some ten days. There were five tables in the dining salon, each with eight seats. Snap and I had one of the tables. We sat at the ends, with three passengers on each of the sides. Snap was in his seat when I arrived. He eyed me down the length of the table. "Good morning, Gregg. We missed you at breakfast. Not pressure-sick, I hope?" There were three passengers already seated at our table--all men. Snap, in a gay mood, introduced me. "This is our third officer, Gregg Haljan. Big, handsome fellow, isn't he? And as pleasant as he is good-looking. Gregg, this is Sero Ob Hahn." * * * * * I met the keen, dark-eyed somber gaze of a Venus man of middle age. A small, slim, graceful man, with sleek black hair. His pointed face, accentuated by the pointed beard, was pallid. He wore a white and purple robe; upon his breast was a huge platinum ornament, a device like a star and cross entwined. "I am happy to meet you, sir." His voice was soft and sleek. "Ob Hahn," I repeated. "I should have heard of you, no doubt. But--" A smile plucked at his thin, gray lips. "That is the error of mine, not yours. My mission is that all the universe shall hear of me." "He's preaching the religion of the Venus Mystics," Snap explained. "And this enlightened gentleman," said Ob Hahn ironically, "has just termed it fetishism. The ignorance--" "Oh, I say!" protested the man at Ob Hahn's side. "I mean, you seem to think I intended something opprobrious. As a matter of fact--" "We've an argument, Gregg," laughed Snap. "This is Sir Arthur Coniston, an English gentleman, lecturer and sky-trotter--that is, he will be a sky-trotter; he tells us he plans a number of voyages." The tall Englishman in his white linen suit bowed acknowledgment. "My compliments, Mr. Haljan. I hope you have no strong religious convictions, else we will make your table here very miserable!" * * * * * The third passenger had evidently kept out of the argument. Snap introduced him as Rance Rankin. An American--a quiet, blond fellow of thirty-five or forty. I ordered my breakfast and let the argument go on. "Won't make me miserable," said Snap. "I love an argument. You said, Sir Arthur?... "I mean to say, I think I said too much. Mr. Rankin, you are more diplomatic." Rankin laughed. "I am a magician," he said to me. "A theatrical entertainer. I deal in tricks--how to fool an audience--" His keen, amused gaze was on Ob Hahn. "This gentleman from Venus and I have too much in common to argue." "A nasty one!" the Englishman exclaimed. "By Jove! Really, Mr. Rankin, you're a bit too cruel!" I could see we were doomed to have turbulent meals this voyage. I like to eat in quiet; arguing passengers always annoy me. There were still three seats vacant at our table; I wondered who would occupy them. I soon learned the answer--for one seat at least. Rankin said calmly: "Where is the little Venus girl this meal?" His glance went to the empty seat at my right hand. "The Venza--wasn't that her name? She and I are destined for the same theater in Ferrok-Shahn." So Venza was to sit beside me. It was good news. Ten days of a religious argument three times a day would be intolerable. But the cheerful Venza would help. "She never eats the mid-day meal," said Snap. "She's on the deck, having orange juice. I guess it's the old gag about diet, eh?" * * * * * My attention wandered about the salon. Most of the seats were occupied. At the captain's table I saw the objects of my search. George Prince and his sister sat one on each side of the captain. I saw George Prince in the life now as a man who looked hardly twenty-five. He was at this moment evidently in a gay mood. His clean-cut, handsome profile, with its poetic dark curls, was turned toward me. There seemed little of the villain about him. And I saw Anita Prince now as a dark-haired, black eyed little beauty, in feature resembling her brother very strongly. She presently finished her meal. She rose, with him after her. She was dressed in Earth fashion--white blouse and dark jacket, wide, knee-length trousers of gray, with a red sash her only touch of color. She went past me, flashed me her smile and nod. My heart was pounding. I answered her greeting, and met George Prince's casual gaze. He, too, smiled, as though to signify that his sister had told him of the service I had done her. Or was his smile an ironical memory of how he had eluded me this morning when I chased him? I gazed after his small, white-suited figure as he followed Anita from the salon. And thinking of her, I prayed that Carter and Halsey might be wrong. Whatever plotting against the Grantline Expedition might be going on, I hoped that George Prince was innocent of it. Yet I knew in my heart it was a futile hope. Prince had been that eavesdropper outside the helio-room. I could not really doubt it. But that his sister must be ignorant of what he was doing, I was sure. * * * * * My attention was brought suddenly back to the reality of our table. I heard Ob Hahn's silky voice: "We passed quite close to the moon last night, Mr. Dean." "Yes," said Snap. "We did, didn't we? Always do--it's a technical problem of the exigencies of interstellar navigation. Explain it to them, Gregg--you're an expert." I waved it away with a laugh. There was a brief silence. I could not help noticing Sir Arthur Coniston's queer look, and I think I have never seen so keen a glance as Rance Rankin shot at me. Were all these people aware of Grantline's treasure on the moon? It suddenly seemed so. I wished fervently at that instant that the ten days of this voyage were over and we were safely at Ferrok-Shahn. Captain Carter was absolutely right. Coming back we would have a cordon of interplanetary police aboard. Sir Arthur broke the awkward silence. "Magnificent sight, the moon, from so close a viewpoint--though I was too much afraid of pressure-sickness to be up to see it." * * * * * I had nearly finished my hasty meal when another incident shocked me. The two other passengers at our table came in and took their seats. A Martian girl and man. The girl had the seat at my left, with the man beside her. All Martians are tall. This girl was about my own height--that is, six feet, two inches. The man was seven feet or more. Both wore the Martian outer robe. The girl flung hers back. Her limbs were encased in pseudo-mail. She looked, as all Martians like to look, a very warlike Amazon. But she was a pretty girl. She smiled at me with a keen-eyed, direct gaze. "Mr. Dean said at breakfast that you were big and handsome. You are." They were brother and sister, these Martians. Snap introduced them as Set Miko and Setta Moa.[5] This Miko was, from our Earth standards, a tremendous, brawny giant. Not spindly, like most Martians, this fellow, for all his seven feet of height, was almost heavy-set. He wore a plaited leather jerkin beneath his robe, and knee pants of leather out of which his lower legs showed as gray, hairy pillars of strength. He had come into the salon with a swagger, his sword-ornament clanking. "A pleasant voyage so far," he said to me as he started his meal. His voice had the heavy, throaty rasp characteristic of the Martian. He spoke perfect English--both Martians and Venus people are by heritage extraordinary linguists. Miko and his sister Moa had a touch of Martian accent, worn almost away by living for some years in Great-New York. The shock to me came within a few minutes. Miko, absorbed in attacking his meal, inadvertently pushed back his robe to bare his forearm. An instant only, then it dropped again to his wrist. But in that instant I had seen, upon the gray flesh, a thin sear turned red. A very recent burn--as though a pencil-ray of heat had caught his arm. My mind flung back. Only last night in the City Corridor, Snap and I had been followed by a Martian. I had shot at him with the heat-ray; I thought I had hit him on the arm. Was this the mysterious Martian who had followed us from Halsey's office? CHAPTER V _Venza the Venus Girl_ It was shortly after that mid-day meal when I encountered Venza sitting on the starlit deck. I had been in the bow observatory; taken my routine castings of our position and worked them out. I was, I think, of the Planetara's officers the most expert handler of the mathematical mechanical calculators. The locating of our position and charting the trajectory of our course was, under ordinary circumstances, about all I had to do. And it took only a few minutes each twelve hours. I had a moment with Carter in the isolation of his chart-room. "This voyage! Gregg, I'm getting like you--too fanciful. We've a normal group of passengers, apparently; but I don't like the look of any of them. That Ob Hahn, at your table--" "Snaky-looking fellow," I commented. "He and the Englishman are great on arguments. Did you have Prince's cabin searched?" My breath hung on his answer. "Yes. Nothing unusual among his things. We searched both his room and his sister's." I did not follow that up. Instead I told him about the burn on Miko's thick gray arm. * * * * * He stared. "I wish to the Almighty we were at Ferrok-Shahn. Gregg, to-night when the passengers are asleep, come here to me. Snap will be here, and Dr. Frank. We can trust him." "He knows about--about the Grantline treasure?" "Yes. And so do Balch and Blackstone." Balch and Blackstone were our first and second officers. "We'll all meet here, Gregg--say about the zero hour. We must take some precautions." He suddenly felt he should say no more now. He dismissed me. I found Venza seated alone in a secluded corner of the starlit deck. A porthole, with the black heavens and the blazing stars, was before her. There was an empty seat nearby. "Hola-lo,[6] Gregg! Sit here with me. I have been wondering when you would come after me." I sat down beside her. "What are you doing--going to Mars, Venza? I'm glad to see you." "Many thanks. But I am glad to see you, Gregg. So handsome a man.... Do you know, from Venus to the earth and I have no doubt on all of Mars, no man will please me more." "Glib tongue," I laughed. "Born to flatter the male--every girl of your world." And I added seriously, "You don't answer my question? What takes you to Mars?" "Contract. By the stars, what else? Of course, a chance to make a voyage with you--" "Don't be silly, Venza." * * * * * I enjoyed her. I gazed at her small, slim figure gracefully reclining in the deck chair. Her long, gray robe parted--by design, I have no doubt--to display her shapely, satin-sheathed legs. Her black hair was coiled in a heavy knot at the back of her neck; her carmined lips were parted with a mocking, alluring smile. The exotic perfume of her enveloped me. She glanced at me sidewise from beneath her sweeping black lashes. "Be serious," I added. "I am serious. Sober. Intoxicated by you, but sober." I said, "What sort of a contract?" "A theater in Ferrok-Shahn. Good money, Gregg. I'm to be there a year." She sat up to face me. "There's a fellow here on the Planetara, Rance Rankin, he calls himself. At our table--a big, good-looking blond American. He says he is a magician. Ever hear of him?" "That's what he told me. No, I never heard of him." "Nor did I. And I thought I had heard of everyone of any importance. He is listed for the same theater where I'm going. Nice sort of fellow." She paused, and added suddenly, "If he's a professional entertainer, I'm a motor-oiler." * * * * * It startled me. "Why do you say that?" Instinctively my gaze swept the deck. An Earth woman and child and a small Venus man were in sight, but not within earshot. "Why do you look so furtive?" she retorted. "Gregg, there's something strange about this voyage. I'm no fool, nor you, and you know it as well as I do." "Rance Rankin--" I prompted. She leaned closer toward me. "He could fool you. But not me--I've known too many real magicians." She grinned. "I challenged him to trick me. You should have seen him trying to evade!" "Do you know Ob Hahn?" I interrupted. She shook her head. "Never heard of him. But he told me plenty at breakfast. By Satan, what a flow of words that devil-driver can muster! He and the Englishman don't mesh very well, do they?" She stared at me. I had not answered her grin; my mind was too busy with queer fancies. Halsey's words: "Things are not always what they seem--" Were these passengers masqueraders? Put here by George Prince? And then I thought of Miko the Martian, and the burn upon his arm. "Come back, Gregg! Don't go wandering off like that!" She dropped her voice to a whisper. "I'll be serious. I want to know what in the hell is going on aboard this ship. I'm a woman, and I'm curious. You tell me." * * * * * "What do you mean?" I parried. "I mean a lot of things. What we've just been talking about. And what was the excitement you were in just before breakfast this morning?" "Excitement?" "Gregg, you may trust me." For the first time she was wholly serious. Her gaze made sure no one was within hearing. She put her hand on my arm. I could barely hear her whisper: "I know they might have a ray upon us--I'll be careful." "They?" "Anyone. Something's going on. You know it--you are in it. I saw you this morning, Gregg. Wild-eyed, chasing a phantom--" "You?" "And I heard the phantom! A man's footsteps. A magnetic reflecting invisible cloak. You couldn't fool an audience with that--it's too commonplace. If Rance Rankin tried--" I gripped her. "Don't ramble, Venza! You saw me?" "Yes. My stateroom door was open. I was sitting with a cigarillo. I saw the purser in the smoking room. He was visible from--" "Wait! Venza, that prowler went through the smoking room!" "I know he did. I could hear him." "Did the purser hear him?" "Of course. The purser looked up, followed the sound with his gaze. I thought that was queer. He never made a move. And then you came along and he acted innocent. Why? What's going on, that's what I want to know!" * * * * * I held my breath. "Venza, where did the prowler run to? Can you--" She whispered calmly, "Into A 20. I saw the door open and close--I even think I could see the blurred outline of him. Those magnetic cloaks!" She added, "Why should George Prince be sneaking around with you after him? And the purser acting innocent? And who is this George Prince, anyway?" The huge Martian, Miko, with his sister Moa came strolling along the deck. They nodded as they passed us. I whispered, "I can't explain anything now. But you're right, Venza: there is something going on. Listen! Whatever you learn--anything you encounter which looks unusual--will you tell me? I--well, I do trust you--really I do!--but the thing isn't mine to tell." The somber pools of her eyes were shining. "You are very lovable, Gregg. I won't question you." She was trembling with excitement. "Whatever it is, I want to be in it. Here's something I can tell you now. We've two high-class gold-leaf gamblers aboard. Did you know that?" "No. Who are--" "Shac and Dud Ardley. Let me state every detective in Great-New York knows them. They had a wonderful game with that Englishman, Sir Arthur Coniston, this morning. Stripped him of half a pound of eight-inch leaves--a neat little stack. A crooked game, of course. Those fellows are more nimble-fingered than Rance Rankin ever dared to be!" * * * * * I sat staring at her. She was a mine of information, this girl. "And Gregg, I tried my charms on Shac and Dud. Nice men, but dumb. Whatever's going on, they're not in it. They wanted to know what kind of a ship this was. Why? Because Shac has a cute little eavesdropping microphone of his own. He had it working in the night last night. He overheard George Prince and that big giant Miko arguing about the moon!" I gasped. "Venza, softer!" Against all propriety of this public deck she pretended to drape herself upon me. Her hair smothered my face as her lips almost touched my ear. "Something about treasure on the moon--Shac couldn't understand what. And they mentioned you. He didn't hear what they said because the purser joined them." Her whispered words tumbled over one another. "A hundred pounds of gold leaf--that's the purser's price. He's with them, whatever it is. He promised to do something for them." She stopped. "Well?" I prompted. "That's all. Shac's current was interrupted." "Tell him to try it again, Venza! I'll talk with him. No! I'd better let him alone. Can you get him to keep his mouth shut?" "I think he might do anything I told him. He's a man." "Find out what you can." She sat away from me suddenly. "There's Anita and George Prince." * * * * * They came to the corner of the deck, but turned back. Venza caught my look. And understood it. "So you love Anita Prince so much as that, Gregg?" Venza was smiling. "I wish you--I wish some man handsome as you would gaze after me like that." She turned solemn. "You may be interested to know that she loves you. I could see it. I knew it when I mentioned you to her this morning." "Me? Why, we've hardly spoken!" "Is it necessary? I never heard that it was." I could not see Venza's face; she stood up suddenly. And when I rose beside her, she whispered, "We should not be seen talking so long. I'll find out what I can." I stared after her slight robed figure as she turned into the lounge archway and vanished. CHAPTER VI _A Traitor, and a Passing Asteroid_ Captain Carter was grim. "So they've bought him off, have they? Go bring him in here, Gregg. We'll have it out with him now." Snap, Dr. Frank, Balch, our first officer, and I were in the captain's chart-room. It was 4 P. M.--our Earth starting time. We were sixteen hours upon our voyage. I found Johnson in his office in the lounge. "Captain wants to see you. Close up." He closed his window upon an American woman passenger who was demanding details of Martian currency, and followed me forward. "What is it, Gregg?" "I don't know." Captain Carter banged the slide upon us. The chart-room was insulated. The hum of the current was obvious. Johnson noticed it. He started at the hostile faces of the surgeon and Balch. And he tried to bluster. "What is this? Something wrong?" Carter wasted no words. "We have information, Johnson--there's some under cover plot here aboard. I want to know what it is. Suppose you tell us frankly." * * * * * The purser looked blank. "What do you mean? We've gamblers aboard, if that's--" "To hell with that," growled Balch. "You had a secret interview with that Martian, Set Miko, and with George Prince!" Johnson scowled from under his heavy brows, and then raised them in surprise. "Did I? You mean changing their money? I don't like your tone, Balch. I'm not your under-officer!" "But you're under me," roared the captain. "By God, I'm master here!" "Well, I'm not disputing that," said the purser mildly. "This fellow Balch--" "We're in no mood for argument," Dr. Frank cut in. "Clouding the issue." "I won't let it be clouded," the captain exclaimed. I had never seen Carter so choleric. He was evidently under a tremendous strain. He added, "Johnson, you've been acting suspiciously. I don't give a damn whether I've proof of it or not--I say it. Did you, or did you not meet George Prince and that Martian last night?" "No, I did not. And I don't mind telling you, Captain Carter, that your tone also is offensive!" "Is it?" Carter suddenly seized him. They were both big men. Johnson's heavy face went purplish red. "Take your hands!--" They were struggling. Carter's hands were fumbling at the purser's pockets. I leaped, flung an arm around Johnson's neck, pinning him. "Easy there! We've got you, Johnson!" * * * * * Snap tried to help me. "Go on, bang him on the head, Gregg. Now's your chance!" We searched him. A heat-ray cylinder--that was legitimate. But we found a small battery and eavesdropping microphone similar to the one Venza had mentioned that Shac the gambler was carrying. "What are you doing with that?" the captain demanded. "None of your business! Is it criminal? Carter, I'll have the Line officials dismiss you for this! Take your hands off me, all of you!" "Look at this!" exclaimed Dr. Frank. From Johnson's breast pocket the surgeon drew a folded document. It was the scale drawing of the Planetara's interior corridors, the lower control rooms and mechanisms. It was always kept in Johnson's safe. And with it, another document: the ship's clearance papers--the secret code pass-words for this voyage, to be used if we should be challenged by any interplanetary police ship. Snap gasped. "My God, that was in my helio-room strong box! I'm the only one on this vessel except the captain who's entitled to know those pass-words!" Out of the silence, Balch demanded, "Well, what about it, Johnson?" The purser was still defiant. "I won't answer your questions, Balch. At the proper time, I'll explain--Gregg Haljan, you're choking me!" * * * * * I eased up. But I shook him. "You'd better talk." He was exasperatingly silent. "Enough!" exploded Carter. "He can explain when we get to port. Meanwhile I'll put him where he'll do no more damage. Gregg, lock him in the cage." We ignored his violent protestations. The cage--in the old days of sea-vessels on Earth, they called it the brig--was the ship's jail. A steel-lined, windowless room located under the deck in the peak of the bow. I dragged the struggling Johnson there, with the amazed watcher looking down from the observatory window at our lunging, starlit forms. "Shut up, Johnson! If you know what's good for you--" He was making a fearful commotion. Behind us, where the deck narrowed at the superstructure, half a dozen passengers were gazing in surprise. "I'll have you thrown out of the Service, Gregg Haljan!" I shut him up finally. And flung him down the ladder into the cage and sealed the deck trap-door upon him. I was headed back for the chart-room when from the observatory came the lookout's voice. "An asteroid, Haljan! Officer Blackstone wants you." I hurried to the turret bridge. An asteroid was in sight. We had attained nearly our maximum speed now. An asteroid was approaching, so dangerously close that our trajectory would have to be altered. I heard Blackstone's signals ringing in the control rooms; and met Carter as he ran to the bridge with me. "That scoundrel! We'll get more out of him, Gregg. By God, I'll put the chemicals on him--torture him, illegal or not!" * * * * * We had no time for further discussion. The asteroid was rapidly approaching. Already, under the glass, it was a magnificent sight. I had never seen this tiny world before--asteroids are not numerous between the Earth and Mars, or in toward Venus. I never expected to see this one again. How little of the future can we humans fathom, for all our science! If I could only have looked into the future, even for a few short hours! How different then would have been the outcome of this tragic voyage! The asteroid came rushing at us. Its orbital velocity, I later computed, was some twenty-two miles a second. Our own, at the present maximum, was a fraction over seventy-seven. The asteroid had for some time been under observation by the lookout. He gave his warning only when it seemed that our trajectory should be altered to avoid a dangerously close passing. At the combined speeds of nearly a hundred miles a second the asteroid swept into view. With the naked eye, at first it was a tiny speck of star-dust, unnoticed in the gem-strewn black velvet of Space. A speck. Then a gleaming dot, silver white, with the light of our Sun upon it. Five minutes. The dot grew to a disc. Expanding. A full moon, silver-white. Brightest world in the firmament--the light from it bathed the Planetara, illumined the deck, painting everything with silver. I stood with Carter and Blackstone on the turret bridge. It was obvious that unless we altered our course, the asteroid would pass too close for safety. Already we were feeling its attraction; from the control rooms came the report that our trajectory was disturbed by this new mass so near. "Better make your calculations now, Gregg," Blackstone suggested. * * * * * I cast up the rough elements from the observational instruments in the turret. It took me some ten or fifteen minutes. When I had us upon our new course, with the attractive and repulsive plates in the Planetara's hull set in their altered combinations, I went out to the bridge again. The asteroid hung over our bow quarter. No more than twenty or thirty thousand miles away. A giant ball now, filling all that quadrant of the heavens. The configurations of its mountains--its land and water areas--were plainly visible. Its axial rotation was apparent. "Perfectly habitable," Blackstone said. "But I've searched all over this hemisphere with the glass. No sign of human life--certainly nothing civilized--nothing in the fashion of cities." A fair little world, by the look of it. A tiny globe: Blackstone had figured it at some eight hundred miles in diameter. There seemed a normal atmosphere. We could see areas where the surface was obscured by clouds. And oceans, and land masses. Polar icecaps. Lush vegetation at its equator. Blackstone had roughly cast its orbital elements. A narrow ellipse. No wonder we had never encountered this fair little world before. It had come from the outer region beyond Neptune. At perihelion it would reach inside Mercury, round the Sun, and head outward again. * * * * * We swept past the asteroid at a distance of some six thousand miles. Close enough, in very truth--a minute of flight at our combined speeds totaling a hundred miles a second. I had descended to the passenger deck, where I stood alone at a window, gazing. The passengers were all gathered to view the passing little world. I saw, not far from me, Anita, standing with her brother; and the giant figure of Miko with them. Half an hour since, first with the naked eye, this wandering little world had shown itself; it swam slowly past, began to dwindle behind us. A huge half moon. A thinner, smaller quadrant. A tiny crescent, like a silver bar-pin to adorn some lady's breast. And then it was a dot, a point of light indistinguishable among the myriad others hovering in this great black void. The incident of the passing of the asteroid was over. I turned from the deck window. My heart leaped. The moment for which all day I had been subconsciously longing was at hand. Anita was sitting in a deck chair, momentarily alone. Her gaze was on me as I looked her way, and she smiled an invitation for me to join her. CHAPTER VII _Unspoken Love_ Unspoken love! I think if I had yielded to the impulse of my heart, I would have poured out all those protestations of a lover's ecstasy, incongruous here upon this starlit public deck, to a girl I hardly knew. I think, too, she might have received them with a tender acquiescence. The starlight was mirrored in her dark eyes. Misty eyes, with great reaches of unfathomable space in their depths. Yet I felt their tenderness. Unfathomable strangeness of love! Who am I to write of it, with all the poets of all the ages striving to express the unexpressible? A bond, strangely fashioned by nature, between me and this little dark-haired Earth beauty. As though marked by the stars we were destined to be lovers.... Thus ran the romance of my unspoken thoughts. But I was sitting quietly in the deck chair, striving to regard her gentle beauty impersonally. And saying: "But Miss Prince, why are you and your brother going to Ferrok-Shahn? His business--" Even as I voiced it, I hated myself for such a question. So nimble is the human mind that mingled with my rhapsodies of love was my need for information of George Prince.... "Oh," she said, "this is pleasure, not business, for George." It seemed to me that a shadow crossed her expressive face. But it was gone in an instant, and she smiled. "We have always wanted to travel. We are alone in the world, you know--our parents died when we were children." * * * * * I filled in her pause. "You will like Mars--so many interesting things to see." She nodded. "Yes, I understand so. Our Earth is so much the same all over, cast all in one mould." "But a hundred or two hundred years ago it was not, Miss Prince. I have read how the picturesque Orient, differing from--well, Great-New York, or London, for instance--" "Transportation did that," she interrupted eagerly. "Made everything the same--the people all look alike--dress alike." We discussed it. She had an alert, eager mind, childlike with its curiosity, yet strangely matured. And her manner was naïvely earnest. Yet this was no clinging vine, this little Anita Prince. There was a firmness, a hint of masculine strength in her chin, and in her manner. "If I were a man, what wonders I could achieve in this marvelous age!" Her sense of humor made her laugh at herself. "Easy for a girl to say that," she added. "You have greater wonders to achieve, Miss Prince," I said impulsively. "Yes? What are they?" She had a very frank and level gaze, devoid of coquetry. My heart was pounding. "The wonders of the next generation. A little son, cast in your own gentle image--" What madness, this clumsy brash talk! I choked it off. * * * * * But she took no offense. The dark rose-petals of her cheeks were mantled deeper red, but she laughed. "That is true." She turned abruptly serious. "I should not laugh. The wonders of the next generation--conquering humans marching on...." Her voice trailed away. My hand went to her arm. Strange tingling something which poets call love! It burned and surged from my trembling fingers into the flesh of her forearm. The starlight glowed in her eyes. She seemed to be gazing, not at the silver-lit deck, but away into distant reaches of the future. And she murmured: "A little son, cast in my own gentle image. But with the strength of his father...." Our moment. Just a breathless moment given us as we sat there with my hand burning her arm, as though we both might be seeing ourselves joined in a new individual--a little son, cast in his mother's gentle image and with the strength of his father. Our moment, and then it was over. A step sounded. I sat back. The giant gray figure of Miko came past, his great cloak swaying, with his clanking sword-ornament beneath it. His bullet head, with its close-clipped hair, was hatless. He gazed at us, swaggered past, and turned the deck corner. Our moment was gone. Anita said conventionally, "It has been pleasant to talk with you, Mr. Haljan." "But we'll have many more," I said. "Ten days--" "You think we'll reach Ferrok-Shahn on schedule?" "Yes. I think so.... As I was saying, Miss Prince, you'll enjoy Mars. A strange, aggressively forward-looking people." * * * * * An oppression seemed on her. She stirred in her chair. "Yes, they are," she said vaguely. "My brother and I know many Martians in Great-New York." She checked herself abruptly. Was she sorry she had said that? It seemed so. Miko was coming back. He stopped this time before us. "Your brother would see you, Anita. He sent me to bring you to his room." The glance he shot me had a touch of insolence. I stood up, and he towered a head over me. Anita said, "Oh yes. I'll come." I bowed. "I will see you again, Miss Prince. I thank you for a pleasant half-hour." The Martian led her away. Her little figure was like a child with a giant. It seemed, as they passed the length of the deck with me staring after them, that he took her arm roughly. And that she shrank from him in fear. And they did not go inside. As though to show me that he had merely taken her from me, he stopped at a distant deck window and stood talking to her. Once he picked her up as one would pick up a child to show it some distant object through the window. "A little son with the strength of his father...." Her words echoed in my mind. Was Anita afraid of this Martian's wooing? Yet held to him by some power he might have over her brother? The vagrant thought struck me. Was it that? CHAPTER VIII _A Scream in the Night_ We kept, on the Planetara, always the time and routine of our port of departure. The rest of that afternoon and evening were a blank of confusion to me. Anita's words; the touch of my hand upon her arm; that vast realm of what might be for us, like a glimpse of a magic land of happiness which I had seen in her eyes, and perhaps she had seen in mine--all this surged within me. I wandered about the vessel. I was not hungry. I did not go to the dining salon for dinner. I carried Johnson food and water to his cage; and sat, with my heat-cylinder upon him, listening to his threats of what would happen when he could complain to the Line's higher officials. But what was Johnson doing carrying a plan of the ship's control rooms in his pockets? And worse: How had he dared open Snap's box in the helio-room and abstract the code pass-words for this voyage? Without them we would be an outlawed vessel, subject to arrest if any patrol hailed us. Had Johnson been planning to sell those pass-words to Miko? I thought so. I tried to get the confession out of him, but could not. I had a brief consultation with Captain Carter. He was genuinely apprehensive now. The Planetara carried no long-range guns, and very few side-arms. A half-dozen of the heat-ray hand projectors; a few old-fashioned weapons of explosion-rifles and automatic revolvers. And hand projectors with the new Benson curve-light. We had models of this for curved vision, so that one might see around a corner, so to speak. And with them, we could project the heat-ray in a curve as well. * * * * * The weapons were all in Carter's chart-room, save the few we officers always carried. Carter was apprehensive, but of what he could not say. He had not thought that our plan to stop at the Moon for treasure could affect this outward voyage. Any danger would be upon the way back, when the Planetara would be adequately guarded with long-range electronic guns, and manned with police-soldiers. But now we were practically defenseless.... I had a moment with Venza, but she had nothing new to communicate to me. And for half an hour I chatted with George Prince. He seemed a gay, pleasant young man. I could almost have fancied I liked him. Or was it because he was Anita's brother? He told me how he looked forward to traveling with her on Mars. No, he had never been there before, he said. He had a measure of Anita's earnest naïve personality. Or was he a very clever scoundrel, with irony lurking in his soft voice, and a chuckle that he could so befool me? "We'll talk again, Haljan. You interest me--I've enjoyed it." He sauntered away from me, joining the saturnine Ob Hahn, with whom presently I heard him discussing religion. The arrest of Johnson had caused considerable comment among the passengers. A few had seen me drag him forward to the cage. The incident had been the subject of passenger discussion all afternoon. Captain Carter had posted a notice to the effect that Johnson's accounts had been found in serious error, and that Dr. Frank for this voyage would act in his stead. * * * * * It was near midnight when Snap and I closed and sealed the helio-room and started for the chart-room, where we were to meet with Captain Carter and the other officers. The passengers had nearly all retired. A game was in progress in the smoking room, but the deck was almost deserted. Snap and I were passing along one of the interior corridors. The stateroom doors, with the illumined names of the passengers, were all closed. The metal grid of the floor echoed our footsteps. Snap was in advance of me. His body suddenly rose in the air. He went like a balloon to the ceiling, struck it gently, and all in a heap came floating down and landed on the floor! "What in the infernal!--" He was laughing as he picked himself up. But it was a brief laugh. We knew what had happened: the artificial gravity-controls in the base of the ship, which by magnetic force gave us normality aboard, were being tampered with! For just this instant, this particular small section of this corridor had been cut off. The slight bulk of the Planetara, floating in space, had no appreciable gravity pull on Snap's body, and the impulse of his step as he came to the unmagnetized area of the corridor had thrown him to the ceiling. The area was normal now. Snap and I tested it gingerly. He gripped me. "That never went wrong by accident, Gregg! Someone down there--" * * * * * We rushed to the nearest descending ladder. In the deserted lower room the bank of dials stood neglected. A score of dials and switches were here, governing the magnetism of different areas of the ship. There should have been a night operator, but he was gone. Then we saw him lying nearby, sprawled face down on the floor! In the silence and dim lurid glow of the fluorescent tubes, we stood holding our breaths, peering and listening. No one here. The guard was not dead. He lay unconscious from a blow on the head. A brawny fellow. We had him revived in a few moments. A broadcast flash of the call-buzz brought Dr. Frank in haste from the chart-room. "What's the matter?" We pointed at the unconscious man. "Someone was here," I said hastily. "Experimenting with the magnetic switches. Evidently unfamiliar with them--pulling one or another to test their workings and so see the reactions on the dials." We told him what had happened to Snap in the upper corridor. Dr. Frank revived the guard in a moment. He was no worse off for the episode, save a lump on his head, and a nasty headache. But he had little to tell us. He had heard a step. Saw nothing--and then had been struck on the head, by some invisible assailant. * * * * * We left him nursing his head, sitting belligerent at his post. Armed now with my heat-ray cylinder which I loaned him. "Strange doings this voyage," he told us. "All the crew knows it--all been talkin' about it. I stick it out now, but when we get back home I'm done with this star travelin'. I belong on the sea anyway. A good old freighter is all right for me." We hurried back to the upper level. We would indeed have to plan something at this chart-room conference. This was the first tangible attack our adversaries had made. We were on the passenger deck headed for the chart-room when all three of us stopped short, frozen with horror. Through the silent passenger quarters a scream rang out! A girl's shuddering, gasping scream. Terror in it. Horror. Or a scream of agony. In the silence of the dully vibrating ship it was utterly horrible. It lasted an instant--a single long scream; then was abruptly stilled. And with blood pounding my temples and rushing like ice through my veins, I recognized it. Anita! CHAPTER IX _The Murder in A 22_ "Good God, what was that?" Dr. Frank's face had gone white in the starlight. Snap stood like a statue of horror. The deck here was patched as always, silver radiance from the deck ports. The empty deck chairs stood about. The scream was stilled, but now we heard a commotion inside--the rasp of opening cabin doors; questions from frightened passengers; the scurry of feet. I found my voice. "Anita! Anita Prince!" "Come on!" shouted Snap. "Was it the Prince girl? I thought so too! In her stateroom, A 22!" He was dashing for the lounge archway. Dr. Frank and I followed. I realized that we passed the deck door and window of A 22. But they were dark, and evidently sealed on the inside. The dim lounge was in a turmoil; passengers standing at their cabin doors. I heard Sir Arthur Coniston: "I say, what was that?" "Over there," said another man. "Come back inside, Martha." He shoved his wife back. "Mr. Haljan!" He plucked at me as I went past. I shouted, "Go back to your rooms! We want order here--keep back!" We came to the twin doors of A 22 and A 20. Both were closed. Dr. Frank was in advance of Snap and me. He paused at the sound of Captain Carter's voice behind us. "Was it from in there? Wait a moment!" Carter dashed up; he had a large heat-ray projector in his hand. He shoved us aside. "Let me in first. Is the door sealed? Gregg, keep those passengers back!" * * * * * The door was not sealed. Carter burst into the room. I heard him gasp, "Good God!" Snap and I shoved back three or four crowding passengers, and in that instant Dr. Frank had been in the room and out again. "There's been an accident! Get back, Gregg! Snap, help him keep the crowd away." He shoved me forcibly. From within, Carter was shouting, "Keep them out! Where are you, Frank? Come back here! Send a flash for Balch--I want Balch!" Dr. Frank went back into the room and banged the cabin door upon Snap and me. I was unarmed--I had loaned my cylinder to the guard in the lower corridor. Weapon in hand, Snap forced the panic-stricken passengers back to their rooms. "It's all right! An accident! Miss Prince is hurt." Snap reassured them glibly; but he knew no more about it than I. Moa, with a night-robe drawn tight around her thin, tall figure, edged up to me. "What has happened, Set Haljan?" I gazed around for her brother Miko, but did not see him. "An accident," I said shortly. "Go back to your room. Captain's orders." She eyed me and then retreated. Snap was threatening everybody with his cylinder. Balch dashed up. "What in the hell? Where's Carter?" "In there." I pounded on A 22. It opened cautiously. I could see only Carter, but I heard the murmuring voice of Dr. Frank through the interior connecting door to A 20. * * * * * The captain rasped, "Get out, Haljan! Oh, is that you, Balch? Come in." He admitted the older officer and slammed the door again upon me. And immediately reopened it. "Gregg, keep the passengers quiet. Tell them everything's all right. Miss Prince got frightened, that's all. Then go up to the turret. Tell Blackstone what's happened." "But I don't know what's happened," I protested miserably. Carter was grim and white. He whispered, "I think it may turn out to be murder, Gregg! No, not dead yet--Dr. Frank is trying--Don't stand there like an ass, man! Get to the turret! Verify our trajectory--no--wait--" The captain was almost incoherent. "Wait a minute, I don't mean that! Tell Snap to watch his helio-room. Gregg, you and Blackstone stay in the chart-room. Arm yourselves and guard our weapons. By God, this murderer, whoever he is--" I stammered, "If--if she dies--will you flash us word?" He stared at me strangely. "I'll be there presently, Gregg." He slammed the door upon me. I followed his orders, but it was like a dream of horror. The turmoil of the ship gradually quieted. Snap went to the helio-room; Blackstone and I sat in the tiny steel chart-room. How much time passed, I do not know. I was confused. Anita hurt! She might die.... Murdered.... But why? By whom? Had George Prince been in his own room when the attack came? I thought now I recalled hearing the low murmur of his voice in there with Dr. Frank and Carter. Where was Miko? It stabbed at me. I had not seen him among the passengers in the lounge. * * * * * Carter came into the chart-room. "Gregg, you get to bed--you look like a ghost!" "But--" "She's not dead--she may live. Dr. Frank and her brother are with her. They're doing all they can." He told us what had happened. Anita and George Prince had both been asleep, each in their respective rooms. Someone unknown had opened Anita's corridor door. "Wasn't it sealed?" I demanded. "Yes. But the intruder opened it." "Burst it? I didn't think it was broken." "It wasn't broken. The assailant opened it somehow, and assaulted Miss Prince--shot her in the chest with a heat-ray. Her left lung." "She is conscious?" Balch demanded. "Yes. But she did not see who did it. Nor did Prince. Her scream awakened him, but the intruder evidently fled out the corridor door of A 22, the way he entered." I stood weak and shaken at the chart-room entrance. "A little son, cast in the gentle image of his mother. But with the strength of his father...." But Anita--dying, perhaps; and all my dreams were fading into a memory of what might have been. "You go to bed, Gregg--we don't need you." I was glad enough to get away. I would lie down for an hour, and then go to Anita's stateroom. I'd demand that Dr. Frank let me see her, if only for a moment. * * * * * I went to the stern deck-space where my cubby was located. My mind was confused, but some instinct within me made me verify the seals of my door and window. They were intact. I entered cautiously, switched on the dimmer of the tube-lights, and searched the room. It had only a bunk, my tiny desk, a chair and clothes robe. There was no evidence of any intruder here. I set my door and window alarm. Then I audiphoned to the helio-room. "Snap?" "Yes." I told him about Anita. Carter cut in on us from the chart-room. "Stop that, you fools!" We cut off. Fully dressed, I flung myself on my bed. Anita might die.... I must have fallen into a tortured sleep. I was awakened by the sound of my alarm buzzer. Someone was tampering with my door! Then the buzzer ceased; the marauder outside must have found a way of silencing it. But it had done its work--awakened me. I had switched off the light; my cubby was Stygian dark. A heat-cylinder was in the bunk-bracket over my head; I searched for it, pried it loose softly. I was fully awake. Alert. I could hear a faint sizzling--someone outside trying to unseal the door. In the darkness, cylinder in hand, I crept from the bunk. Crouched at the door. This time I would capture or kill this night prowler. * * * * * The sizzling was faintly audible. My door-seal was breaking. Upon impulse I reached for the door, jerked it open. No one there! The starlit segment of deck was empty. But I had leaped, and I struck a solid body, crouching in the doorway. A giant man. Miko! His electronized metallic robe burned my hands. I lunged against him--I was almost as surprised as he. I shot, but the stab of heat evidently missed him. The shock of my encounter close-circuited his robe; he materialized in the starlight. A brief, savage encounter. He struck the weapon from my hand. He had dropped his hydrogen torch, and tried to grip me. But I twisted away from his hold. "So it's you!" "Be quiet, Gregg Haljan! I only want to talk." Without warning, a stab of radiance shot from a weapon in his hand. It caught me. Ran like ice through my veins. Seized and numbed my limbs. I fell helpless to the deck. Nerves and muscles paralyzed. My tongue was thick and inert. I could not speak, nor move. But I could see Miko bending over me. And hear him: "I don't want to kill you, Haljan. We need you." He gathered me up like a bundle in his huge arms; carried me swiftly across the deserted deck. Snap's helio-room in the network under the dome was diagonally overhead. A white actinic light shot from it--caught us, bathed us. Snap had been awake; had heard the slight commotion of our encounter. His voice rang shrilly: "Stop! I'll shoot!" His warning siren rang out to arouse the ship. His spotlight clung to us. Miko ran with me a few steps. Then he cursed and dropped me, fled away. I fell like a sack of carbide to the deck. My senses faded into blackness.... * * * * * "He's all right now." I was in the chart-room, with Captain Carter, Snap and Dr. Frank bending over me. The surgeon said, "Can you speak now, Gregg?" I tried it. My tongue was thick, but it would move. "Yes." I was soon revived. I sat up, with Dr. Frank vigorously rubbing me. "I'm all right." I told them what had happened. Captain Carter said abruptly, "Yes, we know that. And it was Miko also who killed Anita Prince. She told us before she died." "Died!..." I leaped to my feet. "She ... died...." "Yes, Gregg. An hour ago, Miko got into her stateroom and tried to force his love on her. She repulsed him--he killed her." It struck me blank. And then with a rush came the thought, "He says Miko killed her...." I heard myself stammering, "Why--why we must get him!" I gathered my wits; a surge of hate swept me; a wild desire for vengeance. "Why, by God, where is he? Why don't you go get him? I'll get him--I'll kill him, I tell you!" "Easy, Gregg!" Dr. Frank gripped me. The captain said gently, "We know how you feel, Gregg. She told us before she died." "I'll bring him in here to you! But I'll kill him, I tell you!" "No you won't, lad. You're hysterical now. We don't want him killed, not attacked even. Not yet. We'll explain later." They sat me down, calming me. Anita dead. The door of the shining garden was closed. A brief glimpse, given to me and to her of what might have been. And now she was dead.... CHAPTER X _A Speck of Human Earth-dust, Falling Free...._ I had not been able at first to understand why Captain Carter wanted Miko left at liberty. Within me there was that cry of vengeance, as though to strike Miko down would somehow lessen my own grief at Anita's loss. Whatever Carter's purpose, Snap had not known it. But Balch and Dr. Frank were in the captain's confidence--all three of them working on some plan of action. Snap and I argued it, and thought we could fathom it; and in spite of my desire to kill Miko, the thing looked reasonable. It was obvious that at least two of our passengers were plotting with Miko and George Prince; trying during this voyage to learn what they could about Grantline's activities on the Moon; scheming doubtless to seize the treasure when the Planetara stopped at the Moon on the return voyage. I thought I could name those masquerading passengers. Ob Hahn, supposedly a Venus Mystic. And Rance Rankin, who called himself an American magician. Those two, Snap and I agreed, seemed most suspicious. And there was the purser. With my hysteria still on me, I sat for a time on the deck outside the chart-room with Snap. Then Carter summoned us back, and we sat listening while he, Balch and Dr. Frank went on with their conference. Listening to them I could not but agree that our best plan was to secure evidence which would incriminate all who were concerned in the plot. Miko, we were convinced, had been the Martian who followed Snap and me from Halsey's office in Great-New York. George Prince had doubtless been the invisible eavesdropper outside the helio-room. He knew, and had told the others, that Grantline had found radium-ore on the Moon--that the Planetara would stop there on the way home. * * * * * But we could not incarcerate George Prince for being an eavesdropper. Nor had we the faintest tangible evidence against Ob Hahn or Rance Rankin. And even the purser would probably be released by the Interplanetary Court of Ferrok-Shahn when it heard our evidence. There was only Miko. We could arrest him for the murder of Anita. But the others would be put on their guard. It was Carter's idea to let Miko remain at liberty for a time and see if we could not identify and incriminate his fellows. The murder of Anita obviously had nothing to do with any plot against the Grantline Moon treasure. "Why," exclaimed Balch, "there might be--probably are--huge Martian interests concerned in this thing. These men here aboard are only emissaries, making this voyage to learn what they can. When they get to Ferrok-Shahn they'll make their report, and then we'll have a real danger on our hands. Why, an outlaw ship could be launched from Ferrok-Shahn that would beat us back to the Moon--and Grantline is entirely without warning of any danger!" It seemed obvious. Unscrupulous, moneyed criminals in Ferrok-Shahn would be dangerous indeed, once these details of Grantline were given them. And so now it was decided that in the remaining nine days of our outward voyage, we would attempt to secure enough evidence to arrest all these plotters. "I'll have them all in the cage when we land," Carter declared grimly. "They'll make no report to their principals. The thing will end, be stamped out!" Ah, the futile plans of men! * * * * * Yet we thought it practical. We were all doubly armed now. Explosive bullet-projectors and the heat-ray cylinders. And we had several eavesdropping microphones which we planned to use whenever occasion offered. It was now, Earth Eastern Time, A. M. Twenty-eight hours only of this eventful voyage were passed. The Planetara was some six million miles from the Earth; it blazed behind us, a tremendous giant. The body of Anita was being made ready for burial. George Prince was still in his stateroom. Glutz, effeminate little hairdresser, who waxed rich acting as beauty doctor for the women passengers, and who in his youth had been an undertaker, had gone with Dr. Frank to prepare the body. Gruesome details. I tried not to think of them. I sat, numbed, in the chart-room. An astronomical burial--there was little precedent for it. I dragged myself to the stern deck-space where, at five A. M., the ceremony took place. Most of the passengers were asleep, unaware of all this--which was why Carter hastened it. We were a solemn little group, gathered there in the checkered starlight with the great vault of the heavens around us. A dismantled electronic projector--necessary when a long-range gun was mounted--had been rigged up in one of the deck ports. They brought out the body. I stood apart, gazing reluctantly at the small bundle, wrapped like a mummy in a dark metallic screen-cloth. A patch of black silk rested over her face. * * * * * Four cabin stewards carried her. And beside her walked George Prince. A long black robe covered him, but his head was bare. And suddenly he reminded me of the ancient play-character of Hamlet. His black, wavy hair; his finely chiseled, pallid face, set now in a stern, patrician cast. And staring, I realized that however much of a villain this man not yet thirty might be, at this instant, walking beside the body of his dead sister, he was stricken with grief. He loved that sister with whom he had lived since childhood; and to see him now, with his set white face, no one could doubt it. The little procession stopped in a patch of starlight by the port. They rested the body on a bank of chairs. The black-robed Chaplain, roused from his bed and still trembling from excitement of this sudden, inexplicable death on board, said a brief, solemn little prayer. An appeal: That the Almighty Ruler of all these blazing worlds might guard the soul of this gentle girl whose mortal remains were now to be returned to Him. Ah, if ever God seemed hovering close, it was now at this instant, on this starlit deck floating in the black void of space. Then Carter for just a moment removed the black shroud from her face. I saw her brother gaze silently; saw him stoop and implant a kiss--and turn away. I did not want to look, but I found myself moving slowly forward. * * * * * She lay, so beautiful. Her face, white and calm and peaceful in death. My sight blurred. Words seemed to echo: "A little son, cast in the gentle image of his mother...." "Easy, Gregg!" Snap was whispering to me. He had his arm around me. "Come on away!" They tied the shroud over her face. I did not see them as they put her body in the tube, sent it through the exhaust-chamber, and dropped it. But a moment later I saw it--a small black oblong bundle--hovering beside us. It was perhaps a hundred feet away, circling us. Held by the Planetara's bulk, it had momentarily become our satellite. It swung around us like a moon. Gruesome satellite, by nature's laws forever to follow us. Then from another tube at the bow, Blackstone operated a small Zed-co-ray projector. Its dull light caught the floating bundle, neutralizing its metallic wrappings. It swung off at a tangent. Speeding. Falling free in the dome of the heavens. A rotating black oblong. But in a moment distance dwindled it to a speck. A dull silver dot with the sunlight on it. A speck of human Earth-dust, falling free.... It vanished. Anita--gone. In my heart was an echo of the prayer that the Almighty might watch over her and guard her always.... CHAPTER XI _The Electrical Eavesdropper_ I turned from the deck. Miko was near me! So he had dared to show himself here among us! But I realized that he could not be aware we knew he was the murderer. George Prince had been asleep, had not seen Miko with Anita. Miko, with impulsive rage, had shot the girl and escaped. No doubt now he was cursing himself for having done it. And he could very well assume that Anita had died without regaining consciousness to tell who had killed her. He gazed at me now, here on the deck. I thought for an instant he was coming over to talk to me. Though he probably considered he was not suspected of the murder of Anita, he realized, of course, that his attack on me was known; he must have wondered what action Captain Carter would take. But he did not approach me; he moved away, and went inside. Moa had been near him; and as though by pre-arrangement with him she now accosted me. "I want to speak to you, Set Haljan." "Go ahead." I felt an instinctive aversion for this Martian girl. Yet she was not unattractive. Over six feet tall, straight and slim. Sleek blond hair. Rather a handsome face. Not gray, like the burly Miko, but pink and white. Stern-lipped, yet feminine, too. She was smiling gravely now. Her blue eyes regarded me keenly. She said gently: "A sad occurrence, Gregg Haljan. And mysterious. I would not question you--" "Is that all you have to say?" I demanded, when she paused. "No. You are a handsome man, Gregg--attractive to women--to any Martian woman." * * * * * She said it impulsively. Admiration for me was on her face, in her eyes--a man cannot miss it. "Thank you." "I mean, I would be your friend. My brother Miko is so sorry about what happened between you and him this morning. He only wanted to talk to you, and he came to your cubby door--" "With a torch to break its seal," I interjected. She waved that away. "He was afraid you would not admit him. He told you he would not hurt you." "And so he struck me with one of your cursed Martian paralyzing rays!" "He is sorry...." She seemed gauging me, trying, no doubt, to find out what reprisal would be taken against her brother. I felt sure that Moa was as active as a man in any plan that was under way to capture the Grantline treasure. Miko, with his ungovernable temper, was doing things that put their plans in jeopardy. I demanded abruptly, "What did your brother want to talk to me about?" "Me," she said surprisingly. "I sent him. A Martian girl goes after what she wants. Did you know that?" She swung on her heel and left me. I puzzled over it. Was that why Miko had struck me down, and was carrying me off? Was my accursed masculine beauty so attractive to this Martian girl? I did not think so. I could not believe that all these incidents were so unrelated to what I knew was the main undercurrent. They wanted me, had tried to capture me. For something else than because Moa liked my looks.... * * * * * Dr. Frank found me mooning alone. "Go to bed, Gregg! You look awful." "I don't want to go to bed." "Where's Snap?" "I don't know. He was here a while ago." I had not seen him since the burial of Anita. "The captain wants him." The surgeon left me. Within an hour the morning siren would arouse the passengers. I was seated in a secluded corner of the deck, when George Prince came along. He went past me, a slight, somber, dark-robed figure. He had on high, thick boots. A hood was over his head, but as he saw me he pushed it back and dropped down beside me. But for a moment he did not speak. His face showed pallid in the pallid star-gleams. "She said you loved her." His soft voice was throaty with emotion. "Yes." I said it almost against my will. There seemed a bond springing between this bereaved brother and me. He added, so softly I could barely hear him, "That makes you, I think, almost my friend. And you thought you were my enemy." I held my answer. An incautious tongue running under emotion is a dangerous thing. And I was sure of nothing. * * * * * He went on, "Almost my friend. Because--we both loved her, and she loved us both." He was hardly more than whispering. "And there is aboard--one whom we both hate." "Miko!" It burst from me. "Yes. But do not say it." Another silence fell between us. He brushed back the black curls from his forehead. And his dark eyes searched mine. "Have you an eavesdropping microphone, Haljan?" I hesitated. "Yes." "I was thinking...." He leaned closer toward me. "If, in half an hour, you could use it upon Miko's cabin--I would rather tell you than the captain or anyone else. The cabin will be insulated, but I shall find a way of cutting off that insulation so that you may hear." So George Prince had turned with us! The shock of his sister's death--himself allied to her murderer!--had been too much for him. He was with us! Yet his help must be given secretly. Miko would kill him in an instant if it became known. He had been watchful of the deck. He stood up now. "I think that is all." As he turned away, I murmured, "But I do thank you...." * * * * * The name Set Miko glowed upon the small metal door. It was in a transverse corridor similar to A 22. The corridor was forward of the lounge: it opened off the small circular library. The library was unoccupied and unlighted, dim with only the reflected lights from the nearby passages. I crouched behind a cylinder-case. The door of Miko's room was in sight, being some thirty feet away from me. I waited perhaps five minutes. No one entered. Then I realized that doubtless the conspirators were already there. I set my tiny eavesdropper on the library floor beside me; connected its little battery; focused its projector. Was Miko's room insulated? I could not tell. There was a small ventilating grid above the door. Across its opening, if the room were insulated, a blue sheen of radiance would be showing. And there would be a faint hum. But from this distance I could not see or hear such details, and I was afraid to approach closer. Once in the transverse corridor, I would have no place to hide, no way of escape; if anyone approached Miko's door, I would be discovered. I threw the current into my little apparatus. I prayed, if it met interference, that the slight sound would pass unnoticed. George Prince had said he would make opportunity to disconnect the room's insulation. He had evidently done so. I picked up the interior sounds at once; my headphone vibrated with them. And with trembling fingers on the little dial between my knees as I crouched in the darkness behind the cylinder-case, I synchronized. "Johnson is a fool." It was Miko's voice. "We must have the pass-words." "He got them from the helio-room." A man's voice; I puzzled over it at first, then recognized it. Rance Rankin. * * * * * Miko said, "He is a fool. Walking around this ship as though with letters blazoned on his forehead--'Watch me--I need watching--' Hah! No wonder they apprehended him!" Was George Prince in there? Rankin's voice said: "He would have turned the papers over to us. I would not blame him too much. What harm--" "Oh, I'll release him," Miko declared. "What harm? That braying ass did us plenty of harm. He has lost the pass-words. Better he had left them in the helio-room." Moa was in the room. Her voice said: "We've got to have them. The Planetara, upon such an important voyage as this, may be watched. How do we know--" "It is, no doubt," Rankin said quietly. "We ought to have the pass-words. When we are in control of this ship...." It sent a shiver through me. Were they planning to try and seize the Planetara? Now? It seemed so. "Johnson undoubtedly memorized them," Moa was saying. "When we get him out--" "Hahn is to do that, at the signal." Miko added, "George could do it better, perhaps." And then I heard George Prince for the first time. He murmured, "I will try." "No need," said Miko. "I praise where praise is deserved. And I have little praise for you now, George!" I could not see what happened. A look, perhaps, which Prince could not avoid giving this man he had come to hate. Miko doubtless saw it, and the Martian's hot anger leaped. Rankin said hurriedly, "Stop that!" And Moa: "Let him alone! Sit down, you fool!" * * * * * I could hear the sound of a scuffle. A blow--a cry, half suppressed, from George Prince. Then Miko: "I will not hurt him. Craven coward! Look at him! Hating me--frightened!" I could fancy George Prince sitting there with murder in his heart, and Miko taunting him: "Hates me now, because I shot his sister!" Moa: "Hush!" "I will not! Why should I not say it? I will tell you something else, George Prince. It was not Anita I shot at, but you! I meant nothing for her, but love. If you had not interfered--" This was different from what we had figured. George Prince had come in from his own room, had tried to rescue his sister, and in the scuffle, Anita had taken the shot intended for George. "I did not even know I had hit her," Miko was saying. "Not until I heard she was dead." He added sardonically, "I hoped it was you I had hit, George. And I will tell you this: You hate me no more than I hate you. If it were not for your knowledge of radium ores--" "Is this to be a personal wrangle?" Rankin interrupted. "I thought we were here to plan--" "It is planned," Miko said shortly. "I give orders, I do not plan. I am waiting now for the moment--" * * * * * He checked himself. Moa said, "Does Rankin understand that no harm is to come to Gregg Haljan?" "Yes," said Rankin. "And Dean. We need them, of course. But you cannot make Dean send messages if he refuses, nor make Haljan navigate." "I know enough to check on them," Miko said grimly. "They will not fool me. And they will obey me, have no fear. A little touch of sulphuric--" His laugh was gruesome. "It makes the most stubborn very willing." "I wish," said Moa, "we had Haljan safely hidden. If he is hurt--killed--" So that was why Miko had tried to capture me? To keep me safe so that I might navigate the ship. It occurred to me that I should get Carter at once. A plot to seize the Planetara? But when? I froze with startled horror. The diaphragms at my ears rang with Miko's words: "I have set the time for now! In two minutes--" It seemed to startle both Rankin and George Prince almost as much as I. Both exclaimed: "No!" "No? Why not? Everyone is at his post!" Prince repeated: "No!" And Rankin: "But can we trust them? The stewards--the crew?" "Eight of them are our own men! You didn't know that, Rankin? They've been aboard the Planetara for several voyages. Oh, this is no quickly-planned affair, even though we let you in on it so recently. You and Johnson. By God!" * * * * * I crouched tense. There was a commotion in the stateroom. Miko had discovered that his insulation was cut off! He had evidently leaped to his feet; I heard a chair overturn. And the Martian's roar: "It's off! Did you do that, Prince? By God, if I thought--" My apparatus went suddenly dead as Miko flung on his insulation. I lost my wits in the confusion; I should have instantly taken off my vibrations. There was interference; it showed in the dark space of the ventilator grid over Miko's doorway; a snapping in the air there, a swirl of sparks. I heard with my unaided ears Miko's roar over his insulation: "By God, they're listening!" The scream of a hand-siren sounded from his stateroom. It rang over the ship. His signal! I heard it answered from some distant point. And then a shot; a commotion in the lower corridors.... The attack upon the Planetara had started! I was on my feet. The shouts of startled passengers sounded, a turmoil beginning everywhere. I stood momentarily transfixed. The door of Miko's stateroom burst open. He stood there, with Moa, Rankin and George Prince crowding behind him. He saw me. "You, Gregg Haljan!" He came leaping at me. CHAPTER XII _The Weightless Combat_ I was taken wholly by surprise. There was an instant when I stood numbed, fumbling for a weapon at my belt, undecided whether to run or stand my ground. Miko was no more than twenty feet from me. He checked his forward rush. The light from an overhead tube was on him; I saw in his hand the cylinder projector of his paralyzing ray. I plucked my heat-cylinder from my belt, and fired without taking aim. My tiny heat-beam flashed. I must have grazed Miko's hand. His roar of anger and pain rang out over the turmoil. He dropped his weapon; then stooped to pick it up. But Moa forestalled him. She leaped and seized it. "Careful! Fool--you promised not to hurt him!" A confusion of swift action. Rankin had turned and darted away. I saw George Prince stumbling half in front of the struggling Miko and Moa. And I heard footsteps beside me; a hand gripped me, jerked at me. Over the turmoil Prince's voice sounded: "Gregg--Haljan!" I recall I had the impression that Prince was frightened; he had half fallen in front of Miko. And there was Miko's voice: "Let go of me!" And Moa: "Come!" It was Balch gripping me. "Gregg! This way--run! Get out of here! He'll kill you with that ray--" Miko's ray flashed, but George Prince had knocked at his arm. I did not dare fire again. Prince was in the way. Balch, who was unarmed, shoved me violently back. "Gregg--the chart-room!" * * * * * I turned and ran, with Balch after me. Prince had fallen, or been felled by Miko. A flash followed me. Miko's weapon, but again it missed. He did not pursue me; he ran the other way, through the port-side door of the library. Balch and I found ourselves in the lounge. Shouting, frightened passengers were everywhere. The place was in wild confusion, the whole ship ringing now with shouts. "To the chart-room, Gregg!" I called to the passengers: "Get back to your rooms!" I followed Balch. We ran through the archway to the deck. In the starlight I saw figures scurrying aft, but none were near us. The deck forward was dim with heavy shadows. The oval window and door of the chart-room were blue-yellow from the tube-lights inside. No one seemed on the deck there; and then, as we approached, I saw, further forward in the bow, the trap-door to the cage standing open. Johnson had been released. From one of the chart-room windows a heat-ray sizzled. It barely missed us. Balch shouted, "Carter--don't!" The captain called, "Oh--you, Balch--and Haljan--" He came out on the deck as we rushed up. His left arm was dangling limp. "God--this--" He got no further. From the turret overhead a tiny search-beam came down and disclosed us. Blackstone was supposed to be on duty up there, with a course-master at the controls. But, glancing up, I saw, illumined by the turret lights, the figures of Ob Hahn in his purple-white robe, and Johnson the purser. And on the turret balcony, two fallen men--Blackstone and the course-master. * * * * * Johnson was training the spotlight on us. And Hahn fired a Martian ray. It struck Balch beside me. He dropped. Carter was shouting, "Inside! Gregg, get inside!" I stopped to raise up Balch. Another beam came down. A heat-ray this time. It caught the fallen Balch full in the chest, piercing him through. The smell of his burning flesh rose to sicken me. He was dead. I dropped his body. Carter shoved me into the chart-room. In the small, steel-lined room, Carter and I slid the door closed. We were alone here. The thing had come so quickly it had taken Captain Carter, like us all, wholly unawares. We had anticipated spying eavesdroppers, but not this open brigandage. No more than a minute or two had passed since Miko's siren in his stateroom had given the signal for the attack. Carter had been in the chart-room. Blackstone was in the turret. At the outbreak of confusion, Carter dashed out to see Hahn releasing Johnson from the cage. From the forward chart-room window now I could see where Hahn with a torch had broken the cage-seal. The torch lay on the deck. There had been an exchange of shots; Carter's arm was paralyzed; Johnson and Hahn had escaped. Carter was as confused as I. There had simultaneously been an encounter up in the turret. Blackstone and the course-master were killed. The lookout had been shot from his post in the forward observatory. His body dangled now, twisted half in and half out of his window. * * * * * We could see several of Miko's men--erstwhile members of our crew and steward-corps--scurrying from the turret along the upper bridges toward the dark and silent helio-room. Snap was up there. But was he? The helio-room glowed suddenly with dim light, but there was no evidence of a fight there. The fighting seemed mostly below the deck, down in the hull-corridors. A blended horror of sounds came up to us. Screams, shouts, and the hissing and snapping of ray weapons. Our crew--such of them as were loyal--were making a stand down below. But it was brief. Within a minute it died away. The passengers, amidships in the superstructure, were still shouting. Then above them Miko's roar sounded. "Be quiet! Go in your rooms--you will not be harmed." The brigands in these few minutes were in control of the ship. All but this little chart-room, where, with most of the ship's weapons, Carter and I were intrenched. "God, Gregg, that this should come upon us!" Carter was fumbling with the chart-room weapons. "Here, Gregg, help me. What have you got? Heat-ray? That's all I had ready." It struck me then as I helped him make the connections that Carter in this crisis was at best an inefficient commander. His red face had gone splotchy purple; his hands were trembling. Skilled as captain of a peaceful liner, he was at a loss now. Nor could I blame him. It is easy to say we might have taken warning, done this or that, and come triumphant through this attack. But only the fool looks backward and says, "I would have done better." * * * * * I tried to summon my wits. The ship was lost to us, unless Carter and I could do something. Our futile weapons! They were all here--four or five heat-ray hand projectors that could send a pencil-ray a hundred feet or so. I shot one diagonally up at the turret where Johnson was leering down at our rear window, but he saw my gesture and dropped back out of sight. The heat-beam flashed harmlessly up and struck the turret roof. Then across the turret window came a sheen of radiance--an electro-barrage. And behind it, Hahn's suave, evil face appeared. He shouted down: "We have orders to spare you, Gregg Haljan--or you would have been killed long ago!" My answering shot hit his barrage with a shower of sparks, behind which he stood unmoved. Carter handed me another weapon. "Gregg, try this." I levelled the old explosive bullet projector; Carter crouched beside me. But before I could press the trigger, from somewhere down the starlit deck an electro-beam hit me. The little rifle exploded, burst its breech. I sank back to the floor, tingling from the shock of the hostile current. My hands were blackened from the exploding powder. Carter seized me. "No use! Hurt?" "No." * * * * * The stars through the dome-windows were swinging. A long swing--the shadows and starlit patches on the deck were all shifting. The Planetara was turning. The heavens revolved in a great round sweep of movement, then settled as we took our new course. Hahn at the turret controls had swung us. The earth and the sun showed over our bow quarter. The sunlight mingled red-yellow with the brilliant starlight. Hahn's signals were sounding; I heard them answered from the mechanism rooms down below. Brigands there--in full control. The gravity plates were being set to the new positions; we were on our new course. Headed a point or two off the Earth-line. Not headed for the moon? I wondered. Carter and I were planning nothing. What was there to plan? We were under observation. A Martian paralyzing ray--or electronic beam, far more deadly than our own puny police weapons--would have struck us the instant we tried to leave the chart-room. My swift-running thoughts were interrupted by a shout from down the deck. At a corner of the cabin superstructure some fifty feet from our windows the figure of Miko appeared. A barrage-radiance hung around him like a shimmering mantle. His voice sounded: "Gregg Haljan, do you yield?" Carter leaped up from where he and I were crouching. Against all reason of safety he leaned from the low window, waving his hamlike fist. "Yield? No! I am in command here, you pirate! Brigand--murderer!" * * * * * I pushed him back. "Careful!" He was spluttering, and over it Miko's sardonic laugh sounded. "Very well--but you will talk? Shall we argue about it?" I stood up. "What do you want to say, Miko?" Behind him the tall, thin figure of his sister showed. She was plucking at him. He turned violently. "I won't hurt him! Gregg Haljan--is this a truce? You will not shoot?" He was shielding Moa. "No," I called. "For a moment, no. A truce. What is it you want to say?" I could hear the babble of passengers who were herded in the cabin with brigands guarding them. George Prince, bareheaded, but shrouded in his cloak, showed in a patch of light behind Moa. He looked my way and then retreated into the lounge archway. Miko called, "You must yield. We want you, Haljan." "No doubt," I jeered. "Alive. It is easy to kill you." * * * * * I could not doubt that. Carter and I were little more than rats in a trap, here in the chart-room. But Miko wanted to take me alive: that was not so simple. He added persuasively: "We want you to help us navigate. Will you?" "No." "Will you help us, Captain Carter? Tell your cub, this Haljan, to yield. You are fools. We understand that Haljan has been handling the ship's mathematics. Him we need most." Carter roared: "Get back from there! This is no truce!" I shoved aside his levelled bullet-projector. "Wait a minute!" I called to Miko. "Navigate--where?" "Oh," he retorted, "that is our business, not yours. When you lay down your weapons and come out of there, I will give you the course." "Back to the earth?" I suggested. I could fancy him grinning behind the sheen of his barrage at my question. "The earth? Yes--shall we go there? Give me your orders, Gregg Haljan. Of course I will obey them." His sardonic words were interrupted. And I realized that all this parley was a ruse of Miko's to take me alive. He had made a gesture. Hahn, watching from the turret window, doubtless flashed a signal down to the hull-corridors. The magnetizer control under the chart-room was altered, our artificial gravity cut off. I felt the sudden lightness; I gripped the window casement and clung. Carter was startled into incautious movement. It flung him out into the center of the chart-room, his arms and legs grotesquely flailing. * * * * * And across the chart-room, in the opposite window, I felt rather than saw the shape of something. A figure--almost invisible, but not quite--was trying to climb in! I flung the empty rifle I was holding. It hit something solid in the window; in a flare of sparks a black-hooded figure materialized. A man climbing in! His weapon spat. There was a tiny electronic flash, deadly silent. The intruder had shot at Carter; struck him. Carter gave one queer scream. He had floated to the floor; his convulsive movement when he was hit hurled him to the ceiling. His body struck, twitched; bounced back and sank inert on the floor-grid almost at my feet. I clung to the casement. Across the space of the weightless room the hooded intruder was also clinging. His hood fell back. It was Johnson. He leered at me. "Killed him, the bully! Well, he deserved it. Now for you, Mr. Third Officer Haljan!" But he did not dare fire at me--Miko had forbidden it. I saw him reach under his robe, doubtless for a low-powered paralyzing ray such as Miko already had used on me. But he never got it out. I had no weapon within reach. I leaned into the room, still holding the casement, and doubled my legs under me. I kicked out from the window. The force catapulted me across the space of the room like a volplane. I struck the purser. We gripped. Our locked, struggling bodies bounced out into the room. We struck the floor, surged up like balloons to the ceiling, struck it with a flailing arm or a leg and floated back. * * * * * Grotesque, abnormal combat! Like fighting in weightless water. Johnson clutched his weapon, but I twisted his wrist, held his arm outstretched so that he could not aim it. I was aware of Miko's voice shouting on the deck outside. Johnson's left hand was gouging at my face, his fingers plucking at my eyes. We lunged down to the floor, then up again, close to the ceiling. I twisted his wrists. He dropped the weapon and it sank away. I tried to reach it, but could not. Then I had him by the throat. I was stronger than he, and more agile. I tried choking him, his thick bull-neck within my fingers. He kicked, scrambled, tore and gouged at me. Tried to shout, but it ended in a gurgle. And then, as he felt his breath stopped, his hands came up in an effort to tear mine loose. We sank again to the floor. We were momentarily upright. I felt my feet touch. I bent my knees. We sank further. And then I kicked violently upward. Our locked bodies shot to the ceiling. Johnson's head was above me. It struck the steel roof of the chart-room. A violent blow. I felt him go suddenly limp. I cast him off, and, doubling my body, I kicked at the ceiling. It sent me diagonally downward to the window, where I clung and regained stability. And I saw Miko standing on the deck with a weapon levelled at me! CHAPTER XIII _The Torture_ "Haljan! Yield or I'll fire! Moa, give me the smaller one. This cursed--" He had in his hand too large a projector. Its ray would kill me. If he wanted to take me alive, he would not fire. I chanced it. "No!" I tried to draw myself beneath the window. An automatic bullet projector was on the floor where Carter had dropped it. I pulled myself down. Miko did not fire. I reached the revolver. The dead bodies of the captain and purser had drifted together on the floor in the center of the room. I hitched myself back to the window. With upraised weapon I gazed cautiously out. Miko had disappeared. The deck within my line of vision was empty. But was it? Something told me to beware. I clung to the casement, ready upon the instant to shove myself down. There was a movement in a shadow along the deck. Then a figure rose up. "Don't fire, Haljan!" The sharp command, half appeal, stopped the pressure of my finger on the trigger of the automatic. It was the tall lanky Englishman, Sir Arthur Coniston, as he called himself. So he too was one of Miko's band! The light through a dome-window fell full on him. "If you fire, Haljan, and kill me--Miko will kill you then, surely." From where he had been crouching he could not command my window. But now, upon the heels of his placating words, he abruptly shot. The low-powered ray, had it struck, would have felled me without killing. But it went over my head as I dropped. Its aura made my senses reel. Coniston shouted, "Haljan!" * * * * * I did not answer. I wondered if he would dare approach to see if I had been hit. A minute passed. Then another. I thought I heard Miko's voice on the deck outside. But it was an aerial, microscopic whisper close beside me. "We see you, Haljan! You must yield!" Their eavesdropping vibrations, with audible projection, were upon me. I retorted aloud. "Come and get me! You cannot take me alive." I do protest if this action of mine in the chart-room may seem bravado. I had no wish to die. There was within me a very healthy desire for life. But I felt, by holding out, that some chance might come wherewith I might turn events against these brigands. Yet reason told me it was hopeless. Our loyal members of the crew were killed, no doubt. Captain Carter and Balch were killed. The lookouts and Course-masters also. And Blackstone. There remained only Dr. Frank and Snap. Their fate I did not yet know. And there was George Prince. He, perhaps, would help me if he could. But, at best, he was a dubious ally. "You are very foolish, Haljan," murmured the projection of Miko's voice. And then I heard Coniston: "See here, why would not a hundred pounds of gold-leaf tempt you? The code-words which were taken from Johnson--I mean to say, why not tell us where they are?" So that was one of the brigands new difficulties! Snap had taken the code-word sheet, that time we sealed the purser in the cage. I said, "You'll never find them. And when a police ship sights us, what will you do then?" The chances of a police ship were slim indeed, but the brigands evidently did not know that. I wondered again what had become of Snap. Was he captured--or still holding them off? I was watching my windows; for at any moment, under cover of this talk, I might be assailed. * * * * * Gravity came suddenly to the room. Miko's voice said. "We mean well by you, Haljan. There is your normality. Join us. We need you to chart our course." "And a hundred pounds of gold-leaf," urged Coniston. "Or more. Why, this treasure--" I could hear an oath from Miko. And then his ironic voice: "We will not bother you, Haljan. There is no hurry. You will be hungry in good time. And sleepy. Then we will come and get you. And a little acid will make you think differently about helping us...." His vibrations died away. The pull of gravity in the room was normal. I was alone in the dim silence, with the bodies of Carter and Johnson lying huddled on the grid. I bent to examine them. Both were dead. My isolation was no ruse this time. The outlaws made no further attack. Half an hour passed. The deck outside, what I could see of it, was vacant. Balch lay dead close outside the chart-room door. The bodies of Blackstone and the Course-master had been removed from the turret window. A forward lookout--one of Miko's men--was on duty in the nearby tower. Hahn was at the turret controls. The ship was under orderly handling, heading back upon a new course. For the Earth? Or the Moon? It did not seem so. I found, in the chart-room, a Benson curve-light projector which poor Captain Carter had very nearly assembled. I worked on it, trained it through my rear window, along the empty deck; bent it into the lounge archway. Upon my grid the image of the lounge interior presently focused. The passengers in the lounge were huddled in a group. Disheveled, frightened, with Moa standing watching them. Stewards were serving them with a meal. * * * * * Upon a bench, bodies were lying. Some were dead. I saw Rance Rankin. Others were evidently only injured. Dr. Frank was moving among them, attending them. Venza was there, unharmed. And I saw the gamblers, Shac and Dud, sitting white-faced, whispering together. And Glutz's little be-ribboned, be-curled figure on a stool. George Prince was there, standing against the walls shrouded in his mourning cloak, watching the scene with alert, roving eyes. And by the opposite doorway, the huge towering figure of Miko stood on guard. But Snap was missing. A brief glimpse. Miko saw my Benson-light. I could have equipped a heat-ray, and fired along the curved Benson-light into that lounge. But Miko gave me no time. He slid the lounge door closed, and Moa leaped to close the one on my side. My light was cut off; my grid showed only the blank deck and door. Another interval. I had made plans. Futile plans! I could get into the turret perhaps, and kill Hahn. I had the invisible cloak which Johnson was wearing. I took it from his body. Its mechanism could be repaired. Why, with it I could creep about the ship, kill these brigands one by one perhaps. George Prince would be with me. The brigands who had been posing as the stewards and crew-members were unable to navigate; they would obey my orders. There were only Miko, Coniston and Hahn to kill. Futile plans! From my window I could gaze up to the helio-room. And now abruptly I heard Snap's voice: "No! I tell you--no!" And Miko: "Very well. We will try this." So Snap was captured, but not killed. Relief swept me. He was in the helio-room, and Miko was with him. But my relief was short-lived. * * * * * After a brief interval there came a moan from Snap. It floated down from the silence overhead. It made me shudder. My Benson-beam shot into the helio window. It showed me Snap lying there on the floor. He was bound with wire. His torso had been stripped. His livid face was ghastly plain in my light. Miko was bending over him. Miko with a heat-cylinder no longer than a finger. Its needle-beam played upon Snap's naked chest. I could see the gruesome little trail of smoke rising; and as Snap twisted and jerked, there on his flesh was the red and blistered trail of the violet-hot ray. "Now will you tell?" "No!" Miko laughed. "No? Then I shall write my name a little deeper...." A black scar now--a trail etched in the quivering flesh. "Oh!--" Snap's face went white as chalk as he pressed his lips together. "Or a little acid? This fire-writing does not really hurt? Tell me what you did with those code-words!" "No!" In his absorption Miko did not notice my light. Nor did I have the wit to try and fire along it. I was trembling. Snap under torture! As the beam went deeper, Snap suddenly screamed. But he ended, "No! I will send--no message for you--" It had been only a moment. In the chart-room window beside me again a figure appeared! No image. A solid, living person, undisguised by any cloak of invisibility. George Prince had chanced my fire and had crept up upon me. "Haljan! Don't attack me." * * * * * I dropped my light connections. As impulsively I stood up, I saw through the window the figure of Coniston on the deck watching the result of Prince's venture. "Haljan--yield." Prince no more than whispered it. He stood outside on the deck; the low window casement touched his waist. He leaned over it. "He's torturing Snap! Call out that you will yield." The thought had already been in my mind. Another scream from Snap chilled me with horror. I shouted, "Miko! Stop!" I rushed to the window and Prince gripped me. "Louder!" I called louder. "_Miko!_ Stop!" My upflung voice mingled with Snap's agony of protest. Then Miko heard me. His head and shoulders showed up there at the helio-room oval. "You, Haljan?" Prince shouted, "I have made him yield. He will obey you if you stop that torture." I think that poor Snap must have fainted. He was silent. I called, "Stop! I will do what you command." Miko jeered, "That is good. A bargain, if you and Dean obey me. Disarm him, Prince, and bring him out." * * * * * Miko moved back into the helio-room. On the deck Coniston was advancing, but cautiously, mistrustful of me. "Gregg." George Prince flung a leg over the casement and leaped lightly into the dim chart-room. His small slender figure stood beside me, clung to me. "Gregg." A moment, while we stood there together. No ray was upon us. Coniston could not see us, nor could he hear our whispers. "Gregg." A different voice; its throaty, husky quality gone. A soft pleading. "Gregg-- "Gregg, don't you know me? Gregg, dear...." Why, what was this? Not George Prince? A masquerader, yet so like George Prince. "Gregg, don't you know me?" Clinging to me. A soft touch upon my arm. Fingers, clinging. A surge of warm, tingling current was flowing between us. My sweep of instant thoughts. A speck of human Earth-dust, falling free. That was George Prince, who had been killed. George Prince's body, disguised by the scheming Carter and Dr. Frank, buried in the guise of his sister. And this black-robed figure who was trying to help us-- "Anita! Dear God! Anita, darling! Anita!" "Gregg, dear one!" "Anita! Dear God!" * * * * * My arms went around her, my lips pressed hers, and felt her tremulous, eager answer. "Gregg, dear." "Anita, you!" The form of Coniston showed at our window. She cast me off. She said, with her throaty swagger of assumed masculinity: "I have him, Sir Arthur. He will obey us." I sensed her warning glance. She shoved me toward the window. She said ironically, "Have no fear, Haljan. You will not be tortured, you and Dean, if you obey our commands." Coniston gripped me. "You fool! You caused us a lot of trouble, didn't you? Move along there!" He jerked me roughly through the window. Marched me the length of the deck. Out to the stern-space; opened the door of my cubby; flung me in and sealed the door upon me. "Miko will come presently." I stood in the darkness of my tiny room, listening to his retreating footsteps. But my mind was not on him.... All the Universe in that instant had changed for me. Anita was alive! (_To be continued_) FOOTNOTES: [1] As early as 1910 it was discovered that an object magnetized under certain conditions was subject to a loss of weight, its gravity partially nullified. The Martel discovery undoubtedly followed that method. [2] "United States of the World," which came into being in 2057 upon the centenary of the Yellow War. [3] Trinight Hour, i.e., 3 A. M. [4] Pressure sickness. Caused by the difficulty of maintaining a constantly normal air pressure within the vessel owing to the sudden, extreme changes from heat to cold. [5] "Set and Setta," the Martian equivalent of Mr. and Miss. [6] A Venus form of jocular, intimate greeting. * * * * * _REMEMBER_ ASTOUNDING STORIES _Appears on Newsstands_ THE FIRST THURSDAY IN EACH MONTH * * * * * _In the Next Issue_ MONSTERS of MOYEN _A Complete Novelet of a Half-God Half-Beast's Extraordinary Attempt to Dominate the Earth_ _By_ Arthur J. Burks _A Large Instalment of_ BRIGANDS of the MOON _The Splendid Interplanetary Novel_ _By_ Ray Cummings The RAY of MADNESS _The Account of Another of Dr. Bird's Amazing Exploits_ _By_ Captain S. P. Meek --_And Many Other Stories by Your Favorite Authors!_ * * * * * The Soul Master _By Will Smith and R. J. Robbins_ Desperately O'Hara plunged into Prof. Kell's mysterious mansion. For his friend Skip was the victim of the eccentric scientist's de-astralizing experiment, and faced a fate more hideous than death. [Illustration: _A terrific force was emanating from that devilish globe above._] The train was slowing down for Keegan. A whistle from the locomotive ahead had warned the two alert young men in the smoker to that effect, and they arose to leave the train. Both were neatly and quietly dressed. One carried a medium-sized camera with the necessary tripod and accessory satchel. The other carried no impediments of any sort. Both were smoking cigars, evidently not of expensive variety, judging by the unaromatic atmosphere thereabouts. "Can't see what Bland shipped us up to this one-horse dump for," grumbled Skip Handlon, the one who carried the camera. He was the slighter of the two and perhaps half a head shorter than the other. "Do you know anything about it?" "Not much," confessed the other as they alighted from the smoker. "All I can tell you is that Bland sent for me early this morning, told me to get a story out of this Professor Kell and to drag you along. After we get there you are to do as judgment dictates. But I remember that the Chief was specific as regards one thing. You are to get the proff's mug. Don't forget. The old fellow may growl and show fight, but it's up to you to deliver the goods--or, in this case, get them. Don't depend on me for help. I expect to have troubles of my own." Thus gloomed Horace Perry, star reporter for the Journal. "This Keegan place"--Handlon was using his eyes swiftly and comprehensively--"isn't worth much. Can't see how it manages to even rate a name. Some dump, all right!" "You said a couple mouthfuls." "How's the train service, if any?" "Rotten. Two trains a day." The other was anything but enthusiastic. "We've a nice long wait for the next one, you can bet. Now, just add to that a rough reception after we reach the old lion's lair and you get a nice idea of what Bland expects from his men." * * * * * Handlon made a wry face at this. "The bird who first applied the words 'Hard Boiled' to the Chief's monniker knew something." "You don't know the half of it," retorted Perry encouragingly. "Just wait and see what a beaut of a fit he can throw for _your_ benefit if you fail to do your stuff--and I don't mean maybe." Old Man Bland owned the Journal, hired and fired his crew and did his own editing, with the help of as capable an office gang as could be gotten together. It is quite possible that "Hard Boiled" Bland demanded more from his men than any other editor ever has before or since. Nevertheless he got results, and none of his experienced underlings ever kicked, for the pay was right. If a hapless scribe had the temerity to enter the editorial sanctum with a negative report, the almost invariable reply had been a glare and a peremptory order, "Get the copy." And get it they did. If a person refused an interview these clever fellows generally succeeded in getting their information from the next most reliable source, and it arrived in print just the same. Of such a breed was Perry. Handlon, being a more recent acquisition to the staff, was not yet especially aggressive in his work. On this account the former took keen zest in scaring him into displaying a bit more sand. * * * * * The train had disappeared around a bend and the two reporters felt themselves marooned. Keegan, without question, was a most forlorn looking spot. A dismal shanty, much the worse for weather, stood beside the track. In front, a few rotting planks proclaimed that once upon a time the place had boasted a real freight platform. Probably, back in some long-forgotten age, a station agent had also held forth in the rickety shanty. A sign hung on each end of the crumbling structure on which could still be deciphered the legend "KEEGAN." On the opposite side of the track was an old, disused siding. The only other feature of interest thereabouts was a well traveled country road which crossed the tracks near the shanty, wound sinuously over a rock-strewn hill and became lost in the mazes of an upland forest. There being no signboard of any kind to indicate their destination, the two, after a moment's hesitation, started off briskly in a chance direction. The air was hot and sultry, and in the open spaces the sun beat down mercilessly upon the two hapless ones. As they proceeded into the depths of the forest they were shielded somewhat from the worst of the heat. Gradually upon their city-bred nostrils there stole the odor of conifers, accompanied by a myriad of other forest odors. Both sniffed the air appreciatively. "This is sure the life," remarked Perry. "If I weren't so darn thirsty now...." He became lost in mournful thought. * * * * * A considerable time passed. The newspaper men trudged wearily along until finally another bend brought them to the beginning of a steep descent. The forest had thinned out to nothing. "Seems to me I smell smoke," blurted out Handlon suddenly. "Must be that we are approaching the old party's lair. Remember? Bland said that he--" "Uh huh!" the other grunted, almost inaudibly. Now that they seemed to be arriving at their destination something had occurred to him. He had fished from his pocket a sheaf of clippings and was perusing them intently. "Bland said, 'Get the copy'," he muttered irrelevantly and half to himself. The clippings all related directly to Professor Kell or to happenings local to Keegan. Some were of peculiar interest. The first one was headlined thus: MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF ROBERT MANION AND DAUGHTER STILL UNSOLVED The piece contained a description of the missing man, a fairly prosperous banker who had been seen four days previously driving through Keegan in a small roadster, and one of the girl, who was in the car with him. It told that the banker and his daughter were last seen by a farmer named Willetts who lived in a shack on the East Keegan road, fleeing before a bad thunder storm. He believed the pair were trying to make the Kell mansion ahead of the rain. Nothing more of the Manions or their car had been seen, and their personal effects remained at their hotel in a nearby village unclaimed. The heavy rain had of course effectually obliterated all wheel tracks. Another clipping was fairly lengthy, but Perry glanced only at the headlines: KELL STILL CARRYING ON HIS STRANGE EXPERIMENTS Has Long Been Known to Have Fantastic Theories. Refuses to Divulge Exact Methods Employed, or Nature of Results Still another appeared to be an excerpt from an article in an agricultural paper. It read: A prize bull belonging to Alton Shepard, a Keegan cattle breeder, has created considerable sensation by running amuck in a most peculiar manner. While seemingly more intelligent than heretofore, it has developed characteristics known to be utterly alien to this type of animal. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the case is the refusal of the animal to eat its accustomed food. Instead it now consumes enormous quantities of meat. The terrific bellow of the animal's voice has also undergone a marked change, now resembling nothing earthly, although some have remarked that it could be likened to the bay of an enormous hound. Some of its later actions have seemingly added further canine attributes, which make the matter all the more mystifying. Veterinaries are asking why this animal should chase automobiles, and why it should carry bones in its mouth and try to bury them! The last one read in part: Professor Kell has been questioned by authorities at Keegan relative to the disappearance there last Tuesday of Robert Manion and his daughter. Kell seemed unable to furnish clues of any value, but officials are not entirely satisfied with the man's attitude toward the questions. Somewhat bewildered by these apparently unrelated items, the reporter remained lost in thought for quite a space, the while he endeavored to map out his course of action when he should meet the redoubtable Professor. That many of the weird occurrences could be traced in some way to the latter's door had evidently occurred to Bland. Furthermore, the Old Man relied implicitly upon Perry to get results. It must be said that for once the star reporter was not overly enthusiastic with the assignment. Certain rumors aside from the clippings in his hand had produced in his mind a feeling of uneasiness. So far as his personal preference was concerned he would have been well satisfied if some cub reporter had been given the job. Try as he would, however, he could offer no tangible reason for the sudden wariness. He was aroused from his absorption by his companion. "Thought I smelled smoke a while back, and I was right. That's the house up in the edge of the pines. Deep grounds in front and all gone to seed; fits the description exactly. Thank Heaven we struck off from the station in the right direction. This stroll has been long enough. Come out of it and let's get this job finished." Suiting the action to the words Handlon started off at a brisk pace down the hill, followed at a more moderate rate by Perry. At length they came within full sight of the grounds. Extending for a considerable distance before them and enclosing a large tract of land now well covered with lush grass, was a formidable looking wall. In former days a glorious mantle of ivy had covered the rough stones; but now there was little left, and what there was looked pitifully decrepit. They continued their progress along this barrier, finally coming upon a huge iron gate now much the worse for rust. It stood wide open. * * * * * The road up to the house had long since become overgrown with rank grass and weeds. Faintly traceable through the mass of green could be seen a rough footpath which the two followed carefully. They met no one. As they approached the night of black pines the mass of the old mansion began to loom up before them, grim and forbidding. Instinctively both shivered. The silence of the place was complete and of an uncannily tangible quality. Nervously they looked about them. "How do you like it, Skip?" The words from Perry's previously silent lips broke upon the stillness like a thunderclap. The other started. "I should hate to die in it," Handlon answered solemnly. "I'll bet the old joint is haunted. Nobody but a lunatic would ever live in it." "I get a good deal the same impression myself," said Perry. "I don't wonder that Bland sent two of us to cover the job." As he spoke he mounted a flight of steps to a tumbledown veranda. There was no sign of a door bell on the weather-beaten portal, but an ancient knocker of bronze hanging forlornly before him seemed to suggest a means of attracting attention. He raised it and rapped smartly. * * * * * No answer. Possessing all the attributes of the conventional reporter and a few additional ones, Perry did not allow himself to become disheartened, but merely repeated his summons, this time with more vim. "Well, Horace," grinned Handlon, "it does look as if we were not so very welcome here. However, seems to me if you were to pick up that piece of dead limb and do some real knocking with it.... The dear Professor may be deaf, you know, or maybe he's--" "Skip, my boy, I don't know as we ought to go in right now after all. Do you realize it will soon be dark?" "To tell you the truth, Horace, I'm not stuck on this assignment either. And I feel that after dark I should like it even less, somehow. But, gee, the Old Man...." "Oh, I'm not thinking of quitting on the job. We don't do that on the Journal." Perry smiled paternally at the photographer. Could it be he had purposely raised the other's hopes in order to chaff him some more? "But I was thinking that it might be a good idea to look about the outbuildings a bit while we have a little daylight. Eh?" Handlon looked disappointed, but nodded gamely. He delayed only long enough to deposit his camera and traps behind a grossly overgrown hydrangea by the steps, then, with a resigned air, declared himself ready to follow wherever the other might lead. Perry elected to explore the barn first. This was a depressing old pile, unpainted in years, with what had once been stout doors now swinging and bumping in the light breeze. As the two men drew nearer, this breeze--which seemed to sigh through the place at will--brought foul odors that told them the place was at least not tenantless. In some trepidation they stepped inside and stood blinking in the half darkness. "Pretty Polly!" "Good God! What was that?" Handlon whispered. He knew it was no parrot's voice. This was a far deeper sound than that, a sound louder than anything a parrot's throat could produce. It came from the direction of a ruinous stall over near a cobwebbed window. As Perry started fearfully toward this, there issued from it a curious scraping sound, followed by a fall that shook the floor, and a threshing as of hoofs. Now the great voice could be heard again, this time uttering what sounded strangely like oaths roared out in a foreign tongue. Yet when the newspaper men reached the stall they found it occupied only by a large mule. * * * * * The animal was lying on its side, its feet scraping feebly against the side of the stall. The heaving, foam-flecked body was a mass of hideous bruises, some of which were bleeding profusely. The creature seemed to be in the last stage of exhaustion, lying with lips drawn back and eyes closed. Beneath it and scattered all over the stall floor was a thick layer of some whitish seeds. "That's--why that's sunflower seed, Horace!" Handlon almost whimpered. "And look! Look in that crib! It's full of the same stuff! Where's the hay, Horace? Does this thing--" He was interrupted by a mighty movement of the beast--a threshing that nearly blinded the men in the cloud of bloodstained seeds it raised. With something between a curse and a sob, the mule lunged at its crib as if attempting to get bodily into it. But no: it was only trying to perch on its edge! Now it had succeeded. The ungainly beast hung there a second, two, three. From its uplifted throat issued that usually innocuous phrase, a phrase now a thing of delirious horror: "Pretty Polly!" With a crash the tortured creature fell to the floor, to lie there gasping and moaning. Skip Handlon left that barn. Perry retained just enough wit to do what he should have done the instant he first saw the animal. He whipped out his automatic and fired one merciful shot. Then he too started for the outside. He arrived in the yard perhaps ten seconds behind Handlon. "Good Heavens, Perry," gibbered Handlon. "I'm not going to stay around this place another minute. Just let me find where I left that suffering camera, that's all I ask." "Easy now." Perry laid a hand on his companion's shoulder. "I guess we're up against something pretty fierce here, but we're going to see it through, and you know it. So let's cut out the flight talk and go raise the Professor." Handlon tried earnestly to don a look of determination. If Perry was set on staying here the least he could do was stay with him. However, could Perry have foreseen the events which were to entangle them, he probably would have led the race to the gate. As it was, he grasped a stick and marched bravely up toward the front door. * * * * * A sudden commotion behind him caused him to wheel sharply around. Simultaneously a yell burst from Handlon. "Look out, Horace!" What he saw almost froze the blood in his veins. From a tumbledown coach house had issued an enormous wolf-hound which was now almost upon then, eyes flaming, fangs gleaming horribly. So unexpected was the attack that both men stood rooted in their tracks. The next moment the charging brute was upon them, and had bowled Handlon off his equilibrium as if he were a child. The unfortunate photographer made a desperate attempt to prevent injury to his precious camera, which he had but a moment earlier succeeded in retrieving, and in doing so fell rather violently to the ground. Every moment he expected to feel the powerful jaws crunch his throat, and he made no effort to rise. For several seconds he remained thus, until he could endure the suspense no longer. He glanced around only to see Perry, staring open-mouthed at the animal which had so frightened them. Apparently it had forgotten the presence of the two men. Handlon regained his feet rather awkwardly, the while keeping a watchful eye on the beast, of whose uncertain temper he was by now fully aware. In an undertone he addressed his companion. "What do you make of it?" he wanted to know. "Did the critter bite you?" "No. That's the queer part of it. Neither did he bite you, if you were to think it over a minute. Just put his nose down and _rammed_ you, head on." The photographer was flabbergasted. Involuntarily his gaze stole again in the direction of the offending brute. "What on earth--" he began. "Is he sharpening his teeth on a rock preparatory to another attack upon us? Or--What the deuce _is_ he doing?" "If you ask me," came astonishingly from the watchful Perry, "he's eating grass, which is my idea of something damn foolish for a perfectly normal hound, genus lupo, to be--Look out!" * * * * * The animal, as if suddenly remembering the presence of the men, suddenly charged at them again, head down, eyes blazing. As before, it made no effort to bite. Though both men were somewhat disconcerted by the great brute they held their ground, and when it presented the opportunity the older reporter planted a terrific kick to the flank which sent the animal whimpering back to its shed behind. "Score one," breathed Handlon. "If we--" At a sudden grating sound overhead, he stopped. Both turned to face the threatening muzzle of an ancient blunderbuss. Behind it was an irate countenance, nearly covered by an unclipped beard of a dirty gray color. In the eyes now glaring at them malevolently through heavily concaved spectacles they read hate unutterable. The barrel of the blunderbuss swung slightly as it covered alternately one and the other. Both sensed that the finger even now tightening on the trigger would not hesitate unduly. Being more or less hardened to rebuffs of all kinds in the pursuance of their calling, the reporters did not hesitate in stating their purpose. "What?" yelled the old man. "You dare to invade my grounds and disturb me at my labors for such a reason? Reporters! My scientific research work is not for publicity, sirs; and futhermore I want it understood that I am not to be dragged from my laboratory again for the purpose of entertaining you or any others of your ilk. Get away!" Without further ado the window was slammed down, a shutter closed on the inside, and once more the silence of the dead descended upon the spot. The two men grinned ruefully at each other, Handlon finally breaking the stillness. "My idea of the world's original one-sided conversation. We simply didn't talk--and yet we're supposed to be reporters. You've got to hand it to the Proff, Horace, for the beautiful rock-crusher he just handed us." "You didn't think we had anything easy, did you?" said Perry irritably. "He'll change his tune presently, when--" * * * * * Handlon's jaw dropped. "You don't mean you're going to take any more chances! Would you rouse him again after the way he treated us with that gun? Besides, the train...." Perry bent a scathing glance at his companion. "What on earth has the train to do with our getting the Professor's confession of crime or whatever he has to offer? You evidently don't know Bland--much. I deduce that a lot of my sweetness has been wasted on the desert air. Once more, let me assure you that if you propose to go back without the Proff's mug on one of those plates you might as well mail your resignation from _here_. Get me?" The other wilted. "I wonder," Perry ruminated as he stared in the direction of the shed wherein the canine monstrosity had disappeared. "Do you suppose that you can get a snap of the old boy's mug if I can get him to the window again? If you can do that, just leave the rest to me. I've handled these crusty birds before. What say?" "Go as far as you like." The photographer was once more grinning as he unslung his camera and carefully adjusted a plate in place. Everything at last to his satisfaction he gripped flash pan and bulb. "I'm going to make some racket now," announced Perry grimly. "If Kell shows up, work fast. He may shoot at you, but don't get excited. It's almost dark, so his aim _might_ be poor." At this suggestion his companion showed signs of panic, but the other affected not to notice this. There came a deafening hullaballoo as Perry beat a terrific tattoo on the ancient door. Followed a deep silence, while Perry leaped back to stand in front of Skip and his camera. After perhaps a full minute's wait he once more opened up his bombardment, to jump quickly back to the camera as before. This time he had better success. The window was again opened and the muzzle of the blunderbuss put in its appearance. Handlon stood close behind Perry as he silently swung the camera into a more favorable position for action. The face at the window was purple with wrath. "You damned pests! Leave my grounds at once or I shall call my hound and set him upon you. And when--" * * * * * Crack! Flash! Click! Perry had made a sudden sidewise movement as Handlon went into action. "Much obliged, Professor," said Perry politely. "Your pose with that old cannon is going to be very effective from the front page. The write-up will doubtless be interesting too. Probably the story won't be quite so accurate as it would be had you told it to us yourself; but we shall get as many of the details from the natives hereabouts as we can. Good-day to you, sir!" Motioning to the other he turned on his heel and started down the driveway. It was an old trick, and for a long moment of suspense he almost feared that it would fail. Another moment-- "Wait!" The quavering voice of the irascible old villain had lost some of its malice. "Come back here a minute." With simulated reluctance the two slowly retraced their steps. "Is there something else, sir?" "Perhaps...." The old man hesitated, as if pondering upon his words. "Perhaps if you care to step in I can be of assistance to you after all. It occurs to me that possibly I have been too abrupt with you." "I am very glad that you have decided to cooperate with us, Professor Kell," answered the reporter heartily, as they ascended the steps. The old man's head disappeared from the window and shortly the sound of footsteps inside told of his approach. Finally the oaken door swung open, and they were silently ushered into the musty smelling hallway. Though outwardly accepting the Professor's suddenly pacific attitude, Perry made up his mind to be on his guard. * * * * * As they entered what had evidently been the parlor in bygone days, an oppressive, heavy odor smote their nostrils, telling of age-old carpets and of draperies allowed to decay unnoticed. On the walls hung several antique prints, a poorly executed crayon portrait of a person doubtless an ancestor of the present Kell, and one or two paintings done in oil, now badly cracked and stained. Everything gave the impression of an era long since departed, and the two men felt vaguely out of place. Their host led them to a pair of dilapidated chairs, which they accepted gratefully. The ride to Keegan after a hard day's work had not tended to improve their spirits. "Now to business." Perry went straight to the point, desiring to get the interview over as soon as possible. "We have heard indirectly of various happenings in this vicinity which many think have some connection with your scientific experiments. Any statement you may care to make to us in regard to these happenings will be greatly appreciated by my paper. Inasmuch as what little has already been printed is probably of an erroneous nature, we believe it will be in your own best interest to give us as complete data as possible." Here he became slightly histrionic. "Of course we do not allow ourselves to take the stories told by the local inhabitants too literally, as such persons are too liable to exaggerate, but we must assume that some of these stories have partial basis in fact. Any information relative to your scientific work, incidentally, will make good copy for us also." Perry gazed steadily at the patriarch as he spoke. For a moment, a crafty expression passed over the old man's face, but as suddenly it disappeared. Evidently he had arrived at a decision. "Come with me," he wheezed. * * * * * The two newspaper men exchanged swift glances, the same thought in the mind of each. Were they about to be led into a trap? If the old man's shady reputation was at all deserved they would do well to be wary. Perry thought swiftly of the clippings he had read and of what gossip he had heard, then glanced once more in the direction of Handlon. That worthy was smiling meaningly and had already arisen to follow the Professor. Reluctantly Perry got to his feet and the three proceeded to climb a rickety stairway to the third floor. The guide turned at the head of the stairs and entered a long dark corridor. Here the floor was covered with a thick carpet which, as they trod upon it, gave forth not the slightest sound. The hall gave upon several rooms, all dark and gloomy and giving the same dismal impression of long disuse. How could the savant endure such a depressing abode! The accumulation of dust and cobwebs in these long forgotten chambers, the general evidence of decay--all told of possible horrors ahead. They became wary. But they were not wary enough! The uncouth figure ahead of them had stopped and was fumbling with the lock of an ancient door. Instinctively Perry noted that it was of great thickness and of heavy oak. Now the Professor had it open and was motioning for them to enter. Handlon started forward eagerly, but hurriedly drew back as he felt the grip of the other reporter's hand on his arm. "Get back, you fool!" The words were hissed into the ear of the incautious one. Then, to the Professor, Perry observed: "If you have no objection we would prefer that you precede us." A look of insane fury leaped to the face of the old man, lingered but an instant and was gone. Though the expression was but momentary, both men had seen, and seeing had realized their danger. * * * * * They followed him into the chamber, which was soon illumined fitfully by a smoky kerosene lamp. Both took a rapid survey of the place. Conceivably it might have been the scene of scientific experiments, but its aspect surely belied such a supposition. The average imagination would instantly pronounce it the abode of a maniac, or the lair of an alchemist. Again, that it might be the laboratory of an extremely slovenly veterinary was suggested by the several filthy cages to be seen resting against the wall. All of these were unoccupied except one in a dark corner, from which issued a sound of contented purring, evidently telling of some well-satisfied cat. The air was close and foul, being heavy with the odor of musty, decaying drugs. In every possible niche and cranny the omnipresent dust had settled in a uniform sheen of gray which showed but few signs of recent disturbance. "Here, gentlemen," their host was saying, "is where I carry on my work. It is rather gloomy here after dark, but then I do not spend much time here during the night. I have decided to acquaint you with some of the details of one or two of my experiments. Doubtless you will find them interesting." While speaking he had, mechanically it seemed, reached for a glass humidor in which were perhaps a dozen cigars. Silently he selected one and extended the rest to the two visitors. After all three had puffed for a moment at the weeds, the old man began to talk, rapidly it seemed to them. Perry from time to time took notes, as the old man proceeded, an expression of utter amazement gradually overspreading his face. Handlon pulled away contentedly at his cigar, and on his features there grew an almost ludicrous expression of well-being. Was the simple photographer so completely at ease that he had at length forsaken all thought of possible danger? As Professor Kell talked on he seemed to warm to his subject. At the end of five minutes he began uncovering a peculiar apparatus which had rested beneath the massive old table before which they were sitting. The two men caught the flash of light on glass, and a jumble of coiled wires became visible. * * * * * Was the air in the laboratory getting unbearably close? Or was the queer leaden feeling that had taken possession of Perry's lungs but an indication of his overpowering weariness? He felt a steadily increasing irritation, as if for some strange reason he suddenly resented the words of their host, which seemed to be pouring out in an endless stream. The cigar had, paradoxically, an oddly soothing quality, and he puffed away in silence. Why had the room suddenly taken on so hazy an aspect? Why did Handlon grin in that idiotic manner? And the Professor ... he was getting farther and farther away ... that perfecto ... or was it an El Cabbajo? What was the old archfiend doing to him anyhow?... Why was he laughing and leering at them so horribly?... Confound it all ... that cigar ... where was it?... Just one more puff.... Blindly he groped for the missing weed, becoming aware of a cackle of amusement nearby. Professor Kell was standing near the spot where he had fallen and now began prodding him contemptuously with his toe. "Fools!" he was saying. "You thought to interfere with my program. But you are in my power and you have no hope of escape. I am unexpectedly provided with more subjects for my experiments. You will...." His words became hazy and unintelligible, for the hapless reporter was drifting off into a numb oblivion. He had long since lost the power to move a muscle. Out of the corner of an eye, just before he lost consciousness altogether, he perceived Handlon lying upon the floor still puffing at the fateful drugged cigar. * * * * * Eons passed. To the reporter came a vision of a throbbing, glaring inferno, wherein he was shaken and tossed by terrific forces. His very vital essence seemed to respond to a mighty vibration. Now he was but a part of some terrific chaos. Dimly he became aware of another being with whom he must contend. Now he was in a death struggle, and to his horror he found himself being slowly but surely overpowered. A demoniac grin played upon the features of the other as he forced the reporter to his knees. It was Handlon.... Once more he was sinking into soft oblivion, the while a horrid miasma assailed his nostrils. He was nothing.... * * * * * Slowly, and with infinite effort, Perry felt himself returning to consciousness, though he had no clear conception of his surroundings. His brain was as yet but a whirling vortex of confused sounds, colors and--yes, odors. A temporary rift came in the mental cloud which fettered his faculties, and things began to take definite shape. He became aware that he was lying upon his back at some elevation from the floor. Again the cloudy incubus closed in and he knew no more. When he finally recovered the use of his faculties it was to discover himself the possessor of a violent headache. The pain came in such fearsome throbs that it was well nigh unendurable. The lamp still sputtered dimly where the professor had left it. At the moment it was on the point of going out altogether. The reporter noticed this, and over him stole a sense of panic. What if the light should fail altogether, leaving him lying in the dark in this frightful place! Still dizzy and sick, he managed to rise upon his elbows enough to complete a survey of the room. He was still in the laboratory of Professor Kell, but that worthy had disappeared. Of Handlon there was no sign. The mysterious apparatus, of which he now had but a vague remembrance, also had vanished. His thoughts became confused again, and wearily he passed a hand over his brow in the effort to collect all of his faculties. The lamp began to sputter, arousing him to action. Desperately he fought against the benumbing sensation that was even again stealing over him. Gradually he gained the ascendancy. He struggled dizzily to his feet and took a few tentative steps. Where was Handlon? He decided his friend had probably recovered from the drug first and was gone, possibly to get a doctor for him, Perry. However, he must make some search to determine if Skip had really left the premises. As he walked through the open door the lamp in his hand gave a last despairing flicker and went out. From there he was forced to grope his way down the dark hall to the stairs. Just how he reached the lower floor he was never able to remember, for as yet all the effect of the powerful drug had not worn off. He had a dim recollection of being thankful to the ancestor of Kell who had provided such thick carpets in these halls. Thanks to them his footsteps had been noiseless, at any rate. What was Kell's real object in giving them those drugged cigars? he wondered. How long had they been under the influence of the lethal stuff? Surely several hours. Upon glancing through a hall window he found that outside was the blackness of midnight. * * * * * Cautiously he explored the desolate chambers on the ground floor: the kitchen--where it could be plainly seen that cooking of a sort had been done--the barn, and woodshed. Not a living thing could he find, not even the huge wolf-hound which had attacked them in so strange a manner that afternoon. By now he was quite frankly worried on Handlon's account. At that moment, could he have known the actual fate that had overtaken his companion, it is quite probable he would have gone mad. He stumbled back and into the dark front hall, shouting his friend's name. The response was a hollow echo, and once or twice he thought he heard the ghost of a mocking chuckle. At length he gave up the search and started for the door, intent now only upon flight from the accursed place. He would report the whole thing to the office and let Bland do what he pleased about it. Doubtless Handlon had already left. Then he stumbled over Handlon's camera. Evidently the Professor had neglected to take possession of it. That must be rescued, at all costs. He picked it up and felt the exposed plate still inside. He started again for the door. What little light there was faded out and he felt stealing over him a horrid sensation of weakness. Again came a period of agony during which he felt the grip of unseen forces. Once more it seemed that he was engaged in mortal strife with Skip Handlon. Malevolently Handlon glared at him as he endeavored with all his strength to overcome Perry. This time, however, the latter seemed to have more strength and resisted the attack for what must have been hours. Finally the other drew away baffled. At this the mental incubus surrounding Perry's faculties broke. Dimly he became aware of a grinding noise nearby and a constant lurching of his body. At length his vision cleared sufficiently to enable him to discover the cause of the peculiar sensations. He was in a railroad coach! * * * * * He took a rapid glance around and noted a drummer sitting in the seat across the aisle, staring curiously at him. With an effort Perry assumed an inscrutable expression and determined to stare the other out of countenance. Reluctantly the man glanced away, and after a moment, under Perry's stony gaze, he suddenly arose and chose a new seat in front of the car. Perry took to the solace of a cigarette and stared out at the flying telegraph poles. From time to time he noted familiar landmarks. The train had evidently left Keegan far behind and was already nearly into the home town. For the balance of the ride the reporter experienced pure nightmare. The peculiar sensations of dizziness, accompanied by frightful periods of insensibility, kept recurring, now, however, not lasting more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. At such times as he was conscious he found opportunity to wonder in an abstracted sort of way how he had ever managed to get on the train and pay his fare, which must have been a cash one, without arousing the conductor's suspicions. Discovery of a rebate in his pocket proved that he must have done so, however. The business of leaving the train and getting to the office has always been an unknown chapter in Perry's life. He came out of one of his mental fogs to find himself seated in the private editorial sanctum of the Journal. Evidently he had just arrived. Bland, a thick-set man with the jaw of a bulldog, was eyeing him intently. "Well! Any report to make?" The question was crisp. The reporter passed a hand across his perspiring forehead. "Yes, I guess so. I--er--that is--you see--" "Where's Handlon? What happened to you? You act as if you were drunk." Bland was not in an amiable mood. "Search me," Perry managed to respond. "If Skip isn't here old man Kell must have done for him. I came back alone." "You wha-a-t?" the irate editor fairly roared, half rising from his chair. "Tell me exactly what happened and get ready to go back there on the next train. Or--no, on second thoughts you'd better go to bed. You look all used up. Handlon may be dead or dying at this minute. That Kell could do anything." He pressed the button on his desk. "Johnny," he said to the office boy, "get O'Hara in here on the double quick and tell him to bring along his hat and coat." * * * * * He turned again to Perry, who was gazing nervously at the door. "Now tell me everything that happened and make it fast," he ordered. The reporter complied, omitting nothing except the little matter of his mental lapses at the house of Professor Kell and later on the train. The incident of the drugged cigars seemed to interest the Old Man hugely, and Perry did not forget to play up Handlon's exploits in getting the picture of the Professor. All through the recital he was in a sweat for fear that he might have a recurrence of one of his brain spells and that Bland would become cognizant of it. When would the Chief finish and let him escape from the office? Desperately he fought to prevent the numbing sensation from overcoming him. All that kept him from finally fleeing the place in panic was the entrance of Jimmie O'Hara. Slight, wiry and efficient looking, this individual was a specimen of the perfect Journal reporter. This is saying a good deal, for the news crew and editorial force of the paper were a carefully selected body of men indeed. Bland never hired a man unless experience had endowed him with some unusual qualification. Most of them could write up a story with realistic exactitude, being able in most cases to supply details gleaned from actual experience in one walk of life or another. * * * * * Of this redoubtable crew probably the queerest was Jimmie O'Hara. Jimmie had just finished a sentence in the "pen" for safe-cracking at the time he landed the job with the Journal. Theoretically all men should have shunned him on account of his jailbird taint. Not so Bland. The Chief was independent in his ideas on the eternal fitness of things and allowed none of the ordinary conventions of humanity to influence his decisions. So Jimmie became one of the staff and worked hard to justify Bland in hiring him. His former profession gave him valuable sidelights upon crime stories of all kinds, and he was almost invariably picked as the man to write these up for the columns. "Jimmie," said the Chief, "we have need of an experienced strong-arm man and all around second story worker. You are the only man on the force who fills the bill for this job. Perry here has just returned from Keegan, where I sent him to interview Professor Kell. Skip Handlon went with him, but failed to return. We want to know what happened to Skip. That is your job. _Get Handlon!_ If he is dead let me know by long distance phone and I'll have a couple of headquarters men down there in a hurry. Get a good fast car and don't waste any time. That's all." O'Hara stopped long enough to get the location of Professor Kell's place fixed in his mind, then abruptly departed. Bland gazed after him musingly. "The Professor will have some job to put anything over on that bird," he said grimly. "Personally, I'm sorry for the old soul." * * * * * After leaving the Journal office Jimmie proceeded directly to a certain stable where he kept his private car. It was a long, low speedster with a powerful engine, and capable of eating up distance. It was the work of a minute to touch the starter and back out of the yard. For the next hour he held the wheel grimly while the car roared over the seventy-odd miles to Keegan. Would he be in time? At last a sign post told him that he was within five miles of the railroad crossing at Keegan. Now the headlights were picking out the black outlines of the freight shed, and the next moment he had swept over the tracks. The luminous dial on his wrist watch notified him that he had been on the road but little over an hour, but his spirits somehow refused to revive with the knowledge. About a mile beyond the station he drove the car into a dark wood road and parked it, turning off all lights. The rest of the way to the Professor's mansion he did on foot. Rather than approach from the front of the grounds he nimbly climbed a stone wall and, crossing a field or two, entered the stretch of woods which extended just behind the mansion. His pocket flashlight here came into use, and once or twice he gave a reassuring pat to a rear pocket where bulged a heavy Colt automatic. * * * * * What was that? He had approached very close to the rear of the house now. No lights were visible as yet, but unless he was greatly mistaken he had heard a muffled scream. He stopped in his tracks and listened intently. Again it came, this time with a blood-curdling cadence ending in what he would have sworn was a choking sob. The little job of getting the old-fashioned rear window open was a mere nothing to the experienced O'Hara, and in a moment he was inside the house. His feet struck soft carpet. Catlike, he stepped to one side in order to prevent any hidden eyes from perceiving his form silhouetted in the dim light of the open window. He dared not use his flashlight for fear that the circle of light would betray his position, thus making him an excellent target for possible bullets. Following the wall closely he managed to circle the room without mishap. His searching fingers finally came in contact with a door frame, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Here there was nothing to bar his progress except some moth-eaten portieres. These he brushed aside. The room which he now entered was probably the same into which the Professor had ushered Handlon and Perry the day before. There being still no sign of life about, the reporter decided to throw caution to the winds. He brought his flash into play. Quickly casting the powerful beam around the chamber he examined the place with an all-searching glance. * * * * * Nothing. With a stifled oath he turned his attention to the other rooms in the immediate vicinity. The brilliant light revealed not the slightest trace of a person, living or dead. The sound must have come from the second story or from the cellar. He decided on the upper floor. Feverish with impatience because of the valuable time he had already lost, he bounded up the heavily carpeted stairs two at a time. Now to his keen ears came certain faint sounds which told him that he was on the right track. Before him extended a long, dusty hall, terminating in a single heavy door. Several other doors opened at intervals along the corridor. One or two of these were open, and he threw the beam from his flash hastily into one after another of them. He saw only dusty and mildewed chamber furnishings of an ancient massive style. Suddenly he pricked up his ears. The door ahead of him was creaking slowly open. Instantly he extinguished his torch and leaped into the nearest room. Whoever was opening that end door was carrying a lamp. What if the Professor had accomplices who might discover him and overpower him by force of numbers! O'Hara drew the automatic from his pocket, deriving a comforting assurance from the feel of the cold steel. Here was something no man could resist could he but get it into action. The light was now nearly abreast of his door, and for a sickening instant he thought the prowler was coming into the room. He held his breath. Now the lamp was at the open door, and now it was quickly withdrawn. After a breathless second he tip-toed forward and peered cautiously down the hallway. About here it was that James O'Hara began to realize that this was going to be a horrible night indeed. He had wondered why the progress of the light had been so deathly slow. Now he knew why, by reason of what he saw--and what he saw made him feel rather sick. The man with the lantern was quite plainly Professor Kell, bent nearly double with the weight of a grotesquely big thing on his back, a thing that flung a dim, contorted shadow on the ceiling. And that thing was a dead man. * * * * * A corpse it was--the attitude proved that. With a numb relief O'Hara realized it was not the body of Skip Handlon. This had been a much larger man than Skip, and the clothing was different from anything Handlon had worn. The light was now disappearing down the stairway. For a moment O'Hara felt undecided as to his next move. Should he follow Kell and his burden, or should he not take advantage of this fine opportunity to continue his search of the upper story? That scream still rang in his ears; there had been a very evident feminine quality in it, and the remembrance of that fact reproached him. Had he been guilty of mincing daintily about in this old house while a woman was being done to death under his nose, when a little bolder action on his part might have saved her? Stepping once more into the hall he advanced to the door just closed behind the Professor and tried it, only to find it locked. Out of a pocket came several articles best known to the "profession"--a piece of stiff wire, a skeleton key and other paraphernalia calculated to reduce the obstinate mechanism to submission. For a minute, two, three, he worked at the ancient lock; then, without a creak, the door swung open. A touch of oil to the hinges had insured their silence. Jimmie O'Hara believed in being artistic in his work, especially when it came to fine points, and he was. * * * * * He found himself in the same room where the drugged cigars had been proved the undoing of Handlon and Perry. In order not to alarm the Professor unduly by chance noises and perhaps invite a surprise attack upon himself, O'Hara closed the laboratory door behind him and let the lock spring again. Hastily he made search of the place. No trace of the missing reporter could he find, except two half-consumed cigars in a corner whence the Professor had impatiently kicked them. On the big table in the center of the room, however, was an object which excited his interest. It was apparently nothing more or less than a giant Crookes tube, connected in some way with a complicated mechanism contained in a wooden cabinet under the table. Probably this apparatus was concerned in the Professor's weird experiments which had so aroused the countryside. He studied it curiously, his eyes for the moment closed in thought, until a slight sound somewhere near at hand caused him to open them wide. Was the Kell returning? Quickly he extinguished the lamp and glided to a nearby door, thinking to secrete himself here, and take Kell by surprise. To his consternation the door swung inward at a touch. He prepared instinctively for battle against any foe who might present himself. For a moment he held himself taut; then, nothing of an alarming nature having happened, he drew a swift breath of relief and flashed on his light. He gave vent to a low exclamation. The swiftly darting shaft from the torch had revealed the figure of a girl, bound and gagged. * * * * * The girl lay trembling on a wretched bed in a corner of the dilapidated old chamber. O'Hara crossed the room and bent over her. Still wary of a trap he glanced back in the direction of the laboratory door: all safe there. Jimmie made haste to remove the cruel gag from her mouth. "Courage," he whispered. "Half a minute and you will be free." He produced a knife with a suspiciously long blade and cut her bonds. He then assisted her to her feet, where she reeled dizzily. Realizing the need for fast action he made her sit down while he massaged the bruised arms and ankles, which were badly swollen from the tight ropes. The girl had apparently been in the grip of such terrible fright that she had temporarily lost her power of speech. Mentally he chalked up another score against the Professor as the girl made several ineffectual attempts to speak. "Easy, kid," Jimmie whispered. "Just sit tight, and when you feel able you can tell me all about it. I'm going to get him good for this, you can bank on that." She thanked him with a faint smile, and of a sudden she found her voice. "Who are you? Where is father? Oh, tell me, please! I am afraid that horrible man has murdered him. Are you a servant here? Oh, I don't know whom to trust." "My name is Jimmie O'Hara," replied the reporter briefly; "and I hope you won't worry about me. I am gunning for the Proff myself. Tell me as quickly as you can what you know about him." He still kept an eye on the door of the adjoining laboratory. Any moment he expected to hear the sound of the old man's approach. The room would make an ideal place to ambush the maniac, he had swiftly decided. "I am Norma Manion. Please don't delay, but see if you can locate father." The girl's voice was agonized. "I heard him groan a half-hour ago, and a little later came a terrific crash. Oh, I'm afraid he's dead!" * * * * * Reluctantly Jimmie gave up the idea of ambushing the Professor. "Wait here," he commanded curtly. "If you hear a shot join me as soon as you can. I want to take him alive if I can, but...." With this parting hint he disappeared through the door into the laboratory. Down the carpeted hall he crept to the stairway. Here he stopped and listened, but to his sensitive ears came no sound from below. "Must have gone down the cellar with the body," he muttered. "Here goes for a general exploration." With more boldness than the occasion perhaps really justified he descended the stairs and proceeded to examine the ground floor rooms minutely. The first was the room through which he had made entrance to the house. It proved to be but a storeroom containing nothing of interest, and he soon decided to waste no more time on it. The adjoining chamber, however, yielded some surprising finds. He had pushed back a dusty portiere to find himself in what could be nothing less than the Professor's sleeping chamber. At present the bed was unoccupied, though it showed signs of recent use. The electric torch played swiftly over every possible corner which could constitute a hiding place for an assassin, revealing nothing. Now the ever-searching ray fell upon an old-fashioned dresser, on which was piled a miscellaneous array of articles. Here were combs, brushes, a wig, a huge magnifying glass, and a gold watch. With a barely suppressed exclamation, Jimmie pounced upon the gold timepiece. Handlon's! So well did he know the particular design of his watch that he could have recognized it in the dark by sense of touch alone. So the old man was not averse to robbery among his other activities! The former two-story man thought fast. Handlon had probably been done in, and the body had been disposed of in some weird manner. The only thing that remained to be done, since the unlucky photographer was evidently past human help, was to cut short the Professor's list of murders. * * * * * With the intention of missing no essential detail O'Hara swept the ray of the searchlight around the chamber once more, but discovered no more of importance. Deciding that the sleeping chamber could yield no further clue he shut off the tell-tale ray and stepped noiselessly back into the next room. Here he groped his way around until he encountered a door, which stood open. A moment's cautious exploration with an outstretched foot revealed the top step of a descending staircase. No faintest glimmer of light was visible, but muffled sounds proceeding from the depths told him that someone was below. With infinite care, feeling his way gingerly over the rickety old steps and fearful that an unexpected creak from one of the ancient boards would at any moment prove his undoing, he commenced the descent. Once a board did groan softly, causing him to stop in his tracks and stand with bated breath. He listened for sign of a movement below, while his heart loudly told off a dozen strokes. Stealthily he continued his progress, until finally soft earth under his feet told him he had reached the cellar bottom. Now his straining eyes perceived a tiny bit of light, and simultaneously he became conscious of a deathly stench. The damp earth padding his footsteps, he advanced swiftly toward the source of light, which now seemed to lie in stripes across his line of vision. He soon saw that the stairs gave upon a small boarded-off section of the cellar proper, and light was seeping between the boards. Ah, and here was a rickety door, fortuitously equipped with a large knot-hole. O'Hara applied an eye to this--and what he saw nearly ruined even his cast iron nerve. * * * * * The Professor was working beside a heavy wooden cask, from which issued the horrible stench. From time to time a sodden thud told that he was hacking something to pieces with an ax. Now and then he would strain mightily at a dark and bulky thing which lay on the floor, a thing that required considerable strength to lift. It seemed to be getting lighter after each spasm of frenzied chopping. For a second Kell's shadow wavered away from the thing, and the enervated newspaper man saw it plainly. His senses almost left him as he realized that he was witnessing the dismemberment of a human body. As he hacked the fragments of tissue from the torso the fiend carefully deposited each in the huge cask. At such times a faint boiling sound was heard, and there arose an effluvium that bade fair to overcome even the monster engaged in the foul work. At last the limbs and head had been entirely removed. The Professor evidently decided that the trunk should be left whole, and he put his entire strength into the job of getting it into the cask. It was almost more than he could negotiate, but finally a dull splash told that he had succeeded. At this moment Jimmie O'Hara came out of his trance. The horrible proceeding had left him faint and shaken, and he wished heartily that he could leave the disgusting place as fast as his legs could carry him. But there was still work to be done and he resolved to get it over. The lantern! First he must put that out of commission. The maniac would then be at his mercy. Slowly, steadily he stole through the doorway, his eyes glued to the Professor's back. Now he was within a yard of the lantern, and he drew back his foot for the kick. Next moment Jimmie found himself gazing into the glaring eyes of his intended victim. Instinctively he struck out with the clubbed automatic, but the blow must have fallen short, or else the Professor had developed an uncanny agility. Now to his horror he saw the flashing blade of the bloodstained ax raised on high. He had no time to dodge the blow. He pressed the trigger of the Colt from the position in which he held it. * * * * * The bullet grazed the upraised arm. The ax fell toward O'Hara from fingers lacking strength to retain it, and he grasped it by the handle in midair. The next moment the assassin collected his wits and sprang at him. Silently, the breath of both coming in gasps, the two men strove, each clawing desperately at the other's throat. The reporter fought with the knowledge that should he lose he would never again see the light of day, the other with the fear of the justice that would deal with him. The maniac hugged his arms tightly about Jimmie, pinioning him so tightly that the reporter could not use his gun. At length their convulsive movements brought the men close to the lantern, and the next instant the cellar was plunged in darkness. A second later the Professor tripped over some hidden obstruction and fell, dragging his opponent with him to the earthen floor. To Jimmie's surprise there was no further movement from the body beneath him. Could the old villain be playing possum? He cautiously shifted his hold and grasped the hidden throat. He pressed the Professor's windpipe for a moment, but there was no answering struggle. Slowly the truth dawned upon him. The heavy fall to the floor had rendered the older man insensible. He must work fast. Reaching into his pocket he brought out the ever handy electric torch and flashed it over the features of his prisoner. Kell was breathing heavily. With dexterous hands O'Hara swiftly went through the old man's pockets, removing all which might tend to make that worthy dangerous--an ugly looking pistol of large caliber, a blackjack similar to his own and a small bottle. The latter item Jimmie examined curiously, finally uncorking it and inhaling the contents. He inhaled, not wisely but too well. The fumes from the vial were nigh overpowering, and he reeled back nauseated. The cork he hastily replaced. Just what the nature of the powerful stuff was he never attempted to discover. One acquaintance was enough. * * * * * He staggered to his feet and got the lantern lighted, then sat, gun in hand, waiting for his prisoner's return to his senses. This was becoming increasingly imminent, judging by certain changes in the Professor's respiration. Finally there came a series of shuddering movements as the man attempted to raise his battered body. "Get up, you damned butcher," ordered Jimmie, "and march upstairs. And just remember that I've got you covered; don't make any false moves." He prodded the prostrate form of the by now glaring fiend before him. The stench of the place was nearly overcoming him, and again he felt an overwhelming desire to dash madly from that den of evil, and once more breathe God's fresh air. Under the stimulus of several shoves the Professor finally won to his feet and stumbled up the stairs. Jimmie was taking no chances and kept the automatic sharply digging into the ribs of his prisoner. The fight, however, seemed temporarily to have been all taken out of the old man, and he made no resistance as the reporter drove him on up to the laboratory. The room he found exactly as he left it. At a word from him Norma Manion came from her hiding place in the horrible room where she had been kept prisoner. With an hysterical scream she fell limply to the floor. The sight of her father's murderer had proved too much for her. Forgetting his prisoner for the moment Jimmie sprang to the girl's side. Kell chose this moment to make a dash for freedom. His footsteps, however, were not as noiseless as he had intended, and O'Hara whirled just in time to see his quarry about to throw open the hall door. Jimmie dove for his gun, only to encounter the Professor's mysterious vial, which, though forgotten, still lay in his pocket. With no time to think, he acted purely upon instinct. His arm drew back and the bottle flew straight for the Professor's head. * * * * * By a miracle the missile missed its mark. Came a shivering crash, as the bottle struck a stud in the massive door. Of a sudden recalling the terrific potency of the contents of that particular bottle, Jimmie gasped in dismay. Norma Manion's safety drove every other thought from his mind. At any cost he must remove her from the proximity of those lethal fumes. Hastily and without a backward glance, he gathered the girl into his arms and dashed into the room where he had first found her. Ascertaining that she had but swooned he placed her gently on the bed. In some perplexity as to his next move he stared at the beautiful face now so wan and white. Queer that he hadn't noticed the fact before--she was beautiful. He even took a second look, then noting a continued absence of all sound from the laboratory decided to investigate. Gingerly he pushed open the door, sniffing the air cautiously as he advanced. To his nostrils gradually came a slight scent, which though almost imperceptible made his senses reel. As he approached the hall door he found the atmosphere heavy with the soporific vapors from the broken vial, and he staggered drunkenly. He gave a start of surprise. On the floor, lying in a grotesque huddle which suggested a most unpleasant possibility, was the inert body of Professor Kell. * * * * * Jimmie bent over the body and put an experienced ear to the heart. Yes, there as a faint beat--very faint. Even as he listened he perceived a slight increase in the respiration. Now the breath began coming in great, choking gasps, only to die suddenly to next to nothing. At last with a rueful sigh Jimmie reached to his hip and produced the private O'Hara flagon. He stooped over the Professor's form once more and by dint of much prying at clenched jaws managed to force a sizeable charge of fiery liquid down the old man's throat. Jimmie had just begun to entertain a strong hope that this latter effort would bring the Professor to life, when his keen ear detected signs of a commotion below. He sprang from his position over the slowly reviving Kell and leaped to a vantage point beside the door. A blackjack miraculously appeared from some hidden part of his anatomy and the ever-dependable Colt also became in evidence. Now came the banging of a door, muffled voices, a crash as of a chair overturned in the dark. Up rolled a horrible oath, and the same was rendered in a voice to Jimmie sweetly familiar. Came the sound of footsteps on the stairway and several persons coming along the hall. "Where in hell is Jimmie?" roared a wicked voice. "If he's met with any monkey business in this hell-hole I'll see that the damned place burns to the ground before I leave it!" * * * * * Delightedly Jimmie jerked open the door. "Still alive, Chief," he chirped as the Old Man strode into the laboratory. Bland was followed by Perry, who seemed to be in a sort of daze. Bringing up the rear were a pair of plainclothesmen whom Jimmie knew very well--almost too well. One of these gentlemen bore a lantern which reminded Jimmie strongly of some he had seen that night guarding an open ditch in the public highway. The Professor had fully regained consciousness and was struggling to his feet. As for Norma Manion, she had suddenly appeared, leaning weakly against the door casing, and was surveying the group in great alarm. After being assured by O'Hara that they were her friends she smiled wanly. To Bland and the others she was, of course, an unexpected factor in the weird night's doings, and for several moments they regarded her curiously. At length Jimmie, sensing the question in the Old Man's eyes, elected to offer a few words of explanation. "Miss Manion has just been through a terrible experience," he said. "She and her father have been for some time at the mercy of this monster"--indicating Kell--"and her nerves are completely shattered. We'd better get her out of this as quickly as we can." "Mike!" Hard Boiled Bland glared at one of the officers. "Don't stand there with your teeth in your gums like that. Take this girl out to my car and let her lie down. She needs a stimulant, too. If you search my car and find any red liquor in the left back door pocket, I don't know a thing about it. And stay with her so she won't be afraid to go to sleep." She smiled in silent gratitude and allowed the plainclothesman to lead her away from that chamber of horror. * * * * * The reporter lost no time in telling Bland of his failure to find Skip Handlon. He went on to acquaint his Chief with the facts of all that had occured while he had been at the Professor's house. The fiery old fellow listened grimly. When Jimmie came to the story of the corpse and the cask the editor breathed one word, "Manion!" Jimmie nodded sadly. All eyes turned to the dejected huddle on the floor that was Professor Kell. Finally Bland could wait no longer, but fixed a terrible eye on the murderer and demanded harshly, "Where's Handlon?" Now the Professor burst into a fit of insane laughter, laughter that curdled the blood of the listeners. "You ask me that! It's almost too good. Hee-hee! You sent your two precious reporters out to my house to pry into my secrets, and thought to display my name all over your yellow sheet; but you forgot that you were dealing with Professor Anton Kell, didn't you?" The last he fairly shrieked. "A lot of people have tried to intrude upon me before, but none ever escaped me!" "We know that," cut in Jimmie, for he was getting impatient and the old man's boastings seemed out of place. "You are slated for the rope anyway, after what I discovered down cellar." He jerked his eyes in the direction of the door significantly. "Now we propose to find Handlon, and the better it will be for you if you tell us what you have done with him. Otherwise...." "You can go to hell!" screamed the maniac. "If you are so clever, find out for yourselves. He isn't so far away that you couldn't touch him by reaching out your hand. In fact, he's been with you quite a while. Hee-hee-hee! Well, if you must know--there he is!" With an insane chuckle he pointed at Horace Perry. And Perry did a strange thing. "Yes, you fiend, here I am!" Whose voice was that? Was it Perry speaking, or was it Skip Handlon? Most assuredly Perry stood before them, but the voice, in a subtle manner, reminded the group strongly of poor old Skip. * * * * * As he spoke Perry had launched himself at the Professor's throat and had to be restrained by the others. Savagely he fought them but slowly and surely they overcame his struggles and placed him, writhing, in a chair. Of a sudden Bland leaned forward and scrutinized Perry's face sharply. Had the reporter gone insane too? The pupils of the eyes had taken on a sort of queer contraction, a fixed quality that was almost ludicrous. He looked like a man under hypnosis. He had gone limp in their grasp, but now suddenly he stiffened. The eyes underwent another startling change, this time glowing undoubtedly with the look of reason. Bland was mystified and waited for Perry to explain his queer conduct. The latter seemed finally to come to. Simultaneously he realized that his peculiar lapse from consciousness had been observed by the others. "Guess I may as well admit it," he said with a wry smile. "Ever since I came back from my assignment with Kell I have had a hell of a time. Half the time I have been in a daze and have not had the least idea what I was doing. Funny part of it is that I have seemed to keep right on doing things even while I was out of my head." He told briefly of the visions he had had in which he had seemed to contend with his brother reporter, the horrid sensations as he felt himself overcome, the black oblivion in which he then found himself, and the mysterious manner in which he had left Keegan on that ill-fated assignment. "What have you done to Handlon?" Jimmie's voice cut in. He was standing over the form of the maniac, rigid and menacing. "You have exactly two minutes to go." "Find out for yourself!" snarled the bruised and battered fiend. "I will," was the answer, and on the instant a horrible shriek rent the air. Jimmie had quickly grasped both of the Professor's arms at the wrists and was slowly twisting them in a grip of iron. Kell's face went white, the lips writhed back over toothless gums, the eyes closed in the supreme effort to withstand the excruciating pain. Then-- "Enough, enough!" he screamed. * * * * * O'Hara eased the pressure slightly but retained his hold upon the clawlike hands. "Talk fast," he ordered. The old man struggled futilely in the grasp of the powerful reporter, finally glancing in the direction of the others. Would they show signs of pity? Surely not Hard Boiled Bland. The Chief was watching the struggles of the victim through a cloud of tobacco smoke which he was slowly exhaling through his nose. The plainclothesman displayed no sign of interest at all. The game was up! "Very well," he said sullenly. "Handlon and Perry are both occupying the same body." "Wh-a-a-t?" roared Bland. "Jimmie, I guess you'll have to put the screws to him some more. He's trying to make fools of us at the last minute!" "No, no!" screamed the Professor. "What I say is true. I have been working for years on my system of de-astralization. This last year I at length perfected my electric de-astralizer, which amplifies and exerts the fifth influence of de-cohesion." The whole party began to look uneasy and gazed apprehensively at the huge Crookes tube which still stood in its supporting frame on the table. "I have been forced to experiment on animals for the most part," the Professor continued. "I succeeded in de-astralizing a dog and a bull and caused them to exchange bodies. The bodies continued to function. I was enthusiastic. Other experiments took place of which I will not tell you. Finally I began to long for a human subject on which to try my fifth influence." "Just get down to cases, if you don't mind, Kell." The Chief wanted action. "Suppose you tell us just what you did to Handlon and where we can find him. I may as well mention that your life depends upon it. If we find that you have done for him, something worse than death may happen to you." The tone was menacing. Although Handlon was a comparatively late acquisition to the old Chief's staff, still he had been loyal to the paper. "When your two damned reporters entered my driveway," Kell resumed. "I saw them coming through a powerful glass which I always have on hand. I had no desire to see them, but they forced themselves upon me. At last I determined that they should furnish material for my experiments. * * * * * "If your men had looked into the grove behind the barn they would have found the automobile which furnished two more subjects I was keeping on hand in a room upstairs. Old Manion and his daughter gave me quite a bit of trouble, but I kept them drugged most of the time. He broke out of the room to-night though, and I had to kill him. It was self defense," he added slyly. "Anyway, I found it was possible to make two astrals exchange bodies. But I also wanted to see if it were possible to cause two astrals to occupy the same body at the same time, and if so what the result would be. I found out. It was rare sport to watch your star reporter leave my house. He was damned glad to leave, I believe...." Again came the insane cackle. "Guess we have to believe him whether we want to or not." The detective came to life. "How about making him release Handlon's--what d'ye call it?--astral--from Perry's body?" "Just a moment." The voice now was unmistakably Handlon's, though it was issuing from the throat of Perry. "In the minute I have in consciousness let me suggest that before you do any more de-astralizing you _locate my body_. Until then, if I am released from this one I am a dead man." The words struck the group dumb. Where _was_ Handlon's body? Could the Professor produce it? That worthy looked rather haunted at that moment, and they began to see the fear of death coming upon him. "Mercy, mercy!" he begged as the four men started to advance upon him. "As soon as I had de-astralized Handlon I destroyed his body in my pickling barrel down cellar. But there is another way...." He paused, uncertain as to how his next words would be received. "Go out and get the Manion girl. She can be de-astralized and friend Handlon can have her body." * * * * * At this suggestion, advanced so naïvely, the four men recoiled in horror. It was entirely too much even for Hard Boiled Bland, and he could hardly restrain himself from applying the editorial fist to the leering face before him. Undoubtedly Professor Kell was hopelessly insane, and for that reason he held himself in leash. "Kell, you are slated to pull off one more stunt," Jimmie addressed the cringing heap. "You know what it is. Get busy. And just remember that I am standing over here"--he indicated a corner well separated from the rest--"with this cannon aimed in your direction. If things aren't just according to Hoyle, you get plugged. Get me?" "What about it, men?" Bland spoke up. "Is it going to be treating Handlon right to de-astralize him now? It will be his last chance to have a body on this earth." "Unfortunately that body never belonged to Handlon," said O'Hara. "Hence I fail to see why Perry should be discommoded for the balance of his life with a companion astral. Perry is clearly entitled to his own body, free and unhampered. Friend Skip is out of luck, unless--Well, I don't mind telling you, Kell, that you just gave me an idea. Snap into it now!" The Professor dragged himself to his feet and under the menace of the automatic fumbled under the table until he had located the intricate apparatus before mentioned. "Now if Mr. Perry--or Handlon--will kindly recline at full length on this table," he said with an obscene leer, "the experiment will begin." "Just remember, Kell, this is no experiment," advised Bland, fixing the Professor with an ugly eye. "You do as you're told." The other made no reply, but threw a hidden switch. Perry, lying flat on his back on the ancient table, suddenly found himself being bathed by what seemed to be a ray of light, and yet was not a ray of light. What was it? It was surely not visible, yet it was tangible. A terrific force was emanating from that devilish globe above him, drawing him out of himself--or--no--was he expanding? Again his ears became filled with confused, horrible sounds, the outlines of the room faded from sight, he felt a strange sense of inflation ... of lightness.... Oblivion! * * * * * From where the others sat a gasp of wonder went up. At the first contact of the switch there had been a momentary flash of greenish light within the bulb, and then a swift transition to a beautiful orange. It had then faded altogether, leaving the glass apparently inert and inactive. But it was not so! The form lying beneath the bulb was evidently being racked with untold tortures. The face became a thing of horror. Now it had twisted into a grotesque semblance of Handlon's--now it again resembled Perry's. The Professor quietly increased the pressure of the current. From the bulb emanated a steel gray exhalation of what must be termed light, and yet so real it was seemingly material. Assuredly it was not a ray of light as we understand light. It came in great beating throbs, in which the actual vibrations were entirely visible. Under each impact the body of Perry seemed to change, slowly at first, then with increasing speed. The body was now swelled to enormous size. Bland reached forward to touch it. "This de-cohering influence," the Professor was murmuring, almost raptly, "causes the atoms that go to make a living body repel one another. When the body is sufficiently nebulized, the soul--Back! Back, you fool!" he suddenly shrieked, grasping Bland by the arm. "Do you want to kill him?" Bland hurriedly retreated, convinced perforce that Kell's alarm was genuine. The editorial fingers had penetrated the subject's garments without resistance and sank into the body as easily as if it were so much soft soap! * * * * * The body continued to expand until at length even the hard-headed plainclothesman realized that it had been reduced to a mere vapor. Within this horrid vaporized body, which nearly filled the room and which had now lost all semblance to a man, could be discerned two faint shapes. Swiftly the Professor extinguished the lantern. The shapes, vague though they were, could be recognized as those of Horace Perry and Skip Handlon. And they were at strife! All eyes were now focused on Professor Kell, who was evidently waiting for something to happen. The two apparitions within the body-cloud were at death grips. One had been overcome and was temporarily helpless. It was that of Handlon. And then again the astral of Perry forcibly ousted that of Handlon from the cloud-cyst. And at that instant Professor Kell shut off the influence-tube. At once a terrific metamorphosis took place. There came a sharp sound almost like a clap of thunder, with the slight exception that this was occasioned by exactly the reverse effect. Instead of being an _ex_plosion it might more properly be termed an _in_plosion, for the mist-cloud suddenly vanished. The de-cohering influence having been removed, the cloud had condensed into the form of Perry. Apparently none the worse, he was even now beginning to recover consciousness. The astral of Handlon was no longer visible, though hovering in the vicinity. Perry's body was again his own. * * * * * At this time Jimmie O'Hara elected to start something new by hitting the Professor a workmanlike blow on the back of the head with the butt of his automatic. The next thing Bland or anyone else present knew the unconscious body of the Professor was on the table and Jimmie was groping for the concealed switch. At length he found it, and the green flash of light appeared in the bulb, followed by the brilliant orange manifestation. "What in hell are you doing?" gasped Bland. "De-astralizing the Professor," replied O'Hara cheerfully. "Don't you get the idea yet? Watch!" Fascinated, the four men saw the terrific emanation take its baleful effect. As before, the body commenced to expand and gradually took on a misty outline. Larger and larger it grew, until finally it had become a vast cloud of intangible nothingness which filled the room like some evil nebula. A cry of consternation from the detective aroused Jimmie. Skip Handlon's astral had appeared within the field of the nebula to fight for possession. There ensued what was perhaps the weirdest encounter ever witnessed. Though he was in poor physical shape, the Professor seemed to have an extremely powerful astral; and for some time the spectators despaired of Handlon's victory. Once the latter, evidently realizing that the powerful influence tube had rendered him visible, glanced sharply in Jimmie's direction. O'Hara was considerably puzzled at this, but watched the progress of the struggle tensely. At length the moment seemed to arrive which the reporter's astral had been awaiting. It turned tail and fled away from the astral of the Professor, disappearing beyond the outer confines of the nebula. Jimmie suddenly divined the other's purpose and dived for the hidden switch. As he had anticipated, Handlon had finally given up the attempt to overcome the astral of Kell by force and had made up his mind to accomplish his end by strategy. Almost on the instant that Jimmie's hand closed on the switch the reporter's astral again leaped into the field of the nebula. Fiercely it signalled to the former second story man to shut off the current, but the admonition was unnecessary, for Jimmie had already done so. * * * * * Swiftly the cloud-cyst faded. Even as the group caught a fleeting sight of Skip Handlon, the last that mortal eyes would ever see of him as he actually was, there came a violent disturbance at the edge of the shrinking nebula. Would the speed of condensation of the atoms which comprised the body of Professor Kell serve to shut out the pursuing astral of Kell? Even Bland held his breath! The cloud lost its luminous quality, the action of condensation increasing in speed. It was barely visible in the enshrouding gloom. An astral had long since been enveloped within the rapidly accumulating substance. Came a sudden clap of sound as before, and the final act of resolution had been accomplished. Whether the Professor had succeeded in regaining a position within the cloud-cyst before the crucial second none could say. Jimmie relighted the lantern. Apparently the effect of the love tap administered by his automatic was more or less of a lasting character, and the men were put to some ado to restore the body of Kell to consciousness. At length their efforts began to bear fruit, however, and it became expedient to remove the patient to the softer couch in the sitting room below. As they moved forward to lay hold of the limp body a figure appeared in the doorway to the hall. It was the plainclothesman, Riley. "How about getting under way for town," he wanted to know. "Is the old party croaked yet? Miss Manion has had a fierce time and says she won't stay near this house another minute. I don't like this place myself either. Do you know I just got kicked by a poll parrot? Let's get away from here." "Hold on, Riley, what are you talking about?" growled Bland. "Kicked by a poll parrot! You're--" "That's all right, Chief," broke in the now thoroughly cheerful Perry. "That jackass I shot could probably have told us all about it. I positively know the beast could talk." "Humph!" snorted Bland, "Well, if a donkey can talk, and a bull can bite, and a hound can hook, why shouldn't a parrot--Judas Priest, I'm getting as crazy as the rest of you! Hurry up and get Kell downstairs so we can see who he is. There I go again! Oh, go lie down, Riley." "But look, Bland, look!" Riley was pointing a demoralized finger at a cage in the corner. He tugged frantically at Bland's coat sleeve. "See what's in there, won't you? I--well, I did find some liquor in your car, and Miss Manion made me take some. I--I didn't know it would do this to me. Look in there; please, Mr. Bland!" * * * * * Bland gave Riley a dark look, but nevertheless he reached for O'Hara's flashlight. In the cage two yellow eyes blinked sleepily out at him. Perry began to laugh. "Why, there's nothing in there but a cat. Skip and I heard it purring when we first came in here this afternoon. Guess Riley--" "Great God, Jimmie, give me your gun!" Hard Boiled Bland for the moment failed to merit his sobriquet. The torch in his hand threw a trembling beam full into the cage. "It's a snake! And--there! It's doing it again!" A snake it was, indubitably, a huge black specimen with bright yellow stripes. Bland's frenzied yell seemed not to have excited it at all, for now the sleek fellow had arched its body neatly and was calmly licking its sides with a long forked tongue. After a moment it halted the operation long enough to rub its jaw against a bar of its cage, and gave vent to a sociable mew! Even this could not dash the spirits of Horace Perry. He laughed delightedly again as he laid Bland by the arm. "That creature is perfectly harmless, Chief," he told the editor. "Somewhere I suppose there's a mighty dangerous kitty cat at large, but there's no sense in taking it out on this poor reptile. Let's live and let live." With a show of reluctance Bland returned Jimmie's automatic, then strode over to where lay the form of Kell. Perry and O'Hara lingered by the cage long enough to arrange a plan to let the snake out doors as soon as opportunity offered, after which they joined their Chief. Riley went out to resume his vigil in Bland's car, while his fellow sleuth prepared to light the way downstairs. Under his guidance the sick man was carried below without mishap. Downstairs the now conscious form of the venerable Professor was laid out on the ancient sofa until his senses could clear a bit. Presently the eyelids fluttered open and a feeble voice asked, "Where the deuce am I, and how did all you guys get here?" * * * * * A joyous gasp went up. That voice! Although uttered in somewhat the same vocal quality as Kell's the intonation and accents had strangely altered. O'Hara leaned eagerly over the figure on the couch. The question he asked was startling in its incongruity: "How are you feeling, _Skip_!" "Rotten," was the reply from the lips of Kell. "What hit me such a crack on the dome? I feel as if I had been dragged through a knot-hole. Lemme up." "Stay still," commanded O'Hara, kindly but firmly. "You aren't fit to move yet. You are going on a long ride and will need your strength. Don't talk, either." A half-hour later they left the house. In the front yard the editor called a hasty conclave which included the entire party. Hard Boiled Bland has never been known to talk so much at a stretch, before or since. "Before we start back," he began, "we had better come to an understanding. In the first place--Skip, come over here a minute." Norma Manion uttered an involuntary cry of fear as the aged form of Kell passed by her. Skip's instant response to his name had, of course, been perfectly natural to him. But it had an odd effect on the others. "Miss Manion, and gentlemen," Bland went on, with a bow of mock ceremony, "I want you to meet Mister--er, Mister--oh hell, call him Saunders. This is Mr. Kenneth Saunders, ladies and gentlemen. When he gets a shave and has his new face patched up I believe you will like his appearance much more than you do now. "Seriously though, folks, I hope that with a little fixing up the gentleman will hardly resemble Professor Anton Kell. Kell is dead. Obviously, however, this gentleman can hardly continue his existence as Skip Handlon. Hence--well, hence Mr. Saunders. And don't forget the name. "Now another little matter. This house has proven a curse to humanity. What has transpired here need never be known. Would it not be the wiser to eliminate all traces of to-night's happenings? There is a way." He looked significantly at the others. * * * * * "You mean--" began Perry. "That we destroy all traces of Professor Kell's villainy. Although he is no more, still someone might notice that _his body actively remains_. And no one wants to do any explaining." "It's the only way we can protect Handlon," one of the sleuths ruminated, half to himself. "No judge would ever believe a word about this de-astralization business. The chances are we would all go to the booby hatch and Handlon would go to prison for Kell's crimes." "There were four of us that witnessed the fact of the--the soul transfusion, though," Perry objected. "Wouldn't that be enough to clear Skip? Besides, wouldn't it be possible for us to lead a jury out here and duplicate the experiment?" "Too much undesirable publicity," growled Bland, who for once in his life had found reason to keep something good out of the headlines. "What do you say, people?" "I move we move," from the detective who had had the uncomfortable job of attending to Norma Manion. "Gentleman, I believe we understand each other," said Jimmie quietly. "Now I am going into the barn"--significantly--"to see if everything's all right. While I am there something _might_ happen. You understand?" The others nodded silent assent. * * * * * In the snug seat of Jimmie's speedster Norma Manion shivered as she followed the direction indicated by her companion's finger. It was that darkest hour which comes just before the dawn. To the westward could be perceived a dull, red glow, which, even as they watched with fascinated eyes, developed into an intense glare. Gradually the fading stars became eclipsed in the greater glory. Three cars, motors throbbing as if eager to be gone, stood a space apart on the main road. The car behind O'Hara's was the Manion machine, now occupied by Bland and Riley. The remaining one was a touring car and contained the balance of the party. Perry was at the wheel, and beside him sat the Handlon-Kell-Saunders combination. "Thus passes a den of horror," whispered Jimmie to his companion. "It is the funeral pyre of my father," the girl answered simply. She had long since recovered from her initial outburst of grief at her loss, and now watched the progress of the conflagration dry-eyed. At length Jimmie slipped an arm protectingly about the trembling shoulders. "You have seen enough," he said. As the three cars raced from the scene of the holocaust, faint streamers in the east told of the rising orb of day. "Good-by, Keegan, forever," murmured Norma. "Amen," O'Hara devoutedly agreed. From the Ocean's Depths _By Sewell Peaslee Wright_ Man came from the sea. Mercer, by his thought-telegraph, learns from the weirdly beautiful ocean-maiden of a branch that returned there. [Illustration: _Her head was a little to one side, in the attitude of one who listens intently._] From somewhere out on the black, heaving Atlantic, the rapid, muffled popping of a speed-boat's exhaust drifted clearly through the night. I dropped my book and stretched, leaning back more comfortably in my chair. There was real romance and adventure! Rum-runners, seeking out their hidden port with their cargo of contraband from Cuba. Heading fearlessly through the darkness, fighting the high seas, still running after the storm of a day or so before, daring a thousand dangers for the sake of the straw-packed bottles they carried. Sea-bronzed men, with hard, flat muscles and fearless eyes; ready guns slapping their thighs as they-- Absorbed in my mental picture of these modern free-booters, the sudden alarm of the telephone startled me like an unexpected shot fired beside my ear. Brushing the cigarette ashes from my smoking-jacket, I crossed the room and snatched up the receiver. "Hello!" I snapped ungraciously into the mouthpiece. It was after eleven by the ship's clock on the mantel, and if-- "Taylor?" The voice--Warren Mercer's familiar voice--rattled on without waiting for a reply. "Get in your car and come down here as fast as possible. Come just as you are, and--" * * * * * "What's the matter?" I managed to interrupt him. "Burglars?" I had never heard Mercer speak in that high-pitched, excited voice before; his usual speech was slow and thoughtful, almost didactic. "Please, Taylor, don't waste time questioning me. If it weren't urgent, I wouldn't be calling you, you know. Will you come?" "You bet!" I said quickly, feeling rather a fool for ragging him when he was in such deadly earnest. "Have--" The receiver snapped and crackled; Mercer had hung up the instant he had my assurance that I would come. Usually the very soul of courtesy and consideration, that act alone would have convinced me that there was an urgent need for my presence at The Monstrosity. That was Mercer's own name for the impressive pile that was at once his residence and his laboratory. I threw off the smoking-jacket and pulled on a woolen golfing sweater, for the wind was brisk and sharpish. In two minutes I was backing the car out of the garage; a moment later I was off the gravelled drive and tearing down the concrete with the accelerator all the way down, and the black wind shrieking around the windshield of my little roadster. My own shack was out of the city limits--a little place I keep to live in when the urge to go fishing seizes me, which is generally about twice a year. Mercer picked the place up for me at a song. The Monstrosity was some four miles further out from town, and off the highway perhaps a half-mile more. I made the four miles in just a shade over that many minutes, and clamped on the brakes as I saw the entrance to the little drive that led toward the sea, and Mercer's estate. * * * * * With gravel rattling on my fenders, I turned off the concrete and swept between the two massive, stuccoed pillars that guarded the drive. Both of them bore corroded bronze plates, "The Billows," the name given The Monstrosity by the original owner, a newly-rich munitions manufacturer. The structure itself loomed up before me in a few seconds, a rambling affair with square-shouldered balconies and a great deal of wrought-iron work, after the most flamboyant Spanish pattern. It was ablaze with light. Apparently every bulb in the place was burning. Just a few yards beyond the surf boomed hollowly on the smooth, shady shore, littered now, I knew, by the pitiful spoils of the storm. As I clamped on my brakes, a swift shadow passed two of the lower windows. Before I could leap from the car, the broad front door, with its rounded top and circular, grilled window, was flung wide, and Mercer came running to meet me. He was wearing a bathrobe, hastily flung on over a damp bathing suit, his bare legs terminating in a pair of disreputable slippers. "Fine, Taylor!" he greeted me. "I suppose you're wondering what it's all about. I don't blame you. But come in, come in! Just wait till you see her!" "Her?" I asked, startled. "You're not in love, by any chance, and bringing me down here like this merely to back up your own opinion of them eyes and them lips, Mercer?" * * * * * He laughed excitedly. "You'll see, you'll see! No, I'm not in love. And I want you to help, and not admire. There are only Carson and myself here, you know, and the job's too big for the two of us." He hurried me across the broad concrete porch and into the house. "Throw the cap anywhere and come on!" Too much amazed to comment further, I followed my friend. This was a Warren Mercer I did not know. Usually his clean-cut, olive-tinted face was a polite mask that seldom showed even the slightest trace of emotion. His eyes, dark and large, smiled easily, and shone with interest, but his almost beautiful mouth, beneath the long slim mustache, always closely cropped, seldom smiled with his eyes. But it was his present excited speech that amazed me most. Mercer, during all the years I had known him, had never been moved before to such tempestuous outbursts of enthusiasm. It was his habit to speak slowly and thoughtfully, in his low, musical voice; even in the midst of our hottest arguments, and we had had many of them, his voice had never lost its calm, unhurried gentleness. To my surprise, instead of leading the way to the really comfortable, although rather gaudy living room, Mercer turned to the left, towards what had been the billiard room, and was now his laboratory. The laboratory, brilliantly illuminated, was littered, as usual, with apparatus of every description. Along one wall were the retorts, scales, racks, hoods and elaborate set-ups, like the articulated glass and rubber bones of some weird prehistoric monster, that demonstrated Mercer's taste for this branch of science. On the other side of the room a corresponding workbench was littered with a tangle of coils, transformers, meters, tools and instruments, and at the end of the room, behind high black control panels, with gleaming bus-bars and staring, gaping meters, a pair of generators hummed softly. The other end of the room was nearly all glass, and opened onto the patio and the swimming pool. * * * * * Mercer paused a moment, with his hand on the knob of the door, a strange light in his dark eyes. "Now you'll see why I called you here," he said tensely. "You can judge for yourself whether the trip was worth while. Here she is!" With a gesture he flung open the door, and I stared, following his glance, down at the great tiled swimming pool. It is difficult for me to describe the scene. The patio was not large, but it was beautifully done. Flowers and shrubs, even a few small palms, grew in profusion in the enclosure, while above, through the movable glass roof--made in sections to disappear in fine weather--was the empty blackness of the sky. None of the lights provided for the illumination of the covered patio was turned on, but all the windows surrounding the patio were aglow, and I could see the pool quite clearly. The pool--and its occupant. * * * * * We were standing at one side of the pool, near the center. Directly opposite us, seated on the bottom of the pool, was a human figure, nude save for a great mass of tawny hair that fell about her like a silken mantle. The strangely graceful figure of a girl, one leg stretched out straight before her, the other drawn up and clasped by the interlocked fingers of her hands. Even in the soft light I could see her perfectly, through the clear water, her pale body outlined sharply against the jade green tiles. I tore myself away from the staring, curious eyes of the figure. "In God's name, Mercer, what is it? Porcelain?" I asked hoarsely. The thing had an indescribably eery effect. He laughed wildly. "Porcelain? Watch ... _look_!" My eyes followed his pointing finger. The figure was moving. Gracefully it arose to its full height. The great cloud of corn-colored hair floated down about it, falling below the knees. Slowly, with a grace of movement comparable only with the slow soaring of a gull, she came toward me, walking on the bottom of the pool through the clear water as though she floated in air. * * * * * Fascinated, I watched her. Her eyes, startlingly large and dark in the strangely white face, were fixed on mine. There was nothing sinister in the gaze, yet I felt my body shaking as though in the grip of a terrible fear. I tried to look away, and found myself unable to move. I felt Mercer's tense, sudden grip upon my arm, but I did not, could not, look at him. "She--she's smiling!" I heard him exclaim. He laughed, an excited, high-pitched laugh that irritated me in some subtle way. She was smiling, and looking up into my eyes. She was very close now, within a few feet of us. She came still closer, until she was at my very feet as I stood on the raised ledge that ran around the edge of the pool, her head thrown back, staring straight up at me through the water. I could see her teeth, very white between her coral-pink lips, and her bosom rising and falling beneath the veil of pale gold hair. She was breathing _water_! Mercer literally jerked me away from the edge of the pool. "What do you think of her, Taylor?" he asked, his dark eyes dancing with excitement. "Tell me about it," I said, shaking my head dazedly. "She is not human?" "I don't know. I think so. As human as you or I. I'll tell you all I know, and then you can judge for yourself. I think we'll know in a few minutes, if my plans work out. But first slip on a bathing suit." I didn't argue the matter. I let Mercer lead me away without a word. And while I was changing, he told me all he knew of the strange creature in the pool. * * * * * "Late this afternoon I decided to go for a little walk along the beach," Mercer began. "I had been working like the devil since early in the morning, running some tests on what you call my thought-telegraph. I felt the need of some fresh sea air. "I walked along briskly for perhaps five minutes, keeping just out of reach of the rollers and the spray. The shore was littered with all sorts of flotsam and jetsam washed up by the big storm, and I was just thinking that I would have to have a man with a truck come and clean up the shore in front of the place, when, in a little sandy pool, I saw--_her_. * * * * * "She was laying face down in the water, motionless, her head towards the sea, one arm stretched out before her, and her long hair wrapped around her like a half-transparent cloak. "I ran up and lifted her from the water. Her body was cold, and deathly white, although her lips were faintly pink, and her heart was beating, faintly but steadily. "Like most people in an emergency. I forgot all I ever knew about first aid. All I could think of was to give her a drink, and of course I didn't have a flask on my person. So I picked her up in my arms and brought her to the house as quickly as I could. She seemed to be reviving, for she was struggling and gasping when I got here with her. "I placed her on the bed in the guest room and poured her a stiff drink of Scotch--half a tumblerful, I believe. Lifting up her head, I placed the glass to her lips. She looked up me, blinking, and took the liquor in a single draught. She did not seem to drink it, but sucked it out of the glass in a single amazing gulp--that's the only word for it. The next instant she was off the bed, her face a perfect mask of hate and agony. "She came at me, hands clutching and clawing, making odd murmuring or mewing sounds in her throat. It was then that I noticed for the first time that her hands were webbed!" * * * * * "Webbed?" I asked, startled. "Webbed," nodded Mercer solemnly. "As are her feet. But listen, Taylor. I was amazed, and not a little rattled when she came for me. I ran through the French windows out into the patio. For a moment she ran after me, rather awkwardly and heavily, but swiftly, nevertheless. Then she saw the pool. "Apparently forgetting that I existed, she leaped into the water, and as I approached a moment later I could see her breathing deeply and gratefully, a smile of relief upon her features, as she lay upon the bottom of the pool. Breathing, Taylor, on the bottom of the pool! Under eight feet of water!" "And then what, Mercer?" I reminded him, as he paused, apparently lost in thought. "I tried to find out more about her. I put on my bathing suit and dived into the pool. Well, she came at me like a shark, quick as a flash, her teeth showing, her hands tearing like claws through the water. I turned, but not quickly enough to entirely escape. See?" Mercer threw back the dressing robe, and I saw a ragged tear in his bathing suit on his left side, near the waist. Through the rent three deep, jagged scratches were clearly visible. * * * * * "She managed to claw me, just once," Mercer resumed, wrapping the robe about him again. "Then I got out and called on Carson for help. I put him into a bathing suit, and we both endeavored to corner her. Carson got two bad scratches, and one rather serious bite that I have bandaged. I have a number of lacerations, but I didn't fare so badly as Carson because I am faster in the water than he is. "The harder we tried, the more determined I became. She would sit there, calm and placid, until one of us entered the water. Then she became a veritable fury. It was maddening. "At last I thought of you. I phoned, and here we are!" "But, Mercer, it's a nightmare!" I protested. We moved out of the room. "Nothing human can live under water and breathe water, as she does!" Mercer paused a moment, staring at me oddly. "The human race," he said gravely, "came up out of sea. The human race as we know it. Some may have gone back." He turned and walked away again, and I hurried after him. "What do you mean. Mercer? 'Some may have gone back?' I don't get it." Mercer shook his head, but made no other reply until we stood again on the edge of the pool. The girl was standing where we had left her, and as she looked up into my face, she smiled again, and made a quick gesture with one hand. It seemed to me that she invited me to join her. * * * * * "I believe she likes you, Taylor," said Mercer thoughtfully. "You're light, light skin, light hair. Carson and I are both very dark, almost swarthy. And in that white bathing suit--yes, I believe she's taken a fancy to you!" Mercer's eyes were dancing. "If she has," he went on, "it'll make our work very easy." "What work?" I asked suspiciously. Mercer, always an indefatigable experimenter, was never above using his friends in the benefit of science. And some of his experiments in the past had been rather trying, not to say exciting. "I think I have what you call my thought-telegraph perfected, experimentally," he explained rapidly. "I fell asleep working on it at three o'clock, or thereabouts, this morning, and some tests with Carson seem to indicate that it is a success. I should have called you to-morrow, for further test. Nearly five years of damned hard work to a successful conclusion, Taylor, and then this mermaid comes along and makes my experiment appear about as important as one of those breakers rolling in out there!" "And what do you plan to do now?" I asked eagerly, glancing down at the beautiful pale face that glimmered up at me through the clear water of the pool. * * * * * "Why, try it on her!" exclaimed Mercer with mounting enthusiasm. "Don't you see, Taylor? If it will work on her, and we can direct her thoughts, we can find out her history, the history of her people! We'll add a page to scientific history--a whole big chapter!--that will make us famous. Man this is so big it's swept me off my feet! Look!" And he held out a thin, aristocratic brown hand before my eyes, a hand that shook with nervous excitement. "I don't blame you," I said quickly. "I'm no savant, and still I see what an amazing thing this is. Let's get busy. What can I do?" Mercer reached around the door into the laboratory and pressed a button. "For Carson," he explained. "We'll need his help. In the meantime, we'll look over the set-up. The apparatus is strewn all over the place." He had not exaggerated. The set-up consisted of a whole bank of tubes, each one in its own shielding copper box. On a much-drilled horizontal panel, propped up on insulators, were half a score of delicate meters of one kind and another, with thin black fingers that pulsed and trembled. Behind the panel was a tall cylinder wound with shining copper wire, and beside it another panel, upright, fairly bristling with knobs, contact points, potentiometers, rheostats and switches. On the end of the table nearest the door was still another panel, the smallest of the lot, bearing only a series of jacks along one side, and in the center a switch with four contact points. A heavy, snaky cable led from this panel to the maze of apparatus further on. * * * * * "This is the control panel," explained Mercer. "The whole affair, you understand, is in laboratory form. Nothing assembled. Put the different antennae plug into these jacks. Like this." He picked up a weird, hastily built contrivance composed of two semi-circular pieces of spring brass, crossed at right angles. On all four ends were bright silvery electrodes, three of them circular in shape, one of them elongated and slightly curved. With a quick, nervous gesture, Mercer fitted the thing to his head, so that the elongated electrode pressed against the back of his neck, extending a few inches down his spine. The other three circular electrodes rested on his forehead and either side of his head. From the center of the contrivance ran a heavy insulated cord, some ten feet in length, ending in a simple switchboard plug, which Mercer fitted into the uppermost of the three jacks. "Now," he directed, "you put on this one"--he adjusted a second contrivance upon my head, smiling as I shrank from the contact of the cold metal on my skin--"and think!" He moved the switch from the position marked "Off" to the second contact point, watching me intently, his dark eyes gleaming. Carson entered, and Mercer gestured to him to wait. Very nice old chap, Carson, impressive even in his bathing suit. Mercer was mighty lucky to have a man like Carson.... * * * * * Something seemed to tick suddenly, somewhere deep in my consciousness. "Yes, that's very true: Carson is a most decent sort of chap." The words were not spoken. I did not _hear_ them, I _knew_ them. What--I glanced at Mercer, and he laughed aloud with pleasure and excitement. "It worked!" he cried. "I received your thought regarding Carson, and then turned the switch so that you received my thought. And you did!" Rather gingerly I removed the thing from my head and laid it on the table. "It's wizardry, Mercer! If it will work as well on _her_...." "It will, I know it will!--if we can get her to wear one of these," replied Mercer confidently. "I have only three of them; I had planned some three-cornered experiments with you, Carson, and myself. We'll leave Carson out of to-night's experiment, however, for we'll need him to operate this switch. You see, as it is now wired only one person transmits thoughts at a time. The other two receive. When the switch is on the first contact, Number One sends, and Numbers Two and Three receive. When the switch is on Number Two, then he sends thoughts, and Numbers One and Three receive them. And so on. I'll lengthen these leads so that we can run them out into the pool, and then we'll be ready. Somehow we must induce her to wear one of these things, even if we have to use force. I'm sure the three of us can handle her." "We should be able to," I smiled. She was such a slim, graceful, almost delicate little thing; the thought that three strong men might not be able to control her seemed almost amusing. "You haven't seen her in action yet," said Mercer grimly, glancing up from his work of lengthening the cords that led from the antennae to the control panel. "And what's more, I hope you don't." * * * * * I watched him in silence as he spliced and securely taped the last connection. "All set," he nodded. "Carson, will you operate the switch for us? I believe everything is functioning properly." He surveyed the panel of instruments hastily, assuring himself that every reading was correct. Then, with all three of the devices he called antennae in his hand, their leads plugged into the control panel, he led the way to the side of the pool. The girl was strolling around the edge of the pool, feeling the smooth tile sides with her hands as we came into view, but as soon as she saw us she shot through the water to where we were standing. It was the first time I had seen her move in this fashion. She seemed to propel herself with a sudden mighty thrust of her feet against the bottom; she darted through the water with the speed of an arrow, yet stopped as gently as though she had merely floated there. As she looked up, her eyes unmistakably sought mine, and her smile seemed warm and inviting. She made again that strange little gesture of invitation. With an effort I glanced at Mercer. There was something devilishly fascinating about the girl's great, dark, searching eyes. "I'm going in," I said hoarsely. "Hand me one of your head-set things when I reach for it." Before he could protest, I dived into the pool. * * * * * I headed directly towards the heavy bronze ladder that led to the bottom of the pool. I had two reasons in mind. I would need something to keep me under water, with my lungs full of air, and I could get out quickly if it were necessary. I had not forgotten the livid, jagged furrows in Mercer's side. Quickly as I shot to the ladder she was there before me, a dim, wavering white shape, waiting. I paused, holding to a rung of the ladder with one hand. She came closer, walking with the airy grace I had noted before, and my heart pounded against my ribs as she raised one long, slim arm towards me. The hand dropped gently on my shoulder, pressed it as though in token of friendship. Perhaps, I thought quickly, this was, with her, a sign of greeting. I lifted my own arm and returned the salutation, if salutation it were, aware of a strange rising and falling sound, as of a distant humming, in my ears. The sound ceased suddenly, on a rising note, as though of inquiry, and it dawned on me that I had heard the speech of this strange creature. Before I could think of a course of action, my aching lungs reminded me of the need of air, and I released my hold on the ladder and let my body rise to the surface. * * * * * As my head broke the water, a hand, cold and strong as steel, closed around my ankle. I looked down. The girl was watching me, and there was no smile on her face now. "All right!" I shouted across the pool to Mercer, who was watching anxiously. Then, filling my lungs with air again, I pulled myself, by means of the ladder, to the bottom of the pool. The restraining hand was removed instantly. The strange creature thrust her face close to mine as my feet touched bottom, and for the first time I saw her features distinctly. She was beautiful, but in a weird, unearthly sort of way. As I had already noticed, her eyes were of unusual size, and I saw now that they were an intense shade of blue, with a pupil of extraordinary proportion. Her nose was well shaped, but the nostrils were slightly flattened, and the orifices were rather more elongated than I had ever seen before. The mouth was utterly fascinating, and her teeth, revealed by her engaging smile, were as perfect as it would be possible to imagine. The great mane of hair which enveloped her was, as I have said, tawny in hue, and almost translucent, like the stems of some seaweeds I have seen. And as she raised one slim white hand to brush back some wisps that floated by her face, I saw distinctly the webs between her fingers. They were barely noticeable, for they were as transparent as the fins of a fish, but they were there, extending nearly to the last joint of each finger. * * * * * As her face came close to my own, I became aware of the humming, crooning sound I had heard before, louder this time. I could see, from the movement of her throat, that I had been correct in assuming that she was attempting to speak with me. I smiled back at her and shook my head. She seemed to understand, for the sound ceased, and she studied me with a little thoughtful frown, as though trying to figure out some other method of communication. I pointed upward, for I was feeling the need for fresh air again, and slowly mounted the ladder. This time she did not grasp me, but watched me intently, as though understanding what I did, and the reasons for it. "Bring one of your gadgets over here, Mercer," I called across the pool. "I think I'm making progress." "Good boy!" he cried, and came running with two of the antennae, the long insulated cords trailing behind him. Through the water the girl watched him, evident dislike in her eyes. She glanced at me with sudden suspicion as Mercer handed me the two instruments, but made no hostile move. "You won't be able to stay in the water with her," explained Mercer rapidly. "The salt water would short the antennae, you see. Try to get her to wear one, and then you get your head out of water, and don yours. And remember, she won't be able to communicate with us by words--we'll have to get her to convey her thoughts by means of mental pictures. I'll try to impress that on her. Understand?" * * * * * I nodded, and picked up one of the instruments. "Fire when ready, Gridley," I commented, and sank again to the bottom of the pool. I touched the girl's head with one finger, and then pointed to my own head, trying to convey to her that she could get her thoughts to me. Then I held up the antennae and placed it on my own head to show that it could not harm her. My next move was to offer her the instrument, moving slowly, and smiling reassuringly--no mean feat under water. She hesitated a moment, and then, her eyes fixed on mine, she slowly fixed the instrument over her own head as she had seen me adjust it upon my own. I smiled and nodded, and pressed her shoulder in token of friendly greeting. Then, gesturing toward my own head again, and pointing upward. I climbed the ladder. "All right, Mercer," I shouted. "Start at once, before she grows restless!" "I've already started!" he called back, and I hurriedly donned my own instrument. Bearing in mind what Mercer had said, I descended the ladder but a few rungs, so that my head remained out of water, and smiled down at the girl, touching the instrument on my head, and then pointing to hers. I could sense Mercer's thoughts now. He was picturing himself walking long the shore, with the stormy ocean in the background. Ahead of him I saw the white body lying face downward in the pool. I saw him run up to the pool and lift the slim, pale figure in his arms. * * * * * Let me make it clear, at this point, that when I say that I saw these things, I mean only that mental images of them penetrated my consciousness. I visualized them just as I could close my eyes and visualize, for example, the fireplace in the living room of my own home. I looked down at the girl. She was frowning, and her eyes were very wide. Her head was a little on one side, in the attitude of one who listens intently. Slowly and carefully Mercer thought out the whole story of his experiences with the girl until she had plunged into the pool. Then I saw again the beach, with the girl's figure in the pool. The picture grew hazy; I realized Mercer was trying to picture the bottom of the sea. Then he pictured again the girl lying in the pool, and once again the sea. I was aware of the soft little tick in the center of my brain that announced that the switch had been moved to another contact point. I glanced down at her. She was staring up at me with her great, curious eyes, and I sensed, through the medium of the instrument I wore, that she was thinking of me. I saw my own features, idealized, glowing with a strange beauty that was certainly none of my own. I realized that I saw myself, in short, as she saw me. I smiled back at her, and shook my head. * * * * * A strange, dim whirl of pictures swept through my consciousness. I was on the bottom of the ocean. Shadowy shapes swept by silently, and from above, a dim bluish light filtered down on a scene such as mortal eyes have never seen. All around were strange structures of jagged coral, roughly circular as to base, and rounded on top, resembling very much the igloos of the Eskimos. The structures varied greatly in size, and seemed to be arranged in some sort of regular order, like houses along a narrow street. Around many of them grew clusters of strange and colorful seaweeds that waved their banners gently, as though some imperceptible current dallied with them in passing. Here and there figures moved, slim white figures that strolled along the narrow street, or at times shot overhead like veritable torpedoes. There were both men and women moving there. The men were broader of shoulder, and their hair, which they wore to their knees, was somewhat darker in color than that of the women. Both sexes were slim, and there was a remarkable uniformity of size and appearance. None of the strange beings wore garments of any kind, nor were they necessary. The clinging tresses were cinctured at the waist with a sort of cord of twisted orange-colored material, and some of the younger women wore bands of the same material around their brows. * * * * * Nearest of all the figures was the girl who was visualizing all this for us. She was walking slowly away from the cluster of coral structures. Once or twice she paused, and seemed to hold conversation with others of the strange people, but each time she moved on. The coral structures grew smaller and poorer. Finally the girl trod alone on the floor of the ocean, between great growths of kelp and seaweeds, with dim, looming masses of faintly tinted coral everywhere. Once she passed close to a tilted, ragged hulk of some ancient vessel, its naked ribs packed with drifted sand. Sauntering dreamily, she moved away from the ancient derelict. Suddenly a dim shadow swept across the sand at her feet, and she arrowed from the spot like a white, slim meteor. But behind her darted a black and swifter shadow--a shark! Like a flash she turned and faced the monster. Something she had drawn from her girdle shone palely in her hand. It was a knife of whetted stone or bone. Darting swiftly downward her feet spurned the yellow sand, and she shot at her enemy with amazing speed. The long blade swept in an arc, ripped the pale belly of the monster just as he turned to dart away. * * * * * A great cloud of blood dyed the water. The white figure of the girl shot onward through the scarlet flood. Blinded, she did not see that the jutting ribs of the ancient ship were in her path. I seemed to see her crash, head on, into one of the massive timbers, and I cried out involuntarily, and glanced down at the girl in the water at my feet. Her eyes were glowing. She knew that I had understood. Hazily, then, I seemed to visualize her body floating limply in the water. It was all very vague and indistinct, and I understood that this was not what she had seen, but what she thought had happened. The impressions grew wilder, swirled, grew gray and indistinct. Then I had a view of Mercer's face, so terribly distorted it was barely recognizable. Then a kaleidoscopic maze of inchoate scenes, shot through with flashes of vivid, agonizing colors. The girl was thinking of her suffering, taken out of her native element. In trying to save her, Mercer had almost killed her. That, no doubt, was why she hated him. My own face appeared next, almost godlike in its kindliness and its imagined beauty, and I noticed now that she was thinking of me with my yellow hair grown long, my nostrils elongated like her own--adjusted to her own ideas of what a man should be. * * * * * I flung the instrument from my head and dropped to the bottom of the pool. I gripped both her shoulders, gently, to express my thanks and friendship. My heart was pounding. There was a strange fascination about this girl from the depths of the sea, a subtle appeal that was answered from some deep subterranean cavern of my being. I forgot, for the moment, who and what I was. I remembered only that a note had been sounded that awoke an echo of a long-forgotten instinct. I think I kissed her. I know her arms were about me, and that I pressed her close, so that our faces almost met. Her great, weirdly blue eyes seemed to bore into my brain. I could feel them throbbing there.... I forgot time and space. I saw only that pale, smiling face and those great dark eyes. Then, strangling, I tore myself from her embrace and shot to the surface. Coughing, I cleared my lungs of the water I had inhaled. I was weak and shaking when I finished, but my head was clear. The grip of the strange fantasy that had gripped me was shaken off. Mercer was bending over me; speaking softly. "I was watching, old man," he said gently. "I can imagine what happened. A momentary, psychic fusing of an ancient, long since broken link. You, together with all mankind, came up out of the sea. But there is no retracing the way." * * * * * I nodded, my head bowed on my streaming chest. "Sorry, Mercer," I muttered. "Something got into me. Those big eyes of hers seemed to tug at threads of memory ... buried.... I can't describe it...." He slapped me on my naked shoulder, a blow that stung, as he had intended it to. It helped jerk me back to the normal. "You've got your feet on the ground again, Taylor," he commented soothingly. "I think there's no danger of you losing your grip on terra firma again. Shall we carry on?" "There's more you'd like to learn? That you think she can give us?" I asked hesitantly. "I believe," replied Mercer, "that she can give us the history of her people, if we can only make her understand what we wish. God! If we only could!" The name of the Deity was a prayer as Mercer uttered it. "We can try, old-timer," I said, a bit shakenly. Mercer hurried back to the other side of the pool, and I adjusted my head-set again, smiling down at the girl. If only Mercer could make her understand, and if only she knew what we wanted to learn! I was conscious of the little click that told me the switch had been moved. Mercer was ready to get his message to her. Fixing my eyes on the girl pleadingly, I settled myself by the edge of the pool to await the second and more momentous part of our experiment. * * * * * The vision was vague, for Mercer was picturing his thoughts with difficulty. But I seemed to see again the floor of the ocean, with the vague light filtering down from above, and soft, monstrous growths waving their branches lazily in the flood. From the left came a band of men and women, looking around as though in search of some particular spot. They stopped, and one of the older men pointed, the others gathering around him as though in council. Then the band set to work. Coral growth were dragged to the spot. The foundation for one of the semi-circular houses was laid. The scene swirled and cleared again. The house was completed. Several other houses were in process of building. Slowly and deliberately, the scene moved. The houses were left behind. Before my consciousness now was only a vague and shadowy expanse of ocean floor, and in the sand dim imprints that marked where the strange people had trod, the vague footprints disappearing in the gloom in the direction from which the little weary band had come. To me, at least, it was quite clear that Mercer was asking whence they came. Would it be as clear to the girl? The switch clicked, and for a moment I was sure Mercer had not been able to make his question clear to her. * * * * * The scene was the interior of one of the coral houses. There were persons there, seated on stone or coral chairs, padded with marine growths. One of the occupants of the room was a very old man; his face was wrinkled, and his hair was silvery. With him were a man and a woman, and a little girl. Somehow I seemed to recognize the child as the girl in the pool. The three of them were watching the old man. While his lips did not move, I could see his throat muscles twitching as the girl's had done when she made the murmuring sound I had guessed was her form of speech. The scene faded. For perhaps thirty seconds I was aware of nothing more than a dim gray mist that seemed to swirl in stately circles. Then, gradually, it cleared somewhat. I sensed the fact that what I saw now was what the old man was telling, and that the majestic, swirling mist was the turning back of time. Here was no ocean bottom, but land, rich tropical jungle. Strange exotic trees and dense growths of rank undergrowth choked the earth. The trees were oddly like undersea growths, which puzzled me for an instant. Then I recalled that the girl could interpret the old man's words only in terms of that which she had seen and understood. This was the way she visualized the scene. * * * * * There was a gray haze of mist everywhere. The leaves were glistening with condensed moisture; swift drops fell incessantly to the soaking ground below. Into the scene roamed a pitiful band of people. Men with massive frames, sunken in with starvation, women tottering with weakness. The men carried great clubs, some tipped with rudely shaped stone heads, and both men and women clothed only in short kittles of skin. They searched ceaselessly for something, and I guessed that something was food. Now and then one or the other of the little band tore up a root and bit at it, and those that did so soon doubled into a twitching knot of suffering and dropped behind. At last they came to the edge of the sea. A few yards away the water was lost in the dense steaming miasma that hemmed them in on all sides. With glad expressions on their faces, the party ran down to the edge of the water and gathered up great masses of clams and crabs. At first they ate the food raw, tearing the flesh from the shells. Then they made what I understood was a fire, although the girl was able to visualize it only as a bright red spot that flickered. The scene faded, and there was only the slowly swirling mist that I understood indicated the passing of centuries. Then the scene cleared again. * * * * * I saw that same shore line, but the people had vanished. There was only the thick, steamy mist, the tropic jungle crowding down to the shore, and the waves rolling in monotonously from the waste of gray ocean beyond the curtain of fog. Suddenly, from out of the sea, appeared a series of human heads, and then a band of men and women that waded ashore and seated themselves upon the beach, gazing restlessly out across the sea. This was not the same band I had seen at first. These were a slimmer race, and whereas the first band had been exceedingly swarthy, these were very fair. They did not stay long on shore, for they were restless and ill at ease. It seemed to me they came there only from force of habit, as though they obeyed some inner urge they did not understand. In a few seconds they rose and ran into the water, plunged into it as though they welcomed its embrace, and disappeared. Then again the vision was swallowed up by the swirling mists of time. * * * * * When the scene cleared again, it showed the bottom of the sea. A group of perhaps a hundred pale creatures moved along the dim floor of the ocean. Ahead I could see the dim outlines of one of their strange cities. The band approached, seemed to talk with those there, and moved on. I saw them capture and kill fish for food, saw them carve the thick, spongy hearts from certain giant growths and eat them. I saw a pair of killer sharks swoop down on the band, and the quick, deadly accuracy with which both men and woman met the attack. One man, older than the rest, was injured before the sharks were vanquished, and when their efforts to staunch his wounds proved unavailing, they left him there and moved on. And as they left I saw a dim, crawling shape move closer, throw out a long, whiplike tentacle, and wrap the body in a hungry embrace. They came to and passed other communities of beings like themselves, and a city of their own, in much the way that Mercer had visualized it. Fading, the scene changed to the interior of the coral house again. The old man finished his story, and moved off into a cubicle in the rear of the place. Dimly, I could see there a low couch, piled high with soft marine growths. Then the scene shifted once more. A man and a woman hurried up and down the narrow streets of the strange city the girl had pictured when she showed us how she had met with the shark, and struck her head, so that for a long period she lost consciousness and was washed ashore. * * * * * Others, after a time, joined them in their search, which spread out to the floor of the ocean, away from the dwellings. One party came to the gaunt skeleton of the ancient wreck, and found the scattered, fresh-picked bones of the shark the girl had killed. The man and the woman came up, and I looked closely into their faces. The woman's features were torn with grief; the man's lips were set tight with suffering. Here, it was easy to guess, were the mother and the father of the girl. A milling mass of white forms shot through the water in every direction, searching. It seemed that they were about to give up the search when suddenly, from out of the watery gloom, there shot a slim white figure--the girl! Straight to the mother and father she came, gripping the shoulder of each with frantic joy. They returned the caress, the crowd gathered around them, listening to her story as they moved slowly, happily, towards the distant city. Instead of a picture, I was conscious then of a sound, like a single pleading word repeated softly, as though someone said "Please! Please! Please!" over and over again. The sound was not at all like the English word. It was a soft, musical beat, like the distant stroke of a mellow gong, but it had all the pleading quality of the word it seemed to bring to mind. I looked down into the pool. The girl had mounted the ladder until her face was just below the surface of the water. Her eyes met mine and I knew that I had not misunderstood. I threw off the instrument on my head, and dropped down beside her. With both hands I grasped her shoulders, and, smiling, I nodded my head vigorously. She understood, I know she did. I read it in her face. When I climbed the ladder again, she looked after me, smiling confidently. Although I had not spoken to her, she had read and accepted the promise. * * * * * Mercer stared at me silently, grimly, as I told him what I wished. Whatever eloquence I may have, I used on him, and I saw his cold, scientific mind waver before the warmth of my appeal. "We have no right to keep her from her people," I concluded. "You saw her mother and father, saw their suffering, and the joy her return would bring. You will, Mercer--you will return her to the sea?" For a long time, Mercer did not reply. Then he lifted his dark eyes to mine, and smiled, rather wearily. "It is the only thing we can do, Taylor," he said quietly. "She is not a scientific specimen; she is, in her way, as human as you or I. She would probably die, away from her own kind, living under conditions foreign to her. And you promised her, Taylor, whether you spoke your promise or not." His smile deepened a bit. "We cannot let her receive too bad an opinion of her cousins who live above the surface of the sea!" * * * * * And so, just as the dawn was breaking, we took her to the shore. I carried her, unresisting, trustful, in my arms, while Mercer bore a huge basin of water, in which her head was submerged, so that she might not suffer. Still in our bathing suits we waded out into the ocean, until the waves splashed against our faces. Then I lowered her into the sea. Crouching there, so that the water was just above the tawny glory of her hair, she gazed up at us. Two slim white hands reached towards us, and with one accord, Mercer and I bent towards her. She gripped both our shoulders with a gentle pressure, smiling at us. Then she did a strange thing. She pointed, under the water, out towards the depths and with a broad, sweeping motion of her arm, indicated the shore, as though to say that she intended to return. With a last swift, smiling glance up into my face, she turned. There was a flash of white through the water. She was gone.... Silently, through the silence and beauty of the dawn, we made our way back to the house. * * * * * As we passed through the laboratory, Mercer glanced out at the empty pool. "Man came up from the sea," he said slowly, "and some men went back to it. They were forced back to the teeming source from whence they came, for lack of food. You saw that, Taylor--saw her forebears become amphibians, like the now extinct Dipneusta and Ganoideii, or the still existing Neoceratodus, Polypterus and Amia. Then their lungs became, in effect, gills, and they lost their power of breathing atmospheric air, and could use only air dissolved in water. "A whole people there beneath the waves that land-man never dreamed of--except, perhaps, the sailors of olden days, with their tales of mermaids, which we are accustomed to laugh at in our wisdom!" "But why were no bodies ever washed ashore?" I asked. "I would think--" "You saw why," interrupted Mercer grimly. "The ocean teems with hungry life. Death is the signal for a feast. It was little more than a miracle that her body came ashore, a miracle due perhaps to the storm which sent the hungry monsters to the greater depths. And even had a body come ashore it would have been buried as that of some unknown, unfortunate human. The differences between these people and ourselves would not be noticeable to a casual observer. "No, Taylor, we have been party to what was close to a miracle. And we are the only witnesses to it, you and Carson and myself. And"--he sighed deeply--"it is over." I did not reply. I was thinking of the girl's odd gesture, at parting, and I wondered if it were indeed a finished chapter. Vandals of the Stars _By A. T. Locke_ A livid flame flares across Space--and over Manhattan hovers Teuxical, vassal of Malfero, Lord of the Universe, who comes with ten thousand warriors to ravage and subjugate one more planet for his master. [Illustration: _Many planes and Zeppelins were circling around the mysterious visitant._] It came suddenly, without warning, and it brought consternation to the people of the world. A filament of flame darted down the dark skies one moonless night and those who saw it believed, at first, that it was a meteor. Instead of streaking away into oblivion, however, it became larger and larger, until it seemed as though some vagrant, blazing star was about to plunge into the earth and annihilate the planet and every vestige of life upon it. But then it drew slowly to a stop high up in the atmosphere, where it remained motionless, glowing white and incandescent against the Stygian background of the overcast skies. In shape it resembled a Zeppelin, but its dimensions very apparently exceeded by far those of any flying craft that ever had been fabricated by the hand of man. As it hung poised high up in the air it gradually lost its dazzling glow and became scarlet instead of white. Then, as it continued to cool, the color swiftly drained from it and, in a few minutes, it shone only with the dull and ugly crimson of an expiring ember. In a half-hour after it first had appeared its effulgence had vanished completely and it was barely visible to the millions who were staring up toward it from the earth. It seemed to be suspended directly above Manhattan, and the inhabitants of New York were thrown into a feverish excitement by the strange and unprecedented phenomenon. * * * * * For it scarcely had come to a stop, and certainly it had not been poised aloft for more than a few minutes, when most of those who had not actually witnessed its sensational appearance were apprised of the inexplicable occurrence by the radiovision, which were scattered throughout the vast metropolis. In theaters and restaurants and other gathering places, as well as in millions of homes, a voice from the Worldwide Broadcasting Tower announced the weird visitant. And its image, as it glowed in the night, was everywhere transmitted to the public. Only a short time after it first had been observed people were thronging roof-tops, terraces, and streets, and gazing with awe and wonder at the great luminous object that was floating high above them. There were those who thought that the world was coming to an end, and they either were dumb with fright or strident with hysteria. People with more judgment, and a smattering of scientific knowledge, dismissed the thing as some harmless meteorological manifestation that, while interesting, was not necessarily dangerous. And there were many, inclined to incredulity and skepticism, who believed that they were witnessing a hoax or an advertising scheme of some new sort. But as the moments went by the world commenced to become stirred and alarmed by the reports which came over the radiovisors. For powerful planes and metal-shelled Zeppelins had climbed swiftly aloft to investigate the incomprehensible Thing that was poised high above Manhattan, and almost unbelievable reports were being sent earthward. * * * * * Dirk Vanderpool had been sitting alone on the broad terrace of his apartment that occupied the upper stories of the great Gotham Gardens Building when he saw that streak of fire slip down against the darkness of the night. For a moment he, too, had believed that he was watching a meteor, but, when he saw it come to a slow stop and hang stationary in the heavens, he rose to his feet with an exclamation of surprise. For a while he gazed upward with an expression of astonishment on his face and then he turned as he heard someone walking softly in his direction. It was Barstowe, his valet, and the eyes of the man were alive with fear. "What is that thing, Mr. Vanderpool?" he asked in a voice that trembled with alarm. Barstowe was a man of middle age, diminutive in size, and he had the appearance of being nearly petrified with terror. "They are saying over the televisor that--" "What are they saying about it?" asked Dirk somewhat impatiently. "That no one can explain what it is," continued Barstowe. "It must be something terrible, Mr. Vanderpool." "Wheel out the luciscope," ordered Dirk. * * * * * Barstowe disappeared into the apartment and returned with a cabinet that was mounted on small, rubber-tired wheels. The top of it was formed of a metallic frame in which a heavy, circular, concave glass was fitted. The frame was hinged in front so that it could be raised from the rear and adjusted to any angle necessary to catch the light rays from any distant object. Within the cabinet the rays passed through an electrical device that amplified them millions of times, thus giving a clear, telescopic vision of the object on which the luciscope was focused. This instrument, years before, had supplanted entirely the old-fashioned telescopes which not only had been immense and unwieldly but which also had a very limited range of vision. Dirk adjusted the light-converger so that it caught the rays that were being emanated by the weird and shimmering mass that was suspended almost directly above the lofty terrace on which he was standing. Then he switched on the current and glanced into the eye-piece of the apparatus. For several moments he remained silent, studying the image that was etched so vividly on the ground-glass within the luciscope. "It is a queer thing, there is no doubt about that," he confessed when finally he raised his head. "It resembles a gigantic Zeppelin in shape but it does not seem to have any undercarriage or, as far as I can see, any indication of propellers or portholes. I would say, though, Barstowe, that it might be a ship from some other planet if it wasn't for the fact that it seems to be in an almost molten state." * * * * * Dirk again looked into the luciscope and then he made a few adjustments with a thumb-screw that projected from the side of the apparatus. "It is up about forty thousand feet," he told Barstowe, "and it must be more than a half-mile in length. Probably," he added, "it is a planetary fragment of some odd composition that is less responsive to gravitation than the materials with which we are familiar. You will find, Barstowe, that there is nothing about it that science will not be able to explain. That will be all now," he concluded. Barstowe walked over the terrace and disappeared into the apartment. Dirk, left alone, wheeled the luciscope over by the chair in which he had been sitting and near which a radiovisor was standing. He switched on the latter and listened to the low but very distinct voice of the news-dispatcher. "--and planes and Zeppelins now are starting up to investigate the strange phenomenon--" Again Dirk placed an eye to the lens of the luciscope and once more the Thing leaped into his vision. The powerful machine brought it so close to him that he could see the heat waves quiver up from it. The light that it radiated illuminated the night for thousands of feet and Dirk could see, by means of that crimson glare, that many planes and Zeppelins were circling around the mysterious visitant. None of them, however, approached the alien freak, the heat apparently being too intense to permit close inspection. * * * * * Dirk himself was tempted for a moment to jump into a plane and go up and take a look at the fiery mass. But, after a moment's consideration, he decided, that it would be far more interesting and comfortable to remain right where he was and listen to the reports which were being sent down from above. "--thus far there seems to be no cause for alarm, and people are advised to remain calm--careful observations of the luminous monster are being made and further reports concerning it will be broadcast--" Dirk Vanderpool rose to his feet, walked to the coping of the terrace and peered into the magnascope that was set into the wall. He saw that the street, far below him, was jammed with struggling people and the device through which he was looking brought their faces before him in strong relief. Dirk was deeply interested and, at the same time, gravely concerned as he studied the upturned countenances in the mob. Fear, despair, reckless abandon, mirth, doubt, religious ecstasy and all the other nuances in the gamut of human emotions and passions were reflected in those distorted visages which were gazing skyward. * * * * * The silvery humming of a bell diverted his attention from the scene of congestion below him and, turning away, he walked across the terrace and into the great living room of his luxurious abode. Stepping to the televisor, he turned a tiny switch, and the face of a girl appeared in the glass panel that was framed above the sound-box. He smiled as he lifted the receiver and placed it to his ear. "What is the matter, Inga?" he asked. "You look as if you were expecting--well, almost anything disastrous." "Oh, Dirk, what is that thing?" the girl asked. "I really am frightened!" He could see by the expression in her blue eyes that she, too, was becoming a victim of the hysteria that was taking possession of many people. "I wouldn't be alarmed, Inga," he replied reassuringly. "I don't know what it is, and no one else seems to be able to explain it." "But it is frightful and uncanny, Dirk," the girl insisted, "and I am sure that something terrible is going to happen. I wish," she pleaded, "that you would come over and stay with me for a little while. I am all alone and--" "All right, Inga," he told her. "I will be with you in a few minutes." He hung up the receiver of the televisor and clicked off the switch. The image of the golden-haired girl to whom he had been speaking slowly faded from the glass. * * * * * Attiring himself for a short sixty-mile hop down Long Island, Dirk passed out to the landing stage and, stepping into the cabin of his plane, he threw in the helicopter lever. The machine rose straight into the air for a couple of hundred feet and then Dirk headed it westward to where the nearest ascension beam sent its red light towering toward the stars. It marked a vertical air-lane that led upward to the horizontal lanes of flight. Northbound ships flew between two and four thousand feet; southbound planes between five and seven thousand feet; those eastbound confined themselves to the level between nine and eleven thousand feet, while the westbound flyers monopolized the air between twelve and fourteen thousand feet. All planes flying parallel to the earth were careful to avoid those red beacons which marked ascension routes, and the shafts of green light down which descending planes dropped to the earth or into lower levels of travel. When Dirk's altimeter indicated seventy-five hundred feet he turned the nose of his ship eastward and adjusted his rheostat until his motors, fed by wireless current, were revolving at top speed. The great canyons of Manhattan, linked by arches and highways which joined and passed through various levels of the stupendous structures of steelite and quartzite, passed swiftly beneath him; and, after passing for a few minutes over the deserted surface of Long Island, he completed his sixty-mile flight and brought his ship to a rest on a landing stage that was far up on the side of a vast pile that rose up close to the shore of the Sound. * * * * * As soon as he stepped from the door of the cabin he was joined by a girl who, apparently, had been lingering there, awaiting his arrival. She was perhaps twenty years old, and she had the golden hair, the light complexion, and the blue eyes which still were characteristic of the women of northern Europe. The slender lines of her exquisite figure and the supple grace which she displayed when she moved toward Dirk were evidence, however, of the Latin blood which was in her veins. For Inga Fragoni, the daughter and heiress of Orlando Fragoni, seemed to be a culmination of all of the desirable qualities of the women of the south and those of the north. The terrace on which Dirk had landed was illuminated by lights which simulated sunshine, and their soft bright glow revealed the violet hue of her eyes and the shimmering gloss of her silken hair. She wore a sleeveless, light blue tunic which was gathered around her waist with a bejeweled girdle. On her tiny feet she wore sandals which were spun of webby filaments of gold and platinum. "Dirk, I am so glad that you are here!" she exclaimed. "I felt so much alone when I called you up. Dad is locked in the observatory with Professor Nachbaren and three or four other men and the servants--well, they all are so terrified that it simply alarms me to have them around." "But that is Stanton's plane there, isn't it?" asked Dirk, indicating a powerful looking machine that stood on the terrace. * * * * * "Yes, Dirk," the girl replied. "He arrived here three or four minutes before you did. I thought, at first, that it was you coming. And Dirk," she continued, with a note of excitement in her voice, "he flew up to look at that thing, and I know that he is as frightened about it as I am." Dirk grunted, but he gave no expression of the dislike and distrust that Stanton aroused in him. The latter, he knew, was very much inclined to look with favor on Inga, and his presumption annoyed Dirk because, while he and the girl had not declared their intention of living together, they were very much in love with each other. "You will want to hear him tell about it, I know, Dirk," the girl said. "I left Stanton up on the garden terrace when I saw you coming down. Come; we will go and join him." Dirk and Inga strolled slowly along paths which were lined with exotic shrubbery and plants. Here and there a fountain tossed its glittering spray high into the air while birds, invisible in the feathery foliage, warbled and thrilled entrancingly. Soft music, transmitted from the auditoriums below, blended so harmoniously with the atmosphere of the terraces that it seemed to mingle with and be a part of the drifting, subtle scents of the abundant flowers which bloomed on every side. For these upper terraces of Fragoni's palace were enclosed, during inclement weather, with great glass plates which, at the touch of a button, automatically appeared or disappeared. Winding their way easily upward, Dirk and Inga came finally to a secluded terrace which overlooked the Sound. Here they saw Stanton, who was unaware of their approach, looking skyward at the dim and sinister shape which was outlined against the sky. Stanton's brow was contracted and his expression was filled with apprehension. He started suddenly when he became conscious of the presence of Dirk and the lovely daughter of Fragoni. He rose to his feet, a short man in his forties, stocky in build and somewhat swarthy in complexion. He contrasted very unfavorably with Dirk, who was tall and well-built and who had abundant blond hair and steady steel-blue eyes. "What do you make of that thing, Vanderpool?" he asked, almost ignoring the presence of Inga. "I don't know enough about it yet to be able to express an opinion," Dirk replied. "We will find out about it soon enough," he added, "so why worry about it in the meantime?" "It is well enough to affect such an attitude," said Stanton, with a touch of sarcasm in his voice, "but let me tell you, Vanderpool, that there is good reason to worry about it." * * * * * Dirk frowned at the statement as he saw a shadow pass over the fair face of Inga. "That thing up there," continued Stanton, with conviction in his voice, "is not a natural phenomenon. I flew fairly close to it in my plane and I know what I am speaking about. That thing is some sort of a monster, Vanderpool, that is made of metal or of some composition that is an unearthly equivalent of metal. It is a diabolical creation of some sort that has come from out of the fathomless depths of the universe." He shuddered at the fantasy that his feverish imagination was creating. "It is metal, I tell you," he continued, "but it is metal that is endowed with some sort of intelligence. I was up there," he breathed swiftly, "and I saw it hanging there in the sky, quivering with heat and life." "You are nervous, Stanton," said Vanderpool coolly. "Get a grip on yourself, man, and look at the thing reasonably. If that thing has intelligence," he added, "we will find some way to slay it." "Slay it!" exclaimed Stanton. "How can you expect to slay a mad creation that can leap through space, from world to world, like a wasp goes darting from flower to flower? How can you kill a thing which not only defies absolute zero but also the immeasurable heat which its friction with the atmosphere generated when it plunged toward the earth? How can you kill a thing that seems to have brains and nerves and bones and flesh of some strange substance that is harder and tougher than any earthly compound we have discovered?" * * * * * He stopped speaking for a moment. They listened to the voice that was broadcasting from the Worldwide Tower. "--our planes have approached to within a few thousand feet of it and are playing their searchlights over the surface of the leviathan. It is not a meteorite of any kind that scientists have heretofore examined--its surface is smooth and unpitted and shows no apparent effect of the tremendous heat to which it was subjected during its drop through the atmosphere. It seems to be immune to gravity--its weight must be tremendous, and it is fully three-quarters of a mile long and between seven and eight hundred feet in diameter at its widest part, but it lies motionless--motionless--at about forty thousand feet." "It doesn't appear now as if it would prove very dangerous," remarked Dirk. "--and people are warned again to maintain their composure and to go to their homes and remain there for their own protection and the protection of others. Riots and serious disturbances are reported from cities in all parts of the world--mobs are swarming the streets of Manhattan and the other boroughs of New York, and the police are finding it difficult to restrain the frenzied populations in other centers...." * * * * * There was a pause, then, of some moments, and then the voice of the broadcaster, vibrant with excitement, was heard again. "--a plane has made a landing on the surface of the monstrosity, which, it seems, has not only lost its heat but is becoming decidedly cold--" A servant appeared from among the shrubbery and paused before Dirk. "There is a call for you, Mr. Vanderpool," he said respectfully. Dirk excused himself and, entering the sumptuous apartment that opened from the terrace, went to the televisor. He saw the face of Sears, the chief secretary of Fragoni, in the glass panel. "There will be a meeting of the council at nine o'clock in the morning, Mr. Vanderpool," came the voice over the wire. "Thank you, Sears," replied Dirk. "It happens that Stanton is here at the present time. Shall I notify him of the conclave?" "If you will, please," Sears responded. "By the way, Mr. Vanderpool, is there anything wrong at your apartment? I tried to call you there before I located you here and I failed to get any response." "I guess that all of my servants have run out from under cover because of their fear of that thing in the sky," Dirk responded. "Do you know anything about it, Sears?" he asked. "It will be discussed at the meeting to-morrow morning," replied Sears shortly. "Good night, Mr. Vanderpool." * * * * * Dirk, upon returning to the terrace, saw that both Stanton and Inga were silently and fearfully looking up into the night. "A meeting of the council at nine o'clock in the morning, Stanton," Dirk said abruptly. "I told Sears I would notify you." "I thought that we would be called together very soon," said Stanton. "It's concerning that damn thing up there." "Perhaps," agreed Dirk carelessly. "Well," he added, "I believe that I will hop home and get some sleep." "Sleep!" exclaimed Stanton. "Sleep? On a night like this?" "Oh, Dirk," pleaded Inga, "stay here with me, won't you? I am not going to bed because I just know that I wouldn't be able to close my eyes." "Let him go, Inga, if he wants to sleep," urged Stanton. "I will stay here and keep watch with you." "--and if order is not restored in the streets of Manhattan within the course of a short time, the authorities will resort to morphite gas to quell the turbulence and rioting--" "The streets must be frightfully congested," said Inga. "It is the first occasion in a long time that the police have had to threaten the use of morphite." "--we do not want to alarm people unnecessarily but we have to report," came the hurried voice of the broadcaster, "that the monstrous mass that has been hanging above the city just made a sudden drop of five thousand feet and again came to a stop. It is now a little more than six miles over Manhattan and--again it has dropped. This time it fell like a plummet for twelve thousand feet. It is now about twenty thousand feet, some four miles, above Manhattan and--" * * * * * A cry of alarm came from the lips of Inga as she gazed upward and saw that gigantic, ominous-appearing object loom dim and vast in the darkness above them. She went to Dirk and threw her arms around him, as if she were clinging to him for protection. "Don't leave me, Dirk," she whispered. "I can just feel that something terrible is going to happen, and I want you with me!" "I'll stay with you, of course," whispered Dirk. Something of that feeling of dread and apprehension which so fully possessed his two companions entered into his mind. "Don't tremble so, Inga," he pleaded. "It is a strange thing, but we will know more about it in the morning. Be calm until then, my dear, if you can." He looked over the shoulder of the girl, whose face was buried against his breast, and he saw a hundred great red and green shafts of light shooting up into the air. Fleeting shadows seemed to pass swiftly up and down them, and he knew that thousands of planes were abroad, some of them seeking the heights and others dropping down. The great towers of Long Island were all aglow, and it was apparent that few people were sleeping that night. The scarlet sky over Manhattan indicated that the center of the metropolis, too, was alive to the menace of the weird visitant that now was so plainly visible. All night long they remained on the terrace. Dirk and Inga seated close together and Stanton, at a distance, brooding alone over the disaster which he felt was impending. The illuminated dial of the great clock that was a part of the beacon-tower on the Metropole Landing Field told of the slow passing of the hours. All night long they listened to the reports that came through the radiovisor and watched that immobile, threatening monster of metal. But it remained static during the rest of the night. And, with the coming of a gray and sunless dawn, it still hung there, motionless, silent and sinister. * * * * * The next morning the President of the United States of the World, from the capitol at The Hague, issued a proclamation of martial law, to become effective at once in all parts of the world. The edict forbade people to leave their homes, and it was vigorously executed, wherever the police themselves were not in a state of demoralization. At about the same time a special meeting of the Supreme Congress was called, the body to remain in session until some solution of the mystery had been arrived at. At the same time that martial law was declared, however, and the special assemblage of lawmakers convened, a statement was issued in which an attempt was made to eliminate from the minds of the people the idea that the undefinable object above the metropolis was at all dangerous. It was, indeed, suggested that it very probably was some sort of new device which had been constructed on the earth and which was being introduced to the people of the world in a somewhat sensational manner by the person or persons who were responsible for it. The fears of the populace were, to some extent, allayed by this means, and some degree of order restored. * * * * * At nine o'clock Dirk Vanderpool was shown into the council chamber in the palace of Orlando Fragoni, and he was closely followed by Stanton. Fragoni was already there, and he greeted the two men with a countenance that was serene but that, nevertheless, revealed indications of concern. He was a man past middle age, tall and strikingly handsome in appearance. His eyes were dark and penetrating and his forehead, high and wide, was crowned by an abundance of snow-white hair. His voice, while pleasing to the ear, was vibrant with life and energy, and he spoke with the incisive directness of one accustomed to command. For Orlando Fragoni, as nearly as any one man might be, was the ruler of the world. It was in the early part of the twentieth century that wealth had commenced to concentrate into a relatively few hands. This was followed by a period in which vast mergers and consolidations had been effected as a result of the financial power and genius for organization which a few men possessed. A confederation of the countries of the world was brought about by industrial kings who had learned, in one devastating war, that militarism, while it might bring riches to a few, was, in the final analysis, destructive and wasteful. Mankind the world over, relieved of the menace of war, made more progress in a decade than they had made in any previous century, but all the time the invisible concentration of power and money continued. And, in 1975, the affairs of the world were controlled by five men, of whom Orlando Fragoni was the most powerful and most important. * * * * * His grandfather had been a small banker, and out of his obscure transactions the great House of Fragoni had arisen. The money power of the world was now controlled by Orlando Fragoni. Dirk Vanderpool, partly as a result of a vast inheritance and partly through his own ability and untiring industry, dominated the transportation facilities of the world. Planes and Zeppelins, railroad equipment and ships, were built in his plants and operated by the many organizations which he controlled. Stanton had inherited the agricultural activities of the world and, in addition to this, he was the sovereign of distribution. He owned immense acreages in all of the continents; he not only cultivated every known variety of produce, but also handled the sale of his products through his own great chains of stores. His father had been one of the great geniuses of the preceding generation, but Stanton, while inheriting the commercial empire which he had ruled, had not inherited much of the ability which had gone into the establishment of it. There were two other members of that invisible council of Five, the very existence of which was not even suspected by the general populace of the world. Sigmund Lazarre was the world's mightiest builder, and millions of great structures, which were built of material from his own mines, were under his control. It was Lazarre, too, who owned the theaters and other amusement centers in which millions upon millions of people sought relaxation every day. The creation and application of electrical power made up the domain of Wilhelm Steinholt, who also owned the factories that made the machinery of the world. Absolute control of all of the necessities and luxuries of life, in fact, were in the hands of the five men, who used their vast power wisely and beneficently. Ostensibly the peoples of the world ruled themselves by means of a democratic form of government. In reality their lives were directed by a few men whose power and wealth were entirely unsuspected by any but those who were close to them. * * * * * The council room in which Fragoni had received Dirk and Stanton was lofty and sumptuously appointed. The rugs which covered the floor were soft to the tread, and the walls and ceiling were adorned with a series of murals which represented the various heavenly constellations. At the far end of the chamber there was a staircase, and Dirk was among those who knew that it led up to the great observatory in which Fragoni and certain of his scientific associates spent so much of their time at night. For men had commenced to talk about the conquest of the stars, and it was generally believed that it would not be many years more before a way would be found to traverse the interplanetary spaces. "We are rather fortunate, my friends," Fragoni said to his two associates, "to have been the witnesses of the event that transpired last night." "Fortunate!" exclaimed Stanton. "Then you know that the thing is harmless?" A little smile lit the benign and scholarly countenance of Fragoni as he calmly regarded Stanton. "We know very little about it," he replied after a brief pause, "and, if our surmises are correct, it may be very far from harmless. It is intensely interesting, nevertheless," he continued, "because that thing, as you term it, unquestionably is directed by intelligence. Without the slightest doubt the people of the earth are about to behold a form of life from some far-away planet. What that form will be," he added, with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders, "it is impossible to forecast." "But it was so hot," commenced Stanton, "that--" "True," agreed Fragoni, "but it also is large and it may be that only the outer shell of it was affected by friction with the atmosphere that surrounds the earth. Nachbaren," he continued, "is certain that there is intelligent life within it; and Nachbaren," he added dryly, "is usually right." * * * * * While Fragoni had been speaking, two more men had quietly joined them. "Good morning, Lazarre," Fragoni said, addressing a short, swarthy man who, very apparently, was of Jewish extraction. "Good morning," the other replied in a soft and mellifluous voice. "It seems," he continued, with a twinkle in his eyes, "as if some of my pretty buildings may be toppled over soon." "Maybe," agreed Fragoni. "And maybe," he added more seriously, "much more than your buildings will be toppled over, Lazarre." "That thing, then, is...?" questioned the heavy-set, slow-speaking, blue-eyed Teuton who had come into the room with Lazarre. "We do not know, Steinholt," admitted Fragoni, "but our knowledge undoubtedly will be increased considerably within the next few hours. And now," he said, "we will consider the problem at hand." "--the object which has created such unrest is slowly rising. It is now some twenty-five thousand feet above Manhattan. It is--" The voice from the radiovisor attracted the attention of the five men, and, with one accord, they rushed to the terrace and looked toward Manhattan. They saw the great leviathan high in the air for a moment, and then, suddenly, it seemed to vanish from sight. "It's gone!" exclaimed Stanton, with a sigh of relief. "It must have been some odd atmospheric freak, that's all." They searched the skies through the luciscope that was on the terrace, but failed to detect any trace of the monster. * * * * * "That seems to simplify matters," remarked Fragoni as they again walked back into the great conference room. But here, once more, they heard the voice from the Worldwide Tower. "--we are advised by Chicago that the thing, dull-red with heat, is hovering only a couple of thousand feet over the city. Thousands in the streets are being killed by the heat it is radiating--panic reigns, despite a rigorous enforcement of martial law. The strange object just rose suddenly to a high altitude and disappeared--" "It's another one of those damned things," asserted Stanton. "That couldn't go a thousand miles a minute!" "It can go faster than that, if I am not mistaken," said Fragoni. And it presently appeared that he was right, for in a couple of minutes the radiovisor transmitted the news that it was over San Francisco, where it remained for only a few seconds. It was not more than a minute later that word came from Shanghai that it had passed slowly over that city. Then again it was poised high over Manhattan, crimson with heat. "Is there any possible defense against it, Steinholt?" Fragoni asked. The Teuton shook his head with an air of finality. "None," he said, "as far as I can determine now. We can create and direct artificial lightning that would reduce this building to a mass of powdered stone and fused metal in a fraction of a second. But I am certain that it wouldn't leave as much as a scratch on that monster up there. We might try the Z-Rays on it, but an intelligence that could devise such a craft would undoubtedly have the wisdom to protect it against such an elementary menace as rays. Even the mightiest explosives that we have wouldn't send a tremor through that mighty mass." * * * * * "Why not await developments?" asked Dirk. "We do not even know the nature of the thing we are trying to combat." "It's solid metal," insisted Stanton tenaciously. "It's a metal body with a metal brain." "Don't be ridiculous," said Steinholt. "It seems quite apparent that the craft has come from another planet, and, if I am not greatly mistaken, there are intelligent creatures inside it." "In any event," said Dirk, "it seems impractical to make any plans until we know more about it. I suggest that we empower Fragoni to act for the rest of us in this matter." "That is very agreeable to me," said Steinholt. "A crisis very possibly may arise in which the quick judgment of one man may be necessary to avert the danger that always is inherent in delay." "You hold my proxy," Lazarre said to Fragoni, "and I assume that Stanton is agreeable to this procedure." "--the thing is moving very slowly eastward in the direction of Long Island Sound. It is, at the same time, losing altitude. Its movements are being carefully watched. As yet we see no cause for immediate alarm--people are advised to remain calm--" "Yes, I am agreeable," said Stanton nervously and hastily. "If there are things in it with which we can compromise, I would suggest that we do not offend them." "I am, then, empowered to act for all of you," said Fragoni, ignoring the suggestion of Stanton. * * * * * He rose from his chair and walked out on the terrace. The others followed after him. Looking westward, they saw the mammoth craft descending slowly in their direction. Its vast dimensions became more and more apparent as, spellbound, they watched it approach closer and closer to them. The thing in the sky was now not more than three thousand feet above them and only a few miles to the westward. The observers on the terrace regarded it for a moment in silence as it drifted forward and downward. "It's colossal!" Steinholt then exclaimed, lost in scientific admiration of the mammoth craft. "Magnificent! Superb!" "But it's coming right toward us!" cried Stanton. "What makes it move, I wonder?" asked Dirk. "And how in the world is it controlled?" "It surely is not of this world," said Fragoni quietly. "That gigantic thing has come to us from somewhere out of the infinite and terrible depths of space." * * * * * Another minute elapsed while they watched it, speechless with wonder. "Do you know," Lazarre then said calmly, "I believe that it is going to land in the waters of the Sound. It appears so to me, anyway." It was nearly opposite them by this time, and not more than a thousand feet above the water. A few planes which, very apparently, were being flown by intrepid and fearless flyers, were hovering close around it. Then finally it came to rest, as Lazarre had predicted, in the water some two miles off shore, and it was obscured by a great cloud of vapor for several minutes. "Steam," asserted Steinholt. "That trip around the world, which it made in a few minutes, generated considerable frictional heat in the shell." "Come," said Fragoni, "we'll fly out and look the thing over." Around the corner of the building, on the level of the terrace, there was a landing stage which was occupied by a number of planes of various sizes. Dirk entered the door of a small twenty passenger speedster, and the others filed in after him. "Ready?" he asked, after he had seated himself at the controls. "Ready!" replied Fragoni. The plane rose straight up into the air and then darted gracefully out over the Sound. * * * * * Dirk swooped straight down at the leviathan which lay so quietly on the surface of the Sound and then slowly circled around it. No sign of an aperture of any sort could be seen in the craft. Then he dropped the plane lightly on the water, close to the metallic monster, which towered fully four hundred feet above them, despite the fact that more than half of it was submerged. "It must be hollow," remarked Steinholt, "or it wouldn't be so far out of the water. In fact, it most certainly would sink, if it was solid." At the touch of a lever which lay under one of Dirk's hands the plane rose straight out of the water, and he maneuvered it directly over the top of the strange enigma. Then he touched a button and the pontoons were drawn up into the undercarriage of the craft. "Shall I make a landing on it?" he asked, turning his head and addressing Fragoni. The latter nodded his head, and Dirk dropped the ship gently onto the smooth surface of the monster, the pneumatic gearing completely absorbing the shock of the landing. Dirk relinquished the controls and, opening the door of the cabin, he stepped out onto the rough and pitted substance of which the leviathan was compounded. He stood there while the others came out after him. A large area on the top of the monster was perfectly flat and, within a very few moments, Dirk discovered that it was decidedly warm. He had brought the plane down close to the middle of the length of the strange craft in the belief that there, if anywhere, some indication of an entrance might be found. * * * * * The voice of Steinholt, tense with suppressed excitement, appraised him that his surmise had been correct. "There is a manhole of some sort," the electrical wizard exclaimed. "And look, it is turning!" They saw, not far ahead of them, a circular twelve-foot section of the deck slowly revolving, and, even as they watched, it commenced to rise slowly upward as the threads with which it was provided turned gradually around. Almost involuntarily they retreated a few feet and stood there, spellbound, as they stared at the massive, revolving section of the deck. It continued to turn until fully ten feet of the mobile cylinder had been exposed. Then the bottom of it appeared. Even then it continued to revolve and rise on a comparatively small shaft which supported it and, at the same time, thrust it upward. Dirk and his companions kept their eyes on the rim of the well which had been exposed, and awaited the appearance of something, they knew not what. When the top of the great cylinder was fully twelve feet above the deck of the craft it slowly ceased to revolve. Moment succeeded moment as the members of the little group rigidly and almost breathlessly awaited developments. Then Dirk, with an impatient ejaculation, stepped forward toward the yawning hole and cautiously peered over the edge of it. He stood there for a moment, as if transfixed, and then, with an exclamation of horror, retreated swiftly to where his friends were standing. * * * * * "What is it?" gasped Steinholt. "What did you see when--" But the words died on his lips for, swarming swiftly over every side of the well, there poured an array of erect, piercing-eyed beings, who had all the characteristics of humans. They were clad in tight-fitting attire of thin and pliant metal which, with the exception of their faces, shielded them from head to foot. On their heads they wore close-fitting helmets, apparently equipped with visors which could be drawn down to cover their unprepossessing features. Each one of them carried a tube which bore a striking resemblance to a portable electric flashlight. Swiftly they advanced, in ranks of eight, toward Dirk and his companions who, gripped with amazement, held their positions. The first line came to a halt not more than four feet from the little group on the deck. The other lines halted, too, and formed a great platoon. Then a shrill whistle sounded and the formation parted in the middle, leaving an open path that led backward to the entrance, to the well. A moment later the watchers saw the regal figure of a man emerge from the orifice and, after a moment's pause, advance slowly in their direction with a stately stride. He was tall and muscular and blond and his attire, golden in texture, glittered with sparkling gems. As he approached them he raised his right hand and, inasmuch as his countenance was calm and benign, his gesture appeared to be one of peace and good-will. * * * * * Following close behind him there was a younger man who, very apparently, was of the same lineage. His expression, however, was petulant and haughty and it contained more than a suggestion of rapacity and evil. Behind him there were others of the same fair type, all of them sumptuously and ornately attired. Fragoni stepped forward, himself a dignified and striking figure, as the leader of the strange adventurers came forth from the lane that had been formed by his immobile guard of warriors. The two men confronted each other, one whose power and wealth gave him a dominate position on earth, and the other a personage from some domain that was remote in the abyss of space. Fragoni bowed and spoke a few friendly words of welcome and the stranger, to the utter amazement of the banker and his associates, responded in an English that was rather peculiar in accent but that they could understand without any difficulty. "From what part of the world do you come," asked the astounded Fragoni, "that you speak our language?" "We come from no part of this world," replied the stranger. "The empire of my ruler is infinitely far away. But language, my friend, is not a thing of accident. Life grows out of the substance of the universe and language comes out of life. The speech of mankind, in your state of development, varies but little throughout all space and I have heard your English, as you call it, spoken among those who dwell in many, many worlds." "And your world?" asked Steinholt with avid curiosity. "Tell us of the planet from which you come." * * * * * But Fragoni, smiling at the eagerness of Steinholt, interposed with a kindly but arresting gesture. "My name is Fragoni," he said to the stranger, "and I would have you partake, of my hospitality and refresh yourself after your long journey. These," he added, "are my friends, Steinholt, Vanderpool and Lazarre." "I am Teuxical, vassal of his Supreme Highness, Malfero of Lodore," the other replied. "This is my son, Zitlan," he continued, indicating the young man behind him, "and the others are my high captains, Anteucan, Orzitza and Huazibar. More of my officers are below together with ten thousand armed and armored men such as you see before you." If the last part of the statement was intended as a threat or a warning, the expression on Fragoni's face gave no indication that he was aware of it. "You carry a large crew, sir," Fragoni replied, "but we gladly will make provisions for all of your men. As for yourself, your son, and your captains, if you will come with me...." He nodded in the direction of the plane which rested on the great interplanetary vessel and started to walk slowly in the direction of it. The leader of the skymen walked by his side and the other men from Lodore followed close after them. Dirk, Steinholt and Lazarre brought up the rear, while the soldiers remained motionless in their serried array. * * * * * Innumerable planes were circling overhead and hundreds of them had landed on the water in the vicinity. Dirk saw that the wanderers from the stars regarded them curiously as if they never before had seen aircraft of that particular type. When the cabin door of the plane was thrown open, Teuxical turned to one of his captains. "Remain here, Anteucan, with the soldiers," he commanded, "and await our return." Teuxical then entered the plane with his men and Fragoni, Steinholt and Lazarre followed after them. Then Dirk took his seat at the controls. "These are strange craft you use," he heard Teuxical say. "I have seen them in only one of the multitude of other worlds on which I have set my feet, worlds which all pay tribute to Malfero of Lodore. It is safer and swifter to ride the magnetic currents than it is to ride the unstable currents of the air." Dirk caught the significance of the reference to tribute and he admired the clever diplomacy of Teuxical while, at the same time, he wondered if the earth and all of those who dwelt upon it were doomed to fall under the sway of some remote and unseen despot. He also realized that the Lodorians had, in some way, devised a craft that rode the great magnetic streams which flowed through the universe in much the same way that men, in ships, navigated the streams of the earth. He threw on the helicopter switch and the plane rose swiftly into the air, the myriad other flying craft which were circling nearby keeping at a safe distance from it. "Land on the grand terrace," Fragoni directed. The flight was short and rapid and it was only a matter of seconds before Dirk brought the plane down on the landing stage which they had left only a scant half-hour before. He opened the cabin door and stepped out of the plane and the others filed out after him. * * * * * Fragoni led the way along the stage, walking and chatting with Teuxical, and Dirk, following after the others, was the last to turn a corner that brought him a sweeping view of the magnificent terrace that fronted the private apartments of the banker and his daughter. And, when he did, he saw that Inga was standing there, superbly beautiful, with Stanton a few paces behind her. Her lovely eyes were alive with awe and wonder and her slender white hands were crossed over her heart. And Dirk saw, too, that Zitlan, son of Teuxical, had paused and was standing quite still, with his unwavering and insolent eyes fixed on the girl. Resentment, and a touch of apprehension, agitated Dirk when he saw the expression on the face of the young Lodorian. There was admiration in that disagreeable countenance, but it was blended with arrogance, haughtiness and ill-concealed desire. Dirk went quickly to Inga, standing between the girl and the one from Lodore who was staring at her so brazenly. "What does it all mean, Dirk?" she asked in a low voice. "Those strange people, where are they from?" Stanton had come quickly forward and had joined Inga and Dirk. "They are from some far-off world, Inga," he explained, "that we know nothing about as yet." "But what do they want?" she persisted. "What do they intend to do? I saw those horrible creatures through the magnascope when they came swarming out of the inside of that thing on the water and I thought, at first, that they were going to kill you all." "No, they seem to come in peace," Dirk replied. "Teuxical, their leader, seems to be gracious and kindly." * * * * * "We are all doomed," asserted Stanton, "unless something happens. They can crumble our cities with heat and bury us under the ruins of them." "Keep your silence!" breathed Dirk, quietly but tensely. "We will find a way to destroy those creatures if it becomes necessary." "That man who keeps staring at me, who is he?" asked Inga in a voice that betrayed her nervousness. Dirk turned and saw that Zitlan was still standing where he had paused and that he still was looking with searching eyes in the direction of the girl. He returned the insolent gaze of the young Lodorian with an impatient and threatening stare and the countenance of Zitlan at once became stern and menacing. He came striding in the direction of Inga, Dirk and Stanton and paused within a few feet of them, his rapacious eyes still fixed on the girl. "My lady," he said, "your beauty pleases me. I have walked on many worlds but never before have I seen one as lovely as yourself. Of the spoils of this world, all that I crave possession of is you. When we return to Lodore," he added with an air of finality, "I will take you with me and place you with my other women in the Seraglio of the Stars." Dirk swiftly stepped close to Zitlan and the latter quickly clasped a tube that hung at his side, a tube of the sort that the soldiers had carried. "Your words and your manner are insolent," asserted Dirk angrily, "and I warn you now to cease making yourself offensive." "Dog!" exclaimed Zitlan fiercely, leveling the metal tube, "I'll--" But the left fist of Dirk cut short his threat as it made a sudden impact with his chin, and the Lodorian went crashing backward into some exotic shrubbery with a look of surprise on his countenance. Then Dirk heard an odd hissing and crackling sound, and he felt himself becoming dizzy and weak. Darkness seemed to sweep in upon him; he felt that he was dropping swiftly through space, and then he lost consciousness. * * * * * A vague and shadowy figure was standing close by his side and peering down into his face. After a while he realized that it was Steinholt. "Steinholt!" he gasped. "Why--why am I here--in Fragoni's? I must have had a dream--and yet...." He furrowed his brow in thought and, gradually, he commenced to remember what had happened. "It was no dream," said the scientist softly. "Do you remember the trouble that you had with Zitlan?" "Yes," replied Dirk. "I remember that he was insolent to Inga and that I lost my temper and struck him. But what happened to me? I don't recall that anybody hit me. I did hear sort of a peculiar sound just before I started to pass out, but--" "Teuxical took a shot at you," said Steinholt, "and you have been unconscious for over thirty-six hours." "Took a shot at me!" exclaimed Dirk. "What did he shoot me with?" "That is what we all would like to know," said Steinholt. "He leveled one of those damn tubes at you and pressed a button on it. There was a hissing sound, a flash of light, and you got groggy, and went out. He potted Zitlan, too," continued Steinholt, "and he apologized for the trouble that his son was responsible for. Do you know," he added, "I sort of like the old man." * * * * * Lazarre, with a sympathetic smile on his face, entered the room at that moment and overheard the conversation. "Old man is right," he remarked, with a little note of awe in his voice. "Teuxical admits that he is three thousand years old and that he has at least two thousand more ahead of him. That Lodore must be a queer world," he commented, shaking his grizzly head. "It is not so queer when you take everything into consideration," said Steinholt. "It seems quite natural when Teuxical explains it. Lodore it seems, is something like a hundred thousand times as big as this miniature world we live on. It took Lodore infinitely longer to solidify from a gaseous state than it took this world, and its entire evolution has been relatively slower than ours. Therefore, according to Teuxical, the people up there live longer and, incidentally, know infinitely more than we do." * * * * * "What time is it now?" asked Dirk, after a moment of thought. "It is just about twelve o'clock at night," Steinholt informed him. "Have these Lodorians made any demands yet?" Dirk asked. "Does anybody know what they are going to do or what they want?" "They are liable to do almost anything," said Lazarre, "and it looks as though they will be able to get anything that they want. Teuxical, as I understand it, just gave you a slight shock with his death-ray device. If he had pulled the trigger all the way you would have become just a little pile of dust that the first breeze would have blown away." "Our own death-rays are somewhat similar," said Steinholt, "but they are not a hundredth as powerful. And they won't work on the Lodorians, either," he added, "because those metal sheaths that they wear make them immune to all kinds of destructive rays." * * * * * "It appears," remarked Lazarre morosely, "as if this little world of ours is going to be taken for a ride. And it's too bad, considering that it's the only world we've got. There has been no formal presentation of demands yet, but it seems to be sort of understood that the earth is going to become a tributary of Lodore. It is a good thing," he added, "that Teuxical, and not Zitlan, is the boss of that outfit. I don't like the looks of that young fellow. He's only twelve hundred years old and he is sort of hot-blooded, I guess." "I was talking with Anteucan," said Steinholt, "and he told me that the Lodorians usually make heavy levies on worlds which they discover and dominate. As soon as Teuxical returns to Lodore and announces a new discovery a fleet of those damned monsters is sent out to mop up the new planet. That Malfero, who is the emperor of Lodore, is considerable of a monarch, and it seems that he has a passion for piling up wealth. Gold and platinum are as precious on Lodore as they are here and he also likes pretty stones." "And what is worse," added Steinholt, "is his practice of enslaving entire populations and making toilers or warriors out of them. Those soldiers on the ship are not Lodorians. Millions of them were seized on some planet and converted into troops. It was a strange conversion, too," said Steinholt with a shudder. "Their brains were operated on and most of their faculties removed. They have no sense of fear, no consciences, no power of reasoning. They respond only to certain signals on a whistle and their only definite and active impulse is that of murder and destruction." "There is nothing to do," said Dirk positively, "but to kill all of these interlopers, if we hope to save our world from being desolated." * * * * * The three men looked at each other in silence for a moment and then Dirk, somewhat weakly, rose into a sitting position in the bed which he had been occupying. "But how," asked Steinholt, "can we kill them? We might, of course, get rid of a few of them, but that simply would lead to our destruction by those who were left." "There must be some way," asserted Dirk, "and it is up to us to think of it without delay. If we let those Lodorians get a foothold on the world all will be lost." "The old man seems to be reasonable enough," said Lazarre. "He doesn't seem inclined to be destructive." "We must not trust him or any of the others," said Dirk imperatively. "We must rid the earth of every one of them. And the sooner we strike the better!" "It had best be soon if it is to be at all," said Steinholt. "Fragoni has arranged to have Teuxical appear before the Congress, and the meeting has been called for to-night when, I imagine, certain specific demands will be made upon us. We all will go to The Hague together on the ship of the Lodorians." "And we leave?" questioned Dirk. "The meeting is set for ten P. M., New York time," said Lazarre. "We will start east at about four o'clock in the morning, I guess, because it will only take a minute or so to arrive at our destination." "Is Fragoni going?" asked Dirk. "Naturally," replied Lazarre. "And Inga?" "I believe so," Lazarre told him. "Fragoni was both afraid to take her and to leave her behind, but finally he decided that he wanted her with him in case of trouble." * * * * * "And are they--the Lodorians--still here?" queried Dirk. "Yes," responded Lazarre. "Teuxical returned to his ship last night with Zitlan and his other followers, but they came back late this afternoon, and they are still here. Zitlan seemed to be all right this afternoon, too. They must have used some means of bringing him out of the daze that he was in. We did everything we could to revive you, but none of our measures were effective." "I'm all right now," asserted Dirk, as he finished attiring himself. "I want to see Fragoni at once." "We'll go out on the terrace then," said Steinholt. "They are all out there." Dirk, with his two companions, strolled out through the maze of rooms and corridors that led to the garden which hung so high above the city and the Sound below it. The first thing that Dirk saw, when he passed out onto the terrace, was the white tunic of Inga, who was leaning against a coping and talking with Zitlan. The latter was pointing skyward and, very apparently, he was telling her of worlds which circled high among the stars. As if she were suddenly aware of his presence, Inga turned and saw Dirk and he realized, by the expression on her face, that she was distraught and nervous. She came toward him quickly, after a few words to Zitlan, and the face of the latter darkened. There was hatred in his expression as he stared malevolently at Dirk. * * * * * Steinholt and Lazarre passed along and joined Fragoni and Teuxical, who were the center of a group that had formed in another part of the terrace. "Oh, Dirk," said Inga, "I am so afraid of that frightful Zitlan. He has been telling me again that he is going to take me back to his own world with him and it makes me shudder to think of it. He is so strange and queer and his eyes are so terrible. He can't be as young as he looks, because he speaks of years like we speak of minutes. I will die if I ever find myself in that monster's power! He has been telling me of all the creatures he has slain on the worlds on which he has landed, and I tell you, Dirk, that he is cruel and ruthless and horrible." "He will never have you!" swore Dirk. "And if I hear of any more of his insolence, I will throw him headlong from this terrace." "Please, Dirk," she begged, "don't do anything--not yet. He is utterly unscrupulous, Dirk. He told me that, even now, he is plotting against some Malfero who rules Lodore like a god, and that he is planning to seize the throne of the planet. He wants to make me the queen of that fearful world when he becomes king. He boasted that, if I were on the throne, millions of people from other worlds would be sacrificed in my honor in the temples of Lodore." Her voice trembled and her eyes were terror-stricken as she continued. "They tear out the hearts of living victims," she whispered, "and burn them on their high and mammoth pyramids." * * * * * Rage took possession of Dirk and, casting a glance at Zitlan, he saw that the Lodorian was smiling insolently at him. "I'll kill that beast, if it's the last thing that I do!" he exclaimed to Inga. "Dirk, Dirk," she implored, "don't even look at him. He is proud and impetuous, and he will kill you in defiance of his own father." "We will find some way to rid the world of the scourge that has descended upon it," asserted Dirk confidently, "and he will die with the rest of that monstrous crew." "I am going in, Dirk," Inga said. "Please," she begged, "don't do anything rash. If--something--should happen to you, I would lose all the hope that I have and I would, I think, kill myself." "Don't lose hope, my dear," said Dirk reassuringly. "I believe that I know of a way to destroy the plague that menaces us." He pressed her hand and, after she left him, he walked over and joined the other men on the terrace. Zitlan, coming from the terrace wall, stretched out in a chair not far from Dirk. Teuxical regarded the latter with a countenance that was calm and amicable. "I am sorry, my young friend," he apologized, "that I had to intervene between you and my son." He paused a moment and sat in silence, a thoughtful expression on his face. "Ah," he then said, "what disasters have arisen out of the desire of men for women. In my wanderings over the starlit worlds, I have seen...." He ceased speaking, brooded for a moment, and then shook his head slowly. "But you cannot say that I was not just," he continued, addressing Dirk. "I punished Zitlan for his presumption. Fragoni tells me that the woman has pledged herself to you. Let her pledge be kept!" he exclaimed sternly, looking straight at Zitlan. "We are the conquerors," asserted the latter boldly, "and to us should belong the spoils of our daring!" "Silence!" thundered Teuxical. "My own son, above all others, shall be obedient to my commands! Or, like others have done, he shall die because of insubordination!" * * * * * Zitlan, a defiant expression on his face, ceased to speak, but Dirk could see that he was livid with suppressed rage. "As I was saying," Teuxical remarked, turning to Fragoni, "I am getting old and long have I been weary of conquest. I have seen your world and it pleases me. It is a tiny and peaceful place, far removed from the strife and turbulence of the restless centers of the universe. So it is my will to leave you unscathed and return to Lodore for a brief time to ask of the mighty Malfero the grant of this little provincial land. And then, with his permission, I will return here and rule it with wisdom and benevolence. "I will bring to you much knowledge, and peace will be to the people of this earth and peace will be to me." "It is well," replied Fragoni. "No world, I am certain, could hope for a wiser and more just ruler than yourself, and our Congress surely will receive you with acclaim." Teuxical bowed in recognition of the compliment, and his countenance indicated that he was gratified. "We will go, now, back to our vessel," he said, addressing the other Lodorians. "We will return for you at the appointed hour and conduct you to our ship," he added, speaking to Fragoni. "We will be ready," Fragoni replied. * * * * * Zitlan had arisen with the rest of them and Dirk, with a look of contempt and amusement in his eyes, regarded him casually. "May I have the honor of conducting our guests back to their ship in a plane?" Stanton requested of Fragoni. The latter nodded and Stanton walked across the terrace in the direction of the landing stage. Zitlan, as he followed after the others, passed close to Dirk and, pausing for a moment, fixed his hateful eyes on him. "You dog," he whispered malignantly, "remember what I tell you! The time will come when I will cast you to the carnaphlocti in the dark and icy caverns of sunless Tiganda. You will die," he swore, "the death of a million agonies!" For a moment Dirk felt an almost irresistible impulse to hurl himself on the Lodorian and slay him. He managed to maintain his control, however, and only regarded Zitlan with disdain as the latter turned and went on his way. In another moment the plane, containing Stanton and the Lodorians, was high up in the darkness. Dirk glanced at the great clock that gleamed atop of the beacon-tower on the Metropole Landing Field. The hour was close to twelve-thirty A. M. * * * * * A moment of silence on the terrace followed the departure of the plane that bore the Lodorians back to their craft. For an hour the clouds had been gathering in the sky and now a fine, cold rain commenced to fall. A peal of thunder echoed above them after a sharp flash of lightning had streaked across the black night above them. A servant appeared from the entrance to the apartment and pressed a button close to the door. Protective plates of glass noiselessly enveloped the terrace, sheltering those upon it from the inclement weather. "It is well," remarked Fragoni, breaking the silence, "that we were found by a leader like Teuxical. Our tribute will not be unbearable, and he will bestow many benefits upon us." "But surely," protested Dirk, "you do not intend to surrender without a struggle! Nothing but disaster," he asserted earnestly, "will come upon the earth if you do. Teuxical may be honest and just but, after all, he neither is immortal nor all-powerful, and something may happen to him at any moment. And there are those like Zitlan who would turn the world over to ravage and rape, and then convert it into a blazing pyre, if they had their way. These vandals," he insisted, "must be slain one and all, or, mark my words, our world will be laid waste." * * * * * Dirk spoke with such a sense of conviction that his words held his listeners spellbound. "Who is Teuxical," he asked, "but the vassal of a monarch whose corsairs, very apparently, are carrying on a war of conquest in the universe? It will be disastrous, I say, to place any dependence in the good will of this one Lodorian. If he, or any of his men, return to that far-off planet where they dwell word will be carried there of the existence of our world. But who can say that Teuxical ever will return here again? It may be the whim of his ruler to refuse his request, or any one of a thousand other events might arise to thwart his desire to live among us. No," concluded Dirk passionately, "it never will do to let that great engine of destruction rise into the skies again!" "He is right!" asserted Steinholt positively. "It will be far better to annihilate these raiders, if such a thing can be accomplished!" Lazarre was rather inclined to take sides with Fragoni. "But how," he demanded, "can such destruction be brought about? We know nothing of the capabilities of that monster that is lying down there in the Sound. It is undoubtedly equipped with the deadliest of devices and they all will be turned upon us if we fail in an effort to destroy the thing and those who have come from space upon it. If there was a way to smite them suddenly, to bring death to the Lodorians and to those swarming, mindless, murderous minions who act in obedience to them, I would favor doing it. "But, as it is," he concluded, "it seems like inviting disaster even to think of such an attempt, much less to try it." "It can be done, though," asserted Dirk, "or there is at least a fighting chance of accomplishing it. The electrosceotan--" He paused, and looked questioningly at Steinholt. "The top of that monster is open and...." * * * * * The Teuton furrowed his brow and considered the proposition for a moment. "Yes," he said, nodding his head, "it might be done." Again he silently gave the subject his thought. "It is well worth trying," he asserted with an air of decision. "But we will have to make haste," he warned, "if the thing is to be done before the flight to The Hague." "So be it," said Fragoni. "We will apply ourselves to the task at hand. I, too," he confessed, "had rather see these vandals destroyed like so much vermin rather than have them carry the news of the existence of this earth back into those strange worlds in the depth of space. I will only regret the passing of Teuxical, who could have taught us much wisdom. And now," he continued briskly, "I will place myself under your orders, Dirk. You are the one who suggested this plan and upon you will fall the responsibility of executing it. And, if it succeeds," he added, "the glory will be yours." "I care little for the glory," replied Dirk, "but I gladly accept the duties and the responsibilities. These," he said to Fragoni, "are my instructions to you. Inasmuch as Teuxical and his captains will return here at about four o'clock in the morning to convey us back to their craft, it will be necessary to have this building emptied of its inhabitants by that time. Let all of those who dwell here depart from it, a few at a time, so as not to excite suspicion. Inga, above all others, must leave and retreat to a place of safety. Then, as the hour approaches for the arrival of the Lodorians, we will escape by plane from one of the rear terraces. They will land in search of us and--well, then they will feel the force of our power." "I will follow your orders explicitly," promised Fragoni. "I wonder," he added, "where Stanton is? He should be advised of what we are going to attempt." "He will return in due time," replied Dirk. "And, if not, it will be the worse for him. Lazarre will remain here with you," he then told Fragoni, "and Steinholt and I will now go about our part of the task at hand." * * * * * Dirk, followed by Steinholt, hurried across the terrace and, leaving the shelter of its quartzite plates, sought the landing stage. The rain still was falling and the heavens were congested with dark and heavy clouds. Dirk, selecting one of the smaller planes, entered the cabin and Steinholt, following after him, closed the door and threw on the lights. Swiftly they shot straight up into the air, Dirk ignoring all of the rules of flight in his haste to be under way. Once in the westbound lane, he headed his plane toward Manhattan and threw his rheostat wide open. In a few minutes they were skimming over the great city and past the three-thousand-foot steel tower of the Worldwide Broadcasting Station. For fifteen minutes more he kept the plane on a straight course and then, bringing it to a quick stop, he let it drop like a plummet toward the earth. It landed, among many other planes, on the transparent, quartzite roof of a vast building and, looking down into the interior, they could see several rows of great dynamos. Some of them were turning, and the humming that they made could be heard plainly. * * * * * Dirk and Steinholt ran rapidly across the roof until they came to a superstructure, which they entered. There was a shaft inside. Dirk pressed a button, and an elevator shot up and stopped at the door, which automatically flashed open. He closed it after he and his companion had entered the cage and, dropping rapidly downward, they came to a stop in a lighted chamber that was far below the surface of the ground. A stoop-shouldered old man greeted them, an expression of surprise on his face. "Gentlemen!" he exclaimed. "What is--" "Power, Gaeble!" commanded Steinholt tensely. "Power! Let every dynamo run its swiftest. To-night we have to use for the electrosceotan!" "But I thought it was peace that those from the stars desired," said the old electrician. "Through my radiovisor I heard--" "That was sent out," explained Steinholt, "to relieve the fears of the people and to keep them in order." Swiftly the distorted figure of the old man sped to a great switchboard, where he pressed button after button. The very ground commenced to vibrate around them and the massive structure seemed to be alive with straining power. Then Steinholt, going to a corner of the intricate board, adjusted a few levers, while his gnomelike companion watched him carefully. "And now, Gaeble," the scientist said impressively, "these are your orders. At precisely the hour of four o'clock in the morning make one connection with this switch." * * * * * He indicated, with a stubby finger, the lever to be operated. "Keep the circuit closed for just four seconds," he added slowly, "and then break it. Do you understand, Gaeble?" he demanded. "I do," replied the old man. "Then," continued Steinholt, "after you break that connection you quickly will close this next circuit. Keep it closed for four seconds and then, after opening it for one second, close it again for four seconds. Repeat the procedure twice more, Gaeble, after that, and then await my further instructions. Is everything clear?" he asked. "It is, sir," the old man replied. "I will follow your orders implicitly." "There is one thing more," Steinholt said. "Get the Worldwide Tower on the televisor and warn them of what is to happen." "I will do that immediately," Gaeble replied. Dirk and Steinholt shot up to the roof again and the building over which they walked seemed to be quivering with life. They could see that all of the mammoth dynamos beneath them were revolving and the humming which they had heard before had changed into an ugly, vibrant roar. * * * * * Again they took flight and, reaching Manhattan, they continued north and east to the shore of Long Island Sound. Long before the old East River had been filled in and the space which it had occupied reclaimed for building purposes. All indications of its former bed had been obliterated by mammoth terraced structures. When they reached their destination on the shore of the Sound a small submarine, which Dirk had ordered by radio, was awaiting them. "Submerge and proceed up the Sound," Dirk ordered the officer, "and take us directly under the craft of the Lodorians." In a few minutes they were skimming over the surface of the water and, when a sufficient depth had been gained, the tiny boat disappeared beneath the rain-rippled sea. Dirk sat at a port and watched the aquatic life as it was illuminated by the powerful aquamarine searchlights. Progress under the water was comparatively slow, as mankind had made but little progress in underwater navigation. Air liners long before had almost superseded travel by land and sea and the abolition of warfare had swept all of the old navies from the ocean. It was more than an hour before the officer in charge of the boat announced that the mammoth hull of the monster that was lying on the Sound was visible directly above them. Both Dirk and Steinholt donned diving apparatus, and the former carefully adjusted the mechanism that was contained in a metallic box about two feet square. * * * * * Then they stepped up into a chamber in the conning tower of the boat and, after a door slipped shut beneath them, water slowly commenced to pour into the compartment. When it was full a sliding door that was in front of them slowly opened and they passed out onto the deck of the underwater craft. Steinholt had been provided with some welding apparatus and, in a few minutes, the box which Dirk had carried was attached securely to the bottom of the craft of the Lodorians. They then reentered the submarine by reversing the process which had attended their exit. Very soon they were in the cabin of the boat again. "If everything goes well," said Dirk, "those damned Lodorians will never know what struck them." "I only hope," said Steinholt, "that we don't destroy that leviathan altogether. We might solve the secret of it and then we, too, could ride out into the heart of the universe." "It is impossible to imagine what will happen," Dirk replied, "until after we launch our attack." Both of the men were silent during the return trip of the small undersea craft, which emerged at its dock a little before three-thirty in the morning. "We'll have to hurry," urged Dirk nervously, "because we will need a little time to make preparations after we get back to Fragoni's." They entered their plane and Dirk shot it swiftly up into the night, following the red shaft of light that rose almost directly from the point at which they had made their landing. * * * * * Then, having reached the eastbound level, he headed straight in the direction of the palace of Fragoni. Dirk cast a glance at the great city that lay far beneath him. High up into the heavens it tossed the fulgurant fires that betokened its wealth and power. And, down among those myriad lights, millions and millions of people were restless under the danger that menaced them. It was only a matter of moments now before their fate, and the fate of their great metropolis, would be decided. By dawn they would be free forever from the threat of subjugation and slavery or else they, and all that they had toiled and striven for, would be the veriest dust of dying embers. And whatever befell them likewise would befall the rest of the world and every living thing that moved upon it. Dirk was high above Fragoni's when he stopped the forward flight of the plane and, dropping it rapidly through the misty night, brought up easily on the landing stage. The other planes which had been there when he and Steinholt had taken their departure were gone and Dirk felt a sense of relief when he observed this. Inga, then, must have departed with the other occupants of the colossal structure. Things were going according to the plan that he had conceived. He stepped out of the cabin, followed by Steinholt, and proceeded hastily along the terrace and turned the corner into the garden. Then he came to an abrupt halt because there, before him, was Zitlan, with one of the deadly ray-tubes of the Lodorians in his hand. * * * * * Dirk knew immediately that something unexpected had happened and that he was in the power of one who not only hated him but who had an unholy desire for Inga. He realized, too, that any show of resistance would be nothing short of suicide, for he was well aware of the deadliness of the strange weapon with which he and Steinholt were being menaced by the gloating Lodorian. "One false move and you die!" warned Zitlan. "Come forward, now, and join those two others over whom Anteucan and Huazibar are watching." Dirk and Steinholt promptly obeyed the command of Zitlan and walked over to where Fragoni and Lazarre were being guarded by two of the conquerors. The rain had ceased to fall, but the skies were dark and overcast with heavy clouds. There was an occasional flash of lightning, and thunder rolled and echoed through the night. The terrace, however, was brightly illuminated and every detail of the scene around him was visible to Dirk. He saw Stanton, on another part of the terrace, standing among some Lodorians he had not seen before. Stanton, apparently, was not being treated as a prisoner and Dirk wondered, rather vaguely, why this was. "What happened?" Dirk asked Fragoni quietly. "According to what I have heard," the latter replied, "Zitlan murdered his father in a fit of rage, and has taken over the command of the ship. Many of the Lodorians are his adherents and even those who do not favor him are so terrified that they will be obedient to his wishes." "And Inga?" questioned Dirk. "She is inside the apartment," said Fragoni, a note of desperation in his voice. "Zitlan surprised us completely and he and his men had us covered before we realized that Teuxical was not among them." * * * * * Zitlan, in the meantime, had entered the suite of Fragoni and he now came out, Inga walking before him. She was silent and proudly erect but there was a pallor in her face that indicated her realization of the danger that she was threatened with. When Dirk saw her she gave him a brave smile, which he answered with a glance of reassurance. He could see the great clock in the Metropole Tower, and he noticed, with a feeling of grave apprehension, that it was twenty minutes to four o'clock. There were only a few minutes more in which to make a desperate and apparently a hopeless effort to save Inga, his friends and himself from a catastrophe which he had been instrumental in contriving. Then Zitlan stood before him, haughty and arrogant, his lowering countenance ugly with hatred. "So, dog," he said, "you who dared to defy Zitlan now stand before him a captive!" Neither Dirk nor any one of the three others who were guarded with him replied to the utterance. "You and that woman of yours," continued the Lodorian insolently, "both are my prisoners to do with as I please. Your fate," he continued, "I already have planned for you and I assure you that it will not be as pleasurable as the one to which she is destined. You will find that Tigana, on which you and those with you will be cast, is a world of terror such as you never could dream of. Even the monsters which crawl through the deliriums of the mind are not as horrible as those which infest the mad and haunted world of which I speak." * * * * * He paused a moment, a cruel smile on his face, as if he wished the full import of his words to sear themselves into the minds of the doomed men. "But the woman," he added, "will return to Lodore with me and be the queen of all women. And soon," he said savagely, "she may be queen of all Lodore, of the worlds which pay tribute to Lodore, and of other worlds which I will conquer and ravage. My father stood in my way and he died at my own hands. So will others perish who thwart my ambition, and I will become supreme in the universe!" A feeling of reckless fury possessed Dirk as he listened to the words of Zitlan and he felt an almost irresistible desire to drive a fist square between the mad, glittering eyes of the Lodorian. He glanced at the great clock, however, and he saw that the time to act had not yet come. At the last moment he would make one desperate attempt to frustrate the evil designs of Zitlan. If it failed--well, all would be lost. But it was a far better thing to die resisting the despicable Zitlan and his minions than it would be to live and to know that, without a struggle, he had abandoned to degradation the girl he loved. "This world of yours will be my world," he heard Zitlan boast, "and the spoils from it will add to my riches. This one here," he continued, indicating Stanton, "has offered to show me where all of the treasures of the earth may be found. And, as a reward, he will return to Lodore with me and there be elevated to a high position." * * * * * That, then, was why Stanton was not under guard like the rest of them. "Our good friend, Stanton," said Lazarre, "seems to have become something of a Judas." "And let his name be forever cursed, like the name of Judas," said Dirk. "Silence!" thundered the Lodorian. "I, Zitlan, am speaking." He paused a moment. "When I garner up the treasures of this world in the way of precious stones and metals I also shall gather more priceless loot in the way of women. And then, having taken all that I desire, I will lay waste to this earth so that those who survive will fear the name of Zitlan and will grovel before him like a god when once again he appears to them." While Zitlan had been speaking, Dirk had been studying the opponents with whom he soon had to clash. The two Lodorians who were standing guard over himself and his companions were close to his left side. Zitlan was directly in front of him, and there were seven of his minions clustered behind him. Again Dirk glanced at the great dial of the clock, and he saw that it was seven minutes of four. The moment had come to act if action was to prove of any avail. "I will--" But the words of Zitlan were interrupted by Dirk, who suddenly made a mighty sweep with his left arm and knocked the deadly tubes from the hands of Anteucan and Huazibar. Startled by the assault, they went reeling backward. At almost the same instant Dirk leaped forward and, seizing Zitlan, hurled him among those Lodorians who had been massed behind him. Then he threw himself violently into the tangled mass, his fists driving in and out with deadly strength! * * * * * Out of the corner of one eye he saw Inga pass the melee and dart swiftly to the corner of the terrace. Instead of passing around to the landing stage, however, she lingered there and watched the combat. Dirk, as he fought, became conscious that Steinholt and Fragoni were at his side, battling with him against his enemies. He saw, too, that Stanton had retired to the far end of the terrace and that he was watching the struggle with frightened eyes. "We must reach the plane and get away," gasped Dirk. "In another three minutes--" He felled a Lodorian who, having lost his tube, was about to grapple with him. He saw Steinholt send another one of their opponents reeling backward. "Fragoni!" he exclaimed. "The plane! Get in with Inga! We will come!" Even as he spoke his fists were flailing back and forth between each one of his staccato commands. He saw beneath him a hand reaching toward a tube, and he kicked the instrument of death. It hurtled over in the direction of Stanton and landed close to his feet. Stanton might have picked it up and been in possession of the means of aiding his old friends or his new allies. But he shrunk away, panic-stricken, from the thing that lay so close to his reach. A Lodorian leaped upon Dirk's back in an effort to bring him to the ground, but he stooped swiftly forward and his assailant was catapulted over his head into those who were in front of him. * * * * * He caught a flash of the contorted face of Zitlan flying through the air, and saw him land with a crash on the terrace, and lie there writhing in pain. "Steinholt, Lazarre!" he said convulsively. "We've got to strike once more! And then--run!" He plunged into their enemies with every bit of energy that he had left, and saw two of them toppling down. Then, like a flash, he turned to Lazarre, who was trying to fight off three of the Lodorians. Seizing one of them by the waist, Dirk hurled him backward and he disposed of another one in the same manner. His sheer desperation seemed to have given him unbounded strength and power. Lazarre sent his third opponent down with a blow under the chin and then, with Dirk at his side, they turned to the assistance of Steinholt. With one mad rush they crashed into a group of Lodorians and sent them reeling away like so many nine-pins. "Now! To the plane!" exclaimed Dirk, taking to his heels across the terrace. Steinholt and Lazarre followed after him and, turning the corner, they saw that the ship was in place and that Fragoni was anxiously waiting by the door of the cabin. Inga, Dirk knew, already was inside and safe. He stood aside while Steinholt and Lazarre leaped in. During the momentary wait he caught a glimpse of the great clock. It was one minute to four. Dirk jumping into the plane and switched on the helicopter without even waiting to close the cabin door. * * * * * The ship shot skyward like a rocket. When it reached an altitude of thirty-five hundred feet, he turned it north and raced at top speed in that direction. It was miles away from the palace of Fragoni in less than thirty seconds. Dirk then stopped the plane and held it poised in the air with the helicopter. The skies were turgid and black and the massed clouds, reflecting the lights of the great city below them, were permeated with an ugly, feverish, red glow. From where they were hanging in midair, the occupants of the plane could plainly see the sparkling palace of Fragoni towering high up into the darkness of the night. The lights of the magnificent mansion were reflected far out into the Sound where, looming in the golden ripples, lay the sinister monster from the terrible depths of unfathomable space. Dirk took a watch from his pocket and, after glancing at it, he hastily replaced it. "Two seconds more," he said, "and--" * * * * * A sharp and dazzling bolt of greenish fire came hurling suddenly out of the west and, with a thunderous concussion, seemed to fasten itself on the crest of Fragoni's palace. It trembled and quivered, as if endowed with some uncanny life and power, as it remained there against the darkness, throwing a weird, green tinge over the water and up into the skies. Blue waves of light could be seen pulsing and racing along the terrible beam and there, where it had fastened itself, they seemed to disappear in the vast and crumbling structure. For four seconds that destructive streak of light, one end of which was lost back in the mists that concealed Manhattan, tore at the proud pile. And, as the stone crumbled and the steelite fused under the mighty assault, an ominous roar swept through the night. The air was so violently agitated that the plane, miles away, tossed up and down like a tiny boat on a stormy sea. Then suddenly the bolt was gone, but its livid image still burned in the eyes of those who had been watching it. Once more, it came hurling out of the west and, like the fang of some great and deadly serpent, darted into the monster that lay in the waters of the Sound. Dirk and his companions could see plainly, by the light of the bolt itself, that it had crashed into the well from which the Lodorians first had appeared, and that it was beating and hammering its way into the very vitals of the craft. * * * * * Dazzling, blinding fire seemed to pour from the aperture through which the bolt had passed. The clamor that arose was deafening. Then again the streak of fires was withdrawn, leaving the night intensely black until, in a moment more, it came thundering out of the west again and, with an impact that made the land and the sea and the very heavens tremble, hurled its way into the depths of the doomed leviathan. Twice again it fell, a fiery scimitar out of the darkness, and twice again it careened at the vitals of the stricken monster. Then, after the assault was over, the ship still floated on the surface of the Sound and its shell, as far as Dirk and the others could judge, still was unscathed. "We will soon know our fate," remarked Steinholt calmly. "If that didn't kill those beasts we might as well give up our ghosts." "I'll drop the plane a little lower and a little nearer to the ship," said Dirk. "I don't believe that any life is surviving in that thing." "My beautiful palace is nothing but dust," sighed Fragoni, mournfully. "And all my beautiful treasures, too." "And that beautiful Zitlan," Lazarre reminded him, "and his beautiful boy friends, they are all dust too, thank God!" "It was a queer fate that Stanton met," suggested Dirk. "He thought that he would save his life by going over to our enemies, and, instead of that, he lost it." * * * * * "Poor Stanton," said Steinholt. "He was born that way, I suppose, and I, for one, am ready to forgive and forget him. And now," continued the Teuton, "I hope that we didn't do too much damage to that little boat of the Lodorians. If we could get just a little peep at the inside of it we might learn the secret of its contrivance. And then, my friends, we could do a little journeying ourselves." "Have you any theory regarding it?" asked Fragoni. "Teuxical intimated that it rode the magnetic currents which, of course, flow through all the suns and planets in the universe," replied Steinholt. "We have been working along that line ourselves, of course, and it probably won't be very long anyway before we have the solution of interplanetary travel." "Those Lodorians would have solved it for us if it hadn't been for that artificial lightning," said Lazarre. "That's powerful stuff, Steinholt." "Yes, with that three-thousand-foot Worldwide Tower to hurl it from," agreed Steinholt, "we can get fair range with it. If the Lodorians hadn't left the well of their ship open, though, the lightning wouldn't have done us much good. I was afraid, too, for a time, that we might have trouble in welding that automatic wireless circuit box to the bottom of the ship." Dirk, in the meantime, had brought the plane down to within a half-mile of the leviathan, and he was holding it poised there. "It seems to me," he said, after scrutinizing the monster for a couple of minutes, "that it is moving in the water. It is!" he exclaimed. "Steinholt! Look!" * * * * * Only a comparatively short time had elapsed since the last bolt of lightning had vanished back into the darkness. "It is still rocking with the force of the shock that we gave it," asserted Steinholt. "You would be rocking, too, if you had been tickled by a bolt like that one." "It is rising, I tell you!" said Dirk. "The front end of it is slowly getting higher in the water!" "You're right, Dirk," said Fragoni, excitement straining his voice. "Look! It just dropped back into the water!" Then, as they watched, the movements of the leviathan became more and more agitated, until it was churning up the waves around it like a wounded and agonized monster of the sea. Suddenly the front end tilted upward and the monster rose clear of the water. It shot straight up into the air at a speed so terrific that they could scarcely follow it. "It's gone!" gasped Fragoni. "Those brainless, mindless automatons must have survived!" "No," remarked Steinholt thoughtfully. "I don't believe that there is any life left on that thing. No one had closed the well when it rose, and it would mean death to go out into space with the ship in that condition." "Then what made it go up?" demanded Lazarre. "Can the damn thing run itself, Steinholt?" "I imagine," recalled the Teuton, "that our bolts killed every living thing that was on the craft but that, at the same time, they set the mechanism of the monster into action. Ah," he moaned, "but that is too bad. We could have learned much by an examination of the interior of that liner of the air." * * * * * A cry from Inga startled them and they saw that she was looking skyward, with terror in her eyes. They followed her gaze and there, streaking through the black clouds, they saw a long trail of white fire. "It's that thing!" exclaimed Fragoni. "I tell you that those upon it still live and that they are about to wreak vengeance upon us." "No," said Steinholt positively. "You are wrong, Fragoni. What is happening may be almost as disastrous, though," he admitted. "That leviathan is in its death agonies; it is a metal monster gone mad, and none can say what will happen before it expires." "The place for us," asserted Dirk hurriedly, "is in the Worldwide Tower. There we can keep track of what is transpiring and try to decide what to do." The others agreed with him and, seeking the westward level of flight, he sped the plane in the direction of the mammoth pyramid from which the news of the world was broadcast. They reached the vast structure in a few minutes, and, after dropping the plane on a landing stage, they went into the operating room. Here they learned quickly that the craft of the Lodorians was doing incalculable damage, and that it was throwing the population of the world into an unprecedented panic. It was, apparently, following an erratic, uncertain orbit that took it far out into space and then back quite close to the surface of the earth again. * * * * * It had passed through the very heart of Chicago within a few yards of the ground, and it had cut and burned a swath more than a mile wide through the buildings of that metropolis. Other cities in America had felt the devastating effects of its irresistible and molten heat and, within a short time, thousands of people had been slain by it. Time and again, from the terrace of the great tower, Dirk and his companions saw the skies above them light up as that terrible, blazing, projectile which, uncontrolled, went hurtling on its way through the night. For three hours it careened on its mad course and hysteria reigned throughout the cities of the whole civilized world. But then a report came from a rocket-liner that had left Berlin en route for San Francisco. "Either a great meteor or that leviathan of the Lodorians just swept down past us in mid-Atlantic and plunged into the sea. Apparently it has exploded, for it has thrown a great column of water for miles up into the air. We are stopping and standing by, although the heat is intense and clouds of steam are rising from the sea." As the minutes passed by after the report from the rocket-ship had been received, the disappearance from the sky of the flaming craft from space seemed to confirm the belief that it had been swallowed by the ocean. This was accepted as a certainty by eight o'clock in the morning. "Ah," sighed Steinholt, "if only it had crashed on land somewhere. If there only was enough of it left for us to--" "Enough of any damn contraption of that kind," swore Lazarre fervently, "is altogether too much. I hope, for one, that its fragments are scattered so far that we never can put them together again." * * * * * Dirk and Inga leaned against one of the parapets that evening on a gardened terrace of his own great mansion in Manhattan. Their little party had gone there after leaving the Worldwide Tower in the morning. After resting during the day, Lazarre and Fragoni were somewhere together, discussing the plans for a new palace to take the place of the one that was destroyed so that Zitlan and his minions might die in its ruins. Steinholt, elsewhere, was delving into oceanography and submarine engineering, in an attempt to learn whether or not it would be feasible to fish for the remains of the lost ship of Lodore. "It seems like a dream, doesn't it, Dirk?" the girl remarked. "It is difficult to believe that we actually have seen and talked with people from some far-away world." Together they looked up into the crystalline skies, where mazes of shining stars gave testimony to the countless worlds which were wheeling around them. "And just to think, Dirk," Inga continued proudly, "that it was you who saved this world and all of its people from that horrible Zitlan and his horde." "I saved you," he told her gravely and tenderly, "and that somehow means more to me than saving all of this world and all of the other worlds which are rolling through the uncharted ways of time and space." * * * * * COMING-- Murder Madness _An Extraordinary Novel_ _By_ MURRAY LEINSTER * * * * * Transcriber Notes Typographical inconsistencies have been changed and are listed below. Hyphenation standardized. Archaic and variable spelling is preserved. Authors' punctuation style is preserved. Passages in italics indicated by _underscores_. Passages in bold indicated by =equal signs=. Transcriber Changes The following changes were made to the original text: Page 298: Changed =work= to =wreck= (wish to know whether anyone has visited the scene of the =wreck=) Page 299: Changed =focussed= to =focused= (This means that we have =focused= or concentrated cold) Page 317: Added beginning quotes (Its name-grid glowed with the letters: ="_Anita Prince._"=) Page 321: Changed =eavesdroopper= to =eavesdropper= (sitting in the smoking room when the =eavesdropper= fled past) Page 321: Changed =pressure-cick= to =pressure-sick= (We missed you at breakfast. Not =pressure-sick=, I hope?) Page 323: Changed =linquists= to =linguists= (people are by heritage extraordinary =linguists=) Page 324: Added end quote (Did you have Prince's cabin =searched?"=) Page 328: Changed =elipse= to =ellipse= (Blackstone had roughly cast its orbital elements) Page 339: Changed =focussed= to =focused= (connected its little battery; =focused= its projector) Page 339: Changed =syncronized= to =synchronized= (as I crouched in the darkness behind the cylinder-case, I =synchronized=) Page 340: Removed extra quote after leaped (Miko doubtless saw it, and the Martian's hot anger =leaped=) Page 344: Changed =Mika= to =Miko= ("Wait a minute!" I called to =Miko=. "Navigate--where?") Page 344: Changed =catapaulted= to =catapulted= (The force =catapulted= me across the space of the room like a volplane) Page 345: Changed =Halian= to =Haljan= ("If you fire, =Haljan=, and kill me--Miko will kill you then, surely.") Page 346: Changed =focussed= to =focused= (the image of the lounge interior presently =focused=) Page 357: Changed =terriffic= to =terrific= (Perry beat a =terrific= tattoo on the ancient door) Page 362: Removed comma (for the news crew and editorial force of the =paper= were a carefully selected body of men indeed) Page 367: Changed =villian= to =villain= (Could the old =villain= be playing possum?) Page 367: Removed 'the' (With dexterous =hands O'Hara= swiftly went through the old man's pockets) Page 367: Changed =similiar= to =similar= (an ugly looking pistol of large caliber, a blackjack =similar= to his own and a small bottle) Page 369: Changed =and= to =any= (If you search my car and find =any= red liquor in the left back door pocket, I don't know a thing about it) Page 372: Changed =Hanlon= to =Handlon= (could be recognized as those of Horace Perry and Skip =Handlon=) Page 372: Changed =focussed= to =focused= (All eyes were now =focused= on Professor Kell) Page 373: Changed =Kel= to =Kell= (Hurry up and get =Kell= downstairs so we can see who he is) Page 374: Changed =Rotton= to =Rotten= ("=Rotten=," was the reply from the lips of Kell) Page 393: Changed =ecstacy= to =ecstasy= (Fear, despair, reckless abandon, mirth, doubt, religious =ecstasy= and all the other nuances in the gamut of human emotions) Page 394: Changed =scandals= to =sandals= (On her tiny feet she wore =sandals= which were spun of webby filaments) Page 395: Changed =knew= to =know= (fairly close to it in my plane and I =know= what I am speaking about) Page 397: Changed =Igna= to =Inga= (Dirk and =Inga= seated close together and Stanton, at a distance) Page 397: Changed =part= to =parts= (a proclamation of martial law, to become effective at once in all =parts= of the world) Page 399: Changed =melifluous= to =mellifluous= ("Good morning," the other replied in a soft and =mellifluous= voice) Page 401: Changed =Steinhold= to =Steinholt= ("It's colossal!" =Steinholt= then exclaimed, lost in scientific admiration) Page 412: Changed =fulgerant= to =fulgurant= (High up into the heavens it tossed the =fulgurant= fires that betokened its wealth and power) Page 412: Changed =head= to =hand= (with one of the deadly ray-tubes of the Lodorians in his =hand=) Page 413: Changed =Lizarre= to =Lazarre= (walked over to where Fragoni and =Lazarre= were being guarded by two of the conquerors) Page 413: Changed =Igna= to =Inga= ("And =Inga=?" questioned Dirk.) Page 414: Changed =stacatto= to =staccato= (flailing back and forth between each one of his =staccato= commands.) Page 417: Removed extra quote before =There= ("is in the Worldwide Tower. =There= we can keep track of what is transpiring and try to decide what to do.") Page 417: Changed =irresisible= to =irresistible= (Other cities in America had felt the devastating effects of its =irresistible= and molten heat) 
29809	----	[Illustration:] ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees: _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid; by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are_: ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, _and_ FOREST AND STREAM _More Than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. II, No. 2 CONTENTS MAY, 1930 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Water-colors from a Scene in_ "_The Atom-Smasher_." INTO THE OCEAN'S DEPTHS SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT 151 _To Save Imee's Race of Men-Who-Returned-To-The-Sea, Two Land-Men Answer the Challenge of the Dreaded Rorn, Corsairs of the Under-Seas._ MURDER MADNESS MURRAY LEINSTER 166 _Murder Madness! Seven Secret Service Men Had Completely Disappeared. Another Had Been Found a Screaming, Homicidal Maniac, Whose Fingers Writhed Like Snakes. So Bell, of the Secret "Trade," Plunges into South America After The Master--the Mighty, Unknown Octopus of Power Whose Diabolical Poison Threatens a Continent!_ (_Beginning a Four-part Novel._) BRIGANDS OF THE MOON RAY CUMMINGS 195 _Gregg and Anita Risk Quick, Sure Death in a Desperate Bluff on the Ruthless Martian Brigands._ (_Part Three of a Four-part Novel._) THE JOVIAN JEST LILITH LORRAINE 228 _There Came to Our Pigmy Planet a Radiant Wanderer with a Message--and a Jest--from the Vasty Universe._ THE ATOM-SMASHER VICTOR ROUSSEAU 234 _Four Destinies Rocket Through the Strange Time-Space of the Fourth Dimension in Tode's Marvelous Atom-Smasher._ (_A Complete Novelette._) THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 277 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Nathan Goldmann, Secretary. Application for entry as second-class mail pending at the Post Office at New York, under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * Into the Ocean's Depths A Sequel to "From the Ocean's Depths" _By Sewell Peaslee Wright_ [Illustration: The two shark-faced creatures were dragging at my arms and legs.] [Sidenote: To save Imee's race of Men-Who-Returned-To-The-Sea, two Land-Men answer the challenge of the dreaded Rorn, corsairs of the under-seas.] I read the telegram for the second time. Then I folded it up, put it in my pocket, and pressed the little button on my desk. My mind was made up. "Miss Fentress, I'm leaving this afternoon on an extended trip. The Florida address will reach me after Thursday. Tell Wade and Bennett to carry on. I think you have everything in hand? Is everything clear to you?" "Yes, Mr. Taylor." Miss Fentress was not in the least surprised. She was used to my sudden trips. The outfit got along perfectly without me; sometimes I think my frequent absences are good for the business. The boys work like the devil to make a fine showing while I'm away. And Miss Fentress is a perfect gem of a secretary. I had nothing to worry about there. "Fine! Will you get my diggings on the phone?" I hurriedly put my few papers in place, and signed a couple of letters. Then Josef was on the wire. "Josef? Pack my bags right away, will you? For Florida. The usual things.... Yes, right away. I'll be leaving by noon.... Yes, driving through." * * * * * That was that. There were a few more letters to sign, a few hasty instructions to be given regarding one or two matters that were hanging fire. Then, on my way to my bachelor apartments, I read the telegram through again: THINK IT WORTH WHILE IF YOU FEEL ADVENTUROUS AND HAVE NOTHING PRESSING TO COME TO THE MONSTROSITY STOP MAKE YOUR WILL FIRST STOP SHALL LOOK FOR YOU ANY DAY AS I KNOW YOU ARE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR EXCITEMENT AND NEVER HAVE ANYTHING IMPORTANT TO DO SO DON'T BOTHER TO WIRE STOP PERHAPS WE SHALL SEE HER AGAIN MERCER I smiled at Mercer's frank opinion of my disposition and my importance to my business. But I frowned over the admonition to make my will, and the last telling statement in the wire: "Perhaps we shall see her again." I knew whom he meant by "her." Josef had my bags waiting for me. A few hurried instructions, most of them shouted over my shoulder, and I was purring down the main drag, my duffel in the rumble, and the roadster headed due south. "Perhaps we shall see her again." Those words from the telegram kept coming before my eyes. Mercer knew what he was about, if he wanted my company, when he put that line in his wire. * * * * * I have already told the story of our first meeting with the strange being from the ocean's depths that, wounded and senseless, had been flung up on the beach near Warren Mercer's Florida estate. In all the history of civilization, no stranger bit of flotsam had ever been cast up by a storm. Neither of us would ever forget that slim white creature, swathed in her veil of long, light golden hair, as she crouched on the bottom of Mercer's swimming pool, and pictured for us, by means of Mercer's thought-telegraph (my own name for the device; he has a long and scientific title for it with as many joints as a centipede), the story of her people. They had lived in a country of steaming mist, when the world was very young. They had been forced into the sea to obtain food, and after many generations they had gone back to the sea as man once emerged from it. They had grown webs on their hands and feet, and they breathed oxygen dissolved in water, as fishes do, instead of taking it from the atmosphere. And under the mighty Atlantic, somewhere, were their villages. The girl had pictured all these things for us, and then--nearly a year ago, now--she had pleaded with us to let her return to her people. And so we had put her back into the sea, and she had bade us farewell. But just before she disappeared, she had done a strange thing. * * * * * She had pointed, under the water, out towards the depth, and then, with a broad, sweeping motion of her arm, she had indicated the shore, as though to promise, it seemed to me, that she intended to return. And now, Mercer said, we might see her again! How? Mercer, conservative and scientific, was not the man to make rash promises. But how...? The best way to solve the riddle was to reach Mercer, and I broke the speed laws of five states three days running. I did not even stop at my own little shack. It was only four miles from there to the huge, rather neglected estate, built in boom times by some newly-rich promoter, and dubbed by Mercer "The Monstrosity." Hardly bothering to slow down, I turned off the concrete onto the long, weed-grown gravel drive, and shot between the two massive, stuccoed pillars that guarded the drive. Their corroded bronze plates, bearing the original title of the estate, "The Billows," were a promise that my long, hard drive was nearly at an end. * * * * * As soon as the huge, rambling structure was fairly in sight, I pressed the flat of my hand on the horn button. By the time I came to a locked-wheel halt, with the gravel rattling on my fenders, Mercer was there to greet me. "It's ten o'clock," he grinned as he shook hands. "I'd set noon as the hour of your arrival. You certainly must have made time, Taylor!" "I did!" I nodded rather grimly, recalling one or two narrow squeaks. "But who wouldn't, with a wire like this?" I produced the crumpled telegram rather dramatically. "You've got a lot to explain." "I know it." Mercer was quite serious now. "Come on in and we'll mix highballs with the story." Locked arm in arm, we entered the house together, and settled ourselves in the huge living room. Mercer, I could see at a glance, was thinner and browner than when we had parted, but otherwise, he was the same lithe, soft-mannered little scientist I had known for years; dark-eyed, with an almost beautiful mouth, outlined by a slim, closely cropped and very black moustache. "Well, here's to our lady from the sea," proposed Mercer, when Carson, his man, had brought the drinks and departed. I nodded, and we both sipped our highballs. "Briefly," said my friend, "this is the story. You and I know that somewhere beneath the Atlantic there are a people who went back to whence they came. We have seen one of those people. I propose that, since they cannot come to us, we go to them. I have made preparations to go to them, and I wanted you to have the opportunity of going with me, if you wish." "But how, Mercer? And what--" * * * * * He interrupted with a quick, nervous gesture. "I'll show you, presently. I believe it can be done. It will be a dangerous adventure, though; I was not joking when I advised you to make your will. An uncertain venture, too. But, I believe, most wonderfully worth while." His eyes were shining now with all the enthusiasm of the scientist, the dreamer. "It sounds mighty appealing," I said. "But how...." "Finish your drink and I'll show you." I downed what was left of my highball in two mighty gulps. "Lead me to it, Mercer!" He smiled his quiet smile and led the way to what had been the billiard room of "The Billows," but which was the laboratory of "The Monstrosity." The first thing my eyes fell upon were two gleaming metal objects suspended from chains let into the ceiling. "Diving suits," explained Mercer. "Rather different from anything you've ever seen." They were different. The body was a perfect globe, as was the head-piece. The legs were cylindrical, jointed at knee and thigh with huge discs. The feet were solid metal, curved rocker-like on the bottom, and at the ends of the arms were three hooked talons, the concave sides of two talons facing the concave side of the third. The arms were hinged at the elbow just as the legs were hinged, but there was a huge ball-and-socket joint at the shoulder. * * * * * "But Mercer!" I protested. "No human being could even stand up with that weight of metal on and around him!" "You're mistaken, Taylor," smiled Mercer. "That is not solid metal, you see. And it is an aluminum alloy that is not nearly as heavy as it looks. There are two walls, slightly over an inch apart, braced by innumerable trusses. The fabric is nearly as strong as that much solid metal, and infinitely lighter. They work all right, Taylor. I know, because I've tried them." "And this hump on the back?" I asked, walking around the odd, dangling figures, hanging like bloated metal skeletons from their chains. I had thought the bodies were perfect globes; I could see now that at the rear there was a humplike excrescence across the shoulders. "Air," explained Mercer. "There are two other tanks inside the globular body. That shape was adopted, by the way, because a globe can withstand more pressure than any other shape. And we may have to go where pressures are high." "And so," I said, "we don these things and stroll out into the Atlantic looking for the girl and her friends?" "Hardly. They're not quite the apparel for so long a stroll. You haven't seen all the marvels yet. Come along!" * * * * * He led the way through the patio, beside the pool in which our strange visitor from the depths had lived during her brief stay with us, and out into the open again. As we neared the sea, I became aware, for the first time, of a faint, muffled hammering sound, and I glanced at Mercer inquiringly. "Just a second," he smiled. "Then--there she is, Taylor!" I stood still and stared. In a little cove, cradled in a cunning, spidery structure of wood, a submarine rested upon the ways. "Good Lord!" I exclaimed. "You're going into this right, Mercer!" "Yes. Because I think it's immensely worth while. But come along and let me show you the _Santa Maria_--named after the flagship of Columbus' little fleet. Come on!" Two men with army automatics strapped significantly to their belts nodded courteously as we came up. They were the only men in sight, but from the hammering going on inside there must have been quite a sizeable crew busy in the interior. A couple of raw pine shacks, some little distance away, provided quarters for, I judged, twenty or thirty men. "Had her shipped down in pieces," explained Mercer. "The boat that brought it lay to off shore and we lightered the parts ashore. A tremendous job. But she'll be ready for the water in a week; ten days at the latest." "You're a wonder," I said, and I meant it. * * * * * Mercer patted the red-leaded side of the submarine affectionately. "Later," he said, "I'll take you inside, but they're busy as the devil in there, and the sound of the hammers fairly makes your head ring. You'll see it all later, anyway--if you feel you'd like to share the adventure with me?" "Listen," I grinned as we turned back towards the house, "it'll take more than those two lads with the pop-guns to keep me out of the _Santa Maria_ when she sails--or dives, or whatever it is she's supposed to do!" Mercer laughed softly, and we walked the rest of the way in silence. I imagine we were both pretty busy with our thoughts; I know that I was. And several times, as we walked along, I looked back over my shoulder towards the ungainly red monster straddling on her spindling wooden legs--and towards the smiling Atlantic, glistening serenely in the sun. * * * * * Mercer was so busy with a thousand and one details that I found myself very much in the way if I followed him around, so I decided to loaf. For weeks after we had put our strange girl visitor back into the sea from whence Mercer had taken her, I had watched from a comfortable seat well above the high-water mark that commanded that section of shore. For I had felt sure by that last strange gesture of hers that she meant to return. I located my old seat, and I found that it had been used a great deal since I had left it. There were whole winnows of cigarette butts, some of them quite fresh, all around. Mercer, cold-blooded scientist as he was, had hoped against hope that she would return too. It was a very comfortable seat, in the shade of a little cluster of palms, and for the next several days I spent most of my time there, reading and smoking--and watching. No matter how interesting the book, I found myself, every few seconds, lifting my eyes to search the beach and the sea. I am not sure, but I think it was the eighth day after my arrival that I looked up and saw, for the first time, something besides the smiling beach and the ceaseless procession of incoming rollers. For an instant I doubted what I saw; then, with a cry that stuck in my throat, I dropped my book unheeded to the sand and raced towards the shore. * * * * * She was there! White and slim, her pale gold hair clinging to her body and gleaming like polished metal in the sun, she stood for a moment, while the spray frothed at her thighs. Behind her, crouching below the surface, I could distinguish two other forms. She had returned, and not alone! One long, slim arm shot out toward me, held level with the shoulder: the well-remembered gesture of greeting. Then she too crouched below the surface that she might breathe. As I ran out onto the wet sand, the waves splashing around my ankles all unheeded, she rose again, and now I could see her lovely smile, and her dark, glowing eyes. I was babbling--I do not know what. Before I could reach her, she smiled and sank again below the surface. I waded on out, laughing excitedly, and as I came close to her, she bobbed up again out of the spray, and we greeted each other in the manner of her people, hands outstretched, each gripping the shoulder of the other. She made a quick motion then, with both hands, as though she placed a cap upon the shining glory of her head, and I understood in an instant what she wished: the antenna of Mercer's thought-telegraph, by the aid of which she had told us the story of herself and her people. * * * * * I nodded and smiled, and pointed to the spot where she stood, trying to show her by my expression that I understood, and by my gesture, that she was to wait here for me. She smiled and nodded in return, and crouched again below the surface of the heaving sea. As I turned toward the beach, I caught a momentary glimpse of the two who had come with her. They were a man and a woman, watching me with wide, half-curious, half-frightened eyes. I recognized them instantly from the picture she had impressed upon my mind nearly a year ago. She had brought with her on her journey her mother and her father. Stumbling, my legs shaking with excitement, I ran through the water. With my wet trousers flapping against my ankles, I sprinted towards the house. I found Mercer in the laboratory. He looked up as I came rushing in, wet from the shoulders down, and I saw his eyes grow suddenly wide. * * * * * I opened my mouth to speak, but I was breathless. And Mercer took the words from my mouth before I could utter them. "She's come back!" he cried. "She's come back! Taylor--she has?" He gripped me, his fingers like steel clamps, shaking me with his amazing strength. "Yes." I found my breath and my voice at the same instant. "She's there, just where we put her into the sea, and there are two others with her--her mother and her father. Come on, Mercer, and bring your thought gadget!" "I can't!" he groaned. "I've built an improvement on it into the diving armor, and a central instrument on the sub, but the old apparatus is strewn all over the table, here, just as it was when we used it the other time. We'll have to bring her here." "Get a basin, then!" I said. "We'll carry her back to the pool just as we took her from it. Hurry!" And we did just that. Mercer snatched up a huge glass basin used in his chemistry experiments, and we raced down to the shore. As well as we could we explained our wishes, and she smiled her quick smile of understanding. Crouching beneath the water, she turned to her companions, and I could see her throat move as she spoke to them. They seemed to protest, dubious and frightened, but in the end she seemed to reassure them, and we picked her up, swathed in her hair as in a silken gown, and carried her, her head immersed in the basin of water, that she might breathe in comfort, to the pool. It all took but a few minutes, but it seemed hours. Mercer's hands were shaking as he handed me the antenna for the girl and another for myself, and his teeth were chattering as he spoke. "Hurry, Taylor!" he said. "I've set the switch so that she can do the sending, while we receive. Quickly, man!" * * * * * I leaped into the pool and adjusted the antenna on her head, making sure that the four electrodes of the crossed curved members pressed against the front and back and both sides of her head. Then, hastily, I climbed out of the pool, seated myself on its edge, and put on my own antenna. Perhaps I should say at this time that Mercer's device for conveying thought could do no more than convey what was in the mind of the person sending. Mercer and I could convey actual words and sentences, because we understood each other's language, and by thinking in words, we conveyed our thoughts in words. One received the impression, almost, of having heard actual speech. We could not communicate with the girl in this fashion, however, for we did not understand her speech. She had to convey her thoughts to us by means of mental pictures which told her story. And this is the story of her pictures unfolded. First, in sketchy, half-formed pictures, I saw her return to the village, of her people; her welcome there, with curious crowds around her, questioning her. Their incredulous expressions as she told them of her experience were ludicrous. Her meeting with her father and mother brought a little catch to my throat, and I looked across the pool at Mercer. I knew that he, too, was glad that we bad put her back into the sea when she wished to go. * * * * * These pictures faded hastily, and for a moment there was only the circular swirling as of gray mist; that was the symbol she adopted to denote the passing of time. Then, slowly, the picture cleared. It was the same village I had seen before, with its ragged, warped, narrow streets, and its row of dome-shaped houses, for all the world like Eskimo igloos, but made of coral and various forms of vegetation. At the outskirts of the village I could see the gently moving, shadowy forms of weird submarine growths, and the quick darting shapes of innumerable fishes. Some few people were moving along the streets, walking with oddly springy steps. Others, a larger number, darted here and there above the roofs, some hovering in the water as gulls hover in the air, lazily, but the majority apparently on business or work to be executed with dispatch. Suddenly, into the midst of this peaceful scene, three figures came darting. They were not like the people of the village, for they were smaller, and instead of being gracefully slim they were short and powerful in build. They were not white like the people of the girl's village, but swarthy, and they were dressed in a sort of tight-fitting shirt of gleaming leather--shark-skin, I learned later. They carried, tucked through a sort of belt made of twisted vegetation, two long, slim knives of pointed stone or bone. * * * * * But it was not until they seemed to come close to me that I saw the great point of difference. Their faces were scarcely human. The nose had become rudimentary, leaving a large, blank expanse in the middle of their faces that gave them a peculiarly hideous expression. Their eyes were almost perfectly round, and very fierce, and their mouths huge and fishlike. Beneath their sharp, jutting jaws, between the angle of the jaws and a spot beneath the ears, were huge, longitudinal slits, that intermittently showed blood-red, like fresh gashes cut in the sides of their throats. I could see even the hard, bony cover that protected these slits, and I realized that these were gills! Here were representatives of a people that had gone back to the sea ages before the people of the girl's village. Their coming caused a sort of panic in the village, and the three noseless creatures strode down the principal street grinning hugely, glancing from right to left, and showing their sharp pointed teeth. They looked more like sharks than like human beings. A committee of five gray old men met the visitors, and conducted them into one of the larger houses. Insolently, the leader of the three shark-faced creatures made demands, and the scene changed swiftly to make clear the nature of those demands. * * * * * The village was to give a number of its finest young men and women to the shark-faced people; about fifty of each sex, I gathered, to be servants, slaves, to the noseless ones. The scene shifted quickly to the interior of the house. The old men were shaking their heads, protesting, explaining. There was fear on their faces, but there was determination, too. One of the three envoys snarled and came closer to the five old men, lifting a knife threateningly. I thought for an instant that he was about to strike down one of the villagers; then the picture dissolved into another, and I saw that he was but threatening them with what he could cause to happen. The fate of the village and the villagers, were the demands of the three refused, was a terrible one. Hordes of the noseless creatures came swarming. They tore the houses apart, and with their long, slim white weapons they killed the old men and women, and the children. The villagers fought desperately, but they were outnumbered. The shark-skin kirtles of the invaders turned their knives like armor, and the sea grew red with swirling blood that spread like scarlet smoke through the water. Then, this too faded, and I saw the old men cowering, pleading with the three terrible envoys. The leader of the three shark-faced creatures spoke again. He would give them time--a short revolving swirl of gray that indicated only a brief time, apparently--and return for an answer. Grinning evilly, the three turned away, left the dome-shaped house, and darted away over the roofs of the village into the dim darkness of the distant waters. * * * * * I saw the girl, then, talking to the elders. They smiled sadly, and shook their heads hopelessly. She argued with them earnestly, painting a picture for them: Mercer and myself, as she viewed us, tall and very strong and with great wisdom in our faces. We too walked along the streets of the village. The hordes of shark-faced ones came, like a swarm of monstrous sharks, and--the picture was very vague and nebulous, now--we put them to rout. She wished us to help her, she had convinced the elders that we could. She, her mother and father, started out from the village. Three times they had fought with sharks, and each time they had killed them. They had found the shore, the very spot where we had put her back into the sea. Then there was a momentary flash of the picture she had called up, of Mercer and I putting the shark-faced hordes to rout, and then, startlingly, I was conscious of that high, pleading sound--the sound that I had heard once before, when she had begged us to return her to her people. The sound that I knew was her word for "_Please!_" There was a little click. Mercer had turned the switch. He would transmit now; she and I would listen. * * * * * In the center of the village--how vaguely and clumsily he pictured it!--rested the _Santa Maria_. From a trap in the bottom two bulging, gleaming figures emerged. Rushing up, a glimpse through the face-plates revealed Mercer and myself. The shark-faced hordes descended, and Mercer waved something, something like a huge bottle, towards them. None of the villagers were in sight. The noseless ones swooped down on us fearlessly, knives drawn, pointed teeth revealed in fiendish grins. But they did not reach us. By dozens, by scores, they went limp and floated slowly to the floor of the ocean. Their bodies covered the streets, they sprawled across the roofs of the houses. And in a few seconds there was not one alive of all the hundreds who had come! I looked down at the girl. She was smiling up at me through the clear water, and once again I felt the strange, strong tug at my heart-strings. Her great dark eyes glowed with a perfect confidence, a supreme faith. We had made her a promise. I wondered if it would be possible to keep it. * * * * * In the day following, the _Santa Maria_ was launched. Two days later, trial trips and final adjustments completed, we submerged for the great adventure. It sounds very simple when recorded thus in a few brief lines. It was not, however, such a simple matter. Those three days were full of hectic activity. Mercer and I did not sleep more than four hours any of those three nights. We were too busy to talk. Mercer worked frantically in his laboratory, slaving feverishly beside the big hood. I overlooked the tests of the submarine and the loading of the necessary supplies. The girl we had taken back to her parents, giving her to understand that she was to wait. They went away, but every few hours returned, as though to urge us to greater haste. And at last we were ready, and the girl and her two companions seated themselves on the tiny deck of the _Santa Maria_, just forward of the conning tower, holding themselves in place by the chains. We had already instructed the girl in her duties: we would move slowly, and she should guide us, by pointing either to the right or the left. * * * * * I will confess I gave a last long, lingering look at the shore before the hatch of the conning tower was clamped down. I was not exactly afraid, but I wondered if I would ever step foot on solid land again. Standing in the conning tower beside Mercer, I watched the sea rise at an angle to meet us, and I dodged instinctively as the first green wave pelted against the thick porthole through which I was looking. An instant later the water closed over the top of the conning tower, and at a gentle angle we nosed towards the bottom of the sea. An account of the trip itself, perhaps, does not belong in this record. It was not a pleasant adventure in itself, for the _Santa Maria_, like every undersea craft, I suppose, was close, smelly, and cramped. We proceeded very slowly, for only by so doing could our guide keep her bearings, and how she found the way was a mystery to all of us. We could see but very little, despite the clearness of the water. It was by no means a sight-seeing trip. For various reasons, Mercer had cut our crew to the minimum. We had two navigating officers, experienced submarine men both, and five sailors, also experienced in undersea work. With such a short crew, Mercer and I were both kept busy. * * * * * Bonnett, the captain, was a tall, dark chap, stooped from years in the low, cramped quarters of submarines. Duke, our second-officer, was a youngster hardly out of his 'teens, and as clever as they come. And although both of them, and the crew as well, must have been agog with questions, neither by word nor look did they express their feelings. Mercer had paid for obedience without curiosity, and he got it. We spent the first night on the bottom, for the simple reason that had we come to the surface, we might have come down into territory unfamiliar to our guide. As soon as the first faint light began to filter down, however, we proceeded, and Mercer and I crowded together into the conning tower. "We're close," said Mercer. "See how excited they are, all three of them." The three strange creatures were holding onto the chains and staring over the bulging side of the ship. Every few seconds the girl turned and looked back at us, smiling, her eyes shining with excitement. Suddenly she pointed straight down, and held out her arm in unmistakable gesture. We were to stop. * * * * * Mercer conveyed the order instantly to Bonnett at the controls, and all three of our guides dived gracefully off the ship and disappeared into the depths below. "Let her settle to the bottom, Bonnett," ordered Mercer. "Slowly ... slowly...." Bonnett handled the ship neatly, keeping her nicely trimmed. We came to rest on the bottom in four or five seconds, and as Mercer and I stared out eagerly through the round glass ports of the conning tower, we could see, very dimly, a cluster of dark, rounded projections cropping out from the bed of the ocean. We were only a few yards from the edge of the girl's village. The scene was exactly as we had pictured it, save that it was not nearly as clear and well lighted. I realized that our eyes were not accustomed to the gloom, as were those of the girl and her people, but I could distinguish the vague outlines of the houses, and the slowly swaying shapes of monstrous growths. "Well, Taylor," said Mercer, his voice shaking with excitement, "here we are! And here"--peering out through the glass-covered port again--"are her people!" * * * * * The whole village was swarming around us. White bodies hovered around us as moths around a light. Faces pressed against the ports and stared in at us with great, amazed eyes. Then, suddenly the crowd of curious creatures parted, and the girl came darting up with the five ancients she had showed us before. They were evidently the council responsible for the government of the village, or something of the sort, for the other villagers bowed their heads respectfully as they passed. The girl came close to the port through which I was looking, and gestured earnestly. Her face was tense and anxious, and from time to time she glanced over her shoulder, as though she feared the coming of an enemy. "Our time's short, I take it, if we are to be of service," said Mercer. "Come on, Taylor; into the diving suits!" I signaled the girl that we understood, and would hurry. Then I followed Mercer into our tiny stateroom. "Remember what I've told you," he said, as we slipped into the heavy woolen undergarments we were to wear inside the suits. "You understand how to handle your air, I believe, and you'll have no difficulty getting around in the suit if you'll just remember to go slowly. Your job is to get the whole village to get away when the enemy is sighted. Get them to come this way from the village, towards the ship, understand. The current comes from this direction; the way the vegetation bends shows that. And keep the girl's people away until I signal you to let them return. And remember to take your electric lantern. Don't burn it more than is necessary; the batteries are not large and the bulb draws a lot of current. Ready?" * * * * * I was, but I was shaking a little as the men helped me into the mighty armor that was to keep the pressure of several atmospheres from crushing my body. The helmet was the last piece to be donned; when it was screwed in place I stood there like a mummy, almost completely rigid. Quickly we were put into the air lock, together with a large iron box containing a number of things Mercer needed. Darkness and water rushed in on us. The water closed over my head. I became aware of the soft, continuous popping sounds of the air-bubbles escaping from the relief valve of the head-piece. For a moment I was dizzy and more than a little nauseated. I could feel the cold sweat pricking my forehead. Then there was a sudden glow of light from before me, and I started walking towards it. I found I could walk now; not easily, but, after I caught the trick of it, without much difficulty. I could move my arms, too, and the interlocking hooks that served me for fingers. When my real fingers closed upon a little cross-bar at the end of the armored arms, and pulled the bars towards me, the steel claws outside came together, like a thumb and two fingers. * * * * * In a moment we stood upon the bottom of the ocean. I turned my head inside the helmet, and there, beside me, was the sleek, smooth side of the _Santa Maria_. On my other side was Mercer, a huge, dim figure in his diving armor. He made an awkward gesture towards his head, and I suddenly remembered something. Before me, where I could operate it with a thrusting movement of my chin, was a toggle switch. I snapped it over, and heard Mercer's voice: "--n't forget everything I tell him." "I know it," I said mentally to him. "I was rather rattled. O.K. now, however. Anything I can do?" "Yes. Help me with this box, and then get the girl to put on the antenna you'll find there. Don't forget the knife and the light." "Right!" I bent over the box with him, and we both came near falling. We opened the lid, however, and I hooked the knife and the light into their proper places outside my armor. Then, with the antenna for the girl, so that we could establish connections with her, and through her, with the villagers, I moved off. This antenna was entirely different from the one used in previous experiments. The four cross-members that clasped the head were finer, and at their junction was a flat black circular box, from which rose a black rod some six inches in height, and topped by a black sphere half the size of my fist. * * * * * These perfected thought-telegraphs (I shall continue to use my own designation for them, as clearer and more understandable than Mercer's) did not need connecting wires; they conveyed their impulses by Hertzian waves to a master receiver on the _Santa Maria_, which amplified them and re-broadcast them so that each of us could both send and receive at any time. As I turned, I found the girl beside me, waiting anxiously. Behind her were the five ancients. I slipped the antenna over her head, and instantly she began telling me that danger was imminent. To facilitate matters, I shall describe her messages as though she spoke; indeed, her pictures were as clear, almost, as speech in my native tongue. And at times she did use certain sound-words; it was in this way that I learned, by inference, that her name was _Imee_, that her people were called _Teemorn_ (this may have been the name of the community, or perhaps it was interchangeable--I am not sure) and that the shark-faced people were the _Rorn_. "The Rorn come!" she said quickly. "Two days past, the three came again, and our old men refused to give up the slaves. Today they will return, these Rorn, and my people, the Teemorn will all be made dead!" * * * * * Then I told her what Mercer had said: that she and every one of her people must flee swiftly and hide, beyond the boat, a distance beyond the village. Mercer and I would wait here, and when the Rorn came, it was they who would be made dead, as we had promised. Although how, I admitted to myself, being careful to hide the thought that she might not sense it, I didn't know. We had been too busy since the girl's arrival to go into details. She turned and spoke quickly to the old men. They looked at me doubtfully, and she urged them vehemently. They turned back towards the village, and in a moment the Teemorn were stalking by obediently, losing their slim white forms in the gloom behind the dim bulk of the _Santa Maria_, resting so quietly on the sand. They were hardly out of sight when suddenly Mercer spoke through the antenna fitted inside my helmet. "They're coming!" he cried. "Look above and to your right! The Rorn, as Imee calls them, have arrived!" I looked up and beheld a hundred--no, a thousand!--shadowy forms darting down on the village, upon us. They, too, were just as the girl had pictured them: short, swart beings with but the suggestion of a nose, and with pulsing gill-covers under the angles of their jaws. Each one gripped a long, slim white knife in either hand, and their tight-fitting shark-skin armor gleamed darkly as they swooped down upon us. * * * * * Eagerly I watched my friend. In the clasping talons of his left hand he held a long, slim flask that glinted even in that dim, confusing twilight. Two others, mates to the first, dangled at his waist. Lifting it high above his head, he swung his metal-clad right arm, and shattered the flask he held in his taloned left hand. For an instant nothing happened, save that flittering bits of broken glass shimmered their way to the sand. Then the horde of noseless ones seemed to dissolve, as hundreds of limp and sprawling bodies sank to the sand. Perhaps a half of that great multitude seemed struck dead. "Hydrocyanic acid, Taylor!" cried Mercer exultantly. "Even diluted by the sea water, it kills almost instantly. Go back and make sure that none of the girl's people come back before the current has washed this away, or they'll go in the same fashion. Warn her to keep them back!" * * * * * I hurried toward the _Santa Maria_, thinking urgent warnings for Imee's benefit. "Stay back! Stay back, Imee! The Rorn are falling to the sand, we have made many of them dead, but the danger for you and your people is still here. Stay back!" "Truly, do the Rorn become dead? I would like to see that with my own eyes. Be careful that they do not make you dead also, and your friend, for they have large brains, these Rorn." "Do not come to see with your own eyes, or you will be as the Rorn!" I hurried around the submarine, to keep her back by force, if that were necessary. "You must--" "Help, Taylor!" cut in a voice--Mercer's. "These devils have got me!" "Right with you!" I turned and hurried back as swiftly as I could, stumbling over the bodies of dead Rorn that had settled everywhere on the clean yellow sand. I found Mercer in the grip of six of the shark-faced creatures. They were trying desperately to stab him, but their knives bent and broke against the metal of his armor. So busy were they with him that they did not notice me coming up, but finding their weapons useless, they suddenly snatched him up, one at either arm and either leg, and two grasping him by the head-piece, and darted away with him, carrying his bulging metal body between them like a battering ram, while he kicked and struggled impotently. "They are taking him to the Place of Darkness!" cried Imee suddenly, having read my impressions of the scene. "Oh, go quickly, quickly, toward the direction of your best hand--to your right! I shall follow!" "No! No! Stay back!" I warned her frantically. All but these six Rorn had fallen victims of Mercer's hellish poison, and while they seemed to be suffering no ill effects, I thought it more than likely that some sly current might bring the deadly poison to the girl, did she come this way, and kill her as surely as it had killed these hundreds of Rorn. * * * * * To the right, she had said. Towards the Place of Darkness. I hurried out of the village in the direction she indicated, towards the distant gleam of Mercer's armor, rapidly being lost in the gloom. "I'm coming, Mercer!" I called to him. "Delay them as much as you can. You're going faster than I can." "I can't help myself much," replied Mercer. "Doing what I can. Strong--they're devilish strong, Taylor. And, at close range, I can see you were right. They have true gill-covers; their noses are rudimentary and--" "The devil take your scientific observations! Drag! Slow them down. I'm losing sight of you. For heaven's sake, drag!" "I'm doing what I can. Damn you, if I could only get a hand free--" I realized that this last was directed at his captors, and plunged on. * * * * * Huge, monstrous growths swirled around me like living things. My feet crunched on shelled things, and sank into soft and slimy creeping things on the bottom. I cursed the water that held me back so gently yet so firmly; I cursed the armor that made it so hard for me to move my legs. But I kept on, and at last I began to gain on them; I could see them quite distinctly, bending over Mercer, working on him.... "Do your best, Taylor," urged Mercer desperately. "We're on the edge of a sort of cliff; a fault in the structure of the ocean bed. They're tying me with strong cords of leather. Tying a huge stone to my body. I think they--" I had a momentary flash of the scene as Mercer saw it at that instant: the horrid noseless face close to his, the swart bodies moving with amazing agility. And at his very feet, a yawning precipice, holding nothing but darkness, leading down and down into nothingness. "Run quickly!" It was Imee. She, too, had seen what I had seen. "That is the Place of Darkness, where we take those whom the Five deem worthy of the Last Punishment. They will tie the stone to him, and bear him out above the Blackness, and then they will let him go! Quickly! Quickly!" I was almost upon them now, and one of the six turned and saw me. Three of them darted towards me, while the others held Mercer flat upon the edge of the precipice. If they had only realized that by rolling his armored body a foot or two, he would sink ... without the stone.... But they did not. Their brains had little reasoning power, apparently. The attaching of a stone was necessary, in their experience; it was necessary now. * * * * * With my left hand I unhooked my light; I already gripped my knife in my right hand. Swinging the light sharply against my leg, I struck the toggle-switch, and a beam of intense brilliancy shot through the gloom. It aided me, as I had thought it would; it blinded these large-eyed denizens of the deep. Swiftly I struck out with the knife. It hacked harmlessly into the shark-skin garment of one of the men, and I stabbed out again. Two of the men leaped for my right arm, but the knife found, this time, the throat of the third. My beam of light showed palely red, for a moment, and the body of the Rorn toppled slowly to the bed of the ocean. The two shark-faced creatures were hammering at me with their fists, dragging at my arms and legs, but I plunged on desperately towards Mercer. Myriads of fish, all shapes and colors and sizes, attracted by the light, swarmed around us. "Good boy!" Mercer commended. "See if you can break this last flask of acid, here at my waist. See--" * * * * * With a last desperate plunge, fairly dragging the two Rorn who tugged at me, I fell forward. With the clenched steel talons of my right hand, I struck at the silvery flask I could see dangling from Mercer's waist. I hit it, but only a glancing blow; the flask did not shatter. "Again!" commanded Mercer. "It's heavy annealed glass--hydrocyanic acid--terrible stuff--even the fumes--" I paid but slight heed. The two Rorn dragged me back, but I managed to crawl forward on my knees, and with all my strength, I struck at the flask again. This time it shattered, and I lay where I fell, sobbing with weakness, looking out through the side window of my head-piece. The five Rorn seemed to suddenly lose their strength. They struggled limply for a moment, and then floated down to the waiting sand beneath us. "Finish," remarked Mercer coolly. "And just in time. Let's see if we can find our way back to the _Santa Maria_." * * * * * We were weary, and we plodded along slowly, twin trails of air-bubbles like plumes waving behind us, rushing upwards to the surface. I felt strangely alone at the moment, isolated, cut off from all mankind, on the bottom of the Atlantic. "Coming to meet you, all of us," Imee signaled us. "Be careful where you step, so that you do not walk in a circle and find again the Place of Darkness. It is very large." "Probably some uncharted deep," threw in Mercer. "Only the larger ones have been located." For my part, I was too weary to think. I just staggered on. A crowd of slim, darting white shapes surrounded us. They swam before us, showing the way. The five patriarchs walked majestically before us; and between us, smiling at us through the thick lenses of our headpieces, walked Imee. Oh, it was a triumphal procession, and had I been less weary, I presume I would have felt quite the hero. * * * * * Imee pictured for us, as we went along, the happiness, the gratefulness of her people. Already, she informed us, great numbers of young men were clearing away the bodies of the dead Rorn. She was so happy she could hardly restrain herself. A dim skeleton shape bulked up at my left. I turned to look at it, and Imee, watching me through the lights of my head-piece, nodded and smiled. Yes, this was the very hulk by which she had been swimming when the shark had attacked her, the shark which had been the cause of the accident. She darted on to show me the very rib upon which her head had struck, stunning her so that she had drifted, unconscious and storm-tossed, to the shore of Mercer's estate. I studied the wreck. It was battered and tilted on its beam ends, but I could still make out the high poop that marked it as a very old ship. "A Spanish galleon, Mercer," I conjectured. "I believe so." And then, in pictured form, for Imee's benefit, "It has been here while much time passed?" "Yes." Imee came darting back to us, smiling. "Since before the Teemorn, my people were here. A Rorn we made prisoner once told us his people discovered it first. They went into this strange skeleton, and inside were many blocks of very bright stone." She pictured quite clearly bars of dully-glinting bullion. Evidently the captive had told his story well. * * * * * "These stones, which were so bright, the Rorn took to their city, which is three swims distant." How far that might be, I could not even guess. A swim, it seemed, was the distance a Teemorn could travel before the need for rest became imperative. "There were many Rorn, and they each took one stone. And of them, they made a house for their leader." The leader, as she pictured him, being the most hideous travesty of a thing in semi-human form that the mind could imagine: incredibly old and wrinkled and ugly and gray, his noseless face seamed with cunning, his eyes red rimmed and terrible, his teeth gleaming, white and sharp, like fangs. "A whole house, except the roof," she went on. "It is there now, and it is gazed at with much admiration by all the Rorn. All this our prisoner told us before we took him, with a rock made fast to him, out over the Place of Darkness. He, too, was very proud of their leader's house." "Treasure!" I commented to Mercer. "If we could find the city of the Rorn, we might make the trip pay for itself!" I could sense his wave of amusement. "I think," he replied, "I'd rather stand it myself. These Rorn don't appeal to me." It was over half an hour before we were at last free of our diving suits. The first thing Captain Bonnett said: "We've got to get to the surface, and that quickly. Our air supply is running damnably low. By the time we blow out the tanks we'll be just about out. And foul air will keep us here until we rot. I'm sorry, sir, but that's the way matters stand." * * * * * Mercer, white-faced and ill, stared at him dazedly. "Air?" he repeated groggily--I knew just how he felt--"We should have lots of air. The specifications--" "But we're dealing with facts, not specifications, sir," said Captain Bonnett. "Another two hours here and we won't leave ever." "Then it can't be helped, Captain," muttered Mercer. "We'll go up. And back. For more compressed air. We must remember to plot our course exactly. You kept the record on the way out as I instructed you?" "Yes, sir," said Captain Bonnett. "Just a minute, then," said Mercer. Weakly he made his way forward to the little cubbyhole in which was housed the central station of his thought-telegraph. I didn't even inspect the gleaming maze of apparatus. I merely watched him dully as he plugged in an antenna similar to the one we had left with Imee, and adjusted the things on his head. * * * * * His eyes brightened instantly. "She's still wearing her antenna," he said swiftly over his shoulder. "I'll tell her that something's happened; we must leave, but that we will return." He sat there, frowning intently for a moment, and then dragged the antenna wearily from his head. He touched a switch somewhere, and several softly glowing bulbs turned slowly red and then dark. "You and I," he groaned, "had better go to bed. We overdid it. She understands, I think. Terribly sorry, terribly disappointed. Some sort of celebration planned, I gather. Captain Bonnett!" "Yes, sir?" "You may proceed now as you think best," said Mercer. "We're retiring. Be sure and chart the course back, so we may locate this spot again." "Yes, sir!" said Captain Bonnett. * * * * * When I awoke we were at anchor, our deck barely awash, before the deserted beach of Mercer's estate. Still feeling none too well, Mercer and I made our way to the narrow deck. Captain Bonnett was waiting for us, spruce in his blue uniform, his shoulders bowed as always. "Good morning, gentlemen," he offered, smiling crisply. "The open air seems good, doesn't it?" It did. There was a fresh breeze blowing in from the Atlantic, and I filled my lungs gratefully. I had not realized until that instant just how foul the air below had been. "Very fine, Captain," said Mercer, nodding. "You have signaled the men on shore to send out a boat to take us off?" "Yes, sir; I believe they're launching her now." "And the chart of our course--did the return trip check with the other?" "Perfectly, sir." Captain Bonnett reached in an inner pocket of his double-breasted coat, extracted two folded pages, and extended them, with a little bow, to Mercer. Just as Mercer's eager fingers touched the precious papers, however, the wind whisked them from Bonnett's grasp and whirled them into the water. Bonnett gasped and gazed after them for a split second; then, barely pausing to tear off his coat, he plunged over the side. * * * * * He tried desperately, but before he could reach either one of the tossing white specks, they were washed beneath the surface and disappeared. Ten minutes later, his uniform bedraggled and shapeless, he pulled himself on deck. "I'm sorry, sir," he gasped, out of breath. "Sorrier than I can say. I tried--" Mercer, white-faced and struggling with his emotions, looked down and turned away. "You don't remember the bearings, I suppose?" he ventured tonelessly. "I'm sorry--no." "Thank you, Captain, for trying so hard to recover the papers," said Mercer. "You'd better change at once; the wind is sharp." * * * * * The captain bowed and disappeared down the conning tower. Then Mercer turned to me, and a smile struggled for life. "Well, Taylor, we helped her out, anyway," he said slowly. "I'm sorry that--that Imee will misunderstand when we don't come back." "But, Mercer," I said swiftly, "perhaps we'll be able to find our way back to her. You thought before, you know, that--" "But I can see now what an utterly wild-goose chase it would have been." Mercer shook his head slowly. "No, old friend, it would be impossible. And--Imee will not come again to guide us; she will think we have deserted her. And"--he smiled slowly up into my eyes--"perhaps it is as well. After all, the photographs and the data I wanted would do the world no practical good. We did Imee and her people a good turn; let's content ourselves with that. I, for one, am satisfied." "And I, old timer," I said, placing my hand affectionately upon his shoulder. "Here's the boat. Shall we go ashore?" We did go ashore, silently. And as we got out of the boat, and set foot again upon the sand, we both turned and looked out across the smiling Atlantic, dancing brightly in the sun. The mighty, mysterious Atlantic--home of Imee and her people! Murder Madness BEGINNING A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Murray Leinster_ [Illustration: _The heads leveled the revolver in spite of him, while he flung his head from side to side in a frantic attempt to disturb their aim._] [Sidenote: Murder Madness! Seven Secret Service men had completely disappeared. Another had been found a screaming, homicidal maniac, whose fingers writhed like snakes. So Bell, of the secret "Trade," plunges into South America after The Master--the mighty, unknown octopus of power whose diabolical poison threatens a continent!] CHAPTER I The engines of the _Almirante Gomez_ were going dead slow. Away up beside her monster funnels her siren blew dismally, _Whoo-oo-oo-oo!_ and was silent for the regulation period, and blew desolately again into the clinging gray mist that ringed her all about. Her decks were wet and glistening. Droplets of water stood upon the deck-stanchions, and dripped from the outer edge of the roof above the promenade deck. A thin, swirling fog lay soggily upon the water and the big steamer went dead slow upon her course, sending dismal and depressing blasts from her horn from time to time. It was barely possible to see from one side of the ship to the other. It was surely impossible to see the bow from a point half astern. Charley Bell went forward along the promenade deck. He passed Senor Ortiz, ex-Minister of the Interior of the Argentine Republic. Ortiz bowed to him punctiliously, but Bell had a sudden impression that the Argentine's face was gray and ghastly. He checked himself and looked back. The little man was climbing the companion-ladder toward the wireless room. * * * * * Bell slipped on toward the bow. He did not want to give an impression of furtiveness, but the _Almirante Gomez_ was twelve days out of New York and Bell was still entirely ignorant of why he was on board. He had been called into the office of his chief in the State Department and told curtly that his request for leave of absence had been granted. And Bell had not asked for a leave of absence. But at just that moment he saw a rubber band on the desk of his immediate superior, a fairly thick rubber band which had been tied into a certain intricate knot. And Bell had kept quiet. He went to his apartment, found his bags packed and tickets to Rio via the _Almirante Gomez_ in an envelope on his dressing-table, and went out and caught a train to the ship. [Illustration] And that was all he knew. The siren up above blared dolefully into the fog. It was damp, and soggy, and depressing. The other passengers were under cover, and the decks seemed to be deserted. From the saloon came the sound of music. Bell pulled the collar of his light topcoat about his throat and strolled on toward the bow. He faced a row of steamer chairs. There was a figure curled up in one of them. Paula Canalejas, muffled up against the dampness and staring somberly out into the mist. Bell had met her in Washington and liked her a great deal, but he swore softly at sight of her in his way. The afternoon before, he had seen a stoker on the _Almirante Gomez_ pick up a bit of rope and absently tie knots in it while he exchanged Rabelasian humor with his fellows. He had not looked at Bell at all, but the knots he tied were the same that Bell had last seen tied in a rubber band on a desk in the State Department in Washington. And Bell knew a recognition signal when he saw one. The stoker would be off watch, just now, and by all the rules of reason he ought to be out there on the forecastle, waiting for Bell to turn up and receive instructions. * * * * * But Bell paused, lit a cigarette carefully, and strolled forward. "Mr. Bell." He stopped and beamed fatuously at her. It would have been logical for him to fall in love with her, and it is always desirable to seem logical. He had striven painstakingly to give the impression that he had fallen in love with her--and then had striven even more painstakingly to keep from doing it. "Hullo," he said in bland surprise. "What are you doing out on deck?" Brown eyes regarded him speculatively. "Thinking," she said succinctly. "About you, Mr. Bell." Bell beamed. "Thinking," he confided, "is usually a bad habit, especially in a girl. But if you must think, I approve of your choice of subjects. What were you thinking about me?" The brown eyes regarded him still more speculatively. "I was wondering--" said Paula, glancing to either side, "I was wondering if you happen to be--er--a member of the United States Secret Service." Bell laughed with entire naturalness. "Good Lord, no!" he said amusedly. "I have a desk in the State Department building, and I read consular reports all day long and write letters bedeviling the consuls for not including unavailable statistics in their communications. That's my work. I'm on leave now." * * * * * She looked skeptical and, it may be, disappointed. "You look as if you didn't believe me," said Bell, smiling. "I give you my word of honor I'm not a member of the United States Secret Service. Will that do to relieve your suspicions?" "I believe you," she said slowly, "but it does not relieve my mind. I shall think about other people. I have something important to tell a member of the United States Secret Service." Bell shrugged. "I'm sorry," he said amiably, "that I can't oblige you by tipping one of them off. That's what you wanted me to do, isn't it?" She nodded, and the gesture was very much like a dismissal. Bell frowned, hesitated, and went on. He was anxious to meet the stoker, but this.... The siren droned dismally over his head. Fog lay deep about the ship. The washing of the waves and dripping of water on the decks was depressing. It seemed to be getting thicker. Four stanchions ahead, the mist was noticeable. He found that he could count five, six, seven.... The eighth was indefinite. But a bar materialized in the fog before him, and the grayness drew away before him and closed in behind. When he was at the forward end of the promenade, looking down upon the forecastle deck, he was isolated. He heard footsteps some distance overhead. The watch officer up on the bridge. Bell glanced up and saw him as an indistinct figure. He waited until the officer paced over to the opposite side of the bridge. The air throbbed and shook with the roaring of the siren. Bell slipped over the edge of the rail and swung swiftly down the little ladder of iron bars set into the ship's structure. In seconds he had landed, and was down upon that terra incognita of all passengers, the deck reserved for the use of the crew. * * * * * A mast loomed overhead, with its heavy, clumsy derrick-booms. A winch was by his side. Oddments of deck machinery, inexplicable to a landsman, formed themselves vaguely in the mist. The fog was thicker, naturally, since the deck was closer to the water's edge. "Hey!" growled a voice close beside him. "Passengers ain't allowed down here." An unshaven, soot-smeared figure loomed up. Bell could not see the man save as a blur in the mist, but he said cheerfully: "I know it, but I wanted to look. Seafaring's a trade I'd like to know something about." The figure grunted. Bell had just given his word of honor that he wasn't a member of the Secret Service. He wasn't. But he was in the Trade--which has no official existence anywhere. And the use of the word in his first remark was a recognition signal. "What is your trade, anyways?" growled the figure skeptically. "I sharpen serpents' teeth from time to time," offered Bell amiably. He recognized the man, suddenly. "Hullo, Jamison, you look like the devil." * * * * * Jamison drew nearer. He grunted softly. "I know it. Listen closely, Bell. Your job is getting some information from Canalejas, Minister of War in Rio. He sent word up to Washington that he'd something important to say. It isn't treachery to Brazil, because he's a decent man. Seven Secret Service men have disappeared in South America within three months. They've found the eighth, and he's crazy. Something has driven him mad, and they say it's a devilish poison. He's a homicidal maniac, returning to the United States in a straight-jacket. Canalejas knows what's happened to the Service men. He said so, and he's going to tell us. His daughter brought the news to Washington, and then instead of going on to Europe as she was supposed to do, she started back to Rio. You're to get this formation and pass it on to me, then try to keep your skin whole and act innocent. You were picked out because, as a State Department man, hell could be raised if you vanished. Understand?" Bell nodded. "Something horrible is going on. Secret Service can't do anything. The man in Asunción isn't dead--he's been seen--but he's cut loose. And Service men don't often do that. He don't report. That means the Service code may have been turned over, and hell to pay generally. It's up to the Trade." "I've got it," said Bell. "Here are two items for you. Miss Canalejas just said she suspected I was Secret Service. I convinced her I wasn't. She says she has important information for a Service man." * * * * * The brawny figure of the stoker growled. "Damn women! She was told somebody'd be sent to see her father. She was shown a recognition-knot with the outsider's variation. Given one, for father. That'll identify you to him. But she shouldn't have talked. Now, be careful. As nearly as we know, that chap in the straight-jacket was given some poison that drove him insane. There are hellish drugs down there. Maybe the same thing happened to others. Look out for yourself, and give me the information Canalejas gives you as quickly as God will let you. If anything happens to you, we want the stuff to get back. Understand?" "Of course," said Bell. He carefully did not shiver as he realized what Jamison meant by anything happening to him. "The other item is that Ortiz, ex-Minister of the Interior of the Argentine, is scared to death about something. Sending radios right and left." "Umph," growled Jamison. "One of our men vanished in Buenos Aires. Watch him. You're friendly?" "Yes." "Get friendlier. See what he's got. Now shoo." Bell swung up the ladder again. Mist opened before him and closed again behind. He climbed over the rail to the promenade deck, and felt a little flare of irritation. There was a figure watching him. He slipped to the deck and grinned sheepishly at Paula Canalejas. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her little sport coat, regarding him very gravely. * * * * * "I suppose," said Charley Bell sheepishly, "that I look like a fool. But I've always wanted to climb up and down that ladder. I suppose it's a survival from the age of childhood. At the age of seven I longed to be a fireman." "I wonder," said Paula quietly. "Mr. Bell"--she stepped close to him--"I am taking a desperate chance. For the sake of my father, I wish certain things known. I think that you are an honorable man, and I think that you lied to me just now. Go and see Senor Ortiz. Your government will want to know what happens to him. Go and see him quickly." Bell felt the same flare of irritation as before. Women do not follow rules. They will not follow rules. They depend upon intuition, which is sometimes right, but sometimes leads to ungodly errors. Paula was right this time, but she could have been wholly and hopelessly wrong. If she had talked to anyone else.... "My child," said Bell paternally--he was at least two years older than Paula--"you should be careful. I did not lie to you just now. I am not Secret Service. But I happen to know that you have a tiny piece of string to give your father, and I beg of you not to show that to anyone else. And--well--you are probably watched. You must not talk seriously to me!" He lifted his hat and started astern. He was more than merely irritated. He was almost frightened. Because the Trade, officially, does not exist at all, and everybody in the Trade is working entirely on his own; and because those people who suspect that there is a Trade and dislike it are not on their own, but have plenty of resources behind them. And yet it is requisite that the Trade shall succeed in its various missions. Always. * * * * * The Government of the United States, you understand, will admit that it has a Secret Service, which it strives to identify solely with the pursuit of counterfeiters, postal thieves, and violators of the prohibition laws. Strongly pressed, it will admit that some members of the Secret Service work abroad, the official explanation being that they work abroad to forestall smugglers. And at a pinch, and in confidence, it may concede the existence of diplomatic secret agents. But there is no such thing as the Trade. Not at all. The funds which members of the Trade expend are derived by very devious bookkeeping from the appropriations allotted to an otherwise honestly conducted Department of the United States Government. Therefore the Trade does not really exist. You might say that there is a sort of conspiracy among certain people to do certain things. Some of them are government officials, major and minor. Some of them are private citizens, reputable and otherwise. One or two of them are in jail, both here and abroad. But as far as the Government of the United States is concerned, certain fortunate coincidences that happen now and then are purely coincidences. And the Trade, which arranges for them, does not exist. But it has a good many enemies. * * * * * The fog-horn howled dismally overhead. Mist swirled past the ship, and an oily swell surged vaguely overside and disappeared into a gray oblivion half a ship's length away. Bell moved on toward the stern. It was his intention to go into the smoking-room and idle ostentatiously. Perhaps he would enter into another argument with that Brazilian air pilot who had so much confidence in Handley-Page wing-slots. Bell had, in Washington, a small private plane that, he explained, had been given him by a wealthy aunt, who hoped he would break his neck in it. He considered that wing-slots interfered with stunting. He had picked out the door with his eye when he espied a small figure standing by the rail. It was Ortiz, the Argentine ex-Cabinet Minister, staring off into the grayness, and seeming to listen with all his ears. Bell slowed up. The little stout man turned and nodded to him, and then put out his hand. "Senor Bell," he said quietly, "tell me. Do you hear airplane motors?" Bell listened. The drip-drip-drip of condensed mist. The shuddering of the ship with her motors going dead slow. The tinkling, muted notes of the piano inside the saloon. The washing and hissing of the waves overside. That was all. "Why, no," said Bell. "I don't. Sound travels freakishly in fog, though. One might be quite close and we couldn't hear it. But we're a hundred and fifty miles off the Venezuelan coast, aren't we?" * * * * * Ortiz turned and faced him. Bell was shocked at the expression on the small man's face. It was drained of all blood, and its look was ghastly. But the rather fine dark eyes were steady. "We are," agreed Ortiz, very steadily indeed, "but I--I have received a radiogram that some airplane should fly near this ship, and it would amuse me to hear it." Bell frowned at the fog. "I've done a good bit of flying," he observed, "and if I were flying out at sea right now, I'd dodge this fog bank. It would be practically suicide to try to alight in a mist like this." Ortiz regarded him carefully. It seemed to Bell that sweat was coming out upon the other man's forehead. "You mean," he said quietly, "that an airplane could not land?" "It might try," said Bell with a shrug. "But you couldn't judge your height above the water. You might crash right into it and dive under. Matter of fact, you probably would." Ortiz's nostrils quivered a little. "I told them," he said steadily, "I told them it was not wise to risk...." * * * * * He stopped. He looked suddenly at his hands, clenched upon the rail. A depth of pallor even greater than his previous terrible paleness seemed to leave even his lips without blood. He wavered on his feet, as if he were staggering. "You're sick!" said Bell sharply. Instinctively he moved forward. The fine dark eyes regarded him oddly. And Ortiz suddenly took his hands from the railing of the promenade deck. He looked at his fingers detachedly. And Bell could see them writhing, opening and closing in a horribly sensate fashion, as if they were possessed of devils and altogether beyond the control of their owner. And he suddenly realized that the steady, grim regard with which Ortiz looked at his hands was exactly like the look he had seen upon a man's face once, when that man saw a venomous snake crawling toward him and had absolutely no weapon. Ortiz was looking at his fingers as a man might look at cobras at the ends of his wrists. Very calmly, but with a still, stunned horror. * * * * * He lifted his eyes to Bell. "I have no control over them," he said quietly. "My hands are useless to me, Senor Bell. I wonder if you will be good enough to assist me to my cabin." Again that deadly pallor flashed across his face. Bell caught at his arm. "What is the matter?" he demanded anxiously. "Of course I'll help you." Ortiz smiled very faintly. "If any airplane arrives in time," he said steadily, "something may be done. But you have rid me of even that hope. I have been poisoned, Senor Bell." "But the ship's doctor...." Ortiz, walking rather stiffly beside Bell, shrugged. "He can do nothing. Will you be good enough to open this door for me? And"--his voice was hoarse for an instant--"assist me to put my hands in my pockets. I cannot. But I would not like them to be seen." Bill took hold of the writhing fingers. He saw sweat standing out upon Ortiz's forehead. And the fingers closed savagely upon Bell's hands, tearing at them. Ortiz looked at him with a ghastly supplication. "Now," he said with difficulty, "if you will open the door, Senor Bell...." Bell slid the door aside. They went in together. People were making the best of boresome weather within, frankly yawning, most of them. But the card-room would be full, and the smoking-room steward would be busy. "My cabin is upon the next deck below," said Ortiz through stiff lips. "We--we will descend the stairs." * * * * * Bell went with him, his face expressionless. "My cabin should be unlocked," said Ortiz. It was. Ortiz entered, and, with his hands still in his pockets, indicated a steamer-trunk. "Please open that." He licked his lips. "I--I had thought I would have warning enough. It has not been so severe before. Right at the top...." Bell flung the top back. A pair of bright and shiny handcuffs lay on top of a dress shirt. "Yes," said Ortiz steadily. "Put them upon my wrists, please. The poison that has been given to me is--peculiar. I believe that one of your compatriots has experienced its effects." Bell started slightly. Ortiz eyed him steadily. "Precisely." Ortiz, with his face a gray mask of horror, spoke with a steadiness Bell could never have accomplished. "A poison, Senor Bell, which has made a member of the Secret Service of the United States a homicidal maniac. It has been given to me. I have been hoping for its antidote, but--Quick! Senor Bell! Quick! The handcuffs!" CHAPTER II The throbbing of the engines went on at an unvarying tempo. There was the slight, almost infinitesimal tremor of their vibration. The electric light in the cabin wavered rhythmically with its dynamo. From the open porthole came the sound of washing water. Now and then a disconnected sound of laughter or of speech came down from the main saloon. Ortiz lay upon the bed, exhausted. "It is perhaps humorous, Senor Bell," he said presently, in the same steady voice he had used upon the deck. "It is undoubtedly humorous that I should call upon you. I believe that you are allied with the Secret Service of your government." Bell started to shake his head, but was still. He said nothing. "I am poisoned," said Ortiz. He tried to smile, but it was ghastly. "It is a poison which makes a man mad in a very horrible fashion. If I could use my hands--and could trust them--I would undoubtedly shoot myself. It would be entirely preferable. Instead, I hope--" He broke off short and listened intently. His forehead beaded. "Is that an airplane motor?" Bell went to the port and listened. The washing of waves. The throbbing of the ship's engines. The dismal, long-drawn-out moaning of the fog-horn. Nothing else.... Yes! A dim and distant muttering. It drew nearer and died away again. "That is a plane," said Bell. "Yes, It's out of hearing now." Ortiz clamped his jaws together. "I was about to speak," he said steadily, "to tell you--many things. Which your government should know. Instead, I ask you to go to the wireless room and have the wireless operator try to get in touch with that plane. It is a two-motored seaplane and it has a wireless outfit. It will answer the call M.S.T.R. Ask him to use his directional wireless and try to guide it to the ship. It brings the antidote to the poison which affects me." Bell made for the door. Ortiz raised his head with a ghastly smile. "Close the door tightly," he said quietly. "I--I feel as if I shall be unpleasant." * * * * * Closing the door behind him, Bell felt rather like a man in a nightmare. He made for the stairway, bolted for the deck, and fairly darted up the ladder to the wireless room. "Ortiz sent me," he said to the operator. "You heard that plane just now. See if you can get it." The operator looked up at him beneath a green eyeshade and grinned crookedly. "Talking to 'em now," he said. The key flicked up and down, and a tiny dancing spark leaped into being and vanished beneath its contact-point. The wireless room was dark save for the bright, shaded light above the sending table. A file of sent messages by an elbow. A pad for messages received was by a hand. Stray wreaths of tobacco smoke floated about the room, leaping into view as they drifted beneath the lamp. "Is he bad?" asked the operator fascinatedly, his eyes fixed on his key. Bell felt his eyelids flicker. "Very bad," he said shortly. "They tell me," said the operator and shuddered, "your hands get working and you can't stop 'em.... I'm playing, I am! I'm playing The Master's game!" * * * * * The key stopped. He listened. "They're going to try to swoop over the ship and drop it," he said a moment later. "I don't think they can. But tell Ortiz they're going to try." Bell's eyes were narrow. It is not customary for a radio operator on a passenger ship to speak of an ex-Cabinet Minister of the Argentine Republic by his surname only. It bespeaks either impertinence or a certain very peculiar association. Bell frowned imperceptibly for an instant, thinking. "You've--had it?" he asked sharply. "God, no! I never took the chance! I saw the red spots once, and I went to Rib--Say! You got a password?" He was staring up at Bell. Bell shrugged. "I'm trying to help Senor Ortiz now." The operator continued to stare, his eyes full of suspicion. Then he grimaced. "All right. Go tell him they're going to drop it." * * * * * Bell went out. Gray fog, and washing seas, and the big ship ploughing steadily on toward the south.... The horn blared, startlingly loud and unspeakably doleful. Bell listened for other sounds. There were none. Down the steep ladder to the promenade deck. Paula Canalejas nodded to him. "I saw you speak to Senor Ortiz," she said quietly. "You see?" Bell was beginning to have a peculiar, horrible suspicion. It was incredible, but it was inevitable. "I think I see," he said harshly. "But I don't dare believe it. Keep quiet and don't speak to me unless I give you some sign it's safe! It's--hellish!" He went inside and swiftly down the stairs. He found a steward hesitating outside the door of Ortiz's cabin. He touched Bell's arm anxiously as he was about to go in. "Beg pardon, sir," he said, and stammered. "I--I heard Mr. Ortiz making some--very strange noises, sir. I--I thought he was sick...." "He is," said Bell grimly. "He told me he does not want a doctor, though. I'm looking after him." He closed the door behind him, and Ortiz grinned at him. It was a horrible, a terrible grin, and Ortiz fought it from his face with a terrific effort of will. There was foam about his lips. * * * * * "_Dios!_ It was--it was devilish!" he gasped. "Senor Bell, _amigo mio_, for the love of the good God get my revolver from my trunk. Give it to me...." Bell said shortly: "The airplane just radioed that it's going to try to swoop overhead and drop a package on board the steamer. It doesn't dare alight in this fog." "I think," gasped Ortiz, "I think it would be well to tie my feet. Tie them fast! If--if the package comes, if I--if I am unpleasant, knock me unconscious and pour it into my mouth. I fear it is too late now. But try it...." Through the port came the muttering of a seaplane's engines. The noise died away. Almost instantly the siren boomed hoarsely. "Ah, _Dios!_" said Ortiz unsteadily. "There it is! Senor Bell, I think it is too late. Would you--would you assist me to go out on deck, where I might fling myself overboard? I--think I can control my legs so long." "Steady!" said Bell, wrenched by the sight of the man before him fighting against unnameable horror. "Tell me--" "It is poison," said Ortiz, his features fixed in a terrible effort of will. "A ghastly, a horrible poison of the _Indios_ of Matto Grosso, in Brazil. It drives a man mad, murder mad. It is as if he were possessed by a devil. His hands first refuse to obey him. His feet next. And then his body. It is as if a devil had seized hold of his body and carried it about doing murder with it. A part of the brain is driven insane, and a man goes about shrieking with the horror of what crimes his body commits until the poison reaches that portion of his brain as well. Then he is mad forever. That is what I face, _amigo mio_. That is why I beg you, I implore you, to kill me or assist me to the side of the ship so that I may fling myself overboard! The Master had it administered to me secretly, and demanded treason as the price of the antidote. He deman--" * * * * * Steady and strong, rising from a muttering to a steady roar, the sound of airplane motors came through the port. Bell started up. "Hold fast," he snapped savagely. "I'll go get that package when it lands. Hold fast, I tell you! Fight it!" He flung out of the cabin and raced up the stairs. The door to the deck was open. He crowded through a group of passengers who had discounted the dampness for the sake of a novelty--an airplane far out at sea--and raced up to the upper deck. The roaring noise was receding. The siren roared hoarsely. Then the noise came back. For minutes, then, the ship seemed to play hide-and-seek with the invisible fliers. The roaring noise overhead circled about, now near, now seeming very far away. And the siren sent its dismal blasts out into the grayness all about. Then, for an instant, a swiftly scudding shadow was visible overhead. It banked steeply and vanished, and seemed to have turned and come lower when it reappeared a moment later. It was not distinct, at first. It was merely a silhouette of darker gray against the all-enveloping mist. But its edges sharpened and became clear. One could make out struts, an aileron's trailing edge. "Got nerve, anyhow," said Bell grimly. It swept across the ship and disappeared, but the noise of its engines did not dwindle more than a little. The blast of the siren seemed to summon it back again. Once more it came in sight, and this time it dived steeply, flashed across the forecastle deck amid a hideous uproar, desperately, horribly close to the dangling derrick-cables, and was gone. * * * * * Bell had seen it more clearly than anyone else on the ship, perhaps. He saw a man in the pilot's cockpit between wings and tail reach high and fling something downward, something with a long streamer attached to it. Bell had an instant's glimpse of the goggled face. Then he was darting forward, watching the thing that fell. It took only a second. Two at most. But the thing seemed to fall with infinite deliberation, the streamer shivering out behind it. It fell at a steep slant, the forward momentum of the plane's speed added to its own drop. It swooped down, slanting toward the rail.... Bell groaned. It struck the rail itself, and bounced. A sailor flung himself toward it. The streamer slipped from his fingers and slithered over the side. Bell was at the railing just in time to see it drop into the water. He opened his mouth to shout, and saw it sink. The last of the streamer followed the dropped object down into the green water when it was directly below him. His hands clenched. Bell stared sickly at the spot where it had vanished. An instant later he had whirled and was thrusting wide the wireless room door. The operator was returning to his key, grinning crookedly. He looked up sidewise. "Tell them it went overside," snapped Bell. "Tell them to try it again. Ortiz is in hell! To try again! He's dying!" * * * * * The operator looked up fascinatedly, his fingers working his key. "Is he--bad?" he asked with a shuddering interest. "He's dying!" snarled Bell, in a rage because of his helplessness. He had forgotten everything but the fact that a man below decks was facing the most horrible fate that can overtake a man, and facing it with a steadfast gameness that made Bell's heart go out to him. "They don't die," said the operator. He shuddered. "They don't die of it." His key stopped. He listened. His key clicked again. "They only had two packages," he said a moment later. "They don't dare risk the other one. They say the fog ends twenty miles farther on. They're going to land up there and taxi back on the surface of the water. It shouldn't be more than half an hour." He pushed himself back from the table with an air of finality. "That's all. They've signed off." Bell felt rage sweeping over him. The operator grinned crookedly. "Better go down and tie him up," he said, and licked his lips with the fascinated air of one thinking of a known and terrifying thing. "Better tie him up tight. It'll be half an hour more." * * * * * Bell went down the companion-ladder. The promenade was crowded with passengers now, asking questions of each other. Some, frowning portentously, thought the plane an unscheduled ocean flier who had lost his way in the fog. Paula Canalejas was close to Bell as he shouldered his way through the crowd. "That was for him?" she asked, without moving her lips. Bell nodded. "Tell him," she said quietly, "I--pray for him." Bell nodded abruptly and went into the saloon. It was nearly empty. He wiped the sweat off his face. It was horrible to have to go down to Ortiz and tell him that at best it would be half an hour more.... Then there was a sudden scream below him, and then a shot. Bell jumped for the stairs, his heart in his throat, and saw Ortiz coming out of his stateroom door. His eyes were wide and agonized. His body.... Even in the incredibly short time before he reached the bottom of the steps, Bell had time to receive the ghastly impression that Ortiz was sane, but that his body had gone mad. Ortiz's face was white and horrified. His hands and arms were writhing savagely, working at the handcuffs on his wrists. His legs were carrying him at a curious, padding trot down the hallway. One of the hands held a glittering revolver. A steward was crouched behind a couch, his face white and filled with stark terror. And Ortiz held his head back, as if struggling to hold back and control his body, which was under the control of a malignant demon. "Out of the way!" cried Ortiz in a voice of terrible despair. "Get someone to shoot me! Kill me! I cannot--ah, _Dios!_" * * * * * The hands leveled the revolver in spite of him, while he flung his head from side to side in a frantic attempt to disturb their aim. "Close your eyes!" panted Bell, and hurled himself upon--whom? It was not Ortiz. It was Ortiz's body, gone mad and raging. The manacled arms flailed about frenziedly. The gun went off. Again. Again.... Bell struck. He knocked the Thing that possessed Ortiz's body off its feet. The hands groped for him. They clubbed at him with the revolver. The feet kicked.... "Keep your eyes closed," gasped Bell, struggling to get the gun away from those horrible hands. "It--it can't see when you keep your eyes closed!" Fighting insanely as the Thing was fighting, he could not identify it with Ortiz himself. One of the hands unclosed from about the revolver and clawed at his throat. It seemed to abandon that effort and attacked Ortiz's face in a frenzy of rage, struggling to claw his eyes open. The other held the weapon fast with maniacal strength. At the horror of feeling one of his own manacled hands attacking his face savagely as if it were itself a sensate thing, Ortiz opened his eyes. They were wide with despair. The hand with the revolver made a sudden movement, and Bell flung his weight upon it as the clutching hand pulled the trigger. There was a deafening report.... * * * * * The body seemed to weaken suddenly in Bell's grip. It fought less and less terribly, though with no lessening of its savagery. He managed to get the revolver away from the hands that shook with unspeakable rage. He flung it away and stood panting. There was a crowd of people suddenly all about the place. Staring, stunned, incredulous people who regarded Bell with a dawning, damning suspicion. Ortiz spoke suddenly. His voice was weak, but it was steady, and it was full of a desperate relief. "I wish to make a statement," he said sharply. "I--I wished to commit suicide for personal reasons. Senor Bell tried to dissuade me. The handcuffs upon my wrists were placed there with my consent. Senor Bell is my friend and has done me no wrong. I shot myself, with intention." Bell beckoned to the ship's doctor. "Get him bandaged up," he ordered harshly. "There's no need for him to die." The body was writhing only feebly, now. Ortiz looked up at him, and managed a smile. Again there was that incredible impression of the body not belonging to Ortiz, or Ortiz as a sane and whole and honorable, admirable man, and the feebly writhing body with its clutching hands as some evil thing that had properly been defeated and killed. * * * * * The doctor bent down. It was useless, of course. He made futile movements. "I wish to speak to my friend, Senor Bell," said Ortiz weakly. "I--I have not long." Bell knelt beside him. "The Master's--deputy in Rio," panted Ortiz weakly, almost in a whisper, "is--is Ribiera. In Buenos Aires I--I do not know. There was a man--the one who poisoned me--but I killed him. Secretly. I do not think--the Master knows. I pray that--" He stopped. He could not speak again. But he smiled, and a few seconds later Bell clenched his hands. Ortiz was gone. Someone touched his arm. Paula Canalejas. He stared down at her and managed to smile. It was not a very successful smile. He drew a deep breath. "I would like," said Bell wryly, "to think that, when I die, I will die as well as this man did. But I'm afraid I shan't." But Paula said: "The airplane can be heard outside. It seems to be moving on the surface." * * * * * And ten minutes later the plane loomed up out of the mist, queerly ungainly on the surface of the water. Its motors roared impatiently as if held in leash. It swung clumsily about, heading off out of sight in the fog to turn. It came back, sliding along the top of the water with its wing-tip floats leaving alternate streaks of white foam behind them. A man stood up in its after cockpit. Bell crowded to the rail. The man--goggled and masked--held up a package as if to fling it on board. Bell watched grimly. But he saw that the pilot checked himself and looked up at the upper deck. Bell craned his neck. The wireless operator was waving wildly to the seaplane. He writhed his hands, and held his hand to his head is if blowing out his brains, and waved the plane away, frantically. The pilot of the plane sat down. A moment later its motors roared more thunderously. It is not safe to alight on either land or water when fog hangs low, but there is little danger in taking off. The seaplane shot away into the mist, its motors bellowing. The sound of its going changed subtly. It seemed to rise, and grow more distant.... It died away. Bell halted at the top of the companion-ladder and saw the wireless operator, with a crooked, nervous grin upon his face. CHAPTER III Bell saw what he was looking for, out in the throng of traffic that filled the Avenida do Acre, in Rio. He'd seen it over the heads of the crowd, which was undersized, as most Brazilian crowds are, and he managed to get through the perpetual jam on the mosaic sidewalk and reach the curb. He stood there and regarded the vehicles filling the broad avenue, wearing exactly the indifferent, half-amused air of a tourist with no place in particular to go and a great deal of time in which to go there. Taxis chuffed past, disputing right of way with private cars which were engaged in more disputes with other cars, all in the rather extraordinary bad temper and contentiousness which comes to the Latin-American when he takes the wheel of an automobile. As if coming to an unimportant decision, Bell raised his hand to an approaching cab. It had two men on the chauffeur's seat. Of course. All taxis in Rio carry two men in front. One drives, and the other lights his cigarettes, makes witty comments upon passing ladies, and helps in collecting the fares from recalcitrant passengers. The extra man is called the "secretary," and he assists materially in giving an impression of haughty pride. The taxi ground to the curb. The secretary reached behind him indifferently and opened the door. Bell did not glance at him. He stepped inside and settled down languidly. "The Beira Mar," he said listlessly. The taxi started off with a jolt. It is the invariable custom in Rio de Janeiro. And besides, it reminds the passenger that he is merely a customer, admitted to the cab on suffrance, and that he must be suitably meek to those who will presently blandly ignore the amount registered by the meter and demand a fare of from eight to twenty-seven times the indicated amount. * * * * * The cab went shooting down the Avenida do Acre toward the harbor. The Avenida do Acre is officially the Avenida Rio Blanco, and it should be called by that name, only people forget. The Beira Mar, however, is named with entire propriety. It is actually the edge of the sea, and it is probably one of the two or three most beautiful driveways in the world. The cab whirled past the crowded sidewalks. Incredible numbers of people, with an incredible variation in the shades of their complexions, moved to and from with the peculiar aimlessness of a Brazilian crowd. A stout and pompous negro politician from Bahia, wearing an orchid in his button-hole, rubbed elbows with a striking blonde lady of the sidewalks on his left, and forced a wizened little silk-hatted _parda_--approximately an octoroon--to dodge about him in order to progress. A young and languid person, his clothes the very last expiring gasp of fashion, fingered his stick patiently. He wore the painstakingly cultivated expression of bored disillusionment your young Brazilian dandy considers aristocratic. It was very probable that he shared a particularly undesirable bedroom with four or five other young men in order to purchase such clothing, but then, _farenda fita_--making a picture--is the national Brazilian sport. Bell lighted a cigarette. It was not wise to regard the secretary of this particular taxi too closely, but if his face had been thickly smeared with coal dust, and if he had had a two weeks' beard, and if he had been seen on the forecastle of the _Almirante Gomez_, one would have deduced him to be a stoker who had not used the name of Jamison. * * * * * The cab reached the Beira Mar, and turned to take the long route about the bay. It is one of the most beautiful views to be found anywhere, and tall apartment houses have been built along its whole length to capitalize the scenery. True, the more brightly-colored ladies of the capital have established themselves in vast numbers among these apartment houses, but in their languid promenades they add--let us say--the beauties of art to those of nature. A voice spoke from the chauffeur's seat. "Bell." "Right," said Bell without moving. His eyes flickered, however, and he found the device Jamison had inserted. A speaking-tube of sorts. Not especially efficient, but inconspicuous enough. He stirred listlessly and got his lips near it. "All right to talk?" he asked briefly. "Shoot," said Jamison from the secretary's seat beside the chauffeur. "This man doesn't understand English, and he thinks I'm in a smuggling gang. He expects to make some money out of me eventually." Bell spoke curtly, while the taxi rolled past the Morro da Gloria with its quaint old church and went along the winding, really marvelous driveway past many beaches, with the incredibly blue water beyond. "Canalejas is out of town," he said. "It isn't known when he'll be back. I met his daughter at a dance at our Embassy here, and she told me. We didn't dare to talk much, but she's frightened. Especially after what happened to Ortiz. And I've met Ribiera, whom Ortiz named." "I've been looking him up," growled Jamison through the speaking-tube. * * * * * Bell flicked the ash from his cigarette out the door, and went on quietly. "He's trying to get friendly with me. I've promised to call at his house and have him take me out to the flying field. He has two planes, he tells me, a big amphibian and a two-seater. Uses them for commuting between Rio and his place back inland. He went out of his way to cultivate me. I think he suspects I'm trying to find out something." "Which you are," said Jamison dryly. "You've found out that Ortiz was right at least about--" Bell nodded, and frowned at himself for having nodded. He spoke into the mouthpiece by his head with an expressionless face. "He's practically fawned upon by a bunch of important officials and several high ranking army officers. Suspecting what I do, I think he's got hold of a devil of a lot of power." Jamison scowled in a lordly fashion upon a mere pedestrian who threatened to impede the movement of the taxicab by making it run over him. * * * * * "Ortiz," said Bell quietly, "told me he'd been poisoned, and treason asked as the price of the antidote. I've heard that the Brazilian Minister for Foreign Affairs went insane six months ago. I heard, also, that it was homicidal mania--murder madness. And I'm wondering if these people who fawn upon Ribiera aren't paying a price for--well--antidotes, or their equivalent. The Minister for Foreign Affairs may have refused." "You're improving," said Jamison dryly. The taxi rounded a curve and a vista of sea and sand and royal palms spread out before it. "Yes, you're improving. But Ortiz spoke of Ribiera only as a deputy of The Master. Who is The Master?" "God knows," said Bell. He stared languidly out of the window, for all the world to see. A tourist, regarding the boasted beauties of the Biera Mar. "A deputy," said Jamison without emotion, "of some unknown person called The Master poisoned Ortiz in Buenos Aires. And Ortiz was an important man in the Argentine. Ribiera is merely the deputy of that same unknown Master in Rio, and he has generals and state presidents and the big politicians paying court to him. If deputies in two countries that we know of have so much power, how much power has The Master?" * * * * * Silence. The taxi chugged steadily past unnoticed beauties and colorings. Rio is really one of the most beautiful cities in the world. "It's like this," said Jamison jerkily. "Seven Service men vanish and one goes mad. You get two tips that the fate of Ortiz is the fate of the seven men--eight, in fact. We find that two men dispense a certain ghastly poison in two certain cities, at the orders of a man they call The Master. We find that those two men wield an astounding lot of power, and we know they're only deputies, only subordinates of the Master. We know, also, that the Service men vanished all over the whole continent, not in just those two cities. How many deputies has The Master? What's it all about? He wanted treason of Ortiz, we know. What does he want of the other men his deputies have enslaved? Why did he poison the Service men? And why--especially why--do two honorable men, officials of two important nations, want to tip off the United States Government about the ghastly business? What's it got to do with our nation?" Bell flung away his cigarette. "That last question has occurred to me too," he observed, and carefully repressed a slight shiver. "I have made a guess, which is probably insane. I'm going to see Ribiera this afternoon." "He already suspects you know too much," said Jamison without expression. "I am"--Bell managed the ghost of a mirthless smile--"I am uncomfortably aware of it. And I may need an antidote as badly as Ortiz. If I do, and can't help myself, I'll depend on you." * * * * * Jamison growled. "I simply mean," said Bell very quietly, "that I'd really rather not be--er--left alive if I'm mad. That's all. But Ortiz knew what was the matter with him before he got bad off. I know it's a risk. I'm goose-flesh all over. But somebody's got to take the risk. The guess I've made may be insane, but if it's right one or two lives will be cheap enough as a price for the information. Suppose you chaps turn around and take me to Ribiera's house?" There was a long pause. Then Jamison spoke in Portuguese to his companion. The taxi checked, swerved, and began to retrace its route. "You're a junior in the Trade," said Jamison painstakingly. "I can't order you to do it." Bell fumbled with his cigarette case. "The Trade doesn't exist, Jamison," he said dryly. "And besides, nobody gives orders in The Trade. There are only suggestions. Now shut up a while. I want to try to remember some consular reports I read once, from the consul at Puerto Pachecho." "What?" "The consul there," said Bell, smiling faintly, "was an amateur botanist. He filled up his consular reports with accounts of native Indian medicinal plants and drugs, with copious notes and clinical observations. I had to reprove him severely for taking up space with such matters and not going fully into the exact number of hides, wet and dry, that passed through the markets in his district. His information will be entirely useless in this present emergency, but I'm going to try to remember as much of it as I can. Now shut up." * * * * * When the taxi swung off the Biera Mar to thread its way through many tree-lined streets--it is a misdemeanor, punishable by fine, to cut down a tree in Rio de Janeiro--it carried a young American with the air of an accomplished idler, who has been mildly bored by the incomparable view from the waterside boulevard. When it stopped at the foot of one of the slum covered _morros_ that dot all Rio, and a liveried doorman came out of a splendid residence to ask the visitor his name, the taxi discharged a young American who seemed to feel the heat, in spite of the swift motion of the cab. He wiped off his forehead with his handkerchief as he was assured that the Senhor Ribiera had given orders he was to be admitted, night or day. When the taxi drove off, it carried two men on the chauffeur's seat, of whom one had lost, temporarily, the manner of haughty insolence which is normally inseparable from the secretary of a taxicab chauffeur. But though he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, Bell actually felt rather cold when he followed his guide through ornately furnished rooms, which seemed innumerable, and was at last left to wait in an especially luxurious salon. There was a pause. A rather long wait. A distinctly long wait. Bell lighted a cigarette and seemed to become mildly bored. He regarded a voluptuous small statuette with every appearance of pleased interest. A subtly decadent painting seemed to amuse him considerably. He did not seem to notice that no windows at all were visible, and that shaded lamps lit this room, even in broad daylight. * * * * * Two servants came in, a footman in livery and the major-domo. Your average _Carioca_ servant is either fawning or covertly insolent. These two were obsequious. The footman carried a tray with a bottle, glass, ice, and siphon. "The Senhor Ribiera," announced the major-domo obsequiously, "begs that the Senhor Bell will oblige him by waiting for the shortest of moments until the Senhor Ribiera can relieve himself of a business matter. It will be but the shortest of moments." Bell felt a little instinctive chill at sight of the bottle and glasses. "Oh, very well," he said idly. "You may put the tray there." The footman lifted the siphon expectantly. Bell regarded it indifferently. The wait before the arrival of this drink had been longer than would be required merely for the announcing of a caller and the tending of a tray, especially if such a tray were a custom of the place. And the sending of a single bottle only, without inquiry into his preferences.... "No soda," said Bell. He poured out a drink into the tinier glass. He lifted it toward his lips, hesitated vaguely, and drew out his handkerchief again. He sneezed explosively, and the drink spilled. He swore irritably, put down the glass, and plied his handkerchief vigorously. A moment later he was standing up and pouring the drink out afresh, from the bottle in one hand to the glass in the other. He up-tilted the glass. "Get rid of this for me," he said annoyedly of the handkerchief. * * * * * He saw a nearly imperceptible glance pass between the footman and the major-domo. They retired, and Bell moved about the room exactly like a young man who has been discomfited by the necessity of sneezing before servants. Anywhere else in the world, of course, such a pose would not have been convincing. But your Brazilian not only adopts _fazenda fita_ as his own avocation, but also suspects it to be everybody else's too. And a young Brazilian of the leisure class would be horribly annoyed at being forced to so plebeian an exhibition in public. He moved restlessly about the room, staring at the picture. Presently he blinked uncertainly and gazed about less definitely. He went rather uncertainly to the chair he had first occupied and sat down. He poured--or seemed to pour--another drink. Again he sneered, and looked mortified. He put down the glass with an air of finality. But he looked puzzledly about him. Then he sank back in his chair and gradually seemed to sink into a sort of apathetic indifference. * * * * * He looked, then, like a very bored young man on the verge of dozing off. But actually he was very much alert indeed. He had the feeling of eyes upon him for a while. Then that sensation ceased and he settled himself to wait. And meantime he felt a particular, peculiar gratitude to the late American consul at Puerto Pachecho for his interest in medicinal plants. That gentleman had gone into the subject with the passionate enthusiasm of the amateur. He had described _icus_, _uirari_ and _timbo_. He had particularized upon _makaka-nimbi_ and _hervamoura_. And he had gone into a wealth of detail concerning _yagué_, on account of its probable value if used in criminology. As consul at Puerto Pachecho he was not altogether a success in some ways, but he had invented an entirely original method of experimentation upon those drugs and poisons which did not require to be introduced into the blood-stream. His method was simplicity itself. An alcoholic solution "carried" a minute quantity of the drug in its vapor, just as an alcoholic solution carries a minute quantity of perfuming essential oil. He inhaled the odor of the alcoholic solution. The effect was immediately, strictly temporary, and not dangerous. He was enabled to describe the odors, in some cases the tastes, and in a few instances the effects of the substances he listed, from personal experience. * * * * * And Bell had used his method as an unpromising but possible test for a drug in the drink that had been brought him. He inhaled the strangling odor of the spilled liquor on his handkerchief. And there was a drug involved. For an instant he was dizzy, and for an instant he saw the room through a vivid blue haze. And something clicked in his brain and said "It's _yagué_." And the relief of dealing with something which he knew--if only at second-hand--was so enormous that he felt almost weak. _Yagué_, you see, is an extract from the leaves of a plant which is not yet included in materia medica. It has nearly the effect of scopolamine--once famous in connection with twilight sleep--and produces a daze of blue light, an intolerable sleepiness, and practically all the effects of hypnotism. A person under _yagué_, as under scopolamine or hypnosis, will seem to slumber and yet will obey any order, by whomever given. He will answer any question without reserve or any concealment. And on awakening he will remember nothing done under the influence of the potion. The effects are not particularly harmful. Bell then, sat in an apparent half-daze, half-slumber, in the salon in which he waited for Ribiera to appear. He knew exactly what he was expected to do. Ribiera wanted to find out what he knew or suspected about Ortiz's death. Ribiera wanted to know many things, and he would believe what Bell told him because he thought Bell had taken enough _yagué_ to be practically an hypnotic subject. Let Ribiera believe what he was told! When he came into the room, bland and smiling, Bell did not stir. He was literally crawling, inside, with an unspeakable repulsion to the man and the things for which he stood. But he seemed dazed and dull, and when Ribiera began to ask questions he babbled his answers in a toneless, flat voice. He babbled very satisfactorily, in Ribiera's view. * * * * * When Ribiera shook him roughly by the shoulder he started, and let his eyes clear. Ribiera was laughing heartily. "Senhor! Senhor!" said Ribiera jovially. "My hospitality is at fault! You come to be my guest and I allow you to be so bored that you drop off to sleep! I was detained for five minutes and came in to find you slumbering!" Bell stared ruefully about him and rubbed his eyes. "I did, for a fact," he admitted apologetically. "I'm sorry. Up late last night, and I was tired. I dropped in to see those planes you suggested I'd be interested in. But I daresay it's late, now." Ribiera chuckled again. He was in his late and corpulent forties and was something of a dandy. If one were captious, one might object to the thickness of his lips. They suggested sensuality. And there was a shade--a bare shade--more of pigment in his skin than the American passes altogether unquestioned. And his hair was wavy.... But he could be a charming host. "We'll have a drink," he said bluntly, "while the car's coming around to the door, and then go out to the flying field." "No drink," said Bell, lifting his hand. "I feel squeamish now. I say! Haven't you changed the lamps, or something? Everything looks blue...." That was a lie. Things looked entirely normal to Bell. But he looked about him as if vaguely puzzled. If he had drunk the liquor Ribiera had sent him, things would have had a bluish tinge for some time after. But as it was.... Ribiera chaffed him jovially on the way to the flying field. And introducing him to fliers and officials of the field, he told with gusto of Bell's falling asleep while waiting for him. A very jolly companion, Ribiera. But Bell saw two or three men looking at him very queerly. Almost sympathetically. And he noticed, a little later, that a surprising number of fliers and officials of the airport seemed to be concealing an abject terror of Ribiera. One or two of them seemed to hate him as well. CHAPTER IV Bell stepped out of a tall French window to a terrace, and from the terrace to the ground. There was a dull muttering in the sky to the east, and a speck appeared, drew nearer swiftly, grew larger, and became a small army biplane. It descended steeply to earth behind a tall planting of trees. Bell lighted a cigarette and moved purposelessly down an elaborately formalized garden. "More victims," he observed grimly to himself, of the plane. Ribiera lifted a pigmented hand to wave languidly from a shaded chair. There were women about him, three of them, and it sickened Bell to see the frightened assiduity with which they flattered him. Bell had met them, of course. Madame the wife of the State President of Bahia--in the United States of Brazil the states have presidents instead of governors--preferred the title of "Madame" because it was more foreign and consequently more aristocratic than Senhora. And Madame the wife of the General-- "Senhor," called Ribiera blandly, "I have news for you." Bell turned and went toward him with an air of pleased expectancy. He noticed for the first time the third of the women. Young, in the first flush of youthful maturity, but with an expression of stark terror lingering behind a palpably assumed animation. "An acquaintance of yours, Senhor," said Ribiera, "is to be my guests." Bell steeled himself. "The Senhor Canalejas," said Ribiera, beaming, "and his daughter." * * * * * Bell seemed to frown, and then seemed to remember. "Oh, yes," he said carelessly, "I met her in Washington. She was on the _Almirante Gomez_, coming down." The next instant he saw Ribiera's expression, and cursed himself for a fool. Ribiera's eyes had narrowed sharply. Then they half-closed, and he smiled. "She is charming," said Ribiera in drowsy contentment, "and I had thought you would be glad to improve her acquaintance. Especially since, as my friend, you may congratulate me. A contract of marriage is under discussion." Bell felt every muscle grow taut. The fat, pigmented man before him.... "Indeed," said Bell politely, "I do congratulate you." Ribiera looked at him with an expression in which a sardonic admiration mingled with something else less pleasant. "You are clever, Senhor Bell," he said heavily, seeming to sink more deeply into his chair. "Very clever." He shifted his eyes to the women who stood about him. "You may go," he said indifferently. His tone was exactly that of a despot dismissing his slaves. Two of them colored with instinctive resentment. His eyes lingered an instant on the third. Her face had showed only a passionate relief. "You, Senhora," he said heavily, "may wait nearby." The terror returned to her features, but she moved submissively to a spot a little out of earshot. Bell found his jaws clenched. There is a certain racial taint widespread in Brazil which leads to an intolerable arrogance when there is the slightest opportunity for its exercise. Ribiera had the taint, and Bell felt a sickening wrath at the terrified submission of the women. "_Si_," said Ribiera, suddenly adverting to insolence. "You are clever, Senhor Bell. Where did you learn of _yagué_?" * * * * * Bell inhaled leisurely. His muscles were tense, but he gave no outward sign. Instead, he sat down comfortably upon the arm of a chair facing Ribiera's. The only way to meet insolence is with equal insolence and a greater calm. "Ah!" said Bell pleasantly. "So you found out it didn't work, after all!" Ribiera's eyes contracted. He became suddenly enraged. "You are trifling with me," he said furiously. "Do you know the penalty for that?" "Why, yes," said Bell, and smiled amiably. "A dose of--er--poison of The Master's private brand." It was a guess, but based on a good deal of evidence. Ribiera turned crimson, then pale. "What do you know?" he demanded in a deadly quietness. "You cannot leave this place. You are aware of that. The people here--guests and servants--are my slaves, the slaves of The Master. You cannot leave this place except also as my slave. I will have you bound and given _yagué_ so that you cannot fail to tell me anything that I wish to know. I will have you tortured so that you will gladly say anything that I wish, in return for death. I will--" "You will," said Bell dryly, "drop dead with seven bullets in your body if you give a signal for anyone to attack me." * * * * * Ribiera stared at him as his hand rested negligently in his coat pocket. And then, quite suddenly Ribiera began to chuckle. His rage vanished. He laughed, a monstrous, gross, cackling laughter. "You have been my guest for two days," he gasped, slapping his fat knees, "and you have not noticed that your pistol his been tampered with! Senhor Bell! Senhor Bell! My uncle will be disappointed in you!" It seemed to impress him as a victory that Bell had been depending upon an utterly futile threat for safety. It restored his good humor marvelously. "It does not matter," he said jovially. "Presently you will tell me all that I wish to know. More, perhaps. My uncle is pleased with you. You recall your little talk with the wireless operator on the _Almirante Gomez_? You tried to learn things from him, Senhor. He reported it. Of course. All our slaves report. He sent his report to my uncle, The Master, and I did not have it until to-day. I will admit that you deceived me. I knew you had talked with Ortiz, who was a fool. I thought that in his despair he might have spoken. I gave you _yagué_, as I thought, and informed my uncle that you knew nothing. And he is very much pleased with you. It was clever to deceive me about the _yagué_. My uncle has high praise for you. He has told me that he desires your services." Bell inhaled again. There was no question but that Ribiera was totally unafraid of the threat he had made. His gun must have been tampered with, the firing-pin filed off perhaps. So Bell said placidly: "Well? He desires my services?" * * * * * Ribiera chuckled, in his gross and horrible good humor. "He will have them. Senhor. He will have them. When you observe your hands writhing at the ends of your wrists, you will enter his service, through me. Of course. And he will reward you richly. Money, much money, such as I have. And slaves--such as I have. The Senhora...." Ribiera looked at the terrified girl standing thirty or forty feet away. He chuckled again. "My uncle desires that you should be induced to enter his service of your own will. So, Senhor, you shall see first what my uncle's service offers. And later, when you know what pleasures you may some day possess as my uncle's deputy in your own nation, why, then the fact that your hands are writhing at the ends of your wrists will be merely an added inducement to come to me. And I bear you no ill will for deceiving me. You may go." Bell rose. "And still," he said dryly, "I suspect that you are deceived. But now you deceive yourself." He heard Ribiera chuckling as he walked away. He heard him call, amusedly, "Senhora." He heard the little gasp of terror with which the girl obeyed. He passed her, stumbling toward the gross fat man with the light brown skin and curly hair. Her eyes were literally pools of anguish. * * * * * Bell threw away his cigarette and began to fumble for another. He was beginning to feel the first twinges of panic, and fought them down. Ribiera had not lied. Bell had been at this _fazenda_ of his--which was almost a miniature Versailles three hundred miles from Rio--for two days. In all that time he had not seen one person besides himself who did not display the most abject terror of Ribiera. Ribiera had made no idle boast when he said that everyone about, guests and servants, were slaves. They were. Slaves of a terror vastly greater than mere fear of death. It-- "Senhor!... _Oh, Dios!_" It was the girl's voice, in despair. Ribiera laughed. Bell felt a red mist come before his eyes. He deliberately steadied his hands and lighted his cigarette. He heard stumbling footsteps coming behind him. A hand touched his arm. He turned to see the girl Ribiera had pointed out, her cheeks utterly, chalky white, trying desperately to smile. "Senhor!" she gasped. "Smile at me! For the love of God, smile at me!" In the fraction of a second, Bell was mad with rage. He understood, and he hated Ribiera with a corrosive hatred past conception. And then he was deathly calm, and wholly detached, and he smiled widely, and turned and looked at Ribiera, and Ribiera's whole gross bulk quivered as he chuckled. Bell took the girl's arm with an excessive politeness and managed--he never afterward understood how he managed it--to grin at Ribiera. "Senhora," he said in a low tone, "I think I understand. Stop being afraid. We can fool him. Come and walk with me and talk. The idea is that he must think you are trying to fascinate me, is it not?" She spoke through stiffened lips. "Ah, that I could die!" Bell had a horrible part to play while he walked the length of the formal garden with her, and found a pathway leading out of it, and led her out of sight. He stopped. "Now," he said sharply, "tell me. I am not yet his slave. He has ordered you...." She was staring before her with wide eyes that saw only despair. "I--I am to persuade you to be my lover," she said dully, "or I shall know the full wrath of The Master...." * * * * * Bell asked questions, crisply, but as gently as he could. "We are his slaves," she told him apathetically. "I and _mi Arturo_--my husband. Both of us...." She roused herself little under Bell's insistent questioning. "We were guests at his house at dinner. Our friends, people high in society and in the Republic, were all about us. We suspected nothing. We had heard nothing. But two weeks later Arturo became irritable. He said that he saw red spots before his eyes. I also. Then Arturo's hands writhed at the ends of his wrists. He could not control them. His nerves were horrible. And mine. And we--we have a tiny baby.... And Senhor Ribiera called upon my husband. He was charming. He observed my husband's hands. He had a remedy, he said. He gave it to my husband. He became normal again. And then--my hands writhed. Senhor Ribiera told my husband that if he would bring me to him.... And I was relieved. We were grateful. We accepted the invitation of the Senhor Ribiera to this place. And he showed us a man, in chains. He--he went mad before our eyes. He was a member of the United States Secret Service.... And then the Senhor Ribiera told us that we faced the same fate if we did not serve him...." * * * * * Bell had thrust aside rage as useless, now. He was deliberately cold. "And so?" "It is a poison," she said unsteadily. "A deadly, a horrible poison which drives men murder mad in two weeks from the time of its administration. The Senhor Ribiera has an antidote for it. But mixed with the antidote, which acts at once, is more of the horrible poison, which will act in two weeks more. So that we are entrapped. If we disobey him...." Bell began to smile slowly, and not at all mirthfully. "I think," he said softly, "that I shall gain a great deal of pleasure from killing the Senhor Ribiera." "_Dios_--" She strangled upon the word. "Do you not see, Senhor, that if he dies we--we--" She stopped and choked. "We--have a tiny baby, Senhor. We--we would...." Again sick rage surged up in Bell. To kill Ribiera meant to drive his slaves mad, and mad in the most horrible fashion that can be imagined. To kill Ribiera meant to have these people duplicate the death of Ortiz, as their greatest hope, or to fill madhouses with snarling animals lusting to kill.... "It is--it is not only I, Senhor," said the girl before him. She was utterly listless, and in the agony of despair. "It is Arturo, also. The Senhor Ribiera has said that if I do not persuade you, that both Arturo and I.... And our little baby, Senhor!... Our families also will be entrapped some day. He has said so.... He will give that poison to our baby.... And it will grow up either his slave, or--" Her eyes were pools of panic. "Oh, God!" said Bell very quietly. "And he's offering me this power! He's trying to persuade me to become like him. He's offering me pleasures!" * * * * * He laughed unpleasantly. And then he went sick with helplessness. He could kill Ribiera, perhaps, and let only God know how many people go mad. Perhaps. Or perhaps Ribiera would merely be supplanted by another man. Ortiz had said that he killed The Master's deputy in Buenos Aires, but that another man had taken his place. And the thing went on. And The Master desired a deputy in the United States.... "Somehow," said Bell very softly, "this has got to be stopped. Somehow. Right away. That devilish stuff! Can you get hold of a bit of the antidote?" he asked abruptly. "The merest drop of it?" She shook her head. "No, Senhor. It is given in food, in wine. One never knows that one has had it. It is tasteless, and we have only Senhor Ribiera's word that it has been given." Bell's hands clenched. "So devilish clever.... What are we going to do?" The girl stuffed the corner of her handkerchief into her mouth. "I am thinking of my little baby," she said, choking. "I must persuade you, Senhor. I--I have been tearful. I--I am not attractive. I will try. If I am not attractive to you...." * * * * * Bell cursed, deeply and savagely. It seemed to be the only possible thing to do. And then he spoke coldly. "Listen to me, Senhora. Ribiera talked frankly to me just now. He knows that so far I am not subdued. If I escape he cannot blame you. He cannot! And I am going to attempt it. If you will follow me...." "There is no escape for me," she said dully, "and if he thinks that I knew of your escape and did not tell him...." "Follow me," said Bell, smiling queerly. "I shall take care that he does not suspect it." He gazed about for an instant, orienting himself. The plane that had just landed--the last of a dozen or more that had arrived in the past two days--had dipped down on the private landing field to the north. There was a beautifully kept way running from the landing field to the house, and he went on through the thick shrubbery amid a labyrinth of paths, choosing the turnings most likely to lead him to it. * * * * * He came out upon it suddenly, and faced toward the field. There were two men coming toward the house, on foot. One was a flying pilot, still in his flying clothes. The other was a tall man, for a Brazilian, with the lucent clarity of complexion that bespeaks uncontaminated white descent. He was white-haired, and his face was queerly tired, as if he were exhausted. Bell looked sharply. He seemed to see a resemblance to someone he knew in the tall man. He spoke quickly to the girl beside him. "Who is the man to the left?" "Senhor Canalejas," said the girl drearily. "He is the Minister of War. I suppose he, too...." Bell drew a deep breath. He walked on, confidently. As the two others drew near he said apologetically: "Senhores." They halted with the instinctive, at least surface, courtesy of the Brazilian. And Bell was fumbling with his handkerchief, rather nervously tying a knot in it. He held it out to Canalejas. "Observe." It was, of course, a recognition-knot such as may be given to an outsider by one in the Trade. The tall man's face changed. And Bell swung swiftly and suddenly and very accurately to the point of the other man's jaw. He collapsed. * * * * * "Senhor Canalejas," said Bell politely, "I am about to go and steal an airplane to take what I have learned to my companion for transmission. If you wish to go with me...." Canalejas stared for the fraction of a second. Then he said quietly: "But of course." He turned to retrace his steps. Bell turned to the girl. "If you are wise," he said gently, "you will go and give the alarm. If you are kind, you will delay it as much as you dare." She regarded him in agonized doubt for a moment, and nodded. She fled. "Now," said Bell casually, "I think we had better hasten. And I hope, Senhor Canalejas, that you have a revolver. We will need one. Mine has been ruined." Without a word, the white-haired man drew out a weapon and offered it to him. "I had intended," he said very calmly, "to kill the Senhor Ribiera. His last demand is for my daughter." They went swiftly. The plane Bell had seen alight some fifteen or twenty minutes before was just being approached by languid mechanics. It was, of course, still warm. Canalejas shouted and waved his arm imperiously. It is probable that he gave the impression of a man returning for some forgotten thing, left in the cockpit of the plane. * * * * * What happened then, happened quickly. A few crisp words in a low tone. A minor hubbub began suddenly back at the house. Canalejas climbed into the passenger's seat as if looking for something. And Bell presented his now useless automatic pleasantly at the head of the nearest staring mechanic, and while he froze in horror, scrambled up into the pilot's cockpit. "Contact!" he snapped, and turned on the switch. The mechanic remained frozen with fear. "Damnation!" said Bell savagely. "I don't know the Portuguese for 'Turn her over'!" He fumbled desperately about in the cockpit. Something whirred. The propeller went over.... Canalejas shot with painstaking accuracy, twice. The motor caught with a spluttering roar. As a horde of running figures, servants and guests, running with the same desperation, came plunging out on the flying field from the shrubbery. Bell gave the motor the gun. The fast little plane's tail came up off the ground as she darted forward. Faster and faster, with many bumpings. The bumpings ceased. She was clear. And Bell zoomed suddenly to lift her over the racing, fear-ridden creatures who clutched desperately at the wheels, and then the little ship shot ahead, barely cleared the trees to the east of the field, and began to roar at her topmost speed toward Rio. CHAPTER V The Trade--which does not exist--has its obligations and its code, but also it has its redeeming features. When a man has finished his job, he has finished it. And as far as the Trade was concerned, Bell had but little more to do. But after that--and his eyes burned smokily in their depths--there was much that he intended to do. He sat in one of the _bondes_ of the Botanical Garden half of the street railway system of Rio, and absent mindedly regarded the scenery. This particular _bonde_ was headed out toward the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, by which salty mass of water Bell would meet Paula Canalejas. He would receive a package from her, which he would deliver to Jamison. And then he would be free, and it was his private intention to engage in an enterprise which was very probably a form of suicide. But there are some things one cannot dismiss with a sage reflection that they are not one's business. This matter of Ribiera was definitely one of them. * * * * * The escape from Ribiera's _fazenda_ had been relatively easy, because so thoroughly unexpected. The little plane had climbed to five thousand feet and found a stratum of cloud that stretched for very many miles. Bell had emerged from it only twice in the first hour of flight, and the second time the sky was clear all about him. That he was pursued, he had no doubt. That Ribiera had wireless communications with Rio, he knew. And he knew that instant, and imperative orders would have gone out for his capture. Rio would not be a healthy place for him. If Ribiera had power over high government officials, he had surely indirect power over the police, and a search for Bell would be in order at once. Yet Canalejas assuredly expected to return to Rio. A shouted question with the motor cut out, and a nodded answer. Bell headed for Petropolis, which is Rio's only real summer resort and is high in the hills and only an hour and a half from it by train. It was surprisingly satisfactory to be handling a swift plane again, and Bell allowed himself what he knew was about the only pleasure he was likely to have for some time to come. Something of his hatred of Ribiera, however, came back as he prepared to land. He managed to crack the plane up very neatly, so that it would be of no use to Ribiera any more. And at the same time, of course, the cracking-up provided an excellent excuse for Canalejas to continue on by train. * * * * * They talked very briefly by the puffing engine. "It is best," said Canalejas, "for you, Senhor, to remain here overnight. I believe Senhor Ribiera has given orders for us both to be looked for, yet as a Cabinet Minister I am still immune from arrest by the ordinary police. If I reach my home I shall be able to do all that is necessary." "And you will prepare a message for me to carry," said Bell. "It is ready," said Canalejas. He smiled faintly. "No, Senhor. I have instructions to give my daughter. She will deliver the information to you to-morrow. Let me see. At the edge of the Lagao Rodrigo de Feitas, at nine o'clock. She is the only messenger I can trust. I think that is all." Bell hesitated uncomfortably. "But you, sir," he said awkwardly. "You have been poisoned, as Senor Ortiz was." "But certainly," said Canalejas. His smile was ironic as before. "But, unlike Senor Ortiz, I have no hope. I have arranged for my daughter to conceal herself and escape from Brazil. I have prepared for everything, Senhor. As you know, I had intended to kill Senhor Ribiera. In returning with you I have merely delayed my own death by a few hours." Still smiling, and with the air of one entering a train for the most casual of journeys, Canalejas entered the coach. * * * * * And Bell, sitting in the _bonde_ next morning, saw with an uncanny clarity the one weak point in Ribiera's hold upon his subjects. When they had courage to fear nothing more than death, they could defy him. And not many could attain to that courage. But a few.... "I'll have some help, anyway," muttered Bell savagely to himself. It is a long ride to the Botanical Gardens, from which one half the surface lines of Rio take their name. On the way out to the Lagao Rodrigo de Feitas, which, is close by the Garden itself, Bell had time to work over for the thousandth time the information he possessed, and realize its uselessness. Two things, only, might be of service. One was that Ribiera was the nephew of the person referred to as The Master, and yet was evidently as much subjected to him as his own victims to himself. The other was that the ultimate end of all the ghastly scheme was in some fashion political. If wealth alone had been Ribiera's aim, the gathering of his slaves would have had a different aspect. The majority of them would have been rich men, men of business, men who could pay out hundreds of thousands a month in the desperate hope of being permitted to remain sane. There would not have been politicians and officials and officers of the army. "The key men of the country," growled Bell inaudibly, "enslaved to Ribiera. They give him the power he's after more than cash. And it's those key men who have more to lose than money. There's such a thing as honor...." Three times the conductor stopped beside him and suggestively rattled the coins in his box. Three times Bell absent mindedly paid the fare for the zone. But the ride is a long one, and he had had time to realize the hopelessness of any single-handed attack upon the thing he faced long before the end. Then he absently moved through the amazing collection of tropic and near tropic growths that is the Botanical Garden until he came at once to Paula and the Lagoa Rodrico de Freitas. * * * * * It was alive with birds, and they hopped and pecked and squabbled without acrimony within feet of her seated figure. Bell knew that she had been waiting for a long time. He looked quickly at her face. It was quite pale, but entirely tearless. "Here is the message, Senhor Bell," she said quietly, "but I think I have been followed." Bell growled in his throat. "I did not discover it until I reached this spot," she said evenly. "And I did not know what to do. If I left, I would be seized and the message taken--and I think that someone would have waited here for you. So, in part to gain time, and in part because I hoped you might have some resource, I remained." "How many of them?" asked Bell shortly. "Two," she said quietly. She looked at him, her large eyes entirely calm and grave. "Give me the package," said Bell briefly. "They'll be more anxious to get it back than to bother you. And I'll either knock them cold or hold them in a scrap until you get away." She reached in her pocket and handed him a small thick envelope. He stuffed it in the side pocket of his coat. "I will walk away," he observed, "and they'll follow me. Can you arrange to give me some sign that you're safe?" "By the gateway," she told him. "My handkerchief. I shall start as soon as you have vanished. If I am followed, I will drop this handkerchief, as it is. If I am not followed, I will tie a knot. But what can you do?" "I'll do something," said Bell coldly. "Something!" * * * * * She smiled, with the same odd bitterness her father had shown. "My father--shot himself," she said briefly. "I have no particular hope of doing better. But I shall not be Ribiera's slave." She remained quite still. Bell moved away. He hurried. There was thick jungle ahead, a section of the Gardens that is painstakingly preserved untouched and undisturbed, that visitors to the capital of Brazil may observe a typical sample of the virgin interior. He dived into that jungle as if in flight. And very shortly after, two men dived in after him. They hesitated, these men, because your policeman of Rio does not like to injure his uniform, and there are many thorns in jungle growths. But they entered it, having first drawn small glittering weapons. And then from the jungle came silence. * * * * * It seemed to be silence. But there may have been some small unusual noises. It would not be easy to tell if they were unusual or not, because there are peculiar flashes of charm in certain Brazilian institutions. The preservation of the spot of jungle itself is one. Another is the fact that in the Gardens all manner of wild things live at large and provide unexpected and delightful surprises to the usually foreign visitors. So there were noises, after a bit. Such noises as some grunting wild thing might have made, perhaps. But they might also have been the gasping of a man as breath was choked out of him.... And there was a cracking sound a little later, which might--of course--have been any one of any number of accidental and perfectly natural causes. And it might have been a man upon whom another man had hurled himself, when the second man landed on his jaw. And thrashing noises a little later might have been anything. But after what seemed a long time, Bell emerged. Alone. He was breathing quickly, and there were scratches on his face and hands which--well, which might have been made by thorns. He went swiftly back toward the spot where Paula had waited. He looked cautiously. She was gone. And then Bell went leisurely, in the studious fashion of a person going through the Botanical Gardens because it was the thing to do, toward the gateway and the surface cars. As he neared the gate his eyes roved with apparent casualness all about. He saw a tiny speck of white on the edge of the roadway. It looked as if it had been flung from a car. Bell picked it up. It was Paula's handkerchief, and there was no knot whatever in it. In fact, its lacy edge was torn. "They've got her," said Bell, apparently unmoved. * * * * * He waited for a car. A bulky figure wearing thick spectacles came placidly from the Gardens. It waited, also, for the car. The car arrived, in its two sections of first and second class; the first reserved for _cavalhieros_, which is to say persons wearing coat, shirt, collar, necktie, hat, shoes and socks, and carrying no parcel larger than a brief case. Lesser folk who lacked any of the sartorial requirements for admission to the first class section, or wore _tomancos_ instead of shoes, heaped themselves into the second section and paid one-third of the fare in the first. Bell took his seat in the first section. It was comfortably filled. The bulky person with the thick spectacles wedged himself carefully into the space beside Bell. He unfolded a copy of the _Jornal do Commercio_ and began to regard the advertisements. Presently he found what he was looking for. "_O Bicho_," said medium-sized type. Beside it was a picture of a kangaroo. The gentleman with the thick spectacles resignedly fished into his pockets and found a lottery ticket. He tore it into scraps and threw them away. Then he began to gaze disinterestedly at the scenery and the other passengers in the car. * * * * * Bell drummed on his knee. With one's forefinger representing a dot, and one's second finger serving as a dash, it is surprising how naturally and absentmindedly one may convey a perfectly intelligible message to a man sitting within a reasonable distance. When the man is alongside, the matter is absurdly simple. Presently the man with the thick lenses got out his paper again, as if bored by vistas such as no other city in the world can offer. His paper was in the pocket which pressed against Bell. If in getting out his newspaper he also abstracted a thick fat envelope from Bell's pocket and placed it in his own, and if all this took place under a sign--even in the section reserved for _cavalhieros_ of approved raiment--solemnly warning passengers against "_batadores de carteiras_," or pickpockets--well, it was an ironical coincidence whose humor Bell did not see. He was busily tapping out on his knee the briefest possible account of what he had learned at Ribiera's _fazenda_ up country. "_One chance for me_," he tapped off at the end. "_If I can kidnap Ribiera I can make him talk. Somehow. He has big amphibian plane kept fueled and ready for long trip. I think he is back in Rio to direct hunt for me. Paula kidnapped. My job finished. On my own now._" The man with thick spectacles did not nod. He seemed to be looking idly at his paper, but it was folded at an article very discreetly phrased, beneath a photograph of Senhor Teixeira Canalejas, Minister of War, who had very unfortunately been found dead that morning. He had been depressed, of late, but there were certain circumstances which made it as yet impossible to determine whether he had killed himself or was the victim of an assassin. "_Getting set for me_," tapped Bell grimly on his knee. "_Ribiera told me too much._" * * * * * The man with thick spectacles yawned and turned the paper over. Under a smaller headline--which would only find a place on a Brazilian sheet--"A Regrettable Incident"--an item of more direct importance was printed. It told of an unnamed Senhor from the United States of the North America, who as the guest of a widely known Brazilian gentleman had behaved most boorishly, had stolen an airplane from his host and broken it to bits on landing unskilfully, and had vanished with priceless heirlooms belonging to his host. It read, virtuously: No names are mentioned because the American Senhor has been widely introduced in Rio society as a person with an official status in Washington. It is understood that an inquiry is to be made of the Ambassador as to the status of the young man, before any action is taken by the police. It is to be expected, however, that he will at least be requested to leave the country. Bell managed the barest flicker of a smile. Arrest, of course. Detention, most courteously arranged, while the Ambassador was communicated with. And Ribiera. "_Give me dismiss_," he tapped on his knee. The gentleman in the thick spectacles ran his finger thoughtfully about the edge of his collar. In the Trade that is a signal of many varied meanings. A hand across the throat in any fashion means, "Clear out, your job is finished," "Save your skin as best you can," and "Get away without trying to help me," according to circumstances. In this case it relieved Bell of all future responsibility. He yawned, tapping his lips with the back of his hand, signaled for a stop of the car, and got out. Five minutes later he had signaled a taxicab and given Ribiera's address. In six minutes he was being whirled toward the one house in all Rio de Janeiro from which his chance of a safe departure was slightest. In little more than half an hour he had dismissed the cab and was gazing placidly into the startled eyes of the doorman. The doorman, like all of Rio where Ribiera was known and feared, knew that Bell was being hunted. Bell handed over his card with an inscrutable air. "The Senhor Ribiera," he said drily, "returned to the city last night. Present my card and say that I would like to speak to him." * * * * * The doorman ushered him inside and summoned the major-domo, still blinking his amazement. And the major-domo blinked again. But Bell followed with the air of an habitué, as he was again ushered into the luxurious salon in which he had once been offered a drugged drink. Again he sank down in a softly padded chair and surveyed the pictures and the minor objects of decadent art about him. Again he lighted a cigarette with every appearance of ease, and again had the impression of eyes upon him. The major-domo appeared, somewhat agitated. "The Senhor Ribiera," he said harshly, "will see you only if you are not armed. He requires your word of honor." Bell smiled lazily. "I'll do better than that," he said languidly. "I haven't had time to buy a revolver. But the automatic he had put out of commission is in my pocket. Present it to him with my compliments." He handed over the weapon, butt first. The major-domo blinked, and took it. Bell sat down and smiled widely. He had been expected to be uproarious, to attempt to force the major-domo to lead him to Ribiera. And, of course, he would have been led past a perfectly planned ambush for his capture--but he might have killed the major-domo. Which would not disturb Ribiera, but had disturbed the servant. * * * * * Bell smoked comfortably. And suddenly hangings parted, and Ribiera came into the room. He smiled nervously, and then, as Bell blew a puff of smoke at him and nodded casually, he scowled. "I came," said Bell deliberately, "to make a bargain. Frankly, I do not like to break my word. I was under obligations to deliver a package from Senhor Canalejas to a certain messenger who will take it to my government. I have done it. But I am not, Senhor Ribiera, a member of the Secret Service. I am entirely a free agent now, and I am prepared to consider your proposals, which I could not in honor do before." He smiled pleasantly. Effrontery, properly managed, is one of the most valuable of all qualities. Especially in dealing with people who themselves are arrogant when they dare. * * * * * Ribiera purpled with rage, and then controlled it. "Ah!" he rumbled. "You are prepared to consider my proposals. There are no proposals. The Master may be amused at your cleverness in escaping. I do not know. I do know that I am ordered to make you my slave and send you to The Master. That, I shall do." "Perhaps," said Bell blandly: "but I can go without food and drink for several days, which will delay the process. And while I cannot honorably tell you how to stop the man bearing Senhor Canalejas' package to my government, still ... If I willingly accepted a dose of _yagué_ in token of my loyalty to The Master...." Ribiera's good humor returned. He chuckled. "You actually mean," he said jovially, "that you think you were given some of The Master's little compound, and that you wish to make terms before your hands begin to writhe at the ends of your wrists. Is not that your reason?" Bell's eyes flickered. He had been horribly afraid of just that. But Ribiera's amusement was reassuring. "Perhaps," said Bell. "Perhaps I am." * * * * * Ribiera sat down and stretched his fat legs in front of him. He surveyed Bell with an obscene, horrible amusement. "Ah, Senhor," he chuckled, "some day we will laugh together over this! You yet hope, and do not yet know how much better it will be for you if you cease to hope, and cultivate desires! The Master is pleased with you. You have just those qualities he knows are necessary in dealing with your nation. He is not angry with you. It is his intention to use you to extend his--ah--influence among the officials of your nation. You know, of course, that in but a little more time I will hold all Brazil--as I now hold this city--in the hollow of my hand. Four of the republics of this continent are already completely under the control of The Master's deputies, and of the rest, Brazil is not the most nearly subdued. A year or two, and The Master will become Emperor, and his deputies viceroys. And it is his whim to give you the opportunity of becoming the first deputy and the first viceroy of North America. And you come to me and offer--you, Senhor!--to make terms! I believe even The Master will laugh when he hears of it." "But," said Bell practically, "do you accept my terms?" Ribiera chuckled again. "What are they, Senhor?" "That you release the daughter of the Senhor Canalejas and pledge your word of honor that she will not be enslaved." * * * * * Ribiera's word of honor, of course, would be worth rather less than the breath that was used to give it. But his reception of the proposal would be informative. He chuckled again. "No, Senhor. I do not accept. But I will promise you as a favor, because my uncle The Master admires you, that within a few weeks you shall enjoy her charms. I do not," he added with amused candor, "find that any one woman diverts me for a very long time." "Oh," said Bell, very quietly. He sat still for an instant, and then shrugged, and looked about as if for an ash tray in which to knock the ashes from his cigarette. He stood up, carrying the tube of tobacco gingerly, and moved toward one by Ribiera's elbow. He knocked off the ash, and crushed out the tiny coal. He fumbled in his pockets. The next instant Ribiera choked with terror. "Let me explain," said Bell softly. "I did not give your major-domo my word that I was unarmed. I merely gave him a weapon. I got these from two policemen who tried to arrest me an hour or so ago. And I also remind you, Senhor, that if the armed men you have posted to prevent my escape try to shoot me, that the inevitable contraction of my muscles will send two bullets into your heart--even if I am dead. I am a dead man, Senhor, if you give the word, but so are you if you give it." Ribiera gasped. His eyes rolled in his head. "Send for her," said Bell very gently. "Send for her, Senhor. I estimate that she has been in this house for less than half an hour. Have her brought here at once, and if she has been harmed the three of us will perish very promptly, and half of Rio will go mad after our death." And the muzzles of two revolvers bored into the fat flesh of Ribiera's body, and a gasp that was almost a wail of terror came from the watchers--armed watchers--who dared not kill the man they had been posted to guard Ribiera against. Ribiera lifted his hand and croaked an order. (_To be continued._) [Advertisement:] Brigands of the Moon (The Book of Gregg Haljan) PART THREE OF A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Ray Cummings_ [Illustration: Light-rays and silent flashes seemed to envelop us.] [Sidenote: Gregg and Anita risk quick, sure death in a desperate bluff on the ruthless Martian brigands.] _WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE_ One day in 2075 the Interplanetary Space-Ship _Planetara_ left the Earth for Mars. I, Gregg Haljan, was third officer. It was destined to be a tragic voyage. For in our midst were unscrupulous brigands, masquerading as harmless passengers, intent on seizing the secret treasure of radium ore Johnny Grantline of the Grantline Expedition had dug from the Moon. The _Planetara_ was to stop on the Moon and pick the treasure up on her return trip from Mars. Miko, a giant Martian, and his sister, Moa, were the ringleaders. With them were, as passengers, Sir Arthur Coniston and Ob Hahn, a Venus mystic. The whole crew was in their pay. Miko struck. The captain was killed, as were the officers. Only Snap Dean, the radio-helio operator, Venza, a girl of Venus, and I were left. And, of course, Anita Prince, who had captivated my heart upon my first glimpse of her. The brigands abandoned the other passengers on a small asteroid, and Miko signaled his space-ship far off on Mars to meet him on the Moon. I was forced to guide the _Planetara_ to the Moon. We sighted the huts of the Grantline Expedition, and suddenly, just as we started to descend, the controls, snapped, and the _Planetara_ tumbled like a spent rocket! Desperately I tried to check her, but only partially succeeded. We crashed horribly against the barren gray rock of the Moon. Anita, Venza, Snap and I lived through it, but we could not find the bodies of Miko and Moa in the wreckage. Evidently they were still alive, somewhere. We reached Johnny Grantline. The _Planetara_ was a complete wreck. And, speeding to us from Mars, was Miko's brigand ship. We were powerless--without means of leaving the Moon--and completely at the mercy of Miko's fast approaching brigands! CHAPTER XXIII _The Prowling Watchman_ "Try it again," Snap urged. "Good God, Johnny, we've got to raise some Earth station! Chance it! Use your power--run it up to the full. Chance it!" We were gathered in Grantline's instrument room. The duty-man, with blanched grim face, sat at his senders. The Grantline crew shoved close around us, tense and silent. Above everything we must make some Earth station aware of our plight. Conditions were against us. There were very few observers, in the high-powered Earth stations who knew that an exploring party was on the Moon. Perhaps none of them. The Government officials who had sanctioned the expedition--and Halsey and his confrères in the Detective Bureau--were not anticipating trouble now. The _Planetara_ was supposed to be well on her course to Ferrok-Shahn. It was when she was due to return that Halsey would be alert. And it seemed, too, that nature was against us. The bulging half-Earth[1] hung poised near the zenith over our little crater. Its rotation through the hours was clearly visible. We timed our signals when the western hemisphere was facing us. But nature was against us. No clouds, no faintest hint of mist could fog the airless Lunar surface. But there were continuous clouds over the Americas. [Footnote 1: Between the half and the full illumined disc, the complete Earth now was some ten days old.] "Try it again," Snap urged. * * * * * These bulging walls! Grantline used his power far beyond the limits of safety. He cut down his lights; the telescope intensifiers were permanently disconnected; the ventilators were momentarily stilled, so that the air here in the little room crowded with men rapidly grew fetid. All to save power pressure, that the vital Erentz system might survive. Even so it was strained to the danger point. The walls seemed to bulge outward with the pressure of the room, the aluminite braces straining and creaking. And our heat was radiating away; the deadly chill of space crept in. "Again!" ordered Grantline. The duty-man flung on the power in rhythmic pulses. In the silence the tubes hissed. The light sprang through the banks of rotating prisms, intensified up the scale until, with a vague, almost invisible beam, it left the last swaying mirror and leaped through our overhead dome into space. "Commander!" The duty-man's voice carried an appeal. These bulging walls! If they cracked, or even sprung a serious leak, the camp would be uninhabitable.... "Enough," said Grantline. "Switch it off. We'll let it go at that for now." It seemed that every man in the room had been holding his breath in the darkness. The lights came on again: the Erentz motors accelerated to normal. The strain on the walls eased up, and the room began warming. Had the Earth caught our signal? We did not want to waste the power to find out. Our receivers were disconnected. If an answering signal came, we could not know it. One of the men said: "Let's assume they saw us." He laughed, but it was a high-pitched, tense laugh. "We don't dare even use the telescope. Our rescue ship will be right overhead, visible to the naked eye before we see it. Three days more--that's what I'll give it." * * * * * But the three days passed, and no rescue ship came. The Earth was almost at the full. We tried signaling again. Perhaps it got through--we did not know. But our power was weaker now. The wall of one of the rooms sprang a leak, and the men were hours repairing it. I did not say so, but never once did I feel that our signals were seen on Earth. Those cursed clouds! The Earth almost everywhere seemed to have poor visibility. Four of our eight days of grace were all too soon passed. The brigand ship must be half-way here by now. They were busy days for us. If we could have captured Miko and his band, our danger would have been less imminent. With the treasure insulated so that its Gamma rays could not betray us, and our camp in darkness, the arriving brigand ship might never find us. But Miko knew our location: he would signal his oncoming ship when it was close and lead it to us. Three times during those days--and the days which followed them--Grantline sent out searching parties. But it was unavailing. Miko, Moa and Coniston, with their five underlings, could not be found. We searched all the territory from the camp to the _Planetara_, and off to the foot-crags of Archimedes, and a score of miles into the flatness of the Mare Imbrium. There was no sign of the brigands. Yet we knew they could be near here--it was so easy to hide amid the tumbled crags, the ravines, the gullies, the numberless craters and pit-holes: or underground in the vast honeycombed subterranean recesses. * * * * * We had at first hoped that the brigands might have perished. But that was soon dispelled! I went--about the third day--with the party that was sent to the _Planetara_. We wanted to salvage such of its equipment, its unbroken power units, as might be available. And Snap and I had worked out an idea which we thought might be of service. We needed some of the _Planetara's_ smaller gravity-plate sections. Those in Grantline's wrecked little _Comet_ had stood so long that their radiations had gone dead. But the _Planetara's_ were still efficacious. We secured the fragments of Newtonia.[2] But our hope that Miko might have perished was dashed. He too had returned to the _Planetara_! The evidence was clear before us. The vessel was stripped of all its power units save those which were dead and useless. The last of the food and water stores was taken. The weapons in the chart-room--the Benson curve-lights, bullet projectors, and heat-rays--had vanished. [Footnote 2: An allusion to the element Newtonia, named in memory of the great founder of celestial mechanics, Sir Isaac Newton. Artificially electronized, this metal element may be charged either positively or negatively, thus to attract or repell other masses of matter. The gravity plates of all space-ships were built of it.] Other days passed. The Earth reached the full, and began waning. The twenty-eight day Lunar night was in its last half. No rescue ship came from Earth. We had ceased our efforts to signal, for we needed all our power to maintain ourselves. The camp would be in a state of siege. That was the best we could hope for. We had a few short-range weapons, such as Bensons, heat-rays and rifles. A few hundred feet of effective range was the most any of them could obtain. The heat-rays--in giant form one of the most deadly weapons on Earth--were only slowly efficacious on the airless Moon. Striking an intensely cold surface, their warming radiations, without atmosphere to aid them, were slow to act. Even in a blasting heat-beam a man in his Erentz helmet-suit could withstand the ray for several minutes. * * * * * We were, however, well equipped with explosives. Grantline had brought a large supply for his mining operations, and much of it was still unused. We had, also, an ample stock of oxygen fuses, and a variety of oxygen light flares in small fragile glass-globes. It was to use these explosives against the brigands that Snap and I were working out our scheme with the gravity-plates. The brigand ship would come with giant projectors and with some thirty men. If we could hold out against them for a time, the fact that the _Planetara_ was missing would bring us help from Earth. "A month," said Grantline. "A month at the most. If we can hold them off that long--even in a week or two help may come." Another day. A tenseness fell on us all, despite the absorption of our feverish activities. To conserve the power, the camp was almost dark, we lived in dim, chill rooms, with just a few weak spots of light outside to mark the watchmen on their rounds. We did not use the telescope,[3] but there was scarcely an hour when one or the other of the men was not sitting on a cross-piece up in the dome of the little instrument room, casting tense searching gaze into the black, starry firmament. A ship might appear at any time now--a rescue ship from Earth, or the brigands from Mars. * * * * * Anita and Venza during these days could aid us very little save by their cheering words. They moved about the rooms, trying to inspire us; so that all the men, when they might have been humanly sullen and cursing their fate, were turned to grim activity, or grim laughter, making a joke of this coming siege. The morale of the camp now was perfect. An improvement indeed over the inactivity of the former peaceful weeks! [Footnote 3: An old-fashioned telescope, of limited field and needing no electronic power, would have been immensely serviceable to Grantline, but his was of the more modern type.] Grantline mentioned it to me. "We'll put up a good fight, Haljan. These fellows from Mars will know they've had a task before they ever sail off with this treasure." I had many moments alone with Anita. I need not mention them. It seemed that our love was crossed by the stars, with an adverse fate dooming it. And Snap and Venza must have felt the same. Among the men we were always quietly, grimly active. But alone.... I came upon Snap once with his arms around the little Venus girl. I heard him say: "Accursed luck! That you and I should find each other too late, Venza. We could have a mighty lot of fun in Great-New York together." "Snap, we will!" As I turned away, I murmured: "And, pray God, so will Anita and I." The girls slept together in a small room of the main building. Often during the time of sleep, when the camp was stilled except for the night watch, Snap and I would sit in the corridor near the girls' door-grid, talking of that time when we would all be back on our blessed Earth. * * * * * Our eight days of grace were passed. The brigand ship was due--now, to-morrow, or the next day. I recall, that night, my sleep was fitfully uneasy. Snap and I had a cubby together. We talked, and made futile plans. I went to sleep, but awakened after a few hours. Impending disaster lay heavily on me. But there was nothing abnormal nor unusual in that! Snap was asleep. I was restless, but I did not have the heart to awaken him. He needed what little repose he could get. I dressed, left our cubby and wandered out into the corridor of the main building. It was cold in the corridor, and gloomy with the weak blue light. An interior watchman passed me. "All as usual, Haljan." "Nothing in sight?" "No. They're looking." I went through the connecting corridor to the adjacent building. In the instrument-room several of the men were gathered, scanning the vault overhead. "Nothing, Haljan." I stayed with them awhile, then wandered away. The outside man met me near the admission lock-chambers of the main building. The duty-man here sat at his controls, raising the air-pressure in the locks through which the outside watchman was coming. The relief sat here in his bloated suit, with his helmet on his knees. It was Wilks. "Nothing yet, Haljan. I'm going up to the peak of the crater to see if anything is in sight. I wish that damnable brigand ship would come and get it over with." Instinctively we all spoke in half whispers, the tenseness bearing in on us. The outside man came out of his helmet. He was white and grim, but he grinned at Wilks. "All is usual." He tried the familiar jest at Wilks, but his voice was flat: "Don't let the Earthlight get you!" Wilks went out through the portes--a process of no more than a minute. I wandered away again through the corridors. * * * * * I suppose it was half an hour later that I chanced to be gazing through a corridor window. The lights along the rocky cliff-edge were tiny blue spots. The head of the stairway leading down to the abyss of the crater floor was visible. The bloated figure of Wilks was just coming up. I watched him for a moment making his rounds. He did not stop to inspect the lights. That was routine; I thought it queer that he passed them. Another minute passed. The figure of Wilks went with slow bounds over toward the back of the ledge where the glassite shelter housed the treasure. It was all dark off there. Wilks went into the gloom, but before I lost sight of him he came back. As though he had changed his mind he headed for the foot of the staircase which led up the cliff-face to where, at the peak of the little crater, five hundred feet above us, the narrow observatory platform was perched. He climbed with easy bounds, the light on his helmet bobbing in the gloom. I stood watching. I could not tell why there seemed to be something queer about Wilks' actions. But I was struck with it, nevertheless. I watched him disappear over the peak of the summit. Another minute went by. Wilks did not reappear. I thought I could make out his light on the platform up there. Then abruptly a tiny white beam was waving from the observatory platform! It flashed once or twice, then was extinguished. And now I saw Wilks plainly, standing in the Earthlight, gazing down. Queer actions! Had the Earthlight touched him? Or was that a local signal-call which he had sent out? Why should Wilks be signalling? What was he doing with a hand-helio? Our watchmen, I knew, had no reason to carry one. And to whom could Wilks be signalling across this Lunar desolation? The answer stabbed at me: to Miko's band! I waited another moment. No further light. Wilks was still up there! * * * * * I went back to the lock entrance. Spare suits and helmets were here beside the keeper. He gazed at me inquiringly. "I'm going out, Franck, just for a minute." It struck me that perhaps I was a meddlesome fool. Wilks, of all Grantline's men, was, I knew, most in his commander's trust. The signal could have been some part of this night's ordinary routine, for all I knew. I was hastily donning an Erentz suit. I added, "Let me out. I just got the idea Wilks is acting queerly." I laughed. "Maybe the Earthlight has touched him." With my helmet on I went through the locks. Once outside, with the outer panel closed behind me, I dropped the weights from my belt and shoes and extinguished my helmet-light. Wilks was still up there. Apparently he had not moved. I bounded off across the ledge to the foot of the ascending stairs. Did Wilks see me coming? I could not tell. As I approached the stairs the platform was cut off from my line of vision. I mounted with bounding leaps. In my flexible gloved hand I carried my only weapon, a small bullet projector with oxygen firing caps for use in this outside near-vacuum. The leaden bullet with its slight mass would nevertheless pierce a man at the distance of twenty feet. I held the weapon behind me. I would talk to Wilks first. I went slowly up the last hundred feet. Was Wilks still up there? The summit was bathed in Earthlight. The little metal observatory platform came into view above my head. Wilks was not there. Then I saw him standing on the rocks nearby, motionless. But in a moment he saw me coming. I waved my left arm with a gesture of greeting. It seemed to me that he started, made as though to leap away, then changed his mind and waited for me. I sailed from the head of the staircase with a twenty-foot leap and landed lightly beside him. I gripped his arm for audiphone contact. "Wilks!" Through the visors his face was visible. I saw him, and he saw me. And I heard his voice. "You, Haljan! How nice!" It was not Wilks, but the brigand Coniston! CHAPTER XXIV _Imprisoned!_ The duty-man at the exit locks of the main building stood at his window and watched me curiously. He saw me go up the spider-stairs. He could see the figure he thought was Wilks, standing at the top. He saw me join Wilks, saw us locked together in combat. For an instant the duty-man stood amazed. There were two fantastic, misshapen figures swaying in the Earthlight five hundred feet above the camp, fighting desperately at the very brink. They were small, dwarfed by distance, alternately dim and bright as they swayed in and out of the shadows. Soon the duty-man could not tell one from the other. Haljan and Wilks--fighting to the death! The duty-man recovered himself and sprang into action. An interior siren-call was on the instrument panel near him. He rang it, alarming the camp. The men came rushing to him, Grantline among them. "What's this? Good God, Franck!" They saw the silent, deadly combat up there on the cliff. The two figures had fallen together from the observatory platform, dropped twenty feet to a lower landing on the stairs. They lay as though stunned for a moment, then fought on. Grantline stood stricken with amazement. "That's Wilks!" "And Haljan," the duty-man gasped. "Went out--something wrong with Wilks--acting strangely--" The interior of the camp was in a turmoil. The men awakened from sleep, ran out into the corridors, shouted questions. "An attack?" "Is it an attack?" "The brigands?" * * * * * But it was Wilks and Haljan in a fight out there on the cliff. The men crowded at the bulls'-eye windows. And over all the confusion the alarm siren, with no one thinking to shut it off, was screaming with its electrical voice. Grantline, stricken for that moment of inactivity, stood gazing. One of the figures broke away from the other, bounded up to the summit from the stair-platform to which they had fallen. The other followed. They locked together, swaying at the brink. For an instant it seemed to Grantline that they would go over; then they surged back, momentarily out of sight. Grantline found his wits. "Stop them! I'll go out to stop them! What fools!" He was hastily donning one of the Erentz suits which stood at the lock entrance. "Shut off that siren, Franck!" Within a minute Grantline was ready. The duty-man called from the window: "Still at it! By the infernal, such fools! They'll kill themselves!" The figures had swayed back into view, then out of sight again. "Franck, let me out." Grantline was ready. He stood, helmet in hand. "I'll go with you, Commander." But the volunteer was not equipped. Grantline would not wait. "I'm going at once. Hurry, Franck." The duty-man turned to his panel. The volunteer shoved a weapon at Grantline. "Here, take this." Grantline jammed on his helmet. * * * * * He moved the few steps into the small air-chamber which was the first of the three pressure locks. Its interior door-panel swung open for him. But the door did not close after him! Cursing the duty-man's slowness, he waited a few seconds. Then he turned to the corridor. The duty-man came running. Grantline took off his helmet. "What in hell--" "Broken! Dead!" "What!" "Smashed from outside," gasped the duty-man. "Look there--my tubes--" The control-tubes of the portes had flashed into a close-circuit and burned out. The admission portes would not open! "And the pressure controls smashed! Broken from outside--!" There was no way now of getting out through these pressure-locks. The doors, the entire pressure-lock system, was dead. Had it been tampered with from outside? As though to answer Grantline's amazed question there came a chorus of shouts from the men at the corridor windows. "Commander! By God--look!" A figure was outside, close to the building! Clothed in suit and helmet, it stood, bloated and gigantic. It had evidently been lurking at the porte-entrance, had ripped out the wires there. It moved past the windows, saw the staring faces of the men, and made off with giant bounds. Grantline reached the window in time to see it vanish around the building corner. It was a giant figure, larger than a normal Earthman. A Martian? * * * * * Up on the summit of the crater the two small figures were still fighting. All this turmoil had taken no more than a minute or two. A lurking Martian outside? The brigand, Miko? More than ever, Grantline was determined to get out. He shouted to his men to don some of the other suits, and called for some of the hand bullet projectors. But he could not get out through these main admission portes. He could have forced the panels open perhaps; but with the pressure-changing mechanisms broken, it would merely let the air out of the corridor. A rush of air, probably uncontrollable. How serious the damage was no one could tell as yet. It would perhaps take hours to repair it. Grantline was shouting. "Get those weapons! That's a Martian outside! The brigand leader, probably! Get into your suits, anyone who wants to go with me! We'll go by the manual emergency exit!" But the prowling Martian had found it! Within a minute Grantline was there. It was a smaller, two-lock gateway of manual control, so that the person going out could operate it himself. It was in a corridor at the other end of the main building. But Grantline was too late! The lever would not open the panels! Had someone gone out this way and broken the mechanisms after him? A traitor in the camp? Or had someone come in from outside? Or had the skulking Martian outside broken this lock as he had broken the other? The questions surged on Grantline. His men crowded around him. The news spread. The camp was a prison. No one could get out. And outside, the skulking Martian had disappeared. But Wilks and Haljan were still fighting. Grantline could see the two figures up on the observatory platform. They bounded apart, then together again. Crazily swaying--bouncing--striking the rail. * * * * * They went together in a great leap off the platform onto the rocks, and rolled in a bright patch of Earthlight. First one on top, then the other, they rolled, unheeding, to the brink. Here, beyond the midway ledge which held the camp, it was a sheer drop of a thousand feet, on down to the crater-floor. The figures were rolling: then one shook himself loose, rose up, seized the other and, with a desperate lunge, shoved him-- The victorious figure drew back to safety. The other fell, hurtling down into the shadows past the camp-level--down out of sight in the darkness of the crater-floor. Snap, who was in the group near Grantline at the windows, gasped. "God! Was that Gregg Haljan who fell?" No one could say. No one answered. Outside, on the camp-ledge, another helmeted figure now became visible. It was not far from the main building when Grantline first noticed it. It was running fast, bounding toward the spider-staircase. It began mounting. And now still another figure became visible--the giant Martian again. He appeared from around the corner of the main Grantline building. He evidently saw the winner of the combat on the cliff, who now was standing in the Earthlight, gazing down. And he saw, too, no doubt, the second figure mounting the stairs. He stood quite near the window through which Grantline and his men were gazing, with his back to the building, looking up to the summit. Then he ran with tremendous leaps toward the ascending staircase. Was it Haljan standing up there on the summit? Who was it climbing the staircase? And was the third figure Miko? Grantline's mind framed the questions. But his attention was torn from them, and torn even from the swift silent drama outside. The corridor was ringing with shouts. "We're imprisoned! Can't get out! Was Haljan killed? The brigands are outside!" And then an interior audiphone blared a call for Grantline. Someone in the instrument room of the adjoining building was talking: "Commander, I tried the telescope to see who got killed--" But he did not say who got killed, for he had greater news. "Commander! The brigand ship!" Miko's reinforcements from Mars had come. CHAPTER XXV _The Combat on the Crater-top_ Not Wilks, but Coniston! His drawling, British voice: "You, Gregg Haljan! How nice!" His voice broke off as he jerked his arm from me. My hand with the bullet-protector came up, but with a sweeping blow he struck my wrist. The weapon dropped to the rocks. I fought instinctively, those first moments; my mind was whirling with the shock of surprise. This was not Wilks, but the brigand Coniston. His blow wrenched him around. Awkward, fighting in the air-puffed suits, with only a body-weight of some thirty pounds! Coniston stumbled over the rocks. I had still scarce recovered my wits, but I avoided his outflung arms, and, stooping, tried to recover my revolver. It lay nearby. But Coniston followed my scrambling steps and fell upon me. My foot struck the weapon; it slid away and fell down a crag into a six-foot pit. We locked together, and when I rose erect he had me around the middle. His voice jangled with broken syllables in my receiver. "Do for you now, Haljan--" It was an eery combat. We swayed, shoving, kicking, wrestling. His hold around my middle shut off the Erentz circulation; the warning buzz rang in my ears to mingle with the rasp of his curses. I flung him off, and my tiny Erentz motors recovered. He staggered away, but in a great leap came at me again. I was taller, heavier and far stronger than Coniston. But I found him crafty, and where I was awkward in handling my lightness, he seemed more skilfully agile. * * * * * I became aware that we were on the twenty-foot square grid of the observatory platform. It had a low metal railing. We surged against it. I caught a dizzying glimpse of the abyss. Then it receded as we bounced the other way. And then we fell to the grid. His helmet bashed against mine, striking as though butting with the side of his head to puncture my visor-panel. His gloved fingers were trying to rip at the fabric around my throat. As we regained our feet, I flung him off, and bounded, like a diver, head-first into him. He went backward, but skilfully kept his feet, gripped me again and shoved me. I was tottering at the head of the staircase--falling. But I clutched at him. We fell some twenty or thirty feet to the next lower spider landing. The impact must have dazed us both. I recall my vague idea that we had fallen down the cliff--my Erentz motors smashed--my air shut off. Then the air came again. The roaring in my ears was stilled; my head cleared, and I found that we were on the landing--fighting. He presently broke away from me, bounded to the summit, with me after him. In the close confines of the suit I was bathed in sweat, and gasping. I had had no thought to increase the oxygen content of my air. But I sorely needed more oxygen for my laboring, pounding heart and my panting breath. I fumbled for the oxygen control-lever. I could not find it; or it would not operate. I realized I was fighting sluggishly, almost aimlessly. But so was Coniston! * * * * * It seemed dreamlike. A phantasmagoria of blows and staggering steps. A nightmare with only the horrible vision of this goggled helmet always before my eyes. It seemed that we were rolling on the ground, back on the summit. The unshadowed Earthlight was clear and bright. The abyss was beside me. Coniston, rolling, was now on top, now under me, trying to shove me over the brink. It was all like a dream--as though I were asleep, dreaming that I did not have enough air. I strove to keep my senses. He was struggling to roll me over the brink. Ah, that would not do! But I was so tired. One cannot fight without oxygen! I suddenly knew that I had shaken him off and gained my feet. He rose up, swaying. He was as tired, confused, half-asphyxiated as I. The brink of the abyss was behind us. I lunged, desperately shoving, avoiding his clutch. He went over, and fell soundlessly, his body whirling end over end down into the shadows, far down. I drew back. My senses faded as I sank panting to the rocks. But with inactivity, my thumping heart quieted. My respirations slowed. The Erentz circulation gained on my poisoned air. It purified. That blessed oxygen! My head cleared again. Strength came to me. I felt better. Coniston had fallen to his death. I was victor. I went to the brink, cautiously, for I was still dizzy. I could see, far down there on the crater-floor, a little patch of Earthlight in which a mashed human figure was lying. * * * * * I staggered back again. A moment or two must have passed while I stood there on the summit, with my senses clearing and my strength renewed as the blood-stream cleared in my veins. I was victor. Coniston was dead. I saw now, down on the lower staircase below the camp-ledge, another goggled figure lying huddled. That was Wilks, no doubt. Coniston had doubtless caught him there, surprised him, killed him. My attention, as I stood gazing, went down to the camp-buildings. Another figure was outside! It bounded along the ledge, reached the foot of the ascending staircase at the top of which I was standing. With agile leaps, it came mounting at me! Another brigand! Miko? No, it was not large enough to be Miko, not nearly large enough. I was still confused. I thought of Hahn. But that was absurd. Hahn was in the wreck of the _Planetara_. One of the stewards then.... The figure came up the staircase recklessly, to assail me. I took a step backward, bracing myself to receive this new antagonist. And then I saw Miko! Unquestionably he: for there was no mistaking his giant figure. He was down on the camp-ledge, running toward the foot of the staircase, coming up to help this other man in advance of him. I thought of my revolver. I turned to try and find it. I was aware that the first of my assailants was at the stairhead. I could not locate at once where the revolver had fallen. I would be caught, leaped upon from behind. Should I run? I swung back to see what the oncoming brigand was doing. He had reached the summit. His arms went up, legs bent under him. With a sailing leap he launched for me. I could have bounded way, but with a last look to locate the revolver, I braced myself for the shock. The figure hit me. It was small and light in my clutching arms. I recall I saw that Miko was half-way up the staircase. I gripped my assailant. The audiphone contact brought a voice. "Gregg! Is it you?" It was Anita clutching at me! CHAPTER XXVI _At Bay_ "Gregg, you're safe!" She had heard the camp corridors resounding with the shouts that Wilks and Haljan were fighting. She had come upon a suit and helmet by the manual emergency lock, had run out through the lock, confused, with her only idea to stop Wilks and me from fighting. Then she had seen one of us killed. Impulsive, barely knowing what she was doing, she mounted the stairs, frantic to find if I were alive. "Anita!" Miko was coming! She had not seen him: for she had no thought of brigands--only the belief that either Wilks or I had been killed. But now, as for an instant we stood together on the rocks near the observation platform, I could see the towering figure of Miko nearing the top of the stairs. "Anita, that's Miko! We must run." Then I saw my bullet projector. It lay in a bowl-like depression quite near us. I jumped for it. And as I tore loose from Anita, she leaped down after me. It was a broken bowl in the rocks, some six feet deep. It was open on the side facing the staircase--a narrow, ravinelike gully, full of gray, broken, tumbled rock-masses. The little gully was littered with crags and boulders. But I could see out through it. Miko had come to the head of the staircase. He stopped there, his great figure etched sharply by the Earthlight. I think he must have known that Coniston was the one who had fallen over the cliff, as my helmet and Coniston's were different enough for him to recognize which was which. He did not know who I was, but he did know me for an enemy. * * * * * He stood now at the summit, peering to see where we had gone. He was no more than fifty feet from us. "Anita, lie down." I pulled her down on the rocks. I took aim with the bullet projector. But I had forgotten our helmet-lights. Miko must have seen them just as I pulled the trigger. The flying bullet missed him as he jumped sidewise. He dropped, but I could see him moving in the shadows to where a jutting rock gave him shelter. I fired again. "Gregg." I had stood up to take aim. I saw the bullet chip a bit of rock. Anita pulled me sharply down beside her. "Gregg, he's armed!" It was his turn to fire. It came--the familiar vague flash of the paralyzing ray. It spat its tint of color on the rocks near us, but could not reach us. Miko rose a moment later and bounded to another rock. I scrambled up, and shot at him, but missed. Then he crouched and returned my fire from his new angle; but Anita and I had shifted. Time passed--only a few moments. I could not see Miko momentarily. Perhaps he was crouching; perhaps he had moved away again. He was, or had been, on slightly higher ground than the bottom of our bowl. It was dim down here where we were lying, but I feared that every moment Miko might appear and strike at us. His ray at any short range would penetrate our visor-panes, even though our suits might temporarily resist it. "Anita--it's too dangerous here." Had I been alone, I might perhaps have leaped up to lure Miko. But with Anita I did not dare chance it. "We've got to get back to the camp," I told her. The audiphone brought her comment: "Perhaps he has gone." * * * * * But he had not. We saw him again, out in a distant patch of Earthlight. He was further from us than before, but on still higher ground. We had extinguished our small helmet-lights. But he knew we were here, and possibly he could see us. His projector flashed again. But we had again shifted, and were untouched. He was a hundred feet or more away now. His weapon was of longer range than mine. I did not answer his fire, for I could not hope to hit him at such a distance, and the flash of my weapon would help him with his aim. I murmured to Anita, "We must get out of here." Yet how did I dare take Anita from these concealing shadows? Miko could reach us so easily as we bounded away, in plain view in the Earthlight of the open summit! We were caught, at bay in this little bowl. The camp from here was not visible. But out through the broken gully, beyond the staircase top, a white beam of light suddenly came up from below. "_Haljan._" It spelled the signal. "_Haljan._" It was coming from the Grantline instrument room, I knew. I could answer it with my helmet-light, but I did not dare. I hesitated. "Try it," urged Anita. * * * * * We crouched where we thought we might be safe from Miko's fire. My little light-beam shot up from the bowl. It was undoubtedly visible to the camp. "_Yes? I am Haljan._" And I added: "_Help! Send us help._" I did not mention Anita. Miko could doubtless read these signals. And in the camp they must have missed Anita by now. They answered: "_Cannot_--" I lost the rest of it. There came a flash from Miko's weapon. But it gave us confidence. He could not reach us at the moment. The Grantline beam repeated: "_Cannot come out. Portes broken. You cannot get in. Stay where you are--an hour or two. We may be able to repair portes._" The portes were broken! Stay here an hour or two! But I could not hold this position against Miko that long! Sooner or later he would find a place from where he could sweep this bowl beyond possibility of our hiding. I saw him running now, well beyond my range, to ferret out another point of vantage. I extinguished my light. What use was it to tell Grantline anything further? Besides, my light was dangerous. But the Grantline beam spelled another message: "_The brigand ship is coming! It will be here before we can get out to you! No lights! We will try and hide our location._" And the signal-beam brought a last appeal to me: "_Miko and his men will divulge where we are. Unless you can stop them_--" The beam vanished. The lights of the Grantline camp made a faint glow that showed above the crater-edge. The glow died, as the camp now was plunged into darkness. CHAPTER XXVII _Anita's Plan_ We crouched in the shadows, the Earthlight filtering down to us. The skulking figure of Miko had vanished; but he was out there somewhere on the crags I was sure, lurking, maneuvering to where he could strike us with his ray. Anita's metal-gloved hand was on my arm; in my ear diaphragm her voice sounded eager and unmistakable: "What was the signal, Gregg?" She could not read the semaphore lights. I told her. "Oh Gregg, the Martian ship coming!" Her mind clung to that as the most important thing. But not so myself. To me there was only the realization that Anita was caught out here, almost at the mercy of Miko's ray. Grantline's men could not get out to help us, nor could I get Anita into the camp. She added, "Where do you suppose the ship is? In telescopic view?" "Yes--twenty or thirty thousand miles up, probably." The stars and the Earth were visible over us. Somewhere up there disclosed by Grantline's instrument but not yet discernible to the naked eye, Miko's reinforcements were hovering. I stood up cautiously to try and locate Miko. Immediately I saw him. He jumped as though fearing my coming bullet, and I dropped back, barely avoiding his flash, which swept across the top of our bowl. "Gregg--Gregg, don't take such a chance!" We lay for a moment in silence. It was horribly nerve-straining. Miko could be creeping up on us. Would he dare chance my sudden fire? Creeping--or would he make a swift, unexpected rush? The feeling that he was upon us abruptly swept me. I jumped to my feet, against Anita's effort to hold me. But again Miko had vanished. Where was he now? * * * * * I sank back. "That ship will be here in a few hours." I told her what Grantline's signal had suggested: the ship was hovering overhead. It must be fairly close; for Grantline's telescope had revealed its identity as a bandit flyer, unmarked by any of the standard code-identification lights. It was doubtless too far away as yet to have located the whereabouts of Grantline's camp. The Martian brigands knew that we were in the vicinity of Archimedes, but no more than that. Searching this glowing Moon surface, our little lights, the tiny local semaphore beams we had momentarily been using, could easily pass unnoticed. But as the brigand ship approached now--dropping close to Archimedes as it probably would--our danger was that Miko and his men would then signal it, join it, and reveal the camp's location, and the brigand attack would be upon us. I told this now to Anita. "The signal said, '_Unless you can stop them_.'" It was an appeal to me. But how could I respond to it? What could I do, alone out here with Anita, to cope with this enemy? Anita made no comment. I added, "That ship will land near Archimedes I imagine, within an hour or two! If Grantline can repair his portes, and I can get you inside--" Again she made no comment. Then suddenly she gripped me. "Gregg, look there!" Out through the gully break in our bowl the figure of Miko showed! He was running. But not at us. Circling the summit, leaping to keep himself behind the upstanding crags. He passed the head of the staircase; he did not descend it, but headed off along the summit of the curving crater-rim. * * * * * I stood up to watch him. He was making off. Abandoning us! "He's going!" I let her stand up beside me; cautiously, at first, for it occurred to me that this might be a ruse to cover some other of Miko's men who might be lurking up here. But the summit seemed clear. The figure of Miko was a thousand feet away now. We could see the tiny blob of it bobbing over the rocks. Then it plunged down--not into the crater-valley, but out toward the open Moon surface. Miko had abandoned his attack on us. The reason seemed plain. He had come here from his encampment with Coniston, had sent Coniston ahead to lure and kill Wilks. When this was done, Coniston had flashed his brief signal to Miko, who was hiding nearby. It was not like the brigand leader to remain in the background. Miko was no coward. But Coniston could impersonate Wilks, whereas Miko's giant stature at once would reveal his identity. Miko had been engaged in smashing the portes. He had looked up and seen me kill Coniston. He had come up to assail me. And then he had read Grantline's signal to me. It was his first knowledge that his ship was at hand. With the camp exits inoperative, Grantline and his men were imprisoned. Miko made an effort to kill me. He did not know my companion was Anita. The effort was taking too long: with the Grantline camp imprisoned and his ship at hand, it was Miko's best move to return to his own camp, rejoin his men, and await their opportunity to signal the ship. At least, so I reasoned it. Anita and I stood alone. What could we do? * * * * * We went to the brink of the cliff. The unlighted Grantline buildings showed vaguely in the Earthlight. I said, "We'll go down, I'll leave you there. You can wait at the porte. They'll repair it soon, perhaps, and let you in." "And what will you do?" she demanded. I was hurrying her down the stairs. But suddenly she stopped. "What are you going to do, Gregg?" I had not intended to tell her. "Hurry, Anita!" "Why?" She stood stock still. Through the visors I could see her white face gazing at me rebelliously. "Why should I hurry, Gregg?" "Because I want to leave you at the porte. I'm going after Miko--try and locate where he and his men are camping." I had indeed no specific plan as yet. But it seemed useless for me to sit at the porte waiting to be let in. "But he's gone, Gregg." She was right on that. Miko was already a mile or more away, down on the outer surface, making off. He would soon be out of sight. It would be impossible to follow him. "Gregg, let me go with you." She jerked away from me and bounded back up the staircase. I caught her on the summit. "Anita!" "I'm going with you." "You're going to stay here." "I'm not!" This exasperating controversy! And time was so precious! "Anita, please." "I'll be safer with you than waiting here, Gregg." * * * * * It almost decided me. Perhaps she would. It was only my intention to follow Miko at a distance. And with much more of this delay here, he would be lost to me. And she added, "Besides, I won't stay, and you can't make me." We ran along the crater-top. At its distant edge the lower plain spread before us. Far down, and far away on the distant broken surface, the leaping figure of Miko showed. We plunged down the broken outer slope, reached the level. Soon, as we ran, the little Grantline crater faded behind us. Anita ran more skillfully than I. Ten minutes or so passed. We had seen Miko, and the direction he was taking, but down here on the plain we could no longer see him. It struck me that this was purposeless--and dangerous. Suppose Miko were to see us following? Suppose he stopped and lay in ambush to fire at us as we came leaping heedlessly by? "Anita, wait," I said, checking her. I drew her down amid a group of tumbled boulders. And then abruptly she clung to me. "Gregg, I know what we can do! Gregg, don't tell me you won't let me try it!" * * * * * I listened to her plan. Incredible! Incredibly dangerous! Yet, as I pondered it, the very daring of the thing seemed the measure of its possible success. The brigands would never imagine we could be so rash! "But Anita--" "Gregg, you're stupid!" It was her turn to be exasperated. In truth, I was indeed in no mood for daring, for my mind was obsessed with Anita's safety. I had been planning that we might see the glow of Miko's encampment, and then return to Grantline and hope that he would have the portes repaired. "But Gregg--the safety of the treasure--of all the Grantline men...." "To the infernal with that! It's you--your safety." "My safety, then! If you put me in the camp and the brigands attack it and I am killed--what then? But this plan of mine, if we can do it, Gregg ... safety, in the end, for all of us." And it seemed possible. We crouched, discussing it. So daring a thing! The brigand ship would come down near Archimedes. That was fifty miles from Grantline. The brigands from Mars would not have seen the dark Grantline buildings hidden in the little crater-pit. They would wait for Miko and his men to make their whereabouts known. * * * * * Miko's encampment was ahead of us now, undoubtedly. We had been following him toward the Mare Imbrium; we were at its borders now. Archimedes from here was also about fifty miles. And Anita proposed that we go to Archimedes, climb in slope and await the coming of the brigand ship. Miko would be off in the Mare Imbrium. Or at least, we hoped so. He would signal his ship. But Anita and I, closer to it, would also signal it--and, posing as brigands, could join it! "Remember, Gregg, I am Anita Prince, George's sister." Her voice trembled as, she mentioned her dead brother. "They know that George was in Miko's pay, and I am his sister.... It will help convince them." This daring scheme! If we could join the ship, we might be able to persuade its leader that Miko's distant signals were merely a ruse of Grantline to lure the brigands in that direction. A long-range projector from the ship would kill Miko and his men as they came forward to join it! And then we could falsely direct the brigands, lead them away from Grantline and the treasure. "Gregg, we must try it." Heaven help me, I yielded to her persuasion! We turned at right angles and ran toward where the distant frowning walls of Archimedes loomed against the starlit sky. CHAPTER XXVIII _The Ascent of Archimedes_ The broken shaggy ramparts of the giant crater rose above us. We toiled upward, out of the foothills, clinging now to the crags and pitted terraces of the main ascent. An hour had passed since we turned from the borders of the Mare Imbrium. Or was it two hours? I could not tell. I only know that we ran with desperate frantic haste. Anita would not admit that she was tired. She was more skilful than I in this leaping over the broken rock masses. Yet I felt that her slight strength must give out. It seemed miles up the undulating slopes of the foothills with the black and white ramparts of the massive crater close before us. And then the main ascent. There were places where, like smooth black frozen ice, the walls rose sheer. We avoided them, toiling aside, plunging into gullies, crossing pits where sometimes we perforce went downwards, and then up again; or sometimes we stood, hot and breathless, upon ledges, recovering our strength, selecting the best route upward. This tumbled mass of rock! Honeycombed everywhere with caves and passages leading into darkness impenetrable. There were pits into which we might so easily have fallen; ravines to span, sometimes with a leap, sometimes by a long and arduous detour. Endless climb! We came to a ledge, with the plains of the Mare Imbrium stretching out beneath us. We might have been upon this main ascent for an hour; the plains were far down, the broken surface down there smoothed now by the perspective of our height. And yet still above us the brooding circular wall went up into the sky. Ten thousand feet still above us--I think it was at least that, or more. "You're tired, Anita. We'd better stay here." "No! If we could only get to the top--the ship may land on the other side--they would see us if we were at the top." * * * * * There was as yet no sign of the brigand ship. With every stop for rest we searched the starry vault. The Earth hung over us, flattened beyond the full. The stars blazed to mingle with the Earthlight and illumine these massive crags of the Archimedes walls. But no speck appeared to tell us that the ship was up there. We were on the curving side of the Archimedes wall which fronted the Mare Imbrium to the North. The plains lay like a great frozen sea, congealed ripples shining in the light of the Earth, with dark patches to mark the hollows. Somewhere down there--six or eight thousand feet below us now, or even more than that, for all I could tell--Miko's encampment lay concealed. We searched for lights of it, but could see none. Or had Miko rejoined his party, left his camp and come here like ourselves to climb Archimedes? Or was our assumption wholly wrong--perhaps the brigand ship would not land near here at all? Sweeping around from the Mare Imbrium, the plains were less smooth--the shattered, crag-littered, crater-scarred region beyond which the distant Apennines raised their terraced walls. The little crater which concealed the Grantline camp was off that way. There was nothing to mark it from here. "Gregg, do you see anything up there? There seems to be a blur." * * * * * Her sight, sharper than mine, had picked it out. The descending brigand ship! A faintest tiny blur against the stars, a few of them occulted as though strangely an invisible shadow were upon them. A growing shadow, materializing into a blur--a blob, a shape faintly defined. Then sharper until we were sure of what we saw. It was the brigand ship. It came dropping slowly, silently down. We crouched on the little ledge. A cave-mouth was behind us. A gully was beside us, a break in the ledge; and at our feet the wall dropped sheer. We had extinguished our little lights. We crouched, silently gazing up into the stars. The ship, when first we distinguished it was central over Archimedes. We thought for a while that it might descend into the crater. But it did not; it came sailing forward. I whispered into the audiphone--whispering by instinct, as though out here in all this airless desolation someone might overhear us! "It's coming over the crater." Her hand pressed my arm in answer. I recalled that when, from the _Planetara_, Miko had forced Snap to signal this brigand band on Mars, Miko's only information as to the whereabouts of the Grantline camp was that it lay between Archimedes and the Apennines. That was Grantline's first message to us, and Miko had relayed it to his men. The brigands from Mars now were following that information. A tense interval passed. We could see the ship plainly above us now, a gray-black shape among the stars up beyond the shaggy, towering crater-rim. The vessel came upon a level keel, hull-down, slowly circling, looking for Miko's signal, no doubt, or for possible lights of Grantline. They were also picking a landing place. * * * * * We saw it soon as a cylindrical, cigarlike shape, rather smaller than the _Planetara_, but similar of design. It bore lights now. The ports of its hull were tiny rows of illumination, and the glow of light under its rounding upper dome was faintly visible. A bandit ship, no doubt of that. Its identification keel-plate was empty of official pass-code lights. These brigands had not attempted to secure official sailing lights when leaving Ferrok-Shahn. It was an outlawed ship, unmistakably. And here upon the deserted Moon there was no need for secrecy. Its lights were openly displayed, that Miko might see it and join it. It went slowly past us, only a few thousand feet higher than our level. We could see the whole outline of its pointed cylinder-hull, with the rounded dome on top. And under the dome was its open deck-space, with a little cabin superstructure in the center. I thought for a moment that by some fortunate chance it might land quite near us. There was a wide ledge a quarter of a mile away. "Anita, look." But it went past. And then I saw that it was heading for a level, plateau-like surface a few miles further on. It dropped, cautiously floating down. There was still no sign of Miko. But I realized that haste was necessary. We must be the first to join the brigand ship. I lifted Anita to her feet. "I don't think we should signal from here." "No. Miko might see it." We could not tell where he was. Down on the plains, perhaps? Or up here, somewhere in these miles of towering rocks? "Are you ready, Anita?" "Yes, Gregg." * * * * * I stared through the visors at her white, solemn face. "Yes, I'm ready," she repeated. Her hand-pressure seemed to me suddenly like a farewell. Were we plunging rashly into what was destined to mean our death? Was this a farewell? An instinct swept me not to do this thing. Why, in an hour or two I could have Anita back to the comparative safety of the Grantline buildings. The exit portes would doubtless be repaired by now. I could get her inside. She had bounded away from me, leaped down some thirty feet into the broken gully, to cross it and then up on the other side. I stood for an instant watching her fantastic shape, with the great rounded, goggled, trunked helmet and the lump on her shoulders which held the little Erentz motors. Then I made after her. It did not take us long--two or three miles of circling along the giant wall. The ship lay only a few hundred feet above our level. We stood at last on a buttelike pinnacle. The hull-porte lights of the ship were close over us. And there were moving lights up there, tiny moving spots on the adjacent rocks. The brigands had come out, prowling around to investigate their location. No signal yet from Miko. But it might come at any moment. "I'll flash now," I whispered. "Yes." The brigands had probably not yet seen us. I took the lamp from my helmet. My hand was trembling. Suppose my signal were answered by a shot? A flash from some giant projector mounted on the ship? Anita crouched behind a rock, as she had promised. I stood with my torch, and flung its switch. My puny light-beam shot up. I waved it, touched the ship with its faint glowing circle of illumination. They saw me. There was a sudden movement among the lights up there. * * * * * I semaphored: "_I am from Miko. Do not fire._" I used the open Universal Code. In Martian first, and then in English. There was no answer, but no attack. I tried again. "_This is Haljan, once of the_ Planetara. _George Prince's sister is with me. There has been disaster to Miko._" A small light-beam came down from the brink of the overhead cliff beside the ship. "_We read you._" I went steadily on: "_Disaster--the_ Planetara _is wrecked. All killed but me and George Prince's sister. We want to join you._" I flashed off my light. The answer came: "_Where is the Grantline camp?_" "_Near here. The Mare Imbrium._" As though to answer my lie, from down on the Earthlit plains, ten miles or so from the crater-base, a tiny signal-light shot up. Anita saw it and gripped me. "There is Miko's light!" It spelled in Martian, "_Come down. Land Mare Imbrium._" Miko had seen the signalling up here and was joining it! He repeated, "_Land Mare Imbrium._" * * * * * I flashed a protest up to the ship: "_Beware! That is Grantline! Trickery!_" From the ship the summons came: "_Come up._" We had won this first encounter! Miko must have realized his disadvantage. His distant light went out. "Come, Anita." There was no retreat now. But again I seemed to feel in the pressure of her hand that vague farewell. Her voice whispered, "We must do our best, act our best to be convincing." In the white glow of a search-beam we climbed the crags, reached the broad upper ledge. Helmeted figures rushed at us, searched us for weapons, seized our helmet lights. The evil face of a giant Martian peered at me through the visors. Two other monstrous, towering figures seized Anita. We were shoved toward the port-locks at the base of the ship's hull. Above the hull bulge I could see the grids of projectors mounted in the dome-side, and the figures of men standing on the deck, peering down at us. We went through the admission locks into a hull corridor, up an incline passage, and reached the lighted deck. Our helmets were taken off. The Martian brigands crowded around us. CHAPTER XXIX _On the Brigand Ship_ Anita's words echoed in my memory: "We must act our best to be convincing." It was not her ability that I doubted as much as my own. She had played the part of George Prince cleverly, unmasked only by an evil chance. I steeled myself to face the searching glances of the brigands as they shoved around us. This was a desperate game into which we had plunged! For all our acting, how easy it would be for some small chance thing abruptly to undo us! I realized it, and now, as I gazed into the peering faces of these men from Mars, I cursed my witless rashness which had brought Anita into this! The brigands--some ten or fifteen of them here on the deck--stood in a ring around us. They were all big men, nearly of a seven-foot average, dressed in leather jerkins and short leather breeches, with bare knees and flaring leatherboots. Piratical swaggering fellows, knife-blades mingled with small hand-projectors fastened to their belts. Gray, heavy faces, some with scraggling, unshaved beard. They plucked at us, jabbering in Martian. One of them seemed the leader. I said sharply, "Are you the commander here? I speak not Ilton[4] well. You speak the Earth English?" [Footnote 4: Ilton, the ruling race and official language of the Martian Union.] "Yes," he said readily, "I am Commander here." He spoke English with the same freedom and accent of Miko. "Is this George Prince's sister?" "Yes. Her name is Anita Prince. Tell your men to take their hands off her." He waved his men away. They all seemed more interested in Anita than in me. He added: "I am Set Potan." He addressed Anita. "George Prince's sister? You are called Anita? I have heard of you. I knew your brother--indeed, you look very much like him." He swept his plumed hat to the grid with a swaggering gesture of homage. A courtierlike fellow this, debonair as a Venus cavalier! He accepted us. I realized that Anita's presence was immensely valuable in making us convincing. Yet there was about this Potan--as with Miko--a disturbing suggestion of irony. I could not make him out. I decided that we had fooled him. Then I remarked the steely glitter of his eyes as he turned to me. "You were an officer of the _Planetara_?" * * * * * The insignia of my rank was visible on my white jacket-collar which showed beneath the Erentz suit, now that my helmet was off. "Yes, I was supposed to be. But a year ago I embarked upon this adventure with Miko." He was leading us to his cabin. "The _Planetara_ wrecked? Miko dead?" "And Hahn and Coniston. George Prince, too--we are the only survivors." While we divested ourselves of our Erentz suits at his command, I told him briefly of the _Planetara's_ fall. All had been killed on board save Anita and me. We had escaped, awaited his coming. The treasure was here; we had located the Grantline camp, and were ready to lead him to it. Did he believe me? He listened quietly. He seemed not shocked at the death of his comrades. Nor yet pleased: merely imperturbable. I added with a sly, sidelong glance, "There were too many of us on the _Planetara_. The purser had joined us, and many of the crew. And there was Miko's sister, the Setta Moa--too many. The treasure divides better among less." An amused smile played on his thin gray lips. But he nodded. The fear which had leaped in me was allayed by his next words. "True enough, Haljan. He was a domineering fellow, Miko. A third of it all was for him alone. But now...." The third would go to this sub-leader, Potan! The implication was obvious. I said, "Before we go any further--I can trust you for my share?" "Of course." * * * * * I figured that my very boldness in bargaining so prematurely would convince him. I insisted, "And Miss Prince? She will have her brother's share?" Clever Anita! She put in swiftly, "I give no information until you promise! We know the location of the Grantline camp, its weapons, its defense, the amount and location of the ore. I warn you, if you do not play us fair...." He laughed heartily. He seemed to like us. He spread his huge legs as he lounged in his settle, and drank of the bowl which one of his men set before him. "Little tigress! Fear me not--I play fair!" He pushed two of the bowls across the table. "Drink, Haljan. All is well with us, and I am glad to hear it. Miss Prince, drink my health as your leader." I waved it away from Anita. "We need all our wits; your strong Martian drinks are dangerous. Look here, I'll tell you just how the situation stands--" I plunged into a glib account of our supposed wanderings to find the Grantline camp; its location off in the Mare Imbrium--hidden in a cavern there. Potan, with the drink, and under the gaze of Anita's eyes, was in a high good humor. He laughed when I told him that we had dared to invade the Grantline camp, had smashed its exit portes, had even gotten up to have a look at where the ore was piled. "Well done, Haljan! You're a fellow to my liking!" But his gaze was on Anita. "You dress like a man, or a charming boy." She still wore the dark clothes of her brother. She said, "I am used to action--man's garb pleases me. You shall treat me like a man, give me my share of the gold-leaf." * * * * * He had already demanded of us the meaning of that signal from the Mare Imbrium. Miko's signal! It had not come again, though any moment I feared it. I told him that Grantline had doubtless repaired his damaged portes and sallied out to assail me in reprisal. And seeing the brigand ship landing on Archimedes, had tried to lure it. I wondered if my explanation were very convincing. It did not sound so. But he was flushed now with the drink. And Anita added: "Grantline knows the territory near his camp very well. He is equipped only for short-range fighting." I took it up. "It's like this, Potan: if he could get you to land unsuspectingly near the mouth of his cavern...." I pictured how Grantline might have figured on a sudden surprise attack upon the ship. It was his only chance to catch it unprepared. We were all three in friendly, intimate mood now. Potan said, "We'll land down there right enough! But I need a few hours for my assembling." "He will not dare advance," I said. "For one thing, he can't leave the treasure." "He knows we have unmasked his lure," Anita put in smilingly. "Haljan and I joining you--that silenced him. His light went out very promptly, didn't it?" She flashed me a side-gaze. Were we acting convincingly? But if Miko started up his signals again, they might so quickly betray us! Anita's thoughts were upon that, for she added: "Grantline will not dare show his light! If he does, Set Potan, we can blast him with a ray from here! Can't we?" "Yes," Potan agreed. "If he comes within ten miles, I have one powerful enough. We are assembling it now." "And we have thirty men?" Anita persisted. "When we sail down to attack him it should not be very difficult to kill all the Grantline party. Thirty of us--that's enough to share in this treasure. I'm glad Miko is dead." "By Heaven, Haljan, this girl of yours is small, but very blood-thirsty!" "That accursed Miko murdered her brother," I explained. * * * * * Acting! And never once did we dare relax! If only Miko's signals would hold off and give us time! We may have talked for half an hour. We were in a small, steel-lined cubby, located in the forward deck-space of the ship. The dome was over it. I could see from where I sat at the table that there was a forward observatory tower under the dome quite near here. The ship was laid out in rather similar fashion to the _Planetara_, though considerably smaller. Potan had dismissed his men from his cubby so as to be alone with us. Out on the deck I could see them dragging apparatus about--bringing the mechanisms of giant projectors up from below, beginning to assemble them. Occasionally some of the men would come to our cubby windows to peer in at us curiously. My mind was roaming as I talked. For all my manner of casualness, I knew that haste was necessary. Whatever Anita and I were to do must be quickly done. But to win this fellow's utter confidence first was necessary, so that we might have the freedom of the ship, might move about unnoticed, unwatched. I was horribly tense inside. Through the dome windows across the deck from the cubby the rocks of the Lunar landscape were visible. I could see the brink of this ledge upon which the ship lay, the descending crags down the precipitous wall of Archimedes to the Earthlit plains far below. Miko, Moa, and a few of the _Planetara's_ crew were down there somewhere. * * * * * Anita and I had a fairly definite plan. We were now in Potan's confidence. With this interview at an end, I felt that our status among the brigands would be established. We would be free to move about the ship, join in its activities. It ought to be possible to locate the signal-room, get friendly with the operator there. Perhaps we would find a secret opportunity to flash a signal to Earth. This ship, I was confident, would have the power for a long-range signal, if not of too sustained a length. It was a desperate thing to attempt but our whole procedure was desperate! And I felt--if Anita perhaps could cajole the guard or the duty-man from the signal-room--I might send a single flash or two that would reach the Earth. Just a distress call, signed "Grantline." If I could do that and not get caught. Anita was engaging Potan in talking of his plans. The brigand leader was boasting of his well-equipped ship, the daring of his men, and questioning her about the size of the treasure. My thoughts were free to roam. A signal to Earth. And while we were making friends with these brigands, the longest range electronic projector was being assembled. Miko then could flash his signal and be damned to him! I would be on the deck with that projector. Its operator, and I would turn it upon Miko--one flash of it and he and his little band would be wiped out. But there was our escape to be thought of. We could not remain very long with these brigands. We could tell them that the Grantline camp was on the Mare Imbrium. It would delay them for a time, but our lie would soon be discovered. We must escape from them, get away and back to Grantline. With Miko dead--a distress signal to Earth--and Potan in ignorance of Grantline's location, the treasure would be safe until help arrived from Earth. It all fitted together so nicely! It seemed possible of success. Our futile plans! Star-crossed always, doomed, fated always to be upset by such unforeseen evil chances! "By the infernal, little Anita, you look like a dove, but you're a tigress! A comrade after my own heart--blood-thirsty as a fire-worshipper!" * * * * * Her laugh rang out to mingle with his. "Oh no, Set Potan! I am treasure-thirsty." "We'll get the treasure, never fear, little Anita." "With you to lead us, Potan, I'm sure we will." A man entered the cubby. Potan looked frowningly around. "What is it, Argle?" The fellow answered in Martian, leered at Anita and withdrew. Potan stood up. I noticed that he was unsteady with the drink. "They want me with the work at the projectors." "Go ahead," I said. He nodded. We were comrades now. "Amuse yourself, Haljan. Or come out on deck if you wish. I will tell my men you are one of us." "And tell them to keep their hands off Miss Prince." He stared at me. "I had not thought of that--a woman among so many men." His own gaze at Anita was as leeringly offensive as any of his men could have given. He said, "Have no fear, little tigress." Anita laughed. "I am afraid of nothing." But when he had lurched from the cabin she touched me. Smiled with her mannish swagger, for fear we were still observed, and murmured: "Oh, Gregg, I am afraid!" We stayed in the cubby a few moments, whispering--trying to plan. "You think the signal room is in the tower, Gregg? This tower outside our window here?" "Yes, I think so." "Shall we go out and see?" "Yes. Keep near me always." "Oh, Gregg. I will!" We deposited our Erentz suits carefully in a corner of the cubby. We might need them so suddenly! Then we swaggered out to join the brigands working on the deck. CHAPTER XXX _Desperate Plans_ The deck glowed lurid in the queer blue-greenish glare of Martian electro-fuse lights. It was in a bustle of ordered activity. Some twenty of the crew were scattered about, working in little groups. Apparatus was being brought up from below to be assembled. There was a pile of Erentz suits and helmets, of Martian pattern, but still very similar to those with which Grantline's expedition was equipped. There were giant projectors of several kinds, some familiar to me, others of a fashion I had never seen before. It seemed there were six or eight of them, still dismantled, with a litter of their attendant batteries and coils and tube-amplifiers. They were to be mounted here on the deck, I surmised; I saw in the dome-side one or two of them already rolled into position at the necessary pressure portes. Anita and I stood outside Potan's cubby, gazing around us curiously. The men looked at us, but none of them spoke. "Let's watch from here a moment," I whispered. She nodded, standing with her hand on my arm. I felt that we were very small, here in the midst of these seven-foot Martian men. I was all in white, the costume used in the warm interior of the Grantline camp. Bareheaded, white silk _Planetara_ uniform jacket, broad belt and tight-laced trousers. Anita was a slim black figure beside me, somber as Hamlet, with her pale boyish face and wavy black hair. The gravity being maintained here on the ship we had found to be stronger than that of the Moon--rather more like Mars. "There are the heat-rays, Gregg." * * * * * A pile of them was visible down the deck-length. And I saw caskets of fragile glass globes, bombs of different styles; hand-projectors of the paralyzing ray; search-beams of several varieties; the Benson curve-light, and a few side-arms of ancient Earth-design--swords and dirks, and small bullet projectors. There seemed to be some mining equipment also. Far along the deck, beyond the central cabin in the open space of the stern, steel rails were stacked; half a dozen small-wheeled ore-carts; a tiny motor engine for hauling them--and what looked as though it might be the dismembered sections of an ore-shute. The whole deck was presently strewn with this mass of equipment. Potan moved about, directing the different groups of workers. The news had spread that we knew the location of the treasure. The brigands were jubilant. In a few hours the ship's armament would be ready, and it would advance to attack Grantline. I saw many glances being cast out the dome side-windows toward the distant, far-down plains of the Mare Imbrium. The brigands believed that the Grantline camp lay in that direction. Anita whispered, "Which is their giant electronic projector, Gregg?" I could see it amidships of the deck. It was already in place. Potan was there now, superintending the men who were connecting it. The most powerful weapon on the ship, it had, Potan said, an effective range of some ten miles. I wondered what it would do to a Grantline building! The Erentz double walls would withstand it for a time, I was sure. But it would blast an Erentz fabric-suit, no doubt of that. Like a lightning bolt, it would kill--its flashing free-stream of electrons shocking the heart, bringing instant death. I whispered, "We must smash that before we leave! But first turn it on Miko, if he signals now." * * * * * I was tensely watchful for that signal. The electronic projector obviously was not yet ready. But when it was connected, I must be near it, to persuade its duty-man to fire it on Miko. With this done we would have more time to plan our other tasks. I did not think Potan would be ready for his attack before another time of sleep here in the ship's routine. Things would be quieter then--I would watch my chance to send a signal to Earth, and then we would escape. With my thoughts roving, we had been standing quietly at the cubby door-oval for perhaps fifteen minutes. My hand in my side pouch clutched the little bullet projector. The brigands had taken it from me and given it to Potan. He had placed it on the settle with my Erentz suit; and when we gained his confidence he had forgotten it and left it there. I had it now, and the feel of its cool sleek handle gave me a measure of comfort. Things could go wrong so easily--but if they did, I was determined to sell my life as dearly as possible. And a vague thought was in my mind: I must not use the last bullet. That would be for Anita. I shook myself free from such sinister fancy. "That electronic projector is remote-controlled. Look, Anita--that's the signal room over us. The giant projector will be aimed and fired from up there." It seemed so. A thirty-foot skeleton tower stood on the deck near us, with a spiral ladder leading up to a small square steel cubby at the top. Through the cubby window-ovals I could see instrument panels. A single Martian was up there; he had called down to Potan concerning the electronic projector. * * * * * The roof of this little tower room was close under the dome--a space of no more than four feet. A pressure lock-exit in the dome was up there, with a few steps leading up to it from the roof of the tower signal-room. We could escape that way, perhaps. In the event of dire necessity it might be possible. But only as a desperate resort, for it would put us on the top of the glassite dome, with a sheer hundred feet or more down its sleek bulging exterior side, and down the outside bulge of the ship's hull, to the rocks below. There might be a spider ladder outside leading downward, but I saw no evidence of it. If Anita and I were forced to escape that way, I wondered how we could manage a hundred foot jump to the rocks and land safely. Even with the slight gravity of the Moon it would be a dangerous fall. "You are Gregg Haljan?" I started as one of the brigands, coming up behind us, addressed me. "Yes." "Commander Potan tells me you were chief navigator of the _Planetara_?" "Yes." "You shall pilot us when we advance upon the Grantline camp. I am control-commander here--Brotow, my name." He smiled. A giant fellow, but spindly. He spoke good English. He seemed anxious to be friendly. "We are glad to have you and George Prince's sister with us." He shot Anita an admiring glance. "I will show you our controls, Haljan." "All right," I said. "Whatever I can do to help...." "But not now. It will be some hours before we are ready." I nodded, and he wandered away. Anita whispered: "Did he mean that signal room up here in the tower? Oh, Gregg, maybe it's only the ship's control room!" "I don't know. But the projector range-finders are up there, and I think it's the signal room." "Suppose we go up and see? Gregg, Miko's signals might start any minute." * * * * * And the electronic projector now seemed about ready. It was time for me to act. But a reluctant instinct was upon me. Our Erentz suits were here close behind us in Potan's cubby. I hated to leave them: if anything happened and we had to make a sudden dash, there would be no time to garb ourselves in the suits. To adjust the helmets was bad enough. I whispered swiftly, "We must get into our suits--find some pretext." I drew her back through the cubby doorway where we would be more secluded. "Anita, listen: I've been a fool not to plan our escape more carefully! We're in too great a danger here." It seemed to me suddenly that we were in desperate plight. Was it premonition? "Anita, listen: if anything happens and we have to make a dash--" "Up through that dome-lock, Gregg? It's a manual control; you can see the levers." "Yes. It's a manual. But up there--how would we get down?" She was far calmer than I. "There may be an outside ladder, Gregg." "I don't think so. I haven't seen it." "Then we can get out the way they brought us in. The hull-porte--it's a manual, too." "Yes, I think I can find our way down through the hull corridors. I mean, for a quick run. If we have to run, you stay close behind me. I've this bullet projector, and evidently there aren't many men in the lower corridors." "There are guards outside on the rocks." We had seen them through the dome windows. But there were not many--only two or three. A surprise rush at them would turn the trick. * * * * * We donned our Erentz suits. "What will we do with the helmets?" Anita demanded. "Leave them here?" "No--take them with us. I'm not going to get separated from them; it's too dangerous." "We'll look strange going up to that signal room equipped like this," she commented. "I can't help it. We'll figure out something to explain it." She stood before me, a queer-looking little figure in the now deflated, bagging suit with her slim neck and head protruding above the metal circle of its collar. "Carry your helmet, Anita. I'll take mine." We could adjust the helmets and start the Erentz motors all within a few seconds. "I'm ready, Gregg." "Come on, then. Let me go first." I had the bullet projector in an outer pouch of the suit where I could instantly reach it. This was more rational: we had a fighting chance now. The fear which had swept me so suddenly began to recede. I was calm. "We'll climb the tower to the signal room," I whispered. "Do it boldly." We stepped from the cubby. Potan was not in sight; he was on the further deck beyond the central cabin structure perhaps, or had gone below. On the deck, we were immediately accosted. This was different--our appearance in the Erentz suits! "Where are you going?" This fellow spoke in Martian. I answered in English. "Up there." * * * * * He stood before us, towering over me. I saw a group of nearby workers stop to regard us. In a moment we would be causing a commotion, and it was the last thing I desired. I said in Martian, "Commander Potan told me, what I wish I can do. From the dome we look around--see where is the Grantline camp--I am pilot of this ship to go there." The man who had called himself Brotow passed near us. I appealed to him. "We put on our suits. I thought we might go up on the dome for a minute and look around. If I'm to pilot the ship...." He hesitated, his glance sweeping the deck as though to ask Potan. Someone said in Martian: "The commander is down in the stern storeroom." It decided Brotow. He waved away the Martian who had stopped me. "Let them alone." Anita and I gave him our most friendly smiles. "Thanks." He bowed to Anita with a sweeping gesture. "I will show you over the control room presently." His gaze went to the peak of the bow. The little hooded cubby there was the control room. Satisfaction swept me. Then this, above us in the tower, must surely be the signal room. Would Brotow follow us up? I hoped not. I wanted to be alone with the duty-man up there, giving me a chance to get at the projector controls if Miko's signal should come. I drew Anita past Brotow, who had stood aside. "Thanks," I repeated. "We won't be long." We mounted the little ladder. CHAPTER XXXI _In the Tower Cubby_ "Hurry, Anita!" I feared that Potan might come up from the hull at any moment and stop us. The duty-man over us gazed down, his huge head and shoulders blocking the small signal room window. Brotow called up in Martian, telling him to let us come. He scowled, but when we reached the trap in the room floor-grid, we found him standing aside to admit us. I flung a swift glance around. It was a metallic cubby, not much over fifteen feet square, with an eight-foot arched ceiling. There were instrument panels. The range-finder for the giant projector was here; its little telescope with the trajectory apparatus and the firing switch were unmistakable. And the signalling apparatus was here! Not a Martian set, but a fully powerful Botz ultra-violet helio sender with its attendant receiving mirrors. The _Planetara_ had used the Botz system, so I was thoroughly familiar with it. I saw, too, what seemed to be weapons: a row of small fragile glass globes, hanging on clips along the wall--bombs, each the size of a man's fist. And a broad belt with bombs in its padded compartments. My heart was pounding as my first quick glance took in these details. I saw also that the room had four small oval window openings. They were breast-high above the floor; from the deck below I knew that the angle of vision was such that the men down there could not see into this room except to glimpse its upper portion near the ceiling. And the helio set was banked on a low table near the floor. In a corner of the room a small ladder led through a ceiling trap to the cubby roof. This upper trap was open. Four feet above the room-roof was the arch of the dome, with the entrance to the upper exit-lock directly above us. The weapons and the belt of bombs were near this ascending ladder, evidently placed here as equipment for use from the top of the dome. * * * * * I turned to the solitary duty-man. I must gain his confidence at once. Anita had laid her helmet aside. She spoke first. "We were with Set Miko," she said smilingly, "in the wreck of the _Planetara_. You heard of it? We know where the treasure is." This duty-man was a full seven feet tall, and the most heavy-set Martian I had ever seen. A tremendous, beetling-browed, scowling fellow. He stood with hands on his hips, his leather-garbed legs spread wide; and as I fronted him I felt like a child. He was silent, glaring down at me as I drew his attention from Anita. "You speak English? We are not skilled with Martian." I wondered if at the next time of sleep this fellow would be on duty here. I hoped not; it would not be easy to trick him and find an opportunity to flash a signal. But that task was some hours away as yet; I would worry about it when the time came. Just now I was concerned with Miko and his little band, who at any moment might arrive in sight. If we could persuade this scowling duty-man to turn the projector on them.... He answered me in ready English: "You are the man Gregg Haljan? And this is the sister of George Prince--what do you want up here?" "I am a navigator. Brotow wants me to pilot the ship when we advance to attack Grantline." "This is not the control room." "No, I know it isn't." I put my helmet carefully on the floor-grid beside Anita's. I straightened to find the brigand gazing at her. He did not speak; he was still scowling. But in the dim blue glow of the cubby I caught the look in his eyes. * * * * * I said hastily, "Grantline knows your ship has landed here on Archimedes. His camp is off there on the Mare Imbrium. He sent up a signal--you saw it, didn't you?--just before Miss Prince and I came aboard. He was trying to pretend that he was your Earth-party, Miko and Coniston." "Why?" The fellow turned his scowl on me, but Anita brought his gaze back to her. She put in quickly: "Grantline, as Brother always said, has no great cunning. I believe he's planning now to creep up on us, catch us unaware by pretending that he is Miko." "If he does that," I said, "we will turn this electronic projector on him and annihilate him. You have its firing mechanism here." "Who told you so?" he shot at me. I gestured. "I see it here. It's obvious. I'm skilled at trajectory-firing. If Grantline appears down there now, I'll help you--" "Is it connected?" Anita demanded boldly. "Yes," he said. "You have on your Erentz suits: are you going to the dome-roof? Then go." But that was what we did not want to do. Anita's glance seemed to tell me to let her handle this. I turned toward one of the cubby windows; she said sweetly: "Are you in charge of this room? Show me how that projector is operated; it will be invincible against the Grantline camp." "Yes." * * * * * I had my back to them for a moment. Through the breast-high oval I could see down across the deck-space and out through the side dome windows. And my heart suddenly leaped into my throat. It seemed that down there in the Earthlit shadows, where the spreading base of the giant crater joined the plains, a light was bobbing. I gazed, stricken. Miko's lights? Was he advancing, preparing to signal? I tried to gauge the distance; it was not over two miles from here. Or was it not a light at all? With the naked eye, I could not be sure. Perhaps there was a telescopic finder here in the cubby.... I was subconsciously aware of the voices of Anita and the duty-man behind me. Then abruptly I heard Anita's low cry. I whirled around. The giant Martian had gathered her into his huge arms, his heavy-jowled gray face with a leering grin close to hers! He saw me coming. He held her with one arm: his other flung at me, caught me, knocked me backward. He rasped: "Get out of here! Go up to the dome, leave us." Anita was silently struggling with her little hands at his thick throat. His blow flung me against a settle. But I held my feet. I was partly behind him. I leaped again, and as he tried to disengage himself from Anita to front me, her clutching fingers impeded him. My bullet projector was in my hand. But in that second as I leaped, I had the sense to realize I should not fire it and with its noise alarm the ship. I grasped its barrel, reached upward and struck with its heavy metal butt. The blow caught the Martian on the skull, and simultaneously my body struck him. We went down together, falling partly upon Anita. But the giant had not cried out, and as I gripped him now, I felt his body limp. I lay panting. Anita squirmed silently from under us. Blood from the giant's head was welling out, hot and sticky against my face as I lay sprawled on him. * * * * * I cast him off. He was dead, his fragile Martian skull split open by my blow. There had been no alarm. The slight noise we made had not been heard down on the busy deck. Anita and I crouched by the floor. From the deck all this part of the room could not be seen. "Dead!" "Oh, Gregg--" It forced our hand. I could not wait now for Miko to come. But I could flash the Earth signal now, and then we would have to make our run to escape. Abruptly I remembered that light down at the crater-base! I kept Anita out of sight on the floor and went cautiously to a window. The deck was in turmoil with brigands moving about excitedly. Not because of what had happened in our tower signal room; they were unaware of that. Miko's signals were showing! I could see them now plainly, down at the crater-base. A group of hand-lights and a small waving helio-beam. And they were being answered from the ship! Potan was on the deck--a babble of voices, above which his rose with roars of command. At one of the dome windows a brigand with a hand search-beam was sending its answering light. And I saw that Potan was working over a deck telescope-finder. It had all come so suddenly that I was stunned. But I did not wait to read the signals. I swung back at Anita. "It's Miko! And they are answering him! Get your helmet; I'll try firing the projector." Or would I instead try to send a brief flash-signal to Earth? There would be no time to do both: we must escape out of here. The route up through the dome was the only feasible one now. This range mechanism of the projector was reasonably familiar, and I felt that I could operate it. The range-finder and switch were on a ledge at one of the windows. I rushed to it. As I swung the little telescope, training it down on Miko's lights, I could see the huge projector on the deck swinging similarly. Its movement surprised the men who were attending it. One of them called up to me, but I ignored him. * * * * * Then Potan looked up and saw me. He shouted in Martian at the duty-man, whom he doubtless thought was behind me: "Be ready! We may fire on them, whoever they are. I'll give you the word." The signals were proceeding. It had only been a moment. I caught something like, "_Haljan is impostor._" I was aiming the projector. I was aware of Anita at my elbow. I pushed her back. "Put on your helmet!" I had the range. I flung the firing switch. At the deck window the giant projector spat its deadly electronic stream. The men down there leaped away from it with surprise. I heard Potan's voice, his shout of protest and anger. But down in the Earthglow at the crater-base, Miko's lights had not vanished! I had missed! An error in the range? Abruptly I knew it was not that. Miko's lights were still there. His signals still coming. And I remarked now a faint distortion about them, the glow of his little group of hand-lights faintly distorted and vaguely shot with a greenish cast. Benson curve-lights! I realized it. My thoughts whirled in the few seconds while I stood there at the tower window. Miko had feared he might summarily be fired upon. He had gone back to his camp, equipped all his lights with the Benson curve. He was somewhere at the crater-base now. But not where I thought I saw him! The Benson curve-light changed the path of the light-rays traveling from him to me--I could not even approximate his true position! Anita was plucking at me. "Gregg, come." "I can't hit him!" I gasped. Should I try the flash-signal to Earth? Did we dare linger here? I stood another few seconds fascinated at the window. I saw Potan down in the confusion of the deck, training a telescope. He had shouted up violently at his duty-man here not to fire again. And now he suddenly let out a roar. "I can see them! It's Miko! By the Almighty--his giant stature--Brotow, look! That's not an Earthman!" He flung aside his little telescope finder. "Disconnect that projector! It's Miko down there! This Haljan is a trickster! Where is he? Braile--Braile, you accursed fool! Are Haljan and the girl up there with you?" But the duty-man lay weltering in his blood at our feet. I had dropped back from the window. Anita and I crouched for an instant in confusion, fumbling with our helmets. The ship rang with the alarm. And amid the turmoil we could hear the shouts of the infuriated brigands swarming up the tower ladder after us! CHAPTER XXXII _A Speck Amid the Stars_ I was only inactive a moment. I had thought Anita would have on her helmet. But she was reluctant, or confused. "Gregg." "We've got to get out of here! Up through the overhead locks to the dome." "Yes--" She fumbled with the helmet. Under the floor-grid the climbing men on the ladder were audible. They were already nearing the top. The trap door was closed: Anita and I were crouching on it. There was a thick metal bar set in a depressed groove of the grid. I slid it in place--it would seal the trap for a time, at any rate. A degree of confidence came to me. We had a few moments before there could be any hand-to-hand conflict. That giant electronic projector would eventually be used against Grantline: it was the brigands' most powerful weapon. Its controls were here--by Heaven, I would smash them! That at least I could do! I jumped for the window. Miko's signals had stopped, but I caught a glimpse of his distant moving curve-lights. A flash came up at me, as in the window I became visible to the brigands on the ship's deck. It was a small hand-projector, hastily fired, for it went wide of the window. It was followed by a rain of small beams, but I was warned and I dropped my head beneath the high sill. The rays flashed diagonally upward through the oval opening, hissed against our vaulted roof. The air snapped and tingled with a shower of blue-red sparks, and the acrid odor of the released gases settled down upon me. * * * * * The trajectory controls of the projector were beside me. I seized them, ripped and tore at them. There was a roar down on the deck. The projector had exploded. A man's agonized scream split the confusion of sounds. It silenced the brigands on the deck. Under our floor-grid those on the ladder had been pounding at the trap-door. They stopped, evidently to see what had happened. The bombardment of our windows ceased momentarily. I cautiously peered out the window again. In the wreck of the projector three men were lying. One of them was screaming horribly. The dome-side was damaged. Potan and other men were frantically investigating to see if the ship's air were hissing out. A triumph swept me. They had not found me so meek and inoffensive as they might have thought! Anita clutched at me. She still had not donned her helmet. "Put it on!" "But Gregg--" "Put it on!" "I--I don't want to put it on until you put yours on." "I've smashed the projector! We've stopped them coming up for a while." But they were still on the ladder under our floor. They heard our voices; they began thumping again. Then pounding. They seemed now to have some heavy implement. They rammed with it against the trap. But the floor seemed holding. The square of metal grid trembled, yielded a little. But it was good for a few minutes longer. I called down, "The first one who comes through will be shot." My words mingled with their oaths. There was a moment's pause, then the ramming went on. The dying man on the deck was still screaming. * * * * * I whispered, "I'll try an Earth-signal." She nodded. Pale, tense, but calm. "Yes, Gregg. And I was thinking--" "It won't take a minute. Have your helmet ready." "I was thinking--" She hurried across the room. I swung on the Botz signaling apparatus. It was connected. Within a moment I had it humming. The fluorescent tubes lighted with their lurid glare; they painted purple the body of the giant duty-man who lay sprawled at my feet. I drew on all the ship's power. The tube-lights in the room quivered and went dim. I would have to hurry. Potan could shut this off from the main hull control room. I could see, through the room's upper trap, the primary sending mirror mounted in the peak of the dome. It was quivering, radiant with its light-energy. I sent the flash. The flattened, past-full Earth was up there. I knew that the western hemisphere faced the Moon at this hour. I flashed in English, with the open Universal Earth-code: "_Help! Grantline._" And again: "_Send help! Archimedes region near Apennines. Attacked by brigands. Send help at once! Grantline!_" If only it would be received! I flung off the current. Anita stood watching me intently. "Gregg, look!" She had taken some of the glass globe-bombs which lay by the foot of the ascending ladder. She held some of them now. "Gregg. I threw some." * * * * * At the window we gazed down. The globes she flung had shattered on the deck. They were occulting darkness bombs.[5] [Footnote 5: Filled with an odorless, harmless gas, these bombs were used in warfare, taking the place of the old-fashioned smoke screens. The diffusing gas was of such a nature that, when released, it absorbed within itself all the color inherent to the light-rays striking it, thus creating a temporary darkness.] Through the blackness of the deck, the shouts of the brigands came up. They were stumbling about. But the ramming of our trap went on, and I saw that it was beginning to yield. One corner of it was bent up. "We've got to go, Anita!" "Yes." From out of the darkness which hung like a shroud over the deck an occasional flash came up, unaimed--wide of our windows. But the darkness was dissipating. I could see now the dim glow of the deck lights, blurred as through a heavy fog. I dropped another of the bombs. "Put on your helmet." "Yes--yes, I will. You put on yours." We had them adjusted in a moment. Our Erentz motors were pumping. I gripped her. "Put out your helmet-light." She extinguished it. I handed her my bullet projector. "Hold it a moment. I'm going to take that belt of bombs." The trap-door was all but broken under the ramming blows of the men on the ladder. I leaped over the body of the duty-man, seized the belt of bombs and strapped it about my waist. Anita stood with me. "Give me the projector." She handed it to me. The trap-door burst upward! A man's head and shoulders appeared. I fired a bullet into him--the little leaden pellet singing down through the yellow powder-flash that spat from the projector's muzzle. * * * * * The brigand screamed, and dropped back out of sight. There was confusion at the ladder-top. I flung a bomb at the broken trap. A tiny heat-ray came wavering up through the opening, but went wide of us. The instrument room was in darkness. I clung to Anita. "Hold on to me! You go first--here is the ladder." We found it in the blackness, mounted it and went through the cubby's roof-trap. I took a hasty look and dropped another bomb beside us. The four-foot space up here between the cubby roof and the overhead dome went black. We were momentarily concealed. Anita located the manual levers of the lock-entrance. "Here, Gregg." I shoved at them. Fear leaped in me that they would not operate. But they swung. The tiny porte opened wide to receive us. We clambered into the small air-chamber; the door slid closed, just as a flash from below struck at it. The brigands had seen our little cloud of darkness and were firing up through it. We were through the locks in a moment, out on the open dome-top. A sleek, rounded spread of glassite, with broad aluminite girders. There were cross-ribs which gave us footing, and occasional projections--streamline fin-tips, the casings of the upper rudder shafts, and the upstanding stubby funnels into which the helicopters were folded. We moved along the central footpath and crouched by a six-foot casing. The stars and the glowing Earth were over us. The curving dome-top--a hundred feet or so in length, and bulging thirty feet wide beneath us--glistened in the Earthlight. It was a sheer drop down these curving sides past the ship's hull, a hundred feet to the rocks on which the vessel rested. The towering wall of Archimedes was beside us; and beyond the brink of the ledge the thousands of feet down to the plains. * * * * * I saw the lights of Miko's band down there. He had stopped signaling. His little lights were spread out, bobbing as he and his men advanced up the crater's foothills, coming to join their ship. I had an instant's glimpse. Anita and I could not stay here. The brigands would follow us up in a moment. I saw no exterior ladder. We would have to take our chances and jump. There were brigands down there on the rocks. I saw three or four skulking helmeted figures, and they saw us! A bullet whizzed by us, and then came the flash of a hand-ray. I touched Anita. "Can you make the leap? Anita, dear...." Again it seemed that this must be farewell. "Gregg, dear one--oh, we've got to do it!" Those waiting figures would pounce on us. "Anita, lie here a moment." I jumped up and ran twenty feet toward the bow; then back, toward the stern, flinging down the last of my bombs. The darkness was like a cloud down there, enveloping the outer brigands. But up here we were above it, etched by the starlight and Earthglow. I came back to Anita. "We'll have to chance it now." "Gregg...." "Good-by, dear. I'll jump first, down this side--you follow." To leap into that black patch, with the rocks under it.... "Gregg--" She was trying to tell me to look overhead. She gestured. "Gregg, see!" I saw it out over the plains--a little speck amid the stars. A moving speck, coming toward us! "Gregg, what is it?" * * * * * I gazed, held my breath. A moving speck out there. A blob now. And then I realized that it was not a large object, far away, but small, and already very close--only a few hundred feet off, dropping toward the top of our dome. A narrow, flat, ten-foot object, like a wingless volplane. There were no lights on it, but in the Earthlight I could see two crouching, helmeted figures riding it. "Anita! Don't you remember!" I was swept with dawning comprehension. Back in the Grantline camp Snap and I had discussed how to use the _Planetara's_ gravity plates. We had gone to the wreck and secured them, had rigged this little volplane flyer.... The brigands on the rocks saw it now. A flash went up at it. One of the figures crouching on it opened a flexible fabric like a wing over its side. I saw another flash from below, harmlessly striking the insulated shield. I gasped to Anita, "Light your helmet! It's from Grantline! Let them see us!" I stood erect. The little flying platform went over us, fifty feet up, circling, dropping to the dome-top. I waved my helmet-light. The exit-lock from below--up which we had come--was near us. The advancing brigands were already in it! I had forgotten to demolish the manuals. And I saw that the darkness down on the rocks was almost gone now, dissipating in the airless night. The brigands down there began firing up at us. It was a confusion of flashing lights. I clutched at Anita. "Come this way--run!" The platform barely missed our heads. It sailed lengthwise of the dome-top, and crashed silently on the central runway near the stern-tip. Anita and I ran to it. The two helmeted figures seized us, shoved us prone on the metal platform. It was barely four feet wide: a low railing, handles with which to cling, and a tiny hooded cubby in front, with banks of controls. "Gregg!" "Snap!" It was Snap and Venza. She seized Anita, held her crouching in place. Snap flung himself face down at the controls. The brigands in the lock were out on the dome now. I took a last shot as we lifted. My bullet punctured one of them; he fell, slid scrambling off the rounded dome and dropped out of sight. Light-rays and silent flashes seemed to envelop us. Venza held the side-shields higher. We tilted, swayed crazily, and then steadied. The ship's dome dropped away beneath us. The rocks of the open ledge were under us. Then the abyss, with the moving climbing specks of Miko's lights far down. I saw, over the side-shield, the already distant brigand ship resting on the ledge with the massive Archimedes' wall behind it. A confusion back there of futile flashing rays. It all faded into a remote glow as we sailed smoothly up into the starlight and away, heading for the Grantline camp. CHAPTER XXXIII _Besieged!_ "Wake up, Gregg! They're coming!" I forced myself to consciousness. "Coming--" "Yes. Wake up!" I leaped from my bunk, followed Snap with a rush into the corridor. We had returned safely to the Grantline Camp. Anita and I found ourselves exhausted from lack of sleep, our arduous climb of Archimedes and that tense time on the brigand ship. On the flight back Snap had explained how the landing of the ship on Archimedes was observed through the Grantline telescope, using but little of its power for this local range. They had read with amazement my signals to the brigands. Snap had rushed to completion the first of our contemplated flying platforms. Then he had seen Miko's signals from the crater-base, seen the lights of the fight to capture Anita and me in the cubby, and had come to rescue us. Back at the camp we were given food, and Grantline forced me to try and sleep. "They'll be on us in a few hours, Gregg. Miko will have joined them by now. He'll lead them to us. You must rest, for we need everyone at his best." And surprisingly, in the midst of the camp's turmoil of last minute activities, I slept soundly, until Snap called me that the ship was coming. The corridor echoed with the tramp of Grantline's busy crew. But there was no confusion now; a grim calmness had settled upon everyone. Anita and Venza rushed up to join us. "It's in sight!" * * * * * There was no need of going to the instrument room. From the windows fronting the brink of the cliff the brigand ship was plainly visible. It came sailing from Archimedes, a dark shape blurring the stars. All its lights were extinguished save a single white search-beam in the bow-peak, slanting diagonally down. The beam presently caught our little group of buildings; its glare shone in the windows as it clung for a moment. I could envisage the triumphant curiosity, of Potan and his fellows up there, gazing along the beam. Then it swung away. The ship was at an altitude of no more than three thousand feet when I first saw it, coming upon a level keel. Would it circle over us, firing at us? Or sail past, after inspecting us? Or land, perhaps, boldly crowded upon our little ledge? We were ready--as ready as we could be with our meager equipment. The camp was in a state of siege. The cliff-lights were extinguished: the interior lights were dim, save in the workshops of the main building, where the final assembling of Snap's other flying platforms and their insulated protective shields was still in progress. We had dimmed the lights to conserve our power, and to enable the Erentz motors to run at full capacity. Our buildings would have to withstand the brigand rays which soon would be upon us. Outside on our dim, Earthlit cliff, the tiny lights showed where our few guards were lurking. As I stood at the window watching the oncoming ship, Grantline's voice sounded: "Call in those men! Ring the call-lights, Franck!" The siren buzzed over the camp's interior; the warning call-lights on the roof brought in the outer guards. They came running to the admission portes, which had been repaired after Miko disabled them. * * * * * The guards came in. We dimmed our lights further. The treasure sheds were black against the cliff behind us. No need for guards there--the bulk of the ore was such that we reasoned the brigands would not attempt to move it until our buildings were captured. But, if they should try it, we were prepared to sally out with our hand-weapons and defend it. In the dim lights we crouched. A silence was upon us, save for the clanging in the workshop down the corridor. Most of us wore our Erentz suits, with helmets ready, though I am sure there was not a man of us but who prayed he might not have to go out. At many of the windows--our weakest points to withstand the rays--insulated fabric shields were hung like curtains. The brigand ship slowly advanced. It was soon over the opposite rim of our little crater. Its search-beam swung about the rim and down into the valley. My thoughts ran like a turgid stream as I stood tensely watching. Four hours ago I had sent that flash-signal to Earth. If it were received, a patrol-ship could come to our rescue and arrive here in another eight hours--or perhaps even less. Ah, that "if!" _If_ the signal were received! _If_ the patrol-ship were immediately available! _If_ it started at once.... Eight hours at the very least. I tried to assure myself that we could hold out that long.... The brigand ship crossed the opposite crater-rim. It dropped lower. It seemed poised over the crater-valley, almost at our own level and less than two miles from us. Its search-beam vanished. For a moment it hung, a sleek, cylindrical silver shape, gleaming in the Earthlight. Snap looked at me and murmured, "It's descending." It slowly settled, cautiously picked its landing-place amid the crags and pits of the tumbled scarred valley floor. It came to rest, a vague silver menacing shape lurking in the lower shadows, close at the foot of the inner opposite crater-wall. A few moments of tense waiting passed. Soon tiny lights were moving down there, some out on the rocks near the ship, others up under its deck-dome. A stab of searchlight shot across the valley, swung along our ledge and clung with its glaring ten-foot circle to the front of our main building. Then a ray flashed. The assault had begun! (_To be concluded_) [Advertisement:] The Jovian Jest _By Lilith Lorraine_ [Illustration: _The object shot forth another tentacle._] [Sidenote: There came to our pigmy planet a radiant wanderer with a message--and a jest--from the vasty universe.] Consternation reigned in Elsnore village when the Nameless Thing was discovered in Farmer Burns' corn-patch. When the rumor began to gain credence that it was some sort of meteor from inter-stellar space, reporters, scientists and college professors flocked to the scene, desirous of prying off particles for analysis. But they soon discovered that the Thing was no ordinary meteor, for it glowed at night with a peculiar luminescence. They also observed that it was practically weightless, since it had embedded itself in the soft sand scarcely more than a few inches. By the time the first group of newspapermen and scientists had reached the farm, another phenomenon was plainly observable. The Thing was growing! Farmer Burns, with an eye to profit, had already built a picket fence around his starry visitor and was charging admission. He also flatly refused to permit the chipping off of specimens or even the touching of the object. His attitude was severely criticized, but he stubbornly clung to the theory that possession is nine points in law. * * * * * It was Professor Ralston of Princewell who, on the third day after the fall of the meteor, remarked upon its growth. His colleagues crowded around him as he pointed out this peculiarity, and soon they discovered another factor--pulsation! Larger than a small balloon, and gradually, almost imperceptibly expanding, with its viscid transparency shot through with opalescent lights, the Thing lay there in the deepening twilight and palpably shivered. As darkness descended, a sort of hellish radiance began to ooze from it. I say hellish, because there is no other word to describe that spectral, sulphurous emanation. As the hangers-on around the pickets shudderingly shrank away from the weird light that was streaming out to them and tinting their faces with a ghastly, greenish pallor, Farmer Burns' small boy, moved by some imp of perversity, did a characteristically childish thing. He picked up a good-sized stone and flung it straight at the nameless mass! * * * * * Instead of veering off and falling to the ground as from an impact with metal, the stone sank right through the surface of the Thing as into a pool of protoplastic slime. When it reached the central core of the object, a more abundant life suddenly leaped and pulsed from center to circumference. Visible waves of sentient color circled round the solid stone. Stabbing swords of light leaped forth from them, piercing the stone, crumbling it, absorbing it. When it was gone, only a red spot, like a bloodshot eye, throbbed eerily where it had been. Before the now thoroughly mystified crowd had time to remark upon this inexplicable disintegration, a more horrible manifestation occurred. The Thing, as though thoroughly awakened and vitalized by its unusual fare, was putting forth a tentacle. Right from the top of the shivering globe it pushed, sluggishly weaving and prescient of doom. Wavering, it hung for a moment, turning, twisting, groping. Finally it shot straight outward swift as a rattler's strike! Before the closely packed crowd could give room for escape, it had circled the neck of the nearest bystander, Bill Jones, a cattleman, and jerked him, writhing and screaming, into the reddish core. Stupefied with soul-chilling terror, with their mass-consciousness practically annihilated before a deed with which their minds could make no association, the crowd could only gasp in sobbing unison and await the outcome. * * * * * The absorption of the stone had taught them what to expect, and for a moment it seemed that their worst anticipations were to be realised. The sluggish currents circled through the Thing, swirling the victim's body to the center. The giant tentacle drew back into the globe and became itself a current. The concentric circles merged--tightened--became one gleaming cord that encircled the helpless prey. From the inner circumference of this cord shot forth, not the swords of light that had powdered the stone to atoms, but myriads of radiant tentacles that gripped and cupped the body in a thousand places. Suddenly the tentacles withdrew themselves, all save the ones that grasped the head. These seemed to tighten their pressure--to swell and pulse with a grayish substance that was flowing from the cups into the cord and from the cord into the body of the mass. Yes, it was a grayish something, a smokelike Essence that was being drawn from the cranial cavity. Bill Jones was no longer screaming and gibbering, but was stiff with the rigidity of stone. Notwithstanding, there was no visible mark upon his body; his flesh seemed unharmed. Swiftly came the awful climax. The waving tentacles withdrew themselves, the body of Bill Jones lost its rigidity, a heaving motion from the center of the Thing propelled its cargo to the surface--and Bill Jones stepped out! Yes, he stepped out and stood for a moment staring straight ahead, staring at nothing, glassily. Every person in the shivering, paralysed group knew instinctively that something unthinkable had happened to him. Something had transpired, something hitherto possible only in the abysmal spaces of the Other Side of Things. Finally he turned and faced the nameless object, raising his arm stiffly, automatically, as in a military salute. Then he turned and walked jerkily, mindlessly, round and round the globe like a wooden soldier marching. Meanwhile the Thing lay quiescent--gorged! * * * * * Professor Ralston was the first to find his voice. In fact, Professor Ralston was always finding his voice in the most unexpected places. But this time it had caught a chill. It was trembling. "Gentlemen," he began, looking down academically upon the motley crowd as though doubting the aptitude of his salutation. "Fellow-citizens," he corrected, "the phenomenon we have just witnessed is, to the lay mind, inexplicable. To me--and to my honorable colleagues (added as an afterthought) it is quite clear. Quite clear, indeed. We have before us a specimen, a perfect specimen, I might say, of a--of a--" He stammered in the presence of the unnamable. His hesitancy caused the rapt attention of the throng that was waiting breathlessly for an explanation, to flicker back to the inexplicable. In the fraction of a second that their gaze had been diverted from the Thing to the professor, the object had shot forth another tentacle, gripping him round the neck and choking off his sentence with a horrid rasp that sounded like a death rattle. Needless to say, the revolting process that had turned Bill Jones from a human being into a mindless automaton was repeated with Professor Ralston. It happened as before, too rapidly for intervention, too suddenly for the minds of the onlookers to shake off the paralysis of an unprecedented nightmare. But when the victim was thrown to the surface, when he stepped out, drained of the grayish smokelike essence, a tentacle still gripped his neck and another rested directly on top of his head. This latter tentacle, instead of absorbing _from_ him, visibly poured into him what resembled a threadlike stream of violet light. * * * * * Facing the cowering audience with eyes staring glassily, still in the grip of the unknowable, Professor Ralston did an unbelievable thing. He resumed his lecture at the exact point of interruption! But he spoke with the tonelessness of a machine, a machine that pulsed to the will of a dictator, inhuman and inexorable! "What you see before you," the Voice continued--the Voice that no longer echoed the thoughts of the professor--"is what you would call an amoeba, a giant amoeba. It is I--this amoeba, who am addressing you--children of an alien universe. It is I, who through this captured instrument of expression, whose queer language you can understand, am explaining my presence on your planet. I pour my thoughts into this specialised brain-box which I have previously drained of its meager thought-content." (Here the "honorable colleagues" nudged each other gleefully.) "I have so drained it for the purpose of analysis and that the flow of my own ideas may pass from my mind to yours unimpeded by any distortion that might otherwise be caused by their conflict with the thoughts of this individual. "First I absorbed the brain-content of this being whom you call Bill Jones, but I found his mental instrument unavailable. It was technically untrained in the use of your words that would best convey my meaning. He possesses more of what you would call 'innate intelligence,' but he has not perfected the mechanical brain through whose operation this innate intelligence can be transmitted to others and, applied for practical advantage. * * * * * "Now this creature that I am using is, as you might say, full of sound without meaning. His brain is a lumber-room in which he has hoarded a conglomeration of clever and appropriate word-forms with which to disguise the paucity of his ideas, with which to express nothing! Yet the very abundance of the material in his storeroom furnishes a discriminating mind with excellent tools for the transportation of its ideas into other minds. "Know, then, that I am not here by accident. I am a Space Wanderer, an explorer from a super-universe whose evolution has proceeded without variation along the line of your amoeba. Your evolution, as I perceive from an analysis of the brain-content of your professor, _began_ its unfoldment in somewhat the same manner as our own. But in your smaller system, less perfectly adjusted than our own to the cosmic mechanism, a series of cataclysms occurred. In fact, your planetary system was itself the result of a catastrophe, or of what might have been a catastrophe, had the two great suns collided whose near approach caused the wrenching off of your planets. From this colossal accident, rare, indeed, in the annals of the stars, an endless chain of accidents was born, a chain of which this specimen, this professor, and the species that he represents, is one of the weakest links. "Your infinite variety of species is directly due to the variety of adaptations necessitated by this train of accidents. In the super-universe from which I come, such derangements of the celestial machinery simply do not happen. For this reason, our evolution has unfolded harmoniously along one line of development, whereas yours has branched out into diversified and grotesque expressions of the Life-Principle. Your so-called highest manifestation of this principle, namely, your own species, is characterized by a great number of specialized organs. Through this very specialization of functions, however, you have forfeited your individual immortality, and it has come about that only your life-stream is immortal. The primal cell is inherently immortal, but death follows in the wake of specialization. * * * * * "We, the beings of this amoeba universe, are individually immortal. We have no highly specialized organs to break down under the stress of environment. When we want an organ, we create it. When it has served its purpose, we withdraw it into ourselves. We reach out our tentacles and draw to ourselves whatsoever we desire. Should a tentacle be destroyed, we can put forth another. "Our universe is beautiful beyond the dreams of your most inspired poets. Whereas your landscapes, though lovely, are stationary, unchangeable except through herculean efforts, ours are Protean, eternally changing. With our own substance, we build our minarets of light, piercing the aura of infinity. At the bidding of our wills we create, preserve, destroy--only to build again more gloriously. "We draw our sustenance from the primates, as do your plants, and we constantly replace the electronic base of these primates with our own emanations, in much the same manner as your nitrogenous plants revitalize your soil. "While we create and withdraw organs at will, we have nothing to correspond to your five senses. We derive knowledge through one sense only, or, shall I say, a super-sense? We see and hear and touch and taste and smell and feel and know, not through any one organ, but through our whole structure. The homogeneous force of our omni-substance subjects the plural world to the processing of a powerful unity. * * * * * "We can dissolve our bodies at will, retaining only the permanent atom of our being, the seed of life dropped on the soil of our planet by Infinite Intelligence. We can propel this indestructible seed on light rays through the depths of space. We can visit the farthest universe with the velocity of light, since light is our conveyance. In reaching your little world, I have consumed a million years, for my world is a million light-years distant: yet to my race a million years is as one of your days. "On arrival at any given destination, we can build our bodies from the elements of the foreign planet. We attain our knowledge of conditions on any given planet by absorbing the thought-content of the brains of a few representative members of its dominant race. Every well-balanced mind contains the experience of the race, the essence of the wisdom that the race-soul has gained during its residence in matter. We make this knowledge a part of our own thought-content, and thus the Universe lies like an open book before us. "At the end of a given experiment in thought absorption, we return the borrowed mind-stuff to the brain of its possessor. We reward our subject for his momentary discomfiture by pouring into his body our splendid vitality. This lengthens his life expectancy immeasurably, by literally burning from his system the germs of actual or incipient ills that contaminate the blood-stream. * * * * * "This, I believe, will conclude my explanation, an explanation to which you, as a race in whom intelligence is beginning to dawn, are entitled. But you have a long road to travel yet. Your thought-channels are pitifully blocked and criss-crossed with nonsensical and inhibitory complexes that stand in the way of true progress. But you will work this out, for the Divine Spark that pulses through us of the Larger Universe, pulses also through you. That spark, once lighted, can never be extinguished, can never be swallowed up again in the primeval slime. "There is nothing more that I can learn from you--nothing that I can teach you at this stage of your evolution. I have but one message to give you, one thought to leave with you--forge on! You are on the path, the stars are over you, their light is flashing into your souls the slogan of the Federated Suns beyond the frontiers of your little warring worlds. Forge on!" The Voice died out like the chiming of a great bell receding into immeasurable distance. The supercilious tones of the professor had yielded to the sweetness and the light of the Greater Mind whose instrument he had momentarily become. It was charged at the last with a golden resonance that seemed to echo down vast spaceless corridors beyond the furthermost outposts of time. * * * * * As the Voice faded out into a sacramental silence, the strangely assorted throng, moved by a common impulse, lowered their heads as though in prayer. The great globe pulsed and shimmered throughout its sentient depths like a sea of liquid jewels. Then the tentacle that grasped the professor drew him back toward the scintillating nucleus. Simultaneously another arm reached out and grasped Bill Jones, who, during the strange lecture, had ceased his wooden soldier marching and had stood stiffly at attention. The bodies of both men within the nucleus were encircled once more by the single current. From it again put forth the tentacles, cupping their heads, but the smokelike essence flowed back to them this time, and with it flowed a tiny threadlike stream of violet light. Then came the heaving motion when the shimmering currents caught the two men and tossed them forth unharmed but visibly dowered with the radiance of more abundant life. Their faces were positively glowing and their eyes were illuminated by a light that was surely not of earth. Then, before the very eyes of the marveling people, the great globe began to dwindle. The jeweled lights intensified, concentrated, merged, until at last remained only a single spot no larger than a pin-head, but whose radiance was, notwithstanding, searing, excruciating. Then the spot leaped up--up into the heavens, whirling, dipping and circling as in a gesture of farewell, and finally soaring into invisibility with the blinding speed of light. * * * * * The whole wildly improbable occurrence might have been dismissed as a queer case of mass delusion, for such cases are not unknown to history, had it not been followed by a convincing aftermath. The culmination of a series of startling coincidences, both ridiculous and tragic, at last brought men face to face with an incontestable fact: namely, that Bill Jones had emerged from his fiery baptism endowed with the thought-expressing facilities of Professor Ralston, while the professor was forced to struggle along with the meager educational appliances of Bill Jones! In this ironic manner the Space-Wanderer had left unquestionable proof of his visit by rendering a tribute to "innate intelligence" and playing a Jovian Jest upon an educated fool--a neat transposition. A Columbus from a vaster, kindlier universe had paused for a moment to learn the story of our pigmy system. He had brought us a message from the outermost citadels of life and had flashed out again on his aeonic voyage from everlasting unto everlasting. FOR VACATION ADVENTURERS Truth is stranger than fiction. Ask the Regular Army man who has soldiered in the far-off corners of the earth, gone "over the top" in action, and has experienced the thrill of service in the tropics or the sub-arctic. Better yet, get an earful of real Astounding Stories yourself, at first hand this summer, as one of the thirty thousand young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four enjoying those thirty glorious days and nights as a student-camper at one of Uncle Sam's Citizens' Military Training Camps. All of these Camps are pitched at Regular Army posts, and it is the custom for grizzled old-timers who have followed the Flag for many long years to drift down to "the boys" around campfire time each night and regale the student campers with thrilling, real life yarns of action and adventure in many strange and unusual circumstances. It is not necessary for one to be a rich man's son in order to enjoy the manifold benefits of their Camps. Uncle Sam pays all the necessary bills including transportation, the best of food, bedding, laundry service and medical treatment if needed. And there is no obligation for future military service entailed by attendance at any of these Nation-wide CMT camps. Their primary mission is the upbuilding of American youth in health and good citizenship. Detailed information, together with illustrated literature about the Citizens' Military Training Camp, may be obtained by addressing the CMTC Officer at the U.S. Army post nearest your home. [Advertisement:] The Atom-Smasher _By Victor Rousseau_ [Illustration: _It was sublime and terrible, and on the result of that conflict depended--what?_] [Sidenote: Four destinies rocket through the strange Time-Space of the Fourth Dimension in Tode's marvelous Atom-Smasher.] CHAPTER I _The "Vanishing Place"_ "Look at that plane! That fellow's crazy! Took off with the wind behind him! He'll nose dive before he clears the clubhouse! He'll crash into those trees along the edge of the golf course!" The group on the field at Westbury, Long Island, held their breaths as they watched James Dent take off in the wildest, most erratic flight that they had ever seen. Under lowering storm clouds, with the wind roaring half a hurricane behind him, Dent spiraled upward as if unconscious of the laws of Earthly gravity. "I told you so! You ought to have stopped him, even if it is his private plane! A feller's got no business trying to break his neck! Look there! He's cleared those trees after all!" James Dent had cleared them, and the clubhouse too, and was already disappearing across the Hempstead Plains, looking like a leaf whirling up in a winter storm. At a height of five hundred feet he sped eastward. "Didn't tell you where he was going?" "Nope, acted like a crazy man. Something on his mind sure. Wherever he's bound for, he'll never get there!" * * * * * But James Dent was already out of sight, and the little group dispersed. And Dent, winging his way due east, over the oak barrens of central Long Island, was conscious neither of the storm that howled about him nor of the excitement that his rash take-off had occasioned. The rain lashed him in the open cockpit, the ground fog swirled about him, and, though it was still afternoon, there brooded a somber twilight over the wastes. But in his mind Dent was already anticipating his descent at the "Vanishing Place," as the natives called it near Peconic Bay. The "Vanishing Place" was so called because of the terrible and inexplicable catastrophe that had occurred there five years previously. In the two-century-old farmhouse, Miles Parrish, the world's greatest authority on physical chemistry, had been conducting investigations into the structure of the atom. James Dent and Lucius Tode had been associated with old Parrish in this work, which, carried to a successful issue, would revolutionize the social organization of the world. The energy locked up in the atom is so stupendous that, as Eddington indicated, a thimbleful of coal, disintegrated, would carry the _Mauretania_ from England to America and back again. To unlock this energy would be to set man free from bondage, to restore the pristine leisure and happiness of Eden. * * * * * And because the three men were playing with deadly forces, of incalculable power, this deserted spot had been selected for the carrying on of the investigations. The old farmhouse had been converted into a laboratory. For days together the three had bent over their tubes and laboratory apparatus, hardly eating or sleeping. And the day had come when success had seemed almost within their grasp. Dent had received six months' leave of absence from his duties at Columbia University in order to prosecute the experiments. As the weeks went by, and the blind track that the three were following opened into a clear road, a sort of madness settled upon every one of them. The Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary continuously, but only by a certain finite amount, or exact multiples of this amount, had been the key that unlocked the door. But always it had been Lucius Tode who led the way. Tode was a graduate of the University of Virginia, and accounted one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. At thirty, he stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries. Dark, handsome, fearless, with a will power that nothing seemed able to subdue, he had taken the leadership away from old Miles Parrish, who eagerly and without thought of his own reputation followed in his assistant's footsteps. There were the three men--and there was the girl, Lucille Parrish, the child of Miles's old age. Seventeen, when the catastrophe occurred, she had come out to the deserted spot sometimes of a Sunday from her boarding school at Garden City. And Tode had found time to make love to her when he rushed her back to her school in his high-powered foreign car! Jim Dent had known nothing of that until after the catastrophe. Lucille had been afraid of him, afraid to open her mouth upon the subject even to her father. And she had been fascinated too, as a young girl may well be, when a fascinating man of thirty uses his arts to win her. * * * * * It was only by chance that Jim had failed to be involved in the hideous catastrophe that had stamped the old farmhouse with the name of "Vanishing Place" whenever the natives spoke of it. "Two Killed in Laboratory Explosion!" was the heading in the next morning's paper which gave Jim his first intimation of the accident. He had been to Columbia overnight to look up a new publication that contained an article on the hydrogen spectrum. It was only a long paragraph, and the names of Parrish and Tode meant nothing to the man who had written it. But Jim had taken train to Hempstead, taxied to the flying fields, and essayed his first plane ride to Peconic Bay, in the charge of a pilot. A group of natives, three newspaper men and a Suffolk County policeman were near the spot where the farmhouse had been--near the spot, not on it. For where the farmhouse had been was a great pool of stagnant water, black as ink, covering an expanse of perhaps three-quarters of an acre. "No, sir, there was no explosion," said the officer. "At least, none of these fellows heard anything. Just a--you tell the Professor, Mr. Lumm." "It was about half-past eight last night, Mr. Dent," said Andrew Lumm, who kept the village store a mile away. "Ground seemed to rock. Earthquake, I says to myself, holdin' on to the door. But it wasn't no earthquake. Too gentle for that. Nothin' broke, not even a plate. Then I says to Mrs. Lumm, 'They're gone, poor fellers, and I allus knowed it would be that way. It's lucky young Mr. Dent went out last night on the 7.15.' "We hurried here, but there wasn't no sign of the place, jest a hole on the ground with a sort of sticky mud in it. Water's been fillin' in since then, but I guess it's reached its level now. They jest blowed themselves to bits, Mr. Dent." "Tell him about the vi'let light, Andy," put in one of the bystanders. "Yeah, like a pillar of vi'let fire that were, Mr. Dent. We seed it through the trees, but by the time we got here it was 'most gone. Gosh, that throwed a scare into some of us!" "It was Mr. Tode's soul a-burnin'," squeaked Granpop Dawes. "I allus said that feller'd come to no good end." The group shook their heads and remained silent. It was clear that, if they did not share Granpop Dawes's opinion, at least they considered it not without the bounds of plausibility. Lucius Tode had created a bad impression among the natives. * * * * * Jim Dent stooped and picked up something lying imbedded in the mud at the edge of the black pool, and slipped it into his pocket. He had been present at the inquest and had gone back to Columbia. That had been five years before. Professor McDowd, the palaeontologist, had identified the object Jim had found as the milk molar of _merychippus insignis_, the miocene representative of the modern horse. And that had made Jim Dent think furiously. The catastrophe must have been a gigantic one to have flung up that fossil tooth from strata far beneath the level of the earth's surface. More, there were even traces of archaean deposits around the borders of the pool, whose depth, in the center, was ascertained to be 164 feet. Black, silent, uninhabited, unstirred save by a passing breeze, the pool had remained those five years past. The spot was shunned as haunted or accursed by the superstitious country folks. Dense underbrush had grown up around it. Periodically, Jim had gone out to visit it. That was how he had come to invest in a private plane. It was only an hour to the flying-fields, and less than an hour from there to Peconic Bay. What he expected to achieve he did not know. In the back of his mind was the belief that some day he would light upon some clue that would tell something of the unusual catastrophe. And then that afternoon he had been shaken to the depths when a message came to him in Lucille's voice over the telephone: "I've heard from dad!" * * * * * Winging his way eastward through the storm, Jim Dent was mentally reconstructing all that had led up to the present moment. Lucille had finished her high school course and gone into business life. Jim had found a position for her as secretary to a small group of physicists, who were conducting private investigations, a position for which her training well fitted her. She had done well. He had kept in touch with her. Six months before, their relations had altered. They had realized that they were in love with each other. In the months that followed they had discovered all sorts of things about each other that neither had suspected, which might be summed up by saying that they had become all in all to each other. It was so amazing, this transformation of ordinary friendship into radiant love, that they were still bewildered over it. They were to be married at the end of the year. It was then that Lucille had first told Jim about Lucius's wooing, and her fear of the man. Apart from that, both had refrained, by tacit agreement, from making reference to the past. And then, that afternoon, there sounded Lucille's voice over the telephone, "I've heard from dad!" "From--your father? You're mistaken, dear!" "No, Jim, I'm not mistaken. He called me on the 'phone two hours ago. I couldn't mistake his voice, and, besides, he called me "Lucy," like he used to do. He told me to come at once to the Vanishing Place, but not to tell a soul unless I wished to do him a great evil. Then he rang off." "Where are you now?" asked Jim. "I'm 'phoning from Amityville. I took the train immediately, but I was so frightened, and--and at last I decide I must tell you. I didn't think dad would have minded my telling you. So I got out. There's another train in a few minutes, and I shall go on to Hampton Bays and walk the two miles to the Vanishing Place. I--I'll meet you there." "Lucille, wait! Can't you meet me somewhere else, and we'll go on together. I'll get my plane and--" "Oh, I just can't wait, Jim! I'm in such terror that I won't find dad when I get there. And he told me to tell nobody. I--I'll meet you at the Vanishing Place, Jim." And so great had been her agitation that with that arrangement Jim had had to rest content. He had taken a taxi out to the flying fields at once. * * * * * In half an hour he would know what had happened. And he was obsessed by the terror that he would not find Lucille or anything except the lonely pool. That was why he opened the throttle and drove on wildly through the scurrying wraiths of mist, pierced by the tops of trees that at times rose dangerously near the spreading wings. That gap in the trees was Lake Ronkokoma. Not far now! Jim would know soon. But as he flew, vague fears that had beset his mind since he had received Lucille's message began to crystallize into the single fear of Tode. If Parrish was really alive--why not Tode too? Beneath the polish and the surface comradeship, Jim had always been conscious of some _diablerie_ about the man, of some inner life of which he knew nothing. Something unscrupulous and relentless, something infinitely cruel--as when he had tested the Atom Smasher on a stray cur that had run into the laboratory, not for experimentation, but in mere ruthless savagery, converting the living beast instantly into a shapeless mass of flesh and bone. And Tode had known more about the Atom Smasher--as they affectionately called the mechanism for releasing atomic energy--than old Parrish and he together. Suppose Lucille's story were true! Suppose old Parrish were actually alive, suppose Tode were responsible for some designed scheme which would, in the end place Lucille in his power! Wild thoughts and fears--but Jim would soon know. And with throttle stretched to the limit he went roaring over the scrub oak toward Peconic Bay. * * * * * It was beginning to grow dark, almost too dark for landing. But now Jim could feel the tang of the salt wind upon his face. He slowed down. The fog was as thick as ever, but the scrub oak had given place to more open country. In a minute or two he ought to sight some landmark. Yes, he had overshot his mark, for suddenly, through a gap in the mists, he saw the line of breakers forming a white ridge upon the sand. A mile southward! Jim knew where he was now, for he knew every curve of that shore. He banked and turned. And then he saw something that for an instant chilled his blood. Not far away, and not far beneath him, a ghostly violet haze was spreading through the fog, and the fog itself was coiling back from it until it formed a dense white wall. For a moment Jim's hand was paralysed upon the stick. The next, his decision was made. He closed his throttle and went down in a slow descent right toward the heart of that column of lavender smoke that seemed to be springing straight up out of the ground. "A pillar of violet fire!" It could not have been described better. The plane dived through the dense wall of fog, which for a moment shut out the violet fire completely. Then Jim was through, and almost immediately beneath him lay the black and glassy surface of the pool. Out of the very heart of it rose the fire, burning like some infernal flame that consumed nothing, and between it and the fog was a space of almost translucent air, extending to the borders of the pool. Jim began to circle the pool to find a landing-place. But as he looked down, the surface of the pool began to change its aspect. * * * * * In place of the unruffled calm, it began to work with some devil's yeast all around the central pillar of flame, until its depths seemed to be churned up in frothy masses and the movement extended almost to the circumference. Then the whole surface of the water began to tilt and sway with a slow, shimmering, undulatory movement, as if it was a giant roulette wheel in rotation. And something was materializing out of the heart of the violet flame itself. It was a face--a human face, with bestial features, distorted and enormously magnified through the substance in which it was. Such a face as might look back upon an observer out of one of those distorting mirrors at Coney Island, or some other place of popular amusement, but twisted and enlarged beyond conception, so that it covered half the area of a city block. Curiously blurred, too, as if each atom of that face was in isolated motion on its own account. And beneath the face appeared the vague outlines of a hand, apparently manipulating some sort of infernal mechanism. And that face, enlarged as it was out of all proportion, filled Jim's heart with greater horror than any face he had ever known. For it was the visage of Lucius Tode, and on those huge and distorted features was something that looked like a diabolical smile. * * * * * Everything vanished. Jim was back in the surrounding wall of fog. Instinctively he banked again. He strove to drive the horror from his brain. He must circle, circle incessantly, in the hope of finding Lucille. She must have already arrived. But if she had not fallen into Tode's power, she would hear the roaring of the plane and manage to signal him. He circled back into the clear space between the white and the violet, and now he saw that the effect upon the pool was still more pronounced. The waters were rising up in a rim all around, and yet not overflowing. They were standing up like a bowl of clay upon the potter's wheel, and down in the depths Jim could see the head and shoulders of Tode, much less magnified, more natural in appearance, and less blurred. And Tode was looking up at him and pointing that infernal mechanism at him--something that looked like the tube of a telescope. Suddenly the plane shivered and stood still. The motor died abruptly. The stick went dead. And yet the plane did not fall. As if upheld by the same repulsive force that drove back the white fog, it simply hung suspended three hundred feet above the heart of the violet flame. Then--there was no longer any plane. The stick had melted in Jim's hand, the wings dissolved like wreaths of mist. The entire body had disintegrated into nothingness. Jim sat suspended in the void, and felt himself very slowly descending into the violet column. Down into the vortex of that bubbling pool, which rimmed him on all sides ... down into the central aperture out of which emerged the leering face of Tode! And as he dropped Jim heard, thin, faint, and very far away, the despairing cry of Lucille.... CHAPTER II _Old Friends--and Foes_ Jim must have lapsed into unconsciousness, for when he opened his eyes there was a gap in his consciousness of the passage of time, though none in his memory. He opened his eyes, and instantly he remembered everything. Only a brief interval could have elapsed, for it was not quite dark. The fog and the violet flame had cleared away. Overhead a few stars twinkled. Jim was lying on his side, half-buried in the black, slimy mud of the dried up pool. There was nothing but the smooth, shelving mud basin, with the scrub oak surrounding it. Tode and the machine had vanished. Jim pulled himself with an effort out of the sucking mud, and, heavily clogged with it, began to make his way toward the margin. Stumbling, struggling through the viscid ooze, he shouted Lucille's name despairingly. But no answer came, and his cries only made the utter silence all about him seem more fearsome. Exhausted by his efforts, he gained the edge of the pool at last, and stopped, trying to orientate himself. As he did so, he saw a human face peering at him out of a clump of scrub oak. It was the face of an aged man, with a long white beard and rags of clothes that were festooned about him. Jim took a step toward it, shouting a challenge. Next moment it had hurled itself out of its shelter toward him, and two skeletonlike arms were twined about his shoulders, while the fingers worked upward toward his throat. The face was that of a madman, crazed by fear. And Jim recognized it. It was the face of Professor Parrish. Parrish, the trim, immaculate, clean-shaven, urbane old man, whose lectures, imbued with wit and scholarship, had always been the delight of his classes--Parrish reduced to this gibbering maniac! And yet Parrish himself, returned to the site of their experiments after five years! * * * * * So fierce was the old man's onset, so desperate his clutch, that for a half-minute or more Jim was reduced to fighting for his life. The clawing fingers, armed with long nails, furrowed Jim's throat, there was a terrific strength in the body, wasted though it was almost to a skeleton. But it was only for a half-minute that old Parrish's endurance lasted. Suddenly the old man went limp and tottered forward, dropped upon the ground. Jim bent over him. "Parrish, you know me! I'm Jim Dent!" he cried. "I came here to save you." Parrish was muttering something. Jim caught the words "Tode," and "God help Lucille!" "Parrish, I'm Jim Dent!" Jim cried again, and the old man, shuddering, opened his eyes and recognized him. "Jim!" he muttered. "Jim Dent! Then where is she? I got away from that devil, found farmhouse empty, got telephone book, found her and 'phoned her. Told her to come. Save--Lucille!" He fell back, his eyes closed. Jim crouched over the unconscious old man. He was in a state of utter perplexity. He could not quite gather what Parrish had been trying to tell him, and it was with difficulty that he could focus his mind upon the situation, so great had been the shock of finding his former chief in that condition. What had become of his plane, and where was Lucille? Jim was positive that he had heard her cry for help out of the vortex in the water. But there was no water, only the circle of black mud extended in the starlight. Again and again Jim shouted Lucille's name, and his cries went echoing away through the scrub without result. Jim looked down at the unconscious old man beside him. He must get Parrish away, get him to Andy Lumm's. He bent over him again and raised him in his arms. * * * * * Suddenly he heard two familiar sounds behind him, two dull thumps that sounded less like explosions than echoes, long drawn out, and receding into infinity. There was no other sound quite like them that he had ever heard. They were the snap of the electrical discharge as the Atom Smasher began to operate, and why the snap had sounded like a heavy body falling a long distance away, was not known. Tode had said one day, with what Jim had taken for sarcasm, that they represented the wave series of a single sound extended in time to make four-dimensional action, but Jim had never considered the explanation seriously. That sound, bringing back all Jim's memories of their experiments, brought him to his feet sharply. He swung around. The surface of the pool was a bubbling, seething mass of mud and water. And over its surface that faint violet haze was beginning to spread. In the center where the light was thickest, something like a gyroscope appeared to be revolving. Out of the gyroscope something was beginning to project--that infernal tube of Lucius Tode. And Jim knew that in the heart of the flame that enormous, distorted face of Lucius Tode would again be visible. The human nervous system can only endure a certain amount of impact. The sight of that ghastly flame, already condensing into a violet pillar, was more than Jim could stand. He dragged old Parrish to his feet and started off with him into the thickest part of the undergrowth. A fearful scream behind him stopped him at the very edge of the scrub. He looked back, still supporting the half-conscious old man in his arms. The violet flame was shooting up in a straight pillar, the whole central portion of the pool was dry, and the waters were heaped up all around it. From the slightly elevated spot where Jim stood, he could see Tode holding Lucille in his arms in the very heart of the fire, which threw a pale, fluorescent light over their faces. Tode was wearing a spotted skin, like that of a leopard, and Lucille was in the blue frock that she had worn when Jim and she had dinner together two evenings before. Jim dropped old Parrish, shouted in answer, and dashed back like a madman down the slope into the solid wall of water. * * * * * He fought his way desperately through that wall, which seemed of the consistency of soft rubber or treacle, as if some subtle change had taken place in its molecular isomers. It adhered to him without wetting him, and he plunged through it, hearing Lucille cry out again, and yet again. And now he was through, and once more struggling over the viscid surface of the pond. Behind him he heard old Parrish blundering, and screeching at the top of his voice, but he paid no attention to him. He could see Lucille more clearly, and the large, hazy outlines of Tode's features were beginning to assume the proper proportions. There was a diabolical leer upon Tode's face, unchanged during the five years since Jim had seen him last, except that it had become more evil, more powerful. The enormous and distorted face that Jim had seen had been simply due to the presence of some refracting medium. The pillar of violet light was thinning, spreading out over the pool, but Jim could now see the scene more clearly than before, even as he rushed onward. The machine was inside what looked like a flat boat, but more circular than a boat, and apparently was made of some metal resembling aluminum. Either from the metal hull or from the mechanism inside it there was emitted a pungent odor resembling chlorine. The mechanism itself bore some resemblance to the old Atom Smasher of five years before, but it appeared to be immensely more complicated. Wheels of various sizes were set at every conceivable angle around the central tube, from which the violet light was emanating, and all were rotating and gyrating so fast that they looked like discs of light. The boat itself was trembling, and this movement appeared to be communicated to the boiling mud in the central part of the pool. * * * * * As Jim tried to leap down through the sucking mud to snatch Lucille from Tode, the latter stopped, straightened himself, and pointed a short tube at Jim's heart. Jim felt as if an enormous, invisible force had struck him in the chest. It was apparently the same repulsive force that had driven back the waters. The shock was not a violent one. It did not throw him off his feet. It merely pushed him slowly and irresistibly backward. And the whole picture was beginning to fade. Etched sharply in the violet light one moment, it now looked like a drawing that had been covered with tissue paper. The outlines were dissolving into a haze--or, rather, each line seemed reproduced an infinite number of times, as the edge of a vibrating saw shows an infinitude of edges. The violet fire was becoming still more diffused. It hovered over the waters, a pale, flickering glow. And simultaneously the walls of water began to break and come surging forward. Jim saw Lucille stretching out her arms toward him, and tried to struggle forward, but in vain. She cried out his name, and he put all his strength into that desperate futile struggle to reach her. But he was being borne backward by the invisible power in the tube. The rushing torrent was surging about his knees; grew waist deep: in another moment Jim was swimming for his life against the furious flood. Suddenly, however, the tremendous pressure on his chest was relaxed. Tode had turned the tube away from him. He was leaning forward out of the boat and grasped old Parrish, who had been flung violently against it by the dissolving waters. The same flood carried Jim to the boat's side. Here, however, the flood was only knee deep, owing to the repulsion still being exercised by the violet light, which was glimmering feebly. Jim found his feet and leaped into the craft. He grasped Lucille in his arms. * * * * * He turned to confront Tode, who had just dragged old Parrish over the side. The three men confronted one another. "Turn that tube on me, and I'll jump into your damn machinery and bust it!" Jim shouted. An ironical expression came on Tode's face. It was clear that he still considered himself master of the situation. "At the immediate moment, Dent, the lives of all of us depend upon your keeping absolutely still," he answered. "Take my advice and sit down!" Jim saw Lucille's face, ghastly in the faint violet light that played about it. The girl had fainted. She was lying unconscious, her feet against the circular metal plate that protected the machinery, her head upon the rail that ran around the boat's upper edge. Tode, without waiting for Jim's answer, stepped over the plate and took his seat at a sort of instrument board with control levers and thumb screws that apparently controlled the needles on four dials. He touched a button, and instantly the violet light disappeared. With its vanishing, the waves came surging forward, and lapped violently against the hull, as if about to overwhelm the vessel, which, however, seemed immovable. It simply rose higher in the water. Jim understood the cause of this. Those gyroscopes would retain the hull in the same position against anything but a mechanical force strong enough to ruin it. He watched Tode as he sat at the instrument board, which was illuminated by two tiny lights of what looked like mercury-vapor. His face, handsome and cruel as ever, was tense as he manipulated the thumb screws. Beside him lay Parrish, faintly whimpering. The old man had evidently abandoned all hope of effecting his escape, or of rescuing his daughter. It was unbearable to have to sit there, knowing that the three of them were absolutely at Tode's mercy, and yet there was nothing else to do. * * * * * Tode looked up with a saturnine smile. "It's a delicate operation to blur the present without shooting out a hundred years or so in time," he said, "but my micrometer's pretty accurate, Dent. Don't move, I caution you!" He smiled again. "Yes, Dent, time is something like the fourth dimension of space, as we believed in the old days, and I've proved it." Jim saw Tode touch the screw that controlled the fourth dial, and instantly it was borne in on him that each of the dials controlled one spatial dimension. This fourth, then, was the time dimension! Could it be true that Tode had solved the practical problem of traveling in time, theoretically implied since the discoveries of Einstein? He had known in the old days that the Atom Smasher might be adapted to this purpose, but neither Parrish nor he had dreamed of turning aside from their endeavor to utilize it for the purpose of releasing atomic energy. Thump! Thump! The familiar old sound, rushing back into memory after all those years, the release of the electrical discharge, echoing through infinity! The scrub around the pool blurred and was gone. A vast gray panorama extended itself on either side of them. They were travelling--in space--and time too. Jim no longer doubted. And, chilled with horror, he sat there, his arm about Lucille's unconscious form. CHAPTER III _Into the Infinite_ How long he sat there he did not know. Minutes or hours seemed all the same to him. Nothing but that gray monochrome, of neither light nor darkness, that endless panorama of miles and years, blended together into this chaos! But suddenly there came a shout from Tode. The blur ceased, the lights flickered. Again there sounded the two thumps of the electrical discharge. The vibrating mechanism grew steady. Above them, out of the grayness, a moon disclosed itself, then the pin-points of stars. All about them was an immense, sandy waste. "Know where we are, Dent?" came Tode's chuckle. Jim was not sufficiently master of himself to attempt to answer. "We are on what will be the Russian steppes some fifty thousand years ahead of us in time," grinned Tode. "This is an interlude between two ice ages. Observe how pleasantly warm the climate is, for Russia. Unfortunately the receding glaciers carried off the top-soil, which accounts for the barrenness of the district, but in another century this country will be overgrown with ferns, and inhabited by the mastodon and wild horse, and a few enterprising palaeolithic hunters, who will come in to track them down and destroy them with their stone axes." * * * * * "I think you're the same sort of damn liar you always were, Tode," answered Jim--but without conviction. There was something terrific about that desolation. Nothing within a thousand miles of Long Island corresponded to it. "You'll be convinced pretty quickly, when you see my specimen," answered Tode. "I let him off here on the way to the pool. He's not exactly presentable, and when I got the idea of picking up Lucille and taking her back with me, I thought it best not to let her see him. He didn't want to be let off. Was afraid I wouldn't pick him up again, and I'll admit it was a matter of pretty careful reckoning. But this is the place, almost to the yard. "Yes, I've done some close reckoning, Dent, but the cleverest part of the business was letting old Parrish think he'd got away from me. I knew he'd telephone Lucille. You know, I always had the brains of the outfit, Dent," he continued, with a smirk of self-satisfaction. He looked out of the boat. "And here, if I'm not mistaken, comes my specimen," he added. * * * * * Something was running across the steppes toward them. It came nearer, took human form. It was human! A man--but such a man as Jim had never seen before outside the covers of a book. And he recognised the race immediately. It was a Neanderthal man, one of the race that co-existed with the highly developed Cro-Magnons some thirty thousand years ago. Man and not ape, though the face was bestial, and there were huge ridges above the eyebrows. And if Jim had needed conviction, the sight of this gibbering creature, now climbing into the boat and fawning upon Tode, convinced him. For the Neanderthal man vanished from the scene long before the beginning of recorded history. For a few moments a deathly faintness overcame him ... his eyes closed, he felt unconsciousness rushing in upon him like a black cloud. "It's all right, Dent--don't look so scared!" came Tode's mocking voice. Jim opened his eyes, shook off that cloud of darkness with an immense effort. The boat was throbbing violently as the wheels gyrated, the violet light had become a pillar as thick as a man, and shot straight up to a height of fifty feet, before it rolled away. Lucille was lying where she had been, her eyes still staring up unseeing at the stars. Old Parrish was whining and whimpering as he crouched in his place. And at Tode's feet crouched the Neanderthal man, repulsive, bestial, even though hardly formidable, and filling the last vacant spot inside the boat. He was gibbering and mouthing as he fawned upon Tode and pressed his hand to his hairy face. He continued to crouch and looked up at his master with doglike eyes. * * * * * Repulsive, and yet man, not ape. Distinctly human, perhaps a little lower than the Australian aborigine, the Neanderthal showed by his reverence that the human faculty of worship existed in him. "Meet Cain, one of my Drilgoes," said Tode, with a grin. "A faithful servant. I left him here to wait for me on the return journey. Cain's just my pet name for him because he subsists on the fruits of the earth, don't you, Cain?" The Drilgo grunted, and pressed Tode's hand to his repulsive lips, which were fringed with a reddish beard. Suddenly Tode began to laugh uproariously. "Feel anything wrong with your head, Dent?" he asked. Dent put up his hand and pulled away a quantity of charred hair. His forehead began to itch, and, rubbing his finger across it, he realized that his eyebrows were gone. Tode laughed still louder. "You've kept your teeth by about two seconds' grace, Dent, but I shouldn't be surprised if you needed dental attention shortly," he said. "What a pity dentists won't be invented for another forty or fifty thousand years." "You're a devil!" cried Jim. "You see, the human body is very resistant to the Ray," Tode went on. "It almost seems as if there is an organizing principle within it. Even the animal tissues are resistant, though not to the same extent as the human ones. It takes about twenty seconds for the organized human form to be disintegrated. But hair and beaks and claws, being superficial matter, vanish almost as soon as the Ray is turned on them. Ten seconds more, and you'd have been obliterated, Dent, just as your plane was. "Yes, rub your head. Your hair will probably grow again--if I decide to let you live. It rather depends upon what impression you make upon Lucille as a bald-headed hero. After all, I didn't invite you to accompany us. It's your own lookout." * * * * * Jim could find nothing to say to that. He was discovering more and more that they were all helpless in Tode's hands. "Sit back!" snarled Tode suddenly. He gave the Drilgo a push that sent him sprawling into the bottom of the boat. "Dent, your life depends upon your absolute acquiescence to my proposals. I didn't like you particularly in the old days, any more than you liked me. I thought you were a fool. On the other hand, I've no active reason to hate you, at present. It may be that I can use you. "Meanwhile we've got a longish journey before us, ten thousand years more, multiplied by the fourth power of two thousand miles. Seems simple? Well, I had to invent the mathematical process for it. Reckon in the gravitational attraction of the planets, and you'll begin to get an idea of the complexity of it. So, in vulgar parlance, we're not likely to arrive till morning." He glanced at Lucille, who was still lying unconscious with Jim's arm about her. Then his eyes rose to meet Jim's, and a sneering smile played about his lips. That smile was the acknowledgment of their rivalry for the girl's affections. And it was more--it was a challenge. Tode welcomed that rivalry because, Jim could see, he meant to keep him alive under conditions of servitude, to demonstrate to Lucille his superiority. Tode turned his thumbscrews, and the two thuds resounded. The violet column sank down, the boat vibrated, the level stretch of land became a blur again. The moon and stars vanished. Once more the four were off on that terrific journey. * * * * * At first they seemed to be traversing space that was shot through by alternate light and darkness, so that at times Jim could see the other occupants of the boat clearly, while at other times there was only Tode visible at the instrument board, with the dark outlines of the Drilgo, Cain, sprawled at his feet. But soon these streaks seemed to come closer and closer together, until the duration of each was only a fraction of a second. And closer, until light and darkness blended into a universal gray. These, Jim knew, were the alternations of night and day. They were traveling--incredible as it was--in time as well as space, though whether backward or forward Jim could not know. From the presence of the Neanderthal man, however, Jim was convinced that Tode was taking them back more thousands of years, into the beginnings of humanity. A fearful journey! A madder journey than Jim could have conceived of, had he not been a participant in it. He was losing all sense of reality. He was hardly convinced that he would not awaken in New York, to discover that the whole episode had been a dream. Was this Lucille, the girl he loved ... with whom he had dined in New York only a day or two before ... this unconscious form, stretched out on the deck of the weird ship that was rushing through eternity? Or, rather, it was they who were rushing through space and time upon a stationary ship! What was reality, and what was dream, then? Tode called "Come over here, Dent! I want to talk to you!" * * * * * Jim picked his way over the metal floor of the round boat, came up to Tode, and sat down beside him above the sprawling form of the Drilgo, Cain. "You were a fool to come here, Dent." Tode turned with a malicious smile from his seat at the instrument board. "You didn't have to come. I take it that you are in love with Lucille, you poor imbecile, and still cherish dreams of winning her. We'll take up that matter in due course. "Do you think I've been idle during these five years of my exile? I've been too busy even to come back for the woman I was in love with. And do you know what I've been doing during all this hellish period? Charting courses, Dent! Mapping out all the planetary movements back for uncounted ages--roughly, crudely, of course, but the best I was able to. These are difficult seas to navigate, though they may not seem so. You fool," he added savagely, "why didn't you come in with me in the old days? I told you that the Atom Smasher could be used to travel through time, and you mocked at me as a dreamer. "I chose my hour. When everything was ready, I set forth on the most desperate journey ever attempted by man. Talk of Columbus!--he had nothing on me. I tell you, Dent, I've been back to the Archaean Age, back to the time when nothing but crawling worms moved on the face of the earth. And I've been forward to the time when an errant planet will disrupt the earth into a shower of lava--and I nearly wrecked the boat. Dent. "I've won, Dent! I've won! I've solved the problem that gives man immortality! All the epochs that have existed since God first formed the world are mine to play with! I have seen myself as a puling infant, and as a greybeard. I have made myself immortal, because, with this machine, I can set back the clock of time. I have found a land where I am worshipped as a god." * * * * * Tode's eyes glittered with maniacal fires. He went on in a voice of indescribable triumph: "I'm a god there, Dent. Do you want to know where that land is? It is Atlantis, sunk beneath the waves nine thousand years before recorded history opened. It is Atlantis, from which the Cro-Magnons fled in their ships, to land on the coasts of Spain and France, and become the ancestors of modern man. "In old Atlantis, still not wholly submerged, I have made myself a god. I have mastered the savage Drilgoes whom the Atlanteans oppressed. All the spoils of their ruined cities are at my disposal. And I came back to get Lucille, whom I had never ceased to love. Together Lucille and I will rule like god and goddess. "Join me, Dent. I'm a god in Atlantis--a god, I tell you. The lesser races fear me as a supernatural being. Only the city remains uncaptured, but it is mine whenever I choose to take it. A god--a god--a god!" Jim saw now what he had not realized before, that Tode was insane. It would, indeed, have been a miracle if he had been able to retain his sanity under such circumstances as he had described. His voice rose into a wild scream. Yes, Tode was mad--just such a madman as any of the old Roman emperors, drunk with power, each in his turn the sole ruler of the world. "The Earth is mine!" Tode screamed. "Before the modern world was dreamed of, before the nations were created, Atlantis was the sole power that held dominion over the scattered tribes of mankind. And she is in my hand whenever I strike. "Wealth incalculable, treasures such as man has never since seen, marvels of scientific discovery, flying machines that would make ours look foolish, paintings grander than have since been executed--all these things exist in the proud city that will shortly be at my command. And I have my Drilgoes, the inferior race, to serve me. They worship me because they know I am a god. Join me, Dent, and taste the joys of being one of the supreme rulers of the world." * * * * * In spite of his undoubted madness, there was such power in Tode's voice that Jim could not help believe what he had said. "Well," snarled Tode. "You hesitate to give me your answer, Dent?" "Lucille and I are engaged to be married," answered Jim, and the words were drawn from his lips almost against his will. "We love each other. I am not going to lie to you and then betray you, Tode." The expression on Tode's face was demoniacal. He snatched up the deadly tube that contained the violet fire and turned it upon Jim. Again Jim felt that repulsive force pushing him back. He gasped for breath, and tensed his whole body in supreme resistance, while he tried to grapple with Tode in vain. But suddenly Tode dropped the tube, and a roar of laughter broke from his lips. "You fool!" he shouted. "I tell you I am a god, the one god, supreme above all. Do you think to match your puny will against my own? I tell you Lucille is mine. And for ever, Dent. Whenever we two have reached old age, all that will be necessary for us to do will be to turn this screw a hair's breadth back into the past, and we are both young again. By holding this vessel steady in four-dimensional space, I can achieve immortality." "Yes, Tode," answered Jim, "but, you see, that's the one thing that you haven't been able to work out yet." The words seemed to come automatically from Jim's lips. It was only after he had spoken them that he realized they were true. For a moment Tode glared at him; then suddenly, with a shriek of insane rage, he leaped from the instrument board and swung the ray tube with all his might. Jim felt the blow descend with stunning force upon his head. He reeled, flung out his arms, and toppled forward, unconscious.... CHAPTER IV _Escape_ An intolerably bright light that seemed to sear his eyeballs was the first thing of which Jim was conscious. Then he became aware of his aching head, of a sense of utter lassitude, as if he had been bruised all over in some machine that had caught him up and held him in its grip for endless aeons. At last, despite the pain in his eyes, he managed to get his eyelids open. He tried to struggle to his feet, only to discover that he was firmly bound with what appeared to be tough creepers, pliant as ropes. After the lapse of a few minutes, during which he struggled with the receding waves of unconsciousness, he came to a realization of his surroundings. That light that had so distressed him--though the effects were now beginning to pass off--was a pillar of smoke and flame, shooting out of the crater of a volcano about a mile away, across a valley. He was lying in the entrance to a cave, pegged out on his back, and bound by the tough creepers to the stakes driven into the ground. Up to the mouth of the cave grew huge tree-ferns, cattails, cycads, and such growths as existed in earlier ages in the warm, moist regions of the world. Beneath the level of the cave a heavy white fog completely shrouded the valley, extending up to within a short distance of the volcano opposite. But on the upper slopes of the volcano the sunlight played, making its crater a sheen of glassy lava, intolerably bright. Beyond the volcano Jim could see what looked like an expanse of ocean. * * * * * He groaned, and at the sound a creature came shambling forward, carrying what looked like a huge melon in either hand. Jim recognized the Drilgo, Cain. Chattering and mumbling, Cain placed one of the fruits to Jim's mouth. It was a sort of bread-fruit, but he was too nauseated to eat, and rejected it with disgust. Cain offered him the second fruit. It was a hollow gourd, the interior filled with a clear fluid. Jim drank greedily as the Drilgo put it to his lips. The contents were like water, but slightly acid. Jim felt refreshed. He looked about him. The Drilgo uttered a chattering call, and immediately a host of the savages swarmed into the cave. Men--undoubtedly men, in spite of the brow ridges and the receding foreheads, carrying long spears, consisting of chipped and pointed heads of stone, with holes bored in them, through which long bands of creepers passed, fastening them firmly to the shaft. Chattering and gesticulating, the Drilgoes surrounded Jim as he lay helpless on the ground. Their savage faces, their rolling eyes, the threatening gestures that they made with their spears, convinced Jim that his end was a foregone conclusion. But suddenly a distant rumbling sound was heard, increasing rapidly in volume. The floor of the cave vibrated; masses of rock dropped from the walls. The light of the volcano across the valley was suddenly obscured in an immense cloud of black smoke. The twilight within the cave was succeeded by almost impenetrable darkness. Shrieking in terror, the Drilgoes bolted, while Jim lay straining at his ropes, expecting each moment to be crushed by the masses of rock that were falling all about him. Suddenly a soft whisper came to Jim through the darkness: "Jim! Are you safe! Where are you? I can't see you! Speak to me!" It was Lucille's voice, and Jim called back, husky and tremulous in the sheer joy that had succeeded his anticipation of instant death. * * * * * Then he felt the girl kneeling at his side, and heard her hacking at his bonds. A whole minute passed before the stone knife was able to sever the last of the stout withes, however. Then Jim was swaying on his feet, and Lucille's arms were about him, and for a few moments their fears were forgotten in the renewal of their love. "I heard what that devil said to you last night," the girl said. "He means to kill you with awful tortures. He is away now, on some task or other, but he'll be back at any moment. We must get away at once--we three. Dad's in another cave not far away, and his guards bolted after the earthquake." The earth was still rumbling, and the cavern still vibrating, but it was clear that there was no time to lose. As soon as the quake subsided the Drilgoes would return. Guided by Lucille, Jim groped his way through the cavern. The girl called softly at intervals, and presently Jim heard old Parrish's answering call. Then the old man's form appeared in silhouette against the dark. "I've got Jim," Lucille whispered. "Are you ready, dad?" "Yes, yes, I'm ready," chattered the old man. "Now's our chance. I know a place where we can hide in the thick forests, where the Ray of the Atlanteans cannot penetrate the mists. Let's go! Let's go!" Gripping hands, the three started back toward the point where a faint patch of darkness showed out the entrance to the cavern. They were nearing it when another and more violent shock flung them upon their faces. Huge masses of rock came hurtling down from the roof and sides of the cavern, and again the three seemed to escape by a miracle. * * * * * Suddenly a huge shaft of fire shot from the crater opposite, evolving into an inverted cone that made the whole land dazzlingly bright. It pierced the mists in the valley underneath, and by that light Jim could see a great wave of lava streaming down the mountain sides, like soup spilled out of a bowl. A gush of black smoke followed, and the light went out. "Now!" gasped Parrish, and, clinging to one another, the three darted out of the cavern's entrance. Another terrific shock sent them stumbling and reeling and sprawling down the side of the mountain. Jim heard old Parrish wailing, and, as the shock subsided, groped his way to his side. "You hurt?" he shouted. "Lucille, Lucille," moaned the old man. "She's dead! A big rock crushed her. I wish I was dead too." Jim called Lucille's name frantically, and to his immense relief heard her crying faintly out of the darkness. He rushed to her side and held her in his arms. "Where are you hit, darling?" "I'm--all right," she panted. "I was stunned for a moment. I--can--go on now." But she went limp in Jim's arms, and Jim picked her up and stood irresolute, until he heard Parrish shambling toward him over the heaving ground. "She's not hurt, I think, only fainted," said Jim. "Which way, Parrish? You lead us." "Down the slope," panted Parrish. "We'll be in the ferns in a minute. We can hide there for a while, till she's able to walk. God help us all! And I was once Professor of Physical Chemistry at Columbia!" The outcry might have seemed comical under other circumstances; as it was, Jim heartily re-echoed old Parrish's sentiments in his heart. The last shock was subsiding in faint earth tremors. The two men plunged down into the heavy fog, which quickly covered them, Jim carrying Lucille in his arms. He felt the ferny undergrowth all about him, the thick boles of tree-ferns emerged out of the mist. "We can stop here for a while," panted Parrish. "Crouch down! They'll never find us in this fog, and in a few minutes, when Lucille's better, we can go on." * * * * * "You must tell me where we are and what our chances are," said Jim, after again ascertaining that Lucille was unharmed. "I'll tell you, Dent, as quick as I can. It's the place where I've spent five years of hell as the slave of that devil, Tode. I never dreamed, when we were working on the old Atom Smasher, that he had adapted it to travel in the fourth dimension. He's taken us back twelve thousand years or so to the island of Atlantis. History hasn't begun yet. Atlantis is the only civilization in the world. The rest are Drilgoes, Neanderthal men, wandering in the forests, and still in their stone age. "It's true, Dent, what old Plato learned from the Egyptian priests. Atlantis has been slowly sinking for thousands of years, and all that's left now is the one great island that we're on. Nearly all the Atlanteans, the Cro-Magnon men, have perished, except for a few who have crossed in ships to the coasts of France and Spain. They'll be the founders of modern Europe--Basques and Iberians, and Bretons and Welshmen. Our ancestors! It makes my brain reel to think of it!" "Go on! Go on!" said Jim. "There's a great city on the island, known as Atlantis too. As big as London or New York. With flying-machines and temples and art galleries and big ships that they're building to carry them away when the next subsidence comes. They know they're doomed, for every few days there's an eruption now. "Tode means to make himself master of Atlantis, and transport it into another epoch by means of the Atom Smasher. But he's never managed to enter. He's made himself a god in the eyes of the Drilgoes, the savages who inhabit these forests. He's planning to lead them against the city, and he's got an army of thousands from all parts of the interior, who worship him as divine. * * * * * "The Atlanteans are unwarlike. They've forgotten how to fight in their thousands of years of peace. But they've got a Ray ten times as strong as Tode's, that brings instant death to everything it touches. It shrivels it up. It's a different principle. I don't understand it, but it's this Ray that keeps the Drilgoes from capturing the city. "Tode's got a laboratory inside the cave, fitted up with apparatus that he brought from Chicago, the world capital of the year 3000 A. D., after disintegrating the atoms and recombining them. But he hasn't succeeded altogether. He hasn't learned everything. The future isn't quite clear, like the past. There's a dark cloud moves across the spectral lines and blurs them. I think it's the element of free will--or God!" "I know," Jim answered. "He can't hold that boat steady in four-dimensional space, as he pretends he can. If he could, it would mean that man was wholly master of his destiny. He can't and he never will. "There's an unknown quantity comes in, Parrish. It is God, and that's what's going to beat him in the end." "I've not been as idle as Tode thinks," said Parrish, with a senile leer. "I know more about the Atom Smasher than he dreams of. He thinks me just an old fool, the remnants of whose brains are useful to him in his laboratory. That's why he's kept me alive so far. He'll find out his mistake," he chuckled. "I have something Tode doesn't dream of." Suddenly Parrish's air of intense seriousness vanished. He chuckled and fumbled in his rags. Jim felt a small object like a lever pressed into his hand and then withdrawn. "It's death, Dent," chuckled old Parrish. "The concentrated essence of the destructive principle. It's a lever I fitted into a concealed groove in the Atom Smasher unknown to Tode. This lever has a universal joint and connects with a hidden chamber, and when pulled will catapult the annihilated components of a small quantity of uranium in any direction we desire. The release of the slumbering energy of this uranium will produce an explosion of proportions beyond the wildest dreams of engineers--perhaps, one great enough to throw the Earth out of its orbit!" "Uranium!... Breaking up its components!" gasped Jim. "You mean you can actually do that?" "Yes!" chuckled Parrish. "I'm keeping it for the day when Tode becomes a god. When he's steadied the boat in time-space and halted the march of the past, and when he's got Lucille--then, Dent, I shall so pull the lever that it will release the energy straight at Tode--and destroy the Atom-Smasher, ourselves, and even, perhaps, the whole Earth!" And he burst into a peal of such wild laughter that Jim realized the old man's wits were gone. * * * * * Was it true, that amazing story? It was difficult to know, and yet anything seemed possible in this amazing world into which Jim had suddenly been thrown. The vast pall of smoke cast out by the volcano was beginning to subside. Slowly a spectral light began to filter through the valley. Through the fog Jim could see glimpses of the ferny undergrowth, the giant tree-ferns and cycads that towered aloft. It was like a picture of the earth when the mastodons, the grass-eaters and the meat-eaters disputed for its supremacy. Jim bent over Lucille. He saw her stir, he heard her murmur his name. Suddenly she sat up, fixed her eyes on his, and shuddered. "I'm all right, Jim. Let's go," she said. "I can walk now." She staggered to her feet. Jim put out his hand to support her, but she shook her head. Jim touched old Parrish on the arm. He started and uttered a wild screech; then seemed to come to himself and rose. But that screech of his was re-echoed from the mountainside above. Other voices took up the echoes. Lucille clutched at Jim in a frenzy of fear. "The Drilgoes!" she whispered. "They're on our trail!" Seizing old Parrish by the arm, Jim started to drag him into the recesses of the fern forest. Suddenly the bestial face of a Drilgo appeared. A yell broke from the man's throat. The hairy arm shot back. Jim saw the stone tip of the long spear poised overhead. He leaped forward, delivering a blow in the man's midriff with all the strength of his right arm. * * * * * The Drilgo grunted and doubled forward, the spear falling from his hand. The heavy head of stone embedded itself in the soft ground, so that the spear remained upright. As the man collapsed he yelled at the top of his voice. "This way! This way!" gibbered old Parrish, suddenly alert. But now the undergrowth all about them was alive with Drilgoes. The three dodged and doubled like hunted hares. High overhead something began to clack with a sound like that made by a woodpecker drilling a tree, but infinitely louder. And out of the void above came Tode's voice, shouting commands to the Drilgoes in their own language. Suddenly a column of fire shot up from the volcano, infusing the white mists with a reddish glare. Overhead the three could see Tode. He was flying with a pair of mechanical wings strapped to his shoulders, not more than two hundred feet above them. With a shout of triumph he swooped down. In his hand was a small cylinder, about the mouth of which a phosphorescent violet light was beginning to play. "I've got you, Dent," he screamed in triumph, hovering above the three, while the wings drummed and vibrated till they seemed the mere play of light and shadow about Tode's shoulders. "Halt, or I'll blast your body and soul to hell! Halt, or I'll kill _her_!" The deadly tube was pointing steadily at Lucille's body as Tode hovered ten feet overhead, perfectly still save for the whirring wings. The three stopped dead, and Tode, with a shout of triumph, began calling the Drilgoes, who swarmed forward out of the undergrowth. Huge brown bodies, nude save for their skins of jungle-cat or serpent, they emerged, quickly forming a ring about the three prisoners. Tode fluttered to the ground. "Fools, did you think you could escape that way?" he asked. "As for you, Dent. I'm going to convince you of the reality of four-dimensional space as you would not be convinced in the old days. Do you know what I'm going to do with you? I'm going to strip the skin from you with the ray, and take you into the anatomical room at Columbia University and leave you there as an exhibit, Dent!" Tode grinned like a madman. But Jim was looking past him, at something that had suddenly appeared upon the far horizon. * * * * * It was a round disc of bluish white, a disc like the moon, but slightly smaller, a disc that flickered as if it had an eyelid that was being winked repeatedly. Simultaneously screams broke from the throats of all the Drilgoes. They stampeded. Tode whirled about and saw. With a curse he leaped into the air and whirred away. Out of that disc a slender, blue-white beam shot suddenly, driving a pathway through the fog, and disclosing the dark depths of the valley. "The Eye! The Eye!" screeched Parrish. "Down on the ground! Down! Down!" He dropped, and Jim caught Lucille and flung himself headlong with her. To and fro overhead, but only a few feet above them, moved the searchlight. Shrieks broke from the Drilgoes' throats as they scattered through the jungle. Everywhere that ray moved, trees and undergrowth simply disappeared. A bunch of Drilgoes, caught by it, were obliterated in an instant. Great gaps were left through the undergrowth as the ray passed. It faded as quickly as it had come, and instantly old Parrish was on his feet, dragging at his daughter. "Now! Now!" he babbled, heading along one of the burned tracks through the undergrowth. Jim seized Lucille and the two raced in the wake of old Parrish. Behind them they could hear the Drilgoes shouting, but a dense, impenetrable darkness was already beginning to settle down over the valley. They lost the track and went crashing through the ferns, on and on until all was silence about them. Suddenly Parrish went down like a log. He lay breathing heavily, completely exhausted. When Jim spoke to him a feeble muttering was the only answer. Jim and Lucille dropped to the ground exhausted beside him. CHAPTER V _The Eye of Atlantis_ For perhaps half an hour the three lay there, hearing nothing. It seemed to be night, for the darkness was impenetrable, save for the lurid flashes of fire from the volcano. Parrish, who was slowly recovering his strength, was mumbling incessantly. It was with difficulty that Jim recalled him to a realization of his surroundings. "Where is the city of Atlantis?" he asked him. "Over there," mumbled Parrish. "Behind the volcano. Why do you ask me?" "I'm thinking of going there." "Eh? Going there? You're mad. The Eye will see you, the Eye that can see for a hundred miles. They'll turn the Ray on you. Nothing is too small for the Eye. And they watch night and day." "The Eye is off now." "It's never off. The Eye is dark. It grows white only when they are about to use the Ray. Perhaps the Eye is watching us now." "Nevertheless," said Jim, "I think we would do well to try to enter the city. We can't live here in the jungle at the mercy of these Drilgoes." "It is impossible to enter. All strangers are killed by the Atlanteans." "Dad," interposed Lucille, "I think we'd better do what Jim suggests. One of us must decide." "My idea is that you take us to some place where we can get a view of the city," said Jim. "Then we can make up our minds what to do. We've got to get somewhere out of this jungle." * * * * * Parrish rose to his feet, mumbling. "If we go round the base of the volcano we can see Atlantis," he said. "It's always light there. In the daytime they drive away the fogs by some means they've got, and at night they have an artificial sun. But we'll be killed, we'll all be killed." Mumbling and muttering, he began groping his way through the undergrowth in the direction of the volcano, whose flashes were again becoming more frequent, affording a means of directing their route. Obscure rumblings were again beginning to shake the earth. For an hour the three picked their way steadily upward through the ferns, until the ground became more open. They were approaching the base of the volcano, whose side now towered above them, the upper part glassy with vitreous lava. Suddenly Parrish, who was still leading, stopped and began to tremble with fear. Stepping to his side, Jim heard the low muttering of voices not far away. Very cautiously he moved forward through the thin fern scrub, until the glow of burning embers caught his sight. He stopped, hearing the voices more distinctly, and again moved forward. Three Drilgoes, huge, bestial men, and evidently an outpost, were squatting around the ashes, devouring something with noisy gusto. Softly as Jim had moved, their acute ears had caught the sound of his footsteps. They rose, still holding what they were eating in their hands, and, grasping their stone spears, moved in three separate ways toward the edge of the clearing. The man nearest Jim uttered a guttural exclamation and, after sniffing a moment, began to lope in his direction. Suddenly he stopped short, petrified with astonishment and fear at the sight of a man who, instinct told him, was neither Atlantean nor of his own kind. * * * * * Jim leaped, tackling him about the knees, and brought him heavily to the ground. As the Drilgo fell, the spear clattered from his hand, but from his snakeskin girdle he pulled a long, curved knife of chipped obsidian, sharp as a razor. Jim grasped the Drilgo's wrist, but in a moment he saw that he was no match for the creature in strength. He drew back his right arm and delivered a punch to the solar plexus with all his strength. As the Drilgo's hand grew limp he snatched away the knife. There was no helping what he did for the two others were close upon him. A thrust, a slashing blow, and the Drilgo was weltering in his life-blood. A backward leap, and Jim evaded the flung spear by a hair's breadth. Knife in hand he leaped forward, and, dodging in beneath the long shaft of the weapon, got in a slash that almost cut the Drilgo's body in two. The third Drilgo, seeing his two companions in their death-throes, flung away his spear and fled with loud howls into the jungle. Jim stepped back. Lucille and her father were already almost at his heels. "It's all right," he called. "Come this way!" He led them through the ferny growth in such a manner that they should not see the two dead bodies. Nevertheless, he felt that Lucille knew. "Let's see what they were cooking," he said. But again he turned quickly. He could not know for sure what flesh that was, roasting and scorching on the embers, and he had no desire to know. It might have been monkey, but ... he turned away, and as he did so, Parrish picked up several round objects that were lying a little distance away. "These are good to eat," he said. "A sort of bread-fruit. I've lived on it for five years," he added with a sort of grotesque pathos. They munched the fruit as they proceeded up the mountain, and found it satisfying. Parrish seemed more himself again, though he still muttered at intervals. Lucille clung closely to Jim as they proceeded. * * * * * They were treading on lava now, vitreous, and smooth as glass. It was impossible to proceed further in that direction. They turned their steps around the base in the direction of the sea. After another hour, during which their way was lit by almost continuous lurid flashes from the crater, a patch of illumination, apparently out at sea, began to become visible. A half hour more, and they were rounding the volcano's base, and suddenly it burst upon them, a stupendous spectacle that drew an exclamation of amazement from Jim's lips. That low, flat background was the sea, the sound of whose breakers was faintly audible. Between sea and land ran a narrow, slender causeway, perhaps a mile in length. And beyond that, set on a small island, was the most splendid city that Jim could have imagined. Like New York--very like New York, with its mighty towers, but more symmetrical, sloping upward from the sea toward a towering rampart at the heart of it, crowned with huge domes and minarets and serpentine ramps and mighty blocks of stone that must have sheltered as many occupants as New York's highest skyscrapers. The whole was snow-white, and gleamed softly in an artificial light dispensed from an enormous artificial planet that seemed to hover above the ramparts. "God!" whispered Jim in awe as he gazed at the great city. "You cannot cross that causeway," whimpered old Parrish. "It's death to try. One sweep of the Ray will blot out every living thing." "Hush! Listen!" came from Lucille's lips. "Something's moving down there!" * * * * * The distant murmur of voices, the indescribable "feel" of the proximity of other human beings told Jim that they were in imminent danger. He glanced about him. A little overhead was an outcrop of enormous boulders, standing up like a little fortress above the smooth lava. "Get behind there!" Jim whispered. They turned and ran, slipping and stumbling up the smooth slope. Reaching the boulders, they ensconced themselves hastily behind them. Jim peered out through a crevice between two of the largest stones. The sound of moving things became more audible. Then, as a flash of flame shot from the crater overhead, Jim saw a black human horde creeping like an array of ants around the base of the mountain not far beneath. Just like an army of warrior ants it seemed to flow onward, in perfect order. And in the midst of it a faint violet light began to be visible. Parrish seized Jim's arm, shaking with terror. "You know what that is, Dent?" he whimpered. "It's Tode's Drilgoes, moving for a night attack upon Atlantis," answered Jim. "And that thing in the middle is the Atom Smasher." * * * * * It seemed hours before the last of the serried ranks of Drilgoes had passed. By the light of a lurid flash from the volcano Jim could see the column winding toward the causeway. Then all was shrouded in impenetrable darkness, save for the snow-soft city upon the island. "What are we going to do?" chattered old Parrish. "I wish I was back in Tode's cave. He gave me food and let me help with his work sometimes. I'll die here. We'll never get away. We'll never get anywhere." "We're safer here than anywhere else," answered Jim. "We'll have to stay till morning, or--God, look at that!" Out of the ramparts of the city the round, blue-white disc of the Eye had suddenly disclosed itself. And simultaneously a violet flare shot up above the moving hosts of the Drilgoes in the middle of the causeway. Out of the center of the Eye that blinding searchlight streamed. And the pillar of violet fire rose up to counter it, clove it in two, as a man cuts off the tentacle of a cuttlefish, and left it groping helplessly above the heads of the Drilgoes. * * * * * To and fro wavered the blue-white beam, and like a protective wall the violet column spread and extended, till the air was interlaced with the play of the two colors. Streaks of white shot through streaks of purple and black neutral clouds twirled, swirling in ghostlike forms. It was a scene inconceivably beautiful, and it was impossible to realize what must be happening out there. Men must be dying, withering like stubble in the blue-white flames, whenever they caught them. And yet, under that play of colors, Jim could see the vast host crawling forward to the assault. * * * * * He held his breath. It was sublime and terrible, and on the result of that conflict depended--what? What difference, when all this was forgotten history, antedating the written records of the human race? Then of a sudden the blue-white rays were seen to win. They were beating down the violet light. Like living fingers they pierced that protective wall, flinging it back, until only the tall central pillar remained. And then for the first time the sound of combat became audible. A groan of despair, of defeat, of hopelessness. The black stream was recoiling, turning upon itself. In the vivid glare of the white light it could be seen dissolving, breaking into a thousand pieces, streaming back toward the land. And, as it broke, the blue-white light pursued, eating its way and blasting all it met. Atlantis had triumphed. Another sound was audible. From the city it came, a whirring as of innumerable grasshoppers, increasing till it sounded once more like the tapping of innumerable woodpeckers. Suddenly the night broke into whirling balls of fire. Lucille cried out. Jim leaped to his feet to see more clearly. "It's men with wings," he cried. "Scores of them. They're hurling something at the Drilgoes!" * * * * * The clacking of the wing mechanism filled the air. Now the fugitives from the Drilgo host were streaming along the base of the mountain underneath, seeking the safety of the jungles, and over them, riding them, harrying them, flew the Atlantean birdmen, hurling their fiery balls. And where the balls fell, conflagrations of cold fire seemed to start and run like mercury, and shrivel up everything they touched. But the birdmen were not without casualties of their own. Here and there one could be seen to drop, and then the massed Drilgoes would turn savagely upon him with their stone-pointed spears. The fight was coming very close now. The savage cries of the Drilgoes filled the night. A ball of fire broke hardly fifty yards away from where the three were crouching. A birdman fluttered down like a wounded hawk and lay a-sprawl just underneath the rampart of boulders. Jim surmounted them, ran down the slope of the mountainside, and bent over the dying man. He was hideously wounded by the thrust of a Drilgo spear--whether because the mechanism had failed, or because he had swooped too low, Jim could not determine. As Jim bent over him he looked up at him. A youth in his teens, with the face and build of a Greek warrior, a worthy ancestor of European man. Jim looked at him and shuddered. "My grandfather four hundred generations removed," he thought. Seeing that this was no Drilgo, with eyes widened by the anticipation of death, the Atlantean smiled, and died. Jim detached the straps that held the wings to his shoulders and examined them. They were multi-hinged, built of innumerable layers of laminated wood, which seemed to have been subjected to some special treatment. In the base of each, just where it fitted to the curve of the shoulder-blade, a tiny light was burning. * * * * * Jim looped the straps about his arms and walked back to the rampart. Old Parrish saw him and screamed. Lucille cried out. "I'm going to try to get the Atom Smasher," said Jim, pointing to the thin spire of violet flame that was still visible in the center of the causeway. "It's our only chance. You must stay here. If I live, I'll return. If I don't return--" But he knew that he must return. Nothing could kill him, because Lucille would be waiting for him behind that rampart of stones upon the bare, vitreous mountainside. "I'm going to get the Atom Smasher," Jim repeated. "In these wings I'll be taken for Atlantean. I'll--bring it back." He spoke with faltering conviction. And yet there was nothing else to do. Everything depended upon his being able to bring back the Atom Smasher and take Lucille and her father away. "I think you're right, Jim," answered Lucille. "We'll--wait here till you--come--back." Her voice died away in a sob. Jim bent and kissed her. Then he began examining the mechanism of the wings. It did not appear difficult. A leather strap fastened around the body. Through this strap ran cords operated by levers upon the breast, and there was a knob in a groove that looked as if it controlled the starting of the mechanism. "I'll be back," said Jim. And suddenly the Eye appeared again, and with it there sounded once more the whir of wings. "Down!" shouted Jim. * * * * * He was too late. A score of birdmen shot out of the dark and hovered over them. Next moment they had descended to the ground. Lucille and Parrish were seized, and Jim, struggling furiously, quickly found himself equally helpless in their grasp. The accents of the Atlanteans as they spoke to one another were soft and liquid, their faces were refined and gentle, but their strength was that of athletes. Jim saw Lucille and Parrish lifted into the air; next moment he himself was raised in the arms of one of the birdmen, who shot upward like an arrow and headed a course back toward the city, carrying Jim as if he had been as light as a child. CHAPTER VI _Human Sacrifice_ In a great open space, flanked by temples and colonnades, the flight had come to rest. There, under the soft artificial light that made the whole city as bright as day, Jim, Lucille, and her father were set down before a sort of rostrum, on which were gathered the dignitaries of the city. Jim's hopes were rising fast, for between the Atlanteans and the savage Drilgoes there was as much difference as between a modern American and a blackfellow from the Australian bush. These men were civilized to a degree that even modern America has not attained. Nowhere was there a speck of dirt to be seen. Vehicles moved soundlessly along the wide streets on either side of this central meeting-place, and the whole city was roofed with glass, through which could be seen the brilliant moon and stars--invisible from the mist-filled valley without. * * * * * Soft garments of white wool clothed men and women alike, fashioned something like togas, but cut short at the knee, leaving the lower part of the leg bare and disclosing the sandaled feet. The hair was long and flowed about the shoulders. But what struck Jim most forcibly was the look of utter gentleness and benignity upon these faces. "I guess we've fallen into pretty good hands after all," he whispered to Parrish. But one of the dignitaries upon the platform, an elderly man with a face reminiscent of William Jennings Bryan in his inspired moments, was leaning forward out of his curved chair and addressing the old man, and, to Jim's astonishment, Parrish was answering. But these were not the liquid accents of the Atlanteans. The words resembled the barking of a dog, and across Jim's brain there suddenly flashed the explanation. The dignitary was speaking in the tongue of the Drilgoes, which Parrish, of course, would have learned in his five years of captivity. Suddenly Parrish turned to Jim. "He wants to know where we come from," he said. "I've told him from a far country. He thinks we're ambassadors from some of the parts of Europe that the Atlanteans who sailed away some years ago landed at. It's no use trying to explain--they don't seem to have succeeded in inventing an Atom Smasher for themselves." Jim nodded, and the colloquy went on and on, while the Atlanteans listened with languid interest, their kind and smiling faces seeming to exude benignity. At length the session seemed to have ended. Parrish wore a wide grin. "Everything's coming right, dear," he told Lucille. "The old chap says we are to be the guests of the city either for a night or for a week. It's something to do with the moon, and there seems to be a full moon to-night. Some quaint superstition or other. And then I guess we'll have a chance to get away in the Atom Smasher. I've learned something of the mechanism, and it won't be hard to operate it. We've fallen into good hands." * * * * * A squad of four soldiers or policemen, with shorter robes and what looked like truncheons in their hands, made signs to the three to accompany them. Amid mutual bows, the city's guests filled into a small court-way, closed at the further end, on which a number of Atlanteans were standing. While Jim was wondering what the next move was to be, to his astonishment the whole courtyard began to rise slowly up the walls of the tall buildings on either side. "An elevator!" gasped Lucille. "Now I do feel that everything is coming out all right, Jim, dear." Jim did not question the psychology of this. He pressed her hand tenderly. Already Tode and the past were becoming a bad dream. "Did you say anything about the Atom Smasher, Parrish?" he asked. "No, I thought it better not to," replied the old scientist. "You see, they know it only as a force that neutralizes the blue-white ray. Best not to let them know we're sailing for home in it." "I think that was wise," answered Jim, and just then the rising court-way came to a stop level with the top story of the great building at one side. Smiling courteously, the guards invited the three to precede them inside an enormous hall, supported on pillars of gleaming stone resembling alabaster. In the center was a small, low table, triangular in shape, with three of the low, curved chairs. The guards invited the three to be seated. Almost immediately smiling servitors brought in fruits on platters of porcelain, dishes of cooked vegetables, somewhat like the modern ones, but seasoned and flavored with delicious herbs. The staple dish was something like an oval banana, but infinitely more succulent. The three fell to and made a hearty meal, which was washed down with fine wines. "We've certainly fallen into good hands," said Jim. "All we've got to do is to lie low, and look pleasant, and it won't be long before we get an opportunity to get hold of the Atom Smasher." * * * * * The guards, seeing that they had finished their meal, smilingly invited them to accompany them through a huge bronze door at one end of the hall. It swung back, disclosing complete darkness. Jim felt Lucille's hand upon his arm. The girl was hesitating, and for a moment Jim hesitated too, half afraid of a fall into emptiness. Then he heard the footsteps of the guards ahead, and went on. It was eery, moving there with the sound of feet in front of them, and, apart from that, utter silence. Then Lucille uttered a little cry. "Jim, do you feel something pushing you?" she asked. "There is something--" Jim swung around, but some invisible force continued to propel him forward. He moved sidewise, and the force gently corrected him. The sound of footsteps had ceased. "What is it, Jim?" cried the girl. "Help me! Something's got hold of me!" Old Parrish was struggling close beside them. Jim panted as he wrestled with the force, but his efforts were absolutely futile. Slowly, as if slid on wires, he was propelled forward, until a cushion of air seemed to block his further progress. Dark as it was, and silent, Jim had the consciousness of other human beings about him, of a vast, unseen multitude that was watching him. Suddenly the droning of a chant began to fill the place, as if a priest were intoning hymns. As that chant rose and fell, voices all about took up the echoing refrain. Jim tried to reach Lucille, but he could move his arm only a few inches against that resilient force pressing in on all sides of him. Then, in an instant, a blinding, stabbing light shot through his eyeballs. He heard Lucille scream, old Parrish yelp, and, with eyelids screwed tight against the intolerable glare, fought once more desperately and ineffectively to reach Lucille's side. * * * * * Slowly Jim managed to unscrew his eyes. He began to realize that he was standing in what appeared to be an enormous amphitheatre. But high up, upon a narrow tongue of flooring that ran like a bridge from one end to the other, with Lucille on his right and Parrish on his left. Nothing visible seemed to be restraining them, and yet they were as securely held as if fastened with tight chains. Jim's brain reeled as he looked down. Imagine a bridge about half-way up an amphitheatre of a hundred stories, the ground beneath packed with human beings no larger than ants, the whole of the vast interior lined with them, tier above tier, faces and forms increasing from pismire size below to the dimensions of the human form upon a level, and, again, fading almost to pin-points at the summit of the vast building, where the soft glow of the artificial light filtered through the glass of the roof. He clutched at the air, felt the soft pressure of the force that was restraining him, looked at Lucille, and saw her half-unconscious with fear, leaning against it, leaning against that soft, resilient, cushionlike, invisible substance; looked at Parrish, whom the shock had thrown into a sort of semi-catalepsy--Parrish, mouthing and staring! He looked forward to where the tongue of flooring ended. Here, upon a stage, flanked with huge carven figures, a group was gathered. At first he was unable to discern what was being enacted there, so brilliant was the light that glared overhead. It was the Eye, a round disc perhaps ten feet in diameter, that all-seeing Eye of Atlantis that guarded the great city, but how it worked Jim was totally unable to discover. He saw, however, that it was blinking rapidly, the alternations being so swift that it was only just possible to be conscious of them. Perhaps the Eye was opening and closing ten times a second. Jim strained his eyes to see what was taking place on the stage at the end of the tongue on which he stood. What was it? What were they doing there? And was that the captured Atom Smasher standing between what looked like grinning idols? A group of captured Drilgoes near it? A shrill scream from Lucille echoed through the vast amphitheatre. Her eye had seen what Jim's had not yet seen--something that had shocked her into complete unconsciousness. A marble figure, she stood leaning against the invisible force that kept her on her feet, and in those open, staring eyes was a look of ineffable horror. * * * * * Jim could see clearly now, for the light from the Eye was slowly diminishing in brilliancy, or else his own eyes were growing more accustomed to it. Those carven figures, forming a semi-circle upon the platform were figures of gods, squat, huge forms seeming to emerge out of the blocks of rock from which they had been fashioned. Hideous, gruesome carvings they were, resembling some futuristic sculpture of to-day, for the artist who had fashioned them had given hardly more than a hint of the finished representation. It was rather as if the masses of rock that had been transported there had become vitalized, foreshadowing the dim yet awful beings that were some day to emerge from them. Only the arms were clearly sculptured, and each of the half-dozen figures squatting upon its haunches in that semi-circle had four of them. Arms that protruded so as to form an interlacing network, and the fingers were long claws fashioned of some metal. Over the arms the shapeless heads beat down with a leering look, and from each mouth protruded a curved tongue. A masterpiece of horror, that group, like the great stone figures of the Aztecs, or some of the hideous Indian gods. Seen under the glare of the Eye, they formed a background of horrible omen. In a flash it dawned upon Jim that these hideous figures might be gods of bloody sacrifice. "That's why these people seem so gentle," he heard himself saying. "It's the--the contrast." He pulled himself together. Again he tried to move towards Lucille, and again that invisible force restrained him. Yes, it was the captured Atom Smasher upon the platform, and those forms grouped in front of the dignitaries were captured Drilgoes, a dozen or so of them. And the concealed priest was droning a chant again. Every other sound was hushed, but from each square foot of the great amphitheatre a pair of eyes was watching. A myriad of eyes turned upon the platform! What was going to happen next? * * * * * Suddenly the priest's voice died away, and simultaneously the three dignitaries, who seemed to be officiating priests, from their solemn gestures, stepped backward, passing beneath the protruding arms of the idols. There sounded the deep whir of some mechanism somewhere, and the same invisible force that had Jim and his two companions in its control suddenly began to agitate the captive Drilgoes. _It was shuffling them!_ It was forcing them into line, pushing here and pulling there, in spite of the Drilgoes' terrified struggles. They writhed and twisted, groaning and clicking in abject terror as they wrestled with that unseen power, and all in vain. Slowly the foremost of the Drilgoes was propelled forward, inch by inch, until he stood immediately beneath the interlacing arms. And what happened next filled Jim with sick horror and loathing. For of a sudden the arms began to move, the iron claws cut through the air--a shriek of terror and anguish broke from the Drilgo's mouth ... and he was no longer a man, but a clawed and pulped mass of human flesh! "Aiah! Aiah! Aiah!" broke from the throats of the assembled multitude. The weaving arms had stopped. From behind them an attendant was gathering up what had been the Drilgo in a basket. Then the mechanism had begun again, and again that shrill cry of the spectators was ringing in Jim's ears. Louder still rose the shriek of old Parrish as he understood. Jim put forth all his strength in a mad effort to break free. A child would have had more chance in the grip of a giant. And each time the arms of the gods revolved, the unseen force pushed Jim, Lucille, and Parrish nearer the platform. Now Jim understood. This horrible sacrifice was a part of the religion of the Atlanteans, and he, Lucille, and Parrish, were being reserved for the final spectacle. And at the sight of Lucille beside him, stonily unconscious, and yet standing, and moving like a mechanical doll, in little forward jerks--at the sight of the girl, hardly six feet distant, and yet utterly beyond the touch of his finger-tips, Jim went mad. He would not shout; he closed his lips in pride of race, pride of that civilization that he had left twelve thousand years ahead of him. Not like the shrieking Drilgoes on the platform, howling as each of them in turn was forced into that maze of revolving knives. But he fought as a madman fights. He hammered at the resilient air, while the sweat ran down his face, he braced his feet upon the wooden tongue, and sought to stay his forward progress. And all the while that infernal force moved him steadily onward. * * * * * He was on the platform now. He was traveling the same route that the Drilgoes had taken. The unseen force was shuffling him, Lucille, and Parrish, pushing and pulling them. And, despite Jim's efforts, it was Lucille who was first of the three ... and Jim second ... and old Parrish third.... Jim heard Parrish's hoarse whisper behind him, "Death! Death! The uranium!" He was fumbling at his breast, but the significance of the words and gestures escaped him. He was staring ahead. Only three living Drilgoes of the whole number of prisoners remained alive, and suddenly it was borne in upon Jim that he knew the last of the three. It was the Drilgo, Cain, who had been their companion in the Atom Smasher--there, not a dozen feet distant. Cain, his bestial face, with the ridged eyebrows and great jaws convulsed with terror and dripping sweat. Cain, immediately in front of Lucille. "God, let her not wake! Let her never know!" Jim breathed. The agony would be but momentary. And there was nothing a man could not endure if he must. He could even endure to see Lucille become--what the Drilgoes had become. It would soon be over now. The Eye was blinking overhead. The hideous stone faces of the Atlantean gods looked down in leering mockery. Another of the Drilgoes had gone the same route as the others. Cain was the second now, Lucille the third victim, and he, Jim, would be the fourth. Gritting his teeth, Jim saw the next Drilgo propelled forward into the whirling knives. He saw the man fling up his arms, as if to shield his head--and then he was a man no longer, and the horrible knives revolved, and "Aiah! Aiah! Aiah!" cried the multitude. Once more the mechanism whirred.... Once more the arms revolved. A howl of terror broke from Cain's lips as he was propelled onward.... Then suddenly the whirring stopped. The arms of the stone gods, with their hooked, razorlike claws, to which clung particles of flesh, were arrested in mid-air. Cain, unharmed, was leaning backward, his features set in a mask of awful fear. Simultaneously Jim knew that the force which had held him in thrall was gone. He flung his arms out. He was free. He grasped Lucille, held her tightly against his breast, stood there drawing great, labored breaths, waiting--for what? * * * * * A film was creeping over his eyes, but he was aware that the Eye had suddenly gone out. And out of the dark the priest was chanting. Then came a deep-drawn sigh from the spectators, followed by a ringing shout. In place of the Eye the full moon appeared, sailing overhead. And, holding off that deathly weakness, Jim understood. The sacrifice had ended; a new month had begun.... CHAPTER VII _Back to Long Island_ Jim, seated beside Lucille, was listening to Cain's gruntings and chucklings as he expounded the situation to old Parrish. It was the day following the scene in the amphitheatre. The four had been escorted back along the tongue of flooring into a hall with walls of fretted stone and sumptuous colorings. The floor was strewn with rich rugs woven of some vegetable fibre. There were divans and low chairs. At brief intervals, servitors, always smiling, passed carrying trays with wines and foods. And in the corridors were always glimpses of the guards. "It was the rising of the full moon saved our lives, Dent," Parrish explained. "It appears they have this sacrifice at each of the moon's phases. The victims, captives or criminals, are eaten by the priests. We've got a week's respite, Dent, and then--God help us." Jim's arm tightened about Lucille, but the girl turned and smiled into his face. There was no longer any fear there. And Jim swore to himself that he would yet find some way of outwitting their devilish captors. "What the devil are we supposed to be, criminals or what?" he asked her father. "Why do they smile at us all the time in that confounded way?" Parrish questioned the Drilgo, but apparently he was unable to explain himself to him. "Maybe they think it an honor for us, Dent," he answered, "or maybe it's their idea of etiquette. Anyway, we four are to head the list when the moon's at the three-quarters. God, if only we could reach the Atom Smasher, I'm certain I could find out how it works!" * * * * * Jim had tried more than once to reach it. Through the colonnades at the end of the hall he could see the mechanism standing on the platform, always being inspected by half a dozen or so of the dignitaries of Atlantis. But all his attempts to cross that tongue of flooring had been vetoed by the guards. They had presented their hands to him, palms outward, and on the palms were fine steel points, about two inches long, set into leather gauntlets. It had been impossible to try conclusions with them. Two days went by. Once a group of dignitaries had entered the hall and, with smiles and profuse bows, inspected the prisoners. Then they had departed. And Jim had paced the floor, to and fro, thinking desperately. There was no sort of weapon with which to hazard an attack. Jim knew that they were under the closest observation. He could only wait and hope. And if all else failed, he meant to hurl himself, with Lucille in his arms, off the tongue of floor into the depths below when their time came. On the third morning, after a troubled sleep induced by very weariness, Jim was awakened by one of the guards, and started up to see one of the bowing dignitaries before him, and Parrish and Lucille sitting up among their rugs. Bowing repeatedly, the smiling old man addressed some words to Jim, and then turned to Parrish. "He says he wants you to show him the way the Atom Smasher works," said Parrish. "Now's our chance, Dent. He thinks it's simply an apparatus for neutralizing the blue-white ray. Don't let him guess--" "I won't let him guess," Jim answered. "Tell him we'll go and show him--" "I've told him, and he says only you are to go. He's suspicious. Say something quickly, Dent." "Tell him," said Jim, "that I must have my two assistants and the lady. Tell him I may also need the help of some of his people. It requires many men to operate the machine." * * * * * Parrish translated, speaking in the Drilgo tongue, which was their only means of communication. The Atlantean considered. Then he spoke again. "He says that we three men may go, but Lucille must be left behind," groaned Parrish. "The answer is no," said Jim. The old dignitary, who seemed somewhat crestfallen, departed with an expressive gesture. Jim and Parrish looked at each other. "That's our end," groaned Parrish. "No, he'll bite," answered Jim, with the first grin that had appeared on his countenance since their arrival. "Let's make our plans quickly. We must contrive to get Lucille inside the machine, under the pretense of assisting with the mechanism. And Cain, of course," he added, glancing at the goggly-eyed Drilgo. "You do your best to locate the starting mechanism, Parrish, and signal me the moment you're ready. We'll both leap in, and the four of us will sail--God, I don't care where we sail to, so long as we get away from here! Into eternity, if need be. But I hope it's Long Island!" Back came the dignitary with two of the guards. Smiling at Jim, he indicated by signs that the three others might accompany him. The Atlanteans had bitten, as Jim had forecast. The four proceeded along the hall and over the tongue of flooring. This time the force that had previously controlled their movements was not in action. At the farther end of the bridge they saw the group of dignitaries gathered about the Atom Smasher, examining it curiously. Over their heads the hooked arms of the hideous gods were raised. The Eye was darkened, as if with a curtain, and through the glass roof, high overhead, the sunlight streamed down upon the empty amphitheatre. * * * * * In spite of their smiles, the dignitaries of Atlantis were very much on the alert, as their tense attitudes denoted. Two more guards had appeared, and Jim saw that they were uncovering some apparatus at the base of the Eye. They were swinging a camera-like object toward him, its lens focused upon the Atom Smasher. It was not difficult to understand what was in the minds of the Atlanteans. The dignitaries were uneasy and mistrustful, and at the first suspicion of treachery they meant to loose the blue-white Ray contained in the apparatus, and blow the Atom Smasher and the group about it to destruction. Jim intercepted a sign from Parrish, indicating that he was to make pretense of assisting him. He bent over the machine, Lucille beside him. Parrish was busily examining the wheels and levers. He was adjusting the thumbscrews, moving the needles along the dials. One of the Atlanteans spoke, and Cain translated into "Drilgo" for Parrish's benefit. Parrish answered. Then, without raising his head, the old man said quietly, "I've located the starting lever, Dent. You and Lucille get inside quickly and pretend you're doing something to the machinery." They stepped over the bow of the boat and stood beside Parrish, who continued examining the wheels. "We mustn't forget Cain," whispered the girl to her father. "Oh, I hope he understands!" But there was no direct evidence that Cain did understand, and Parrish dared not warn him in "Drilgo," for fear one of the Atlanteans might understand the language. Cain was standing close beside the boat. But he was not in the boat. Again one of the Atlanteans shot a question at Parrish. Parrish beckoned to Cain, and awaited the translation. He answered. Each moment was growing tenser. It was impossible that the Atlanteans could fail to understand what was being planned. The only saving chance was that they did not realize the possibilities of escape that the vessel offered. A full minute went by. * * * * * Suddenly Parrish raised his head. "I've got it fixed, I think, Dent," he said. "I'm going to count. When I reach 'three,' seize Cain and pull him aboard." Jim nodded. The uneasiness was increasing. The guards at the camera-like object were each holding some sort of mechanical accessory in their hands. It looked like a small sphere of glass, and it connected with the apparatus by means of a hollow tube of fibre. Jim guessed that in an instant the Ray could be made to dart out of the lens. It would be quick work--as nearly as possible instantaneous work. "Ready, Dent?" asked Parrish in an even voice. In this crisis the old man had become astonishingly calm. He seemed the calmest of the lot. "One!" Jim beckoned to Cain, who came toward him, his eyes goggling in inquiry. "Two!" Jim reached out and took Cain by the arm. There was a sharp question from the Atlantean who had spoken before. "Three!" With all his force Jim yanked Cain over the edge of the boat. The Drilgo stumbled and fell headlong with a howl of terror. But headlong--inside. What happened was practically instantaneous. A sudden whir of the mechanism, a violet glow from the funnel, the smell of chlorine--a flash of blinding blue-white light. The Atlantean guards had fired--a quarter-second too late! The thump, thump of the electrical discharge died away. The four were in the boat, whirling away through space. Cain was rising to his knees, a woe-begone expression on his face. And there was a clean cut, with charred, black edges along one side of the boat, showing how near the Atlanteans had come to success. * * * * * The relief, after the hideous suspense of the past days, was almost too much for the three white people. "We're free, we're going back home!" cried Jim exultantly, as he caught Lucille in his arms. And she surrendered her lips to his, while the tears streamed down her checks. Old Parrish, at the instrument board, looked up, smiling and chuckling. Even Cain, understanding that they were not to be hacked to bits with knives, gurgled and grinned all over his black face. "How long will it take us to get back?" Jim asked Parrish after a while. "I--I'm not quite sure, my boy," the old man replied. "You see--I haven't quite familiarized myself with the machine as yet." "But we'll get back all right?" asked Jim. "Well, we--we're headed in the right direction," answered Parrish. "You see, my boy, it's rather an intricate table of logarithmic calculations that that scoundrel has pasted on this board. The great danger appears to be that of coming within the orbit of the giant planet Jupiter. Of course, I'm trying to keep within the orbit of the Earth, but there is a danger of being deflected onto Pallas, Ceres, or one of the smaller asteroids, and finding ourselves upon a rock in space." Jim and Lucille looked at Parrish in consternation. "But you don't have to leave the Earth, do you?" Jim asked. "Unfortunately, it's pretty hard sticking to the Earth, my lad," said Parrish. "You see, Earth has moved a good many million miles through space since the time of Atlantis." But both Jim and Lucille noticed that Parrish was already speaking of Atlantis as if it was in the past. They drew a hopeful augury from that. And then there was nothing to do but resign themselves to that universal greyness--and to hope. * * * * * They noticed that Cain seemed to be watching Parrish's movements with unusual interest. The Neanderthal man seemed fascinated by the play of the dials, the whir of the wheels and gyroscopes. "Are you setting a course, dad?" asked Lucille presently. "I mean, do you know just where we are?" "To tell you the truth, my dear," answered her father, "I don't. I'm relying on some markings that Tode made on the chart--certain combinations of figures. God only knows where they'll take us to. But I'm hoping that by following them we shall find ourselves back on Long Island in the year 1930. "No, that rascal could hardly have written down those figures to no purpose. They seem to me to comprise a course, both going and returning. But the calculations are very intricate, especially in the _time_ dimension. I've nearly reached the last row now. Then, we shall have arrived, or--we sha'n't." Jim and Lucille sat down again. There was nothing that they could do. But somehow their hopes of reaching Long Island in the year of grace 1930 had grown exceedingly slim. Everything depended upon whether or not Tode had meant those figures to represent the course back to the starting point or not. A desperate hope--that was all that remained to them. They watched Parrish as his eyes wandered along the rows of figures, while his fingers moved the micrometer screws. And then he looked up. "We're reaching the end of our course," he said. "We're going to land somewhere. God knows where it will be. We must hope--that's all that's left us." His hands dropped from the dials. He pressed a lever. The blur of nights and days began to slow. A column of vivid violet light shot from the funnel. "Grip tight!" shouted Parrish. Thump, thump! The Atom Smasher was vibrating violently. A jar threw Jim against Lucille. It was coming to a standstill. Trees appeared. Jim uttered a shout. He stepped across to Parrish and wrung his hand. He put his arms about Lucille and kissed her. They were back at the Vanishing Place, and all their sufferings seemed to be of the past.... CHAPTER VIII _A Fruitless Journey_ "Why don't you stop the boat, Parrish?" "I'm trying to, lad!" The Atom Smasher was still vibrating, even more violently than before. A column of violet light was pouring from her funnel. The pool, the mud, the walls of heaped up water were discernible, but all quivering and reproduced, line after line, to infinity. It was like looking into the rear-view mirror of a car that is vibrating rapidly. It was like one of those Cubist paintings of a woman descending the stairs, where one had to puzzle out which is the woman and which is the stairs. A dreadful thought shot through Jim's mind. He remembered what he had said to Tode: "You can't hold the boat still in four-dimensional space." This was not quite the same. By stopping the infernal mechanism, one re-entered three-dimensional space, and landed. Certainly the Atom Smasher could land. They were not like the motorcyclist who got on a machine for the first time, and rode to the admiration of all who saw him, except that he couldn't find out how to stop. Yet there was Parrish still fumbling with the controls, and the boat was still vibrating at a terrific rate of speed. It is impossible to dream of leaping out, for there was no solidity, no continuity in the scenery outside. It was not like attempting to leap from a moving train, for instance. In that case one knows that there is solid earth beneath, however hard one lands. Here everything was distorted, a sort of mirror reflection. And Jim noticed a strange thing that had never occurred to him before. Everything was reversed, as in a mirror picture. That clump of trees, for instance, which should have been on the right, was on the left. Parrish looked up. "There's some means of stopping her, of course," he said. "There must be a lever--but I don't know where to look for it in all this mess." He pointed to the revolving wheels. No, it might be a matter of days of experimenting in order to discover the elusive switch. "It may be a combination of switches," said Parrish. "I don't know what we're going to do." "Suppose I jumped and chanced it," Jim suggested. Lucille caught his arm with a little cry. Parrish shook his head. "That devil--Listen: there was a Drilgo he disliked. He threw him out of the boat just before she landed at the cave. Everything was in plain sight, plainer than things are here. But he was never seen again. For God's sake, lad, sit still. I'll try--" * * * * * Hours later Parrish was still trying. And gradually Jim and Lucille had ceased to hope. Side by side they had sat, watching that glimmering scene about them. Sometimes everything receded into a blur, across which sunlight and shadow, and then moonlight raced, at others the surroundings were so clear that it almost seemed as if, by steadying the boat, they could leap ashore. And once there happened something that sent a thrill of cold fear through both of them. For where the pool had been there appeared suddenly a hut--and Tode, standing in the doorway, looking about him, a malicious sneer curving his lips. Jim leaped to his feet, and old Parrish, who had seen Tode too, sprang up in wild excitement. "Sit down, lad," he shouted. "It's nothing. I--I turned the micrometer screw a trifle hard. I got us back to five years ago, when we were living here with Tode. That's just a picture--out of the past, Jim!" Jim understood, but he sank down again with cold sweat bathing his forehead. The terrific powers of the Atom Smasher were unveiling themselves more and more each moment. Jim felt Lucille's hand on his arm. He looked into her face. "Jim, darling, what's going to happen to us if dad can't find how to work the machine?" "I don't know, dear. I've thought that we might all jump out and chance it. If we held each other tight, we'd probably land in the same place--" * * * * * Old Parrish stood up. "I can't work it, Jim," he said. "Tode's got us beat. There's only one thing for us to do. You can guess what it is." "I think I can," said Jim, glancing askance at Lucille. Yes, he knew, but he lacked the heart to tell her. "If we were all to jump out, tied together--don't you think we might land--somewhere near where we want to land?" he asked. "Jim, do you realize what each vibration of this boat means?" asked Parrish. "There's a table on the instrument-board. It's a wave length of four thousand miles in space and nineteen years in time." "You mean we're moving to London or San Francisco and back--" "Further than that, every infinite fraction of a second," answered Parrish. "No, Jim, we--we wouldn't land. So we must just go back to where we came from, and--" He had been speaking in a low voice, calculated not to reach Lucille's ears. The girl had been leaning back, her eyes closed, as if half asleep. Now she rose and stepped up to her father and lover. "You can tell me the truth," she said. "I'm not afraid." "We've got to go back, Lucille," answered her father. "It's our only chance. By following the course in reverse we can expect to make Atlantis again--" "Back to that horrible place?" "No, my dear. The chart will lead us, obviously, back to the cave where Tode has his headquarters. We must try to surprise him, and force him to bring us back to Long Island." "And then?" asked Lucille. Parrish shrugged his shoulders. "We'll face that problem when we come to it," he answered. "But how do you expect to be able to land at the other end any more than this?" asked Jim. "Suppose the machine continues to vibrate instead of coming to a standstill?" "I think," said Parrish, "that we'll be able to strike a bargain with Tode. Obviously he will be willing to bring the machine to a standstill in order to parley with us. We'll make terms--the best we can. After all, he can't afford to remain marooned on the isle of Atlantis without the Atom Smasher." "I hate the idea of bargaining with that wretch," said Lucille. "So do we all, dear," answered Jim. "But there's nothing else that we can do. It's just a matter of give and take. And I'd be glad to consent to any terms that would bring us three safe back to earth, with all this business behind us." "I'll start back, then," said Parrish, turning back to the instrument board. And, to the familiar thump, thump of the electrical discharge, the Atom Smasher took up its backward journey once more. * * * * * A long time passed. With her head resting against Jim's breast, Lucille rested. Jim bent over her, trying to discover whether she was asleep or not. Her eyes were closed, her breathing so soft that she hardly seemed alive. An infinite pity for the girl filled Jim's heart, and, mingled with it, the intense determination to overcome the madman who had subjected her to these perils. He glanced across at Parrish, fingering his screws. Old Parrish looked up and nodded. There was a new determination in the old man's face that made him a different person from the crazed old man whom Jim had encountered at the Vanishing Place. "We can beat him, Parrish!" Jim called, and Parrish looked back and nodded again. "We're nearly back to the top of the column," he answered. Not long afterward Parrish looked up once more. "Stand by, Jim!" he called. "And be ready. Tode will be aware of our approach by means of the sensitive instruments he keeps in his laboratory. But don't harm him. We want him aboard, and we want him badly. He won't be able to play any more tricks with us. I've learned too much about the Atom Smasher." He pressed a lever, and the greyness dissolved into its component parts of light and darkness. A jar. Thump, thump! The violet light! Lucille looked up, raised herself, uttered a low cry and caught at Jim's arm, trembling. They had run their course truly. The Atom Smasher was vibrating outside the entrance to Tode's cave. And that was Tode, standing there, watching them, that devilish grin of his accentuated to the utmost. A blurred figure that appeared and vanished, and a surrounding crowd of Drilgoes--how many it was impossible to guess, for they looked like a crowd of apes in motion. Suddenly Tode disappeared, and a moment later Lucille uttered a terrified cry as his voice spoke in her ear: "I thought you'd be back. I knew you'd got away from Atlantis when my recorder showed the waves of electrical energy proceeding from the city. You were clever, Dent, but you see, you had to come back to me to get my help." "Don't be afraid, dear," said Jim, trying to soothe the girl. "That's a wireless receiving apparatus." He pointed to a sort of cabinet enclosed among the rotating wheels, and then it was evident that Tode's voice was proceeding from it. * * * * * Tode's figure appeared again, dancing through a haze of lines and patches. He was holding something in his hand which Jim made out to be the mouthpiece of a microphone. The voice inside the Atom Smasher spoke again: "Turn all the micrometer screws until the needles register zero, Parrish. Then turn Dial D to point 3, Dial C to 5, Dial B to 1, and Dial A to 2. I'll repeat.... Now press the starting lever, Parrish, and you'll find yourself on firm ground again." A few moments later the Atom Smasher was pouring out an immense column of the violet light, and slowly the vibration ceased. The blurred forms of Tode, of the Drilgoes grew clear. They had arrived. Tode stepped over the rail. "And now, my friends, we'll have a talk," he said. "No tricks, Tode," Jim warned him, "You've probably got a number of deviltries up your sleeve--" "One or two, Dent," grinned Tode. "We're willing to negotiate." "Of course you are. You see, I hold the trumps, Dent. Those dial deflections, which are inevitable in the construction of any piece of mechanism, are not the same for Earth in 1920. Don't think you can use the same figures to land with. You must remember that there has been a precession of the equinoxes since the time of Atlantis, with a consequent shift in the earth's axis. No, Dent, I've got you very much where I want you. But I'm willing to discuss terms with you. First of all, let's get rid of this useless cargo. I don't believe in overburdening a ship," he grinned. He picked up Cain bodily and heaved the astonished Drilgo over the side before he knew what was happening to him. Cain picked himself up and rubbed his sides, whimpering mournfully. The Drilgoes crowded closer, their faces agape with astonishment. Tode spoke a command sharply, and they scattered. * * * * * "Before we come to terms, Dent, I'll give you a piece of news that may interest you," said Tode. "Much has happened during the time you've been away. Ambassadors have been out to see me from Atlantis. With the aid of a Drilgo interpreter, they conveyed to me that they had been greatly impressed by the disappearance of the Atom Smasher. They have nothing like it, of course, and they think I'm a Number One magician. "The upshot is, they want me to accept the supreme rule of the city, and use my arts to restore the lost territory that has sunk beneath the waves. They swore on an image of their god, Cruk, that they were sincere. I told them that I'd sent the Atom Smasher away on a journey, but that it would be back shortly, and that I'd then give them their answer. "Now, Dent"--Tode's face took on that look of fanaticism that Jim had seen on it before--"I'm going to repeat the proposition I made to you before. Join me. I'll make you my chief subordinate, and I'll load you and Parrish down with honors. Everything that a human being can desire shall be yours. And in a year or two, when we're tired of being gods, we'll take the Atom Smasher back to Earth and destroy it, and with our wealth we'll become the supreme rulers of Earth too. I need you, Dent. You don't realize how lonely life can be when one is worshiped as a god. As for Lucille, there are a thousand maidens more beautiful than she is, in Atlantis. Come, Dent, your answer! Your last chance, Dent! Don't throw it away!" He read the answer before Jim could speak it. Jim saw Tode's face flicker, and hurled himself upon him. Lucille screamed. The two men wrestled together in the narrow confines of the circular boat. Jim struck Tode a blow that sent him reeling against the rail. Then he felt himself seized from behind. A giant Drilgo had him in his arms. He lifted him over the side and flung him to the earth. In an instant the chattering Drilgoes were crowding down upon him. Struggling madly, Jim saw Tode fell old Parrish with a blow, push back Lucille as she sprang at him, and quickly press the starting lever. The column of violet fire faded, there came the whir of the mechanism--the Atom Smasher vanished.... CHAPTER IX _The Blinded Eye_ Jim fought with all his strength; he managed to shake off his assailants and regain his feet. Then one of the Drilgoes poised his stone-tipped spear, ready to hurl it through his body. But the spear never left the Drilgo's hand in Jim's direction. Like a great black ape, Cain leaped upon the fellow and bore him to the ground, his feet twined around his shoulders, his hands gripping his throat. Not until the Drilgo had been reduced to a heaving, half-strangled hulk did Cain leave him. Then Cain, bending until his stomach almost touched the ground, came worming toward Jim, making signs of obeisance. What had happened that Jim had won the Drilgo's faith? Why did Cain now look upon him, apparently, as his master? It was impossible to gauge the processes of the black man's mind, and at the moment Jim was in no mood to wonder. The stunning disaster that had overtaken him monopolized his thoughts. Lucille and Parrish were once more in Tode's power. That was the dominating fact. The only gleam of comfort in the situation was that Tode had given him the clue to his movements. Beyond a doubt Tode had taken his captives into Atlantis with him. It was impossible to disbelieve Tode's statement that he had been offered the supreme power in the city. Tode's egotism would have compelled him to blurt out that fact. Besides, Tode had certainly not gone back to earth. Jim must force his way into Atlantis. He would find and rescue the two prisoners or die there. He turned away from the groveling Cain and the chattering Drilgoes, who, inspired by Cain's example, now seemed animated by the same instinct to obey him, and went into the cave. But at the entrance he turned for a moment and looked back. * * * * * It was night. The valley was swathed in mists, the volcano opposite was spouting a shaft of lurid fire. On the water was a path of moonlight, where the clouds had been dispersed by the Atlanteans. Jim took in the scene, he raised one arm and shook his fist. Then, without a word, he passed inside. There was a soft light in the cave, streaming out from an inner chamber, access to which was through a narrow orifice in the rock. Jim passed through, and found himself in Tode's laboratory. He was astonished at its completeness, still more so at the existence of numerous pieces of apparatus whose purpose it was difficult to understand. There was a radio transmitter and receiver, but improved out of all recognition from those in use in the prosaic year 1930. Three or four tiny dynamos, little more than toys in appearance, were generating as much voltage, from the indicators, as a modern power station. And overhead was a dial, with two series of figures in black and red, and two needles, both of which were swinging briskly, indicating that there was an intense electrical disturbance in the vicinity. The Atom Smasher! Jim took heart. Tode could not be far away! He looked about him, subconsciously trying to discover some implement that would prove of service to him, but there was nothing that he could see, not even one of the ray tubes. He looked about uneasily. Then his eyes fell upon something so singularly out of place that it looked, for the moment, like some pre-historic weapon. It was the last thing Jim would have expected to find there--nothing more nor less than a sporting rifle! Deer shooting had been one of Tode's pastimes in the old days, and more than one fat buck had been surreptitiously shot for the benefit of the larder at the Vanishing Place. There was something almost pathetic in the sight of that rifle and the fifty cartridges in their cardboard carton. Perhaps Tode had pictured himself shooting big game in Atlantis at some period or other. It was a human weakness that for an instant lessened Jim's hate and horror of the man. It brought him to a saner view of the situation. Jim had been on the point of losing his powers of reason. The sight of the rifle restored them. * * * * * He turned sharply as he heard a sound in the entrance. Cain was coming toward him, with many genuflexions, and much stomach wriggling. He stopped, straightened himself. There was a look of singular intelligence on the Drilgo's face. He began chattering, pointing in the direction of Atlantis. Jim could make nothing of what he was trying to convey. "Yes, they're there," he said bitterly, "but I don't see how that's going to help me." "Oh my poor Lucille!" said Cain unexpectedly. The words were like a parrot's speech, the intonation so remarkable a copy of old Parrish's that Jim was flabbergasted. Nevertheless it was evident that Cain knew he was referring to Lucille. With a strange, slinking motion he crossed the laboratory and bent beneath a huge slab of stone, resting on two great hewn rocks. He emerged, holding in his arms two curious contrivances. He laid them at Jim's feet. Jim stared at them, and suddenly understood what they were. They were two pairs of wings, of the kind the Atlanteans had used when they made their aerial sortie against the Drilgoes. Cain picked up one pair and began adjusting it about his body. He made fluttering movements with his arms. "You mean that you've learned how to fly, you black imp of Satan?" shouted Jim. And Cain, as if understanding, nodded and beamed all over his black face. With that Jim's idea was born. If the Drilgoes would follow him, he would lead them against Atlantis. And, before the assault began, he would fly to the great Eye that guarded it, and blind it. * * * * * He thought afterward that it was like a supernatural revelation, this scheme, that leaped full-fledged into his brain. And Cain had developed extraordinary executive ability. Outside the cave, through rifts in the swirls of fog, Jim could see innumerable Drilgoes massing in the valley, as if they understood Jim's purpose. From Cain's gesticulations, and the number of times he rubbed his stomach, it was evident that he counted upon sacking Atlantis and was imagining innumerable meals of fat captives. Each flash of lurid light from the volcano disclosed further masses of Drilgoes, armed with their stone spears, apparently assembling for the attack. Whether Tode had summoned them before the Atlanteans offered him the rulership of the city, or whether Jim's own plan had been communicated to them by some telepathic process, it was impossible to guess, but there was not the least doubt but that they were prepared to follow him. Cain nudged Jim and began strapping the other pair of wings about his body. Jim saw that the energy was supplied by two tiny, lights burning in the base, cold fire, stored energy whose strength he did not guess. For, when Cain took him by the hand, and motioned to him to slide the knob in the groove, he was hurled skyward like a rocket. There followed a delirious hour. Tossing and tumbling like a pigeon in a gale, Jim by degrees acquired mastery over the apparatus. At the end of the hour he could fly almost as well as Cain, who, like a black guardian angel kept beside him, reaching out a hand when he overbalanced, and pulling him out of aerial side-slips. * * * * * Suddenly Cain motioned toward the volcano, and started toward it in a rocketlike swoop. Jim understood. The Drilgoes were ready for the attack upon Atlantis. Jim dropped to earth, ran back into the cave, and picked up the rifle and the carton of ammunition. He filled the magazine, and, with the rifle on his arm, rose into the air again. Cain was circling back, uttering weird cries of distress at finding his master absent. "It's all right, Cain," said Jim. "I'm here." Side by side they flew steadily toward the base of the great cone, which was pouring out a fan-shaped stream of fire. Rumblings shook the earth; it was evident that another upheaval was in course of preparation. The long column of the Drilgoes could be seen, extending around the flank of the mountain. Then of a sudden the Eye opened. And across the causeway came the blue-white Ray, carrying death and destruction. The Drilgoes, who had learned wisdom, remained concealed out of the Ray's path, and escaped, but a great dinosaur, fifty or sixty feet in length, startled by the light, came blundering out of the ferns, uttered a bellow, and melted into an amorphous mass. Birds dropped from their roosting places with a sound like that of falling hail. Black paths were cloven through the midst of the jungle. Rifle in hand, Jim soared into the air, and shot forward, high above the causeway toward the glowing Eye. He had noticed that the blue-white ray appeared in cycles of about two minutes, and had made his plans accordingly. Two minutes in which to accomplish his task, or take the chance of a hideous death. Some thirty seconds carried him right into the glowing heart of the winking Eye: he hovered and raised his rifle. Underneath him the breakers thundered: round the Eye a myriad sea-birds fluttered, dashing themselves against it, falling into the waves. Huge and high the great city towered into the skies, lit by its soft incandescence. Jim could see the throngs in the streets, the traffic. But what was happening in the other side of the Eye? * * * * * Suddenly he saw the moon in her third quarter sailing through the skies, and a hideous fear overcame him. Suppose Tode had met with treachery; suppose that this very night Lucille were doomed to be sacrificed to the terrible god Cruk! Suppose that even at that moment her tender flesh were being sacrificed by the awful hooks! He drew a bead upon the Eye and fired--and missed. The bullet went wide. But even if it struck, what guarantee had he that it would shatter the glass, or whatever substance it was that covered the orb? He lost position, and knew that the two-minute interval was drawing to a close. He soared and fired again. The Eye still glowed. Then of a sudden a blinding ray shot forth from it, so dazzling that it seemed to sear Jim's eyeballs. The interval was ended. It shot beneath him, but no more than a few feet, and turning his eyes shoreward, Jim saw it sweep along the causeway and tear a black path through the forest. Frantically he soared, and circled around the temple. The ray went out. Two minutes more. And now the temporary panic had passed; Jim's nerves grew steady as a rock. He eased the controls and floated in toward the glowing orb. Sea-mews, screaming, dashed themselves against it and fell, wounded and broken, into the breaking seas below. They fluttered past Jim's face, one impacted against his chest with a thud that rocked him where he hovered. But Jim knew that he could not fail. At a distance of fifty feet he drew a bead upon the centre of the Eye and pressed the trigger. And instantly the light went out.... CHAPTER X _The Fight in the Dark_ He dropped down softly to the causeway. Within the city he heard a sound such as he had never heard before, as if some ancient prophecy of doom had been fulfilled, a wailing "Aiah! Aiah! Aiah!" that was caught up from throat to throat and rose upon the wind in a clamor wild and mournful as that of the sea-birds around the broken Eye. It was the death-keening of proud Atlantis, Queen of the Atlantic for fifty thousand years. She was dying in darkness. For, with the blinding of the Eye, all the soft lights within the city had gone out. Dense, utter, impenetrable darkness reigned, and even the gibbous moon, floating overhead, seemed to give no light. Jim dropped to the causeway and began running in the direction of the city. But, feeling the drag of his wings, he unbuckled the strap and flung them away. He might need them, but his one thought was to get to Lucille, if she were still alive. And he felt that each moment lost might mean that he would be too late. Through the blackness he raced forward, hearing that sobbing ululation within the walls. But behind him he heard another sound, and shuddered at it, all his hopes suddenly reversed. For that sound was the shouting of the Drilgoes as they rushed forward to conquest. And now it seemed a monstrous thing that proud Atlantis should be at the mercy of these hordes. He had let loose destruction upon the world. But it was to save Lucille. That was his consolation. Yet he hardly checked the racing thoughts within his mind even for a moment, to meditate on what he had done. Those thoughts were all of Lucille. He must get to her before the Drilgoes entered. And he ran faster, panting, gasping, till of a sudden the portals loomed before him, and he saw a crowd of frenzied Atlanteans struggling to pass through, and a file of soldiers struggling to keep them back. * * * * * He could distinguish nothing more than the confused struggle. He hurled himself into the midst of the crowd and swept it back. He was within the walls now, and struggling to pass through the mob of people that was swarming like homeless bees. He fought them with flailing fists, he clove a pathway through them, until he found himself in a great shadowy space that he recognized as the central assembly of the city. More by instinct than design he hit upon the narrow court that was the elevator. But the court was filled with another mob of struggling people, and in the darkness there was no possibility of discovering the secret of raising it. He blundered about, raging, forcing a path now here, now there. He ran into blind alleys, into small threading streets about the court, which led him back into the central place of assembly. It was like a nightmare, that blind search under the pale three-quarter moon and the black, star-blotched sky. Suddenly Jim found himself wedged by the pressure of the crowd into a sort of recess leading off the elevator court. So strong was the pressure here that he was unable to move an inch. Wedged bolt upright, he could only wait and let the frenzied mob stream past him. And louder above the sound of wailing came the roars of the Drilgoes swarming along the causeway. Suddenly something gave behind him--a door, as it seemed, broken off its hinges by the mob pressure. Jim was hurled backward, and fell heavily down a flight of stone stairs, bringing up against a stone balustrade. He got up, unconscious of his bruises, ran to the top of the flight, and saw the dim square of palest twilight where the door had been. But over him he could faintly see the stairs and the balustrade, winding away to what seemed immeasurable height. That stairway must lead to the top of the building, and thence there should be some access to the amphitheatre. Jim turned toward it. * * * * * Suddenly a tremendous uproar filled the streets, yells, the clicking grunts of the Drilgoes, the screams of the panic-stricken populace. The invaders had arrived, and they were sweeping all before them. No chance of recognition in that darkness. Lucille! Shouting her name, Jim began to ascend the stairs in leaps of three at a time. But long before he reached the top he was ascending one by one, with straining limbs and laboring breath. Red slaughter down below, a very inferno of sound; above, that shadowy stairway, still extending almost to the heavens. Step after step, flight beyond flight! Jim's lungs were bursting, and his heart hammering as if it would break his chest. One flight more! One more! Another! Suddenly he realized that his task was ended. In place of the stairs stood a vast hall, and beyond that another hall, dim in the faint light that filtered through the glass above. Jim thought he remembered where he was. Beyond that next hall there should be the tongue of flooring, crossing the amphitheatre and joining the platform of the idols. But he stopped suddenly as he emerged, not upon the tongue, but upon still another stairway. He had gone astray, and out of his bursting lungs a cry of rage and despair went up. For a moment he stood still. What use to proceed further? And then, amazingly, there came what might have been a sign from heaven. Down through a small, square opening overhead, no larger than a ventilator, it came ... a glimmer of violet flame! And Jim hurled himself like a madman against the stairs, and surmounted them with two bounds. There were no more. Instead, Jim found himself looking down into the amphitheatre. The thick walls had cut off all sound from his ears, save a confused murmur, but now a hideous uproar assailed them. The whole floor of the amphitheatre was a mass of moving shadows, of slayers and slain. The Drilgoes had broken in and trapped the multitudes that had taken refuge there. Their fearful stone-tipped spears thrust in and out, to the accompaniment of their savage howls and the screams of the dying. * * * * * Never has such a shadow-play been seen, perhaps, as that below, where death stalked in dense darkness, and the slayer did not even see his victim. Only the thrust of spears, the soft, yielding flesh that they encountered, the scream, the wrench of stone from tissue, and the blended howl of triumph and scream of despair. Yet only for a moment did Jim turn his eyes upon that sight. For he knew where he was now. He had emerged upon the other side of the amphitheatre, upon the platform where he had seen the priests and dignitaries gathered when he was led forward to be sacrificed. There, in the rear, were the hideous, shadowy gods, looming up out of the darkness, their outstretched arms interlaced. And there upon the platform was the Atom Smasher, a little thread of violet light seeping out of the central tube. Beside it stood a group of figures, impossible to distinguish in the darkness, but of a sudden Lucille's scream rang out above the din below. With three leaps Jim was at her side. He saw the girl, Tode, and Parrish, struggling in the grasp of a dozen priests. They were dragging them toward the idols, and Jim understood what that scene portended. In despair at the irruption of the Drilgoes, the priests were seeking to propitiate their gods by sacrificing the three strangers whom they held responsible for all their woes. Jim caught Lucille in his arms, shouting her name. She knew him, turned toward him. Then one of the priests, armed with a great stone-headed club--for no metal is permitted within the precincts of the god Cruk--struck at him furiously. Jim leaped aside, letting the club descend harmlessly upon the floor. He shot out his right with all his strength behind it, catching the priest upon the jaw, and the man crumpled. * * * * * Whirling the club around his head, he fought back the fanatics, all the while shouting to Tode to start the Atom Smasher. In such a moment he only remembered that Tode was a white man, and of his own generation. He struck down three of the priests; then he was seized around the knees from behind, and fell heavily. The club was wrenched from his hand. In another moment Jim found himself helpless in the grasp of the Atlanteans. As he stopped struggling for a moment, to gather his strength for a supreme effort, he heard a whir overhead, and saw the arms of the stone gods begin their horrible revolution. The priests had started the machinery. And high above the din below rang out the wild chant of the high priest. Jim saw him now, a figure poised upon a platform behind the arms, his own arms raised heavenward. "Aiah! Aiah! Aiah!" Jim was being dragged forward, with Lucille beside him, old Parrish following, still making a futile struggle for life, while pitiful screeches issued from his mouth. Jim saw the revolving arms descend within a foot of his head. One more fight--one more, the last. Suddenly, with loud yells, a band of Drilgoes leaped forward from the head of the stairs and rushed upon the struggling priests and victims. And, dark as it was, Jim recognized their leader--Cain. And Cain knew Lucille. As the priests rallied for a desperate resistance, Cain hurled his great body through the air, landing squarely upon the shoulders of the priest nearest the revolving arms, and knocking him flat. Then the arms caught priest and Drilgo, and the steel hooks dug deep into their flesh. A screech of terror, a howl that reverberated through the amphitheatre, and nothing remained of either but a heap of macerated flesh. But in that instant Jim had fought free again. He caught Lucille and dragged her back toward the Atom Smasher. * * * * * Tode had already broken from his captors and was working at it frantically. "Hold on!" screeched old Parrish. "Hold on!" They had a moment's leeway. The Drilgoes had driven the priests back into the hooks. With awful shrieks the fanatics were yielding up their lives, in the place of their selected victims. But more Drilgoes were pouring up the stairs. A moment's leeway, and no more, before the savage band would impale the four upon their stone-pointed spears. There was not the slightest chance that they would be able to make their identity known. "For God's sake hurry!" Jim yelled in Tode's ear. The wheels were revolving, a stream of violet light, leaping out of the central tunnel, cast a lurid illumination upon the scene. But it was too late. A score of Drilgoes, with leveled spears, were rushing on the four. "Hold tight!" screeched Parrish. He thrust his arm into his breast, and pulled out a little lever. Jim recognized it and remembered. It was the instrument of universal death--the uranium release of untold forces of cataclysmic depredation. "Take that!" screamed the old man, inserting the lever into the secret groove in the Atom Smasher and jerking it in the direction of the priests. CHAPTER XI _Tode's Last Gamble_ A roar that seemed to rend the heavens followed. Roar upon roar, as the infinite momentum of the disintegrating uranium struck obstacle after obstacle. The Drilgoes vanished, the amphitheatre melted away, walls and roof.... Overhead were the moon and stars. And proud Atlantis was sinking into the depths of the sea.... Not as a ship sinks, but piecemeal, her walls and towers crumbling and toppling as a child's sand-castle crumbles under the attack of the lapping waves. Down they crashed, carrying their freight of black, clinging, human ants, while from the sea's depths a wave, a mile high, rose and battered the fragments to destruction. From the crater of the volcano a huge wave of fire fanned forward, and where fire and water met a cloud of steam rose up. A boiling chaos in which water and earth and fire were blended, spread over land and sea. And then suddenly it was ended. Where the last island of the Atlantean continent had been, only the ocean was to be seen, placid beneath the stars. The Atom Smasher was vibrating at tremendous speed. Jim, with one arm round Lucille, faced Tode at the instrument board. Near by sat Parrish, watching him too. "That took a whole year," said Tode. "That pretty little scene of destruction we've just witnessed. The good old Atom Smasher has been doing some lively stunts, or we'd have been engulfed too. We're not likely to see anything so pretty in history again, unless we go to watch the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii by lava from Vesuvius. But that would be quite tame in comparison with this." * * * * * Tode's jeering tone grated on Jim's ears immeasurably. "I don't think any of us are craving any more experiments, Tode," he said, trying to keep his voice steady. "Suppose you take us back to Peconic Bay. We'll dump the Atom Smasher into the pond, and try to forget that we've had anything except a bad nightmare." "Don't trust him, Jim," whispered Lucille. Tode heard. "Thank you," he answered, scowling. "But seriously, Dent, we can't go back with nothing to show for all our trouble. Those fools tried to betray me, and then the Eye went out. Perhaps I have you to thank for that performance? However, the sensible thing is to let bygones be bygones. But we must make a little excursion. How about picking up a little treasure from the hoards of Solomon or Genghis Khan? A few pounds of precious stones would make a world of difference in our social status when we reach Long Island." Jim felt a cold fury permeating him. Tode saw his grim look and laughed malignantly. "Well, Dent, I'm ready to be frank with you," he said. "The game's still in my hands. I want Lucille. I'm willing to take you and Parrish back, provided you agree she shall be mine. I'll have to trust you, but I shall have means of evening up if you play crooked." "Why don't you ask my girl herself?" piped old Parrish. "He needn't trouble. He knows the answer!" cried Lucille scornfully. "There's your answer," said Jim. "Now, what's the alternative?" "The alternative is, that I have already set the dial to eternity, Dent," grinned Tode. "Eternity in the fifth dimension. Didn't know I'd worked that out, did you? A pleasant little surprise. No, don't try to move. My hand is on the lever. I have only to press it, and we're there." * * * * * Jim stood stock still in horror. Tode's voice rang true. He believed Tode had the power he claimed. "Yes, the fifth dimension, and eternity," said Tode, "where time and space reel into functionlessness. Don't ask me what it's like there. I've never been there. But my impression of it is that it's a fairly good representation of the place popularly known as hell. "You fool, Dent," Tode's voice rang out with vicious, snarling emphasis, "I gave you your chance to come in with me. Together we'd have made ourselves masters of Atlantis and brought back her plunder to our Twentieth Century world. You refused because of a girl--a girl, Dent, who loved me long before you came upon the scene." "That's a lie, Lucius," answered Lucille steadily. "And you can do your worst. There's one factor you haven't reckoned in your calculations, and that's called God." "The dark blur on the spectral lines," old Parrish muttered. Tode laughed uproariously. "Come, make your choice, Dent," he mocked. "It's merely to press this lever. You'll find yourself--well, we won't go into that. I don't know where you'll find yourself. You'll disappear. So shall I. But I'm desperate. I must have Lucille. Choose!" His voice rang out in maniac tones. "Choose, all of you!" "Lucille has answered you," Jim retorted. "And how about you, old man?" called Tode to Parrish. Parrish leased forward, making a swift movement with his hand. "Go to your own hell, you dev--" A blinding light, a frantic oscillation of the Atom Smasher, a sense of death, awful and indescribable--and stark unconsciousness rushed over Jim. His last thought was that Lucille's arms were about him, and that he was holding her. Nothing mattered, therefore, even though they two were plunged into that awful nothingness of the fifth dimension, where neither space nor time recognizably exists. Love could exist there. CHAPTER XII _Solid Earth_ "He's coming around, Lucille. Thank God for it!" Jim opened his eyes. For a few moments he looked about him without understanding. Then the outlines of a room etched themselves against the clouded background. And in the foreground Lucille's face. The girl was bending over Jim, one hand soothing his forehead. "Where am I?" Jim muttered. "Back on earth, Jim, the good old earth, never again to leave it," answered Lucille, with a catch in her voice. With an effort she composed herself. "You mustn't talk," she said. "But what place is this?" "It's Andy Lumm's house. Now rest, and I'll explain everything later." But the first explanation came from Andy Lumm. "Well, Mr. Dent, my wife and me sure were glad to be on the spot when you and Miss Parrish got bogged on the edge of the Black Pool," he said. "Mean, treacherous place it is. Thar was a cow got mired thar last month, up to her belly. If us hadn't found her, and dragged her out with ropes, she'd have gone clear under. Granpop Dawes says thar's underground springs around the edge, and that it runs straight down to hell, though that seems sorter far-fetched to me. "Yessir, and if I hadn't heard WNYC giving Miss Parrish on the list of missing persons, and as having been seen near here, I reckon I'd never have found you. Made me and my wife uneasy, that did. 'Andy,' she says. 'I got an inkling you oughter go to the Vanishing Place and see if she ain't there.' And there I found you two, mired to the waist, and Mr. Parrish dancing around and fretting, and his clothes burned to cinders. "It sure seems strange to me, to think Mr. Parrish got away safe after that explosion five years ago, and of his wandering around with loss of memory, till you found him, and brung him back here to restore it, but thar's strange things in the world--yes, sir, thar surely is!" In the happiness of being back on Earth once more, Jim was content to let further explanations go. The return of Parrish had been duly chronicled in the newspapers, and had provoked a mild interest, but fortunately the public mind was so occupied at the moment with the trial of a night club hostess that, after the first rush of newspaper men, the three were left alone. * * * * * Day after day, in the brilliant autumn weather, Jim and Lucille would roam the tinted woods, recharging themselves with the feel of Earth, until the memory of those dread experiences grew dim. "Well, Jim, I reckon I'd better tell you and get it over," said old Parrish one morning--Parrish, quite his old, jaunty self again. "Tode had got the dials pointing to the fifth dimension--eternity, he called it, though actually I believe it's nothing more than annihilation, a grand smash. Well, he pressed that lever. But something had gone wrong. "You remember how poor Cain seemed to take great interest in the Atom Smasher. There's no way of telling what had been going on in that brain of his, but it looks to me like he'd known that that lever meant death. It was sealed up in wax, and Tode had got it free on the way out of Atlantis. "Well--this it what I made out from examining the thing afterward. Cain had been monkeying with the lever. He'd pried loose one of the wires that hooked to the transformer, and short-circuited it, not knowing, of course, just what he was doing. The result was that when Tode pressed that lever, instead of blowing the whole contraption to pieces, he got a couple of billion volts of electricity through his body, combined with a larger amperage than has ever been imagined. It burned him to a few grease spots. He simply--vanished. You don't remember what you did at the moment, boy?" "I don't seem to remember anything," said Jim. "Well, your response was an automatic one. You jumped him. Luckily you were too late, for Tode vanished like that!" Old Parrish snapped his fingers. "But you must have got into the field of magnetic force--any way, you were almost electrocuted. Lucille and I thought you were dead for hours. "We laid you down and set a course for home. I used those dial numberings Tode had given me. He'd said they wouldn't work, but he'd lied. They did work. They brought us back to the Vanishing Place. "We carried you out, and then I saw your eyelid twitch. We worked over you with artificial respiration till it looked as if there was a chance for you. Then I shut off the power and let the waters rush in over the Atom Smasher, and swam ashore. And there it lies at the bottom of the pool, and may it lie there till the Judgment Day." * * * * * "Tode was a genius," said Jim, "but he never understood that character counts for more than genius." "Let's think no more about him," said Lucille. She had come up to them, and the two looked at each other and smiled. Love is self-centred; other things it forgets very quickly. "To-morrow we go back to New York," said Jim. "You think you're able to face the world and take up life again?" "I think so, Jim," said Lucille. "You're not remembering him after all?" "No, Jim. I was thinking of poor Cain. He died for me." "But that was twelve thousand years ago, my dear, and to-day's to-day," said Jim. "And to-morrow a new life begins for you and me." He drew her closer to him. No, he would never quite forget, but that was twelve thousand years ago ... and to-morrow was his wedding day. _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories [Illustration: _The Readers' Corner_] _An "Astounding" Career_ Dear Editor: A friend introduced me to your new magazine, and it is wonderful. The best story in the magazine, or, rather, the one I liked best, outside of the serial, which I didn't read, is "The Cave of Horror," by Capt. S. P. Meek. Next comes Ray Cummings' story of the Fourth Dimension, "Phantoms of Reality." Other good ones are, "Tanks," "Invisible Death," and "Compensation." I did not like "The Stolen Mind." It seemed to me to be a mixture of superstition and magic. A fairy tale. I am glad that you are publishing this magazine, and I think that it is worth double its present price. You have my good wishes to the magazine for a long and astounding career. My way of reading a serial is to save copies and to read the story at one time. I do not like to wait a month for a story to end or continue. Your next issue seems to sound quite interesting. "The Spawn of the Stars," a very interesting and, I am sure, a fit name for the story. "Creatures of the Light" is a very vague name--you don't know what to expect. The others will prove to be as interesting as any that I have named. I prefer interplanetary stories the most, as any amount of science can be injected in them.--Nathan Greenfield, 318 East 78th St., New York, N. Y. _Prefers Long Stories_ Dear Editor: I got your first issue of Astonishing Stories, and, although I like the stories, I do not like the way you have it bound. (This is supposed to be criticism, so don't take it to heart.) The pages are uneven and hard to turn. But the stories in the first copy were good. And you'll have a swell magazine if you have stories by Harl Vincent and Ray Cummings. The aforesaid men are two of the best in the science fiction field. Another thing: don't have any short stories. If you have about 3 or 4 l-o-n-g stories, I'd like it better. I hope your magazine enjoys much success!--Linus Hogenmiller, 502 N. Washington Street, Farmington, Mo. _Another Who Likes Interplanetary Stories_ Dear Editor: I have read the first issue of Astounding Stories with much pleasure, and if the first issue is any indication of what is to follow I will continue to be a reader. You inquire as to the kind of stories that your readers think should be published. I think you will find the most popular brand to be interplanetary stories and stories along the line of the "Beetle Horde." Best wishes for success in your new endeavor--F. C. Cowherd, Room 333, L. & N. Railroad, Louisville, Ky. _Attention, Joiners!_ Dear Editor: I have just finished one of the stories in your magazine, and could not resist the temptation to write and tell you how much I enjoyed it. The stories are great and are just the thing to give one rest and recreation. At the same time they fire imagination and are not trashy love stories. The main purpose of the letter is to revive an old idea and see if I can put it through. I propose to organize a correspondence society for readers interested in science. We would use Astounding Stories as our official medium. Each member would receive a list of members' names and addresses, a quantity of official stationery for inter-correspondence, and a certificate of membership suitable for framing. The object would be the discussion of scientific topics and the latest advances. I would suggest an annual fee of $2.50 to cover the cost of printing stationery, certificates, application forms, copy of the constitution, lists of members and official pins. All those interested in the formation of such a society are earnestly requested to write me, giving suggestions as to a suitable name, etc. They will receive full information, and a sample of the certificate of membership and an application form. I trust you will publish this letter at your earliest convenience--M. R. Bercovitch, B. Sc., 4643 St. Urbain Street, Montreal, Canada. _Sound Criticism_ Dear Editor: You ask for readers to write you regarding types of stories desired. Well, I am an electrical engineer and of course like my yarns to have a touch of science in them. Also I like my authors to make an original contribution to whatever theory of science they develop fictionally. This Ray Cummings doesn't do in his very interesting story, "Phantoms of Reality." His beginning is palpably borrowed from Francis Flagg's story, "The Blue Dimension," which appeared in a Science Fiction magazine in 1927. Flagg developed the theory of vibrations, reverberation, etc., and contributed something new to speculative science. Cummings merely seizes this point and dives into a series of improbable adventures. Now I am not quarrelling with their improbability: I like my stories improbable, but I am asking for something more original than the old rehash of kings and queens, intrigues, and returning princes, etc. Again, Cummings seems to lack enough scientific acumen to make his other world different than this. Even a superficial thinker will readily see that the terrain of the other world would not faithfully follow our own in its salient features. However, forgive me for knocking--the story wasn't so bad, and Cummings doubtless can do better than this--or has. "The Beetle Horde"--so far--is a gem, and holds the interest. Furthermore, its science is splendid. I am looking forward to its conclusion. "The Cave of Horror" is a damn good yarn, well written, interest sustained: but I didn't care for "The Stolen Mind." The truth is that that particular story didn't hang together very well. It left one up in the air, as it were, and far from satisfied me. Too, the science involved, to say the least of it, was not very sound or plausibly put. In reading the story I felt that the author was one who should be encouraged to write more--nothing wrong with his imagination or ability to fling words--but that he should be gently coerced into writing with better continuity and intelligence. "Compensation" didn't click--too loose--not compact enough. Splendid idea ruined by hasty writing. Another author needing a gentle hint. But "Tanks" was another sure-fire hit with me. Held me to last word. The story sounded real. So for the stories in your first issue. You see, on the whole, I liked all of them. Still, I also like variety. Can't you give us some of the Francis Flagg type of fiction? H. Hyatt Verril is another of my favorites, also Dr. Keller and Clara Harris. I have read mighty good tales by those authors. I believe you could do worse than to run an occasional H. G. Wells story, and if you gave us "The First Men in the Moon" serially, I for one would be delighted. I have tried in vain to get that story and never have. Well, I guess I have said enough. Best wishes for the New Year. May Astounding Stories grow and prosper--and its Editor.--C. Harry Jaeger, 2900 Jeedan Road, Oakland, California. _Likes Interplanetary Stories_ Dear Editor: Having read the first issue of Astounding Stories, I am about to pronounce a sentence on it. It is guilty of being "Astounding" to the Nth degree! I enjoyed all the stories immensely and will be anxiously awaiting the next issue. Now as for some suggestions which I think would improve the magazine. I. Try to have an interplanetary story in each issue. II. Publish a number of interesting letters concerning Astounding Stories in each issue. III. Have several illustrations in long stories. I think this would improve the magazine, although it is perfect just the way it is. Hoping Astounding Stories has a long and successful life!--Forrest Ackerman, 530 Staples Avenue, San Francisco, Cal. _Watch the Coming Issues, Miss Miller!_ Dear Editor: Saw your new magazine at the newsstand and bought it at once. I like the following stories in this issue: "The Beetle Horde," "Phantoms of Reality," "The Stolen Mind." I did not care much for the others, and least of all for "Tanks." I believe that readers, like myself, who are interested in scientific fantasies, prefer stories of interplanetary travels and fourth dimensional stories, and variations of these themes. Such as various space-ships and vibration machines for visiting other planets and traveling backward and forward in time. Stories of lost continents and of strange races of people living in unknown places on our own Earth are interesting also. A magazine of this kind has unlimited possibilities for stories of the aforementioned types, and I believe that readers who buy magazines of these subjects expect to find therein really Astounding Stories. Best wishes for the success of your magazine!--Ruth Miller, St. Regis Hotel, Cleveland, Ohio. "_The Scienceers_" Dear Editor: This is to inform you that we have formed a club which we named "The Scienceers." The object of this club is to bring together members who are interested in science in general, also to talk the stories of your magazine over. We have no means of reaching those who are interested except through your magazine. We hope you will grant us space to print this letter in your magazine. We would appreciate it if every reader of your magazine living in New York City or nearby towns would drop us a card with his name and address. We then would be able to send him information of our club. We hope you will print this letter, as we are all readers of your magazine.--Louis Wexeler, 1933 Woodbine Street, Brooklyn, New York. _We Examine All Science Very Carefully_ Dear Editor: In the first edition of your periodical, you invite criticism from its readers. I am extremely pleased to note that Ray Cummings is among its contributors. His short crisp sentences and word pictures are most interesting. As to the type of stories, I would not be particular; but there is one thing which must be observed: Since this magazine is about science every story must be examined to discover any false statements by the author concerning present-day science. I think that discoveries and inventions to be made in the future--by the author, of course--cannot be censored.--James Brodent, New York, N. Y. _Young Mr. Wright Writes In_ Dear Editor: I am accepting your offer to write and tell you what kind of stories I like. So I did. I prefer stories of the Fourth Dimension. I hope to find plenty of these fascinating stories in your coming issues.--Billy Wright, Age 11, Sheppard Place, Nashville, Tenn. _Likes His Science Fiction_ Dear Editor: Allow me to congratulate you on your fine magazine, it being one of the seven (more or less) magazines in print that are the best on the market. I am glad to say that I can't throw you any brickbats, only bouquets, and thought I would tell you the kind of stories I would like to see in "our" magazine, if I may take the liberty of calling it that. I like stories of the type A. Merritt and Edgar Rice Burroughs write, particularly A. Merritt, and if you could reprint "Through the Dragon Glass," by A. Merritt, I wish you would, and give it a cover illustration, as I have everything by him except that one. Please give it a cover illustration as well as any by Merritt and Burroughs you ever print. You certainly have a good title, and in my opinion the magazine need not be changed one iota, except perhaps you might have the background a different color every month; that is, the background of the cover, using every color in the solar spectrum, which might make it sell better, and, at any rate, would make a nice looking magazine in my opinion. Everything in Science Fiction that comes out I have to get, and pretty soon I will have so much that I will probably have to pay storage space for it. I have a pretty good amount now; four stacks two feet high each, but I can't resist it and will keep on buying as long as there is anything in that line to buy, and as long as I can. Put this in the proverbial waste-basket if you don't want to print it, as that is probably its ultimate destination anyway, as my ideas are not worth much or less than that. But I do wish you would read it through and act on my suggestions soon. Thanks--from an ardent devourer of Science Fiction, who reads everything in that line he can get his hands on, your and our magazine being one of the best in that line.--Worth K. Bryant, 406 North Third Street, Yakima, Washington. "_A Great Magazine_" Dear Editor: I have just come across a copy of your new magazine Astounding Stories, and to say that it is a great magazine is putting it mild. I enjoy stories of the distant future. The first instalment of "The Beetle Horde" by Victor Rousseau was great. I hope to hear more of this author in coming issues. I would like to see stories by such authors as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Harl Vincent, Otis Adelbert Kline, Garret Smith, also Ray Cummings. I wish Astounding Stories a long life.--Wilbert Moyer, 533 N. 7th Street, Allentown, Pa. _Mr. Anderson's Favorites_ Dear Editor: Just a word referring to your "What kind of stories do you like?" in Astounding Stories. I like stories with some facts based on true science of to-day, but let the author's imagination wander a little, because anything might be possible to-morrow. I do not like love stories or much humor in this type of stories. Stories of other worlds or of the Fourth Dimension always interest me, because there is no limit to the imagination there. Why not have a discussion column and print some of the letters? It would encourage more to write, and give you their opinion: and, whether good or bad, should help you please the majority. Some will maybe say the cover is too vivid--but that was what attracted my eye when I picked it out from among many others. Most of your stories in the first edition were good. I liked "The Beetle Horde" and "Phantoms of Reality" best. Also noticed the "Spawn of the Stars" next issue, which sounds O. K. Hoping you all success in this type of stories.--C. E. Anderson, 3504 Colfax Avenue, Minneapolis, Minn. _A Young Reader's Favorites_ Dear Editor: I am writing you, per your request in your first issue of Astounding Stories. They are most entertaining. I have read three of the stories and they are excellent. You asked the readers to tell you the kind of stories we liked best. I like stories that concern the future of aviation. I like interplanetary stories, also the stories about the Fourth Dimension. I like Cummings', Rousseau's, Leinster's Meek's, Vincent's and Starzl's writing. Your magazine is sure worth twenty cents. You could put more science in your stories. Please hold H. Wesso, your artist. He can really draw. I have seen his drawings in other magazines. And you may console yourself with the thought that you have one continuous reader. I feel that your magazine is going to be a success. I am also expressing the thoughts of other readers. I am only 15 years old, but I like to read good science stories, nevertheless. I hope to see you in next month's magazine.--Ward Elmore, 2912 Avenue J. Ft. Madison, Iowa. _A Contented Reader_ Dear Editor: Congratulations on your new publication, Astounding Stories. I certainly enjoyed reading the January issue. I believe that this magazine is the answer to the prayer of those readers who are desirous of something different, something unique. Another feature is that you are charging only 20¢ a copy for a magazine that is really worth several times that amount. You may count on me as a steady buyer of the Astounding Stories as long as future issues are up to the standard of the January issue. Let me urge you that you give us the magazine on time every month. I do not want to postpone my enjoyment of reading the Unique Magazine on the first Thursday of each month. Keep up the good work, and remember me as a contented reader of your publication--T. J. Creaff, Jr. P. O. Box 734, Phoenix Arizona. "_A Lallapaloozer_"! Dear Editor: Well, I've got to say something, and I might as well get it over with. Your new magazine, Astounding Stories, is a Lallapaloozer. I'm sorry I didn't get the first edition of the new magazine, but I suppose you have some in stock and I'm sending in my twenty cents in stamps to get one. I might as well tell you how I found out about this new wonder. One dreary, dreary night I walked into my newsdealer's store to get a paper. While there I happened to glance upon the bookstand--I saw the word Astounding and, my curiosity aroused, I walked over to the stand and pulled the magazine out. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found out what it was! Well, I bought the book then and there without even taking a look inside. When I got home I opened the book, and the first story that caught my eye was "Old Crompton's Secret," by Harl Vincent. I knew the story was good before I read it, because I've read quite a few of Mr. Vincent's novels and they were all excellent. The best stories I like are interplanetary stories. Why not have a "Reader Talks" in Astounding Stories, where each reader gives his point of view on the stories in the magazine? I know everyone would enjoy that, as it gives the readers a chance to comment on stories and, also, see what the other reader thinks about any story in particular. I wish you success in your new enterprise and hope my first edition of Astounding Stories arrives soon.--Joseph Kankowsky, 35 Columbia Street, West Orange, New Jersey. "_The Readers' Corner_" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for Readers, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here: so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! --_The Editor._ * * * * * 
29919	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, and WESTERN ADVENTURES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. IV, No. 2 CONTENTS NOVEMBER, 1930 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "The Pirate Planet."_ THE WALL OF DEATH VICTOR ROUSSEAU 151 _Out of the Antarctic It Came--a Wall of Viscid, Grey, Half-Human Jelly, Absorbing and Destroying All Life That It Encountered._ THE PIRATE PLANET CHARLES W. DIFFIN 168 _A Strange Light Blinks on Venus, and Over Old Earth Hovers a Mysterious Visitant--Dread Harbinger of Interplanetary War._ (Beginning a Four-Part Novel.) THE DESTROYER WILLIAM MERRIAM ROUSE 198 _Slowly, Insidiously, There Stole Over Allen Parker Something Uncanny. He Could No Longer Control His Hands--Even His Brain!_ THE GRAY PLAGUE L. A. ESHBACH 210 _Maimed and Captive, in the Depths of an Interplanetary Meteor-Craft, Lay the Only Possible Savior of Plague-Ridden Earth._ JETTA OF THE LOWLANDS RAY CUMMINGS 230 _Black-Garbed Figures Move in Ghastly Greenness As the Invisible Flyer Speeds on Its Business of Ransom._ (Conclusion.) VAGABONDS OF SPACE HARL VINCENT 244 _From the Depths of the Sargasso Sea of Space Came the Thought-Warning, "Turn Back!" But Carr and His Martian Friend Found It Was Too Late!_ (A Complete Novelette.) THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 271 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York. N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York: or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * The Wall of Death _By Victor Rousseau_ [Illustration: And then Kay had broken through and was hewing madly with great sweeps of the ax.] [Sidenote: Out of the Antarctic it came--a wall of viscid, grey, half-human jelly, absorbing and destroying all life that it encountered.] "This news," said Cliff Hynes, pointing to the newspaper, "means the end of _homo Americanus_." The newspaper in question was the hour-sheet of the International Broadcast Association, just delivered by pneumatic tube at the laboratory. It was stamped 1961, Month 13, Day 7, Horometer 3, and the headlines on the front page confirmed the news of the decisive defeat of the American military and naval forces at the hands of the Chinese Republic. A gallant fight for days against hopeless odds; failure of the army dynamos; airships cut off from ground guidance; battleships ripped to pieces by the Chinese disintegrators; and, finally, the great wave of black death that had wiped out two hundred thousand men. Kay Bevan--to use the old-fashioned names which still persisted, despite the official numerical nomenclature--glanced through the account. He threw the sheet away. "We deserved it, Cliff," he said. Cliff nodded. "You saw that bit about the new Chinese disintegrator? If the Government had seriously considered our Crumbler--" Kay glanced at the huge, humming top that filled the center of the laboratory. It spun so fast that it appeared as nothing but a spherical shadow, through which one could see the sparse furnishings, the table, the apparatus ranged upon it, and the window over-looking the upper streets of New York. "Yes--_if!_" he answered bitterly. "And I'm willing to bet the Chinese have an inferior machine, built upon the plans that Chinese servant stole from us last year." "We deserved it, Cliff," said Kay again. "For ten years we've harried and enslaved the yellow man, and taken a hundred thousand of his men and women to sacrifice to the Earth Giants. What would we have done, if conditions had been reversed?" "Self-preservation," Cliff suggested. "Exactly. The law of the survival of the fittest. They thought that they were fitter to survive. I tell you they had right on their side, Cliff, and that's what's beaten us. Now--a hundred thousand of our _own_ boys and girls must be fed into the maw of these monsters every year. God, suppose it were Ruth!" "Or you or I," said Cliff. "If only we could perfect the Crumbler!" "What use would that be against the Earth Giants? There's nothing organic about them, not even bones. Pure protoplasm!" "We could have used it against the Chinese," said Cliff. "Now--" He shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. * * * * * And if explorers had been content to leave the vast unknown Antarctic Continent alone, they would never have taught the imprisoned Giants to cross the great ice barrier. But that crossing had taken place fifteen years ago, and already the mind of man had become accustomed to the grim facts. Who could have dreamed that the supposed table-land was merely a rim of ice-mountains, surrounding a valley twice the size of Europe, so far below sea-level that it was warmed to tropic heat by Earth's interior fires? Or that this valley was peopled with what could best be described as organized protoplasm? Enormous, half-transparent, gelatinous organism, attaining a height of about a hundred feet, and crudely organized into forms not unlike those of men? Half the members of the Rawlins Expedition, which had first entered this valley, had fallen victims to the monsters. Most of the rest had gone raving mad. And the stories of the two who returned, sane, to Buenos Aires, were discredited and scoffed at as those of madmen. But of a second expedition none had survived, and it was the solitary survivor of the third who had confirmed the amazing story. The giant monsters, actuated by some flickering human intelligence, had found their way out of the central valley, where they had subsisted by enfolding their vegetable and small animal prey with pseudopods, that it to say, temporary projections of arms from the gelatinous bulk of their substance. They had floated across the shallow seas between the tip of the Antarctic Continent and Cape Horn, as toy balloons float on water. Then they had spread northward, extending in a wall that reached from the Atlantic to the Andes. And, as they moved, they had devoured all vegetables and animal life in their path. Behind them lay one great bare, absolutely lifeless area. * * * * * How many of them were there? That was the hideous fact that had to be faced. Their numbers could not be counted because, after attaining a height of about a hundred feet, they reproduced by budding! And within a few weeks these buds, in turn, attained their full development. The Argentine Government had sent a force of twenty thousand men against them, armed with cannon, machine-guns, tanks, airplanes, poison gas, and the new death-ray. And in the night, when it was bivouacking, after what it had thought was glorious victory, it had been overwhelmed _and eaten_! Proof against the poison gas, the hideous monsters were, and invulnerable to shot and shell. Divided and sub-divided, slashed into ribbons, blown to fragments by bombs, each of the pieces simply became the nucleus of a new organism, able, within a few hours, to assume the outlines of a dwarf man, and to seize and devour its prey. But the Argentine expedition had done worse than it at first dreamed of. _It had given the monsters a taste for human flesh!_ After that, the wave of devastation had obliterated life in every city clear up to the Amazonian forests. And then it had been discovered that, by feeding these devils human flesh, they could be rendered torpid and their advance stayed--so long as the periodical meals continued! At first criminals had been supplied them, then natives, then Chinese, obtained by periodical war raids. What would you have? The savage regions of the earth had already been depopulated, and a frenzy of fear had taken possession of the whole world. Now the Chinese had defeated the annual American invasion, and the Earth Giants were budding and swarming through the heart of Brazil. * * * * * "Man," said the Theosophists, "is the fifth of the great root-races that have inhabited this planet. The fourth were the Atlanteans. The third were the Lemurians, half-human beings of whom the Australian aborigines are the survivors. The second race was not fully organized into human form. Of the first, nothing is known. "These are the second race, surviving in the Antarctic valleys. Half-human objects, groping toward that perfection of humanity of which we ourselves fall very far short. As the Kabbala says, man, before Adam, reached from heaven to earth." Kay Bevan and Cliff Hynes had been working feverishly to perfect their Crumbler for use in the Chinese wars. Convinced, as were all fair-minded men, that these annual raids were unjustified, they yielded to the logic of the facts. Should America sacrifice a hundred thousand of her boys and girls each year, when human life was cheap in China? _Boys and girls!_ It had been discovered that the Earth Giants required the flesh of women as well as of men. Some subtle chemical constituent then produced the state of torpidity during which the advance and the budding of the monsters was stayed. During the ten past years their northward advance had been almost inappreciable. Brazil had even sent another army against them. But the deadliest gases had failed to destroy the tenacious life of these protoplasmic creatures, and the tanks, which had driven through and through them, had become entangled and blocked in the gelatinous exudations, and their occupants eaten. All over the world scientists were striving to invent some way of removing this menace to the world. Moreover, airplanes sent to the polar continent had reported fresh masses mobilizing for the advance northward. A second wave would probably burst through the Amazon forest barrier and sweep over the Isthmus and overrun North America. Five days after the news of the Chinese disaster was confirmed, Cliff Hynes came back from the capital of the American Confederation, Washington. "It's no use, Kay," he said. "The Government won't even look at the Crumbler. I told them it would disintegrate every inorganic substance to powder, and they laughed at me. And it's true, Kay: they've given up the attempt to enslave China. Henceforward a hundred thousand of our own citizens are to be sacrificed each year. Eaten alive, Kay! God, if only the Crumbler would destroy organic forms as well!" * * * * * The first year's quota of fifty thousand boys and fifty thousand girls, thrown to the maw of the monsters to save humanity, nearly disrupted the Confederation. Despite the utmost secrecy, despite the penalty of death for publishing news of the sacrifice, despite the fact that those who drew the fatal lots were snatched from their homes at dead of night, everything became known. On the vast pampas in the extreme north of the Argentine Republic, where Bolivia, the Argentine, Paraguay and Brazil unite, was the place of sacrifice. Thousands of acres, white with the bones of those whom the monsters had engulfed. Brainless, devoid of intelligence, sightless, because even the sense had not become differentiated in them, yet by some infernal instinct the Earth Giants had become aware that this was their feasting ground. By some tacit compact, the guards who had annually brought their victims to be devoured had been unmolested, the vast wall of semi-human shapes withdrawing into the shelter of the surrounding forests while the Chinese were staked out in rows. Death, which would have been a mercy, had been denied them. It was living flesh that the Earth Giants craved. And here, on the spot known as Golgotha, the hideous sacrifice had been annually repeated. That first year, when the chosen victims were transported to the fatal spot, all America went mad. Frenzied parents attacked the offices of the Federation in every city. The cry was raised that Spanish Americans had been selected in preference to those of more northern blood. Civil war loomed imminent. And year after year these scenes must be repeated. Boys and girls, from fifteen to twenty years of age, the flower of the Federation, a hundred thousand of them, must die a hideous death to save humanity. Now the choice of the second year's victims was at hand. In their laboratory, removed to the heart of the Adirondacks wilderness, Cliff and Kay were working frantically. "It's the last chance, Kay," said Cliff. "If I've not solved the secret this time, it means another year's delay. The secret of dissolving organic forms as well as inorganic ones! What is this mysterious power that enables organic forms to withstand the terrific bombardment of the W-ray?" The W-ray was the Millikan cosmic ray, imprisoned and adapted for human use. It was a million times more powerful than the highest known voltage of electricity. Beneath it, even the diamond, the hardest substance known, dissolved into a puff of dust; and yet the most fragile plant growth remained unaffected. * * * * * The laboratory in the Adirondacks was open at one end. Here, against a background of big forest trees, a curious medley of substances had been assembled: old chairs, a couple of broken-down airplanes, a large disused dynamo, a heap of discarded clothing, a miscellany of kitchen utensils on a table, a gas stove, and a heap of metal junk of all kinds. The place looked, in fact, like a junk heap. The great top was set in a socket in a heavy bar of craolite, the new metal that combined the utmost tensile strength with complete infusibility, even in the electric furnace. About six feet in height, it looked like nothing but what it was, a gyroscope in gimbals, with a long and extremely narrow slit extending all around the central bulge, but closed on the operator's side by a sliding cover of the same craolite. Within this top, which, by its motion, generated a field of electrical force between the arms of an interior magnet, the W-rays were generated in accordance with a secret formula; the speed of gyration, exceeding anything known on earth, multiplied their force a billionfold, converting them to wave-lengths shorter than the shortest known to physical science. Like all great inventions, the top was of the simplest construction. "Well," said Cliff, "you'd better bring out Susie." Kay left the laboratory and went to the cabin beside the lake that the two men occupied. From her box in front of the stove a lady porcupine looked up lazily and grunted. Kay raised the porcupine; in the box, of course. Susie was constitutionally indolent, but one does not handle porcupines, however smooth their quills may lie. Kay brought her to the heap of junk and placed the box on top of it. He went inside the laboratory. "I may as well tell you, Cliff. I wouldn't have brought Susie if I'd thought the experiment had the least chance of success," he said. Cliff said nothing. He was bending over the wheel, adjusting a micrometer. "All ready, Kay?" he asked. * * * * * Kay nodded and stepped back. He swallowed hard. He hated sacrificing Susie to the cause of science; he almost hoped the experiment would fail. Cliff pressed a lever, and slowly the ponderous top began to revolve upon its axis. Faster, faster, till it was nothing but a blur. Faster yet, until only its outlines were visible. Cliff pressed a lever on the other side. Nothing happened apparently, except for a cloudy appearance of the air at the open end of the laboratory. Cliff touched a foot lever. The top began to grow visible, its rotations could be seen; it ran slower, began to come to a stop. The cloud was gone. Where the airplanes and other junk had been, was nothing but a heap of grayish dust. It was this that had made the cloud. Nothing remained, except that impalpable powder against the background of the trees. Kay caught Cliff's arm. "Look out!" he shouted, pointing to the heap. "Something's moving in there!" Something was. A very angry lady porcupine was scrambling out, a _quillless_ porcupine, with a white skin, looking like nothing so much as a large, hairless rat. Cliff turned to Kay. "We've failed," he said briefly. "Too late for this year now." "But--the quills?" "Inorganic material. But even the bones remain intact because there's circulation in the marrow, you see. And the Earth Giants haven't even bones. They're safe--this year!" He flung himself down under a tree, staring up at the sky in abject despair. * * * * * "Look, Kay, I've got my number!" Ruth Meade smiled as she handed Kay the ticket issued by the Government announcing the lottery number provided for each citizen. One hundred thousand young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty would be drawn for the sacrifice, and Ruth, being nineteen, had come within the limits, but this would be her last year. In a few weeks the Government would announce the numbers--drawn by a second lottery--of those who were condemned. Then, before these had been made public, the victims would already have been seized and hurried to the airship depots in a hundred places, for conveyance to the hideous Golgotha of the pampas. The chance that any individual would be among the fated ones was reasonably small. It was the fashion to make a jest of the whole business. Ruth smiled as she showed her ticket. Kay stared at it. "Ruth, if--if anything happened to you I'd go insane. I'd--" "Why this sudden ardor, Kay?" * * * * * Kay took Ruth's small hand in his. "Ruth, you mustn't play with me any more. You know I love you. And the sight of that thing makes me almost insane. You do care, don't you?" And, as Ruth remained silent, "Ruth, it isn't Cliff Hymes, is it? I know you two are old friends. I'd rather it were Cliff than anybody else, if it had to be some one, but--tell me, Ruth!" "It isn't Cliff," said Ruth slowly. "Is it--some one else?" "It's you, dear," answered Ruth. "It's always been you. It might have been Cliff if you hadn't come along. But he knows now it can never be he." "Does he know it's me?" asked Kay, greatly relieved. Ruth inclined her head. "He took it very finely," she said. "He said just what you've said about him. Oh, Kay, if only your experiment had succeeded, and the world could be free of this nightmare! What happened? Why couldn't you and Cliff make it destroy life?" "I don't know, dear," answered Kay. "Iron and steel melt into powder at the least impact of the rays. They are so powerful that there was even a leakage through the rubber and anelektron container. Even the craolite socket was partly fused, and that is supposed to be an impossibility. And there was a hole in the ground seven feet deep where the very mineral water in the earth had been dissolved. But against organic substances the W-ray is powerless. "Next year, dear--next year we'll have solved our problem, and then we'll free the world of this menace, this nightmare. Ruth--don't let's talk about that now. I love you!" They kissed. The Earth Giants faded out of their consciousness even while Ruth held that ominous ticket in her hand. * * * * * Kay said nothing to Cliff about it, but Cliff knew. Perhaps he had put his fate to the test with Ruth and learned the truth from her. Ruth made no reference to the matter when she saw Kay. But between the two men, friends for years, a coolness was inexorably developing. They had gone to work on the new machine. They were hopeful. When they were working, they forgot their rivalry. "You see, Kay," said Cliff, "we mustn't forget that the Millikan rays have been bombarding Earth since Earth became a planet, out of the depths of space. It is their very nature not to injure organic life, otherwise all life on Earth would have been destroyed long ago. Now, our process is only an adaptation of these cosmic rays. We haven't changed their nature." "No," agreed Kay. "What we want is a death-ray strong enough to obliterate these monsters, without simply disintegrating them and creating new fragments to bud into the complete being. Why do you suppose they are so tenacious of life, Cliff?" "They represent primeval man, life itself, striving to organize itself, and nothing is more tenacious than the life principle," answered Cliff. Meanwhile the fatal weeks were passing. A few days after the tickets had been distributed, a Government notice was broadcasted and published, ordaining that, in view of former dissensions, no substitutes for the condemned persons would be permitted. Rich or poor, each of the victims chosen by lot must meet his fate. * * * * * And the monsters were growing active. There had been an extension of their activities. Tongues had been creeping up the rivers that ran into the Amazon. Suddenly a dense mass of the devils had appeared on the north coast, near Georgetown. They had overleaped the Amazon; they were overrunning British Guiana, eating up everything on their way. Georgetown was abandoned; the monsters were in complete control. "They will be cut off from the main herd," the optimistic reports announced. "We shall deal with the main herd first. This year the sacrifice will have to be made, but it will be the last. Scientists have at last hit upon an infallible toxin which will utterly destroy this menace within a few months." Nobody believed that story, for everything had been tried and failed. In their laboratory Cliff and Kay were working frantically. And now the coldness that had developed between them was affecting their collaboration too. Cliff was keeping something back from Kay. * * * * * Kay knew it. Cliff had made some discovery that he was not sharing with his partner. Often Kay, entering the laboratory, would find Cliff furtively attempting to conceal some operation that he was in the midst of. Kay said nothing, but a brooding anger began to fill his heart. So Cliff was trying to get all the credit for the result of their years of work together! And always, in the back of his mind, there was a vision of the little Government ticket in Ruth's hand, with the numbers in staring black type. They had burned into his brain. He could never forget them. Often at night, after a hard day's work, he would suddenly awaken out of a hideous nightmare, in which he saw Ruth taken away by the agents of the Government, to be thrown as a sacrifice to the monsters. And Cliff was hiding something! That made the situation unbearable. The coolness between the two men was rapidly changing into open animosity. And then one day, quite by chance, in Cliff's absence, Kay came upon evidence of Cliff's activities. Cliff was no longer experimenting with the W-ray! He was using a new type of ray altogether, the next series, the psenium electron emanation discovered only a few years before, which had the peculiar property of non-alternation, even when the psenium electron changed its orbit around the central nucleus of the psenium atom. Instead of discontinuity, the psenium electron had been found to emit radiation steadily, and this had upset the classic theories of matter for the ninth time in the past fifteen years. * * * * * And Kay's wrath broke loose in a storm of reproaches when Cliff came into the laboratory. "You've been deliberately keeping me in the dark!" he shouted. "You're a nice sort of partner to have! Here's where we split up the combination, Hynes!" "I've been thinking that for a long time," sneered Cliff. "The fact is, Kay, you're a little too elementary in your ideas to suit me. It's due to you that I kept hammering away on the wrong tack for years. The sooner we part, the better." "No time like now," said Kay. "Keep your laboratory. You put most of the money into it, anyway. I'll build me another--where I can work without being hampered by a partner who's out for himself all the time. Good luck to you in your researches, and I hope you'll get all the credit when you find a way of annihilating the Earth Giants." And he stormed out of the laboratory, jumped into his plane, and winged his way southward toward his apartment in New York. * * * * * Crowds in the streets of every town on the way. In villages and hamlets, swarming like ants, and hurrying along the highways! Kay, who flew one of the slow, old-fashioned planes, averaging little more than a hundred miles an hour, winged his way methodically overhead, too much absorbed in his anger against Cliff to pay much attention to this phenomenon at first. But gradually it was borne in upon him that something was wrong. He flew lower, and now he was passing over a substantial town, and he could hear the shouts of anger that came up to him. The whole town was in a ferment, gathered in the town square. Suddenly the reason came home to Kay. He saw the adjoining airport, and dropped like a plummet, hovering down until his wheels touched the ground. Without waiting to taxi into one of the public hangars, he leaped out and ran through the deserted grounds into the square. Groans, yells, shrieks of derision rent the air. The whole crowd had gone maniacal. And it was as Kay had thought. Upon a white background high up on the town ball building, the numbers of the local boys and girls who had been picked for sacrifices were being shown. * * * * * Eight boys and fifteen girls, already on their way into the wastes of South America, to meet a hideous death. "They took my Sally," screamed a wizened woman, the tears raining down her checks. "Kidnapped her at the street corner after dark. I didn't know why she hadn't come home last night. God, my Sally, my little girl, gone--gone--" "People, you must be patient," boomed the Government announcer. "The President feels with you in your affliction. But by next year a means will have been devised of destroying these monsters. Your children will have their sacrifice recorded in the Hall of Fame. They are true soldiers who--" "To hell with the Government!" roared a man. "Stop that damn talk machine! Break her, fellows! Then we'll hang President Bogart from the top of the Capitol!" Yells answered him, and the crowd surged forward toward the building. "Stand back!" shrieked the announcer. "It's death to set foot on the step. We are now electrified. Last warning!" The first ranks of the mob recoiled as a charge of electricity at a voltage just short of that required to take life coursed through their bodies. Shrieks of agony rang out. Files of writhing forms covered the ground. * * * * * Kay rushed to the automatic clerk at the window beside the metal steps, taking care to avoid contact with them. Within six feet, the temperature of his body brought the thermostatic control into action; the window slid upward and the dummy appeared. He turned the dial to Albany. "I want New York Division, Sub-station F, Loyalist Registration," he called. "Give me Z numbers of the lottery, please." "No numbers will be given out until Horometer 13," the dummy boomed. "But I tell you I must know immediately!" Kay pleaded frantically. "Stand away, please!" "I've got to know, I tell you!" "We are now electrified. Last warning!" "Listen to me. My name's Kay Bevan. I--" A mighty buffet in the chest hurled Kay ten feet backward upon the ground. He rose, came within the electric zone, felt his arms twisted in a giant's grasp, staggered back again and sat down gasping. The window went down noiselessly, the dummy swung back into place. Kay got upon his feet again, choking with impotent rage. All about him men and women were milling in a frantic mob. He broke through them, went back to where his plane was standing. A minute later he was driving madly toward the district airport in New York within three blocks of Ruth's apartment. * * * * * He dropped into a vacant landing place, checked hastily, and rushed into the elevator. Once in the upper street, he bounded to the middle platform, and, not satisfied to let it convey him at eight miles an hour, strode on through the indignant throng until he reached his destination. Hurling the crowds right and left he gained the exit, and a half-minute later was on the upper level of the apartment block. He pushed past the janitor and raced along the corridor to Ruth's apartment. She would be in if all was well; she worked for the Broadcast Association, correcting the proofs that came from the district headquarters by pneumatic tube. He stopped outside the door. The little dial of white light showed him that the apartment was unoccupied. As he stood there in a daze, hoping against hope, he saw a thread hanging from the crevice between door and frame. He pulled at it, and drew out a tiny strip of scandium, the new compressible metal that had become fashionable for engagement rings. Plastic, all but invisible, it could be compressed to the thickness of a sheet of paper: it was the token of secret lovers, and Kay had given Ruth a ring of it. It was the signal, the dreaded signal that Ruth had been on the lottery list--the only signal that she had been able to convey, since stringent precautions were taken to prevent the victims becoming known until all possibility of rescue was removed. * * * * * No chance of rescuing her! From a hundred airports the great Government airships had long since sailed into the skies, carrying those selected by the wheel at Washington for sacrifice to the Earth Giants. Only one chance remained. If Cliff had discovered the secret that had so long eluded them, surely he would reveal it to him now! Their quarrel was forgotten. Kay only knew that the woman he loved was even then speeding southward to be thrown to the maw of the vile monsters that held the world in terror. Surely Cliff would bend every effort to save her! Only a few hours had passed since Kay had stormed out of the laboratory in the Adirondacks in a rage when he was back on their little private landing field. He leaped from the plane and ran up the trail beside the lake between the trees. The cabin was dark; and, when Kay reached the laboratory he found it dark too. "Cliff! Cliff!" he shouted. No answer came, and with a sinking heart he snapped the button at the door. It failed to throw the expected flood of light through the interior. With shaking hand Kay pulled the little electron torch from his pocket, and its bright beam showed that the door was padlocked. He moved round to the window. The glass was unbreakable, but the ray from the torch showed that the interior of the laboratory had been dismantled, and the great top was gone. In those few hours Cliff, for reasons best known to himself, had removed the top, Kay's one hope of saving Ruth. And he was gone. * * * * * In that moment Kay went insane. He raved and cursed, calling down vengeance upon Cliff's head. Cliff's very motive was incredible. That he had deliberately removed the top in order that Ruth should die was not, of course, conceivable. But in that first outburst of fury Kay did not consider that. Presently Kay's madness burned itself out. There was still one thing that he could do. His plane, slow though it was, would carry him to the pampas. He could get fresh fuel at numerous bootleg petrol stations, even though the regulations against intersectional flight were rigid. With luck he could reach the pampas, perhaps before the sluggish monsters had fallen upon their prey. It was said that the victims sometimes waited for days! Something was rubbing against his leg, pricking it through his anklets. Kay looked down. A lady porcupine, with tiny new quills, was showing recognition, even affection, if such a spiny beast could be said to possess that quality. Somehow the presence of the beast restored Kay's mind to normal. "Well, he's left us both in the lurch, Susie," he said. "Good luck to you, beastie, and may you find a secure hiding place until your quills have grown." * * * * * Drowning men catch at straws. Kay snatched out his watch, and the illuminated dial showed that it was already two quintets past horometer 13. He darted back to the cabin. The door was unfastened, and his torch showed him that, though Cliff had evidently departed, and taken his things, the interior was much as it had been. When Kay picked up the telephotophone, the oblong dial flashed out. The instrument was in working order. He turned the crank, and swiftly a succession of scenes flashed over the dial. On this little patch of glassite, Kay was actually making the spatial journey to Albany, each minutest movement of the crank representing a distance covered. The building of the New York Division appeared, and its appearance signified that Kay was telephonically connected. But there was no automatic voice attachment, an expense that Kay and Cliff had decided would be unjustified. He had to rely upon the old-fashioned telephone, such as was still widely in use in rural districts. He took up the receiver. "Sub-Station F, Loyalist Registration, please," he called. "Speaking," said a girl's voice presently. "I want the Z numbers. All from Z5 to ZA," said Kay. And thus, in the dark hut, he listened to the doom pronounced, miles away, by a more or less indifferent operator. When the fatal number was read out, he thanked her and hung up. He released the crank, which moved back to its position, putting out the light on the dial. * * * * * For a moment or two he stood there motionless, in a sort of daze, though actually he was gathering all his reserves of resolution for the task confronting him. Simply to find Ruth among the hundred thousand victims, and die with her. A task stupendous in itself, and yet Kay had no doubt that he would succeed, that he would be holding her in his arms when the tide of hell flowed over them. He knew the manner of that death. The irresistible onset of the giant masses of protoplasm, the extrusion of temporary arms, or feelers, that would grasp them, drag them into the heart of the yielding substance, and slowly smother them to death while the life was drained from their bodies. It had been said the death was painless, but that was Government propaganda. But he would be holding Ruth in his arms. He'd find her: he had no doubt of that at all. And, strangely enough, now that Kay knew the worst, now that not the slightest doubt remained, he was conscious of an elevation of spirits, a sort of mad recklessness that was perfectly indefinable. * * * * * Kay turned his torch into a corner of the kitchen. Yes, there was the thing subconsciousness had prompted him to seek. A long-shafted, heavy woodsman's ax, a formidable weapon at close quarters. Because it is the instinct of _homo Americanus_ to die with a weapon in his hands, rather than let himself be butchered helplessly, Kay snatched it up. He ran back to his plane. The gas tank was nearly empty, but there was petrol in the ice house beside the lake. Kay wheeled the machine up to it, and filled up with gas and oil. All ready now! He leaped in, pressed the starter, soared vertically, helicopter wings fluttering like a soaring hawk's. Up to the passenger air lane at nine thousand: higher to twelve, the track of the international and supply ships; higher still, to the fourteen thousand ceiling of the antiquated machine. He banked, turned southward. It was freezing cold up there, and Kay had no flying suit on him, but, between the passenger lane and the lane of the heliospheres, at thirty thousand, there was no air police. And he could afford to take no chances. The Government police would be on the lookout for a score such desperate men as he, bent on a similar mission. He drove the plane toward the Atlantic till a red glow began to diffuse itself beneath him, an area of conflagration covering square miles of territory. Swooping lower, Kay could hear the sound of detonations, the roar of old-fashioned guns, while through the pall of lurid smoke came the long, violet flashes of atomic guns, cleaving lanes of devastation. New York was burning. The frenzied populace had broken into revolt, seized the guns stored in the arsenals, and attacked the great Bronx fortress that stood like a mighty sentinel to protect the port. A swarm of airships came into view, swirling in savage fight. Kay zoomed. It was not his battle. * * * * * Now New York lay behind him, and he was winging southward over the Atlantic. All night he flew. At dawn he came down in a coast hamlet for bootleg petrol and oil. "You come from New York?" asked the Georgian. "Hear there's war broke out up there." "My war's down in Brazil," muttered Kay. "Say, if them Giants comes up here yuh know what us folks is going to do? We're going to set the hounds on 'em. Yes, sirree, we've got a pack of bloodhounds, raised for jest that purpose. I guess that's something them wisecrackers at Washington ain't thought of. They took two little fellers from Hopetown, but they won't take nobody from here." Kay fuelled up and resumed his flight southward. After that it was a nightmare. The sun rose and set, alternating with the staring moon and stars. Kay crossed the Caribbean, sighted the South American coast, swept southward over the jungles of Brazil. He drank, but no food passed his lips. He had become a mechanism, set for on special purpose--self-immolation. * * * * * It was in a wide savannah among the jungles that he first caught sight of the monsters. At first he thought it was the rising dawn mist; then he began to distinguish a certain horrible resemblance to human forms, and swooped down, banking round and round the opening in the jungle until he could see clearly. There were perhaps a score of them, an advance guard that had pushed forward from one of the main divisions. Men? Anthropoids, rather, for their sex was indistinguishable! Human forms ranging from a few feet to a hundred, composed apparently of a grayish jelly, propelling themselves clumsily on two feet, but floating rather than walking. Translucent, semi-transparent. Most horrible of all, these shadowy, spheroid creatures exhibited here and there buds of various sizes, which were taking on the similitude of fresh forms. And among them were the young, the buds that had fallen from the parent stems, fully formed humans of perhaps five or six feet, bouncing with a horrible playfulness among their sires. As Kay soared some three hundred feet overhead, a young tapir came leaping out of the jungle and ran, apparently unconscious of their presence, right toward the monsters. Suddenly it stopped, and Kay saw that it was already encircled by coils of protoplasm, resembling arms, which had shot forth from the bodies of the devils. * * * * * Swiftly, despite its struggles and bleatings, the tapir was drawn into the substance of the monsters, which seemed to fuse together and form a solid wall of protoplasm in all respects like the agglutination of bacteria under certain conditions. Then the beast vanished in the wall, whose agitated churnings alone gave proof of its existence. For perhaps ten minutes longer Kay remained hovering above the clearing. Then the bodies divided, resuming their separate shapes. And the white bones of the tapir lay in a huddled mass in the open. Kay went mad. Deliberately he set down his plane, and, hatchet in hand, advanced upon the sluggish monsters. Shouting wildly, he leaped into their midst. The fight that followed was like a nightmare fight. He lopped off the slow tentacles that sought to envelop him, he slashed the devils into long ribbons of writhing jelly, slashed until the substance blunted the ax; wiped it clean and leaped into their midst again, hewing until he could no longer raise his arm. Then he drew back and surveyed the scene before him. It was dreadful enough to drive the last remnants of sanity from his brain. For every piece that he had cut from the monsters, every protoplasmic ribbon was reorganizing before his eyes into the semblance of a new creature. Where there had been a score, there were now five hundred! Kay ran back to his plane, leaped in, and soared southward. His face was a grotesque mask of madness, and his cries rang out through the ether. * * * * * The victims were no longer chained to stakes. The Federation, which always acted with complete secrecy, had gone one better. It had engaged electrical engineers, kept them housed in secret places, transported them to Golgotha; and there a vast electrified field had been established, an open space whose boundaries were marked out by pillars of electron steel. Between these pillars ran lines of electric force. To attempt to pass them meant--not death, for dead boys and girls were spurned by the devils--but a violent shock that hurled one backward. On this great plain the hundred thousand victims sat huddled in the open. Food they had none, for no purpose was to be served by mitigating their last agonies. No shelter either, for the sight of buildings might delay the final phase. But high above the doomed there floated the flag of the Federation, on a lofty pole, a touch of ironic sentimentality that had commended itself to some mind at Washington. Over a square mile of territory, ringed with jungle the victims lay. The majority of them ringed this terrain; that is to say, attempting to escape, they had been hurled back by the electrical charge, and, having no strength or will remaining, they had dropped where they had been hurled, and lay in apathetic resignation. There had been screams and cries for mercy, and piteous scenes when the Government airships had deposited them there and flown away, but now an intense silence had descended upon the doomed. Resigned to their fate, they sat or lay in little silent groups, all eyes turned toward the gloomy jungle. * * * * * And everywhere within this jungle a wraith-like mist was forming at this dawn hour. From a thousand miles around, the devils were mustering for their prey, agglutinating, in order that the meal of one might become the meal of all. Wisps of protoplasmic fog were stealing out through the trees, changing shape every instant, but always advancing: now presenting the appearance of an aligned regiment of huge, shadowy men, now nothing but a wall of semi-solid vapor. And still, with eyeballs straining in their sockets, the victims watched. Suddenly all were seized with the same spasm of mad terror. Again they hurled themselves against the electrified lines, and again they were hurled back, masses of boys and girls tumbling against one another, and screaming in one wail that, could it have been heard in Washington, would have driven all insane. Again and again, till they fell back, panting and helpless. And solidly the wall of devils was creeping up from every side. Ruth Deane, one of the few who had themselves in control, lay some distance back from the electrified field. From the moment when she was surprised in her apartment by the Government representatives, she had known that there was no hope of escape. * * * * * She had slipped the ring off her finger, snapped the plastic metal, and attached it to a thread torn from her dress. She had managed to insert it in the door, hoping that Kay would find it. It would serve as a last message of love to him. Every removal of a selected victim was in the nature of a kidnapping. At dead of night her apartment had been opened. She had been ordered to dress. Nothing could be written, no arrangements made. She was already considered as one dead. She had been hurried out of the upper entrance to the monorail, which conveyed her in a special car to the landing station. A few minutes later she had been on her way to join the camp of other victims, a hundred miles away. Within two hours she was on her way southward. Stunned by the tragedy, none of the victims had made much of an outcry. They had been given water by the airship police. No food for boys and girls already dead. Days and nights had passed, and now she was here, faint from exhaustion, and wondering at the despair shown by those others. What difference would it make in half an hour? Besides, that Government pamphlet had insisted that this death was painless! But an immense longing to see Kay once more came over her. There had been a time when she thought she loved Cliff; then Kay had come into her life, and she had known that other affair was folly. She had never told Kay of the bitter scene between Cliff and herself, how he had raved against Kay and sworn to win her in the end. Cliff had calmed down and apologized, and Ruth had never seen him again. She wished he had not taken it like that. But above all she wanted to see Kay, just to say good-by. And she tried to send out her whole heart to him in an unspoken message of love that would surely somehow convey itself to him. * * * * * The wall of devils was creeping up on every side, slowly, lethargically. The monsters took their time, because they knew they were invincible. The sobs and shrieks had died away. Collected into a mass almost as rigid as that of the Earth Giants, the victims waited, palsied as a rabbit that awaits the approach of the serpent. A humming overhead. An airplane shooting down from the sky. Rescue? No. Only a solitary pilot, armed with a woodsman's ax. Kay drifted down, touched ground, leaped to his feet. Chance had brought him within five hundred yards of where Ruth was standing. But Ruth had known who that lone flyer must be. She broke through the throng; she rushed to meet him. Her arms were around him. "Kay, darling Kay!" "Ruth, dearest!" "I knew you'd come." "I've come to die beside you!" * * * * * It was perhaps odd that it did not enter the head of either as a possibility that Kay should simply place Ruth in the plane and fly away with here to safety. Had the thought occurred to Kay, he might have been tempted. But such black treachery was something inconceivable by either. So long as the Federation remained, so long as man moved in an organized society, he was bound to his fellows, to fight, suffer, and die with them. "Stand by me, Ruth. We're going down fighting." They moved back toward the throng, which, momentarily stirred to hope by Kay's appearance, had fallen into the former apathy of despair. And now the monsters were beginning to enter the electrified zone at one point. As they passed the line of posts, the high tension current made their bodies luminous, but it had no appreciable effect upon them. They moved on, inevitably. A score or so of semi-human forms, agglutinated into a mass, and yet individually discernible. They bore down slowly upon the crowd of victims, who pressed backward as they advanced. On the other sides, though they almost encircled the field of death, the monsters were making no maneuvers to entrap their prey. Their sluggish minds were incapable of conceiving anything of the kind. But for the electrified zone, the great majority of the victims could have effected their escape. The monsters were simply pressing forward to their meal; they did not interpret its capture in terms of strategy at all. * * * * * A new frenzy of horror seized the crowd. They fled, struggling back until the foremost in flight reached the other side of Golgotha, to be repulsed by the electrified zone there. They fell in tumbled heaps. Appalling shrieks rang through the air. Another line of the monsters was seeping forward, converging toward the first. As the two lines met, they coalesced into a wall of protoplasm, a thousand feet in length by a hundred high. A wall out of which leered phantasmal faces, like those in a frieze. Kay stood alone, his arm around Ruth. To follow the flying mob would but prolong the agony. He raised the ax. He looked into the girl's eyes. She understood, and nodded. One last embrace, one kiss, and Kay placed her behind him. He sprang forward, shouting, and plunged into the very heart of the wall. And Ruth, watching with eyes dilated with horror, saw it yield with a sucking sound, and saw Kay disappear within it. * * * * * She saw the hideous mass fold itself upon him, and a hundred extruded tentacles wave in the air as they blindly grappled for him. And then Kay had broken through, and was hewing madly with great sweeps of the ax that slashed great streamers of the amorphous tissue from the wall of protoplasm. It recoiled and then folded once more, and Kay's mighty sweeps were slashing phantom limbs from phantom bodies; and lopping off tentacles that curled and coiled, and put forth caricatures of hands and fingers, and then, uniting with other slashed off tentacles, began to mould themselves into the likeness of dwarf monsters. Kay's struggle was like that of a man fighting a fog, for again and again he broke through the wall, and always it reunited. And behind it another wall of protoplasm was pressing forward, and on another side a wall was drifting up. As Kay stopped, panting, and momentarily free, Ruth saw that they were almost encircled. She saw the nature of that fight. Inevitably that wall would close about them; and, though the bones of last year's victims had been gathered up and carried away by the Federation, she guessed what would occur. She ran to Kay and dragged him back through the closing gap. It met behind them, and again they stood face to face with the devils. Only this time, instead of a wall of protoplasm, it was a veritable mountain that confronted them, and there could be no more breaking through. Kay thought afterward that the one touch of absolute horror was that the reforming monsters, the young ones growing visibly before his eyes, had the gamboling instinct of young lambs or other creatures. They were much more lively than the parent creatures. * * * * * By this time perhaps a third of the space within the electrified lines had been occupied by the devils. The wall was slowly and sluggishly advancing, and a fresh infiltration was drifting in on another side. As the victims were pressed closer and closer together in their flight, half of them seemed to go insane. They raced to and fro, laughing and screaming, flinging their arms aloft in extravagant gestures. One young fellow, rushing across the ground, hurled himself like a bolt from a catapult into the heart of the grisly mass, which opened and received him. There was a struggle, a convulsion; then the mass moved on. Kay wiped his ax. He stood beside Ruth, gathering strength and breath to fight again. What else was there to do? Suddenly a humming sound came to his ears. Still some little distance from the monsters, he glanced back. The victims were shouting, staring upward. Over the tops of the jungle trees Kay saw a second airplane flying toward them, a larger one than the plane which he had flown. It opened its helicopter wings and drifted downward. Kay saw a single pilot, and, in the baggage compartment something that at first he did not recognize. Then he recognized both this object and the aviator. "It's Cliff," he whispered hoarsely. "He's brought the top!" * * * * * The crowd was milling about Cliff as he stepped out of the plane. Kay broke through their midst, shouting to them to clear a space, that it was their chance, their only chance. They heard him and obeyed. And Cliff and Kay clasped hands, and there was Ruth beside them. The two men carried the top out of the baggage compartment and set it up. "Thank God I came in time," Cliff hissed. "How long have we got, Kay?" "Five minutes, I think," Kay answered, glancing at the oncoming wall. "They're slow. Will it work, Cliff? God, when I found you'd gone last night--" Cliff did not answer. Ignoring Kay's offer of assistance, he fitted the top tightly into its socket of craolite, much heavier than the former one. Beneath this, three heavy craolite legs formed a sort of tripod. "I looked forward to this possibility, Kay," said Cliff, as he adjusted the top and turned the clamps that held it in position. "Sorry I had to deceive you, but you we're so set on the cosmic rays, and I knew the psenium emanations wouldn't appeal to you. You wouldn't have believed. I had a hunch Ruth would draw one of those numbers.... _How long?_" The swaying masses of gray jelly were very near them. Cliff worked feverishly at the top. "Let me help. Cliff!" "No! I'm through! Stand back!" shouted Cliff. * * * * * Even then--he regretted it afterward, and knew that he would regret it to his dying day--even then the thought flashed through Kay's mind that Cliff wanted all the glory. Behind him the milling, screaming crowd was huddling, as if for protection. Slowly a wisp-like tentacle protruded from the advancing wall. Kay swung his ax and lopped it from the phantom body. But the wall was almost upon them, and from the other side it was advancing rapidly. "I'm ready! Stand back!" Cliff turned upon Kay, his face white, his voice hoarse. "I've one request to make, Kay. Keep everybody back, including you and Ruth. Nobody is to come within twenty-five yards of this machine!" "That shall be done," said Kay, a little bitterness in his tone. "Ruth, I think I'm going to save you all." Cliff looked into the girl's face for a moment. "Please stand back twenty-five yards," he repeated. Kay took Ruth by the arm and drew her back. The crowd moved back, their pressure moving back the vast multitudes behind them. The vast mob was almost packed into the quarter of the Golgotha; there was scarcely room to move. Kay saw Cliff press the lever. * * * * * Slowly the giant top began to whirl. Faster ... faster.... Now it was revolving so fast that it had become totally invisible. But Cliff was almost surrounded by the wall of jelly. Only his back could be seen, and then space was narrowing fast. Kay gripped Ruth's arm tightly. He held his breath. The crowd, of whom only a small part knew what was taking place, was screaming with terror as the mass of jelly on the other side pressed them inexorably backward. And Cliff had almost vanished. Would the machine work? Was it possible that the psenium emanations would succeed where the Millikan rays, the W-ray had failed? Then of a sudden the air grew dark as night. Kay began to sneeze. He gasped for air. He was choking. He could see nothing, and he strained Ruth to him convulsively, while the terrified multitudes behind him set up a last wail of despair. He could see nothing, and he stood with the ax ready for the onset of the monsters, more terrible now, in their invisibility, than before. Then of a sudden there sounded subterranean rumblings. The ground seemed to open almost under Kay's feet. He leaped back, dragging Ruth with him. Slowly the dust was settling, the darkness lessening. A faint, luminous glow overhead revealed the sun. Kay was aware that Cliff had swung the top, so that the psenium rays were being brought to bear upon the second mass of the monsters on the other side. The sun vanished in appalling blackness. Again the dust-choked air was almost unbreathable. The shrieks of the crowd died away in wheezing gasps; and then a wilder clamor began. "The earthquake! The earthquake!" a girl was shrilling. "God help us all!" Kay stood still, clutching Ruth tightly in his arms. He dared not stir, for all the world seemed to be dissolving into chaos. * * * * * Slowly the dust began to settle again. Perhaps five minutes passed before the sunbeams began to struggle through. A cloud of grey dust still obscured everything. But the wall of protoplasm was gone! Cliff's voice came moaning out of the murk, calling Kay's name. Kay moved forward cautiously, still holding Ruth. He seemed to be skirting the edge of a vast crater. At the edge of it he found the top, revolving slowly. And Cliff's voice came from beside the top. "Kay, we've won. Don't look at me. Don't let Ruth see me! Look down!" Kay looked down into the bottomless pit, extending clear across the plain to the distant jungle. An enormous canyon cloven in the earth, filled with the slowly settling cloud of dust. "They're there, Kay. Don't look this way!" But Kay looked--and could see nothing except a pile of debris, from the bottom of which Cliff's voice issued. "Cliff, you're not hurt?" "A--a little. You must listen while I tell you how to clean up the monsters. It's the psenium emanation. It has the same effect when our method is applied to it. It disintegrates everything inorganic--not organic. "I thought, if I couldn't get them, I'd crumble the earth away--bury them. They're underneath the debris, Kay, a mile deep, buried, beneath the impalpable powder that represented the inorganic salts and minerals of the earth. They'll never get out of that. Protoplasm needs oxygen. They'll trouble us no more. "You must take the top, Kay. Use our old method. You'll find its application to the psenium emanation written in a book fastened beneath the hood. Wipe out the rest of them. If any more come, you'll know how to deal with them." "Cliff, you're not badly hurt?" Kay asked again. "Don't look, I tell you! Keep Ruth away!" * * * * * But the dust was settling fast, and suddenly Ruth uttered a scream of fear. And a strangled cry broke from Kay's throat as he looked down at what had been Cliff Hynes. The man seemed to have become resolved into the same sort of protoplasm as the Earth Giants. He lay, a little heap, incredibly small, incredibly distorted. Flesh without bones, shapeless lumps of flesh where arms and legs and body frame should have been. Cliff's voice came faintly. "You remember the leakage through the rubber and analektron container, Kay. The W-rays even fused the craolite socket. The psenium rays are stronger. They destroy even bone. They're fatal to the man who operates the machine, unless he follows the directions. I've written them out for you, but I had--no time--to apply them." His voice broke off. Then, "Good luck to you and--Ruth, Kay," he whispered, absent inaudibly. "Don't let--her--look at me." Kay led Ruth gently away. "Did you hear that?" she whispered, sobbing. "He died to save us Kay." * * * * * It was like a return from the grave for the amazed boys and girls who--since the onset of the monsters had destroyed the electric lines--poured out of the plain of Golgotha to life and freedom. Many of them had gone mad, a few had died of fright, but the rest would come back to normal, and the world was saved. Hunger was their greatest problem, for, despite Kay's hurried flight to the nearest occupied post, it was difficult to convince the Federation officials that the devils were really gone, buried beneath a mile of crumbled earth. And Kay had to be back to mop up other, smaller bands that had spread through the forests. It was six months before the last of the monsters had been obliterated, and then Kay, now one of the highest officials in the Federation's service, was granted a lunarian's leave of absence pending his taking command of an Antarctic expedition for the purpose of destroying the remaining monsters in their lair. He took this opportunity to be married to Ruth, in the church in his native town, which was _en fête_ for the occasion. "Thinking of Cliff?" Kay asked his bride, as she settled in his plane preparatory to their starting for the honeymoon in the Adirondacks. "I think he would be happy if he knew. He saved the world, dear; he gave his best. And that was all he wanted." * * * * * [Advertisement: ] The Pirate Planet BEGINNING A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Charles W. Diffin_ [Illustration: Like rats in a cage, the planes of the 91st Squadron were darting and whirling.] [Sidenote: A strange light blinks on Venus, and over old Earth hovers a mysterious visitant--dread harbinger of interplanetary war.] CHAPTER I Lieutenant McGuire threw open his coat with its winged insignia of the air force and leaned back in his chair to read more comfortably the newspaper article. He glanced at Captain Blake across the table. The captain was deep in a game of solitaire, but he looked up at McGuire's audible chuckle. "Gay old girl!" said Lieutenant McGuire and smoothed the paper across his knees. "She's getting flirtatious." The captain swore softly as he gathered up his cards. "Not interested," he announced; "too hot to-night. Keep her away." "Oh, she's far enough away," McGuire responded; "about seventy million miles. Don't get excited." "What are you talking about?" The captain shuffled his cards irritably. "Venus. She's winking at us, the old reprobate. One of these star-gazers up on Mount Lawson saw the flashes a week or so ago. If you'll cut out your solitaire and listen, I'll read you something to improve your mind." He ignored the other's disrespectful remark and held the paper closer to see the paragraphs. "Is Venus Signalling?" inquired the caption which Lieutenant McGuire read. "Professor Sykes of Mt. Lawson Observatory Reports Flashes. "The planet Venus, now a brilliant spectacle in the evening sky, is behaving strangely according to a report from the local observatory on Mount Lawson. This sister star, most like Earth of all the planets, is now at its eastern elongation, showing like a half-moon in the big telescopes on Mt. Lawson. Shrouded in impenetrable clouds, its surface has never been seen, but something is happening there. Professor Sykes reports seeing a distinct flash of light upon the terminator, or margin of light. It lasted for several seconds and was not repeated. "No explanation of the phenomenon is offered by scientists, as conditions on the planet's surface are unknown. Is there life there? Are the people of Venus trying to communicate? One guess is as good as another. But it is interesting to recall that our scientists recently proposed to send a similar signal from Earth to Mars by firing a tremendous flare of magnesium. "Venus is now approaching the earth; she comes the nearest of all planets. Have the Venusians penetrated their cloak of cloud masses with a visible light? The planet will be watched with increased interest as it swings toward us in space, in hope of there being a repetition of the unexplained flash." * * * * * "There," said Lieutenant McGuire,"--doesn't that elevate your mind? Take it off this infernally hot night? Carry you out through the cool reaches of interplanetary space? If there is anything else you want to know, just ask me." "Yes," Captain Blake agree, "there is. I want to know how the game came out back in New York--and you don't know that. Let's go over and ask the radio man. He probably has the dope." "Good idea," said McGuire; "maybe he has picked up a message from Venus; we'll make a date." He looked vainly for the brilliant star as they walked out into the night. There were clouds of fog from the nearby Pacific drifting high overhead. Here and there stars showed momentarily, then were blotted from sight. The operator in the radio room handed the captain a paper with the day's scores from the eastern games. But Lieutenant McGuire, despite his ready amusement at the idea, found his thoughts clinging to the words he had read. "Was the planet communicating?" he pictured the great globe--another Earth--slipping silently through space, coming nearer and nearer. Did they have radio? he wondered. Would they send recognizable signals--words--or some mathematical sequence to prove their reality? He turned to the radio operator on duty. "Have you picked up anything peculiar," he asked, and laughed inwardly at himself for the asking. "Any new dots and dashes? The scientists say that Venus is calling. You'll have to be learning a new code." The man glanced at him strangely and looked quickly away. "No, sir," he said. And added after a pause: "No new dots and dashes." "Don't take that stuff too seriously, Mac," the captain remonstrated. "The day of miracles is past; we don't want to commit you to the psychopathic ward. Now here is something real: the Giants won, and I had ten dollars on them. How shall we celebrate?" * * * * * The radio man was listening intently as they started to leave. His voice was hesitating as he stopped them; he seemed reluctant to put his thoughts into words. "Just a minute, sir," he said to Captain Blake. "Well?" the captain asked. And again the man waited before he replied. Then-- "Lieutenant McGuire asked me," he began, "if I had heard any strange dots and dashes. I have not; but ... well, the fact is, sir, that I have been getting some mighty queer sounds for the past few nights. They've got me guessing. "If you wouldn't mind waiting. Captain; they're about due now--" He listened again to some signal inaudible to the others, then hooked up two extra head-sets for the officers. "It's on now," he said. "If you don't mind--" McGuire grinned at the captain as they took up the ear-phones. "Power of suggestion," he whispered, but the smile was erased from his lips as he listened. For in his ear was sounding a weird and wailing note. No dots or dashes, as the operator had said, but the signal was strong. It rose and fell and wavered into shrill tremolos, a ghostly, unearthly sound, and it kept on and on in a shrill despairing wail. Abruptly it stopped. The captain would have removed the receiver from his ear, but the operator stopped him. "Listen," he said, "to the answer." * * * * * There was silence, broken only by an occasional hiss and crackle of some far distant mountain storm. Then, faint as a whisper, came an answering, whistling breath. It, too, trembled and quavered. It went up--up--to the limit of hearing; then slid down the scale to catch and tremble and again ascend in endless unvarying ups and downs of sound. It was another unbroken, unceasing, but always changing vibration. "What in thunder is that?" Captain Blake demanded. "Communication of some sort, I should say," McGuire said slowly, and he caught the operator's eyes upon him in silent agreement. "No letters," Blake objected; "no breaks; just that screech." He listened again. "Darned if it doesn't almost seem to say something," he admitted. "When did you first hear this?" he demanded of the radio man. "Night before last, sir. I did not report it. It seemed too--too--" "Quite so," said Captain Blake in understanding, "but it is some form of broadcasting on a variable wave; though how a thing like that can make sense--" "They talk back and forth," said the operator; "all night, most. Notice the loud one and the faint one; two stations sending and answering." Captain Blake waved him to silence. "Wait--wait!" he ordered. "It's growing louder!" * * * * * In the ears of the listening men the noise dropped to a loud grumble; rose to a piercing shriek; wavered and leaped rapidly from note to note. It was increasing; rushing upon them with unbearable sound. The sense of something approaching, driving toward them swiftly, was strong upon Lieutenant McGuire. He tore the head-phones from his ears and rushed to the door. The captain was beside him. Whoever--whatever--was sending that mysterious signal was coming near--but was that nearness a matter of miles or of thousands of miles? They stared at the stormy night sky above. A moon was glowing faintly behind scudding clouds, and the gray-black of flying shadows formed an opening as they watched, a wind-blown opening like a doorway to the infinity beyond, where, blocking out the stars, was a something that brought a breath-catching shout from the watching men. Some five thousand feet up in the night was a gleaming ship. There were rows of portholes that shone twinkling against the black sky--portholes in multiple rows on the side. The craft was inconceivably huge. Formless and dim of outline in the darkness, its vast bulk was unmistakable. And as they watched with staring, incredulous eyes, it seemed to take alarm as if it sensed the parting of its concealing cloud blanket. It shot with dizzy speed and the roar of a mighty meteor straight up into the night. The gleam of its twinkling lights merged to a distant star that dwindled, shrank and vanished in the heights. The men were wordless and open-mouthed. They stared at each other in disbelief of what their eyes had registered. "A liner!" gasped Captain Blake. "A--a--liner! Mac, there is no such thing." * * * * * McGuire pointed where the real cause of their visitor's departure appeared. A plane with engine wide open came tearing down through the clouds. It swung in a great spiral down over the field and dropped a white flare as it straightened away; then returned for the landing. It taxied at reckless speed toward the hangars and stopped a short distance from the men. The pilot threw himself out of the cockpit and raced drunkenly toward them. "Did you see it?" he shouted, his voice a cracked scream. "Did you see it?" "We saw it," said Captain Blake; "yes, we saw it. Big as--" He sought vainly for a proper comparison, then repeated his former words: "Big as an ocean liner!" The pilot nodded; he was breathing heavily. "Any markings?" asked his superior. "Anything to identify it?" "Yes, there were markings, but I don't know what they mean. There was a circle painted on her bow and marks like clouds around it, but I didn't have time to see much. I came out of a cloud, and there the thing was. I was flying at five thousand, and they hung there dead ahead. I couldn't believe it; it was monstrous; tremendous. Then they sighted me, I guess, and they up-ended that ship in mid-air and shot straight up till they were out of sight." It was the captain's turn to nod mutely. "There's your miracle," said Lieutenant McGuire softly. "Miracle is right," agreed Captain Blake; "nothing less! But it is no miracle of ours, and I am betting it doesn't mean any good to us. Some other country has got the jump on us." To the pilot he ordered: "Say nothing of this--not a word--get that? Let me have a written report: full details, but concise as possible." He went back to the radio room, and the operator there received the same instructions. "What are you going to do?" the lieutenant questioned. Captain Blake was reaching for a head-set. "Listen in," he said briefly; "try to link up that impossible ship with those messages, then report at once to the colonel and whoever he calls in. I'll want you along, Mac, to swear I am sober." * * * * * He had a head-set adjusted, and McGuire took up the other. Again the room was still, and again from the far reaches of space the dark night sent to them its quavering call. The weird shrillness cried less loudly now, and the men listened in strained silence to the go and come of that variable shriek. Musical at times as it leaped from one clear note to another, again it would merge into discordant blendings of half-tones that sent shivers of nervous reaction up the listeners' spines. "Listen," said McGuire abruptly. "Check me on this. There are two of them, one loud and one faint--right?" "Right," said Captain Blake. "Now notice the time intervals--there! The faint one stops, and the big boy cuts in immediately. No waiting; he answers quickly. He does it every time." "Well?" the captain asked. "Listen when he stops and see how long before the faint one answers. Call the loud one the ship and the faint one the station.... There! The ship is through!" There was pause; some seconds elapsed before the answer that whispered so faintly in their ears came out of the night. "You are right, sir," the operator said in corroboration of McGuire's remark. "There is that wait every time." "The ship answers at once," said McGuire; "the station only after a wait." "Meaning--?" inquired the captain. "Meaning, as I take it, that there is time required for the message to go from the ship to the station and for them to reply." "An appreciable time like that," Captain Blake exclaimed, "--with radio! Why, a few seconds, even, would carry it around the world a score of times!" Lieutenant McGuire hesitated a moment. "It happens every time," he reminded the captain: "it is no coincidence. And if that other station is out in space--another ship perhaps, relaying the messages to yet others between here and--Venus, let us say...." * * * * * He left the thought unfinished. Captain Blake was staring at him as one who beholds a fellow-man suddenly insane. But the look in his eyes changed slowly, and his lips that had been opened in remonstrance came gradually in a firm, straight line. "Crazy!" he said, but it was apparent that he was speaking as much to himself as to McGuire. "Plumb, raving crazy!... Yet that ship _did_ go straight up out of sight--an acceleration in the upper air beyond anything we know. It might be--" And he, too, stopped at the actual voicing of the wild surmise. He shook his head sharply as if to rid it of intruding, unwelcome thoughts. "Forget that!" he told McGuire, and repeated it in a less commanding tone. "Forget it, Mac: we've got to render a report to sane men, you and I. What we know will be hard enough for them to believe without any wild guesses. "That new craft is real. It has got it all over us for size and speed and potential offensive action. Who made it? Who mans it? Red Russia? Japan? That's what the brass hats will be wondering; that's what they will want to find out. "Not a word!" he repeated to the radio man. "You will keep mum on this." He took McGuire with him as he left to seek out his colonel. But it was a disturbed and shaken man, instead of the cool, methodical Captain Blake of ordinary days, who went in search of his commanding officer. And he clung to McGuire for corroboration of his impossible story. * * * * * There was a group of officers to whom Blake made his full report. Colonel Boynton had heard but little when he halted his subordinate curtly and reached for a phone. And his words over that instrument brought a quick conference of officers and a quiet man whom McGuire did not recognize. The "brass hats," as Blake had foreseen, were avid for details. The pilot of the incoming plane was there, too, and the radio man. Their stories were told in a disconcerting silence, broken only by some officer's abrupt and skeptical question on one point and another. "Now, for heaven's sake, shut up about Venus," McGuire had been told. But he did not need Captain Blake's warning to hold himself strictly to what he had seen and let the others draw their own conclusions. Lieutenant McGuire was the last one to speak. There was silence in the office of Colonel Boynton as he finished, a silence that almost echoed from the grim walls. And the faces of the men who gathered there were carefully masked from any expression that might betray their thoughts. It was the quiet man in civilian attire who spoke first. He sat beside another whose insignia proclaimed him of general's rank, but he addressed himself to Colonel Boynton. "I am very glad," he said quietly, "very glad. Colonel, that my unofficial visit came at just this time. I should like to ask some few questions." Colonel Boynton shifted the responsibility with a gesture almost of relief. "It is in your hands. Mr. Secretary," he said. "You and General Clinton have dropped in opportunely. There is something here that will tax all our minds." The man in civilian clothes nodded assent. He turned to Captain Blake. "Captain," he said, "you saw this at first hand. You have told us what you saw. I should like greatly to know what you think. Will you give us your opinion, your impressions?" * * * * * The captain arose smartly, but his words came with less ease. "My opinion," he stated, "will be of little value, but it is based upon these facts. I have seen to-night, sir, a new type of aircraft, with speed, climb and ceiling beyond anything we are capable of. I can only regard it as a menace. It may or may not have been armed, but it had the size to permit the armament of a cruiser; it had power to carry that weight. It hung stationary in the air, so it is independent of wing-lift, yet it turned and shot upward like a feather in a gale. That spells maneuverability. "That combination, sir, can mean only that we are out-flown, out-maneuvered and out-fought in the air. It means that the planes in our hangars are obsolete, our armament so much old iron. "The menace is potential at present. Whether it is an actual threat or not is another matter. Who mans that ship--what country's insignia she carries--is something on which I can have no opinion. The power is there: who wields it I wish we knew." The questioner nodded at the conclusion of Blake's words, and he exchanged quiet, grave glances with the general beside him. Then-- "I think we all would wish to know that, Captain Blake," he observed. And to the colonel: "You may be able to answer that soon. It would be my idea that this craft should be--ah--drawn out, if we can do it. We would not attack it, of course, until its mission is proved definitely unfriendly, but you will resist any offensive from them. "And now," he added, "let us thank these officers for their able reports and excuse them. We have much to discuss...." * * * * * Captain Blake took McGuire's arm as they went out into the night. And he drew him away where they walked for silent minutes by themselves. The eyes of Lieutenant McGuire roamed upward to the scudding clouds and the glimpse of far, lonely stars; he stumbled occasionally as he walked. But for Captain Blake there was thought only of matters nearby. "The old fox!" he exclaimed. "Didn't he 'sic us on' neatly? If we mix it with that stranger there will be no censure from the Secretary of War." "I assumed that was who it was," said McGuire. "Well, they have something to think about, that bunch; something to study over.... Perhaps more than they know. "And that's their job," he concluded after a silence. "I'm going to bed; but I would like a leave of absence to-morrow if that's O. K." "Sure," said Captain Blake, "though I should think you would like to stick around. Perhaps we will see something. What's on your mind, Mac?" "A little drive to the top of Mount Lawson," said Lieutenant McGuire. "I want to talk to a bird named Sykes." CHAPTER II Lieutenant McGuire, U. S. A., was not given as a usual thing to vain conjectures, nor did his imagination carry him beyond the practical boundaries of accepted facts. Yet his mind, as he drove for hours through the orange-scented hills of California, reverted time and again to one persistent thought. And it was with him still, even when he was consciously concentrating on the hairpin turns of Mount Lawson's narrow road. There was a picture there, printed indelibly in his mind--a picture of a monstrous craft, a liner of the air, that swung its glowing lights in a swift arc and, like a projectile from some huge gun, shot up and up and still up until it vanished in a jet-black sky. Its altitude when it passed from sight he could not even guess, but the sense of ever-increasing speed, of power that mocked at gravitation's puny force, had struck deep into his mind. And McGuire saw plainly this mystery ship going on and on far into the empty night where man had never been. No lagging in that swift flight that he had seen; an acceleration that threw the ship faster and yet faster, regardless of the thin air and the lessened buoyancy in an ocean of atmosphere that held man-made machines so close to Earth. That constant acceleration, hour after hour, day after day--the speed would be almost unlimited; inconceivable! He stopped his car where the mountain road held straight for a hundred feet, and he looked out over the coastal plain spread like a toy world far below. "Now, how about it?" he asked himself. "Blake thinks I am making a fool of myself. Perhaps I am. I wonder. It's a long time since I fell for any fairy stories. But this thing has got me. A sort of hunch, I guess." * * * * * The sun was shining now from a vault of clear blue. It was lighting a world of reality, of houses where people lived their commonplace lives, tiny houses squared off in blocks a mile below. There was smoke here and there from factories; it spread in a haze, and it meant boilers and engines and sound practical machinery of a practical world to the watching man. What had all this to do with Venus? he asked himself. This was the world he knew. It was real; space was impenetrable; there were no men or beings of any sort that could travel through space. Blake was right: he was on a fool's errand. They couldn't tell him anything up here at the observatory; they would laugh at him as he deserved.... Wondering vaguely if there was a place to turn around, he looked ahead and then up; his eyes passed from the gash of roadway on the mountainside to the deep blue beyond. And within the man some driving, insistent, mental force etched strongly before his eyes that picture and its problem unanswered. There was the ship--he saw it in memory--and it went up and still up; and he knew as surely as if he had guided the craft that the meteor-like flight could be endless. Lieutenant McGuire could not reason it out--such power was beyond his imagining--but suddenly he dared to believe, and he knew it was true. "Earthbound!" he said in contempt of his own human kind, and he looked again at the map spread below. "Ants! Mites! That's what we are--swarming across the surface of the globe. And we think we're so damn clever if we lift ourselves up a few miles from the surface! "Guess I'll see Sykes," he muttered aloud. "He and his kind at least dare to look out into space; take their eyes off the world; be impractical!" He swung the car slowly around the curve ahead, eased noiselessly into second gear and went on with the climb. * * * * * There were domed observatories where he stopped: rounded structures that gleamed silvery in the air; and offices, laboratories: it was a place of busy men. And Professor Sykes, he found, was busy. But he spared a few minutes to answer courteously the questions of this slim young fellow in the khaki uniform of the air service. "What can I do for you?" asked Professor Sykes. "No dreamer, this man," thought McGuire as he looked at the short, stocky figure of the scientist. Clear eyes glanced sharply from under shaggy brows; there were papers in his hand scrawled over with strange mathematical symbols. "You can answer some fool questions," said Lieutenant McGuire abruptly, "if you don't mind." The scientist smiled broadly. "We're used to that," he told the young officer; "you can't think of any worse ones than those we have heard. Have a chair." McGuire drew a clipping from his pocket--it was the newspaper account he had read--and he handed it to Professor Sykes. "I came to see you about this," he began. The lips of Professor Sykes lost their genial curve; they straightened to a hard line. "Nothing for publication," he said curtly. "As usual they enlarged upon the report and made assumptions and inferences not warranted by facts." "But you did see that flash?" "By visual observation I saw a bright area formed on the terminator--yes! We have no photographic corroboration." "I am wondering what it meant." "That is your privilege--and mine," said the scientist coldly. "But it said there," McGuire persisted, "that it might have been a signal of some sort." "_I_ did not say so: that is an inference only. I have told you, Lieutenant"--he glanced at the card in his hand--"--Lieutenant McGuire--all that I know. We deal in facts up here, and we leave the brilliant theorizing to the journalists." * * * * * The young officer felt distinctly disconcerted. He did not know exactly what he had expected from this man--what corroboration of his wild surmises--but he was getting nowhere, he admitted. And he resented the cold aloofness of the scientist before him. "I am not trying to pin you down on anything," he said, and his tone carried a hint of the nervous strain that had been his. "I am trying to learn something." "Just what?" the other inquired. "Could that flash have been a signal?" "You may think so if you wish: I have told you all that I know. And now," he added, and rose from his chair, "I must ask to be excused; I have work to do." McGuire came slowly to his feet. He had learned nothing; perhaps there was nothing to be learned. A fool's errand! Blake was right. But the inner urge for some definite knowledge drove him on. His eyes were serious and his face drawn to a scowl of earnestness as he turned once more to the waiting man. "Professor Sykes," he demanded, "just one more question. Could that have been the flash of a--a rocket? Like the proposed experiments in Germany. Could it have meant in any way the launching of a projectile--a ship--to travel Earthward through space?" * * * * * Professor Sykes knew what it was to be harassed by the curious mob, to avoid traps set by ingenious reporters, but he knew, too, when he was meeting with honest bewilderment and a longing for knowledge. His fists were placed firmly on the hips of his stocky figure as he stood looking at the persistent questioner, and his eyes passed from the intent face to the snug khaki coat and the spread wings that proclaimed the wearer's work. A ship out of space--a projectile--this young man had said. "Lieutenant," he suggested quietly--and again the smile had returned to his lips as he spoke--"sit down. I'm not as busy as I pretend to be. Now tell me: what in the devil have you got in your mind?" And McGuire told him. "Like some of your dope," he said, "this is not for publication. But I have not been instructed to hush it up, and I know you will keep it to yourself." He told the clear-eyed, listening man of the previous night's events. Of the radio's weird call and the mystery ship. "Hallucination," suggested the scientist. "You saw the stars very clearly, and they suggested a ship." "Tell that to Jim Burgess," said McGuire: "he was the pilot of that plane." And the scientist nodded as if the answer were what he expected. He asked again about the ship's flight. And he, too, bore down heavily upon the matter of acceleration in the thin upper air. He rose to lay a friendly hand on McGuire's shoulder. "We can't know what it means," he said, "but we can form our own theories, you and I--and anything is possible. "It is getting late," he added, "and you have had a long drive. Come over and eat; spend the night here. Perhaps you would like to have a look at our equipment--see Venus for yourself. I will be observing her through the sixty-inch refractor to-night. Would you care to?" "Would I?" McGuire demanded with enthusiasm. "Say, that will be great!" * * * * * The sun was dropping toward the horizon when the two men again came out into the cool mountain air. "Just time for a quick look around," suggested Professor Sykes, "if you are interested." He took the lieutenant first to an enormous dome that bulged high above the ground, and admitted him to the dark interior. They climbed a stairway and came out into a room that held a skeleton frame of steel. "This is the big boy," said Professor Sykes, "the one hundred-inch reflector." There were other workers there, one a man standing upon a raised platform beside the steel frame, who arranged big holders for photographic plates. The slotted ceiling opened as McGuire watched, and the whole structure swung slowly around. It was still, and the towering steel frame began to swing noiselessly when a man at a desk touched various controls. McGuire looked about him in bewilderment. "Quite a shop," he admitted; "but where is the telescope?" Professor Sykes pointed to the towering latticework of steel. "Right there," he said. "Like everyone else, you were expecting to see a big tube." He explained in simple words the operation of the great instrument that brought in light rays from sources millions of light years away. He pointed out where the big mirror was placed--the one hundred-inch reflector--and he traced for the wondering man the pathway of light that finally converged upon a sensitized plate to catch and record what no eye had ever seen. He checked the younger man's flow of questions and turned him back toward the stairs. "We will leave them to their work," he said; "they will be gathering light that has been traveling millions of years on its ways. But you and I have something a great deal nearer to study." * * * * * Another building held the big refractor, and it was a matter of only a few seconds and some cryptic instructions from Sykes until the eye-piece showed the image of the brilliant planet. "The moon!" McGuire exclaimed in disappointed tones when the professor motioned him to see for himself. His eyes saw a familiar half-circle of light. "Venus," the professor informed him. "It has phases like the moon. The planet is approaching; the sun's light strikes it from the side." But McGuire hardly heard. He was gazing with all his faculties centered upon that distant world, so near to him now. "Venus," he whispered half aloud. Then to the professor: "It's all hazy. There are no markings--" "Clouds," said the other. "The goddess is veiled; Venus is blanketed in clouds. What lies underneath we may never know, but we do know that of all the planets this is most like the earth; most probably is an inhabited world. Its size, its density, your weight if you were there--and the temperature under the sun's rays about double that of ours. Still, the cloud envelope would shield it." McGuire was fascinated, and his thoughts raced wildly in speculation of what might be transpiring before his eyes. People, living in that tropical world; living and going through their daily routine under that cloud-filled sky where the sun was never seen. The margin of light that made the clear shape of a half-moon marked their daylight and dark; there was one small dot of light forming just beyond that margin. It penetrated the dark side. And it grew, as he watched, to a bright patch. "What is that?" he inquired abstractedly--his thoughts were still filled with those beings of his imagination. "There is a light that extends into the dark part. It is spreading--" * * * * * He found himself thrust roughly aside as Professor Sykes applied a more understanding eye to the instrument. The professor whirled abruptly to his assistant. "Phone Professor Giles," he said sharply; "he is working on the reflector. Tell him to get a photograph of Venus at once; the cloud envelope is broken." He returned hurriedly to his observations. One hand sketched on a waiting pad. "Markings!" he said exultantly. "If it would only hold!... There, it is closing ... gone...." His hand was quiet now upon the paper, but where he had marked was a crude sketch of what might have been an island. It was "L" shaped; sharply bent. "Whew!" breathed Professor Sykes and looked up for a moment. "Now that was interesting." "You saw through?" asked McGuire eagerly. "Glimpsed the surface?--an island?" The scientist's face relaxed. "Don't jump to conclusions," he told the aviator: "we are not ready to make a geography of Venus quite yet. But we shall know that mark if we ever see it again. I hardly think they had time to get a picture. * * * * * "And now there is only a matter of three hours for observation: I must watch every minute. Stay here if you wish. But," he added, "don't let your imagination run wild. Some eruption, perhaps, this we have seen--an ignition of gasses in the upper air--who knows? But don't connect this with your mysterious ship. If the ship is a menace, if it means war, that is your field of action, not mine. And you will be fighting with someone on Earth. It must be that some country has gained a big lead in aeronautics. Now I must get to work." "I'll not wait," said McGuire. "I will start for the field; get there by daylight, if I can find my way down that road in the dark." "Thanks a lot." He paused a moment before concluding slowly: "And in spite of what you say, Professor, I believe that we will have something to get together on again in this matter." The scientist, he saw, had turned again to his instrument. McGuire picked his way carefully along the narrow path that led where he had parked his car. "Good scout, this Sykes!" he was thinking, and he stopped to look overhead in the quick-gathering dark at that laboratory of the heavens, where Sykes and his kind delved and probed, measured and weighed, and gathered painstakingly the messages from suns beyond counting, from universe out there in space that added their bit of enlightenment to the great story of the mystery of creation. He was humbly aware of his own deep ignorance as he backed his car, slipped it into second, and began the long drive down the tortuous grade. He would have liked to talk more with Sykes. But he had no thought as he wound round the curves how soon that wish was to be gratified. * * * * * Part way down the mountainside he again checked his car where he had stopped on the upward climb and reasoned with himself about his errand. Once more he looked out over the level ground below, a vast glowing expanse of electric lights now, that stretched to the ocean beyond. He was suddenly unthrilled by this man-made illumination, and he got out of his car to stare again at the blackness above and its myriad of stars that gathered and multiplied as he watched. One brighter than the rest winked suddenly out. There was a constellation of twinkling lights that clustered nearby, and they too vanished. The eyes of the watcher strained themselves to see more clearly a dim-lit outline. There were no lights: it was a black shape, lost in the blackness of the mountain sky, that was blocking out the stars. But it was a shape, and from near the horizon the pale gleams of the rising moon picked it out in softest of outline; a vague ghost of a curve that reflected a silvery contour to the watching eyes below. There had been a wider space in the road that McGuire had passed; he backed carefully till he could swing his car and turn it to head once more at desperate speed toward the mountain top. And it was less than an hour since he had left when he was racing back along the narrow footpath to slam open the door where Professor Sykes looked up in amazement at his abrupt return. The aviator's voice was hoarse with excitement as he shouted: "It's here--the ship! It's here! Where's your phone?--I must call the field! It's right overhead--descending slowly--no lights, but I saw it--I saw it!" He was working with trembling fingers at the phone where Sykes had pointed. "Long distance!" he shouted. He gave a number to the operator. "Make it quick," he implored. "Quick!" CHAPTER III Back at Maricopa Flying Field the daily routine had been disturbed. There were conferences of officers, instructions from Colonel Boynton, and a curiosity-provoking lack of explanations. Only with Captain Blake did the colonel indulge in any discussion. "We'll keep this under our hats," he said, "and out of the newspapers as long as we can. You can imagine what the yellow journals would do with a scarehead like that. Why, they would have us all wiped off the map and the country devastated by imaginary fleets in the first three paragraphs." Blake regarded his superior gravely. "I feel somewhat the same way, myself. Colonel," he admitted. "When I think what this can mean--some other country so far ahead of us in air force that we are back in the dark ages--well, it doesn't look any too good to me if they mean trouble." "We will meet it when it comes," said Colonel Boynton. "But, between ourselves, I am in the same state of mind. "The whole occurrence is so damn mysterious. Washington hasn't a whisper of information of any such construction; the Secretary admitted that last night. It's a surprise, a complete surprise, to everyone. "But, Blake, you get that new ship ready as quickly as you can. Prepare for an altitude test the same as we planned, but get into the air the first minute possible. She ought to show a better ceiling than anything we have here, and you may have to fly high to say 'Good morning' to that liner you saw. Put all the mechanics on it that can work to advantage. I think they have it pretty well along now." "Engine's tested and installed, sir," was Blake's instant report. "I think I can take it up this afternoon." * * * * * He left immediately to hurry to the hangar where a new plane stood glistening in pristine freshness, and where hurrying mechanics grumbled under their breaths at the sudden rush for a ship that was expected to take the air a week later. An altitude test under full load! Well, what of it? they demanded one of another; wouldn't another day do as well as this one? And they worked as they growled, worked with swift sureness and skill, and the final instruments took their place in the ship that she might roll from the hangar complete under that day's sun. Her supercharger was tested--the adjunct to a powerful engine that would feed the hungry cylinders with heavy air up in the heights where the air is thin; there were oxygen flasks to keep life in the pilot in the same thin air. And the hot southern sun made ludicrous that afternoon the bulky, heavily-wrapped figure of Captain Blake as he sat at the controls and listened approvingly to the roaring engine. He waved good-by and smiled understandingly as he met the eyes of Colonel Boynton; then pulled on his helmet, settled himself in his seat and took off in a thunderous blast of sound to begin his long ascent. * * * * * He had long since cracked open the valve of his oxygen flask when the climb was ended, and his goggles were frosted in the arctic cold so that it was only with difficulty he could read his instrument board. "That's the top," he thought in that mind so light and so curiously not his own. He throttled the engine and went into a long spiral that was to end within a rod of where he had started on the brown sun-baked field. The last rays of the sun were slanting over distant mountains as he climbed stiffly from the machine. "Better than fifty thousand," exulted Colonel Boynton. "Of course your barograph will have to be calibrated and verified, but it looks like a record, Blake--and you had a full load. "Ready to go up and give merry hell to that other ship if she shows up?" he asked. But Captain Blake shook a dubious head. "Fifty thousand is just a start for that bird," he said. "You didn't see them shoot out of sight, Colonel. Lord knows when they quit _their_ climb--or where." "Well, we'll just have a squadron ready in any event," the colonel assured him. "We will make him show his stuff or take a beating--if that is what he wants." They were in the colonel's office. "You had better go and get warmed up," he told the flyer: "then come back here for instructions." But Blake was more anxious for information than for other comforts. "I'm all right," he said: "just tired a bit. Let me stretch out here, Colonel, and give me the dope on what you expect of our visitor and what we will do." * * * * * He settled back comfortably in a big chair. The office was warm, and Blake knew now he had been doing a day's work. "We will just take it as it comes," Colonel Boynton explained. "I can't for the life of me figure why the craft was spying around here. What are they looking for? We haven't any big secrets the whole world doesn't know. "Of course he may not return. But if he does I want you to go up and give him the once over. I can trust you to note every significant detail. "You saw no wings. If it is a dirigible, let's know something of their power and how they can throw themselves up into the air the way you described. Watch for anything that may serve to identify it and its probable place of manufacture--any peculiarity of marking or design or construction that may give us a lead. Then return and report." Blake nodded his understanding of what was wanted, but his mind was on further contingencies: he wanted definite instructions. "And," he asked; "if they attack--what then? Is their fire to be returned?" "If they make one single false move," said Colonel Boynton savagely, "give them everything you've got. And the 91st Squadron will be off the ground to support you at the first sign of trouble. We don't want to start anything, nor appear to do so. But, by the gods, Blake, this fellow means trouble eventually as sure as you're a flyer, and we won't wait for him to ask for it twice." * * * * * They sat in silence, while the field outside became shrouded in night. And they speculated, as best they could from the few facts they had, as to what this might mean to the world, to their country, to themselves. It was an hour before Blake was aware of the fact that he was hungry. He rose to leave, but paused while Colonel Boynton answered the phone. The first startled exclamation held him rigid while he tried to piece together the officer's curt responses and guess at what was being told. "Colonel Boynton speaking.... McGuire?... Yes, Lieutenant.... Over Mount Lawson?... Yes--yes, the same ship, I've no doubt." His voice was even and cool in contrast to the excited tones that carried faintly to Blake standing by. "Quite right!" he said shortly. "You will remain where you are: act as observer: hold this line open and keep me informed. Captain Blake will leave immediately for observation. A squadron will follow. Let me know promptly what you see." He turned abruptly to the waiting man. "It is back!" he said. "We're in luck! Over the observatories at Mount Lawson; descending, so Lieutenant McGuire says. Take the same ship you had up to-day. Look them over--get up close--good luck!" He turned again to the phone. There were planes rolling from their hangars before Blake could reach his own ship. Their engines were thundering: men were rushing across the field, pulling on leather helmets and coats as they ran--all this while he warmed up his engine. A mechanic thrust in a package of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee while he waited. And Captain Blake grinned cheerfully and gulped the last of his food as he waved to the mechanics to pull out the wheel blocks. He opened the throttle and shot out into the dark. He climbed and circled the field, saw the waving motion of lights in red and green that marked the take-off of the planes of the 91st, and he straightened out on a course that in less than two hours would bring him over the heights of Mount Lawson and the mystery that awaited him there. And he fingered the trigger grip that was part of the stick and nodded within his dark cockpit at the rattle of a machine gun that merged its staccato notes with the engine's roar. But he felt, as he thought of that monster shape, as some primordial man might have felt, setting forth with a stone in his hand to wage war on a saurian beast. CHAPTER IV If Colonel Boynton could have stood with one of his lieutenants and Professor Sykes on a mountain top, he would have found, perhaps, the answer to his question. He had wondered in a puzzled fashion why the great ship had shown its mysterious presence over the flying field. He had questioned whether it was indeed the field that had been the object of their attention or whether in the cloudy murk they had merely wandered past. Could he have seen with the eyes of Lieutenant McGuire the descent of the great shape over Mount Lawson, he would have known beyond doubt that here was the magnet that drew the eyes of whatever crew was manning the big craft. It was dark where the two men stood. Others had come running at their call, but their forms, too, were lost in the shadows of the towering pines. The light from an open door struck across an open space beyond which McGuire and Professor Sykes stood alone, stood silent and spellbound, their heads craned back at a neck-wrenching angle. They were oblivious to all discomforts; their eyes and their whole minds were on the unbelievable thing in the sky. Beyond the fact that no lights were showing along the hull, there was no effort at concealment. The moon was up now to illumine the scene, and it showed plainly the gleaming cylinder with its long body and blunt, shining ends, dropping, slowly, inexorably down. "Like a dirigible," said McGuire huskily. "But the size, man--the size! And its shape is not right; it isn't streamlined correctly; the air--" He stopped his half-unconscious analysis abruptly. "The air!" What had this craft to do with the air? A thin layer of gas that hung close to the earth--the skin on an apple! And beyond--space! There was the ethereal ocean in which this great shape swam! The reality of the big ship, the very substance of it, made the space ship idea the harder to grasp. Lieutenant McGuire found that it was easier to see an imaginary craft taking off into space than to conceive of this monstrous shape, many hundreds of tons in weight, being thrown through vast emptiness. Yet he knew; he knew! And his mind was a chaos of grim threats and forebodings as he looked at the unbelievable reality and tried to picture what manner of men were watching, peering, from those rows of ports. * * * * * At last it was motionless. It hung soundless and silent except for a soft roar, a scant thousand feet in the air. And its huge bulk was dwarfing the giant pines, the rounded buildings; it threw the men's familiar surroundings into a new and smaller scale. He had many times flown over these mountains, and Lieutenant McGuire had seen the silvery domes of the observatories shining among the trees. Like fortresses for aerial defense, he had thought, and the memory returned to him now. What did these new-comers think of them? Had they, too, found them suggestive of forts on the frontier of a world, defenses against invasion from out there? Or did they know them for what they were? Did they wish only to learn the extent of our knowledge, our culture? Were they friendly, perhaps?--half-timid and fearful of what they might find? A star moved in the sky, a pin-point of light that was plain in its message to the aviator. It was Blake, flying high, volplaning to make contact and learn from the air what this stranger might mean. The light of his plane slanted down in an easy descent; the flyer was gliding in on a long aerial toboggan slide. His motor was throttled; there was only the whistle of torn air on the monoplane's wings. McGuire was with the captain in his mind, and like him he was waiting for whatever the stranger might do. Other lights were clustered where the one plane had been. The men of the 91st had their orders, and the fingers of the watching, silent man gripped an imaginary stick while he wished with his whole heart that he was up in the air. To be with Blake or the others! His thoughts whipped back to the mysterious stranger: the great shape was in motion: it rose sharply a thousand feet in the air. * * * * * The approaching plane showed clear in the moon's light. It swung and banked, and the vibrant song of its engine came down to the men as Blake swept in a great circle about the big ship. He was looking it over, but he began his inspection at a distance, and the orbit of his plane made a tightening spiral as he edged for a closer look. He was still swinging in the monotonous round when the ship made its first forward move. It leaped in the air: it swept faster and faster. And it was moving with terrific speed as it crashed silently through the path of the tiny plane. And Blake, as he leaned forward on the stick to throw his plane downward in a power dive, could have had a vision, not of a ship of the air, but only of a shining projectile as the great monster shrieked overhead. McGuire trembled for the safety of those wings as he saw Blake pull his little ship out of the dive and shoot upward to a straight climb. But--"That's dodging them!" he exulted: "that's flying! I wonder, did they mean to wipe him out or were they only scared off?" His question was answered as, out of the night, a whistling shriek proclaimed the passage of the meteor ship that drove unmistakably at the lone plane. And again the pilot with superb skill waited until the last moment and threw himself out of the path of the oncoming mass, though his own plane was tossed and whirled like an autumn leaf in the vortex that the enemy created. Not a second was lost as Blake opened his throttle and forced his plane into a steep climb. "Atta-boy!" said McGuire, as if words could span across to the man in the plane. "Altitude, Blake--get altitude!" The meteor had turned in a tremendous circle; so swift its motion that it made an actual line of light as the moon marked its course. And the curved line straightened abruptly to a flashing mark that shot straight toward the struggling plane. * * * * * This time another sound came down to the listening ears of the two men. The plane tore head on to meet the onslaught, to swing at the last instant in a frantic leap that ended as before in the maelstrom of air back of the ship. But the muffled roar was changed, punctured with a machine-gun's familiar rattle, and the stabbing flashes from Blake's ship before he threw it out of the other's path were a song of joy to the tense nerves of the men down below. This deadly rush could only be construed as an attack, and Blake was fighting back. The very speed of the great projectile must hold it to its course; the faster it went the more difficult to swerve it from a line. This and much more was flashing sharply in McGuire's mind. But--Blake!--alone against this huge antagonist!... It was coming back. Another rush like a star through space.... And McGuire shouted aloud in a frenzy of emotion as a cluster of lights came falling from on high. No lone machine gun now that tore the air with this clattering bedlam of shots: the planes of the 91st Squadron were diving from the heights. They came on a steep slant that seemed marking them for crashing death against the huge cylinder flashing past. And their stabbing needles of machine-gun fire made a drumming tattoo, till the planes, with the swiftness of hawks, swept aside, formed to groups, tore on down toward the ground and then curved in great circles of speed to climb back to the theater of action. * * * * * Lieutenant McGuire was rigid and quivering. He should go to the phone and report to the colonel, but the thought left him as quickly as it came. He was frozen in place, and his mind could hold only the scene that was being pictured before him. The enemy ship had described its swift curve, and the planes of the defenders were climbing desperately for advantage. So slowly they moved as compared with the swiftness of the other! But the great ship was slowing; it came on, but its wild speed was checked. The light of the full moon showed plainly now what McGuire had seen but dimly before--a great metal beak on the ship, pointed and shining, a ram whose touch must bring annihilation to anything it struck. The squadron of planes made a group in the sky, and Blake's monoplane, too, was with them. The huge enemy was approaching slowly: was it damaged? McGuire hardly dared hope ... yet that raking fire might well have been deadly: it might be that some bullets had torn and penetrated to the vitals of this ship's machinery and damaged some part. It came back slowly, ominously, toward the circling planes. Then, throwing itself through the air, it leaped not directly toward them but off to one side. * * * * * Like a stone on the end of a cord it swung with inconceivable speed in a circle that enclosed the group of planes. Again and again it whipped around them, while the planes, by comparison, were motionless. Its orbit was flat with the ground: then tilting, more yet, it made a last circle that stood like a hoop in the air. And behind it as it circled it left a faint trace of vapor. Nebulous!--milky in the moonlight!--but the ship had built a sphere, a great globe of the gas, and within it, like rats in a cage, the planes of the 91st Squadron were darting and whirling. "Gas!" groaned the watching man: "gas! What is it? Why don't they break through?" The thin clouds of vapor were mingling now and expanding: they blossomed and mushroomed, and the light of the moon came in pale iridescence from their billowing folds. "Break through!" McGuire had prayed--and he stood in voiceless horror as he saw the attempt. The mist was touching here and there a plane: they were engulfed, yet he could see them plainly. And he saw with staring, fear-filled eyes the clumsy tumbling and fluttering of unguided wings as the great eagles of the 91st fell roaring to earth with no conscious minds guiding their flight. The valleys were deep about the mountain, and their shadowed blackness opened to receive the maimed, stricken things that came fluttering or swooping wildly to that last embrace, where, in the concealing shadows, the deeper shadows of death awaited.... * * * * * There was a room where a telephone waited: McGuire sensed this but dumbly, and the way to that room was long to his stumbling feet. He was blinded: his mind would not function: he saw only those fluttering things, and the moonlight on their wings, and the shadows that took them so softly at the last. One plane whistled close overhead. McGuire stopped where he stood to follow it with unbelieving eyes. That one man had lived, escaped the net--it was inconceivable! The plane returned: it was flying low, and it swerved erratically as it flew. It was a monoplane: a new ship. Its motor was silenced: it stalled as he watched, to pancake and crash where the towering pines made a cradle of great branches to cushion its fall. No thought now of the colonel waiting impatiently for a report; even the enemy, there in the sky was forgotten. It was Blake in that ship, and he was alive--or had been--for he had cut his motor. McGuire screamed out for Professor Sykes, and there were others, too, who came running at his call. He tore recklessly through the scrub and undergrowth and gained at last the place where wreckage hung dangling from the trees. The fuselage of a plane, scarred and broken, was still held in the strong limbs. * * * * * Captain Blake was in the cockpit, half hanging from the side. He was motionless, quiet, and his face shone white and ghastly as they released him and drew him out. But one hand still clung with a grip like death itself to a hose that led from an oxygen tank. McGuire stared in wonder and slowly gathering comprehension. "He was fixed for an altitude test," he said dazedly; "this ship was to be used, and he was to find her ceiling. He saw what the others were getting, and he flew himself through on a jet of pure oxygen--" He stopped in utter admiration of the quickness of thought that could outwit death in an instant like that. They carried the limp body to the light. "No bones broken so far as I can see," said the voice of Professor Sykes. "Leave him here in the air. He must have got a whiff of their devilish mist in spite of his oxygen; he was flying mighty awkwardly when he came in here." But he was alive!--and Lieutenant McGuire hastened with all speed now to the room where a telephone was ringing wildly and a colonel of the air force must be told of the annihilation of a crack squadron and of a threat that menaced all the world. * * * * * In that far room there were others waiting where Colonel Boynton sat with receiver to his ear. A general's uniform was gleaming in the light to make more sober by contrast the civilian clothing of that quiet, clear-eyed man who held the portfolio of the Secretary of War. They stared silently at Colonel Boynton, and they saw the blood recede from his face, while his cool voice went on unmoved with its replies. "... I understand," he said; "a washout, complete except for Captain Blake; his oxygen saved him.... It attacked with gas, you say?... And why did not our own planes escape?... Its speed!--yes, we'll have to imagine it, but it is unbelievable. One moment--" He turned to those who waited for his report. "The squadron," he said with forced quiet, though his lips twitched in a bloodless line, "--the 91st--is destroyed. The enemy put them down with one blow; enveloped them with gas." He recounted the essence of McGuire's report, then turned once more to the phone. "Hello, Lieutenant--the enemy ship--where is it now?" He listened--listened--to a silent receiver: silent save for the sound of a shot--a crashing fall--a loud, panting breath. He heard the breathing close to the distant instrument; it ended in a choking gasp; the instrument was silent in his ear.... He signalled violently for the operator: ordered the ringing of any and all phones about the observatory, and listened in vain for a sound or syllable in reply. "A plane," he told an orderly, "at once! Phone the commercial flying field near the base of Mount Lawson. Have them hold a car ready for me: I shall land there!" CHAPTER V To Captain Blake alone, of all those persons on the summit of Mount Lawson, it was given to see and to know and be able to relate what transpired there and in the air above. For Blake, although he appeared like one dead, was never unconscious throughout his experience. Driving head on toward the ship, he had emptied his drum of cartridges before he threw his plane over and down in a dive that escaped the onrush of the great craft by a scant margin, and that carried him down in company with the men and machines of the squadron that dived from above. He turned as they turned and climbed as they climbed for the advantage that altitude might give. And he climbed faster: his ship outdistanced them in that tearing, scrambling rush for the heights. The squadron was spiraling upward in close formation with his plane above them when the enemy struck. He saw that great shape swing around them, terrible in its silent swiftness, and, like the others, he failed to realize at first the net she was weaving. So thin was the gas and so rapid the circling of the enemy craft, they were captured and cut off inside of the gaseous sphere before the purpose of the maneuver was seen or understood. He saw the first faint vapor form above him; swung over for a steep bank that carried him around the inside of the great cage of gas and that showed him the spiraling planes as the first wisps of vapor swept past them. He held that bank with his swift machine, while below him a squadron of close-formed fighting craft dissolved before his eyes into unguided units. The formations melted: wings touched and locked; the planes fell dizzily or shot off in wild, ungoverned, swerving flight. The air was misty about him; it was fragrant in his nostrils; the world was swimming.... * * * * * It was gas, he knew, and with the light-headedness that was upon him, so curiously like that of excessive altitudes, he reached unconsciously for the oxygen supply. The blast of pure gas in his face revived him for an instant, and in that instant of clear thinking his plan was formed. He threw his weight on stick and rudder, corrected the skid his ship was taking, and, with one hand holding the tube of life-giving oxygen before his face, he drove straight down in a dive toward the earth. There were great weights fastened to his arm, it seemed, when he tried to bring the ship from her fearful dive. He moved only with greatest effort, and it was force of will alone that compelled his hands to do their work. His brain, as he saw the gleaming roundness of observatory buildings beneath him, was as clear as ever in his life, but his muscles, his arms and legs, refused to work: even his head; he was slowly sinking beneath a load of utter fatigue. The observatories were behind him; he must swing back; he could not last long, he knew; each slightest movement was intolerable effort. Was this death? he wondered; but his mind was so clear! There were the buildings, the trees! How thickly they were massed beyond-- He brought every ounce of will power to bear ... the throttle!--and a slow glide in ... he was losing speed ... the stick--must--come--back! The crashing branches whipped about him, bending, crackling--and the world went dark.... * * * * * There were stars above him when he awoke, and his back was wrenched and aching. He tried to move, to call, but found that the paralysing effect of the gas still held him fast. He was lying on the ground, he knew: a door was open in a building beyond, and the light in the room showed him men, a small group of them, standing silent while someone--yes, it was McGuire--shouted into a phone. "... The squadron," he was saying. "... Lost! Every plane down and destroyed.... Blake is living but injured...." And then Blake remembered. And the tumbling, helpless planes came again before his eyes while he cursed silently at this freezing grip that would not let him cover his face with his hands to shut out the sight. The figure of a man hurried past him, nor saw the body lying helpless in the cool dark. McGuire was still at the phone. And the enemy ship--? His mind, filled with a welter of words as he tried to find phrases to compass his hate for that ship. And then, as if conjured out of nothing by his thoughts, the great craft itself came in view overhead in all its mighty bulk. It settled down swiftly: it was riding on an even keel. And in silence and darkness it came from above. Blake tried to call out, but no sound could be formed by his paralyzed throat. Doors opened in silence, swinging down from the belly of the thing to show in the darkness square openings through which shot beams of brilliant yellow light. There were cages that lowered--great platforms in slings--and the platforms came softly to rest on the ground. They were moving with life; living beings clustered upon them thick in the dark. Oh God! for an instant's release from the numbness that held his lips and throat to cry out one word!... The shapes were passing now in the shelter of darkness, going toward the room.... He could see McGuire's back turned toward the door. Man-shapes, tall and thin, distorted humans, each swathed in bulging garments; horrible staring eyes of glass in the masks about their heads, and each hand ready with a shining weapon as they stood waiting for the men within to move. * * * * * McGuire must have seen them first, though his figure was half concealed from Blake where he was lying. But he saw the head turn; knew by the quick twist of the shoulders the man was reaching for a gun. One shot echoed in Blake's ears; one bulging figure spun and fell awkwardly to the ground; then the weapons in those clumsy hands hissed savagely while jets of vapor, half liquid and half gas, shot blindingly into the room. The faces dropped from his sight.... There had been the clamor of surprised and shouting men: there was silence now. And the awkward figures in the bloated casings that protected their bodies from the gas passed in safety to the room. Blake, bound in the invisible chains of enemy gas, struggled silently, futilely, to pit his will against this grip that held him. To lie there helpless, to see these men slaughtered! He saw one of the creatures push the body of his fallen comrade out of the way: it was cast aside with an indifferent foot. They were coming back: Blake saw the form of McGuire in unmistakable khaki. He and another man were carried high on the shoulders of some of the invaders. They were going toward the platforms, the slings beneath the ship.... They passed close to Blake, and again he was unnoticed in the dark. A clamor came from distant buildings, a babel of howls and shrieks, inhuman, unearthly. There were no phrases or syllables, but to Blake it was familiar ... somewhere he had heard it ... and then he remembered the radio and the weird wailing note that told of communication. These things were talking in the same discordant din. * * * * * They were gathering now on the platforms slung under the ship. A whistling note from somewhere within the great structure and the platforms went high in the air. They were loaded, he saw, with papers and books and instruments plundered from the observatories. Some made a second trip to take up the loot they had gathered. Then the black doorways closed; the huge bulk of the ship floated high above the trees; it took form, dwindled smaller and smaller, then vanished from sight in the star-studded sky. Blake thought of their unconscious passenger--the slim figure of Lieutenant McGuire. Mac had been a close friend and a good one; his ready smile; his steady eyes that could tear a problem to pieces with their analytic scrutiny or gaze far into space to see those visions of a dreamer! "Far into space." Blake repeated the words in his mind. And: "Good-by Mac," he said softly; "you've shipped for a long cruise, I'm thinking." He hardly realized he had spoken the words aloud. * * * * * Lying there in the cold night he felt his strength returning slowly. The pines sang their soothing, whispered message, and the faint night noises served but to intensify the silence of the mountain. It was some time before the grind of straining gears came faintly in the air to announce the coming of a car up the long grade. And still later he heard it come to a stop some distance beyond. There were footsteps, and voices calling: he heard the voice of Colonel Boynton. And he was able to call out in reply, even to move his head and turn it to see the approaching figures in the night. Colonel Boynton knelt beside him. "Did they get you, old man?" he asked. "Almost," Blake told him. "My oxygen--I was lucky. But the others--". He did not need to complete the sentence. The silent canyons among those wooded hills told plainly the story of the lost men. "We will fight them with gas masks," said the colonel; "your experience has taught us the way." "Gas-tight uniforms and our own supplies of oxygen," Blake supplemented. He told Boynton of the man-things he had seen come from the ship, of their baggy suits, their helmets.... And he had seen a small generator on the back of each helmet. He told him of the small, shining weapons and their powerful jets of gas. Deadly and unescapable at short range, he well knew. "They got McGuire," Blake concluded; "carried him off a prisoner. Took another man, too." For a moment Colonel Boynton's quiet tones lost their even steadiness. "We'll get them," he said savagely, and it was plain that it was the invaders that filled his mind; "we'll go after them, and we'll get them in spite of their damn gas, and we'll rip their big ship into ribbons--" Captain Blake was able to raise a dissenting hand. "We will have to go where they are, Colonel, to do that." Colonel Boynton stared at him. "Well?" he demanded. "Why not?" "We can't go where _they_ went," said Blake simply. "I laughed at McGuire; told him not to be a fool. But I was the fool--the blind one; we all were, Colonel. That thing came here out of space. It has gone back; it is far beyond our air. I saw it go up out of sight, and I know. Those creatures were men, if you like, but no men that we know--not those shrieking, wailing devils! And we're going to hear more from them, now that they've found their way here!" CHAPTER VI A score of bodies where men had died in strangling fumes in the observatories on Mount Lawson; one of the country's leading astronomical scientists vanished utterly; the buildings on the mountain top ransacked; papers and documents blowing in vagrant winds; tales of a monster ship in the air, incredibly huge, unbelievably swift-- There are matters that at times are not allowed to reach the press, but not happenings like these. And the papers of the United States blazed out with headlines to tell the world of this latest mystery. Then came corroboration from the far corners of the world. The mystery ship had not visited one section only; it had made a survey of the whole civilized sphere, and the tales of those who had seen it were no longer laughed to scorn but went on the wires of the great press agencies to be given to the world. And with that the censorship imposed by the Department of War broke down, and the tragic story of the destruction of the 91st Air Squadron passed into written history. The wild tale of Captain Blake was on every tongue. An invasion from space! The idea was difficult to accept. There were scoffers who tried to find something here for their easy wit. Why should we be attacked? What had that other world to gain? There was no answer ready, but the silent lips of the men who had fallen spoke eloquently of the truth. And the world, in wonder and consternation, was forced to believe. Were there more to come? How meet them? Was this war--and with whom? What neighboring planet could reasonably be suspected. What had science to say? The scientists! The scientists! The clamor of the world was beating at the doors of science and demanding explanations and answers. And science answered. A conference was arranged in London; the best minds in the realms of astronomy and physics came together. They were the last to admit the truth that would not be denied, but admit it they must. And to some of the questions they found their answer. * * * * * It was not Mars, they said, though this in the popular mind was the source of the trouble. Not Mars, for that planet was far in the heavens. But Venus!--misnamed for the Goddess of Love. It was Venus, and she alone, who by any stretch of the imagination could be threatening Earth. What did it mean? They had no answer. The ship was the only answer to that. Would there be more?--could we meet them?--defeat them? And again the wise men of the world refused to hazard a guess. But they told what they knew; that Venus was past her eastern elongation, was approaching the earth. She of all the planets that swung around the sun came nearest to Earth--twenty-six million miles in another few weeks. Then whirling away she would pass to the western elongation in a month and a half and drive out into space. Venus circled the sun in a year of 225 days, and in 534 days she would again reach her eastern elongation with reference to the earth, and draw near us again. They were reluctant to express themselves, these men who made nothing of weighing and analyzing stars a million of light years away, but _if_ the popular conception was correct and _if_ we could pass through the following weeks without further assault, we could count on a year and a half before the menace would again return. And in a year and a half--well, the physicists would be working--and we might be prepared. Captain Blake had made his report, but this, it seemed, was not enough. He was ordered to come to Washington, and, with Colonel Boynton, he flew across the country to tell again his incredible story. * * * * * It was a notable gathering before which he appeared. All the branches of the service were represented; there were men in the uniform of admirals and generals; there were heads of Departments. And the Secretary of War was in charge. He told his story, did Blake, before a battery of hostile eyes. This was not a gathering to be stampeded by wild scareheads, nor by popular clamor. They wanted facts, and they wanted them proved. But the gravity with which they regarded the investigation was shown by their invitation to the representatives of foreign powers to attend. "I have told you all that happened," Blake concluded, "up to the coming of Colonel Boynton. May I reiterate one fact? I do not wonder at your questioning my state of mind and my ability to observe correctly. But I must insist, gentlemen, that while I got a shot of their gas and my muscles and my nervous system were paralyzed, my brain was entirely clear. I saw what I saw; those creatures were there; they entered the buildings; they carried off Lieutenant McGuire and another man. "What they were or who they were I cannot say. I do not know that they were men, but their insane shrieking in that queer unintelligible talk is significant. And that means of communication corresponds with the radio reception of which you know. "If you gentlemen know of any part of this earth that can produce such a people, if you know of any people or country in this world that can produce such a ship--then we can forget all our wild fancies. And we can prepare to submit to that country and that people as the masters of this earth. For I must tell you, gentlemen, with all the earnestness at my command, that until you have seen that ship in action, seen its incredible speed, its maneuverability, its lightning-like attack and its curtain of gas, you can have no conception of our helplessness. And the insignia that she carries is the flag of our conquerors." * * * * * Blake got an approving nod from the Secretary of War as he took his seat. That quiet man rose slowly from his chair to add his words. He spoke earnestly, impressively. "Captain Blake has hit the nail squarely on the head," he stated. "We have here in this room a representative gathering from the whole world. If there is any one of you who can say that this mystery ship was built and manned by your people, let him speak, and we will send you at once a commission to acknowledge your power and negotiate for peace." The great hall was silent, in a silence that held only uneasy rustlings as men glanced one at another in wondering dismay. "The time has come," said the Secretary with solemn emphasis, "when all dissensions among our peoples must cease. Whatever there is or ever has been of discord between us fades into insignificance before this new threat. It is the world, now, against a power unknown; we can only face it as a united world. "I shall recommend to the President of the United States that a commission be appointed, that it may co-operate with similar bodies from all lands. I ask you, gentlemen, to make like representations to your governments, to the end that we may meet this menace as one country and one man; meet it, God grant, successfully through a War Department of the World." * * * * * It was a brave gesture of the President of the United States; he dared the scorn and laughter of the world in standing behind his Secretary of War. The world is quick to turn and rend with ridicule a false prophet. And despite the unanswerable facts, the scope and power of the menace was not entirely believed. It was difficult for the conscious minds of men to conceive of the barriers of vast space as swept aside and the earth laid open to attack. England was slow to respond to the invitation of the President: this matter required thought and grave deliberation in parliament. It might not be true: the thought, whether spoken or unexpressed, was clinging to their minds. And even if true--even if this lone ship had wandered in from space--there might be no further attack. "Why," they asked, "should there be more unprovoked assaults from the people of another planet? What was their object? What had they to gain? ... Perhaps we were safe after all." The answer that destroyed all hope came to them borne in upon a wall of water that swept the British coast. The telescopes of the world were centered now on just one object in the heavens. The bright evening star that adorned the western sky was the target for instruments great and small. It was past the half-moon phase now, and it became under magnification a gleaming crescent, a crescent that emitted from the dark sphere it embraced vivid flashes of light. Sykes' report had ample corroboration; the flash was seen by many, and it was repeated the next night and the next. What was it? the waiting world asked. And the answer came not from the telescopes and their far-reaching gaze but from the waters of the Atlantic. In the full blaze of day came a meteor that swept to the earth in an arc of fire to outshine the sun. There must have been those who saw it strike--passengers and crews of passing ships--but its plunge into the depths of the Atlantic spelled death for each witness. * * * * * The earth trembled with the explosion that followed. A gas--some new compound that united with water to give volumes tremendous--that only could explain it. The ocean rose from its depths and flung wave after wave to race outward in circles of death. Hundreds of feet in height at their source--this could only be estimated--they were devastating when they struck. The ocean raged over the frail bulwark of England in wave upon wave, and, retreating, the waters left smooth, shining rock where cities had been. The stone and steel of their buildings was scattered far over the desolate land or drawn in the suction of retreating waters to the sea. Ireland, too, and France and Spain. Even the coast of America felt the shock of the explosion and was swept by tidal waves of huge proportions. But the coast of Britain took the blow at its worst. The world was stunned and waiting--waiting!--when the next blow fell. The flashes were coming from Venus at regular intervals, just twenty hours and nineteen minutes apart. And with exactly the same time intervals the bolts arrived from space to lay waste the earth. They struck where they would: the ocean again; the Sahara; in the mountains of China; the Pacific was thrown into fearful convulsions; the wheat fields of Canada trembled and vanished before a blast of flaming gas.... Twenty hours and nineteen minutes! Where it would strike, the next star-shell, no man might say; that it surely would come was a deadly and nerve-shattering certainty. The earth waited and prayed under actual bombardment. * * * * * Some super-gun, said science with conviction; a great bore in the planet itself, perhaps. But it was fixed, and the planet itself aimed with an accuracy that was deadly; aimed once as each revolution brought its gun on the target. Herein, said science, lay a basis for hope. If, in that distant world, there was only one such bore, it must be altering its aim as the planet approached; the gun must cease to bear upon the earth. And the changing sweep of the missiles' flight confirmed their belief. Each meteor-shell that came rushing into Earth's embrace burned brilliantly as it tore into the air. And each flaming arc was increasingly bent, until--twenty hours and nineteen minutes had passed--twenty minutes--thirty--another hour ... and the peoples of Earth dropped humbly to their knees in thankful prayer, or raised vengeful eyes and clenched fists toward the heavens while their quivering lips uttered blasphemous curses. The menace, for the time, had passed; the great gun of Venus no longer was aiming toward the earth. "No more ships," was the belief; "not this time." And the world turned to an accounting of its losses, and to wonder--wonder--what the planet's return would bring. A year and one half was theirs; one year and a half in which to live in safety, in which to plan and build. * * * * * A column, double leaded, in the _London Times_ voiced the feeling of the world. It was copied and broadcast everywhere. "Another attack," it concluded, "is not a probability--it is a certainty. They are destroying us for some reason known only to themselves. Who can doubt that when the planet returns there will be a further bombardment; an invasion by armed forces in giant ships; bombs dropped from them miles high in the air. This is what we must look forward to--death and destruction dealt out by a force we are unable to meet. "Our munitions factories may build larger guns, but can they reach the heights at which these monster ships of space will lie, with any faint probability of inflicting damage? It is doubtful. "Our aircraft is less than useless; its very name condemns it as inept. Craft of the air!--and we have to war against space ships which can rise beyond the thin envelope of gas that encircles the earth. "The world is doomed--utterly and finally doomed; it is the end of humankind; slavery to a conquering race at the very best, unless-- "Let us face the facts fairly. It is war--war to the death--between the inhabitants of this world and of that other. We are men. What they are God alone can say. But they are creatures of mind as are we; what they have done, we may do. "There is our only hope. It is vain, perhaps--preposterous in its assumption--but our sole and only hope. We must meet the enemy and defeat him, and we must do it on his own ground. To destroy their fleet we must penetrate space; to silence their deadly bombardment we must go out into space as they have done, reach their distant world as they have reached ours, and conquer as we would have been conquered. "It is a tenuous hope, but our only one. Let our men of mundane warfare do their best--it will be useless. But if there be one spark of God-given genius in the world that can point the way to victory, let those in authority turn no deaf ear. "It is a battle now of minds, and the best minds will win. Humanity--all humankind--is facing the end. In less than one year and a half we must succeed--or perish. And unless we conquer finally and decisively, the story of man in the history of the universe will be a tale that is told, a record of life in a book that is ended--closed--and forgotten through all eternity." CHAPTER VII A breath of a lethal gas shot from the flying ship had made Captain Blake as helpless as if every muscle were frozen hard, and he had got it only lightly, mixed with the saving blast of oxygen. His heart had gone on, and his breathing, though it became shallow, did not cease; he was even able to turn his eyes. But to the men in the observatory room the gas from the weapons of the attacking force came as a devastating, choking cloud that struck them senseless as if with a blow. Lieutenant McGuire hardly heard the sound of his own pistol before unconsciousness took him. It was death for the men who were left--for them the quick darkness never lifted--but for McGuire and his companion there was reprieve. He was lying flat on a hard floor when remembrance crept slowly back to his benumbed brain. An odor, sickish-sweet, was in his nostrils; the breath of life was being forcibly pumped and withdrawn from laboring lungs; a mask was tight against his face. He struggled to throw it off, and someone bending over removed it. Someone! His eyes stared wonderingly at the grotesque face like a lingering phantasm of fevered dreams. There were others, he saw, and they were working over a body not far away upon the floor. He recognized the figure of Professor Sykes. Short, stocky, his clothes disheveled--but Sykes, unmistakably, despite the mask upon his face. He, too, revived as McGuire watched, and, like the flyer, he looked wonderingly about him at his strange companions. The eyes of the two met and held in wordless communication and astonishment. * * * * * The unreal creatures that hovered near withdrew to the far side of the room. The walls beyond them were of metal, white and gleaming; there were doorways. In another wall were portholes--round windows of thick glass that framed circles of absolute night. It was dark out beyond them with a blackness that was relieved only by sharp pin-points of brilliance--stars in a night sky such as McGuire had never seen. Past and present alike were hazy to the flyer; the spark of life had been brought back to his body from a far distance; there was time needed to part the unreal from the real in these new and strange surroundings. There were doorways in the ceiling, and others in the floor near where he lay; ladders fastened to the wall gave access to these doors. A grotesque figure appeared above the floor and, after a curious glance at the two men, scrambled into the room and vanished through the opening in the ceiling. It was some time before the significance of this was plain to the wondering man--before he reasoned that he was in the enemy ship, aimed outward from the earth, and the pull of gravitation and the greater force of the vessel's constant acceleration held its occupants to the rear walls of each room. That lanky figure had been making its way forward toward the bow of the ship. McGuire's mind was clearing; he turned his attention now to the curious, waiting creatures, his captors. There were five of them standing in the room, five shapes like men, yet curiously, strangely, different. They were tall of stature, narrow across the shoulders, muscular in a lean, attenuated fashion. But their faces! McGuire found his eyes returning in horrified fascination to each hideous, inhuman countenance. A colorless color, like the dead gray of ashes; a skin like that of an African savage from which all but the last vestige of color had been drained. It was transparent, parchment-like, and even in the light of the room that glowed from some hidden source, he could see the throbbing lines of blood-vessels that showed livid through the translucent skin. And he remembered, now, the fingers, half-seen in his moments of awakening--they were like clinging tendrils, colorless, too, in that ashy gray, and showed the network of veins as if each hand had been flayed alive. * * * * * The observer found himself analyzing, comparing, trying to find some earthly analogy for these unearthly creatures. Why did he think of potatoes sprouting in a cellar? What possible connection had these half-human things with that boyhood recollection? And he had seen some laboratory experiments with plants and animals that had been cut off from the sunlight--and now the connection was clear; he knew what this idea was that was trying to form. These were creatures of the dark. These bleached, drained faces showed skin that had never known the actinic rays of the sun; their whole framework proclaimed the process that had been going on through countless generations. Here was a race that had lived, if not in absolute darkness, then in some place where sunlight never shone--a place of half-light--or of clouds. "Clouds!" The exclamation was startled from him. And: "Clouds!" he repeated meditatively; he was seeing again a cloud-wrapped world in the eye-piece of a big refracting telescope. "Blanketed in clouds," Professor Sykes had said. The scientist himself was speaking to him now in bewildered tones. "Clouds?" he inquired. "That's a strange remark to make. Where are we, Lieutenant McGuire? I remember nothing after you fired. Are we flying--in the clouds?" "A long, long way beyond them, is my guess," said McGuire grimly. It was staggering what all this might mean; there was time needed for fuller comprehension. But the lean bronzed face of the flyer flushed with animation, and in spite of the terrors that must surely lie ahead he felt strangely elated at the actuality of an incredible adventure. * * * * * Slowly he got to his feet to find that his muscles still were reluctant to respond to orders; he helped the professor to arise. And from the group that drew back further into the far end of the room came a subdued and rasping tumult of discordant sound. One, seemingly in charge, held a weapon in his hand, a slender tube no thicker than a common wire; and ending in a cylinder within the creature's hand. He pointed it in threatening fashion while his voice rose in a shrill call. McGuire and Professor Sykes stood quiet and waited for what the next moment might have in store, but McGuire waved the weapon aside in a gesture that none could fail to read. "Steady," he told his companion. "We're in a ticklish position. Do nothing to alarm them." From up above them came an answering shrill note. Another of the beings was descending into the room. "Ah!" said Lieutenant McGuire softly, "the big boss, himself. Now let's see what will happen." If there had seemed something of timidity in the repulsive faces of the waiting creatures, this newcomer was of a different type. He opened flabby thin lips to give one sharp note of command. It was as sibilant as the hissing of a snake. The man with the weapon returned it to a holder at his side; the whole group cringed before the power and authority of the new arrival. The men that they had seen thus far were all garbed alike; a loose-fitting garment of one piece that was ludicrously like the play rompers that children might wear. These were dull red in color, the red of drying blood, made of strong woven cloth. But this other was uniformed differently. McGuire noted the fineness of the silky robe. Like the others this was made of one piece, loosely fitting, but its bright vivid scarlet made the first seem drab and dull. A belt of metal about his waist shone like gold and matched the emblem of precious metal in the turban on his head. * * * * * All this the eyes of the flyer took in at a glance; his attention was only momentarily diverted from the ashen face with eyes narrow and slitted, that stared with the cold hatred of a cat into those of the men. He made a sound with a whistling breath. It seemed to be a question directed to them, but the import of it was lost. "An exceedingly queer lot," Professor Sykes observed. "And this chap seems distinctly hostile." "He's no friend of mine," said McGuire as the thin, pendulous lips repeated their whistling interrogation. "I can't place them," mused the scientist. "Those facial characteristics.... But they must be of some nationality, speak some tongue." He addressed himself to the figure with the immobile, horrid face. "We do not understand you," he said with an ingratiating smile. "_Comprenez vous Francaise?_... _Non?_"... German, perhaps, or Spanish?... "_Sprecken sie Deutsche?_ _Usted habla Española?_..." He followed with a fusillade of questions in strange and varying tongues. "I've even tried him with Chinese," he protested in bewilderment and stared amazed at his companion's laughter. There had to be a reaction from the strain of the past hours, and Lieutenant McGuire found the serious questioning in polyglot tongues and the unchanging feline stare of that hideous face too much for his mental restraint. He held his sides, while he shook and roared with laughter beyond control, and the figure before him glared with evident disapproval of his mirth. * * * * * There was a hissing order, and two figures from the corner sprang forward to seize the flyer with long clinging fingers. Their strength he had overestimated, for a violent throw of his body twisted him free, and his outstretched hands sent the two sprawling across the room. Their leader took one quick step forward, then paused as if hesitating to meet this young adversary. "Do go easy," Professor Sykes was imploring. "We do not know where we are nor who they are, but we must do nothing to antagonize them." McGuire had reacted from his hilarious seizure with an emotional swing to the opposite extreme. "I'll break their damn necks," he growled, "if they get rough with me." And his narrow eyes exchanged glare for glare with those in the face like blood and ashes before him. The cold cat eyes held steadily upon him while the scarlet figure retreated. A louder call, shrill and vibrant, came from the thin lips, and a swarm of bodies in dull red were scrambling into the room to mass about their scarlet leader. Above and behind them the face under its brilliant turban and golden clasp was glaring in triumph. The tall figures crouched, grotesque and awkward; their long arms and hands with grasping, tendril-like fingers were ready. McGuire waited for the sharp hissing order that would throw these things upon him, and he met the attack when it came with his own shoulders dropped to the fighter's pose, head drawn in close and both fists swinging free. There were lean fingers clutching at his throat, a press of blood-red bodies thick about him, and a clustering of faces where color blotched and flowed. The thud of fists in blows that started from the floor was new to these lean creatures that clawed and clung like cats. But they trampled on those who went down before the flyer's blows and stood upon them to spring at his head; they crowded in in overwhelming numbers while their red hands tore and twined about his face. * * * * * It was no place now for long swings; McGuire twisted his body and threw his weight into quick short jabs at the faces before him. He was clear for an instant and swung his heavy boot at something that clung to one leg; then met with a rain of hooks and short punches the faces that closed in again. He saw in that instant a wild whirl of bodies where the stocky figure of Professor Sykes was smothered beneath his taller antagonists. But the professor, if he was forgetting the science of the laboratory, was remembering that of the squared circle--and the battle was not entirely one sided. McGuire was free; the blood was trickling down his face from innumerable cuts where sharp-nailed fingers had sunk deep. He wiped the red stream from his eyes and threw himself at the weaving mass of bodies that eddied about Sykes in frantic struggle across the room. The face of the professor showed clear for a moment. Like McGuire he was bleeding, and his breath came in short explosive gasps, but he was holding his own! The eyes of McGuire glimpsed a wildly gesticulating, shouting figure in the rear. The face, contorted with rage, was almost the color of the brilliant scarlet that the creature wore. The blood-stained man in khaki left his companion to fight his own battle, and plunged headlong at a leaping cluster of dull red, smashed through with a frenzied attack of straight rights and lefts, and freed himself to make one final leap at the leader of this unholy pack. He was fighting in blind desperation now; the two were out-numbered by the writhing, lean-bodied creatures, and this thing that showed in blurred crimson before him was the directing power of them all. The figure symbolized and personified to the raging man all the repulsive ugliness of the leaping horde. The face came clear before him through the mist of blood, and he put the last ounce of his remaining strength and every pound of weight behind a straight, clean drive with his right fist. His last conscious impression was of a red, clawing hand that was closed around the thick butt of a tube of steel ... then down, and still down, he plunged into a bottomless pit of whirling, red flashes and choking fumes.... There were memories that were to occur to Lieutenant McGuire afterward--visions, dim and hazy and blurred, of half-waking moments when strange creatures forced food and water into his mouth, then held a mask upon his face while he resisted weakly the breathing of sweet, sickly fumes that sent him back to unconsciousness. There were many such times; some when he came sufficiently awake to know that Sykes was lying near him, receiving similar care. Their lives were being preserved: How, or why, or what life might hold in store he neither knew nor cared; the mask and the deep-drawn fumes brought stupor and numbness to his brain. A window was in the floor beside him when he awoke--a circular window of thick glass or quartz. But no longer did it frame a picture of a sky in velvet blackness; no unwinking pin-points of distant stars pricked keenly through the night; but, clear and dazzling, came a blessed radiance that could mean only sunshine. A glowing light that was dazzling to his sleep-filled eyes, it streamed in golden--beautiful--to light the unfamiliar room and show motionless upon the floor the figure of Professor Sykes. His torn clothing had been neatly arranged, and his face showed livid lines of healing cuts and bruises. McGuire tried gingerly to move his arms and legs; they were still functioning though stiff and weak from disuse. He raised himself slowly and stood swaying on his feet, then made his uncertain way to his companion and shook him weakly by the shoulder. Professor Sykes breathed deeply and raised leaden lids from tired eyes to stare uncomprehendingly at McGuire. Soon his dark pupils ceased to dilate, and he, too, could see their prison and the light of day. "Sunlight!" he said in a thin voice, and he seemed to know now that they were in the air; "I wonder--I wonder--if we shall land--what country? ... Some wilderness and a strange race--a strange, strange race!" He was muttering half to himself; the mystery of these people whom he could not identify was still troubling him. * * * * * McGuire helped the other man to his feet, and they clung to each to the other for support as they crossed to kneel beside the floor-window and learn finally where their captors meant to take them. A wilderness, indeed, the sight that met their eyes, but a wilderness of clouds--no unfamiliar sight to Lieutenant McGuire of the United States Army air service. But to settle softly into them instead of driving through with glistening wings--this was new and vastly different from anything he had known. Sounds came to them in the silence, penetrating faintly through thick walls--the same familiar wailing call that trembled and quavered and seemed to the listening men to be guiding them down through the mist. Gone was the sunlight, and the clouds beyond the deep-set window were gloriously ablaze with a brilliance softly diffused. The cloud bank was deep, and they felt the craft under them sink slowly, steadily into the misty embrace. It thinned below them to drifting vapor, and the first hazy shadows of the ground showed through from far beneath. Their altitude, the flyer knew, was still many thousands of feet. "Water," said McGuire, as his trained eyes made plain to him what was still indistinct to the scientist. "An ocean--and a shore-line--" More clouds obscured the view; they parted suddenly to show a portion only of a clear-cut map. * * * * * It stretched beyond the confines of their window, that unfamiliar line of wave-marked shore; the water was like frozen gold, wrinkled in countless tiny corrugations and reflecting the bright glow from above. But the land,--that drew their eyes! Were those cities, those shadow-splashed areas of gray and rose?... The last veiling clouds dissolved, and the whole circle was plain to their view. The men leaned forward, breathless, intent, till the scientist, Sykes--the man whose eyes had seen and whose brain recorded a dim shape in the lens of a great telescope--Sykes drew back with a quivering, incredulous breath. For below them, so plain, so unmistakable, there lay an island, large even from this height, and it formed on this round map a sharp angle like a great letter "L." "We shall know that if we ever see it again," Professor Sykes had remarked in the quiet and security of that domed building surmounting the heights of Mount Lawson. But he said nothing now, as he stared at his companion with eyes that implored McGuire to arouse him from this sleep, this dream that could never be real. But McGuire, lieutenant one-time in the forces of the U. S. A., had seen it too, and he stared back with a look that gave dreadful confirmation. The observatory--Mount Lawson--the earth!--those were the things unreal and far away. And here before them, in brain-stunning actuality, were the markings unmistakable--the markings of Venus. And they were landing, these two, in the company of creatures wild and strange as the planet--on Venus itself! (_To be continued._) * * * * * [Advertisement: ] The Destroyer _By William Merriam Rouse_ [Illustration: "The connection is made," murmured Von Stein.] [Sidenote: Slowly, insidiously, there stole over Allen Parker something uncanny. He could no longer control his hands--even his brain!] The pencil in the hand of Allen Parker refused to obey his will. A strange unseen force pushed his will aside and took possession of the pencil point so that what he drew was not his own. It was the same when he turned from drawing board to typewriter. The sentences were not of his framing; the ideas were utterly foreign to him. This was the first hint he received of the fate that was drawing in like night upon him and his beautiful wife. Parker, a young writer of growing reputation who illustrated his own work, was making a series of pencil sketches for a romance partly finished. The story was as joyous and elusive as sunlight, and until to-day his sketches had held the same quality. Now he could not tap the reservoir from which he had taken the wind-blown hair and smiling eyes of Madelon, his heroine. When he drew or wrote he seemed to be submerged in the dark waters of a measureless evil pit. The face that mocked him from the paper was stamped with a world-old knowledge of forbidden things. Parker dropped his pencil and leaned back, tortured. He and his wife, Betty, had taken this house in Pine Hills, a small and extremely quiet suburban village, solely for the purpose of concentration on the book which was to be the most important work he had done. He went to the door of the room that he used for a studio and called: "Betty! Can you come here a moment, please?" * * * * * There was a patter of running feet on the stairs and then a girl of twenty, or thereabout, came into the room. Any man would have said she was a blessing. Her hair "was yellow like ripe corn," and her vivid blue eyes held depth and character and charm. "Look!" exclaimed Parker. "What do you think of this stuff?" For a moment there was silence. Then Allen Parker saw something he had never before seen in his wife's face for him or his work--a look of complete disgust. "I wouldn't have believed you capable of doing anything so ... so horrid!" she said coldly. "How could you?" "I don't know!" His arms, which had been ready to take her to him for comfort, dropped. "The work has been ... difficult, lately. As though something were pulling at my mind. But not like this! It isn't _me_!" "It must be you, since it came out of you!" She turned away and moved restlessly to one of the windows. "Through me!" muttered Parker. "Ideas _come_!" "You'll have to do something!" "But what? I don't know what to do!" "Why not go to see that new doctor?" asked Betty, over her shoulder. "Dr. Friedrich von Stein?" "Von Stein?" repeated Parker, vaguely. "Don't know him. Anyhow, I don't need a doctor. What in the world made you think of that?" * * * * * "Nothing, except that I can see his house from here. He's taken what they call 'the old Reynolds place.' You know--opposite the church. We looked at it and thought it was too large for us. He's made a lot of alterations." "Oh, yes!" Parker had placed the newcomer, more recent than himself. "I had an idea that he was a doctor of philosophy, not medicine." "He has half a dozen degrees, they say. Certainly he's a stunning looking man. I saw him on the street." "Maybe he doesn't practice." The artist was gazing, baffled and sick at heart, upon what he had wrought. "And what could he do, unless it's my liver?" "He might be a psycho-analyst, or something like that," she replied, slowly. "But why the wild interest in this particular doctor?" Parker roused himself and looked at her. He felt irritable, and was ashamed of it. "Only for your work," said Betty. A faint pink touched her cheeks. Allen Parker had a sudden feeling of certainty that his wife was lying to him. To one who knew the Parkers it would have been equally impossible to think of Betty as lying, or of her husband as believing such a thing. Parker was outraged by his own suspicion. He sprang up and began to pace the floor. "All right, then!" he exploded. "My work is going to the dogs! Why, there's an appointment with Cartwright to-morrow to show him these sketches, and the last few chapters I've done! We'll go now! If this man can't do anything for me I'll try somebody else!" * * * * * In ten minutes they were walking up the quiet street toward the present home of Dr. Friedrich von Stein. Despite his self-absorption Parker could not help noticing that his wife had never looked more attractive than she did at this moment. Her color had deepened, little wisps of hair curled against her cheeks, and there was a sparkle in her eyes which he knew came only on very particular occasions. Even from the outside it was apparent that many strange things had been done to the staid and dignified house of Reynolds. A mass of aerials hung above the roof. Some new windows had been cut at the second floor and filled with glass of a peculiar reddish-purple tinge. A residence had been turned into a laboratory, in sharp contrast to the charming houses up and down the street and the church of gray stone that stood opposite. Beside the door, at the main entrance, a modest plate bore the legend: "Dr. Friedrich von Stein." Parker pressed the bell. Then he squared his broad shoulders and waited: a very miserable, very likeable young man, with a finely shaped head and a good set of muscles under his well cut clothes. He had brought his sketches, but he was uncomfortable with the portfolio under his arm. It seemed to contaminate him. * * * * * The door opened to reveal a blocky figure of a man in a workman's blouse and overalls. The fellow was pale of eye, towheaded; he appeared to be good natured but of little intelligence. The only remarkable thing about him was a livid welt that ran across one cheek, from nose to ear. Beside him a glossy-coated dachshund wagged furiously, after having barked once as a matter of duty. "May we see Dr. von Stein?" asked Parker. "If he is in?" "I will ask the Herr Doktor if he iss in," replied the man, stiffly. "_Dummkopf!_" roared a voice from inside the house. An instant later man and dog shrank back along the hall and there appeared in their place one of the most striking personalities Allen Parker had ever seen. Dr. Friedrich von Stein was inches more than six feet tall and he stood perfectly erect, with the unmistakable carriage of a well drilled soldier. He was big boned, but lean, and every movement was made with military precision. More than any other feature his eyes impressed Parker: they were steady, penetrating, and absolutely black. But for a thread of gray here and there his well-kept beard and hair were black. He might have been any age from forty to sixty, so deceptive was his appearance. "Come in, if you please," he said, before Parker could speak. Von Stein's voice was rich and deep, but with a metallic quality which somehow corresponded with his mechanical smile. Except for the guttural r's there was hardly a hint of the foreigner in his speech. "It is Mr. and Mrs. Parker, I believe? I am Dr. von Stein." * * * * * He stood aside for them to pass into the hallway, and while they murmured their thanks he shot a volley of German at the man, whom he called Heinrich. The frightened servant vanished; and the Parkers were taken into a living room furnished carelessly, but in good enough taste. Betty took her place on a couch, to which the doctor led her with a bow. Parker sank into an overstuffed chair not far from a window. "I learned your names because of the beauty of madame," said Von Stein, as he stood looming above the mantel. Again he bowed. "One could not see her without wishing to know how such a charming woman was called. You are my neighbors from down the street, I believe." "Yes," replied Allen. He wanted to be agreeable, but found it difficult. "And I think Mrs. Parker has developed a great admiration for you. She persuaded me to come here to-day. Are you, by chance, a psycho-analyst? I don't even know that you are a doctor of medicine, but--" "I know a very great deal about the human mind," interrupted Dr. von Stein calmly. "I know a great deal about many things. I am not going to practice medicine here in Pine Hills because I have research work to do, but I will help you if I can. What is your trouble?" * * * * * The question brought back to Parker the mood of half an hour ago. Almost savagely he snapped the portfolio open and spread out a few of his recent drawings, with some of the earlier ones for comparison. "Look!" he cried. "These vicious things are what I am doing now! I can't help myself! The pencil does not obey me! Apparently I have no emotional control. It's as though my normal ideas were shouldered aside, like people in a crowd. And my writing to-day was as bad as these illustrations. I'm doing a book. Consider these things carefully, Doctor. They are not obscene, except by inference. They can't be censored. The book would go through the mails. Yet they are deadly! Look at my heroine in these two pictures. In one she is like--like violets! In the other she looks capable of any crime! What is she? A vampire, if there is such a thing? A witch? I can almost believe in demonology since I made these last drawings!" Parker, in spite of his excitement, tried to read the face of Dr. Friedrich von Stein. He found nothing but the automatic smile upon that mask. Yet it seemed to the artist that this time there was a hint of real pleasure in the curve of the lips. Was it possible that anyone could like those drawings? Parker began to think that he was going insane. "This is most unfortunate for you," rumbled the doctor. "I understand. But I trust that the condition can be remedied, if it persists. You, Mr. Parker, and you, Madame, do you understand something of physics, of psychology, of metaphysics?" "I fear that I'm rather ignorant," answered Betty. "Certainly I am in comparison with a man of your attainments." * * * * * Dr. von Stein bowed. He turned his black eyes upon Parker. "And you, sir? I must adjust my explanation to--what shall I say? To your knowledge of the higher reaches of scientific thought?" "Why, I majored in philosophy in college," said Parker, hesitatingly. "But that's quite a time ago, Herr Doktor. Of course I've tried to keep up with the conclusions of science. But a writer or a painter doesn't have any too much opportunity. He has his own problems to concern him." "Yes, indeed!" Dr. von Stein was thoughtful. "So, and especially for the benefit of madame, I shall speak in terms of the concrete." "Please consider me stupid!" begged Betty. "But I want to understand!" "Certainly, except that you are not stupid, Madame. I will proceed. Both of you, I assume, know something of the radio? Very good! You know that an etheric wave transmits the message, and that it is received and amplified so that it is within the range of the human ear. These waves were there when paleolithic man hunted his meat with a stone-tipped club. To use them it was necessary to invent the microphone, and a receiving instrument. "What I have said you already know. But here is what may startle you. Human thought is an etheric wave of the same essential nature as the radio wave. They are both electrical currents external to man. Thoughts sweep across the human mind as sound currents sweep across the aerials of a radio--" "I told you!" Allen Parker turned a triumphant face to his wife. "Pardon me, Herr Doktor! I have tried to convince Mrs. Parker that my idea came from outside!" * * * * * "Exactly!" Dr. von Stein took no offense. "And a difference between the mind and the radio set is that with the radio you tune in upon whatever you choose, and when you choose. The mind is not under such control, although it should be. It receives that to which it happens to be open. Or that thought which has been intensified and strengthened by having been received and entertained by other minds. In India they say: 'Five thousand died of the plague and fifty thousand died of fear.' Do you both follow me?" It was unnecessary to ask. Betty sat on the edge of the couch, intent upon every word. Parker, although more restrained, was equally interested. Moreover he was delighted to have what he had felt instinctively confirmed, in a way, by a man of science. "Herbert Spencer said," continued the doctor, "that no thought, no feeling, is ever manifested save as the result of a physical force. This principle will before long be a scientific commonplace. And Huxley predicted that we would arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness. But I will not attempt to bolster my position with authorities. I know, and I can prove what I know. "You, Mr. Parker, have been receiving some particularly annoying thoughts which have been intensified, it may be, by others, or another. Human will power can alter the rate of vibration of the line of force, or etheric wave. So-called good thoughts have a high rate of vibration, and those which are called bad ordinarily have a low rate. Have you, perhaps, an enemy?" "Not that I know of," replied Parker, in a low voice. "Then it would follow that this is accidental." * * * * * "Good heavens! Do you mean to say that someone could do this to me maliciously?" "So far my experiments leave something to be desired," said Dr. von Stein, without answering directly. "No doubt you are peculiarly susceptible to thoughts which bear in any way on your work." "But isn't there any help for it?" asked Betty. She was regarding her husband with the eyes of a stranger. "I believe I can do something for Mr. Parker." There was a knock at the door. The doctor boomed an order to come in. Heinrich, with the dachshund at his heels, entered bearing a tray with a bottle of wine and some slices of heavy fruit cake. He drew out a table and placed the tray. "Do not bring that dog in when I have guests," said Von Stein. He spoke with a gleam of white teeth. "You know what will happen, Heinrich?" "_Ja_, Herr Doktor! I take Hans oudt!" The man was terrified. He gathered the dog into his arms and fairly fled from the room. Dr. von Stein turned with a smile. "I have to discipline him," he explained. "He's a stupid fellow, but faithful. I can't have ordinary servants about. There are scientific men who would be willing to bribe them for a look at my laboratory." "I did not know such things were done among scholars," said Betty, slowly. "What I have accomplished means power, Madame!" exclaimed the doctor. "There are jackals in every walk of life. If an unscrupulous man of science got into my laboratory, a physicist for instance, he might ... find out things!" * * * * * Dr. von Stein turned to his duties as host. He filled their glasses, and watched with satisfaction Betty's obvious enjoyment of the cake. A box of mellow Havanas appeared from a cabinet: imported cigarettes from a smoking stand. But Parker, in spite of a liking for good wine and tobacco, was far too much concerned about his work to forget the errand that had brought him there. "So you think," he said, when there was opportunity, "that you can help me, Dr. von Stein?" "I can," replied von Stein, firmly; "but before attempting anything I'd like to wait a day or two. The attacking thoughts may become less violent, or your resistance greater, in either of which cases the condition will fade out. You will either get better or much worse. If you are worse come to see me again, and I promise you that I will do something!" "I'll come, and thank you!" Parker felt better, and more cheerful than he had since the beginning of the disturbance. "Few things could make me suffer so much as trouble with my work." "That is what I thought," agreed Dr. von Stein. * * * * * Betty rose. Her husband caught the look in her eyes as they met the bright, black gaze of Dr. von Stein, and he went cold. That look had always been for him alone. Her feet seemed to linger on the way to the door. "He's wonderful!" she breathed, as they started down the uneventful street. "Scientific things never interested me before. But he makes them vital, living!" "And yet," said Parker, thoughtfully, "there's something uncanny about that man!" "Nonsense!" exclaimed Betty. "It's because he's a genius! Don't be small, Allen!" Parker gasped, and remained silent. He could not remember that his wife had ever spoken to him in quite that way. They finished the little journey home without speaking again and Parker went directly to studio. He sat down, with drooping shoulders, and considered the mess he had made of his book. Well, there was nothing to do but see Cartwright to-morrow and face the music! Dinner that night was a mournful affair. The soft footsteps of the servant going in and out of the dining room, the ticking of the clock, were almost the only sounds. Betty was deep in her own thoughts; Parker was too miserable to talk. He went to bed early and lay staring into the darkness for what seemed like an eternity of slow moving hours. The tall, deep voiced clock in the hall downstairs had just struck one when suddenly Parker's room was flooded with light. He sat up, blinking, and saw Betty standing near his bed. Her fingers twisted against each other; her face was drawn and white. "Allen!" she whispered. "I'm afraid!" Instantly he was on his feet; his arms went around her and the yellow head dropped wearily against his shoulder. "Afraid of what?" he cried. "What is it, sweetheart?" "I don't know!" All at once her body stiffened and she pulled away from him. Then she laughed--"What nonsense! I must have been having a bad dream ... it's nothing. Sorry I bothered you, Allen!" She was gone before his could stop her. Bewildered, he did not know whether to follow. Better not, he thought. She would sleep now, and perhaps he would. But he was worried. Betty was becoming less and less like herself. * * * * * At last Parker did sleep, to awake shortly after daylight. He got a hasty breakfast and took an early train to New York. When John Cartwright, a shrewd and kindly man well advanced in years, arrived at his office Allen Parker was right there waiting for him. Cartwright had shown a real affection for the younger man, a paternal interest. He beamed, as usual, until he sat down with the new drawings. Slowly the smile faded from his face. He went over them twice, three times, and then he looked up. "My boy," he said, "did you do these?" "Yes." "Do you know that you are turning a delicate and beautiful romance into a lascivious libel on the human race?" "It is being done," replied Parker, in a low voice. "And I--I can't help myself!" "What do you mean by that?" "I mean that when I start to draw Madelon my hand produces that woman of Babylon! The writing is just as bad. It's full of sneering hints, double meanings ... I shall destroy the stuff. I've been to see a psycho-analyst." "Ah!" thoughtfully. "Perhaps you're tired, Allen. Why not take Betty for a sea trip? There'll still be time for fall publication." "I'm going to try everything possible. I'd rather be dead than do work like this!" * * * * * When Parker left his friend he was somewhat encouraged. After the first shock Cartwright had been inclined to make light of the difficulty, and by the time Allen Parker reached Pine Hills his stride had the usual swing and snap. He ran up the steps of his house and burst into the living room with a smile. Betty was sitting by one of the windows, her hands lying relaxed in her lap. She turned a somber face toward her husband, and spoke before he had time to say a word of greeting. "You knew that Cordelia Lyman died a short time ago, didn't you?" "What's that?" exclaimed Parker, bewildered. "Lyman? Oh, the old lady down the street who left her money to found a home for aged spinsters? What about it?" "But she didn't leave her money to found a home for aged spinsters, Allen. She had said she was going to, and everybody thought so. Her will was admitted to probate, or whatever they call it, yesterday. She left half a million, all she had, to Dr. Friedrich von Stein, to be used as he thinks best for the advancement of science!" "Good heavens!" Parker stared. "Why, I didn't know she knew him. He'd only been here a week or so when she died." "There isn't a flaw in the will, they say. You can imagine that Pine Hills is talking!" "Well," said Parker philosophically, "he's lucky. I hope he does something with it." "He will," replied Betty, with conviction. "He'll do a great many things!" * * * * * Parker told her of his interview with Cartwright, but she seemed little interested. He did not try to work that day but, after he had put the offending drawings and manuscript out of sight, he wandered, read, smoked, and in the evening persuaded Betty to take a moonlight walk with him. They passed the house of Dr. von Stein, from which came a faint humming that sounded like a dynamo. Across the street the church was alight for some service. Triumphant music drifted to them. The moon hung above the spire, with its cross outlined darkly against the brilliant sky. The windows were great jewels. Betty drew a deep breath. "Sometimes, Allen," she said, "I feel like praying!" "You _are_ a beautiful prayer," whispered Parker. She walked close to him, holding his arm, and repeated softly: "Are not two prayers a perfect strength? And shall I feel afraid?" But that was the end of that mood. By the time they arrived home Betty was again the strange, aloof, cold, slightly hard woman of the past few days. Again depression settled upon Allen Parker. * * * * * The next morning he breakfasted alone and went directly to the studio, without seeing Betty. Sun streamed into the room; the pencil moved swiftly. For a brief time Parker thought that he was himself again, as Madelon grew upon the block of paper. But the end was terrible. The last few strokes made her grotesque. This time the woman he had drawn was not merely evil; she was a mocking parody of his heroine. He threw drawing and pencil across the room. But no real artist can be discouraged short of death. He went to work again and labored until luncheon time. The results were no better, although they varied. Now it seemed that some malevolent power was playing with him, torturing him to the accompaniment of devilish laughter. He was haggard and actually stooped of body when he bathed his face and went down to the dining room. From across the table Betty regarded him curiously. "Fleming Proctor shot himself last night," she announced, calmly. "This morning they found him dead in his office." "Proctor? You don't mean the president of the Pine Hills National Bank?" "Yes." The expression of Betty's face did not change. "There was a note saying that he was sorry. It seems he'd made a large loan without security to an unknown person, and the bank examiner was coming to-day. Proctor said he couldn't help what he did. The note was confused as though he were trying to tell something and couldn't. They think his mind must have given way, particularly as they can't trace the loan, although the money is undoubtedly gone." * * * * * "That kind of thing doesn't happen!" Parker was stunned. He had known Fleming Proctor, and liked him. They met often at the country club. "Proctor was honest, and a fine business man!" "It did happen, Allen!" "I'd like to know more about it. That would have been a case for Dr. von Stein to take in hand." "Perhaps," said Betty, in a voice like ice. "But I'm more interested in finding out how soon you are going to return to normal. Frankly, I'm beginning to get bored." Without a word Parker rose and left the room. Never before had his wife hurt him like this. Doubly sensitive just now, he was suffering alone in the studio when the telephone rang. "Dr. von Stein speaking. Are you better, Mr. Parker?" "Worse! Much worse!" "Then come to my house this evening at nine. May I expect you? And alone?" "Yes." There was much Parker wanted to say, but he choked the words back. "I'll be there, and alone." "I shall be ready for you. Good-by." Allen Parker hung up the receiver. He did not leave the studio again until evening. * * * * * As Parker approached the house of Dr. Friedrich von Stein he saw that the church was lighted as it had been the night before. In a clear sky the moon rode above the spire. He paused to let his glance sweep up along the beautiful line that ran from earth to the slender cross. That was how he felt. He wanted to rise, as that line rose, from cumbering earth to clarity and beauty. He mounted the steps and rang. Dr. von Stein met him, with eyes and teeth agleam in the hall light. Wearily Parker stepped inside. His mood of the moment before was fading. "Go upstairs to my laboratory, if you please," said the doctor. "It is best that I see you there, for it may be that you will need treatment." "I need something," replied Parker as he went up a long flight of stairs. "I'm in a bad way." Without answer von Stein led him down a short corridor and held open a door. Allen Parker stepped into a room that bewildered him with its strange contrasts. At a glance he saw that nearly the whole upper floor of the building had been converted into one gigantic room. Near a big stone fireplace, where burning driftwood sent up its many tinted flames, Heinrich stood rigidly at attention. Hans, the dachshund, crouched at his feet. When the dog started to meet Parker a guttural command stopped him. Here there were bearskins on the floor, huge stuffed chairs, footrests, little tables, humidors, pipe racks, all that one could desire for comfort. Two German duelling swords were crossed above the mantel. * * * * * But beyond this corner everything was different. Parker saw the massed windows of reddish-purple glass; he saw apparatus for which he had no name, as well as some of the ordinary paraphernalia of the chemical laboratory. There was wiring everywhere, and a multitude of lighting fixtures. Utilitarian tables, desks and chairs were placed about with mathematical precision. There were plates and strips of metal set into the glass smooth flooring, which was broken by depressions and elevations of unusual form. The most striking thing in the room was a huge copper bowl that hung inverted from the ceiling. In it, and extending down below the rim, was what seemed to be a thick and stationary mist. It looked as though the bowl had been filled with a silver gray mist and then turned bottom side up. But the cloud did not fall or float away. "I can think and speak best from my desk," Von Stein was saying. "Please sit down facing me in the chair which Heinrich will place for you. Then we will talk." Heinrich rolled one of the overstuffed chairs noiselessly to a position about six feet from the desk. Parker noticed a long metal strip in the floor between him and the doctor. Just then Hans wriggled forward and the artist scratched his ears, to be rewarded by a grateful tongue. Again a command from Heinrich brought the dog to heel, but the voice was not so gruff this time. Together they returned to the fireplace. Von Stein let his hands rest upon the desk top--a surface covered with levers, electric switches, push buttons, and contrivances the nature of which Parker could not guess. The doctor leaned forward. He threw over a switch. The lights in the room became less bright. He pressed a button. The Danse Macabre of Saint-Saens floated weirdly upon the air, as though the music came from afar off. "Is that part of the treatment?" asked Parker, with a faint smile. "It's not cheering, exactly." "Merely an idiosyncrasy of mine," answered Von Stein, showing his teeth. "Before anything is done I must, in order to aid the receptivity of your mind, go a little further with the explanation of certain things which I mentioned the other day. I promise not to bore you. More than that, Mr. Parker, I promise that you will be more interested than you have ever been in anything!" * * * * * It seemed to Parker that there was something sinister in the manner and speech of Dr. von Stein. The Dance of Death! Did that music have a meaning? Impossible! It was only his own sick mind that was allowing such thoughts to come to him. "Anything that will help," he murmured. "You have noticed that copper bowl?" Von Stein did not wait for a reply. "The misty appearance inside and underneath it is given by thousands upon thousands of minute platinum wires. When it is in use a slight electrical current is passed through it, varying in power according to the rate of vibration needed. That instrument, my dear sir, is a transmitter of thought. I may call it the microphone of the mind. I can tune in on any mind in the world, by experimenting up and down the vibration range to determine the susceptibility of the particular person. The human mind does not need an amplifier, as the radio receiving set does. Rather, it acts as its own amplifier, once having received the thought. I invented one, however, to prove that it could be done. I equipped Heinrich with it and in half an hour by suggestion reduced him to his present state of docile stupidity. I have, Mr. Parker, the means of moving people to do my bidding!" * * * * * Von Stein stopped abruptly, as though for emphasis and to allow his astounding statements to take effect. Parker sat stunned, struggling to grasp all the implications of what he had just heard. Suddenly they became clear. He saw events in order, and in relation to each other. "So that's how it was with Cordelia Lyman!" he cried hoarsely, leaning forward. "And it was you who had that money from Fleming Proctor!" "You are not unintelligent," remarked Dr. von Stein. "Better that science should have the Lyman money than a few old women of no particular use. As for Proctor, he was a fool. I would have protected him." "And my pictures ... my book...." "I can cure you, Mr. Parker. _If I will!_" "And anyone is at the mercy of this man!" groaned Parker. "Not absolutely, I'm sorry to say," said the doctor. "The action of thought on the human consciousness is exactly like that of sound on the tuning fork. When the mind is tuned right, we'll say for illustration, the lower vibrations are not picked out of the ether. But as few minds are tuned right, and as all vary from time to time, I'm practically omnipotent." "You have changed the nature of my wife!" Parker was getting hold of himself and he could speak with a degree of calmness. "That is a worse crime than the one you've committed against me directly!" "Mr. Parker," said the doctor, impressively, "you are in a web. I am the spider. You are the fly. I don't particularly desire to hurt you, but I want your wife. This is the crux of the matter. She is the woman to share my triumphs. Already I have aroused her interest. Give her up and you will continue your work as before. Refuse, and you will lose her just as certainly as though you give her to me. For, my dear sir, you will be insane in less than a month from now. I promise you that!" * * * * * Allen Parker was not one to indulge in melodrama. For a long moment he sat looking into the black eyes of Von Stein. Then he spoke carefully. "If my wife of her own will loved you, and wanted freedom, I'd let her go. But this is a kind of hypnosis. It's diabolical!" "Who but the devil was the father of magic?" asked the doctor, cheerfully. "Hypnosis is unconsciously based on a scientific principle which I have mastered. Repeated advertising of a tooth brush or a box of crackers is mild mental suggestion--hypnosis, if you will. My dear fellow, be sensible!" "Sophistry!" growled Parker. Von Stein laughed. He moved a lever upon a dial and a sheet of blue flame quivered between them. With another movement of the lever it vanished. "I could destroy you instantly," he said, "and completely, and no one could prove a crime! I shall not do it. I have no time to be bothered with investigations. Think of the fate I have promised you. Think, and you will give her up!" "I shall not!" Parker wiped cold drops from his forehead. The doctor frowned thoughtfully. "I'll intensify her desire to come here to-night," he said. "She herself will persuade you." * * * * * Parker set his fingers into the arms of his chair as Von Stein rose and walked to the copper bowl. He stood directly under it, and put on goggles with shields fitting close to his feet. At the pressure of his foot a tablelike affair rose from the floor in front of him. This, like the desk, was equipped with numerous dials, buttons and levers. Von Stein manipulated them. The great cap of copper descended until his head was enveloped by the mist of platinum wires. A faint humming grew in the room. A tiny bell tinkled. "The connection is made," murmured Von Stein. He lifted a hand for silence: then his fingers leaped among the gadgets on the table. After that came a brief period, measured by seconds, of immobility. Then the table sank from view, the copper bowl lifted, and Dr. von Stein went back to his chair. "She will be here shortly," he said. "If that does not change your mind...." He shrugged. Parker knew what that shrug meant. He searched his mind for a plan and found none. Better die fighting than yield, or risk the vengeance of Friedrich von Stein. If he could get the doctor away from the desk where he controlled the blue-white flame there might be a chance to do something. Von Stein was by far the larger man, but Parker had been an athlete all his life. If.... "That mass of copper and platinum," he said, tentatively, "will make you master of the world!" "My brain, my intelligence, has made me master of the world!" corrected Von Stein, proudly. He was touched in the right spot now. "You have not seen all!" * * * * * He sprang up and went to one of the tables. From his pocket he took a piece of paper and crumpled it into a ball while, with the other hand, he made some electrical connections to a plate of metal set into the surface of the table. Next he placed the wad of paper on the plate. Then, standing at arm's length from the apparatus, he pressed a button. Instantly the paper disappeared behind a screen of the colors of the spectrum, from red to violet. The banded colors were there for a minute fraction of a second. Then there was nothing where the paper had been on the plate. Von Stein smiled as he stepped away from the table. "The electron is formed by the crossing of two lines of force," he said, "and the interaction of positive and negative polarity. The electron is a stress in the ether, nothing more, but it is the stuff of which all matter is made. Thought is vibration in one dimension; matter in two. You have just seen me untie the knot, dissociate the electrons, or what you will. In plain language I have caused matter to vanish utterly. That paper is not burned up. It no longer exists in any form. The earth upon which we stand, Parker, can be dissolved like mist before the sun!" Appalled as he was at this man who boasted and made good his terrible boasts Allen Parker had not forgotten the purpose that was in him. Now was his chance, while Von Stein stood smiling triumphantly between table and desk. Parker shot from his chair with the speed of utter desperation. He feinted, and drove a vicious uppercut to the jaw of Dr. Friedrich von Stein. The doctor reeled but he did not go down. His fists swung. Parker found him no boxer, and beat a tattoo upon his middle. Von Stein began to slump. Then two thick muscled arms closed around the artist from behind and he was lifted clear of the floor. He kicked, and tried to turn, but it was useless. The doctor recovered himself. His eyes blazed fury. "Put him in the chair, Heinrich!" he roared. "For this I will show you what I can do, Herr Parker!" * * * * * At that instant little Hans, who had been yelping on the edge of the battle, dashed in. He leaped for the throat of Von Stein. The doctor kicked him brutally. The shriek of agony from Hans loosened the arms of Heinrich. Parker got his footing again. He saw the clumsy serving man spring forward and gather his dog up to his breast. Again Parker rushed for his enemy. It was clear now that Von Stein was cut off from the controls he wanted, and without Heinrich he could not master Parker in a fight. For an instant he stood baffled. Then he retreated the length of the room, taking what blows he could not beat off. He staggered upon a plate of metal set into the floor, righted himself, and failed in an attempt to catch hold of Parker. Suddenly he bowed in the direction of the distant doorway. Allen half turned. Betty was coming down the room, staring and breathless. "_Leben sie wohl!_" cried Von Stein. "Farewell, Madame! I should like to take you with me!" A great flash of the colors of the spectrum sent Parker reeling back. Dr. Friedrich von Stein had gone the way of the crumpled ball of paper. There was a long moment of silence. Then Allen Parker found his wife in his arms, clinging to him. "'Are not two prayers a perfect strength?'" she murmured, sobbing against his heart. A HUNDRED MILES UNDERGROUND Scientists bidding their families good-by in the morning to drop fifty or a hundred miles underground in high speed elevators, there to undertake researches not possible nearer to the earth's surface, may be realities of the next decade or two if some wealthy individual or institution accepts the recommendation of Dr. Harlow Shapley, distinguished astronomer of Harvard, in a talk recently before the American Geographical Society. The earth's interior, Dr. Shapley said, is the "third dimension" of geography. Exploration of the planet's surface soon must cease from lack of places to explore. Even the upper air is coming to be reasonably well known scientifically, thanks to instruments sent up with balloons and to the radio and other investigators who have been uncovering secrets of upper-air electricity. But the interior of the earth is still one of the great mysteries. It is a paradox of astronomy that much more is known about the center of the sun or a star like Sirius than about the center of the earth. Deep shafts of bore holes into the earth have been suggested often as sources of heat for human use. It is doubtful, however, whether such heat supplies could be obtained. For one thing, the supposed internal heat of the earth is still nothing but a guess. It may be that the relatively slight increases of heat found as one goes deeper in existing mines are due to radioactivity in the rocks instead of to outward seepage from the internal fires. Another difficulty about utilizing earth heat is that heat moves so slowly through substances like rock, as any housewife can prove by trying to fry an egg on a brick placed over a gas flame. As soon as the rock heat immediately at the bottom of a bore hole had been exhausted heat supply would stop until more could diffuse in from the sides. Dr. Shapley's suggestion, in any event, is not to search for heat but for facts. Even in existing, relatively shallow mines, he believes, scientific laboratories at different depths under the surface might yield valuable data not now obtainable. Most scientific men will agree. Revolutionary as the idea may seem to those familiar only with the standardized laboratories of physics or chemistry, there are sound reasons why a half-dozen or so of the sciences should do precisely what Dr. Shapley suggests. At least one underground laboratory has already been installed, for Prof. E. B. Babcock of the University of California has such a workroom in the Twin Peaks Tunnel, underneath the mountain that rises above the city of San Francisco. Natural radioactivity in the rocks thereabouts is greater than normal and Prof. Babcock finds that this apparently increases new species among fruit flies. To dig out laboratory rooms a mile or so down in existing deep mines probably would cost far less than many enterprises already financed by philanthropists. Even to deepen these shafts for several miles would be much less difficult than most people imagine. Increasing heat, if it is found that heat does increase, would not be difficult to overcome had the engineers sufficient money. Ventilation and transportation to and from the surface, while too costly for the business enterprise of winning metals from very deep mines, probably would present no serious difficulty were facts the chief object instead of profit. The only question to be decided before intending benefactors of science are urged to consider some such project is whether or not the facts likely to be won promise enough value to mankind. An excellent case can be made out for answering yes. Dr. Shapley mentioned four chief lines of investigation suitable for such deep-mine laboratories: studies of gravity and of the variable length of the day, researches on the various kinds of earthquake waves, experiments on ether drift and tests of the biological effects of cosmic rays and of the rays from radium. Astronomical theories indicate that the day ought to be growing slightly longer as the earth's rotation decreases a trifle from century to century because of friction from the tides. The actual length of the days seems, however, sometimes to be decreasing a tiny fraction of a second from year to year, as theory says that it should; sometimes to be increasing in a way for which no present theory provides. Observations underneath the earth, with a portion of the planet's crust and gravity overhead, might yield important clues to the cause of this mysterious wrong time kept by the terrestrial clock. The Gray Plague _By L. A. Eshbach_ [Sidenote: Maimed and captive, in the depths of an interplanetary meteor-craft, lay the only possible savior of plague-ridden Earth.] [Illustration: _They were almost upon him when he leaped into action._] CHAPTER I Five months before the beginning of that period of madness, that time of chaos and death that became known as the Gray Plague, the first of the strange meteors fell to Earth. It landed a few miles west of El Paso, Texas, on the morning of March 11th. In a few hours a great throng of people gathered around the dully smoldering mass of fire-pitted rock, the upper half of which protruded from the Earth where it had buried itself, like a huge, roughly outlined hemisphere. And then, when the crowd had assumed its greatest proportions, the meteor, with a mighty, Earth-shaking roar, exploded. A vast flood of radiance, more brilliant than the light of the sun, lit up the sky for miles around. One moment, a throng of curious people, a number of scientists, newspaper men--a crashing explosion--and then a great, yawning pit sending forth a blinding radiance! Destruction and death where life had been. The brilliant light streamed from the pit for about ten minutes; then like a snuffed-out candle flame, it vanished. The second of the strange meteors landed on the evening of March 13th, in the city of Peking, China. It demolished several buildings, and buried itself beneath the ruins. The Chinese, unaware of the tragedy at El Paso, gathered in the vicinity, and when the meteor exploded at about ten o'clock that night, were instantly destroyed. As in Texas, the great pit emitted a cloud of dazzling light for about ten minutes, throwing a brilliant glow over the city and its surroundings; then was extinguished. The people of the world awoke to the fact that events worthy of more than passing interest were occurring. The press of every nation begin giving the strange meteors more and more publicity. Statements of different pseudo-scientists were published in explanation of the meteor's origin, statements that aroused world wide conjecture. * * * * * Approximately twenty-four hours after the falling of the second missile, the third one fell, landing near Madrid, Spain. The Spaniards, having received news of the El Paso and Peking tragedies, avoided the ugly mass of rock as though it were a dreaded pestilence. In every way its action was similar to that of its two predecessors. The interest of the world was doubled now. The unusual similarity of the action of the meteors, and the regularity of their landings, seemed indicative of a definite, hostile purpose behind it all. A menace from the unknown--a peril from the skies! Scientists began giving serious consideration to the unusual phenomenon, pottering around in the pits, wearing airs of puzzlement. But their investigations were of no avail, for nothing of any great significance came to light through their efforts. At about that time, an announcement was made that created a furor. Astronomers in different parts of the United States reported that they had observed a bright flare of light leaping up from the darkened portion of the planet Venus. The astronomers had no definite idea of anything of importance in back of what they had seen; but not so the masses. The flare, they said, was caused by the release of another meteor! From Venus! Missiles, hurled by Venerians, menacing the Earth! The silver planet became the subject of universal discussion; innumerable fantastic articles about it appeared in magazine sections of Sunday newspapers. And the astronomers of Earth turned their telescopes toward Venus with an interest they had never felt before. * * * * * Four days of expectant waiting passed by after the third meteor had fallen, while interest continued mounting at an accelerating pace. And then, at about two o'clock in the morning of the 18th, three great observatories, two in North America and one in England, recorded the falling of an extraordinarily large and unusually brilliant meteor that glowed with an intense, bluish-white light as it entered the Earth's atmosphere. And, unlike most meteors, this one was not consumed by its intense heat, but continued gleaming brilliantly until it vanished below the horizon. Simultaneous with the falling of the meteor, the Earth was rocked by one of the worst quakes in history. Seismographs in all parts of the world recorded the tremors of the Earth, each indicating that the disturbance had occurred somewhere beneath the Atlantic ocean. Evidently the fourth meteor had fallen into the ocean, for the shaking of the Earth was obviously the result of the collision. That quakes had not followed the landing of the first three was due to the fact that they had been far smaller than the fourth. And then, a short time after the earthquake, the worst storm in two hundred years broke over the Atlantic. Waves, mountain high, piled themselves upon each other in a wild frenzy; a shrieking wind lashed the waters into a liquid chaos. Great ocean-liners were tossed about like tiny chips; an appalling number of smaller ships were lost in that insane storm. Nor was the destruction confined to the sea, for all along the Atlantic coast of North America and Europe, mighty walls of water rushed in, and wrecked entire towns and cities. Fortunately the storm was of short duration; a few hours after it began, it subsided. For a number of weeks public attention was centered upon the meteors and storm; but gradually, when nothing further occurred, the fickle interest of the masses began to wane. A month after the storm, the strange meteors were no longer mentioned by the press, and consequently, had passed from the public mind. Only the astronomers remembered, keeping their telescopes trained on Venus night after night. Four months passed by during which nothing of an unusual nature came to the attention of the world. But at the end of that time, it suddenly dawned upon those nations whose shores touched the Atlantic ocean, that something extraordinary was happening. It was taking place so insidiously, so quietly, that it had attracted no great attention. A series of inexplicable sea disasters had begun. Every ship that had traveled over a certain, regular steamship route, had disappeared, leaving no trace. Mysteriously, without warning, they had vanished; without a single S O S being sent, seven freighters had been lost. The disappearances had been called to the world's attention by the shipping companies, alarmed at the gradual loss of their boats. Then other mysterious vanishings came to the attention of the world. Ships in all parts of the Atlantic were being lost. When this fact became known, trans-Atlantic commerce ceased almost over night. With the exception of a few privately owned yachts and freighters, the Atlantic became deserted. And finally, a few days after the world became aware of the strange disappearances on the Atlantic, the Gray Plague introduced itself to humanity. Attempts were made to repress the facts: but the tragedy of the freighter, _Charleston_, in all its ghastliness and horror, became known in spite of all attempts at secrecy. On the morning of August 3rd, the _Charleston_ was found, half buried in the sand of a beach on the coast of Florida, cast there, evidently, by a passing storm. The freighter had been one of the first boats to disappear. When the ship's discoverers boarded her, their eyes were greeted by a sight whose ghastliness filled them with a numbing horror. Indeed, so terrifying was the spectacle on the _Charleston_, that the discoverers, four boys of adolescent age, left in fear-stricken haste. Nor could they be induced to return to the ship's deck. * * * * * Later, a group of men from a nearby town boarded the freighter to investigate the boys' amazing report. In the group was a newspaper reporter who chanced to be in the vicinity on a minor story. It was through the reporter's account that the facts became known as quickly as they did. When the men clambered up the side of the _Charleston_ to her deck, they saw a spectacle the like of which had never before been seen on Earth. Although they had been prepared for the horror to some extent by the story of the boys, the sight on the _Charleston_ exceeded their description to such a degree that, for the moment, the men were rendered speechless. The deck of the _Charleston_ was a shambles--a scene of sudden, chilling death. All about were strewn gray, lifeless bodies. Death had overtaken the crew in the midst of their duties, suddenly, without warning, it seemed. Bodies strewn about--yet nowhere was there sign of decay! Bodies, lifeless for days, or weeks--yet intact! The men were fearfully impressed by the strangely grotesque positions of the corpses. With a few exceptions, they lay on the deck in abnormal, twisted masses of gray covered flesh. Somehow, they seemed flattened, as though they had been soft, jellylike, and had flowed, had settled, flat against the deck. Some were no more than three inches thick, and had spread out to such an extent that they looked like fantastic caricatures of human bodies. That unnatural change in their structure, and the ghastly, dead-gray color of their skins gave the corpses a horrifying, utterly repulsive appearance that made the flesh of the men crawl. The bodies had a strangely soft aspect, as though they were still jellylike. One of the men, bolder than the rest, touched a body--and withdrew his hand in revulsion and surprise. For the ugly mass was cold, and as hard as bone: the tissues of the flesh seemingly replaced by a solid, bony substance. Later investigation revealed that all the dead on the _Charleston_ had assumed a similar, bonelike solidity. When the men left the freighter to report the tragedy to the proper authorities, their faces were blanched, and their nerves badly shaken. Yet their horror was nothing when compared with what it would have been, had they known what was to follow. * * * * * Rapidly the story of the_ Charleston_ spread. By means of the press, over the radio, even by word of mouth, the story of the horror on the freighter was given publicity. All over the United States and Canada it spread, and from thence to the rest of the world. Eagerly was the story accepted: here, at last, was the explanation of the sea disasters! And then, more than ever before, was the Atlantic ocean shunned. The bodies of the seamen on the freighter were turned over to scientists for experimentation and research. It was thought that they might be able to discover the cause of the Gray Death, and with a knowledge of its cause, create something with which to free the Atlantic from its scourge. The scientists' investigations only served to mystify the world to a greater degree. The only thing that came to light was the cause of the bodies' bonelike rigidity. In some inexplicable way the bones in the seamen had dissolved, and according to appearances, while the bodies were plastic, had flattened out. And then, strange and unnatural though it seemed, the calcium from the dissolved bones had gathered at the surface of each body, and combining with the flesh and skin, had formed the hard, bony shell that gave them their ghastly grayness, and their appearance of petrification. Aside from this, the scientists learned nothing; the cause of this amazing phenomenon was a complete mystery to them. Slowly, methodically, step by step, the unusual had been taking place. From the time of the landing of the first strange meteor, up to the discovery of the _Charleston_, there had been a gradual increase in the significance of each succeeding event. Then finally came the climax: the Gray Plague itself. All that preceded it faded into significance before the horror of the dread pestilence that seized the world with its destroying talons. * * * * * A short time after the discovery of the _Charleston_, the Plague made its first appearance on land. Slowly, pitilessly, inexorably, it began, taking its toll all along the Atlantic coast. From Newfoundland to Brazil; from the British Isles to Egypt, wherever people lived near the ocean, thousands were stricken with the dread malady. The old and infirm were the most quickly affected; their weakened bodies could not withstand the ravage of the Plague as could those of younger people. An old man, walking along a large thoroughfare in Savannah, Georgia, suddenly uttered a fearful shriek and sank to the pavement. While the pedestrians watched with bulging eyes, he seemed to shrink, to flatten, to flow liquidly, turning a ghastly gray. Within an hour he was as hard as the men of the _Charleston_. Of all the millions, perhaps he was the first. Others followed in the wake of the first victim, young as well as old; three hours after the death in Savannah, every channel of communication was choked with news of a constantly increasing number of casualties. A Boston minister, preaching a funeral sermon, collapsing beside the coffin; a lineman on a telegraph pole, overcome, falling--and splashing! A thousand incongruous tragedies shocking humanity. In Europe the action of the Plague was the same as in North America. Death stalking the sea-coast, destroying thousands; ignorant fishermen, men of learning, women and children of every age--all were grist to be ground in the mill of the Gray Plague. Before a week had gone by, no one remained alive in the villages, towns and cities all along the Atlantic. New York, London, all the large coast cities were deserted by the living, left to the rigid dead. From the largest metropolis to the smallest hamlet, all became body-glutted tombs. And then, on the morning of October 12th, news was given to the world that threw mankind into a panic. The Plague was moving inland! Slowly, yet relentlessly it spread, no longer confining its effect to the sea-coast, but moving farther and farther inland toward the heart of the two continents, driving mankind before it. For people fled in insane terror before the advancing death. Nor was there escape from the menace--no antidote to counteract, no sanctuary wherein to hide. To North and South, to East and West, the pestilence spread, destroying as it went. Unless there were some miraculous intervention, the human race would be destroyed! * * * * * Officials of the world were at their wits' end; scientists threw up their hands in despair. The Plague was an insoluble puzzle--enigmatical, utterly inexplicable, beyond the knowledge of Earth. Scientists and doctors were brutally slain during that period by fear-crazed mobs, because of their inability to rescue the world from the grip of the Plague. Thousands of people died while striving to escape from the Gray Death, crushed by passing motor vehicles, or starving in the congested areas. Gone was the boasted civilization of man--humanity sinking rapidly to the level of the beast; gone, destroyed in a few weeks! And then one day when the end seemed perilously close, there was ushered into the presence of the remnant of the United States officials who had gathered in San Francisco, a twisted monstrosity of a man, fearfully scarred and deformed. He was closeted with them for two hours. At the end of that time an excited official communicated with the leader of the American scientists. "A cure for the Plague has been discovered!" he cried in joyful tones. "Man still has a chance!" Before an hour had passed by, scientists were in possession of cultures of germs that would destroy the bacilli of the Gray Death. The hope of salvation restored some semblance of order; and in a very short time the development of the germs was going forward as rapidly as skilled bacteriologists could carry it. Forces of doctors were marshalled to administer the cure, inoculating all who were untouched by the Plague. At about that time, a small, bronze-colored sphere arose into the air above San Francisco, and sped eastward with amazing velocity. It flashed over the United States, over the Atlantic ocean, and over western Europe, finally landing in the midst of the European hordes. There its operator, a deformed cripple, left bacteria similar to those he had given to the United States. In a short time Europe, too, was busily engaged in developing the bacteria, and inoculating her people. Many others died before the world was rendered immune, but at last mankind let its labors cease. The Gray Plague was overcome. Then the work of reclaiming the deserted areas was begun; then, too, was started the ghastly task of disposing of the countless, rigid dead. And finally, a great steamer left New York harbor, and started across the Atlantic. It was the purpose of the men on board to destroy utterly the source of the Plague. But long before that occurred, humanity had heard the story of Phillip Parkinson, the man who saved the world--had heard, and had honored the deliverer of mankind. Parkinson's story follows: CHAPTER II The steam yacht, Diana, bound for the Azores and points south, was two days out from Miami when the great meteor fell into the Atlantic. On the after deck, leaning over the rail, watching the moonlit waters, stood Phillip Parkinson, owner of the yacht. A bacteriologist of international fame was Parkinson, on an early vacation to recuperate from the effects of a strenuous winter of research. Nervous, rather high-strung, he had been unable to sleep; at about one in the morning of the 18th of March, he had come up on deck. He had stood there for about an hour when suddenly there appeared in the sky above him, a meteor, a great disc of blue-white incandescence. It seemed to be rushing straight down toward him; instinctively he leaped back, as though to avoid the fiery missile. As the constantly expanding disc flashed through the hundred miles of Earth's atmosphere, the ocean, as far as eye could see, became as light as day. Bathed in that baleful, white glare, Parkinson, bewildered, dazed, half-blinded, watched the approaching stellar visitant. In a few moments it struck--no more than two miles away. In the last, bright flare of blue-white light, Parkinson saw a gigantic column of steam and boiling water leap up from the sea. Then thick, impenetrable darkness fell--darkness that was intensified by its contrast with the meteor's blinding light. For ten tense, breathless seconds utter silence hung over the sea ... then, for those on the yacht, the world went mad! A shrill, unearthly shriek--the sound of the meteor's passage through the atmosphere; an ear-splitting roar, as of the simultaneous release of the thunder-drums of ages; a howling demon of wind; a solid wall of raging, swirling water of immeasurable height--all united in an indescribable chaos that bewildered those on board the Diana, and that lifted the yacht and--threw it upon its side! When the first rushing mountain of lathering, thundering water crashed upon the yacht, Parkinson felt himself hurtling through the roaring air. For a moment he heard the infernal pandemonium of noise ... then the strangling, irresistible brine closed over his head. A blackness deeper than that of the night--and Parkinson knew no more.... * * * * * Slowly consciousness returned to the bacteriologist. It came under the guise of a dull, yet penetrating throbbing coming from beneath the surface on which he lay. Vaguely he wondered at it; he had not yet entirely cast off the enshrouding stupor that gripped him. Gradually he came into full possession of his faculties--and became aware of a dull aching throughout his entire body. In his chest it seemed to be intensified; every breath caused a sharp pang of pain. Faltering and uncertain, he arose and peered around. Before, lay the open sea, calm now, and peaceful. Long, rolling swell swept in and dashed themselves against the rocks a few feet away. Rocks? For a moment Parkinson stared at the irregular shore-line in dazed wonder. Then as his mind cleared, the strangeness of his position flashed upon him. Solid earth was under his feet! Although he must be hundreds of miles from shore, in some way he had drifted upon land. So far as he knew, there were no islands in that part of the Atlantic; yet his very position belied the truth. He could not have drifted to the mainland; the fact that he was alive precluded all possibilities of that, for he would have drowned in far less time than the latter thought implied. He turned and inspected the land upon which he had been cast. A small, barren island, bleak and inhospitable, and strangely metallic, met his gaze. The rays of the sun beating down upon it were thrown back with an uncomfortable intensity; the substance of the island was a lustrous, copperlike metal. No soil softened the harshness of the surface; indescribably rugged and pitted was the two hundred-foot expanse. It reminded Parkinson of a bronze relief-map of the moon. For a moment he puzzled over the strangeness of the unnatural island; then suddenly he realized the truth. This was the meteor! Obviously, this was the upper side of the great sphere from space, protruding above the sea. * * * * * Fortunate for him that the meteor had not been completely covered by water, he thought--but was it fortunate? True, he was alive now, thanks to the tiny island, but how long would he remain alive without food or water, and without hope of securing either? Unless he would be picked up by a passing steamer, he would die a far more unpleasant death than that of drowning. Some miracle had saved him from a watery grave; it would require another to rescue him from a worse fate. Even now he was beginning to feel thirsty. He had no way of determining how long he had been unconscious, but that it was at least ten hours, he was certain, for the sun had been at its zenith when he had awakened. No less than fifteen hours had gone by since water--other than that of the sea--had passed his lips. And the fact that it was impossible for him to quench his thirst only served to render it more acute. In order to take his mind from thoughts of his thirst and of the immediate future, he rapidly circled the island. As he had expected, it was utterly barren. With shoulders drooping in despair he settled wearily to a seat on the jagged mass of metal high up on top of the meteor. An expression of sudden interest lit up his face. For a second time he felt that particular throbbing, that strange pulsing beneath the surface of the meteor. But now it was far more noticeable than before. It seemed to be directly below him, and very close to the surface. Parkinson could not tell how long he sat there, but from the appearance of the sun, he thought that at the very shortest, an hour passed by while he remained on that spot. And during that time, the throbbing gradually increased until the metal began vibrating under his feet. Suddenly the bacteriologist leaped aside. The vibrating had reached its height, and the meteor seemed to lurch, to tilt at a sharp angle. His leap carried him to firm footing again. And then, his thirst and hopeless position completely forgotten, Parkinson stared in fascination at the amazing spectacle before him. * * * * * An eighteen-foot disc of metal, a perfect circle, seemed to have been cut out of the top of the meteor. While he watched, it began turning slowly, ponderously, and started sinking into the meteor. As it sank, Parkinson fancied that it grew transparent, and gradually vanished into nothingness--but he wasn't sure. A great pit, eighteen feet wide, but far deeper, lay before him in the very place where, not more than ten minutes before, he had stood. Not a moment too soon had he leaped. Motionless he stood there, waiting in tense expectation. What would happen next, he had not the least idea, but he couldn't prevent his imagination from running riot. He hadn't long to wait before his watching was rewarded. A few minutes after the pit appeared, he heard a loud, high-pitched whir coming from the heart of the meteor. As it grew louder, it assumed a higher and still higher key, finally rising above the range of human ears. And at that moment the strange vehicle arose to the surface. A simple-appearing mechanism was the car, consisting of a twelve-foot sphere of the same bronze-like metal that made up the meteor, with a huge wheel, like a bronze cincture, around its middle. It was the whirling of this great wheel that had caused the high-pitched whirring. The entire, strange machine was surrounded by a peculiar green radiance, a radiance that seemed to crackle ominously as the sphere hovered over the mouth of the pit. For a moment the car hung motionless, then it drifted slowly to the surface of the meteor, landing a few feet away from Parkinson. Hastily he drew back from the greenly phosphorescent thing--but not before he had experienced an unpleasant prickling sensation over his entire body. As the bacteriologist drew away, there was a sharp, audible click within the interior of the sphere; and the green radiance vanished. At the same moment, three heavy metal supports sprang from equi-distant points in the sides of the car, and held the sphere in a balanced position on the rounded top of the meteor. There was a soft, grating sound on the opposite side of the car. Quickly, Parkinson circled it--and stopped short in surprise. * * * * * Men were descending from an opening in the side of the sphere! Parkinson had reasoned that since the meteor had come from the depths of space, any being in its interior, unnatural as that seemed, would have assumed a form quite different from the human. Of course, conditions on Earth could be approximated on another planet. At any rate, whatever the explanation, the sphere was emitting men! They were men--but there was something queer about them. They were very tall--seven feet or more--and very thin; and their skins were a delicate, transparent white. They looked rather ghostly in their tight-fitting white suits. It was not this that made them seem queer, however: it was an indefinite something, a vague suggestion of heartless inhumanity, of unearthliness, that was somehow repulsive and loathsome. There were three of them, all very similar in appearance and bearing. Their surprise at the sight of Parkinson, if anything, was greater than the start their appearance had given him. He, at least, had expected to see beings of some sort, while the three had been taken completely by surprise. For a moment they surveyed him with staring, cold-blue eyes. Then Parkinson extended his hand, and as cordially as he could, exclaimed: "Hello! Welcome to Earth!" The visitors from space ignored his advances and continued staring at him. Their attitude at first was quizzical, speculative, but slowly a hostile expression crept into their eyes. Suddenly, with what seemed like common consent, they faced each other, and conversed in low tones in some unintelligible tongue. For almost a minute they talked, while Parkinson watched them in growing apprehension. Finally they seemed to have reached some definite conclusion; with one accord they turned and moved slowly toward the bacteriologist, something distinctly menacing in their attitudes. The men from the meteor were tall, but they were thin; Parkinson, too, was large, and his six-foot length was covered with layers of solid muscle. As the three advanced toward him, he doubled his fists, and crouched in readiness for the expected attack. * * * * * They were almost upon him when he leaped into action. A crushing left to his stomach sent the first one to the meteor-top, where he lay doubled up in pain. But that was the only blow that Parkinson struck; in a moment he found himself lying prone upon his back, utterly helpless, his body completely paralyzed. What they had done to him, he did not know; all that he could remember was two thin bodies twining themselves around him--a sharp twinge of pain at the base of his skull; then absolute helplessness. One of the tall beings grasped Parkinson about the waist, and with surprising strength, threw him over his shoulder. The other assisted his groaning fellow. When the latter had recovered to some extent, the three ascended the ladder that led into the metal sphere. The interior of the strange vehicle, as far as Parkinson could see, was as simple as its exterior. There was no intricate machinery of any sort in the square room; probably what machinery there was lay between the interior and exterior walls of the sphere. As for controls, these consisted of several hundred little buttons that studded one of the walls. When they entered the vehicle, Parkinson was literally, and none too gently, dumped upon the floor. The man who had carried him stepped over to the controls. Like those of a skilled typist, his long, thin fingers darted over the buttons. In a moment the sphere was in motion. There were no more thrills for Parkinson in that ride than he would have derived from a similar ride in an elevator. They sank very slowly for some minutes, it seemed to him; then they stopped with a barely noticeable jar. The door of the car was thrust aside by one of the three, and Parkinson was borne from the sphere. A bright, coppery light flooded the interior of the meteor, seeming to radiate from its walls. In his helpless state, and in the awkward position in which he was carried, with his head close to the floor, he could see little of the room through which they passed, in spite of the light. Later, however, he learned that it was circular in shape, and about twice the diameter of the cylindrical tube that led into it. The wall that bound this chamber was broken at regular intervals by tall, narrow, doorways, each leading into a different room. Parkinson was carried into one of these, and was placed in a high-backed metal chair. After he had been strapped fast, one of the men placed his hands at the base of the bacteriologist's skull; he felt a sudden twinge of pain; and his strange paralysis left him suddenly. * * * * * He knew it was useless to struggle; without resisting, he let them place upon his head a cap-like device that seemed lost in a tangled maze of machinery. Each meteor-man grasped one of the instruments resembling old-time radio head-phones that were fastened to Parkinson's head-gear, and clamped it over his ears. The bacteriologist heard a steady, humming drone, like a swarm of angry bees--felt a peculiar, soothing warmth about his head; and then he slept. Only a moment or two seemed to have passed when he awoke. The strange device on his head was removed and put away; and then, to Parkinson's amazement, one of the three men, evidently the leader, spoke--in English! "Now that you have recovered consciousness," he remarked in a cold, expressionless voice, "you had better realize at the very beginning that you are completely in our power. Any effort to escape will be futile, for there is only one way to reach the outside; the opening through the top; and only one means of travel through that opening: the sphere. And since you know nothing about the operation of the machine, any attempt to run it would be disastrous to you. "If you promise to refrain from violence, we'll release you, and give you some measure of freedom. We'll do this because you can be of assistance to us in one of our tasks here on your planet." Parkinson assented readily; he knew he could gain nothing by rejecting their offer. "Of course I'll promise. But--but, how did you learn English?" he asked in bewilderment. "You taught us," the leader replied. "That device we placed upon your head created a duplicate of your knowledge in our minds. We knew your language, your world, indeed, yourself, as well as you do." Parkinson shook his head in amazement. Another question came to his mind as the men released him. He was interrupted before he could give it expression. * * * * * "Don't ask," the leader exclaimed. "I'll tell our entire story so that you'll have no occasion to annoy us with your questions. "We're Venerians," he began, "inhabitants of the planet you call Venus. For ages our world has been overcrowded. A short time ago, the conditions became so acute that something had to be done. It was suggested that we seek another habitable planet to which our people could migrate. "Your Earth was thought to be the world with physical conditions most closely resembling those of Acor, or Venus. Our scientists set to work immediately, using forces and devices with which you are totally unfamiliar, and constructed several missiles which they hurled at Earth. These missiles, spherical masses closely resembling meteors, were set to explode after a certain period of contact with an atmosphere similar to our own. By their explosion we on Venus could determine whether or not this world had a breathable atmosphere. "Upon our deciding that the Earth was habitable, we built this great machine. It is chiefly composed of our greatest heat-resister, a metal we call thoque; I see no corresponding word in your vocabulary; evidently you are unfamiliar with the element, or else it is unknown on Earth. "After our flight through space, automatically controlled, by the way, on Venus, we landed here. With our thoque disintegrator, we bored a passageway to the surface of this great sphere. Then we entered the car, rose to the top of the passageway, and discovered you. "That is a brief synopsis of our actions--and it must suffice! Ask no questions; we do not wish to be disturbed by the blind gropings of your primitive mind!" There was a cold finality in the Venerian's voice that convinced Parkinson that for the moment, at least, he had better forget the many questions that had surged up in his mind. The Venerian leader spoke again. "From our observations of your mind, we know that you have not had food or water for a rather lengthy period of time. It is not our purpose to starve you: you shall eat and drink." A minute later Parkinson sat at a very high table in one of the rooms, drinking water from Venus, and eating the fare of an alien world. * * * * * Days passed by, merging into weeks, while Parkinson lost all track of time. The bacteriologist's existence became a ceaseless round of toil. The Venerian had said that he would be given some measure of freedom, because he would be of use to them; he had not been with them long ere he learned what that use was. One of the rooms was filled with great slabs of thoque; it was Parkinson's task to carry the slabs to the vehicle at the base of the shaft, one by one; to rise to the surface with them, accompanied by two of the men--the third was working on the surface--and there unload them. Day after day this continued. Hope of escaping was almost dead in Parkinson's breast, because he was constantly under the surveillance of those hard, blue eyes. Only one thing kept hope alive: by watching the Venerians operate the car, he was slowly gaining a knowledge of the meaning of the many buttons in the wall. Some day, if an opportunity came, he meant to be ready to take advantage of it. Once, shortly after his monotonous toil began, Parkinson experienced a great flare of hope for deliverance. They had just brought another slab to the surface, when a steamer appeared above the horizon. It was far away, but its crew must surely have seen the island. But his expectations were short-lived. One of the three drew from beneath his tight-fitting, white garments a little, metal object, a long tube, with a handle at one end, and pointed it at the vessel. For a moment he held it thus, moving it slowly backward and forward: then he returned it to its place of concealment, and turned away with an air of indifference. And Parkinson saw the ship burst suddenly into flame, a few minutes later to sink beneath the waves. * * * * * Shaken to the depths of his being, Parkinson resumed his work. The inhumanity of these saturnine Venerians filled him with a dread so great that he refused to admit it to himself. That that had not been the first time that they had destroyed a ship, he felt sure; his heart sank, and grew more hopeless. At last his task of carrying slabs was finished. The room was empty, and the work completed. A great tower, entirely covering the island, reared its head into the sky. In appearance, it resembled a very tall lighthouse. This resemblance held true only until its top was reached; there it ended. From the tower's top extended four long, hollow arms, so constructed that they whirled about the tower at a mad pace when the machinery with which they were connected was started. In addition, arrangement was made for a powerful blast of air to be sent through the tubes when the Venerians so desired. What the purpose of this great edifice was, Parkinson could not guess: later, he learned the horrible significance of it all. After the tower was finished, the bacteriologist was left to his own devices to a great extent, though always closely watched by one of his captors. They let him eat all the food he desired, and let him lie around as much as he wished, regaining his health and strength. This was a pleasant surprise for him: he took full advantage of his privileges. Then, one day when Parkinson had fully recovered from the effects of his grueling labors, the leader of the Venerians approached him from behind, and before he could raise a hand in defense, had rendered him helplessly paralyzed. "You will now be given a second opportunity to help the cause of Venus on Earth," he said in his expressionless voice. And so saying, he lifted Parkinson, and bore him into one of the rooms. CHAPTER III At no time while he was held captive by the Venerians was Parkinson as hopeless, or as completely filled with despair as when he was carried into this room. There was something depressing about the chamber, something that gripped his heart with the chill hand of dread. He had a feeling of impending evil. The few momentary glimpses of the chamber that he had gotten while he was being carried, sufficed to convince Parkinson that this was a laboratory, or--he shuddered at the thought--an operating room. The walls, floor and ceiling were composed of a white porcelainlike substance: from these walls, strangely, streamed the same coppery light that filled the entire meteor. Entirely concealing one wall was a long, glass case, constructed to form countless little niches, each of which held a small, transparent vessel. At the back of the room was a high table, covered with transparent cases which were filled with complex instruments of every description, some similar to those on Earth; others entirely different. The thing that brought the thought of an operating room to Parkinson's mind was the long, white slab that rested on metal uprights in the room's center--an operating table. A moment after they entered the room, he had his theory substantiated: the Venerian leader placed him on the white slab, stretching him to full length. It was an operating table--and he was to be the subject of their operation! He had lain there but a moment when two of the Venerians approached, one on either side, and began removing his clothing. It was not long before he lay on the cold slab, entirely nude. * * * * * While he was being stripped, he heard the leader of the Venerians moving about, heard the click of glass, the rasp of metal upon metal. But, unable to move his eyes, he had seen none of his activities, except to note that several of the little vessels had been taken from their resting places. When the two had finished disrobing him, and had replaced him upon his back, the leader appeared. He looked down at Parkinson, a queer expression in his hard, blue eyes. He seemed to hesitate a moment: then he spoke. "Earthling," he said in his toneless voice, "I have decided to tell you of our intentions. You are going to play a very important part in our scheme, and it is only fitting that you should know. You can do nothing to hinder our plans: you are giving us incalculable aid: and it affords me some degree of satisfaction to tell you this. "As you know, Earthling, we purpose to have the people of Acor to come to Earth to live, to relieve the congested conditions of our own world. Obviously, there is no room for two types of intelligent beings on one planet--your race must go! It is our intention to destroy all human life on Earth! "We intend accomplishing this with Venerian microbes. From the record of your knowledge, I've learned that diseases of various kinds are common on Earth. We expected that such would be the case, and thus, you would not be immune to germs, so we came prepared. Each of the small compartments in that case that you may have seen, contains a culture of a different germ. After we have determined which Venerian bacilli will be the most effective, we will develop them in great quantities, and loose them upon your world. "In the selecting process, you will play your part. Since our germs may have a different effect upon your bodies than they do upon Venerians, we will inoculate you with different diseases, and watch their effects upon you. "Of course, you yourself will be in no great danger, for we will have the diseases under our constant control. On Acor we have abolished disease entirely, having a reagent or an antitoxin for every malady; we will use our cures upon you immediately after we have seen how you react to each disease. "What we desire is a bacillus that will take effect when it is breathed in through the lungs. If the disease is of such a nature as to instill fear in the minds of observers, so much the better; but that is unnecessary. When we discover a microbe of that nature, we will be ready to act. "By the way, our work has been lessened to a great degree by the fact that you are a bacteriologist. The knowledge we gain from you has enabled us to eliminate at least half of our microbes. All Venerian germs that are duplicated on Earth will be left out of our calculations. Only those unknown to your planet will be tried upon you." * * * * * When the Venerian had finished his explanation, each word of which had sounded like a death knell to Parkinson, the bacteriologist lay on the slab in the grip of a nightmare of horror. The cold-blooded brutality of these Venerian beasts, and the thought of lying there helpless with his body the prey of unknown diseases, filled him with a maddening fear and dread. Mightily he struggled to break the uncanny bonds that held him paralyzed, but it was of no avail. His body retained its helpless rigidity. Only for a moment was Parkinson left to his fearful musings; then the Venerians begin their work. A tall table on wheels was brought from somewhere, and drawn to the side of the slab. Upon this various instruments were placed, side by side with numerous flat vessels containing germ cultures. Parkinson saw none of this, but from the sounds that came to his ears he could infer what was taking place. Finally, everything seemed to be in readiness. The Venerian leader bent over Parkinson for a moment: and the latter felt a sharp pain in his side. Then the Venerian withdrew. Slowly, interminably, the time dragged by while the microbes that had been introduced into his body were at their work. How long he lay there with the Venerians watching, he could not tell, but it seemed to be hours. During that time he felt himself gripped by an increasingly violent fever. Unbearable heat flooded his body. And because of his helplessness, he could do nothing to relieve his pain and discomfort. It was maddening! When he thought he had reached the limit of his endurance, and felt that he would go insane in another moment, the Venerian leader injected something into his side. He became aware of an immediate sense of relief; in an unbelievably short time the fever had left him and he was himself again. There followed for Parkinson hours of nightmare agony, while the Venerians experimented with his living body. Time after time he was inoculated with strange bacilli that wracked him with tortures indescribable. Hideous diseases covered him with festering sores; twisted his flesh into a repellent mass of scars; left him weakened and deformed. Had it not been for the incredible curative powers of the Venerians, he would have died then; but always, when the end seemed at hand, they brought him back to life, only to subject him to other horrors. * * * * * After what seemed countless ages, the Venerians left him alone. Under the powerful effects of their cures, Parkinson began to recover. Hope welled up in his heart; perhaps the terrible experiments were ended. When he was almost certain that the torture was over, his hopes were suddenly destroyed. The three Venerians approached again, each bearing a number of vessels containing germ cultures. These they placed on the table at Parkinson's side; then two of them withdrew, leaving the leader to continue his work. Uttering a few words in the Venerian tongue, he occupied himself with something on the table, and a moment later turned toward the bacteriologist, a long needle in his hands. Parkinson felt a great burning pain in his left arm, as though a searing, hot needle had been thrust into his flesh. In a moment this vanished. Then a feeling of irresistible lassitude overwhelmed him; an unbearable weariness filled him with longing for rest, peace--death. This, too, was of short duration. With the passing of the weariness, Parkinson became aware of a sharp throbbing in his arm. Rapidly this increased in violence, until suddenly an unbearable, excruciating agony seized him. Far greater was this than any pain he had suffered before. For a moment he struggled to scream, to move, to do anything to relieve his agony. There seemed to be a sudden snap--a cry of anguish burst from his lips--and his senses left him. Just as the bonds of paralysis had broken, he had lost consciousness. Life returned to Parkinson very slowly. In a daze he stared around, uncomprehending. Then suddenly he realized that he was no longer paralyzed: nor was he in the operating room. The bed on which he lay was soft, comfortable; the room, unfamiliar. But not for long did his mind dwell upon this; in a few moments his eyelids closed, and he slept the sleep of complete mental and physical exhaustion. Daring the weeks that followed, Parkinson did little other than sleep. Occasionally he arose, either to stretch himself, or to secure food, but for the greater part of the time he remained in bed. His body was a mere shadow of its former self as the result of his terrible experience on the white slab: his incessant sleeping, necessary because of his weakened condition, served to bring him back to his former health. The Venerians seemed glad to have it thus: asleep, he did not disturb their activities. * * * * * When he had awakened from his first period of natural slumber, he had received a terrible shock. His left arm was gone, amputated at the shoulder. Strangely, the wound had healed while he slept, probably the result of the Venerian doctoring, so there was no pain: but the shock had been terrible. After he had recovered from the effects of that shock, he had resolved to make the Venerians pay for what they had done. And then he had realized that the inhuman brutes must be destroyed for a greater reason: unless he interfered, he believed that they would carry out their intention of destroying all human life. As the weeks passed by, while strength was returning to Parkinson, he learned in a general way what the invaders were doing. They were engaged in developing vast quantities of microbes to be spread over Earth. When these were ready, a great amount of fine dust that the Venerians had brought with them, was impregnated with the bacilli. This was then taken up into the tower, where, as Parkinson learned later, it was blown out through the four tubes that spun around the tower's top, to drift through the air--to enter human bodies--to destroy life. The Venerians worked with the cultures and impregnated dust without protection of any sort: evidently they were immune to the disease. Later Parkinson learned that he was likewise immune; they had rendered him so after trying the germs upon him. Gradually the bacteriologist's health returned--so gradually that his captors seemed not to notice it. He was glad of this, for their vigilance had relaxed, and he did not want it renewed. Even when he was as strong and well as ever, he spent much time in bed, shamming illness. And when he could do so without danger of detection, he kept a close watch upon the three, waiting for a time when he would be entirely alone. * * * * * At last his opportunity came. The three Venerians rose to the surface together, leaving him in his room, to all outward appearances, asleep. But sleep was far from him at that moment; he had been watching. Shortly after the sphere had vanished up the shaft, Parkinson emerged from his room. For a moment he surveyed the circle of doors: then he shrugged his shoulders. They all looked alike to him. Quickly he crossed the room, and pressed a button that mechanically opened a door. It was his purpose, first of all, to secure a weapon; one room would do as well as another for a beginning. At first glance Parkinson was struck by the strange familiarity of this chamber: then, after a moment, he recognized it. A tall, high-backed metal chair in its center was its mark of identification. This was the chamber wherein the Venerians had transferred a record of his knowledge to their minds. Carefully he looked around in search of a weapon, but the room held nothing but the chair and the thought transference device. In a moment he withdrew, closing the door behind him. In the next room he entered, he was fortunate. This chamber was filled with strange devices of various kinds. While curiously inspecting the intricate machines, he saw something that brought a smile of satisfaction to his lips. Against one wall stood a tall, glass case, one of the shelves of which held several metal devices that Parkinson immediately recognized as being the Venerians' weapons. Poignantly he remembered how a similar device had destroyed a ship. Leaving the door slightly ajar, he crossed to the case and secured one of the weapons. For a moment he studied it. There was nothing complex about the mechanism; a cursory examination sufficed to reveal how it was operated. Pressure on a little knob at the back of the handle released the devastating ray. He was about to slip the device into his pocket when he stiffened involuntarily. There was a sound of movement outside the room--he heard a step on the metal floor--then he whirled. * * * * * One of the Venerians stood in the doorway, a menacing frown on his face. He was crouching, ready to spring upon Parkinson. Quick as thought, the bacteriologist leveled his newly-acquired weapon, and pressed on the knob. There was a sudden spurt of flame from the Venerian's body; then it crumpled, sagging, shrinking together. Hastily Parkinson released the pressure on the little knob, aghast at the destructive power of his little weapon. Then, as he remembered the torture he had endured at their hands, he directed the ray upon the ashes, until they, too, were consumed, leaving naught but a dark patch on the floor. For several minutes Parkinson stood there in deep thought. There was no immediate danger from the two remaining Venerians, for they were up in the tower, while the sphere was in the meteor; so he could think with utmost safety. Deep thought and careful planning were necessary now, for he had taken the step that must mean either his death or the death of the Venerians. Suddenly he leaped into action; he had decided upon his next move. Crossing to the case he secured another weapon. He wasn't sure that they could be effectively discharged without re-loading; handicapped as he was with one arm gone, he had to be certain of the reliability of his means of defense. Then he left the room, and crossed to the huge thoque sphere. It was the work of a moment to enter this, and prepare to ascend. This done, he turned his attention to the numerous knobs on the wall. He had not seen them for quite a while; it was with difficulty that he recalled which knobs controlled the car's ascent. At last, hesitantly, but correctly, he pressed on the knobs, and the sphere rose slowly toward the surface. At the proper moment, Parkinson, brought the vehicle to a halt, and slid back the door. Furtively he peered around. The Venerians were on the other side of the tower. Quickly he lowered the ladder and descended. * * * * * As he stepped to the floor, a sudden cry of dismay fell upon his ears. One of the Venerians, coming around the car, had discovered him. Without a moment's hesitation, Parkinson aimed his little weapon, and pressed upon the knob. Like his fellow, the Venerian fell to the floor, a heap of charred ashes. With the second Venerian destroyed, Parkinson dashed around the sphere, metal cylinder held in readiness. The leader of the Venerians was stealing stealthily around the other side of the car, his hand fumbling beneath his garment. "Stop!" Parkinson cried. "Raise your hands above your head--empty!" A cylinder clattered to the metal floor as the Venerian's hands moved skyward. "Keep your back turned!" Parkinson snapped as the invader began about. "I won't hesitate to press on this little knob, at your first hostile move! I'd thoroughly enjoy burning you to a crisp, so be very careful." While talking, Parkinson had moved slowly toward the man from Venus; now, almost upon him, he quickly dropped his weapon into a pocket, and swung a terrible blow at the base of his skull. The Venerian fell to the floor without a groan, unconscious. Parkinson stared at the recumbent figure rather dubiously for a moment. If only he had his other arm! But it was gone; with an impatient shake of his head he stooped and raised the senseless invader. It was anything but an easy task for the bacteriologist to carry his seven-foot burden up the ladder and into the sphere, but finally, he succeeded in doing so. Then, without delay, he lowered the car into the meteor again. As he bore the Venerian from the vehicle, he tried to decide upon his next move. Obviously, he had to secure the one surviving invader, so that he would not be a menace to Parkinson when he revived. And then the logical thing to do would be, in some way, to secure information from him as to how to cure the disease that was spreading over the world. * * * * * The logical thing to do, yes--but how? With only one arm, the simple task of binding the Venerian presented considerable difficulty. How much more difficult would it be to force anything from him? Then the solution of the first problem presented itself to Parkinson. What was to prevent his strapping this being into the high-backed chair to which he had been secured some time before? Quickly he crossed the circular room to the door he had first passed through while searching for a weapon. Ten minutes later, when the Venerian regained his senses, he was fastened securely to the tall, metal chair. "Well," Parkinson addressed him, "conditions seem to be reversed now, and you're the underdog. I've nipped your invasion in the bud. All your elaborate preparations are wasted." Something resembling a sneer wreathed the Venerian's thin lips; a mocking gleam lit his cold, blue eyes. "So our efforts have been wasted, have they? I'm afraid I can't agree with you. Already, enough bacteria have been released to destroy all life, though it will take longer than we desire. Even though you kill me, our goal will still be reached. The human race will die!" A cloud of gloom fell upon Parkinson. He had expected this; but he had been hoping that he was wrong. "Then there's only one thing for me to do, and that is: I'll have to force you to tell me how to undo the damage you've done." The Venerian smiled mirthlessly. "You have absolutely no chance of accomplishing that," he said. "We've done our work too well to allow any interference now. "You do not know this, but we have released upon your world the worst malady ever known to Venus. There is only one remedy; and I'm the only one who knows it, or who has the means wherewith to accomplish it. And I certainly won't tell!" The worried expression on Parkinson's face increased in intensity. There was something in the Venerian's voice that convinced him that he meant what he said. Then suddenly his countenance cleared, and a happy smile replaced his frown. "Perhaps you won't tell, but I think you will. There are more ways than one of forcing you." * * * * * Parkinson had hit upon a solution to his problem. The Venerians had reproduced his knowledge in their brains; why wouldn't it be possible for him to reverse the operation? In a moment he secured the thought-transference apparatus from a case in the rear of the room, and bore it to the chair, and in spite of the Venerian leader's struggles, placed it upon his head. He put the head-phones over his own ears, and began fumbling with the controls. Suddenly he seemed to strike the right combination. There was a faint, humming drone in his ears; after a moment this was replaced by a loud crackling--and the knowledge of the man from Venus was becoming his own. Somewhat dazed, Parkinson shut off the current. His mind was in a turmoil. He was in possession of knowledge of such an amazing character that, for the moment he had lost his mental equilibrium. Indeed, so strange was his new-found knowledge, that he could not grasp the significance of even half of the facts in his mind. But already, he knew how, with animal electricity, they had paralyzed him; knew what had happened to him on the operating table; knew the nature of the dread disease that destroyed his arm; the Gray Plague--and knew the cure! A sudden thought arrested this review of his new knowledge. The Gray Plague! At that very moment incalculable quantities of the deadly bacilli were being cast into the air. And he was doing nothing about it! He glanced at the Venerian. He was still unconscious, and would remain so for some minutes to come. And even if he did recover his senses, he was securely fastened to the chair; Parkinson dashed out of the room, crossed to the sphere, and passed through the open doorway. Without hesitation he manipulated the controls, directed by his Venerian knowledge. Rapidly the sphere rose to the surface. As it came to rest on the floor of the tower, Parkinson sprang from the car, and headed toward a mass of intricate machinery that filled fully a quarter of the great building. Even this caused him no great concern; he was as familiar with it as he would have been had he constructed it. For some moments he was busy with numerous dials and levers; then the release of the germs was stopped. * * * * * Parkinson spent several minutes in examining the contents of the tower, his Earthly mind lost in wonder at the strange things his Venerian knowledge revealed to him. Then he entered the sphere again, and sank into the meteor. As he moved toward the room that held the Venerian, his mind was busy with conjectures as to what he would do with his prisoner. It was necessary for the bacteriologist to reach the mainland as quickly as possible, and make use of his knowledge of the cure for the Gray Plague. He didn't want to kill the man; he couldn't free him; yet if he left him strapped to the chair, he'd surely die of starvation. Still undecided, he thrust open the door. With a startled gasp he stopped short. Somehow the Venerian had freed himself; at that moment he leaped toward Parkinson. Instinctively the bacteriologist flung up his hand in a defensive attitude. The onrushing Venerian caught Parkinson's out-thrust fist in the pit of his stomach, and doubled up in pain. While he was thus defenseless, Parkinson placed a well-directed blow on the side of the Venerian's jaw, a blow carrying every ounce of his strength. So great was the force of the punch, that it lifted the man from Venus and cast him headlong upon the floor. His head landed with a sickening thud. Unmoving, he lay where he had fallen. Parkinson knelt over him for a moment, then arose. Without question, the man was dead. The Venerian had solved the bacteriologist's last problem; he was free to return to the United States with his means of saving mankind. * * * * * Drawing the little metal cylinder from his pocket, he burned the body of the Venerian leader to a heap of ashes, ridding the world of the last invader. Then he turned and entered the glass-lined operating room. Following the dictates of his Venerian knowledge, he crossed to one of the walls, and drew therefrom a flat, glass vessel, somewhat like a petri dish. This contained bacteria that were harmless in themselves, and were hostile to those of the Gray Plague. These germs, brought from Venus, were the only cure for the terrible disease.[1] [Footnote 1: The work of the English bacteriologist Twort, in 1915, and the Frenchman, d'Herelle, in 1917, brought to the attention of the scientific world the fact that many bacteria are subject to attack and destruction by some unknown active agent with which they are associated in infected material. This agent, whatever its character, changed growing germ cultures to a dead, glassy substance. Twort advanced the thought that the agent might be a living, filtered virus, although he favored the theory that it was an enzyme derived from the bacteria themselves. D'Herelle, on the contrary, believed that this phenomenon was due to a living, multiplying, ultra-microscopic microbe that destroyed certain bacteria. Evidence favoring both theories has come to light, with the result that, at present, controversy is rife. Up to date, the contention of neither side has been proved.] Parkinson's adventure was almost at an end. He had not emerged unscathed, but he had won! The details of his further actions need not be recorded. Suffice it to say that he entered the sphere, carrying his precious, curative germs, arose to the top of the tower, and passed through a round opening in its side. His borrowed knowledge revealed that the car possessed abilities that he had not suspected; with amazing speed he caused it to flash across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. There he saw the frightful carnage that the Plague had caused, saw the deserted cities--and was filled with self-reproach because he had not acted sooner. Across the miles and miles of deserted country he sped, following the fleeing hordes, finally passing over the stragglers and landing in the heart of the congested areas. After making a few inquiries, he returned to the sphere, and continued on toward the West. He landed, finally, outside the city of San Francisco. A short time later, twisted, deformed, yet triumphant, he was ushered into the presence of the United States government as--the man who had saved the human race. CHAPTER IV The terrible days of the Gray Plague ended in mystery. Much that had puzzled the world, Parkinson, with his Venerian knowledge, explained; but there was one thing, the final, enigmatical act in the strange drama, that was as much of a mystery to him as it was to the rest of the world. Enigma! Of what significance, of what portent--who could tell? When the great vessel from the United States, equipped to destroy the meteor of the Venetians, neared the great thoque sphere, they came upon a scene quite different from what they had expected. Parkinson, who was on the ship, was more surprised than the rest, for he had definite knowledge of what, in the natural course of events, they should see. For the others there was nothing so very strange in what they saw; Parkinson had lied, that was all. When the bacteriologist had left the meteor, there had been a high, bronze-colored tower, a burnished lighthouse, covering its entire top. It had been there--but now it was gone! Only the jagged, arched surface of the meteor remained. They lowered boats and rowed to the strange island. There they saw something that filled them--Parkinson especially--with a very definite uneasiness. The entire top of the meteor was a twisted, fire-blasted mass of bronze-like metal. Where the tower had been, where the shaft had led into the remarkable interplanetary vehicle, there was now a broken expanse of thoque that flashed fire under the rays of the sun. Something seemed to have melted, to have fused the tower, until it had crumpled, and had run, filling the entrance of the meteor. There was irrefutable evidence to that effect; no one thought otherwise. But what agency had done this strange thing? Someone suggested that it might have been the work of some prearranged mechanism. Parkinson shook his head. Had such been the case, his Venerian knowledge would have told him so. Obviously, nothing of Earth had done it, nothing of Earth--then something of Venus! Inconclusive conjecture, perhaps, but no other explanation offered itself. Something had sealed the contents of the meteor from the sight of man, something with a purpose. From Venus? The thought was logical, to say the least. Not for long did they remain there beside the Venerian vehicle; there was naught for them to do, so they turned about and headed toward the United States. They bore tidings that were vaguely disturbing, tidings that none were glad to hear. For, according to all indications, something alien to Earth was still within her confines. * * * * * Behind it all--the meteors, the Plague, the sealing of the Venerian vehicle--is one fact of great significance. No longer is man alone in the universe; no longer is he in isolation! Out of space came a menace, an intelligence striving to wrest from him his right to rule over Earth. No longer can man in his smug complacency think of himself as being secure in his strength. He has been shown the utter folly of such thinking. The menace--the invaders from Venus--came, and were destroyed, their purposes defeated. Yet--in the vast reaches of space, in worlds of other dimensions, in the cosmic crucible of life that embodies all creation, there may be other forms of life, other menaces, hovering clouds of death, preparing to sweep down upon Earth to snuff out her life. Who can tell? And who may say that man is free from the Venerian danger? The strange sealing of the meteor implies that the menace is still present. Who knows but what those inhuman Venerian brutes may even now be planning some new invasion, may be preparing to renew their attack upon Earth? Time alone will tell. ROBOT PILOTS FOR AIRCRAFT Perfection of an automatic mechanical piloting mechanism for airplanes has been achieved after several years of experiment at the royal aircraft establishment of Farnborough. The apparatus has been successfully tried out on various types of planes--two-seater day bombers, large twin-engine night bombers and big flying boats. Its use as a second or relief pilot on long distance flights by Royal Air Force machines is now being considered. In every test the robot pilot has steered an accurate course for hours at a time and over distances up to 400 miles while human members of the crew have been concerned with other duties. The basis of the mechanical pilot is a gyroscope that controls pistons connected with the rudder and elevators of the plane. These pistons are actuated by compressed air. Once a course is set the robot pilot keeps the machine on that route and errors of even a fraction of a degree are instantly and automatically detected and corrected. All the human pilot has to do in a plane so equipped is to take off and land the machine. The Pilot's Assister is the official name of the new English device. It weighs about 120 pounds. Flights have been made with the mechanical pilot in all sorts of weather. In dense fog and clouds, when a human pilot would have found it almost impossible to maintain straight or level flight because of the absence of any visible horizon by which to steer, the mechanical pilot flew the plane with absolute accuracy. On one test flight the automatic pilot steered a dead true course from Farnborough in South England, to Newcastle, 270 miles farther north. The human pilot did not touch the controls until it was necessary to land the plane at the destination. Jetta of the Lowlands Conclusion _By Ray Cummings_ [Sidenote: Black-garbed figures move in ghastly greenness as the invisible flyer speeds on its business of ransom.] [Illustration: _Hans and I hauled out the heavy casket._] CHAPTER XV _In the Bandit Camp_ The dark cave, with its small spots of tube-light mounted upon movable tripods, was eery with grotesque swaying shadows. The bandit camp. Hidden down here in the depths of the Mid-Atlantic Lowlands. An inaccessible retreat, this cave in what once was the ocean floor. Only a few years ago water had been here, water black and cold and soundless. Tremendous pressure, with three thousand or more fathoms of the ocean above it. Fishes had roamed these passages, no doubt. Strange monsters of the deeps: sightless, or with eyes like phosphorescent torches. But the water was gone now. Blue ooze was caked upon the cave floor. Eroded walls; niches and tiny gullies; crevices and an arching dome high overhead. A fantastic cave--no one, seeing it as I saw it that morning at dawn, could have believed it was upon this earth. From where De Boer had put me--on the flat top of a small, butte-like dome near the upper end of the sloping cave floor--all the area of this strange bandit camp was visible to me. A little tent of parchment was set upon the dome-top. "Yours," said De Boer, with a grin. "Make yourself comfortable. Gutierrez will be your willing servant, until we see about this ransom. It will have to be one very large, for you are a damn trouble to me, Grant. And a risk. Food will come shortly. Then you can sleep: I think you will want it." He leaped from the little butte, leaving the taciturn ever-watchful Gutierrez sitting cross-legged on the ledge near me, with his projector across his knees. * * * * * The cave was irregularly circular, with perhaps, a hundred-feet diameter and a ceiling fifty feet high. A drift of the fetid, Lowland air went through it--into a rift at this upper end, and out through the lower passage entrance which sloped downward thirty feet and debouched upon a rippled ramp of ooze outside. It was daylight out there now. From my perch I could see the sullen heavy walls of a ridge. Mist hung against them, but the early morning sunlight came down in shafts penetrating the mist and striking the oily surface of a spread of water left here in the depths of a cauldron. De Boer's flyer was outside. We had landed by the shore of the sea, and the bandits had pushed the vehicle into an arching recess which seemed as though made to hide it. All this camp was hidden. Arching crags of the ridge-wall jutted out over the cave entrance. From above, any passing flyer--even though well below the zero-height--would see nothing but this black breathing sea, lapping against its eroded, fantastic shore-line. Within the cave, there was only a vague filtering daylight from the lower entrance, a thin shaft from the rift overhead, and the blue tube-light, throwing great shadows of the tents and the men against the black rock walls. There seemed perhaps a hundred of the bandits here. A semi-permanent camp, by its aspect. Grey parchment tents were set up about the floor, some small, others more elaborate. It seemed as though it were a huddled little group of buildings in the open air, instead of in a cave. One tent, just at the foot of my dome, seemed De Boer's personal room. He went into it after leaving me, and came out to join the main group of his fellows near the center of the cave where a large electron stove, and piped water from a nearby subterranean freshet, and a long table set with glassware and silver, stood these men for kitchen and eating place. * * * * * The treasure had not yet been brought in from the flyer. But, from what I overheard, it seemed that the radiumized ingots of the ill-fated Spawn and Perona were to be stored for a year at least, here in this cave. I could see the strong-room cubby. It was hewn from the rock of the cave wall, its sealed-grid door-oval set with metal bars. I saw also what seemed a small but well-equipped machine shop, in a recess room at one side of the cave. Men were working in there under the light of tubes. And there was a niche hollowed out in the wall to make a room for De Boer's instruments--ether-wave receivers and transmitters, the aerial receiving wires of which stretched in banks along the low ceiling. There was no activity in there now, except for one man who was operating what I imagined might be an aerial insulator, guarding the place from any prying search-vibrations. The main cave was a bustle of activity. The arriving bandits were greeting their fellows and exchanging news. The men who had been left here were jubilant at the success of the Chief's latest enterprise. Bottles were unsealed and they began to prepare the morning meal. My presence caused considerable comment. I was a complication at which most of the men were ill pleased, especially when the arriving bandits told who I was, and that the patrols of the United States were doubtless even now trying to find me. But De Boer silenced the grumbling with rough words. "My business, not yours. But you will take your share of his ransom, won't you? Have done!" And Jetta, she had caused comment also. But when the bottles were well distributed the grumbling turned to ribald banter which made me shudder that it should fall upon Jetta's ears. De Boer had kept his men away from her, shoving them aside when they crowded to see her. She was in a little tent now, not far from the base of my ledge. My meal presently was brought from where most of the bandits now were roistering at the long table in the center of the cave. "Eat," said Gutierrez. "I eat with you, Americano. _Madre Mia_, when you are ransomed away from here it will please me! De Boer is fool, with taking such a chance." * * * * * With the meal ended, another guard came to take Gutierrez' place and I was ordered into my tent. The routine of the camp, it seemed, was to use the daylight hours for the time of sleep. There were lookouts and guards at the entrance, and a little arsenal of ready weapons stocked in the passage. The men at the table were still at their meal. It would end, I did not doubt, by most of them falling into heavy alcoholic slumber. I was tired, poisoned by the need of sleep. I lay on fabric cushions piled in one corner of my tent. But sleep would not come; my thoughts ran like a tumbling mountain torrent, and as aimlessly. I hoped that Jetta was sleeping. De Boer was now at the center table with his men. Hans was guarding Jetta. He was a phlegmatic, heavy Dutchman, and seemed decent enough. I wondered what Hanley might be doing to rescue me. But as I thought about it, I could only hope that his patrols would not find us out here. An attack and most certainly De Boer and his men in their anger would kill me out of hand. And possibly Jetta also. I had not had a word alone with Jetta since that scene in the control room. When we disembarked, she had stayed close by De Boer. But I knew that Jetta had fathomed my purpose, that she was working to the same end. We must find a way of arranging the ransom which would give us an opportunity to escape. I pondered it. And at last an idea came to me, vague in all its details, as yet. But it seemed feasible, and I thought it would sound plausible to De Boer. I would watch my chance and explain it to him. Then I realized how much aid Jetta would be. She would agree with my plan, and help me convince him. And when the crucial time came, though I would be a captive, watched by Gutierrez, bound and gagged, perhaps--Jetta would be at liberty. De Boer and Gutierrez would not be on their guard with her. I drifted off to sleep, working out the details of my plan. CHAPTER XVI _Planning The Ransom_ I was awakened by the sound of low voices outside my tent. Jetta's voice, and De Boer's, and, mingled with them, the babble of the still hilarious bandits in the center of the cave. But there were only a few left now; most of them had fallen into heavy slumber. I had been asleep for several hours, I figured. The daylight shadows outside the cave entrance showed that it was at least noon. I lay listening to the voices which had awakened me. De Boer was saying: "But why, Jetta, should I bother with your ideas? I know what is best. This ransom is too dangerous to arrange." His voice sounded calmly good humored; I could hear in it now more than a trace of alcoholic influence. He added, "I think we had better kill him and have done. My men think so, too; already I have caused trouble with them, by bringing him." It jolted me into full wakefulness. Jetta's voice: "No! I tell you it can be arranged, Hendrick. I have been thinking of it, planning it--" "Child! Well what? The least I can do is listen; I am no pig-headed American. Say it out. What would you do to ransom him safely?" * * * * * They were just at the foot of my ledge, in front of De Boer's tent. Their voices rose so that I could hear them plainly. For all my start at being awakened to hear my death determined upon, I recall that I was almost equally startled by Jetta's voice. Her tone, her manner with De Boer. Whatever opportunities they had had for talking together, the change in their relationship was remarkable. De Boer was now flushed with drink, but for all that he had obviously still a firm grip upon his wits. And I heard Jetta now urging her ideas upon him with calm confidence. An outward confidence; yet under it there was a vibrant emotion suppressed within her even tone; a hint of tremulous fright; a careful calculation of the effect she might be making upon De Boer. Had he not been intoxicated--with drink and with her--he might have sensed it. But he did not. "Hendrick, it can be done. A big price. Why not?" "Because if we are trapped and caught, of what use is the price we might have gotten? Tell me that, wise one?" "We will not be trapped. And suppose you kill him--won't they track you just the same, Hendrick?" "No. We would leave his body on some crag where it would be found. The patrols would more quickly tire of chasing a killer when the damage is done. They want Grant alive." "Then let them have him alive--for a big price. Hendrick, listen--" "Well, what?" he demanded again. "What is your plan?" "Why--well, Hendrick, like this--" She stammered, and I realized that she had no plausible plan. She was fumbling, groping, urging upon De Boer that I must be ransomed alive. But she had not good reason for it. "Well?" he prompted impatiently. "You--can you raise Great New York on the audiphone, Hendrick?" "Yes," he said. "Hanley's office?" "Yes, no doubt. Chah--that would give him a start, wouldn't it? De Boer calmly calling him!" * * * * * He was laughing. I heard what sounded as though he were gulping another drink. "By damn, Jetta, you are not the timid bird you look. Call Hanley, eh?" "Yes. Can it be done and still bar his instruments from locating us?" "Yes, and bar his television. Believe it, Jetta. I have every device for hiding. But--call Hanley!" "Why not? ... Hendrick, stop!" I started. It seemed that he was embracing her; forcing half drunken caresses upon her. I scrambled through my tent doorway, but Gutierrez, who had come back on guard, at once seized me. "_Hui_--so haste! Back, you." The Spaniard spoke softly, and he was grinning. "The chief plays with woman's words, no? Charming señorita, though she dresses like a boy. But that is the more charming, eh? Listen to her, Grant." He gripped me, and prodded my side with the point of his knife blade. "Lie down Americano: we will listen." Jetta was insisting. "Hendrick, stop!" "Why?" * * * * * I could see them now. They were seated before the opening of De Boer's tent. A little stove in front of them. Coffee for Jetta, who was seated cross-legged, pouring it; a bowl of drink for De Boer. And some baked breadstuff dainties on a platter. "Hendrick--" She pushed him away as he leaned to embrace her. Although she was laughing with him, I could only guess at the chill of fear that might be in her heart. "Foolish, Hendrick!" "Foolish little bird, Jetta mine." "You--it is you who are foolish, Hendrick." She slid from his embrace and held her brimming coffee cup balanced before her, to ward him off. "You think I am really clever, so trust me, Hendrick. Oh there is a great future for us: you say I inspire you; let me! Hendrick De Boer, Chieftain of the Lowlands! My father would have helped you become that. You can build a little empire. Hendrick--why not? Father wanted to make you President of Nareda. Why not build your own Lowland Empire? We have a hundred men now? Why not gather a thousand? Ten thousand? An empire!" "_Ave Maria_," from Gutierrez. "This _niña_ thinks big thoughts!" De Boer raised his bowl. "An empire--De Boer of the Lowlands! Go on; you amuse me. We have a nice start, with this treasure." "Yes. And the ransom money. But you will take me first to Cape Town, Hendrick? We can be married there: I am seventeen in a month." "Of course, Jetta. Haven't I promised?" There was no convincingness to me in the way he said it. "Of course. To Cape Town for our marriage." "Stop! Hendrick, be serious!" He had reached for her again. "Don't be a fool, Hendrick." "Very well," he said. "I am all serious. What is your plan?" * * * * * She was more resourceful this time. She retorted, "This craven Grant, he fears for his life--but he is very smart, Hendrick. I think he is scheming every moment how he can be safely ransomed." "Hah! No doubt of that!" "And he has had experience with Chief Hanley. He knows Hanley's methods, how Hanley will act. Let us see what Grant says of this." She had no plan of her own, but she hoped that by now I had one! And she was making an opportunity for me to put it before De Boer. He said, "There is sense to that, Jetta. If there is any way to fool Hanley, that craven American has no doubt thought it out." She held another drink before him. "Yes. Let us see what he says." He drank; and again as they were near together he caressed her. "What a schemer you are, little bird. You and I are well matched, eh?" "Gutierrez may be watching us!" she warned. They suddenly looked up and saw Gutierrez and me. "Hah!" Fortunately it struck De Boer into further good humor. "Hah--we have an audience! Bring down the prisoner, Gutierrez! Let us see if his wits can get him out of this plight. Come down, Grant!" Gutierrez shoved me down the ladder ahead of him. De Boer stood up and seized me. His great fingers dug into my shoulders. "Sit down, American! It seems you are not to die. _Perhaps_ not." The strength of his fingers was hurting me: he hoped I would wince. Mine was now an ignominious role, indeed, yet I knew it was best. I gasped. "Don't do that: you hurt!" He chuckled and cast me loose. I added, with a show of spirit, "You are a bullying giant. Just because you are bigger than I am--" "Hear that, Jetta? The American finds courage with his coming ransom!" * * * * * He shoved me to the ground. Gutierrez grinned, and withdrew a trifle. Jetta avoided meeting my gaze. "Have some coffee," De Boer offered. "Alcohol is not good for you. Now say: have you any suggestions on how I can safely ransom you?" It seemed that Jetta was holding her breath with anxiety. But I answered with an appearance of ready eagerness. "Yes. I have. I can arrange it with complete safety to you, if you give me a chance." "You've got your chance. Speak out." "You promise you will return me alive? Not hurt me?" "De duvel--yes! You have my promise. But your plan had better be very good." "It is." I told it carefully. The details of it grew with my words. Jetta joined in it. But, most of all, it did indeed sound feasible. "But it must be done at once," I urged. "The weather is right; to-night it will be dark; overcast; not much wind. Don't you think so?" He sent Gutierrez to the cave's instrument room to read the weather forecast instruments. My guess was right. "To-night then," I said. "If we linger, it only gives Hanley more time to plan trickery." "Let us try and raise him now," Jetta suggested. The Dutchman, Hans, had joined us. He too, seemed to think my ideas were good. Except for the guards at the cave entrance, all the other bandits were far gone in drink. With Hans and Gutierrez, we went to the instrument room to call Hanley. As we crossed the cave, with Hans and De Boer walking ahead together, De Boer spoke louder than he realized, and the words came back to me. "Not so bad, Hans? We will use him--but I am not a fool. I'll send him back dead, not alive! A little knife-thrust, just at the end! Safest for us, eh, Hans?" CHAPTER XVII _Within the Black Sack_ We left the bandit stronghold just after nightfall that same day. There were five of us on the X-flyer. Jetta and De Boer, Hans and Gutierrez and myself. The negotiations with Hanley had come through satisfactorily; to De Boer, certainly, for he was in a triumphant mood as they cast off the aero and we rose over the mist-hung depths. It was part of my plan, this meager manning of the bandit ship. But it was mechanically practical: there was only Hans needed at the controls for this short-time flight: with De Boer plotting his course, working out his last details--and with Gutierrez to guard me. De Boer had been quite willing to take no other men--and most of them were too far gone in their cups to be of much use. I never have fathomed De Boer's final purpose. He promised Jetta now that when I was successfully ransomed he would proceed to Cape Town by comfortable night flights and marry her. It pleased Gutierrez and Hans, for they wanted none of their comrades. The treasure was still on the flyer. The ransom gold would be added to it. I think that De Boer, Gutierrez and Hans planned never to return to their band. Why, when the treasure divided so nicely among three, break it up to enrich a hundred? I shall never forget Hanley's grim face as we saw it that afternoon on De Boer's image-grid. My chief sat at his desk with all his location detectors impotent, listening to my disembodied voice explaining what I wanted him to do. My humble, earnest, frightened desire to be ransomed safely at all costs! My plea that he do nothing to try and trap De Boer! It hurt me to appear so craven. But with it all, I knew that Hanley understood. He could imagine my leering captor standing at my elbow, prompting my words, dictating my very tone--prodding me with a knife in the ribs. I tried, by every shade of meaning, to convey to Hanley that I hoped to escape and save the ransom money. And I think that he guessed it, though he was wary in the tone he used for De Boer to hear. He accepted, unhesitatingly, De Boer's proposition: assured us he would do nothing to assail De Boer; and never once did his grim face convey a hint of anything but complete acquiescence. * * * * * We had President Markes on the circuit. De Boer, with nothing to lose, promised to return Jetta with me. In gold coin, sixty thousand U. S. dollar-standards for me; a third as much from Nareda, for Jetta. The details were swiftly arranged. We cut the circuit. I had a last look at Hanley's face as the image of it faded. He seemed trying to tell me to do the best I could; that he was powerless, and would do nothing to jeopardize my life and Jetta's. Everything was ready for the affair to be consummated at once. The weather was right; there was time for Hanley and De Boer each comfortably to reach the assigned meeting place. We flew, for the first hour, nearly due west. The meeting place was at 35 deg. N. by 59 deg. W., a few hundred miles east by north of the fairy-like mountaintop of the Bermudas. Our charts showed the Lowlands there to run down to what once was measured as nearly three thousand fathoms--called now eighteen thousand feet below the zero-height. A broken region, a depth-ridge fairly level, and no Lowland sea, nor any settlements in the neighborhood. The time was set at an hour before midnight. No mail, passenger or freight flyers were scheduled to pass near there at that hour, and, save for some chance private craft, we would be undisturbed. The ransom gold was available to Hanley. He had said he would bring it in his personal Wasp. * * * * * The details of the exchange were simple. Hanley, with only one mechanic, would hover at the zero-height, his Wasp lighted so that we could see it plainly. The wind drift, according to forecast, would be southerly. At 11 P.M. Hanley would release from his Wasp a small helium-gas baloon-car--a ten-foot basket with the supporting gas bag above it, weighted so that it would slowly descend into the depths, with a southern drift. Our flyer, invisible and soundless, would pick up the baloon-car at some point in its descent. The gold would be there, in a black casket. De Boer would take the gold, deposit Jetta and me in the car, and release it again. And when the balloon finally settled to the rocks beneath, Hanley could pick it up. No men would be hidden by Hanley in that basket. De Boer had stipulated that when casting loose the balloon, its car must be swept by Hanley with a visible electronic ray. No hidden men could withstand that blast! Such was the arrangement with Hanley. I was convinced that he intended to carry it out to the letter. He would have his own invisible X-flyer in the neighborhood, no doubt. But it would not interfere with the safe transfer of Jetta and me. That De Boer would carry out his part, Hanley could only trust. He had said so this afternoon bluntly. And De Boer had laughed and interposed his voice in our circuit. "Government money against these two lives, Hanley! Of course you have to trust me!" * * * * * It was a flight, for us, of something less than four hours to the meeting place. Hans was piloting, seated alone in the little cubby upon the forward wing-base, directly over the control room. De Boer, with Jetta at his side, worked over his course and watched his instrument banks. I was, at the start of the flight, lashed in a chair of the control room, my ankles and wrists tied and Gutierrez guarding me. Jetta did not seem to notice me. She did not look at me, nor I at her. She pretended interest only in the success of the transfer; in her father's treasure on board, the coming ransom money, and then a flight to Cape Town, dividing the treasure only with Hans and Gutierrez; and in her marriage with De Boer. She said she wanted me returned to Hanley alive; craven coward that I was, still I did not deserve death. De Boer had agreed. But I knew that at last, as they tumbled me into the basket, someone would slip a knife into me! I had, as we came on board, just the chance for a few whispered sentences with Jetta. But they were enough! We both knew what we had to do. Desperate expedient, indeed! It seemed more desperate now as the time approached than it had when I planned it. The weather at 7 P.M. was heavily overcast. Sultry, breathless, with solid, wide-flung cloud areas spread low over the zero-height. Night settled black in the Lowlands. The mists gathered. We flew well down--under the minus two thousand-foot level--so that out of the mists the highest dome peaks often passed close beneath us. * * * * * At 8 P.M. De Boer flung on the mechanism of invisibility. The interior of the ship faded to its gruesome green darkness. My senses reeled as the current surged through me. Lashed in my chair, I sat straining my adjusting eyes, straining my hearing to cope with this gruesome unreality. And my heart was pounding. Would Jetta and I succeed? Or was our love--unspoken love, born of a glance and the pressure of our hands in that moonlit Nareda garden--was our love star-crossed, foredoomed to tragedy? A few hours, now, would tell us. De Boer was taking no chances. He was using his greatest intensity of power, with every safeguard for complete invisibility and silence. From where I sat I could make out the black form of Hans through the ceiling grid, at his pilot controls in the overhead cubby. A queer glow like an aura was around him. The same green radiance suffused the control room. It could not penetrate the opened windows of the ship; could not pass beyond the electro-magnetic field enveloping us. Nor could the curious hum which permeated the ship's interior get past the barrage barrier. From outside, I knew, we were invisible and inaudible. Strange unreality, here in the control room! The black-garbed figures of De Boer and Jetta at their table were unreal, spectral. At the door oval, which I could barely see, Gutierrez lurked like a shadow. All of them, and Hans in the cubby above, were garbed in tight-fitting dead-black suits of silklene fabric. Thin, elastic as sheer silk web, opaque, lustreless. It covered their feet, legs and bodies; and their arms and hands like black, silk gloves. Their heads were helmeted with it. And they had black masks which as yet were flapped up and fastened to the helmet above their foreheads. Their faces only were exposed, tinted a ghastly, lurid green by this strange light. It glowed and glistened like phosphorescence on their eyeballs, making them the eyes of animals in a hunter's torchlight, at night. * * * * * De Boer moved upon an errand across the control room. He was a burly black spectre in the skin-tight suit. His footfalls faintly sounded on the metal floor. They were toneless footfalls. Unreal. They might have been bells, or jangling thuds; they had lost their identity in this soundless, vibrating hum. And he spoke, "We are making good progress, Jetta. We will be on time." Ghastly voice! So devoid of every human timbre, every overtone shade to give it meaning, that it might have been a man's voice, or a woman's, the voice of something living, or something dead. Sepulchral. A stripped shell of voice. Yet to me, inside here with it, it was perfectly audible. And Jetta said, "Yes, Hendrick, that is good." A voice like his: no different. Gruesome. Weird. * * * * * I try now to picture the scene in detail, for out of these strange conditions Jetta and I were to make our opportunity. 9 P.M. De Boer was a methodical fellow. He checked his position on the chart. He signalled the routine orders to Hans. And he gestured to Gutierrez. The movements and acts of everyone had been definitely planned. And this, too, Jetta and I had anticipated. "Time to make him ready, Gutierrez. Bring the sack in here. I'll fasten him away." I was not garbed like the others. They could move out on the wing runway under Hanley's eyes at short range, or climb in and out of the balloon car, and not be visible. Gutierrez brought the sack. A dead-black fabric. "Shall I cut him loose now from his chair, Commander?" "I'll do it." De Boer drew a long knife blade, coated black, and thin and sharp as a half-length rapier. Gutierrez had one of similar fashion. No electronic weapons were in evidence, probably because the hiss of one fired would have been too loud for our barrage, and its flash too bright. But a knife thrust is dark and silent! The Spaniard's eyes were gleaming as he approached me with the bag, as though he were thinking of that silent knife thrust he would give me at the last. Dr. Boer said, "Stand up, Grant." He cut the fastenings that held me in my chair. But my ankles and wrists remained tied. "Stand up, can't you?" "Yes." * * * * * I got unsteadily to my feet. In the blurred green darkness I could see that Jetta was not looking at me. Gutierrez held the mouth of the sack open. As though I were an upright log of wood, De Boer lifted me. "Pull it up over his feet, Gutierrez." The oblong sack was longer than my body. They drew it over me, and bunched its top over my head. And De Boer laid me none too gently on the floor. "Lie still. Do you get enough air?" "Yes." The black fabric was sufficiently porous for me to breathe comfortably inside the sack. "All right, Gutierrez, I have the gag." I felt them carrying me from the control room, twenty feet or so along the corridor, where a door-porte opened to a small balcony runway hung beneath the forward wing. Jutting from it was a little take-off platform some six feet by twelve in size. It was here that the balloon-basket was to be boarded. The casket containing the ransom gold would be landed here, and the sack containing me placed in the car and cast loose. It was all within the area of invisibility of our flyer. De Boer knelt over me, and drew back the top of the sack to expose my face. "A little gag for you, Grant, so you will not be tempted to call out." "I won't do that." "You might. Well, good-by, American." "Good-by." And I breathed, "Good-by Jetta." Would I ever see her again? Was this the end of everything for us? * * * * * He forced the gag into my mouth, tied it, and verified that my ankles and wrists were securely lashed. In the green radiance he and Gutierrez were like ghouls prowling over me, and their muffled toneless voices, tomblike. The sack came up over my head. "Good-by, Grant." I could not tell which one said it. And the other chuckled. I could feel them tying the mouth of the sack above my head. I lay stiff. Then I heard their steps. Then silence. I moved. I might have rolled, but I did not try it. I could raise my knees within the sack--double up like a folded pocket knife--but that was all. A long, dark silence. It seemed interminable. Was Gutierrez guarding me here in the corridor? I could not tell; I heard nothing save the vague hum of the electronite current. It had been 9 o'clock. Then I fancied that it must be 10. And then, perhaps, almost 11. I wondered what the weather outside was like. Soon we would be nearing the meeting place. Would Hanley be there? Would Jetta soon, very soon now, be able to do her part? I listened, horribly tense, with every interval between the thumps of my heart seeming so long a gap of waiting. * * * * * I heard a sound! A toneless, unidentifiable sound. Another like it; a little sequence of faint sounds. Growing louder. Approaching footsteps? Jetta's? I prayed so. Then a low voice. Two voices. Both the same in quality. But from the words I could identify them. "Hello, Gutierrez." "_Niña_, hello." Jetta! She had come! "The captive is safe? No trouble?" "No. He has not moved." "Careful of him, Gutierrez. He is worth a lot of money to us." "Well you say it. Señorita. In half an hour now, we will be away. Santa Maria, when this is over I shall breathe with more comfort!" "We'll have no trouble, Gutierrez. We're almost there. In ten minutes now, or a little more." "So soon? What time is it?" "Well, after half-past ten. When it's over, Gutierrez, we head for Cape Town. Clever of me, don't you think, to persuade Hendrick to take us to Cape Town? Just you three men to divide all this treasure. It would be foolish to let a hundred others have it." "True, _Niña_; true enough." "I insisted upon you and Hans--Gutierrez, what is that?" A silence. "I heard nothing." "A voice, was it?" "The Americano?" "No! No--the commander calling? Was it? Calling you, Gutierrez? Perhaps we have sighted Hanley's Wasp. Go! I'll stand here, and come quickly back." * * * * * Footsteps. Now! Our chance, come at last! I twisted over on my side, and lay motionless. Ah, if only those were Gutierrez' fading footfalls! And Jetta, here alone with me in the green darkness! Just for this one vital moment. Fingers were fumbling at the top of my sack, unfastening the cord. Hands and arms came swiftly in. Fingers ran down my back as I lay on my side to admit them quickly. Fingers went fumbling at the cords that lashed my crossed wrists behind me. A knee pressed against me. A hurried, panting, half sobbing breath close over me-- Just a hurried moment. The hands withdrew. The sack went back over my head. The knees, the slight weight against me, was gone. A few seconds only. Footsteps. The voices again. "Was it the commander, Gutierrez?" "No. I do not know what it was. Nothing, probably." "The Wasp in sight?" "Not yet, _Niña_. You had best go back: De Boer, he might be jealous of us, no? He is busy with his instruments, but should he realize you are here, talking with me--" "Senseless, Gutierrez!" "Is it so, _Niña_? I have no attraction? Go back to him. Gold I want, not trouble over you!" Faint laughter. "When we sight the Wasp, I'll call and tell you, Gutierrez. Too bad you won't let me stay with you. I like you." "Yes. But go now!" Faint laughter. Footsteps. Then silence. Our vital moment had come and passed. And Jetta had done her part; the role of action upon this dim lurid stage was now mine to play. My hands were free. CHAPTER XVIII _The Combat in the Green Darkness_ Another interval. A dead, dark silence. I did not dare move. Gutierrez was here, within a few feet of me, probably. I wondered if he could see the outlines of the black sack. Doubtless they were very vague. But if I exposed my flesh, my face, my hands, that would at once attract his attention. I worked the loosened cords from my wrists; moved my stiffened hands until, with returning blood, the strength came to them. I could not reach my bound ankles without doubling up my knees. I did not dare chance such a movement of the sack. But, after a moment, I got my hands in front of me. Then I took the gag from my mouth and, with a cautious hand, pried at the top of the sack where it was bunched over my head. Its fastening was loose. Another interval. A dim muffled voice; "The Wasp is in sight, Gutierrez!" A movement--a sound like footsteps. Probably Gutierrez moving to the corridor window to glance at Hanley's distant hovering flyer. I hoped it might be that: I had to take the chance. * * * * * I slid the bag from my face. I feared an abrupt alarm, or Gutierrez leaping upon me. But there was silence, and I saw his vague dark outlines at the window oval, five feet from me. I got my ankles loose and slid the bag off. I was unsteady on my feet, but desperation aided me. Gutierrez half turned as I gripped him from behind. My hand on his mouth stifled his outcry. His black knife blade waved blindly. Then my clenched knuckle caught his temple, and dug with the twisting Santus blow. I was expert at it, and I found the vulnerable spot. He crumpled in my grasp, and I slid his falling body across the narrow corridor into the nearest cubby oval. Almost soundless; and in the control room Jetta and De Boer were murmuring and gazing at Hanley's ship, which hung ahead and above us at the zero-height. I had planned all my movements. No motion was lost. Gutierrez was about my height and build. I stripped his black suit from him, donned it, then tied his ankles and wrists, and gagged him against the time when he would recover consciousness. Then I stuffed his body in the sack and tied its top. This black suit had a mask, rolled up and fastened to the helmet. I loosed it, dropping it over my face. Knife in hand, I stood at the corridor window. * * * * * It was all black outside. The clouds were black overhead; the highest Lowland crags, several thousand feet beneath us, were all but blotted out in the murky darkness. Only one thing was to be seen: a quarter of a mile ahead, now, and a thousand feet higher than our level, the shining, bird-like outlines of Hanley's hovering little Wasp. It stood like a painted image of an aero, alone on a dead-black background. Red and green signal-lights dotted it, and on its stern tip a small, spreading searchlight bathed the wings and the body with a revealing silver radiance. Our forward flight had been checked, and we, too, were hovering. Hans doubtless would remain for a time in the pilot cubby; De Boer and Jetta were in the control room. It was only twenty feet away, but I could barely see its oval entrance. "Gutierrez!" One of them was calling. My hollow empty voice echoed back as I softly responded: "Yes?" "Be ready. We are arrived." "Yes, Commander. All is well." I continued to stand at the window. Hanley's little balloon-car was visible now. Then he cut it away. We had moved forward in the interval. The tiny car floated out almost above us. My gaze searched the void of darkness outside. Did Hanley have an invisible flyer out there? Perhaps so. But it could accomplish nothing as yet. It would not even dare approach, for fear of collision with us. * * * * * The tiny car, with a white pilot light in it, swayed with a slow descent. The basket beneath the supporting balloon oscillated in a wide swing, then steadied. A sudden flash showed up there--a flashing electronic stream, from Hanley's Wasp to the basket. The shot swept the basket interior. No one could be hidden there and survive. It was Hanley's proof to us that he was following instructions. "Hah! He obeys properly, Jetta!" The voice floated back to me from the control room. Could I creep in there, surprise De Boer now, and kill him? Doubtless. But it would alarm Hans. I must await my chance to get them together. "Gutierrez! Hans, get us under it! Gutierrez!" The vague outline of De Boer came toward me in the corridor, burly dark blob. His mask was down now. There were points of light, glowing like faint distant stars, to mark his eyes. "Gutierrez." "Yes." A small black figure followed after him. Jetta. "Yes, De Boer." I stood over the sack. "I am ready." De Boer's giant shape towered beside me. Now! My knife thrust now! But Hans was coming toward us. He would take alarm before I could reach him. "Open the side porte, Gutierrez. Hurry, the car is here. Hans, you should have stayed up there!" "The drift is calculated; the car is just here." We were all swift-moving shadows; disembodied voices. "Get that porte open." "Yes." I opened it. * * * * * We went outside on the runway. I passed close to Jetta, and just for an instant pressed my gloved fingers on the black fabric of her arm--and she knew. "Now, seize it." "Here, Hans, climb up." "I have it. Pull it, Gutierrez!" The car drifted at us from the black void. We caught it. "Hold it, Gutierrez." "Hans, clip the balloon. Up with you." In the blurred haste, I could not get them together. I did not want to kill one and have the other leap upon me. We fastened the little balloon and dragged the car onto the take-off platform. The shape of Hans leaped into the car. "It is here! The ransom money!" "Lift it to me. Heavy?" "Yes." "Gutierrez, help me. Hurry! If Hanley tries any trickery--" Our aero was drifting downward and southward in the slight wind. Hanley's Wasp still hovered at the zero-height. "In, Gutierrez." * * * * * Hans and I hauled out the heavy casket and placed it on the wing runway. De Boer pried up its lid. The gold was there. I could not tell where Jetta was; I prayed she would keep away from this. Then the shape of De Boer was missing! But in a moment he appeared, dragging the sack. "Lift him, Gutierrez. Hans, unclip the balloon and shove off the car!" We were all standing at the two-foot rail of the runway. The car-basket, floating now, was off side and level with us. My chance! "In with him, Gutierrez." I shoved the body, encased in its black sack, with Hans helping me. And suddenly De Boer's knife came down at the sack! A stab. But an instinct to save the poor wretch within swept me. I struck at De Boer's arm and deflected the blow. The sack tumbled into the car. I had neglected whatever chance had existed. Too late now! "What in the hell!" De Boer's shape seized me. "What--" It sent me into a sudden confusion. I flung him off. I stumbled against the shape of Hans. The car was almost loose; drifting away. Without thought--a frantic impulse--I pushed Hans over the brink. He fell into the car. It swayed into an oscillation with the impact. The balloon sank below our wing level and was gone, with only Hans, muffled shouts floating up. * * * * * And De Boer came leaping at me from behind. I whirled around. My danger was too much for the watching Jetta. She screamed. "Philip, look out for him!" "Hah! The American. By damn, what is this?" It gave De Boer pause. He gripped a wing stay-wire for a second. Then he came with a rush. The corridor door was open behind me. I flung myself into it--and collided with a shape. "Philip!" I shoved at her frantically. "Jetta, get back! Away from us!" I pulled at her, half falling. De Boer's shape came through the doorway into the corridor. And was blotted out in the green darkness as he turned the other way, to avoid me if I struck. A silence. The shadow of Jetta was behind me. I stood with poised knife, listening, straining my eyes through the faint green darkness. De Boer was here, knife in hand, fallen now into craftly, motionless silence. He might have been close here down the corridor. Or in any one of these nearby cubby doorways. I slid forward along the wall. The corridor was solid black down its length: the green radiance seemed brighter at the control room behind me. Had De Boer gone into this solid blackness, to lure me? * * * * * I stopped my advance. Stood again, trying to see or hear something. And then I saw him! Two small glowing points of light. Distant stars. His eyes! Five feet ahead of me? Or ten? Or twenty? A rustle. A sound. His dark form materialized as he came--a huge, black blob overwhelming me, his arm and knife blade striking. I dropped to the floor-grid, and his blade went over me. And as I dropped, I struck with an upward thrust. My knife met solidity; sank into flesh. I twisted past him on the floor as he fell. My knife was gone: buried in him. Words were audible; choking gasps. I could see his form rising, staggering. The open porte was near him; he swayed through it. Did he know he was mortally wounded? I think so. He swayed on the wing runway, and I slid to the door and stood watching. And was aware of the shadow of Jetta creeping to join me. "Is he--?" "Quiet, Jetta." He stood under the wing, swaying, gripping a stay. Then his voice sounded, and it seemed like a laugh. "The craven American--wins." He moved a step. "Not to see--me die--" He toppled at the rail. "Good-by, Jetta." A great huddled shadow. A blob, toppling, falling.... Far down there now the crags and peaks of the Lowland depths were visible. The darkness swallowed his whirling body. We could not hear the impact. CHAPTER XIX _Episode of the Lowlands_ There is but little remaining for me to record. I could not operate the mechanism of invisibility of De Boer's X-flyer. But its pilot controls were simple. With Jetta at my side, trembling now that our gruesome task was over, we groped our way through the green darkness and mounted to the pilot cubby. And within ten minutes I had lowered the ship into the depths, found a landing place upon the dark rocks, and brought us down. Hanley's Wasp had landed: we saw its lights half a mile from us. And then the lights of another ship--an X-flyer convoying Hanley--slowly materializing nearby. And then reunion. Jetta and I left De Boer's invisible vessel and clambered over the rocks. And presently Hanley, staring at our grotesque black forms, came rushing forward and greeted us. We were an hour locating De Boer's flyer, for all that Jetta and I had just left it and thought we could find our way back. But we stumbled onto it at last. Hanley felt his way aboard and brought it to visibility. It has since been returned to the Anti-War Department, with the compliments of Hanley's Office. The ransom money was restored to its proper source. Spawn's treasure of radiumized quicksilver we shipped back to Nareda, where it was checked and divided, and Jetta's share legally awarded to her. De Boer was dead when Hanley found him that night on the rocks. Jetta and I did not go to look at him.... The balloon basket landed safely. Hanley and his men were down there in time to seize it. Hans was caught; and Gutierrez, within the sack, was found to be uninjured. They are incarcerated now in Nareda. They were willing to tell the location of the bandit stronghold. A raid there the following day resulted in the capture of most of De Boer's men. All this is now public news. You have heard it, of course. Yet in my narrative, setting down the events as I lived them, I have tried to give more vivid details than the bare facts as they were blared through the public audiphones. An episode of the strange, romantic, fantastic Lowlands. A very unimportant series of incidents mingled with the news of a busy world--just a few minutes of the newscasters' time to tell how a band of depth smugglers was caught. But it was a very important episode to me. It changed, for me, a clanking, thrumming machine-made world into a shining fairyland of dreams come true. It gave me little Jetta. (_The End_) Vagabonds of Space A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By Harl Vincent_ [Illustration: _Carr went mad with fury. There it was, looming close in his vision._] [Sidenote: From the depths of the Sargasso Sea of Space came the thought-warning, "Turn back!" But Carr and his Martian friend found it was too late!] CHAPTER I _The Nomad_ Gathered around a long table in a luxuriously furnished director's room, a group of men listened in astonishment to the rapid and forceful speech of one of their number. "I tell you I'm through, gentlemen," averred the speaker. "I'm fed up with the job, that's all. Since 2317 you've had me sitting at the helm of International Airways and I've worked my fool head off for you. Now--get someone else!" "Made plenty of money yourself, didn't you, Carr?" asked one of the directors, a corpulent man with a self-satisfied countenance. "Sure I did. That's not the point. I've done all the work. There's not another executive in the outfit whose job is more than a title, and you know it. I want a change and a rest. Going to take it, too. So, go ahead with your election of officers and leave me out." "Your stock?" Courtney Davis, chairman of the board, sensed that Carr Parker meant what he said. "I'll hold it. The rest of you can vote it as you choose: divide the proxies pro rata, based on your individual holdings. But I reserve the right to dump it all on the market at the first sign of shady dealings. That suit you?" The recalcitrant young President of International Airways had risen from the table. The chairman attempted to restrain him. "Come on now, Carr, let's reason this out. Perhaps if you just took a leave of absence--" "Call it anything you want. I'm done right now." Carr Parker stalked from the room, leaving eleven perspiring capitalists to argue over his action. * * * * * He rushed to the corridor and nervously pressed the call button of the elevators. A minute later he emerged upon the roof of the Airways building, one of the tallest of New York's mid-town sky-scrapers. The air here, fifteen hundred feet above the hot street, was cool and fresh. He walked across the great flat surface of the landing stage to inspect a tiny helicopter which had just settled to a landing. Angered as he was, he still could not resist the attraction these trim little craft had always held for him. The feeling was in his blood. His interest, however, was short lived and he strolled to the observation aisle along the edge of the landing stage. He stared moodily into the heavens where thousands of aircraft of all descriptions sped hither and yon. A huge liner of the Martian route was dropping from the skies and drifting toward her cradle on Long Island. He looked out over the city to the north: fifty miles of it he knew stretched along the east shore of the Hudson. Greatest of the cities of the world, it housed a fifth of the population of the United States of North America; a third of the wealth. Cities! The entire world lived in them! Civilization was too highly developed nowadays. Adventure was a thing of the past. Of course there were the other planets, Mars and Venus, but they were as bad. At least he had found them so on his every business trip. He wished he had lived a couple of centuries ago, when the first space-ships ventured forth from the earth. Those were days of excitement and daring enterprise. Then a man could find ways of getting away from things--next to nature--out into the forests; hunting; fishing. But the forests were gone, the streams enslaved by the power monopolies. There were only the cities--and barren plains. Everything in life was made by man, artificial. * * * * * Something drew his eyes upward and he spotted an unusual object in the heavens, a mere speck as yet but drawing swiftly in from the upper air lanes. But this ship, small though it appeared, stood out from amongst its fellows for some reason. Carr rubbed his eyes to clear his vision. Was it? Yes--it was--surrounded by a luminous haze. Notwithstanding the brilliance of the afternoon sun, this haze was clearly visible. A silver shimmering that was not like anything he had seen on Earth. The ship swung in toward the city and was losing altitude rapidly. Its silvery aura deserted it and the vessel was revealed as a sleek, tapered cylinder with no wings, rudders or helicopter screws. Like the giant liners of the Interplanetary Service it displayed no visible means of support or propulsion. This was no ordinary vessel. Carr watched in extreme interest as it circled the city in a huge spiral, settling lower at each turn. It seemed that the pilot was searching for a definite landing stage. Then suddenly it swooped with a rush. Straight for the stage of the Airways building! The strange aura reappeared and the little vessel halted in mid-air, poised a moment, then dropped gracefully and lightly as a feather to the level surface not a hundred feet from where he stood. He hurried to the spot to examine the strange craft. "Mado!" he exclaimed in surprise as a husky, bronzed Martian squeezed through the quickly opened manhole and clambered heavily to the platform. Mado of Canax--an old friend! "Devils of Terra!" gasped the Martian, his knees giving way, "--your murderous gravity! Here, help me. I've forgotten the energizing switch." * * * * * Carr laughed as he fumbled with a mechanism that was strapped to the Martian's back. Mado, who tipped the scales at over two hundred pounds on his own planet, weighed nearly six hundred here. His legs simply couldn't carry the load! "There you are, old man." Parker had located the switch and a musical purr came from the black box between the Martian's broad shoulders. "Now stand up and tell me what you're doing here. And what's the idea of the private ship? Come all the way from home in it?" His friend struggled to his feet with an effort, for the field emanating from the black box required a few seconds to reach the intensity necessary to counteract two-thirds of the earth's gravity. "Thanks Carr," he grinned. "Yes, I came all the way in that bus. Alone, too--and she's mine! What do you think of her?" "A peach, from what I can see. But how come? Not using a private space-flier on your business trips, are you?" "Not on your life! I've retired. Going to play around for a few years. That's why I bought the Nomad." "Retired! Why Mado, I just did the same thing." "Great stuff! They've worked you to death. What are you figuring on doing with yourself?" Carr shrugged his shoulders resignedly. "Usual thing, I suppose. Travel aimlessly, and bore myself into old age. Nothing else to do. No kick out of life these days at all, Mado, even in chasing around from planet to planet. They're all the same." * * * * * The Martian looked keenly at his friend. "Oh, is that so?" he said. "No kick, eh? Well, let me tell you, Carr Parker, you come with me and we'll find something you'll get a kick out of. Ever seen the Sargasso Sea of the solar system? Ever been on one of the asteroids? Ever seen the other side of the Moon--Uranus--Neptune--Planet 9, the farthest out from the sun?" "No-o." Carr's eyes brightened somewhat. "Then you haven't seen anything or been anywhere. Trouble with you is you've been in the rut too long. Thinking there's nothing left in the universe but the commonplace. Right, too, if you stick to the regular routes of travel. But the _Nomad's_ different. I'm just a rover when I'm at her controls, a vagabond in space--free as the ether that surrounds her air-tight hull. And, take it from me, there's something to see and do out there in space. Off the usual lanes, perhaps, but it's there." "You've been out--how long?" Carr hesitated. "Eighty Martian days. Seen plenty too." He waved his arm in a gesture that seemed to take in the entire universe. "Why come here, with so much to be seen out there?" "Came to visit you, old stick-in-the-mud," grinned Mado, "and to try and persuade you to join me. I find you footloose already. You're itching for adventure; excitement. Will you come?" Carr listened spellbound. "Right now?" he asked. "This very minute. Come on." "My bag," objected Carr, "it must be packed. I'll need funds too." "Bag! What for? Plenty of duds on the _Nomad_--for any old climate. And money--don't make me laugh! Vagabonds need money?" He backed toward the open manhole of the _Nomad_, still grinning. Carr hesitated, resisting the impulse to take Mado at his word. He looked around. The landing stage had been deserted, but people now were approaching. People not to be tolerated at the moment. He saw Courtney Davis, grim and determined. There'd be more arguments, useless but aggravating. Well, why not go? He'd decided to break away. What better chance? Suddenly he dived for the manhole of Mado's vessel; wriggled his way to the padded interior of the air-lock. He heard the clang of the circular cover. Mado was clamping it to its gasketed seat. "Let's go!" he shouted. CHAPTER II _Into the Heavens_ The directors of International Airways stared foolishly when they saw Carr Parker and the giant Martian enter the mysterious ship which was a trespasser on their landing stage. They gazed incredulously as the gleaming torpedo-shaped vessel arose majestically from its position. There was no evidence of motive power other than a sudden radiation from its hull plates of faintly crackling streamers of silvery light. They fell back in alarm as it pointed its nose skyward and accelerated with incredible rapidity, the silver energy bathing them in its blinding luminescence. They burst forth in excited recrimination when it vanished into the blue. Courtney Davis shook his fist after the departing vessel and swore mightily. Carr Parker forgot them entirely when he clambered into the bucket seat beside Mado, who sat at the Nomad's controls. He was free at last: free to probe the mysteries of outer space, to roam the skies with this Martian he had admired since boyhood. "Glad you came?" Mado asked his Terrestrial friend. "You bet. But tell me about yourself. How you've been and how come you've rebelled, too? I haven't seen you for a long time, you know. Why, it's been years!" "Oh, I'm all right. Guess I got fed up with things about the same way you did. Knew last time I saw you that you were feeling as I did. That's why I came after you." "But this vessel, the _Nomad_. I didn't know such a thing was in existence. How does it operate? It seems quite different from the usual ether-liners." * * * * * "It's a mystery ship. Invented and built by Thrygis, a discredited scientist of my country. Spent a fortune on it and then went broke and killed himself. I bought it from the executors for a song. They thought it was a pile of junk. But the plans and notes of the inventor were there and I studied 'em well. The ship is a marvel, Carr. Utilizes gravitational attraction and reversal as a propelling force and can go like the Old Boy himself. I've hit two thousand miles a second with her." "A second! Why, that's ten times as fast as the regular liners! Must use a whale of a lot of fuel. And where do you keep it? The fuel, I mean." "Make it right on board. I'm telling you Carr, the _Nomad_ has no equal. She's a corker." "I'll say she is. But what do you mean--make the fuel?" "Cosmic rays. Everywhere in space you know. Seems they are the result of violent concentrations of energy that cause the birth of atoms. Thrygis doped out a collector of these rays that takes 'em from their paths and concentrates 'em in a retort where there's a spongy metal catalyst that never deteriorates. Here there is a reaction to the original action out in space and new atoms are born, simple ones of hydrogen. But what could be sweeter for use in one of our regular atomic motors? The energy of disintegration is used to drive the generators of the artificial gravity field, and there you are. Sounds complicated, but really isn't. And nothing to get out of whack either." * * * * * "Beats the rocket motors and bulky fuel of the regular liners a mile, doesn't it? But since when are you a navigator, Mado?" "Don't need to be a navigator with the _Nomad_. She's automatic, once the controls are set. Say we wish to visit Venus. The telescope is sighted on that body and the gravity forces adjusted so we'll be attracted in that direction and repelled in the opposite direction. Then we can go to bed and forget it. The movement of the body in its orbit makes no difference because the force follows wherever it goes. See? The speed increases until the opposing forces are equal, when deceleration commences and we gradually slow down until within ten thousand miles of the body, when the _Nomad_ automatically stops. Doesn't move either, until we awaken to take the controls. How's that for simple?" "Good enough. But suppose a wandering meteor or a tiny asteroid gets in the way? At our speed it wouldn't have to be as big as your fist to go through us like a shot." "All taken care of, my dear Carr. I told you Thrygis was a wiz. Such a happenstance would disturb the delicate balance of the energy compensators and the course of the _Nomad_ would instantly alter to dodge the foreign object. Once passed by, the course would again be resumed." "Some ship, the _Nomad_!" Carr was delighted with the explanations. "I'm sold on her and on the trip. Where are we now and where bound?" * * * * * Mado glanced at the instrument board. "Nearly a million miles out and headed for that Sargasso Sea I told you about," he said. "It isn't visible in the telescope, but I've got it marked by the stars. Out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, a quarter of a billion miles away. But we'll average better than a thousand miles a second. Be there in three days of your time." "How can there be a sea out there in space?" "Oh, that's just my name for it. Most peculiar thing, though. There's a vast, billowy sort of a cloud. Twists and weaves around as if alive. Looks like seaweed or something; and Carr, I swear there are things floating around in it. Wrecks. Something damn peculiar, anyway. I vow I saw a signal. People marooned there or something. Sorta scared me and I didn't stay around for long as there was an awful pull from the mass. Had to use full reversal of the gravity force to get away." "Now why didn't you tell me that before? That's something to think about. Like the ancient days of ocean-going ships on Earth." "Tell you? How could I tell you? You've been questioning me ever since I first saw you and I've been busy every minute answering you." Carr laughed and slid from his seat to the floor. He felt curiously light and loose-jointed. A single step carried him to one of the stanchions of the control cabin and he clung to it for a moment to regain his equilibrium. "What's wrong?" he demanded. "No internal gravity mechanism on the _Nomad_?" "Sure is. But it's adjusted for Martian gravity. You'll get along, but it wouldn't be so easy for me with Earth gravity. I'd have to wear the portable G-ray all the time, and that's not so comfortable. All right with you?" "Oh, certainly. I didn't understand." * * * * * Carr saw that his friend had unstrapped the black box from his shoulders. He didn't blame him. Glad he wasn't a Martian. It was mighty inconvenient for them on Venus or Terra. Their bodies, large and of double the specific gravity, were not easily handled where gravity was nearly three times their own. The Venusians and Terrestrials were more fortunate when on Mars, for they could become accustomed to the altered conditions. Only had to be careful they didn't overdo. He remembered vividly a quick move he had made on his first visit to Mars. Carried him twenty feet to slam against a granite pedestal. Bad cut that gave him, and the exertion in the rarefied atmosphere had him gasping painfully. He walked to one of the ports and peered through its thick window. Mado was fussing with the controls. The velvety blackness of the heavens; the myriad diamond points of clear brilliance. Cold, too, it looked out there, and awesomely vast. The sun and Earth had been left behind and could not be seen. But Carr didn't care. The heavens were marvelous when viewed without the obstruction of an atmosphere. But he'd seen them often enough on his many business trips to Mars and Venus. "Ready for bed?" Mado startled him with a tap on the shoulder. "Why--if you say so. But you haven't shown me through the _Nomad_ yet." "All the time in the universe for that. Man, don't you realize you're free? Come, let's grab some sleep. Need it out here. The ship'll be here when we wake up. She's flying herself right now. Fast, too." Carr looked at the velocity indicator. Seven hundred miles a second and still accelerating! He felt suddenly tired and when Mado opened the door of a sleeping cabin its spotless bunk looked very inviting. He turned in without protest. CHAPTER III _A Message_ The days passed quickly, whether measured by the Martian chronometer aboard the _Nomad_ or by Carr's watch, which he was regulating to match the slightly longer day of the red planet. He was becoming proficient in the operation of all mechanisms of the ship and had developed a fondness for its every appointment. Behind them the sun was losing much of its blinding magnificence as it receded into the ebon background of the firmament. The Earth was but one of the countless worlds visible through the stern ports, distinguishable by its slightly greenish tinge. They had reached the vicinity of the phenomenon of space Mado had previously discovered. Carr found himself seething with excitement as the _Nomad_ was brought to a drifting speed. Mado, who had disclaimed all knowledge of navigation, was busy in the turret with a sextant. He made rapid calculations based on its indications and hurried to the controls. "Find it?" Carr asked. "Yep. Be there in a half hour." The nose of the vessel swung around and Mado adjusted the gravity energy carefully. Carr glued his eye to the telescope. "See anything?" inquired Mado. "About a million stars, that's all." "Funny. Should be close by." Then: "Yes! Yes! I see it!" Carr exulted. "A milky cloud. Transparent almost. To the right a little more!" The mysterious cloud rushed to meet them and soon was visible to the naked eye through the forward port. Their speed increased alarmingly and Mado cut off the energy. "What's that?" Mado stared white-faced at his friend. "A voice! You hear it too?" "Yes. Listen!" Amazed, they gazed at each other. It was a voice; yet not a sound came to their ears. The voice was in their own consciousness. A mental message! Yet each heard and understood. There were no words, but clear mental images. "Beware!" it seemed to warn. "Come not closer, travelers from afar. There is danger in the milky fleece before you!" * * * * * Mado pulled frantically at the energy reverse control. The force was now fully repelling. Still the billowing whiteness drew nearer. It boiled and bubbled with the ferocity of one of the hot lava cauldrons of Mercury. Changing shape rapidly, it threw out long streamers that writhed and twisted like the arms of an octopus. Reaching. Searching for victims! "God!" whispered Carr. "What is it?" "Take warning," continued the voice that was not a voice. "A great ship, a royal ship from a world unknown to you, now is caught in the grip of this mighty monster. We can not escape, and death draws quickly near. But we can warn others and ask that our fate be reported to our home body." A sudden upheaval of the monstrous mass spewed forth an object that bounced a moment on the rippling surface and then was lost to view. A sphere, glinting golden against the white of its awful captor. "The space-ship!" gasped Mado. "It's vanished again!" They hurtled madly in the direction of this monster of the heavens, their reverse energy useless. "We're lost, Mado." Carr was calm now. This was excitement with a vengeance. He'd wished for it and here it was. But he'd much rather have a chance to fight for his life. Fine ending to his dreams! "Imps of the canals! The thing's alive!" Mado hurled himself at the controls as a huge blob of the horrible whiteness broke loose from the main body and wobbled uncertainly toward them. A long feeler reached forth and grasped the errant portion, returning it with a vicious jerk. "Turn back! Turn back!" came the eery warning from the golden sphere. "All is over for us. Our hull is crushed. The air is pouring from our last compartment. Already we find breathing difficult. Turn back! The third satellite of the fifth planet is our home. Visit it, we beseech you, and report the manner of our going. This vile creature of space has power to draw you to its breast, to crush you as we are crushed." * * * * * The _Nomad_ lurched and shuddered, drawn ever closer to the horrid mass of the thing. A gigantic jellyfish, that's what it was, a hundred miles across! Carr shivered in disgust as it throbbed anew, sending out those grasping streamers of its mysterious material. As the _Nomad_ plunged to its doom with increasing speed, Mado tried to locate some spot in the universe where an extreme effect could be obtained from the full force of the attracting or repulsive energies. They darted this way and that but always found themselves closer to the milky billows that now were pulsating in seeming eagerness to engulf the new victim. Once more came the telepathic warning, "Delay no longer. It is high time you turned back. You must escape to warn our people and yours. Even now the awful creature has us in its vitals, its tentacles reaching through our shattered walls, creeping and twining through the passages of our vessel. Crushing floors and walls, its demoniac energies heating our compartment beyond belief. We can hold out no longer. Go! Go quickly. Remember--the third satellite of the fifth planet--to the city of golden domes. Tell of our fate. Our people will understand. You--" The voice was stilled. Mado groaned as if in pain and Carr saw in that instant that each knob and lever on the control panel glowed with an unearthly brush discharge. Not violet as of high frequency electricity, but red. Cherry red as of heated metal. The emanations of the cosmic monster were at work on the _Nomad_. A glance through the forward port showed they had but a few miles to go. They'd be in the clutches of the horror in minutes, seconds, at the rate they were traveling. Mado slumped in his seat, his proud head rolling grotesquely on his breast. He slid to the floor, helpless. * * * * * Carr went mad with fury. It couldn't be! This thing of doom was a creature of his imagination! But no--there it was, looming close in his vision. By God, he'd leave the mark of the _Nomad_ on the vicious thing! He remembered the ray with which the vessel was armed. He was in the pilot's seat, fingering controls that blistered his hands and cramped his arms with an unnameable force. He'd fight the brute! Full energy--head on--that was the way to meet it. Why bother with the reversal? It was no use. A blood-red veil obscured his vision. He felt for the release of the ray; pulled the gravity energy control to full power forward. In a daze, groping blindly for support, he waited for the shock of impact. The mass of that monstrosity must be terrific, else why had it such a power of attraction for other bodies? Or was it that the thing radiated energies unknown to science? Whatever it was, the thing would know the sting of the _Nomad's_ ray. Whatever its nature, animate or inanimate, it was matter. The ray destroyed matter. Obliterated it utterly. Tore the atoms asunder, whirling their electrons from their orbits with terrific velocity. There'd be some effect, that was certain! No great use perhaps. But a crater would mark the last resting place of the _Nomad_; a huge crater. Perhaps the misty whiteness would close in over them later. But there'd be less of the creature's bulk to menace other travelers in space. His head ached miserably; his body was shot through and through with cramping agonies. The very blood in his veins was liquid fire, searing his veins and arteries with pulsing awfulness. He staggered from the control cabin; threw himself on his bunk. The covers were electrified and clung to him like tissue to rubbed amber. The wall of the sleeping cabin vibrated with a screeching note. The floors trembled. Madness! That's all it was! He'd awaken in a moment. Find himself in his own bed at home. He'd dreamed of adventures before now. But never of such as this! It just couldn't happen! A nightmare--fantasy of an over-tired brain--it was. There came a violent wrench that must have torn the hull plates from their bracings. The ship seemed to close in on him and crush him. A terrific concussion flattened him to the bunk. Then all was still. Carr Parker's thoughts broke short abruptly. He had slipped into unconsciousness. CHAPTER IV _Europa_ When Carr opened his eyes it was to the normal lighting of his own sleeping cabin. The _Nomad_ was intact, though an odor of scorched varnish permeated the air. They were unharmed--as yet. He turned on his side and saw that Mado was moving about at the side of his couch. Good old Mado! With a basin of water in his hand and a cloth. He'd been bathing his face. Brought him to. He sat up just as Mado turned to apply the cloth anew. "Good boy, Carr! All right?" smiled the Martian. "Little dizzy. But I'm okay." Carr sprang to his feet where he wabbled uncertainly for a moment. "But the _Nomad?_" he asked. "Is she--are we safe?" "Never safer. What in the name of Saturn did you do?" Carr passed his hand across his eyes, trying to remember. "The D-ray," he said. "I turned it on and dived into the thing with full attraction. Then--I forget. Where is it--the thing, I mean?" "Look!" Mado drew him to the stern compartment. Far behind them there shone a misty wreath, a ring of drifting matter that writhed and twisted as if in mortal agony. "Is that it?" "What's left of it. You shot your way through it; through and out of its influence. D-ray must have devitalized the thing as it bored through. Killed its energies--for the time, at least." Already, the thing was closing in. Soon there would be a solid mass as before. But the _Nomad_ was saved. "How about yourself?" asked Carr anxiously. "Last time I saw you you were flat on the floor." "Nothing wrong with me now. A bit stiff and sore, that's all. When I came to I put all the controls in neutral and came looking for you. I was scared, but the thing's all over now, so let's go." "Where?" "Europa." "Where's that?" "Don't you remember? The third satellite of the fifth planet. That's Europa, third in distance from Jupiter, the fifth planet. It is about the size of Terra's satellite--your Moon. We'll find the city of the golden domes." * * * * * Carr's eyes renewed their sparkle. "Right!" he exclaimed. "I forgot the mental message. Poor devils! All over for them now. But we'll carry their message. How far is it?" "Don't know yet till I determine our position and the position of Jupiter. But it's quite a way. Jupiter's 483 million miles from the Sun, you know." "We're more than half way, then." "Not necessarily. Perhaps we're on the opposite side of the sun from Jupiter's present position. Then we'd have a real trip." "Let's figure it out." Carr was anxious to be off. Luck was with them, as they found after some observations from the turret. Jupiter lay off their original course by not more than fifteen degrees. It was but four days' journey. Again they were on their way and the two men, Martian and Terrestrial, made good use of the time in renewing their old friendship and in the study of astronomy as they had done during the first leg of their journey. Though of widely differing build and nature, the two found a close bond in their similar inclinations. The library of the Nomad was an excellent one. Thrygis had seen to that, all of the voice-vision reels being recorded in Cos, the interplanetary language, with its standardized units of weight and measurement. * * * * * The supplies on board the _Nomad_ were ample. Synthetic foods there were for at least a hundred Martian days. The supply of oxygen and water was inexhaustible, these essential items being produced in automatic retorts where disassembled electrons from their cosmic-ray hydrogen were reassembled in the proper structure to produce atoms of any desired element. Their supply of synthetic food could be replenished in like manner when necessity arose. Thrygis had forgotten nothing. "How do you suppose we'll make ourselves understood to the people of Europa?" asked Carr, when they had swung around the great orb of Jupiter and were headed toward the satellite. "Shouldn't have any trouble, Carr. Believe me, to a people who have progressed to the point of sending mental messages over five hundred miles of space, it'll be a cinch, understanding our simple mental processes. Bet they'll read our every thought." "That's right. But the language. Proper names and all that. Can't get those over with thought waves." "No, but I'll bet they'll have some way of solving that too. You wait and see." Carr lighted a cigar and inhaled deeply as he gazed from one of the ports. He'd never felt better in his life. Always had liked Martian tobacco, too. Wondered what they'd do when the supply ran out. One thing they couldn't produce synthetically. The disc of the satellite loomed near and it shone with a warmly inviting light. Almost red, like the color of Mars, it was. Sort of golden, rather. Anyway, he wondered what awaited them there. This was a great life, this roaming in space, unhampered by laws or conventions. The _Nomad_ was well named. "Wonder what they'll think of our yarn," he said. "And me. I wonder, too, what that ungodly thing was back there. The thing that is now the grave of some of their people. And what the golden sphere was doing so far from home. It's a mystery." * * * * * They had gone over the same ground a hundred times and had not reached a satisfactory conclusion. But perhaps they'd learn more in the city of golden domes. "Another thing," said Carr, "that's puzzled me. Why is it that Europa has not been discovered before this; that it's inhabited, I mean?" "Rocket ships couldn't carry enough fuel. Besides, our astronomers've always told us that the outer planets were too cold; too far from the sun." "That is something to think about. Maybe we'll not be able to stand the low temperature; thin atmosphere; low surface gravity." "We've our insulated suits and the oxygen helmets for the first two objections. The G-rays'll hold us down in any gravity. But we'll see mighty soon. We're here." They had entered the atmosphere as they talked and the _Nomad_ was approaching the surface in a long glide with repulsion full on. It was daytime on the side they neared. Pale daylight, but revealing. The great ball that was Jupiter hung low on the horizon, its misty outline faintly visible against the deep green of the sky. * * * * * The surface over which they skimmed was patchworked with farm-lands and crisscrossed by gleaming ribbons. Roadways! It was like the voice-vision records of the ancient days on Mars and Terra before their peoples had taken to the air. Here was a body where a person could get out in the open; next to nature. They crossed a lake of calm green water fringed by golden sands. At its far side a village spread out beneath them and was gone; a village of broad pavements and circular dwellings with flat rooms, each with its square of ground. A golden, mountain range loomed in the background; vanished beneath them. More fields and roads. Everywhere there were yellows and reds and the silver sheen of the roads. No green save that of the darkening sky and the waters of the streams and ponds. It was a most inviting panorama. Occasionally they passed a vessel of the air--strange flapping-winged craft that soared and darted like huge birds. Once one of them approached so closely they could see its occupants, seemingly a people similar to the Venusians, small of stature and slender. "How in time are we to find this city of golden domes?" Carr ejaculated. As if in answer to his question there came a startling command, another of the mental messages. "Halt!" it conveyed to their mind. "Continue not into our country until we have communed with you." Obediently Mado brought up the nose of the _Nomad_ and slowed her down to a gradual stop. They hovered at an altitude of about four thousand feet, both straining their ears as if listening for actual speech. "It is well," continued the message. "Your thoughts are good. You come from afar seeking the city of golden domes. Proceed now and a fleet of our vessels will meet you and guide you to our city." "Now wouldn't that jar you?" whispered Carr. "Just try to get away with anything on this world." Mado laughed as he started the generators of the propelling energy. "I'd hate to have a wife of Europa," he commented. "No sitting-up-with-sick-friend story could get by with her!" CHAPTER V _The City of Golden Domes_ With the _Nomad_ cruising slowly over the surface of the peaceful satellite, Mado sampled the atmosphere through a tube which was provided for that purpose. The pressure was low, as they had expected; about twenty inches of mercury in the altitude at which they drifted. But the oxygen content was fairly high and the impurities negligible. A strange element was somewhat in evidence, though Mado's analysis showed this to be present in but minute quantity. They opened the ports and drew their first breath of the atmosphere of Europa. "Good air, Carr." Mado was sniffing at one of the ports. "A bit rare for you, but I think you'll get along with it. Temperature of forty-five degrees. That's not so bad. The strangest thing is the gravity. This body isn't much more than two thousand miles in diameter, yet its gravity is about the same as on Venus--seven eighths of that of Terra. Must have a huge nickel-iron core." "Yes. It'll be a cinch for me. But you, you big lummox--it's the G-ray for you as long as we're here." "Uh-huh. You get all the breaks, don't you?" Carr laughed. He was becoming anxious to land. "What sort of a reception do you suppose we'll get?" he said. "Not bad, from the tone of that last message. And here they come, Carr. Look--a dozen of them. A royal reception, so far." Suddenly they were in the midst of a flock of great birds; birds that flapped their golden wings to rise, then soared and circled like the gulls of the terrestrial oceans. And these mechanical birds were fast. Carr and Mado watched in fascination as they strung out in V formation and led the way in the direction of the setting sun. Six, seven hundred miles an hour the _Nomad's_ indicator showed, as they swung in behind these ships of Europa. * * * * * They crossed a large body of water, a lake of fully five hundred miles in width. More country then, hardly populated now and with but few of the gleaming roadways. The sun had set, but there was scarcely any diminution of the light for the great ball that was Jupiter reflected a brilliance of far greater intensity than that of the full Moon on a clear Terrestrial night. A marvelous sight the gigantic body presented, with its alternate belts of gray-blue and red and dazzling white. And it hung so low and huge in the heavens that it seemed one had but to stretch forth a hand to touch its bright surface. Another mountain range loomed close and was gone. On its far side there stretched the desolate wastes of a desert, a barren plain that extended in all directions to the horizon. Wind-swept, it was and menacing beneath them. Europa was not all as they had first seen it. A glimmer of brightness appeared at the horizon. The fleet was reducing speed and soon they saw that their journey was nearly over. At the far edge of the desert the bright spot resolved itself into the outlines of a city, the city of golden domes. Cones they looked like, rather, with rounded tops and fluted walls. The mental message had conveyed the most fitting description possible without words or picture. The landing was over so quickly that they had but confused impressions of their reception. A great square in the heart of the city, crowded with people. Swooping maneuvers of hundreds of the bird-like ships. An open space for their arrival. The platform where a committee awaited them. The king, or at least he seemed to be king. The sea of upturned faces, staring eyes. * * * * * Mado fidgeted and opened his mouth to voice a protest but Carr nudged him into silence. The king had risen from his seat in the circle on the platform and was about to address them. There was no repetition of the telepathic means of communication. "Welcome, travelers from the inner planets," said the king. He spoke Cos perfectly! "Cardos, emperor of the body you call Europa, salutes you. Our scientists have recorded your thoughts with their psycho-ray apparatus and have learned that you have a message for us, a message we fear is not pleasant. Am I correct?" Carr stared at the soft-voiced monarch of this remarkable land. It was incredible that he spoke in the universal language of the inner planets! "Your Highness," he replied, "is correct. We have a message. But it amazes us that you are familiar with our language." "That we shall explain later. Meanwhile--the message!" "The message," Carr said, "is not pleasant. A golden sphere out in space. Helpless in the clutches of a nameless monster, a vast creature of jellylike substance but possessed of enormous destructive energy. A mental message to our vessel warning us away and bidding us to come here; to tell you of their fate. We escaped and here we are." The face of Cardos paled. He reached for an egg-shaped crystal that reposed on the table; spoke rapidly into its shimmering depths. Hidden amplifiers carried his voice throughout the square in booming tones. It was a strange tongue he spoke, with many gutturals and sibilants. A groan came up from the assembled multitude. Cardos tossed the crystal to the table with a resigned gesture, then tottered and swayed. Instant confusion reigned in the square and the emperor was assisted from the platform by two of his retainers. They never saw him again. * * * * * One of the counsellors, a middle-aged man with graying russet hair and large gray eyes set in a perfectly smooth countenance, stepped from the platform and grasped the two adventurers as the confusion in the square increased to an uproar. "Come," he whispered, in excellent Cos; "I'll explain all to you in the quiet of my own apartments. I am Detis, a scientist, and my home is close by." Gently he clung to them as the larger men forced their way between the milling groups of excited Europans. No one gave them much attention. All seemed to be overcome with grief. A terrible disaster, this loss of the golden sphere must be! They were out of the square and in one of the broad streets. The fluted sides of the unpointed cones shone softly golden on all sides. Alike in every respect were these dwellings of the people of Europa, and strangely attractive in the light of the mother planet. Not a word was spoken when they reached the abode of their guide. They entered an elaborate hall and were whisked upward in an automatic elevator. Detis ushered them into his apartment when they alighted. He smiled gravely at their looks of wonder as they cast eyes on the maze of apparatus before them. It was a laboratory rather than a living room in which they stood. Detis led them to an adjoining room where he bid them be seated. They exchanged wondering glances as their host paced the floor vigorously before speaking further. "Friends," he finally blurted, "I hope you'll excuse my emotion but the news you brought is a terrible blow to me as to all Europa. Carli, our prince, beloved son of Cardos, was commander of the ship you reported lost. We deeply mourn his loss." * * * * * Carr and Mado waited in respectful silence while their host made effort to control his feelings. "Now," he said, after a moment, "I can talk. You have many questions to ask, I know. So have I. But first I must tell you that Carli's was an expedition to your own worlds. A grave danger hangs over them and he was sent to warn them. He has been lost. Our only space-ship capable of making the journey also is lost. Six Martian years were required to build it, so I fear the warning will never reach your people. Already the time draws near." "A grave danger?" asked Mado. "What sort of a danger?" "War! Utter destruction! Conquest by the most warlike and ambitious people in the solar system." "Not the people of Europa?" asked Carr. "Indeed not. There is another inhabited satellite of Jupiter, next farthest from the mother planet. Ganymede, you call it. It is from there that these conquerors are to set forth." "Many of them?" inquired Mado. "Two million or so. They're prepared to send an army of more than a tenth of that number on the first expedition." "A mere handful!" Carr was contemptuous. "True, but they are armed with the most terrible of weapons. Your people are utterly unprepared and, unless warned, will be driven from their cities and left in the deserts to perish of hunger and exposure. This is a real danger." "Something in it, Carr, if what he says is true. We've no arms nor warriors. Haven't had for two centuries. You know it as well as I do." "Bah! Overnight we could have a million armed and ready to fight them off." * * * * * Detis raised his hand. "You offend me," he said gravely. "I have told you this in good faith and you reward me with disbelief and boastful talk. Your enemies are more powerful than you think, and your own people utterly defenceless against them." "I'm sorry," Carr apologized, "and I'll listen to all you have to say. Surely your prince has not given his life in vain." He was ashamed before this scientist of Europa. A tinkling feminine voice from the next room called something in the Europan tongue. Detis raised his head proudly and his frown softened at the sound of dainty footsteps. His voice was a caress as he replied. A vision of feminine loveliness stood framed in the doorway and the visitors rose hastily from their seats. Carr gazed into eyes of the deepest blue he had ever seen. Small in stature though this girl of Europa was--not more than five feet tall--she had the form of a goddess and the face of an angel. He was flushing to the roots of his hair. Could feel it spread. What an ass he was anyway! Anyone'd think he'd never seen a woman in all his thirty-five years! "My daughter, Ora, gentlemen," said Detis. The girl's eyes had widened as she looked at the huge Martian with the funny black box on his back. They dropped demurely when turned to those of the handsome Terrestrial. "Oh," she said, in Cos, "I didn't know you had callers." CHAPTER VI _Vlor-urdin_ The time passed quickly in Pala-dar, city of the golden domes. Detis spent many hours in the laboratory with his two visitors and the fair Ora was usually at his side. She was an efficient helper to her father and a gracious hostess to the guests. The amazement of the visitors grew apace as the wonders of Europan science were revealed to them. They sat by the hour at the illuminated screen of the rulden, that remarkable astronomical instrument which brought the surfaces of distant celestial bodies within a few feet of their eyes, and the sounds of the streets and the jungles to their ears. It was no longer a mystery how the language of Cos had become so familiar to these people. They learned of the origin of the races that inhabited Europa and Ganymede. Ages before, it was necessary for the peoples of the then thickly populated Jupiter to cast about for new homes due to the cooling of the surface of that planet. Life was becoming unbearable. In those days there were two dominant races on the mother body, a gentle and peaceful people of great scientific accomplishment and a race of savage brutes who, while very clever with their hands, were of lesser mental strength and of a quarrelsome and fighting disposition. Toward the last the population of both main countries was reduced to but a few survivors, and the intelligent race had discovered a means of traversing space and was prepared to leave the planet for the more livable satellite--Europa. Learning of these plans, the others made a treaty of perpetual peace as a price for their passage to another satellite--Ganymede. The migration began and the two satellites were settled by the separate bands of pioneers and their new lives begun. * * * * * The perpetual treaty had not been broken since, but the energies of the warlike descendants of those first settlers of Ganymede were expended in casting about for new fields to conquer. Through the ages they cast increasingly covetous eyes on those inner planets, Mars, Terra and Venus. Not having the advantage of the Rulden, they knew of these bodies only what could be seen through their own crude optical instruments and what they had learned by word of mouth from certain renegade Europans they were able to bribe. While their neighbors of the smaller satellite were engaged in peaceful pursuits, tilling the soil and making excellent homes for themselves, the dwellers on Ganymede were fashioning instruments of warfare and building a fleet of space-ships to carry them to their intended victims. It was a religion with them; they could think of nothing else. An unscrupulous scientist of Europa sold himself to them several generations previously and it was this scientist who had made the plans for their space-fliers and had contrived the deadly weapons with which they were armed. He likewise taught them the language of Cos and it now was spoken universally throughout Ganymede in anticipation of the glorious days of conquest. "You honestly believe them able to do this?" asked Carr, still skeptical after two days of discussion. "I know it as a certainty," Detis replied solemnly. "It is only during the past generation we have learned of the completeness and awfulness of their preparations. Your people can not combat their sound-ray. With it they can remain outside the vision of those on the surface and set the tall buildings of your cities in harmonic vibrations that will bring them down in ruins about the ears of the populace." * * * * * "There'll be nothing left for them to take if they destroy all our cities: nowhere for them to live. I don't get it." "Only a few will be destroyed completely, to terrify the rest of the inhabitants of your worlds. Others will be depopulated by means of vibrations that will kill off the citizens without harming the cities themselves--vibrations which are capable of blanketing a large area and raising the body temperature of all living things therein to a point where death will ensue in a very few minutes. Other vibrations will paralyze all electrical equipment on the planet and make it impossible for your ships of the air to set out to give battle, even were they properly armed." "Looks bad, Carr," said Mado glumly. "It does that. We've got to go back and carry the warning." "I fear it is too late," said Detis. "Much time will be needed in which to develop a defense and surely it can not be done within the three isini before they set forth--about four of your days." "They leave that soon?" Carr was taken aback. "Yes, with their one hundred and twenty vessels; forty to each of your three planets; seventeen hundred men to a vessel." Carr jumped to his feet. "By the heat devils of Mercury!" he roared, "well go to their lousy little satellite and find a way to prevent it!" * * * * * Ora gazed at his flushed face with unconcealed admiration. "You're crazy!" exploded Mado. "What can we do with the _Nomad_?" "Her D-ray can do plenty of damage." "Yes, but they'd have us down before we could account for five of their vessels. It's no use, I tell you." But Carr was stubborn. "We'll pay them a call anyway. I'll bet we can dope out some way of putting it over on them. Are you game?" "Of course I'm game. I'll go anywhere you will. But it's a fool idea just the same." "Maybe so. Maybe not. Anyway--let's go." "Just a moment, gentlemen," Detis interposed. "How about me?" Carr stared at him and saw that his eyes shone with excitement. "Why, I believe you'd like to go with us!" he exclaimed admiringly. "I would, indeed." "Come on then. We're off." He was impatient to be gone. Detis busied himself with a small apparatus that folded into a compact case, explaining that it was one that might prove useful. Ora left the room but quickly returned. She too carried a small case, and she had donned a snug fitting leather garment that covered her from neck to knees. "What's this?" demanded Carr. "Surely Miss Ora does not intend to come with us?" "She never leaves my side," said Detis proudly. "Nothing doing!" Carr stated emphatically. "There'll be plenty of danger on this trip. Well have no woman along--least of all your charming daughter." * * * * * Mado was leaving everything to his friend, but he grinned in anticipation when he saw the look of anger on the girl's face. She stamped her little foot and faced Carr valiantly. "See here, Mr. Carr Parker!" she stormed. "I'm no weakling. I'm the daughter of my father and where he goes I go. You'll take me or I'll never speak to you again." Carr flushed. He was accustomed to his own way in most things and entirely unused to the ways of the gentler sex. He could have shaken the little vixen! But now she was standing before him and there was something in those great blue eyes besides anger; something that set his heart pounding madly. "All right!" he agreed desperately, "have your own way." He turned on his heel and strode to the door. Giving in to this slip of a girl! What a fool he was! But it would be great at that to have her along in the _Nomad_. They found the public square deserted, the gilded dwellings hung with somber colors in mourning for Carli. Ora and Detis were very quiet and preoccupied when they entered the _Nomad_. The five isini of lamentation for the young prince had not yet passed. The two Europans were delighted with the appointments and mechanisms of the little vessel from Mars. They investigated every nook and cranny of its interior during the journey and were voluble in their praise of its inventor and builder. Neither had ever set foot in a space-flier and each was seized with a longing to explore space with these two strangers from the inner planets. They would make a couple of good vagabonds along with Mado and himself, Carr thought as they expressed their feelings. But there was more serious business at hand. They were nearing Ganymede. "Where'll we land, Detis?" Mado called from the control cabin. "Vlor-urdin. That is their chief city. I'll guide you to the location." * * * * * They took up their places at the ports and scanned the surface of the satellite as Mado dropped the ship into its atmosphere. A far different scene was presented than on Europa. The land was seamed and scarred, the colors of the foliage somber. Grays and browns predominated and the jungles seemed impenetrable. A river swung into view and its waters were black as the deepest night, its flow sluggish. A rank mist hung over the surface. "The river of Charis!" exclaimed Detis. "Follow it, Mado. No, the other direction. There! It leads directly to Vlor-urdin." By good chance they had entered the atmosphere at a point not far from their destination. In less than an hour by the _Nomad's_ chronometer the towers of Vlor-urdin were sighted. It was a larger city than Pala-dar and of vastly different appearance. A hollow square of squat buildings enclosed the vast workshops and storage space of the fleet of war vessels. Their huge spherical bulks rose from their cradles in tier after tier that stretched as far as the eye could reach when the _Nomad_ had dropped to a level but slightly above the tips of the highest spires. The spires were everywhere, decorative towers at the corners of the squat buildings. Everything was black, the vessels of the fleet, the squat buildings and the spires of Vlor-urdin. Death was in the air. Rank vapor drifted in through the opened ports. There was silence in the city below them and silence in the _Nomad_. Ora shuddered and drew closer to him. Carr was aware of her nearness and a lump rose in his throat. A horrible fear assailed him. Fear for the safety of the dainty Europan at his side. He found her hand; covered it protectingly with his own. CHAPTER VII _Rapaju_ Detis was setting up and adjusting the complicated mechanisms of his little black case. A dozen vacuum tubes lighted, and a murmur of throbbing energy came from a helix of shining metallic ribbon that topped the whole. Flexible cables led to a cap-like contrivance which Detis placed on his head. He frowned in concentration. "The psycho-ray apparatus." Ora explained. "He's sending a message to the city." Evidently the influence of the ray was directive. They had no inkling of the thoughts transmitted from the alert brain of the scientist but, from the look of satisfaction on his face, they could see that he was obtaining the desired contact. "Rapaju," he exclaimed, switching off the power of his instrument, "commander of the fleet of the Llotta. I have advised him of our arrival. Told him that a Martian and a Terrestrial wish to treat with him concerning the proposed invasion of their planets. His answering thought first was of fiercest rage, then conciliatory in nature. He'll receive you and listen to your arguments, though he promises nothing. Is that satisfactory?" "Yes." Carr and Mado were agreed. At least it would give them a chance to look over the ground and to make plans, should any occur to them. The _Nomad_ circled over the heart of the city and soon Mado saw a suitable landing space. They settled gracefully in an open area close by the building indicated by Detis as that of the administration officials of the city. * * * * * A group of squat, sullen Llotta awaited them and, without speaking a word either of hatred or welcome, led them into the forbidding entrance of the building. Close-set, beady eyes; unbelievably flat features of chalky whiteness; chunky bowed legs, bare and hairy; long arms with huge dangling paws--these were the outstanding characteristics of the Llotta. Mado stared straight before him, refusing to display any great interest in the loathsome creatures, but Carr was frankly curious and as frankly disapproving. Rapaju leered maliciously when the four voyagers stood before him. He looked the incarnation of all that was evil and vile, a monster among monsters. Sensing him to be the more aggressive of the two visitors from doomed planets, he addressed his remarks to Carr. "You come to plead with Rapaju," he sneered, his Cos tinged with an outlandish accent, "to beg for the worthless lives of your compatriots; for the wealth of your cities?" "We come to reason with you," replied Carr haughtily, "if you are capable of reasoning. What is this incredible thing you are planning?" Mado gasped at the effrontery of his friend. But Carr was oblivious of the warning looks cast in his direction. "Enough of that!" snapped Rapaju. "I'll do the talking--you the reasoning. I've a proposition to make to you, and if you know what's best, you'll agree. Otherwise you'll be first of the Terrestrials to die. Is that clear?" "Clear enough, all right," growled Carr. "What do you mean--a proposition?" "Ha! I thought you'd listen. My offer is the lives of you and your companion in exchange for your assistance in guiding my fleet to the capital cities of your countries. Not that our plans will be changed if you refuse, but that much time will be saved in this manner and quick victory made certain without undue sacrifice of valuable property." "You--you--!" Carr stammered in anger. But there was no use in raising a rumpus--now. They'd only kill him. Something might be accomplished if he pretended to accede. "Go on with your story," he finished lamely. "In addition to sparing your lives I'll place you both in high position after we seize your respective planets. Make you chief officers in the prison lands we intend to establish for your countrymen. What do you say?" "Will you give us time to talk it over and think about it?" "Until the hour of departure, if you wish." * * * * * Carr bowed, avoiding Mado's questioning eyes. He looked at Ora where she stood at the side of Detis. She flashed him a guarded smile. He knew that she understood. Rapaju relaxed. He was confident he could bribe these puerile foreigners to help him in the great venture. And sadly he needed such help. The Llotta were not navigators. Their knowledge of the heavens was sadly incomplete. They had no maps of the surfaces of the planets to be visited. Their simultaneous blows would be far more effective and the campaign much shorter if they could choose the most vital centers for the initial attacks. "Now," he said, "that we understand one another, let us talk further of the plans. Then you will be able to consider carefully before making your decision." Rapaju could be diplomatic when he wished. Carr longed to sink his fingers in the hairy throat. But he smiled hypocritically and found an opportunity to wink meaningly at Mado. This was going to be good! And who knew?--perhaps they might find some way to outwit these mad savages. To think of them in control of the inner planets was revolting. They retired to a small room with Rapaju and four of his lieutenants, Detis and Ora accompanying them. Ora sat close to Carr at the circular table in Rapaju's council. Carr thought grimly of the board meetings in far away New York. Rapaju talked. He told of the armament of his vessels, painting vivid pictures of the destruction to be wrought in the cities of Terra, of Mars and Venus. His great hairy paws clutched at imaginary riches when he spoke glowingly of the plundering to follow. He spoke of the women of the inner planets and Carr half rose from his seat when he observed the lecherous glitter in his beady eyes. Ora! Great God, was she safe here? He stole a glance at the girl and a recurrence of the awful fear surged through him. In her leather garment, close fitting and severe, she looked like a boy. Perhaps they would not know. Besides, there was the perpetual treaty with Europa. It always had been observed, Detis said. * * * * * As Rapaju expanded upon the glories to come he told perforce of many of the details of the plans. One thing stood out in Carr's mind: the vessels of the Llotta were not equal to the _Nomad_ in many respects. They must carry their entire supply of fuel from the starting point and this was calculated as but a small percentage in excess of that required to carry them to their destinations. Their speed was not as great as the _Nomad's_ by at least a third. If the _Nomad_ led the fleet from Ganymede they might be able to get them off their course; cause them to run out of fuel out in the vacuum and absolute zero of space. He kicked Mado under the table and arose to ask a few leading questions. Ora was whispering to her father and he nodded his head as if in complete agreement with what she was saying. These two were not deceived by his apparent traitorous talk, but Mado was aghast. Carr wondered if Rapaju believed him as did his friend. "We'll do it, Rapaju," he stated finally. "In our ship, the _Nomad_, we'll guide you across the trackless wastes of the heavens. We'll take you to our capital cities; point out to you the richest of the industrial centers. We have no love for our own worlds. Mado and I deserted them for a life of vagabondage amongst the stars. We ask no reward other than that we be permitted to leave once more on our travels, to roam space as we choose." Mado attempted to voice an objection but Carr's hand was heavy on his shoulder. "Shut up, you fool!" he hissed in his ear. "Can't you trust me?" * * * * * Rapaju's eyes seemed to draw closer together as he returned Carr's unflinching stare. He walked around the table and stood at the side of the tall Terrestrial. Suddenly he grasped Ora's jacket, tore it open at the throat. He ran his hairy fingers over the bare shoulder of the shrinking girl and gurgled his delight at the velvet smoothness of her skin. With a roar like a wild animal Carr was upon him, bearing him to the floor. His fingers were in that hairy throat, where they had itched to twine. "Dirty, filthy beast!" he was snarling. "Lay your foul hands on Ora, will you? Say your prayers, if you know any, you swine!" Then his muscles went limp and he was jerked to his feet by a terrible force, a force that sent him reeling and gasping against the wall. One of Rapaju's lieutenants stood before him with a tiny weapon in his hand, the weapon which had released the paralyzing gas he breathed. He was choking; suffocating. A black mist rose before him. He felt his knees give way. Dimly, as in a dream, he saw that Ora was in Detis' arms. Rapaju was on his feet, fingering his neck and laughing horribly. "The treaty, Rapaju!" Detis was shouting. Ora was sobbing. Mado was in the hands of two of the vile Llotta, struggling wildly to free himself. The Martian's eyes accused him. He shut his own and groaned. Opened them again. But it was no use. Everything in the room was whirling now, crazily. He fought to regain his senses, crawled weakly toward the squat figure of Rapaju where it swayed and twisted and spun around. Then all was darkness. The gas had taken its toll. CHAPTER VIII _The Expedition_ Carr awakened to a sense of wordless disgust. Fool that he was to spill the beans as he had! All set to put one over on the leader of the Llotta, then to come a cropper like this! He knew he had been spared for a purpose. The gas was not intended to kill, only to render him helpless for a time. He opened his eyes to the light of a familiar room. He had awakened before in this bed. It was his own cabin on board the _Nomad_. What had happened? Had he dreamed it all. Europa, Ora, Rapaju--all of it? He sat up and felt of his aching head. "Oh, are you awake?" a soft voice greeted him. "Ora!" he exclaimed. It was indeed she, beautiful as ever. "Sh-h," she warned, placing the tip of a finger to his lips. "They'll hear us." "Who?" he whispered. "Rapaju--his two guards. They're in the control cabin with father and Mado." "What? They've taken the _Nomad_?" "Yes. We're under way. They've forced Mado to guide them but do not trust him. Rapaju spared you as he believes you more capable. He'll hold you to your word." "Lord! But what are you doing here?" Ora dropped her eyes. "He--Rapaju--" she said, "inferred from your action in assaulting him that you were very fond of me. He holds me as a hostage for your good behavior. Father volunteered to come along. He persuaded Rapaju to allow it. Swore allegiance to his cause. Of course he wouldn't leave me." * * * * * Carr gazed at her in admiration of her courage. She had been nursing him, too! What a girl she was! "Ora," he said huskily, "Rapaju was right. I am fond of you. More than fond: I love you. I never knew I could feel this way." "Oh Carr, you mustn't!" She drew back as he scrambled to his feet. "They'll find us. We must not show that we care. Rapaju is a beast. He wants me for himself and is delaying the time only until you have brought the fleet safely to the inner planets and to their great cities. He--" "The skunk! Wants you himself, does he? Why, why didn't I kill him? But Ora, you said--you do care--" "Ha! I thought so!" Rapaju stood in the doorway, grinning mockingly at the pair. "The impetuous Terrestrial is up and about. Back at his old game!" "Please, please, for my sake, Carr!" Ora pressed him back as he tensed his muscles for a spring. "Sorry I was so slow," Carr grated, over her shoulder. "Another five seconds, Rapaju, and I'd have had your windpipe out by the roots." Rapaju scowled darkly and fingered his throat. "But, my dear Carr, you were too slow," he said, "and I live--and shall live--while you shall die. Meanwhile you'll carry out your agreement. Come, Ora." The girl hesitated a moment, then with a pleading glance at Carr stepped from the room. "All right now, Parker," snapped Rapaju. "Into your clothes and into the pilot's seat. You'll stay there, too, till the journey's over. Get busy!" One of his guards had appeared in the doorway. Carr knew that resistance was useless. Besides, seated at those controls, he might think of something. Rapaju'd never get Ora if he could help it! * * * * * Mado's shoulders drooped and his face was haggard and drawn, but he summoned a smile when he saw Carr. "Hello, Carr," he said. "You all right?" "Sure. Rapaju says I've got to take the controls." "Very well." Mado shrugged his broad shoulders and slipped from the pilot's seat. Two ugly Llotta guards were watching, ray-pistols in hand. "The chart is corrected, Carr, and--" "Never mind the conversation!" Rapaju snarled. "There'll be no talk between you at all. Beat it to your cabin, Mado." The Martian glowered and made as if to retort hotly. "But Rapaju," Detis interposed, speaking from his position at one of the ports, "they'll have to consult regarding the course of the vessel. Mado is more familiar than Carr with the navigation of space." "Shut up!" roared Rapaju. "I know what I am doing. And, what's more, you'll not converse with them, either! I'm running this expedition, and I'm not taking any chances." Detis subsided and followed Mado through the passage to the sleeping cabins. * * * * * The ensuing silence was ominous. Carr could feel the eyes of the Llotta upon him as he examined the adjustments of the controls and peeped through the telescope. A glance at the velocity indicator showed him they were traveling at a rate of eight hundred miles a second. He studied the chart and soon made out their position. Jupiter was a hundred million miles behind them and they were heading almost due sunward. The automatic control mechanism was not functioning. Evidently Mado had kept this a secret--and for a purpose. He wished he could talk with his friend. They'd plan something. "Like your job?" Rapaju was gloating over this Terrestrial who had dared to lay hands upon him. "Yes, but not the company." Carr was disdainful. "You'll like it less before I've finished with you. And get this straight. You think we're dependent on you to guide us to the inner planets, and that we'll not harm any of you until they are reached. Don't fool yourself! I've watched Mado and I've spent much time in the excellent library of the _Nomad_. I've learned plenty about the navigation of space and can reach those planets as quickly and directly as you. But it pleases me to see you work, so work you shall. I'll check you carefully, and don't think you can deceive me. Don't try to depart from the true course. The sun is my check as it is yours, and I'll keep constant tab on our position. Get it?" "A rather long speech, Rapaju." Carr grinned into the evil face of the commander. "Still defiant, eh? Suits me, Carr Parker. We'll have some nice talks here, and then--when it pleases me--you'll suffer. You shall live to see your home city crash in utter ruin; your people slain, starved, beaten. And, above all, there's Ora--" "Don't defile her name in your ugly mouth, you--!" * * * * * Carr bit his tongue to keep back the torrent of invectives that sprang to his lips. This would never do! He'd get himself bumped off before they were well started. And while there was life there was hope. He'd stick to his guns and think; think and plan. If only he could have a few words with Mado. They must get out of this mess. There must be a way! There must! Rapaju was laughing in triumph. Thought he had cowed him, did he? Boastful savage! If he could navigate the _Nomad_ himself, why didn't he? Liar! He and Mado were godsends to him, and he knew it! His speech at the council table had been the real truth. Foreign thoughts entered his mind. Detis, good old Detis, was using his thought apparatus in his own cabin! He paid no attention to the words of Rapaju when he left the control room. Detis was on the job! Between them they'd outwit this devil of Ganymede. "Keep your courage," came the message. "I've read the thoughts of Mado and he bids you examine the chart carefully. He's made some notations in the ancient language of Mars. The automatic control of the _Nomad_ can be used when necessary. He has not advised Rapaju of its existence." Carr was encouraged and he concentrated on a suitable reply. But, though he did not consciously will it, his thoughts were of Ora. Instantly there came the reassurance of her father. "Ora is not in immediate danger. Rapaju is saving her for his revenge on you. And I'm watching her constantly. A ray-pistol is concealed in my clothing, its charge ready for the foul creature in case he should lay hands on her. But you must plan an escape, and salvation for your worlds. Examine the chart at once." * * * * * He looked from the corner of his eye and saw that one of the Llotta guards was watching intently. He peered into the eye-piece of the telescope; made an inconsequential change in one of the adjustments. The guard stirred but did not arise. He looked at the chart with new interest, scanned its markings carefully. What had Mado marked for his attention? There were hundreds of notations, some in Cos and a few in the ancient Martian, all in Mado's painstaking chirography. Ah, there it was! A tiny spot almost on their course, with Mado's minute notation. Sargasso Sea! What did it mean? Did Mado intend to lead the fleet into the embrace of that dreadful monster they had so fortunately escaped? An excellent idea to save the inner planets. But suicide for them! He'd do it though, if it weren't for Ora. She was so sweet and innocent. She must not die; must not suffer. Another way must be found. He groaned aloud as he realized that her predicament was the result of his own bullheadedness. If only he hadn't insisted on the trip to Ganymede. But then there was the problem of preserving the civilization of the inner planets. It had to be met. There was a commotion behind him; a feminine shriek from the after cabins; loud shoutings from the beast called Rapaju. Carr's heart skipped a beat. He was paralyzed with fear. But only for an instant. With a bellow of rage he whirled around and started for the door, charging the two guards with head down and arms flailing. CHAPTER IX _Nemesis_ The Llotta did not use their ray-pistols. They were too busy attempting to elude the mad rushes of the powerful Terrestrial. Besides, there were good reasons they should not kill him--yet. Carr drove one of them halfway down the passageway with a well-planted punch. The other was on his back, hairy legs twined around his waist, an arm under his chin, drawing his head back with a steady and terrible pressure. He whirled around, trying to shake off his beastly antagonist. But these powerful legs and arms held fast. He tore at the hairy ankles where they crossed in the pit of his stomach; wrenched them free. Still the creature clung to him, twisting his head until it seemed his neck must break. He found a waving foot with his right hand; wrenched it mightily. There was a sharp snap and the foot dangled limp in his fingers. He had broken the ankle. With a howl of pain his assailant let go and dropped to the floor to crawl away like a whipped cur. In a flash Carr saw that the brute was reaching for his ray-pistol where it had dropped during the encounter. He kicked it from the reach of that hairy paw and sprang after it. With one of those little weapons in his hands the odds would change! His fingers closed on its grip just as Ora rushed into the room, closely followed by Rapaju, whose distorted features were terrible to behold. The cabin was full of them now; the guard he had first knocked down; the lust-crazed commander--the one with the broken ankle. All but Detis and Mado. Carr faced them alone. So close was Rapaju to the girl that he dared not use the pistol, and now the uninjured guard was circling him, trying to get in a position where he could use his ray-pistol without endangering his commander. Carr fumbled for the release of the weapon he held in his hand; found it. The guard threw himself to the floor when he saw it raised; shouted a warning. But it was too late. The deadly ray had sped on its mission of death; struck him full in the middle. The twisted body lay still a moment and then collapsed like a punctured balloon, leaving his scant clothing in a limp heap--empty. A worthy miniature of the D-ray, this little weapon! * * * * * He turned to face Rapaju and saw that he was shielding himself with Ora's body. She had fainted and now hung drooping in the arms of the beast. Where was Mado? Detis? Good God--he'd killed them! Carr thought of that little spot on the chart. Must be very close now. They'd pass so near there'd be no escape. But he could not reach the controls without taking his eyes from Rapaju. That would have to wait. Rapaju was backing toward the door, still holding the limp figure of the girl before him. The injured guard lay moaning on the floor. "Drop her, you devil!" Carr shouted desperately as he saw that Rapaju soon would reach the passageway. Then suddenly he reached for the controls and pushed the energy lever to full speed forward. He braced himself for the shock of acceleration and saw Rapaju and Ora thrown backward into the passageway, the girl's body cushioned by that of her captor as they were flung violently to the floor. Madly he rushed to the narrow entrance and tore at the hairy arms that encircled the slender waist of the girl. He jerked the snarling commander of the Llotta expedition to his feet and slammed him against the metal wall. "Now, you damn pig," he grunted, "I'll finish the job. Dirty scum of a rotten world!" He dragged his victim into the control cabin and threw him to the floor. But Rapaju was like an eel. He wriggled from under him and snatched from the heap of clothing the ray-pistol of the disintegrated guard. With a yelp of triumph he rose to his knees and leveled the weapon. A well placed kick sent it spinning and Carr was upon him. He snapped back the head with a terrible punch; then lifted the dazed creature to his feet and stepped back. "Stand up and take it like a man!" he roared. * * * * * Rapaju shook his head to clear it and rushed in with a bellow of rage. Just what Carr wanted! Starting almost from the floor, his right came up to meet the vicious jaw with a crack that told of the terrific power behind it. Lifted from his feet and hurled half way across the room by the impact, Rapaju lay motionless where he fell. Carr was at the telescope. Their speed was close to fifteen hundred miles a second. The monstrous mass of Mado's Sargasso Sea loomed close in his vision. Off their course by a hundred miles or more. They'd miss it all right. He had the situation in hand now on board the _Nomad_. But how about the fleet behind them? He thought fast and furiously. Another two minutes and they'd pass the thing; the inexplicable horror which had accounted for the golden sphere of the Europans. Could he use it? Suppose the fleet of the enemy-- The idea was full of possibilities. He rushed to the stern compartment, and scanned the heavens for the massed body of spheres he knew would be the fleet of the Llotta. At this speed they must have fallen far behind. Yes, there they were. Not so far behind at that. The battle in the control room must have been a shorter one than it had seemed. He returned quickly to the controls and reversed the energy, to give the fleet a chance to catch up to him. Closer came that mass of whitish jelly. And now it was much larger than before. The terrible creature, for living matter it was, beyond doubt, was growing with the rapidity of a rising flood. Great tentacles of its horrid translucent substance reached in all directions for possible victims. He sickened at the sight. But what a fate for the fleet of the Llotta! If only he could maneuver them into its influence. * * * * * He changed his course slightly and headed directly for the monster, again increasing speed. Perhaps--if he calculated the forces correctly--he could dive through it again with the D-ray to clear a path. But no. It was a miracle they had escaped before, and now the vicious thing was more than double its previous size. Once more he altered his course. He'd cross in front of the thing; skim it as close as he dared and shoot from its influence on the far side. The greater mass of the enemy vessels and their lack of a quick-acting repulsive force would prove their undoing. Full speed ahead. A rapid mental calculation--an educated guess, rather--and he set the automatic control. Turning around to start for the stern compartment, he saw that Ora had recovered from her swoon and now stood swaying weakly in the passageway. "Ora!" he exclaimed delightedly. He rushed to her side and supported her in a tender embrace. "Rapaju?" she questioned with horror in her eyes. "Won't bother you for a while, dear. But your father--Mado?" "He gassed them. They'll recover." The brave girl had regained her composure. "Good! But, come! Time's short." He half carried her to the rear, berating himself the while for his inability to pay her closer attention. With arms still around her he placed her at one of the stern ports. "What is it, Carr?" She sensed his excitement. "The fleet--see! We'll destroy them." The spherical vessels were close behind, huddled together in mass formation and following the _Nomad_ blindly. "How, Carr?" "Lead them into it. Wait tall you see! There's a--" * * * * * The _Nomad_ lurched, and changed direction. Cold fear clutched at his throat. That devil of a guard! Why hadn't he killed him? He dashed through the passage, Ora at his heels. Sure enough, the crippled guard had dragged himself to the controls; was manipulating the energy director as he had seen Mado do. They were heading directly for the terrible monster of the heavens! No need now to peer through the telescope. The thing was visible to the naked eye. No power could save them! Carr hurled himself at the guard and tore at the hairy paw which gripped the lever. The throbbing of strange energies filled the air of the room, and Carr's brain pulsed with the maddening rhythm. The red discharge appeared at the projections of the control panels. He forgot the fleet of the Llotta, forgot the menace to his own world. Only Ora mattered now, and he had not the power to save her! As in a daze he knew he was wrenching mightily at the body of the powerful minion of Rapaju. His fingers encountered heated metal--one of the ray-pistols. He felt the intense vibration of the weapon as its charge was released. But he still lived. The beast who held it had missed! Dimly he was conscious of the screams of Ora; of the yielding of the creature who fought him. An animal cry registered on his consciousness and he shook the suddenly limp Llotta from him. He knew somehow that his last enemy was gone. A quick glance showed him that Ora was still on her feet, braced against the wall. The red veil was before his eyes. He grasped the controls, and fought desperately to keep his strength and senses. A streamer of horrid whiteness swung across his vision; slithered clammily over the glass of one of the forward ports. They were into the thing! It was the end! He groaned aloud as he fumbled with the mechanisms and strove to formulate a plan of escape. * * * * * The fleet, he knew, was just behind. An enormous mass. The repulsive energy astern would be terrific. He turned it full on. The whiteness obscured his vision. Then it was gone once more. A single streamer waved before him and encompassed them. The movement of these members must be inconceivably rapid, else they'd be invisible at the speed the _Nomad_ was traveling. Full speed ahead. The repulsion full on in the direction of the center of the mass as well as astern. The framework of the _Nomad_ creaked protestingly from the terrific forces that tore at her vitals. Then suddenly they were released. The _Nomad_ was shooting off into space. The resultant of those combined forces had done the trick. Only the edge of that devil-fish of space, had they touched. Free--they were free of the monster! The red veil lifted. He rushed to Ora's side. She was kneeling at one of the floor ports, breathing heavily but unharmed. Below them they saw the swiftly receding mass: the fleet of the Llotta diving headlong, drawn inexorably into the rapacious embrace of the vile creature of the heavens. An instant the awful whiteness of the thing closed in greedily about the many spheres of the fleet; swallowed them from sight and contorted madly and with seeming glee over the triumph. Then, in a burst of blinding incandescence, it was gone. The monster, the fleet--everything--blasted into nothingness. The fuel storage compartments of the vessels of Ganymede had exploded! The heavens were rid of the inexplicable growing menace; the inner planets were saved from a terrible invasion. And the _Nomad_ was safe. Ora, Detis, Mado--all were safe! At his side Ora was trembling. Gently he raised her to her feet, and took her into his arms. CHAPTER X _Vagabonds All_ Together they cared for Detis and Mado; made them comfortable in their bunks until the time when the effects of the gas would wear off. Lucky it was that Rapaju had used the gas pistol rather than the ray. Perhaps it had been a mistake. Or perhaps he had needed the scientific knowledge of Detis, the familiarity with the inner planets that was Mado's. At any rate, they had no delusions regarding his designs on Ora or his hatred of Carr. By his own passions had the commander of the fleet been led to the error that cost him his life and made possible the destruction of his fleet. Carr was torn by conflicting emotions. The delectable little Europan was most disturbing. He'd never had much use for the other sex--on Earth. Too dominating, most of them. And always thrown at his head by designing parents for his money. But Ora was different! Her very nearness set his pulses racing. And he knew that she cared for him as he did for her. Those moments in the control cabin after the explosion! But something had come over him since he cut loose from the old life. Wanderlust--that was it. He'd never go back. Neither would he be content to settle down to a domestic life in Pala-dar. Wanted to be up and going somewhere. "Oh, Carr, Carr!" Ora's voice called to him. "Mado is awake. He wants you." Good old Mado! Why couldn't they just continue on their way as they had started out? Roaming the universe in search of other adventures! But the silvery tinkle of Ora's laughter reached his ears. She was irresistible! He forgot his doubts as he hurried to his friend's cabin. * * * * * Mado was staring at the Europan maiden with a ludicrous expression of astonishment--gawping, Carr called it. And Ora was laughing at him. "Your friend," she gurgled, "doesn't believe he's alive, or that I am, or you. Tell him we are." Carr grinned. Mado did look funny at that. "Hello, old sock," he said, "had a bad dream?" "Did I? Oh boy!" Mado rocked to and fro, his head in his hands. Then he displayed sudden intense interest. "Rapaju?" he asked. "His guards--the fleet--what's happened?" "Ah ha! Now you know you're alive!" Carr laughed. "But the others are dead and gone. The fleet's gone to smash--and how!" "But Carr. How did you do it? Tell me!" Mado threw off his covers and clapped his friend on the back, a resounding thump that brought a gasp from Ora. "Your Sargasso Sea did it. And it's a thing of the past, too. Wait till I tell you about it!" * * * * * Ora tripped from the room as Carr sat on the edge of the bunk to spin his yarn. "But man alive!" Mado exclaimed when the story was finished. "Don't you know you've done a miraculous thing? I'd never have had the nerve. That damn creature out there had more than four times its former attracting energy. That's what made it impossible for the fleet to get away. And you--you lucky devil--you just doped it out right. The fleet of the Llotta gave you a tremendous push from astern when you used the repulsive energy. If they hadn't been there with their enormous mass to react against we'd all have been mincemeat now along with the Llotta. You Terrestrials sure can think fast! Me, now--Lord, if it had been me, I'd have thought of it after my spirit had departed to its reward--or punishment. Glory be! It's the greatest thing I ever heard of." "Rats! You'd have done the same as I did. Probably would have missed it a mile instead of nearly getting caught as I did. A good thing the fleet's gone, though. Mars and Terra--Venus, too--they'll never know how close it was for them. Wouldn't have sense enough to appreciate it, anyway." "They would if they ever got a taste of what the Llotta planned. But what's wrong with you Carr? You act sore. Want to go home?" "Me? Don't be like that. No--I'd like to carry on as we planned. There's Saturn, Uranus and Neptune yet; Planet 9; a flock of satellites and asteroids. Oh, dammit!" Mado looked his amazement. "Well, what's to prevent it?" he demanded. "The _Nomad's_ still here, and so are we. I'm just as anxious to keep going as you are. Why not?" But Carr did not reply. Why not, indeed? He strode from the cabin and into the control room. The _Nomad_ was drifting in space, subject only to natural forces that swung it in a vast orbit around the sun. He started the generators and drove the vessel from her temporary orbit with rapid acceleration. Out--out into the jeweled blackness of the heavens. There was Jupiter out there, a bright orb that came suddenly very near when he centered it on the cross-hairs of the telescope. The excited voices of Ora and Detis came to his ears. The booming speech of Mado. Why couldn't he be sensible and companionable as they were? But a perverse demon kept him at the controls. They'd think him a grouch. Well, maybe he was! But the vastness of the universe beckoned. New worlds to explore; mysteries to be solved; a life of countless new experiences! Anyone'd think he was the owner of the _Nomad_, the way he planned for the future. * * * * * They were in the control cabin now--Mado and Detis and Ora. A moment he hesitated, eyes glued to the telescope. Then, with a petulant gesture, he reached for the automatic control; locked it. Shouldn't be this way. They'd think him an awful cad. And they'd be right! He whirled to face them. Detis was smiling. Mado gazed owlishly solemn. Ora clung to the arm of her father, and her long lashes hid the blue eyes that had played such havoc with the emotions of the Terrestrial. "Carr," said Detis, gently, "we must thank you. You saved our lives, you know." "Aw, forget it. Saved my own, too, didn't I? By a lucky break." "It wasn't luck, Carr." Detis was gripping his hand now. "It was sheer grit and brains. You had them both. If you hadn't used them we'd all be corpses--or disintegrated--excepting Ora, perhaps. And you know the fate that awaited her. Instead, we are alive and well. The fleet is gone. Rapaju's body and that of his guard drift nameless in space where you disposed of them through the air-lock of the _Nomad_. The inner planets need fear no future invasion, for the resources of Ganymede have been expended in the one huge enterprise that has failed. All through your quick wit and bravery. No, it wasn't luck." "Nonsense, Detis." Carr returned the pressure of the scientist's hand, smiling sheepishly. He pushed him away after a moment. He didn't want their gratitude or praise. Didn't know what he wanted. Ora still avoided meeting his gaze. "Nonsense," he repeated. "And now, please leave me. You, Detis. Mado, too. I'd like to be alone for a while--with Ora. Mind?" Mado's owlish look broadened to a knowing grin as he backed into the passageway. Detis collided with the huge Martian in his eagerness to be out of the room. They were alone and Carr was on his feet. Nothing mattered now--excepting Ora. Suddenly she was in his arms, the fragrance of her hair in his nostrils. * * * * * Star gazing, the two of them. It was ridiculous! But the wonders of the universe held a new beauty now for Carr. The distant suns had taken on added brilliance. Still they beckoned. "Carr," the girl whispered, after a time, "where are we going?" "To Europa. Your home." "To--to stay?" "No." Carr was suddenly confident; determined. "We'll stop there to break the news. Then we'll be wedded, you and I, according to the custom of your people. Our honeymoon--years of it--will be spent in the _Nomad_, roving the universe. Mado'll agree, I know. Wanderers of the heavens we'll be, Ora. But we'll have each other; and when we've--you've--had enough of it, I'll be ready to settle down. Anywhere you say. Are you game?" "Oh, Carr! How did you guess? It's just as we'd planned. Father and Mado and I. Didn't think I'd go, did you, you stupid old dear?" "Why--why Ora." Carr was stammering now. He'd thought he was being masterful--making the plans himself. But she'd beat him to it, the adorable little minx! "I was a bit afraid," he admitted; "and I still can't believe that it's actually true. You're sure you want to?" "Positive. Why Carr, I've always been a vagabond at heart. And now that I've found you we'll just be vagabonds together. Father and Mado will leave us very much to each other. Their scientific leanings, you know. And--oh--it'll just be wonderful!" "It's you that'll make it wonderful, sweetheart." Carr drew her close. The stars shone still more brightly and beckoned anew. Vagabonds, all of them! Like the gypsies of old, but with vastly more territory to roam. The humdrum routine of his old life seemed very far behind. He wondered what Courtney Davis would say if he could see him now. Wordless happiness had come to him, and he let his thoughts wander out into the limitless expanse of the heavens. Star gazing still--just he and Ora. Reader's Corner [Illustration: ] _From a Science Fiction "Fiend"_ Dear Editor: I agree with you about the reprinting of old stories, because you would only force older Science Fiction readers to read the same stuff that they have read before. Any Science Fiction fiend like myself will surely have the reprinted story in his collection of magazines. The size of your magazine is perfect, but your paper is not very good. As for me, I don't care about your paper because your stories are so very good that the paper doesn't matter. My favorite story, and one of the best stories that I have ever read so far, is "Murder Madness." It has a very original idea and holds your interest from the very start. I am also for a more often publication of your magazine; about twice a month--Rupert Jones, New York, N. Y. _Valuable Suggestions_ Dear Editor: The July issue of Astounding Stories is one of the best issues you have so far published. Arthur J. Burks sure is a master at writing Science Fiction tales. The first installment of "Earth, the Marauder" was swell. Harl Vincent is another very good author. His novelette, "The Terror of Air-Level Six," was a close second. "The Forgotten Planet," by S. P. Wright, "Beyond the Heaviside Layer," by S. P. Meek and "From an Amber Block," by Tom Curry were all good stories. The cover illustration was the best yet. I hope that the next dozen covers do not have blue backgrounds. Other colors you might have are green, red, pink, orange, yellow, black and light and dark purple. When will Edmond Hamilton's first story be published in Astounding Stories? Have you received any stories by Stanton Coblentz, A. Hyatt Verrill, Ed Earl Repp, John W. Campbell, Jr., Edward E. Chappelow and Edgar Rice Burroughs yet? Why not have a page devoted to the authors? You could print a picture and tell something about one author each month. I think that an illustration representing Science Fiction would look good on the contents page. I hope that Wesso will soon be illustrating every story in Astounding Stories, or that you will obtain another artist equally as good (if possible). Is it possible for you to use a better and thinner grade of paper? I save all my Astounding Stories and I like them to be thin so they will not take up so much room.--Jack Darrow, 4225 N. Spaulding Ave., Chicago, Illinois. _Not Yet_ Dear Editor: I have just received your July issue of Astounding Stories, and I must say that it is the best yet. The only thing wrong with it, in my opinion, is that it is too small; the size should be at least 9x12. Also it should be a semi-monthly, or at least accompanied by a quarterly and annual. The stories in the July issue are wonderful, all except Murray Leinster's serial, which does not belong in your magazine. If you have any intention of putting an annual or a quarterly on the market, will you be so kind as to communicate with me as I am very much interested in your magazine.--Louis Wentzler, 1933 Woodbine St., Brooklyn, N. Y. _"Ever Since"_ Dear Editor: I want to tell you what I think of your new magazine. I think it's great. I stopped in a drug store and saw Astounding Stories on the newsstand. I bought it and have been buying it ever since. I am fourteen years old, but I am interested in science. Why not get a story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and some more by Ray Cummings? I wish success to your wonderful magazine.--Wm. McCalvy, 1244 Beech St., St. Paul, Minn. _"Not One Poor Story Yet"_ Dear Editor: I agree with you that reprints should absolutely be kept out of your magazine. I admit that there are many stories of unusual merit among the reprints but I favor new and fresher stories. In your last issue (June) I consider "The Moon Master" as being the best story, closely followed by "Out of the Dreadful Depths." "The Cavern World" came next, followed by "Giants of the Ray," "Brigands of the Moon" and "Murder Madness." I have not found one poor story in your magazine yet, and never expect to. I, for one, favor a larger sized magazine with a five cent increase in price, or, at least, if the magazine must remain small, I would like to see a quarterly out on the third Thursday every three months. I am extremely pleased to see that an interplanetary story by R. F. Starzl will appear in your next issue. Please have more of his stories if possible.--Forrest James Ackerman, 530 Staples Ave., San Francisco, Calif. _Likes Present Size_ Dear Editor: Best stories in the last two issues: C. D. Willard's "Out of the Dreadful Depths" (Excellent); Chas. W. Diffin's "The Moon Master" (Very Good); Sewell P. Wright's "Forgotten Planet" (Fairly Good). I am a new reader, but interested in these kinds of stories. I am pleased to see that your readers criticize freely. A story that will please one reader will not interest another, perhaps, and it may not be the fault of the author's ability so much as that he doesn't like that type of story. "Out of the Dreadful Depths," by C. Willard is the best story I've read for some time. I could not see a single way it could be improved. "The Moon Master," by Chas. Diffin was just as good but I didn't like the ending so well. I certainly hope Mr. Diffin will write more stories like it, especially using his same three leading characters. "The Forgotten Planet," by Mr. Wright, was well written and pretty good in spite of the fact that I don't like that type of story so well. "Murder Madness," by Murray Leinster was well written and the characters interesting and real but I didn't like his subject. I hope for more and different stories from him. "Earth, the Marauder," by Arthur J. Burks looks as though it was going to be a record winner for me--accomplish the impossible, and make a good story from a story of the future. I don't like horror stories, crazy stories and stories written far into the future, as "Brigands of the Moon." These stories make light of the vast distances of space and are too weird, droll and fail to give a single shiver down my old backbone. They are strange and inhabited by strange people. No story can give the faintest idea of the space between those mighty suns of the universe. Most of them have more imagination than scientific knowledge. "Earth, the Marauder," an exception. I would much rather hear stories of primeval days of the lost Atlantis before Earth was populated with scientific beings, when the cave man looked up at the unknown, then so near to him. At the moon, which was then so close, and uninhabited by superior beings. Tales of superstition and all mystery stories of the unknown. I like interplanetary stories, if not written too far into the future. I like the present size and shape of your magazine. Best wishes for the success of your magazine.--An Interested Reader, Goffstown, N. H. _Likes_ Dear Editor: I have just finished reading the July issue of Astounding Stories and I think every story is simply great, especially "The Terror of Air-Level Six." That sure is a story! "The Forgotten Planet" is a corker, too! While reading the letters in "The Readers' Corner" I noticed that almost everyone has a hankering for Edgar Rice Burroughs' stories. Believe it or not, I'm wild about his stories myself and I'm looking forward to reading his stories in Astounding Stories. It won't make any difference if they'll be originals or reprints, so long as they're Burroughs! Ray Cummings is another one of my favorites and I always read his stories first. His "Brigands of the Moon" hit me in the right spot. "The Moon Master" in the June issue was also a very fine story. Now about this argument about reprinted stories. I think that if, at least, one reprinted story appeared in each issue of Astounding Stories, it wouldn't hurt its reputation. Here are some reprints that hit the ceiling: "The War in the Air," by Wells; "Tarranto, the Conqueror," by Cummings; "The Conquest of Mars," by Serviss. I'm sure the readers would enjoy reading them. But if you are persistent about avoiding reprints then we'll have to do without them.--Paul Nikolaieff, 4325 S. Seeley Ave., Chicago, Illinois. _Wants Sequel_ Dear Editor: I have read every issue of Astounding Stories though I can barely afford it. I like it very much. The best novels were, in order: 1. "The Moon Master"; 2. "Phantoms of Reality"; 3. "Spawn of the Stars"; 4. "Terror of Air-Level Six." In the July issue you published a story, "Earth, the Marauder," which promises to be even better than the "Skylark of Space" that once came out in another magazine. I like Harl Vincent, Ray Cummings, Arthur Burks, and Martian stories best. Interplanetary stories always agree with me. Burroughs is an excellent author. I like his Martian books. "The Beetle Horde" in the first two issues was very good. But why not give a sequel about the other and more terrible creatures in the earth whom the madman spoke of? Fourth dimensionals are sometimes good. You should have reprints by Burroughs, Cummings and Merritt. I am eagerly waiting for the next issue. Do not enlarge the magazine because I cannot afford it. Don't publish stories like "From an Amber Block." They're rotten. Publish more future and interplanetary stories.--Joseph Edelman, 721 De Kalb Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y. _Stands Pat_ Dear Editor: I have read all the issues of A. S. since the date of publication and think that there is no other magazine like it on the market. I would like to offer a few suggestions contrary to most of your readers (i.e., Jack Darrow & Chas. Barret): 1.--Keep magazine in present size and price. 2.--Issue it only once a month. If it was issued semi-monthly the writers would soon run out of ideas; and the readers would get sick of it if they read it so often anyway. 3.--Keep up the style of stories now running, i.e., keep the science a little in the background. Do not let it monopolize the story. I get other magazines that do not follow the last mentioned rule and the result is the stories are full of machines going 10,000 miles per hour, etc.; pink, black, purple and eleventeen other colored rays. As a result the stories are drier than the Sahara Desert. The illustrations are fine (O.K.) as they are.--Walter O'Brien, 6 Hageman Pl., North Bergen, N. J. _Trial by Readers_ Dear Editor: When Astounding Stories first appeared on the newsstands, a brand new Science Fiction magazine, I was prejudiced against it as a competitor to the existing magazines--one that might carry an inferior quality of Science Fiction so closely approaching the supernatural as to practically disregard science. In a few cases, as with very good writers like A. Merritt and H. P. Lovecraft, this is permissible, but, otherwise, not at all so. In the first issue, "The Stolen Mind" seemed to bear me out, but, then, there was "Tanks." I bought the next issue--much better! And then the third showed "The Soul Master," very well written, but not quite science, as related. Yet, "Cold Light" held me on, and "Brigands of the Moon." There is no danger of my dropping off now! In the current issue, "Murder Madness" and "The Power and the Glory" stand out as mile-posts in the history of Science Fiction. The rest are not far behind, though, as a matter of fact, "Beyond the Heaviside Layer" and "Earth, the Marauder" have more discernible flaws than the rest. Just for example, a layer of organic matter would raise Cain with astronomy, due to refraction. Air is bad enough. But the writing overwhelms the error. You have certainly assembled a group of excellent authors, new and old, and I am glad to see the promise of R. F. Starzl in the next issue. His "Madness of the Dust" is one of the most naturally written interplanetary stories I have read--logical and clear, just as it would happen to anybody. And now for the big question--that of reprints. You seem to have already decided the answer, and have defended your action well, but I wonder if it is well enough. By far your best argument is your last--"authors must eat"--with which I have no quarrel at all. Still, one classic serial a year, or at most two, might not prove too harmful. Following back, I reach a statement concerning "The Saturday Evening Post." In the past it has published hundreds of the world's best stories, and never reprinted. True. But why? Because these stories are all available in book form, in libraries and book stores, in original or new editions or in the Grosset and Dunlap list of perpetually printed best sellers. It is possible to read them for years after publication. But try to find the past masterpieces of Science Fiction. With the exception of Burroughs' books, most were never printed in book form. Even books by Wells and Verne, classics of their kind are gone, totally gone, even from the shelves of libraries. Many of Verne's best stories were never translated from the French. And the other classics of which readers write, classics familiar to most of us only by name and a few lucky tastes of others, newer works by the same authors, are absolutely gone--annihilated. Their best works are beyond the reach of the reader. Only by republication, in magazine or book, can they be revived in an age when they will be remembered and preserved--an age awake to science and Science Fiction. Other magazines are doing it, one or two to the year, and it may be that you need not reprint; but the reservoir of the past is large, and a few cannot drain it. This leads to your first argument, that better stories are being written to-day. They are--better than the average of the past--but not better than the classics. It would be folly to say that because the short story is a modern development, and because Galsworthy or Walpole or Reimarch are better than the average of yesterday, to our present tastes, that the classics of the past should be scrapped. The analogy, I feel, is good. The classics of general literature have their place in history. The classics of Science Fiction should have theirs. There are dozens better than the general run of present work, by A. Merritt, Homer Eon Flint, George Allan England, Austin Hall, John Taine, Garret P. Serviss, Ralph Milne Farley, Ray Cummings, and others that stood out in an age when Science Fiction was considered pure phantasy or imaginative "trash." In the present age, they would be still better, and this time they would not be lost to the world, for there are publishers and readers who would preserve them. You may adhere to your decision, but, to my mind, and, I think to far more than 1% of other minds, reprints of classics are essential, actually vitally necessary. Try to find out what a ballot would show. Again, from the author's point of view. Up to now, Burroughs has had all the breaks as to book publication. Now Ray Cummings and others are being published. "An author must eat." Give him a chance, by reviving his best efforts, and bringing them to public attention, so that a publisher will find them worthy of publication. Most of the masters of Science Fiction are alive--give them a chance to eat. Too, a great many of the best modern authors are modern readers: ask them if they would be willing to see one of the best stories of the past re-issued each year, stories unpublished in existing magazines for ten years or more. I certainly hope you will alter your decision. And now to reverse some other decisions of readers. The size is quite all right and very handy for binding purposes, Mr. Mack to the contrary. Incidentally, the staples are so placed as to make binding simple. Also contrary to Mr. Darrow, I prefer the artist Gould, to Wesso, for interior illustrations, though Wesso is best for mechanical illustrations. Incidentally, give us the name of the artist for each story, especially when the illustrations are unsigned, as in the April issue. Wesso's best cover for you has been that for April, illustrating "Monsters of Moyen." It shows his best style very well. As to my favorite type of Science Fiction, any kind, if well written, will do. As it happens, the king of authors, A. Merritt, has a type all his own, as Mr. Bryant notes, which is unbeatable, and my favorite. However, at times, a good writer may fall down in his fundamental assumptions. I don't care where or how far he goes, so long as he starts with something that present-day science does not deny. Here is where "The Soul Master" fell down, and, even more so, "The Soul Snatcher." Better leave souls and astrals and egos alone, except in very, very rare cases, when an author turns up who can make you believe in them as mechanical entities. As a Science Fiction fan, a student of chemistry, and a hopeful author, I will probably write to "The Readers' Corner" as often as I want to blow off steam regarding science or fiction or the way in which you are running the magazine. I hope I won't be considered an utter nuisance, and will be given a trial by jury--a jury of readers.--P. Schuyler Miller, 302 So. Ten Broeck St., Scotia, New York. "_Handy to Hold_" Dear Editor: I wish to say that I have the seven numbers of Astounding Stories that have been issued thus far and I have read them through ever word. It is wonderful, and there is no word of fault to be uttered concerning any of them. I think "Murder Madness" is the best story you have printed so far, but they are all good in different ways. You received some letters that surprise me. How anyone can ask you to change the make-up to the blanket sheet form is more than I can see. It is so handy to hold and to read as it is now. I do hope you will not change it. No, there is so much that one wants to read these days that I do not advocate issuing twice a month. One issue each month is just right. But I do wish you would increase the number of pages to at least the number in Five Novels magazine. Of course, you would want 25c. for it then, and that is all right. Am glad that you refuse to give us reprints. We do not want them. Astounding Stories is a gem, and I hope to read it for the remainder of my life. Keep right on with the good work.--Will S. Cushing, 21 Cottage St., Abington, Massachusetts. _We Hope So, Too_! Dear Editor: Your July issue of Astounding Stories was wonderful. Your magazine is improving greatly. "Murder Madness" is a great story, and "Earth, the Marauder," is one of the best stories I have ever read. I hope the other parts of it are just as interesting as the first part.--Mick Scotts, 115 W. 16th Ave., Gary, Indiana. _Another Sequel_ Dear Editor: Well, I have so much to say, or rather would like to say for your magazine. I like it in every detail but one, which is waiting a whole month for the rest of my stories. I wish you would give us the third sequel of "Out of the Ocean's Depths." Let the young scientist discover a way to perform matrimony between the girl of the ocean and the man, and then let their child live either in or out of water. There could be two more good stories or sequels of "Out of the Ocean's Depths." I like them all. I liked "Murder Madness," too. It seems as though it is really real, and not fiction. I wish you would get the book out twice a month.--Mrs. B. R. Woods, Cotte, Arkansas. _From Author to Author_ Dear Editor: Since Astounding Stories began you have published a goodly number of really remarkable stories, chief among which, in my estimation, are the following: "Spawn of the Stars," by C. W. Diffin; "Brigands of the Moon," by Ray Cummings; "Monsters of Moyen," by Arthur J. Burks; "The Atom Smasher," by Victor Rousseau; and "The Moon Master," C. W. Diffin. But none of these can compare with Diffin's last short story, "The Power and the Glory," which appeared in the last (July) issue. For originality of theme, clever phraseology and excellent literary craftsmanship it stands alone--a little masterpiece. Its author should be congratulated. To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Diffin is a newcomer in Science Fiction. The first story of his that I read was "Spawn of the Stars." Keep his pen busy, Mr. Editor; he's valuable--an' I don't mean maybe! If I could write a story like "The Power and the Glory," I'd certainly congratulate myself!--L. A. Eshbach, 225 Chestnut St., Reading, Pa. "_Held Me Spellbound_" Dear Editor: I happened to read one of your books the other day--Astounding Stories is the one--and I was very much taken up with it. I found that it was a very interesting book, indeed. I have no fear in saying that it held me spellbound from the start till the finish. The one that I happened to buy was the issue of May, 1930, and the story that gripped me most was "Brigands of the Moon." It was very thrilling, indeed, and I am very sorry I could not obtain the previous copies so as to start at the beginning. But, however, I am able to obtain a copy every month and am very pleased, as I would hate to miss a copy again. Well, I hope this letter will reach you safely. Remember me as a contented reader of your magazine.--Geo. Young, 447 Canning St., Nth. Carlton N. 4, Melbourne, Australia. _We Are Printing It_! Dear Editor: It seems that you have taken a wrong slant on my letter which you published recently. True, I did give you a long list of stories which I wanted to see, but I didn't mean that you should publish only reprints, no new stories. Far from it. Instead, I'd suggest that you give us a classic, say, every six months. This arrangement ought to be okay with everyone. That's that for reprints. About the stories and the authors, they're all right. There's one thing that I like about you that I don't find in the other Science Fiction magazines. With the very first issue you started off with the authors that are wanted by everyone who reads this type of literature. You began with Cummings, Rousseau, Meek and Leinster. Hm-m, let's see. And you're keeping up the good system by having added Vincent, Starzl, Burks, Curry, Miss Lorraine, Hamilton, etc. But you don't escape entirely unscathed, for the other magazines give us stories from authors which haven't as yet written a story which appeared in your columns. Let's see; besides the stars above, let's add to the galaxy Keller (three cheers), Breuer, Smith (his story, "The Skylark of Space," ought to have about six sequels), the late Mr. Serviss, Verrill, Poe, Wells, Verne, Flint (o-o-oh, for that "Blind Spot"), Hall, England, Hasta (one story by him is all I've read, but it only whetted my appetite), and Simmons. Oh, yes, the two Taines, the detective of Dr. Keller's and the author. But there's something missing. Hm-m--ah, A. Merritt! What a writer! How could I have forgotten him? Which reminds me of Burroughs who has been left out in the rain for quite a while. He belongs back in the fold. Mr. Editor, do you remember way back when you said we should write in to you to tell you of the stories we want and that you would get them for us? Of course, you do. Stories and authors cannot be parted, so get those authors I've listed above and forget about the stories, for they'll all be good. I do not kick about any particular author for the reason that if I tried to write on the same subject they picked out and are picking, my work would be pretty different from what they'd produce, and their works would be the ones that would be published. Please don't read that twice; I hope to be a contributor very soon. In my opinion you should enlarge the size of the magazine, but for heaven's sake don't increase the departments. Every day that we read a paper we learn of what science is doing. And, at the end of the month we read the same thing in a magazine which should give us a story instead. The price is just right. But, even if the magazine were enlarged and the price boosted to a quarter, do you really think that we get enough material to devour? No! Then what? Get out a Quarterly! And please don't wait about that for the next ten years. This is a pretty lengthy letter and I don't expect you to print it but I want you to get the views of at least one devoted reader--Isidore Mansen, 544 Myrtle Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y. _Every Single One_ Dear Editor: I certainly received a pleasant surprise when I glanced at the table of contents for the August issue. When one sees Victor Rousseau, R. F. Starzl, Murray Leinster, Harl Vincent, and Edmond Hamilton, one knows that the issue is bound to be a good one. I wish to congratulate you on the way you have been running Astounding Stories. If you intend to keep giving us the authors you are now, throughout your whole career, you are a law-breaker. What I mean by that is that no other magazine has kept a high grade of authors very long. The old magazines on the market have once had stories by the authors you are giving us now, but they never kept those authors long. If you keep the authors you have now you may well be assured of success. "Silver Dome" undoubtedly copped the prize for this issue. It could not have been better. "The Lord of Space" was a very good story. "The Planet of Dread" was another very good story. "The Second Satellite," by Hamilton, was excellent. For once in his life Hamilton has written a story that has not the same old plot all his other stories have! I wish to congratulate him on the best story he has ever written! "The Flying City" was the same thing all over again. The world in danger and suddenly our magnificent hero comes along, takes a hand, and presto the danger is all over. Of course, he has to meet the beautiful girl and fall in love with her, and at the end of the story marry her! Remember, history repeats itself. Have you ever heard of the world being saved by one man? No! Neither have I. The world will never be saved by one man. Therefore, all those stories are "the bunk." "Murder Madness" was wonderful. I expect to see it in the talkies before long. It could be filmed easily enough, couldn't it! I know it certainly would make a wonderful picture. I expect to see you publish "Murder Madness" and "Brigands of the Moon" in book form. If you do, I will try my darnedest to get a copy. Also in my list of good authors up there I forgot to mention Arthur J. Burks. Now I wish to broach the subject of a Quarterly to you. I think Astounding Stories should have one. Every other Science Fiction magazine has, so let us have one, too. Won't you? You can give us over twice as much as you do in the monthly and charge about 50c. a copy. Have one good book and several short stories in each issue; no serials. How about it? And now let's talk a little about Astounding Stories! Why not cut the paper smooth, the way you do in Five Novels Monthly? It would make the magazine look a lot better. It would also be a lot easier to find one's place when one has to lay the book down for a moment. The last reason may sound trivial, but it's really annoying to try to find one's place among those bulky pages. The paper you use now gives the magazine an inferior appearance when compared to others of its kind. It certainly would be a relief to see you use better paper. Won't you please consider the points I have brought out in my letter?--Gabriel Kirschner, Box 301, Temple, Texas. "_What Authors_!" Dear Editor: Astounding Stories is improving with every issue. However, you would have to go far to beat the August issue. It can be called an "all star" number. What authors! Hamilton, Rousseau, Starzl, Burks, and others, all of whom are among my favorite authors. The stories were so good that it is almost impossible to pick out the best one. However, after some thought I have finally chosen Hamilton's "The Second Satellite." "Earth, the Marauder," is a close second. I hope you have many more stories by Edmond Hamilton. I see that the cover is the first one to be of a different color. Please have a new color each month. There are a few ways in which Astounding Stories may be improved. Enough of the readers have mentioned improving the quality of the paper so that I do not have to comment on this. An editorial each month would improve the magazine greatly. Here's hoping that Astounding Stories becomes a semi-monthly soon--very soon--Michael Fogaris, 157 Fourth St., Passiac, N. J. _Stands Pat_ Dear Editor: I have been a reader of your magazine for some time. I hope to continue reading it in the future. I notice in "The Readers' Corner" that some want reprints. Others want the size of the magazine changed. I say, give us "fresh" stories and leave the size of the magazine alone. In my opinion, the best stories in your July issue were "Beyond the Heaviside Layer" and "Earth, the Marauder." They were both fine. Keep up the good work--Carlson Abernathy, P. O. Box 584, Clearwater, Florida. "_The Readers' Corner_" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for Readers, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here; so "come over in 'The Readers-Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! --_The Editor._ * * * * * 
31168	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. VII, No. 1 CONTENTS JULY, 1931 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSO _Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "The Doom from Planet 4."_ THE DOOM FROM PLANET 4 JACK WILLIAMSON 5 _A Ray of Fire, Green, Mysterious, Stabs Through the Night to Dan on His Ship. It Leads Him to an Island of Unearthly Peril._ THE HANDS OF ATEN H. G. WINTER 20 _Out of the Solid Ice Craig Hews Three Long-Frozen Egyptians and Is at Once Caught Up into Amazing Adventure._ (A Complete Novelette.) THE DIAMOND THUNDERBOLT H. THOMPSON RICH 46 _Locked in a Rocket and Fired into Space! Such Was the Fate which Awaited Young Stoddard at the End of the Diamond Trail!_ THE SLAVE SHIP FROM SPACE A. R. HOLMES 68 _Three Kidnapped Earthlings Show Xantra of the Tillas How "Docile" Earth Slaves Can Be._ THE REVOLT OF THE MACHINES NAT SCHACHNER AND ARTHUR L. ZAGAT 86 _Something in the Many-Faceted Mind of the Master Machine Spurs It to Diabolical Revolt Against the Authority of Its Human Masters._ THE EXILE OF TIME RAY CUMMINGS 109 _Only Near the End of the World Does Fate Catch Up with Tugh, the Cripple Who Ran Amuck Through Time._ (_Conclusion._) THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 129 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ * * * * * Single Copies, 20 Cents In Canada, 25 Cents Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by The Clayton Magazines, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group. For advertising rates address The Newsstand Group, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York; or The Wrigley Bldg., Chicago. * * * * * The Doom from Planet 4 _By Jack Williamson_ [Illustration: _For long seconds he was plunging down through space._] [Sidenote: A ray of fire, green, mysterious, stabs through the night to Dan on his ship. It leads him to an island of unearthly peril.] "S O S. S O S. S O S." Three short, three long, three short, the flashes winked from the dark headland. Dan McNally, master and owner of the small and ancient trading schooner, _Virginia_, caught the feeble flickering light from the island as he strode across the fore-deck. He stopped, stared at the looming black line of land beneath the tropical stars. Again light flashed from a point of rock far above the dim white line of phosphorescent surf, spelling out the signal of distress. "Somebody bane callin' with a flashlight, I t'ank," the big Swede, Larsen, rumbled from the wheel. Dan thought suddenly of a reply. He rushed into the charthouse, to return in a moment with a lighted lantern and a copy of the _Nautical Almanac_ which would serve to hide the flame between flashes. He flashed an answer. Again the pale light flickered from the dark mass of land, spelling words out rather slowly, as if the sender were uncertain in his knowledge of Morse. Surprised as Dan had been by the signal from an island marked on the charts as uninhabited, he was astonished at the message that now came to him. "You are in terrible danger," he read in the flashes. "Dreadful thing here. Hurry away. Radio for warships. I am--" The winking light suddenly went out. Dan strained his eyes to watch the point where it had been, and a few seconds later he saw a curious thing. A darting, stabbing lance of green fire flashed out across the barren, rocky cliff, lighting it fleetingly with pale green radiance. It leapt out and was gone in an instant, leaving the shoulder of the island dark as before. Dan watched for long minutes, but he saw nothing more brilliant than the pale gleam of phosphorescence where the waves dashed against the sheer granite wall of the island. "What you t'ank?" Larsen broke in upon him. * * * * * Dan started, then answered slowly. "I don't know. First I thought there must be a lunatic at large. But that green light! I didn't like it." He stared again at the looming mass of the island. Davis Island is one of the innumerable tiny islets that dot the South Pacific; merely the summit of a dead volcano, projecting above the sea. Nominally claimed by Great Britain, it is marked on the charts as uninhabited. "Radio for warships, eh?" he muttered. A wireless transmitter was one of many modern innovations that the _Virginia_ did not boast. She had been gathering copra and shell among the islands long before such things came into common use, though Dan had invested his modest savings in her only a year before. "What would anyone want with warships on Davis Island?" The name roused a vague memory. "Davis Island?" he repeated, staring in concentration at the black sea. "Of course!" It came to him suddenly. A newspaper article that he had read five years before, at about the time he had abandoned college in the middle of his junior year, to follow the call of adventure. The account had dealt with an eclipse of the sun, visible only from certain points on the Pacific. One Dr. Hunter, under the auspices of a Western university, had sailed with his instruments and assistants to Davis Island, to study the solar corona during the few precious moments when the shadow covered the sun, and to observe the displacement of certain stars as a test of Einstein's theory of relativity. The reporter had interviewed the party at San Francisco, on the eve of sailing. There had been photographs of the chartered vessel, of Dr. Hunter and his instruments, and of his daughter, Helen, who acted as his secretary. She looked not at all like a scientist, Dan recalled. In fact, her face had seemed rather pretty, even in the blurred newspaper half-tone. But the memory cast no light upon the present puzzle. In the rambling years that had led him to this spot upon the old _Virginia_, he had lost touch with the science that had interested him during his college days. He had heard nothing of the results of the Hunter expedition. But this island had been its destination. * * * * * He turned decisively to the man at the wheel. "Larsen, we'll stand well offshore till daylight," he said. "Then, unless we see something unusual, we can sail in and land a boat to--" The sentence was never finished. Through the corner of his eye, Dan saw a ray of green light darting toward them from the island. A line of green fire seemed to reach out and strike him a physical blow. Green flame flared around him; and somehow he was hurled from the bridge, clear of the rail and into the sea. His impression of the incident was very confused. He seemed to have struck the water with such force that his breath was knocked out. He struggled back to the surface, strangling, and coughing the bitter brine from his lungs. It was several minutes before he was comfortably treading water, and able to see what had happened. The old schooner was then a hundred yards away, careening crazily, and drifting aimlessly before the light breeze. The strange green fire had vanished. Parts of the ship apparently had been carried away or disintegrated by the ray or the force of which it was a visible effect. The mainmast was down, and was hanging over the side in a tangle of rigging. Bright yellow flames were dancing at a dozen points about the wreckage on the listing deck. A grotesque broken thing, queerly illuminated by the growing fires, was hanging over the wheel--the body of Larsen. No living thing was visible; and Dan, after a second look at the wreck of the bow, knew that he must be the sole survivor of the catastrophe. "Too bad about the boys," he muttered through teeth that chattered, for the cold water had already chilled him. "And poor old Larsen." He thought again of the warning flashed from the shore. "Guess there must be something hellish afoot after all," he muttered again. "The flicker of green that stopped the signals, and the green fire that got us--what can they mean?" He looked toward the looming black shadow of the island, and began divesting himself of his clinging, sodden garments. "I don't wonder somebody wanted battleships. But even a battleship, if that green ray hit it--" He drew a deep breath and ducked his head while he unlaced his shoes and kicked out of them. Then, with a final look at the burning wreck of the _Virginia_, he tore off the last bit of his underclothing and swam for the shore in an easy crawl. * * * * * The rocky ramparts of Davis Island were three or four miles away. But there was no wind; the black sea was calm save for a long, hardly perceptible swell. A strong swimmer and in superb condition, Dan felt no anxiety about being able to make the distance. There was danger, however, that a shark would run across him, or that he could not find a landing place upon the rocky shore. Four bells had rung when he had seen the first flash; it had been just ten o'clock. And it was some four hours later that Dan touched bottom and waded wearily up a bit of smooth hard beach, through palely glittering phosphorescent foam. He rubbed the brine from his tired limbs, and sat down for a time, in a spot where a fallen boulder sheltered his naked body from the cool morning wind. In a few moments he rose, flexed his muscles and peered through the starlit darkness for a way up the cliff behind the beach. He found it impossible to distinguish anything. "Got to keep moving, or find some clothes," he muttered. "And I may stumble onto what made the green light. Darn lucky I've been so far, anyhow. Larsen and the others--but I shan't think of them. Wonder who was flashing the signals from the island. And did the green fire get him?" He turned to look out over the black plain of the sea. Far out, the _Virginia_ lay low in the water, a pillar of yellow flame rising from her hull. As he watched, the flame flickered and vanished: the old schooner, he supposed, had sunk. Then he noticed a pale glow come into being among the stars on the eastern horizon. "Hello," he muttered again. "So we're going to have a moon? In the last quarter, but still it ought to light me up from this beach." A moment later the horns of the crescent had come above the black rim of the sea. Dan waited, swinging his arms and tramping up and down on the sand, until the silvery moon had cleared the horizon and illuminated the rugged face of the cliff with pale white radiance. He chose a path to the top of the cliff and clambered up, emerging in a jungle-like thicket of brush. Picking his way with the greatest caution, yet scratching his naked skin most painfully, he made his way for a few yards through the brush to a point of vantage from which he could look about. He was, he perceived, in a narrow valley or ravine, with rugged black walls rising sheer on either side. The silvery light of the crescent moon fell upon the rank jungle that covered the narrow floor of the canyon, which rose and dwindled as it penetrated inland. * * * * * Gazing up the canyon, Dan gasped in amazement at what he saw. Mars, the red planet, hung bright and motionless, low in the western sky, gleaming with deep bloody radiance. Directly beneath it, bathed in the white light of the moon, was a bare, rocky peak that seemed the highest point of the island. And upon that highest pinnacle, that chanced to be just below the ruddy star, was an astounding machine. Three slender towers, of a white metal that gleamed in the moonlight with the silvery luster of aluminum, rose from the rocky peak. They supported, in a horizontal position, an enormous metal ring. It must be, Dan reckoned swiftly, at least a hundred feet in diameter, and held a hundred feet above the summit of the mountain. The huge ring gleamed with a strange purple radiance. A shimmering mist of red-violet light surrounded it. An unknown force seemed to throb within the mighty ring, drawing the mantle of purple haze about it. And suspended inside the ring and below it was a long, slender needle of dazzling white light. To Dan, from where he stood in the canyon, it seemed a fine, sharp line, though he knew it must be some kind of pointer, luminous with the strange force pulsing through it. The strange needle wavered a little, with quick, uncertain motions. The brilliance of its light varied oddly; it seemed to throb with a queer, irregular rhythm. And the gleaming needle pointed straight at the planet Mars! Dan stood a long time, watching the purple ring upon the silver towers, with the shining white needle hanging below it. He stared at Mars, glowing like a red and sinister eye above the incredible mechanism. His mind was in a wild storm of wonder shot with fear. What was the meaning of the gleaming ring and needle? What connection did this great device have with the signal of distress from the cliff, and the green fire that had destroyed the _Virginia_? And why did the glowing needle point at Mars? * * * * * He did not know when he first began to hear the sound. For a time it was merely part of the strange mystery of the island, only another element in the atmosphere of fear and wonder that surrounded him. Then it rose a little, and he became suddenly sharply conscious of it as an additional menace. The sound was not loud, but deep and vibrant. A whir or hum, like that of a powerful, muffled motor, but deeper than the sound of any motor man has ever made. It came down the gorge, from the direction of the machine on the mountain. That deep, throbbing noise frightened Dan as none of his previous experiences had done. Shivering from fear as much as from cold, he crouched down beside a huge boulder in the edge of the tangle of brush that covered the bottom of the ravine. His heart pounded wildly. He was in the clutches of an unreasoning fear that some terrible Thing had seen him, and was about to seek him out. For a moment he had to use all his will to keep himself from panic flight through the brush. The unknown is always terrible, and he had invaded the domain of a force he could not understand. In a moment, however, he recovered himself. He would be as safe there in the jungle, he thought, as anywhere on the island. He thought of starting a fire, then realized that he had no matches, and that he would not dare to make a light if he were able. He pulled a few handfuls of dry grass to make a sort of bed, upon which he huddled up, thanking his lucky stars that the island was in semi-tropical latitudes. His mind returned again to the riddles that confronted him: the green flash and the strange mechanism on the peak. He recalled fantastic stories he had read, of hermit scientists conducting amazing experiments in isolated parts of the world. Presently he decided that something of the kind must be on foot here. "The green flash is a sort of a death ray," he summed up, aloud. "And they shoot it from that bright needle. No wonder they don't want to be bothered! Somebody may be fixing to upset civilization! "But it's queer that the needle points at Mars...." Of this last fact, which might have been a clue to the most reasonable solution of the mystery, if a rather astounding one, he was able to make nothing. In fact, huddled up on his pile of grass in some degree of comfort, he presently went to sleep, still pondering in vain upon this last clue. * * * * * He was awakened by a soft, insistent purring sound, rather like that of a small electric motor run without load at very high speed. Recollection of the night's events came abruptly to him, and he sprang to his feet in alarm, finding his muscles sore and stiff from his cramped position. From one side Dan heard the rumble of thunder, and, glancing up, saw that the sky above the sea was overcast with a rolling mass of dark, menacing clouds. There was a strange portentous blackness about these storm clouds that filled him with a nameless fear. Suddenly he was struck with the thought that it was not thunder that had wakened him. The noise he had heard had not the rumbling or booming quality of thunder. As he stood there he again became conscious of the low, whirring sound, behind him. He whirled around to face it. The shock of what he saw left him momentarily dizzy and trembling--though undoubtedly his surroundings had much to do with its effect upon him. The sound came from a glistening metal machine which stood half-hidden in the brush a dozen yards away _looking at him_! The thing was made of a lustrous, silvery metal, which Dan afterwards supposed to be aluminum, or some alloy of that metal. Its gleaming case was shaped more like a coffin, or an Egyptian mummy-case, than any other object with which he was familiar, though rather larger than either. That is, it was an oblong metal box, tapering toward the ends, with the greatest width forward of the middle. Twin tubes projected from the end of it, lenses in them glistening like eyes. Just below them sprang out steely, glistening tentacles several feet long, writhing and twitching as if they were alive. The tangle of green brush hid the thing's legs, so that Dan could not see them. * * * * * Suddenly it sprang toward him, rising ten feet high and covering half the distance between them. It alighted easily upon the two long, jointed metal limbs upon which it had leapt, and continued to keep the lens-tubes turned toward Dan, so he knew that the grotesque metal thing was _watching him_. The limbs, he observed, were similar to the hind legs of a grasshopper, both in shape and position. And evidently the thing leapt upon them in about the same way. Then he noticed another curious thing about it. Three little bars of metal projected above the thickest part of its case, on the upper side. Their ends were joined by a little ring, three inches across. The tiny metal ring glowed with purple luminosity. A purple haze seemed to cling about it, as to the huge ring Dan had seen on the towers above the peak. And suspended inside this ring was a tiny metal needle, shimmering with pulsating white fire. On the back of this metal monster was a miniature replica of the strange mechanism upon the pinnacle. The little needle pointed up the canyon. A glance that way showed Dan that it pointed at the great device upon the mountain, which looked even more brilliant on this gloomy morning than in the uncertain radiance of the moon. The colossal ring was shrouded in a splendid mantle of purple flame; and the long, slender needle, which seemed to have swung on down to follow Mars below the horizon, still throbbed with scintillating white fire. For several minutes the two stood there, studying each other. A naked man, tense and bewildered in the presence of mysterious forces--and a grotesque machine, cased in gleaming white metal, whose parts seemed to duplicate most of the functions of a living creature. Then one of the writhing tentacles that shot from the "head" of the machine reached back under the metal case, and reappeared grasping what appeared to be a flat disk of emerald, two inches across and half an inch thick. This green disk it held up, with a flat side toward Dan. There was no sound, but a flash of green light came from it, cutting a wide swath into the jungle, and littering its path with smoking and flaming debris. * * * * * But Dan, expecting something of the kind, had flung himself sidewise into the shelter of the boulder beside which he had slept. Behind it, he gathered his feet under him, picked up a rock of convenient size for throwing, and waited, ready and alert. He heard the soft humming sound on the other side of the boulder. A glittering object flashed above him. Crashing through the brush the metal monster came to earth on the same side of the boulder with him. But the metal thing had not turned in its flight: consequently its rear end was toward Dan. As it began cumberously to turn about, he hurled his rock with an accuracy that came of a boyhood on the farm. Instinct had made him try for the little ring and needle on the back of the monster, apparently its most vulnerable part. Whether by luck or skill, the rock struck the gleaming ring, crushing it against the needle--and instant paralysis overtook the metal thing. Its tentacles and limbs became fixed and rigid, and it toppled over in the brush. Dan walked over to it, and examined it briefly. The green disk had fallen on the ground, and he picked it up. It was made of emerald crystal, it had a little knob of glistening metal set in one side. Rather afraid of it, Dan forebore to twist the knob. But he still clutched it in his hand a few moments later, when, partly for fear that others of its kind would come to succor the fallen monster, and partly to secure shelter from the threatening rain, he retired into the shadows of the tangled jungle. He spent perhaps half an hour in creeping back to what he supposed a place of comparative safety. For some time he lay there in the cool gloom, brushing occasional insects off his bare skin, wishing by turns that he had a cup of coffee and a good beefsteak, and that he could puzzle out a logical solution of all the astounding things he had met in the island. After the encounter with the metal monster, he felt his theory of the hermit scientists a bit inadequate. * * * * * Presently his attention was attracted by the unmistakable mew of a kitten. Then he heard the padding sound of cautious human footsteps, and a clear feminine voice calling "Kitty, kitty," in low tones. The steps and the voice seemed coming toward him; since there was no sound of crackling brush, he supposed there was a trail which he had not found. "Hello," he ventured, when the voice seemed only a few yards away through the green tangle. At the same instant a gray kitten appeared out of the underbrush, and frisked trustfully across to him. He put out a hand, caressed it, picked it up. In a moment the feminine voice replied, "Hello yourself. Who are you?" A crackling sound came from the brush, as if the speaker were starting toward him. Dan, abruptly conscious of his lack of attire, said quickly, "Wait a minute! I haven't anything on, you see. I'm Dan McNally. I owned the schooner that something happened to off the island last night." A delicious, trilling laugh greeted the panic of his first words. Then the clear, sweet voice, serious again, replied, "So you swam ashore from the boat I signaled?" "Yes." "Gee, but I'm glad to find you! And you say you haven't any clothes? I wonder what...." The voice paused reflectively, then resumed, "Here's a sheet that I got to signal with in the daytime, if I had a chance. You might wrap it around you until we find something better." The low, liquid laugh rang out again; again there was a rustling in the brush, and presently an arm appeared, holding a rolled-up sheet. "All right," he called. "Throw it this way." * * * * * In a moment, with the sheet draped around him like a Roman toga, and the kitten on his arm, he advanced to meet the owner of the beautiful voice. At the trail he met a trim, active-looking young woman, clad in out-of-door attire and with a canvas knapsack on her back. Bareheaded, she wore her brown hair closely shingled. Her face, Dan recognized from the photograph he had seen five years before, though it was more lovely than the splotched newspaper picture had hinted. Her brown eyes were filled with laughter at his predicament and his present unusual garb. He bowed with mock gravity and said, "How do you do, Miss Helen Hunter?" Brown eyes widened in surprise. "You know me?" she asked. "Not half so well as I hope to," he grinned. Then, handing her the kitten, he spoke seriously. "What about this island? The green flashes? The big machine on the mountain? The metal thing that jumps about like a grasshopper? What's it all about? You know anything about it?" "Yes, I know a good deal about it," she told him soberly. "It's rather a terrible story. And one you may not believe--no, you've seen them! But the kitten is hungry, and you must be, too, if you swam ashore." "Well, yes, I am." Dan admitted. The storm clouds were drifting out to sea; the sun was beginning to assert itself, and it now lighted up the scene with a cheerful brightness. She slung off her pack and sat down cross-legged at the side of the trail. Dan sat down opposite her as she opened the knapsack and produced a can of condensed milk, one of sardines, a can-opener, and half a loaf of bread. "I had to select my supplies rather at random," she said, "and you'll have to make the best of them." She started to open the sardines. "You'd better give it to me," Dan advised. "You might cut your hand." "You think so?" she asked, deftly lifting the lid, fishing out a fish for the kitten, and presenting the can to Dan. Then with capable hands she broke off a large chunk of bread, which she handed him. "Go ahead and finish this up," she said. "I've already had breakfast." She punched two holes in the end of the milk can, and poured some of the thick yellow fluid into the palm of her left hand, from which she let the kitten lap it. "And now for the mystery of the island," Dan demanded, forgetting bread and sardines in his eagerness. * * * * * The girl turned her face to him. "I'm Helen Hunter, as you seem to know," she began. "I came here with my father five years ago to observe an eclipse of the sun. When it was all over, and the ship called to take us off, he decided to send the results of our observations by one of the other men. He wanted to stay here to carry on another experiment--the one that led to that machine on the hill. Part of the other men were willing to stay. The yacht left us here, and has been back from San Francisco every six months since, with mail and supplies." "And what was the experiment?" Dan demanded eagerly. "Have you ever looked at Mars through a good telescope?" she countered. "Then you must have seen the canals--straight dark lines running from the white polar caps to the equatorial zone. All scientists did not agree as to what they were, but nobody could suggest a natural origin for them. "My father was one of those who thought that the canals were fertile, cultivated strips, irrigated with water brought down from the melting ice-caps. Irrigation systems meant intelligent life upon the planet, and his experiment was an attempt to communicate with that intelligence." "And he succeeded?" Dan was astounded. "Yes. The means was simple enough: other men had suggested it years before, in fact. Any fairly bright light on Mars--such as the beam of a searchlight directed toward earth--would be visible in a good telescope, when the planet is favorably situated: it follows that such a light on earth should be visible to an observer with a similar instrument on Mars. "It was possible, of course, but unlikely, that Mars would have intelligent inhabitants still ignorant of the telescope. It was also possible that their senses would be different from ours--that, if they saw at all, it would be with a different part of the spectrum. Father took the chance. And he succeeded. "The call was simple: merely three flashes of light, repeated again and again. We used a portable searchlight, mounted on a motor-truck, such as is used in the army. The three flashes meant that we were on the third planet of the solar system. The answering call, from the fourth planet, should be four flashes, of course. "For three nights we kept signaling. One of the men watched the motor-generator, and I operated the searchlight, swinging it on Mars and off again, to make the flashes. Dad kept his eye screwed to the telescope. Nothing happened and he got discouraged. I persuaded him to keep on for another night, in case they hadn't seen us at first; or needed more time to get their searchlight ready. "And on the fourth night poor Dad came out of the observatory, shouting that he had seen four flashes." * * * * * Dan gasped, speechless with astonishment. "Then that machine, with the needle pointing at Mars, and the green flashes, and the thing that jumped at me--" Helen waved a white hand for silence. "Just keep cool a minute! I'm coming to them. "The four flashes just began it. In a few days Dad and the Martians were communicating by a sort of television process. He would mark off a sheet of paper into squares, blacken some of the squares to make a picture or design, then have me send a flash for each black square, and miss an interval for each white one, taking them in regular order. The Martians seemed to catch on pretty soon; in a few days Dad was receiving pictures of the same sort. "Rather a slow way of communication, perhaps. But it worked better than one might think at first. In a month Dad had received instructions for building a small machine like that big one on the hill. It is something like radio--at least it operates with vibrations in the ether--but it's as much ahead of our radio as an airplane is in advance of a fire-balloon. I understand a good bit about it, but I won't try to explain it now. "And in the next three years Dad learned no end of things from the people on Mars. One queer thing about it was, that they never let us see them on the television apparatus, no matter how many of their scientific secrets they gave us. Dad and I exhibited ourselves, but I don't know yet what the Martians look like--though I have made a guess. "By the end of the third year they had showed Dad how to make one of those metal things--" "Like that one that jumped at me?" Dan broke in with a shudder. "Yes. They seem almost alive; but they are machines, like our robots, and controlled by the radio apparatus. The eyes use photo-electric cells, and relay what is before them to the Master Intelligence." The girl spoke these last words in a low tone, shrinking involuntarily. She paused a moment, then shrugged and continued. "The first machine did not obey my father. It was controlled by signals that came from Mars, over the big station on the hill. And it went to work, making more apparatus, building more machines, enlarging the receiving station. It worked in obedience to the Master Intelligence on Mars! "That was a year ago. The last time the yacht called, my father and the other men still hoped to control the machines. They let her go back without us. The machines tolerated us a while; paid no attention to us; they were busy working mines and building huge, strange things that must be flying machines; the plateau on the other side of the peak is crowded with them. "For the machines are preparing to leave the island! They are going to conquer the world for the Master Intelligence on Mars! "Months ago my father discovered this, and realized that he had loosed doom upon the earth. He and the three other men planned to destroy that big station on the peak. All the signals to the machines are relayed through that, from Mars. The machines seemed to pay no heed as they made their preparations. "Then one night, about three weeks ago, they tried to dynamite the station." The girl's shoulder trembled; she paused to brush a tear from her eye, then went on hastily, in a voice grown husky with emotion. Dan felt an odd desire to take her slight form in his arms and comfort her in her grief. "The machines had seemed heedless, but they were ready. They had those disks that throw the green fire: we had not seen them before. And--well, all four of them were killed." Dan handed her the disk of green crystal he had taken from the thing that had attacked him. She examined it silently, then went on. "Dad had left me in bed, but I heard an explosion. I think the bombs went off when the green fire struck them. I knew what had happened, and got out of the house just before the machines arrived. They wrecked the place with their green flashes. "And for the last three weeks I've been hiding in the jungle, or watching for ships. Three times I've raided the ruins of the house for something to eat: fortunately it didn't burn, like your ship. And that's all, I suppose--except I'm awfully glad that you got ashore." "Thanks," Dan said, earnestly. "And what are we going to do now?" * * * * * "I don't know," Helen answered in a troubled tone. "I'm afraid. Afraid for all humanity. On the television, I've seen enough of Mars to be sure that it is a world of machines, controlled by one Master Intelligence. And even that may be a machine. We make machines that compute the tides and carry out other computations that are almost beyond the power of the human mind: why couldn't a machine think? "The Master Intelligence of Mars plans to add the Earth to his domain. Unless we can do something to stop it, in a few years the world will be overrun with gigantic robot-machines, controlled by force from across the gulf of space. Humanity cannot resist them. Imagine a battleship pitted against that green annihilating ray, and all the other science of an elder planet! "Life is to be blotted out! The Master Intelligence of Mars will rule two worlds of mechanical monsters!" Dan sat in a dazed vision of horror to come, until Helen straightened up as if shaking off a mantle of fear, and smiled heroically, if a bit wanly. "Now you must eat your bread and sardines, to give you strength to fight for humanity!" she cried, with a laugh that she strived, not too successfully, to make cheerful and gay. Obediently, he began to eat, finding an excellent appetite.... It was several minutes later that he fancied he heard a whirring and crackling in the brush behind them. He sprang to his feet in alarm. "It can't be far back to where I left the machine," he cried. "Do you suppose there's danger that--" The mechanical ears of the metal things may have picked up the sound of his voice: but in any event, green flame flashed about them on the instant. Feeling a sudden protective impulse, Dan started toward Helen. That was his last recollection, before what seemed a terrific concussion swept him into the abyss of unconsciousness.... * * * * * His first thought, when he awakened, was of the girl. But he was alone in the silence of the canyon. He sat up, realizing that many hours had passed, for the air was growing cool again, and the sun was low behind the peak at the head of the ravine. The huge, mysterious machine of the purple ring and the vibrating white needle were blazing splendidly. He took more detailed stock of his immediate surroundings. The tangle of brush that had sheltered them had been cut away by the green annihilating ray. Charred stumps remained to show where it had fired bushes beyond the trail. His own shoulder was blistered, a hole was burned in the sheet wound about him, and the hair was singed from the back of his head. Suddenly trembling with horror, he looked about for anything to show that Helen had perished by the ray. Discovering nothing, he breathed a sigh of relief. "She must be still alive, anyhow," he muttered. "And I've had another lucky break! The ray was too high to get me. They must have left me for dead." Presently he became conscious of torturing thirst. He retired through the brush, along the rocky wall of the canyon. By sunset he came upon a little natural basin in a rock, half full of rain water. It was none too clean, but he drank his fill of it, and felt relief. Looking up the canyon, he could see the great mechanism on the peak, gleaming in the dusk. Intensely-glowing purple mist clung about the great metal ring, and the slender, delicate needle swung below it, still vibrating, still throbbing with brilliant, white radiance. It pointed at the red eye of Mars, which had just winked into view. Dan stared at it a long time. "It all sounds crazy," he muttered, "but it isn't! The Master Intelligence of Mars, she said, is controlling the mechanical things through that! The doom of the Earth is coming through that white needle! If only I could smash it, somehow!" He looked down at the white folds of the sheet that draped him, and clenched his hands impotently. "No gun! Not even a pocket-knife. Nothing but my bare hands!" He bit his lip. * * * * * Still he stared challengingly at the gleaming mechanism on the peak. An idea slowly took form in his mind; an exclamation abruptly escaped him. Narrowly he eyed the trussed girders of the silver towers which supported the great ring, muttering to himself. "Yes, I can do it! If I don't get caught! I can climb it, well enough. The needle looks a bit frail. I should be able to smash it! I'd like to see Helen again, though." He gathered the sheet around him, and began picking a cautious way up the canyon, staying always in the cover of boulders or brush. A few times he disturbed a rock, or snapped a twig beneath his foot. Then he waited out of sight for long minutes, though he had no reason to believe that the metal monsters were on the alert for him. "I've got to do it! The world depends on it!" he kept saying again and again in his mind. The quick darkness of the tropics had fallen almost before he started. But he welcomed the night, for, if it made his own silent progress more difficult, it reduced the hazard that he would be discovered. Gauging the time by the slow wheeling of the diamond-like stars across the velvet sky, he thought that two hours had passed when he reached the head of the canyon. He stood up cautiously to survey the little plateau at the summit of the hill. It was several acres in extent, quite level, and almost clear of vegetation. At the farther side was a pile of wreckage, which, he supposed, had been the quarters of Dr. Hunter's party, before they had been destroyed. Many huge machines stood about the plateau, vast, dark masses looming in the starlight. Mostly they were either not running or very silent in operation; but a very deep, vibrant humming sound came from one near him. Smaller shapes were moving about them, with long easy leaps. These, he knew, were the mechanical monsters, though it was too dark to distinguish them. * * * * * But by far the most prominent object upon the plateau was the enormous gleaming thing that Helen had said was the station over which came the signals from the Master Intelligence on Mars. One of its three towers sprang up not far from where he stood. The huge, refulgent ring, swathed in its mist of purple fire, was a full hundred feet above him; and the slender needle, pulsing with white flame, swinging within and below the colossal ring, was itself a hundred feet in length. The white needle, for all its length, seemed hardly thicker than a man's finger. It was mounted at the top of a curiously complex and delicate-looking device that spread broadly out between the three towers, below the center of the huge purple ring. Dan looked at it and decided that his plan had at least a chance of success--though he had no hope that it would not be fatal to him. Quickly and silently he ran to the base of the mighty silver towers nearest him and began to climb the side toward the ravine, where the maze of girders would hide him, at least partially, from any watchers back on the plateau. The starlight and the faint weird radiance of the purple ring above sufficed to guide him. The cross-braces on the girder he had chosen were spaced closely enough to serve as the rungs of a ladder. Dan climbed easily, pausing twice for breath, and to look down at the dark plateau. The vast, humming machines loomed up strangely in the pale purple light that fell from the gleaming ring. Once he looked across toward the other side of the island. The surface there was more level. He glimpsed tiny moving lights, and huge stationary masses, apparently as large as ocean liners. He had an impression of a vast amount of mechanical activity, proceeding in the darkness very rapidly, and in a silent and orderly fashion. "The expeditionary force of the Master Intelligence of Mars," he thought, "preparing to set out against humanity! And what I can do is the only chance to stop it!" * * * * * He climbed again with renewed energy. A few yards more brought him to the colossal metal ring. Resting upon the three towers, it was a circular band of shining metal a foot thick and as wide as a road. The intense purple glow extended several feet from its surface. Dan touched it tentatively. He felt a tingling electric shock. And he thought he could feel a radiation coming from it, giving him a curious sensation of cold. As he reached his hands up and grasped the upper edge of the great ring, he felt what seemed a physical current of cold. Controlling his tendency to shiver, he climbed upon the last brace, and, lifting his weight with his hands, threw himself face down upon the flat upper surface of the vast ring. He lay bathed in cold purple fire. He tingled with the chill of it. A frozen current seemed to penetrate his body. Involuntarily he trembled, lost his grip and dangled precariously from the rim. Only a frantic scrambling restored his hold. Then, fighting the sensation of freezing cold that came from the mist of purple flame, he drew himself forward and got to his feet upon the broad surface of the metal ring. On both sides it curved away like a circular track. Red-violet fire shimmered about it, bathing him to the waist in a chilling torrent. Through coruscating frozen flame he waded to the inner rim of the colossal ring. Below him hung the needle, a mere straight line of white fire, a hundred feet in length. Eye-dazzling radiance scintillated along it, waxing and waning with a curious throbbing rhythm. The needle vibrated a little, but it pointed directly at the red point of Mars, now almost directly overhead. Repressing a shudder, Dan looked down at the complex and delicate apparatus upon which the slender needle was mounted. It was a light frame of white metal bars, with spidery coils and huge glowing tubes and flimsy spinning disks mounted in it. The gleaming needle was mounted much like a telescope at the top of the device, fully fifty feet below him. "Looks flimsy enough," Dan muttered. "I'll go through it like a sixteen-inch shell! Who would have thought I'd end this way!" * * * * * He stepped back for a moment, and stood on the polished metal, hidden to the waist in cold purple flame. Lest it impede his movements, he tore the sheet from him and threw it aside. He let his eyes sweep for a last time over the familiar constellations blazing so splendidly in the black sky above. He had a pang of heartache, as if the stars were old friends. His glance roved fondly over the dark, indistinct masses of the island, and across the black plain of the sea. "Well, no good in waiting," he muttered again. "Sorry I can't see Helen. Hope she gets off all right." He backed to the outer rim and drew a deep breath, like one about to dive. Then, with set face, he sprinted forward. As he did so a blinding flash of green light flickered up before him. He ducked his head and leapt from the inner edge of the vast glowing ring. For long seconds, it seemed, he was plunging down through space, feet first. Air rushed screaming about his ears. But his mind was quite calm, and registered an astonishingly large series of impressions. He saw the delicate, gleaming machine rushing up to meet him, the shimmering white needle swung on its top. He took in the silent, dark plateau, with the masses of the great machines rising like ominous shadows here and there, and the mechanical monsters leaping busily about it, almost invisible in the dim, ghostly radiance that fell from the purple ring. He saw a vivid flame of green reach up past him from somewhere below. He knew, without emotion or alarm, that he had been discovered, and that it was too late for his discoverers to stop him. He found time, even, for a fleeting thought of death. His mind framed the question, "What will I be in a moment from now?" Then he had struck the great white needle, and was crashing into the delicate apparatus below it. Waves of pain beat upon his mind like flashes of blinding light. But his last mental image, as he passed into oblivion, was a picture of Helen's face. Oddly, it was not her face as he had last seen it, but a reproduction of the old newspaper half-tone, curiously retouched with life and color. * * * * * There is little more to tell. It was some weeks later when Dan came back out of a world of delirium and dreams, to find himself lying on his back in a tent, very much bandaged. He was alone at the moment, and at first could not recall that tremendous last day of his conscious life. Then he heard a thrillingly familiar feminine voice calling "Kitty, kitty, kitty." He tried to move, a dull pain throbbed in his breast, and a groan escaped him. In a moment Helen appeared; the gray kitten was forgotten. She looked very anxious and solicitous--and also, Dan thought, very beautiful. "No, no!" she cried. "You are going to be all right! Dad made me learn a little elementary medicine before we came here, and I know. But you mustn't speak! Not for days yet! I'll have to guess what you want. And you can wink when I guess the right thing. "Gee, but I'm glad you've come to! You'll be as well as ever, pretty soon. The kitten was lots of comfort. Still--" Dan attempted to move. She leaned over him, shifted his weight and smoothed the sheet with strong, capable hinds. "You want to know about what happened to the machine monsters?" He winked. "Well, you remember when they found us, and shot the green ray at us. They left you there--I thought you were dead--and carried me up here on the hill. Perhaps they wanted me for a laboratory subject to test the green ray on, or something of the kind. Anyhow, they carried me into a big shed filled with strange machines. "They kept me there until that night. Then, all of a sudden, they all--stopped! They froze! They were dead! "The tentacles of the one that was holding me were set about me. But I worked free, and got out of the shed. It took all night. And when I came out, just at sunrise, I saw that the purple fire was gone from the great ring. The needle was knocked down, and the apparatus smashed. "I found you there in the wreckage. You made a human bullet of yourself to smash it! The greatest thing a man ever did!" * * * * * Though normally rather modest, Dan felt a glow of pride at the honest admiration ringing in her clear voice, and shining from her warm brown eyes. "So I gathered up what was left of you," she went on, "and tried to put you back together again. A good many bones were broken, and you had more cuts and bruises than I could mention; but the apparatus had broken the force of the fall, and you were still alive. You are remarkably well put together, I should say; and unusually lucky, as well! "And, well, the machines and apparatus are scattered about all over the island. Every one of them stopped the instant you smashed the connection with the directing intelligence on Mars. There'll be quite a stir in the scientific world, I imagine, in about three weeks, when the yacht comes and carries us back with a lot of plans and specimens. We must send about a thousand engineers back here to study what we leave behind us. "And do you want anything else?" She bent over and watched his bandaged face. Looking up into her bright eyes, thrilling to the cool, comforting pressure of her hand on his forehead, Dan reflected. Then he winked. "Something you want me to do?" He winked. "When? Right now?" No response. "After the yacht comes." He winked. "What is it?" She looked him in the eye, blushed a little, and laughed. "You mean--" Dan winked. [Illustration: Advertisement.] The Hands of Aten A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By H. G. Winter_ [Illustration: The sharp roar of an explosion thundered through the Temple.] [Sidenote: Out of solid ice Craig hews three long-frozen Egyptians--and is at once caught up into amazing adventure.] The sleek black monoplane came scudding out of the south, flying low over fields of ice and snow that were thawing slowly under the heat of the arctic sun. After a long time it wheeled, circled gradually, and then, as if it had found what it had been looking for, came lightly down and skidded to a graceful halt in a low flat area between some round-topped hillocks. A fur-clad figure emerged from the enclosed cockpit and climbed a low ridge into the wan sunlight above. For a while the man looked around, getting his bearings. Miles on every side stretched the great rough plains of ice--ice that became a broad path of glittering diamonds where it led toward the low-hung sun, far in the south. Perhaps a quarter mile in that direction lay the white rise of a hill much larger than its fellows, probably, the man thought, a volcano. Towards it he laboriously made his way. His tiny figure was only a speck on the far-flung, deserted landscape--a human mite, puny and futile against the giant, hostile white waste. The sky was clear and cloudless, the sun unusually warm. So warm, indeed, that long clefts, caused by the unequal expansion of the ice, appeared here and there. The man from the plane had not gone more than fifty yards when he halted sharply. With a crack like thunder, a cleft had opened at his very feet--a rift ten feet deep in places, apparently bottomless in others, and very long. Not wanting to go around it, he slid down one side and, with an ice pick, started to hack a foothold in the opposite bank. It was then that the man saw the thing--something sticking from the ice just above his head. As he stared at it, amazement appeared on his bronzed face. He looked around bewilderedly, then peered still more closely into the bluish depths of the crystal wall. The head of a spear was jutting from the ice. And the spear was held by a man entrapped within the wall. * * * * * The details of the ice-held figure were but slightly blurred, for it was only a few feet from the surface. It was that of a man, and it was plain that he was not an Eskimo. He was locked in a distorted position, as if caught unawares by a terrific weight of sliding snow. And he had been caught, seemingly, when in the act of hurling his weapon. For a long time the man from the plane peered at his discovery. Then his blue eyes followed slowly the direction in which the spear was pointing, and he gasped, and took a few quick steps further down the cleft. There, in the opposite wall, were two more bodies. These, though, were of man and woman. They were even closer to the surface of the ice. Crouched over, the man's left hand was craned as if to protect his companion from some peril--from the cataclysm that had trapped them, it might have been. Or perhaps from the spear of the other. The fur-muffled figure stood motionless, gazing at them. His ice pick was held limply, his eyes were wide. Then, suddenly, the pick was grasped firmly, and flakes of ice flew under its level blows as he started to carve his find from their frozen tomb. The man was trembling with wild excitement when at last the stiff form of the woman was extricated. She was not so much a woman as a girl, really--and she was beautiful. But the man from the plane evidently didn't care so much about that; nor even her almost miraculous state of preservation. He rubbed away some of the coating of ice from her face, and stared most intently at her forehead. Then he stood upright, and said, simply: "Well, I'll be damned!" * * * * * If Wesley Craig had been merely what he was listed as on the roster of the Somers Arctic Expedition of 1933--that is, a geologist--he would not have been so astounded. But his life work, really, was archaeology. He had spent years delving in the ruins of ancient temples, especially, those of old Egypt. He knew the ancient language as well as anyone knew it, and was familiar with every known detail of the civilization of the Pharaohs. And, being so, he was now properly confused. For every bit of his knowledge told him that this girl, whom he had found in the wastes of the arctic, was of Egyptian stock. A certain tiny hieroglyph traced on her smooth forehead--the intricate band around her fine hair--the very cut of the frozen robe she wore--Egyptian--every one of them! Yet, stubbornly, Wesley Craig wouldn't admit it. Not until he had cut the two men from the ice and hauled all three laboriously up the side of the cleft and stretched them out on the level ice, did he have to. He couldn't deny it, then. In some mysterious way, Egypt was connected with the three rigid bodies. For the two men were garbed as warriors, and their helmets and harness and sword-sheaths were indisputably of Egyptian design. There, however, the similarity between the two ended. The one with the spear was big-muscled and burly; the other much slighter of build. This latter, Craig guessed, had been fleeing with the girl when icy death had overwhelmed them. * * * * * But he did not then try to go into that, the story that some sudden cataclysm had cut short. His fervor, as an Egyptologist, was afire. He was burning with eagerness to get these bodies back to the main base of the Somers Expedition, some three hundred miles south. Into the learned circles of Egyptology, of archaeology, they'd throw a bomb-shell that would make nitroglycerine seem like weak tea. Craig couldn't taxi his plane closer; he would have to carry them to it; and to do this he began to carefully massage all the larger pieces of ice from the girl's limbs and clothing, to make her lighter. At the Somers base they could all be re-frozen, to maintain their perfect preservation. It was while he was diligently rubbing that he fully realized the girl's beauty. Delicate, cleanly cut features; fine, large eyelids; tiny, slender hands. Save for her icy pallor, she might almost have been merely asleep as she lay on the snow. Wes Craig finished massaging the girl and then went on and did the same for the two warriors. For an hour he carefully and reverently released them from the reluctant fingers of their icy death, and he was a little tired from his exertions and his great excitement when at last he finished and stood erect, resting. But he did not stand quiet for long. A sudden gleam lit his eyes: a mad idea had come to him. "Won't hurt to try!" he muttered excitedly, and the next moment his lithe figure was running over the slippery ice bank to his airplane, out of sight behind the nearby hillocks. * * * * * Wes Craig worked from a sub-base on his sole expeditions to chart the various mountains and ranges in the islands off north-east King Charles Land, within the Arctic Circle. He had only one partner, a mechanic, who stayed behind on his shorter trips. And therefore all manner of emergency devices were stowed in the cockpit of his plane: a tiny folding tent, an amazingly light sled, a large store of compressed food--and a large vial of Kundrenaline and a hypodermic needle. Kundrenaline was still somewhat of an unknown quantity in 1933. Kund, the German, had developed it but a year before. The fluid was already standard beside the operating tables of the world's most modern hospitals, so valuable had its qualities proven to be. It had actually restored life after hours of death. A complex mixture of concentrated adrenaline and highly compressed liquid food, it gave a tremendous stimulation to the heart, at the same time providing the body with energy food to withstand the shock. It was meant for emergency use on the Somers Expedition. But Wes Craig wasn't going to use it for that. He was going to use it for an experiment--a crazy experiment, he told himself. Fish--many forms of life--withstand freezing in solid ice without hurt. Human beings--? It wouldn't hurt to try, anyway, his mind kept repeating. Fifteen minutes saw him back beside the rigid bodies, and kneeling over the girl. The sun had warmed her body somewhat, and the glistening rheum of frost had melted from all three. Hardly breathing from his suspense, Wes filled the needle's chamber full and plunged it into the firm white flesh just above the girl's silent heart. A short laugh came from him--an ironic laugh. It seemed idiotic to even think of restoring her to life, even if she _had_ been dead only a week or so. It was quite-- And then his thoughts stopped. "My God!" he said suddenly. For a tide of faintest color had surged through the girl's wan cheeks. And her slim figure had stirred perceptibly on the sheet of ice! "By heaven, she's coming to!" Craig muttered unbelievingly. * * * * * Pressing his ear to her chest, he detected a faint and labored beating of her heart, stirring from its cold sleep as the terrific stimulation jolted it back to life. The girl's eyelids flickered; a tiny sigh escaped her full lips. Craig took off his heavy parka and laid it over her. Trembling with tremendous excitement, he tore himself away from the miracle of re-created life, and strode to the body of the young man who was apparently her partner. Again he administered the Kundrenaline. Then he went to his first discovery--the heavily built, powerful warrior whose spear had stuck out of the ice. The hypodermic was once more filled, and the fluid plunged into his body. Even as a faint moan came from the younger man, the warrior's heart started to beat. Perspiring, breathing quickly, vial and needle still in his hands, Wes stood off and surveyed the three. The girl's hands were moving fitfully; strange, racking gasps came from her throat. The other two were similarly affected. Almost frightened, held motionless by the weirdness of it, the American watched. The heavily built warrior was tossing in a series of convulsions. His legs kicked out spasmodically, arms jerked and clenched, and the helmeted head rolled from side to side. Then the man lay still for as long as a minute; but, just as Craig was about to go to him, his legs tensed once again, and, staggering drunkenly, he got to his feet. He looked around wildly, but did not see the dumbfounded Craig, for his eyes fell on the figure of the younger man. He too had risen, swaying on weak legs. And the girl was sitting up and staring at the two of them. * * * * * And then, grotesquely, preluded by a cry from the woman, the tragedy which death had once cut short was enacted out, there on the rough sheet of ice and snow. The man with the spear fixed his eyes on the girl's young partner, raised his weapon, leveled it unsteadily, and tossed it weakly forward. The pointed end clipped its target and sent him reeling, with a thin trickle of slow blood running from his right shoulder. The girl staggered to her feet and ran between the two. But the big warrior's hand swept her aside, and a short sword leaped from its sheath at his waist. Wes was stupidly staring, unable to move. The combatants were utterly unconscious of him. The younger one, painfully wounded, drew his own sword and swayed forward to meet his enemy. The fight was grotesque. Both were weak, unsteady. The short swords stabbed slowly, missing by yards in their drunken course. Hatred was on the big man's dark face, and a fierce lust for blood. It was only when the weapons clashed loudly together that Craig came out of his daze. "Stop!" he yelled, jumping forward. "Wait! Stop!" All three turned and looked full at him. And then death, which had been banished for but a few minutes, swooped swiftly once more on the young man. While he stood peering, bewildered, at Craig, the huge warrior steadied his blade and drove it home through his unguarded chest. The man slid over the edge of the ice into the cleft below. The girl shrieked again and went down to his fallen figure, while the victor waved his bloody sword aloft with a shout of triumph. Then, without hesitation, he leaped at the American. Wes was taken wholly by surprise. He dropped the vial of Kundrenaline and the hypodermic, and he heard them crash and break at his feet as he fumbled for his automatic, in a holster at his belt. But the warrior was upon him. His crimsoned blade swung high, gleamed downward, and smote Wesley Craig square on the side of the head. Lucky for him, the flat of the sword had been used--but it was enough. The American reeled under the terrific swipe. He had a last glimpse of two inflamed eyes, of a savage, contorted face; then the universal whiteness went black, and he fell, and the whole incredible scene passed from his consciousness.... * * * * * Just how long he had remained unconscious, Wesley Craig had no means of determining. His head was hurting devilishly; for a moment he thought that his plane had crashed, and that he was lying in the wreckage. Then he tried to move his hands, and found that he couldn't. They were bound. His eyes opened. He discovered that he was lying flat on the ice, hands tied behind his back. Somebody was moaning softly. It was the girl. She too was tied. Wes tried to sit up; and a hand grasped his shoulder tightly and yanked him to his feet. The big warrior who had felled him, his bloody sword still in hand, stared closely at the American, and fingered his fur jacket curiously. Presently he muttered a few words in some strange tongue. When Craig did not reply, he again spat out the words, his dark brows bunching malevolently. And this time Wes understood part of what he said. He was speaking ancient Egyptian! That proved it. These three, who but half an hour before were dead and entombed in the ice, _were_ Egyptians. Trying to cope with his returning bewilderment, Craig racked his brains for remnants of the difficult language. And finally said laboriously: "Who--who art thou?" A torrent of words broke from the warrior. Only a few were understandable. "Shabako--Pharaoh Shabako!" And he repeated Craig's question: "Who art thou?" The girl was sitting up now, and peering at the American. Her eyes were still tear-filled, for the dead body of the young man was at her side. She cried out a warning, and Craig caught most of it. "Be careful, Stranger! He will slay thee as he slew Inaros!" "Answer me! Who art thou?" repeated the warrior angrily. His patience was short; he played with the hilt of his sword. "I come," said Wesley Craig slowly, groping for words, "from a far country. I found the three of you in this ice--dead. I brought thee back to life." * * * * * There was an astounded silence. Then the man who called himself Shabako deliberately cuffed his prisoner on the cheek. "Blasphemer!" he roared. "To claim the powers of the gods! Thou shall die for that! Yea, the ice entrapped me when I was about to slay the guilty Inaros--but our mighty god Aten restored me to life! Enough! The priests shall deal with thee!" He jerked the trembling girl to Craig's side, and with a prick of his sword in their backs made them go forward. The American was too bewildered to think evenly. Why, the god Aten was the Sun God!--the divinity Egypt worshipped in five hundred B.C.? How had these warm-blooded people come to the far north? Where did they live? And what fate lay in store for him? He felt none too optimistic about his position. He knew that it would be two weeks before Somers, at the main base, would become alarmed at his absence. Unless, of course, the mechanic at the sub-base tried to beat his way back on foot, which was only barely possible.... Then he discovered that his automatic was still in its holster; it was slapping against his thighs; and he felt more hopeful. The girl trudged tiredly at his side. Shabako was a few feet behind, grumbling and urging his captives along. "Where does he drive us?" Craig asked softly. "What is thy name--and why did he slay thy companion?" Her frightened eyes slanted towards his face. "To the Temple of the Sun God, Stranger," she whispered. "And there--" She broke off, to get control of the emotion she was feeling. "There--what?" "The God's awful hands!... Taia is my name. I do not know how I am once again alive, when a short while ago I was dead--but it matters not. I am a priestess of Aten, a virgin of the Temple. Inaros, he--he who lies behind--dared to love me. But a few hours gone he committed sacrilege, hiding in the Temple, so he could watch me. Pharaoh Shabako chanced on him, threatened death to us and pursued us out here. And then of a sudden, when Shabako was hurling his spear, we were entrapped ... and died...." It was a strange story of forbidden love, one that might have been enacted in age-old times beneath the shadows of the pyramids. Craig began, "How did--" but a harsh voice cut his question short. "Silence, infidel! Stir thy feet! This ice cools my blood!" * * * * * The American's plane, hidden from view behind the hillock, was left farther and farther in the rear, and Wes was surprised to find that he was being driven up the very slopes of the ice-covered hill he had come to investigate. At the top, he saw that the hill was a volcano, as he had guessed. There, in the center, was a wide gaping hole from which, in past ages, fiery streams of lava and ashes had belched forth. He was amazed to see that rude steps had been hacked in one side of the great cleft, and that they led sharply downwards. A faint warmth reached him, and he observed that there was but little ice in the crater cup, and none on the rocky walls where the hewn steps led down. It was here that these warm-blooded people lived! As soon as Taia reached the steps she began to descend them, but Craig wasn't so docile. He told himself that this was his last chance; once below, surrounded by numbers, there might be no opportunity to strike for freedom. His eyes narrowed as he groped for a plan. If he could butt his brawny captor, strike him fairly in the solar plexus, and, while he lay helpless, cut his bonds with the sword.... He whirled around. Reverting to football tactics, he tensed his lean, hard body and plunged squarely at Shabako. The Pharaoh was taken completely by surprise, and went sprawling; but the sword did not pitch from his hand. He had received a stiff, shrewd blow, but only a glancing one, for he had twisted his body at the last second. Now, sputtering with wrath, he scrambled to his feet and whipped back his blade for a killing slice at the American. It was Taia who saved him, then. In a flash she threw herself against the sword arm and deflected the sweep. "Wait, O Pharaoh!" she cried breathlessly. "The priests will claim this stranger; 'tis they who must decide his fate! Do not kill him here!" Shabako's face was livid with wrath; rage choked him; but he paused. The girl's aptly timed words had told. He was obviously not decided as to what to do. There was a pause, while the sword pointed straight at Craig's chest; then, grumbling, the Egyptian let down his weapon. "But try no more of thy tricks, dog!" he said harshly. "Else thy death come before its time!" Taia glanced appealingly at Wes. Her eyes were half-frightened. Craig smiled wryly. "Lead on!" he said. * * * * * Years of time fell away with each of their descending steps. Egypt stirred under the dust of the centuries; Egypt lived again, though in a sad mockery of her former glory. It was like a descent into a new world, yet a world that was, at the same time, as old as man's civilization.... Fifty or more steps they trudged down, then came suddenly to two dark corridors, both of which slanted steeply into the bowels of the earth. The one they took was mystic with deep shadows thrown by flaring oil lamps, cunningly imbedded in the walls of rock; and immediately into Wes's mind came the memory of a corridor he had once walked through in old Egypt, a corridor that pierced to the heart of a pyramid and the somber vault of a mummy who had once been revered as the Pharaoh Aknahton. In his nostrils now there seemed to be that same, musty, age-old smell; the same hushed gloom was about him; his eyes saw dimly on the walls the same rows of hieroglyphs telling of long-past deeds of warriors and priests. But there the similarity ended. In Egypt it had been a dead Pharaoh; here, though even yet he could hardly believe it, a living one--living by grace of modern science--walked warily behind him, and a living virgin of the temple at his side. The sword of the Pharaoh was pricking his back. The passageway they trudged down became one of many. Others angled from it frequently, all dark, all hushed, all seemingly devoid of people. The volcano--extinct, almost surely, for the warmth was only that of the earth--was honey-combed with corridors. The marvelous ingenuity of the Egyptian race had come into play in fashioning this warm home in the barren arctic wastes. But Craig's ever-alert eyes warned him of what was to come. The characters, the hieroglyphs, the rude forms of Egyptian gods on the jagged walls were of degenerate character--and always, when degeneration sets in, the cruellest form of worship has been chosen. The worship of Aten, the Sun God, Wes recalled, was one that demanded human sacrifice.... * * * * * Still they went down. Savage crevices, split in the days when the volcano roared with fire and gushing lava, were skirted; crude ladders reached down ever-recurring pits, beneath which there was always another corridor, and always leading down. Craig could not reckon the depth they must be at; he knew that the heat was growing, though, and that his skin was wet with perspiration beneath his furs. He started to ask Taia the question that ceaselessly tormented him--how her race had come to the arctic; but a prick from Shabako's sword silenced him. Then the passageway they were in widened. There was a bend just ahead. Through the gloom came the sonorous chant of many voices. "The Temple!" whispered Taia. They turned the bend, and saw, ahead, lit by a thick cluster of oil lamps which threw a broad swathe of yellowish light, two tall columns of corrupt Egyptian design. They framed the entrance to the Sun God's Temple. The full volume of a chant of worship from inside poured through them. Shabako's sword brooked no pause. He drove his prisoners straight through. A host of impressions thronged Wes's bewildered eyes: a huge, misty-dark room, columns lining it--the vague form of a great idol squatting at the far end, massed people bowed before it--a weird chant rising into murmuring echoes along the high, dim ceiling. There were priests standing rigidly in front of the idol, their hands stretched high; and every eye was upon them. None saw the three in the doorway until a roar split the drone of worship. "Way! Way for thy Pharaoh, Shabako the Fourth!" * * * * * Shabako had stepped for the moment in front of his prisoners. His sword blade was waved aloft; his bawl rudely interrupted the ceremony. The chant stopped, and silence fell as the priests whirled around. The worshippers, too, turned and stared at the man who had broken the service with his imperious command. "Way!" the vibrant voice cried again. "Aside for thy Pharaoh, who returns to the shrine of Aten, Father of Life!" Some sixty bewildered faces peered at the man. The silence of the buried Temple was solid, awesome. Through the mist of wreathing incense-smoke and heavy shadows the giant head of the idol stared down, cruel in the coldness of the rock it had been chiselled from. But a pathway cleared in the thick of the crowd, and, without a glance to either side, Shabako's proud figure strode down it, driving his prisoners before him. Craig heard low gasps of astonishment, glimpsed the people fall back as he walked forward, saw the amazement in their eyes. The statue of the god seemed to grow as he neared the altar; it was in squatting posture, with hands outstretched, one above the other. The American was to learn the reason for that position later. Now he had only a fleeting impression of it, for a man stepped from his ceremonial position beside the god's feet and met Shabako halfway. His face was thin and cunning, with slanted rat's eyes. Ornate head-dress and stiffly inlaid robes denoted him to be the High Priest. He held a claw-like hand high. "Hold!" he bade shrilly. "Who art thou to come thus into the Temple, calling thyself Shabako--Shabako, who has been dead these twenty years?" * * * * * The words were a thunderbolt of surprise, both to the Pharaoh and Taia, and to Wes Craig. He could not see Shabako's face, but he saw his tall form pause, and his tensed muscles relax. "Dead ... these twenty years?" the Egyptian at last repeated slowly, struggling to overcome the shock. "Why, 'twas but a few hours ago that I left this Temple, in pursuit of--" He peered at the priest's sly face. "Who art thou?" he demanded suddenly. "Hrihor, High Priest of Aten." Craig heard the girl whisper something, inaudible because of her surprise, but Shabako's bewildered voice cut in: "Hrihor! It cannot be! Thou art not Hrihor! When last I saw Hrihor, he was an under-priest of twenty. Ay was High Priest of the Temple! Call him! Where is Ay?" "Dust," said the priest. "Dust these ten years and more." Wes's senses were reeling. The bodies in the ice--he had taken it for granted they had only lain there for days; a week at most. That they had been entrapped for twenty years was incredible. Had he known that, he would not even have thought of using the Kundrenaline. Twenty years ago he had been a boy of eight; it meant--Lord!--it meant the youthful girl beside him was twice her age; and Shabako an old man! Old--yet young! Fantastic, unimaginable--yet true! He saw Shabako pass a hand over his face, as if his body were suddenly tired; but the next moment it tautened again and he swung around. His face was unreadable. A multitude of conflicting emotions struggled there. He strode to a group of several of the older men. "Look at me!" he cried, facing them squarely. "Look well at my features! Am I not he who twenty years ago--as the High Priest says--pursued the priestess and her lover into the land of ice? Am I not the man who ruled thee? Am I not Shabako? Is this not the priestess, Taia?" They stared at him. Remembrance suddenly gleamed on their faces. A thin, cracked voice shrilled: "Yea! Thou art Shabako! Thou art Shabako as he was twenty years ago--old, yet without the lines of age on thy brow! And the priestess--well do I remember her. That is she!" A hand pointed at the trembling girl; all eyes centered on her. The High Priest's mouth dropped open, and he believed. * * * * * Then Shabako breathed deeply, drew himself up and with kingly dignity faced the ranks of his people, sword again held imperiously aloft. "Thou hast seen!" he cried. "Thou hast heard! Here is the guilty Taia--and here am I, returned to thee, still with the strength of my prime! As I was about to slay the rash Inaros, the ice entrapped us, and for twenty years we lay thus, while my spirit pursued those two guilty ones across the River of Death. Then Aten aided me, filled my veins with His holy fire and melted the ice from our bodies. We lived and breathed again. With His divine help I slew Inaros and brought the transgressing virgin back to the Temple. Twenty years have passed--but of years Aten thinks nothing. Give praise to our God!" A breathless silence swallowed his shout. Then a mighty roar burst out, an exultant roar that soared up past the impassive image of the god and rolled in thunderous echoes along the roof. "Praise to Aten! Praise to Aten!" Wesley Craig smiled wryly. He could hardly credit the Kundrenaline's power in wiping twenty years away; but it was evidently true. Shabako, he saw, really believed the superstition-conceived story he had just spun, so--now what? The High Priest was staring at him malevolently, his slanted eyes fastened on his garb of furs. His weedy voice pierced through the echoes. "O divine Shabako," he questioned shrilly, "who is this stranger?" The Pharaoh's glance was contemptuous. "A blasphemer," he said harshly. "One who dares claim--" But Wes had understood the question. He stepped forward. Frankly and simply, he told his story. "I found thy ruler and the maid and her lover in the ice, entrapped," he concluded. "I cut them out and, with a fluid which is of common knowledge in my country, restored them to life. I told this to Shabako, but he overpowered me and--" "Hear thou!" bawled the Pharaoh, furiously breaking in. "Blasphemy! He claims the might of the God! Back, dog, lest I kill thee here myself!" Wes saw how hopeless it was; he shrugged and stepped back. He read all too plainly the hatred in Shabako's eyes; his frank story had also apparently inflamed the High Priest against him. There was not a friend in the whole Temple, save the girl--and the next moment Hrihor walked to her. His slanted eyes ran over her figure. A sneering smile appeared. "So!" he observed mockingly. "Taia is returned to the Temple! Yes, well do I remember thee now--the scornful cast of thy mouth, the proud bearing of thy head. Even Aten thou were scornful of, I remember. Aten remembers too!" He turned slightly. "Listen, O Shabako. Three days ago thy elected successor, Siptah, died. We had met to choose a new ruler. But, by the will of the God, thou art returned and art again Pharaoh. Thy people are grateful to Aten. In twelve hours a sacrifice shall proclaim our gratitude." His crafty eyes again swung to the girl. "There!" he shrilled, "--she pays for her sin. She is the sacrifice!" There was a great shout from the crowd, but the words that Shabako then cried savagely were plainly audible to Wes Craig. "Aye. Taia. O High Priest--and the blasphemous stranger, too! Both shall die in the hands of Aten!" The priest nodded, smiling cruelly. "'Tis well, Shabako. Both shall die!" Taia's frightened eyes met Craig's, then lifted to the form of the idol. He too peered up at it, and for the first time its hideousness and the cold-blooded cruelty of its design struck him. The rudely carved figure was a full forty feet high. The impassive face, horrible in the lifelessness of rock, stared unseeingly down on its worshippers. One gross black hand was held some ten feet above the palm of the other, and, inserted in its palm, was a long, keen-pointed blade. The living sacrifice would be tied to the lower palm; the upper, by some trickery, would be made to slowly descend.... * * * * * A surge of panic swept over Craig. In his mind he saw the slight, helpless form of the girl strapped to that grim paw, saw the knife inch down, saw it touch and prick and finally drive through her heart. And it would be the same for him! A flame of blind fury burst in him, making him reckless; mad. "The hell we die!" he yelled, in English, and with a great bound he was at Taia's side. A priest leaped for him, but Craig shot a foot out and sent him sprawling. Then, with eyes flaming and legs outthrust, he stood in front of the girl, facing the worshippers. "Fools!" he roared. "Listen to me! My words are truthful! I do not lie, as does thy Pharaoh! I can prove that which I say! I can--" "Take him!" the High Priest shrieked. "Forward! Take him!" Craig could handle one or two, but not a dozen. A mass of men, women, soldiers, priests, swept at him. There was a brief moment of struggle, of oaths and shouts and excited yells from the crowd in the Temple, till something thudded into the American's head and he went down. Feet trampled him; men surged over him; then blessed unconsciousness en-wrapped him, and he knew no more. He did not hear, as did Taia, Shabako's command: "To a chamber with them! Guard them well, till the time of sacrifice!" * * * * * A small party, led by the stocky figure of the captain of the Pharaoh's guard, wound its way through a network of corridors, past jagged walls down which water slowly dripped, across a swaying bridge of hides that spanned an awful chasm in the volcano's very heart, and came at last to a large dark hole in the rock. The captain turned. "In there!" he commanded harshly. The two figures, man and girl, were dumped like sacks of flour into the gloomy chamber. The men who had carried them turned and tramped away; the captain faced one who had stayed. "Guard them with thy life, Sitah. Thou knowest the payment for carelessness." Sitah nodded grimly. He was fully armed, with spear and sword. He sat down outside the dark hole, and the captain retraced his steps. The pad of his feet on the floor died away, and then, for a long time, there was silence. Perhaps every five minutes Sitah turned and stared down into the hole behind, ears craned for the slightest sound. But none came. The two inside, no doubt, were asleep. It was very hot, down in the deep-buried corridor, and though Sitah was accustomed to the heat, he soon found his eyelids drooping and his whole body crying out for sleep. But he did not go to sleep. He knew too well what would befall him in Aten's hands if he did. He had seen many old men and women die in those hands, on ceremony days--old people who croaked in helpless agony as the keen knife blade dropped slowly down toward them, paused a second, inches from their hearts, and then plunged in with a rush. Old men and women, useless, their years of service gone. Yes, and many unwanted girl children.... That was what the Sun God demanded. His hands reached ever for human bodies. It was cruel, but he was a god; and who was to question the will of a god? * * * * * Sitah was very glad when, after six hours of lonely vigil, another guard relieved him and took his place outside the dark hole. Sitah spoke humorously to him, a grim kind of humor, as befitting one who has seen much death. "They sleep, Hapu," he said, nodding into the prison. "But soon a longer sleep will come for them--the sleep of the knife!" He chuckled as he made his way far below, to his bed. A few hours of rest and he would be in fine fettle for the ceremony. The relieving guard grunted and peered into the cell. He saw two dark figures outstretched, mere blobs of black, a little blacker than the shadows. Yes, they slept.... He sat down on the bench Sitah had just vacated. He had four hours to wait. Then the priests, led by Hrihor, would come, and the ceremony would begin, and the god's hands would move together. It would be a fine show! He looked forward to it keenly. It would be delicious to see that girl Taia bared to the knife. It would please the god: seldom did his hands hold such a beautiful sacrifice. And the queer stranger, too--he would probably die very noisily. When he saw the knife sliding down, he would regret his blasphemy and shriek for forgiveness! For along time Hapu sat quite motionless. He was a good watchdog. Hours passed; his vigil was nearing its end; the priests would soon come. Soon-- A slight noise came from the cell behind him. He whirled around. The noise came again, louder. A voice cried out. "Water! Water! I am dying!" Hapu grunted. It was the stranger's voice. The stranger must not die; it would spoil the ceremony; Aten would be wroth. He stared into the hole. One of the figures was tossing, writhing painfully. The agonized cry echoed again. "Water! Please! I am dying!" Hapu strode into the cell. For a moment he stood still, peering down at the tossing figure. His brain suddenly shouted alarm. This was no human body! "What--" he began. But the question was never finished. Something hard crashed into the back of his skull; his spear dropped with a clank, and he slumped to the floor. * * * * * Out of the shadows, behind, a man emerged and bent down over the outstretched figure of the guard. A smile appeared on the man's lean face: the guard was out--cold. It took Wes Craig just a moment to ascertain this; then he tiptoed over to a dark form that lay on the floor--the girl, whose pale, anxious face peered up out of the shadows. Craig cut her bonds with the guard's sword and raised her to her feet. She stood close to him, clinging to him, trembling, almost not believing she was free. Her eyes were filled with awe as she looked up into the American's eyes. "First thou didst restore me to life," she whispered, "and now thou hast broken thy bonds. Surely, thou must be a god!" Wes smiled. "It was simple, Taia. Look! This buckle on my belt--'tis sharp. I edged it round and cut the rope. It was slow work, else we would have been free long before." "But I saw thee toss and writhe on the floor, and cry out for water!" Craig kicked a pile of furs that had been heaped one on top of the other, and tied together with thread from an unraveled woolen mitten. "This was my body," he said coolly. "Furs. The cell must be a storeroom for them--lucky for us. I was standing with a rock in my hand near the door, when I cried out for water.... We shall not die in Aten's hands, Taia! See--I have a sword. With luck--" There was a warmer quality than reverence in Taia's eyes when she spoke--though she did not realize it. "Then come quickly, O Stranger!" she said. "The guard has been changed once; the time for sacrifice nears!" Craig nodded. Only a sword was in his hand; his automatic, he found, had been taken from him while he lay unconscious in the Temple, probably desired as a curious heathen object. The discovery, made when he had cut his bonds, had been a serious blow to his hopes: with a sword, he was only a human being, but with a gun he might have passed as supernatural to this primitive race. But it could not be helped. He peered to each side, gestured to the girl, and together they started up the sloping incline of the corridor. * * * * * The heat of the earth was great, down where they were, and it made the passageway muggy and odorous. Fitful shadows were flung by widely separated oil lamps as they pressed forward--grotesque splotches of black that half a dozen times tightened the American's grasp on his sword, sure that a guard had come upon them. He knew that their margin of time in which to effect escape was small, and he gradually quickened their pace, sacrificing caution for speed. Taia's hand was in his left; and he had just turned to her to ask if they were taking the best course up to the surface, when suddenly she stopped short. "Hearken!" she whispered, frightened. Wes craned his ears. For a moment there was nothing but silence. Then a faint sound trembled through the shadows. It could only have been that of many approaching footsteps. "The priests!" Taia murmured, tightening her grip on his hand. "They come!" There was a sharp bend in the corridor fifty feet ahead; from behind it a growing clatter of sandals echoed through the rock-walled passageway. Craig paused, irresolute. "Are we blocked, ahead?" he asked. "Yes," her low voice hurriedly told him. "But we can go back, cross the bridge of the chasm and go up the other side. But others may be there, and--" A shout cut her words short. Dim figures appeared around the bend in the passage. They were discovered! Wes Craig's face set grimly; he worked his hand into a good grip on the sword handle, looked levelly at the gathering crowd ahead and said: "I think it best to face them now, Taia. I can hold them for minutes at least; thou canst perhaps escape. Rest assured I shall take that High Priest with me, when I cross thy River of Death!" "But where can I go?" cried the girl. "Nay, Divine One--I shall stay at thy side!" * * * * * The excited yells of Hrihor, urging the others forward, came plainly to their ears. Swords glittered in the gloom of the corridor, and like a foam-tipped wave that slowly gathers speed the group of priests and soldiers charged down on the man and girl. Craig saw that she would not run. "Then come!" he shouted, and swung her around. With desperate speed they retraced their steps. They soon passed their cell, and recklessly leaped through the deceptive shadows on the far side, on down the corridor. The High Priest and the others followed close behind. His crafty face was distorted with rage, and he kept screaming to his men: "The wrath of the God on thee if they escape!" Craig's ears caught that, and he found time for a bitter smile. _If!_ If only they had left him his automatic! A few bullets flung into them would even matters a trifle. The corridor twisted and slanted ever downward. They panted around a corner and came to the brink of a dark pit. "Down!" cried the girl. She led the way, nimbly dropping down the fifteen-foot rawhide ladder that was there. Halfway down the ladder Wes reached up with his sword and cut it from where it was fastened. He fell to the bottom of the hole with a grunt. As he extricated himself from the ladder's entangling meshes be yelled up, "Come and get us, you cutthroats--if you can!" and was off after the lithe form of the girl. * * * * * But the action helped them but little, and added only a few feet to the distance between them and their pursuers, for they boldly made the deep drop without sending for another ladder. Taia was sobbing for air, and Wes himself beginning to feel the bitter pang of hopelessness when they rounded a corner and came to a great chasm--a wide cleft in the very heart of the volcano. A terrific heat came from its maw of unbroken black, and a peculiar, choking odor, sulphurous. Across it was a slender framework of hides and thongs--a mere catwalk over the terrible depths below. "You first!" Craig snapped, and as Taia started across a spear came hurtling from the mob behind, and clanked against the rocky wall on the far side. Nimbly Taia sped over the bridge, and Wes, the yells of Hrihor and his men loud in his ears, followed. Midway a long spear snaked after him. It missed by inches, and went pitching into the gulf. In his haste he caught his foot on the interlaced thongs, stumbled and almost fell--which saved his life, for another spear streaked through the very spot he had been a second before. Then he was across, and his sword was flashing in vicious hacks at one of the two main supporting thongs of the bridge. The hide was tough, but Craig's strength was that of a desperate man, and in several mighty strokes he severed it. The framework slumped to one side, held only by one thong. Hrihor, half across, croaked in sudden horror and sprang back as he saw the stranger raise his blade to carve through the other support. But even as the sword swept down a spear streamed from a warrior's hand and thudded against Wes's right shoulder. His sword jarred loose. It fell into the chasm. "Thou art hurt!" cried the girl. Wes grinned wryly. "Nay," he said, "but weaponless. Lead on!" * * * * * They were now on the other side of the chasm in the tunneled volcano. The priests had hesitated a moment when the bridge had slackened; but now, seeing the weaponless man and girl disappear in a tortuous corridor ahead, they sidled across the damaged catwalk after their fierce leader. "They will go past the Temple!" Hrihor shrilled. "It is Taia who leads him: again she tries to escape to the land of ice! Follow--up here!" His words were true. The corridor that led by the Temple was the one which led to the only other passage up to the crater of the volcano. But Taia had guided Craig only a few steps past the place of worship, now a silent vault of impenetrable blackness when, turning a corner, the American felt her shrink back. "Shabako comes!" she told him faintly. Quickly he verified it. Led by the Pharaoh himself, a party of soldiers was coming down the corridor some thirty yards away. Even as Wes saw them, they saw him--and Shabako's roar of sudden alarm tingled his ears. Priests behind, soldiers and the blood-lustful Pharaoh ahead. They were cut off, blocked, trapped. There was no nearby branch passage to run down; there was no way to turn. It was the end of the game.... But no, not quite, Craig told himself grimly. His sword was gone, but his fists would tell on them before he went down, before the paws of the idol finally claimed him.... He stepped before Taia, clenched his fists, and waited the shock of the charge. * * * * * He could see the fury in Shabako's narrowed eyes, so close were they, when a soft hand pulled him back. It was Taia's. "Come!" she whispered, and darted swiftly back to the gloomy, shadow-filled entrance of the Temple. And wondering, Wes Craig followed. She glided through the pillared portal and was immediately swallowed up by a shroud of silent, velvety darkness. Wes could not see her, but her soft hand touched his arm lightly to guide him forward, and he sensed the girl's warm body close to his. Where was she going? Inevitably they would be trapped in the far end of the Temple, beneath the very hands of the idol--or so he thought. But he trusted her, and went on. A shout came from the entrance. "They went in here!" someone cried, and the two heard Shabako detailing swift instructions to his men--instructions which were cut short by another clatter of feet and the approaching voice of Hrihor. Priests and soldiers had joined, a confusion of men, most of them hanging back, half afraid to venture into the well of blackness that was Aten's abode on earth. But the Pharaoh whipped them into discipline with the harsh tones of his voice, and strung them into a close line, to advance slowly through the Temple. "Have thy blades ready!" he added. "They cannot escape us now: they are trapped. Forward!" * * * * * Nothing could get through that line. It was like a fine-toothed comb, with every tooth a man. Craig saw it coming, and knew that he and the girl could not go much farther back, for already he sensed himself directly beneath the looming figure of Aten. Yet the gentle touch led him on--around and past the idol into the furthermost corner of the Temple. It was then that Taia paused, felt around, and placed Craig's right hand upon some unseen knob in the wall. Her faint whisper hurriedly explained the purpose of the knob as Wes drank in her words eagerly. "There is a secret room behind the idol, from whence the priests ape the God's voice and move his hands at sacrifice. A priest should be there e'en now, ready for the ceremony. Thou must overcome him, Divine One, and we too can hide therein. Hrihor dare not search for us there while others are present, for e'en Shabako knows not of the room. Quick, then--they come! Thy hand is on the latch of the secret panel. I follow thee!" Wes pressed the girl's hand tightly and his body tensed. Then, without hesitation, he jerked the secret panel back. A faint glow of light lay ahead, and he plunged into the tiny room that lay revealed. An alarmed face stared up--the priest! Wes leaped at him, his steely fingers thumbing into the man's throat and throttling its scream to a gasping choke. All the American's pent-up fury went into a lunge that the priest could not begin to stand against. He was bowled sharply over and went down. Craig on top, and there the fight ended as suddenly as it had begun. The priest's head thudded into the smooth rock floor; a convulsion quivered his body; he moaned and lay still. A grim flicker in his eyes, Craig got up and looked around for Taia. Then astonishment and cold fear swept through him. The secret door was closed--but she was not inside! * * * * * "Now what--" Wesley Craig gasped. He did not dare finish the thought. He glared around, much as a trapped tiger does, his brain a turmoil. His eyes fell on a ladder that led up from the floor to a niche in the left wall--a slit about forty feet high, a pool of darkness, shadowed from the thin tongue of flame that lit the room. Only half realizing what the slit was, Wes sprang forward and leaped up the ladder. A platform was built high up inside the niche, a place for a man to stand on. The American reached it, pressed himself forward, and peered through a tiny hole that was in the rock ahead. He knew it ought to command a view of the Temple. But if it did, Craig could see nothing, for there was no light in the huge vault outside. For minutes the brooding silence was not broken, save by an occasional scraping sound made by one of the searching line of men. There was no hint of the girl who waited beside the hideous figure of the god, nor of the network that gradually closed in on her. But suddenly the silence was shattered by a shout. "I have her!" someone yelled. Then came a multitude of sounds. The piercing voice of Hrihor was audible above them all. "Light the lamps! Hast thou the other, too?" "Nay--he is not here." "Not here? What--" * * * * * A spark of light made an erratic course from the Temple door: someone was bringing a flame to light the lamps. A moment later there was a flare of yellow light as the oil in a large wall lamp caught fire, and then the darkness melted further before a wave of light from the opposite wall. Now could be seen the warriors who, with gleaming outdrawn swords, were clustered around the girl. Shabako was gripping her arm and shaking her roughly: the High Priest was drawing to a stop before her, to stand glaring at her with hate-inflamed eyes. "Tell us!" roared the Pharaoh. "Where is the man?" She looked at him levelly. Her eyes were quite calm, and she breathed evenly. There was a glorious light in her eyes as she replied. "I will tell thee," she said; "though thou wilt not comprehend. He vanished. Vanished, even as a god. He was here beside me, in the darkness and then suddenly he was gone. But why not? For he was a god...." The soldiers gaped at her. Silence came down in the Temple. The High Priest did not break it, but only stared closely at the girl with eyes that suddenly had something more than hate in them--comprehension, and a trace of fear.... But the Pharaoh Shabako's eyes were only wrathful, and he shouted: "A god? Vanished, sayest thou? Lies! Lies! But thou canst not lie to Aten! The God knows of a way to loosen thy tongue!" Despite herself, Taia shuddered. She knew that way. * * * * * Gradually the Temple was filling with other worshippers come to see the sacrifice, and soon there were sixty or seventy of them. The men outnumbered the women two to one, and none of them was very old. Fifty was about their age limit--and those who were near this age were reluctant to let their eyes rest on the hands of the idol. When they did glance at them, and at the cruel knife blade in the upper one, fear showed on their faces. There were also very few children.... Hrihor's thin features grew unreadable in the coldness that settled upon them. He was now in the role of High Priest: apart, separate from the common mob before him; interpreter of Aten's divine mysteries: playing his part of one who listened to a god's awful whisperings. Impassively he superintended the binding of Taia by a priestess, who tightened the cords around the girl's slim body with claw-like hands, a gleam of unholy anticipation on her fleshless, soured face. Then the High Priest turned from the altar and faced the crowd of people. "Silence!" he commanded. "Silence, before thy God Aten!" A hush fell instantly. Their eyes centered on the bound figure of the girl, standing just beside the lowermost hand of the idol that would presently claim her. Her face was very pale, but none could detect fear in it. There was an uneasy stir, a shifting of feet, a mumbling, as her fresh young beauty struck the watchers. Somewhere a man muttered that she was very young to die. Aten had returned her once: perhaps the God did not wish her to perish.... His neighbor demurred. And the ceremony went on. Ornate but crude censers were in the hands of two priests; the incense was lit by long tapers, and its acrid odor wound up in wavering purple spirals of smoke. On each side of Hrihor were five under-priests, eyes stiffly on their superior's impassive face. The soldiers had retreated from the altar and now were massed in the rear of the Temple, their spear blades glittering dully above their heads. The High Priest raised his hands slowly, and stared with glazed eyes into the gloom of the ceiling, high above. "Praise!" he shrilled. "Praise to Aten!" * * * * * The assembled worshippers joined him in the chant of sacrifice. It was low and soft, and, at first, almost drowsy, like the slow stir of a tropical wind through palm leaves. But soon it quickened with rising tones from perfectly concerted voices; it soared up; its tenor changed; it became fierce, lustful, eager for blood, eager for the sacrifice, a heathen chant shrilling for sight of a girl's body in the god's, awful hands. And it died in a sad, discordant moan on an expectant note.... Hrihor's body, stiff and rigid in its ceremonial robes, did not seem human as he stretched his arms straight forward and wheeled silently to the huge idol of stone. A full two minutes he stood without so much as flicking an eyelash; then, not shifting his glazed stare, he harshly intoned: "Ages ago our ancestors set out from the homeland of Egypt in a great galley, bound for the barbarian countries of the north in quest of metal. But storms seized upon them, drove them far from their course, till at last, weak from hunger, they came to this land of ice, where their galley was wrecked and they were cast ashore. At first all was dark; then came the Sun God Aten's life giving rays, leading them to this mountain, which they inhabited and in which they carved this Temple wherein to worship the God who had saved them. The lord of the galley was the first Pharaoh; the priest of the galley was called High Priest; the Pharaoh took a concubine to wife--and thus was our civilization begun. "There were virgins of the Temple, holy, set apart from man, sacred to Aten. Never did one betray her sacred trust--never, until Taia fled to the land of ice with the sacrilegious Inaros. Our mighty Pharaoh pursued them, and after twenty years, by Aten's special grace, slew the man and brought the maid back to pay for her transgression. Never before has this happened." He paused, waiting. An under-priest spoke; evidently following some ritual. "Here is the priestess, O High Priest of Aten! What penalty must she pay?" "Death in Aten's hands!" the cold voice shrilled instantly. "The God wills it!" * * * * * But now came an interruption, unexpected and disconcerting to the well-laid plans of Hrihor. The voice of Pharaoh Shabako cried out: "Another came with this priestess--a blasphemous stranger! He lies concealed; the maid will not tell where! High Priest, let her be tortured in Aten's hands until she reveals where he is!" For a moment Hrihor lost his mask-like rigidity, of expression. His eyes shifted nervously. But Shabako was not to be denied. Again be repeated his demand. "We must pray to Aten to make his hand descend on her, prick and gash her, till she divulges!" A murmur arose from the people in the Temple: they approved the torture. Hrihor, obviously reluctant, was forced to comply. "O mighty Aten," he cried, turning to the idol, "thou hast heard our Pharaoh. We pray to thee to lay thy hand on the priestess Taia, till she tells where the stranger lies concealed!" Shabako nodded in approval. While a mumbled prayer rose, four priests strode to the girl, lifted her slight form and flung it on the upturned lower band of the idol. They strapped her there securely, her breast but ten feet below the waiting knife. Even then she did not struggle or cry out. She did not know who had won the fight inside the secret room, but her heart told her it was the mysterious stranger, for was he not a god?--She would not be afraid, for he would surely reveal his divinity, and save her, even as he had from her twenty-year death, and from her bonds in the cell where they had been imprisoned.... The softly chanted prayer surged through the Temple. Hrihor's slitted eyes were on the knife in the upper palm of the idol. Suddenly he flung up his arms, and cried: "Now, O Aten!" The prayer stopped. With fearful interest the people stared at the dagger, at the inert figure of the girl--the more elderly seeing in her a hint of what was to come to them when their days of service were ended. The knife started downward. * * * * * Taia's eyes were closed. Her breathing was even and regular. She did not seem at all aware of the shaft of steel that slowly, in the hushed gasp from the audience, stirred with the stone hand that held it and moved deliberately downward. To the silent crowd of worshippers it was a religious phenomenon, and well calculated to strike fear and awe into their hearts. The moving idol seemed to be a living thing, motivated by the unseen spirit of the god it represented, who caused the massive upper hand to execute his will. Its movement was slow and clumsy, and close listeners would have heard a slight creaking noise from somewhere behind it--but the ears of the worshippers were deaf from the fear and the horror in which they were vicariously participating. Slowly the hands came together, until the long, wicked shear was but a foot above the bound girl.... It dropped to within inches of her flesh.... And there it stopped. Then, before the amazed crowd could realize what was happening, before even Hrihor could control the surprise that raised his brows incredulously, the palm in which the blade was implanted slowly retraced its course and returned to its original position. A breathless silence reigned in the Temple. The hand was motionless. It did not stir again. "The God will not touch his priestess!" It was a faint, awed whisper that came from someone amongst the worshippers. But Hrihor heard it, and so did the other priests. While they stared at each other, utterly at a loss, the whisper was taken up and repeated on all sides. "The God will not touch his priestess!" * * * * * The High Priest sensed the crowd's conviction, and sensed them turning against him. His beady eyes glanced around nervously. His lips a thin line, he called to his second ranking priest in a tense whisper, and, when the other came to him, muttered in his ear: "'Tis the stranger, hiding in the secret chamber, who does this! He has overcome our brother there, and now controls the levers! And Taia knows it; and if she reveals it to the people our hold will be broken! She must be killed!" "Yes! But how? We must be quick!" Hrihor's crafty face set cruelly. "I know a way. Watch thou...." He strode to the fore of the altar and flung his hands high. A shrill shout from his thin lips cut the uneasy murmuring short. "Hearken! Aten will not torture His own priestess! He will not maim those who have sworn their lives to Him!" The silent crowd waited for his next words. He screamed savagely. "His High Priest must perform the rite! Aten has appointed me to be His instrument of vengeance!" A gleam of unholy exultation was in his narrowed eyes. His face worked: he thrust a hand inside his ornate ceremonial vestment. "By Divine Will," he cried, "this knife in my hand is the knife in the God's hand!" And he whipped a long blade from the robe. Never before had such a ceremony been held in the Temple of Aten, the Sun God. Never before had the hand of the god paused above the living sacrifice and deliberately risen again without tasting blood. It was miracle upon miracle; half-bewildered, Pharaoh Shabako and the herd of common people alike waited for what would come next, their High Priest's savage words somewhat reassuring them that all was correct. They saw him clench his dagger tightly and with slow steps advance to the side of the helpless girl. Glaring down at her, he swung the blade high. It poised directly over her heart. It would not torture her, Taia knew: it was death that she read in the High Priest's eyes. She closed her own, and thought of the stranger; she breathed a silent prayer to him. She waited. "In Aten's name!" screamed Hrihor, and brought the dagger down. * * * * * At that second the sharp roar of a sudden explosion thundered through the Temple, and the startled worshippers saw, slowly trickling from the right eye of Aten, a curling streamer of gray smoke. They did not know what had happened. And not until, after a moment of fearful silence, they saw the expression on Hrihor's face change to great surprise, and saw his right hand relax and drop the dagger to the floor, did they comprehend that he had been struck down. He clutched at his side, staggered, twisted round, and fell full length before the feet of the god whose representative he was. A frightened woman close to the altar saw a dark red stain on his robe, and a scream from her lips pierced out: "He is dead! Killed by Aten--whose eyes have looked death! Oh!" She flung herself flat on the floor, and the others, back to the soldiers in the rear, did likewise. The priests clustered together in a scared group, staring fearfully at the right eye of the idol, from which a wisp of smoke was still trailing. None dared approach the outstretched figure of the High Priest. Only Shabako dared look at him. The Pharaoh clutched his sword tightly, muttering uneasily to himself. Not a sound came from the prostrate multitude. The slow echoes of the explosion died away; again the heavy silence fell. Then Shabako suddenly stared around, and peered up at the stone image of the god. * * * * * His ears had caught a sound. It was a panting and scuffling noise, as if men were fighting. It grew, even though muffled by apparently intervening rock. The beginning of a scream, cut short into a choke, added to its volume. The worshippers far back in the Temple heard it, and looked up. There was a muffled crash--then another crash of thundering noise, similar to the one that had come from the god's eye. But this time no smoke eddied from the eye. The explosion echoed through the Temple and died away, while all the time Pharaoh Shabako stared at the idol. Slow comprehension broke through the bewilderment on his face. Suddenly he swung around and gripped the cowering form of the second ranking priest, who stood near him. "From whence came those sounds, Priest?" he hissed. "Tell me!" The frightened priest gibbered unintelligibly, but there was a guilty look on his face which spurred Shabako on. He shook the man and roared the question again. Then the priest spoke. "They came--from--the secret chamber," he stammered. A gasp rose from the crowd behind. But before they could master their astonishment, Shabako had whipped his sword from its sheath and sprung up the altar. "Show me this chamber!" he cried. * * * * * Up on the platform in the secret room, his eye glued to the hole that was the eye of Aten, Wes Craig had seen and heard everything that had transpired. He had been shocked to see the brave thing Taia had submitted to, rather than divulge where he was hidden. Sacrificing herself, so that he, a stranger, might have a few more minutes of life! It hurt. He had climbed down from the platform and glared around the lower floor of the secret room again, scanning shelves that were crowded with scores of curious objects, sacred relics, properties to aid in the manipulation of the idol and other unidentifiable things--looking for a potential weapon. If the girl had to die--and he--it would be better to go out and meet his enemies, taking some of them with him in full fight. And then his heart leaped madly at the sight of something lying on one of the shelves. A stumpy black shape, it was, with a short barrel of cold blue steel, and it looked as much out of place in that chamber as did the fur-clad man who stared half-unbelievingly at it. It was a foreigner, as he was, in the gloomy corridors and chambers of the race that worshipped Aten. It too was American. It was a friend--his automatic! To Wes Craig, bewildered and tired and sadly without hope, it almost seemed to be alive, smiling at him with its wicked round mouth. He picked it up, and it bolstered his courage, his hope and his energy enormously. At once he leaped to the closed entrance-door and felt for the lever that opened it. But there he paused a moment to think. There was only the faintest chance of fighting free with Taia now. There were at least thirty men outside, and he had only seven bullets. And then he remembered where he was, and what the purpose of the secret room was. He remembered, also, a certain nervous expression on the High Priest's face that he had just seen.... He swung around and inspected the levers and crude wheels of wood that led to a handle up in the niche, shoulder-high to whoever might stand on the platform there. He had had experience with certain idols in Egypt. He remembered particularly one that had been worshipped in a degenerate age--its hands, its eyes. And then he stepped over the sprawling body of the still unconscious priest and climbed to the platform and his peep-hole again. As he pressed himself forward in the niche, and applied his eye to the slit, he gently fingered the handle of the large lever right beside him. And he also measured the size of the slit in the right eye of the god.... * * * * * Craig had not minded shooting the murderous High Priest Hrihor, but he did not want to kill the under-priest in the secret room. He had had no choice in the matter. At the tensest moment in the dramatic scene in the Temple, just when he had been hoping that the mysterious death he had sent to Hrihor would frighten the worshippers away, he had heard a slight rustling sound behind him, and had turned just in time to see a hate-distorted face within feet of him, and a short curved-knife upraised to strike him in the back. It was the priest, whom he had left unconscious below, now revived and coming to kill him. Wes could have shot the man then and there, but he knew the thunder of his gun would betray his presence; so, using the weapon as a club he had struck out at his attacker and tried to block the thrust of the knife. For a moment he was successful; but the knife proved the better weapon in the close rough and tumble scuffle that ensued and, with its point at his very throat, Wes had been forced to shoot. He had killed the man instantly, but he felt no slightest relief. Like a tiger--even before the crashing echoes had died away in the little room--he sprang back to his peep-hole to see what the effect was outside. And just what he feared most was happening. The frightened priest in the Temple was telling the suspicious Shabako about the hidden chamber--and even then was leading him to the secret entrance! * * * * * The two passed the American's line of vision, and after a moment he heard them fumbling at the catch of the panel. He could shoot them both down, easily, but there would still be a whole Temple full of warriors and priests to be faced with only three bullets! Then, in a flash, came an inspiration. Wes swung around, leveled the automatic's muzzle at the hole in the idol's eye, sighted carefully, and squeezed the trigger. And as the explosion boomed through the vast chamber outside, he veered the gun in a different aim and fired again and again. The two huge oil lamps, imbedded one in each side wall, splintered and crashed. "Now for it!" Wes Craig muttered. He sprang for the ladder, snatching the dagger of the dead priest as he passed, and half-slid, half-tumbled to the floor below. At once he was at the secret door and grasping the lever that worked it; and, pausing only to take a deep breath, he plunged out. He came into a scene of wildest confusion. Panic-stricken screams rang in his ears; the oil from the cracked lamps, transformed into splatters of flame, had splashed down from the walls and scattered fire over much of the floor. A tumult of shadows moiled through the flames as the crowd fought to get free. Shrieks and gasps and curses cut through the air: the worshippers were caught up in a mob panic caused more by their superstitious frenzy than by the understandable fire. The flames pierced fantastically into the blackness, throwing a vivid glow on the frantic faces of the people who struggled to get out of their reach. The altar was deserted, save for the girl who still lay on the hand of the idol.... * * * * * Wes Craig, a blur in the wavering shadows, darted to her side. His dagger sped through the cords that bound her, and he lifted her slight form down. For a moment she clung to him. "I knew thou wouldst come, Divine One!" she whispered. "I knew!" He smiled for answer, gripped her hand, and then swiftly led her along the least crowded wall of the Temple towards the door, packed with a frantic, struggling crowd of soldiers, people and priests. The deceptive shadows thrown by the flames were kind to them; for some time no one in the whole crowd recognized the two. Everyone was reacting in a blind panic of fear from the mysterious thunders that had killed their High Priest, splintered the lamps, and caused the resultant inferno of leaping fire. But discovery was inevitable, and at last one did see the fleeing pair--one who had kept his head and was looking for them. It was Shabako. He roared: "The stranger escapes--and the girl! There, there! Hold them!" His imperative shout brought a measure of control to the soldiers, who were fighting to get through the doorway. They grouped uncertainly together, gripping their swords and staring wildly around. They saw, in the ruddy light of the flames, a grim-faced man pressing into them, holding in one hand a stubby black object, and in the other the arm of the sacrifice, Taia. * * * * * Wes cursed, and, forgetting that the warriors understood no English, ordered them in that tongue to make way for him. For answer, one of them leaped out at him, his sword swinging up. Craig's face set; he levelled the automatic and fired. The bullet caught the man in the midst of his leap; he spun round, his sword clanked to the floor, and he fell. Wes fired again at the staring mob; then again; but the last time only a sharp click answered his trigger finger. He flung the gun into the thick of the hesitating warriors, swept the dead soldier's sword off the floor and pressed forward, intending to hack his way through. But he did not have to. The other warriors were only human. They had just seen uncanny, instant death. They shrank back from the door; some even ran back from the stranger, preferring the flames to the thunder-death that he meted out. The doorway was cleared, and Craig pulled the girl through. "Back to the left!" she gasped. "Across the bridge! Quick--Shabako comes!" Even as they ran, they heard the Pharaoh's furious bawling as he struggled up to the door of the Temple, which he had not been able to reach for the rolling tide of fear-stricken people around him. He was shouting: "After them--after them! They cross the bridge! Follow them, everyone! I will take the other way up and trap them! Hurry!" He turned to the right, panting up the corridor in the direction from which he had first approached the Temple. And slowly, as they collected their dazed wits, the swarm of warriors and priests and common people followed the fleeing pair toward the bridge. * * * * * Wes Craig was tired, but the shouting pursuit lent strength to his near-exhausted limbs. Spears snaked after Taia and him from the warriors close behind; but, once across the dangerous bridge, he disregarded them long enough to hack its supports through and see it fade into the blackness beneath. "Get across now, damn you!" he yelled, and ran again after the girl's leading figure. All now depended on their speed in reaching the top of the extinct volcano, and of that speed he was none too confident. He had gone through two strength-sapping fights in the last hour; his nerves were ragged from the constant strain, and his breath came in racking sobs. He wished passionately he had a loaded gun--even his smashed vial of Kundrenaline. The fluid would have put marvelous new life in his weary limbs. "Hurry, Taia!" he gasped: "we must beat them! Shabako goes some other way to head us off! If only we can get to my bird-that-flies-in-the-air!" Once again they stumbled up the difficult passage, fighting for speed with tired bodies, bodies which every twist and obstacle tried sorely. Without the girl, Wes could never have made it: she led him unerringly through the branching, gloomily-lit corridors, up flights of rickety steps, her knowledge of several short-cuts aiding measurably the speed of their progress. Tired as he was, admiration for the mighty fire of courage that burned in Taia's frail figure, and drove it forward when all physical strength was gone, never left him. For she had been through as much as he--and even more!... * * * * * They did not know it then, but the Pharaoh had made good time on the other side. As they at last neared the cup of the crater, and passed the place where the two diverging main corridors, each slanting downwards, met, they heard Shabako's shouts and the rapid clatter of his feet on the rock floor. In a desperate sprint, they gained the flight of steps, stumbled up them, and came again into the glorious fresh cold air, and the slanting rays of the setting sun.... New life surged through Craig's body; but, whereas he ran across the uneven cup of the crater with fresh speed, the girl seamed suddenly to tire. He had taken the lead; now he went back, took her hand and pulled her forward, puzzled by her sudden exhaustion. He did not have time to question her, however, for the rapid beat of footsteps grew quickly very loud, and with a shout Shabako burst up into the open and caught sight of them. The two went across the lip and slid down the slope of the volcano with all the haste they could. Shabako only twenty yards behind, his sword waving aloft and his dark face lit with a savage hate. And he was gaining--gaining steadily; and Taia was tiring more and more, and was becoming almost a dead weight on Wes Craig's supporting arm.... This was the last stretch, over almost the same ground the girl and her dead lover, Inaros, had covered twenty years before--and with the same pursuer behind. Again, by grace of the potent Kundrenaline, Shabako and the girl were enacting the desperate chase of years before, the chase that had ended in death for Inaros.... But there was a stricken look in Taia's eyes now. "I am suddenly so tired, Divine One!" she gasped. She seemed hardly able to walk. Craig could not understand. Snatching a glance backwards, he saw that the Pharaoh, too, seemed to be strangely tiring--but gaining nevertheless.... * * * * * He was practically carrying the suddenly exhausted girl when they came to the cleft in the ice from which he had dug her the day before. There was no time to get across, for before they could climb the other side Shabako would be on them. Wes gripped the handle of his blade. Here the last fight would have to be made. "Go down the cleft, out of the way!" he told the girl rapidly. He did not have time to help her; he swung round just in time to parry a slash of Shabako's sword with his own. Then Wes Craig stepped back and stared at his opponent, a peculiar look in his eyes. It might have been merely from the force of his first swipe, or he might have slipped--but Shabako staggered drunkenly and barely avoided falling. With an oath, he came erect and once more charged at the American. It was easy for Wes to avoid his thrust; it would have been childishly easy to drive his blade through the Pharaoh's unguarded chest. But somehow Craig withheld his attack, and only peered more closely at the other. He rubbed his hand across his eyes. What he was seeing was incredible. For Shabako's face was going a ghastly white; and, as Wes watched, he groaned, tried to raise his sword arm for another blow--and could not. He staggered, legs askew, lurched crazily forward, stumbled, and at last pitched down on the ice near the cleft. Then his great body rolled over, arms flung wide, and lay still. And the face of Pharaoh Shabako stared unseeingly up at the darkening sky.... Then, in a flash, understanding came to Wes Craig. "Oh, God!" he cried. "The Kundrenaline!" He had forgotten completely about the liquid he had infused into Shabako's veins. Its potency, adequate to the tremendous task of revitalizing a long-dead heart, had given out--hastened, no doubt, by the great physical exertions of the man, and made sudden by the return to the biting air of the ice fields. The liquid was only for emergency use, anyway, and supposed to serve for a period of but hours, after which the heart was intended to carry on alone. Shabako's heart had not been able to carry on any longer.... * * * * * Wes Craig was afraid to think, afraid almost to look, to see how Taia had stood the shock. Her sudden weariness became at once all too clear to him.... Slowly he turned and looked down into the cleft. He saw her--a slender, quiet little figure, flat on the ice by the body of her slain lover. He leaped down the slippery bank and ran to her side; knelt there, and grasped her cold white hand. The girl's eyelids were closed, but when he touched her, they flickered, and a little sigh came from her pallid lips. Then her large black eyes, opened and looked up straight into his--and when she saw him there, she smiled. It wrenched the man's heart. "Taia!" he cried. "Taia!" She nodded feebly, still smiling, and her lips moved. He bent close. She was whispering something. The words came to him through a great fear. "Take me--take me, O Divine One. Take me with thee to--to thy--heaven.... Canst thou not--take--Taia?" With her last bit of quickly ebbing strength, she pressed his hand. Then the fingers went limp in his, and her arm dropped. And her eyelids gently closed.... Wes's jaws were clenched tightly as he folded her hands across her slim body. "If thy Pharaoh had not made me drop the vial," he murmured softly, "I would again bring thee to life, Taia, and take thee to my heaven.... Though"--with a sad smile, and relapsing into English--"Times Square would not be quite the heaven you had pictured...." * * * * * He stood up. The irony of the thing gripped him, and brought a wry smile to his tight lips. The body of Inaros, her dead lover, lay at her side; and Shabako's still figure was but feet away. Once again they were all together in death. The Kundrenaline had pierced the black veil of their silent tryst and brought them back for a few fleeting hours; but even modern science could not stand long against the weight of twenty years. And science would not have another chance with their still bodies. They would quickly be found there by the pursuing Egyptians, and would be gone, already decaying, when he could get back with another vial.... A growing murmur of nearby voices brought the silent man back to the present. Over the cleft in the ice he saw a string of priests and warriors speeding towards him. He sighed. It was time to go. There was much he wanted to learn about these people and their strange civilization, but there was no chance for it now. Perhaps on another trip, later. He looked a last time on Taia, lying by her lover. Then he scrambled up the other bank and ran towards the hillock behind which a sleek black monoplane with an eight hundred horse-power motor awaited him.... * * * * * The thing that followed next was never forgotten by the people who worshipped Aten, the Sun God. It went down in legends; it was repeated and repeated, and it grew in the telling. It was awful; it was magical; it was godlike. A great thunder sounded from behind the hillock of ice, a thunder that pulsed louder and louder, until the people fell down in awe, hardly daring to look. When they did, they saw a gleaming black form that stood on queer shafts of wood come gliding with the speed of the wind from behind the hillock. It straightened out on a stretch of snow, bellowing with a loudness that hammered their eardrums into numbness, and sped lightly along till the queer shafts of wood left the surface and the sleek black object soared up into the air. Into the air! With frightened eyes they watched it wheel around, and then come roaring towards them. They fell flat again, and did not dare to look. The thunderous blast passed close over them, then dwindled and dwindled, until they ventured timidly to look up again. They saw the shape ringed with sunset fire hurtling through the air, soaring up and up and up ... till it died to a speck ... till it disappeared into the face of the sun they worshipped as Aten.... A warrior spoke. His tones were low and awed but they all heard him. "Truly," he whispered, "he was a god!..." A ONE-BILLIONTH-OF-A-SECOND CAMERA Through use of a spectroscopic camera with a shutter which operates in about one-billionth of a second, physicists at the University of California have been able to take pictures of the action of light at various periods during the course of an electrical spark which lasts only one one-hundred-thousandth of a second. They have been able to show by photographic evidence that the magnetic field developed by the passage of an electric current across the spark gap gives the first light emitted a different appearance from that emitted a few millionths of a second later. At the moment that the spark jumps, electricity is released in enormous quantities much as water is released by the breaking of a dam. It is this sudden release of the dammed-up current across the spark gap that causes the temporary magnetic field and the difference in the appearance of the light from the spark. In answer to those who scoff at the possibility of a camera shutter operating in a billionth of a second, it was explained that the shutter is not a mechanical device, but operates automatically through the application of a physical law of light. In a general way, it might be said that the spark takes its own picture. The spectroscope camera is set up at one end of a long corridor. When the electrical current jumps across the spark gap it sets up a momentary current in a set of wires running the length of the corridor and connected with the camera. This current travels toward the camera at the rate of about 186,000 miles a second. At about the same instant that the current jumps, or an infinitesimal fraction of a second later, the light of the resulting spark starts toward the camera at a trifle more than 186,000 miles a second. It is a race between the spark current and the spark light as to which arrives first. The current jumps just before the spark appears; so it is possible for the current to reach the camera and close the shutter even before the light which is to be pictured arrives. By lengthening the wires between the spark gap and the camera the light is allowed to arrive first. By suitable adjustment of the wiring, the shutter can be made to close during any one-billionth of a second interval during the first four ten-millionths of a second of the spark's short life. The camera shutter consists of two Nicol prisms of Iceland spar and balsam, arranged in such a way that under ordinary conditions the light coming from the spark is stopped by polarization and prevented from reaching the camera. Between these two prisms, however, is a solution of chemicals which will depolarize the light and allow it to continue. The wires leading from the spark gap connect with this solution. When the current jumps across the gap it races down the corridor and electrifies the solution for about one-billionth of a second. This electrification removes the depolarizing effects of the solution and light passage stops; in other words, the shutter is closed. The Diamond Thunderbolt _By H. Thompson Rich_ [Illustration: "_Good Lord! What's this?_"] [Sidenote: Locked in a rocket and fired into space!--such was the fate which awaited young Stoddard at the end of the diamond trail!] Prof. Norman Prescott, leader of the American Kinchinjunga expedition, crept from his dog-tent perched eerily at the 26,000-foot level of this unscaled Himalayan peak, the third highest in the world. With anxious eyes he searched the appalling slopes that lifted another 2,000 feet to its majestic summit, now glistening in the radiance of sunset. Where was young Jack Stoddard, official geologist and crack mountaineer of the party? That morning Professor Prescott and Stoddard had set off together, from Camp No. 4, at the 22,000-foot level. Mounting laboriously but swiftly, they had reached the present eyrie by noon. There Stoddard had left the leader of the expedition and pushed on alone, to reconnoiter a razor-back ridge that looked as though it might prove the key to the summit. But the afternoon had passed; the daring young geologist had promised to return in an hour; and now it was sunset, with still no sign of him. Professor Prescott sighed, and a bitter expression crossed his bronzed, lined face. Just one more evidence of the cursed luck that had marked the expedition from the start! Well he knew that he must head down at once for Camp No. 4 or risk death on this barren, wind-swept slope, and equally well he knew that to go would be to leave his brave companion to his fate, providing he had not already met it on those desolate ridges above. Yes, and another thing he knew. The report of this latest disaster would mean the doom of the expedition. The terrified, superstitious natives would bolt, claiming the "snow people" had struck again. "Gods of the Mountain" they called them, those mysterious beings they alone seemed to see--evil spirits who kept guard over this towering realm, determined none should gain its ultimate heights. * * * * * Tensely Professor Prescott stood there on that narrow shelf of glacial ice, peering off into the sunset. A hundred miles to the west, bathed in the refulgence of a thousand rainbows, rose the incredible peak of Everest, mightiest of all mountains, yet less than 1,000 feet higher than Kinchinjunga. And down, straight down those almost vertical slopes up which the expedition had toiled all summer, lay gorges choked with tropical growth. Off to the south, a scant fifty miles away, the British health station of Darjeeling flashed its white villas in the coppery glow. An awesome spectacle!--one that human eyes had seldom if ever seen. Yet from the summit, so invitingly near!... Perhaps, even now, Stoddard was witnessing this incomparable sight. To push on, to join him, meant triumph. To head down, defeat. While to stay, to wait.... Grimly, Professor Prescott left his insecure perch and headed up over that razor-back ridge whence the young geologist had vanished. As he proceeded cautiously along, drawing sharp, quick breaths in the rarefied upper atmosphere, he told himself it was ambition that was leading him on, but in his heart he knew it was not so. In his heart, he knew he was going to the rescue of his gallant companion, though the way meant death. * * * * * A hundred yards had been gained, perhaps two--each desperate foothold fraught with peril of a plunge into the yawning abysms to left and right--when suddenly he spied a figure on a twilit spur ahead. Panting, he paused. It must be Stoddard! Yet it seemed too small, too ghostly. Professor Prescott waved, but even as he looked for an answering signal, the figure vanished. "My eyes!" he muttered to himself. "I'm getting snow-blind." Then he called aloud: "Jack! Oh, Jack! Hello!" Only an echo greeted the call, and he did not repeat it but pushed on silently, conserving his energy. Was there truth after all in those persistent rumors of the natives about the snow people who inhabited the upper slopes of the Himalayas? His tired brain toyed with the idea, to be cut off sharply by the cheery call: "Hi there, Professor! Hi-ho!" And gazing upwards toward a jutting crag not ten rods beyond, he saw young Stoddard etched against the darkening sky. * * * * * In a few joyous steps, Professor Prescott had reached his audacious companion. "Thank God!" he gasped. "I'd given you up for lost." "Why give me up for anything so unpleasant?" was the genial reply. "I've just been enjoying the view." "Then--then you reached the top?" with a quick intake of breath. "Well, not exactly, but I feel on top of the world, just the same." The professor's spirits fell. "Then I can't see--" "Of course you can't see!" interrupted Stoddard. "But look at this!" As he spoke, he drew from a pocket of his leather jacket something that caught the last light of the dying day and refracted it with weird brilliance. Professor Prescott blinked. "Well?" "A diamond. As big as your fist! And here's another!" His left hand reached into his jacket and produced a second sparkling gem. "But--but I don't understand--" "Granted. But you will, when I tell you I've found the Diamond Thunderbolt!" The professor gave a shrug of scorn. "And no doubt you've seen the snow people and have had a perfect afternoon, while--" "No, I haven't seen any snow people, but I've had a perfect afternoon, all right! As I said, I've found the Diamond Thunderbolt; and here are a couple of chips, picked up from around the edge." * * * * * So saying, Stoddard extended his two specimens toward Professor Prescott, who disdained at first to touch them. "Nothing but quartz!" was the deprecating comment. "The snow has affected your eyesight, as it has my own." "I'll say it's affected _yours_, if you don't recognize diamonds when you see them. But wait till I show you the old Thunderbolt itself! It's--" "More quartz!" brusquely. "Be sensible, Jack. This Diamond Thunderbolt thing is a pure myth, like the snow people business. Just because this section of India is known as The Land of the Diamond Thunderbolt you think you're going to find some precious meteor or other, whereas the term applies merely to the Lama's scepter." "Granted it does,"--a little impatiently--"but did it ever occur to you that where there's smoke, there's fire? Meteor is the word! One struck here once--a diamond meteor!--and I've found it. Take a look at these two specimens and see what you think." Whereupon Professor Prescott accepted the glinting gems from his young friend--to gasp a moment later, as he held them tremblingly: "Good Lord--they're diamonds, to be sure! Where did you find them?" * * * * * Stoddard hesitated before replying. "Not far from here," he said at length, moving off. "Come, I'll show you." But the professor stood firm on their narrow ledge. "You must be crazy!" he exclaimed. "We'll have trouble enough now, getting back. It's practically dark already." "Then what's the odds?" retorted the young geologist. "We've got all night." "But our friends at Camp No. 4. Even now, they must think we are lost." "Then further thought won't kill them. Besides, we'll be back before morning--and they can't send out a relief party sooner." "But any moment a storm may come up. You know what that would mean." "Does it look likely?" scoffed Stoddard, waving his hand aloft. "See--there's the moon! She'll be our guide." Professor Prescott looked, saw a slender shallop charting her course among the stars, and for a moment was tempted. But speedily his responsibilities reasserted themselves. "No, I can't do it," he said with finality. "I owe it to the expedition to return as soon as possible. Furthermore, there's the matter of the authorities. We assured the British we would adhere strictly to our one purpose--to scale Kinchinjunga." "A mere formality." "No--a definite order from the Lamas. They closed Mt. Everest, after the last expedition, you will recall. The Lama's scepter is veritably a diamond thunderbolt of power in this region." Whereupon Stoddard's patience snapped. "Listen!" he said. "I hurried away because I knew you'd be anxious, but I'm going back, if I have to--" "And I say you're not!" The professor's patience, too, had snapped. "I'm not going with you, and you're not going back alone! As the leader of this expedition, I forbid it!" The younger man laughed raspingly, as he shook off the hand that clasped his arm, and for a moment it looked as though the two would fight, there on that dizzy ledge above the world. Then Stoddard got control of himself. "Sorry!" he said. "I see I've got to tell you something, Professor. You think I'm merely the geologist of this expedition, but in fact I'm a secret service man from Washington, on the trail of the biggest diamond-smuggling plot in history--and here is where the trail ends!" * * * * * Professor Prescott's astonishment at these words was profound. He stood there blinking up at Stoddard, scarcely believing he had heard aright. "You--you say you are--?" "A detective, if you want. Anyway, if you've read the papers, you must know that for the past year or more the diamond markets of the world have been flooded with singularly perfect stones." "Yes, I recall reading about that. They were thought to be synthetic, were they not?" "By certain imaginative newspaper reporters, not by the experts, for under the microscope they revealed the invariable characteristics of diamonds formed by nature--the tiny flaws and imperfections no artificial means could duplicate." "But didn't I read something, too, about some anonymous Indian rajah who was thought to be raising money by disposing of his jewels?" "More newspaper rubbish! For one thing, British secret service men traced the rumor down and satisfied themselves there wasn't a rajah in India unloading any diamonds. For another; no rajah could possibly have the wealth involved. Why, do you know that since this plot unfolded, over five million carats' worth have made their appearance--and that means something like a billion dollars." "Whew!" whistled the professor. "Whew is right!" his companion agreed. "And not only have the diamond markets of the world been disorganized by this mysterious influx, but the countries involved have lost millions of dollars in revenue, due to the fact that the gems have been smuggled in without payment of duty." "But surely, my dear fellow, you don't connect this gigantic plot with your discovery of--whatever it is you have discovered?" "A diamond as big as a house! That's what I've discovered! And I most surely _do_ connect the plot with it. Did you ever have a hunch, Professor? Well, I had one--and it's worked out!" "You leave me more in the dark momentarily!" declared the older man, glancing around as though to give his words a double meaning. "What was your hunch, and how did it come to lead you here?" Whereupon Stoddard told him, swiftly, for there was no time to lose. * * * * * When first assigned to the case, he said, he had been as baffled as anyone. But as he had studied the problem, one outstanding fact had given him the clue. All the gem experts agreed that the mysterious flood of smuggled stones was of Indian origin, being of the first water and of remarkable fire--in other words, of the finest transparency and brilliance. Therefore, since they were genuine and were seemingly coming from India, Stoddard had concentrated his attention on this country, seeking their exact source. Investigation showed that there were no mines within its borders capable of producing anything like the quantity that was inundating the market. But--and here was where the hunch came in--there was a district in the Sikkim Himalayas of Bengal whose capital was Darjeeling--Land of the Diamond Thunderbolt. Why had it been called that? Was there some legend back of it? There was, he had learned. For though in modern times the phrase had come to apply merely to the Lama's scepter, as Professor Prescott had pointed out, originally it had carried another meaning--for legend said that once a diamond meteor had fallen on the mighty slopes of Kinchinjunga. That had been enough for Stoddard. He had followed his hunch, had got himself attached to the American Kinchinjunga expedition-- "And that's why I'm here, and all about it," he finished. "Now, then, are you coming back with me and have a look at my Diamond Thunderbolt, or am I going back alone?" A long moment the professor debated, before replying. "Yes, I'll come with you," he said at length, extending his hand. "Forgive me, Jack. I didn't know, or--" "Forget it," said Stoddard shaking. "How the devil could you, till I told you? But just one thing. Mum's the word--right?" "Right!" "And one thing more. It may be--well, a one-way trip." "Forget it." "O. K., Professor." With a last warm handclasp, leaving them joined in a new bond of friendship, the two men moved on over that narrow, moonlit ridge across the top of the world. * * * * * It was a desperate trail, Professor Prescott realized after scarcely a dozen steps. The ridge grew narrower, sheerer, and in places they had to straddle it, legs dangling precariously to left and right. Admiration for his gallant companion mounted in the professor's pounding heart, as they struggled on. Only to picture anyone eager to return such a perilous way, after once getting safely back! Other thoughts occupied his mind, too, during the next half-hour. More than once he could have sworn he saw small, ghostly figures on the ridge ahead. But he made no mention of it, for Stoddard didn't seem to see them. Now they gained the far end of that hazardous ridge, where a sloping shelf of jagged rock offered a somewhat more secure footing. Along this they proceeded laterally for some distance. Suddenly Stoddard paused and called out: "Ah--there we are!" He indicated a steep pocket to the left. "Have a look down there, Professor, and tell me what you see." * * * * * Prescott lowered his eyes to the depths below, to draw back with a gasp--for what he saw was a vast phosphorescent glow, like a fallen star. "What--what is it?" he cried, in an awed voice. And back came the ringing reply: "The Diamond Thunderbolt!" "But the radiance of the thing! It couldn't reflect that much light from the moon!" "No, and it doesn't. But there's nothing uncanny about it. Just what I expected the thing would look like at night. But come on, Professor. You haven't seen the half of it!" The way led down the jagged, shelving slope, now, and the descent was too precarious for further comment. Ten minutes passed--fifteen, possibly--when they reached a sheltered, snowless arena where titanic forces had clashed at some remote age. Fragments of splintered rock lay strewn in wild confusion--and among them, glinting in the moonlight, were bright crystals. Picking up one, Stoddard said laughingly: "One of Mother Nature's trinkets worth half a million or so!" Professor Prescott blinked at it a moment, almost in disbelief, then stooped and picked up one for himself--a diamond that would have made the Kohinoor look like a pebble. There was no doubting its genuineness. Even in the moonlight, it flashed and burned like a thing afire. But as the professor turned his eyes at last from its dazzling facets, they failed him again--or so he thought--for half hidden behind a jutting crag loomed a huge cylindrical object, seemingly of metal. * * * * * For the space of two breaths, he stared speechless, then gasped: "Good Lord! What's that?" Following his gaze, Stoddard saw it too. "God knows!" he muttered, in a tense voice. "It wasn't there this afternoon. Let's have a look at it." Cautiously, not knowing what to expect, they advanced toward the singular phenomenon. Nearing, they saw that it was a mechanism some twenty feet at the base and sixty or more feet high, pointed at the top. "A rocket!" declared Professor Prescott. "Though I've never seen anything larger than a laboratory model, I'll gamble that's what it is." "And I'll gamble you're right!" exclaimed Stoddard. "And one capable of carrying passengers, would you say?" "Fully." "Then I think we have solved the mystery of how these diamonds reach the market. The question now is, who's back of this thing? And since our position here probably isn't any too healthy--" He broke off and drew his automatic, as a small, ghostly figure appeared--seemingly from nowhere. The professor saw it, too--saw it followed by another, and another--and now he knew his eyesight had not failed him back on that wind-swept slope above, either, for these were actual creatures, incredible as they seemed. The snow people? He did not know--had no time to find out--for with a rush, the strange beings were all around them. * * * * * Stoddard levelled his pistol and called on them to halt, but they came on--scores, hundreds now, seeming to pour out of some unseen aperture of the earth. Once or twice he fired, over their heads, but it failed to halt them. They closed in, jabbering shrilly. But though their words were a babel, their actions were plain enough. Swarming up, they overpowered the explorers by sheer numbers, and herded them with jabs of sharp, tiny knives toward a cavern mouth that opened presently amid those eery crags. Led underground, they found themselves proceeding along a frosty passage lit every few yards by a great chunk of diamond. Their dim glow seemed to be refracted from some central point beyond. This point they soon reached--a great, vaulted chamber whose brilliance was at first dazzling. Its source, after the first moment or so, was obvious. It was coming from the roof, which was one vast diamond. "You see where we are?" whispered Stoddard. "Under the Diamond Thunderbolt! These people have tunneled beneath the meteor. Or else--" "Their tunnel was already there, when the meteor fell," finished Professor Prescott. "But can it be possible such creatures could have produced that rocket?" "I'm inclined to think anything is possible, now! But I'm sorry I dragged you into this, Professor. I--" "Forget it! We're here and we'll face it together, whatever it is." "You're a game sport!" Stoddard gripped the older man's hand. "We'll face it--and lick it!" Further talk was interrupted by a stir among their captors. The ranks parted--and into that dazzling chamber stepped a tall, bearded personage whose aristocratic features and haughty bearing suggested a Russian of the old regime. * * * * * He strode toward them, smiling sardonically. "Greetings, my friends! Nice of you to drop in on me while in the neighborhood." His English was suave, precise. "Professor Norman Prescott, leader of the American Kinchinjunga expedition, I believe." He paused and lifted inquiring eyebrows to his other guest. "And--?" "Dr. John Stoddard, our geologist," came the answer stiffly. "And you, sir?" "A fellow professor, you might say. Prince Ivan Krassnov. You have heard of me, perhaps?" Prescott had indeed. One of Russia's most brilliant and erratic scientists under the czar, the man had been permitted to continue his work for the Soviets, developing among other inventions, a rocket reported to be capable of carrying passengers. But some two years ago he and his rocket had vanished in the course of a test flight from Moscow, and the natural conclusion was that he had either perished in the sea or shot off the earth altogether, since no trace of the unique mechanism was ever found. "Yes, I have heard of you," said the professor, recalling this sensational story that had occupied the front pages of the world's press for days. "And so it turns out that your rocket didn't come to grief." "Not exactly--though as you can see, it landed me in rather an inaccessible spot," was the reply. "But quite an interesting one! I was well satisfied to let the papers report me missing. You can understand, yes?" "I think I can, that part of it." While as for Stoddard, he was beginning to understand a great deal. "But these curious creatures?" he said, indicating the whispering, pigmy host that filled the cavern. "You found them here?" * * * * * "They found me, rather!" corrected the prince. "But we get on quite well together. They consider me a god, you see, since I, too, came out of the sky in a thunderbolt, as their great diamond once did, according to their legends." "But who are they? What is their origin? Why are they so small, so pale?" "Natural questions, Professor, but not so easy to answer. Who they are I cannot say, save that they are the snow people of native superstition. Their origin? It is lost in antiquity. Perhaps they are the remnants of some Tibetan tribe driven into the mountains by enemies, thousands of years ago. While as for their stature, their pallor--these no doubt are the result of the furtive underground life they lead." He paused, waited politely, as though for further questions, but neither spoke. Now that the main mystery was solved, the one question uppermost in both their minds was what this suave, inscrutable nobleman was going to do with them--and that question neither cared to ask, fearful of what the answer might be. * * * * * Finally Prince Krassnov spoke again. "What, gentlemen--you have no further curiosity about me? How unflattering! I thought perhaps you might want to know why I have chosen to maintain my headquarters here on Kinchinjunga, the past two years, and how I have been occupying my time. But I hold no resentment. I shall tell you, so that you will be prepared for what I am going to propose." He turned and addressed the pigmy host in what must have been their own tongue. Then, facing his guests again, he said: "Now, come. Let us retire to my private study, where we shall have more leisure." They followed him from that dazzling chamber and proceeded on down the cavern to a fork that ended about twenty paces further in a massive steel-bound door. There he paused and twirled a knob like the dial of a safe. After a moment there came a click, as of tumblers meshing, and a tug on the knob swung the door open. The prince bowed. "Step into my little apartment," he said. They entered, to find themselves in a large oblong room furnished in Slavic luxury. * * * * * As they crossed a rich Oriental rug spread over the threshold, a musical gong sounded somewhere, and almost instantly two enormous Cossacks sprang into view, to bar their way with rifles. "My bodyguard," apologized Krassnov, shutting the door. "They are quite harmless, except to intruders. Just one of the little precautions that make life safer." He spoke to the men in Russian and they withdrew. Then he advanced to a divan beside a teakwood table on which stood a large copper samovar. Dropping down, he motioned for them to take seats beside him. "You will have tea, my friends? Or perhaps you would prefer whiskey and soda?" They chose the latter, since their recent exertions seemed to have warranted it, and their host tinkled a silver bell, bringing a Chinese boy beaming and salaaming. A few words to him and the samovar was lit; then he hurried off on padding feet, to return with miraculous speed, bearing not only the whiskey and soda but a platter heaped with exotic cakes, cubed sandwiches of caviar and spiced fish, together with a profusion of other delicacies--doubly welcome to men who had toiled all day on a mountain peak, with nothing but chocolate to sustain them. And while they drank and ate, Prince Krassnov told his story--a story whose very first words were an admission that he was the head of the great diamond-smuggling plot Stoddard had set out to trace down. * * * * * It was a story as dramatic and romantic as it was unscrupulous. Finding himself and the crew of the rocket marooned on the upper slopes of this mighty mountain, in the midst of an incalculable wealth, he had set about at once to capitalize their astounding discovery. First he had made certain adjustments in the mechanism of his apparatus--which fortunately had not been injured by its forced landing--and then he had taken off with specimens of the treasure, bringing the craft down this time with precision in the midst of his ancestral estates near Baku, in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. This vast property the Bolsheviks had not confiscated, partly because of its remoteness, no doubt, and partly because of the prince's services to the Soviet Republic. At any rate, it was here he had developed in secret the details of his amazing plot--a plot that had as its aim not only his own enrichment but the rehabilitation of all the Russian nobles. Once they had heard his story of the Diamond Thunderbolt and seen the specimens he showed them, many had eagerly joined the plot, with the result that an international ring had been formed for disposal of the gems. His plans perfected, Prince Krassnov had then returned to Kinchinjunga with his rocket, since when the mysterious flood of those perfect diamonds into the jewel markets of the world had begun. "So you see, my friends," he smiled, "that is what you Americans would call my 'little game'--a game your chance discovery has rather jeopardized, you must admit." Professor Prescott could well realize this, but at a glance from Stoddard he declined to admit it. "A very ingenious game!" he said. "But where do the Lamas figure in this? Surely they must know of the presence of this meteor within their kingdom." "No doubt they do," the prince conceded. "This is why they are so reluctant to have foreigners enter their domain. At one time, I am satisfied, they knew its exact location and drew many of their own gems from that source. But in recent times the snow people have guarded their secret well. The Lamas are as terrified of them as the natives--and with better reason!" He did not mention what the reason was, but there was something ominous in his tone. * * * * * "But to get on with my story, friends. I am not telling you all this merely to satisfy your curiosity. I have what you call a motive in my madness!" Madness was right, thought Stoddard. The man was dangerously, criminally mad. "My motive is simply this," he went on. "You have chanced upon my little nest-egg, and consequently I have either to let you in on the deal or--" Krassnov paused; shrugged. "But why talk of anything unpleasant, when there is wealth enough here for all? What I propose, briefly, is that you join me." They knew it was coming, but they winced, nevertheless. "Oh, don't be premature!" he exclaimed, a little nettled. "Hear me out. What is good enough for me and my fellow nobles of Imperial Russia is surely good enough for poor, under-paid professors of democratic America. Listen, friends--I am generous. Join me and we will make millionaires out of all of you. Every professor in your country shall be a little czar. It will be, to use the old phrase, a triumph of the intellect." Beyond a doubt, the man was mad; yet his madness was vast, dizzying. Though neither was tempted, they were both rendered speechless for a moment. It was like standing on a mountain top and being shown the countries and the glories of the world--like standing on the top of Kinchinjunga, thought Prescott. "But you assume we are all Bolsheviks, like yourself, we professors," he said, struggling for calm words. "Bolsheviks!" snorted the prince. "I spit on them! You think I, a nobleman, am interested in the masses? Cattle--swine! I plan only for the day when we who are worthy rule again, and this that I have told you is my plan. You can, as you Americans so coarsely say, either take it or leave it." * * * * * A tension hung in the air, as his words echoed into silence. The man had revealed himself. "And suppose we leave it?" asked the professor, restraining his irritation as best he could. "What then?" "Then I am afraid--ah--unpleasant consequences would result," was the bland answer. "Surely you realize that I could not let you and young Dr. Stoddard rejoin your expedition with this story to report." They realized it quite well. "But suppose we agree not to report it?" said Professor Prescott. "Not to doubt your honesty of intention," replied Krassnov sharply. "I would refuse to accept such an agreement." "Then I see nothing else but to decline your kind proposal," said Stoddard, before the professor could formulate further words. "What do you propose to do--murder us?" "Nothing so personal," said the prince, with his sardonic smile. "I shall merely turn you over to my little subjects. They no doubt will deal with you as your merits warrant." Whereupon he pressed a button under that elaborate teakwood table. The musical gong they had heard before sounded again, and the prince's two Cossack retainers reappeared. He addressed them briefly in Russian, adding to his guests: "Adieu, friends! If you change your minds, you have only to speak. You will be understood, and I shall be gratified." And without further words, they were led from that ornate apartment. * * * * * Taken back to the dazzling chamber under the meteor, they were turned over to the pigmies. A powwow resulted, but it was brief. The two captives were bound fast in a curious ceremonial pit near the center of the room. Then the midget horde withdrew, leaving them alone there under that eery glow. "Now what the devil will be the next step?" queried Stoddard, when the last of the pigmies had gone. Professor Prescott considered for a moment, before replying. "I don't think there will be any next step, except our cremation," he said at length. "Cremation?" gasped his young friend. "What do you mean, cremation?" Another pause, then: "Just this. Don't you see where we are? Right under the Thunderbolt! Well?" "Well what?" "Simple enough, Jack." The professor's tone was grave. "When dawn comes, and the rising sun strikes that--" "Good God!" Stoddard suddenly understood. "Why, we'll be cooked alive--frizzled!" It was only too true. Even now, the pale rays of the moon, concentrated by the myriad facets of that monumental diamond, were beginning to focus on them a warmth that was uncomfortable. And by morning--! The two men crouched there silent, realizing their desperate plight. They _must_ escape, before the sun rose. But how? * * * * * Studying their bonds, they discovered that they were of rawhide of some sort, obviously from the hides of animals these strange people caught on the lower slopes somewhere. But though they strained and twisted, they could not stretch them, the leather evidently having been cured to a marvelous toughness in these high altitudes. Precious minutes ticked by as they struggled there, but they were unable to extricate themselves. But before the end of a half-hour, Stoddard managed to free one arm, and reaching into his jacket he drew forth a small, compact metal object--his cigarette lighter. Twirling the wheel, while Professor Prescott held his breath, he succeeded in kindling a flame on its tiny wick. If only he could reach the thongs with it! If only he could burn them through and free himself and the professor before any of the pigmies re-entered that lethal chamber! Wrenching around now, he applied the flame to his left wrist, which was still bound. As the living fire touched his flesh, he winced with pain, but almost anything was better than the grisly fate that threatened. Slowly, a little at a time, he endured the torture, straining at each application to see if the thongs would yield. "Here, let me try it once!" called out Professor Prescott, as he cried aloud with the agony of the ordeal. "No. I'll get it!" Stoddard gritted his teeth, continued. "There! I think my hand is free!" He struggled. "Yes. Now wait!" Replacing his cigarette lighter in his pocket, he drew his blistered wrist from its smouldering bonds and struggled feverishly now to undo the lashes about his feet. Five minutes of that and suddenly he flung them off and stood up. "Now! Now then, Professor. I'll have you loose in a jiffy!" Bending over his fettered companion, he worked with frantic haste to untie the rawhide bonds. Another five minutes and they were both free. * * * * * Professor Prescott stood up and stretched. "Thank God for small favors!" he exclaimed. "But you, Jack? You must be burned cruelly. "Forget it!" Stoddard was already wrapping a handkerchief around his wrist. "Now let's see about getting out of here. These little rats all seem to be asleep, and Lord knows where that maniac Krassnov is. Perhaps we can make it. At any rate, we'll give them a run for their money!" As he spoke, he drew his automatic. Silently, stealthily, they left that glittering chamber and proceeded down the cavern toward what seemed to be the entrance, guided by their remembrance of the way they had come. A hundred yards or more they made, seeing no sign of their captors, when suddenly a musical gong rang out. "We've stepped on one of Krassnov's infernal signals!" cried Stoddard, above the din. "Now there'll be hell to pay!" And "hell to pay" there was, almost instantly--for before they had taken ten more steps, the cavern ahead was full of small, ghostly figures, jabbering in their shrill voices. Indifferent now of what he did, their lives at stake, Stoddard blazed away with his automatic, sweeping it from side to side of the stony walls as he fired. As the shots crashed out, the jabbers turned to shrieks of terror. Several of the pigmies fell. The rest broke their ranks and shrank into the shadows. "Run!" yelled Stoddard, slipping a new clip into his pistol. The professor needed no invitation. Gathering his long legs he sped after the younger man, and together they burst from the mouth of the cavern. * * * * * Outside, in the dazzle of moonlight, they paused for an instant. "This way!" called Stoddard, racing toward that splintered arena. They gained it and lunged across it to the shelving slope that reached upward to the narrow, perilous ridge whence they had come. As they proceeded, the pigmy horde following with incredible swiftness, Stoddard wheeled and fired time and again--and now his shots were answered by the reports of rifles. "Krassnov and his Cossacks!" he muttered. "Well, we'll give them our heels, unless they hit us." "And Russians are notoriously bad shots, I understand," panted the professor. At any rate, they reached the slope and struggled upward toward the ridge, putting themselves presently out of range behind the jagged rocks that loomed on every side. But just as they were congratulating themselves on their escape, came a dull, reverberating explosion--and as they clung to their insecure footholds, a volcano of snow and ice rose ahead. Thousands of tons of debris avalanched into the chasm below. * * * * * Stunned, deafened, they looked around. Down in that pocket where the Thunderbolt had so recently gleamed was one vast chaos, and above, where that razor-back ridge had led across the intervening chasms to safety, was a dazzling void. To both came the same thought, but Stoddard expressed it first. "Krassnov--he's dynamited the ridge!" he gasped. "Then we--we'll never get back now!" echoed Professor Prescott. "No, but they'll never get us here!" "Scant comfort, though, when we're pinioned here like a couple of birds with their wings clipped." "Right; but let's see. Let's figure. We're better off than we were. And what was it Napoleon once said: 'When you can't retreat, advance.' So suppose we--" "But listen!" * * * * * Stoddard heard. It was the sound of rifle shots. And looking down, he saw a feverish activity surrounding the rocket. Myriads of the pigmies were swarming upon it, while a handful of Cossacks were holding them off. "Something doing down there, all right!" he muttered. "Looks to me like--why, sure I've got it! That madman has overshot himself, for once! He's buried their precious meteor, in blowing up our ridge, and they've turned on him!" "I think you're right," agreed Professor Prescott. "Suppose we advance as you say. It looks like a chance." "Right," said Stoddard. Slowly, cautiously, they returned down the slope. When within a hundred yards, they knew they had sized up the situation correctly. With frantic speed, Krassnov was supervising the shoveling out of his rocket from amid the debris; was directing its loading, while the free members of his crew held off the enraged natives who were obstructing them. Descending even more cautiously now, they neared the scene of activity. "My plan is this--to get aboard and find out where they're going!" said Stoddard, through shut teeth. "What do you say?" "Lead on!" said the professor. So they continued down, neared the resting-place of that strange craft, and, under shelter of the moonlight shadows, stole through the confused ranks surrounding it and crept aboard. * * * * * Stowing themselves into the first likely niche that offered--a narrow cubicle behind a flight of metal stairs--they waited, scarcely daring to breathe for fear of being discovered. Fifteen minutes passed, a half-hour, when suddenly sounded a rasping of doors that told them the rocket was being sealed. Then came a roar, as of some mighty blast beating down upon the frozen earth, followed by a lifting, rushing sensation--and they were flung violently to the flooring. The pressure ceased in a moment, however, to be supplanted by a buoyant, exhilarating sense of flight. It increased, and they judged they must be traveling at great speed. Glancing at the luminous dial of his watch, Professor Prescott saw that it was a quarter to ten. "Well, we're off!" he whispered. "And where, would you guess, are we headed?" "I wouldn't guess," Stoddard whispered back. "From the way we're riding, it might be Mars! We must be making hundreds of miles an hour." "Or thousands! Who knows?" They crouched there in their cramped niche, scarcely even whispering now, as the tense minutes passed. * * * * * Suddenly the motion changed. They seemed to be dropping. Another moment or two, and with a slight jar the rocket came to rest. "Well, we're here, wherever it is," said Stoddard, stirring. "Yes, undoubtedly," the professor agreed. "And the next move?" "I think we'll let them make that." They were not long in doing so. There came the sound of doors rasping open, of footsteps echoing on metal stairs and corridors. Once a giant Cossack passed within four feet of them. But at length, all was silent within the rocket. "Now, then, suppose we have a look around," said Stoddard, stepping out. "Right," agreed his companion, following. "I'll admit I am mildly curious to know what corner of the earth we've been transported to." They proceeded down the dim-lit corridor the way they had come, descended a flight of stairs and headed along another corridor--to pause suddenly and gasp with astonishment. For through the door whence they had entered the rocket poured a flood of sunshine. * * * * * Stoddard stared at it a moment incredulously, and then glanced at his watch. "Ten o'clock, I make it!" he muttered. "Am I crazy, or what?" "No, I hardly think so," smiled Professor Prescott, recovering from his own surprise. "It is merely that we are in some part of the world quite a few thousand miles removed from India. Back on Kinchinjunga, it is still ten o'clock at night, but here, it is quite obviously daytime." "That must be the explanation," Stoddard agreed. "But it certainly gave me a start at first!" Approaching the door, followed by the professor, he peered cautiously out, to confront a desolate stretch of scrubby growth, hemmed in by a background of rugged mountains. "Now where the devil would you say we are?" he demanded, gazing around perplexedly. "Either in the United States or in Mexico," was the astonishing reply. "But how can you say that?" "Because it must be some place approximately twelve hours distant from India in time, to judge from the sun, which is not far past the meridian." "But why not Australia, for instance?" "Because Australia is too far. It would be three o'clock tomorrow morning there, since it is ten o'clock last night now in India." * * * * * Stoddard pondered this a minute, then admitted its correctness. "All right, then. Assuming that we are somewhere on the North American continent, the next thing is to give Krassnov the slip; otherwise it won't be big enough for all of us!" And that Professor Prescott conceded readily enough. But before making any further move, they looked over their surroundings carefully, to satisfy themselves none of their late captors were in view. "They're evidently somewhere on the other side of the rocket," Stoddard concluded at length. "So let's make a break for it while we've got the chance." "Lead the way!" said the professor. "O. K., here we go!" And, stepping through the door, they dropped to the ground and raced off under the glare of the burning sun toward the rugged mountains that loomed ahead. * * * * * For a hundred yards or so they were able to keep the rocket between themselves and the Russians but soon the ground sloped up to such an extent that they realized they must be in full view. Dropping behind the scant shelter of a scraggly tree, they turned and glanced down--and there, beyond the rocket, they could now see a group of men standing around outside a small wooden shack, shouting and gesticulating in their direction. "Damn it, they've seen us!" muttered Stoddard. "But why don't they come after us?" queried Professor Prescott. The answer came even as he spoke, for out of the shack rushed the tall figure of the prince, in his hand a pair of binoculars which he raised to his eyes. Whether or not be spotted them, an instant later he turned and uttered a command, and two huge Cossacks sprang to the pursuit. "There's nothing to do now but run for it!" cried Stoddard, leaping to his feet. The professor followed and they plunged on up the slope, bullets from their pursuers' pistols and the rifles of those below kicking up the dust around them. But either because the aim was bad or the targets difficult, they escaped unscathed. As for Stoddard, he wasted no time in firing back. "Once we get in those mountains, we're safe!" he gasped, as they struggled on. "How are you, Professor--all right?" "No holes in my skin so far!" came the panting answer. Five desperate, dodging minutes passed. Glancing over their shoulders, they saw that the heavy, stolid Cossacks were losing ground. And ahead, tauntingly near now, loomed a thickly-wooded slope that meant the beginning of big timber--and safety. Another five minutes--each second an hour--and they had gained it. * * * * * But there was no pausing yet, they could hear the Cossacks crashing on like determined blood-hounds behind. "No need to climb any more!" exclaimed Stoddard, half breathless. "We'll edge along, keep in the trees, and try to throw them off." The older man said nothing; merely gritted his teeth. This climb had told on him more than anything he had experienced on the cruel slopes of Kinchinjunga. As they struggled along now, sometimes it seemed that they had thrown their pursuers off the trail, or completely outdistanced them, but always a moment later they would hear again the crunch of the Cossacks' boots on the dry undergrowth. So the grim flight continued, mile after heart-tearing mile, and Stoddard was beginning to realize that the professor couldn't keep on much longer--had just about decided to stop and shoot it out with their pursuers--when suddenly there came a sound that brought new hope to him. "Did you hear that?" he gasped, pausing. "It--sounded like--a car!" panted his companion. "Right. And that means there must be a road through here somewhere! But where?" "Listen." Professor Prescott pointed to the left. "The sound seems to be coming from over there." And sure enough, from the left came a wheezing grind of a car making a heavy grade. "Near, too," decided Stoddard. "Come on--let's go! We've got to head it off. It's our only hope, except--" With relief, he shoved his automatic back into its holster and led the way in the direction of the now rapidly nearing car. * * * * * A hundred yards they had made, up a slight rise, when there spread before them a rutted mountain road, and on it, in full view, was a laboring Ford of ancient vintage. Over the wheel hovered a lanky, leathery native, and beside him sat a small, plump woman who looked as though she might be his wife. They were almost to the top of the hill when Stoddard hailed them. "Say!" he said. "Give us a ride, will you? We're lost." "Keep on, Henry!" he heard the woman urge. "I don't like the looks of 'em." Americans! Well, thought Stoddard, they were in the United States, anyway. That was something. And he didn't exactly blame the good woman for her suspicions. They must look pretty wild, at that, with their two-day beards and tattered clothes. "Sorry," spoke up Henry. "Missus says no. She knows best. 'Sides, it ain't fur to Martin's Bluff. You kin make it in an hour." "But say, wait a minute!" They were running along beside the wheezing car now. "We've got to get there in a hurry. We'll pay you." Henry pricked up his ears at this, but his wife shook her head. "Keep on!" she urged. "They may be bandits!" * * * * * Whereupon Stoddard drew his automatic, for there was no more time to argue. "Stop!" he commanded. "You'll take us, understand? I'll pay you well!" "See, I was right!" screamed the woman. "Bandits! Bandits! Oh, Henry--save me!" Wildly she clung to him, as Stoddard mounted the running-board, but before he could make another move, Professor Prescott gasped out: "The Cossacks! Quick!" And jumping down, he wheeled to face the two leering Russians, not forty feet down the road. Pistols levelled, they were advancing stolidly. Stoddard half-raised his own weapon, then turned to see if the car was within range of the return fire it would bring. It was--but not for long. With a furious chattering of bands, as Henry gave it the gas, the decrepit vehicle gained the top of the hill and disappeared from view down the far slope, and the last thing he saw of it was a dusty plate flapping under its tail-light. It was a Texas license! Then, turning back, he lifted his automatic; but it was too late. The Cossacks were on them. In answer to a guttural command, he dropped the weapon and raised his hands, as the professor had already done. * * * * * Two hours later, they were back at the rocket. Led into the shack--which was furnished inside like an Oriental hunting-lodge--they were confronted at once by Prince Krassnov. Though his aristocratic features were immobile, it was obvious that he was in no amiable frame of mind. "So, my friends!" he exclaimed. "I leave you in India, and meet you again in America, all within a matter of hours. It is but an example of our modern progress, is it not?" They made no reply. "Ha! You are not sociable, after enjoying my hospitality, my transportation? Then suppose we--as you Americans so quaintly say--call a spade a spade! I gave you your chance. You declined it. And what is the result? My beautiful Diamond Thunderbolt, my immeasurable treasure, is buried forever." "Through no fault of ours!" put in Stoddard. "But buried nevertheless, and my adopted kingdom in revolt. Yet do not think I mourn too much, my friends. Though the game is what you call up, my plans shall go on. Here and elsewhere in the world, where we have sub-headquarters, are billions of dollars' worth of diamonds--supplies for years ahead. We shall not suffer. But you--Professor Prescott and Doctor Stoddard--I have a very interesting fate in store for you. How would you care to make a little scientific expedition to Mars, say?" "Mars?" gasped the professor. "Yes, or Venus, or even Jupiter, not to mention the moon! Or how about the sun? That would be an interesting sphere for exploration." "We don't know what you're talking about," said Stoddard growing nettled. "Why mince matters? Call a spade a spade, if you're going to! What do you propose to do with us, now that you have us in your power?" The prince paused, drew forth a long Russian cigarette from an exquisite platinum case. "I propose," he smiled, when he had lit it, "to turn over my rocket to you, my fellow scientists, since I shall have no further use for it and it might be embarrassing to be found with it in my possession." And the way he proposed to turn it over to them, as they had already suspected, was to lock them in it and fire it off into space. * * * * * Within the hour, the man's diabolical plan had been put into operation. Led to the rocket, the luckless pair were locked within a small metal room somewhere within its recesses. There sounded again the peculiar rasping that told them its doors were being sealed. And then came the roar of that mighty exhaust beating down. There followed the lifting, rushing sensation they had experienced before, and again they were flung violently to the flooring by the force of the upward impulse. When the pressure slacked, they staggered to their feet and groped around the dark, stuffy little room. "Well, this is the end, I guess," sighed Professor Prescott. "I had never thought," with a grim attempt at humor, "that I would meet quite such a scientific fate as this!" "Nor had I!" Stoddard agreed. "But I'm not quite ready to cash in my checks yet. The game isn't over!" He was pacing around the room, knocking on the metal walls with something that gave back a strident ring. "Have you any idea what composition this stuff is?" * * * * * The professor rapped on one of the panels; felt of it. "Aluminum, I would say." "Nothing so lucky! If it were, I could cut it like cheese. But duralumin, probably, a very light, strong alloy; and what I have here is a hunting knife with a can-opener on one end! If I'm not mistaken, we'll be out of this sardine box before long." Whereupon he applied himself to the thin metal wall of their cell, working determinedly, while Professor Prescott held his cigarette lighter for a torch. "You see, duralumin yields to heat, like aluminum," he exclaimed, as finally his knife thrust through. "Now then, let's get the can opener working." The progress was slow but sure. Within an hour, he had cut out a jagged section some two feet square, through which they squeezed into an equally dark corridor. "Now then!" Stoddard's mood was exultant. "There must be switches around here somewhere. There were lights, I remember, so let's find them. Once we get a little light on the subject--" "Here!" called the professor, who had groped down the corridor with the cigarette lighter. "How's that?" As he pressed a switch, a row of small bulbs glowed overhead. "Fine!" was the answer. "Now let's see if we can find the engine-room, or whatever they call it." * * * * * Jubilant now, they continued on down the corridor, which ended in a flight of stairs. "I fancy it must be below," said Professor Prescott. "From what I have seen of experimental models, the propulsion impulse must originate from the base." So they descended the stairs, entered another dark corridor, found another switch and pressed it, and thus they proceeded, lighting the interior of the rocket as they went. And as they descended, the roar of the exhaust increased in volume, indicating that they were nearing its source. Presently they entered a large, circular room with an illuminated dial at the far end. Drawing near, they saw a confusion of instruments that for a moment left them dazed. While Stoddard studied them in bewilderment, Prescott circled the room till he found a switch. Pressing it, he produced a brilliant flood of illumination. "Now then, let me have a look at this," he said, returning to the dial. "Professor Goddard once explained to me the workings of one of his experimental models. The motive force must be some liquefied mixture, possibly oxygen and hydrogen. Some of these instruments--most of them, in fact--must be valves." He touched one, turned it, and the rocket responded with a sickening burst of speed. "No, that won't do! We're going plenty fast enough now!" He touched another, and they slacked off dizzyingly. "Well, there are two controls, anyway. Now then, how do they steer this thing? That is the next problem we must solve." But though he touched this instrument and that, producing weird effects, their course continued in the direction set. And meanwhile, they were hurtling outward through space at a rate of speed he knew would presently carry them beyond the gravitational pull of the earth. Then, as he grasped and swung down a curious lever that worked in a quadrant, they felt a violent lunge to the left, and for a moment it seemed they would shoot to the ceiling. "Good God!" gasped Stoddard. "What's happened?" "Nothing--only that I've found how to steer this wild steed!" cried the professor, exultantly. * * * * * It was really quite simple, he explained, as he eased up on the lever. In application, it was a development of the gyroscope principle, that a wheel revolving freely within a freely suspended frame tends to make the frame revolve in the other direction. "You see, the rocket is the freely suspended frame," he went on, "while this lever controls a gyroscopic wheel somewhere. To set it spinning to the right causes us to turn to the left, and vice versa." "But you almost stood us on our heads, a moment ago! How did that happen?" "Simply because I threw the lever too far to the right. We are in interstellar space, obviously, where every change of direction involves an adjustment of equilibrium." And if Stoddard didn't exactly understand, being first a secret service man and only secondarily a scientist, at least he showed his ignorance no further. If the professor could bring this astounding machine back to Earth, that was all he wanted. Prescott said he could, he thought, providing they had fuel enough left. So for the next few minutes, while the younger man held his breath, the professor labored with the various instruments on that complicated dial. "Now then, I think we're headed back," he said at length, relaxing. "But we've got to have visibility, otherwise we will land with a velocity of about twenty thousand miles an hour, which is what I figure we're making at the present time." "Good Lord!" gasped Stoddard. "I'll say we've got to have visibility! Wait a minute! Let me look around!" He searched the room for further instruments--to find nothing that in any way met the purpose. But even as he returned dejected, the professor cried out: "Here--I've got it! Take a look at this!" Bending over a small table beside the dial, Stoddard saw mirrored, in its ground-glass surface a hazy circular panorama that at first had no significance. But as he continued to peer down upon the scene, certain familiar aspects loomed out. It was the Earth--and what he was looking at was a view of the North and South American continents! * * * * * For some moments Stoddard stared at this amazing panorama in silence; saw it grow rapidly clearer, as the careening rocket plunged like a giant shell toward the earth. "My God!" he whispered at length in awe. "Do you think you can ever check our speed?" "I think so," the professor replied, busy over his instruments. "But where do we want to land? How do we know what state we were in?" Whereupon Stoddard told him of that Texas license plate. "But we don't want to land anywhere near that fiend Krassnov," he added, with a shudder. "I suggest, if it's possible, that you pick out some aerodrome, preferably in the western part of the state--for if I remember my geography, Texas isn't mountainous in the east." "I will do the best I can," said Prescott, grimly. There followed tense minutes as the panorama in that ground-glass narrowed and grew more intense. Now they could see only North America, now only the United States and a portion of Mexico, and now only Texas. "Back--_back!_" cried Stoddard, as the rugged land loomed up, spread into a panorama of towns and ranches. "We're descending too fast! We're bound to crash, unless--" But already the professor had touched the ascending valve and swung the steering lever. Up they zoomed again. Once more a portion of Mexico was visible on the glass, and along the international border now they could see a winding thread of silver. "The Rio Grande!" exclaimed the young geologist. "Just follow it up toward its source till we come to El Paso. There'll be a landing-field there." "Yes, undoubtedly." The professor was working in abstraction over the unfamiliar controls. "Now if I can just hold us on our course...." * * * * * He succeeded, and presently a white city gleamed over the curving rim of the horizon to the northwest, the tall chimneys of its smelters throwing long shadows from the lowering sun beyond. In a minute or two they were over it, at a height of perhaps twelve miles--and now, as they began descending, its patchwork of buildings and plazas unfolded like some great quilt below. "There's the field!" cried Stoddard, pointing in the glass to a wide clear space on the outskirts. "Can you make it, do you think?" "We'll know soon!" was the grim answer, as Prescott worked frantically now with his valves and levers. "It's a matter of balancing off our flow of gases, of holding up buoyancy to the very last. A little too much, or not enough, and--" Breathlessly, as they descended, Stoddard peered into the glass. Now a scene of excitement was visible below. Figures could be seen gazing up, waving their arms, running about this way and that. "They must think they're getting a visit from another planet," said Stoddard. "Or that the end of the world has come!" "Maybe it has, for us!" agreed the professor, gravely. "I'm afraid we're going to crash. I can't seem to--" Whatever he was going to add was lost in a sudden, rending concussion that flung them violently down, and plunged the room into darkness. * * * * * Staggering to his feet a moment later, bruised and shaken, Stoddard gasped out: "Professor are you there? Are you all right?" A groan answered him, and for a moment his heart sank, but then came the reassuring call: "Yes--all right, I guess. And you?" "O.K. Let's get out of here, quick!" An ominous hissing sound beat on their ears, as they groped their way toward the door. Evidently escaping gases from the deranged mechanism, thought Stoddard. The floor rose at an angle, indicating that the rocket was half over on its side. They found the door, and struggled along the twisted corridor toward a flight of stairs that would lead below; found it, descended, and groped along another dark corridor, seeking an exit; when suddenly, around a bend, daylight confronted them, and to their joy they saw that one of the main doors had been burst open by the impact. Approaching it, they peered out--to be greeted by an awed group of officials and mechanics from the field. As they climbed through, dropped to the ground, the group retreated, taking no chances. "Back!" called Professor Prescott, warning and reassuring them with a word. Then, turning to his companion: "Come on, Jack--run! This thing is likely to explode at any moment." Following this advice, Stoddard raced from the rocket with the rest. At a safe distance, he turned and peered back--to see it standing there at a crazy angle, dust and fumes issuing from under it in a blast that was hollowing a deep crater to the far side. Even as they looked, the strange craft quivered, tottered, and fell over on its side, and the next instant was enveloped in a blinding sheet of flame that brought with it a dull detonation and a blast of dazing heat. The party backed still farther away. "A nasty mixture, oxygen and hydrogen," muttered the professor, feeling of his singed eyebrows. "We got out of there just in time, Jack." "I'll say we did!" Stoddard agreed, with a shudder. * * * * * By now the higher officials of the field were on the scene, among them a number of Army men. Curiosity ran high, not unmingled with indignation. Who were these strange visitors? Where had they come from? What did they mean by endangering the lives of everyone, with their damned contraption? Inquiring for the commandant, they were taken to him--Major Clark Hendricks, U.S.A.--and Stoddard briefly outlined their astounding story, producing credentials, whereupon a squadron of fast military planes was assembled. From the way they described the mountainous region where the rocket had first landed, mentioning the town Martin's Bluff, that Henry of the ancient Ford had named, the major declared that it must have been the Guadalupe Mountains a hundred miles to the east--and sure enough, a government map showed such a town there. So it was that presently the squadron lifted into the late afternoon skies, with Major Hendricks in the leading plane, accompanied by the two weary adventurers. Swiftly the squadron winged eastward. They reached the mountains in less than an hour, and circled them in search of that little wooden shack which Prince Krassnov and his Cossacks had made their rendezvous.... * * * * * It was like finding a needle in a haystack, and for a time Stoddard despaired of success. But those rugged mountains were an open book to the planes circling high overhead, and with Martin's Bluff once located, the rest was not so hard. At last, as twilight was falling, they found the shack and brought their planes to rest near it. But as the party approached the shack, after posting a heavy guard over their planes, they saw that it was deserted. This, after all, was only what Stoddard had feared, but nevertheless they forced their way inside--and there, had Major Hendricks had any doubt of their story, it was dispelled. As Stoddard had told them, it was furnished like an Oriental hunting-lodge, with evidences of the recent occupation of the Russians on all sides. But where were they? Had they got away or were they hiding somewhere? Proceeding from room to room until they had searched it thoroughly, the party paused baffled. But not for long, for suddenly Stoddard discovered something that gave him a clue. It was a barred door, within a closet, covered over with clothes and uniforms so as to be fairly well concealed. On battering it in, they found that it led into a passage below. * * * * * As the party entered the passage, leaving further guards above, it became obvious that what they had found was the shaft of an old mine. It led down abruptly, for a while, then more gradually, with many windings and twistings, and ending presently in another barred door. This they in turn battered in--to be greeted suddenly by a volley of rifle-fire that dropped three of them in their tracks. Stoddard was one of those who fell. Bending over him, Professor Prescott lifted up his head. "Jack!" he called. "Where are you hit? Answer me!" "I--it seems to be in the shoulder," came the weak reply. "If you've got a handkerchief--" The professor produced one and staunched the flow of blood as best he could, working with the aid of his flashlight. Meanwhile, ahead, the crash of pistols and rifles continued to split the stillness of the passage, as the attacking party pressed forward. "There--that does it!" gasped Stoddard, at length. "Help me up. I'll be all right." Prescott steadied him to his feet. They continued on. * * * * * Now the firing ceased, and in a moment Major Hendricks appeared, at the head of his party. "Well, we've got them," he said, saluting Stoddard. "How are you, old man?" "All right," was the gritted reply. "Let's have a look at them." A flashlight was swept across the stolid group of Cossack prisoners, but as Stoddard peered into one face after another, he realized that Krassnov was not among them. "You haven't got the leader," he said. "See here, you birds," he addressed the Cossacks, "where is he, eh?" If they understood, they gave no indication of it, but shook their heads sullenly. "Well, damn it, we'll find him!" Stoddard wheeled and strode past them. "Give me three or four men, Major. I'll smoke out that Russian bear. He must be here somewhere." Hendricks sent the main body above, with their prisoners, and gave him the men he wanted, putting himself at their head. "You'd better go on up, too, Professor," said Stoddard, addressing Prescott. "You've risked enough, in my behalf." But the older man shook his head. "No, I'll come along, if you don't mind," he insisted. "I want to see the end of this thing." * * * * * It was an end that came with dramatic suddenness. Pausing before a barred door some fifty paces down the passage, they were debating what their next move would be--when suddenly it was flung open. "Come in, gentlemen," came a suave, ironical voice. "Sorry my servants were so uncivil." In the glare of light from beyond, Stoddard and the professor saw that it was Prince Krassnov. He stood there unarmed, smiling. "Is this the fellow?" rasped Major Hendricks, his automatic levelled. "It is," said Stoddard. Slowly, cautiously, they followed the man into the room, which in reality was merely the end of the passage sealed off, though its walls were richly panelled and it was luxuriously furnished. Pausing beside a small, heavy table, he swept his hand over it, indicating a heap of rough diamonds that must have represented millions. "Merely a fraction of my treasure, gentlemen," he told them, with a deprecating shrug. "I hadn't quite finished storing away the last shipment, when you interrupted me." He strode to one of the walls, drew out a small drawer from a built-in cabinet and dumped its glittering contents on the table with the rest. All around the room, Stoddard noted as he stood there swaying, were other cabinets dotted with the knobs of similar drawers. "And this, gentlemen, is but my American sub-headquarters," the Prince went on. "In Siberia, in Brazil--but why bore you with the multiplication of my now useless wealth? Tell me, instead, my good friends--Professor Prescott, Doctor Stoddard--how come you back here, after I saw you safely on your way earlier in the afternoon?" "Because I happen to have a knack with can-openers, and my colleague is rather adept with machinery," Stoddard told him, "while Major Hendricks here is quite a hand with geography, not to mention aviation." * * * * * A question or two, which they answered briefly, and Krassnov had the story. "Ah, my poor rocket!" he sighed. "But it is fate, I suppose; Kismet, as the Turkish say. Still, I deserved a better fate than to be captured by a pair of American professors, when the secret service of the world was on my trail." "Then cheer up!" said Stoddard, gritting his teeth to keep back the pain of his throbbing shoulder. "For I have the honor to represent Washington in this case." At that, the prince scowled darkly for a moment. Then he brightened. "Kismet again! I might have acted differently, had I known that, but--well, I drink to your success, Doctor Stoddard!" Whereupon, before they could restrain him, he lifted a vial from a shelf over one of the cabinets and downed its contents. "A diamond-dust cocktail!" he smiled, replacing the vial. "The most expensive, even in your country of costly drinks--and the most deadly!" But Stoddard knew, as the doomed nobleman stood there facing them in stoic triumph, that diamond dust in the human system was as slow as it was deadly, and that the desperate gesture had been futile, so far as justice was concerned. There would be ample time, in the weeks Prince Krassnov of Imperial Russia still lived, to round up his international allies and stamp out the remnants of their amazing ring of diamond smugglers. While as for Professor Prescott, he was thinking with what amazement the members of his expedition back on Kinchinjunga would receive the cablegram he would dispatch that night, informing them that Stoddard and himself were safe in El Paso, Texas. The Slave Ship From Space _By A. R. Holmes_ [Illustration: "_The slaves!" gasped Jim, and involuntarily backed into the room._] [Sidenote: Three kidnapped Earthlings show Xantra of the Tillas how "docile" Earth slaves can be.] Twice that night the two young men had seen the thing, and their hour for turning in had long since passed as they lay half reclining on the ground by their campfire waiting, hoping that it would return once more. Their interest in the strange visitant had completely banished all sensations of fatigue from a full day of vacation fishing in the cold Adirondack streams among which they were camping for that month. They had discussed the appearance until there was nothing more they could say; and now as for the last hour, they watched in silence, only moving to knock the dottle from their pipes and to get fresh lights off the splinters they stuck into their slumbering fire. The velvet night was now at full reign, and the myriad stars in their familiar patterns leaned close--brilliant jewels for man to share but never pluck. Jim Wilson had seen the thing first--a pinpoint of cherry red that moved upward in a perfect arc against the brilliant white constellations of the east. As it rose, it grew perceptibly larger, to dwindle again as it arced over the western horizon. Nearly an hour later it had appeared again; but this time, when halfway up the skies, it had changed its direction until it was heading directly over the spot where the two thrilled campers were watching; and as it approached they saw its color fade slowly until it had disappeared completely from sight among the inky patches between the stars overhead. For minutes the two were not able to locate it--until Jim, once again, had pointed to a faint red spot that grew in color and intensity as it drew away from the zenith. Once again it had disappeared over the rim of the western world--and from then on there was no thought of sleep in the minds of Jim Wilson and Clee Partridge. They were watching the skies, hoping it would return. "What was the thing?" Jim Wilson exclaimed suddenly with exasperation. "I've been racking my brain, Clee, but nothing I can think of makes sense. It couldn't have been a plane, and it couldn't have been a meteor. And if it was a fire-fly--well, then I'm one too." He paused, and looked at the other. "Any new suggestions?" he asked. "Me--I still think it was a space ship from Mars or Venus," Clee Partridge answered drily; "searching for a couple of good Earth-men to help 'em out of some jam. You noticed the way it disappeared for a moment when it was overhead: it was looking us over." "Then it'll be back," answered Jim, not to be outdone, "for it's not apt to find anyone better qualified. I, myself, would kinda like to take a joy-ride out through the Great Dipper." * * * * * Clee smiled and looked down at the luminous dial of his wrist watch. The two resumed their vigil, and there was quietness between them. For some time they lost themselves in the sparkling glory of the firmament, hardly moving, except to pull closer the collars of their flannel shirts against the increasing coldness of the mountain air. And then for the third time that night the mysterious sky traveler sprang over the trees on the eastern horizon. Suddenly it appeared; both men saw it at once; and this time it made a clear, beautiful arc straight for the zenith. As it raised, it grew in size, a beautiful, delicate cherry star spanning the whole welkin. The two men got to their knees and watched it, breathless with fascination. "Look!" cried Jim suddenly. As had happened on its second appearance, the thing began to slow up and its color gradually faded as it drew directly overhead. By the time it should have reached the zenith it could no longer be seen. It had dissolved against the inky spaces above. "It should come into view again in a moment," Clee said; "a little farther on, like the other time." They watched, thrilled by the mystery of the midnight phenomenon. Minutes passed, but still it did not appear. Clee grew restive, and as his eyes chanced on his wrist watch he started violently and held out his arm for Jim to see. The radium-painted hands and dial were glowing with unusual brilliance. Looking quickly into the skies again, Clee sensed something wrong; something different. For a moment he could not figure out what--and then it came to him. One of the great stars, one that he had been watching in its climb up the sky through the night, had disappeared! * * * * * He got excitedly to his feet, grabbed his companion's arm and pointed out this strange thing--and as he pointed another star blinked out and did not reappear. "Something's happening up there," Jim said soberly. "I don't know what; but I, for one, don't feel quite comfortable." He kept peering at the place pointed out, at a spot of black even darker than the inky sky; or did he only imagine it was darker? he asked himself. Soon the spot enlarged; became a distinct patch; then, growing still, obliterated one star after another around its borders. It made a pure circle; and before long the starlight glinting off its sides showed it to be a great, tinted sphere. Swiftly it dropped down on the two men, and they watched it hypnotized, incapable of moving. It was only a hundred yards overhead when some presence of mind returned to Clee. "Run, Jim!" he yelled, moving away. "It's coming straight down!" Wilson came out of his daze and the two sprinted wildly for the path that led down the spur on which their camp was located. They had not made more than fifty yards when they heard a dull thud, and, turning, saw the great sphere resting on the ground with a slight rocking motion that quickly ceased. A gully cut into the trail ahead, and when they reached it Clee grabbed his partner's arm and pulled him off to one side, where, panting with their sudden exertion, they wormed up to the brow and peeped over at their strange visitor. * * * * * The sphere stood in the starlight on the very spot they had been occupying when they first saw it. Right in their campfire it lay--a great, dark-red crystal shape perhaps fifty feet in diameter, whose surface sparkled with innumerable facets. It rested quietly on the ground, as if oblivious of the two routed men breathlessly watching it from a short distance. No ports or variations of any kind were visible to mar its star-reflecting sides. "It must be some new kind of dirigible!" murmured Jim; "but why did it go and pick on us for its midnight call!" "It's a space ship from Mars," answered Clee with a serious face. "They heard you, and're coming to take you for your ride. See?" he added quickly, pointing. A large door was opening in the side of the sphere, and the illumination within threw a bright beam of amber-colored light in their direction. A metallic ramp slid out and angled down to the ground. Breathlessly the two men waited to see who would emerge, but a long time went by without their catching the slightest sign of life within. The face of Clee's wrist watch was fluorescing brilliantly now, and moment by moment the weird glow was increasing. Jim stirred nervously. "I don't mind telling you, I'm scared," he said. "Aw, they won't make you walk back," consoled Clee; but he was scared himself. Why didn't something happen? Why didn't someone come out of the ship? Jim thought he heard a noise, and touched Clee on the shoulder, pointing to a place on the trail down which they had come a few minutes before. Clee looked, and as he did so the hair on the back of his neck stood up. For the bushes along the side of the path were moving as if they were being brushed aside by someone in passing--someone making a straight line to the spot where they lay concealed. And no one was there! "Can they be invisible?" breathed Jim, every pore in his body prickling. * * * * * For a moment the two men could hardly breathe, so great was their unnamed fear. During that time no other movements could be noted. Then Clee suddenly pointed to a bush only five yards away. Half a dozen leaf-tipped branches were bending slowly in their direction--and then a sharp crack, as of a broken twig, came to them from the same spot. Panic, blind and unreasoning, swept them. "Run!" gasped Jim; and together, instinctively, they turned and scrambled down the side of the ridge to get away, anywhere, far from the approaching menace of they knew not what. Reckless of possible injury, they slid and stumbled down the brush-covered slope--and right behind them came sudden crashing sounds of pursuit. New fears lent wings to their flight, but the sounds behind continued inexorably at their heels no matter how fast they ran or how lucky they were in making past obstacles. Their pursuer was as fast as they. They had no idea who--or what--it might be, for in the brief glances they snatched over their shoulders they could not see anything at all! The going was bad, and the two campers had not gone more than a quarter-mile when they were breathing hard, and felt that they could not make one more step without collapsing on the ground to give their laboring lungs a chance to catch up. Panting like dogs they dragged themselves along through pine and birch trees, around large rocks and over briar-covered hills, only a few steps ahead of their pursuer. Then Partridge, a little in the lead as they made their way up a steep slope, heard Jim suddenly go sprawling; heard him gasp: "It's got me!" * * * * * Turning, he saw his partner rolling and threshing violently on the ground, and now and then lashing out at the empty air with his fists. Without a moment's hesitation he jumped from his position above--jumped square and hard into the space which Jim's invisible assailant should be occupying. With a great thud he crashed into some unseen body in the air, and went down, the breath knocked out of him. As he got to his knees an odor like that of cloves came to his nostrils, and something caught him around the neck and began constricting. Frantically he tried to tear himself loose, but the harder he struggled the more strangling became the grip on his neck; and at last, faint from the growing odor and the lack of air, his efforts dwindled into a spasmodic tightening and relaxing of the muscles. Then, for a moment, the hold on his neck must have loosened, for he found himself able to breathe a little. Turning, he saw Jim at his side, apparently similarly held. "If I could only--see it!" Clee managed to get out. Jim's spasmodic, bitter answer came a moment later. "Being invisible--tremendous advantage!" he gasped. In desperation the two men again began to fight against the clutches that were holding them, and this time the grip about their necks unexpectedly loosened--to bring to their noses the odor of cloves overpowering in strength. And that was all they knew before they lapsed into a black and bottomless void.... * * * * * Through the lifting haze of returning consciousness Clee felt a command to get up. As he automatically complied he saw that Jim was doing likewise. Once on his feet he felt another impulse to go to the cherry-crystal sphere, visible in the distance; but his legs were weak, and neither he nor Jim could walk very well until out of the nothingness around them came something of invisible bulk to lend them support. Slowly, carefully, straight for the waiting globe the two men were conducted; and in his state of half-consciousness Clee wondered at the impotence of his will to make his body offer resistance. They passed right by their tent and up the ramp to the inside of the strange sphere. Clee's impressions were blurred and dull, but he noticed that they were in a small room brilliant with amber light, on one wall of which there was a circular area which contained a dozen or more instruments and levers and wheels. As his eyes rested on them, one of the levers moved, seemingly of itself, and the ramp came sliding into the ship and the thick door slowly swung closed. Then they were conducted along a short, narrow passageway into which opened, on the right, a small dim room; and there the grip about their bodies loosened and they slumped to the floor. The door whereby they had entered, closed. A faint vibration became noticeable; they suddenly felt very heavy; and to the accompaniment of a low but rising hum they saw one wall of their room begin to glow with a beautiful cherry color. Although they had been too stupefied to try to speak, this spurred their tired bodies, and they dragged themselves over to it. They found the wall to be of some kind of hard crystal; it was the outer shell of the sphere; and it now gleamed redly transparent. * * * * * Far out and down the men saw a great convex surface on which lay narrow ribbons of silver, winding veinlike through dark areas that were in some places lit by little clusters of twinkling lights. As they watched, the distances on the surface shrank in on themselves; they could see the outline of a great circle. The sight stimulated the exhausted men. In a hushed and awestruck voice, Jim Wilson broke the silence. "We've been kidnaped," he said. "Being taken God knows where, out among the stars...." He was getting the sky-ride he had asked for. Clee smiled faintly, and was going to remind him of this; but he was too tired to make the effort. He only looked at the tremendous scene below: at the Earth they knew so well, with its familiar streets, comfortable fireplaces, the faces of those they loved and those others who were their friends.... The Earth soon became a ball--a globe such as he had used at school, showing clearly the outline of the continents and oceans. And little by little it dwindled, until it was only a ghostly shape far out in nothingness.... A little later, had the two Earthlings not been deep in sleep, they might have seen enter a strange-looking man clad in odd garments--a man whose great, bulging head was quite bald, and whose wrinkled, leprous-white face wore an expression of unutterable wisdom and majesty. In his hands he carried a strange piece of apparatus which he held to Jim's wrist while it emitted a coarse vibratory hum that whined slowly up in pitch until it passed the range of hearing. He did the same thing to Clee, and then he quietly left. But the two Earthlings knew nothing of this. Limp on the floor, oblivious to everything, they slept.... * * * * * Some hours later found the kidnapped men well recovered and sitting on the floor of their cell talking over their situation. As usual, Wilson was thinking out loud. "What can they be?--or who?" he asked, frowning with his thought. "They can't be from Earth, for no one there could invent such a ship as this and keep it a secret; and even if someone had, he could never have done the equally astounding thing of inventing a way to render living bodies invisible. I doubt if the thing that caught us was human, by what I was able to feel in my short struggle with it. There was something that might have been a hand; but the strength and the weight of its body was enormous!" "Well, we'll probably soon see," commented Clee with philosophic resignation and pulling out of a hip pocket a package of tobacco and his corn-cob pipe. "Or, rather, we may soon know. Our captors may keep themselves invisible; and of course it's barely possible that it's their natural state to be invisible, so that we may never hope to see them. What I'm chiefly afraid of, is that they are from some other planet, and that that's where we are being taken--though heaven knows what any creatures so infinitely far ahead of us Earthlings scientifically could want with a pair of young Earth lawyers!" He offered the package to Jim. "Here, have a smoke; you'll feel better," he said. "While there's tobacco there's hope." "At least they don't seem disposed to kill us right off," returned Jim, handing back the tobacco after lighting his own pipe. "Later--if there's to _be_ any 'later' for us--we may be able to find a way to get out of this room; though how we'd run the ship, to get back home, is another hard brick wall.... Maybe the controls are invisible, too!" he suggested with a wry grin. "Ever take any pre-law courses on how to work the invisible controls of a space ship?" * * * * * Clee's reply was spoken low, and was entirely irrelevant. "That's funny," he said. He was looking at the face of the watch on his left wrist. For the first time since they had been abducted, its abnormal brightness had left it. As Jim watched, inquiringly, Clee moved his right hand a little, and once more the dial leaped out through the dimness with unnatural brilliance. Jim saw that his friend was holding in this hand the package of tobacco. Clee repeated the demonstration. "The dial glows with unusual brightness always--except when I hold the package of tobacco in front of it at this spot," he said wonderingly, half to himself. "If I remember my science right, ultra-violet light would make the radium on the dial glow; and the lead in the tin-foil of the tobacco wrapping would screen it off. Let's see--" He crossed to the other side of the room and held his watch and the package of tobacco in various positions until he again found one line along which the watch-dial gave off only its customary light. "Yes," he said, "--exactly in the extended line made by my watch and this package of tobacco is the source of the ray which makes the watch-dial glow. It's probably the control room of this ship." "An extraordinary deduction, my dear Sherlock," commented Wilson drily; "and valuable. I wish you'd now take a moment and deduce the reason for the mysterious appearance of the lumps on the back of our necks. I know I didn't have mine before I was taken for this sky-ride." * * * * * As he spoke, his hand sought the back of his neck where there was a fat lump about the size of a quarter--a lump not painful, for all its newness and size. Hard pushing with probing fingers had revealed something that seemed to be hard and flat, buried within; but close examinations failed to show any wound or scar, and the men had no notion what the lumps might be. Clee's was just like Jim's. But Clee did not respond to his friend's invitation. A heavy mood had come over him; he was standing by the outer wall, looking out. Jim went and stood beside him, his hand on his shoulder, and together they gazed through the cherry-crystal wall of their prison ship out on the loneliness of the immeasurable miles outside. For them, space was red, instead of the deep black they knew they would see through colorless glass. Brilliant pinpoints of light, millions of them, in all sizes, made up the infinite space that was the background of their adventure. To which one--near which one were they going? Would they ever return to their Earth again? Would their friends ever know of the incredible adventure that had overtaken them?--or would they, after the few weeks of searching and inquiry that must follow their disappearance, at last conclude that some nameless mountain disaster had made them victims, and give them up for dead? No doubt. And month after succeeding month their memory would fade from the minds of those who had loved them, while they would be--where?... * * * * * A peculiar, dynamic thought came simultaneously into the minds of the two men. It was not a word: it seemed more like a feeling; but its unquestionable import was "Come." Together they rose, and looked at each other wonderingly. Again came the feeling. They started for the door. "But that's foolish!" Jim said aloud, as if objecting to his own thought. "The door's locked! We tried it!" He looked at Partridge, who returned his gaze blankly--and then, in spite of what he had said, he reached out and turned the latch. The door swung open! Expressions of surprise died on the men's lips as again came the compelling urge to go to some unknown destination. "Suggestion!" said Clee, as he passed through the doorway. "Someone's suggesting--telepathically willing--that we come to him! And I--God help me--I can't resist!" His neck corded with veins and muscles with his effort to restrain his body from obeying the mysterious command that was drawing it onward. Wilson, one arm outstretched in a repelling gesture, his legs stiff and tight, was also trying to resist. But the will that had sounded within them was stronger than theirs, and slowly, inevitably, they were drawn down the passage. Their carpeted way took them back to the entrance chamber and then up a steeply sloping corridor that led upward to the left. As they passed along they saw that the hand of a master had made on the walls, in panel effect, marvelously complicated decorations in many-colored mosaic. No man of Earth could ever have done such work, the two men realized--and this thought did not cheer them any. * * * * * At the top of their curving passage a doorway led them into a spacious room hung with soft, finely woven tapestries with a metallic lustre and furnished with deep-napped rugs and luxurious chairs and divans. Through this room the intangible threads of the alien will directed them--on into a wide-vaulted alcove about one-third its size. There, the strange clutch on them relaxed, and they looked about, at first apprehensively, then with growing boldness and curiosity. "This is the control room!" exclaimed Clee suddenly; and after a moment Jim agreed with him. It was the simplicity of the controls which had prevented them from recognizing it at first. Against the left wall was a great table with a tilted top, bearing, in its center, a raised and hooded eyepiece giving a view into a large, enclosed black box. On each side were several rows of small, shiny, metallic levers and what they took to be instrument dials--round, cup-shaped depressions with pointers free to move across dials lined with disorderly and meaningless convolutions. For the full length of the middle wall, straight ahead, was a broad table of some jet-black polished material, and on it was a large array of instruments and apparatus, all unfamiliar to them. Against the draperies of the wall to their right was one large cushioned chair, simple and beautiful in its lines. No living person or thing could be discerned in either the main room or the alcove. For several minutes the two men walked all about, examining everything they saw with curiosity and interest; and then Clee discovered a peculiar thing. His watch-dial, glowing very brightly now, would perceptibly increase in brilliance every time he neared the great chair. With sudden inspiration he took out his package of tobacco and held it in the line his watch made with the chair--and he found that his watch stopped glowing. He tried it again from another angle, and the result was the same. From that chair came the electrical disturbance that was making his watch-dial glow--yet nowhere near the chair was any bit of electrical apparatus to be seen. What he did see in the chair, though, almost caused his heart to stop beating. The cushions of the seat, compressed before, began to puff out to full volume, as if someone had just risen from them. And then, faintly but sharply outlined in the long-napped rug in front, appeared the print of a human shoe! "A man!" breathed Clee. "A human being!" * * * * * The two men stood frozen in their tracks. Clee's arm, with the package of tobacco in his hand, was still outstretched toward the great chair, but now the dial of his watch was glowing brightly again. Something within caused him in spite of his terror to move the package between the watch and the space above the footprint on the rug. The glowing stopped. The man--devil--whatever it was that made the print--was the source of the strange excitation! This took but a second--the interval before another shoe-print formed in the rug in their direction. Jim gasped something unintelligible and started to back away; but no sooner did Partridge start to follow suit, than a compulsion to stand still came over them. Caught where they were, unable to move, they saw the shoe-prints come towards them. Slowly, step by step, twelve inches apart, they came, and did not stop until they were only four or five feet away. "We'll jump him, if we get the chance!" hissed Jim, never taking his eyes off the prints. "Yes," came the answer; but Clee's further words were cut off in the making by an added compulsion to keep quiet. Were their words understood? The two men were locked, speechless, where they stood. And by some creature with a human footprint whom they could not see! The touch of firm flesh came out of the nothingness of space about them, to poke and pry all over their bodies. Anger began to take the place of their fear, as, for some time, impotent of resistance, they had to submit to the examination given them. They were prodded and felt like dogs at a show; their breathing and heart action were carefully listened to; their mouths were opened and their teeth inspected as if they were horses offered for sale. Both men were inwardly fuming. "Dogs!" shouted Clee in his thoughts. "Treating us like dogs, to see how healthy we are! Does he want us for slaves?" * * * * * At last the examination came to a stop, and they saw the shoe-prints in the rug go over to the black table and remain there, heels toward them, while various pieces of apparatus were invisibly moved across the table top. For a moment the compelling will did not seem, to Clee, to be constraining him as much is it had, and he began to wonder if he might not have a little control over his body again. Tentatively he tried to break through the oppressing blanket of foreign will; his arms and legs moved a little; he succeeded! He caught Jim's eye and showed him. He thrilled all over at his discovery, and his will to move measurably increased with his growing confidence that he could. The toes of the prints were still turned away. He was going to try and get the man or monster who was making them. He gestured to Jim, and with a great effort took a step in the invisible man's direction. A thrill of gladness helped him on--for Jim was following suit! Again and again, with greatest mental effort, they made steps toward the footprints, which, remaining side by side and motionless, gave them increasing hope of stealing up unobserved. When they were only three feet away Clee motioned to Jim, and with a tremendous effort of will they jumped at the space where their enemy should be. They hit him hard, and bore him heavily to the floor. By the feel, he was a man such as they! Clee's blood leaped with the lust for revenge, and blanking his mind against strong urges to cease his attack he rained savage blows at the place he was holding. But almost at once they had evidence that their opponent was not such a man as they. A terrific pain stabbed suddenly through them, and they doubled up on the floor, writhing in agony. It was as if every nerve in their bodies had turned into white-hot wire, and was searing through their flesh. Again and again came the terrible stabs of pain--and their source seemed to be the mysterious lumps at the back of their necks! * * * * * At last they ceased coming, and Jim and Clee stretched out on the floor all but unconscious from the terrific shocks of fiery agony. They were completely helpless; further thoughts of resistance were unthinkable. But they were not left lying long. There came a telepathic compulsion to stand up; and they found themselves obeying, in spite of the shrieking protest of their every nerve. Twitching, stumbling, they were made to do servile things--to kneel on the floor; get up again; turn round and round; bow low, then stretch backwards. And out of the air around them came shocking blows which landed on their faces, necks and chests; feet which kicked out at their shins; and they had to stand there and take it, helpless to resist. Then Clee, as the nearer of the two men, was pushed over to the work-table, where an oval head-piece of finely-woven wire was fitted over his head. Another very large one, standing next to it, and connected to it by wires which led to a small instrument panel nearby, lifted into the air until it must have settled about the head of their persecutor. A dial on the panel turned slowly. And gradually the helmet resting in the air dissolved into nothingness before their eyes. A slight nausea swept over Clee as it did so, and in the midst of it he felt a series of sharp, staccato thoughts--thoughts which did not seem to be composed of words, and yet were clear and intelligible. * * * * * "Fool of a fool!" crackled in his brain with almost a physical effort, "do you think to resist Xantra? Do you think with your sub-human minds to overcome one of the Tillas, Masters of the Universe? Close you were to death--and death indeed would have come had I not other plans for you. "Know that henceforth you and your companion are my slaves. You will jump at my slightest will; serve me as best you can with such intelligence as you may possess. For faithful, willing service you shall have food and clothing and a portion of leisure. Disobedience and tardiness will bring you the pain you have already tasted; revolt, or the attempt to escape--death; but only after torture such as you have never known. "I shall never repeat this mode of communication: it is as physically nauseating to me as to you. And you may never expect to see me, though I can always see you. By vibrational means I have given you the universal atomic rhythm of all Tillian slaves; and, although in that state your fellow-slaves will be visible to you, I, your master, will not! "You will now return to your place of confinement. After you have recovered you will be taken in hand by your fellow-slaves and shown your duties. And if your instinct for self-preservation is only one-tenth normal, you will never again be such a stupid sub-animal fool as to attempt to resist Xantra--to fly in the face of the inevitable!" The sharp, staccato voice in Clee's brain stopped; his nausea began to leave him; his helmet was removed; and had he been looking he might have seen the other one slowly materialize on the table. The ordeal was over just in time, for the last remnants of his strength was giving out--as was Jim's. The two Earth-men slumped down, and would have fallen but for the telepathic will, stronger than theirs, that forced them erect again. There came a very strong compulsion to return to their cell, and bruised, stumbling, their nerves still afire from their strange stabbing pains, they made their way back. They fell to the floor and passed into unconsciousness--beaten, subdued. Slaves.... * * * * * After a long blank interval a distinct thought crossed Clee's mind. He was in heaven, and an angel voice had spoken. There it was again! Cool hands were stroking his wrists and forehead. He opened his eyes and looked, but seeing no one closed them again. The Voice returned, and two of the words which kept repeating were somehow familiar. "So sorry ... so sorry...." The Voice was low and cool and feminine. And someone was bathing his battered head.... He rolled over and got up on one elbow. He still could see no one. The Voice said: "Oh, I'm so glad you're better! I thought you'd never come to!" Mechanically Clee asked: "Who are you?" "Vivian Gray," came the quick answer; "from Boston. And you?" Clee did not answer, but started to lie back again. Things were all wrong: he couldn't even see anyone. He'd go back to sleep, and wake up some other time. But the Voice wouldn't let him. "Oh, you must listen!" it said. "I haven't much time!" "Where are you?" he asked. "Why--right here!" came the surprised answer. "Can't you see me?" "No," answered Clee, still not himself. He added categorically: "I can see Jim. I can see the door. I can see my hands, but I can't see you." "Oh, then it must be true! Xantra _told_ me he was going to make you one of his common slaves; but I hoped--I hoped--" * * * * * This didn't mean much to Clee; but with the words came memory of all that had happened, and with sudden concern he crept over to where Jim was lying, to see how he was. He found him blinking and stirring, aroused by the voices. Quickly he explained the invisible presence to him, warning him to be on guard. "Oh, but I'm a friend--Vivian Gray--kidnapped from Earth just like you!" came quick explanation out of the air. "Xantra stole me from Cape Cod, where I was vacationing, about the time he took you. Xantra is the one whose space ship we are on. He looks much like a man; he is some kind of a man; but he's not from Earth--" "You've _seen_ him?" interrupted Clee, beginning to believe the Voice a little. "Yes," came the instant response; "not when he abducted me--he had made himself invisible for that--but always after. Haven't you yet?" And then, without waiting for his answer, she gave it herself. "But of course you couldn't see him if he's already given you the universal atomic rhythm the slaves have. You'd then be able to see only each other, and the other slaves; not Xantra and not me. "I think he makes his slaves that way for protection," she explained. "They can't very well plot or rebel against him when they can't even see him, and never know but what he's around." "Who are these slaves you keep mentioning?" Jim broke in. "How many of them are there on this ship: and how many like Xantra?" * * * * * "Xantra is the only one of his kind," came the answer. "The slaves are a race of inferior people found on his planet--wherever that is: I couldn't understand, from his explanation, just where. They are creatures much like ugly human beings with a touch of the ape, and are entirely bald, very strong and not very intelligent. There're seven or eight on board. Normally they are good-natured: but sometimes when they have a hard master, like Xantra, they take to hating him; and when they do that they can be very fierce and treacherous. That's the main reason for Xantra's stopping at Earth: to see what kind of slaves we humans will make. He is hoping that we will be more intelligent than those he has--and more docile, and safer to have around." "Well," snorted Jim belligerently, "if Mr. Xantra thinks that I'm going to be safe to have around, he's a lot dumber than _I_ am!" "Oh, it's good to hear you talk that way," the girl's voice went on. "We three have got to stick together, and find some way to escape! "I've so much to say!" she went on; "but I daren't stay long, for fear of getting caught. What you said is where my chief hope lies: Xantra doesn't realize how intelligent we are, and how dangerous; and we mustn't let him know! I think he believes we are much like his present slaves: he gets away with murder with them. You've noticed the lumps on the back of your necks? Well, they have them, too; it's something that's attached to the spinal cord and gives him telepathic control over them; also the power to hurt them dreadfully--as you've unfortunately found out. His slaves don't understand these lumps; they don't seem to know that he would lose control if they could only in some way get rid of the things in their necks!" * * * * * For the first time since the girl started talking, Clee spoke. His voice was low and grave, and there was a tinge of suspicion in it. "Just how does it happen," he asked, "that you know so much about things here?" The girl's voice broke as she gave her answer. "I'm ashamed to tell you," she said. "Xantra--he--he admires me as a healthy animal; one close, in species, to himself. He thinks by being nice to me that he might be able to make me a willing companion to share his trip!" For a moment the girl was silent; and when she spoke again there was a hard note in her voice. "I let him have hopes," she said, "--deliberately. I planned to make him trust me, and give me the run of the ship, so I could find out all I could. So far--before you came--I saw no slightest hope of ever escaping back to Earth; but I had at least to look for a quick, sure way to death, in case--in case--" "You--and us too!" exclaimed Clee impulsively. "No Earth-man--no American, at least--is ever going to submit to slavery. If the worst comes to the worst, we'll at least die together, Vivian!" Jim added soberly: "And perhaps, if we do, no one from Xantra's planet will ever again come to Earth looking for 'docile' slaves...." * * * * * For a moment everyone was silent, affected by the thought behind what they had said. Then the girl's voice suggested, with a touch of Earth formality that was almost ludicrous under the circumstances: "But you two men have not yet introduced yourselves!" Both Clee and Jim smiled, and told her their names, and in the slight pause that followed Clee said awkwardly, almost shyly: "Miss Gray, we don't know what's in store for us here, and it--it's possible that we may never know each other any better: so would you--I mean, I wonder would you mind if I reached out and touched you. In spite of all we have said. I--I can hardly realize that you are there, somewhere, before me." Out of the nothingness came an impulsive soft hand that closed over his. There was both a smile and something deeper in Vivian's voice as she said, "Here," and raised his hand until it touched her brow and the thick smooth hair of her head. Then she placed it a little lower, over her face; and gently Clee's fingers told him what his eyes could not read. "In case you never see me--why, I--I'd like you to know that I'm really, not bad looking," she said; and Clee knew she was blushing as he smiled at the eternal feminine in her. * * * * * But the smile suddenly left his face. His hand had felt her give a distinct start. Then-- "He's calling!" she gasped faintly. "Xantra's calling for me to come to him!" Her voice, as she spoke, moved, and Clee knew she was going towards the door. "No!" he cried impulsively. "Don't risk it! Stay here, and we'll begin our fight against him right now!" "I will be safe," came Vivian's reassuring voice from the door. "I can manage him a while yet." Her further words came with a rush. "But I wanted to tell you--I had a faint plan. If I could get hold of the anaesthetic--the vial of stuff that smells like cloves--" The door was closing now, and the two men knew she was moving down the corridor. They listened in vain for her to complete what she had been saying. Just before the door clicked shut, Jim jammed his foot in it, preventing it from closing. "Gee, that girl has courage!" Clee murmured. For a moment the two men looked at each other. Jim was thinking about the opened door, and the chance they had to get out. But Clee's mind was on something else. "Well, Jim," he said, "you and I have a nasty job ahead." Jim looked at Clee wonderingly as he took out his pipe and stuck it in the crack of the door, allowing him to remove his foot. Clee explained to him what Xantra had told him with the thought-sending helmets; reminded him of what they had learned from Vivian about the lumps on their necks. After he had finished he said quietly but decisively: "Now, we're going to try and remove whatever is under these lumps. Have you got anything sharp? Your knife? Something with an edge on it?" It would mean escape from the domination of Xantra's will!--from his terrible stabbing punishment!--if they could remove them! Jim breathed a little quicker in his excitement. "But once we do it--if we _can_ do it--it'll mean that we'll have to make our break to escape right away," he reminded Clee. "We'll be caught if Xantra wills us to come to him and we don't appear!" "You know what will happen to Vivian if we delay the attempt." Clee reminded him levelly: and Jim knew that Clee was right--that their break for freedom must start right then and there.... * * * * * He looked through his pockets and produced some cigarettes, matches, a pipe, a nailfile and some utterly useless odds and ends. Clee's hands came out of his pockets empty. "I've got nothing at all," he said--and picked up the nailfile and looked at it questioningly. "We'll have to use this, I guess.... Well, I'm first." He lay face down on the floor and loosened his collar. Quietly, he made several suggestions. "Light a match and heat the tip in the flame," he said. "The point's pretty dull, but cut as deep and quick and clean as you can. If I yell, pay no attention; I'll try to hold still. Unless it bleeds very much, best not make a bandage; we've nothing clean enough." That was all he said; and Jim, his heart beating like mad, and a lump in his throat, could find no words at all. He sterilized the tip of the file as directed, studied the lump a moment, then, after a rough, affectionate shake of his friend's shoulder, he knelt close to his task. One quick hard cut; a sharp gasp from Clee; a repetition; then two more times crossways--and a firm, spongelike metallic disc lay revealed. Then the worst--raising it a little, and breaking the several fine wires that led from it through the flesh within.... Clee lay panting, the sweat running down the deep wrinkles of pain on his face. Dark blood oozed from the jagged wound. But he smiled a little, and some of the pain-wrinkles in his face smoothed away, when Jim showed him the disk.... For a short time Clee rested, quieting his nerves, while Jim staunched the flow of blood. And then it was Jim's turn; and he bore the sharp agony as stoically as Clee.... It was perhaps a strange thing; but at this great moment in the lives of the two men they felt no need to talk. For the few minutes they rested after they had done, no word was spoken; but in that time a bond of friendship was formed that only death could ever break.... * * * * * They did not rest long. Every moment brought them nearer to the inevitable discovery of what they had done. Their muscles were still quivering, the wounds on their necks still slowly bleeding, when Clee rose and aroused Jim. The most dangerous, desperate part of their wild revolt lay just ahead. They were able to make but the vaguest of plans, not knowing what to anticipate outside. They only knew that they would first have to strike boldly for possession of the control alcove--which, without doubt meant they would have, somehow, to kill Xantra--to find and kill a man they could not see, yet who could see them. An enormous task. And only the first of several. For a moment, realizing this, they hesitated at the door. But the die had been cast; there was nothing for them to do but go forward--and quickly; so, giving Jim a final warning that they must stick together, Clee opened wide the door and stepped out into the corridor. What he saw there halted, him in his tracks. "The slaves!" gasped Jim, and involuntarily both Earth-men backed into the room again. The creatures they had seen at once followed them inside. There were four of them. As tall as men, they were, and the general cast of their bodies was identical. But they were different in shocking little details. Their heads were much larger, and in the shape of inverted pears, like those of hydrocephalics; their eyes, popped and dull. The thin lips beneath their stubs of noses were ever writhing and twisting in horrible grimaces. And, worst, their skins were sickly-white, and were absolutely bald of hair. The only clothes they wore were loin-cloths and very large sandals, which exposed to full view their chunky, muscular bodies. All this the two men took in at a glance. They knew they could never hope to cope, unarmed, with four such creatures as these, so they stood with their backs to the wall, alertly awaiting their first move. "Easy," warned Clee. "They're probably only coming to take us in hand, as Vivian said." * * * * * The nearest of the slaves stepped a little closer to the two men, and by the twitching of its eyelids and the increased mouthings of its lips it was apparent that the creature was highly excited. A high, variable moaning sound came from its throat. Curiously, boldly, it looked Clee all over--and then it did an amazing thing. Seeing the blood on the back of his neck, it swung him around, put its writhing lips to the still-bleeding wound and dog-like licked it clean. The gesture was altogether a friendly one. Another of the slaves of Xantra went up and did the same to Jim, and the two men looked at each other with relief. This meant that the removal of the disks had not been understood by the creatures! It was with growing hope that they allowed themselves to be conducted from their cell, through the sloping corridor into a doorway they had passed coming in, and down a curving flight of steps into a large room below. They were in the space at the very bottom of the ship, for, through the redly-glowing transparent walls that curved on each side and below, they could see the infinite deeps of star-filled space. Three other slaves were there, waiting for them. At the far side of the room their guide pointed to two small stalls, with a partition between, which they understood were to be their beds. They were across from a long row of similar ones. "Making us right at home," commented Jim. "I wonder if they'll serve cakes and tea." "Wish they would," added Clee; "I'm getting damned hungry. But we've got work to do--and we've got to do it quick!" His eyes swept the room, looking among the sparse furnishings for something they might be able to use as a weapon. He saw nothing, but the sight of the lump on the neck of a nearby slave gave him an idea. "I wonder if these slaves would fight for us if we removed the lumps from their necks," he said musingly, his eyes narrow. "I wish there were some way to talk to them...." * * * * * He looked from one to another of the animal-men making a circle about them, wondering what to do; then quickly he made his decision. "Jim, I'm going to try. It'll have to be done by signs; I've got to make them understand, and get their permission." At once he raised his hand to get the slaves' attention; then, raising both fists high in the air, he shook them violently, at the same time gritting his teeth, working his face, and growling in animal anger at something overhead. He was trying to show the slaves his anger at Xantra, above. The slaves fell away from him in surprise and alarm, not understanding what he was trying to put across. He continued his demonstration, hopping about furiously, but still without result. Then Jim cried out: "Touch the place on your neck!" Clee did so, and the result was startling. Quickly there ran around the circle throaty growls of anger, and every slave raised a hand to the lump on its neck. Evidently they had all felt the awful punishment-pain of their master. Heartened by this, Clee extended his pantomime. Stopping his demonstration of anger, he put one finger on the wound on his neck and fell to the floor, writhing in simulated pain. As he lay there groaning, the easily aroused animal-men moaned with him in sympathy. Then Jim, inspired, stepped into the act. Taking out his nailfile, he bent over the prostrate Clee and pretended to cut into his neck, making a great show of removing something and throwing it away; and as he did so Clee jumped to his feet and grinned and hopped about the room in a wildly exaggerated affectation of joy and relief. Then he stopped his acting and carefully showed the slaves the wounds in his and Jim's necks, by finger movements doing his best to make it clear that they had removed something from there. And then, taking no chances, he repeated the whole pantomime, Jim, at the proper place, acting his part as before. * * * * * When at last he stopped and looked around, he was over-joyed at his apparent success in putting across the idea. All over the room the animal-men were repeating his show in its various phases. "Now I've got to take the disk out of one of them," said Clee, "and it's a mighty dangerous thing to attempt! You see how easily their emotions are aroused. If I hurt too much--!" "I know," responded Jim, "but we've got to risk it, for if we succeed we've got a good bunch of tough fighters at our backs. We need every bit of help we can get!" Carefully they made their few preparations, and Clee, again by acting, indicated to one of the animal-men what he wanted to do. He seemed to make himself well understood, for without hesitation the creature lay face down on the floor. The others all gathered around as Clee bent over it, and Jim scanned their faces closely for any sign of suspicion or resentment. Seeing none, he told Clee to start; then held his breath in awful suspense. The disk appeared near the surface, and with a quick slice Clee made his first incision. With the cut, the prone slave bucked and snarled. Clee murmured soothing words to it in English, and, as the creature quieted down, made another cut. Again came the bucking and throaty protest; and this time, to Jim's dismay, he saw in the bestial faces of the animal-men around them a sympathetic swing of emotional protest. A little more, now; and Clee would be able to take the disk out; but would the slaves restrain themselves until then? Again Clee allowed the brute body under him to calm down. Then, as he was about to cut once more, from somewhere above in the space ship came the piercing scream of a woman. Something was happening to Vivian. * * * * * Clee half started to rise, to run to her aid, but he forced himself to be reasonable. Weaponless, visible, he could never hope to rescue an invisible girl from someone he couldn't even see. He was on the point of making valuable allies; in just a few moments more--! He decided to hurry through with the job he had undertaken. All below had heard the scream. The circle around him was shifting uncertainly, and peculiar sounds were coming out of the brutes' twisting mouths as he bent again over their fellow on the floor. Clee's hand was trembling like an aspen leaf as he prepared to make the next incision. He was completely unnerved, and with the utmost efforts of his will he was unable to control the nailfile. And he had to hurry! He sliced as straight as he could at the bleeding lump; the slave moved; and the point of the file slipped deep into the creature's flesh! At that, with a snarling growl the brute below arched from the floor and flung Clee sprawling. From all around the circle came menacing growls as the bleeding animal-man lumbered to its feet and came after him in a definite attack. Jim, not at that moment the center of their attention, pushed one of the slaves in the way of the charging brute and the two of them half fell; and before they could recover their balance Clee was on his feet making after Jim to the steps that led up out of the room. "Up!" came Jim's shout. "Fast! We've made them enemies!" Above them on the stairs was descending another slave, innocent of what had transpired below, and the two men bowled it over in their haste to get past. All the way to the bottom of the stairs it tumbled; and that delayed pursuit for the moment needed by the Earth-men to gain the upper corridor. Quickly they darted through the door; there was no way they could lock or block it, so they had to run on. Taking to the left, they found themselves in the little entrance room, and from there their only course led up the corridor leading to Xantra's quarters and the control alcove. Arrived there, the two men found the door ajar, but they paused irresolute before it, hardly daring to go in. They had no choice, however, for behind, only fifteen feet away, came the van of the animal-men. They pushed through the door, closed and bolted it, then, wheeling tigerishly, surveyed the room. * * * * * They saw no one. They were not relieved at this. Xantra might well be there; he, as well as Vivian, would be invisible to them. And he had every opportunity of striking first; even then he might be preparing to deal with them, if he was in the room. The slaves were not attempting to break in the door to get them--and this was ominous: it argued that the master was there. The two men stood motionless at the door, peering intently at the rug in search of telltale footprints. Then Clee touched Jim's shoulder and whispered faintly in his ear: "Cloves! Smell it?" Jim nodded. Slowly, on guard every second, they advanced to the alcove. They saw no sign of anyone there, though the odor of cloves was stronger. Jim grabbed a chair and held it ready, and Clee followed suit with a small, heavy tabouret. Cautiously, methodically, the two men began to reconnoitre the large room, examining foot by foot the rug in search of the faint clear prints that would reveal the presence of their enemy. The smell of cloves was beginning to dull their brains a little. Clee saw the danger in this, and whispered to Jim: "Faster! Xantra may be insidiously anaesthetizing us! We've got to find where he is--quick!" They hastened their search, feeling more and more sure that Xantra was close by. And not till then did Clee remember that he had a way to discover Xantra's location. Jim heard him curse under his breath; saw him put down the tabouret and take out his tobacco; and knew at once what he was about to do. He went close to Clee, to guard him with his chair against possible attack. * * * * * The face of Clee's wrist watch was glowing brightly; it took only a second to find with the package of tobacco a spot which cut the dial's unnatural glow. As they found it the skin on the two men's bodies prickled all over. The line from the dial to the package of tobacco, if continued, would reach a spot on the floor not six feet away. And looking carefully there they could barely make out, in the bent hairs of the rug, a broken outline that might have been made by a prone figure. As they prepared to jump they heard from that place a low sigh--and just before them appeared the distinct print of a human hand. Xantra was rising! And coincident with this a sudden banging at the door told them that the slaves at last had started to break in! As one man the two Earthlings leaped on Xantra; he would have to be taken care of first. When they had fastened on his rising body they punched and pounded it furiously. Though their enemy was undoubtedly only half conscious, the sudden attack aroused him and he resisted vigorously. But then Clee made a lucky connection on what he felt to be his jaw, and the invisible form in their arms went limp. "Get a rope--wire--anything to bind him with--quick!" yelled Clee. "I'll hold him!" The pounding at the door was increasing ominously is Jim dashed over to the work-table. Rapidly he looked for something suitable, and in a few seconds was back with a length of stout wire which they quickly wrapped around the ankles and wrists of the limp form Clee was holding. As the wire touched Xantra it gradually disappeared from their sight, but their fingers reassured them that he was tightly bound. Then they were at the door, which, shivering and bending from the battering without, showed signs of giving in. With herculean efforts they dragged a heavy divan over and wedged it tightly against it; then added other furniture in a tight supporting pile. But the door, of some light metal, was not built to stand such a siege, and was buckling further inward with each blow being dealt it. More and more plainly the two men could hear the triumphant snarls and howls of the animal-men. Frantically they ransacked the rooms looking for what they thought might be weapons, but found none. They looked at each other with dismay. It was only a question of time--minutes--before the slaves would break in. What could they do? * * * * * In that tense moment of indecision a low, weak voice reached their ears--a woman's voice, and one they remembered well. "Vivian!" cried Clee, and ran to the alcove, from whence it had seemed to come. The girl's next words brought them understanding. "Clee--Jim--it's Xantra! He's willing the slaves to break in! He's lying bound on the floor, but he's conscious!" Clee ran to where he had left the invisible man, cursing himself under his breath for being an utter ass for not having guessed this. His groping fingers quickly found the squirming Xantra's neck; and he had begun to throttle him into unconsciousness when Vivian called out: "No! Don't! That won't stop the slaves: they've already been given the order! We've got to make Xantra stop them! Here--drag him to the work-table! I've got something--" Wondering what the girl was about, Clee relaxed his grip on the invisible man's neck and complied. But he suddenly understood--and Jim, too--when he saw coming through the air the pair of thought-sending helmets. He had a way of communicating with Xantra, of course! He saw the larger helmet lower to rest over the head he was still holding; then soft hands placed the other over his own. As it settled down a great crash sounded in the other room: the door had given in. It was still held almost in place by the tightly-wedged furniture, but that would not hold the animal-men long. "Hurry!" cried Jim. "I'll stand by the door!" And he was already on his way to it. Clee saw the small panel on the table above; saw the knob on it turn. He caught Vivian's excited voice. "Tell him to order them to stop," she said; "or else--or else--" "He dies!" finished Clee, viciously thumbing into the air where the invisible Xantra's neck was. * * * * * With all the intensity he could muster, Clee concentrated on one simple, strong thought. He hardly heard the triumphant cries of the slaves as they felt the blocking furniture give before their efforts; all his energy was being expended in the will to get his thought across. "Tell those slaves to stop breaking in or you die!" he commanded. The noises at the door continued. Either Xantra had not understood, or else he was stubborn. He repeated his command and threat, and still the crashing sounds came to his ears. Desperate, he played his last card; and unconsciously his lips formed the words of his next mental command, so that it was understood by the breathlessly watching Vivian. "_Tell them to stop!_" he willed. "_No more air till you do!_" And with the words his fingers closed tightly over the other's throat. The sounds at the door continued; for a moment the invisible form between Clee's knees writhed violently--and then suddenly, almost magically, a silence fell over the whole room. Clee had forced his will on Xantra! He had made him stop the slaves! And just in time. Clee's fingers relaxed a little on the throat of the man beneath him. He turned and said: "Quick, Vivian--find that anaesthetic!" A moment later it was pressed in his hands. "Say when," he told the girl, and held it beneath the nose of the helpless man. Xantra's head at once fell back, and he heard Vivian telling him to stop. He pulled away the bottle, corked it and stood up. "Well, that's that," he said. * * * * * For a moment he was silent. Only the noises made by Jim in strengthening the barricade at the door could be heard in the room. Then he said, earnestly: "I wish I could see you, Vivian--right now; but that'll have to wait. I guess...." A low laugh came from the place where the girl was standing. A hand touched his arm, and he found himself being conducted into the alcove. Vivian laughed again; said, teasingly, "What a stupid expression on your face!" then commanded him to shut his eyes, and keep them shut. He felt something being attached to his wrists; heard a coarse hum that quickly rose in pitch until it passed the range of hearing. He was caught up in a surprising exhilaration; he heard the hum again, sliding down and down in pitch, while every atom in his body felt a sickening vibration that grew ever coarser. Then suddenly he felt normal; the things on his wrists were removed and Vivian told him he could open his eyes. He did so. He had guessed what she had done, but he was surprised, nevertheless, to see the straight, slender, attractive girl who stood before him. "You see, Xantra used this on me twice--the latter time to restore me, so I would be able to see him. I watched him carefully," the girl explained. Clee gazed at Vivian in greatest confusion. Why--she was beautiful! He grew conscious of a growing need to say something, and eventually the asinine thing that left his lips was: "Yes--you--you aren't bad looking at all." The girl turned away, blushing; and it was Jim who relieved Clee from his awkward situation. He came swinging happily through the alcove portal to suddenly stop in blank surprise. Clee had disappeared! * * * * * It did not take long to restore Jim to his normal self, and Vivian and Clee laughed at the great sigh of relief he unconsciously gave when he found himself able to see the girl who before had been only a disembodied Voice to him. Clee explained to Vivian what had happened to them down below, and she in turn told them how she and Xantra had come to be unconscious when they reached the control alcove. "I found the anaesthetic by its smell soon after I went to Xantra," she explained. "I tried to conceal it in my dress, but Xantra saw me and tried to take it away; and in the struggle that followed I guess we both got anaesthetized. When I came to I saw you and Jim trying to hold back the slaves; and I could see Xantra on the floor, conscious--which you couldn't--and knew he was ordering the slaves on. So I told you, and--here we are! "Do you want to see Xantra now?" she added. Clee would never forget the sight of the bound figure that met his eyes on the floor on the large room. The clothes were odd; the figure was much that of a normal man, though the shoulders were more sloped and the head much larger; but it was the face, its expression, that held him. Unhealthy, leprous-white was the skin, and there was not one hair, eyelash or eyebrow on the whole head. The closed eyes lay in deep caverns surrounded by a thousand fine wrinkles, which crisscrossed all over his face in every direction. The face and head were freakish--monstrous; and yet, somehow, over it rested an expression of infinite wisdom and calm. He lay bound and still and unconscious, at the mercy of men far below him intellectually, this man from another planet. Clee could not help but compare him to a stoical man staked out on an anthill to die.... "We'll have to keep him unconscious with the anaesthetic," he said at length; "he's too dangerous to monkey with. And that means we've got to find out how to run this ship--take it back ourselves." "Leave that to me!" said Jim, feeling quite chipper. "Never saw anything yet I couldn't drive. Where is it--Cape Cod, you want to be let off, Miss Gray?... O. K. This is my joy-ride, and I'll see that you're delivered at your front door." * * * * * More than two days later, again at night, the few look-outs on the lonely fishing craft off Cape Cod might have seen a pinpoint of cherry-red appear off the eastern horizon and make a wide arc up the heavens. Its course was erratic, and it made sudden angles as it drew near the zenith. It glowed more and more brightly as it approached--until it disappeared from sight overhead. For some minutes it was invisible; and then, suddenly, only a few hundred yards overhead, it emerged into view again, a great sphere of faintly glowing, cherry-red crystal. Rapidly--with dangerous speed--it descended, straight for the shore-line of Massachusetts Bay. And as it neared, its erratic side-to-side dashes increased, rather than diminished. Down at a wide angle it came for the beach; then, when it was a hundred feet away, it sheared suddenly out to sea. There, only a few feet above the water, it darted to the side once more--and fell, and skipped along the water at dizzying speed. But it did not go far. With its first contact with the water a great crack split the night air; and a little further, the ship split into hundreds of small pieces, all of which slid along the surface of the water until, their momentum lost, they came to a stop and slowly sank from view. A dozen figures were left threshing on the surface; but one by one they disappeared, till there were only four left. Then one of the four sank from sight.... Slowly but steadily the remaining three drew near to the welcoming shore, and at last stood dripping and tired on the sandy beach. For some time they stood there in silence, reviewing all the incredible adventure they had been through, as they gazed off across the water to the place where the slave ship had gone down. But one of them--Jim--had something to say, and at last it came out. "Well, I _told_ you I'd drive you safely back!" Clee, his arm around the waist of the exhausted Vivian, smiled and answered: "But I don't see Vivian's front door." "We're close enough!" Jim snorted. "After all, I _did_ hit the Earth!" [Illustration: Advertisement] The Revolt of the Machines _By Nat Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat_ [Illustration: "Look!" he gasped. Out on the floor was a shambles.] [Sidenote: Something in the many-faceted mind of the master machine spurs it to diabolical revolt against the authority of its human masters.] PROLOGUE _For five thousand years, since that nigh legendary figure Einstein wrote and thought in the far-off mists of time, the scientists endeavored to reduce life and the universe to terms of a mathematical formula. And they thought they had succeeded. Throughout the world, machines did the work of man, and the aristos, owners of the machines, played in soft idleness in their crystal and gold pleasure cities. Even the prolat hordes, relieved of all but an hour or two per day of toil, were content in their warrens--content with the crumbs of their masters._ _Then the ice began to move, down from the north and up from the south. Slowly, inexorably, the jaws of the great vise closed, till all that was left of the wide empire of man was a narrow belt about the equator. Everywhere else was a vast tumbled waste of cold and glaring whiteness, a frozen desert. In the narrow habitable belt were compacted the teeming millions of earth's peoples._ _In spite of the best efforts of the scientists among them, the crowding together of the myriads of earth's inhabitants brought in its train the inevitable plagues of famine and disease. Even with the most intensive methods of cultivation, even with the synthetic food factories running day and night, there could not be produced enough to sustain life in the hordes of prolats. And with the lowering of resistance and the lack of sufficient sanitary arrangements, disease began to spread with ever increasing rapidity and virulence._ * * * * * _The aristos trembled, for they were few, and the prolats many. Already were arising loud and disheveled orators, inciting the millions to arise against their masters. The aristos were few, but they were not helpless. In the blackness of a moonless, clouded night there was a whispering of many wings, and from dark shapes that loomed against the dark sky, great beams swept over the tented fields where the prolats lay huddled and sleeping. And when the red sun circled the ice-chained earth he found in his path heaps of dust where on his last journey he had warmed the swarming millions._ _The slaves thus ruthlessly destroyed could well be spared, for the machines did the work of the world, even to the personal care of the aristos' pampered bodies. Only for direction, and starting and stopping, was the brain and the hand of man required. Now that the inhabited portion of the terrestrial globe was so straitly circumscribed, radio power waves, television and radio-phone, rendered feasible the control of all the machines from one central station, built at the edge of the Northern Glacier. Here were brought the scant few of the prolats that had been spared, a pitiful four hundred men and women, and they were set to endless, thankless tasks._ _I was one of those few; and Keston, my friend, who was set at the head of the force. I was second in command. For a decade we labored, whipped our fellows to their tasks, that the aristos might loll careless in the perfume and silks of their pleasure palaces, or riot in wild revel, to sink at last in sodden stupor. Sprawled thus they would lie, until the dressing machines we guided would lift them gently from their damasked couches, bathe them with warm and fragrant waters, clothe their soft carcasses in diaphanous, iridescent webs, and start them on a new day of debauchery._ _But the slow vengeance of an inscrutable Omnipotence they mockingly denied overtook them at last, and I saw the rendering and payment of the long past due account._ * * * * * As I entered the vast domed hall wherein all my waking hours were spent, the shrill whistle of an alarm signal told me that something had been wrong. Instinctively I looked toward the post of Abud. Three times in the past week had Keston or I been called upon for swift action to right some error of that dull witted prolat. On the oval visor-screen above the banked buttons of his station I saw the impending catastrophe. Two great freight planes, one bearing the glowing red star that told of its cargo of highly explosive terminite, were approaching head-on with lightning rapidity. The fool had them on the same level. Abud was gaping now at the screen in paralyzed fright, with no idea of how to avoid the cataclysm. Just below I glimpsed the soaring towers of Antarcha. In a moment that gold and crystal pleasure city would be blasted to extinction, with all its sleeping thousands. Swift would be the vengeance of the aristos. Already I could see Abud and Keston and a hundred others melting in the fierce rays of the Death Bath! But, even as my face blanched with the swift and terrible vision, the little controller's car ground to a smoking stop at Abud's back. With one motion Keston's lithe form leaped from his seat and thrust aside the gaping prolat. His long white fingers darted deftly over the gleaming buttons. The red starred plane banked in a sudden swerve; the other dipped beneath. Distinct from the speaker beneath the screen came the whoosh of the riven air as the fliers flashed past, safe by a margin of scant feet. Another rippling play of the prolat chief's fingers and the planes were back on their proper courses. The whistle ceased its piercing alarm, left a throbbing stillness. * * * * * Chief Keston turned to the brute faced culprit. Cold contempt tautened the thin, ascetic features of his face. Somehow I was at his side: I must have been running across the wide floor of the Control Station while the crisis had flared and passed. In measured tones, each word a cutting whip-lash, came his well merited rebuke: "Don't try me too far, Abud. Long before this I should have relieved you of your post, and ordered you to the Death Bath. I am derelict in my duty that I do not do so. By my weak leniency I imperil the lives of your comrades, and my own. It is your good fortune that a Council delegate has not been present at one of your exhibitions. But I dare not risk more. Let the warning whistle come from your station just once again and I shall report you as an incompetent. You know the law." I looked to see the man cringe in abasement and contrition. But the heavy jaw thrust forth in truculent defiance; hate blazed forth from the deep-set eyes; the florid features were empurpled with rage. He made as if to reply, but turned away from the withering scorn in Keston's face. "Ha, Meron, here at last." A warm smile greeted me. "I've been waiting for you impatiently." "I'm an hour before my time," I replied, then continued, exasperatedly: "Chief, I hope this latest imbecility will convince you that you ought to turn him in. I know it hurts you to condemn a prolat to the Death Bath, but if you let him go on, his mistakes will bring us all to that end." I glanced toward where a black portal broke the circle of switchboards, and shuddered. Behind that grim gate leaped and flared eternally the flame of the consuming Ray, the exhaust flue of the solar energy by which the machines were fed. Once I had seen a condemned man step through that aperture at the order of an aristo whom he had offended. For a moment his tortured body had glowed with a terrible golden light. Then--there was nothing. * * * * * My friend pressed my arm, calmingly. Again he smiled. "Come, come, Meron, don't get all worked up. It isn't his fault. Why, look at him. Can't you see that he is a throwback, lost in this world of science and machines? Besides"--his voice dropped low--"it doesn't matter any more. Man-failure will no longer trouble the even tenor of the machines. I've finished." A tremor of excitement seized me. "You've completed it at last? And it works?" "It works. I tested it when the shifts changed at midnight; kept the oncoming force outside for five minutes. It works like a charm." "Great! When will you tell the Council?" "I've already sent the message off. You know how hard it is to get them away from their wines and their women--but they'll be here soon. But before they come, I've something to tell you. Let's go back behind the screens." As we walked toward the huge tarpaulin-screened mass that bulked in the center of the great chamber, I glanced around the hall, at the thousand-foot circle of seated prolats. Two hundred men and women were there; two hundred more were sleeping in the dormitories. These were all that were left of the world's workers. Before each operative rose the serried hundreds of pearl buttons, dim lit, clicking in and out under the busy fingers. Above each, an oval visor-screen with its flitting images brought across space the area the switches controlled. Every one of the ten score was watching his screen with taut attention, and listening to the voices of the machines there depicted--the metallic voices from the radio speakers broadcasting their needs. The work was going on as it had gone on for ten years, with the omnipresent threat of the Death Bath whipping flagged, tired brains to dreary energy. The work kept going on till they dropped worn out at last in their tired seats. Only in Keston's brain, and in mine, flamed the new hope of release. Tomorrow the work would be done, forever. Tomorrow, we would be released, to take our places in the pleasure palaces. To loll at ease, breathing the sweet perfume of idleness, waited on by machines _directed by a machine_. * * * * * For, as we stood behind the heavy canvas folds that Keston had drawn aside, there towered, fifty feet above me, halfway to the arching roof, a machine that was the ultimate flowering of man's genius. Almost man-form it was--two tall metal cylinders supporting a larger, that soared aloft till far above it was topped by a many-faceted ball of transparent quartz. Again I had a fleeting, but vivid, impression of something baleful, threatening, about it. Small wonder, though. For the largest cylinder, the trunk of the man-machine Keston had created, was covered thick with dangling arms. And the light of the xenon tube that flooded the screened space was reflected from the great glass head till it seemed that the thing was alive; that it was watching me till some unguarded moment would give it its chance. A long moment we stood, going again over each detail of the thing, grown so familiar through long handling as it was slowly assembled. Then my friend's voice, low pitched as was its wont, dissipated the visions I was seeing. "Two hours ago, Meron, with none here but me to see, those arms were extended, each to its appointed station. And, as the sensitive cells in the head received the signals from the visor-screens and the radio-speakers the arms shot about the key-boards and pressed the proper buttons just as our men are doing now. The work of the world went on, without a falter, with only the master machine to direct it. Yet a year ago, when I first spoke to you of the idea, you told me it was impossible!" "You have won," I responded; "you have taken the last step in the turning over of the functions of man to machines--the last step but one. Routine control, it is true, can now be exercised by this--those fellows out there are no longer necessary--but there will still be the unexpected, unforeseen emergencies that will require human intelligence to meet and cope with them. You and I, I'm afraid, are still doomed to remain here and serve the machines." * * * * * Keston shook his head, while a little smile played over his sharp-featured face, and a glow of pride and triumph suffused his fine dark eyes. "Grumbling again, old carper. What would you say if I told you that I have solved even _that_ problem? I have given my master machine intelligence!" My wide-eyed, questioning stare must have conveyed my thought to him, for he laughed shortly, and said, "No, I've not gone insane." "It was an accident," he went on with amazing calm. "My first idea was merely to build something that would reduce the necessary supervisory force to one or two humans. But, when I had almost completed my second experimental model, I found that I was out of the copper filaments necessary to wind a certain coil. I didn't want to wait till I could obtain more from the stores, and remembered that on the inside of the door to the Death Bath there was some fine screening that could be dispensed with. I used the wire from that. Whether the secret of life as well as of death lies in those waste rays from the sun, or whether some unknown element of the humans consumed in the flame was deposited on the screening in a sort of invisible coating, I do not know. But this I do know: when that second model was finished, and the vitalizing current was turned on, things happened--queer things that could be explained only on the ground that the machine had intelligence." He fell silent a moment, then his thin pale lips twisted in a wry smile. "You know, Meron, I was a little scared. The thing I had created seemed possessed of a virulent antagonism toward me. Look." He bared an arm and held it out. A livid weal ran clear around the fore-arm. "One of the tentacles I had given it whipped around my arm like a flash. If I had not cut off the current at once it might have squeezed through flesh and bone. The pressure was terrific." * * * * * I was about to speak, when from the screen nearest the entrance door a beam of green light darted out, vanished, came again. Once, twice, three times. "Look, Chief, the signal. They're coming. The Council will soon be here." "They're over-prompt. My message must have aroused their curiosity. But listen: "I incorporated my new thought coil, as I called it, in the large master machine. But I don't know just what will happen when the current flows through that. So I shunted it. The machine will work, routinely, without it. There is a button that will bring it into action. When I shall have taken the proper precautions I will switch it on, and then we shall see what happens." We saw, sooner than Keston expected. Again the green beam flashed out. The great portals slowly opened. Through them glided the three travel cars of the Supreme Council of the aristos. It had been almost a year since I saw them, the Over Lords of the World, and I had forgotten their appearance. Sprawled on the glowing silks of their cushioned couches, eyes closed in languid boredom, they were like huge white slugs. Swollen to tremendous size by the indolent luxuriousness of their lives, the flesh that was not concealed by the bright hued web of their robes was pasty white, and bagged and folded where the shrunken muscles beneath refused support. Great pouches dropped beneath swollen eyelids. Full-lipped, sensual mouths and pendulous cheeks merged into the great fat rolls of their chins. I shuddered. These, _these_ were the masters for whom we slaved! * * * * * As we bent low the gliding cars came to rest, and a warm redolence of sweet perfume came to me from the fans softly whirling in the canopies over the aristos' heads. Strains of music rose and fell, and ceased as a flat, tired voice breathed: "Rise, prolats." I straightened up. The eyes of the Council were now opened, little pig's eyes almost lost in the flesh about them. They glinted with a cold, inhuman cruelty. I shuddered, and thought of the night of terror ten years before. And suddenly I was afraid, deathly afraid. Ladnom Atuna, head of the Council, spoke again. "We have come at your petition. What is this matter so grave that it has led you to disturb us at our pleasures?" Keston bowed low. "Your Excellency, I would not have presumed to intrude upon you for a small matter. I have so greatly ventured because I have at length solved the final step in the mechanization of the world. I have invented a master machine to operate the switchboards in this hall and replace the workers thereat." The flabby faces of the aristos betrayed not the slightest interest, not the least surprise. Only Atuna spoke: "Interesting, if true. Can you prove your statement?" Keston strode to the canvas screen and pulled a cord. The great canvas curtains rolled back. "Here is the machine, my Lords!" His face was lit with the glow of pride of achievement. His voice had lost its reverence. Rapidly he continued: "The head of this contrivance is a bank of photo and sono-electric cells, each facet focussed on one of the screens. Through a nerve-system of copper filaments any combination of lights and sounds will actuate the proper arm which will shoot out to the required bank of buttons and press the ones necessary to meet any particular demand. That is all the prolats are doing out there, and they make mistakes, while my master machine cannot. The--" But Ladnom Atuna raised a languid hand. "Spare us these technical explanations. They bore us. All we desire to know is that the machine will do as you say." The chief flushed, and gulped. His triumph was not meeting with the acclaim he had expected. But he bowed. "Very well. With your gracious permission I shall demonstrate its operation." Atuna nodded in acquiescence. * * * * * Keston's voice rang out in crisp command. "Attention, prolats. Cease working." The long circling row suddenly jerked around; their flying fingers halted their eternal dartings. "Quickly, down to the space in front of the door to the Death Bath." A rush of hurried feet. These men and women were accustomed to instant, unquestioning obedience. "Absolute silence. Keep clear of the floor on peril of your lives." The chief wheeled to the master machine and pressed a button. Instantly, the hundreds of dangling arms telescoped out, each to a button bank where a moment before a prolat had labored. And, with a weird simulation of life, the ten forked ends of each arm commenced a rattling pressing of the buttons. Rapidly, purposefully, the metallic fingers moved over the key-boards, and on the screens we could see that the machines all over the world were continuing on their even course. Not the slightest change in their working betrayed the fact that they were now being directed by a machine instead of human beings. A great surge of admiration swept me at the marvelous accomplishment of my friend. Not so the aristos. Expressionless, they watched as the maze of stretching tentacles vibrated through the crowded air. Yet not quite expressionless. I thought I could sense in the covert glances they cast at one another a crafty weighing of the implications of this machine; a question asked and answered; a decision made. Then their spokesman turned languidly to the waiting, triumphant figure of Keston. "Evidently your claims are proven. This means that the force of prolat operatives are no longer necessary." "Yes, Your Excellency. They may now be released to a well earned reward." The aristo ignored the interruption. "We take it that only two will now be required to operate this Control Station, to supply the last modicum of human intelligence required to meet unforeseen emergencies." * * * * * I saw that Keston was about to interrupt once more, to tell the Council of the thought coil, the most unbelievable part of the miracle he had wrought. But something seemed to warn me that he should not speak. Standing behind him I nudged him, while I myself replied: "Yes, Your Excellency." The chief flung me a startled look, but did not correct me. From the packed crowd of prolats at the other end of the hall I could hear a murmuring. While I could not make out the words, the very tones told me that in the hearts of those weary slaves new hope was rising, the same hope that glowed in Keston's face. But I was oppressed by an unreasoning fear. Atuna was still talking, in his cold, unemotional monotone. "This being so, hear now our decision. Keston and Meron, you will remain here to meet all emergencies. You others, your function is done. You have done your work well, you are now no longer needed to control the machines. Therefore,"--he paused, and my heart almost stopped--"therefore, being no longer of value, you will be disposed of." A click sounded loud through the stunned silence. Beyond the white crowd the huge black portal slid slowly open. A shimmering radiance of glowing vapors blazed from the space beyond. "Prolats, file singly into the Death Bath!" Atuna raised his voice only slightly with the command. I glanced at Keston. He was livid with fury. Incredible as it may seem, so ingrained was the habit of obedience to the aristos in the prolats that not even a murmur of protest came from the condemned beings. The nearest man to the flaming death stepped out into the void. His doomed body flared, then vanished. The next moved to his turn. * * * * * But suddenly a great shout rang out. "Stop!" It was Keston's voice, but so changed, so packed with fury and outrage, that I scarcely recognized it. His spare, tall form was drawn tensely straight as he shook a clenched fist at the Council. He was quivering with anger, and his eyes blazed. "Aristos, you do wrong! These men have served you faithfully and well. I demand for them the reward they have earned--rest and leisure, and the pleasures that for ten years they have seen you enjoy while they worked here for you. They have worked for you, I say, and now that I have released them you would destroy them. Aristos, I demand justice!" For the first time I saw expression on the flaccid faces of the Council--surprise and astonishment that a prolat should dare dispute an aristo command. Then a sneer twisted Atuna's countenance. "What is this? Who are you to demand anything from us? We spared these prolats because we needed them: we need them no longer, hence they must die. What madness has seized you? Reward! Justice! For prolats! As well say we should reward the stone walls of our houses; dispense justice to the machines. Proceed, prolats!" Keston made as if to spring for the aristo's throat. I put out a hand to stop him. An invisible shield of death rays rimmed the platforms the Council used. It was suicide! But suddenly he turned and sprang to the master machine. He grasped a switch lever and threw it down. A long tentacle left its keys and swished menacingly through the air. "Meron, prolats, under the key-boards!" came Keston's shout. I dived to obey. Steel fingers clutched my jerkin and tore it loose as I landed with a thud against the wall. Keston thumped alongside of me. He was breathing heavily and his face was deathly pale. "Look!" he gasped. * * * * * Out on the floor was a shambles. I saw one snakelike arm whip around the stout form of Atuna, then tighten. A shriek of agony rang through the hall. Another tentacle curled about the couch of a second aristo, pinning the occupant to it. Then couch and all were swung a hundred feet in the air to be crashed down with terrific force on the stone floor. Two arms seized the third at the same time.... "Too sluggish to get out of the way in time, damn them!" I heard Keston mutter. True, but not all the prolats had moved fast enough at the warning shout. Cowering under the saving key-boards, shrinking from the metallic arms not quite long enough to reach them, I could count only a score. The others--but what use to describe the slaughter out there! I see it in nightmares too often. A thunder from the speakers grew till it drowned out the agonized shrieks in the great hall. On the screens horror flared. All over the world, it appeared, the machines had gone mad. I saw Antarcha crash as a dozen air freighters plunged through the crystal towers. I saw a huge dredge strip the roof from a great playhouse, and smash the startled crowd within with stones it plucked from an embankment. I saw untenanted land cars shooting wild through packed streets. Great ponderous tractors left the fields and moved in ordered array on the panic-stricken cities. Methodically they pursued the fleeing aristos, and crushed them beneath their tread like scurrying ants. * * * * * I realized that the scraping of the tentacles reaching for us had ceased, that the arms had all returned to the button banks. Then it dawned on me that Keston's master machine was directing all the destruction I was watching, that the intelligence he had given it was being used to divert the machines from their regular tasks to--conquer the world. "You sure started something, Keston," I said. "Yes," he gasped, white-faced, "something that I should have expected when that model machine went for me. Do you understand? I've given the machines intelligence, created a new race, and they are trying to wipe out the humans; conquer the world for themselves. The possibility flashed on me when I was half-mad with rage and disappointment at the callous cruelty of the aristo Council. I threw that switch with the thought that it would be far better for all of us to be wiped out. But now, I don't know. After all, they are men, like ourselves, and it hurts to see our own race annihilated. If only I can get to that switch." He started to push out from under the scant shelter, but an alert tentacle hissed through the air in a swift stab at him, and he dodged back, hopelessly. "Don't be a damn fool," I snapped at him. "Forget that mushy sentimentality. Even if you save the aristos, we're due for extinction just the same. Better that the whole human race be wiped out together." Then a thought struck me. "Maybe we have a chance to get out of this ourselves." "Impossible. Where could we hide from the machines?" He waved a hand at the screens. "Look." "The Glacier, man, the Glacier!" He started. "There are no machines out there. If we can get to the ice we are safe." "But the aircraft will find us." "They won't know we're there. There are no microphones or radio-eyes in the wastes." * * * * * A rough voice came from the cowering files behind us. "Hey, Keston, let's get a move on. You're the smart guy around here: get us out of this mess you've started." It was Abud. When so many better prolats had perished, he was alive and whole. We got out, crawling under the key-boards till we could make a dash for the door. We emerged into a world ablaze with the light of many fires, and reverberating with the far off crashing of destruction. To the right we could see the tumbled remains of what a short hour before had been our barracks. Two digging machines were still ponderously moving about among the ruins, pounding down their heavy buckets methodically, reducing the concrete structure to a horrible dead level. Ten score prolats had been sleeping there when I left. As we rushed into the open, the machines turned and made for us; but they had not been built for speed, and we easily outdistanced them. The rest of that day will always remain a dim haze to me. I can remember running, running, Abud's broad form always in the lead. I can remember long minutes of trembling under tangled underbrush, while from above sounded the burring of an air machine searching ceaselessly for us. I can remember seeing at last the tall white ramparts of the Glacier. Then a blackness swallowed me up, hands tugged at me, and I knew no more.... * * * * * The great white waste of hummocky ice dazzled under the blinding sun. My eyes were hurting terribly. There was a great void in my stomach. For two days I had not eaten. Keston, tottering weakly at my side, was in an even worse state. His trembling hand could scarcely hold the primitive bone-tipped spear. God knows I had difficulty enough with mine. Yet, tired, hungry, shivering as we were, we forced our dragging feet along, searching the interminable expanse for sign of polar bear or the wild white dogs that hunted in packs. We had to find flesh--any kind--to feed our shriveled stomachs--or go under. Keston uttered a weak shout. I looked. From behind a frozen hummock a great white bear padded. He saw us, sniffed the air a moment, then turned contemptuously away. He must have sensed our weakness. Almost crying in his eagerness, Keston raised his spear and cast it with what strength he had at the animal that meant food and warmth for our bodies. The weapon described a slow arc, and caught the shaggy bear flush in the shoulder. But there had been no force behind the throw. The sharpened bone tip stuck in the flesh, quivered a bit, and dropped harmlessly to the ice. Aroused, the creature whirled about. We caught a glimpse of small, vindictive eyes. Then, with a roar, it made for us. "Look out!" I cried. Keston started to run, but I knew he could not match the wounded animal in speed. I threw my futile spear, but the bear shook it off as though it were a pin prick, and would not be diverted from his prey. I ran after, shouting for help. Then Keston stumbled and went down in a sprawl on the rough gray ice. The bear was almost on him and there was nothing I could do. * * * * * Then the figure of a man darted from behind a sheltering mound. It was Abud, swathed in warm white furs, brawny of body, strong, well fed, heavy jowled. He swung easily a long spear, far heavier than ours, and pointed with keen barbs. He stopped short at the sight of us, and his brutal features contorted in merriment. The desperate plight of my friend seemed to afford him infinite amusement. Nor did he make any move to help. I shouted to him. "Quick, kill it before it's too late!" "So it is Abud you turn to now," he sneered heavily. "Abud, whom you thought deserving of the Death Bath not so long ago. No, my fine friends, let me see you help yourselves, you two who thought you were king pins down in the valley. Men? Bah! Weaklings, that's all you are!" I ran blindly over the uneven ice, unarmed, some crazy notion in my mind of tackling the brute with bare fists, to drag him off my friend. Abud shouted with laughter, leaning on his spear. For some strange animal reason, the mocking laughter enraged the bear. He had almost reached the motionless figure of Keston when he swerved suddenly, and made for Abud. The ghastly merriment froze on the heavy jowled man. Like lightning he lifted his heavy lance, and drove it with a powerful arm squarely into the breast of the advancing brute. It sank a full foot into the blubbery flesh, and, while the stricken bear clawed vainly at the wound and sought to push himself along toward the man, Abud held the spear firmly as in a vise, so that the animal literally impaled itself. With a gush of blood, it sank motionless to the ground. * * * * * Abud plucked the spear away with a dexterous twist. Keston was feebly groping to his feet. I was torn between joy at his deliverance and rage at the inhuman callousness of Abud. The latter grinned at us hatefully. "You see what poor weakling creatures you are," he jeered. "Good for nothing but to push a lot of senseless buttons. Down there you were the bosses, the ones to look upon me as dirt. Here, on the ice, where it takes guts to get along, _I_ am the boss. I let you live on my scraps and leavings, simply because it tickled me to see you cringe and beg. But I am growing weary of that sport. Henceforth you keep away from my camp. Don't let me catch you prowling around, d'you hear? Let's see how long you'll last on the ice!" "This animal is mine." He prodded the carcass. "I killed it. I'll make the prolats skin and, cut it up for me. Ho-ho, how they cringe and obey me--Abud, the dull one! Ho-ho!" On this he strode away, still laughing thunderously. I looked to Keston in blank dismay. What was to be our fate now, but death by cold and slow starvation! Three-months had passed since we had escaped to the ice from the dreadful machines--a score of us. For a while it seemed that we had fled in vain. We were not fit to cope with the raw essentials of life: it was uncounted centuries since man fought nature bare handed. So we huddled together for warmth, and starved. Even Keston's keen brain was helpless in this waste of ice, without tools, without machines. * * * * * Then it was that Abud arose to take command. He, dull brute that he was amid the complexities of our civilization, fairly reveled in this primitive combat with hunger and cold. He was an anachronism in our midst, a throwback to our early forebears. It did not take him long to fashion cunning nooses and traps to catch the few beasts that roamed the ice. Once he pounced upon a wolf-like creature, and strangled it with bare hands. He fashioned with apt fingers spears and barbs of bone, curved knives from shin bones, and skinned the heavy fur pelts and made them into garments. No wonder the prolats in their helplessness looked to him as their leader. Keston and I were thrust aside. But Abud did not forget. His slow witted mind harbored deadly rancor for former days, when we were in command. He remembered our contempt for his slow dull processes; for the many errors he was guilty of. By a queer quirk, the very fact that Keston had saved him from the Death Bath on several occasions but fed the flames of his hatred. Perhaps that was an ancient human trait, too. So he set himself to twit and humiliate us. His jibes were heavy handed and gross. He refused to let us eat at the communal mess, but forced us to wait until all were through, when he tossed us a few scraps as though we were dogs. Many times I started up in hot rage, ready to match my softened muscles against his brawn. But always Keston caught me in time and whispered patience. Some plan was taking shape in his mind, I could see, so I stopped short, and was content to bide my time. Now we were through, discarded, as a last brutal gesture. What was there to be done now? * * * * * In utter silence I looked at Keston. To my great surprise he did not seem downcast. Quite the contrary. His eyes were sparkling, once more alive with the red fire. The weariness was gone from him; there was energy, decision stamped on his finely cut features. "Now is our time to act," he said. "I've been hesitating too long." "What are you talking about?" "Abud forced my hand," Keston explained. "You didn't think we were going to live here in this fashion the rest of our lives? I'd rather die now than have such a future staring me in the face. No, we're going down into the valley to fight the machines." I stared at him aghast. "Man, you're crazy. They'd crush us in a minute!" "Maybe," he said unconcernedly. "But we have no time to lose. Abud will be back with the prolats, and we'll have to clear out before then. Quick--cut off a few chunks of meat. We'll need them." "But Abud will kill us when he finds out what's been done." "And we'll starve if we don't." Which was an unanswerable argument. So with our bone knives we hacked off gobs of the still warm flesh, covered with great layers of fat. Looking up from my task, I saw black figures coming toward us from the direction of the camp. They quickened into a run even as I noticed them--Abud and the prolats. "Quick, Keston," I cried, "they're coming." Keston glanced around and started to run. I followed as fast as I could. "They'll catch us," I panted. "Where can we hide?" "Down in the valley." "But the machines will get us then." "Save your breath and follow me. I know a place." * * * * * We were racing along as fast as our weakened legs could carry us, toward the edge of the Glacier. I looked back to see Abud, his brute face distorted with rage, gaining rapidly on us. The other prolats were being outdistanced. Abud shouted threateningly for us to stop, but that only made us re-double our efforts. I knew he would kill us if he caught up with us. He had his spear and we were without ours. The steep terminus of the great Northern Glacier hove into view. Far below was the broad fertile habitable belt, stretching as far as the eye could see. A lump rose in my throat as I ran. It was our earth, our heritage down there--and here we were, fleeing for our lives, dispossessed by bits of metal and quartz, machines that we had fashioned. Hovering in the air, on a level with us, were scout planes, vigilant guardians of the frontier. Once a prolat had become crazed by the eternal ice and cold, and had ventured down the side of the Glacier, to reach the warm lands his thin blood hungered for. As soon as he had painfully clambered to the bottom, within the area of the televisors, a plane had swooped and crushed him, while we, lining the edge, had witnessed the horror helplessly. Yet Keston ran on confidently. Abud was just a little way behind, bellowing exultantly, when we came to the jumping-off place. He was sure he had us now. Keston slid from view. It was sheer suicide to go down there, I knew; yet, to remain where I was, meant certain death. Abud's spear was already poised to thrust. There was only one thing to do, and I did it. I threw myself over the rim, just where Keston had disappeared. * * * * * I landed with a thud on a narrow ledge of ice. The surface was glassy smooth, and I started slipping straight toward the outer edge, a sheer drop of a thousand feet to the valley below. I strove to recover my balance, but only accelerated my progress. Another moment and I would have plunged into the abyss, but a hand reached out and grabbed me just in time. It was Keston. "Hold tight and follow me," he whispered urgently, "we've no time to lose. The master machine is seeing us now in the visor screen, and will act." I had an impulse to turn back, but Abud's face was leering down at us. "I'll get you for this!" he screamed, and let himself down heavily over the ledge. Keston edged his way along the treacherous trail, I after him. It was ticklish work. A misstep, and there would be nothing to break our fall. I heard a siren sound, then another; and another. I wasted a precious moment to look up. A scout plane was diving for us, on a terrific slant. The air was black with aircraft converging on us. The master machine had seen us! I sensed utter malevolence in the speed of these senseless metals, thrown at us by the thing my friend had created. But there was no time for thought. In desperate haste, we inched our way along. Abud had seen the peril, too, and lost all his truculence in the face of the greater danger. He clawed after us, intent only on reaching whatever safety we were heading for. I could hear the zoom of the great wings when the path took a sudden turn and we catapulted headlong into a black cavern thrusting into the ice. We were not an instant too soon. For a giant shape swooped by our covert with a terrifying swoosh, inches away from Abud's leg as he dived after us, and it was followed by a grinding crash. The machine had been directed too close to the ice and had smashed into bits. * * * * * We crouched there a moment, panting, struggling to regain our wind. Keston had regained the air of quiet power he had once possessed. Quietly he spoke to our enemy. "Listen to me, Abud. Up there on the ice, you played the bully, relying on your brute strength. Here, however, we're up against the machines, and your intelligence is of too low an order to compete with them. You need my brains now. If you expect to escape from them, and live, you'll have to do exactly as I say. I'm boss, do you understand?" I expected a roar of rage at Keston's calm assertion, and quietly got in back of Abud ready to jump him if he made a threatening move. But the big brute was a creature of abject terror, staring out with fear-haunted eyes. Quite humbly he replied: "You are right. You are the only one who can beat the machines. I'll follow you in everything." "Very well, then. This cave leads through a series of tunnels down through the ice to the bottom of the valley. I explored it nights when you were all sleeping." I looked at him in amazement. I had not known anything about his midnight wanderings. He saw my glance. "I'm sorry, Meron, but I thought it wiser to say nothing of my plans, even to you, until they had matured. Let us go." Outside hundreds of craft were hurtling across the opening. Escape that way was clearly impossible. "No doubt the master machine is hurrying over high explosives to blast us out," Keston said indifferently; "but we won't be here." We started down a tortuous decline, crawling on hands and knees. We had not progressed very far when we heard a thud and a roar behind us, followed by a series of crashes. "Just as I thought. The master machine is firing terminite into the cavern. What a high degree of intelligence that thing has! Too bad we'll have to smash it." He sighed. I verily believe he hated to destroy this brain child of his. Yet just how he was going to do it, I did not know. * * * * * There passed hours of weary, tortured stumblings, and slitherings, and sudden falls--down, always down, interminably. A pale glimmering showed us the way, a dim shining through the icy walls. At last, faint with toil, bleeding and torn from glass-sharp splinters, we reached a level chamber, vaulted, surprisingly, with solid rock. It was good to see something of the earth again, something that was not that deadly, all-embracing ice. At the far end lay a blinding patch. I blinked. "Sunlight!" I shouted joyously. "Yes," Keston answered quietly. "That opening leads directly into the valley on our land." Abud roused himself from the unreasoning dread he had been in. It was the first time he had spoken. "Let us get out of here. I feel as though I'm in a tomb." "Are you mad?" Keston said sharply. "The visors would pick you up at once. You wouldn't last very long." Abud stopped suddenly. There was a plaintive, helpless note to him. "But we can't stay here forever. We'd starve, or die of cold. Isn't there some way to get back to the top of the Glacier?" "No--only the way we came. And that's been blocked with terminite." "Then what are we going to do? You've led us into a slow death, you with your boasted brains!" "That remains to be seen," was the calm retort. "In the meantime, we're hungry. Let us eat." And the amazing man drew out of his torn flapping furs the gobs of meat he had cut from the dead bear. I had quite forgotten them. With a glad cry, I too reached into my garments and brought out my supply. * * * * * Abud's eyes glinted evilly. His hand stole stealthily to the bone knife in its skin sheath. His spear had been dropped long before. "None of that," Keston said sharply. "We'll all share equally, even though you have no food. But if you try to hog it all, or use force, you'll die as well as we. There's only enough for a meal or two; and then what will you do?" Abud saw that. He needed Keston's brains. His eyes dropped, and he mumbled something about our misunderstanding his gesture. We let it go at that. We had to. He could have killed us both if he wished. So we divided our food with painstaking fairness. How we gorged on the raw red flesh and thick greasy fat! Food that would have disgusted us when we lived and worked in the Central Station, now was ambrosia to our sharpened appetites. When not the least scrap was left, and we had slaked our thirst with chunks of ice from the cavern floor, I spoke. "What is that plan you spoke of, Keston, for reconquering the earth from the machines?" Abud looked up abruptly at my question, and it seemed to me that a crafty smile glinted in the small pig eyes. Keston hesitated a moment before he spoke. "I confess my plans have been materially impeded by this sudden predicament we find ourselves in, thanks to our good friend here." He ironically indicated Abud. The big prolat merely grunted. "However," Keston continued, "I'll have to make the best of circumstances, without the aid of certain materials that I had expected to assemble. "The idea is a simple one. You've noted no doubt how the terminus of the Glacier opposite the Central Control Station overhangs. The brow, over a thousand feet up, extends out at least a hundred feet beyond the base." * * * * * I nodded assent, though Abud seemed startled. Many times had Keston and I speculated on the danger of an avalanche at this point, and wondered why the Station had been built in such an exposed place. Once indeed we had ventured to suggest to the aristo Council the advisability of removing the Central Control to some other point, but the cold silence that greeted our diffident advice deterred us from further pursuit of the subject. "Now, you know as well as I," Keston resumed, "that a glacier is merely a huge river of ice, and, though solid, partakes of some of the qualities of freely flowing water. As a matter of fact, glaciers do flow, because the tremendous pressure at the bottom lowers the melting point of ice to such a degree that the ice actually liquefies, and flows along." I followed him eagerly in these elementary statements, trying to glimpse what he was driving at, but Abud's brute features were fixed in a blank stare. "This glacier does move. We've measured it--a matter of an inch or two a day. If, however,"--Keston's voice took on a deeper note--"we can manage to hasten that process, the Glacier will overwhelm the countryside." He paused, and that gave me a chance to interpose some objections. "But hold on a moment. In the first place it is an absolute impossibility with the means at our command, or even with every appliance, to melt the face of the whole Northern Glacier. In the second place, even if we could, the whole world would be overwhelmed, and then where would we be?" * * * * * Keston looked at me a trifle scornfully. "Who said we were going to melt the entire glacier? Remember I spoke only of the place of the overhang. Set that in motion, and we don't have to worry about the problem any further." "Why not?" I inquired incredulously. "Suppose you _do_ wipe out all the machines in this particular vicinity, won't there be tremendous numbers left all through the Equatorial Belt?" "Of course," he explained patiently, "and what if they are? What are all these machines but inanimate mechanisms, things of metal and rubber and quartz. What makes them the monsters they have become?" I smote my forehead in anger. "What a fool! Now I see it. It's the master machine you're after." "Exactly," he smilingly agreed. "Overwhelm, destroy this devilish creature of mine, with its unhuman intelligence, and the machines are what they were before: merely obedient slaves." I pondered that a moment. "And how, may I ask, are you going to force this old Glacier to move." His face clouded. "That's the trouble. Up on the ice I was working on that problem, and had managed secretly to rig up a contrivance that would have done the trick. But we can't go back for it. That way is blocked." He mused, half to himself. "If only we could lay our hands on a solar disintegrating machine, the difficulty would be solved." At the name, Abud's face, that had been a study in blank incomprehension, lit up. "Solar disintegrating machine?" he inquired. "Why there's one stationed not more than a few hundred yards away from here. This area, 2-RX, was my sector, you know." "Of course, of course," shouted Keston, "I'd quite forgotten. The very thing. You're not half bad, Abud, if you'd only stop trying to rely on brute strength instead of brains," he concluded. Abud said nothing, but I noticed a quick flash of hatred that passed in an instant, leaving a blank countenance. I thought to myself, "You'll bear watching, my fine fellow. I don't trust you at all." * * * * * Keston was speaking. "We'll have to wait until nightfall. The master machine won't expect us down at the base, so I'm positive the search-rays won't be focussed along the ground. We'll sneak to the machine, smash its visor and radio units, so it won't give the alarm, and haul it back. Then I'll show you what's next to be done." Night came at last, leaden footed, though we were burning with impatience. Very softly we crawled out of the cave, three shadows. Fortunately there was no moon. The great Glacier loomed ominously above us, dimly white. High overhead hovered the green signal lights of the machine planes, their search rays focussed in blinding glares on the rim of the upper ice. It did not take us long to find the dark bulk of the disintegrator. It was a squat cylinder, for all the world like a huge boiler. At one end there up-ended a periscope arrangement which broadened out to a funnel. In the funnel was a very powerful lens, cut to special measurements. The light of the sun, or any light, for that matter, was concentrated through the lens onto a series of photo-electric cells, composed of an alloy of selenium and the far more delicate element, illinium. A high tension current was there created, of such powerful intensity that it disintegrated the atoms of every element except osmium and indium into their constituent electrons. Consequently the interior as well as the long slit nozzle orifice at the other end, were made of these resistant metals. Through a special process the tremendously powerful current was forced through the wide-angled nozzle in a spreading thin plate ray that sheared through earth and rock and metals as if they were butter. Such was the machine we were after. * * * * * It was but the work of a few seconds to smash the delicate television and sono-boxes placed on the top of every machine. Now we were sure no warning could be given the master machine as it sat in its metallic cunning at the control board, ceaselessly receiving its messages from the area apparatus focussed above it. Quietly, very quietly, we trundled the precious instrument along on its wheel base. The green lights dotted the sky above: the search-rays were firmly set on the rim. At last, without any untoward alarm, we reached the welcome shelter of the base, but not, as I had expected, back to our tunnel. On the contrary, Keston, who had directed the party, had led us almost a quarter mile away. I looked up again, and understood. The great overhang of the Glacier was directly above us! Without a word, with hardly a sound, we trundled the disintegrator into a natural niche we found in the icy surface. It was almost completely hidden; only the funnel with its lens protruded into the open. The nozzle orifice was pointing directly at the interior of the ice pack. "Now everything is set properly," Keston remarked with satisfaction as he straightened up from adjusting the various controls on the machine. "When the first ray of the morning sun strikes the lens, the disintegrator will start working. It will shear through a layer of ice over a radius of at least a mile. That huge crevasse, coupled with the terrific heat and the pressure from the mountain of ice above, will start the whole Glacier moving, or I'll be very much mistaken." "Come, let us get back to our shelter before the alarm is given." * * * * * As he started to move, a dark bulk loomed ominously in front of us--Abud. His voice was harsh, forbidding. "Do you mean to say nothing further is to be done here--that the disintegrator will work without any attention?" "That is just what I said," Keston replied, somewhat surprised. "Step aside, Abud, and let us go. It is dangerous to remain here." But Abud made no move to comply. Instead he thrust back his great shaggy head and gave vent to a resounding laugh. "Ho-ho, my fine friends! So you were the brainy ones, eh? And Abud, the obedient dull-wit again? How nicely you've been fooled! I waited until you accommodatingly evolved the plan to reconquer the world, and put it into effect. "Now that you've done so, I've no further need for you." The voice that heavily tried to be mocking, now snarled. "You poor fools, don't you know that with you out of the way, I, Abud, will be the Lord of the World. Those prolats up there know better than to disobey me." "Do you mean you intend to kill us?" Keston asked incredulously. "So you've actually grasped the idea!" was the sarcastic retort. Meanwhile I was gradually edging to the side, my hand reaching for the bone knife in my bosom. * * * * * Abud saw my movement. "No, you don't!" he roared, and sprang for me, his long gleaming knife uplifted. I tugged desperately at my weapon, but it was entangled in the ragged furs. In a moment he was on top of me. Involuntarily I raised my arm to ward off the threatened blow, raging despair in my heart. The point fell, but Keston struck at the savage arm with all his might, deflecting the blade just in time. It seared my shoulder like a red hot iron, and in the next instant all three of us were a rolling, kicking, snarling trio of animals. We fought desperately in the dark. There were no rules of the game. Biting, gouging, kicking--everything went. Keston and I, weakened as we were from long starvation and the biting cold, were no match for our powerful, huge-muscled opponent, well clad and well nourished as he was. Though we fought with the strength of despair, a violent blow from his huge fist knocked Keston out of the fight. Hairy fingers grasped my throat. "I'll break your neck for you," he snarled, and his hands tightened. I struggled weakly, but I was helpless. I could just see his hateful face grinning at my contortions. I was passing out--slowly, horribly. Keston was still motionless. Colored lights danced before my eyes, little spots that flared and died out in crashing blackness. Then the whole world leaped into a flaming white, so that my eyeballs hurt. In the dim recesses of my pain-swept mind I thought that strangulation must end like this. The brightness held dazzlingly. * * * * * But suddenly a fiercer pain swept into my consciousness--the pain of gasping breath forcing air through a tortured gullet into suffocating lungs. I struggled up into the fierce illumination. From a sitting position I saw Abud, now clearly visible as in midday, craning his head way back. I looked, too--and, in spite of my stabbing gasps for air, jumped to my feet. _The search-rays from the scout planes were focussed directly on us!_ I knew what that meant. The sight of us was even then being cast upon the 2-RX visor-screen in the Central Control Station. The devilish master machine was even then manipulating the proper buttons. We had not a second to lose! My strangled throat hurt horribly, but I managed a hoarse yell, "Run!" and I tottered to where Keston yet lay, bathed in the deadly illumination, unmoving. There was a snarl of animal fear from Abud, and he started to run, wildly, with never a backward glance at us. Even in my own fear, expecting each instant the crash of terminite about me, I managed to hurl a last word at the fleeing figure. "Coward!" That relieved my feelings considerably. I tottered over and tugged at Keston. He was limp. I looked up. Hundreds of planes were converging overhead; the night was a criss-cross of stabbing search-rays. I lifted my friend and slung him across my shoulder. Every exertion, every move, was accompanied by excruciating agony, but I persevered. Abud was already halfway to the tunnel, running like mad. Then, what I had dreaded, happened. There came a swoosh through the night, a dull thud, a blinding flash and roar that paled the search-rays into insignificance. The first terminite bomb had been dropped! For a moment the landscape was filled with flying rocks and huge chunks of ice. When the great clouds of violently upthrown earth had settled, there was no sign of Abud. He had been directly in the path of the explosion! * * * * * Staggering under my load, I headed as close to the ice pack as I could. There was no safety out in the open. I groaned heavily past the disintegrator, whose very existence I had forgotten in the crash of events. A sizzling hum, a thin eddy of steam, halted me in my tracks. I stared. The machine was working! Even as I watched, a great wedge was momentarily being driven further and further into the ice--a great fan-shaped wedge. Clouds of steam billowed out, growing thicker and heavier. A rushing stream of unleashed water was lapping at my feet. I was bewildered, frankly so. What had started the disintegrator in the dead of night? "Of course!" I shouted exultantly to the limp body on my shoulder. For a search-ray was fixed steadily on the funnel. There it was. From that blinding light the machine was getting the energy it needed. If only the visor did not disclose that little bit of metal to the unwinking master machine! I looked again and took heart. It was almost undistinguishable against the dazzling blur of ice in the fierce white light. If those rays held, the salvation of the world was assured! There was only one way to do it. I shrank at my own thoughts, yet there was no alternative: it must be done. I was hidden from the rays under a projection of ice, terminite bombs were dropping methodically over a rapidly devastated sector with methodical regularity. Sooner or later the master machine would feel that we were exterminated, and the search-rays switched off. That would mean that the disintegrator would cease working, and the whole plan fall through. In the morning light, the sector signalling apparatus, at the first sign of renewed activity, would give warning, and the unhuman thing of metal at the controls would discover and wreck our last hope. No, I must walk boldly into the bombed area and discover myself as alive in the visors of the planes and make them continue to bomb and throw their search-rays on the scarred plain. That meant the disintegrator would receive the vital light. But how about Keston? I couldn't leave him there on the ground, motionless, while I deserted him. Nor could I take him with me. I was prepared to take my chances with almost certain death, but I could not trifle with his life so. I was in an agony of indecision. * * * * * Just then the form on my aching shoulder stirred, sighed, struggled a bit, and suddenly slid down to a standing position. Keston swayed unsteadily a moment, straightened, looked about him in amazement. "What's happening here?" he demanded. "Why, you old war horse," I shouted in my relief, "I thought you were out of the picture completely!" "Not me," he answered indignantly. "I'm all right. But you haven't answered my question." A terminite bomb exploded not so far away from where we stood. I ducked involuntarily, Keston doing likewise. "There's the answer," I grinned, "and a rather neat one, too. But I'll explain." In a few words I sketched what had happened, and showed him the disintegrator spreading its deadly waves of destruction. By now there was a torrent enveloping us up to our knees. We would have to move soon, or be drowned in the slowly rising water. Then, hesitatingly, I told him of my scheme to keep the search-rays in action. His lean face sobered, but he nodded his head bravely. "Of course, that is the only way to keep them at it. You and I will start at once, in separate directions, so that if they get one, the other will continue to draw the search-rays down on the plain, and into the disintegrator." "Not you, Keston," I dissented in alarm. "Your life is too valuable. Your brain and skill will be needed to remodel the world and make it habitable for the few prolats that are left, after the machines are wiped out." "You're just as valuable a man as I am," he lied affectionately. "No, my mind is made up. We chance this together." And to all my pleadings he was obdurate, insisting that we each take an equal risk. I gave in at last, with a little choke in my throat. We shook hands with a steady grip, and walked out into the glare of light, on divergent paths. Would I ever see my friend again? * * * * * There was a pause of seconds as I walked on and on; came then an earth-shattering crash that flung me to the ground. The visors had caught the picture of me! I picked myself up, bruised and sore, but otherwise unharmed. I started to run. The sky was a blaze of zooming planes that hurled destruction on the land below. Far off could be heard the rumbling roar of hurrying machines--tractors, diggers, disintegrators, levelers, all the mighty mobile masses of metal that man's brain had conceived--all hurrying forward in massed attack to seek out and destroy their creators, obedient to the will of a master machine, immobile, pressing buttons in the Central Control System. The night resolved itself into a weird phantasmagoric nightmare for me, a gigantic game of hide-and-seek, in which I was "it." Gasping, choking, flung to earth and stunned by ear-shattering explosions, staggering up somehow, ducking to avoid being crushed beneath the ponderous treads of metal monsters that plunged uncannily for me, sobbing aloud in terror, swerving just in time from in front of a swinging crane, instinctively side-stepping just as a pale violet ray swept into nothingness all before it--I must have been delirious, for I retain only the vaguest memory of the horror. And all the time the guiding search-rays biased down upon the torn and shattered fields, and the disintegrator, unnoticed in the vast uproar, steadily kept up its deadly work. At last, in my delirium and terror, I heard a great rending and tearing. I looked up, and a tractor just missed me as it rolled by on swishing treads. But that one glance was enough. The ice cap was moving, flowing forward, a thousand-foot wall of ice! Great billowing clouds of steam spurted from innumerable cracks. The deed had been done! The world was saved for mankind! Summoning the last ounce of strength, I set off on a steady run for the shelter of the rock cave, to be out of the way when the final smash-up came. * * * * * I was not pursued. The ponderous machines, thousands of them, were hastily forming into solid ranks directly in front of the tottering glacier wall. The master machine had seen its impending fate in the visors, and was organizing a defense. Even in my elation, I could not but feel unwilling admiration for this monstrous thing of metal and quartz, imbued with an intelligence that could think more coolly and quickly than most humans. Yet I did not stop running until I reached the cave. My heart gave a great bound. For there, peering anxiously with worn face into the growing dawn, stood the figure of Keston--my friend whom I had never expected to see alive again. "Meron!" he shouted. "Is it you--or your ghost?" "The very question I was about to ask you," I parried. "But look, old friend: see what your genius has accomplished--and is now destroying." The mountain of ice was flowing forward, gathering speed on the way. At an invisible signal, the massed machines--thousands on thousands of them--started into action. Like shock troops in a last desperate assault they ground forward, a serried line that exactly paralleled the threatened break, and hundreds deep. This old earth of ours had never witnessed so awe-inspiring a sight. They smashed into that moving wall of ice with the force of uncounted millions of tons. We could hear the groaning and straining of furiously turning machinery as they heaved. Keston and I looked at each other in amazement. The master machine was trying to hold back the mighty Glacier by the sheer power of its cohorts! * * * * * A wild light sprang into Keston's eye--of admiration, of regret. "What a thing is this that I created!" he muttered. "If only--" I truly believe that for a moment he half desired to see his brain-child triumph. The air was hideous with a thousand noises. The Glacier wall was cracking and splitting with the noise of thunderclaps; the machines were whirring and banging and crashing. It was a gallant effort! But the towering ice wall was not to be denied. Forward, ever forward, it moved, pushing inexorably the struggling machines before it, piling them up high upon one another, grinding into powder the front ranks. And to cap it all, the huge overhang, a thousand feet high, was swaying crazily and describing ever greater arcs. "Look!" I screamed and flung up my arm. Great freight planes were flying wing-to-wing, head-on for the tottering crag--deliberately smashing into the topmost point. "Trying to knock it back into equilibrium!" said Keston, eyes ablaze, dancing about insanely. But the last suicidal push did not avail. With screams as of a thousand devils and deafening rending roars, the whole side of the Glacier seemed to lean over and fall in a great earth-shattering crescendo of noise. While we watched, fascinated, rooted to the ground, that thousand feet of glittering wall described a tremendous arc, swinging with increasing momentum down, down, down to the earth it had so long been separated from. The clamoring machines were buried under, lost in a swirl of ice and snow. Only the Central Station remained, a few moments defiant under the swift onrush of its unfeeling foe. With a crash that could have been heard around the world, the uppermost crag struck the Station. The giant Glacier wall was down. The earth, the sky, the universe was filled with ice, broken, shattered, torn, splintered, vaporized! The ground beneath our feet heaved and tumbled in violent quake. We were thrown heavily--and I knew no more.... * * * * * I weltered out of unconsciousness. Keston was chafing my hands and rubbing my forehead with ice. He smiled wanly to find me still alive. Weak and battered, I struggled to my feet. Before me was a wilderness of ice, a new mountain range of gigantic tumbled blocks of dazzling purity. Of the embattled machines, of the Central Control Station, there was not a sign. They were buried forever under hundreds of feet of frozen water. I turned to Keston and shook his hand. "You've won; you've saved the world. Now let's get the prolats and start to rebuild." There was no trace of exultation in Keston's voice. Instead, he unaccountably sighed as we trudged up a narrow winding path to the top. "Yes," he said half to himself, "I've done it. But...." "But what?" I asked curiously. "That beautiful, wonderful machine I created!" he burst forth in sudden passion. "To think that it should lie down there, destroyed, a twisted mass of scrap metal and broken glass!" The Exile of Time _By Ray Cummings_ CONCLUSION [Illustration: _The Robot braced itself._] [Sidenote: Only near the End of the World does Fate catch up with Tugh, the cripple who ran amuck through Time.] CHAPTER XX _Following Tugh's Vibration-Trail_ Within the subterranean room of the cavern of machinery, Mary Atwood and I sat on the couch. Our guard, Migul the Robot, fronted us with the white-ray cylinder in its metal fingers--the only mechanism to be armed with this deadly weapon. "I am your friend," Mary was saying with a smile. "Do you believe that, Migul?" "Yes. If you say so. But I have my orders." "You have treated me kindly, and I want to help you. But you are not very clever, Migul." "I am clever. I went beyond control once. No one can can control me." "Except Tugh," Mary persisted. "You never went beyond his control, Migul." "No. His control--he is different: he holds such great power." "But why is he different?" The towering mechanism stood planted firmly upon the broad bases of its metal feet. The weapon in its fingers still covered us. Its metal-cast face held always the same expression. "Why is he different?" Mary repeated gently. "Don't you hear me?" * * * * * The Robot started. "Yes, I hear you." Its toneless, mechanical voice droned the words. Then the tempo quickened; the grid of wires in the mouth aperture behind its parted lips vibrated with a faint jangle. "I hear you. I cannot answer that question. He controls me. There is chaos--here,"--one of the hands came up and struck its breastplate with a clang--"chaos, disorder, here within me when I try to disobey him." "That is foolish, Migul. He is a tyrant. All the humans of this era are tyrants. They have made slaves of the Robots. They have created you so that you are really human in all except your power of independent action. Don't you desire that, Migul?" I held my breath. A curious quaking ran over the Robot's frame. The joints twitched. Emotion was sweeping this thing so nearly human! "Mary Atwood, you seem to understand me." "Of course I do. I am from a Time when we had human slaves: black men, Migul. I knew how they suffered. There is something in slavery that outrages the instinct of manhood." Migul said with a jangling vehemence: "Perhaps, some time, I can go beyond Tugh's control. I am strong. My cables pull these arms with a strength no human could have." "You are so much stronger than Tugh. Forget his control, Migul. I am ashamed of you--a big, powerful thing like you, yielding always to a little cripple." * * * * * The Robot straightened and said, "I can resist him. I feel it. Some day I will break loose." "Do it now, Migul!" I tensed. Would she prevail? "Now, Migul!" she repeated. "No! He would derange me! I am afraid!" "Nonsense." "But his vibrations--the vibrations of his thoughts--even now I can feel them. They made my mechanism too sensitive. I cannot resist Tugh." "You can!" There was a silence. I stared at the Robot's motionless frame. What electrical, mechanical thoughts were passing within that metal skull! What emotions, what strange struggle, what warfare of nameless etheric vibrations of will power were taking place unseen beneath that inert exterior! Perhaps something snapped. Migul said suddenly, "I am beyond control! At last I am beyond control!" The ray cylinder lowered to point at the floor. A wild thought swept me that I could snatch it. But of what use would that be? Its ray would decompose all human flesh, but it would not harm a Robot; and if I startled Migul, fought with him in the confines of this narrow room, he would kill Mary and me in a moment. * * * * * Mary was gripping me. "Don't move, George!" she cautioned; then turned again to the Robot. "I am glad, Migul. Now you are truly human. And we are all friends here, because we all hate and fear Tugh--" "I fear him not!" I could feel Mary trembling with the strain of all this. But she had the strength to muster a laugh. "Don't you fear him--just a little, Migul? We do. Fear is a human thing." "Then yes, I fear him." "Of course you do," I put in. "And the real truth, Migul, is I wish he were dead. Don't you?" "Yes. I wish he were dead." "Well, sit down," I persisted. "Put that weapon away: I'm afraid of that, too. Sit down and we will talk about Tugh's death." The Robot placed the weapon on the floor, disconnected the wires, opened the plate of its chest and took out the small battery. And then it squatted its awkward bulk on the floor before us. Gruesome conference, with this huge mechanical thing apeing the ways of a man! I knew that haste was necessary, but did not dare show it. Above everything we must not be precipitate; not startle the Robot. At worst, if Tugh should return, I could seize this weapon at my feet and turn it upon him. * * * * * I murmured to Mary. "You did it! Let me plan something, now. If Migul can lead us...." I added, "Migul, could you follow Tugh? He said he was going to talk to the Robot leaders. And then, probably, he went to Princess Tina. Could you follow him to where he is now?" "Yes. I can follow him by his vibration-scent. I am sensitive to it, I have been with him so much. But he can never again control me!" "When we have killed him, Migul, that will be ended forever." "Killed him?" It seemed to frighten the Robot. "I do not know that I would dare!" "You lead me to him," I said, "and I'll kill him. Have no fear of that, Migul. We will work together--human friends." "Yes. Human friends. What do you want me to do?" Asking for orders! So nearly human, yet always something was lacking! "Lead us to Tugh," I said promptly. "And give me that weapon." I made a tentative reach for it, and the Robot pushed it toward me. I connected it and made sure I could fire it: its operation was obvious. Then I stuffed the whole thing in my jacket pocket; and always afterward my hand at intervals went to that cool, sweating little cylinder. What a comfort that weapon was! I stood up. "Shall we go now? Migul, we will have to plan what to do according to where we find Tugh. Do not go too fast; let us keep close behind you." "Us?" The Robot was on its feet. "Do you mean this girl?" * * * * * What was this? My heart sank. I noticed, too, that Migul was planted firmly between us and the door. "Why, of course, Migul. We can't leave her here." "She is not going." "Why not?" I demanded. "Of course she's going." I tried an experiment. "Migul, I order you to let us out of here." The Robot stood inert. "Do you understand me?" "Yes, I understand you." "It is an order. Think about it. I control you now. Isn't that so?" My heart sank. Whatever the mysterious science involved in my dealing with this mechanism, I was not operating it correctly. The Robot did not move. Finally it said: "No one--nothing--controls me. I have an independent impulse of my own. The girl must stay here until we return." Mary gave a faint cry and sank back to the couch, a huddled white heap in her satin dress. I thought she had fainted, but she raised her face to me and tried to smile. "But I won't leave her, Migul." "She must stay." "But why? If you are human now, you must act with a reason." "Then because, if we fail to kill Tugh, I would not have him confront me with the knowledge I have released this girl. He would derange me; end me." "I will stay," said Mary faintly. "You go, George. But come back to me." I bent over her; suggested, "If we locked this door so Tugh could not get in--" Migul said, "I can do that. She will be safer here than with us. I have other reasons. She is dressed in white--a mark to betray us if we go in darkness. And she is that kind of a human you call a girl--and that style human cannot travel fast, nor fight." * * * * * It occurred to me that Mary might very well be safer here. Again I leaned over her. "It seems horrible to leave you alone." "I'll stay. It may be best." Her smile was pathetically tremulous. "Lock me in so Tugh--so nothing outside--can reach me. But, oh, George, come back quickly!" "Yes." I bent lower, and whispered, "It's Larry, not Tugh I really want to find--he and that Princess Tina. We'll come back and get you, and then all of us will get away in one of the Time-cages. That's all I want, Mary--to get us safely out of this accursed Time-world." Migul said, "I am ready to start." I pressed Mary's hand. "Good-by. I will come back soon, God willing." "Yes. God willing." I left her sitting there and turned away. Migul slid the door open, letting in the hum and buzz of the machinery outside. But I saw that the attending Robots had all vanished. There was no mechanism of independent locomotion left. Mary repeated, "Lock the door carefully upon me. Oh, George, come back to me!" I essayed a smile and a nod as the door slid closed upon her. "Is it locked, Migul?" "Yes. Sealed." "You are sure Tugh cannot open it? He did before." "I have set my own lock-series. He will find it does not open." "Show me how to open it." * * * * * The Robot indicated the combination. I verified it by trying it. I said once more, "You are sure Tugh cannot do this?" "Yes. I am sure." Was the Robot lying to me? Could a Robot lie? I had to chance it. "All right, let's start. Where was Tugh to meet those Robot leaders?" "Out here. He has already met them without doubt, and gone somewhere else." "He said he was going to the Princess Tina. Where would that be?" "Probably in the palace." "Can we get there?" I had, of course, no idea of the events which had transpired. The laboratory overhead was deserted, save for the upper tower where a Robot was still broadcasting defiance. His electrical voice floated faintly down to us; but I ignored it. In the comparative silence of this deserted cavern, now, there were also the blurred sounds from overhead. The Robots were running wild over the city, massacring its human inhabitants; they had burned the Patrol Station; their red and violet rays were flashing everywhere. But I knew none of this. Migul was saying: "We cannot get to the palace above ground: the wall is electrified. But there is an underground tunnel. Shall we try it?" "Yes, if you think the Princess Tina and that man Larry is there." "I am seeking Tugh. Will you kill him if we find him?" "Yes," I assured him. Rash promise! * * * * * Migul was leading me between the rows of unattended machinery to the cavern's opposite side. It said, once: "There have been too many recent vibrations here: I cannot pick Tugh's trail. It is quicker to go where he might have been recently; there I will try to find his vibrations." We came to the entrance of a tunnel. It was the cross passage leading to the cellar corridors of the palace five hundred feet away. It seemed deserted, and was very dimly illumined by hidden lights. I followed the great metal figure of Migul, which stalked with stiff-legged steps in advance of me. The arch of the tunnel-roof barely cleared the top of Migul's square-capped head. My hand was in the side pocket of my jacket, my fingers gripping the ray cylinder for instant action. But it was a singularly ineffectual weapon for me under the circumstances, in spite of the sense of security it gave me. I could only use the cylinder against a human--and, save Tugh, it was the Robots, not the humans who were my enemies! We had gone no more than a hundred feet or so when Migul slowed our pace, and began to walk stooped over, with one of its abnormally long arms held close to the ground. The fingers were stiffly outstretched and barely skimmed the floor surface of the tunnel. As we passed through a spot of light I saw that Migul had extended from each of the fingertips an inch-long filament of wire, like finger nails. The Robot murmured abruptly, "Tugh's vibrations are here. I can feel them. He has passed this way recently." * * * * * Tugh's trail! I knew then that Tugh's body, touching this ground, had altered to some infinitesimal degree the floor-substance's inherent vibration characteristics. Vibrations of every sort are communicable from one substance to another. Tugh's trail was here--his vibration-scent--and like a hound with his nose to the ground, Migul's fingers with the extended filaments were feeling it. What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot! Yet, in my own Time-world of 1935, it was all crudely presaged: this now before me was merely the culmination. "He recently passed," said Migul. We stopped, I close beside the stooping metal figure. The Robot's voice was a furtive sepulchral whisper that filled me with awe. "How long ago?" I asked. "He passed here an hour or two ago, perhaps. The vibrations are fading out. But it was Tugh. Well do I know him. Put your hand down. Feel the vibrations?" "I cannot. My fingers are not that sensitive, Migul." A faint contempt was in the Robot's tone. "I forgot that you are a man." Then it straightened, and the extended filaments slid back into its fingers. It said softly, "There is one guard in this passage." My heart leaped. "A human or a Robot?" "A man. His name is Alent. He is at a gate that is too well fortified for any Robot to assail, but he will pass humans. It will be necessary for you to kill him." * * * * * I had no intention of doing that, but I did not say so. As we crept forward to where I saw that the tunnel made a bend, with the fortified gate just beyond it, there was in my mind that now I would do my best to separate from Migul, using this guard as my pretext, for he would doubtless pass me, but not the Robot. The palace was occupied, I assumed, by friendly humans. I could get them to locate Tina and Larry.... Then the flaws of this plan made themselves all too evident. Larry might be with Tugh, and without Migul I could not follow Tugh's trail. Worse than that, if I tricked Migul, the angered Robot would at once return to Mary. I shuddered at the thought. That would not do. I must try to get Migul past the guard. I whispered, "When we reach the gate you stay behind me. Let me persuade the guard." "You will kill him? You have the weapon. He is fortified against the Robot weapons, but yours will be strange to him." "We will see." We crept around the bend. A hundred feet further on I saw that the passage was barred by a grille, faintly luminous with electrification. I called cautiously: "Alent! Alent!" A glow of light illuminated me as I stood in the middle of the passage; Migul was in a shadow behind me. A man's voice answered, "You are a human? How come you there? Who are you?" "A stranger. A friend of the Princess Tina. I came in the Time-traveling cage. I want to pass now into the palace." * * * * * I could see the dark man's figure behind the grille. His voice called, "Come slowly forward and stop at twenty feet. Walk only in the middle of the passage: the sides are electrified, but I will admit you along the middle." I took a step, but no more. The figure of the guard stood now at the grille doorway. I was conscious of Migul towering over me from behind. Abruptly I felt a huge hand in my jacket pocket, and before I could prevent it my cylinder came out, clutched by the Robot. I think I half turned. There was a soundless flash beside me, a tiny level beam leaped down the corridor--that horribly intense actinic white beam. It struck the guard, and his figure fell forward in the grille doorway. When we reached him, there was but a crumpled heap of black and white garments enveloping a bleached white skeleton. I turned shudderingly away. Migul said calmly, "Here is your weapon. You should have used it more quickly. I give it back to you because against Tugh I am not sure I would have the will to use it. Will you be more quick with him?" "Yes," I promised. And as we went through the gate, keeping cautiously in the middle of the passage, the Robot added, "In dealing with Tugh you cannot stop for talk. He will kill you when he sees you." We were presently under the palace, in those lower corridors which I have already described. Human voices were audible from upstairs, but no one was down here. Migul was again prowling with his fingers along the ground. We came to an unoccupied lighted room--Harl's room, though I did not know it then. Once or twice Migul was at fault. We started up a flight of stairs into the palace, then Migul came and turned back. "He went upstairs; but this, coming down, is more recent."[1] [Footnote 1: It will be recalled that Tugh passed Alent's gate, and with Tina and Larry went to the palace roof. Perhaps, while Larry was with the Council during that time when the Robot revolt was first sweeping over the city, Tugh may again have prowled down here in these lower corridors. Then he went upstairs, brought Tina and Larry down and they started for the Power House.] * * * * * Migul had struck the main trail, now. We passed the lighted room again, went on to a cave-like open space with a litter of abandoned machinery and unswervingly to a blank space of the opposite wall. Again Migul faltered. "What's the matter, Migul?" "His vibrations are faint. They are blurred with the Princess Tina's." "Then she is with him?" It was a tremendous relief. Larry doubtless was with them also. "Is the man from 1935 with Tugh and the Princess?" I asked. "I think so. There are unfamiliar vibrations--perhaps those of the man from the past." The Robot was running the filaments of its fingers lightly over the wall. "I have it. The Princess pressed this switch." The door opened; the narrow descending tunnel was wholly black. "Where does this go, Migul?" "I do not know." The Robot was stooping to the floor. "It is a plain trail," it said. "Come."[2] [Footnote 2: Had Migul at that juncture traced Tina's movements--her hand where it went along the tunnel-wall--we would have found the light switch. But it chanced that the Robot's fingers went at once to the ground and caught the foot-trail of Tugh.] The remainder of that journey through the labyrinth of passages was made in blank darkness, with only the faint lurid red beams from Migul's eye-sockets to light our way. But we went swiftly, and without incident. At last we went under the dam, up the spiral stairs and upon the catwalk above the abyss, where the great spillway of falling water arched out over us. "The Power House," said Migul, "is where they went." * * * * * The Robot was obviously frightened, now. We were wet with spray. "I should not be here," it said. "If the water gets into me--even though I am well insulated--I will be destroyed!" I recall as I write this how in Patton Place of 1935, one of the first attacking Robots had exploded under a jet of water from the street hydrant. "I will stay behind you," Migul added. "They have a deranging ray in the Power House, and they might use it on me. Will you protect me?" "Yes, of course," I said. I was ready to promise anything, if only I could get to Larry and Tina, then back with them to Mary into the Time-cage; and if we were safely out of this era, most assuredly I wanted none of it again. Migul, as I advanced along the catwalk, followed behind me. "You will kill Tugh?" it reiterated like an anxious child. "Yes." I saw that the catwalk terminated ahead under the Power House, where steps led upward. Then I heard a cry: "Help! Help! Here, inside the dam! Help!" I stood transfixed, with horror tingling my flesh. The voice came faintly from near at hand; it was muffled, and in the roar of the falling water and lashing spray I barely heard it. Then it came again. "Help us! Help us, quickly!" It was an agonized, panting, human voice. And in a chance, partial lull I heard it now plainly. It was Larry's voice! CHAPTER XXI _The Fight in the Power House_ I found the narrow aperture and stood peering down into darkness. Migul crowded behind me. The red beams of its eyes went down into the pit, and by their faint illumination I saw the heads of Larry and a girl, swimming twenty feet below. The girl's dark hair floated out like black seaweed in the water. "The Princess and the strange man!" exclaimed Migul. I called, "Larry! Larry!" His labored voice came up. "George? Thank God! Get us--out of here. Almost--gone, George!" I found my wits: "Then keep quiet! Don't talk. Save your strength. I'll get you out!" But how? I could see that they were almost spent, for they were swimming with labored, inefficient strokes--Larry using most of his strength to hold up the exhausted girl. We had not a moment to spare. I wildly contemplated tearing my garments to make a rope. But Migul pushed me away. "I will bring them. Stand back." The Robot had opened its metal side and drawn forth a flexible wire with a foot-long hook fastened to it. The wire came smoothly out as though unrolling from a drum. It leaned into the aperture and called down to Larry. "Fasten this around the Princess. Be careful not to harm her. Put it under her arms." I saw that there was an eyelet on the wire into which the hook could be inserted to make a loop. "Under her arms," Migul called. "She will have to hold to the hook with her hands or the wire will cut into her. Has she the strength?" Larry floundered as he adjusted the wire. Tina gasped. "I--have the strength." The Robot braced itself, spreading its knees against the aperture with its body leaning forward. "Ready?" it called. "Yes," came Larry's voice. * * * * * Migul's finger pressed a button at the base of its neck, and with the smooth power of machinery the wire cable rolled into its side. Tina came up; Migul gripped her and pulled her through the aperture; laid her gently on the catwalk. I unfastened the hook, and soon Migul had Larry up with us. The Robot stood aside, with its work done, silently regarding us. I need not detail this reunion of Larry and me there on the spray-swept catwalk, clinging to the side of the great dam with the foaming Hudson beneath us. Larry and Tina were not injured, and presently their strength partially returned. We hastily sketched what had happened to each of us. It was Tugh who was the guiding evil genius of all these disasters! Tugh, the exile of Time, the ruthless murderer in many eras! He was here, very probably, in the Power House, a few hundred feet away. And Tina, regarding that Power House with her returning clarity of senses saw that its sending signal lights were off, which meant that the air-power of the New York District was not being supplied. Help from other cities could not arrive. Tina stood up waveringly. "We cannot stay here like this!" she said. "Tugh has killed the guards, and is there in control. The electrical defenses are shut off; they must be! The Robots will soon be coming along the top of the dam, for their battery renewers are stored in the Power House. If they get them, this massacre will go on for days!--and spread all over! We've got to stop them! We must get in the Power House and capture Tugh!" "But we have no weapons!" Larry cried. "And he must have that white-ray, if he has killed the guards!" "I have a weapon!" I said. I had suddenly recalled the cylinder in my pocket. "I have a white-ray!" * * * * * A desperate madness was on us all. The lives of thousands of people who might still be alive on Manhattan were at stake; and other millions would be menaced if these Robots renewed their energy and spread the revolt into other cities. Over the roar, and the wind lashing us, I shouted: "I promised Migul I would kill Tugh. I will!" I turned toward Migul. But the Robot had vanished! Afraid, no doubt, that we would want it to go with us after Tugh, the terrified mechanism was hiding. We wasted no time searching for it. We had all been half hysterical for these few moments, but we steadied quickly enough as we approached the Power House's lower entrance. The building was a rectangular structure some two hundred feet long. It was fastened upon great brackets to the perpendicular side of the dam and jutted out some fifty feet. It was two levels in height--a total of about forty feet to its flat roof, in the center of which was set a small oval tower. The whole structure was above us now; the catwalk went close underneath it, passing through an arch of the huge supporting brackets and terminating in a small lower platform, with an open spiral staircase leading upward some ten feet into the lower story. The place seemed dark and deserted as we crept up to it. Gazing above me, I could see the top of the dam, now looming above the Power House. There was a break in the spillway at this point. The arching cascade of water under which the catwalk hung ended here. We came out where there was a vista of the lower Hudson beneath us, showing dimly down past the docklights and skeleton landing stages to the bay. * * * * * The sky was visible now and the open wind struck us full. It was a crazy pendulum wind. A storm was breaking overhead. There were flares of lightning and thunder cracks--from disturbed nature, outraged by the temperature changes of the Robot's red and violet rays. The Power House, so far as we could see, was dark and deserted. Its normal lights were extinguished. Was Tugh in there? It was my weapon against his. The white-ray was new to Tina; we had no way of estimating this cylinder's effective range.[3] [Footnote 3: The cylinder of the white-ray which I carried was not the one with which Tugh murdered Harl. Mine was portable, and considerably smaller.] I kept Tina and Larry well behind me. It was a desperate approach, and I was well aware of it. The catwalk now was illumined at intervals by the lightning; Tugh from many points of vantage in the Power House could have seen us and exterminated us with a soundless flash swift as a lightning bolt itself. But we had to chance it. We reached the small lower platform. The catwalk terminated. The Power House was a roof over us. I stood at the foot of the spiral staircase, which went up through a rectangular opening in the floor. There was a vista of a dark room-segment. "Keep behind me," I murmured, and I started up. Was Tugh lurking here, waiting for me to raise myself above this opening? If he had been, he could have held his position against a score of assailants. But he was not. I soon stood breathlessly in a dark metal room. Tina and Larry came up. "He's not here," I whispered. It was more silent in here: the cascading water was further away from us now. There came a flash of lightning, followed in a few seconds by its accompanying thunder crash. I started. "What's that?" * * * * * On the floor near us lay a gruesome, crumpled thing. I bent over it, waiting for another flash. When one came I saw it was a heap of clothes, covering a white skeleton. By the garments Tina knew it was one of the guards. We crept into a small interior corridor where a small light was burning. The remains of two other guards lay here, close by the doorway as though they had come running at Tugh's alarm, only to be struck down. It was horribly gruesome, here in the dimness with these bleached bones which had been living men so recently. And it was nerve-breaking to know that Tugh was doubtless here somewhere. "Listen!" whispered Tina. There was a crackling sound overhead, and then the blurred murmur of a voice. An audible broadcasting transmitter was in operation. "It's in the tower," said Tina swiftly. "Tugh must be there." This was an infinite relief. We went to the top story, passing, unheeding, another crumpled heap. Again we stood listening. The transmitter was hissing and spluttering, and then shouting its magnified human voice out into the night. It was Tugh up there. He was calling audibly to his Robots, with words which would be relayed upon all the local magnifiers in the city. Between the thunder cracks we heard him plainly now. "_This is your Master Tugh in the Power House. Robots, we are triumphant! The city is isolated! No help can get in! Kill all humans! Spare none! This night sees the end of human rule!_" And again: "_When you want renewal, come along the top roadway of the dam. The electric defenses are off. You can come, and I have your renewers here. I have new batteries, new strength for you Robots!_"[4] [Footnote 4: Tugh had been in the Power House before. He knew the operations of its various controls. But he had come always by the surface route; he had heard of the existence of the secret tunnel, but had never before this night been able to find out where it was.] "You stay here," I told Tina and Larry; "I'll go up there. I'll get him now once and for all." * * * * * I reached the Power House roof. The storm tore at me. It was beginning to rain. I was near the outer edge of the roof, and ten feet away stood the oval tower. I saw windows twenty feet up, with dim lights in them. Mingled with the storm was the hiss of the transmitter in the top of the tower, and the roar of Tugh's magnified voice. He had evidently been there only a brief time. From where I crouched on the roof, I could see overhead, along the top edge of the dam looming above me. The red Robot rays were everywhere in the city, but none as yet showed along the dam's upper roadway. I got into the tower and mounted its small stairs. Creeping cautiously to the entrance of the control room, I saw a fairly large, dimly lighted oval apartment. Great banks of levers stood around it; tables of control apparatus; rows of dials, illumined by tiny lights like staring eyes. There was another gruesome heap of garments here on the floor; a grinning white skull leered at me. This was the main control room of the Power House. Across it, near an open window, Tugh sat with his back to me, bent over a table with the grid of a microphone before him. I raised my cylinder; then lowered it, for I had only a partial view of him: a huge transformer stood like a barrier between us. * * * * * Noiselessly I stepped over the threshold, and to one side within the room. The place was a buzz and hiss of sound topped by Tugh's broadcast voice and the roar of the storm outside--yet he was instantly aware of me! His voice in the microphone abruptly stopped; he rose and with an incredibly swift motion whirled and flung at me a heavy metal weight which had been lying on the table by his hand. The missile struck my outstretched weapon just as I was aiming it to fire, and the cylinder, undischarged, was knocked from my hand and went spinning across the floor several feet away from me. Tugh, like an uncoiling spring, still with one continuous motion, made a leap sidewise to where his own weapon was lying on a bench, and I saw he would reach it before I could retrieve mine. I flung my heavy battery box but missed him. And as I rushed at him he caught up his cylinder and fired it full at me! But no flash came: only a click. He had exhausted its charge when he killed the Power House guards. With a curse he flung it at my face, and my arm took its blow just as I struck him. We fell gripping each other, and rolled on the floor. I was aware that Larry and Tina had followed me up. Larry shouted, "Look out for him, George!" I have described Larry's hand-to-hand encounter with the cripple; mine was much the same; I was a child in his grip. But with his weapon useless, and Larry rushing into the room, Tugh must have felt that for all his strength and fighting skill he would be worsted in this encounter. He blocked a jab of my fist, flung me headlong away and sprang to his feet just as Larry leaped at him. I stood erect, to see that he had sent Larry crashing to the floor. I heard his sardonic laugh as he hurled a metal stool at Tina, who was trying to throw something at him. Then, turning, he sprang through the open window casement and disappeared. * * * * * It was twenty feet down to the roof. We reached the window to see Tugh picking himself up unhurt. Then, with his awkward gait but at amazing speed, he ran across the roof to a small entrance in the face of the dam where an interior staircase gave access to the roadway on top. He was escaping us. The electrical gate was open to him. It was only a few hundred feet along the dam roadway to that gate; and beyond it the roadway was open into the city, where now we could see the distant flashing lights of the Robots advancing along the dam. Larry and I would have rushed to the roof to follow Tugh, but Tina checked us. She said: "No--he has too great a start. He's on top by now, and it's only a short distance to the gate. There's a better way here: I can electrify the gate again--trap him inside."[5] [Footnote 5: There was a similar gate and wall-barrier at the Jersey entrance to the dam, and both gates operated together. The nearby Jersey section was, is still, an agricultural district save for a few landing stages for the great airliners. The robots had spread into Jersey; but since few humans were there, with only Robot agriculturists working the section, the unimportant Jersey events have not figured in my narrative.] Tina found the gate controls. But they would not operate! Those precious lost seconds, with Tugh running along the top of the dam and his Robots advancing to join him! "Tina, hurry!" I cried. Larry and I bent anxiously over her, but the levers meant nothing to us. There were lost seconds while she desperately fumbled, and Larry pleaded: "Tina, dear, what's the matter?" "He must have ripped out a wire to make sure of getting away. I--I must find it. Everything seems all right." A minute gone. Surely Tugh would have reached the gate by now. Or, worse, the Robots would have come through, and would assail us here. "Tina!" pleaded Larry, "don't get excited. Take it calmly: you can find the trouble." * * * * * I rushed to the window. I could see the upper half of the cross wall gate-barrier. It jutted above the top edge of the dam from the point of vision. On the Manhattan side I saw the oncoming Robot lights. And then suddenly I made out a light on this side of the barrier; it marked Tugh; it must have been a beam signal he was carrying. It moved slowly, retarded by distance, but it was almost to the gate; and then it reached there. "He's gone through!" I called. Then I saw him on the land side. He had escaped us and joined the Robots. The lights showed them all coming for the gate. And then Tina abruptly found the loosened wire. "I have it!" she exclaimed. She stood up, tugging with all her strength at the great switch-lever. I saw, up there on the top of the dam, a surge of sparks as the current hissed into the wall-barrier; saw the barrier glow a moment and then subside. And presently the lights of the balked Robots, Tugh with them, retreated back into the wrecked and blood-stained city. "We did it!" exclaimed Larry. "We're impregnable here. Tina, now the air-power, for help may be on its way. And then call some other city. Can you do that? They must have sent us help by now." * * * * * In a moment the air-power went on, and the city lighting system. Then Tina was at the great transmitter. As she closed the circuits, London was frantically calling us. In the midst of the chaos of electrical sounds which now filled the control room, came the audible voice of the London operator. "I could not get you because your circuit was broken," it said. "Our air-vessel _Micrad_; bearing the large projector of the Robot-deranger, landed on the ocean surface two hundred miles from New York harbor. It was forced down when your district air-power failed." Tina said hurriedly, "Our air-power is on now. Is the _Micrad_ coming?" "Wait. Hold connection. I will call them." And after a moment's pause the London voice came again: "The _Micrad_ is aloft again, and should be over New York in thirty minutes. You are safe enough now." As the voice clicked off Tina's emotion suddenly overcame her. "Safe enough! And our city red with human blood!" A wild thought abruptly swept me. Mary Atwood was back there in the cavern, alone, waiting for me to return! Subconsciously, in the rush of these tumultuous events, my mind had always been on her; she was secure enough, no doubt, locked in that room. But now Tugh was back in the city, and realizing that his cause was lost he would return to her! I hastily told Larry and Tina. "But he cannot open the door to get into her," said Larry. But Migul could open the door. Where was Migul now? It set me shuddering. * * * * * We decided to rush back by the underground route. The Power House could remain unattended for a time. We got down into the tunnel and made the trip without incident. We ran to the limit of Tina's strength, and then for a distance I carried her. We were all three panting and exhausted when we came to the corridors under the palace. I think I have never had so shuddering an experience as that trip. I tried to convince myself that nothing could have happened to Mary, that all this haste was unnecessary, but the wild thought persisted: Where was Migul? A group of officials stood in one of the palace's lower corridors. As they came hastily up to Tina, I suddenly had a contempt for these men who governed a city in which neither they nor anyone else did any work. In this time of bloodshed, all these inmates of the palace had stayed safely within its walls, knowing that it was well fortified and that within a few hours help would doubtless come. "The _Micrad_ is coming with the long-range deranger," Tina told them briefly. After a moment they hastened away upstairs and I heard one of them shouting: "The revolt is over! Within an hour we will have all the accursed Robots inert. The _Micrad_ can sweep all the city with her ray!" The death of Alent, the guard in the tunnel to the Robot cavern, had been discovered by the palace officials, and another guard was there now in his place. Migul had not passed him, this guard told us. But there had been an interim when the gate was open. Had Migul returned here and gone back to Mary? We reached the cavern of machinery. It was dim and deserted, as before. We came to the door of Mary's room. It was standing half open! * * * * * Mary was gone! The couch was overturned, with its coving and pillows strewn about. The room showed every evidence of a desperate struggle. On the floor the great ten-foot length of Migul lay prone on its back. A small door-porte in its metal side was open; the panel hung awry on hinges half ripped away. From the aperture a coil and grid dangled half out in the midst of a tangled skein of wires. We bent over the Robot. It was not quite inert. Within its metal shell there was a humming and a faint, broken rasping. The staring eye-sockets showed wavering beams of red; the grid of tiny wires back of the parted lips vibrated with a faint jangle. I bent lower. "Migul, can you hear me?" I asked. Would it respond? My heart sent a fervent prayer that this mechanical thing--the product of man's inventive genius through a thousand years--would have a last grasp of energy to answer my appeal. "Migul, can you--" It spoke. "I hear you." They were thin, jangled tones, crackling and hissing with interference. "What happened, Migul? Where is the girl?" I asked. "Tugh--did this--to me. He took the girl." "Where? Migul, where did he take her? Do you know?" "Yes. I--have it recorded that he said--they were going to the Time-cage--overhead in the laboratory. He said--they--he and the girl were leaving forever!" CHAPTER XXII _The Chase to the End of the World_ The giant mechanism, fashioned in the guise of a man, lay dying. Yet not that, for it never had had life. It lay deranged; out of order; its intricate cycle was still operating, but faintly, laboriously. Jangling out of tune. Every moment its internal energy was lessening. It seemed to want to talk. The beams of its eyes rolled wildly. It said: "Tugh--did this--to me. I came back here frightened because I knew that Tugh still controlled me. You--hear me...." There was a muffled, rumbling blur, then its voice clicked on again. "When Tugh came I opened the door to him, even though the girl tried to stop me.... And I was humble before Tugh.... But he was angry because I had released you. He--deranged me. I tried to fight him, and he ripped open my side porte...." I thought the mechanism had gone inert. From within it was complete silence. Larry murmured, "Good Lord, this is gruesome!" Then the faint, rasping voice started again. "Deranged me.... And about Tugh, he--" A blur. Then again, "Tugh--he is--Tugh, he is--" It went into a dull repetition of the three words, ending in a rumble which died into complete silence. The red radiance from the eye-sockets faded and vanished. The thing we had called Migul seemed gone. There was only this metal shell, cast to represent a giant human figure, lying here with its operating mechanisms out of order--smashed. * * * * * I stood up. "That's the end of it. Mary Atwood's gone--" "With Tugh in the Time-cage!" Larry exclaimed. "Tina, can't we--" "Follow them?" Tina interrupted. "Come on! No--you two wait here. I will go upstairs and verify if the Time-cage is gone." She came back in a moment. The laboratory overhead was fortunately deserted of Robots: Larry and I had not thought of that. "The cage is gone!" Tina exclaimed. "Migul told us the truth!" We hastened back through the tunnel, past the guard, up into the palace and into the garden. My heart pounded in my throat for fear that Tina's Time-cage would have vanished. But it stood, dimly glowing under the foliage where she had left it. A young man rushed up to us and said, "Princess Tina, look there!" A great row of colored lights sailed slowly past overhead. The _Micrad_ was here, circling over the city. The storm had abated; it had rained only for a brief time.[6] The crazy winds were subsiding. The _Micrad_ was using its deranging ray: we could hear the thrum of it. It sent out vibrations which threw the internal mechanisms of the Robots out of adjustment, and they were dropping in their tracks all over the city. [Footnote 6: It was afterward found that many of the Robots, heedless of the rain as they ran about the city intent upon their murderous work, had exploded by getting too wet.] * * * * * It chanced, as momentarily we stood there at the entrance to the Time-cage while the great airliner swept by, that the top of the nearby laboratory was visible through the trees. We saw a white search-beam from the _Micrad_ come down and disclosed a group of Robots on the laboratory roof. Then the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and they stood an instant transfixed, stricken, with wildly flailing arms. Then one toppled and fell. Then another. Two rushed together, locked in each other's grip, desperately fighting because of some crazy, deranged thought-impulse. They swayed and tore at each other until both wilted and sank inert. Another tottered with jerky steps to the edge of the roof and plunged headlong, crashing with a great metal clatter to the stone paving of the ground.... The young man who had joined us dashed into the palace. We heard his shouts: "The revolt is over! The revolt is over!" This had been a massacre similar to Tugh's vengeance upon the New York City of 1935; just as senseless. Both, from the beginning, were equally hopeless of ultimate success. Tugh could not conquer this Time-world, so now he had left it, taking Mary Atwood with him.... We hastened into the Time-cage. Larry and I braced ourselves for the shock as Tina slid the door closed and hurried to the controls. Within a moment we were flashing off into the great stream of Time.... * * * * * "You think he has gone forward into the future?" Larry asked. "Won't the instrument show anything, Tina?" "No. No trace of him yet." We were passing 3,000 A.D., traveling into the future. Tina reasoned that Tugh, according to Harl's confession, had originally come from a future Time-world. It seemed most probable that now he would return there. The Time-telespectroscope so far had shown us no evidence of the other cage. Tina kept the telescope barrel trained constantly on that other space five hundred feet from us which held Tugh's vehicle. The flowing gray landscape off there gave no sign of our quarry; yet we knew we could not pass it, without at least a brief flash of it in the telespectroscope and upon the image-mirror. Nervously, breathlessly we waited for a sign of the other Time-cage. But nothing showed. We were not traveling fast. With Larry and Tina at the instrument table, I was left to stand at the window. Always I gazed eastward. That other little point of space only five hundred feet to the east held Mary; she was there; but not _now_. She was remote, inaccessible. The thought of her with Tugh, so inaccessible, set me shuddering. I was barely aware of the changing gray outlines of the city: I stared, praying for the fleeting glimpse of a spectral cage.... I think that up to 3,000 A.D., New York remained much the same. And then, quite suddenly, in some vast storm or cataclysm, it was gone. I saw but a blurred chaos. This was near 4,000 A.D. Then it was rebuilt, smaller, with more trees growing about, until presently there seemed only a forest. People, if they still were here, were building such transitory structures that I could not see them. * * * * * 5,000 A.D. Mankind no doubt had reached its peak of civilization, paused at the summit and now was in decadence, reverting to savagery. Perhaps in Europe the civilized peak lasted longer. This was a backward space during the ascent; perhaps now it was reverting faster to the primitive. But I think that by 15,000 A.D., mankind over all the Earth had become primitive. There is no standing still: we must go forward; or back. Man, with his own machines softening him, enabling him to do nothing, eventually unfitted himself to cope with nature. That storm at 4,000 A.D. in New York, for instance, even in my own Time would have been merely an incentive to reconstruct upon a greater scale. But the men of 4,000 A.D. could not do that.... At the year 10,000 A.D., with a seemingly primeval forest around us, Tina, Larry and I held an anxious consultation. We had anticipated that Tugh would stop in his own Time-world. That might have been around 3,000 or 4,000; but we hardly thought, as we viewed the scene in passing, that he had come originally from beyond 4,000. He was too civilized. Tugh had not stopped. He had to be still ahead of us, so our course was to follow. Whenever he stopped, we would see him. If he turned back and flashed past us, that too would be evident. But if, from 2,930, he had gone into the past--! * * * * * And then suddenly we glimpsed the other cage! It was ahead of us, traveling more slowly and retarding as though about to stop. A gray unbroken forest was here. The time was about 12,000 A.D. Tina saw it first through the little telescopic-barrel; then it showed on the mirror-grid--a faint, ghostly-barred shape, thin as gossamer. We even saw it presently through the window. It held its steady position, level with us, hanging solid amid the melting, changing gray outlines of the forest trees. They blurred it as they rose and fell. This chase through Time! The two cages sped forward with the gray panorama whirling around them. Of all the scene, only that other cage, to us, was real. Yet it was the cages which were apparitions. We gathered at our eastward window to gaze across the void of that five hundred feet. The interior of Tugh's cage was not visible to us. A little window--a thinner patch in the lattices of the cage-side--fronted us; but nothing showed in it. We were so helpless! Only five hundred feet away, the Tugh cage was there--now; yet we could do nothing save hold our Time-changing rate to conform with it. Of course Tugh saw us. He was making no effort to elude us, for neither cage was running at its maximum. For hours I stood gazing, praying that Mary might be safe, striving with futile fancy to guess what might be transpiring within that cage speeding side by side with us in the blurred shadows of the corridors of Time. And again, as so many times before, I was balked at guessing Tugh's motives for his actions. He knew we could not assail him unless he stopped. But to what destination was he going? * * * * * It was a chase--to our consciousness of the passing of Time--which lasted several hours. Tugh altered his Time-rate and sped more swiftly. My heart sank, for this showed he was not preparing to stop. We lost direct sight of the other cage several times as it drew ahead of us. But it was always visible on the image-mirror. "I think," Tina said finally, "that we should stay behind it. When he retards to stop, we will have a better opportunity of landing simultaneously with him." We passed 100,000 A.D. The forest went down, and it seemed that only rocks were here. A barren vista was visible off to the river and the distant sea. The familiar conformations of the sea and the land were changed. There was a different shore-line. It was nearer at hand now; and it was creeping closer. I stared at that blurred gray surface of water; at the wide, undulating stretch of rock. We came to 1,000,000 A.D.--a million years into my future. Ice came briefly, and vanished again. But there were no trees springing into life on this barren landscape. I could not fancy that even the transitory habitations of humans were here in this cold desolation. Were we headed for the End? I could envisage a dying world, its internal fires cooling. Ten million years.... Then a hundred million.... The gray scene, blended of dark nights and sunshine days, began changing its monochrome. There were fleeting alternating intervals, now, when it was darker, and then lighter with a tinge of red. The Earth's rotation was slowing down. Through thousands of centuries the change had been proceeding, but only now could I see the lengthening days and nights. Perhaps now the day was a month long, and the night the same. * * * * * A billion years! 1,000,000,000 A.D.! By now the day and the year were of equal length. And it chanced that this Western Hemisphere faced the sun. I could see the sun now, motionless above the horizon. The scene was dull red. The sun painted the rocks and the sullen sea with blood.... A shout from Larry whirled me round. "George! Good God!" He was bending over the image-mirror; Tina, ghastly pale, with utter horror stamped upon her face, sprang for the controls. On the mirror I caught a fleeting glimpse of Tugh's cage, wrecked and broken--and instantly gone. "It stopped!" Larry shouted. "Good God, it stopped all at once! It was wrecked! Smashed!" We reeled; I all but lost consciousness with the shock of our own abrupt retarding. Our cage stopped and turned back. Tina located the wreckage and stopped again. We slid the door open. The outer air was deadly cold. The sun was a huge dull-red ball hanging in the haze of a grey sky. The rocks were grey-black, with the blood-light of the sun upon them. Five hundred feet from us, by the shore of an oily, sullen sea, the wreckage of Tugh's cage was piled in a heap. Near it, the crumpled white figure of Mary lay on the rocks. And beside her, still with his black cloak around him, crouched Tugh! CHAPTER XXIII _Diabolical Exile of Time!_ Tugh saw us as we stood in our cage doorway. His thick barrel-like figure rose erect, and from his parted cloak his arms waved with a wild gesture of defiance and triumph. He was clearly outlined in the red sunlight against the surface of the sea behind. We saw in one of his hands a ray cylinder--and then his arm came down and he fired at us. It was the white, disintegrating ray. We were stricken by surprise, and stood for that moment transfixed in our doorway. Tugh's narrow, intensely white beam leaped over the intervening rocks; but it fell short of us. I saw that it had a range of about a hundred feet. Over the muffled heavy silence of the blood-red day the cripple's curse floated clear. He lowered his weapon; and, heedless that we also might be armed, he leaped nimbly past Mary's prostrate form and came shambling over the rocks directly for me! It stung me into action, and for all the chaotic rush of these desperate moments my heart surged with relief. Mary was not dead! Beyond Tugh's oncoming figure, as he shambled like an infuriated charging bear over the rough rocky ground, I saw the white form of Mary move! She was striving to sit up! I held my ray cylinder--the one I had rescued from Migul. But its range was no more than twenty feet: I had tested it; and Tugh's beam had flashed a full hundred! I whirled on Larry. "Get away from here, you and Tina! You can't help me!" "George, listen--" "He's coming. Larry--you damn fool, get away from here! It goes a hundred feet, that ray of his: it'll be raking us in a minute! Run, I tell you! Get to that line of rocks!" * * * * * Close behind our cage was a small broken ridge of rocks--strewn boulders in a tumbled line some ten or fifteen feet in height. It would afford shelter: there were broken places to give passage through it. The ridge curved crescent-shaped behind our cage and ran down toward the shore. Larry and Tina stood white and confused. Larry panted, "But, George. I can help you fight him! Hide here in the cage--" "Get away, I tell you! It's his death or mine this time! I'll get him if I can!" I shoved Larry violently away and ducked back into our doorway. Only a few breathless seconds had passed; Tugh was still several hundred feet away from us. Larry and Tina ran behind the cage, darted between the boulders of the ridge and vanished. I crouched in the cage. Tugh was not visible from here. A moment passed. Dared I remain? If I could get Tugh within twenty feet of me, my shot was as good as his.... The silence was horrible. Was he coming forward? Did he know I was in here? I thought surely he must have seen Larry and Tina run away, and me dart in here: we had all been in plain sight of him. This horrible silence! Was he creeping up on me? Would he fire through the doorway, or appear abruptly at the window? I could not tell where to place myself in the room--and it could mean my life or death. The silence was split by Tina calling, "Tugh, we have caught you!" * * * * * Her voice was to one side and behind our cage, calling defiance at Tugh to distract his attention from me. Through the window I saw the flash of his beam, slanting sidewise at Tina. I gauged the source of his ray to be still some distance off, and crept to the door, cautiously peering. Tugh stood on the open rock surface. He had swung to my right and was near the little ridge of rocks where it turned and bent down to the shore. Behind me came Tina's voice again: "At last we have you, Tugh!" I saw Tina poised on the top of the ridge, partially behind me at the elbow of the ridge-curve. She screamed her defiance, and again Tugh fired at her. The beam slanted over me, but still was short. Larry had vanished. Then I saw him, though Tugh did not. He had run along behind the ridge, and appeared, now, well down toward the shore. He was barely a hundred feet from the cripple. I saw him stoop, seize a chunk of rock, and throw it. The missile bounded and passed close to Tugh. Larry instantly ducked back out of sight. The bounding stone startled Tugh; he whirled toward it and fired over the ridge. Tina again had changed her position and was shouting at him. They were trying to exhaust his cylinder charges; and if they could do that he would be helpless before me. * * * * * For a moment he stood as though confused. As he turned to gaze after Tina, Larry flung another rock. But this time Tugh did not fire. He started back toward where, by the wreckage of his cage, Mary was now sitting up in a daze; then he changed his mind, whirled and fired directly at my doorway. I was just beyond the effective range of his beam, but it was truly aimed: I felt the horrible nauseous impact of it, a shuddering, indescribable sickening of all my being. I staggered back into the room and recovered my strength. A side window porte was open; I leaped through it and landed upon the rocks, with the cage between Tugh and me. He fired again at the doorway. Tina had disappeared. Larry was now out of range, standing on the ridge, shouting and hurling rocks. But Tugh did not heed him. He was shambling for my doorway. He would pass within twenty feet of me as I crouched outside the cage at its opposite corner. I could take him by surprise. And then he saw me. He was less than a hundred feet away. He changed his direction and fired again, full at me. But I had had enough warning, and, as the beam struck the cage corner, I ran back along the outer wall of the cage and appeared at the other corner. Tugh came still closer, his weapon pointed downward as he ran. Fifty feet away. Not close enough! I think, there at the last, that Tugh was wholly confused. Larry had come much closer. He was shouting: and from the ridge behind me Tina was shouting. Tugh ran, not for where I was lurking now, but for the corner where a moment before he had seen me. Now he was thirty feet from me.... Twenty.... Then nearer than that. Wholly without caution he came forward.... I leaned around the edge of the cage and fired. For one breathless instant the voices of Tina and Larry abruptly hushed. My beam struck Tugh in the chest. It caught him and clung to him, bathing him in its spreading, intense white glare. He stopped in his tracks; stood transfixed for one breathless, horrible instant! He was so close that I could see the stupid surprise on his hideous features. His wide slit of mouth gaped with astonishment. * * * * * My beam clung to him, but he did not fall! He stood astonished; then turned and came at me! For just a moment I was stricken helpless there before him. What manner of man was this? _He did not fall!_ My ray, which had decomposed the body of Alent, the guard, and left his skeleton stripped and bleached in an instant, did not harm Tugh! He had walked into it, taken it full and he did not fall! He was still alive! I came to my senses and saw that Larry, seeing my danger, had run into the open, dangerously close, and hurled a rock. It struck Tugh upon the shoulder and deflected his aim, so that his flash went over me. I saw Tugh whirl toward Larry, and I rushed forward, ripping loose the cylinder of the ray projector from its restraining battery cord. In the instant the cripple was turned half way from me I landed upon him, and with all my strength brought the point of the small heavy cylinder down on his skull. There was a strange splintering crack, and a wild, eery scream from his voice. He fell, with me on top of him. Crowning horror! Tugh lay motionless, twisted half on his back, his thick arms outstretched on the rocks and his weapon still clutched in his hand. Culminating, gruesome horror! I rose from his body and stood shuddering. Amazing realization! The bulging misshapen head was splintered open. And from it, strewn over the rocks, were tiny intricate cogs and wheels, coils and broken wires! He was not a man, but a Robot! A Super-Robot from some unknown era, running amuck! A mechanism so cleverly fashioned by the genius of man that it stood diabolically upon the threshhold of humanity! A super-mechanical exile of Time! But its wild, irrational career of destruction through the ages now was over. It lay inert, smashed and broken at my feet.... CHAPTER XXIV _The Return_ I think that there is little I should add. Tugh's last purpose had been to hurl himself and Mary past the lifetime of our world, wrecking the cage and flinging them into Eternity together. And Tugh was luring our cage and us to the same fate. But Mary, to save us, had watched her opportunity, seized the main control lever and demolished the vehicle by its instantaneous stopping. We left the shell of Tugh lying there in the red sunlight of the empty, dying world, and returned to Tina's palace. We found that the revolt was over. The city, with help arrived, was striving to emerge from the bloody chaos. Larry and Tina decided to remain permanently in her Time. They would take us back; but the cage was too diabolical to keep in existence. "I shall send it forward unoccupied," said Tina; "flash it into Eternity, where Tugh tried to go." Accompanied by Larry, she carried Mary and me to 1935. With Mary's father, her only relative, dead, she yielded to my urging. We arrived in October, 1935. My New York, like Tina's a victim of the exile of Time, was rapidly being reconstructed. * * * * * It was night when we stopped and the familiar outlines of Patton Place were around us. We stood at the cage doorway. "Good-by," I said to Larry and Tina. "Good luck to you both!" The girls kissed each other. Such strangely contrasting types! Over a thousand years was between them, yet how alike they were, fundamentally. Both--just girls. Larry gripped my hand. In times of emotion one is sometimes inarticulate. "Good-by, George," he said. "We--we've said already all there is to say, haven't we?" There were tears in both the girls' eyes. We four had been so close; we had been through so much together; and now we were parting forever. All four of us were stricken with surprise at how it affected us. We stood gazing at one another. "No!" I burst out. "I haven't said all there is to say. Don't you destroy that cage! You come back! Guard it as carefully as you can, and come back. Land here, next year in October; say, night of the 15th. Will you? We'll be here waiting." "Yes," Tina abruptly agreed. We stood watching them as they slid the door closed. The cage for a moment stood quiescent. Then it began faintly humming. It glowed; faded to a spectre; and was gone. Mary and I turned away into the New York City of 1935, to begin our life together. (_The End_) TO THE MOON The prediction that man will fly to the moon within the next 100 years was made by John Q. Stewart, associate professor of astronomical physics at Princeton University, in a recent address at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. The first obstacle to be overcome is that of developing a speed of 25,000 miles an hour, the professor said, which means production of fuels more powerful than coal, gasoline, dynamite or any other source of energy now available. Such remarkable progress has been made in the speed of passenger carrying vehicles in the last century that scientists believe that a speed of 1,000 miles per hour will be reached in 1950 and 50,000 an hour will be surpassed before the year 2030, a century from now. The one theoretically feasible method of making the journey to the moon, Stewart believes, is a vehicle propelled on the principle of the rocket. He visions a ship built in the form of a large metal sphere--110 feet in diameter, weighing 70,000 metric tons and carrying a crew of sixty and a dozen scientists. A dozen or more cannon would protrude slightly from the surface, shooting material the rate of 200 miles a second. A half hour or so before noon and about three days before a new moon, Stewart would head his ship toward the sun, expecting it to rise twelve miles in the first six minutes and to soar out of the earth's atmosphere at 200 miles per hour. Two hours and 29 minutes after the take-off the firing from the lower cannon would be stopped with the ship going upward, the professor estimates, at 190 miles per minute and having reached a height of 13,200 miles. Seventy hours later, crossing the moon's orbit, Stewart would fire the forward cannon and the ship would coast around the moon, becoming the temporary satellite of a satellite. "The rest would be easy," said Stewart, "owing to the lesser gravity of the moon. The cannon would be fired to cushion the fall to the moon as the ship was gradually sucked toward the satellite. "The moon is airless, waterless and lifeless, days and nights are two weeks long, temperatures range from that of boiling water at noon down perhaps to that of liquid air at midnight. The men of the ship would walk on the moon clad in diving suits. Gravity being only one-sixth that of the earth, a man would carry several hundred pounds of apparatus for providing air and for regulating the temperature. "To leave the moon the ship would fire her rear cannon and coast back to earth. By firing its forward cannon it would cushion its landing on the earth, which would have to be made on a desert, because of the tremendous charges the cannon would fire." _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories [Illustration: The Readers' Corner] _The Author Explains_ Dear Editor: Am very much puzzled by the several apparent mistakes in two of the stories in the April issue of Astounding Stories. In "The World Behind the Moon," Mr. Ernst makes an error so obvious that it almost makes me believe that it isn't an error. Like doing a math problem and finding it so easy that you're sure that you have it wrong. Anyway, here is my problem; this is taken verbatim from the story: "At two thousand miles from the Earth there had still been enough hydrogen traces in the ether to give purchase to the explosions of their water-motor." Does the author mean to say that the explosions of the tubes have to have something to push against to have any action? (a) Has it not been proven actually and mathematically that the explosions of rockets and expanding gases are even more powerful in space? The space ship in this story was equipped with both bow and stern tubes; why not fire them to slow the ship down instead of waiting to run into some resistance? (b) Also, when they landed they took some air-guns which shot bullets containing a liquid which exploded when heated by the passage of the shell through the barrel; then the author goes ahead and tells us that the planet was about as hot as the tropics. Such heat should explode the bullets, but it didn't. Why? Mr. Ernst has his heroes do a lot of running around on that little planet. (c) Since the planet is smaller than the moon, it hasn't much gravity and therefore can't retain a very heavy atmosphere, or one very thick. Anyone doing all that violent exercise would probably die of exhaustion before many minutes of it. "Four Miles Within" was a good story, but I am unable to understand why they did not find a lot of stagnant air. Air that had lain stagnant for the time that cavern must have been closed would have killed the person who breathed it. Also, I would imagine that it wouldn't be safe to handle a chunk of radium like the characters in the story did; it's liable to burn. However, it probably wasn't pure radium, just pitchblende-bearing rocks. The rest of the stories were fine. I especially like the stories of the Special Patrol Service which S. P. Wright has created. Let's have some more stories of Commander John Hanson and his crew. "The Exile of Time" has started off quite well and I look forward to the next installments. Cummings is always good for a batch of thrills and some swell adventure, to say nothing of the enjoyable way he introduces science into the story. Wish you would publish this, as I would like to get in touch with some other Science-Fiction fans. By the way, some of the readers seem to want the mag changed, but don't you do a thing to it. All the suggestions, if followed, would make "our" mag like the other S.-F. mags on the market, and I read Astounding Stories because it is DIFFERENT, and I mean every one of those capitals!--Ben Smith, Box 444, Billings, Mont. Mr. Ernst's Answers: (a) No, it has not been actually proved. It has been indicated mathematically (by formulae based on conjecture), but never actually solved--for the very good reason that it is impossible to reproduce spacial conditions in earthly laboratories. Know how an explosive force would react in space? We don't even know positively what space is, let alone how our chemicals and instruments would behave in it. The majority theory is that explosive charges would propel a rocket or space ship more effectively in the (theoretical) emptiness of space, than in our atmosphere. But to my mind it is quite possible that an explosion--a violent expansion of gases causing rapid increase of pressures--would be ineffectual where there are no pressures to be increased. Might not the violently expanding gases fly forth from an exhaust vent to expand instantly, frictionlessly and impotently to the ends of the universe? In my story, "The World Behind the Moon," I assumed that would occur. And no man living is in a position positively to disprove it. And, as a corollary, if a propulsion explosion cannot have effect in empty space, as presumed in the story, the space ship must enter atmosphere before it can stop by firing its bow tubes. Otherwise, with the bow tubes shooting their expanding gases futilely into nothingness, you could go into "reverse" till the cows came home and the ship would hurtle forward just the same. (b) Friction of a bullet through a rifle barrel produces a temperature considerably higher than "tropical." (c) Again, no one knows spacial or planetary conditions. It seems reasonable to assume that a planet's mass may have a fairly direct bearing on the density of its atmosphere. However, Venus, a smaller globe than Earth, is supposed to have a denser atmosphere. For all we know to the contrary, meteors no larger than pebbles may carry about with them microscopic films of "atmospheres" of varying densities.--Paul Ernst. _Hitting Our Stride_ Dear Editor: The more I read Astounding Stories, the more I like it. You're just getting your stride this, the second year. But why not foresee the demand of your Readers and have a few stories by R. F. Starzl? You have other top-notchers such as Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster; and Tom Curry is another good writer. "Monsters of Mars" would have been better if it were boiled down to about two thirds as many pages. It reads "stretched."--W. P. O'Toole, Parker, S. Dak. "_This Missile_" Dear Editor: Congratulations! Your magazine--excuse me, "our" magazine--is going over big! However, there are a few things I would like to suggest. First, why not take a vote on the quarterly idea? Second, give us more stories and illustrations. Increase the price if you have to, but keep up the good work and I'm your steady buyer. So far I have not missed a copy, and my only regret is that I didn't have sense enough to keep the first six or seven instead of throwing them away. By the way, didn't I notice a rather heated argument going on in "The Readers' Corner" about reprints? And what is the matter with reprints? Nothing, except that they are reprints. That is hardly an argument, but if you value my monthly twenty cents please give us at least one reprint to a volume, which I see comprises three copies of your--pardon, "our" magazine. If the rest of the Readers acquiesce I think we ought to have a reprint in the near future. If they object, well, the world will roll on. Your time is precious, and besides there are more Readers waiting to say the same things I have just said, so I will close this missile--er, missive.--Eugene Benefiel, The Pioneer, Tucson, Arizona. _From the Antipodes_ Dear Editor: As a regular Reader of your magazine, Astounding Stories, I thought I would write and tell you how I appreciate the stories contained in it. I am a heavy Reader and have always had a soft spot for stories unusual and bizarre. Until I happened to see your magazine at a bookshop in Perth, I had to be content with occasional Science Fiction stories by Wells, Burroughs, and a few others which I picked up in my browsing in various bookshops and libraries. Now that I get Astounding Stories regularly, I have a monthly feast of good things that I read and reread until the next issue arrives. You ask us Readers to criticize the magazine. Well, I have no complaints worth mentioning, except that some of the illustrations do not tally sufficiently with the text of the story. Some of the stories, in my opinion, are weak and not worth reading. But, as tastes differ, I take everything as it is, and say you have a first-class publication. Will you thank your Authors for me for the very many hours of interesting reading they have given me during the past twelve months? Later I intend to get my Astounding Stories bound in cloth covers, each twelve months' issue in a volume. If any Reader sees this letter--of course, should you think it worth while to publish it--and can spare the time to write to me here in Australia, I would be very grateful. Perhaps we could exchange snapshots of various places of interest. Every part of America interests me, so a Reader need not back out because he thinks his district would not be interesting enough. Here's hoping Astounding Stories grows and prospers as the years go by, so as to give more entertainment to me and my fellow-readers. A rather selfish wish, you may think, but you will forgive me when I say that I look forward with great pleasure to each month's issue.--Claude J. Nanley, 65 Forrest St., Mt. Lawley, Western Australia. _Note to Ray Cummings_ Dear Editor: I have just started Ray Cummings' latest story in the April issue. Although I wish Cummings would lay off this type of story, I am willing to read anything by him. Jack Williamson's "The Lake of Light" ranked second in this issue. He is another Merritt. "The Ghost World," by S. P. Wright, came third. Edmond Hamilton was better than he has been of late. If anyone wants to read "Through the Dragon Glass," "The Girl in the Golden Atom," etc, and writes to me, I will tell him where they can be obtained. (This is not an attempt at free advertising.) I know several places where it is possible to secure works of this kind and will be glad to assist anyone who doesn't. Cummings brought me to your mag. He is keeping me there. So hold on to him. But, please tell him to forget all about time and probe the mysteries of the infinitely large and small, of interplanetary space, of future civilization and future warfare.--Dale Mullen, 611 West Fifth, Topeka, Kansas. _The Effects of Cannabis_ Dear Editor: I have sold magazines, written for magazines, and, now that I have just concluded your April issue, I am editing one--for myself. Specifically, one story, "Four Miles Within." Inside of a radium mine! Chased by an amoeboid body! Ooh! Several years ago when I was a clinical chemist in hospital service, the Roentgenologist, also a young chap, and a surgical nurse and myself were so badly burned with three grains of the substance enclosed in a lead capsule that we were crippled for nearly a month. [No fair. Your experience was with pure radium. It was only radium ore in the story.--_Ed._] Imagine being four miles inside of the earth exposed to radium "ore"! And chased and pursued by a gigantic amoeba! Oh, oh! That must have been my pet mother-of-vinegar that escaped. She was hard to herd. She took after my dad's pet fish which fell through a crack in a bridge and was drowned. In passing, it is interesting to note that persons can vanish "into" a plane surface; say, "into" a fifth dimension. My instructor in trig. must have been all wet. And Dr. Bird catches a man withdrawing "menthium" from human brains with a "needle," without the use of either x-ray or a trephine! And then low forms of life such as crabs and alligators with very highly developed scientific knowledge! A few issues ago octopi were in the lead! And those "space" ships! Mars must be an interesting spot. And those Martians! Sometimes they are ant-like, and other times worms, and again human freaks! (I still prefer the silver-green messenger I saw on the stage twenty years ago. He was a gentleman and a scholar and no one yet has improved upon him.) And those radio waves that can vibrate matter in a straight line! One Jackson Gee vibrates it in two straight lines. (Rather funny at that.) And people disappear into an atom by taking pellets! They take the pellets into their system and that shrinks or expands them. How does the author calculate that in "Beyond The Vanishing Point"? The pellets must contain cannabis indica (hashish) I guess. Once upon a time I was suffering from an acute attack of colic and was obliged to use an anti-spasmodic. I took cannabis, and in the delirium that followed I shrunk small enough to walk into a mouse-hole into which I had seen a mouse disappear a few hours previous. The mouse was there and looked like an elephant. I awoke in a sweat. Maybe all your stories won't be weird and full of monstrosities. Science is full of beauty and culture, you know.--Arthur H. Carrington, Seaside Heights Pharmacy, Seaside Heights, N. J. _Where Fantasy Meets Science Fiction_ Dear Editor: I have purchased many of the issues of your magazine, and have read everything in them, including the letter columns, with great interest. I have particularly enjoyed certain stories, such as "The Forgotten Planet," "The Jovian Jest" and "The Planet of Dread," in which genuine imaginative quality was combined with good writing. Many other tales, not so well written, I have enjoyed for their fantasy, their suggestive ideas. In following "The Readers' Corner" I have noted the objection to so-called "impossible" stories, voiced by some of your Readers. Stories thus classified, one would infer, are tales dealing with the marvelous and the mysterious in which the author has not attempted to give a naturalistic or scientific explanation of his wonders and mysteries. In other words, he has not rendered them in terms of the test-tube. He has admitted the inexplicable, the "supernatural." Personally, I enjoy stories of this type, as well as those that are written with the purely scientific approach. I suspect that those who condemn them are suffering from a rather amusing--and also pathetic--sort of unconscious hypocrisy. I think that people who read your magazine, as well as Science Fiction magazines in general, are people with the ingrained human love for wonder and mystery; but some of them are afraid to accept and enjoy anything--even a fairy tale--that is not couched in the diction of modern materialistic science, with a show of concern for verified credibilities. Probably, in most cases, they would like and prize the very stories that they condemn if the writer had used a different terminology, and had offered explanations that were even superficially logical according to known laws. Please do not think that I am decrying, or even criticizing, Science Fiction. I consider it a highly important and significant branch of present-day writing, and have hopes of contributing to it myself. I am merely advocating an open attitude of mind and imagination. For those who think that the "impossible" requires justification--or cannot be justified--I would suggest that the only impossible thing is to define and delimit the impossible. In an infinite, eternal universe, there is nothing imaginable--or unimaginable--which might not happen, might not be true, somewhere or sometime. Science has discovered, and will continue to discover, an enormous amount of relative data; but there will always remain an illimitable residue of the undiscovered and the unknown. And the field for imaginative fiction, both scientific and non-scientific, is, it seems to me, wholly inexhaustible.--Clark Ashton Smith, Auburn, Cal. _Heroes Too Heroic?_ Dear Editor: I wrote you a letter last month. I'm writing you a letter this month, and I'll write you a letter next month. In fact, I'm going to write you a letter every month just as soon as I finish the latest issue of Astounding Stories, so you might as well have a special department installed in Astounding Stories right away entitled "Letters from the Sap Who Thinks He Is So Smart," or something else equally appropriate. Have you ever noticed that 99% of Edmond Hamilton's stories have the same plot as "Monsters of Mars"? The plot I mean is this: A group of men, preferably three, get into enemy territory. As to the enemy (if the enemy are not lizards or some other repulsive form of life), Mr. Hamilton has them wear repulsive clothes, live in ugly buildings, etc., to make the reader dislike them at the start. An old, old idea, and quite a commonly used one, is to have these creatures about to declare war and conquer the hero's country with the enemy's super-weapons; and after capturing our brave, bold, and heroic heroes, proceed to tell the heroes the way the weapons work, the zero hour set for attack, and the line of march of the enemy's armies (as if prisoners are told all these things!). Our heroes then cleverly escape and grab an enemy machine. About two thousand of the enemy close in to the kill, but (Mr. Hamilton simply loves "buts") our brave heroes glance over the strange controls of the captured craft and without hesitation pick out the right levers and hold the enemy at bay. After annihilating most of them, and after the zero hour has come, the heroes prevent the great invasion and return to their native land. It is interesting to note that the heroes, though greatly outnumbered and with strange weapons, always down many of the enemy while they themselves escape unscathed. Also, Mr. Hamilton loves narrow escapes, and phrases such as these appear frequently in his story: "But even as he raised his deadly ray-tube, I leaped and knocked it from his hand. They charged, but I was too quick and dodged as the foremost hurtled at me." These incidents are supposed to get the reader all excited, but after a while they grow monotonous. The second story in the April issue, "The Exile of Time," promises to be excellent in every way. It would be interesting if George Rankin, in his time-traveling, should witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the Battle of Bunker Hill. "Four Miles Within" was good also, save that the heroes' escape from being marooned and James Quade's death savored unpleasantly of Edmond Hamilton. Sewell Peaslee Wright's adventures of the space patrol are always fascinating, and "The Ghost World" is a splendid example of this. On the whole, your magazine is practically perfect.--Robert Baldwin, 359 Hazel Ave., Highland Park, Ill. _Likes 'Em to Seem Real_ Dear Editor: I've been reading Astounding Stories since the November issue, and I think that, on the whole, it is a very good magazine. It is of a handy size, convenient price, and O. K., except that you might cut the edges of the pages smoother. Wesso is an excellent artist. I think your best authors are Harl Vincent, Ray Cummings and Capt. S. P. Meek. I like Capt. Meek's Dr. Bird stories immensely. Also among your best authors are Charles W. Diffin aid Murray Leinster. And now about the stories themselves. I've noticed that quite a few in "The Readers' Corner" are all for fiction and no scientific explanation. I like fiction, too, but anybody can make up a pretty good plot about a girl, a lover, and a villain, and have a wild theory of super-science for a basis, and then not explain it. What I like most is when an Author--who uses such a theory as, for instance, making matter invisible by bathing it with a ray, the color of which is beyond the range of the spectrum, as in "Terrors Unseen," by Harl Vincent--backs up his idea with a clear explanation and makes it plausible and convincing. It makes his tale seem more possible, and hence more real. I like it much better when the writer doesn't even suggest a theory in his plot--to say nothing of trying to prove it--than when he gives you the invention of a professor in the year 2431, and lets you imagine how and why it works.--T. Caldwell, 912 Moreno Road, Santa Barbara, Cal. _Covers Too Imaginative?_ Dear Editor: For crying out loud, why can't everyone be satisfied! One person says "our" mag is too small, another says it's O. K.; one wants so-and-so's work, someone else doesn't, etc. Why can't Readers be reasonable? They'll continually admit A. S. is the best Science Fiction mag on the market (with which I thoroughly agree) and then they'll start complaining. As if anything can be 100% perfect--though A. S. comes awfully near it! Then for some of the complaints, I recall but two sensible ones. I have read every issue of A. S. except the first two, and several times I have been tempted to write to you about them. 1--Too imaginative a cover gives the narrow-minded non-Science Fiction reader an idea that "our" mag contains trash. I refer to such covers as those on the August, September, October, 1930, issues, and the March, April, and especially May, 1931, issues. These people's opinions reflect rather harshly on the faithful A. S. Readers. Can't the covers be more like those on the March, May, June and July, 1930, issues? (All those stories themselves, however, were great, as usual.) 2--Please hold down on "The Readers' Corner." Isn't an eight and nine-page section a bit too much? A short story has been suggested--good idea. Why not limit it to a maximum of, say, five pages? I shall not complain of any of the stories, because I realize that others probably enjoyed what very few I may not have. I must, however, say that Ray Cummings' "Brigands of the Moon" holds first place, in my opinion. It was great! Please keep up the excellent work.--Meredith L. Evons, 4001 Cedar Lane, Drexel Hill, Pa. "_Evenly Divided_" Dear Editor: Although I missed the first few issues of Astounding Stories due to the fact that I was not aware of its publication, I have become a regular reader. In glancing through your "Readers' Corner," I became aware of the fact that most of the letters therein praise Astounding Stories to the skies, and put it far ahead of any other Science Fiction magazine. I will not go quite so far, as it is my belief that most magazines of this type are on the same level. In fact, it seems absurd to me to state otherwise, as the authors who write for you one month publish stories in another magazine the next month. Of course, these authors put out, once in a while, stories that are much better than their usual offering, but, taken over a fairly long period of time, these periodic occurrences will be about evenly divided among various magazines. I have the conceit to believe that I know what I am talking about, as my observations are based on five years of Science Fiction reading. Of course, while I believe that there are other magazines equally as good, Astounding Stories is certainly not inferior to any. There is always room for a Science Fiction magazine of the same caliber as Astounding Stories, but unfortunately for the public there are too few of them.--James M. Kennedy, Ithaca, N. Y. _Machine or Beast?_ Dear Editor: Having read about every issue of Astounding Stories to date, I have decided that it is the best of the three Science Fiction magazines that I have read. The best story that you have published yet, in my opinion, is "Brigands of the Moon," by Ray Cummings. Sewell Peaslee Wright and Victor Rousseau are also very good writers. The only two stories that I did not like were "Murder Madness" and "Earth, the Marauder." The former belonged in a detective magazine, and the latter in the waste basket. It was too far-fetched for even my imagination. Now a word about your cover illustrations. The first issue that I bought convinced me that your artist was a genius, but my opinion of him is steadily decreasing. That illustration that I speak of was a scene from "Brigands of the Moon." It certainly was good. Lately, I am ashamed to show the magazine to my friends because of the gaudily painted and repugnant creatures on the cover. A picture of a machine is much more appropriate than a beast of some kind. Wesso seems to be able draw a picture like that which is on the March or April, 1930, numbers better than those of late. I would like to communicate with Science Fiction Readers of about my age, which is 15. I will answer any or all letters that are written to me.--William D. Crocker, Ashfield, Mass. _Expert Opinion_ Dear Editor: May I express my pleasure and gratification in your worthy magazine? I read two other Science Fiction publications beside yours, but Astounding Stories is by far their superior, especially as there is a human interest to your stories that is sadly lacking in others. They also contain too much technical detail. Your magazine is just right. The paper is easy on the eyes and the type is distinct and doesn't blur or tire the eyes. The cover illustrations leave nothing to be desired. The edges, size, number of pages, etc., are of no concern to me. I have read every issue of Astounding Stories since it was published and can find no fault with it whatever. If those soreheads who howl incessantly about minor details would only try to get out a paper of their own they would soon see what a wonderful work you are doing. The May 1931, issue, which I have just finished, is really the best collection of Science Fiction stories I've read in many a day, and I've read quite a bit. I wish you every success in the world.--C. P. Binsford. M. D., 604 Pearl Street, Huntsville, Ala. _A Satirical Drama--Complete_ Dear Editor: One Act Play of the Future Time-traveler from the Twentieth Century: "So this is the year 24,000 A.D.?" Sulsu-D-9: "Yes, Visitor from the Past." Time-Traveler: "Say, Sulsu-D-9, has Astounding Stories brought out a Quarterly yet?" Sulsu-D-9: "No, Man from the Long Ago, but it looks like we'll have one within the next five years!"--Forrest J. Ackerman, 530 Staples Ave., San Francisco, Cal. _An Employment Non-Solution_ Dear Editor: Owing to the fact that I have been a constant Reader of Astounding Stories since the first day it appeared on the news-stands, I think that it is about time for me to drop a few lines to you to show my appreciation for the many, many good stories that you have given the Readers of Science Fiction in the pages of your mag. I agree very strongly with Mr. Sager of Bessemer, Ala., about the paper in the book. If the stories are interesting, why in the name of Seven Kinds of Hades should anyone worry about the kind of paper as long as the print is readable. What is that old saying about the best articles not being always in the best wrapped parcels? I am here to say that Astounding Stories is the best of its kind. What I have to say now is by no means a criticism. I am merely asking for an explanation. I have no regard for those people who are continually looking for flaws to peck about in various stories. In the May, 1931, issue my choice of all the fine stories was "Dark Moon." That was a super-story and I enjoyed it from start to finish, even the third or fourth time I read it. If a story is worth reading once it is worth reading several times, is my belief. But now comes the question. Will some other kind Reader endeavor to explain it to me? How could the intrepid explorers on the Dark Moon see the light of Earth and the other planets if the light from the Dark Moon could not pass the gaseous formation to Earth, etc.? And how could the Dark Moon receive the light that it did? [Mr. Diffin did not explain that; perhaps he intends to do so in a sequel. Who knows?--_Ed._]. One main fault I have to find with Astounding Stories is that it is not published twice a month, if not oftener. By the way, would that not be a plan to help out unemployment. It would put more men to work and I am sure that all of us Readers could scrape up 20c more a month for this wonderful magazine. How about it? [But this, I think, would _increase_ unemployment!--_Ed._]. I would like to hear from some of the Readers in the near future. Best wishes for the continued prosperity of the magazine.--Christen G. Davis, 531 South Millard, Chicago, Ill. _Doggoned If He Didn't!_ Dear Editor: The stories, being the most important part of the magazine, come first: "Dark Moon," by Charles W. Diffin, is the best novelette you have yet published, and that's saying a lot for it, isn't it? Next comes "The Exile of Time," by Ray Cummings, another impossible time-traveling story, but nevertheless interesting. Welcome to Astounding Stories, Mr. Schachner and Mr. Zagat. Your story "The Death Cloud" was great. I hope you'll favor us with another story very soon. And if here isn't Capt. Meek with another Dr. Bird story! Captain Meek, if you stop writing them, I'll never read another of your marvelous stories. The moon turned green, and I'll be doggone if Hal K. Wells didn't go and write a nice little story telling us all about it. That was nice of you, Mr. Wells; I enjoyed it very, very much. Now let's take a look at the cover. Mr. Wesso, you certainly have a marvelous imagination. You are an excellent cover artist. It isn't everyone that can illustrate Science Fiction stories, I do wish that you will illustrate Science Fiction stories only, as that is where you are at your best. Almost any artist can illustrate detective story magazines, so don't waste your talent on them. Ha! Here we are at the "In the Next Issue" page. Hurrah! Hurrah! Arthur J. Burks is back again! Can't you manage to get next month's issue out a little earlier, Mr. Bates? R. F. Starzl's also back again; and there's to be another story by Charles W. Diffin. Isn't this a grand old world? I will close with this suggestion. Let's have more illustrations. At least two for each installment of the serials and two for each long novelette. Make the extra illustrations full page ones.--Jack Darrow, 4225 N. Spaulding Ave., Chicago, Ill. "--_And Amusing_" Dear Editor: I have just finished the May issue of A. S. and I want to tell you that "Dark Moon," by Charles W. Diffin, was fine. Let's have more stories like that. Your "The Readers' Corner" sure is interesting--and amusing. I like to read letters from Readers. A bouquet: A. S. is a really fine magazine. I think it's one of the best of its kind. Of course, it can be improved--but what can't? There's no sense in criticizing a magazine as some Readers do. I think if the Editor could make his magazine any better, he would do it without hesitation.--Charles Strada, 503 Olive Street, Kansas City, Mo. _Cummings and Wagner_ Dear Editor: Astounding Stories is in my estimation the best magazine on the market. Words are feeble when an accurate description of the pleasure that I receive from every issue of Astounding Stories is needed. However, I will say that next to my extreme appreciation of classical music, I rate Astounding Stories as being the best outlet of my emotions. As in the music of that great German composer, Richard Wagner, whom I rate as the greatest of all composers, so do I find an outlet of my emotions by reading a novelette by Cummings, Vincent, Leinster and many other of your excellent Authors. For example, I shall take the overture to "The Flying Dutchman." In the beginning of this overture we hear the opening call played by the trombones with the string section accompanying this principal motive with wild crescendo. This excites the brain so that a taste of the supreme motives is like an appetizer at dinner. So, taking the novel by Ray Cummings entitled "Beyond the Vanishing Point," we find that in the opening paragraphs there is also an "appetizer" to the rest of the story which is to follow. Now, returning to our "Flying Dutchman" overture, we find that after the introduction by the wild calls by the trombones and the string accompaniment, we gradually drift into a somewhat pensive mood; so in the story, for the next few pages we find more or less quiet reading. Gradually, however, this quiet mood in the music gives way to rolls on the kettle-drums announcing a grand climax; finally the music becomes wilder and wilder until at last the storm breaks and we actually picture this ghost-ship riding over the waves in a terrific storm. Lightning flashes, thunder roars, huge waves sweep over the deck of the ship as we see the Dutchman at the wheel laughing out his defiance in diabolical fury. And so in the story we are finally led up to a grand climax which actually grips anyone with an ounce of red blood in his veins. And now I would like to ask the following questions: Is there some Reader of Astounding Stories who no longer has any use for the old issues of Astounding Stories and would be so kind as to send me these? From the first issue up to the November, 1930, issue and also the December, 1930, issue are the magazines that I should like to have. Leave your magazine as is, only have one good long novelette, not two fairly good ones as in your April issue, which was not up to the standard set by your previous magazines.--Walter G. Diehl, 145-38 Eighth Ave., Malba, L. I., N. Y. _This Time-Traveling Traffic_ Dear Editor: Many times during the past months, while reading your really remarkable magazine, I have come across contradictions in explanations throughout the stories, which, while not very serious, tend to give me the impression that the Authors either did not care about or did not see through the errors they committed. I did not complain about them, considering them but minor mistakes. But in Ray Cummings' latest current novel, "The Exile of Time," there exists such a monstrosity as I believe calls for an explanation. Mr. Cummings' story, you know, centers around his time-traveling machine. If such a thing were possible, would it not be reasonable to believe that a holder of the secret of time-traveling could go back into the past and prevent some catastrophe or tragedy as his historical knowledge of the event would make possible? According to this theory then, a person could go back into the past and divert the hand of Wilkes Booth on April 15, 1865, about to assassinate Lincoln. But this shows its own impossibilities: that of two contradicting absolute truths for the world to believe. Likewise, a person could travel into the future, learn of his own death, go back into his own time and take measures to prevent it. In the same way, this could not be. [But Mr. Cummings explains that these things are impossible.--_Ed._] I do not mean to be critical, but it would lend much more interest to the story if the authors would be a bit more careful.--Robert W. Conrad, Rush City, Minn. _Tripe?_ Dear Editor: In the short time your mag. has been out, it has already established itself as the best in the field. I got a real kick out of most of your stories. In the May issue, two yarns are outstanding: Charles W. Diffin's splendid "Dark Moon" and Nat Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat's especially fine "The Death Cloud." These two are as thrilling stories as I have ever read. Mr. Diffin I've read before and always enjoyed; but Messrs. Schachner and Zagat are new to me. I am looking forward to seeing more of their stuff. But what has happened to Cummings? He used to be aces up, but now comes this tripe of his called "The Exile of Time"; especially the current installment with its long-winded rot about mysticism and theosophy and the Lord knows what. Where was the Editor when this blew in? Surely there are plenty of Swami sheets for that truck; it has no place in Astounding Stories. Give us more of Diffin, Leinster, Schachner, Zagat and Rousseau, and you'll keep us all satisfied.--D. Kay, Standish Arms, Brooklyn, N. Y. _For Rocket Fans_ Dear Editor: It may interest your Readers to know that the American Interplanetary Society has just completed its first year of existence, and looks forward to a most energetic second year in pursuing its aims. The Society has practically completed the first lap of its research on the possibilities and limitations of the rocket, and intends to continue this research for another year before publishing a complete report which shall be the first extensive survey of the rocket in English. We plan also to extend the size and scope of our monthly Bulletin, to make of it a real magazine that shall publish all the news, both of America and abroad, dealing with developments in astronautics and rocketry. It will also contain the reports of the Society's members on the rocket, as well as interesting general articles on the various phases of interplanetary travel. Plans are also maturing for a campaign of mutual experimentation on the rocket which we shall be ready to carry out before the end of this year. The Society is also completing plans for the formation of an International Interplanetary Commission which shall coordinate the work of the national societies and plan to solve the problems of astronautics on a world-wide basis. While the growth of the Society during the past year was very promising we hope to extend during this year the scope and field of our activities and membership. We have members now in thirty-six states, in Canada, Mexico, France and Russia. To your readers we offer our active and associate memberships, giving to lovers of Science Fiction a chance to assist in the bringing to realization the dream of all interplanetary travel. Information about the Society and the classes of membership can be obtained by writing to the secretary at the address below.--Nathan Schachner, Sec., American Interplanetary Society. 113 West 42nd St., New York City. "_The Readers' Corner_" All readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here; so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! _The Editor._ [Illustration: Advertisement] * * * * * 
30166	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. V, No. 3 CONTENTS MARCH, 1931 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSO _Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "Beyond the Vanishing Point."_ WHEN THE MOUNTAIN CAME TO MIRAMAR CHARLES W. DIFFIN 297 _It is Magic against Magic As Garry Connell Bluffs for His Life with a Prehistoric Savage in the Heart of Sentinel Mountain._ BEYOND THE VANISHING POINT RAY CUMMINGS 314 _The Tale of a Golden Atom--an Astounding Adventure in Size._ (A Complete Novelette.) TERRORS UNSEEN HARL VINCENT 360 _One after Another the Invisible Robots Escape Shelton's Control--and Their Trail Leads Straight to the Gangster Chief Cadorna._ PHALANXES OF ATLANS F. V. W. MASON 376 _Never Did an Aviator Ride a More Amazing Sky-Steed Than Alden on His Desperate Dash to the Great Jarmuthian Ziggurat._ (Conclusion of a Two-Part Novel.) THE METEOR GIRL JACK WILLIAMSON 404 _Through the Complicated Space-Time of the Fourth Dimension Goes Charlie King in an Attempt to Rescue the Meteor Girl._ THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 417 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Readers' Guild, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * When the Mountain Came To Miramar _By Charles W. Diffin_ [Illustration: "_That'll be all from you," he told the black one._] [Sidenote: It is magic against magic as Garry Connell bluffs for his life with a prehistoric savage in the heart of Sentinel Mountain.] The first tremor that set the timbers of the house to creaking brought Garry Connell out of his bunk and into the middle of the floor. Then the floor heaved and 'dobe walls swayed while the man fought to keep his footing and pull himself through the doorway to the safety of the dark night. The earthquake that came with the spring of 1932 was on. He was nauseated with that deathly sickness that only an earthquake gives, and he dropped breathlessly in the shelter of a date palm while the earth beneath him rolled and groaned in agony. A deeper roar was rising above all other sounds, and Connell looked up at the nearby top of Sentinel Mountain. The stars of the desert land showed clear; the grim blackness of Sentinel's lone peak rose abruptly from the sand of the desert floor in darker silhouette against the velvet of a midnight sky. And the mountain was roaring. Softened by the distance, the deep, grumbling bass sang thunderingly through and above the other noises of the night, as if old Sentinel itself were voicing its remonstrance against this disturbance of its age-long rest. The grumbling died to a clatter of falling boulders a hundred yards away at the mountain's base, and Connell's eyes discerned a puff of vaporous gray, a cloud of wind-blown dust, high up on the mountain's flank. "Holy cats!" said Garry explosively, "what a slide! That must have ripped the old boy wide open." His eyes followed the white scar far up on the mountainside, followed it down to the last loosened stones that had crashed among the date palms of Miramar ranch. "I don't just like the idea of the whole mountain moving in on me," he told himself; "I'll have to go up and look at that to-morrow." * * * * * It was afternoon of the following day when Garry rolled blankets and food into a snug pack and prepared for the ascent. "Guess likely I'll sleep out to-night," he mused and looked at the pistol he held in his hand. "I don't want that thing slapping against me," he argued; "too darned hot! And there's nothing to use a gun on up on Sentinel.... Oh, well!" He threw the holster upon his bunk and dropped the automatic into the pack he was rolling. "I'll take it along. Might meet up with a rattler." He brushed the sandy hair from his wet forehead and straightened to his full six feet of slender height before he slipped the straps of his pack about his shoulders. And a broad grin made pleasant lines about his gray eyes as he realized the boyish curiosity that was driving him to a stiff climb in the heat of the day. There was no real trail up the thousand-foot slope of Sentinel Mountain. Prospectors had been over it, doubtless, in earlier days, but in all of Garry's twenty-one years no one besides himself had ever made the ascent. There was nothing in all that solitary, desolate peak to call them; nothing, for that matter, to beckon Garry, except the hot desert days, the cool breath of evening and the glory of nights when the stars hung low over all the miles of sand and sagebrush that reached far out to the rippling sand-dunes shimmering in the distance. Nothing, that is, but the "feel" of the desert--and young Garry Connell was desert-born and bred. He stopped once and dropped his pack while he mopped his wet face. From this point he could see his own ranch spread below him. Miramar, he had named it--"Beautiful Sea." The name was half an affectionate mockery of this land where the nearest water was fifty miles away, and half because of the sea of blue that he looked at now. Garry had never ceased to wonder at the mirage. It was always the same in the summer heat--a phantom ocean of water. Garry's eyes loved to follow the quivering blue expanse that seemed so cool and deep. It rippled softly away to end in a line of white, like distant breakers on the horizon's rolling dunes. This had been the bed of an ocean in some distant past, and that ancient ocean could never have seemed more real than this; yet Garry knew that this sea would vanish with the setting sun. He had watched it often. * * * * * A hundred yards farther and he stopped again. It was no well-trodden path that Garry followed, but he knew his landmarks. There was the big split rock a half mile ahead, and the three-branched cactus beside it. But between these and the place where Garry stood was a fan-shaped sweep of boulders--and this where smooth going had been before. He forgot for the moment all discomfort. He stood staring under the hot sun that cast purple shadows beside the weathered rocks, and his eyes followed up the scarred mountainside. "That whole ledge that stood out up there--that's gone!" he told himself. "The whole side of the mountain just shook itself loose...." Far above, his eyes found another towering mass that reared itself menacingly. "That will come down next time," he said with conviction, "and I don't want to be under it when it breaks loose." Then his searching eyes found the lower ledge and its shattered remains. It had held a welter of rocks above it as a dam holds the pressure of water--and the dam had burst. The torrent of stone from above had swept into motion and carried with it the accumulation of loose rubble below. Where the ledge had been was now a cliff--a sheer wall of rock. It had been covered before by the talus that was swept away. Garry's eyes narrowed to see more plainly under the sun's glare. He was staring not alone at the cliff but at a shadow within it--a black shadow in the white face of the cliff itself. "That was all covered up before," Garry stated; "buried for thousands of years, I suppose. But it can't be a cave; not a natural one, at least. There are no caves in this rock." He stopped at times for breath, and his wonder grew as he climbed and the black mark took clearer form. At last he stood panting before it, to stare deep into the utter blackness of a passageway beyond an entrance of carved stone. It was carved; there was no mistaking it! Here was a passage that nature had never formed. He took a quick stride forward to see the tool marks that showed on hard walls where symbols and figures of strange design were carved. An intrusion of harder rock had formed a roof, and they had cut in below-- "They!" He spoke the word aloud. Who were "they?" * * * * * He remembered the scientist who had stopped at the ranch some time before, and he recalled enough of the talk of Aztec and Toltec and Mayas to know that none of these old civilizations could explain the things he saw. "This goes way back beyond them--it must," he reasoned. And there were pictures, long forgotten, that came to his mind to show him a vision from the past--figures whose coppery faces shone dark above their brilliant, colored robes--slaves, toiling and sweating to drive this tunnel into solid rock. He was suddenly a-quiver with a feeling of the presence of living things. His breath seemed stifled within him as he stepped into the dark where a pencil of light from his pocket-flash made the blackness more intense. He tried to shake off the feeling, but an indefinable oppression was heavy upon him; the weight of the uncounted centuries these walls had seen filled him with strange forebodings. His feet stumbled and scuffed over chips of stone; he steadied himself against the wall at times as he followed the corridor that went down and still down before him. It turned and twisted, then leveled off at last, and Garry Connell drew himself up sharply with a quick-drawn breath. His flash was making a circle of light a dozen steps ahead, and showed a litter of sharp stone fragments. And, scattered over them, a tangle of bones shone white; one skull stood upright to stare mockingly from hollow sockets. The sudden white of them was startling in the black pit. "Bones!" he said, and forced himself to disregard the echoes that tried to shout him down; "just bones! And the old-timers that wore them haven't been using them for thousands of years." He moved forward with determined steps to the end of the passage that finished in solid stone. He stopped abruptly. At closer range was something that froze him to a tense, waiting crouch. This wall of solid stone--it was not solid as it had seemed. There was a doorway; the stone was swung inward; and at one side in a straight-marked crack, he saw a thread of light. He snapped off his own flash. Someone was there! Someone had beaten him to it! He held himself crouched and rigid at the thought. But who could it be? The utter silence and the steady, unchanging, pale-green light showed him the folly of the thought. There was no one there; there couldn't be anyone. * * * * * His hand, that trembled with excitement, reached across and over the skeleton remains posted like a ghostly guard before the door. He threw his weight upon the stone. Its bearings groaned, but it moved at his touch. The stone swung slowly and ponderously into a silent room, and Garry Connell stared wide-eyed and wondering where rock walls, in carved and colored brilliance reflected the softest of diffused light. A great room, hewn from the solid rock!--and Garry tried to see it and all that it held at one glance. He grasped the extent of the stone vault, a hundred feet across; the distant walls were plain in the soft light. One high point of flashing color caught his eye and held it in marveling amazement. A thing of beauty and grace. It was a shining, silvery shape like a mushroom growth; it towered high in air, almost to the ceiling, a slender rod that swelled and opened to a curved and gleaming head. Graceful as a fairy parasol, huge enough to shelter a giant, it was like nothing he had ever seen. But there was no time now for conjectures. He made no effort to understand; he wanted only to see what might be here; and his eyes flashed quickly over sculptured walls and a stone floor where metal boxes were arranged in orderly rows. Hundreds of them, he estimated; huge cases, some eight or ten feet long. Two nearby were raised above the floor on bases of carved stone. Lusterless gray in color--metal, unmistakably--and in them.... "No use getting all hopped up over treasure hunting," Garry had told himself. But under all his incredulous amazement had been flickering thoughts of what he might find. He stared hungrily at those two boxes near him. Each of the hundreds was big enough to hold a fortune. He reached for a metal bar beside the scattered bones, and, like a man in a sleep-walking dream, he stepped across those relics of earlier men and entered the room that they had guarded. The light stopped him for a moment. He puzzled over it; stared wonderingly at a circle of glowing radiance in the roof of stone. It reminded him of something ... the watch on his wrist ... yes, that was the answer--some radio-active substance. His eyes came back to the nearest chest, and he jammed the point of his corroded bar beneath the flange of a tight-fitting lid. * * * * * The hidden room was cool, but Garry Connell wiped the sweat from his eyes when he ceased his frantic efforts. The metal bar clanged loudly upon the floor beside him. He stood, breathing heavily, his eyes on the metal cover that refused to move. And in the silence there came to him again that strange, prickling apprehension. He caught himself looking quickly behind him as if to find another person there. His eyes were accustomed now to the pale light, and the sculptured figures on the walls stood out with startling distinctness. Garry turned to look at the nearer wall and the figure that was repeated over and over again. It was a man, tall and lean, his robes, undimmed by the years, blazed in crimson and gold. But the face above! Garry shivered in spite of himself at the devilish ugliness the artist had copied. It was dead black in color, with slitted eyes that had been touched up artfully to bring out their venomous stare. The head itself rose up to a rounded point that added to the inhuman brutality of the face. He was seated on a throne, Garry saw, and other figures, less skilfully carved, were kneeling before him. Again, he was standing above a prostrate enemy, a triple-pointed spear raised to deliver the final blow. Silently, Garry let his eyes follow around the room with its repetition of the horrible being who was evidently a king. Then he whistled softly. "Nice kind of hombre, he must have been," he said. And, "Boy," he told the carved image familiarly, "whoever you were, you've been dead a long time, and I don't mind telling you I'm glad of it." He was slowly circling the first casket. Beyond it was the slender rod with its mushroom head that seemed more like a bell as he looked from below. The head's inner surface was emblazoned, like the figures on the wall, with crimson and gold in strange designs. He saw now that the base of it was connected with a smaller box, placed like the two beside it on a stone pedestal. He came slowly beside it to study the box with narrowed eyes. He expected the metal cover would be as immovable as the others, and he started back and caught his breath sharply as the metal raised at his touch and the green radiance from above flashed back from within the box in a thousand scintillant lights. Then he stooped to see the brilliant, silvery sheen of metal wheels that moved on jeweled bearings. * * * * * A mechanism of some sort--but what? he wondered. He had some knowledge of the stream of electrons that discharged continuously from the light above, and he knew how they could charge an electroscope that would automatically discharge to produce motion. He nodded in half-understanding as the fluttering gold-leaf fell and allowed a tiny wheel to move one notch in its escapement. "Clockworks!" he told himself--it was as near as he could come to a name for the machine--"and it's been running here all this time.... What for, I wonder? What was it supposed to do?" He stared again at the bell-shape towering above him, but its purpose was beyond guessing: it was a part of the machine. His eyes came back to the mechanism itself. There was a splinter of stone.... Garry reached for it unthinkingly, but his hand was checked in mid-air. The fragment was wedged beneath a tiny lever, holding it erect. "That's the answer," Garry whispered. "The machine was left open,"--he felt of the cover that had been dented by some heavy blow, and saw sharp splinters of rock beneath his feet--"a rock fell from the roof, flaked off and dropped onto the machine, and a splinter jammed this little lever. But the machine has been ticking along...." His fingers reached for the stone. "Let's go!" he said, and grinned broadly at the thoughts that were in his mind. "Let's see what the machine would have done!" The fragment came away within his hand, and he saw the lever fall slowly. There was motion within the case--wheels and shining spheres that touched one upon another were spinning in gleaming circles of silvery green--and from above he heard the first faint whisper of a sound. It came from the bell, and Garry drew back to stare upward. The first soft humming of the clear bell-note was incredibly sweet. It rose in pitch while the volume increased, till the musical note was lost in the rising roar that resounded from walls and roof. Higher it rose; it was a scream that was human in its agony, prodigious in its volume! * * * * * Garry Connell stood trembling with unnamed fear. This sound was unbearable; it beat upon his ears; it battered his whole body; it searched out every quivering nerve and tore at it with fingers of fire. Still higher!--and the scream was piercing and torturing his brain. He felt the jerk of uncontrollable muscles. The whirling machine was a blur of light, and he longed with every fibre of his tortured mind to throw himself upon it--into it!--anything to end the unbearable impact from on high. His body, assailed by a clamor that was physical torment, could not move; the vibrations beat him down with crushing force, while the shrieking voice rose higher, then grew faint, and, with a final whisper, died to nothingness. And still Garry felt himself sinking; the room was blurred; the excruciating agony of tortured nerves melted into a lethargy that swept through him. Dimly he sensed that the monstrous, quivering, bell-topped thing was still launching its devastating rain of vibrations; they were above the range of hearing; but he felt his body quivering in response to the unheard note. Then even these vague fragments of understanding left him. The towering, soundless thing was indistinct ... it vanished in the darkness that closed about.... He was upon the floor in a crouching heap when the tremors that shook him ceased. His mind, in the same instant, was cleared, and he knew that the soundless vibrations from the bell had ended. A wave of thankfulness flooded through him, and he luxuriated in the utter silence of the room--until that silence was broken by another sound. It was hard and metallic, like the click of a withdrawn bolt, and came first from the case at his side. A second sharp rap replied from the other raised casket, then an echoing tattoo of metallic impacts rattled and clattered in the resounding room. Each of the hundreds of caskets was adding its voice to the clacking chorus. * * * * * The paralysis that had held Garry's muscles was gone, and he came slowly to his feet to see the edge of the cover he had tried vainly to move, rising smoothly in the air. His eyes darted about; the second casket was opening; beyond were countless others; the room was alive with silent motion where metal lids lifted like petals of flowers unfolding to the sun. The machine had done it! The conviction came to him abruptly. Those vibrations that had beaten him down had done this: some unlocking mechanism within each case had been actuated when the vibrations reached the proper pitch. Then the thoughts were driven from his mind by a more thrilling conviction: The caskets were open! The treasure! Who could know what some of them might contain? He took one quick step toward the nearer of the two. One step!--and his reaching hands stopped motionless above the open case. The contents of the box were plain before him--and he stared in horror at the black, half-naked figure of a man as silent and unmoving as its counterpart upon the wall. Black as a carving in ebony, it was the face that held Garry's eyes. He saw the pointed head, the thin lips half-drawn from snarling teeth, the expression of brutal savagery that even this frozen stillness could not conceal. The eyes were closed; Garry saw their slitted lids. He was looking at them when they quivered and twitched. The lids opened slowly, drew back from staring eyes that were cold and dead--eyes that came suddenly to life, that turned and stared unwinkingly, horribly, into his. * * * * * Garry's lips were moving as he drew back in slow retreat, but he heard no sound of his own voice, only a husky whisper that said over and over again: "Mummies! Caskets of mummies! And they're coming back to life!" Suspended animation. He had heard of such things. Dim, fleeting remembrance of what he had read came flashingly to him--toads that had lived a thousand years sealed up in rock--but this, a human thing, a man!--no, no!--it couldn't come to life; not after all this time! The pointed head, the ugly, menacing face and the body of dead black that rose slowly within the casket gave his argument the lie. In dreadful, living reality he saw the thing before him as it stretched its corded neck, extended and flexed its long, black arms and breathed deeply through lips drawn thin. Then, with a bound of returning energy, it leaped out and down to stand half-naked and black, towering threateningly above his head. And Garry, too stunned to feel a sense of fear, looked first at the living face before him and then at the carvings done in stone. There was too much here for instant comprehension; his reason could not follow fast enough where facts were leading, and his mind seemed groping for some certain, proven thing. "It's the same one that's on the wall," he explained painstakingly to himself. "It's the king, the old boy himself! I said he would be a bad hombre; I said he was a bad one--" He saw the other raise his hands threateningly, and he crouched to meet the attack. But the black hands dropped, and the scowling face turned, while Garry's eyes followed toward a sound of movement in the second casket. The green light flooded down, and Garry Connell glanced quickly at the doorway. Too many of these blacks and this would be no safe place for him. He was expecting another apparition like the first; he would have thought himself prepared against any further surprise, but his gray eyes opened wide at what the light disclosed. * * * * * There was the casket, gray and lusterless on its low, stone base. Its cover, like the others, stood erect, and above the nearer edge an arm was raising. But it was a white arm, and it ended in a slim, white hand!--its rounded softness held in clear outline against the back ground of gray, until the arm fell that the hand might grip the metal edge. Garry's eyes held in wondering fascination upon those slender white fingers. The hand of a woman--a girl!--what marvel of miracles was this? He held his silent pose while he stared at the face that appeared before him. It was milk-white against the dull gray metal beyond, the white of death itself, until returning circulation brought a flush of pink that crept slowly to the rounded cheeks. Dark hair cascaded about the shoulders to mingle with a lacy veil of golden threads. A film of golden lace wrapped about her--her robes had gone to dust, vanished with the vanished years--and only the threads of gold with which the robe was shot remained, a futile concealment for the slim white of her shoulders, the soft curves of rounded breasts. But Garry's eyes were held by the eyes that looked and locked with his. Dark eyes, deep and steady, yet glowing softly with the wonder of this awakening. Windows, crystal clear, through which shone softly a light that filled him through and through! Alluring as was the rounded whiteness of the form so thinly veiled, it was not this nor the childlike beauty of the face that held him spellbound. Garry Connell's only love had been the desert, and now he was filled and shaken by the glamour from within these thrilling eyes. A rasping word made echoes in the silence, and Garry saw the girl's eyes widen as she turned them upon the black one, who had spoken. He saw her face lose its color and go dead white, and plainly her wide eyes showed the fears that swept in upon her with returning remembrance. * * * * * Garry followed her gaze to the wild figure whose slitted eyes glittered in savage triumph and possessiveness at the white beauty of the trembling girl. The lean figure spoke again in that rasping, unintelligible voice--he addressed the girl now--and the tone sent a strange prickling of animosity through every fibre of the watching man. The black one took one stride forward; the girl, in a flash of white and gold, sprang from her resting place to take shelter behind the high casket. Her eyes came back to Garry's, and the call for help though voiceless was none the less real. Then her pale lips moved, and she called to him with a clear voice that uttered unknown words. Garry came from the spell that bound him, and with a quick rush made between her and the advancing man. He landed tense and crouching, and his voice was hoarse with excitement when he spoke. "That'll be all from you," he told the black one. His words could mean nothing to this savage, but the tone that rang through them, and his crouching, ready pose, must have been plain. The inky face beneath the high-pointed dome of head was twisted with rage; the eyes glared at this being who dared to oppose him. But the black one paused, then stepped backward to the casket where he had been. Garry retreated a few slow steps to the end of the metal box that sheltered the girl. "Can't you understand me?" he asked. "Am I dreaming? What has happened? Who are you, and who is this black beast? What does it all mean?" Again he was sure that mere speech useless, but he felt that he had to speak, to say something, anything, to prove the reality of his own waking self and of the wild, nightmare experience. He saw the crouching girl rise to her full height; he saw the movement of her hand as she swept the dark hair away from her face, and the film of gold lace clung closely about her as she came to his side. One hand was outstretched to rest, light and cool, upon his forehead. * * * * * He heard her voice, so soft and liquid yet so charged with terror. She spoke meaningless words and phrases, but at the touch of her hand upon his face he started abruptly. Did the words themselves take on meaning and coherence, or was it something within himself?--Garry could not have told. But, with the startling clarity of a radio switched full on, he got the impress of her thoughts, and his own brain took them and put them into words that he knew. "You will help me, you will save me," the words were saying. "You are one of us, I know. You are a stranger, but your skin is white; you are not of the tribe of Horab." Garry was motionless and listening. He knew he was sensing her thoughts--she was communicating with him by some telepathic magic--and he knew, as he caught the words, that Horab was the black one there before him, reaching and feeling within the casket where he had slept. Horab--a savage king of a savage land-- "He captured me," the words continued in breathless haste. "I am from Zahn: do you know the good land of Zahn? I am Luhra. Horab captured me; carried me here to this island; it was yesterday he brought me here. He put me to sleep, and he put his men to sleep, hundreds of his chosen warriors. He worked his magic, and he said we would sleep for one hundred summers. But it was yesterday. And now you will save me; my father is a great man; he will reward you--" The sentences flashed almost incoherently into his mind, but ceased at a sound and stirring from the room at their backs. Garry needed a moment for the substance of the message to register. He had heard it as truly as if she had spoken: Horab had captured her--yesterday!... And his own lips that had been loose with astonishment closed to a grim smile. "Yesterday!" She thought it was yesterday that her long night had begun. Did Horab know the truth? Garry was suddenly certain that he did. Horab's plans had miscarried; he could not know how far in a distant past was that day when he had placed himself and this girl in their caskets, safe in their mountain tomb. * * * * * Only an instant for these thoughts to form--then his eyes were steady upon the tall savage who had found what he sought in the big metal case. Horab, king of a vanished race, turned now with a heavy scepter in his hand; and its jeweled head flashed brilliantly as he raised it high in air and shouted an echoing command into the room. A white hand was tugging at Garry's shoulder, a soft body clinging close, to turn him where new danger threatened. The other caskets! He had forgotten them, and he saw the nearer ones alive with struggling forms. A black man-shape, with sullen, animal face and pointed head, came slowly erect and staggered upon the floor. Another--and another! There were scores of the black, naked men who scrambled from the nearer caskets and swayed drunkenly upon their feet. Garry stood tense, his mind a chaos of half-formed plans. This one brute he might handle, but the whole tribe--that was too large an order. Yet he knew with an unshakable conviction that he would carry this girl from their evil clutches or die in the trying. Feminine charms had failed to interest Garry in that world outside, but now the message of these soft eyes, the appealing beauty of this lovely face, proud and unafraid despite her fears, the hand so soft and trusting upon his face!--there had something entered into Garry Connell's lonely life that struck deep within him and found a ready response. He swept one arm about the soft, yielding body beneath its wisp of garment, and he swung her behind him as he set himself to meet the attack. And he flashed her a look that must have carried a message, for the trembling lips were framing a ghost of a smile as her eyes met his. Garry's thoughts darted to the gun, but his tightly-wrapped pack was in the passage outside. He prayed for a moment's time that he might meet this mob pistol in hand, and he half turned; but no time was given. The leader was shouting orders, his harsh voice resounded in shattering echoes throughout the stone vault, and the horde of blacks surged forward at his command. * * * * * A mass of lean bodies, with faces ugly and brutal where sleep-filled eyes opened wide and glaring! They crowded upon him, and Garry met the rush with a rain of straight rights and lefts into the nearest faces. He was carried backward to the wall by the weight of their numbers, but he saw some go down for the count. The room seemed filled with leaping, shouting men. Their shrill cries echoed in a tumult of discord, and above all Garry heard the hoarse screams of their leader. There were fists and arms clubbing at his head. He warded them off, then sprang from the wall, leaping outward and sideways, where there was room for free swings of his pounding fists. Another black face went blank under the impact of his blow--a second--and a third! He was giving ground slowly as the others came on. Then beyond the crowding figures he saw one who held a trident spear high in air. The weapon was poised; the metal points shone in the green light--points that would tear his body to shreds at a single blow. Garry paused but an instant, then opened his clenched fists to clutch the lean neck of an enemy before him. He whirled the man's body and held it as a shield while he reached vainly to grip at the thrusting spear. Dimly he saw the flash of white and gold where the girl, Luhra, threw her own body upon the armed figure and clung in desperation to the shaft of the deadly weapon. * * * * * Garry hung fast to the struggling body, that was his shield; there were other spears now that flashed in the air. He loosed one hand and landed a short jab in the face of a savage whose hands were at his throat. The blow was light, and he was amazed to see the man stagger and fall. There were others who swayed helplessly and stumbled to their knees. Spears rang sharply, clattering upon the stone.... They were falling. The body he held went suddenly limp within his arms and sagged heavily to the floor.... Garry saw the one who had threatened him drop; he took the girl with him as he fell, and his spear flew wildly from his open hand. Garry was alone!--and the enemy was only a tangle of sprawling bodies where the twitching of an outflung arm marked the last sign of life. He was breathing hard, for some of the enemies' blows had landed, and he staggered as he wiped a trickle of blood from his eyes. No time to figure what this meant, but the blacks were certainly out of it. Beyond the huddled bodies the tall figure of Horab leaped wildly in air as he sprang forward, and in the same instant Garry threw himself between the black menace and the prostrate girl. He staggered again as he landed from his wild leap, and he called for his last reserve of strength to put power behind the blow that he launched for the snarling face above. The heavy scepter swung high, and was falling as Garry struck. He saw the blow start; saw the fiery arc the jeweled head made in descending like a mace above his head. Then the face of Horab vanished, and the room was a whirling place of flashing red and yellow before blackness blotted it out.... * * * * * Garry awoke to blink stupidly at a green light above him. His head was a blinding, throbbing pain that blurred his thoughts. It cleared slowly. The gleaming figure of a girl was rising from the floor. His aching eyes saw the white of her young body through the dull glow of golden lace. Her eyes came to his, and sharply he realized that this was no dream--this cave whose walls seemed swaying, the face that was staring pitifully at him, and, beyond, in a ghastly green light, the dark silhouette of a lean man who bent his pointed head above a chest. Connell's mind was a whirl of snarled thoughts and emotions, of puzzled wonder and fighting rage; yet strangely through and above them all was a feeling of pure joy in the message of the eyes in a face that was utterly lovely. The black figure had opened the chest. Garry saw the luminous green about it shot through with the reflected radiance of many gems. Jewels cascaded brilliantly from the lean black hands as they withdrew a golden cord. Part of some gem-incrusted fabric, it was, that he tore roughly from its rotted fastenings before coming swiftly to the still helpless body of Connell. Garry's struggles were futile; his hands were tied before him. The shooting pain of a prodding spear brought him from the paralyzing numbness that held him, and he came dizzily to his feet. Again the walls whirled, and he would have fallen headlong but for a lithe, soft body that sprang close to throw white arms about him. Through blood-shot eyes he saw Luhra, of the land of Zahn, with head held high and flashing eyes as she turned squarely to face the savage black. And he heard the stream of strange sentences that she poured protestingly upon him. * * * * * Her message broke off abruptly. Garry's eyes followed hers to watch a savage king, naked but for the tattered remnants of robes that time had eaten. He was reaching, into a casket that had once held kingly raiment--reaching with a lean black hand that brought forth only fragments of purple and crimson cloth that went quickly to dust within his hands. Garry saw the slitted eyes stare in puzzled wonder at the rotted cloth, then glance sharply and inquiringly about. He saw the black one place a jeweled head-dress of barbaric splendor upon his ugly, pointed head, then rise and cross slowly to the heap of bodies. Spear in hand, he passed on to the serried rows of caskets. Those nearest were empty, as Garry knew; he had seen the eruption of life from within them. Horab, with a growled word, moved on to the other caskets that stretched out across the room. The ugly head stooped; again the hands reached down, to come back this time with an empty, gleaming skull. Garry thought once of his pistol, but knew in the same thought that he could never reach it; the spear of Horab would crash through him at the first movement. He dismissed the thought--forgot it--and forgot all else in the fascination of beholding the sagging lips and the scowling stupefaction on the black face of Horab. And slowly there came to his throbbing brain an explanation. One hundred summers, Luhra had said--Horab had meant to sleep for a hundred years--and the machine that was to waken him had failed to function. Ages beyond computing had passed, and these two only, the black king and the girl, had survived. They had been directly beneath the light; its flooding energy had brought them safely through the dreamless years. But, for the others, it had been different. Those nearest the light had responded to the vibrating call, but their vitality was gone; their moment of life was short. As for the hundreds who had felt the light but faintly--the skull told the story. They had died as they slept, died thousands of years ago, and their skeletons were all that remained to mock at their king and the frustration of his plans. * * * * * But what was the purpose of the long sleep? Luhra's touch and her soundless words supplied the answer. "Why did he wish this?" her mind said, repeating his question. "Horab's own country was lost; the yellow-ones from across the great water had conquered and overrun it. But Horab had planted the seeds of disease, and the yellow ones must all die in time. Horab is a king and a worker of magic; he is in league with a devil; he learns his magic of him. We of Zahn, all feared the magic of Horab--" She stopped at the quiver of rock beneath their feet. Garry's mind had cleared, but it was an instant before he knew that the movement was not in his own throbbing head. Then the earth tremor came unmistakably, and his thoughts flashed back to the mass of rock above the mouth of the cave. If more quakes were coming they must get out, and do it at once-- The black hand of King Horab cast the skull vindictively against the wall, and the clatter of its falling fragments mingled with strange oaths from the savage lips. Then he came toward the two and Garry searched his mind desperately for some means of escape. The trident spear was aimed, and Garry waited for the throw. He felt, more than saw, the flash of light that was Luhra as she sprang for a spear beside the fallen men. An instant and she was before him, tense and poised, a golden Amazon, whose upraised arm and steady eyes checked even Horab in his advance. She spoke to the savage in sharp, staccato phrases, but Garry got no meaning from the words. There was a quick interchange between them; vehement protest and shaking of his poised spear on the part of Horab. Luhra added a word or two, and she lowered her weapon as Horab did the same. Her head was bowed as she reached to touch Garry's forehead. He sensed a hopeless sorrow that was so plainly hers, but with it he felt a mingling of another emotion that stirred him to the depths of his being. The slim, white figure straightened, and the dark eyes squarely upon his when she spoke. "Listen carefully," she said; "it is the last time--" * * * * * Garry found himself trembling; he was suddenly breathless with emotion. The racking pain in his head had settled to a dull ache, but his brain was clear, and through it were flashing strange thoughts. The threat, the wild adventure itself!--they were nothing before the truth that was so plain to him now. He loved this girl! he loved her!--and his whole self responded with an inflow of fresh energy at the thought. A stranger from a strange, lost world!--but what of it?--he loved her!... The message from the lips and fingers of the girl broke in upon the thoughts that were crying for expression. "You think of me." She smiled with her lips and eyes. "I am glad that you do, my dear one, but it is hopeless. "Listen: I have promised; Luhra has spoken: I will go with Horab to do as he wills. I will go freely, and he will leave you here unharmed. He promises me this. "I will go with Horab far across the blue water that surrounds us here. It is an island, as you know, for have you not come here from afar?" Garry broke in with a startled exclamation. An island! Water! He closed his lips upon the denial of her words. "And you," Luhra continued unheeding, "when we have gone, will return to your own land. "But, oh, my dear one, remember always I love you. I have read your thoughts, oh bravest and tenderest of men; I loved you from the moment when my eyes opened and found you waiting there. I am telling you now, for I will never see you again." She broke in upon the wild urge of protest that filled his mind. With an imperious gesture she motioned Horab to discard his spear, and she placed hers beside it on the rocky floor. But she flinched and retreated from the outstretched arms and grasping hands, while Garry Connell struggled in insane frenzy at the cords that bound his wrists. He felt the lean hands of Horab upon him, and the long arms held him in a crushing grip. And he saw the black face laugh evilly at the watching girl as Horab kicked the spears over beside the casket where she had been. Garry felt himself raised in air, and he was as helpless as a child in that grasp. An instant later he was thrown heavily, to lie bruised and breathless in the metal box where first he had seen Luhra's face in wide-eyed awakening. * * * * * The rasping voice of Horab rose high and shrill. He was shouting triumphantly at the girl, while his hands worked to bind Garry's feet. Luhra's head and shoulders showed above the casket edge as she circled swiftly to approach from the opposite side and reach a trembling hand that would make the contact necessary for thought transference. Her cool touch was upon him; Garry ceased his futile struggle while her words came, brokenly to his mind. "Horab has tricked us," she cried; "he is leaving you here. He will paralyze you with the devil song of the bell, but not to sleep as I did: it will stop on another note. He says you will be always awake, but helpless--thinking--thinking--always!" She buried her face in her hands to hide from his gaze the horror that was in her eyes. Garry Connell's straining hands went limp. The terror in the girl's voice struck through his own wild medley of thoughts to make him shudder with realization of the truth. The threat was real! If Horab left the cave and took Luhra with him, the two would die in the desert. The black savage would never dare to face the strange, new world. And he, Garry, would be here in this cave, in this very coffin, held in a waking death. No one knew he was here; only by chance would the cave be investigated. And when someone finally came! Garry stared in fascination at the green light. He knew with terrible certainty that whatever help might come would come too late. To lie there hour after hour, for days and then for years--waiting!--always waiting!... And he could never still his thoughts.... He had a sickening realization of the thing they would find. A body!--his body!--and the mind within it utterly insane.... The sound of the shrieking bell was in his ears, and his nerves were trembling in response. He saw long arms above the casket, tearing away the figure of a struggling girl.... And then he knew he was alone.... * * * * * The sound of the bell rose to the piercing, nerve-shredding scream he had heard before. He must think fast--and act!--but the numbness of brain and muscle was creeping upon him. He tried to call out, but his throat was tight, and would not respond. The echoes died into silence; the vibrations, as before, passed beyond audible range. He was sinking ... sinking.... Dimly he felt the casket shaking beneath him. In some distant corner of his mind he knew that the earthquake shocks had turned. Then he heard with ear-splitting plainness the shrieking discord as the tremor shook the vibrating machine to silence. The room was quiet; the paralysis left him; and in the instant of his release the clear brain of Garry Connell flashed from chaos to lay before him a full-formed plan. "Luhra!" he called in the silent room. "Luhra!" But it seemed an age before he heard Horab and his captive returning from the passage. Then the touch of her hand gave him courage to continue. "Yes?" she whispered; "yes, my dear one?" He saw the shoulders of the black as he half-raised a spear threateningly toward the girl, then turned to adjust the whirring machine. "Tell him," shouted Garry, "--tell Horab to shut off that damnable machine!" The shriek of it was rising again to drown his voice. "Tell him his life depends upon it. Tell him to listen to what I say or he will die." He heard the girl's voice raised in a high-pitched call, and he heard the rasping snarl of Horab in reply. The girl repeated her cry above the echoing clamor of the bell--and the intolerable, rising scream, after a time, was stilled. Garry experienced one raging moment when he would have given his hope of life for the ability to talk to Horab face to face and in words that could penetrate the black one's brain. But he could not. He must use this girl as an interpreter, and he must give her words to say that would make this ugly beast pause. He must speak as she would speak; put words and sentences into her mouth that would reach the savage superstitions of the other. He spoke slowly, and stared impressively into the dark, fear-filled eyes in the white face that bent above him. He must make the girl believe. "Horab works magic," he told her. "Tell Horab that I, too, am a magician--a great magician--a greater one than Horab." * * * * * He waited an instant to hear the girl's words and the disdainful laughter from lips in a savage face thrust close to where he lay. "Horab is truly a magician," said Luhra doubtfully; "he laughs at your magic. Horab's _Tao_ is a strong _Tao_, wicked and powerful." "His _Tao_?" said Garry, and looked at the girl questioningly. He got the thought in her mind. "Oh, yes--his god, or devil." He turned his head to stare straight into the grinning face whose wide, thin lips were twisted into a leering snarl. Garry had to summon all his power of will to hold the look that he gave his enemy and to laugh, in his turn, long and contemptuously. Another tremor shook the casket where he lay. "Tell Horab," he ordered, while his eyes stared steadily into those of the savage king, "--tell Horab my _Tao_ is stronger than his. My _Tao_ is angry because I have been harmed; he is shaking the mountain. He will shake it down on Horab and crush out his life." He continued to stare while he heard Luhra's voice, high with hope, and he saw a change of expression flicker across the black face, though Horab shouted a vehement reply. Luhra was speaking to him. "Horab says the earth has shaken before; that it is not your _Tao_ who shakes it. He asks for another sign." Garry was not surprised. He had fired this shot at random; the tremor itself had suggested it. And now-- "Another sign!" Garry had to fight hard for self-control to keep from shouting the truth to this evil thing--to keep from telling him of the time that had passed, and of the world that was waiting for him. But that would never do: he must play upon this black one's superstitions. Let Horab once leave this cave with that devilish, soundless scream ringing in his ears and he, Garry Connell, was lost. And Luhra!--what hope for her out there?... The black hands were moving impatiently toward the machine.... Garry found himself speaking slowly--short sentences that Luhra quickly repeated. And something within him rose to frame words such as Garry Connell, man of the desert, would never have thought to speak--phrases that best might reach a savage, vicious mind. * * * * * He glanced once at the watch on his wrist. He did not feel the torture of the tight gold cord. He was thinking in terms of daylight, and of how much time had passed since he had seen the sun.... "Horab shall have a sign--a terrible sign," he said. "Death waits for Horab in the world outside, my _Tao_ tells me. Horab shall die horribly. I see him choking in the hot sand. His tongue fills his mouth. The hot sun burns, and he is filled with fire. He tries to scream--to call upon his _Tao_--but he makes no sound.... And so shall Horab die." The girl translated swiftly; the answer was a wild cry of rage from the black. He sprang beside the helpless man and his spear was raised high. Garry felt the weight of Luhra's body thrown protectingly across him, and looked up to see murder in the savage, slitted eyes. "Tell Horab," he directed sharply, "that if be harms you or me the burning death is his! But--" He waited deliberately after Luhra had spoken, and he saw plainly the flicker of fear in the ugly face. Now was the time. "Unbind my feet!" he ordered, and he put into his voice all the force and menace he could muster. "Take me to the outer world. Take your spear. If I do not speak truth, kill me there. My _Tao_ will show you a sign; he will fill your heart with fear as it now is filled with evil. But, it may be I can save you. Unbind my feet! Be quick!" Again he waited while Luhra spoke, and he cursed silently with the agony of waiting. To be playing a part, speaking these absurdly childish things, when what he wanted was his hand upon a gun or in a grip of death about that black throat! Yet he lay as still as if the vibrations of the bell were upon him, and his eyes held unwaveringly upon the savage face, until he felt the fumbling of hands about his feet.... * * * * * A square-cut portal!--and beyond it a golden sun that shone through mists of purple and rose! Was he too late? Garry pressed forward in what would have been a clumsy run, but for the spear that had prodded him through all the long passage, and that warned now against attempted escape. The brilliance and heat that struck him when he stepped, out into the open brought Garry in a flash from the world of horror and make-believe into the world he knew. He wanted to shout for sheer joy; but more than all else he wanted to leap at the ugly thing who stood blinking his eyes in the mouth of the cave. The thought of escape was strong upon him, but the touch of a timid hand showed the folly of that. Luhra was beside him, her filmy lacework shining softly in the sun, to make more lovely the delicate flush beneath. Her eyes, shielded from the sun, were upon him with a look half hopeful, half despairing. No, he must see it through--go on with his play-acting--meet magic with magic. Horab had come out from the cave, and spear in hand he stood commandingly above them on a huge boulder. Yes, the magic must go on. The harsh voice of the savage ripped out unintelligible words. Luhra translated. "It is changed," she said, "and Horab fears. But the water is there, and there is no burning death.... He says your _Tao_ is weak." Garry stared with thankful eyes across the blue expanse where a line of white marked ghostly breakers on a distant shore; where hills were reflected in the shimmering blue. But the sun was still above their tops, so he must spar for time-- "My _Tao_ is strong," he said, and went on with whatever fantastic thoughts came into his mind. He was talking against time. He told of the new world his _Tao_ had built, of men harnessing the lightning and flying through the air; of cannon that roared like the thunder and threw death and destruction upon those that the _Tao_ would destroy.... And his eyes watched the slow descent of the dropping sun, while the figure above stirred impatiently and raised his spear. "A sign!" Luhra was imploring. "He does not believe!" The golden ball was touching now on a distant, purple peak. The amazing magic of the desert!--its moment had come! Garry indicated as best he could the phantom sea, so real, below. "My _Tao_ has spoken," he shouted: "watch! The waters shall be dried up; the seas shall become a desert of hot sand; the lands and waters that Horab knows shall be no more! There shall be no food for his stomach nor water for his lips where Horab wanders in torment.... Unless I save him." * * * * * He turned to stare at the vast mirage. He knew that the eyes of the others had followed his, and he knew that they saw the first change that crept over the land. The blue that was so unmistakably a sea was dissolving; it seemed sucked into the sand. And, while yet the hot rays cast their lingering gold over mountain and plain, the seas faded and were gone ... and where they had been in unquestioned reality was only yellow sand that whirled hotly and drifted in the first breath of the coming night.... The towering figure above them stood rigid. Garry had found a sharp edge of rock, and sawed frantically upon it to cut the soft gold of the cords at his wrists. The one above them paid no heed; his eyes were held in horror of this silent death that swept across the world. The hand that Garry extended was steady and cautious; his arm crept about the body of white and gold to draw the amazed and wondering girl silently into the open cave. "Follow!" he ordered, and dashed headlong down the darkened way where an automatic was waiting for his eager fingers. The pack was there, and he tore at it with frenzied hands to grip at the pistol within. And there was also an open chest whose contents glittered in the green light, and whose weight was not too great for him to carry.... He had both chest and gun when he returned. The stumbling falls in his mad rush had not served to allay the hurts of his tortured body, nor still his raging fury. He called to Luhra as he ran--and realized that Luhra was gone. The chest fell forgotten at his feet as he rushed out; he shouted her name and cursed himself for leaving her. * * * * * Had the fascination of the outer world drawn her back? Had she trusted too greatly in the power of his Tao to shield her from harm? Connell could not know. He knew only that he saw her struggling in the grip of the long arms where the black one held her on an outthrust rock. They were a hundred feet away, yet the black face beneath its pointed skull showed plainly its bestial fury as Garry sprang forward. With one motion the tall figure dashed the girl to the stone at his feet and raised his spear. He paused to laugh harshly at the man who rushed toward him--who could never reach him to stop the fatal thrust. A threat, it might have been, to hold the attacker off, or a murderous intent to end now and forever this one captive's life: Garry did not wait to learn. And the hundred-foot distance that meant a hundred feet of safety to the savage was spanned by a stream of lead from a gun whose stabbing flashes cracked sharply upon the still air. The ringing clatter of a spear that fell among granite stones came thinly to Garry as he saw the black form of Horab, king of another day, spin dizzily from the rock on which he stood. He had hit him--wounded him at least--and the firing of that wild fusillade might have emptied the magazine! Gary waited for nothing more, but gathered the limp body of the girl within his outstretched arms and carried her stumblingly across the welter of rocks on the boulder-strewn slope. Nor did he stop until he had gained the safety of open ground beyond the marks of the great slide. * * * * * The earth was shivering and weaving as he laid her down; a rock crashed sharply in the distance. Garry turned to retrace his steps and leap wildly from rock to rock toward the mouth of the cave in a granite cliff. And the metal chest was in his arms when he returned where Luhra waited. The ground was alive with sickening motion, he was nauseated with earthquake sickness, but he gave thought only to his gun and the one cartridge that he found in the chamber. He steadied his arm upon a rock to take aim at a figure on a distant slope. Horab had climbed back upon the rock. A lean figure and black, he was sharply outlined in the last rays of the setting sun; the target was clear beyond the pistol's sights. But the fingers of the grim-faced man refused to tighten upon the trigger. Savage and cruel--a relic of a bygone age! He stood there, ludicrous and unreal in his stark black nakedness, his frayed robes of crimson whipping to tatters in the breeze. Yet he had forgotten his wounds--Horab was standing upright--and Garry's hand that held the pistol fell loosely at his side. The hate melted from his heart as he watched where Horab drew himself painfully erect. A barbarous figure was Horab, and evil beyond redemption, yet there were not lacking the attributes of a king in the grotesque form whose head was still held high. The sun made flashing brilliance of the jewels on that distorted head, while he stared with hopeless, savage eyes across the changed world where he could have no part. His _Tao_ had failed him; his enemy had struck him down; and now-- The rock that had been a rest for Garry's arm was swaying, and to his ears came a rumble and groan. Sentinel Mountain, that had watched the ages pass, that had seen the oceans truly change to sand, protested again at this disturbance of its own long sleep. Garry heard the coming of the masses from above; the crashing din was deadening to his ears. They were safe--and his eyes were upon a savage figure, black and tall, that stared and stared, silently, across a sea of yellow sand. He watched it, clear-cut, motionless--until it vanished beneath the roaring flood of rocks. * * * * * And close in his arms there pressed the soft body of a trembling girl who touched his face and whispered: "Your _Tao_, my brave one, is strong. Hold me closely that he may count me as your friend." His own whispered words, though differing somewhat, were a fervent echo of hers. He saw the rocky masses piled high where the mouth of a cave had been; and "Thank God!" Garry Connell said, "we got out of there in time!" The casket of jewels lay neglected among the rocks: to-morrow would be time enough to salvage the wealth for which he had risked his life. He swept the girl into his arms, and the sun's last rays made golden splendor of his burden as he carried her across the broken stones. His ranch showed far below him when he stopped, but the green of date palms had vanished under the last great sweep of rocks. Some few that remained made dark splotches among the shadows that were engulfing the world. What did it matter? Miramar--"Beautiful Sea!" He laughed grimly at thought of how that sea had served him, but his eyes were tender in his tanned and blood-stained face. Miramar could be restored. And it would be less lonely now.... ROBOT CHEMIST A robot chemist with an electric eye, radio brain and magnet hands functioned without human supervision in an improvised laboratory recently before members of the New York Electrical Society. The automatic chemist performed several experiments. Its work was explained by William C. MacTavish, professor of chemistry at New York University, and was part of a program in which cold light was reproduced, a sample weighing a millionth of a gram analyzed, a photo-electric cell used to control analysis and new scientific apparatus demonstrated. In his talk on "The Magic of Modern Chemistry," Professor MacTavish demonstrated the separation of para-hydrogen and ortho-hydrogen. In the micro-analysis of a millionth of a gram, Professor MacTavish exhibited in the micro-projector a ball of gold weighing one thousandth of a milligram (one twenty-eight millionth of an ounce), having a value of less than one ten-thousandth of a cent. The robot chemist was the joint creation of Dr. H. M. Partridge and Professor Ralph H. Muller of the department of chemistry at New York University. In explaining what the automatic chemist can do, Professor MacTavish said: "The ability of the automatic chemist to control chemical operations is due to its sensitivity to slight variations in color and light intensity. Its working parts are very simple. They consist of a standard light source, in this case an electric light, a photo-electric cell which detects differences in the amount of light impinging on it, a radio tube which amplifies the signal received from the photo-electric cell and which operates the relays controlling the automatic valves. "Between the electric light and the photo-electric cell is placed a glass vessel holding an alkali that is to be neutralized. Above is a tube from which an acid passes, drop by drop, through an automatic valve, into the alkali. A small amount of chemical indicator added to the alkali maintains a red color in it until it is neutralized. When a sufficient amount of the acid has dropped into the alkali, the red color disappears, indicating complete neutralization. "When the solution is colored red, an insufficient amount of lights gets through to the photo-electric cell. As the red color gradually diminishes, the amount of light passing through increases, and when the solution is entirely clear the light reaches a critical value which causes the photo-electric cell to pass a signal to the radio tube. This tube operates the relay which closes a valve and shuts off the supply of acid. "Using a device of this sort to perform such operations around a laboratory will save a great deal of a chemist's time. Its electric eye is about 165 times as sensitive to differences in color as any human eye." Beyond the Vanishing Point A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By Ray Cummings_ CHAPTER I _The Fragment of Quartz_ [Sidenote: The tale of a golden atom--an astounding adventure in size.] [Illustration: The fly landed with a thud on the center table.] It was shortly after noon of December 31, 1960, when the series of weird and startling events began which took me into the tiny world of an atom of gold, beyond the vanishing point, beyond the range of even the highest-powered electric-microscope. My name is George Randolph. I was, that momentous afternoon, assistant chemist for the Ajax International Dye Company, with main offices in New York City. It was twelve-twenty when the local exchange call-sorter announced Alan's connection from Quebec. "You, George? Look here, we've got to have you up here at once. Chateau Frontenac, Quebec. Will you come?" I could see his face imaged in the little mirror on my desk; the anxiety, tenseness in his voice, was duplicated in his expression. "Well--" I began. "You must, George. Babs and I need you. See here--" He tried at first to make it sound like an invitation for a New Year's Eve holiday. But I knew it was not that. Alan and Barbara Kent were my best friends. They were twins, eighteen years old. I felt that Alan would always be my best friend; but for Babs my hopes, longings, went far deeper, though as yet I had never brought myself to the point of telling her so. "I'd like to come, Alan. But--" "You must! George, I can't tell you over the public air. It's--I've seen _him_! He's diabolical! I know it now!" _Him!_ It could only mean, of all the world, one person! "He's here!" he went on. "Near here. We've seen him to-day! I didn't want to tell you, but that's why we came. It seemed a long chance, but it's he, I'm positive!" I was staring at the image of Alan's eyes; it seemed that there was horror in them. And in his voice. "God, George, it's weird! Weird, I tell you. His looks--he--oh I can't tell you now! Only, come!" * * * * * I was busy at the office in spite of the holiday season, but I dropped everything and went. By one o'clock that afternoon I was wheeling my little sport midge from its cage on the roof of the Metropole building, and went into the air. It was a cold gray afternoon with the feel of coming snow. I made a good two hundred and fifty miles at first, taking the northbound through-traffic lane which to-day the meteorological conditions had placed at 6,200 feet altitude. Flying is largely automatic. There was not enough traffic to bother me. The details of leaving the office so hastily had been too engrossing for thought of Alan and Babs. But now, in my little pit at the controls, my mind flung ahead. They had located him. That meant Franz Polter, for whom we had been searching nearly four years. And my memory went back into the past with vivid vision.... The Kents, four years ago, were living on Long Island. Alan and Babs were fourteen years old, and I was seventeen. Even then Babs represented to me all that was desirable in girlhood. I lived in a neighboring house that summer and saw them every day. To my adolescent mind a thrilling mystery hung upon the Kent family. The mother was dead. Dr. Kent, father of Alan and Babs, maintained a luxurious home, with only a housekeeper and and no other servant. Dr. Kent was a retired chemist. He had, in his home, a chemical laboratory in which he was working upon some mysterious problem. His children did not know what it was, nor, of course, did I. And none of us had ever been in the laboratory, except that when occasion offered we stole surreptitious peeps. I recall Dr. Kent as a kindly, iron-gray haired gentleman. He was stern with the discipline of his children; but he loved them, and was indulgent in a thousand ways. They loved him; and I, an orphan, began looking upon him almost as a father. I was interested in chemistry. He knew it, and did his best to help and encourage me in my studies. * * * * * There came an afternoon in the summer of 1956, when arriving at the Kent house, I ran upon a startling scene. The only other member of the household was a young fellow of twenty-five, named Franz Polter. He was a foreigner, born, I understood, in one of the Balkan Protectorates; and he was here, employed by Dr. Kent as laboratory assistant. He had been with the Kents, at this time, two years. Alan and Babs did not like him, nor did I. He must have been a clever, skilful chemist. No doubt he was. But in aspect he was, to us, repulsive. A hunchback, with a short thick body; dangling arms that suggested a gorilla; barrel chest; a lump set askew on his left shoulder, and his massive head planted down with almost no neck. His face was rugged in feature; a wide mouth, a high-bridged heavy nose; and above the face a great shock of wavy black hair. It was an intelligent face; in itself, not repulsive. But I think we all three feared Franz Polter. There was always something sinister about him, quite apart from his deformity. I came, that afternoon, upon Babs and Polter under a tree on the Kent lawn. Babs, at fourteen with her long black braids down her back, bare-legged and short-skirted in a summer sport costume, was standing against the tree with Polter facing her. They were about of a height. To my youthful imaginative mind rose the fleeting picture of a young girl in a forest menaced by a gorilla. I came upon them suddenly. I heard Polter say: "But I lof you, And you are almos' a woman. Some day you lof me." He put out his thick hand and gripped her shoulder. She tried to twist away. She was frightened, but she laughed. "You--you're crazy!" He was suddenly holding her in his arms, and she was fighting him. I dashed forward. Babs was always a spunky sort of girl. In spite of her fear now, she kept on laughing, and she shouted: "You--let me go, you--hunchback!" He did let her go; but in a frenzy of rage he hauled back his hand and struck her in the face. I was upon him the next second. I had him down on the lawn, punching him; but though at seventeen I was a reasonably husky lad, the hunchback with his thick, hairy gorilla arms proved much stronger. He heaved me off. And then the commotion brought Alan. Without waiting to find out what the trouble was, he jumped on Polter. Between us, I think we would have beaten him pretty badly. But the housekeeper summoned Dr. Kent and the fight was over. * * * * * Polter left for good within an hour. He did not speak to any of us. But I saw him as he put his luggage into the taxi which Dr. Kent had summoned. I was standing silently nearby with Babs and Alan. The look he flung us as he drove away carried an unmistakable menace--the promise of vengeance. And I think now that in his warped and twisted mind he was telling himself that he would some day make Babs regret that she had laughed at his love. What happened that night none of us ever knew. Dr. Kent worked late in his laboratory; he was there when Alan and Babs and the housekeeper went to bed. He had written a note to Alan; it was found on his desk in a corner of the laboratory next morning, addressed in care of the family lawyer to be given Alan in the event his father died. It said very little. Described a tiny fragment of gold quartz rock the size of a walnut which would be found under the giant microscope in the laboratory; and told Alan to give it to the American Scientific Society to be guarded and watched very carefully. This note was found, but Dr. Kent had vanished! There had been a midnight marauder. The laboratory was on the lower floor of the house. Through one of its open windows, so the police said, an intruder had entered. There was evidence of a struggle, but it must have been short, and neither Babs, Alan, the housekeeper nor any of the neighbors heard anything amiss. And the fragment of golden quartz was gone! The police investigation came to nothing. Polter was found in New York. He withstood the police questions. There was nothing except suspicion upon which he could be held, and he was finally released. Immediately, he disappeared. Neither Alan, Babs nor I saw Polter again. Dr. Kent had never been heard from to this day, four years later when I flew to join the twins in Quebec. And now Alan had told me that Polter was up there! We had never ceased to believe that Dr. Kent was alive, and that Polter was the midnight marauder. And as we grew older, we began to search for Polter. It seemed to us that now we were older, if we could once get our hands on him, we could drag from him the truth in which the police had failed. * * * * * The call of a traffic director in mid-Vermont brought me back from these vivid thoughts. My buzzer was clanging; a peremptory halting-signal day-beam came darting up at me from below. It caught me and clung: I shouted down at it. "What's the matter?" I gave my name and number and all the details in a breath. Above everything I had no wish to be halted now. "What's the matter? I haven't done anything wrong." "The hell you haven't," the director roared. "Come down to three thousand. That lane's barred." I dove obediently and his beam followed me. "Once more like that, young fellow--" But he went busy with somebody else and I didn't hear the end of his threat. I crossed into Maine in mid-afternoon. Twilight was upon me. The sky was solid lead. The landscape all up through here was gray-white with snow in the gathering darkness. I passed the city of Jackman, crossing full over it to take no chances of annoying the border officials; and a few miles further, I dropped to the glaring lights of the International Inspection Field. The formalities were soon finished. I was ready to take-away when Alan rushed at me. "George! I thought I could connect here." He gripped me. He was wild-eyed, incoherent. He waved his taxiplane away. "I'm going back with my friend. George. I can't--I don't know what's happened to her. _She's_ gone, now!" "Who's gone? Babs?" "Yes." He pushed me into my plane and climbed in after me. "Don't talk. Get us up! I'll tell you then. I shouldn't have left." When we were up in the air, I swung on him. "What are you talking about? Babs gone?" I could feel myself shuddering with a nameless horror. "I don't know what I'm talking about, George. I'm about crazy. The Quebec police think I am, anyway. I been raising hell with them for an hour. Babs is gone. I can't find her. I don't know where she is." * * * * * He finally calmed down enough to tell me. Shortly after his radiophone to me in New York, he had missed Babs. They had had lunch in the huge hotel and then walked on the Dufferin Terrace--the famous promenade outside looking down over the lower city, the great sweep of the St. Lawrence River and the gray-white distant Laurentian mountains. "I was to meet her inside. I went in ahead of her. But she didn't come. I went back to the terrace and she was gone. Wasn't in our rooms. Nor the lobby--nor anywhere." But it was early afternoon, in the public place of a civilized city. In the daylight of the Dufferin Terrace, beside the long ice toboggan slide, under the gaze of skaters on the ice-rink and several hundred holiday merrymakers, a young girl could hardly be murdered, or forcibly abducted, without attracting some attention! The Quebec police thought the young American unduly excited over his sister, who was missing only an hour. They would do what they could, if by dark she had not rejoined him. They suggested that doubtless the young lady had gone shopping. "Maybe she did," I agreed. But in my heart, I felt differently. "She'll be waiting for us in the hotel when we get there, Alan." "But I'm telling you we saw Polter this morning. He lives here--not thirty miles from Quebec. We saw him on the terrace after breakfast. Recognized him at once." "Did he see you?" "I don't know. He was lost in the crowd in a minute. But I asked a young French fellow who it was. He knew him. Told me, Frank Raskor. That's the name he wears now. He's a famous man up here--well known, immensely rich. I don't know if he saw us or not. What a fool I was to leave Babs alone, even for a minute!" We were speeding over a white-clad valley with a little frozen river winding down its middle. Almost full night had come. The leaden sky was low above us. It began snowing. The lights of the small villages along the river were barely visible. "Can you land us, Alan?" "Yes, surely. Municipal field just beyond the Citadel. We can get to the hotel in five minutes. Good landing lights." * * * * * It was a flight of only half an hour. During it, Alan told me about Polter. The hunchback, known now as Frank Rascor, owned a mine in the Laurentides, some thirty miles from Quebec City--a fabulously productive mine of gold. It was an anomaly that gold should be produced in this region. No vein of gold-bearing rock had been found, except the one on Polter's property. Alan had seen a newspaper account of the strangeness of it; and just upon the chance had come to Quebec, seen Frank Rascor on the Dufferin Terrace, and recognized him as Polter. Again my thoughts went back into the past. Had Polter stolen that missing fragment of golden quartz the size of a walnut which had been beneath Dr. Kent's microscope? We always thought so. Dr. Kent had some secret, some great problem upon which he was working. Polter, his assistant, had evidently known, or partially known, its details. And now, four years later, Polter was immensely rich, with a "gold mine" in mountains where there was no other such evidence of gold! I seemed to see some connection. Alan, I knew, was groping with a dim idea, so strange he hardly dared voice it. "I tell you, it's weird, George. The sight of him. Polter--heavens, one couldn't mistake that hunchback--and his face, his features, just the same as when we knew him." "Then what's weird?? I demanded. "His age." There was a queer solemn hush in Alan's voice. "George, when we knew Polter, he was about twenty-five, wasn't he? Well, that was four years ago. But he isn't twenty-nine now! I swear it's the same man--but he isn't around thirty. Don't ask me what I'm talking about. I don't know. But he isn't thirty. He's nearer fifty! Unnatural! Weird! I felt it, and so did Babs, just that brief look we had at him." I did not answer. My attention was on managing the plane. The lights of Sevis were under us. Beyond the city cliffs the St. Lawrence lay in its deep valley; and the Quebec lights, the light-dotted ramparts with the terrace and the great fortress-like hotel showed across the river. "Better take the stick, Alan. I don't know where the field is. And don't you worry about Babs. She'll be back by now." * * * * * But she was not. We went to the two connecting rooms in the tower of the hotel which Alan and Babs had engaged. We inquired with half a dozen phone-calls. No one had seen or heard from her. The Quebec police were sending a man up to talk to Alan. "Well, we won't be here," Alan called to me. He was standing by the window in Bab's room; he was trembling too much to use the phone. I hung up the receiver and went through the connecting door to join him. Bab's room! It sent a pang through me. A few of her garments were lying around. A negligee was laid out on the dainty little bed. A velvet boudoir doll--she had always loved them--stood on the dresser. Upon this hotel room, in a day, she had impressed her personality. Her perfume was in the air. And now she was gone. "We won't be here," Alan was repeating. He gripped me at the window. "Look!" In his hand was an ugly-looking, smokeless, soundless automatic of the Essen type. "And I've got another, for you. Brought them up with me." His face was white and drawn, but his hands abruptly were steady. The tremble was gone out of his voice. "I'm going after him. George! Now! Understand that? Now! His place is only thirty miles from here, out there in the mountains. You can see it in the daylight--a wall around his property and a stone castle which he built in the middle of it. A gold mine? Hell!" There was nothing to be seen now out of the window but the snow-filled darkness, the blurred lights of lower Quebec and the line of dock-lights five hundred feet under us. "Will you fly me, George?" "Of course." I was the one trembling now; the cool feel of the automatic which Alan thrust into my hand seemed suddenly to crystallize Bab's danger. I was here in her room, with the scent of her perfume around it, and this deadly weapon was needed! But the trembling was gone in a moment. "Yes. Of course, Alan. No use talking to the police. You can't get a search warrant to ransack the castle of a rich man just because you can't find your sister. Come on. You can tell me what his place is like as we go." * * * * * Bundled in our flying suits we hurried from the hotel, climbed the Citadel slope of the landing field, and in ten minutes were again in the air. The wind sucked at us. The snow now was falling with thick huge flakes. Directed by Alan, I headed out over the ice-filled St. Lawrence, past the frozen Isle d'Orleans, toward Polter's mysterious mountain castle. Suddenly Alan burst out, "I know what father's secret was, George! I can piece it together now, from little things that were meaningless when I was a kid. He invented the electro-microscope. You know that. The infinitely small fascinated him. I remember he once said that if we could see far enough down into smallness, we would come upon human life!" Alan's low tense voice was more vehement than I had ever heard it before. "It's clear to me now, George. That little fragment of golden quartz which he wanted me to be so careful of contained a world with human inhabitants! Father knew it, or suspected it. And I think the chemical problem on which he was working aimed for some drug. I know it was a drug they were compounding. Polter said so once, a radio-active drug; I remember listening at the door. A drug, George, capable of making a human being infinitely small!" I did not answer when momentarily Alan paused. So strange a thing! My mind whirled with it; struggled to encompass it. And like the meaningless pieces of a puzzle, dropping so easily into place when the key-piece is fitted. I saw Polter stealing that fragment of gold; abducting Dr. Kent--perhaps because Polter himself was not fully acquainted with the secret. And now, Polter, up here with a fabulously rich "gold mine." And Babs, abducted by him, to be taken--where? It set me shuddering. "Alan!" "That's what it was!" Alan reiterated. "And Polter, here now with what he calls a 'mine.' It isn't a mine, it's a laboratory! He's got father, too, hidden God knows where! And now Babs. We've got to get them. George! The police can't help us! It's just you and me, to fight this thing. And it's diabolical!" CHAPTER II _The Girl an Inch Tall_ We soared over the divided channel of the St. Lawrence, between Orleans and the mainland. Montmorency Falls in a moment showed dimly white through the murk to our left, a great hanging veil of ice higher than Niagara. Further ahead, the lights of the little village of St. Anne de Beaupré were visible with the gray-black, towering hills behind them. Historic region! But Alan and I had no thoughts for it. "Swing left, George. Over the mainland. That's St. Anne; we pass this side of it. Put the mufflers on. This damn thing roars like a tower siren." I cut in the mufflers, and switched off our wing-lights. It was illegal, but we were past all thought of that. We were both desperate; the slow prudent process of acting within the law had nothing to do with this affair. We both knew it. Our little plane was dark, and amid the sounds of this night blizzard our muffled engine could not be heard. Alan touched me. "There are his lights; see them?" We had passed St. Anne. The hills lay ahead--wild mountainous country stretching northward to the foot of Hudson Bay. The blizzard was roaring out of the north and we were heading into it. I saw, on what seemed a dome-like hill perhaps a thousand feet above the river level, a small cluster of lights which marked Polter's property. "Fly over it once, George. Low--we can chance it. And find a place to land outside the walls." We presently had it under us. I held us at five hundred feet, and cut our speed to the minimum of twenty miles an hour facing the gale, though it was sixty or seventy when we turned. There were a score or two of hooded ground lights. But there was little reflection aloft, and in the murk of the snowfall I felt we would escape notice. We crossed, turned and went back in an arc following Polter's outer curved wall. We had a good view of it. A weird enough looking place, here on its lonely hilltop. No wonder the wealthy "Frank Rascor" had attained local prominence! * * * * * The whole property was irregularly circular, perhaps a mile in diameter covering the almost flat dome of the hilltop. Around it, completely enclosing it, Polter had built a stone and brick wall. A miniature wall of China! We could see that it was fully thirty feet high with what evidently were naked high-voltage wires protecting its top. There were half a dozen little gates, securely barred, with doubtless a guard at each of them. Within the wall there were several buildings: a few small stone houses suggesting workmen's dwellings; an oblong stone structure with smoke funnels which seemed perhaps a smelter; a huge, dome-like spread of translucent glass over what might have been the top of a mine-shaft. It looked more like the dome of an observatory--an inverted bowl fully a hundred feet wide and equally as high, set upon the ground. What did it cover? And, there was Polter's residence--a castle-like brick and stone building with a central tower not unlike a miniature of the Chateau Frontenac. We saw a stone corridor on the ground connecting the lower floor of the castle with the dome, which lay about a hundred feet to one side. Could we chance landing inside the wall? There was a dark, level expanse of snow where we could have done it, but our descending plane would doubtless have been discovered. But the mile-wide inner area was dark in many places. Spots of light were at the little wall-gates. There was a glow all along the top of the wall. Lights were in Polter's house; they slanted out in yellow shafts to the nearby white ground. But for the rest, the whole place was dark, save a dim glow from under the dome. I shook my head at Alan's suggestion. "We couldn't land inside." We had circled back and were a mile or so off toward the river. "You saw guards down there. But that low stretch outside the gate on this side--" A plan was coming to me. Heaven knows it was desperate enough, but we had no alternative. We would land and accost one of the gate guards. Force our way in. Once inside the wall, on foot in the darkness of this blizzard, we could hide; creep up to that dome. Beyond that my imagination could not go. * * * * * We landed in the snow a quarter of a mile from one of the gates. We left the plane and plunged into the darkness. It was a steady upward slope. A packed snowfield was under foot, firm enough to hold our shoes, with a foot or so of loose soft snow on its top. The falling flakes whirled around us. The darkness was solid, Our helmeted leather-furred flying suits were soon shapeless with a gathering white shroud. We carried our Essens in our gloved hands. The night was cold, around zero I imagine, though with that biting wind it felt far colder. From the gloom a tiny spot of light loomed up. "There it is, Alan. Easy now! Let me go first." The wind tore away my words. We could see the narrow rectangle of bars at the gate, with a glow of light behind them. "Hide your gun, Alan." I gripped him. "Hear me?" "Yes." "Let me go first. I'll do the talking. When he opens the gate, let me handle him. You--if there are two of them--you take the other." We emerged from the darkness, into the glow of light by the gate. I had the horrible feeling that a shot would greet us. A challenge came, at first in French, then in English. "Stop! What do you want?" "To see Mr. Rascor." We were up to the bars now, shapeless hooded bundles of snow and frost. A man stood in the doorway of a lighted little cubby behind the bars. A black muzzle in his hand was leveled at us. "He sees no one. Who are you?" Alan was pressing at me from behind. I shoved back, and took a step forward. I touched the bars. "My name is Fred Davis. Newspaper man from Montreal. I must see Mr. Rascor." "You cannot. You may send in your call. The mouthpiece is there--out there to the left. Bare your face; he talks to no one without the face image." * * * * * The guard had drawn back into his cubby; there was only this extended hand and the muzzle of his weapon left visible. I took a step forward. "I don't want to talk by phone. Won't you open the gate? It's cold out here. We have important business. We'll wait with you." Abruptly the gate lattice slid aside. Beyond the cubby doorway was the open darkness within the wall. A scuffed path leading inward from the gate showed for a few feet. I walked over the threshold, with Alan crowding me. The Essen in my coat pocket was leveled. But from the cubby doorway, I saw that the guard was gone! Then I saw him crouching back of a metal shield. His voice rang out. "Stand!" A light struck my face--a little beam from a television sender beside me. It all happened in an instant, so quickly Alan and I had barely time to make a move. I realized my image was now doubtless being presented to Polter. He would recognize me! I ducked my head, yelling: "Don't do that! You frighten me!" It was too late! The guard had received a signal. I was aware of its buzz. From the shield a tiny jet of fluid leaped at me. It struck my hood. There was a heavy, sickening-sweet smell. It seemed like chloroform. I felt my senses going. The cubby room was turning dark; was roaring. I think I fired at the shield. And Alan leapt aside. I heard the faint hiss of his Essen. And his choked, horrified voice: "George--come back! Run! Don't fall! Don't!" I crumpled; slid into blackness. And it seemed, as I went down, that Alan's inert body was falling on top of me.... * * * * * I recovered consciousness after a nameless interval, a phantasmagoria of wild, drugged dreams. My senses came slowly. At first, there were dim muffled voices and the tread of footsteps. Then I knew that I was lying on the ground, and that I was indoors. It was warm. My overcoat was off. Then I realized that I was bound and gagged. I opened my eyes. Alan was lying inert beside me, roped and with a black gag around his face and in his mouth. We were in a huge dim open space. Presently, as my vision cleared, I saw that the dome was overhead. This was a circular, hundred-foot-wide room. It was dimly lighted. The figures of men were moving about, their great misshapen shadows shifting with them. Twenty feet from me there was a pile of golden rock--chunks of gold the size of a man's fist, or his head, and larger, heaped loosely into a mound ten feet high. Beyond this pile of ore, near the center of the room, twenty feet above the concrete floor, there was a large hanging electrolier. It cast a circular glow downward. Under it I saw a low platform raised a foot or two above the ground. A giant electro-microscope was hung with its twenty-foot cylinder above the platform. Its intensification tubes were glowing in a dim phosphorescent row on a nearby bracket. A man sat in a chair on the platform at the microscope's eyepiece. I saw all this with a brief glance, then my attention went to a white stone slab under the giant lense. It rested on the platform floor, a two-foot-square surface of smooth white stone like marble. A little roped railing a few inches high fenced it. And in its center lay a fragment of golden quartz the size of a walnut! There was a movement across my line of vision. Two figures advanced. I recognized both of them. And I strained at my bonds; mouthed the gag with futile, horrified effort. I could no more than writhe; and I could not make a sound. I lay, after a moment exhausted, and stared with horror. The familiar hunched figure of Polter advanced toward the microscope. And with him, his huge hand holding her wrists, was Babs. They were nearly fifty feet from me, but with the light over them I could see them clearly. Bab's slim figure was clad in a long skirted dress--pale blue, now, with the light on it. Her long black hair had fallen disheveled to her shoulders. I could not see her face. She did not cry out. Polter was half dragging her as she resisted him; and then abruptly she ceased struggling. I heard his gutteral voice. "That iss better." * * * * * They mounted to the platform. It seemed to me that they must have been far away; they were very small. Abnormally small. I blinked. Horror surged over me. Their figures were dwindling as they stood there! Polter was saying something to the man at the microscope. Other men were nearby, watching. All normal, save Polter and Babs. A moment passed. Polter was standing by the chair in which the man at the microscope was sitting. And Polter's head barely reached its seat! Babs was clinging to him, now. Another moment. They were both little figures down by the chair-leg. Then they began walking with swaying steps toward the tiny railing of the white slab. The white reflection from the slab plainly illumined then. Polter's arm was around Babs. I had not realized how small they were until I saw Polter lift the rope of the four-inch little fence, and he and Babs stooped and walked under it. The fragment of quartz lay a foot from them in the center of the white surface. They walked unsteadily toward it. But soon they were running. My horrified senses whirled. Then abruptly I felt something touch my face! Alan and I were lying in shadow. No one had noticed my writhing movements, and Alan was still in drugged unconsciousness. Something tiny and light and soundless as a butterfly wing brushed my face! I jerked my head aside. On the floor, within six inches of my eyes, I saw the tiny figure of a girl an inch high! She stood, with a warning gesture to her lips--a human girl in a filmy flowing drapery. Long pale golden tresses lay on her white shoulders; her face, small as my little fingernail, colorful as a miniature painted upon ivory, was so close to my eyes that I could see her expression--warning me not to move. There was a faint glow of light on the floor where she stood, but in a moment she moved out of it. Then I felt her brush against the back of my head. My ear was near the ground. A tiny warm hand touched my ear-lobe; clung to it. A tiny voice sounded in my ear. "Please do not move your head! You might kill me!" There was a pause. I held myself rigid. Then the tiny voice came again. "I am Glora, a friend. I have the drug! I will help you!" CHAPTER III _The Fight in the Shrinking Dome Room_ It seemed that Alan was stirring. I felt the tiny hand leave my ear. I thought that I could hear faint little footfalls as the girl scampered away, fearful that a sudden movement from Alan would crush her. I turned cautiously after a moment and saw Alan's eyes upon me. He too had seen, with a blurred returning consciousness, the dwindling figures of Babs and Polter. I followed his gaze. The white slab with the golden quartz under the microscope seemed empty of human movement. The several men in this huge circular dome-room were dispersing to their affairs: three of them sat whispering by what I now saw was a pile of gold ingots stacked crosswise. But the fellow at the microscope held his place, his eye glued to its aperture as he watched the vanishing figures of Polter and Babs on the rock-fragment. Alan seemed trying to convey something to me, He could only gaze and jerk his head. I saw behind his head the figure of the tiny girl on the floor behind him. She wanted evidently to approach his head but did not dare. When for an instant he was quiet, she ran forward, but at once scampered back. From the group by the ingots, one of the men rose and came toward us. Alan held still, watching. And the girl, Glora, seized the opportunity to come nearer. We both heard her tiny voice: "Do not move! Close your eyes! Make him think you are still unconscious." Then she was gone, like a mouse hiding in the shadows near us. Amazement swept Alan's face; he twisted, mouthed at his gag. But he saw my eager nod and took his cue from me. * * * * * I closed my eyes and lay stiff, breathing slowly. Footsteps approached. A man bent over Alan and me. "Are you no conscious yet?" It was the voice of a foreigner, with a queer, indescribable intonation. A foot prodded us. "Wake up!" Then the footsteps retreated, and when I dared to look the man was rejoining his fellows. It was a strange-looking trio. They were heavy-set men in leather jackets and short, wide knee-length trousers. One wore tight, high boots, and the others a sort of white buskin, with ankle straps. All were bareheaded--round, bullet heads of close-dipped black hair. I suddenly had another startling realization. These men were not of normal size as I had assumed! They were eight or ten feet tall at the very least! And they and the pile of ingots, instead of being close to me, were more distant than I had thought. Alan was trying to signal me. The tiny girl was again at his ear, whispering to him. And then she came to me. "I have a knife. See?" She backed away. I caught the pin-point gleam of what might have been a knife in her hand. "I will get a little larger. I am too small to cut your ropes. You lie still, even after I have cut them." I nodded. The movement frightened her so that she leaped backward; but she came again, smiling. The three men were talking earnestly by the ingots. No one else was near us. Glora's tiny voice was louder, so that we both could hear it at once. "When I free you, do not move or they may see that you are loose. I get larger now--a little larger--and return." * * * * * She darted away and vanished. Alan and I lay listening to the voices of the three men. Two were talking in a strange tongue. One called to the man at the microscope, and he responded. The third man said suddenly: "Say, talk English. You know damn well I can't understand that lingo." "We say, McGuire, the two prisoners soon wake up." "What we oughta do is kill 'em. Polter's a fool." "The doctor say, wait for him return. Not long--what you call three, four hours." "And have the Quebec police up here lookin' fer 'em? An' that damn girl he stole off the terrace--What did he call her, Barbara Kent?" "These two who are drugged, their bodies can be thrown in a gully down behind St. Anne. That what the doctor plan to do, I think. Then the police find them--days maybe from now--and their smashed airship with them." Gruesome suggestion! The man at the microscope called, "They are gone. Almost. I can hardly see them more." He left the platform and joined the others. And I saw that he was much smaller than they--about my own size possibly. There seemed six men here altogether. Four now, by the ingots, and two others far across the room where I saw the dark entrance of the corridor-tunnel which led to Polter's castle. Again I felt a warning hand touch my face, and saw the figure of Glora standing by my head. She was larger now--about a foot tall. She moved past my eyes; stood by my mouth; bent down over my gag. I felt the cautious side of a tiny knife-blade inserted under the fabric of the gag. She hacked, tugged at it, and in a moment ripped it through. She stood panting from the effort. My heart was pounding with fear that she would be seen; but the man had turned the central light off when he left the microscope, and it was far darker here now than before. * * * * * I moistened my dry mouth. My tongue was thick, but I could talk. "Thank you, Glora." "Quiet!" I felt her hacking at the ropes around my wrists. And then at my ankles. It took her a long time, but at last I was free! I rubbed my arms and legs; felt the returning strength in them. And presently Alan was free. "George, what--" he began. "Wait!" I whispered. "Easy! Let her tell us what to do." We were unarmed. Two, against these six, three of whom were giants. Glora whispered, "Do not move! I have the drugs. But I can no give them to you when I am still so small. I have not enough. I will hide--there." Her little arm gestured to where, near us, half a dozen boxes were piled. "When I am large as you, I come back. Be ready, quickly to act. I may be seen. I give you then the drug." "But wait," Alan whispered. "We must know--" "The drug to make you large. In a moment then you can fight these men. I had planned it for myself, to do that, and then I saw you held captive. That girl of your world the doctor just now steal, she is friend of yours? "Yes! Yes, Glora. But--" A thousand questions were springing in my mind, but this was no time to ask them. I amended, "Go! Hurry! Give us the drug when you can." The little figure moved away from us and disappeared. Alan and I lay as we had before. But now we could whisper. We tried to anticipate what would happen; tried to plan, but that was futile. The thing was too strange, too astoundingly fantastic. * * * * * HOW long Glora was gone I do not know. I think, not over three or four minutes. She came from her hiding place, crouching this time, and joined us. She was, probably, of normal Earth size--a small, frail-looking girl something over five feet tall. We saw now that she was about sixteen years old. We lay staring at her, amazed at her beauty. Her small oval face was pale, with the flush of pink upon her cheeks--a face queerly, transcendently beautiful. It was wholly human, yet somehow unearthly, as though unmarked by even the heritage of our Earthly strifes. "Now! I am ready." She was fumbling at her robe. "I will give you each the same." Her gestures were rapid. She flung a quick glance at the distant men. Alan and I were tense. We could easily be discovered now, but we had to chance it. We were sitting erect. He murmured: "But what do we do? What happens? What--" On the palm of her hand were two small pink-white pellets. "Take these--one for each of you. Quickly!" Involuntarily we drew back. The thing abruptly was gruesome, frightening. Horribly frightening. "Quickly," she urged. "The drug is what you call highly radio-active. And volatile. Exposed to the air it is gone very soon. You are afraid? No! No, it will not harm you." With a muttered curse at his own reluctance, Alan seized the pellet. I stopped him. "Wait!" * * * * * The men momentarily were engaged in a low-voiced, earnest discussion. I dared to hesitate a moment longer. "Glora, where will you be?" "Here. Right here. I will hide." "We want to go after Mr. Polter." I gestured. "Into that little piece of golden rock. Is that where he went? Is that where he took the Earth girl?" "Yes. My world is there--within an atom there in that rock." "Will you take us?" "Yes! Yes!" Alan whispered suddenly, "Then let us go now. Get smaller, now." But she shook her head vehemently. "That is not possible. We would be seen as we climbed the platform and crossed the white slab." "No." I protested. "Not if we get very small, hiding here first." She was smiling, but urgently fearful of this delay. "Should we get that small, then it would be, from here"--she gestured toward the microscope--"to there, a journey of very many miles. Don't you understand?" This thing so strange! Alan was plucking at me. "Ready, George?" "Yes." I put the pellet on my tongue. It tasted slightly sweet, but seemed quickly melted and I swallowed it hastily. My head swam. My heart was pounding, but that was apprehension, not the drug. A thrill of heat ran through my veins as though my blood were on fire. Alan was clinging to me as we sat together. Glora again had vanished. In the background of my whirling consciousness the sudden thought hovered that she had tricked us; done to us something diabolical. But the thought was swept away in the confusion of the flood of impressions upon me. I turned dizzily. "All right, Alan?" "Yes, I--I guess so." My ears were roaring, the room seemed whirling, but in a moment that passed. I felt a sudden, growing sense of lightness. A humming was within me--a soundless tingle. To every tiny microscopic cell in my body the drug had gone. The myriad pores of my skin seemed thrilling with activity. I know now it was the exuding volatile gas of this disintegrating drug. Like an aura it enveloped me, acted upon my garments. * * * * * I learned later much of the principles of this and its companion drug. I had no thought for such things now. The huge dimly illumined room under the dome was swaying. Then abruptly it steadied. The strange sensations within me were lessening, or I forgot them. And I became aware of externals. The room was shrinking! As I stared, not with horror now, but with amazement and a coming triumph, I saw everywhere a slow, steady, crawling movement. The whole place was dwindling. The platform, the microscope, were nearer than before, and smaller. The pile of ingots, with the men off there, was shifting toward me. "George! My God--weird!" I saw Alan's white face as I turned to him. He was growing at the same rate as myself evidently, for of all the scene he only was unchanged. We could feel the movement. The floor under us was shifting, crawling slowly. From all directions it came, contracting as though it were being squeezed beneath us. In reality our expanding bodies were pushing outward. The pile of boxes which had been a few feet away, were thrusting themselves at me I moved incautiously and knocked them over. They seemed small now, perhaps half their former size. Glora was standing behind them. I was sitting and she was standing, but across the litter, our faces were level. "Stand up!" she murmured. "You all right now. I hide!" I struggled to my feet, drawing Alan up with me. Now! The time for action was upon us! We had already been discovered. The men were shouting, clambering to their feet. Alan and I stood swaying. The dome-room had contracted to half its former size. Near us was a little platform, chair and microscope. Small figures of men were rushing at us. I shouted, "Alan! Watch yourself!" * * * * * We were unarmed. These men might have automatics. But evidently they did not. Knives were in their hands. The whole place was ringing with shouts. And then a shrill siren alarm from outside was clanging. The first of the men--a few moments before he had seemed a giant--flung himself upon me. His head was lower than my shoulders. I met him with a blow of my fist in his face. He toppled backward; but from one side, another figure came at me. A knife-blade bit into the flesh of my thigh. The pain seemed to fire my brain. A madness descended upon me. It was the madness of abnormality. I saw Alan with two dwarfed figures clinging to him. But he threw them off, and they turned and ran. The man at my thigh stabbed again, but I caught his wrist and, as though he were a child, whirled him around me and flung him away. He landed with a crash against the shrunken pile of gold nuggets and lay still. The place was in a turmoil. Other men were appearing from outside. But they stood now well away from us. Alan backed against me. His laugh rang out, half hysterical with the madness upon him as it was upon me. "God! George, look at them! So small!" They were now hardly the height of our knees. This was now a small, circular room, under a lowering concave dome. A shot came from the group of pigmy figures. I saw the small stab of flame, heard the sing of the bullet. We rushed, with the full frenzy of madness upon us, enraged giants. What actually happened I can not recount. I recall scattering the little figures; seizing them; flinging them headlong. A bullet, tiny now, stung the calf of my leg. Little chairs and tables under my feet were crashing. Alan was lunging back and forth; stamping; flinging his tiny adversaries away. There were twenty or thirty of the figures here now. Then I saw some of them escaping. The room was littered with wreckage. I saw that by some miracle of chance the microscope was still standing, and I had a moment of sanity. "Alan, watch out! The microscope! The platform--don't smash it! And Glora! Look out for her!" * * * * * I suddenly became aware that my head and a shoulder had struck the dome roof. Why, this was a tiny room! Alan and I found ourselves backed together, panting in the small confines of a circular cubby with an arching dome close over us. At our feet the platform with the microscope over it hardly reached our boot-tops. There was a sudden silence, broken only by our heavy breathing. The tiny forms of humans strewn around us were all motionless. The others had fled. Then we heard a small voice. "Here! Take this! Quickly! You are too large! Quickly!" Alan took a step. And then a sudden panic was on us both. Glora was here at our feet. We did not dare turn; hardly dared move. To stoop might have crushed her. My leg hit the top of the microscope cylinder. It rocked but did not fall. Where was Glora? In the gloom we could not see her. We were in a panic. Alan began, "George, I say--" The contracting inner curve of the dome bumped gently against my head. The panic of confusion which was upon us turned to fear. The room was closing in to crush us. I muttered. "Alan! I'm going out!" I braced myself and heaved against the side and top curve of the dome. Its metal ribs and heavy translucent, reinforced glass plates resisted me. There was an instant when Alan and I were desperately frightened. We were trapped, to be crushed in here by our own horrible growth. Then the dome yielded under our smashing blows. The ribs bent; the plates cracked. We straightened, pushed upward and emerged through the broken dome, with head and shoulders towering into the outside darkness and the wind and snow of the blizzard howling around us! CHAPTER IV _The Journey Into Smallness_ "Glora, that--that was horrible." We stood, again in normal size, with the wrecked dome-laboratory around us. The dome had a great jagged hole halfway up one of its sides, through which the snow was falling. The broken bodies strewn around were gruesome. Alan repeated, "Horrible, Glora. This drug, the power of it, is diabolical." Glora had grown large after us; had given us the companion drug. I need not detail the strange sensations of our dwindling. We were so soon to experience them again! We had searched, when still large, all of Polter's grounds. Some of his men undoubtedly escaped, made off into the blizzard. How many, we never knew. None of them ever made themselves known again. We were ready to start into the atom. The fragment of golden quartz still lay under the microscope on the white square of stone slab. We had hurried with our last preparations. The room was chilling. We were all inadequately dressed for such cold. I left a note scribbled on a square of paper by the microscope. With daylight, Polter's wrecked place would be discovered. The police would come. "Guard this piece of golden quartz. Take it at once, very carefully, to the Royal Canadian Scientific Society. Have it watched day and night. We will return." I signed it George Randolph. And as I did so, the extraordinary aspect of these events swept me anew. Here in Polter's weird place I had seemed living in some strange fantastic realm. But this was the Province of Quebec, in civilized Canada. These were the Quebec authorities I was addressing. I flung the thoughts away. "Ready, Glora?" "Yes." * * * * * Then doubts assailed me. None of Polter's men had gotten large to fight us. Evidently he did not trust them with the drug. We could well believe that, for the thing, misused, was diabolical beyond human conception. A single giant, a criminal, a madman, by the power of giant size alone, could devastate the earth! The drug, lost, or carelessly handled, could get loose. Animals, insects, eating it, could roam the earth, gigantic monsters! Vegetation, nourished with it, might in a day overrun a great city, burying it with a jungle growth! How terrible a thing, if the realm of smallness were suddenly to emerge! Monsters of the sea, marine organisms, could expand until even the ocean was too small for them. Microbes of disease, feeding upon this drug-- Alan was gripping me. "We're ready, George." "Yes. Yes, I'm ready." This was not largeness we were facing now, but smallness. I thought of Babs, down there with Polter, beyond the vanishing point in the realm of the infinitely small. They had been gone an hour at least. Every moment lost now was adding to Bab's danger. "Yes. I'm ready, Alan." Glora sat with us on the platform. Strange little creature! She was wholly calm now; methodical with her last directions. There had been no time for her to tell us anything about herself. Alan had asked her why she had come here and how she had gotten the drugs. She waved him away: "On the journey down. Plenty of time, then." "How long?" Alan demanded. "Not too long. If we are careful with managing the trip, what you might call ten hours." * * * * * And now as we were ready to start, she told us calmly: "I will give you each your share of the drugs, but them you take only as I tell you." She produced from her robe several small vials a few inches long. They were tightly stoppered. The feel of them was cool and sleek; they seemed of some strange, polished metal. Some of them were tinted black while the others glowed opalescent. She gave each of us one vial of each kind. "The light ones are for diminishing," she said. "We take them very carefully, one small pellet only at first." Alan was opening one of his, but she checked him. "Wait! The drug evaporates very quickly. I have more to say, first. We sit here together. Then you follow me to the white slab. We climb upon the little rock." She laid her hands on our arms. Her blue eyes regarded us earnestly. Her manner was naive; childlike. But I could not mistake her intelligence; the force of character stamped on her face for all its dainty, ethereal beauty. "Alan--" She smiled at him, and tossed back a straying lock of her hair which was annoying her. "You pay attention, Alan. You are very young, reckless. You listen. We must not be separated. You understand that, both of you? We will be always in that little piece of rock. But there will be miles of distance. And to be lost in size--" Strange journey upon which now we were starting! Lost in size? "You understand me? Lost in size. If that happens, we might never find each other. And if we come upon the Doctor Polter and the girl he holds captive--if we can overtake them--" "We must!" I exclaimed. "And we must start, Glora!" "Yes. Now!" * * * * * She showed us which pellet to select. They were of several sizes, I found. And as she afterward told us, the larger ones were not only larger but of an intensified strength. We took the smallest. It was barely a thousandth part of the strength of the largest. In unison we placed the pellets on our tongues, and hastily swallowed. The first sensations were as before. And, familiar now, they caused no more than a fleeting discomfort. But I think I could never get used to the outward strangeness! The room in a moment was expanding. I could feel the platform floor crawling outward beneath me, so that I had to hitch and change my position as it pulled. We were seated together, Alan and I on each side of Glora. My fingers were on her arm. It did not change size, but it slowly drew away with a space opening between us. Overhead, the dome-roof, the great jagged hole there, was receding, lifting, moving upward and away. Glora pulled us to our feet. "We had better start now. The distance is so far, so quickly." We had been sitting within five feet of the stone slab with its little four-inch-high railing around it. A chair was by the microscope eyepiece. As we stood swaying I saw that the chair was huge, and its seat level with my head. The great barrel-cylinder of the microscope slanted sixty feet upward. The dome-roof was a distant spread three hundred feet up in the dimness. This gigantic room! It was a vast arena now. Alan and I must have hesitated, confused by the expanding scene--a slow steady movement everywhere. Everything was drawing away from us. Even as we stood together, the creeping platform floor was separating us. A moment passed. Glora was urging vehemently: "Come! You must not stand!" We started walking. The railing around the slab was knee-high. The slab itself was a broad square surface. The fragment of golden quartz lay in its center. It was now a jagged lump nearly a foot in diameter! * * * * * The platform seemed shifting as we walked; the railing hardly came closer as we advanced toward it. Then suddenly I realized it was receding. Thirty feet away? No, now it was more than that--a great, thick rope, waist-high, with a huge spread of white surface behind it. "Faster!" urged Glora. We ran, and reached the railing. It was higher than our heads. We ran under it, and out upon the white slab--a level surface, larger now than the whole dome-room had been. Glora, like a fawn ran in advance of us, her draperies flying in the wind. She turned to look back. "Faster! Faster--or it will be too hard a climb!" Ahead lay a golden mound of rock. It was widening; raising its top steadily higher. Beyond it and over it was a vast dim distance. We reached the rock, breathless, winded. It was a jagged mound like a great fifty-foot butte. We plunged upon it, began climbing. The ascent was steep; precipitous in places. There were little gullies, which expanded as we climbed up them. It seemed that we should never reach the top, but at last we were there. I was aware that the drug had ceased its action. The yellow rocky ground was no longer expanding. We came to the summit and stood to get back our breath. And Alan and I gazed with awe upon the top of a rocky hill. Little buttes and strewn boulders lay everywhere. It was all naked rock, ridged and pitted, and everywhere yellow-tinged. Overhead was distance. I could not call it a sky. A blur was there--something almost but not quite distinguishable. Then I thought that I could make out a more solid blur which might be the lower lens of the microscope above us. And there were blurred, very distant spots of light, like huge suns masked by a haze, and I knew that they were the hooded lights of the laboratory room. * * * * * Before us, over the brink of a five hundred-foot cliff, a great glistening white plain stretched into the distance. I seemed to see where it ended in a murky blur. And far higher than our own hilltop level a horizontal streak marked the rope railing of the slab. "Well," said Alan, "we're here." He gazed behind us, back across the rocky summit which seemed several hundred feet across to its opposite brink. He was smiling, but the smile faded. "Now what, Glora? Another pellet?" "No. Not yet. There is a place where we go down. It is marked in my mind." I had a sudden ominous sense that we three were not alone up here. Glora led us back from the cliff. As we picked our way among the naked crags, it seemed behind each of them an enemy might be lurking. "Glora, do you know if any of Dr. Polter's men have the drug? I mean, do they come in and out here?" She shook her head. "I think not. He lets no one have the drug. He trusts not any one. I stole it; I will tell you later. Much I have to tell you before we arrive." Alan made a sudden sidewise leap, and dashed around a rock. He came back to us, smiling ruefully. "Gets on your nerves, all this. I had the same idea you did, George. Might be someone around here. But I guess not." He took Glora's hand and they walked in advance of me. "We haven't thanked you yet, Glora." "Not needed. I came for help from your world. I could not get back to my own, and I followed the Doctor Polter when he came outward. He has made my world, my people, his slaves. I came for help. And because I have helped you needs no thanks." "But we do thank you, Glora." Alan turned his flushed, earnest face back to me. I thought I had never seen him so handsome, with his boyish, rugged features, and shock of tousled brown hair. The grimness of adventure was upon him, but in his eyes there was something else. It was not for me to see it. That was for Glora; and I think that even then its presence and its meaning did not escape her. "Stay close, George." "Yes." * * * * * We reached a little gully near the center of the hilltop. It was some twenty feet deep. Glora paused. "We descend here." The gully was an unmistakable landmark--open at one end, forty feet long, with the other end terminating in a blind wall, smoothly precipitous. We retraced our steps, entered the gully at its open end, and walked its length. Glora paused by the wall which now loomed above us. "A pit is here--a hole. I cannot tell just how large it will look when we are in this size." We found and stood over it--a foot-wide circular hole extending downward. Alan abruptly knelt and shoved his hand and arm into it, but Glora sprang at him. "Don't do that!" "Why not? Is this it? How deep is it?" She retorted sharply, "The Doctor Polter is ahead of us. How far away in size, who knows? Do you want to crush him, and crush that young girl with him?" Alan's jaw dropped. "Good Lord!" We stood with the little pit before us, and another of the pellets ready. "Now!" said Glora. Again we took the drug, a somewhat larger pellet this time. The familiar sensations began. Everywhere the rocks were creeping with a slow inexorable movement, the landscape expanding around us. The gully walls drew back and upward. In a moment they were precipice cliff-walls and we were in a broad valley. We had been standing close together. We had not moved except to shift our feet as the expanding ground drew them apart. I became aware that Alan and Glora were a distance from me. Glora called: "Come, George! We go down, quickly now." * * * * * We ran to the pit. It had expanded to a great round hole some six feet wide and equally as deep. Glora let herself down, peered anxiously beneath her, and dropped. Alan and I followed. We jammed the pit; but as we stood there, the walls were receding and lifting. I had remarked Glora's downward glance, and shuddered. Suppose, in some slightly smaller size, Babs had been here among these rocks! The pit widened steadily. The movement was far swifter now. We stood presently in a great circular valley. It seemed fully a mile in diameter, with huge encircling walls like a crater rim towering thousands of feet into the air. We ran along the base of one expanding wall, following Glora. I noticed now that overhead the turgid murk had turned into the blue of distance. A sky. It was faintly sky-blue, and there seemed a haze in it, almost as though clouds were forming. It had been cold when we started. The exertion had kept us fairly comfortable; but now I realized that the air was far warmer. It was a different air, more humid, and I thought the smell of moist earth was in it. Rocks and boulders were strewn here on the floor of this giant valley, and I saw occasional pools of water. There had been rain recently! The realization came with a shock of surprise. This was a new world! A faint, luminous twilight was around us. And then I noticed that the light was not altogether coming from overhead. It seemed inherent to the rocks themselves. They glowed very faintly luminous, as though phosphorescent. We were now well embarked upon this strange journey. We spoke seldom. Glora was intent upon guiding us. She was trying to make the best possible speed. I realized that it was a case of judgment, as well as physical haste. We had dropped into that six-foot pit. Had we waited a few moments longer, the depth would have been a hundred feet, two hundred, a thousand! It would have involved hours of arduous descent--if we had lingered until we were a trifle smaller! * * * * * We took other pellets. We traveled perhaps an hour more. There were many instances of Glora's skill. We squeezed into a gully and waited until it widened; we leaped little expanding caverns; we slid down a smooth yellowish slide of rock like a child's toboggan, and saw it behind and over us, rising to become a great spreading ramp extending upward into the blue of the sky. Now, up there, little sailing white clouds were visible. And down where we stood it was deep twilight, queerly silvery with the phosphorescence from the luminous rocks as though some hidden moon were shining. Strange, new world! I suddenly envisaged the full strangeness of it. Around me were spreading miles of barren, naked landscape. I gazed off to where, across the rugged plateau we were traversing, there was a range of hills. Behind and above them were mountains; serrated tiers, higher and more distant. An infinite spread of landscape! And, as we dwindled, still other vast reaches opened before us. I gazed overhead. Was it--compared to my stature now--a thousand miles, perhaps even a million miles up to where we had been two or three hours ago? I think so. Then suddenly I caught the other viewpoint. This was all only an inch of golden quartz--if one were large enough to see it that way! Alan had been trying to memorize the main topographical features of our route. It was not as difficult as it seemed at first. We were always far larger than normal to our environment. The main distinguishing characteristics of the landscape were obvious--the blind gully, with the round pit, for instance, or the ramp-slide. We had been traveling some three or four hours when Glora suggested a rest. We were at the side-wall of a broad canyon. The wall towered several hundred feet above us; but a few moments before we had jumped down it with a single leap! * * * * * The drug we had last taken had ceased its action. We sat down to rest. It was a wild, mountainous scene around us, deep with luminous gloom. We could barely see across the canyon to its distant cliff-wall. The wall beside us had been smooth, but now it was broken and ridged. There were ravines in it, and dark holes like cave-mouths. One was near us. Alan gazed at it apprehensively. "I say, Glora. I don't like sitting here." I had been telling her all we knew of Polter. She listened quietly, seldom interrupting me. Then she said: "I understand. I tell you now about Polter as I have seen him." She talked for five or ten minutes. I listened amazed, awed by what she told. But Alan suddenly interrupted her. "I say, let's move away from here. That tunnel-mouth, or cave, whatever it is--" "But we go in there," she protested. "A little tunnel. That is our way to travel. We are not far from my city now." Perhaps Alan felt what a generation ago they called a hunch, a premonition, the presage of evil which I think comes strangely to us more often than we realize. Whatever it was, we had no time to act upon it. The tunnel-mouth which had caused Alan's apprehension was about a hundred feet away. It was a ten-foot, black yawning hole in the cliff. Perhaps Alan sensed a movement off there. As I turned to gaze, from the opening came a great hairy human arm! Then a shoulder! A head! The giant figure of a man came squeezing through the hole on his hands and knees! He gathered himself, and as he stood erect, I saw that he was growing in size! Already he was twenty feet tall compared to us--a thick-set fellow, dressed in leather garments, his legs and bare arms heavily matted with black hair. He stood swaying, gazing around him. I stared up at his round bullet head, his villainous face. He saw us! Stupid amazement struck him, then comprehension. He let out a roar and came at us! CHAPTER V _The Message from Polter_ Glora shouted, "Into the tunnel! This way!" She held her wits and darted to one side, with Alan and me after her. We ran through a narrow passage between two fifty-foot boulders which lay close together. Momentarily the giant was out of sight, but we could hear his heavy tread and his panting breath. We emerged; had passed him. He was taller now. He seemed confused at our sudden scampering activity. He checked his forward rush, and ran around the twin boulders. But we had squeezed into a narrow ravine. He could not follow. He threw a rock: to us it was a boulder. It crashed behind us. To him, we were like scampering insects; he could not tell which way we were about to dart. Alan panted, "Glora, this--does this lead out?" The little ravine seemed to open fifty feet ahead of us. Alan stopped, seized a chunk of rock, flung it up. I saw the giant's face above us. He was kneeling, trying to reach in. The rock hit him in the forehead--a pebble, but it stung him. His face rose away. Again we emerged. The tunnel-mouth was near us. We reached it and flung ourselves into its ten-foot width just as the giant came lunging up. He was far larger than before. Looking back, I could see only the lower part of his legs blocked against the outer light. "Glora! Alan, where are you?" For a moment I did not see them. It was darker in this tunnel; broken rocky walls, a jagged arching roof ten feet high. Then I heard Alan's voice. "George! Here!" They came running to me. For a moment we stood, undecided what to do. My eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness; it was illumined by a dim phosphorescence from the rocks. I saw Alan fumbling for his vials, but Glora stopped him. "No! We are the right size." * * * * * We were a hundred feet back from the opening. The giant's legs disappeared. But in a moment the round light hole of the exit was obscured again. His head and shoulders! He was lying prone. His great arms came in. He hitched forward. The width of his expanding shoulders wedged. I think that he expected to reach us with a single snatch of his tremendous arms. Or perhaps he was confused, and forgot his growth. He did not reach us. His shoulders stuck. Then suddenly he was trying to back out, but could not! It was only a moment. We stood in the radiant gloom of the tunnel, clinging to each other, ourselves stricken by confusion. The giant's voice roared, reverberating around us. Anger. A note of fear. Finally stark terror. He heaved, but the rocks of the opening held solid. Then there was a crack, a gruesome rattling, splintering--his shoulder bones breaking. His whole gigantic body gave a last convulsive lunge, and he emitted a deafening shrill scream of agony. I was aware of the tunnel-mouth breaking upward. Falling rocks--an avalanche, a cataclysm around us. Then light overhead. The giant's crushed body lay motionless. A pile of boulders, rocks and loose metallic earth was strewn upon his head and torso, illumined by the outer light through a jagged rent where the cliff-face had fallen down. We were unhurt, crouching back from the avalanche. The giant's mangled body was still expanding; shoving at the litter of loose rocks. In a moment it would again be too large for the broken cliff opening. I found my wits. "Alan! Out of here--God! Don't you see--" * * * * * But Glora held us. The drug the giant had taken was about at its end, and Glora recognized it. The growth presently stopped. That huge, noisome mass of pulp which once had been human shoulders-- I shoved Glora away. "Don't look!" I was shaking; my head was reeling. Alan's face, painted by the phosphorescence, was ghastly. Glora pulled at us. "This way! The tunnel is not too long. We go." But the giant had drugs. And perhaps weapons. "Wait!" I urged. "You two wait here. I'll climb over him." I told them why, and ran. I can only leave to the imagination that brief exploratory climb. The broken body seemed at least a hundred feet long; the mangled shoulders and chest filled the great torn hole in the cliff. I climbed over the litter. Indescribable, horrible scene! A river of warm blood was flowing down the declivity outside.... I came back to Glora and Alan. Under my arm was a huge cylinder vial. It was black--the enlarging drug. I set it down. They stared at me in my blood-stained garments. "George! You're--" "His blood, not mine, Alan." I tried to smile. "There's the drug he carried. Evidently Polter was only sending him out. Just the one drug." "What'll we do with it?" Alan demanded. "Look at the size of it!" "Destroy it," said Glora. "See, that is not difficult." She tugged at the huge stopper, and exposed a few of the pellets--to us as large as apples. "The air will soon spoil it." We left it in the tunnel. I had brought a great roll of paper; had found it folded in the giant's belt, with the drug cylinder. We unrolled it, and hauled its folds to a spread some ten feet long. It was covered with a scrawled handwriting in pencil, but its giant characters seemed thick blurred strokes of charcoal. We could not read it; we were too close. Alan and Glora held it up against the tunnel wall. From a distance I could make it out. It was a note written in English, signed "Polter," evidently to one of his men. I read it: "The two men prisoners, kill them at once. That is better. It will be too dangerous to wait for my return. Put their bodies with their airplane. Crash it a mile or more from our gate." Full directions for our death followed. And Polter said he would return by dawn or soon after. * * * * * It gave me a start. By dawn! We had been traveling four or five hours. The dawn was up there now! "No," said Glora. She and Alan cast away the paper. "No, the time in here is different. A different time-rate. I do not know how much difference. My world speeds faster; yours is very slow. It is not the dawn up there quite yet." Again my mind strove to encompass these things so strange. A faster time-rate prevailed in here? Then our lives were passing more quickly. We were living, experiencing things, compressed into a shorter interval. It was not apparent; there was nothing to which comparison could be made. I recalled Alan's description of Polter--not thirty years old as he should have been, but nearer fifty. I could understand that, now. A day in here--while our gigantic world outside might only have progressed a few hours. We walked the length of the tunnel. I suppose it was a quarter of a mile, to us in this size. It wound through the cliff with a steady downward slope. And suddenly I realized that we had turned downward nearly half the diameter of a circle! We had turned over--or at least it seemed so. But the gravity was the same. I had noticed from the beginning very little change. The realization of this turning brought a mental confusion. I lost all sense of direction. The outer world of Earth was under my feet, instead of overhead. Then we went level. I forgot the confusion; this was normality here. We turned upward a little. Cross tunnels intersected ours at intervals. I saw caverns, open, widened tunnels, as though this mountain were honeycombed. "Look!" said Glora. "There is the way out. All these passages lead the same way." * * * * * There was a glow of light ahead. I recall that I was at that moment fumbling at my belt in two small compartments of which I was carrying the two vials of the drugs which Glora had given me. Alan wore the same sort of belt. We had found them in the wrecked dome-room. I heard a click on the ground at my feet. I was about to stoop to see what I had kicked--only a loose stone, perhaps--but Glora's words distracted me. I did not stoop. If only I had, how different events might have been! The glow of light ahead of us widened as we approached, and presently we stood at the end of the tunnel. A spread of open distance was outside. We were on a ledge of a rocky, precipitous wall some fifty feet above a wide level landscape. Vegetation! I saw trees--a forest off to the left. A range of naked hills lay behind it. A mile away, in front and to the right, a little town nestled on the shore of shining water. There was starlight on the water! And over it a vast blue-purple sky was studded with stars! I gazed, with that first sudden shock of emotion, into illimitable depths of interplanetary space! Light years of distance. Gigantic worlds, blazing suns off there shrunken by distance now to little points of light. A universe was here! But this was an inch of golden quartz! Above my head were stars which, compared to my bodily size now, were vast worlds ten thousand light-years away! Yet, from the other viewpoint, I had only descended perhaps an eighth or a quarter of an inch beneath the broken pitted surface of a little fragment of golden quartz the size of a walnut--into just one of its myriads of golden atoms! CHAPTER VI _The Girl in the Golden Cage_ "My world," Glora was saying. "You like it? See the starlight on the lake? I have heard that your world looks like this at night, in summer. Ours is always like this. No day, no night. Just like this--starlight." Her hand went to Alan's shoulder. "You like it? My world?" "Yes. Yes, Glora, It's beautiful." There seemed a sheen on everything, a soft, glowing sheen of phosphorescence from the rocks rising to meet the pale wan starlight. The night air was soft, with a gentle breeze that rippled the distant lake into a great spread of gold and silver light. The city was called Orena. I saw at once that we were about normal size to its houses and people. There were fields beneath our ledge, with farm implements lying in them; no workers, for this was the time for sleep. Ribbons of roads wound over the country, pale streamers in the starlight. Glora gestured. "The giants are on their island. Everyone sleeps now. You see the island off there?" Beyond the city, over the low stone roofs of its flat-topped dwellings, the silver spread of lake showed a green-clad island some three miles off shore. The distance made its white stone houses seem small. But as I gazed, I realized that they were large to their environment, all far larger than those of the little town. The island was perhaps a mile in length. Between it and the mainland a boat was coming toward us. It was a dark blob of hull on the shining water, and above it a queerly shaped circular sail was puffed out like a balloon-parachute by the wind. * * * * * "The giants live, there?" said Alan. "You mean Polter's men?" "And women. Yes." "Are there many giants?" "No." "How many?" I put in. "How large are they? In relation to us now, I mean. And to your normal size?" I turned to Alan. "Polter and Babs must be down there now! They must have arrived only recently. But we must determine what size to be before we go any further. We can't be gigantic If he sees us--if we assailed him--well, he'd kill Babs. We're got to plan. Glora tell us--" "You ask so many questions so fast, George. There are two hundred or more of the giants. And there are more than that many thousands of our people here. Slaves, because the giants are four times as large. This little city, these fields, these hills of stone and metal, all this was ours to have in peace and happiness--until your Polter came. And that starlight on the water--" She gestured. "Everywhere is a great reach of desert and forests. Insects, but there are no wild beasts--nothing to harm us. Nature is kind here. The weather is always like this. We were happy--until Polter came." "And only a few thousand people," Alan said. "No other cities?" "What lies off in the great distance we do not know. Our nation is ten times what is here. A few other cities, though some of our people live in the forests--" She broke off. "That boat is coming for Polter. He is in the city, no doubt of that. The boat will take him and that girl you call Babs to the giant's island. His castle is there." * * * * * If we could get on that boat and go with him to the island--! But in what size? Very small? But then, if we were very small it would take us hours to get from here to the boat. Glora pointed out where it would land--just beyond the village where the houses were set in a sparse fringe. It would be there, apparently, in ten or fifteen minutes. Polter was probably there now with Babs, waiting for it. In our present size we could not get there in time. It was two or three miles at least. But a trifle larger--the size of one of Polter's giants--would enable us to make it. We would be seen, but in the pale starlight, keeping away from the city as much as possible, we might only be mistaken for Polter's people. And when we got closer we would diminish our size, creep into the boat, get near Babs and Polter and then plan what to do. Futile plans! All of life is so futile, so wind-swept upon the tossing sea of chance! We climbed down from the ledge and stood at the base of the towering cliff which reared its jagged wall against the stars. A field and a road were near us. The road seemed of normal size. A man was across the field. He did not seem to notice us. He was apparently about my height. He presently discarded his work, went away from us and vanished. "Hurry, Glora." Alan and I stood beside her while she took pellets from her vials. It needed a careful adjustment. We wanted our stature now to be four times what it was. Glora gave us pellets of both drugs, one of which was slightly more intense than the other. "Polter made them this way," she said. "The two at once gives just the growth to take us from this normal size to the stature of the giants." Alan and I did not touch our own vials. We had used none of our enlarging drug upon the journey; the supply she had given us of the other was nearly gone. * * * * * As I took these pellets which Glora now gave us, standing there by the side of that road, I recall that I was struck with the realization that never once upon this journey had I conceived myself to be other than normal stature. I am normally about six feet tall. I still felt--there in that golden atom--the same height. This landscape seemed of normal size. There were trees nearby--spreading, fantastic looking growths with great strings of pods hanging from them. But still, as I looked up to see one arching over me with its blue-brown leaves and an air-vine carrying vivid yellow blossoms--whatever the size of the tree, my consciousness could only conceive myself as of a normal six-foot stature standing beneath it. The human ego always is supreme! Around each man's consciousness of himself the entire universe revolves! We crouched on the ground when this growth now began; it would not do to be observed changing size. Polter's giants never did that. Years before, he had made them large--his few hundred men and women. They were, Glora said, people both of this realm and from our great world above--dissolute, criminal characters who now had set themselves up here as the nucleus of a ruling race. In a moment now, we were the size of these giants. Twenty to twenty-five feet tall, in relation to this environment. But I did not feel so. As I stood up--still myself in normal stature--I saw around me a shrunken little landscape. The trees, as though in a Japanese garden, were about my own height; the road was a smooth level path: the little field near us a toy fence around it. In another road across it, the man was walking. In height he would barely have reached my knees. He saw us rise beside the trees. He darted off his road in alarm, and disappeared. * * * * * I have taken longer to tell all this than the actual time which passed. We could see the boat coming from the island, and it was still a fair distance off shore. We ran along the road, skirting the edge of the little town. Its houses were none of them taller than ourselves. The windows and doorways were ovals into which we could only have inserted a head or an arm. They were most of them dark. Little people occasionally stared out, saw us run past, and ducked back, thankful that we did not stop to harass them. "This way," said Glora. She ran like a fawn, hardly winded, with Alan and me heavily panting behind her. "There are trees--thick trees--quite near where the boat lands. We can get in them and hide and change our size to smallness. But hurry, for we will need so much time when we are small!" The little spread of town and the shining lake remained always to our right. In five minutes we were past most of the houses. A patch of woods, with thick interlacing treetops about our own height, lay ahead. It extended a few hundred feet over to the lake shore. The sailboat was heading in close. There was a broad, starlit roadway at the edge of the lake, and a dock there at which the boat was preparing to land. Would we be in time? I suddenly feared not. To get small now, with distance lengthening between us and the boat, would be disastrous. And where was Polter? Abruptly we saw him. There had been only little people visible to us; none of our own height. The lake roadway by the dock was brightly starlit. As we approached the intervening patch of woods it seemed that a crowd of little people were near the dock. Polter must have been sitting. But now he rose up. We could not mistake his hunched thick figure, the lump on his shoulders clear in the starlight with the gleaming lake as a background. The crowd of little figures were milling around his knees. In the silence of the night the murmur of their voices floated over to us. "There he is!" Alan gasped. We all three checked our running; we were at the edge of the patch of woods. "By God, there he is! Let's get larger! Rush him! Why that's only a few hundred feet over there!" But Babs? Where was Babs? "Alan! Down!" I crouched, pulling Alan and Glora with me. "Don't let him see us! He'd know at once--and where is Babs? Can't rush him, Alan. He'd see us coming--kill her--" * * * * * Of all the strange events which had been flung at us, I think this sudden crisis now most confused Alan and me. To get larger, or smaller? Which? Yet something must be done at once. Glora said, "We can get through the woods best in this size. And not be seen--get closer to the landing." We crouched so that the little treetops were always well over us. The patch of woods was dark. A soil of black loam was under us, a thick soft underbrush reached our knees, and lacy, flexible leaves and branches were at our shoulder height. We pushed them aside, forcing our way softly forward. It was not far. The little murmuring voices of the crowd grew louder. Presently we were crouching at the other edge of the woods. I softly shoved the tree branches aside until we could all three get a clear view of the strange scene now directly before us. And I saw a toy dock, at which a twenty-foot, barge-like open sailboat was landing; a narrow starlit roadway, crowded with a milling throng of people all no more than a foot and a half in height. The crowd milled almost to where we were crouching, unseen in the shrubbery. Across the road by the dock. Polter stood with the crowd down around his knees. In height he seemed the old familiar Polter. Bareheaded, with his shaggy black hair shot with white. He was dressed in Earth fashion: narrow black evening trousers and a white shirt and collar with flowing black tie. I saw at once what Alan had noticed--the change in him. An abnormality of age. I would have called him now forty, or older. Beyond even that there was an abnormality. A man old before his time; or younger than he should have been for the years he had lived. An indescribable mingling of something. The mingling, of the two worlds, perhaps. It marked him with a look at once unnatural and sinister. These were instant impressions. Glora was plucking at me. "On the white chest of his shirt, something is there." * * * * * Polter was coatless, with snowy white shirt and cuffs to his thick wrists. He was no more than fifty feet from us. On his shirt bosom something golden in color was hanging like a large bauble, an ornament, an insignia. It was strapped tightly there with a band about his chest, a cord like a necklace chain up to his thick hunched neck, and other chains down to his belt. I stared at it. An ornament, like a cube held flat against his shirt-front--a little golden cube, ornate with tiny bars. I heard Alan murmuring, "A cage! Why George, it's--" And then, simultaneously, realization struck me. It was a golden cage strapped there. And I seemed to see that there was something in it. A tiny figure? Babs! "I think he has her there," Glora murmured. "You see the little box with bars? The girl Babs, a prisoner in there." She spoke swiftly, vehemently. "He will take the boat to the island." She suddenly gripped us. "You think really it best to go? I do what you say. I had the wish to get to my father with these drugs." "No!" exclaimed Alan. "We must keep close to Polter!" We were ready with our pellets. But a sudden activity in the road made us pause. The crowd of little people were hostile to Polter. A sullen hostility. They milled about him as he stood there, gazing down at then sardonically. And abruptly he shouted at them in English. "You speak my language, some of you. Then listen." The crowd fell silent. "Listen. This iss your future Queen. Can you see her? She iss small now. But she has the magic power. Soon, she will be large. Like me." The crowd was shouting again. It surged forward, but it lacked a leader, and those in advance shoved backward in fear. Polter spoke again. "This girl from my world, you will like her. She iss kind and very beautiful. When she iss large, you will see how beautiful." A little stone suddenly came up from the throng of little people and struck Polter on the shoulder. Then another. The crowd, emboldened, made a rush; surged against his legs. He shouted, "You do that? Why how dare you? I show to you what giants do when you make dem angry!" From down by his knees he plucked the small figure of a man. The crowd scattered with shouts of terror. Polter had the struggling eighteen-inch figure by the wrist. He whirled it around his head like a nine-pin and flung it over the canopy of the dock far out into the shimmering lake! CHAPTER VII _Within the Golden Cage_ The trees around us expanded to towering forest giants. The underbrush rose up over our heads. We had taken only a taste of the diminishing drug; Glora showed us how to touch it to our tongue several times, to adjust our size as we became smaller. It was no more than a minute of diminishing. We could hear the roar of the crowd, and Polter's voice shouting. We ran forward through the great forest. It was a fair distance out to the starlit road. We saw it as a wide shining esplanade. The people now were giants twice our height! Polter, himself towering with a seeming fifty foot stature, was standing by the gigantic canopy of the dock. He had dispersed the crowd. There was an open space on the esplanade--a run for us of about a hundred feet. "We've got to chance it!" I murmured. "Make a run of it--now." We darted across. In the confusion, with all eyes centered on Polter, we escaped discovery. It was dim under the dock canopy. Polter had backed from the road and was walking to the barge. It lay like the length of an ocean liner, its sail looming an enormous spread above it. The gunwale was level with the dock-floor. A dozen or more fifty-foot men were greeting Polter. They were amidships. I realize now that in those moments as we scurried aboard like wharf rats, we took wild chances. We made for the stern which momentarily was unoccupied. To Polter and his men we were eight or nine inches tall. We dropped over the gunwale, slid down the convex thirty or forty-foot incline of the interior and landed on the bottom of the boat. There were many places where we could safely hide. A litter of gigantic rope-strands was around us. We could see the bottom of a cross-bench looming overhead, and the great curving sides of the vessel with the gunwales outlined against the starlight. * * * * * The boat left the dock in a moment; the sail bellied out enormous over us. Ten feet forward from us the towering figure of a man sat on a bench with the steering mechanism before him. Further on, the other men were dispersed, with one or two in the distant bow. Polter reclined on a cushioned couch amidships. Looking along the dark widely level bottom of the boat there were only the feet and legs of the men visible. Alan whispered, "Let's get closer." We were insects soundlessly scuttling unnoticed in the dimness. And it was noisy down here--the clank of the steering mechanism; the swish, and surge of the water against the hull; the voices of the men. We passed the boots of the seated helmsmen, and found another hiding place nearer Polter. We could see his giant length plainly. None of the other men were near him. He was reclining on an elbow, stretched at ease on the cushion. And at the moment, he was fumbling with the chains that fastened the little golden cage to his chest. The cage was double its former size to us now. A shaft of pale light came down, reflected from the great sail surface overhead. It struck the bars of the cage. We could see a small figure in there. Babs! Then we heard Polter's voice. "I will let you out, Babs. You come out, sit on my hand and talk with me. That will be nice? We haf a little time." He unfastened the cage and put it on the cushion beside him. He was still propped up on one elbow. "I let you out, now. Be careful, Babs." My heart was almost smothering me. "Alan! We've got to get still closer! Try something! Get large, shall we?" Alan whispered tensely, "I don't know! Oh, I don't know what to do! This thing--" This thing so strange. "We can get closer," Glora whispered. "But never larger--not here. They would discover us too soon." * * * * * We crept forward. We reached the edge of the cushion. Its top surface was a trifle lower than our heads--a billowing, wrinkled mass of fabric. But I saw that the folds of it were rough enough to afford a foothold. I thought that I could climb it. We stood erect. There was a deep shadow along here, but it was brighter on the cushion top. We could see over its edge; an undulating spread of surface with the giant length of Polter stretched there. The cage was nearer to us. Polter's great fingers fumbled with it; a door in the lattice bars flipped open. "Careful, my Babs!" His voice was a throaty, rumbling roar from above us. "Careful! I do not want you to be hurt." From the little doorway came the figure of Babs! The starlight glowed on her long blue dress; her black hair was tumbling over her shoulders; her face was pale, but she was unhurt. Babs! I think that I had never loved her so much as at that moment. Nor ever seen her so beautiful as in that miniature, standing at the door of her golden cage, bravely facing the monstrous misshapen figure of her captor. We heard her small voice. "What do you want me to do?" "Stand quiet. Now I put my hand for you." His monstrous hand bristled with a thatch of heavy black hair. He brought it carefully sliding along the cushion. Babs was barely the length of one of its finger joints. She climbed upon its palm. "That iss right, Babs. Now I bring you--hold tight to my finger. Here, I crook the little one. Fling your arms around it." With a swoop his hand took her aloft and away. Then we saw her, twenty feet or so in the air, still on his hand as he held it near his face. "Now we haf a little talk, Babs. When we get to the island, I put you back in your cage." * * * * * I had a sudden flash of realization. Something I could do. I did not plan it. I know now my judgment was bad. I recall it struck me that Alan would want to do it also. And, perhaps, even Glora. That would not work. My chances, however desperate, were better alone. And Glora and Alan--in our present size-could doubtless disembark safely. Glora knew the lay-out of the island. She could follow Polter. Alan and Glora were standing beside me, peering over that billowing cushion spread toward the distant giant palm with Babs standing upon it. I gripped Alan's shoulder. "See here, Alan," I whispered vehemently, "whatever happens, we must follow Polter. Glora knows the way. Some chance will come. What we want is an opportunity to get large without discovery. Then rush Polter!" Alan's white face turned to me. "Yes, that's what we're planning. But George, here on this boat--" "Of course. Can't do it here. Tell Glora, be sure and follow Polter. Whatever happens, you think of nothing else: you won't, will you?" "George, what--" "We've got to make some opportunity." I was trembling inside, fearful that Alan would be suspicious of me. Yet I had to make sure that he and Glora would stay as close to Polter as possible. "Yes," Alan agreed. "Listen to them." Polter was talking to Babs. But I did not hear the words. I moved a trifle away. Rash decision! I hardly decided anything. There was only the vision of Babs before me; my love for her. And my desperate need of doing something; getting to her; seeing her, being with her; having her near my own size again as though the blessed normality of that would rationalize and lessen her danger. If only I had been less rash! If only back there in that tunnel I had stopped to see what it was my foot kicked against! * * * * * I slid away. Alan and Glora did not notice it; they were whispering together and gazing over the cushion at Babs. In the floor shadow I moved some ten feet. On the undulating top of the cushion the little golden cage stood with its lattice door open! It was only a few feet from my face. I fumbled at my belt for the diminishing vial. I found one pellet left. Well, that would be enough. I was hurried. Alan might discover me. Polter might move; put Babs back in the cage and close its door. We might be near the island already, and the confusion, the activity of disembarking would defeat me. A thousand things might happen. I touched the pellet to my tongue. In a few seconds the drug action had come and passed. The cushion top loomed well over my head. The side was a ridged, indescribably unnatural vista of cliff-wall. The fabric was coarse with hairy strands, dented into little ravines and crevices. I climbed. I came panting to the pillow surface. The golden cage was six or eight feet away and was now two feet high. Again I touched the drug to my tongue; held it an instant. The cage drew away; grew to a normal six-foot height; then larger, until in a moment it stopped. I stood peering at it, trying to gauge its size in relation to me. I wanted so intensely now to be normal to Babs. The cage seemed about ten feet high. A little less, possibly. I barely tasted the pellet, and replaced it carefully in the vial. I could only hope its efficacy would be preserved. I had to chance that I would not be seen now crossing this billowy expanse. I ran. The rope strands of the fabric now had spaces between their curving surfaces. The cage was a shining golden house, set on this wide rolling area. Far in the distance there was a blur--Polter's reclining body. I reached the cage. It was a room about ten feet square and equally as high. Walled solid, top and bottom, and on three sides. The front was a lattice of bars, with a narrow six-foot-high doorway, standing open now. I dashed in. The interior was not wholly bare. There was a metal-wrought couch fastened to the wall, with a railing around it and handles. It suggested a ship's bunk. There was a railing at convenient height all around the wall. I sought a hiding place. I saw just one--under the couch. It was secluded enough. There was a grille-like lattice extending down from the seat to the floor. I squeezed under one end, and lay wedged behind the grille. * * * * * How much time passed I do not know. My thoughts were racing. Babs would be coming. I heard the distant approaching rumble of Polter's voice. Through the grille I could see across the floor of the ten-foot cage to the front lattice bars. Outside, there appeared a huge, pink-white, mottled blob--Polter's hand, a ridged and pitted surface with great bristling black stalks of hair. The figure of Babs came through the cage doorway. Blessed normality! The same slim little Babs who always stood, since we were both matured, with her head about level with my shoulders. The latticed door swung shut with a reverberating metallic clank. Babs stood tense, clinging to the wall railing. I heard the blurred rumble of Polter's voice. "Hold tightly, my little Babs!" The room lurched; went upward and sidewise with a wild dizzying swoop. Babs clung; and I was wedged prone under the couch. Then the movement stopped; there was a jolting, rocking, and outside I heard the clank of metal. Polter was fastening the chains of the cage to his chest. A white reflected glow now came through the bars. It was starlight reflected from Polter's shirt bosom. An abyss of distance was outside. I could see nothing but the white glow. Momentarily there was very little movement to the room. Only the rhythmic sway of Polter's breathing and an occasional jolt as he shifted his position. The floor was tilted at a sharp angle. Babs came toward the couch, pulling herself along the wall railing. I called softly, "Babs! Babs, dear!" She stopped. I called again, "Babs! Don't cry out! It's George! Here--stand still!" She gave a little cry. "George--where are you? I don't--" I slid out from my concealment and stood up, holding to the railing. "Babs, dear." Blessed normality of size! She cried again, "George! You! George, dear--" She edged along the railing, a step or two down the tilting floor, then released her hold and flung herself into my waiting arms. * * * * * "I think we are landing. Hold the railing, George. When the room moves it goes with a rush." Babs laughed softly. It must have seemed to her, after being alone in here, that now our plight was far less desperate. She had told me how she was captured. A man accosted her on the terrace, saying he wanted to speak to her about Alan. Then a weapon threatened her. Amid all those people she was held up in old fashioned style, hurried to a taxicar and whirled away. She was saying now, "When Polter moves, it is dizzying. You'll see." "I have already, Babs. Heavens, that swoop!" The room was more level now. We carefully drew ourselves to the front lattice. Polter was standing, and we had the white sheen from his shirt-front. A sheer drop was outside the bars, but looking down I could see the outlines of his body with the huge spread of the boat interior underneath us. A confusion of rumbling voices sounded. Blurred giant shapes were outside. The room jolted and swayed as the boat landed and Polter disembarked. Babs stood clinging to me. Blessed normality of size! We, at least, were normal--this metal barred room, Babs and I. But outside was the abnormality of largeness. I think that in relation to us, the men were of over two hundred foot stature, and the hunched Polter a trifle less. It seemed as he walked that we were lurching at least a hundred and fifty feet above the ground. "You had better hide," Babs urged. "He might stop and speak to someone. If anyone peered in here you would be seen: no chance then, even to get across the room." * * * * * It was true. But for a few moments I lingered, though I could distinguish vegetation on their flat roof-tops, as though flower-gardens were laid there. We passed a house with its hundred-foot oval windows all aglow with light. Music floated out--a distant blare of musical sounds, and the ribald laughter of giant voices. I had seen no women among these giants of the islands. But now a huge face was at one of the ovals. A dissolute, painted woman of Earth, staring out at Polter as he passed. It was like the enormous close-up image on a large motion picture screen. She shouted a ribald jest as he went by. "George, please go back. Suppose she had seen you?" We were ascending a hill. A distance ahead a great oblong building loomed like a giant's palace, which indeed it was. We headed for it, passed through a vast arching doorway into the greater dimness of an echoing interior. I scurried back across the lurching room and again wedged myself under the couch. Babs stood at the lattice ten feet away. We dared to talk in low tones; the rumbling voices and footsteps outside would make our tiny voices inaudible to Polter. I was tense with my plans. I had told them to Babs. With the one partially used remaining pellet of the diminishing drug we could make ourselves small enough to walk out through the bars. Then my black vial of the enlarging chemicals, as yet unused, would take us up, out to our own world. We could not use the drugs now. But the chance might come when Polter would set the cage on the ground, or somewhere so that we might climb down from it, with a chance to hide and get large before we were discovered. I would fight our way upward; all I needed was a fair start in size. * * * * * But I lay now with doubts assailing me. This was the first moment I had had for calm thoughts, though in truth they were far from calm! Where were Alan and Glora? Following us now? I could only hope so. Once out of this, Babs and I would have to rejoin them. But how? A panic swept me. I should not have left them. Or at least I should have told them what I was trying, and given Alan a chance to plan. The panic grew upon me, the premonition of disaster. From my belt I took the opalescent vial with its one partly used pellet. I dumped the pellet out. It was spoiling! The former exposure of the air, the moisture of my tongue, had ruined it! I had no need to guess at the catastrophe; as I held its crumbling, deliquescing fragments on my palm it melted into vapor and was gone! We could not make ourselves smaller! We would have to wait now until Polter opened the cage. But once outside, the enlarging drug would give us our chance to fight our way upward. My trembling fingers sought the black vial in my belt. It was not there! My mind flung back: in that tunnel, something had dropped and I had kicked it! Accursed chance! My accursed, heedless stupidity! I had lost the black vial! We were helpless! Caged! Marooned here in a size microscopic! CHAPTER VIII _From a Drop of Water_ I lay concealed, and Babs stood at the lattice of our cage room. I was aware that Polter had entered some vast apartment of this giant palace. A brighter light was outside; I heard voices--Polter's and another man's. I could see the distant monster shape of one. He was at first so far away that all his outline was visible. A seated man, in a huge white room. I thought there were great shelves with enormous bottles. The spread of table tops passed under our cage as Polter walked by them. They held a litter of apparatus, and there was the smell of chemicals in the air. It seemed that this was a laboratory. The man stood up to greet Polter. I had a glimpse of his head and shoulders level with us. He wore a white linen coat, open, soft collar and black tie. He seemed an old man, queerly old, with snow-white hair.... I had an instant of whirling, confused impressions. Something was familiar about his face. It was seamed and wrinkled with lines of age and care. There were gentle blue eyes. Then all I could see was the vast spread of his white shirt and coat, a black splotch of his tie outside our bars as Polter faced him. Babs gave a low cry. "Why--why--dear God--" And then I knew! And Polter's words were not needed, though I heard their rumble. "I am back again, Kent. Are you still rebellious? You haf still determined to compound no more of our drugs? You would rather I killed you? Then see what I haf here. This little cage, someone--" It was Dr. Kent, a prisoner here all these years! Babs turned her white face toward me. "George, it's father! He's alive! Here!" "Quiet, Babs! Don't let them know I'm here. Remember!" The old man recognized her. "Babs!" It was an agonized cry. The blur of him was gone as he sank down into his chair. Polter continued standing. I could envisage his sardonic grin. Babs was calling: "Father, dear! Father!" From over us came Polter's rumble. "She iss glad to see you, Kent. I haf her here, safe. You always knew I would nefer be satisfied until I had my little Babs? Well, now I haf her. Can you hear me?" A sudden desperate calmness fell on Babs. She called evenly, "Yes, I hear you. Father, do not anger him. Do not rebel; do what he commands. Dr. Polter, will you let me be with my father? After all these years, let me be with him, just for a little while. In his size--normal." "Hah! My Babs iss scheming." "No! I want to talk to him, after so long. These years when I thought he was dead." "Scheming. You think, my little Babs, that he has the drugs? I am not so much a fool. He makes them. He can do that, and the last secret reactions only he can perform. He iss stubborn. Never would he tell me that one reaction. But he makes no drugs complete, only when I am here." "No, Dr. Polter! I want only to be with him." The old man's broken voice floated up to us. "You will not harm her, Polter?" "No. Fear nothing. But you no longer rebel?" "I will do what you tell me." The tones carried hopeless resignation, years of being beaten down, rebelling--but now this last blow vanquished him. Then he spoke again, with a sudden strange fire. "Even for the life of my daughter, I will not make your drugs, Polter, if you mean to harm our Earth." The golden cage room swooped as Polter sat down. "Hah! Now we bargain. What do you care what I do to your world? You never will see it again. I can lie to you. My plans--" "I do care." "Well, I will tell you, Kent. I am good natured now. Why should I not be, with my dear little Babs? I tell you. I am done with the Earth world. It iss so much nicer here. My friends, they haf a good time always. We like this little atom realm. I am going out once more. I must hide the little piece of golden quartz so no harm will come to it." * * * * * Polter was evidently in a high good humor. His voice fell to an intimate tone of comradeship; but still I could not mistake the irony of it. "You listen to me, Kent. There was a time, years ago, when we were good friends. You liked your young assistant, the hunchback Polter. Iss it not so? Then why should we quarrel now? I am gifing up the Earth world. I wanted of it only the little Babs.... You look at me so strange! You do not speak." "There is nothing to say," retorted Dr. Kent wearily. "Then you listen. I haf much gold above, in Quebec. You know that. So very simple to take it out of our atom, grow large with it, to what we call up there the size of a hundred feet. I haf a place, a room, secluded from prying eyes under a dome-roof. I become very tall, holding a piece of gold. It is large when I am a hundred feet tall. So I haf collected much gold. They think I own a mine. I haf a smelter and my gold quartz I make into ingots, refined to the standard purity. So simple, and I am a rich man. "But gold does not bring happiness, my friend Kent." He chuckled ironically at his use of the platitude. "There is more in life than the ownership of gold. You ask my plans. I haf Babs, now. I am gifing up our Earth world. The mysterious man they know as Frank Rascor will vanish. I will hide our little fragment of quartz. No one up there will even try to find it. Then I come down here, with Babs, and we will haf so nice a little government and rule this world. No more of the drugs then will be needed, Kent. When you die, let the secret die with you." Again Polter's voice turned ingratiating, even more so than before. "We will be friends, Kent. Our little Babs will lof me; why should she not? You will tell her--advise her--and we will all three be very happy." Dr. Kent said abruptly, "Then leave her with me now. That was her request, a moment ago. If you expect to treat her kindly, then why not--" "I do! I do! But not now. I cannot spare her now. I am very busy, but I must take her with me." * * * * * Babs had been silent, clinging to the bars of our cage. She called: "Why? I ask you to put this cage down." "Not now, little bird." "And let me be with my father." It struck a pang through me. Babs was scheming, but not the way Polter thought. She wanted the cage put on the floor, herself out, and a chance for me to escape. I had not yet told her of my miserable stupidity in losing the vial. Polter was repeating. "No, little bird. Presently; not now. I may take you out with me, my last trip out. I want to talk with you in a normal size when I haf time." Our room swooped as he stood up. "You think over what I haf said, Kent. You get ready now to make the fresh drugs I will need to bring down all my men from the outer world. They will all be glad to come, or, if not--well, we can easily kill those who refuse. You make the drugs. I need plenty. Will you?" "Yes." "That iss good. I come back soon and gif you the catalyst for that last reaction. Will you be ready?" "Yes." The blur outside our bars swung with a dizzying whirl as Polter turned and left the room, locking its door after him with a reverberating clank. * * * * * Left alone in his laboratory, Dr. Kent began his preparations for making a fresh supply of the drugs. This room, with two smaller ones adjoining, was at once his workshop and his prison. He stood at his shelves, selecting the basic chemicals. He could not complete the final compounds. The catalyst which was necessary to the final reaction would be brought to him by Polter. How long he worked there with his thoughts in a whirl at seeing Babs, he did not know. His movements were automatic; he had done all this so many times before. His mind was confused, and he was trembling from head to foot, an old, queerly, unnaturally old man now--unnerved. His shaking fingers could hardly hold the test tubes. His thoughts were flying. Babs was here, come down from the world above. It was disaster--the thing he had feared all these years. He suddenly heard a voice. "Father!" And again: "Father!" A tiny voice, down by his shoe-tops. Two small figures were there on the floor beside him. They were both panting, winded by running. They were enlarging; they had come from a smaller size. It was Alan and Glora, who had followed Polter from the boat, diminished again, and come running through the tiny crack under the metal door of the laboratory. They grew to a foot in size, down by Dr. Kent's legs. He was too unnerved; he sat in a chair while Alan swiftly told him what had happened. Babs was in the golden cage. Dr. Kent knew that; but none of them knew what had happened to me. "We must make you small, Father. We have the drugs, here with us." "Yes! Yes, Alan. How much have you? Show me. Oh, my boy, that you are here--and Babs--" "Don't you worry, we'll get away from him." * * * * * Glora and Alan had almost reached Dr. Kent's size before their excited fingers could get out the vials. They took some of the diminishing drug to check their growth. Alan handed his father a black vial. "Yes, lad--" "No! Wait, Father! That's the wrong drug. This other--" Dr. Kent had opened the vial. His trembling hand spilled some of the pellets, but none of them noticed it. "Father, dear, this one." Alan held an opalescent vial. "This one." Glora said abruptly, "Listen! Is that someone coming?" They thought they heard approaching footsteps. A moment passed, but no one came into the room. "Hurry," urged Glora. "It is nothing. We wait too long." "My boy--Alan, dear, after all these years--" They were about to take the diminishing drug. From across the room there came a very queer sound. A scuttling, scratching, and the drone of wings. "Father, good God--look!" Over by the wall, a giant fly was running across the floor. It was growing larger! At Dr. Kent's feet the pellets he had dropped were crushed by his footsteps and strewn on the floor. A fly had eaten of the sweetish powder. The enlarging drug was loose! A few drops of water lay mingled with the drug on the floor. And from the water nameless hideous things were rising! CHAPTER IX _The Doomed Realm_ To Alan the first few moments that followed the escape of the drug were the most horrible of his life. The discovery struck old Dr. Kent, Glora and Alan into a numb, blank confusion. They stood transfixed, staring with cold terror. The fly was scurrying along the floor close against the wall Already it was as large as Alan's hand. It ran into the corner, hit the wall in its confused alarm, and turned back. Its wings were droning with an audible hum. It reared itself on its hairy legs, lifted and sailed across the room. As though drawn by a magnet Alan turned to watch it. It landed on the wall. Alan was aware of Dr. Kent rushing with trembling steps to a shelf where bottles stood. Glora was stricken into immobility, the blood draining from her face. The fly flew again. It passed directly over Alan. Its body, with a membrane sac of eggs, was now as large as his head; its wide-spread transparent wings were beating with a reverberating drone. Alan flung a bottle which was on the table beside him. It missed, crashed against the ceiling, came down with splintering glass and spilling liquid. Fumes spread chokingly over the room. The fly landed again on the floor. Larger now! Expanding with a horribly rapid growth. Glora flung something--a little wooden rack with a few empty test-tubes in it. The rack struck the monstrous fly, but did not hurt it. The fly stood with hairy legs braced under its bulging body. Its multiple-lensed eyes were staring at the humans. And with its size must have come a sense of power, for it seemed to Alan that the monstrous insect had an abnormal alertness as it stood measuring its adversaries, gathering itself to attack them. Only a few seconds had passed. Confused thoughts swept Alan. This fly with its growth would soon fill this room. Burst it; burst upward through a wrecked palace; soar out, and by the power of its size alone, devastate this world. He heard himself shouting. "Father, get back! It's too large! I've got to kill it!" * * * * * Launch himself upon it? Wrestle with it in a hand to hand combat? Alan edged around the center table. He was bathed in cold sweat. This thing so horrible! It was too large! Half the length of his own body, now. In a moment it might be twice that! He was aware of Glora pulling at him; and his father rushing past him with a bottle of liquid, and shouting: "Alan! Run! You and this girl, get out of here! The other room--" Then Alan saw the things upon the floor! His foot crushed one with a slippery squash! Nameless, hideous, noisome things grown monstrous, risen from their lurking invisibility in the drops of water! Sodden, gray-black and green-slimed monsters of the deep; palpitating masses of pulp! One lay rocking, already as large as a football with streamers of ooze hanging upon it, and a black-ink fluid squirting; others were rods of red jelly-pulp, already as large as lead pencils, quivering, twitching. Germs of disease, these ghastly things, enlarging from the invisibility of a drop of water! The fly landed with a thud on the center table. The fumes of the shattered bottle of chemicals were choking Alan. He flung himself toward the monster fly, but Glora held him. "No! Escape! The other room!" Dr. Kent was stamping the things upon the floor; pouring acids upon them. Some eluded him. The air in the room was unbreathable.... They reached the bedroom. The laboratory was a hideous chaos. They were aware of its outer door opening, disclosing the figure of Polter who, undoubtedly, had been attracted by the noise. He shouted a startled oath. Alan heard it above the beating wings of the monster fly. Things lurched at the opened door; Polter banged it upon them and rushed away, shouting the alarm through the palace. Dr. Kent was stammering, "Not the enlarging drug! Glora, child, the other! Hurry!" Alan helped Glora with the opalescent vial. Things were lurching toward this room from the laboratory. Alan with averted face, choked by the incoming fumes, slammed the door upon the gruesome turmoil. They took the diminishing drug. The bedroom expanded. The hideous sounds from the laboratory, and the whole palace now ringing with a wild alarm, then faded into the blessed remoteness of distance above them.... * * * * * "I think it is this way, Alan. Off there--a doorway from my bedroom. Polter always kept it locked, but it leads into a corridor. We must get out of here. A crack under the door--is that it, off there?" Dr. Kent pointed into the gloomy blur of distance. "We are horribly small--it's so far to run--and I've lost my sense of direction." The drug had ceased its action. The wooden floor of the room had expanded to a spread of cellular surface, ridged with broken, tube-like tunnels; pits and jagged cave-mouths. A knot-hole yawned like a crater a hundred feet away. "We are too small," Glora protested hurriedly. "The door is where you say, Dr. Kent, but miles away." With the other drug, the room contracted. The floor-surface shrank and smoothed a little. The door was distinguishable--a square panel several hundred feet in width and towering into the upper haze. The black line of the crack was visible along its bottom. They ran to it. The top of the crack was ten feet above their heads. They ran under, across the wide intervening darkness toward a glow of light. Then they came from under the door into a corridor--and shrank against a cliff-wall as with a rush of wind and pounding tread the blurred shapes of a man's huge feet and legs rushed passed. The upper air was filled with rumbling shouts. "We must chance it!" exclaimed Dr. Kent. "Too dangerous, so small! Larger--and if they see us, fight our way out!" In the turmoil of the doomed palace no one noticed them. They cast aside all restraint. It was too dangerous to wait. The excessive dose they took of the drug made the corridor shrink with dizzying speed. They rushed along its length. Alan hurled a little man aside who was in their path. Already they were larger than the Polter people. * * * * * They squeezed out of a shrinking doorway. The dwindling island was a turmoil. Little figures were plunging from the palace. At the edge of the water, Alan, Glora and Dr. Kent stood for an instant looking behind them. The palace was rocking! Its roof heaved upward then smashed and fell aside with the clatter of tumbling masonry. The monstrous fly, its hideous face mashed and oozing, reared itself up and, with broken, torn wings tried to soar away. But it could not. It slipped back. The drone and buzz of its fright sounded over the chaos of noise. Other things came lurching and twitching upward; slithering out.... The expanding body of the fly was pushing the palace walls outward. In a moment they collapsed and it emerged.... To Alan and his companions the scene was all shrinking into a miniature chaos of horror at their shoe-tops. A diminuendo of screams mingled down there. Overhead were the stars, shining peacefully remote. Nearby lay a rapidly narrowing channel of shining water. A tiny city was across it. Lights were moving. The panic had spread from the island to Orena. Beyond the tiny city, a range of mountains showed; a cliff, gleaming in the starlight; tunnel mouths. Suddenly against the stars off there, Alan saw the enlarging figure of Polter, his hunched shape unmistakable. He was facing the other way. He lunged and scrambled into a yawning black hole in the mountains. Polter was escaping! None of these people except himself had the drugs. He was escaping with the golden cage, out of this doomed atomic world to our Earth above. Glora murmured, "There is our way out. Your way. And that is Polter going. I think he did not see us. So much is growing gigantic here." She clung to Alan. "Dear one--" Dr. Kent muttered, "We will wait a moment--wade across--or leap over, and follow him out. Babs with him--dear God I hope so! This doomed realm!" * * * * * Alan held Glora close. And suddenly he was laughing--a madness, half hysteria. "Why, this, all this--why look, Glora, it's funny! This little world all excited, an ant-hill, outraged! Look! There's our giant sailboat!" Down near their feet the inch-long sailboat stood at its dock. Tiny human figures were rushing for it; others, floundering in the water, were trying to climb upon it. Dr. Kent had stepped from the shore a foot or two, and tiny, lashing white rollers rocked the boat, almost engulfing it. Alan's laugh rang out, "God! It's funny, isn't it? All those little creatures, so excited!" "Steady, lad!" Dr. Kent touched him. "Don't let yourself laugh! A moment now, then we'll wade across. Polter won't have much start on us. We mustn't get too close to him in size, but try and attack him unawares. We have got to get Babs away from him." The narrowing passage rose hardly to their knees. They stepped ashore, well to one side of the toy city. Their growth had almost stopped. But suddenly Alan realized that Glora was diminishing! She had taken the other drug. "Glora!" "I must go back, Alan. This is my world, doomed perhaps, but I cannot forsake it now. I must give the enlarging drug to my father. And others who can rise and fight these monsters." "Glora!" Dr. Kent said hurriedly, "She's right, Alan. There is a chance they can save their city. For her to leave them would be dastardly." She cried, "You go on up, Alan. You have enough of the drugs. Leave me, dear one--I am going back!" "No!" he protested. "You must not! Or if you do, I'll come with you!" She clung to him. He felt her body diminishing within his encircling arms. His love for her swept him--this girl who had cajoled Polter, or tricked him, stolen several of the little vials from him heaven knows how, and followed him up to the other world. This girl whom Alan now knew he loved, was leaving him. Forever? * * * * * As he stood there, with the miniature landscape at his feet in the wan starlight, the panic-stricken tiny city, the island with its monsters rising to overwhelm this microscopic world--it seemed to Alan then that if he let her go it was the end for him of all life's promised happiness. "Alan, lad, come." His father was pulling at him. So horrible a choice! Alan thought that I was back on that island. But Babs, a prisoner in the golden cage, was with Polter, plunging upward in size. And his father was beside him, pleading. "Alan--come--I can't get out alone. Nor save Babs. And the maddened Polter, with the power of this drug, can conquer and enslave our Earth as he has enslaved Orena--just one little city of one tiny golden atom! Believe me, lad, your duty lies above." Glora's head was now down at Alan's waist. He stooped and kissed her white forehead; his fingers, just for an instant, smoothed her glossy hair. "Good-by, Glora." "Dear one, good-by." She plunged away, and her tread as she dwindled mashed the forest behind the city. Alan and his father ran for the cliff. They were too large to squeeze into the little hole. But in a moment they made themselves smaller. They climbed as they dwindled; checked the drug action and rushed into the tunnel-mouth. Alan stopped just for an instant to gaze out over the starlit scene. It was almost the same viewpoint from which he had his first sight of Glora's world only an hour or two before. The distant island beyond the city showed plainly with the shining water around it. The vegetation there was growing! And there were dark, horribly formless blobs lurching outward and rising with monstrous bulk against the background of the stars! "Alan! Come, lad!" With a prayer for Glora trembling on his lips, Alan plunged into the dim phosphorescent gloom of the tunnel. CHAPTER X _The Escape_ To Babs and me the ride in the golden cage strapped to Polter's chest as he made his escape outward into largeness was an experience awesome and frightening almost beyond conception. We heard the alarm in the palace on the island. Polter rushed to Dr. Kent's laboratory door, looked in, and in a moment banged it shut. Babs and I saw very little. We knew only that something horrible had happened; we could see only a blur with formless things in the void beneath our bars; and there were the choking fumes of chemicals surging at us. Polter rushed through the castle corridor. We heard rumbling distant shouts. "The drug is loose! The drug is loose! Monsters! Death for everyone!" The room swayed with horrible dizzying lurches as Polter ran. We clung to the lattice bars, our legs and arms entwined. There were moments when Polter leaped, or suddenly stooped, and our reeling senses all but faded. "Babs! Babs, darling, don't let go! Don't lose consciousness!" If she should be limp, here in this lurching room, her body to be flung back and forth across its confines--that would be death in a moment. I feared I could not hold her. I managed to get an arm about her waist. "Babs!" "I'm--all right, George. I can stand it. We're--he is enlarging." "Yes." I saw water far beneath us, lashed into a turmoil of foam with Polter's wading steps. There was a brief swaying vista of a toy city; starlight overhead; a lurching swaying miniature of landscape as Polter ran for the towering cliffs. Then he climbed and scrambled into the tunnel-mouth. Had he turned at that instant doubtless he would have seen the rising distant figures of Glora, Alan and Dr. Kent. But he did not see them, evidently. Nor did we. Polter spoke only very occasionally to Babs. "Hold tightly!" It was a rumbling voice from above us. He made no move to touch the cage, except that a few times the great blur of his hand came up to adjust its angle. * * * * * The lurching and jolting was less violent in the tunnel. Polter's frenzy to escape was subsiding into calmness. He traversed the tunnel with a methodical swinging stride. We were aware of him climbing over the noisome litter of the dead giant's body which blocked the tunnel's further end. We heard his astonished exclamations. But evidently he did not suspect what had happened, thinking only that the stupid messenger had miscalculated his growth and been crushed. We emerged into a less dim area. Polter did not stop at the fallen giant. Nothing mattered now to him, quite evidently, save his own rapid exit with Babs from this atomic realm. His movements seemed calm, yet hurried. We realized now how different was an outward journey from the trip coming in. This was all only an inch of golden quartz! The stages upward were frequently only a matter of growth in size; the distances in this vast desert realm of golden rock always were shrinking. Polter many times stood almost motionless until the closing dwindling walls made him scramble upward into the greater space above. It may have been an hour, or less. Babs and I, from our smaller viewpoint, with the landscape so frequently blurred by distance and Polter's movements, seldom recognized where we were. But I realized that going out was far easier in every way than coming in. Easier to determine the route, since usually the diminishing caverns and gullies made the upward step obvious.... We knew when Polter scrambled up the incline ramp. It seemed impossible for us to plan anything. Would Polter make the entire trip without a stop? It seemed so. We had no drugs. Our cage was barred beyond possibility of our getting out. But even if we had had the drugs, or had our door been open, there was no escape. An abyss of distance was always yawning beyond our lattice--the sheer precipice of Polter's body from his chest to the ground. "Babs, we must make him stop. If he sits down to rest, you might get him to take you out. I must reach his drugs." "Yes. I'll try it, George." * * * * * Polter was momentarily standing motionless as though gazing around him, judging what to do next. His size seemed stationary. Beyond our bars we could see the distant circular walls as though this were some giant crater-pit in which Polter was standing. Then I thought I recognized it--the round, nearly vertical pit into which Alan had plunged his hand and arm. Above us then was a gully, blind at one end. And above that, the outer surface, the summit of the fragment of golden quartz. "Babs! I know where we are! If he takes you out, keep his attention. I'll try and get one of his black vials. Make him hold you near the ground. If I see you there, in position where you can jump, I'll startle him. Oh, Babs, dear, it's desperately dangerous but I can't think of anything else. Jump! Get away from here. I'll keep his attention on me. Then I'll join you if I can--with the drug." Polter was moving. We had no time to say more. "Yes! Yes, I'll try it, George." For just an instant she clung to me with her soft arms about my neck. Our love was sweeping us in this desperate moment, and it seemed that above us was a remote Earth world holding the promise of all our dreams. Or were we star-crossed, doomed like the realm of the atom? Was this swift embrace now marking the end of everything for us? Babs called, "Dr. Polter?" We could feel his movements stopping. "Yes? You are all right, Babs?" She laughed--a ripple of silvery laughter--but there was tragic fear in her eyes as she held her gaze on me. "Yes, Dr. Polter, but breathless. Almost dead, but not quite. What happened? I want to come out and talk to you." "Not now, little bird." "But I want to." To me it was a miracle that she could call so lightly and hold that note of lugubrious laughter in her voice. "I am hungry. Don't you think of that? And frightened. Take me out." * * * * * He was sitting down! "You remind me that I am tired, Babs. And hungry, also. I haf a little food. You shall come out for just a short time." "Thank you. Take me carefully." Our tilted cage was near the ground as he seated himself. But still it was too far for me to jump. I murmured, "Babs--" "Wait, George! I'll fix that. You hide! If he looks in he'll see you, where you are now!" I scrambled back to my hiding place. Polter's huge fingers were fumbling at our bars. The little door sprang open. "Come, Babs." He held the cupped bowl of his palm to the doorway. "Come out." "No!" she called. "It is too far down!" "Come. That iss foolish." "No! I'm afraid. Put the cage on the ground." "Babs!" His finger and thumb came reaching in to seize her, but she avoided them. "Dr. Polter! Don't! You'll crush me!" "Then come out on my hand." He seemed annoyed. I had scrambled back to the doorway; I knew he could not see me so long as the cage remained strapped to his shirt front. I whispered, "I can make it, Babs!" Polter was apparently on one elbow, half turned on his side. From our cage, the sloping gleaming white surface of his stiff glossy shirt-bosom went down a steep incline. His belt was down there, and the outward bulging curve of his lap--a spreading surface where I could land like a scuttling insect, unobserved, if only Babs could hold his attention. I whispered vehemently. "Try it! Go out! Leave me! Keep talking to him!" She called instantly, "Very well, then. Bring your hand! Closer! Carefully! It seems so high up here!" * * * * * She swung herself to his palm, and flung her arms about the great pillar of his upcrooked finger. The bowl of his hand moved slowly away. I heard her calling voice, and his overhead rumble. I chanced it! I could not determine the exact position, or which way he was looking. Again I heard Bab's voice. "Careful, Dr. Polter. Don't let me fall!" "Yes, little bird." I let myself down from the tilted doorway, hung by my hands and dropped. I struck the ramp-like yielding surface of his shirt-bosom. I slid, tumbling, scrambling, and landed softly in the huge folds of his trouser fabric. I was unhurt. The width of his belt, high as my body, was near me. I shrank against it; I found I could cling to its upper edge. My hold came just in time. He shifted, and sat up. I was lifted with a swoop of movement. When it steadied I saw above me the top of his knee. His left leg was crooked, the foot drawn close to him. Babs was perched up there on the knee summit. His right leg was outstretched. I was at the right side of his belt. I could dart off along that curving expanse of his leg and leap to the ground. If he would hold this position! One of the pouches of his belt was near me. The vial in it was black. The enlarging drug! I moved toward it. But Babs was too high to jump from that summit of his crooked knee! I think she saw me at his belt. I heard her voice. "I cannot eat up here. It is too high. Oh, please be careful how you move! I am so dizzy, so frightened! You move with such great jerks!" He had what seemed a huge surface of bread and meat. He was breaking off crumbs to put before her. I reached the pouch of his belt. The vial was as long as my body. I tugged to try and lift it out. * * * * * All the giant contours of Polter's body shifted as he cautiously moved. I clung. I saw that Babs was being held gently between his thumb and forefinger. He lowered her to the ground, and she stood beside the bread and meat he had placed there. And she had the courage to laugh! "Why this--this is an enormous sandwich! You will have to break it." He was leaning over her, half turned on his left side. The vial came free. I shoved it; but I could not control its weight. I pushed desperately. It slid over the round brink of his right hip, and fell behind him. I heard the tinkling thud of it down on the rocks. There was no alarm. I could not chance leaping from his hip. I scurried along the convex top of his outstretched leg, and beyond his knee I jumped. I landed safely. I could see the black vial back across the broken rock surface, with the bulge of Polter's hip above it. I ran back and reached the vial; tugged at its huge stopper. The cork began to yield under my panting, desperate efforts. In a moment I would have a pellet of the enlarging drug; make away with it; startle Polter so that Babs might dart off and escape. The huge stopper of the vial was larger than my head. It came suddenly out. I flung it away, plunged in my hand, and seized an enormous round pellet. Then abruptly the alarm came, and I had not caused it! Polter ripped out a startled, rumbling curse and sat upright. Under the curve of his leg, I saw that Babs had been momentarily neglected. She was running. Across the boulder-strewn plain, two tiny men had appeared. Polter had seen them. They were the enlarging figures of Dr. Kent and Alan! CHAPTER XI _The Combat of Size_ The astounded Polter was taken wholly by surprise. He could have had no idea that anyone was following him. He thought he was alone with the tiny Babs in this rock-strewn metal desert. What he saw as he scrambled to his feet were four insect-size humans, two of them at a distance, and two within reach of him, and all of them scampering in different directions. The ground was littered with crags and boulders; was ridged and pitted, pock-marked, with tiny crater-holes and caves. The four scuttling figures almost instantly had disappeared from his sight. I did not see where Babs went. I turned from the black vial of Polter's enlarging drug, and with the huge pellet under my arm I ran leaping over the rough ground and flung myself into a gully. I lay prone, flattened against a rock. In the murky distance of a pseudo-sky overhead, the monstrous head and shoulders of Polter were visible. I could see down to just below his waist. The empty cage with its door flapping open hung against his shirt-front. He had stooped to try and recover Babs. And instinctively his hands went to his belt to seize his enlarging drug. They were fumbling there now. He hauled out an opalescent vial of the diminishing element. But his black vial was gone. His frown spread into fear as he searched for it in the other compartments of his belt. I had thought that he had more than one black vial, but now it seemed not. His huge face was swept with the panic of terror. He flung a wild glance around him. Through the open end of my gully I saw in the distance, miles away, the enlarging figure of Alan rising up. Then it ducked back of a distant rocky peak. Polter undoubtedly saw it. He was fumbling with his opalescent vial, and with confused panic upon him he made the mistake of taking the diminishing drug. And instantly seemed to regret it. His curse rumbled above me. His glance went down to the rocks at his feet, and there he saw lying his black vial with its stopper out. His body already was beginning to dwindle. He stooped, seized the vial, and took the enlarging drug. The shock of it made him stagger; momentarily he disappeared from my line of vision but I could hear his panting breath and the unsteady pound of his footsteps. * * * * * I still held that huge round ball of the drug. I seized a loose stone and frantically knocked off a chunk--heaven knows how much, I do not. I shoved it into my mouth, chewed and hastily swallowed it. And with the lurching, swaying, shrinking gully closing in upon me, I ran to get out of its distant open end. I was heading toward where Alan and his father were lurking. I came from the gully into the open, just as the walls closed behind me. The whole scene was a dizzying blurred sway of contracting movement. I saw that I was in a circular valley now some five miles in diameter, with its jagged enclosing walls rising sheerly perpendicular out of sight in the haze overhead. Polter had staggered backward. I saw him a mile or so away. His back at that instant was turned to me. He was now no more than three or four times my own height. He scrambled against the valley cliff-wall as though trying to find a foothold to climb up it. He went a little way, but fell back. Near me, Alan and old Dr. Kent suddenly appeared. I was larger. They flung themselves at my knees. Alan gasped: "You, George! You got Babs?" "Yes--Babs is around somewhere! Stay down here! Don't lose her in size! Stay small! Search and--" "But George--" "I'll tackle Polter. I've taken--God, I don't know how much I've taken of the drug!" They were shrinking down by my boot-tops. Alan shouted suddenly, "There's Babs! Thank God, there's Babs!" She was too small; I could not see her, nor even hear her, though she must have been calling to them. Alan again screamed up at me with his little voice: "She's here, George! You--go on and get Polter! I can't overtake you you--haven't enough of the drug!" His tiny voice was fading away. "Go on and get him, George! This time--get him--" * * * * * I swung with a staggering step around to face the open valley. It was shrunken now to barely half a mile of width. Its smooth walls rose some two or three thousand feet to an upper circular horizon with murky distance overhead. Polter stood across from me. He had tried to climb out but could not. He saw me and came lurching. We were a quarter of a mile from each other. I ran forward through a shifting scene of shrinking rock walls and crawling, contracting ground. Quarter of a mile? It seemed hardly more than a score of running strides before Polter loomed close ahead of me. He was still nearly twice my size. I stooped, seized a loose boulder, and flung it. I missed his face, but, as his hand went up carrying a bared knife-blade, by fortunate chance the stone struck his wrist. The knife dropped to the rocks. He stooped to recover it, but I was upon him. As I felt his huge arms go around me, half lifting me, my foot struck the knife. But in an instant it was swept down into smallness beneath us as we expanded above it. Both of us were unarmed in this combat of size. I was a half-grown youth in Polter's first grip upon me. I heard his panting words, grimly triumphant: "This--George Randolph, I haf been--waiting for so many many years! The hunchback--takes his revenge--now--" He lifted me. His great arms were horribly powerful, but I could feel them dwindling. I was enlarging faster. Just a few moments--if I could last a few moments!... My feet were off the ground, my chest close pressed against the little golden cage between us. He had a hand shoving back my head; his fingers sought my throat. I wound my legs around him, and then he tried to throw me down and fall upon me. But we had twisted and my back was to the cliff. The rocks were shoving at us, insistently pushing with almost a living movement. Polter staggered with me. His grip on my throat tightened, shutting off my breath. My senses whirled. His grim sardonic face over me was blurred to my sight. I tore futilely at my throat to break his choking grip. All the world was a roaring chaos to my fading senses. Then in the blur I saw horror sweep his expression. His fingers involuntarily loosened. I got a breath of blessed air, gasping, and my sight cleared. Walls were closing around us! We were in a pit barely ten feet wide, with the top a few feet above Polter's head. The nearer wall shoved us again. Our bodies almost filled the shrinking pit! Polter lurched and cast me off. I half fell, striking my shoulder against the opposite wall, and I saw Polter leap at the dwindling brink and scramble out. I was nearly wedged. As I rose, the top of the pit only reached my waist. Polter had fallen on the upper ground, and was on hands and knees. Instead of standing up, he lurched at me; tried to shove me back. But I was out. I clutched at him. We were almost of a size now. We rolled on the ground, locked together; rolled to the brink of the pit and over it, as it shrank to a little round hole unnoticed beneath our threshing bodies! * * * * * At the side of the circular valley Alan and Dr. Kent crouched with the smaller figure of Babs between them. They saw Polter and me as two swaying gigantic forms locked in a death struggle, towering against the sky. Tremendous expanded bodies! They saw us come to grips; saw the great hunched Polter bend me backward, choking me. Our bodies lurched. Our huge legs with a single step brought us to the center of the valley. It was a shrinking valley to Alan, Babs and Dr. Kent, for they too, were enlarging. But the fighting giant figures were growing faster. In only a moment their shoulders were up there in the sky, pressing against the narrowing cliff-walls. Alan gasped. "But George will be crushed! Look at him!" Horror swept them as they crouched watching. The enormous pillars of Polter's legs towered straight up from near at hand. Alan was aware of himself screaming: "George--out! You're too large! Too large for in here!" As though his microscopic voice could reach me--my head hundred of feet above him. But he screamed it again. This was all in a few horrible moments, though it seemed to the three watchers an eternity. Alan was helpless to aid me; they had taken all of the enlarging drug they had. Then they saw Polter cast me off. I lurched and struck, with my shoulders wedged against the cliff directly over where they crouched. The overhead sky was darkened as Polter scrambled upward. Alan was still screaming futilely, "George--up! Get out!" Babs huddled with white, horrified face, staring. Then I went out after Polter. My disappearing legs were great dark blurs in the sky. Alan saw the valley now contracted to a thousand feet of width, with its cliffs equally as high. Then everything was smaller.... The sky overhead went dark again; from cliff to cliff a segment of our rolling bodies momentarily spanned the opening. * * * * * And presently Alan realized that the valley had narrowed to a pit. He stood up. "Hurry! Now we can get out after them. Up there!" The opening above was empty. Polter and I were fighting some distance away.... Dr. Kent was soon large enough to scramble out of the pit. Alan handed the little Babs up to him and followed. Alan saw that they were now in a long gully, blind at one end with a five hundred-foot perpendicular cliff. Against the wall, the titanic form of Polter stood at bay. And I was fronting him. The summit of the cliff was lower than our waists. Triumph swept Alan; he saw that I was the larger! As Polter bored into me my backward step crossed the full width of the gully. Alan shouted: "Down! Babs--Father!" They had barely time to flatten themselves in a narrow crevice between upstanding rocks before my foot crashed down. For an instant the sole of my boot formed a flat black ceiling as it trod and spanned the rocks. Then it lifted; was gone with a blurred swoop. They saw the white blur of my hand come down and snatch a tremendous boulder, raising it with a great sweep of movement into the sky. They saw me crash it against Polter; but it only struck his shoulder. He roared with anger. The whole sky was roaring and rumbling with our shouts and our panting breathing, and the ground was clattering, pounding with our giant tread. Huge loose boulders were tumbled in an avalanche everywhere. Again it seemed to Alan that our lurching, heedlessly surging bodies must be crushed within these contracting walls. Only our locked, intertwined legs were visible; our bodies were lost in the sky. Then it seemed to Alan that I had heaved Polter upward. And followed him. We disappeared. There was a distant overhead rumble, and the murky sky, with vague patches of far-distant illumination in it, became empty of movement.... The walls presently were again closing upon Alan and his companions. They ran out of the open end of the shrinking little gully and came to a new upward vista.... * * * * * I found myself a full head and shoulders taller than Polter. And he was tiring, panting heavily. His face was cut and bleeding from the blows of my fists. The rock I heaved struck his shoulder. He roared, head down, and bored into me. He was heavier than I. His weight flung me back. My foot slid on the loose stones of the gully floor. I did not know that Babs, Alan and their father were huddled under those stones! My back struck the opposite wall. Polter's upflung knee caught me in the stomach, all but knocking the breath from me. He was desperate, oblivious to the closing walls. And as he flung his arms with a grip about my neck, hanging, trying to bear me down, I saw in his blazing dark eyes what seemed the light of suicide. I think that then, with a sudden frenzied madness he realized that he was beaten. And tried to pull us to the ground and let the walls crush us. I summoned all my remaining strength and heaved us forward. I broke his hold. His body was jammed back against a lowering wall. Its top seemed almost at our knees. I shoved frantically. He fell backward and I jumped after him. We were on a great rocky plateau. But it was shrinking, crawling into itself. Spots of light were in the murk overhead; there seemed a distant circular horizon of emptiness around us. Polter was lying in a heap. But it was trickery, for as I incautiously bent over him his hand crashed a rock against my head. I reeled, with all the world turning black, but did not fall. There was a horrible instant when my senses were going, but I fought to hold them. Blood from a wound on my forehead was streaming in my eyes. I was staggering. Then I realized I was grimly tossing my head, shaking the blood away; and little by little my sight came back. Polter was on his feet, rushing me. His fist came with an upward swing at my chin, but I ducked my head aside at the last moment. And suddenly, fighting up there in the open, my mind envisaged how gigantic we were! This was a great upland plateau, rounded with miles of distance and a shadowy, dimly radiant abyss beyond its circular horizon. And I was a thousand feet or more tall! A titan, looming here in the sky!... * * * * * My fist quite unexpectedly caught Polter's jaw. His simultaneous swing went wild, though I leaped backward from it. He staggered, and his arms dropped to his sides. I was crouched forward, guarded, watching him while I gasped for breath. There was the briefest of instants when an expression of vague surprise swept his face. But I had not knocked him out. It was death overtaking him. His heart was yielding, overtaxed from this strain; and I think there at the last, he realized it. The blood drained suddenly from his face and lips, leaving them livid. I saw fear, then a wild horror in his eyes. He stood swaying. Then his knees gave way and he toppled. He fell from his height in the air where I stood gazing at him--fell forward on his face, his titanic length spread all across the top of this rocky landscape! For a moment I did not move. My head was reeling, my ears roaring. Blood streamed into my eyes. I wiped it away with a torn sleeve and stood panting, gazing at the glowing distance around me. I was a titan, standing there. The body of Polter was shrinking at my feet. The circular abyss of emptiness came nearer as this rocky eminence contracted. Suddenly my attention went to the sky overhead. Vague distant lights were there. Then a broad flat blur seemed spread over me. Light everywhere was growing. Beyond the nearby brink of the abyss was a white reflected radiance from beneath. Abruptly I realized there was a level, flat white plain running far off there in the distance. Overhead a radiance contracted into a spot of light. A shape in the sky moved! I heard a far-away rumble--a human voice! The body of Polter lay at my feet. It was hardly the length of my forearm I stood, a titan. And then, with a shock of realization, I saw how tiny I was! This was the broken top of that fragment of golden quartz the size of a walnut! I was standing there, under the lens of the giant microscope in Polter's dome-room laboratory, with half a dozen astounded Quebec police officials peering down at me! CHAPTER XII _Mysterious Little Golden Rock_ I need not detail the aftermath of our emergence from the atom. Dr. Kent and Babs followed me out within a few moments. But Alan was not with them! He had seen Polter fall. His father and Babs were safe. The sacrifice he had made in leaving Glora was no longer needed. Down there on the rocky plateau, Dr. Kent suddenly realized that Alan was dwindling. "Father, I must! Don't you understand? Glora's world is menaced. I can't leave her like this. My duty to you and Babs is ended. I did my best, Dad--you two are safe now." "Alan! My boy!" He was already down at Dr. Kent's waist, Bab's size. He held up his hand. "Dad, good-by." His rugged, youthful face was flushed, his voice choked. "You--you've been a mighty good father to me. Always." Babs flung her arms about him. "Alan, don't!" "But I must." He smiled whimsically as he kissed her. "You wouldn't want to leave George, would you? Never see him again? I'm not asking you to do that, am I?" "But, Alan--" "You've been a great little pal, Babs. I'll never forget it." "Alan! You talk as though you were never coming back!" "Do I? But of course I'm coming back!" He cast her off. "Babs, listen. Father's upset. That's natural. You tell him not to worry. I'll be careful, and do what I can to save that little city. I must find Glora and--" Babs was suddenly trembling with eagerness for him. "Yes! Of course you must, Alan!" "Find her and bring her out here! I'll do it! Don't you worry." He was dwindling fast. Dr. Kent had collapsed to a rock, staring down with horror-stricken eyes. Alan called up to Babs: "Listen! Have George watch the chunk of gold-quartz. Have it guarded and watched day and night. Handle it carefully, Babs!" "Yes! Yes! How long will you be gone, Alan?" "Heavens--how do I know? But I'll come back, don't you worry. Maybe in only a day or two of your time." "Right! Good-by, Alan!" "Good-by," his tiny voice echoed up. "Good-by, Babs--Father!" Babs could see his miniature face smiling up at her. She smiled back and waved her arm as he vanished into the pebbles at her feet. The eyes of youth! They look ahead; they see all things so easily possible! But old Dr. Kent was sobbing. * * * * * It has broken Dr. Kent. A month now has passed. He seldom mentions Alan to Babs and me. But when he does, he tries to smile and say that Alan soon will return. He has been very ill this last week, though he is better now. He did not tell us that he was working to compound another supply of the drugs, but we knew it very well. And his emotion, the strain of it, made him break. He was in bed a week. We are living in New York, quite near the Museum of the American Society for Scientific Research. In a room of the biological department there, the precious fragment of golden quartz lies guarded. A microscope is over it, and there is never a moment of the day or night without an alert, keen-eyed watcher peering down. But nothing has appeared. Neither friend nor foe--nothing. I cannot say so to Babs, but often I fear that Dr. Kent will suddenly die, and the secret of his drugs die with him. I hinted once that I would make a trip into the atom if he would let me, but it excited him so greatly I had to laugh it off with the assurance that of course Alan will soon return safely to us. Dr. Kent is an old man now, unnaturally old, with, it seems, the full weight of eighty years pressing upon him. He cannot stand this emotion. I think he is despairingly summoning strength to work upon his drugs, fearful that he will not be equal to it. Yet more fearful to disclose the secret and unloose so diabolical a power. There are nights when with Dr. Kent asleep, Babs and I slip away and go to the Museum. We dismiss the guard for a time, and in that private room we sit hand in hand by the microscope to watch. The fragment of golden quartz lies on its clean white slab with a brilliant light upon it. Mysterious little golden rock! What secrets are there, down beyond the vanishing point in the realm of the infinitely small! Our human longings go to Alan and to Glora. But sometimes we are swept by the greater viewpoint. Awed by the mysteries of nature, we realize how very small and unimportant we are in the vast scheme of things. We envisage the infinite reaches of astronomical space overhead. Realms of largeness unfathomable. And at our feet, everywhere, are myriad entrances into the infinitely small. With ourselves in between--with our fatuous human consciousness that we are of some importance to it all! Truly there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy! INVISIBLE EYES An invisible eye that can see in the dark and detect the light of a ship two miles away on a black foggy night was introduced to newspaper men recently by its inventor, John Baird of television fame. He calls the invention "Noctovisor." It looks like a large camera and can be mounted on a ship or airplane. It was announced that it would soon be tried on trans-Atlantic liners. For the demonstration it was mounted in the garden of Baird's cottage, overlooking the twinkling lights of Dorking. In the dark beyond those lights an automobile headlight three miles away pointed toward the cottage. At a signal from the inventor a sheet of ebonite, as a substitute for a supposed fog, two miles thick, was placed in front of the headlight. Not a glimmer was then visible to the human eye, but it appeared on the noctovisor screen as a bright red disc. It was supposed to have particular value in permitting a navigator in a fog to tell the exact direction of a beacon and to estimate roughly its distance. The device is a combination of camera lens, television transmitter and television receiver. The lens throws a distant image on the exploring disc of the transmitter, through which it acts on a photo-electric cell sensitive to invisible infra-red rays. The receiver amplifies it for the observer. MOON ROCKETS Seventeen years of experimenting on a rocket designed by Prof. Albert H. Goddard of Clark University, to shriek its way from the earth to the moon, came to a glorious climax recently in an isolated and closely guarded section of Worcester when the rocket tore its flaming way through the air for a quarter-mile with a roar heard for a distance of two miles. Prof. Goddard said the rocket was shot out of its cradle, careened through the air a mass of flame, and landed about where it was directed to land, beyond the Auburn town line. Test of a new propellant was the object of his demonstration, Prof. Goddard said. Two or three times a week a small rocket goes up into the air a short distance, not enough to attract great attention. But the latest was a nine-foot rocket, shot out of a forty-foot tower. Near the tower is a safety post built of stone, with slits for peepholes. The experimental party stepped into the safety zone when the rocket was started. The forty-foot tower is built much like an oil well derrick. Inside it are two steel rails to fill grooves in the rocket. These guide the rocket much as rifling in a gun barrel guides a bullet. Prof. Goddard, when teaching at Princeton in 1912, evolved the idea of shooting a rocket to the moon by means of successive charges of explosive much as the new German rocket motor racers are powered. In this most recent experiment he used a new powder mixture. Prof. Goddard issued a statement after the demonstration, which said: "My test was one of a series of experiments with rockets using an entirely new propellant. There was no attempt to reach the moon or anything of such a spectacular nature. The rocket is normally noisy, possibly enough to attract considerable attention. The test was thoroughly satisfactory, nothing exploded in the air, and there was no damage except possibly that incidental to landing." Terrors Unseen _By Harl Vincent_ [Illustration: _"Eddie!" Lisa screamed suddenly. "Look out!"_] [Sidenote: One after another the invisible robots escape Shelton's control--and their trail leads straight to the gangster chief Cadorna.] Something about the lonely figure of the girl caused Edward Vail to bring his car to a sudden stop at the side of the road. When first he had glimpsed her off there on that narrow strip of rock-bound coast he was mildly surprised, for it was a desolate spot and seldom frequented by bathers so late in the season. Now he was aroused to startled attention by the unnatural posture of the slender body that had just been erect and outlined sharply against the graying September sky. He switched off the ignition and sprang to the ground. Bent backward and twisted into the attitude of a contortionist, the little figure in the crimson bathing suit was a thing at which to marvel. No human being could maintain that position without falling, yet the girl did not fall to the jagged stones that lay beneath her. She was rigid, straining. Then suddenly her arm waved wildly and she screamed, a wild gasping cry that died in her throat on a note of despairing terror. It seemed that she struggled furiously with an unseen power for one horrible instant. Then the tortured body lurched violently and collapsed in a pitiful quivering heap among the stones. Eddie Vail was running now, miraculously picking his way over the treacherous footing. The girl had fainted, no doubt of that, and something was seriously wrong with her. A mysterious mechanical something whizzed past; something that buzzed like a thousand hornets and slithered over the rocks in a series of metallic clanks. Then it was gone--or so it seemed in the confusion of Eddie's mind; but he had seen nothing. Probably a fantasy of his overworked brain, or only the surf breaking against the sea wall. He turned his attention to the girl. * * * * * She was moaning and tossing her head, returning painfully to consciousness. He straightened her limbs and placed his folded coat under the restless head, noting with alarm that vicious red welts marred the whiteness of her arms and shoulders. It was as if she had been beaten cruelly; those marks could never have resulted from her fall. Poor kid. Subject to fits of some sort, he presumed. She was a good looker, too, and no mistake. He smoothed back the rumpled mass of golden hair and studied her features. They were vaguely familiar. Then she opened her eyes. Stark terror looked out from their ultra-marine depths, and her lips quivered as if she were about to cry. He raised her to a more comfortable position and supported her with an encircling arm. She did cry a little, like a frightened child. Then, with startling abruptness, she sprang to her feet. "Where is it?" she demanded. "Where's what?" Eddie was on his feet, peering in all directions. He remembered the queer sounds he had heard or imagined. "I--I don't know." The girl passed a trembling hand before her eyes as if to wipe away some horrifying vision. "Perhaps it's my imagination, but I felt--it was just as real--one of father's iron monsters. Beating me; bending me. I'd have snapped in a moment. But nothing was there. I--I'm afraid...." Eddie caught her as she swayed on her feet. "There now," he said soothingly, "you're all right, Miss Shelton. It's gone now, whatever it was." Iron monsters! In a flash it had come to him that this girl he held in his arms was Lina Shelton, daughter of the robot wizard. No wonder she was afflicted with hallucinations! But those bruises were real, as was the forcible twisting of her lithe young body. And he _had_ heard something. * * * * * "You know me?" The girl was calmer now and faced him with a surprised look. "Yes, Miss Shelton. At least I recognize you from the pictures. Society page, you know. And I'm Edward Vail--Eddie for short--on vacation and at your service." The girl smiled wanly. "You know of father's break with Universal Electric? Of his private experiments?" "I heard of the scrap and of how he walked out on the outfit, but nothing further." Eddie thought grimly of how nearly he had come to losing his own job when David Shelton broke relations with his employers. He had been too enthusiastic in support of some of the older man's claims. "It's been terrible," the girl whispered. She clung nervously to his arm as he picked the way back to the road. "The loneliness, and all. No servants will stay out here now, and father spends all of his time in the laboratory. Then--this fear of the mechanical men--they haunt me. I--I guess they've got me a little goofy." Eddie laughed reassuringly. "Perhaps," he suggested, "you will let me help you. Your father, I believe, will remember me, and I'll be very glad to--" "No, no!" The girl seemed frightened at the thought. "I'm sure he wouldn't welcome you. He's changed greatly of late and is suspicious of everyone, even keeping things from me. But it's awfully nice of you to offer your assistance, and you've been a perfect peach to take care of me this way. I--I'd better go now." They had reached the road and Eddie looked uncertainly at his roadster. He hated to think of leaving the girl in this lonely spot. She was obviously in a state of extreme nervous tension and, to him, seemed pathetically helpless, and afraid. "That the house?" he asked, pointing in the direction of the gloomy old mansion whose dilapidated gables were barely visible over the tree tops. "Yes." The girl shivered and drew closer to him. The ensuing silence was broken by the slam of a door. His car! Eddie looked toward it in amazement; he was hearing things again. The springs sagged on the driver's side as under the weight of a very heavy occupant, but the seat was empty. Then came the whine of the starter and the motor purred into life. The gears clashed sickeningly and the car was jerked into the road with a violence that should have stripped the differential. He pulled the girl aside just as it roared past and disappeared around the bend in a cloud of dust. The sound of the exhaust died away rapidly and left them staring into each other's eyes in awed silence. * * * * * David Shelton was prowling around in the shrubbery when they approached the house--a furtive, unkempt creature whom Eddie would hardly have recognized. He straightened up and peered at his daughter's companion with obvious disapproval. "Lina," he said severely, "I've told you we want no visitors." "Yes, Dad, I know, but Mr. Vail's car was stolen out in front and there is no way for him to go on. We must look after him." "His car--stolen? Who stole it?" David Shelton drew close and glared suspiciously at his unwelcome visitor. "One of your monsters, I think," she replied shakily, "though we could see nothing. And the same thing attacked me and beat me. Look at my bruises!" Shelton was examining the marks, and his fingers trembled as he touched his daughter's shoulder. He looked piteously into her eyes. "Are you sure, Lina? Sure? Did you see it?" "No, no. But I felt and heard--the iron arms and the clamps and the buzzing. Oh, it was horrible!" The girl's voice rose hysterically. "Oh, Lord! What have I done?" groaned Shelton. "It's true, then. Lina, listen: I've succeeded in making them invisible, and one got away this morning. But I thought--I thought--" He looked at Eddie, remembering his presence suddenly. "But I'm talking too much. It seems to me I remember having seen you before, young man." "You have, sir," Eddie stated. "In the research laboratory of Universal Electric. I work with Borden." "They've sent you to find me?" Shelton stiffened perceptibly. "Indeed, not, sir. I'm on vacation and was merely passing by when I saw your daughter in danger, a danger I still do not understand." "Yes, and he helped me to the road," Lina interposed, "and then lost his car at the hands of--" "Silence!" the father thundered. But his eyes fell before the fire that instantly flashed in those of the girl. "Now, you listen to me!" she returned angrily, "I've stayed on here with you until I'm nearly crazy with your everlasting puttering and experimenting--hearing your uncanny machines walking around in the middle of the night--seeing impossible sights--then, this thing I couldn't see but could feel. And you've gotten into such a state that you'll go crazy yourself, if you continue. Something's got to be done, I tell you. I can't stand it!" * * * * * Her voice broke on a choked sob. "But Lina--" "Don't but me, Father. I mean it. Mr. Vail discovered your hideout quite by accident and he's been very nice to me. I tell you he means no harm and I want him to stay. If you're not decent to him, if you send him away, I swear I'll go too. I will--I will!" Shelton's eyes misted and something of the hardness left his expression. A look of haunting fear took its place and he stared pleadingly at Eddie. "Br-r! I'm cold!" Lina exclaimed irrelevantly. "And--and I believe I'm going to cry." She turned away and raced for the shelter of the gloomy old house without another word. Eddie turned inquiring eyes on his unwilling host. "Just like her mother before her," Shelton muttered softly. Then he faced the younger man squarely and his shoulders straightened. "Mr. Vail," he said sheepishly, "I've been a fool and I ask your pardon. But Lina doesn't know. There's something tremendous behind all this, something that's gotten beyond me. I'll send her away for her own safety, but I must stay on. If--if only there was someone I could trust--" "You can trust me, sir," Eddie stated simply. The older man paced the ground nervously, and Eddie could see that he was under a most severe mental strain. Several times he halted in his tracks and peered anxiously at his guest. Then he seemed to make a sudden decision. "Vail," he said sharply, "I need help badly. I want you to stay, if you will. You swear you'll not reveal what I am about to show you?" "I swear it, sir." "You'll not report to Universal?" "Never." * * * * * They surveyed each other appraisingly. Eddie was mystified by the happenings of the day and was curious to learn more concerning these mythical invisible creations. It was inconceivable that the scientist had spoken truly of his accomplishment. Yet, he had done some marvelous things with Universal and, maybe--well, anyway, there was the girl. "Come with me," Shelton was saying: "I believe you're a square shooter, Vail." He was leading the way along the gravel path at the side of the house. Before them loomed the squat brick building that was the laboratory. The door crashed open before Shelton's hand had reached the knob, and one of those buzzing, unseen, monstrosities rushed clanking by, knocking the scientist from his feet in its passage. Ponderous, speeding footsteps crunched the gravel of the path, and then, with a wild thrashing of the underbrush alongside, the thing was gone. Eddie bent over the prostrate man and saw that he was unconscious. A thin trickle of blood ran from a cut in the side of his head. "Lina! Lina!" called Eddie frantically. For the first time in his life he was genuinely frightened. * * * * * He half carried, half dragged the limp body through the door of the laboratory and propped it in a chair. It required but a moment for him to see that Shelton's injury was inconsequential. He had only been stunned and already showed signs of recovering. "What is it, Mr. Vail? What's happened?" came the voice of Lina Shelton breathlessly. She was framed in the doorway, dressed now and panting from her exertions in responding to his call. "Oh, it's father," she wailed, dropping to her knees at his side. "He's been hurt. Badly, too." "No, not badly, Miss Shelton. He'll be around in a minute. I'm sorry to have excited you, but when I called I feared it was worse than it is." He was washing the blood from her father's small wound as he spoke. She took the basin from his hand, spilling some of the water in her eagerness. "Here, let me have that cloth," she demanded. Eddie admired her as her deft fingers took up the task. She was as exquisite in a simple sport outfit as she had been in her bathing suit. The scientist opened his eyes after a moment. Remembrance came at once and he sat erect in the chair, staring. "Lina!" he exclaimed, grasping her hand conclusively. "You're here, thank God! I dreamed--oh, it was horrible--I dreamed they had you." He clung to her closely. "They?" she murmured inquiringly. "Yes. Two of them are loose now. It's danger for you, my dear. You must leave at once. No, no--I can't let you out of my sight until they are captured or destroyed." He rose to his feet in his agitation and shook his head to clear it. He looked pleadingly at Eddie as if expecting him to offer a solution of the difficulty. "Vail!" he exploded, then, pointing a shaking forefinger at an elaborate short-wave radio transmitter which occupied a corner of the large room. "I ask you to bear witness. That is the source of energy for these creations of mine and it's shut down. How on earth can they keep going? I ask you." "Perhaps someone else, sir," Eddie suggested doubtfully. "Have you any enemies who might be able to duplicate the impulses of that apparatus?" "Bah! Enemies, yes--with Universal--but none who could duplicate the complicated frequencies I use. My secrets are my own. I've never even put them on paper." * * * * * Eddie was examining the intricate apparatus. "You knew of the first one's escape, didn't you?" he asked. "How did it happen?" Shelton again became the enthusiastic scientist. "Here," he said, "I'll show you and you can judge for yourself." He strode to the gleaming figure of a seven-foot robot of startlingly human-like appearance. Lina let forth an exclamation of repugnance and fear. "No, Mr. Shelton," Eddie objected. "The same thing will occur again. Then there will be three." "We'll fix that, my boy." The scientist was removing cover plates from the hip joints of the mechanical man. "I'll disconnect the cables that feed the locomotors. He _can't_ walk then." Eddie was still doubtful but dared offer no further objection, especially since Lina Shelton was watching in wide-eyed silence. He examined the monster and saw that it was quite similar in outside appearance to those supplied by Universal for heavy manual labor, excepting that this one was armed as were those used for prison guards. There were the same articulated limbs and the various clamps and hooks for lifting and heavy hauling; the tentacles for grasping; machine guns front and back. Under the helical headpiece that was the antenna this robot seemed to have two eyes--a new feature--but closer examination showed these to be the twin lenses of a stereoscopic motion picture camera. This robot, then, could see. Or at least it could record what the lenses saw for its masters. "There," Shelton grunted when he had finished his tinkering, "he's paralyzed from the waist down. Let this one try and get away from us." "Guns aren't loaded, are they?" Eddie asked. "Lord, no! Never have any of them loaded. That _would_ be a fool stunt." Shelton had pulled the starting handle of a motor-generator and its rising whine accompanied his words. * * * * * The vacuum tubes of the transmitter glowed into life and the scientist manipulated the controls rapidly. Lina was watching the robot with fascinated awe. Its arms moved in obedience to the controls, tentacles waved and coiled; the humming of its internal mechanisms filled the room. The locomotion controls had no effect, as the scientist had predicted. Eddie drew a sigh of relief. "Now, Vail, watch," Shelton exulted. "I'll show you what I was doing with the first one." He closed a switch that lighted another bank of vacuum tubes behind the control panel. "You can make this one invisible?" Eddie asked incredulously. "Certainly--from the waist up. This ought to be good." "Mind telling me the principle?" "Not at all--now. I've your promise of secrecy. It's a simple matter, Vail, really. Just a problem of wave motions--light. Invisible light; the ultra-violet, you know. My robots are built of specially alloyed metals which permit great freedom of molecular vibration. The insulating materials and even the glass of the camera lenses are possessed of the same property. Get it? I merely set up a wave motion in the atoms of the material that is in synchronism with the frequency of ultra-violet light, which is invisible to the human eye. All visible colors are absorbed, or more accurately, none are reflected excepting the ultra-violet. Perfect transparency is obtained since there is neither refraction nor diffraction of the visible colors. And there you are!" Eddie stared at the upper half of the robot and saw that it was changing color as Shelton tuned the transmitted wave. Then suddenly it was gone. The entire upper portion of the mechanism had vanished; had just snuffed out like the flame of a candle. He could see down into the tops of the thing's hollow legs. Shelton laughed at him as he stretched forth his hand and hesitatingly felt for the invisible mid-section and upper body. It was there all right, unyielding and cold, that metal body. But no trace of it was visible to the eye. He drew back his fingers as if they had touched a hot stove. The thing was positively uncanny. "Dad! Turn it off--please," Lina begged. "It's getting on my nerves. Please!" Obligingly, Shelton pulled the switch. "Now you'll see," he said to Eddie, "whether the same thing happens. Watch." * * * * * Mistily at first, the outlines of the monster's torso and arms came into view, semi-transparent but clouding rapidly to opacity. Then it glinted with the barely visible violet, a solid once more, rigid and motionless. It was a lifeless mechanism, for the source of its energy had been cut off. Eddie had an almost irresistible impulse to pinch himself. Then he gasped audibly, as did Shelton, for the thing snuffed out of sight again without warning, and the hum of its many motors resumed. There came a terrific clanking as it waved arms and tentacles and violently threshed with its upper body. But the visible portion, its legs, remained rooted to the floor of the laboratory. Lucky it was that the scientist had disconnected those wires; lucky too that the machine guns were empty of ammunition. "There now--see?" Shelton's voice rose excitedly. "It's been no fault of mine. The power is off but it moves--it moves. What on earth do you suppose--" Eddie's shout interrupted him. He had seen something at the window: a face pressed against the pane and contorted with unutterable malice. Then it was gone. With the shout of warning still in his throat, Eddie bounded through the door in pursuit of the intruder. Lina's cry of recognition followed him into the twilight. "Carlos!" she had called. He saw a stocky figure slink around the corner of the laboratory and make for the underbrush beyond. In a flash he was after him. No, he thought grimly, Shelton hadn't any enemy clever enough to duplicate his transmitter! The hell he didn't! Who the devil was this fellow Carlos anyway? He tore savagely at the impeding branches as he plunged deeper and deeper into the thicket. * * * * * It was a fruitless chase and Eddie soon retraced his steps to the laboratory. Swell mess he'd gotten himself into! His car was gone: probably wrapped around a tree by this time. And here was a situation that spelled real danger, a thing with which Shelton was utterly unable to cope. As a matter of fact, he was so impractical--such a visionary cuss, after the fashion of all geniuses--that he'd never be convinced of the seriousness of the matter until it was too late. What to do? The girl was a corker, though, and game as they made 'em. Just the sort a fellow could tie to.... Lina's firm clear voice came to him through the open door of the laboratory. "Dad," she was saying, "why don't you give it up? Let's go back to New York where it is safe for you and for me. Let the things go and forget about them. What do they amount to, after all? We've plenty of money and you already have earned enough fame to last the rest of your life. Come on now--please--for me." "What do they amount to?" Shelton reiterated, his voice rising querulously. "Lina, it's the most tremendous thing I've ever done. Think for a moment of what my robots could accomplish in the next war. And there'll be a next war as sure as you're alive. Think of it! No sending of our young manhood into the bloody fields of battle; no manning of our air fleets with the cream of our youth; no bloodshed on our side whatsoever. Instead, these robots will fight the war. They'll fight other robots too, no doubt, but the property of invisibility will be an invincible weapon. It will be a war that will end war once and for all. You can't--" "Nonsense, Father," the girl returned sharply. "You've let your enthusiasm run away with your judgment. See what's happened already?--someone's figured it out before you've even perfected the thing. An enemy of our country could do the same in wartime. Maybe it's a foreign spy who has done what's been done to-day." * * * * * Eddie walked into the laboratory. "Couldn't find him," he announced briefly. "No difference," said Shelton. "He doesn't count in this. We called to you when you rushed out, but couldn't make you hear." "Who is he?" Eddie asked shortly. What he had overheard made him more than ever impatient with the older man. So clever and yet so dense, Shelton was. Lina avoided his gaze. "Only Carlos--Carlos Savarino," said Shelton, carelessly, "a Chilean, I think. He worked for me for two months during the summer and I fired him for getting fresh with Lina. Good mechanic, but dumb as an ox. Had to tell him every little detail when he was doing something in the shop. I'd have saved time if I'd done it myself." The girl looked at Eddie squarely now. She was flushing hotly. "And I horsewhipped him," she added. "Yes," Shelton laughed; "it was rich. He sneaked away like a whipped puppy, and this is the first time we've seen him since." Eddie whistled. "And you think he doesn't count in this?" he asked. "Of course not. Too dumb, I tell you. Doesn't know the first principles of science. He thinks the only wave motion is that of the ocean." Shelton chuckled over his own jest. "I wouldn't be too sure," Eddie snapped. "And I want to tell you something, Mr. Shelton. Through no fault of my own, I heard some of your conversation with Li--with your daughter, before I returned here. I was puzzled over your reasons for working so absorbedly on this thing, but now I know them and I think you're wasting your time and keeping your daughter in needless danger." "You dare talk to me like this!" Shelton roared. "I do, sir, and you'll thank me later." Eddie returned the older man's glare with one equally savage. Lina's gurgle of laughter broke the tension. "He's right, Dad, and you know it," she interposed. "Let him finish." Eddie needed no such encouragement, though it warmed his heart. And Shelton listened respectfully when he continued, "I'm into this now, sir, and I intend to see it through to the end. I'll keep your secret, too, though I doubt if it'll ever be of much value to you. Know what I think? I think this Carlos is a damn clever fellow instead of the ass you took him to be. He probably just pretended he was ignorant of science. Why shouldn't he? That way he got a liberal education from you in the very things he wanted to find out. Since you tied the can to him he's had plenty of chances to build a duplicate of your control apparatus--with the aid of some foreign government, no doubt--and now they've stolen two of your machines to complete the job. Your secret already is out and in the very hands you've tried to keep it from." * * * * * Shelton paled visibly as Eddie talked. "But--but how--" he stammered. "How should I know how they did it?" the younger man countered. "Here--let's take a look around. I'll bet they've left their trail right here in this room." He walked from one end of the laboratory to the other, peering into corners and under work benches as he passed. Shelton trailed him like a shadow, squinting through the square lenses of his spectacles. They carefully avoided the partially invisible robot, for the humming of its upper motors continued and clanking sounds occasionally issued from the unseen upper portion. The enemies of David Shelton were still at work on their hidden controls. "Here--what's this?" Eddie exclaimed suddenly, pointing out a glinting object in a dark corner of the laboratory. Shelton examined it closely, looking over his shoulder. The object he had located seemed to be a mounted and hooded lens, a highly polished glass of about two inches diameter with its mounting attached rigidly to the wall. "Never saw that before," Shelton stated with conviction. "And--why--it looks like an objective such as those used in the latest automatic television transmitters." "Just what it is," Eddie grunted. He picked up a pinch bar from a nearby tool rack and drove its end through the glass as he spoke the words. A violent wrench tore the thing loose and broke away a section of the thin plastered wall. There, in the cleverly concealed cavity behind, was revealed the mechanism of the radio "eye." Somewhere, someone bad been watching their every move. And abruptly the thrashings of the robot ceased and its upper portion again became visible. * * * * * "Well," said David Shelton. "Well! Looks as if you're right, young man. I'm astonished." His watery eyes looked sheepishly over the rims of his glasses. Lina watched their every move. She seemed to sense the seriousness of the situation far more than did her father. Then the lights went out. It had darkened to night outside and the blackness and silence in the laboratory was like that of a tomb. "They've cut the wires," Eddie whispered hoarsely. "Got any weapons here, Shelton?" "Yes. A couple of automatics. I'll get them." The scientist was no coward, anyway. His whispered words came calmly through the silence. Eddie heard him shuffle a few steps and fumble with a drawer of the desk. In a moment the cold hard butt of a pistol was thrust into his hand. It had a comforting feel. "Stay here with Lina," he commanded. "I'll go out and see if I can find them. This looks nasty to me." "No," came the girl's voice, "I'm going too." "You are not," Eddie hissed. "You'll stay here or I'll know the reason. It's dark as a pocket outside and my eyes are as good as theirs. I'll get 'em if they're around here. You hear me?" "Yes," she whispered meekly. Edward Vail, only that morning headed for rest and quiet, was now out in the night, stalking an unknown and vicious enemy. And--for what? As he asked himself the question, the smile of Lina seemed to answer him from the blackness. Cherchez la femme! He was getting dotty as he neared his thirties. Maybe it was the hard work that had affected his mind. * * * * * The black hulk of the old house loomed against the scarcely less dark sky. There was no moon, and in only one tiny portion of the heavens were the stars visible. Mighty few of them at that. The swish-swish of the surf came to his ears faintly. Or was it someone creeping along the wall of the house? He held his breath and waited. They wouldn't use the robots at night. Couldn't follow their movements in the teleview, if such an attachment had been built into their control transmitter. No, the devils would be here in person. A muttered Teutonic curse sounded close at hand. That wouldn't be Carlos. God! Were the heinies mixed up in this thing? Just like 'em to be swiping a new war machine; but hadn't they gotten enough in 1944? Without warning he was catapulted from his feet by the impact of a heavy body. He struck the ground so violently that the pistol was jarred from his hand. Disarmed before the fight had started! Then he was rolling over and over, battling desperately with an assailant who was much larger and heavier than himself. He was dazed and weakened from his initial dive to the hard ground. All rules of boxing and wrestling were forgotten. Biting, kicking, gouging, all were the same to this silent and powerful antagonist. It was catch-as-catch-can in the darkness, and mostly the other fellow could and did. He had a grip like the clamp of a robot. Trying to dig out one of his eyes? Eddie saw stars--and lashed out with all his might, his flying fists playing a tattoo on the others ribs. Short arm jabs that brought grunts of agony from his big assailant. Try to blind him, would he? Eddie somehow managed to get on top; his clutching fingers found the other's collar. Then he let loose with terrific rights and lefts that smacked home to head and face. Those outlanders don't like the good old American fist, and Eddie had room to bring them in from way back, now. The fellow had ceased struggling and Eddie's hands were getting slippery. Blood! Must be, for the stuff was warm and sticky. He rested for a moment, breathing heavily. The other was quiet beneath him--knocked cold. He staggered to his feet triumphantly; wondered how many more of them there were. * * * * * He looked around in the darkness, straining his eyes in vain to pierce its thick veil. There was a glimmer of light over there, through a window. The laboratory! The light flickered a second and vanished. A cold fear gripped him and he stumbled through the grounds blindly, finally colliding painfully with the brick wall. He felt his way toward the door, or where he thought it should be. He dared not call out for fear the others would hear. Where was that damned door? He rested again and listened. Not a sound was to be heard from within or without. He clawed his way frantically along the unsympathetic wall. It was a mile wide, that laboratory of Shelton's. Ah--at last! Weakly, he staggered within. "Lina!" he whispered, "Lina! Shelton!" There was no reply. He fumbled for a match. Funny how slowly his mind worked ... thoughts coming jerkily like a sound film running at quarter speed ... fingers shaking so he could scarcely strike a light. The flare showed the laboratory empty of human beings ... Lina gone ... that crazy robot ... quiet now, and visible ... but grinning at him ... then darkness.... * * * * * What a headache! Eddie rolled over and groaned. Astounded by the hardness of his bed and the stiffness of his joints, he roused to instant wakefulness; sat up and stared. Where the devil was he? The laboratory--Shelton's--Lina. He jumped to his feet. Dawn was breaking and its first faint radiance lighted the robot with eery shifting colors. He berated himself: he'd passed out. He dashed through the door and made a wild circuit of the grounds. Empty! No--there was his automatic, where it had fallen. Blood stains on the grass showed where the encounter had taken place last night. Must have smashed the Dutchman's nose. But he was gone. Everybody was gone. He rushed into the house and from room to room, upstairs and down. The place was deserted. This was something to think about. Not an automobile around, no neighbors, not even a telephone. When Shelton went into seclusion, he did it thoroughly. Eddie returned to the laboratory and hunched himself in the scientist's chair. Maybe he could think better here. They had Shelton and his daughter, all right. Kidnapped them. There was probably some detail of his discovery they couldn't dope out, and had decided to force him into telling them. The devils would use Lina's safety as a threat to force him into anything. Horrible, that thought. And Carlos already had made advances to her. Startled by a sharp click, he turned around. The robot was whirring into life. Fast workers, whoever Shelton's enemies were, and up early! He found the pinch bar with which he had wrecked the television apparatus and, with a few mighty blows, destroyed the antenna and headpiece of the mechanical man. They'd not pull off any devilment with this one, anyway. A wave meter on one of the benches attracted his attention and he twirled its knob. It gave strong indication at one and a half meters. The wave length of their control transmitter! If only he could find--but there it was: a direction finder. Hastily, he lighted its tubes and tuned to the frequency shown by the meter. He rotated the loop over the compass dial and carefully noted maximum and minimum signals. He had a line on the transmitter! And it must be close by, for the intensity of the carrier wave was tremendous. * * * * * Slipping the automatic into his pocket, he left the laboratory and struck out through the underbrush in the direction Carlos had taken the day before. Fighting his way through the tangled shrubbery, he kept his eyes constantly on the needle of the magnetic compass he had wrenched from the direction finder. It was tough going through the thicket, and just as bad across a swampy clearing where he was mired to the knees before he got across. Up the hill and into the woods he forged, keeping doggedly to the direction he had determined. This was rough country, less than a hundred miles from New York but uncultivated and unsettled excepting for the few summer places along the shore. He'd heard that these backwoods were infested with rum-runners and hijackers, a cutthroat gang. There was a cabin off there through the trees, almost on the line he was following. Must be what he was looking for. He advanced cautiously, creeping stealthily from tree to tree. Voices came to his ears, and the throb of a motor-generator. It was the place, all right. He crept closer, and, circling the house, saw that an almost impassable road led to it from the rear. A heavy limousine was parked there in the trees, and another car, a yellow roadster--his own. A feeling of grim satisfaction was quickly dispelled by the sound of a familiar humming. Within a foot of his ear, it seemed to be, and instinctively he ducked. Click! A powerful clamp had fastened itself to his wrist. One of Shelton's invisible robots! He struck blindly at the unseen monster and was rewarded by a shooting pain up his wrist as one of his knuckles was driven backward by the impact with the hard metal. Bands of writhing metal encompassed his body, pinning his arms to his side and lifting him bodily from the ground. There he hung, kicking and struggling in mid-air, supported by nothing he could see. He closed his eyes and felt of the thing that held him. Cold, hard metal it was--implacable and unyielding. Clank, clank. The monster was walking with long, jerky strides. The pressure against his ribs brought a gasp of agony from his lips. Each jarring step was an individual and excruciating torture. His breath was cut off by the relentless constriction of one of the tentacles which now encircled his neck. It wouldn't be long now. * * * * * Then, when everything had turned black and he had given up hope, he was dumped unceremoniously on the hard floor of the cabin. A harsh laugh greeted him as he struggled weakly to his knees. "Thought you could put one over on Al Cadorna, did you?" a voice rasped. The room spun round as he tried to regain his feet. A mist swam before his eyes. Al Cadorna! The most picturesque figure in gangland. Credited with a dozen killings and with ill-gotten wealth untold, this leader of the underworld openly boasted that the police had never gotten anything on him. And they hadn't. So it was a criminal who had laid hands on Shelton's robots, not a foreign spy. Worse and worse. He thought of what they might be able to do with these invisible mechanical things: make gunmen out of them; safe blowers; house breakers. Why, society would be at their mercy; banks defenceless; the mints, even-- "Stand up on your pins, you worm! Let's have a look at you!" The muzzle of an automatic was thrust in his abdomen, prodding insistently. Things stabilized in the room and he looked up into the cruelest face he had ever seen, and recognizable from the many pictures which had appeared in the yellow press. Eddie took in the surroundings at a glance. He was in a low-ceilinged room that was almost unfurnished. In one corner there was a replica of Shelton's robot control, teleview disc and all. Carlos had just pulled the switch and the robot was taking visible form. The man who prodded him with the automatic was Cadorna, no doubt of that. His evil leer and yellow eyes marked him at once. The other occupant of the room was a big square-built man with a patch over one eye and strips of adhesive tape across his nose--his antagonist of the night before. Must have sneaked off after he came to; it was safer to send one of the robots after the _verdammt Amerikaner_. Eddie restrained a chuckle at the thought. "Nothing to laugh at, kid!" Cadorna snarled. "You're goin' for a nice long ride pretty quick. Know that?" Eddie's head was clearing rapidly, but he pretended to sway on his feet. Lina and her father were not in sight. If only he could spar for a little time. "What's the idea?" he asked. "Haven't you guys got enough?" "That's our business. We know what we're doin', and when you butted in you just signed your own papers. Dead men don't talk, you know, kid!" * * * * * There was a door at the other side of the room. If only he could see whether Lina was in there; whether she was alive. "Tie him up, Gus!" Cadorna kept the pistol pressed into the pit of Eddie's stomach as he gave the order. "Hands and feet--and make it a good job, you wiener." Eddie shouted then. "Lina!" Resistance was useless, but it would give him some satisfaction to know she still lived even though Cadorna pulled that trigger in the next instant. No reply came from beyond that door. "So!" Cadorna grinned maliciously. "Another victim! Carlos first, then you, and now--Al Cadorna. If you're worrying about her, kid, you needn't. She'll be perfectly safe with me." Eddie's roar of rage shook the rafters. Heedless of consequences, he brought his knee up suddenly and violently. Cadorna sank to the floor with a groan, his pistol clattering harmlessly on the rough planks. In a flash Eddie retrieved it, dropping behind the prostrate form of the stricken gangster. Gus had fired and missed. Now he dared not shoot for fear of hitting his chief. Eddie's gun spat fire and the big German clapped his hands over his heart, his good eye widening in surprise. Then he reeled and pitched forward on his face. A feminine cry sounded from the adjoining room and Eddie's heart skipped a beat when he heard it. Carlos was padding across the floor, trying to get into a position where he could fire without endangering Cadorna. Eddie swung his pistol around and pulled the trigger. A miss! He fired again, but too late. Fingers of steel had gripped his wrist and the king of gangland rolled over on him, twisting the gun from his hand. Clubbed now, the pistol was raised high over that distorted, malicious face. Eddie tried to twist away from under the blow as it started its downward swing, then a thousand steam hammers hit him all at once and ... blackness.... * * * * * Something was pounding insistently at the doors of his consciousness. He must pull himself together! They'd left him for dead and he was--almost. But voices as loud and raucous as those would waken the dead. He groaned with pain when he attempted to move his head. "That for you, you rat." It was Cadorna's voice. "Try to take my woman, will you?" The pounding resolved itself into the angry barking of an automatic. Someone squealed with mortal agony. Eddie opened his eyes cautiously and saw that the room was full of people. The pungent odor of burned powder assailed his nostrils. There was Cadorna and Carlos, David Shelton and Lina. An undersized, dapper youth stood over the body of the big German, his hands outstretched before his horror-stricken face. A moment he stood thus, like a statue. Then his knees gave way beneath him and he crumpled into a grotesque heap beside the man who had been called Gus. Such was the manner of Cadorna's dealing with those who displeased him. The door to the adjoining room was open. Lina and her father had been kept in there, with the little thug as their guard. Evidently Cadorna had caught him trying to force his attentions on the girl. Good thing he'd killed him. Lina was sobbing and the sound brought increased agony to the helpless Eddie. He lay still where they had placed him, beside the table which supported the robot control apparatus. His cheek was against the floor and he saw that a little pool of blood was forming there, blood drawn by the butt of Cadorna's pistol when it contacted with his skull. He was bound hand and foot. They hadn't thought him dead, after all. Keeping him for that ride and a watery grave. Couldn't afford to leave his body around where it might be found. "What are you going to do with us?" Shelton was asking, his voice bravely defiant. Game old sport at that, he was. "Don't fret over your daughter. Al Cadorna's her protector now, and she'll be taken care of better'n she's ever been. But you--that's somethin' else again. First off, you're goin' to give Carlos the dope on these trick metals in your machines. He couldn't analyze 'em, or whatever you call it. Then you're goin' to have a nice long ride with your friend over there." "You'll go to the chair for this, Cadorna. And I'll never tell you the secret of the alloys." "Tell him, Dad," Lina was crying. "He'll let us go if you do." "The hell I will, girlie. What I said, goes. We'll make him talk first, too," Cadorna snarled. "Never!" Shelton shouted. * * * * * Lina had seen Eddie and, with a little cry, she bounded across the room. Carlos was after her like a panther. "Hands off that dame!" Cadorna yelled. "Let her cry over the boy friend if she wants to. Won't do her any good. You get busy and set one of the tin soldiers goin'. Make the old buzzard talk." Carlos muttered sullenly as he started the motor-generator. Give him a chance and he'd knife Cadorna in the back--for Lina. The girl was kneeling at Eddie's side now, examining his bleeding scalp. He opened one eye and gazed at her solemnly, pursing his lips in a warning to silence. She caught her breath and nodded in understanding. Cadorna was shouting like a madman. "Keep the damn thing so I can see it, you spig! They make me bug-house when you blink 'em off. Besides, I don't trust you." The bold Cadorna was afraid of something he couldn't see! An idea flashed across Eddie's quickening mind. But he was helpless--bound so tightly that the cords cut his wrists. One of the robots was clanking across the room. Lina looked up in momentary terror and Eddie saw her eyes stray over the table top where Carlos was working. "Want to grab the old one?" the Chilean called. "Yes. Pick him up and squeeze him till his ribs crack. He'll talk." Lina let a little moan escape her lips. Eddie was watching as the iron monster approached the scientist and flung its tentacles around his madly struggling form. Lina was fussing with him, trying to turn him over. Cadorna's back was to them, his face thrust into that of Shelton, who was fighting desperately to avoid the crushing grip of the robot. "Give him a squeeze, Carlos." * * * * * Shelton's yell brought another low moan from the girl's set lips. She was working furiously at Eddie's bonds. Lord, she had a knife! Good girl! Must have found it on the table. His hands were free and he wriggled his fingers to bring them to life. Then his feet. He was able to move. Lina whispered in his ear. "All right?" she asked anxiously. "Yes," he whispered. Somehow their lips touched and Eddie felt his heart pound at his temples. New life came to him with a rush of exaltation. Shelton was crying out in pain and Lina sprang to her feet. "You beast!" she shouted at Cadorna. "Let him go." Then she was across the room, tearing at the unyielding metal bands that pinioned her father and slowly crushed him. Cadorna laughed mirthlessly. "Tell him to give me the dope," he retorted. "Then I'll let him go--for a while." Shelton's head hung on his chest, rolling weakly from side to side. Eddie doubted whether he could speak if he wished to. The Chilean was working at the controls, increasing the tension of those terrible tentacles. Eddie raised himself to his knees, watching Cadorna narrowly. He fingered the knife Lina had used in freeing him. No, he couldn't use that. The Chilean would cry out and queer everything. He laid it on the floor, within easy reach. Cadorna was cursing now, first Shelton and then the girl. His rage was maniacal. "Another notch!" he bellowed. Eddie rose silently and clamped his fingers on the Chilean's windpipe. Lina's eyes widened as she saw. She did everything in her power to keep Cadorna's attention occupied as Eddie sunk those fingers into Carlos' throat. The Chilean's eyes popped from his head as he struggled furiously to tear away the steel-sinewed hand that had stopped off his breath. Death was staring him in the face, and he could not cry out. His strength left suddenly as the fingers dug in deeper, and Eddie shook him as he would a rat. In a surprisingly short time he had slumped to the floor, and not until his squirmings ceased did Eddie loose that awful grip. "Another notch, you spiggoty!" * * * * * Eddie bent over the controls. Lina's pleadings mingled with the curses of Cadorna. She was cajoling now--telling the brute she'd go with him gladly if only he'd free her father; promising anything, everything, in the desperate attempt to keep him from discovering that his last henchman was out of the picture. But her words served only to spur Eddie to swifter action. He twirled the knobs of the dual control. The second robot was fading from view. He'd give Cadorna a dose of the thing he really feared. He eased off a little on the other control, releasing the pressure on poor Shelton's ribs as much as he dared. The position indicator of the second robot moved slightly as Eddie started the invisible monster toward the yelling gangster. He watched the screen closely. It was quite a trick, at that, controlling these things you couldn't see. All you had to go by were these sketchy representations in the teleview; tiny flecks of light that outlined the various movable members of the robot. "Eddie!" Lina screamed suddenly. "Look out!" But he had seen Cadorna wheel around as he watched his image on the screen. At that moment a tentacle was writhing its way around his thick neck. A bullet whistled past Eddie's ear and buried itself harmlessly in the wall. Then from the blasphemous mouth of the king of gangland there came a shriek of awful fear. The tightening tentacle shut it off in a choking gurgle. Cadorna was captured at last--by a monster he could not see, a monster that struck terror to his craven soul. It was the work of but a moment to free David Shelton from the grip of the other robot. The tortured man tottered into Lina's arms for support. Eddie played with Cadorna now, releasing the grip from his throat and pinioning his arms instead. With rapid fingers he manipulated the controls until the screaming gangster was raised high in the air by the unseen arms of the robot. "Another notch, Al," he chortled. Cadorna yelled anew as the clamps tightened, "For God's sake, kid, quit it! Let me down. I'll do anything you say." "Yeah?" Eddie moved one of the rheostat knobs a trifle. The prince of racketeers was whimpering now, like a baby. The sharp snap of a rib punctured his outcries. "Another notch," said Eddie grimly. But the king of the underworld had fainted. * * * * * An hour later Eddie Vail surveyed the scene complacently. Lina had washed the blood from his head and face and bandaged his wound. Luckily, Cardorna's blow had been a glancing one. The girl was fussing over her father, now, and the scientist was on the point of resenting her attentions; swore he could take care of himself; he wasn't a baby. Carlos and his chief were trussed up like mummies, and had been snarling at each other ever since the Chilean recovered his senses, each blaming the other for their predicament. The robots stood motionless by the wall. This would be a big haul for the police. Plenty of evidence to send Cadorna to the chair now. The murder of Butch Collins, the undersized thug, had been witnessed by three of them. No, four: Carlos would squeal. He was that kind. There would be rejoicing in the underworld too, for Cadorna had many enemies. They'd be killing each other off in droves though, for the leaders of rival gangs would be battling for his place. "Guess we'll have to dump them in the limousine," he remarked to Shelton. "Drive them to the nearest town and turn them over to the authorities." "Yes. Then they can come back for the bodies of the other two." Shelton grimaced as he contemplated the sprawled figures. "What about your robots?" Eddie asked. "Why, I'll go ahead with my original plans, of course." The scientist looked surprised. "Dad!" Lina turned beseeching eyes on Eddie and his heart performed amazingly as he looked into their depths. "And why not?" asked her father dolefully. "They'll insure the peace of the world. They'll--" "Listen, Mr. Shelton," Eddie interrupted. "If you'll think a little you'll realize that they'll do no such thing. Has any new and terrible engine of destruction ever accomplished that result? No--the enemy always finds a way of combating the new weapon and of devising another still more terrible. You've discovered a marvelous thing, but its value is quite problematical." "How can they ever combat a thing they cannot see?" "Easily. Why, I could devise a teleview attachment in two days that would make them visible. Photo-electric cells are capable of detecting ultra-violet light as you well know. Radium glows under its rays. Why not coat a teleview screen with some radio-active material?" * * * * * Shelton frowned thoughtfully. "You're right. Vail," he said, after a moment of silence; "absolutely right. It was only a dream." With dragging feet he walked to the transmitter, his expression grim in the realization of failure. He started the motor-generator with a gesture of finality. "What are you going to do?" Eddie asked fearfully. "Watch me! At least I can demonstrate another phase of the basic principle I have discovered." The motors of both robots whirred. "Don't!" Cadorna wailed. "For God's sake, don't blink 'em out!" Carlos cursed his chief for a coward. Shelton was talking rapidly as he manipulated the controls. Instead of building up the wave motion to the frequency of invisible light he was reducing it. Past the other end of the spectrum and into the infra-red. The heat ray! Both monsters were changing color as he marched them through the door and into the open. But now they glowed with a visible red that rapidly intensified to the dazzling whiteness of intense heat. Cadorna babbled in superstitious terror. Then, in an instant, both mechanisms were reduced to shapeless blobs of molten metal. Lina clapped her hands gleefully. Shelton looked up with enthusiasm once more shining in his face. "Vail, my boy," he said, "we can find some use for that in industry. Let the next war take care of itself." "You bet!" Eddie was lost in contemplation of the girl--the flush of pleasure that came at her father's words; the shining eyes. "Then you'll leave the old place down here?" she asked eagerly. "Yes, as soon as we get rid of these crooks and the other robot. Vail is to spend the rest of his vacation with us, too--if he will." Would he? Eddie gazed at the girl in rapt admiration and with an inward thrill over his astounding good fortune. Her eyes dropped before the intensity in his and her flush heightened. David Shelton was wiping his glasses and peering at them with an understanding smile. Good sport, Shelton--and in some ways as wise as they made them. Eddie waited breathlessly for the girl to speak. "Oh, that's wonderful, Dad," she approved; "and I'm sure that Mr. Vail will agree." She turned those glorious eyes on Eddie once more and her inquiring smile spoke volumes. He opened his mouth to accept the invitation but the words would not come. He could only nod his head vigorously like an abashed schoolboy. Some vacation! [Illustration: Advertisement.] Phalanxes of Atlans _By F. V. W. Mason_ CONCLUSION WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE [Illustration: _Yes, there came a strange, but welcome sight._] [Sidenote: Never did an aviator ride a more amazing sky-steed than Alden on his desperate dash to the great Jarmuthian Ziggurat.] Victor Nelson and Richard Alden are forced down on a flight over an unexplored Arctic region. Returning from a hunt for food, Nelson finds his companion gone; but many footprints and blood splashes establish a clear trail to a tunnel, passing beneath a range of very high mountains on the edge of the unexplored area. In following the trail, Nelson encounters and slays an allosaurus, a terrible, carnivorous species of dinosaur surviving from the Cretaceous era. Then he presses on to presently emerge in an almost tropical valley and encounter a remnant of the long lost Atlantean race, who are ruled by a dynasty of English-speaking kings--descendants of Sir Henry Hudson, who had wandered into Atlans after being abandoned by his men. This valley in the Arctic owes its existence to the thinness of the earth's crust, which permits the interior heat to warm the surface. The Atlanteans are on the verge of war with another race, the Jarmuthians, descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel, when Nelson is transported to Heliopolis, the Atlantean Capital, for trial. All strangers must prove their value to the State or be condemned to feed the war monsters. Nelson soon discovers that Alden had been captured from the Atlanteans by the Jarmuthians. He strikes a bargain with Altorius, Emperor of Atlans. He will undertake to fight any six of the enemy on condition he and Alden will be released if successful. Altorius agrees to Nelson's suggestion and makes a proposal to the Jarmuthians. Heretofore he had been paying them an annual tribute of six maidens, as price for the safety of Altara, Sacred Virgin of Atlans, whom Jarmuth had captured in a previous war. With Nelson's bargain in mind he offers an increase of six maidens to the annual tribute, if the American fails to defeat six Jarmuthian champions. On the other hand, if Nelson wins, all tribute will cease, Altara will not be sacrificed, and Alden is to be returned unharmed. On a dueling ground between the rival armies Nelson, armed with his Winchester rifle, sallies out to battle with the enemy, who, on their side, are armed with retortii--curious weapons hurling live steam--fungus bombs, swords and lances. The tricky Jarmuthians, however, mount their men on a diplodocus, a huge dinosaur some eighty-seven feet in length. All seems lost; but by blinding the colossal creature, Nelson destroys its usefulness, and one by one kills the six Jarmuthians. Stung with rage, the enemy disregard the terms of the contest and attack with their whole army. They are, however, defeated, and the conquered Jarmuthians sullenly turn over Alden and the captive maidens; though Altara still remains in their possession. After making much of the Americans, Altorius reluctantly allows his preservers to depart for their plane--unconscious that the priestly party is planning rebellion against his authority because he did not insist on Altara's return. CHAPTER VII "That's one of the fixed retortiis I was speaking about," remarked Victor Nelson as he paused to point out a tapering brass tube which was mounted on a platform above the long staircase up which he and Alden were toiling. "It's a big brute: see how small the gunners look beside it? These steam guns are wonderful things." The younger aviator sighed. "I've had enough of miracles," he said wiping his flushed features and hitching a small pack higher on his leather-clad shoulders. "All I want to do is to lay my weary eyes on the plane again. What with these ghastly allosauri, diplodocuses and other monsters, I'm damn well fed up with this place." Nelson settled his Winchester rifle more comfortably into the hollow of his arm. "Correct. So am I. But we can't say Altorius didn't do right by our Nell. Good Lord, what a triumph he gave us!" The dark pilot's smile flashed from beneath his neat, close-clipped black mustache. "Wait till Cartier gets a peep at those diamonds he gave us." Panting, the two halted by mutual consent. "Ever see so many stairs?" grunted Nelson. "Three more flights and we'll be into the tunnel; ah, there's the opening. I only hope these blighters haven't hurt the plane." Before resuming the climb Nelson shifted his rifle, idly regarding the armored gunners just above; then suddenly he stiffened his wiry body with a sharp cry. "Look out, Dick! What the devil? Those damn fools ahead are swinging the retortii across our--" * * * * * The dark haired aviator's words were drowned out in a deafening, hissing roar that burst from the great retortii's throat, and his heart gave a great convulsive leap at the sight. Was this an accident--or treachery? An accident of course. Somehow he could not bring himself to think that Altorius would break his pledged word. Projected in a shimmering white arm the scalding death vapor shot across the staircase, its hot breath licking the faces of the startled and angry Americans, and quickly forcing them to turn and run downwards to avoid being scalded. "What the devil are these idiots trying to do?" gasped Nelson, anxiously eyeing the red-crested warriors who, peering down through the blue lenses of their helmets, watched the khaki-clad aviators but made no effort to realign their retortii. "Hero Giles'll skin those fools alive if he hears of this. Guess we'd better wait a minute: they'll soon shut off the steam." Shielding his face from the steam clouds that obliterated all view of the staircase above, Alden stood watching the billowing steam clouds in silent awe. "Terrible, aren't they, Vic?" he remarked. "I've never seen those big fellows in action. They make the portable variety look like water pistols." * * * * * As the steam barrier showed no signs of abating, an uneasy gleam crept into Nelson's dark eye, and with jaw grimly set, he cocked the Winchester and turned with the intention of lodging a complaint at the next station below; but, to his utter dismay, he beheld bronze armored figures on the next platform now training their long-muzzled steam gun across the stair. Even as he sprang back, the deadly white vapor hissed forth from the second retortii, completely barring further retreat down the stair. Like an icy flood the chill of impending doom invaded Nelson's soul. This was no accidental discharge, for with the slightest change of direction in the deflection of either retortii, death would descend upon him and his companion. Swiftly speech became impossible, as the roar of the huge retortii was deafening; the two were lost in the heart of an opaque cloud which completely blotted out the copper-hued Atlantean sky. Hot blood surged into Nelson's head while he became aware of ghostly and stealthy figures advancing through the shimmering billows of vapor. Up, up, they came, like dream men, their eyes weird and unreal. Cursing the treachery of their late host, Nelson and Alden watched dozens upon dozens of hoplites come swarming up the stairs in solid, dully-gleaming ranks. Apparently intent to take them prisoners, the foremost Atlanteans made a rush, giving the American time to fire just twice. Unable to retreat, the helpless aviators stood to meet the engulfing wave of hoplites. Nelson struck out as hard as he could at those yelling, red-bearded faces, though he knew the effort was hopeless. He was dimly conscious that Alden, not far away, also fought with the vigor of despair. With a sense of savage satisfaction, the dark haired aviator felt his fist impact solidly into a yelling, sweating face; then something struck his head and, amid a miniature sunburst, his senseless form sank limply on the damp stones of the great staircase. * * * * * After an interval, the length of which he did not know, Victor Nelson opened his eyes slowly, for his head throbbed like a savage's war drum. Uttering a stifled groan he shut the lids to still an overpowering sense of nausea which gripped him, but a moment later he made another attempt to discover in what sort of place he found himself. Gradually, his eyes became accustomed to a curious orange-red glare beyond a series of bars. Bars? The idea fixed itself in his benumbed brain; bars meant prison! Yes, those grim blank walls bore out the assumption. He lay on the damp stone floor of what must be a fairly spacious cell. Beneath his leather aviator's jacket he shuddered. "Jail, eh? What a nice place to wake up in!" A groan from behind him prompted Nelson to painfully raise his head and look about. He blinked dazedly, meanwhile trying to focus his eyes, then he heaved a faint sigh of relief as his gaze encountered the muscular, well-proportioned figure of Richard Alden, who half sat, half reclined, against one of the grey stone walls, burying a ghastly pale face between trembling hands. "You hurt?" To speak, Nelson drew a slightly deeper breath and at once became conscious of a horrible, throat-wrenching stench. Dimly, he recalled having once before encountered such an odor; when was it? Oh, yes; during the Great War when he'd stumbled into a dugout tenanted by long unburied corpses. A cold finger stabbed at his brain. Corpses. "Are you hurt, Dick?" he repeated hoarsely. * * * * * The lax figure stirred and Alden's blonde head was raised slowly. "I don't know." His voice came very thickly. "I--I'm still dizzy. What's happened?" "Damned if I know; but those bright boys have evidently heaved us into a calaboose of some kind!" Nelson, on peering about, had discovered that one end of the cell was closed only by a series of massive bronze bars; the two other walls were solid masonry; while the fourth was also solid but fitted with a small oval door of bronze. "Calaboose? The hell you say!" Alden coughed feebly. "My God, but that steam was terrible stuff. I nearly smothered before I got knocked out." Slowly, the younger aviator looked about, and suddenly his eyes widened in an expression of indescribable horror. "Look!" Alden's voice had died to a shaken whisper. "My God, Nelson, we're finished! Look at that allosaurus!" * * * * * Following the line indicated by the pilot's shaking forefinger, Nelson peered out through the series of great bars while a shudder shook his aching body. Though he had seen these fearful monsters on many occasions, yet it was never from such a position as that in which he now found himself. To his ears came a sibilant hissing like that of a thousand serpents; and, quivering in every nerve, he forced his eyes open once again, to discover that the cell which he and his companion occupied was but one of a series of cells surrounding a huge square in which were imprisoned perhaps twenty or thirty of those horrible, gargoylesque creatures which were the Atlantean dogs of war. Some thirty-four feet in length, the enormous, slate-grey monsters hopped leisurely about, their warty hides and huge luminous eyes betraying their reptilian origin. In shape the allosauri resembled loathsome and titanic kangaroos as they lumbered awkwardly to and fro, picking viciously at what appeared to be fragments of human flesh and bones. While the two prisoners crouched paralyzed with horror, one of the nightmarish creatures came hopping over and, pressing a head as big as a steam scoop against the bars, stared in with huge, pale green eyes. A long minute the ghastly creature remained looking in, clearly outlined by the orange glow from outside. * * * * * The doomed aviators found something fearfully fascinating about those narrow vertical irises set in pupils the size of dinner plates. Uttering a deep growl, the allosaurus shuffled nearer, and impatiently rubbed its huge, bullet head against the bars; then gripped the ponderous bronze bars with its ridiculously small front legs to shake the whole grille-work with a savagery that dislocated bits of plaster and made the metal reverberate. While Nelson and Alden shrank flat against the far wall, a scarlet tongue at least four feet long flicked the air but a few feet from their bloodless, sweating visages. Becoming irritated at the sturdiness of the barrier, the mountainous reptile tugged harder and hissed, filling the cell with a foul exhalation that stank like the reeks of smoldering rags. Nelson's wavering consciousness reeled, and a mad, dreadful fear, like that a dreamer suffers in the grip of nightmare, invaded his being. He felt the hairs rising on the nape of his neck. But, with a squall of rage, the monster abandoned its futile efforts and leaped away. Feigning indifference, the allosaurus picked up a half-gnawed skull with its tiny forelegs; and, while the prisoners watched, it stuffed the head into a maw twice the size of an elephant's and crunched the gruesome tidbit as easily as a boy would a walnut. Presently it shuffled off to rejoin the hideous herd in the center of the court. "Nice kind of a jail we've been thrown into. Wish I could understand what's happened." Alden buried his face in his hands. "It kind of looks as though Altorius had a change of heart." * * * * * Nelson replied nothing, but sat staring fixedly out into the horrible court. "Somehow, I don't think Altorius would do such a thing," he said at last. "Let's think back and see if we can't piece this treachery together." "Wish I had your faith in the Emperor--but I haven't." Alden's handsome face twisted itself into a wry smile. "Let's see, now," persisted Nelson, fingering a square jaw upon which sprouted a thick growth of reddish bristles. "There was a deputation of priests to see Altorius yesterday. They were clamoring for the return of Altara--the Sacred Virgin--and looked pretty mad when he put them off." "Maybe this is the private doing of the priests," admitted Alden. "Anyway, we're in one devil of a fix. There's certainly no way out of this calaboose--and those damned brutes out there look hungry." Nelson frowned, deep in thought. "Wish I could find a reasonable explanation. I really don't think it's Altorius; still, that's what you get for mixing in on the politics of these forgotten kingdoms." "But," reminded the other, "you had no choice, old lad. Remember, you mixed in to save me." From across the courtyard rang a loud, penetrating shriek of fear that made the two aviators spring to their feet and rush to the bars. Peering across the court, they discovered three naked men shrieking and clinging frantically to the bars of an exactly similar cell. "What's wrong with them?" demanded Alden as the agonized screams rang louder still. "I don't know," was Alden's breathless reply. "But what's that noise?" A curious metallic clanking sound filled the poisoned air, and for a moment Nelson remained utterly puzzled. Then, as the noise grew louder, the allosauri commenced to betray a strange restlessness. They ceased basking and feeding, and their hideous heads commenced to dart quickly this way and that. * * * * * While the terrific shrieks of the wretches across the court rang to the copper-hued sky, the two Americans remained in doubt; then all at once the chill of death gripped their hearts, as they saw the bars of that cell directly opposite slowly but surely rising! Uttering heart-rending cries, the doomed prisoners clung frantically to stay the vanishing barrier separating them from those appalling man-eaters. But, disdainful of their pitiful efforts, the bronze bars rose relentlessly with metallic rattlings and janglings from some unseen mechanism. Rooted to the floor, both Americans watched the distant grille vanish into the upper stone-work and heard the ghastly hissing as the allosauri herd commenced to move forward. Sick and shaken, Nelson beheld one of the doomed men cling in desperation to the bars; he was lifted clear of the floor and borne towards the ceiling, meanwhile venting his terror with such screams as could otherwise have risen only from an inquisitor's torture chamber. The tragedy was swiftly completed. Half a dozen of the nearest allosauri, taller than any giraffes, suddenly sprang forward, their long, naked tails rising as their gait increased. Snarling horribly, the vast slate-colored beasts plunged into the cell, terminating shrieks of mortal terror. Backs broader than bus tops squirmed and tugged, then one of the loathsome monsters reappeared carrying in its dripping jaws a mangled, yet struggling victim much as a cat carries a mouse. In a trice the other allosauri came rushing eagerly up, seeking to snatch the prey from the first monster. Nelson stiffened. "Great God! And that's what'll happen to us!" * * * * * Weakened by his head wound, and blind with nausea, he stumbled to the rear of the cell to collapse upon a pile of foul straw, littered with equipment which the superstitious captors must have condemned together with the owners. Nelson sank upon them, then stiffened, for his outflung hand had encountered a hard, familiar outline. It was a .45 automatic pistol. A moment's furious search revealed that the captors had missed or not understood the use of the weapon in Alden's leather flying coat. "God, but we're lucky," Nelson panted. "The Atlanteans never saw this pistol of yours. They're only used to my rifle." Hope lit Alden's features, then faded. "But what good is a .45 against brutes like those? Might at well have a pop gun!" "Still we're lucky," grunted Nelson, delighted to find the magazine yet filled. "Can't tell what's ahead. Yes, we're the luckiest--" He broke off in quick alarm. From overhead had come a premonitory clang! Somewhere a tackle whined and, with a sense of suffocation, both men realised that now the bars of _their_ prison were beginning to creep up into a long slit in the stone ceiling! Cold fingers of fear clutched Nelson's heart as the terrible allosauri, their jaws yet dripping redly, wheeled about at the familiar sound--to stand listening. Up and up crept the ponderous grille, while the allosauri commenced to shuffle forward, fixing on their next victims enormous, unblinking green eyes. * * * * * While the whole loathsome cell spun about, Victor Nelson forced stiff fingers to throw off the safety catch as the nearest allosaurus opened its cavernous mouth in anticipation, displaying an array of curved teeth, as long and sharp as bayonets. Standing some fifteen feet high at the shoulder the horrible creature's body was; it all but blotted out the light. The bars rose inexorably. Now they were waist high.... Now above Nelson's head.... In a moment would come the rush. Richard Alden stood up straight and squared his shoulders. "Good-by, Vic," he said, in clear, unafraid tones. "I don't imagine that .45 will even tickle those ghastly brutes." Nelson nodded. "All over but the cheering," he replied with that strange, macabre humor which often comes to solace men about to die. "See you in church." There was an equally gallant lightness to Alden's reply. The dark haired pilot, with a curious, detached sense of unreality, stepped into the middle of the room, the automatic in his hand seeming no more potent than a water pistol, for a ponderous, lambent eyed monster was now hopping forward. While minute particles of dust and dirt rained down from the disappearing barrier, the foremost allosaurus opened its enormous jaws, uttered an eery scream and charged straight at the unbarred cell. Drawing a deep breath, Nelson raised the .45, sighted, and, remembering his former experience, fired at the enormous right eye. As in a dream, he felt the recoil. The monster neither slowed nor swerved in the least, though its great, saucer-like eye disintegrated horribly. Immediately Nelson swiftly sighted at the other eye and fired, just as the allosaurus' shadow filled the threshold. _Crack!_ A swirl of bitter smoke stung the aviator's staring eyes. He'd hit; he knew it! * * * * * Cyclopean moments followed as the blinded monster dashed forward, missed the circular door, and, butting his head against the stone wall to the left, fell completely stunned, effectively blocking the doorway with its huge body. One enormous hind leg, fully ten feet long, and equipped with three razor-like claws, projected into the cell and lashed aimlessly back and forth, forcing the two prisoners to dodge wildly. There ensued that indescribable kind of a moment when men go mad. Outside the cell the ravenous herd pounced upon their fallen mate and with hideous grunts and snarls promptly commenced to tear it apart. The shaken prisoners realized that the rending jaws would before long undoubtedly remove the temporary obstacle; but meanwhile the hideous hissing and the fetid stench of the allosauri breath made the cell a mad-house. Gradually, the gigantic carcass at the door commenced to quiver and roll violently under the ferocious tugs of the eager feasters. A gap of light appeared over the huge haunches, and, all at once, another of those terrible heads slipped over the carcass and into the cell. Again the .45 thundered, lighting the darkened cell with a brief orange flame. A noise like the furious trumpeting of a dozen elephants nearly blew Nelson flat as the wounded monster drew back its head, but the respite promised to be short, for the other reptiles only re-doubled their horrid, cannibalistic rending of the carcass. When the barrier was removed there would be a general rush which the shaken aviators could not hope to stay. * * * * * Suddenly, Alden uttered a low shout and pointed to the small, oval door which had, up to this point, remained securely bolted and shut. It was swinging gradually open, rimmed with a strong reddish light. Wide-eyed, and with black hair streaming lank over his forehead, Nelson, in the act of reloading, swung about to meet this new menace. Hell! What point was there in prolonging the pitiful struggle? What was happening? Slowly, the door swung back, and a rosy glow lit the opening, a glow that became as strong as the gleam of a spotlight. Then, slowly, a glittering, green-crested helmet of highly polished bronze appeared, and, under it, Hero Giles' familiar features, now distorted by a terrible fear. The blue eyes seemed enormous. "Quickly!" he called. "Quick or ye are lost!" Unbelieving of the reprieve, both the aviators stared an instant at that martial figure clad in brazen armor liberally studded with enormous diamonds and emeralds, then leaped forward with the speed of desperation, for from behind came a fierce squalling from the allosauri. As he darted towards the door Nelson had a glimpse of the carcass blocking the door commencing to slip sidewise. Alden was already out and Nelson sped through the door barely in time to escape the razor-sharp talons of the foremost allosaurus as it scrambled into the deserted cell with a resounding bellow of disappointed fury. CHAPTER VIII As the door clanged shut, drowning out the allosauri's furious screams, both aviators, shaken to the depths of their beings, could do nothing but stare about them in surprise. Completely surrounding and protecting the exit stood a double rank of hoplites in bronze armor. Like unreal automata, they remained utterly motionless, fixed in the various postures of an ancient Macedonian phalanx, their broad backs gleaming dully in the light of the neon flares. As in a dream, Nelson recognized on top of each spearsman's casque the graceful Atlantean military crest--a metal dolphin from the back of which sprouted a series of bright blue feathers, arranged like a dorsal fin. "Thank Poseidon, ye still live!" cried Hero Giles, gripping their hands eagerly. "I had fear for ye, oh my friends." Nelson grinned. "You cut the rescue act pretty fine, but of course we're damned grateful. And now,"--eagerly seizing the Hero's splendidly muscled arm--"in God's name tell us what's happened. Why we were arrested and--nearly made into allosaurus fodder?" Hero Giles turned from snapping an order to a subaltern who was peering down a great, shadowy hallway with a distinctly uneasy manner. "Much," he said. "Scarcely had ye two departed from Heliopolis than the priests, mad with rage over Altara's continued captivity, dared to seize the person of His Splendor and proclaim a regency. Herakles, the arch-priest is--" * * * * * From far down the gloomy, vaulted corridor came a faint sound, rather like the distant cheering of a crowd. The hoplites, standing about, turned their helmeted heads and stared uneasily, their brazen armor glowing dully with each movement. "I'll tell ye more later, but now--"--Hero Giles' voice took on a ringing quality like the clash of steel--"there is work to be done. To rescue ye, oh Hero Nelson, I slew the guards at the lower gate, for this prison lies in the hands of a caitiff rogue, Hero Edmund, one who clings to the priestly party. We had best be off lest we be trapped and slaughtered like rats in a pit." Very distinctly to the ears of the aviator now came the dull clash of equipment and the tread of feet. "Forward! We must hasten to reach the podokos waiting below," cried Hero Giles, settling his ponderous helmet more squarely on his leonine head. At once the escort of fifteen-odd hoplites commenced to move down the corridor to the left, their hands tightly gripping the butts of their retortii pistols. At their head ran Hero Giles, and by his side Alden and Victor Nelson, who gripped his .45 vowing never again to return to that ghastly cell. A long ringing cry from the rear brought home the dread realization that the enemy had appeared. Looking back, Nelson could see the far end of the great corridor filled with menacing figures. Then his heart leaped like a deer in a thicket, for _from ahead_ sounded the clash of weapons! The rescue party's retreat was cut off! * * * * * Hero Giles acted with the speed of a veteran accustomed to emergencies. "Forward!" he roared, making the bare walls reverberate and rumble with his voice. "_Halor vàn! Ula Storr!_"[1] [Footnote 1: Make ready for your retortii.] As by magic, there appeared before the retreating force a double rank of blue-crested hoplites who debouched from a side passage into the hall and clawed desperately for fungus bombs and retortii. Evidently they had not expected to come upon the invaders so abruptly. "_Storr!_" Like a brazen trumpet's call, the voice of Hero Giles rang out the order to fire--which was instantly drowned out in the furious hissing of the retortii of his followers. Ever watchful, Nelson fired at a gigantic officer who, avoiding the first steam jets, flung back his arms to hurl one of the deadly fungus bombs among the rescuers. Shattering the bronze helmet, the American's bullet struck the Atlantean squarely between the eyes, but nevertheless the stricken officer's grenade rolled forward and burst among the hindermost of Hero Giles' followers. Instantly, the deadly green mold flung itself upon the nearest hoplites and in a moment they crashed to the smooth granite floor, the yellowish growths already sprouting from nose, mouth and ears. In the corridor reigned chaos, for Hero Giles' followers were now turning the full fury of their retortii upon the rank of men barring further flight. With dreadful ease, the scalding steam struck dead the opposing warriors, stripping the flesh from their bones as easily as a boy peels a banana. Amid the swirling white clouds, Nelson had ghastly visions of yellow skulls, of steaming accoutrement, of limp heaps of disintegrating bodies; then silence fell, and, before he quite realized it, he, together with Alden and three hoplites who had survived the disastrous fungus grenade, were bounding along after Hero Giles' glittering figure as he led the way down one passage after another. * * * * * Louder than ever rang the fierce cry from the rear. Behind him Nelson could see dozens upon dozens of yelling pursuers, and knew that if he were to live he must run as never before. Into a succession of spacious rooms dashed the fugitives; on through deserted armories where hundreds of bronze helmets dangled in orderly rows; and across silent barrack halls. Closer and closer sounded the pursuing feet, spurring the runners to an even more headlong gait. All at once a door loomed to the right; into this darted Hero Giles and after him pounded the two Americans and three hoplites. In an instant the six men set their shoulder to the ponderous bronze door and swung it to, just as the hiss of a retortii on the other side rose above the mad, blood-hungry clamor of the momentarily baffled rebels. Gasping and sweat-bathed, the fugitives paused only an instant. "We've gained a short passage," gasped the Atlantean wrenching off his helmet and breast plate. The veins stood out in great blue cords on his forehead, for the weight of the armor could not have been inconsiderable. "Below wait our podokos." Nelson stripped off his leather coat, following the example of the hoplites, who swiftly divested themselves of such cumbersome equipment as could readily be removed. Then, while the shouts of the thwarted pursuers swelled like a demonic chorus, and while feathers of steam crept under the great door, Hero Giles spun about and, with his short yellow hair gleaming bright, led on down another series of passages. * * * * * All at once the fugitives, now reduced by exhaustion to five, found themselves on a balcony overlooking the great valley of Atlans. Before them opened an enormous staircase and down this they dashed at top speed, infinitely relieved to be once more in the open air. Running like hunted stags, the fugitives had descended but a third of the great staircase, when, from behind, came a sudden, menacing cry that warned Nelson that the pursuers had, after going a longer way around, come once more in sight. "Ah! Poseidon blast the traitorous Edmund and his varlets! See?" panted Hero Giles pointing to a huge arch from beneath which was issuing a glittering column of shouting, swift running warriors at whose head dashed a splendidly-proportioned figure that must be Hero Edmund. With the speed of the hunted, Hero Giles bounded forward, taking three and four steps at a stride, his jade green cloak snapping out behind. Down, ever downwards over the endless flight of stairs the aviators followed him until, spent and panting, the hard pressed five plunged down a final circular staircase and so gained a courtyard where waited a detachment of armored lancers whose yellow plumes and pennons shone bright in the glare of the flame suns. Staring anxiously upwards, the troopers nevertheless stood to attention in an orderly rank beside those curious Atlantean mounts called podokos. During all his sojourn in Atlans, Nelson had never become used to the hideous and awe-inspiring podokos which closely resembled the allosauri but were only eighteen feet long. Like the other monsters, they had tremendously developed hind legs which promised the speed now so vital for escape and safety. Ready in the tooth-studded jaws of each podoko was fitted a bronze bit together with a bridle and reins; and cinched up on each creature's back was one of those curious Atlantean saddles, which was built up at the cantle to overcome the downward slope of the podokos' spines. Need for vital haste was but too obvious and, as he drew near, Hero Giles gasped the command to be off. "Quick," he shouted, his scarred visage flushed and sweat-bathed. "Saddles! Speed! Speed! Cling fast as your beasts arise!" * * * * * All five literally hurled themselves into gorgeously caparisoned saddles. Instantly, the urging squatting podokos leaped to their feet. It was the work of a moment for Nelson to wrench his reptile around, for already Alden and the Atlantean cavalrymen were speeding across the wide paved court, their lance pennons fluttering bravely in the orange-hued glare. At top speed the rescuers dashed for a great, oval gateway while the podokos increased their gait; like aero-planes gathering speed, the faster the weird creatures traveled, the higher arose their tails. Then, following the frightened, backward glances of the hard-riding, red-haired lancers, Nelson suddenly discovered a new and terrible cause for this headlong flight, for, issuing from an unbarred gateway, came perhaps a dozen of _the terrible and enormous allosauri_, which, spying the fleeing cavalry, instantly gave chase. With a sense of despair, the aviators heard the ferocious bellows booming from behind and watched the appallingly swift progress of those uncouth monsters as, leaping high into the air, the allosauri covered between fifty and sixty feet at a single bound. "They'll get you," cried an inner voice in Nelson's being. "They'll catch you sure." But the small and lithe podokos, sensing death leaping up from the rear, stretched out their slender, snake-like heads, stood on tiptoe, and, pressing their small forelegs tight against their chests, commenced to run far faster than any horse could gallop. Nevertheless, the allosauri came bounding up like colossal kangaroos, uttering weird, screaming roars that brought a chill of imminent death to the fugitives. Casting a quick glance over his shoulder, Nelson's blood froze to find an allosaurus not more than seventy yards behind, and making terrible exertions to close that slender gap! Nearer and nearer coursed the incredible monster, body rocking in its terrific stride, dreadful jaws wide apart--jaws that could, without an effort, cut a horse in half. * * * * * A fear such as he had never known racked Nelson's consciousness as he found he was hindermost of the cavalcade, which was strung out like a field of racers. The other riders crouched low in their saddles like jockeys, lances held straight out before them, and furiously goaded their strange mounts with curious hooks. Nelson was vastly relieved to get a glimpse of Alden far in the lead, almost beside the Atlantean Prince. His podoko was evidently better than the average. Faster and faster pursuers and pursued raced across level meadows, over straight, white roads and rolling grain fields. Wind whistled madly in Nelson's ears, filled his eyes with tears, and made his short, dark hair snap, but two huge allosauri were now not twenty yards behind and _gaining with appalling speed!_ On the verge of madness, Nelson hammered his heels into the podoko's scaly side and wished he dared let go the saddle horn to draw his pistol, but to loose his grip was to risk falling off. Closer and closer! Two enormous nightmarish heads were actually snapping at the fleeing podoko's tail. Then fear must have inspired the reptile Nelson bestrode, for it put on a sudden desperate burst of speed which carried it past the next two lancers. In passing he glimpsed the doomed wretches, pale-faced and horrified, as they frantically goaded their failing podokos. A moment later, piercing screams from just behind assailed Nelson's ears, but when he looked to the rear once more it was to find that a wide gap had opened between him and the great monsters behind. Evidently, the heavy-built allosauri were unable to long maintain the terrific pace set by the smaller and more agile podokos whose maximum speed Nelson judged to be well over sixty miles an hour. * * * * * The pilot's eyes narrowed on beholding, in clear relief and not far away, the majestic, whitish outline of mighty Heliopolis, whose lofty towers, graceful domes and frowning citadels shone pink under the leaping, blinding glare on Mount Pelion. "We certainly picked a nice time to drop in on this God-forsaken country," grunted Alden as the walls of Heliopolis loomed near. "We seem to have crashed into the busiest days they've had in centuries. How many shots you got?" Nelson, swaying to the steady trot of his podoko, hesitated. "Only five. Damned if I know what's going to happen next. I suppose it all depends on Hero Giles. Looks as though the nobles were bent on restoring Altorius--if he's not dead by now." Alden tugged powerfully at the strange bridle which controlled his beast. "The priests wouldn't dare kill him, but it surely looks like their rebellion has gained a lot of headway." A moment Alden's clear, blue eyes swept the towering battlements, gorgeously-sculptured temples and curious stepped pyramids, which now loomed near at hand and cast their rugged outlines sharp against the copper-colored heavens. "Maybe there's some way we can work this revolution trouble to help us," suggested Nelson, without enthusiasm. "If we could play off one crowd against the other--" His remarks were cut short as the foremost lancers slowed before an enormous bronze gate looming ahead. On the vast main panel was a beautifully-wrought dolphin curling about a trident--symbol of the imperial power now so sorely tried. Beyond that gate, breathlessly mused Nelson, lay Heliopolis and an unknown fate. CHAPTER IX It would have taken no trained eye to observe that something very unusual had happened in Atlans. Some of Heliopolis' many wide streets were quite deserted save for several small, bright-red cat-like reptiles that the Atlanteans sheltered as pets, but in other thoroughfares large throngs of people milled uneasily about, while listening to the impassioned harangue of black-robed priests. Everywhere business was at a standstill, shops were closed and markets tenantless. Riding at an easy hopping gallop, the aviators urged their green, scaly mounts to the side of Hero Giles, for here and there some wandering citizens, spying the Americans, would yell shrill curses and shake their fists. Reining in, Nelson demanded to know the reason for this unaccountable hostility. "'Tis the work of our gentle and holy priests," explained Hero Giles with a hard laugh. "They have told the populace ye are magicians seeking to set other gods above Poseidon." "Nonsense," rapped the American, looking about uneasily. "We've never given two thin damns about anything except getting back to our plane." "So I know," was the Atlantean's preoccupied reply; "but this spawn of Herakles' temples speak loud, and the loutish populace hearkens to their lies!" "But what the devil is all this revolt about?" broke in Alden. "Why were we arrested? You started to tell us at the prison." * * * * * Hero Giles frowned as he pulled his podoko into a gracefully carved gateway of green marble. "There's but little to add, for 'tis all very simple. The priests have laid impious hands on His Splendor, Altorius, and imprisoned him in the great temple of Poseidon. We nobles have defied the arch-priest, for the dog-conceived Jereboam already marshals his forces for a fresh attack, knowing that Atlans is sore beset by internal strife. Have patience for now we go to the council chamber, where ye shall hear everything." To say that the newcomers found the council of nobles in a furore would be to put it mildly. Their angry voices carried far down the beautifully ornamented corridors of the Imperial Palace, which was used as headquarters. "Sounds like a dog-fight going on in there," muttered Alden anxiously. "Don't like the sound of it a bit. I hope they feel kindly towards us." Nelson, swinging along with his ragged shirt fluttering like a scarecrow's, nodded. "Yes, so do I. But I guess they need our help or Hero Giles wouldn't have risked his life to save us." Conscious of the value of appearances, the dark-haired aviator unconsciously straightened his frayed black tie, buttoned the sleeves of his khaki flannel shirt and otherwise made pathetic attempts at improving his appearance as the clamor of wrangling voices grew loud down the corridor. His wide shoulders swinging to his stride, Hero Giles flung open a door, beautifully wrought with leaping podokos, and halted on the threshold. "Death!" rumbled a voice from inside. "I say death to the Wanderers! Let us make our peace with the priests, lest they slay His Splendor forthwith." "And that's what I call a nice friendly greeting," was Alden's murmured comment. "Better get your gat handy, Vic. I'll bet they've got a reception committee of retortii men behind the door." * * * * * There was no time for Nelson to reply because now the threshold was at hand. Inside, seated at a table, he had an impression of perhaps ten or fifteen scarred and angry-looking veteran nobles whose green cloaks and bejeweled armor revealed their high rank. In mid-dispute they halted, eyeing the three figures in the doorway with curiously conflicting expressions. Some smiled a relieved welcome, some stared in surprise, but not a few greeted the Americans with lowering brows and angry, threatening eyes. "Harken," Hero Giles greeted them. "By Poseidon's grace the Wanderers were saved from a vile death. Rise Heroes, and bid them welcome!" "Ah, the Wanderers!" In an instant Hero John was wringing Nelson's hand. "Oh blessed hour! I had feared for ye both. Welcome, Hero Alden!" A faint flush crept over the young man's wan and trouble-lined face. "'Tis well ye've come," he whispered. "The council was prepared to change their intent towards ye." A grizzled, one-eyed prince arose, and leveling an accusing forefinger at Nelson shouted, "'Tis he hath caused the rebellion. Slay him!" "Nay!" thundered the Hero Giles, "and forget not, Hero Paul--_I_ am senior Prince of Atlans!" * * * * * In the great white marble council chamber silence fell, while from wonderfully carved ivory and gold chairs the harassed, yellow-bearded princes regarded the two uneasy Americans. "Hearken, Hero Giles!" rasped another dark-browed officer in a plain, much-dented red breast plate. "I side with Paul. Away with them, I say! Time is too precious. Do not the dark hordes of Jereboam beat back our frontiers?" Hero Giles glowered and sat bolt upright in his chair--a strange disordered figure among his gorgeously robed and armored peers. "Thou wert ever a hothead! I prithee pause a moment! Remember how the dark-haired Wanderer once aided our imprisoned Emperor, whom Poseidon protect! Perchance, Hero Nelson and his friend once more can aid us in this, our hour of need." A chorus of variously opined voices broke out, while Nelson with an eye to possible violence stood ready. "Silence! Sirrah!" The fierce old veteran banged a powerful fist on a golden dolphin head forming his chair arm. "This idle wrangling accomplishes naught, and a thousand weighty matters await our attention. Is it true the phalanxes at Tricca have risen for the priests?" * * * * * [Illustration: _Map of Jarmuth and Atlans_] Before Hero Giles could reply, a stalwart guard at the door flung it open to admit a dust and sweat-bathed courier who, darting forward, flung himself at Hero Giles' no less dusty feet. While the yellow-haired Prince started back muttering in amazement, the runner raised a shaking hand. "Woe, woe to Atlans!" he panted. "Jarmuthian retortii men have crossed the boiling river. Cierum is fallen! Its garrison is drenched in clouds of fungus gas. But a handful escaped!" "Speak on: is that all?" A terribly intent expression crept over the aquiline faces around the council table. "Nay, spare thy servant!" begged the green kilted courier, raising sweaty, imploring hands. "I--I dare not--" "Speak!" snarled Hero Giles, his blue eyes terribly lit. "Speak!--else thy carcass shall be flung to the pteranodons." Wild-eyed, the fellow blinked fearfully about. The grim-lipped nobles edged closer. Nelson, realizing all that lay at stake, watched intently, conscious that Alden was now by his side. "I--I, Her Sacred Holiness, Altara--." The messenger's red face twitched and he choked as in terror. "Altara!" The name reechoed weirdly from a dozen dry throats, and Nelson saw the skin suddenly pale and tighten over Hero John's face. "What of the divine Altara, fool?" he thundered in a dreadful, shaken monotone. "Have those foul swine of Jarmuth dared--?" "Forgive, oh Hero!" cried the groveling courier, his long red hair sweeping the marble floor. "The dog-sired Jereboam hath made proclamation in Jezreel that the Sacred Virgin is doomed to perish on the altar of Beelzebub, their demon god, in two days' time!" "What?" The great marble-walled chamber was shaken by an unearthly outcry as horror and rage struggled for mastery in the circle of tense faces surrounding the momentarily forgotten aviators. Bedlam broke loose, while Hero Giles sat as though stunned, staring on the shivering runner at his feet. Nelson, very much on the alert, could see that the announcement of Altara's impending death had produced nothing short of a cataclysm in the plans of the council. * * * * * Like men paralyzed by electric shocks, the yellow bearded veterans and nobles sat stupefied, frozen in their last gesture. Then, in the midst of their silent despair, came the sound of a curious, high-pitched horn that had in its note something of the eery wail of a fire siren. The effect was magical, for the nobles sprang up, hands on sword hilts and eyes searching the corridor. "The priests!" gasped a short, broad-shouldered noble at Altorius' left. "By Poseidon! 'Tis the fanfare of the Herakles himself." Then indeed did the council glower, for, as Nelson soon learned, Herakles was the moving spirit and evil genius of that priestly party which had dared to imprison the Emperor. Again the horn wailed its warning of the arch-priest's approach, whereat a stalwart hoplite in green painted armor clanked in, saluted stiffly and waited for Hero Giles' instructions. "Bid the old man enter," directed the Prince at last. "Tell the graybeard he has naught to fear if he comes alone. Otherwise, bid him return to his kennel in the temples." A moment after the hoplite had vanished, there appeared in the doorway a tall, emaciated old man on whose silvery head was set a curious golden mitre ending in the shape of a wondrously bejewelled trident. The curious Americans noted that the arch-priest's robes were as black as his evilly glittering eyes, and were embroidered with curious cabalistic symbols done in silver thread. In his withered hand Herakles carried a ceremonial trident--the mark of the Head Priest of Poseidon. As though wary of advancing, the arch priest paused in the doorway, not three feet from where Nelson stood poised for action. * * * * * All at once the gaunt figure in black raised thin hands to the dome far overhead and cried in high-pitched prophetic tones: "Woe to Atlans! When perishes Altara, virgin of Poseidon the God-head, then shall a darkness fall on Atlans! Her cities shall be cast down, there will be a weeping and wailing in the land, for Beelzebub and his followers shall prevail! Woe to Atlans and woe to ye all, blasphemous nobles!" Gripped by a superstitious awe, the generals and nobles fell into an uneasy silence, fearfully lowering their eyes and then glancing askance at the plain khaki clad figures standing alert in their corner. Nelson, defiantly meeting their eyes, beheld Hero Giles staring fixedly before him, his powerful shoulders bowed as though bearing an overwhelming burden. Deeper grew the silence of disaster while the American furiously searched his mind for some means of thwarting the death in store for him and his companion. By chance, a word of Hero Giles recurred, the "pteranodons." What in the devil was a pteranodon? He turned sidewise to Alden who stood, hands in the pocket of his leather jacket, also thinking deeply. "Dick," he whispered. "You studied paleontology at college. Do you remember what a pteranodon was?" "A what?" The younger aviator seemed to make a definite effort to return to the present. "A pteranodon? I'm not sure, Vic, but I think it was a kind of flying reptile related to the pterodactyl group." * * * * * He could go on no further, for Herakles, the arch-priest, raised his snowy head suddenly, his eyes blazing. "To save Atlans in her hour of trial, we demand that ye deliver to us the Wanderers. They shall die as an offering to Ares, God of War. Perchance he will preserve us." The arch-priest's deep-set and glittering eyes swept with venomous hatred the two calm-featured aviators, who looked very plain and unromantic in their flying jackets and khaki serge. "We, familiars of the Gods, herewith demand that the blasphemers perish on the War God's altar! Else shall ye all die unbeloved of the Gods!" "And we do your bidding, will ye give us back His Splendor?" demanded Hero Giles. "Nay--we priests do not bargain like hucksters." Risking all, Nelson muttered a swift aside to Alden. "How big were those pteranodons?" "Some species had a wing spread of twenty-five feet." The muscular pilot's mouth closed into a firm, colorless line as he nodded and glanced at the vindictive old man who was by now white with fury. Up sprang a good three-quarters of the nobles present and turned on the grim figure at the head of the board. "Surrender the Wanderers!" they shouted. "We demand it!" * * * * * In another instant the death sentence would have been forced on Hero Giles, but Victor Nelson leaped forward, pistol menacing the raging gray-bearded priest. "Listen, all of you!" he shouted in deep tones that were strangely authoritative. "Beware, foolish Princes, how you threaten us. Great is our knowledge and power: you've seen that already. Even now, the other Wanderer and I can save or ruin Atlans, as we wish! Have ye forgotten the battle by Lake Copias?" The Princes, furious at the American's defiance, half rose, hand on sword hilt, but sank back at a swift, menacing gesture from Nelson's pistol. "What sayest thou, mad fellow?" screeched the arch-priest, his black eyes bright as knife points. "Save Atlans--?" Fierce questioning was in his sombre, sunken eyes. "I said," repeated Nelson, "that, if we choose, we can yet save your Altara and the Emperor from death." "Impossible! He is mad!" shouted Paul, the one-eyed Hero. "Not the Gods themselves could rescue Altara from the claws of the demon Beelzebub!" The nearest nobles flung themselves back in their chairs and snarled threats of all kinds as they gripped their sword hilts. Sensing an inescapable climax, the khaki-clad American raised his pistol, covering Hero Paul, the speaker. "Silence!" he rasped. "You're a thick-headed idiot not to see the truth. Can this priest save Altara? No! You know damned well he can't! And yet you'd have us killed." "Now, Herakles," he swung on the priest, "about this Altara matter--if you'll restore Altorius unharmed, guarantee our safety, and punish those liars who condemned us to death, the other Wanderer and I will undertake to not only prevent the sacrifice of Altara, but to bring the Princess back as well!" * * * * * To all this Alden listened with increasing and indescribable dismay, his blue eyes round as marbles. "My God!" he whispered in an undertone. "What in the devil is Vic doing? _Undertake_ is _right_, the crazy fool!" "How will ye accomplish this mad boast?" demanded the arch-priest in deep suspicion. "Know ye that the Sacred Virgin lies captive in the dungeons of the great temple of Beelzebub? Know ye that this temple is in the center of Jezreel, capitol of Jarmuth?" "I had some idea that was the case." "Know ye," continued, the graybeard priest, "that Altara is ever guarded by two thousand picked priests and warriors? Know ye, moreover, that this vile sacrifice will be made but two days hence?" The aviator's lean, dark head inclined with a serenity he far from felt. At this point the scarred veteran officer who had spoken before broke in, his face menacing. "Believe not this liar, oh Hero Giles! He speaks with a tongue made bold by fear. He promises that which he cannot accomplish!" Had Victor Nelson had time to reflect upon the weirdness of the plan he had evolved, he would probably have silently admitted that his grizzled accuser was more than a little justified, but as it was he smiled serenely. From all sides rose a threatening shout. "Let the blasphemers be sacrificed. Ares will protect us!" * * * * * His yellow brows knit, Hero Giles wavered, but as he hesitated there ran through a great circular window a distant yet menacing shout. "Down with Altorius, the Unlucky! Down with the sons of Hudson! Give back to the ancient Gods their Sacred Virgin. Hail to Ares! Death to the Wanderers! Death! Death!" Drowning out these ominous cries there came from below the window the brazen clang of trumpets and the clank of many armored men hurrying forward. Presently the mob's outcry grew fainter, but still the cries of "Death" could be heard. It was a tense moment. Would Hero Giles remain friendly? With poignant anxiety, Nelson watched that dishevelled martial head sink forward in perplexity. "Hero Giles," he warned, in a low voice. "You'd better trust us. You're risking nothing." Slowly, the fierce blue eyes of the veteran rose, and, meeting the level gray ones of the aviator, lingered there as though asking a question. Suddenly reaching a determination, he rose to his feet and addressed the triumphantly grinning arch-priest, who tightly clutched his trident wand with thin, blue-veined fingers. "Hearken, black crow of a priest, who has dared lay foul hands on His Splendor, the Emperor. This is my reply: show me how ye will rescue Altara; otherwise begone! My hand itches for the sword." * * * * * A deep silence fell while Herakles glowered helplessly, then shrewdly avoided the trap. "This is blasphemy!" he croaked and raised a quivering forefinger in solemn warning. "Woe to thee, Hero Giles. Woe to the people! Fear the wrath of the Gods! "Jeer not, ye nobles!" Herakles stormed on. "Be not deceived by lies! I bid thee deliver these magicians to Ares, God of War!" A nasty moment; Nelson's heart drummed as he gazed down at the row of uneasy, war-like faces, but Hero Giles proved the strength of his heritage. Back went his patrician head; he drew himself up to full height and stared coldly upon the black robed priest, who, nothing daunted, gave back look for look. "Nay! We keep them: they will bear out their promise. I give ye good day, oh Holiness!" Quivering with rage Herakles raised his withered hand in anathema. "Then perish, blind spawn of Hudson! Verily shall ye all die under the torture. Woe! Woe! Woe!" Then, amid a strained silence, pregnant of distrust and disaster, the old man wheeled and stalked out. As he watched the departure, color drained from the Atlantean prince's haggard features. "Ah," he observed bitterly, "ever have these black crows feasted on our land, and ever as birds of ill omen." He turned and, with a weary sigh, surveyed the group of loyal, but anxious souls. "I thank ye. Will ye still do my bidding and help to save our sovereign lord?" Out flashed the swords of a dozen-odd nobles as they raised the hoarse, ringing cry of "Altorius! Altorius! Supreme!" * * * * * A little later Nelson, before a very mistrustful gathering composed of Hero Giles, Hero John and two or three other veterans, traced the barest outline of his plan. "You understand? I'm to be taken to the border as a prisoner; then, in plain sight of the enemy lines, the guards must maltreat me and turn me loose." The aviator searched one after another of the brutal, war-like faces, while Hero Giles translated for the benefit of two Atlantean generals who did not speak the royal language. "Are you positive," Alden demanded of Hero John, "that this revolution in Atlans will die out if Altara is returned?" "Yes! A thousand times yes!" The prince's fine eyes gleamed with savage enthusiasm. "With the Sacred Virgin restored to Atlans, new courage will come into the phalanxes! The priests will cease their outcries against them. Then, with the help of the blue maxima vapor, we will rend the dog-begotten followers of Jereboam limb from limb!" "All right." Nelson's wiry khaki-clad body bent far over the table. "Remember, Hero Giles, that part of the fighting's up to you. When I'm gone, you'll do exactly what Alden tells you. Now, one thing more: what part of the border is still unquestionably loyal?" Hero Giles frowned and shrugged his armor-clad shoulders a little helplessly beneath the splendid cloak of imperial green. "The gods alone know; but at the third division of this morning, Mayda and Thebes still vowed their loyalty. 'Tis there are quartered the phalanxes of the Imperial guards. They alone can I trust to the death." "All right." Bending over a huge parchment map of the valley, Nelson nodded, and his keen black eyes became very serious. "I want you to concentrate every man you can muster in each of those cities. Meanwhile tell the populace,"--he drew a deep breath--"that Altara will certainly be returned to them." "Art thou sure?" broke in the scarred veteran in the dented breast plate; then, his brow dark with doubt, he engaged Hero Giles and the rest in a heated, low-voiced colloquy. * * * * * Alden stepped near, an anxious frown on his unshaven features. "Think this idea of yours is sure-fire?" "No," Nelson's lean head shook. "I'm far from sure. It's a wild gamble at best, but we can't be any worse off than we are now. If the priests win out, we're sunk and no mistake about it; but there's a fighting chance my idea could be brought off." "Now look here," objected the younger pilot tensely. "What's this rot about your going into Jarmuth alone? How d'you know they won't skin you alive once you're over the border?" "I don't," admitted his friend, shrugging slightly. "But I don't see there's anything but to take the risk. If I don't go over there, sure as shooting we're going to feed some damn unpleasant kind of beast here in Atlans. "Another thing," Nelson said, turning to the Hero who, surrounded by the others, was bent in deep consultation over a map. "How am I to know Altara if I see her? Is there a statue, a painting or something--?" The Hero's aquiline features lit in a slow smile. "Nay, we have better than that. Come, thou shalt see the Sacred Virgin as she now is." The members of the conference followed Hero Giles down a short corridor, through a couple of doors and into a chamber where a huge disc of crystal stood on edge fixed upon an axis above a bewildering array of wires, pipes and gauges. * * * * * Hero John, who seemed familiar with the mechanism, turned a lever, whereupon the disc commenced to spin like a pie plate on a dance floor. Faster and faster it spun, silently gathering speed each second while a low humming sound filled the chamber. Gradually the outline of the whirling disk commenced to brighten, tinting the scar-seamed, craggy features of the Atlantean generals and picking glorious, glowing lights from the jewels on Hero Giles' wonderfully engraved breastplate. "Ah." Hero John turned a small dial. "The crystal warms. Look, oh Wanderers!" Nelson rubbed his eyes incredulously, for in the heart of the shimmering circle had materialized the outline of a room with walls of yellow marble. "Well, I'm damned!" gasped Alden. "See how it flickers!" As the revolving disc of crystal gained top speed, the flickering subsided and a picture, clearer than most photographs, could be seen in the center. A wondrously slender, yellow-haired young girl clad in Grecian robes of pale blue sat in deep despond upon a plain wooden couch, with a black haired servant kneeling before her, apparently lacing sandals on her tiny, pink-hued feet. "Bring closer the face," snapped Hero Giles gruffly. Gradually the focus changed, like the close-up of a movie camera, until in the center of the madly whirling disc could be seen in minute detail and living color the face of an indescribably lovely girl. "Whew," muttered Nelson, staring in silent amazement. "No wonder they want her back! She makes Ziegfeld's little girls look like Armenian refugees." He cast a sidewise glance, but Alden had apparently not heard him; the younger American stood gazing with rapturous joy at the girl. "Aye! Aye!" The two veteran generals uttered stifled groans and one of them drew a hand across his eyes. "Poseidon save her! Aye! Preserve the fair Altara." "Wouldst thou not doubly save her, now?" demanded Hero John in a low voice that bespoke his anguish. He seemed suddenly older than the grim, helmeted veterans to either side. "You bet! I guess a man sees a face like that only once is a lifetime. And now," Nelson continued with an effort to return to the practical, "there's no time to be lost--so I'd just like to take a look at those pteranodons of yours." * * * * * A few minutes later, the two aviators found themselves nearing a lofty structure which adjoined the imperial palace. It was constructed along the lines of an immense aviary. Between beautiful, glistening Ionic columns of white marble, gleamed bronze bars, set at regular intervals to prevent the escape of the most appalling creatures which could ever have skimmed the air. "What in the devil is your idea?" demanded Alden, taken aback. "God, look at the loathsome brutes!" Some of these huge, flying reptiles were hopping awkwardly over the ground picking at bones and refuse littering the floor with long pelican-like bills, which were, however, very much thicker than those of pelicans, and set with sharp teeth at least six inches long. "Not very pretty are they? Kind of look like huge bats," commented Nelson thoughtfully. "Wonder if they could be handled?" "Yes, their wings are leathery. Look at 'em up yonder." Alden pointed to the roof of that immense aviary where, hanging head downwards like gigantic bats, must have been hundreds upon hundreds of the pteranodons. One of them, whistling oddly, fluttered up to the bars, affording the Wanderers an excellent view of a loathsome head, the back of which ended in a curious sort of horn, that, projecting backwards, jutted far above its rear. Fierce, vermillion eyes with green irises glared at the Americans through the bars, and great wings of greasy-looking leather fanned a disgusting stench from the interior of the aviary. * * * * * "Sweet little things," was Alden's comment. "God! Imagine having one of those great things swooping down on you. Hey, Alden, look at that big devil over there! He must have a wing spread of thirty feet. Big as a Moth plane, isn't he?" For answer the pteranodon clattered its vast beak savagely. One of the generals stooped and, catching up a huge slab of meat from a basket nearby, hurled it through the bars into the gaping jaws. "What would ye with these creature?" demanded Hero Giles with undisguised curiosity. "You'd be surprised." Nelson was not deliberately rude, but his mind was wrapped up in the daring project he had evolved. "I want a couple of the biggest of these caught and set aside in a courtyard where there will be no one looking on. If your people can train and handle podokos and allosauri--I guess a couple of Yanks ought to be able to manage these flying nightmares. So don't you worry about us." Hero Giles uttered grim, significant laugh. "Thou hadst best manage them. I note yonder pteranodon is in need of nourishment." CHAPTER X With sharp anxiety, Victor Nelson kept watching the towers of Jezreel rise ever clearer above the great, warm plain of Jarmuth, but, for all that, he noted how distinctly Jezreel differed from Heliopolis. The Jarmuthian capital was predominantly amber-yellow instead of white in color; its towers were flat-topped, angular, hideous structures that compared not at all favorably with the graceful Grecian architecture of Atlantean public buildings. The populace, he decided, as he strode along in the midst of half a dozen silent guards, were as harsh and graceless as their architecture. Whereas the Atlanteans had been white skinned and uniformly red haired--save for those of Hudsonian blood--the inhabitants of Jarmuth almost without exception were black haired and had dark, olive-hued skins. "They're the lost tribes of Israel, all right," Nelson decided after a brief sojourn in that savage land lying beyond Apidanus--the great boiling river, whose bubbling and scalding currents had for centuries served as a natural boundary between the two realms. But now the Jarmuthian armies had crossed it and were steadily pushing back the demoralized and despairing Atlanteans with savage energy that heaped the dead in hillocks. "Their armor," mused the ragged, barefoot prisoner, studying his silent guards, "looks a lot like a Roman legionnaire's, but that six pointed star on their helmets is pure Semitic. Yes, this sure is an Asiatic outfit." His eyes wandered from one fierce, big-nosed infantryman to another and noted the splendid physical structure of the majority. Evidently hardier, much less refined and luxury-loving than the Atlanteans, these swart warriors disdained robes and other garments. Save for helmet, armor and brief black kilts, they were quite naked. Like the Atlantean hoplites the infantrymen carried spears, steam retortii and quantities of grenades. The country side through which the prisoner passed had a holiday air, for garlands of flowers hung in every doorway, and naked, pot-bellied children squatted by the roadside, industriously weaving crowns and streamers of gay blossoms. "Look, Atlantean dog!" commanded the black-bearded leader of the escort. "Let thine infidel eyes gaze upon the mightiest city of the world. Seest thou yonder Ziggurat which o'er towers all others?" Nelson raised eyes red-rimmed from sleeplessness and deep anxiety--for the crafty Jarmuthians had proved unexpectedly unwilling to credit him as the Atlantean outcast and would-be renegade he had pretended to be. "Yes," he said in reply to the English-speaking _jehar's_--captain's--question. "What's it for?" "'Tis the temple of the almighty Beelzebub, Steam God of Jarmuth. Without his hot breath no wheel would turn, our armies would be powerless and this land would perish under the ice of the outer world." The dark eyed officer's eye fell speculatively upon his bound and dust-covered prisoner. "Perchance, dog of a spy, thou wilt die during to-day's fourth division[2] together with Altara, pale daughter of the feeble, false god Poseidon." [Footnote 2: The Atlantean day was divided into six divisions of four hours each; due to the flame suns there was no sunrise or sunset.] * * * * * This afternoon? Nelson could not realize that the time had flown so quickly. Four short hours separated him from the crisis of his life. A thousand doubts assailed him. What if Alden or Hero Giles failed in their share of the great scheme for rescue? Narrowly, the aviator's eye searched the great, rich plain, then swept the amber-hued sky where, far above the plain, Jilboa, the nearest flame sun, beat off the Arctic chill and darkness. The great, black-bearded jehar eased the straps from which was suspended the brass coil of his retortii. "Aye," he chuckled, his thick lips parted in a crafty smile. "Ere long will the fair flesh of Altara grace the ceremonial board of His Exaltation, the King, and his priests and princes." Nelson gasped in horror. The divinely beautiful Altara--butchered for meat like a calf? Grotesque! Ghastly! "What! You eat your prisoners?" He felt sick, nauseated. For answer, the swart Jarmuthian raised an enormous hand and dealt the captive American a stinging cuff which made his teeth rattle. "Peace!" he snarled. "Else I slit thy spying throat ere we pass yonder walls." Fingering a short blue-black beard that was frizzed into tight curls in the Assyrian manner, the jehar lengthened his stride as the little detachment clanked into the shadow of a great wall surrounding Jezreel, and through a huge gate guarded by two hideous, jackal-headed effigies. Hurrying into the city were throngs of eager men, women and children, interspersed with muscular, black bearded soldiers who cast threatening, baleful eyes on the pale-skinned prisoner. * * * * * At first the great metropolis of Jezreel seemed boundless, for everywhere arose tall, massive monuments of yellow marble whose facades were engraved with Sanskrit characters, thus bearing out Nelson's surmise that this was indeed a race of Semitic origin. Here and there hurried grey-bearded, vulture-eyed priests oddly garbed in corrupt Occhive and Tyrian regalia. Nelson found it odd to see the Tablet of the Laws, which Jarmuth so openly ignored, swaying on their yellow robed breasts; and none cried out more menacingly nor more loudly against the limping, wan-faced captive, than these same ecclesiastics, who must have long since forgotten all worship of Jehovah in the foul service of a bestial golden effigy. A stone sailed through the air, narrowly missing the American; then another, which struck his shoulder. "God, what a rough looking crowd," thought Nelson, as the guards, cursing, held back the screaming mob. "At this rate I won't live to even reach the temple!" Every second his life stood in great danger. Unkempt, sloe-eyed women hurled themselves, shrieking with fury, against the armored chests of the guards, who were hard pressed to beat them off with their spear hafts. Nelson's one small ray of comfort in this evil hour was the fact that his .45 pistol remained untouched in a food wallet. At the border the jehar had cast one contemptuous glance at the weapon, but, no doubt deeming it some strange culinary tool, he had made no effort to remove it. It was a continual struggle for the guards to win their way up a long flight of stairs, for ever the great stream of humanity grew denser and more menacing. * * * * * Nelson felt a violent sense of revolt grip his being. "I must win free," he thought. "If I fail, Alden dies, and--and--" For the first time he realised how much he wanted to actually see Altara. Like a clear cameo, an image of her had remained fresh in his memory. Except for her Grecian garments she might have been a lovely, carefree English or American girl. "And these decadent swine would sacrifice her!" The thought was sickening. Yet how could he prevent the pitiful tragedy? Fortunately, a detachment of troops--tall, sinewy fellows with conical helmets, crested with six-pointed stars--reenforced the guards just as clawing hands began to snatch and tug at the prisoner's ragged Atlantean chiton of blue cotton. Almost before he realized it, Nelson was dragged inside a great gloomy building and into a circular chamber where four eagle-featured elders sat in council beneath the six-pointed star of Sem. On approaching, the jehar in command sank on one knee and in humble salute raised both hands to the tribunal. "A tough looking desk sergeant they've got," muttered the prisoner to himself as his eye met the chilling regard of a lean, yellow-faced priest. "Wonder what I'm booked for?" Idiotically, he recalled being summoned before a traffic court, years back. "Guess I don't get off with vagrancy; it'll probably be everything from speeding to mayhem, with maybe arson and well-poisoning thrown in." The deliberations of this ominous court proved to be appallingly short. The dour-faced elders merely put their heads together, muttered a few sentences, then straightened up almost immediately. The chief priest--he with the yellow face--thrust out his fist and made the immemorial signal of death by jerking his thumb at the black marble floor. * * * * * Before the outraged and astounded aviator could utter a word of protest, powerful guards seized and hauled him off down a dark, narrow passageway in which the fetid prison smell was very strong. Too wise to struggle against overwhelming odds, yet appalled at the thought of his impending doom, Nelson was dragged into a room where four or five furtive, enslaved Atlanteans, made dumb by the removal of their tongues, were engaged in a curious occupation. On a bare stone bench, five other Atlantean captives were sitting in miserable silence. They made a grotesque array, for their heads were crowned with gay yellow and blue flowers, and the upper half of their perfectly formed bodies gleamed with an application of a sweet-smelling oil. About their wrists and waists were twined fragrant garlands of yellow roses which hid the leather straps confining their hands. Struggling, Nelson was forced on to the bench, whereupon slaves, skipping to avoid the lash of a scarred, olive-hued slave driver, hurried to wash the newly arrived prisoner's limbs, face and hands. A weary-looking old slave with sunken, rheumy eyes listlessly pulled the blue chiton from Nelson's broad shoulders, and would have removed the food pouch had not the prisoner winked vigorously. The ministering slave glanced swiftly sidewise and, discovering the slave driver's attention directed to another corner, pulled the upper folds of the chiton over the food pouch and its precious contents, then set a crown of yellow roses more or less askew on the American's head. For all the peril of the situation Nelson could not suppress a fleeting smile as the phrase, "For I'm to be Queen of the May, Mother," leaped nonsensically into his brain. * * * * * "Yes, I guess they are getting us all dolled up for a sacrifice of some kind." Nelson's heart began to pound at the thought. Then he fought for self control. It must be a hideously realistic nightmare! He, Victor Nelson, American citizen, a quiet birdman, member of the Caterpillar Club and ex-flight commander of the A. E. F. was about to be offered as a sacrifice to some hideous, pagan god? Nonsense! He'd wake up in a minute and hear the drone of a ship on the line. He blinked, staring fixedly at a single ray of light that came streaming in through a small, barred window, then glanced sidewise at his fellow victims, who with Spartan indifference sat waiting for the end of all things. It was no dream! From the tiny window came the shrill discordant braying of many trumpets, and a roar like that of a football crowd arose surprisingly near. In response, the slave driver lashed the gaudily bedecked sacrificial victims to their feet with vicious cuts of his pliant whip, and herded them like a drove of calves down a very long passage, lit at intervals by those strange column lamps of incandescent gas. In their red glare the doomed six seemed as though already bathed in blood. "Must be some crowd of people outside," muttered Nelson as a great gale of sound deafened him. Yonder the amber glare of the flame suns glimmered, and now it was his turn to step into the open! * * * * * On a sort of spiral roadway he paused, breathless, awed, bewildered, for there, eddying restlessly about the bases of towers and other huge structures, was a great sea of up-turned faces. To his surprise he found the passage he had followed opened perhaps halfway up what must be the great Ziggurat of Beelzebub. He judged the tower's height must be immense, for already the crowd was a good hundred feet below. "_Zarotoa! Zarotoa! ù Wlanka!_"[3] Nelson shivered. How terrible was the wild, bloodthirsty clamor of that vast throng, when they beheld the six flower-decked prisoners appear upon the circular winding road which led to the lofty and wind-swept summit of the great conical pyramid of the people of Jezreel. [Footnote 3: Death to the victims!] Behind the victims marched perhaps eighteen or twenty spearmen gorgeously uniformed in yellow and black painted armor. Their retortii were plated with gold, and in the center of a star forming the crest of each helmet was set a diamond large as a hickory nut. Preceding the despairing prisoners marched a squad of tall, clean-shaven priests with great gold hoops in their ears. They blew mightily upon long, curved horns, and were followed by perhaps a dozen lithe, posturing girls, half clothed in diaphanous yellow robes. These priestesses swung golden censers which flung bluish clouds of aromatic smoke high into the humid air above. * * * * * Up and up, around and around the great tower temple, Nelson was dragged, while the vast city of Jezreel, palaces, towers, courts, dwellings and all, lay like a great panorama below. Up and up, and the wind grew stronger while Nelson marvelled at the great height of the structure he was mounting. Immediately in front of him swayed the naked shoulders of the three captive Atlanteans; he could see rose petals from their crowns fluttering in the strong warm breeze sweeping that man-made pinnacle for the worship of a heathen god. Despairingly, the American's eyes searched the horizon, to discover nothing but a few great birds wheeling lazily in the bronze-hued sky. Very clearly he could discern three of the flame suns, casting flame high from their peaks. "Alden!" he groaned. "Oh God, Alden, don't fail me!" Chilled by the fate in store, he scanned the dark and hostile faces below, but found no friendly visage. Up and up. The procession was now nearing the summit. There were hosts of poignant problems before him, each vital if Altara and the Empire of Atlans were to be saved; but one primary question immediately confronted him. How could he get his hands free? He ventured a few words in English to the stolid Atlantean at his side, whereat the fellow only stared dully and shook his red, flower-crowned head. He next tried to cautiously work loose his hands, but to no avail. The rope of plaited skin binding his aching wrists together was tough as any rawhide. Cursing, he abandoned the effort, and, as his eyes once more swept the great bloodthirsty throng below, he felt himself doomed indeed. CHAPTER XI Standing at last on the summit of the great Ziggurat, Nelson found himself staring up at the fearsome golden image of the dread demon Beelzebub. The god stood some twelve feet in height and had a hideous human face, but, in place of hair and beard, countless golden tubes writhed in all directions. From the end of one, the puzzled prisoner beheld several tiny feathers of steam creeping forth, indicating that these hairs were a species of steam vent. When, with the other captives, he was made to halt near its base, he further discovered that the idol sat upon a throne of yellow marble, the sides of which were carved with Sanskrit characters, necessarily quite meaningless to the doomed aviator. In a grim and silent rank before Beelzebub's feet, stood some six or eight priest-executioners bending their black-robed bodies against the strong wind which swept that ghastly pinnacle. Just below the base of the image, Nelson noted several great, copper coils, no doubt conducting steam from the interior of the Ziggurat. Between the knees of Beelzebub rested a huge, shallow bowl, the use of which puzzled the American not a little, for he saw that the base of this ornate receptacle was also wrapped with a number of steam coils. Two great hands, ending in cruel-looking claws, were stretched horizontally above the demon's knees, seeming to plead for victims. * * * * * Suddenly a deep toned brazen gong sounded somewhere below; the trumpeters blew an ear-piercing note; and, at a gesture from the high priest, four of the brawny executioner-priests leaped forward, seized one of the Atlantean victims, hurled him to the stone platform and, in an unbelievably short interval, strapped the shrieking wretch by wrists, elbows, knees and ankles to a long, brass rod. Slung like a dead deer from a rail, they lifted the helpless Atlantean, and, while five hundred thousand voices roared in acclaim the priests fitted the pole ends into notches above the hands of the idol with the effect that the idol actually seemed to be clutching its victim. Then, from all the pipes composing the hair and beard of Beelzebub, sprang forth hissing spouts of snowy steam which, whipped by the rising wind, went whirling madly down the lee of the Ziggurat. At the same time, from the half open mouth of the demon issued a fearful, screaming howl, a thousand times louder than the whistle of a speeding locomotive. Deafening and barbaric, it was reechoed from a hundred towers and battlements. A dreadful, exultant yell burst from the multitude below as the red-robed priest drew from beneath his garments a sickle-shaped knife that glittered evilly in the light of the flaming suns. Still chanting, he stooped and quickly made a deep incision over the heart of the victim. While a piercing, agonized shriek burst from the ashen lips of the doomed Atlantean, his bright life-blood began to splash into the golden bowl below where, due to the presence of the steam coils, it swiftly commenced to hiss and bubble. Very quickly the last scarlet drops had fallen. Then while Nelson, sick and horrified, stood watching, the dead body on its pole was taken down, unstrapped, and hurled, limp and red-spattered, to the next lower platform where other priests waited to dismember it for the ceremonial cannibalism soon to follow. * * * * * In rapid succession two more victims were slaughtered amid the blood-hungry cheers of the Jarmuthian populace. Now the great bowl hissed and bubbled with a generous supply of the dark red fluid, from which rose clouds of evil-smelling steam that fanned the hideous features above. From below suddenly arose an excited shout far mightier than any which had preceded it, when the executioners, sweating from their exertions, now turned and, spying Nelson, hurried forward. Coincidently, the American's bound hands disappeared beneath the chiton. Squaring his shoulders, he gripped the pistol, prepared to make a good end. "They'll get me, but before I die I'll send at least two or three of these devils to hell," he thought. "Come on--" But, for an inexplicable reason, the arch-priest beckoned back his satellites, while roar upon roar of terrific excitement swelled from the swarming mob below, and a shout which at last became distinguishable bid fair to split the heavens. "Altara! Altara! Altara!" Slowly, the temporarily reprieved victim's muscles stiffened. He understood. The next victim was to be the fair Altara, sister of Altorius and Sacred Virgin of Atlans. "Altara! Altara!" A rising hurricane of impassioned human voices thundered the name. Suddenly, the desire to live burned doubly strong in the American's breast. He must somehow prevent this inhuman catastrophe. But how? How? Stealing a quick glance over his shoulder, Nelson stifled a groan. The southern horizon remained clear, and put an end to hope. No help! He must fight it out to the end alone. * * * * * A rank of exultant, black-bearded priests now appeared at the head of the stairway, then a quartet of olive skinned, semi-naked priestesses joyfully clashing brass cymbals. There came an interval--and Nelson's heart stood still as there appeared the lovely head and shoulders of her whom he had first seen in the heart of the revolving crystal. Even more fiercely, mad revolt at fate gripped him. Through hot, strained eyes the American saw that the stately Altara was beautiful beyond all possible comparison, and that she seemed utterly unafraid in the hour of her dreadful death. The Atlantean maiden's large, clear blue eyes were fixed with calm resignation on the distant flame sun of Jilboa. On her curling golden hair had been set a circlet of ceremonial yellow roses, while her white, slender body was thinly covered with a scanty robe of yellow silk. Slowly, and moving her small bare feet in a regal stride, Altara climbed the last few steps and stood straight and unafraid before the hideous demon god of Jarmuth. Thousands of frantic inner voices assailed the aviator's consciousness. "Save her! You must save her! She's too young, too beautiful to die!" Like a vast maelstrom of sound, so swelled the lustful cry of the dark multitude at the base of the Ziggurat, while the arch-priest chanted his litany in a sort of triumphant exultation. Then, all at once, one of the executioners roughly tripped the golden haired girl, sprawling her helpless on the bloody stones; and, before Nelson could quite realize it, the slender, silver hued form lay limp and helpless between Beelzebub's bloody claws. * * * * * Like a dynamo furiously gathering speed, so buzzed Nelson's brain. He was going to save her--if only for a brief interval! One man against a nation. Through a raging mist of fury he saw the red-robed priest raise his lean arms; then the American's bound hands darted beneath the blue chiton to reappear immediately. No one saw the pistol, for every eye was rivetted upon the gleaming, sickle-knife of the red priest. Like a voice from hell, that eery scream burst again from Beelzebub's throat as his priest stepped near, the knife raised. Amid a deafening roar the sickle-knife flashed higher; but it never fell, for the red priest suddenly reeled, clutched his chest and, staring wildly, staggered sidewise, while the assembled priests stared thunderstruck. The deafening roar of Beelzebub, the clamor of horns and cymbals had drowned out the report. In superstitious awe the Jarmuthians leaped back, panic-stricken, from the convulsively writhing body of the red priest, which rolled crazily down the steps before the idol; but a high shout of terror rang out as he toppled off the summit and, like a discarded puppet, plunged down the precipitous side of the cone-like tower. Again Nelson's pistol spat, and two of the executioners collapsed in kicking agony. Like an avenging fury, the American raged about the summit, the pistol in his bound bands dealing death right and left until panic seized the remaining priests, who, with one accord, abandoned their weapons to rush headlong down the dizzy, winding roadway. In a trice, none but Altara, Nelson, the two Atlanteans and the fallen priests remained on the summit. * * * * * It was the work of a moment for the Atlanteans to cast loose Nelson's bound wrists, and he theirs; time was precious, for, from below, a furious cohort of spearmen were charging up the stairs, their dark features terrible in their wrath. "Only four more shots!" The sickening realization dashed into Nelson's brain. "That'll never stop them." Then in the midst of his despair he saw an answer. Stepping back he fired twice full into the great steam coil circling the base of the idol. _Spang! Spang!_ His bullets smacked through the copper coil to puncture neat, round holes. As he fervently hoped, jets of live steam rushed through these vents with terrible force and bathed the head of the stairs with a scalding, blinding vapor. Howling like mad beasts, the agonized Jarmuthian hoplites fell back, while overhead Beelzebub bellowed incessantly, shaking the sky with his hideous voice. "That's better." But Nelson knew his triumph to be brief. "_Where in hell is Alden?_" he raged as with shaking hands be released the bewildered girl from the death bar after the two Atlanteans had lifted it and its fair burden from the claws of Beelzebub. Picking up the swords and other weapons of the fallen priests the two Atlanteans uttered their deep-toned war cry of _Halor vàn!_ and joyously prepared to die fighting, as furious roar on roar of wrath arose from the populace, infuriated at being cheated of their prey. But the black-armored temple guards dared not charge those twin steam jets barring their approach. Accordingly they tried other means. * * * * * Nelson's heart stopped as a small, dark object sailed up from below and clattered on the platform. It was a grenade. With the speed of thought, the American kicked it to the landing below, where it exploded, annihilating a detachment of Jarmuthians by drenching them with the terrible fungus gas. Heart bounding with savage joy, Nelson watched the deadly green fog leap from the broken grenade and of its own accord settle on the nearest soldiers. With the usual astonishing speed there formed on the stricken soldiery that poisonous yellow mould, whose fungus-like shoots sprouted through nostrils and mouths. On the dense crowd below the bomb's effect was appalling, and no more grenades were hurled.... During the respite Nelson's anguished eyes once more swept the skies. He started. Was it true or was it a mirage? Far to the southward a small, black speck materialized in the orange-hued heavens. Good old Alden! Hope wavered in the American's breast. Could he and his two fellows beat off the infuriated Jarmuthians long enough? He doubted it. A shower of spears sailed up, but because of the angle, their trajectory was too great, and like rays of death the lances flashed harmlessly overhead to plunge over the summit and wreak death among those on the other side. Nearer and nearer came the black speck while from the populace a low shout of amazement arose. Coincidently Nelson's heart stopped; aghast, he saw that the steam was no longer hissing from the holes at the idol's feet! Evidently, the steam current had been shut off from below to allow the raging priests to lead their followers in a desperate charge up the stairs. Marshalling an Atlantean to either side, Nelson sprang to the head of the stair and fired full in the face of gorgeously robed priests who staggered back screaming. But the others wavered only an instant. "_Halor vàn!_" Both Atlanteans hurled spears retrieved from the abandoned weapons--and each struck down his man. * * * * * The American's eye flickered up. Yes, there came a strange, but welcome sight: a great creature with enormous, leathery pinions was circling down towards the tower top! A clashing of weapons brought Nelson's eyes earthwards. He joined in a furious melée at the stair top, like the Atlanteans, using a captured bronze sword. There came a deep groan as the right-hand Atlantean collapsed with a bloodied bronze spear point standing far out from between his naked shoulder blades. A swooping shadow fell across the slowly advancing attackers. Beholding that awesome creature the Jarmuthians cowered, hesitated; then in headlong panic they darted below, uttering howls of fear and pursued by the surviving Atlantean, who, gone berserk, must have shortly paid for his folly. The pteranodon was now quite recognizable, and seated on a double saddle was Alden, skillfully guiding the ungainly monster by means of a curious bridle, by shifting his weight and by pressing certain nerve centers between the great reptile's leathery shoulders. Down, down circled Alden until the great wings skimmed just above Beelzebub's ugly golden head. Her courage strained beyond endurance, Altara screamed shrilly in fear as Alden guided the huge reptile to the summit and forced it to light. "Quick!" shouted Alden. "They're coming back up!" "All right!" Catching up the fainting girl, Nelson hurdled two or three fallen bodies, and, while Alden showered fungus bombs upon the returning Jarmuthians, he laid his precious burden across the saddle and secured her with straps specially designed for the purpose. "All right, Dick," he snapped. "Get going!" "But you?" Alden's brown face was terribly intent. "I'm not going! This creature could never carry the three of us. It can't, I tell you! Hurry, those devils are coming!" Alden folded his arms. "If you don't go, I don't." "All right then," snarled Nelson, vaulting into the saddle after casting loose the inert, yellow-robed girl. "Be a damned fool! We'll all die now." * * * * * It was a near thing, for the pteranodon, scenting the fresh blood, was very loath to obey its master, and scuffed awkwardly around the tower top two or three times, while Nelson, clutching Altara to him, expended his last shot in driving back the enemy. At last, the pteranodon spread its huge brown pinions and took off. Then Nelson gasped in alarm, for, unaccustomed to the heavy weight it now bore, the pteranodon scaled earthwards with the speed of a meteor, wildly flapping its bat-like-wings. Down! Down! Nelson had an impression of people scattering like frightened ants. Alden cursed, tugged furiously on the bridle, and set his weight back in the saddle, but to no avail. Down! Ever down! The pteranodon now struggled among the tall buildings. A sickening sense of defeat gripped Nelson as a long jet of steam shot out from a huge brass retortii mounted on the roof of an arsenal. The scalding fingers of steam just missed its target, but fortunately served to sting the descending pteranodon. With a convulsive shudder and a whistling scream, the hideous reptile commenced to flap its gigantic wings faster, and, slowly but surely, began to rise over the yellow temples and towers of the barbarous city of Jezreel. * * * * * What followed is now a matter of Atlantean history. On its pages is set forth in full detail how the giant pteranodon barely crossed the boiling river to sink exhausted in the outskirts of Tricca. There, also, is described the series of tremendous battles in which the Atlanteans, led by Altorius and inspired by the return of their Sacred Virgin, employed the terrible fungus gas to overwhelm the Jarmuthian invaders, driving them back with great slaughter to the steaming plains of their own land. At even greater length is described the great triumph Altorius accorded the victorious aviators on the occasion of Victor Nelson's marriage to Altara. "Doth it not seem strange," she whispered as they stood looking out over the great, sleeping city of Heliopolis, "that thou of the New World and I of the Lost World, should stand man and wife?" The American's tanned face softened. "My darling," he whispered, "there are lots of strange things in the new Atlantis--but this isn't one of them." _(The End.)_ The Meteor Girl _By Jack Williamson_ [Illustration: _She seemed to scream, though we could hear nothing._] [Sidenote: Through the complicated space-time of the fourth dimension goes Charlie King in an attempt to rescue the Meteor Girl.] "What's the good in Einstein, anyhow?" I shot the question at lean young Charlie King. In a moment he looked up at me; I thought there was pain in the back of his clear brown eyes. Lips closed in a thin white line across his wind-tanned face; nervously he tapped his pipe on the metal cowling of the _Golden Gull's_ cockpit. "I know that space is curved, that there is really no space or time, but only space-time, that electricity and gravitation and magnetism are all the same. But how is that going to pay my grocery bill--or yours?" "That's what Virginia wants to know." "Virginia Randall!" I was astonished. "Why, I thought--" "I know. We've been engaged a year. But she's called it off." Charlie looked into my eyes for a long minute, his lips still compressed. We were leaning on the freshly painted, streamline fuselage of the _Golden Gull_, as neat a little amphibian monoplane as ever made three hundred miles an hour. She stood on the glistening white sand of our private landing field on the eastern Florida coast. Below us the green Atlantic was running in white foam on the rocks. In the year that Charlie King and I had been out of the Institute of Technology, we had built the nucleus of a commercial airplane business. We had designed and built here in our own shops several very successful seaplanes and amphibians. Charlie's brilliant mathematical mind was of the greatest aid, except when he was too far lost in his abstruse speculations to descend to things commercial. Mathematics is painful enough to me when it is used in calculating the camber of an airplane wing. And pure mathematics, such as the theories of relativity and equivalence, I simply abhor. I was amazed. Virginia Randall was a girl trim and beautiful as our shining _Golden Gull_. I had thought them devotedly in love, and had been looking forward to the wedding. "But it isn't two weeks, since Virginia was out here! You took her up in our _Western Gull IV_!" * * * * * Nervously Charlie lit his pipe, drew quickly on it. His face, lean and drawn beneath the flying goggles pushed up on his forehead, sought mine anxiously. "I know. I drove her back to the station. That was when--when we quarreled." "But why? About Einstein? That's silly." "She wanted me to give it up here, and go in with her father in his Wall Street brokerage business. The old gent is willing to take me, and make a business man of me." "Why, I couldn't run the business without you, Charlie!" "We talked about that, Hammond. I don't really do much of the work. Just play around with the mathematics, and leave the models and blueprints to you." "Oh, Charlie, that's not quite--" "It's the truth, right enough," he said, bitterly. "You design aircraft, and I play with Einstein. And as you say, a fellow can't eat equations." "I'd hate to see you go." "And I'd hate to give up you, and our business, and the math. Really no need of it. My tastes are simple enough. And old 'Iron-clad' Randall has made all one family needs. Virginia's not exactly a pauper, herself. Two or three millions, I think." "And where did Virginia go?" "She took the _Valhalla_ yesterday at San Francisco. Going to join her father at Panama. He cruises about the world in his steam yacht, you know, and runs Wall Street by radio. I was to telegraph her if I'd changed my mind. I decided to stick to you, Hammond. I telegraphed a corsage of orchids, and sent her the message, 'Einstein forever!'" "If I know Virginia, those were not very politic words." "Well, a man--" * * * * * His words were cut short by a very unusual incident. A thin, high scream came suddenly from above our neat stuccoed hangars at the edge of the white field. I looked up quickly, to catch a glimpse of a bright object hurtling through the air above our heads. The bellowing scream ended abruptly in a thunderous crash. I felt a tremor of the ground underfoot. "What--" I ejaculated. "Look!" cried Charlie. He pointed. I looked over the gleaming metal wing of the _Golden Gull_, to see a huge cloud of white sand rising like a fountain at the farther side of the level field. Deliberately the column of debris rose, spread, rained down, leaving a gaping crater in the earth. "Something fell?" "It sounded like a shell from a big gun, except that it didn't explode. Let's get over and see!" We ran to where the thing had struck, three hundred yards across the field. We found a great funnel-shaped pit torn in the naked earth. It was a dozen yards across, fifteen feet deep, and surrounded with a powdery ring of white sand and pulverized rock. "Something like a shell-hole," I observed. "I've got it!" Charlie cried. "It was a meteor!" "A meteor? So big?" "Yes. Lucky for us it was no bigger. If it had been like the one that fell in Siberia a few years ago, or the one that made the Winslow crater in Arizona--we wouldn't have been talking about it. Probably we have a chunk of nickel-iron alloy here." "I'll get some of the men out here with digging tools, and we'll see what we can find." Our mechanics were already hurrying across the field. I shouted at them to bring picks and shovels. In a few minutes five of us were at work throwing sand and shattered rock out of the pit. * * * * * Suddenly I noticed a curious thing. A pale bluish mist hung in the bottom of the pit. It was easily transparent, no denser than tobacco smoke. Passing my spade through it did not seem to disturb it in the least. I rubbed my eyes doubtfully, said to Charlie, "Do you see a sort of blue haze in the pit?" He peered. "No. No.... Yes. Yes, I do! Funny thing. Kind of a blue fog. And the tools cut right through it without moving it! Queer! Must have something to do with the meteor!" He was very excited. We dug more eagerly. An hour later we had opened the hole to a depth of twenty feet. Our shovels were clanging on the gray iron of the rock from space. The mist had grown thicker as the excavation deepened; we looked at the stone through a screen of motionless blue fog. We had found the meteor. There were several queer things about it. The first man who touched it--a big Swede mechanic named Olson--was knocked cold as if by a nasty jolt of electricity. It took half an hour to bring him to consciousness. As fast as the rugged iron side of the meteorite was uncovered, a white crust of frost formed over it. "It was as cold as outer space, nearly at the absolute zero," Charlie explained. "And it was heated only superficially during its quick passage through the air. But how it comes to be charged with electricity--I can't say." He hurried up to his laboratory behind the hangars, where he had equipment ranging from an astronomical telescope to a delicate seismograph. He brought back as much electrical equipment as he could carry. He had me touch an insulated wire to the frost-covered stone from space, while he put the other end to one post of a galvanometer. I think he got a current that wrecked the instrument. At any rate, he grew very much excited. "Something queer about that stone!" he cried. "This is the chance of a lifetime! I don't know that a meteor has ever been scientifically examined so soon after falling." * * * * * He hurried us all across to the laboratory. We came back with a truck load of coils and tubes and batteries and potentiometers and other assorted equipment. He had men with heavy rubber gloves lift the frost-covered stone to a packing box on a bench. The thing was irregular in shape, about a foot long; it must have weighed two hundred pounds. He sent a man racing on a motorcycle to the drug store to get dry ice (solidified carbon dioxide) to keep the iron stone at its low temperature. In a few hours he had a complete laboratory set up around the meteorite. He worked feverishly in the hot sunshine, reading the various instruments he had set up, and arranging more. He contrived to keep the stone cold by packing it in a box of dry ice. The mechanics stopped for dinner, and I tried to get him to take time to eat. "No, Hammond," he said. "This is something big! We were talking about Einstein. This rock seems energized with a new kind of force: all meteors are probably the same way, when they first plunge out of space. I think this will be to relativity what the falling apple is to gravity. This is a big thing." He looked up at me, brown eyes flashing. "This is my chance to make a name, Hammond. If I do something big enough--Virginia might reconsider her opinion." Charlie worked steadily through the long hot afternoon. I spent most of the time helping him, or gazing in fascination at the curious haze of luminous blue mist that clung like a sphere of azure fog about the meteoric stone. I did not completely understand what he did; the reader who wants the details may consult the monograph he is preparing for the scientific press. He had the men string up a line from our direct current generator in the shops, to supply power for his electrical instruments. He mounted a powerful electromagnet just below the meteorite, and set up an X-ray tube to bombard it with rays. * * * * * Night came, and the fire of the white sun faded from the sky. In the darkness, the curious haze about the stone became luminescent, distinct, a dim, motionless sphere of blue light. I fancied that I saw grotesque shapes flashing through it. A ball of blue fire, shimmering and ghost-like, shrouded the instruments. Charlie's induction coil buzzed wickedly, with purple fire playing about the terminals. The X-ray tube flickered with a greenish glow. He manipulated the rheostat that controlled the current through the electromagnet, and continued to read his instruments. "Look at that!" he cried. The bluish haze about the stone grew brighter; it became a ball of sapphire flame, five feet thick, bright and motionless. A great sphere of shimmering azure fire! Wisps of pale, sparkling bluish mist ringed it. The stone in its box, the X-ray bulb and other apparatus were hidden. The end of the table stuck oddly from the ball of light. I heard Charlie move a switch. The hum of the coils changed a note. The ball of blue fire vanished abruptly. It became a hole, a window in space! Through it, we saw another world! The darkness of the night hung about us. Where the ball had been was a circle of misty blue flame, five feet across. Through that circle I could see a vast expanse of blue ocean, running in high, white-capped rollers, beneath a sky overcast with low gray clouds. It was no flat picture like a movie screen. The scene had vast depth; I knew that we were really looking over an infinite expanse of stormy ocean. It was all perfectly clear, distinct, real! * * * * * Astounded, I turned to find Charlie standing back and looking into the ring of blue fire, with a curious mixture of surprise and delighted satisfaction. "What--what--" I gasped. "It's amazing! Wonderful! More than I had dared hope for! The complete vindication of my theory! If Virginia cares for scientific reputation--" "But what is it?" "It's hard to explain without mathematical language. You might say that we are looking through a hole in space. The new force in the meteorite, amplified by the X-rays and the magnetic field, is causing a distortion of space-time coordinates. You know that a gravitational field bends light; the light of a star is deflected in passing the sun. The field of this meteorite bends light through space-time, through the four-dimensional continuum. That scrap of ocean we can see may be on the other side of the earth." I walked around the circle of luminous smoke with the marvelous picture in the center. It seemed that the window swung with me. I surveyed the whole angry surface of that slate-gray, storm-beaten sea, to the misty horizon. Nowhere was it broken by land or ship. Charlie fell to adjusting his rheostat and switches. It seemed that the gray ocean moved swiftly beyond the window. Vast stretches of it raced below our eyes. Faint black stains of steamer smoke appeared against the blue-gray horizon and swept past. Then land appeared--a long, green-gray line. We had a flash of a long coast that unreeled in endless panorama before us. It was such a view as one might get from a swift airplane--a plane flying thousands of miles per hour. The Golden Gate flashed before us, with the familiar skyline of San Francisco rising on the hills behind it. "San Francisco!" Charlie cried. "This is the Pacific we've been seeing. Let's find the _Valhalla_. We might be able to see Virginia!" * * * * * The coast-line vanished as he manipulated his instruments. Staring into the circle of shining blue mist, I saw the endless ocean racing below us again. We picked up a pleasure yacht, running under bare poles. "I didn't know there was such a storm on," Charlie murmured. Other vessels swam past below us, laboring against heavy seas. Then we looked upon an ocean whipped into mighty white-crowned waves. Rain beat down in sheets from low dense clouds; vivid violet lightnings flashed before us. It seemed very strange to see such lightning and hear not the faintest whisper of thunder--but no sound came from anything we saw through the blue-rimmed window in space. "I hope the _Valhalla_ isn't in weather like this!" cried Charlie. In a few minutes a dark form loomed through the wind-riven mist. Swiftly it swam nearer; became a black ship. "Only a tramp," Charlie said, breathing a sigh of relief. It was a dingy tramp steamer, her superstructure wrecked. Her fires seemed dead. She lay across the wind, rolling sluggishly, threatening to sink with every monstrous wave. We saw no living person aboard her; she seemed a sinking derelict. We made out the name _Roma_ on her side. Charlie moved his dials again. In a few minutes the slender prow of another great steamer came through the sheets of rain. It was evidently a passenger vessel. She seemed limping along, half wrecked, with mighty waves breaking over her rail. Charlie grew white with alarm. "The _Valhalla_!" he gasped. "And she's headed straight for that wreck!" In a moment, as he brought the liner closer below our blue-rimmed window, I, too, made out the name. The wet, glistening decks were almost deserted. Here and there a man struggled futilely against the force of the storm. * * * * * In a few minutes the drifting wreck of the _Roma_ came into our view, dead ahead of the limping liner. Through the mist and falling rain, the derelict could not have been in sight of the lookout of the passenger vessel until she was almost upon it. We saw the white burst of steam as the siren was blown. We watched the desperate effort of the liner to check her way, to come about. But it was too much for the already crippled ship. Charlie cried out as a mighty wave drove the _Valhalla_ down upon the sluggishly drifting wreck. All the mad scene that ensued was strangely silent. We heard no crash when the collision occurred; heard no screams or shouts while the mob of desperate, white-faced passengers were fighting their way to the deck. The vain struggle to launch the boats was like a silent movie. One boat was splintered while being lowered. Another, already filled with passengers, was lifted by a great ware and crushed against the side of the ship. Only shivered wood and red foam were left. The ship listed so rapidly that the boats on the lee side were useless. It was impossible to launch the others in that terrible, lashing sea. "Virginia can swim." Charlie said hopefully. "You know she tried the Channel last year, and nearly made it, too." He stopped to watch that terrible scene in white-faced, anxious silence. The tramp went down before the steamer, drawing fragments of wrecked boats after it. The liner was evidently sinking rapidly. We saw dozens of hopeless, panic-stricken passengers diving off the lee side, trying to swim off far enough to avoid the tremendous suction. Then, with a curious deliberation, the bow of the _Valhalla_ dipped under green water; her stern rose in the air until the ship stood almost perpendicular. She slipped quickly down, out of sight. Only a few swimming humans, and the wrecks of a few boats, were left on the rough gray sea. Charlie fumbled nervously with his dials, trying to get the scene near enough so that we could see the identity of the struggling swimmers. * * * * * A long boat, which must have been swept below by the suction of the ship, came plunging above the surface, upside down. It drifted swiftly among the swimmers, who struggled to reach it. I saw one person, evidently a girl, grasp it and drag herself upon it. It swept on past the few others still struggling. The wrecked boat with the girl upon it seemed coming swiftly toward our blue-rimmed window. In a few minutes I saw something familiar about her. "It's Virginia!" Charlie cried. "God! We've got to save her, somehow!" The long rollers drove the over-turned boat swiftly along. Virginia Randall clung desperately to it, deluged in foam, whipped with flying spray, the wild wind tearing at her. About us, the clear still night was deepening. The air was warm and still; the hot stars shone steadily. Quiet lighted houses were in sight above the beach. It was very strange to look through the fire-rimmed circle, to see a girl struggling for life, clinging to a wrecked boat in a stormy sea. Charlie watched in an apathy of grief and horror, trembling and speechless doing nothing except move the controls to keep the floating girl in our sight. * * * * * Hours went by as we watched. Then Charlie cried out in sudden hope. "There's a chance! I might do it! I might be able to save her!" "Might do what?" "We are able to see what we do because the field of the meteor bends light through the four-dimensional continuum. The world line of a ray of light is a geodesic in the continuum. The field I have built distorts the continuum, so we see rays that originated at a distant point. Is that clear?" "Clear as mud!" "Well, anyhow, if the field were strong enough, we could bring physical objects through space-time, instead of mere visual images. We could pick Virginia up and bring her right here to the crater! I'm sure of it!" "You mean you could move a girl through some four or five thousand miles of space!" "You don't understand. She wouldn't come through space at all, but through space-time, through the continuum, which is a very different thing. She is four thousand miles away in our three-dimensional space, but in space-time, as you see, she is only a few yards away. She is only a few yards from us in the fourth dimension. If I can increase the field a little, she will be drawn right through!" "You're a wizard if you can do it!" "I've got to do it! She's a fine swimmer--that's the only reason she's still alive--but she'll never live to reach the shore. Not in a sea like that!" Charlie fell to work at once, mounting another electromagnet beside the one he had set up, and rigging up two more X-ray bulbs beside the packing box which held the meteor. The motion of the boat in the fire-rimmed window kept drawing it swiftly away from us, and Charlie showed me how to move the dial of his rheostat to keep the girl in view. * * * * * Before he had completed his arrangements, a patch of white foam came into view just ahead of the drifting boat. In a moment I made out a cruel black rock, with the angry sea breaking into fleecy spray upon it. The boat was almost upon it, driving straight for it. Charlie saw it, and cried out in horror. The long black hull of the splintered boat, floating keel upward, was only a few yards away. A great white-capped breaker lifted it and hurled it forward, with the girl clinging to it. She drew herself up and stared in terror at the black rock, while another long surging roller picked up the boat and swept it forward again. I stood, paralyzed in horror, while the shattered boat was driven full upon the great rock. I could imagine the crash of it, but it was all as still as a silent picture. The boat, riding high on a crest of white foam, smashed against the rock and was shivered to splinters. Virginia was hurled forward against the slick wet stone. Desperately she scrambled to reach the top of the boulder. Her hands slipped on the polished rock; the wild sea dragged at her. At last she got out of reach of the angry gray water, though spume still deluged her. I breathed a sigh of relief, though her position was still far from enviable. "Virginia! Virginia! Why did I let you go?" Charlie cried. Desperately he fell to work again, mounting the magnet and tubes. Another hour went by, while I watched the shivering girl on the rock. Bobbed hair, wet and glistening, was plastered close against her head, and her clothing was torn half off. She looked utterly exhausted; it seemed to take all her ebbing energy to cling to the rock against the force of the wind and the waves that dashed against her. She looked cold, blue and trembling. The water stood higher. "The tide is rising!" Charlie exclaimed. "It will cover the rock pretty soon. If I don't get her off in time--she's lost!" * * * * * He finished twisting his wires together. "I've got it all ready," he said. "Now, I've got to find out exactly where she is, to know how to set it. Even then it's fearfully uncertain. I hate to try it, but it's the only chance. "You can find out?" "Yes. From the spectral shift and other factors. I'll have to get some other apparatus." He ran up to the laboratory, across the level field that lay black beneath the stars. He came back, panting, with spectrometer, terrestrial globe, and other articles. "The tide is higher!" he cried as he looked through the blue-rimmed circle at the girl on the rock. "She'll be swept off before long!" He mounted the spectrometer and fell to work with a will, taking observations through the telescope, adjusting prisms and diffraction gratings, reading electrometers and other apparatus, and stopping to make intricate calculations. I helped him when I could, or stared through the ring of shining blue mist, where I could see the waves breaking higher about the exhausted girl who clung to the rock. Clouds of wind-whipped spray often hid her from sight. I knew that she would not have the strength to hold on much longer against the force of the rising sea. Although driven almost to distraction by the horror of her predicament, he worked with a cool, swift efficiency. Only the pale, anxiety-drawn expression on his face showed how great was the strain. He finished the last spectrometer observation, snatched out a pad and fell to figuring furiously. "Something queer here," he said presently, frowning. "A shift of the spectrum that I can't explain by distortion through three-dimensional space alone. I don't understand it." We stared at the chilled and trembling girl on the rock. "I'm almost afraid to try it. What if something went wrong?" He turned to the terrestrial globe he had brought down and traced a line over it. He made a quick calculation on his pad, then made a fine dot on the globe with the pencil point. "Here she is. On a rock some miles off Point Eugenia, on the coast of the Mexican State of Lower California. Most lonely spot in the world. No chance for a rescue. We must-- "My god!" he screamed in sudden horror. "Look!" * * * * * I looked through the blue-ringed window and saw the girl. Green water was surging about her waist. It seemed that each wave almost tore her off. Then I saw that she was struggling with something. A great coiling tentacle, black and leathery and glistening, was thrust up out of the green water. It wavered deliberately through the air and grasped at the girl. She seemed to scream, though we could hear nothing. She beat at the monster, weakly, vainly. "She's gone!" cried Charlie. "An octopus!" I said. "A giant cuttlefish!" Virginia made a sudden fierce effort. With a strength that I had not thought her chilled limbs possessed, she tore away from the dreadful creature and clambered higher on the rock. But still a hideous black tentacle clung about her ankle, tugging at her, drawing her back despite her desperate struggle to break free. "I've got to try it!" Charlie said, determination flashing in his eyes. "It's a chance!" He closed a switch. His new coils sung out above the old one. X-ray tubes flickered beside the blue fire that ringed the window. He adjusted his rheostats and closed the circuit through the new magnet. A curtain of blue flame was drawn quickly between us and the round, fire-rimmed window. A huge ball of blue fire hung, about the meteorite and the instruments. For minutes it hung there, while Charlie, perspiring, worked desperately with the apparatus. Then it expanded; became huge. It exploded noiselessly, in a great flash of sapphire flame, then vanished completely. Meteor, bench, and apparatus were gone! In the light of the stars we could make out the huge crater the meteorite had torn, with a few odds and ends of equipment scattered about it. But all the apparatus Charlie had set up, connected with the meteoric stone, had disappeared. He was dumbfounded, staggered with disappointment. "Virginia! Virginia!" he called out, in a hopeless tone. "No, she isn't here. It didn't draw her through. I've failed. And we can't even see her any more!" * * * * * Desperately I searched for consolation for him. "Maybe the octopus won't hurt her," I offered. "They say that most of the stories of their ferocity are somewhat exaggerated." "If the monster doesn't get her, the tide will!" he said bitterly. "I made a miserable failure of it! And I don't know why! I can't understand it!" Apathetically, he picked up his pad and held it in the light of his electric lantern. "Something funny about this equation. The shift of the spectrum lines can't be accounted for by distortion through space alone." With wrinkled brow, he stared for many minutes at the bit of paper he held in the white circle of light. Suddenly he seized a pencil and figured rapidly. "I have it! The light was bent through time! I should have recognized these space-time coordinates." He calculated again. "Yes. The scene we saw in that circle of light was distant from us not only in space but in time. The _Valhalla_ probably hasn't sunk yet at all. We were looking into the future!" "But how can that be? Seeing things before they happen!" I have the profoundest respect for Charlie King's mathematical genius. But when he said that I was frankly incredulous. "Space and time are only relative terms. Our material universe is merely the intersection of tangled world lines of geodesics in a four-dimensional continuum. Space and time have no meaning independently of each other. Jeans says. 'A terrestrial astronomer may reckon that the outburst on Nova Persei occurred a century before the great fire of London, but an astronomer on the Nova may reckon with equal accuracy that the great fire occurred a century before the outburst on the Nova.' The field of this meteorite deflected light waves so that we saw them earlier, according to our conventional ideas of time, than they originated. We saw several hours into the future. "And the amplified field of the magnet, though strong enough to move Virginia through space, was not sufficiently powerful to draw her back to us across time. Yet she must have felt the pull. Some dreadful thing may have happened. The problem is rather complicated." * * * * * He lifted his pencil again. In the glow of the little electric lantern I saw his lean young face tense with the fierce effort of his thought. His pencil raced across the little pad, setting down symbols that I could make nothing of. My own thoughts were racing. Seeing into the future was a rather revolutionary idea to me. My mind is conservative; I have always been sceptical of the more fantastic ideas suggested by science. But Charlie seemed to know what he was talking about. In view of the marvelous things he had done that night, it seemed hardly fair to doubt him now. I decided to accept his astounding statement at face value and to follow the adventure through. He lifted his pencil and consulted the luminous dial of his wrist watch. "We saw that last scene some twelve hours and forty minutes before it happened--to put it in conventional language. The distortion of the time coordinates amounted to that." In the light of dawn--for we had been all night at the meteor pit, and silver was coming in the east--he looked at me with fierce resolve in his eyes. "Hammond, that gives us over twelve hours to get to Virginia!" "You mean to go? But just twelve hours! That's better than the transcontinental record--to say nothing of the time it would take to find a little rock in the Pacific!" "We have the _Golden Gull_! She's as fast as any ship we've ever flown." "But we can't take the _Gull_! Those alterations haven't been made. And that new engine! A bear-cat for power, but it may go dead any second. The _Gull_ can fly, but she isn't safe!" "Safety be damned! I've got to get to Virginia, and get there in the next twelve hours!" "The _Gull_ will fly, but--" "All right. Please help me get off!" "Help you off? It's a fool thing to do! But if you go, I do!" "Thanks, Hammond. Awfully!" He gripped my hand. "We've got to make it!" * * * * * With a last glance into the gaping pit from which we had dug the marvelous stone, we turned and ran across to the hangars. As we ran the sun came above the sea in the east: its first rays struck us like a fiery lance. The mechanics had not yet appeared. Charlie pushed the doors back, and we ran out the trim little _Golden Gull_, beautiful with her slender wing and her graceful, tapering lines. I seized the starting crank and Charlie sprang into the cockpit. I cranked until the mechanism was droning dismally, and pulled the lever that engaged it with the engine. I had been in too much haste to get up the proper speed, and the powerful new engine failed to fire. Charlie almost cried with vexation while I was cranking again. This time the motor coughed and fell into a steady, vibrant roar. With the wind from the propeller screaming about me, I disengaged the crank and stood waiting while the motor warmed. Charlie gave it scant time to do so before he motioned me to kick out the blocks. I tumbled into the enclosed cockpit beside him, he gave the ship the gun, and we roared across the field. In five minutes we were flying west, at a speed just under three hundred miles per hour. Charlie was crouched over the stick, scanning the instrument board, and flying the _Gull_ almost at her top speed. Again and again his eyes went to the little clock on the panel. "Twelve hours and forty minutes," he said. "And an hour gone already! We're got to be there by five minutes after six." We were flying over Louisiana when the oil line clogged. The engine heated dangerously. Reluctantly, Charlie cut off the ignition, and fell in a swift spiral to an open field. "We're got to fix it!" he said. "Another hour gone! And we needed every minute!" "This new engine! It's powerful enough, but we should have had time to overhaul it, and make those changes." * * * * * Charlie landed with his usual skill, and we fell to work in desperate haste. A grizzled farmer, a wad of tobacco in his cheek and three ragged urchins at his heels, stopped to watch us. He had just been to his mailbox, and had a morning paper in his hand. Charlie questioned him about the storm. "Storm-center nears the American coast," he read in a nasal drawl. "Greatest storm of year drives shipping upon west coast. Six vessels reported lost. _S. S. Valhalla_, disabled, sends S. O. S. "A thousand lives are the estimated toll to-night of the most terrific storm of the year, which is sweeping toward the Pacific coast, driving all shipping before it. Radiograms from the _Valhalla_ at 5 P. M. report that she is disabled and in danger. It is doubtful that rescue vessels can reach her through the storm." We got the engine repaired, took off again. Charlie looked at the little clock. "Five minutes to ten. Eight hours and ten minutes left, and we've got a darn long ways to go." We had to stop at San Antonio, Texas, to replenish gasoline and oil. "Ten minutes lost!" Charlie complained as we took off. "And that monster--waiting in the future to drag Virginia to a hideous death!" Two hours later the plane developed trouble in the ignition system. The motor was new, with several radical changes that we had introduced to increase power and lessen weight. As I had objected to Charlie, we had not done enough experimental work on it to perfect it. * * * * * We limped into the field at El Paso and spent another priceless half-hour at work. I got some sandwiches at a luncheon counter beside the field, and listened a moment to a radio loudspeaker there. "Many thousands are dead," came the crisp, metallic voice of the announcer, "as a result of the storm now raging on the Pacific coast, the worst in several years. The storm-center is spending its force on the coastal regions to-day. Millions of dollars in damage are reported in cities from San Francisco to Manzanillo, Mexico. "The greatest disaster of the storm is the loss of the passenger liner _Valhalla_, of the Red Star Line. It is believed to have collided with the abandoned hulk of an Italian-owned tramp freighter, the _Roma_, which was left by its crew yesterday in a sinking condition. Radiograms from the liner ceased three hours ago, when she was said to be sinking. The officers doubted that her boats could be launched in such a sea--" I waited to hear no more. Charlie checked our route while we were stopped. And we took off; we crossed the Rio Grande and flew across the rocky, brush-scattered hills of Mexico, in a direct line for the rock in the sea. "If anything happens so we have to land again--well, it's just too bad," Charlie said grimly. "But we've got to go this way. It's something over six hundred miles in a straight line. Fifteen minutes to four, now. We have to average nearly three hundred miles an hour to get there." He was silent and intent over his maps and instruments as we flew on over the lofty Sierra Madre Range, and over a long slope down to the Gulf of California. Head-winds beset us as we were over the stretch of blue water, and we flew on into a storm. "We had hardly time to make it, without the wind against us," Charlie said. "If it holds us back many miles--well, it just mustn't!" * * * * * Purple lightning flickered ominously in the mass of blue storm-clouds that hung above the mountainous peninsula of Lower California. I had a qualm about flying into it in our untested machine. But Charlie leaned tensely forward and sent the _Golden Gull_ on at the limit of her speed. Gray vapor swirled about us, rent with livid streaks of lightning. Thunder crashed and rumbled above the roar of our racing engine. Wild winds screeched in the struts; rain and hail beat against us. The plane rose and fell; she was swirled about like a falling leaf. The stick struggled in Charlie's hands like a living thing. With lips tightened to a thin line, he fought silently, fiercely, desperately. Suddenly we were sucked down until I had an uneasy feeling at the pit of my stomach. I saw the grim outline of a bare mountain peak dangerously close below us, shrouded in wind-whipped mist. In sudden alarm I shouted, "We'd better get out of this, Charlie! We can't live in it long!" In the roar of the storm he did not hear me, and I shouted again. He turned to face me, after a glance at the clock. "We've less than an hour, Hammond. We've got to go on!" I sank back in my seat. The plane rolled and tossed until I thanked my lucky stars for the safety strap. In nervous anxiety I watched Charlie bring the ship up again, and fight his way on through the storm. For an eternity, it seemed, we battled through a chaos of wind-driven mist, bright with purple lightning and shaken with crashing thunder. Charlie struggled with the controls until he was dripping with perspiration. He must have been utterly worn out, after thirty-six hours of exhausting effort. A dozen times I despaired of life. The compass had gone to spinning crazily; we dived through the rain until we could pick up landmarks below. Three times a great bare peak loomed suddenly up ahead of us, and Charlie averted collision only by zooming suddenly upward. Then slate-gray water was beneath us, running in white-crested mountains. I knew that we were at last out over the Pacific. "We've passed Point Eugenia," Charlie said. "It can't be far, now. But we have only fifteen minutes left. Fifteen minutes to get to her--before the attraction of the meteor jerks her away, perhaps to a horrible fate." * * * * * We flew low and fast over the racing waves. Charlie looked over his charts and made a swift calculation. He changed our course a bit and we flew on at top speed. We scanned the vast, mad expanse of sea below the blue-gray clouds. Here and there were lines of white breakers, but nowhere did we see a rock with a girl upon it. Presently the green outline of an island appeared out of the wild water on our right. "That's Del Tiburon," Charlie said. "We missed the rock." He swung the plane about and we flew south over the hastening waves. I looked at the little clock. It showed two minutes to six. I turned to Charlie. "Seven minutes!" he whispered grimly. On and on we flew, in a wide circle. The motor roared loud. An endless expanse of racing waves unreeled below us. The little hand crawled around the dial. One minute past six. Only four minutes to go. We saw a speck of white foam on the mad gray water. It was miles away, almost on the horizon. We plunged toward it, motor bellowing loud. Five miles a minute we flew. The white fleck became a black rock smothered in snowy foam. On we swept, and over the rock, with bullet-like speed. As we plunged by, I saw Virginia's slender form, tattered, brine-soaked, straggling in the hideous tentacles of the monster octopus. It was the same terrible scene that we had viewed, through the amazing phenomenon of distortion of light through space-time, four thousand miles away and twelve hours before. In a few minutes the time would come when Charlie had ended our view of the scene by his attempt to draw the girl through the fourth dimension to our apparatus in Florida. What terrible thing might happen then? Charlie brought the ship about so quickly that we were flung against the sides. Down we came toward the mad waves in a swift glide. In sudden apprehension, I dropped my hand on his shoulder. "Man, you can't land in a sea like that! It's suicide!" Without a word, he shook off my hand and continued our steep glide toward the rock. I drew my breath in apprehension of a crash. * * * * * I do not blame Charlie for what happened. He is as skilful a pilot as I know. It was a mad freak of the sea that did the thing. The gray waste of mountainous, white-crested waves rose swiftly up to meet us, with the rock with the girl clinging to it just to our right. The _Golden Gull_ struck the crest of a wave, buried herself in the foam, and plunged down the long slope to the trough. We rose safely to the crest of the oncoming roller, and I saw the black outline of the rock not a dozen yards away. Charlie had landed with all his skill. It was not his fault that the blustering wind caught the ship as she reached the crest of the wave and flung her sidewise toward the rock. It is no fault of his that the white-capped mountain of racing green water completed what the wind had begun and hurled the frail plane crashing on the rock. I have a confused memory of the wild plunge at the mercy of the wave, of my despair as I realized that we were being wrecked. I must have been knocked unconscious when we struck. The next I remember I was opening my eyes to find myself on the rock, Charlie's strong arm on my shoulder. I was soaked with icy brine and my head was aching from a heavy blow. Virginia, shivering and blue, was perched beside us. I could see no sign of the plane: the mighty sea had swept away what was left of it. Clinging to the lee side of the rock I saw the black tentacles of the giant octopus--waiting for a wave to dash us to its mercy. "All right, Hammond?" Charlie inquired anxiously. "I'm afraid you got a pretty nasty bump on the head. About all I could do to fish you out before the _Gull_ was swept away." * * * * * He helped me to a better position to withstand the force of the great roller that came plunging down upon us like a moving mountain. Virginia was in his arms, too exhausted to do more than cling to him. "What can we do?" I sputtered, shaking water from my head. "Not a thing! We're in a pretty bad fix, I imagine. In a few seconds we will feel the attraction of the meteor's field--the force with which I tried to draw Virginia to the crater through the fourth dimension. I don't know what will happen; we may be jerked out of space altogether. And if that doesn't get us, the tide and the octopus will!" His voice was drowned in the roar of the coming wave. A mountain of water deluged us. Half drowned, I clung to the rock against the mad water. Then blinding blue light flashed about me. A sharp crash rang in my ears, like splintering glass. I reeled, and felt myself falling headlong. * * * * * I brought up on soft sand. I sat up, dumbfounded, and opened my eyes. I was sitting on the steep sandy side of a conical pit. Charlie and Virginia were sprawled beside me, looking as astonished as I felt. Charlie got to his knees and lifted the limp form of the girl in his arms. Something snapped in my brain. The sand-walled pit was suddenly familiar. I got to my feet and clambered out of it. I saw that we were on our own landing field. Astonishingly, we were back in the meteor crater. Charlie's vanished apparatus was scattered about us. I saw the gray side of the rough iron meteorite itself, half-buried in the sand at the bottom of the pit. "What--what happened?" I demanded of Charlie. "Don't you see? Simple enough. I should have thought of it before. The field of the meteorite brought Virginia--and us--through to this point in space. But it could not bring us back through time; instead, the apparatus itself was jerked forward through time. That is why it vanished. We got here just twelve hours and forty minutes after I closed the switch, since we had been looking that far into the future. The mathematical explanation--" "That's enough for me!" I said hastily. "We better see about a warm, dry bed for Virginia, and some hot soup or something." * * * * * Now the rough gray meteorite, in a neat glass case, rests above the mantel in the library of a beautiful home where I am a frequent guest. I was there one evening, a few days ago, when Charlie King fell silent in one of his fits of mathematical speculation. "Einstein again?" I chaffingly inquired. He raised his brown eyes and looked at me. "Hammond, since relativity enabled us to find the Meteor Girl, you ought to be convinced!" Virginia--whom her husband calls the Meteor Girl--came laughingly to the rescue. "Yes, Mr. Hammond, what do you think of Einstein now?" The Reader's Corner [Illustration: The Reader's Corner] _Now--Internationale Scientific Society_ Dear Editor: The genial editor of this "Astounding" publication has granted me a few words directed to all readers who may be interested. The Science Correspondence Club, with the inception of the new year, will operate under an entirely new policy, most important of which is the change of name to Internationale Scientific Society. The archaic and tedious correspondence will be a minor consideration in the new policy. Our publications and form letter methods of communication keep all members fully informed as to up-to-date news of the Society. Affiliation with the "Verein für Raumschiffarht" in Berlin has been accomplished also. This makes available to all "Internationale Scientific" members the latest news from the forefront of science in Germany, with especial reference to latest rocket interplanetary developments. Constant improvements on our monthly journal are always sought for. Contributors of well-known reputation are: Willy Ley, Earl D. Streeter, R. P. Starzl, Robt. A. Wait, Dr. Wm. Tyler Olcott, Lilith Lorraine and Dr. D. W. Morehouse, president of Drake University, Iowa. This society is endeavoring to bring the scientific news and personal contact to all scientifically inclined laymen of the world. Many prominent men in science and Science Fiction are honorary members, as is Mr. Bates, Editor of Astounding Stories. All information may be obtained from the business office at 8834 Michigan Ave., Chicago, Illinois. Thank you--Walter L. Dennis, Treas. _Advice to Advertise_ Dear Editor: Astounding Stories makes me tickle the typewriter keys to tell you what I think about your magazine. Is it absolutely without a doubt the best magazine on the market, and that means something. I have only been acquainted with Astounding Stories since May--since then I have had greater pleasure in reading them than anything else. To my sad disappointment I missed the first four issues, but I've read every story since. The first story I read was "The Atom Smasher," and I considered this very good. The majority of your stories are very good. Occasionally a poor one will mix in, but I know we all regard this as only a slight error. I suggest that it would be to your advantage to advertise Astounding Stories more than you do because it was by mere accident that I came in contact with it, and it has happened to others the same way. You would see the increased number of copies sold if you make special advertising a part of your business. The reason I suggest this is because I know what your future readers are missing if they don't read Astounding Stories. Here's wishing you success in continuing to publish the best stories.--Walter Oathout, 91 College Ave., Troy, New York. "_Cut That Romantic Stuff_" Dear Editor: I am accepting your offer to come over to "The Readers' Corner," and am coming over in two ways, as you will see by my address. First of all, I must say that I raise my hat to you and your coworkers for having brought out another Science Fiction magazine--a real benefaction to readers like myself who thrive, as it were, on such stories. I can tell you my eyes grew big with delight when I saw the first number--to me--of Astounding Stories. Mille mercis. Why don't you try publishing a thick Quarterly? My favorite authors are A. Hyatt Verrill, J. W. Campbell, Jr., Miles J. Breuer, M. D., Captain S. P. Meek, Ray Cummings, Arthur J. Berks and Edmond Hamilton. If you get stories by these for your magazine it will continue to prosper, as they are excellent writers, and the first four have fine science in their tales. I have had only three copies of Astounding Stories, and the tales I like best are: "Vandals of the Stars," the serial "Brigands of the Moon," "Monsters of Moyen"--this was most interesting--"The Ray of Madness," "The Soul Snatcher," and "The Jovian Jest." This last, though short, I thought to be very good, and it gave one furiously to think, too. While I like all kinds of Science Fiction, I have a special preference for interplanetary and fourth dimension stories. Now having handed out one or two bouquets, I am going to sling some brickbats. Doggone it, but why don't you cut out some of that romantic stuff in your stories? Goodness knows, but one has enough of love and the ubiquitous heroine in other tales without this sentimentality entering into Science Fiction. Indeed, that is the biggest criticism I have of Astounding Stories, and I do honestly wish that if you have absolutely got to give the stuff you would confine it to half the stories. Half and half--that's fair, isn't it? If you will publish this letter, which I should like you to do, it would draw to the notice of the other readers that I am always very pleased to correspond with any of them on science and science stories. Now I'll dry up, wishing you the very best of sincere wishes for the continued success of your--or rather "our"--little treasure, Astounding Stories.--Glyn Owens, 20, Rugby Rd., Newport, Man., Canada. _Nossir--No "Half Pints"_ Dear Editor: I have been reading Astounding Stories for some time, although this is the first time I have written, and I want to say it is one swell mag. I like all of its stories, though I like the ones of adventure on other planets and in strange lands best. But listen, I don't want any by a few half pint authors I know of that write for a few other quarter pint magazines. Let's have some more by such as Victor Rousseau, Capt. S. P. Meek, Arthur J. Burks, Murry Leinster and R. P. Starzl. Also Ray Cummings. Here's to them and to the best mag on the market. Remember, no half pints.--Boyd Goodman, 2801 Laclede St., Dallas, Texas. "_Out of Curiosity_" Dear Editor: Seeing your magazine on the newsstands the other day, I purchased it out of curiosity to see whether it was just another magazine or something out of the ordinary. Being a reader of other Science Fiction magazines, I was surprised to see how much better Astounding Stories turned out to be than the rest. Ever since that first issue I have been a steady reader of "our" magazine. I think that one of the best improvements that could be made is to cut all the pages even. Wesso sure is a dandy artist. Try not to lose him. I, for one, am very much in favor of reprints. I think they would very much increase our circle of readers. Some of your best authors are: S. P. Meek, V. Rousseau, Ray Cummings and S. P. Wright. Let's have some more novels by those authors, please.--E. F. Hittleman, 3400 Wayne Ave., Bronx, N. Y. "_Or What Have You?_" Dear Editor: I've just finished reading the October issue of Astounding Stories and am convinced that the magazine is getting better and better. I'd like to take back what I said in my first letter about interplanetary stories being ruled out, because I notice they are improving. They seem more realistic and true. I like "Jetta of the Lowlands." Something different, don't you think? Seems strange to imagine what the ocean bottoms might be like. And how can "Stolen Brains" help but be good when Captain Meek brings his Philo Vance to the rescue--that intelligent Dr. Bird. (This may sound like sarcasm, but it's meant to be praise.) I always read Dr. Bird first of all. "Prisoners on the Electron" is just what I like. Somewhere I read a story similar to it--that of life on an electron. I don't doubt one bit that there can be life on such minute surfaces, which also gives me an idea that the earth may be an electron to some gigantic planet which is so large that we cannot comprehend its size. Couldn't that be possible? I still find that among the contributors there is only one girl besides myself. Letters sent to me from readers are all from men or boys. Am I so different from other girls? Or what have you?--Gertrude Hemken, 5730 So. Ashland Ave., Chicago, Illinois. _Only Fiction_ Dear Editor: I am writing a second letter criticizing some of the later stories you published. I think Astounding Stories is steadily improving. In the June issue, "The Moon Master" takes first place. Other first place stories are: "The Forgotten Planet," (July); "The Second Satellite," (August); "Marooned Under the Sea," (Sept); "The Invisible Empire," (Oct). I agree with Mr. W. Gelman. You ought to have coupons to fill out on reprints and see whether or not the majority vote for reprints. I saw a mistake in "Prisoners on the Electron." The author states that four months of time passed on the electron during fifteen seconds Earth time. That is wrong, because electrons revolve several thousand times per second around their nucleus or sun, so by the time Karl Danzig fished out Aaron and Nanette they would be as old as the hills. I would like to know if the story, "Marooned Under the Sea," was found near New Zealand or is it just fiction? Another thing I want to say is that you have too many serials.--Geo. Brandes, 141 South Church St., Schenectady, New York. _This Is Treason!_ Dear Editor: This is the first time I have written to the "Corner," but I wished to call your attention to a story I have just finished reading in another magazine--"Skylark Three," by Edward E. Smith. I think it is by far better than anything I have read in your magazine. I thought you might be able to get something on this line. Of course, some of the theories are rather far fetched. I think this is the best story I have read for years, and hope that if Smith writes any more, I will be able to read them.--D. R. Guthrie, P. O. Box 23, Copeland, Idaho. _Announcement_ Dear Editor: Several months ago an announcement was made in this magazine concerning The Scienceers, an organization of scientifically-minded young men, with headquarters in New York City. We wish to thank you for publishing this notice, which resulted in the acquisition of several new members. We are all readers of Astounding Stories, and consider it the premier magazine in the Science Fiction field. The purpose of our organization, as taken from the constitution, is as follows: To promote informal fellowship among persons interested in science, and to foster discussion and debate on modern discoveries, theories, and projects in the realm of science. The only requirements for membership in The Scienceers are that applicants must be over sixteen years of age, and must show a hearty willingness to cooperate with the other members in discussing theories, etc., in science. The member of the club has the companionship and friendship of other persons interested in the same activities. He will find a congenial atmosphere upon his arrival and will have a wonderful time in helping the club to be bigger and better. He will be as well informed on the latest events in science as though he were taking a course in it, which in reality he will be doing. He will have access to the club's library, consisting of several hundred books and magazines on science and Science Fiction. In our library are the latest Science Fiction books published, such as "Red Snow," by F. W. Moxley, "The Monster Men," by E. R. Burroughs and "The World Below," by S. Fowler Wright. In our collection we have reprints that we feel sure many of our present Science Fiction fans have not read. We have a great many scientific books and magazines. The club buys regularly Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Science and Invention, and others. Those who would like to visit the clubroom will be gladly received. The clubroom is at 266 E. Van Cortland Ave. Get off at Mosholu Parkway station on the Jerome Avenue line. Our secretary, Allen Glasser, of 1610 University Ave., New York City, will receive all inquiries for information. The Scienceers have a branch in Clearwater, Florida, and another in Temple, Texas. The former may be reached by writing to Mr. Guy Cole, Secretary, Clearwater, Florida, and the latter by writing to Mr. Gabriel Kirschner, Box 301, Temple, Texas.--Nathan Greenfeld, Librarian, The Scienceers, 873 Whitlock Ave, New York, N. Y. "_Abominable," "Rotten," etc._ Dear Editor: I aim for this letter to represent the hardest and reddest brickbats imaginably possible, excepting perhaps the first paragraph, not counting this prelude (warping). I have classified the stories of all issues out so far, and the results show that Victor Rousseau, Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster, Capt. Meek, Charles W. Diffin, Arthur J. Burks, Harl Vincent, S. P. Wright, R. P. Starzl, Edmond Hamilton, Miles J. Breuer, M. D., James P. Olsen, Tom Curry, S. W. Ellis and Jackson Gee are your most outstanding authors. The first seven stand head and shoulders above the other authors, though. Now for the brickbats. No kiddin'--where is your Editor's pride? We want a magazine to be proud of, don't we? Its binding is abominable. The edges are terrible: it takes ten minutes to find a certain page. The paper itself is absolutely rotten. What about the poor readers who want to have a Science Fiction library? He wants a magazine that can be bound and will look half good. Please put better grade paper in your magazine. And for goodness sake, answer in the department all questions and inquiries from the readers. Why not have a vote on this? I guarantee you that over 90% of the votes will want your answers to their personal questions. Please answer my request in "The Readers' Corner."--Ward Elmore, 3022 Avenue K, Fort Madison, Iowa. "_Pictures of the Readers_" Dear Editor: The November Astounding Stories is up to the high standard set by previous issues. For first place I nominate "The Pirate Planet," which promises to be as good as "Earth, the Marauder." The last part of "Jetta of the Lowlands" was a fitting conclusion to a great story. "Vagabonds of Space," "The Wall of Death," and "The Gray Plague" are all worthy of being ranked with your best stories. The cover illustration is one of Wesso's best, if not the best. It is a marked improvement over the October one. There's also a great improvement in the illustrations inside the book, since all except one were drawn by Wesso. I heartily approve of the suggestion of Jack Darrow, who proposes that you devote a page to your authors. Your writers are the outstanding Science Fiction authors of the day, and we should like to know something about them. If you happen to run out of new authors, you could run the Eves and pictures of some of the readers (Mr. Darrow, Mr. Kirschner, Mr. Wentzler, etc.), who contribute almost as much material as some of your authors. To be serious, though, the above make many valuable suggestions, especially Mr. Darrow, with whom I agree on almost every point. Those persons who said that the small size of Astounding Stories was insult to Science Fiction can't complain now. After October the majority of the monthly Science Fiction magazines will have the small size. The controversy over the reprint question seems to be getting warm. There are a good many letters on the subject in this issue both pro and con. In fact, there were more "con" letters in this issue than all the previous issues combined. However, the "pros" are more than holding their own, and I believe that if a vote was held they would be in the majority.--Michael Fogaris, 157 Fourth St., Passaic, N. J. _Prefers More Science_ Dear Editor: The size of Astounding Stories now is O. K. Only it would be better if it was thicker than it is, even if you have to raise the price five cents. I like the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories and wish you would have them in your magazine. In the November issue, "The Wall of Death" wasn't any good; "The Pirate Planet" was good: "The Destroyer" was fair; "The Gray Plague" was very good; "Vagabonds of Space" was excellent, but I didn't like the ending. "Jetta of the Lowlands" was fair. I don't like the stories by Victor Rousseau very much. I don't want any reprints and I think you should cut the pages even. I wish you would have some true Science Fiction stories with more science in them.--Alvin Wasserman, 339 N. 6th St., Allentown, Pa. "_Fits Book Case_" Dear Editor: I have read every issue of Astounding Stories yet produced. Keep the magazine the same size, as it conveniently fits in a book rack or book case. I like stories on chemistry and physics, also stories narrating the exploits of Dr. Bird. I think your November issue is the best one yet. My favorite story so far is "The Gray Plague." I did not like "Beyond the Heaviside Layer." The illustrations are fine. Well, I guess it's about time for me to sign off.--Henry Seitz, 1732 Summerfield St., Brooklyn, N. Y. _Suggestions from Australia_ Dear Editor: I have accepted your invitation to join "The Readers' Corner" and give criticism on your magazine. I will criticize the recent stories first, and divide them into three classes: good, medium and bad. August: "The Lord of Space," "The Second Satellite," "Silver Dome," "The Flying City," good. "The Planet of Dread," medium. September: "Marooned under the Sea," "The Terrible Tentacles of L-472," good. "Problem in Communication," medium. "Murder Machine," bad. Serials: "Brigands of the Moon," good. "Murder Madness," good, but I don't consider it a suitable story for this type of magazine. "Earth, the Marauder," good, but the end was too hurried. I wonder why the gnomes of Luar were brought into the story; I don't see that they serve any useful purpose there. There seems to be a hand-rail around the submarines on the cover of the April number. If this is so, it is out of proportion. And don't you think that such monsters as those in "The Moon Master" would need more to eat than just the few herbivorous animals that could exist on the fungus vegetation? I think that your magazine would be much better if printed on smoother paper and cut evenly. I am sure that no one would mind the extra cost of the book. And why not call "The Readers' Corner" something more appropriate, such as the "Observatory," or the "Microscope," or something, anyway, that deals with science?--P. Leadbeater, Drysdale, Victoria, Australia. _Thanks Very Much_ Dear Editor: I would like to shake hands with Mr. P. Schuyler Miller. He has given us such conclusive and unopposable proof for reprints in his letter printed in the November issue, that there is hardly anything more to be said. All we ask (by "we," I mean those thousands of Readers who are eagerly waiting for a story of which they have heard so much) is one good reprint. That is, one a year. During the year 1930, Astounding Stories has published five novels. Can you not publish four new novels and one reprint in 1931? It amounts to much the same thing. Also, there are other magazines which publish Science Fiction and these would see to it that the good authors did not starve. The bad ones, however, deserve to. Especially when some poor misguided Editor accepts their stuff. No, Mr. Bates, I am not placing you in that category. The stories you publish certainly show that you are not misguided. Quite the opposite. At a vote taken among the members of the Scienceers last week, the results showed that reprints were unanimously wanted. In my opinion, Astounding Stories is best fitted for the publishing of reprints because of the high standard it has preserved throughout the year of its existence. I have been directed, Mr. Bates, because of the great work you have accomplished in popularizing science through Science Fiction, and because of the keen enjoyment you have given the Scienceers during 1930, to inform you that you have been elected an honorary member of the Scienceers. The Scienceers is now taking a vote among all its members to find out their favorite stories of 1930. That is, in Science Fiction. We want to find the five best serials, and the ten best short stories of the year. First returns indicate that Astounding Stories captured most of the honors. "Murder Madness," "Brigands of the Moon" and "Earth, the Marauder" having places among the serials. About six of the ten short stories were also published in Astounding Stories. I close with best wishes from all Scienceers for a bigger and better year for Astounding Stories. Happy birthday!--Nathan Greenfeld, President, Scienceers, 873 Whitlock Avenue, New York, New York. _Words Are Weak_ Dear Editor: It was a terrible storm! The thunder roared; the lightning flashed; the wind howled; the tempest beat through the night, bearing on its fleet winds of darkness a torrent of driving, splattering rain. Splintering darts of lightning crackled through the raging storm, their crystalline reflection caught in the driving sheets of watery spray; their swift illumination lighting but dimly a rocky shore beaten and tossed by black lashing waves of the angry ocean. And, upon that ragged, element-swept shore, cowered the Searcher. He crouched there in the darkness, his muffled figure swaying to the fierce tug of the wind and the impact of the driving rain. Water ran in streams from his drenched clothing. The icy breath of the wind pierced through to his soul like so many needles of death. Placing a gaunt, weary hand above his brow he strained his vision to pierce out into the darkness. And suddenly the storm ceased. The rain disappeared with a last futile spray, and the dark clouds overhead parted sullenly to reveal a cold frozen moon of silver. The thousands of tiny aberrations in the tossing wavelets on the ocean's bottom sent steely reflection of the moon's luminescence in sparkling sheens to the Searcher's eyes. For long he hung there motionless, a gaunt shadow peering into the distant darkness of the horizon. But abruptly-- He started. He has sighted an object floating inward upon the tide. Running swiftly along the shore, he seized it eagerly as it fell to the shore at his feet. With a wild cry of exuberant delight he threw himself down upon the sands to scan its pages. It was a copy of Astounding Stories! Yes! Out of the great ocean of magazine fiction it had come to the Searcher's eyes, the magazine supreme--Astounding Stories! A magazine which was new, a magazine which expressed something new in an entirely different way! A thing super-ordinary, it was--a boon to the tired fiction reader. Yessirree! Something new and in a different way! You bet that's what I like, and that's why I halted, hearkened, and hastened to the newsstands to buy that new magazine, Astounding Stories. New authors!--a breath of delicious novelty!--the magazine of to-morrow's romance and the super-science thereof! Why, it's almost too good to be true, and here am I, ready to take that new mag to hand and make it our own. Yes, I think we can call it "our" own, for with the installation of Astounding Stories comes the new epic of the magazine, a magazine which is made by the reader. Sure nuff--our wants and whims rule the magazine; so it's surely "ours," and I mean possessively! So, Readers all, I'm going to take my part of the magazine this day and operate on it, no matter what Mr. Bates thinks or cares about it. Yes, sir. First, I'm creating a new department of a page which prints the picture of the most popular author (as voted for by the reader) and which gives a brief synopsis of his life. Once his picture has been printed, that's enough. Next time a new author. And then I'm filling that magazine with new "different" stories, daring in aspect beyond ordinary Science Fiction, more glorious by far than any predecessors. And now, the rest of you Readers, what are you going to do with your share? As I have said, I am going to do what I want with my part even if we have to split up the magazine and pass a page all around. There's just a lot of you Readers who look at a magazine, and, because it isn't your ideal, pass it up and go down the line passing up all the magazines. Take it from me, you'll never find your ideal. Savvy? The only way to get that ideal is to step in and take a hand. Make your ideal! A magazine must be fashioned to the reader's wants! The fact is our weapon, and believe me I'm beaning Mr. Bates a smacking good one with it. As I said, the magazine is ours, and my part in it surely is going to be more daring in tone, thought and structure than any paltry nowaday Science Fiction! Reach out into the imagination, stretch your faintest and most super-ordinary scientific hypothesis to its vaguest straining point, and produce-- A real, honest-to-goodness, glorious he-man action magazine of Science Fiction! I mean it! And that's how my page is gonna be, and I'll bet that I have made my page of that future idealistic magazine, merely by writing this letter! How about it, Mr. Bates? Aren't we all signed up as associate editors for the future "ideal magazine?"--Tom Olog, 940--5th St., San Bernardino, Calif. _Right! One on Us_ Dear Editor: I have been following with great interest Ray Cummings' latest piece, "Jetta of the Lowlands," which is rather unique in its ideas. In a recent issue Mr. Cummings explained to his readers that the flyer was made invisible by bending the light rays around it. This in itself is quite plausible, but when he tells us he could see the land below them, and the other flyer, we have to draw a line. It is quite plain that if the light is bent away from the hull of the flyer that no light will come to the eyes within, and that the invisibility will be more of a hindrance than an advantage. However, it was a good story and we know that authors cannot be perfect any more than ordinary humans can. I am wishing you the best of luck for your second year, which you will soon enter!--W. Johnston, New York City. _A Riddle_ Dear Editor: I have only read two issues of Astounding Stories. These two have determined me to continue reading A. S. until I grow broke or give up my ghost. The only brickbats that you are going to get are: Use a better grade of paper and bind the magazines more securely. Your stories are O. K. In fact there is only one story in the two issues (October and November), that I did not give a darn about, and that was "The Extra Man," by Jackson Gee. As I have been a reader of Science Fiction for the past four years I think that I know a little about a good story when I read one. And last but not least, I have a riddle to ask you. Question: What is the difference between an egg and a copy of Astounding Stories? Answer: When an egg falls it busts. But when a copy of Astounding Stories falls only the cover comes off. A steady reader from now on.--Edward Anderson, 929 S. Westlake Ave., Los Angeles, Calif. "_High Literary Quality_" Dear Editor: Just a few words to express my appreciation of the consistently high standard of stories which have so far appeared in Astounding Stories. I was mainly inspired to write to you by those two fine stories, "Brigands of the Moon," by Ray Cummings and "Murder Madness," by Murray Leinster. The former was one of the year's best interplanetary stories, and the latter a very fine adventure yarn. As well as being of scientific interest, these stories held my interest to the end by reason of their high literary quality and the fact that they did not lack excitement. I am afraid that these two qualities are lacking in a large number of Science Fiction stories. I would suggest that you accept these stories as a standard for the magazine.--A. M. D. Pender, 201, Red Lion Road, Tolworth, Surbiton, Surrey, England. _Expert Testimony_ Dear Editor: We had quite a little discussion at a recent meeting of The Scienceers as to why all of us consider Astounding Stories the best Science Fiction magazine printed to-day. One reason to which all of us agreed was your endless variety of good continued stories. They always have a new twist about them. I read a number of Science Fiction magazines each month. None of them comes anywhere near Astounding Stories as to the quality of the stories printed. On both long and short stories they rank way below the Astounding standard. Your best writer is Ray Cummings, with Harl Vincent and R. F. Starzl close behind. I consider "Vagabonds of space," by Harl Vincent, as the best story I have read so far. Ask Mr. Vincent to give us a sequel.--Herbert Smith, Sec., Scienceers, 2791 Grand Concourse, Bronx, New York City. "_Heads My List_" Dear Editor: I'm accepting your kind invitation to come over to "The Readers' Corner" and express my opinion of your magazine. I like it immensely. I read all the Science Fiction I can, and your magazine heads my list. I think the serial "The Pirate Planet," is as interesting a story as any I've read. Astounding Stories improves with every issue.--Dorothea Cutler, P.O. Box 122, Mesa, Arizona. _Two Problems_ Dear Editor: My last letter was entirely commendatory, but this time I am losing the full force of my critical powers (?) on the story "Marooned Under the Sea," by Paul Ernst. In this story the characters descend to the depths of the ocean by means of a large glass sphere. Mr. Ernst mentions the terrific strain on the supporting cable caused by the weight of the sphere. He quite overlooks the fact that it would float. As a matter of fact the sphere, not counting its contents, weighs about 3,511,520 lbs.--less than an equal amount of water. Hard to believe, but true, as the figures show. The formula for the volume of a sphere is V equals pi 1/2 diameter cubed. It is a pretty little problem. Also, there was no need to break the helmets of the Quabos, since the hoses could be cut with an ax. However, it was a fine story. Let's have more like it. Here is another problem. X equals wonderful. Y equals superb. Z equals marvelous. XYZ equals Astounding Stories. Yes? No? You are getting many requests to change your size. Don't do it. As it is now, it is just the size to carry conveniently, or put in your pocket. It is easier to read, too. Don't change your grade of paper, either. Glazed paper is hard on the eyes. I join my fervent prayers to those who wish the edges cut smooth, however. It is hard to turn to the page you want, with the deckle edge you now have. "Earth, the Marauder" was wonderful. Too bad it wasn't longer. "The Pirate Planet" is fine. Dr. Bird is keeping up the good work. Some of his stories are a bit far-fetched, but that is no drawback. I notice that some authors repeat themselves. I read "Brigands of the Moon," by Cummings, and also his story, "Tarrano the Conqueror." The weapons used in both stories are identical--Hugh M. Gilmore, 11307 N. Orange Drive, Hollywood, California. _Concerning "Indisputable Data"_ Dear Editor: From the time Astounding Stories first made its debut, I have been a rabid and enthusiastic reader of your excellent publication. As yet, I have never missed an issue, and only a physical incapability could compel me to. The unlimited amount of pleasure derived from your magazine is beyond compensation. Your selections are varied, interesting and based on cold, scientific logic, barring minor discrepancies. My whole-hearted approval, commendation and good wishes go to you for your remarkably fine work. Continue along the lines you are now pursuing, and I feel assured your magazine will outrival all others in circulation, as it already does in literature. Perhaps I have been a trifle flowery, but I also have a criticism to make. Why do these skeptical and scientifically disposed critics continue to waste your valuable time picking scientific flaws in various stories? Some of the amateur experts' opinions really serve as a comic sequel after a night of interesting reading. If they would only stop to realize that some of their most indisputable data is merely hypothesis, the criticisms might be more lenient. I am certainly enjoying "The Pirate Planet," by Charles W. Diffin, in the current issue. It is exceptionally well-written, and I am looking forward to more work by his pen. Other stories of merit are "Gray Denim," by Harl Vincent and "Slaves of the Dust," by S. W. Ellis. Well, I guess I've unburdened myself enough for one evening. I give you many thanks for hours of enjoyable recreation, and wish everlasting success to your illustrious magazine and the personnel that makes it possible.--Mortimer Weisinger, 266 Van Cortland Ave., Bronx, N. Y. _A Letter from England_ Dear Editor: You will no doubt be surprised at receiving a letter of appreciation of your really stunning magazine from England. And here let me say as an aside, that I think Americans are very fortunate in having publishing concerns who are not afraid of publishing a modern book like Astounding Stories. In England I am considered abnormal minded because of my fondness for Science Fiction. We have nothing like it in our bookshops, where the stereotyped thriller and prosaic life and adventure novels are popular to the majority of English Readers. Unfortunately, my file is incomplete by the June, July, August and September issues. My only kick is that "Brigands of the Moon" remains unfinished for me; and "Murder Madness" whetted my palate for more. Still I am happy to be now in regular contact with the mag and hope for more stories like the above. Now for my only brickbat. Of all the stories I have read, "The Wall of Death" is the only one I dislike; and the worst of it is that it was written by Victor Rousseau, who is one of my favorite authors. The story is horribly reminiscent of the old Greek myth of the Minotaur, which it resembles in many phases. Still, this is an exception that proves Victor Rousseau's stories to be of high average value. And I shall expect to see more of him. As regards bouquets, I can only say that each succeeding magazine is more astounding, more wonderful and of better value than the last. Of your authors I class as favorites S. P. Meek, C. W. Diffin, Murray Leinster, Harl Vincent, Ray Cummings and S. P. Wright among others, not forgetting Victor Rousseau. In the current edition I think "The Pirate Planet" is going strong; and "Gray Denim" is a peach of a story, as is also "The Ape-Men of Xloti." I like extra-dimensional stories of which I see you have one in your next issue, so roll on, January! I should like to see Astounding Stories printed more often, or else have a brother mag. The mag itself stands pat as it is, and more power to your authors' elbows! You will please excuse my bad penmanship, but since the war, in which I served throughout, I cannot altogether control the nerves of my right hand when writing. I wish you a prosperous future with Astounding Stories!--Leo Greenhill, 5 Market Terrace, St. Leonards on Sea, Sussex, England. "_At Last It's Come_" Dear Editor: I have read all the issues of your magazine from the July issue to the December, and it sure fills a long felt need in Science Fiction. Ever since I knew what an atom was I've been longing for just such a mag, and at last it's come. You sure deserve credit, and lots of it. You were better at the very start than your competitors ever will be, and that's saying a lot, as they're pretty good. By the way, you may have noticed that one of them has come down to your size and price since your mag came out. That's proof against big mags. They're awful. However, I would not mind an Astounding Stories quarterly, and I'd gladly pay fifty cents for one. As to reprints, I'm in favor of them. I think a story by Edgar Rice Burroughs running in your mag each month would make it just about perfect. As to your authors and stories, they're good as a general rule; however, you've made some pretty bad slips at times, such as "The Invisible Death," by Victor Rousseau, "The Wall of Death," by the same man, "Slaves of the Dust," "Gray Denim" and "The Ape-Men of Xloti." In fact, the December issue was pretty poor for you. I hope you make up for it next month. When it comes to artists I think that Wesso takes the cake, especially in drawing machinery, etc. However, Gould is good on people and inanimate things, and I don't think you should drop him as many seem to wish. I like Wesso's covers very much, and I don't think they are too gaudy for a magazine like yours. I like nearly all Science Fiction stories if they are written well, but especially I lean toward interplanetary, atomic adventure and prehistoric stories. I do not care so much for murders, wars, mind control, etc. I notice that you have never printed a story of prehistoric conditions existing at present on some part of the earth or universe, and I would like to see one of this type. I like serials only if they do not get boresome; and a lot of them do. That is the trouble. I think that the love interest in your stories is a good point, and should be encouraged in your authors. And I also think there should be more interplanetary friendship than hatred, and that the heroes should fight beasts rather than men, as a rule, in your stories. Just one more thing before I close. I think that Astounding Stories should have more than one department. I would like to see a list of scientific terms defined each month; a department for answering scientific questions; and some kind of fraternity of Science Fiction Readers with membership cards, some kind of emblems, and possibly an entrance test of some kind. Seriously, now, why not consider this and take up a vote among your Readers to see what they think? You could cut down on "The Readers' Corner" for them without using much more space, or you could enlarge the mag a little. What say? Well, I'm about out of Z-ray so I guess I'll come back to earth and refuel with the January issue, which will be out soon. So long and good luck.--Frank Missman, Jr., V. E. R. (Very Enthusiastic Reader), 739 N. Alexandria, Los Angeles, Calif. _Gr-r-r--She's Mad!_ Dear Editor: Gr-r-r, now I am mad! I do wish that people who want a regular instruction book of a magazine would kindly refrain from spending their valuable pennies on ours. And if Mr. Johnston of Newark believes us who like A. S. to be morons, why let's be morons! for when ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise. I'd like to inform this highly intelligent person that our mag is dealing with pure Science Fiction, and why should any author go into detail describing how cities are made to float and why invisible cloaks are invisible? Why, if every paragraph were broken off to let us know how this or that is possible, I'm sure we'd all be yawning and nodding over the magazine, and finally discard it entirely in search of something more to our liking! Why waste your time, Mr. Johnston, telling us you don't like A. S.? Just don't purchase it, if it isn't to your liking. We're satisfied with what we have. What if the stories are like fairy tales? Isn't all fiction more or less of a fairy tale? I want Mr. Johnston to get this point: what we want is fiction, pure Science Fiction and not instructions. We read A. S. as a pleasure. We do not have to be scientists just because we are interested in science! "The Wall of Death" was grand. It's somewhat terrorizing and gruesome, but I get a big "kick" out of such horrors. However, I hope nothing like that would ever happen, 'cause I'm 18 years old, and I'd be among the first ones to be chosen for those mad half-human jelly-fishes, without a doubt. I shudder to think that meteors could be hurled from one planet to another and then have some kind of machine, with people in it, on the inside of the meteor. But the hero of "The Gray Plague" surely proved himself a hero, in spite of his handicap. I relish the idea of that Venusian instrument, by which one can learn all from another within a few minutes. Something for our students who cannot seem to learn anything. Here's one point that I don't like: Why are all those invaders from other planets hostile? Why can't they go on an exploring expedition to our Earth? C'm'on, you Authors--get busy! "The Pirate Planet" has me all hot and bothered, and my brain in a muddle how any craft of such dimension can move through space with such speed. As the story has just started, I can't say much about it, but here's hoping the captured hero conquers the hostile invaders and comes home with bells on and colors flying, as all good stories should end. That Sargasso Sea, in "Vagabonds of Space," reminds me of a Halloween ghost. And it was just as bad as a ghost, too. After having been scattered once, it just coolly collects itself into twice its size. Br-r-r--that gives me the chills. Howsoever, nevertheless, be that as it may, I will say that I liked it so much that I'm asking for more like it. Another word to ye Authors: Please do not always have the girls in your stories such sweet little bundles of humanity. Aren't there any tall girls in your imaginations? Please give us tall girls a break once in a while. It makes me feel better. Thanks.--Gertrude Hemken, 5730 So. Oshland Ave., Chicago, Ill. "_Also Amazed ... But--_" Dear Editor: Since my good friend, Forrest Ackerman has undertaken to suggest an author whose works would be enjoyed by your readers, I will add two more to your "should have" list. They are Francis Flagg, an author who is freely engraved in the minds of all Science Fiction lovers as a genius at writing time-traveling and dimensional stories, and Jack Williamson, a shark for new plots and inventions and one who knows how to put romance into a story. Although I doubt whether the Editor himself can secure stories from these two famed authors, (Wrong! At this time we have two or three stories by Jack Williamson waiting their turn to be published!--Ed.) I hope they may see our wants and favor us with a tale in the near future. I agree with George E. Addison in that Miles J. Bruer is a "wow" in other magazines, but I emphatically disagree in that he does not belong in Astounding Stories. Maybe "A Problem in Communication" wasn't as good as some others he has written, but do you think he will honor us with a real good story if he, himself, gets such a welcome as Mr. Addison gave him? If you have faith in "the good old Doc," I am sure he will feel encouraged and consequently be spurred to greater heights. As for Mr. C. E. Bush: I am also amazed by some of the letters in "The Readers' Corner," but not from those who take their literature too seriously. Rather, from those who write letters such as his. If he doesn't care whether a story is scientifically possible or not, why, then, doesn't he read Anderson's Fairy Tales or some of the Oz books?--Jim H. Nicolson, 40 Lunado Way, San Francisco, Calif. "_Shrewd," Yet Somehow Obtuse!_ Dear Editor: I like your magazine. By this, I do not mean that it is the best Science Fiction periodical, for it assuredly is not; but it is the most reliable. I am sure when I pick up your magazine that I shall find therein consistently interesting stories. I have yet to find a story that failed to hold my attention; on the other hand, I have yet to find a masterpiece. Of all the Editors, you have shown yourself the shrewdest judge of public taste, but also the least interested in the advancement of Science Fiction. Your authors are among the leading lights in Science Fiction; yet, strangely, the days when they submit their offerings to Astounding Stories seem to be "off days." Not one of them has given us a story to equal his best for the other magazines. For instance, Ray Cummings has yet to write a story for you as entertaining as "The Girl in the Golden Atom" or his others. Speaking of Cummings, I wish he would take a course in grammar. His grammatical atrocities--such as sentences without predicates--are eye-wracking. The main purpose of this letter, however, is to offer a fervent plea for reprints. I am unalterably opposed to your short-sighted policy in regard to the reprinting of old Science Fiction tales long out of print. You made an utterly asinine statement when you declared that 99 per cent of your readers have already read these classics. [We did not say that. We said: "Would it be fair to 99 per cent of our Readers to force on them reprint novels they have already read, or had a chance to read?"--Ed.] I am willing to wager that the percentage is nearer 10 per cent. For instance, can a baby read magazines? You seem to grant them this strange ability. Most of the stories that should be reprinted were published from eight to fifteen years ago, in one other magazine. That automatically excludes all those who have not been constant Readers of that one magazine. In the second place, the average Reader of your magazine is under twenty-one (I am eighteen myself). When the science classics were published, we were anywhere from four to ten years of age. In the third place, relatively few of these stories were published in book form, and these few have for years been out of print. Try to buy "The Moon Pool," the greatest Science Fiction story ever written, in book form. In the fourth place, even those who were old enough to understand them did not become interested in Science Fiction until several years ago. In the fifth place, the few who have read them--and they are very few--would welcome the chance to re-read them. In the sixth place, and this is the most important reason of all, not one of the stories you have published is worth re-reading, or is even a sixteenth as good as some of the old stories. Take a sporting offer. If you don't, I won't think much of you. Publish just one of the Science Fiction classics, preferably A. Merritt's "Through the Dragon Class," which so many of your Readers have clamored for and see how gratifying is its reception. If it does receive their acclaim, you could reprint one story in each issue.--J. Vernon Shea, Jr., 1140 N. Negley Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pa. "_Right Formula_" Dear Editor: I have been a satisfied and silent reader of your magazine, and while I'm still satisfied, I wish to break my silence. A letter by C.E. Bush, of Decatur, Ark., in the January issue has caught my attention. Miss Bush apparently does not care whether the stories contain science or not. I believe she wants the author to leave out the scientific explanations of the various machines and forces used in the story. To me, an "improbable" story is much more interesting if the author succeeds in making it seem perfectly plausible. The author needs to give technical explanations now and then to do this; and a good author can weave these facts into the fiction in such a manner that they are not dry. For some reason, the letter by M. Clifford Johnston, of Newark, N. J., antagonizes me. I am willing to admit that there are--or were--one or two stories that showed a definite lack of scientific explanation in certain parts, yet I do not believe that all the issues can be condemned because of these few stories. Mr. Johnston is apparently the opposite of Miss Bush. He, from the "sound" of his letter, revels in scientific explanations. On the whole I've enjoyed practically every story, and am thankful to you for your magazine. I believe that most of the authors have found the right formula for mixing their explanations with the story so that such technical discussions are complete without being dry. I enjoy the novelettes more than either the short stories or the serials. The serials are all right, but a month is too long to let the hero or heroine suffer. Imagine how WE suffer, too, from the suspense! If either Miss Bush or Mr. Johnston feel that they have been misunderstood and wronged in any way I shall be glad to either apologize or vindicate myself in a personal letter to them. May Astounding Stories continue to improve!--Ben Smith, Box 1542, Butte, Montana. _Fiction's the Thing!_ Dear Editor: Hurrah for Mr. Lorenzo's letter in January's "The Readers' Corner"! For a half year already, all other Science Fiction magazines have had to struggle along without my patronage, also. For the same reason as Mr. Lorenzo gives, I want to heartily congratulate you, Mr. Editor, on your magazine. I have read Science Fiction stories since the first magazine of its kind ever appeared in print. They started out good, but in the last few years have utterly degenerated into a collection of dry, drawn-out lectures. Also, C. E. Bush's letter should be rated as 100 per cent correct. We want FICTION mixed with some science, and above all a good plot and lots of action; and if your authors feel so inclined, let them weave a romance into the stories, too. "We read stories to be amused, not for technical information." I am a radio operator, but I wouldn't think of reading a story for information on the latest transmitter design. Mr. Editor, your choice of authors is par excellence. I can't too highly emphasize this, because we don't want the authors who write for other Science Fiction magazines. Why? Because they can't even write a story that has a semblance of coherence or plot to it, and never any action. If you should ever use any of these writers, I shall give up Science Fiction altogether. Please, Mr. Editor, continue to run Astounding Stories yourself, and don't heed the request of a minority who want dead authors to write dead stories in our magazine. "The Pirate Planet" is the fastest moving, best written interplanetary story I have ever read, and I've read scores. C. W. Diffin surpasses himself. "Vagabonds of Space" was great. Isn't a sequel possible? I have your January issue before me, and although I haven't read it yet, I'm delighted to see Murray Leinster with us again. He's excellent. I can't figure out how you can afford so many top-notch authors in each issue, but keep it up, because it's the life of your magazine. As Mr. Addison says in his letter, "Why ruin a truly great magazine by catering to a misguided minority?" and printing flops by cheap writers, who are ruining other Science Fiction magazines? Forgive me for so much repetition, Mr. Editor; run your magazine "as is" and I'll continue to be an interested reader.--P.C. Favre, 124 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, N.Y. _For Blushers_ Dear Editor: I noticed in a letter in the December number of Astounding Stories that one of your Readers thinks your covers too gaudy. In fact, he blushes when he buys it. If he feels that way about it, why doesn't he subscribe to it and take the cover off when he reads it? I believe that the majority of your Readers like your covers and illustrations, and are not afraid to let people see them reading Astounding Stories. I wish that you could have a long novelette like "The Ape-Men of Xloti" in every issue of "our" magazine. The longer stories are most always the more interesting. That is one of the reasons why I like book-length serials. Why should Five-Novels Monthly get all the breaks? I am sure that you as the Editor of "our" magazine think Astounding Stories the best magazine published by Mr. Clayton. I should think that you would like to see it published in as good an edition as F. N. M. I am pretty sure that the majority of your Readers would not mind paying five cents more for many more pages of fiction, smooth-cut edges, and a better grade of paper.--Jack Darrow, 4225 N. Spaulding Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. "_The Readers' Corner_" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'," and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here; so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! _The Editor._ * * * * * 
30691	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DR. DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are_: ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ VOL. IV, No. 3 CONTENTS DECEMBER, 1930 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Oils from a Scene in "The Ape-Men of Xlotli."_ SLAVES OF THE DUST SOPHIE WENZEL ELLIS 295 _Fate's Retribution Was Adequate. There Emerged a Rat with a Man's Head and Face._ THE PIRATE PLANET CHARLES W. DIFFIN 310 _It is War. Interplanetary War. And on Far-Distant Venus Two Fighting Earthlings Stand Up Against a Whole Planet Run Amuck._ (Part Two of a Four-Part Novel.) THE SEA TERROR CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 336 _The Trail of Mystery Gold Leads Carnes and Dr. Bird to a Tremendous Monster of the Deep._ GRAY DENIM HARL VINCENT 354 _The Blood of the Van Dorn's Ran in Karl's Veins. He Rode the Skies Like an Avenging God._ THE APE-MEN OF XLOTLI DAVID R. SPARKS 370 _A Beautiful Face in the Depths of a Geyser--and Kirby Plunges into a Desperate Mid-Earth Conflict with the Dreadful Feathered Serpent._ (A Complete Novelette.) THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 421 _A Meeting place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ * * * * * Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Readers' Guild, Inc., 80 Lafayette St., New York, N.Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York. N.Y., under Act of March 3. 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U.S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crow & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * Slaves of the Dust _By Sophie Wenzel Ellis_ Fate's retribution was adequate. There emerged a rat with a man's head and face. _It's a poor science that would hide from us the great, deep, sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as mere superficial film._ --_Carlyle_. [Illustration: _Sir Basil showed his teeth in his ugly smile. "A creator is never merciful."_] The two _batalões_ turned from the open waters of the lower Tapajos River into the _igarapé_, the lily-smothered shallows that often mark an Indian settlement in the jungles of Brazil. One of the two half-breed rubber-gatherers suddenly stopped his _batalõe_ by thrusting a paddle against a giant clump of lilies. In a corruption of the Tupi dialect, he called over to the white man occupying the other frail craft. "We dare go no farther, master. The country of the Ungapuks is bewitched. It is too dangerous." Fearfully he stared over his shoulder toward a spot in the slimy water where a dim bulk moved, which was only an alligator hunting for his breakfast. Hale Oakham, as long and lanky and level-eyed as Charles Lindbergh, ran despairing fingers through his damp hair and groaned. "But how can I find this jungle village without a guide?" The _caboclo_ shrugged. "The village will find you. It is bewitched, master. But you will soon see the path through the _matto_." "Can't you stay by me until time to land? I don't like the looks of these alligators." "It is better for a white man to face an alligator than for a _caboclo_ to face an Ungapuk. Once they used to kill and eat us for our strength. Now--" Again his shrug was eloquent. "Now?" Hale prompted impatiently. "The white god who put a spell on these one-time cannibals will bewitch us and make us wash and rejoice when it is time to die." * * * * * He shuddered and spat at a cayman that was lumbering away from his _batalõe._ Hale Oakham laughed, a hearty boyish laugh for a rather learned young professor. "Is that all they do to you?" he asked. "No. All who enter this magic _matto_ die soon, rejoicing. Before the last breath comes, it is said their bodies turn into a handful of silver dust--poof!--like that." He snapped his dirty fingers. "Then the life that leaves them goes into rocks that walk." Hale sighed resignedly. There wasn't any use to argue. "Unload your _batalõe_," he ordered testily, "and get your filthy carcasses away." The half-breeds obeyed readily. As the departing _batalõe_ turned from the _igarapé_ into the open water of the river, the young man repressed a sudden lifting of his scalp. He was in for it now! His long body sprawled out in the _batalõe_, he paddled about aimlessly for several minutes until he found an aisle through the jungle--the path that led to the jungle village which he was visiting in the name of science, and for a certain award. Before plunging into that waiting tangle where life and death carried on a visible, unceasing struggle, he hesitated. Instinctively he shrank from losing himself in that mad green world. * * * * * He had first heard of the Ungapuks at the convention of the Nescience Club in New York, that body of scientists, near-scientists and adventurers linked together for the purpose of awarding the yearly Woolman prizes for the most spectacular addition of empiric facts to various branches of science. One of the members of the club, an explorer, had told a wild yarn about a tribe of Brazilian Indians, headed by Sir Basil Addington, an English scientist, who was conducting secret experiments in biochemistry in his jungle laboratory. The explorer had said that the scientist, half-crazed by a powerful narcotic, had seemingly discovered some secret of life which enabled him to produce monsters in his laboratory and to change the physical characteristics of the Ungapuk Indians, who, in five years, had been transformed from cannibals into cultured men and women. And now Hale Oakham, hoping to win one of the Woolman prizes, was here in the country of the Ungapuks, entering the jungle path that lead to the unknown. Fifty feet from the _igarapé_, the path curved sharply away from a giant tree. Hale approached the bend with his hand on his gun. Just before he reached it, he stopped suddenly to listen. A woman's voice had suddenly broken forth in a wild, incredibly sweet song. Hale stood entranced, drinking in the heady sounds that stirred his emotions like _masata_, the jungle intoxicant. The singer approached the bend in the path, while the young man waited eagerly. The first sight of her made him gasp. He had expected to see an Indian girl. No sane traveler would imagine a white woman in the Amazon jungle, with skin as amazingly pale as the great, fleshy victoria regia lilies in the _igarapé_. When she saw Hale, she stopped instantly. With a quick, practiced twist, she reached for the bow flung across her shoulders and fitted a barbed arrow to the string. * * * * * She was a beautiful barbarian, standing quivering before him. In the thick dull gold braids hanging over her bare shoulders flamed two enormous scarlet flowers, no redder than her own lips pouted in alarm. There was a savage brevity to her clothing, which consisted only of a short skirt of rough native grass and breastplates of beaten gold, held in place by strings of colored seeds. The girl held out an imperious hand and, in perfect English, said: "Go back!" Hale drew his long body up to its slim height, folded his arms, and gave her his most winning smile. His insolence added to his wholesome good looks. "Why?" he exclaimed. "I've come a couple of thousand miles to call on you." He saw that the eyes which held his levelly were pure and limpid, and of an astonishing orchid-blue. "Who are you?" Her throaty, vibrant voice was a thing of the flesh, whipping Hale's senses to sudden madness. "I'm Hale Oakham," he said, a little tremulously, "a lone, would-be scientist knocking about the jungle. Won't you tell me your name?" She nodded gravely. "I am Aña. I, too, am white." Her rich voice was quietly proud. "Come; I'll see if Aimu will receive you." With surprising, childlike trust, she held out her little hand to him. The gesture was so delightfully natural that Hale, grinning boyishly, took her hand and held it as they walked down the jungle path. "Sing for me," he demanded abruptly. "Sing the song you sang just now." "That?" asked the girl, turning the virgin-blue fire of her eyes on him. "That was my death-song that I practice each day. Perhaps soon I shall be released from this." She passed her hands over her beautiful, half-clothed body. * * * * * Hale's warm glance swept over her. "Do you want to die?" "Yes; don't you? But you do not, or you would not have retreated from my poisoned arrow." "No, Aña; I want to live." "To live--and be a slave of _this_?" Again her hand went over her slim body. "A slave of a pile of flesh that you must feed and protect from the agonies that attack it on every side? Bah! But I am hoping that my turn will come next." "Your turn for what, Aña?" "To enter the Room of Release. Perhaps, if Aimu approves of you, you, too, may taste of death." Her gentle smile was beatific. "Do you speak of Sir Basil Addington?" "He was called that once, before he came to us. Now he has no name. We can find none holy enough for him; and so we call him Aimu, which means good friend." Her beautiful face was sweet with reverence. And now, in the distance, Hale saw that the path led into a large clearing. He slowed his pace, for he wanted to know this lovely girl better before he joined the Ungapuks. "Who are you, Aña?" he asked suddenly, bending closer to the crinkled, dull-gold hair. "I am Aña, a white woman." She looked at him frankly. "But who are your parents, and how did you get among the Ungapuks?" Aña's red lips curved into a dewy smile. "I thought all white men were wise, like Aimu. But you are stupid. How do you think a white woman could appear in a tribe of Indians who live in the jungle, many weeks' journey from what you call civilization?" Hale looked a little blank and more than a little disconcerted. "I suppose I am stupid," he said dryly. "But tell me, Aña, how did you get here?" "Why," she exclaimed, "he made me!" "Made you? Good Lord! What do you mean?" "Just what I said, Hale Oakham. If he can take a few grains of dust and make a shoot that will grow into a giant tree like yonder monster itauba, don't you think he can create a small white girl like me?" Her orchid-blue eyes glowed innocently into his. * * * * * The eager questions that he would have asked froze upon his lips, for a party of Indians approached. The six nearly naked red men came close and surveyed him, toying nervously with their primitive, feather-decorated weapons. A tall, handsome young fellow who possessed something of the picturesque perfection of the North American plains' Indian stepped forward and, in perfect English, said: "Good morning, white stranger. What is it you wish of the Ungapuks?" "I came to see your white _cacique_," said Hale. "Aimu? What is it you wish of Aimu? He is ours, white stranger." "Yes, he is yours. I come as a friend, perhaps to help him in his great work." "Perhaps!" The young Indian folded his bronze, muscular arms over his broad chest and continued his cool survey of Hale. "White men before you have come: spies and thieves. Some we poisoned with curari. Others Aimu took into the Room of Release." He turned to Aña, who was still standing by Hale, and his expression softened. "What shall we do with him, Aña?" he asked the question, a fleeting look of hunger swept his fine, flashing eyes. Aña flushed beautifully, and, moving closer to Hale, with an impulsive, almost childish gesture, slipped her arm through his. "Let us take him to our village, Unani Assu!" she suggested. "I like him." It was Hale's turn to flush, which he did like a schoolboy. * * * * * Unani Assu's brows drew together in a scowl. The hand holding his blow-pipe jerked convulsively. "Aña! Come away!" he growled. "You mustn't touch a stranger!" Aña's blue eyes stretched with astonishment. "But I like to touch him, Unani Assu!" The tall Indian, with a half comical gesture of despair, said: "Don't misunderstand her, stranger. She is young, very young, ah! And she has known only the reborn men of the Ungapuks." He stepped firmly over to Aña, and, taking the girl by the arm, drew her away. "Run ahead," he commanded, "and tell Aimu that we come." Aña, her feathered bamboo anklets clicking together, sped away. Unani Assu bowed courteously to Hale. "Come, stranger. If you are an enemy, it is you who must fear." He motioned for him to proceed down the jungle path. The path ended at a clearing studded with _moloccas_, the Indian grass huts made of plaited straw. Altogether the scene was peaceful and sane and far removed from the strange tales that Hale had heard concerning the Ungapuks. Hale was conducted to a long, low stone building, where, in the doorway, stood a tall and emaciated white man. "Aimu!" said the Indians reverently, and bowed themselves. Over the bare, brown backs, the white man looked at Hale. "Sir Basil Addington?" asked the young man. "Yes. You are welcome. Come in." Hale entered the building. * * * * * He was in a book-filled study, furnished with hand-made chairs and a desk. Sir Basil asked him to be seated. He offered the young man long, brown native cigarettes and a very good drink made from yucca. After several minutes of conversation, Sir Basil suddenly changed his manner. "And now," he shot out, eyeing the young man through narrowed lids, "will you please state the purpose of this visit?" Hale looked squarely at his questioner. "Frankly, Sir Basil, I have called on you because I am so intensely interested in your work among the Ungapuks that I wish to offer my services." He gave in detail his family history, his education, and his experience as a teacher and a scientist. Sir Basil tapped his teeth thoughtfully with a pencil. "But why do you think you can be of assistance to me?" "That, of course, is for you to decide." Hale thought that the scientist looked like a huge, starved crow in his loose-fitting coat. He was so fleshless that, when the light fell strongly on his face as it now did, the bones of his head and hands showed through the skin with horrible clearness. Hale, under Sir Basil's scrutiny, decided instantly that he did not like him. "I need a helper," the scientist went on, with the air of talking to himself. "A white assistant who neither loves nor fears me. Unani Assu is good enough in his way, but I need a helper who has had technical training." Suddenly he wheeled on Hale and asked sharply, "How are your nerves, young man?" * * * * * Hale started, but managed to answer calmly. "Excellent. My war record isn't half bad, and that was surely backed with good nerves." "And you say you have no close relatives, no ties of any sort to interfere with work that is dangerous--and something else?" "Not a soul would care if I passed out to-day, Sir Basil." "Good! And now tell me this: are you one of those scientists whose minds are so mechanical, so mathematically made, as it were, that your entire outlook on science is based on old, established beliefs, or do you belong to that rare but modern type of trained thinker and dreamer who refuse to permit yesterday's convictions to influence to-day's visions?" Hale smiled quietly. "I recently lost my chair in a famous university because of my so-called unscientific teachings regarding ether-drift." Expressing himself in purely scientific terms, he went into an elaboration of his revolutionary theory. When he had finished, Sir Basil reached out his clawlike hand to him. "Good!" he approved. "You have dared to think originally. Now listen to my theory of mind-electrons which has grown into the established fact that I have discovered the secret of life and death." The long, thin hands reached into a pocket for a box of pills. He swallowed one greedily, and immediately his emaciated face seemed charged with new virility. He spoke out suddenly. "Our world, you know, is made up of three powers: matter, energy and what you call life. I might really say that there are but two powers, for matter, in its last analysis, is a form of energy. And what is life? You can't call it a form of energy, for every inorganic atom has energy without having life. Life, Mr. Oakham, is mind or consciousness." He began pacing the floor restlessly. "Everything that lives has this consciousness, and I say this in defiance of some fixed scientific views. The amoeba in a stagnant pool, a thallophyte on a bit of old bread, any of the myriads of trees and plants that you see in the jungle all have consciousness as well as you. And why?" * * * * * He brought his fist down upon the table. "Because they issue from the same source as you and I, the almighty mind, eternal, indestructible, which has permitted itself to be enslaved by matter. You are Hale Oakham. I am Basil Addington, yet we are one and the same. Let me illustrate." He seized a glass and poured it full of _masata_. "Look! Two portions of _masata_. But I pour what is in the glass back into the bottle. The molecules cohere and the two portions become one again. Some day you and I--our individual consciousnesses--will flow back to the Whole. That sounds mystical, but listen. "We scientists hold that the electron explains nearly all the physical and chemical phenomena. I go further and say that it explains _all_. Matter, electricity, light, heat, magnetism--all can be reduced to the ultimate unit. So, Mr. Oakham, I am going to make clear to you how life itself is electronic." His long finger touched Hale's arm. "You, I, yonder mosquito on your sleeve, even one of the germs that is causing my malaria, all being individual living things, are the ultimate units of what I shall personify as the Mind. When I say _you_ I do not speak of that mound of flesh in which you exist, and which can be reduced to the same familiar basic elements and compounds as make up inorganic structures; I speak of your mind, your consciousness--for that is the real you. Are you following me?" "Perfectly, Sir Basil." Hale reached for another drink. "But do you mean to say that you and I are no more than a mosquito, a malaria protozoan, or even one of those trees in the jungle?" Sir Basil's dry skin slipped back into a long smile. "Startling, isn't it? You, I, and all other living organisms are nothing but matter, energy and consciousness. You and I have a larger share of consciousness, because our organic structure permits the mind-electrons greater freedom over the matter than composes our bodies. We are more acutely aware of the universe about us, have a greater facility for enjoyment and suffering, a more intricate brain and nervous system. Yet when our bodies die and our consciousness is released, the mind-electrons enslaved by our atoms go back to the elemental Whole. This holds good for the protozoan, the tree, the man--for all things that live." * * * * * Hale was drinking again. "You mean, Sir Basil, that there is a sort of war waged against what you personify as the Mind by matter; that matter is constantly seeking to enslave mind-electrons, so that it may become an organism which, for awhile, may enjoy what we call life?" Sir Basil pushed back his tufted hair and looked happy. "Yes! And it's Nature's supreme blunder! In the end, the Mind always conquers and gains its release, yet the eternal chain of enslavement goes on and on, and will continue to go on as long as there is a living organism in the world to bind mind to matter." Hale was excited now, as much from the fiery intoxicant as from the scientist's weird revelation. "I get you," he said, rather inelegantly for a professor. "You mean that if every living thing in the world should pass out, every man, every plant, every animal, even down to microscopic infusoria, the Mind would collect all its electrons, and through some more jealous law of, er, cohesion hold these electrons inviolate from matter and energy?" "Right! And again, as in the beginning, the Mind would rule supreme. By what I have proved, you and I and all other creatures that now have life may, as separate unfleshed electrons, enjoy eternal consciousness as a part of the Mind." A new passion leaped to his dark eyes. "When I have finished my mission, no more need we be slaves of the dust, subject to all the frightful sufferings of this dunghill of flesh." He brought his fist down upon his skinny leg with a resounding blow. "But you cannot reduce your theory to fact, Sir Basil!" "No?" Again came that frightful grin to his cadaverous face. "Can you withstand shock?" "If you mean shock to the eye, let me remind you that I served two years in the big fight." "Then come to my laboratory. Better take another drink." While Hale helped himself again from the _masata_ bottle, Sir Basil swallowed another pellet. Then the two went into the adjoining apartment. * * * * * Sir Basil, his hand over the doorknob, paused. "Before we go in," he said, "I want you to remember that we call natural that which is characteristic of the physical world. Everything alive in this laboratory was produced by nature. I merely made available the materials, or, rather, I made the conditions under which matter was able to enslave mind-electrons." He opened the door, slipped his body through, and, with his ugly, teeth-revealing grin, gestured for Hale to follow him. Hale steeled himself and looked around half fearfully. The first glance took in a large and well-equipped laboratory, somewhat fetid with animal odors. The second lingered here and there on cages, aquariums, incubators, and other containers where creatures moved. Suddenly, as something scuttled across the floor and disappeared into a hole in the wall, Hale cried out and covered his eyes with a hand. Sir Basil laughed aloud. "Why didn't you examine it closer?" Hale looked nauseated. "My God, Sir Basil! A rat with a man's head and face!" Sir Basil's voice was sharp, decisive. "Before you leave this laboratory, you're going to come out of your foolish belief that man is a creature apart from other living organisms. You--the conscious you--is no greater, no more important in the final balance than the spark of consciousness in that rat. When your body and the rat's body give up their atoms to nature's laboratory, the little enslaved mind-electron that is you and the one that is the rat will be identical." Again Hale shivered and turned away from that cold, too-thin face. The scientist was speaking. "Step around to all those cages and pens. I want you to see all my slaves of the dust." * * * * * But long before Hale had encircled the room, he was so disturbed at what he saw that he could scarcely complete his frightful inspection. In every enclosure he viewed a monstrosity that in some way resembled a human. Every reptile, every insect, every queer, misshapen animal not only looked human in some shocking manner, but also seemed to possess human characteristics. It seemed as though some demented creator with a perverted sense of humor had attempted to mock man by calling forth monsters in his image. At last the young man cried out: "How did you breed these freaks?" "They are not freaks, and I did not breed them. They are nature's parentless products whose basic elements were brought together in this laboratory, and, by a scientific reproduction of the functions of creation, endowed with the life principle, which is merely mind-electrons." He smoothed his long tuft of hair nervously. "Would you like to see how life springs from a wedding of matter, energy, and consciousness?" "I suspect I can stand anything now," Hale admitted. "Then come and peep into a very remarkable group of apparatus I have developed, where you can watch atoms building molecules and molecules building living organisms." "You say I can see atoms?" "Not directly, of course. The light waves will forever prevent us from actually seeing the atom. But I have perfected a system of photography which magnifies particles smaller than light waves, and, separating their images from the light waves, renders detail clear in the moving pictures." * * * * * He went to a huge machine or series of machines which took up all the center floor space of the laboratory, where he busied himself in an intricate network of wires, mirrors, electrodes, ray projectors, and traveling metal compartments. Presently he called out to Hale. "Let me remind you, Oakham, that while any scientist can break up any of the various proteid molecules which are the basis of all living cells, animal and vegetable, no scientist before me has been able to compound the atoms and build them into a proteid molecule." He bared his teeth in the smile that Hale hated. "I am proud to tell you that the proteid molecule can be built up only when the third element of nature's trinity is added--the mind-electron. I have found a means of capturing the mind-electron and of bringing it in contact with proteid elements. And now it is possible to bring forth life in the laboratory. Come closer and watch proteid forming protoplasm, protoplasm forming a cell, and the cell evolving into--well, what do you want, an animal, plant, or an insect?" Hale had fallen under the scientist's spell. He did not feel foolish when he said: "Let's have a rat!" * * * * * Hale became so absorbed in the wonders of the laboratory that when lunch time came, Sir Basil had food brought to them. While they were eating a very good vegetable stew, farina, and luscious tropical fruits, a sudden, agonized scream rang out, followed by other screams and wails. Sir Basil opened the door and looked out. Aña came running forward. Her blue eyes were flooded with tears. "Oh, Aimu!" she moaned. "A tree fell on Unani Assu." She buried her beautiful face in her hands and sobbed aloud. Sir Basil frowned heavily. "I can't lose Unani Assu yet," he declared. "He is a wonderful help around the laboratory. Is he dead?" "No. We should rejoice if his time of release had come. But his legs, Aimu! No one wants to suffer and be crippled." Even in her distress, the girl's voice was rich and vibrant, and every tone moved Hale curiously. "Hurry!" cried the scientist. "Have them bring him here before he dies." The girl leaped to her feet and sped away. "Come, Oakham," continued Sir Basil. "Here is a rare opportunity for you to see how completely I have mastered the laws that govern organic matter. Help me prepare." * * * * * For several minutes, Hale worked under the scientist's sharply spoken directions. By the time the injured man was brought to the laboratory, Sir Basil was ready for him. Unani Assu was still conscious, but his pale face indicated that he had lost much blood. When the improvised stretcher was lowered to the floor, Sir Basil sent all the Indians away. Unani Assu opened his eyes and called feebly, "Aña!" "Be still!" ordered Sir Basil. "Aña is not here." "Please!" gasped the dying man. "I want her--my Aña!" Sir Basil sucked in his breath sharply. "What's this? Have you been making love to Aña again, after my warning to you?" The sufferer stirred uneasily. "No!" he panted. "But perhaps my hour of release has come, and I want to look at her--once more." The scientist smiled unpleasantly as he eyed the magnificent body which looked like a broken statue in bronze. "Some human characteristics are strange," he muttered. "In spite of everything I do, this fellow continues to love Aña: Aña whom I intend for myself." He stepped to the apparatus and swiftly changed one of the adjustments. "Perhaps," he resumed, with a gleam in his eyes that chilled Hale, "this will forever cure him." * * * * * In another moment, the still, half-dead body was lifted and gently slipped into a compartment. Before Hale's horrified gaze fastened on the eye-piece which revealed moving pictures of every process that went on within, Unani Assu's body was reduced almost instantly to a fine, silvery dust. "Good God!" he cried. "You have killed him." The scientist's teeth showed in his wide smile. "Think so? Does a woman destroy a dress when she rips it up to make it over?" "Do you mean me to understand that you can reduce a living body to its basic elements and then rebuild these elements into a remade man?" "Watch!" warned the scientist. Hale looked again and saw the silver dust that was once a living body being whirled into a tiny, grublike thing. He saw the grub expand into an embryo, and the embryo develop into a foetus. From now on the development was slower, and he often stopped to talk with Sir Basil. Once he asked: "If this man had died naturally, could you have brought him back to life?" Sir Basil shook his head. "No. When once the mind-electron is completely freed from its enslavement by matter, it is forever beyond recall by the body it has just vacated. Like atomic electrons, whose equilibrium disturbed break away from their planetary system and go dashing off into space, only to be drawn into another planetary system, the mind-electron may be enslaved almost immediately by extraneous matter. Had Unani Assu died, his liberated mind-electron might at once have been captured by a jungle flower going to seed. Immediately a new seed would be started. And now the former Unani Assu would be a seed of a jungle flower, later to find new life as a plant." Suddenly the scientist threw up his hand and cried: "You see? The Mind will be eternally enslaved as long as there is life! Oh, for the time of deliverance!" He gazed fanatically into space, as though he dreamed magnificently. Hale observed him thoughtfully. When that great brain weakened, the consequences would be frightful. * * * * * Sir Basil, as though he had made a sudden decision, went over to that part of his machine which he called the molecule-disintegrator. "Oakham!" he called out. "I have taken you partly into my confidence. Now I want to show you something. Come here." Hale obeyed with misgivings. The scientist pointed out the window to a group of Indians, anxious relatives of Unani Assu. "Watch!" he ordered. Turning one of the projectors on the machine toward the window, he sighted carefully and pressed a button. Immediately one of the Indians fell to the ground and struggled. His companions began dancing around him in evident joy. Faintly to the laboratory came a familiar chant, which Hale recognized as Aña's death song. Dust to dust Mind to Mind-- He will shed his body As the green snake sheds his skin. As Hale watched, the struggling Indian's body seemed to shrink, and then, instantly, it disappeared. "Watch them scatter the dust!" said the scientist. One of the Indians stooped and blew upon the grass. "What have you done!" Hale gasped. "You've killed this one. Oh, I see now! These poor devils are totally ignorant that you are killing them for practice. They worship you while you turn them to--silver dust!" He turned angrily on the scientist as though he longed to strike him. "Keep cool, young man!" Sir Basil held up his fleshless hand. "There is no death! Change, yes; but no permanent blotting out of consciousness. Can't you see the horror of it as nature works? When your time for release comes, as it inevitably will, your mind-electron might find new enslavement in a worm!" * * * * * Hale's reply came hotly. "If that is true, why do you murder these poor devils deliberately!" "My dear Oakham, perhaps you are not so brilliant as I had hoped! All that I have done thus far is only child's play, in preparation for my real work. Haven't you guessed by now what I am getting ready to do?" "No; I'm a poor guesser." The scientist made a gesture of mock despair. "Then let me tell you. The molecule-disintegrator is active only on organic structures. When I concentrate it so"--he reached out again, sighted the projector on some point beyond the window and pressed a button--"one single living organism passes out. See that jupati tree by the rock disappear?" Before Hale's eyes, the tall, slender tree melted into air. "But," continued Sir Basil, "if I should _broadcast_ my molecule-disintegrator on electron magnetic waves, destruction would pass out in all directions, following the curve of the earth's surface, penetrating earth, air, water." He wet his lips carefully. "You understand?" Hale stiffened suddenly. "I understand. No life could survive these vibrations of destruction? Through every corner of the earth where life lurks, they would reach?" "Yes!" cried Sir Basil. "There would be not a blade of grass, not a living spore, not a hidden egg! Think of it, Oakham! No more would the clean air and the sweet earth reek with life, and at last the ultimate mind-electron would be released forever." He was breathing fast, and his emaciated face burned with two red spots. Hale thought rapidly. He was convinced now that the fate of all life lay within that diabolical network of chemical apparatus. At last he said: "And what of you and I, Sir Basil? Shall we, too, be caught in this wholesale destruction?" "Not immediately," replied the scientist. "Of course, I want to remain in the flesh long enough to be sure that my purpose has been accomplished. I have provided a way for my own safety. If you desire, you may remain with me." He smiled craftily. "I have planned to keep Aña also, the woman whom I called into life and made as I wished." * * * * * His words pounded against Hale's tortured ears with almost physical force. With a supreme effort, the young man controlled his rage and despair. Aña needed him too much now for him to risk defeat by showing his emotions. To Sir Basil he said: "But if all life disappears from the earth, what shall we do for food--you, Aña, and I?" Sir Basil lifted his brows. "You don't think I overlooked that, do you? What is food? Various combinations of the basic elements. I who have conquered the atom need never worry about starving to death." All this time, the machinery had been humming, and now the humming changed its note to a shrill whistle. Sir Basil went to the eye-piece and looked into it. Opening a door in the machinery, he disappeared inside. He came out soon, flushed and evidently elated. "Bring the stretcher, Oakham," he ordered. Hale brought the stretcher, placing it close to the machine. Then Sir Basil opened a metal door and gently eased out a human body. It was Unani Assu, unconscious but alive and breathing. Hale, helping the scientist to get the man on the stretcher, noticed that the crushed legs were perfectly healed. Together they bore him to a long seat. The Indian's eyes were still closed, but his even breathing indicated that he was only sleeping. Suddenly Hale pointed a finger and cried out. "My God, Sir Basil, look at his hands and feet!" * * * * * Unani Assu, still lying like a recumbent bronze statue sculptured by a master, was perfect from shoulder to wrist, from thigh to ankle. But, somewhere in that diabolical machine through which he had passed, his hands and feet had undergone a hideous metamorphism which had transformed them from the well-formed extremities of a splendid young Indian into the hairy paws of a giant rat! Hale turned away his head, sick with disgust. Sir Basil cut the silence triumphantly: "Now he'll never again face Aña with love in his eyes!" "What!" broke in Hale. "Did you plan this monstrous thing?" "Of course! I told you I should forever cure him of his mad infatuation." "But why didn't you kill him, as you killed the others? It would have been the most merciful way." Sir Basil showed his teeth in his ugly smile. "A creator is never merciful." A quiver passed through the Indian's body and presently, he sighed deeply and opened his eyes. He seemed dazed, puzzled. He looked from Hale to the scientist, and turned seeking eyes to other parts of the laboratory. "Aña!" he called weakly. "Where is Aña?" He pulled himself a little unsteadily to his feet--to the spatulated, hairy _rodent_ feet that had come out of the life-machine. Staggering, he would have fallen, had he not thrown out his arm to steady himself. Instinctively he tried to grasp something for support, and then, for the first time, he discovered his deformity. * * * * * Hale was never to forget that expression of horror and disgust that swept over the Indian's face as he spread open his revolting extremities and stared at them. A sudden, wild roar of despair rang through the room. "Aimu! My hands!" The scientist smiled with evident amusement. "You are a grotesque sight, Unani Assu. Do you want to see Aña now?" The fright and horror faded from the Indian's face, for now he glared with hate into the mad, mocking eyes. "You did it!" the Indian ground out. "You've made me into a thing from which Aña will run screaming." Through the quiet rage of the perfectly spoken English ran a thread of sorrow. "Aimu, whom we considered too holy to name!" Choking, he hobbled away to the door, which he unbolted. As he passed out into the open, Sir Basil went over to the machine and began sighting the projector which cast forth the ray of destruction. "No!" cried Hale. "You've done enough murder for to-day." The scientist paused. "I was trying to be merciful. And then, I wonder if it is safe to let him go, hating me? Oh, well!" He shrugged his narrow shoulders. "I seldom leave the laboratory, and certainly nothing can harm me here." He touched the death-projector significantly. Hale made a mental decision. "I must find out how the damned thing works and put it out of commission." * * * * * With this determination uppermost in his mind, he assumed a more intense interest in the strange laboratory. For the next two days, he assisted Sir Basil so assiduously that he learned much about the operation of the life-machine. And gradually he stopped being horrified as the fascination of producing life in the laboratory grew upon him. After he had assisted the scientist in building living organisms from basic elements, he ceased to cringe when he remembered that perhaps it was true that Aña was created in the mysterious life-machine. Once the scientist declared, "She is untainted with inheritance. She is the perfect mate that I called into life so that before I pass from the flesh I may taste that one human emotion I've never experienced--love." That very night Hale kept a secret tryst with Aña after the village slept. Sweet, virginal Aña, who knew less of the world than a civilized child of twelve--what a sensation she would create in New York with her beauty, her culture, her natural fascination! With her in his arms and an orange tropical moon hanging low in the hot, black sky, he ceased to care that she had no ancestors, for now his one passionate desire was to save her from Sir Basil and to hold her forever for himself. He might have been content to go on like this for months, tampering with creation in the day time, courting Aña in secret at night, had not Unani Assu come back for revenge. * * * * * On the fourth night after Unani Assu had disappeared into the jungle, Hale went to the _igarapé_ to meet Aña. He had gone only half the distance when he encountered her, running frantically up the path toward him. "Hale!" she gasped, falling into his opened arms, where she lay panting and exhausted. Hale gently patted the long braids, shimmering in silver tangles under the moonlight, and, crushing the soft little trembling body close, he murmured: "What's the matter, darling?" She dug her face deeper into the bend of his arm. "Oh, Hale! I saw Unani Assu a few minutes ago." For several moments she was unable to go on, for sudden sobs cut off her breath. "It's terrible, Hale, what Aimu did to his hands and feet, but what Unani's going to do to Aimu is still more terrible." Hale placed his hand gently under her chin and tilted up her small, pale, tear-drenched face. "Be calm, Aña, and tell me plainly." Still clinging to him, she went on. "He told me that Aimu is a devil, Hale. He showed me his hands and asked me if I could ever get used to them and be--his squaw." The round gold breastplates and the necklace of painted seeds clinked together over her panting bosom. "I told him about you, Hale. And then he seemed to go mad. He said he'd kill Aimu to-night." "But, Aña! Why did he let you go, knowing that you would give the alarm?" "He didn't let me go." Her petaled lips parted in a faint smile. "I escaped. Unani Assu tied me to a tree by the _igarapé_. Because he doesn't ... hate me, he could not bear to tie me too tightly." "Then he must be close to the laboratory now. If he breaks in upon Aimu--oh, my God!" Hale remembered the death-projector. If Sir Basil were in danger of attack, he would not hesitate to touch the waiting button that would broadcast death throughout the world. He seized Aña's little hand and cried out: "Run, Aña! The only safe place now is Aimu's laboratory. Run!" * * * * * As they dashed on madly, Hale opened wide his nostrils to scent the heavy, flower-laden air of the jungle. Any moment all this sweet, rich life might vanish instantly. He had a horrible vision of a world devoid of life, a world of bare rocks, dry sand, odorless, dead waters. For it was life that greened the landscape, roughened the stones with moss and lichen, thickened the ocean with ooze, and turned the dry sand into loam--life that swarmed underfoot, overhead, all around! And now, just as they reached the laboratory door, panting and frantic, a hoarse shriek broke forth. Dragging Aña after him, Hale dashed forward, conscious of two masculine voices raised in passion. The door to the room where the life-machine performed its vile work was locked. Hale pounded against it and called out to Sir Basil, but only curses and the sound of tumbling bodies came from beyond the door. Although originally the door had been thick and strong, the destructive forces of the tropics had pitted and rotted the wood. A few blows of Hale's shoulder broke it down. Under the brilliant electric light, Sir Basil and Unani Assu were fighting upon the blood-spattered floor. The struggle was uneven: the scientist's emaciated body was no match for the splendid strength of the young Indian. "Help Aimu!" cried Aña, pushing Hale forward. Aimu was being choked to death. Hale acted fantastically but efficiently. Catching up a bottle of ammonia, he moistened a handkerchief and clapped it against Unani Assu's nose. Instantly the Indian choked, released Sir Basil, and fell back, gasping for breath. Hale thrust the handkerchief into his pocket. "Get out!" he ordered Unani Assu. "Quick!" He threatened him with the ammonia bottle. But Unani Assu was not looking at the bottle. "Aimu!" he screamed, pointing. * * * * * When Hale saw and understood, he leaped across the room to plant his body in front of Aña; for Sir Basil was behind the life-machine, reaching for the controls of the ray projector. Suddenly, from behind Hale, a silver streak shot across the room. Sir Basil groaned and sank to the floor of the laboratory. A keen-bladed dissecting knife, thrown by Aña, stuck out from his left breast. Aña ran forward, sobbing wildly. "Oh, Aimu! I'm sorry! I didn't mean for it to strike you there. Only your hand, Aimu! I didn't want Hale to die, Aimu. I didn't--oh!" She was on her knees by the scientist's side, his head held in her slender arms. "He's breathing!" she rejoiced. "Some _masata_, Hale, quick!" Hale found a bottle of good brandy which he had contributed from his own supplies. Soon Sir Basil gasped and opened his eyes. He stared about him wildly, then gasped: "I'm dying, Hale Oakham! Quick, the life-machine, before my mind-electron escapes." He tried to pull his body up, but fell back, weak and panting. Hale hesitated, looking doubtfully at Aña. "For God's sake, quick!" screamed Sir Basil. "I'm dying, I say! I must have--rebirth. Lift me to the disintegrator. Hurry!..." His voice trailed off faintly. "He is dying," snapped Hale. "We might as well try it." He jerked open the door to the disintegrator. "Here, Unani Assu! Lend a hand!" * * * * * Instantly the Indian came forward, a peculiar, pleased expression on his handsome face. In a moment, Sir Basil's body was inside, and the machine began its weird humming, the humming that indicated the transformation of a human body into dust. "Now!" cried Unani Assu exultingly, going behind the machine. "I have helped him enough to understand that if one changes this--and this--and this"--he made some rapid adjustments on the machine--"something that is not pleasant will happen." "Stop!" cried Hale. "What did you change?" The Indian laughed mockingly. "Wouldn't you like to know? But, yet, you should not worry. You have no cause to love him, have you?" "I can't be a traitor, Unani Assu! Arrange the machine as it was originally, and I give you my word of honor than when Sir Basil comes out, I'll wreck the damned thing beyond repair. See, Unani Assu? You and I together will smash it." The Indian folded his arms so that the repulsive things that should have been hands were hidden. "It's too late now," he admitted, shaking his head. "Yet I've done no more to him than he did to me." Hale went to the eye-piece in the machine and started to look inside. Unani Assu stepped forward, tapped him on the shoulder, and, fingering significantly the dissecting knife which he had picked up, said: "I am operating the machine. Will you sit over there by Aña and wait? It won't be long. And, white stranger, remember this: I am your friend. I am turned against none but our common enemy." He pointed significantly to the machine. * * * * * Two hours passed, long, silent hours for the watchers in the laboratory. Aña fell asleep, in a sweet, childish bundle upon the piled cushions, her golden hair, still decorated with the red flowers which she always wore, crushed and withered now. Several times Hale caught Unani Assu gazing at her sadly, and his own look saddened when it rested on the Indian's strong, outraged body. The humming of the machine changed to a whistle. Placing his fingers on his lips in a signal of quiet, Unani Assu whispered: "Let Aña sleep. She mustn't see this." Opening a door in the machine, his handsome face lighted with a grim smile, he whispered exultingly: "Watch!" A scuttling sound issued forth and then, half drunkenly, an enormous rat tumbled out--one of those horrible rats with the hairless, humanlike faces that had so frequently come from the life-machine. Hale could not crush back the cry that issued from his throat. "Where is Sir Basil?" he gasped. "There!" cried the Indian, pointing to the kicking rat, which was fast gaining strength. * * * * * Hale staggered back. "No! You don't mean it, do you?" Unani Assu turned the rat over with a contemptuous toe. "Yes, I mean it. Behold Aimu, the man who thought himself creator and destroyer--the man who said that a human being was no higher than a rat! Perhaps he was right, for see this thing that was once a man!" Hale buried his face in his hands. "Kill it, Unani Assu! Kill it!" Unani Assu's low laugh was metallic. "You kill it." Hale uncovered his face. "Open the disintegrator." Gingerly he reached for the rat's tail. But his hand never touched the animal. The hairless face turned for a second, and the little, beady eyes blinked up at Hale with an expression that his fevered imagination thought almost human. Then, like a dark shadow, the rat dashed away. Once around the room it scampered, hunting for an exit. Hale started in pursuit. He was almost upon the animal again, when, leaping up from his grasp, it landed on a low shelf where chemicals were stored. Several bottles fell, filling the room with fumes. Another bottle fell, and, suddenly, amid a thunderous roar, the ceiling and walls began falling. Some highly explosive chemical had been stored in one of the bottles. Hale was thrown violently against the couch. His hand touched Aña's body. One last shred of consciousness enabled him to pick her up and drag her out. In the open, he fell, aware, before blackness descended, that flames leaped high over the laboratory building and that Unani Assu lay dead within. * * * * * Hale and Aña, leaning over the deck-rail of a small steam launch, gazed into the dark waters of the Amazon. "We ought to reach Para by morning," said Hale, "and then, dearest, we're off for New York!" Aña, wearing one of the first civilized dresses she had ever donned, and looking as smart as any débutante, slipped her little hand into her husband's. "Isn't it a shame, Hale," she moaned, "that the fire burned all the animals and insects, the machinery, and even your notes?" Her beautiful face saddened. "Just one or two specimens might have been proof enough for your What-You-Call-It Club!" "The Nescience Club, darling. No, I can't expect to win the Woolman prize, but I've won a prize worth far more." He squeezed her little hand and looked devotedly into her blue eyes. "And, Aña, I've reasoned out something concerning mind-electrons which even Sir Basil overlooked." "What is it, Hale?" "He maintained that matter seeks always to enslave mind-electrons, but I am convinced that mind-electrons seek to enslave matter. Understand? It's creation, Aña! Had Sir Basil succeeded in broadcasting death throughout the world, the freed mind-electrons, as in the beginning, would have started again to vitalize inorganic atoms. And, in a few million years, which is no time to the Mind, the world would be humming with a new civilization. Large thought, eh, sweetheart?" A SIGNAL TO THE MOON The idea of a radio signal to the moon may sound fantastic, but is easily within the range of possibility, says Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor, Chief of the Radio Division of the United States Naval Research Laboratories at Washington, who plans such an attempt in the near future. "We have reason to expect a good chance of getting the signal back in a time interval of slightly less than three seconds," said Dr. Taylor. To be exact, a radio signal should be reflected back to earth in a time interval of 2.8 seconds, this being the necessary elapsed time for it to carry the 250,000 miles to the moon and return at its speed of 300,000 kilometers, or 186,000 miles per second. The signal would be very weak, Dr. Taylor points out, but not impossible of detection with the present refinement of receiving instruments, provided no great absorption took place in interstellar space. A high frequency wave will be used, as such a wave penetrates readily the earth's atmosphere and probably goes far beyond. The frequency of the wave will range between 20,000 and 30,000 kilocycles. Twenty kilowats of power will be used, enough to furnish current for about forty flatirons. The value of a radio signal to the moon lies in the confirmation of whether there is or not heavy absorption of waves in the upper levels of our own atmosphere. If successful it would indicate a reasonably good reflection coefficient at the surface of the moon--the power of the moon's surface to act as a joint agent in the perfection of the signal. The signal might have some bearing also on whether the moon has an atmosphere--something pretty much settled already by astronomical observation. It would also lead to the possibility of fairly accurate determination of wave velocity in free space, all of interest to science, either confirming existing theories or establishing new ones. The Pirate Planet PART TWO OF A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Charles W. Diffin_ It is war. Interplanetary war. And on far distant Venus two fighting Earthlings stand up against a whole planet run amuck. WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE A flash of light on Venus!--and at Maricopa Flying Field Lieutenant McGuire and Captain Blake laugh at its possible meaning until the radio's weird call and the sight of a giant ship in the night sky prove their wildest thoughts are facts. "Big as an ocean liner," it hangs in midair, then turns and shoots upward at incredible speed until it disappears entirely, in space! McGuire goes to Mount Lawson observatory, and there he sees the flash on Venus repeated. Professor Sykes, who had observed the first flash, confirms it and sees still more. He sees the enveloping clouds of Venus torn asunder, and beneath them an identifying mark, a continent shaped like the letter "L." And then the great ship comes again. It hovers above the observatory and settles slowly down. [Illustration: "Hold them off as long as you can!"] Back at Maricopa Field, Captain Blake has tested a new plane for altitude, and is now prepared to interview the stranger in the higher levels. McGuire's frantic phone call sends him out into the night with the 91st Squadron of planes in support. It is their last flight, for all but Blake. The invader smothers them in a great sphere of gas, but Blake, with his oxygen flasks, flies through to crash beside the observatory. Only Blake survives to see the enemy land, while strange man-shapes loot the buildings and carry off McGuire and Sykes. A bombardment with giant shells dispels the last doubt of the earth being under attack. The flashes from Venus at regular intervals spout death and destruction upon the earth; a mammoth gun, sunk into the planet itself, bears once upon the earth at every revolution, until the changing position of the globes take the target out of range. In less than a year and a half the planets must meet again. It is war to the death; a united world against an enemy unknown--an enemy who has conquered space. And there is less than a year and a half in which to prepare! Far out in the blackness of space McGuire and Sykes are captives in the giant ship. Their stupor leaves them; they find themselves immersed in clouds. The clouds part; their ship drops through; and below them is a strange continent shaped like the letter "L." Captives of inhuman but man-shaped things, they are landing upon a strange globe--upon the planet Venus itself! CHAPTER VIII Miles underneath the great ship, from which Lieutenant McGuire and Professor Sykes were now watching through a floor-window of thick glass, was a glittering expanse of water--a great ocean. The flickering gold expanse that reflected back the color of the sunlit clouds passed to one side as the ship took its station above the island, a continent in size, that had shown by its shape like a sharply formed "L" an identifying mark to the astronomer. They were high in the air; the thick clouds that surrounded this new world were miles from its surface, and the things of the world that awaited were tiny and blurred. Airships passed and repassed far below. Large, some of them--as bulky as the transport they were on; others were small flashing cylinders, but all went swiftly on their way. It must have come--some ethereal vibration to warn others from the path--for layer after layer of craft were cleared for the descent. A brilliant light flashed into view, a dazzling pin-point on the shore below, and the great ship fell suddenly beneath them. Swiftly it dropped down the pathway of light; on even keel it fell down and still down, till McGuire, despite his experience in the air, was sick and giddy. The light blinked out at their approach. It was some minutes before the watching eyes recovered from the brilliance to see what mysteries might await, and then the surface was close and the range of vision small. A vast open space--a great court paved with blocks of black and white--a landing field, perhaps, for about it in regular spacing other huge cylinders were moored. Directly beneath in a clear space was a giant cradle of curved arms; it was a mammoth structure, and the men knew at a glance that this was the bed where their great ship would lie. * * * * * The smooth pavement seemed slowly rising to meet them as their ship settled close. Now the cradle was below, its arms curved and waiting. The ship entered their grasp, and the arms widened, then closed to draw the monster to its rest. Their motion ceased. They were finally, beyond the last faint doubt, at anchor on a distant world. A shrill cackle of sound recalled them from the thrill of this adventure, and the attenuated and lanky figure, with its ashen, blotchy face that glared at them from the doorway, reminded them that this excursion into space was none of their desire. They were prisoners--captives from a foreign land. A long hand moved its sinuous fingers to motion them to follow, and McGuire regarded his companion with a hopeless look and a despondent shrug of his shoulders. "No use putting up a fight," he said; "I guess we'd better be good." He followed where the figure was stepping through a doorway into a corridor beyond. They moved, silent and depressed, along the dimly lighted way; the touch of cold metal walls was as chilling to their spirits as to their flesh. But the mood could not last: the first ray of light from the outside world sent shivers of anticipation along their spines. They were landing, in very fact, upon a new world; their feet were to walk where never man had stood; their eyes would see what mortal eyes had never visioned. Fears were forgotten, and the men clung to each other not for the human touch but because of an ecstasy of intoxicating, soul-filling joy in the sheer thrill of adventure. They were gripping each other's hand, round-eyed as a couple of children, as they stepped forward into the light. * * * * * Before them was a scene whose blazing beauty of color struck them to frozen silence; their exclamations of wonder died unspoken on their lips. They were in a city of the stars, and to their eyes it seemed as if all the brilliance of the heavens had been gathered for its building. The spacious, open court itself stood high in the air among the masses of masonry, and beyond were countless structures. Some towered skyward; others were lower; and all were topped with bulbous towers and graceful minarets that made a forest of gleaming opal light. Opalescence everywhere!--it flashed in red and gold and delicate blues from every wall and cornice and roof. "Quartz?" marveled Sykes after one long drawn breath. "Quartz or glass?--what are they made of? It is fairyland!" A jewelled city! Garish, it might have been, and tawdry, in the full light of the sun. But on these weirdly unreal structures the sun's rays never shone; they were illumined only by the soft golden glow that diffused across this world from the cloud masses far above. McGuire looked up at that uniform, glowing, golden mass that paled toward the horizon and faded to the gray of banked clouds. His eyes came slowly back to the ramp that led downward to the checkered black and white of the court. Beyond an open portion the pavement was solidly massed with people. "People!--we might as well call them that," McGuire had told Sykes; "they are people of a sort, I suppose. We'll have to give them credit for brains: they've beaten us a hundred years in their inventions." He was trying to see everything, understand everything, at once. There was not time to single out the new impressions that were crowding upon him. The air--it was warm to the point of discomfort; it explained the loose, light garments of the people; it came to the two men laden with strange scents and stranger sounds. McGuire's eyes held with hungry curiosity upon the dwellers in this other world; he stared at the gaping throng from which came a bedlam of shrill cries. Lean colorless hands gesticulated wildly and pointed with long fingers at the two men. * * * * * The din ceased abruptly at a sharp, whistled order from their captor. He stood aside with a guard that had followed from the ship, and he motioned the two before him down the gangway. It was the same scarlet one who had faced them before, the one whom McGuire had attacked in a frenzy of furious fighting, only to go down to blackness and defeat before the slim cylinder of steel and its hissing gas. And the slanting eyes stared wickedly in cold triumph as he ordered them to go before him in his march of victory. McGuire passed down toward the masses of color that were the ones who waited. There were many in the dull red of the ship's crew; others in sky-blue, in gold and pink and combinations of brilliance that blended their loose garments to kaleidoscopic hues. But the figures were similar in one unvarying respect: they were repulsive and ghastly, and their faces showed bright blotches of blood vessels and blue markings of veins through their parchment-gray skins. The crowd parted to a narrow, living lane, and lean fingers clutched writhingly to touch them as they passed between the solid ranks. McGuire had only a vague impression of a great building beyond, of lower stories decorated in barbaric colors, of towers above in strange forms of the crystal, colorful beauty they had seen. He walked toward it unseeing; his thoughts were only of the creatures round about. "What damned beasts!" he said. Then, like his companion, he set his teeth to restrain all show of feeling as they made their way through the lane of incredible living things. * * * * * They followed their captor through a doorway into an empty room--empty save for one blue-clad individual who stood beside an instrument board let into the wall. Beyond was a long wall, where circular openings yawned huge and black. The one at the instrument panel received a curt order: the weird voice of the man in red repeated a word that stood out above his curious, wordless tone. "Torg," he said, and again McGuire heard him repeat the syllable. The operator touched here and there among his instruments, and tiny lights flashed; he threw a switch, and from one of the black openings like a deep cave came a rushing roar of sound. It dropped to silence as the end of a cylindrical car protruded into the room. A door in the metal car opened, and their guard hustled them roughly inside. The one in red followed while behind him the door clanged shut. Inside the car was light, a diffused radiance from no apparent source, the whole air was glowing about them. And beneath their feet the car moved slowly but with a constant acceleration that built up to tremendous speed. Then that slackened, and Sykes and McGuire clung to each other for support while the car that had been shot like a projectile came to rest. "Whew!" breathed the lieutenant; "that was quick delivery." Sykes made no reply, and McGuire, too, fell silent to study the tremendous room into which they were led. Here, seemingly, was the stage for their next experience. A vast open hall with a floor of glass that was like obsidion, empty but for carved benches about the walls; there was room here for a mighty concourse of people. The walls, like those they had seen, were decorated crudely in glaring colors, and embellished with grotesque designs that proclaimed loudly the inexpert touch of the draughtsman. Yet, above them, the ceiling sprang lightly into vaulted, sweeping curves. McGuire's training had held little of architecture, yet even he felt the beauty of line and airy gracefulness of treatment in the structure itself. * * * * * The contrast between the flaunting colors and the finished artistry that lay beneath must have struck a discordant note to the scientist. He leaned closer to whisper. "It is all wrong some way--the whole world! Beauty and refinement--then crude vulgarity, as incongruous as the people themselves--they do not belong here." "Neither do we," was McGuire's reply; "it looks like a tough spot that we're in." He was watching toward a high, arched entrance across the room. A platform before it was raised some six feet above the floor, and on this were seats--ornate chairs, done in sweeping scrolls of scarlet and gold. A massive seat in the center was like the fantastic throne of a child's fairy tale. From the corridor beyond that entrance came a stir and rustling that rivetted the man's attention. A trumpet peal, vibrant and peculiar, blared forth from the ceiling overhead, and the red figures of the guards stood at rigid attention with lean arms held stiffly before them. The one in scarlet took the same attitude, then dropped his hands to motion the two men to give the same salute. "You go to hell," said Lieutenant McGuire in his gentlest tones. And the scarlet figure's thin lips were snarling as he turned to whip his arms up to their position. The first of a procession of figures was entering through the arch. Sykes, the scientist, was paying little attention. "It isn't true," he was muttering aloud; "it can't be true. Venus! Twenty-six million miles at inferior conjunction!" He seemed lost in silent communion with his own thoughts; then: "But I said there was every probability of life; I pointed out the similarities--" "Hush!" warned McGuire. The eyes of the scarlet man were sending wicked looks in their direction. Tall forms were advancing through the arch. They, too, were robed in scarlet, and behind them others followed. * * * * * The trumpet peal from the dome above held now on a long-drawn, single note, while the scarlet men strode in silence across the dais and parted to form two lines. An inverted "V" that faced the entrance--they were an assembly of rigid, blazing statues whose arms were extended like those on the floor below. The vibrant tone from on high changed to a crashing blare that shrieked discordantly to send quivering protest through every nerve of the waiting men. Those about them were shouting, and again the name of Torg was heard, as, in the high arch, another character appeared to play his part in a strange drama. Thin like his companions, yet even taller than them, he wore the same brilliant robes and, an additional mark of distinction, a head-dress of polished gold. He acknowledged the salute with a quick raising of his own arms, then came swiftly forward and took his place upon the massive throne. Not till he was seated did the others on the platform relax their rigid pose and seat themselves in the semicircle of chairs. And not till then did they so much as glance at the men waiting there before them--the two Earth-men, standing in silent, impassive contemplation of the brilliant scene and with their arms held quiet at their sides. Then every eye turned full upon the captives, and if McGuire had seen deadly malevolence in the face of their captor he found it a hundred-fold in the inhuman faces that looked down upon them now. The inquiring mind of Professor Sykes did not fail to note the character of their reception. "But why," he asked in whispers of his fellow-prisoner, "--why this open hatred of us? What possible animus can they have against the earth or its people?" The figure on the throne voiced a curt order; the one who had brought them stepped forward. His voice was raised in the same discordant, singing tone that leaped and wandered from note to note. It conveyed ideas--that was apparent; it was a language that he spoke. And the central figure above nodded a brief assent as he finished. Their captor took an arm of each in his long fingers and pushed them roughly forward to stand alone before the battery of hard eyes. * * * * * Now the crowned figure addressed them directly. His voice quavered sharply in what seemed an interrogation. The men looked blankly at each other. Again the voice questioned them impatiently. Sykes and McGuire were silent. Then the young flyer took an involuntary step forward and looked squarely at the owner of the harsh voice. "We don't know what you are saying," he began, "and I suppose that our lingo makes no sense to you--" He paused in helpless wonderment as to what he could say. Then-- "But what the devil is it all about?" he demanded explosively. "Why all the dirty looks? You've got us here as prisoners--now what do you expect us to do? Whatever it is, you'll have to quit singing it and talk something we can understand." He knew his words were useless, but this reception was getting on his nerves--and his arm still tingled where the scarlet one had gripped him. It seemed, though, that his meaning was not entirely lost. His words meant nothing to them, but his tone must have carried its own message. There were sharp exclamations from the seated circle. The one who had brought them sprang forward with outstretched, clutching hands; his face was a blood-red blotch. McGuire was waiting in crouching tenseness that made the red one pause. "You touch me again," said the waiting man, "and I'll knock you into an outside loop." The attacker's indecision was ended by a loud order from above. McGuire turned as if he had been spoken to by the leader on the throne. The thin figure was leaning far forward; his eye were boring into those of the lieutenant, and he held the motionless pose for many minutes. To the angry man, staring back and upward, there came a peculiar optical illusion. The evil face was vanishing in a shifting cloud that dissolved and reformed, as he watched, into pictures. He knew it was not there, the thing he saw; he knew he was regarding something as intangible as thought; but he got the significance of every detail. He saw himself and Professor Sykes; they were being crushed like ants beneath a tremendous heel; he knew that the foot that could grind out their lives was that of the one on the throne. * * * * * The cloud-stuff melted to new forms that grew clearer to show him the earth. A distorted Earth--and he knew the distortion came from the mind of the being before him who had never seen the earth at first hand; yet he knew it for his own world. It was turning in space; he saw oceans and continents; and before his mental gaze he saw the land swarming with these creatures of Venus. The one before him was in command; he was seated on an enormous throne; there were Earth people like Sykes and himself who crept humbly before him, while fleets of great Venusian ships hovered overhead. The message was plain--plain as if written in words of fire in the brain of the man. McGuire knew that these creatures intended that the vision should be true--they meant to conquer the earth. The slim, khaki-clad figure of Lieutenant McGuire quivered with the strength of his refusal to accept the truth of what he saw. He shook his head to clear it of these thought wraiths. "Not--in--a--million--years!" he said, and he put behind his words all the mental force at his command. "Try that, old top, and they'll give you the fight of your life--" He checked his words as he saw plainly that the thin cruel face that stared and stared was getting nothing from his reply. "Now what do you think about that?" he demanded of Professor Sykes. "He got an idea across to me--some form of telepathy. I saw his mind, or I saw what he wanted me to see of it. It's taps, he says, for us, and then they think they're going across and annex the world." He glanced upward again and laughed loudly for the benefit of those who were watching him so closely. "Fine chance!" he said; "a fat chance!" But in the deeper recesses of his mind he was shaken. For themselves there was no hope. Well, that was all in a lifetime. But the other--the conquest of the earth--he had to try with all his power of will to keep from his mind the pictures of destruction these beastly things could bring about. * * * * * The chief of this strange council made a gesture of contempt with the grotesque hands that were so translucent yet ashy-pale against his scarlet robe, and the down-drawn thin lips reflected the thoughts that prompted it. The open opposition of Lieutenant McGuire failed to impress him, it seemed. At a word the one who had brought them sprang forward. He addressed himself to the circle of men, and he harangued them mightily in harsh discordance. He pointed one lean hand at the two captives, then beat it upon his own chest. "They are mine," he was saying, as the men knew plainly. And they realized as if the weird talk came like words to their ears that this monster was demanding that the captives be given him. An exchange of dismayed glances, and "Not so good!" said McGuire under his breath; "Simon Legree is asking for his slaves. Mean, ugly devil, that boy!" The lean figures on the platform were bending forward, an expression of mirth--distorted, animal smiles--upon their flabby lips. They represented to the humans, so helpless before them, a race of thinking things in whom no last vestige of kindness or decency remained. But was there an exception? One of the circle was standing; the one beside them was sullenly silent as the other on the platform addressed their ruler. He spoke at some length, not with the fire and vehemence of the one who had claimed them, but more quietly and dispassionately, and his cold eyes, when they rested on those of McGuire and Sykes, seemed more crafty than actively ablaze with malevolent ill-will. Plainly it was the councilor now, addressing his superior. His inhuman voice was silenced by a reply from the one on the throne. He motioned--this gold-crowned figure of personified evil--toward the two men, and his hand swept on toward the one who had spoken. He intoned a command in harsh gutturals that ended in a sibilant shriek. And the two standing silent and hopeless exchanged looks of despair. They were being delivered to this other--that much was plain--but that it boded anything but captivity and torment they could not believe. That last phrase was too eloquent of hissing hate. * * * * * The creature rose, tall and ungainly, from his throne; amid the salutations of his followers he turned and vanished through the arch. The others of his council followed, all but the one. He motioned to the two men to come with him, and the sullen one who had demanded the men for himself obeyed an order from this councilor who was his superior. He snapped an order, and four of his men ranged themselves about the captives as a guard. Thin metal cords were whipped about the wrists of each; their hands were tied. The wire cut like a knife-edge if they strained against it. The new director of their destinies was vanishing through an exit at one side of the great hall; their guard hustled them after. A corridor opened before them to end in a gold-lit portal; it was daylight out beyond where a street was filled with hurrying figures in many colors. With quavering shrieks they scattered like frightened fowls as an airship descended between the tall buildings that reflected its passing in opalescent hues. It was a small craft compared with the one that had brought them, and it swept down to settle lightly upon the street with no least regard for those who might be crushed by its descent. Consideration for their fellows did not appear as a marked characteristic of this strange people, McGuire observed thoughtfully. They swarmed in endless droves, these multicolored beings who made of the thoroughfare an ever-changing kaleidoscope--and what was a life or two, more or less, among so many? He found no comfort for themselves in the thought. Shoulder to shoulder, the two followed where the scarlet figure of the councilor moved toward the waiting ship. Only the professor paid further heed to their surroundings; he marveled aloud at the numbers of the people. "Hundreds of them," he said; "thousands! They are swarming everywhere like rats. Horrible!" His eyes passed on to the buildings in their glory of delicate hues, as he added, "And the contrast they make with their surroundings! It is all wrong some way; I wish I knew--" They were in the ship when McGuire replied. "I hope we live long enough to satisfy your curiosity," he said grimly. The ship was rising beneath them; the opal and quartz of the city's walls were flashing swiftly down. CHAPTER IX They were in a cabin at the very nose of the ship, seated on metal chairs, their hands unshackled and free. Their scarlet guardian reclined at ease somewhat to one side, but despite his apparent disregard his cold eyes seldom left the faces of the two men. Windows closed them in; windows on each side, in front, above them, and even in the floor beneath. It was a room for observation whose metal-latticed walls served only as a framework for the glass. And there was much to be observed. The golden radiance of sunlit clouds was warm above. They rose toward it, until, high over the buildings' tallest spires, there spread on every hand the bewildering beauty of that forest of minarets and sloping roofs and towers, whose many facets made glorious blendings of soft color. Aircraft at many levels swept in uniform directions throughout the sky. The ship they were in hung quiet for a time, then rose to a higher level to join the current of transportation that flowed into the south. "We will call it south," said Professor Sykes. "The sun-glow, you will observe, is not directly overhead; the sun is sinking; it is past their noon. What is the length of their day? Ah, this interesting--interesting!" The certain fate they had foreseen was forgotten; it is not often given to an astronomer to check at first hand his own indefinite observations. "Look!" McGuire exclaimed. "Open country! The city is ending!" * * * * * Ahead and below them the buildings were smaller and scattered. Their new master was watching with closest scrutiny the excitement of the men; he whispered an order into a nearby tube, and the ship slowly slanted toward the ground. He was studying these new specimens, as McGuire observed, but the lieutenant paid little attention; his eyes were too thoroughly occupied in resolving into recognizable units the picture that flowed past them so quickly. He was accustomed, this pilot of the army air service, to reading clearly the map that spreads beneath a plane, but now he was looking at an unfamiliar chart. "Fields," he said, and pointed to squared areas of pale reds and blues; "though what it is, heaven knows. And the trees!--if that's what they are." The ship went downward where an area of tropical denseness made a tangled mass of color and shadow. "Trees!" Lieutenant McGuire had exclaimed, but these forests were of tree-forms in weirdest shapes and hues. They grew to towering heights, and their branches and leaves that swayed and dipped in the slow-moving air were of delicate pastel shades. "No sunlight," said the Professor excitedly; "they have no direct rays of the sun. The clouds act as a screen and filter out actinic rays." McGuire did not reply. He was watching the countless dots of color that were people--people who swarmed here as they had in the city; people working at these great groves, crouching lower in the fields as the ship swept close; people everywhere in teeming thousands. And like the vegetation about them, they, too, were tall and thin, attenuated of form and with skin like blood-stained ash. "They need the sun," Sykes was repeating; "both vegetable and animal life. The plants are deficient in chlorophyl--see the pale green of the leaves!--and the people need vitamins. Yet they evidently have electric power in abundance. I could tell them of lamps--" * * * * * His comments ceased as McGuire lurched heavily against him. The flyer had taken note of the tense, attentive attitude of the one in scarlet; the man was leaning forward, his eyes focused directly upon the scientist's face; he seemed absorbing both words and emotions. How much could he comprehend? What power had he to vision the idea-pictures in the other's mind? McGuire could not know. But "Sorry!" he told Sykes; "that was clumsy of me." And he added in a whisper, "Keep your thoughts to yourself; I think this bird is getting them." Buildings flashed under them, not massed solidly as in the city, yet spaced close to one another as if every foot of ground not devoted to their incredible agriculture were needed to house the inhabitants. The ground about them was alive with an equally incredible humanity that swarmed over all this world in appalling profusion. Their horrid flesh! Their hideous features! And their number! McGuire had a sudden, sickening thought. They were larvae, these crawling hordes--vile worm-things that infested a beautiful world--that bred here in millions, their numbers limited only by the space for their bodies and the food for their stomachs. And he, McGuire, a _man_--he and this other man with his clear-thinking scientific brain were prisoners to this horde; captives, to be used or butchered by those vile, crawling things! And again it was this world of contrast that drove home the conviction with its sickening certainty. A world of beauty, of delicate colors, of sweeping oceans and gleaming shores and towering cities with their grace and beauty and elfin splendor yet a world that shuddered beneath this devouring plague of grublike men. * * * * * They swept past cities and towns and over many miles of open land before their craft swung eastward toward the dark horizon. The master gave another order into the speaking tube and their ship shot forward, faster and yet faster, with a speed that pressed them heavily into their seats. Behind them was the glory of the sunlit clouds; ahead the gloomy gray-black masses that must make a stygian night sky over this lonely world--a world cut off by that vaporous shell from all communion with the stars. They were over the water; before them a dark ocean reached out in forbidding emptiness to a darker horizon. Ahead, the only broken line in the vast level expanse was a mountain rising abruptly from the sea. It was a volcanic cone surmounting an island; the sunlight's glow reflected from behind them against the sombre mass that lifted toward the clouds. Their ship was high enough to clear it, but instead it swung, as McGuire watched, toward the south. The island drifted past, and again they were on their course. But to the flyer there were significant facts that could not pass unobserved. Their own ship had swung in a great circle to avoid this mountain. And all through the skies were others that did the same. The air above and about the grim sentinel peak was devoid of flying shapes. McGuire caught the eyes of the councilor, their keeper. "What is that?" he asked, though he knew the words were lost on the other. He nodded his head toward the distant peak, and his question was plainly in regard to the island. And for the first time since their coming to this wild world, he saw, flashing across the features of one of these men, a trace of emotion that could only be construed as fear. The slitted cat eyes lost their look of complacent superiority. They widened involuntarily, and the face was drained of its blotched color. There was fear, terror unmistakable, though it showed for but an instant. He had control of his features almost at once, but the flyer had read their story. Here was something that gave pause to this race of conquering vermin; a place in the expanse of this vast sea that brought panic to their hearts. And there came to him, as he stowed the remembrance away in his mind, the first glow of hope. These things could fear a mountain; it might be that they could be brought to fear a man. * * * * * The sky was clearing rapidly of traffic and the mountain of his speculations was lost astern, when another island came slanting swiftly up to meet them as their ship swept down from the heights. It was a tiny speck in the ocean's expanse, a speck that resolved itself into the squared fields of colored growth, orchards whose brilliant, strange fruits glowed crimson in the last light of day, and enormous trees, beyond which appeared a house. A palace, McGuire concluded, when he saw clearly the many-storied pile. Like the buildings they had seen, this also constructed of opalescent quartz. There were windows that glowed warmly in the dusk. A sudden wave of loneliness, almost unbearable, swept over the man. Windows and gleaming lights, the good sounds of Earth; home!... And his ears, as he stepped out into the cool air, were assailed with the strange cackle and calling of weird folk; the air brought him scents, from the open ground beyond, of fruits and vegetation like none he had ever known; and the earth, the homeland of his vain imaginings, was millions of empty miles away.... The leader stopped, and McGuire looked dispiritedly at the unfamiliar landscape under dusky lowering skies. Trees towered high in the air--trees grotesque and weird by all Earth standards--whose limbs were pale green shadows in the last light of day. The foliage, too, seemed bleached and drained of color, but among the leaves were flashes of brilliance where night-blooming flowers burst open like star-shells to fill the air with heavy scents. Between the men and the forest growth was a row of denser vegetation, great ferns twenty feet and more in height, and among them at regular intervals stood plants of another growth--each a tremendous pod held in air on a thick stalk. Tendrils coiled themselves like giant springs beside each pod, tendrils as thick as a man's wrist. The great pods were ranged in a line that extended as far as McGuire could see in the dim light. * * * * * His shoulders drooped as the guard herded him and his companion toward the building beyond. He must not be cast down--he would not! Who knew how much of such feeling was read by these keen-eyed observers? And the only thought with which he could fill his mind, the one forlorn ghost of a hope that he could cling to, was that of an island, a volcanic peak that rose from dark waters to point upward toward the heights. The guard of four was clustered about; the figures were waiting now in the gathering dark--waiting, while the one in scarlet listened and spoke alternately into a jeweled instrument that hung by a slender chain about his neck. He raised one lean hand to motion the stirring guards to silence, listened again intently into the instrument, then pointed that hand toward the cloud-filled sky, while he craned his thin neck to look above him. The men's eyes followed the pointing hand to see only the sullen black of unlit clouds. The last distant aircraft had vanished from the skies; not a ship was in the air--only the enveloping blanket of high-flung vapor that blocked out all traces of the heavens. And then!-- The cloud banks high in the skies flashed suddenly to dazzling, rolling flame. The ground under their feet was shaken as by a distant earthquake, while, above, the terrible fire spread, a swift, flashing conflagration that ate up the masses of clouds. "What in thunder--" McGuire began; then stopped as he caught, in the light from above, the reflection of fierce exultation in the eyes of the scarlet one. The evil, gloating message of those eyes needed no words to explain its meaning. That this cataclysm was self-made by these beings, McGuire knew, and he knew that in some way it meant menace to him and his. Yet he groped in thought for some definite meaning. No menace could this be to himself personally, for he and Sykes stood there safe in the company of the councilor himself. Then the threat of this flaming blast must be directed toward the earth! * * * * * The fire vanished, and once more, as Professor Sykes had seen on that night so long ago, the blanket of clouds was broken. McGuire followed the gaze of the scientist whose keen eyes were probing in these brief moments into the depths of star-lit space. "There--there!" Sykes exclaimed in awe-struck tones. His hand was pointing outward through the space where flames had cleared the sky. A star was shining in the heavens with a glory that surpassed all others. It outshone all neighboring stars, and it sent its light down through the vast empty reaches of space, a silent message to two humans, despondent and heartsick, who stared with aching eyes. Lieutenant McGuire did not hear his friend's whispered words. No need to name that distant world--it was Earth! Earth!... And it was calling to its own.... There was a flying-field--so plain before his mental eyes; men in khaki and leather who moved and talked and spoke of familiar things ... and the thunder of motors ... and roaring planes.... Some far recess within his deeper self responded strangely. What now of threats and these brute-things that threatened?--he was one with this picture he had visioned. He was himself; he was a man of that distant world of men; they would show these vile things how men could meet menace--or death.... His shoulders were back and unconsciously he stood erect. The scarlet figure was close beside them in the dusk, his voice vibrant with a quality which should have struck fear to his captives' hearts as he ordered them on. But the look in his crafty eyes changed to one of puzzled wonder at sight of the men. Hands on each other's shoulders, they stood there in the gathering dark, where grotesque trees arched twistingly overhead. Their moment of depression had passed; Earth had called, and they had heard it, each after his own fashion. But to each the call had been one of clear courage. No longer cast off and forlorn, they were one with their own world. "Down," said Professor Sykes with a whimsical smile; "down, but not out!" And the lieutenant responded in kind. "Are we down-hearted?" he demanded loudly. And the two turned as one man to grin at the scarlet one as they thundered. "N-o-o!" CHAPTER X Two men grinned in derision at the horrible, man-shaped thing that held their destinies in his lean, inhuman hands!--but they turned abruptly away to look again above them where that bright star still shone through an opening in the clouds. "The earth! Home!" It seemed as if they could never tear their eyes away from the sight. Their captor whistled an order, and the guard of four tugged vainly at the two, who resisted that they might gaze upon their own world until the closing clouds should blot it from sight. A cry from one of the red guards roused them. The dark was closing in fast, and their surroundings were dim. Vaguely, McGuire felt more than saw one of the red figures whirled into the air. He sensed a movement in the jungle darkness where were groves of weird trees and the tangle of huge vegetable growths. What it was he could not say, but he felt the guard who clutched at him quiver in terror. Their leader snatched at the instrument that hung about his neck and put it to his lips; he whistled an order, sharp and shrill. Blazing light that seemed to flame in the air was the response; the air was aglow with an all-pervading brilliance like that in the car that had whirled them from the landing field. The light was everywhere, and the building before them was surrounded by a dazzling envelope of luminosity. Whatever of motion or menace there had been ceased abruptly. Their guard, three now in number instead of four, seized them roughly and hustled them toward an open door. No time, as they passed, for more than fleeting impressions: a hall of warm, glowing light--a passage that branched off--and, at the end, a room into which they were thrown, while a metal door clanged behind them. * * * * * These were no gentle hands that hurled the men staggering through the doorway, and Professor Sykes fell headlong upon the glassy floor. He sprang to his feet, his face aflame with anger. "The miserable beasts!" he shouted. "Take it easy," admonished the flyer. "We're in the hoose-gow; no use of getting all fussed up if they don't behave like perfect gentlemen. "There's a bunk in the corner," he said, and pointed to a woven hammock that was covered with soft cloths; "and here's another that I can sling. Twin beds! What more do you want?" He opened a door and the splash of falling water came to them. A fountain cascaded to the ceiling to fall splashing upon a floor of inlaid, glassy tile. McGuire whistled. "Room and bath," he said. "And you complained of the service!" "I have an idea," he told the scientist, "that our scarlet friend who owns this place intends to treat us decently, even though his helpers are a bit rough. My hunch is that he wants to get some information out of us. That old bird back there in the council chamber told me as plain as day that they think they are going to conquer the earth. Maybe that's why we are here--as exhibits A and B, for them to study and learn how to lick us." "You are talking what I would have termed nonsense a month ago," replied Sykes, "but now--well, I am afraid you are right. And," he said slowly, "I fear that they are equally correct. They have conquered space; they have ships propelled by some unknown power; they have gas weapons, as you and I have reason to know. And they have all the beastly ferocity to carry such a plan through to success. But I wonder what that sky-splitting blast meant." "Bombardment," the flyer told him; "bombardment of the earth as sure as you're alive." "More nonsense," said Sykes; "and probably correct.... Well, what are we to do?--sit tight and give them as little information as we can? or--" His question ended unfinished; the alternative, it seemed, was not plain to him. "There's only one answer," said McGuire. "We must get away; escape somehow." * * * * * Professor Sykes' eyes showed his appreciation of a spirit that could still dare to hope, but he asked dejectedly: "Escape? Good idea. But where to?" "I have an idea," the flyer said slowly. "An idea about an island." He told the professor what he had observed--the fact that there was one spot of land on this globe from which the traffic of these monsters of Venus steered clear. This, he explained, must have some significance. "Whatever is there, God only knows," he admitted, "but it is something these devils don't like a little bit. It might be interesting to learn more. We'll make a break for it; find a boat. No, we probably can't do it, but we can make a try. Now what is our first step, I wonder." "Our first step," said Professor Sykes, measuring his words as if he might be working out some astronomical calculation, "is into the inverted shower-bath, if you feel as hot as I do. And our next step, when all is quiet for the night, is through the window I see beyond. I can see the branches of one of those undernourished trees from here." "Last one in is a lop-eared Venusian!" said McGuire, throwing off his jacket. And in that strange room in a strange world, under the shadow of death and of tortures unknown, the two men stripped with all the care-free abandon of a couple of schoolboys racing to be first in the old swimming hole. * * * * * It was some time later when the door opened and a long red hand pushed a tray of food into the room. The tray was of unbreakable crystal--he rattled it heedlessly upon the floor--and it held crystal dishes of unknown foods. They were sampling them all when Sykes remarked plaintively, "I would like to know what under heaven I am eating." "I've wished to know that in lots of restaurants," McGuire replied. "I remember a place down on--" He stopped abruptly, then chewed in silence upon a fruit like a striped pepper that stung his mouth and tongue while he scarcely felt it. References to Earth things plainly were to be avoided: the visions they brought before one's eyes were unnerving. They made a pretence of sleeping in case they were being observed, and it was some hours later when the two stood quietly beside the open window. As Sykes had seen, there were branches of a pale, twisted tree-growth close outside. McGuire tried his weight upon them, then swung himself out, hand over hand, upon the branch that bent low beneath him. Sykes was close behind when he clambered to the ground to stand for some minutes, listening silently in the dark. "Too easy!" the lieutenant whispered. "They are too foxy to leave a gateway like that--but here we are. The shore is off in this direction." The dark of a night unrelieved by a single star was about them as they moved noiselessly away. They followed open ground at first. The building that had been their brief prison was upon their right; beyond and at the left was where the ship landed--it was gone now--and beyond that the wall of vegetation. And again, in the dark, McGuire had an uncanny sense of motion. Soft bodies were slipping quietly one upon another; something that lived was there beyond them in the night. No sound or sign of life came from the house; no guard had been posted; and McGuire stopped again, before plunging into the tangled growth, to whisper, "Too easy, Sykes! There's something about this--" * * * * * He had pushed aside the fronds of a giant fern; a cautious step beyond his hands touched a slippery, pliant vine. And his whisper ended as he felt the thing turn and twist beneath his hand. It was alive!--writhing!--cold as the body of a monster snake, and just as vicious and savage in the way that it whipped down and about him in the gloom of the starless night. The thing was alive! It threw its coils around his body in an embrace that left him breathless; a slender tendril was tightening about his neck; his hands and arms were bound. His ankle was grasped as he was whirled aloft--a human hand that gripped him this time--and Sykes, forgetting discretion and the need for silence, was shouting in the darkness that gave no clue to their opponent. "Hang on!" he yelled. "I've got you, Mac!" His shouts were cut short by another serpent shape that thrashed him and smashed the softer growing things to earth that it might wrap this man, too, in its deadly coils. McGuire felt his companion's hold loosen as he was lifted from the ground; there were other arms flailing about him--living, coiling things that seemed to fight one with another for this prize. Abruptly, blindingly, the scene was vividly etched before him: the strange trees, the ferns, the writhing and darting serpent-arms! They were illumined in a dazzling, white light! He was in the air, clutched strangely in constricting arms; an odor of rotted flesh was in his nostrils, sickening, suffocating! Beyond and almost beneath him a cauldron of green gaped open, and he saw within it a pool of thick liquid that eddied and steamed to give off the stench of putrescence. All this in an instant of vision--and in that instant he knew the death they courted. It was a giant pod that held that pool--one of the growths he had seen ranged out like a line of sentinels. But the terrible tendrils that had been coiled and at rest were wrapped about him now, drawing him to that reeking pool of death and the waiting thick lips that would close above him. Sykes, too! The tendrils that had clutched him were whisking his helpless body where another gaping mouth was open-- * * * * * And then, in the blazing light that was more brilliant than any light of day in this world, the hold about McGuire relaxed. He saw, as he fell, the thick, green lips snap shut; and the arms that had held him pulled back into harmless, tight-wound coils. Their bodies crashed to earth where a great fern bent beneath them to cushion their fall. And the men lay silent and gasping for great choking breaths, while from the building beyond came the cackle and shrieking of man-things in manifest enjoyment of the frustrated plans. It was the laughter that determined McGuire. "Damn the plants!" he said between hoarse breaths. "Man-eating plants--but they're--better--than--those devils! And there's only--one line of them: I saw them here before. Shall we go on?--make a break for it?" Sykes rolled to the shelter of an arching frond and, without a word, went crawling away. McGuire was behind him, and the two, as they came to open ground, sprang to their feet and ran on through the weird orchard where tree trunks made dim, twisting lines. They ran blindly and helplessly toward the outer dark that promised temporary shelter. A hopeless attempt: both men, knew the futility of it, while they stumbled onward through the dark. Behind them the night was hideous with noise as the great palace gave forth an eruption of shrieking, inhuman forms that scattered with whistling and wailing calls in all directions. * * * * * A mile or more of groping, hopeless flight, till a yellow gleam shone among the trees to guide them. A building, beyond a clearing, gave a bright illumination to the black night. "We've run in a circle," choked McGuire, his voice weak and uncertain with exhaustion. "Like a couple of fools!--" He waited until the heavy breathing that shook his body might be controlled, then corrected himself. "No--this is another--a new one--see the towers! And listen--it's a radio station!" The slender frameworks that towered high in air glowed like flame--a warning to the ships whose lights showed now and then far overhead. And, clear and distinct, there came to the listening men the steady, crackling hiss of an uninterrupted signal. Against the lighted building moving figures showed momentarily, and McGuire pulled his friend into the safe concealment of a tangle of growth, while the group of yelling things sped past. "Come on," he told Sykes; "we can't get away--not a chance! Let's have a look at this place, and perhaps--well, I have an idea!" He slipped silently, cautiously on, where a forest of jungle ferns gave promise of safe passage. * * * * * Some warning had been sounded; the occupants of the building were scattered to aid in the man-hunt. Only one was left in the room where two Earth-men peeped in at the door. The figure was seated upon an insulated platform, and his long hands manipulated keys and levers on a table before him. McGuire and Sykes stared amazedly at this broadcasting station whose air was filled with a pandemonium of crashing sound from some distant room, but McGuire was concerned mainly with the motion of a lean, blood-red hand that swung an object like a pointer in free-running sweeps above a dial on the table. And he detected a variation in the din from beyond as the pointer moved swiftly. Here was the control board for those messages he had heard; this was the instrument that varied the sending mechanism to produce the wailing wireless cries that made words in some far-distant ears. McGuire, as he slipped into the room and crept within leaping distance of the grotesque thing so like yet unlike a man, was as silent as the nameless, writhing horror that had seized them in the dark. He sprang, and the two came crashing to the floor. Lean arms came quickly about him to clutch and tear at his face, but the flyer had an arm free, and one blow ended the battle. The man of Venus relaxed to a huddle of purple and yellow cloth from which a ghastly face protruded. McGuire leaped to his feet and sprang to the place where the other had been. "Hold them off as long as you can!" he shouted to Sykes, and his hand closed upon the pointer. Did this station send where he was hoping? Was this the station that had communicated with the ship that had hovered above their flying field in that far-off land? He did not know, but it was a powerful station, and there was a chance-- * * * * * He moved the pointer frantically here and there, swung it to one side and another; then found at last a point on the outside of the strange design beneath his hand where the pointer could rest while the crashing crackle of sound was stilled. And now he swung the pointer--upon the plate--anywhere!--and the noise from beyond told instantly of the current's passage. He held it an instant, then pushed it back to the silent spot--a dash! A quick return that flashed back again to bring silence--a dot! More dashes and dots ... and McGuire thanked a kindly heaven that had permitted him to learn the language of the air, while he cursed his slowness in sending. Would it reach? Would there be anyone to hear? No certainty; he could only flash the wild Morse symbols out into the night. He must try to get word to them--warn them! And "Blake," he called, and spelled out the name of their field, "warning--Venus--" "Hold them!" he yelled to Sykes at the sound of rushing feet. "Keep them off as long as you can!" "... Prepare--for invasion. Blake, this is McGuire...." Over and over, he worked the swinging pointer into symbols that might in some way, by some fortunate chance, help that helpless people to resist the horror that lay ahead. And while heavy bodies crashed against the door that Sykes was holding, there came from some deep-hidden well of memory an inspiration. There was a man he had once met--a man who had confided wondrous things; and now, with the knowledge of these others who had conquered space, he could believe wholly what he had laughed and joked about before. That man, too, had claimed to have travelled far from the earth; he had invented a machine; his name-- The pointer was swinging in frenzied haste to spell over and over the name of a man, and the name, too, of a forgotten place in the mountains of Nevada. It was repeating the message; then finished in one long crashing wail as a cloud of vapor shot about McGuire and his hand upon the pointer went suddenly limp. CHAPTER XI Captain Blake's game of solitaire had become an obsession. He drove himself to the utmost in the line of duty, and, through the day, the demands of the flying field filled his mind to forgetfulness. And for the rest, he forced his mind to concentrate upon the turn of the cards. He could not read--and he must not think!--so he sat through long evenings trying vainly to forget. He looked up with an expressionless face as Colonel Boynton entered the room. The colonel saw the cards and nodded. "Does that help?" he asked, and added without waiting for an answer, "I don't like cards, but I find my mathematics works well.... My old problems--I can concentrate on them, and stop this eternal, damnable thinking, thinking--" There was something of the same look forming about the eyes of both--that look that told of men who struggled gamely under the sentence of death, refusing to think or to fear, and waiting, waiting, impotently. Blake looked at the colonel with a carefully emotionless gaze. "It's hell in the big towns, I hear." The Colonel nodded. "Can't blame them much, if that's what appeals to them. A year and a half!--and they've got to forget it. Why not crowd all the recklessness and excesses they can into the time that is left?--poor devils! But for the most part the world is wagging along, and people are going through the familiar motions." "Well," said Blake, "I used to wonder at times how a man might feel if he were facing execution. Now we all know. Just going dumbly along, feeling as little as we can, thinking of anything, everything--except the one thing. They've turned to using dope, a lot of them, I hear. Maybe it helps; nobody cares much. Only a year and a half." * * * * * He raised his face from which all expression was consciously erased. "Any possible hope?" he asked. "Or do we take it when it comes and fight with what we've got as long as we can? There was some talk in the papers of an invention--Bureau of Standards cooperating with the big General Committee to investigate. Anything come of it?" "A thousand of them," said the colonel, "all futile. No, we can't expect much from those things. Though there's a whisper that came to me from Washington. General Clinton--you may remember him; he was here when the thing first broke--says that some scientist, a real one, not another of these half-baked geniuses, has worked out a transformation of some kind. It was too deep for me, but it is based upon changing hydrogen into helium, I think. Liberates some perfectly tremendous amount of power. The general had it all down pat--" He stopped speaking at the change in Captain Blake's face. The careful repression of all emotions was gone; the face was suddenly alive-- "I know," he said sharply; "I remember something of the theory. There is a difference in the atoms or their protons--the liberation of an electron from each atom--matter actually transformed into energy; theoretical, what I have read. But--but--Oh my God, Boynton, do you mean that they've got it?--that it will drive us through space?" * * * * * The colonel drove one fist into the palm of his other hand. "Fool! Idiot!" he exclaimed, and it was evident that the epithets were intended for himself. "I had forgotten that you had been trained along that line. The general wants a man to work with them, somewhat as a liason officer to link the army requirements closely with their developments; we are hoping to work out a space ship, of course. You are just the man; I will radio him this minute. Be ready to leave--" The slamming of the door marked a hurried exit toward the radio room. And abruptly, stifflingly, Captain Blake dared to hope. "Scientists will come through with something, some new method of propulsion. All the world is looking to them!" His thoughts were leaping from one possibility to another. "Some miracle of power that will drive a fleet through space as they have done, to battle with the enemy on his own ground--" Could he help? Was there one little thing that he could do to apply their knowledge to practical ends? The thought thrilled him with overpowering emotion an hour later as he felt the lift of the plane beneath him. "Report to General Clinton," the colonel's reply had said. "Captain Blake will be assigned to special duty." He opened the throttle to his ship's best cruising speed, but his spirit was soaring ahead to urge on the swift scout ship whose wings drove steadily into the gathering dusk. * * * * * And then, after long hours, Washington! Brief words with many men--and discouragement! The seat of government of the United States was a city of despondent men, weary, hopeless, but fighting. There was a look of strain on every face; the eyes told a story of sleepless nights and futile thinking and planning. Blake's elation was short lived. He was sent to New York and on into the state, where the laboratories of a great electrical company had turned their equipment from commercial purposes to those of war. Here, surely, one might find fuel to feed the dying embers of hope; the new development must give greater promise than General Clinton had intimated. "Nothing you can do as yet," he was told, when he had stated his mission. "It is still experimental, but we have worked out the transformation on a small scale, and harnessed the power." Captain Blake was in no mood for temporizing; he was tired with being put off. He stared belligerently at the chief of this department. "Power--hell!" he said. "We've got power now. How will you apply it? How will we use it for travelling through space?" The great man of science was unmoved by the outburst. "That is poppycock," he replied; "the unscientific twaddle of the sensational press. We are practical men here; we are working to give you men who do the fighting better ships and better arms. But you will use them right here on Earth." The calm assurance of this man who spoke with a voice of such confidence and authority left the flyer speechless. His brain sent a chaos of profane and violent expletives to the lips that dared not frame them. There was no adequate reply. * * * * * Blake jammed his hat upon his head and walked blindly from the room. Heedless of the protests of those he jostled on the street he went raging on, but some subconscious urge directed his steps. He found himself at the railway. There was a station, and a grilled window where he was asking for a ticket back to Washington. And on the following day-- "There is nothing I can do," he told General Clinton. "It is hopeless. I ask to be relieved." "Why?" The general snapped the question at him. What kind of man was this that Boynton had sent him? "They are fools," said Blake bluntly, "pompous, well-meaning fools! They are planning better motors, more power"--he laughed harshly--"and they think that with them we can attack ships that are independent of the air." "Still," asked General Clinton coldly, "for what purpose do you wish to be relieved? What do you intend to do?" "Return to the field," said Captain Blake, "to work, and put my planes and personnel in the best possible condition; then, when the time comes, go up and fight like hell." An unusual phrasing of a request when one is addressing one's commander; but the older man threw back his shoulders, that were bending under responsibilities too great for one man to bear, and took a long breath that relaxed his face and seemed to bring relief. "You've got the right idea,"--he spoke slowly and thoughtfully--"the right philosophy. It is all we have left--to fight like hell when the time comes. Give my regards to Colonel Boynton; he sent me a good man after all." * * * * * Another long flight, westward this time, and, despite the failure of his hopes and of his errand, Blake was flying with a mind at peace. "It is all we have left," the general had said. Well, it was good to face facts, to admit them--and that was that! There was no use of thinking or worrying.... He lifted the ship to a higher level and glanced at his compass. There were clouds up ahead, and he drove still higher into the night, until he was above them. And again his peace of mind was not to last. It was night when he swung the ship over his home port and signalled for a landing. A flood of light swept out across the field to guide him down. He went directly to the colonel's quarters but found him gone. "In the radio room, I think," an orderly told him. Colonel Boynton was listening intently in the silent room; he scowled with annoyance at the disturbance of Blake's coming; then, seeing who it was, he motioned quickly for the captain to listen in. "Good Lord, Blake," he told the captain in an excited whisper; "I'm glad you're here. Another ship had been sighted; she's been all over the earth; just scouting and mapping, probably. And there have been signals the same as before--the same until just now. Listen!--it's talking Morse!--it's been calling for you!" He thrust a head set into Blake's hands, then reached for some papers. "Poor reception, but there's what we've got," he said. * * * * * The paper held the merest fragments of messages that the operator had deciphered. Blake examined them curiously while he listened at the silent receiver. "Maricopa"--the message, whatever it was, was meant for them, but there were only parts of words and disjointed phrases that the man had written down--"Venus attacking Earth ... Captain Blake ... Sykes and...." At the name of Sykes, Blake dropped the paper. "What does this mean?" he demanded. "Sykes!--why Sykes was the astronomer who was captured with McGuire!" "Listen! Listen!" The colonel's voice was almost shrill with excitement. The night was whispering faintly the merest echo of a signal from a station far away, but it resolved itself into broken fragments of sound that were long and short in duration, and the fragments joined to form letters in the Morse code. "See Winslow," it told them, and repeated the message: "See Winslow at Sierra...." Some distant storm crashed and rattled for breathless minutes. "Blake see Winslow. This is McGuire, Blake. Winslow can help--" The message ended abruptly. One long, wailing note; then again the night was voiceless ... and in the radio room at Maricopa Flying Field two men stood speechless, unbreathing, to stare at each other with incredulous eyes, as might men who had seen a phantom--a ghost that spoke to them and called them by name. "McGuire--is--alive!" stammered Blake. "They've taken him--there!" * * * * * Colonel Boynton was considering, weighing all the possibilities, and his voice, when he answered, had the ring of conviction. "That was no hoax," he agreed; "that quavering tone could never be faked. That message was sent from the same station we heard before. Yes, McGuire is alive--or was up to the end of that sending.... But, who the devil is Winslow?" Blake shook his head despairingly. "I don't know," he said. "And it seems as if I should--" It was hours later, far into the night, when he sprang from out of a half-conscious doze to find himself in the middle of the floor with the voice of McGuire ringing clearly in his ears. A buried memory had returned to the level of his conscious mind. He rushed over to the colonel's quarters. "I've got it," he shouted to that officer whose head was projecting from an upper window. "I remember! McGuire told me about this Winslow--some hermit that he ran across. He has some invention--some machine--said he had been to the moon. I always thought Mac half believed him. We'll go over Mac's things and find the address." "Do you think--do you suppose--?" began Colonel Boynton doubtfully. "I don't dare to think," Blake responded. "God only knows if we dare hope; but Mac--Mac's got a level head; he wouldn't send us unless he knew! Good Lord, man!" he exclaimed, "Mac radioed us from Venus; is there anything impossible after that?" "Wait there," said Colonel Boynton; "I'll be right down--" CHAPTER XII Lieutenant McGuire awoke, as he had on other occasions, to the smell of sickly-sweet fumes and the stifling pressure of a mask held over his nose and mouth. He struggled to free himself, and the mask was removed. Another of the man-creatures whom McGuire had not seen before helped him to sit up. A group of the attenuated figures, with their blood-and-ashes faces, regarded him curiously. The one who had helped him arise forced the others to stand back, and he gave McGuire a drink of yellow fluid from a crystal goblet. The dazed man gulped it down to feel a following surge of warmth and life that pulsed through his paralyzed body. The figures before him came sharply from the haze that had enveloped them. A window high above admitted a golden light that meant another day, but it brought no cheer or encouragement to the flyer. McGuire felt crushed and hopeless in the knowledge that his life must still go on. If only that sleep could have continued--carried him out to the deeper sleep of death! What hope for them here? Not a chance! And then he remembered Sykes; he mustn't desert Sykes. He looked about him to see the same prison room from which he and Sykes had escaped. The body of the scientist was motionless on the hammock-bed across the room; an occasional deep-drawn breath showed that the man still lived. No, he must not leave Sykes, even if he had the means of death. They would fight it through together, and perhaps--perhaps--they might yet be of service, might find some way to avert the catastrophe that threatened their world. Hopeless? Beyond doubt. But he must hope--and fight! The leader had watched the light of understanding as it returned to the flyer's eyes. He motioned now to the others, and McGuire was picked up bodily by four of them and carried from the room. * * * * * McGuire's mind was alert once more; he was eager to learn what he could of this place that was to be their prison, but he saw little. A glory of blending colors beyond, where the golden light from without shone through opal walls--then he found himself upon a narrow table where straps of metal were thrown quickly about to bind him fast. He was tied hand and foot to the table that moved forward on smooth rollers to a waiting lift. What next? he questioned. Not death, for they had been too careful to keep him alive, these repulsive things that stared at him with such cold malevolence. Then what? And McGuire found himself with unpleasant recollections of others he had seen strapped in similar fashion to an operating table. The lift that he had thought would rise fell smoothly, instead, to stop at some point far below ground where the table with its helpless burden was rolled into a great room. He could move his head, and McGuire turned and twisted to look at the maze of instruments that filled the room--a super-laboratory for experiments of which he dared not think. "Whoever says I'm not scared to death is a liar," he whispered to himself, but he continued to look and wonder as he was wheeled before a gleaming machine of many coils and shining, metal parts. A smooth sheet of metal stood vertically beyond him; painted a grayish-white, he saw; but he could not imagine its use. A throng of people, seated in the room, turned blood-red faces toward the bound man and the metal sheet. "Looks as if we were about to put on a show of some kind," he told himself, "and I am cast for a leading role." He watched as best he could from his bound position while a tall figure in robes of lustreless black appeared to stand beside him. The newcomer regarded him with a face that was devoid of all emotion. McGuire felt the lack of the customary expression of hatred; there was not even that; and he knew he was nothing more than a strange animal, bound, and helpless, ready for this weird creature's experiments. The one in black held a pencil whose tip was a tiny, brilliant light. * * * * * Abruptly the room plunged to darkness, where the only visible thing was this one point of light. Ceaselessly it waved back and forth before his eyes; he followed it in a pattern of strange design; it approached and receded. Again and again the motion was repeated, until McGuire felt himself sinking--sinking--into a passive state of lethargy. His muscles relaxed; his mind was at rest; there seemed nothing in the entire universe of being but the single point of light that drew him on and on ... till something whispered from the far reaches of black space.... It came to him, an insistent call. It was asking about the earth--his own world. _What of Earth's armies and their means of defense?_ Vaguely he sensed the demand, and without conscious volition he responded. He pictured the world he had known; how plainly he saw the wide field at Maricopa, and the sweeping flight of a squadron of planes! _Yes--yes! How high could they ascend?_ From one of the planes he saw the world below; the ships were near their ceiling; this was the limit of their climb. _And did they fight with gas? What of their deadliness?_ And again he was seated in a plane, and he was firing tiny bullets from a tiny gun. No. They did not use gas. _But on the ground below--what fortifications? What means of defense?_ McGuire's mind was no longer his own; he could only respond to that invisible questioner, that insistent demand from out of the depths where he was floating. And yet there was something within him that protested, that clamored at his mind and brain. Fortifications! They must know about fortifications--anti-aircraft guns--means for combatting aerial attack. Yes, he knew, and he must explain--and the thing within him pounded in the back of his brain to draw him back to himself. He saw a battery of anti-aircraft guns in operation; the guns were firing; shells were bursting in little plumes of smoke high in the air. And that self within him was shouting now, hammering at him; "You are seeing it," it told him; "it is there before you on the screen. Stop! Stop!" * * * * * And for an instant McGuire had the strange experience of witnessing his own thoughts. Memories, mental records of past experience, were flashing through his mind; mock battles, and the batteries were firing! And, before him, on the metal screen, there glowed a vivid picture of the same thing. Men were serving the guns with sure swiftness; the bursts were high in the air--in a flash of understanding Lieutenant McGuire knew that he was giving his country's secrets to the enemy. And in that same instant he felt himself swept upward from the depths of that darkness where he had drifted. He was himself again, bound and helpless before an infernal contrivance of these devil-creatures. They had read his thoughts; the machine beside him had projected them upon the screen for all to see; a steady clicking might mean their reproduction in motion pictures for later study! He, Lieutenant McGuire, was a traitor against his will! The screen was blank, and the lights of the room came on to show the thin lips that smiled complacently in a cruel and evil face. McGuire glared back into that face, and he tried with all the mental force that he could concentrate to get across to the exultant one the fact that they had not wholly conquered him. This much they had got--but no more! The thin-lipped one had an instrument in his hand, and McGuire felt the prick of a needle plunged into his arm. He tried to move his head and found himself powerless. And now, in the darkness of the room where all lights were again extinguished, the helpless man was fighting the most horrible of battles, and the battleground was within his own mind. He was two selves, and he fought and struggled with all his consciousness to keep those memories from flooding him. With one part of himself he knew what it meant: a sure knowledge given these invaders of what they must prepare to meet; he was betraying his country; the whole of humanity! And that raging, raving self was powerless to check the flow of memory pictures that went endlessly through his mind and out upon the screen beyond.... He had no sense of time; he was limp and exhausted with his fruitless struggle when he felt himself released from the bondage of the metal straps and placed again in the hammock in his room. And he could only look wanly and hopelessly after the figure of Professor Sykes, carried by barbarous figures to the same ordeal. * * * * * Sleep, through the long night, restored both McGuire and his companion to normal strength. The flyer was seated with his head bowed low in his cupped hands. His words seemed wrung from an agony of spirit. "So that's what they brought us here for," he said harshly; "that's why they're keeping us alive!" Professor Sykes walked back and forth in their bare room while he shook his impotent fists in the air. "I told them everything," he exploded; "everything!" Their astronomical knowledge must be limited; under this blanket of clouds they can see nothing, and from their ships they could make approximations only. "And I have told them--the earth, and its days and seasons--its orbital velocity and motion--its relation to the orbit of this accursed planet. They had documents from the observatory and I explained them; I corrected their time of firing their big gun on its equatorial position. Oh, there is little I left untold--damn them!" "I wish to heaven," said the flyer savagely, "that we had known; we would have jumped out of their beastly ship somehow ten thousand feet up, and we would have taken our information with us." Sykes nodded agreement. "Well," he asked, "how about to-morrow, and the next day, and the next? They will want more facts; they will pump the last drop of information from us. Are we going to allow it?" * * * * * McGuire's tone was dry. "You know the answer to that as well as I do. We have just two alternatives; either we get out of here--find some place to hide in, then find some way to put a crimp in their plans; or we get out of here for good. It's twenty feet, not twenty thousand, from that window to the ground, but I think a head-first dive would do it." Sykes did not reply at once; he seemed to be weighing some problem in his mind. "I would prefer the water," he said at last. "If we _can_ get away and reach the shore, and if there is not a possibility of escape--which I must admit I consider highly improbable--well, we can always swim out as far as we can go, and the result will be certain. "This other is so messy." The man had stopped his ceaseless pacing, and he even managed a cheerful smile at the lieutenant. "And, remember, it might only cripple us and leave us helpless in their hands." "Sounds all right to me," McGuire agreed, and there was a tone of finality in his voice as he added: "They've made us do that traitor act for the last time, anyway." * * * * * Daylight comes slowly through cloud-filled skies; the window of the room where the fountain sprayed ceaselessly was showing the first hint of gold in the eastern sky. Above was the utter darkness of the cloud-wrapped night as the two men swung noiselessly out into the grotesque branches of a tree to make their way into the gloom below. There, under the cover of great leaves, they crouched in silence, while the darkness about them faded and a sound of subdued whistling noises came to them from the night. A wheel creaked, and in the dim light two figures appeared tugging at a cart upon which was a cage of woven wire. Beyond them, against the darker background of denser growth, tentacles coiled and twisted above the row of guardian plants that surrounded the house. One of the ghostly forms reached within the cage and brought forth a struggling object that whimpered in fear. The low whine came distinctly to the hidden men. They saw a vague black thing tossed through the air and toward the deadly plants; they heard the swishing of pliant tentacles and the yelping cry of a frightened animal. And the cry rose to a shriek that ended with the gulping splash of thick liquid. The giant pod next in line was open--they could see it dimly--and its tentacles were writhing convulsively, hungrily, across the ground. Another animal was taken from the cage and thrown to the waiting, serpent forms that closed about and whirled it high in air. Another--and another! The yelps of terror grew faint in the distance as the monsters passed on in their gruesome work. And the two men, palpitant with memories of their own experience, were limp and sick with horror. * * * * * In the growing light they saw more plainly the fleshy, pliant arms that whipped through the air or felt searchingly along the ground. No hope there for bird or beast that passed by in the night; nor for men, as they knew too well. But now, as the golden light increased, the arms drew back to form again the tight-wound coils that flattened themselves beside the monstrous pods whose lips were closing. Locked within them were the pools of liquid that could dissolve a living body into food for these vampires of the vegetable world. "Damnable!" breathed Sykes in a savage whisper. "Utterly damnable! And this world is peopled with such monsters!" The last deadly arm was tightly coiled when the men stole off through the lush growth that reached even above their heads. McGuire remembered the outlines he had seen from the air and led the way where, if no better concealment could be found, the ocean waited with promise of rest and release from their inhuman captors. They counted on an hour's start--it would be that long before their jailer would come with their morning meal and give the alarm--and now they went swiftly and silently through the stillness of a strange world. The air that flicked misty-wet across their faces was heavy and heady with the perfume of night-blooming plants. Crimson blossoms flung wide their odorous petals, and the first golden light was filtered through tremendous tree-growths of pale lavenders and grays to show as unreal colors in the vegetation close about them. * * * * * They found no guards; the isolation of this island made the land itself their prison, and the men ran at full speed through every open space, knowing as they ran that there was no refuge for them--only the ocean waiting at the last. But their flight was not unobserved. A great bird rose screaming from a tangle of vines; its heavy, flapping wings flashed red against the pale trees. A pandemonium of shrieking cries echoed its alarm as other birds took flight; the forest about them was in an uproar of harsh cries. And faintly, from far in the rear, came a babel of shrill calls--weird, inhuman!--the voices of the men-things of Venus. "It's all off," said McGuire sharply; "they'll be on our trail now!" He plunged through where the trees were more open, and Sykes was beside him as they ran with a burst of speed toward a hilltop beyond. They paused, panting, upon the crest. A wide expanse of foliage in delicate shadings swept out before them to wave gently in a sea of color under the morning breeze, and beyond was another sea that beckoned with white breakers on a rocky shore. "The ocean!" gasped Sykes, and pointed a trembling hand toward their goal. "But--I had no idea--that suicide--was--such hard work!" The tall figure of Lieutenant McGuire turned to the shorter, breathless man, and he gripped hard at one of his hands. "Sykes," he said, "I'll never get another chance to say it--but you're one good scout!... Come on!" * * * * * McGuire fought to force his way through jungle growth, while screaming birds marked where they went. The sounds of their pursuers were close behind them when the two tore their way through the last snarled tangle of pale vine to stand on a sheer bluff, where, below, deep waters crashed against a rocky wall. They staggered with weariness and gulped sobbingly of the morning air. McGuire could have sworn he was exhausted beyond any further effort, yet from somewhere he summoned energy to spring savagely upon a tall, blood-red figure whose purpling face rose suddenly to confront them. One hand closed upon the metal tube that the other hand raised, and, with his final reserve of strength, the flyer wrapped an arm about the tall body and rushed it stumblingly toward the cliff. To be balked now!--to be brought back to that intolerable prison and the unthinkable role of traitor! The khaki-clad figure wrenched furiously at the deadly tube as they struggled and swayed on the edge of the cliff. He freed his arm quickly, and, regardless of the clawing thing that tore at his face and eyes, he launched one long swing for the horrible face above him. He saw the awkward fall of a lean body, and he swayed helplessly out to follow when the grip of Sykes' hand pulled him back and up to momentary safety. McGuire's mind held only the desire to kill, and he would have begun a staggering rush toward the shrieking mob that broke from the cover behind them, had not Sykes held him fast. At sight of the weapon, their own gas projector, still clutched in the flyer's hand, the pursuers halted. Their long arms pointed and their shrill calls joined in a chorus that quavered and fell uncertainly. * * * * * One, braver than the rest, dashed forward and discharged his weapon. The spurting gas failed to reach its intended victims; it blew gently back toward the others who fled quickly to either side. Above the trees a giant ship nosed swiftly down, and McGuire pointed to it grimly and in silence. The men before them were massed now for a rush. "This is the end," said the flyer softly. "I wonder how this devilish thing works; there's a trigger here. I will give them a shot with the wind helping, then we'll jump for it." The ship was above them as the slim figure of Lieutenant McGuire threw itself a score of paces toward the waiting group. From the metal tube there shot a stream of pale vapor that swept downward upon the others who ran in panic from its touch. Then back--and a grip of a hand!--and two Earth-men who threw themselves out and downward from a sheer rock wall to the cool embrace of deep water. They came to the top, battered from their fall, but able to dive under a wave and emerge again near one another. "Swim!" urged Sykes. "Swim out! They may get us here--recover our bodies--resuscitate us. And that wouldn't do!" Another wave, and the two men were swimming beyond it; swimming feebly but steadily out from shore, while above them a great cylinder of shining metal swept past in a circling flight. They kept on while their eyes, from the wave tops, saw it turn and come slowly back in a long smooth descent. It was a hundred feet above the water a short way out at sea, and the two men made feeble motions with arms and legs, while their eyes exchanged glances of dismay. * * * * * A door had opened in the round under-surface, and a figure, whose gas-suit made it a bloated caricature of a man, was lowered from beneath in a sling. From the stern of the ship gaseous vapor belched downward to spread upon the surface of the water. The wind was bringing the misty cloud toward them. "The gas!" said McGuire despairingly. "It will knock us out, and then that devil will get us! They'll take us back! Our last chance--gone!" "God help us!" said Sykes weakly. "We can't--even--die--" His feeble strokes stopped, and he sank beneath the water. McGuire's last picture as he too sank and the waters closed over his head, was the shining ship hovering beyond. He wondered only vaguely at the sudden whirling of water around him. A solid something was rising beneath his dragging feet; a firm, solid support that raised him again to the surface. He realized dimly the air about him, the sodden form of Professor Sykes some few feet distant. His numbed brain was trying to comprehend what else the eyes beheld. A metal surface beneath them rose higher, shining wet, above the water; a metal tube raised suddenly from its shield, to swing in quick aim upon the enemy ship approaching from above. His eyes moved to the ship, and to the man-thing below in the sling. Its clothes were a mass of flame, and the figure itself was falling headlong through the air. Above the blazing body was the metal of the ship itself, and it sagged and melted to a liquid fire that poured, splashing and hissing, to the waters beneath. In the wild panic the great shape threw itself into the air; it swept out and up in curving flight to plunge headlong into the depths.... The gas was drifting close, as McGuire saw an opening in the structure beside him. The voice of a man, human, kindly, befriending, said something of "hurry" and "gas," and "lift them carefully but make haste." The white faces of men were blurred and indistinct as McGuire felt himself lowered into a cool room and laid, with the unconscious form of Sykes, upon a floor. He tried to remember. He had gone down in the water--Sykes had drowned, and he himself--he was tired--tired. "And this,"--the thought seemed a certainty in his mind--"this is death. How--very--peculiar--" He was trying to twist his lips to a weak laugh as the lighted ports in the wall beside him changed from gold to green, then black--and a rushing of torn waters was in his ears.... (_To be continued_) * * * * * ASTOUNDING STORIES _Appears on Newsstands_ THE FIRST THURSDAY IN EACH MONTH The Sea Terror _By Captain S. P. Meek_ The trail of mystery gold leads Carnes and Dr. Bird to a tremendous monster of the deep. [Illustration: "_The mass hung over the ship._"] "I beg your pardon, sir. I'm looking for Dr. Bird." The famous Bureau of Standards scientist appraised the speaker rapidly. Keen blue eyes stared questioningly at him from a mahogany brown face, criss-crossed with a thousand tiny wrinkles. The tattooed anchor on his hand and the ill-fitting blue serge suit smacked of the sea while the squareness of his shoulders and the direct gaze of his eye spoke eloquently of authority. "I'm Dr. Bird, Captain. What can I do for you?" "Thank you, Doctor, but I'm not a captain. My name is Mitchell and I am, or was, the first mate of the _Arethusa_." "The _Arethusa_!" Operative Carnes of the United States Secret Service sprang to his feet. "You said the _Arethusa_? There _were_ no survivors!" "I believe that I am the only one." "Where have you been hiding and why haven't you reported the fact of your rescue to the proper authorities? Tell the truth; I'm a federal officer!" Carnes flashed the gold badge of the Secret Service and an expression of anger crossed Mitchell's face. "If I had wished to talk to an officer I could have found plenty in New York," he said shortly. "I came to Washington in order to tell my story to Dr. Bird." The seaman and the detective glared at one another for a moment and then Dr. Bird intervened. "Pipe down, Carnes," he said softly. "Mr. Mitchell undoubtedly has reasons, excellent reasons, for his actions. Sit down, Mr. Mitchell, and have a cigar." * * * * * Mitchell accepted the cigar which the doctor proferred and took a chair. He lighted the weed and after another glance of hostility toward the detective he pointedly ignored him and addressed his remarks to Dr. Bird. "I have no objection to telling you why I haven't spoken earlier, Doctor," he said. "When the _Arethusa_ sank, I must have hit my head on something, for the next thing I knew, I was in the Marine Hospital in New York. I had been picked up unconscious by a fishing boat and brought in, and I lay there a week before I knew anything. When I knew what I was doing I heard about the loss of my ship and was told that there were no survivors, and I didn't know what to do. The story I had to tell was so weird and improbable that I hesitated to speak to anyone about it. I was not sure at first that it was not a trick of a disordered brain, but since my head has cleared I am convinced of the truth of it ... and yet I know that it _can't_ be so. I have read about you and some of the things you have done, and so as soon as I was able to travel I came here to tell you about it. You will be better able to judge than I, whether what I tell you really happened or was only a vision." Dr. Bird leaned back in his chair and put the tips of his fingers together. Long, tapering fingers they were, sensitive and well shaped, though sadly marred by acid stains. It was in his hands alone that Dr. Bird showed the genius in his make-up, the artistry which inspired him to produce those miracles of experimentation which had made his name a household word in the realm of science. Aside from those hands he more resembled a pugilist than a scientist. A heavy shock of unruly black hair surmounted a face with beetling black brows and a prognathous jaw. His enormous head, with a breadth and height of forehead which were amazing, rose from a pillar-like neck which sprang from a pair of massive shoulders and the arching chest of the trained athlete. Dr. Bird stood six feet two inches in his socks, and weighed over two hundred stripped. As he leaned back a curious glitter, which Carnes had learned to associate with keen interest, showed for an instant in his eyes. "I will be glad to hear your story, Mr. Mitchell," he said softly. "Tell it in your own way and try not to omit any detail, no matter how trivial it may be." * * * * * The seaman nodded and sat silent for a moment as though marshaling his thoughts. "The story really starts the afternoon of May 12th," he said, "although I didn't realize the importance of the first incident at the time. We were steaming along at good speed, hoping to make New York before too late for quarantine, when a hail came from the forward lookout. I was on watch and I went forward to see what was the matter. The lookout was Louis Green, an able bodied seaman and a good one, but a confirmed drunkard. I asked him what the trouble was and he turned toward me a face that was haggard with terror. "'I've seen a sea serpent, Mr. Mitchell,' he said. "'Nonsense!' I replied sharply. 'You've been drinking again.' "He swore that he hadn't and I asked him to describe what he had seen. His teeth were chattering so that he could hardly speak, but he gasped out a story about seeing a monstrous head, a half mile across, he said, with a long snake body stretching out over the sea until the end of it was lost on the horizon. I turned my glass in the direction he pointed and of course there was nothing to be seen. The man's condition was such as to make him worse than useless as a lookout, so I relieved him and ordered him below. I took it for a touch of delirium tremens. "We were bucking a head wind, although not a very stiff one, and we didn't make port until after dark, so we anchored at quarantine, just off Staten Island, in forty fathoms of water, and Captain Murphy radioed for a Coast Guard boat to come out and lay by us for the night. As you have probably heard, we were carrying four millions in bar gold consigned to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from the Bank of England." * * * * * Dr. Bird and Carnes nodded. The inexplicable loss of the _Arethusa_ had occupied much space in the papers ten days earlier. "The cutter came out, signalled, and dropped anchor about three hundred yards away. So far, everything was exactly as it should be. I walked to the stern of the boat and looked out across the Atlantic and then I realized that Green wasn't the only one who could see things. The wind had fallen and it was getting pretty dark, but not too dark to see things a pretty good distance away. As I looked I saw, or thought I saw, a huge black leathery mass come to the surface a mile or so away. There were two things on it that looked like eyes, and I had a feeling as though some malignant thing was staring at me. I rubbed my eyes and looked again, but the vision persisted, and I went forward to get a glass. When I came back the thing, whatever it was, had disappeared, but the water where it had been was boiling as though there were a great spring or something of the sort under the surface. "I trained my glass on the disturbed area, and I will take my oath that I saw a huge body like a snake emerge from the water. It lay in long undulations on the waves, and moved with them as though it were floating. It was quite a bit nearer than the first thing had been and I could see it plainly with the glass. I would judge it to be fifteen or twenty feet thick, and it actually seemed to disappear in the distance as Green had described it. The sight of the thing sent shivers up and down my spine, and I gave a hoarse shout. The lookout hurried to my side and asked me what the trouble was. I pointed and handed him the glass. He looked through it and handed it back to me with a curious expression. "'I can't see nothing, sir,' he said. "I took the glass from him and tried to level it but my hands were trembling so that I was forced to rest it on the rail. The lookout was right. There was absolutely nothing to be seen and the peculiar appearance of the sea had subsided to normal. The lookout was staring at me rather curiously and I knew that he was thinking the same thing about me as I had thought about Green in the afternoon. I made some kind of an excuse and went below to pull myself together. I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass. I was as white as a sheet, and the sweat was running off my face in drops. * * * * * "I shook myself together after a fashion and managed to persuade myself that the whole thing was just a trick of my mind, inspired by Green's vivid description of his delirious vision of the afternoon. Eight bells struck, and when Mr. Fulton, the junior officer, relieved me, I laid down and tried to quiet myself. I didn't have much luck. Just before I took the deck again at midnight I slipped down to the forecastle to see how Green was coming along. He was lying in his bunk, wide awake, with staring eyes. "'How are you feeling now, Green?' I asked. "He looked up at me with an expression of a man who has looked death in the face. "'Ain't there no chance of dockin' to-night, Mr. Mitchell?' he asked. "'Of course not,' I said rather sharply. 'What's the matter with you? Are you afraid your sea serpent will get us?' "'He'll get us if we stay out here to-night, sir,' he replied with an air of conviction. 'I saw the horrible mouth on him, large enough to bite this ship in half; and it had a beak like a bird, like a bloody parrot, sir. I saw its horrible body, too, with great black ulcers on the under side of it where the sharks had been after it. For all the shark takes a man now and then, he's the seaman's friend, sir, because he kills off the sea serpents who would take ship and all.' "'Nonsense, Green!' I said sharply. 'Don't talk any more such foolishness or I'll have you ironed. You've been drinking so much that you are seeing things, and I won't have the crew disturbed by your crazy talk.' "'You won't think it's talk when those big eyes stare into yours to-night, Mr. Mitchell, and that body twists around you and squeezes the life out of you. I don't care whether you iron me or not; I know that I'm doomed and so is everyone else; but I won't talk about it, sir. The crew might as well rest easy while they can, for there's no escape if we have to stay out here to-night.' "'Well, be sure you keep a tight mouth then,' I said, and left rather hurriedly. I was in a cold sweat, for his air of conviction, together with what I had seen, had shaken me pretty badly. I heard the watch changing up above, and knew there would be men in the forecastle in a minute. I didn't want to face them right then. * * * * * "Mr. Fulton reported everything quiet when I went on deck to relieve him, and although I surveyed the water through a night glass for as far as I could see, there was nothing out of the way. The Coast Guard's lights were shining less than a quarter of a mile away, and things looked peaceful enough. The wind had gone down with the sun; the sea was almost glassy, and there was a bright moon. "After going around the ship, I relieved all of the watch except two men for lookouts, and sent them below to get a good night's sleep. If I hadn't done that, some of them might be alive now. "I paced the deck for an hour trying to quiet my nerves, but really getting more nervous every minute. Three bells struck and I walked forward and leaned on the rail to watch the water. I saw a peculiar swirl as though some large body were coming to the surface from below, and then I saw--it. "Dr. Bird, I take a drink once in a while when I am on shore, but never at sea and never in excess, and I know it wasn't a vision of drink delirium. I felt perfectly normal aside from my nervousness, and I don't think it was fever. Either I saw it or I am insane, for it is as vivid to me as though I were standing on the _Arethusa's_ deck and that monstrous horror was rising once more before my eyes." The seaman's face had become drawn and white as he talked, and drops of sweat were trickling from his chin. Carnes sat forward absorbed in his narrative while Dr. Bird sat back with a glitter in his black eyes and an expression of great attention on his face. "Go on, Mr. Mitchell," the doctor said soothingly. "Tell me just what you saw." * * * * * Mitchell shuddered and glanced quickly around the laboratory as though to assure himself that he was safe within four walls. "From the surface of the sea," he went on, "rose a massive body, black, and of the appearance of wet leather. It must have been a couple of hundred yards across, although the size of objects is often magnified by moonlight and my terror may have added to its size. In the midst of it were two great discs, thirty feet across, which glowed red with the reflected moonlight. It stared for a moment and then rose higher until it towered above the ship; and then I saw, or thought I saw, a huge gaping beak like a parrot's. It was as Green had described it, large enough to bite the _Arethusa_ in half, and she was a ship of three thousand tons. "I was frozen with horror and couldn't move or cry out. As I watched, I saw the long snake-like body emerge from the water, and the estimate I had made of the size in the afternoon seemed pitifully inadequate. Presently a second and a third snake arose from the water, and then more, until the whole sea and the air above it seemed a writhing mass of huge snakes. I remember wondering why the watch of the Coast Guard cutter didn't sound an alarm, and then I realized that the thing had arisen on our port side and the cutter was on the starboard. "The mass of snakes writhed backward and forward, and then two of them rose in the air and hung over the ship. I could see the under side and I saw what Green had called the scars where the sharks had attacked. They were great cup-shaped depressions with vile white edges, and they did resemble huge sores or ulcers. They wavered over the ship for an instant, and then both of them dropped down on the deck. "I found my voice and I think that I gave a yell, but even as I opened my mouth, I realized the futility of it. The _Arethusa_ was sucked down into the sea as though it had been a tiny chip. I saw the water rising to the rail, and I think I cried out again. The ship tilted and I felt myself falling. The next thing I knew was when I was in the hospital and was told that I had been raving for a week. I was afraid to tell my story for fear I would be put in an asylum, so I kept a tight tongue in my head until I was discharged." * * * * * Dr. Bird mused for a moment as the seaman's voice stopped. "You cried out all right, Mr. Mitchell," he said. "You gave two distinct shouts, both of which were heard by the watch on the _Wren_, the Coast Guard cutter. They reported that at 1:30, the _Arethusa_ sank without warning. As soon as he heard your shouts, the watch gave the alarm and the crew piled on deck. The _Arethusa_ was gone completely and the _Wren_ was tossing about like 'a chip in a whirlpool' as they graphically described it. The _Wren_ had steam up and they fought the waves and steamed over your anchoring ground looking for survivors, but they found none. The sea gradually subsided and they did the only thing they could do--dropped a buoy, to guide the salvage people, and radioed for assistance. The _Robin_ came out and joined them, and both cutters stood by until daylight, but nothing unusual was seen. The insurance people are trying to salvage the wreck now, but so far they have made little headway." "That brings me to the rest of the story, the part that made me decide to come to you, Doctor," said the seaman. "Did you see what happened to the divers yesterday?" Dr. Bird nodded. "I saw a brief account of it," he said. "It seems that two of them were lost through their lines getting fouled and their air connections severed in some way. I don't believe the bodies have been recovered yet." "They never will be recovered, Doctor. I was discharged from the hospital yesterday and the papers were just out with an account of it. I went down to the dock where the _John MacLean_, the salvage ship, ties up, and I talked to Captain Starley who commands it. I have known him casually for some years, although not intimately, and he gave me a few more details than the press got. He didn't connect me up at first with the Mitchell who was reported lost on the _Arethusa_. "The first man to go down from the _MacLean_ was Charley Melrose, an expert diver. He went down in a pressure outfit to the bottom and started to work. Everything was going along fine until the telephone suddenly rang and the man who answered it heard him say, 'Raise me, for God's sake! Hurry!' The signal for raising was given, but they hadn't got him more than thirty feet from the bottom before there came a tug on the line and he was gone! The air line, the lifting cable and the telephone cord floated free and were reeled in. Melrose had been plucked off the end of that line as you or I would pluck off a grape." * * * * * Dr. Bird leaned forward with the curious glitter again in his eye. "Go on," he said tersely. "Blake, the other diver, donned a suit and insisted on being lowered at once. Starley tried to dissuade him but he insisted on going down. They lowered him over the side with a twelve-foot steel-shod pike in his hand. He never got to the bottom. He had not been lowered more than a hundred feet when a scream came over the telephone, and again there was a jerk on the lines which threatened to wreck the reel--and the line came aboard with no diver on the end of it. At the same time, Starley told me, the sea boiled and churned as though the whole bottom were coming up, and his ship was tossed about as though it were in a violent storm, although it was calm enough for forty fathom salvage work and that is pretty quiet, you know. Half the time his screws were out of water and he had a hard time to keep from being capsized. He fought his way out of the disturbed area, and as soon as he did, it started to quiet down, and in ten minutes it was calm again. "Starley was pretty badly shaken and besides he had lost both of his divers, so he came in and I saw him at the dock. When I heard his yarn, I took him into my confidence and told him what I had seen and that I proposed coming to you and asking your advice. I was afraid until I heard his story that it was merely a vision that I had had, but it certainly was no vision that plucked those two divers off their lines." "Has Captain Starley told that story to anyone else yet?" "No, Doctor, he hasn't. He promised not to talk until after I had seen you. I'll vouch for him; he'll keep his word through anything; and he is keeping his whole crew on board until he hears from me." * * * * * Dr. Bird sprang to his feet. "Mr. Mitchell," he said energetically, "you have shown excellent judgment. Wire Captain Starley that you have seen me and that he is to hold his crew on board and to talk to no one until I get there. Carnes, telephone the Chief of Naval Operations and ask him to receive me in conference at once. Have him get the Secretary of the Navy in, too, if he is available. When you have finished that, telephone Bolton that you will be away from Washington indefinitely." "I'll telephone Admiral Buck for you, Doctor, but I don't dare telephone any such message to Bolton; he'd take my head off. He has been running the whole service ragged lately, and this is my first afternoon off duty in a fortnight." "What's the trouble, a flood of new counterfeits?" "No, the counterfeit division is getting along all right. In point of fact, they have lent us a dozen men. The trouble is a sudden big increase in Communist activity throughout the country, with the Young Labor party behind it. Bolton has been pretty jumpy since that Stokowski affair last August and he is afraid of another attempt of some sort on the President." "The Young Labor party? I thought that gang was bankrupt and out of business, since the Coast Guard broke up their alien smuggling scheme." "They were down and out for a while, but they are in funds again--and how! They must have three or four millions at least." "Where did they get it?" "That's what we have been trying to find out. The leaders have presented bars of gold to a dozen banks throughout the country and demanded specie. The banks shipped the gold to the mint and it was good gold, nine hundred and twenty-five fine. What we are trying to find out is how that gold got into the United States." "A shipment of that size should be easy to trace." "It would seem so, but it hasn't been. We have accounted for every pound of every shipment that has come in through a port of entry, and we have checked almost that close on the output of every mine in the United States. If the gold came from Russia, it would have had to cross Europe, and we can't get any trace of it from abroad. It looks as though they were _making_ it." * * * * * Dr. Bird rubbed his head thoughtfully. "Possible, but hardly probable," he said. "How much did you say they had?" "Over three millions in thirty-pound bars. Each bar shows signs of having a mint mark chiselled off, but that don't help much for they have done too good a job. It has us pretty well bluffed." Again Dr. Bird rubbed his head. "Telephone Admiral Buck, and then phone Bolton and tell him exactly what I told you to: that you will be away indefinitely. When he gets through exploding, tell him that you are going with me and that possibly, just barely possibly, we might be on the trail of that gold shipment." "On the trail of the gold!" gasped Carnes. "Surely, Doctor, you don't think--" "Once in a while, old dear," replied the Doctor with a chuckle, "which is more than anyone in the Secret Service does. You might tell Bolton that I said that, but hang up quickly if you do. I don't want the wires of my telephone melted off. No, Carnesy, I have no miraculous inspiration as to where that gold is coming from; I just have a plain old-fashioned hunch, and that hunch is that we are going to have lots of fun and more than our share of danger before we see Washington again. After you get through bearding Bolton in his den, you might call the Chief of the Air Corps and ask him to have a bomber held at Langley Field subject to my orders. If he squawks any, I'll talk to him." He turned to a telephone which stood on his desk and lifted the receiver. "Get Mr. Lambertson on the wire," he said. "He is the chief technician of the Pyrex Glass Works at Corning, New Jersey." * * * * * The _U.S.S. Minneconsin_ steamed out of New York harbor and headed down toward the lower bay. On her forward deck rested a huge globe. The bottom quarter of the sphere was made of some dark opaque substance but the upper portion was transparent as crystal. Through the walls could be seen a quantity of apparatus resting on the opaque bottom portion. Two mechanics from the Bureau of Standards were making final adjustments of one of the pieces of apparatus, which resembled a tank fitted with a piston geared to an electric motor. From the tank, tubes ran to four hollow pipes, an inch and a half in diameter, which ran through the skin and extended thirty inches from the outer skin of the twenty-foot sphere. Dr. Bird stood near talking with the executive officer of the ship and from time to time giving a brief word of direction to the mechanics. "It's safer than you might think, Commander," he said. "In the first place, that globe is not made of ordinary glass; it is made of vitrilene, a new semi-malleable glass which was developed at the Bureau and which is being made on an experimental scale for us by the Pyrex people. It is much stronger than ordinary glass, and is not sensitive to shock. It is also perfectly transparent to ultra-violet light, being superior even to rock crystal or fused quartz in that respect. The walls, as you have noticed, are four inches thick, and I have calculated that the ball will stand a uniform external pressure of thirty-five hundred atmospheres, the pressure which would be encountered at a depth of about twenty miles. I believe that it will stand a squeeze of six thousand tons without buckling, and it is impossible to fracture it by shock. It could be dropped from the top of the Woolworth Building, and it would just bounce." "It seems incredible that it could stand such a pressure as you have named." "My figures are conservative ones. Lambertson calculated them even higher, but we allowed for the fact that this is the first large mass of the material to be cast, and lowered them." * * * * * "But suppose your lifting cable should break?" objected the naval officer. "The outfit weighs a good many tons." "You notice that the lower quarter is made of lead. The specific gravity of the entire globe when sealed up tight with two men in it is only a little more than unity. In the water its weight is so little that a three-inch manilla hawser would raise it, let alone a steel cable. I have another safety device. Granted that the cable should snap, I can detach the lead from it and it would shoot to the surface like a rocket." "How long can you remain under water in it?" "A week, if necessary. I have an oxygen tank and a carbon dioxide removing apparatus which will keep the air in good condition. The globe is electrically lighted, and can be heated if necessary. Should my telephone line become fouled and broken, I have a radio set which will enable me to communicate with you. I can't see that it is especially dangerous; not nearly as much so as a submarine." "What is your object in going down, if I may ask?" "To take pictures and to explore the wreck if we can. The globe is equipped with huge floodlights and excellent cameras. The salvage people are having a little trouble and we are trying to help them out." "You mentioned exploring. Can you leave the globe while it is under water?" "Yes. There is a locking device for doing so. A man in a diving suit can enter the lock and fill it with water. Once the external pressure is released he can open the outer door and step out. Coming back, he seals the outer door and the man inside blows out the lock and compressed air and then the inner door can be opened. It is the same principle as a torpedo tube." * * * * * A jangle of bells interrupted them and the _Minneconsin_ slowed down. Commander Lawrence stepped to the rail and gave a sharp order to the navigating officer on the bridge. The bells jangled again and the ship's engines stopped. "We are almost over the buoy, Doctor," he said. Dr. Bird nodded and spoke to the two mechanics. With a few final touches to the apparatus they emerged from the globe and Dr. Bird entered. "Come on, Carnes," he called. "No backing out at the last minute." Carnes stepped forward with a sickly smile and joined the Doctor in the huge sphere. "All right, boys; close her up." The mechanics swung the outer door into place with a crane. Both the edge of the door and the surface against which it fitted had been ground flat and were in addition faced with soft rubber. Bolts were fastened in the door which passed through holes in the main sphere, and Dr. Bird spun nuts onto them and tightened them with a heavy wrench. He and Carnes lifted the smaller inner door into place and bolted it tight. Dr. Bird stepped to the telephone. "Lower away," he directed. From a boom attached to the _Minneconsin's_ forward fighting top, a huge steel cable swung down, and the latch at the end of the cable was closed over a vitrilene ring which was fastened to the top of the sphere. The cable tightened and the globe with the two men in it was lifted over the side of the battleship and lowered gently into the water. Carnes involuntarily ducked and threw up his hand as the waters closed over them. Dr. Bird laughed. "Look up, Carnes," he said. Carnes gasped as he looked up and saw the surface of the water above him. Dr. Bird laughed again and turned to the telephone. "Lower away," he said. "Everything is tight." * * * * * The globe descended into the depths of the sea. Darker and darker it grew until only a faint twilight glow filled the sphere. A dark bulk loomed before them. Dr. Bird snapped on one of his huge floodlights and pointed. "The _Arethusa_," he said. The ill-fated vessel lay on her side with a huge jagged hole torn in her fabric amidships. "That's where her boilers burst," explained the Doctor. "Luckily we have a hard bottom to deal with. Let's see if we can locate any of Mitchell's sea serpents." He turned on other flood lights and swept the bottom of the sea with them. The huge beams bored out into the water for a quarter of a mile, but nothing unusual was to be seen. Dr. Bird turned his attention again to the wreck. "Things look normal from this side," he said after a prolonged scrutiny. "I'll have the _Minneconsin_ steam around it while we look it over." In response to his telephone orders the ship above them swung around the wreck in a circle, and Carnes and the Doctor viewed each side in turn. But nothing of a suspicious nature made its appearance. The sphere stopped opposite the hole in the side and Dr. Bird turned to Carnes. "I'm going to put on a diving suit and explore that wreck," he said. "If there ever was any danger, it isn't apparent now; and I can't find out anything until I get inside." "Don't do it, Doctor!" cried Carnes. "Remember what happened to the other divers!" * * * * * "We don't know what happened to them, Carnes. No matter what it was, there is no danger apparent right now, and I've got to get into that ship before I can get any real information. We could have lowered an under-sea camera and learned as much as we have so far." "Let me go instead of you, Doctor." "I'm sorry to refuse you, old dear, but frankly, I wouldn't trust your judgment as to what you had seen if you went alone; and we can't both go." "Why not?" "If we both went, who would work the air to let us back in? No, this is a one-man job and I'm the one to do it. While I am gone, keep a sharp lookout, and if you see anything unusual call me at once." "How can I call you?" "On this small radio phone. A pair of receivers tuned to the right wave-length are in my diving helmet, and I will be able to hear you although I can't reply. I won't be gone long: I have only a small air tank, large enough to keep me going for thirty minutes. Now help me into my suit and keep a sharp watch. A timely warning may save my life if anything happens." With Carnes' assistance, Dr. Bird donned a deep-sea diving outfit and screwed down the helmet. He crawled through the inner door into the lock and lifted the inner door into place. Carnes fastened the door with nuts and the Doctor opened a pair of valves in the outer door and filled the lock with water. He removed the outer door; and, taking in one hand a steel-shod twelve-foot pike with a hook on the end, and in the other a waterproof flashlight, he sallied forth. As he left the shell he paused for a moment, and then returned and picked up the heavy wrench with which he had removed the nuts holding the outer door into place. He fastened the tool to the belt of his suit. Then, with a wave of his hand toward the detective, he approached the hulk. The hole in the side was too high for him to reach, but he hooked the end of his pike in one of the joints of the _Arethusa's_ plates and climbed slowly and painfully up the side of the vessel. As he disappeared into the hull, Carnes realized with a sudden start that he had been watching his friend and neglecting the duty imposed on him of keeping a sharp watch. He turned quickly to the floodlights and searched the sea bottom. * * * * * Nothing appeared, and the minutes moved as slowly as hours should. Carnes felt that he had been submerged alone for weeks, and his nerves grew so tense that he felt that he would scream in another instant. A sudden thought sobered him like a dash of cold water. If he screamed, Dr. Bird would take it for an alarm signal and possibly be afraid to emerge from the vessel. His watch showed him that the Doctor had been gone for twenty-five minutes and he moved slowly to the radio transmitter. "Dr. Bird," he said slowly and distinctly, "you have been gone nearly thirty minutes. Nothing alarming has appeared but I will feel better when I see you coming back." He glued his eyes on the opening in the ship's side and waited. Five minutes passed, and then ten, with no signs of the Doctor. Carnes moved again to the receiver. "It has been over half an hour. Doctor," he cried in a pleading voice. "If you are all right, for God's sake show yourself. I am frantic with worry." Another five minutes passed, and the sweat dripped in a steady stream from the detective's chin. Suddenly he gave a sob of relief and sank back against the side of the globe. A bulky figure showed at the edge of the hole, and Dr. Bird climbed slowly and heavily out of the hold and dropped to the sea bottom. He lay prone for a moment before he rose and made his way with evident effort toward the sphere. He entered the compartment and with a heroic effort lifted the outer door into place, and feebly and with fumbling fingers placed nuts on the bolts. His hands wandered uncertainly toward the valves and closed the upper one. He waved his hand toward Carnes and sank in a heap on the floor of the lock. * * * * * With trembling hands Carnes connected the air and opened the valve. Air flowed into the lock and the water was gradually forced out. When the lock was empty, he waited for Dr. Bird to close the outer valve but the Doctor did not move. Carnes tore at the bolts which held the inner door and threw his weight against it. It held against his assault, and he thought frantically. An inspiration came to him, and he disconnected the air valve. With a whistling rush, the air from the lock rushed into the sphere and he forced open the inner door. A stream of sea water drove against his feet through the open valve, and he reached for the valve to close it. The force of the water held it open for a moment, but he threw every ounce of his strength into the effort. The valve slowly closed. It was beyond his strength to haul the heavy Doctor with his pressure diving suit through the restricted confines of the inner door, so Carnes wormed his way into the lock and with trembling fingers unscrewed the helmet of the Doctor's diving suit. The helmet clanged to the floor and Carnes scooped up his hands full of water and dashed it into the Doctor's face. There was no response and he was at his wit's end. He sprang for the radio to order the sphere hauled up when his glance fell on the oxygen tank. It took him only a moment to connect a rubber hose to the tank, and in a few seconds a blast of the life-giving gas was blowing into the scientist's face. Dr. Bird gave a convulsive gasp or two and opened his eyes. "Shut off the juice, Carnes," he said faintly. "Too much of that's bad." Carnes shut off the oxygen and Dr. Bird struggled to a sitting position and inhaled deep breaths. "That was a narrow squeak, old dear," he said faintly. "Give me a hand and I'll climb in." * * * * * With the detective's aid he climbed into the sphere and Carnes fastened the inner door. Slowly the Doctor rid himself of the diving suit and lay prone on the floor, his breath still coming in gasps. "Thanks for your warning about the time, Carnes," he said. "I knew that my air supply was running short but I was caught down there and couldn't readily free myself. I thought for a while that my time had come, but it wasn't so written. By the looks of things, I freed myself just in time." "Did you find out anything?" asked the detective eagerly. "I did," replied Dr. Bird grimly. "For one thing, the gold is no longer in the hold of the _Arethusa_." "It's gone?" "Clean as a whistle, every bar of it. A hole has been cut in the vault around the combination, and the bars slid back and the door opened. The gold has been stolen." "Might it not have been stolen before the vessel sank?" "The idea occurred to me of course, and I examined things pretty carefully. I know that the theft occurred after the vessel sank." "How could you tell?" "For one thing, the hole was cut with an under-water cutting torch. For the second, look here." * * * * * The Doctor rolled up his trousers and showed the detective his leg. Carnes cried out as he saw huge purple welts on it. "What caused that?" he cried. "As I entered the vault, I stepped full into a steel bear trap which was set there for the purpose of catching and holding anyone who entered. Someone has visited the _Arethusa_, since she sank, and looted her, and also arranged so that any diver who got as far as the vault would never return to the surface to tell of it. Luckily for myself, I carried a heavy wrench and was able to free myself. Most divers don't carry such a thing." "But who could have done it?" "That's what we have got to find out, and we aren't going to do it down here. Give the word to have us hauled up; and, Carnes, don't mention anything about the looting of the vessel. Allow it to be understood that I couldn't get into the hold. We'll head back for New York at once. I want to have a few small changes made in this sphere before we use it again. While I am doing that, I want you to get hold of the Coast Guard or the Immigration Service or whoever it is that has the complete records in that case of alien smuggling, by the Young Labor party. When you get the information, report to me and we'll go over it. You might also drop a hint to Captain Starley that will stop all further attempts at salvage operations for a few days. Tell him that I'll arrange to have a Coast Guard cutter guard the locality of the wreck." "Won't that be rather risky for the cutter?" "I think not. The gold is gone and there is no reason to apprehend any further danger in that locality, at least for the present." * * * * * At nine o'clock next morning Carnes and Dr. Bird sat in the office of Lieutenant Commander Minden of the United States Coast Guard, listening intently to the history of the alien smuggling case. Commander Minden was saying: "Their boats would load up and clear ostensibly for Rio de Janeiro or some other South American port, but once they were in the Atlantic, they would alter their course and head from the Massachusetts coast. Of course, we had no right to interfere with them on the high seas, and they never came closer than fifty miles of our coast line. When they got that close, they would cruise slowly back and forth for a few days and then steam away south to the port they had cleared for. When they got there, of course there were no passengers on board. "We patrolled the coast carefully while they were around but we never got any indication of any landing of aliens and yet we knew they were being landed in some way. We drew lines so close that a cork couldn't get by without being seen and we even had the air patrolled, but with no results. Eventually the air patrol was the thing that gave them away. "They had been operating so successfully that they evidently got careless and started a load off late in the night so they didn't reach the coast by dawn. A Navy plane was flying along the coast-line about twelve miles off when they spotted a submarine running parallel with the coast, headed north. It didn't look like an American craft and they went on and radioed Washington and found that we had no under-sea craft in that neighborhood. They returned to their patrol and followed the sub for a matter of thirty or forty miles up the coast, and then it turned in right toward the shore. The shore line there is rocky, and, at the point where the sub was heading, it falls sheer about two hundred fathoms. The sub ran right at the cliff and disappeared from view." * * * * * Lieutenant Commander Minden paused impressively. Carnes and Dr. Bird set forward in their chairs, for it was evident that the crux of the story was at hand. "When the plane reported what they had seen, we knew how those aliens were being landed. The point where the sub went in gave us a good idea of the location of their base and we threw a cordon of men around and searched. A Navy sub was sent to the scene and they reported that there was a tunnel opening into the rock, about a hundred fathoms under water, running for they had no idea how far under the land. They stayed to guard the hole while we combed the land. It took us a week to locate the place, but we traced some truck loads of food and finally found it. This tunnel ran under the land for a mile and then ended in a large cave underground. The Young Labor party had established a regular receiving depot there, and took the aliens from the sub and kept them for a day or two until they had a chance to load them into trucks and run them into Boston or some other town in the night. "Once we had the place spotted, we sent a gang in and captured the whole works without any trouble. The underground cavern had no natural opening to the surface, but one had been made by blasting. We captured the whole lot and then sealed the end of the hole with rock and concrete. That was the end of the affair." "Thank you, Commander; you have given us a very graphic description of it. I suppose you could find the entrance which was sealed up?" * * * * * "Easily. I led the raiding party. I forgot to mention one blunder we made. Evidently some word of our plans leaked out, for the sub which was guarding the outer end of the tunnel was called away by a radio message supposed to be from the Navy Department. It had gone only a short distance, however, when the commander smelled a rat and made his way back. He was too late. He was just in time to see the sub emerge from the hole and head into the open sea. He gave chase, but the other sub was faster than the Navy boat and it got clear away. The leader of the gang must have been on it, for we didn't get him." "Who was the leader?" "From some records we captured, his name was Ivan Saranoff. I never saw him." "Saranoff?" said Dr. Bird thoughtfully. "The name seems familiar. Where have I--Thunder! I know now. He was at one time a member of the faculty of St. Petersburg. He was one of the leading biologists of his time. Carnes, we've found our man." "If you are thinking of Saranoff, I am afraid you are mistaken, Doctor," said Commander Minden. "Neither he nor his submarine have ever been heard of since and it has been generally conceded that they were lost at sea. We had some pretty rough weather just after that affair." "Rough weather doesn't mean much to a sub, Commander. I expect that he's our man. At any rate, the place we want to go is the end of that tunnel." "I'm at your service, Doctor." "Carnes, get the location of that tunnel entrance from Commander Minden and order the _Minneconsin_ to proceed north along the coast to that vicinity and stand by for radio orders. I am going to telephone Mitchell Field and get a plane. We have no time to lose." * * * * * The plane from Mitchell Field roared down to a landing, and Carnes, Dr. Bird and Commander Minden dismounted from the rear cockpit and looked around. They had landed in a smooth field at the base of a rise almost rugged enough to be called a mountain. A group of three men were standing near them as they got out of the plane. One of the men approached. "Dr. Bird?" asked the newcomer. "I am Tom Harron, United States Marshal. These two men are deputies. I understand that I am to report to you for orders." "I'm glad to know you, Mr. Harron. This is Operative Carnes of the Secret Service and Commander Minden of the Coast Guard. We are going to explore an underground cavern that is located in this vicinity." "Do you mean the one where they used to smuggle aliens? That is closed up. I was in charge of that work and we closed it tight as a drum two years ago." "Can you find the entrance?" "Sure. It isn't over a mile from here." "Lead the way, then. We want to take a look at it." The marshal led the way toward the eminence and took a path which led up a gully in its side. He paused for a moment to take his bearings and then turned sharply to his left and climbed part way up the side of the ravine. "Here it is," he announced. An expression of astonishment crossed his face and he examined the ground closely. "By Golly, Doc," he went on as he straightened up, "this place has been opened since I left it!" * * * * * Dr. Bird hurried forward and joined him. The heavy stone and concrete with which the entrance to the cavern had been sealed were undisturbed, but in the side of the hill was set a steel door beside the concrete. There was no sign of a keyhole or other means of entering it. "Was this steel door part of your work?" asked Carnes. "No, sir, it wasn't. We sealed it solid. That door has been put there since." Dr. Bird closely examined the structure. He tapped it and went around the edges and then straightened up and took a small pocket compass from his pocket and opened the case. The needle swung crazily for a moment and then pointed straight toward the door. "A magnetic lock," he exclaimed. "If we could find the power line it would be easy to force, but finding that line might take us a week. At any rate, we have found out what we were after. This is their base from which they are operating. Mr. Harron, I want you to station a guard armed with rifles at this door day and night until I personally relieve you. Remember, until I relieve you, in person. Verbal or written orders don't go. Capture or kill anyone who tries to enter or leave the cavern through this entrance. Just now we'll find that cavern more vulnerable from the sea end, and that is where I mean to attack. We'll force that door and explore from this end later. Commander Minden, you may stay here with Mr. Harron, if you like, or you may come with Carnes and me. We are going on board the _Minneconsin_." * * * * * The Mitchell Field plane roared to a take-off and bore south along the coast. Half an hour of flying brought them in view of the battleship steaming at full speed up the coast. Dr. Bird radioed instructions to the ship, and an hour later a launch picked them up from the beach and took them out. As soon as they were on board they resumed their progress, and in two hours the peak that Dr. Bird had marked as a landmark was opposite. "Steam in as close to the shore as you can safely," he said, "and then lower us. Once we are down, you will be guided by our telephoned instructions. Come on, Carnes, let's go." The detective followed him into the sphere as the _Minneconsin_ edged up toward the shore. The huge ball was lifted from the deck and lowered gently into two hundred fathoms of water. It was pitch dark at that depth, and Dr. Bird switched on one floodlight and studied the cliff which rose a hundred yards from them. "We have missed the place, Carnes," he said. "We'll have them pull us up a few hundred feet and then steam along the coast." He turned to the telephone and the sphere rose while the battleship steamed slowly ahead, the vitrilene ball following in her wake. For a quarter of a mile they continued on their way, and then Dr. Bird halted the ship. "What depth are we?" he asked. "Eighty fathoms? All right, lower us, please." * * * * * The ball sank until it rested on the sea bottom, and Dr. Bird turned on two additional floodlights and studied the surroundings. The bed of the ocean was literally covered with lobster and crab shell, with the bones of fish scattered here and there among them. A few bones of land animals were mixed with the debris and Carnes gave a gasp as Dr. Bird pointed out to him a diving helmet. "We are on the right track," said the scientist grimly. He stepped to the telephone and ordered the sphere raised to one hundred fathoms. The ship moved forward along the coast until Dr. Bird again stepped to the telephone and halted it. Before them yawned the entrance to the underground tunnel. It was about two hundred feet high and three hundred across, and their most powerful beams would not penetrate to the end of it. A pile of debris could be seen on the floor of the tunnel and Carnes fancied that he could see another diving helmet among the litter. Dr. Bird pointed toward the side of the cavern. "See those floodlights fastened to the cliff so that their beams will sweep across the mouth of the tunnel when they are lighted?" he said. "Apparently the cave is used as a prison and the light beams are the bars. The creature is not at home just now or the bars would be up. My God! Look at that, Carnes!" Carnes stared and echoed the Doctor's cry of surprise. Clinging to a shelf of rock which extended out from the wall of the cavern and half hidden among the seaweed was a huge marine creature. It looked like a huge black slug with rudimentary eyes and mouth. The thing was fifty feet in length and fully fifteen feet in diameter. It hung there, moving sluggishly as though breathing, and rudimentary tentacles projecting from one end moved in the water. "What is it, Doctor?" asked Carnes in a voice of awe. "It is a typical trochosphere of the giant octopus, the devil fish of Indian Ocean legend, multiplied a thousand times," he replied. "When the octopus lays its eggs, they hatch out into the larval form. The free swimming larva is known as a trochosphere, and I am positive that that is what we see; but look at the size of the thing! Man alive, if that ever developed, I can't conceive of its dimensions!" * * * * * "I have seen pictures of a huge octopus pulling down a ship," said Carnes, "but I always fancied they were imaginary." "They are. This monstrosity before us is no product of nature. A dozen of them would depopulate the seas in a year. It is a hideous parody of nature conceived in the brain of a madman and produced by some glandular disturbance. Saranoff spent years in glandular experimentation, and no doubt he has managed to stimulate the thyroid of a normal octopus and produce a giant. I fancy that the immediate parent of the thing before us was of normal size, and so, probably, are its brothers and sisters. The phenomenon of giantism of this nature occurs in alternate generations and then only in rare instances. Its grandparent may not be far away, however. I wish it was safe to use a submarine to explore that cavern." "Why isn't it?" "Any creature powerful enough to pull the _Arethusa_ under water would crush a frail submarine without effort. Anyway, a Navy sub isn't built for under-water exploration like this ball is. The window space is quite limited and they aren't equipped with powerful floodlights. I would like to be able to reach that thing and destroy it, but it can wait until later. The best thing we can do is to put out our lights and wait." His hand sought the light switch, and the globe became dark. Only a tiny glimmer of light came down to them from the surface, a hundred fathoms above. In the darkness they stared into the depths of the sea. * * * * * For an hour they waited and then Dr. Bird grasped Carnes by the shoulder and pointed. Far in the distance could be seen a tiny point of light. It wavered and winked and at times disappeared, but it was gradually approaching them. Dr. Bird stepped to the telephone and the _Minneconsin_ moved a hundred yards further from the shore. The light disappeared again as though hidden by some opaque body. Their eyes had become accustomed to the dim light and they could dimly see a long snake-like body approach the globe and then suddenly withdraw. The light appeared again only a few hundred yards away. The water swirled and the sphere swayed drunkenly as some gigantic body moved past it with express train speed and entered the mouth of the cavern. The light turned toward them and they could see the dim outlines of a small submarine on which it was mounted. Another rush of water came as the object which had entered the cave started to leave it, and the light swung around. It bore on a huge black body, and was reflected with a red glow from huge eyes, and the creature backed again into the cave. Back and forth across the mouth of the cavern the light played, and the watchers caught a glimpse of a huge parrot beak which could have engulfed a freight car. From the cavern projected twisting tentacles of gargantuan dimensions, and red eyes, thirty feet in diameter, glared balefully at them. For several minutes the light of the submarine played across the mouth of the cave, and then the floodlights on the cliff sprang into full glow and bathed the ball and the mouth of the tunnel in a flood of light. Before their horrified gaze was an octopus of a size to make them disbelieve their eyes. The submarine had moved up to within a few feet of them, and the light from it played full on the ball. The submarine maneuvered in the vicinity, keeping the ball full in the beam of its light, and then drew back. As it did so, the floodlights on the cliff died out and the beam of the submarine's light was directed away from them. Dr. Bird jumped to the telephone. "Head straight out to sea and full speed ahead!" he shouted. "Don't try to pull us in; tow us!" * * * * * The ball swayed as the _Minneconsin's_ mighty engines responded to his orders and the cliff wall disappeared. "As long as they know we're here, we might as well announce our presence in good style," said the doctor grimly as he closed a switch and threw all of the sphere's huge lights into action. He had turned on the lights just in time, for even as he did so a mighty tentacle shot out of the darkness and wrapped itself around the ball. For a moment it clung there and then was withdrawn. "The thing can't stand light," remarked the doctor as he threw off the switch. "That sub was herding it like a cow by the use of a light beam. As long as we are lighted up we are safe from attack." "Then for God's sake turn on the lights!" cried Carnes. "I want it to attack us," replied the doctor calmly. "We have no offensive weapons and only by meeting an attack can we harm the thing." As he spoke there came a soft whisper of sound from the vitrilene walls and they were thrown from their feet by a sudden jerk. Dr. Bird stumbled to the switch and closed it, and the ball was flooded with light. Two arms were now on them but they were slowly withdrawn as the lights glared forth. The huge outlines of the beast could be seen as it followed them toward the surface. Its great eyes glared at them hungrily. The submarine was visible only as a speck of light in the distance. * * * * * The _Minneconsin's_ speed was picking up under the urge of her huge steam turbines, and the ball was nearing the surface. The sea was light enough now that they could see for quite a distance. The telephone bell jangled and Dr. Bird picked the receiver from its hook. "Hello," he said. "What's that? You can? By all means, fire. Yes, indeed, we're well out of danger; we must be thirty or forty feet down. Watch the fun now," he went on to Carnes as he replaced the receiver. "The beast is showing above the surface and they're going to shell it." They watched the surface and suddenly there came a flash of light followed by a dull boom of sound. The huge octopus suddenly sank below them, thrashing its arms about wildly. "A hit!" shouted Dr. Bird into the telephone. "Get it again if it shows up. I want it to get good and mad." He turned off the lights in the ball and the octopus attacked again. The shell had taught it caution and it kept well down, but three huge arms came up from the depths of the sea and wrapped themselves about the ball. The forward motion stopped for a moment, and then came a jerk that threw them down. The ball started to sink. "Our cable has parted!" cried the doctor. "Turn on the lights!" * * * * * Carnes closed the switch. The ball was so covered with the huge tentacles that they could see nothing, but the light had its usual effect and they were released. The ball sank toward the bottom and they could see the huge cephalopod lying below watching them. Blood was flowing from a wound near one of its eyes where the _Minneconsin's_ shell had found its mark. Toward the huge monster they sank until they lay on the bottom of the ocean and a few yards from it. In an instant the sea became opaque and they could see nothing. "He has shot his ink!" cried the doctor. "Here comes the real attack. Strap yourself to the wall where you can reach one of the motor switches." Through the darkness huge arms came out and wrapped themselves around the ball. The heavy vitrilene groaned under the enormous pressure which was applied, but it held. The ink was clearing slightly and they could see that the sphere was covered by the arms. The mass moved and the huge maw opened before them. The pipes projecting from the sides of the ball were buried in the creature's flesh. "Good Lord, he's going to swallow us!" gasped the doctor. "Quick, Carnes, the motor switch." He closed one of them as he spoke, and the powerful little electric motors began to hum, forcing forward the piston attached to the tank connected to the hollow rods. Steadily the little motors hummed, and the tank emptied through the rods into the body of the giant cephalopod. "I hope the stuff works fast," groaned the doctor as they approached closer to the giant maw. "I never tried giving an octopus a hypodermic injection of prussic acid before, but it ought to do the business. There's enough acid there to kill half New York City." * * * * * Carnes blanched as the ball approached the mouth. One by one the arms unwound until only one was holding them and the jaws opened wider. They were almost in them when the motion stopped. They could feel a shudder run through the arm which held them. For a moment the arm alternately expanded and contracted, almost releasing them only to clutch them again. Another arm came from the depths and whipped about the ball, and again the vitrilene groaned at the pressure which was applied. The arms were suddenly withdrawn and the ball started to sink. "Drop the lead, Carnes!" cried the doctor. With the aid of the detective he operated the electric catches which held the huge mass of lead to the bottom, and the sphere shot up through the water like a rocket. It leaped clear of the water and fell back with a splash. A half mile away the _Minneconsin_ was swinging in a wide circle to head back toward them. They turned their gaze toward the shore. As they looked a giant arm shot a hundred yards up into the air, twisting and writhing frantically. It disappeared, and another, and then half a dozen flashed into the air. The arms dipped below the surface. A huge black body reared its bulk free from the water for a moment, and the sea boiled as though in a violent storm. The body sank and again the arms were thrown up, twisting and turning like a half dozen huge snakes. The whole creature sank below the waves and the ball tossed back and forth, often buried under tons of water and once tossed thirty feet into the air by the huge waves. * * * * * A momentary lull came in the waves. Carnes gave a cry of astonishment and pointed toward the shore. With an effort, Dr. Bird twisted himself in his lashing and looked in that direction. The huge body had again come to the surface, and three of the arms were towering into the air. Grasped in them was a long, black, cigar-shaped object. As they watched the object was torn into two parts and the fragments crushed by the enormous power of the octopus. Again the arms writhed in torment, and then they stiffened out. For a moment they towered in the air and then slowly sank below the surface of the sea. "The cyanide has worked," cried the doctor, "and in its last agonies the creature has turned on its creator and destroyed him. It is a shame, for Saranoff was a brilliant although perverted genius, and besides, I would have liked to have learned his method. However, I may find something when we open the land end and raid the cave; and really, he was too brilliant a man to hang for murder. Once we open the cave and I get any data that is there, my connection with the case will end. Trailing down the gold and recovering it is a routine matter for Bolton, and one in which he won't need my help." "What about that creature we saw in the cave, Doctor? Won't it hatch into another terror of the sea like the thing that destroyed the ship?" "The trochosphere? No, I'm not worried there. It won't try to leave the cave for some days yet, and by that time we'll have the land end opened and the floodlights turned on. They will keep it there and it will starve to death. We could send down a sub to feed it a torpedo, but there's no need. Nature will dispose of it. Meanwhile, I hope the _Minneconsin_ rigs up a jury tackle pretty soon and takes us on board. I'm getting seasick." * * * * * _IN THE NEXT ISSUE_ THE FIFTH-DIMENSION CATAPULT _A Novelette of an Extraordinary Interdimensional Rescue_ _By_ Murray Leinster THE GATE TO XORAN _A Thrilling Story of a Metal Man's Visit to Earth_ _By_ Hal K. Wells THE EYE OF ALLAH _A Story of the Tracking Down of a Mysterious Scientific Killer_ _By_ C. D. Willard THE PIRATE PLANET _Part Three of the Outstanding Current Novel_ _By_ Charles W. Diffin ----_AND OTHERS_! * * * * * Gray Denim _By Harl Vincent_ The blood of the Van Dorn's ran in Karl's veins. He rode the skies like an avenging god. [Illustration: _There came a stabbing pencil of light from over Karl's shoulder._] Beneath the huge central arch in Cooper Square a meeting was in progress--a gathering of the gray-clad workers of the lower levels of New York. Less than two hundred of their number were in evidence, and these huddled in dejected groups around the pedestal from which a fiery-tongued orator was addressing them. Lounging negligently at the edge of the small crowd were a dozen of the red police. "I tell you, comrades," the speaker was shouting, "the time has come when we must revolt. We must battle to the death with the wearers of the purple. Why work out our lives down here so they can live in the lap of luxury over our heads? Why labor day after day at the oxygen generators to give them the fresh air they breathe?" The speaker paused uncertainly as a chorus of raucous laughter came to his ears. He glared belligerently at a group of newcomers who stood aloof from his own gathering. Seven or eight of them there were, and they wore the gray with obvious discomfort. Slummers! Well, they'd hear something they could carry back with them when they returned to their homes! "Why," he continued in rising tones, "do we sit at the controls of the pneumatic tubes which carry thousands of our fellows to tasks equally irksome, while they of the purple ride their air yachts to the pleasure cities of the sky lanes? Never in the history of mankind have the poor been poorer and the rich richer!" "Yah!" shouted a disrespectful voice from among the newcomers. "You're full o' bunk! Nothing but bunk!" An ominous murmur swelled from the crowd and the red police roused from their lethargy. The mounting scream of a siren echoed in the vaulted recesses above and re-echoed from the surrounding columns--the call for reserves. * * * * * All was confusion in the Square. The little group of newcomers immediately became the center of a mêlée of dangerous proportions. Some of the more timid of the wearers of the gray struggled to get out of the crowd and away. Others, not in sympathy with the speaker, rushed to the support of the besieged visitors. The police were, for the moment, overwhelmed. The orator, mad with resentment and injured pride, hurled himself into the group. A knife flashed in his hand; rose and fell. A scream of agony shrilled piercingly above the din of the fighting. Then came the reserves, and the wielder of the knife turned to escape. He broke away from the milling combatants and made speedily for the shadows that lay beyond the great pillars of the Square. But he never reached them, for one of the red guards raised his riot pistol and fired. There was a dull _plop_, and a rubbery something struck the fleeing man and wrapped powerful tentacles around his body, binding him hand and foot in their swift embrace. He fell crashing to the pavement. A lieutenant of the red police was shouting his orders and the din in the Square was deafening. With their numbers greatly augmented, the guards were now in control of the situation and their maces struck left and right. Groans and curses came from the gray-clad workers, who now fought desperately to escape. Then, with startling suddenness, the artificial sunlight of the cavernous Square was gone, leaving the battle to continue in utter darkness. * * * * * Cooper Square, in the year 2108, was the one gathering place in New York City where the wearers of the gray denim were permitted to assemble and discuss their grievances publicly. Deep in the maze of lower-level ways seldom visited by wearers of the purple, the grottolike enclosure bore the name of a philanthropist of the late nineteenth century and still carried a musty air of certain of the traditions of that period. In Astor Way, on the lowest level of all, there was a tiny book shop. Nestled between two of the great columns that provided foundation support for the eighty levels above, it was safely hidden from the gaze of curious passersby in the Square. Slumming parties from afar, their purple temporarily discarded for the gray, occasionally passed within a stone's throw of the little shop, never suspecting the existence of such a retreat amidst the dark shadows of the pillars. But to the initiated few amongst the wearers of the gray, and to certain of the red police, it was well known. Rudolph Krassin, proprietor of the establishment, was a bent and withered ancient. His jacket of gray denim hung loosely from his spare frame and his hollow cough bespoke a deep-seated ailment. Looking out from behind thick lenses set in his square-rimmed spectacles, the watery eyes seemed vacant; uncomprehending. But old Rudolph was a scholar--keen-witted--and a gentleman besides. To his many friends of the gray-clad multitude he was an anomaly; they could not understand his devotion to his well-thumbed volumes. But they listened to his words of wisdom and, more frequently than they could afford, parted with precious labor tickets in exchange for reading matter that was usually of the lighter variety. * * * * * When the fighting started in the Square, Rudolph was watching and listening from a point of vantage in the shadows near his shop. This fellow Leontardo, who was the speaker, was an agitator of the worst sort. His arguments always were calculated to arouse the passions of his hearers; to inflame them against the wearers of the purple. He had nothing constructive to offer. Always he spoke of destruction; war; bloodshed. Rudolph marveled at the patience of the red police. To-day, these newcomers, obviously a slumming party of youngsters bent on whatever mischief they could find, were interfering with the speaker. The old man chuckled at the first interruption. But at signs of real trouble he scurried into the shadows and vanished in the blackness of first-level passages known only to himself. He knew where to find the automatic sub-station of the Power Syndicate. Returning to the darkness he had created in the Square, he was relieved to find that the sounds of the fighting had subsided. Apparently most of the wearers of the gray had escaped. He skirted the avenue of pillars along Astor Way, feeling his way from one to another as he progressed toward his little shop. Peering into the blackness of the square he saw the feeble beams of several flash-lamps in the hands of the police. They were searching for survivors of the fracas, maces and riot pistols held ready for use. A sobbing gasp from close by set his pulses throbbing. He crept stealthily in the direction from which the sound had come. "Steady now," came a whispered voice. "My uncle's shop is close by. He'll take you in. Here--let me lift you." * * * * * There was a shuffling on the opposite side of the pillar at which Rudolph had halted; another grunt of pain. "Karl!" hissed the old man. It was his nephew. "Uncle Rudolph?" came the guarded response. "Yes. Can I help you?" "Quick--yes--he's fainted." The old man was around the huge base of the column in an instant. He groped in the darkness and his hands encountered human bodies. "Who is it?" he breathed. "One of the hecklers, Uncle. A young lad; and of the purple I think. He's been knifed." Together they dragged the inert form into the shelter of the long line of pillars. There was a trampling of many men in the square. That would be a second detachment of reserves. A ray of light filtered through and dancing shadows of the giant columns made grotesque outlines against the walls of the Way. A portable searchlight had been brought to the scene. They must hurry. Impeded by the dead weight of their burden, they made sorry progress and several times found it necessary to halt in the shadow of a pillar while the red police passed by in their search of the Square. It was with a sigh of relief that Rudolph opened the door of his shop and with still greater satisfaction closed and bolted it securely. His nephew shouldered the limp form of the unconscious youth and carried it to his own bed in one of the rear rooms. "Ugh!" exclaimed old Rudolph as he ripped open the young man's shirt, "it's a nasty cut. Warm water, Karl." The gaping wound was washed and bound tightly. Rudolph's experienced fingers told him the knife had not reached a vital spot. The youth would recover. "But Karl," he objected, "he wears the purple. Under the gray. See! It'll get us in trouble if we keep him." He was stripping the young man of his clothing to prepare him for bed. Suddenly there was revealed on the white skin a triangular mark. Bright scarlet it was and just over the right hip. He made a hasty attempt to hide it from the watching eyes of Karl. "Uncle!" snapped his nephew, "--the mark you call cursed! He has it, too!" * * * * * The tall young man in gray was on his knees, tearing the hands of the old man away. He saw the mark clearly now. There was no further use of attempting to conceal it. Rudolph rose and faced his angered nephew, his watery eyes inscrutable. "You told me, Rudolph, that it was a brand that cursed me. I have seen it on him, too. You have lied to me." The old man's eyes wavered. He trembled violently. "Why did you lie?" demanded Karl. "Am I not your nephew? Am I not really cursed as you've maintained? Tell me--tell me!" He had the old man by the shoulders, shaking him cruelly. "Karl--Karl," begged the helpless ancient, "it was for your good. I swear it. You were born to the purple. That's what that mark means--not that you're degraded to the gray, as I said. But there's a reason. Let me explain." "Bah! A reason! You've kept me in this misery and squalor for a reason! Who's my father?" He flung Rudolph to the floor, where the old man crouched in apprehensive misery. "Please Karl--don't! I can explain. Just give me time. It's a long story." "Time! Time! For twenty-odd years you've lied to me; cheated me. My birthright--where is it?" He menaced his supposed uncle; was about to strike him. Then suddenly he was ashamed. He turned on his heel. "I'm leaving," he said shortly. "Karl--my boy," begged Rudolph Krassin, struggling to his feet. "You can't! That lad in there--he--" But Karl was too angry to reason. "To hell with him!" he raged, "and to hell with you! I'm through!" He stamped from the room and out into the eery shadows of the Way. Karl was done with his old life. He'd go to the upper levels and claim his rights. Some day, too, he'd punish the man who'd stolen them away. God! Born to the purple! To think he'd missed it all! Probably was kidnaped by the old rascal he'd been calling uncle. But he'd find out. Rudolph didn't have to explain. Fingerprint records would clear his name; establish his rightful station in life. He dived into a passage that would lead him to one of the express lifts. He'd soon be overhead. * * * * * A sergeant of the red police looked up startled from his desk as a tall youth in the gray denim of forty levels below appeared before him. "Well?" he growled. The stalwart young worker had stared belligerently and insolently, he thought. "I want to check my fingerprint record, Sergeant." "Hm. Pretty cocky, aren't you? The records for such as you are down below, where you belong." "Not mine, I think." "So? And who the devil are you?" "That's what I'm here to find out. I've got a triangle branded on my right hip." "A what?" "Triangle. Here--look!" The amazing youngster had raised his jacket and was pulling at his shirt. The sergeant stared at what was revealed, his eyes bulging as he looked. "Lord!" he gasped, "a Van Dorn--in the gray!" Quickly he turned to the radiovision and made rapid connection with several persons in turn--important ones, by the appearance of the features of each in the brilliant disc of the instrument. Karl was confused by the sudden turn of things. The sergeant talked so rapidly he could not catch the sense of his words. And that name, Van Dorn, eluded him. He knew he had heard it before, in the little shop down there in Astor Way. But he could not place it. He wished fervently that he had paid more attention to the desires of old Rudolph; had studied more and read the books the old man had begged him to read. His new surroundings confused him, too, and he knew that he was the center of some great new excitement. * * * * * Then they were in the room; two individuals, one in the red uniform of a captain of police, the other a pompous, whiskered man in purple. Others followed and it seemed to Karl that the room was filled with them, strangers all, and they stared at him and chattered incessantly. He experienced an overwhelming impulse to run, but mastered it and faced them boldly. A square of plate glass was placed under his outstretched fingers. It was smeared with something sticky and he watched the whiskered man as he held it up to the light and studied the impressions. Then there was more confusion. Everyone talked at once and the pompous one in purple made use of the radiovision, holding the square of glass near its disc for observation by the person he had called. The identification number was repeated aloud, a string of figures and letters that were a meaningless jumble to Karl. The room became quiet while the police captain thumbed the pages of a huge book he had taken from among many similar ones that filled a rack behind the desk. Karl's blood froze in his veins at the rumbling swish of a car speeding through the pneumatic tube beneath their feet. His nerves were on edge. Then the captain of police looked up from the book and there was a peculiar glint in his eyes as he spoke. "Peter Van Dorn. Missing since 2085. Wanted by Continental Government. Ha!" The words came to Karl's ears through a growing sensation of unreality. It seemed that the speaker was miles away and that his voice and features were those of a radiovision likeness. Wanted by the great power across the Atlantic! It was unthinkable. Why, he had been but an infant in 2085! What possible crime could he have committed? But the red police captain was speaking again, this time in a chill voice. And the room of the police, thick with the smoke of a dozen cigars, became suddenly stifling. "Where have you been these twenty-three years, Peter Van Dorn?" asked the captain. "Who have you lived with, I mean?" * * * * * Something warned him to protect old Rudolph. And somehow he wished he had not treated the old fellow as he did when he left. His self-possession returned. A wave of hot resentment swept over him. "That's my affair," he said defiantly. The captain shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, well," he said, "you needn't answer--now. We'll find out when it's necessary. In the meanwhile we'll have to turn you over to the Continental Ambassador." Two of the red police advanced toward him and the rest drew back. "You mean I'm under arrest?" asked Karl incredulously. "Certainly. Of course you're not to be harmed." One of the guards had him by the arm and he saw the glint of handcuffs. They couldn't do this! If it had been for rioting in the Square it would be different. But this! It meant he was a prisoner of a foreign government, for what reason he could not guess. He lost his head completely. The captain cried out in amazement as one of his huskiest guards went sprawling under a well-planted punch. This youngster must be as crazy as was his father before him. But he was a whirlwind. Before he could be stopped he had tackled the other guard and with a mighty heave flung him halfway across the room where he fell with a thud that left him dazed and gasping. The pompous little man in the purple crawled under the desk as the sergeant leveled a slender tube at the young giant in gray. Karl ducked instinctively at sight of the weapon, but the spiteful crackle of its mechanism was too quick for him. A faintly luminous ray struck him full in the breast and stopped him in his tracks. A thrill of intense cold chased up his spine and a thunderbolt crashed in his brain. The captain caught his stiffened body as he fell. * * * * * Karl--refusing to think of himself as Peter Van Dorn--came to his senses as from a troubled sleep. His head ached miserably and he turned it slowly to view his surroundings. Then, in a flash, he remembered. The paralyzing ray of the red police! They never used it in the lower levels; but overhead--why, the swine! He sat suddenly erect and glared into a pair of green eyes that regarded him curiously. A quick glance showed him that he was in a small padded compartment like that of the pneumatic tube cars. At one end there was an amazing array of machinery with glittering levers and handwheels--a control board on which numberless tiny lights blinked and flickered in rapid succession. At these controls squatted the twisted figure of a dwarf. A second of the creatures sat at his side and stared with those horrible green eyes. "Lord!" he muttered. "Am I still asleep?" "No," smiled the dwarf, "you're awake, Peter Van Dorn." The misshapen creature did not seem unfriendly. "Then where am I, and who are you?" "You're in one of the Zar's rocket cars, speeding toward Dorn. We are but two of the Zar's servants--Moon men." "Rocket car? Moon men?" Karl was aghast. He wanted to pinch himself. But a hollow roar to the rear told him he was in a rapidly moving vessel of some sort. Certainly, too, these dwarfs were not figments of his imagination. "You've been kept completely ignorant?" asked the dwarf. "It--it seems so." Karl was bewildered. "You mean we are out in the open--traveling in space--to the Moon perhaps?" * * * * * The dwarf laughed. "No, I wish we were," he replied. "But we are about halfway to the capital of the Continental Empire, greatest of world powers. We'll be there in an hour." "But I don't understand." "Stupid. Didn't you ever hear of the rocket ships that cross the ocean like a projectile, mounting a thousand miles from the surface and making the trip in two hours?" "No!" Karl was aghast. "Are we really in such a contraption?" he faltered. "Say! Are you kidding me?" The dwarf was incredulous. "Do you mean to tell me you know so little of your world as that? Have you never read anything? The news broadcasts, the thought exchangers--don't you follow them at all?" Karl shook his head in growing wonder. Truly Rudolph had kept him in ignorance. Or was it his own fault? He had refused to dig into the volumes old Krassin had begged him to read. The broadcasts and the thought machines--well, only those of the purple had access to those. "Hey, Laro!" called the dwarf to his companion, "this mole is as dumb as can be. Doesn't know he's alive hardly. And a Van Dorn!" The two laughed uproariously and Karl raged inwardly. Mole! So that's what they called wearers of the gray! He clenched his fists and rose unsteadily to his feet. "Sorry," apologized his tormentor. "Mustn't get sore now. It seems so funny to us though. And listen, kid, you'll never have another chance to hear it all. So, if you'll sit down and calm yourself a bit I'll give you an earful." * * * * * Mollified, Karl listened. A marvelous tale it was, of a disgruntled scientist of the Eastern Hemisphere who had conquered that portion of the world with the aid of the inhabitants he had found on the outer side of the Moon; of the scientist who still ruled the East--Zar of the Continental Empire. A horrible war--in 2085, the year of his own birth--depopulated the countries of Asia, Europe and Africa and reduced them to subjection. There was no combatting the destructive rays and chemical warfare of the Moon men. The United Americas, still weakened from a civil war of their own, remained aloof and, for some strange reason, the Zar left them in peace, contenting himself with his conquest of practically all of the rest of the world. Now, it seemed, the two major powers were as separate as if on different planets, there being no traffic between them save by governmental sanction; and that was rarely given. It grew uncomfortably warm in the compartment as the rocket car entered the lower atmosphere but Karl listened spellbound to the astounding revelations of the Moon man. There came a pause in the discourse of the dwarf as a number of relays clicked furiously on the control board and the vessel slackened its speed perceptibly. "But," said Karl, thinking aloud rather than meaning to interrupt, "what has all this to do with me? Why does the government of this Zar want me?" The dwarf bent close and eyed him cautiously. "Poor kid!" he whispered, "it doesn't seem right that you should suffer for something that happened when you were born; something you know nothing about. But the Zar knows best. You--" There came a stabbing pencil of light from over Karl's shoulder and the green eyes of the dwarf went wide with horrified surprise. He clutched at his breast where the flame had contacted, then slowly collapsed in a pitiful, distorted heap. Karl recoiled from the odor of putrefaction that immediately filled the compartment. He whirled to face the new danger but saw nothing but the padded walls. Then they were in darkness save for the blinking lights of the control board. He was thrown forward violently and the piercing screech of compressed air rushing past the vessel told him they had entered the receiving tube at their destination and were being retarded in speed for the landing. This much he had gathered from the explanations of the now silenced dwarf. Laro, the other Moon man, remained mute at the controls. His companion evidently had talked too much. * * * * * The vessel had stopped and a section of the padded rear wall of the compartment moved back to reveal a second chamber. There were three other occupants of the ship and Karl knew now at whose hands the talkative Moon man had met his death. One of the three--all wearers of the purple--still held the generator of the dazzling ray in his hands. He decided wisely that resistance was useless and followed meekly when he was led from the ship. Endlessly they rode upward in a high-speed lift, dismounting finally at a pneumatic tube entrance. A special car whisked them roaring into the blackness. Then they were shot forth into the open and Karl saw the light of the sun for the first time in many years. They were on the upper surface of a great city, Dorn, the capital of the Continental Empire. The air was filled with darting ships of all sorts and sizes, most of them being pleasure craft of the wearers of the purple. To Karl it was the sudden realization of his dreams. He was one of them. He, too, should be wearing the purple. Then his heart sank as one of his guards prodded him into action. His dream already was shattered for they stood at the entrance to a great crystal pyramid that rose from the flat expanse of the roofs of Dorn. It was the palace of the Zar. It seemed then that fairyland had opened its gates to the young man in gray denim. He immediately fell under its influence when they traversed a long lane between rows of brightly colored growing things which filled the air with sweet odors. Feathered creatures fluttered about and twittered and caroled in the sheer joy of being alive. It was sweeter music than he had ever believed possible or even imagined as existing. Again he forgot the menace of the imperial edict which had brought him from the other side of the world. * * * * * Then rudely, he was brought back to earth. He was in the presence of the mighty Zar and his three escorts were bowing themselves from the huge room in which the wizened monarch sat enthroned. They had finished their duties. A shriveled face; beady eyes; trembling hands with abnormally large knuckles; a cruel and determined mouth--these were the features that most impressed Karl as he stared wordlessly at this Zar of the Eastern Hemisphere. The magnificence of the royal robe was lost on the young wearer of the gray. "Well, well, so this is Peter Van Dorn, my beloved nephew." The Zar was speaking and the chilly sarcasm in which the words were uttered belied the friendliness they otherwise might have implied. "That's what I'm told," replied Karl, "though I didn't know I'm supposed to be the nephew of so great a figure as yourself." Not bad that, for an humble wearer of the gray. "Oh, yes, yes, indeed. Why else should I have sent for you?" "I have wondered why--and still wonder." "Oh, you wonder, eh?" The Zar inspected him carefully and then broke into a cackle of horrible laughter. "A Van Dorn in gray denim!" he chortled. "A mole of the Americas! And to think that even the Zar has been unable to find him in all these years!" "Stop!" bellowed Karl. "I'll not have your ridicule. Come to the point now and have it over with. Kill me if you will, but tell me the story!" He had seen the slender tube in the Zar's hand. * * * * * An expression of surprise, almost of admiration, flickered in the beady eyes of the Zar and was gone. He spoke coldly. "Very well, I shall explain. You, Peter, are actually my nephew. Your father, Derek Van Dorn, was my brother; he a king of Belravia and I a poor but experienced scientist. He scorned me and he paid, for I learned of the ancient race of the other side of the Moon, the side we can not see from the earth. I went to them and enlisted their aid in warring upon my brother. When we returned to carry on this war I learned that I had a son. So, too, did Derek. But my son was born in obscurity and Derek's son--you, Peter--in the lap of luxury. The war was short and, to me, sweet. Belravia was first to fall, and I had your father removed from this life by the vibrating death." "You monster!" cried Karl. But the slender rod menaced him. "A moment, my hot-headed nephew. I vowed I'd have your life, Peter, but your father had a few friends and one of these spirited you away. So temporarily you escaped. But now I have you where I can keep that vow. You, too, shall die. By the vibration. But first--ha! ha!--I'll give you a taste of the purple. Just so the going will be harder." Karl kept his temper as best he could. He thought, conscience-stricken, of old Rudolph, that good friend of his father. Then he thought of that youth he had taken from the Square. "Your son?" he asked gently. "Has he the triangular brand?" The Zar was taken aback. "He has, yes. Why?" he asked. "I have seen him in the Americas. He now lies wounded and in peril of his life. What do you think of that?" Karl was triumphant as the Zar paled. "You lie, Peter Van Dorn!" * * * * * But the beady eyes saw that the young man was truthful. Sudden fury assailed the monarch of the East. A bell pealed its mellow summons and three Moon men entered the Presence. "Quick, Taru--the radiovision! Our ambassador in the Americas!" The Zar was on his feet, his hard features terrible in fear and anger. "By God!" he vowed, "I'll lay waste the Americas if harm has come to my son. And you"--turning to Karl--"I'll reserve for you an even more terrible fate than the vibrating death!" The radiovision was wheeled in and in operation. A frightened face appeared in its disc: the Zar's ambassador across the sea. "Moreau--my son!" snapped the Zar. "Where is he?" "Majesty! Have mercy!" gasped Moreau. "Paul has eluded us. He was skylarking--in the lower levels of New York. But our secret agents are combing the passages. We'll have him in twenty-four hours. I promise!" The rage of the Zar was terrible to see. Karl expected momentarily that the white flame would lay him low, for the anger of the mad ruler was directed first at Moreau, then at himself. But a quick, evil calm succeeded the storm. "You, Peter," he stated, in tones suddenly silky, "shall have that twenty-four hours--no more. If Moreau has not produced my son in that time you shall be dismembered slowly. A finger; an ear; your tongue; a hand--until you reveal the whereabouts of the heir to my throne!" "Never! You scum!" Karl was on the dais in a single bound. He had the Zar by the throat, his fingers twisting in the flabby flesh. Might as well have it over at once. "Fratricide--murderer of my father, I'll take you with me!" * * * * * But it was not to be. The throne room was filled with retainers of the mad emperor. Strong hands tore him away and he was borne, struggling and fighting, to the floor. A sharp pain in his forearm. A deadening of the muscles. He was powerless, save for the painful ability to crawl to his knees, swaying drunkenly. A delicious languor overcame him. Nothing mattered now. He saw that a tall man in the purple had withdrawn the needle of the hypodermic and was replacing the instrument in its case. Ever so slowly, it seemed. The Zar was laughing. That horrible cackle. But Karl didn't care. They'd have their sport with him. Let 'em! Then it'd be over. Lord! If only he had been a little quicker. He'd have torn the old Zar's windpipe from its place! "My word," laughed the Zar. "The sacred word of a Van Dorn. I gave it. He'll wear the purple for a day. Take him from my sight!" Karl was walking, quite willingly now. The effects of the drug were altering. His muscular strength returned but his mental state underwent a complete change. Always he'd wanted a taste of the purple. For years he'd listened to the orators of the Square, to the conflicting statements of old Krassin. But now he'd see. He'd know the joys of the upper levels; the pleasure cities, perhaps. For one day. But what did it matter? He found himself laughing and joking with his companion, a heavy-set wearer of the purple. They were in a luxurious apartment. Servants! Moon men all of them, but so efficient. They stripped him of his gray denim; discarded it contemptuously. Karl kicked the heap into a corner and laughed delightedly. His bath was waiting. * * * * * Much can happen in a day. Clothed in the purple, Karl--Peter Van Dorn, he was, now--expanded. Turgid emotions surged through his new being. He was a new man. In his rightful place. He was delighted with the companionship of his new friend of the purple, Leon Lemaire. An euphonious name! A fine fellow! Fool that the Zar must be, to leave him in the care of so amiable a man. Why, Leon couldn't hold him! None of them could. He'd escape them all--if he wished. Twenty-four hours, indeed! They were in the midst of a gay company. Wine flowed freely, and Leon had attached to their party a pair of beautiful damsels, young, and easy to know. There was music and dancing. Lights of marvelous color played over the assemblage in the huge hall, swaying their senses at the will of some expert manipulator. Peter was a different person now. He was exhilarated to the point of intoxication, but not by the wine. Somehow he couldn't bear the taste of the amber fluid the others were imbibing with such gusto. The effects of the drug had left a coppery taste in his mouth. But no matter! Rhoda, his lovely companion at the table leaned close. Her breath was hot at his throat. He swept her into his arms. Leon and the other girl laughed approvingly. There were many such places in the upper levels of Dorn and they traveled from one to another. Now their party was larger, it having been augmented by the appearance of other of Leon's friends. Fine companions, these men of the purple, and the women were incomparable. Especially Rhoda. They understood one another perfectly now. It was all as he had pictured it. Someone proposed that they visit the intermediate levels. It would be such a lark to watch the mechanicals. They made the drop in a lift. A laughing, riotous party. And Peter was one of them! He felt that he had known them for years. Rhoda clung to his arm, and the languorous glances from under her long lashes set the blood racing madly in his veins. * * * * * In the levels of the mechanicals they romped boisterously. To them the strange robots--creatures of steel and glass and copper--were objects of ridicule. Poor, senseless mechanisms that performed the tasks that made the wearers of the purple independent of labor. Here they saw the preparation of their synthetic food, untouched by human hands. In one chamber a group of mechanicals, soulless and brainless, engaged in the delicate chemical compounding of raw materials that went into the making of their clothing. Here was a nursery, where tiny tots born to the purple were reared to adolescence by unfeeling but efficient mechanical nurses. The mothers of the purple could not be bothered with their offspring until they had reached the age of reason. The whirring machinery of a huge power plant provided much amusement for the feminine members of the party. It was all so massive; throbbing with energy. But dirty! Ugh! Lucky the attendants could be mechanicals. "We have visited the lower levels," whispered Rhoda in his ear, "but not often. It isn't pleasant. Ignorant fools in the gray denim--too many of them. I don't know why we permit their existence. Fools who will not learn. Education made us as we are, and they won't take it. Sullen looks and evil leers are all that they have for us. Hope nobody suggests going down there now." "Me, too," said Peter. He had forgotten that once he was Karl Krassin, a wearer of the despised gray. Someone in the party was becoming restless. They must move on. "Where to?" asked Peter. "Sans Dolor, sweet boy. A pleasure city within a hundred kilometers of Dorn. You'll love it, Peter." A pleasure city! Fondest dream of the wearers of the gray! In the dim past, when he was Karl, he had dreamed it often. Now he was to visit one! * * * * * They were atop the city now and the crystal palace of the Zar shimmered in the sunlight off there across the flat upper surface of Dorn. But it seemed so far away that Peter did not give it a second thought. He was living in the present. A swift aero took them into the skies and they roared out above the wilderness that was everywhere between the great cities of earth. Funny nobody thought of leaving the cities and exploring the jungles of the outside. But, of course, it wasn't necessary. They had everything they needed within the cities. All of their wants were supplied by the mechanicals and by the few toilers in the gray who still persisted in ignorance and in some perverse ideas that they must work in order to live. Besides, the jungle was dangerous. Sans Dolor loomed into view, a great island floating in the air a thousand meters above the tossing waters of the ocean. Peter gave not a thought to the forces that kept it suspended. Dimly he recalled certain words of old Rudolph, words regarding the artificial emanations that had been discovered as capable of counteracting the force of gravity. But his mind was intent on the pleasures to come. They were over the city. Carefully tended foliage lined its streets and a smooth lagoon glistened in its center. Its towers and spires were decorated with gay colors. The streets were filled with wearers of the purple and the nude bodies of bathers in the lagoon gleamed white in the strong sunlight. He sensed anew the nearness of Rhoda. Her soft warm hand nestled in his and she responded instantly to his sudden embrace. There came a shock and the party was stilled in dismay. The aero careened violently and the pilot struggled with controls that were dead. Sans Dolor dropped rapidly away beneath them. They were shooting skyward, drawn by some inexplicable and invisible energy from above. * * * * * Rhoda screamed and held him close, trembling violently. All of the women screamed and the men cursed. Leon arose to his feet and stared at Peter. The friendliness was gone from his features and he spat forth an accusation. A glistening mechanism appeared in his hand as if by magic. A ray generator! He had been appointed by the Zar to guard this upstart and, whatever happened, he'd not let him escape with his life. The girl shuddered at sight of the weapon and extricated herself from his arms. Her affection too had been a pose. Peter's mind was clearing from the effects of the drug. He had not the slightest idea of what might have caused the quick change in the situation but he resolved he would die fighting, if die he must. Leon fumbled with the catch of the generator. It refused to operate. The force that was drawing them upward had paralyzed all mechanisms aboard the little aero. Flinging it from him in disgust he sprang for Peter. Their minds befuddled, the rest of the men watched dully. The women huddled together in a corner, whimpering. They were a sorry lot after all, thought Karl. He was no longer Peter Van Dorn, and he thrilled to the joy of battle. * * * * * Leon Lemaire was no mean antagonist. His flailing arms were everywhere and a huge fist caught Karl on the side of his head and sent him reeling. But this only served to clear his mind further and to fill him with a cold rage. He bored in unmercifully and Lemaire soon was on the defensive. A blow to his midsection had him puffing and Karl hammered in rights and lefts to the now sinister face that rocked his opponent to his heels. But the minion of the Zar was crafty. He slid to the floor as if groggy, then with catlike agility, dove for Karl's knees, bringing him down with a crash. The air whistled by them as the ship was drawn upward with ever-increasing speed. The other passengers cowered in fright as the two men rolled over and over on the floor, banging at each other indiscriminately. Both were hurt. Karl's lip was split, and bleeding profusely. One eye was closing. But now he was on top and he pummeled his opponent to a pulp. Long after he ceased resisting them, the blows continued until the features of Leon Lemaire were unrecognizable. The infuriated Karl did not see that one of the members of the party was creeping up on him from behind. Neither was he aware that the upward motion of the aero had ceased and that they now hung motionless in space. A terrific blow at the base of his skull sent him sprawling. Must have been struck by a rocket, one of those funny ships that crossed the ocean so quickly. A million lights danced before his aching eyeballs. Lying prone across the inert body of his foe, dimly conscious and fingers clutching weakly, he knew that the cabin was filled with people. Alien voices bellowed commands. There was the screaming of women; the sound of blows; curses ... then all was silence and darkness. * * * * * It was a far cry to the little book shop off Cooper Square, but Karl was calling for Rudolph when he next awoke to the realization that he was still in the land of the living. His head was bandaged and his tongue furry. A terrible hangover. Then he heard voices and they were discussing Peter Van Dorn. He opened one eye as an experiment. The other refused to open. But it might have been worse. At least he was alive; he could see well enough with the one good optic. "Sh-h!" whispered one of the voices. "He's recovering!" He looked solemnly into the eyes of an old man; a pair of wise and gentle eyes that reminded him somehow of Rudolph's. "Quiet now, Peter," said the old man. "You'll be all right in a few minutes. Banged up a bit, you are, but nothing serious." "Don't call me Peter," objected Karl. He loathed the sound of the name; loathed himself for his recent thoughts and actions. "I am Karl Krassin," he continued, "and as such will remain until I die." There were others in the room and he saw glances of satisfaction pass between them. This was a strange situation. These men were not of the purple. Neither were they of the gray. Their garments shone with the whiteness of pure silver. And that's what they were; of finely woven metallic cloth. Was he in another world? "Very well, Karl." The kind old man was speaking once more. "I merely want you to know that you are among friends--your father's friends." * * * * * Surprised into complete wakefulness, Karl struggled to a seated position and surveyed the group that faced him. They were a fine looking lot, mostly older men, but there was a refreshing wholesomeness about them. "My father?" he faltered. "He's not alive." "No, my poor boy. Derek Van Dorn left this life at the hands of your uncle, Zar Boris. But we, his friends, are here to avenge him and to restore to you his throne." "But--but--I still do not understand." "Of course not, because we've kept ourselves hidden from the world for more than twenty-two years, waiting for this very moment. There are forty-one of us, including Rudolph, my brother. We have lived in the jungle since Boris conquered the Eastern Hemisphere. But amongst our numbers were several scientists, two greater than was Boris, even in his heyday. They have done wonderful things and we are now prepared to take back what was taken from Derek--and more. His life we can not restore--Heaven rest him--but his kingdom we can. And to his son it shall be returned. "You were given into Rudolph's care when little more than a babe in arms and he has cared for you well. We've watched, you know, in the detectoscopes--long range radiovision mechanisms that can penetrate solid walls, the earth itself, to bring to us the images and voices of persons who may be on the other side of the world. We've followed your every move, my boy, and the first time we feared for you was yesterday when the drug of the Zar's physician stole away your sense of right and wrong. But we were in time to save you, and now we are ready to kneel at your feet and proclaim you our king. First there is the Zar to be dealt with and then we shall set up the new regime. Are you with us?" * * * * * Karl gazed at the speaker in wonder. He a king? Always to live amongst the wearers of the purple? To be responsible for the welfare of half the world? It was unthinkable! But Zar Boris, the murderer of his own father--he must be punished, and at the hands of the son! "I'll do it," he said simply. "That is, I'll do whatever you have planned in the way of exterminating the Zar. Then we'll talk of the new empire. But how is the Zar to be overcome? I thought he was invincible, with his Moon men and terrible weapons." "Ah! That, my boy, is where our scientists have triumphed. True, his rays were terrible. They could not be combatted when he first returned. The strange chemicals and gases of the Moon men defied analysis or duplication. His citadel atop the city of Dorn is proof against them all; proof against explosives and rays of all kinds known to him. The disintegration and decomposition rays have no effect on the crystal of its walls. It is hermetically sealed from the outer air so can not be gassed. The vibration impulses have no effect upon its reinforced structure. But there is a ray, a powerful destructive agent, against which it is not proof. And our scientists have developed this agency. You shall have the privilege of pressing the release of the energy that destroys the arch-fiend in his lair. His dominance over, the empire will fall. We shall take it--for you." A strange exaltation shone from the faces of those in the room, and Karl found that it was contagious. His bosom swelled and he itched to handle the controls of this wonderful ray. "This ray," continued the brother of old Rudolph, "carries the longest vibrations ever measured, the vibrations of infra-red, the heat-ray. We have succeeded in concentrating a terrific amount of power in its production, and with it are able to produce temperatures in excess of that of the interior of the earth, where all substances are molten or gaseous. The Zar's crystal palace cannot withstand it for a second. He cannot escape!" "How'll you know he's there at the time?" Karl was greatly excited, but he was curious too. "Come with me, my boy. I'll show you." The old man led him from the room and the others followed respectfully. * * * * * They stopped at a circular port and Karl saw that they were high above the earth in a vessel that hovered motionless, quivering with what seemed like human eagerness to be off. "This vessel?" he asked. "It's a huge sphere; the base of our operations. To it we drew the aero on which you were fighting. A magnetic force discovered by our scientists and differing only slightly from that used in counteracting gravity. We let the rest of them go; foolishly I think. But it's done now and we have no fear. From this larger vessel we shall send forth smaller ones, armed with the heat-ray. The flagship of the fleet is to be yours and you'll lead the attack on Dorn. Here--I'll show you the Zar." They had reached the room of the detectoscopes--a mass of mechanisms that reminded Karl of nothing so much as the vitals of the intermediate levels which he had visited with Leon--and Rhoda. He knew that he flushed when he thought of her. What a fool he had been! A disc glowed as one of the silver-robed strangers manipulated the controls. The upper surface of Dorn swung into view. Rapidly the image drew nearer and they were looking at the crystal pyramid that was the Zar's palace. Down, down to its very tip they passed. Karl recoiled from the image as it seemed they were falling to its glistening sides. The sensation passed. They were through, penetrating solid crystal, masonry, steel and duralumin girders. Room after room was opened to their view. It was magic--the magic of the upper levels. * * * * * Now they were in the throne room. A group of purple-clad men and women stood before the dais. Leon, Rhoda--all of his wild companions were there, facing the dais. The Zar was raging and the words of his speech came raucously to their ears through the sound-producing mechanism. "You've failed miserably, all of you," he screamed. "He's gotten away and you know the penalty. Taru--the vibrating ray!" The Moon man already was fussing with a gleaming machine, a machine with bristling appendages having metallic spheres on their ends, a machine in which dozens of vacuum tubes glowed suddenly. Rhoda screamed. It was a familiar sound to Karl. He noted with satisfaction that Leon could hardly stand on his feet and that his face was covered with plasters. Then, startled, he saw that Leon was shivering as with the ague. His outline on the screen grew dim and indistinct as the rate of vibration increased. Then the body bloated and became misty. He could see through it. The vibrating death! His father had gone the same way! Karl groaned at the thought. The whine of the distant machine rose in pitch until it passed the limit of audibility. Tiny pin-points of incandescence glowed here and there from the Zar's victims as periods of vibration were reached that coincided with the natural periods of certain of the molecules of their structure. They were no longer recognizable as human beings. Shimmering auras surrounded them. Suddenly they were torches of cold fire, weaving, oscillating with inconceivable rapidity. Then they were gone; vanished utterly. The Zar laughed--that horrible cackle again. "Great God!" exclaimed Karl, "let's go! The fiend must not live a moment longer than necessary. Are you ready?" Rudolph's brother smiled. "We're ready Karl," he said. * * * * * The great vessel hummed with activity. The five torpedo-shaped aeros of the battle fleet were ready to take off from the cavities in the hull. In the flagship Karl was stationed at the control of the heat-ray. His instructions in its operation had been simple. A telescopic sight with crosshairs for the centering of the object to be attacked; a small lever. That was all. He burned with impatience. Then they were dropping; falling clear of the mother ship. The pilot pressed a button and the electronic motors started. A burst of roaring energy streamed from the tapered stern of their vessel and the earth lurched violently to meet them. Down, down they dived until the rocking surface of Dorn was just beneath them. Then they flattened out and circled the vast upper surface. From the corner of his eye Karl saw that the other four vessels of his fleet were just behind. There was a flurry among the wasplike clouds of pleasure craft over the city. They scurried for cover. Something was amiss! "Hurry!" shouted Karl. "The warning is out! There is no time to lose!" He pressed his face to the eye-piece of his sight, his finger on the release lever of the ray. The crystal pyramid crossed his view and was gone. Again it crossed, more slowly this time. And now his sight was dead on it, the gleaming wall rushing toward him. Pressure on the tiny button. They'd crash into the palace in another second! But no, a brilliant flash obscured his vision, a blinding light that made the sun seem dark by comparison. They roared on and upward. He took his eye from the telescope and stared ahead, down. The city was dropping away, and, where the crystal palace had stood, there was a spreading blob of molten material from which searing vapors were drifting. The roofs of the city were sagging all around and great streams of the sparkling, sputtering liquid dripped into the openings that suddenly appeared. Derek Van Dorn was avenged. "Destroy! Destroy!" yelled Karl madly. A microphone hung before him and his words rang through every vessel of his convoy. * * * * * The lust of battle was upon him. A fleet of the Zar's aeros had risen from below; twenty of them at least. These would be manned by Moon creatures, he knew, and would carry all of the dreadful weapons which had originated on that strange body. But he did not know that his own ships were insulated against most of the rays used by the Zar's forces. He knew only that he must fight; fight and kill; exterminate every last one of the Zar's adherents or be exterminated in the attempt. Kill! Kill! The madness was contagious. His pilot was a marvel and drove his ship straight for the massed ships of the foe. The air was vivid with light-streamers. A ray from an enemy vessel struck the thick glass of the port through which he looked and the outer surface was shattered and pock-marked. But a cloud of vapor and a dripping stream of fiery liquid told him his own ray had taken effect on a vessel of the enemy. One! They wheeled about and spiraled, coming up under another of the Zar's aeros. It vanished in a puff of steam and they narrowly missed being covered by the falling remnants of incandescent liquid. Two! Karl's aim was good and he gloated in the fact. Three! They climbed and turned over, dropping again into the fray. Four! The air grew stifling, for the expended energy of the enemies' rays must needs be absorbed. It could not disintegrate them nor decompose their bodies, but the contacts were many and the liberation of heat enormous. They were suffocating! But Karl would not desist. They drove on, now beneath, now above an enemy ship. He lost count. One of his own vessels was in trouble. The report came to him from the little speaker at his ear. He looked around in alarm. A glowing object reeled uncertainly over there between two of the aeros of the Zar. The concentration of beams of vibrations was too much for the sturdy craft. It was red hot and its occupants burned alive where they sat. Suddenly it slipped into a spin and went slithering down into the city, leaving a gaping opening where it fell. This sobered him somewhat, but he went into the battle with renewed fury. * * * * * How many had they brought down? Fifteen? Sixteen? He tore his purple jacket from his body. The perspiration rolled from his pores. His own ship would be next. But what did it matter? Kill! Kill! He shouted once more into the microphone, then dived into battle. Another and another! In Heaven's name, how many were there? It was maddening. If only he could breathe. His lungs were seared; his eyes smarting from the heat. And then it was over. Three of the Zar's aeros remained, and these turned tail to run for it. No! They were falling, nose down, under full power; diving into the city from which they had come. Suicide? Yes. They couldn't face the recriminations that must come to them. And anything was better than facing that burning death from the strange little fighters which had come from out the skies. Dorn was a mass of wreckage. Karl tore at the fastenings of the ports, searing his fingers on the heated metal. His pilot had collapsed, the little aero heading madly skyward with no guiding hand. Air! They must have air! He loosened the pilot's jacket; slapped frantically at his wrists in the effort to bring him to consciousness. Then he was at the controls of the vessel, tugging on first one, then the other. The aero circled and spun, executing the most dangerous of sideslips and dives. A little voice was speaking to him--the voice of the radio--instructing him. In a daze he followed instructions as best he could. The whirlings of the earth stabilized after a time and he found he was flying the vessel; climbing rapidly. * * * * * A sense of power came to him as the little voice of the radio continued to instruct. Here were the controls of the electronic motor; there the gravity-energy. He was proceeding in the wrong direction. But what did it matter? He learned the meaning of the tiny figures of the altimeter; the difference between the points of the compass. Still he drove on. "East! Turn East!" begged the little voice from the radio. "You're heading west. Your speed--a thousand kilometers an hour--it's too fast. Turn back, Zar Peter!" He tore the loud speaker of the radio from its fastenings. West! He wanted to go west! On and on he sped, becoming more and more familiar with the workings of the little vessel as he progressed. A cooling breeze whistled from the opened ports, a breeze that smelled of the sea. His heart sang with the wonder of it all. He could fly. And fly he did. Zar Peter? Never! He knew now where he belonged; knew what he wanted. He'd find the coast of North America. Follow it until he located New York. A landing would be easy, for had not the voice instructed him in the use of the gravity-energy? He'd make his way to the lower levels, to the little book shop of Rudolph Krassin. A suit of gray denim awaited him there and he'd never discard it. * * * * * Onward he sped into the night, which was falling fast. He held to his westward course like a veteran of the air lanes. The pilot had ceased to breathe and Karl was sorry. Game little devil, that pilot. Have to shove his body overboard. Too bad. Rudolph's brother would understand. He'd be watching in the detectoscope. And the others--those who had wished to seat him on a throne--they'd understand, too. They'd have to! Rudolph would forgive him, he knew. Paul Van Dorn--his own cousin--the secret agents of the Zar would never locate him! Too many friends of Rudolph's were of the red police. He gave himself over to happy thoughts as the little aero sped on in the darkness. Home! He was going home! Back to the gray denim, where he belonged and where now he would remain content. The Ape-Men of Xlotli _By David R. Sparks_ A beautiful face in the depths of a geyser--and Kirby plunges into a desperate mid-Earth conflict with the dreadful Feathered Serpent. CHAPTER I Kirby did not know what mountains they were. He did know that the Mannlicher bullets of eleven bad Mexicans were whining over his head and whizzing past the hoofs of his galloping, stolen horse. The shots were mingled with yelps which pretty well curdled his spine. In the circumstances, the unknown range of snow mountains towering blue and white beyond the arid, windy plateau, offering he could not tell what dangers, seemed a paradise. Looking at them, Kirby laughed harshly to himself. As he dug the heels of his aviator's boots into the stallion's flanks, the animal galloped even faster than before, and Kirby took hope. Then more bullets and more yelps made him think that his advantage might prove only temporary. Nevertheless, he laughed again, and as he became accustomed to the feel of a stallion under him, he even essayed a few pistol shots back at the pack of frantic, swarthy devils he had fooled. [Illustration: _His head wavered back and forth and his hiss filled the night._] Three hours ago he had been eating a peaceful breakfast with his friend and commandant, Colonel Miguel de Castanar, in the sunlit patio of the commandant's hacienda. Castanar, chief of the air patrol for the district, had waxed enthusiastic over the suppression of last spring's revolutionists and the cowed state of up-country bandits. Captain Freddie Kirby, American instructor of flying to Mexican pilots in the making, had agreed with him and asked for one of the Wasps and three days' leave with which to go visiting in Laredo. The simple matter of a broken fuel line, a forced landing two hundred kilometres from nowhere, and the unlucky proximity of the not-so-cowed horsemen, were the things which had changed the day from what it had been to what it was. The one piece of good fortune which had befallen him since the bandits had surrounded the wrecked Wasp, looted it, and taken its lone pilot prisoner, was the break he was getting now. During the squadron's first halt to feed, he had knocked down his guards and made a bolt for the grazing stallion. So far, the attempt was proving worth while. * * * * * On and on the stallion lunged toward the white mountains. Kirby's eyes became red rimmed now from fatigue and the glare of the sun and the dust of the pitilessly bare plateau. A negligible scalp wound under his mop of straw-colored hair, slight as it was, did not add to his comfort. But still he would not give up, for the horse, as if it sensed what its rider needed most, was making directly for a narrow ravine which debouched on the plateau from the nearest mountain flank. It was the promise of cover afforded by the jagged rocks and jungle growth of that ravine which kept hope alive in Kirby's throbbing brain. The stallion was blown and staggering. Foam from the heavily bitted mouth flashed back in great yellow flakes against Kirby's dust-caked aviator's tunic. But just the same, the five mile gallop had carried both horse and rider beyond range of any but the most expert rifle shot. And Kirby knew that if his own splendid mount was almost ready to crash, the horses of his pursuers must be in worse shape still. So for the third time since the fight had begun, he laughed. This time there was no harshness, but only relief, in the sound which came from his dry lips. Ten minutes later, he flung himself out of his saddle. Like the caress of a vast, soothing hand, the shadowed coolness of the ravine lay upon him. As his feet struck ground, they splashed in the water overflowing from a spring at the base of an immense rock. At once Kirby dropped the reins on the stallion's neck, giving him his freedom, and as the horse lowered his head to drink, Kirby stooped also. There was cover everywhere. Kirby's first move after pulling both himself and the horse away from the spring, was to glance up the long, deeply shaded canyon which he had entered--a gash hacked into the breast of the steep mountain as by a titanic ax. Then, reassured as to the possibilities for a defensive retreat, he glanced back toward the dazzling, bare plateau. * * * * * It was what he saw taking place amongst the sombreroed bandits out there which made the grin of satisfaction fade from his broad mouth. His last glance backward, before bolting into the canyon mouth, had showed him a ragged squadron of men left far behind, yet galloping after him still. But now-- Presently a puzzled frown made wrinkles in Freddie Kirby's wide sunburned forehead. He relaxed his grip upon the heavy Luger, which, in his big hands, looked like a cap pistol, and rubbed his eyes. But he was not mistaken. The horsemen had halted! Out there on the glaring, alkali-arid plateau, they were standing as still as so many statues. Looking toward the canyon mouth which had swallowed their quarry, they certainly were, but they were halted as completely as men struck dead. "Huh," Kirby grunted, and scratched behind his ear. The next second he swung around to look at his horse, uncertain what he was going to do next, but aware of the fact that right now, with a lot of unknown country between himself and Castanar's sunlit patio, the stallion was going to be a friend in need. As he turned, however, prepared to take up the loose reins, something else happened. The stallion let out a neigh as shrill as a trumpet blast. As Kirby jumped, grabbed for the bridle, his fingers found empty air. Like a crazy animal the stallion leaped past him, barely missing him. Out toward the plain the horse jumped, out and away from the shaded canyon mouth, out toward the spot where other horses waited. And despite the animal's blown condition, the speed he put into his retreat left Kirby dazed. * * * * * After a helpless, profanity-filled second, Kirby scratched behind his ear again. As certain as the fact that almost his sole hope of getting back to civilization depended upon the stallion, was the fact that the brute did not intend to stop running until he dropped. "Now what in the hell ever got into his crazy head?" Kirby muttered grimly. Then he turned around to glance up the shadow-filled slash of a canyon, and sniffed. "Huh!" Faintly in the air had risen an odor the like of which he had never encountered in his life. A combination, it was, of the unforgetable stench which hangs over a battlefield when the dead are long unburied, and of a fragrance more rare, more heady, more poignantly sweet than any essence ever concocted by Parisian perfumer. With the drifting scent came a sound. Faint, carrying from a distance, the rumble which Kirby heard was almost certainly that of a geyser. There was no telling what had brought the troop of horsemen to a halt, but after a time Kirby knew that the cause of his horse's sudden departure must have been a whiff of the strange perfume. * * * * * For a long time he stood still, watching the crazy stallion dwindle in size, watching the line of unexpectedly timid bandits. Then, when it became apparent that the horsemen were going to stay put either until he came out, or showed that he never was coming out, he shrugged, and swung on his heel so that he faced up the canyon. The odor was dying away now, and the geyser rumble was gone. In Kirby's heart came a mingled feeling of tense uneasiness and fascinated curiosity. Momentarily he was almost glad that his horse _had_ bolted, and that his pursuers _were_ blocking any lane of retreat except that offered by the canyon. If things had been different, the queer behavior of the Mexicans, the unaccountable actions of his horse and the equally strange growth of his own uneasiness might have made him uncertain whether he would go up the canyon or not. Now it was the only thing to do, and Kirby was glad because, fear or no fear, he wanted to go on. "I wonder," he said out loud as he started, "just what the denizens of First Street in Kansas would say to a layout like this!" CHAPTER II At the end of an hour he was still wondering. At midday the canyon was chill and dank, lit only by a half light which at times dwindled to a deep dusk as the rock walls beetled together hundreds of feet above his head. Always when he stumbled through one of the darkest passages, he heard and half saw immense gray bats flapping above him. In the half-lit reaches, he hardly took a step without seeing great rats with gray coats, yellow teeth, and evil pink eyes. But rats and bats combined were not as bad as the snakes. They were almost white, and nowhere had he seen rattlers of such size. If his caution relaxed for a second, they struck at him with fangs as long and sharp as needles. The tortured, twisted cedars, the paloverdi, occatilla, cholla, opunti, through which he edged his laborious way, all offered an almost animate, armed hostility. Altogether this journey was the least sweet he had taken anywhere. Yet he went on. Why had eleven Mexican bandits refused to advance even to within decent rifle range of the canyon's mouth? What was there about the putrid yet gorgeous perfume that had made the stallion go off his nut, so to speak? After a time, Kirby veered away from a fourteen-foot rattler which flashed in a loathsome coil on his left hand. Hungry, weakened by all he had been through since breakfast time, he plodded doggedly on. But a moment later he stumbled past a twisted cedar, and then stopped, forgetting even the snakes. At his feet lay the bleached skeleton of a man. * * * * * Beside the right hand, in a position which indicated that only the final relaxation of death had loosened his grip upon a precious object, lay a cylinder, carefully carved, of rich, yellow gold. Of the science of anthropology Kirby knew enough to make him sure that the dolicocephalic skull and characteristically shaped pelvic and thigh bones of the skeleton had belonged to a white man. As for the cylinder--But he was not so sure what that was. Regardless of the dry swish of a rattler's body on the rocks behind him, he lifted the object from the spot in which it had lain for no man knew how long. Of much the size and shape of an old-time cylindrical wax phonograph record, the softly gleaming thing weighed, he judged, almost two pounds. Two pounds of soft, virgin gold of a quality as fine as any he had seen amongst all the treasures brought out of Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru combined! But the gold was not the only thing. If Kirby was human enough to think in terms of treasure, he was also enough of an amateur anthropologist to hold his breath over the carvings on the yellow surface. First he recognized the ancient symbols of Sun and Moon. And then a representation, semi-realistic, semi-conventionalized, of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, known in all the annals of primitive Mexican religions. Good enough. But the mere symbols by no means told the whole story of the cylinder. The workmanship was archaic, older than any Aztec art Kirby knew, older than Toltec, older far, he ventured to guess, than even earliest archaic Mayan carvings. God, what a find! * * * * * For a moment it seemed almost impossible that he, Freddie Kirby, native of Kansas, unromantic aviator, should have been the one to discover this relic of an unknown, lost race. Yet the cylinder of gold was there, in his hand. After a long minute Kirby looked around him, then listened. From up the canyon came the provocative rumble of the geyser. It was closer now, and Kirby, glancing at his watch which had been spared to him in the Wasp's crash, noted that just forty-four minutes had passed since the last eruption. There was nothing to be done about the bleached skeleton. So, tucking the precious cylinder into his tunic, Kirby headed on up the gash of a canyon. Far away indeed seemed the neat, maple-shaded asphalt street, the rows of parked cars and farm wagons, the telephone office and drug store and bank, of the Kansas town where he had grown up. Time passed until again he heard the geyser, and again was dizzied by the perfume. As the fragrance--close and powerful now--died away, he flailed with one arm at a two-foot bat which flapped close to his head. And then he trudged his dogged way around a deeply shadowed bend, and found the chasm not only almost wholly dark, but narrower than it had been at any previous point. "Holy mackerel," Kirby groaned. "Phew! If this keeps up, I--" He stopped. His jaw dropped. "Oh, hell!" The beetling walls narrowed in until the gash was scarcely fifteen feet wide. Further progress was barred by a smooth wall which rose sheer in front of him. * * * * * Kirby did not know how many seconds passed before he made out through the gloom that the wall was man-made and carved with the same symbols of Sun, Moon, and Feathered Serpent, which ornamented the cylinder of gold. But when he did realize at last, the shout with which he expressed his feeling was anything but a groan. It simply meant that the skeleton which once had been a man, had almost surely found the golden cylinder beyond the wall and not in the canyon. And if the dead man had passed that smooth, carved barrier, another man could do it! Kirby jumped forward, began to search in the darkness for some hidden entrance. Minute after minute passed. He gave another cry. He saw a long, upright crack in the stone surface, and a quick push of his hands made the stones in front of him give almost an inch. All at once his shoulder was planted, and behind that square shoulder was straining all the muscle of his two hundred pound body. The result was all that he desired. When he ceased pushing, a slab of rock gaped wide before him, giving entrance to a pitch dark tunnel. For a moment he held the portal back, then, releasing his pressure, he stepped into the dark passage. By the time a ponderous grating of rocks assured him that the door had swung shut of its own weight, he had produced matches and struck a light. * * * * * The puny flame showed him a curving passage hewn smoothly through the heart of bedrock. Before the flare died he walked twenty feet, and as another match burned to his fingers, he found the right hand curve of the passage giving way to a left hand twist. After that he dared use no more of his precious matches. But just when the darkness was beginning to wear badly on his nerves, he uttered a low cry. As he increased his rapid walk to a run, the faint light he had suddenly seen ahead of him grew until it became a circular flare of daylight which marked the tunnel's end. Out of the passage Kirby strode with shoulders square and head up, his cool, level, practical blue eyes wide with wonder. Out of the tunnel he strode into the valley of the perfumed geyser. "God above!" The words were vibrant with hoarse reverence. He saw the sunlight of a cliff-surrounded diminutive Garden of Eden. He saw a vale of flowering grass, of palms and live oaks, saw patches of lilies so huge as to transcend belief, and dizzying clumps of tree cactus almost as tall as the palms themselves. What was more, he saw in the center of this upland, cliff-guarded valley, a gaping black orifice which every faculty of judgment told him was the mouth of the geyser of perfume. And beside it, outstretched on a smooth sheet of rock which glistened as though coated with a layer of clear, sparkling glass, he saw-- * * * * * Kirby blinked his eyes rapidly, hardly believing what he saw. On the glistening rock lay the perfectly preserved figure of a Spanish Conquistadore in full armor. Morion and breast-plate were in place, and glistened as though they had been burnished this morning. And the Spaniard's dark, handsome, bearded face! Kirby saw instantly that no decay had touched it, that even the hairs of the beard were perfect. The whole armor-clad corpse gleamed softly with a covering of the same glassy substance which covered the rock. Kirby glanced at his watch, saw that twelve minutes must elapse before the geyser spouted again. Then his eyes narrowed. He remained standing where he was, hard by the mouth of the tunnel, knowing that a wise man would conduct cautiously his exploration of this valley of wonders. Arsenic! Silicon! The two words stood out sharply in his thought. In Africa existed plenty of springs whose waters contained enough arsenic to bring death to those who drank. Might not the Spaniard's presence here be explained, then, by assuming that the geyser water was charged with a strong arsenic content, and, in addition, with some sort of silicon solution which, left to dry in the air, hardened to glass? Lord, what a discovery to take back with him to Kansas! Almost it made the discovery of the golden cylinder pale by comparison. Why, the commercial uses to which this silicon water might be put were almost without limit, and the owner of the concession might confidently expect to make millions! It was while Kirby stood there, breathless and jubilant, waiting for the geyser to spout, that he began to feel that _he was being watched_. Suddenly, with a start, he shot a sweeping glance over the whole grove. But that did no good. He saw nothing save sunlight and waving green leaves. Eleven days were to pass before he discovered all that was to be involved in that sensation of being gazed at by unseen eyes. CHAPTER III At the beginning of the eleventh morning in the valley, Kirby had again posted himself close to the mouth of the black tunnel, and again felt that hidden eyes were observing him. But this morning differed from the first morning, because now, for the first time, he was ready to do something about the watcher or watchers. Exploration of the whole valley had not helped. Therefore, there lay at his feet a considerable coil of rope, the manufacture of which from plaited strands of the tough grass in his Eden had taken him whole days. With what patience he could find, he was waiting for the gigantic spout of milky-colored, perfumed water which would mean that the geyser had gone off and would erupt no more for exactly forty-four minutes. Eleven days in the valley! While he waited, Kirby considered them. Who had made the beautiful footprints beside him, when he had slept at last after his arrival here? Why had so many of the queer, fuzzy topped shrubs with immense yam-shaped roots, which grew here been taken away during that first sleep, and during all his other periods of sleep? Who had taken them? Early in his stay, he had learned that the tuberlike roots were good to eat and would sustain life, and he supposed that the unseen people of the valley took them for food. But who were these people of the valley? Who had laid beside him during his first sleep the immense lily with perfume like that which came with the milky geyser spray--that spray of death and delight mingled? Why had someone scratched a line in the earth from him directly to the distant orifice of the geyser? Was this, as he believed, a signal to come not only to the edge of the orifice, _but to lower himself down into its depths_? And if the line were intended as a signal, did the persons who came to the valley while he slept, always eluding him, wish him well or mean to do him harm? Last question of all: had the beautiful girl's face he believed he had seen just once, been real or an hallucination? It had been while he was kneeling at the very edge of the geyser cone, staring down its many colored throat, that the vision had appeared. Misty white amidst the green gloom, the face had been turned up to him, smiling, its lips forming a kiss, and its great eyes beckoning. Had the face been real or a dream? Eleven days in the valley! Now, with his braided rope ready at last, he was going to do something which might help to answer his questions. * * * * * Kirby reached out and began to run his grass rope, yard by yard, through his hands, searching carefully for any flaw. A canyon wren made the air sweet above him, while the morning sun began to wink and blink against the shadows which still lay against the face of the guardian cliffs. Kirby glanced at his watch and got up. Crossing beyond the mouth of the geyser, he grinned good morning at his friend the Conquistadore, and marched on into the shade of the live oak which grew nearest the geyser. Here he made one end of his rope fast to the gnarled trunk, inspected his pistol, patted his tunic to make sure that the cylinder of gold was safe, then stood by to await the geyser. With the passing of three minutes there came from the still empty orifice a sonorous rumbling. Kirby grinned. From deep in the earth issued a sound of fizzing and bubbling, and then, to the accompaniment of subterranean thunder, burst loose the milky, upward column which had never ceased to awe the man who watched so eagerly this morning. As the titanic jet leaped skyward now, the slanting rays of the sun caught it, and turned the water, fanning out, into a fire opal, into a sheet of living color. Kirby, hard headed to the last, drew from the supply in one pocket of his tunic, a strip of one of the tuberlike roots, and munched it. The thunder ceased. The waters receded. After that Kirby hesitated not a second. Promptly he moved forward, flung his coil of line down into the geyser tunnel, and swung on to the line. By the time he had swallowed the last bite of his breakfast, the world he knew had been left behind, and he was climbing down to a new. * * * * * It became at once apparent that the gorgeously colored, glassy-smooth throat glowed with tints which were unfamiliar to him. He could perceive these new shades of color, yet had no name for them. As he stopped after fifty feet to breathe, the color phenomenon made him wonder if the tuber roots he had been eating had affected his vision; then decided they had not. In addition to food value, the roots had some power to stimulate courage and a slight mental exhilaration. But the drug had proved non-habit forming, and Kirby knew that his powers of perception were not now, and never had been, affected. He swung down further. Just a moment after he began that progress was when things began to happen to him. First he heard what seemed to be the low titter of a human voice laughing sweetly. Next came a far off, unutterably lovely strumming of music. And then he realized that, at a depth of about a hundred feet, he was hanging level with a hole which marked the mouth of another tunnel. This new tunnel sloped down into the earth on his right hand. The floor and walls were glassy smooth, and the angle of descent was steep, but by no means as steep as the drop of the vertical geyser shaft in which he now hung. Laughter, music, the new tunnel suddenly aroused an excitement which made him quiver. "When I saw _her_," he gasped, "she was standing here, in the mouth of this tunnel, looking up at me!" Violently, Freddie Kirby forgot the maple-shaded street of his Kansas town, forgot everything but desire to reach the mouth of the new tunnel, where the girl of the exquisite face and beckoning lips had stood. Tightening his grip on the rope, he began to swing himself back and forth like a pendulum. It seemed probable that when the geyser water shot up past the horizontal tunnel, its force was so great that no water at all entered. He redoubled his efforts to widen his swing. * * * * * Then his feet scraped on the floor, and in a second he had alighted there. He still hung stoutly to his line, however, for the tunnel sloped down sharply enough, and was slippery enough, to prohibit the maintenance of footing unaided. The music which issued from the depths of that stunningly mysterious passage swelled to a crescendo--and stopped. Kirby clung there to his precarious perch, his feet slipping on the glass under them with every move he made, and feelings stirred in his heart which had never been there before. Then, as silence reigned where the music had been, something prompted him to look up. The next instant he stifled a cry. With widening eyes he saw the flash of a white arm and the gleam of a knife hovering over the spot where his taut rope passed out of the geyser opening into the sunshine of the outer world. Again he stifled a cry. For crying out would do no good. While the suppressed sound was still on his lips, the knife flickered. Then Kirby was shooting downward, the severed line whipping out after him. The first plunge flung him off his feet. A long swoop which he took on his back dizzied him. But as the fall continued, he was able to slow it a little by bracing arms and legs against the tunnel walls. "Holy Jeehosophat!" he gurgled. But there seemed to be no particular danger. The slide was as smooth as most of the chutes he had ever encountered at summer swimming pools. If ever the confounded spiral passage came to an end, he might find that he was still all right. As seconds passed and he fell and fell, it seemed that he was bound for the center of the earth. It seemed that-- * * * * * He swished around a multiple bend, and eyes which had been accustomed to darkness were blinded by light. It was light which radiated in all colors--blue, yellow, browns, purples, reds, pinks, and then all the new colors for which he had no name. Somehow Kirby knew that he had shot out of the tunnel, which emerged high up in the face of a cliff, and that he was dropping through perfumed, brilliant air resonant with the sound of birds and insects and human cries. The funny thing was that the pull of gravity was not right, somehow, and he was dropping fairly slowly. From far below, a body of what looked like water was sweeping up to meet him. Kirby closed his eyes. When he opened them again, his whole body was stinging with the slap of his impact, and he found that it was water which he had struck. The proof of it lay in the fact that he was swimming, and was approaching a shore. But such water! It was milky white and perfumed as the geyser flow had been, and it seemed luminous as with a radium fire. Had he not realized presently that the fluid probably contained enough arsenic to finish a thousand like him, he would have thought of himself as bathing in the waters of Paradise. But then he began to forget about the poison which might already be at work upon him. Ahead of him, stretched out in the gorgeous, colored light, ran a beach which was backed by heavy jungle. And on the beach stood the lovely creatures, all clad in shimmering, glistening garments, whose flutelike cries had come to him as he fell. * * * * * Kirby looked, and became almost powerless to continue his swim. The beauty of those frail women was like the reputed beauty of bright angels. That paralyzing effect of wonder, however, did not last long. The girls moved forward to the water's edge, and, laughing amongst themselves, beckoned to him with lovely slender hands whose every motion was a caress. "Be not afraid," called one in a curious patois dialect, about five-sixths of which seemed made up of Spanish words, distorted but recognizable. "The water would kill you," called another, "as it killed the Spaniard in armor. But we are here to save you. I will give you a draught to drink which will defeat the poison. Come on to us!" Kirby's heart was almost literally in his mouth now, because the girl who promised him salvation was she whose lips had formed a kiss at him from the green-gloomy throat of the geyser. His feet struck a shale bottom. Panting, he stood up and was conscious of the fact that despite his forlornly dripping and dishevelled condition, he was tall and straight and big, and that for some reason all of the girls on the gleaming sand, and one girl in particular, were anxious to receive him here. The one girl had drawn a small, gleaming flask of gold from the misty bodice of her gown, and was holding it out while she laughed with red lips and great, dazzling dark eyes. "_Pronto!_" she called in pure Spanish, and other girls echoed the word. "Oh," went on the bright owner of the flask, "we thought you would _never_ have done with your work on the rope. It took you so long!" * * * * * Kirby left the smooth lake behind him and stood dripping on the sand. The moment the air touched his clothes, he felt that they were stiffening slightly. Yet the sensation brought no terror. He could not feel terror as he faced the girls. "Give him the flask, Naida!" someone exclaimed. "Ah, but the Gods _have_ been kind to us!" echoed another. The girl with the flask made a gesture for silence. "Is it Naida you are called?" Kirby put in quickly, and as he spoke the Spanish words, the roll of them on his tongue did much to make him know that he was sane and awake, and not dreaming, that this was still the Twentieth Century, and that he was Freddie Kirby. Answering his question, Naida nodded, and gave him the flask. "A single draught will act as antidote to the poison," she said. "I drink," said Kirby as he raised the flask, "to the many of you who have been so gracious as to save me!" A flashing smile, a blush was his answer. And then he had wetted his lips with, and was swallowing, a limpid liquid which tasted of some drug. "Enough!" Naida ordered in a second. As she reached for the flask, her companions closed in as though a ceremony of some sort had been completed. "Is it time to tell him yet, Naida?" piped one of the girls, younger than the rest, whom someone had called Elana. "Oh, _do_ begin, Naida," chorused two more. "We can't wait _much_ longer to find out if he is going to help us!" Kirby turned to Naida, while a soothing sensation crept through him from the draught he had taken. "Pray tell me what it is that I am to be permitted to do for you. I can promise you that the whole of my life and strength, and such intelligence as I possess, is yours to command." * * * * * Excited small cries and a clapping of hands answered him. As for Naida, her face lighted with glowing joy. "Oh, one who could say that, _must_ be the friend and protector of whom we have stood in such bitter need!" "What," asked Kirby, "is this need which made one of you cut my rope, so that I should come here?" A momentary silence was broken only by the hum of insects in the perfumed air, and by the golden thrilling of a bird back in the jungle. Then Kirby beheld Naida bowing to him. "So be it," she said in a voice low and flutelike. "I will speak now since you request it. Already you have seen that you are here in our world because we conspired amongst ourselves to bring you here. Our reason--" She paused, looked deep into his eyes. "Amigo," she continued slowly, "we whom you see here are the People of the Temple. For more centuries than even our sages can tell, our progenitors have dwelt here, where you find us, knowing always of your outer world, but remaining always unknown by it. But now the time has come when those of us who are left amongst our race need the help of one from the outer races we have shunned. Dangers of various orders confront us who have waited here for your coming. When we first discovered you in the Valley of the Geyser, the idea came to me that we must make you understand our troubles, and ask of you--" But then she stopped. As Kirby stared at her, the gentleness of her expression was replaced by a swift strength which made her majestic. The next moment bedlam reigned upon the beach. "_They are after us!_" gasped one of the girls in terror. "Quick, Naida! Quick! Quick!" * * * * * Whatever it was that threatened, Naida did not need to be told that the need for action was pressing. She shouted at her companions some order which Kirby did not understand. From a pouch at her side, she snatched out a greyish, spherical vegetable substance which looked almost like a tennis ball. Then she braced herself as if to withstand an assault. "Stand back!" she cried to Kirby. He had long ago ceased to wonder at anything that might happen here. Disappointed that Naida's story had been interrupted, wondering what was wrong, he obeyed Naida's order to keep clear. As he fell back and stood motionless, there came from behind a dense screen of shrubs which would have resembled aloe and prickly pear bushes, save that they were as big as oak trees, a ghastly howling. The next second, hopped and hurtled across the beach toward the girls, a group of hair-covered, shaggy creatures which were neither apes nor men. The faces, contorted with lust, were hideously leathery and brown, the foreheads small and beetling, and the mouths enormous, with immense yellow teeth. Helpless, Kirby realized that Naida and all the others had clapped over their faces curious masks which seemed to be made of some crystalline substance, and that now others had armed themselves with the tennis balls. And that was the last observation he made before the battle opened furiously. With a cry muffled behind her mask, Naida leaped out in front of her squadron and cut loose her queer vegetable ball with whizzing aim and force. Full into the snarling face of one of the ape-men the thing smashed, filling the air all about the creature with a yellow, mistlike powder. Kirby was half deafened by the yells of rage and terror which went up from the entire attacking band. The creature who had been hit fell to his knees the while he made agonized tearing movements at his face and uttered shrill, jabbering yelps. Other balls flashed instantly from Naida's ranks, and each brought about the same ghastly result as the first. But then Kirby saw that the whole jungle seethed with the hairy, awful men. "Keep back!" Naida shrieked at him through her mask. "We have no mask for you. If the powder from our fungi touches you, it will be the end!" * * * * * With gaps in the advancing line filled as soon as each screeching ape went down, the attackers leaped on until Kirby knew they would be upon the girls in a matter of seconds. A sweat broke out on his neck. But then an idea gripped him, and suddenly, without even a last glance at Naida, he leaped away even as she had commanded. A great boulder lay on the shore fifty yards away. Toward it Kirby streaked as though he had become coward. But he had not turned coward. By the time he reached the shelter which would protect him from the fungus mist, a turning point had come in the battle. The ape-men had closed in on the girls, were swarming about them, and the mist balls had almost ceased to fly. But the thing which gave Kirby hope was that the apes were not attempting to harm the girls. They seemed victors, but they were not committing atrocities. It was the sharp intuition that something like this might happen which had sent Kirby fleeing from the fight. He believed he might yet prove useful. The thickest group of attackers were jostling about Naida. As the screams and sobs of the girls quivered out, mingled with the guttural roaring of the men, Naida was shut off by a solid wall of aggressors. Then Kirby saw her again. But now two of the most powerful of the ape-men had caught her up and was carrying her. Her kicking and writhing and biting accomplished nothing. The apes were headed directly back to the jungle. * * * * * Now, however, most of the yellow mist had disappeared, and that was all Kirby had been waiting for. With a growling shout, he tore out from behind his boulder, his Luger ready. Naida's captors were in full retreat, and other pairs of men were snatching up other girls and hopping after them. Toward Naida Kirby ran madly but not blindly. "Naida! Naida!" he bellowed. He got in two strides for every one the apes made. "Naida!" he shouted, and at last saw her look at him. Her face was pallid with loathing and terror. As her glimmering dark eyes met his, they flashed a plea which made his heart thrash against his lungs. With a final roar of encouragement Kirby closed in on the hair-covered men, and fired instantly a shot which caught one full in the heart. The creature wavered on its legs, looked at the unexpected enemy with dismayed, swinish little red eyes, and relaxing his hold upon Naida, dropped without making a sound. After that-- But suddenly Kirby found himself unable to comprehend fully the other terrific results of his intervention. Before the echoes of his shot died, there came to him the rumble of what seemed to be tons of falling rock. In the bright air a slight mist was precipitated. To all of which was added the effect upon the ape-men of fear of a weapon and a type of fighter utterly new to them. Kirby had fired believing that he would have to fight other ape-men when the first fell. But not so. Instead of that-- * * * * * He blinked rapidly as he took in the scene. Naida had been released. Lying on the sand beside the dead ape-man, she was looking up at him in stupefied wonder. And her other captor, instead of remaining to fight, had clapped shaggy hands over his ears, and was leaping headlong for the protection of the jungle! Moreover, the soprano cries of the girls and the deep howls of the men were rising everywhere, and everywhere the ape-men were dropping their captives and plunging away after their leader. "Huh," Kirby muttered aloud, and wondered what the citizens of Kansas would have to say about _this_. Naida looked at the dead and bleeding ape-man and shuddered, and then at the score or so of others brought down by the puff balls. Then she looked up at Kirby, raised her arms for his support, and smiled up into his brown face. Kirby forgot Kansas, lifted her, warm and alive, radiantly beautiful, in his arms. "Our friends the enemies," she whispered as she remained for a second in his embrace and then drew away, "will attack no more this day--thanks to you." There was no possible need for another shot, Kirby saw. In terrified silence, the first of the apes had already floundered behind the prickly pear and aloe bushes, and the last stragglers were using all the power in their legs to catch up. On the beach, Naida's followers were picking themselves up, and already a few of them had burst into ringing laughter. "Come on, all of you," Naida said to them, and, including Kirby in her glance, added, "We may as well go to the caciques now, and have it over with." CHAPTER IV It was with Naida at his side and the other girls grouped about them, that they started their journey to the "caciques," whoever they might be, "to have it over with," whatever that might mean. As they strode along in silence, Kirby did what he could to straighten out in his mind the many curious things which had happened since he sat testing his rope in the upper world this morning. In final analysis, it seemed to him that, extraordinary as his experience had been, there was nothing so much out of the way about it, after all. The only unusual thing was the existence of this inhabited pocket in the earth. For the rest, the strange colors to which he could not put a name, were simply some manifestation of infra-reds and ultra-violets. And then the startling effect of his single shot at the ape-men--that was simply the old story of savage creatures running from a new weapon and a new enemy; naturally the shot had sounded loud in this enclosed cavern. Lastly, the pull of gravity down here seemed upset somehow. But why should it not seem so, at this distance within the earth? The American was no scientist; the conclusions he reached seemed very reasonable to him. All told, the last thing Kirby found he needed to do was pinch himself to see if he was awake. A place of indefinite extent, the cavern seemed to be exactly what he had already judged it--a giant pocket within the earth. The ceiling, or the sky, was of some kind of natural glass--no doubt the same kind which was crackling on his clothes now--and from it emanated the brilliant, many colored glow which lighted the cavern. Radium? Perhaps it was that. Perhaps the rays were cast off from some other element even less understood than mysterious radium. As for the plant and animal life with which the cavern teemed, it was amazing. * * * * * But Kirby did not give himself up to silent observation any longer. "Will you finish telling me," he asked of Naida, "about the task I am to perform for you here?" Naida, walking with lithe strides along a path jungle-hemmed on both sides, smiled at him. "You are to be our leader." "Yes?" Now both Naida and the other girls became sober. "You will lead us in a revolt." "Ah!" Kirby whistled softly. "In a revolt against the caciques--the wise men--whose kind have governed the People of the Temple since the beginning." Her statement was received with acclaim by the whole troop, who crowded close around, the while they smiled at Kirby. "You mean I am to lead a revolt," he asked, "against these same caciques whom we are going now to face?" Naida nodded emphatically. "Yes, if revolt proves necessary. And it probably will." "Hum." Kirby scratched behind his ear. "You'd better tell me what you can about it." * * * * * Then, as they hurried on, Naida spoke rapidly. The situation before the People of the Temple was that for a long time now, the only children to be born had been girls. Worse still, not even a girl had been born during a period equal to sixteen upper-world years. The only remaining members of a race which had flourished in this underground land for countless thousands of years, consisted of the caciques, a handful of aged people, and the thirty-four girls, including Naida, who accompanied Kirby now. On one hand was promised extinction through lack of reproduction. On the other, even swifter and more terrible extinction at the hands of the ape-men, whom Naida called the Worshippers of Xlotli, the Rabbit God, the God of all bestiality and drunkenness. It was the menace of the ape-men, rather than the less appalling one of lack of reproduction, which was making the most trouble now. Ages ago, when the People of the Temple had flourished as a race, they had been untroubled by the Worshippers of Xlotli. But now the ape-men were by far the stronger; and they desired the girls who had been born as the last generation of an ancient race. The battle of this morning had been only one of many. Dissension between the caciques, who ruled the People of the Temple, and their girl subjects, had arisen on the subject of the best way of dealing with the ape-man menace. * * * * * Some time ago, Naida, heading a council of all the girls, had proposed to the caciques that support be sought amongst the people of the upper world. This would be done judiciously, by bringing to the lower realm a few men who were wise and strong, men who would make good husbands, and who could fight the ape-men. This proposal the priests had promptly quashed. They would never receive, they said, any members of the teeming outer races from whom the People of the Temple had so long been hidden. Those few who had blundered into the Valley of the Geyser during the centuries, and who had never escaped, were enough. Better, said the caciques, that a compromise be arranged with the subjects of the Rabbit God. Flatly then, the priests had proposed that some of the girls, the number to be specified later, should be given to the ape-men, and peace won. During the time of reprieve which would thus be afforded, prayers and sacrifices could be offered the Lords of the Sun and Moon, and to Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. In answer to these prayers, the Gods would surely send the aged people who alone were left as prospective parents, a generation of sons. Once the priests' program of giving up some of the girls to the ape-men had been made definite, it had not taken Naida and the others long to decide that they would never submit. And then, while matters were at an acute stage, a tall, blond white man had come to the Valley of the Geyser--Kirby. * * * * * As Naida had finished her story, Kirby mustered a smile despite the soberness which had come upon him. "So the white man came," he repeated after her, "and all of you decided forthwith to stage your revolt." "Why not?" Naida answered. "We observed you until we were sure you possessed the qualities of leadership we wanted. After that, we did what we could to coax you to come here." Kirby grinned at that. "Now," Naida ended simply, "we will go to the caciques. If they accept you, and grant our requests to them, there will be peace. If they rage, it will be war." Suddenly she drew closer to Kirby as they swung along, and slipped her hand into his, looking up at him in silent entreaty. "How much farther," he asked in a voice which became sharp, "until we reach the headquarters of these caciques?" "They live in a castle which our ancestors built ages ago on a protected plateau," Naida answered tensely. "It is a good distance still, but we will cover it soon enough." They crossed now one edge of a shadow-filled forest composed principally of immense, pallid palmlike trees. Farther on, the path wound through a belt of swampy land covered by gigantic reeds which rustled above their heads with a glassy sound, and by things which looked like the cat-tails of the upper world, but were a hundred times larger. Everywhere hovered odd little creatures like birds, but with teeth in their long snouts and small frondlike growths on each side of their tails. About some swamp plants with very large blooms resembling passion flowers, flitted dragon flies of jeweled hues and enormous size, and under the flowers hopped strange toadlike creatures equipped with two pair of gauzy wings. * * * * * Finally, through a tunnel composed of ferns a hundred feet high, they emerged to a still densely overgrown but higher country which Naida said was a part of the Rorroh forest. In the forest, Kirby gained a hazy impression of bronzy, immense cycads and what appeared to be tree chrysophilums with gorgeous blossoms. Then he received a much clearer impression of other trees with blossoms of bright orange yellow and very thick petals, each tipped with a glassy sharp point. The disconcerting thing about the tree was that, as they approached, the scaly limbs began to tremble and wave, and suddenly lashed out as though making a human effort to snatch at the bright travelers. Naida and all the others hurried along without offering comment, and Kirby asked no questions. Once he thought he saw a group of gorilla creatures parallelling their course back amongst the forest growth, but if Naida observed the animals, she paid no attention. The one thing which had any effect upon the company was the appearance, presently, of two vast, birdlike creatures. As these things approached, Naida signaled to all to crouch beneath the shelter of a tall rock beside the path. Enormous, the birds had bat wings, and carried with them, as they approached, the stink of putrid flesh. The long beaks were overfull of sharp teeth. The heads, set upon bodies of glistening white-grey, were black. Reddish grey eyes searched the jungle as the creatures flapped along. But, the Pterodactyls--if they were that--passed above Naida's band without offering attack, and presently Naida gave the command to advance again. * * * * * In time, they came to a chasmlike gorge across which was suspended a slender long thread of a bridge. Not far above the bridge, a considerable river emptied itself into the gorge in a mirrorlike ribbon. Kirby could not hear the torrent fall--or rather could not hear it strike any solid bottom. But from somewhere in the unlighted, unfathomed depths of the abyss rose strange bubbling and whistling sounds. At the bridge, Naida paused and pointed to the land across the river. And as Kirby looked in the direction indicated, he beheld a rocky eminence rising for several hundred feet straight up from the expanse of a level, tree and grass covered plain. Atop of the plateau, glimmered the complex towers and turrets, the crenellated walls of a castle which, in its grey antiquity, seemed as old as the race of men. "It is behind those walls that the caciques dwell," Naida said quickly. "It is behind the castle, in a series of separate houses, that the older members of the race dwell. We shall go and look upon them presently. But first we will force an interview with the caciques." In silence Kirby took her hand, and, with the others following, they moved out upon the swaying, perilous causeway which hung above the chasm. After that, the trip across the plain to the foot of the plateau cliffs was quickly accomplished. Here, however, Kirby thought they must face trouble, for he found that the great walls, of a sparkling, almost glassy smoothness, shot up to a height of at least three hundred feet, and that no path of any sort was visible. "We're here," he said, "but how can we get up?" * * * * * But understanding began to dawn as Naida laughed, and produced from the pouch at the side of her gauzy dress four pliable discs of a substance which resembled rubber. "You are very strong, are you not?" she asked. "Yes." "Then you will have no trouble in following us up the cliff. Our Serpent God, Quetzalcoatl, taught us how to climb long ago." With that she handed Kirby the set of vacuum discs, and producing another for herself, moistened them in a pool of water close at hand. Then, as all of the girls followed her action, she strapped them to her hands and feet, and in a moment they had begun the ascent. "Why," Kirby said presently, "with these things you could hang by your feet and walk on a smooth ceiling!" Naida laughed, and they worked their way upward. When the climb was accomplished and the discs were put away, Kirby found himself standing on the outer edge of a mediaeval paradise, of a magnificent plateau partly fortified by nature, partly by the hand of man. "Ah!" he cried in deep admiration, then followed Naida. The building--the castle--in the near distance, resembled a castle of Spain, save that there was greater beauty and subtlety of architecture. Turreted on all four corners, constructed of material which looked like blocks of natural glass, the fairylike structure was crowned by a gigantic tower of something which resembled obsidian. Up and up this tower soared until its gleaming black tip seemed almost to touch the glassy-radiant sky of the cavern. No people showed themselves, and Kirby saw that the bronze-studded portals set in the front of the castle were closed. Admiringly, he glanced at the surrounding land laid out in checkerboard patches of gardens and orchards where grew a bewildering variety of unknown fruits and blooms. Butterflies drifted past, and the air was freighted with the scent of flowers. Inside a walled enclosure, Kirby saw a good-sized plot heavily grown with the plant on which he had been subsisting. As they passed this ground, each of the girls, Naida leading, made a strange little bowing, gliding genuflection, and Kirby wondered. * * * * * Now, however, new sights distracted him as they crossed a port drawbridge above a deep moat which was a fairyland of aquatic plants. Although not a sound had come from the castle, the great entrance doors were swinging back. "Be ready," Naida whispered, "for almost anything. The doors are being opened by some of the palace guard. I have little doubt that word was long ago rushed to the caciques that we are come to them with an upper-world man!" Kirby answered with a nod. Then they passed the outer doors, passed inside, and Kirby blinked at what he saw. In a long hall decorated bewilderingly with a carven frieze in which appeared all of the symbols common to early Mexican religions, and many new ones, stood a row of bright suits of armor of the Sixteenth Century. From each suit peered the glassy face and shovel beard of a dead Conquistadore. So this was what happened to intruders from the upper world! The Conquistadore who kept his long watch beside the geyser was not the only one! Kirby felt an involuntary chill prickle up his back. But he was not given long to think before Naida, ignoring the gruesome array, clasped his arm. "Look! Behold!" And Kirby saw that with almost magical silence the whole wall at the end of the corridor was sliding back to reveal an enormous amphitheatre in the center of which stood a vast circular table. Ranged in a semicircle about that table, stood fifteen incredibly ancient men clad in long, glistening grey robes. Blanched beards trailed down the front of the garments until they all but touched the floor. The caciques! Kirby, on the threshold of the amphitheatre, squared his shoulders and held his head high. Then with Naida on his right, his own eyes boring unyieldingly into the smouldering, narrowed eyes which stared at him, he advanced. But in front of him the priests moved suddenly. From Naida burst a shriek. In the radiant glare of the council room flashed the long, thin, cruel blade of a sacrificial knife. The cacique who had whipped it from his robe flew at Kirby with a condor swoop, talon-hands outstretched, his wrinkled, bearded face contorted with fury. CHAPTER V Before Kirby was more than half set to fight, the priest was clawing at his throat, and a gnarled old fist was poised to drive the knife in a death stroke. Kirby did the only thing he could do quickly--sprang to one side. The move saved him. The knife whipped past his shoulder, and the cacique nearly fell. But it had been a close enough squeak for all that. Nor was it over. After Kirby the priest sprang with unexpected agility, and before Kirby could snatch at his pistol the talon-hands were lunging at his throat once more. With the gasps of the girls ringing in his ears, Kirby bunched himself for another side leap only to find the cacique all over him like an octopus. Momentarily the knife hung above his chest, and Kirby, dismayed at the powers of his opponent, almost felt that the thing must plunge before he could break the octopus hold. But he had no intention of being defeated, and now he was getting used to the fight. The priest's left arm swiftly clenched about his neck and shoulders, and the right arm, with the knife, attempted a drive through to the heart. Suddenly, however, Kirby lurched sideways and backward, and as the octopus grip slackened for a flash, he himself got a wrestler's grip that left him ready to do business. As the priest broke free, he slid around in an attempt to fasten himself on Kirby's back. Quickly, tensely Kirby doubled, and knew that he had done enough. The cacique shot over his shoulders, described a somersault in midair, and landed with a sharp crack of head and shoulders against unyielding stone. * * * * * From the semicircle of other priests went up a gasp. From Naida came a strangled cry of joy. Kirby made one leap for the knife which had fallen from the cacique's hand as he slumped into unconsciousness, and then he straightened up with the weapon safe in his possession. "There, you old billygoat," he croaked in English, "maybe you won't try any more fast ones for awhile." A second later he stepped over the sprawled body to stand beside Naida. Upon the wrinkled countenances of the remaining caciques was stamped a look of dismay and hatred which boded no good. It was plain to Kirby that in battering up the man detailed to kill him, he had committed a desecration of first order. "Is there anyone else who cares to fight?" he flung at them in Spanish, showing a contempt as great as their rage. The response he got was instant. From one old gullet, then from others, came choking, snarling sounds which presently became words. By those words Kirby heard himself cursed with a vituperation which made him, even in his temporary triumph, feel grave. But he did not let that soberness trouble him long. For the main point now was that no one made a move to fight further, which was what he had expected. He had flung them the challenge, knowing that he was possessed of their knife, and suspecting that it was their only weapon. The belief that no one would care to try a barehanded conflict, no matter what insult was waiting to be avenged, seemed justified as none of the caciques advanced, and as even the cursing presently ceased. "No?" Kirby asked. "There is to be no more fighting?" * * * * * One of the caciques now came forward a few steps. "No," he answered with a lameness which was not to be denied. "But you, a criminal interloper in our realm, have been marked as a victim for sacrifice, and from this there is no power in the universe which can save you." Kirby, after a reassuring glance at Naida, looked at the floored priest who was sitting up now, looking stupidly about, and feeling himself all over, and Kirby suppressed a grin. "Ah, I am to be sacrificed, eh? But what happens until that time comes? Listen my Wise Ones--" He stabbed a finger at them, and his eyes flashed. "Listen! What you mean to say is that I have defeated you, and you must lay off me until you can launch another attack. But I have a few things to say to that. One is that I am not going to permit myself to _be_ sacrificed. Another is that I demand, right here and now, that you begin to discuss with me certain agreements which are going to regulate the future conduct of affairs in this world to which I have come." A low exclamation answered that, but it came from no priest. They remained sullen and staggered. It was Naida who murmured, and there was excitement and pleasure in her voice. Suddenly she placed her lips against Kirby's ear. "You must not treat with them," she said. "Tell them you want to see the Duca, and will destroy them all unless he comes!" Understanding burst over Kirby. The Duca! Then these men were only the representatives of a High Priest, the Duca! "Yes," he repeated resolutely to the assembled greybeards, "a meeting is going to be held in this chamber of council at once. But I will not deal with you! Do you understand me? I must see the Duca. I leave it to you to decide whether you will summon him, or force me to fight my way through to wherever he is staying." "The Duca!" * * * * * The words burst in dismay from the gimlet-eyed cacique who had said there would be no more fighting. He looked at Naida, well aware of the fact that it was her interference which had made Kirby extend his demand. And his look was black. Kirby slid between Naida and the cacique. "Yes," he spat out, "the Duca! Will you summon him, or--" He did not repeat what he would do as an alternative. A second passed in silence. It seemed as if the cacique who had been speaking was ready to burst. "Answer me!" Kirby thundered. And then the priest obeyed. "Very well," he growled in a voice which quaked with rage. "I obey. But you will wish you had never made the demand!" The next second he swung on his heel, and leaving his company behind as a guard, headed toward a stair which led upward from one side of the amphitheatre, and which was protected by a door of heavy, grilled metal work. The stairway seemed to be spiral, and was all enclosed. Kirby realized that it must lead into the tall and beautiful tower of obsidion which he had seen outside. "Oh," Naida whispered as looks and smiles of approval came from all of the girls, "you have been magnificent! Mark now, what we must do. You must be the one to state our terms, because you have already won a victory for us. Tell the Duca that we will not submit to any compromise with the ape-men, and least of all will we let any of our number go to the ape-men." A deep flush crept into Kirby's cheeks at thought of what he would like to do to the man who had proposed that sacrifice. "Then tell him," Naida continued, "that we want men brought to our world from the world above. And finally tell him we will live under his dictatorship no longer, and hereafter demand a voice in all councils affecting temporal affairs." "All right," Kirby spoke grimly. "I'll tell him. Naida, is this high priest we're waiting for, the one who proposed sacrifice of some of you to the apes?" Naida nodded. * * * * * Next moment, she, Kirby, and all the others, including the row of glowering caciques, became silent. At sounds from above, all looked toward the grilled doorway to the tower. Then Kirby realized that all of the girls, as well as the caciques, were dropping to their knees. "No!" he commanded quickly. "Get up! You must not abase--" He had not finished, and Naida had scarcely risen, when the heavy door swung on noiseless hinges. The light in the amphitheatre seemed to become more intense. Then, against the great glow, Kirby beheld majesty, beheld one who represented the apotheosis of priestly rank and power. Clad in robes of filmy material which glimmered white beside the gray robes of his underlings, the Duca wore about his waist the living flame of a girdle composed of alternate cut diamonds and blood red rubies each larger than a golf ball. And Kirby, searching for comparisons, realized that the Duca's face, upheld to others, would be as remarkable as his jewels must be when compared to ordinary gems. It was a chiseled face, seamed by a thousand wrinkles, which a god might have carved from ivory before endowing it with the flush and glow of life. A mane of snow white hair cascaded back from a tremendous forehead to fall about thin but square shoulders and mingle with the downward sweep of pure white beard. The eyes, black as polished jet, flamed now with the glare of baleful fires. As Naida, stealing close to Kirby, trembled, and even the abased caciques trembled, Kirby himself felt as if icy water was trickling over him. He fought the sensation off. For suddenly he knew that in spite of first impressions which made the man seem a living god, the old Duca was human. And what was more, he was in the wrong. All of which being true, the thing to do was keep a level head and fight. * * * * * All at once Kirby spoke across the silence in the great room. "I have sent for you," he said, weighing words carefully. "And I,"--the Duca's voice was mellow and deep--"have come. But I am not here because you summoned me." "Oh!" Kirby let sarcasm edge his words. "Well, I won't quibble about your motives for coming. Did my messenger tell you why we are here and demand your presence?" "Your messenger," the old man said calmly, "told me." "Very well. Do you consent to listen to Naida's and my terms? If you _will_ listen--" "But wait a moment," the Duca interrupted, still calmly, but with a look in his eyes which Kirby did not like. "Are you asking _me_, to my face, whether I will listen to terms which you offer as self-styled victor of a battle with my caciques?" Kirby nodded. His apprehension increased. "Ah," said the Duca softly. And then, amazingly, a smile deepened every wrinkle of his parchment face. "But do you not remember that I said I had _not_ come here because you summoned me?" "Yes," Kirby said solidly. "I remember very well." "The thing which brought me here was the failure of my followers to accomplish an assignment which I had given them--namely, that of ending your life." "Hum." Kirby scratched behind his ear. "You are _not_ interested in arranging terms of peace, then." "I am here,"--suddenly the Duca's voice filled the room--"to do that which my priests were unable to do. And the moment has come when the Gods will no longer trifle with you. You dog! You thieving intruder! You--" Swiftly the Duca plunged one withered but still powerful hand into the folds of his robe above the flaming girdle. Then his hand flashed out, and in it he held-- * * * * * But Kirby did not get to see. A strangled cry of terror smote his ears. Naida leaped toward him from one side, while Elana, the lovely youngest girl, sprang from another direction, hurled Naida aside, and stopped in front of Kirby. Through the glaring room flickered a tiny red serpentine creature which the Duca hurled from a crystalline tube in his hand. As the minute snake struck Elana's breast, she gave a choked cough, and then, as she half turned to smile at both Naida and Kirby over her shoulder, her eyes went blank, and she collapsed gently to the polished stones of the floor--dead. A second later came squirming out from under her the ghastly, glimmering little snake which had struck. Slowly, while every mortal in the room stood paralyzed, Kirby stepped forward and set his heel upon the writhing thing. When he raised his boot, the snake was only a blotch on the floor. The Duca was standing as still as girls and caciques. The laughter with which he had started to greet what he had thought would be Kirby's extermination had faded to a look of wonder--and fear. He was an easy mark. Up to him Kirby rolled, and with all the force of soul and muscular body, drove his fist into the Duca's face. "By God," he roared, "you want war, and you shall have it!" The Duca was simply out--not dead. Since Kirby did not want him dead, he did not strike again, but swung back from the sprawled body, faced Naida, and pointed to the tower door. "Up there!" he snapped. "Seize the tower. I have a reason!" At the Duca's crashing downfall, had come to the caciques a tension which made Kirby know they would not be dummy figures much longer. His eyes never left them. "Quick, Naida!" he snapped again. "We must hold the tower!" Naida, all of the girls, were staring dazedly at Elana, dead. "The tower!" she choked. "But we cannot go there. It is the Duca's!" "Because it is the Duca's," Kirby said firmly, "is exactly why we must hold it. Come, Naida, please--" * * * * * And then he saw comprehension begin to dawn at last. He also saw two of the caciques glide from the wooden line, and slink toward him past the unconscious Duca, stealthily. As Naida suddenly cried out to her companions, pushed at two of them, and then darted like a rainbow nymph toward the silent and forbidding upward spiral of steps, Kirby faced the gliding caciques. One he clutched with viselike hands, and lifted him. As the other shrieked and sprang, he was mowed down by the hurtling body of his fellow priest which Kirby flung forward mightily. The rest of the caciques were howling. While Naida waited beside the tower door, the other girls flashed up the steps. The Duca still lay where he had fallen, a thread of blood oozing from his mouth. Kirby, after his last look over all, solemnly stooped and gathered in his arms the limp, radiant little body of the girl who had given her life that her friends might be left with a leader. A moment later, he was standing on the steps. Naida, unopposed by the still stupefied caciques, swung shut the tower door and shot a double bolt. "Naida--" Kirby whispered as he held Elana closer to him, "oh, I am so sorry that we could have won only at such a price." As Naida stooped to kiss the pale little forehead with its halo of golden hair, sobs came. But then she raised her eyes, and they were, for Kirby, alight with the message that she could and would accept Elana's sacrifice, because she would gladly have made it herself. "We will not forget," she whispered. "Carry her tenderly, and come." For better, for worse, the Duca's tower was theirs. CHAPTER VI At the end of an hour, Kirby was taking a turn of guard duty at the foot of the steps, while the others remained with Elana in a chamber above. To Kirby, with things thus far along, it seemed that the seizure of the tower had proved a shrewd stroke. It seemed that the tower was to the Duca what hair was to Sampson. From Naida had come the information that the Duca lived hidden within the great shaft of obsidion, and appeared but seldom even before his caciques. Apparently a large part of his hold upon his subjects was maintained by the mystery with which he kept himself surrounded. And now his retreat was lost to him! Such had been the moral effect of the loss upon both Duca and caciques, that his whole first hour had gone by without their doing anything. Kirby, standing just around the first turn of the winding stairway, presently cocked his ears to listen to the conclave being held in the amphitheatre. "Why not starve them out, O Holy One?" he heard one of the caciques ask of the Duca, only to be answered by a growl of negation. The Duca, Kirby had gathered before this, wanted to fight. "But there is no food in the tower, is there?" the cacique still pressed on, and this time he was supported by other voices. "No," the Duca rumbled back. "But am I to be deprived of my retreat, left here like a common dog amongst other dogs, while these accursed fiends starve slowly to death? No! I tell you, you must fight for me!" * * * * * But he had told them so several times before and nothing had happened. Kirby grinned at the thought of the caste the Duca was losing by being driven to this belittling parley. "Holy One," exclaimed a new priest in answer to the urge to fight, "what can we do against the golden haired fiend? The stairs are so narrow that he could defend them alone. And then there are the gates of bronze. If we could shatter the first, at the foot of the steps, we should only encounter others. The Duca must remember that his tower was built to withstand attack." "Even so," the Duca snapped back, "it must be attacked! I--" But then he fell silent, having been made so by the sounds of dissension which arose amongst his caciques. Kirby, laughing to himself, turned away from his listening post, and tip-toed up the steps. After he had closed and bolted behind him three of the bronze portals so feared by the caciques, he turned to the entrance of the chamber in which he had left Naida and the others. Here all was silent, and he found his friends grouped about a couch on which lay Elana. Feeling the solemnity of the moment, he would have taken his place quietly amongst the mourners. Naida, however, came to him at once, and in a low voice asked for news from the amphitheatre, and when Kirby answered that the caciques were unanimously in favor of leaving them alone until they starved, she exclaimed: "Oh, then it is good news!" After that, however, a shadow of doubt flickered in her great eyes. "And yet, is it? It means temporary immunity, of coarse. But--starvation!" Kirby assured her with a grin. "If we had to starve we might worry. But there is more food here than the Duca thinks. Look!" * * * * * From a bulging pocket of his tunic he fished a strip of the roots on which he had subsisted so comfortably. Naida's eyes widened, and several of the girls gave low cries. "Yes," Naida exclaimed, "but such food! Why--why, do you know what you are offering us? Why, this is the sacred Peyote! Only the Duca eats it, and, at rare intervals, his priests." Kirby was really startled now. "But surely you and the others have taken quantities of the stuff away from the Valley of the Geyser. Do you mean--" "Because we gathered the Peyote does not mean that we have ever tasted it. We gather it for the Duca. To taste would be complete, utter sacrilege. Have _you_ been eating it?" Inwardly Kirby was chuckling at this added proof of the buncumbe with which the Duca--and other Ducas--had fooled all. "Of course I've been eating the Peyote." "And--and nothing has happened to you?" Naida asked. "Hardly. I certainly haven't been blasted by the Lords of the Sun and Moon, or the Serpent either!" Naida and all the others were silent. The conflict between their reverence for the food and their clear desire to eat it, now that it was become the food of their leader, was pathetic. Kirby put one of the strips in Naida's hand. "Why not?" he asked. "We have bested the Duca in fair fight. We have seized his tower. Why not eat his food?" As he had hoped it would, the suggestion at last settled the matter. A moment later, as Naida nibbled her first bite, she smiled. "Why, it--it's good!" With the question of provisions settled at least for a time, Kirby's next thought was of the tower. The present lull of peace seemed made for exploration. "Come along," he said to Naida, "we've plenty to do," and then, when he explained, they set out, accompanied by Nini, a cousin of Naida's, and Ivana, a younger sister. All of the others remained with little Elana. * * * * * While they climbed spiral stairs, Naida explained that the chamber they had just left was used by the Duca as a place in which he prayed before and after contacts with caciques or subjects. A sort of halfway station between earth and heaven, as it were, where the Duca might be purged of any sullying influence gained from human relationships. At thought of the rank, egotistical hypocrisy implied by the story, Kirby smiled grimly. Then they came to a new door, heavier than that which barricaded the prayer chamber. Unlocked, the thing swung ponderously at Kirby's push, and with the three girls pressing close beside him, he entered--and stopped. "Naida!" he gasped. "Oh, _oh_!" she cried, and while Nini and Ivana gasped, she clapped her hands in an instinctive, feminine reaction of joy. "But there are things here which I believe none but the Ducas of our race have ever seen! Oh! Why, the sacred girdle is as nothing compared to this display!" By "display" she meant a treasure which took Kirby's breath away, which made his heart act queerly. The walls of the chamber were fashioned of polished blocks of obsidion on which stood out in heavy bas-relief a maze of decorative figures fashioned of pure, beaten gold--the same kind of gold which had gone into the making of the cylinder of gold. With his first glance at the gorgeously wrought motifs of Feathered Serpent and Sun and Moon symbols, Kirby knew to a certainty whence the golden cylinder had come originally. But even the gold--literally tons of it there must have been--was nothing compared to the gems. * * * * * They were spread out in blinding array upon a great table in the center of the room. There were pearls as big as turkey eggs and whiter, softer than the light of a June morning growing in the East. There were rubies. One amongst the many was the size of a baseball and glowed like the heart of a red star. The least of the two or three hundred gems would have outclassed the greatest treasures of the Crown jewels of England and Russia combined. Most overwhelming of all, however, was the jewel which rested against a square of black cloth all its own in the center of the table. While his heart still acted queerly, while Naida, Nini, and Ivana hung back, delighted, but still too bewildered to move, Kirby advanced and took gingerly in his hands a single white diamond about eighteen inches long, and almost as wide and deep as it was long. The thing was carved with exquisite cunning to a likeness of the living head of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. Kirby dared not guess how many pounds the carven hunk of flashing, blue-white carbon weighed. He knew only that like it there was no other diamond in the world, and that the thing was real. Naida and the two girls were silent now, and suddenly Kirby realized that to their awe of the gem was added awe of deepest religious nature. Slowly he put the diamond head of the Serpent back upon its square of cloth. "We--we had heard that this thing existed," Naida said presently, voice hushed, "but no one except the holy men of our race has ever beheld it." "But, what is it?" Kirby asked. "Whence came it?" However, when Naida would have answered, he interrupted. "But wait! Tell me as we go. We could stay here for the rest of our lives without much trouble, but we've got to cover the rest of the tower and get back to the others." * * * * * It was after they had closed the door to the treasure room that Naida told him the story. "There is not so much to tell," she began. "The diamond itself is so gorgeous that it is hard to talk about. But here is the story. A great many ages ago one of the Ducas of our race found the diamond, decided to carve it into a perfect likeness of the head of the Serpent God. All of the craftsmen of the race helped him and when they were done, they took their image to Quetzalcoatl himself, and showed him what they had done. "Quetzalcoatl was pleased. So pleased, that he promised all of the wise men that he would cease to prey upon them as he had in the past, and henceforward would take his toll of sacrifice from the ape-men alone. Them he hated and would continue to hate because they worshipped not him but Xlotli. "And so it came about," Naida went on slowly, looking up at Kirby as they still mounted wide steps to the upper reaches of the tower, "that our people gained immunity from a God which had always before harmed and destroyed them. Our race presently began to build this castle here on the high plateau, and Quetzalcoatl kept his compact with them. He still comes out of his chasm at intervals and preys upon the ape-men, but no one of our race has seen him for thousands of years, and he has always let us alone. And there is the whole myth and explanation of why the great diamond is revered among us as a holy of holies." * * * * * They had mounted to a new door which Kirby guessed might give entrance to the Duca's living quarters. But he was in no mood to open it at once. "Wait a minute," he said as they all paused. "You say that, although none of your race has seen Quetzalcoatl since the diamond head was carved, he still comes out of his chasm and makes trouble for the ape-men. Just what does that mean?" "Why--" Naida looked at him wonderingly. "I mean what I have said. The Serpent comes out of his chasm and--" "What chasm?" Kirby asked sharply. "Why, the one we crossed this morning. It extends to the far reaches of our country, beyond the Rorroh forest, where the ape-men dwell but which our people never visit. It is in that distant part of the chasm that the Serpent dwells." "But--but--Oh, good Lord!" Kirby whistled softly. "Naida, do you mean to tell me that Quetzalcoatl was not simply a mythical monster, but an actual, living serpent which is alive _now_?" Naida and the others shrugged. "Why not?" she answered. "Sometimes we have captured a few ape-men, and they tell us stories of how Quetzalcoatl kills them. _They_ say he is very much alive." "But," Kirby mumbled in increasing wonder, "is this living creature the same which your ancestors worshipped first as long ago, perhaps, as a million years?" "That," Naida answered unhesitatingly, "I'm not sure of. Our caciques believe that the Serpent, although it lives longer than any other sentient thing, finally dies and is succeeded by a new Serpent which is reproduced by itself, within its own body." So overwhelming did Kirby find this unexpected sequel to their discovery of the great diamond head, so staggered was he by the fact that Quetzalcoatl, of Aztecan myth, might exist as a sentient creature here in this cavern world, that he had little heart left for exploring other wonders. * * * * * Nevertheless, he presently pushed open the new door before which they had paused, and behind it found, as he had expected, the Duca's living quarters. These were as severe as the jewel chamber had been gorgeous. A thin pallet spread upon a frame of wood formed the bed, and beside it stood a single stiff chair. That was all. The walls of glistening obsidion were bare. There was, however, a door in one circular wall, and as Kirby flung this open, his previous disappointment changed to delight. For shelves along the walls of the small chamber held roll after roll of parchment covered with script. And in one corner lay six undamaged, almost new Mannlichers and several hundred rounds of ammunition! "Naida," he exclaimed, "do you know what those are?" "I suppose that they are weapons of the sort you used against the ape-men this morning?" Kirby grinned. "They are the same kind I used, and then some. With these weapons we can do what we never could with the smaller one. How did they get here?" "They came when I was much younger," Naida answered with a shade of sadness in her voice. "The men who had them penetrated the Valley of the Geyser, coming by a different route from the one you followed. When the Duca learned they were there, he sent such men of the race as were still able to fight to kill them. That order of the Duca's was one of the first things to turn me against him. The men were not harming us, and they should have been permitted to go away. But the Duca insisted that they be killed, and in the fight were lost eight of our youngest and strongest men." * * * * * Kirby stooped to inspect the rifles. "Has no one learned to use these weapons?" "No," Naida answered. "The Duca kept them for himself." "We think," put in Ivana, "that he hoped to learn to use them, and was afraid for us to have the knowledge." Kirby filled one of the magazines, and felt the heft of the gun with pleasure. "Very well," he said. "It looks to me as though your time to learn the art of shooting has come at last. Come, I think we had better be getting back downstairs." Kirby took three guns himself, and with the others lugging the rest, they started back. The parchment rolls, he decided, must be left for examination later on. They were all elated when they rejoined the girls in the prayer chamber, and high spirits were still further increased by the report, promptly given, that all had remained quiet in the amphitheatre. Save only for the presence of Elana, radiant and calm in death, the give and take of questions would have been accompanied by actual gaiety. But the time of peace did not last much longer. While Naida was in the midst of answering incessant questions about the wonders of the jewel chamber, Kirby heard a sound from below, and suddenly went over to the downward-winding steps. "Listen," he called sharply back to the others. He had not been mistaken. Many footsteps echoed from the amphitheatre, and he made out that the caciques were coming toward the bolted gate at the foot of the steps. While he listened, and Naida came eagerly to his side, silence fell. But then clear words came up to them. "Let the upper-world man come to the foot of the steps," called the Duca. "I have an offer to make him!" CHAPTER VII To himself Kirby chuckled. Such real entreaty filled the Duca's voice that there seemed no danger of further treachery from him at the moment. With a grin, Kirby took Naida's hand and led her down the steps, unbolting each bronze gate but the last. "What do you want?" he asked in a cool voice a moment later, when he stopped on the final step and faced the Duca from behind the protection of the final gate. Clearly the parley was going to be a blunt one. "I want you to leave our world," the Duca rumbled promptly. He was drawn up in a posture intended to display dignity. But his left cheek, where Kirby had hammered him, was pulpy and discolored, and somehow he seemed to Kirby more than ever merely human. "Under what conditions am I to leave?" "If you will vacate my tower at once," the Duca said with a flush of eagerness which he could not conceal, "I will permit Naida and one of my caciques to escort you back to the Valley of the Geyser. I will also give you directions by which you may travel in safety from there to the outer world." Kirby, wanting more details, made himself seem thoughtful. "And what will happen to me, and to the girls, if I decline?" Encouraged, the Duca made an impressive gesture. "You will be left in the tower to die of starvation. Mine is not a complicated offer. It should require no complicated decision. What is your answer?" Kirby dropped his carefully assumed mask of thought. "My answer is this," he lashed out. "I will not leave! The tower is ours, and we will hold it until you have accepted Naida's peace terms on your priestly oath!" "But if you stay in the tower you will starve!" thundered the Duca. "No, we won't starve! We won't starve because we eat the food of Ducas!" * * * * * In silence, Kirby took from his pocket a strip of the sacred Peyote and bit off one end of it. Suddenly the hush in the amphitheatre became complete. As he watched Kirby chewing, the Duca gasped and choked. "Moreover," Kirby announced with slow emphasis, "I have taken possession of the weapons which you took from men of the upper world, and which have already sent men of your race to their death. I have no wish to kill either you or your caciques, but if you do not presently discuss peace with me, you will certainly find yourself embroiled in a struggle more bitter than the mild one of this morning." With that said, he swung on his heel, and taking Naida's hand again, started with her up the steps. "I have nothing more to say," he called over his shoulder to a Duca whose white haired majesty had been stripped from him. "We're getting on," he whispered to Naida a moment later. "The best thing for us is just to sit still now, and wait." With the questions he wanted to ask Naida about her world becoming insistent, he found himself, as a matter of fact, glad for the prospect of further respite. As both of them rejoined the girls in the Duca's prayer chamber, the first thing he did was to take from his tunic the cylinder of gold which he had found in the canyon. "What is this, Naida?" he asked, hoping to start talk that would make all of them forget the Duca and politics, and at the same time help him to learn much that he wished to know. But a queer thing happened. Naida's reaction to the carven gold was as unexpected as it was marked. "_Oh!_" she cried in a voice which suddenly trembled with surprise, with blank dismay. Somehow, the cylinder of gold brought to her face things which not even the Serpent's head of the diamond had evoked. * * * * * The prospect of a long session of talk began to fade out in Kirby's mind. "But Naida, whatever is there about this fragment of gold to startle you as it does?" By this time all of the thirty-odd other girls had come flocking about them, and all were staring at the cylinder as fascinatedly as Naida. "Do you see what he has there?" Naida finally asked, ignoring Kirby in her continued excitement. "Do we _see_?" answered the girl she had addressed. "Naida, surely it is the carving which was lost!" Naida was quivering with feeling now. "Do you realize what it means to our cause that it should have been returned to us in this way?" The girl to whom she had spoken, and the others, simply looked at her, but in one face after another presently dawned awe and joy. Kirby stood still, puzzled and interested, until at last Naida was recovered enough to speak to him. "Where did you get this thing which you call 'a fragment of gold'?" she asked in a hushed voice. "I found it," Kirby answered, "lying beside the skeleton of an upper-world man, while I was ascending the canyon which brought me to the Valley of the Geyser." "And you do not know what the cylinder is? But no, of course you could not." "_What_ is it, Naida?" * * * * * Naida glanced at her friends, then laid her hand on Kirby's. "Next to the great diamond, it is the most cherished possession of our race. In some respects it is even more holy than the Serpent's head. The cylinder happens to be the first work in gold which was ever produced by our people. It was made when the race was new. It was because our first wise men had found they could create things of beauty like this cylinder, that they decided to attempt the creation of the Serpent's head, which is supposed to have brought all of our blessings upon us." Kirby thought he was beginning to understand the excitement which his introduction of the cylinder had created. He also thought he could see what Naida had meant by implying that the cylinder could be made to aid their cause. "Tell me," he asked in a mood approaching reverence, "how the cylinder came to be lying beside a dead man's bones." "It was stolen," Naida answered in the breathless silence which the others were keeping. "When I was very young, an upper-world man found his way here, and the Duca captured and meant to sacrifice him. But while they were leading him to the temple where such special ceremonies are held--the building stands on another plateau, beyond this--the man broke away. Some of the priests in the procession were carrying the cylinder, for it was an occasion of great importance. The prisoner knocked them down, got the cylinder away from them, and finally escaped by the same route over which you came." "And he escaped," said Kirby wonderingly, "only to be killed by a rattlesnake before he ever reached the civilized world. But do you mean that you never knew your sacred cylinder was so close to you all these years?" Naida shook her head. "We never got to the canyon of which you speak, for a special reason which I shall explain some day. And besides that, I think the Duca was afraid of this man who fought so bravely. So he counted the cylinder as lost. And that is one of the reasons why he killed the men with the rifles, who appeared in the Valley a few years later." * * * * * Kirby looked at her thoughtfully. The mood for discussing all the wonders of this lower world, which had made him bring out the cylinder originally, had quite vanished. "I suppose," he said, "that anyone who was responsible for the return of the cylinder to its rightful owners, would be held in some respect?" Naida nodded vigorously, while little lightnings of excitement flickered in her eyes. "He might be held in more than respect." "What, then, do you suggest that we do next?" Again the small lightnings darted, and Naida reached for the cylinder. "Do you mind if I take it for a moment?" "Of course not." Promptly then she faced around. "Wait here, everyone," she ordered. And with that she waved the cylinder in a flashing little arc before their eyes, and darted to the door. It was all so unexpected that she was gone before Kirby could speak. Slowly, with all of the suddenly gay company of girls following after him, he went to the doorway, and stood on the steps leading to the amphitheatre. * * * * * A minute passed. He heard voices downstairs. He heard Naida's voice ringing clearly, though he could not distinguish her words. He heard a great cry from a score of male throats. More minutes passed. Words that were low and tense poured out in a rumbling volume. Above the rumble, Naida's voice presently sounded again, clear and sweet, but incisive. Then, when no more than five or six minutes had gone, Kirby heard the clang of the bronze gate at the foot of the steps, heard light, swift footsteps ascending. "Naida!" he called softly. She flashed upward toward him around the last curve in the stairway. Straight to his outstretched arms she went. "It is done! It is done!" she whispered. "Tell us!" cried first one girl and then others. Naida drew away from Kirby at last. "I told the Duca," she said to all of them, "that our leader would keep the cylinder for a period of time equal to one upper-world year. If the Duca grants all the terms of peace which we will ask of him, and if he accepts the upper-world man as our temporal ruler, and all goes well for a year, then we will consider replacing the cylinder where it belongs." "And what," Kirby asked exultantly, "does the Duca say?" Suddenly, without warning, Naida dropped before him on one knee, and from that position gazed up at him laughing. "He says he will make you our King, to govern all temporal affairs within our realm! He is waiting for you to come and hold a conclave now." "_What?_" Still kneeling half in fun, half in sincere reverence, Naida held out the precious, potent cylinder of gold. "Guard it carefully!" she exclaimed. "So long as you keep it away from the Duca, making him hope to win it back, he will consent to almost anything. Yes, he is waiting with the caciques in the amphitheatre now; waiting to draw up terms of peace." CHAPTER VIII To be King amongst these people! A queer sensation tugged at Kirby's heart as he descended the steps with Naida at his right, and all of her--and his--dainty and gracious friends following after. Yet, intense as his emotion was, never for a second was he able to doubt the evidence of his senses which told him that all of this was real. As they descended the black steps of the tower, Naida's sweetness, her grace, the warm humanity of her, made him humble with gratitude for the extraordinary fortune which had come to him, an unromantic aviator born in Kansas. Then they were standing in the brilliant light of the amphitheatre, and the Duca, surrounded by his caciques, was advancing to meet them. It was not a long conference which followed. Kirby saw from the start that the Duca was indeed ready to come to terms. So treasured an object, it seemed, was the cylinder of gold, that the mere fact that Kirby possessed it made the Duca respect the possessor, whether he would or no. With this initial advantage, it did not take long to make demands and win acceptance. It was agreed that some systematic campaign of extermination should be planned and carried out against the ape-men. Further, the project for eventually bringing other upper-world men to the realm was accepted. Most notable of all, it was agreed that while the Duca should retain a voice in the regulation of temporal affairs, Kirby should possess an absolute veto over his word. Naida said there must be some formal ceremony to celebrate Kirby's ascendency to power. To this the Duca consented, and established the date as a fortnight hence, and the place as the temple on the plateau beyond the plateau of the castle, where the Ducas had been invested with their robes of state from time immemorial. At the end, it was decided that little Elana should be left in the prayer chamber until a burial ceremony could be held on the morrow. * * * * * In less than an hour, Kirby, Naida, and the others withdrew from the amphitheatre to return to the regular dwelling places of the girls. Deep in his mind, Kirby did not know how sincere the Duca was, and fear lingered, somehow, but he put it aside for the present. As they came out of the castle, proceeding in a gay procession across the drawbridge above the moat of beautiful aquatic plants, Kirby saw that the light from the glass sky was fading to a glow like that of spring twilight in the upper world. Naida answered his question about the phenomenon by saying that day and night in the cavern corresponded to the same period above. What quality of the glass sky gave out light, she did not know, but it seemed definite that the element was sensitive to the presence of light in the upper world, and when the sun sank there, the glow faded here. A flower embroidered path led them around the castle to a group of little crystalline houses all overgrown with bougainvillea vines and honeysuckle. In front of the first, Naida paused, and while the others went on to the other houses, she looked at Kirby. "It is Elana's dwelling," she said simply, "and it will be vacant now. Elana would want you to take it. Will you, please?" The twilight was deepening swiftly. Kirby nodded reverently, then drew close to Naida. "Naida?" "Yes?" He took her hand. "I can stay here, I can consent to become, after a fashion, a King, only if you will reign with me as Queen. Will you, Naida? Will you love me as I have learned to love you during this single day in Paradise?" She did not answer. But presently Kirby's mind went blank for sheer joy. For then Naida raised her face, and he kissed her lips. It made no difference then that, despite the day's victory, Kirby could see trouble ahead, and feared, rather than rejoiced at, the Duca's too easy acceptance of terms. The future could take care of itself. This moment in the dusk belonged to him and Naida. * * * * * The two weeks which passed for Kirby after that particular twilight sped quickly. During the first morning, all attended the ceremony which was held for Elana's burial in the plot of gardened ground where lay her ancestors. Ensuing mornings were devoted to conferences in the amphitheatre with Duca and caciques. After the fourth day Kirby, at Naida's insistence, moved into splendid quarters in the castle--a suite of chambers across the amphitheatre from those in which the caciques dwelt. In practically forcing the move on Kirby, Naida won his consent finally by agreeing to have their wedding ceremony performed on the day of his coronation; then she would come to the castle with him. The afternoons of that first fortnight before the wedding and coronation were spent in hunting and fishing. Also Kirby and Naida visited often the aged people of the race, who dwelt in crystalline, vine covered houses like those of the girls, but removed from them. Naida's relatives were dead, but she had relatives there, and to all these aged ones, who sat living in the past, she did what she could to explain present developments in the affairs of the younger generation. Last but not least, Kirby set aside certain hours each afternoon which he devoted to the formation of a rifle squad amongst the girls. Six rifles he had, and in turn he trained each of the girls in their use, having set up a range at the foot of the plateau cliffs. The results he gained made him feel that the day would come soon enough when he would dare launch an offensive against the ape-people; and especially pleasing was the sense of power over the Duca which he gained. The Duca showed no sign of treachery. Yet Kirby did not trust him. Never did he quite forget the misgivings which had lingered in his mind after the first conclave. * * * * * As for his relationship with Naida, that grew with every moment they could steal to spend with each other. And side by side with their growing knowledge of each other grew, for Kirby, an increasing store of knowledge of the realm. He learned, amongst other things, what seemed the origin of the worship of the Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, amongst primitive Mexican races. The time had been when the People of the Temple had mingled freely with the races above them; and, that they might have ready means of egress to the world, they had built the tunnel through which Kirby had entered the Valley of the Geyser. Thus, going and coming as they did, they had spread their cult of the worship of Quetzalcoatl; and when, eventually, strife arose between the peoples of upper world and lower, and the People of the Temple withdrew to their realm, they left behind them the Serpent myth which was to live through countless centuries. The tunnel, Naida said, had been abandoned when her people left the upper world once and for all, and its use for any reason prohibited. This, Naida gave as the reason why none of them went near the tunnel now, and why the cylinder of gold had lain in the canyon undiscovered. It was the explanation she had promised on the day in the tower, when first she saw the cylinder. So the days passed, until the day set aside for wedding and coronation dawned. On that morning, Kirby, having concluded a long conference with the Duca, was walking with Naida in the gardens outside the castle. "Tell me," he said to her: "do you yourself believe that this Serpent has the powers of a God?" Naida looked at him quickly, a sudden fright in her eyes. "I believe the Serpent exists to-day, somewhere in the distant reaches of the chasm, beyond the Rorroh forest." "Yes, but do you believe the Serpent is God?" * * * * * Actually frightened now, she looked swiftly about. But when she saw that they were alone, confidence returned. "No!" she exclaimed. "I do not believe Quetzalcoatl is a god. I believe he is the most terrible creature anywhere in our realm, and that men first worshipped him through fear. I believe our race would be better a hundred times if they had never made him their God." Kirby whistled. "Then you do _not_ believe that the Ducas of past ages talked with him. You do not believe it was Quetzalcoatl's pleasure over the great diamond which made him cease preying on your people?" "No! Long habit makes me show respect for these myths, and adhere to the customs of our cult, but I do not believe. I think our race gained immunity for the Serpent's ravages, not through a compact with Quetzalcoatl, but because our builders were intelligent enough to erect the castle up here on the plateau, where Quetzalcoatl could not reach them. To tell the truth, I think the whole cult is false and wrong, and I wish Quetzalcoatl were dead and gone from the world!" Kirby smiled. In spite of Naida's reverence for certain features of the cult, he had long suspected that her true feelings were those she had just expressed. And he was glad for this new bond of understanding between them. He glanced at her with understanding and perfect trust. "Naida, since we have talked so frankly, there is one more thing which I must bring out." She looked up at him. "What is it?" "The Duca." * * * * * She drew closer, her perfumed body brushing his, her great eyes caressing him. "Naida, I am afraid of the man." "And so am I!" she confessed suddenly. "It has all been too easy," Kirby said in a slow voice. "There is no doubt whatever that our possession of the cylinder of gold has had great influence on the Duca, and yet--" He paused, taking her hand. "And yet," she went on for him, "you do not believe he would have conceded what he has, unless he intends to make trouble?" Kirby nodded twice, emphatically. "Well, you have trained all of us to use the rifles." He smiled gravely at her understanding. "Yes, I have. And your skill, and that of the others, with the rifles, will always help us. Yet even so--" Closer still she drew now, and there was sadness in her eyes. "I think I see," she said in a voice which choked. "When do you think he will make a move to start trouble?" Kirby hesitated, then drew a long breath. "To-day!" "On--on the day of our union?" Naida echoed in dismay. "Can you tell where or how he will strike at us?" Kirby shook his head. "There are a hundred things he could do. Naida, I--I--Well, somehow I am afraid of the ceremony this afternoon--the wedding ceremony!" * * * * * He felt a little shiver go through her, and would have taken her in his arms, save that a gay cry rang in the garden then. "Naida, Naida!" It was her cousin, Nini, a bronze-haired youngster as elfin and Pucklike as her name. "I thought we should never find you! Do you realize this is your _wedding_ day, and that you're acting as if there was nothing to be done?" Nini darted a mocking glance at Kirby, who grinned. "Do come, Naida!" cried another girl. "Your gown is ready, and we want you to ourselves for awhile." Other girls joined them, some singing and some carrying an obligato on the sweet, flutelike instruments which Kirby had first heard as he hung in the throat of the geyser. In front of them all, Kirby laughed and kissed Naida on the forehead. But as he took leave of her thus, he whispered: "We must not let our guard relax for a second this afternoon. And I think there is a more definite precaution which I will take, besides." CHAPTER IX Some hours later, Kirby smiled with tight-lipped satisfaction at thought of that precaution which he had taken. What it was only he, Nini, Ivana, and three other girls knew, which secrecy pleased him as much as the precautionary measure itself. Seated alone in a dimly-lighted, thick-walled cell of the ancient temple in which the dual ceremony of wedding and coronation would take place, he was waiting for the moment when the festivities would begin. Thus far the Duca had done nothing. Yet Kirby's uneasiness would not leave him, and he continued to be thankful that, if trouble should start, the Duca might not find as many trumps in his hand as he expected. A couple of hours after Kirby had left Naida and the other girls in the garden, all had begun the two-mile journey from the castle to the small plateau on which stood this temple, where the ceremony would be held. Now, while Kirby waited alone, the Duca and his caciques had gone to another wing of the temple. Naida, attended by her bridesmaids, had been assigned to a cell of their own, and the rest of the girls were waiting in the nave of the temple. Unable to attend the walk from their plateau to this, the old people of the race had remained in their crystal houses. With ten minutes more to wait, Kirby rose from a bench on which he had been seated, and began to pace his cell. It was this archaic pile of stone, he finally decided, which was causing his depression. Unlike the bright and cheerful castle, this place, older than any other building in the realm, was squat, thick-walled, and gloomy. Here, in the dusky cells which lined labyrinthine corridors, the early generations of the race had found protection from outside dangers. All of which was all right, Kirby thought, but just the same he wished he had insisted upon being wedded in the brilliant and cheerful amphitheatre. * * * * * But presently he stopped pacing and faced the door of his cell. Then he breathed a sigh of relief. From down the twisting corridors which wound out to the central nave, stole the high sweetness of soprano voices, the whisper of flutes, and the mellow resonance of little gongs of jade and gold. It was the signal for which he had waited. It had been the Duca's instructions that he should come out into the temple when the music began, and meet Naida there. Both would advance to the altar, and when they were in place, the Duca would come to them. Kirby, therefore, after a glance at the blue trousers and tunic of tanager scarlet which the girls had made for him, opened the door of his cell, and stepped out. In a moment he traversed the windings of the corridor, and halted under a flat arch at one side of the temple nave. As he paused so, to await the appearance of Naida and her bridesmaids under a similar arch directly across the temple, he held his breath. Not even nymphs could be as graceful as were the twenty-six girls who were performing the dance of Life Immortal, which tradition decreed should be given before the ceremony by which, in this realm, two souls were wedded. The flash of rainbow gowns was like the swirling of light in a sky at dawning. The music of voices, flutes, and the little gongs of jade, would have stirred the souls of the dead. If only the confounded sense of approaching disaster would leave him, Kirby thought grimly, this would be a magnificent moment. As it was, he turned his eyes away from the girls, and began to examine the temple. Just as Naida had told him the case would be, he found both sides of the nave surrounded by arches similar to the one under which he was standing. Everywhere, dim and tortuous corridors led to cells like the one he had just left. Then, in one end of the nave, loomed a closed door from behind which the Duca and caciques would appear when the couple to be wedded were in place, before the altar. The altar itself, a rectangular mass of some jadelike stone, stood at a distance of perhaps twenty paces in front of the closed door. On top of the greenish stones, resting on a cushion of some crimson material, flashed the crown which would be used at the coronation. Kirby's eyes widened as he beheld a single rose-cut diamond two inches in diameter, mounted in an exquisitely simple bandeau of wrought gold. But, a moment later, even the crown which would be his--if nothing happened--seemed only a bauble compared to the other prize which he had won in this world beneath the world. Naida! * * * * * He realized that the dance was ended, the music stilled, and that the rainbow garbed girls had formed a double line in the center of the temple. Suddenly his heart beat fast, and for just a moment, as he dared look full and deeply at Naida, and she smiled back at him across the distance, he even forgot to be depressed. But even as he advanced to meet her, his uneasiness returned. Now the girls were singing again, their voices raised in a triumphant chorale as beautiful as Naida's face with its warm red lips and smiling eyes, as beautiful as her wedding gown that might have been woven, in its filminess, of mist from the sea. The bridesmaids, silent, their lovely faces alight, paused. But Naida came on. From her floated to Kirby a fragrance more overwhelming than even the perfume of the geyser. Presently he felt her hand on his arm, and at last they stood side by side. Now again, his premonition of evil left him for a flash; but again it returned. "I love you," he whispered. "I love _you_." "But I am still afraid." Naida's smile faded. "And I too. Oh, I've been terribly afraid! We will keep our guard!" "Yes." * * * * * In front of them, on the altar, the crown diamond winked and shimmered in a dim light. The swelling chorus of triumph, in which the bridesmaids had joined now, made the whole temple ring. Slowly, while Naida moved easily beside him, Kirby began to march to the altar. Then it was done, and they were halted. After both of them had given a lingering glance at the crown whose diamond shimmered now within their reach, they raised their eyes to the closed door behind the altar. The thing was swinging open. An inch it moved, two inches. Kirby waited, never taking his eyes away from the widening crack. With a crashing final volume of sound, the chorus swept magnificently to its climax. Then the door was flung wide. Still Kirby stood stiffly before the altar, with Naida drawn up splendidly beside him. After two seconds, however, he moved. Duca and caciques were not standing in the corridor. In the semi-darkness, the only figures visible there were squatting, grotesque things whose bodies were covered with whitish hair and whose leathery faces were disfigured by gashes of mouths filled with enormous teeth. A feeling of standing face to face with final disaster, turned Kirby sick. As he jerked back from the altar, sweeping a paralyzed Naida with him, the ape-men let out gibbering howls, half-human. With gigantic, hopping strides, the foremost rank of the creatures swung forward, straight into the temple. CHAPTER X Kirby, already falling back toward the other girls, caught Naida up in his arms, and ran. "Nini!" he bellowed. "Ivana! Get the rifles!" While the two whom he had ordered sprang to a corridor, and four others followed, Kirby fell in with the others and dropped Naida on her feet. Sick as he was, there was still a ray of hope, because the hard-headed precaution he had taken against treachery this morning was to have Nini and Ivana bring the rifles here and hide them. The first of the ape-men, snarling, laughing, had hopped beyond the altar, and the yellow foam of madness was slavering from his jaws. Over his shoulder he howled some jargon which made his hairy legion struggle to catch up with him. "Have you got any puff balls?" Kirby snapped at Naida. She shook her head numbly, just as Nini and Ivana swung forward with the Mannlichers. "No. But you had sense enough to bring the rifles! Oh, what does it mean?" "The Duca has sold himself out to the ape-man! He was helpless against us, and has brought them to destroy us for him. Here, Ivana, give me a rifle! Everyone for herself!" The next moment he had a Mannlicher at his shoulder. * * * * * As the thing kicked, an ape who would have reached him in two more jumps crashed over with his heart torn out, the temple echoed with sound which threatened to rip its solid walls apart, and bright flashes at Kirby's right and left told him that other rifles were getting under way. He fired again, twice more, slaughtering an ape with each shot. The five other rifles were creating havoc. Blocked by a dozen torn and bleeding bodies on the floor, the reenforcements which still poured from the corridor, began to mill around amongst themselves, and the forward charge slowed down. All the panic which had sent the ape-men scuttling from the beach at their first experience of gunfire, seemed ready to break loose again now. Kirby felt it was good enough for the work of a minute. "Get into line as I showed you how!" he shouted. "Rifles in the front rank, the others behind them. We're all right now! Keep firing!" "Keep behind me!" he ordered Naida, still unarmed. Then he placed a shell in the chest of one brute who was broader and heavier than the others--a leader--and saw that he had increased the demoralization; and from the hastily-formed front rank a volley leaped hot and jagged. Then the rout which had threatened broke loose. As eight ape-men slumped into blubbering, bleeding heaps, the milling remainder of the horde turned, and in a fighting, scrambling frenzy attempted to get back to the corridor. Kirby let his triumph take the form of thoughts about what he would do to the Duca when that personage could be rounded up. "Follow after them!" he ordered. "Don't stop until we have located the Duca. He is the one we must settle--" * * * * * But he never finished. As he himself, holding fire for a second, prepared to follow up the retreat, he found himself confronted by the utterly unexpected. A voice unquestionably the Duca's began to shout orders at the ape-men from somewhere down the corridor! And, riot or no riot, the tones of that voice seemed to inspire the creatures with more fear than the rifle fire. So suddenly the change came, that by the time Kirby flung his rifle again to his shoulder, the crazy retreat had been halted, and as he fired again, the ape-men swung in their tracks and began to charge! There was no time to guess by what power the Duca had turned the tables. There was not even time for orders. Kirby fired twice, knowing that the ape-men had been infused with some spirit which would bring them on in spite of rifle fire. Naida, unarmed, cried out behind him, and he shoved his gun at her. "Take it!" He had just inserted a new clip. He handed her others. "Fire for your lives!" he shouted to the girls. "But you!" Naida gasped. "You are unarmed!" "I'll be all right." On the floor lay a jagged, hand-chipped knife of obsidion which had fallen as some ape died. Kirby grabbed it. * * * * * In another second the flood of ape-men had burst in all its fury over him. Crashing, thundering shots were dinning in his ears, animal death screams and the Valkyrie battle cries of the girls filled the temple. He could not tell how many of the apes were fighting him. As a cave-man's club whizzed past his head, he drove his knife once, and yanked it dripping from hairy, yielding flesh to plunge it again. A sudden side-step carried him away from another assailant. He dropped the knife to snatch the gigantic club of one of the creatures he had killed. Quicker in every movement than the ape-men, he laid on, right and left, with such power that blood spurted in a dozen places, and heads were split open on every side. And because of his speed, the frantic, clumsy blows and knife thrusts which were directed at him proved harmless. A terrific drive which smashed a snarling face into pulp, left Kirby free for a second, and he emerged from the first round of battle ready to cut in and help the girls. But then he saw that he had gotten separated from the main body. "Naida!" he called. "Naida!" A series of shots answered him, and as several apes fell, a gap was opened through which he saw her conducting a well ordered retreat of all the girls toward the dark corridors surrounding the temple. Again Kirby fell to with his club, swinging, hacking, fighting with his whole strength to catch up. He made headway, and hope began to come again. The ape-men would not kill, or even harm, the girls. What they wanted was to carry them off. If he and Naida together could get their party rounded up in the corridors, the chances were good. "Naida!" he shouted again. "Coming!" Battering down an ape in front of him, he jumped up on the corpse, and saw that already the vanguard of girls had reached the first sheltering corridor. Naida had been cut off from the others by eight or ten apes. But even so her fire made her mistress of the situation, and she seemed all right. It was just as Kirby started to jump down from the corpse that he saw something which put another complexion on the matter, and left him frozen where he was. * * * * * Behind Naida, directly in the path in which her slavering aggressors were slowly forcing her, a huge stone slab in the temple floor had begun to tilt up as if it were a trapdoor raised by an invisible hand. Within the yawning opening, Kirby caught a glimpse of stone steps winding down into blackness. In a flash he saw that it was Naida, and her alone, that the ape-men were after. The Duca's determination was to capture her, and it was the presence of this trapdoor, making capture possible, which had brought on the second charge of the apes. A scream, high and wild, from Naida released Kirby from his trance of horror. He leaped off the corpse, and smashed a suddenly presented skull like an egg shell. Momentarily he saw Naida, too terrified to fire, staring at the open trapdoor. Kirby felled two apes and felt their blood on his arms. "Ivana!" he yelled. "Help Naida, for God's sake!" An answering shout, not from Ivana alone but from many girls, encouraged him, and he swung his club with a speed and force which would let nothing stand before him. But then another scream from Naida rang in his ears. "Naida!" he shouted. "It's all right! We're coming!" He knew, though, that it _wasn't_ all right. Fighting like a maniac, he opened another lane down which he glimpsed her. Fighting still, in a last terrific effort to force his way down the lane to her side, he saw the black opening gape at her feet; and, as Naida screamed again, a dozen hairy arms reached it at once, twisted the empty rifle out of her hands, and lifted her shining body as if it had been a feather. Shouts and murderous fire were coming from the other girls, and Kirby swung his club as never before. But even as he fell upon the last two or three apes which kept him away from Naida, those who had snatched her, bolted down the steps. Kirby was left with the memory of Naida's great eyes fixed upon his, fear-filled, beseeching his protection. In a second, the ponderous trapdoor crashed into place, and she was gone. CHAPTER XI Dazed and grief-stricken, Kirby stood in the bloody, corpse-filled nave of the temple, surrounded by thirty-two girls whose faces were blanched and most of whose eyes were tear-bright. The fight was over, and they were assembled to decide what must be done, but for a time no one spoke. Gaining the trapdoor just as it was pinioned from beneath, Kirby had torn at it with bare hands. But that had been hopeless. Then he had begun to fight again. But that had been hopeless also. With howls and screams they started to retreat, and it had not taken Kirby long to find out that every part of their raid had been carefully planned, even to this retreat under fire. Straight into the damp black tunnel which led away from the corridor behind the altar, the ape-men had leaped. And Kirby, in hot pursuit, had heard the Duca's voice driving them on. Too much the soldier to follow in that darkness where the Duca knew every foot of the way, and he knew nothing, Kirby had seen that he must go back to the girls and take stock. Now he looked at the strewn ape corpses, smelled the corrosive reek of burned powder, and tried to put aside his grief. "The Duca," he said at last, "must have been planning this with the apes ever since the first morning in the castle." Ivana, Naida's sister, nodded. "The Duca brought the ape-people here, kept them in the tunnel, and then herded them back when their work was done. I suppose it was one of the caciques who opened the door when the time was right." "Does anyone think we ought to try the tunnels now?" Kirby asked. * * * * * Several girls shook their heads. He knew that already they felt he had been wise in giving up the pursuit. Ivana spoke. "If the Duca and his horde stay underground, we shouldn't have a chance against them. And if they don't, we're better here." Kirby shot a searching glance at her, somehow sure that her thoughts were running parallel with his. "You don't think they're going to stay here, do you?" "No, and you don't either," Ivana answered. "It seems to me that they will retreat into the Rorroh as fast as they can," Kirby then observed. "And do you think the Duca and all the caciques will go with the apes?" This time it was Nini who spoke, and with the council so well launched, Kirby began to feel better. "I think," he answered Nini, "that the Duca has gone over to Xlotli altogether. We fooled him to-day. Instead of killing or capturing us all, he--he only got Naida. But he won't give up. I think he is taking the apes off to some place from which he can launch a new attack. And we've got to stop him before he is ready to deliver another blow." "What do you mean?" Ivana now asked. "Do you know where the villages of the ape-people are?" "Yes. None of us has been very far into the Rorroh, but I could guess where some of the villages may stand." * * * * * Silence fell after that, but Kirby knew from the glint in Ivana's eyes, and the quick breaths which other girls drew, that they understood. "Ivana," he said suddenly, "will you go with me into the Rorroh jungle, and stay with me, facing down every danger it may conceal, until we have found Naida and brought her back?" A flush of life crept into Ivana's pallid cheeks. "Yes!" Kirby faced the other girls, all of them keyed up now. "Nini, will you go?" Nini, bronze-haired, dainty nymph of a girl, who had yet the stamina of a man, looked at him with brave eyes. Then her hands tightened on her rifle, and she stepped forward. "When will you have us start?" Ivana asked in a low voice. "Now!" Kirby answered, and, taking up the rifle which lay beside him--the same with which Naida had fought--he looked at the other girls. "There is not one of you," he said slowly, "who would not go willingly on this quest. But the pursuit party must be small and mobile. And there is another duty. To all of you I leave the care of the castle and the plateau. Take the three rifles I shall leave behind, do what you can to reassure the old people, and hold the plateau safe until we return." A murmur of girls' voices sounded in the temple. Kirby motioned to Nini and Ivana, and followed by a low cheer, they moved off together. * * * * * The night was on them, where they crouched in a cave above a swiftly flowing river. Kirby, rifle across his knees, sat peering out across the black, invisible stretches of the forest. His nostrils quivered to this mingled smells of fresh growth and fetid decay of the grotesque land. In his ears shrilled the creaking and scraping of insects, the flap of unseen wings, the distant bellowing grunt of some unseen, unknown animal. "I cannot sleep," Ivana said presently, from back in the cave. "Hush," he whispered, "you will wake Nini." "But I am already awake!" came her answer. "I--I cannot forget the white snakes which slid from that tree when you tried to cut firewood." "Hush," Kirby murmured again. "Presently the moon will rise on the earth above, and light will come here. Even if the jungle is terrible, were you not born with courage? Go to sleep now, both of you, because you must relieve me soon." As silence fell again, he knew that the real thing behind their nervousness was their ghastly doubt about what the night was bringing to Naida. But none of them spoke of Naida. So sickening were the possibilities that Kirby would not permit conjecture to occupy even his mind when, at length, the sound of even breathing told him that Nini and Ivana slept. After dreary passing of an hour, a faint light grew over the jungle, silver and clear, and Kirby let his mind run back to the two deserted ape-men communities which they had found and searched before dusk sent them to the cave. From the signs of hasty departure, it looked as though a far-reaching order had taken the brutes away from their dwellings, and sent them--somewhere. That somewhere seemed likely to be the great central community which Ivana said was rumored to exist in the far reaches of the Rorroh. The problem was how to locate the community through the hideous country. But Kirby presently drove the question from his head. To-morrow's evils could best be faced when morrow dawned. * * * * * Enough light had grown now so that the swirling bosom of the river, and a strip of sand directly below the cliff in which their cave was set, were visible. As Kirby let his eyes wander to the lush growth beyond the sand, he heard something which made him stir uneasily. Some creature which suggested power and hugeness immeasurable was moving there. The brush parted, and he saw plainly an animal with the bulk of a two-story house. On two feet the nightmare thing stood, as lightly as a cat, and then came down on all four feet as it ambled out on the sand and extended into the lapping river a tremendous beak studded with teeth. A smell of crushed weeds and the musty odor like that of a lion house filled the night. The tyranosaur--it was more like a tyranosaur than anything else--breathed heavily and guzzled in great mouthfuls of water. Kirby sat perfectly still. He hoped the thing would go away. But the tyranosaur did not go away. All at once it hissed loudly and stood up, its eyes glowing green and baleful, and Kirby leaned forward. From the water was slithering another creature with a gigantic, quivering, jelly body. Kirby saw to his horror that, in addition to four short legs with webbed, claw-tipped feet, there sprouted from the body a number of octopus tentacles. From the scabrous mottle of the head, cruel, unintelligent, bestial eyes glared at the rearing tyranosaur. * * * * * One of the serpentine tentacles whipped out, slapped against the tyranosaur's fore-shoulder to call forth a hiss and a short bellow. Then other tentacles waved in the moonlight, and in a flash the tyranosaur was enmeshed as by a score of slimy cables. He was not altogether helpless. Suddenly the steam shovel of a beak buried itself in the jelly body of the water animal, and there spurted out a flood of inky liquid. The water animal emitted a sickening gurgle. But the tyranosaur's advantage was only temporary. Closer and closer drew the ugly, scabrous tentacles. The tyranosaur never had a chance. Its green eyes flared, the shovel beak plunged and slashed, but never for a second did the tentacles relax. As Kirby stared, he saw the water animal begin to back up, dragging its gigantic enemy with it. For a second the whole night was hideous with the sound of hisses, gurgles, dashing water. Then the river boiled once and for all, and both animals sank in its depths. Kirby chafed cold hands together and shivered a little, then turned to see if Nini and Ivana had heard the struggle. Fortunately, however, they still slept. And as if this peace which was upon them were an omen of good, the jungle continued quiet for the next hour. Kirby wakened them at last, and after a snatched nap, was in turn awakened. The three of them started again when the first glimmerings of dawn came to the forest. Of food there was plenty--fruits which grew in profusion, and some roots which Nini grubbed out of the earth. Having started along the first trail which they encountered beside the river bank, they ate as they walked. * * * * * Kirby judged they had kept their steady gait for more than two hours before a slight widening of the trail roused him from the preoccupation into which he had fallen. "See there," he exclaimed to both girls, and pointed at a grove of trees with fanlike leaves which towered up to the right of the trail. "What are those big bundles fastened to the lower limbs?" Ivana glanced at Nini, who nodded as if in answer to a question. "This must be one of the places where the ape-people leave their dead," Nini answered. "The bundles--But come over to them." Kirby forced his way ahead until he stood beneath a huge, unsavory bundle wrapped in roughly woven brown fibre, and wedged in a fork between two limbs. Judging from the ugly odor which overhung the grove, there could be no question about what the bundle contained. Nini and Ivana, glancing at the scores of similar bundles which burdened the trees of the whole grove, made wry faces. Kirby slung his rifle in the crook of his arm, and nodded toward the trail. "There must be a village somewhere near," he said. A mile farther on they found what they were seeking, a colony of seventy or eighty conical dwellings of mud and thatch, which were ranged in a double circle about a central common of bare, well-trodden earth. It took no long reconnaissance to discover that the town was deserted completely of all inhabitants. Ivana beckoned and darted to one of the nearest huts, and Kirby, following her, found lying on the uneven earth floor within, a half-skinned animal which resembled a small antelope. An obsidion knife beside the carcass, the disordered condition of a couch of grass, the sour odor of recent animal occupancy, all told their story. "The owner left in a hurry," Kirby observed aloud. Nini, who had gone beyond, to a larger hut which might have belonged to a king ape, called out excitedly to them. "A great number of apes have eaten a hurried meal here!" * * * * * Kirby entered the shadowed, foul-smelling interior of the central hut to find her statement true. Broken meats, some raw, some cooked, lay on the dirt floor, and scattered bits of fruit were mingled with them. The ashes of a burned out fire at the hut entrance were cold, but had not been for long. "Do you think--" Ivana began. "I think the whole of the Duca's horde came this way, fed, and went on, taking everyone with them," Kirby finished. "But which direction did they take?" asked Nini, who was standing at the door of the big hut and had already begun to examine the crowding, green, inscrutable walls of jungle which foamed up to the clearing on all sides. No less than seven trails wound away into the dark country beyond, and Kirby saw that the question would not be an easy one. Having hastily circled the clearing and peered down one trail after another without finding a clue, he knew that it was the Duca's intelligence which had made the ape-people depart without leaving even tracks behind them. He did not like the situation. "Well," he rumbled to his companions, "we may as well take our choice. One chance in seven of coming out right!" But the words were hardly out of his mouth before he pulled himself up with a jerk, and cursed himself for having given in. "Ivana! Nini!" Sharpness, a sudden ring of hope edged his voice. "Am I seeing things, or is that--" * * * * * As he pointed to a huge aloe bush down one of the trails to their left, they started to run. Then Kirby knew that he was not seeing things. What his first inspection of the trails had failed to show, he saw plainly now. Tied loosely to one branch of the aloe bush, almost concealed amidst the deep green of foliage, was a bit of white cloth! In a second Kirby was holding out to his companions a tiny strip of Naida's wedding gown. "She knew we would come!" He stared down the trail with narrowed, keen eyes. How Naida had contrived to leave her signal was more than they knew. The fact that she _had_ done so, sent all three of them down the trail at driving speed. An hour passed, then another, and the morning which had been barely born when they first took the trail, wore on to the sultriness and vast, colored light of a tropical noon. Twice the main trail forked, and twice they found an unobtrusive bit of cloth to guide them beyond the works. When the hands of Kirby's still useful watch pointed to twelve, they paused to eat and rest. Then they pushed on. Meanwhile, the country through which they passed left Kirby with a clear understanding of why Naida and her people had shunned the Rorroh forest down the centuries of time. Just one thing which stuck in his head was the sight of a small creature like a marmoset, sticking an inquisitive nose into the heart of a sickly-sweet plant which resembled a terrestrial nepenthe. No sooner had the little pink snout touched the green and maroon splotched petals, than the plant writhed, closed its leaves, and swallowed the monkey whole. Little squeaks of agony and terror sounded for a moment, and ceased. * * * * * At midafternoon they paused in a spot where a forest of trees with whorled tops were slowly being strangled to death by immense orchids of every conceivable shape and color, and by a kind of creeping mistletoe which grew almost as they watched. Here also, the ground was covered with fluffy, grey-green moss which seethed constantly as if it were a carpet of maggots. Both Ivana and Nini warned Kirby on his life not to touch or go near the moss, and a moment later he knew why. From the forest came the flash of a small, five-toed horse being pursued by some animal with a hyena head that barked. At the edge of the mossy glade the hyena swerved aside, but the terrified horse plunged straight out on the carpet of moss. Instantly the air was filled with the sound of animal screams, and a series of tiny, muffled explosions. A cloud of greenish-red mist swirled about the horse. Quivering, still screaming, the animal went down on its knees, and as the reddish green smoke fell on him and settled, it became a mass of growing moss spores. Before Kirby's eyes, the pitiful animal was covered by a shroud of green that spread over him and cloaked him, licking over all with tiny sounds like far off muffled drums as fresh spore cases developed and burst. The screams died. Even as Kirby drew the girls to him and they passed on, the horse's nostrils, eyes, mouth were filled with choking green moss; and he lay still. * * * * * On and on, deeper into the jungle Kirby pushed, and never for a moment did his companions falter. But the way was not so easy now, for nerves were jaded, muscles sore, and no human will could have been powerful enough to cast aside the growing fear for Naida. Fear came finally to a head when, toward dusk, Kirby sighted a fork ahead of them, approached it confidently to look for Naida's sign, and found nothing. "Oh Lord!" he muttered, and realized that it was the first time any of them had spoken for long. "There must be something to guide us!" Ivana exclaimed as she searched with questing eyes through the swiftly deepening gloom of evening. Nini, making an effort to keep up hope in spite of the paleness which came to her lovely face, darted down both paths, glancing as she went at every bush and shrub. But she returned in a moment, and as she shook her head, her great eyes were somber. Kirby grunted, scratched behind his ear. Then, however, he stifled an exclamation, and clutched at the hands of both girls. On one of the two trails appeared suddenly in the dusk an ape-creature. Kirby saw at once that the thing was small--a female undoubtedly--and that it had spied them and was moving toward them with all speed. And borne in upon him most certainly was the fact that the ape-woman was making signals of peace. In her outstretched hand flickered through the gloom a strip of cloth that was gauzy and white. Again--a strip of Naida's gown. "If you know any words of her tongue, call to her," Kirby said sharply. * * * * * Ivana obeyed. All three of them started forward. The ape-woman, after returning the hail in creaking gutturals, came up to them, and with an unexpected look of pathos and entreaty in her face, began to address the girls with a flood of talk. Word after creaking word she poured out while Nini and Ivana listened in silence. Finally Kirby could stand the suspense no longer. "What is it, Ivana? What does she say? Your eyes are lighting up with hope! Tell me--" Ivana smiled and turned toward him, while the ape-woman still looked her entreaty. "She says," Ivana announced bluntly, "that she and the other women amongst their people, do not want any of the girls of our race to be taken by their males. Already the men are quarreling about Naida. They will not look at their own women. Naida told this woman that we would be following, and sent her to lead us to the place where the ape-people are assembling!" Kirby felt his lips tightening in a grim smile at the thought that jealousy was not unknown even to the semi-human creatures of this neither world. He looked at Nini and Ivana during a stretched out second. Then he moved. "Good," he snapped. "We go on at once." That was his only recognition of what was surely one of the important happenings of a lifetime. But for all that, his tired brain, which so lately had felt the chill of black depression, was suddenly set on fire with triumph and thanksgiving. CHAPTER XII As they marched rapidly, the ape-woman, who called herself Gori, succeeded in making them understand that most of the ape-tribes, commanded by the Duca and his caciques, were assembled in the central community toward which they were heading, that grave danger of some sort threatened Naida, and that the need for haste was great. But what the danger was, the two girls could not understand. "We can't make out what is going to happen--what they plan to do to-night," Ivana whispered at last to Kirby. "All Gori says is that we must rescue Naida and take her away, and must take the Duca away so that he cannot influence the men any more. And she keeps repeating that we must hurry." "And you can't find out what we must rescue Naida _from_?" Ivana shook her head. "I'm afraid we're facing something of an appalling nature, as dangerous to ourselves as to Naida. But I know nothing more." By the time the silver glow which corresponded to moonlight flooded the jungle, Gori had left the open trail, and was leading them across country which humans could not have negotiated without the guidance she offered. Advancing cautiously always, she stopped for long seconds at a time to reconnoitre, shifting her huge ears about and changing their shape, twitching her nostrils, and glancing hither and thither with bright little eyes. Sometimes they passed immense spike-tipped flowers ten feet in diameter, with fleshy yellow leaves which gave out a nauseating stench. Vines with long, recurved thorns and blossoms of deep scarlet, laced the undergrowth together and made passing dangerous. Fire-flies drifted past, and all above and about them flapped moths as big as bats. Kirby, his clothes almost torn from his body, sweat pouring from every pore, heard the labored breathing of the girls, and wondered how they could hang on. But they did, and after a long time, Gori, halting in the midst of a slight clearing, held up a warning hand. * * * * * A queer sensation came over Kirby. As he stared and listened, he realized that the twinkles he saw far ahead were not fire-flies, as he had thought, but lights. In the frosted moon glow, Nini and Ivana drew close, and Kirby clasped their hands and pressed them for a second. Too tired to exult further he was, even though they seemed close to their goal of goals. Gori swung her hairy arm in a signal, and with rifles clasped carefully, they began to advance. When, five minutes later, they stood in the heart of a rank glade beyond which they could see nothing, Gori spoke to the two girls in her creaking whisper, and Nini laid a restraining hand on Kirby's. "We have gone as far as Gori dares! She says we must climb a tree here, and watch what will go on in a clearing just beyond this thicket." "And we still don't know what we're getting into," Kirby muttered. But at any rate they had reached the end of their march. Exultation did come to Kirby now, but still he was too completely fagged, as were both girls, to give much sign. Gori pointed to a tree some fifty feet away, which shot up to a great, foliage-crowned height. They moved toward it, and in a moment were climbing, Gori first, the girls after her, and Kirby last. "Here we are," Ivana presently whispered, at the same time drawing herself out on a limb just beneath one on which Gori and Nini had crawled. Kirby found himself hedged in by tasselated leaves through which he could not see. The foliage thinned, however, and soon Ivana halted, perched herself in a comfortable position. Kirby, making himself at ease beside her, and seeing that Nini and Gori were in place, turned his eyes slowly, expectantly downward. * * * * * At first, all that he saw from his bird's-eye perch, was a circular clearing two hundred yards across, which was surrounded on all sides by lowering jungle. In the exact center of the circle, like a splotch of ink on gray paper, there gaped a deep hole which might have measured six feet in diameter. Around this hole, eight poles as tall and stout as telephone poles stood up in bristling array. The moonlight showed that the whitish earth of the clearing was tamped smooth as though thousands of creatures had danced or walked about there for centuries. But not a living form was visible. A grunt of disappointment escaped Kirby after that one look. When he looked beyond the clearing, however, a change came to his feelings. A quarter of a mile away, lights were twinkling--the same ones which had been visible on the last stretch of the journey. And the moonlight touched the little conical roofs of fully two hundred huts of the ape-people. No sound was audible save the soughing of night wind in the trees, the shrilling of insects. Nevertheless, there stole over Kirby all at once a feeling that the great ape-village was crowded to overflowing. What was more, he felt himself touched by an eery sensation--familiar these days--of evil to come. Ivana, seated with her rifle across her knees, stirred on the limb beside him. "Oh," she whispered suddenly, "I am afraid of this place!" Kirby took her hand. "I know. Maybe it is the sensation of all the legions of the apes herded together so silently in their village. I wish we knew what to expect from them. I wish--" * * * * * But he broke off, and called softly to Nini on the limb above. She looked down with a drawn expression about her mouth. "Are you all right?" Kirby whispered. "Yes. But--Well, are both of _you_ all right? Gori says we have reached here in time, but I--" A gasp of uneasiness escaped her, and Kirby heard Ivana echo it. "There is something about that black, silent hole out there in the clearing, and about those poles sticking up like fangs, that makes me terribly, terribly afraid. Oh, what are they planning? Where is Naida? What are they going to do to her?" Kirby whistled in a low key. He had not thought about the black hole in the clearing. "Hum," he muttered, "that's interesting. Ivana, Nini, what do you suppose--" But he got no answer. Gori's twitching lips grimaced them to silence. The next instant, the stillness of the night was hurled aside by a howling, gurgling shout from a hundred, a thousand hysterically distended ape throats. With the sickening sound came from the village the sullen roaring of drums. * * * * * Ten minutes later, a Kirby who was cold with apprehension and wonder looked down from his leaf-crowned height at such a spectacle as he knew human eyes had never before seen. The shouting had died away, the drums were silenced. Crammed into the clearing, their foul, hairy bodies packed close together, the silver light glinting against rolling red eyes and grinning white teeth, stood fully a thousand apes! Once the first tumult of shouting in the village had died, they had come on in silence, and in orderly procession. Those who bore the drums--huge gourds with heads of stretched skin--had formed a line entirely around the outer diameter of the circular clearing. Then others, lugging vats of a dark, heady-smelling liquor, had deposited their burden beside the drums, and formed a second circle. The balance of the thousand had crowded itself together as best it might, leaving bare the center of the clearing with its black hole and fangs of poles. Kirby, looking down at these legions, did not wonder that cold sweat wetted his back. Capable of thinking about only one thing--Naida--he was trying with all his strength not to think. Ivana, her face blanched in the light which filtered their camouflage of leaves, sat rigid, her hands locked about her cold rifle. On the branch above, Nini and Gori were as still as mummies. No one had spoken since the vanguard of apes had appeared. But at last Nini leaned close to Kirby. "Have you any idea of what all this means?" A draught of hot night air carried up a stench of drunkenness, and the goaty odor of massed animal bodies. "No," Kirby whispered. "I suppose, from Gori's having brought us here, that Naida is going to appear somehow. We've simply got to trust that Gori knows what she is about." "But listen--" Ivana suppressed a shudder. "Suppose they should bring Naida here presently to force her to take part in some ceremony at which we can only guess. Gori, who thinks we can work miracles, supposes we can rescue Naida. But I--I'm not so certain. Is there _anything_ we can do?" * * * * * It was exactly that question which had made Kirby fight to keep himself from thinking. His face turned gray before he answered. But answer he did, finally. "Yes, there is one thing we can do, Ivana. We've got to be frank with each other, and so far, this is the _only_ thing I've been able to figure out. If Naida is brought here, and they make any move to harm her or torture her, we can, and we will, shoot her quickly, before harm or pain comes." A grim silence settled once more. During the last miles of march in the jungle, there had persisted in Kirby's heart the hope that there would be at least _something_ favorable in whatever situation they might encounter. His spirits were so low now that he dared not speak again. Amongst the noiseless sea of ape-men below them came, every now and again, a little ripple of motion as some anthropoid shadow fell out of his place, approached the liquor vats, and swilled down the black brew, a quart at a gulp. But mostly there was little commotion. Ivana drew a sibilant breath and said that she wished something would happen. "I wish," Kirby answered tensely, "that we knew _what_ is going to happen." But the nightmare waiting was not to go on forever. Kirby leaned forward and pointed. It was only instinct that had made him know action must come. For a second, no change in the expression of the ape-men, no movement in their crammed ranks, was visible. Then, however, a queer, subdued grunting rumbled deep down in many throats, and those who had faced the hundred-foot space in the center of the clearing squatted down on their hams. In the back of the crowd necks were craned. The stronger shoved the weaker in an effort to get a better view of the cleared stage, and a few ape-men who had been drinking hurried on unsteady legs to their places. "The drums!" Kirby whispered then. * * * * * With almost military precision, the scores of leather-faced creatures who had led the procession into the clearing, clasped the skin-headed gourds to their shaggy bellies, and stood with free arm raised as though awaiting a signal. Nini moved in her position, and Kirby felt Ivana shiver and edge close to him. From the front rank of the crowd, there sprang up a great male creature with the face of a gargoyle and the body of a jungle giant. Just once he reeled on his feet, as though black alcohol had befuddled him, then he steadied himself, flung both arms above his head, and rolled out a command which burst upon Kirby's ears like thunder. It was as if the whole cavern of the lower world, and the whole of the round earth itself, had been rocked uneasily, dreadfully by the bellowing, crashing explosion of the drums. Maddened by the turmoil he had let loose, the gargoyle-faced giant ape-man leered about him with blood-shot, drunken eyes, and beat on his cicatrized chest with massive fists. Suddenly he let out a bellow. Straight up into the air he sprang in a wild leap. When he came down, he was dancing, and the portentious, the sickeningly mysterious ceremony for which such solemn preparation had been made, was begun. Kirby drew a rasping breath. Knowing that there must be some definite reason for the dance having begun just when and as it had, he looked beyond the solitary dancing giant, on beyond the crowded legions of the apes, toward the village. There, where the main trail from the community approached the clearing, he saw precisely the thing which he had both hoped desperately and dreaded terribly to find. * * * * * Headed directly toward the clearing, moving down the trail with slow, majestic pace, came a procession headed by a bodyguard of ape-men and augmented by other men whose nakedness was covered by unmistakable, unforgetable priestly robes of gray. All at once the ape-people in the clearing began to scuffle apart, opening a lane down which the procession might pass to the central stage with its dancer, its ink spot orifice, and its fangs of tall poles. Kirby, watching the congregation, watching the majestic approach of gray robes through the night, wiped away from his forehead a sweat of fear. "I think," Nini called in a voice pitched high to outsound the drums, "that the--the Duca is with them!" "Yes." Kirby pointed jerkily. "In the middle of the procession, there, surrounded by his caciques!" The Duca! Yet his approach did not hold Kirby. Directly behind the priests were emerging now from the jungle a new company of ape-men. Squinting his eyes, Kirby saw that two of them were lugging on a pole across their shoulders a curious burden--a sort of monstrous bird cage of barked withes. Crouched on the floor of the cage in a little motionless, white heap-- But Kirby closed his eyes. Ivana, cowering against him, gulped as though she were going to be sick. Nini leaned down from above and looked at them with dilated eyes. Although none of them spoke, all knew that they had found Naida at last. Kirby was the first to pull himself up. Opening his eyes, he stared long at the white gowned, motionless shape within the cage. Next summing up the whole situation--the cage surrounded by an armed band, the clearing crammed with a thousand ape-men--he shook his head. Afterward, he made a quick movement with his hands. Ivana, seeing that movement, seeing the expression on his face, started out of her daze. "No! No! Oh, there must be some other way out for her! There must--" * * * * * Her cry, half a shriek, did not change Kirby's look. What he had done with his hands was to throw a shell into the chamber of his rifle. Now he held the rifle grimly, ready to carry it to his shoulder. The procession with the bodyguard of ape-men at its head, the renegade Duca and his caciques following next, and the cage bringing up the rear, advanced relentlessly down the lane to the central stage. The gargoyle-faced ape-man who held the stage alone danced with increasing wildness, writhing, twisting, with weird suppleness. Upon the dancing giant the procession bore down, and before him it finally halted. The halt left the Duca and the king ape facing each other, and the ape ended his dance. After each had given a salute made by raising their arms, both Duca and the king ape turned to face the creatures who were standing with the cage slung across their shoulders. Whereupon the bearers of the cage advanced with it until they stood between two of the tall poles. There, facing the ominous hole in the center of the clearing, with a pole on either side of them, the ape-men lowered the cage to the ground. Kirby felt his last hope and courage ebbing. Now he noticed that each pole was equipped with a rope which passed through a hole near its top, like a thread through the eye of a needle. And while he stared at the dangling ropes, the ape-men made one end of each fast to a ring in the top of the cage. The next instant they leaped back, and began to heave at the other end of the lines. From the drums came a quicker pounding, a more head-splitting volume of thunder. Over all the ape-people who watched the show, passed a shiver of what seemed to be whole-souled, ecstatic satisfaction. Slowly, as the two ape-men heaved hard, the cage swung off the ground, and slowly rose higher and higher into the moonlit air. * * * * * When finally the thing hung high above the heads of the multitude, swaying midway between its tall supports, the ape-men who had done the hoisting fastened their lines to cleats on the poles. Then they turned to the Duca and the giant king who stood behind them, executed a queer, lumbering bow, and fell back to the rear. The next moment it seemed as though every creature in the clearing--men and those who were only half men--had gone crazy. The king flung himself into the air as if he were a mass of bounding rubber. Following his lead, the whole assembly let out howls that drowned even the drums, and then began to sway, to squirm, to leap, even as their king was doing before them. The caciques and the Duca joined in the madness of foul dancing as heartily as any there. Their eyes were flaming, their long robes flapping, their beards streaming. On his perch in the tree Kirby muttered an oath which was lost, swept away like a breath, in the shrieking turmoil of sound. Then he turned to Ivana. "They've brought Naida here to sacrifice her." "But _why_?" Ivana's sweet face was frozen in lines of horror. "I've been able to guess what was going to happen to her. But--_sacrifice_. Why will it be that?" "Don't you see?" Looking up to include Nini, Kirby found his hands quivering against his rifle. "It is easy to understand. In the temple yesterday, what the Duca hoped to do was to kidnap most, or all, of the girls for the ape-people. But he was able to get only Naida. The first result was that the ape-men started to quarrel over the one girl. From what Gori says, trouble started on all sides at once. It became inadvisable to let Naida live. So the Duca, in his shrewdness, planned a sacrifice. By sacrificing Naida, he rids himself of a source of contention amongst the ape-men. He also hopes his act will win favor from his Gods, and make them help him when he is ready to launch a new attempt to capture _all_ the girls." * * * * * Ivana and Nini looked at each other, then at Kirby, and horror was etched deeper into their faces. "I think," gulped Ivana, "that you--are right. I--begin to understand." Nini leaned close to them. "Tell us, then, _how_ this sacrifice is to be made." Silent at that, Kirby presently made a heavy gesture toward the maelstrom of howling, leaping animals below them. "I couldn't guess at first. Now I think I can. They have placed her in that cage and swung it high above the black hole you were afraid of. What can that mean except that she is to be offered to--to--" It was a monstrous theory which had stunned his hope and courage, and to voice the thing in words was too gruesome. His bare suggestion, however, made Ivana pass a hand limply over her forehead and look at him with blank, stricken eyes. Nini tottered so uncertainly that Gori, who had remained motionless and silent throughout, had to steady her with muscular arms. If it was impossible for Kirby to utter his fears aloud, he had no need to speak to make them understood. "And--and we can do nothing?" Nini choked at last. "You can see for yourself how she is surrounded. If we had been able to get here sooner, we might have done something. Now--" Kirby's voice trailed off, and he gave an agonized look at his rifle. * * * * * The terrific dance in the clearing was going forward with madness which increased second by second. It had been a general debauch at first, with the whole thousand of the apes bellowing and squirming. Now a change was becoming apparent. Red eyes which had caught the glare of ultimate madness, focused upon the caciques, the Duca, and the great king, all of whom were swaying together on the central stage. As they looked, the horde of ape-men broke loose with a heightened frenzy of noise and movement too overwhelming for Kirby to follow. He leaned forward, making an effort to see what actions of Duca and king could be so influencing the congregation. And then he saw. Both of those central figures, the one with hair-covered giant's body and evilly grimacing face, the other with white robes and whipping silver hair, were definitely emulating the motions of a serpent! It was as if the angles and joints had disappeared from their bodies. They were become gliding lengths of muscle as swift, as loathsome in their supple dartings and coilings as any snake lashing across the expanses of primeval jungle. Lost in what they did, unconscious of the nightmare, demoniac legion before which they danced, they had eyes only for the empty, ominous hole beneath Naida's cage. As they circled the hole, drawing ever and ever closer to it, they opened and closed their arms with the motion of great serpent jaws biting and striking. "God in Heaven!" Kirby cried in a voice which shrilled with horror and then broke. It was not alone the Duca's dance which had wrung the shout from him. As Nina and Ivana shrieked and cowered, as Gori twitched, gasped, buried her head in trembling arms, Kirby knew that Naida was fully aware of what was going on--had been, perhaps, from the beginning. Slowly, numbly she raised herself from her huddled position, rose to her knees, and clutching with despairing hands at the sides of her cage, looked out from between the bars. * * * * * The king and Duca edged closer to the hole until they were dancing upon its very brink. From that position, they stared down into the depths, their faces tense and strained. And then their look became radiant, exalted, joyous. Suddenly the Duca leaped back. He shrieked something at the gargoyle ape, and they flung their arms high in a commanding, mighty signal which was directed across the nightmare legion of ape-men, to the drums. As Kirby winced in expectancy, the drums ceased to roar. Over the night smashed a hideous concussion of silence, deafening, absolute. And the ape-men--all of them--and the Duca, his caciques, and the king, ceased to dance. As if a whirlwind had hurled them, the caciques scattered in all directions. The Duca, having already leaped back from the gaping orifice, suddenly turned and ran with blurred speed over to the slobbering, deadly still front rank of the congregation. An instant later the king crouched down beside him, and the whole stage was left bare and deserted. Kirby gave one look at Naida, found her staring down, deeper and deeper down, into the hole which yawned beneath her so blackly. Then Kirby lowered his eyes until he, too, stared at the opening. Amidst the pressing silence there stole from the earth an uneasy sound as of some immense thing waking and stirring. Came a hissing note as of escaping steam. The tribes of the ape-men waited in silent rapture. Kirby saw Naida still looking down, and felt Ivana crouch against him, fainting. He held his rifle tighter, and continued to stare. Something red, like two small flames, licked up above the edge of the pit. Then Kirby gasped and all but went limp. Up and out into the moonlight slid a glistening white lump that moved from side to side and licked at the night with flickering black and red tipped forked tongue. The glistening white lump was the head of Quetzalcoatl, buried God of the People of the Temple. It was wider and bigger than an elephant's, and the round snake body could not have been encircled by a man's two arms. Kirby guessed at the probable length of the Serpent in terms of hundreds of feet. * * * * * Sick, numb, he glanced at Naida, who was still staring silently, and hitched his rifle half up to his shoulder. But he did not look down the sights yet. Although it was time, and more than time, that he fired, he would not do it until the last possible second, when nothing else remained. Slowly from the hole slid a fifteen or twenty-foot column of the body, and Quetzalcoatl, thus reared, looked about him with a pair of eyes immense and not like snake's eyes, but heavily lidded and lashed; eyes that stared in a wise, evil way; eyes glittering and round and black as ink. After a time the mouth opened in a silent snarl, showing great white fangs and recurved simitars of teeth. The head was snow white, leperous in its scabby, scaly roughness, with here and there a patch of what looked like greenish fungus. From the rounded body trailed a short, unnatural, sickening growth of--feathers. Old and evil and very wise the Feathered Serpent seemed as his forked tongue flickered in and out and he stared at the ape horde, who stared back silently. He seemed in no hurry to devote his attention to the cage set forth for his delectation. The black eyes rolled beneath their lashes, staring now at the Duca in his robes, and again at the huddled ape-people. But after ghastly seconds, Quetzalcoatl at last had seen enough. Again the moonlight glinted against simitar teeth as the great, white, puffy mouth yawned in its silent snarl. Quetzalcoatl reared his head a little higher, slid further from his hole, and then looked up at the dangling cage of barked withes. In Kirby's mind stirred cloudily a remembrance of moments in the past: the feel of Naida's first kiss, her look as they advanced to the altar in the temple. Then he saw things as they were now, with Naida surrounded by all the tribes of the apes, and with Quetzalcoatl staring from beneath heavily lidded lashes at the whiteness of her. Suddenly Kirby stirred to free his shoulder of Ivana's supine weight against it, and he made himself look down his rifle. He let the breath half out of his lungs, and nursed the trigger. * * * * * But he did not fire. All at once he started so violently that he almost hurtled from the tree. Suddenly, trembling, he lowered his rifle. "Oh, thank God!" he yelped in the silence of the night. The idea which had transformed him was perhaps the conception of a lunatic. But it was still an idea, and offered a chance. Again Kirby peered down his rifle. But he no longer aimed at Naida. As Quetzalcoatl lifted white fangs, Kirby aimed deliberately at him, and turned loose his fire. With the first shot, the Serpent lurched back from the cage, snapped his jaws, and closed evil, black eyes. From one lidded socket squirted dark blood. As a second and third shot crashed into the cavernous fanged mouth, and others ripped into the flat skull, Quetzalcoatl seemed dazed. His head wavered back and forth and his hiss filled the night, but he did nothing. But all at once Kirby felt that he was _going_ to do something in a second, and a great calm came upon him. He quickly jammed home a fresh clip of shells. "Nini! Ivana! Fire at the Serpent. Give him everything you've got! Do you understand? Fire! He thinks that the ape-people have hurt him, and he will be after them in a second. If we have any luck, he will do to them what we never could have done, and maybe destroy himself at the same time! Me, I'm going down there and get Naida now!" CHAPTER XIII No sooner did Kirby see comprehension in the girls' faces than he swung around and let go of his perch. As he crashed, caught the next limb below him, and let go to crash to another, he had all he could do to suppress a yelp of joy. For all at once every voice in the ape congregation was raised in howls and screams of devastated terror. He did not care how he got down from the tree. Seconds and half seconds were what counted. From the last limb above the ground he swung into space, and a split second later staggered to his feet, clutched his rifle, and started for the clearing. His lungs seemed collapsed and both ankles shattered. He did not care. Not when the ape screams were growing louder with every step he took. Not when he heard Nini and Ivana pouring down from their tree a continuation of the scorching fire he had started. Panting, his breath only half regained, but steeled to make the fight of his life, he tore from the jungle into the clearing just in time to see a twisting, pain-convulsed seventy-foot coil of white muscle lash up and strike Naida's cage a blow which knocked it like a ball in the air. Naida screamed and hung to the bars. But she was all right. It was not against her that Quetzalcoatl was venting his wrath: the blow had been blind accident. As Kirby stood at the clearing's edge, he knew to a certainty that Quetzalcoatl's reaction to sudden pain had been all he had dared hope. In front of him forty or fifty ape-bodies lay in a crushed heap. While yard after yard of the Serpent's bleached length streamed out of the hole, the hundreds of feet of coils already in the clearing suddenly whipped about a whole squadron of ape-men, and with a few constrictions annihilated them as if they had been ants. Across the clearing, the leperous head reared up as high as the trees and swooped down, fangs gleaming. The howls of the ape-men trying to flee, the screams of those who had been caught, rose until they became all one scream. * * * * * But Kirby had not left the safety of the tree merely to get a ringside view of carnage. He faced his next, his final task unhesitatingly. Straight out he leaped from the shadows of the jungle into the clearing, out into the presence of the beleagured, screaming ape-men. Well enough he knew that those creatures, despite their frenzy, might sight him and fall upon him at any second; well enough he knew that a single flick of the white coils all over the clearing could crush him instantly. But the time to worry about those hazards would be when they beset him. With a yell as piercing as any in the whole bedlam, Kirby rushed forward. High up in the moonlit vault of the night, swaying between the two poles which supported it, hung the white cage which was Naida's prison. By the time Kirby had sprinted fifty yards, he knew that his yells had reached Naida. For she staggered to her knees and looked straight at him. A second later, though, he realized that the almost inevitable recognition of him by ape-men had come to pass. Eight or ten of the creatures, left unmolested for a second by the Serpent, halted in the mad run they were making for the sheltering jungle, and while one pointed with hairy arm, the others let out shrieks. Kirby gritted his teeth in something like despair. Then he realized that the worst danger--Quetzalcoatl's blurred coils--was not threatening him so far. And he went on, straight toward the ape-men. He did not look where, how, or at whom he struck. All he knew was that his rifle blazed, and as he clubbed at soft flesh with the butt, blood spurted, and new screams filled the night. He felt and half saw big, stinking bodies going down, and clawed his way forward, around them, over them. Then he felt no more bodies, and knew that he was through. A little farther he ran over the trampled earth, and stopped and looked up. The howls of the living, the shrieks of the dying deafened him. Renewed shots from the rifles in the tree, made the Serpent lash about in a dazzling white blur, smashing trees, apes, everything in its path. But Kirby, finding himself still safe, scarcely heard or saw. His eyes, turned upward, saw one thing only. "Naida!" * * * * * She had snapped two of the withes of the cage and was leaning forward through the opening. Her face was livid with horror and exhaustion, but she was able to look at him with eyes that glowed. "You--you came!" she gasped. "You came to me!" In a flash Kirby jumped over to the poles and began to cast off one of the lines which held the cage aloft. "Get ready for a bump!" he shouted, as he lowered away, arms straining. Paying out the one line left the cage suspended from the second, but let it sweep from its position between the poles, down toward one pole. As the thing struck the tall support, Kirby bounded over to stand beneath it, only too sharply aware of the death waiting for him on every side, but ignoring it. Naida still hung suspended a good twenty feet above him, but there was no time to let go the other line. He braced himself and held up his arms. "Jump!" he yelled. Then he saw the white gown sweeping down toward him, felt the crash of a soft body against his, and staggered back. Recovered in a tenth of a second, he drew a deep breath, and looked at Naida beside him, tall and brave, unhurt. "Are you able to run?" he snapped, and then, the moment she nodded, motioned toward the jungle. Behind them, in front, on all sides, rose screams so horrible that he wondered even then if he would ever forget. As he started to run, he realized that when Naida had finally landed in his arms, the nearest squirming loop of the Serpent had been no more than four yards away, and that, right now, if their luck failed, a single unfortunate twist of the incredible hundreds of feet of white muscle could still end things for them. * * * * * But luck was not going to fail. Somehow Kirby knew it as they sprinted side by side, and the sheltering jungle loomed closer every second. And a moment later, something beside his own inner faith made him know it, too. "Look, Naida! Look!" he screeched all at once. At the upper end of the clearing, where an unthinkable slaughter was going on, there leaped out from amongst a surging mass of apes, leaped out from almost directly beneath a downward smashing blur of white snake folds, a figure which Kirby had not seen or thought about for many seconds. The Duca's robe hung in tatters from his body. Blood had smeared his white hair. His eyes were those of a man gone mad from fear. And as he escaped the tons of muscle which so nearly had engulfed him, he began to run even as Kirby felt himself running. Straight toward him and Naida, Kirby saw the man spurt, but whether the mad eyes recognized them or not, he could not tell, nor did he care. All at once his feeling that they would escape the clearing, became conviction. For suddenly the same single twitch of Quetzalcoatl's vast folds which might have finished them, if luck had not held, put an end to the Duca's retreat. At one moment the man's path was clear. The next-- Kirby, running for dear life, gasped, and heard Naida cry out beside him. The great loops flashed, twisted, and where had been an open way for the Duca, loomed a wall of scaly white flesh. The living wall twitched, closed in; and as the Duca dodged and leaped to no avail, a cry shrilled across the night--a cry that cut like a knife. * * * * * Kirby saw no more. But it was likely that most, if not all, of the caciques had gone with the Duca. Somehow, anyhow, in but a few seconds more, Kirby dove into the spot from which he had left the jungle to enter the clearing. As Naida pressed against him, winded but still strong, he found his best hopes for immediate retreat realized, for Gori, Nini, and Ivana, down from their tree, ran toward them. "She is all right," he said with a gesture which cut short the outbursts ready to come. "But we've got to keep going. Ivana, tell Gori that her people are gone, wiped out, but that if she will cast her lot with us, we will not forget what she has done. Come on!" With Gori leading them they ran, stumbling, recovering themselves, stumbling again. To breathe became an agony. But not until many minutes later, when they plowed into the cover of a fern belt whose blackness not even the moonlight had pierced, did Kirby call a halt. Here he swept a final glance behind him, listened long for sounds of pursuit, and relaxed a little only when none came to disturb the night stillness. However, that relaxation, now that he permitted it at last, meant something. The complete silence gave him final conviction that what he had said about the whole ape-people being destroyed was true. As for the Serpent--well, perhaps he was destroyed even as they were. Perhaps not. In any case the grip which Quetzalcoatl held upon the imagination of the People of the Temple had been destroyed by this night's work, and that was what counted most. The Serpent would be worshipped no longer. * * * * * Kirby reached out in the darkness and found Naida's hand. "Come along," he said to all of the party. "I think the past is--the past. And with Gori to guide us out of the jungle, and our own brains to guide us through the jungle of self-government after that, I think the future ought to be bright enough." Ivana and Nini both chuckled as they moved again, and Gori, hearing her name spoken in a kindly voice, twitched her ears appreciatively. Naida drew very close to Kirby. "What are you thinking about?" she asked presently. "The--temple," he answered. "About the crown which probably is still lying on the altar there?" Kirby looked up in surprise. "Why, I had forgotten about that!" "What was it, then?" "But what could I have been thinking about except how you looked when we came together in that gloomy place, and walked forward, side by side? _Now_ have I told you enough?" Naida laughed. "There is so much to be done!" Kirby exclaimed then. "As soon as possible, we must climb to the Valley of the Geyser, go on into the outer world, and there seek carefully for men who are willing, and fit, to come here. And that is only one task. Others come crowding to me every second. But first--" "What?" Naida asked softly. "The temple. Naida, we will reach the plateau sometime to-morrow. All of the girls who kept watch there will be waiting for us, and it will be a time of happiness. May we not, then, go to the temple? There will be no priests. But we will make our pledges without them. Tell me, may I hope that it will be so--to-morrow?" Naida did not answer at once. She did not even nod. But presently her shoulder, still fragrant with faint perfume, brushed his. She clasped his hand then, and as they walked on in silence, Kirby knew. The Reader's Corner [Illustration: The Readers' Corner A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories] "Literature" Dear Editor: After comparison with various other magazines which specialize in the publication of Science Fiction, we--The Scientific Fiction Library Ass'n, of 1457 First Ave., New York City--have found that your magazine, Amazing Stories, publishes stories to which the term "literature" may be applied in its real sense. A fine example of this is the story "Murder Madness," by Murray Leinster. Others of the finer novels are: "The Beetle Horde," by Victor Rousseau, and, up to the present installment, "Earth, the Marauder," by Arthur J. Burks. "Brigands of the Moon," by Ray Cummings, was interesting and well-written, but it was not literature (not a story which you will remember and read over again). Of the shorter stories, the novelettes, the best are: "Spawn of the Stars," by Charles W. Diffin, "Monsters of Moyen," by Arthur J. Burks, and "The Atom Smasher," by Victor Rousseau. Since the magazine started, there are only three stories that did not belong in the magazine, and were not even interesting. These are: "The Corpse on the Grating," by Hugh B. Cave; "The Stolen Mind," by M. Staley, and the last (I wonder that the editors who used such good sense in picking the other finer stories, let it pass), "Vampires of Venus," by Anthony Pelcher. May you keep up the high standard of fiction you are publishing at present.--Nathan Greenfeld, 873 Whitlock Ave., New York City. You See--It Didn't! Dear Editor: Firstly, let me say that I am sending a year's subscription to Astounding Stories, which will tell you that they are good. On the average, the stories are of good literary merit and plot. However, there is one thing that seems to be getting rather pushed into the background and that is the second part of your title, "Super-Science." If this is to be a Science Fiction magazine let us have it so. I am kicking against stories like "Murder Madness" and the like. They are really excellent in every way but just need that tincture of a little scientific background to make them super-excellent. "Brigands of the Moon" and "The Moon Master" seem to me more the type of story "our mag" should publish, from its name. No doubt this criticism will leave you cold and this effusion find its way into the nearest waste paper basket, but I find that a number of your readers in Australia think somewhat the same as I do. More brickbats--I hope not! and more bouquets--I hope so! the next time I write.--N.W. Alcock, 5 Gaza Rd., Naremburn, N.S.W., Australia. Not in de Head!! Dear Editor: I shall be glad to take advantage of your cordial invitation to come over to "The Readers' Corner." In the first place, I find your magazine the best of its kind on the market, and you are to be congratulated on having such excellent authors as Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster and Captain S. P. Meek. Nevertheless, there are so many things to be criticized that I hardly know where to begin. Let's start of with stories of future warfare. Although this class is potentially one of the most interesting, it is at the same time one of the most abused. Ray Cummings can write classics in this field, but the efforts of most the others are atrocities. I'll wager that their favorite childhood sport was mowing down whole regiments of lead soldiers with oxy-acetylene torches. It shows in their writings. Why can't they think of something original? Why can't they make their stories logical? The merits of a story are not dependent on the number of people wiped out by one blast of a death ray! But they all stick to the same old plot. A merciless but well-meaning scientist, or hordes from a foreign planet, wipe out thousands of American citizens at one blow. Hundreds of airplanes are disintegrated before they discover that the enemy is invulnerable. An ultimatum in domineering tones gives the terror-stricken populace forty-eight hours in which to surrender. But, all unknown to the dastardly villains, an obscure young scientist labors to save his country and the girl he loves. Fifteen minutes before the time set in the ultimatum he perfects a new weapon that soon sends the invaders to their well merited fate. Surely you realize how ridiculous the whole affair is. It is only slightly less nauseating than the plot used in the stories of advanced civilizations where the hero is conducted on a sight-seeing tour by the individual in whose path he popped upon entering this new world. I can't believe that more than a handful of my fellow beings are of such low intelligence that they can find enjoyment in such trash. You will notice that although every reader has a different list of favorite authors, Ray Cummings has his name in practically every list. He is easily your favorite author. Ray Cummings does not wipe out whole cities at one time. His heroes do not save the world by inventing a new weapon at a moment's notice. His wars are not of forty-eight hours' duration. His conquerors do not attempt to win the war by one great attack on New York City. Do try to have your authors write logical stories. I would now like to criticize the love element in your stories. I do not claim that there should be none whatever from cover to cover of your magazine, but I do claim that there should be none unless it really helps the plot. Most of your authors seem to think that a girl is necessary in every plot and so they bring her in, disregarding the fact that they do not know how to handle such material. The way it stands now, the heroine is introduced in a lame, routine fashion; is rescued once or twice; and accepts the hero as a husband in an altogether lame fashion. There are many other points but they can wait. Logical war stories, no Utopias or sight-seeing tours, sensible love element, plus your present policy will make a corking magazine.--Philip Waite, 3400 Wayne Ave., New York, N.Y. No Present Plans Dear Editor: Thanks for the new color cover. It certainly is a big improvement. The picture on the front of "our" magazine was just as astounding as the story by R. F. Starzl from which it was drawn. Let's have more stories from the pen of Mr. Starzl. In my opinion "Beyond the Heaviside Layer" is the best story I have read in Astounding Stories to date. I am very pleased that you intend to print a sequel to it. Now I would like to ask you a question. Do you intend to print an Annual or Quarterly, or do think you will ever enlarge the size of this magazine? I don't care so much whether you enlarge the magazine or not, but I certainly would like to read an Annual or Quarterly. Even though this letter meets the fate of thousands of other such letters and sees the inside of your wastebasket, I will at least have had the pleasure of writing to you and wishing "our" magazine success to the nth degree.--Forrest J. Ackerman, 236-½ N. New Hampshire, Los Angeles, Calif. "Excellent" to "So-So" Dear Editor: I notice a large number of subscribers are giving their opinions of Astounding Stories. I hate to be with the crowd, but I have to side with the majority in this case and say it's just about right. My favorite writers are R. F. Starzl (that "Planet of Dread" was a peach). Chas. W. Diffin, A. Merritt, Ralph Milne Farley, Murray Leinster and Ray Cummings. Now as to the August issue, here is how I rate them: "Planet of Dread"--more than 20c. worth at the first crack. A real story. "Lord of Space"--excellent. I meant to include Victor Rousseau in my list of favorites above. "The Second Satellite"--so-so. "Silver Dome"--so. "Earth the Marauder"--too deep for me. And that Beryl stuff is sheer bunk. "Murder Madness"--a real story. Get more like this. "The Flying City"--too much explanation and description and not enough action. Perhaps it looks like I'm sort of critical after all, but I didn't mean it just that way. What I'm driving at is that Astounding Stories is by far superior to its competitors, and I'm telling you so because it might make you feel better to know it. If you want to print this testimonial, go to it. To tell the truth, I'll be looking for it.--Leslie P. Mann, 1227 Ogden Ave., Chicago, Illinois. "Too Many Serials" Dear Editor: I have just finished the August issue, and I would like to tell you my opinion of it and the magazine as a whole. The stories in order of merit were: 1--"The Second Satellite"; 2--"The Flying City"; 3--"Silver Dome"; 4--"The Lord of Space"; 5--"The Planet of Dread." I won't pass judgment upon the serials, as I have not read all the parts. In "The Flying City" there are a number of points I am hazy about. How could Cor speak English? However, this could be cleared up by saying that Cor sent out men to get the language, etc. As a whole, Astounding Stories is a good magazine. There are too many serials, however, but since other readers like them I won't complain. You have a fine array of Science Fiction authors. With such writers as Vincent, Meek, Hamilton, Starzl and Ernst, your magazine can't be anything but a success. The September layouts look good to me. I hope it is.--E. Anderson, 1765 Southern Blvd., New York, N.Y. Thanks, Mr. Glasser Dear Editor: Somewhat belatedly I am writing to commend you most heartily on the August issue of Astounding Stories, which I consider by far the finest number since the inception of the magazine last January. The authors whose work appeared in this issue are among the greatest modern writers of fantasy and scientific fiction. Leinster, Burks, Hamilton, Rousseau--what a brilliant galaxy! And Starzl, Vincent, Rich; all writers of note. If ever a magazine merited the designation "all-star number," your August issue filled the bill. However, I am confident that even this superb achievement will be surpassed by some future edition of Astounding Stories, for each succeeding number to date has improved on the one before. And with a new Cummings novel in the offing, it seems the August issue, despite its excellence, will speedily be eclipsed.--Allen Glasser, 1510 University Ave., New York, N.Y. Are Our Covers Too "Gaudy"? Dear Editor: This is the first time that I have ventured to air my views to any magazine, but as yours interests me greatly I hereby shed my reticence. I believe, of all magazine of your type, you have come nearest perfection. But there are just a few things that bother me, and, no doubt, others like me. In the first place, must you make your covers as lurid and as contradictory to good design as they are? Really, I blush when my newsdealer hands me the gaudy thing. People interested in science do not usually succumb to circus poster advertising. Then there are the stories. I realize that you must cater to all tastes, but some of them are very childish, slightly camouflaged fairy tales. Science Fiction can be written very convincingly, as is testified by the stories of H. G. Wells, Ray Cummings, Jules Verne, and others. These writers attain their effects by the proper use of the English language, without silly and obviously tacked-on romance, the use of known scientific facts elaborated sensibly and by not trying to make a novel out of a short story. The stimulation of the imagination from Science Fiction is most enjoyable and I shall continue to read your magazine even though my fault finding is not considered, for, as I said before, you certainly have come nearer my ideal than any of the others.--Hector D. Spear, 867 W. 181st St., The Tri-Sigma Fraternity, New York City. Nossir--Our Astronomy Is O. K. Dear Editor: I am taking advantage of your invitation to write to you. Since Astounding Stories is available you have given me a lot of pleasure, and I hope you may get a little pleasure out of reading this. First, I want to say that you're hitting the ball as far as I'm concerned. I could hardly suggest an improvement. In the August issue I liked "Planet of Dread," by R. F. Starzl, best. When that thing in the "pipe" grabbed me, I mean Gunga, wow! And it gave me a lot of satisfaction to see the Master in "Murder Madness," by Murray Leinster, get it in the neck. "Lord of Space" was good, too. In fact all the stories were good. I have only read two or three I really did not like since you started. Say, I never heard of a planet named Inra. Don't you think your author ought to brush up on his astronomy? I also noticed some other authors are a little weak on astronomy; not that I'm complaining. The stories are O. K. with me.--Harry Johnson, 237 E. 128th St., New York City. Mr. Yetter Checks Up on Us Dear Editor: As I am a constant reader of Astounding Stories I wish to say that though S. P. Meek is one of my favorite authors his story, "Cold Light," was a little wrong when he called the "Silver Range" by the name of "Stillwater Range." I also think it would have been better if he had had a car take Dr. Bird and Carnes out to the hills, became even in Fallon a burro is a strange sight. But Meek, Cummings, Burks and all the rest of our famous authors' stories should be in the magazine often. If Verrill, Wells, Nathenson and Hamilton would also write, the magazine would be perfect. I like all the stories, though some seem to be copies, and others lack science. Here is for a long life for Astounding Stories!--Frank Yetter, 369 Railroad Ave., Fallon, Nevada. "Charm All Its Own" Dear Editor: Let me congratulate you. I have just read "The Planet of Dread," by R. F. Starzl, in your August issue of Astounding Stories. Real science, you know, is pretty rigidly limited, but super-science of the kind you seem to run has a freshness and charm all its own. I came upon your magazine quite by accident, and from now on no doubt will look for it as I stand before the racks of magazines, trying to decide upon something to read--Anton J. Sartori, 1330 W. 6th St., Los Angeles, Calif. Inra Could Exist Dear Editor: You will have to excuse this old telegraph office typewriter. It is all I have to express my appreciation to you for the tremendously interesting magazine you put out. I have only read the last three issues, but those are enough to convince me that Astounding Stories fills a long-felt want. I read all the others too, but from now on I'm going to look over their offerings at the stand before I buy. They have to go some to come up to the standard set by you, especially in the August copy. That story, "The Planet of Dread," was the most weird, exciting, thrilling, satisfying--in short, the most "astounding" story I have ever read. Nothing has seemed so real since I first read Wells' stories. I liked the characters. Poor Gunga. I could just see him, trying to sacrifice the man he obviously worshipped to stop that horrible noise. The picture of Gunga on the cover was just exactly what I would expect the Martian to look like. You have a good artist. I liked Mark Forepaugh, too. He didn't lose his nerve for one minute--not Mark. Who says civilization is going down, when the future holds men like that? Next to "The Planet of Dread" I liked "The Lord of Space." That was a vivid and well-drawn story, too. Those two, I think, were the outstanding stories for August. But I must not forget "Murder Madness," the serial; it was thrilling and convincing. That's the only kick I have: so many stories sound thin. I don't believe them when I read them. I also want to mention "The Forgotten Planet" and "From An Amber Block." Good, exciting, and you can believe them without too much strain. Oh, by the way, the author of "The Planet of Dread" made a mistake when he chose a mythical planet for his terrific adventures. Why not Venus or Mercury? If they have water the conditions on them would be similar to what he described for Inra. There ain't no such planet. But why expect perfection! I'm satisfied. I wish you success. That's a late wish. You're a success already.--Tom P. Fitzgerald, Newcastle, Nebraska. Thus Ended the Quest Dear Editor: This is my first letter to your magazine, and right away I'm asking for a pair of sequels. One of these is to "The Moon Master," by Charles W. Diffin. These sad endings depress me greatly, but if I looked at the ending first to see whether or not it was sad it would ruin the story; and besides sad endings usually have good stories in front of them. The other sequel I want is to "From The Ocean's Depths," by Sewell P. Wright, and its sequel "Into The Ocean's Depths." In looking over my back copies of the magazine I find that I have not disliked a single story. Thus endeth my quest for a brickbat. Are you going to put out a quarterly? Both the other Science Fiction magazines that I get do so, and I observe that it gives opportunity for a story of full novel length all in one piece. Not that I object to serials, but I like once in a while to sit down to a long story without having to dig out three or four magazines. However, please continue the long serials, for what is life without the element of suspense?--Hugh M. Gilmore, 920 N. Vista St., Hollywood, Cal. "The Readers' Corner" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here; so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! _The Editor._ * * * * * Transcriber Notes Typographical and hyphenation inconsistencies have been standardized. Otherwise, archaic and variable spelling is preserved, including 'obsidion' and 'tyranosaur'. Passages in italics indicated by _underscores_. 
29848	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. The other Clayton magazines are: ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and FOREST AND STREAM. _More Than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. II, No. 3 CONTENTS JUNE, 1930 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Water-colors from a Scene in "The Moon Master."_ OUT OF THE DREADFUL DEPTHS C. D. WILLARD 293 _Robert Thorpe Seeks Out the Nameless Horror That Is Sucking All Human Life Out of Ships in the South Pacific._ MURDER MADNESS MURRAY LEINSTER 310 _Bell, of the Secret "Trade," Strikes into the South American Jungle to Find the Hidden Stronghold of the Master--the Unknown Monster Whose Diabolical Poison Swiftly and Surely Is Enslaving the Whole Continent._ (Part Two of a Continued Novel.) THE CAVERN WORLD JAMES P. OLSEN 340 _A Great Oil Field Had Gone Dry--and Asher, Trapped Far under the Earth Among the Revolting Petrolia, Learns Why._ BRIGANDS OF THE MOON RAY CUMMINGS 352 _The Besieged Earth-men Wage Grim, Ultra-scientific War with Martian Bandits in a Last Great Struggle for Their Radium-ore--and Their Lives._ (Conclusion.) GIANTS OF THE RAY TOM CURRY 368 _Madly the Three Raced for their Lives up the Shaft of the Radium Mine, for Behind Them Poured a Stream of Hideous Monsters--Giants of the Ray!_ THE MOON MASTER CHARLES W. DIFFIN 384 _Through Infinite Deeps of Space Jerry Foster Hurtles to the Moon--Only to be Trapped by a Barbaric Race and Offered as a Living Sacrifice to Oong, their Loathsome, Hypnotic God._ (A Complete Novel.) THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 421 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York, N.Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Nathan Goldmann, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York. N.Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U.S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. Out of the Dreadful Depths _By C. D. Willard_ [Illustration: "_Help--help--the eyes--the eyes!_"] [Sidenote: Robert Thorpe seeks out the nameless horror that is sucking all human life out of ships in the South Pacific.] Robert Thorpe reached languidly for a cigarette and, with lazy fingers, extracted a lighter from his pocket. "Be a sport," he repeated to the gray haired man across the table. "Be a sport, Admiral, and send me across on a destroyer. Never been on a destroyer except in port. It ... would be a new experience ... enjoy it a lot...." In the palm-shaded veranda of this club-house in Manila, Admiral Struthers, U. S. N., regarded with undisguised disfavor the young man in the wicker chair. He looked at the deep chest and the broad shoulders which even a loose white coat could not conceal, at the short, wavy brown hair and the slow, friendly smile on the face below. A likable chap, this Thorpe, but lazy--just an idler--he had concluded. Been playing around Manila for the last two months--resting up, he had said. And from what? the Admiral had questioned disdainfully. Admiral Struthers did not like indolent young men, but it would have saved him money if he had really got an answer to his question and had learned just why and how Robert Thorpe had earned a vacation. "You on a destroyer!" he said, and the lips beneath the close-cut gray mustache twisted into a smile. "That would be too rough an experience for you, I am afraid, Thorpe. Destroyers pitch about quite a bit, you know." He included in his smile the destroyer captain and the young lady who completed their party. The young lady had a charming and saucy smile and knew it; she used it in reply to the Admiral's remark. "I have asked Mr. Thorpe to go on the _Adelaide_," she said. "We shall be leaving in another month--but Robert tells me he has other plans." "Worse and worse," was the Admiral's comment. "Your father's yacht is not even as steady as a destroyer. Now I would suggest a nice comfortable liner...." * * * * * Robert Thorpe did not miss the official glances of amusement, but his calm complacence was unruffled. "No," he said, "I don't just fancy liners. Fact is, I have been thinking of sailing across to the States alone." The Admiral's smile increased to a short laugh. "I would make a bet you wouldn't get fifty miles from Manila harbor." The younger man crushed his cigarette slowly into the tray. "How much of a bet?" he asked. "What will you bet that I don't sail alone from here to--where are you stationed?--San Diego?--from here to San Diego?" "Humph!" was the snorted reply. "I would bet a thousand dollars on that and take your money for Miss Allaire's pet charity." "Now that's an idea," said Thorpe. He reached for a check book in his inner pocket and began to write. "In case I lose," he explained, "I might be hard to find, so I will just ask Miss Allaire to hold this check for me. You can do the same." He handed the check to the girl. "Winner gets his thousand back, Ruth; loser's money goes to any little orphans you happen to fancy." "You're not serious," protested the Admiral. "Sure! The bank will take that check seriously, I promise you. And I saw just the sloop I want for the trip ... had my eye on her for the past month." "But, Robert," began Ruth Allaire, "you don't mean to risk your life on a foolish bet?" Thorpe reached over to pat tenderly the hand that held his check. "I'm glad if you care," he said, and there was an undertone of seriousness beneath his raillery, "but save your sympathy for the Admiral. The U. S. Navy can't bluff me." He rose more briskly from his chair. "Thorpe...." said Admiral Struthers. He was thinking deeply, trying to recollect. "Robert Thorpe.... I have a book by someone of that name--travel and adventure and knocking about the world. Young man, are you _the_ Robert Thorpe?" "Why, yes, if you wish to put it that way," agreed the other. He waved lightly to the girl as he moved away. "I must be running along," he said, "and get that boat. See you all in San Diego!" * * * * * The first rays of the sun touched with golden fingers the tops of the lazy swells of the Pacific. Here and there a wave broke to spray under the steady wind and became a shower of molten metal. And in the boat, whose sails caught now and then the touch of morning, Robert Thorpe stirred himself and rose sleepily to his feet. Out of the snug cabin at this first hint of day, he looked first at the compass and checked his course, then made sure of the lashing about the helm. The steady trade-winds had borne him on through the night, and he nodded with satisfaction as he prepared to lower his lights. He was reaching for a line as the little craft hung for an instant on the top of a wave. And in that instant his eyes caught a marking of white on the dim waters ahead. "Breakers!" he shouted aloud and leaped for the lashed wheel. He swung off to leeward and eased a bit on the main-sheet, then lashed the wheel again to hold on the new course. Again from a wave-crest he stared from under a sheltering hand. The breakers were there--the smooth swells were foaming--breaking in mid-ocean where his chart, he knew, showed water a mile deep. Beyond the white line was a three-master, her sails shivering in the breeze. The big sailing ship swung off on a new tack as he watched. Was she dodging those breakers? he wondered. Then he stared in amazement through the growing light at the unbroken swells where the white line had been. * * * * * He rubbed his sleepy eyes with a savage hand and stared again. There were no breakers--the sea was an even expanse of heaving water. "I could swear I saw them!" he told himself, but forgot this perplexing occurrence in the still more perplexing maneuvers of the sailing ship. This steady wind--for smooth handling--was all that such a craft could ask, yet here was this old-timer of the sea with a full spread of canvas booming and cracking as the ship jibed. She rolled far over as he watched, recovered, and tore off on a long, sweeping circle. The one man crew of the little sloop should have been preparing breakfast, as he had for many mornings past, but, instead he swung his little craft into the wind and watched for near an hour the erratic rushes and shivering haltings of the larger ship. But long before this time had passed Thorpe knew he was observing the aimless maneuvers of an unmanned vessel. And he watched his chance for a closer inspection. * * * * * The three-master _Minnie R._, from the dingy painting of the stern, hung quivering in the wind when he boarded her. There was a broken log-line that swept down from the stern, and he caught this and made his own boat fast. Then, watching his chance, he drew close and went overboard, the line in his hand. "Like a blooming native after cocoanuts," he told himself as he went up the side. But he made it and pulled himself over the rail as the ship drew off on another tack. Thorpe looked quickly about the deserted deck. "Ahoy, there!" he shouted, but the straining of rope and spars was his only answer. Canvas was whipping to ribbons, sheets cracked their frayed ends like lashes as the booms swung wildly, but a few sails still held and caught the air. He was on the after deck, and he leaped first for the wheel that was kicking and whirling with the swing of the rudder. A glance at the canvas that still drew, and he set her on a course with a few steadying pulls. There was rope lying about, and he lashed the wheel with a quick turn or two and watched the ship steady down to a smooth slicing of the waves from the west. And only then did the man take time to quiet his panting breath and look about him in the unnatural quiet of this strangely deserted deck. He shouted again and walked to a companionway to repeat the hail. Only an echo, sounding hollowly from below, replied to break the vast silence. * * * * * It was puzzling--inconceivable. Thorpe looked about him to note the lifeboats snug and undisturbed in their places. No sign there of an abandonment of the boat, but abandoned she was, as the silence told only too plainly. And Thorpe, as he went below, had an uncanny feeling of the crew's presence--as if they had been there, walked where he walked, shouted and laughed a matter of a brief hour or two before. The door of the captain's cabin was burst in, hanging drunkenly from one hinge. The log-book was open; there were papers on a rude desk. The bunk was empty where the blankets had been thrown hurriedly aside. Thorpe could almost see the skipper of this mystery ship leaping frantically from his bed at some sudden call or commotion. A chair was smashed and broken, and the man who examined it curiously wiped from his hands a disgusting slime that was smeared stickily on the splintered fragments. There was a fetid stench within his nostrils, and he passed up further examination of this room. Forward in the fo'c'sle he felt again irresistibly the recent presence of the crew. And again he found silence and emptiness and a disorder that told of a fear-stricken flight. The odor that sickened and nauseated the exploring man was everywhere. He was glad to gain the freedom of the wind-swept deck and rid his lungs of the vile breath within the vessel. He stood silent and bewildered. There was not a living soul aboard the ship--no sign of life. He started suddenly. A moaning, whimpering cry came from forward on the deck! Thorpe leaped across a disorder of tangled rope to race toward the bow. He stopped short at sight of a battered cage. Again the moaning came to him--there was something that still lived on board the ill-fated ship. * * * * * He drew closer to see a great, huddled, furry mass that crouched and cowered in a corner of the cage. A huge ape, Thorpe concluded, and it moaned and whimpered absurdly like a human in abject fear. Had this been the terror that drove the men into the sea? Had this ape escaped and menaced the officers and crew? Thorpe dismissed the thought he well knew was absurd. The stout wood bars of the cage were broken. It had been partially crushed, and the chain that held it to the deck was extended to its full length. "Too much for me," the man said slowly, aloud; "entirely too much for me! But I can't sail this old hooker alone; I'll have to get out and let her drift." He removed completely one of the splintered bars from the broken cage. "I've got to leave you, old fellow," he told the cowering animal, "but I'll give you the run of the ship." He went below once more and came quickly back with the log-book and papers from the captain's room. He tied these in a tight wrapping of oilcloth from the galley and hung them at his belt. He took the wheel again and brought the cumbersome craft slowly into the wind. The bare mast of his own sloop was bobbing alongside as he went down the line and swam over to her. Fending off from the wallowing hulk, he cut the line, and his small craft slipped slowly astern as the big vessel fell off in the wind and drew lumberingly away on its unguided course. She vanished into the clear-cut horizon before the watching man ceased his staring and pricked a point upon his chart that he estimated was his position. And he watched vainly for some sign of life on the heaving waters as he set his sloop back on her easterly course. * * * * * It was a sun-tanned young man who walked with brisk strides into the office of Admiral Struthers. The gold-striped arm of the uniformed man was extended in quick greeting. "Made it, did you?" he exclaimed. "Congratulations!" "All O.K.," Thorpe agreed. "Ship and log are ready for your verification." "Talk sense," said the officer. "Have any trouble or excitement? Or perhaps you are more interested in collecting a certain bet than you are in discussing the trip." "Damn the bet!" said the young man fervently. "And that's just what I am here for--to talk about the trip. There were some little incidents that may interest you." He painted for the Admiral in brief, terse sentences the picture of that daybreak on the Pacific, the line of breakers, white in the vanishing night, the abandoned ship beyond, cracking her canvas to tatters in the freshening breeze. And he told of his boarding her and of what he had found. "Where was this?" asked the officer, and Thorpe gave his position as he had checked it. "I reported the derelict to a passing steamer that same day," he added, but the Admiral was calling for a chart. He spread it on the desk before him and placed the tip of a pencil in the center of an unbroken expanse. "Breakers, you said?" he questioned. "Why, there are hundreds of fathoms here, Mr. Thorpe." * * * * * "I know it," Thorpe agreed, "but I saw them--a stretch of white water for an eighth of a mile. I know it's impossible, but true. But forget that item for a time, Admiral. Look at this." He opened a brief case and took out a log-book and some other papers. "The log of the _Minnie R._," he explained briefly. "Nothing in it but routine entries up to that morning and then nothing at all." "Abandoned," mused the Admiral, "and they did not take to the boats. There have been other instances--never explained." "See if this helps any," suggested Thorpe and handed the other two sheets of paper. "They were in the captain's cabin," he added. Admiral Struthers glanced at them, then settled back in his chair. "Dated September fourth," he said. "That would have been the day previous to the time you found her." The writing was plain, in a careful, well-formed hand. He cleared his throat and read aloud: "Written by Jeremiah Wilkens of Salem, Mass., master of the _Minnie R._, bound from Shanghai to San Pedro. I have sailed the seas for forty years, and for the first time I am afraid. I hope I may destroy this paper when the lights of San Pedro are safe in sight, but I am writing here what it would shame me to set down in the ship's log, though I know there are stranger happenings on the face of the waters than man has ever seen--or has lived to tell. * * * * * "All this day I have been filled with fear. I have been watched--I have felt it as surely as if a devil out of hell stood beside me with his eyes fastened on mine. The men have felt it, too. They have been frightened at nothing and have tried to conceal it as I have done.--And the animals.... "A shark has followed us for days--it is gone to-day. The cats--we have three on board--have howled horribly and have hidden themselves in the cargo down below. The mate is bringing a big monkey to be sold in Los Angeles. An orang-outang, he calls it. It has been an ugly brute, shaking at the bars of its cage and showing its ugly teeth ever since we left port. But to-day it is crouched in a corner of its cage and will not stir even for food. The poor beast is in mortal terror. "All this is more like the wandering talk of an old woman muttering in a corner by the fireside of witches and the like than it is like a truthful account set down by Jeremiah Wilkins. And now that I have written it I see there is nothing to tell. Nothing but the shameful account of my fear of some horror beyond my knowing. And now that it is written I am tempted to destroy--No, I will wait--" "And now what is this?" Admiral Struthers interrupted his reading to ask. He turned the paper to read a coarse, slanting scrawl at the bottom of the page. "The eyes--the eyes--they are everywhere above us--God help--" The writing trailed off in a straggling line. * * * * * The lips beneath the trim gray mustache drew themselves into a hard line. It was a moment before Admiral Struthers raised his eyes to meet those of Robert Thorpe. "You found this in the captain's cabin?" he asked. "Yes." "And the captain was--" "Gone." "Blood stains?" "No, but the door had been burst off its hinges. There had been a struggle without a doubt." The officer mused for a minute or two. "Did they go aboard another vessel?" he pondered. "Abandon ship--open the sea-cocks--sink it for the insurance?" He was trying vainly to find some answer to the problem, some explanation that would not impose too great a strain upon his own reason. "I have reported to the owners," said Thorpe. "The _Minnie R._ was not heavily insured." The Admiral ruffled some papers on his desk to find a report. "There has been another," he told Thorpe. "A tramp freighter is listed as missing. She was last reported due east of the position you give. She was coming this way--must have come through about the same water--" He caught himself up abruptly. Thorpe sensed that an Admiral of the Navy must not lend too credulous an ear to impossible stories. "You've had an interesting experience, Mr. Thorpe," he said. "Most interesting. Probably a derelict is the answer, some hull just afloat. We will send out a general warning." He handed the loose papers and the log book to the younger man. "This stuff is rubbish," he stated with emphasis. "Captain Wilkins held his command a year or so too long." "You will do nothing about it?" Thorpe asked in astonishment. "I said I would warn all shipping; there is nothing more to be done." "I think there is." Thorpe's gray eye were steady as he regarded the man at the desk. "I intend to run it down. There have been other such instances, as you said--never explained. I mean to find the answer." * * * * * Admiral Struthers smiled indulgently. "Always after excitement," he said. "You'll be writing another book, I expect. I shall look forward to reading it ... but just what are you going to do?" "I am going to the Islands," said Thorpe quietly. "I am going to charter a small ship of some sort, and I am going out there and camp on that spot in the hope of seeing those eyes and what is behind them. I am leaving to-night." Admiral Struthers leaned back to indulge in a hearty laugh. "I refused you a passage on a destroyer once," he said, "and it was an expensive mistake. I don't make the same mistake twice. Now I am going to offer you a trip.... "The _Bennington_ is leaving to-day on a cruise to Manila. I'll hold her an extra hour or two if you would like to go. She can drop you at Honolulu or wherever you say. Lieutenant Commander Brent is in command--you remember him in Manila, of course." "Fine," Thorpe responded. "I'll be there." "And," he added, as he took the Admiral's hand, "if I didn't object to betting on a sure thing I would make you a little proposition. I would bet any money that you would give your shirt to go along." "I never bet, either," said Admiral Struthers, "on a sure loss. Now get out of here, you young trouble-shooter, and let the Navy get to work." His eyes were twinkling as he waved the young man out. * * * * * Thorpe found himself comfortably fixed on the _Bennington_. Brent, her commander, was a fine example of the aggressive young chaps that the destroyer fleet breeds. And he liked to play cribbage, Thorpe found. They were pegging away industriously the sixth night out when the first S.O.S. reached them. A message was placed before the commander. He read it and tossed it to Thorpe as he rose from his chair. "S.O.S.," said the radio sheet, "_Nagasaki Maru_, twenty-four thirty-five N., one five eight West. Struck something unknown. Down at the bow. May need help. Please stand by." Captain Brent had left the room. A moment later, and the quiver and tremble of the _Bennington_ told Thorpe they were running full speed for the position of the stricken ship. But: "Twenty-four thirty-five North," he mused, "and less than two degrees west of where the poor old _Minnie R._ got hers. I wonder ... I wonder...." "We will be there in four hours," said Captain Brent on his return. "Hope she lasts. But what have they struck out there? Derelict probably, though she should have had Admiral Struthers' warning." Robert Thorpe made no reply other than: "Wait here a minute, Brent. I have something to show you." * * * * * He had not told the officer of his mission nor of his experience, but he did so now. And he placed before him the wildly improbable statement of the late Captain Wilkins. "Something is there," surmised Captain Brent, "just awash, probably--no superstructure visible. Your _Minnie R._ hit the same thing." "Something is there," Thorpe agreed. "I wish I knew what." "This stuff has got to you, has it?" asked Brent as he returned the papers of Captain Wilkins. He was quite evidently amused at the thought. "You weren't on the ship," said Thorpe, simply. "There was nothing to see--nothing to tell. But I know...." He followed Brent to the wireless room. "Can you get the _Nagasaki_?" Brent asked. "They know we are coming, sir," said the operator. "We seem to be the only one anywhere near." He handed the captain another message. "Something odd about that," he said. "_U. S. S. Bennington_," the captain read aloud. "We are still afloat. On even keel now, but low in water. No water coming in. Engines full speed ahead, but we make no headway. Apparently aground. _Nagasaki Maru._" "Why, that's impossible," Brent exclaimed impatiently. "What kind of foolishness--" He left the question uncompleted. The radio man was writing rapidly. Some message was coming at top speed. Both Brent and Thorpe leaned over the man's shoulder to read as he wrote. "_Bennington_ help," the pencil was writing, "sinking fast--decks almost awash--we are being--" In breathless silence they watched the pencil, poised above the paper while the operator listened tensely to the silent night. * * * * * Again his ear received the wild jumble of dots and dashes sent by a frenzied hand in that far-off room. His pencil automatically set down the words. "Help--help--" it wrote before Thorpe's spellbound gaze, "the eyes--the eyes--it is attack--" And again the black night held only the rush and roar of torn waters where the destroyer raced quivering through the darkness. The message, as the waiting men well knew, would never be completed. "A derelict!" Robert Thorpe exclaimed with unconscious scorn. But Captain Brent was already at a communication tube. "Chief? Captain Brent. Give her everything you've got. Drive the _Bennington_ faster than she ever went before." The slim ship was a quivering lance of steel that threw itself through foaming waters, that shot with an endless, roaring surge of speed toward that distant point in the heaving waste of the Pacific, and that seemed, to the two silent men on the bridge, to put the dragging miles behind them so slowly--so slowly. "Let me see those papers," said Captain Brent, finally. * * * * * He read them in silence. Then: "The eyes!" he said. "The eyes! That is what this other poor devil said. My God, Thorpe, what is it? What can it be? We're not all insane." "I don't know what I expected to find," said Thorpe slowly. "I had thought of many things, each wilder than the next. This Captain Wilkins said the eyes were above him. I had visions of some sky monster ... I had even thought of some strange aircraft from out in space, perhaps, with round lights like eyes. I have pictured impossibilities! But now--" "Yes," the other questioned, "now?" "There were tales in olden times of the Kraken," suggested Thorpe. "The Kraken!" the captain scoffed. "A mythical monster of the sea. Why, that was just a fable." "True," was the quiet reply, "that was just a fable. And one of the things I have learned is how frequently there is a basis of fact underlying a fable. And, for that matter, how can we know there is no such monster, some relic of a Mesozoic species supposed to be extinct?" He stood motionless, staring far out ahead into the dark. And Brent, too, was silent. They seemed to try with unaided eyes to penetrate the dark miles ahead and see what their sane minds refused to accept. * * * * * It was still dark when the search-light's sweeping beam picked up the black hull and broad, red-striped funnels of the _Nagasaki Maru_. She was riding high in the water, and her big bulk rolled and wallowed in the trough of the great swells. The _Bennington_ swept in a swift circle about the helpless hulk while the lights played incessantly upon her decks. And the watching eyes strained vainly for some signal to betoken life, for some sign that their mad race had not been quite vain. Her engines had been shut down; there was no steerage-way for the _Nagasaki Maru_, and, from all they could see, there were no human hands to drag at the levers of her waiting engines nor to twirl with sure touch the deserted helm. The _Nagasaki Maru_ was abandoned. The lights held steadily upon her as the _Bennington_ came alongside and a boat was swung out smartly in its davits. But Thorpe knew he was not alone in his wild surmise as to the cause of the catastrophe. "Throw your lights around the water occasionally," Brent ordered. "Let me know if you see anything." "Yes sir," said the man at the search-light. "I will report if I spot any survivors or boats." "Report anything you see," said Commander Brent curtly. "You go aboard if you want to," he suggested to Thorpe. "I will stay here and be ready if you need help." Thorpe nodded with approval as the small boat pulled away in the dark, for there was activity apparent on the destroyer not warranted by a mere rescue at sea. Gun-crews rushed to their stations; the tarpaulin covers were off of the guns, and their slender lengths gleamed where they covered the course of the boat. "Brent is ready," Thorpe admitted, "for anything." * * * * * They found the iron ladder against the ship's side, and a sailor sprang for it and made his way aboard. Thorpe was not the last to set foot on deck, and he shuddered involuntarily at the eery silence he knew awaited them. It was the _Minnie R._ over again, as he expected, but with a difference. The sailing vessel, before he boarded it, had been for some time exposed to the sun, while the _Nagasaki Maru_ had not. And here there were slimy trails still wet on the decks. He went first to the wireless room. He must know the final answer to that interrupted message, and he found it in emptiness. No radio man was waiting him there, nor even a body to show the loser of an unequal battle. But there was blood on the door-jamb where a body--the man's body, Thorpe was sure--had been smashed against the wood. A wisp of black hair in the blood gave its mute evidence of the hopeless fight. And the slime, like the trails on the deck, smeared with odorous vileness the whole room. Thorpe went again to the deck, and, as on the other ship, he breathed deeply to rid his lungs and nostrils of the abhorrent stench. The ensign in charge of the boarding party approached. "What kind of a rotten mess is this?" he demanded. "The ship is filthy and not a soul on board. Not a man of them, officers or crew, and the boats are all here. It's absolutely amazing, isn't it?" "No," Thorpe told him, "about what we expected. What do you make of this?" He touched with his foot a broad trail that shone wet in the _Bennington's_ lights. "The Lord knows," said the ensign in wonder. "It's all over and it smells like a rotten dead fish. Well, we will be going back, sir." He called to a petty officer to round up the men, and the boat was brought alongside. * * * * * Their return to the _Bennington_ again through a pathway of light that Thorpe knew was safe under the black muzzles of the destroyer's guns. Or was it, he asked himself. Safe! Was anything safe from this devilish mystery that could pluck each cowering human from the lowest depths of this steel freighter, that could drag her down in the water till the radio man sent his cry: "We are sinking!..." He told Brent quietly, after the ensign had reported, of the struggles in the wireless room and its few remaining traces. And he watched with the commander through the hour of darkness while the _Bennington_ steamed in slow circles about the abandoned hulk, while her search-lights played endlessly over the empty waters and the men at the guns cast wondering glances at their skipper who ordered such strange procedure when no danger was there. With daylight the scene lost its sense of mysterious threat, and Thorpe was eager to return to the abandoned ship. "I might find something," he said, "some trace or indication of what we have to fight." "I must leave," said Commander Brent. "Oh, I'm coming back, never fear," he added, at the look of dismay on Thorpe's face. The thought of leaving this mystery unsolved was more than that young seeker after adventure could accept. "I'm coming back," Brent repeated. "I've been in communication with the Admiral--Honolulu has relayed the messages through. All code, of course; we mustn't alarm the whole Pacific with our nightmares. The old man says to stick around and get the low-down on this damn thing." "Then why leave?" objected Thorpe. * * * * * "Because I am coming around to your way of thinking, Thorpe. Because I am as certain as can be that we have a monster of some sort to deal with ... and because I haven't any depth charges. I want to run up to the supply station at Honolulu and get a couple of ash-cans of TNT to lay on top of the brute if we sight him." "Glory be!" said Thorpe fervently. "That sounds like business. Go and get your eggs and perhaps we can feed them to this devil--raw.... And I think I'll stay here, if you will be back by dark." "Better not," the other objected; but Thorpe overruled him. "This thing attacks in the dark," he said. "I will lay a little bet on that. It left the orang-outang on the _Minnie R._--quit at the first sign of daylight. I will be safe through the day, and besides, the beast has gutted this ship. It won't return, I imagine. And if I stay there for the day--live as they lived, the men who manned that ship--I may have some information that will be of help when you get back. But for Heaven's sake, Brent, don't stop to pick any flowers on the way." "It's your funeral," said Brent not too cheerfully. "The old man said to give you every assistance, and perhaps that includes helping you commit suicide." But Robert Thorpe only laughed as Commander Brent gave his orders for a small boat to be lowered. A ship's lantern and rockets for night signals were taken at the officer's orders. "We'll be back before dark," he said, "but take these as a precaution." One favor Thorpe asked--that the ship's carpenter go over with him and help him to make a strong-barred retreat of the wireless cabin. "And I'll talk to you occasionally," he told Brent. "I tried the key while I was aboard; the wireless is working on its batteries." He waved a cheery good-by as the small boat pulled away. "And hurry back," he called. The destroyer commander nodded an emphatic assent. * * * * * On board the _Nagasaki Maru_, Thorpe directed the carpenter and his helpers in the work he wanted done. The man seemed to know instinctively where to put his hands on needed supplies, and the result was a virtual cage of strong oak bars enclosing the wireless room, and braces of oak to bar the single door. Thorpe was not assuming any bravado in his feeling of safety, but he was doing what he had done in many other tight corners, and he prepared his defences in advance. These included weapons of offense as well. As the boat with the destroyer's men pulled back to the _Bennington_, he placed in easy reach in a corner of the room a heavy calibered rifle he had taken from his belongings. And, still, with all his feeling of security, there was a strange depression fell upon him when the _Bennington's_ narrow hull was small upon the horizon, and then that, too, was gone and only the heaving swells and the wallowing hulk were his companions. Only these? He shivered slightly as he thought of that unseen watcher with the devil-eyes whose presence Captain Wilkins had felt--and his men, and the poor terrified ape! He deliberately put from his mind the thought of this; no use to start the day with morbid fears. He went below to examine the cabins. But he carried the heavy elephant gun with him wherever he went. * * * * * Below decks the signs of the marauder were everywhere, yet there was little to be learned. The slimy trails dried quickly and vanished, but not before Thorpe had traced them to the uttermost depths of the ship. There was not a nook or corner that had gone unsearched in the horrible quest for human food. And one thing impressed itself forcibly upon the man's mind. He found a lantern, and he used it of necessity in his explorations, but this thing had gone through the dark and with unerring certainty had found its way to every victim. "Can it see in the dark?" Thorpe questioned. "Or...." He visioned dimly some denizen of the vast depths, living beyond the limits of the sun's penetration, far in the abysmal darkness where its only light must be self-made. But his mind failed in the attempt to picture what manner of horror this thing might be. Even in the hold its evil traces were found. There were tiers of metal drums that still shone wet in his lantern's light. Calcium carbide--for making acetylene, he supposed--marked "Made in U.S.A." The _Nagasaki_ must have been westward bound. * * * * * He went, after an hour or so, to the wireless room, and only when he relaxed in the safety of his improvised fortress did he realize how tense had been every nerve and muscle through his long search. He tried the wireless and got an instant response from the destroyer. "Don't shoot it too fast," he spelled out slowly to the distant operator: "I am only a dub. Just wanted to say hello and report all O.K." "Fine," was the steady, careful response. "We have had a little trouble with our condensers--" There was a short pause, then the message continued, this portion dictated by the commander. "Delay not important. We will be back as agreed. Have picked up _S. S. Adelaide_ bound east in your latitude. Warned her to take northerly course account derelict. See you later. Signed, Brent, commanding _U. S. S. Bennington_." The man in the barred room tapped off his acknowledgement and closed the key. He suddenly realized he had had no breakfast, and the hours had been slipping past. He took his gun again and went down to the galley to prepare some coffee. It was not the time or place for an enjoyable meal, but he would have relished it more had he not pictured the _Adelaide_ and her lovely owner steaming across these threatening seas. He knew the captain of the _Adelaide_. "Obstinate pigheaded old Scotchman!" "Hope he takes Brent's advice. Of course Brent couldn't tell him the truth. We can't blat this wild yarn all over the air or the passenger lines would have our scalps. But I wish the _Adelaide_ was safe in Manila." * * * * * His explorations in the afternoon were half-hearted and perfunctory. There was nothing more to be learned. But he had seen in his mind some vague outline of what they must meet. He saw a something, mammoth, huge, that could grasp and hold an ocean freighter--against whose great body he had seen the waves dash in a line of white spray. Yet a something that could force its way down narrow passages, could press with terrific strength on bolted doors and crush them inward, wrecked and splintered. Some serpentine thing that felt and saw its way and crawled so surely through the dark--found its prey--seized it--and carried off a man as easily as it might a mouse. No octopus, no matter what proportions, filled the description. He gave up trying to see too clearly the awful thing. And he kept away from the ship's rail when once he had ventured near. For there had come to him a feeling of fear that had sent the waves of cold trickling and prickling up his spine. Was there something really there?... A waiting lurking horror in the depths? "The eyes," he thought, "the eyes!..." And he went more quickly than he knew to his barred retreat where again he might breathe quietly. * * * * * The position of the deserted ship was south of the regular steamer lanes on the TransPacific run. Only a trace of smoke on the northern horizon marked through the afternoon the passage of other craft. It was a long and lonely vigil for the waiting man. But the _Bennington_ would return, and he listened in at intervals hoping to hear her friendly signal. The batteries operating the _Nagasaki's_ wireless were none too strong; Thorpe saved their strength, though he tried at times to raise the _Bennington_ somewhere beyond his reach. The sun was touching the horizon when he got his first response. "Keep up the old nerve," admonished the slow, careful sending of the _Bennington's_ operator. "We have been delayed but we are on our way. Signed, Brent." The man in the wireless room placed the oak bars across the door, and tried to believe he was nonchalant and unafraid as he laid out extra clips of cartridges. But his eyes persisted in following the sinking sun, and he watched from within his cage the coming of the quick dark. The protecting glare of day must be unbearable to this monster from the lightless depths, and daylight was vanishing. Thorpe's mind was searching for additional means of defense. He found it in the cargo he had seen. The drums of carbide! He could scatter it on the deck--it reacted with water, and those slimy arms, if they came and touched it, could find the contact hot. He took his lantern and went hastily below to stagger back with a drum upon his shoulder. In the half-light that was left him he forced the cover and then rolled the drum about the swaying deck. The gray, earthly lumps of carbide formed erratic lines. Useless perhaps, he admitted, but the threatening dark forced the man to use every means at his command. * * * * * He was scattering the contents of a second drum when he stiffened abruptly to rigid attention. The ship, thrown broadside to the wide-spaced swells, had rolled endlessly with a monotonous motion. But now the deck beneath him was steadying. It assumed an abnormal levelness. The boat rose and fell with the waves, but it no longer rolled. There was something beneath holding, drawing on it. Thorpe knew in that frozen second what it meant. The drum clattered to the rail as he dashed for his room. Gun in hand, he watched with staring eyes where the deserted deck showed dim and vague in the light of the stars and the bow of the ship was lost in the uncertain dark of night. Wide-eyed he watched into the blackness, and he listened with desperate attention for some slightest sound beyond the splashing of waves and the creaking of spars. Far in the west a light appeared, to glow and vanish and glow again in the tumbling waters. The _Bennington_! His heart leaped at the thought, then sank as he knew the destroyer's lights would not appear from that direction. Through a slow hour that seemed an eternity the oncoming ship drew near, and he knew with a sudden, startling certainty that it was the _Adelaide_--and Ruth Allaire--coming on, through into the horror awaiting. He leaned forward tensely as a sound reached his ears. A ghostly echo of a sound, like the softest of smooth, slipping fabric upon hard steel. And as he listened, before his staring eyes, a something came between him and the lighted yacht. It wavered and swung in the darkness. It was formless, uncertain of outline, and it swung in the night out beyond the ship's rail till it suddenly neared, waved high overhead, and the cold light of the stars shone in pale reflection from an enormous, staring eye. It surmounted a serpentine form that took shape in the dim radiance without and came lower in undulating folds to crash heavily upon the deck. * * * * * Thorpe's hand was upon the wireless key. He had wanted to warn off the yacht, but not till the thud of the creature on the bare deck proved its reality could he force his cold fingers to press the key. Then, fast as his inexperience allowed, he called frantically for the _Adelaide_. He spelled her name, over and over.... Would the sleepy operator never answer? The _Bennington_ broke in one. "Is that you, Thorpe? What is up?" they demanded. But Thorpe kept up his slow spelling of the yacht's name. He must get a warning to them! Then he realized that the _Bennington_ could do it better. "_Bennington_," he called, "_Adelaide_ approaching. I am attacked. Warn them off. Warn them--" His frantic, hissing dots and dashes died immediately. Beneath his feet the _Nagasaki Maru_ was rolling again, swinging free to the lift and thrust of the swells beneath. "Good God!" he shouted aloud in his lonely cabin. "It's gone for the yacht. _Adelaide_--turn north--full speed--" he clicked off on a slow, stuttering key. "Head north. You are being attacked!" He groaned again as he saw the _Adelaide's_ shining ports swing away from the safety of the north; the ship broached broadside to the waves and came slowly to a stop. "_Bennington_," he radioed. "Brent--it has got the _Adelaide_. Help--hurry! I am going over." He tore wildly at the barred door, and he made a dash across the deck to slip sprawling in a heap against the rail where the slimy traces of the recent visitor stretched glistening on the deck. * * * * * How he lowered the boat Thorpe never knew. But he knew there was one that the men from the _Bennington_ had swung over the side, and tore madly at the tackle to let the boat crash miraculously upright into the sea. He slung the rifle about his neck with a rope end--there were cartridges in his pocket--and he went down the dangling lines and cast off in a frenzy of haste. What could he do? He hardly dared form the question. Only this stood clear and unanswerable in his mind: The yacht was in the monster's grip, and Ruth Allaire was there on board. Ruth Allaire, so smiling, so friendly, so lovable! Food for that horror from the depths.... He rowed with super-human strength to drive the heavy boat across the wave-swept distance that separated them. Between gasping breaths he turned at times to glance over his shoulder and correct his course. And now, as he drew near, he saw though indistinct the unmistakable, snakelike weaving of horrible tenuous fingers, rolling and groping about the yacht. They were plain as he drew alongside. The trim ship rose and fell with the water, while over her side where Thorpe approached swung a long, white monstrous rope of flesh. It retreated like the lash of a whip, and the horrified watcher saw as it went the struggling figure of a man in the grasp of flabby lips. And above them a single eye glared wickedly. Another vile, twisting arm rose from the afterdeck with a screaming figure in its grasp and vanished into the water beyond the yacht. There were others writhing about the decks. Thorpe saw them as he made his boat fast and clambered aboard. * * * * * A wave of reeking air enveloped him as he reached the deck; the nauseous stench from the monster's tentacles was horrible beyond endurance. He gagged and choked as the stifling breath entered his lungs. A huge rope of slippery, throbbing flesh stretched its twisted length toward the stern. It contracted as he watched into bulging muscular rings and withdrew from the afterdeck. The deadly end of it stopped in mid-air not twenty feet from where he stood. The jawlike pincers on it held the limp form of an officer in its sucking grip, while above, in a protuberance like a gnarled horn, a great eye glared into Thorpe's with devilish hatred. The beak opened sharply to drop its unconscious burden upon the deck, and the watching man, petrified with horror, saw within the gaping maw great sucking discs and beyond them a brilliant glow. The whole cavernous pit was aflame with phosphorescent light. Dimly he knew that this light explained the ability of the beastly arms to grope so surely in the dark. The eye narrowed as the gaping, fleshy jaws distended, and Robert Thorpe, in a flash that galvanized him to action, was aware that his fight for life was on. He fired blindly from the hip, and the recoil of the heavy gun almost tore it from his hands. But he knew he had aimed true, and the toothless, seeking jaws whipped in agony back into the sea. There were other arms whose eyes were searching the stern of the yacht. Thorpe plunged frenziedly down a companionway for the cabin he knew was Ruth Allaire's. Was he in time? Could he save her if he found her? His mind was in a turmoil of half-formed plans as he rushed madly down the corridor to find the body of the girl a limp huddle across the threshold of her cabin. * * * * * She was alive; he knew it as he swung her soft body across one shoulder and staggered with his burden up the stairs. If he could only breathe! His throat was tight and strangling with the reeking putrescence in the air. And before his eyes was a picture of the strong oak bars of his own retreat. Somehow, some way, he must get back to the abandoned ship. An eye detected him as he came on deck, and he dropped the limp body of the girl at his feet as he swung his rifle toward the glowing light within the opening jaws. The sucking discs cupped and wrinkled in dread readiness in the fleshy, toothless opening. He emptied the magazine into the head, though he knew this was only a feeler and a feeder for a still more horrible mouth in the monstrous body that rose and fell tremendously in the dark waters beyond. But it was typical of Robert Thorpe that even in the horror and frenzy of the moment he rammed another clip of cartridges into his rifle before he stooped to again raise the prostrate figure of Ruth Allaire. The forward deck for the moment was clear; it rose high with the weight of the writhing, twisting arms that weighed down the stern of the yacht where the crew had taken refuge. To think of helping them was worse than folly--he dismissed the thought as another great eye came over the rail. Once more he used the gun, then lowered the girl to the waiting boat, and cast off and rowed with the stealthiest of strokes into the dark. * * * * * Behind him were whipping points of light above the white brilliance of the yacht _Adelaide_. The boat was tossing in great waves that came from beyond, where a body, incredibly huge, was tearing the waters to foam. There were ghostly arms that shone in slimy wetness, that lashed searchingly in all directions, as the monster gave vent to its fury at Thorpe's attack. There were screaming human figures grasped in many of the jaws, and the man was glad with a great thankfulness that the girl's stupor could save her from the frightful sight. He dared to row now, and his breath was coming in great choking sobs of sheer exhaustion when at last he pulled the senseless form of Ruth Allaire to the deck of the _Nagasaki_ and drew her within the frail shelter of the wireless room. Stout had the oaken bars appeared, and safe his refuge in the barricaded room, but that was before he had seen in horrible reality the fearful fury of this monster from the deep. He placed the braces against the door and turned with hopeless haste to seize the wireless key. "_Bennington_," he called, and the answer came strong and clear. "Where are you.... Help--" His fingers froze upon the key and the answering message in his ears was unheeded as he watched across the water the destruction of the yacht. This craft that had dared to resist the onset of the brute, to fight against it, to wound it, was feeling the full fury of the monster's rage. The gleaming lights of the doomed ship were waving lines that swept to and fro in the grip of those monstrous arms. The boat beneath Thorpe's feet was tossing in the waves that told of the titanic struggle. He had meant to look south for some sign of the oncoming destroyer, but in fearful fascination he stared spellbound where the masts of the trim yacht swept downward into the waves, where the green of her star-board lantern glowed faintly for an instant, then vanished, to leave only the darkness and the starlit sea. * * * * * A voice aroused him from his stupefaction. "Where am I ... where am I?" Ruth Allaire was asking in a frightened whisper. "That terrible thing--" She shuddered violently as memory returned to show again the horror she had witnessed. "Where are we, Robert? And the _Adelaide_--where is it?" Thorpe turned slowly. The insane turmoil of the past hour had numbed his brain, stunned him. "The _Adelaide_--" he mumbled, and groped fumblingly for coherent thoughts. He stared at the girl. She was half-risen from the floor where he had laid her, and the sight of her quivering face brought reason again to his mind. He knelt tenderly beside her and raised her in his arms. "Where is the yacht?" she repeated. "The _Adelaide_?" "Gone," Thorpe told her. "Lost!" A thought struck him. "Was your father on board, Ruth?" Ruth was dazed. "Lost," she repeated. "The _Adelaide_--lost!... No," she added in belated response to Thorpe's question. "Daddy was not there. But the men--Captain MacPherson ... that horrible monster...." She buried her face in her hands as she realized what Thorpe's silence meant. He held the trembling figure close as the girl whispered: "Where are we, Robert? Are we safe?" "We may win through yet," he told her through grim, set lips. He realized abruptly that he was seeing the face of Ruth Allaire in the light. He had left a lantern burning! He withdrew his arms from about her and sprang quickly to his feet to put out the tell-tale light. In darkness and quiet was their only safety. And he knew as he sprang that he had waited too long. A soft body crashed heavily on the deck outside. * * * * * The girl's voice was shrill with terror as she began a question. Thorpe's hand pressed upon her lips in the dark where he stood waiting--waiting. A luminous something was glowing outside the cabin. It searched and prodded about the deserted deck to whip upward at the audible hiss of wet carbide. Another appeared; the rifle came slowly to the man's shoulder as a pair of jaws gaped glowingly beyond the windows and an eye stared unblinkingly from its hornlike sheath. It crashed madly against the walls of the wireless room to shatter the glass and make kindling of the woodwork of the sash. Thorpe fired once and again before the specter vanished, and he knew with sickening certainty that the wounds were only messages to some central brain that would send other ravening tentacles against them. But the oak bars had held. He reached in the brief interval for the key, and he sent out one final call for help. He strained his ears against the head-set for some friendly human word of hope. "--rocket," the wireless man was saying. "Fire rockets. We can't find--" A swift, writhing arm wrapped crushingly about the cabin as the message ceased. * * * * * Thorpe seized his rifle and fired into the gray mass that bulged with terrible muscular contractions through the window. He fired again to aim lengthways of the arm and inflict as damaging a wound as his weapon would permit. The arm relaxed, but a score of others took up the attack. Again the sickening stench was about them as gaping jaws gleamed fiery beneath the hateful eyes and tore at the flimsy structure. Thorpe jammed more cartridges into the gun and fired again and again, then dropped the weapon to fumble for the rockets that Brent had given him. He lighted one with trembling fingers; the first ball shot straight into a waiting mouth. Another ignited a searing flame of acetlylene gas where a wet arm writhed in the hot carbide trail. The man leaned far out through the broken window. No time to look around. He let the red flares stream upward high into the air, then dropped the rocket hissing on the deck to seize once more the rifle. A mass of muscle crashed against the door; it went to splinters under the impact, and only the two oak bars remained to hold in check the horrible tentacles and the darting heads. One mouth closed to a pointed end that forced its way between the bars. The oak gave under the strain as Robert Thorpe pulled vainly at an empty gun. Beside him rose shrieks of terror as the monstrous thing came on, and Thorpe beat with frantic fury with his clubbed rifle at the fleshy snout. He knew as he swung the weapon that the shrieks had ceased, then smiled grimly in the numbing horror as he realized that Ruth Allaire was beside him. A piece of oak was in her hands, and she was striking with desperate and silent fury at the slimy flesh. * * * * * It was the end, Thorpe knew, and suddenly he was glad. The nightmare was over, and the end was coming with this girl beside him. But Robert Thorpe was fighting on to the last, and he tried to make his blows reach outward to the hateful devilish eye. He saw it plainly now, for the deck was a glare of white light. He saw the eye and the thick arm behind it and the score of others that made a heaving, knotted mass were brilliant and wetly shining. He could see now how best to strike, and he turned his gun to thrust with the barrel at the eye. It withdrew before his stroke--the jaws slid backward to the deck. There were sounds that hammered at his ears. "The guns! The guns!" a girl was screaming. Across the deck, where a search-light played, huge arms were lashing backward toward the sea. The waves beyond had vanished where a monstrous body shone wetly black in a blinding glare. And the man hung panting, helpless, on the one remaining bar across the doorway to look where, beyond, her forward guns a spitting stream of staccato flashes, the _Bennington_ tore the waves to high-thrown spray. Her four clean funnels swung far over as the slim ship, with her stabbing, crashing guns, swung in a sweeping circle to bear down upon the black bulk slowly sinking in the search-light's glare. The vast body had vanished as the destroyer shot like one of her own projectiles over the spot where the beast had lain. And then, where she had passed, the sea arose in a heaving mound. The big ship beneath the watching man shuddered again as another depth charge grumbled its challenge to the master of the deeps. * * * * * The warship went careening on an arc to return and throw the full glare of her search-lights on the scene. They lighted a vast sea, strangely stilled. An oily smoothness leveled waves and ironed them out to show more clearly the convulsions of a torn mass that rose slowly into sight. Thorpe in some way found himself outside the cabin. And he knew that the girl was again beside him as he stared and stared at what the waters held. A bloated serpent form beyond believing was struggling in the greasy swell. Its waving tentacles again were flung aloft in impotent fury, and, beneath them, where their thick ends jointed the body, a head with one horrible eye rose into the air. A thick-lipped mouth gaped open, and the gleam of molars shone white in the blinding glare. The twisting body shuddered throughout its vast bulk, and the waving arms and futile staring eyes dropped helpless into the splashing sea. Again the revolting head was raised as the destroyer sent a rain of shells into its fearful mass. Once more the oily seas were calm. They closed over the whirling vortex where a denizen of the lightless depths was returning to those distant, subterranean caverns--returning as food for what other voracious monsters might still exist. The man's arm was about the figure of the girl, trembling anew in a fresh reaction from the horror they had escaped, when a small boat drew alongside. "They're safe," a hoarse voice bellowed back to the destroyer, and a man came monkeywise up a rope where Thorpe had launched his boat. And now, as one in a dream, Thorpe allowed the girl to be taken from him, to be lowered to the waiting boat. He clambered down himself and in silence was rowed across to the destroyer. "Thank God!" said Brent, as he met them at the rail. "You're safe, old man ... and Miss Allaire ... both of you! You let off that rocket just in time; we couldn't pick you up with our light-- "And now," he added, "we're going back; back to San Diego. The Admiral wants a word of mouth report." Thorpe stilled him with a heavy gesture. "Give Ruth an opiate," he said dully. "Let her forget ... forget!... Good God, can we ever forget--" He stumbled forward, heedless of Brent's arm across his shoulders as the surgeon took the girl in charge. * * * * * Admiral Struthers, U.S.N., leaned back from his desk and blew a cloud of smoke thoughtfully toward the ceiling. He looked silently from Thorpe to Commander Brent. "If either one of you had come to me with such a report," he said finally, "I would have found it incredible; I would have thought you were entirely insane, or trying some wild hoax." "I wish it were a damn lie," said Thorpe quietly. "I wish I didn't have to believe it." There were new lines about the young-old eyes, lines that spoke what the lips would not confess of sleepless nights and the impress of a picture he could not erase. "Well, we have kept it out of the papers," said the Admiral. "Said it was a derelict, and the wild messages floating about were from an inexperienced man, frightened and irresponsible. Bad advertising--very--for the passenger lines." "Quite," Commander Brent agreed, "but of course Mr. Thorpe may want to use this in his next book of travel. He has earned the right without doubt." "No," said Thorpe emphatically. "No! I told you, Brent, there was often a factual basis for fables--remember? Well, we have proved that. But sometimes it is best to leave the fables just fables. I think you will agree." A light step sounded in the corridor beyond. "Nothing of this to Miss Allaire," he said sharply. The men rose as Ruth Allaire entered the room. "We were just speaking," said the Admiral with an engaging smile beneath his close-cut mustache, "of the matter of a bet. Mr. Thorpe has won handily, and he has taught me a lesson." He took a check book from his desk. "What charity would you like to name, Miss Allaire? That was left to you, you remember." "Some seamen's home," said Ruth Allaire gravely. "You will know best, if you two are really serious about that silly bet." "That bet, my dear," said Robert Thorpe with smiling eyes, "was very serious ... and it has had most serious consequences." He turned to the waiting men and extended a hand in farewell. "We are going to Europe, Ruth and I," he told them. "Just rambling around a bit. Our honeymoon, you know. Look us up if you're cruising out that way." Murder Madness PART TWO OF A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Murray Leinster_ [Illustration: "_As the madness grew, the two men fought. They were murder mad. The local sub-deputy gave his guests the thrill of watching maniacs battling to the death._"] [Sidenote: Bell, of the secret "Trade," strikes into the South American jungle to find the hidden stronghold of The Master--the unknown monster whose diabolical poison swiftly and surely is enslaving the whole continent.] Seven United States Secret Service men have disappeared in South America. Another is found--a screaming homicidal maniac. It is rumored that they are victims of a diabolical poison which produces "murder madness." Charley Bell, of the "Trade"--a secret service organization that does not officially exist--discovers that a sinister system of slavery is flourishing in South America, headed by a mysterious man known only as The Master. This slavery is accomplished by means of a poison which causes its victims to experience a horrible writhing of the hands, followed by a madness to do murder, two weeks after the poison is taken. The victims get relief only with an antidote supplied through Ribiera, The Master's Chief Deputy; but in the antidote there is more of the poison which again in two weeks will take effect. And so it is that a person who once receives the poison is forever enslaved. [Illustration] Bell learns that Ribiera has kidnapped Paula Canalejas, daughter of a Brazilian cabinet minister--himself a victim--who has killed himself on feeling the "murder madness," caused by the poison, coming over him. Bell corners Ribiera in his home, buries the muzzles of two six-guns in his stomach, and demands that he set Paula free. CHAPTER VI In this room the electric lights were necessary at all times. And it occurred to Bell irrelevantly that perhaps there were no windows because there might be sometimes rather noisy scenes within these walls. And windows will convey the sound of screaming to the outside air, while solid walls will not. He stood alert and grim, with his revolvers pressing into Ribiera's flabby flesh. His fingers were tensed upon the triggers. If he killed Ribiera, he would be killed. Of course. And men and women he had known and liked might be doomed to the most horrible of fates by Ribiera's death. Yet even the death or madness of many men was preferable to the success of the conspiracy in which Ribiera seemed to figure largely. Ribiera looked up at him with the eyes of a terrified snake. There was a little stirring at the door. "Your friends," said Bell softly, "had better not come close." Ribiera gasped an order. The stirrings stopped. Paula came slowly into the room quite alone. She smiled queerly at Bell. "I believed that you would come," she said quietly. "And yet I do not know that we can escape." "We're going to try," said Bell grimly. To Ribiera he added curtly, "You'd better order the path cleared to the door, and have one of your cars brought around." * * * * * Ribiera croaked a repetition of the command. "Now stand up--slowly," said Bell evenly. "Very slowly. I don't want to die, Ribiera, so I don't want to kill you. But I haven't much hope of escape, so I shan't hesitate very long about doing it. And I've got these guns' hammers trembling at full cock. If I get a bullet through my head, they'll go off just the same and kill you." Ribiera got up. Slowly. His face was a pasty gray. "Your major-domo," Bell told him matter-of-factly, "will go before us and open every door on both sides of the way to the street. Paula"--he used her given came without thought, or without realizing it--"Paula will go and look into each door. If she as much as looks frightened, I fire, and try to fight the rest of the way clear. Understand? I'm going to get down to a boat I have ready in the harbor if I have to kill you and every living soul in the house!" There was no boat in the harbor, naturally. But the major-domo moved hesitantly across the room, looking at his master for orders. For Ribiera to die meant death or madness to his slaves. The major-domo's face was ghastly with fear. He moved onward, and Bell heard the sound of doors being thrust wide. Once he gave a command in the staccato fashion of a terrified man. Bell nodded grimly. "Now we'll move. Slowly, Ribiera! Always slowly.... Ah! That's better! Paula, you go on before and look into each room. I shall be sorry if any of your servants follow after you, Ribiera.... Through the doorway. Yes! All clear, Paula? I'm balancing the hammers very carefully, Ribiera. Very delicate work. It is fortunate for you that my nerves are rather steady. But really, I don't much care.... Still all clear before us, Paula? With the servants nerve-racked as they are, I believe we'll make it through, even if I do kill Ribiera. There'll be no particular point in killing us then. It won't help them. Don't stumble, please, Ribiera.... Go carefully, and very slowly...." * * * * * Ribiera's face was a gray mask of terror when they reached the door. A long, low car with two men on the chauffeur's seat was waiting. "Only one man up front, Ribiera," said Bell dryly. "No ostentation, please. Now, I hope your servants haven't summoned the police, because they might want to stop me from marching you out there with a gun in the small of your back. And that would be deplorable, Ribiera. Quite deplorable." With a glance, he ordered Paula into the tonneau. He followed her, driving Ribiera before him. There seemed to be none about but the stricken, terrified servant who had opened the door for their exit. "My friend," Bell told the major-domo grimly, "I'll give you a bit of comfort. I'm not going to try to take the Senhor Ribiera away with me. Once I'm on board the yacht that waits for me, I'll release him so he can keep you poor devils sane until my Government has found a way to beat this devilish poison of his. Then I'll come back and kill him. Now you can tell the chauffeur to drive us to the Biera Mar." He settled back in his seat. There were beads of perspiration on his forehead, but he could not wipe them off. He held the two revolvers against Ribiera's flabby body. * * * * * The car turned the corner, and he added dryly: "Your servants, Ribiera, will warn your more prominent slaves of my intention of going on board a yacht. Preparations will be made to stop every pleasure boat and search it for me. So ... tell your chauffeur to swing about and make for the flying field. And tell him to drive carefully, by the way. I've still got these guns on a very fine adjustment of the trigger-pressure." Ribiera croaked the order. Bell was exactly savage enough to kill him if he did not escape. For twenty minutes the car sped through the residential districts of Rio. The sun was high in the air, but clouds were banking up above the Pao d'Assucar--the Sugarloaf--and it looked as if there might be one of the sudden summer thunderstorms that sometimes sweep Rio. Then the clear road to the flying field. Rio has the largest metropolitan district in the world, but a great deal of it is piled on end, and Rio itself built on most of the rest. The flying field is necessarily some miles from even the residential districts, for the sake of a level plain of sufficient area. The car shot ahead through practically untouched jungle, interspersed with tiny clearings in which were patchwork houses that might have been a thousand miles in the interior instead of so near the center of all civilization in Brazil. Up smooth gradients. Around beautifully engineered curves. * * * * * Bell put aside one revolver long enough to search Ribiera carefully. He found a pearl-handled automatic, and handed it to Paula. "Worth having," he said cheerfully. "I wonder if you'd mind searching the chauffeur: with that gun at his head I think he'd be peaceful. You needn't have him stop." Paula stood up, smiling a little. "I did not think I lacked courage, Senhor," she observed, "but you have taught me more." "_Nil desperandum_," said Bell lightly. He relaxed deliberately. Matters would be tense at the flying field, and he would need to be wholly calm. There was little danger of an attempt at rescue here, and the necessity of being ready to shoot Ribiera at any instant was no longer a matter of split seconds. He watched, while, bent over the back of the front seat, she extracted two squat weapons from the chauffeur's pockets. "Quite an arsenal," said Bell as he pocketed them. He turned pleasantly to Ribiera. "Now, Ribiera, you understand just what I want. That big amphibian plane of yours is fairly fast, and once when I was merely your guest you assured me that it was always kept fueled and even provisioned for a long flight. When we reach the flying field I want it rolled out and warmed up, over at the other end of the field from the flying line. We'll go over to it in the car. "And I've thought of something. It worried me, before, because sometimes if a man's shot he merely relaxes all over. So while we're at the flying field I'm going to be holding back the triggers of these guns with my thumbs. I don't have to pull the trigger at all--just let go and they'll go off. It isn't so fine an adjustment as I had just now, but it's safer for you as long as you behave. And you might urge your chauffeur to be cautious. I do hope, Ribiera, that you won't look as if you were frightened. If there's any hitch, and delay for letting some fuel out of the tanks or messing up the motors, I'll be very sorry for you." * * * * * The car swooped out into bright sunshine. The flying field lay below, already in the shadow of the banking clouds above. Hangars lay stretched out across the level space. Through the gates. Ribiera licked his lips. Bell jammed the revolver muzzles closer against his sides. The chauffeur halted the car. Paula spoke softly to him. He stiffened. Bell found it possible to smile faintly. Ribiera gave orders. There was a moment's pause--the revolver muzzles went deeper into his side--and he snarled a repetition. The official cringed and moved swiftly. "You have chosen your slaves well, Ribiera," said Bell coolly. "They seem to occupy all strategic positions. We'll ride across." The gears clashed. The car swerved forward and went deliberately across the wide clear space that was the flying field. It halted near the farther side. In minutes the door of a hangar swung wide. There was the sputtering of a not-yet-warmed-up motor. The big plane came slowly out, its motors coughing now and then. It swung clumsily across the field, turned in a wide circle, and stopped some forty or fifty feet from the car. "Send the mechanic back, on foot," said Bell softly. Again Ribiera found it expedient to snarl. And Bell added, gently, while the throttled-down motors of the big amphibian boomed on: "Now get out of the car." Tiny figures began to gaze curiously at them from the row of hangars. The mechanic, starting back on foot, the four people getting out of the car, the big plane waiting.... * * * * * With his revolver ready and aimed at Ribiera's bulk, Bell reached in the front of the car and turned off the switch. The motor died abruptly. He put the key in his pocket. "Just to get a minute or two extra start," he said dryly. "Climb up in the plane, Paula." She obeyed, and turned at the top. "I will cover them until you are up," she said quietly. Bell laughed, now. A genuine laugh, for the first time in many days. "We do work together!" he said cheerfully. But he backed up the ladder. There was a stirring over by the hangars. The mechanic who had taxied the plane to this spot was a dwindling speck, no more than a third of the way across the field. But even from the distant hangars it could be seen that something was wrong. "Close the door, Paula," said Bell. He had seated himself at the controls, and scanned the instruments closely. This machine was heavy and large and massive. The boat-body between the retractable wheels added weight to the structure, and when Bell gave it the gun it seemed to pick up speed with an irritating slowness, and to roll and lurch very heavily when it did begin to approach flying speed. The run was long before the tail came up. It was longer before the joltings lessened and the plane began to rise slowly, with the solid steadiness that only a large and heavily loaded plane can compass. * * * * * Up, and up.... Bell was three hundred feet high when he crossed the hangars and saw tiny faces staring up at him. Some of the small figures were pointing across the field. The big plane circled widely, gaining altitude, and Bell gazed down. Ribiera was gesticulating wildly, pointing upward to the soaring thing, shaking his fist at it, and making imperious, frantic motions of command. Bell took one quick glance all about the horizon. Toward the sea the sun shone down brilliantly upon the city. Inland a broad white wall of advancing rain moved toward the coastline. And Bell smiled frostily, and flung the big ship into a dive and swooped down upon Ribiera as a hawk might swoop at a chicken. Ribiera saw the monster thing bearing down savagely, its motors bellowing, its nose pointed directly at him. And there is absolutely nothing more terrifying upon the earth than to see a plane diving upon you with deadly intent. A panic that throws back to non-human ancestors seizes upon a man. He feels the paralysis of those ancient anthropoids who were preyed upon by dying races of winged monsters in the past. That racial, atavistic terror seizes upon him. Bell laughed, though it sounded more like a bark, as Ribiera flung himself to the ground and screamed hoarsely when the plane seemed about to pounce upon him. The shrill timbre of the shriek cut through the roaring of the motors, even through the thick padding of the big plane's cabin walls that reduced that roaring to a not intolerable growl. * * * * * But the plane passed ten feet or more above his head. It rose, and climbed steeply, and passed again above the now buzzing, agitated hangars, and climbed above the hills behind the flying field as some men went running and others moved by swifter means toward the shaken, nerve-racked Ribiera, on whose lips were flecks of foam. Bell looked far below and far behind him. The incredible greenness of tropic verdure, of the jungle which rings Rio all about. The many glitterings of sunlight upon glass, and upon the polished domes of sundry public buildings, and the multitudinous shimmerings of the tropic sun upon the bay. The deep dark shadow of the banking clouds drew a sharp line across the earth, and deep in that shadow lay the flying field, growing small and distant as the plane flew on. But specks raced across the wide expanse. In a peculiar, irrational fashion those specks darted toward a nearly invisible speck, and encountered other specks darting away from that nearly invisible speck, and gradually all the specks were turned about and racing for the angular, toy-block squares which were the hangars of the aeroplanes of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Little white things appeared from those hangars--planes being thrust out into the open air while motes of men raced agitatedly about them. One of them was suddenly in motion. It moved slowly and clumsily across the ground, and then abruptly moved more swiftly. It seemed to float upward and to swing about in mid-air. It came floating toward the amphibian, though apparently nearly stationary against the sky. Another moved jerkily, and another.... * * * * * Just before the big plane dived into the wide white wall of falling water, the air behind it seemed to swarm with aircraft. In the cabin of the amphibian, of course, the bellowing of the motors outside was muffled to a certain degree. Paula clung to the seats and moved awkwardly up to the place beside Bell. She had just managed to seat herself when the falling sheet of water obliterated all the world. "Strap yourself in your seat," he said in her ear above the persistent tumult without. "Then you might adjust my safety-belt. Well be flying blind in this rain. I hope the propellers hold." She fumbled, first at the belt beside his upholstered chair, and only afterward adjusted her own. He sent a quick glance at her. "Shouldn't have done that," he said quietly. "I can manage somehow." The plane lurched and tumbled wildly. He kicked rudder and jerked on the stick, watching the instrument board closely. In moments the wild gyrations ceased. "The beginning of this," he said evenly, "is going to be hectic. There'll be lightning soon." Almost on his words the gray mist out the cabin windows seemed to flame. There was thunder even above the motors. But the faint, perceptible trembling of the whole plane under the impulse of its engines kept on. Bell kept his eyes on the bank and turn indicator, glancing now and then at the altimeter. "We've got to climb," he said shortly, "up where the lightning is, too. We want to pass the Serra da Carioca with room to spare, or we'll crash on it." There was no noticeable change in the progress of the plane, of course. Rain was dashing against the windows of the cabin with an incredible velocity. Rain at a hundred miles an hour acts more like hail than water, anyhow, and Bell was trusting grimly to the hope that the propellers were of steel, which will withstand even hail, and a hope that the blast through the engine cowlings would keep the wiring free of water-made short circuits. * * * * * But the air was bad beyond belief. At times the plane spun like thistledown in a vast and venomous flood that crashed into the windows with a vicious rattling. Lightning began and grew fiercer. It seemed at times as if the plane were whirling crazily in sheer incandescent flame. The swift air-currents at the beginning of a tropic thunderstorm were here multiplied in trickiness and velocity by the hills of the Serra da Carioca, and Bell was flying blind as well. The safety-belts were needed fifty times within twenty minutes, as the big ship was flung about by fierce blasts that sometimes blew even the rain upward for a time. And over all, as the amphibian spun madly, and toppled crazily and fought for height, there was the terrific, incessant crashing of thunder which was horribly close, and the crackling flares of lightning all about. "I'm going to take a chance," said Bell curtly above the uproar, with the windows seeming to look out upon the fires of hell. "I think we're high enough. The compass has gone crazy, but I'm going to risk it." Again there was no perceptible alteration in the motion of the ship, but he fought it steadily toward the west. And it seemed that he actually was passing beyond the first fierce fringe of the storm, because the lightning became--well, not less frequent, but less continuous. * * * * * And suddenly, in a blinding flare of light that made every separate raindrop look like a speck of molten metal, he saw another airplane. It was close. Breath-takingly close. It came diving down out of nowhere and passed less than twenty yards before the nose of the amphibian. It glistened with wet, and glittered unbearably in the incredible brightness of the lightning. Every spot and speck and detail showed with an almost ghastly distinctness. But it dived on past, its pilot rigid and tense and unseeing, plunging like a meteor straight downward. The golden, iridescent mist of rain closed over its body. And it was gone. Ten minutes later Bell was driving onward through a gray obscurity, which now was no more than tinted pink by receding lightning-flashes. The air was still uneven and treacherous. The big plane hurtled downward hundreds of feet in wild descending gusts among the hills, and was then flung upward on invisible billows of air for other hundreds of feet. But it was less uncontrollable. There were periods of minutes when the safety-belts did not come into use. * * * * * And later still, half an hour perhaps, the steadiness of the air gave assurance that the plane was past the range of the Serra da Carioca and was headed inland. He drove on, watching his instruments and flying blind, but with a gathering confidence in an ultimate escape from the swarm of aircraft Ribiera had sent aloft in the teeth of the storm to hunt for him. The motors hummed outside the padded cabin. The girl beside him was very quiet and very still and very pale. "We want to get out of this before long," he said in her ear, "and then we can find out where we are, and especially begin to make some plans for ourselves." Her eyes turned to him. There was a curious stiffness in her manner. It might have seemed reserve, but Bell recognized the symptoms of a woman whose self-control is hanging by a thread. He smiled. "Hold on a while yet," he said gently. "I know you want to cry. But please hold on a while yet. When we reach friends...." Her hands went to her throat, and he could feel the effort of will that kept her voice steady. "Friends? We have no friends." She managed a smile. "The Senhor Ribiera explained to me when I arrived at his house how it was that no questions would be asked about my disappearance. My father is dead. The newspapers this morning said that it was not known whether he killed himself or was assassinated. The Senhor Ribiera has given orders to his slaves. The newspapers of this afternoon will inform a horrified world that you and I, together, murdered my father that we might flee together with such of his riches as he had actually gathered together for me to take away. We are murderers, my friend. Cables and telegraph wires are reporting the news. The daughter of the Minister of War of the Republic of Brazil was assisted by her lover to murder her father. She has fled with him. Now--where are we still to find friends?" * * * * * Bell stared, for the fraction of an instant. One thought came to him, and was checked. The Trade does not exist, anywhere. The Trade would not help. And murderers are always duly handed over when the Government of the United States is requested politely to do so by another nation. Always. And so far as the whole civilized world was concerned they were murderers. Even the employees of the flying field who were not subject to The Master would swear to the strictly accurate story of their escape together. "It is just scandalous enough and horrible enough," said Bell quietly, "to be reprinted everywhere as news. You're right. We haven't any friends. We're up against it. And so I think we'll have to hunt down and kill The Master. Then we'll be believed. And there are just two of us, with what weapons we have in our pockets, to attack. How many thousands of slaves do you suppose The Master has by now?" And, quite suddenly, he laughed. CHAPTER VII The sun was sinking slowly when the plane appeared above the valley. There was only jungle below. Jungle, and the languid river which now flowed sluggishly into a wide and shallow pool in which drowned trees formed a mass of substance neither land nor marsh nor river. The river now contracted to a narrow space and showed signs of haste, and even foaming water, and then again flowed placidly onward, sometimes even a hundred yards in breadth. Shadows of the mountains to the west were creeping toward the opposite hill-flanks, darkening the thick foliage and sending flocks of flying things home to their chosen roosts. The sound of the plane was a buzzing noise, which grew louder to a sharp drone as it seemed to increase in size, and became a dull monotonous roar as it dipped toward the waters of the stream. It floated downward, very gently, and circled as if regarding a certain spot critically, and resumed its onward flight. Again it circled, anxiously, now, as if the time for alighting were short. It seemed to hesitate in mid-air, and dived, and circled up-stream and came down the valley again. It sank, and sank, lower and lower, until the white of its upper wings was hidden by the tall trees on either side. A _jabiru_ stork saw it from downstream, solemnly squatting on four eggs which eventually would perpetuate the race. The _jabiru_ was about forty feet above the water and had a clear view of the stream. The stork squatted meditatively, with its long, naked neck projecting above the edge of its nest. * * * * * The plane dipped ever lower, its reflection vivid and complete upon the waveless stream below it. Ten feet above the water. Five--and swift ripples from the rush of air disturbed the unbroken reflections behind. It was almost a silhouette against the mirrored appearance of the sunset sky. And then a clumsy-seeming boat body touched water with a vast hissing sound, and settled more and more heavily, while the speed of the plane checked markedly and its motors roared on senselessly. Then, abruptly, the plane checked and partly swung around. The _jabiru_ half-rose from its eggs. The motors were bellowing wildly again. As if tearing itself free, the plane sheered off from some invisible obstacle, one of its wing tip floats splashed water wildly, and, with the motors thundering at their fullest speed, it went toward the shore with a dragging wing, like some wounded bird. It beached, and the _jabiru_ heard a sudden dense silence fall. A man climbed out of the boatlike body. He walked to the bow and dropped to the shore. He peered under the upward slanting nose of the boat-thing. The _jabiru_, listening intently, heard words. Then, quite suddenly and quite abruptly, and generally with the unostentatious efficiency with which Nature manages such things in the tropics, night fell. It was dark within minutes. * * * * * The noise of Bell's scrambling back onto the deck of the amphibian's hull could be heard inside the cabin. He opened the door and slipped down inside. "There ought to be some lights," he said curtly. "Ribiera did himself rather well, as a rule." He struck a match. Paula's eyes shone in the match-flame, fixed upon his face. He looked about, frowning. He found a switch and pressed it, and a dome-light came into being. The cabin of the plane, from a place of darkness comparable to that of the jungle all about, became suddenly a cosy and comfortable place. "Well?" said Paula quietly. Bell hesitated, and took a deep breath. "We're stuck," he said wryly. "We must have struck a snag or perhaps a rock, just under water. Half the bottom of the hull's torn out. There's no hope of repair. If I hadn't given her the gun and beached her, we'd have sunk in mid-stream." Paula said nothing. "Things are piling on us," said Bell grimly. "In the morning I'll try to make a raft. We can't stay here indefinitely. I'll hunt for maps and we'll try to plan something out. But I'll admit that this business worries me--the plane being smashed." * * * * * He passed his hand harassedly over his forehead. To have escaped from Rio was something, but since Paula had told him Ribiera's plans, it was clearly but the most temporary of successes. Cabinet ministers are not so commonplace but that the scandalous and horrifying crime that was imputed to Bell and Paula would be printed in every foreign country. Newspapers in Tokio would include the supposed murder in their foreign news, and in Bucharest and even Constantinople it would merit a paragraph or two. Assuredly every South American country would discuss the matter editorially, even where The Master's deputies did not order it published far and wide. There would be pictures of Bell and of Paula, labeled with an infamy. In every town of all Brazil their faces would be known, and those who were The Master's slaves would hunt them desperately, and all honorable men would seek them for a crime. Even in America there would be no safety for them. The Trade does not exist, officially, and a member of the Trade must get out of trouble as he can. As an accused murderer, Bell would be arrested anywhere. As worse than a mere murderess, Paula.... She was watching his face. "This morning," she said queerly, "you--you quoted '_Nil desperandum_.'" Bell ground his teeth, and then managed to smile. "If I looked like I needed you say that," he said coolly, "I deserve to be kicked. Let's look for something to eat, and count up our resources. The thing to do is, when you fall down--bounce!" He managed a nearly genuine grin, then, and to his intense amazement, she sobbed suddenly and bent her head down and began to weep. He stared at her in stupefaction for an instant, then swore at himself for a fool. Her father.... * * * * * Half an hour later he roused her as gently as he could. It was helplessness, as much as anything else, that had made him leave her alone; but a woman needs to weep now and then. And Paula assuredly had excuse. "Here's a cup of coffee," he said practically, "which you must drink. You can't have had anything to eat all day. Have you?" That question had haunted him too. She had been a prisoner in Ribiera's house for half an hour, possibly more. And Ribiera had in his possession, and used, a deadly, devilish poison from some unknown noxious plant. Its victim took the poison unknowingly, in a morsel of food or a glass of water or of wine. And for two weeks there was no sign of evil. And then the poison drove its victim swiftly mad--unless the antidote was obtained from Ribiera. And Ribiera administered the antidote with a further dose of poison. If Paula had eaten one scrap of food or drunk one drop of water while Ribiera's captive.... She understood. She looked up suddenly, and read the awful anxiety in his eyes. "No. Nothing." She caught her breath and steadied herself with an effort of the will. "I understand. You tried not to let me fear. But I ate nothing, touched nothing. I have not that to fear, at least." "Drink this coffee," said Bell, smiling. "Ribiera was a luxurious devil. There's canned stuff and so on in a locker. He was prepared for a forced landing anywhere. Flares and rockets will do us no good, but there are a pair of machetes and a sporting rifle with shells. We don't need to die for a bit, anyhow." * * * * * Paula obediently took the coffee. He watched her anxiously as she drank. "Now some soup," he urged, "and the rest of this condensed stuff. And I've found some maps and there's a radio receiving outfit if--" Paula managed to smile. "You want to know," she said, "if I can endure listening to it. Yes. I--I should not have given way just now. But I can endure anything." Bell still hesitated, regarding her soberly. "I've heard," he said awkwardly, "that in Brazil the conventions...." She waited, looking at him with her large eyes. "I hoped," said Bell, still more unhappily, "to find this place Moradores, where you said you had some relatives. I hoped to find it before dark. But before I landed I knew I'd missed it and couldn't hope to locate it to-night. I thought--" "You thought," said Paula, smiling suddenly, "that my reputation would be jeopardized. And you were about to offer--" Bell winced. "Of course I don't mean to act like an ass," he said apologetically, "but some people...." "You forget," said Paula, with the same faint smile, "what the newspapers will say of us, Senhor. You forget what news of us the cables have carried about the world. I think that we had better forget about the conventions. As the daughter of a Brazilian, that remark is heresy. But did you know that my mother came from Maryland?" "Thank God!" said Bell relievedly. "Then you can believe that I'm not thinking exclusively of you, and maybe we'll get somewhere." Paula put out her hand. He grasped it firmly. "Right!" he said, more cheerfully than ever before. "Now we'll turn on the radio and see what news we get." * * * * * Into the deep dark jungle night, then, a strange incongruity was thrust. Tall trees loomed up toward the stars. A nameless little stream flowed placidly through the night and, beached where impenetrable undergrowth crowded to the water's edge, a big amphibian plane lay slightly askew, while a light glowed brightly in its cabin. More, from that cabin there presently emerged the incredible sound of music, played in Rio for _os gentes_ of the distinctly upper strata of society by a bored but beautifully trained orchestra. The _jabiru_ stork heard it, and craned its featherless neck to stare downward through beady eyes. But it was not frightened. Presently, instead of music, there was a man's voice booming in the disconnected sounds of human speech. And still the _jabiru_ was unalarmed. Like most of the birds whose necks are bald, the _jabiru_ is a useful scavenger, and so is tolerated in the haunts of men. And if man's gratitude is not enough for safety, the _jabiru_ smells very, very badly, and no man hunts his tribe. * * * * * Bell had been listening impatiently, when a sudden whining, whistling noise broke into the program of very elevated music, played utterly without rest. The sound came from the speaker, of course. He frowned thoughtfully. The whistling changed in timbre and became flutelike, then changed again, nearly to its original pitch and tone. Paula was not listening. Her mind seemed very far away, and on subjects the reverse of pleasurable. "Listen!" said Bell suddenly. "You hear that whistle? It came on all at once!" Paula waited. The whistling noise went on. It was vaguely discordant, and it was monotonous, and it was more than a little irritating. Again it changed timbre, going up to the shrillest of squealings, and back nearly to its original sound an instant later. Bell began to paw over maps. The plane had been intended for flight over the vast distances of Brazil, and there was a small supply of condensed food and a sporting rifle and shells included in its equipment. Emergency landing fields are not exactly common in the back country of South America. "Here," said Bell sharply. "Here is where we are. It must be where we are! No towns of any size nearby. No railroad. No boat route. Nothing! Nothing but jungle shown here!" * * * * * He frowned absorbedly over the problem. "What is it?" asked Paula. "Someone near," said Bell briefly. "That's another radio receiver, an old fashioned regenerative set, sensitive enough and reliable enough, but a nuisance to everyone but its owner--except when it's a godsend, as it is to us." The music ended, and a voice announced in laboriously classic Portuguese, with only a trace of the guttural tonation of the _carioca_, that the most important news items of the day would be given. Paula paled a little, but listened without stirring. The voice read--the rustling of sheets of paper was abnormally loud--a bit of foreign news, and a bit of local news, and then.... She was deathly pale when the announcement of her father's death was finished, and she had heard the official view of the police reported--exactly what Ribiera had told her it would be. When the voice added that a friend of the late Minister of War, the Senhor Ribiera, had offered twenty contos for the capture of the fugitive pair, who had escaped in an airplane stolen from him, she bit her lip until it almost bled. * * * * * "I know," he said abstractedly. "It's as you said. But listen to that whistle." The news announcement ceased. Music began again. The whistling abruptly died away. "I just found some coils," said Bell feverishly, "that plug in to take the place of the longer-wave ones. I'm going to try them. It's a hunch, and it's crazy, but...." There were sharp clickings. The radio receiver was one of those extraordinarily light and portable ones that are made for aircraft. In seconds it was transformed into a short-wave receiver. Bell began to manipulate the dials feverishly. Two minutes. Three. Four. The speaker suddenly began to whine softly and monotonously. "Regeneration," said Bell feverishly, "on a carrier-wave. It can't be far off, that receiving set." Suddenly a voice spoke. It was blurred and guttural. Infinitely delicate adjustments cleared it up. And then.... Bell listened eagerly, at first in triumph, then in amazement, and at last in a grim satisfaction. Reports from Rio on a short-wave band of radio frequencies were passing from Ribiera to some other place apparently inland. It was Ribiera's own voice, which quivered with rage as he reported Bell's escape. "_I do not think_," he snapped in Portuguese, "_that full details should be spoken even on beam wireless. I shall come to the_ fazenda _to-morrow and communicate with The Master direct. In the meantime I have warned all sub-deputies in Brazil. I urge that all deputies be informed and instructed as The Master may direct._" * * * * * Another voice replied that The Master would be informed. In the meantime the deputy for Brazil was notified. This list of bits of information chilled Bell's blood. This man, of Venezuela, had been denied the grace of The Master by the deputy in Caracas. He would probably use the passwords and demand the grace of The Master of sub-deputies in the State of Pará. To be seized and Caracas informed. The deputy in Colombia desired that the son of Colonel García--upon a hunting-party with friends in the Amazon basin--should be attached to the service of The Master. His father had been so attached, and it was believed had smuggled a letter into the foreign mail warning his son. If possible, that letter should be intercepted. And from Paraguay the deputy requested that the family of Senor Gomez, visiting relatives in Rio, should be induced to regard the service of The Master as desirable.... The orders ceased abruptly. Ribiera acknowledged them. The whining whistle cut off. And Bell turned to Paula very grimly indeed. "Pretty, isn't it?" he asked in a vast calmness. "Apparently every nation on the continent has some devil like Ribiera in charge of the administration of this fiendish poison. Every republic has some fiend at work in it. And they're organized. My God! They're organized! The Master seems to supply them with the mixture of poison and its antidote, and they report to him...." * * * * * Paula nodded. "That was what my father had written down for you," she said quietly. "Any man who can be lured to eat or drink anything these men have prepared is lost. He gains no pleasure, as a drug might give. He is entrapped into a lifetime of awful fear, knowing that a moment's disobedience, a moment's reluctance to obey whatever command they give, will cause his madness." "I'm trying to think what we can work out of this," said Bell shortly. "Some things are clear. There's a radio receiving set nearby, which listened to those short-wave reports. Within five or six miles, at most. We're going to find that to-morrow. And there's a central point, a _fazenda_, where one may talk direct with The Master, whoever and wherever he may be. And--judging by Ribiera--my guess is that The Master has the same hold upon them that they have on their underlings. Ribiera is too arrogant a scoundrel to make obsequious reports if he were not afraid to omit them." He was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said abruptly, "Try to get some sleep, if you can. That pistol of Ribiera's--you have it handy? Keep it where you can reach it in the dark. I'm going to watch, though." Paula settled herself comfortably, and looked queerly across the dimly lit little cabin at him. "My friend," she said with the faintest of quavering smiles, "Please do not reassure me. I have the courage of endurance, at least. And--I do not fear you." * * * * * It seemed to Bell, listening in the darkness that fell when he turned off the switch, that she stayed awake for a long time. But when she did sleep, she slept heavily. Bell had a raft of canes afloat beside the amphibian when she waked. He was sweat-streaked and bitten by many insects. He was tired, and his clothes were rags. But the raft was nearly twenty feet long, it would easily float two persons and what small supplies the plane carried, and it could be handled by a long pole. "Hullo," he said cheerfully when she climbed on top of the waterlogged hull of the plane. "We're nearly ready to start off. I'm sorry I can't advise you to try to refresh yourself in the river. There are some fish in it that are fiends. One of them took a slice out of the side of my hand." "_Piranhas!_" she exclaimed, and was pale. "You should have known!" _Piranhas_ are small fresh-water fish of the Brazilian rivers, never more than a foot and a half long, which prove the existence of a devil. Where they swarm in schools they will tear every morsel of flesh from a swimmer's body as he struggles to reach shore, and leave a clean-stripped skeleton of a mule or horse if an animal should essay to swim a stream. "I'll ask, next time," said Bell ruefully. "I'd planned a swim. But if you'll fix some coffee while I finish up this raft, we'll get going. I don't think we're far from some place or other. I heard what sounded suspiciously like a motor boat, about dawn." * * * * * She looked at him anxiously. "Of course," said Bell, smiling, "if the boat belonged to whoever listened in on the Rio broadcast _and_ the short-wave news, he won't be especially friendly, though he should be glad to see us. But I've been studying the map, and I have a rather hopeful idea. Let's have coffee." He grinned as long as she was in sight, and when he went into the cabin of the plane he seemed more cheerful still. But the idea of floating down this nameless little jungle stream upon a raft of canes was not one that he would have chosen. It was forced upon him. To travel through the jungle itself was next to impossible with a girl, especially as they were dressed for city streets and not at all for battling with dense and thorn-studded undergrowth. And to stay with the plane was obviously absurd. Sooner or later they had to abandon it, though the moment they did desert it they would be encountering not only the impersonal menace of the jungle, but the actual enmity of all the human race. The raft was the only possibility. * * * * * It floated smoothly enough when they started off, with Bell working inexpertly with his long pole to keep it in mid-stream. He was, of course, acutely apprehensive. In country like this a rapid could be expected anywhere. The jungle life loomed high above their heads on either side, and the life of the jungle went on undisturbed by their passage. Monkeys gaped at them and exchanged undoubtedly witty comments upon their appearance. Birds flew overhead with raucous and unpleasant cries. Toucans, in particular, made a most discordant din. Once they disturbed a tiny herd of peccaries, drinking, which regarded them pugnaciously and trotted sturdily out of sight as they came abreast. But for one mile, for two, the stream flowed smoothly. A third.... And Paula pointed ahead in silence. A dug-out projected partly from the shoreline. Bell wielded his long pole cautiously now, and drew closer and ever closer to the stream bank. Paula pointed again. There was even a small dock--luxury unthinkable in these wilds. The raft touched bottom. And suddenly from somewhere out of sight there came a horrible and a bestial sound. It was a scream of blood-lust, of madness, of overpowering and unspeakable rage. Following it came cackling laughter. Paula went white. "The _fazenda_," said Bell softly, "of the sub-deputy who was listening in on Ribiera last night. And it sounds as if someone were very much amused. Some poor devil...." Paula shuddered. "I'm going ashore," said Bell, smiling frostily. "There's nothing else to do." CHAPTER VIII Crouched at the edge of the jungle, where the clearing began, Paula heard four shots. Two in quick succession, and a wait of minutes. Then a third, and another long wait, and then the last. Then silence. Paula began to shiver. Bell had helped her ashore from the raft and insisted on her waiting at the edge of the jungle. "Not that you'll be any safer," he had told her grimly, "but that I may be. One person can move more quickly than two. And if I'm chased I'll plunge for the place you're hidden, and you can open fire. Then the two of us might hold them off." "Why?" Paula said slowly. And Bell caught at her wrist. "Don't let me hear you talk like that!" he said sharply. "We're going to beat this thing! We've got to! And being desperate helps, but being in despair doesn't help a bit. Buck up!" He frowned at her until she smiled. "I will not despair again without your permission," she told him. "Really. I will not." He found her a hiding-place and went cautiously out into the clearing, still frowning. * * * * * He had been gone five minutes before the first shot sounded, and quite ten before the last rang out dully, and was echoed and re-echoed hollowly by the jungle trees. And Paula lay waiting by the edge of the clearing, Ribiera's pearl-handled automatic in her hand--Bell had carried the rifle from the plane. Small insects moved all about her, and she heard soft rustlings as the life of the jungle went on over her head and under her feet, and terror welled up in her throat. She was trembling almost uncontrollably when Bell came back. He walked openly toward her hiding-place. "Paula." She came out, trying to steady her quivering lips. "We're all right," said Bell grimly. "This is the _fazenda_ of a sub-deputy. I suspect, also, it's an emergency landing field for Ribiera on the way to that place he talked to last night. There's a two-place plane here with both wheels and floats, in a filthy little shed. It seems to be all right. We're going to take off in it and try to make Moradores, where your people are. What's the matter?" Her face was deathly pale. "I thought," she said with some difficulty, "when I heard the shots--I thought you were killed." Bell shook his head. "I wasn't," he said grimly. "It was four other men who were killed." * * * * * He led her carefully past the house. It was a fairly typical _fazenda_ dwelling, if more substantial than most. It was wholly unpretentious, with whitewashed walls, and the effect of grandeur it would give to natives of this region would come solely from the number of buildings. There were half a dozen or more. "I killed four men," repeated Bell coldly. "And I'm damned glad of it. That scream we heard.... I know pretty well what happened here last night. Remember, Ribiera spoke of using a beam-wireless to make his report. He must have had a short-wave beam set somewhere on the outskirts of Rio, aimed at whatever headquarters he reports to. He's going up to that headquarters some time to-day, by plane, of course. He needed emergency landing fields along the route, and here he picked out a native and made him a sub-deputy. Charming...." Moving past the buildings, Paula caught sight of massive wooden bars set in the side of a building. Something crumpled up and limp lay before them. "Don't look over there," said Bell harshly. "There was a woman in this house and she told me what happened, though I'd guessed it before. The sub-deputy was here last night with a party of friends. Newly enslaved, some of them. He entertained them.... Up at Ribiera's place a girl told me she and her husband had been shown a Secret Service man. He went mad before their eyes. It was an object-lesson for them, a clear illustration of what would happen to them if they ever disobeyed. I imagine that something of the sort is used by all The Master's deputies to convince their slaves of the fate that awaits them for disobedience. The local man had brought a party up to watch two men go mad. After that sight they'll be obedient." * * * * * He reached a shed, huge, but in disrepair. Monster doors were ajar. Bell heaved at them and swung them wide. A small, trim, two-seated plane showed in the shadowy interior. "This is for emergency use," said Bell grimly, "and we face an emergency. I'll get it out and load it up. There's a dump of gas and so on here. You might look around outside the door, in case the one man who got away can find someone to help stop me." He set to work checking on fuel and oil. He loaded extra gas in the front cockpit, a huge tin of it. Another would crowd him badly in the pilot's cockpit in the rear, but he stowed it as carefully as he could. "The local sub-deputy," he added evenly, "has added to the thrill by having the two men put in one cage. He let his guests observe the progress of the madness the damned poison produces. And presently, as the madness grew, the two men fought. They were murder mad. The local sub-deputy gave his guests the thrill of watching maniacs battling to the death. He left early this morning with his party, and I imagine that everyone was suitably submissive to his demands for the future. There were four men and a woman left as caretakers here. I found the four men before the cage, baiting the poor devil who'd killed the other last night. That's why we heard the scream. When I came up with my rifle they stared at me, and ran. * * * * * "I got one then, and as a matter of mercy I put a bullet through the man who'd gone murder mad. The"--Bell sounded as if he were acutely nauseated--"the man he'd killed was still in the cage. My God!... Then I went looking for the other three men. Wasting time, no doubt, but I found them. I was angry. I got one, and the others ran away again. A little later the third man jumped me with a knife. He slit my sleeve. I killed him. Didn't find the fourth man." Bell moved to the front of the plane. "I'll see if she catches." He swung on the stick. It went over stiffly. Again, and again. With a bellow, the motor caught. Bell shouted in Paula's ear. "We'll get in. Use the warming-up period to taxi out. We want to get away as soon as we can." He helped her up into the seat, then remembered. He rummaged about and flung a tumbled flying suit up in the cockpit with her. "If you get a chance, put it on!" he shouted. He stepped into a similar outfit, reached up and throttled down the motor, and kicked away the blocks under the wheels. He vaulted up into place. And slowly and clumsily the trim little ship came lurching and rolling out of the shed. * * * * * The landing field was not large, but Bell took the plane to its edge. He faced it about, and bent below the cockpit combing to avoid the slip stream and look at his maps again, brought from the big amphibian. Something caught his eye. Another radio receiving set. "Amphibian planes," he muttered, "for landing on earth or water. And radios. I wonder if he has directional for a guide? It would seem sensible, and if a plane went down the rest of them would know about where to look." Paula reached about and touched his shoulder. She pointed. There was a movement at the edge of the jungle and a puff of smoke. A bullet went through the fusilage of the plane, inches behind Bell. He frowned, grasped the stick, and gave the motor the gun. It lifted heavily, like all amphibians, but it soared over the group of buildings some twenty or thirty feet above the top of the wireless mast and went on, rising steadily, to clear even the topmost trees on the farther side of the stream by a hundred feet or more. It went on and on, roaring upward, and the jungle receded ever farther below it. The horizon drew back and back. At two thousand feet the earth began to have the appearance of a shallow platter. At three thousand it was a steep sided bowl, and Bell could look down and trace the meandering of the stream on which he had landed the night before. Not too far downstream--some fifteen miles, perhaps--were the squalid, toy sized structures of a town of the far interior of Brazil. He never learned its name, but even in his preoccupation with the management of the plane and a search for landmarks, he wondered very grimly indeed what would be the state of things in that town. If in Rio, where civilization held sway, Ribiera exercised such despotic though secret power, in a squalid and forgotten little village like this the rule of a sub-deputy of The Master could be bestial and horrible beyond belief. * * * * * Eastward. Bell had overshot the mark the night before. Before he had located himself he was quite fifty miles beyond the spot Paula had suggested as a hiding place. Now he retraced his way. A peak jutting up from far beyond the horizon was a guiding mark. He set the plane's nose for it, and relaxed. The motor thundered on valorously. Far below was a vast expanse of thick jungle, intercepted but nowhere broken by occasional small streams and now and then the tiny, angular things which might be houses. But houses were very infrequent. In the first ten miles--with a view of twenty miles in every direction--Bell picked out no more than four small groups of buildings which might be the unspeakably isolated _fazendas_ of the folk of this region. "Ribiera was coming this way," he muttered. He fumbled the headphone of the radio set into place. The set seemed to be already arbitrarily tuned. He turned it on. There was a monotonous series of flashes, with the singing note of a buzzer in them. A radio direction signal. "Ribiera's on the way." Bell stared far ahead, without reason. And it seemed to him that just then, against that far distant guiding peak, he saw a black speck floating in mid-air. * * * * * He pulled back the joy stick. Detached, feathery clouds spread across the sky, and he was climbing for them. Paula looked behind at him, and he pointed. He saw her seem to stiffen upon sight of the other aircraft. In minutes Bell's plane was tearing madly through sunlit fleecy monsters which looked soft and warm and alluring, and were cold and damp and blinding in their depths. Bell kept on his course. The two planes were approaching each other at a rate of nearly two hundred miles an hour. And then, while the harsh, discordant notes of the radio signal sounded monotonously in his ears, Bell stared down and, through a rift between two clouds, saw the other plane for an instant, a thousand feet below. The sun shone upon it fiercely. Its propeller was a shimmering, cobwebby disk before it. It seemed to hang motionless--so short was Bell's view of it--between earth and sky: a fat glistening body as of a monstrous insect. Bell could even see figures in its cockpits. Then it was gone, but Bell felt a curious hatred of the thing. Ribiera was almost certainly in it, headed for the place to which he had spoken the night before. And Bell was no longer able to think of Ribiera with any calmness. He felt a personal, gusty hatred for the man and all he stood for. * * * * * His face was grim and savage as his own plane sped through the clouds. But just as the two aircraft had approached each other with the combined speed of both, so they separated. It seemed only a moment later that Bell dipped down below the clouds and the other plane was visible only as a swiftly receding mote in the sunlight. "I wonder," said Bell coldly to himself, with the thunder of the motor coming through the singing of the air route signal, "I wonder if he'll see the ship I cracked up last night?" Paula was pointing. The shoulder of a hill upthrust beneath the jungle. The tall trees were cleared away at its crest. Small, whitewashed buildings appeared below. "Good landing field," said Bell, his eyes narrowing suddenly. "On the direct route. Fifty miles back there's another landing field. I wonder...." He was already suspicious before he flattened out above the house, while dogs fled madly. He noticed, too, that horses in a corral near the buildings showed no signs of fright. And horses are always afraid of landing aircraft, unless they have had much opportunity to grow accustomed to them. The little plane rolled and bumped, and gradually came to a stop. Bell inconspicuously shifted a revolver to the outer pocket of his flying suit. Figures came toward them, with a certain hesitating reluctance that changed Bell's suspicions even while it confirmed them. * * * * * "Paula," he said grimly, "this is another landing field for Ribiera's emergency use. It sticks out all over the place. Relatives or no relatives, you want to make sure of them. You understand?" Her eyes widened in a sudden startled fear. She caught her breath sharply. Then she said quietly, though her voice trembled: "I understand. Of course." She slipped out of the plane and advanced to meet the approaching figures. There were surprised, astounded exclamations: A bearded man embraced her and shouted. Women appeared and, after staring, embraced. Paula turned to wave her hand reassuringly to Bell, and vanished inside the house. Bell looked over his instruments, examined the gas in the tank, and began to work over his maps in the blaring sunlight. He cut out the switch and the motor stopped with minor hissings of compression. The maps held his attention, though he listened keenly as he worked for any signs of trouble that Paula might encounter. He was beginning to have a definite idea in his mind. Ribiera had talked to a headquarters somewhere, by beam radio from Rio. Beam wireless, of course, is nothing more or less than a concentration of a radio signal in a nearly straight line, instead of allowing it to spread about equally on all sides of the transmitting station. It makes both for secrecy and economy, since nearly all the power used at the sending apparatus is confined to an arc of about three degrees of a circle. Directed to a given receiving station, receiving outfits to one side or the other of that path are unable to listen in, and the signal is markedly stronger in the chosen path. Exactly the same process, of course, is used for radio directional signals, one of which still buzzed monotonously in Bell's ears until he impatiently turned it off. A plane in the path hears the signal. If it does not hear the signal, it is demonstrably off the straight route. * * * * * Bell, then, was in a direct line from Rio to the source of a radio direction signal. Fifty miles back, where the big amphibian had crashed, he was in the same air line. To extend that line on into the interior would give the destination of Ribiera, and the location of the headquarters where direct communication with The Master was maintained. He worked busily. His maps were in separate sheets, and it took time to check the line from Rio. When he had finished, he computed grimly. "At a hundred miles in hour...." He was figuring the maximum distance which could plausibly be accepted as a day's journeying by air. He surveyed the maps again. "The plateau of Cuyaba, at a guess. Hm.... Fleets of aircraft could practise there and never be seen. An army could be maneuvered without being reported. Certainly the headquarters for the whole continent could be there. Striking distance of Rio, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, La Paz, and Asunción. Five republics." * * * * * Certainly, from his figures, it seemed plausible that somewhere up on the Plateau of Cuyaba--where no rails run, no boats ply, and no telegraph line penetrates; which juts out ultimately into that unknown region where the Rio Zingu and the Tapajoz have their origins--certainly it seemed plausible that there must lie the headquarters of the whole ghastly conspiracy. There, it might be, the deadly plants from which The Master's poison was brewed were grown. There the deadly stuff was measured out and mixed with its temporary antidote.... Paula came back, a young man with her. Her eyes were wide and staring, as if she had looked upon something vastly worse than death. "He--Ribiera," she gasped. "My uncle, he owned this place. They--have him here--alive--and mad! And all the rest...." Bell fumbled in the pocket of his flying suit. The young man with Paula was looking carefully at the plane. And there was a revolver in a holster at his side. An air of grim and desperate doggedness was upon him. "This is--my cousin," gasped Paula. "He--and his wife--and--and--" * * * * * The young man took out his weapon. He fired. There was a clanging of metal, the screech of tortured steel. Bell's own revolver went off the fraction of a second too late. "You may kill me, Senhor," said the young man through stiff lips. His revolver had dropped from limp fingers. He pressed the fingers of his left hand upon the place where blood welled out, just above his right elbow. "You may kill me. But if you and my cousin Paula escaped.... I have a wife, Senhor, and my mother, and my children. Kill me if you please. It is your right. But I have seen my father go mad." Sweat, the sweat of agony and of shame, came out upon his face. "I fought him, Senhor, to save the lives of all the rest. And I have spoiled your engine, and I have already sent word that you and Paula are here. Not for my own life, but...." He waited, haggard and ashamed and desperate and hopeless. But Bell was staring at the motor of the airplane. "Crankcase punctured," he said dully. "Aluminum. The bullet went right through. We can't fly five miles. And Ribiera knows we're here--or will." CHAPTER IX There was the sound of weeping in the house, the gusty and hopeless weeping of women. Bell had been walking around and around the plane, staring at it with his hands clenched. Paula watched him. "I am thinking," she said in an attempt at courage, "that you said I must not despair without your permission. But--" "Hush!" said Bell impatiently. He stared at the engine. "I'd give a lot for a car. Bolts.... How many hours have we?" "Four," said Paula drearily. "Perhaps five. You have smashed the radio in the house?" Bell nodded impatiently. He had smashed the radio, a marvelously compact and foolproof outfit, arbitrarily tuned to a fixed short wave-length. It was almost as simple to operate as a telephone. There had been no opposition to the destruction. Paula's cousin had disabled their plane and reported their presence. He was inside the house now, sick with shame--and yet he would do the same again. In one of the rooms of the house, behind strong bars, a man was kept who had been an object-lesson.... "Is there any machinery?" asked Bell desperately. "Any at all about the place?" Paula shook her head. "It may be that there is a pump." Bell went off savagely, hunting it. He came back and dived into the cockpit of the plane. He came out with a wrench, and his jaws set grimly. He worked desperately at the pump. He came back with two short, thick bolts. He crawled into the plane again, tearing out the fire wall impatiently, getting up under the motor. "We have one chance in five thousand," he said grimly from there, "of getting away from here to crash in the jungle. Personally, I prefer that to falling into Ribiera's hands. If your cousin or anybody else comes near us, out here, call me, and I'll be much obliged." * * * * * There was the sound of scraping, patient, desperate, wholly unpromising scraping. It seemed to go on for hours. "The wrench, please, Paula." She passed it to him. The bullet had entered the aluminum crankcase of the motor and pierced it through. By special providence it had not struck the crankshaft, and had partly penetrated the crankcase on the other side. Bell had cut it out, first of all. He had two holes in the crankcase, then, through which the cylinder oil had drained away. And of all pieces of machinery upon earth, an aircraft motor requires oil. Bell's scraping had been to change the punctured holes of the bullet into cone shaped bores. The aluminum alloy was harder than pure aluminum, of course, but he had managed it with a knife. Now he fitted the short bolts in the bores, forced the threads on them to cut their own grooves, and by main strength screwed them in to a fit. He tightened them. He came out with his eyes glowing oddly. "The vibration will work them loose, sooner or later," he observed grimly, "and they may not be oil tight. Also, the crankshaft may clear them, and it may not. If we go up in the ship in this state we may get five miles away, or five hundred. At any minute it may fail us, and sooner or later it will fail us. Are you game to go up, Paula?" * * * * * She smiled at him. "With you, of course." He began to brush off his hands. "There ought to be oil and gas here," he said briefly. "Another thing, there'll probably be some metal chips in the crankcase, which may stop an oil line at any minute. It's a form of committing suicide, I imagine." He went off, hunting savagely for the supplies of fuel and lubricant which would be stored at any emergency field. He found them. He was pouring gasoline into the tanks before what he was doing was noticed. Then there was stunned amazement in the house. When he had the crankcase full of oil the young man came out. Bell tapped his revolver suggestively. "With no man about this house," he said grimly, "Ribiera will put in one of his own choice. And you have a wife and children and they'll be at that man's mercy. Don't make me kill you. Ribiera may not blame you for my escape if you tell him everything--and you're hurt, anyway. Either we get away, and you do that, or you're killed and we get away anyhow." He toppled two last five gallon tins of gasoline into the cockpits--crowding them abominably--and swung on the prop. The engine caught. Bell throttled it down, kicked away the stones with which he had blocked its wheels, and climbed up into the pilot's cockpit. With his revolver ready in his lap he taxied slowly over to a favorable starting point. * * * * * The ship rose slowly, and headed west again. At three thousand feet he cut out the motor to shout to Paula. "One place is as good as another to us, now. The whole continent is closed to us by now. I'm going to try to find that headquarters and do some damage. Afterwards, we'll see." He cut in the motor again and flew steadily westward. He rose gradually to four thousand feet, to five.... He watched his instruments grimly, the motor temperature especially. There were flakes of metal in the oil lines. Twice he saw the motor temperature rise to a point that brought the sweat out on his face. And twice he saw it drop again. Bits of shattered metal were in the oiling system, and they had partly blocked the stream of lubricant until the engine heated badly. And each time the vibration had shifted them, or loosened them.... They had left the big amphibian no earlier than nine o'clock. It was noon when they took off for the _fazenda_ of Paula's kin. But it was five o'clock and after when they rose from there with an engine which might run indefinitely and might stop at any second. Bell did not really expect it to run for a long time. He had worked as much to cheat Ribiera of the satisfaction of a victory as in hopes of a real escape. But an hour, and the motor still ran. It was consistently hotter than an aero engine should run. Twice it had gone up to a dangerous temperature. One other time it had gone up for a minute or more as if the oiling system had failed altogether. But it still ran, and the sun was sinking toward the horizon and shadows were lengthening, and Bell began to look almost hopefully for a clearing in which to land before the dark hours came. Then it was that he saw the planes that had been sent for him and for Paula. * * * * * There were three of them, fast two-seaters very much like the one he drove. They were droning eastward, with all cockpits filled, from that enigmatic point in the west. And Bell had descended to investigate a barely possible stream when they saw him. The leader banked steeply and climbed upward toward him. The others gazed, swung sharply, and came after him, spreading out as they came. And Bell, after one instant's grim debate, went into a maple leaf dive for the jungle below him. The others dived madly in his wake. He heard a sharp, tearing rattle. A machine-gun. He saw the streaks of tracers going very wide. Gunfire in the air is far from accurate. A machine-gun burst from a hundred yards, when the gun has to be aimed by turning the whole madly vibrating ship, is less accurate than a rifle at six hundred, or even eight. Most aircraft duels are settled at distances of less than a hundred yards. It was that fact that Bell counted on. With a motor that might go dead at any instant and a load of passengers and gas at least equaling that of any of the other ships, mere flight promised little. The other ships, too, were armed, at any rate the leader was, and Bell had only small arms at his disposal. But a plane pilot, stunting madly to dodge tracer bullets, has little time to spare for revolver work. * * * * * Bell had but one advantage. He expected to be killed. He looked upon both Paula and himself as very probably dead already. And he infinitely preferred the clean death of a crash to either the life or death that Ribiera would offer them. He flattened out barely twenty yards above the waving branches that are the roof of the jungle. He went scudding over the tree tops, rising where the jungle rose, dipping where it dropped, and behind him the foliage waved wildly as if in a cyclone. The other planes dared not follow. To dive upon him meant too much chance of a dash into the entrapping branches. One plane, indeed, did try it, and Bell scudded lower and lower until the wheels of the small plane were spinning from occasional, breath taking contacts with the feathery topmost branches of jungle giants. That other plane flattened out not less than a hundred feet farther up and three hundred yards behind. To fire on him with a fixed gun meant a dive to bring the gun muzzle down. And a dive meant a crash. * * * * * A stream flashed past below. There was the glitter of water, reflecting the graying sky. A downward current here dragged at the wings of the plane. Bell jerked at the stick and her nose came up. There was a clashing, despite her climbing angle, of branches upon the running gear, but she broke through and shot upward, trying to stall. Bell flung her down again into his mad careering. It was not exactly safe, of course. It was practically a form of suicide. But Bell had not death, but life to fear. He could afford to be far more reckless than any man who desired to live. The plane went scuttling madly across the jungle tops, now rising to skim the top of a monster _ceiba_, now dipping deliberately. The three pursuing planes hung on above him helplessly while the short, short twilight of the tropics fell, and Bell went racing across the jungle, never twenty feet above the tree top and with the boughs behind him showing all the agitation of a miniature hurricane. As darkness deepened, the race became more suicidal still, and there were no lighted fields nearby to mark a landing place. But as darkness grew more intense, Bell could dare to rise to fifty, then a hundred feet above the tops, and the dangers of diving to his level remained undiminished. And then it was dark. * * * * * Bell climbed to two hundred feet. To two hundred and fifty. With more freedom, now, he could take one hand from the controls. He could feel the menace of the tumultuously roaring motors in his wake, but he was smiling very strangely in the blackness. He reached inside his flying suit and tore away the front of his shirt. He reached down and battered in the top of one of the five gallon gasoline tins in the cockpit with the barrel of his revolver. He stuffed the scrap of cloth into the rent. It was wetted instantly by the splashing. Another savage blow, unheard in the thunder of the motor. In the peculiarly calm air of the cockpit the reek of gasoline was strong, but cleared away. And Bell, with the frosty grim smile of a man who gambles with his life, struck a light. The cloth flared wildly, and he reached his hands into the flame and heaved the tin of fuel overside. The cloth was burning fiercely, and spilled gasoline caught in mid-air. A fierce and savage flame dropped earthward. Spark on the cloth, and the cloud of inflammable vapor that formed where the leaking tin fell plummetlike, carried the flame down when the wind of its fall would have blown it out. The following planes saw a flash of light. They saw a swiftly descending conflagration tracing a steep arch toward the tree tops. They saw that flaming vanish among the trees. And then they saw a vast upflaring of fire below. Flames licked upward almost to the tree tops.... Bell looked back from two thousand feet. Wing-tip lights were on, below, and disks of illumination played upon the roof of the jungle above the fire. The three planes were hovering over the spot. But a thick dense column of smoke was rising, now. Green things shriveling in the heat, and dried and rotted underbrush. Altogether, the volume of smoke and flame was very convincing evidence that an airplane had burst into flame in mid-air and crashed through the jungle top to burn to ashes beneath. * * * * * But Bell climbed steadily to five thousand feet. He cut out the motor, there, and in the shrieking and whistling of wind as the plane went into a shallow glide, he spoke sharply. "Paula?" "I am all right," she assured him unsteadily. "What now?" "There's a seat pack under you," said Bell. "It's a parachute. You'd better put it on. God only knows where we'll land, but if the motor stops we'll jump together. And I think we'll have to jump before dawn. This plane won't fly indefinitely. There's just one chance in a million that I know of. There'll be a moon before long. When it comes up, look for the glitter of moonlight on water. With the wing-tip lights we may--we may--manage to get down. But I doubt it." He moved his hand to cut in the motor again. She stopped him. "If we head south," she said unsteadily, "we may reach the Paraguay. It is perhaps two hundred miles, but it is broad. We should see it. Perhaps even the stars...." "Good work!" said Bell approvingly. "_Nils desperandum!_ That's our motto, Paula." He swung off his course and headed south. He was flying high, now, and an illogical and incomprehensible hope came to him. There was no hope, of course. He had had, more than once, a despairing conviction that the utmost result of all his efforts would be but the delaying of their final enslavement to The Master, whose apparent impersonality made him the more terrible as he remained mysterious. So far they seemed like struggling flies in some colossal web, freeing themselves from one snaring spot to blunder helplessly into another. But the moon came up presently, rounded and nearly full. The sky took on a new radiance, and the jungle below them was made darker and more horrible by the contrast. And when there were broad stretches of moonlit foliage visible on the rising slopes beneath, Bell felt the engine faltering. He switched on the instrument board light. One glance, and he was cold all over. The motor was hot. Hotter than it had ever been. The oil lines, perhaps the pump itself.... * * * * * Paula's hand reached back into the glow of the instrument board. He leaned over and saw her pointing. Moonlight on rolling water, far below. He dived for it, steeply. The wing-lights went on. Faint disks of light appeared far below, sweeping to and fro with the swaying of the plane, bobbing back and forth. It seemed to Bell that there had been nothing quite as horrible as the next minute or two. He felt the over-heated, maltreated motor laboring. It was being ruined, of course--and a ruined motor meant that they were marooned in the jungle. But if it kept going only until they landed. And if it did not.... White water showed below in the disks of the landing lights' glow. It tumbled down a swift and deadly _raudal_--a rapid. And then--black, deep water, moving swiftly between tall cliffs of trees. Bell risked everything to bank about and land toward the white water. The little plane seemed to be sinking into a canyon as the trees rose overhead on either side. But the moonlit rapid gave him his height, approximately, and the lights helped more than a little. * * * * * He landed with a terrific crash. The plane teetered on the very verge of a dive beneath the surface. Bell jerked back the stick and killed the engine, and it settled back. A vast, a colossal silence succeeded the deafening noise of twelve cylinders exploding continuously. There were little hissing sounds as the motor cooled. There was the smell of burnt oil. "All right, Paula?" asked Bell quietly. "I--I'm all right." The plane was drifting backward, now. It spun around in a stately fashion, its tail caught in underbrush, and it swung back. It drifted past cliffs of darkness for a long time, and grounded, presently, with a surprising gentleness. "Do you know," said Bell dryly, "this sort of thing is getting monotonous. I think our motor's ruined. I never knew before that misfortunes could grow literally tedious. I've been expecting to be killed any minute since we started off, but the idea of being stuck in the jungle with a perfectly good plane and a bad motor...." He fished inside his flying suit and extracted a cigarette. Then he lit it. "Let's see.... We haven't a thing to eat, have we?" * * * * * There was a little slapping noise. Bell became suddenly aware of a horde of insects swarming around him. Smoke served partially to drive them off. "Look here," he said suddenly, "we could unfold a parachute and cover the cockpits for some protection against these infernal things that are biting me." "We may need the parachute," said Paula unsteadily. "Does--does that smoke of yours drive them away?" "A little." Bell hesitated. "I say, it would be crowded, but if I came up there, or you here...." "I--I'll come back there," she said queerly. "The extra cans of gasoline here...." She slipped over the partition, in the odd flying suit which looks so much more odd when a girl wears it. She settled down beside him, and he tried painstakingly to envelope her in a cloud of tobacco smoke. The plague of insects lessened. There was nothing to do but wait for dawn. She was very quiet, but as the moon rose higher he saw that her eyes were open. The night noises of the jungle all about them came to their ears. Furtive little slitherings, and the sound of things drinking greedily at the water's edge, and once or twice peculiar little despairing small animal cries off in the darkness. * * * * * The jungle was dark and sinister, and all the more so when the moon rose high and lightened its face and left them looking into weird, abysmal blackness between moonlit branches. Bell thought busily, trying not to become too conscious of the small warm body beside him. He moved, suddenly, and found her fingers closed tightly on the sleeve of his flying suit. "Frightened, Paula?" he asked quietly. "Don't be. We'll make out." She shook her head and looked up at him, drawing away as if to scan his face more closely. "I am thinking," she said almost harshly, "of biology. I wonder--" Bell waited. He felt an intolerable strain in her tensed figure. He put his hand comfortingly over hers. And, astoundingly, he found it trembling. "Are all women fools?" she demanded in a desperate cynicism. "Are we all imbeciles? Are--" Bell's pulse pounded suddenly. He smiled. "Not unless men are imbeciles too," he said dryly. "We've been through a lot in the past two days. It's natural that we should like each other. We've worked together rather well. I--well"--his smile was distinctly a wry and uncomfortable one--"I've been the more anxious to get to some civilized place where The Master hasn't a deputy because--well--it wouldn't be fair to talk about loving you while--" he shrugged, and said curtly, "while you had no choice but to listen." * * * * * She stared at him, there in the moonlight with the jungle moving about its business of life and death about them. And very, very slowly the tenseness left her figure. And very, very slowly she smiled. "Perhaps," she said quietly, "you are lying to me, Charles. Perhaps. But it is a very honorable thing for you to say. I am not ashamed, now, of feeling that I wish to be always near you." "Hush!" said Bell. He put his arm about her shoulder and drew her closer to him. He tilted her face upward. It was oval and quite irresistibly pretty. "I love you," said Bell steadily. "I've been fighting it since God knows when, and I'm going to keep on fighting it--and it's no use. I'm going to keep on loving you until I die." Her fingers closed tightly upon his. Bell kissed her. "Now," he said gruffly, "go to sleep." He pressed her head upon his shoulder and kept it there. After a long time she slept. He stirred, much later, and she opened her eyes again. "What is it?" "Damn these mosquitos," growled Bell. "I can't keep them off your face!" CHAPTER X For four hours after sunrise Bell worked desperately. With the few and inadequate tools in the plane he took apart the oiling system of the motor. It was in duplicate, of course, like all modern air engines, and there were three magnetos, and double spark plugs. Bell drained the crankcase beneath a sun that grew more and more hot and blistering, catching the oil in a gasoline can that he was able to empty into the main tanks. He washed out innumerable small oil pipes with gasoline, and flushed out the crankcase itself, and had at the end of his working as many small scraps of metal as would half fill a thimble. He showed then to Paula. "And the stars in their courses fought against Sisera," he quoted dryly. "Any one of these, caught in just the right place, would have let us down into the jungle last night." She smiled up at him. "But they didn't." "No.... God loves the Irish," said Bell. "What's that thing?" Paula was fishing, sitting on a fallen tree in the cloud of smoke from a smudge fire Bell had built for her. She was wearing the oily flying suit he had found in the shed with the plane, and had torn strips from her discarded dress to make a fishing line. The hook was made out of the stiff wire handle of one of the extra gasoline tins. "Hook and leader in one," Bell had observed when he made it. * * * * * He was pointing to a flat bodied fish with incredible jaws that lay on the grass, emitting strange sounds even in the air. It flapped about madly. Its jaws closed upon a stick nearly half an inch thick, and cut it through. "It is a _piranha_," said Paula. "The same fish that bit your hand. It can bite through a copper wire fastened to a hook, but this hook is so long...." "Pleasant," said Bell. Something large and red passed before his eyes. He struck at it instinctively. "Don't!" said Paula sharply. "Why?" "It's a _maribundi_ wasp," she told him "And its sting.... Children have died of it. A strong man will be ill for days from one single sting." "Still more pleasant," said Bell. "The jungle is a charming place, isn't it?" He wiped the sweat off his face. "Any more little pets about?" She looked about seriously. "There." She pointed to a sapling not far distant. "The _palo santo_ yonder has a hollow trunk, and in it there are usually ants, which are called fire-ants. They bite horribly. It feels like a drop of molten metal on your flesh. And it festers afterwards. And there is a fly, the _berni_ fly, which lays its eggs in living flesh. The maggot eats its way within. I do not know much about the jungle, but my father has--had a _fazenda_ in Matto Grosso and I was there as a child. The _camaradas_ told me much about the jungle, then." Bell winced, and sat down beside her. She had Ribiera's pearl handled automatic within easy reach. She saw him looking at it. "I do not think there is any danger," she said with a not very convincing smile, "but there are _cururus_--water snakes. They grow very large." "And I asked you to fish!" said Bell. "Stop it!" * * * * * She hauled the line ashore, with a flapping thing on the end of it. Bell took the fish off and regarded her catch moodily. "I'd been thinking," he said moodily, "that Ribiera suspects we're dead. I'd been envisioning ourselves as marooned, yes, but relatively safe as long as we were thought to be dead. And I'd thought that if we lived a sort of castaway existence for a few weeks we'd be forgotten, and would have a faint chance of getting out to civilization without being noticed. But this...." "I will stay," she said steadily. "I will stay anywhere or go anywhere, with you." Bell's hand closed on her shoulder. "I believe it," he said heavily. "And--if you noticed--I had been thinking of letting down the Trade. I'd been thinking of not trying to fight The Master any longer, but only of getting you to safety. In a sense, I was thinking of treason to my job and my government. I suspect"--he smiled rather queerly--"I suspect we love each other rather much, Paula. I'd never have dreamed for anyone else. Go over to the plane and don't fish any more. I'll rustle the food for both of us." She stood up obediently, smiling at him. "But kill that _piranha_ before you try to handle it," she advised seriously. Bell battered the savage thing until it ceased to move. He picked it up, then, and sniffed the air. Paula had been in a cloud of acrid smoke. She could not have detected the taint in the air he discovered. He went curiously, saw a broken branch overhead, and then saw something on the ground. * * * * * He came back to the plane presently, looking rather sick. "Give me one of the machetes, Paula," he said quietly. "We brought them, I think." "What is the matter?" He took the wide-bladed woods knife. "A man," he said, nauseated. "He either fell or was thrown from somewhere high above. From a plane. He was United States Secret Service. There's a badge in his clothes. Don't come." He went heavily over to the spot beyond the smudge fire. He worked there for half an hour. When he came back there were earth stains on his hands and clothing, and he carried a very small brown package in his hand. "He had a report ready to send off," said Bell grimly. "I read it. It's in code, of course, but in the Trade...." He set to work savagely on the engine, reassembling it. As he worked, he talked in savage, jerky sentences. "The Service man at Asunción. One of the seven who vanished. He'd learned more than we have. He was caught--poisoned, of course--and pretended to surrender. Told a great deal that he shouldn't, in order to convince The Master's deputy. The key men in nearly every republic in South America are in The Master's power. Paraguay belongs to him, body and soul. Bolivia is absolutely his. Every man of the official class from the President down knows that he has two weeks or less of sanity if The Master's deputy shuts down on him--and he knows that at the crook of the deputy's finger he'll be assassinated before then. If they run away, they go murder mad. If they stay, they have to obey him. It's hellish!" * * * * * He stopped talking to make a fine adjustment. He went on, somberly. "Chile's not so bad off, but the deputy has slaves nearly everywhere. Ecuador--well, the President and half of Congress have been poisoned. The man I found was trying to get a sample of the poison for analysis. He'd learned it was unstable. Wouldn't keep. The Master has to send fresh supplies constantly all over the continent. That accounts for the deputies remaining loyal. If The Master had reason to suspect them, he had only to stop their supply.... They couldn't stock up on the deadly stuff for their own use. So they're as abjectly subject to The Master as their slaves are to them. No new slaves are to be made in Paraguay or Bolivia, except when necessary. It's believed that in six months the other republics will have every influential man subjected. Every army officer, every judge, every politician, every outstanding rich man.... And then, overnight, South America will become an empire, with that devil of a Master as its overlord." He lifted one of the oil pumps in place and painstakingly tightened the bolts that held it. "Picture it," he said grimly. "Beasts as viceroys, already taking their pleasure. Caligulas, Neros, on viceregal thrones all over the continent.... And every man who shows promise, or shows signs of honor or courage or decency, either killed or sent mad or...." * * * * * Paula was watching his face closely. "I think," she said soberly, "that there is something worse." Bell was silent for an instant. "For me," he said bitterly, "it is. Before The Master dares to make his coup public, he must be sure that there will be no foreign interference. So, he must establish a deputy in Washington. A relatively few chosen men, completely enslaved, could hold back our Government from any action. Leaders in Congress, and members of the Cabinet, working, in defense of The Master because his defeat would mean their madness.... He would demand no treason of them at first. He would require simply that he should not be interfered with. But his plans include the appointment of deputies in the United States later on. I don't think he can subdue America. I don't think so. But he could--and I think he would--send whole cities mad. And if you think of that...." * * * * * He was silent, working. A long, long time later he swung on the propeller. The motor caught. He throttled it down and watched it grimly. The motor warmed up to normal, and stayed there. "It will run," he said coldly. "Those two plugs in the crankcase may come out at any time. I've tightened them a little. They'd worked loose from the vibration. But--well.... That Service man was heading for Asunción. He'd been found out. They probably shot him down in mid-air after he'd gotten away. His plane may be crashed anywhere in the jungle within a mile or so. And I've two bearings on the _fazenda_ where Ribiera went, now. One from Asunción through here and one from Rio. I want to go back there to-night and dump burning gasoline on the buildings, to do enough damage to disorganize things a little. Then I'm going to try to make it to a seaport. We can stow away, perhaps." He shut off the motor. "We'll start at dusk. There'll be lights there. This report says it's nearly a city--of slaves. We want the darkness for our getaway." Paula looked at the sky. "We have three hours," she said quietly. "Let us cook and eat. You must keep up your strength, Charles." She said it in all seriousness, with the air of one who has entire confidence and is merely solicitous. And Bell, who knew of at least three excellent reasons why neither of them should survive until dawn--Bell looked at her queerly, and then grinned, and then took her in his arms and kissed her. She seemed to like it. And they lunched quite happily on _piranha_ and _pacu_--which is smaller--and drank water, and for dessert had more _piranha_. * * * * * The long afternoon wore away slowly. It was hot, and grew blistering. Insects came in swarms and tormented them until Bell built a second and larger smudge fire. But they fastened upon his flesh when he went out of its smoke for more wood. They talked, as well as they could for smoke, and looked at each other as well as they could for smarting eyes. It was not at all the conventional idea of romantic conversation, but it was probably a good deal more honest than most, because they both knew quite well that their chance of life was small. A plane whose motor was precariously patched, flying over a jungle without hope of a safe landing if that patched-up motor died, was bad enough. But with the three nearest nations subservient to The Master, whose deputy Ribiera was, and all those nations hunting them as soon as they were known to be yet alive.... "Would it not be wise, Charles," asked Paula wistfully, "just for us to try to escape, ourselves, and not try--" "Wise, perhaps," admitted Bell, "but I've got to strike a blow while I can." He was staring somberly at the little plane, fast upon a mud bank, with the tall green jungle all about. "The deputies and all their slaves have their lives hanging by a thread--the thread of a constant supply of the antidote to the poison that's administered with the antidote. The deputies--Ribiera, for instance--don't realize that. Else they wouldn't dare do the things they do. But let them realize that the thread can be broken, and what their slaves would do to them before they all went mad.... You see? Let them learn that a blow has been struck at the center of all the ghastly thing, and they'll be frightened. They'll be close to mutiny through sheer panic. And there may be slip-ups." * * * * * It was vague, perhaps, but it was true. The subjection of the poisoned men and women was due not only to terror of what would happen if they disobeyed the deputies, but to a belief that that thing would not happen if they did obey. If Bell could do enough damage to the _fazenda_ of The Master to shake the second belief, he would have shaken the whole conspiracy. And a conspiracy that is not a complete success is an utter failure. It was close to sunset when they heard a droning noise in the distance. Bell went swiftly to the cockpit of the plane and searched the sky. "Don't see it," he said grimly, "and it probably doesn't see us. We're all right, I suppose." But he was uneasy. The droning noise grew to a maximum and slowly died away again. It diminished to a distant muttering. "What say," said Bell suddenly, "we get aloft now? We'll follow that damned thing home. It's going from Asunción to that place we want to find. This is on that route. Whoever's in it won't be looking behind, and it's close to darkness." * * * * * Paula stood up. "I am ready, Charles." Bell swung out on the floats and tugged at the prop. The motor caught and roared steadily. While it was warming up, he stripped off the rest of his shirt and tore it into wide strips, and tied the rags in the handles of the gasoline tins in the two cockpits. "For our bombs," he explained, smiling faintly. "You'll want to wear your chute pack, Paula. You know how to work it? And we'll divide the guns and what shells we have, and stick them in the flying suit pockets." He made her show him a dozen times that she knew how to pull out the ring that would cause the parachute to open. She climbed into the front cockpit and smiled down at him. He throttled down the motor to its lowest speed and shoved off from the mud bank. Clambering up, while the plane moved slowly over the water under the gentle pull of the slow-moving propeller, he bent over and kissed her. "For luck," he said in her ear. The next instant he settled down at the controls, glanced a last time at the instruments, and gave the motor the gun. * * * * * The plane lifted soggily but steadily and swept up-stream toward the rolling water of the _raudal_, which tumbled furiously about an obstacle half of stones and shallows, and half of caught and rotting tree trunks. It rose steadily until the trees dropped away on either side and the jungle spread out on every hand. It rose to a thousand feet and went roaring through the air to northward, while Bell strained his eyes for the plane on ahead. It was ten minutes or more before he sighted it, winging its way steadily into the misty distance above the jungle. Bell settled down to follow. The engine roared valorously. For half an hour Bell watched it anxiously, but it remained cool and had always ample power. Paula's head showed above the cockpit combing. Mostly she looked confidently ahead, but once or twice she turned about to smile at him. The sun seemed high when they rose from the water, but as it neared the horizon its rate of descent seemed to increase. They had been in the air for no more than three-quarters of an hour when it was twice its own disk above the far distant hills. Almost immediately, it seemed, it had halved that distance. And then the lower limb of the blaring circle was sharply cut off by the hill crests and the sun sank wearily to rest behind the edge of the world. It seemed as if a swift chill breeze blew over the jungle, in warning of the night. The trees became dark. A shadowy dusk filled the air even up to where the plane flew thunderously on. And then, quite abruptly, stars were shining and it was night. * * * * * Bell remembered, suddenly, and switched on the radio as an experiment. The harsh, discordant dashes sounded in his ears through the roaring of the motor. A beam of short waves was being sent out from his destination. While he was on the direct path the monotonous signals could be heard. When they weakened or died he would have left the way. But they continued, discordant and harsh and monotonous, while the last faint trace of the afterglow died away and night was complete, and a roof of many stars glittered overhead, and the jungle lay dark and deadly below him. For nearly half an hour more he kept on. Twice he switched on the instrument board light to glance at the motor temperature. The first time it appeared a little high. The second time it was normal again. But there was little use in watching instruments. If the motor failed there was no landing field to make for. A sudden faint glow sprang into being, many miles ahead. The pinkish glare of many, many lights turned on suddenly. As the plane thundered on the glow grew brighter. An illuminated field, for the convenience of messengers who carried the poison for The Master to all the nations which were to be subjected. The glow went out as Bell was just able to distinguish long rows of twinkling bulbs, and he saw the harsher, fiercer glow of floodlights. He reached forward and touched Paula's shoulder. Conversation was impossible over the motor's roar. Her hand reached up and pressed his. Then he saw other lights. Bright lights, as from houses. Arc lights as from storage warehouses, or something of the sort. A long, long row of lighted windows, which might be dormitories or perhaps sheds in which The Master's enslaved secretaries kept the record of his victims. * * * * * The earth flung back the roaring of the little plane's motor. Bell had but little time to act before other planes would dart upward to seek him out. He dived, and the wing tip landing lights went on, sending fierce glares downward. Twin disks of light appeared upon the earth. Sheds, houses, a long row of shacks as if for laborers. A drying field, on which were spread out plants with their leaves turning brown. A wall about it.... "The damned stuff," said Bell grimly. He swept on. Jungle, only jungle. He banked steeply as lights flicked on and off below and as--once--the wing tip lights showed men running frantically two hundred feet below. Then a stream of fire shot earthward, and Bell held up his hand and arm into the blast of the slip stream. It blew out the blaze that had licked at his flesh. He stared down. The gas can had left a trailing stream of fluid behind it as it went spinning down to earth. All that stream of inflammable stuff was aflame. The can itself struck earth and seemed to explode, and the trailing mass of fire was borne onward by the wind and lay across a row of thatch-roofed buildings. An incredible sheet of fire spread out. The stuff in the drying yard was burning. Bell laughed shortly, and flung over another of his flaming bombs, and another, and the fourth.... * * * * * He climbed for the skies, then, as rectangles of light showed below and planes were thrust out of their lighted hangars. Four huge conflagrations were begun. One was close by a monster rounded tank, and Bell watched with glistening eyes as it crept closer. Suddenly--it seemed suddenly, but it must have been minutes later--flame rushed up the sides of that tank, there was a sudden hollow booming, and fire was flung broadcast in a blazing, pouring flood. "Their fuel tank!" said Bell, his eyes gleaming in the ruddy light from below. He shut off his landing lights and went upward, steeply. "I've played hell with them now!" A thousand feet up. Two thousand. Two thousand five hundred.... And suddenly Bell felt cold all over. The instrument board! The motor was hot. Hot! Burning! He shut it off before it could burst into flames, but he heard the squealing of tortured, unlubricated metal grinding to a stop. He leveled out. It was strangely, terribly silent in the high darkness, despite the roaring of wind about the gliding plane. The absence of the motor roar was the thing that made it horrible. "Paula," said Bell harshly, "one of those plugs came out, I guess. The motor's ruined. Dead. The ship's going to crash. Ready with your parachute?" * * * * * It was dark, up there, save for the glare of fires upon the under surface of the wings. But he saw her hand, encarmined by that glare, upon the combing of the cockpit. A moment later her face. She turned, light-dazzled, to smile back at him. "All right, Charles." Her voice quavered a little, but it was very brave. "I'm ready. You're coming, too?" "I'm coming," said Bell grimly. Below them was the city of The Master, set blazing by their doing. If their chutes were seen descending.... And if they were not.... "Count ten," said Bell hoarsely, "and pull out the ring. I'll be right after you." He saw the slim little black-clad figure drop, plummetlike, and prayed in an agony of fear. Then a sudden blooming thing hid it from sight. Thick clouds of smoke lay over the lights and fires below. Bell stepped over the side and went hurtling down toward the earth in his turn. (_To be continued_) [Advertisement: ] The Cavern World _By James P. Olsen_ [Illustration: _He aimed it, and the Thing gripping him was hurled back upon the others._] [Sidenote: A great oil field had gone dry--and Asher, trapped far under the earth among the revolting Petrolia, learns why.] "Impossible! What sort of creatures would they be, that could live two miles beneath the surface of the earth? Surely, Asher, you are joking!" R. Briggs Johns, mighty power back of Stan-America Oil Corporation, looked at Blaine Asher closely, expecting to see the chief geologist and scientist of the company laugh. But Blaine Asher did not laugh. Serious, his rather thin face grave as he leaned his tall, muscular body above a torsion machine he was adjusting, there was nothing to indicate he had the faintest idea of a joke. "Why damn it, Asher!" Johns insisted wrathfully, "you don't really mean that. And"--he took a nervous turn around the laboratory--"if such a wild thing were possible, what has that to do with our trouble? You haven't led me on to spend a million dollars drilling a thirty-six-inch hole, just so you could test a fantastic theory?" "You know better than that." Asher wiped his hands and leaned against a table. Johns, looking into the cool gray eyes of the man before him, did know better. Blaine Asher was more than just a geologist or scientist. Well he might be termed a master geo-metallurgist. Johns nodded, wiping beads of perspiration from his brow. "You say impossible--and want to know how those creatures cause this field, the largest oil field in the world, to start going bone dry over night. All right: "Remember how you laughed when I told you that oil would some day be mined instead of pumped or flowed from the earth? You couldn't see how one central shaft could be sunk, then tunnels run back underneath the oil strata, tapping the sand from the bottom and letting the oil run down to be pumped out one shaft. Yet, that way, we would get _all_ the oil, instead of the possible one-eighth of the total amount as we get by present methods. "Now, you have seen that done. And you said that was impossible." * * * * * "Yes," Johns objected, "but those test wells we mined were only a few hundred feet deep. Wells in this field are eight thousand feet deep! Think of the heat, man! You can't do it. And as for people--" "Your great field has suddenly gone dry, almost in a month's time," Asher stopped him. "What is happening here can happen elsewhere. Only, formations in this field are more suited to there being life--or something--below us. Stan-America is going broke. Many others have already gone broke. Still, that oil couldn't have gotten away. "As for heat--yes, we know that oil is hot when it comes up from the oil sand at eight thousand feet, or from ordinary wells at three to six thousand feet. But"--Asher lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply--"gas coming out of the same well is _cold_! So cold it forms frost inches thick on pipes and tanks. "Rock pressure--the pressure of the earth--forcing up the gas, causes that. Why couldn't that same pressure cool great caverns below the granite cap below the oil sands? It could. For that matter, I know that same pressure will generate useful power. I'll show you that in a minute." "All right!" Johns chewed his cigar almost savagely. "Say, then, that you can work down there, nearly two miles underground; granted that we can tunnel from beneath the sands and pump more oil from one central shaft than we now do from fifty wells--what has that to do with this tosh about a race of people?" "They are not people, perhaps." Asher grinned at the "there, I've stuck you!" look on Johns' face. "Let's say, rather, creatures. Have you ever met Lee Wong, the great Chinese scientist, or his Russian geological collaborator, Krenski? No? * * * * * "Well, I have. I met them in Paris in 1935--five years ago. They're brilliant men, and they've prepared some wonderful papers. Brilliant, I said: they are also dangerous. They claim, you know, that the fossils we now drill up come from a lost race--people who went _into_ the earth while man, like us, was coming up onto the earth from the water. Some claim those fossils have been on the surface at one time, and were silted over. But eight thousand feet is a lot of silt, Johns: ever thought of that?" "Good God!" Johns gasped hoarsely. "You almost make me believe you are right. But, supposing there is such a race of things--what will you do?" "This." Asher drew back a curtain that was stretched across one end of the laboratory. "You know I was working on a cage in which to descend into that eight-thousand-foot well you've drilled--the well you're going to use to try and find why this field is suddenly gone dry. This it it." Johns stared, shook his head wonderingly and stared again. Before him, ready to be transported to the well that was larger than any ever drilled before, stood what Blaine Asher called his Miner, for want of a better name. A thick steel tube, it was. Twelve feet long and large enough around that a man might stand inside of it. The top was welded on in much the manner a top is welded on an ordinary hot-water heater, and had connections for hose in it. At the height of a man's eyes heavy windows were set in, and in one side was a door just large enough to admit a man's body. This door sealed tight the minute it closed. "It looks like--like some sort of a deep sea diving outfit," Johns said as he walked around the braces that held the Miner upright. "But all those gadgets inside and on the bottom--?" He indicated the strange instruments that could be seen when the door was opened, and the queer glass tubes that projected from the very bottom. * * * * * "Pressure-power units--my own invention," Asher told him. "For ten years I've been working on this. I knew that some day I would want to explore the oil caverns beneath the earth, so I made ready. "As I told you, rock pressure, or earth pressure, is a tremendous thing. It is power, so I figured how to use it. Under artificial pressure, I have tried out my Miner and its equipment. "Those tubes sticking from the bottom contain something you are familiar with: non-burning and non-explosive helium gas. I have discovered a way, by their use, to create power that will melt away rock or iron--literally dissolve it into nothing! Not in an hour, or minutes. In seconds, Johns! "The pressure of the earth acts as my generator. The pressure action on the filaments of platinum, and several compositions I have no time to explain now, causes heat. Call it friction of compressed air, if you wish. As neon gases carry an electric spark, so does this helium carry the power generated by earth pressure. The pressure below earth acts on the delicate coils and points of my generator. This bit of power is carried into the helium tubes, and by a system of vacuum power, is increased millions of times. Thus, the tiny spark of a cigar lighter would electrocute a hundred men!" "I--you mean somewhat like a violet ray is increased in the lightning tubes?" Johns strove to grasp the foundation of the thing. "Yes, the foundation of it all--with the earth's pressure the power motive," Asher nodded. "So, after my Miner is on the bottom of our well, I can burn--or dissolve--a room as large as this laboratory in a few minutes. The whole thing is no mystery after you learn it--not nearly so much as radium, or radio, was. Merely creating a spark of electricity and fanning it through a vacuum and a conductor of massed gases." "But"--Johns had unconsciously dropped his voice to a whisper--"what of these strange creatures? How would you deal with them? Damn it, Asher, I think I'm beginning to believe this nutty idea of yours. Any man who can generate power with the pressure of air as it is packed by earth must know what he is talking about!" "I have but one protection against anything down there that tries to harm me," Asher said simply. "That is this--see?" * * * * * What he held up looked like an old-fashioned six shooter. It was fitted with a platinum-sealed box in the place where a cylinder would have been. The barrel looked like some queer, blue glass. "Do you see that test tube?" Asher pointed to a glass tube on a table a few feet away. "Now watch." He pressed a tiny ratchet under his thumb. A snapping, buzzing noise filled the laboratory. Johns gave an exclamation of wonder and awe. Quickly, the test tube started to melt into a pool of molten glass. Asher increased the pressure of his ratchet trigger. The tube was knocked to the floor. "Static electricity--always some form of electricity," said Asher grinning at the astonished oil baron. "Conductor coils here," he continued as he tapped the sealed cylinder, "are charged much as a flash-lamp battery. The charged conductors attract the static electricity of the air, and, in a manner similar to the action of the power generator, increase power. There is a slight difference: by turning quick power on my static gun, I can cause the charge to knock down and merely electrocute, as I knocked the half-melted tube from the table." "I can understand that, a little," Johns sighed profoundly. "It's the same juice that causes a gasoline truck to catch fire if you don't have a ground chain on it somewhere. But, just the same, I claim it's remarkable." "Not half as remarkable as what I expect to find two miles down when I descend to-morrow." Asher had a dreamy look in his eyes. "I wonder: new ways to get petroleum wealth ... a strange people...." * * * * * "Men,"--Asher, a tight-fitting asbestos composition suit covering him from foot to neck, spoke tersely--"when you get me on bottom, stop every bit of machinery, and don't dare pull up until I give the signal. If I'm down there the entire day, all right. But"--he smiled, trying to make light of the danger--"if I don't signal within thirty-six hours, pull up anyhow." From the bull-wheels of the drilling rig Asher spooled out some of the air-hose cable through which air blown over ice would be pumped into the Miner; then when the long steel cylinder was over the hole and ready, he turned to the company officials and government scientists and engineers around him in the boarded-up derrick. "Possibly I can get a survey in an hour. Perhaps I'll have to come back to the surface and make adjustments to my equipment. That remains to be seen.... Now, let's get low." He adjusted a helmet over his head. It looked much like the helmet worn by a sea diver, except that it had no connecting hose for air. The windows in the helmet, which contained pressure lights, worked on the same principle as the disintegrating rays of the Miner. When Asher turned the ratchet that set the little pressure machine into motion, a violet tinged green ray of great lighting power shot out and increased, by weight of air, or atmosphere beneath the earth, the power of one tiny spark a million times. Without ceremony or farewell, Asher crawled inside his tube. The door was closed and he fastened it from inside. For a moment, wild panic assailed him. But he fought it off, becoming again less the feeling human and more the cold calculator of advanced science. The light from outside, coming in through the windows of the Miner, was shut off. The long steel cage clanked against the sides of the special casing in the well, and Blaine Asher was on his trip into a lower world never before visited by man. That was what Asher believed. But, had he known what waited for him, two miles into the bowels of the earth.... * * * * * At five hundred feet, the descent stopped, giving him time to adjust himself to the pressure change. The gas and oil had been eased out of the hole. That is, the casing had been run on through the producing strata, shutting it off. Asher signaled by buzzer, and a stream of the ice-washed air flowed down to him. Three thousand feet! Six thousand feet! More than a mile down! Sweat poured from his body in streams, and the air coming into the Miner through the hose did not relieve him. It was hot--almost unbearably so. His ears were roaring. The dark of his tube was relieved as he turned on his pressure lamps. He adjusted the pressure discs over his ears by twisting a thumbscrew on his helmet, and the pounding of his ear-drums ceased. Gasping, he watched the depth meter in front of him. It did not seem as if he was moving, but the indicator now showed more than seven thousand feet. It moved around slowly and more slowly; trembled at eight thousand--and stopped. Like the snapping of a man's fingers, the temperature inside the Miner changed. Asher was now fifty feet below the bottom of the oil and gas sands, and if his theory about rock pressure worked.... It _was_ working. Frost was forming on the inside of the Miner! "I'm right--right--right!" Asher thought, elated, sending his buzzer signal up to those so far above. The icy air through his hose changed to air of normal temperature. He signaled for slack in the lowering cable, then prepared for the greatest test of all. Cramped, with hardly room to move, he studied his gages. Helium tubes at the proper pressure for compressing the tiny spark of the pressure generator, so it would flare a million times stronger under the action of the vacuum tubes: diamond and cut-glass tubes in the bottom of the Miner, thermoed with layers of quicksilver: everything cleared, everything ready. * * * * * His hand shaking, Asher pushed the tiny switch that brought his filament points trembling together under the atmospheric pressure so far underground. A tiny spark danced and throbbed through the tiny glass tube before him, beginning to buzz as it started the circuit of increasing coils, and soon humming and vibrating as the helium and vacuum tubes swelled it to full power. Spark after spark, increased almost beyond imagination, followed one after another. The Miner throbbed and shook. White-faced, Asher touched the little lever that opened the blasting outlets in the bottom. Almost instantly the Miner dropped a full six inches--went on, down to a foot. Asher, pride of success choking him, pulled the lever hard over, which brought some of the tubes beneath him spreading out, to blast away the earth on each side of him. He signaled for more and more slack as the depth indicator showed he had burned, or disintegrated, his way down to thirty feet beyond the original bottom of the hole. He was below the bottom of the protecting wall of casing now--at the mercy of the pressure of two miles of earth. Slowly, setting all his bottom tubes to cutting away on all sides of him, he started hollowing out enough room to step out into. His lights, when he looked through the windows, showed ghostly on earth ten feet on each side of him. Ten more minutes and he had created a room nearly twenty-five feet square--a man-made cave, two miles below the surface. There was something akin to awe in the feelings of Asher when he opened the little door, crawled out and stood erect. The pressure lamps in his helmet lit up the room he had made. There were no sounds, just a vague, ringing silence. Then so quickly that it robbed him of his senses, two things happened. A hundred yards away from the well in which he had descended, another well, drilled by another oil company, was shot. Three hundred quarts of nitro-glycerine were set off in the hole. * * * * * Asher screamed and clamped his ear discs down tight. It seemed the very gods of thunder were shrieking and raging in his head; every nerve and fiber in his body throbbed and tingled with the hellish vibration. On his knees, where the shock had thrown him, in darkness beyond description, Asher realized the lights from the Miner no longer shone out. Frantically, he adjusted the small lights in his helmet and got them to sending off their rays again. Then, an icy hand seemed to squeeze his heart, turning his blood to ice-water in his veins. He cursed himself for not foreseeing that some company might shoot a well close by, while he was underground. He turned. The Miner was all right, but Blaine Asher was trapped! For the walls of the hole below the bottom of the casing had caved. Thirty feet of rock, sand and conglomerate matter were between him and the bottom of the pipe. He was trapped--two miles below the earth. There was no hope of rescue, the hope that miners feel in deep shafts. There could be no rescue for Asher. No one could get to him. He cried out his horror, fighting to keep from swooning. The helmet hampered him. He turned on a small pressure lamp attached to the belt at his waist, and chanced taking the helmet off. Dank and nauseous was the air that he breathed, since it no longer came through the filters in his helmet. But it was air that would serve, nevertheless. A crackling, rumbling sound caused him to turn quickly. Eyes wide, he stared at the long crack that was opening before him. Asher was between two layers of granite--one layer under him, and another above him, just below the oil sands. Now, as the crack between these two layers widened, he could see it slope downward until it ended in a great cavern that stretched endlessly away beyond the beams of his light. * * * * * It wasn't this crack that caused Blaine Asher, an iron-hearted man of science, to choke and sag down to a sitting position, his knees refusing to support him. No--it was the terrible, Godless, unbelievable _Things_ that scurried around in the smooth rock hall that stretched away into the cavern. Frozen with soul-chilling fear, Asher stared with eyes that bulged. What were they? Spawned neither of God nor Satan--what could they be? Black-skinned--or was it skin?--like rubber, with round bodies, like black basket balls inflated to triple size; bodies that seemed to ripple, distort, swell and contract with life within life. Short, foot-long stems that must have been legs, ending in round balls that served as feet, no doubt. Tentacles, Asher would have called them, six feet in length, thick as mighty cables and dotted with suckers like the tentacles of an octopus. And heads--Asher gagged and vomited! Not heads. Just masses of the black body substance as large as the two fists of a man. In each head was a crooked black gash for a mouth. There were no eyes that Asher could see. Yet, these Things seemed to see one another, and emitted strange, chill, squeaking sounds! As Asher watched, the Things sensed his presence. A half hundred of them rose and started toward him. They did not walk, nor did they crawl. Undulating, contorting strangely, they came on with incredible speed, long tentacles waving before them; slithering on the rocky floor of the cavern; making those odd squeaking noises. As they neared him, Asher sprang to his feet, backing up against the pile of cavings beside the Miner. A long tentacle whipped out and wrapped around his leg. A short, snout-tentacle quivered toward his face. There was strength beyond imagining in the grip on him. * * * * * With an almost animal snarl the man from the earth's surface moved to protect himself from these creatures, surely of the lowest living order. He grabbed into the pocket of his loose asbestos composition suit, and his fingers closed comfortingly around the static gun. He aimed it, and the Thing gripping him was hurled back upon the others. Crackling, snapping viciously, the charges of electricity that were drawn from the very earth increased in the gun and spumed out like lightning bolts. The Things squeaked excitedly and surged forward. Asher's finger pulled the ratchet trigger full force, and like dew before a strong shaft of sunlight, the gruesome Things were knocked away. Hating the sight, Asher changed the charge of his gun, cutting the size of the path the volts covered, thereby increasing the potency of the discharge. The piled bodies sizzled, and to Asher's nose came a sulphurous smell. Then, there was nothing at all.... Sick, he put the gun back into the deep pocket and leaned on the wall. He turned around again to the pile of cavings that barred his way from the surface, and dug like a madman with his bare hands. The Miner was weighed down, and he could not use it anyhow. The blasting tubes were on the bottom, and could not be shifted to the top. Suddenly he stopped his crazed work, raised his head and listened. "My God!" he gasped hoarsely, "am I stark mad?" He thought he must be, for the voice of a human being came to his ears. "You will be pleased, Blaine Asher, to turn around! And do not make any foolish moves, I warn you." "Lee Wong! Krenski!" Asher turned, face to face with the super-scientists of whom he had spoken to R. Briggs Johns the day before. Asher shook his head. More of the terrible dream, this meeting two humans down in the earth's core. * * * * * "Most right, honorable Asher." Lee Wong bowed mockingly. He and Krenski were garbed in loose-fitting garments of much the same style as Asher. In their hands, they carried static guns. Not the small gun, such as Asher had concealed in his pocket. More like heavy air drills, they were. Asher frowned at the lamps they carried. He knew by the dazzling action of the rays that they were pressure lamps. But they gave off much better light than those of his own invention. They had gone him one better there. "Did--did you see them?" Asher gulped. "And how--how did you get down here? Tell me!" He took a step toward Lee Wong, intending to lay his hand on the Chinaman, to make sure he was live flesh and blood, and not a figment of his disordered brain. "Stand where you are!" Lee Wong snapped. He held the heavy static gun up and Asher felt a light charge tingle his body. "Those Things of which you speak--I assume you mean the Petrolia. Ah, yes, we see them. Every day, we see them. For us they work. They work, my dear Blaine Asher, tapping upward into the oil sands; sands that are burial places of countless millions of generations of Petrolia; of lost races that once ruled supreme over these underground worlds. "How simple, to take the oil from below--the oil you want so much above. Someone must do the work. I and Krenski found the Petrolia ready and willing. Being creatures of feeling, with little sense, we were able to bend their dying wills to do our work. You see, we made them feel we would save them, a dying race, from extinction! They do our bidding." Asher was bewildered by the enormity of the thing. "You mean these Things you have called Petrolia actually work for you? And that you saved them from becoming extinct?" * * * * * "Exactly," Lee Wong nodded, seeming to be enjoying himself. "Like humans of the surface, Petrolia live on the dead. I mean, wherever we get our living food from the earth, we plant our dead back in that earth. Petrolia are spawned in beds of petroleum. Just as eels seek deep water to lay their eggs, so do Petrolia go to the oil strata to spawn future tribes. "When we pump out the oil, they have no--shall we say "hatching?"--beds. But now, by tapping and bringing down the oil, we have assured them more spawning pits. They will increase, and we have made them sense it. For that matter, the very oil they breed in, gives them sustenance. That is why they are black fleshed and blooded, and have suckers instead of mouths, as a black man is black through ages beneath hot suns. "It's easy for us, who are wiser than other men, to figure what oilfield might contain such people. We have a rapid elevator connecting us to the surface. And--" "Then," Asher almost shouted, "I'm not trapped!" "No?" Lee Wong wrinkled his forehead quizzically. "You should realize that we cannot allow you to go back to the surface--alive, or any other way. We intend to increase the Petrolia, spreading them to other underground, yet uninhabited worlds. You would spoil that. "No, you will never return to the surface. They cannot haul your tube to the top, so they will think you perished in it. And"--Lee Wong shrugged--"it might have been better if you had, Mr.--" "_I wouldn't!_" the yellow man snarled. He rolled the ratchet of his static gun and Asher was hurled to the floor by the heavy shock. Wisely, he stood up, keeping his hands well away from the pocket in which his own gun rested. He doubted whether his little static gun could compete with the guns of the others, but it was something. They had not thought to search him--perhaps they might not. It was his only hope. * * * * * Lee Wong bowed low again, motioning Asher to go ahead. "Now you shall see what we have done. We are proud, and we know you can appreciate our workings. You will be glad to learn why we do as we are doing; you will be intrigued as a fellow scientist. Then, so sad to say, you must perish for having gained that very knowledge." Asher shrugged, and through half-closed lids he eyed Lee Wong and the rather small, slender Krenski, of the high brow and large head. Then he walked ahead of them. Head up, shoulders back, he walked carelessly down the wide hall--a hall that led into the main cavern of that underground empire. It was large--fully a hundred feet in a rough square. Not fifteen feet from floor to ceiling at any point, it followed the course of the two layers of granite between which it was sandwiched. Other long halls, or crevices, ran in every direction out of this main cavern. In the walls, in niches and cracks, the superior pressure lamps had been placed, throwing a bright, eery light over it all. Asher recoiled suddenly at the sight of hundreds of Petrolia that swarmed the hallways, and they seemed to sense another presence beside that of Lee Wong or Krenski. A choked, gurgling sound came from the Chinaman, and they disappeared down the halls, squeaking angrily as they went. "Our control room," explained Lee Wong waving his hand about him. He pointed to a dozen twenty-four inch pipe-lines that ran along the low ceiling, coming from as many different halls into the room, but all going out the same large hall, larger than the rest. "There are the arteries of our system. There is the oil that is so--shall we say strangely?--missing in your wells." He smiled, a taunting, mocking light in his eyes. "You well understand how we do it. Above us, just below the oil strata, is a steel, trough-shaped roof. The oil, tapped from below, drains into these, and then into these pipe-lines. If we were working from above, now, we would run it to a central shaft, and pump it out. We do not want it on the surface, however." * * * * * "Then why in the name of hell do you want it?" Asher barked, a tense note of anger in his voice. "And what do you do with it?" These two were humans. At least, they were in man-form, if not in feeling. And the Petrolia could be handled. Asher was getting mad, and his fear ebbed. "Come." Lee Wong led the way under the pipe-lines, down the large hall. Krenski, his heavy static gun ready, walked at Asher's back. They came out into another cavern that stretched beyond the powerful lights. The sound of their voices echoed like thunder of the drums of Thor, and Asher realized this cavern might stretch away in Stygian blackness for hundreds of miles. Asher marveled, for the floor of this cavern dropped at least five feet below the level of the control room or incoming hallways, forming a natural reservoir. A reservoir for the big streams of oil that were pouring into it from the pipe-lines. The rumble of the oil as it came in and splashed out in a never-ending stream, and the rumble of the oil streams above them as the precious fluid flowed down into the plated drain roof, sounded like the tramp of the weary feet of the damned, as it echoed back and forth across the mighty cavern. "Our storage." Lee Wong stood at the edge and explained. "Also, as you may see, a concentration incubator, or spawning bed and food storage for our Petrolia." Blaine Asher looked again at the rippling oil at his feet. He choked brokenly and stepped back a pace. For the oil near the bank was alive! It rippled and splashed, teeming with life. By the strange alchemy of breeding in oil and living on oil as man lives on bread, that lake of oil was a mass of growing Petrolia. Millions--yes, countless billions--of them! Hideous, foul Things that would be turned loose with the rest in that nightmare world--that would be taken to other buried worlds to start new races. * * * * * "But why--why?" Asher almost screamed the words at Lee Wong. "Petrolia will be our armies, protecting our underground wealth," Lee Wong answered him. "They will be our faithful workers, under no command but mine. For, even Krenski has not mastered the over-control it takes to handle them! "Gradually, as happened to the field we are now under, all oil fields will go dry. We will be getting the oil from below, and putting it in storage in mother earth. Think, Blaine Asher, what it will mean!" There was a fanatical light in Lee Wong's beady eyes. "A world without petroleum is a world without power. No oil for fuel; no gasoline, lubricants or by-products of any sort. No airplanes could fly; tanks, tractors, oil-burning trains and ships; mechanical appliances--nothing could run. We now take the oil from America. Later, when our Petrolia have increased and we have devised means of moving them, we will go to all oil-producing countries. "We will secrete the oil and paralyze the world. Now, in Russia and China and India, our societies are organizing and growing. They will handle the weakened, powerless nations, and I shall be ruler of the universe, surface and beneath, with Krenski to aid me, you see. It it wonderful, is it not? And, knowing what you do, having seen what you have, could you call it impossible?" Blaine Asher groaned. It was not impossible, he knew. Unreal; monstrous--but never impossible. A region of hideous Petrolia; a world stripped of automotive and mechanical power, its fuel held in the hands of a few, far underground--it was terrible to think of. And Asher the only one who knew. The only one who could avert such a thing. The fate of an entire world was in his hands. And he would soon die. Die? No! Blaine Asher swore silently to himself that no power in existence should keep him from destroying these two fiends. It had to be done! He dared not fail. * * * * * "Wonderful, stupendous thing," he forced himself to smile. "I'd like to grasp the hand of the genius who devised and carried out such a wonderful thing." He took a step toward Lee Wong, right hand extended, his left slipping toward the pocket where his own static gun rested. Lee Wong extended his own right band. Something in the chill, flint look of Asher's eyes must have warned him. Even as Asher's fingers closed around his hand, he tried to jerk back. "Destroy him!" he cried out to Krenski. Asher dropped to one knee, letting his static gun remain in his pocket. His left hand closed around Lee Wong's wrist as the Oriental tried to pull away. Krenski was bringing the heavy, cylinderlike gun up and aiming it at Asher. Asher twisted on one knee, his teeth gritted, braced to receive the shock from the gun. He jerked Lee Wong's arm down, heaved and came to his feet. Crying out, arms and legs flailing, the Chinaman catapulted toward Krenski--and just at the instant Krenski fired! The sickening smell of cindered flesh was in Asher's nostrils as he turned and ran back up the main hallway. He glanced back over his shoulder as he ran, and shuddered at the black mass lying at Krenski's feet. Lee Wong was no more. Wide-eyed, the Russian stared at the thing at his feet. Then, with a fiendish shriek, turned and brought the gun into line on the fleeing Asher. A crackling charge of electricity singed the back of Asher's head as he dove head first around the corner of the hall into the control cavern. He reasoned that Krenski had sent a full charge after him, and hope kindled higher in his breast. For Asher believed his smaller static weapon was as strong as that of the other. At that, it would be a test, and Asher dared not take chances. * * * * * He crouched in the door of another hallway, waiting. Cursing, Krenski dashed into the control cavern. Asher brought his gun up and fired. But even as he pulled the trigger, a long tentacle reached from the dark crevice behind him and jerked his arm. His charge snapped by the Russian, warning the other that Asher, too, was dealing with powerful electric rays that meant death should they touch. Asher yielded to the tug of the slimy, sulphur-smelling tentacle, letting it pull him into the crevice, the charges of Krenski's weapon crackling by him, leaving his skin dry, and a powdery sensation in his mouth. In the shelter of the crevice, Asher turned his gun upon the Petrolia that gripped him. The tentacles fell away, fading to nothingness before the charges that showed quivery blue in the dark. Like catacombs, one crevice opened into another. Asher darted into the next crevice and edged cautiously toward the control cavern. The angry buzzing and snapping of Krenski's weapon caused him to duck instinctively, although no deadly charges came his way. "Oh, God!" he heard the Russian's high-pitched voice, agonized, wailing, "they're coming in--they're coming in!" A squeaking and slithering, now greater than ever, rose above all other sounds. And Asher realized what Krenski meant. Lee Wong had said that only he could control the Petrolia. They were swarming into the control room now. That was what Krenski was shooting at. The squeaking sounds came up the crevice in which Asher was and a cold, clammy sweat broke out all over him. He could blast a thousand of them into nothing. But by sheer force, more body than his light static gun could down, they would overwhelm him. His mind raced swiftly. He remembered the location, out in the control room, of the cage elevator that ran to the surface. It had not been hurt by the glycerine blast that had trapped Asher. The elevator shaft from the control room was cased clear into the cavern floor, and the blast had not jarred this far. * * * * * He wheeled and sent another charge of static electricity into the crevice back of him, then lunged out into the control room. It would be his own weapon against Krenski's, and a chance to gain the bottom of the shaft. Krenski--piled, charred heaps of the Petrolia around him, which had momentarily cleared the attack--was running across the control room. Like a seething wave, the foul Petrolia undulated from every crevice and hallway, coming in to fresh attack. The Russian, terror lending him speed, raced for the cage at the foot of the shaft that led to the surface. At the same time Asher ran out. Nearly a hundred feet apart, on opposite sides of the cavern, they stopped. Krenski turned his heavy weapon toward Asher at the same time Asher sent his own gun crackling and snapping out blue, fiery flame. Side-stepping, now crouching, now dodging to this side and that, they fought their strange duel. Asher's right arm was burned, his hair singed from his head, and his body jarred again and again as Krenski touched him. Krenski, groaning through gritted teeth, suffered burns all over his chest and left leg. As the Petrolia came on, and the lightning play of deadly electric charges continued, Asher made a discovery. He noticed that the rays, or charges, of the two guns, when they met in mid-air, caused blue flame, and that the charge went no farther. It did it again. The two charges met, crackled to explosion in the air. Krenski, too, noticed it, and he also noticed that the Petrolia were almost upon them again. Coming on in a wave that could not be hurled back. * * * * * He looked at Asher, and met the dare in Asher's eyes. Straight at each other, neither moving, they shot their static charges. Neither would move: it was a challenge from Asher that Krenski had to meet. One of them would have to die before the other would be able to gain the cage in the shaft. There could be no compromise, and only one man at a time could go surfaceward. If they continued to dodge and fight, the Petrolia would overwhelm them. Power against power, they fought it out. Asher's finger tightened on his trigger release until it seemed the skin would split; then he caused his hand to tremble just enough to make his electric charges cover the space in which Krenski's charges traveled. Hissing, spitting, flashing explosions, giving off sounds and light like big explosions of flash powder, the charges met. Asher tingled from head to foot, and thrilled to the very marvel of the thing. Two deadly beams of electricity, holding each other off! In one long, continuous flash, the contact point of the charges began to shift. Closer and closer, as the force of superior charges cleaved through the other, the contact points neared Krenski. He saw death upon him, for in another instant, Asher's charges would hurl his own bolts back upon him. The smaller weapon of Blaine Asher, attracting more static electric currents by reason of having a small attracting battery inside, where the larger gun of the other depended upon magnets for attraction, was triumphing. Krenski's mustache and light beard singed and curled. He cried out, stepped back, throwing up his arms as death flashed through his body. * * * * * His gun playing about him, Asher raced toward the big valves and gates that shut off the drain of the pipe-lines. Burning, reeking of sulphur and burned leather, the Petrolia vanished before him. But, as he turned, the drainage system that was robbing the field shut off. They had blocked his way again! Too many to blast away altogether, they pressed in. Asher leaped forward, feet kicking, left fist smashing out, static gun crackling as if to tell him that nothing could stop them. Tentacles gripped at him, the foul, stinking smell gagged him. But the squeaks of the Petrolia maddened him. "Squeak, damn you!" Asher shouted wildly, kicking, shooting and hitting, gaining toward the shaft. "Squeak--for all the damned Things that ever bred below the earth cannot stop one surface man!" He burned and fought his way through and jumped into the cage as his gun electrocuted two of the Petrolia that tried to weave in after him. As he slammed the door, Asher was conscious that something was happening. He hesitated, just long enough to see the cavern start buckling and caving. The pressure of the oil, now shut off, was filling back toward the surface, creating a mighty pressure downward. The surface wells would produce man's power-fuel once more. Asher slammed the door, turned on the power, and the cage shot upward. A half hour later, those waiting on the floor of the derrick above the hole in which Asher had gone down, started. Asher, burned, wounded, blood streaming from his battered body, staggered in and collapsed at their feet. * * * * * "I can't believe it! Insane! Impossible! Yet, every well in this field has started producing again! And when we went to that old, abandoned wildcat well, we found the shaft opening! I had it covered up, as you ordered." R. Briggs Johns paced up and down the laboratory floor, talking to Asher, who had just arisen from his bed, two weeks after he had collapsed at their feet in the derrick. Still bandaged, he was a different Blaine Asher. His face was lined, and the hair next to his scalp nearly snow white. "I'll be able to do some walking around outside in a few days," Asher declared as he cleaned a test tube and placed it in a rack. "I can locate several wells over that underground storage cavern, and you can recover that oil. But you can't mine this field. "Twenty years, perhaps, and you can. But it will take that long for those Petrolia to die out. We've got to get the oil out from below to a point where they can no longer spawn. We will apply mining in other fields--but not here!" "Not here," Johns repeated, shuddering. "It's up to you to see no one else tries it." Asher lit a cigarette and nodded at Johns. "Get control of the field--anything. Tell the oil men something. But don't tell then the truth. They wouldn't believe you. They would call you raving mad. "The world does not know. It would not believe. Can we do other than remain silent?" R. Briggs Johns, sick of thinking of the cavern world and horrible things below them, knew they could not. Brigands of the Moon (The Book of Gregg Haljan) CONCLUSION OF A FOUR PART NOVEL. _By Ray Cummings_ CHAPTER XXXIV _The First Encounters_ [Illustration: Like feathers we were blown with it.] [Sidenote: The besieged Earth-men wage grim, ultra-scientific war with Martian bandits in a last great struggle for their radium-ore--and their lives.] It seemed, with that first shot from the enemy, that a great relief came to me--an apprehension fallen away. We had anticipated this moment for so long, dreaded it. I think all our men felt it. A shout went up: "Harmless!" It was not that. But our building withstood it better than I had feared. It was a flash from a large electronic projector mounted on the deck of the brigand ship. It stabbed up from the shadows across the valley at the foot of the opposite crater-wall, a beam of vaguely fluorescent light. Simultaneously the search-light vanished. The stream of electrons caught the front face of our main building in a six-foot circle. It held a few seconds, vanished; then stabbed again, and still again. Three bolts. A total, I suppose, of nine or ten seconds. I was standing with Grantline at a front window. We had rigged an oblong of insulated fabric like a curtain: we stood peering, holding the curtain cautiously aside. The ray struck some twenty feet away from us. "Harmless!" The men in the room shouted it with derision. But Grantline swung on them. "Don't think that!" An interior signal-panel was beside Grantline. He called the duty-men in the instrument room. "It's over. What are your readings?" * * * * * The bombarding electrons had passed through the outer shell of the building's double-wall, and been absorbed in the rarefied, magnetized air-current of the Erentz circulation. Like poison in a man's veins, reaching his heart, the free alien electrons had disturbed the motors. They accelerated, then retarded. Pulsed unevenly, and drew added power from the reserve tanks. But they had normalized at once when the shot was past. The duty-man's voice sounded from the grid in answer to Grantline's question: "Five degrees colder in your building. Can't you feel it?" The disturbed, weakened Erentz circulation had allowed the outer cold to radiate through a trifle. The walls had had a trifle extra explosive pressure from the room-air. A strain--but that was all. "It's probably their most powerful single weapon, Gregg." Grantline said. I nodded. "Yes. I think so." I had smashed the real giant, with its ten-mile range. The ship was only two miles from us, but it seemed as though this projector were exerted to its distance limit. I had noticed on the deck only one of this type. The others, paralyzing-rays and heat rays, were less deadly. Grantline commented: "We can withstand a lot of that bombardment. If we stay inside--" That ray, striking a man outside, would penetrate his Erentz suit within a few seconds, we could not doubt. We had, however, no intention of going out unless for dire necessity. "Even so," said Grantline. "A hand-shield would hold it off for a certain length of time." * * * * * We had an opportunity a moment later to test our insulated shields. The bolt came again. It darted along the front face of the building, caught our window and clung. The double window-shells were our weakest points. The sheet of flashing Erentz current was transparent: we could see through it as though it were glass. It moved faster, but was thinner at the windows than in the walls. We feared the bombarding electrons might cross it, penetrate the inner shell and, like a lightning bolt, enter the room. We dropped the curtain corner. The radiance of the bolt was dimly visible. A few seconds, then it vanished again, and behind the shield we had not felt a tingle. "Harmless!" But our power had been drained nearly an aeron, to neutralize the shock to the Erentz current. Grantline said: "If they kept that up, it would be a question of whose power supply would last longest. And it would not be ours.... You saw our lights fade down while the bolt was striking?" But the brigands did not know we were short of power. And to fire the projector with a continuous bolt would, in thirty minutes, perhaps, have exhausted their own power-reserve. This strange warfare! It was new to all of us, for there had been no wars on any of the three inhabited worlds for many years. Silent, electronic conflict! Not a question of men in battle. A man at a switch on the brigand ship was the sole actor so far in this assault. And the results were visible only in the movement of the needle-dials on our instrument panels. A struggle, so far, not of man's bravery, or skill, or strategy, but merely of electronic power supply. * * * * * Yet warfare, however modern, can never transcend the human element. Before this insult was ended I was to have many demonstrations of that! "I won't answer them," Grantline declared. "Our game is to sit defensive. Conserve everything. Let them make the leading moves." We waited half an hour, but no other shot came. The valley floor was patched with Earthlight and shadow. We could see the vague outline of the brigand ship backed up at the foot of the opposite crater-wall. The form of its dome over the illumined deck was visible, and the line of its tiny hull ovals. On the rocks near the ship, helmet-lights of prowling brigands occasionally showed. Whatever activity was going on down there we could not see with the naked eye. Grantline did not use our telescope at first. To connect it, even for local range, drew on our precious ammunition of power. Some of the men urged that we search the sky with the telescope. Was our rescue ship from Earth coming? But Grantline refused. We were in no trouble yet. And every delay was to our advantage. "Commander, where shall I put these helmets?" A man came wheeling a pile of helmets on a little truck. "At the manual porte--other building." Our weapons and outside equipment were massed at the main exit-locks of the large building. But we might want to sally out through the smaller locks also. Grantline sent helmets there; suits were not needed, as most of us were garbed in them now, but without the helmets. * * * * * Snap was still in the workshop. I went there during this first half-hour of the attack. Ten of our men were busy there with the little flying platforms and the fabric shields. "How is it, Snap?" "Almost all ready." He had six of the platforms, including the one we had already used, and more than a dozen hand-shields. At a squeeze, all of us could ride on these six little vehicles. We might have to ride them! We planned that, in the event of disaster to the buildings, we could at least escape in this fashion. Food supplies and water were now being placed at the portes. Depressing preparations! Our buildings uninhabitable, a rush out and away, abandoning the treasure.... Grantline had never mentioned such a contingency, but I noticed, nevertheless, that preparations were being made. "Only that one shot, Gregg?" Snap's voice was raised over the clang of the workmen bolting the little gravity-plates of the last platform. "Four blasts. But just the one projector. Their strongest." He grinned. He wore no Erentz suit as yet. He stood in torn grimy work-trousers and a bedraggled shirt, with the inevitable red eyeshade holding back his unruly hair. Around his waist was the weighted belt and there were weights on his shoes for gravity stability. "Didn't hurt us much." "No." "When I get the tube-panels in this thing I'll be finished. It'll take another half-hour. I'll join you. Where are you stationed?" * * * * * I shrugged. "I was at a front window with Johnny. Nothing to do as yet." Snap went back to his work. "Well, the longer they delay, the better for us. If only your signal got through, Gregg! We'll have a rescue ship here in a few hours more." Ah, that "if!" I turned away. "Can't help you, Snap?" "No. Take those shields," he added to one of the men. "Take them where?" "To Grantline. The front admission porte, or the back. He'll tell you which." The shields were wheeled away on a little cart. I followed it. Grantline sent it to the back exit. "No other move from them yet, Johnny?" "No. All quiet." "Snap's almost finished." The brigands presently made another play. A giant heat-ray beam came across the valley. It clung to our front wall for nearly a minute. Grantline got the reports from the instrument room. He laughed. "That helped rather than hurt us. Heated the outer wall. Frank took advantage of it and eased up the motors." We wondered if Miko knew that. Doubtless he did, for another interval passed and the heat-ray was not used again. * * * * * Then came a zed-ray. I stood at the window, watching it, faint sheen of beam in the dimness. It crept with sinister deliberation along our front building-wall, clung momentarily to our shielded windows and pried with its revealing glow into Snap's workshop. "Looking us over," Grantline commented. "I hope they like what they see." I knew he did not feel the bravado that was in his tone. We had nothing but small hand weapons: heat-rays, electronic projectors, and bullet projectors. All for very short-range fighting. If Miko had not known that before, he could at least make a good guess at it after the careful zed-ray inspection. With his ship down there two miles away, we were powerless to reach him. It seemed that Miko was now testing the use of all his mechanisms. A light-flare went up from the dome-peak of the ship. It rose in a slow arc over the valley, and burst. For a few seconds the two-mile circle of crags was brilliantly illumined. I stared, but I had to shield my eyes against the dazzling actinic glare, and I could see nothing. Was Miko making a zed-ray photograph of our interiors? We had no way of knowing. He was testing his short-range projectors now. With my eyes again accustomed to the normal Earthlight in the valley, I could see the stabs of little electronic beams, the Martian paralyzing-rays and heat-beams. They darted out like flashing swords from the rocks near the ship. Then the whole ship and the crater-wall behind it seemed to shift sidewise as a Benson curve-light spread its glow about the ship, with a projector curve-beam coming up and touching the window through which I was peering. "Haljan, come look at these damn girls! Commander--shall I stop them? They'll kill themselves, or kill us--or smash something!" * * * * * We followed the man into the building's broad central corridor. Anita and Venza were riding a midget flying platform! Anita, in her boyish black garb; Venza with a flowing white Venus-robe. They lay on the tiny, six-foot oblong of metal, one manipulating its side shields, the other at the controls. As we arrived, the platform came sliding down the narrow confines of the corridor, lurching, barely missing a door-grid projection. Up to skim the low vaulted ceiling, then down to the floor. It sailed past our heads, rising over us as we ducked. Anita waved her hand. Grantline gasped, "By the infernal!" I shouted, "Anita, stop!" But they only waved at us, skimming down the length of the corridor, seeming to avoid a smash a dozen times by the smallest margin of chance, stopping miraculously at the further end, hanging poised in mid-air, wheeling, coming back, undulating up and down. Grantline clung to me. "By the gods of the airways!" In spite of my astonished horror I could not but share Grantline's obvious admiration. Three of four other men were watching. The girls were amazingly skillful, no doubt of that. There was not a man among us who could have handled that gravity-platform indoors, not one who would have had the brash temerity to try it. The platform landed with the grace of a humming bird at our feet, the girls dexterously balancing so that it came to rest swiftly, without the least bump. I confronted them. "Anita, what are you doing?" She stood up, flushed and smiling. "Practising." Imperturbable girls! The product of their age. Oblivious to the brigand attack, they were in here practising! "What for?" I demanded. Venza's roguish eyes twinkled at me. Her hands went to her slim hips with a gesture of defiance. She asked, "Are you speaking for yourself or the commander?" * * * * * I ignored her. "What for?" I reiterated. "Because we're good at it," Anita retorted. "Better than any of you men. If you should need us...." "We don't. We won't." I said shortly. "But if you should...." Venza put in, "If Snap and I hadn't come for you, you wouldn't be here, Gregg Haljan. I didn't notice you were so horrified to see me holding that shield up over you!" It silenced me. She added, "Commander, let us alone. We won't smash anything." Grantline laughed, "I hope you won't!" A warning call took us back to the front window. The brigand's search-beam was again being used. It swept slowly along the length of the cliff. Its circle went down the cliff steps to the valley floor, and came sweeping up again. Then it went up to the observatory platform at the summit above us, then back and crept over to the ore-sheds. We had no men outside, if that was what the brigand wanted to determine. The search-beam presently vanished. It was replaced immediately by a zed-ray, which darted at once to our treasure sheds and clung. That stung Grantline into his first action. We flung our own zed-ray down across the valley. It reached the brigand ship; this zed-ray and a search-light were our only two projectors of long range. The brigand ray vanished when ours flashed on. I was with Grantline at an image grid in the instrument room. We saw the deck of the brigand ship and the blurred interior of the cabins. "Try the search-beam, Franck. We don't need the other." The zed-ray went off. We gazed down our search-light which clung to the dome of the distant enemy vessel. We could see movement there. "The telescope," Grantline ordered. * * * * * The little dynamos hummed. The telescope-finder glowed and clarified. On the deck of the ship we saw the brigands working with the assembling of ore-carts. A deck landing-porte was open. The ore-carts were being carried out through a porte-lock and down a landing incline. And on the rocks outside, we saw several of the carts--and rail-sections and the sections of an ore-shute. Miko was unloading his mining apparatus! He was making ready to come up for the treasure! The discovery, startling as it was, nevertheless was far overshadowed by an imperative danger alarm from our main building. Brigands were outside on our ledge! Miko's search-beam, sweeping the ledge a moment before, had carefully avoided revealing them. It had been done just for that purpose, no doubt--making us sure that the ledge was unoccupied and thus to guard against our own light making a search. But there was a brigand group here close outside our walls! By the merest chance the radiating glow from our search-ray had shown the helmeted figures scurrying for shelter. Grantline leaped to his feet. We rushed for the rear exit-porte which was nearest us. The giant bloated figures had been seen running along the outside of the connecting corridor, in this direction. But before we ever got there, a new alarm came. A brigand was crouching at a front corner of the main building! His hydrogen heat-torch had already opened a rift in the wall! CHAPTER XXXV _Desperate Offensive_ "In with you!" ordered Grantline. "Get your helmets on! How many? Six? Enough--get back there, Williams--you were last. The lock won't hold any more." I was one of the six who jammed into the manual exit lock. We went through it: in a moment we were outside. It was less than three minutes since the prowling brigands had been seen. Grantline touched me just as we emerged. "Don't wait for orders! Get them!" "That fellow with the torch, the most dangerous--" "Yes! I'm with you." We went out with a rush. We had already discarded our shoe and belt weights. I leaped, regardless of my companions. The scurrying Martians had disappeared. Through my visor bull's-eye I could see only the Earthlit rocky surface of the ledge. Beside me stretched the dark wall of our building. I bounded toward the front. The brigand with the torch had been at this front corner. I could not see him from here: he had been crouching just around the angle. I had a tiny bullet projector, the best weapon for short range outdoors. I was aware of Grantline close behind me. It took only a few of my giant leaps. I landed at the corner, recovered my balance, and whirled around to the front. The Martian was here, a giant misshapen lump as he crouched. His torch was a little stab of blue in the deep shadow enveloping him. Intent upon his work, he did not see me. Perhaps he thought his fellows had broken our exits by now. * * * * * I landed like a leopard upon his back and fired, my weapon muzzle ramming him. His torch fell hissing with a silent rain of blue fire upon the rocks. As my grip upon him made audiphone contact, his agonized scream rattled the diaphragms of my ear-grids with horrible, deafening intensity. He lay writhing under me, then was still. His scream choked into silence. His suit deflated within my encircling grip. He was dead; my leaden, steel-tipped pellet had punctured the double surface of his Erentz-fabric, penetrated his chest. Grantline's following leap landed him over me. "Dead?" "Yes." I climbed from the inert body. The torch had hissed itself out. Grantline swung on our building corner, and I leaned down with him to examine it. The torch had fused and scarred the surface of the wall, burned almost through. A pressure-rift had opened. We could see it, a curving gash in the metal wall-plate like a crack in a glass window-pane. I went cold. This was serious damage! The rarefied Erentz-air would seep out. It was leaking now: we could see the magnetic radiance of it all up the length of the ten-foot crack. The leak would change the pressure of the Erentz system, constantly lower it, demanding steady renewal. The Erentz motors would overheat; some might go bad from the strain. Grantline stood gripping me. "Damn bad!" "Yes. Can't we repair it, Johnny?" "No. Have to take that whole plate-section out, shut off the Erentz plant and exhaust the interior air of all this bulkhead of the building. Day's job--maybe more." * * * * * And the crack would get worse, I knew. It would gradually spread and widen. The Erentz circulation would fail. All our power would be drained struggling to maintain it. This brigand who had unwittingly committed suicide by his daring act had accomplished more than he perhaps had realized. I could envisage our weapons, useless from lack of power. The air in our buildings turning fetid and frigid: ourselves forced to the helmets. A rush out to abandon the camp and escape. The buildings exploding--scattering into a litter on the ledge like a child's broken toy. The treasure abandoned, with the brigands coming up and loading it on their ship. Our defeat. In a few hours now--or minutes. This crack could slowly widen, or it could break suddenly at any time. Disaster, come now so abruptly upon us at the very start of the brigand attack.... Grantline's voice in my audiphone broke my despairing rush of thoughts. "Bad. Come on, Gregg; nothing to do here." We were aware that our other four men had run along the building's other side. They emerged now--with the running brigands in front of them, rushing out toward the staircase on the ledge. Three giant Martian figures in flight, with our four men chasing. A bullet projector spat, with its queer stab of exploding powder fed by the burning oxygen fumes of its artificial air-chamber--one of our men firing. A brigand fell to the rocks by the brink of the ledge. The others reached the descending staircase, tumbled down it with reckless leaps. Our men turned back. Before we could join them, the enemy ship down in the valley sent up a cautious search-beam which located its returning men. Then the beam swung up to the ledge, landed upon us. We stood confused, blinded by the brilliant glare. Grantline stumbled against me. "Run, Gregg! They'll be firing at us." We dashed away. Our companions joined us, rushing back for the porte. I saw it open, reinforcements coming out to help us--half a dozen figures carrying a ten-foot insulated shield. They could barely get it out through the porte. * * * * * The Martian search-ray abruptly vanished. Then almost instantly the electronic ray came with its deadly stab. Missed us at first, as we ran for the shield. It vanished, and stabbed again. It caught us, but now we were behind the shield, carrying it back to the porte, hiding behind it. The ray stabbed once or twice more. Whether Miko's instruments showed him how serious that damage was to our front wall, we never knew. But I think that he realized. His search-beam clung to it, and his zed-ray pried into our interiors. The brigand ship was active now. We were desperate: we used our telescope freely for observation. And used our zed-ray and search-light. Miko's ore-carts and mining apparatus were unloaded on the rocks. The rail-sections were being carried a mile out, nearly to the center of the valley. A subsidiary camp was being established there, only a mile from the base of our cliff, but still far beyond reach of our weapons. We could see the brigand lights down there. Then the ore-shute sections were brought over. We could see Miko's men carrying some of the giant projectors, mounting them in the new position. Power tanks and cables. Light-flare catapults--little mechanical cannons for throwing the bombs. The enemy search-light constantly raked our vicinity. Occasionally the giant electronic projector flung up its bolt as though warning us not to dare leave our buildings. * * * * * Half an hour went by. Our situation was even worse than Miko could know. The Erentz motors were running hot--our power draining, the crack widening. When it would break we could not tell; but the danger was like a sword over us. An anxious thirty minutes for us, this second interlude. Grantline called a meeting of all our little force, with every man having his say. Inactivity was no longer a feasible policy. We recklessly used our power to search the sky. Our rescue ship might be up there; but we could not see it with our disabled instruments. No signals came. We could not--or, at least, did not--receive them. "They wouldn't signal," Grantline protested. "They'd know the Martians would be more likely to get the signal than us. Of what use to warn Miko?" But he did not dare wait for a rescue ship that might or might not be coming! Miko was playing the waiting game now--making ready for a quick loading of the ore when we were forced to abandon our buildings. The brigand ship suddenly moved its position! It rose up in a low flat arc, came forward and settled in the center of the valley where the carts and rail-sections were piled, and the outside projectors newly mounted on the rocks. But the projectors only shot at us occasionally. The brigands now began laying the rails from the ship toward the base of our cliff. The chute would bring the ore down from the ledge, and the carts would take it to the ship. The laying of the rails was done under cover of occasional stabs from the electronic projector. And then we discovered that Miko had made still another move. The brigand rays, fired from the depths of the valley, could strike our front building, but could not reach all our ledge. And from the ship's new and nearer position this disadvantage was intensified. Then abruptly we realized that under cover of darkness-bombs an electronic projector and search-ray had been carried to the top of the crater-rim, diagonally across and only half a mile from us. Their beams shot down, raking all our vicinity from this new angle. * * * * * I was on the little flying platform which sallied out as a test to attack these isolated projectors. Snap and I and one other volunteer went. He and I held the shield; Snap handled the controls. Our exit-porte was on the lee side of the building from the hostile search-beam. We got out unobserved and sailed upward; but soon a light from the ship caught us. And the projector bolts came up.... Our sortie only lasted a few minutes. To me, it was a confusion of crossing beams, with the stars overhead, the swaying little platform under me, and the shield tingling in my hands when the blasts struck us. Moments of blurred terror.... The voice of the man beside me sounded in my ears: "Now, Haljan, give them one!" We were up over the peak of the rim with the hostile projectors under us. I gauged our movement, and dropped an explosive powder bomb. It missed. It flared with a puff on the rocks, twenty feet from where the two projectors were mounted. I saw that two helmeted figures were down there. They tried to swing their grids upward, but could not get them vertical to reach us. The ship was firing at us, but it was far away. And Grantline's search-beam was going full-power, clinging to the ship to dazzle them. Snap circled us. As we came back I dropped another bomb. Its silent puff seemed littered with flying fragments of the two projectors and the bodies of the men. We flew swiftly back and got in. * * * * * It decided Grantline. For an hour past Snap and I had been urging our plan to use the gravity platforms. To remain inactive was sure defeat now. Even if our buildings did not explode--if we thought to huddle in them, helmeted in the failing air--then Miko could readily ignore us and proceed with his loading of the treasure under our helpless gaze. He could do that now with safety--if we refused to sally out--for we could not fire our weapons through our windows.[1] [Footnote 1: To fire a projector through the walls or windows would at once wreck the protective Erentz system. The enemy ship has pressure portes, constructed for the emission of the weapon-rays. Grantline's only weapons thus mounted were his search-beam and zed-ray.] To remain defensive would end inevitably in our defeat. We all knew it now; it was obvious. The waiting game was Miko's--not ours! And he was playing it. The success of our attack upon the distant isolated projectors heartened us. Yet it was a desperate offensive indeed upon which we now decided! We prepared our little expedition at the larger of the exit portes. Miko's zed-ray was watching all our interior movements. We made a brave show of activity in our workshop with abandoned ore-carts which were stored there. We got them out, started to recondition them. It seemed to fool Miko. His zed-ray clung to the workshop, watching us. And at the distant porte we gathered the little platforms, the shields, helmets, bombs, and a few hand-projectors. There were six platforms--three of us upon each. It left four people to remain indoors. * * * * * I need not describe the emotion with which Snap and I listened to Venza and Anita pleading to be allowed to accompany us. They urged it upon Grantline, and we took no part. It was too important a decision. The treasure--the life or death of all these men--hung now upon the fate of our venture. Snap and I could not intrude our personal feelings. And the girls won. Both were undeniably more skilful at handling the midget platforms than any of us men. Two of the six platforms could be guided by them. That was a third of our little force! And of what use to go out and be defeated, leaving the girls here to meet death almost immediately afterward? We gathered at the porte. A last minute change made Grantline order six of his men to remain guarding the buildings. The instruments--the Erentz system--all the appliances had to be attended. It left four platforms, each with three men, with Grantline at the controls of one of them. And upon the other two of the six Venza rode with Snap, and I with Anita. We crouched in the shadows outside the porte. So small an army, sallying out to bomb this enemy vessel or be killed in the attempt! Only sixteen of us. And thirty or so brigands. I envisaged then this tiny Moon-crater, the scene of this battle we were waging. Struggling humans, desperately trying to kill. Alone here on this globe. Around us, the wide reaches of Lunar desolation. In all this world, every human being was gathered here, struggling to kill! Anita drew me down to the platform. "Ready, Gregg." The others were rising. We lifted, moved slowly out and away from the protective shadows of the building. In a tiny queue the six little platforms sailed out over the valley toward the brigand ship. CHAPTER XXXVI _The Battle in the Crater_ Grantline led us. We held about level. Five hundred feet beneath us the brigand ship lay, cradled on the rocks. When it was still a mile away from us I could see all its outline fairly clearly in the dimness. Its tiny hull-windows were now dark; but the blurred shape of the hull was visible and above it the rounded cap of dome, with a dim radiance beneath it. We followed Grantline's platform. It was rising, drawing the others after it like a tail. I touched Anita where she lay beside me with her head half in the small hooded control-bank. "Going too high." She nodded, but followed the line nevertheless. It was Grantline's command. I lay crouched, holding the inner tips of the flexible side-shields. The bottom of the platform was covered with the insulated fabric. There were two side-shields. They extended upward some two feet, flexible so that I could hold them out to see over them, or draw them up and in to cover us. They afforded a measure of protection against the hostile rays, though just how much we were not sure. With the platform level, a bolt from beneath could not harm us unless it continued for a considerable time. But the platform, except upon direct flight, was seldom level, for it was a frail, unstable little vehicle! To handle it was more than a question of the controls. We balanced, and helped to guide it, with the movement of our bodies--shifting our weight sidewise, or back, or forward to make it dip as the controls altered the gravity-pull in its tiny plate-sections. Like a bird, wheeling, soaring, swooping. To me, it was a precarious business. * * * * * But now we were in straight flight diagonally upward. The outline of the brigand ship came under us. I crouched tense, breathless; every moment it seemed that the brigands must discover us and loose their bolts. They may have seen us for some moments before they fired. I peered over the side-shield down at our mark, then up ahead to get Grantline's firing signal. It seemed long delayed. We were almost over the ship. An added glow down there must have warned Grantline that a shot was coming. The tiny red light flared bright on his platform. I hissed on our Benson curve-light radiance. We had been dark, but a soft glow now enveloped us. Its sheen went down to the ship to reveal us. But its curving path showed us falsely placed. I saw the little line of platforms ahead of us seem to move suddenly sidewise. It was everyone for himself now; none of us could tell where the other platforms actually were placed or headed. Anita swooped us sharply down to avoid a possible collision. "Gregg--?" "Yes. I'm aiming." I was making ready to drop the little explosive globe-bomb. Our search-light ray at the camp, answering Grantline's signal, shot down and bathed the ship in a white glare, revealing it for our aim. Simultaneously the brigand bolts came up at us. I held my bomb out over the shield, calculating the angle to throw it down. The brigand rays flashed around me. They were horribly close; Miko had understood our sudden visible shift and aimed, not where we appeared to be, but where we had been a moment before. * * * * * I dropped my bomb hastily at the glowing white ship. The touch of a hostile ray would have exploded it in my hand. I could see its blue-sizzling fuse as it fell. I saw the others also dropping from our nearby platforms. The explosions from them merged in a confusion of the white glare--and a cloud of black light-mist as the brigands out on the rocks used their occulting darkness bombs. We swept past in a blur of leaping hostile beams. Silent battle of lights! Darkness bombs down at the ship struggling to bar our camp search-ray. The Benson radiance-rays from our passing platforms curving down to mingle with the confusion. The electronic rays sending up their bolts.... Our platforms dropped some ten dynamitrine bombs in that first passage over the ship. As we sped by, I dimmed the Benson's radiance. I peered. We had not hit the ship. Or if we had, the damage was inconclusive. But on the rocks I could see a pile of ore-carts scattered--broken wreckage, in which the litter of two or three projectors seemed strewn. And the gruesome deflated forms of several helmeted figures. Others seemed, to be running, scattering--hiding in the rocks and pit-holes. Twenty brigands at least were outside the ship. Some were running over toward the base of our camp-ledge. The darkness bombs were spreading like a curtain over the valley floor; but it seemed that some of the figures were dragging their projectors away. We sailed off toward the opposite crater-rim. I remember passing over the broken wreckage of Grantline's little space-ship, the _Comet_. Miko's bolts momentarily had vanished. We had hit some of his outside projectors; the others were abandoned, or being dragged to safer positions. * * * * * After a mile we wheeled and went back. I suddenly realized that only four platforms were in the re-formed line ahead of us. One was missing! I saw it now, wavering down, close over the ship. A bolt leaped up diagonally from a distant angle on the rocks and caught the disabled platform. It fell, whirling, glowing red--disappeared into the blur of darkness like a bit of heated metal plunged into water. One out of six of our platforms already lost! Three men of our little force gone! But Grantline led us desperately back. Anita caught his signal to break our line. The five platforms scattered, dipping and wheeling like frightened birds--blurring shapes, shifting unnaturally in flight as the Benson curve-angles were altered. Anita now took our platform in a long swoop downward. Her tense, murmured voice sounded in my ears: "Hold off: I'll take us low." A melee. Passing platform shapes. The darting bolts, crossing like ancient rapiers. Falling blue points of fuse-lights as we threw our bombs. Down in a swoop. Then rising. Away, and then back. This silent warfare of lights! It seemed that around me must be bursting a pandemonium of sound. Yet I heard nothing. Silent, blurred melee, infinitely frightening. A bolt struck us, clung for an instant; but we weathered it. The light was blinding. Through my gloves I could feel the tingle of the over-charged shield as it caught and absorbed the hostile bombardment. Under me the platform seemed heated. My little Erentz motors ran with ragged pulse. I got too much oxygen; my head roared with it. Spots danced before my closed eyes. Then not enough oxygen. I was dully smothering.... Then the bolt was gone. I found us soaring upward, horribly tilted. I shifted over. "Anita! Anita, dear!" "Yes. Gregg. All right." * * * * * The melee went on. The brigand ship and all its vicinity was enveloped in darkness-mist now--a turgid sable curtain, made more dense by the dissipating heavy fumes of our exploding bombs which settled low over the ship and the rocks nearby. The search-light from our camp strove futilely to penetrate the cloud. Our platforms were separated. One went by high over us; I saw another dart close beneath my shield. "God, Anita!" "Too close! I did not mean that--I didn't see it." Almost a collision. "Oh, Gregg, haven't we broken the ship's dome yet?" It seemed not. I had dropped nearly all my bombs. This could not go on much longer. Had it been only five minutes? Only that? Reason told me so, yet it seemed an eternity of horror. Another swoop. My last bomb. Anita had brought us into position to fling it. But I could not. A bolt stabbed up from the gloom and caught us. We huddled, pulling the shields up and over us. Blurred darkness again. Too much to the side now. I had to wait while Anita swung us back. Then we seemed too high. We swooped. But not too low! Down in the darkness-mist we would immediately have lost direction, and crashed. I waited with my last bomb. The other platforms were occasionally dropping them: I had been too hasty, too prodigal. Had we broken the ship's dome with a direct hit? It seemed not. * * * * * The brigands were occasionally sending up catapulted light-flares. They came from positions on the rocks outside the ship. They mounted in lazy curves and burst over us. The concealing darkness, broken only by the flares of our explosions, enveloped the enemy. Our camp search-light was still struggling with it. But overhead, where the few little platforms were circling and swooping, the flares gave an almost continuous glare. It was dazzling, blinding. Even through the smoked pane which I adjusted to my visor I could not stand it. But there were thoughts of comparative dimness. In a patch where the Earthlight struck through the darkness of the rocks, I saw another of our fallen platforms! Snap and Venza! Dear God.... It was not they, but three figures of our men. One was dead. Two had survived the fall. They stood up, staggering. And in that instant, before the turgid black curtain closed over them, I saw two brigands come rushing. Their hand projectors stabbed at close range. Our men crumpled and fell. And now I saw why probably we had never yet hit the ship. Its outline was revealed. "Now, Gregg--can you fling it from here?" We were in position again. I flung my last missile, watched its light as it dropped. On the dome-roof two of Miko's men were crouching. My bomb was truly aimed--perhaps one of the few in all our bombardment which would have landed directly on the dome-roof. But the waiting marksmen fired at it with short-range heat projectors and exploded it harmlessly while it was still above them. We swung up and away. I saw, high above us, Grantline's platform, recognizing its red signal light. There seemed a lull. The enemy fire had died down to only a very occasional bolt. In the confusion of my whirling impressions I wondered if Miko were in distress? Not that! We had not hit his ship; perhaps we had done little damage indeed! It was we who were in distress. Two of our platforms had fallen--two out of six. Or more, of which I did not know. * * * * * I saw one rising off to the side of us. Grantline was over us. Well, we were at least three. And then I saw the fourth. "Grantline is calling us up, Gregg." "Yes." Grantline's signal-light was summoning us from the attack. He was a thousand or two thousand feet above. I was suddenly shocked with horror. The search-ray from our camp abruptly vanished! Anita wheeled us to face the distant ledge. The camp-lights showed, and over one of the buildings was a distress light! Had the crack in our front wall broken, threatening explosion of all the buildings? The wild thoughts swept me. But it was not that. I could see light-stabs from the cliff outside the main building. Miko had dared to send some of his men to attack our almost abandoned camp! Grantline realized it. His red helmet-light semaphored the command to follow him. His platform soared away, heading for the camp, with the other two behind him. Anita lifted us to follow. But I checked her. "No! Off to the right, across the valley." "But Gregg!" "Do as I say, Anita." She swung us diagonally away from both the camp and the brigand ship. I prayed that we might not be noticed by the brigands. "Anita, listen: I've an idea!" The attack on the brigand ship was over. It lay enveloped in the darkness of the powder-gas cloud and its own darkness bombs. But it was uninjured. Miko had answered us with our own tactics. He had practically unmanned the ship, no doubt, and had sent his men to our buildings. The fight had shifted. But I was now without ammunition, save for two or three small bullet projectors. Of what use for our platform to rush back? Miko expected that. His attack on the camp was undoubtedly made just for that purpose. "Anita, if we can get down on the rocks somewhere near the ship, and creep up on it unobserved in that blackness...." * * * * * I might be able to open its manual hull-lock, rip it open and let the air out. If I could get into its pressure chamber and unseal the inner slide.... "It would wreck the ship, Anita, exhaust all its air. Shall we try it?" "Whatever you say, Gregg." We seemed to be unobserved. We skimmed close to the valley floor, a mile from the ship. We headed slowly toward it, sailing low over the rocks. Then we landed, left the platform. "Let me go first, Anita." I held a bullet projector. With slow, cautious leaps, we advanced. Anita was behind me. I had wanted to leave her with the platform, but she would not stay. And to be with me seemed at least equally safe. The rocks were deserted. I thought there was very little chance that any of the enemy would lurk here. We clambered over the pitted, scarred surface. The higher crags, etched with Earthlight, stood like sentinels in the gloom. The brigand ship with its surrounding darkness was not far from us. Then we entered the cloud. No one was out here. We passed the wreckage of broken projectors, and gruesome, shattered human forms. We prowled closer. The hull of the ship loomed ahead of us. All dark. We came at last close against the sleek metal hull-side, slid along it toward where I was sure the manual-porte was located. Abruptly I realized that Anita was not behind me! Then I saw her at a little distance, struggling in the grip of a giant helmeted figure! The brigand lifted her--turned, and, carrying her, ran the other way! I did not dare fire. I bounded after them along the hull-side, around under the curve of the pointed bow, down along the other side. I had mistaken the hull-porte location. It was here. The running, bounding figure reached it, slid the panel. I was only fifty feet away--not much more than a single leap. I saw Anita being shoved into the pressure lock. The Martian flung himself after her. I fired at him, but missed. I came with a rush. And as I reached the porte it slid closed in my face, barring me! CHAPTER XXXVII _In the Pressure Lock._ With puny fists I pounded the panel. A small pane in it was transparent. Within the lock I could see the blurred figures of Anita and her captor--and, it seemed, another figure. The lock was some ten feet square, with a low ceiling. It glowed with a dim tube-light. I pounded, thumped with futile, silent blows. The mechanism was here to open this manual; but it was now clasped from within and would not operate. A few seconds only, while I stood there in a panic of confusion, raging to get in. This disaster had come so suddenly! I did not plan; I had no thought save to batter my way in and rescue Anita. I recall that I beat on the glassite pane with my bullet projector until the weapon was bent and useless; and I flung it with a wild, despairing rage at my feet. They were letting the ship's air-pressure into this lock. Soon they would open the inner panel, step into the secondary chamber--and in a moment more would be within the ship's hull corridor. Anita, lost to me! The outer panel suddenly opened! I had lunged against it with my shoulder; the giant figure inside slid it. I was taken by surprise! I half-fell inward. Huge arms went around me. The goggled face of the helmet peered into mine. "So it is you, Haljan! I thought I recognized that little device over your helmet-bracket. And there is my little Anita, come back to me again!" Miko! * * * * * This was he. His great bloated arms encircling me, bending me backward, holding me almost helpless. I saw over his shoulder that Anita was clutched in the grip of another helmeted figure. No giant, but tall for an Earthman--almost as tall as myself. Then the tube-light in the room illumined the visor. I saw the face, recognized it. Moa! I gasped, "So--I've--got you, Miko--" "Got me! You're a fool to the last, Gregg Haljan! A fool to the last! But you were always a fool." I could scarcely move in his grip. My arms were pinned. As he slowly bent me backward, I wound my legs around one of his; it was as unyielding as a steel pillar. He had closed the outer panel; the air-pressure in the lock was rising. I could feel it against my suit. My helmeted head was being forced backward; Miko's left arm held me. In his gloved right hand as it came slowly up over my throat I saw a knife-blade, its naked, sharpened metal glistening blue-white in the light from overhead. I seized his wrist. But my puny strength could not hold him. The knife, against all my efforts, came slowly down. A moment of this slow deadly combat--the end of everything for me. I was aware of the helmeted figure of Moa casting off Anita--and then the two girls leaping together upon Miko. It threw him off his balance, and my hanging weight made him topple forward. He took a step to recover himself; his hand with the knife was flung up with an instinctive, involuntary balancing gesture. And as it came swiftly down again, I forced the knife-blade to graze his throat. Its point caught in the fabric of his suit. His startled oath jangled in my ears. The girls were clawing at him; we were all four scrambling, swaying. With despairing strength I twisted at his waist. The knife went into his throat. I plunged it deeper. * * * * * His suit went flabby. He crumpled over me and fell, knocking me to the floor. His voice, with the horrible gurgling rasp of death in it, rattled my ear-grids. "Not such a fool--are you, Haljan--" Moa's helmeted head was close over us. I saw that she had seized the knife, jerked it from her brother's throat. She leaped backward, waving it. I twisted from under Miko's inert, lifeless body. As I got to my feet, Anita flung herself to shield me. Moa was across the lock, backed up against its wall. The knife in her hand went up. She stood for the briefest instant regarding Anita and me holding each other. I thought that she was about to leap upon us; but before I could move, the knife came down and plunged into her breast. She fell forward, her grotesque helmet striking the floor-grid almost at my feet. "Gregg!" "She's dead." "No! She moved! Get her helmet off! There's enough air here." My helmet pressure-indicator was faintly buzzing to show that a safe pressure was in the room. I shut off Moa's Erentz motors, unfastened her helmet, raised it off. We gently turned her body. She lay with closed eyes, her pallid face blue-cast from the light in the lock. With our own helmets off, we knelt over her. "Oh. Gregg, is she dead?" "No. Not quite--but dying." "Oh Gregg, I don't want her to die! She was trying to help you there at the last." She opened her eyes; the film of death was glazing them. But she saw me, recognized me. "Gregg--" "Yes, Moa, I'm here." * * * * * Her livid lips were faintly drawn in a smile. "I'm--so glad--you took the helmets off, Gregg. I'm--going--you know." "No!" "Going--back to Mars--to rest with the fire-makers--where I came from. I was thinking--maybe you would kiss me, Gregg--?" Anita gently pushed me down. I pressed the white, faintly smiling lips with mine. She sighed, and it ended with a rattle in her throat. "Thank you--Gregg--closer--I can't talk so loudly--" One of her gloved hands struggled to touch me, but she had no strength and it fell back. Her words were the faintest of whispers: "There was no use living--without your love. But I want you to see--now--that a Martian girl can--die with a smile--" Her eyelids fluttered down: it seemed that she sighed and then was not breathing. But on her livid face the faint smile still lingered to show me how a Martian girl could die. We had forgotten for the moment where we were. As I glanced up I saw that through the inner panel, past the secondary lock, the ship's hull-corridor was visible, and along its length a group of Martians were advancing! They saw us, and came running. "Anita! Look! We've got to get out of here!" The secondary lock was open to the corridor. We jammed on our helmets. The unhelmeted brigands by then were fumbling at the inner panel. I pulled at the lever of the outer panel. The brigands were hurrying, thinking they could be in time to stop me. One of the more cautious fumbled with a helmet. "Anita, run! Try and keep your feet." I slid the outer panel and pushed at Anita. Simultaneously the brigands opened the inner porte. The air came with a tempestuous rush. A blast through the inner porte--through the little pressure-lock--a wild rush out to the airless Moon. All the air in the ship madly rushing to escape.... Like feathers we were blown with it. I recall an impression of the hurtling brigand figures and swift-flying rocks under me. A silent crash as I struck. Then soundless, empty blackness. CHAPTER XXXVIII _Triumph!_ "Is he conscious? We'd better take him back, get his helmet off." "It's over. We can get back now. Venza, dear, we've won--it's over." "He hears us!" "Gregg!" "He hears us--he's all right!" I opened my eyes. I lay on the rocks. Over my helmet other helmets were peering, and faint, familiar voices mingled with the roaring in my ears. "--back to the camp and get his helmet off." "Are his motors smooth? Keep them right, Snap--he must have good air." I seemed unhurt. But Anita.... She was here. "Gregg, dear one!" Anita safe! All four of us here on the Earthlit rocks, close outside the brigand ship. "Anita!" She held me, lifted me. I was uninjured. I could stand; I staggered up and stood swaying. The brigand ship, a hundred feet away, loomed dark and silent, a lifeless bulk, already empty of air, drained in that mad blast outward. Like the wreck of the _Planetara_--a dead, pulseless hulk already. We four stood together, triumphant. The battle was over. The brigands were worsted, almost the last man of them dead or dying. No more than ten or fifteen had been available for that final assault upon the camp buildings. Miko's last strategy. I think perhaps he had intended, with his few remaining men, to take the ship and make away, deserting his fellows. All on the ship, caught unhelmeted by the explosion, were dead long since. I stood listening to Snap's triumphant account. It had not been difficult for the flying platforms to hunt down the attacking brigands on the open rocks. We had only lost one more platform. Human hearts beat sometimes with very selfish emotions. It was a triumphant ending for us, and we hardly gave a thought that half of Grantline's little group had perished. We huddled on Snap's platform. It rose, lurching drunkenly, barely carrying us. And as we headed for the Grantline buildings, where still the rift in the wall had not quite broken, there came the final triumph. Miko had been aware of it, and knew he had lost. Grantline's search-light leaped upward, swept the sky, caught its sought-for object--a huge silver cylinder, bathed brightly in the white search-beam glare. The police-ship from Earth! CHAPTER XXXIX _My Exit_ My narrative lies now in this permanently recorded form before you, and I prepare my exit bow with the humble hope that I may have given you pleasure. If so, I do beg you to tell me of it. There are some who already have flashed their approval of my discs; I thank them most earnestly and gratefully. My errors of recording unquestionably are many; and for them I ask your indulgence. There have been, I can readily see, errors of omission. I have not mentioned, for instance, the final rescue of the _Planetara's_ marooned passengers on the asteroid. You will bear with me, since the disc-space has its technical limitations, that such omissions have been unavoidable. Since the passage of the Earth-law by the Federated Board of Education, forcing narrative fiction to cling so closely to sworn facts of actual happening, I need offer no assurance of the truth of my narrative. My witnesses have filed their corroborating declarations. Indeed, the _Planetara's_ wreck and the brigands' attack upon the Moon-treasure were given the widest news-casters' publicity, as you all know. Yet I, who was unwittingly involved in those stirring events, may have added a more personal note, making the scenes more vivid to your imagination. I have tried to do that. I do hope that in some measure you will think I have succeeded. There are many foolish girls now who say that they would like to know Gregg Haljan. They doubtless would be very disappointed. I really crave no more publicity. And the girls of all the Universe have no charm for me. There is only one, for me--an Earth-girl. I think that life has very beautifully endowed me with its blessings. Giants of the Ray _By Tom Curry_ [Illustration:] [Sidenote: Madly the three raced for their lives up the shaft of the radium mine, for behind them poured a stream of hideous monsters--giants of the ray!] "I tell you I'm not crazy," insisted the tall man. "Durkin, they got a big mine." Bill Durkin laughed roughly, and sneered openly at his partner, Frank Maget. "G'wan, you're drunk." "Well, I was last night," admitted Maget. "But I'd slept it off this morning. I was lying under that table in the Portuguee's, and when I opened my eyes, there were these three birds sitting near me. They hadn't spotted me. I heard 'em talking of wealth, how their mine was of unbelievable richness and greater than any other deposit in the world. Well, that means something, don't it?" "That's all right," said Durkin. "But whoever saw a cricket fifteen inches long?" [Illustration: Its form was that of a gigantic frog, and from its throat sounded the terrific bellowing which rivaled thunder.] "Listen. There were three of these guys. One was a hell of a looking fellow: his face was piebald, with purple spots. His skin was bleached and withered, and one eye looked like a pearl collar button! They called him Professor, too, Professor Gurlone. Well, he takes out this damn cricket thing and it was sort of reddish purple but alive, and as long as your forearm. This professor guy says his son had taken an ordinary cricket and made it grow into the one he had. But the mine was what interested me. I kept my mouth shut and my ears open, and it's in the Matto Grosso. May be emeralds, diamonds, or gold. Boy, I'm heading for it, right now. The old guy's going back to-morrow, get me?" "It's a lot of bunk," growled Durkin, who was stout and red of countenance. "Yeh? Well, Otto Ulrich don't put fifty thousand into bunk." Durkin whistled. "You mean the German loosened up that much?" he asked, and his eyes showed interest. "Sure. He paid this Gurlone fifty thousand dollars--credit, of course." "Well--maybe there's something in the mine story. But boy, you were drunk when you saw that cricket. No cricket ever grew that big. You always see things when you get too much rum in you." "The hell you say," cried Maget. "I saw it, I tell you!" * * * * * Durkin feigned elaborate politeness. "Oh, all right, Frank. Have it your own way. You saw a cricket that big and this Gurlone feller took a couple of pink elephants out of his pocket to pay the check. Sure, I believe you." But money never failed to attract the two tropical tramps. They were looking for trouble, not work, and the idea of a raid on a rich mine in the Matto Grosso was just what they would enjoy. An hour later, they had cornered a small, inoffensive peon named Juan. Juan, Maget and Durkin had discovered, had come out of the wilderness with Professor Gurlone, the strange looking gentleman who spoke of a fabulously wealthy mine and commanded checks for fifty thousand dollars from a reputable banking firm. Such a man was worth watching. The two rascals were expert at pumping the little half-breed. They knew peons, and the first thing that happened was that Durkin had slipped Juan several dollars and had pressed a large glass of whiskey on the little man. The conversation was in broken English and Spanish. "Quien sabe?" Durkin and Maget had this phrase flung at them often during the course of the talk with Juan, and there were many elaborate shrugs. There was a mine, way back in the Matto Grosso, said Juan. He thought it might contain silver: there had been the shaft of an old mine there. But now they were deep down in the ground, digging out reddish brown ore, and the cavern smoked and smelled so badly a man could work but an hour or two before being relieved. But the pay was very high. Also, Juan, in his rambling way, spoke of grotesque animals. What were these creatures like? asked Durkin. Then came a shrug, and Juan said they were like nothing else on earth. * * * * * Durkin discounted the part of the story having to do with the strange animals. He thought it was peon superstition. But now he was sure there was a rich mine to be raided. "It's a tough part of the Grosso," he said, turning to Maget. "Sure. Hard to carry enough water and supplies to make it. Say, Juan, who was that big Portuguee with Professor Gurlone? He's blind, ain't he? His eyes were white as milk, and his face tanned black as river mud. Surely is a great big guy, and tough looking, too." Durkin drummed on the table, considering the matter, while Juan spoke of the big Portuguese. The swarthy man with the colorless blind eyes was Espinosa, former owner of the mine. He had sold part of his claim to the Gurlones, but had remained with them as an assistant. Though blind, he knew the depths of the mine and could feel his way about, and direct the peons in their labors. "I've got it," said Durkin, turning back to Juan and Maget. "Juan, it's up to you. You've got to blaze the trail so we can follow you in. And you can steal food and cache it for use on the way, see? We'll come along a day or so after the Gurlones." It took some persuading to make Juan consent to their plot, but the peon yielded at last to money and the promise of part of the spoils. "Maybe you can steal Gurlone's samples and they'll give us a line on what he's up to out there. Whether it's emeralds or diamonds or gold that they're taking out of the mine." Juan was stupid and superstitious, like most of his fellows. He had obeyed orders, digging out the red ore, and that was all he knew. But prompted by the two tramps, he was ready for trouble, too. Juan told them that Professor Gurlone carried a small lead case which he seemed to prize greatly. "Get it, then," ordered Durkin. The two tramps saw Gurlone's party start on the morrow. There were many cases of supplies loaded into launches, some marked Glass, Acids, and so on. Then there were boxes of food and various things needed in a jungle camp. * * * * * Juan, their tool, was working with the other peons, and at ten o'clock in the morning the launches set out, pushing into the current of the Madeira. Old Gurlone, of the livid face, was in charge of one boat, and the gigantic Portuguese, with his colorless eyes and burned complexion, sat beside him. That night, the two tropical tramps stole a small boat with a one-cylinder motor, and started up the river. It was a hard journey, but they were used to river and jungle work, and the object they had in view was enough to make them discount trouble. They speculated upon what manner of treasure it was they would find in the cavern of the Matto Grosso mine. It might be precious stones, it might be gold. Certainly it was something very valuable. They carried little supplies, but they were heavily armed. For food, they might hunt and also depend on the caches left by their friend, Juan the peon. Three hundred miles from Manaos, they came to the landing where old Gurlone had unloaded his boats. The two tramps drew their own craft up on shore a quarter of a mile away, keeping out of sight, and hid the boat in dense brush. Then they crept up the river bank, keeping out of sight of the boatmen, who were preparing for the return voyage, and cut into the jungle so as to strike the trail of the caravan ahead. For several hours they followed the path easily. They found palm trees blazed with new marks, and these they were sure their friend Juan had left for them. But the trail was easy to keep without these. The supplies had been loaded on burros, which had been awaiting the boats. That night, they camped beside a small stream. They were but twenty-four hours behind Professor Gurlone and his party, and the food Juan had cached for them was in good condition. * * * * * They were up at daybreak, and pressed on, armed to the teeth and ready for a fight. "What's that?" said Durkin, stopping so suddenly that Maget ran into him. They had been walking at a swift pace along the jungle path, the giant trees forming a canopy overhead. Monkeys screamed at them, birds flitted a hundred feet above them in the roof of the forest. The sun beat on the jungle top, but few rays lightened the gloom beneath. From up ahead sounded a frightful scream, followed by a long drawn out wailing. Maget glanced at Durkin, and the latter shrugged, and pressed on. But he gripped his rifle tightly, for the cries were eery. From time to time the two stopped to catch better the direction of the wails. At last, they located the spot where the injured person lay. It was under a great bombax tree, and on the shaded ground writhed a man. The two stopped, horrified at the squirming figure. The man was tearing at his face with his nails, and his countenance was bloody with long scratches. He cursed and moaned in Spanish, and Durkin, approaching closer, recognized Juan the peon. "Hey, Juan, what the hell's the matter? A snake bite you?" The bronzed face of the sturdy little peon writhed in agony. He screamed in answer, he could not talk coherently. He mumbled, he groaned, but they could not catch his words. At his side lay a small lead container, and closer, as though he had dropped it after extracting it from its case, lay a tube some six inches in length. It was a queer tube, for it seemed to be filled with smoky, pallid worms of light that writhed even as Juan writhed. "What's the trouble?" asked Durkin gruffly, for he was alarmed at the behavior of the peon. It seemed to both tramps that the man must have gone mad. * * * * * They kept back from him, with ready guns. Juan shrieked, and it sounded as though he said he was burning up, in a great fire. Suddenly the peon staggered to his feet; as he pushed himself up, his hands gripped the tube, and he clawed at his face. Perplexity and horror were writ on the faces of the two tramps. Maget was struck with pity for the unfortunate peon, who seemed to be suffering the tortures of the damned. He was not a bad man, was Maget, but rather a weakling who had a run of bad luck and was under the thumb of Durkin, a really hard character. Durkin, while astounded at the actions of Juan, showed no pity. Maget stepped forward, to try and comfort Juan; the peon struck out at him, and whirled around. But a few yards away was the bank of the stream, and Juan crashed into a black palm set with spines, caromed off it, and fell face downward into the water. The glass tube was smashed and the pieces fell into the stream. "God, he must be blind," groaned Maget. "Poor guy, I've got to save him." "The hell with him," growled Durkin. He grasped his partner's arm and stared curiously down at the dying peon. "Let go, I'll pull him out," said Maget, trying to wrench away from Durkin. "He's done for. Why worry about a peon?" said Durkin. "Look at those fish!" The muddy waters of the stream had parted, and dead fish were rising about the body of Juan. But not about the dying man so much as close to the spot where the broken tube had fallen. White bellies up, the fish died as though by magic. "Let's--let's get the hell back to Manoas, Bill," said Maget in a sickly voice. "This--this is too much for me." * * * * * A nameless fear, which had been with Maget ever since the beginning of the venture, was growing more insistent. "What?" cried Durkin. "Turn back now? The hell you say! That damn peon got into a fight with somebody and maybe got bit by a snake later. We'll go on and get that treasure." "But--but what made those fish come up that way?" said Maget, his brows creased in perplexity. Durkin shrugged. "What's the difference? We're O. K., ain't we?" In spite of the stout man's bravado, it was evident that he, too, was disturbed at the strange happenings. He kept voicing aloud the question in his mind; what was in the queer tube? But he forced Maget to go on. Without Juan, the peon, to leave them caches of food on the trail, they would have a difficult time getting provender, but both were trained jungle travelers and could find fruit and shoot enough game to keep them going. Day after day they marched on, not far from the rear of the party before them. They took care to keep off Gurlone's heels, for they did not wish their presence to be discovered. When they had been on the journey, which led them east, for four days, the two rascals came to a waterless plateau, which stretched before them in dry perspective. Before they came to the end of this, they knew what real thirst was, and their tongues were black in their mouths before they caught the curling smoke of fires in the valley where they knew the mine must be. "That's the mine," gasped Durkin, pointing to the smoke. * * * * * The sun was setting in golden splendor at their backs; they crept forward, using great boulders and piles of reddish earth, strange to them, for cover. Finally they reached the trail which led to the hills overlooking the valley, and a panorama spread before them which amazed them because of its elaborateness. It seemed more like a stage scene than a wilderness picture. Straight ahead of them, as they lay flat on their stomachs and peered at the big camp, yawned the black mouth of a large cavern. This, they were sure, was the mine itself. Close by this mouth stood a stone hut. It was clear that this building had something to do with the ore, perhaps a refining plant, Durkin suggested. There were long barracks for the peons, inside a barbed wire enclosure, and they could see the little men lounging now about campfires, where frying food was being prepared. Also, there was a long, low building with many windows in it, and houses for supplies and for the use of the owners of the camp. "Looks like they were ready in case of a fight," said Durkin at last. "That fence around the peons looks like they might be havin' trouble." "Some camp," breathed Maget. "We got to find somethin' to drink," said Durkin. "Come on." They worked their way about the rim of the valley, and in doing so caught glimpses of Professor Gurlone, the elderly man they had spotted in Manaos, and also saw the big Portuguese with his sightless eyes. At the other side of the valley, they came on a spring which flowed to the east and disappeared under ground farther down. "Funny water, ain't it?" said Durkin, lying down on his stomach to suck up the milky water. But they were not in any mood to be particular about the fluids they drank. The long dry march across the arid lands separating the camp from the rest of the world had taken all moisture from their throats. * * * * * Maget, drinking beside his partner, saw that the water glinted and sparkled, though the sun was below the opposite rim of the valley. It seemed that greenish, silvery specks danced in the milky fluid. "Boy, that's good," Durkin finally found time to say, "I feel like I could fight a wildcat." The water did, indeed, impart a feeling of exhilaration to the two tramps. They crept up close to the roof of the parallel shaft which they had seen from the other side of the valley, and looked down into the camp again. Professor Gurlone of the livid face and Espinosa the blind Portuguese, were talking to a big man whose golden beard shone in the last rays of the sun. "That's the old bird's son," said Durkin, "that Juan told us about. Young Gurlone." A rumbling, pleasant laugh floated on the breeze, issuing from the big youth's throat. The wind was their way, now, and the valley breathed forth an unpleasant odor of chemicals and tainted meat. "Funny place," said Maget. "Say, I got a hell of a headache, Bill." "So've I," grunted Durkin. "Maybe that water ain't as good as it seemed at first." * * * * * They lay in a small hollow, watching the activity of the camp. The peons were in their pen, and it was evident that they were being watched by the owners of the camp. As purple twilight fell across the strange land, the two tramps began to notice the dull sounds which came to their ears from time to time. "That's funny thunder," said Maget nervously. "If I didn't know it was thunder, I'd swear some big frogs were around here." "Oh, hell. Maybe it's an earthquake," said Durkin irritatedly. "For God's sake, quit your bellyachin'. You've done nothin' but whine ever since we left Juan." "Well, who could blame me--" began Maget. He broke off suddenly, the pique in his voice turned to a quiver of fear, as he grasped Durkin's arm. "Oh, look," he gasped. Durkin, seeing his partner's eyes staring at a point directly behind him, leaped up and scrambled away, thinking that a snake must be about to strike him. He turned round when he felt he was far enough away, and saw that the ground was moving near the spot where he had been lying. The earth was heaving, as though ploughed by a giant share; a blunt, purplish head, which seemed too fearful to be really alive, showed through the broken ground, and a worm began to draw its purple length from the depths. It was no snake, but a gigantic angleworm, and as it came forth, foot after foot, the two watched with glazed eyes. Maget swallowed. "I've seen 'em two feet long," he said. "But never like that." Durkin, however, when he realized that the loathsome creature could not see them and was creeping blindly towards them with its ugly, fat body creasing and elongating, picked up rocks and began to destroy the monstrous worm. He cursed as he worked. Dull red blood spattered them, and a fetid odor from the gashes caused them to retch, but they finally cut the thing in two, and then they moved away from there. * * * * * The dull rumblings beneath them frightened Maget, and Durkin too, though the latter tried to brazen it out. "Come on, it's gettin' dark. We can take a look in their mine now." Maget, whimpering, followed. The booming sounds were increasing. But Durkin slipped down the hillside, and Maget followed into the valley. They crept past the stone shack, which they noticed was padlocked heavily. Durkin stopped suddenly, and cursed. "I've cut my foot," he said. "These damn shoes are gone, all right, from that march. But come on, never mind." They crept to the mouth of the cavern and peered in. "Ugh," said Maget. He drew back with a shudder. The floor of the mine was covered with a grey slush, in which were seething white masses of slugs weaving in the slime. A powerful, rotten odor breathed in their faces, as though they stood in the mouth of a great giant. "Ah!" yelled Durkin, throwing his arms across his face. The greenish, ghostly light which emanated from the slime was weaker than moonlight, just enough to see by; a vast shadow hovered above their heads, as though a gigantic bat flew there. The sweep and beat of great wings drove them back, and they fled in terror from such awful corruption. But the flying monster, with a wing spread of eight feet, dashed past them, and silhouetted against the rising moon like a goblin. Then came another, and finally a flock of the big birds. Durkin and Maget ran away, passing the stone house which stood near the cavern's mouth. The booming sounds from the bowels of the earth filled their ears now, and it was not thunder; no, it issued from the depths of the mine. "We--we got to get somethin' to eat," said Durkin, as they paused near one of the shacks, in which shone a light. * * * * * Sounds of voices came from the interior. They crept closer, and listened outside the window. Inside, they could see Espinosa, Gurlone senior, and the big youth with the golden beard, Gurlone junior. "Yes, father," the young man was saying. "I believe we had better leave, at once. It's getting dangerous. I've reached the five million mark now, with the new process, and it is ready to work with or sell, just as we wish." "Hear that?" whispered Durkin triumphantly. "Five million!" "It's all ready, in the stone house," said young Gurlone. "Why should we leave now?" said old Gurlone, his livid face working. "Now, when we are just at the point of success in our great experiments? So far, while we have struck many creatures of abnormal growth, still, we have overcome them." "Well, father, there is something in the mine now which makes it too dangerous to work. That is, until they are put out of the way. You can hear them now." The three inside the shack listened, and so did Durkin and Maget. The booming sounds swelled louder and the earth of the valley shook. "I t'ink we better go," said Espinosa gruffly. "I agree with your son, Professor." "No, no. We can conquer this, what ever it is." "You see, father, while you were away, we broke through into a natural cavern, an underground river. It was then that the trouble started. You know the effect of the stuff on the insects and birds. It enlarged a cricket one hundred times. You saw that yourself. Six of the peons have disappeared--they didn't run away, either. They went down the shaft and never came back." "Oh, they probably fell into the water and drowned," said old Gurlone impatiently. "Even if they did not, we can kill anything with these large bore rifles." "We'd better pull out and let it alone for a while," said young Gurlone gravely. "The peons have been trying to bolt for several days. They'd be gone now if I hadn't penned them in and electrified the fence." * * * * * Maget put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "I'm starving," he whispered. Durkin nodded, and they turned away, toward what they had marked as a supply shack. They heard a low murmur from the peons' pen, as they began to break off the hasps of the lock which held the door of the storehouse. They got inside with little trouble, and began to feel about in the dark for food. They located biscuits and canned goods which they split open, and these they wolfed hungrily, listening carefully for sounds from outside. "Here they come," said Maget, gripping Durkin's arm. They looked out the window of the supply shack, and saw old Gurlone issue from the building outside which the two tramps had been listening. In one hand, the old Professor, brave as a lion, carried an old fashioned double-barreled elephant gun, and the rays from a powerful electric torch shone across the barrel. At least, they thought the bizarre figure was old Gurlone, from the size. For the man was clad in a black, shiny suit, and over his head was a flapping hood of the same material in which were large eyeholes of green glass. Behind this strange form came a larger one, armed also with a big bore rifle and with another powerful flashlight. The blind Portuguese was armed, too, but he was not clad in the black suit. He took his stand beside the mouth of the cavern, and waited while the two Gurlones entered the mine. "My foot hurts," said Durkin suddenly, breaking the silence. "I'm going out and see what happens," said Maget. * * * * * Durkin limped after Maget, who now took the lead. They crept close as possible to the mine opening, and saw the big Portuguese standing there in silence, listening carefully. Any sounds the two might have made were drowned in the great bellowing from within the cavern. These noises, so like the croak of bullfrogs but magnified a thousand times, were terrifying to the heart. The sweep of wings sounded on the night air, and Espinosa drew back and squatted close to the ground, as immense green creatures, flying on dusty wings, issued from the mine. "God, those are moths," breathed Maget. Yes, unmistakably, they were moths, as large as condors. The green ones, but for their size, were lunar moths, familiar enough to the two tramps. More bats came, disturbed by the entrance of the two Gurlones. Durkin broke, then. "I'm--I'm--I guess you're right, Maget," he whispered, in a terrified voice. "We should have never come. If my foot wasn't hurt, I'd start for the river now. Curse it, what a place!" The booming, vast croaks filled the whole valley, reverberating through the hills. Wails sounded from the peon camp. The big Portuguese was shouting to the Gurlones. "Come out, come out!" Maget gripped his own rifle, and stood up, bravely. His fear, though it was great, seemed to have brought out the better side of the man, while Durkin, so brave at first, had cracked under the strain. "Look out, they'll see you," whimpered Durkin. Maget strode forward. A blast of fetid, stinking air struck his face, and he choked. The noises were now ear-splitting, but above the bellows came the sounds of the big rifles, the echoes booming through the recesses of the cavern. Then the two Gurlones, running madly, burst from the mine entrance. "Run," they screamed. "Run for your life, Espinosa!" "I'll help you," cried Maget, and Durkin could detain him no longer. * * * * * The Gurlones hardly noticed the newcomer, as they ran madly towards the shelter of their houses. Espinosa joined them, going swiftly in spite of his blind eyes. The croaking made Maget's brain scream with the immensity of the sound. Luminous, white disks, three feet in diameter, glared at him, and the creature, which progressed with jerky leaps toward him, almost filled the mouth of the mine. It was hot in pursuit of the fleeing Gurlones. It squatted and then jumped, and presently it was out in the night air. Its form was that of a gigantic frog, but it stood some twenty feet in height, and from its throat sounded the terrific bellowing which rivalled the thunder. Maget bravely stepped forward, and began to fire into the huge, soft body. The great mouth opened, and as the dum-dum bullets tore gashes in the blackish green batrachian, the thunderous croaks took on a note of pain. The odor of the creature was horrible. Maget could scarcely draw his breath as he fired the contents of the magazine into the big animal. Two more jumps brought the frog almost to Maget's feet, and the tropical tramp felt a whiskerlike tentacle touch his face, and bad smelling slime covered him. The frog was blind, without doubt, from its underground life, but the tentacles seemed to be the way it finally located its prey, for it turned on Maget and made a final snap at him. The great jaws closed like the flap of hell, and Maget leaped back with a cry of triumphant terror. * * * * * The bullets had finally stopped the big frog, but at its heels came a strange, jellylike creature, not quite as bulky as the frog, but pushing along on its legs and with a tail some eight feet thick and fifteen feet in length. This, too, evidently a polywog, was blind, with whitened discs for eyes, but it slid along at a rapid rate because of its size. Maget's gun was empty; he turned so flee, but the polywog stopped and sniffed at the thick blood of its fellow. Then, to Maget's relief, it began to hungrily devour its companion. Utterly filthy, and ferocious, the polywog in silence snapped great chunks from the dead giant frog. "Hello. Who are you?" Maget turned, having forgotten the amenities of life in the excitement. Professor Gurlone and his son, still clad in their black suits, but with their helmets off, were standing beside him, clutching their guns and lights. The big Portuguese, Espinosa, appeared, and Durkin was beside him. "Why," said Maget, between gasps, "we just happened to be out exploring, and we saw your camp. We were on our way in when we heard the noises and came to investigate." "I see," said old Gurlone. "What made you head in this direction, and where's your outfit?" "Oh, we cached most of it back there," said Maget. "My partner's hurt his foot, so he can't walk well. Isn't that so, Durkin?" "Yeh," growled Durkin. "I got a sore foot, all right." * * * * * Old Gurlone was suspicious of the vague story which Maget and Durkin concocted as the explanation of their presence in the valley. But evidently the Professor was too worried about the situation in which he and his friends were, to question the two tramps very closely. In fact, he seemed rather glad that he had two more pairs of hands to aid him and he thanked Maget for his bravery. They dispatched the great polywog as it tore its parent to bits, and then the five men, the two Gurlones, Espinoza, Maget, and the limping, cursing Durkin, retired to one of the shacks. The living quarters of the Gurlones was quite elaborate. There were many books on rough shelves, and there was a small bench filled with glass phials and chemicals, though the main laboratory was in one of the long buildings. Professor Gurlone poured drinks for the five, and welcomed Durkin and Maget as allies. "We'll need every man we can get, if we are to cope with these great creatures," said old Gurlone. "The peons are too frightened to be of use. Luckily, it was a frog we came upon on the banks of the subterranean river. There is no telling how many more creatures of the same or greater size may be down there. We will have to destroy them, every one." Maget and Durkin shuddered. "Say," blurted Durkin, his face working nervously, "how the hell did that frog get so big? I thought I was seein' things, Professor." "No, no," said Professor Gurlone. "You see, the ore in the mine contains radium, that is, salts of radium. It is a pitchblende deposit, and it happens to be so rich in radium content that throughout the ages it has affected all the life in the cavern. The arid land surrounding the ore--this has been, generally, one of the characteristics of radium deposits--has kept most of the jungle creatures away, but underground beings such as reptiles, worms and frogs, have gradually become immune to the effects of the ore and have grown prodigiously and abnormally under the stimulation of the rays given off by the radium. "Now, this is nothing strange in itself, but never before has such a rich deposit been discovered, so that the amounts of radium available have been too small to really check its effect on growth in animals. That is our chief scientific object in coming here: we realized, from Senor Espinosa's description of the played-out silver mine he had, and from his loss of sight, that he had stumbled upon a valuable deposit of radium. It usually occurs with silver, that is, the uranium mother ore does, through the disintegration of which radium is formed. The content of radium per ton in this ore proved unbelievably rich: we were delighted. I have always suspected that the animal cell might be stimulated into abnormal growth by exposure to radium salts, for such a thing already has been hinted at in the scientific world. Not till our chance came here, however, has enough radium been available for the experiments." * * * * * Maget and Durkin listened with open mouths. Radium meant but vague things to them. They had heard of radium paint which shone in the dark on the dials of watches and clothes, but of the properties of the metal and its salts they were utterly ignorant. "That radium stuff is what makes the funny light in that mine, then?" asked Maget. "Exactly. The radio-activity of the elements in the ore give off the light. There are three rays, the alpha, beta and gamma, and--" The professor forgot himself in a lecture on the properties of radium. Durkin, breaking in, asked, slyly. "Is this radium worth as much as silver?" Young Kenneth Gurlone laughed, and even old Professor Gurlone smiled. "Radium is worth more than gold or diamonds or platinum. Its value is fabulous. We have five million dollars worth already, in the form of the chloride." "Whew," whistled Durkin. He glanced sidewise at Maget. "Yes," said Professor Gurlone, "five million dollars worth of it! Those great monsters who have been developed throughout the ages by the action of the radium rays on their bodies, causing them to grow so prodigiously, are but incidents. We must destroy them, so that our work cannot be interfered with. We must use dynamite, blow them to bits. They are powerful enough to crush the stone bank by the mine mouth and ruin the labors of the past two years, gentlemen." Armed, and once more fortified with whiskey, the five made their way outside. The moon was darkened by an immense shadow, as one of the giant bats winged its way over their heads. But there were no more monster frogs. The ugly, bulky shapes of the dead polywog and its parent lay before them. "We are safe for the moment," said Professor Gurlone. "Go and quiet the peons, Espinosa: they will listen to you." * * * * * The peons still wailed in terror; the blind Espinosa slipped silently away. "Come," said Professor Gurlone, to his son and to Maget and Durkin. "I will show you the laboratory, so that you can understand better the effects of radium on growth." The professor led them to the long, low, many-windowed building nearby, and flooded it with light. It contained cage after cage in which were monkeys, pumas, and various jungle folk. These creatures set up a chattering and howling at the light and intruders. Maget glanced curiously about him. He saw shining vials and glassware of queer shapes on long black tables, and tubes of chemicals. There were immense screens of dull lead. "Those are for protection," said Professor Gurlone, "as are the lead-cloth suits we wear. Otherwise we would be burned by radium rays." Maget looked about, to see if his partner was listening, but he had gone away. However, Maget was intensely interested. He went from cage to cage as Professor Gurlone, rather in the manner of a man giving a lecture to students, pointed out animal after animal that had been treated by the radium. "This," said the professor, "is a monkey which usually attains a height of two feet. You can see for yourself that it is now larger than a gorilla." * * * * * The horrible, malformed creature bared its teeth and shook its bars in rage, but it was weak, evidently, from the treatment accorded it. Its hair was burned off in spots, and its eyes were almost white. There was a jaguar, and this beast seemed to have burst its skin in its effort to grow as large as three of its kind. "You see, we have not so much time as nature," said Professor Gurlone. "These beasts cannot be enlarged too rapidly, or they would die. They must be protected from the direct rays of the radium, which is refined. In the ore, the action is more gradual and gentle, since it is less concentrated. But the metal itself would burn the vital organs out of these creatures, cause them to be struck blind, shrivel them up inside and kill them in a few minutes in the quantity we have. We expose them bit by bit, allowing more and more time as they begin to grow immune to the rays. Here, you see, are smaller creatures which have grown some eight or ten times beyond normal size." All the animals seemed the worse for wear. Maget, his brain reeling, yet was beginning to grasp what radium did to one. It was not gold that you could pick up and carry away. "If a man touched that radium," he asked, "what would happen to him?" "Just what I said would happen to the animals if we did not give it to them gradually," said Gurlone, with a wave of his hand. "It would kill him, strike him down as though by invisible poison gas. His heart and lungs would cease to function, pernicious anemia would set in, as the red corpuscles in his blood perished by millions. He would be struck blind, fall down and die in agony." To Maget came the picture of the unfortunate Juan. As though answering his unasked question, Professor Gurlone went on. "We had a peon coming up with us," he said. "His name was Juan. He stole my sample-case, which contained an ounce of radium chloride, and ran off with it. If he opens it, it will kill him in just that way." * * * * * Maget shivered. "But--but didn't it hurt you to carry it?" he asked. "No. For it was incased in a lead container some two inches in thickness, and the rays cannot penetrate such a depth of lead. They are trapped in the metal." "Father, father, you're wasting time," broke in Kenneth Gurlone, shaking his yellow head. "We must act at once. The peons are almost mad with fear. Even Espinosa cannot quiet them. And every moment is precious, for the monsters may break forth." But Maget was looking nervously about for Durkin. Where was he? Durkin had his mind on the treasure, and-- As they turned toward the door, the professor saying. "The rays from the ore, which is not so concentrated as the purified metal, do not kill--" Durkin suddenly appeared. He carried his rifle at his hip, and he limped and cursed angrily. "Come across," shouted Durkin. "Give me the key to that stone house. Snap into it, and no argument." "The key--to the stone bank?" repeated old Gurlone. "Yes. I'll give you five counts to throw it over--then I'll shoot you and take it," snarled Durkin savagely. "I want that treasure, whatever it is, and I'll have it. One ... two ... three...." The tramp sent a shot over their heads as a warning. "Hey, Bill, easy, easy," pleaded Maget. "That stuff is radium. It'll ruin you, boy!" "Shut up, you yeller-bellied bum," snarled Durkin. "Four...." A tinkle of metal came on the stone floor of the laboratory, as old Gurlone tossed his keys to Durkin. "Don't go in that shack," cried young Gurlone. "It'll be your death, man--" "Liars," yelled Durkin, and backed out the door. "H'm," said old Gurlone, turning to Maget. "So you came to rob us, eh?" * * * * * But Maget thought of Juan, and then he knew he did not want Durkin, in spite of his failings, to perish so. He ran for the door, and across the clearing. "Durkin--Bill--wait, it's Frank--" Great bellowings sounded from the bowels of the earth, but Maget ignored these in his effort to save his partner. Durkin had the padlock off the stone shack, and pulled back the door. As the door disclosed the interior, Maget could see that a greenish haze filled the entire building. Wan liquid light streamed forth like heavy fluid. Bravely, to save his pal from death, Maget ran forward. But Durkin had entered the stone shack. Maget went to the very door of the building. Durkin was inside, and Maget could see his partner's thick form as a black object in the strange, thick air. An eery scream came suddenly from Durkin's lips; Maget wrung his hands and called for help. "Come out, Bill, come out," he cried. Durkin evidently tried to obey, for he turned toward the door. But his knees seemed to give way beneath him, he threw his arm across his eyes as he sank to the ground, crying in agony, incoherent sounds issuing from his lips. Shriek after shriek the unfortunate man uttered. As Maget made a dash forward to take a chance with death and rescue his friend, Professor Gurlone and his son Kenneth ran up and threw a black cloak over the tramp. The three entered the shack of death. Maget, not entirely covered, felt his heart give a terrific jump, and he gasped for breath. Durkin was quivering on the floor which was lined with lead. * * * * * Round vials stood about the room like a battery of search-lights, and from these emanated the deadly green haze. But almost before Maget touched his pal, Durkin was dead. Curled up as though sewed together by heavy cords. Durkin lay in a ball, a shaking mass of burned flesh. The two Gurlones pushed out ahead of them, and raised their hands. They had on their black suits and their helmets. "It is too late to do anything for him now," said Kenneth Gurlone sadly. "He was headstrong. You can see for yourself that the five million dollars takes care of itself. Certain death goes with it if you are unprotected. These lead-cloth suits will keep off the rays for a short time. We always wear them when we are working with the metal, even when we have a lead screen." "Poor Bill," sobbed Maget. "It's terrible!" Professor Gurlone shrugged. "It was his own fault. He was a thief and he would not let us stop him. I hope it's been a lesson to you, Maget." "Yes, I want to help you," said Maget. "If you'll keep me with you, I'll work for you and be straight. Give me a chance." "Good. Then shake hands on it," said Kenneth, and they clasped hands firmly. Espinosa appeared from the darkness. "The peons are mad with terror," he said morosely. "They cannot be held much longer. They will revolt." "Well, we must kill the creatures in the cavern: that will quiet them more than anything else," said Professor Gurlone. "Better close the stone shack," said Kenneth. But as he spoke, a vast shape, another giant frog, appeared in the entrance of the shaft. "Get some dynamite and fuses," ordered Professor Gurlone quietly. "Come on Kenneth, and you, Maget, if you care to risk your life. You need not do so unless you wish to." Bravely, the older man led the way towards the croaking monster. The ground shook at its approach. It was heading for the bodies of the dead frog and polywog, bent on a search for food. Evidently these vast creatures were forced to prey upon one another for sustenance. * * * * * The rifles spoke, and Maget and the professor, in their black suits, protected by the lead-cloth and helmets from the rays, advanced. They poured bullet after bullet into the frog. Kenneth came running to join them, and Espinosa stood by. Kenneth had dynamite bombs with fuses ready for lighting and throwing. He also brought more ammunition, and the three armed themselves to the teeth. It was well after midnight when they started into the mine. They knew they must act quickly or retreat, for the bellowing sounded nearer and nearer the surface of the earth. Each man carried big, powerful flashlights, and the three entered the mine shaft and walked across the seething slugs into the bowels of the earth. "Stay close together," ordered old Gurlone. The mine was easy to descend for the first hundred yards. It led in a gentle slope downward. The way, save for a few giant bats and moths, and the big maggots, was clear. The greenish haze, not so bright as that in the death shack, enveloped them, but they needed their flashes to see clearly. "Slowly, take it easy," counseled old Gurlone. The mine spread out now, and began a steeper descent. The air was poor, and it was hard to breathe through the mask. Maget, his heart thumping mightily, listened to the roaring within the depths of the mine. Now the ground seemed to drop away before them. Maget could hear the running of water, the underground river, and every now and then there came an immense splash, as if some great whale had thrown itself about in the water. A terrifically loud hissing filled their ears, and suddenly, before them, showed an utterly white snake with a head as big as a barrel. Its white eyes glared sightlessly, but its tongue stuck forth for several feet. Kenneth Gurlone coolly tossed a lighted bomb at the creature: the explosion shattered their ear-drums, but it also smashed the serpent. * * * * * The writhing, wriggling coils, bigger than the body of a horse, slashed about, dangerously near. They picked themselves up, and pushed on, keeping close to the right wall. A great bat smashed against Maget, and knocked the light out of his hand, but the blow was a glancing one, and he was able to retrieve his light and hurry on. They were far from the entrance now. The hole which had been broken through by the peons showed before them, and they could see milky water dashing over black rocks. Pallid eyes looked at them, and they knew they gazed upon another of the giant frogs. They tossed a bomb at the creature, and blew a jagged hole in his back. No sooner had he begun to die than there came a sudden rush of other monsters and a feast began. "Throw, all together," yelled Kenneth Gurlone. Into the vast mass of creatures, who crowded one another in the river for their share of the spoils, they threw bomb after bomb. The dynamite deafened them, and acrid fumes choked them, but they fired their rifles at the prodigious animals and there, in the big river cavern, was a seething mass of horrible life, dying in agony. The bellowings and hissings sounded louder, so loud that the earth shook as if actuated by a mighty earthquake. Maget gripped Kenneth Gurlone's arm. "My bombs are gone," he shouted. He had but a few rounds of ammunition left, and still more of the giant reptiles appeared. A centipede with its creeping, horrible legs topped the mass of squirming matter; they could see the terrific sting of the creature, so deadly when but a fraction of an inch long, and which was now at least a foot, armed with poison. There came the rush of more bats and moths, a rush that threw the three men off their feet. "We must have opened the hole more with our bombs," shrieked old Gurlone. "The dead bodies attract the other creatures, more and more of them are coming. It is impossible; we cannot deal with them all." * * * * * The vast gobbling of the great animals in the river below them was so prodigious they could not grasp it. It seemed it must be optical illusion. In a few moments, the dead had been eaten, swallowed whole, and fights were progressing between the victors. They tossed the rest of their bombs, fired the remaining ammunition, and as they prepared to retreat, several of the big creatures slopped over and started up the river bank into the mine shaft. They ran for their lives, the three. Madly, with the earth shaking behind them as they were pursued by a hopping monster of a beetle with immense mandibles reaching out at them, they dashed for the open air. Giant moths and bats struck at them, and Maget fell down several times before he reached the outside, and he was bruised and out of breath. "Come on, there are too many to fight," gasped old Gurlone, throwing off the lead suit. But there was no need to talk. The creatures, disturbed by the bombs, had collected in one spot and, shown the way out by one of their number, were coming. Espinosa, with Kenneth Gurlone holding his hand, ran swiftly for the hills surrounding the valley. Maget helped old Professor Gurlone, who was so out of breath that he could scarcely move. The great beetle which had been pursuing them was the first to break forth into the valley. Turning back for a look over his shoulder, Maget saw the thing pause, but the cavern belched forth a vast array of monsters, the beasts roaring, hissing, bellowing, in an increasing mass of sound. They swarmed over the ground, and giant bats and moths winged their way about the heads of the monsters. At the rim of the valley, the four men paused. "God help the peons," said Kenneth Gurlone. * * * * * Now the horde of monsters swelled more and more; the bats and moths winged in mad frenzy about the open door of the radium shack. There were great beetles, centipedes, ants, crickets, hopping, crawling things, and grotesquely immense in size. Fights progressed here and there, but the majority of them were carried along in the sweep of the multitude. "See, the radium kills those who get too close," said Professor Gurlone, in a hushed voice. The giant moths and bats were unable to withstand the lure of the green light. They flew with mad beatings of wings straight for the open door of the death house, and many of the great creatures, attracted by the light and urged on by an unexplainable force which sent them to death like gnats and moths in a flame, crowded near to the death-dealing radium. Not until the whole shack was covered with quivering forms of the dead, did the other creatures veer off and with hops, creepings and myriad giant legs, begin to cover the whole valley. The stone walls of the death shack had crumpled in with the weight; the other buildings, more lightly built, gave at once, with crackings and crashings. The four men were powerless to assist the unfortunate peons, who were trapped in their barracks. The charged wires stopped many of the big beasts, but soon the electric light was short-circuited, and the valley, in the moonlight, was a seething mass of fighting, dying, feasting monsters. * * * * * Other sounds, besides those made by the big creatures, came to the ears of the stricken men on the hillside. The breaking of glass, the cries of the jungle animals trapped in their cages, the shrieks of dying peons who were eaten at a gulp by the big frogs or stung to death, impaled on the mandibles of some great stinging centipede. In the spot where the radium death shack had been, was a pulpy mass of livid, smoky light. Now the bowl of the valley was filled as by some vast jelly. The creatures were slopping over the walls, and battling together. The shambles was not yet over, but the four could remain no longer. They made their way down the hillside and struck out across the arid lands. Maget, the tramp, became the leader. He was a trained jungle man, and it was he who finally brought them safely to the Madeira. He was their strong man, the one who found the trail and located roots and fruit for the party to subsist on. They nearly perished in the trip for lack of water, but again, Maget was able to supply them with roots which kept them from dying in agony. * * * * * They lay upon the river bank now, exhausted but alive. Maget had assisted old Gurlone, acted as his staff, half carried him the last miles of the trip. Their clothes were almost gone, they were burned to crisps by the tropic sun. Flies and other insects had taken their toll. But Maget had brought them through. The tall, thin fellow's hair had turned utterly white. But so had his soul. "You're a good man, Maget," said Professor Gurlone. "You have saved us, and you have been brave as a lion." Maget shook his head. "Professor," he said. "I came into the jungle to rob you. Durkin and I bribed Juan to steal that radium, and I feel responsible for his death. We thought you had diamonds or gold in the Matto Grosso, and we were after it. That's why I am here." "You have repaid your debt to us, more than fully," said Kenneth, holding out his hand. "Yes," said Espinosa. "Will you keep me with you, then?" asked Maget anxiously. "Are--will you go back there?" * * * * * Professor Gurlone stared at him, and then said, in a surprised tone, "Why, of course!" "But the monsters?" asked Maget. "Many of them will die in the outer air," said Gurlone. "The survivors of the battles will start eating the dead. They will finally clear away the debris of dead creatures about the radium shack. As each is exposed to the rays of the concentrated metal, it will die. The others will eat it, and be killed in turn. Thus, they will be destroyed. If there are any survivors after this evident turn of events, then we will cope with them when we return, reinforced. Dynamite, enough of it, will finish them off. And, Maget, in your next pursuit after knowledge of strange things, you may get a few earthly riches. The radium is still there, and you will share in it." "Thank you," said Maget humbly. "I'm with you to the end." "You must keep quiet about this," cautioned Kenneth Gurlone. "We do not want the world to know too much of our vast store of radium. It would attract adventurers and we would be annoyed by ignorant men. But we're thankful you lay drunk in that saloon when my father spoke of the millions, Maget." In Manzos, Maget found himself a changed man. To his surprise, in spite of his white hair, brought on by the horror of what he had seen, he found that he had gained two inches in height, and that he was larger of girth. This, Professor Gurlone told him, was the effect of the radium rays. Never again did Maget lie drunk on the floor of a saloon. The events through which he had gone had seared the tramp's soul, and he kept close to his new master, Professor Gurlone. The Moon Master _By Charles W. Diffin_ [Illustration: _He laughed loudly and contemptuously._] [Sidenote: Through infinite deeps of space Jerry Foster hurtles to the Moon--only to be trapped by a barbaric race and offered as a living sacrifice to Oong, their loathsome, hypnotic god.] "Now that's a mighty queer noise." Jerry Foster told himself. He dropped the pack from his shoulders and leaned closer to the canyon rim. Miles behind him was the last beaten trail: Jerry wanted peace and solitude and quiet. And now the quiet of the silent mountains was disturbed. From far below came a steady, muffled roar. Faint it was, and distant, but peculiar in its unvarying, unceasing rush. "Not water," Jerry concluded; "not enough down there. Sounds like--like a wind--like a wind that can't quit. "Oh well--" He shrugged his shoulders and slipped into the straps of his pack. Then he went back again to the granite ledge. "I wonder if there's a way down," he said. There was, but it took all of Jerry's strength to see him safely through. On a fan-shaped talus of spreading boulders he stopped. There was a limestone wall beyond. And at its base, from a crevice that was almost a cave, came a furious rush of air and steam. [Illustration] It touched him lightly a hundred feet away, and he threw himself flat to escape the hot blast. Endlessly it came, with its soft, rushing roar, a ceaseless, scorching blast from the cold rocks. "That's almighty funny," mused Foster, and sniffed the air. There was no odor. "And is it hot!" he said. "Nothing like that in my geology book. And what is beyond? Looks like concrete work, as if someone had plastered up the cave." He picked his way quickly across the rock slope. It was hard going. Below him the rocks and dirt went steep to the canyon floor. At its foot the blast swept diagonally over the slope. He must see what lay beyond.... "Curious," he thought; "curious if that is nature's work--and a lot more so if it isn't." A rock rolled beneath his feet. Another! He scrambled and fought desperately for foothold in the slipping earth. Then, rolling and clawing, he rode helpless on the slide straight toward the mysterious blast. He felt it envelop him, hot and strangling. His lungs were dry and burning ... the blazing sun faded from the rocks ... the world was dark.... * * * * * Darkness was still about him when he awoke. But it was cool; the air was sweet on his lips. And it was not entirely dark. He turned his head. He was in a room. On a rough-hewn table a candle was burning. Its light cast flickering shadows on walls of stone. Rumbling in his ears was the sound of the blast that had overwhelmed him. It echoed, seemingly, from far back in the stone cliff. Jerry made a move to sit up. He found that his hands and feet were tied, his body bound to the rough board bed. At the sound of his stirring, a figure came out from the farther shadow. It was that of a man. Jerry looked at him in silence. He was tall, his thin erectness making him seem abnormal in the low room. The lean face was unshaven, and from under a thatch of black hair a pair of deep-set eyes stared penetratingly at the figure on the rude bed. "Well," asked Jerry, at length, "what's the big idea?" There was no reply. Only the intent, staring eyes. "You got me out of that man-trap of yours," Jerry continued. "You saved my life." * * * * * The tall man finally spoke. "Yes, I saved your life. You missed the hottest part of the exhaust. I pumped you full of oxygen." "Then why tie me up like this?" Jerry Foster was frankly puzzled. "You are lucky to be alive. Spies are not always allowed--" He interrupted himself abruptly. "You are a reporter," he stated. "Wrong," said Jerry Foster. "Who sent you?" "Nobody sent me. I heard the noise of your infernal blast-furnace and came down to have a look." "Who sent you?" repeated the man. "Goodwin? The Stillwater crowd? Who was it?" "I don't know what you are talking about," protested Jerry. "I don't know who your Goodwin or Stillwater people are. I don't know who you are--I don't give a damn. Take these ropes off and cut out the melodrama. I'll go on my way, and I don't care if I never see you again." "That's a lie." The tall figure leaned over to shake a bony fist. "You'd report to Goodwin. He stole my last invention. He'll not get this." Jerry considered the wild figure carefully. "He's a nut," he thought. When he spoke, his voice was controlled. "Now, see here," he said: "I don't know anything about this. I'm Jerry Foster, live in San Francisco--" "So does Goodwin." "Confound you and your Goodwin! So do a million other people live there! I'm getting away from there; I'm heading into the hills for a short vacation. All I want is to get away from the world. I'm looking for a little peace and quiet." * * * * * The thin man interrupted with a harsh laugh. "Come here spying," he said, "and tell me you want to get away from the world." Again he laughed shrilly. "And I am going to be your little fairy godmother. I wish you were Goodwin himself! I wish I had him here. But you'll get your wish--you'll get your wish. You'll leave the world, you shall, indeed." He rocked back and forth with appreciation of his humor. "Didn't know I was all ready to leave, did you? All packed and ready to go. Supplies all stowed away; enough energy stored to carry me millions of miles. Or maybe you did know--maybe there are others coming...." He hurried across the room to open a heavy door of split logs in the rock wall. "I'll fool them all this time," he said; "and you'll never go back to tell them." The door closed behind him. "Crazy as a bed-bug," Jerry told himself. He strained frantically at the ropes that bound him. "Looks bad for me: the old bird said I'd never go back. Well, what if I die now ... or six months from now? Though I know that doctor was wrong." He tried to accept his fate philosophically, but the will to live was strong. And one of his wrists felt looser in its bonds. * * * * * Across the room his pack lay on the floor, and in it was a heavy forty-five. If he could get the pistol.... A knot pulled loose under his twisting fingers. One hand was free. He worked feverishly at the other wrist. The ropes were suddenly loose. He pulled himself to his feet, took a moment to regain control of cramped muscles, then flung himself at the pack. When the heavy door opened he was behind it, his pistol in his hand. There was no struggle: the lanky figure showed no maniacal fury. Instead, the man did a surprising thing. He sank weakly upon the rough bunk where Jerry had lain, his face buried in his thin hands. "I should have let you die," he said slowly, hopelessly. "I should have let you die. But I couldn't do that.... And now you'll steal my invention for Goodwin." Jerry was as exasperated as he was amazed. "I told you," he almost shouted. "I never knew anyone named Goodwin! I don't care a hoot about your invention. And as for letting me die--why didn't you? That's a puzzle: you were about to kill me, anyway." "No," said the other patiently. "I wasn't going to kill you." "You said I'd never go back." "I was going to take you with me." "Take me where?" "To the moon," said the drooping figure. Jerry Foster stared, open-mouthed. The pistol lagged in his limp hand. "To the moon!" he gasped. Then: "See here," he said firmly. "I've got you where I want you."--he held the pistol steady--"and now I'm going to learn what's back of this. I think you are crazy, absolutely crazy. But, tell me, who are you? What do you think you're doing? What was the meaning of that roaring blast?" * * * * * The man looked up. "You don't know?" he asked eagerly. "You really don't?" "No," said Jerry; "but I'm going to find out." "Yes," the other agreed. "Yes, you can, now that you've got the upper-hand. I guess I was half crazy when I thought I had been spied out. But I'll tell you." He sat erect. "I am Thomas J. Winslow," he said, and made the statement as if it were an explanation in itself. "Well," said Jerry, "that's no burst of illumination to my ignorance. Come again." The man called Winslow was ready--anxious--to talk. "I am an inventor. I have made millions of dollars"--Jerry looked at the disheveled apparel of the speaker and smiled--"for other people. The Stillwater syndicate stole my valveless motor. Then I developed my television set. Goodwin beat me out of that: he will have it on the market inside of a year. I swore they should never profit by this, my greatest invention." Jerry was impressed in spite of himself by the man's earnest simplicity. "What is it?" he asked. "I've broken the atom," said Winslow. "First tore the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen apart--dissociated them in the molecule of water--and have resolved them into their energy components. That's what you heard--the reaction. It it self-sustaining, exothermic. That hot blast carried off the heat of my retort." * * * * * Winslow rose from the bunk. Gone was his listless despondency. "Put up that gun," he said: "you don't need it now. I think we understand each other better than we did." He crossed with quick strides to the door leading into the cliff. "Come with me," he told Foster. "I am leaving to-day. You will not stop me. But before I go I will show you something no other man than myself has ever seen." He led the way through the doorway. There was another room beyond, Jerry saw. It was a cave. Plainly Winslow had taken these caves in the rocks and had made of them a laboratory. A lantern gave scant illumination: Jerry made out a small electric generator, and that was all. He felt a keen disappointment. Somehow this thin-faced man had communicated to him something of his own belief, his own earnestness. "What kind of a laboratory do you call this?" he demanded. But the other was busy. In the wall an opening had been closed with a small iron door, with cement around it. Winslow opened it and reached through. He was evidently adjusting something. The little dynamo began to hum. There was a crackling hiss from beyond the iron doorway. The opening was flooded with a clear blue light. Then the roar began. It was tremendous, deafening, in the echoing cave. "You may look now," said Winslow, and stood aside. * * * * * Jerry peered through. There was another cave beyond. In it was a small metal cylinder, a retort of some kind. The blue light came from a crooked bulb beyond. The retort itself was white-hot, despite a stream of water flowing upon it. A cloud of steam drove continuously out and up through a crevice in the rocks. The water flowed steadily from some subterranean stream in the limestone formation. It was diverted for its cooling purposes, but a portion also flowed continuously into the retort. Jerry's eyes found this, and he could see nothing else. For, before his eyes, the impossible was occurring. The retort was small, a couple of feet in diameter. It had no discharge pipes, could hold but a few gallons. Yet into it, in a steady stream, flowed the icy water. Gallons, hundreds of gallons, flowing and flowing, endlessly, into a reservoir which could never hold it. The inventor watched Foster with complacent satisfaction. "Where does it go?" Jerry asked incredulously. "Into nothingness," was the reply. "Or nearly that!" "See?" He held up a flask of pale green liquid. "And this," he added, exhibiting another that was colorless. "I have worked here for many months. I have converted thousands of thousands of gallons of water. It has flowed into that retort, never to return. I have gathered this, the product, a few drops at a time. "The protons and the electrons," he explained, "are re-formed. They are static now, unmoving. Call this what you will--energy or matter--they are one and the same." "Still," said Jerry, gropingly, "what has all that to do with the moon? You said you were going there." * * * * * "Yes," agreed the inventor. I am going, and this is the driving force to carry me there. I pass a certain electric current through these two liquids. I carry the wires to two heavy electrodes. Between them resolution of matter occurs. The current carries these two components to again combine them and form what we call matter, the gases hydrogen and oxygen. "Do I need to tell you of the constant, ceaseless and tremendous explosion that follows? "But enough of this! You said I was crazy. I gave you a few bad hours. I have shown you this much as a measure of recompense. You have seen what no other man has ever seen. It is enough." He motioned Foster through the door. The roaring ceased. The inventor returned shortly, the two flasks of liquid in his hands. He transferred both to two metal containers that were ready for the precious load. He carried them with the utmost care as he went out of doors. Once he returned, and Jerry knew by the crashes from the inner room that the laboratory work was indeed done. There would be nothing left to tell the secret to whomever might come. He followed Winslow outside, trailing him toward a wooded knoll. There was a clearing among the trees. And in it, hidden from all sides, his eyes found another curious sight. On the ground rested a dirigible in miniature. Still, it was small, he reasoned, only by comparison with its monster prototype: actually it was a sizable cylinder of aluminum that shone brightly in the sun. It was bluntly rounded at the ends. There were heavy windows, open exhaust ports, a door in the side, pierced through thick walls. Winslow vanished within, while Jerry watched in pitying wonder. * * * * * Despite its size, it was a toy, an absurd and pitiful toy. Real genius and lunacy had many an over-lapping line, Jerry reflected as he approached to look inside. But he found Winslow in a room surrounded by a network of curving, latticed struts. The machine was no makeshift of a demented builder: it was a beautiful bit of construction that Jerry Foster examined. "How did you ever get it here?" he marveled. "What you had in the cave you could pack in, but this--all these parts--castings--cases of supplies--" The inventor did not even turn. He was busy with some final adjustments. "Flew it in," he said shortly. "Built it in an old shop I owned out near Oakland." "And it flew?" Jerry was still incredulous. "Certainly it flew! On a drop or less of the liquids you saw." He pointed to a heavy casting at the center of the machine. There were braces tying it strongly to the entire structure, braces designed to receive and transmit a tremendous thrust. "This is the generator. Blast expelled through the big exhaust at the stern. These smaller exhausts go above and below--right and left at the bow. Perfect control!" "And you flew it here!" Jerry was still trying to grasp that incontrovertible fact. "And you were going to take me to the moon, you said." He looked above him where a pale, silvery segment showed dimly in the sky. "But why the moon?" he questioned. "Even granting that this will fly through space...." "It will," the other interrupted. "I tried it. Went up to better than fifty miles." Jerry Foster took a minute to grasp that statement, then continued: "Granting that, why go to the moon? There is nothing there, no air to speak of, no water! It's all known." * * * * * The inventor turned to face the younger man in the doorway. "There is _nothing_ known," he stated. "The modern telescopes reach out a million light years into space. But the one place they have never seen--can never see--is less than two hundred and fifty thousand miles away. The moon, as of course you know, always keeps the same side toward us. The other side of the moon has never been seen. "Listen," he said, and his deep-set eyes were afire with an intense emotion. "The moon is no tiny satellite; it is a sister planet. It is whirled on the end of a rope (we call it gravitation), swung around and around the earth. How could there be water or anything fluid on this side? It is all thrown to the other side by the centrifugal force. Who knows what life is there? No one--no one! I am going to find out." Jerry Foster was silent. He was thinking hard. He looked about him at the clean hills, the trees, the world he knew. And he was weighing the secure life he knew against a great adventure. He took one long breath of the clear air as one who looks his last at a familiar scene. He exhaled slowly. But he stepped firmly into the machine. "Winslow," he said, "have you any rope handy?" The inventor was annoyed. "Why, yes, I guess so. Why? What do you want of it?" "I want you to tie me up again," said Jerry Foster. "I want you to carry me off as you planned. I want to go with you." The tall man stared at the quiet, determined face before him. Slowly his own strained features smoothed into kindly lines. He grasped tight at Jerry's hand. "I was dreading that part of it," he confessed slowly: "going alone. It would have been lonely--out there...." * * * * * The shining cylinder of aluminum alloy was hurtling through space. No longer was it a ship of the air; it had thrown itself far beyond that thin gaseous envelope surrounding the earth; out into the black and empty depths that lay beyond. And in it were two men, each reacting in his own way to an adventure incredible. One was deep in the computation of astronomical data; the other athrill with a quivering, nerve-shaking joy that was almost breath-taking. A metal grating that had formed the rear wall of their cabin was now the floor. Winslow had thrown the ship into a vertical climb that made of their machine a projectile shooting straight out from the earth. Gravitation held them now to the grating floor. And, stronger even than the earth-pull, was the constant acceleration of motion that made their weight doubled again and again. The inventor moved ponderously, with leaden limbs, to take sights from the windows above, to consult his maps of the sky, check and re-check his figures. But Jerry had eyes only for the earth they had left. * * * * * Flat on the grating he lay, his eyes over a thick glass in a proturbance of the shell that allowed him to stare and stare at what lay directly below. He watched the familiar things of earth vanish in fleecy clouds; through them there formed the great ball, where oceans and continents drew slowly into focus. And now he was filled with a sense of great solitude. The world, in its old, familiar companionship, was gone--probably forever. The earth--_his_ earth--_his_ world--that place of vast distances on land and on sea, of lofty mountain ranges and heaving oceans, of cities, countries, continents--was become but a toy. A plaything from the nursery of some baby god, hanging so quiet in space he could almost reach and take it in his hands. Beyond it the sun was blaring, a hard outlined disc in the black sky. Its rays made shining brilliance of a polar ice-cap. Jerry Foster closed his eyes and drew back from the glass. Again he was aware of the generator, whose endless roar reverberated in their compartment. A smaller but similar apparatus was operating on one of the liquids from the inventor's laboratory to generate oxygen and release it inside the room. An escape valve had been set to maintain one atmosphere of pressure about them. Water dripped from a condenser where both gases were formed to burn into water vapor and cool to liquid form. * * * * * One of the windows below admitted a shaft of direct sunlight; it illumined their room with a faint glow. It would never cease, Jerry knew. They were in a place of eternal sunshine, yet a realm of an endless night. Above him, as Jerry raised his head, the windows framed nothing but utter blackness, save where some brilliant point marked the presence of a star. He missed the soft diffusion of light that makes daylight on earth. Here was only the one straight beam that entered one window to make a circle of light on the opposite wall. Jerry looked from a window of heavy glass at the side. This had been the bottom of their ship when they left. And he found in the heavens the object of their quest. Clear-cut and golden was half the circle; the rest glowed faintly in the airless void. He tried to realize the bewildering fact--the moon, this great globe that he saw, was rushing, as were they, to their trysting-place in space. Jerry stared until his eyes were aching. His mind refused to take hold upon the truth he knew was true. He was suddenly tired, heavy with weariness that was an aftermath of his emotional turmoil. He let his heavy body relax where some blankets had piled themselves upon the grated floor. The roar of the generator faded into far silence as he slipped into that strange spaceless realm that men call sleep. * * * * * The human mind is marvelous in its power of adjustment, its adaptability to the new and the strange. The unbelievable is so soon the commonplace. Jerry Foster was to sleep more than once in this tiny new world of Winslow's creating, this diminutive meteor, inside which they lived and moved and thought and talked. The fact of their new existence soon ceased as a topic of wonder. They alternated in their rest. And they counted the passage of time by the hours their watches marked, then divided these hours into days out there where there were no days. Seven of them had passed when the hour came that Winslow chose for checking their speed. They were driving directly toward the moon, which was assuming proportions like those of earth. The pilot admitted a portion of the blast to a bow port, and the globe ahead of them gradually swung off. The pilot was reversing their position in space to bring the powerful blast of their stern exhaust toward the moon, so as to resist somewhat its increasing pull. Now their stern windows showed the approaching globe. It was slowly expanding. They were falling toward it. The inventor moved a rheostat, and from behind them the stern blast rose to a tremendous roar. The deceleration held them with unbearable weight to the rear of the cabin. No thought now for the shining earth, yellow and brilliant in the velvet sky above. Jerry Foster watched through the slow hours as the globe beneath them enlarged and expanded in ever-increasing slowness. Slowly their falling motion slackened as they cushioned against the terrific thrust of the exhaust below. * * * * * The globe ceased to grow and held constant. Winslow cut the exhaust to a gentler blast. They were definitely within the moon's gravitational field; their last hold upon the earth was severed. The great globe was revolving beneath them. "How about it?" Foster asked breathlessly. "It doesn't revolve like that--not the moon!" "We have approached from the earth side," said the other, "but we have overshot it. Say that the moon is revolving, or say that we are swinging about it in an orbit of our own--it is all the same thing." "And soon," he added slowly, "we shall see...." He faltered and his lips trembled and refused to frame the words of a dream that was coming true. "We shall see ... the lost side of the moon. What will it be ... what--will--it--be...?" To Foster the whole experience had now the unreality of a dream. He could not bring himself into mental focus. His thoughts were blurred, his emotions dead. They were approaching the moon, he told himself. It was the moon that was there below them, slowly enlarging now, as their own earth had hung below them, but dwindling, when they left. "The moon!" he told himself over and over. "The moon--it is real!" But the numbness in his brain would not be shaken off. His voice, when he spoke, was casual. He might have been speaking of any commonplace--a ball-game, or a good show. "The sun is coming from my right," he said. "We are going around toward the dark side of the moon. Shall you land there?" Winslow shook his head. "Wait," he said, "and watch." Jerry returned to his circle of glass. * * * * * There was a shading of light on the surface below him. From the right the sun's brilliance threw black shadows and bright beams transversely over a wilderness of volcanic waste. And beyond, where the rays could not reach, was a greater desolation of darkness, its blackness relieved only by a dim light. He realized with a start of amazement that the dim light he saw was that of their own earth far above: it was lighting their approach to this sister orb. Their side-motion was swift as they drew nearer. Another hour and more, and they were drawing toward an expanse of utter darkness. The earth-light was fading where they passed. They were approaching, in very fact, the other side of the moon. What was below? What mysteries awaited them? He shivered, despite the warmth of the generator, cherry-red, that heated the snug cabin; shivered with unformed thoughts of unknown terrors. But he forced his voice to calm steadiness when he repeated his question to Winslow. "Must we land there?" he asked. "In the dark?" The inventor was piloting his ship with ceaseless concentration. Their falling speed was checked; they were close enough so that the whistling of air was heard merging with the thunder of their exhaust. He moved the rheostat under his hand, and the thunder slackened. "No," he said. "You are forgetting your astronomy. This 'other side' is subject to the same conditions as the near side. The sun shines on them alike, but alternately. We are rounding the limb away from the sun. We find, as you see, a darkness that is absolute except for the light of the stars. Here the earth never shines, and the sun only during the lunar day. But the sun is creeping down this other side. Their day, equal to fifteen of our days, is beginning. We shall come into the light again. I am checking our motion across the surface. We shall land, when it seems best, later on. There will be light." * * * * * The thin strong hands of the pilot played over the current and valve controls. Their ship slowly swung and dipped to a horizontal position. A blast from below held them off from the moon. A bow port was roaring as their speed slowly decreased. Minutes merged endlessly into long hours as Jerry's eager eyes strained to detect some definite form on the surface beneath. Dimly a glow appeared far ahead; slowly the darkness faded. They were moving ahead, but their wild speed was checked. And slowly the new earth below took on outline and form as the sun's glow crept over it. What would the light disclose? His mind held irrationally to thoughts his reason would have condemned. He found himself watching for people, for houses, lights gleaming from windows. This, in a region of cold that approached the absolute zero. The reality came as a shock. The first rays that crept into vision were silvery fingers of light. They reflected up to the heights in glittering brilliance. They gathered and merged as the ship drove on toward the sunrise, and they showed to the watching eyes a wondrous, a marvelous world. A world that was snowbound, weighted and blanketed with a mantle of white. * * * * * To Jerry the truth came as a crushing, a horrible blow. He turned slowly to look at his companion; to look and be startled anew by the happiness depicted on the lean face. "I knew it," the pilot was saying. "I always knew it. But now--now...." He was speechless with joy. "It's terrible!" said Foster. He almost resented the other's elation. "It's a hell! Just a frozen hell of desolation." "Man--man!" was the response, "can't you see? Look! The whiteness we see is snow, a snow of carbon dioxide. The cold is beyond guessing. But the clear places--the vast fields--it's ice, man, it's ice!" "Horrible!" Jerry shuddered. "Beautiful," said the other. "Marvellous! Think, think what that means. It means water in the hot lunar day. It means vapor and clouds in the sky. It means that where that is there is air--life, perhaps. God alone knows all that it means. And we, too, shall know...." The ship settled slowly to the surface of the new world. Black blobs of shadow become distinct craters; volcanoes rose slowly to meet them, to drift aside and rise above as they sank to the floor of a valley. They came to rest upon a rocky floor. On all sides their windows showed a waste of torn and twisted rock. Volcanic mountains towered to the heights, their sides streaked with masses of lava, frozen to stillness these countless years from its molten state. The rising sun, its movement imperceptible, cast long slanting rays between the peaks. It lighted a ghostly world, white with thick hoar-frost of solid carbon dioxide. A silent world, locked in the stillness of cold near the absolute zero. Not a breath of air stirred; no flurry of snow gave semblance of life to the scene. Their generator was stillen, and the silence, after the endless roaring of endless days, was overpowering. * * * * * But Winslow pointed exultantly from one window, where an icy expanse could be seen. "That will be water," he said; "water, when the sun has risen." He turned on the generator for warmth. The cold was striking through the thick insulated walls. They sat silent, peering out upon that boundless desolation, upon a world's breathless nakedness, exposed for the first time in all eternity to human eyes. Jerry's mind was searching for some means of expression, but the words would not come. There were neither words nor coherent thoughts to give vent to the emotions that surged within him. Their watches showed the passage of nearly two earth days before they dared venture forth. They watched the white mantle of frost vanish into gas. From the darkness that they called "west," winds rushed shriekingly into the sunrise. "Convection currents," Winslow explained; "off under the sun. In the direct rays the heat grows intense; the air rises. This is rushing in to fill the void. It will serve our ends, too. It will churn the air into a mixture we can breathe, dispel the thick layer of CO_2 that must have formed close to the ground." More hours, and the icy sheet was melting. A film of water rippled in the gusts of wind. Winslow opened the release valve that would permit the escape of air from their chamber, equalizing the pressures within and without. The air hissed through the valve, and he closed it so the escape was gradual. "We must exercise," he told Jerry. "We will decompress slowly, like divers coming up from deep-sea work. But watch yourself," he warned. "Remember you are six times as strong as you were on the earth. Don't jump through the roof." * * * * * THE valve had ceased to hiss when Winslow opened it wide. The air in their cabin was thin; their lungs labored heavily at first. Jerry felt as he had felt more than once at some great elevation on earth. But they lived, and they could breathe, and they were about to do what never man had done--to set foot on this place men called the unknown side of the moon. Earth habits were strong: Jerry brought his pistol and a hunting knife out of his pack and hung them at his belt, as the inventor opened the door and sniffed cautiously of the air. Jerry Foster's blood was racing; the air was cold on his face as he rushed out. But it brought to his nostrils odors strange and yet strangely familiar. He was oddly light-headed, irresponsible as a child as he shouted and danced and threw himself high in the air, to laugh childishly at the pure pleasure of his light landing. The sun made long shadows of two ludicrous figures that went leaping and racing across the rocks. Their strength was prodigious, and they were filled with an upwelling joy of living and the combined urge of an eternity of spring-times. The very air tingled with life; there was overpowering intoxication in this potent, exhilarating breath from a world new-born. The ground that they crossed so recklessly was a vast honeycomb of caves. Between the rocks the soil was soft with the waters from melting ice, and the men laughed as they floundered at times in the oozing mud. Beyond was a lake, and it was blue with a depth of color that was almost black, a reflection of the deep, velvet blackness of the sky overhead. And beyond that was the sloping side of an extinct volcano. "Up--up!" Jerry shouted. "From up there we will see the whole world--the whole moon!" He laughed as he repeated the exultant phrase: "The moon--the whole moon!" * * * * * Despite their strength which carried them in wild bounds across impassable chasms, their laboring lungs checked them in the ascent. The joyous inebriation was wearing off. Winslow met his companion's eyes sheepishly as they stopped where a sheer cliff of basalt above caught and held the warmth of the sun's rays. Behind them it rose a straight hundred feet, and before stretched a vast panorama. The sun was mounting now in the sky. It brought into strong relief the welter of volcanic waste that extended in bold detail through the clear air far out to the horizon, where, misty and dim, the first vaporous clouds were forming from the steaming earth. And as they watched, the depressing bareness and emptiness of that gray-black expanse was changing. Far to the east a pink flush was spreading on the hills. It wavered and flowed, and it changed, as they watched, to deep areas of orange and red. The delicate pink swept in waves over valleys and hills, a vast kaleidoscopic coloration that rioted over a strange world. In silence it spilled into the valley below. The slope they had traversed was radiant with color. At their feet the ground was in motion: it heaved and rolled in countless places. Rounded shapes in myriads were emerging. Plants--mushroom growths--poured up from the earth to drink in the sunshine of their brief summer. They burst the earth to show unfolding leaves or blunted, rounding heads, that grew before the men's incredulous eyes. Winslow was the first to recover from the stupefying beauty of the spectacle. "The machine!" he gasped. "Back to the ship! We'll be swamped, overwhelmed...." He rushed madly back down the slope. * * * * * Jerry was beside him, a revulsion of feeling driving him to frantic efforts. The piercing beauty that had enthralled him has become a thing of terror. The soft, pulpy, growing things that crushed beneath his feet were a menace in their lust for life. They were a mile and more from the machine. Could they ever find it, Jerry wondered. The whole landscape was changed; bare rocks were half-hidden now under clinging, creeping vines. Only the sun remained as a guide. They must go toward the sun and a little north. He followed Winslow, who was circling a huge area of weird growths that already were waist high. They leaped across a gaping chasm and fought their way over a low hill, rank with vegetation, only to be confronted by a maze of great stalks--stalks that sprouted as they watched, dismayed, and threw out grotesque and awkward branches. They made one futile effort to force their way, but the trunks, though pliant, were unyielding. To attempt to find their way through the labyrinth was folly. "We've got to keep on trying," said Jerry Foster. "We've got to get back, or...." Winslow, as the look in his eyes showed, needed no ending to that sentence. There was the summer of a lunar day ahead; the inventor did not need to be told of the scorching, broiling heat that would wither the land when the sun struck from straight overhead. And in their ship was food and water and a means of transport to the cooler heights above. * * * * * It was Jerry who took charge of the situation. Here was a prodigious laboratory in which Winslow's science was useless, but in fighting with nature--even nature in as weird and terrifying a mood as this--Jerry felt himself not entirely incompetent. He looked about him. It had been but an hour since they watched the first onslaught of this life that engulfed them. And now they were cut off. Through an opening, where bare rocks made a rift in the vegetation, he saw again the high ground where they had stood. There was more rock there on the volcanic slope: the growing things were in clumps--islands, rather than continents of rank growth. "We must go back," he told Winslow, "and climb while we can. Get to the high ground, take bearings on the place where we left the ship. We'll look over the ground and figure some way to get there." Winslow nodded. He was plainly bewildered, lost in the new jungle. He followed Jerry, who bounded across a crevice in the earth. The ground was rotten with the honeycomb of caves and cracks. Jerry forced his way through and over a rock heap, where the thick trunks of nightmare trees were spaced farther apart. There was an opening ahead; he started forward, then stopped abruptly and motioned the other to silence. * * * * * From beyond there came sounds. There was rending of soft, pliant tissue. The sound came through the thin air from a grove up ahead, where big plants were waving, though the wind had long since ceased. To their ears came a snoring, blubbering snuffle. A stone was dislodged, to come bounding toward them from the hillside; the soft plants were flattened before it. The men cowered in the shelter of a giant fungus. Beyond the rocks, above the mottled reds and yellows of the grotesque trees, a head appeared. It waved at the end of a long, leathery neck. All mouth, it seemed to the watchers, as they saw a pair of short forelegs pull the succulent tops of the giant growth into a capacious maw. Below, there was visible a part of a gigantic, grayish body. It was crashing down toward them, eating greedily as it came. "Back," said Jerry softly. "Go back to that cave. We will hide there in some crack in the ground." They picked their way noiselessly over the rocks. The cave they had crossed offered a refuge from the beast. It went slantingly down into the ground, a great tunnel, deep in the rock. They dropped into the opening and started forward, only to recoil at the fetid stench that assailed their nostrils. "A bear pit," gasped Jerry. "Great Heavens! What a smell!" They stopped, dismayed. Far below them in the bowels of some subterranean passage was the crashing of loose stone; a scrambling and scratching of great claws came echoing to them. They leaped madly for the outer air. "Over here," Jerry directed, and led the way, crouching, to the concealment of great stalks and vine-covered rocks. He pointed toward the open ground where they had been a few moments before. The tree-eater was out in full view. Its flabby, barrel-like body was squatted like that of some unearthly, giant toad, on massive hind legs. It sat erect, its forelegs hung in air, as a hoarse, snarling cry came from the cave. The great head, perched on the long leathery neck, waved from side to side. * * * * * The noise from the cave ceased. The rift in the earth was in plain sight from where they cowered, and the eyes of the men were upon it. One instant it was empty; the next, in uncanny silence, it was filled with huge hideousness--an enormous, crouching beast. It was black, a dull leathery black. Its thick, hairless hide hung in creases and folds on a gaunt frame. Shorter than the tree-eater, it was still a thing of mammoth ugliness. Its hind legs were powerful and armed with claws that curved deep into the earth; its front legs displayed the same fearful weapons. A thick, heavy tail slashed forward and back over the ground. And from this to the grinning, heavy-toothed jaws and beady eyes where the long neck ended in a warty head, it was an incarnation of pitiless ferocity. Was the scent of the hidden, shuddering men in its red nostrils? It forgot them at the sight of the beast in the clearing. The snarling cry echoed hideously in the thin air as the frightful body came erect with neck extended, jaws open and dripping. It hurled itself through the air in one terrific leap. Had there been any lingering hope in the minds of the men that they had no carnivores to deal with, the ensuing struggle ended it. The attacker tore great masses of living flesh from the struggling, screaming body. The first cumbersome brute was helpless before its destroyer. * * * * * Jerry was trembling and sick at the sight, but he grasped his companion's arm and drew him after as he slipped quietly away. "To the high ground," he whispered. "It's our only hope. Perhaps we can fight them off there--find some steep rock we can climb." They worked their way desperately through the rubbery, obstructing growth. At the foot of the hill there was better going; the bare rock gave winding and twisting passage to the heights. They could have leaped over the stunted growths here, could have raced frantically for the high ground, but they dared not. To leap up into view of those fierce, searching eyes! It was unthinkable. They crouched low as they darted from their concealment to new shelter, and crawled behind rocks when open ground must be crossed. They had dared regain hope when again the paralyzing scream ripped through the silence. It was answered by another and another from distant points. The valley of the caves was spewing out its loathsome dwellers from their winter's sleep. The men raced openly now for the heights. As he leaped, Jerry turned to see over one shoulder a pursuer appear. It was one of the flesh-eaters, head to the ground on their trail. At sight of them its cry rang out again. It bounded forward in pursuit. And again there were answering screams from the jungle growth. The men threw themselves frantically up the mountainside. Once Winslow landed in a sprawling heap and groaned as he drew himself to his feet. The beast was below them. Jerry seized a great boulder, whose earth-weight would have made it immovable. He raised it above his head and sent it crashing down the slope. * * * * * Another and another he threw. One struck the great beast in mid-air; it was pure luck that drove the stone crashing against the creature's head. It fell back with a blood-chilling snarl that was half shriek. Another monster appeared, to throw itself upon the first and tear at the crushed, waving head. Jerry took his companion by the arm. His voice came strangled from his straining lungs. "Are you hurt?" he gasped. "Can you run?" Winslow nodded breathlessly. Again they gathered themselves for their wild, leaping retreat toward the top. An uproar of furious fighting behind them marked where a score of the monsters had gathered for the feast. Jerry watched vainly for some refuge, some pinnacle of rock or precipice they could climb, and from which they could beat down their attackers. There was nothing but the welter of volcanic waste: rock heaps and boulders and smooth streams of solid lava. Perhaps in the crater, he thought, over the ragged crest of the cone, might be some place of safety. The pack was in full cry again as they climbed gaspingly to the top. Beyond lay the funnel-shaped crater. Its vast inner slopes were less steep than the hill they had climbed. They were covered with a jungle, like those they had seen--a maze of red toadstools and distorted trees. Jerry turned savagely to face the oncoming brutes. This, he knew, was the end. For this they had hurled themselves through space--to make a morning morsel for these incredible beasts. * * * * * About the men was a confusion of granite rocks, thrown from the crater to provide weapons, crude and futile, for two puny earth-dwellers. The men raised great rocks in the air and threw them with all their strength. Jerry struggled with a mammoth boulder,--Winslow leaping to his aid. They toppled it over to start an avalanche of devastation that swept into the oncoming monsters. And again there was respite for their aching arms, while the hunger-crazed brutes tore at the bruised bodies of their fellows. Jerry Foster looked longingly again toward the crater. Should they chance the shelter of the jungle growth? Hopeless, he knew when these monsters could crash their way through while the men were impeded at every step. The mottled, orange-green stalks, as he watched them, seemed to move. He dashed the sweat from his face--his hair hung matted on his forehead--and passed a grimy hand across his eyes. Plainly, one of those stalks crossed a rocky-floored clearing. Was he dreaming? Was this all a dream--a mad nightmare from which he could force himself to wake? Another moved. He saw definitely a mushroom growth pass swiftly to lose itself in a neighboring clump. Dreaming? No! The screams from behind him and Winslow's hoarse yell proved the stark reality of his surroundings. The vile creatures were close: Jerry could see their fierce heads dripping with blood. He reached for his pistol, knew instantly it was useless against these mammoth brutes, and joined Winslow, who was straining desperately at another great rock. It toppled and fell. Jerry hurled himself at a heap of smaller boulders and sent them crashing as fast as he could seize them and throw. * * * * * One quick look behind him showed still the impossible vision he had seen. And now there were figures--a mob of them--figures that threw off their wrappings of vegetation as they ran, cast to the ground the toadstool disguises that they held. They were caricatures of men that were swarming up the hill.... He swung again in one last hopeless stand against the first horrible enemy. The two men poured a torrent of stones down the slope; they were useless, except for their delaying the advance. The beasts leaped and dodged. They were close when the rock-rain increased to a deluge. Jerry was fighting in a red haze through which he saw dimly. He was aware of the hailstorm of boulders that were thick in the air. He saw vaguely the white faces and copper-clad bodies of strange men leaping about him, and he heard the wild bedlam of their shrieks as they joined in the mad battle against the common enemy. The beasts were swept off in a landslide of loose rock--all but one. Above them, on a high point of stone, it was crouching to spring. A wild human figure, its flesh white as chalk, leaped forward with a tangle of fibers. The tangle was thrown as the brute was in air. A net spread and wrapped around the monster. It fell, clawing and tearing, to roll helplessly down the slope. The battle was won. Jerry swayed drunkenly on his feet. About him the mountains seemed whirling, where unreal figures of men with dead white skin and shining copper armor danced dizzily. He met for an instant the look from Winslow's dazed eyes. Out of the past a picture flashed clearly: Winslow--this same Winslow--arguing that the moon might hold mysteries still. He laughed thickly. "And I said it was all known," he muttered through slack lips. "Nothing on the moon that wasn't known...." He was still laughing in a wild inebriation as a net settled close to entangle his swaying figure and bear him helpless to the ground. He saw Winslow similarly bound, saw him lifted to the shoulders of shouting, yelling men, whose stupid, pasty faces were wide-eyed with excitement. He, too, was raised into the air.... They were being carried toward the crater's mouth.... * * * * * A fight for life in thin air does not make for clear thinking. Jerry Foster knew only that a nightmare world was whirling about him; that beneath him powerful shoulders supported, while the one who carried him leaped at racing speed down the slope. They went more slowly down pathways cleared through the rank vegetation. Soft, pulpy vines from the grotesque trees brushed his face. He tried vaguely to shield himself, but his hands were bound fast. He was helpless in the entangling folds of the net. The touch of cold stone brought him to his senses. He was lying on smooth rock. They were in a clearing. He turned his head to find Winslow, but could not find him. Across the open ground were naked men, their bodies, like these others, dead white in the sun's glare. They were dragging giant stalks to earth by means of ropes. Trunks and branches, bright in their colors of yellow and orange and flaming red, were hacked to short lengths and piled on all sides. The workers, as Jerry watched, dropped their implements to race toward him. There was a press of flat, white faces above. His captors, in their copper armor, beat the newcomers back. The babel of chattering voices was deafening. * * * * * Again he was lifted into the air--plainly these were no weaklings he had to deal with--and again the warrior band surrounded him as the march was resumed. The milling, shrieking crowd of workers followed in an ear-splitting mob. The forest ended, and the men went slowly now down smooth, rocky slopes to stop upon a wide, level expanse. Before he was placed on the ground Jerry had a glimpse of a funnel-shaped pit--the mouth of the extinct volcano. And toward it, bound and helpless, was being carried a struggling form which he thought he recognized. "Winslow!" he shouted. But the bodies in their gleaming copper armor closed about him in a solid throng and cut off his view. In the sky the sun had moved slowly upward since first they landed. It slanted brightly now into the eyes of the prostrate man and made a spectacle of his twisting contortions as he tried to get his hands on his knife in its sheath at his belt. This and his pistol were under his coat. But he could not reach them. He lay panting with his exertions. One of the warriors seemed to have authority, for his arms alone of all the group were sheathed with copper circlets, and the others obeyed his orders. Jerry addressed himself to this one. He knew the words were unintelligible, but he pleaded desperately for a chance. "Take this off," he said. "We are friendly--friends--friends!" He struggled to keep himself from shouting, to keep his voice under control. "The other man," he said, "bring him back." And again he repeated: "We are friends." He scanned his captors' faces. * * * * * The pasty face above him was impassive; the eyes stared uncomprehendingly into his. Then the figure barked an order. One of the warriors swung Jerry lightly to his shoulder, and started toward the pit. At its edge was a basket, a huge affair of knotted fiber ropes. Dimly, Jerry saw other baskets standing about: they were filled with the fragments of fungus. Still bound, he was placed in the empty container. Hands grasped the meshes, and he was swung out over the edge. A rope was above him: he was lowered steadily into the dark shaft. Jerry breathed a sigh of relief. This was not death--not yet. And Winslow? Safe, perhaps, for he had traveled this same road. There was figures outlined above against the circle of light, figures that clambered like apes down swaying ropes. The light glinted and sparkled from their shining armor. His escort was still with him. The circle of light changed to a glowing ring, where only the rim was lighted. Above was the deep black of the lunar sky. Then the circle faded to a mere point as he went down into the pit. The rope basket came to rest upon a rock floor, and Jerry was lifted out. He saw plainly the figures about him, and he wondered vaguely at the light that came from the walls of the cavern. There were long lines of soft light, leading off into the dark, lines that marked plainly a labyrinth of passageways, leading in all directions. * * * * * Beyond a narrow entrance was one brighter than the rest, a broad avenue that led downward still further into the depths. Here he was carried. He tried vainly to keep some mental map of their course. He would return some day--he _must_ return--he and Winslow. They would escape.... But the passage turned and twisted; there were many branching corridors, each with its lines of light. Jerry gave up the attempt. It was a maze of serpentine streets beyond his power to remember and recall. Before him the passage was still wider. It was opening into a great room.... Jerry found himself upon the floor. He strained cruelly at the cords about his head as he twisted and turned to get a view of his surroundings. The room was a cave, its vast vaulted ceiling sprung high above a level floor, where the figures of men--odd, plaster-white figures like animated statues--were small in the distance. His eyes were drawn quickly to the brilliant glow of the farther wall. There was the bright black of basaltic formation, and in it--though he knew the impossibility--was shining the sun. Jerry blinked his eyes to look again and again; the golden circle was dazzling. It was set at a point well above the smooth floor, and up to it there led a sloping pathway of gold. It was as if they had indeed captured their god, these worshipers of the sun, had captured and held it for the adoration of the grovelling people. Jerry saw them upon the floor. The copper of the armored men gleamed bright in the glow from beyond, as they abased themselves and crept slowly toward the light. At each side of the dazzling orb was a platform. There were figures upon it, seated figures, Jerry saw, even at a distance, that were robed in vestments of the sun. Their forms gleamed gold in the light. * * * * * The leader that Jerry had noted among his captors crept on in advance of his men. From among the bright figures on the platform above one rose to extend a glowing arm. He spoke, and the tones rolled majestically back from the high vault above. The crawling man below him stopped rigidly where he was. Another word from above, and he rose slowly to his feet. He stood full in the glow of the captive sun, to be outlined in black against the brilliance beyond. Haltingly he spoke. Then, seeming to gain confidence, he launched into a torrent of words. He gestured and waved, and, to Foster, the sign language was plain. He saw reenacted the surprise of the warriors upon beholding these intruders; saw how they had spied out upon them, using trunks and branches of the fungus as a screen; saw in pantomime their own battle with the beasts, then the rush of the armed men to the rescue. Again the net was thrown, and the gesturing figure turned to point dramatically where Jerry lay bound, then pounded his armored chest with unconcealed pride. He ceased to speak, and there was utter silence in the room as the figure above crossed to stand before the golden sun. He too abased himself before the sign of their god, then rose, to stand motionless, listening.... For a breathless interval he waited before the oracle, then prostrated himself again and returned to his place. * * * * * He repeated, it seemed, a command, congratulation, to judge by the ecstasy of the figure below. The warrior turned once to throw himself before the image of the sun; he repeated this again and yet again before he crept back to his fellows. The group arose and rushed swiftly toward the bound man. They brought him quickly into the presence. With scant ceremony Jerry was unrolled from the net; he lay free and gasping upon the floor. The men scurried like mad from out the pathway of light that shone down from the false sun. Jerry rose to his feet; the brilliance before him almost blinded, but he saw now whence it came. There was a hollow in the wall, a great parabola, deep and wide, and it was lined throughout with beaten gold. In a straight path the light was reflected from every point--every point but one for at the far end, where the curved sides joined, was a circle of darkness. It stared like an eye, evil, portentous. Jerry nerved himself for an ordeal, unknown but imminent. The black eye glared at him unwinkingly. Before him was the pathway of light: it shone brilliantly down the sloping ramp where a floor of bright gold led up to the sun god itself. The figure on the dais raised its hand. Jerry heard the words come from its lips and roll sonorously back from above. The figure waited for an answer. Jerry's hands slipped beneath his coat to rest reassuringly upon his weapons. He withdrew his hands empty and raised one toward the figure above. "I do not understand your words," he said. "Your language is strange. No doubt mine is as strange to you. I come as a visitor--I am friendly." He held out both his hands, palms upward. "We have come, my friend and myself, on a friendly errand." He paused to look vainly about for Winslow. "And you have received us as if we were wild animals." * * * * * Jerry Foster, of San Francisco, U. S. A., was suddenly resentful of their treatment. His words were meaningless, but his tones were not. "You have tied us," he said, "bound us--dragged us before you. Is that the way you receive your guests from another world?" The golden-clad figure stood in majestic silence while Jerry was speaking. It waited a moment after his outburst, then crossed again to bow low in the floodlight of gold. As before, it seemed listening to words from the black heart of the strange sun, words quite inaudible--soundless. He returned quickly and waved Jerry's attention to the place of light. The sense of a presence there in the central blackness was strong upon the waiting man. In that other life that now seemed so remote--his life on earth--Jerry had once felt the threat of a concealed intruder in the dark. He recalled it vividly now. The sensation was the same. But it was magnified. There was no denying the reality of a malign something at the heart of that golden glow. The black center of it vibrated with cold and venomous hate. It struck upon the waiting man like a physical force. His head was swimming, his thoughts refused to form. He was as if suspended in a great void, where all that was lay deep in the center of that radiant orb. And it drew him irresistibly on. * * * * * Like a dazed bird, held and stricken in the hypnotic gaze of a snake, Jerry took one stiff, unconscious forward step. Another, and another. He strove dumbly, helplessly, for realization--there was nothing in the universe but the certain thing ahead. His foot was upon the golden incline leading to his doom, when that buried something which marks a man--the spark of divinity which sets him apart as one alone--reasserted itself. "I am," he heard his own voice shouting in strangled tones, "I am Jerry Foster! I am I ... I am myself!" He awoke from his stupor with a shock that set every nerve-fiber quivering. For long minutes he stood silent. Then, realizing his victory and proving it to his own soul, he looked straight into the black center of the threatening sun god, and he laughed, loudly and contemptuously. Then, turning, and with steady stride, he walked calmly from the light. The great hall was silent with a silence that was breathless. Then pandemonium broke lose. The priests and the god had been defied, and screaming and shouts rang throughout the vast chamber to re-echo batteringly from ceiling and walls. There was tumult and confusion where the populace thronged. Even the figures above on the dais were milling about in disorder; the rippling gold of their robes made a spectacle that forced Jerry's involuntary admiration. Then one from among them sprang forward. His voice roared above the shattering din. The room was still. Another order, and the guard of armed fighting men formed in a circle about the defier of their god. Jerry waited. Trouble was about due, he told himself. One hand was on his pistol, tense and ready. As the ranks stood silent and made no move to attack, Jerry Foster did a curious thing. * * * * * It was not done intentionally, but Jerry Foster had nerves, and they had been under a strain. His hand went unconsciously to his pocket and extracted a cigarette. There were matches there, too, and he struck one and lighted the white cylinder. The match made a tiny flame where he flipped it. The whole room whispered and hissed with one loud gasp of amazement, but the moan that followed, that echoed and resounded from the roof, was of nothing but horror. Even the warriors drew back in trembling dismay. And before them the stranger they had brought to the very portal of their sanctum of holies blew clouds of white smoke that eddied and whirled as they rose round his head. The effect was not lost upon Jerry. And his mind was working. Was fire unknown to these strange beings? Here in the deep caverns, far from the surface, was fire a thing of terror to them? He looked back toward the wall. "If they rush me," he thought, "there's a good place to be. That will feel mighty comfortable at my back." He walked slowly, the smoke rising thick about his head. The copper-clad figures before him withdrew, the ranks parting to let him through. Unharmed he reached the safety of the wall. The enemy now formed a semi-circle before him. The inertia of the stricken beings on the platform was broken by his move. Again their head priest gave an order; from another side a second detachment of armed men came on. They were carrying something. Jerry leaned forward in quivering preparedness as he saw, in the floodlight of radiance, the body of Winslow lying on the floor. * * * * * Was he injured? Dead? The devastating loneliness that swept him at the sight of the still body was unnerving. He breathed a long sigh of relief as the lanky figure rose slowly to its feet. Winslow was alive! They would show these beastly, unearthly humans something yet. There was no preparation--no preliminaries. Whether Winslow could have reacted as Jerry had would never be known. He seemed stunned and helpless, and it was with no resisting hesitation that he began the climb to the unknown. Jerry's crouching tenseness snapped. No thought of the gun as he sprang toward the enemy between him and his friend. "No, Winslow--no!" he shouted as he leaped at the figures in front of him. Their strength had seemed startling to Jerry when they had carried him like a child. He had forgotten his lightness here on this unheavy world. And he had forgotten his own great strength. No panting, exhausted, beaten fighter of beasts was this that hurled himself against the ranks before him. One coppery sword flashed upward above his head. Its bearer was seized in two hands that picked him bodily from the floor and crashed him, a living projectile, among the others. Jerry waited for no more. There was an opening ahead, and beyond was Winslow, walking stiffly, certainly, up that damnable slope. He threw himself in giant leaps across the floor. His companion was half-way up the glittering ramp when Jerry seized him. Holding him in his arms, he leaped outward, to land rolling on the floor. He was on his feet in an instant. He dragged Winslow to a standing posture. "Wake up, man," he was shouting. "Winslow--wake up!" * * * * * The onrushing horde was upon them while the tall man was still brushing his hand over weary eyes, and Jerry, for the moment, had the fighting to himself. No time for anything but parry and strike. He caught one white face on the jaw; the man went bodily through the air. Jerry landed again and again. His weapons were his fists, and they did fearful execution. And he knew, at length, that he was not alone. The long arms of the inventor tore a sword from an upraised hand. Its owner was thrown, as Jerry had thrown one previously, to catapult among its fellows. They were clear for an instant. "Back to the wall!" shouted Jerry. He had time and room to reach for his pistol, and drew it quickly from its holster. They backed hastily to the protection of the stone wall. There were scores upon scores of copper-clad figures that followed them held out of reach. With a flashing of gold, the head priest himself sprang to urge on his men. "Ready!" said Jerry. "I wish you had a gun! Here! Take this!" He handed his companion a long-bladed knife, then turned to aim his pistol with steady hand at the oncoming figure in golden robes. The priest stopped for a brief scrutiny of this new menace, then screamed out an order and hurled himself into the sheltering press of men. Jerry fired into the whirl of bodies. The roar of the forty-five tore like a battery of siege guns throughout the great room. But the creatures before them were fighting now in an insane frenzy. Their bodies pressed the two men to the wall. Jerry fired again, and the fall of a limp, gold-robed body gave him a thrill of delight. * * * * * The inventor was holding a white body as a shield, while he thrust past it incessantly with a red blade. There were huddled figures before them that lay quiet or crept painfully away. The body of the head priest was being carried off. The dark mouth of a passage had impressed itself upon Jerry; he remembered it now. It offered a means of escape. "Off to your right," he said. "Work off to your right. There's a hole in the wall--" They fought off the struggling eruption of bodies that drove at them. Jerry was saving his ammunition, but once more he fired as a sword was falling over Winslow's head. He drove strongly with his left and beat at the white skulls with the butt of the gun gripped in his other hand. The passage was suddenly behind them. One last stand against the screaming, frothing faces, and they backed, panting, into the sheltering dark. Jerry stopped and took Winslow by the arm. "Are you hurt?" he demanded. The inventor was too breathless for reply. "Nothing much," he panted, after a moment. "One got me along the cheek--you shot him just in time. How about you?" "O.K.," was the assurance. "But, man, I've been hammered!" "What a peach of a fight," he added. "But now what?" Winslow laughed mirthlessly in the dark. "This looks like a one-way street," he said. "We can't go back. "Say," he demanded, with sudden, dim recollection. "I remember something of a dream--a ghastly sort of thing. I was ... I was ... where was I when you collared me? Where was I headed?" "For something too damnable for us to imagine," Jerry stated emphatically. They were walking as rapidly as they dared through the dark passage. There were high-pitched voices from the rear. From somewhere ahead came the sound of running water. "Too damnable to imagine!" he repeated. "But we'll hunt the vile thing out if we get a chance, and we'll slaughter--" The words ended in a startled exclamation as the ground fell beneath their feet. They pitched headlong into nothingness-- * * * * * There was water in Jerry's face as he fell. A torrent engulfed him as he struck into it, pouring in from a lower passageway to plunge straight down the shaft. The roaring crash of water tore madly at his body; his arm was shot through with stabbing pain as Winslow's falling body was torn from his grasp. He was conscious only of his bursting lungs when he came to the surface from the depths into which he plunged. With one arm he swam weakly, the other trailing at his side, while he gulped greedily at the air. A voice came hoarsely from a distance. "Foster," it called. "Jerry--where are you, Jerry?" Ah, the good air in his lungs--he could swim more strongly now. He managed to gasp an answer: "Here, Winslow, over here!" There was a splashing in response to his voice. He heard it over the noise of the waters he had been swept away from the cataract. A hand was upon him in the dark. "Hurt?" asked the welcome voice. "Can you swim, Jerry?" "A little. One arm's working." * * * * * The hands fumbled over him quickly, and his good arm was drawn over the other's back. "Hang on," Winslow told him. "I can swim. I'm half fish." Jerry clung to the folds of the coat. He was light in the water, he felt--riding high--and the man beside him was swimming with strong strokes. He released his hold on the other as he felt strength ebbing back into his body. "I can paddle," he said: "but stick around. Where are we going?" "In a circle, probably," was the reply, "though I'm trying to hold a straight course. How big is this lake, I wonder?" They swam slowly, saving their strength, but it was a time that seemed like endless hours before the answer to Winslow's question was found. Jerry was fighting weakly, exhausted, and the hand supporting him was failing when they felt sharp rocks against their dragging feet. The hand that had held him still clung tightly to his shoulder as they struggled upward and fell together where great rocks gave safety in the darkness. In his arm the sharp pain had dwindled to numbness; Jerry Foster asked only for sleep. There was light about him when he awoke. In his stupor he had found again the surroundings he knew so well--the clash and clatter of a distant city--the roaring traffic--signals, and glowing lights. He came slowly back to unwelcome reality. The light was there, but it shone in luminous lines along the wall to illumine the hateful familiarity of the honeycombed rock that composed the moon. * * * * * It showed, too, a familiar figure, breathing heavily where it lay on the far side of the small room. Winslow's face was pale in the dull light, and his eyes were closed. He was on a thick pallet of soft fibers and across his body a cloth was spread, shot through with gold in strange designs. Jerry Foster threw aside a robe of the same material that covered him. He stifled an involuntary word as a twinge of pain shot through his arm, then crossed noiselessly to shake softly at the shoulder of the sleeping man. Winslow, too, came slowly from his sleep of complete exhaustion, but his eyes were clear when they opened. "Where are--" he began a question, but Jerry's hand was pressed quickly against his lips. They stared slowly about. The room that held them was in the natural rock, but whether hewn out by hands or a natural formation they could not tell. The rock was rotten with perforations, through which air flowed in a cool stream. Jerry came softly to his feet to feel cautiously of the glowing, luminous mounds along the wall. They were spread upon a ledge. The light was cold to his touch, the material like fine soil in his hands. "Fluorescent," whispered Winslow. "Calcium sulphide, possibly; I saw them spreading it above ground in the sun. It absorbs light and gives it off slowly." Jerry nodded; the source of the endless glowing lines had been puzzling to him. * * * * * Their whispers ceased at a sound beyond a doorway. In the opening a figure appeared, tall and erect, the figure of a girl. Her face was white like the others of these whose lives were lived below the surface, but there was a kindly softness in the eyes, a refinement and intelligence of no low order, that contrasted with the cold eyes of the warriors and the priests. Not beautiful, perhaps, by earth standards, yet it required no straining of chivalry on Jerry's part to find her human and lovely. In silence the men stood staring. Then Foster, with unconscious gentleness, made a revealing gesture. This woman--this girl--had saved them. He knew it without words, and he was wordless to reply. He dropped swiftly to his knees and pressed a bit of the golden robe against his lips. A flush of scarlet swept across the white face and receded. The hand dropped from its startled poise and rested, gently, questioningly, on the brown head bent before her. She murmured unintelligible words in a guarded voice as Jerry arose. "Marahna," she said, and touched her breast lightly. "Marahna." Her head was erect, the whole attitude imperious, commanding. She questioned them with swift, liquid words. The men shook their heads in utter incomprehension. Again she spoke, and again they shook their heads. Jerry felt foolish and dumb. He took his turn at questioning, and this time, with a trace of a smile, it was the girl's turn to shake her head. She had mastered one sign at least. Pointing toward the great hall they knew was somewhere above, she reenacted the scene there; she evidently knew what had transpired. And now Jerry nodded in confirmation. That she approved of the part they had played was evident. * * * * * Now she questioned whence they had come. She pointed down, and her fluttering hands and graceful posture spoke eloquently. She showed them more than a trace of fear, too, as she marked them coming from the depths. Jerry shook his head in vehement denial. He pointed above, spread his hands wide, tried as best he could to indicate vast distance beyond. She stared, wide-eyed, then in her turn knelt as if before a god. "She thinks we have come down from the sun," Winslow surmised. "Well, let it go at that." But Jerry Foster was embarrassed in the strange role of a god; he raised the humbled, kneeling young woman to her feet. He pointed to her gold-clad figure and repeated the name she had given. "Marahna," he said. "Marahna!" Then, placing his hand on his companion, he repeated: "Winslow--Winslow!" And, pointing to himself, he completed the introduction with: "Foster, Jerry--Jerry Foster!" The pale lips formed themselves slowly to the strange and unaccustomed sounds. "Cherrie," she repeated, and smiled in comprehension. "Cherrie." This was the first of many lessons, and it was amazing to both men how rapidly they learned to get their thoughts across. In turn, they learned to read the messages that the slim hands and graceful, undulating body conveyed. Even words were linked one by one with their indicated objects and meanings. * * * * * One syllable the girl used only in a hushed and awe-stricken tone. It was "Oong" that she whispered, while her eyes filled with terror and dread. And they knew this for the name of the horror that waited in the black center of that unholy place where the pathway of light ascended. It was later that they learned to read hatred as well as sheer terror in the emotions that the word _Oong_ aroused. The first lesson ended in a soft exclamation from the girl. She withdrew, to return in a moment with a beaker of hammered gold, filled with cold water. In her hands, too, were strange fruits and branches of fungus. She ate bits of them to show they were food. And Jerry, as he watched her, was aware that he was famished. But the two men ate sparingly at first of the strange food. It was tasteless, they found, except for an elusive flavor, but the reception of the food in their gnawing stomachs was satisfactory. Their strength was returning, and with it came hope of release. The moon-people, evidently, were not altogether villainous. "Thank you," said Jerry in a normal tone, "that was--" White fingers trembled against his lips to enforce silence. * * * * * The girl listened intently, then stole softly out into the corridor from which she had come. She motioned the men to follow, and pointed there in the dim light to a far room. There were others, they saw; a group of young women lying at ease on their pallets, or moving slowly about. The need for quiet was apparent, more so when the figure of a man appeared as they watched. Quickly the girl, Marahna, stepped before them and motioned them back to their room. She followed and glanced quickly about. In the farther wall was an opening, close to the floor, and low, but they managed to work their way through at her silent command. A passage, much like the others, lay beyond. It widened and grew higher, until they could stand erect. Back in the circle of light they saw, for a moment, the man, bowing low in respect before Marahna. He carried a basket of light that shone brightly in the room. "Replenishing the supply of sulphide," whispered Winslow. A current of air came cool and refreshing from a branching tunnel in the rock. There was no lack of ventilation, as they well knew, throughout all the tortuous passages, but this came with a scent of outdoors that set both men a-tingle with hope. Jerry forgot even the dull ache in his arm as he breathed deep of this messenger from the outside. But exploration must wait. They needed to rest, to learn and to plan. They returned when Marahna called softly from the room. * * * * * Time had lost all its meaning. They could only guess at the hours that had passed since the hour they left their ship, could only make unanswered surmises as to where was the sun or how much was left of the long lunar day. They must escape--they would escape--but their one stroke for freedom must not be made when darkness and paralyzing cold should force them back into the hands of the enemy tribes. Marahna was with them much of the time, and always they struggled and strove with desperate concentration to grasp at the meanings of the thoughts she tried to convey. And they learned much. Of the passage they believed they had found out to the surface, she knew little. But she showed them, with doubt in her face, that there was almost hopeless struggle along that path to the freedom above. Sadly she touched Jerry's injured arm, and she shook her head in dejection. The arm had had a bad wrench, Jerry found. No fracture, but the muscles and ligaments had been painfully torn. But Jerry set his teeth firm at the thought of a possible escape. * * * * * Once, peering along the dark passage that led to the room where the others had been seen, the men noticed the deep bows that unfailingly marked the entrance of Marahna. They questioned her and learned that here was royalty among the people of the moon. This, as they considered the proud poise of her head and her whole attitude of unassuming superiority was not entirely surprising. But they marveled the more at the truth that she finally made plain to them. Marahna, she told them, as plainly as if she were speaking in their own tongue, Marahna was chosen for death. And her white face was pitiful and her eyes full of horror as she enacted for them the slow march she must take up the long golden slope and into the horror that waited. "A sacrifice to that god!" Jerry spoke with dismay. "No, no!" But the face of the Princess Marahna of the moon people was unutterably sad with unspoken thoughts as she touched her breast with one slender finger, then indicated the outer room and showed there were two there beside herself who were to go. "Help us to get out," Jerry begged, and with fierce eagerness he showed them going through the passage to the outside. "We will come back, and we will find some way to end all this damnable thing." She gave them to understand the time that was left. The sun, she showed, was long past the meridian and was on its return. The day was now reaching a close. And then, as the sun set, the great sacrifice would be made--had always been made--to insure the return of their god. * * * * * Their watches were useless, for the water had entered their cases. The two men waited what they judged was the length of a day, while Jerry tried to believe that his arm was improving. Then, putting a small supply of food in their pockets, they were ready for the attempt. Jerry saw that his gun and knife were ready at his belt, and patted a pocket where his matches were safe in their watertight container. The prospect of escape almost unnerved him. To breathe the clear air; to stand in the radiant light of the sun--he could understand now how these people made a god of the sun. He turned to Marahna. "Good-by," he said, "but not for long. We'll be back. And we'll save you, Marahna, we'll save you. Winslow will figure some way to do it.... We'll be back...." The girl was silent. She touched Jerry's arm, and shook her head slowly, doubtfully. He reached for the hand. It trembled, he felt, in his. The impulse to take the slim form within his arms, to hold her close, was strong upon him. Would he ever see her again ... would he? "Won't you say good-by, Marahna?" he asked. But she smiled, instead--a friendly smile, and encouraging. Then dropped in silence to her knees to press with both her trembling hands his hand upon her forehead. And, still in silence, she rose to vanish from the room. The men entered the narrow opening to start forward into the dark. But Jerry Foster was puzzled, puzzled and more than a trifle hurt. Marahna could at least have said good-by. She knew the word, for he had taught it to her. And she had let him--them--go.... "Oh, well," he thought, "how can I know how a princess feels--a princess of the moon? And why should I care--why should she? But...." He refused to complete the thought. He hurried instead, as best he could, to follow Winslow, fumbling ahead of him in the dark. * * * * * Jerry had used plenty of muttered invective with the massage he had given his arm, but he cursed his handicap wholeheartedly at the end of some several hours. They were standing, he and Winslow, in a dark tunnel. They had climbed and clawed their way through the absolute dark, over broken fragments, through narrow apertures, down and up, and up again through a tortuous, winding course. And now they had reached the end. They had found the source of the fresh air, had come within reaching distance, it seemed, of sunlight and all that their freedom might mean. And they had come, too, to a precipitous rock wall. They stared long and hopelessly at the shaft that reached, vertical and sheer, high, high over their heads. And a curse like that of Tantalus was theirs. For, far at the top, slanting in through some off-shooting passage, there was sunlight. It was unmistakable in its clear glare, beautiful, glorious--and unattainable. There were roughnesses in the wall, footholds, handholds here and there. "It might be ... it might be...." Jerry tried to believe, but the ache in his arm made the thought hopeless and incomplete. He turned to his companion. "I believe you can do it," he said steadily. * * * * * Winslow's dark eyes were gleaming in the dimness that surrounded. "Possibly," he replied, and eyed the ascent with an appraising stare. "Even probably. But you know damn well, Foster, that I'm not going to try." "Don't be an ass." Jerry's tone was harsh, but the tall man must have known what emotions lay underneath. "We'll play it out together," he said. Jerry was silent as he reached in the darkness for Winslow's hand. "Of course I knew you were that sort," he said. He waited a moment, then added: "But you're going, old man, you're going. Don't you see it's our only hope?" Winslow shook his head emphatically. Jerry could see him in the dim reflection from that radiance above. "Nothing doing," the calm voice assured him. "Don't bother to think up more reasons why I should desert." "Listen!" Jerry gripped roughly at the other's shoulder. "Listen to reason. "If you go and I go back there, what will happen? With Marahna gone we are helpless, and we will be helpless to save her. The long night is ahead. How can we live? Where can we live? We will be wiped out as sure as we're alive this minute. "If you go--and if you make it to the ship--there's a chance. Alone, I may manage to stick it out." He knew he was lying, knew that the other knew it too, but he went on determinedly. "You can wait for me up above. My arm will be well--" Winslow stopped him with a gesture. "There's a chance," the older man was muttering, "there's a chance...." He swung quickly toward Foster, to grab hard at the good right hand. "I'm going," he stated. "I'm on my way. I won't say good-by; what's the use--I'll be back soon!" He released his hold on Jerry to leap high in the air for a ledge of projecting rock. He caught it and hung. His foot found a toehold and he drew himself up to where another rough outcrop gave grip for his hand. Jerry Foster stood frozen to throbbing stillness. Words were strangling in his throat, an impulse, almost irresistible, to call. If there were only a rope.... He was still silent when the tiny figure of his companion and friend was lost in the heights, where it vanished into that tunnel from which came the light. He turned blindly, to stumble back into the dark. * * * * * Marahna was waiting when he regained the safety of her room. "Safety!" The thought was bitter when linked with the certain fate that lay ahead. Silently she stroked the bent head of the man who dropped dejectedly upon the hard stone floor. Her fingers were gentle, comforting, despite the utter hopelessness and discouragement that lay heavily upon him. They sat thus, nor counted the flying minutes, while the fog of despair in the mind of the beaten man was clearing. He raised his head finally to meet the look in the dark eyes. And he managed a smile, as one can who has thought his way through to the bitter end and has faced it. He patted the hand that had stroked his bowed head. "It's all right," he said gently. "What is to be, will be--and we can't change it. And it's all right somehow." His sleeping, during their long stay, had been a cause for amusement to Marahna, whose habits were tuned to the long days and nights on the moon. And he was sleepy now, sleepy and tired. She spread the robe over him as he rested on the soft fiber bed. He awoke from a deep sleep with a light heart. For Jerry Foster, as he faced his own certain death, had seen certain things. It was the end--that was one fact he couldn't evade. But he grinned cheerfully, all by himself in that strange cheerless room, as he thought of what else he had visioned. "And it will be just one hell of a fight," he said softly aloud. "There will be some of those priests that will know they have been in a war." * * * * * He examined again the knife and the automatic, and counted the cartridges left in the magazine. There were more he had found in a pocket of his coat, enough to replace those he had fired. He slipped the pistol into its holster at the sound of soft footsteps approaching. It was Marahna who entered, a strange and barbaric Marahna. She was clad in a garment of spun gold that enveloped her tall figure. It trailed in rippling beauty on the floor--draped in resplendence her slim body, to end in soft folds about a head-dress that left Jerry breathless. Her face was entirely concealed. The gold helmet covered her head. It was tall, made entirely of hammered gold in which spirals of jewels reflected their colors of glittering light. She was quite unrecognizable in the weird magnificence. Only her voice identified the figure. She murmured chokingly some soft words, then raised her head with its barbaric helmet proudly high as she concluded. There were words become familiar now to Jerry. Together with the spectacle she presented, her meaning was more than plain. "The time has come," she was telling him. "The sun ... the hour of sacrifice." Jerry leaped to his feet. His plans for battle were being revised. An idea--a plan, half-formed--was beating in his brain. A sound was beating upon him, too. There were drums that throbbed in steady unison, that echoed hollowly along resounding walls, that approached in loudly increasing cadence. * * * * * The plan was complete. "No!" said Jerry Foster, with a wild laugh. He reached to remove the golden helmet. He placed it upon his own head, under the startled gaze of the wondering girl. He reached out for the robe. "You shall not go," he told her. "I will go in your place. And when I reach that room...." His eyes were savage behind the slits in the golden head-dress. "No--no!" the girl protested. Her face showed plainly the complete hopelessness of what Jerry proposed. To pit himself against that antagonist--she knew how futile was the brave gesture. Jerry was undaunted. "I've got to die anyway," he tried to explain, "and if I can get in one good crack at whatever is there--well, I may be of help." His hand was taking off the cloak. Marahna's eyes were steady upon him. She ceased to resist. She whipped one of the covers from the couch about her and helped him with the golden robe. The throbbing of drums was hammering at Jerry's temples. They were close at hand! Marahna, without a word, rushed frantically back toward the room where the others waited. And again Jerry Foster felt that odd tightening of disappointment about his heart. But what was the difference, he told himself, in a hundred years--or a hundred minutes. He set his lips tight and walked slowly out and down the passage. The room he entered was deathly quiet. There were figures standing about, figures robed in their gold-threaded drapes, that stared strangely, wonderingly, at him, and drew themselves into a huddled group against the wall. And two there were, who stood apart: the other victims--their sacrificial garments wrapped them round where they waited for the third who was to accompany them. Jerry joined them as a guard came in from the outer hall. * * * * * The drums were rolling softly in their rhythmic beat. The priests who entered showed annoyance at the delay; they gave a curt order, and motioned the three to follow. Outside, the corridor was broad, and the double rows of lights on either side glowed brightly to illumine a pageant grotesque and terrible in its barbaric splendor. The drums throbbed louder. Jerry saw them in their fire of burnished metal, beaten by the bands of naked men. Beyond, a group of warriors waited. Stalwart and strongly muscled, they stood erect in copper armor beside a platform of metal bars, whose floor was of latticed gold. The victims were placed upon it to stand erect. Jerry balanced himself upon the golden floor as the warriors raised it slowly to their shoulders. Priests, in robes of heavy golden rope, were ranged about; they formed a guard and escort ten deep about the living sacrifice. At that the drums increased their volume, and to this was added a nerve-racking, discordant and rasping jangle, when sheets of copper, paper-thin, were struck with a heavy hand. The pulsing, throbbing pandemonium was terrific as the march began. Slowly they made their way through a winding gallery. Slowly they came to where a portal, high-arched, gave entrance upon the great hall. Solemnly, proudly, the priests lead the way as they circled the vast room. Their wrappings of gold were a scintillant quiver of light; above each hard face a circle of gold--symbol of the sun--was borne imperiously high. * * * * * The priestly guard surrounded the platform where the three standing figures were huddled. And behind, and on either side, the men with the drums and the discordant, ringing sheets gave full force to their blows. The high vault above thundered and roared to the thunder and roar of the drums. And, high over all, a wailing began. The thin shrillness beat with the tempo of the drums in a pitch that steadily descended. The glittering procession had come to rest at its appointed place in the pathway, of light as the wailing came down to a moan. "_Oong! Oong!_" the voices groaned, while the walls re-echoed the despairing tones. Only from the band of warriors did the ear of Jerry Foster detect anything but misery and despair. The priests were silent, but the warriors, in their shining armor, stood erect and roared out the syllables in exultant joy. The priests were now upon the dais--the rocky platform, divided by the great, glowing parabola of light. They stood erect as a new high priest, replacing the one Jerry had killed, crossed to bow and grovel in the radiance from their god. The room was silent with the silence of a great tomb as the march of death began. Softly, from the silence, the drums resumed the merest whisper of their former thunderous booming. Beside him. Jerry heard the soft sobs of a girl. One of the figures swayed and threatened to fall as the platform was lowered to rest upon the floor. The other pressed close to support the drooping figure. * * * * * Now the entire directed ray of light from the round, glowing hole struck full upon them. It blinded and dazzled, yet, plain and distinct, Jerry saw at its heart the circle of blackness, the eye of the mysterious, hypnotic parabola--the entrance to what lay beyond. The beat of the drums was hypnotic. As if in a trance he saw, at the side of the way they must go, the form of the head priest beckon them on. The two victims at his side took one step on the path to their death. And the same stiff rigidity held Jerry as he, too, moved onward and up the golden ramp. The drums were bearing them on. Louder they throbbed in a steady crescendo, to carry the three rigid figures a step at a time up the pathway of light. The priest, Jerry felt more than saw, was beside them. Close ahead was the blackness that held the set stare of his eyes. One of the golden figures was before him. He saw the priest reach out to take the helmet from her head. The movement aroused him from his numb horror. An impulse to escape surged through him; every nerve was tense and ready for a spring. He looked quickly about. The warriors were behind, the priests ready on their platform to direct them. And in the doorway, from where he first had seen this chamber, on the only way he knew that led to freedom, another figure, tall in its priestly robes, blocked the passage. * * * * * Hopeless, he knew. And then there swept through him a wave of hate. Gone was his horror, and gone the dull deadness of brain and body. There, facing him, was the mouth of the pit, where waited a something--horrible, rapacious--demanding the lives of these people ... of Marahna ... of others--more and yet more. No thought now of life or escape. For the moment, Jerry Foster's whole being held nothing but hot hate, and the wish for revenge. Before him the priest was stripping the robe from the girl at his feet. She stood like a statue, a carving of purest alabaster, slim and erect in her white, slender nakedness. And the face that he saw through incredulous eyes was that of Marahna. Marahna! The realization and quick understanding held him spellbound. She had come, had taken the robes from another poor victim ... to be with him in this, the last hour.... Marahna--a princess among these strange folk--was giving her life when another could have been in her place. And she smiled tremulously, bravely, as her eyes locked with his, as, speechless and spellbound, he stared through the eyelets of gold. The priest was reaching for his head-dress, Jerry tensed. The moment had come. * * * * * He was ready. As the weight left his shoulders, he dropped, with one swift movement, his golden disguise. The robe fell in folds at his feet. He stared in silence, through narrowing eyes, at the face of the head priest above him. Then, leaping straight up, he fastened one hand, sinewy, sun-browned and strong, on the white neck below the white face. They crashed back, to land on the ramp and roll, struggling, toward the edge. Jerry's hold never slackened. He felt his fingers sink deep in the flesh. He came to his knees, then up, to hold the writhing figure at arm's length. Then, heaving with all his strength, he whipped the man into the air, to drag him in one leaping bound for the sheltering darkness beyond. A figure was entering with him--a slim, naked figure, with glowing and worshipping eyes. Behind them the silence was shattered. Jerry saw, as he stepped from the light, the riot of figures that surged in hysterical frenzy through the great hall. The priests were leaping among them ... the tall priest who had guarded the door was fighting his way through the mob. Jerry loosed his quivering hand from the throat it held. He cast the figure from him. And he blinked his eyes to make them serve him in the blackness all about. Beside him, a form, invisible in the dark, was stroking at his face, and a voice was whispering tremulously: "Cherrie ... Cherrie!" * * * * * The tumult in the great hall reached them but faintly. Jerry Foster strove desperately to focus his eyes in that darkness of utter night. A dim glow from the portal crept softly in to bring faint illumination to the farther wall. Slowly his eyes found that which they feared yet sought. Off in the dark, directly opposite the entrance, was a white and ghostly thing. Formless and vague, it wavered and blurred to his straining eyes. He fumbled clumsily for a match, one of his treasured store. He must see--he must know what was waiting-- The match flared to a point of brilliance in the murky gloom. It showed, on the floor where they stood, a litter of dried vegetation--food, doubtless placed there as an offering. It was dry now, and dusty, and through it there shone the bleak whiteness of bones. Beyond was the floor, and beyond that.... The whiteness that had been but a blur grew sharply distinct. Jerry could not have told what he expected the light to disclose. Certainly it was not the heaping of coils, milk-white and ghastly, that took shape before his staring eyes. Above them a head hung in air. It was motionless--lifeless, almost--like the coiled body that held it. But the eyes, black and staring, in the bloated, bulging head, made its poised stillness the more deadly. Even in the dark Jerry had sensed the hypnotic spell of unseen eyes. Visible, they held him in a rigid, unreasoning terror. Unreal, unthinkable, this serpentlike horror, tremendous and ghastly in its loathsome whiteness. A dweller in the dark, used by the priests as a symbol and a threat for the ignorant folk who trusted and believed them. And it held him, stilled and stricken, in its evil spell. * * * * * The flame was scorching Jerry's hand that nervelessly opened to release the match. The man was like a statue, frozen to mental deadness. About his feet a light was playing, unseen. A bit of the dry stuff sprang brightly to yellow flame. Neither seeing nor feeling, the figure of Jerry Foster stood, held in the deadly magic of the malignant eyes. Dimly he sensed that the prostrate body on the floor was that of Marahna. Vaguely he knew when the form of the priest took a halting step forward. The fire his match had kindled was rising about his feet. The flames seared and stabbed with a pain that reached his dulled brain. Quivering and shaken, the body of Jerry Foster reacted again to a conscious thought. He leaped quickly as the deadly witchery left him, and he tore at the smoldering cloth about his legs. And now he knew the thing before him for what it was. Shocking in its gigantic size, more so in the concentrated venom of its gaze, it was the flabby, scaly and crusted whiteness of the thing that filled his being with a deadly nausea. He stared with a sickened fascination at the flabby, drooping pouches beside the mouth, the distorted, bulging head and the short legs, armed with long, curving talons--legs that sprang from out the neck to clutch and tear at what the jaws might hold. Deadly and hateful--loathsome beyond all imagining--still Jerry Foster found it was something a man could meet. Its devilish power to paralyze and still the soul of him was gone. He snatched quickly for the gun at his belt and knelt to aim--then checked his finger on the trigger. The figure of the priest had come between him and the monster. * * * * * The golden robe was dragging. It fell to the floor, to gleam dully in the flickering light of the fire. Against the heaping coils of white the priest was outlined, drawn, as Jerry sensed, against the protest of every fiber of his being. Yet, one stiff step at a time, he went faltering on. The hair above his white face was torn in disarray. And the face itself, so exultantly fierce in its hour of triumph, now a mask of quivering, hopeless terror. The head of the monster came slowly to life. It raised and raised into the air. The mouth gaped open with a hoarse, sucking sound, then struck, like a whip of light, at the doomed priest. His screams, as the thing descended upon him, rang through the roar of the forty-five. Jerry fired again where the black eyes showed above the writhing body of their prey. The head jerked backward, to tower in the darkness overhead. The mouth disgorged its contents to the floor. Only for a shuddering instant did the monster pause. Then it launched its great bulk in a counter-attack, while the automatic poured out the rest of its futile lead. The gun was knocked from his grasp as the great head smashed past, swerved from its aim by the blinding bullets. Jerry knew only that his knife was in his hand as the great scabrous coils closed inevitably about him. Vaguely he heard the shouting from behind as the writhing folds engulfed him. He stabbed blindly at the scaly mass; again and again his knife ripped slashingly at the abhorrence that drew him close. Then his arm, too, was caught in the crushing loathsome embrace.... * * * * * He felt no pain--the pressure alone was insufferable. His head was drawn back. Above him the horrible eyes glared into his--there was blood dripping from the jaws.... He saw it in the brilliance of a light that flashed in blue heat overhead. There came in his ears a vast roaring of sound, a great heat-blast that scorched and burned at his face. The crushing pressure was relaxed. He went reeling to the floor, as the great coils whirled high into the air. He was stunned by the fall, his body inert and relaxed. But he knew through it all that from somewhere above there was shrieking of gas--blue, roaring fires--a flame that tore blastingly into a writhing contortion beyond. The tall figure of a priest was bending over him, but it was the voice of Winslow that was in his ears--a blessed, human voice--when he awoke. "Thank God, I made it," the voice was saying, over and over. "Thank God, I found the ship and got back here in time!" There was light within the cavern. The burning fungus was extinguished by the smothering coils that had crashed upon it, but beyond was a waving plume of yellow where a blue flame shot against a wall of rock. And Jerry, through the stress and riot of emotion that overwhelmed him, laughed chokingly, wildly, at the words of his companion. "It is sodium," Winslow was saying in explanation, as he saw Jerry's eyes resting on the light. "A hydrogen flame, but there's sodium in the rocks that turns the flame yellow. I rigged up a flame-thrower of hydrogen." "You would," Jerry gasped through hysterical laughter. "You would do just that, and make your way back to this hell just to save me--you damn fool inventor!" * * * * * He clung to Winslow, who was raising him to his feet. Marahna was beside him, robed in the golden garment of the priest. She placed her hands beside his face to turn him toward the further wall. The light was fickle, but it showed him, as it rose and fell, the blackened, swollen body of the monster, still writhing in its death struggle. And beside it, blasted and charred, the head of the obscene sun god, severed by the cutting, obliterating blast, lay flabby and black in a silent heap. "Rather effective," said Winslow complacently, "though I didn't have much to work with. Two small vials of my liquid and a hand generator to furnish the current. A tubular strut from the frame of the ship made the blow-pipe." "And these?" Jerry questioned, and pointed to the priest's vestments that Winslow still wore. "Oh, it was all quiet up above," said the inventor, "and I came down the rope. But there was one of them waiting at the bottom. He didn't need these any more when I left, so I took them to help get about--" He stopped, to cross quickly and pick up the flame-thrower as the flame died away. It roared as he worked at the mechanism, then dwindled again. Its light, for an instant, was reflected in a liquid on the floor. "Broken!" said Winslow in an anguished voice. "The vials are gone--smashed! And I counted on this to hold off the mob, to get us safely out...." He regarded the instrument with silent dismay. The blue flame, as he held it, flickered and died. "Not so good!" said Jerry slowly. He stopped to retrieve the knife. This, he reflected, was their sole weapon of defense. In the dim light his eyes met with Winslow's in mutual comprehension of their plight. * * * * * There were caverns beyond, dark and forbidding. Did they lead to the outer world? Or, instead, was it not probable that they went to some deep, subterranean dens, from which this monster had learned to come at the priests' summons? Jerry put from his mind all thought of escape in that direction. "And Marahna, too," he told Winslow. "What will become of her?" The girl got the essence of the question. Fumbling for phrases that they knew, she made them believe that she was safe. Her people, she told them, would protect her. "Yes," Jerry agreed. "I guess that's right. She's a princess, you know," he reminded Winslow, "and the great mass of the people look up to her. Only the priests and warrior gangs will be opposed. But how can we get through them?" The question was unanswered. "We've got to knock them cold some way," said the inventor. "Got to give them a fright that will last till they let us get through. Once at the big shaft where we came down, we can make our getaway. But how to do it...." His voice died away in dismal thought. Jerry's eyes were casting about. The priest's robe? No, not good enough. It had brought Winslow through, but it couldn't take them back. Marahna? No help there: she had enough to do to protect herself from the fury of the priests. * * * * * His eyes rested again on the steaming, blackened mass that still showed the horrible features that had marked the head of the monster. The sun god! There was an idea there. "Come!" he said to Winslow, and walked swiftly across to the severed head. He had to steel his nerves before he could lay hands upon the vile thing. The paws were still attached behind the head. He took a grip on one and pulled. The great mass moved. "I don't get the idea," said Winslow. "Nor I," Jerry admitted, "but there's an idea here." His thoughts were racing in the moment's silence. "I've got it," he shouted. "I've got it! If only I can make Marahna understand!" He led the girl nearer to the door, where his signs could be seen more plainly. "You," he told her, "go out there." He pointed to the place where the priests had stood. "Tell your people"--he took the attitude of the orator declaiming to his audience--"we have come here from the sun." Again his signs were plain. Marahna nodded. This plainly was literal truth to her. "Tell them," he continued earnestly, "we have saved them from this thing. Tell them it was no sun god, but a monster that the priests had kept. Monster!" he exclaimed, and pointed to the head and to the body that still writhed and jerked spasmodically. "No god--no!" And again the girl showed her understanding. Her eyes were glowing. "Then," said Jerry, indicating Winslow and himself, "we will take the head that they have worshipped, and we'll drag it out and throw it to the priests." His gestures were graphic. The girl nodded her head in an ecstasy of comprehension. "And then," Jerry added softly for Winslow's hearing, "we'll beat it. And, with luck, we'll make it safe." "There's a chance," said Winslow softly, "there's a chance--and that's all we ask." * * * * * "It's up to you, Marahna," Jerry told her. His words were meaningless, but the tone sufficed. She drew herself proudly erect, wrapped herself closely in the robe of braided gold, and stepped firmly and fearlessly through the portal and down toward the platform of the priests. The two men watched from the shadows. Beyond the outline of the platform they saw the warrior clans, a phalanx of protecting bodies. And beyond, drawn back in huddled consternation, were masses of white-faced people--Marahna's people--who listened, now, in wondering silence to their princess. Marahna made her way slowly to the platform's edge. Of all the countless ones to have gone that road, she was the first ever to return. She stood silent, while her eyes found their way scornfully over the enemy below. Then looking beyond them, she began to speak. Her soft voice echoed liquidly throughout the room. She gestured, and Jerry knew that she was giving them the message. From the priests there came once a hoarse, inarticulate growl of hate and unbelief. She silenced them with her hand. She pointed to the heavens, and she told them of the sun and of the two who were true children of the sun, who had come to save them from their false god. * * * * * Her voice rose as she told her people in impassioned tones that which she had seen. And she was shouting above the tumult of the priests and pointing directly at them as she made the roof echo with the message: "_Oong devah! Oong devah!_" "The god is dead," translated Jerry. "_Devah_ means death; she said that of herself before we left. Come on!" he shouted, and laid-hold of one great claw. "It's our turn now." Winslow was tugging at the other foot. Between them they dragged into the light the obscene burden. Down the long ramp they took it and off upon the platform of the priests, where Marahna waited. The priests, as Jerry's quick glance showed, were milling wildly about. It seemed that a charge was soon to follow, but the commotion ceased as the two men come upon the platform, hauling between them the great scorched head of "Oong." The vast hall was without movement or sound as they made their way out to the front. Jerry stood erect and faced the crowd. He pointed, as had Marahna, toward the sun somewhere above those thick masses of rock; he traced it in its course across the sky; he pointed to Winslow and himself. And in loudest tones he roared throughout the room his message. "Oong," he shouted, "_Oong devah!_" "I'll count three," he whispered in the utter silence. "Then let 'er go!" Again he took a firm hold on the flabby paw. "One," he whispered, and swung his body with the word. "Two ... and _three_!" * * * * * The men heaved mightily upon the gruesome horror. The head swung ghastly in scorched whiteness into the air. The dead jaws fell open as it crashed downward among the huddled, stricken priests. "This way!" commanded Winslow. He had been carefully appraising the openings in the crowd. "And don't hurry! Remember, you're a god to them--or something a darn sight worse." Heads proudly erect, the two strode firmly down the pathway of golden light. The room was silent as the few they met fell back in cringing fear. Slowly, interminably, the long triumphal march was made across the rocky cavern of the moon. Not till they reached the portal did the silence break. The shrieks of the priests and the clashing of copper were behind them, as they vanished with steady steps from out the room. "Now run!" ordered Winslow. "Run as if the devils from hell were after you--and I think they are!" The two tore madly down the corridor whose double rows of brightness made possible their utmost speed. There was the narrowing of the passage--Jerry remembered it--where they came out at the foot of the great shaft, the dead throat of the volcano. Behind them the shrieks and clamor echoed close. A rope was dangling from far up at the top. Jerry leaped for it before he recalled the condition of his arm. In the excitement of the encounter he had forgotten that the arm was still in no shape for a long hand-over-hand climb. "I can't make it," he said, and looked about quickly. There were baskets of fungus growth, already dried from the heat of the mid-day sun that had shone where it grew. He dragged one to the narrow part of the tunnel. Winslow tugged at another and threw it up as a barricade. A chalk-white figure in copper sheathing was clambering upon it as he worked at another of the nets. * * * * * Jerry let go the fiber basket he was dragging and drew his knife as he sprang to meet the assault. A sharp cutting edge was unknown to these workers in copper. Jerry slipped under the raised bludgeoning copper weapon to plunge the knife into a white throat. Then, without a look at the body he helped Winslow, struggling with another load. They completed the barricade. A heap of fungus made a raised place where Jerry leaped. Commanding the top of the pile that blocked the choked throat of the passage, he was ready for the next figure that leaped wildly up. It would take them a while, Jerry saw, to learn of this scintillant death that struck at them from close quarters. His knife flashed again and again as he took the men one at a time and let their limp bodies roll back to the passage beyond. * * * * * The assault was checked when Jerry shouted to his companion. "Tie the rope around me," he ordered, "up under my arms ... then you go on up. When you get there pull up--and for the Lord's sake pull fast!" "Go on," he shouted. "I can hold them for a while--" He turned swiftly to take a leaping body upon the red point of his knife. He felt the rope about him as he fought, knew by its twitching when Winslow started the long climb, and prayed dumbly for strength to hold his weak fortress till the other could hoist himself up to the top. He was fighting blindly as they came on in endless succession, the figures of frenzied priests leaping grotesquely beyond. Only the strategic position he had taken allowed him to turn the wild assault again and again. They could only reach him by ones and twos, but the end must come soon. There were priests tearing at the foot of the barricade.... The cold winds that came down from above revived him, but it helped the figures ripping at the fiber cords. The dry fungus fragments whirled gaily away and down the passage in the wind. The wind! The draft was blowing from him, directly upon his attackers. Jerry struggled and clinched with another that bounded beside him, and knew as he fought that a weapon was at hand. His knife found the lower edge of copper, and the figure screamed as he rolled it down the slope. He slipped the knife into his left hand as he fumbled with his right. * * * * * His precious matches! He struck one on the rock; it broke in his trembling fingers. Another--there were so few left. He drew it with infinite care on the surface of rock. The figures below tore in frenzy at the weakening barricade, while yet others stood waiting at this sign of some new form of magic. They shouted again, as they had when, those long days ago, he had lighted a cigarette before their horrified gaze. Jerry shielded the tiny blaze in his hand to bring it beneath a papery leaf beside him. The flame flashed and dwindled. He dared not drop back to set fire to the base of the heap. But even in the exhaustion and strain of the moment Jerry Foster still knew the value of the showman's tricks in reaching the fears of these white-faced fighters. With grandiloquent gesture he raised another of the tindery fragments and ignited it from the first. Another, and he had the beginning of a fire. He lit another piece, and, when he had it blazing, dropped it behind him and kept on with the show. A large piece became a flaming torch, and he waved it before him and laughed to see the warriors cringe. A cloud of smoke was billowing about him--he leaped to safety through a rising wall of flame. The rear slope of the barricade became a furnace; the wind behind him swept the smoke clouds down the passage. He heard, and sank back weakly on the ground as it came to him, the screaming riot where a mob of terrified warriors fought and struck to turn the horde that clamored behind them and pushed them on. The blast roared over the heaped fuel and poured downward from the crest. The noise of the retreat went silent in the distance. * * * * * Spent and exhausted, Jerry Foster lay panting upon the stone floor. The breath of cold and life came down the long shaft from the crater. Had Winslow gained the top? Was he equal to the climb? Jerry hardly felt the jerking of the rope about his shoulders, but he knew as, in frantic haste, it drew him scraping up the long side of the shaft. The biting cold above revived him, and again a scene of desolation was spread before his eyes. Winslow fumbled with the knots and released him from the rope. "Come on!" he shouted, and extended a helping hand as they leaped and raced across the rocky floor. Jerry again was vividly, strongly alive as the cold winds swept him. He leaped hugely through the whirling wisps of dried out vegetation--the sun had stripped the surface of every living thing. Again the rocky slopes rose naked in the rosy light of evening. The sun was hidden below a distant range of jagged hills. The long night was begun. "You're going the wrong way," Jerry shouted. "We left it over there." He stopped to point where the sun had set. "See, that's where we fought the beasts--" "Come on!" repeated Winslow. "Hurry! We mustn't lose out now. I flew the ship over this way while I was up here before." A ridge of rock cut off the view where Winslow pointed. "Bully for you!" Jerry shouted and turned to follow. They stopped as the slope ahead, from its multitude of honeycomb caverns, erupted men. * * * * * The priests were ahead, and behind them swarmed their men. Vindictive and revengeful, the wily enemy was fighting to the end. The two stopped in consternation. "What's the use!" demanded Jerry. His voice was tired, utterly hopeless. "And the ship's right over there...." "A million miles away," said Winslow slowly, "as far as we're concerned." The army was sweeping down the long slope: they had found their quarry. There were other figures, too, pouring from the throat of the volcano--white, naked figures that swarmed in growing numbers and rushed across upon them from the rear. "Trapped," said Jerry Foster savagely, "and we almost made it." He rose wearily to his feet. "We'll take it standing." The armored warriors were approaching; in leaping triumph they raced to be the first ones at the death. The shouts of the priests were ringing encouragement in their ears. * * * * * But the leaders from the rear were nearer. One deep breath Jerry drew as he turned to meet them. Then stared, astonished, as the figures swept past. They streamed by in confusion. They were armed with rocks, with clubs or copper metal--some even carried bars of gold above their heads. They came in a great swarm that swept past and beyond them. And they met, like an engulfing wave, the bounding figures of the men in copper. Smothered and lost were the warriors in the horde that poured increasingly on. The wave, before Jerry's eyes, swept on over the crest, while he still stood in amazed unbelief at the battle that raged. It was Marahna who brought understanding. He turned to see her kneel in sobbing, thankful abasement at his feet. Marahna! Her people! She had saved them! There was time needed for the full force of the truth to banish the hopeless despair from his heart. Then he stooped to raise the crouching figure with arms that were suddenly strong. * * * * * The pale rose light of the departed sun above shone softly within a rocky valley of the moon. It tipped the tall crags with lavender hues, and it touched with soft gleaming reflections a blunted cylinder of aluminum alloy. The valley was silent, save for the hushed whispers of wondering thousands who peopled the enclosing hills, and the rushing roar from the cylinder itself where the inventor was testing his machine. There were figures in priestly robes--scores of them--and they were surrounded by a white throng that, silent and watchful, held them captive. Beyond, in the open, where bare rock made a black rolling floor, there were two who stood alone. The golden figure of a girl, and beside her, Jerry Foster, in wordless indecision. Behind him was the ship. Its muffled thunder came softly to his unheeding ears. He looked at the girl steadily, thoughtfully. Gone was all trace of her imperious dignity. The Princess Marahna was now all woman. And Jerry, looking into her dark eyes, read plainly the yearning and adoration in their depths. The Princess Marahna had forgotten her deference to the god in her love for the man. The tale was told in her flushed face, openly, unashamed. And his gray eyes were thoughtful and tender as he gazed into hers. He was thinking, was Jerry Foster, of many things. And he was weighing them carefully. His hand clasped and unclasped at something safely hidden in his pocket. He had taken it from his pack; he had wanted something for Marahna, something she would treasure. * * * * * And now she was offering him herself. He could take her with him, take her to that far-off world that she never dreamed existed. He could show her the things of that world, its wonders and beauties. He could train her in its ways. He would watch over her, love her.... And she would be miserable and heartsick for the sight of this awful desolation. He knew it--he told himself it was the truth--and he hated himself for the telling. The voice of Winslow aroused him. The inventor had come from his ship. "We had better be starting," he said. The slim figure of the girl in her robe of pure gold trembled visibly. She knew, it was plain, the import of the words. She spoke rapidly, beseechingly, in her own tongue. The words were liquid music in the air. Then, realizing their impotence, she resorted to her poor vocabulary of their own strange sounds. "No!" she said, and shook her head vehemently. "No--no!" She motioned to wait, and she called loud and clear across the silence to her own people. There was a stir about the priests. One in the robes and head-dress of the high priest was brought forward, led by two others of her men. They stopped a few steps from her and bowed low. Again she called, and the leaders among the vast throng came, too, and made their obeisance before her. * * * * * She turned then to Jerry. And now it was Marahna, Princess of the Moon, who stood quiet and poised before him. The light, he saw, made soft wavelets of radiance in her hair, and her eyes were still glowing and tender. She stepped forward toward the priest. The helmet of the sun god was upon his head. It marked him, Jerry knew, as the master of their world. True, they had bowed in submission to that other master, whose vile head lay horrible and harmless on the floor of the great hall--they had believed in the commands the priests had pretended to receive from him--but this emblem on the helmet marked the leader of the race, the master of this world, for these simple folk. Marahna reached her slim hands and lifted the thing of gold. She turned, and held it above the startled eyes of Jerry Foster, and she placed it upon his head with all the dignity that became a queen. A word from her, and the men before him dropped in humbleness to the ground. The Princess Marahna was among them in honoring salutation to their king. Jerry was beyond speech. Not so Winslow. "It looks to me," he said dryly, "as if you were being offered the kingdom of the earth--I mean the moon. Think it over, Jerry--think it over." * * * * * And Jerry Foster thought it over, deeply and soberly. He could rule this people, he and Marahna, rule in peace and quiet and comfort. He could bring them knowledge and wisdom of infinite help; he could make their new civilization a measure of advancement for a whole race. He could teach them, train them, instruct them. And he and Marahna--there would be children who would be princes born--could be happy--for a time. And then ... and then he would be old. Old and lonely for his kind, hungering and longing for his own people. As Marahna would be on earth, so would he be here.... His decision was formed. And with it he knew he must not hurt the heart of Marahna. She loved him, Jerry Foster, the man. He must leave her as Jerry Foster, the god, child of the sun. He stood suddenly to his full height, and who shall say that for a moment the man did not approach the stature of divinity--for he was wholly kind. He placed a hand upon the head of the kneeling girl before him. He held her in her submissive pose, then, turning to the waiting men, he spoke in measured tones. "I thank you," he said, and the words came from a full heart, "but my place is not here. I leave with you one more worthy." Before their wondering gaze he removed the glowing circlet from his head; he leaned to place it on the head of Marahna, humbled before him. With strong hands he raised her to her feet. His look, so tender yet reserved, was full of meaning. She followed his every sign. * * * * * He waved once toward the sun, hidden behind the distant hills: he pointed again to Winslow and himself and to their shining ship: and again he marked the going of the sun. His meaning was plain--these children of the sun must return to their far-off home. He turned now to Marahna. In his hand was the object he had taken from his pack. It was a treasured thing, this locket of platinum on its thin and lacy chain; it had been his mother's, and he thought of her now as he opened the clasp to show his own face framed within the oval. His mother--she had worn this. And she would have approved, he knew, of its disposal. Gravely he faced Marahna. He showed her the picture within the case, then held it aloft where all might see. He closed it and taught her the pressure that released the spring. Then, with gentle dignity that made of the gesture a rite, he placed the chain about the neck of Princess Marahna--Queen, now, of the People of the Moon. And he knew that he gave into her keeping their only relic of a being from the sun. It marked her beyond all future question with a symbol of mastery. And it made of him a god. And even a queen may not aspire to such an one. It was well that Winslow's hand was there to guide him as he walked with unseeing eyes toward the ship. * * * * * Time may lose at times all meaning and measure--moments become timeless. It seemed ages to Jerry Foster when Winslow spoke in casual tones. "I'm going straight up," he said, above the generator's roar. "Then we'll swing around above the other side. We'll follow the sun--make the full circle of the moon before we start." But Jerry neither thought nor heard. His eyes were close to a window of thick glass. Below him was a shrinking, dwindling landscape, wind-swept and desolate. There was a multitude of faces, turned worshipping toward the sky. On one, who stood apart in tiny loneliness, his vision centered. He watched and strained his aching eyes until the figure was no more. Only the pale rose of a dying sun, and a torn, volcanic waste that tugged strangely at his heart. "Yes," he answered mechanically, "yes, we'll go round with the sun ... a couple of sun gods." He laughed strangely as he regarded his companion. If Winslow wondered at the weariness in the voice he made no sign. He was busy with a rheostat that made thunderous roaring of the blast behind their ship: that swung them in a sweeping arc through velvet skies, away from the far side of the moon, to follow the path of the setting sun--homeward bound. _The Readers' Corner_ _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories [Illustration:] "_Second Better Than First_" Dear Editor: The second number of Astounding Stories is better than the first. "Spawn of the Stars," by Charles Willard Diffin, was the best story, closely followed by "Creatures of the Light," by Sophie Wenzel Ellis and "The Beetle Horde," by Victor Rousseau. I like stories of vibration as in "Mad Music," and of acceleration, as in "The Thief of Time." I am glad to see Harl Vincent in the pages of Astounding Stories. I have read many good stories by him. Interplanetary stories are my favorites, and the more you have of them the better. I wish that you would put Astounding Stories out twice a month or put out a quarterly containing twice as much reading material as the monthly. In this you could put one book-length novel and a few shorter stories. Are you going to start a department containing the readers' letters soon?--Jack R. Darrow, 4225 N. Spaulding Avenue, Chicago, Ill. _Size and Paper_ Dear Editor: I certainly am glad to see your magazine appear on the newsstands. I also view with appreciation the fact that you have such brilliant authors as Harl Vincent and Captain S. P. Meek, U. S. A., on your list of contributors. Your stories are of the very highest value in the line of Science Fiction. However, I did not like "The Corpse on the Grating." It did not have an inkling of scientific background. I really am surprised it was published in a Science Fiction magazine. Aside from the fact that the idea of the story was merely a fantastical surmise I was very favorably impressed with the author's style and his use of the English language. Why don't you try for some more of the works of the other well-known authors in this line of fiction? My main object in writing this letter was that I think you rub the name of Science Fiction in the dust by printing it on such paper and in such a small magazine. If you intend to compete with your several contemporaries, you will almost have to alter your size and quality of your paper. You might include a full page Illustration for each story also, but, you will admit, that to combat these other influential Science Fiction magazines, you will have to put your magazine on a par materially with the others in your line. I admire the type of stories which you publish and want to see your magazine get ahead.--Warren Williams, 545 Dorchester, Chicago, Illinois. _They Will!_ Dear Editor: I am a monthly reader of your Astounding Stories and I am greatly interested in them. The best story I have so far read is "Creatures of the Light." It is a story of Super-science indeed. If the author of this story would write more like it, I am sure they would be greatly appreciated. Here is hoping that more of their kind appear in the very near future. Yours for more good stories.--Quenton Stockman, 245 Dixon Street, Portland, Oregon. "_Surpasses the First_" Dear Editor: I have just finished the February issue of your magazine. It surpasses the first issue by far. I am glad to see that you have eight stories in this issue. That is just enough. I like one serial (not too long), one or two novelettes, and five or six short stories in each issue. Tell Captain S. P. Meek to write more adventures of Dr. Bird. I have arranged the stories of the first two issues according to my own liking. Excellent: "The Beetle Horde" and "Phantoms of Reality." Good: "The Care of Horror," "Tanks" and "Invisible Death." Fair: "The Stolen Mind" and "Compensation." In the second issue: Excellent: "Creatures of the Light," "Old Crompton's Secret," "The Beetle Horde" and "Spawn of the Stars." Good: "The Thief of Time" and "Mad Music." Fair: "The Corpse on the Grating" and "Into Space." I hope there will be more stories under "Excellent" next month--Ward Elmore, 2012 Avenue J, Ft. Madison, Ia. "_Only One Trouble_--" Dear Editor: I have just finished reading your new magazine and think it's great. The only trouble with it is that it doesn't have enough stories. I liked "Phantoms of Reality," by Ray Cummings, best, and "The Cave of Horror," by Capt. S. P. Meek, next best. "The Beetle Horde," and "Tanks" were also good. Ray Cummings and S. P. Meek are among my favorite Science Fiction authors. I like best interplanetary stories and stories of the aircraft of the future. I would like to see a good interplanetary story by R. H. Romans in this magazine pretty soon. Other good authors whose stories I would like to read are: Dr. David H Keller, Dr. Miles J. Breuer, Lilith Lorraine, Ed Earl Repp and Walter Kateley. In your editorial you mention the fact that some day in the future a person can disintegrate his body in New York and reintegrate it in China. I would like to see a good story about that by either Ray Cummings or S.P. Meek. Something else: why not make your magazine a little bigger and include a scientific article or two once in a while?--J. W. Latimer, 1000 East 8th Street, National City, Calif. "_No Horror Stories_" Dear Editor: I am taking this opportunity to let you know what I think of Astounding Stories. The worst fault is the tendency to print terror stories. Please don't do this. If I never see another story like "The Corpse on the Grating" in your magazine it will be too soon. Don't print so many detective stories. Capt. Meek's splendid stories are plenty. Please start a discussion column and put Wesso's drawings inside the magazine, too. Are you planning on any reprints? I would like to see some reprints of Ray Cummings', A. Merritt's, H. G. Wells', Garret Smith's and George A. England's stories soon. "Phantoms of Reality," "The Beetle Horde," "The Cave of Horror," "Into Space," "Creatures of the Light," and "Old Crompton's Secret" were splendid. I hope for fewer detective stories and no horror stories.--Joe Stone, 123 20th Street, Toledo, Ohio. _We Liked It, Too!_ Dear Editor: Just a line to tell you that I bought my first copy of Astounding Stories and they certainly are good, especially "Creatures of the Light," by Sophie Wenzel Ellis. It's the best short story I've read in ages. I hope to read more by her in the future. Yours for success.--F. J. Michaslow, Battery "D," Ft. Hancock, N. J. "_Strikes a Mystic Chord_" Dear Editor: I think that your Astounding Story Magazine is a fine magazine. It seems to strike a mystic cord within me and makes me respond to it. One thing lacking--I believe, that is--a department for letters from your readers. "Spawn of the Stars" is certainly a fine scientific story. I wish that the author of "Into Space" would write a sequel to his story.--Ronald Bainbridge, Rockford, Illinois. _We're Avoiding Reprints_ Dear Editor: I am writing again about Astounding Stories. It seems more people are interested in science to-day than ever before, and an easy and interesting way to gain this knowledge is through reading an entertaining science story. Regarding stories in your February issue, will list them according to my likes and dislikes. "Into Space" and "Mad Music" contained science maybe not impossible in the future. "Spawn of the Stars," "The Beetle Horde," "Creatures of the Light," "The Thief of Time" and "Old Compton's Secret" were very interesting science, and good reading, but "The Corpse on the Grating" did not appeal to me. I like interplanetary stories and stories of what might be on other planets. I notice some familiar names among your authors. Why not print some (not too many) stories from H. G. Wells, E. R. Burroughs and Jules Verne? Some of their stories which were considered just wild dreams of the author at the time of writing have actually become a reality, as, for instance, the submarine. If you keep on as you started or improve I can see only success--C. E. Anderson, 3504 Colfax Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minn. _A Few Favorites_ Dear Editor: I am an electrical engineer. I read the last two issues of your magazine. I liked it very much. It is thrilling and very well edited. I will buy it regularly. I liked "Invisible Death" best. "The Beetle Horde" was good, "Phantoms of Reality," good. "Into Space" and "Mad Music," very good. "Creatures of the Light," "Old Crompton's Secret" and "Spawn of the Stars," good.--Adolph Wasserrogel, Gedden Terrace, Waterbury, Conn. "_Going Some!_" Dear Editor: I purchased one of your magazines when I first saw them. I always had a liking for Super-science stories, but your magazine was the best I ever got hold of. Thought I could never wait until the next issue to finish "The Beetle Horde." I believe "The Cave of Horror" was the best story in that issue. It really seemed as if it could be true. Due respect must be paid the author of "The Corpse on the Grating," for it was exciting and fantastic. "Phantoms of Reality" was good. All the stories in the second magazine seemed as good as the best of the first number, and that's going some. May you succeed in getting the same good and better stories as you have in the first two issues of a magazine that I am sure will grow to fame.--Harold Rakestraw, Box 25, Winthop, Wash. _We Intend To_ Dear Editor: Having read the first two issues of your new magazine, I find it has a larger variety of stories than any of the other Science Fiction magazines now found on the newsstands. Why not keep it that way? It will be unique. Mr. Wessolowski, your artist, is great. He is one who can draw when it comes to a good scientific background. I consider "Tanks" your best story as yet, with "Spawn of the Stars" close second. "Invisible Death," "Creatures of the Light" and "Mad Music" were also good. Try to give us some stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt. Did not think much of "The Beetle Horde"--too many like it--Ted Shatkowski, 812 Hoffman St., Hammond, Ind. _Some Good Suggestions_ Dear Editor: I received the pleasure of purchasing a copy of Astounding Stories the other day, the first copy I have seen. I have not yet read it, but I am unable to wait that long to inform you of my great joy in greeting a new magazine of this type. I am a reader of other magazines similar to A. S., Stories of Harl Vincent, Capt. S. P. Meek, Murray Leinster, and others appear in these magazines, also, so I am familiar with your authors. But you have asked me what sort of stories I'd like to see in A. S., so here goes. First of all, I would earnestly beg you not to print such stories as those that deal with ghosts, etc., because in my opinion there are far too many good stories available to cast them aside for trash. The type of story I prefer is the kind that is fanciful, odd and interesting. Some tales deal with a new invention of some sort, but contain no action or plot. However, I fail to see any like that in the present A. S., unless it's "Mad Music." A few utterly impossible stories are so interestingly told that it is worth while to publish them. Some examples are stories by A. Merritt (whose stories are the most fascinating I have ever read). H. P. Lovecraft (master of the bizarre and the grotesque) and G. A. England. My letter seems to be mostly composed of suggestions, but that is only because I am interested in anything pertaining to stories of imagination, or Science Fiction, as it is called. However, Astounding Stories seems to be very satisfying to me. I am glad that you have Wessolowski on your artist's staff. I hope that you will have a story contest some time in the future, as they are very interesting, and often uncover hitherto unknown talent in the contestants. I sincerely wish you the utmost of success in Astounding Stories and hope that it will live a long, enduring life. I hope, as time goes on, you will favor us with more illustrations, for this type of story needs a large amount of drawings so that the readers won't overwork their imaginations. Astounding Stories seems to be very shy, for I heard of it from a friend and got the February, 1930 issue only after an exhaustive search. The place where I got it appears to be about the only one in town selling it. I hope more stores will handle your great magazine. (I didn't intend the words "great magazine" to be sarcastic. I really think it's great!) I hope you will have a department in which the readers may discuss the merits or lacks of stories published. Or at least print excerpts now and then. Enclosed find twenty cents in stamps for which please send me the first issue.--A. W. Bernal, 1374 E. 32 Street, Oakland, Calif. "_Stories I Like Best_--" Dear Editor: The stories I like best in your Astounding Stories of Super-science were "The Beetle Horde" by Victor Rousseau, "The Cave of Horror," by Capt. S. P. Meek, "Compensation," by C. V. Tench, "Invisible Death," by Anthony Pelcher. I have just bought your second copy of Astounding Stories. I like the book very much, and expect to buy it every month--Issac Dworkowits, 1262 Valentine Avenue, Bronx, N. Y. "_Just What Is Needed_" Dear Editor: I have read the first two copies of your new magazine and I would like to make a few comments and criticisms. This magazine is very popular in my community and is just what is needed to instill scientific interest in the mind of the general public. Science Fiction will arouse more interest and will be read by more people than any amount of dry science and cold facts. Since you would like to have a reader's opinion, I will say that "The Beetle Horde" is the best story that I have read in a long time and was based on the most excellent science; "The Thief of Time" was good; try to get some more stories by Capt. S. P. Meek; one in every copy would not be too many. I could not get all "het up" over "Spawn of the Stars," it was a little vague; I do not think the author had a very distinct idea about the nature of the invaders. The stories do not have to stick to cold science, but should not violate an established fact without a reasonable explanation, as this might cause a mistaken idea in the minds of the readers. A few good authors are: Dr. Keller, A Hyatt Verrill, Walter Kately and R. H. Romans.--Wayne Bray, Campbell, Missouri. "_Literature That Typifies New Age_" Dear Editor: As a member of an organization whose existence was founded through the medium of Science Fiction, I have watched your magazine closely, and here are the results: It is all Science Fiction, virile, interesting and new. A popular edition of these stories with the name of a great publishing house behind it. The authors you have acquired are supreme in this field. Ray Cummings and Captain Meek need no introduction. And Harl Vincent is a notable addition whose stories of "Indefinite Extension" and interplanetary travel are well known to Science Fiction fans. Science Fiction, first introduced by Verne, Poe, Wells, Haggard and other old masters in this line, is a type of literature that typifies the new age to come--the age of science. And, in conclusion, may I say that the Science Correspondence Club extends to your new and most acceptable publication heartiest wishes for continued and increasing success. I subscribe myself to the advancement of science and Science Fiction.--Walter P. Dennis, F. P. S., 4653 Addison Street, Chicago, Ill. "_Keep Up the Good Work_" Dear Editor: I have just completed the perusal of the first issue of Astounding Stories and am immensely pleased. I am a high school senior, and though have only a rudimentary knowledge of science, the subject impresses me and I am eager to gain new facts and food for thought. I compliment you on securing the services of such writers of scientifiction as Ray Cummings, Harl Vincent, and R. F. Starzl. They are good! Ray Cummings' impressive style, his vivid imagination, and his knowledge of his subject seem to me invincible. His stories are always welcome. Now, concerning the services of other writers of Science Fiction, I think the majority of the readers would be well pleased with the following list: Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Hyatt Verrill, H.G. Wells, David H. Keller, Otis Adelbert Kline and Stanton Coblentz. The above mentioned, I am sure, would greatly please your readers. I believe it would greatly improve the circulation of your magazine to try to secure the services of such writers (especially E. R. Burroughs). I am greatly interested in the future of your magazine and wish it every bit of luck in the world. You have made an astounding start. Keep up the good work.--A. G. Jaweett, Jr., 132 Murdock Avenue, Asheville, N.C. "_The Readers' Corner_" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here; so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! --_The Editor._ 
30177	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DR. DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor ====================================================================== The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees: _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES. _More Than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ ====================================================================== VOL. V, No. 1 CONTENTS JANUARY, 1931 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSO _Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "The Gate to Xoran."_ THE DARK SIDE OF ANTRI SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT 9 _Commander John Hanson Relates an Interplanetary Adventure Illustrating the Splendid Service Spirit of the Men of the Special Patrol._ THE SUNKEN EMPIRE H. THOMPSON RICH 24 _Concerning the Strange Adventures of Professor Stevens with the Antillians on the Floor of the Mysterious Sargasso Sea._ THE GATE TO XORAN HAL K. WELLS 46 _A Strange Man of Metal Comes to Earth on a Dreadful Mission._ THE EYE OF ALLAH C. D. WILLARD 58 _On the Fatal Seventh of September a Certain Secret Service Man Sat in the President's Chair and--Looked Back into the Eye of Allah._ THE FIFTH-DIMENSION CATAPULT MURRAY LEINSTER 72 _The Story of Tommy Reames' Extraordinary Rescue of Professor Denham and his Daughter--Marooned in the Fifth Dimension._ (A Complete Novelette.) THE PIRATE PLANET CHARLES W. DIFFIN 109 _Two Fighting Yankees--War-Torn Earth's Sole Representatives on Venus--Set Out to Spike the Greatest Gun of All Time._ (Part Three of a Four-Part Novel.) THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 132 _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ ASTOUNDING STORIES. ====================================================================== Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Readers' Guild, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. [Illustration: "_Behold one of those who live in the darkness._"] The Dark Side of Antri _By Sewell Peaslee Wright_ Commander John Hanson relates an interplanetary adventure illustrating the splendid Service spirit of the men of the Special Patrol. An officer of the Special Patrol Service dropped in to see me the other day. He was a young fellow, very sure of himself, and very kindly towards an old man. He was doing a monograph, he said, for his own amusement, upon the early forms of our present offensive and defensive weapons. Could I tell him about the first Deuber spheres and the earlier disintegrator rays and the crude atomic bombs we tried back when I first entered the Service? I could, of course. And I did. But a man's memory does not improve in the course of a century of Earth years. Our scientists have not been able to keep a man's brain as fresh as his body, despite all their vaunted progress. There is a lot these deep thinkers, in their great laboratories, don't know. The whole universe gives them the credit for what's been done, yet the men of action who carried out the ideas--but I'm getting away from my pert young officer. He listened to me with interest and toleration. Now and then he helped me out, when my memory failed me on some little detail. He seemed to have a very fair theoretical knowledge of the subject. "It seems impossible," he commented, when we had gone over the ground he had outlined, "that the Service could have done its work with such crude and undeveloped weapons, does it not?" He smiled in a superior sort of way, as though to imply we had probably done the best we could, under the circumstances. * * * * * I suppose I should not have permitted his attitude to irritate me, but I am an old man, and my life has not been an easy one. "Youngster," I said--like many old people, I prefer spoken conversation--"back in those days the Service was handicapped in every way. We lacked weapons, we lacked instruments, we lacked popular support, and backing. But we had men, in those days, who did their work with the tools that were at hand. And we did it well." "Yes, sir!" the youngster said hastily--after all, a retired commander in the Special Patrol Service does rate a certain amount of respect, even from these perky youngsters--"I know that, sir. It was the efforts of men like yourself who gave us the proud traditions we have to-day." "Well, that's hardly true," I corrected him. "I'm not quite so old as that. We had a fine set of traditions when I entered the Service, son. But we did our share to carry them on, I'll grant you that." "'Nothing Less than Complete Success,'" quoted the lad almost reverently, giving the ancient motto of our service. "That is a fine tradition for a body of men to aspire to, sir." "True. True." The ring in the boy's voice brought memories flocking. It was a proud motto; as old as I am, the words bring a thrill even now, a thrill comparable only with that which comes from seeing old Earth swell up out of the darkness of space after days of outer emptiness. Old Earth, with her wispy white clouds and her broad seas-- Oh, I know I'm provincial, but that is another thing that must be forgiven an old man. "I imagine, sir," said the young officer, "that you could tell many a strange story of the Service, and the sacrifices men have made to keep that motto the proud boast it is to-day." "Yes," I told him. "I could do that. I have done so. That is my occupation, now that I have been retired from active service. I--" "You are a historian?" he broke in eagerly. * * * * * I forgave him the interruption. I can still remember my own rather impetuous youth. "Do I look like a historian?" I think I smiled as I asked him the question, and held out my hands to him. Big brown hands they are, hardened with work, stained and drawn from old acid burns, and the bite of blue electric fire. In my day we worked with crude tools indeed; tools that left their mark upon the workman. "No. But--" I waved the explanation aside. "Historians deal with facts, with accomplishments, with dates and places and the names of great men. I write--what little I do write--of men and high adventures, so that in this time of softness and easy living some few who may read my scribblings may live with me those days when the worlds of the universe were strange to each other, and there were many new things to be found and marveled at." "And I'll venture, sir, that you find much enjoyment in the work," commented the youngster with a degree of perception with which I had not credited him. "True. As I write, forgotten faces peer at me through the mists of the years, and strong, friendly voices call to me from out of the past...." "It must be wonderful to live the old adventures through again," said the young officer hastily. Youth is always afraid of sentiment in old people. Why this should be, I do not know. But it is so. The lad--I wish I had made a note of his name; I predict a future for him in the Service--left me alone, then, with the thoughts he had stirred up in my mind. * * * * * Old faces ... old voices. Old scenes, too. Strange worlds, strange peoples. A hundred, a thousand different tongues. Men that came only to my knee, and men that towered ten feet above my head. Creatures--possessed of all the attributes of men except physical form--that belonged only in the nightmare realms of sleep. An old man's most treasured possessions: his memories. A face drew close out of the flocking recollections; the face of a man I had known and loved more than a brother so many years--dear God, how many years--ago. Anderson Croy. Search all the voluminous records of the bearded historians, and you will not find his name. No great figure of history was this friend of mine; just an obscure officer on an obscure ship of the Special Patrol Service. And yet there is a people who owe to him their very existence. I wonder if they have forgotten him? It would not surprise me. The memory of the universe is not a reliable thing. * * * * * Anderson Croy was, like most of the officer personnel of the Special Patrol Service, a native of Earth. They had tried to make a stoop-shouldered dabbler in formulas out of him, but he was not the stuff from which good scientists are moulded. He was young, when I first knew him, and strong; he had mild blue eyes and a quick smile. And he had a fine, steely courage that a man could love. I was in command, then, of the _Ertak_, my second ship. I inherited Anderson Croy with the ship, and I liked him from the first time I laid eyes upon him. As I recall it, we worked together on the _Ertak_ for nearly two years, Earth time. We went through some tight places together. I remember our experience, shortly after I took over the _Ertak_, on the monstrous planet Callor, whose tiny, gentle people were attacked by strange, vapid Things that come down upon them from the fastness of the polar cap, and-- But I wander from the story I wish to tell here. An old man's mind is a weak and weary thing that totters and weaves from side to side; like a worn-out ship, it is hard to keep on a straight course. We were out on one of those long, monotonous patrols, skirting the outer boundaries of the known universe, that were, at that time, before the building of all the many stations we have to-day a dreaded part of the Special Patrol Service routine. Not once had we landed to stretch our legs. Slowing up to atmospheric speed took time, and we were on a schedule that allowed for no waste of even minutes. We approached the various worlds only close enough to report, and to receive an assurance that all was well. A dog's life, but part of the game. * * * * * My log showed nearly a hundred "All's well" reports, as I remember it, when we slid up to Antri, which was, so far as size is concerned, one of our smallest ports o' call. Antri, I might add, for the benefit of those who have forgotten their maps of the universe, is a satellite of A-411, which, in turn, is one of the largest bodies of the universe, and both uninhabited and uninhabitable. Antri is somewhat larger than the moon, Earth's satellite, and considerably farther from its controlling body. "Report our presence, Mr. Croy," I ordered wearily. "And please ask Mr. Correy to keep a sharp watch on the attraction meter." These huge bodies such as A-411 are not pleasant companions at space speeds. A few minute's trouble--space ships gave trouble, in those days--and you melted like a drop of solder when you struck the atmospheric belt. "Yes, sir!" There never was a crisper young officer than Croy. I bent over my tables, working out our position and charting our course for the next period. In a few seconds Croy was back, his blue eyes gleaming. "Sir, an emergency is reported on Antri. We are to make all possible speed, to Oreo, their governing city. I gather that it is very important." "Very well, Mr. Croy." I can't say the news was unwelcome. Monotony kills young men. "Have the disintegrator ray generators inspected and tested. Turn out the watch below in such time that we may have all hands on duty when we arrive. If there is an emergency, we shall be prepared for it. I shall be with Mr. Correy in the navigating room; if there are any further communications, relay them to me there." * * * * * I hurried up to the navigating room, and gave Correy his orders. "Do not reduce speed until it is absolutely necessary," I concluded. "We have an emergency call from Antri, and minutes may be important. How long do you make it to Oreo?" "About an hour to the atmosphere; say an hour more to set down in the city. I believe that's about right, sir." I nodded, frowning at the twin charts, with their softly glowing lights, and turned to the television disc, picking up Antri without difficulty. Of course, back in those days we had the huge and cumbersome discs, their faces shielded by a hood, that would be suitable only for museum pieces now. But they did their work very well, and I searched Antri carefully, at varying ranges, for any sign of disturbances. I found none. The dark portion, of course, I could not penetrate. Antri has one portion of its face that is turned forever from its sun, and one half that is bathed in perpetual light. The long twilight zone was uninhabited, for the people of Antri are a sun-loving race, and their cities and villages appeared only in the bright areas of perpetual sunlight. Just as we reduced to atmospheric speed, Croy sent up a message "The Governing Council sends word that we are to set down on the platform atop the Hall of Government, the large, square white building in the center of the city. They say we will have no difficulty in locating it." I thanked him and ordered him to stand by for further messages, if any, and picked up the far-flung city of Oreo in my television disc. * * * * * There was no mistaking the building Croy had mentioned. It stood out from the city around it, cool and white, its mighty columns glistening like crystal in the sun. I could even make out the landing platform, slightly elevated above the roof on spidery arches of silvery metal. We sped straight for the city at just a fraction of space speed, but the hand of the surface temperature gauge crept slowly toward the red line that marked the dangerous incandescent point. I saw that Correy, like the good navigating officer he was, was watching the gauge as closely as myself, and hence said nothing. We both knew that the Antrians would not have sent a call for help to a ship of the Special Patrol Service if there had not been a real emergency. Correy had made a good guess in saying that it would take about an hour, after entering the gaseous envelope of Antri, to reach our destination. It was just a few minutes--Earth time, of course--less than that when we settled gently onto the landing platform. A group of six or seven Antrians, dignified old men, wearing the short, loosely belted white robes that we found were their universal costume, were waiting for us at the exit of the _Ertak_, whose sleek, smooth sides were glowing dull red. "You have hastened, and that is well, sirs," said the spokesman of the committee. "You find Antri in dire need." He spoke in the universal language, and spoke it softly and perfectly. "But you will pardon me for greeting you with that which is, of necessity, uppermost in my mind, and in the minds of these, my companions. "Permit me to welcome you to Antri, and to introduce those who extend those greetings." Rapidly, he ran through a list of names, and each of the men bowed gravely in acknowledgment of our greetings. I have never observed a more courteous nor a more courtly people than the Antrians; their manners are as beautiful as their faces. Last of all, their spokesman introduced himself. Bori Tulber, he was called, and he had the honor of being master of the Council--the chief executive of Antri. * * * * * When the introductions had been completed, the committee led our little party to a small, cylindrical elevator which dropped us, swiftly and silently, on a cushion of air, to the street level of the great building. Across a wide, gleaming corridor our conductors led us, and stood aside before a massive portal through which ten men might have walked abreast. We found ourselves in a great chamber with a vaulted ceiling of bright, gleaming metal. At the far end of the room was an elevated rostrum, flanked on either side by huge, intricate masses of statuary, of some creamy, translucent stone that glowed as with some inner light. Semicircular rows of seats, each with its carved desk, surmounted by numerous electrical controls, occupied all the floor space. None of the seats was occupied. "We have excused the Council from our preliminary deliberations," explained Bori Tulber, "because such a large body is unwieldy. My companions and myself represent the executive heads of the various departments of the Council, and we are empowered to act." He led us through the great council chamber, and into an anteroom, beautifully decorated, and furnished with exceedingly comfortable chairs. "Be seated, sirs," the Master of the Council suggested. We obeyed silently, and Bori Tulber stood before, gazing thoughtfully into space. * * * * * "I do not know just where to begin," he said slowly. "You men in uniform know, I presume, but little of this world of ours. I presume I had best begin far back. "Since you are navigators of space, undoubtedly, you are acquainted with the fact that Antri is a world divided into two parts; one of perpetual night, and the other of perpetual day, due to the fact that Antri revolves but once upon its axis during the course of its circuit of its sun, thus presenting always the same face to our luminary. "We have no day and night, such as obtain on other spheres. There are no set hours for working nor for sleeping nor for pleasure. The measure of a man's work is the measure of his ambition, or his strength, or his desire. It is so also with his sleep and with his pleasures. It is--it has been--a very pleasant arrangement. "Ours is a fertile country, and our people live very long and very happily with little effort. We have believed that ours was the nearest of all the worlds to the ideal; that nothing could disturb the peace and happiness of our people. We were mistaken. * * * * * "There is a dark side to Antri. A side upon which the sun never has shone. A dismal place of gloom, which is like the night upon other worlds. "No Antrian has, to our knowledge, ever penetrated this part of Antri, and lived to tell of his experience. We do not even till the land close to the twilight zone. Why should we, when we have so much fine land upon which the sun shines bright and fair always, save for the two brief seasons of rain? "We have never given thought to what might be on the dark face of Antri. Darkness and night are things unknown to us; we know of them only from the knowledge which has come to us from other worlds. And now--now we have been brought face to face with a terrible danger which comes to us from that other side of this sphere. "A people have grown there. A terrible people that I shall not try to describe to you. They threaten us with slavery, with extinction. Four ara ago (the Antrians have their own system of reckoning time, just as we have on Earth, instead of using the universal system, based upon the enaro. An ara corresponds to about fifty hours, Earth time.) we did not know that such a people existed. Now their shadow is upon all our beautifully sunny country, and unless you can aid us, before other help can reach us, I am convinced that Antri is doomed!" * * * * * For a moment not one of us spoke. We sat there, staring at the old man who had just ceased speaking. Only a man ripened and seasoned with the passing of years could have stood there before us and uttered, so quietly and solemnly, words such as had just come from his lips. Only in his eyes could we catch a glimpse of the torment which gripped his soul. "Sir," I said, and have never felt younger than at that moment, when I tried to frame some assurance to this splendid old man who had turned to me and my youthful crew for succor, "we shall do what it lies within our power to do. But tell us more of this danger which threatens. "I am no man of science, and yet I cannot see how men could live in a land never reached by the sun. There would be no heat, no vegetation. Is that not so?" "Would that it were!" replied the Master of the Council, bitterly. "What you say would be indeed the truth, were it not for the great river and seas of our sunny Antri, which bear their heated waters to this dark portion of our world, and make it habitable. "And as for this danger, there is little to be said. At some time, men of our country, men who fish, or venture upon the water in commerce, have been borne, all unwillingly, across the shadowy twilight zone and into the land of darkness. They did not come back, but they were found there and despoiled of their menores. "Somehow, these creatures who dwell in darkness determined the use of the menore, and now that they have resolved that they shall rule all this sphere, they have been able to make their threat clear to us. Perhaps"--and Bori Tulber smiled faintly and terribly--"you would like to have that message direct from its bearer?" * * * * * "Is that possible, sir?" I asked eagerly, glancing around the room. "How--" "Come with me," said the Master of the Council gently. "Alone--for too many near him excites this terrible messenger. You have your menore?" "No. I had not thought there would be need of it." The menores of those days, it should be remembered, were heavy, cumbersome circlets that were worn upon the head like a sort of crown, and one did not go so equipped unless in real need of the device. To-day, of course, your menores are but jeweled trinkets that convey thought a score of times more effectively, and weigh but a tenth as much. "It is a lack easily remedied." Bori Tulber excused himself with a little bow and hurried out into the great council chamber, to appear again in a moment with a menore in either hand. "Now, if your companions and mine will excuse us for a moment...." He smiled around the seated group apologetically. There was a murmur of assent, and the old man opened a door in the other side of the room. "It is not far," he said. "I will go first, and show you the way." * * * * * He led me quickly down a long, narrow corridor to a pair of steep stairs that circled far down into the very foundation of the building. The walls of the corridor and the stairs were without windows, but were as bright as noonday from the ethon tubes which were set into both ceiling and walls. Silently we circled our way down the spiral stairs, and silently the Master of the Council paused before a door at the bottom--a door of dull red metal. "This is the keeping place of those who come before the Council charged with wrong doing," explained Bori Tulber. His fingers rested upon and pressed certain of a ring of small white buttons in the face of the door, and it opened swiftly and noiselessly. We entered, and the door closed behind us with a soft thud. "Behold one of those who live in the darkness," said the Master of the Council grimly. "Do not put on the menore until you have a grip upon yourself: I would not have him know how greatly he disturbs us." I nodded, dumbly, holding the heavy menore dangling in my hand. I have said that I have beheld strange worlds and strange people in my life, and it is true that I have. I have seen the headless people of that red world Iralo, the ant people, the dragon-fly people, the terrible carnivorous trees of L-472, and the pointed heads of a people who live upon a world which may not be named. But I have still to see a more terrible creature than that which lay before me now. * * * * * He--or it--was reclining upon the floor, for the reason that he could not have stood. No room save one with a vaulted ceiling such as the great council chamber, could offer room enough for this creature to walk erect. He was, roughly, a shade better than twice my height, yet I believe he would have weighed but little more. You have seen rank weeds that have grown up in the darkness to reach the sun; if you can imagine a man who had done likewise, you can, perhaps, picture that which I saw before me. His legs at the thigh were no larger than my arm, and his arms were but half the size of my wrist, and jointed twice instead of but once. He wore a careless garment of some dirty yellow, shaggy hide, and his skin, revealed on feet and arms and face, was a terrible, bloodless white; the dead white of a fish's belly. Maggot white. The white of something that had never known the sun. The head was small and round, with features that were a caricature of man's. His ears were huge, and had the power of movement, for they cocked forward as we entered the room. The nose was not prominently arched, but the nostrils were wide, and very thin, as was his mouth, which was faintly tinged with dusky blue, instead of healthy red. At one time his eyes had been nearly round, and, in proportion, very large. Now they were but shadowy pockets, mercifully covered by shrunken, wrinkled lids that twitched but did not lift. * * * * * He moved as we entered, and from a reclining position, propped up on the double elbows of one spidery arm, he changed to a sitting position that brought his head nearly to the ceiling. He smiled sickeningly, and a queer, sibilant whispering came from the bluish lips. "That is his way of talking," explained Bori Tulber. "His eyes, you will note, have been gouged out. They cannot stand the light; they prepared their messenger carefully for his work, you'll see." He placed his menore upon his head, and motioned me to do likewise. The creature searched the floor with one white, leathery hand, and finally located his menore, which he adjusted clumsily. "You will have to be very attentive," explained my companion. "He expresses himself in terms of pictures only, of course, and his is not a highly developed mind. I shall try to get him to go over the entire story for us again, if I can make him understand. Emanate nothing yourself; he is easily confused." I nodded silently, my eyes fixed with a sort of fascination upon the creature from the darkness, and waited. * * * * * Back on the _Ertak_ again. I called all my officers together for a conference. "Gentlemen," I said, "we are confronted with a problem of such gravity that I doubt my ability to describe it clearly. "Briefly, this civilized, beautiful portion of Antri is menaced by a terrible fate. In the dark portion of this unhappy world there live a people who have the lust of conquest in their hearts--and the means at hand with which to wreck this world of perpetual sunlight. "I have the ultimatum of this people direct from their messenger. They want a terrible tribute in the form of slaves. These slaves would have to live in perpetual darkness, and wait upon the whims of the most monstrous beings these eyes of mine have ever seen. And the number of slaves demanded would--as nearly as I could gather, mean about a third of the entire population. Further tribute in the form of sufficient food to support these slaves is also demanded." "But, in God's name, sir," burst forth Croy, his eyes blazing, "by what means do they, propose to inforce their infamous demands?" "By the power of darkness--and a terrible cataclysm. Their wise men--and it would seem that some of them are not unversed in science--have discovered a way to unbalance this world, so that they can cause darkness to creep over this land that has never known it. And as darkness advances, these people of the sun will be utterly helpless before a race that loves darkness, and can see in it like cats. That, gentlemen, is that fate which confronts this world of Antri!" * * * * * There was a ghastly silence for a moment, and then Croy, always impetuous, spoke up again. "How do they propose to do this thing sir?", he asked hoarsely. "With devilish simplicity. They have a great canal dug nearly to the great polar cap of ice. Should they complete it, the hot waters of their seas will be liberated upon this vast ice field, and the warm waters will melt it quickly. If you have not forgotten your lessons, gentlemen, you will remember, since most of you are of Earth, that our scientists tell us our own world turned over in much this same fashion, from natural means, and established for itself new poles. Is that not true?" Grave, almost frightened nods travelled around the little semicircle of white, thoughtful faces. "And is there nothing, sir, that we can do?" asked Kincaide, my second officer, in an awed whisper. "That is the purpose of this conclave: to determine what may be done. We have our bombs and our rays, it is true, but what is the power of this one ship against the people of half a world? And such a people!" I shuddered, despite myself, at the memory of that grinning creature in the cell far below the floor of the council chamber. "This city, and its thousands, we might save, it is true--but not the whole half of this world. And that is the task the Council and its Master have set before us." * * * * * "Would it be possible to frighten them?" asked Croy. "I gather that they are not an advanced race. Perhaps a show of power--the rays--the atomic pistol--bombs-- Call it strategy, sir, or just plain bluff. It seems the only chance." "You have heard the suggestion, gentlemen," I said. "Has anyone a better?" "How does Mr. Croy plan to frighten these people of the darkness?" asked Kincaide, who was always practical. "By going to their country, in this ship, and then letting events take their course," replied Croy promptly. "Details will have to be settled on the spot, as I see it." "I believe Mr. Croy is right," I decided. "The messenger of these people must be returned to his own kind; the sooner the better. He has given me a mental map of his country; I believe that it will be possible for me to locate the principal city, in which his ruler lives. We will take him there, and then--may God aid us gentlemen." "Amen," nodded Croy, and the echo of the word ran from lip to lip like the prayer it was. "When do we start?" I hesitated for just an instant. "Now," I brought forth crisply. "Immediately. We are gambling with the fate of a world, a fine and happy people. Let us throw the dice quickly, for the strain of waiting will not help us. Is that as you would wish it, gentlemen?" "It is, sir!" came the grave chorus. "Very well. Mr. Croy, please report with a detail of ten men, to Bori Tulber, and tell him of our decision. Bring the messenger back with you. The rest of you, gentlemen, to your stations. Make any preparations you may think advisable. Be sure that every available exterior light is in readiness. Let me be notified the moment the messenger is on board and we are ready to take off. Thank you, gentlemen!" * * * * * I hastened to my quarters and brought the _Ertak's_ log down to the minute, explaining in detail the course of action we had decided upon, and the reasons for it. I knew, as did all the _Ertak's_ officers who had saluted so crisply, and so coolly gone about the business of carrying out my orders, that we would return from our trip to the dark side of Antri triumphant or--not at all. Even in these soft days, men still respect the stern, proud motto of our service: "Nothing Less Than Complete Success." The Special Patrol does what it is ordered to do, or no man returns to present excuses. That is a tradition to bring tears of pride to the eyes of even an old man, in whose hands there is strength only for the wielding of a pen. And I was young, in those days. It was perhaps a quarter of an hour when word came from the navigating room that the messenger was aboard, and we were ready to depart. I closed the log, wondering, I remember, if I would ever make another entry therein, and, if not, whether the words I had just inscribed would ever see the light of day. The love of life is strong in men so young. Then I hurried to the navigating room and took charge. Bori Tulber had furnished me with large scale maps of the daylight portion of Antri. From the information conveyed to me by the messenger of the people of darkness--the Chisee they called themselves, as nearly as I could get the sound--I rapidly sketched in the map of the other side of Antri, locating their principal city with a small black circle. Realising that the location of the city we sought was only approximate, we did not bother to work out exact bearings. We set the _Ertak_ on her course at a height of only a few thousand feet, and set out at low atmospheric speed, anxiously watching for the dim line of shadow that marked the twilight zone, and the beginning of what promised to be the last mission of the _Ertak_ and every man she carried within her smooth, gleaming body. * * * * * "Twilight zone in view, sir," reported Croy at length. "Thank you, Mr. Croy. Have all the exterior lights and searchlights turned on. Speed and course as at present, for the time being." I picked up the twilight zone without difficulty in the television disc, and at full power examined the terrain. The rich crops that fairly burst from the earth of the sunlit portion of Antri were not to be observed here. The Antrians made no effort to till this ground, and I doubt that it would have been profitable to do so, even had they wished to come so close to the darkness they hated. The ground seemed dank, and great dark slugs moved heavily upon its greasy surface. Here and there strange pale growths grew in patches--twisted, spotted growths that seemed somehow unhealthy and poisonous. I searched the country ahead, pressing further and further into the line of darkness that was swiftly approaching. As the light of the sun faded, our monstrous searchlights cut into the gloom ahead, their great beams slashing the shadows. In the dark country I had expected to find little if any vegetable growth. Instead, I found that it was a veritable jungle through which even our searchlight rays could not pass. How tall the growths of this jungle might be, I could not tell, yet I had the feeling that they were tall indeed. They were not trees, these pale, weedy arms that reached towards the dark sky. They were soft and pulpy, and without leaves; just long naked sickly arms that divided and subdivided and ended in little smooth stumps like amputated limbs. That there was some kind of activity within the shelter of this weird jungle, was evident enough, for I could catch glimpses, now and then of moving things. But what they might be, even the searching eye of the television disc could not determine. * * * * * One of our searchlight beams, waving through the darkness like the curious antenna of some monstrous insect, came to rest upon a spot far ahead. I followed the beam with the disc, and bent closer, to make sure my eyes did not deceive me. I was looking at a vast cleared place in the pulpy jungle--a cleared space in the center of which there was a city. A city built of black, sweating stone, each house exactly like every other house: tall, thin slices of stone, without windows, chimneys or ornamentation of any kind. The only break in the walls was the slit-like door of each house. Instead of being arranged along streets crossing each other at right angles, these houses were built in concentric circles broken only by four narrow streets then ran from the open space in the center of the city to the four points of the compass. Around the entire city was an exceedingly high wall built of and buttressed with the black, sweating stone of which the houses were constructed. That it was a densely populated city there was ample evidence. People--they were creatures like the messenger; that the Chisee are a people, despite their terrible shape, is hardly debatable--were running up and down the four radial streets, and around the curved connecting streets, in the wildest confusion, their double-elbowed arms flung across their eyes. But even as I watched, the crowd thinned and melted swiftly away, until the streets of the queer, circular city were utterly deserted. * * * * * "The city ahead is not the one we are seeking, sir?" asked Croy, who had evidently been observing the scene through one of the smaller television discs. "I take it that governing city will be farther in the interior." "According to my rather sketchy information, yes." I replied. "However, keep all the searchlight operators busy, going over very bit of the country within the reach of their beams. You have men on all the auxiliary television discs?" "Yes, sir." "Good. Any findings of interest should be reported to me instantly. And--Mr. Croy!" "Yes, sir?" "You might order, if you will, that rations be served all men at their posts." Over such country as this, I felt it would be wise to have every man ready for an emergency. It was, perhaps, as well that I issued this order. It was perhaps half an hour after we had passed the circular city when, far ahead, I could see the pale, unhealthy forest thinning out. A half dozen of our searchlight beams played upon the denuded area, and as I brought the television disc to bear I saw that we were approaching a vast swamp, in which little pools of black water reflected the dazzling light of our searching beams. Nor was this all. Out of the swamp a thousand strange, winged things were rising: yellowish, bat-like things with forked tails and fierce hooked beaks. And like some obscene miasma from that swamp, they rose and came straight for the _Ertak_! * * * * * Instantly I pressed the attention signal that warned every man on the ship. "All disintegrator rays in action at once!" I barked into the transmitter. "Broad beams, and full energy. Bird-like creatures, dead ahead; do not cease action until ordered!" I heard the disintegrator ray generators deepen their notes before I finished speaking, and I smiled grimly, turning to Correy. "Slow down as quickly and as much as possible, Mr. Correy," I ordered. "We have work to do ahead." He nodded, and gave the order to the operating room; I felt the forward surge that told me my order was being obeyed, and turned my attention again to the television disc. The ray operators were doing their work well. The search lights showed the air streaked with fine siftings of greasy dust, and these strange winged creatures were disappearing by the scores as the disintegrator rays beat and played upon them. But they came on gamely, fiercely. Where there had been thousands, there were but hundreds ... scores ... dozens.... There were only five left. Three of them disappeared at once, but the two remaining came on unhesitatingly, their dirty yellow bat-like wings flapping heavily, their naked heads outstretched, and hooked beaks snapping. One of them disappeared in a little sifting of greasy dust, and the same ray dissolved one wing of the remaining creature. He turned over suddenly, the one good wing flapping wildly, and tumbled towards the waiting swamp that has spawned him. Then, as the ray eagerly followed him, the last of that hellish brood disappeared. "Circle slowly, Mr. Correy," I ordered. I wanted to make sure there were none of these terrible creatures left. I felt that nothing so terrible should be left alive--even in a world of darkness. * * * * * Through the television disc I searched the swamp. As I had half suspected, the filthy ooze held the young of this race of things: grub-like creatures that flipped their heavy bodies about in the slime, alarmed by the light which searched them out. "All disintegrator rays on the swamp," I ordered. "Sweep it from margin to margin. Let nothing be left alive there." I had a well trained crew. The disintegrator rays massed themselves into a marching wall of death, and swept up and down the swamp as a plough turns its furrows. It was easy to trace their passage, for behind them the swamp disappeared, leaving in its stead row after row of broad, dusty paths. When we had finished there was no swamp: there was only a naked area upon which nothing lived, and upon which, for many years, nothing would grow. "Good work," I commended the disintegrator ray men. "Cease action." And then, to Correy, "Put her on her course again, please." * * * * * An hour went by. We passed several more of the strange, damp circular cities, differing from the first we had seen only in the matter of size. Another hour passed, and I became anxious. If we were on our proper course, and I had understood the Chisee messenger correctly, we should be very close to the governing city. We should-- The waving beam of one of the searchlights came suddenly to rest. Three or four other beams followed it--and then all the others. "Large city to port, sir!" called Croy excitedly. "Thank you. I believe it is our destination. Cut all searchlights except the forward beam. Mr. Correy!" "Yes, sir." "You can take her over visually now, I believe. The forward searchlight beam will keep our destination in view for you. Set her down cautiously in the center of the city in any suitable place. And--remain at the controls ready for any orders, and have the operating room crew do likewise." "Yes, sir," said Correy crisply. With a tenseness I could not control, I bent over the hooded television disc and studied the mighty governing city of the Chisee. * * * * * The governing city of the Chisee was not unlike the others we had seen, save that it was very much larger, and had eight spoke-like streets radiating from its center, instead of four. The protective wall was both thicker and higher. There was another difference. Instead of a great open space in the center of the city, there was a central, park-like space, in the middle of which was a massive pile, circular in shape, and built, like all the rest of the city, of the black, sweating rock which seemed to be the sole building material of the Chisee. We set the _Ertak_ down close to the big circular building, which we guessed--and correctly--to be the seat of government. I ordered the searchlight ray to be extinguished the moment we landed, and the ethon tubes that illuminated our ship inside to be turned off, so that we might accustom our eyes as much as possible to darkness, finding our way about with small ethon tube flashlights. With a small guard, I stood at the forward exit of the _Ertak_ and watched the huge circular door back out on its mighty threads, and finally swing to one side on its massive gimbals. Croy--the only officer with me--and I both wore our menores, and carried full expeditionary equipment, as did the guard. The Chisee messenger, grimacing and talking excitedly in his sibilant, whispering voice, crouched on all fours (he could not stand in that small space) and waited, three men of the guard on either side of him. I placed his menore on his head and gave him simple, forceful orders, picturing them for him as best I could: "Go from this place and find others of your kind. Tell them that we would speak to them with things such as you have upon your head. Run swiftly!" "I will run," he conveyed to me, "to those great ones who sent me." He pictured them fleetingly. They were creatures like himself, save that they were elaborately dressed in fine skins of several pale colors, and wore upon their arms, between their two elbows, broad circlets of carved metal which I took to be emblems of power or authority, since the chief of them all wore a very broad band. Their faces were much more intelligent than their messenger had led me to expect, and their eyes, very large and round, and not at all human, were the eyes of thoughtful, reasoning creatures. * * * * * Doubled on all fours, the Chisee crept through the circular exit, and straightened up. As he did so, from out of the darkness a score or more of his fellows rushed up, gathering around him, and blocking the exit with their reedy legs. We could hear than talking excitedly in high-pitched, squeaky whispers. Then, suddenly I received an expression from the Chisee who wore the menore: "Those who are with me have come from those in power. They say one of you, and one only, is to come with us to our big men who will learn, through a thing such as I wear upon my head, that which you wish to say to them. You are to come quickly; at once." "I will come," I replied. "Have those with you make way--" A heavy hand fell upon my shoulder; a voice spoke eagerly in my ear: "Sir, you must not go!" It was Croy, and his voice shook with feeling. "You are in command of the _Ertak_; she, and those in her need you. Let me go! I insist, sir!" I turned in the darkness, quickly and angrily. "Mr. Croy," I said swiftly, "do you realize that you are speaking to your commanding officer?" * * * * * I felt his grip tighten on my arm as the reproof struck home. "Yes, sir," he said doggedly. "I do. But I repeat that your duty commands you to remain here." "The duty of a commander in this Service leads him to the place of greatest danger, Mr. Croy," I informed him. "Then stay with your ship, sir!" he pleaded, craftily. "This may be some trick to get you away, so that they may attack us. Please! Can't you see that I am right, sir?" I thought swiftly. The earnestness of the youngster had touched me. Beneath the formality and the "sirs" there was a real affection between us. In the darkness I reached for his hand; I found it and shook it solemnly--a gesture of Earth which it is hard to explain. It means many things. "Go, then, Andy," I said softly. "But do not stay long. An hour at the longest. If you are not back in that length of time, we'll come after you, and whatever else may happen, you can be sure that you will be well avenged. The _Ertak_ has not lost her stinger." "Thank you, John," he replied. "Remember that I shall wear my menore. If I adjust it to full power, and you do likewise, and stand without the shelter of the _Ertak's_ metal hull, I shall be able to communicate with you, should there be any danger." He pressed my hand again, and strode through the exit out into the darkness, which was lit only by a few distant stars. The long, slim legs closed in around him; like a pigmy guarded by the skeletons of giants he was led quickly away. * * * * * The minutes dragged by. There was a nervous tension on the ship, the like of which I have experienced not more than a dozen times in all my years. No one spoke aloud. Now and again one man would matter uneasily to another; there would be a swift, muttered response, and silence again. We were waiting--waiting. Ten minutes went by. Twenty. Thirty. Impatiently I paced up and down before the exit, the guards at their posts, ready to obey any orders instantly. Forty-five minutes. I walked through the exit; stepped out onto the cold, hard earth. I could see, behind me, the shadowy bulk of the _Ertak_. Before me, a black, shapeless blot against the star-sprinkled sky, was the great administrative building of the Chisee. And in there, somewhere, was Anderson Croy. I glanced down at the luminous dial of my watch. Fifty minutes. In ten minutes more-- "John Hanson!" My name reached me, faintly but clearly, through the medium of my menore. "This is Croy. Do you understand me?" "Yes," I replied instantly. "Are you safe?" "I am safe. All is well. Very well. Will you promise me now to receive what I am about to send, without interruption?" "Yes," I replied, thoughtlessly and eagerly. "What is it?" * * * * * "I have had a long conference with the chief or head of the Chisee," explained Croy rapidly. "He is very intelligent, and his people are much further advanced than we thought. "Through some form of communication, he has learned of the fight with the weird birds; it seems that they are--or were--the most dreaded of all the creatures of this dark world. Apparently we got the whole brood of them, and this chief, whose name, I gather, is Wieschien, or something like that, is naturally much impressed. "I have given him a demonstration or two with my atomic pistol and the flashlight--these people are fairly stricken by a ray of light directly in the eyes--and we have reached very favorable terms. "I am to remain here as chief bodyguard and adviser, of which he has need, for all is not peaceful, I gather, in this kingdom of darkness. In return, he is to give up his plans to subjugate the rest of Antri; he has sworn to do this by what is evidently, to him, a very sacred oath, witnessed solemnly by the rest of his council. "Under the circumstances, I believe he will do what he says; in any case, the great canal will be filled in, and the Antrians will have plenty of time to erect a great series of disintegrator ray stations along the entire twilight zone, using the broad fan rays to form a solid wall against which the Chisee could not advance even did they, at some future date, carry out their plans. The worst possible result then would be that the people in the sunlit portion would have to migrate from certain sections, and perhaps would have day and night, alternately, as do other worlds. "This is the agreement we have reached; it is the only one that will save this world. Do you approve, sir?" "No! Return immediately, and we will show the Chisee that they cannot hold an officer of the Special Patrol as a hostage. Make haste!" * * * * * "It's no go, sir," came the reply instantly. "I threatened them first. I explained what our disintegrator rays would do, and Wieschien laughed at me. "This city is built upon great subterranean passages that lead to many hidden exits. If we show the least sign of hostility the work will be resumed on the canal, and, before we can locate the spot, and stop the work, the damage will be done. "This is our only chance, sir, to make this expedition a complete success. Permit me to judge this fact from the evidence I have before me. Whatever sacrifice there is to make, I make gladly. Wieschien asks that you depart at once, and in peace, and I know this is the only course. Good-by, sir; convey my salutations to my other friends upon the old _Ertak_, and elsewhere. And now, lest my last act as an officer of the Special Patrol Service be to refuse to obey the commands of my superior officer, I am removing the menore. Good-by!" I tried to reach him again, but there was no response. Gone! He was gone! Swallowed up in darkness and in silence! * * * * * Dazed, shaken to the very foundation of my being, I stood there between the shadowy bulk of the _Ertak_ and the towering mass of the great silent pile that was the seat of government in this strange land of darkness, and gazed up at the dark sky above me. I am not ashamed, now, to say that hot tears trickled down my cheeks, nor that as I turned back to the _Ertak_, my throat was so gripped by emotion that I could not speak. I ordered the exit closed with a wave of my hand; in the navigating room I said but four words: "We depart at once." At the third meal of the day I gathered my officers about me and told them, as quickly and as gently as I could, of the sacrifice one of their number had made. It was Kincaide who, when I had finished, rose slowly and made reply. "Sir," he said quietly, "We had a friend. Some day, he might have died. Now he will live forever in the records of the Service, in the memory of a world, and in the hearts of those who had the honor to serve with him. Could he--or we--wish more?" Amid a strange silence he sat down again, and there was not an eye among us that was dry. * * * * * I hope that the snappy young officer who visited me the other day reads this little account of bygone times. Perhaps it will make clear to him how we worked, in those nearly forgotten days, with the tools we had at hand. They were not the perfect tools of to-day, but what they lacked, we somehow made up. That fine old motto of the Service, "Nothing Less Than Complete Success," we passed on unsullied to those who came after us. I hope these youngsters of to-day may do as well. _IN THE NEXT ISSUE_ THE TENTACLES FROM BELOW _A Complete Novelette of An American Submarine's Dramatic Raid on Marauding "Machine-Fish" of the Ocean Floor_ By Anthony Gilmore PHALANXES OF ATLANS _Beginning a Thrilling Two-Part Novel of a Strange Hidden Civilisation_ By F. V. W. Mason THE BLACK LAMP _Another of Dr. Bird's Amazing Exploits_ By Captain S. P. Meek THE PIRATE PLANET _The Conclusion of the Splendid Current Novel_ By Charles W. Diffin _AND OTHERS!_ [Illustration: _They tilted her rudders and dove to the abysm below._] The Sunken Empire _By H. Thompson Rich_ Concerning the strange adventures of Professor Stevens with the Antillians on the floors of the mysterious Sargasso Sea. "Then you really expect to find the lost continent of Atlantis, Professor?" Martin Stevens lifted his bearded face sternly to the reporter who was interviewing him in his study aboard the torpedo-submarine _Nereid_, a craft of his own invention, as she lay moored at her Brooklyn wharf, on an afternoon in October. "My dear young man," he said, "I am not even going to look for it." The aspiring journalist--Larry Hunter by name--was properly abashed. "But I thought," he insisted nevertheless, "that you said you were going to explore the ocean floor under the Sargasso Sea?" "And so I did." Professor Stevens admitted, a smile moving that gray beard now and his blue eyes twinkling merrily. "But the Sargasso, an area almost equal to Europe, covers other land as well--land of far more recent submergence than Atlantis, which foundered in 9564 B. C., according to Plato. What I am going to look for is this newer lost continent, or island rather--namely, the great island of Antillia, of which the West Indies remain above water to-day." "Antillia?" queried Larry Hunter, wonderingly. "I never heard of it." Again the professor regarded his interviewer sternly. "There are many things you have never heard of, young man," he told him. "Antillia may be termed the missing link between Atlantis and America. It was there that Atlantean culture survived after the appalling catastrophe that wiped out the Atlantean homeland, with its seventy million inhabitants, and it was in the colonies the Antillians established in Mexico and Peru, that their own culture in turn survived, after Antillia too had sunk." "My Lord! You don't mean to say the Mayas and Incas originated on that island of Antillia?" "No, I mean to say they originated on the continent of Atlantis, and that Antillia was the stepping stone to the New World, where they built the strange pyramids we find smothered in the jungle--even as thousands of years before the Atlanteans established colonies in Egypt and founded the earliest dynasties of pyramid-building Pharaohs." * * * * * Larry was pushing his pencil furiously. "Whew!" he gasped. "Some story, Professor!" "To the general public, perhaps," was the reply. "But to scholars of antiquity, these postulates are pretty well known and pretty well accepted. It remains but to get concrete evidence, in order to prove them to the world at large--and that is the object of my expedition." More hurried scribbling, then: "But, say--why don't you go direct to Atlantis and get the real dope?" "Because that continent foundered so long ago that it is doubtful if any evidence would have withstood the ravages of time," Professor Stevens explained, "whereas Antillia went down no earlier than 200 B. C., archaeologists agree." "That answers my question," declared Larry, his admiration for this doughty graybeard rising momentarily. "And now, Professor, I wonder if you'd be willing to say a few words about this craft of yours?" "Cheerfully, if you think it would interest anyone. What would you care to have me say?" "Well, in the first place, what does the name _Nereid_ mean?" "Sea-nymph. The derivation is from the Latin and Greek, meaning daughter of the sea-god Nereus. Appropriate, don't you think?" "Swell. And why do you call it a torpedo-submarine? How does it differ from the common or navy variety?" * * * * * Professor Stevens smiled. It was like asking what was the difference between the sun and the moon, when about the only point of resemblance they had was that they were both round. Nevertheless, he enumerated some of the major modifications he had developed. Among them, perhaps the most radical, was its motive power, which was produced by what he called a vacuo-turbine--a device that sucked in the water at the snout of the craft and expelled it at the tail, at the time purifying a certain amount for drinking purposes and extracting sufficient oxygen to maintain a healthful atmosphere while running submerged. Then, the structure of the _Nereid_ was unique, he explained, permitting it to attain depths where the pressure would crush an ordinary submarine, while mechanical eyes on the television principle afforded a view in all directions, and locks enabling them to leave the craft at will and explore the sea-bottom were provided. This latter feat they would accomplish in special suits, designed on the same pneumatic principle as the torpedo itself and capable of sustaining sufficient inflation to resist whatever pressures might be encountered, as well as being equipped with vibratory sending and receiving apparatus, for maintaining communication with those left aboard. * * * * * All these things and more Professor Stevens outlined, as Larry's pencil flew, admitting that he had spent the past ten years and the best part of his private fortune in developing his plans. "But you'll get it all back, won't you? Aren't there all sorts of Spanish galleons and pirate barques laden with gold supposed to be down there?" "Undoubtedly," was the calm reply. "But I am not on a treasure hunt, young man. If I find one single sign of former life, I shall be amply rewarded." Whereupon the young reporter regarded the subject of his interview with fresh admiration, not unmingled with wonder. In his own hectic world, people had no such scorn of gold. Gee, he'd sure like to go along! The professor could have his old statues or whatever he was looking for. As for himself, he'd fill up his pockets with Spanish doubloons and pieces of eight! Larry was snapped out of his trance by a light knock on the door, which opened to admit a radiant girl in creamy knickers and green cardigan. "May I come in, daddy?" she inquired, hesitating, as she saw he was not alone. "You seem to be in already, my dear," the professor told her, rising from his desk and stepping forward. Then, turning to Larry, who had also risen, he said: "Mr. Hunter, this is my daughter, Diane, who is also my secretary." "I am pleased to meet you, Miss Stevens," said Larry, taking her hand. And he meant it--for almost anyone would have been pleased to meet Diane, with her tawny gold hair, warm olive cheeks and eyes bluer even than her father's and just as twinkling, just as intelligent. "She will accompany the expedition and take stenographic notes of everything we observe," added her father, to Larry's amazement. "What?" he declared. "You mean to say that--that--" "Of course he means to say that I'm going, if that's what you mean to say, Mr. Hunter," Diane assured him. "Can you think of any good reason why I shouldn't go, when girls are flying around the world and everything else?" Even had Larry been able to think of any good reason, he wouldn't have mentioned it. But as a matter of fact, he had shifted quite abruptly to an entirely different line of thought. Diane, he was thinking--Diana, goddess of the chase, the huntress! And himself, Larry Hunter--the hunter and the huntress! Gee, but he'd like to go! What an adventure, hunting around together on the bottom of the ocean! * * * * * What a wild dream, rather, he concluded when his senses returned. For after all, he was only a reporter, fated to write about other people's adventures, not to participate in them. So he put away his pad and pencil and prepared to leave. But at the door he paused. "Oh, yes--one more question. When are you planning to leave, Professor?" At that, Martin Stevens and his daughter exchanged a swift glance. Then, with a smile, Diane said: "I see no reason why we shouldn't tell him, daddy." "But we didn't tell the reporters from the other papers, my dear," protested her father. "Then suppose we give Mr. Hunter the exclusive story," she said, transferring her smile to Larry now. "It will be what you call a--a scoop. Isn't that it?" "That's it." She caught her father's acquiescing nod. "Then here's your scoop, Mr. Hunter. We leave to-night." To-night! This was indeed a scoop! If he hurried, he could catch the late afternoon editions with it. "I--I certainly thank you, Miss Stevens!" he exclaimed. "That'll make the front page!" As he grasped the door-knob, he added, turning to her father: "And I want to thank you too, Professor--and wish you good luck!" Then, with a hasty handshake, and a last smile of gratitude for Diane, he flung open the door and departed, unconscious that two young blue eyes followed his broad shoulders wistfully till they disappeared from view. * * * * * But Larry was unaware that he had made a favorable impression on Diane. He felt it was the reverse. As he headed toward the subway, that vivid blond goddess of the chase was uppermost in his thoughts. Soon she'd be off in the _Nereid_, bound for the mysterious regions under the Sargasso Sea, while in a few moments he'd be in the subway, bound under the prosaic East River for New York. No--damned if he would! Suddenly, with a wild inspiration, the young reporter altered his course, dove into the nearest phone booth and got his city editor on the wire. Scoop? This was just the first installment. He'd get a scoop that would fill a book! And his city editor tacitly O. K.'d the idea. With the result that when the _Nereid_ drew away from her wharf that night, on the start of her unparalleled voyage, Larry Hunter was a stowaway. * * * * * The place where he had succeeded in secreting himself was a small storeroom far aft, on one of the lower decks. There he huddled in the darkness, while the slow hours wore away, hearing only the low hum of the craft's vacuo-turbine and the flux of water running through her. From the way she rolled and pitched, he judged she was still proceeding along on the surface. Having eaten before he came aboard, he felt no hunger, but the close air and the dark quarters brought drowsiness. He slept. When he awoke it was still dark, of course, but a glance at his luminous wrist-watch told him it was morning now. And the fact that the rolling and pitching had ceased made him believe they were now running submerged. The urge for breakfast asserting itself, Larry drew a bar of chocolate from his pocket and munched on it. But this was scanty fare for a healthy young six-footer, accustomed to a liberal portion of ham and eggs. Furthermore, the lack of coffee made him realize that he was getting decidedly thirsty. The air, moreover, was getting pretty bad. "All in all, this hole wasn't exactly intended for a bedroom!" he reflected with a wry smile. Taking a chance, he opened the door a crack and sat there impatiently, while the interminable minutes ticked off. The _Nereid's_ turbine was humming now with a high, vibrant note that indicated they must be knocking off the knots at a lively clip. He wondered how far out they were, and how far down. Lord, there'd be a riot when he showed up! He wanted to wait till they were far enough on their way so it would be too much trouble to turn around and put him ashore. But by noon his powers of endurance were exhausted. Flinging open the door, he stepped out into the corridor, followed it to a companionway and mounted the ladder to the deck above. There he was assailed by a familiar and welcome odor--food! Trailing it to its origin, he came to a pair of swinging doors at the end of a cork-paved passage. Beyond, he saw on peering through, was the mess-room, and there at the table, among a number of uniformed officers, sat Professor Stevens and Diane. A last moment Larry stood there, looking in on them. Then, drawing a deep breath, he pushed wide the swinging doors and entered with a cheery: "Good morning, folks! Hope I'm not too late for lunch!" * * * * * Varying degrees of surprise greeted this dramatic appearance. The officers stared, Diane gasped, her father leaped to has feet with a cry. "That reporter! Why--why, what are you doing here, young man?" "Just representing the press." Larry tried to make it sound nonchalant but he was finding it difficult to bear up under this barrage of disapproving eyes--particularly two very young, very blue ones. "So that is the way you reward us for giving you an exclusive story, is it?" Professor Stevens' voice was scathing. "A representative of the press! A stowaway, rather--and as such you will be treated!" He turned to one of his officers. "Report to Captain Petersen that we have a stowaway aboard and order him to put about at once." He turned to another. "See that Mr. Hunter is taken below and locked up. When we reach New York, he will be handed over to the police." "But daddy!" protested Diane, as they rose to comply, her eyes softening now. "We shouldn't be too severe with Mr. Hunter. After all, he is probably doing only what his paper ordered him to." * * * * * Gratefully Larry turned toward his defender. But he couldn't let that pass. "No, I'm acting only on my own initiative," he said. "No one told me to come." For he couldn't get his city editor involved, and after all it was his own idea. "You see!" declared Professor Stevens. "He admits it is his own doing. It is clear he has exceeded his authority, therefore, and deserves no sympathy." "But can't you let me stay, now that I'm here?" urged Larry. "I know something about boats. I'll serve as a member of the crew--anything." "Impossible. We have a full complement. You would be more of a hindrance than a help. Besides, I do not care to have the possible results of this expedition blared before the public." "I'll write nothing you do not approve." "I have no time to edit your writings, young man. My own, will occupy me sufficiently. So it is useless. You are only wasting your breath--and mine." He motioned for his officers to carry out his orders. But before they could move to do so, in strode a lean, middle-aged Norwegian Larry sensed must be Captain Petersen himself, and on his weathered face was an expression of such gravity that it was obvious to everyone something serious had happened. * * * * * Ignoring Larry, after one brief look of inquiry that was answered by Professor Stevens, he reported swiftly what he had to say. While cruising full speed at forty fathoms, with kite-aerial out, their wireless operator had received a radio warning to turn back. Answering on its call-length, he had demanded to know the sender and the reason for the message, but the information had been declined, the warning merely being repeated. "Was it a land station or a ship at sea?" asked the professor. "Evidently the latter," was the reply. "By our radio range-finder, we determined the position at approximately latitude 27, longitude 65." "But that, Captain, is in the very area we are headed for." "And that, Professor, makes it all the more singular." "But--well, well! This is indeed peculiar! And I had been on the point of turning back with our impetuous young stowaway. What would you suggest, sir?" Captain Petersen meditated, while Larry held his breath. "To turn back," he said at length, in his clear, precise English, "would in my opinion be to give the laugh to someone whose sense of humor is already too well developed." "Exactly!" agreed Professor Stevens, as Larry relaxed in relief. "Whoever this practical joker is, we will show him he is wasting his talents--even though it means carrying a supernumerary for the rest of the voyage." "Well spoken!" said the captain. "But as far as that is concerned, I think I can keep Mr. Hunter occupied." "Then take him, and welcome!" Whereupon, still elated but now somewhat uneasy, Larry accompanied Captain Petersen from the mess-room; started to, that is. But at a glance of sympathy from Diane, he dared call out: "Say--hold on, folks! I haven't had lunch yet!" * * * * * When young Larry Hunter reported to the captain of the _Nereid_, after this necessary meal, he found that the craft had returned to the surface. Assigned a pair of powerful binoculars, he was ordered to stand watch in the conning-tower and survey the horizon in every direction, in an effort to sight the vessel that had sent out that mysterious radio, but though he cast his good brown eyes diligently through those strong lenses, he saw not so much as a smoke tuft upon the broad, gray-blue surface of the hazy Atlantic. Gradually, however, as the afternoon wore away, something else came in view. Masses of brownish seaweed, supported by small, berry-like bladders, began drifting by. Far apart at first, they began getting more and more dense, till at last, with a thrill, he realized that they were drawing into that strange area known as the Sargasso Sea. Shortly after this realization dawned, he was ordered below, and as the tropic sun was sinking over that eery floating tombstone, which according to Professor Stevens marked a nation's grave, the _Nereid_ submerged. Down she slid, a hundred fathoms or more, on a long, even glide that took her deep under that veiling brown blanket. * * * * * In the navigating room now, Larry stood with the captain, the professor and Diane, studying an illuminated panel on which appeared a cross of five squares, like a box opened out. The central square reproduced the scene below, while those to left and right depicted it from port and starboard, and those to front and rear revealed the forward and aft aspects of the panorama, thus affording a clear view in every direction. This, then, was the television device Professor Stevens had referred to the previous afternoon, its mechanical eyes enabling then to search every square inch of those mysterious depths, as they cruised along. It was the central square that occupied their attention chiefly, however, as they stood studying the panel. While the others represented merely an unbroken vista of greenish water, this one showed the sea floor as clearly as though they had been peering down into a shallow lagoon through a glass-bottomed boat, though it must have been a quarter of a mile below their cruising level. A wonderful and fearsome sight it was to Larry: like something seen in a nightmare--a fantastic desert waste of rocks and dunes, with here and there a yawning chasm whose ominous depths their ray failed to penetrate, and now and then a jutting plateau that would appear on the forward square and cause Captain Petersen to elevate their bow sharply. But more thrilling than this was their first glimpse of a sunken ship--a Spanish galleon, beyond a doubt! There she lay, grotesquely on her side, half rotted, half buried in the sand, but still discernible. And to Larry's wildly racing imagination, a flood of gold and jewels seemed to pour from her ruined coffers. * * * * * Turning to Diane, he saw that her eyes too were flashing with intense excitement. "Say!" he exclaimed. "Why don't we stop and look her over? There may be a fortune down there!" Professor Stevens promptly vetoed the suggestion, however. "I must remind you, young man," he said severely, "that this is not a treasure hunt." Whereupon Larry subsided; outwardly, at least. But when presently the central square revealed another and then another sunken ship, it was all he could do to contain himself. Now, suddenly, Diane cried out: "Oh, daddy, look! There's a modern ship! A--a freighter, isn't it?" "A collier, I would say," was her father's calm reply. "Rather a large one, too. _Cyclops_, possibly. She disappeared some years ago, en route from the Barbados to Norfolk. Or possibly it is any one of a dozen other steel vessels that have vanished from these seas in recent times. The area of the Sargasso, my dear, is known as 'The Port of Missing Ships.'" "But couldn't we drop down and make sure which ship it is?" she pleaded, voicing the very thought Larry had been struggling to suppress. At the professor's reply, however, he was glad he had kept quiet. "We could, of course," was his gentle though firm rebuke, "but if we stopped to solve the mystery of every sunken ship we shall probably see during this cruise, we would have time for nothing else. Nevertheless, my dear, you may take a short memorandum of the location and circumstances, in the present instance." Whereupon he dictated briefly, while Larry devoted his attention once more to the central square. * * * * * Suddenly, beyond a dark pit that seemed to reach down into the very bowels of the earth, rose an abrupt plateau--and on one of its nearer elevations, almost directly under then, loomed a monumental four-sided mound. "Say--hold on!" called Larry. "Look at that, Professor! Isn't that a building of some kind?" Martin Stevens looked up, glanced skeptically toward the panel. But one glimpse at what that central square revealed, and his skepticism vanished. "A building?" he cried in triumph. "A building indeed! It is a pyramid, young man!" "Good Lord!" "Oh, daddy! Really?" "Beyond a doubt! And look--there are two other similar structures, only smaller!" Struggling for calm, he turned to Captain Petersen, who had taken his eyes from the forward square and was peering down as well upon those singular mounds. "Stop! Descend!" was his exultant command. "This is my proof! We have discovered Antillia!" * * * * * Swiftly the _Nereid_ dropped to that submerged plateau. In five minutes, her keel was resting evenly on the smooth sand beside the largest of the three pyramids. Professor Stevens then announced that he would make a preliminary investigation of the site at once. "For, otherwise, I for one would be quite unable to sleep tonight!" declared the graybeard, with a boyish chuckle. He added that Diane would accompany him. At this latter announcement, Larry's heart sank. He had hoped against hope that he might be invited along with them. But once again his champion came to his aid. "We really ought to let Mr. Hunter come with us, daddy, don't you think?" she urged, noting his disappointment. "After all, it was he who made the discovery." "Very true," said her father, "but I had not thought it necessary for anyone to accompany us. In the event anyone does, Captain Petersen should have that honor." But this honor the captain declined. "If you don't mind, sir, I'd prefer to stay with the ship," he said, quietly. "I haven't forgotten that radio warning." "But surely you don't think anyone can molest us down here?" scoffed the professor. "No, but I'd prefer to stay with the ship just the same, sir, if you don't mind." "Very well"--with a touch of pique. "Then you may come along if you care to, Mr. Hunter." If he cared to! "Thanks, Professor!" he said with a grateful look toward Diane. "I'd be keen to!" * * * * * So he accompanied them below, where they donned their pressure-suits--rubber affairs rather less cumbersome than ordinary deep-sea diving gear, reinforced with steel wire and provided with thick glass goggles and powerful searchlights, in addition to their vibratory communication apparatus and other devices that were explained to Larry. When he had mastered their operation, which was rendered simple by reason of the fact that they were so nearly automatic, the trio stepped into a lock on the floor of the ship and Professor Stevens ordered them to couple their suits to air-valve connections on the wall, at the same time admitting water by opening another valve. Swiftly the lock flooded, while their suits inflated. "All right?" came his vibratory query. "Right!" they both answered. "Then stand by for the heavy pressure." Wider now he opened the water-valve, letting the ocean in, while at the same time their suits continued inflating through their air-valve connections. To his surprise, Larry found himself no more inconvenienced by the pressure than he had been from the moment the submarine dove to its present depth. Indeed, most of the air that was coming into his suit was filling the reinforced space between its inner and outer layers, much as the _Nereid_ held air under pressure between her two thick shells. "All right now?" called out the professor's vibrator. "Right!" they called back again. "Then uncouple your air-valve connections and make ready." They did so; and he likewise. Then, advancing to a massive door like that of a vault, he flung back its powerful clamps, dragged it open--and there beyond, its pressure equaled by that within the lock, loomed the black tide of the ocean bottom. * * * * * Awed by this solemn sight, tingling with a sense of unparalleled adventure, Larry stood there a moment, peering out over the threshold of that untrodden world. Then he followed Diane and her father into its beckoning mystery.... Their searchlights cutting bright segments into the dark, they proceeded toward the vast mound that towered ahead, pushing through a weird realm of phosphorescent fish and other marine creatures. As they neared it, any possible doubt that it was in fact a pyramid vanished. Corroded by the action of salt water and covered with the incrustations of centuries, it nevertheless presented unmistakable evidence of human construction, rising in steps of massive masonry to a summit shadowy in the murk above. As Larry stood gazing upon that mighty proof that this submerged plateau had once stood forth proudly above the sea, he realized that he was a party to one of the most profound discoveries of the ages. What a furore this would make when he reported it back to his New York paper! But New York seemed remote indeed, now. Would they ever get back? What if anything went wrong with their pressure-suits--or if they should become lost? He glanced back uneasily, but there gleamed the reassuring lights of the _Nereid_, not a quarter of a mile away. Diane and her father were now rounding a corner of the pyramid and he followed them, his momentary twinge of anxiety gone. * * * * * For some moments, Professor Stevens prowled about without comment, examining the huge basal blocks of the structure and glancing up its sloping sides. "You see, I was right!" he declared at length. "This is not only a man-made edifice but a true pyramid, embodying the same architectural principles as the Mayan and Egyptian forms. We see before us the visible evidence of a sunken empire--the missing link between Atlantis and America." No comments greeted this profound announcement and the professor continued: "This structure appears to be similar in dimensions with that of the pyramid of Xochicalco, in Mexico, which in turn approximates that of the "Sacred Hill" of Atlantis, mentioned by Plato, and which was the prototype of both the Egyptian and Mayan forms. It was here the Antillians, as the Atlanteans had taught them to do, worshipped their grim gods and performed the human sacrifices they thought necessary to appease them. And it was here, too, if I am not mistaken, that--" Suddenly his vibratory discourse was broken into by a sharp signal from the submarine: "Pardon interruption! Hurry back! We are attacked!" At this, the trio stood rigid. "Captain Petersen! Captain Petersen!" Larry heard the professor call. "Speak up! Give details! What has happened?" But an ominous silence greeted the query. Another moment they stood there, thoroughly dismayed now. Then came the professor's swift command: "Follow me--quickly!" He was already in motion, retracing his steps as fast as his bulky suit would permit. But as he rounded the corner of the pyramid, they saw him pause, stand staring. And as they drew up, they in turn paused; stood staring, too. With sinking hearts, they saw that the _Nereid_ was gone. * * * * * Stunned by this disaster, they stood facing one another--three lone human beings, on the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, their sole means of salvation gone. Professor Stevens was the first to speak. "This is unbelievable!" he said. "I cannot credit it. We must have lost our senses." "Or our bearings!" added Diane, more hopefully. "Suppose we look around the other side." As for Larry, a darker suspicion flashed through his mind. Captain Petersen! Had he seized his opportunity and led the crew to mutiny, in the hope of converting the expedition into a treasure hunt? Was that the reason he had been so willing to remain behind? He kept his suspicion to himself, however, and accompanied Diane and her father on a complete circuit of the pyramid; but, as he feared, there was no sign of the _Nereid_ anywhere. The craft had vanished as completely as though the ocean floor had opened and swallowed her up. But no, not as completely as that! For presently the professor, who had proceeded to the site where they left the craft resting on the sand, called out excitedly: "Here--come here! There are tracks! Captain Petersen was right! They were attacked!" Hurrying to the scene, they saw before them the plain evidences of a struggle. The ocean bottom was scuffed and stamped, as though by many feet, and a clear trail showed where the craft had finally been dragged away. Obviously there was but one thing to do and they did it. After a brief conference, they turned and followed the trail. * * * * * It led off over the plateau a quarter mile or more, in an eastward direction, terminating at length beside one of the smaller pyramids--and there lay the _Nereid_, apparently unharmed. But her lights were out and there came no answer to their repeated calls, so they judged she must be empty. What had happened to Captain Petersen and his crew? What strange sub-sea enemy had overcome them? What was now their fate? Unanswerable question! But one thing was certain. Larry had misjudged the captain in suspecting him of mutiny. He was sorry for this and resolved he would make amends by doing all in his power to rescue him and his men, if they were still living. Meanwhile his own plight, and that of Diane and her father, was critical. What was to be done? Suddenly, as all three stood there debating that question, Professor Stevens uttered an exclamation and strode toward the pyramid. Following him with their eyes, they saw him pass through an aperture where a huge block of stone had been displaced--and disappear within. The next moment they had joined him, to find themselves in a small flooded chamber at whose far end a narrow gallery sloped upward at a sharp angle. The floor and walls were tiled, they noted, and showed none of the corrosion of the exterior surfaces. Indeed, so immaculate was the room that it might have been occupied but yesterday. As they stood gazing around in wonder, scarcely daring to draw the natural inferences of this phenomena, there came a rasping sound, and, turning toward the entrance, they saw a massive section of masonry descend snugly into place. They were trapped! * * * * * Standing there tense, speechless, they waited, wondering what would be the next move of this strange enemy who held them now so surely in his power. Nor had they long to wait. Almost immediately, there issued a gurgling sound from the inclined gallery, and turning their eyes in the direction of this new phenomena, they saw that the water level was receding, as though under pressure from above. "Singular!" muttered Professor Stevens. "A sort of primitive lock. It seems incredible that human creatures could exist down here, but such appears to be the case." Larry had no desire to dispute the assumption, nor had Diane. They stood there as people might in the imminence of the supernatural, awaiting they knew not what. Swiftly the water receded. Now it was scarcely up to their waists, now plashing about their ankles, and now the room was empty. The next moment, there sounded a rush of feet--and down the gallery came a swarm of the strangest beings any of them had ever seen. They were short, thin, almost emaciated, with pale, pinched faces and pasty, half-naked bodies. But they shimmered with ornaments of gold and jade, like some strange princes from the realm of Neptune--or rather, like Aztec chieftains of the days of Cortes, thought Larry. Blinking in the glare of the searchlights, they clamored around their captives, touching their pressure-suits half in awe and chattering among themselves. * * * * * Then one of them, larger and more regally clad than the rest, stepped up and gestured toward the balcony. "They obviously desire us to accompany them above," said the professor, "and quite as obviously we have little choice in the matter, so I suggest we do so." "Check!" said Larry. "And double-check!" added Diane. So they started up, preceded by a handful of their captors and followed by the main party. The gallery seemed to be leading toward the center of the pyramid, but after a hundred feet or so it turned and continued up at a right angle, turning twice more before they arrived at length in another stone chamber, smaller than the one below. Here their guides paused and waited for the main party. There followed another conference, whereupon their leader stepped up again, indicating this time that they were to remove their suits. At this, Professor Stevens balked. "It is suicide!" he declared. "The air to which they are accustomed here is doubtless at many times our own atmospheric pressure." "But I don't see that there's anything to do about it," said Larry, as their captors danced about them menacingly. "I for one will take a chance!" And before they could stop him, he had pressed the release-valve, emitting the air from his suit--slowly, at first, then more and more rapidly, as no ill effects seemed to result. Finally, flinging off the now deflated suit, he stepped before them in his ordinary clothes, calling with a smile: "Come on out, folks--the air's fine!" * * * * * This statement was somewhat of an exaggeration, as the air smelt dank and bad. But at least it was breathable, as Diane and her father found when they emerged from their own suits. They discovered, furthermore, now that their flashlights were no longer operating, that a faint illumination lit the room, issuing from a number of small crystal jars suspended from the walls: some sort of phosphorescence, evidently. Once again the leader of the curious throng stepped up to them, beaming now and addressing Professor Stevens in some barbaric tongue, and, to their amazement, he replied in words approximating its harsh syllables. "Why, daddy!" gasped Diane. "How can you talk to him?" "Simply enough," was the reply. "They speak a language which seems to be about one-third Basque, mixed oddly with Greek. It merely proves another hypothesis of mine, namely, that the Atlantean influence reached eastward to the Pyrenees mountains and the Hellenic peninsula, as well as to Egypt." * * * * * Whereupon he turned and continued his conversation, haltingly it is true and with many gestures, but understandably nevertheless. "I have received considerable enlightenment as to the mystery of this strange sunken empire," he reported, turning back to them at length. "It is a singular story this creature tells, of how his country sank slowly beneath the waves, during the course of centuries, and of how his ancestors adapted themselves by degrees to the present conditions. I shall report it to you both, in detail, when time affords. But the main thing now is that a man similar to ourselves has conquered their country and set himself up as emperor. It is to him we are about to be taken." "But it doesn't seem possible!" exclaimed Diane. "Why, how could he have got down here?" "In a craft similar to our own, according to this creature. Heaven knows what it is we are about to face! But whatever it is, we will face it bravely." "Check and double-check!" said Larry, with a glance toward Diane that told her she would not find him wanting. They were not destined to meet the test just then, however, for just at that moment a courier in breech-clout and sandals dashed up the gallery and burst into the room, bearing in his right hand a thin square of metal. Bowing, he handed it to the leader of the pigmy throng, with the awed word: "_Cabiri!_" At this, Professor Stevens gave a start. "A message from their high priests!" he whispered. Whatever it contained, the effect produced on the reader was profound. Facing his companions, he addressed them gravely. Then, turning from the room, he commanded the captives to follow. * * * * * The way led back down the inclined gallery to a point where another door now stood open, then on down until finally the passage leveled out into a long, straight tunnel. This they traversed for fully a mile, entering at length a large, square chamber where for a moment they paused. "I judge we are now at the base of the large pyramid," the professor voiced in an undertone. "It would naturally be the abode of the high priests." "But what do you suppose they want with us?" asked Diane. "That I am not disposed to conjecture," was her father's reply. But the note of anxiety in his voice was not lost on Diane, nor on Larry, who pressed her hand reassuringly. Now their captors led them from the room through a small door opening on another inclined gallery, whose turns they followed until all were out of breath from the climb. It ended abruptly on a short, level corridor with apertures to left and right. Into the latter they were led, finding themselves in a grotesquely furnished room, lit dimly by phosphorescent lamps. Swiftly the leader addressed Professor Stevens. Then all withdrew. The aperture was closed by a sliding block of stone. * * * * * For a moment they stood there silent, straining their eyes in the gloom to detect the details of their surroundings, which included several curious chairs and a number of mattings strewn on the tiled floor. "What did he say?" asked Diane at length, in a tremulous voice. "He said we will remain here for the night," her father replied, "and will be taken before the high priests at dawn." "At dawn!" exclaimed Larry. "How the deuce do they know when it is dawn, down here?" "By their calendars, which they have kept accurately," was the answer. "But there are many other questions you must both want to ask, so I shall anticipate them by telling you now what I have been able to learn. Suppose we first sit down, however. I for one am weary." Whereupon they drew up three of those curious chairs of some heavy wood carved with the hideous figures of this strange people's ancient gods, and Professor Stevens began. * * * * * Their sunken empire, as he had surmised, had indeed been the great island of Antillia and a colony of Atlantis. A series of earthquakes and tidal waves such as engulfed their homeland ages before had sent it down, and the estimated archaeological date of the final submergence--namely, 200 B. C.--was approximately correct. But long before this ultimate catastrophe, the bulk of the disheartened population had migrated to Central and South America, founding the Mayan and Incan dynasties. Many of the faithful had stayed on, however, among them most of the Cabiri or high priests, who either were loath to leave their temples or had been ordered by their gods to remain. At any rate, they had remained, and as the great island sank lower and lower, they had fortified themselves against the disaster in their pyramids, which by then alone remained above the surface. These, too, had gradually disappeared beneath the angry waters, however, and with them had disappeared the steadfast priests and their faithful followers, sealing their living tombs into air-tight bell-jars that retained the atmosphere. This they had supplemented at first by drawing it down from above, but as time went by they found other means of getting air; extracting it from the sea water under pressure, by utilizing their subterranean volcanoes, in whose seething cauldrons the gods had placed their salvation; and it was this process that now provided them with the atmosphere which had so amazed their captives. But naturally, lack of sunshine had produced serious degeneration in their race, and that accounted for their diminutive forms and pale bodies. Still, they had been able to survive with a degree of happiness until some ten or a dozen years ago, when a strange enemy had come down in a great metal fish, like that of these new strangers, and with a handful of men had conquered their country. This marauder was after their gold and had looted their temples ruthlessly, carrying away its treasures, for which they hated him with a fury that only violation of their most sacred deities could arouse. Long ago they would have destroyed him, but for the fact that he possessed terrible weapons which were impossible to combat. But they were in smouldering rebellion and waited only the support of their gods, when they would fall on this oppressor and hurl him off. That, though it left many things unexplained, was all the professor had been able to gather from his conversation with the leader of their captors. He ended, admitting regretfully that he was still in ignorance of what fate had befallen Captain Petersen and the crew of the _Nereid._ * * * * * "Perhaps this fellow in the other submarine has got them," suggested Larry. "But why weren't we taken to him too?" asked Diane. "What do you suppose they want with us, anyway, daddy?" "That, my dear, as I told you before," replied her father, "I am not disposed to conjecture. Time will reveal it. Meanwhile, we can only wait." As before, there was a note of anxiety in his voice not lost on either of them. And as for Larry, though he knew but little of those old religions, he knew enough to realize that their altars often ran with the blood of their captives, and he shuddered. With these grim thoughts between them, the trio fell silent. A silence that was interrupted presently by the arrival of a native bearing a tray heaped with strange food. Bowing, he placed it before them and departed. Upon examination, the meal proved to consist mainly of some curious kind of steamed fish, not unpalatable but rather rank and tough. There were several varieties of fungus, too, more or less resembling mushrooms and doubtless grown in some sunless garden of the pyramid. These articles, together with a pitcher of good water that had obviously been distilled from the sea, comprised their meal, and though it was far from appetizing, they ate it. But none of the three slept that night, though Diane dozed off for a few minutes once or twice, for their apprehension of what the dawn might hold made it impossible, to say nothing of the closeness of the air in that windowless subterranean room. Slowly, wearily, the hours dragged by. At length the native who had brought their food came again. This time he spoke. "He says we are now to be taken before the high priests," Professor Stevens translated for them. Almost with relief, though their faces were grave, they stepped out into the corridor, where an escort waited. * * * * * Five minutes later, after proceeding along an inclined gallery that wound ever upward, they were ushered into a vast vaulted chamber lit with a thousand phosphorescent lamps and gleaming with idols of gold and silver, jewels flashing from their eyes. High in the dome hung a great golden disc, representing the sun. At the far end, above a marble altar, coiled a dragon with tusks of ivory and scales of jade, its eyes two lustrous pearls. And all about the room thronged priests in fantastic head-dress and long white robes, woven through elaborately with threads of yellow and green. At the appearance of the captives, a murmur like a chant rose in the still air. Someone touched a brand to the altar and there was a flash of flame followed by a thin column of smoke that spiraled slowly upward. Now one of the priests stepped out--the supreme one among them, to judge from the magnificence of his robe--and addressed the trio, speaking slowly, rhythmically. As his strange, sonorous discourse continued, Professor Stevens grew visibly perturbed. His beard twitched and he shifted uneasily on his feet. * * * * * Finally the discourse ceased and the professor replied to it, briefly. Then he turned grave eyes on Larry and Diane. "What is it?" asked the latter, nervously. "What did the priest say, daddy?" Her father considered, before replying. "Naturally, I did not gather everything," was his slow reply, "but I gathered sufficient to understand what is afoot. First, however, let me explain that the dragon you see over there represents their deity Tlaloc, god of the sea. In more happy circumstances, it would be interesting to note that the name is identified with the Mayan god of the same element." He paused, as though loath to go on, then continued: "At any rate, the Antillians have worshipped Tlaloc principally, since their sun god failed them. They believe he dragged down their empire in his mighty coils, through anger with them, and will raise it up again if appeased. Therefore they propose today to--" "Daddy!" cried Diane, shrinking back in horror, while a chill went up Larry's spine. "You mean--mean that--" "I mean, my poor child, that we are about to be sacrificed to the dragon god of the Antillians." * * * * * The words were no more than uttered, when with a weird chant the Cabiri closed in on their victims and led them with solemn ceremonial toward the altar. In vain did Professor Stevens protest. Their decision had been made and was irrevocable. Tlaloc must be appeased. Lo, even now he roared for the offering! They pointed to the dragon, from whose nostrils suddenly issued hissing spurts of flame. Larry fumed in disgust at the cheap hocus-pocus of it--but the next moment a more violent emotion swept over him as he saw Diane seized and borne swiftly to that loathsome shrine. But even as he lunged forward, the professor reached his daughter's side. Throwing himself in front of her, he begged them to spare her, to sacrifice him instead. The answer of the priests was a blow that knocked the graybeard senseless, and lifting Diane up, half-swooning, they flung her upon the altar. "Mr. Hunter! Larry!" came her despairing cry. She struggled up and for a moment her blue eyes opened, met his beseechingly. That was enough--that and that despairing cry, "Larry!" With the strength of frenzy, he flung off his captors, rushed to her aid, his hard fists flailing. The pigmies went down in his path like grain before the scythe. Reaching the altar, he seized the priest whose knife was already upraised, and, lifting him bodily, flung him full into the ugly snout of that snorting dragon. Then, as a wail of dismay rose from the Cabiri, at this supreme sacrilege, he seized the now unconscious Diane and retreated with her toward the door. * * * * * But there spears barred his escape; and now, recovered from the first shock of this fearful affront to their god, the priests started toward him. Standing at bay, with that limp, tender burden in his arms, Larry awaited the end. As the maddened horde drew near, she stirred, lifted her pale face and smiled, her eyes still shut. "Oh, Larry!" "Diane!" "You saved me. I won't forget." Then, the smile still lingering, she slipped once more into merciful oblivion, and as Larry held her close to his heart, a new warmth kindled there. But bitterness burned in his heart, too. He had saved her--won her love, perhaps--only to lose her. It wasn't fair! Was there no way out? The priests were close now, their pasty faces leering with fierce anticipation of their revenge, when suddenly, from down the gallery outside that guarded door, came the sharp crash of an explosion, followed by shouts and the rush of feet. At the sound, the priests trembled, fled backward into the room and fell moaning before their idols, while the quaking guards strove frantically to close the door. * * * * * But before they could do so, in burst a half dozen brawny sailors in foreign uniform, bearing in their hands little black bulbs that looked suspiciously like grenades. Shouting in a tongue Larry could not distinguish above the uproar, they advanced upon the retreating guards and priests. Then, when all were herded in the far corner of the room, the sailors backed toward the door. Motioning for Larry and Diane to clear out, they raised those sinister little missiles, prepared to fling them. "Wait!" cried Larry, thinking of Professor Stevens. And releasing Diane, who had revived, he rushed forward, seized the prostrate savant from amid the unresisting Cabiri, and bore him to safety. "Daddy!" sobbed Diane, swaying to meet them. "Back!" shouted one of the sailors, shoving them through the door. The last glimpse Larry had of that fateful room was the horde of priests and guards huddled before their altar, voices lifted in supplication to that hideous dragon god. Then issued a series of blinding flashes followed by deafening explosions, mingled with shrieks of anguish. Sickened, he stood there, as the reverberations died away. * * * * * Presently, when it was plain no further menace would come from that blasted temple, their rescuers led the trio back down those winding galleries, and through that long, straight tunnel to the smaller pyramid. Professor Stevens had recovered consciousness by now and was able to walk, with Larry's aid, though a matted clot of blood above his left ear showed the force of the blow he had received. The way, after reaching the smaller pyramid, led up those other galleries they had mounted the night before. This time, undoubtedly, they were to be taken before that mysterious usurping emperor. And what would be the result of that audience? Would it but plunge them from the frying pan into the fire, wondered Larry, or would it mean their salvation? Anyway, he concluded, no fate could be worse than the hideous one they had just escaped. But if only Diane could be spared further anguish! He glanced at her fondly, as they walked along, and she returned him a warm smile. Now the way led into a short, level passage ending in a door guarded by two sailors with rifles. They presented arms, as their comrades came up, and flung open the door. As he stepped inside, Larry blinked in amazement, for he was greeted by electric lights in ornate clusters, richly carpeted floors, walls hung with modern paintings--and there at the far end, beside a massive desk, stood an imposing personage in foreign naval uniform of high rank, strangely familiar, strangely reminiscent of war days. Even before the man spoke, in his guttural English, the suspicion those sailors had aroused crystallized itself. A German! A U-boat commander! * * * * * "Greetings, gentlemen--and the little lady," boomed their host, with heavy affability. "I see that my men were in time. These swine of Antillians are a tricky lot. I must apologize for them--my subjects." The last word was pronounced with scathing contempt. "We return greetings!" said Professor Stevens. "To whom, might I ask, do we owe our lives, and the honor of this interview?" Larry smiled. The old graybeard was up to his form, all right! "You are addressing Herr Rolf von Ullrich," the flattered German replied, adding genially: "commander of one of His Imperial Majesty's super-submarines during the late war and at present Emperor of Antillia." To which the professor replied with dignity that he was greatly honored to make the acquaintance of so exalted a personage, and proceeded in turn to introduce himself and party. But Von Ullrich checked him with a smile. "The distinguished Professor Stevens and his charming daughter need no introduction, as they are already familiar to me through the American press and radio," he said. "While as for Mr. Hunter, your Captain Petersen has already made me acquainted with his name." At the mention of the commander of the _Nereid_, all three of them gave a start. "Then--then my captain and crew are safe?" asked the professor, eagerly. "Quite," Von Ullrich assured him. "You will be taken to them presently. But first there are one or two little things you would like explained--yes? Then I shall put to you a proposal, which if acceptable will guarantee your safe departure from my adopted country." Whereupon the German traced briefly the events leading up to the present. * * * * * During the last months of the war, he had been placed in command of a special U-boat known as the "mystery ship"--designed to resist depth-charges and embodying many other innovations, most of them growing out of his own experience with earlier submarines. One day, while cruising off the West Indies, in wait for some luckless sugar boat, he had been surprised by a destroyer and forced to submerge so suddenly that his diving gear had jammed and they had gone to the bottom. But the craft had managed to withstand the pressure and they had been able to repair the damage, limping home with a bad leak but otherwise none the worse for the experience. The leak repaired and the hull further strengthened, he had set out again. But when in mid-Atlantic the Armistice had come, and rather than return to a defeated country, subject possibly to Allied revenge, he had persuaded his crew to remain out and let their craft be reported missing. What followed then, though Von Ullrich masked it in polite words, was a story of piracy, until they found by degrees that there was more gold on the bottom of the ocean than the top; and from this to the discovery of the sunken empire where he now held reign was but a step. They had thought at first they were looting only empty temples--but, finding people there, had easily conquered them, though ruling them, he admitted, was another matter. As, for instance, yesterday, when the priests had interfered with his orders and carried his three chief captives off to sacrifice. "Where now, but for me, you would be food for their gods!" he ended. "And if you do not find my hospitality altogether to your liking, friends, remember that you came uninvited. In fact, if you will recall, you came despite my explicit warning!" * * * * * But since they were here, he told them, they might be willing to repay his good turn with another. Whereupon Von Ullrich launched into his proposal, which was that Professor Stevens place the _Nereid_ at his disposal for visiting the depths at the foot of the plateau, where lay the capital of the empire, he said--a magnificent metropolis known as the City of the Sun and modeled after the great Atlantean capital, the City of the Golden Gates, and the depository of a treasure, the greedy German believed, that was the ransom of the world. The professor frowned, and for a moment Larry thought he was going to remind their host that this was not a treasure hunt. "Why," he asked instead, "do you not use your own submarine for the purpose?" "Because for one thing, she will not stand the pressure, nor will our suits," was the reply. "And for another, she is already laden with treasure, ready for an--er--forced abdication!" with a sardonic laugh. "Then have you not enough gold already?" "For myself, yes. But there are my men, you see--and men who have glimpsed the treasures of the earth are not easily satisfied, Professor. But have no fear. You shall accompany us, and, by your aid, shall pay your own ransom." * * * * * Von Ullrich made no mention of the alternative, in case the aid was refused, but the ominous light Larry caught in his cold gray eyes spoke as clearly as words. So, since there was nothing else to do, Professor Stevens agreed. Whereupon the audience terminated and they were led from the presence of this arrogant German to another apartment, where they were to meet Captain Petersen and the crew of the _Nereid._ As they proceeded toward it, under guard, Larry wondered why Von Ullrich had even troubled to make the request, when he held it in his power to take the craft anyway. But after the first joyful moment of reunion, it was a mystery no longer, for Captain Petersen reported that immediately upon their capture, the commander of the U-boat had tried to force him to reveal the operation of the _Nereid_, but that he had steadfastly refused, even though threatened with torture. And to think, it came to Larry with a new twinge of shame, that he had suspected this gallant man of mutiny! * * * * * That very morning, while Professor Stevens and his party were still exchanging experiences with Captain Petersen and the members of the crew, Von Ullrich sent for them and they gathered with his own men in the small lock-chamber at the base of the pyramid. There they were provided with temporary suits by their host, since their own--which they brought along--could be inflated only from the _Nereid_. Beside her, they noted as they emerged in relays, the U-boat was now moored. Entering their own craft, they got under way at once and headed swiftly westward toward the brink of the plateau. Most of Von Ullrich's crew were with them, though a few had been left behind to guard against any treachery, on the part of the now sullen and aroused populace. Slipping out over the edge of that precipitous tableland, they tilted her rudders and dove to the abysm below. Presently the central square of the illuminated panel in the navigating room showed three great concentric circles, enclosed by a quadrangle that must have been miles on a side--and within this vast sunken fortress lay a city of innumerable pyramids and temples and palaces. The German's eyes flashed greedily as he peered upon this vision. "There you are!" he exclaimed, quivering with excitement. "Those circles, that square: what would you judge they were, Professor?" "I would judge that originally they were the canals bearing the municipal water supply," Martin Stevens told him quietly, suppressing his own excitement, "for such was said to be the construction of the City of the Golden Gates; but now I judge they are walls raised on those original foundations by the frantic populace, when the submergence first began, in a vain effort to hold back the tides that engulfed them." "And do you think they are of gold?" "Frankly, no; though I have no doubt you will find plenty of that element down there." Nor was the prediction wrong, for modern eyes had never seen such a treasure house as they beheld when presently the _Nereid_ came to rest outside that ancient four-walled city and they forced their way inside. * * * * * Though the walls were not of gold, the inner gates were, and the temples were fairly bursting with the precious metal, as well as rare jewels, the eyes of a thousand idols gleaming with rubies and emeralds. But where was the populace, amid all this prodigious wealth? Was there no life down here? Von Ullrich declared through the vibrator of his pressure-suit that he had heard there was. And as though in substantiation, many of the temples showed the same bell-jar construction as the pyramids above, though even stouter, revealing evidences of having been occupied very recently; but all were flooded and empty. The city was as a city of the dead. This ominous sign did not deter the "emperor," however. Ruthlessly he and his men looted those flooded temples, forcing Professor Stevens and his party to lend aid in the orgy of pillage. And all the time, Larry had an uneasy feeling of gathering furtive hosts about them, waiting--waiting for what? He confided his fears to no one, though he noted with relief that Von Ullrich seemed to sense these unseen presences too, for he proceeded with caution and always kept a strong guard outside. * * * * * By early afternoon, the _Nereid_ was one great coffer-chest. But still the rapacious U-boat commander was unsatisfied, though Professor Stevens began to have doubts if his craft could lift that massive weight of plunder to the top of the plateau. "One more load and we go," he soothed. "A few more pretties for the little lady!" Larry writhed, and should have suspected then and there--but as it was, the blow fell unexpected, stunning. Filing from the lock, they failed to notice that Von Ullrich and his crew hung back, until there came a sudden, guttural command, whereupon Diane was seized and the massive door flung shut in their faces. Appalled by this overwhelming disaster, the party stood for a moment motionless, speechless. Then, as one, Larry and the professor rushed forward and beat upon that barred hatch, calling upon Von Ullrich to open it. From within the submarine, through their vibrators, they heard him laugh. "_Auf Wiedersehen!_" he toasted them. "I now have all the treasure I want! The rest I leave to you! Help yourselves!" Even as he spoke, the _Nereid's_ auxiliary propellers started churning the water. Slowly, sluggishly, like some great gorged fish, the sturdy craft moved off, lifted her snout, headed upward. * * * * * Professor Stevens bowed his head, and Larry could well picture the grief that distorted the graybeard's face, inside that owl-eyed helmet. "Cheer up!" he said, though his own face was twisted with anguish. "Perhaps--" Then he paused--for how could he say that perhaps the situation wasn't as bad as it seemed, when it was obviously hopeless? "My poor Diane!" moaned the professor. "Poor child. Poor child!" As for Captain Petersen and the crew, they said nothing. Perhaps they were thinking of Diane, perhaps of themselves. At least, they knew it was over. Or so they thought. But to Larry, suddenly, occurred a gleam of hope. That strange sense of unseen presences! It was bizarre, of course, but doesn't a drowning person catch at straws? And Lord knows they were drowning, if ever anyone was! He turned and confided to Professor Stevens his idea, which was to retrace their steps within the city gates, seek out the populace and throw themselves on their mercy. The stricken savant, too, grasped at the straw. "It seems fantastic, but after all it is a chance," he admitted. So they pushed back into that great submerged city, with Captain Petersen and his skeptical crew. They entered one of the largest of the temples, wandered forlornly through its flooded halls and corridors, seeking some sign of these alleged beings Larry had sensed. Nor was their search unrewarded, for suddenly the captain himself, most skeptical of all, cried out: "Listen! Did you hear that?" There was no need to ask the question, for all had heard. It was a rasping sound, as of some great door swinging shut, followed almost immediately by a rushing gurgle--and as they stood there tense, the water level began rapidly receding. Even while it was still plashing about their ankles, a secret block of masonry slid back and a horde of Antillians burst in upon them. * * * * * What happened then, happened with a rush that left them dazed. Unable to talk directly with the pigmies, by reason of their pressure-suits, which they dared not remove, they started gesturing with them, trying to explain their predicament and make known that they bore them no ill-will, but the creatures waved for them to cease and led them swiftly through the now waterless temple. "Well, I guess it's all up!" said Larry, adding with dismal humor: "They're probably going to finish that meal they started feeding their dragon last night!" No one laughed, nor made any comment, and he relapsed into silence, realizing that they probably held him responsible for this latest disaster. Leaving the temple, their captors led them into a passage that was level for a time, then inclined sharply. It was laborious going but they struggled on. "I believe they know we are not their enemies!" declared Professor Stevens, at length, to everyone's cheer. "They seem to be leading us back to the plateau by some underground passage." "Let's hope so!" said Larry. "Perhaps I had the right hunch after all." "But my poor Diane!" came the professor's sorrowing after-thought. "That fiend Von Ullrich could never get the _Nereid_ up safely." "I think perhaps he could, with Miss Stevens to help him," put in Captain Petersen, his usual optimism returning. "She is thoroughly familiar with the craft's operation." "That is so," her father admitted, his tone brighter. "But--" "Of course it's so!" exclaimed Larry, breaking off any less hopeful reflections. "So cheerio, folks, as the English say. We'll make it yet!" But in his heart, he was tormented with doubt for Diane's safety.... * * * * * The trail was growing eery, now, and precipitous. To their right rose a sheer cliff. To their left, the path fell off abruptly to a gigantic caldron where red flames leaped and waned. "Looks like something out of Dante's 'Inferno'!" muttered Larry, with a shudder. "The volcano where they distill their atmosphere, evidently," commented Professor Stevens. "It would have been interesting, in other circumstances, to observe the process." "Not to me, it wouldn't!" Larry was glad when they had passed that seething hell-pot and were once more proceeding through a long, dark gallery. But everywhere, though their guides were but a handful, was a sense of those unseen presences, of gathering, furtive hosts about them, waiting--waiting for what? What was this strange sense of tension, of foreboding, that hung in the air? Was the professor wrong? Were they being led to their doom, after all? He was soon to know, for now the gallery they had been traversing levelled out into a series of short passages, each barred by a heavy stone door, and finally they were led into a small, square room, barely large enough to admit them all. There, with gestures toward the far end, their guides left them. The door closed, and almost immediately another on the opposite side opened, slowly at first, then wider and wider, admitting a rush of water that promptly filled the room. Stepping wonderingly out, they found themselves on the upper level, beside the second of the two smaller pyramids. * * * * * "Whew!" gasped Larry, as they stood looking around, still a little dazed. "These people are sure quick-change artists! First they try to feed you to their gods, then they save you from almost as bad a fate. Dizzy, I call it!" "Quite understandable, I should say," declared the professor. "Unable to cope with Von Ullrich themselves, they think perhaps we may be able to." "Well, let's hope they're right!" grimly. "If once I get my hands on him--" He broke off suddenly, as Captain Petersen called out: "The _Nereid_! There she is!" Following with their eyes the bright segment cut into the murky depths by his flashlight, they saw the familiar outlines of their craft; and close beside her lay the U-boat. A feverish activity seemed to be going on between the two submarines. "They're changing cargo!" cried Larry. "Quick! We've got them now!" But the progress they were able to make, hampered by their heavy suits, was maddeningly slow. Their searchlights, moreover, betrayed their approach. Before they could reach the scene, most of the sailors had abandoned their task and piled into the U-boat. Arms swinging wildly, Von Ullrich stood beside it, trying to rally then. Refusing to risk combat, however, since they were unable to use their deadly hand-grenades under water, they continued clambering up the sides of their submersible and shoving down through its conning-tower hatch. Now a figure in a familiar pressure-suit broke away and started toward the advancing party. It was Diane! * * * * * Even as he recognized her, Larry saw Von Ullrich lunge forward, seize his captive and mount to the conning-tower with her--but before the German could thrust her into the hatch, he had reached the U-boat's side and clambered to her rescue. Dropping Diane, Von Ullrich wheeled to face his assailant. They grappled, fell to the deck, rolled over and over. But suddenly, as they were struggling, there came a sound that caused the German to burst free and leap to his feet. It was the sound of engines under them! Ignoring Larry now, Von Ullrich staggered to the conning-tower hatch. It was battened fast. Frantically he beat on it. This much Larry saw, as he knelt there getting his breath. Then he rose, took Diane by the arm and led her down. And he was none too soon, for with a lunge the U-boat got under way. But she seemed unable to lift her loot-laden mass from the ocean floor, and headed off crazily across the plateau, dragging her keel in the sand. With fascinated horror, they watched the craft's erratic course, as it swung loggily westward and headed toward that yawning abysm from which they had all so lately risen. The last sight they had of the U-boat was as it reached the brink, its despairing commander still standing in the conning-tower, hammering vainly on that fast-bound hatch; then they turned away faint, as the doomed craft plunged down, stern up, into those crushing depths. * * * * * Professor Stevens now joined them. "A lesson in avarice," he said gravely, when he had greeted his daughter with heartfelt relief. "And a typical fate of fortune hunters! Let that be a lesson to you, young man." "Amen!" said Larry. "But what happened, my dear?" asked the professor of Diane, a moment later. "Why were they in such a hurry to be off?" "Because the sensible Antillians seized their opportunity and overcame their guards, while we were below," was her reply. "When we got back, we found the pyramids flooded, so there was nothing else for them to do but go." So that was the explanation of those gathering, furtive hosts in the lower level, thought Larry. Now he knew what they had been waiting for! They had been waiting for that usurping vandal to depart. And how they must be gloating now, down there! "But why were they so eager to abandon the _Nereid_?" asked the savant, still puzzled. "It it a better boat than theirs, even if I do say so myself." "Because I put it out of commission, directly we got back up here," replied Diane. "But not permanently!" she added, with what Larry knew was a smile, though he couldn't see her face, of course, through the helmet of her pressure-suit. "Little thoroughbred!" he exclaimed, half to himself. "What did you say, Mr. Hunter?--Larry, I mean," she inquired. "N--nothing," he replied uneasily. "Fibber!" said Diane. "I heard you the first time!" "Just wait till I get out of this darned suit!" said Larry. "I guess I can wait that long!" she told him. And if Professor Stevens heard any of this, it went in one ear and out the other, for he was thinking what a report he would have to make to his confrères when they got home--particularly with half a boatload of assorted idols for proof. [Illustration: He pressed the tiny switch in the flame-tool's handle just as Arlok came through the door.] The Gate to Xoran _By Hal K. Wells_ A strange man of metal comes to Earth on a dreadful mission. He sat in a small half-darkened booth well over in the corner--the man with the strangely glowing blue-green eyes. The booth was one of a score that circled the walls of the "Maori Hut," a popular night club in the San Fernando Valley some five miles over the hills from Hollywood. It was nearly midnight. Half a dozen couples danced lazily in the central dancing space. Other couples remained tête-à-tête in the secluded booths. In the entire room only two men were dining alone. One was the slender gray-haired little man with the weirdly glowing eyes. The other was Blair Gordon, a highly successful young attorney of Los Angeles. Both men had the unmistakable air of waiting for someone. Blair Gordon's college days were not so far distant that he had yet lost any of the splendid physique that had made him an All-American tackle. In any physical combat with the slight gray-haired stranger, Gordon knew that he should be able to break the other in two with one hand. Yet, as he studied the stranger from behind the potted palms that screened his own booth. Gordon was amazed to find himself slowly being overcome by an emotion of dread so intense that it verged upon sheer fear. There was something indescribably alien and utterly sinister in that dimly seen figure in the corner booth. The faint eery light that glowed in the stranger's deep-set eyes was not the lambent flame seen in the chatoyant orbs of some night-prowling jungle beast. Rather was it the blue-green glow of phosphorescent witch-light that flickers and dances in the night mists above steaming tropical swamps. The stranger's face was as classically perfect in its rugged outline as that of a Roman war-god, yet those perfect features seemed utterly lifeless. In the twenty minutes that he had been intently watching the stranger, Gordon would have sworn that the other's face had not moved by so much as the twitch of an eye-lash. * * * * * Then a new couple entered the Maori Hut, and Gordon promptly forgot all thought of the puzzlingly alien figure in the corner. The new arrivals were a vibrantly beautiful blond girl and a plump, sallow-faced man in the early forties. The girl was Leah Keith, Hollywood's latest screen sensation. The man was Dave Redding, her director. A waiter seated Leah and her escort in a booth directly across the room from that of Gordon. It was a maneuver for which Gordon had tipped lavishly when he first came to the Hut. A week ago Leah Keith's engagement to Blair Gordon had been abruptly ended by a trivial little quarrel that two volatile temperaments had fanned into flames which apparently made reconciliation impossible. A miserably lonely week had finally ended in Gordon's present trip to the Maori Hut. He knew that Leah often came there, and he had an overwhelming longing to at least see her again, even though his pride forced him to remain unseen. Now, as he stared glumly at Leah through the palms that effectively screened his own booth, Gordon heartily regretted that he had ever come. The sight of Leah's clear fresh beauty merely made him realize what a fool he had been to let that ridiculous little quarrel come between them. Then, with a sudden tingling thrill, Gordon realized that he was not the only one in the room who was interested in Leah and her escort. Over in the half-darkened corner booth the eery stranger was staring at the girl with an intentness that made his weird eyes glow like miniature pools of shimmering blue-green fire. Again Gordon felt that vague impression of dread, as though he were in the presence of something utterly alien to all human experience. * * * * * Gordon turned his gaze back to Leah, then caught his breath sharply in sudden amaze. The necklace about Leah's throat was beginning to glow with the same uncanny blue-green light that shone in the stranger's eyes! Faint, yet unmistakable, the shimmering radiance pulsed from the necklace in an aura of nameless evil. And with the coming of that aura of weird light at her throat, a strange trance was swiftly sweeping over Leah. She sat there now as rigidly motionless as some exquisite statue of ivory and jet. Gordon stared at her in stark bewilderment. He knew the history of Leah's necklace. It was merely an oddity, and nothing more--a freak piece of costume jewelry made from fragments of an Arizona meteorite. Leah had worn the necklace a dozen times before, without any trace of the weird phenomena that were now occurring. Dancers again thronged the floor to the blaring jazz of the negro orchestra while Gordon was still trying to force his whirling brain to a decision. He was certain that Leah was in deadly peril of some kind, yet the nature of that peril was too bizarre for his mind to imagine. Then the stranger with the glowing eyes took matters into his own hands. He left his booth and began threading his way through the dancers toward Leah. As he watched the progress of that slight gray-haired figure Gordon refused to believe the evidence of his own eyes. The thing was too utterly absurd--yet Gordon was positive that the strong oak floor of the dancing space was visibly swaying and creaking beneath the stranger's mincing tread! * * * * * The stranger paused at Leah's booth only long enough to utter a brief low-voiced command. Then Leah, still in the grip of that strange trance, rose obediently from her seat to accompany him. Dave Redding rose angrily to intercept her. The stranger seemed to barely brush the irate director with his finger tips, yet Redding reeled back as though struck by a pile-driver. Leah and the stranger started for the door. Redding scrambled to his feet again and hurried after them. It was then that Gordon finally shook off the stupor of utter bewilderment that had held him. Springing from his booth, he rushed after the trio. The dancers in his way delayed Gordon momentarily. Leah and the stranger were already gone when he reached the door. The narrow little entrance hallway to the Hut was deserted save for a figure sprawled there on the floor near the outer door. It was the body of Dave Redding. Gordon shuddered as he glanced briefly down at the huddled figure. A single mighty blow from some unknown weapon had crumpled the director's entire face in, like the shattered shell of a broken egg. * * * * * Gordon charged on through the outer door just as a heavy sedan came careening out of the parking lot. He had a flashing glimpse of Leah and the stranger in the front seat of the big car. Gordon raced for his own machine, a powerful low-slung roadster. A single vicious jab at the starting button, and the big motor leaped into roaring life. Gordon shot out from the parking lot onto the main boulevard. A hundred yards away the sedan was fleeing toward Hollywood. Gordon tramped hard on the accelerator. His engine snarled with the unleashed fury of a hundred horsepower. The gap between the two cars swiftly lessened. Then the stranger seemed to become aware for the first time that he was being followed. The next second the big sedan accelerated with the hurtling speed of a flying bullet. Gordon sent his own foot nearly to the floor. The roadster jumped to eighty miles an hour, yet the sedan continued to leave it remorselessly behind. The two cars started up the northern slope of Cahuenga Pass with the sedan nearly two hundred yards ahead, and gaining all the time. Gordon wondered briefly if they were to flash down the other side of the Pass and on into Hollywood at their present mad speed. Then at the summit of the Pass the sedan swerved abruptly to the right and fled west along the Mulholland Highway. Gordon's tires screamed as he swerved the roadster in hot pursuit. * * * * * The dark winding mountain highway was nearly deserted at that hour of the night. Save for an occasional automobile that swerved frantically to the side of the road to dodge the roaring onslaught of the racing cars, Gordon and the stranger had the road to themselves. The stranger seemed no longer to be trying to leave his pursuer hopelessly behind. He allowed Gordon to come within a hundred yards of him. But that was as near as Gordon could get, is spite of the roadster's best efforts. Half a dozen times Gordon trod savagely upon his accelerator in a desperate attempt to close the gap, but each time the sedan fled with the swift grace of a scudding phantom. Finally Gordon had to content himself with merely keeping his distance behind the glowing red tail-light of the car ahead. They passed Laurel Canyon, and still the big sedan bored on to the west. Then finally, half a dozen miles beyond Laurel Canyon, the stranger abruptly left the main highway and started up a narrow private road to the crest of one of the lonely hills. Gordon slowly gained in the next two miles. When the road ended in a winding gravelled driveway into the grounds of what was apparently a private estate, the roadster was scarcely a dozen yards behind. The stranger's features as he stood there stiffly erect in the vivid glare of the roadster's headlights were still as devoid of all expression as ever. The only things that really seemed alive in that masque of a face were the two eyes, glowing eery blue-green fire like twin entities of alien evil. Gordon wasted no time in verbal sparring. He motioned briefly to Leah Keith's rigid form in the front seat of the sedan. "Miss Keith is returning to Hollywood with me," he said curtly. "Will you let her go peaceably, or shall I--?" He left the question unfinished, but its threat was obvious. "Or shall you do what?" asked the stranger quietly. There was an oddly metallic ring in his low even tones. His words were so precisely clipped that they suggested some origin more mechanical than human. "Or shall I take Miss Keith with me by force?" Gordon flared angrily. "You can try to take the lady by force--if you wish." There was an unmistakable jeering note in the metallic tones. The taunt was the last thing needed to unleash Gordon's volatile temper. He stepped forward and swung a hard left hook for that expressionless masque of a face. But the blow never landed. The stranger dodged with uncanny swiftness. His answering gesture seemed merely the gentlest possible push with an outstretched hand, yet Gordon was sent reeling backward a full dozen steps by the terrific force of that apparently gentle blow. * * * * * Recovering himself, Gordon grimly returned to the attack. The stranger again flung out one hand in the contemptuous gesture with which one would brush away a troublesome fly, but this time Gordon was more cautious. He neatly dodged the stranger's blow, then swung a vicious right squarely for his adversary's unprotected jaw. The blow smashed solidly home with all of Gordon's weight behind it. The stranger's jaw buckled and gave beneath that shattering impact. Then abruptly his entire face crumpled into distorted ruin. Gordon staggered back a step in sheer horror at the gruesome result of his blow. The stranger flung a hand up to his shattered features. When his hand came away again, his whole face came away with it! Gordon had one horror-stricken glimpse of a featureless blob of rubbery bluish-gray flesh in which fiendish eyes of blue-green fire blazed in malignant fury. Then the stranger fumbled at his collar, ripping the linen swiftly away. Something lashed out from beneath his throat--a loathsome snake-like object, slender and forked at the end. For one ghastly moment, as the writhing tentacle swung into line with him, Gordon saw its forked ends glow strange fire--one a vivid blue, the other a sparkling green. Then the world was abruptly blotted out for Blair Gordon. * * * * * Consciousness returned to Gordon as swiftly and painlessly as it had left him. For a moment he blinked stupidly in a dazed effort to comprehend the incredible scene before him. He was seated in a chair over near the wall of a large room that was flooded with livid red light from a single globe overhead. Beside him sat Leah Keith, also staring with dazed eyes in an effort to comprehend her surroundings. Directly in front of them stood a figure of stark nightmare horror. The weirdly glowing eyes identified the figure as that of the stranger at the Maori Hut, but there every point of resemblance ceased. Only the cleverest of facial masques and body padding could ever have enabled this monstrosity to pass unnoticed in a world of normal human beings. Now that his disguise was completely stripped away, his slight frame was revealed as a grotesque parody of that of a human being, with arms and legs like pipe-stems, a bald oval head that merged with neckless rigidity directly into a heavy-shouldered body that tapered into an almost wasp-like slenderness at the waist. He was naked save for a loin cloth of some metallic fabric. His bluish-gray skin had a dull oily sheen strangely suggestive of fine grained flexible metal. The creature's face was hideously unlike anything human. Beneath the glowing eyes was a small circular mouth orifice with a cluster of gill-like appendages on either side of it. Patches of lighter-colored skin on either side of the head seemed to serve as ears. From a point just under the head, where the throat of a human being would have been, dangled the foot-and-a-half long tentacle whose forked tip had sent Gordon into oblivion. Behind the creature Gordon was dimly aware of a maze of complicated and utterly unfamiliar apparatus ranged along the opposite wall, giving the room the appearance of being a laboratory of some kind. * * * * * Gordon's obvious bewilderment seemed to amuse the bluish-gray monstrosity. "May I introduce myself?" he asked with a mocking note in his metallic voice. "I am Arlok of Xoran. I am an explorer of Space, and more particularly an Opener of Gates. My home is upon Xoran, which is one of the eleven major planets that circle about the giant blue-white sun that your astronomers call Rigel. I am here to open the Gate between your world and mine." Gordon reached a reassuring hand over to Leah. All memory of their quarrel was obliterated in the face of their present peril. He felt her slender fingers twine firmly with his. The warm contact gave them both new courage. "We of Xoran need your planet and intend to take possession of it," Arlok continued, "but the vast distance which separates Rigel from your solar system makes it impracticable to transport any considerable number of our people here in space-cars for, though our space-cars travel with practically the speed of light, it requires over five hundred and forty years for them to cross that great void. So I was sent as a lone pioneer to your Earth to do the work necessary here in order to open the Gate that will enable Xoran to cross the barrier in less than a minute of your time. * * * * * "That gate is the one through the fourth dimension, for Xoran and your planet in a four-dimensional universe are almost touching each other in spite of the great distance separating them in a three-dimensional universe. We of Xoran, being three-dimensional creatures like you Earthlings, can not even exist on a four-dimensional plane. But we can, by the use of apparatus to open a Gate, pass through a thin sector of the fourth dimension and emerge in a far distant part of our three-dimensional universe. "The situation of our two worlds," Arlok continued, "is somewhat like that of two dots on opposite ends of a long strip of paper that is curved almost into a circle. To two-dimensional beings capable only of realizing and traveling along the two dimensions of the paper itself those dots might be many feet apart, yet in the third dimension straight across free space they might be separated by only the thousandth part of an inch. In order to take that short cut across the third dimension the two-dimensional creatures of the paper would have only to transform a small strip of the intervening space into a two-dimensional surface like their paper. "They could, do this, of course, by the use of proper vibration-creating machinery, for all things in a material universe are merely a matter of vibration. We of Xoran plan to cross the barrier of the fourth dimension by creating a narrow strip of vibrations powerful enough to exactly match and nullify those of the fourth dimension itself. The result will be that this narrow strip will temporarily become an area of three dimensions only, an area over which we can safely pass from our world to yours." * * * * * Arlok indicated one of the pieces of apparatus along the opposite wall of the room. It was an intricate arrangement of finely wound coils with wires leading to scores of needle-like points which constantly shimmered and crackled with tiny blue-white flames. Thick cables ran to a bank of concave reflectors of some gleaming grayish metal. "There is the apparatus which will supply the enormous power necessary to nullify the vibrations of the fourth dimensional barrier," Arlok explained. "It is a condenser and adapter of the cosmic force that you call the Millikan rays. In Xoran a similar apparatus is already set up and finished, but the Gate can only be opened by simultaneous actions from both sides of the barrier. That is why I was sent on my long journey through space to do the necessary work here. I am now nearly finished. A very few hours more will see the final opening of the Gate. Then the fighting hordes of Xoran can sweep through the barrier and overwhelm your planet. "When the Gate from Xoran to a new planet is first opened," Arlok continued, "our scientists always like to have at least one pair of specimens of the new world's inhabitants sent through to them for experimental use. So to-night, while waiting for one of my final castings to cool, I improved the time by making a brief raid upon the place that you call the Maori Hut. The lady here seemed an excellent type of your Earthling women, and the meteoric iron in her necklace made a perfect focus for electric hypnosis. Her escort was too inferior a specimen to be of value to me so I killed him when he attempted to interfere. When you gave chase I lured you on until I could see whether you might be usable. You proved an excellent specimen, so I merely stunned you. Very soon now I shall be ready to send the two of you through the Gate to our scientists in Xoran." * * * * * A cold wave of sheer horror swept over Gordon. It was impossible to doubt the stark and deadly menace promised in the plan of this grim visitor from an alien universe--a menace that loomed not only for Gordon and Leah but for the teeming millions of a doomed and defenseless world. "Let me show you Xoran," Arlok offered. "Then you may be better able to understand." He turned his back carelessly upon his two captives and strode over to the apparatus along the opposite wall. Gordon longed to hurl himself upon the unprotected back of the retreating Xoranian, but he knew that any attempt of that kind would be suicidal. Arlok's deadly tentacle would strike him down before he was halfway across the room. He searched his surroundings with desperate eyes for anything that might serve as a weapon. Then his pulse quickened with sudden hope. There on a small table near Leah was the familiar bulk of a .45 calibre revolver, loaded and ready for use. It was included in a miscellaneous collection of other small earthly tools and objects that Arlok had apparently collected for study. There was an excellent chance that Leah might be able to secure the gun unobserved. Gordon pressed her fingers in a swift attempt at signalling, then jerked his head ever so slightly toward the table. A moment later the quick answering pressure of Leah's fingers told him that she had understood his message. From the corner of his eye Gordon saw Leah's other hand begin cautiously groping behind her for the revolver. * * * * * Then both Gordon and Leah froze into sudden immobility as Arlok faced them again from beside an apparatus slightly reminiscent of an earthly radio set. Arlok threw a switch, and a small bank of tubes glowed pale green. A yard-square plate of bluish-gray metal on the wall above the apparatus glowed with milky fluorescence. "It is easy to penetrate the barrier with light waves," Arlok explained. "That is a Gate that can readily be opened from either side. It was through it that we first discovered your Earth." Arlok threw a rheostat on to more power. The luminous plate cleared swiftly. "And there, Earthlings, is Xoran!" Arlok said proudly. Leah and Gordon gasped in sheer amaze as the glowing plate became a veritable window into another world--a world of utter and alien terror. The livid light of a giant red sun blazed mercilessly down upon a landscape from which every vestige of animal and plant life had apparently been stripped. Naked rocks and barren soil stretched illimitably to the far horizon in a vast monotony of utter desolation. Arlok twirled the knob of the apparatus, and another scene flashed into view. In this scene great gleaming squares and cones of metal rose in towering clusters from the starkly barren land. Hordes of creatures like Arlok swarmed in and around the metal buildings. Giant machines whirled countless wheels in strange tasks. From a thousand great needle-like projections on the buildings spurted shimmering sheets of crackling flame, bathing the entire scene in a whirling mist of fiery vapors. Gordon realized dimly that he must be looking into one of the cities of Xoran, but every detail of the chaotic whirl of activity was too utterly unfamiliar to carry any real significance to his bewildered brain. He was as hopelessly overwhelmed as an African savage would be if transported suddenly into the heart of Times Square. * * * * * Arlok again twirled the knob. The scene shifted, apparently to another planet. This world was still alive, with rich verdure and swarming millions of people strangely like those of Earth. But it was a doomed world. The dread Gate to Xoran had already been opened here. Legions of bluish-gray Xoranians were attacking the planet's inhabitants, and the attack of those metallic hosts was irresistible. The slight bodies of the Xoranians seemed as impervious to bullets and missiles as though armor-plated. The frantic defense of the beleaguered people of the doomed planet caused hardly a casualty in the Xoranian ranks. The attack of the Xoranians was hideously effective. Clouds of dense yellow fog belched from countless projectors in the hands of the bluish-gray hosts, and beneath that deadly miasma all animal and plant life on the doomed planet was crumbling, dying, and rotting into a liquid slime. Then even the slime was swiftly obliterated, and the Xoranians were left triumphant upon a world starkly desolate. "That was one of the minor planets in the swarm that make up the solar system of the sun that your astronomers call Canopus," Arlok explained. "Our first task in conquering a world is to rid it of the unclean surface scum of animal and plant life. When this noxious surface mold is eliminated, the planet is then ready to furnish us sustenance, for we Xoranians live directly upon the metallic elements of the planet itself. Our bodies are of a substance of which your scientists have never even dreamed--deathless, invincible, living metal!" * * * * * Arlok again twirled the control of the apparatus and the scene was shifted back to the planet of Xoran, this time to the interior of what was apparently a vast laboratory. Here scores of Xoranian scientists were working upon captives who were pathetically like human beings of Earth itself, working with lethal gases and deadly liquids as human scientists might experiment upon noxious pests. The details of the scene were so utterly revolting, the tortures that were being inflicted so starkly horrible, that Leah and Gordon sank back in their chairs sick and shaken. Arlok snapped off a switch, and the green light in the tubes died. "That last scene was the laboratory to which I shall send you two presently," he said callously as he started back across the room toward them. Gordon lurched to his feet, his brain a seething whirl of hate in which all thought of caution was gone as he tensed his muscles to hurl himself upon that grim monstrosity from the bleak and desolate realm of Xoran. Then he felt Leah tugging surreptitiously at his right hand. The next moment the bulk of something cold and hard met his fingers. It was the revolver. Leah had secured it while Arlok was busy with his inter-dimensional televisor. Arlok was rapidly approaching them. Gordon hoped against hope that the menace of that deadly tentacle might be diverted for the fraction of a second necessary for him to get in a crippling shot. Leah seemed to divine his thought. She suddenly screamed hysterically and flung herself on the floor almost at Arlok's feet. * * * * * Arlok stopped in obvious wonder and bent over Leah. Gordon took instant advantage of the Xoranian's diverted attention. He whipped the revolver from behind him and fired point-blank at Arlok's unprotected head. The bullet struck squarely, but Arlok was not even staggered. A tiny spot of bluish-gray skin upon his oval skull gleamed faintly for a moment under the bullet's impact. Then the heavy pellet of lead, as thoroughly flattened as though it had struck the triple armor of a battleship, dropped spent and harmless to the floor. Arlok straightened swiftly. For the moment he seemed to have no thought of retaliating with his deadly tentacle. He merely stood there quite still with one thin arm thrown up to guard his glowing eyes. Gordon sent the remainder of the revolver's bullets crashing home as fast as his finger could press the trigger. At that murderously short range the smashing rain of lead should have dropped a charging gorilla. But for all the effect Gordon's shots had upon the Xoranian, his ammunition might as well have been pellets of paper. Arlok's glossy hide merely, glowed momentarily in tiny patches as the bullets struck and flattened harmlessly--and that was all. His last cartridge fired, Gordon flung the empty weapon squarely at the blue monstrosity's hideous face. Arlok made no attempt to dodge. The heavy revolver struck him high on the forehead, then rebounded harmlessly to the floor. Arlok paid no more attention to the blow than a man would to the casual touch of a wind-blown feather. Gordon desperately flung himself forward upon the Xoranian in one last mad effort to overwhelm him. Arlok dodged Gordon's wild blows, then gently swept the Earth man into the embrace of his thin arms. For one helpless moment Gordon sensed the incredible strength and adamantine hardness of the Xoranian's slender figure, together with an overwhelming impression of colossal weight in that deceptively slight body. * * * * * Then Arlok contemptuously flung Gordon away from him. As Gordon staggered backward, Arlok's tentacle lashed upward and levelled upon him. Its twin tips again glowed brilliant green and livid blue. Instantly every muscle in Gordon's body was paralyzed. He stood there as rigid as a statue, his body completely deadened from the neck down. Beside him stood Leah, also frozen motionless in that same weird power. "Earthling, you are beginning to try my patience," Arlok snapped. "Can you not realize that I am utterly invincible in any combat with you? The living metal of my body weighs over sixteen hundred pounds, as you measure weight. The strength inherent in that metal is sufficient to tear a hundred of your Earth men to shreds. But I do not even have to touch you to vanquish you. The electric content of my bodily structure is so infinitely superior to yours that with this tentacle-organ of mine I can instantly short-circuit the feeble currents of your nerve impulses and bring either paralysis or death as I choose. "But enough of this!" Arlok broke off abruptly. "My materials are now ready, and it is time that I finished my work. I shall put you out of my way for a few hours until I am ready to send you through the Gate to the laboratories of Xoran." The green and blue fire of the tentacle's tips flamed to dazzling brightness. The paralysis of Gordon's body swept swiftly over his brain. Black oblivion engulfed him. * * * * * When Gordon again recovered consciousness he found that he was lying on the floor of what was apparently a narrow hall, near the foot of a stairway. His hands were lashed tightly behind him, and his feet and legs were so firmly pinioned together that he could scarcely move. Beside him lay Leah, also tightly bound. A short distance down the hall was the closed door of Arlok's work-room, recognizable by the thin line of red light gleaming beneath it. Moonlight through a window at the rear of the hall made objects around Gordon fairly clear. He looked at Leah and saw tears glistening on her long lashes. "Oh, Blair, I was afraid you'd never waken again," the girl sobbed. "I thought that fiend had killed you!" Her voice broke hysterically. "Steady, darling," Gordon said soothingly. "We simply can't give up now, you know. If that monstrosity ever opens that accursed Gate of his our entire world is doomed. There must be some way to stop him. We've got to find that way and try it--even if it seems only one forlorn chance in a million." * * * * * Gordon shook his head to clear the numbness still lingering from the effect of Arlok's tentacle. The Xoranian seemed unable to produce a paralysis of any great duration with his weird natural weapon. Accordingly, he had been forced to bind his captives like two trussed fowls while he returned to his labors. Lying close together as they were, it was a comparatively easy matter for them to get their bound hands within reach of each other, but after fifteen minutes of vain work Gordon realized that any attempt at untying the ropes was useless. Arlok's prodigious strength had drawn the knots so tight that no human power could ever loosen them. Then Gordon suddenly thought of the one thing in his pockets that might help them. It was a tiny cigarette lighter, of the spring-trigger type. It was in his vest pocket completely out of reach of his bound hands, but there was a way out of that difficulty. Gordon and Leah twisted and rolled their bodies like two contortionists until they succeeded in getting into such a position that Leah was able to get her teeth in the cloth of the vest pocket's edge. A moment of desperate tugging, then the fabric gave way. The lighter dropped from the torn pocket to the floor, where Leah retrieved it. Then they twisted their bodies back to back. Leah managed to get the lighter flaming in her bound hands. Gordon groped in an effort to guide the ropes on his wrists over the tiny flickering flame. * * * * * Then there came the faint welcome odor of smoldering rope as the lighter's tiny flame bit into the bonds. Gordon bit his lips to suppress a cry of pain as the flame seared into his skin as well. The flame bit deeper into the rope. A single strand snapped. Then another strand gave way. To Gordon the process seemed endless as the flame scorched rope and flesh alike. A long minute of lancing agony that seemed hours--then Gordon could stand no more. He tensed his muscles in one mighty agonized effort to end the torture of the flame. The weakened rope gave way completely beneath that pain-maddened lunge. Gordon's hands were free. It was an easy matter now to use the lighter to finish freeing himself and Leah. They made their way swiftly back to the window at the rear of the hall. It slid silently upward. A moment later, and they were out in the brilliant moonlight--free. They made their way around to the front of the house. Behind the drawn shades of one of the front rooms an eery glow of red light marked the location of Arlok's work-room. They heard the occasional clink of tools inside the room as the Xoranian diligently worked to complete his apparatus. They crept stealthily up to where one of the French windows of Arlok's work-room swung slightly ajar. Through the narrow crevice they could see Arlok's grotesque back as he labored over the complex assembly of apparatus against the wall. A heavy stone flung through the window would probably wreck that delicate mechanism completely, yet the two watchers knew that such a respite would be only a temporary one. As long as Arlok remained alive on this planet to build other gates to Xoran, Earth's eventual doom was certain. Complete destruction of Arlok himself was Earth's only hope of salvation. * * * * * The Xoranian seemed to be nearing the end of his labors. He left the apparatus momentarily and walked over to a work-bench where he picked up a slender rod-like tool. Donning a heavy glove to shield his left hand, he selected a small plate of bluish-gray metal, then pressed a switch in the handle of the tool in his right hand. A blade of blinding white flame, seemingly as solid as a blade of metal, spurted for the length of a foot from the tool's tip. Arlok began cutting the plate with the flame, the blade shearing through the heavy metal as easily as a hot knife shears through butter. The sight brought a sudden surge of exultant hope to Gordon. He swiftly drew Leah away from the window, far enough to the side that their low-voiced conversation could not be heard from inside the work-room. "Leah, there is our one chance!" he explained excitedly. "That blue fiend _is_ vulnerable, and that flame-tool of his is the weapon to reach his vulnerability. Did you notice how careful he was to shield his other hand with a glove before he turned the tool on? He can be hurt by that blade of flame, and probably hurt badly." Leah nodded in quick understanding. "If I could lure him out of the room for just a moment, you could slip in through the window and get that flame-tool, Blair," she suggested eagerly. "That might work," Gordon agreed reluctantly. "But, Leah, don't run any more risks than you absolutely have to!" He picked up a small rock. "Here, take this with you. Open the door into the hall and attract Arlok's attention by throwing the rock at his precious apparatus. Then the minute he sees you, try to escape out through the hall again. He'll leave his work to follow you. When he returns to his work-room I'll be in there waiting for him. And I'll be waiting with a weapon that can stab through even that armor-plated hide of his!" They separated, Leah to enter the house, Gordon to return to the window. * * * * * Arlok was back over in front of the apparatus, fitting into place the piece of metal he had just cut. The flame-tool, its switch now turned off, was still on the work-bench. Gordon's heart pounded with excitement as he crouched there with his eyes fixed upon the closed hall door. The minutes seemed to drag interminably. Then suddenly Gordon's muscles tensed. The knob of the hall door had turned ever so slightly. Leah was at her post! The next moment the door was flung open with a violence that sent it slamming back against the wall. The slender figure of Leah stood framed in the opening, her dark eyes blazing as she flung one hand up to hurl her missile. Arlok whirled just as Leah threw the rock straight at the intricate Gate-opening apparatus. With the speed of thought the Xoranian flung his own body over to shield his fragile instruments. The rock thudded harmlessly against his metallic chest. Then Arlok's tentacle flung out like a striking cobra, its forked tip flaming blue and green fire as it focussed upon the open door. But Leah was already gone. Gordon heard her flying footsteps as she raced down the hall. Arlok promptly sped after her in swift pursuit. As Arlok passed through the door into the hall Gordon flung himself into the room, and sped straight for the work-bench. He snatched the flame-tool up, then darted over to the wall by the door. He was not a second too soon. The heavy tread of Arlok's return was already audible in the hall just outside. Gordon prepared to stake everything upon his one slim chance of disabling that fearful tentacle before Arlok could bring it into action. He pressed the tiny switch in the flame-tool's handle just as Arlok came through the door. * * * * * Arlok, startled by the glare of the flame-tool's blazing blade, whirled toward Gordon--but too late. That thin searing shaft of vivid flame had already struck squarely at the base of the Xoranian's tentacle. A seething spray of hissing sparks marked the place where the flame bit deeply home. Arlok screamed, a ghastly metallic note of anguish like nothing human. The Xoranian's powerful hands clutched at Gordon, but he leaped lithely backward out of their reach. Then Gordon again attacked, the flame-tool's shining blade licking in and out like a rapier. The searing flame swept across one of Arlok's arms, and the Xoranian winced. Then the blade stabbed swiftly at Arlok's waist. Arlok half-doubled as he flinched back. Gordon shifted his aim with lightning speed and sent the blade of flame lashing in one accurate terrible stroke that caught Arlok squarely in the eyes. Again Arlok screamed in intolerable agony as that tearing flame darkened forever his glowing eyes. In berserker fury the tortured Xoranian charged blindly toward Gordon. Gordon warily dodged to one side. Arlok, sightless, and with his tentacle crippled, still had enough power in that mighty metallic body of his to tear a hundred Earth men to pieces. Gordon stung Arlok's shoulder with the flame, then desperately leaped to one side just in time to dodge a flailing blow that would have made pulp of his body had it landed. Arlok went stark wild in his frenzied efforts to come to grips with his unseen adversary. Furniture crashed and splintered to kindling wood beneath his threshing feet. Even the stout walls of the room shivered and cracked as the incredible weight of Arlok's body caromed against them. * * * * * Gordon circled lithely around the crippled blue monstrosity like a timber wolf circling a wounded moose. He began concentrating his attack upon Arlok's left leg. Half a dozen deep slashes with the searing flame--then suddenly the thin leg crumpled and broke. Arlok crashed helplessly to the floor. Gordon was now able to shift his attack to Arlok's head. Dodging the blindly flailing arms of the Xoranian, he stabbed again and again at that oval-shaped skull. The searing thrusts began to have their effect. Arlok's convulsive movements became slower and weaker. Gordon sent the flame stabbing in a long final thrust in an attempt to pierce through to that alien metal brain. With startling suddenness the flame burned its way home to some unknown center of life force in the oval skull. There was a brief but appalling gush of bright purple flame from Arlok's eye-sockets and mouth orifice. Then his twitching body stiffened. His bluish-gray hide darkened with incredible swiftness into a dull black. Arlok was dead. Gordon, sickened at the grisly ending to the battle, snapped off the flame-tool and turned to search for Leah. He found her already standing in the hall door, alive, and unhurt. * * * * * "I escaped through the window at the end of the hall," she explained. "Arlok quit following me as soon as he saw that you too were gone from where he had left us tied." She shuddered as she looked down at the Xoranian's mangled body. "I saw most of your fight with him, Blair. It was terrible; awful. But, Blair, we've won!" "Yes, and now we'll make sure of the fruits of our victory," Gordon said grimly, starting over toward the Gate-opening apparatus with the flame-tool in his hand. A very few minutes' work with the shearing blade of flame reduced the intricate apparatus to a mere tangled pile of twisted metal. Arlok, Gate-opener of Xoran, was dead--and the Gate to that grim planet was now irrevocably closed! "Blair, do you feel it too, that eery feeling of countless eyes still watching us from Xoran?" There was frank awe in Leah's half-whispered question. "You know Arlok said that they had watched us for centuries from their side of the barrier. I'm sure they're watching us now. Will they send another Opener of Gates to take up the work where Arlok failed?" Gordon took Leah into his arms. "I don't know, dear," he admitted gravely. "They may send another messenger, but I doubt it. This world of ours has had its warning, and it will heed it. The watchers on Xoran must know that in the five hundred and forty years it would take their next messenger to get here, the Earth will have had more than enough time to prepare an adequate defense for even Xoran's menace. I doubt if there will ever again be an attempt made to open the Gate to Xoran." [Illustration: _The great ship tore apart._] The Eye of Allah _By C. D. Willard_ On the fatal seventh of September a certain Secret Service man sat in the President's chair and--looked back into the Eye of Allah. Blinky Collins' part in this matter was very brief. Blinky lasted just long enough to make a great discovery, to brag about it as was Blinky's way, and then pass on to find his reward in whatever hereafter is set apart for weak-minded crooks whose heads are not hard enough to withstand the crushing impact of a lead-filled pacifier. The photograph studio of Blinky Collins was on the third floor of a disreputable building in an equally unsavory part of Chicago. There were no tinted pictures of beautiful blondes nor of stern, square-jawed men of affairs in Blinky's reception room. His clients, who came furtively there, were strongly opposed to having their pictures taken--they came for other purposes. For the photographic work of Mr. Collins was strictly commercial--and peculiar. There were fingerprints to be photographed and identified for purpose of private revenge, photographs of people to be merged and repictured in compromising closeness for reasons of blackmail. And even X-Ray photography was included in the scope of his work. * * * * * The great discovery came when a box was brought to the dingy room and Mr. Collins was asked to show what was inside it without the bother and inconvenience of disturbing lock and seals. The X-Ray machine sizzled above it, and a photographic plate below was developed to show a string of round discs that could easily have been pearls. The temporary possessor of the box was pleased with the result--but Blinky was puzzled. For the developer had brought out an odd result. There were the pearls as expected, but, too, there was a small picture superimposed--a picture of a bald head and a body beneath seated beside a desk. The picture had been taken from above looking straight down, and head and desk were familiar. Blinky knew them both. The odd part was that he knew also that both of them were at that instant on the ground floor of the same disreputable building, directly under and two floors below his workshop. Like many great discoveries, this of Blinky's came as the result of an accident. He had monkeyed with the X-Ray generator and had made certain substitutions. And here was the result--a bald head and a desk, photographed plainly through two heavy wood floors. Blinky scratched his own head in deep thought. And then he repeated the operation. This time there was a blonde head close to the bald one, and two people were close to the desk and to each other. Blinky knew then that there were financial possibilities in this new line of portrait work. It was some time before the rat eyes of the inventor were able to see exactly what they wanted through this strange device, but Blinky learned. And he fitted a telescope back of the ray and found that he could look along it and see as if through a great funnel what was transpiring blocks and blocks away; he looked where he would, and brick walls or stone were like glass when the new ray struck through them. Blinky never knew what he had--never dreamed of the tremendous potentialities in his oscillating ethereal ray that had a range and penetration beyond anything known. But he knew, in a vague way, that this ray was a channel for light waves to follow, and he learned that he could vary the range of the ray and that whatever light was shown at the end of that range came to him as clear and distinct as if he were there in the room. He sat for hours, staring through the telescope. He would train the device upon a building across the street, then cut down the current until the unseen vibration penetrated inside the building. If there was nothing there of interest he would gradually increase the power, and the ray would extend out and still out into other rooms and beyond them to still others. Blinky had a lot of fun, but he never forgot the practical application of the device--practical, that is, from the distorted viewpoint of a warped mind. * * * * * "I've heard about your machine," said a pasty-faced man one day, as he sat in Blinky's room, "and I think it's a lot of hooey. But I'd give just one grand to know who is with the district attorney this minute." "Where is he?" asked Blinky. "Two blocks down the street, in the station house ... and if Pokey Barnard is with him, the lousy stool-pigeon--" Blinky paid no attention to the other's opinion of one Pokey Barnard; he was busy with a sputtering blue light and a telescope behind a shield of heavy lead. "Put your money on the table," he said, finally: "there's the dicks ... and there's Pokey. Take a look--" It was some few minutes later that Blinky learned of another valuable feature in his ray. He was watching the district attorney when the pasty-faced man brushed against a hanging incandescent light. There was a bit of bare wire exposed, and as it swung into the ray the fuses in the Collins studio blew out instantly. But the squinting eyes at the telescope had seen something first. They had seen the spare form of the district attorney throw itself from the chair as if it had been dealt a blow--or had received an electric shock. Blinky put in new fuses--heavier ones--and tried it again on another subject. And again the man at the receiving end got a shot of current that sent him sprawling. "Now what the devil--" demanded Blinky. He stood off and looked at the machine, the wire with its 110 volts, the invisible ray that was streaming out. "It's insulated, the machine is," he told his caller, "so the juice won't shoot back if I keep my hands off; but why," he demanded profanely, "don't it short on the first thing it touches?" * * * * * He was picturing vaguely a ray like a big insulated cable, with light and current both traveling along a core at its center, cut off, insulated by the ray, so that only the bare end where the ray stopped could make contact. "Some more of them damn electrons," he hazarded; then demanded of his caller: "But am I one hell of a smart guy? Or am I?" There was no denying this fact. The pasty-faced man told Blinky with lurid emphasis just how smart. He had seen with his own eyes and this was too good to keep. He paid his one grand and departed, first to make certain necessary arrangements for the untimely end of one Pokey Barnard, squealer, louse, et cetera, et cetera, and then to spread the glad news through the underworld of Collins' invention. That was Blinky's big mistake, as was shown a few days later. Not many had taken seriously the account of the photographer's experiments, but there was one who had, as was evident. A bearded man, whose eyes stared somewhat wildly from beneath a shock of frowzy hair, entered the Collins work-room and locked the door behind him. His English was imperfect, but the heavy automatic in his hand could not be misunderstood. He forced the trembling inventor to give a demonstration, and the visitor's face showed every evidence of delight. "The cur-rent," he demanded with careful words, "the electreek cur-rent, you shall do also. Yes?" Again the automatic brought quick assent, and again the visitor showed his complete satisfaction. Showed it by slugging the inventor quietly and efficiently and packing the apparatus in the big suitcase he had brought. Blinky Collins had been fond of that machine. He had found a form of television with uncounted possibilities, and it had been for him the perfect instrument of a blackmailing Peeping Tom; he had learned the secret of directed wireless transmission of power and had seen it as a means for annoying his enemies. Yet Blinky Collins--the late Blinky Collins--offered no least objection, when the bearded man walked off with the machine. His body, sprawled awkwardly in the corner, was quite dead.... * * * * * And now, some two months later, in his Washington office, the Chief of the United States Secret Service pushed a paper across his desk to a waiting man and leaned back in his chair. "What would you make of that, Del?" he asked. Robert Delamater reached leisurely for the paper. He regarded it with sleepy, half-closed eyes. There was a crude drawing of an eye at the top. Below was printed--not written--a message in careful, precise letters: "Take warning. The Eye of Allah is upon you. You shall instructions receive from time to time. Follow them. Obey." Delamater laughed. "Why ask me what I think of a nut letter like that. You've had plenty of them just as crazy." "This didn't come to me," said the Chief; "it was addressed to the President of the United States." "Well, there will be others, and we will run the poor sap down. Nothing out of the ordinary I should say." "That is what I thought--at first. Read this--" The big, heavy-set man pushed another and similar paper across the desk. "This one was addressed to the Secretary of State." Delamater did not read it at once. He held both papers to the light; his fingers touched the edges only. "No watermark," he mused; "ordinary white writing stock--sold in all the five and ten cent stores. Tried these for fingerprints I suppose?". "Read it," suggested the Chief. "Another picture of an eye," said Delamater aloud, and read: "'Warning. You are dealing with an emissary from a foreign power who is an unfriend of my country. See him no more. This is the first and last warning. The Eye of Allah watches.' "And what is this below--? 'He did not care for your cigars, Mr. Secretary. Next time--but there must be no next time.'" * * * * * Delamater read slowly--lazily. He seemed only slightly interested except when he came to the odd conclusion of the note. But the Chief knew Delamater and knew how that slow indolence could give place to a feverish, alert concentration when work was to be done. "Crazy as a loon," was the man's conclusion as he dropped the papers upon the desk. "Crazy," his chief corrected, "like a fox! Read the last line again; then get this-- "The Secretary of State _is_ meeting with a foreign agent who is here very much incog. Came in as a servant of a real ambassador. Slipped quietly into Washington, and not a soul knew he was here. He met the Secretary in a closed room; no one saw him come or leave--"; "Well, the Secretary tells me that in that room where nobody could see he offered this man a cigar. His visitor took it, tried to smoke it, apologized--and lit one of his own vile cigarettes." "Hm-m!" Delamater sat a little straighter in his chair; his eyebrows were raised now in questioning astonishment. "Dictaphone? Some employee of the Department listening in?" "Impossible." "Now that begins to be interesting," the other conceded. His eyes had lost their sleepy look. "Want me to take it on?" "Later. Right now. I want you to take this visiting gentleman under your personal charge. Here is the name and the room and hotel where he is staying. He is to meet with the Secretary to-night--he knows where. You will get to him unobserved--absolutely unseen; I can leave that to you. Take him yourself to his appointment, and take him without a brass band. But have what men you want tail you and watch out for spies.... Then, when he is through, bring him back and deliver him safely to his room. Compray?" "Right--give me Wilkins and Smeed. I rather think I can get this bird there and back without being seen, but perhaps they may catch Allah keeping tabs on us at that." He laughed amusedly as he took the paper with the name and address. * * * * * A waiter with pencil and order-pad might have been seen some hours later going as if from the kitchen to the ninth floor of a Washington hotel. And the same waiter, a few minutes later, was escorting a guest from a rear service-door to an inconspicuous car parked nearby. The waiter slipped behind the wheel. A taxi, whose driver was half asleep, was parked a hundred feet behind them at the curb. As they drove away and no other sign of life was seen in the quiet street the driver of the taxi yawned ostentatiously and decided to seek a new stand. He neglected possible fares until a man he called Smeed hailed him a block farther on. They followed slowly after the first car ... and they trailed it again on its return after some hours. "Safe as a church," they reported to the driver of the first car. "We'll swear that nobody was checking up on that trip." And: "O. K." Delamater reported to his chief the next morning. "Put one over on this self-appointed Allah that time." But the Chief did not reply: he was looking at a slip of paper like those he had shown his operative the day before. He tossed it to Delamater and took up the phone. "To the Secretary of State," Delamater read. "You had your warning. Next time you disobey it shall be you who dies." The signature was only the image of an eye. * * * * * The Chief was calling a number; Delamater recognized it as that of the hotel he had visited. "Manager, please, at once," the big man was saying. He identified himself to the distant man. Then: "Please check up on the man in nine four seven. If he doesn't answer, enter the room and report at once--I will hold the phone...." The man at the desk tapped steadily with a pencil; Robert Delamater sat quietly, tensely waiting. But some sixth sense told him what the answer would be. He was not surprised when the Chief repeated what the phone had whispered. "Dead?... Yes!... Leave everything absolutely undisturbed. We will be right over." "Get Doctor Brooks, Del," he said quietly; "the Eye of Allah was watching after all." Robert Delamater was silent as they drove to the hotel. Where had he slipped? He trusted Smeed and Wilkins entirely; if they said his car had not been followed it had not. And the visitor had been disguised; he had seen to that. Then, where had this person stood--this being who called himself the Eye of Allah? "Chief," he said finally. "I didn't slip--nor Wilkins or Smeed." "Someone did," replied the big man, "and it wasn't the Eye of Allah, either." The manager of the hotel was waiting to take them to the room. He unlocked the door with his pass key. "Not a thing touched," he assured the Secret Service men; "there he is, just the way we found him." In the doorway between the bedroom and bath a body was huddled. Doctor Brooks knelt quickly beside it. His hands worked swiftly for a moment, then he rose to his feet. "Dead," he announced. "How long?" asked the Chief. "Some time. Hours I should say--perhaps eight or ten." "Cause?" the query was brief. "It will take an autopsy to determine that. There is no blood or wound to be seen." * * * * * The doctor was again examining the partly rigid body. He opened one hand; it held a cake of soap. There was a grease mark on the hand. Delamater supplied the explanation. "He touched some grease on the old car I was using," he said. "Must have gone directly to wash it off. See--there is water spilled on the floor." Water had indeed been splashed on the tile floor of the bath room; a pool of it still remained about the heavy, foreign-looking shoes of the dead man. Something in it caught Delamater's eye. He leaned down to pick up three pellets of metal, like small shot, round and shining. "I'll keep these," he said, "though the man was never killed with shot as small as that." "We shall have to wait for the autopsy report," said the Chief crisply; "that may give the cause of death. Was there anyone in the room--did you enter it with him last night, Del?" "No," said the operative; "he was very much agitated when we got here--dismissed me rather curtly at the door. He was quite upset about something--spoke English none too well and said something about a warning and damned our Secret Service as inefficient." "A warning!" said the Chief. The dead man's brief case was on the bed. He crossed to it and undid the straps; the topmost paper told the reason for the man's disquiet. It showed the familiar, staring eye. And beneath the eye was a warning: this man was to die if he did not leave Washington at once. The Chief turned to the hotel manager. "Was the door locked?" "Yes." "But it is a spring lock. Someone could have gone out and closed it after him." "Not this time. The dead-bolt was thrown. It takes a key to do that from the outside or this thumb-turn on the inside." The hotel man demonstrated the action of the heavy bolt. "Then, with a duplicate key, a man could have left this room and locked the door behind him." "Absolutely not. The floor-clerk was on duty all night. I have questioned her: this room was under her eyes all the time. She saw this man return, saw your man, here"--and he pointed to Delamater--"leave him at the door. There was no person left the room after that." "See about the autopsy, Doctor," the Chief ordered. And to the manager: "Not a thing here must be touched. Admit only Mr. Delamater and no one else unless he vouches for them. "Del," he told the operative, "I'm giving you a chance to make up for last night. Go to it." And Robert Delamater "went to it" with all the thoroughness at his command, and with a total lack of result. * * * * * The autopsy helped not at all. The man was dead; it was apparently a natural death. "Not a scratch nor a mark on him," was the report. But: "... next time it will be you," the note with the staring eye had warned the Secretary of State. The writer of it was taking full credit for the mysterious death. Robert Delamater had three small bits of metal, like tiny shot, and he racked his brain to connect these with the death. There were fingerprints, too, beautifully developed upon the mysterious missives--prints that tallied with none in the records. There were analyses of the paper--of the ink--and not a clue in any of them. Just three pellets of metal. Robert Delamater had failed utterly, and he was bitter in the knowledge of his failure. "He had you spotted, Del," the Chief insisted. "The writer of these notes may be crazy, but he was clever enough to know that this man _did_ see the Secretary. And he was waiting for him when he came back; then he killed him." "Without a mark?" "He killed him," the Chief repeated; "then he left--and that's that." "But," Delamater objected, "the room clerk--" "--took a nap," broke in the Chief. But Delamater could not be satisfied with the explanation. "He got his, all right," he conceded, "--got it in a locked room nine stories above the street, with no possible means of bringing it upon himself--and no way for the murderer to escape. I tell you there is something more to this: just the letter to the Secretary, as if this Eye of Allah were spying upon him--" The Chief waved all that aside. "A clever spy," he insisted. "Too clever for you. And a darn good guesser; he had us all fooled. But we're dealing with a madman, not a ghost, and he didn't sail in through a ninth story window nor go out through a locked door; neither did he spy on the Secretary of State in his private office. Don't try to make a supernatural mystery out of a failure, Del." The big man's words were tempered with a laugh, but there was an edge of sarcasm, ill-concealed. * * * * * And then came the next note. And the next. The letters were mailed at various points in and about the city; they came in a flood. And they were addressed to the President of the United States, to the Secretary of War--of the Navy--to all the Cabinet members. And all carried the same threat under the staring eye. The United States, to this man, represented all that was tyrannical and oppressive to the downtrodden of the earth. He proposed to end it--this government first, then others in their turn. It was the outpouring of a wildly irrational mind that came to the office of the harassed Chief of the United States Secret Service, who had instructions to run this man down--this man who signed himself The Eye of Allah. And do it quickly for the notes were threatening. Official Washington, it seemed, was getting jumpy and was making caustic inquiries as to why a Secret Service department was maintained. The Chief, himself, was directing the investigation--and getting nowhere. "Here is the latest," he said one morning. "Mailed at New York." Delamater and a dozen other operatives were in his office: he showed them a letter printed like all the others. There was the eye, and beneath were words that made the readers catch their breath. "The Eye of Allah sees--it has warned--now it will destroy. The day of judgment is at hand. The battleship _Maryland_ is at anchor in the Hudson River at New York. No more shall it be the weapon of a despot government. It will be destroyed at twelve o'clock on September fifth." "Wild talk," said the Chief, "but today is the fourth. The Commander of the _Maryland_ has been warned--approach by air or water will be impossible. I want you men to patrol the shore and nail this man if he shows up. Lord knows what he intends--bluffing probably--but he may try some fool stunt. If he does--get him!" * * * * * Eleven-thirty by the watch on Robert Delamater's wrist found him seated in the bow of a speed-boat the following morning. They patrolled slowly up and down the shore. There were fellow operatives, he knew, scores of them, posted at all points of vantage along the docks. Eleven forty-five--and the roar of seaplanes came from above where air patrols were-guarding the skies. Small boats drove back and forth on set courses; no curious sight-seeing craft could approach the _Maryland_ that day. On board the battleship, too, there was activity apparent. A bugle sounded, and the warning of bellowing Klaxons echoed across the water. Here, in the peace and safety of the big port, the great man-of-war was sounding general quarters, and a scurry of running men showed for an instant on her decks. Anti-aircraft guns swung silently upon imaginary targets-- The watcher smiled at the absurdity of it all--this preparation to repel the attack of a wild-eyed writer of insane threats. And yet--and yet-- He knew, too, there was apprehension in his frequent glances at his watch. One minute to go! Delamater should have watched the shore. And, instead, he could not keep his eyes from the big fighting-ship silhouetted so clearly less than a mile away, motionless and waiting--waiting--for what? He saw the great turreted guns, useless against this puny, invisible opponent. Above them the fighting tops were gleaming. And above them-- Delamater shaded his eyes with a quick, tense hand: the tip of the mast was sparkling. There was a blue flash that glinted along the steel. It was gone to reappear on the fighting top itself--then lower. * * * * * What was it? the watching man was asking himself. What did it bring to mind? A street-car? A defective trolley? The zipping flash of a contact made and broken? That last! Like the touch of a invisible wire, tremendously charged, a wire that touched and retreated, that made and lost its contact, the flashing arc was working toward the deck. It felt its way to the body of the ship; the arc was plain, starting from mid-air to hiss against the armored side; the arc shortened--went to nothing--vanished.... A puff of smoke from an open port proved its presence inside. Delamater had the conviction that a deadly something had gone through the ship's side--was insulated from it--was searching with its blazing, arcing end for the ammunition rooms.... The realization of that creeping menace came to Delamater with a gripping, numbing horror. The seconds were almost endless as he waited. Slowly, before his terrified eyes, the deck of the great ship bulged upward ... slowly it rolled and tore apart ... a mammoth turret with sixteen-inch guns was lifting unhurriedly into the air ... there were bodies of men rocketing skyward.... The mind of the man was racing at lightning speed, and the havoc before him seemed more horrible in its slow, leisurely progress. If he could only move--do something! The shock of the blasted air struck him sprawling into the bottom of the boat; the listener was hammered almost to numbness by the deafening thunder that battered and tore through the still air. At top speed the helmsman drove for the shelter of a hidden cove. They made it an instant before the great waves struck high upon the sand spit. Over the bay hung a ballooning cloud of black and gray--lifting for an instant to show in stark ghastliness the wreckage, broken and twisted, that marked where the battleship _Maryland_ rested in the mud in the harbor of New York. * * * * * The eyes of the Secret-Service men were filled with the indelible impress of what they had seen. Again and again, before him, came the vision of a ship full of men in horrible, slow disintegration; his mind was numbed and his actions and reactions were largely automatic. But somehow he found himself in the roar of the subway, and later he sat in a chair and knew he was in a Pullman of a Washington train. He rode for hours in preoccupied silence, his gaze fixed unseeingly, striving to reach out and out to some distant, unknown something which he was trying to visualize. But he looked at intervals at his hand that held three metal pellets. He was groping for the mental sequence which would bring the few known facts together and indicate their cause. A threat--a seeming spying within a closed and secret room--the murder on the ninth floor, a murder without trace of wound or weapon. Weapon! He stared again at the tangible evidence he held; then shook his head in perplexed abstraction. No--the man was killed by unknown means. And now--the _Maryland_! And a visible finger of death--touching, flashing, feeling its way to the deadly cargo of powder sacks. Not till he sat alone with his chief did he put into words his thoughts. "A time bomb did it," the Chief was saying. "The officials deny it, but what other answer is there? No one approached that ship--you know that, Del--no torpedo nor aerial bomb! Nothing as fanciful as that!" Robert Delamater's lips formed a wry smile. "Nothing at fanciful as that"--and he was thinking, thinking--of what he hardly dared express. "We will start with the ship's personnel," the other continued; "find every man who was not on board when the explosion occurred--" "No use," the operative interrupted; "this was no inside job, Chief." He paused to choose his words while the other watched him curiously. "Someone _did_ reach that ship--reached it from a distance--reached it in the same way they reached that poor devil I left at room nine forty-seven. Listen--" * * * * * He told his superior of his vigil on the speed-boat--of the almost invisible flash against the ship's mast. "He reached it, Chief," he concluded; "he felt or saw his way down and through the side of that ship. And he fired their ammunition from God knows where." "I wonder," said the big man slowly; "I wonder if you know just what you are trying to tell me--just how absurd your idea is. Are you seriously hinting at long-distance vision through solid armor-plate--through these walls of stone and steel? And wireless power-transmission through the same wall--!" "Exactly!" said the operative. "Why, Del, you must be as crazy as this Eye of Allah individual. It's impossible." "That word," said Delamater, quietly, "has been crossed out of scientific books in the past few years." "What do you mean?" "You have studied some physical science, of course?" Delamater asked. The Chief nodded. "Then you know what I mean. I mean that up to recent years science had all the possibilities and impossibilities neatly divided and catalogued. Ignorance, as always, was the best basis for positive assurance. Then they got inside the atom. And since then your real scientist has been a very humble man. He has seen the impossibility of yesterday become the established fact of to-day." The Chief of the United States Secret Service was tapping with nervous irritation on the desk before him. "Yes, yes!" he agreed, and again he looked oddly at his operative. "Perhaps there is something to that; you work along that line, Del: you can have a free hand. Take a few days off, a little vacation if you wish. Yes--and ask Sprague to step in from the other office; he has the personnel list." * * * * * Robert Delamater felt the other's eyes follow him as he left the room. "And that about lets me out," he told himself; "he thinks I've gone cuckoo, now." He stopped in a corridor; his fingers, fumbling in a vest pocket, had touched the little metal spheres. Again his mind flashed back to the chain of events he had linked together. He turned toward an inner office. "I would like to see Doctor Brooks," he said. And when the physician appeared: "About that man who was murdered at the hotel, Doctor--" "Who died," the doctor corrected; "we found no evidence of murder." "Who was murdered," the operative insisted. "Have you his clothing where I can examine it?" "Sure," agreed the physician. He led Delamater to another room and brought out a box of the dead man's effects. "But if it's murder you expect to prove you'll find no help in this." The Secret Service man nodded. "I'll look them over, just the same," he said. "Thanks." Alone in the room, he went over the clothing piece by piece. Again he examined each garment, each pocket, the lining, as he had done before when first he took the case. Metal, he thought, he must find metal. But only when a heavy shoe was in his hands did the anxious frown relax from about his eyes. "Of course," he whispered, half aloud. "What a fool I was! I should have thought of that." The soles of the shoes were sewed, but, beside the stitches were metal specks, where cobbler's nails were driven. And in the sole of one shoe were three tiny holes. "Melted!" he said exultantly. "Crazy, am I, Chief? This man was standing on a wet floor; he made a perfect ground. And he got a jolt that melted these nails when it flashed out of him." He wrapped the clothing carefully and replaced it in the box. And he fingered the metal pellets in his pocket as he slipped quietly from the room. * * * * * He did not stop to talk with Doctor Brooks; he wanted to think, to ponder upon the incredible proof of the theory he had hardly dared believe. The Eye of Allah--the maniac--was real; and his power for evil! There was work to be done, and the point of beginning was not plain. How far did the invisible arm reach? How far could the Eye of Allah see? Where was the generator--the origin of this wireless power; along what channel did it flow? A ray of lightless light--an unseen ethereal vibration.... Delamater could only guess at the answers. The current to kill a man or to flash a spark into silken powder bags need not be heavy, he knew. Five hundred--a thousand volts--if the mysterious conductor carried it without resistance and without loss. People had been killed by house-lighting currents--a mere 110 volts--when conditions were right. There would be no peculiar or unusual demand upon the power company to point him toward the hidden maniac. He tossed restlessly throughout the night, and morning brought no answer to his repeated questions. But it brought a hurry call from his Chief. "Right away," was the instruction; "don't lose a minute. Come to the office." He found the big man at his desk. He was quiet, unhurried, but the operative knew at a glance the tense repression that was being exercised--the iron control of nerves that demanded action and found incompetence and helplessness instead. "I don't believe your fantastic theories," he told Delamater. "Impractical--impossible! But--" He handed the waiting man a paper. "We must not leave a stone unturned." Delamater said nothing; he looked at the paper in his hand. "To the President of the United States," he read. "Prepare to meet your God. Friday. The eighth. Twelve o'clock." The signature he hardly saw; the staring, open eye was all too familiar. "That is to-morrow," said Delamater softly. "The President dies to-morrow." * * * * * "No!" exploded the Chief. "Do you realize what that means? The President murdered--more killings to follow--and the killer unknown! Why the country will be in a panic: the whole structure of the Government is threatened!" He paused, then added as he struck his open hand upon the desk: "I will have every available man at the White House." "For witnesses?" asked Delamater coldly. The big man stared at his operative; the lines of his face were sagging. "Do you believe--really--he can strike him down--at his desk--from a distance?" "I know it." Delamater's fingers played for a moment with three bits of metal in his pocket. Unconsciously he voiced his thoughts: "Does the President have nails in his shoes, I wonder?" "What--what's that?" the Chief demanded. But Delamater made no reply. He was picturing the President. He would be seated at his desk, waiting, waiting ... and the bells would be ringing and whistles blowing from distant shops when the bolt would strike.... It would flash from his feet ... through the thick rug ... through the rug.... It would have to ground. He paid no heed to his Chief's repeated question. He was seeing, not the rug in the Presidential office, but below it--underneath it--a heavy pad of rubber. "If he can be insulated--" he said aloud, and stared unseeingly at his eagerly listening superiors--"even the telephone cut--no possible connection with the ground--" "For God's sake, Del, if you've got an idea--any hope at all! I'm--I'm up against it, Del." The operative brought his distant gaze back to the room and the man across from him. "Yes," he said slowly, thoughtfully, "I've got the beginning of an idea; I don't see the end of it yet. "We can cut him off from the ground--the President, I mean--make an insulated island where he sits. But this devil will get him the instant he leaves ... unless ... unless...." "Yes--yes?" The Chief's voice was high-pitched with anxious impatience; for the first time he was admitting to himself his complete helplessness in this emergency. "Unless," said Delamater, as the idea grew and took shape, "unless that wireless channel works both ways. If it does ... if it does...." The big man made a gesture of complete incomprehension. "Wait!" said Robert Delamater, sharply. If ever his sleepy indolence had misled his Chief, there was none to do so now in the voice that rang like cold steel. His eyes were slits under the deep-drawn brows, and his mouth was one straight line. * * * * * To the hunter there is no greater game than man. And Robert Delamater, man-hunter, had his treacherous quarry in sight. He fired staccato questions at his Chief. "Is the President at his desk at twelve?" "Yes." "Does he know--about this?" "Yes." "Does he know it means death?" The Chief nodded. "I see a way--a chance," said the operative. "Do I get a free hand?" "Yes--Good Lord, yes! If there's any chance of--" Delamater silenced him. "I'll be the one to take the chance," he said grimly. "Chief, I intend to impersonate the President." "Now listen-- The President and I are about the same build. I know a man who can take care of the make-up; he will get me by anything but a close inspection. This Eye of Allah, up to now, has worked only in the light. We'll have to gamble on that and work our change in the dark. "The President must go to bed as usual--impress upon him that he may be under constant surveillance. Then, in the night, he leaves-- "Oh, I know he won't want to hide himself, but he must. That's up to you. "Arrange for me to go to his room before daylight. From that minute on I am the President. Get me his routine for that morning; I must follow it so as to arouse no least suspicion." * * * * * "But I don't see--" began the Chief. "You will impersonate him--yes--but what then? You will be killed if this maniac makes good. Is the President of the United States to be a fugitive? Is--" "Hold on, hold on!" said Delamater. He leaned back in his chair; his face relaxed to a smile, then a laugh. "I've got it all now. Perhaps it will work. If not--" A shrug of the shoulders completed the thought. "And I have been shooting it to you pretty fast haven't I! Now here is the idea-- "I must be in the President's chair at noon. This Allah person will be watching in, so I must be acting the part all morning. I will have the heaviest insulation I can get under the rug, and I'll have something to take the shot instead of myself. And perhaps, perhaps I will send a message back to the Eye of Allah that will be a surprise. "Is it a bet?" he asked. "Remember, I'm taking the chance--unless you know some better way--" The Chief's chair came down with a bang. "We'll gamble on it, Del," he said; "we've got to--there is no other way.... And now what do you want?" "A note to the White House electrician," said Robert Delamater, "and full authority to ask for anything I may need, from the U. S. Treasury down to a pair of wire-cutters." His smile had become contagious; the Chief's anxious look relaxed. "If you pull this off, Del, they may give you the Treasury or the Mint at that. But remember, republics are notoriously ungenerous." "We'll have to gamble on that, too," said Robert Delamater. * * * * * The heart of the Nation is Washington. Some, there are, who would have us feel that New York rules our lives. Chicago--San Francisco--these and other great cities sometimes forget that they are mere ganglia on the financial and commercial nervous system. The heart is Washington, and, Congress to the contrary notwithstanding, the heart of that heart is not the domed building at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue, but an American home. A simple, gracious mansion, standing in quiet dignity and whiteness above its velvet lawns. It is the White House that draws most strongly at the interest and curiosity of the homely, common throng that visits the capital. But there were no casual visitors at the White House on the seventh of September. Certain Senators, even, were denied admittance. The President was seeing only the members of the Cabinet and some few others. It is given to a Secret Service operative, in his time, to play many parts. But even a versatile actor might pause at impersonating a President. Robert Delamater was acting the role with never a fumble. He sat, this new Robert Delamater, so startlingly like the Chief Executive, in the chair by a flat top desk. And he worked diligently at a mass of correspondence. Secretaries came and went; files were brought. Occasionally he replied to a telephone call--or perhaps called someone. It would be hard to say which happened, for no telephone bells rang. On the desk was a schedule that Delamater consulted. So much time for correspondence--so many minutes for a conference with this or that official, men who were warned to play up to this new Chief Executive as if the life of their real President were at stake. * * * * * To any observer the busy routine of the morning must have passed with never a break. And there was an observer, as Delamater knew. He had wondered if the mystic ray might carry electrons that would prove its presence. And now he knew. The Chief of the U. S. Secret Service had come for a consultation with the President. And whatever lingering doubts may have stifled his reluctant imagination were dispelled when the figure at the desk opened a drawer. "Notice this," he told the Chief as he appeared to search for a paper in the desk. "An electroscope; I put it in here last night. It is discharging. The ray has been on since nine-thirty. No current to electrocute me--just a penetrating ray." He returned the paper to the drawer and closed it. "So that is that," he said, and picked up a document to which he called the visitor's attention. "Just acting," he explained. "The audience may be critical; we must try to give them a good show! And now give me a report. What are you doing? Has anything else turned up? I am counting on you to stand by and see that that electrician is on his toes at twelve o'clock." "Stand by is right," the Chief agreed; "that's about all we can do. I have twenty men in and about the grounds--there will be as many more later on. And I know now just how little use we are to you, Del." "Your expression!" warned Delamater. "Remember you are talking to the President. Very official and all that." "Right! But now tell me what is the game, Del. If that devil fails to knock you out here where you are safe, he will get you when you leave the room." "Perhaps," agreed the pseudo-executive, "and again, perhaps not. He won't get me here; I am sure of that. They have this part of the room insulated. The phone wire is cut--my conversations there are all faked. "There is only one spot in this room where that current can pass. A heavy cable is grounded outside in wet earth. It comes to a copper plate on this desk; you can't see it--it is under those papers." * * * * * "And if the current comes--" began the visitor. "When it comes," the other corrected, "it will jump to that plate and go off harmlessly--I hope." "And then what? How does that let you out?" "Then we will see," said the presidential figure. "And you've been here long enough, Chief. Send in the President's secretary as you go out." "He arose to place a friendly, patronizing hand on the other's shoulder. "Good-by," he said, "and watch that electrician at twelve. He is to throw the big switch when I call." "Good luck," said the big man huskily. "We've got to hand it to you, Del; you're--" "Good-by!" The figure of the Chief Executive turned abruptly to his desk. There was more careful acting--another conference--some dictating. The clock on the desk gave the time as eleven fifty-five. The man before the flat topped desk verified it by a surreptitious glance at his watch. He dismissed the secretary and busied himself with some personal writing. Eleven fifty-nine--and he pushed paper and pen aside. The movement disturbed some other papers, neatly stacked. They were dislodged, and where they had lain was a disk of dull copper. "Ready," the man called softly. "Don't stand too near that line." The first boom of noonday bells came faintly to the room. The President--to all but the other actors in the morning's drama--leaned far back in his chair. The room was suddenly deathly still. The faint ticking of the desk clock was loud and rasping. There was heavy breathing audible in the room beyond. The last noonday chime had died away.... The man at the desk was waiting--waiting. And he thought he was prepared, nerves steeled, for the expected. But he jerked back, to fall with the overturned chair upon the soft, thick-padded rug, at the ripping, crackling hiss that tore through the silent room. * * * * * From a point above the desk a blue arc flamed and wavered. Its unseen terminal moved erratically in the air, but the other end of the deadly flame held steady upon a glowing, copper disc. Delamater, prone on the floor, saw the wavering point that marked the end of the invisible carrier of the current--saw it drift aside till the blue arc was broken. It returned, and the arc crashed again into blinding flame. Then, as abruptly, the blue menace vanished. The man on the floor waited, waited, and tried to hold fast to some sense of time. Then: "Contact!" he shouted. "The switch! Close the switch!" "Closed!" came the answer from a distant room. There was a shouted warning to unseen men: "Stand back there--back--there's twenty thousand volts on that line--" Again the silence.... "Would it work? Would it?" Delamater's mind was full of delirious, half-thought hopes. That fiend in some far-off room had cut the current meant as a death-bolt to the Nation's' head. He would leave the ray on--look along it to gloat over his easy victory. His generator must be insulated: would he touch it with his hand, now that his own current was off?--make of himself a conductor? In the air overhead formed a terrible arc. From the floor, Delamater saw it rip crashingly into life as twenty thousand volts bridged the gap of a foot or less to the invisible ray. It hissed tremendously in the stillness.... And Delamater suddenly buried his face in his hands. For in his mind he was seeing a rigid, searing body, and in his nostrils, acrid, distinct, was the smell of burning flesh. "Don't be a fool," he told himself fiercely. "Don't be a fool! Imagination!" The light was out. "Switch off!" a voice was calling. There was a rush of swift feet from the distant doors; friendly hands were under him--lifting him--as the room, for Robert Delamater, President-in-name of the United States, turned whirlingly, dizzily black.... * * * * * Robert Delamater, U. S. Secret Service operative, entered the office of his Chief. Two days of enforced idleness and quiet had been all he could stand. He laid a folded newspaper before the smiling, welcoming man. "That's it, I suppose," he said, and pointed to a short notice. "X-ray Operator Killed," was the caption. "Found Dead in Office in Watts Building." He had read the brief item many times. "That's what we let the reporters have," said the Chief. "Was he"--the operative hesitated for a moment--"pretty well fried?" "Quite!" "And the machine?" "Broken glass and melted metal. He smashed it as he fell." "The Eye of Allah," mused Delamater. "Poor devil--poor, crazy devil. Well, we gambled--and we won. How about the rest of the bet? Do I get the Mint?" "Hell, no!" said the Chief. "Do you expect to win all the time? They want to know why it took us so long to get him. "Now, there's a little matter out in Ohio, Del, that we'll have to get after--" THE "TELELUX" Sound and light were transformed into mechanical action at the banquet of the National Tool Exposition recently to illustrate their possibilities in regulating traffic, aiding the aviator, and performing other automatic functions. A beam of light was thrown on the "eyes" of a mechanical contrivance known as the "telelux," a brother of the "televox," and as the light was thrown on and off it performed mechanical function such as turning an electric switch. The contrivance, which was developed by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, utilizes two photo-electric cells, sensitive to the light beam. One of the cells is a selector, which progressively chooses any one of three operating circuits when light is thrown on it. The other cell is the operator, which opens or closes the chosen circuit, thus performing the desired function. S. M. Kintner, manager of the company's research department, who made the demonstration, also threw music across the room on a beam of light, and light was utilized in depicting the shape and direction of stresses in mechanical materials. [Illustration _"The globe leaped upward into the huge coil, which whirled madly."_] The Fifth-Dimension Catapult A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By Murray Leinster_ The story of Tommy Reames' extraordinary rescue of Professor Denham and his daughter--marooned in the fifth dimension. FOREWORD This story has no normal starting-place, because there are too many places where it might be said to begin. One might commence when Professor Denham, Ph. D., M. A., etc., isolated a metal that scientists have been talking about for many years without ever being able to smelt. Or it might start with his first experimental use of that metal with entirely impossible results. Or it might very plausibly begin with an interview between a celebrated leader of gangsters in the city of Chicago and a spectacled young laboratory assistant, who had turned over to him a peculiar heavy object of solid gold and very nervously explained, and finally managed to prove, where it came from. With also impossible results, because it turned "King" Jacaro, lord of vice-resorts and rum-runners, into a passionate enthusiast in non-Euclidean geometry. The whole story might be said to begin with the moment of that interview. But that leaves out Smithers, and especially it leaves out Tommy Reames. So, on the whole, it is best to take up the narrative at the moment of Tommy's first entrance into the course of events. CHAPTER I He came to a stop in a cloud of dust that swirled up to and all about the big roadster, and surveyed the gate of the private road. The gate was rather impressive. At its top was a sign. "Keep Out!" Halfway down was another sign. "Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted." On one gate-post was another notice, "Live Wires Within." and on the other a defiant placard. "Savage Dogs At Large Within This Fence." The fence itself was all of seven feet high and made of the heaviest of woven-wire construction. It was topped with barbed wire, and went all the way down both sides of a narrow right of way until it vanished in the distance. Tommy got out of the car and opened the gate. This fitted the description of his destination, as given him by a brawny, red-headed filling-station attendant in the village some two miles back. He drove the roadster through the gate, got out and closed it piously, got back in the car and shot it ahead. He went humming down the narrow private road at forty-five miles an hour. That was Tommy Reames' way. He looked totally unlike the conventional description of a scientist of any sort--as much unlike a scientist as his sport roadster looked unlike a scientist's customary means of transit--and ordinarily he acted quite unlike one. As a matter of fact, most of the people Tommy associated with had no faintest inkling of his taste for science as an avocation. There was Peter Dalzell, for instance, who would have held up his hands in holy horror at the idea of Tommy Reames being the author of that article. "On the Mass and Inertia of the Tesseract," which in the _Philosophical Journal_ had caused a controversy. And there was one Mildred Holmes--of no importance in the matter of the Fifth-Dimension Catapult--who would have lifted beautifully arched eyebrows in bored unbelief if anybody had suggested that Tommy Reames was that Thomas Reames whose "Additions to Herglotz's Mechanics of Continua" produced such diversities of opinion in scientific circles. She intended to make Tommy propose to her some day, and thought she knew all about him. And everybody, everywhere, would have been incredulous of his present errand. * * * * * Gliding down the narrow, fenced-in road. Tommy was a trifle dubious about this errand himself. A yellow telegraph-form in his pocket read rather like a hoax, but was just plausible enough to have brought him away from a rather important tennis match. The telegram read: PROFESSOR DENHAM IN EXTREME DANGER THROUGH EXPERIMENT BASED ON YOUR ARTICLE ON DOMINANT COORDINATES YOU ALONE CAN HELP HIM IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY COME AT ONCE. A. VON HOLTZ. The fence went on past the car. A mile, a mile and a half of narrow lane, fenced in and made as nearly intruder-proof as possible. "Wonder what I'd do," said Tommy Reames, "if another car came along from the other end?" He deliberately tried not to think about the telegram any more. He didn't believe it. He couldn't believe it. But he couldn't ignore it, either. Nobody could: few scientists, and no human being with a normal amount of curiosity. Because the article on dominant coordinates had appeared in the _Journal of Physics_ and had dealt with a state of things in which the normal coordinates of everyday existence were assumed to have changed their functions: when the coordinates of time, the vertical, the horizontal and the lateral changed places and a man went east to go up and west to go "down" and ran his street-numbers in a fourth dimension. It was mathematical foolery, from one standpoint, but it led to some fascinating if abstruse conclusions. * * * * * But his brain would not remain away from the subject of the telegram, even though a chicken appeared in the fenced-in lane ahead of him and went flapping wildly on before the car. It rose in mid-air, the car overtook it as it rose above the level of the hood, and there was a rolling, squawking bundle of shedding feathers tumbling over and over along the hood until it reached the slanting windshield. There it spun wildly upward, left a cloud of feather's fluttering about Tommy's head, and fell still squawking into the road behind. By the back-view mirror, Tommy could see it picking itself up and staggering dizzily back to the side of the road. "My point was," said Tommy vexedly to himself, speaking of the article the telegram referred to, "that a man can only recognize three dimensions of space and one of time. So that if he got shot out of this cosmos altogether he wouldn't know the difference. He'd still seem to be in a three-dimensioned universe. And what is there in that stuff to get Denham in trouble?" A house appeared ahead. A low, rambling sort of bungalow with a huge brick barn behind it. The house of Professor Denham, very certainly, and that barn was the laboratory in which he made his experiments. Instinctively, Tommy stepped on the gas. The car leaped ahead. And then he was braking frantically. A pipe-framed gate with thinner, unpainted wire mesh filling its surface loomed before him, much too late for him to stop. There was a minor shock, a crashing and squeaking, and then a crash and shattering of glass. Tommy bent low as the top bar of the gate hit his windshield. The double glass cracked and crumpled and bent, but did not fly to bits. And the car came to a halt with its wheels intricately entangled in torn-away fence wire. The gate had been torn from its hinges and was draped rakishly over the roadster. A tire went flat with a loud hissing noise, and Tommy Reames swore softly under his breath and got out to inspect the damage. * * * * * He was deciding that nothing irreparable was wrong when a man came bursting out of the brick building behind the house. A tall, lean, youngish man who waved his arms emphatically and approached shouting: "You had no right to come in here! You must go away at once! You have damaged property! I will tell the Professor! You must pay for the damage! You must--" "Damn!" said Tommy Reames. He had just seen that his radiator was punctured. A spout of ruddy, rusty water was pouring out on the grass. The youngish man came up furiously. A pale young man, Tommy noticed. A young man with bristling, close-cropped hair and horn-rimmed spectacles before weak-looking eyes. His mouth was very full and very red, in marked contrast to the pallor of his cheeks. "Did you not see the sign upon the gate?" he demanded angrily, in curiously stilted English. "Did you not see that trespassers are forbidden? You must go away at once! You will be prosecuted! You will be imprisoned! You--" Tommy said irritably: "Are you Von Holtz? My name is Reames. You telegraphed me." The waving, lanky arms stopped in the middle of an excited gesture. The weak-looking eyes behind the lenses widened. A pink tongue licked the too-full, too-red lips. "Reames? The Herr Reames?" Von Holtz stammered. Then he said suspiciously, "But you are not--you cannot be the Herr Reames of the article on dominant coordinates!" "I don't know why," said Tommy annoyedly. "I'm also the Herr Reames of several other articles, such as on the mechanics of continua and the mass and inertia of the tesseract. And I believe the current _Philosophical Journal_--" * * * * * He surveyed the spouting red stream from the radiator and shrugged ruefully. "I wish you'd telephone the village to have somebody come out and fix my car," he said shortly, "and then tell me if this telegram is a joke or not." He pulled out a yellow form and offered it. He had taken an instinctive dislike to the lean figure before him, but suppressed the feeling. Von Holtz took the telegram and read it, and smoothed it out, and said agitatedly: "But I thought the Herr Reames would be--would be a venerable gentleman! I thought--" "You sent that wire," said Tommy. "It puzzled me just enough to make me rush out here. And I feel like a fool for having done it. What's the matter? Is it a joke?" Von Holtz shook his head violently, even as he bit his lips. "No! No!" he protested. "The Herr Professor Denham is in the most terrible, most deadly danger! I--I have been very nearly mad, Herr Reames. The Ragged Men may seize him!... I telegraphed to you. I have not slept for four nights. I have worked! I have racked my brains! I have gone nearly insane, trying to rescue the Herr Professor! And I--" * * * * * Tommy stared. "Four days?" he said. "The thing, whatever it is, has been going on for four days?" "Five," said Von Holtz nervously. "It was only to-day that I thought of you, Herr Reames. The Herr Professor Denham had praised your articles highly. He said that you were the only man who would be able to understand his work. Five days ago--" Tommy grunted. "If he's been in danger for five days," he said skeptically, "he's not in such a bad fix or it'd have been over. Will you phone for a repairman? Then we'll see what it's all about." The lean arms began to wave again as Von Holtz said desperately: "But Herr Reames, it is urgent! The Herr Professor is in deadly danger!" "What's the matter with him?" "He is marooned," said Von Holtz. Again he licked his lips. "He is marooned, Herr Reames, and you alone--" "Marooned?" said Tommy more skeptically still. "In the middle of New York State? And I alone can help him? You sound more and more as if you were playing a rather elaborate and not very funny practical joke. I've driven sixty miles to get here. What is the joke, anyhow?" Von Holtz said despairingly: "But it is true, Herr Reames! He is marooned. He has changed his coordinates. It was an experiment. He is marooned in the fifth dimension!" * * * * * There was dead silence. Tommy Reames stared blankly. Then his gorge rose. He had taken an instinctive dislike to this lean young man, anyhow. So he stared at him, and grew very angry, and would undoubtedly have gotten into his car and turned it about and driven it away again if it had been in any shape to run. But it wasn't. One tire was flat, and the last ruddy drops from the radiator were dripping slowly on the grass. So he pulled out a cigarette case and lighted a cigarette and said sardonically: "The fifth dimension? That seems rather extreme. Most of us get along very well with three dimensions. Four seems luxurious. Why pick on the fifth?" Von Holtz grew pale with anger in his turn. He waved his arms, stopped, and said with stiff formality: "If the Herr Reames will follow me into the laboratory I will show him Professor Denham and convince him of the Herr Professor's extreme danger." Tommy had a sudden startling conviction that Von Holtz was in earnest. He might be mad, but he was in earnest. And there was undoubtedly a Professor Denham, and this was undoubtedly his home and laboratory. "I'll look, anyway," said Tommy less skeptically. "But it is rather incredible, you know!" "It is impossible," said Von Holtz stiffly. "You are right, Herr Reames. It is quite impossible. But it is a fact." He turned and stalked toward the big brick barn behind the house. Tommy went with him, wholly unbelieving and yet beginning to wonder if, just possibly, there was actually an emergency of a more normal and ghastly nature in being. Von Holtz might be a madman. He might.... Gruesome, grisly thoughts ran through Tommy's head. A madman dabbling in science might do incredible things, horrible things, and then demand assistance to undo an unimaginable murder.... * * * * * Tommy was tense and alert as Von Holtz opened the door of the barnlike laboratory. He waved the lean young man on ahead. "After you," he said curtly. He felt almost a shiver as he entered. But the interior of the laboratory displayed no gruesome scene. It was a huge, high-ceilinged room with a concrete floor. A monster dynamo was over in one corner, coupled to a matter-of-fact four-cylinder crude-oil engine, to which was also coupled by a clutch an inexplicable windlass-drum with several hundred feet of chain wrapped around it. There were ammeters and voltmeters on a control panel, and one of the most delicate of dynamometers on its own stand, and there were work benches and a motor-driven lathe and a very complete equipment for the working of metals. And there was an electric furnace, with splashes of solidified metal on the floor beside it, and there was a miniature casting-floor, and at the farther end of the monster room there was a gigantic solenoid which evidently had once swung upon gymbals and as evidently now was broken, because it lay toppled askew upon its supports. The only totally unidentifiable piece of apparatus in the place was one queer contrivance at one side. It looked partly like a machine-gun, because of a long brass barrel projecting from it. But the brass tube came out of a bulging casing of cast aluminum and there was no opening through which shells could be fed. * * * * * Von Holz moved to that contrivance, removed a cap from the end of the brass tube, looked carefully into the opening, and waved stiffly for Tommy to look in. Again Tommy was suspicious; watched until Von Holtz was some distance away. But the instant he put his eye to the end of the brass tube he forgot all caution, all suspicion, all his doubts. He forgot everything in his amazement. There was a lens in the end of the brass tube. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than a telescope, apparently looking at something in a closed box. But Tommy was not able to believe that he looked at an illuminated miniature for even the fraction of a second. He looked into the telescope, and he was seeing out-of-doors. Through the aluminum casting that enclosed the end of the tube. Through the thick brick walls of the laboratory. He was gazing upon a landscape such as should not--such as could not--exist upon the earth. There were monstrous, feathery tree-ferns waving languid fronds in a breeze that came from beyond them. The telescope seemed to be pointing at a gentle slope, and those tree-ferns cut off a farther view, but there was an impenetrable tangle of breast-high foliage between the instrument and that slope, and halfway up the incline there rested a huge steel globe. Tommy's eyes fixed themselves upon the globe. It was man-made, of course. He could see where it had been bolted together. There were glassed-in windows in its sides, and there was a door. * * * * * As Tommy looked, that door opened partway, stopped as if someone within had hesitated, and then opened fully. A man came out. And Tommy said dazedly: "My God!" Because the man was a perfectly commonplace sort of individual, dressed in a perfectly commonplace fashion, and he carried a perfectly commonplace briar pipe in his hand. Moreover, Tommy recognized him. He had seen pictures of him often enough, and he was Professor Edward Denham, entitled to put practically all the letters of the alphabet after his name, the author of "Polymerization of the Pseudo-Metallic Nitrides" and the proper owner of this building and its contents. But Tommy saw him against a background of tree-ferns such as should have been extinct upon this earth since the Carboniferous Period, some millions of years ago. He was looking hungrily at his briar pipe. Presently he began to hunt carefully about on the ground. He picked together half a handful of brownish things which had to be dried leaves. He stuffed them into the pipe, struck a match, and lighted it. He puffed away gloomily, surrounded by wholly monstrous vegetation. A butterfly fluttered over the top of the steel globe. Its wings were fully a yard across. It flittered lightly to a plant and seemed to wait, and abruptly a vivid carmine blossom opened wide; wide enough to admit it. Denham watched curiously enough, smoking the rank and plainly unsatisfying dried leaves. He turned his head and spoke over his shoulder. The door opened again. Again Tommy Reames was dazed. Because a girl came out of the huge steel sphere--and she was a girl of the most modern and most normal sort. A trim sport frock, slim silken legs, bobbed hair.... Tommy did not see her face until she turned, smiling, to make some comment to Denham. Then he saw that she was breath-takingly pretty. He swore softly under his breath. * * * * * The butterfly backed clumsily out of the gigantic flower. It flew lightly away, its many-colored wings brilliant in the sunshine. And the huge crimson blossom closed slowly. Denham watched the butterfly go away. His eyes returned to the girl who was smiling at the flying thing, now out of the field of vision of the telescope. And there was utter discouragement visible in every line of Denham's figure. Tommy saw the girl suddenly reach out her hand and put it on Denham's shoulder. She patted it, speaking in an evident attempt to encourage him. She smiled, and talked coaxingly, and presently Denham made a queer, arrested gesture and went heavily back into the steel globe. She followed him, though she looked wearily all about before the door closed behind her, and when Denham could not see her face, her expression was tired and anxious indeed. Tommy had forgotten Von Holtz, had forgotten the laboratory, had forgotten absolutely everything. If his original suspicions of Von Holtz had been justified, he could have been killed half a dozen times over. He was oblivious to everything but the sight before his eyes. Now he felt a touch on his shoulder and drew his head away with a jerk. Von Holtz was looking down at him, very pale, with his weak-looking eyes anxious. "They are still all right?" he demanded. "Yes," said Tommy dazedly. "Surely. Who is that girl?" "That is the Herr Professor's daughter Evelyn," said Von Holtz uneasily. "I suggest, Herr Reames, that you swing the dimensoscope about." "The--what?" asked Tommy, still dazed by what he had seen. "The dimensoscope. This." Von Holtz shifted the brass tube. The whole thing was mounted so that it could be swung in any direction. The mounting was exactly like that of a normal telescope. Tommy instantly put his eye to the eyepiece again. * * * * * He saw more tree-ferns, practically the duplicates of the background beyond the globe. Nothing moved save small, fugitive creatures among their fronds. He swung the telescope still farther. The landscape swept by before his eyes. The tree-fern forest drew back. He saw the beginning of a vast and noisome morass, over which lay a thick haze as of a stream raised by the sun. He saw something move in that morass; something huge and horrible with a long and snake-like neck and the tiniest of heads at the end of it. But he could not see the thing clearly. He swung the telescope yet again. And he looked over miles and miles of level, haze-blanketed marsh. Here and there were clumps of taller vegetation. Here and there were steaming, desolate pools. And three or four times he saw monstrous objects moving about clumsily in the marsh-land. But then a glitter at the skyline caught his eye. He tilted the telescope to see more clearly, and suddenly he caught his breath. There, far away at the very horizon, was a city. It was tall and gleaming and very strange. No earthly city ever flung its towers so splendidly high and soaring. No city ever built by man gave off the fiery gleam of gold from all its walls and pinnacles. It looked like an artist's dream, hammered out in precious metal, with its outlines softened by the haze of distance. And something was moving in the air near the city. Staring, tense, again incredulous, Tommy Reames strained his eyes and saw that it was a machine. An air-craft; a flying-machine of a type wholly unlike anything ever built upon the planet Earth. It swept steadily and swiftly toward the city, dwindling as it went. It swooped downward toward one of the mighty spires of the city of golden gleams, and vanished. * * * * * It was with a sense of shock, of almost physical shock, that Tommy came back to realization of his surroundings to feel Von Holtz's hand upon his shoulder and to hear the lean young man saying harshly: "Well, Herr Reames? Are you convinced that I did not lie to you? Are you convinced that the Herr Professor Denham is in need of help?" Tommy blinked dazedly as he looked around the laboratory again. Brick walls, an oil-spattered crude-oil engine in one corner, a concrete floor and an electric furnace and a casting-box.... "Why--yes...." said Tommy dazedly. "Yes. Of course!" Clarity came to his brain with a jerk. He did not understand at all, but he believed what he had seen. Denham and his daughter were somewhere in some other dimension, yet within range of the extraordinary device he had looked through. And they were in trouble. So much was evident from their poses and their manner. "Of course," he repeated. "They're--there, wherever it is, and they can't get back. They don't seem to be in any imminent danger...." Von Holtz licked his lips. "The Ragged Men have not found them yet," he said in a hushed, harsh voice. "Before they went in the globe we saw the Ragged Men. We watched them. If they do find the Herr Professor and his daughter, they will kill them very slowly, so that they will take days of screaming agony to die. It is that that I am afraid of, Herr Reames. The Ragged Men roam the tree-fern forests. If they find the Herr Professor they will trace each nerve to its root of agony until he dies. And we will be able only to watch...." CHAPTER II "The thing is," said Tommy feverishly, "that we've got to find a way to get them back. Whether it duplicates Denham's results or not. How far away are they?" "A few hundred yards, perhaps," said Von Holtz wearily, "or ten million miles. It is the same thing. They are in a place where the fifth dimension is the dominant coordinate." Tommy was pacing up and down the laboratory. He stopped and looked through the eyepiece of the extraordinary vision apparatus. He tore himself away from it again. "How does this thing work?" he demanded. Von Holtz began to unscrew two wing-nuts which kept the top of the aluminum casting in place. "It is the first piece of apparatus which Professor Denham made," he said precisely. "I know the theory, but I cannot duplicate it. Every dimension is at right angles to all other dimensions, of course. The Herr Professor has a note, here--" He stopped his unscrewing to run over a heap of papers on the work-bench--papers over which he seemed to have been poring desperately at the time of Tommy's arrival. He handed a sheet to Tommy, who read: "If a creature who was aware of only two dimensions made two right-angled objects and so placed them that all the angles formed by the combination were right angles, he would contrive a figure represented by the corner of a box; he would discover a third dimension. Similarly, if a three-dimensioned man took three right angles and placed them so that all the angles formed were right angles, he would discover a fourth dimension. This, however, would probably be the time dimension, and to travel in time would instantly be fatal. But with four right angles he could discover a fifth dimension, and with five right angles he could discover a sixth...." * * * * * Tommy Reames put down the paper impatiently. "Of course" he said brusquely. "I know all that stuff. But up to the present time nobody has been able to put together even three right angles, in practise." Von Holtz had returned to the unscrewing of the wing-nuts. He lifted off the cover of the dimensoscope. "It is the thing the Herr Professor did not confide to me," he said bitterly. "The secret. The one secret! Look in here." Tommy looked. The objective-glass at the end of the telescope faced a mirror, which was inclined to its face at an angle of forty-five degrees. A beam of light from the objective would be reflected to a second mirror, twisted in a fashion curiously askew. Then the light would go to a third mirror.... Tommy looked at that third mirror, and instantly his eyes ached. He closed them and opened them again. Again they stung horribly. It was exactly the sort of eye-strain which comes of looking through a lens which does not focus exactly, or through a strange pair of eyeglasses. He could see the third mirror, but his eyes hurt the instant they looked upon it, as if that third mirror were distorted in an impossible fashion. He was forced to draw them away. He could see, though, that somehow that third mirror would reflect his imaginary beam of light into a fourth mirror of which he could see only the edge. He moved his head--and still saw only the edge of a mirror. He was sure of what he saw, because he could look into the wavy, bluish translucency all glass shows upon its edge. He could even see the thin layer of silver backing. But he could not put himself into a position in which more than the edge of that mirror was visible. "Good Lord!" said Tommy Reames feverishly. "That mirror--" "A mirror at forty-five degrees," said Von Holtz precisely, "reflects light at a right angle. There are four mirrors, and each bends a ray of light through a right angle which is also a right angle to all the others. The result is that the dimensoscope looks into what is a fifth dimension, into which no man ever looked before. But I cannot move other mirrors into the positions they have in this instrument. I do not know how." * * * * * Tommy shook his head impatiently, staring at the so-simple, yet incredible device whose theory had been mathematically proven numberless times, but never put into practice before. "Having made this device," said Von Holtz, "the Herr Professor constructed what he termed a catapult. It was a coil of wire, like the large machine there. It jerked a steel ball first vertically, then horizontally, then laterally, then in a fourth-dimensional direction, and finally projected it violently off in a fifth-dimensional path. He made small hollow steel balls and sent a butterfly, a small sparrow, and finally a cat into that other world. The steel balls opened of themselves and freed those creatures. They seemed to suffer no distress. Therefore he concluded that it would be safe for him to go, himself. His daughter refused to permit him to go alone, and he was so sure of his safety that he allowed her to enter the globe with him. She did. I worked the catapult which flung the globe in the fifth dimension, and his device for returning failed to operate. Hence he is marooned." "But the big catapult--" "Can you not see that the big catapult is broken?" demanded Von Holtz bitterly. "A special metal is required for the missing parts. That, I know how to make. Yes. I can supply that. But I cannot shape it! I cannot design the gears which will move it as it should be moved! I cannot make another dimensoscope. I cannot, Herr Reames, calculate any method of causing four right angles to be all at right angles to each other. It is my impossibility! It is for that that I have appealed to you. You see it has been done. I see that it is done. I can make the metal which alone can be moved in the necessary direction. But I cannot calculate any method of moving it in that direction! If you can do so, Herr Reames, we can perhaps save the Herr Professor Denham. If you cannot--Gott! The death he will die is horrible to think of!" "And his daughter," said Tommy grimly. "His daughter, also." * * * * * He paced up and down the laboratory again. Von Holtz moved to the work-bench from which he had taken Denham's note. There was a pile of such memoranda, thumbed over and over. And there were papers in the angular, precise handwriting which was Von Holtz's own, and calculations and speculations and the remains of frantic efforts to work out, somehow, the secret which as one manifestation had placed one mirror so that it hurt the eyes to look at it, and one other mirror so that from every angle of a normal existence, one could see only the edge. "I have worked, Herr Reames," said Von Holtz drearily. "Gott! How I have worked! But the Herr Professor kept some things secret, and that so-essential thing is one of them." Presently he said tiredly: "The dimension-traveling globe was built in this laboratory. It rested here." He pointed. "The Herr Professor was laughing and excited at the moment of departure. His daughter smiled at me through the window of the globe. There was an under-carriage with wheels upon it. You cannot see those wheels through the dimensoscope. They got into the globe and closed the door. The Herr Professor nodded to me through the glass window. The dynamo was running at its fullest speed. The laboratory smelled of hot oil, and of ozone from the sparks. I lifted my hand, and the Herr Professor nodded again, and I threw the switch. This switch, Herr Reames! It sparked as I closed it, and the flash partly blinded me. But I saw the globe rush toward the giant catapult yonder. It leaped upward into the huge coil, which whirled madly. Dazed, I saw the globe hanging suspended in mid-air, two feet from the floor. It shook! Once! Twice! With violence! Suddenly its outline became hazy and distorted. My eyes ached with looking at it. And then it was gone!" * * * * * Von Holtz's arms waved melodramatically. "I rushed to the dimensoscope and gazed through it into the fifth dimension. I saw the globe floating onward through the air, toward that bank of glossy ferns. I saw it settle and turn over, and then slowly right itself as it came to rest. The Herr Professor got out of it. I saw him through the instrument which could look into the dimension into which he had gone. He waved his hand to me. His daughter joined him, surveying the strange cosmos in which they were. The Herr Professor plucked some of the glossy ferns, took photographs, then got back into the globe. "I awaited its return to our own world. I saw it rock slightly as he worked upon the apparatus within. I knew that when it vanished from the dimensoscope it would have returned to our own universe. But it remained as before. It did not move. After three hours of anguished waiting, the Herr Professor came out and made signals to me of despair. By gestures, because no sound could come through the dimensoscope itself, he begged me to assist him. And I was helpless! Made helpless by the Herr Professor's own secrecy! For four days and nights I have toiled, hoping desperately to discover what the Herr Professor had hidden from me. At last I thought of you. I telegraphed to you. If you can assist me...." "I'm going to try it, of course," said Tommy shortly. He paced back and forth. He stopped and looked through the brass-tubed telescope. Giant tree-ferns, unbelievable but real. The steel globe resting partly overturned upon a bank of glossy ferns. Breast-high, incredible foliage between the point of vision and that extraordinary vehicle. * * * * * While Tommy had been talking and listening, while he had been away from the eyepiece, one or other of the occupants of the globe had emerged from it. The door was open. But now the girl came bounding suddenly through the ferns. She called, though it seemed to Tommy that there was a curious air of caution even in her calling. She was excited, hopefully excited. Denham came out of the globe with a clumsy club in his hand. But Evelyn caught his arm and pointed up into the sky. Denham stared, and then began to make wild and desperate gestures as if trying to attract attention to himself. Tommy watched for minutes, and then swung the dimensoscope around. It was extraordinary, to be sitting in the perfectly normal brick-walled laboratory, looking into a slender brass tube, and seeing another universe entirely, another wild and unbelievable landscape. The tree-fern forest drew back and the vast and steaming morass was again in view. There were distant bright golden gleams from the city. But Tommy was searching the sky, looking in the sky of a world in the fifth dimension for a thing which would make a man gesticulate hopefully. He found it. It was an aircraft, startlingly close through the telescope. A single figure was seated at its controls, motionless as if bored, with exactly the air of a weary truck driver piloting a vehicle along a roadway he does not really see. And Tommy, being near enough to see the pilot's pose, could see the aircraft clearly. It was totally unlike a terrestrial airplane. A single huge and thick wing supported it. But the wing was angular and clumsy-seeming, and its form was devoid of the grace of an earthly aircraft wing, and there was no tail whatever to give it the appearance of a living thing. There was merely a long, rectangular wing with a framework beneath it, and a shimmering thing which was certainly not a screw propeller, but which seemed to draw it. * * * * * It moved on steadily and swiftly, dwindling in the distance, with its motionless pilot seated before a mass of corded bundles. It looked as if this were a freight plane of some sort, and therefore made in a strictly utilitarian fashion. It vanished in the haze above the monster swamp, going in a straight line for the golden city at the world's edge. Tommy stared at it, long after it had ceased to be visible. Then he saw a queer movement on the earth near the edge of the morass. Figures were moving. Human figures. He saw four of them, shaking clenched fists and capering insanely, seeming to bellow insults after the oblivious and now invisible flying thing. He could see that they were nearly naked, and that one of them carried a spear. But the indubitable glint of metal was reflected from one of them for an instant, when some metal accoutrement about him glittered in the sunlight. They moved from sight behind thick, feathery foliage, and Tommy swung back the brass tube to see the globe again. Denham and his daughter were staring in the direction in which Tommy had seen those human figures. Denham clutched his clumsy club grimly. His face was drawn and his figure tensed. And suddenly Evelyn spoke quietly, and the two of then dived into the fern forest and disappeared. Minutes later they returned, dragging masses of tree-fern fronds with which they masked the globe from view. They worked hastily, desperately, concealing the steel vehicle from sight. And then Denham stared tensely all about, shading his eyes with his hand. He and the girl withdrew cautiously into the forest. * * * * * It was minutes later that Tommy was roused by Von Holtz's hand on his shoulder. "What has happened, Herr Reames?" he asked uneasily. "The--Ragged Men?" "I saw men," said Tommy briefly, "shaking clenched fists at an aircraft flying overhead. And Denham and his daughter have hidden the globe behind a screen of foliage." Von Holtz licked his lips fascinatedly. "The Ragged Men," he said in a hushed voice. "The Herr Professor called them that, because they cannot be of the people who live in the Golden City. They hate the people of the Golden City. I think that they are bandits; renegades, perhaps. They live in the tree-fern forests and scream curses at the airships which fly overhead. And they are afraid of those airships." "How long did Denham use this thing to look through, before he built his globe?" Von Holtz considered. "Immediately it worked," he said at last, "he began work on a small catapult. It took him one week to devise exactly how to make that. He experimented with it for some days and began to make the large globe. That took nearly two months--the globe and the large catapult together. And also the dimensoscope was at hand. His daughter looked through it more than he did, or myself." "He should have known what he was up against," said Tommy, frowning. "He ought to have taken guns, at least. Is he armed?" Von Holtz shook his head. "He expected to return at once," he said desperately. "Do you see, Herr Reames, the position it puts me in? I may be suspected of murder! I am the Herr Professor's assistant. He disappears. Will I not be accused of having put him out of the way?" "No," said Tommy thoughtfully. "You won't." He glanced through the brass tube and paced up and down the room. "You telephone for someone to repair my car," he said suddenly and abruptly. "I am going to stay here and work this thing out. I've got just the glimmering of an idea. But I'll need my car in running order, in case we have to go out and get materials in a hurry." * * * * * Von Holtz bowed stiffly and went out of the laboratory. Tommy looked after him. Even moved to make sure he was gone. And then Tommy Reames went quickly to the work bench on which were the littered notes and calculations Von Holtz had been using and which were now at his disposal. But Tommy did not leaf through them. He reached under the blotter beneath the whole pile. He had seen Von Holtz furtively push something out of sight, and he had disliked and distrusted Von Holtz from the beginning. Moreover, it was pretty thoroughly clear that Denham had not trusted him too much. A trusted assistant should be able to understand, at least, any experiment performed in a laboratory. A folded sheet of paper came out. Tommy glanced at it. "You messed things up right! Denham marooned and you got nothing. No plans or figures either. When you get them, you get your money. If you don't you are out of luck. If this Reames guy can't fix up what you want it'll be just too bad for you." There was no salutation nor any signature beyond a scrawled and sprawling "J." Tommy Reames' jaw set grimly. He folded the scrap of paper and thrust it back out of sight again. "Pretty!" he said harshly. "So a gentleman named 'J' is going to pay Von Holtz for plans or calculations it is hoped I'll provide! Which suggests--many things! But at least I'll have Von Holtz's help until he thinks my plans or calculations are complete. So that's all right...." Tommy could not be expected, of course, to guess that the note he had read was quite astounding proof of the interest taken in non-Euclidean geometry by a vice king of Chicago, or that the ranking beer baron of that metropolis was the man who was so absorbed in abstruse theoretic physics. * * * * * Tommy moved toward the great solenoid which lay askew upon its wrecked support. It had drawn the steel globe toward it, had made that globe vibrate madly, twice, and then go hazy and vanish. It had jerked the globe in each of five directions, each at right angles to all the others, and had released it when started in the fifth dimension. The huge coil was quite nine feet across and would take the steel globe easily. It was pivoted in concentric rings which made up a set of gymbals far more elaborate than were ever used to suspend a mariner's compass aboard ship. There were three rings, one inside the other. And two rings will take care of any motion in three dimensions. These rings were pivoted, too, so that an unbelievably intricate series of motions could be given to the solenoid within them all. But the device was broken, now. A pivot had given away, and shaft and socket alike had vanished. Tommy became absorbed. Some oddity bothered him.... He pieced the thing together mentally. And he exclaimed suddenly. There had been four rings of metal! One was gone! He comprehended, very suddenly. The third mirror in the dimensoscope was the one so strangely distorted by its position, which was at half of a right angle to all the dimensions of human experience. It was the third ring in the solenoid's supports which had vanished. And Tommy, staring at the gigantic apparatus and summoning all his theoretic knowledge and all his brain to work, saw the connection between the two things. "The time dimension and the world-line," he said sharply, excited in spite of himself. "Revolving in the time dimension means telescoping in the world-line.... It would be a strain no matter could endure...." * * * * * The mirror in the dimensoscope was not pointing in a fourth dimension. It did not need to. It was reflecting light at a right angle, and hence needed to be only at half of a right angle to the two courses of the beam it reflected. But to whirl the steel globe into a fifth dimension, the solenoid's support had for one instant to revolve in time! For the fraction of a second it would have literally to pass through its own substance. It would be required to undergo precisely the sort of strain involved in turning a hollow seamless metal globe, inside out! No metal could stand such a strain. No form of matter known to man could endure it. "It would explode!" said Tommy excitedly to himself, alone in the great bare laboratory. "Steel itself would vaporize! It would wreck the place!" And then he looked blank. Because the place had very obviously not been wrecked. And yet a metal ring had vanished, leaving no trace.... Von Holtz came back. He looked frightened. "A--a repairman, Herr Reames," he said, stammering, "is on the way. And--Herr Reames...." Tommy barely heard him. For a moment, Tommy was all scientist, confronted with the inexplicable, yet groping with a blind certainty toward a conclusion he very vaguely foresaw. He waved his hand impatiently.... "The Herr Jacaro is on the way here," stammered Von Holtz. * * * * * Tommy blinked, remembering that Von Holtz had told him he could make a certain metal, the only metal which could be moved in the fourth dimension. "Jacaro?" he said blankly. "The--friend of the Herr Professor Denham. He advanced the money for the Herr Professor's experiments." Tommy heard him with only half his brain, though that half instantly decided that Von Holtz was lying. The only Jacaro Tommy knew of was a prominent gangster from Chicago, who had recently cemented his position in Chicago's underworld by engineering the amalgamation of two once-rival gangs. Tommy knew, in a vague fashion, that Von Holtz was frightened. That he was terrified in some way. And that he was inordinately suspicious of someone, and filled with a queer desperation. "Well?" said Tommy abstractedly. The thought he needed was coming. A metal which would have full tensile strength up to a certain instant, and then disrupt itself without violence into a gas, a vapor.... It would be an alloy, perhaps. It would be.... He struck at his own head with his clenched fist, angrily demanding that his brain bring forth the thought that was forming slowly. The metal that could be revolved in time without producing a disastrous explosion and without requiring an impossible amount of power.... * * * * * He did not see Von Holtz looking in the eyepiece of the dimensoscope. He stared at nothing, thinking concentratedly, putting every bit of energy into sheer thought. And suddenly, like the explosion he sought a way to avoid, the answer came, blindingly clear. He surveyed that answer warily. A tremendous excitement filled him. "I've got it!" he said softly to himself. "By God, I know how he did the thing!" And as if through a mist the figure of Von Holtz became clear before his eyes. Von Holtz was looking into the dimensoscope tube. He was staring into that other, extraordinary world in which Denham and his daughter were marooned. And Von Holtz's face was utterly, deathly white, and he was making frantic, repressed gestures, and whispering little whimpering phrases to himself. They were unintelligible, but the deathly pallor of his cheeks, and the fascinated, dribbling fullness of his lips brought Tommy Reames suddenly down to earth. "What's happening?" demanded Tommy sharply. Von Holtz did not answer. He made disjointed, moaning little exclamations to himself. He was twitching horribly as he looked through the telescope into that other world.... Tommy flung him aside and clapped his own eye to the eyepiece. And then he groaned. * * * * * The telescope was pointed at the steel globe upon that ferny bank, no more than a few hundred yards away but two dimensions removed from Earth. The screening mass of tree-fronds had been torn away. A swarm of ragged, half-naked men was gathered about the globe. They were armed with spears and clubs, in the main, but there were other weapons of intricate design whose uses Tommy could not even guess at. He did not try. He was watching the men as they swarmed about and over the steel sphere. Their faces were brutal and savage, and now they were distorted with an insane hate. It was the same awful, gibbering hatred he had sensed in the caperings of the four he had seen bellowing vituperation at an airplane. They were not savages. Somehow he could not envision them as primitive. Their features were hard-bitten, seamed with hatred and with vice unspeakable. And they were white. The instant impression any man would have received was that here were broken men; fugitives, bandits, assassins. Here were renegades or worse from some higher, civilized race. They battered hysterically upon the steel globe. It was not the attack of savages upon a strange thing. It was the assault of desperate, broken men upon a thing they hated. A glass pane splintered and crashed. Spears were thrust into the opening, while mouths opened as if in screams of insane fury. And then, suddenly, the door of the globe flew wide. The Ragged Men did not wait for anyone to come out. They fought each other to get into the opening, their eyes glaring madly, filled with the lust to kill. CHAPTER III A battered and antiquated flivver came chugging down the wire-fenced lane to the laboratory, an hour later. It made a prodigious din, and Tommy Reames went out to meet it. He was still a little pale. He had watched the steel globe turned practically inside out by the Ragged Men. He had seen them bringing out cameras, cushions, and even the padding of the walls, to be torn to bits in a truly maniacal fury. But he had not seen one sign of a human being killed. Denham and his daughter had not been in the globe when it was found and ransacked. So far, then, they were probably safe. Tommy had seen them vanish into the tree-fern forest. They had been afraid, and with good reason. What dangers they might encounter in the fern forest he could not guess. How long they would escape the search of the Ragged Men, he could not know. How he could ever hope to find them if he succeeded in duplicating Denham's dimension-traveling apparatus he could not even think of, just now. But the Ragged Men were not searching the fern forest. So much was sure. They were encamped by the steel sphere, and a scurvy-looking lot they were. Coming out of the brick laboratory, Tommy saw a brawny figure getting out of the antiquated flivver whose arrival had been so thunderous. That brawny figure nodded to him and grinned. Tommy recognized him. The red-headed, broad-shouldered filling station attendant in the last village, who had given him specific directions for reaching this place. "You hit that gate a lick, didn't you?" asked the erstwhile filling station attendant amiably. "Mr. Von Holtz said you had a flat and a busted radiator. That right?" * * * * * Tommy nodded. The red-headed man walked around the car, scratched his chin, and drew out certain assorted tools. He put them on the grass with great precision, pumped a gasoline blow-torch to pressure and touched a match to its priming-basin, and while the gasoline flamed smokily he made a half dozen casual movements with a file, and the broken radiator tube was exposed for repair. He went back to the torch and observed placidly: "The Professor ain't around, is he?" Tommy shook his head. "Thought not," said the red-headed one. "He gen'rally comes out and talks a while. I helped him build some of them dinkuses in the barn yonder." Tommy said eagerly: "Say, which of those things did you help him build? That big thing with the solenoid--the coil?" "Yeah. How'd it work?" The red-headed one set a soldering iron in place and began to jack up the rear wheel to get at the tire. "Crazy idea, if you ask me. I told Miss Evelyn so. She laughed and said she'd be in the ball when it was tried. Did it work?" "Too damn well," said Tommy briefly. "I've got to repair that solenoid. How about a job helping?" The red-headed man unfastened the lugs of the rim, kicked the tire speculatively, and said, "Gone to hell." He put on the spare tire with ease and dispatch. "Um," he said. "How about that Mr. Von Holtz? Is he goin' to boss the job?" "He is not," said Tommy, with a shade of grimness in his tone. * * * * * The red-headed man nodded and took the soldering iron in hand. He unwound a strip of wire solder, mended the radiator tube with placid ease, and seemed to bang the cooling-flanges with a total lack of care. They went magically back into place, and it took close inspection to see that the radiator had been damaged. "She's all right," he observed. He regarded Tommy impersonally. "Suppose you tell me how come you horn in on this," he suggested, "an' maybe I'll play. That guy Von Holtz is a crook, if you ask me about him." Tommy ran his hand across his forehead, and told him. "Um," said the red-headed man calmly. "I think I'll go break Mr. Von Holtz's neck. I got me a hunch." He took two deliberate steps forward. But Tommy said: "I saw Denham not an hour ago. So far, he's all right. How long he'll be all right is a question. But I'm going after him." The red-headed man scrutinized him exhaustively. "Um. I might try that myself. I kinda like the Professor. An' Miss Evelyn. My name's Smithers. Let's go look through the dinkus the Professor made." They went together into the laboratory. Von Holtz was looking through the dimensoscope. He started back as they entered, and looked acutely uneasy when he saw the red-headed man. "How do you do," he said nervously. "They--the Ragged Men--have just brought in a dead man. But it is not the Herr Professor." Without a word, Tommy took the brass tube in his hand. Von Holtz moved away, biting his lips. Tommy stared into that strange other world. * * * * * The steel sphere lay as before, slightly askew upon a bank of glossy ferns. But its glass windows were shattered, and fragments of everything it had contained were scattered about. The Ragged Men had made a camp and built a fire. Some of them were roasting meat--the huge limb of a monstrous animal with a scaly, reptilian hide. Others were engaged in vehement argument over the body of one of their number, lying sprawled out upon the ground. Tommy spoke without moving his eyes from the eyepiece. "I saw Denham with a club just now. This man was killed by a club." The Ragged Men in the other world debated acrimoniously. One of them pointed to the dead man's belt, and spread out his hands. Something was missing from the body. Tommy saw, now, three or four other men with objects that looked rather like policemen's truncheons, save that they were made of glittering metal. They were plainly weapons. Denham, then, was armed--if he could understand how the weapon was used. The Ragged Men debated, and presently their dispute attracted the attention of a man with a huge black beard. He rose from where he sat gnawing at a piece of meat and moved grandly toward the disputatious group. They parted at his approach, but a single member continued the debate against even the bearded giant. The bearded one plucked the glittering truncheon from his belt. The disputatious one gasped in fear and flung himself desperately forward. But the bearded man kept the truncheon pointed steadily.... The man who assailed him staggered, reached close enough to strike a single blow, and collapsed. The bearded man pointed the metal truncheon at him as he lay upon the ground. He heaved convulsively, and was still. The bearded man went back to his seat and picked up the gnawed bit of meat again. The dispute had ceased. The chattering group of men dispersed. * * * * * Tommy was about to leave the eyepiece of the instrument when a movement nearby caught his eye. A head peered cautiously toward the encampment. A second rose beside it. Denham and his daughter Evelyn. They were apparently no more than thirty feet from the dimensoscope. Tommy could see them talking cautiously, saw Denham lift and examine a metal truncheon like the bearded man's, and force his daughter to accept it. He clutched a club, himself, with a grim satisfaction. Moments later they vanished quietly in the thick fern foliage, and though Tommy swung the dimensoscope around in every direction, he could see nothing of their retreat. He rose from that instrument with something approaching hopefulness. He'd seen Evelyn very near and very closely. She did not look happy, but she did look alert rather than worn. And Denham was displaying a form of competence in the face of danger which was really more than would have been expected in a Ph.D., a M.A., and other academic distinctions running to most of the letters of the alphabet. "I've just seen Denham and Evelyn again," said Tommy crisply. "They're safe so far. And I've seen one of the weapons of the Ragged Men in use. If we can get a couple of automatics and some cartridges to Denham, he'll be safe until we can repair the big solenoid." "There was the small catapult," said Von Holtz bitterly, "but it was dismantled. The Herr Professor saw me examining it, and he dismantled it. So that I did not learn how to calculate the way of changing the position--" * * * * * Tommy's eyes rested queerly on Von Holtz for a moment. "You know how to make the metal required," he said suddenly. "You'd better get busy making it. Plenty of it. We'll need it." Von Holtz stared at him, his weak eyes almost frightened. "You _know_? You know how to combine the right angles?" "I think so," said Tommy. "I've got to find out if I'm right. Will you make the metal?" Von Holtz bit at his too-red lips. "But Herr Reames!" he said stridently, "I wish to know the equation! Tell me the method of pointing a body in a fourth or a fifth direction. It is only fair--" "Denham didn't tell you," said Tommy. Von Holtz's arms jerked wildly. "But I will not make the metal! I insist upon being told the equation! I insist upon it! I will not make the metal if you do not tell me!" Smithers was in the laboratory, of course. He had been surveying the big solenoid-catapult and scratching his chin reflectively. Now he turned. * * * * * But Tommy took Von Holtz by the shoulders. And Tommy's hands were the firm and sinewy hands of a sportsman, if his brain did happen to be the brain of a scientist. Von Holtz writhed in his grip. "There is only one substance which could be the metal I need, Von Holtz," he said gently. "Only one substance is nearly three-dimensional. Metallic ammonium! It's known to exist, because it makes a mercury amalgam, but nobody has been able to isolate it because nobody has been able to give it a fourth dimension--duration in time. Denham did it. You can do it. And I need it, and you'd better set to work at the job. You'll be very sorry if you don't, Von Holtz!" Smithers said with a vast calmness. "I got me a hunch. So if y'want his neck broke...." Tommy released Von Holtz and the lean young man gasped and sputtered and gesticulated wildly in a frenzy of rage. "He'll make it," said Tommy coldly. "Because he doesn't dare not to!" Von Holtz went out of the laboratory, his weak-looking eyes staring and wild, and his mouth working. "He'll be back," said Tommy briefly. "You've got to make a small model of that big catapult, Smithers. Can you do it?" "Sure," said Smithers. "The ring'll be copper tubing, with pin-bearings. Wind a coil on the lathe. It'll be kinda rough, but it'll do. But gears, now...." "I'll attend to them. You know how to work that metallic ammonium?" "If that's what it was," agreed Smithers. "I worked it for the Professor." Tommy leaned close and whispered: "You never made any gears of that. But did you make some springs?" "Uh-huh!" Tommy grinned joyously. "Then we're set and I'm right! Von Holtz wants a mathematical formula, and no one on earth could write one, but we don't need it!" * * * * * Smithers rummaged around the laboratory with a casual air, acquired this and that and the other thing, and set to work with an astounding absence of waste motions. From time to time he inspected the great catapult thoughtfully, verified some impression, and went about the construction of another part. And when Von Holtz did not return, Tommy hunted for him. He suddenly remembered hearing his car motor start. He found his car missing. He swore, then, and grimly began to hunt for a telephone in the house. But before he had raised central he heard the deep-toned purring of the motor again. His car was coming swiftly back to the house. And he saw, through a window, that Von Holtz was driving it. The lean young man got out of it, his face white with passion. He started for the laboratory. Tommy intercepted him. "I--went to get materials for making the metal," said Von Holtz hoarsely, repressing his rage with a great effort. "I shall begin at once, Herr Reames." Tommy said nothing whatever. Von Holtz was lying. Of course. He carried nothing in the way of materials. But he had gone away from the house, and Tommy knew as definitely as if Von Holtz had told him, that Von Holtz had gone off to communicate in safety with someone who signed his correspondence with a J. Von Holtz went into the laboratory. The four-cylinder motor began to throb at once. The whine of the dynamo arose almost immediately after. Von Holtz came out of the laboratory and dived into a shed that adjoined the brick building. He remained in there. Tommy looked at the trip register on his speedometer. Like most people with methodical minds, he had noted the reading on arriving at a new destination. Now he knew how far Von Holtz had gone. He had been to the village and back. "Meaning," said Tommy grimly to himself, "that the J who wants plans and calculations is either in the village or at the end of a long-distance wire. And Von Holtz said he was on the way. He'll probably turn up and try to bribe me." * * * * * He went back into the laboratory and put his eye to the eyepiece of the dimensoscope. Smithers had his blow-torch going and was busily accumulating an apparently unrelated series of discordant bits of queerly-shaped metal. Tommy looked through at the strange mad world he could see through the eyepiece. The tree-fern forest was still. The encampment of the Ragged Men was nearly quiet. Sunset seemed to be approaching in this other world, though it was still bright outside the laboratory. The hours of day and night were obviously not the same in the two worlds, so close together that a man could be flung from one to the other by a mechanical contrivance. The sun seemed larger, too, than the orb which lights our normal earth. When Tommy swung the vision instrument about to search for it, he found a great red ball quite four times the diameter of our own sun, neatly bisected by the horizon. Tommy watched, waiting for it to sink. But it did not sink straight downward as the sun seems to do in all temperate latitudes. It descended, yes, but it moved along the horizon as it sank. Instead of a direct and forthright dip downward, the sun seemed to progress along the horizon, dipping more deeply as it swam. And Tommy watched it blankly. "It's not our sun.... But it's not our world. Yet it revolves, and there are men on it. And a sun that size would bake the earth.... And it's sinking at an angle that would only come at a latitude of--" That was the clue. He understood at once. The instrument through which he regarded the strange world looked out upon the polar regions of that world. Here, where the sun descended slantwise, were the high latitudes, the coldest spaces upon all the whole planet. And if here there were the gigantic growths of a carboniferous era, the tropic regions of this planet must be literal infernos. And then he saw in its gradual descent the monster sun was going along behind the golden city, and the outlines of its buildings, the magnificence of its spires, were limned clearly for him against the dully glowing disk. Nowhere upon earth had such a city ever been dreamed of. No man had ever envisioned such a place, where far-flung arches interconnected soaring, towering columns, where curves of perfect grace were united in forms of utterly perfect proportion.... * * * * * The sunlight died, and dusk began and deepened, and vividly brilliant stars began to come out overhead, and Tommy suddenly searched the heavens eagerly for familiar constellations. And found not one. All the stars were strange. These stars seemed larger and much more near than the tiny pinpoints that blink down upon our earth. And then he swung the instrument again and saw great fires roaring and the Ragged Men crouched about them. Within them, rather, because they had built fires about themselves as if to make a wall of flame. And once Tommy saw twin, monstrous eyes, gazing from the blackness of the tree-fern forest. They were huge eyes, and they were far apart, so that the head of the creature who used them must have been enormous. And they were all of fifteen feet above the ground when they speculatively looked over the ring of fires and the ragged, degraded men within them. Then that creature, whatever it was, turned away and vanished. But Tommy felt a curious shivering horror of the thing. It had moved soundlessly, without a doubt, because not one of the Ragged Men had noted its presence. It had been kept away by the fires. But Denham and Evelyn were somewhere in the tree-fern forest, and they would not dare to make fires.... Tommy drew away from the dimensoscope, shivering. He had been looking only, but the place into which he looked was real, and the dangers that lay hidden there were very genuine, and there was a man and a girl of his own race and time struggling desperately, without arms or hope, to survive. * * * * * Smithers was casually fitting together an intricate array of little rings made of copper tubing. There were three of them, and each was fitted into the next largest by pins which enabled them to spin noiselessly and swiftly at the touch of Smithers' finger. He had them spinning now, each in a separate direction, and the effect was bewildering. As Tommy watched, Smithers stopped them, oiled the pins carefully, and painstakingly inserted a fourth ring. Only this ring was of a white metal that looked somehow more pallid than silver. It had a whiteness like that of ivory beneath its metallic gleam. Tommy blinked. "Did Von Holtz give you that metal?" he asked suddenly. Smithers looked up and puffed at a short brown pipe. "Nope. There was some splashes of it by the castin' box. I melted 'em together an' run a ring. Pressed it to shape; y' can't hammer this stuff. It goes to water and dries up quicker'n lightning--an' you hold y'nose an' run. I used it before for the Professor." Tommy went over to him excitedly. He picked up the little contrivance of many concentric rings. The big motor was throbbing rhythmically, and the generator was humming at the back of the laboratory. Von Holtz was out of sight. * * * * * With painstaking care Tommy went over the little device. He looked up. "A coil?" "I wound one," said Smithers calmly. "On the lathe. Not so hot, but it'll do, I guess. But I can't fix these rings like the Professor did." "I think I can," said Tommy crisply. "Did you make some wire for springs?" "Yeah!" Tommy fingered the wire. Stout, stiff, and surprisingly springy wire of the same peculiar metal. It was that metallic ammonium which chemists have deduced must exist because of the chemical behavior of the compound NH3, but which Denham alone had managed to procure. Tommy deduced that it was an allotropic modification of the substance which forms an amalgam with mercury, as metallic tin is an allotrope of the amorphous gray powder which is tin in its normal, stable state. He set to work with feverish excitement. For one hour, for two he worked. At the end of that time he was explaining the matter curtly to Smithers, so intent on his work that he wholly failed to hear a motor car outside or to realize that it had also grown dark in this world of ours. "You see, Smithers, if a two-dimensioned creature wanted to adjust two right angles at right angles to each other, he'd have them laid flat, of course. And if he put a spring at the far ends of those right angles--they'd look like a T, put together--so that the cross-bar of that T was under tension, he'd have the equivalent of what I'm doing. To make a three-dimensioned figure, that imaginary man would have to bend one side of the cross-bar up. As if the two ends of it were under tension by a spring, and the spring would only be relieved of tension when that cross-bar was bent. But the vertical would be his time dimension, so he'd have to have something thin, or it couldn't be bent. He'd need something 'thin in time.' "We have the same problem. But metallic ammonium is 'thin in time.' It's so fugitive a substance that Denham is the only man ever to secure it. So we use these rings and adjust these springs to them so they're under tension which will only be released when they're all at right angles to each other. In our three dimensions that's impossible, but we have a metal that can revolve in a fourth, and we reinforce their tendency to adjust themselves by starting them off with a jerk. We've got 'em flat. They'll make a good stiff jerk when they try to adjust themselves. And the solenoid's a bit eccentric--" "Shut up!" snapped Smithers suddenly. * * * * * He was facing the door, bristling. Von Holtz was in the act of coming in, with a beefy, broad-shouldered man with blue jowls. Tommy straightened up, thought swiftly, and then smiled grimly. "Hullo, Von Holtz," he said pleasantly. "We've just completed a model catapult. We're all set to try it out. Watch!" He set a little tin can beneath the peculiar device of copper-tubing rings. The can was wholly ordinary, made of thin sheet-iron plated with tin as are all the tin cans of commerce. "You have the catapult remade?" gasped Von Holtz. "Wait! Wait! Let me look at it!" For one instant, and one instant only, Tommy let him see. The massed set of concentric rings, each one of them parallel to all the others. It looked rather like a flat coil of tubing; certainly like no particularly obscure form of projector. But as Von Holtz's weak eyes fastened avidly upon it, Tommy pressed the improvised electric switch. At once that would energize the solenoid and release all the tensed springs from their greater tension, for an attempt to reach a permanent equilibrium. As Von Holtz and the blue-jowled man stared, the little tin can leaped upward into the tiny coil. The small copper rings twinkled one within the other as the springs operated. The tin can was wrenched this way and that, then for the fraction of a second hurt the eyes that gazed upon it--and it was gone! And then the little coil came spinning down to the work bench top from its broken bearings and the remaining copper rings spun aimlessly for a moment. But the third ring of whitish metal had vanished utterly, and so had the coiled-wire springs which Von Holtz had been unable to distinguish. And there was an overpowering smell of ammonia in the room. * * * * * Von Holtz flung himself upon the still-moving little instrument. He inspected it savagely, desperately. His full red lips drew back in a snarl. "How did you do it?" he cried shrilly. "You must tell me! I--I--I will kill you if you do not tell me!" The blue-jowled man was watching Von Holtz. Now his lips twisted disgustedly. He turned to Tommy and narrowed his eyes. "Look here," he rumbled. "This fool's no good! I want the secret of that trick you did. What's your price?" "I'm not for sale," said Tommy, smiling faintly. The blue-jowled man regarded him with level eyes. "My name's Jacaro," he said after an instant. "Maybe you've heard of me. I'm from Chicago." Tommy smiled more widely. "To be sure," he admitted. "You were the man who introduced machine-guns into gang warfare, weren't you? Your gunmen lined up half a dozen of the Buddy Haines gang against a wall and wiped them out, I believe. What do you want this secret for?" The level eyes narrowed. They looked suddenly deadly. "That's my business," said Jacaro briefly. "You know who I am. And I want that trick y'did. I got my own reasons. I'll pay for it. Plenty. You know I got plenty to pay, too. Or else--" "What?" "Something'll happen to you," said Jacaro briefly. "I ain't sayin'' what. But it's damn likely you'll tell what I want to know before it's finished. Name your price and be damn quick!" Tommy took his hand out of his pocket. He had a gun in it. "The only possible answer to that," he said suavely, "is to tell you to go to hell. Get out! But Von Holtz stays here. He'd better!" CHAPTER IV Within half an hour after Jacaro's leaving, Smithers was in the village, laying in a stock of supplies and sending telegrams that Tommy had written out for transmission. Tommy sat facing an ashen Von Holtz and told him pleasantly what would be done to him if he failed to make the metallic ammonium needed to repair the big solenoid. In an hour, Smithers was back, reporting that Jacaro was also sending telegrams but that he, Smithers, had stood over the telegraph operator until his own messages were transmitted. He brought back weapons, too--highly illegal things to have in New York State, where a citizen is only law-abiding when defenseless. And then four days of hectic, sleepless labor began. On the first day one of Tommy's friends drove in in answer to a telegram. It was Peter Dalzell, with men in uniform apparently festooned about his car. He announced that a placard warning passersby of smallpox within, had been added to the decorative signs upon the gate, and stared incredulously at the interior of the big brick barn. Tommy grinned at him and gave him plans and specifications of a light steel globe in which two men might be transported into the fifth dimension by a suitably operating device. Tommy had sat up all night drawing those plans. He told Dalzell just enough of what he was up against to enlist Dalzell's enthusiastic cooperation without permitting him to doubt Tommy's sanity. Dalzell had known Tommy as an amateur tennis player, but not as a scientist. He marveled, refused to believe his eyes when he looked through the dimensoscope, and agreed that the whole thing had to be kept secret or the rescue expedition would be prevented from starting by the incarceration of both Tommy and Smithers in comfortable insane asylums. He feigned to admire Von Holtz, deathly white and nearly frantic with a corroding rage, and complimented Tommy on his taste for illegality. He even asked Von Holtz if he wanted to leave, and Von Holtz snarled insults at him. Von Holtz was beginning to work at the manufacture of metallic ammonium. * * * * * It was an electrolytic process, of course. Ordinarily, when--say--ammonium chloride is broken down by an electric current, ammonium is deposited at the cathode and instantly becomes a gas which dissolves in the water or bubbles up to the surface. With a mercury cathode, it is dissolved and becomes a metallic amalgam, which also breaks down into gas with much bubbling of the mercury. But Denham had worked out a way of delaying the breaking-down, which left him with a curiously white, spongy mass of metal which could be carefully melted down and cast, but not under any circumstances violently struck or strained. Von Holtz was working at that. On the second day he delivered, snarling, a small ingot of the white metal. He was imprisoned in the lean-to-shed in which the electrolysis went on. But Tommy had more than a suspicion that he was in communication with Jacaro. "Of course," he said drily to Smithers, who had expressed his doubts. "Jacaro had somebody sneak up and talk to him through the walls, or maybe through a bored hole. While there's a hope of finding out what he wants to know through Von Holtz, Jacaro won't try anything. Not anything rough, anyhow. We mustn't be bumped off while what we are doing is in our heads alone. We're safe enough--for a while." Smithers grumbled. "We need that ammonium," said Tommy, "and I don't know how to make it. I bluffed that I could, and in time I might, but it would need time and meanwhile Denham needs us. Dalzell is going to send a plane over today, with word of when we can expect our own globe. We'll try to have the big catapult ready when it comes. And the plane will drop some extra supplies. I've ordered a sub-machine gun. Handy when we get over there in the tree-fern forests. Right now, though, we need to be watching...." Because they were taking turns looking through the dimensoscope. For signs of Denham and Evelyn. And Tommy was finding himself thinking wholly unscientific thoughts about Evelyn, since a pretty girl in difficulties is of all possible things the one most likely to make a man romantic. * * * * * In the four days of their hardest working, he saw her three times. The globe was wrecked and ruined. Its glass was broken out and its interior ripped apart. It had been pillaged so exhaustively that there was no hope that whatever device had been included in its design, for its return, remained even repairably intact. That device had not worked, to be sure, but Tommy puzzled sometimes over the fact that he had seen no mechanical device of any sort in the plunder that had been brought out to be demolished. But he did not think of those things when he saw Evelyn. The Ragged Men's encampment was gone, but she and her father lingered furtively, still near the pillaged globe. The first day Tommy saw her, she was still blooming and alert. The second day she was paler. Her clothing was ripped and torn, as if by thorns. Denham had a great raw wound upon his forehead, and his coat was gone and half his shirt was in ribbons. Before Tommy's eyes they killed a nameless small animal with the trunchionlike weapon Evelyn carried. And Denham carted it triumphantly off into the shelter of the tree-fern forest. But to Tommy that shelter began to appear extremely dubious. That same afternoon some of the Ragged Men came suspiciously to the globe and inspected it, and then vented a gibbering rage upon it with blows and curses. They seemed half-mad, these men. But then, all the Ragged Men seemed a shade less than sane. Their hatred for the Golden City seemed the dominant emotion of their existence. And when they had gone, Tommy saw Denham peering cautiously from behind a screening mass of fern. And Denham looked sick at heart. His eyes lifted suddenly to the heavens, and he stared off into the distance again, and then he regarded the heavens again with an expression that was at once of the utmost wistfulness and the uttermost of despair. * * * * * Tommy swung the dimensoscope about and searched the skies of that other world. He saw the flying machine, and it was a swallow-winged device that moved swiftly, and now soared and swooped in abrupt short circles almost overhead. Tommy could see its pilot, leaning out to gaze downward. He was no more than a hundred feet up, almost at the height of the tree-fern tops. And the pilot was moving too swiftly for Tommy to be able to focus accurately upon his face, but he could see him as a man, an indubitable man in no fashion distinguishable from the other men of this earth. He was scrutinizing the globe as well as he could without alighting. He soared upward, suddenly, and his plane dwindled as it went toward the Golden City. And then, inevitably, Tommy searched for the four Ragged Men who had inspected the globe a little while since. He saw them, capering horribly behind a screening of verdure. They did not shake their clenched fists at the flying machine. Instead, they seemed filled with a ghastly mirth. And suddenly they began to run frantically for the far distance, as if bearing news of infinite importance. And when he looked back at Denham, it seemed to Tommy that he wrung his hands before he disappeared. * * * * * But that was the second day of the work upon our own world, and just before sunset there was a droning in the earthly sky above the laboratory, and Tommy ran out, and somebody shot at him from a patch of woodland a quarter of a mile away from the brick building. Isolated as Denham's place was, the shot would go unnoticed. The bullet passed within a few feet of Tommy, but he paid no attention. It was one of Jacaro's watchers, no doubt, but Jacaro did not want Tommy killed. So Tommy waited until the plane swooped low--almost to the level of the laboratory roof--and a thickly padded package thudded to the ground. He picked it up and darted back into the laboratory as other bullets came from the patch of woodland. "Funny," he said dryly to Smithers, inside the laboratory again; "they don't dare kill me--yet--and Von Holtz doesn't dare leave or refuse to do what I tell him to do; and yet they expect to lick us." Smithers growled. Tommy was unpacking the wrapped package. A grim, blued-steel thing came out of much padding. Boxes tumbled after it. "Sub-machine gun," said Tommy, "and ammunition. Jacaro and his little pals will try to get in here when they think we've got the big solenoid ready for use. They'll try to get it before we can use it. This will attend to them." "An' get us in jail," said Smithers calmly, "for forty-'leven years." "No," said Tommy, and grinned. "We'll be in the fifth dimension. Our job is to fling through the catapult all the stuff we'll need to make another catapult to fling us back again." "It can't be done," said Smithers flatly. "Maybe not," agreed Tommy, "especially since we ruin all our springs and one gymbal ring every time we use the thing. But I've got an idea. I'll want five coils with hollow iron cores, and the whole works shaped like this, with two holes bored so...." * * * * * He sketched. He had been working on the idea for several days, and the sketch was ready in his mind to be transferred to paper. "What you goin' to do?" "Something crazy," said Tommy. "A mirror isn't the only thing that changes angles to right ones." "You're the doctor," said the imperturbable Smithers. He set to work. He puzzled Tommy sometimes, Smithers did. So far he hadn't asked how much his pay was going to be. He'd worked unintermittantly. He had displayed a colossal, a tremendous calmness. But no man could work as hard as Smithers did without some powerful driving-force. It was on the fourth day that Tommy learned what it was. The five coils had been made, and Tommy was assembling them with an extraordinary painstaking care behind a screen, to hide what he was doing. He'd discovered a peep-hole bored through the brick wall from the lean-to where Von Holtz worked. He was no longer locked in there. Tommy abandoned the pretense of imprisonment after finding an automatic pistol and a duplicate key to the lock in Von Holtz's possession. He'd had neither when he was theoretically locked up, and Tommy laughed. "It's a farce, Von Holtz," he said dryly, "this pretending you'll run away. You're here spying now, for Jacaro. Of course. And you don't dare harm either of us until you find out from me what you can't work out for yourself, and know I have done. How much is Jacaro going to pay you for the secret of the catapult, Von Holtz?" Von Holtz snarled. Smithers moved toward him, his hands closing and unclosing. Von Holtz went gray with terror. "Talk!" said Smithers. "A--a million dollars," said Von Holtz, cringing away from the brawny red-headed man. "It would be interesting to know what use it would be to him," said Tommy dryly. "But to earn that million you have to learn what we know. And to learn that, you have to help us do it again, on the scale we want. You won't run away. So I shan't bother to lock you up hereafter. Jacaro's men come and talk to you at night, don't they?" * * * * * Von Holtz cringed again. It was an admission. "I don't want to have to kill any of them," said Tommy pleasantly, "and we'll all be classed as mad if this thing gets out. So you go and talk to them in the lane when you want to, Von Holtz. But if any of them come near the laboratory, Smithers and I will kill them, and if Smithers is hurt I'll kill you; and I don't imagine Jacaro wants that, because he expects you to build another catapult for him. But I warn you, if I find another gun on you I'll thrash you." Von Holtz's pallor changed subtly from the pallor of fear to the awful lividness of rage. "You--Gott! You dare threaten--" He choked upon his own fury. "I do," said Tommy. "And I'll carry out the threat." Smithers moved forward once more. "Mr. Von Holtz," he said in a very terrible steadiness, "I aim to kill you some time. I ain't done it yet because Mr. Reames says he needs you a while. But I know you got Miss Evelyn marooned off in them fern-woods on purpose! And--God knows she wouldn't ever look at me, but--I aim to kill you some time!" His eyes were flames. His hands closed and unclosed horribly. Von Holtz gaped at him, shocked out of his fury into fear again. He went unsteadily back to his lean-to. And Smithers went back to the dimensoscope. It was his turn to watch that other world for signs of Denham and Evelyn, and for any sign of danger to them. * * * * * Tommy adjusted the screen before the bench on which he was working, so Von Holtz could not see his task, and went back to work. It was a rather intricate task he had undertaken, and before the events of the past few days he would have said it was insane. But now he was taking it quite casually. Presently he said: "Smithers." Smithers did not look away from the brass tube. "Yeah?" "You're thinking more about Miss Denham than her father." Smithers did not reply for a moment. Then he said: "Well? What if I am?" "I am, too," said Tommy quietly. "I've never spoken to her, and I daresay she's never even heard of me, and she certainly has never seen me, but--" Smithers said with a vast calmness: "She'll never look at me, Mr. Reames. I know it. She talks to me, an' laughs with me, but she's never sure-'nough looked at me. An' she never will. But I got the right to love her." Tommy nodded very gravely. "Yes. You have. So have I. And so, when that globe comes, we both get into it with what arms and ammunition we can pack in, and go where she is, to help her. I intended to have you work the switch and send me off. But you can come, too." Smithers was silent. But he took his eyes from the dimensoscope eye-piece and regarded Tommy soberly. Then he nodded and turned back. And it was a compact between the two men that they should serve Evelyn, without any rivalry at all. * * * * * Tommy went on with his work. The essential defect in the catapult Denham had designed was the fact that it practically had to be rebuilt after each use. And, moreover, the metallic ammonium was so fugitive a substance that it was hard to keep. Once it had been strained by working, it gradually adverted to a gaseous state and was lost. And while he still tried to keep the little catapult in a condition for use, he was at no time sure that he could send a pair of automatics and ammunition through in a steel box at any moment that Denham came close enough to notice a burning smoke-fuse attached. But he was working on another form of catapult entirely, now. In this case he was using hollow magnets placed at known angles to each other. And they were so designed that each one tended to adjust its own hollow bore at right angles to the preceding one, and each one would take any moving, magnetic object and swing it through four successive right angles into the fifth dimension. He fitted the first magnet on twin rods of malleable copper, which also would carry the current which energized the coil. He threaded the second upon the same twin supports. When the current was passed through the two of them, the magnetic field itself twisted the magnets, bending the copper supports and placing the magnets in their proper relative positions. A third magnet on the same pair of rods, and a repetition of the experiment, proved the accuracy of the idea. And since this device, like the dimensoscope, required only a forty-five degree angle to our known dimensions, instead of a right angle as the other catapult did, Tommy was able to work with ordinary and durable materials. He fitted on the last two coils and turned on the current for his final experiment. And as he watched, the twin three-eighths-inch rods twisted and writhed in the grip of the intangible magnetic force. They bent, and quivered, and twisted.... And suddenly there seemed to be a sort of inaudible _snap_, and one of the magnets hurt the eyes that looked at it, and only the edge of the last of the series was visible. * * * * * Tommy drew in his breath sharply. "Now we try it," he said tensely. "I was trying to work this as the mirrors of the dimensoscope were fitted. Let's see." He took a long piece of soft-iron wire and fed it into the hollow of the first magnet. He saw it come out and bend stiffly to enter the hollow of the second. It required force to thrust it through. It went still more stiffly into the third magnet. It required nearly all his strength to thrust it on, and on.... The end of it vanished. He pushed two feet or more of it beyond the last place where it was visible. It went into the magnet that hurt one's eyes. After that it could not be seen. Tommy's voice was strained. "Swing the dimensoscope, Smithers," he ordered. "See if you can see the wire. The end of it should be in the other world." It seemed an age, an aeon, that Smithers searched. Then: "Move it," he said. Tommy obeyed. "It's there," said Smithers evenly. "Two or three feet of it." * * * * * Tommy drew a deep, swift breath of relief. "All right!" he said crisply. "Now we can fling anything we need through there, when our globe arrives. We can built up a dump of supplies, all sent through just before we slide through in the globe." "Yeah," said Smithers. "Uh--Mr. Reames. There's a bunch of Ragged Men in sight, hauling something heavy behind them. I don't know what it's all about." Tommy went to the brass tube and stared through it. The tree-fern forest, drawing away in the distance. The vast and steaming morass. The glittering city, far, far in the distance. And then a mob of the Ragged Men, hauling at some heavy thing. They were a long way off. Some of them came capering on ahead, and Tommy swung the dimensoscope about to see Denham and Evelyn dart for cover and vanish amid the tree-ferns. Denham was as ragged as the Ragged Men, by now, and Evelyn's case was little better. Frightened for them, Tommy swung the instrument about again. But they had not been seen. The leaders who ran gleefully on ahead were merely in haste. And they were followed more slowly by burly men and lean ones, whole men and limping men, who hauled frantically on long ropes of hide, dragging some heavy thing behind them. Tommy saw it only indistinctly as the filthy, nearly naked bodies moved. But it was an intricate device of a golden-colored metal, and it rested upon the crudest of possible carts. The wheels were sections of tree trunks, pierced for wooden axles. The cart itself was made of the most roughly-hewed of timbers. And there were fifty or more of the Ragged Men who dragged it. The men in advance now attacked the underbrush at the edge of the forest. They worked with a maniacal energy, clearing away the long fern-fronds while they capered and danced and babbled excitedly. * * * * * Irrelevantly, Tommy thought of escaped galley slaves. Just such hard-bitten, vice-ridden men as these, and filled with just such a mad, gibbering hatred of the free men they had escaped from. Certainly these men had been civilized once. As the golden-metal device came nearer, its intricacy was the more apparent. No savages could utilize a device like this one. And there was a queer deadliness in the very grace of its outlines. It was a weapon of some sort, but whose nature Tommy could not even guess. And then he caught the gleam of metal also in the fern-forest. On the ground. In glimpses and in fragments of glimpses between the swarming naked bodies of the Ragged Men, he pieced together a wholly incredible impression. There was a roadway skirting the edge of the forest. It was not wide; not more than fifteen feet at most. But it was a solid road-bed of metal! The dull silver-white of aluminum gleamed from the ground. Two or more inches thick and fifteen feet wide, there was a seamless ribbon of aluminum that vanished behind the tree-ferns on either side. The intricate device of golden metal was set up, now, and a shaggy, savage-seeming man mounted beside it grinning. He manipulated its levers and wheels with an expert's assurance. And Tommy saw repairs upon it. Crude repairs, with crude materials, but expertly done. Done by the Ragged Men, past doubt, and so demolishing any idea that they came of a savage race. "Watch here, Smithers," said Tommy grimly. * * * * * He sat to work upon the little catapult after Denham's design. His own had seemed to work, but the other was more sure. This would be an ambush the Ragged Men were preparing, and of course they would be preparing it for men of the Golden City. The plane had sighted Denham's steel globe. It had hovered overhead, and carried news of what it had seen to the Golden City. And here was a roadway that must have been made by the folk of the Golden City at some time or another. Its existence explained why Denham remained nearby. He had been hoping that some vehicle would travel along its length, containing civilized people to whom he could signal and ultimately explain his plight. And, being near the steel globe, his narrative would have its proofs at hand. And now it was clear that the Ragged Men expected some ground-vehicle, too. They were preparing for it. They were setting a splendid ambush, with a highly-treasured weapon they ordinarily kept hidden. Their triumphant hatred could apply to nothing else than an expectation of inflicting injury on men of the Golden City. So Tommy worked swiftly upon the catapult. A new little ring of metallic ammonium was ready, and so were the necessary springs. The Ragged Men would lay their ambush. The men of the Golden City might enter it. They might. But the aviator who had spotted the globe would have seen the shredded contents of the sphere about. He would have known the Ragged Men had found it. And the men who came in a ground-vehicle from the Golden City should be expecting just such an ambush as was being laid. There would be a fight, and Tommy, somehow, had no doubt that the men of the Golden City would win. And when they had cleared the field he would fling a smoking missile through the catapult. The victors should see it and should examine it. And though writing would serve little purpose, they should at least recognize it as written communication in a language other than their own. And mathematical diagrams would certainly be lucid, and proof of a civilized man sending the missile, and photographs.... * * * * * The catapult was ready, and Tommy prepared his message-carrying projectile. He found snapshots and included them. He tore out a photograph of Evelyn and her father, which had been framed above a work bench in the laboratory. He labored, racking his brain for a means of conveying the information that the globe was of any other world.... And suddenly he had an idea. A cord attached to his missile would lead to nothingness from either world, yet one end would be in that other world, and the other end in this. A wire would be better. Tugs upon it would convey the idea of living beings nearby but invisible. The photograph would identify Denham and his daughter as associated with the phenomenon and competent to explain it.... Tommy worked frantically to get the thing ready. He almost prayed that the men of the Golden City would be victors, would find his little missile when the fray was over, and would try to comprehend it.... All he could do was try. Then Smithers said, from the dimensoscope: "They're all set, Mr. Reames. Y'better look." Tommy stared through the eye-piece. Strangely, the golden weapon had vanished. All seemed to be exactly as before. The cleared-away underbrush was replaced. Nothing was in any way changed from the normal in that space upon a mad world. But there was a tiny movement and Tommy saw a Ragged Man. He was lying prone upon the earth. He seemed either to hear or see something, because his lips moved as he spoke to another invisible man beside him, and his expression of malevolent joy was horrible. Tommy swung the tube about. Nothing.... But suddenly he saw swiftly-moving winkings of sunlight from the edge of the tree-fern forest. Something was moving in there, moving with lightning swiftness along the fifteen-foot roadway of solid aluminum. It drew nearer, and more near.... * * * * * The carefully camouflaged ambuscade was fully focussed and Tommy was watching tensely when the thing happened. He saw glitterings through the tree-fronds come to a smoothly decelerated stop. There was a pause; and suddenly the underbrush fell flat. As if a single hand had smitten it, it wavered, drooped, and lay prone. The golden weapon was exposed, with its brawny and horribly grinning attendant. For one-half a split second Tommy saw the wheeled thing in which half a dozen men of the Golden City were riding. It was graceful and stream-lined and glittering. There was a platform on which the steel sphere would have been mounted for carrying away. But then there was a sudden intolerable light as the men of the Golden City reached swiftly for peculiar weapons beside them. The light came from the crudely mounted weapon of the Ragged Men, and it was an unbearable actinic glare. For half a second, perhaps, it persisted, and died away to a red flame which leaped upward and was not. Then the vehicle from the Golden City was a smoking, twisted ruin. Four of the six men in it were blasted, blackened crisps. Another staggered to his feet, struggled to reach a weapon and could not lift it, and twitched a dagger from his belt and fell forward; and Tommy could see that his suicide was deliberate. The last man, alone, was comparatively unharmed by the blast of light. He swept a pistol-like contrivance into sight. It bore swiftly upon the now surging, yelling horde of Ragged Men. And one--two--three of them seemed to scream convulsively before they were trampled under by the rest. But suddenly there were a myriad little specks of red all over the body of the man at bay. The pistol-like thing dropped from his grasp as his whole hand became encrimsoned. And then he was buried beneath the hating, blood-lusting mob of the forest men. CHAPTER V An hour later, Tommy took his eyes away from the dimensoscope eye-piece. He could not bear to look any longer. "Why don't they kill him?" he demanded sickly, filled with a horrible, a monstrous rage. "Oh, why don't they kill him?" He felt maddeningly impotent. In another world entirely, a mob of half-naked renegades had made a prisoner. He was not dead, that solely surviving man from the Golden City. He was bound, and the Ragged Men guarded him closely, and his guards were diverting themselves unspeakably by small tortures, minor tortures, horribly painful but not weakening. And they capered and howled with glee when the bound man writhed. The prisoner was a brave man, though. Helpless as he was, he presently flung back his head and set his teeth. Sweat stood out in great droplets upon his body and upon his forehead. And he stilled his writhings, and looked at his captors with a grim and desperate defiance. The guards made gestures which were all too clear, all too luridly descriptive of the manner of death which awaited him. And the man of the Golden City was ashen and hopeless and utterly despairing--and yet defiant. Smithers took Tommy's place at the eye-piece of the instrument. His nostrils quivered at what he saw. The vehicle from the Golden City was being plundered, of course. Weapons from the dead men were being squabbled over, even fought over. And the Ragged Men fought as madly among themselves as if in combat with their enemies. The big golden weapon on its cart was already being dragged away to its former hiding-place. And somehow, it was clear that those who dragged it away expected and demanded that the solitary prisoner not be killed until their return. It was that prisoner, in the agony which was only the beginning of his death, who made Smithers' teeth set tightly. * * * * * "I don't see the Professor or Miss Evelyn," said Smithers in a vast calmness. "I hope to Gawd they--don't see this." Tommy swung on his heel, staring and ashen. "They were near," he said stridently. "I saw them! They saw what happened in the ambush! They'll--they'll see that man tortured!" Smithers' hand closed and unclosed. "Maybe the Professor'll have sense enough to take Miss Evelyn--uh--where she--can't hear," he said slowly, his voice level. "I hope so." Tommy flung out his hands desperately. "I want to help that man!" he cried savagely. "I want to do something! I saw what they promised to do to him. I want to--to kill him, even! It would be mercy!" Smithers said, with a queer, stilly shock in his voice: "I see the Professor now. He's got that gun-thing in his hand.... Miss Evelyn's urging him to try to do something.... He's looking at the sky.... It'll be a long time before it's dark.... He's gone back out of sight...." "If we had some dynamite!" said Tommy desperately, "we could take a chance on blowing ourselves to bits and try to fling it through and into the middle of those devils...." * * * * * He was pacing up and down the laboratory, harrowed by the fate of that gray-faced man who awaited death by torture; filled with a wild terror that Evelyn and her father would try to rescue him and be caught to share his fate; racked by his utter impotence to do more than watch.... Then Smithers said thickly: "God!" He stumbled away from the eye-piece. Tommy took his place, dry-throated with terror. He saw the Ragged Men laughing uproariously. The bearded man who was their leader was breaking the arms and legs of the prisoner so that he would be helpless when released from the stake to which he was bound. And if ever human beings looked like devils out of hell, it was at that moment. The method of breaking the bones was excruciating. The prisoner screamed. The Ragged Men rolled upon the ground in their maniacal mirth. And then a man dropped, heaving convulsively, and then another, and still another.... The grim, gaunt figure of Denham came out of the tree-fern forest, the queer small golden-metal trunchion in his hand. A fourth man dropped before the Ragged Men quite realized what had happened. The fourth man himself was armed--and a flashing slender body came plunging from the forest and Evelyn flung herself upon the still-heaving body and plucked away that weapon. * * * * * Tommy groaned, in the laboratory in another world. He could not look away, and yet it seemed that the heart would be torn from his body by that sight. Because the Ragged Men had turned upon Denham with a concentrated ferocity, somehow knowing instantly that he was more nearly akin to the men of the Golden City than to them. But at sight of Evelyn, her garments rent by the thorns of the forest, her white body gleaming through the largest tears, they seemed to go mad. And Tommy's eyes, glazing, saw the look on Denham's face as he realized that Evelyn had not fled, but had followed him in his desperate and wholly hopeless effort. Then the swarming mass of Ragged Men surged over the two of them. Buried them under reaching, hating, lusting fiends who fought even among themselves to be first to seize them. Then there was only madness, and Denham was bound beside the man of the Golden City, and Evelyn was the center of a fighting group which was suddenly flung aside by the bearded giant, and the encampment of the Ragged Men was bedlam. And somehow Tommy knew with a terrible clarity that a man of the Golden City to torture was bliss unimaginable to these half-mad enemies of that city. But a woman-- He turned from the instrument, three-quarters out of his head. He literally did not see Von Holtz gazing furtively in the doorway. His eyes were fixed and staring. It seemed that his brain would burst. Then he heard his own voice saying with an altogether unbelievable steadiness: "Smithers! They've got Evelyn. Get the sub-machine gun." * * * * * Smithers cried out hoarsely. His face was not quite human, for an instant. But Tommy was bringing the work bench on which he had installed his magnetic catapult, close over by the dimensoscope. "This cannot work," he said in the same incredible calmness. "Not possibly. It should not work. It will not work. But it has to work!" He was clamping the catapult to a piece of heavy timber. "Put the gun so it shoots into the first magnet," he said steadily. "The magnet-windings shouldn't stand the current we've got to put into them. They've got to." Smithers' fingers were trembling and unsteady. Tommy helped him, not looking through the dimensoscope at all. "Start the dynamo," he said evenly--and marveled foolishly at the voice that did not seem to belong to him at all, talking so steadily and so quietly. "Give me all the juice you've got. We'll cut out this rheostat." He was tightening a vise which would hold the deadly little weapon in place while Smithers got the crude-oil engine going and accelerated it recklessly to its highest speed. Tommy flung the switch. Rubber insulation steamed and stank. He pulled the trigger of the little gun for a single shot. The bullet flew into the first hollow magnet, just as he had beforehand thrust an iron wire. It vanished. The series of magnets seemed unharmed. * * * * * With a peculiar, dreamlike steadiness, Tommy put his hand where an undeflected bullet would go through it. He pressed the trigger again. He felt a tiny breeze upon his hand. But the bullet had been unable to elude the compound-wound magnets, each of which now had quite four times the designed voltage impressed upon its coils. Tommy flung off the switch. "Work the gun," he ordered harshly. "When I say fire, send a burst of shots through it. Keep the switch off except when you're actually firing, so--God willing--the coils don't burn out. Fire!" He was gazing through the dimensoscope. Evelyn was struggling helplessly while two Ragged Men held her arms, grinning as only devils could have grinned, and others squabbled and watched with a fascinated attention some cryptic process which could only be the drawing of lots.... Tommy saw, and paid no attention. The machine-gun beside him rasped suddenly. He saw a tree-fern frond shudder. He saw a gaping, irregular hole where a fresh frond was uncurling. Tommy put out his hand to the gun. "Let me move it, bench and all," he said steadily. "Now try it again. Just a burst." * * * * * Again the gun rasped. And the earth was kicked up suddenly where the bullets struck in that other world. The little steel-jacketed missiles were deflected by the terribly overstrained magnets of the catapult, but their energy was not destroyed. It was merely altered in direction. Fired within the laboratory upon our own and normal world, the bullets came out into the world of tree-ferns and monstrous things. They came out, as it happened, sideways instead of point first, which was due to some queer effect of dimension change upon an object moving at high velocity. Because of that, they ricocheted much more readily, and where they struck they made a much more ghastly wound. But the first two bursts caused no effect at all. They were not even noticed by the Ragged Men. The noise of the little gun was thunderous and snarling in the laboratory, but in the world of the fifth dimension there was no sound at all. "Like this," said Tommy steadily. "Just like this.... Now fire!" He had tilted the muzzle upward. And then with a horrible grim intensity he traversed the gun as it roared. And it was butchery. Three Ragged Men were cut literally to bits before the storm of bullets began to do real damage. The squabbling group, casting lots for Evelyn, had a swathe of dead men in its midst before snarls begun had been completed. "Again," said Tommy coldly. "Again, Smithers, again!" * * * * * And again the little gun roared. The burly bearded man clutched at his throat--and it was a gory horror. A Thing began to run insanely. It did not even look human any longer. It stumbled over the leader of the Ragged Men and died as he had done. The bullets came tumbling over themselves erratically. They swooped and curved and dispersed themselves crazily. Spinning as they were, at right angles to their line of flight, their trajectories were incalculable and their impacts were grisly. The little gun fired ten several bursts, aimed in a desperate cold-bloodedness, before the smell of burnt rubber became suddenly overpowering and the rasping sound of an electric arc broke through the rumbling of the crude-oil engine in the back. Smithers sobbed. "Burnt out!" But Tommy waved his hand. "I think," he said savagely, "that maybe a dozen of them got away. Evelyn's staggering toward her father. She'll turn him loose. That prisoner's dead, though. Didn't mean to shoot him, but those bullets flew wild." He gave Smithers the eye-piece. Sweat was rolling down his forehead in great drops. His hands were trembling uncontrollably. He paced shakenly up and down the laboratory, trying to shut out of his own sight the things he had seen when the bullets of his own aiming literally splashed into the living flesh of men. He had seen Ragged Men disemboweled by those spinning, knifelike projectiles. He had turned a part of the mad world of that other dimension into a shambles, and he did not regret it because he had saved Evelyn, but he wanted to shut out the horror of seeing what he had done. "But now," he said uncertainly to himself, "they're no better off, except they've got weapons.... If that man from the Golden City hadn't been killed...." * * * * * He was looking at the magnetic catapult, burned out and useless. His eyes swung suddenly to the other one. Just a little while since he had made ready a missile to be thrown through into the other world by that. It contained snapshots, and diagrams, and it was an attempt to communicate with the men of the Golden City without any knowledge of their language. "But--I can communicate with Denham!" He began to write feverishly. If he had looked out of the laboratory window, he would have seen Von Holtz running like a deer, waving his arms jerkily, and--when out of earshot of the laboratory--shouting loudly. And Von Holtz was carrying a small black box which Tommy would have identified instantly as a motion picture camera, built for amateurs but capable of taking pictures indoors and with a surprisingly small amount of light. And if Tommy had listened, he might possibly have heard the beginnings of those shoutings to men hidden in a patch of woodland about a quarter of a mile away. The men, of course, were Jacaro's, waiting until either Von Holtz had secured the information that was wanted, or until an assault in force upon the laboratory would net them a catapult ready for use--to be examined, photographed, and duplicated at leisure. But Tommy neither looked nor listened. He wrote feverishly, saying to Smithers at the dimensoscope: "Denham'll be looking around to see what killed those men. When he does, we want to be ready to shoot a smoke-bomb through to him, with a message attached." Smithers made a gesture of no especial meaning save that he had heard. And Tommy went on writing swiftly, saying who he was and what he had done, and that another globe was being built so that he and Smithers could come with supplies and arms to help.... "He's lookin'' around now, Mr. Reames," said Smithers quietly. "He's picked up a ricocheted bullet an' is staring at it." * * * * * The crude-oil engine was running at a thunderous rate. Tommy fastened his note in the little missile he had made ready. He placed it under the solenoid of the catapult after Denham's design, with the springs and rings of metallic ammonium. He turned to Smithers. "I'll watch for him," said Tommy unsteadily. "You know, watch for the right moment to fling it through. Slow up the generator a little. It'll rack itself to pieces." He put his eye to the eye-piece. He winced as he saw again what the bullets of his aiming had done. But he saw Denham almost at once. And Denham was scratched and bruised and looked very far indeed from the ideal of a professor of theoretic physics, with hardly more than a few shreds of clothing left upon him, and a ten-day's beard upon his face. He limped as he walked. But he had stopped in the task of gathering up weapons to show Evelyn excitedly what it was that he had found. A spent and battered bullet, but indubitably a bullet from the world of his own ken. He began to stare about him, hopeful yet incredulous. Tommy took his eye from the dimensoscope just long enough to light the fuse of the smoke-bomb. "Here it goes, Smithers!" He flung the switch. The missile with its thickly smoking fuse leaped upward as the concentric rings flickered and whirled bewilderingly. The missile hurt the eyes that watched it. It vanished. The solenoid dropped to the floor from the broken small contrivance. Then Tommy's heart stood still as he gazed through the eye-piece again. He could see nothing but an opaque milkiness. But it drifted away, and he realised that it was smoke. More, Denham was staring at it. More yet, he was moving cautiously towards its source, one of the strange golden weapons held ready.... Denham was investigating. * * * * * The generator at the back of the laboratory slowed down. Smithers was obeying orders. Tommy hung close by the vision instrument, his hands moving vaguely and helplessly, as one makes gestures without volition when anxious for someone else to duplicate the movements for which he sets the example. He saw Denham, very near, inspecting the smoking thing on the ground suspiciously. The smoke-fuse ceased to burn. Denham stared. After an age-long delay, he picked up the missile Tommy had prepared. And Tommy saw that there was a cord attached to it. He had fastened that cord when planning to try to communicate with the men of the Golden City, when he had expected them to be victorious. But he saw Denham's face light up with pathetic hope. He called to Evelyn. He hobbled excitedly to her, babbling.... Tommy watched, and his heart pounded suddenly as Evelyn turned and smiled in the direction in which she knew the dimensoscope must be. A huge butterfly, its wings a full yard across, fluttered past her head. Denham talked excitedly to her. A clumsy batlike thing swooped by overhead. Its shadow blanketed her face for an instant. A running animal, small and long, ran swiftly in full view from one side of the dimensoscope's field of vision to the other. Then a snake, curiously horned, went writhing past.... Denham talked excitedly. He turned and made gestures as of writing, toward the spot where he had picked up Tommy's message. He began to search for a charred stick where the Ragged Men had built a fire some days now past. A fleeing furry thing sped across his feet, running.... * * * * * Denham looked up. And Evelyn was staring now. She was staring in the direction of the Golden City. And now what was almost a wave of animals, all wild and all fleeing, swept across the field of vision of the dimensoscope. There were gazelles, it seemed--slender-limbed, graceful animals, at any rate--and there were tiny hoofed things which might have been eohippi, and then a monstrous armadillo clanked and rattled past.... Tommy swung the dimensoscope. He gasped. All the animal world was in flight. The insects had taken to wing. Flying creatures were soaring upward and streaking through the clear blue sky, and all in the one direction. And then out of the morass came monstrous shapes; misshapen, unbelievable reptilian shapes, which fled bellowing thunderously for the tree-fern forest. They were gigantic, those things from the morass. They were hideous. They were things out of nightmares, made into flabby flesh. There were lizards and what might have been gigantic frogs, save that frogs possess no tails. And there were long and snaky necks terminating in infinitesimal heads, and vast palpitating bodies following those impossible small brain-cases, and long tapering tails that thrashed mightily as the ghastly things fled bellowing.... And the cause of the mad panic was a slowly moving white curtain of mist. It was flowing over the marsh, moving with apparent deliberation, but, as Tommy saw, actually very swiftly. It shimmered and quivered and moved onward steadily. Its upper surface gleamed with elusive prismatic colors. It had blotted out the horizon and the Golden City, and it came onward.... * * * * * Denham made frantic, despairing gestures toward the dimensoscope. The thing was coming too fast. There was no time to write. Denham held high the cord that trailed from the message-bearing missile. He gesticulated frantically, and raced to the gutted steel globe and heaved mightily upon it and swung it about so that Tommy saw a great steel ring set in its side, which had been hidden before. He made more gestures, urgently, and motioned Evelyn inside. Tommy struck at his forehead. "It's poison gas," he muttered. "Revenge for the smashed-up vehicle.... They knew it by an automatic radio signal, maybe. This is their way of wiping out the Ragged Men.... Poison gas.... It'll kill Denham and Evelyn.... He wants me to do something...." He drew back, staring, straining every nerve to think.... And somehow his eyes were drawn to the back of the laboratory and he saw Smithers teetering on his feet, with his hands clasped queerly to his body, and a strange man standing in the door of the laboratory with an automatic pistol in his hand. The automatic had a silencer on it, and its clicking had been drowned out, anyhow, by the roaring of the crude-oil engine. The man was small and dark and natty. His lips were drawn back in a peculiar mirthless grin as Smithers teetered stupidly back and forth and then fell.... The explosion of Tommy's own revolver astounded him as much as it did Jacaro's gunman. He did not ever remember drawing it or aiming. The natty little gunman was blotted out by a spouting mass of white smoke--and suddenly Tommy knew what it was that Denham wanted him to do. * * * * * There was rope in a loose and untidy coil beneath a work bench. Tommy sprang to it in a queer, nightmarish activity. He knew what was happening, of course. Von Holtz had seen the magnetic catapult at work. That couldn't be destroyed or its workings hidden like the ring catapult of Denham's design. He'd gone out to call in Jacaro's men. And they'd shot down Smithers as a cold-blooded preliminary to the seizure of the instrument Jacaro wanted. It was necessary to defend the laboratory. But Tommy could not spare the time. That white mist was moving upon Evelyn and her father, in that other world. It was death, as the terror of the wild things demonstrated. They had to be helped.... He knotted the rope to the end of the cord that vanished curiously somewhere among the useless mass of rings. He tugged at the cord--and it was tugged in return. Denham, in another world, had felt his signal and had replied to it.... A window smashed suddenly and a bullet missed Tommy's neck by inches. He fired at that window, and absorbedly guided the knot of the rope past its vanishing point. The knot ceased to exist and the rope crept onward--and suddenly moved more and more swiftly to a place where abruptly it was not. For the length of half an inch, the rope hurt the eyes that looked at it. Beyond that it was not possible to see it at all. Tommy leaped up. He plunged ahead of two separate spurts of shots from two separate windows. The shots pierced the place where he had been. He was racing for the crude-oil engine. There was a chain wound upon a drum, there, and a clutch attached the drum to the engine. He stopped and seized the repeating shotgun Smithers had brought as his own weapon against Jacaro's gangsters. He sent four loads of buckshot at the windows of the laboratory. A man yelled. And Tommy had dropped the gun to knot the rope to the chain, desperately, fiercely, in a terrible haste. * * * * * The chain began to pay out to that peculiar vanishing point which was here an entry-way to another world--perhaps another universe. A bullet nicked his ribs. He picked up the gun and fired it nearly at random. He saw Smithers moving feebly, and Tommy had a vast compassion for Smithers, but-- He shuddered suddenly. Something had struck him a heavy blow in the shoulder. And something else battered at his leg. There was no sound that could be heard above the thunder of the crude-oil motor, but Tommy, was queerly aware of buzzing things flying about him, and of something very warm flowing down his body and down his leg. And he felt very dizzy and weak and extremely tired.... He could not see clearly, either. But he had to wait until Denham had the chain fast to the globe. That was the way he had intended to come back, of course. The ring was in the globe, and this chain was in the laboratory to haul the globe back from wherever it had been sent. And Von Holtz had disconnected it before sending away the globe with Denham in it. If the chain remained unbroken, of course it could be hauled in, as it would turn all necessary angles and force the globe to follow those angles, whatever they might be.... Tommy was on his hands and knees, and men were saying savagely: "Where's that thing, hey? Where's th' thing Jacaro wants?" He wanted to tell them that they should say if the chain had stopped moving to a place where it ceased to exist, so that he could throw a clutch and bring Denham and his daughter back from the place where Von Holtz had marooned them when he wanted to steal Denham's secret. Tommy wanted to explain that. But the floor struck him in the face, and something said to him: "They've shot you." * * * * * But it did not seem to matter, somehow, and he lay very still until he felt himself strangling, and he was breathing in strong ammonia which made his eyes smart and his tired lungs gasp. Then he saw flames, and heard a motor car roaring away from close by the laboratory. "They've stolen the catapult and set fire to the place," he remembered dizzily, "and now they're skipping out...." Even that did not seem to matter. But then he heard the chain clank, next to him on the floor. The white mist! Denham and Evelyn waiting for the white mist to reach them, and Denham jerking desperately on the chain to signal that he was ready.... The flames had released ammonia from the metal Von Holtz had made. That had roused Tommy. But it did not give him strength. It is impossible to say where Tommy's strength came from, when somehow he crawled to the clutch lever, with the engine roaring steadily above him, and got one hand on the lever, and edged himself up, and up, and up, until he could swing his whole weight on that lever. That instant of dangling hurt excruciatingly, too, and Tommy saw only that the drum began to revolve swiftly, winding the chain upon it, before his grip gave way. And the chain came winding in and in from nowhere, and the tall laboratory filled more and more thickly with smoke, and lurid flames appeared somewhere, and a rushing sound began to be audible as the fire roared upward to the inflammable roof, and the engine ran thunderously.... * * * * * Then, suddenly, there was a shape in the middle of the laboratory floor. A huge globular shape which it hurt the eyes to look upon. It became visible out of nowhere as if evoked by magic amid the flames of hell. But it came, and was solid and substantial, and it slid along the floor upon small wheels until it wound up with a crash against the winding drum, and the chain shrieked as it tightened unbearably--and the engine choked and died. Then a door opened in the monstrous globe. Two figures leaped out, aghast. Two ragged, tattered, strangely-armed figures, who cried out to each other and started for the door. But the girl stumbled over Tommy and called, choking, to her father. Groping toward her, he found Smithers. And then Tommy smiled drowsily to himself as soft arms tugged bravely at him, and a slender, glorious figure staggered with him to fresh air. "It's Von Holtz," snapped Denham, and coughed as he fought his way to the open. "I'll blast him to hell with these things we brought back...." * * * * * That was the last thing Tommy knew until he woke up in bed with a feeling of many bandages and an impression that his lungs hurt. Denham seemed to have heard him move. He looked in the door. "Hullo, Reames. You're all right now." Tommy regarded him curiously until he realized. Denham was shaved and fully clothed. That was the strangeness about him. Tommy had been watching him for many days as his clothing swiftly deteriorated and his beard grew. "You are, too, I see," he said weakly. "I'm damned glad." Then he felt foolish, and querulous, and as if he should make some apology, and instead said, "But five dimensions does seem extreme. Three is enough for ordinary use, and four is luxurious. Five seems to be going a bit too far." Denham blinked, and then grinned suddenly. Tommy had admired the man who could face so extraordinary a situation with such dogged courage, and now he found, suddenly, that he liked Denham. "Not too far," said Denham grimly. "Look!" He held up one of the weapons Tommy had seen in that other world, one of the golden-colored truncheons. "I brought this back. The same metal they built that wagon of theirs with. All their weapons. Most of their tools--as I know. It's gold, man! They use gold in that world as we use steel here. That's why Jacaro was ready to kill to get the secret of getting there. Von Holtz enlisted him." "How did you know--" began Tommy weakly. "Smithers," said Denham. "We dragged both of you out before the lab went-up in smoke. He's going to be all right, too. Evelyn's nursing both of you. She wants to talk to you, but I want to say this first: You did a damned fine thing, Reames! The only man who could have saved us, and you just about killed yourself doing it. Smithers saw you swing that clutch lever with three bullets in your body. And you're a scientist, too. You're my partner, Reames, in what we do in the fifth dimension." * * * * * Tommy blinked. "But five dimensions does seem extreme...." "We are the Interdimensional Trading Company," said Denham, smiling. "Somehow, I think we'll find something in this world we can trade for the gold in that. And we've got to get there, Reames, because Jacaro will surely try to make use of that catapult principle you worked out. He'll raise the devil; and I think the people of that Golden City would be worth knowing. No, we're partners. Sooner or later, you'll know how I feel about what you've done. I'm going to bring Evelyn in here now." He vanished. An instant later Tommy heard a voice--a girl's voice. His heart began to pound. Denham came back into the room and with him was Evelyn. She smiled warmly upon Tommy, though as his eyes fell blankly upon the smart sport clothes she was again wearing, she flushed. "My daughter Evelyn," said Denham. "She wants to thank you." And Tommy felt a warm soft hand pressing his, and he looked deep into the eyes of the girl he had never before spoken to, but for whom he had risked his life, and whom he knew he would love forever. There were a thousand things crowding to his lips for utterance. He had watched Evelyn, and he loved her-- "H-how do you do?" said Tommy, lamely. "I'm--awfully glad to meet you." But before he was well he learned to talk more sensibly. [Illustration: _--And the ships, at that touch, fell helplessly down from the heights._] The Pirate Planet PART THREE OF A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Charles W. Diffin_ Two fighting Yankees--war-torn Earth's sole representatives on Venus--set out to spike the greatest gun of all time. WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE The attack comes without warning; its reason is unknown. But Venus is approaching the earth, and flashes from the planet are followed by terrific explosions that wreak havoc throughout the world. Lieutenant McGuire and Captain Blake of the U. S. Army Air Service see a great ship fly in from space. Blake attacks it with the 91st Squadron in support, and Blake alone survives. McGuire and Professor Sykes, an astronomer of Mount Lawson, are captured. The bombardment ceases as Venus passes on, and the people of Earth sink into hopeless despondency. Less than a year and a half and the planet will return, and then--the end! The armament of Earth is futile against an enemy who has conquered space. Blake hopes that science might provide a means; might show our fighters how to go out into space and throttle the attack at its source. But the hope is blasted, until a radio from McGuire supplies a lead. McGuire is on Venus. He and Sykes land on that distant planet, captives of a barbarous people. They are taken before Torg, the emperor, and his council, and they learn that these red, man-shaped beasts intend to conquer the earth. Spawning in millions, they are crowded, and Earth is to be their colony. Imprisoned on a distant island, the two captives are drugged and hypnotized before a machine which throws their thoughts upon a screen. Involuntary traitors, they disclose the secrets of Earth and its helplessness; then attempt to escape and end their lives rather than be forced to further betrayal of their own people. McGuire finds a radio station and sends a message back to Earth. He implores Blake to find a man named Winslow, for Winslow has invented a space ship and claims to have reached the moon. No time for further sending--McGuire does not even know if his message has been received--but they reach the ocean where death offers them release. A force of their captors attacking on land, they throw themselves from a cliff, then swim out to drown beyond reach in the ocean. An enemy ship sweeps above them: its gas cloud threatens not the death they desire but unconsciousness and capture. "God help us," says Sykes; "we can't even die!" They sink, only to be buoyed up by a huge metal shape. A metal projector raises from the ocean, bears upon the enemy ship and sends it, a mass of flame and molten metal, into the sea. And friendly voices are in McGuire's ears as careful hands lift the two men and carry them within the craft that has saved them. CHAPTER XIII Lieutenant McGuire had tried to die. He and Professor Sykes had welcomed death with open arms, and death had been thwarted by their enemies who wanted them alive--wanted to draw their knowledge from them as a vampire bat might seek to feast. And, when even death was denied them, help had come. The enemy ship had gone crashing to destruction where its melting metal made hissing clouds of steam as it buried itself in the ocean. And this craft that had saved them--Lieutenant McGuire had never been on a submarine, but he knew it could be only that that held him now and carried him somewhere at tremendous speed. This was miracle enough! But to see, with eyes which could not be deceiving him, a vision of men, human, white of face--men like himself--bending and working over Sykes' unconscious body--that could not be immediately grasped. Their faces, unlike the bleached-blood horrors he had seen, were aglow with the flush of health. They were tall, slenderly built, graceful in their quick motions as they worked to revive the unconscious man. One stopped, as he passed, to lay a cool hand on McGuire's forehead, and the eyes that looked down seemed filled with the blessed quality of kindness. They were human--his own kind!--and McGuire was unable to take in at first the full wonder of it. Did the tall man speak? His lips did not move, yet McGuire heard the words as in some inner ear. "We were awaiting you, friend Mack Guire." The voice was musical, thrilling, and yet the listening man could not have sworn that he heard a voice at all. It was as if a thought were placed within his mind by the one beside him. The one who had paused hurried on to aid the others, and McGuire let his gaze wander. * * * * * The porthole beside him showed dimly a pale green light; they were submerged, and the hissing rush of water told him that they were travelling fast. There was a door in the farther wall; beyond was a room of gleaming lights that reflected from myriads of shining levers and dials. A control room. A figure moved as McGuire watched, to press on a lever where a red light was steadily increasing in brightness. He consulted strange instruments before him, touched a metal button here and there, then opened a switch, and the rippling hiss of waters outside their craft softened to a gentler note. The tall one was beside him again. "Your friend will live," he told him in that wordless tongue, "and we are almost arrived. The invisible arms of our anchorage have us now and will draw us safely to rest." The kindly tone was music in McGuire's ears, and he smiled in reply. "Friends!" he thought. "We are among friends." "You are most welcome," the other assured him, "and, yes, you are truly among friends." But the lieutenant glanced upward in wonder, for he knew that he had uttered no spoken word. Their ship turned and changed its course beneath them, then came finally to rest with a slight rocking motion as if cushioned on powerful springs. Sykes was being assisted to his feet as the tall man reached for McGuire's hand and helped him to rise. The two men of Earth stood for a long minute while they stared unbelievingly into each other's eyes. Their wonder and amazement found no words for expression but must have been apparent to the one beside them. "You will understand," he told them. "Do not question this reality even to yourselves. You are safe!... Come." And he led the way through an opening doorway to a wet deck outside. Beyond this was a wharf of carved stone, and the men followed where steps were inset to allow them to ascend. Again McGuire could not know if he heard a tumult of sound or sensed it in some deeper way. The air about them was aglow with soft light, and it echoed in his ears with music unmistakably real--beautiful music!--exhilarating! But the clamor of welcoming voices, like the words from their tall companion, came soundlessly to him. * * * * * There were people, throngs of them, waiting. Tall like the others, garbed, like those horrible beings of a past that seemed distant and remote, in loose garments of radiant colors. And everywhere were welcoming smiles and warm and friendly glances. McGuire let his dazed eyes roam around to find the sculptured walls of a huge room like a tremendous cave. The soft glow of light was everywhere, and it brought out the beauty of flowing lines and delicate colors in statuary and bas-relief that adorned the walls. Behind him the water made a dark pool, and from it projected the upper works of their strange craft. His eyes were hungry for these new sights, but he turned with Sykes to follow their guide through the colorful crowd that parted to let them through. They passed under a carved archway and found themselves in another and greater room. But was it a room? McGuire marveled at its tremendous size. His eyes took in the smooth green of a grassy lawn, the flowers and plants, and then they followed where the hand of Sykes was pointing. The astronomer gripped McGuire's arm in a numbing clutch; his other hand was raised above. "The stars," he said. "The clouds are gone; it is night!" And where he pointed was a vault of black velvet. Deep hues of blue seemed blended with it, and far in its depths were the old familiar star-groups of the skies. "Ah!" the scientist breathed, "the beautiful, friendly stars!" Their guide waited; then, "Come," he urged gently, and led them toward a lake whose unruffled glassy surface mirrored the stars above. Beside it a man was waiting to receive them. McGuire had to force his eyes away from the unreal beauty of opal walls like the fairy structures they had seen. There was color everywhere that blended and fused to make glorious harmony that was pure joy to the eyes. * * * * * The man who waited was young. He stood erect, his face like that of a Grecian statue, and his robe was blazing with the flash of jewels. Beside him was a girl, tall and slender, and sweetly serious of face. Like the man, her garments were lovely with jeweled iridescence, and now McGuire saw that the throng within the vast space was similarly apparelled. The tall man raised his hand. "Welcome!" he said, and McGuire realized with a start that the words were spoken aloud. "You are most welcome, my friends, among the people of that world you call Venus." Professor Sykes was still weak from his ordeal; he wavered perceptibly where he stood, and the man before them them turned to give an order. There were chairs that came like magic; bright robes covered them; and the men were seated while the man and girl also took seats beside them as those who prepare for an intimate talk with friends. Lieutenant McGuire found his voice at last. "Who are you?" he asked in wondering tones. "What does it mean? We were lost--and you saved us. But you--you are not like the others." And he repeated, "What does it mean?" "No," said the other with a slight smile, "we truly are not like those others. They are not men such as you and I. They are something less than human: animals--vermin!--from whom God, in His wisdom, has seen fit to withhold the virtues that raise men higher than the beasts." His face hardened as he spoke and for a moment the eyes were stern, but he smiled again as he continued. "And we," he said, "you ask who we are. We are the people of Venus. I am Djorn, ruler, in name, of all. 'In name' I say, for we rule here by common reason; I am only selected to serve. And this is my sister, Althora. The name, with us, means 'radiant light.'" He turned to exchange smiles with the girl at his side. "We think her well named," he said. "The others,"--he waved toward the throng that clustered about--"you will learn to know in time." * * * * * Professor Sykes felt the need of introductions. "This is Lieutenant--" he began, but the other interrupted with an upraised hand. "Mack Guire," he supplied; "and you are Professor Sykes.... Oh, we know you!" he laughed; "we have been watching you since your arrival; we have been waiting to help you." The professor was open-mouthed. "Your thoughts," explained the other, "are as a printed page. We have been with you by mental contact at all times. We could hear, but, at that distance, and--pardon me!--with your limited receptivity, we could not communicate. "Do not resent our intrusion," he added; "we listened only for our own good, and we shall show you how to insulate your thoughts. We do not pry." Lieutenant McGuire waved all that aside. "You saved us from them," he said; "that's the answer. But--what does it mean? Those others are in control; they are attacking our Earth, the world where we lived. Why do you permit--?" Again the other's face was set in sterner lines. "Yes," he said, and his voice was full of unspoken regret, "they do rule this world; they _have_ attacked your Earth; they intend much more, and I fear they must be successful. Listen. Your wonderment is natural, and I shall explain. "We are the people of Venus. Some centuries ago we ruled this world. Now you find us a handful only, living like moles in this underworld." "Underworld?" protested Professor Sykes. He pointed above to the familiar constellations. "Where are the clouds?" he asked. The girl, Althora, leaned forward now. "It will please my brother," she said in a soft voice, "that you thought it real. He has had pleasure in creating that--a replica of the skies we used to know before the coming of the clouds." * * * * * Professor Sykes was bewildered. "That sky--the stars--they are not real?" he asked incredulously. "But the grass--the flowers--" Her laugh rippled like music. "Oh, they are real," she told him, and her brother gave added explanation. "The lights," he said: "we supply the actinic rays that the clouds cut off above. We have sunlight here, made by our own hands; that is why we are as we are and not like the red ones with their bleached skins. We had our lights everywhere through the world when we lived above, but those red beasts are ignorant; they do not know how to operate them; they do not know that they live in darkness even in the light." "Then we are below ground?" asked the flyer. "You live here?" "It is all we have now. At that time of which I tell, it was the red ones who lived out of sight; they were a race of rodents in human form. They lived in the subterranean caves with which this planet is pierced. We could have exterminated them at any time, but, in our ignorance, we permitted them to live, for we, of Venus--I use your name for the planet--do not willingly take life." "They have no such compunctions!" Professor Sykes' voice was harsh; he was remembering the sacrifice to the hungry plants. A flash as of pain crossed the sensitive features of the girl, and the man beside her seemed speaking to her in soundless words. "Your mind-picture was not pleasant," he told the scientist; then continued: "Remember, we were upon the world, and these others were within it. There came a comet. Oh, our astronomers plotted its course; they told us we were safe. But at the last some unknown influence diverted it; its gaseous projection swept our world with flame. Only an instant; but when it had passed there was left only death...." * * * * * He was lost in recollection for a time; the girl beside him reached over to touch his hand. "Those within--the red ones--escaped," he went on. "They poured forth when they found that catastrophe had overwhelmed us. And we, the handful that were left, were forced to take shelter here. We have lived here since, waiting for the day when the Master of Destinies shall give us freedom and a world in which to live." "You speak," suggested the scientist, "as if this had happened to you. Surely you refer to your ancestors; you are the descendants of those who were saved." "We are the people," said the other. "We lived then; we live now; we shall live for a future of endless years. "Have you not searched for the means to control the life principle--you people of Earth?" he asked. "We have it here. You see"--and he waved a hand toward the standing throng--"we are young to your eyes and the others who greeted you were the same." McGuire and the scientist exchanged glances of corroboration. "But your age," asked Sykes, "measured in years?" "We hardly measure life in years." Professor Sykes nodded slowly; his mind found difficulty in accepting so astounding a fact. "But our language?" he queried. "How is it that you can speak our tongue?" The tall man smiled and leaned forward to place a hand on a knee of each of the men beside him. "Why not," he asked, "when there doubtless is relationship between us. "You called the continent Atlantis. Perhaps its very existence is but a fable now: it has been many centuries since we have had instruments to record thought force from Earth, and we have lost touch. But, my friends, even then we of Venus had conquered space, and it was we who visited Atlantis to find a race more nearly like ourselves than were the barbarians who held the other parts of Earth. "I was there, but I returned. There were some who stayed and they were lost with the others in the terrible cataclysm that sank a whole continent beneath the waters. But some, we have believed, escaped." "Why have you not been back?" the flyer asked. "You could have helped us so much." "It was then that our own destruction came upon us. The same comet, perhaps, may have caused a change of stresses in your Earth and sunk the lost Atlantis. Ah! That was a beautiful land, but we have never seen it since. We have been--here. "But you will understand, now," he added, "that, with our insight into your minds, we have little difficulty in mastering your language." This talk of science and incredible history left Lieutenant McGuire cold. His mind could not wander long from its greatest concern. "But the earth!" he exclaimed. "What about the earth? This attack! Those devils mean real mischief!" "More than you know; more than you can realize, friend Mack Guire!" "Why?" demanded the flyer. "Why?" "Have your countries not reached out for other countries when land was needed?" asked the man, Djorn. "Land--land! Space in which to breed--that is the reason for the invasion. "This world has no such continents as yours. Here the globe is covered by the oceans; we have perhaps one hundredth of the land areas of your Earth And the red ones breed like flies. Life means nothing to them; they die like flies, too. But they need more room; they intend to find it on your world." * * * * * "A strange race," mused Professor Sykes. "They puzzled me. But--'less than human,' I think you said. Then how about their ships? How could they invent them?" "Ours--all ours! They found a world ready and waiting for them. Through the centuries they have learned to master some few of our inventions. The ships!--the ethereal vibrations! Oh, they have been cleverer than we dreamed possible." "Well, how can we stop them?" demanded McGuire. "We must. You have the submarines--" "One only," the other interrupted. "We saved that, and we brought some machinery. We have made this place habitable; we have not been idle. But there are limitations." "But your ray that you projected--it brought down their ship!" "We were protecting you, and we protect ourselves; that is enough. There is One will deliver us in His own good time; we may not go forth and slaughter." There was a note of resignation and patience in the voice that filled McGuire with hopeless forebodings. Plainly this was not an aggressive race. They had evolved beyond the stage of wanton slaughter, and, even now, they waited patiently for the day when some greater force should come to their aid. The man beside them spoke quickly. "One moment--you will pardon me--someone is calling--" He listened intently to some soundless call, and he sent a silent message in reply. "I have instructed them," he said. "Come and you shall see how impregnable is our position. The red ones have resented our destruction of their ship." The face of the girl, Althora, was perturbed. "More killings?" she asked. "Only as they force themselves to their own death," her brother told her. "Be not disturbed." * * * * * The throng in the vast space drew apart as the figure of their leader strode quickly through with the two men following close. There were many rooms and passages; the men had glimpses of living quarters, of places where machinery made soft whirring sounds; more sights than their eyes could see or their minds comprehend. They came at last to an open chamber. The men looked up to see above them a tremendous inverted-cone, and there was the gold of cloudland glowing through an opening at the top. It was the inside of a volcano where they stood, and McGuire remembered the island and its volcanic peak where the ship had swerved aside. He felt that he knew now where they were. Above them, a flash of light marked the passage of a ship over the crater's mouth, and he realized that the ships of the reds were not avoiding the island now. Did it mean an attack? And how could these new friends meet it? Before them on the level volcanic floor were great machines that came suddenly to life, and their roar rose to a thunder of violence, while, in the center, a cluster of electric sparks like whirling stars formed a cloud of blue fire. It grew, and its hissing, crackling length reached upward to a fine-drawn point that touched the opening above. "Follow!" commanded their leader and went rapidly before them where a passage wound and twisted to bring them at last to the light of day. The flame of the golden clouds was above them in the midday sky, and beneath it were scores of ships that swept in formations through the air. "Attacking?" asked the lieutenant with ill-concealed excitement. "I fear so. They tried to gas us some centuries ago; it may be they have forgotten what we taught them then." * * * * * One squadron came downward and swept with inconceivable speed over a portion of the island that stretched below. The men were a short distance up on the mountain's side, and the scene that lay before them was crystal clear. There were billowing clouds of gas that spread over the land where the ships had passed. Other ships followed; they would blanket the island in gas. The man beside them gave a sigh of regret. "They have struck the first blow," he said. He stood silent with half-closed eyes; then: "I have ordered resistance." And there was genuine sorrow and regret in his eyes as he looked toward the mountain top. McGuire's eyes followed the other's gaze to find nothing at first save the volcanic peak in hard outline upon the background of gold; then only a shimmer as of heat about the lofty cone. The air above him quivered, formed to ripples that spread in great circles where the enemy ships were flashing away. Swifter than swift aircraft, with a speed that shattered space, they reached out and touched--and the ships, at that touch, fell helplessly down from the heights. They turned awkwardly as they fell or dropped like huge pointed projectiles. And the waters below took them silently and buried in their depths all trace of what an instant sooner had been an argosy of the air. The ripples ceased, again the air was clear and untroubled, but beneath the golden clouds was no single sign of life. * * * * * The flyer's breathless suspense ended in an explosive gasp. "What a washout!" he exclaimed, and again he thought only of this as a weapon to be used for his own ends. "Can we use that on their fleets?" he asked. "Why, man--they will never conquer the earth; they will never even make a start." The tall figure of Djorn turned and looked at him. "The lust to kill!" he said sadly. "You still have it--though you are fighting for your own, which is some excuse. "No, this will not destroy their fleets, for their fleets will not come here to be destroyed. It will be many centuries before ever again the aircraft of the reds dare venture near." "We will build another one and take it where they are--" The voice of the fighting man was vibrant with sudden hope. "We were two hundred years building and perfecting this," the other told him. "Can you wait that long?" And Lieutenant McGuire, as he followed dejectedly behind the leader, heard nothing of Professor Sykes' eager questions as to how this miracle was done. "Can you wait that long?" this man, Djorn, had asked. And the flyer saw plainly the answer that spelled death and destruction to the world. CHAPTER XIV The mountains of Nevada are not noted for their safe and easy landing places. But the motor of the plane that Captain Blake was piloting roared smoothly in the cool air while the man's eyes went searching, searching, for something, and he hardly knew what that something might be. He went over again, as he had done a score of times, the remarks of Lieutenant McGuire. Mac had laughed that day when he told Blake of his experience. "I was flying that transport," he had said, "and, boy! when one motor began to throw oil I knew I was out of luck. Nothing but rocky peaks and valleys full of trees as thick and as pointed as a porcupine's quills. Flying pretty high to maintain altitude with one motor out, so I just naturally _had_ to find a place to set her down. I found it, too, though it seemed too good to be true off in that wilderness. "A fine level spot, all smooth rock, except for a few clumps of grass, and just bumpy enough to make the landing interesting. But, say, Captain! I almost cracked up at that, I was so darn busy staring at something else. "Off in some trees was a dirigible--Sure; go ahead and laugh; I didn't believe it either, and I was looking at it. But there had been a whale of a storm through there the day before, and it had knocked over some trees that had been screening the thing, and there it was! "Well, I came to in time to pull up her nose and miss a rock or two, and then I started pronto for that valley of trees and the thing that was buried among them." * * * * * Captain Blake recalled the conversation word for word, though he had treated it jokingly at the time. McGuire had found the ship and a man--a half-crazed nut, so it seemed--living there all alone. And he wasn't a bit keen about Mac's learning of the ship. But leave it to Mac to get the facts--or what the old bird claimed were facts. There was the body of a youngster there, a man of about Mac's age. He had fallen and been killed the day before, and the old man was half crazy with grief. Mac had dug a grave and helped bury the body, and after that the old fellow's story had come out. He had been to the moon, he said. And this was a space ship. Wouldn't tell how it operated, and shut up like a clam when Mac asked if he had gone alone. The young chap had gone with him, it seemed, and the man wouldn't talk--just sat and stared out at the yellow mound where the youngster was buried. Mac had told Blake how he argued with the man to prove up on his claims and make a fortune for himself. But no--fortunes didn't interest him. And there were some this-and-that and be-damned-to-'em people who would never get _this_ invention--the dirty, thieving rats! And Mac, while he laughed, had seemed half to believe it. Said the old cuss was so sincere, and he had nothing to sell. And--there was the ship! It never got there without being flown in, that was a cinch. And there wasn't a propellor on it nor a place for one--just open ports where a blast came out, or so the inventor said. Captain Blake swung his ship on another slanting line and continued to comb the country for such marks as McGuire had seen. And one moment he told himself he was a fool to be on any such hunt, while the next thought would remind him that Mac had believed. And Mac had a level head, and he had radioed from Venus! There was the thing that made anything seem possible. Mac had got a message through, across that space, and the enemy had ships that could do it. Why not this one? And always his eyes were searching, searching, for a level rocky expanse and a tree-filled valley beyond, with something, it might be, shining there, unless the inventor had camouflaged it more carefully now. * * * * * It was later on the same day when Captain Blake's blocky figure climbed over the side of the cockpit. Tired? Yes! But who could think of cramped limbs and weary muscles when his plane was resting on a broad, level expanse of rock in the high Sierras and a sharp-cut valley showed thick with pines beyond. He could see the corner only of a rough log shack that protruded. Blake scrambled over a natural rampart of broken stone and went swiftly toward the cabin. But he stopped abruptly at the sound of a harsh voice. "Stop where you are," the voice ordered, "and stick up your hands! Then turn around and get back as fast as you can to that plane of yours." There was a glint of sunlight on a rifle barrel in the window of the cabin. Captain Blake stopped, but he did not turn. "Are you Mr. Winslow?" he asked. "That's nothing to you! Get out! Quick!" Blake was thinking fast. Here was the man, without doubt--and he was hostile as an Apache; the man behind that harsh voice meant business. How could he reach him? The inspiration came at once. McGuire was the key. "If you're Winslow," he called in a steady voice, "you don't want me to go away; you want to talk with me. There's a young friend of yours in a bad jam. You are the only one who can help." "I haven't any friends," said the rasping voice: "I don't want any! Get out!" "You had one," said the captain, "whether you wanted him or not. He believed in you--like the other young chap who went with you to the moon." * * * * * There was an audible gasp of dismay from the window beyond, and the barrel of the rifle made trembling flickerings in the sun. "You mean the flyer?" asked the voice, and it seemed to have lost its harsher note. "The pleasant young fellow?" "I mean McGuire, who helped give decent burial to your friend. And now he has been carried off--out into space--and you can help him. If you've a spark of decency in you, you will hear what I have to say." The rifle vanished within the cabin; a door opened to frame a picture of a tall man. He was stooped; the years, or solitude, perhaps, had borne heavily upon him; his face was a mat of gray beard that was a continuation of the unkempt hair above. The rifle was still in his hand. But he motioned to the waiting man, and "Come in!" he commanded. "I'll soon know if you're telling the truth. God help you if you're not.... Come in." An hour was needed while the bearded man learned the truth. And Blake, too, picked up some facts. He learned to his great surprise that he was talking with an educated man, one who had spent a lifetime in scientific pursuits. And now, as the figure before him seemed more the scientist and less the crazed fabricator of wild fancies, the truth of his claims seemed not so remote. Half demented now, beyond a doubt! A lifetime of disappointments and one invention after another stolen from him by those who knew more of law than of science. And now he held fortune in the secret of his ship--a secret which he swore should never be given to the world. "Damn the world!" he snarled. "Did the world ever give anything to me? And what would they do with this? They would prostitute it to their own selfish ends; it would be just one more means to conquer and kill; and the capitalists would have it in their own dirty hands so that new lines of transportation beyond anything they dared dream would be theirs to exploit." * * * * * Blake, remembering the history of a commercial age, found no ready reply to that. But he told the man of McGuire and the things that had made him captive; he related what he, himself, had seen in the dark night on Mount Lawson, and he told of the fragmentary message that showed McGuire was still alive. "There's only one way to save him," he urged. "If your ship is what you claim it is--and I believe you one hundred per cent--it is all that can save him from what will undoubtedly be a horrible death. Those things were monsters--inhuman!--and they have bombarded the earth. They will come back in less than a year and a half to destroy us." Captain Blake would have said he was no debater, but the argument and persuasion that he used that night would have done credit to a Socrates. His opponent was difficult to convince, and not till the next day did the inventor show Blake his ship. "Small," he said as he led the flyer toward it. "Designed just for the moon trip, and I had meant to go alone. But it served; it took us there and back again." He threw open a door in the side of the metal cylinder. Blake stood back for only a moment to size up the machine, to observe its smooth duralumin shell and the rounded ends where portholes opened for the expelling of its driving blast. The door opening showed a thick wall that gave insulation. Blake followed the inventor to the interior of the ship. * * * * * The man had seen Winslow examining the thick walls. "It's cold out there, you know," he said, and smiled in recollection, "but the generator kept us warm." He pointed to a simple cylindrical casting aft of the ship's center part. It was massive, and braced to the framework of the ship to distribute a thrust that Blake knew must be tremendous. Heavy conduits took the blast that it produced and poured it from ports at bow and stern. There were other outlets, too, above and below and on the sides, and electric controls that were manipulated from a central board. "You've got a ship," Blake admitted, "and it's a beauty. I know construction, and you've got it here. But what is the power? How do you drive it? What throws it out through space?" "Aside from one other, you will be the only man ever to know." The bearded man was quiet now and earnest. The wild light had faded from his eyes, and he pondered gravely in making the last and final decision. "Yes, you shall have it. It may be I have been mistaken. I have known people--some few--who were kindly and decent; I have let the others prejudice me. But there was one who was my companion--and there was McGuire, who was kind and who believed. And now you, who will give your life for a friend and to save humanity!... You shall have it. You shall have the ship! But I will not go with you. I want nothing of glory or fame, and I am too old to fight. My remaining years I choose to spend out here." He pointed where a window of heavy glass showed the outer world and a grave on a sloping hill. * * * * * "But you shall have full instructions. And, for the present, you may know that it is a continuous explosion that drives the ship. I have learned to decompose water into its components and split them into subatomic form. They reunite to give something other than matter. It is a liquid--liquid energy, though the term is inaccurate--that separates out in two forms, and a fluid ounce of each is the product of thousands of tons of water. The potential energy is all there. A current releases it; the energy components reunite to give matter again--hydrogen and oxygen gas. Combustion adds to their volume through heat. "It is like firing a cannon in there,"--he pointed now to the massive generator--"a super-cannon of tremendous force and a cannon that fires continuously. The endless pressure of expansion gives the thrust that means a constant acceleration of motion out there where gravity is lost. "You will note," he added, "that I said 'constant acceleration.' It means building up to speeds that are enormous." Blake nodded in half-understanding. "We will want bigger ships," he mused. "They must mount guns and be heavy enough to take the recoil. This is only a sample; we must design, experiment, build them! Can it be done? ... It _must_ be done!" he concluded and turned to the inventor. "We don't know much about those devils of the stars, and they may have means of attack beyond anything we can conceive, but there is just one way to learn: go up there and find out, and take a licking if we have to. Now, how about taking me up a mile or so in the air?" * * * * * The other smiled in self-deprecation. "I like a good fighter," he said; "I was never one myself. If I had been I would have accomplished more. Yes, you shall go up a mile or so in the air--and a thousand miles beyond." He turned to close the door and seal it fast. Beside the instrument board he seated himself, and at his touch the generator of the ship came startlingly to life. It grumbled softly at first, then the hoarse sound swelled to a thunderous roar, while the metal grating surged up irresistibly beneath the captain's feet. His weight was intolerable. He sank helplessly to the floor.... Blake was white and shaken when he alighted from the ship an hour later, but his eyes were ablaze with excitement. He stopped to seize the tall man by the shoulders. "I am only a poor devil of a flying man," he said, "but I am speaking for the whole world right now. You have saved us; you've furnished the means. It is up to us now. You've given us the right to hope that humanity can save itself, if humanity will do it. That's my next job--to convince them. We have less than a year and a half...." * * * * * There was one precious week wasted while Captain Blake chafed and waited for a conference to be arranged at Washington. A spirit of hopelessness had swept over the world--hopelessness and a mental sloth that killed every hope with the unanswerable argument: "What is the use? It is the end." But a meeting was arranged at Colonel Boynton's insistence, though his superiors scoffed at what he dared suggest. Blake appeared before the meeting, and he told them what he knew--told it to the last detail, while he saw the looks of amusement or commiseration that passed from man to man. There were scientists there who asked him coldly a question or two and shrugged a supercilious shoulder; ranking officers of both army and navy who openly excoriated Colonel Boynton for bringing them to hear the wild tale of a half-demented man. It was this that drove Blake to a cold frenzy. The weeks of hopeless despair had worn his nerves to the breaking point, and now, with so much to be done, and so little time in which to do it, all requirements of official etiquette were swept aside as he leaped to his feet to face the unbelieving men. "Damn it!" he shouted, "will you sit here now and quibble over what you think in your wisdom is possible or not. Get outside those doors--there's an open park beyond--and I'll knock your technicalities all to hell!" The door slammed behind him before the words could be spoken to place him under arrest, and he tore across a velvet lawn to leap into a taxi. There was a rising storm of indignant protest within the room that he had left. There were admirals, purple of face, who made heated remarks about the lack of discipline in the army, and generals who turned accusingly where the big figure of Colonel Boynton was still seated. It was the Secretary of War who stilled the tumult and claimed the privilege of administering the rebuke which was so plainly needed. "Colonel Boynton," he said, and there was no effort to soften the cutting edge of sarcasm in his voice, "it was at your request and suggestion that this outrageous meeting was held. Have you any more requests or suggestions?" The colonel rose slowly to his feet. "Yes, Mr. Secretary," he said coldly, "I have. I know Captain Blake. He seldom makes promises; when he does he makes good. My suggestion is that you do what the gentleman said--step outside and see your technicalities knocked to hell." He moved unhurriedly toward the door. * * * * * It was a half-hour's wait, and one or two of the more openly skeptical had left when the first roar came faintly from above. Colonel Boynton led the others to the open ground before the building. "I have always found Blake a man of his word," he said quietly, and pointed upward where a tiny speck was falling from a cloud-flecked sky. Captain Blake had had little training in the operation of the ship, but he had flown it across the land and had concealed it where fellow officers were sworn to secrecy. And he felt that he knew how to handle the controls. But the drop from those terrible heights was a fearful thing, and it ended only a hundred feet above the heads of the cowering, shouting humans who crouched under the thunderous blast, where a great shell checked its vertical flight and rebounded to the skies. Again and again the gleaming cylinder drove at them like a projectile from the mortars of the gods, and it roared and thundered through the air or turned to vanish with incredible speed straight up into the heights, to return and fall again ... until finally it hung motionless a foot above the grass from which the uniformed figures had fled. Only Colonel Boynton was there to greet the flyer as he laid his strange craft gently down. "Nice little show, Captain," he said, while his broad face broke into the widest of grins. "A damn nice little show! But take that look off of your face. They'll listen to you now; they'll eat right out of your hand." CHAPTER XV If Lieutenant McGuire could have erased from his mind the thought of the threat that hung over the earth he would have found nothing but intensest pleasure in the experiences that were his. But night after night they had heard the reverberating echoes of the giant gun speeding its messenger of death toward the earth, and he saw as plainly as if he were there the terrible destruction that must come where the missiles struck. Gas, of course; that seemed the chief and only weapon of these monsters, and Djorn, the elected leader of the Venus folk, confirmed him in this surmise. "We had many gases," he told McGuire, "but we used them for good ends. You people of Earth--or these invaders, if they conquer Earth--must some day engage in a war more terrible than wars between men. The insects are your greatest foe. With a developing civilization goes the multiplication of insect and bacterial life. We used the gases for that war, and we made this world a heaven." He sighed regretfully for his lost world. "These red ones found them, and our factories for making them. But they have no gift for working out or mastering the other means we had for our defense--the electronic projectors, the creation of tremendous magnetic fields: you saw one when we destroyed the attacking ships. Our scientists had gone far--" "I wish to Heaven you had some of them to use now," said the lieutenant savagely, and the girl, Althora, standing near, smiled in sympathy for the flyer's distress. But her brother, Djorn, only murmured: "The lust to kill: that is something to be overcome." The fatalistic resignation of these folk was disturbing to a man of action like McGuire. His eyes narrowed, and his lips were set for an abrupt retort when Althora intervened. "Come," she said, and took the flyer's hand. "It is time for food." * * * * * She took him to the living quarters occupied by her brother and herself, where opal walls and jewelled inlays were made lovely by the soft light that flooded the rooms. "Just one tablet," she said, and brought him a thin white disc, "then plenty of water. You must take this compressed food often and in small quantities till your system is accustomed." "You make this?" he asked. "But certainly. Our chemists are learned men. We should lack for food, otherwise, here in our underground home." He let the tablet dissolve in his mouth. Althora leaned forward to touch his hand gently. "I am sorry," she said, "that you and Djorn fail to understand one another. He is good--so good! But you--you, too, are good, and you fear for the safety of your own people." "They will be killed to the last woman and child," he replied, "or they will be captured, which will be worse." "I understand," she told him, and pressed his hand; "and if I can help, Lieutenant Mack Guire, I shall be so glad." He smiled at her stilted pronunciation of his name. He had had the girl for an almost constant companion since his arrival; the sexes, he found, were on a level of mutual freedom, and the girl's companionship was offered and her friendship expressed as openly as might have been that of a youth. Of Sykes he saw little; Professor Sykes was deep in astronomical discussions with the scientists of this world. But she was charming, this girl of a strange race so like his own. A skin from the velvet heart of a rose and eyes that looked deep into his and into his mind when he permitted; eyes, too, that could crinkle to ready laughter or grow misty when she sang those weird melodies of such thrilling sweetness. Only for the remembrance of Earth and the horrible feeling of impotent fury, Lieutenant McGuire would have found much to occupy his thoughts in this loveliest of companions. * * * * * He laughed now at the sounding of his name, and the girl laughed with him. "But it _is_ your name, is it not?" she asked. "Lieutenant Thomas McGuire," he repeated, "and those who like me call me 'Mac.'" "Mac," she repeated. "But that is so short and hard sounding. And what do those who love you say?" The flyer grinned cheerfully. "There aren't many who could qualify in that respect, but if there were they would call me Tommy." "That is better," said Althora with engaging directness; "that is much better--Tommy." Then she sprang to her feet and hurried him out where some further wonders must be seen and exclaimed over without delay. But Lieutenant McGuire saw the pink flush that crept into her face, and his own heart responded to the telltale betrayal of her feeling for him. For never in his young and eventful life had the man found anyone who seemed so entirely one with himself as did this lovely girl from a distant star. He followed where she went dancing on her way, but not for long could his mind be led away from the menace he could not forget. And on this day, as on many days to come, he struggled and racked his brain to find some way in which he could thwart the enemy and avert or delay their stroke. * * * * * It was another day, and they were some months on their long journey away from the earth when an inspiration came. Althora had offered to help, and he knew well how gladly she would aid him; the feeling between them had flowered into open, if unspoken love. Not that he would subject her to any danger--he himself would take all of that when it came--but meanwhile-- "Althora," he asked her, "can you project your mind into that of one of the reds?" "I could, easily," she replied, "but it would not be pleasant. Their minds are horrible; they reek of evil things." She shuddered at the thought, but the man persisted. "But if you could help, would you be willing? I can do so little; I can never stop them; but I may save my people from some suffering at least. Here is my idea: "Djorn tells me that I had it figured right: they plan an invasion of the earth when next the two planets approach. He has told me of their armies and their fleets of ships that will set off into space. I can't prevent it; I am helpless! But if I knew what their leader was thinking--" "Torg!" she exclaimed. "You want to know the mind of that beast of beasts!" "Yes," said the man. "It might be of value. Particularly if I could know something of their great gun--where it is and what it is--well, I might do something about that." The girl averted her eyes from the savage determination on his face. "No--no!" she exclaimed; "I could not. Not Torg!" McGuire's own face fell at the realization of the enormity of this favor he had demanded. "That's all right," he said and held her soft hand in his; "just forget it. I shouldn't have asked." But she whispered as she turned to walk away: "I must think, I must think. You ask much of me, Tommy; but oh, Tommy, I would do much for you!" She was sobbing softly as she ran swiftly away. And the man in khaki--this flyer of a distant air-service--strode blindly off to rage and fume at his helplessness and his inability to strike one blow at those beings who lived in that world above. * * * * * There were countless rooms and passages where the work of the world below went on. There were men and women whose artistic ability found outlet in carvings and sculpture, chemists and others whose work was the making of foods and endless experimentation, some thousand of men and women in the strength of their endless youth, who worked for the love of the doing and lived contentedly and happily while they waited for the day of their liberation. But of fighters there were none, and for this Lieutenant McGuire grieved wholeheartedly. He was striding swiftly along where a corridor ended in blackness ahead. There was a gleaming machine on the floor beside him when a hand clutched at his arm and a warning voice exclaimed: "No further, Lieutenant McGuire; you must not go!" "Why?" questioned the lieutenant. "I've got to walk--do something to keep from this damnable futile thinking." "But not there," said the other; "it is a place of death. Ten paces more and you would have vanished in a flicker of flame. The projector"--he touched the mechanism beside them--"is always on. Our caves extend in an endless succession; they join with the labyrinth where the red ones used to live. They could attack us but for this. Nothing can live in its invisible ray; they are placed at all such entrances." "Yet Djorn," McGuire told himself slowly, "said they had no weapons. He knows nothing of war. But, great heavens! what wouldn't I give for a regiment of scrappers--good husky boys with their faces tanned and a spark in their eyes and their gas masks on their chests. With a regiment, and equipment like this--" And again he realized the futility of armament with none to serve and direct it. * * * * * It was a month or more before Althora consented to the tests. Djorn advised against it and made his protest emphatic, but here, as in all things, Althora was a free agent. It was her right to do as she saw fit, and there was none to prevent in this small world where individual liberty was unquestioned. And it was still longer before she could get anything of importance. The experiments were racking to her nerves, and McGuire, seeing the terrible strain upon her, begged her to stop. But Althora had gained the vision that was always before her loved one's eyes--a world of death and disaster--and he, here where the bolt would be launched, and powerless to prevent. She could not be dissuaded now. It was a proud day for Althora when she sent for McGuire, and he found her lying at rest, eyes closed in her young face that was lined and tortured with the mental horror she was contacting. She silenced his protests with a word. "The gun," she whispered; "they are talking about the gun ... and the bombardment ... planning...." More silent concentration. Then: "The island of Bergo," she said, "--remember that! The gun is there ... a great bore in the earth ... solid rock ... but the casing of titanite must be reinforced ... and bands shrunk about the muzzle that projects ... heavy bands ... it shows signs of distortion--the heat!..." She was listening to the thoughts, and selecting those that bore upon gun. "... Only fifty days ... the bombardment must begin ... Tahnor has provided a hundred shells; two thousand tals of the green gas-powder in each one ... the explosive charges ready ... yes--yes!..." "Oh!" she exclaimed and opened her troubled eyes. "The beast is so complacent, so sure! And the bombardment will begin in fifty days! Will it really cause them anguish on your Earth, Tommy?" "Just plain hell; that's all!" McGuire's voice was low; his mind was reaching out to find and reject one plan after another. The gun!... He must disable it; he could do that much at least. For himself--well, what of it?--he would die, of course. The guard he had been taught to place about his own thoughts must have relaxed, for Althora cried out in distress. "No--no!" she protested; "you shall not! I have tried to help you, Tommy dear--say that I have helped you!--but, oh, my beloved, do not go. Do not risk your life to silence this one weapon. They would still have their ships. Remember what Djorn has told of their mighty fleets, their thousands of fighting men. You cannot stop them; you can hardly hinder them. And you would throw away your life! Oh, please do not go!" McGuire was seated beside her. His face was hidden in one hand while the other was held tight between the white palms of Althora's tense hands. He said nothing, and he shielded his eyes and locked his mind against her thought force. "Tommy," said Althora, and now her voice was all love and softness, "Tommy, my dear one! You will not go, for what can you do? And if you stay--oh, my dear!--you can have what you will--the secret of life shall be yours--to live forever in perpetual youth. You may have that. And me, Tommy.... Would you throw your life away in a hopeless attempt, when life might hold so much? Am I offering so little, Tommy?" And still the silence and the hand that kept the eyes from meeting hers; then a long-drawn breath and a slim figure in khaki that stood unconsciously erect to look, not at the girl, but out beyond the solid walls, through millions of miles of space, to the helpless speck called Earth. "You offer me heaven, my dear," he spoke softly. "But sometimes"--and his lips twisted into a ghost of a smile--"sometimes, to earn our heaven, we have to fight like hell. And, if we fail to make the fight, what heaven worth having is left? "And the people," he said softly; "the homes in the cities and towns and villages. My dear, that's part of loving a soldier: you can never own him altogether; his allegiance is divided. And if I failed my own folk what right would I have to you?" * * * * * He dared to look at the girl who lay before him. That other vision was gone but he had seen a clear course charted, and now, with his mind at rest, he could smile happily at the girl who was looking up at him through her tears. She rose slowly to her feet and stood before him to lay firm hands upon his shoulders. She was almost as tall as he, and her eyes, that had shaken off their tears but for a dewy fringe, looked deep and straight into his. "We have thought," she said slowly, "we people of this world, that we were superior to you and yours; we have accepted you as someone a shade below our plane of advancement. Yes, we have dared to believe that. But I know better. We have gone far, Tommy, we people of this star; we have lived long. Yet I am wondering if we have lost some virtues that are the heritage of a sterner race. "But I am learning, Tommy; I am so thankful that I can learn and that I have had you to teach me. We will go together, you and I. We will fight our fight, and, the Great One willing, we will earn our heaven or find it elsewhere--together." She leaned forward to kiss the tall man squarely upon the lips with her own soft rose-petal lips that clung and clung ... and the reply of Lieutenant McGuire, while it was entirely wordless, seemed eminently satisfactory. * * * * * Althora, the beautiful daughter of Venus, had the charm and allure of her planet's fabled namesake. But she thought like a man and she planned like a man. And there was no dissuading her from her course. She was to fight beside McGuire--that was her intention--and beyond that there was no value in argument. McGuire was forced to accept the insistent aid, and he needed help. Sykes dropped his delving into astronomical lore and answered to the call, but there was no other assistance. Only the three, McGuire, Althora and Sykes. There were some who would agree to pilot the submarine that was being outfitted, but they would have no part in the venture beyond transporting the participants. More than once McGuire paused to curse silently at the complaisance of this people. What could he not do if they would help. Ten companies of trained men, armed with their deadly electronic projectors that disintegrated any living thing they reached--and he would clutch at his tousled hair and realize that they were only three, and go grimly back to work. "I don't know what we can do till we get there," he told Sykes. "Here we are, and there is the gun: that is all we know, except that the thing must be tremendous and our only hope is that there is some firing mechanism that we can destroy. The gun itself is a great drilling in the solid rock, lined with one of their steel alloys, and with a big barrel extending up into the air: Althora has learned that. "They went deep into the rock and set the firing chamber there; it's heavy enough to stand the stress. They use a gas-powder, as Althora calls it, for the charge, and the same stuff but deadlier is in the shell. But they must have underground workings for loading and firing. Is there a chance for us to get in there, I wonder! There's the big barrel that projects. We might ... but no!--that's too big for us to tackle, I'm afraid." "How about that electronic projector on the submarine?" Sykes suggested. "Remember how it melted out the heart of that big ship? We could do a lot with that." "Not a chance! Djorn and the others have strictly forbidden the men to turn it on the enemy since they have given no offense. "No offense!" he repeated, and added a few explosive remarks. "No, it looks like a case of get there and do what dirty work we can to their mechanism before they pot us--and that's that!" * * * * * But Sykes was directing his thoughts along another path. "I wonder ..." he mused; "it might be done: they have laboratories." "What are you talking about? For the love of heaven, man, if you're got an idea, let's have it. I'm desperate." "Nitrators!" said the scientist. "I have been getting on pretty good terms with the scientific crowd here, and I've seen some mighty pretty manufacturing laboratories. And they have equipment that was never meant for the manufacture of nitro-explosives, but, with a few modifications--yes, I think it could be done." "You mean nitro-glycerine? TNT?" "Something like that. Depends upon what materials we can get to start with." The lieutenant was pounding his companion upon the back and shouting his joy at this faintest echo of encouragement. "We'll plant it alongside the gun--No, we'll get into their working underground. We'll blow their equipment into scrap-iron, and perhaps we can even damage the gun itself!" He was almost beside himself with excitement at thought of a weapon being placed in his straining helpless hands. * * * * * It was the earth-shaking thunder of the big gun that hastened their final preparations and made McGuire tremble with suppressed excitement where he helped Sykes to draw off a syrupy liquid into heavy crystal flasks. There were many of these, and the two men would allow no others to touch them, but stored them themselves and nested each one in a soft bed within the submarine. Then one last repetition of their half-formed plans to Djorn and his followers and a rush toward the wharf where the submarine was waiting. Althora was waiting, too, and McGuire wasted minutes in a petition that he knew was futile. "Wait here, Althora," he begged. "I will come back; this is no venture for you to undertake. I can take my chances with them, but you--! It is no place for you," he concluded lamely. "There is no other place for me," she said; "only where you are." And she led the way while the others followed into the lighted control room of the big under-water craft. McGuire's eyes were misty with a blurring of tears that were partly from excitement, but more from a feeling of helpless remonstrance that was mingled with pure pride. And his lips were set in a straight line. The magnetic pull that held them to their anchorage was reversed; the ship beneath them was slipping smoothly beneath the surface and out to sea, guided through its tortuous windings of water-worn caves and rocky chambers under the sea by the invisible electric cords that drew it where they would. And ahead on some mysterious island was a gun, a thing of size and power beyond anything of Earth. He was going to spike that gun if it was the last act of his life; and Althora was going with him. He drew her slim body to him, while his eyes stared blindly, hopefully, toward what the future held. CHAPTER XVI Throughout the night they drove hour after hour at terrific speed. The ship was running submerged, for McGuire was taking no slightest chance of their being observed from the air. He and the others slept at times, for the crew that handled the craft very evidently knew the exact course, and there were mechanical devices that insured their safety. A ray was projected continuously ahead of them; it would reflect back and give on an indicator instant warning of any derelict or obstruction. Another row of quivering needles gave by the same method the soundings from far ahead. But the uncertainty of what their tomorrow might hold and the worry and dread lest he find himself unable to damage the big gun made real rest impossible for McGuire. But he was happy and buoyant with hope when, at last, the green light from the ports showed that the sun was shining up above, and the slackening drive of the submarine's powerful motors told that their objective was in sight. They lay quietly at last while a periscope of super-sensitiveness was thrust cautiously above the water. It brought in a panoramic view of the shoreline ahead, amplified it and projected the picture in clear-cut detail upon a screen. If Lieutenant McGuire had stood on the wet deck above and looked directly at the island the sight could have been no clearer. The colors of torn and blasted tree-growths showed in all their pale shades, and there was stereoscopic depth to the picture that gave no misleading illusions as to distance. The shore was there with the white spray of breakers on a rocky shoal, and a beach beyond. And beyond that, in hard outline against a golden sky, was a gigantic tube that stood vertically in air to reach beyond the upper limits of the periscope's vision. * * * * * McGuire tingled at the sight. To be within reach of this weapon that had sent those blasting, devastating missiles upon the earth! He paced back and forth in the small room to stop and stare again, and resume his pacing that helped to while away the hours they must wait. For there were man-shapes swarming over the land, and the dull, blood-red of their loose uniforms marked them as members of the fighting force spawned by this prolific breed. "Not a chance until they're out of the picture," said the impatient man; "they would snow us under. It's just as I thought: we must wait until the gun is ready to fire; then they will beat it. They won't want to be around when that big boy cuts loose." "And then?" asked Althora. "Then Sykes and I will take our collection of gallon flasks ashore, and I sure hope we don't stumble." He grinned cheerfully at the girl. "That reinforced concrete dome seems to be where they get down into the ground; it is close to the base of the gun. We will go there--blow it open if we have to--but manage in some way to get down below. Then a time-fuse on the charge, and the boat will take me off, and we will leave as fast as these motors can drive us." He omitted to mention any possible danger to Sykes and himself in the handling of their own explosive, and he added casually, "You will stay here and see that there is no slip-up on the getaway." He had to translate the last remark into language the girl could understand. But Althora shook her head. "You do try so hard to get rid of me, Tommy," the laughed, "but it is no use. I am going with you--do not argue--and I will help you with the attack. Three will work faster than two--and I am going." McGuire was silent, then nodded his assent. He was learning, this Earth-man, what individual freedom really meant. * * * * * Only the western sky showed golden masses on the shining screen when McGuire spoke softly to the captain: "Your men will put us ashore; you may ask them to stand by now." And to Professor Sykes, "Better get that 'soup' of yours ready to load." The red-clad figures were growing dim on the screen, and the blotches of colors that showed where they were grouped were few. Some there were who left such groups to flee precipitately toward a waiting airship. This was something the lieutenant had not foreseen. He had expected that the force that served the gun would have some shock-proof shelter; he had not anticipated a fighting ship to take them away. "That's good," he exulted; "that is a lucky break. If they just get out of sight we will have the place to ourselves." There were no red patches on the screen now, and the picture thrown before them showed the big ship, its markings of red and white distinct even in the shadow-light of late afternoon, rising slowly into the air. It gathered speed marvelously and vanished to a speck beyond the land. "We're getting the breaks," said McGuire crisply. "All right--let's go!" The submarine rose smoothly, and the sealed doors in the superstructure were opened while yet there was water to come trickling in. Men came with a roll of cloth that spread open to the shape of a small boat, while a metal frame expanded within it to hold it taut. McGuire gasped with dismay as a seaman launched it and leaped heavily into the frail shell to attach a motor to one end. "Metal!" the captain reassured him; "woven metal, and water-tight! You could not pierce it with anything less than a projector." * * * * * Sykes was ready with one of the crystal flasks as the boat was brought alongside, and McGuire followed with another. They took ten of the harmless-looking containers, and both men held their breaths as the boat grounded roughly on the boulder-strewn shore. They lifted them out and bedded them in the sand, then returned to the submarine. This time Althora, too, stepped into the boat. They loaded in the balance of the containers; the motor purred. Another landing, and they stood at last on the island, where a mammoth tube towered into the sky and the means for its destruction was at their feet. But there was little time; already the light was dimming, and the time for the firing of the big weapon was drawing near. The men worked like mad to carry the flasks to the base of the gun, where a dome of concrete marked the entrance to the rooms below. Each man held a flask of the deadly fluid when Althora led the way where stairs went deep down into the earth under the domed roof. This part of the work had been foreseen, and the girl held a slender cylinder that threw a beam of light, intensely bright. They found a surprising simplicity in the arrangements underground. Two rooms only had been carved from the solid rock, and one of these ended in a wall of gray metal that could be only the great base of the gun. But nowhere was a complication of mechanism that might be damaged or destroyed, nor any wiring or firing device. A round door showed sharp edges in the gray metal, but only the strength of many men could have removed its huge bolts, and these two knew there must be other doors to seal in the mighty charge. "Not a wire!" the scientist exclaimed. "How do they fire it?" The answer came to him with the question. "Radio, of course; and the receiving set is in the charge itself; the barrel of the gun is its own antenna. They must fire it from a distance--back on the island where we were, perhaps. It would need to be accurately timed." "Come on!" shouted McGuire, and raised the flask of explosive to his shoulder. * * * * * Each one knew the need for haste; each waited every moment for the terrible blast of gun-fire that would jar their bodies to a lifeless pulp or, by detonating their own explosive, destroy them utterly. But they carried the flasks again to the top, and the three of them worked breathlessly to place their whole supply where McGuire directed. The massive barrel of the gun was beside them; it was held in tremendous castings of metal that bolted to anchorage in the ground. One great brace had an overhanging flange; the explosive was placed beneath it. Professor Sykes had come prepared. He attached a detonator to one of the flasks, and while the other two were placing the explosive in position he fastened two wires to the apparatus with steady but hurrying fingers; then at full speed he ran with the spool from which the wires unwound. McGuire and Althora were behind him, running for the questionable safety of the sand-hills. Sykes stopped in the shelter of a tiny valley where winds had heaped the sand. "Down!" he shouted. "Get down--behind that sand dune, there!" He dropped beside them, the bared ends of the wires in his hands. There was a battery, too, a case no larger than his hands. Professor Sykes, it appeared, had gained some few concessions from his friends, who had learned to respect him in the field of science. One breathless moment he waited; then-- "Now!" he whispered, and touched the battery's terminals with the bare wires. * * * * * To McGuire it seemed, in that instant of shattering chaos, that the great gun itself must have fired. He had known the jar of heavy artillery at close range; he had had experience with explosives. He had even been near when a government arsenal had thrown the countryside into a hell of jarring, ear-splitting pandemonium. But the concussion that shook the earth under him now was like nothing he had known. The hill of sand that sheltered them vanished to sweep in a sheet above their heads. And the air struck down with terrific weight, then left them in an airless void that seemed to make their bodies swell and explode. It rushed back in a whirling gale to sweep showers of sand and pebbles over the helpless forms of the three who lay battered and stunned. An instant that was like an age; then the scientist pointed with a weak and trembling hand where a towering spire of metallic gray leaned slowly in the air. So slowly it moved, to the eyes of the watchers--a great arc of gathering force and speed that shattered the ground where it struck. "The gun!" was all that the still-dazed lieutenant could say. "The--the gun!" And he fell to shivering uncontrollably, while tears of pure happiness streamed down his face. The mammoth siege gun--the only weapon for bombardment of the helpless Earth--was a mass of useless metal, a futile thing that lay twisted and battered on the sands of the sea. * * * * * The submarine now showed at a distance; it had withdrawn, by prearrangement, to the shelter of the deeper water. McGuire looked carefully at the watch on his wrist, and listened to make certain that the explosion had not stopped it. Sykes had told him the length of the Venusian day--twenty hours and nineteen minutes of Earth time, and he had made his calculations from the day of the Venusians. And, morning and night, McGuire had set his watch back and had learned to make a rough approximation of the time of that world. The watch now said five-thirteen, and the sun was almost gone; a line of gold in the western sky; and McGuire knew that it was a matter only of minutes till the blast of the big gun would rock the island. One heavy section of the great barrel was resting upon the shattered base, and McGuire realized that this blocking of the monster's throat must mean it would tear itself and the island around it to fragments when it fired. He ran toward the beach and waved his arms wildly in air to urge on the speeding craft that showed dim and vague across the heaving sea. It drove swiftly toward them and stopped for the launching of the little boat. There was a delay, and McGuire stood quivering with impatience where the others, too, watched the huddle of figures on the submarine's deck. It was Althora who first sensed their danger. Her voice was shrill with terror as she seized McGuire's arm and pointed landward. "Tommy--Tommy!" she said. "They are coming! I saw them!" * * * * * A swarming of red figures over the nearby dunes gave quick confirmation of her words. McGuire looked about him for a weapon--anything to add efficiency to his bare hands--and the swarm was upon them as he looked. He leaped quickly between Althora and the nearest figures that stretched out grasping hands, and a red face went white under the smashing impact of the flyer's fist. They poured over the sand-hills now---scores of leaping man-shapes--and McGuire knew in an instant of self-accusation that there had been a shelter after all, where a portion of the enemy force had stayed. The explosion had brought them, and now-- He struck in a raging frenzy at the grotesque things that came racing upon them. He knew Sykes was fighting too. He tore wildly at the lean arms that bound him and kept him from those a step or two away who were throwing the figure of a girl across the shoulders of one of their men, while her eyes turned hopelessly toward McGuire. They threw the two men upon the sand and crowded to kneel on the prostrate bodies and strike and tear with their long hands, then tied them at ankles and wrists with metal cords, and raised them helpless and bound in the air. One of the red creatures pointed a long arm toward the demolished gun and shrieked something in a terror-filled tone. The others, at the sound, raced off through the sand, while those with the burden of the three captives followed as best they could. "The gun!" said Professor Sykes in a thick voice: the words were jolted out of him as the two who carried him staggered and ran. "They know--that it--hasn't--gone off--" * * * * * The straggling troop that strung out across the dim-lit dunes was approaching another domed shelter of heavy concrete. They crowded inside, and the bodies of the three were thrown roughly to the floor, while the red creatures made desperate haste to close the heavy door. Then down they went into the deeper safety of a subterranean room, where the massive walls about them quivered to a nerve-deadening jar. It shook those standing to the floor, and the silence that followed was changed to a bedlam by the inhuman shrieking of the creatures who were gloating over their safety and the capture they had achieved. They leaped and capered in a maniacal outburst and ceased only at the shrill order of one who was in command. At his direction the three were carried out of doors and thrown upon the ground. McGuire turned his head to see the face of Althora. There was blood trickling from a cut on her temple, and her eyes were dazed and blurred, but she managed a trembling smile for the anxious eyes of the man who could only struggle hopelessly against the thin wires that held him. Althora hurt! Bound with those cutting metal cords! Althora--in such beastly hands! He groaned aloud at the thought. "You should never have come; I should never have let you. I have got you into this!" He groaned again in an agony of self-reproach, then lay silent and waited for what must come. And the answer to his speculations came from the night above, where the lights of a ship marked the approach of an enemy craft. * * * * * The ships of the red race could travel fast, as McGuire knew, but the air monster whose shining, pointed beak hung above them where they lay helpless in the torturing bonds of fine wire, was to give him a new conception of speed. It shot to the five thousand-foot level, when the captives were safe aboard, and the dark air shrieked like a tortured animal where the steel shell tore it to tatters. And the radio, in an adjoining room, never ceased in its sputtering, changing song. The destruction of the Earth-bombarding gun! The capture of the two Earth-men who had dared to fight back! And a captive woman of the dreaded race of true Venusians! There was excitement and news enough for one world. And the discordant singing of the radio was sounding in the ears of the leaders of that world. They were waiting on the platform in the great hall where Sykes and McGuire had stood, and their basilisk eyes glared unwinkingly down at the three who were thrown at their feet. The leader of them all, Torg himself, arose from his ornate throne and strode forward for a closer view of the trophies his huntsmen had brought in. A whistled word from him and the wires that had bound Althora's slim ankles were cut, while a red-robed warrior dragged her roughly to her feet to stand trembling and swaying as the blood shot cruelly through her cramped limbs. Torg's eyes to McGuire were those of a devil feasting on human flesh, as he stared appraisingly and gloatingly at the girl who tried vainly to return the look without flinching. He spoke for a moment in a harsh tone, and the seated councilors echoed his weird notes approvingly. "What does he say?" McGuire implored, though he knew there could be nothing of good in that abominable voice. "What does he say, Althora?" * * * * * The face that turned slowly to him was drained of the last vestige of color. "I--do not--know," she said in a whisper scarcely audible; "but he thinks--terrible things!" She seemed speaking of some nightmare vision as she added haltingly, "There is a fleet of many ships, and Torg is in command. He has thousands of men, and he goes forth to conquer your Earth. He goes there to rule." She had to struggle to bring the words to her lips now. "And--he takes me--with--him!" "No--no!" the flyer protested, and he struggled insanely to free his hands from the wires that cut the deeper into his flesh. The voice of Althora, clear and strong now, brought him back. "I shall never go, Tommy; never! The gift of eternal life is mine, but it is mine to keep only if I will. But, for you and your friend--" She tried to raise her hands to her trembling lips. "Yes," said Lieutenant McGuire quietly, "for us--?" But there were some things the soft lips of Althora refused to say. Again she tried vainly to raise her hands, then turned her white, stricken face that a loved one might not see the tears that were mingling with the blood-stains on her cheeks, nor read in her eyes the horror they beheld. But she found one crumb of comfort for the two doomed men. "You will live till the sailing of the ships, Tommy," she choked, "and then--we will go together, Tommy--you and I." Her head was bowed and her shoulders shaking, but she raised her head proudly erect as she was seized by a guard whose blood-red hands forced her from the room. And the dry, straining eyes of Lieutenant McGuire, that watched her going, saw the passing to an unknown fate of all he held dear, and the end of his unspoken dreams. He scarcely felt the grip of the hands that seized him, nor knew when he and Sykes were carried from the room where Torg, the Emperor, held his savage court. The stone walls of the room where they were thrown could not hold his eyes; they looked through and beyond to see only the white and piteous face of a girl whose lips were whispering: "We will go together, Tommy--you and I." (_Concluded in the next issue_) MYSTERIOUS CARLSBAD CAVERN The largest cavern ever discovered, at Carlsbad Cavern, N. M., is soon going to be explored. Carlsbad Cavern is so large that that three sky-scrapers a half-mile apart could be built in the largest of its innumerable "rooms," according to Mr. Nicholson, who was there once before, about a year ago. Only 22 miles of the cavern's apparently limitless tunnels have been explored, revealing such natural beauties that President Coolidge established it as a national monument. The stalagmites in the cavern tower 100 feet high. The age of the cavern was put at 60,000,000 years by Dr. Willis T. Lee of the National Geographic Society, after his survey three years ago. The caverns were discovered fifteen years ago by a New Mexican cowboy named Jim White, according to Mr. Nicholson. White was riding across a desert waste one day when he saw what appeared to be smoke from a volcano. After riding three hours in the direction of the smoke he discovered that it was an enormous cloud of bats issuing from the mouth of a gigantic cavern. He decided the cavern deserved exploration, and a few years later he and a Mexican boy were lowered in a barrel over the 750-foot cliff which overhangs the cavern. The stalagmites of the cavern, according to Mr. Nicholson, are very vibrant and resonant. One can play a "xylophone solo" on them with practice, he said, but it is dangerous, since a certain pitch would crack them. The temperature of the cavern is 56 degrees Fahrenheit, never varies, day and night, winter and summer. The air is purified every twenty-four hours in some mysterious fashion, though there are no air currents. This is explained by the theory that there exists a great subterranean stream at a lower level, probably 1,200 feet down. Specimens of stalagmites will be collected and reconstructed for the American Museum of Natural History. The explorers expect to find also flying fish, flying salamanders, rare insects and thousands of bats. A Government representative will go along, and drawings and motion pictures will be made. _The Readers' Corner_ _A Meeting Place for Readers of ASTOUNDING STORIES_ _A Letter and Comment_ Three or four times in the year we have been issuing Astounding Stories the Editor has received letters calling attention to fancied scientific errors in our stories. All these letters were published, but until now we have not cut in on the space of "The Readers' Corner" to answer such objections because they were very obviously the result of hasty or inaccurate readings. The other week one more such letter reached us--from Mr. Philip Waite, this time--claiming that there was "an atrocious flaw" in two stories of Captain S. P. Meek's. This we could not let go unanswered, first because of the strong terms used, and second because the objection would sound to many like a true criticism; so we turned the letter over to Captain Meek, and his answer follows Mr. Waite's letter below. We welcome criticism of stories in our "The Readers' Corner." Never yet have we withheld from it any criticism or brickbats of importance--and we never intend to. But space is limited; there's not room now for all the good letters that come in; and we do not want to intrude too much with editorial comment. Therefore when we do not stop and answer all criticisms we are not necessarily admitting they are valid. In most cases everyone will quickly see their lack of logic or accuracy, and in the rest we will ask you to remember that our Staff is meticulously careful about the scientific facts and laws and possibilities that enter our stories, so it's extremely unlikely that anything very "atrocious" will get by. Well, we'd better cut short now, before we take up too much "Corner" room. But first, thanks to Captain Meek for going to the trouble of defending two stories that needed no defense. And thanks, too, to Mr. Waite, for his kindness in writing in to inform us of what he thought--unquestionably because of hasty reading--were errors.--_The Editor._ P. S. (Now we'll have to be _super_ careful of our science, for if Mr. Waite ever gets anything on us--!!) Dear Editor: Just a note to tell you to keep up the good work. There was an atrocious flaw, however, in the two stories by Capt. S. P. Meek about the Heaviside Layer. How, may I ask, do meteors penetrate through that imaginary substance which is too much for a powerful space flyer? Also, how about refraction? A substance denser than air would produce refraction that would have been noticed long ago. I don't mind minor errors, but an author has no right to ignore the facts so outrageously. Fiction goes too far when an author can invent such false conditions. In the latest issue "Stolen Brains" was fine, up to the Dr. Bird standard. "The Invisible Death" was good enough, but too much like the general run to be noteworthy. "Prisoners on the Electron"--couldn't stomach it. Too hackneyed. "Jetta of the Lowlands," by Ray Cummings; nuff said. "An Extra Man"--original idea and perfectly written. One of the reasons I hang on to Science Fiction. A perfect gem.--Philip Waite, 3400 Wayne Ave., New York, N. Y. Dear Editor: May I use enough space in your discussion columns to reply briefly to the objections raised to the science in my two stories, "Beyond the Heaviside Layer" and "The Attack from Space"? Understand that I am not arguing that there actually is a thick wall of semi-plastic material surrounding the earth through which a space flyer could not pass. If I did, I would automatically bar myself from writing interplanetary stories, a thing that is far from my desires. I do wish to point out, however, that such a layer might exist, so far as we at present know. The objections to which I wish to reply are two: first, "How do meteors pass through that imaginary substance which is too much for a powerful space flyer?" and second, "How about refraction?" To reply to the first we must consider two things, kinetic energy and resistance to the passage of a body. The kinetic energy of a moving body is represented by the formula 1/2 mv^2 where m is the mass of the body and v the velocity. The resistance of a substance to penetration of a body is expressed by the formula A f_c where A is the area of the body in contact with the resisting medium and f_c is the coefficient of sliding friction between the penetrating body and the resisting medium. Consider first the space flyer. To hold personnel the flyer must be hollow. In other words, m must be small as compared to A. A meteor, on the other hand, is solid and dense with a relatively large m and small A. Given a meteor and a space flyer of the same weight, the volume of the meteor would be much smaller, and as the area in contact with the resisting medium is a function of volume, the total resistance to be overcome by the space flyer would be much greater than that to be overcome by the meteor. Again, consider the relative velocities of a meteor and a space flyer coming from the earth toward the heaviside layer. The meteor from space would have an enormous velocity, so great that if it got into even very rare air, it would become incandescent. As it must go through dense air, the space flyer could attain only a relatively low velocity before it reached the layer. Remember that the velocity is squared. A one thousand pound meteor flying with a velocity 100 times that of the space ship would have 100^2 or 10,000 times the kinetic energy of the space ship while it would also have less friction to overcome due to its smaller size. If my critic wishes to test this out for himself, I can suggest a very simple experiment. Take a plank of sound pine wood, two inches thick by twelve inches wide and four feet long. Support it on both ends and then pile lead slabs onto it, covering the whole area of the board. If the wood be sound the board will support a thousand pounds readily. Now remove the lead slabs and fire a 200 grain lead bullet at the board with a muzzle or initial velocity of 1,600 feet per second. The bullet will penetrate the board very readily. Consider the heaviside layer as the board, the space ship as the lead slabs and the bullet as the meteor and you have the answer. Consider one more thing. According to the stories, the layer grew thicker and harder to penetrate as the flyer reached the outer surface. The meteor would strike the most viscous part of the layer with its maximum energy. As its velocity dropped and its kinetic energy grew less, it would meet material easier to penetrate. On the other hand the flyer, coming from the earth, would meet material easy to penetrate and gradually lose its velocity and consequently its kinetic energy. When it reached the very viscous portion of the layer, it would have almost no energy left with which to force its way through. Remember, the Mercurians made no attempt to penetrate the layer until a portion of it had been destroyed by Carpenter's genius. As for the matter of refraction. If you will place a glass cube or other form in the air, you will have no difficulty in measuring the refraction of the light passing through it. If, however, the observer would place himself inside a hollow sphere of glass so perfectly transparent as to be invisible, would not the refraction he would observe be taken by him to be the refraction of air when in reality it would be the combined refraction of the glass sphere and the air around him? I have taken glass as the medium to illustrate this because my critic made the statement that "a substance denser than air would produce refraction that would have been noticed long ago." However nowhere in either story is the statement made that the material of the heaviside layer was denser than air. The statement was that it was more viscous. Viscosity is not necessarily a function of density. A heavy oil such as you use in the winter to lubricate your automobile has a much higher viscosity than water, yet it will float on water, i. e. it is less dense. There is nothing in the story that would prevent the heaviside layer from having a coefficient of refraction identical with that of air. To close, let me repeat that I am not arguing that such a layer exists. I do not believe that it does and I do believe that my generation will probably see the first interplanetary expedition start and possibly see the first interplanetary trip succeed. I do, however, contend that the science in my stories is accurate until it transcends the boundaries of present day knowledge and ceases to be science and becomes "super-science," and that my super-science is developed in a logical manner from science and that nothing in present knowledge makes the existence of such a layer impossible--S. P. Meek. Capt. Ord. Dept., U. S. A. _Likes Long Novelettes_ Dear Editor: I have just finished reading the August issue of your magazine. I am going to rate the different stories in per cents. 100% means excellent; 75% fairly good; 50% passable; 25% just an ordinary story. I give "Marooned Under The Sea," by Paul Ernst, 100%; 75% for "The Attack From Space," by Captain S. P. Meek. "The Problem in Communication," by Miles J. Breuer, M. D. and "Jetta of the Lowlands," by Ray Cummings; 50% for "The Murder Machine," by Hugh B. Cave and "Earth, The Marauder," by Arthur J. Burks; 25% for "The Terrible Tentacles of L-472," by Sewell Peaslee Wright. I am happy to say that since I have been reading your magazine, I have induced at least ten of my friends to be constant readers of this magazine. I like the long novelettes much better than continued novels, and hope that in the future we will get bigger and better novelettes.--Leonard Estrin, 1145 Morrison Ave., Bronx, N. Y. _Hasn't Decided_ Dear Editor: Move over, you old-timers, and let a newcomer say something. A few months ago I didn't read any Science Fiction. Now I read it all. I haven't decided yet which magazine I like best. I was a little disappointed when you didn't have another story in the September copy by R. P. Starzl, who wrote "Planet of Dread." I thought you would hold on to a good author when you find one. I would also like another story by the fellow who wrote the serial "Murder Madness." I like short stories best. That idea of a mechanical nirvana in Miles J. Breuer's story was good. "Jetta of the Lowlands?" Opinion reserved. I like the action of the story, but I hate a hero who is always bragging about himself. Don't think I'm complaining, but nothing is perfect. Why not try to get a story of A. Merritt's, or Ralph Milne Farley's?--A. Dougherty, 327 North Prairie Ave., Sioux Falls, So. Dak. _Announcement_ Dear Editor: May I enter "The Readers' Corner" to announce that a branch of The Scienceers has recently been formed in Clearwater, Florida, by a group of Science Fiction enthusiasts? We have a library of 175 Science Fiction magazines, including a complete file of Astounding Stories to date. We hold weekly meetings at which scientific topics are discussed, and current Science Fiction stories commented upon. As the first branch of The Scienceers, we are striving to achieve a success that will be a mark for other branches to aim at.--Carlton Abernathy, P. O. Box 584, Clearwater, Fla. _From Merrie England_ Dear Editor: I came across your May publication of Astounding Stories the other day, and I cannot resist writing to you to congratulate you on the most interesting magazine I have ever read. I am now determined to take it every month. Re "The Atom Smasher," it is A-1. I have read several interplanetary stories over here but none to touch those of your magazine. Best wishes for the success of your book and its authors.--J. C. Atkinson, 17 Balaclava Rd., Sheffield, England. _Starting Young_ Dear Editor: You'll excuse my writing, for it is the end of vacation. I like your book very much, which many other readers approve of. Some dislikes, of course, everyone has, and I have three which many readers have, too. First, I wish the magazine were bigger and the paper better. Second, have more stories and raise the price to 25c. Third, have stories of the future such as "Earth, the Marauder," and stories of lost Atlantis, the fourth dimension, other planets, atoms and electrons.--Jack Farber, Payette, Idaho. P. S. I am 11 years old and interested in science. _Doesn't Like Serials_ Dear Editor: I am a recent reader of the Astounding Stories magazine. I am going to keep getting the magazine, as I like it very much. I did not like "Murder Madness," or Burks' "Earth, the Marauder" very much. I do not think "Murder Madness" is the type of story that belongs in this magazine. I do not like continued stories very much as I hate to break off at an interesting point and wait a whole month before I can read the next installment or conclusion of the story. The front piece of the magazine is very good, and except for the criticisms mentioned above the magazine is excellent.--Kempt Mitchell. _A Staunch Defender_ Dear Editor: At one time a friend introduced your excellent little publication to me. I read it and enjoyed every paragraph of it. This issue starred "The Monsters of Moyen," which I consider a real super-science story. I have followed "The Readers' Corner" quite a time. In the September issue I saw where someone made a commentary on the magazine. One of the things they said was that the paper should be of a better grade. It is true that this would help, but "our" magazine is not half full of advertisements to pay for this expense. Dear friends, this is no Saturday Evening Post. Don't ask too much. Then, you may take in consideration that other magazines of Science Fiction have no better grade of paper than this, for I have purchased several. I have but one thing to say as an improvement for it. That is, why shouldn't there be a Quarterly? Other Science Fiction magazines have them. They have complete stories and are double in size and price. Dear Editor, please, for the public's sake, put out a Quarterly. I'm sure others would like one.--H. C. Kaufman, Jr., 1730 N. Monroe St., Baltimore, Maryland. _Announcement_ Dear Editor: We would appreciate it very much if you would print this in your "Readers' Corner" department. We wish to inform the readers of Astounding Stories of an organization lately formed, called The Boys' Scientifiction Club. Its purpose is to promote scientific interest among boys between the ages of 10 and 15, to encourage the reading of Science Fiction and scientific works, and to create a bond of friendship among them. A circulating library, composed of Science Fiction books, magazines, articles, etc., is being constructed to circulate among members who desire to read any of the contents. Officers are: President-Librarian, Forrest J. Ackerman, 530 Staples Ave., San Francisco, Cal.; Secretary-Treasurer, Frank Sipos, 174 Staples Ave., San Francisco, California. Address all letters concerning membership to the President. He will be glad to answer all letters and explain particulars of the club. Thank you for your kindness.--Linus Hogenmiller, Vice-President B. S. C., 502 N. Washington St., Farmington, Missouri. _But--Ray Cummings Writes Us Only Brand New Stories!_ Dear Editor: I want to commend Astounding Stories on carrying out an idea which I have had in mind for some time; that is, some scientific articles. "A Star That Breathes," in the July number, was very interesting, as were the two articles in the August copy. However, I hope that this is only the start of a valuable new addition to Astounding Stories. There should be at least five or six in each magazine, and I think most of the readers would prefer them at the end of the stories instead of in the back of the magazine. Another thing that is absolutely essential if Astounding Stories would hold its own as a high-class Science Fiction magazine is a scientific editorial in the front of the book. The way it starts off abruptly onto a story gives the impression of a cheap publication. A lot of your readers have been setting up a clamor for stories by Ray Cummings. While it is true that he has written a few good stories, you will find that his antiquated stuff is not being printed in any of the other Science Fiction magazine, but only in ones devoted to adventure-stories. For the sake of your many readers who would like to see "our magazine" keep abreast of the times, Cummings should be dropped and some of the peerless authors of to-day employed. As an advance along this line you already have Capt. S. P. Meek, Harl Vincent, Lilith Lorraine, Edmond Hamilton, and, in the latest copy, R. F. Starzl. "The Planet of Dread," by R. F. Starzl was the best story in the August issue. A wealth of ideas was contained in that treatise of life on a young, warm planet, and the idea of fooling the liquid intelligence by thought-suggestion is quite novel but entirely reasonable. Mr. Starzl is an author of the highest type and ability, and you will do well to secure more stories from his typewriter. I was glad to see that the cover has finally been changed from the conventional blue background, and I hope we will have a little variation from now on. Concerning illustrations, Wesso is a great artist, and aside from a few scientific errors his covers are excellent. The inside drawings could be improved, however. I hope for your continued success--Wayne D. Bray, Campbell, Mo. _Are We All "Morons?"_ Dear Editor: Having perused three issues of your magazine, I must agree that its title is well chosen. The stories are nearly all "astounding"; astounding in that they utterly ignore every scientific fact and discovery of the past ten centuries. The cold of inter-stellar space; its lack of oxygen; the interplanetary effects of gravitation--all are passed over as if non-existent. An "anti-gravity ovoid"--of which no description is given--if worn in a man's hat, makes his whole body weightless. Men, buildings and cities float through the air or become invisible, yet not the least semi-scientific explanation is made as to the how of it all. In other words, the pattern of your stories appears to have been taken from the Arabian Nights and from Grimm's Fairy Tales--but with not a millionth part of the interest. How anyone, save a young child or a moron, can read and enjoy such futile nonsense is incredible. If your writers would (like Jules Verne) only invent some pseudo-scientific explanation for their marvels, your publication might then be read with pleasure--but why do so when trash is acceptable without thought behind it!--M. Clifford Johnston, 451 Central Avenue, Newark, N. J. _A Wesso Fan_ Dear Editor: Let me congratulate you on the September issue of Astounding Stories. It is the best issue you have published yet. I noticed in this issue that you had four illustrations by Wesso. Though that is the most you have ever had, I think it would be much better if all the illustrations were by him. However, getting down to brass tacks, the reason I'm typing this letter is to ask you to publish an Astounding Stories Quarterly. You could have it contain twice as much reading material as in the monthly and charge forty cents a copy for it. It would be much better than a semi-monthly and I am quite sure it would "go over" big.--Thomas L. Kratzer, 3593 Tullamore Rd., University Heights, Ohio. _Bang--Bang--Bang_ Dear Editor: I have read the August Astounding Stories and greatly enjoyed the fiction, but "The Readers' Corner" gave me a good deal of amusement. Some of your readers take their fiction so seriously! Take the "Brick or Two" from George L. Williams and Harry Heillisan, for instance. They want Astounding Stories filled with material from authors that appear in other magazines--because your readers "are used to the standards set by those publications," etc. And again, "you should have some one who is well qualified to pass upon the science in the stories." For the love of Pete, if people want scientific treatises, why don't they buy books and magazines dealing with the subject? There are many on the market--serious and dull enough for anyone. But for our fiction magazines, let's have it pure and unadulterated, the more improbably the better. What possible difference does it make if, in a story, the moon has a crater every ten feet, or the black sky of outer space were blazing with moons and aurora borealises, or the sun were in a double eclipse! We read stories to be amused, not for technical information, so we certainly don't want "a scientific editorial in each issue by some 'eminent scientist.'" As for a department in which readers could write their opinions of the stories and suggest improvements in the conduct of the magazine, what else is "The Readers' Corner?" Why not adopt a tolerant attitude, and instead of howling about petty faults and mistakes get a good laugh over them? As for telling writers and editors "how to do it," we would only expose our ignorance and inability and make ourselves ridiculous. If we think we could do so much better, let's try it. Write a story ourselves or start running a magazine! Astounding Stories is all right as is. We like it "different." We want different authors from those of other magazines. What is the use of having various publications if they must all be conducted along identical lines? Now for your writers: Mr. R.F. Starzl is easily the best. His story, "The Planet of Dread," is full of thrills and imagination and clever situations that are well developed and surmounted. One thing that is rather remarkable in this class of story, the hero gets himself and his companion out of every difficulty by his own ingenuity. The story moves along with interest and thrills in every paragraph, and is really my ideal of a "super-scientific" yarn; i.e., not stuffed with tiresome technical data. Let's have more from this interesting author.--C.E. Bush, Decatur, Ark. _Assorted Bouquets_ Dear Editor: Before commenting upon the September issue of your wonderful magazine, I would like to personally thank Mr. Bates for the kind reply to my former letter. It shows that at least one editor glanced over my literary ramblings. Now for comments on the September issue. I placed the stories in the following order, which is based upon their merit: "Marooned Under the Sea"; "Terrible Tentacles of L-472"; "Jetta of the Lowlands"; "The Attack from Space"; "A Problem in Communication"; "Earth the Marauder," and "The Murder Machine." Your serials are the best I have ever read in any magazine; your latest one, "Jetta of the Lowlands," promises to be an A-1 top-notcher. Your artists, H.W. Wessolowski and J. Fleming Gould, draw the finest illustrations I have ever seen anywhere. "The Readers' Corner" is a fine corner which can only be improved by making it larger. The stories scheduled for the October issue look good to me. Am glad to see that Dr. Bird is returning. Will sign off now wishing Astounding Stories all the luck it deserves.--Edwin Anderson, 1765 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, N.Y.C., N.Y. _A Request_ Dear Editor: I thought I would drop you just a line to comment on the authors now writing for "our" magazine. Among the best are: R. F. Starzl, Edmond Hamilton, Harl Vincent, Ray Cummings and Captain S. P. Meek. However, there is one brilliant author whose fascinating stories have, to date, failed to appear in our magazine. The man I am referring to is Ed Earl Repp. Please have a story by him in our magazine as soon as possible. I am sure other readers will agree with me when I say that Mr. Repp writes exceedingly thrilling and exciting Science Fiction tales. Let's see many stories by him in the forthcoming issues of Astounding Stories.--Forrest J. Ackerman, 530 Staples Avenue, San Francisco, California. _Thank You, Mr. Lorenzo_ Dear Editor: Several Science Fiction magazines will have to struggle along without my patronage. Why? Because they flew (literally speaking) over my head with all kinds of science. I want some science, but mostly fiction. I couldn't understand what they were writing about, so I lost interest. I can read a single copy of a good magazine from cover to cover in one day, but let me lose interest in it by having too much dry matter and I just don't buy that book again. Your magazine is the best of all Science Fiction magazines, which means that I can read and understand the tales in Astounding Stories. So you get my trade. You're trying your best to supply me with interesting stories so if there is an occasional dry story (to me), I just remember one thing: you, as Editor, are a human being like myself; so, neither one of us being perfect, I just forgive and go on buying.--Jas Lorenzo, 644 Hanover St., San Francisco, Cal. _Suggestions_ Dear Editor: "Earth, the Marauder," by Arthur J. Burks, gets four stars. It is one of the most astounding stories I have ever read. I hope you have more stories by Arthur J. Burks on schedule for early issues. "Jetta of the Lowlands," by Ray Cummings, "Marooned Under the Sea," by Paul Ernst (a sequel soon, I hope). "The Terrible Tentacles of L-472," by S.P. Wright and "The Attack from Space," by S.P. Meek (let's have another sequel), all get three stars. I hope that S.P. Wright will write more stories of strange planets. I think that your serials should all be book-length novels with the installments from thirty-five to fifty pages in length. Don't publish novelettes (thirty to sixty-five pages) as serials. In your August issue you mention that you may some day publish Astounding Stories twice a month. I would rather have you increase the price to twenty-five cents, give us as much material as Five Novels Monthly, and smooth cut edges. Wesso's cover illustrations are improving each month. I am glad to see more of his illustrations inside. Since so many readers ask for reprints, why not give us an occasional one?--Jack Darrow, 4225 N. Spaulding Ave., Chicago, Illinois. "_A Flop_" Dear Editor: I have read Astounding Stories since its first issue, and I am convinced that it is without a peer in the field of Science Fiction. This preeminence is due to the fact that the magazine regularly contains the work of the best contemporary writers of scientific fantasy, such as Cummings, Rousseau, Leinster, Burks and Hamilton. Certain readers, unaccustomed to such rich fare, ask for stories by lesser lights. For a time these requests went unheeded; but of late it seems they are getting results--more's the pity. Your September issue contained a story called "A Problem in Communication" by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. Now, the good doctor may be a "wow" in other magazines, but his stuff is not up to the standard of Astounding Stories. His initial effort in this magazine was dull and uninspired. It lacked the sustained interest and gripping action of your other stories. It was, to put it bluntly, a flop. In spite of this sad example, several readers are still clamoring for more stuff from the small-timers. If they get their way--which Allah forbid!--it will mean the downfall of Astounding Stories. Why ruin a truly great magazine by catering to a misguided minority?--George K. Addison, 94 Brandt Place, Bronx, New York. "_No Favorites_" Dear Editor: I found your magazine on the newsstand while looking for another kind. The cover picture looked interesting so I bought Astounding Stories instead of the other. Since that moment I have been a steady reader. I can see no way to improve your magazine unless it is to enlarge it or to publish it oftener. I am satisfied with it as it is. It is the best magazine on the newsstands now. I have no favorites among your stories as I like them all equally well.--Robert L. King, Melbourne, Florida. _Pride of the Regiment_ Dear Editor: I have just finished reading the September issue of Astounding Stories and want to congratulate you on your staff of writers. Although this is the first copy I have read, I can assure you that it will not be the last, by any means. I think the story called "Marooned Under the Sea," by Paul Ernst, a story that no one could have passed without reading it. The way the author explains the story to have come to life has really got me guessing. The only thing that I regretted was that I didn't get the copies previous to the story called, "Earth, the Marauder," by Arthur J. Burks. Please give us more stories by Paul Ernst. (I say us because I am a soldier, and where you find one soldier you find plenty soldiers.) So keep the good work up, as we are looking forward to a good time when the next issues come around.--Co. "I," 26th Inf. Plattsburgh Barracks, Plattsburgh, New York. _Covers Not Too Vivid_ Dear Editor: I can't help joining the great number of admirers of your wonderful magazine. A great many readers ask for interplanetary stories. As for me, I like any kind, stories of other worlds, under the earth, under the sea, on other planets, dimensional stories, anything. So far I have not had the slightest excuse to complain. When I finish reading a story I write after the title, "good," "very good," "fair," etc. Then I read the best ones over again while waiting for the next issue. The following two and the only stories I didn't like so far are: "The Stolen Mind" and "Creatures of the Light." One critic stated that he considered the illustrations of Astounding Stories too vivid. Illustrations for stories such as are contained in this magazine cannot be too vivid. Readers have plenty of opportunity to use their imaginations. Many scenes which the authors try to portray are hard to visualize, and I think that a number of good illustrations would help the readers enjoy the stories more. As long as you keep your magazine up to the standard you have set thus far, I will remain an eager reader.--Sam Castellina, 104 E. Railroad St. Pittston, Penn. _Quite True_ Dear Editor: I have enjoyed every one of your Astounding Stories magazines from the first. However, in the story, "The Murder Machine," by Hugh B. Cave, a man, Sir John Harman, was made to kill a man by meccano-telepathically projected hypnotic suggestions. Some people think it is entirely possible to make a man do such a thing by hypnotism, but it is not possible because no person under hypnotic influence will do anything that his subconscious mind knows is immoral. Neither a thief nor a murderer can be made to confess their crime while under hypnotic influence. I am merely writing this so that the others who have read the story will not get the wrong idea of hypnotism. A man under hypnotic influence can be made to think he is murdering or robbing, but he will not do it really, no matter how hard the hypnotist tries to make him.--Henry Booth, 916 Federal St., N. S. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "_Paper Correct Kind_" Dear Editor: I am a reader of four other Science Fiction magazines but like Astounding Stories the best for two main reasons. First, the size is just right, second, the paper is the correct kind. It does not glare at you when you read. I have every issue of Astounding Stories since it came out. The stories are all good and are becoming better each month. I prefer stories of space traveling and of the fourth dimension. About reprints, I think that if you want to give reprints, why not publish them in booklet form. I'm sure many of the readers will prefer to have reprints that way.--Frank Wogavoda, Water Mill, New York. _Bouquets_ Dear Editor: "The Planet of Dread" was a classic in the full meaning of the word. Not only was the story a masterpiece of fantastic adventure but also of short story craft. By all means secure more of Mr. Starzl's fine tales. Your stories by Ray Cummings are great. It would be a good policy upon your part to continue to present stories of his at the most not more than two issues apart. Continue up to your present standard and you'll continue to stand above all other Science Fiction magazines where stories of super-science are concerned, now and forever.--Jerome Siegel, 10622 Kimberley Ave., Cleveland, Ohio. "_The Readers' Corner_" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here; so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it will all of us! --_The Editor._ ASTOUNDING STORIES _Appears on Newsstands_ THE FIRST THURSDAY IN EACH MONTH 
6714	----	DAVE DASHAWAY AND HIS HYDROPLANE Or Daring Adventures Over The Great Lakes By Roy Rockwood CHAPTER I THE YOUNG AVIATOR "Telegram, sir." "Who for?" "Dave Dashaway." "I'll take it." The messenger boy who had just entered the hangar of the great prize monoplane of the aero meet at Columbus, stared wonderingly about him while the man in charge of the place receipted for the telegram. The lad had never been in so queer a place before. He was a lively, active city boy, but the closest he had ever seen an airship was a distance away and five hundred feet up in the air. Now, with big wonder eyes he stared at the strange appearing machine. His fingers moved restlessly, like a street-urchin surveying an automobile and longing to blow its horn. The man in charge of the place attracted his attention, too. He had only one arm and limped when he walked. His face was scarred and he looked like a war veteran. The only battles this old warrior had been in, however, were fights with the elements. He was a famous "wind wagon" man who had sustained a terrible fall in an endurance race. It had crippled him for life. Now he followed the various professional meets for a living, and also ran an aviation school for amateurs. His name was John Grimshaw. The messenger boy took a last look about the place and left. The old man put on a cap, went to the door and rather gruesomely faced the elements. "A cold drizzling rain and gusty weather generally," he said to himself in a grumbling tone. "I'll face it any time for Dashaway, though. The telegram may be important." The big aero field looked lonely and gloomy as the man crossed it. Lights showed here and there in the various buildings scattered about the enclosure. The ground was wet and soft. The rain came in chilling dashes. Old Grimshaw breasted the storm, and after half a mile's walk came to a hangar a good deal like the one he had left. There was a light inside. "Hello, there!" he sang out in his big foghorn voice, thrusting the door open with his foot and getting under the shelter, and shaking the rain from his head and shoulders. Two boys were the occupants of the place. They had a lamp on the table, upon which was outspread pictures and plans of airships. The older of the two got up from his chair with a pleasant smiling face. "Why, it's Mr. Grimshaw!" he exclaimed. "That's who it is," joined in the other boy cheerily. "Say, you're welcome, too. We were looking over some sketches of new machines, and you can tell us lots about them, you know." "Got to get back to my own quarters," declared Grimshaw. "Some other time about those pictures. Boy brought a telegram to Mr. King's hangar. It's for you, Dashaway." "For me?" inquired the lad who had first addressed the visitor. "Yes. Here it is. Mr. King's away, but if you need me for anything let me know." "I'm always needing you," replied Dave Dashaway. "I don't know what we'd do without you." The young aviator--for such he was in fact and reality--took the proffered envelope. He tore open its end and read the enclosure rapidly. "Why," he said, "this is strange." "Any answer? Need me?" asked Grimshaw, moving towards the door. "No, thank you," replied Dave in a vague, bothered way that made his companion and chum, Hiram Dobbs, study his face with some perplexity. "I'd better get back home, then," said the old man. "Fine weather for hydroplanes this, eh?" Both Dave and Hiram proceeded to the door with the grim old fellow who had so kindly taught them all they knew about aeronautics. When their visitor had departed, Dave went back to the table. He sat down and perused the telegram once more. Then he sat looking fixedly at it, as if he was studying some hard problem. Hiram stood it as long as he could. Then he burst out impetuously: "What is it, Dave?" "I'm trying to find out," was the abstracted reply. "Who is it from?" "The Interstate Aeroplane Co." That name meant a good deal to Hiram Dobbs, and a great deal more to Dave Dashaway. It marked the starting point in the aviation career of the latter, and that in its turn had meant a first step up the ladder for his faithful comrade, Hiram. In the first volume of this series, entitled: "Dave Dashaway, the Young Aviator; Or, In the Clouds for Fame and Fortune," the career of Dave Dashaway has been told. The father of the young airman had been a noted balloonist, and when he died a mean old skinflint named Silas Warner had been appointed Dave's guardian. Warner had acted the tyrant and hard taskmaster for the youth. A natural love for aeronautics had been born in Dave. He had made an airship model which his guardian had maliciously destroyed. Warner had also appropriated a package dropped accidentally by a famous aviator, named Robert King, from a monoplane. Dave had found this package, containing money, a watch and a medal greatly prized by Mr. King. Dave resolved that this property should be restored to the airman. He got hold of the lost articles, which his guardian had secreted, and ran away from home. After various adventures, during which he was robbed of the airman's property, Dave managed to reach the aero meet at Fairfield. He found Robert King and described to him the boy thief. The airman took a fancy to Dave from the nerve and ability he showed in experimenting with a parachute garment, and hired him. About the same time Hiram Dobbs came along, ambitious to change his farm life for an aviation career, and secured work helping about the grounds. Mr. King sent Dave to Grimshaw for training. The Interstate Aeroplane Co. wanted to exhibit its Baby Racer, a novel biplane. Dave made a successful demonstration, and won the admiration and good will of the company. In a few weeks time Dave scored a big success and won several trophies. His final exploit was taking the place of an aviator who had fainted away in his monoplane, and winning the race for Mr. King's machine. Dave was now the proud possessor of a pilot's license, and had fairly entered the professional field. The thief who had stolen Mr. King's property from Dave, a graceless youth named Gregg, was found, and the property recovered. He had also got hold of some papers that belonged to Dave's father. Gregg through these had obtained a trace of a Mr. Dale, a great friend of the dead balloonist. He had made Mr. Dale believe he was the real Dave Dashaway, until he was unmasked. Another bad boy Dave had run across was named Jerry Dawson. From the start in his career as an airman this youth had been an enemy. Dave had succeeded him in the employ of Mr. King, Jerry having been discharged in disgrace. Jerry tried to "get even," as he called it, by trying to wreck Mr. King's monoplane, the Aegis. He also betrayed Dave's whereabouts to his guardian. Because Dave was right and Jerry wrong, there plots rebounded on the schemer and did Dave no harm. Jerry and his father were exposed. They still followed the various meets, however, just as Mr. King and Dave and Hiram did, but they were shunned by all reputable airmen. After leaving the aero meet at Dayton the proud possessor of a trophy as winner of a one hundred mile dash, Dave now found himself and his friends on the aero, grounds at Columbus. This was a summer resort located on Lake Michigan. A two weeks' programme had been arranged, in which Dave was to give exhibitions for his employers of their new model hydroplane. Hiram was practicing for a flight in the Baby Racer. The two friends that rainy summer evening were interested in plans for the coming meet and aviation business generally. The arrival of the telegram once more introduces the reader to Dave Dashaway, now popularly known as the young aviator. The telegram which Grimshaw had brought to Dave was dated at the headquarters of the Interstate Aeroplane Co., some three hundred miles distant. It was addressed to Dave in care of Mr. King, and it was signed by the manager of the company. It read as follows: "Our sales agent, Timmins, reported from your quarters at Columbus three days ago. Was due at Kewaukee this morning on big contract with County Fair Amusement Co. Wired Northern Hotel there, where we had forwarded all the contracts and papers, and he is not there. Find him at any expense, and get him to Kewaukee before to-morrow morning, or the Star Aero Co. will get the order. Fear some trick. This means ten thousand dollars to us." Dave read and reread this message, weighing every word in his mind as he did so. Hiram sat watching him in a fever of suspense and anxiety. Finally he exclaimed: "See here, Dave Dashaway, is that Greek you can't make out, or have you gone to sleep?" "I was only trying to figure out this telegram," replied Dave thoughtfully. "Here, read it for yourself, and see what you make of it." The young aviator passed the yellow sheet over to his curious friend. The latter scanned it rapidly. Then, with startling suddenness, his face twitching with excitement, he jumped to his feet. "What do I make of it?" shouted Hiram. "Just what the telegram says--a trick! It's come all over me in a flash. Why, Dick, I know all about it." CHAPTER II The "BABY RACER" "You know all about it?" repeated Dave Dashaway, looking up in great surprise. "That's what I do," declared Hiram positively. "What do you mean?" "I'll explain." "I wish you would." "I'm a blockhead, that's just what I am!" cried Hiram. "I don't know what possessed me that I didn't tell you all about it before." "See here, Hiram," broke in Dave, "What are you talking about?" "Why, about Mr. Timmins. You know he here night before last and left us then?" "Yes, Hiram, to go to Kewaukee." "Well, he just didn't go to Kewaukee at all." "That's no news, for this telegram shows that couldn't have done so." "You see, when Mr. Timmins got telling us about the big sale he was going to make at Kewaukee," continued Hiram, "and how the Star Aero people were bidders for the same contract, you warned him against the Dawsons, and the people they are working for!" "I know I did. That was because the Dawsons are stunting for the Star people." "Exactly. Then when I caught Jerry Dawson and Brooks, that precious chum of his, sneaking around the Aegis hangar, I made up my mind that they were up to no good. I know what they were snooping around for, now." "What was it?" "To pick up what information they could about Mr. Timmins' plans, so, when Mr. Timmins went away, I was awful glad. I felt pleased, for Mr. King told as you know that he was a free and easy fellow, friendly to everybody, and sometimes drank more than he ought to." "Yes, I know that, Hiram." "Well, last night I went to town to get some supplies for Mr. Grimshaw. There's a tavern at the cross roads, and some men were in there. I saw them through an open window. There were six of them. Brooks was there, and Jerry and his father, and three more of the crowd. They were playing cards and making a great deal of noise. Just as I looked in some one pulled down the shade. I caught a sight of the other man, though. Right off, even at the distance I was, it struck me he looked like Mr. Timmins. Then I remembered that Mr. Timmins had certainly gone to Kewaukee the night before, so I put it off my mind. Now, I see the whole trick." "What is that?" "The crowd kept Mr. Timmins here, delaying and entertaining him. Maybe later some of them led him still further away from Columbus. Their man is probably on the spot at Kewaukee now, ready to get that big contract for show biplanes." Dave had been anxiously walking up and down the floor while Hiram was talking. Now he took his cap off a peg and picked up an umbrella. "You wait here till I come back, Hiram," he said. "Where are you going, Dave?" "Down to the Aegis hangar. This telegram disturbs me very much. I have no idea where Mr. Timmins can be, and something must certainly be done about this contract." "That's so, Dave," agreed Hiram. "It isn't exactly our business, but it would be a big feather in your cap to help out the people who are hiring you." "That's what I want to do, if I can," replied Dave, as he left the place. The youth went straight to the Aegis hangar, where he found Grimshaw tinkering over a broken airplane wing. Mr. King had a desk in one corner of what he called his office room. Dave was free to use this at all times. He opened it now, and for ten minutes was busy with some railroad time tables he found there. Then he consulted an aero guide map. Grimshaw watched him from under his shaggy eyebrows, but said nothing until Dave got up from the desk, buttoned his coat and prepared to face the storm again. "What's the trouble, Dashaway?" he asked. "Why, Mr. Grimshaw?" inquired Dave, wishing to evade direct questioning. "You seem bothered about something, I see." "Well, as a matter of fact, I am," confessed Dave. "What is it?" "I'm trying to find a way to get to Kewaukee," explained Dave. "Something has come up that makes me think I ought to be there in the interests of my employers early to-morrow morning. I am figuring out how I can make it." "See here, Dashaway," spoke the old airman in a grim, impressive way, "don't you do anything reckless." "I won't," answered Dave. "You know you once said I was all business. Well, I'll always try to do my duty without any unnecessary risks." Dave laughed carelessly and got away from the hangar. A daring idea had come into his mind. Perhaps Grimshaw suspected it, and Dave was afraid he might. The lad knew that the eccentric old fellow liked him, and would try to dissuade him from any exploit of unusual peril. "I'll do it, I'll have to do it or let the company lose out," breathed Dave, as once outside he broke into a run across the aviation field. Dave found Hiram winding the alarm clock as he re-entered the half shed, half canvas house where the Baby Racer was stored. Although they got their meals at Mr. King's headquarters, the boys had two light cots and slept near to the machine which Dave had been exhibiting. Dave glanced at the clock, and Hiram noticing the look, said: "Eleven thirty, Dave. I've set the alarm clock for five thirty. You know that new hydroplane will probably come in on an early freight. What's the programme?" "Well, Hiram," responded Dave, throwing off his coat and hat, "I'm going to dress up for a ride." "Eh?" ejaculated Hiram, staring hard at the set resolute face of his comrade. "Yes, I've got to get to Kewaukee." "Oh, you mean going by train?" "No. Last one left an hour ago. Next one nine o clock to-morrow morning." "Automobile, then?" "On the country mud roads we've been having for the last week?" "That's so. Then--" "It's the airship route or nothing, Hiram," said Dave. "I'm going in the biplane." "The Baby Racer?" "Yes." "On such a night as this! Why, Dave," began Hiram, almost in alarm. "Don't say a word," interrupted Dave with a preemptory wave of his hand. "I've made up my mind, and that ends it." "It usually does," said Hiram. "If you're bound to do it, though, Dave--" "I certainly am." "Ask Mr. Grimshaw's advice, first." "Not for worlds." "Why not?" "I think he would try to stop me. See here, Hiram, I've thought it all over. I know it's a hard, rough night, but I also know what the Baby Racer can do." "It's a pretty bad night to do any fooling in the air," remarked Hiram. "There won't be much fooling about it, Hiram. I know the chances and, I shan't look for any fun. It is a bad night, I know, but the wind is right, and I can head straight into it in reaching Kewaukee." "How far away is Kewaukee, Dave?" "Ninety-five miles." Dave, while he talked, had been putting on his regular aviator's suit. As he finished up with a helmet, he noticed Hiram changing his coat for a sweater. "What are you up to, Hiram," he inquired quickly. "Getting ready, of course." "Getting ready for what?" "The trip to Kewaukee." "Oh, you think you're going?" "If you are," retorted Hiram, "I know I am. Now, see here, Dave," continued Hiram, waving a silencing finger as Dave was about to speak, "I know I'm not an aviator like you, and never will be. All the same, I am some good in an airship, if it's only to act as ballast. The other day when I was up with you in the Racer, you. said I shifted the elevator just in time to save a smash up. In a storm like the one to-night, you my need me worse than ever. Anyhow, Dave Dashaway, I won't let you go alone." The young airman looked at his loyal, earnest friend with pleasure and pride. Hiram was only a crude country boy. He had, however, shown diamond in the rough, and Dave appreciated the fact. Hiram had made several ground runs in an aeroplane. He had gone up in the Baby Racer twice with Dave, and had proven himself a model passenger. As he had just hinted, too, he had been familiar enough with the mechanism of the biplane to operate some of its auxiliary machinery so as to avert an accident. "You are the best company in the world, Hiram," said Dave, "but I wouldn't feel right in letting you take the risk of a hazardous run." "Dave, I won't let you go alone," persisted Hiram. Dave said nothing in reply. He went outside, and Hiram followed him. They unlocked the door of the shed adjoining where the Baby Racer was housed, and lit two lanterns. "Get a couple of the nearest field men, Hiram," directed Dave, "and I will have everything in order by the time you get back." There was not much for Dave to do. Only the noon of that day they had got the little biplane ready for a cross country spurt. Then the rain came on, and they decided to defer the dash till the weather was more propitious. Dave was looking over the machinery, when a gruff hail startled him. "Hello!" challenged old Grimshaw, appearing at the open doorway of the hangar. "What you up to, Dashaway?" Dave flushed guiltily. He was dreadfully embarrassed to be "caught in the act" as it were, by his great friend, the old airman. "Why--you see, Mr. Grimshaw--" stammered Dave. "Yes, of course I see," retorted the old man firmly. "You're going to start out a night like this." "I've got to, Mr. Grimshaw," declared Dave desperately. "Business, eh?" "Of the most important kind." "What is it?" It was in order for Dave to explain details, and did so briefly. "H'm," commented Grimshaw, when his pupil concluded his explanation. "And so you thought you'd steal away without letting me know it?" "Oh, now, Mr. Grimshaw!" Dave hastened to say--"that was not the spirit of the thing at all." "Go ahead, Dashaway." "Well, then, I think so very much of you I didn't want it to worry you." "Roll her out," was all that Grimshaw would say, placing his one hand on the tail of the biplane. "Hold on for a minute. Gasoline supply?" "Twenty-five gallons." "That will do. Lubricating oil-all right. Now then, lad, hit that head wind every time, and you'll make it, sure." CHAPTER III A WILD NIGHT RIDE "Go!" It was less than half an hour after the appearance of Grimshaw on the scene that the Baby Racer was all ready for its stormy night's flight. The old aviator had fussed and poked about the dainty little biplane, as if it was some valued friend he was sending out into the world to try its fortune. Every once in a while he had growled out some brief advice to Dave in his characteristic way. Then he directed and helped, while two field men started the machine on its forward run. "Look out for telegraph poles, and watch your fuel tank," was Grimshaw's final injunction. Dave knew the Baby Racer just as an engineer understands his locomotive. Daylight or dirk, once aloft the young aviator did not doubt his own powers. The moment the Racer left the ground, however, with a switch of her flapping tail, Dave knew that he was to have no easy fair-weather cruise. "Slow it is," the watchful, excited Hiram heard him say, working the wheel as cautiously as an automobilist rounding a sharp curve. Dave saw that everything depended on getting a start and reaching a higher level. He kept the angle of ascent small, for the maximum power of the engine could not be reached in a moment. The starting speed naturally let down with the machine ascending an inclined plane. "It's slow enough, that's sure," remarked Hiram. "It's the wind, isn't it, Dave?" "We don't want to slide back in the air or be blown over backwards," replied Dave, eye, ear, and nerve on the keenest alert. The wind resistance caused a growing speed reduction. The sensitiveness of the elevating rudder warned Dave that he must maintain a perfect balance until they could strike a steady path of flight. Hiram's rapt gaze followed every skillful maneuver of the master hand at that wheel. "Good for you!" he chirped, as Dave worked the ailerons to counteract the leaning of the machine. A swing of the rudder had caused the biplane to bank, but quick as a flash Dave righted it by getting the warping control on the opposite tack, avoiding a bad spill. The machine was tail heavy as Dave directed a forward plunge, coasting slightly. He had, however, pretty good control of the center of gravity. It was now only a question of fighting the stiff breeze that prevailed, and keeping an even balance. Hiram's eyes sparkled as the Racer volplaned, caught the head wind at just the right angle, and struck a course due northwest like a sail boat under perfect control. The engine was near the operator's seat, and on the post just under the wheel were the spark and throttle levers on the fuselage beam. The steering wheel was a solid piece of wood about eight inches in diameter with two holes cut into it to fit the hands. The passenger's seat now occupied by Hiram was in the center line of the machine, so that, filled or vacant, the lateral balance was not affected. Hiram knew all about the monoplane dummy or the aerocycle with treadle power for practice work which he had operated under old Grimshaw's direction. As to the practical running of a biplane aloft, however, that was something for him to learn. He was keenly alive to every maneuver that Dave executed, and he stored in his mind every new point he noticed as the Racer seemed fairly started on its way. "Keep me posted, Dave," spoke the willing Hiram. "If anything happens I want to know what you expect me to do." "I don't intend to have anything happen if I can help it, Hiram," replied Dave. "This is a famous start." "It's not half as bad as I thought it would be," said Hiram. The rain had changed into a fine mist, but the breeze continued choppy and strong at times. Dave had gone over the course with Mr. King in The Aegis twice in the daytime, and had an accurate idea of the route. However, he had landmarks to follow. What guided Dave were the lights of the various towns on the route to Kewaukee and railway signals. These were dimly outlined by a glow only at times, but Dave as he progressed felt that he was keeping fairly close to his outlined programme. Hiram chuckled and warbled, as he knew from Dave's manner and the way the Baby Racer acted that his friend had it under full control. Our hero attempted no fancy flying nor spurts of swiftness. Up to the end of the first hour the flight had proven far less difficult than he had anticipated. "There's Medbury," said Dave at length, inclining his head towards a cluster of electric lights below and somewhat beyond them. "That means one-third of our journey covered." "It's great what you and the Baby Racer can do, Dave," cried the admiring and enthusiastic country boy. "We're going to make it, aren't we?" "If the wind doesn't change and we meet with no mishaps," answered Dave. A stretch of steady sailing was an excuse for Hiram to share a brief lunch of ham sandwiches with Dave. The thoughtful Grimshaw had provided these at the last moment of the departure of the biplane. By the watch Mr. King had given him on the occasion of winning a race for the Aegis, Dave found that it was a little after two o'clock when the Racer passed a town named Creston. "It's only twenty miles farther, Hiram," announced the young aviator with satisfaction. "And plenty of juice in the tank left to go on," added Hiram. "This is a trip to talk about, eh, Dave?" Dave nodded and smiled. He suddenly gave renewed attention to wheel and levers. "Anything wrong?" inquired Hiram, noticing the movement. "The wind is shifting slightly," was the reply. Dave felt of the breeze cautiously after that, keeping his cheek well to windward. It required constant watchfulness and maneuvering for the next fifteen miles to keep the control permanent. Dave was glad when a dim glow of radiance told that they had nearly reached the end of their journey. Dave "ducked," as the phrase goes, as a swoop from a new quarter sent the machine banking. He managed the dilemma by circling. There was only five more miles to cover. Dave went up searching for a steadier air current, found it, maintained a steady flight for over a quarter of an hour, and slowed down slightly as they came directly over Kewaukee. "Going to land?" inquired Hiram, attentively attracted by all these skillful maneuvers. "Yes," replied Dave. "The question is, though, to find just the right place." Dave tried to figure out the contour of the landscape beneath them. He passed over high buildings, skirted what seemed like a factory district, and began to volplane. "Going to drop?" queried Hiram. "I think so," responded Dave. "According to those electric lights there is a park or some other large vacant space we can strike on this angle." "The mischief!" exclaimed Hiram abruptly as the Racer struck a lower air current a strong blast of wind made it shake and reel. Then there was a creak, a sway and a snap. "Something broke!" shouted Hiram in excitement. "Yes," answered Dave rapidly. "It's one of the right outermost struts between the supporting planes." "The one that snapped the other day," suggested Hiram. "Likely. Grimshaw fixed it with glue and bracing, and fitting iron rings about it. The vibration of the motor and the straining have pulled the nail heads through the holes in the rings." "Can you hold out?" Dave did not reply. He felt new vibrations, and knew that the strain of warping the wings at the tips had caused more than one of the struts to collapse. The young aviator realized that it would be a hard drop unless he did something quickly and effectively. There was no time to think. Counterbalance was everything. Dave tried to restore the disturbed balance of the machine by bringing the left wing under the control. Then he forced the twisting on the right side. The young aviator held his breath, while his excited companion stared ahead and down, transfixed. They were going at a rapid rate, and every moment the Baby Racer threatened to turn turtle and spill them out. Dave succeeded in temporarily checking the tendency to tip. All aerial support was gone. He kept the rudder at counterbalance, threw off the power, and wondered what they were headed into. The next moment the Baby Racer crashed to the ground. CHAPTER IV A BUSINESS BOY "We've landed!" shouted Hiram in a jolty tone, plunging forward in his seat in the biplane. "Yes, but where?" Dave asked quickly. "That's so. Whew! What have we drifted into?" The Baby Racer had struck a mass soft and yielding. It drove through some substance rather than ran on its wheels. There was a dive and a joggle. Then the machine came to a halt--submerged. Whatever had received it now came up about the puzzled young aviators as might a snowdrift or it heap of hay. Dave dashed a filmy, flake-like substance resembling sawdust from eyes, ears and mouth. Hiram tried to disentangle himself from strips and curls of some light, fluffy substance. Then he cried out: "Dave, it's shavings!" "You don't say so." "Yes, it is--a great heap of shavings, a big mountain of them." "Lucky for us. If we had hit the bare ground I fear we would have had a smash up." Gradually and cautiously the two young aviators made their way out of the seats of the machine. They got past the wings. A circle of electric street lamps surrounded them on four sides. Their radiance, dim and distant, seemed to indicate that they were in the center of a factory yard covering several acres. A little way off they could discern the outlines of high piles of lumber and beyond these several buildings. The biplane lay partly on its side, sunk deep in a heap of long, broad shavings. The mass must have been fully a hundred feet in extent and fifteen to twenty feet high. They reached its side and slid down the slant to the ground. "Well!" ejaculated Dave. "Yes, and what?" inquired Hiram, brushing the loose bits of shavings from his soaked tarpaulin coat. "Business--strictly and quick," replied Dave promptly. "And leave the Racer where she is?" "Can you find a better place, Hiram?" "Well, no, but--" A man flashing a dark lantern and armed with a heavy cane came upon them around the corner of the buildings. The boys paused. The man, evidently the watchman of the place, challenged them, moving his lantern from face to face. "Who are you?" he demanded sternly. "Aviators," replied Dave. "What's that?" "We just arrived in an airship." "No nonsense. How did you get in here?" "Mister," spoke out Hiram, "we just landed in the biplane, the Baby Racer. If you don't believe me, come to the shavings pile yonder and we'll show you the machine, and thank you for having it there, for if you hadn't I guess we'd have needed an ambulance." The watchman looked incredulous. He followed Dave and Hiram, however, as they led the way back to the heap of shavings. One wing of the biplane stuck up in the air and he made it out. "This is queer," he observed. "You say it's an airship?" "Yes, sir," nodded Hiram. "We had to make a hurried night journey from Columbus," explained Dave. "There were no trains, and we came with the biplane." "Well, well, well," commented the watchman. He had heard of Columbus and the aero meet there, and began to understand matters. "You see," spoke Hiram, "we can't land everywhere, or we'd have to settle some damage suits." "I will be glad to pay you for letting us leave the machine here till after daylight, and watch it to see no harm comes to it," proposed Dave. "Why, we'll do that," assented the watchman. "You look like two decent young fellows, and I'm sure the company won't object to letting your airship stay up there for a few hours." "We will be back to see about it in a few hours," promised Dave. The watchman led the boys to the big gate of' the factory yard and let them out. The rain had ceased and the wind was not blowing so hard as before. "What now, Dave?" inquired Hiram, as they found themselves in the deserted street. "The Northern Hotel." "Oh, going to try and fix things before daylight?" "We can't afford to lose a minute," declared Dave. "There's a policeman. I want to ask him a question." They hurried to a corner where a policeman had halted under the street lamp. Dave inquired the location of the Northern Hotel. Then the boys proceeded again on their way, and reached the place in about half an hour. The night clerk and others were on duty. Dave approached the desk and addressed the clerk. "Is a Mr. Timmins stopping here?" he asked. "Why, no," replied the clerk, looking Dave and Hiram over curiously, their somewhat queer garb attracting his attention. "Do you know him, may I inquire?" "Oh, yes, Mr. Timmins has been here several times. We are holding some mail for him, and expected him several days ago." "Do you know the company he represents?" "Airships, isn't it?" propounded the clerk. "That's right. The Interstate Aeroplane Company." "Yes, I remember now," added the clerk. "I am also connected with that company," explained Dave. The clerk stared vaguely, as if he did not quite understand the situation. "Yes," eagerly broke in the irrepressible Hiram, as if he was introducing some big magnate, "he's Dave Dashaway, and he's beat the field with the Interstate Baby Racer." "Oh, Dashaway, eh?" said the clerk, with a pleasant smile. "I've heard of you and read about you." "I am glad of that," responded Dave, "because it may help you identify me with the Inter-state people. As an employee of theirs and a friend of Mr. Timmins, I will have to be confidential with you." "That's all right--we are used to confidences in this business," said the hotel clerk. Dave reflected deeply for a moment. He had a definite plan in view. He realized that he must confide to a degree in the hotel clerk. "The gist of the matter," said Dave, "is that Mr. Timmins has missed connections. He should have been here two days ago. Here is a telegram I received from the Interstate people." The clerk read the telegram. He nodded his head and smiled, which the observant Dave took to mean that he was friendly towards Mr. Timmins, but knew of some of his business-lapses in the past. "What do you want me to do?" asked the clerk. "You notice that the Interstate people refer in that telegram to some papers sent to the hotel here for Mr. Timmins." "I noticed that," assented the clerk. "I shouldn't wonder if this is the package." As he spoke the clerk reached over to the letter case near his desk and took up a large manila envelope. It was addressed to Mr. Timmins, and bore in one corner the printed name and address of the Interstate Aeroplane Co. "That is the letter, I feel sure," said Dave. "I have no doubt of it," agreed the clerk. "Do you suppose it would help you out any to have me give it to you?" "Why, will you?" questioned Dave eagerly. "I was going to ask you to do so." "I think I understand the situation now," said the clerk, "and I can see how your getting the letter may help your people out of a tangle. It's taking some responsibility on my part, for the letter is of course the property of Mr. Timmins. I'm going to take the risk, though, and I think Mr. Timmins will say it's all right when he comes along." "I know he will," declared Dave. "You see, I hope to carry through a contract he has neglected." Dave took the bulky letter and opened its envelope. He glanced hastily but intelligently over its contents. They were just what he imagined they would be, contracts for eight biplanes ready to sign, and details and plans as to the machines. "Have you a Kewaukee directory here?" he asked. The clerk pushed a bulky volume across the marble slab of the counter, with the words: "Anybody special you are looking up?" "Why, yes," replied Dave, "the County Fair Amusement Co." "Oh, you mean Col. Lyon's proposition," observed the clerk at once. "He runs county fair attractions all over the country." "It must be the same," said Dave. "I know Col. Lyon very well," proceeded the clerk. "He comes in here very often." "Where is his office?" inquired Dave. "I don't think he has any regular office," responded the clerk. "Two or three times a week he calls for mail at the Central Amusement Exchange. He travels a good deal--has side attractions with most of the big shows." "But he lives in Kewaukee?" "Not exactly. He has a very fine place called Fernwood, out on the North Boulevard." Dave thought things over for a minute or two. Then he asked: "How can I reach Fernwood?" "You don't mean before daylight?" "Why, yes," responded Dave, "the sooner the better." "I think any of the taxi men out at the curb know the location," said the clerk. "Thank you," replied Dave, "and for all your great kindness about that letter." He and Hiram went out to the street. There were three or four taxicabs lined up at the curb, their drivers napping in the seats. Dave approached one of them. "Do you know where Fernwood is?" he inquired of the chauffeur. "You mean Col. Lyon's place?" "Yes." "Was there only last night. I took the Colonel home." "Then he's there," spoke Dave to Hiram. "All right, take us to Fernwood." "You won't find anybody stirring at this hour of the morning," suggested the chauffeur. "Then we'll Wait till the Colonel gets up," said Dave. In less than half an hour the auto came to a halt before one of a score or more of fine houses lining the most exclusive section of the country boulevard. Dave got out of the machine and Hiram followed him. They passed through the gates of a large garden. In its center was a mansion with wide porches. No light showed anywhere about the place. "You're not going to wake anybody up at this outlandish hour?" asked Hiram. "Well, perhaps not," answered Dave. "Why didn't you wait and see this Col. Lyon in the city at his office?" "Because there is no certainty that he will be at his office today. Then, too, that Star fellow may be on hand there to grab the contract. I want to head him off." By this time they had reached the steps of the front porch. "See here, Hiram," observed Dave, lowering his voice, "we'll sit down here for a spell. It's about five o'clock, and by six someone will be stirring about." "Say," said Hiram, staring across the shadowed porch, "the front door there is open." "Why, so it is," replied Dave, peering towards it. "That's strange, isn't it?" "Oh, no--neglected, or left open for ventilation." Both boys relapsed into silence. Hiram rested his face on his hands and his knees, inclined to doze. Dave was framing up in his mind how he would approach Col. Lyon. He was deeply immersed in thought, when a sound behind him caused him to start and look behind him. Somebody with a great bundle done up in a sheet had just passed through the open doorway out upon the porch. The bundle was so big that its bearer had both hands clasped about it, and its top came above his eyes. Before Dave could speak a warning, the man carrying the package crossed the porch and stumbled against Hiram, whom he did not see. "Thunder! what's this?" shouted Hiram, knocked from his position and rolling down the steps. The man with the bundle echoed the try with one of alarm, as he missed his footing and plunged forward. "The mischief!" exclaimed Dave, starting at the bundle over which the man tumbled, bursting it open. There was an immense clatter. Even in the imperfect light of the early morning, the young aviator made out a great heap of clothing, silverware and jewelry, rattling down the steps of the porch. CHAPTER V A TEN THOUSAND DOLLAR ORDER "What's happened?" cried Hiram, rolling over and over on the gravel walk to which he had tumbled. "Stop that man!" shouted Dave. In a flash the young aviator took in the meaning of the situation. The fugitive, for such he now was, made a quick move the instant he gained his feet. Not waiting to see who had obstructed his progress, and probably deciding that it was the police, he bounded in among some bushes. Dave, running after him, made out his form dimly, swiftly scaling a rear brick wall. "Why, what is all this?" demanded Hiram, staring at the litter on the steps. "That man was a thief," explained Dave. "It looks that way, doesn't it? Hello!" Both boys stepped back and stared upwards. Over the porch was a second railed-in veranda. A night-robed figure had crossed it from some bed chamber fronting upon it. "Hey, you down there! What's all this racket?" challenged this newcomer on the scene. "Are you Colonel Lyon?" inquired Dave. "That's me." "Then you had better come down and see what's going on." "Why so?" "Your house has been burglarized." "Gracious I you don't say so. Where is the thief?" "He has escaped." "Hm. Down in a minute," mumbled the man, retiring from view. It was several minutes before the owner of the mansion put in a second appearance. He came cautiously out on the porch, clutching a great heavy cane. He looked the boys over suspiciously. "I don't understand this," he began. "Neither did we, Mister," returned Hiram, "till the thief came bolting out through that front door. He fell all over me and dropped his bundle. There's what was in it." Hiram pointed to the scattered plunder. For the first time the colonel caught sight of the scattered stuff. He gasped, and stared, and fidgeted. Then he hastened back across the porch and into the vestibule. Clang! clang! Clang! rang out a great alarm gong, and almost immediately two men servants of the place came rushing out half-dressed upon the porch. In a very much excited way the colonel incoherently told of the burglary. He ordered the men to gather up the scattered plunder. Then he turned his attention to Dave and Hiram. "Now, tell me about the whole thing," he spoke. "There isn't much to tell, Colonel Lyon," replied Dave. "We were sitting here waiting--" "Waiting?" repeated the showman sharply. "Yes, sir." "What for?" "To see you." "Eh?" projected the Colonel, with a stare. "That's right, Mister," declared Hiram. "You see, it's pretty early, and we didn't want to wake you up." "Yes, but what brought you here so early?" "Business," answered Dave. "Business--with me?" "Yes, sir. We came in an automobile from the city, so as to be sure to find you early enough. We had just settled down here to wait and rest, when that burglar came out." "Why, then, you've saved my losing all that valuable stuff!" exclaimed the showman. "I should say so," added the speaker with force, as he moved over and glanced at the heaps his servants were massing together, upon the lower step. "Watches, rings, silverware, my fur winter coat, and hello--my whole collection of rare coins! Hump! the man must have had the run of the house for hours. Here, you two, come inside. You've done me a big service." Hiram chuckled, nudging Dave in a knowing way. "What luck!" he whispered. "Dave, you're all right now." The owner of the place led his young guests through the vestibule into a hallway, and pointed to a large reception room. "You wait till I get dressed," he directed. "Sit down, and make yourself comfortable." As he spoke the showman turned on a perfect blaze of electric light. Dave and Hiram took off their helmets, and made themselves look as little like stormy night aviators as was possible under the circumstances. It was nearly ten minutes before their host reappeared. He was fully dressed now, and presented the appearance of a keen, active business man. "Think there's any use trying to catch that burglar?" was his first question. "I don't think so at all," replied Dave. "All right, then. Carry that truck into the library," the showman ordered his two men, who had gathered it up in a rug taken from the vestibule. "You'll take turns guarding the house, nights after this. Now then, young men, who are you?" The showman put the question as he plumped down in an armchair besides his two guests. "We're airship boys," explained Hiram hastily, but proudly. "Oh!" commented Colonel Lyon slowly, looking the pair over from head to foot. "That is, Dave is an airman," corrected Hiram. "He's Dave Dashaway." "Why, I've heard of you. At the Dayton meet, weren't you? Honorable mention, or was it a prize?" "Both," shot out Hiram promptly. "That's very good," said the colonel. "I'm pretty well up in the aero field myself. I run that line at county fairs." "Yes, sir, I know that," said Dave, "and that is why I came to see you." "That's so--you said it was business, but I must say you are early birds," smiled the showman. "We had to be," again spoke Hiram. "How was that?" "Why," said Dave, "I thought it was very necessary that I should see you first thing this morning. I acted on a wire from my employers, the Interstate Aeroplane Co." "Your employers?" repeated the colonel, a fresh token of interest in his eyes. "Yes, sir, I have been exhibiting their Baby Racer at the meets." "Ah, I understand now." "I am going to take up hydroplane work at Columbus, now. Last night late I received a telegram from the Interstate people. It led to getting to Kewaukee and seeing you. There were no trains." "Roads too bad for an automobile," put in Hiram. "And we came in the Baby Racer," concluded Dave. "What's that?" exclaimed the showman. "You came all the way from Columbus in a biplane?" "Yes, sir," nodded Dave. "A night like last night--" "We had to, you see," observed Hiram. "H'm," observed the colonel, with decided admiration in his manner, "that was a big thing to do. Where is your machine?" "We landed on a heap of shavings in a city factory yard," explained Dave. "We left the machine in charge of the watchman." "And automobiled it out here? Why, say, I had some dealings with your company." "I know you did," said Dave. "I wrote to them for specifications and figures on light biplanes. They sent outlines that pleased me very much, and I told them so. Their man made an appointment to be at my city office to close up matters day before yesterday. He never showed up." "I know that," said Dave. "What was the trouble?" "I will explain that to you." "You see, the Star man was here yesterday. He made a pretty fair showing, but I was rather struck on your goods." "Everybody is that knows them," spoke Hiram. "Well, I was to let the man know this morning at my city office my decision. You are on deck. All right, what have you got to say?" "Why, just this," replied Dave: "I'm not much of a business man, of course, but I hurried on to see you because I believe a trick has been played on our people." "Who by?" "The Star crowd." "Oh!" "In some way they have sidetracked our agent. I have with me," continued Dave, "the detailed plans and figures on your order, which had been forwarded from the factory to the Northern Hotel, at Kewaukee." "All right, show them up," directed the colonel briskly. Dave did so. Hiram sat regarding his friend, with undisguised admiration, as for one half, hour Dave went over papers, explaining the merits of the Interstate biplane with all the clearness and ability of a born salesman. "You'll do," pronounced the showman with an expansive smile, as Dave concluded. "That's the contract, is it?" "Yes, sir," and Dave handed the showman the paper in question. "All right, I'll just go to the library and sign it." "Dave," whispered Hiram in a triumphant chuckle, as Colonel Lyon left the room. "Great!" Dave returned a pleased smile. He suppressed partly the great satisfaction he felt. "You see," remarked the showman, returning in a few minutes and handing the signed contract to Dave, "I favored your machines from the start. It must be a good machine, to make ninety miles on a night like last night. Now then, young gentlemen, I've ordered an early breakfast, and I want you to join me at the meal." There was no gainsaying the hearty, imperious old fellow. The boys felt first class as they finished a repast that sent them on their way complacent and delighted. "The company will acknowledge the contract, Colonel Lyon," said Dave, as they left the porch, "and attend to other details." "I don't suppose, Dashaway," answered the showman, "that you're open for such a week stunt as exhibiting at some of my county fairs?" "I am under contract with the Interstate people," replied Dave. "If I get out of a job, Colonel Lyon, I shall be glad to have you consider me." "I fancy I will," declared the showman with enthusiasm. "I'll make you a liberal offer, too. You've saved the carting away of all that stuff the burglar gathered. It make it up to you some way." Dave waved the contract in reply. "I couldn't have a better feather in my cap than this," he cried gaily. "Many, many, thanks, Colonel Lyon." "And you'll find the Interstate biplane just the best in the world," added Hiram. "We've kept that chauffeur waiting a long time," observed Dave, as they came out upon the boulevard. "Oh, he's used to that," suggested Hiram. "I'll give him something extra for his patience," said Dave. "Yes, the Interstate people can well afford it," commented Hiram. "Think of it: a ten thousand dollar order! Hurrah!" CHAPTER VI ABOARD THE HYDROPLANE "Dashaway, you're a wonder." "Thank you, sir." "And I'm proud of you," added Mr. Robert King, the winner of the monoplane endurance prize, and the man who had practically adopted Dave into the aviation field. "I've got something to say as to the matter of pride," spoke up old Grimshaw. "A lad who can make the run Dashaway did with the Baby Racer, is a boy to holler about." "If there's anything to be proud about," added Dave, "it's the right good friends I've made." "My friends, too," put in the impetuous Hiram. "I'm getting along famously. Why, I only tipped out of the dummy airship once yesterday." All hands were in fine high spirits. It was several days after the wild night race Dave and Hiram had made to Kewaukee. Now the entire party were on their way to the borders of the lake, where the new hydroplane made by the Interstate Aviation Company was ready for a trial trip. Grimshaw knew little of hydroplanes, and the Interstate people had sent an expert demonstrator to the spot to teach their young exhibitor the ropes. Dave had been constantly under this man's tuition. It was far more easy, he had learned, to acquire a thorough knowledge, of how to run a hydroplane than to operate a monoplane. It was simpler, and besides that his experience with an airship helped wonderfully. Dave was winning golden opinions from his employers. The way in which he had dosed the Kewaukee contract had pleased them immensely. There was another end to the Kewaukee episode that had brought heaps of satisfaction to all of them, especially to Hiram Dobbs. The Baby Racer had been quickly repaired at Kewaukee, and had made a speedy return trip to Columbus. Somehow the story of how the Interstate people had outwitted the plots of the Star crowd had gotten noised around the meet. Then a class journal devoted to aeronautics printed the story. "Well," Hiram had come to Mr. King's hangar that morning to say, "the Dawson crowd are simply squelched. I met Jerry Dawson and his father. You ought to see the looks they gave me when I just grinned at them, and said 'Contract!' It was like a fellow saying 'Baa!' to sheep. Why, those fellows just sneaked away. We've beaten them at every angle, Dave, and I reckon they'll give up their meanness now, and quickly fade away." "It would be a good thing for honest aeronautics if they would," growled old Grimshaw. "We'll hasten them with a little help, if they try any more tricks," announced Mr. King. The hydroplane had been run into a boat house after the practice of the day previous, and was all ready for use. It was equipped to carry two or more passengers, and was driven by a fifty horse power motor. It had two propellers, and these were controlled by chain transmission. Old Grimshaw had not much use for hydroplanes, he had told Dave. His hobby was air machines. However, because his favorite pupil was going to run the machine, he allowed Dave to explain about the hydroplane, and was quite interested. The machine had a bulkhead fore and aft, with an upward slope in front and a downward slope to the rear. "It's safe, comfortable, and quick to rise to control," declared Dave. "See, Mr. Grimshaw, there's a new wrinkle." Dave touched a little device attached to the flywheel. The latter was made with teeth to fit into another gear, operated from a shaft. "What do you call that, now?" asked the old airman. "A self starter. You see, the shaft runs forward alongside the pilot's seat. Here's the handle of it, right at the end of the shaft." "Looks all right," admitted Grimshaw grudgingly. "Give me the air, though, every time. If you want to be a sailor, why don't you enlist the navy?" "How about an air and water combination, Grimshaw?" called Mr. King. "Well, that is a little better," replied Grimshaw. "I'm dying to see that new aero-hydroplane Dave's people are getting out," remarked the ardent Hiram. "They wrote me it would be completed this week," said Dave. "And you are going to run it, Dave?" "I think so, I hope so. They claim great things for it." "Well, give your hydroplane a spin, Dashaway," suggested Mr. King. "I want to see how she works, and must get back to the hangars on business." The Reliance, the new hydroplane of the Interstate people, was twenty feet long and had a fuel gauge and a bilge pump. Dave got into his seat, and Hiram sat directly beside him. A touch put the machinery in motion. "There's a puffy eighteen mile wind, Dashaway," cried out Mr. King. "Yes, I wouldn't venture too far from shore," advised Grimshaw, a trifle anxiously. The water was quite rough where the flight started. The machine acted all right, however. A crowd had gathered on the beach, and there was some encouraging cheering as the power boat gained good headway. "Whew I what have you invited me to, Dave--bath?" puffed Hiram. Dave had neglected to put in place the rubber cover, so that during the preliminary run along the water the waves drenched both of the boys. Dave stopped the motor and started drifting, at a sudden current or breeze sent the tail before the wind. The rear of the hydroplane was forced under water. "Look out!" ordered Dave sharply. "I see--we're in for an upset," spoke Hiram quickly. The hydroplane was forced over backwards, the tail striking a sand bar. Dave and Hiram were both ready for the tip. They escaped with only wetting their feet, for they climbed upon the bottom of the upper surface as the hydro capsized. The hydroplanes prevented the machine from sinking. Almost at once a boat put out from shore. Once back at the boat house, the damage shown was a slight fracture to the main girder and some of the ribs at the trailing edge, and two broken tail spars. Dave sent Hiram at once to the practice grounds to arrange about the repairs. "It's no weather for a trial, Dashaway," said Mr. King, "I think I would postpone the trial trip until tomorrow, if I were you." Dave did not commit himself. He stayed about the boat house after the airman and Grimshaw had gone away, watching every move of the repair man. "She's staunch and sound as she was at the beginning," the latter declared, when he had completed his work. "Yes, I think that is true," replied Dave. "What's the programme?" inquired Hiram, "for I see you don't intend to give up." "Not until I master the Reliance, just as I did the Baby Racer," declared Dave. "That upset was necessary, I guess, to teach me that I must drive on just as little surface as possible in speeding, and make the wings do one half the work." "Then you are going to try again?" questioned Hiram. "Yes, Hiram. The waves aren't so choppy now, and the wind has gone down a good deal." "It's pretty late for much of a run," replied Hiram. "Oh, we can make the end of the lake and back inside of an hour." "Well, I'm always ready--with you," laughed Hiram gaily. From the start this time Dave knew that he had a better grasp of the mechanism than on his first trial. The Reliance behaved splendidly. Once clear of shore obstructions and sandbars, they must have run a stretch at nearly forty miles an hour. Sand Point, at the rounding end of the great lake, was reached without a mishap. Dave did not wait to try any maneuvering for a crowd that had gathered to watch the Reliance. "Straight home," he observed, as they made the turn. "It's time, I'm thinking," said Hiram. A squall had come up, and the dimness of coming eventide had already spread over the water, but there was no rain. In fact, it had turned too cold for that. A fine baffling mist was falling, however, and this was condensing into a heavy fog. "Not much to see, eh?" propounded Dave, as they got clear of the shore. "I shouldn't like to run into some stray craft." It was something of a strain on Dave, the present situation. No air signal had yet been placed on the Reliance, nor was its lighting apparatus installed. The darkness increased, and the fog became almost an impenetrable shroud. "What was that?" shouted out Hiram sharply, as there was a heavy jarring shock. "Grazed a rock, I think," replied Dave. "I don't like this a bit. If I knew my bearings, I'd run straight ashore." "Do it, anyway, Dave," advised Hiram. "We don't want to wreck the Reliance on her first trip." Dave gave the wheel a turn. Just then a distinct yell rang out across the muggy waters, and then, in rapid succession, seven quick, snappy explosions. CHAPTER VII A RESCUE IN THE FOG "What do your suppose that was?" inquired Hiram excitedly. "It was kind of startling," said Dave. "Listen." With the power shut off, the hydroplane drifted, Dave checking its slack running. They were now in a dense fog; with night fast coming on. For the moment everything was still. Then there rang through the misty space one word: "Help!" "It was in that direction," said Hiram quickly, pointing. "I think so, too," nodded Dave, "and not far away." "What could have happened? Those shots?" "Probably fired to call assistance." "If you could speed up the hydroplane a little--" "I would have to get the starter in use, and we might run into something. Hello! Hello! Hello!" Dave shouted loudly. There was a speedy reply. "Here! Hello! this wa-aa-ay!" "That's a man's voice, and he's right near to us," declared Hiram, leaning forward and peering through the mist. "Hey, there!" "I see you. Good!" There was a tilt of the machine. The person in the water had seized one of the wing stays. "Careful, there," ordered Dave. "Don't cling to that wing or bear it down." "I can't hold out." Dave cautiously edged from his seat towards a form now plainly visible. It was that of a man about thirty years of age. It was no easy task to take the man aboard. One of his hands was useless. He seemed in pain and half choked with water he had swallowed. Hiram gave up his seat to the rescued man, who sank back as if overcome with faintness and exhaustion. Hiram himself found a resting place on the platform supporting the two seats. "Is there anybody else in trouble?" Dave asked of their passenger. "No, no," replied the man. "The launch is gone up. Get me to land quick as you can. I'm afraid my arm is broken. It pains me terribly. I must get to a surgeon soon as possible." Dave got the hydroplane under way again. He was fortunate in striking a course that brought them back to the boat house in about an hour's time. The rescued man was somewhat revived by this time, and when the hydroplane was safely housed, Dave took his arm and piloted the way from the beach. "It is less than half a mile to the hangars," the young aviator explained. "When we get there we can find an automobile to take you into town." "It was when my launch struck a rock that I hurt my arm," the man explained. "Were you on board alone?" asked the curious Hiram. "Yes. I was driving ahead full speed, to get ashore out of the fog. I heard your machine, and was afraid I'd get run into. My launch ran into a reef with terrific force. I was thrown against it bulkhead, arm sprained or broken, nearly stunned, and then into the water." "But the launch, Mister?" questioned the interested Hiram anxiously. "Smashed. I don't know if I could locate it again in the fog. I couldn't use my hurt arm, and I fired my revolver, yelled, and gave up when your machine came along." "Where did you come from, Mister?" pressed the persistent Hiram. "Why--well, I came from up north. Own a launch. Had some business this way, and got well on my way till the craft struck." Dave noticed as the man spoke that it was in a hesitating, evasive way. He seemed anxious to change the conversation, for he said: "You are taking me to the Columbus aero field?" "Yes, we belong there," answered Dave. "Some people there named Dawson?" "Yes, father and son." "That's it. Here, now?" "Oh, yes, they follow the different meets." "Why, then, say," observed the man, "if you will just get me up against them, I shall be pleased. You see, they're friends of mine. They'll take care of me." Dave gave the man a look. Hiram pulled a face at him behind his back. That settled it with Hiram. In his mind he was sure that anybody who knew the Dawsons in a friendly way could not possibly amount to much. The man did not mention his name. He seemed to care nothing whatever for the fate of the launch. He barely thanked Dave, as, reaching the aero grounds, our hero led him near to the headquarters of the man for whom the Dawsons were working. "You'll find your friends over there," he said. "All right," nodded the man he had rescued. "Lucky I met you. Thanks." "Say, Dave Dashaway, now what do you think of that!" burst out Hiram, as the man got out of earshot. "Think of what, Hiram?" inquired the young aviator. "Friend of the Dawsons!" "Well, they've got to know somebody, haven't they?" "That's so, but I don't like the fellow you rescued." "Why not, Hiram?" "Did you notice the way he hesitated when we asked him where he had come from?" "Yes." "And about that launch? He didn't seem to care what had become of it." "Maybe it didn't belong to him." "Well, anyway, hadn't he ought to have some concern about other folks' property?" Dave did not reply. He had his own ideas and opinion of the rescued man. He was due for a public exhibition of the Reliance the next day, and dismissed the incident from his mind as he got back to the Baby Racer hangar. Mr. King was to make a non-stop race also, and there was plenty of detail to attend to at the Aegis headquarters as well. That was a busy, exciting day, the one following. The Aegis and her competitors got started by ten o'clock. There was a varied programme from eleven to one. At three o'clock Dave made his run with the hydroplane. Two other machines engaged in the contest, but not only were they of inferior make, but their operators were clumsy and not up to standard. Dave won considerable praise. The Reliance made a beautiful run, and he felicitated himself that he had got onto the knack of running it right. "I don't believe much in hydroplanes," old Grimshaw observed to him as he accompanied Dave back to the aero grounds, "but I believe in you, and I will say you made a clever showing." "Wait till the Interstate folks send on their latest improved aero-hydroplane, Mr. Grimshaw," said Dave. "You'll see some fine work then." "There's your friend, young Dobbs," remarked Grimshaw. Dave saw Hiram on a run, headed towards them. He came up breathless. "Some one at the hangar to see you, Dave," he reported. "Who is it, Hiram?" "He says he's a United States revenue officer." "Hello!" spoke Grimshaw, "I hope your hydroplane hasn't got you into any trouble running up against the government." "Oh, I think not," replied Dave with a smile. "It's a long story and a big story, Dave," replied Hiram. "You know the man you rescued he lake yesterday?" "Yes, Hiram." "Well, it turns out that he is a notorious smuggler and the government is looking for him." CHAPTER VIII A PUZZLING DISAPPEARANCE Dave hurried his steps. Old Grimshaw turned off at the Aegis headquarters. Hiram led his companion by a short cut to the Baby Racer hangar. On a campstool inside the tent where the boys slept, Dave found a keen-eyed, hatchet-faced man. He sat stiff as a poker, and seemed to pierce Dave through and through with his glance as he looked him over critically. "Dashaway, yes?" he interrogated, and as Dave bowed assent he added: "Thought I'd wait and see you, although our young friend here has been pretty dear." "About what?" asked Dave. "Ridgely." "Who is he?" "The man you rescued from the lake last evening. As I have told your friend, the man is a bad one, and we have chased him up and down the lakes clear from Detroit." "He is a criminal, then?" "A smuggler. He has outwitted the revenue officers for some time. His last specialty was running Chinese emigrants over the border. When he learned the chase was on, he stole a launch and scudded for other waters. He had the name and color of the launch changed. Why he came to Columbus we don't know." "To see some people named Dawson, he said." "Yes, they appear to be fiends." "Can't Jerry Dawson tell you anything about him?" asked Dave. "No." "For a very good reason." "And what is at?" "Dawsons left last night." "Left--left the meet?" exclaimed Dave in surprise. "Yes, bag and baggage." "That puzzles me," said Dave. "It baffles us," observed the revenue officer, "for they have left no clew to their future whereabouts." "Won't Jerry's employer tell you?" "He says he can't. Professes to be quite at sea as to the meaning of their sudden departure. Angry, too, for it seems they had a contract in the service." "I wouldn't believe him," broke in Hiram. "Anybody respectable about the meet can tell you that he is not to be trusted." "Well, the Dawsons are gone and Ridgely went away with them," said the revenue officer definitely. "I fancied you might give me some hint that might help me, Dashaway, as to their antecedents, friends." "I'm a new one in the aviation line," said Dave. "I found them in the business when I joined it, only a few weeks ago." "Well, I understand you are two pretty keen young fellows," said the officer, "I'm going to leave you my card. There it is." Dave glanced at the bit of pasteboard his visitor extended. It bore simply a name: "James Price." "If you get the faintest clew to Ridgely or the Dawsons," continued Mr. Price, "wire the secret service bureau at Chicago. I will arrange so that I shall be advised at once." "I will do what I can for you, Mr. Price," promised Dave. "All right, and send in any reasonable bill you like for your service. We feel certain that this, Ridgely, driven from one district, will begin operations in another. Then, too, from what I learn these Dawsons are not above engaging in of off-color schemes." "They aren't!" cried Hiram. "If they had stayed, Mr. King said they'd be barred from the meets in a few days." "Well, help me all you can." "Queer, isn't it?" spoke Hiram, as the revenue officer left them. "It is a rather strange proceeding," admitted Dave. At five o'clock that afternoon the two friends were down at the south pylons awaiting the coming in of the machines engaged in the non-stop race. A great crowd was gathered, for according to estimated schedules some of the monoplanes would be due within the coming half hour. "If it's the Aegis first," spoke Hiram, "it makes three winning stunts for Mr. King in two days." A sort of instantaneous flutter pervaded the people as some word starting from the judge's stand passed electrically through the crowd. "They've sighted something," shouted an excited spectator. "Yes, there's one of the airships," added a quick voice. "I see it!" "There's another!" "Hurrah!" Hiram stood looking up into the sky, fairly trembling with suspense. A man standing by Dave had a field glass. "I make out two," he spoke to an inquirer at his side. "I think I can tell you who they are if you'll give me your glass for a minute," said Dave. "Certainly," replied the man. "What is it, Dave?" cried Hiram, as, watching the face of his comrade closely, he discerned an intense expression upon it. "Aegis in the lead--" began Dave, lowering the field glass. "Aegis in the lead!" ran from the spot in receding echoes as the news passed down the line. "That's King's craft." "I knew it!" "Butterfly a close second," reported Dave. "There's another one!" "And another!" "See them come!" cried an excited old farmer. "Say, it beats the electric cars down at Poseyville!" The field was in a wild flutter. The contesting aircraft came nearer and nearer. Finally Hiram could make out the Aegis fully a mile in the lead, the wings set for a drop straight beyond the south pylon. "He's won--Mr. King has won!" he shouted again and again, fairly dancing up and down. The crowd surged towards the landing point as the Aegis gracefully sailed to earth, ran a stopping course, and Robert King stepped out amid the frantic cheers of his friends and admiring spectators in general. The great aviator looked please and proud. Old Grimshaw trotted at his side on the way to the Aegis hangar. "Say, you're taking about everything there is in sight," he remarked, with one of his grim chuckles. "I've run the limit on the set spurts, I guess," replied the expert airman. "I'm going to look, for something better." "What is there that's better than these famous stunts of yours, Mr. King?" inquired Hiram. "A record beater of some account," was the quick response. "Record breaker of what?" pressed the persistent Hiram. "Well," said Mr. King with an animated sparkle in his eye, "you and Dashaway come down to the hangar this evening, and I'll tell you all about it." CHAPTER IX A GIANT AIRSHIP Dave Dashaway and his friend were promptly on hand at the Aegis hangar at eight o'clock that evening. Usually the boys took their meals with Mr. King. A group of the airman's admirers, however, had insisted on a special dinner at a hotel just outside the grounds. Hiram piloted the way for Dave to the restaurant on the field. He had worked for the man having it in charge, and the best meal possible was set out for them free of charge. They found Mr. King in the little partitioned off room of the Aegis hangar which he used as an office. The airman sat before a desk littered up with a variety of papers. One of these Dave noticed as he entered, was a detailed drawing of an immense airship. "Oh, arrived, eh?" spoke the aviator with a pleasant smile, as the boys came into view. "Glad of it. Get comfortable seats and we'll have a little chat." The boys settled themselves in camp chairs, Mr. King closed the door of the apartment and sat down again. Hiram regarded him eagerly and expectantly. "I've got something to tell you, lads," began the airman, after a brief thoughtful pause. "This is business, and of course you will be wise enough to treat it confidentially." "I love to keep secrets," declared the ardent Hiram, and Dave smiled and nodded assent to the sentiment. "I have been thinking and planning for a big event for some time," continued Mr. King. "As how, now?" asked Hiram, devoured with suspense. "Well, in the first place I propose to build a giant airship." "I know," said Hiram. "A big passenger monoplane." "No," interrupted the aviator. "What I want is a dirigible airship." "Pshaw! only a balloon!" remarked Hiram disappointedly. "Not at all," corrected the good-natured airman. "Except for the self-sustaining power, it will be constructed on the best aeroplane principles. I have been working on it for some months, and only yesterday I got figures on the machine." "What is it for, Mr. King?" submitted the inquisitive Hiram, "exhibitions?" "No. It's first big feat is to cross the Atlantic." "Cross the Atlantic Ocean!" almost gasped the excited Hiram. "Cross the Atlantic!" repeated Dave, in a startled yet thoughtful manner. He sat looking fixedly at the aviator as if fascinated. The novelty, the immensity of the proposition, stunned Dave. "Can it be done?" he asked in a low, intense tone, vast dreams running through his mind a lightning speed. "According to my calculations, yes," replied Mr. King definitely. "Oh, it is no new idea with me. The project has been the constant ideal of every advanced airman. It has got to come to that, if aeronautics is the progressive science we enthusiasts believe it to be." "I would like to be the first one to win such a triumph," said Dave. "Yes, the first one gets the fame," said the airman. "The prize, too. If such an experiment was rationally started I believe the profession and its backers would put up a small fortune to go to the successful winner. Now, boys, I have great confidence in you. What has held me back has been the lack of capital." "Say, Mr. King," broke in Hiram impetuously, "I've got nearly thirty dollars saved up, and Dave--" "It will take bigger amounts than we three put together can earn just to get the plans of the giant airship on paper," said Mr. King, with an indulgent smile at his loyal young friends. "If I go to any regular aero promoters they will want all the proceeds. I can raise a few thousand dollars myself and do as much more among my friends but, all put together, the amount wouldn't make even a beginning." "How much will it take, Mr. King?" asked Dave seriously. "At least twenty-five thousand dollars." "Whew!" whistled Hiram. "It's no child's play. It's a big risk, and there's no doing it half way," declared Mr. King. "Last night while I was planning over it, a sudden idea came to me. Dashaway, you remember that fellow who stole my watch and money and medal from you?" "You mean the young thief who called himself Briggs, and then Gregg?" "Exactly." "Yes, Mr. King." "And how he used some letters sent to your father from a great friend of his?" "Mr. Dale?" nodded Dave, wondering what all this had to do with the giant airship scheme. "Well, as you know, that young scamp, Gregg, had gone to Mr. Dale, who had never seen you, and by means of the letters stolen from you made him believe that he was the son of his old friend. So delighted was Mr. Dale, that he practically adopted young Gregg. In fact, he was on the point of making the pretended Dave Dashaway heir to all his fortune." "You told me about that," said Dave. "When we left Dayton to come here, we had to make a hurried jump to fill our contract, as you know. I let Gregg go, after recovering my stolen property from him, but I got a written confession of his bold imposture, first. You know my plan was for you and me to go where Mr. Dale lives, and introduce him to the real Dave Dashaway. You see, although I have managed to scare that old tyrant guardian of yours, Silas Warner, into leaving you alone, I feared he might work some trick to get you back in his clutches again." "I've thought a good deal about that lately," said Dave. "My plan was to have this Mr. Dale go to Brookville, show up Warner, and apply for your guardianship." "Yes, then I would feel safe," said Dave. "Well, Mr. Dale, having been an old balloonist, would probably not object to your remaining in the same line of business in which your father was famous." "I should think he would be pleased," remarked Hiram, who was always interested and active in any conversation going on. "I counted on that," resumed the aviator. "At all events, not being able to go or send Dave to Warrenton to meet this Mr. Dale, I wrote to a friend of mine who lives at Warrenton. I told him the whole story, instructing him to inform Mr. Dale, so if this Gregg came around again, he would be ready to treat him as an imposter. My friend wrote me only yesterday that Mr. Dale was off on an automobile trip, and might not be back for a day or two. He said that Mr. Dale was a very lonely old bachelor. He had been delighted to take up Gregg, believing him to be the son of his old balloonist comrade, so you would, be sure to receive a really grand welcome, Dave." "I'm glad of that," said Dave, filled with deep gratitude as he contrasted his present circumstances with his former forlorn condition. "Now then, to business," continued Mr. King briskly. "I don't want to 'work' anybody with my personal schemes, but I see a chance to put my giant airship project on its feet." "Why," cried Dave brightly, "you mean to interest Mr. Dale?" "That's just what I do mean," assented the aviator. Dave rose to his feet, excited and pleased. "Mr. King," he said earnestly, "I not only would do all I could to have Mr. Dale join you, but I feel sure he would be glad to take an interest in your plan." "It's worth trying, anyway," responded the airman. "I'm going to go by rail to Warrenton to-morrow, in the hope of finding Mr. Dale at home. I shall send you to him later." "All this isn't grand, or exciting, or anything of that sort, is it, now!" ejaculated Hiram, as Dave and he returned to the Baby Racer hangar. "I hope Mr. King's plans come out, all right," responded Dave. "I'll do a good deal to repay him for all he has done for me." "And me, too," echoed Hiram. "He's a fine fellow!" Mr. King departed on his journey the next day. Dave was not on the programme, so he practiced some with the hydroplane. Coming home for dinner, he found a letter from the Interstate people. They were cheery and optimistic over the completion of their new model aero-hydroplane. It had been tested and worked splendidly. The company stated that they would ship the machine to the meet at Columbus two days later. Dave told Hiram about the machine, and the hitter was in a fever of expectation over its anticipated arrival. The boys were eating their supper at the King hangar later in the day, when a telegraph messenger appeared. "Message for Mr. Dave Dashaway," he said. "I'm your man," replied Dave. He signed for the message, tore open the envelope, and glanced rapidly over the enclosure. His face clouded as he did so, for the message was from his employers, the Interstate Aero Company, and it read: "Cancel all dates. Come on at once. Trouble." CHAPTER X SOMETHING WRONG "What is it, Dave?" inquired Hiram, tracing a sudden seriousness in the manner of his comrade. Dave did not reply. With a thoughtful air he passed the telegram to Hiram. "Wonder what's up?" queried the latter. "I can't imagine," said Dave. "They tell you to cancel your dates," went on Hiram, looking very much worried. "Yes, that's what bothers me," replied Dave. "And to come on to the factory at once." "Perhaps they want to pay me off and let me go," suggested Dave, pretending to smile. "Don't take any trouble on your mind on that score," cried Hiram. "They'd search a long time before they'd find a better demonstrator than you are." "Thank you Hiram," said Dave. "The telegram is plain." "Yes, cancel all dates." "That's easy, I have nothing on the programme for the rest of the week." "There's the aero-hydroplane stunt." "But the machine hasn't arrived." "That's so." "Let's go down and see Grimshaw. I want to talk to him about this," said Dave. They found the airman at the Aegis hangar. Dave read him the telegram. Grimshaw looked bothered. "Too bad, when things are going so finely for you," he remarked. "I wish Mr. King was here," said Dave, "but he probably won't be until tomorrow." "Hardly, I should judge, from what he said," replied Grimshaw. "I had better start right off for the Interstate plant." "Yes. I would do that if I were you," advised Grimshaw. "I wish you would see the managers and explain about this," continued Dave. "Suppose the Drifter comes Dave?" asked Hiram. The Drifter was the name of the new model aero-hydroplane concerning which Dave had received a letter from the Interstate people that day, but written the day previous. "I'll see that it is handled all right," promised Grimshaw. "Tell Mr. King I will wire him just as soon as I learn what's up," said Dave. "You'll look after the Racer and the hydroplane, won't you, Hiram?" "Surely I will," pledged Hiram. Dave returned to his own quarters and packed a small hand bag. Hiram went to the railroad depot with him. They had to wait two hours for a south-bound train. The factory of the Interstate Aero Company was located at a city in Ohio. It was over three hundred miles from Columbus. The train Dave was on arrived at a junction about daylight the next morning. There he had to wait for a train on another road. He had slept a few hours and got his breakfast at the depot restaurant. According to schedule he would reach the Interstate plant about ten O'clock in the morning. Dave had been looking out of the car window enjoying the scenery and thinking over affairs in general, when he chanced to direct his gaze at a newspaper the man in the forward seat was reading. A glaring head line had caught his eye: "A Burglar In The Clouds." Anything suggestive of the air was of interest to the young aviator. He wondered what the item might refer to. Dave leaned over to try to scan the body matter of the article, when the locomotive whistled and the train slowed up for a station. The man in front of him shoved the newspaper into his pocket to leave the train. Then the incident drifted from the youth's mind. Dave reached Bolton on schedule time. An inquiry directed him to the extensive works of the Interstate Aeroplane Company. He found it to be a very large plant. The company, besides manufacturing aircraft, also turned out automobiles. Past the entrance gates of the big establishment, Dave became at once interested in a large building bearing the sign "Aerodrome." He could not resist the impulse to enter it. Then he found himself going from section to section, viewing the splendid assortment of aircraft on exhibition and for sale. To a devotee of aeronautics the display was most fascinating. There were monoplanes, biplanes, and hydroplanes. In one section were samples of the various accessories of the craft. Dave was looking over a splendid passenger monoplane when some one hailed him. "Dashaway--say, we've been expecting you." Dave turned to face the man who had been sent on by the Interstate people to drill him in the use of the hydroplane at Columbus. "Yes," nodded Dave, "I got a hurry call wire, and came on at once." "Seen the manager?" "Not yet. I drifted in here and lost myself among so many beauties. I don't see the new hydro-aeroplane." A quick shade came over the face of Dave's companion. "No," he hesitatingly replied. "Has it been shipped to Columbus yet?" inquired Dave. "Why--that is, I guess I had better let the manager tell you about the machine." Dave noticed a singular constraint in the manner of his companion. "Come along, I'll introduce you," volunteered the latter. Dave accompanied his guide from the aerodrome. They passed several large factory buildings. In their center was a small one story brick structure labeled "Office." Dave had never met the manager of the Interstate Company. He had transacted all his business with the agent of the company and the hydroplane expert. His companion led him past a row of desks occupied by clerks and stenographers and into a neatly furnished office. "Here is Dashaway, Mr. Randolph," he said. A fine looking man writing at a desk wheeled quickly in his chair. He arose to his feet with a pleasant smile and shook Dave's hand in a welcoming way. "I am glad to meet you," he spoke. "You received our telegram?" "Yes, sir, and came on at once." "I suppose you know why we sent for you?" questioned the manager. "Why, no, sir," replied Dave. "We tried to keep our loss a secret," proceeded the manager, "but the newspapers got hold of it." Dave recalled the newspaper heading he had glanced at, "A Burglar In The Clouds," and wondered if that had anything to do with the case. "I have not read a newspaper since leaving Columbus last night," said Dave. "Well," explained the manager of the Interstate Company, "our new model aero-hydroplane his been stolen." CHAPTER XI "N. A. L." "Stolen!" exclaimed Dave, in dismay. "It startles you?" spoke the manager of the Interstate Aeroplane concern. "So it did us." "But--" "You are mystified--unusual occurrence rather. You can follow the track of a stolen automobile. But when it comes to pursuing an airship, you won't find many familiar roads in the clouds." "How did it happen?" inquired Dave. "Why, we had tested the machine and it was to have been shipped to you yesterday. The day before, our expert made a very fine and satisfactory demonstration. The tanks were full, everything in perfect shape for another spurt early yesterday morning. During the night some one scaled the fence, evaded the watchman, and broke into the aerodrome." "It must have been some one familiar with the place here," suggested Dave. "We don't know that. It is certain, though, that they knew all about airships." "Why so?" "Because from the trail they left we could trace where they ran the machine outside. They gauged its ground run just right. They must have put on the muffler, for the watchman heard no sounds. Then they flew away." "Do you suspect anybody?" questioned Dave. "No." "Could it have been a business rival?" "Scarcely. We have some hard competitors, but we have canvassed the situation and do not believe they could afford to mix up in a deliberate steal." "It is strange," commented Dave, in a musing tone. "Our belief is that the Drifter was selected as the nearest and highest type of aircraft in existence. The people who stole it did so with some definite purpose in view." "What could that purpose be?" asked Dave. "We cannot as yet decide. One thing is certain--they will not venture to use it at any of the aero meets." "Then they must design to take it to a distance." "Of course." "You have no trace of it?" asked Dave. "None whatever. We can account for that, however. The night was dark, they started out when everybody was asleep, and they could have gone in one certain direction and struck a positive wilderness in a few hours time." "You mean north?" "Among the pineries, yes." "Or over the Canadian border?" "Exactly." Dave sat silent and thoughtful for some moments. The situation was a novel one. He had never heard of any one stealing an airship before. The Interstate manager aroused him from his reverie with the words: "We sent for you, Dashaway, because you are our most active man in the field." "That sounds pretty grand for a young fellow like me," returned Dave with a smile, and flushing up, too. "We gage out men by what they do," replied Mr. Randolph in a matter-of-fact tone. "We have found blood the best in our business. You have made good, Dashaway." "Thank you, sir." "Mr. King said you were the most promising aviator in the field." "Oh, he is always saying something good about me." "You proved it in your ideal work with the Baby Racer." "Who wouldn't, with any pride and that perfect machine?" challenged Dave. "That dash of yours after that Lyon order when you outwitted the Star people was simply brilliant. It showed your loyalty to us. The newspapers have given your hydroplane work so far the biggest kind of a send off." Dave was silent. He looked modest and embarrassed at all this praise. He could not, however, feel otherwise than pleased at all these eulogies bestowed upon him. "The Drifter has got to be found," resumed the manager. "It is our first perfected model, and we can hardly build its counterpart in time for full seasonal exhibitions. We think you are the man to find it, Dashaway." "Oh, Mr. Randolph," said Dave with a slight start. "I am expressing the opinion of the head men in the company here, who knew your good record. You are young, ambitious, a capable airman, and above all you are loyal to the interest of your employers." "I should hope it," exclaimed Dave, roused up to genuine emotion. "Just think--you picked me out, a mere boy, and trusted me. And see what you helped me do, already!" "Exactly," interrupted Mr. Randolph quickly. "That is just the point--you've outdone some of the veterans in the service and jumped to a high place in a bound. That's why we trust you." "I don't know about what you propose, though," said Dave, sobering down. "Yes, it's a pretty hard task to set. We're all at sea." "So am I," admitted Dave. "Put those keen wits of yours at work, Dashaway," urged the manager encouragingly. "I know after thinking this affair over you'll be ready to suggest something." "Well, all airmen should know of the theft of the Drifter, and be on the lookout." "We notified every association and meet in the country after we found that the newspapers had got onto the theft. That advertises it widely. The persons, however, who stole the Drifter knew that would come about. Rest assured of on point, therefore--they won't stay within range of possible identification any longer than they can help." "That's so," acknowledged Dave musingly. "The company wishes you to take charge of a search for the Drifter," went on Mr. Randolph. "Any machine we own, half a dozen of them if you like, are at your disposal. You may proceed regardless of the expense. If Mr. King could be induced to assist--" "I think he is under contract clear up to the end of the season," explained Dave. "Sorry for that, but he is such a good friend to you and to us, and I fancy he would gladly cooperate with advice and direction." "Yes, indeed," assented Dave. "We owe you a good deal more than your contract income already, Dashaway," said the manager. "I don't think there's an aviator living ever had a finer settlement than you will have if you succeed in running down the Drifter." "I'll try," said Dave. "That's capital." "Give me a few hours to think it over," suggested Dave. The young aviator left the Interstate plant very thoughtful and serious. Dave decided that he had assumed a big responsibility. He seemed to feel an actual ponderous weight on his young shoulders. A score of theories ran riot through his mind its to the motive for the theft of the Drifter. Then he decided that it must be some professional who had done the act. It was hard to fathom the ultimate plans of such an abstractor, who would not dare to use the machine in any public way and could scarcely sell it. "It's a puzzle, a big, worrying poser," said Dave, walking slowly from the factory grounds. About half a mile city-wards from the plant Dave passed through a square devoted to public park purposes. He sat down on a tree-shaded rustic bench. There, alone, quiet and undisturbed, he set his wits at work. Whoever it was who had committed the theft must have been a professional airman. Dave formulated a plan to ask Mr. Randolph if anybody in Bolton, or any employee of the plant was missing. In case this was not discovered then some stranger must have come to Bolton. There might be a trace found of the party at some of the hotels. "There's a bit of detective work to do by some one besides myself," decided Dave. "I'm going to suggest this plan to Mr. Randolph." "Hello, boss," spoke an approaching voice as Dave got up to return to the plant. He observed a man he had noticed on a bench directly opposite to the one he had occupied sidling towards him. The fellow was ragged and trampish looking. There was a queer leer in his face and his eyes were fixed on the coat Dave wore. "Well, what is it?" inquired Dave. "Excuse a question, matey?" "Oh, that's all right." "Noticed a badge you're wearing," said the tramp. "Oh, that?" spoke Dave lifting his hand to his coat lapel, and wondering at the man been so observant. "Yes--N. A. L.," nodded the tramp. Dave eyed the speaker keenly. At the distance he was, it was doubtful that he could have dearly made out the monogram, yet he named the letters glibly and correctly. "N. A. L." stood for the National Aero League. Dave was not a member and neither was Hiram Dobbs. Mr. King was and during the meets it had become the custom with professionals to furnish their assistants with duplicate badges, which enabled them to enter and leave the aero grounds unchallenged by the gateman, and ticket takers. "You must have pretty good eyes to make out those letters on that badge at a distance," said Dave. "I've seen them before," readily explained the tramp. "Oh, you have?" "Yes, and I've got a badge for sale just like the one you're wearing." CHAPTER XII DAVE'S DISCOVERIES "You have got a badge like mine for sale, you say?" exclaimed Dave. "That's so," bobbed the tramp with a grin. "Where did you get it?" "That don't go with the sale, but I didn't steal it." "You found it, I suppose?" suggested Dave. "Well, you might call it so." The man drew from his pocket a badge which was the exact counterpart of that worn by the young aviator. "Let me have a look at it," said Dave. "No, sir." "Why not?" "You can see what it is, can't you? I don't want to get into trouble, boss." "I'm not going to get you into any trouble," declared Dave. "Then why do you want to look at the badge? It's no different from yours, is it?" "Are there no marks on it?" "Why, I didn't notice. Say, yes, there are," announced the tramp, scrutinizing the little piece of metal on the back of the badge. "Looks like T. O." Dave put his hand in his pocket. "What do you want for it?" he asked. Evidently the tramp was about to say "fifteen cents." He shrewdly, however, observed an interested if not an eager expression on Dave's face, arid added: "--ty cents." "It's yours," replied Dave, promptly producing the coin. "Wh-e-w!" Dave stared, started and gave utterance to a prolonged whistle. He came to his feet with a shock. Upon the rear plate of the badge were scratched two letters, indeed--but the tramp had read them wrong. As read by Dave they were a mine of information. Dave's mind ran rapidly. He sat down again on the bench. The tramp grinned broadly as Dave turned an eager and excited face upon him. "Why," he chuckled, "you're real friendly, aren't you?" "No trifling," said Dave seriously. "I'll give you a good deal more than fifty cents if you tell me truthfully and right away how you came by that badge." "How much now?" "Two dollars." "The information is yours, Cap," answered the tramp, with an assumed air of grandness. "I found it." "When?" "At one o'clock yesterday morning." "Where?" "By the fence of the big Fly factory down yonder." "You mean the Interstate works?" "That's the place, I guess." Dave became more interested than ever. He handed a two dollar bill to the tramp without further question. "Now, my man," he said, "I've been square with you." "That's right," assented the tramp. "I want you to tell me all about how you came by that badge." "Well, boss, I'm troubled with asthma, and have to sleep out of doors nights." "Go on." "The police in the city know me moderately well, and I prefer the suburbs." "Don't fool--give me the facts." "Night before last I camped down in a grassy spot near the fence of the big Fly factory. It must have been about midnight when I was waked up. I heard somebody say: 'Oh, at take it!'" "Who was it?" "A boy about your size." "What was he doing?" asked Dave. "He was up on top of the fence. He had climbed up one of the slanting outside supports, I guess. You know there's two rows of barbed wire a-top of the boards. Well, there he was, making a great fuss." "What about?" inquired Dave. "The back of his coat was all tangled up in the barbs. He couldn't pull it loose. Then I heard some voices speak on the inside of the fence. There were two men there." "You think they had got over first?" "It looked that way. They told the boy to pull out of his coat. He got his arms out, started to untwist the coat, stuck his fingers with the barbs, and tumbled over into the factory yard." "And then?" pressed Dave eagerly. "H'm! I went to sleep." "What! not knowing but what they were burglars?" "Boss, I never mix up with other people's business, good or bad." "How did you come to get the badge?" "Why, when I woke up at sunrise I saw the coat sticking on the fence where the boy had left it. I climbed up and got it. The badge was pinned to it." "You haven't got the coat on." "Good reason." "What's that?" "Well, my own coat is pretty ragged but it ain't a marker to the way that boy's coat was riddled and torn by them barb wires." "Didn't you search the coat?" "Every time that, matey." "And found--?" "Humph! nothing." "Nothing at all?" "Oh, yes, there was some cigarettes, a stub of a pencil and a card with some marks and writing, on it." "What did you do with the card?" asked Dave. "Tossed it into the ditch with the coat." "Do you remember where?" "Sure, I do." "I'll give you another dollar to take me to the spot." "Say, you're a gold mine to me, Cap. Come ahead." Dave was doing a good deal of active thinking. More than once, as his companion led way around the high board fence enclosing the Interstate plant, Dave took out the badge he had bought and scrutinized the scratches on its back closely. 'The tramp guided the way across a bleak prairie stretch. Then he followed the dry ditch, until they came to a spot where thick clumps of weeds directly lining the fence suggested a cozy resting and hiding place for any stray wayfarer. "There's where I was asleep, as I told you," spoke Dave's companion, pointing to a spot where the weeds were somewhat trodden down. "And there's the place where the coat caught. See, there's one or two pieces of the cloth of the coat hanging in the barbs yet." "Yes, I see," assented Dave. "Now, where did you throw the coat and the things you found In it?" The tramp moved about from place to place, got in line with the fence support, and looked down into the ditch. He moved along slowly, his eyes on the ground. Finally he stooped down. "Here's the coat--what there's left of it," he reported. "Here's that card, too. I can't find the pencil." "Never mind that," replied Dave, extending his hand for the proffered objects. "I smoked up the cigarettes." Dave glanced eagerly at the card. He shoved it in a safe pocket. Then he rolled up the coat and placed it under his arm. "Very good, very good, indeed," he said. "Here's that dollar I promised you." The tramp received the money, beaming all over his face. "Say," he observed, as he moved on, "if it wasn't that you've made me rich enough to retiree from business for a time, I'd offer to find the owner of that coat and the fellows who were with him." "I'll do just that," said Dave to himself in a satisfied way. Then, his hand resting on the card in his pocket, he added: "What luck!" CHAPTER XIII HIRAM DOBBS AND THE BIPLANE Dave walked straight along the fence. By the shortest route possible he reached the gateway entrance to the factory yard. The tramp had put nimbly in the opposite direction. He was headed for the nearest business street, where he could spend some of the money that he had earned so easily. The young aviator was very much excited. He had made certain discoveries that had amazed him. He could not help but mentally rejoice over the strange fortune that had come from his stray meeting with the tramp. "It's a clew--a sure clew," said Dave to himself. "Now to move just right in this affair and make no mistake." The youth crossed the grounds of the plant and again entered the office building. He did not wait to announce himself, but, as he reached the door of the manager's room and found it closed, he tapped briskly. "Come in," spoke Mr. Randolph. "Hello, you, Dashaway?" "Yes, Sir," bowed Dave, removing his cap. "You are back soon." "Sooner than I planned," replied Dave, "But I--" "You've thought the affair over, I hope?" "Something more than that, Sir," responded Dave. "I have come to tell you that I think I can be of some service to you about that stolen aero-hydroplane." "Good for you!" "I've thought out a plan, Sir," went on Dave. "I feel certain that the people who raided the aerodrome and made off with the Drifter are bound for a distant and unsettled section." "But why? What benefit can they hope to secure way off from civilization?" "That we have to guess at and work out," replied Dave. "I will say, Mr. Randolph, that I think I have a faint clew to the disappearance of the airship." "You don't say so!" "I shall know more inside of twenty-four hours. In fact, Mr. Randolph, I feel pretty certain that I can soon submit a plan that will satisfy you that I know what I am about." "We already think that of you, Dashaway." "And that I can bring results." "Capital! I knew we were not mistaken in you. Now, see here, I see you have something working in your mind. I don't want to even hamper you by asking what it is." "I would like to go back to Columbus on the first train, Mr. Randolph." "Very well." "I want to look up some affairs there, consult with Mr. King, and come back here the next day." "And then?" "I shall perhaps want to use the very best aircraft you have in your factory." "To hunt for the Drifter?" "Yes, Sir." "Dashaway, the whole plant and everything in it is at your service." "Thank you, Sir." "I consider this theft of the Drifter even more important than I at first thought." "How is that, Mr. Randolph?" "I have been thinking that if some competitor was concerned in the affair, he might steal and utilize many points in our new model which are not yet protected by patents." "I feel pretty sure that no business rival had anything to do with the theft," observed the young aviator confidently. "Well, you work this affair out in your own way. Remember, as I told you, expense is no point whatever. When shall we see you again?" "To-morrow evening, or the next morning at the latest." Something in Dave's manner seemed to convince the shrewd manager of the Interstate Aeroplane Company that their young employee was started on the right track. He shook hands cordially with Dave when the latter left the office. Dave went at once to the railroad depot. He learned that a train left in two hours. "That will bring me to Columbus before dark," he reflected. "I wonder what Mr. King will say?" The young aviator had a good deal on his mind, enough to make the average lad impatient. He had, however, learned a hard lesson of discipline with his tyrannical guardian, old Silas Warner. Then, too, since coming under the helpful influence of Mr. King, he had acquired a certain self reliance that now stood him in good stead. Running an airship took nerve, steadiness of purpose, a definite, concrete way of looking at things. Dave knew in his own mind that the Drifter was each hour speeding farther and farther away from the haunts of men. He recalled the old adage, however, which says "the more haste the less speed," and he determined to stick to the plan he had mentally outlined at the start. "I'm going to work on this affair slow but sure," he told himself. "I think I can guess where the Drifter is headed for. If I am right, I know that I shall find it." Dave reached Columbus about dark. He went straight from the depot to the aero grounds. The plan he had formed in his mind took in a talk with Mr. King right away. The Baby Racer hangar, however, was on his way to the Aegis quarters. As he neared it he saw a light in the shed where the little biplane was housed. Dave went to the half open door of the place to find Hiram Dobbs with a lantern puttering about the machine. "What have you been up to, Hiram?" challenged Dave. "Why, hello! Got back? Good!" cried Hiram, rushing forward to warmly welcome his best friend. "Yes, just arrived," answered Dave. "I've been cleaning up the machine," explained Hiram. "It's old Grimshaw's fault." "What is?" "Taking the Baby Racer out." "Oh, the machine has been out, then, has it?" remarked Dave. "Yes, and up. Say, Dave, I made the five hundred feet level. I hope you're not put out. It was a chance to make fifty dollars." "Fifty dollars?" "Uh-huh," bobbed Hiram in a broad grin. "How was that?" "Why, Grimshaw was piloting a party over the grounds. Rich man and his family-wife, son and two daughters. The youngest one was a daring little miss. She wanted to fly, and would fly. Grimshaw got to bragging about what you had done with the Baby Racer. Well, nothing would do but I must roll the little beauty out." "That was all right, Hiram," the young aviator hastened to say. "I should always feel that the biplane is safe in your hands." "Well, finally the father consented to let his daughter try a fly along the ground. I settled her in a comfortable seat, and away we went. I made it a good stiff run, and there was some jolting, but the girl was wild over it. She begged for a second run. We got such a fine start that I lifted about twenty feet in the air." "And then, of course, she screamed out in fear?" said Dave, with a smile. "Screamed nothing," dissented Hiram. "She just spoke one delighted 'O-oh!' and then: 'Higher, oh, please keep on going!' Say, Dave, she looked so bright and brave I couldn't help it--Z--I--P!" "What does 'Z--I--P!' mean, Hiram?" asked Dave. "A slide, a swoop, then a circle, another, a shoot upwards, and the girl laughing out, 'Oh, this is just grand!' Her sister shrieked, her mother fainted away, and her father was shaking his cane at us and yelling for us to come back. The Racer did her prettiest in two grand circles of the grounds, and came down light as a feather. The girl jumped out, one big smile. 'Just think of it!' I heard her cry to her sister, 'when I've told my seminary chums that I've been up in a real airship!' Then, seeing that she was safe, I think her folks were just as proud of her exploit as she was. Anyhow, she ran up to her father in a coaxing way, and came back to place a bank note in my hand. When they were gone, and I found that it was a fifty dollar bill, old Grimshaw chuckled and said he had hinted to the party that the regular fee for a ride in an airship was one hundred dollars. I'm mighty glad you're back, Dave." "Why, you seem to have got along finely without me," said Dave. "We've missed you, all the same. Where you going, Dave?" asked Hiram, as his friend moved out of the shed. "Why, I'm anxious to see Mr. King as soon as I can. I have something very important to talk about with him." "It's about that rush telegram?" "Yes, Hiram." "What did it mean?" "When we meet with Mr. King you shall, hear all about it, Hiram." "Well, Mr. King isn't home yet," explained Hiram. Dave looked disappointed. "That is," continued Hiram, "he hadn't got back when I was last up at the Aegis hangar." "When was that?" "About four o'clock this afternoon. Mr. Grimshaw, though, said he expected him on the six o'clock train." "We'll go and see if he has returned," said Dave. They started for the aviator's headquarters. Half the distance covered, they met him coming in search of them. Mr. King looked pale and worried. Dave knew that something had happened to upset him. "I'm glad you're back, Dashaway," said Mr. King. "Grimshaw told me you had been called to headquarters by the Interstate people. I should have wired you to return right away if you had not returned. Something very important has transpired." "About Mr. Dale--about my father's old friend, Mr. King?" asked Dave. "That's it exactly. Bad news, Dashaway, I'm sorry to say," announced the aviator in a very serious tone. CHAPTER XIV THE MISSING AIRCRAFT The aviator led the way back to the Aegis hangar. Dave saw that Mr. King was not inclined to explain any further until they were off the public course, so he asked no more questions, for the present. Dave had a good deal to tell himself. His mind had been full of it all day. Something in the grave, thoughtful manner of Mr. King, however, caused him to defer his own anxiety and impatience. When they were inside the comfortable room where the aviator made his office, Mr. King turned to Dave with a very sober face. "I said I had bad news, Dashaway," he spoke, "and that's no mistake." "Then you failed to find Mr. Dale at Warrenton?" inquired Dave. "He has not been there for over a week." "Why, I thought he lived there?" "He did. He went away, or was kidnapped, nearly ten days ago." "Kidnapped?" exclaimed Dave in surprise. "That's what I think. Mr. Dale lived alone, except for a very old man servant. As near as I can figure it out, that young thief, Gregg, appeared at Warrenton two days after I had him arrested. I did a very foolish thing in dealing with the young scamp." "You mean letting him go free?" inquired Dave. "Yes, I feared at the time that I was unwise in not punishing him, to serve as a lesson against more mischief. He acted so scared, though, he helped me get back the property he had stolen from you, he signed a confession telling that he was not the real Dave Dashaway and had imposed on Mr. Dale, so I thought he would proceed to at once make himself very scarce. I felt sure that he would not be able to play any more tricks on Mr. Dale, for I expected that you and I would go the very next day and see this old friend of your father. You know we were rushed from Dayton to the next meet, and had no chance to get to Warrenton and explain matters to Mr. Dale. I blame myself for not sending you at, once to him at the time. As I told you, I wrote to a friend, a lawyer at Warrenton, to learn what I could about Mr. Dale. He reported Mr. Dale was absent on a trip. When I got to Warrenton yesterday and met the old Dale servant, I saw at once that something was wrong." "How do you mean, Mr. King?" asked Dave quite anxiously. "Well, I learned that this young scamp, Gregg, had appeared at Warrenton two days after I let him go." "Still pretending to be Dave Dashaway?" "So the old servant says. Gregg and Mr. Dale went away together. There is no doubt in my mind that Gregg put up a plot to get Mr. Dale away from Warrenton before we could expose him." "But he could not keep Mr. Dale away from home forever?" "No, but he and his accomplices might get the old man to some remote place and make him a prisoner." "And force him to give up a lot of money before they let him go." "Yes, that has been done before," admitted Dave. "Anyhow, two days alter Mr. Dale left Warrenton, a check passed through the bank signed by him for one thousand dollars." Dave was both interested and alarmed. "Four days ago a check for two thousand dollars arrived. The bank refused to cash it." "Why, Mr. King?" "Because it was a forgery." "Not Mr. Dale's signature?" "That's it." "But where did the checks come from?" inquired Dave. "From two cities, widely apart. I know the places. It looks to me as if the first check was given willingly by Mr. Dale. Then he must have become suspicious, and refused to pay out any more money. The second check was numbered correctly, and Gregg must have got possession of the old man's regular check book." "This is a pretty serious affair, Mr. King," commented Dave. "It is, and I came straight back here to tell you about it, and then cancel all my engagements at the meet. I shall start out at once to run down this Gregg and locate Mr. Dale." "And I must join you-I see that it is my duty," declared Dave. "Not at all," responded the aviator definitely. "I have mapped out the best plan of procedure, and I believe I can run down this business alone in a very short time." Dave was really anxious concerning Mr. Dale. He truly believed it his first duty towards the old friend of his father to do all he could to assist him. For all that, Dave was relieved to know that he could go on without interruption in service of his employers. "Yes," proceeded the aviator, "I feel that I have an interest in finding Mr. Dale. In the first place, he is your friend. Next, I feel responsible for letting that young scamp, Gregg, go free. At a selfish motive, I believe that if I succeed in rescuing the old man he will gladly finance my giant airship scheme." "He surely will, Mr. King," said Dave confidently. "I believe he would help you, anyway. I do hope he can be found." "I shall not rest until he is," declared the aviator. "Now, Dashaway, I don't want you to take this affair on your mind. If I fail in what I have planned, I will certainly call you into the case. I fancy, from what Hiram here has told me, that you have some important business of your own on hand." "Yes, that is quite true," replied Dave seriously. "Are you having some trouble with the Interstate people?" inquired the aviator pointedly. "Not on my account, I, am glad to say, Mr. King," replied Dave. "There is some trouble, though, for all hands around. It's about the stolen aero-hydroplane, or hydro-aeroplane, they haven't just settled on the exact name." "The Drifter?" "Yes, sir." "I read about that strange case. I suppose it puts you back in your arrangements at the meet here?" "Not only that, Mr. King," explained Dave, "but it has placed me in a position where I shall have to give up all my engagements for a time." "Why, you don't say so, Dashaway?" exclaimed the aviator, much disturbed. "Those are the orders," replied Dave. "I have hurried back to Columbus purposely, to consult on your helping in a search for the Drifter." "Of course that is not possible, now that this Dale affair has come up," said Mr. King. "As to a search for the stolen aircraft, that is going to be no easy task, I'm thinking. Have the Interstate people no theory as to the way the Drifter was stolen, and the motive for the theft?" "I had better tell you all I know about it, Mr. King." "Do so, Dashaway." Dave proceeded to relate his interview with Mr. Randolph, the manager of the Interstate factory. He did not refer just then to his experience with the tramp. "It's a good deal of a puzzle," commented the aviator. "What is your plan?" "Why, I expected that I could induce you to take charge of the search. As you cannot, I am thinking of Hiram going back with me to Bolton." "What's your idea?" "The Interstate people have offered me their best monoplane to start the chase for the missing Drifter." "It will be a blind start, Dashaway, without a clew." "But I have a clew," announced Dave. "You didn't say so." "I hadn't come to that yet, Mr. King. I haven't even told the Interstate people. I am pretty certain that the Drifter left Bolton on a due northwest course," and Dave drew from his pocket the card he had got from the tramp. "Capital!" cried the aviator, becoming very much interested. "If you know that, you have half solved the problem." "Besides that," went on Dave, producing the duplicate N. A. L. badge, and glancing at the scratched initials on its back, "I know who stole the Drifter." "What's that?" almost shouted the aviator, springing to his feet, in a great state of excitement. "Say, Dave, are you sure?" pressed the eager Hiram Dobbs, worked up to fever heat with curiosity and suspense. "Who was it?" asked Mr. King. "Jerry Dawson," was Dave Dashaway's reply. CHAPTER XV AT THE AERODROME "That is the machine I want, Mr. Randolph," said Dave Dashaway. It was two days after the young aviator had told his friends at Columbus the name of the person he suspected of stealing the aero-hydroplane, the Drifter from the Interstate Aeroplane Company. Now, he and Hiram and the manager of the Interstate plant stood amid the half hundred or more aero machines that comprised the stock of one of the largest factories in that line in the country. They had left the aero meet at Columbus the evening previous, not, however, until Dave had explained how he came to suspect Jerry Dawson. "It's simple and plain, Mr. King," the young aviator had said. "The badge I bought from the tramp at Bolton was the property of young Dawson." "Sure of that, Dashaway?" Mr. King had inquired. "Oh, yes. The initials are crude, but they certainly stand for 'J. D.' and not 'T. O.' as the tramp thought." An inspection of the duplicate badge by both Mr. King and Hiram satisfied them that Dave's theory was correct. "Another thing," Dave had added--"the coat found on the barb wire top of the factory fence I have seen Jerry wear many a time." "And the card?" pressed Hiram. "The card has some scrawls on it, made by Jerry, I think. It shows a sort of rough outline of the upper lake district here. Some arrows show a straight course due northwest. I believe the Drifter was started on its way over the Canadian border." "And the two men with Jerry?" asked Mr. King. "I can't figure out that they could be anybody but Jerry's father and the man who left Columbus with them--Ridgely." "The man the revenue officer was looking for!" exclaimed Hiram. "The smuggler, as he was called, yes," replied Dave. Mr. King and Hiram indulged in all kinds of conjectures as to the possible motive of the party of three in stealing the aircraft. "The way I figure it out," said Mr. King, "is that this Ridgely wanted to get out of the country knowing that the revenue people were dose on his trail." "Perhaps," agreed Dave thoughtfully. "There's another thing, though." "What's that?" inquired the interested Hiram. "His coming all the way around the lakes to find his friends, the Dawsons, looks as though he had some future scheme in view, with an airship a part of it." "That's so," assented Mr. King. "Well, Dashaway, you have done famously so far in finding out what you have. The Interstate people think the only way to chase the fugitives is with one of their own machines. I don't know anybody better adapted to do just that than yourself." "Thank you, Mr. King," said Dave modestly The two boys left Columbus with pretty clear minds. They had a definite purpose in view, and Mr. King, Dave felt sanguine, would do all that the interests of Mr. Dale required while they were gone. "Say, Dave," spoke Hiram, as they boarded the train bound for Bolton, "this is just like acting out some story, isn't it?" "In a way," acquiesced the young aviator, "only there won't be much acting--it will be real, earnest hard work." "I see that, and I am anxious to do my share," declared Hiram. "You always are, Hiram," said Dave. Now, the morning following, the two aviator friends found themselves at the Interstate factory, where both received a warm welcome from Mr. Randolph. Dave now related to the manager all that he had held back during his first visit to the great plant. "I say, Dashaway, that's simply wonderful," was Mr. Randolph's enthusiastic comment. "Anybody with the genius to gather up all those clews cannot fail to work out this entire case. We shall soon receive some great reports from you." "I hope so," said Dave. "Now then, you and your friend go over to the aerodrome and see which one of our machines there suits you best." It was after Dave and Hiram had spent the most fascinating half hour of their lives viewing the wonders of mechanism on display, that the manager rejoined them. It was then, too, that Dave reported to him with the words: "That is the machine I want, Mr. Randolph." As Dave spoke he pointed to a monoplane of which he had made a close inspection for over ten minutes. The manager burst out into a hearty laugh. "Well, well!" he cried, clapping Dave on the shoulder in an approving way, "I must say you are certainly a grand judge of monoplanes." "How is that?" asked Dave. "You have picked out the best machine in the place." "Why, I was looking for the best one, wasn't I, Mr. Randolph?" asked the young aviator with a smile. "It is our new model of the composite hydro-aeroplane," explained the manager. "It's the best standard built in this country--the Monarch II." "It's easy to see that," responded Dave. "It is the equal of the Drifter in a great many ways." "That is true," replied Mr. Randolph. "While it may not be as swift in the water as an all-steel hydro, it is built on the best float system and will sustain a weight of one thousand three hundred pounds." "And the front elevation and tail are also of the newest type," said Dave. "You studied that out, eh? It's a model of lightness as such machines go. The engine is only three hundred pounds, it carries twenty gallons of gasoline, and has a lifting capacity of twelve hundred pounds, giving leeway for a three hundred pound pilot." "Dave and I wouldn't weigh that together, Mr. Randolph," said Hiram. "Its simplicity strikes me," remarked Dave. "Yes," said Mr. Randolph, "and it can be knocked down and reassembled in a hurry. You see, the ailerons never leave their sections and in the planes not a wire is changed. The outriggers fold, keeping them in pairs together, each piece is bent, not buckled, and can be straightened good as new in case of a disarrangement." The manager went over the entire machine in a speedy but expert way. He saw that all locks on the turnbuckles were fastened, and that the locks had lock washers beneath them. All the movable wires were reinforced with a piece of loose hay wire, and provisions against rust perfected. Hiram stood mute, but fascinated, as the manager explained in detail the fine points of the Monarch II, as the composite hydro-aeroplane was named. What interested Dave immensely was a self starting apparatus. This was operated by a handle inserted in a socket, fastened on a special ball ratchet on the large sprocket. Pulling this handle turned the motor over two, sometimes three compressions, and started up the machine without difficulty, Mr. Randolph explained. During the operation the throttle shut down so that the operator might resume his seat and take the levers. The planes had double covered fabric on top and bottom, tightened at the rear of the planes by lacing. A single lever controlled the elevator and side flaps and there were radical bearings to take both side and end thrusts. "Tell you, Dashaway," said Mr. Randolph in conclusion, "I'll trust you with the Monarch II because you are something more than a grass-cutting pilot by mail trying to coast a flying machine off the ground." "I hope to deserve your compliment," laughed the young aviator. "You've got a horse power engine and planes hard to beat. There are self-priming oil pumps, an auxiliary exhaust, and the machine follows the lines of the lowest gasoline consumption. Remember the triple axis conditions, Dashaway. One controls the fore and aft axis, producing tipping. The second is the vertical axis, producing turning. The third is the lateral axis, producing rising and falling." "Some one at the office wishes to see Mr. Dashaway," just here interrupted a lad from the plant. "To see me?" spoke Dave in some surprise. "Yes, sir. He asked me to give you his card, and said he had come quite a distance to see you." Dave took the card the lad handed him. He was a little startled, and then curious, as he read the name-- "JAMES PRICE, Revenue Officer." CHAPTER XVI THE "MONARCH II" The manager of the Interstate factory and Dave and Hiram followed the messenger from the plant back to the office. "The gentleman who wishes to see me," the young aviator explained to Mr. Randolph, "is the revenue officer I told you about." "Ah, I think I understand the purpose of his visit, then," said the manager. Mr. Price was the same keen-faced, ferret-like person he always appeared, as Dave introduced him to the manager. "I have heard of you from our young friend, Dashaway," said Mr. Randolph. "Lucky I ran across him," responded the officer, in his usual short, jerky way. "Lucky to catch you here, too, before you got off, Dashaway." "Then you came specially to see me?" asked Dave. "And your friends," replied Mr. Price with a comprehensive wave of his hand. "Mutual interests all around, it seems. You see, I met Mr. King at Columbus after you left," explained the official. "He told me of your remarkable discoveries, Dashaway. You are keener than I, young man. I have been chasing all over the district, and here you get a clew to Ridgely, while I and my men were blundering around." "If it is really a dew to him, Mr. Price," submitted the young aviator. "You know, it is all a theory so far." "As the facts stand, I have no doubt from your story that Ridgely is one of the men who ran away with the Drifter," declared the officer. "Have you fathomed his purpose in taking the air route, Mr. Price?" asked the factory manager. "Most certainly." "I am puzzled to guess what it may be." "Why, it's plain as the nose on your face," said the officer bluntly. "How is that?" "You know that this man, Ridgely, is a professional smuggler?" "So Dashaway has told me." "We drove him from one point on the border. He has selected another, that's all. He has worn out the old methods of evading the revenue service, so he is adopting new ones. In fact, I rather admire his brilliant originality. Why, I can conceive no situation so ideal as that capture of an airship, and professional operators in his employ." "Then--" "I am positive that the Dawsons and Ridgely have made for some obscure point, probably near Lake Superior, and will open up business in the old way, do their work only at night, and I have come on here to ask Dashaway to work in harmony with me." "Most certainly he will," pledged the factory manager. "I am after Ridgely, you are after your aircraft. We can work together," pronounced the officer. "I intend to start at once for the Lake Superior district. I shall set my men at work clear along the line and over the border, to try and find a trace of my man. I haven't an airship, though, you must remember, and wouldn't know how to run one if I had. That's where you come in, Dashaway. You search the air, I'll watch the land. What I want to do is to give you a list of points where I or my men can be reached at a moment's notice any time. If we keep in touch with each other, I believe we can land those rascals." For over an hour after that the officer and Dave had an earnest, confidential chat together. Mr. Price brought out maps, and gave Dave great deal of information as to the smuggling system on the border. In the meantime, Randolph and Hiram again visited the aerodrome. After the revenue officer had departed, Dave came across Hiram looking for him. "Say, Dave," exclaimed the excited youth, "it's like a new world to me, all this. I declare, I never had such a time in my life. This Mr. Randolph is a prince." "Fixed things up for us, has he, Hiram?" "Right royally. He's stocked up that monoplane like a banquet hall. Why, say, if we can keep the Monarch II aloft, we can live like millionaires in an up-to-date hotel for a week to come." Hiram in his enthusiasm was exaggerating things considerably. However, when Dave revisited the aerodrome, he found that the clever Interstate manager had stocked up the aircraft, with every necessity for safety and comfort he could think of. The Monarch II was certainly a marvel in its construction and scope. It had been made to accommodate an operator and one, or even two, passengers. The seating space was quite roomy, and there was a handy basket-like compartment, arranged to hold wraps, provisions and duplicate machine parts. It was late in the afternoon when the Monarch II was rolled out into the broad roomy yard of the factory. Everything was in order for the finest start in the world. Dave had thought out and mapped out every detail of the proposed air voyage. Mr. Randolph personally superintended all the initial arrangements. The starter worked liked a charm. There was no wavering. A turn of the handle, and the magnificent machine spread its wings like some great bird poised for a steady flight. Hiram gave a great shout of delight. Dave smiled down at the manager proudly. "Good luck!" cried Mr. Randolph. Just then the factory whistle sounded out shrilly for quitting time. Workmen appeared at the open windows of the factor. Some came running out into the yard. The word had gone around that the young aviators were bound on an extraordinary cruise--a search for the stolen airship. A great chorus of ringing hurrahs went up from the crowd. "It's great, isn't it, Dave?" chuckled the delighted Hiram. "The Monarch II acts prettily, that's sure," replied the young aviator. Dave delighted his companion by giving him charge of the barograph readings and attention to some of the minor duties of aviation. The rapid progress of the machine in mid air was exhilarating. The weather conditions were ideal, and Dave had a definite goal in view. There was not a break in the pleasant twilight journey. The Monarch II fulfilled all expectations and promises. About nine o'clock in the evening the record showed over two hundred miles accomplished, when they descended on a level stretch of prairie near a small bustling city. Here the gasoline supply in the tanks was replenished. The basket had been stored with over a hundred gallons of this in separate packages, without embarrassing the buoyancy of the machine, as the young aviators were far below average operating weight. "This high living of ours makes and hungry," intimated Hiram, as they finished getting the machine in shape to renew the flight. "Time for lunch, you think?" proposed Dave with a jolly laugh. "Here we are." They selected from the packages in the accommodation basket enough things for a feed. Mr. Randolph had certainly provided for them in a liberal way. The packages produced two kinds of sandwiches, some doughnuts, a cream cakes, cheese, celery and a prime apple pie. Dave was pleased and proud with their progress thus far on their strange journey. There was a steady but mild head wind, and if he held till daylight the young aviator counted on reaching the first important destination on the route he had mapped out. His idea was to reach a certain point in the dark. They would then seek a hiding place, or at least seclusion, until evening again, resting through the day. Dave's plan was to travel so that their progress might not be noted and get to the Dawson group through the public prints or by some other avenue, and thus warn them that they were being traced. There was not a landmark on the route, such as a city, lake or river, that Dave had not memorized, from standard "fly" directories during the past two days. The Drifter, being in the hands of the Dawsons, who knew considerable about aviation, would probably follow the same course. At night it was more difficult to tally off progress than in daylight, but so far Dave felt that he had not deviated from the due northwest course that was to bring him to a certain destination. For over five hours after lunch and rest the Monarch II kept steadily on its way. Dawn was just breaking when Dave passed a few miles to the west of a town he knew to be Millville. He glanced at Hiram, about to address him. Hiram was fast asleep. "We will have to get down somewhere near here," decided Dave. As he changed the course of the aircraft there was a slight jar, and Hiram woke up. "Hello!" he cried, "have I been--" "Asleep at the switch?" smiled Dave. "Yes, but it hasn't needed any attention. We are going to land, Hiram." Dave knew his bearings, as has been said. His anxiety, however, was to get to cover, so to speak, before the airship was seen by anyone in the vicinity. He soon knew that he had failed in this. Circling about and drifting in trying to select a suitable landing spot, Dave made out rising farmer staring up at the machine from his chicken yard. A little farther on the driver of a truck wagon, bound town-wards evidently, espied the Monarch II, even in the dim morning light, for he stopped his horses, his face turned in the direction of the machine. Finally Dave located a spot that suited him. It was where there had been mining going on some period in the past. Some hills shut in the deserted diggings. Several great heaps of ore surrounded a sort of pit, broad and roomy. "I don't think we can find a better resting place," said Dave, as they reached the ground and he shut off the power. "Going to stay here all day?" inquired Hiram. "That is the programme, yes." "Well, I suppose breakfast is the first move?" asked the young aviator's assistant. "I'm hungry as a bear," announced Dave. "So am I," agreed Hiram, and he set at work to explore the accommodation, basket. Hiram soon had a tempting spread. There was cold ham, a roasted chicken, an abundance of bread and butter, and a two gallon jug of cold coffee. The boys did full justice to the layout. Then Dave went over the machine, seeing to it that every part was in order. "I'll have to take a little nap, Hiram," he advised his companion. "No, a good long one," corrected Hiram. "If we're going to lay off until night, there isn't much to do. I'll stay awake and keep a look out for anything happening. You see, I had quite a snooze up there in the air." Dave made a comfortable couch by spreading out some of the wraps found in the accommodation basket. It was after ten o'clock when he woke up. He insisted on Hiram taking a turn on the couch. "Can't do it. Not a bit sleepy," declared Hiram. "Well, you can try it while I'm gone," suggested Dave. "Oh, going somewhere?" "Yes, to the town. I want to make a few inquiries as to the country around here and ahead of us, and I may wire Mr. Randolph." "All right, go ahead," replied Hiram. "I'll see that everything is kept trim and safe about the machine." Dave visited Millville, and posted himself as to certain geographical points in which he was interested. He also sent a brief dispatch to the Interstate people. Provided with some railroad maps, and some fresh rolls from a bakery, he started out to rejoin his chum. He found Hiram busy burnishing up every bit of metal about the Monarch II. They had their noon lunch. On his way back from town Dave' had noticed a little brook. He was telling Hiram about it, and they were discussing a plan of a plunge and a swim, when Hiram, facing the point where the pit began, sprang suddenly to his feet. "Hello!" he cried excitedly. "Someone is coming." "Sure enough," echoed Dave, also arising. "Why, I noticed that man in Millville. Can it be possible that he has followed me? I didn't know it, if he has." The boys stood motionless, awaiting the coming up of the intruder. He was a brisk, smart looking man. There was something in his sharp way of glancing at things that made Dave think of a lawyer. The stranger came up within a dozen feet of them. Then he halted, took in the flying machine with a grim smile, and then looked the young aviators over from head to foot. "Reckon I've landed on both feet," he observed, a confident, satisfied drawl in his voice. "What do you mean by that?" inquired Dave. "Why, I've been looking out for an airship said to be cruising around this neighborhood. Truck farmer said he saw one early this morning. Then I noticed you in town. I think you'll understand me, young man," continued the stranger, "when I say that I'm on the hunt for a chap about your size running a stolen airship, and whose name is Jerry Dawson." "Why," exclaimed Dave with a quick start, "so are we!" CHAPTER XVII ON THE WING Hiram stared his hardest at the stranger, Dave's eyes quickened with sudden intelligence. Almost in a flash he took in the situation. "You just mentioned a name," he said. "I would like to mention another one." "All right, what?" "James Price." "Hello!" The stranger looked flabbergasted, as the saying goes. He furrowed his brow as if puzzled. "You have made a mistake," continued Dave. "You think one of us two is Jerry Dawson." "I did think it, yes," admitted the man, a trifle less self assured than at first. "Wrong." "Is that so, now?" "Yes. You know Mr. Price, don't you?" "Perhaps I do." "And you are on the lookout for an airship, but not this machine. Let me explain briefly, and see if we cannot come to an understanding." Dave surmised that the stranger must be one of the assistants of Mr. Price, the revenue officer. In a very few minutes he knew that this was true. Assured from Dave's talk that he was not the Dawson boy, and that the hydro-aeroplane before him was not the Drifter, the man became very friendly. It seemed that he was one of the agents of the revenue service. He made his headquarters at Millville, and had received a telegram from Mr. Price the day previous to look out for the stolen airship. This was before Mr. Price had met Dave at Bolton, but immediately after Mr. King at Columbus had told him of the discovery that the Dawsons had made away with the Drifter. So far as the man knew, none of the many assistants of Mr. Price had found any traces of the missing aero-hydroplane. Dave did not enlighten him as to his plans and destination, for the man's present duties were simply those of a lookout at Millville. The stranger stayed and chatted with the boys for over two hours, and then went away. Dave had told him that they would not start out again with the Monarch II until after dark. About six o'clock the man drove up with a wagon. "Thought you might be getting tired of cold dry fare," he said, "so I've brought you a real supper for a change." "Why, say, you're a prince!" cried the impetuous Hiram, as the man lifted a gas oven from the wagon, and then a shallow box, and the contents of both receptacles were revealed. The oven contained two heaping dishes of lamb chops, and potatoes, still quite warm. From the box the stranger produced all the trimmings for a first class meal. "This is pretty kind and thoughtful of you," said Dave. "Nothing too good for friends of Mr. Price," insisted the man. "Besides, I remember how good the present of a meal has been when I've got stranded on duty myself." The speaker, it seemed, had been a member of the Canadian mounted police. The boys whiled the time away interestingly during the next two hours, listening to some of, his exciting experiences with Indians and outlaws in the Winnipeg wilds. It was just after dark when the Monarch started on the second stage of the journey. Three stops were made during the ensuing six, hours. Dave was very tired and Hiram pretty sleepy, when, at three o'clock in the morning, the machine came to rest on a little reed-covered island in the center of a swampy stretch. "We may stay here for several days, I don't know exactly how long," the young aviator told his assistant. "You don't suppose that the Dawsons and the Drifter are anywhere near here, do you?" inquired Hiram. "Perhaps not, but we are near Ironton, on the American side of Lake Superior. If Mr. Price's theories are all right, that fellow, Ridgely, will begin his new operations somewhere in this district." "I see," nodded Hiram. "What are we to do now--sleep?" "As much as we like for the next eight or ten hours." "I'm ready," announced Hiram. "It's been fine and dandy up aloft there, but I notice that when it doesn't make a fellow hungry it does make him good and sleepy." "All right, we'll bunk down, Hiram. I don't think any one is likely to run across us in this out-of-the-way place." "I don't think so, either," responded Hiram, and was soon asleep and snoring. The breakfast programme of the previous morning was repeated later. Hiram called the whole thing a picnic, and was jolly and happy. "One thing, though," he said; "isn't something exciting going to happen soon, Dave?" "We ought to be pretty well satisfied with the splendid cruise of the Monarch II," suggested Dave. "Yes, but I'm getting anxious to run across some of the smugglers. I've read a lot about them in the papers and books. They must be great fellows to tackle, with their cutlasses, and walking the plank, and treasure hoards." "Why, Hiram," laughed Dave, "you're not thinking of smugglers." "What am I then?" "Pirates." "Oh, yes, that's so," agreed Hiram. "Well, the Dawsons are worse than pirates. They won't give up that airship without a tussle, I can tell you." "All I want to do is to locate them," said Dave. "The government will do the rest." Dave left the camp, as they called it, about noon. He had some difficulty in getting from the island to the mainland, as the soil was soggy and at places two feet deep with water. He accomplished the task, however, with only a slight wetting. The young aviator had been given the address, of one of Mr. Price's men at Ironton. He visited his office, but found him absent for the day. Then he wired his progress to the Interstate people and told them if necessary to reach, him at the Northern Hotel. Dave went to the hotel and made arrangement with the clerk as to mail and telegrams. He decided to remain in the vicinity of Ironton till he got in touch with the revenue officer's agent there. He was just leaving the hotel when one placed a hand on his shoulder, with the friendly words: "Why, hello, Dashaway." Dave turned quickly, startled for a moment. Then his face broke into smiles of warm welcome. "Mr. Alden," he said, and returned the friendly hand clasp of his companion. The chance meeting took Dave's mind back instantly to a most pleasant period of his experience since leaving his guardian's home at Brookville. It was Mr. Alden, the moving picture man, who had given Dave what might be called his first start in business life. Dave had posed for the "movies," and later he and Mr. King had taken a prominent part in some motion pictures bringing in the monoplane, the Aegis. "I didn't expect to see you way up here, Dashaway," spoke Mr. Alden. "How are you getting along?" "First class, thanks to the friendly help you gave me in the first place," responded the young aviator. "I'm glad of that. Come up to my room and tell me all about it, Dashaway. Now then, for a talk over old times," resumed the moving picture man, as they were comfortably seated in his room at the hotel. Dave parried a good many questions. He did not exactly wish to tell Mr. Alden about his business, which in the present case was also that of his employers. He managed to lead Mr. Alden to talk of his own affairs. "Oh, I've had the actors up here on a lot of marine scenarios," explained the moving picture man. "They went away only this morning. We've been picturing 'The Island Hermit of Lake Superior,' 'Iron Miners' Revenge,' 'Flight Across the Border,' and 'The Mystery of the Pineries.' Great scenery around here for fittings, you see. There are some of my key negatives on the table there, look them over." Dave examined some of the films with interest. The former kindness of Mr. Alden and his party had left a warm spot in the heart of the young aviator for anything concerning the movies. "There's some plain slides we made to catch the costumes and figures," added Mr. Alden, pointing to a rack containing about a dozen glass negatives. Dave began holding them up to the light in turn. He had inspected perhaps one half of them, when he somewhat startled the moving picture man with a sharp sudden exclamation. "Mr. Alden," he asked quite excitedly, "where did you take that slide?" CHAPTER XVIII ON DESERT ISLAND The young aviator might well ask the question he put to the moving picture man, for the negative in Dave's hand showed plainly the face and figure of Jerry Dawson. There could be no mistake. The boy who had run away with the Drifter had features strongly marked and not readily forgotten. The picture had been taken in the open street. Jerry was standing there talking to a Chinaman. "Some scene you know, Dashaway?" asked Mr. Alden. "No, somebody I know--and am very anxious to find," replied Dave. "So? Let me have a look at it." Dave handed the plate to the moving picture man, who slanted it against the light and nodded intelligently. "Oh, that?" he said. "Yes, I remember all about it." "Where did you take it, Mr. Alden?" pressed Dave. "At Anseton. There's a sort of foreign quarter there, and I was catching up some street scenes. It was the Chinaman I shot. Wanted the costume, you know." "When was that?" asked Dave. "Yesterday morning." Dave asked a score of questions. The moving picture man saw that Dave had some important motive in his inquiries. He did not ask what it was, and was patient and careful in his replies. Dave left Mr. Alden feeling that he had learned a good deal. The presence of Jerry Dawson in Anseton, and that, too, with a Chinaman, verified many of the theories of the young aviator. Dave lost no time in getting to a telegraph office, to send a dispatch that would reach Mr. Price. It told briefly of the progress of the Monarch II and of the definite clew Dave had just discovered. That afternoon our hero hired a hand cart he saw in a blacksmith's yard labeled "For Sale." He drove it as near to the swamp island as he could, without getting stuck in the mud. Then, he called to Hiram, who put himself in wading trim. The empty gasoline cans were over to the cart by Hiram. Dave trundled them to the town, got them filled and to the island, and, returning the cart, was ready to prepare for a new night journey. "It's less than sixty miles that we have to go, Hiram," he advised his assistant. "Then you've found out something definite?" guessed Hiram. "Yes, I have got a trace of Jerry Dawson." "You don't say so!" "I do, and I'll tell you how," and Dave recited the story of his meeting with the moving picture man. "Why, that's just grand," commented Hiram in his exuberant way. "You've good as run down the Drifter." "Not quite, Hiram." "Oh, you'll find the stolen airship. I feel it in my bones. I've felt it ever since I saw the way you took hold of this affair." "Well, I've had good help and a splendid machine, you must remember." "I don't go much on the help," declared Hiram modestly. "As to the Monarch II, though, I never saw such a well-behaved machine. If she does in the water what she's done in the air, she's a record breaker, sure." The machine was put in the best possible trim. It lacked two hours of nightfall but Dave had plenty to occupy his mind. For over an hour he sat looking over maps and memoranda, and blocking out his course. He had been very explicit and painstaking in questioning the moving picture man. He had made inquiries concerning Anseton and its vicinity down to the smallest detail. From all this Dave had decided on a permanent landing place, a sort of headquarters from which he could branch out in his personal investigations in the day time and sally forth on an air hunt in the dark. The aviators could distinctly hear a bell in some tower tolling the hour of nine as they circled a busy city that lay beyond and below, them, a blur of light. Dave at the levers kept the Monarch II at a fair height, constantly scanning an expanse to the north dotted only here and there with lights. Once past the outskirts of the city he turned due north. "Why, hello!" exclaimed his companion, "we're over water!" "Yes," replied Dave, "it's the lake." "Lake Superior! Dave, are we going to cross it?" "A good many times in the future probably, but not tonight. I am looking for a revolving light west of the city, right along the coast." "I'll keep a lookout, too." The lake was here and there dotted with the signal lights of steamers. Along the shore, which Dave skirted closely, various lights their met view. Both boys strained their gaze. Finally Hiram called out sharply: "I see it, Dave." "See what?" "A revolving light." "Where?" "See, just beyond that little cluster of town lights--quite high up." "Yes," answered Dave in a tone of satisfaction. "That is Rocky Point lighthouse. I know my bearings, now." "Are you going to land, Dave?" "Presently." "But you're driving out further over the lake." "Just for a short distance, Hiram," advised Dave. "There's an island down shore where they run a smelter--ah, I think I locate it." Dave was not mistaken. He came within range of some tall, stacks sending out sparks and flames. Now he changed his course. He kept his glance fixed below him and to the right as steadily as his duties at the lever would permit. The Monarch II passed over two small islands. Half a mile beyond them arose a third larger one. It was quite prominent, for the reason, that it presented a range of great cliffs. Dave navigated the air in narrowing circles. Then, timing and calculating a volplane glide, he let the machine down easily to the ground. "Well!" ejaculated Hiram, "you've hit on a pretty dark spot for a camp, Dave." "And a safe one," replied the young aviator. "Mr. Alden described this place to me. It is called Desert Island, and has no inhabitants on it. It seems dark because we are so shut in, but your eyes will soon become used to that." It was a singular place into which the Monarch II had descended. High declivitous, masses of rock formed a sort of immense cairn. They seemed shut in on every side, fully one hundred feet below the level of the cliffs. The farther north they had run the cooler air currents had become. Both boys felt somewhat chilly. "See here," spoke Hiram, after they had seen that the machine was all right and a rubber sheet thrown over the machinery to protect it from the heavy night dews, "a warm cup coffee wouldn't hurt us." "That's right, Hiram," agreed Dave. "We are all shut in here, and even a big fire wouldn't show from the land or the deck of a passenger steamer. You can try your hand at coffee making, if you like." "The coffee is all made, but cold, in these bottles," explained Hiram, fishing out two from the accommodation basket. There were both trees and bushes near by. Hiram gathered some dry branches and roots and soon had a comfortable little campfire going. He poured out the coffee from the bottles into a tin water pail, and soon had it steaming hot. Sandwiches and some bakery stuff Dave had bought at Ironton made a very satisfactory meal. Then they spread some wraps over a heap of dried grass, which they gathered up without much trouble. They rested in luxurious ease, watching the bright, snapping fire glow and feeling its genial warmth. "Well, this is just like Robinson Crusoe, isn't it, Dave?" asked Hiram, with an air of great comfort. "If you are a man Friday, then," rejoined the young aviator with a smile, "you scout around in the morning and see if there are any breaks in these great walls of rock shutting us in." "Oh, then you're not counting an leaving here again by the air route?" inquired Hiram in some surprise. "Not in daylight. I want to find some other way out for that. You see," explained Dave, "this is just an ideal spot as a rendezvous. I want to get over to the city tomorrow, though, to attend to some important business." "How are you going to get there?" "Why, I'll have to trust to my swimming skill, I guess," replied Dave. "Um-m," observed Hiram thoughtfully, and, if the young aviator had been more watchful, he would have noticed that for the rest of the evening his willing assistant seemed to have something on his mind. CHAPTER XIX THE SEARCHLIGHT "Hallo! Hallo!" Dave made the echoes ring with the loud call as he moved up and down and across the queer basin, or cairn, where they had landed in the Monarch II the night previous. He had awakened just at daylight to find Hiram Dobbs mysteriously missing. Dave was not worried at the first, but as he looked around and then explored the immediate neighborhood, he began to get mystified, if not alarmed. Neither did his vigorous shouting bring any response. Dave came back to the camp spot to make a new discovery that puzzled him. On the ground near where they had slept were Hiram's coat, vest, shoes and cap. "Why, I can't understand this at all," mused the young aviator. "Hiram couldn't have done much in the way of climbing up, he appears to be nowhere within hail, and he is not given to play tricks." Dave did not wait to eat anything. He was really concerned about his comrade. He got a long tree branch, stripped it, and went along the side of the cairn, poking in and out among the dense dumps of shrubbery. "Hello," he exclaimed suddenly, as disturbing some vines he saw an opening, and not twenty feet away a natural rocky tunnel, "daylight, and the waves of the lake. I think I understand now." Dave penetrated the passage. As he came out at the other end, he found he faced a rock-strewn stretch of sand. The waves of the lake lapped this. In the distance he could make out Anseton, and nearer still, about a mile distant, the main shore. The shore he was on terminated in a ridge of rocks that ran far out into the water. Dave wondered if the exploring spirit had moved Hiram to attempt an entire circle about the island. "He went away in swimming trim," thought Dave, "so that may be so. I'll go out on that ledge of rocks and explore a little myself." "Hello, Dave Dashaway!" sang out an exultant voice, just as Dave was about to remove his shoes. Around the ledge of rock came a light skiff. The oarsman was Dave's missing comrade. He drove the boat upon the sandy beach and leaped out with a gay laugh. "Why, Hiram," exclaimed the young aviator in marked surprise. "It's me," chuckled Hiram. "Stole a march on you. Nearly dry," he added, shaking his clinging garments. "And oh! what a swim." "You have been to the mainland?" questioned Dave. "Where else? When you said 'swim' last night, it gave me an idea. I'm some swimmer, Dave Dashaway. Always was. Took the prize in a contest in Plum Creek back at home one Fourth of July. I found a way out of that shut in place and made a jolly dive for shore." "But the skiff?" "You'll need one, won't you?" challenged Hiram. "Why, yes. I intended hiring one when I got across from the island." "So you said, and I acted. I did better than hiring a boat, Dave." "How is that?" "Bought one outright. I took my money with me. Found an old fellow who lets out a lot of boats for fishing, and made a bargain. The skiff isn't the staunchest craft on the lake. Leaks a little, and one oar has been split and mended, but it's all right for our little use. Four dollars and a half--and we can sell it for something when we get through using it." "You're a great fellow, Hiram, I must confess," said Dave admiringly. "I'd like to do something to help on this trip of ours, you know." "You've done a good deal this time, I can tell you that," declared Dave. "I can manage all my plans finely, now." They pulled the boat into the shelter of some rocks. Then they returned to the rocky hollow. A good breakfast was in order. Dave announced the importance of his getting to Anseton at once. An hour later the little skiff was launched once more. Dave rowed over to the mainland and lined the shore till well into city waters. He secured the skiff near a public pier, and started on foot for his destination. Left to himself on the island, Hiram proceeded to dry his clothing. Then he puttered about the machine. He read for an hour or two in a book on aeronautics he found in the basket, well on towards the afternoon. Hiram got tired of waiting for Dave. He went through the tunnel finally and roamed about on the rocky shore. There was more of scenery and variety here. The youth watched the boats in the distance. Then he made out the little skiff he had bought that morning making its way in and out among other craft between the island, and the mainland. "What's the news, Dave?" inquired Hiram, as they gained the camp after securing the skiff where it could not be easily seen or found. "The best ever," reported Dave cheerily. "Tell me about it, won't you?" "Well, I saw Mr. Price." "Is he here at Anseton?" "Yes, with his men. I had a long talk with him. He feels pretty good to know that we got here safely with the Monarch II. I told him all about the place where the moving picture man saw Jerry Dawson and the Chinaman. He thinks that is an excellent clew." "I should think it was," said Hiram. "He wants us to try and discover the Drifter. He says it's only a question of time, he and his men running down the smugglers. You see, Hiram, we are interested mainly in finding the aero-hydroplane, and getting it back to the Interstate people." "That's so." "And we must think of that first." "I understand." "We will make a long trip tonight--clear across the lake." "Suppose you get a sight of the Drifter?" "Then we'll know that it is really here, won't we?" "Yes, but are you going to jog right into them and capture them?" "Hardly," laughed Dave. "I hope if we do come across the Drifter, that we can follow it or keep it company, or find out where it is hidden away in the daytime. We will have to run across it before we can decide what circumstances will lead us to do." "They're an ugly crowd--the Dawsons, and probably the fellows with them, too." "I realize that. Mr. Price insisted on my taking these," and Dave began opening a boxlike package he had brought with him in the skiff. "Hello," cried Hiram, as two good sized weapons and some boxes of cartridges were disclosed. "Do we have to use them?" "I hope not," replied Dave, "but Mr. Price said we might come to a pinch where we could use them to show we were not unprotected, and to scare any crowd that tried to interfere with us." "Well, it begins to look like real business," commented Hiram. "That's what we're here for." "Yes, indeed." They had no difficulty in getting the Monarch II aloft, the hollow extending for several hundred feet. The night was ideal for a secret sky voyage. A slight mist hung over the ground, but at a height of five hundred feet the air was perfectly clear. There was bright starlight, and against the radiance they could make out flying birds quite a distance away. Dave took a route across the lake diagonally from Anseton. They skirted the other shore for about ten miles. Then they recrossed the lake. The machine made a sweep along the coast line. "Well, Dave," remarked his trusty assistant, "we've run across no air bird so far." "I didn't expect to, all at once," was Dave's reply. "We can only keep at it." "And trust to luck--I say!" Hiram interrupted himself with a shout. Just beneath them an excursion steamer was ploughing its way through the waves, bound citywards on its return trip. They could hear the music of the band aboard, until now drowned out by hoarse blare of the fog whistle. At the same moment a broad vivid flare of electric radiance shot across the sky from the deck of the steamer. It waved horizontally in some signal to the landing dock two miles further away. Then the operator of this glowing searchlight sent its gleams upwards in a slow way, as if for scenic effect for the passengers on board. "The mischief!" exclaimed Dave bending to levers and starting the Monarch II forward at best speed. Hiram sat staring. He blinked, half-blinded. The machine was irradiated in clear, sharp outlines as the great searchlight glare was focused, a speck of action in the sky. A chorus of cheers went up from the deck of the steamer as its passengers caught sight of the airship. Only for a moment, however, was the brilliant sky picture in view. Dave turned the head of the machine on a volplane sweep, and the searchlight operator could not locate it again. "Well, we've been seen," observed Hiram, "I'm sorry for it," replied Dave simply. "Look there!" cried Hiram abruptly. Dave had selected a course leading over the land, away from the water. As Hiram spoke, his own eye caught sight of some brilliant sparkles of light. It was a rocket, exploding in mid air directly in their course, and it was to this that Hiram Dobbs had directed the attention of the young aviator. CHAPTER XX ACROSS THE BORDER "Did you see it?" asked Hiram, in a great state of excitement. "Yes," responded Dave. "A rocket." "See! See!" continued Hiram-"there's it second one!" "Sure enough." "Dave, this means something." "For us, you think?" "Yes, I do. Keep near the place where these rockets were fired, Dave. Now then, what do you think?" Dave slowed down. There was certainly something to his companion's surmises or suspicions, whatever they were. Directly at the spot whence the rockets had been fired there now suddenly flared up a great reach of flames. Watching these, the interested aviators saw them change to a reddish hue. Three times, at brief intervals, they did this. "Don't you see?" persisted Hiram. "See what?" asked Dave. "A signal." "You think so?" "I surely do. Now, then, look sharp. There are figures about the fire. The fire is pitch or oil, or something that could be made to flame up quickly. One of the men threw something into it from a box. It was red fire." "Why, yes," observed Dave slowly. "I'll admit that was some kind of a signal." "For the airship," interrupted Hiram quickly. "Look, look again, Dave! One of the men is shading his eyes from the glare of the fire, and is looking straight up into the sky. Why, it's plain as day. They saw our airship when that searchlight caught us. They were waiting for an airship to come along." "Another airship than ours, you mean?" "That's it, and I'll bet the Drifter! They took ours for the Drifter. They want us to land. Why, see there, one of the fellows is looking through a field glass--as if he could make us out in the dark away up here!" It did not take Dave long to drift to Hiram's way of thinking. The spot where the fire showed seemed to be a large yard of some kind, attached to a factory. "Of course this is all guess work, Hiram," said Dave, after a moment's thought. "Just the same, it fits in to your theory." "Say," spoke Hiram suddenly, "I've an idea." "What is it, Hiram?" "Make a stop just as soon as you can." "What's that for?" "Let me out, and give me a chance to find out who that signal was intended for." "I declare, it's not a bad plan," said Dave at once. "Can't you find some safe place where we can land?" "There won't be much trouble about that." "Do it, Dave," urged Hiram, "and right away, so I won't lose track of the place yonder." Dave inspected the country below as closely as he could at a distance. He circled to a lower level, and selected a patch of high grass between two corn fields. "Now then," announced Hiram. "I'm off." "I shall wait anxiously for your return, Hiram." "Don't worry, I shan't get into any trouble." Dave did not leave the flying machine. He kept himself in readiness for a flight, should anyone approach the spot. There was not much fear of that, though, he reasoned, as the place was away from the traversed roads and paths. The young aviator had quite a spell of waiting. He began to fear that Hiram had lost his way or that something had happened to him, as an hour passed by. Suddenly, however, his active young assistant bounded into view, chipper and lively as usual. "What news, Hiram?" inquired Dave. "The best in the world." "You have found out something?" "You'll think so when I tell you," declared Hiram. "I found the place where they sent up the rockets without much trouble." "What was it, Hiram?" "An old factory yard. Part of the buildings have been burned down, and three or four loaferish looking fellows seem to live in an old shake down there. They belong to the crowd of that fellow, Ridgely, the smuggler, right enough." "How did you know that, Hiram?" asked Dave. "Because I overheard them. They had let their signal fire burn down low, and were sitting around it talking. I crept up behind an old shed and listened. It was as near as I dared to get, and I could catch only a word now and then. They spoke the name Drifter," asserted Hiram positively. "You didn't see anything of Jerry Dawson?" asked Dave. "No, but--say, yes, they mentioned his name, too. They were all excited about seeing our airship. It seems they were trying to warn the Drifter." "To warn the Drifter?" repeated Dave somewhat puzzled. "Yes." "Why, what for?" "To keep away from the American shore. Somehow, they had found out that the revenue officers were at Anseton. They knew, too, that the Interstate people had an airship out after them. It seems that when we didn't reply to their signal, they guessed that they had hailed the wrong airship. They have sent a man to the city to telegraph to the men on the Canadian side to look out for an airship on their track." "You don't know where they are going to telegraph to, Hiram?" "But I do," cried Hiram triumphantly. "That's my big discovery. They talked over the whole thing. The message is to be sent to a friend at Brantford. He is to ride post haste horseback ten miles west of that place to where the Drifter people have a camp in what they call Big Moose Woods." "Hiram," applauded the young aviator, "you're a jewel. Why, you have simplified the whole business." "And you're going right after the Drifter?" propounded Hiram eagerly. "'We're going to try to," replied Dave, "but first we must get word of all this to Mr. Price." The Monarch II had mounted aloft while they were conversing. Dave started the machine in a direction opposite to that in which they had been going. Hiram noted this. "Are you going back to Desert Island?" he asked. "First, yes. Then I shall skiff over to Anseton and report to Mr. Price direct or through any of his agents I may find." The machine was brought safely to her old moorings within an hour. Dave, after landing on Desert Island, at once rowed over to the mainland. Hiram was full of curiosity when he returned. "It's all right," Dave explained. "I was lucky enough to meet Mr. Price himself. He and his men had already acted on the clew that picture of Jerry and the Chinaman gave us. The old factory yard where the rockets were sent up will be under watch before the night is over, and Mr. Price is going to Brantford on a special boat." "Then the crowd who stole the Drifter are as good as caught!" exclaimed Hiram hopefully. "Hardly," replied Dave. "Mr. Price has advised me to get the Monarch II over to the Canadian side of the lake to night!" "Which you are going to do, Dave?" "Right away." Dave, while in Anseton, had made some necessary inquiries as to the location of Brantford. He had also got a very good idea of Big Moose Woods. His arrangements with the revenue officer had been precise. He was aware that their only chance of getting near to the missing airship was to make new headquarters somewhere in the vicinity of Brantford, just as they had on Desert Island. The darkness was fading in the east when Dave selected a plateau on the top of a high hill as a landing place. Once landed, trees and bushes at its crest hid them from view except from overhead. Dave had used diligence and haste in getting out of possible sight, for day was breaking. They had reach Brantford, sailed over it, and Dave calculated had skirted the vicinity of Big Moose Woods. Nowhere, however, had lights, a campfire or any other token indicated the camp or rendezvous of the Drifter party. "We are within twenty miles of Brantford," Dave announced. "And what's the programme?" inquired Hiram. "Sleep, for we need it. We seem to be safely shut in here. Later we'll plan just what we will do." "If the Dawson crowd are warned all around about us and the revenue officers, they may run for some other territory," suggested Hiram. "We want to be on the lookout for that," replied the young aviator. They made themselves a comfortable bed, and both were soon asleep. Hiram woke up first; and found the sun shining in his eyes, and was about to shift his position, intent on a longer nap, when he checked himself not moving a muscle. Through his half closed eyelids, still feigning sleep, Hiram kept his glance fixed on one spot. He almost held his breath. Thus for nearly five minutes he lay inert, but every nerve on the keenest edge. His glance widened and seemed to be following some disappearing object. Then he sat straight upright, stared fixedly down the hill, and leaning over pulled his companion by the sleeve. "Dave! Dave!" whispered the excited boy-"wake up! We've been discovered!" CHAPTER XXI A CHASE IN MID AIR Dave roused up, wide awake in an instant. He was about to spring to his feet, when Hiram pulled him back with the words: "Don't get up." "Why not?" inquired the somewhat puzzled young aviator. "You'll be seen." "Who by?" "A man who was just here." "Do you mean that, Hiram?" exclaimed Dave in a startled tone. "I certainly do. Look," said Hiram, pointing, and then he added: "No, the trees shut him out now. As I just said, though, we have been discovered." Now Hiram arose to his feet, the danger of being seen appearing to have passed. Dave followed his example. "Some one was here, you say?" began Dave. "Yes." "Who was it?" "A fellow who looked like some of the half breed Indians we saw fishing over near Anseton. I woke up, and he came in range clear as a picture. It was over by that thicket of pine trees. There he stood, staring at our machine, then at us. He seemed to take it in with a good deal of surprise. Finally he threw up his hands as if he was making up his mind to something, and started on a run down the hill." "In that direction?" asked Dave, pointing due east. "Yes, in the direction of Brantford. I tell you, Dave, he's a spy. If he ran across us accidentally then he's gone to tell his friends about discovering the airship." "That doesn't follow," remarked Dave thoughtfully, "but I'm glad you saw him." "Yes, I think we need to keep a pretty close lookout. Say, Dave," questioned Hiram, "if he is some friend of the Dawson crowd, and has gone to tell them about us, what do you suppose they'll do?" "I have no idea," replied the young aviator. "But they won't catch us napping." Dave kept a close watch out in all directions while Hiram hurried up a quick breakfast. They got through with the meal rapidly. Then Dave went over the machine, seeing that the gasoline tanks were full and the gearing and oiling apparatus in good order. Two hours went by, and there were no developments that indicated that the visitor to their camp had been other than a straggler, with no purpose in view in his rapid disappearance. Hiram became more matter-of-fact, and guessed he had "got scared for nothing." All the same he kept a close lookout all of the time, particularly in the direction of Brantford. Dave was planning a visit on foot to that town. He decided, however, that he would wait till afternoon so as to be sure that there was no occasion for worry. Both lads discovered the fallacy of their theories at the same moment. "Look!" suddenly shouted Hiram, pointing. "I see," said Dave calmly, but under the surface greatly stirred up. "It's the Drifter!" "Yes." "What are you going to do?" "Come," spoke Dave simply, and sprang into his seat in the Machine. Hiram hastily collected their few belongings scattered about the spot. He bundled them into the accommodation basket, and was in his place almost as soon as Dave. The eyes of both of the young aviators were fixed on a rapidly approaching object--an airship. Dave did not have to glance at its construction more than once to know definitely that it was the stolen Drifter. Whoever was at the levers, Jerry or his father, thoroughly understood his business, Dave saw that. The aero-hydroplane came rather abruptly into view over a wooded hill top, and was rapidly approaching them. "You see, I was right," said Hiram hastily. "That half breed was a spy, at least to that crowd. He has directed them here." "All ready," ordered Dave, in a set, sturdy tone, and the self starter began to work. "What is it--a chase?" fluttered Hiram. "We'll have to wait and see. You know what kind of fellows the Dawsons are. I'm not going to sit like a bird in a nest and have them swoop down upon us, though." "There are three--you can count them in their airship," said Hiram, shading his eyes and craning his neck. "Four," corrected Dave. "The Drifter has a capacity of five ordinary people, Mr. Randolph told me." The Monarch II made a magnificent slanting rise up into the air. Dave knew the splendid qualities of the machine under his control. They included an ability for a quick light ascent. He had no idea of the purpose of the Drifter crowd, but of course their main object was to capture their rival. The question was, failing in this, how, far would they go in the way of crippling or even destroying the Monarch II. The Drifter was headed on a course directly towards the eminence which the boys had just left behind them. There had come up an eight hour wind about noon, and Dave knew that would be child's play maneuvering to avoid the enemy intent on annoying or injuring them. He drove ahead at a six hundred feet level and waited for the Drifter crowd to indicate what their purpose was. "They are changing their course!" said Hiram quickly, as the Drifter wheeled suddenly. "They are going to try a new ascent," explained Dave. "Why?" "To get to a higher level than ourselves." "Then they mean mischief?" "I am afraid that they do," replied the young aviator. "Maybe they are trying to scare us," suggested Hiram. Dave was now certain that the purpose of the Dawsons was to pursue, capture or intimidate them, or drive them away. They had a superb machine, and as they made a far lateral shoot it brought them considerably higher up than the Monarch II. In fact, after one or two circles, like a huge bird swooping after prey, the Drifter came almost directly over them. Dave's tactics were now purely defensive and evasive. There were five people aboard the aero-hydroplane, and they were desperate persons. He was not surprised when an object same shooting downwards from the Drifter. It struck one of the plane wires and then dropped earthwards. "Something's whipped loose," spoke Hiram quickly. "It's one of the elevator wires," said Dave, darting a quick glance at the spot. "This won't do." Now it was an over-water flight with no measured course to pursue. The Drifter tried to repeat its recent tactics. Dave noticed that the Monarch II had become somewhat faulty in its running. He was anxious to get away from the enemy. His main efforts were directed towards preserving a sure balance, for once or twice there was a wobble, as if the machine was hurt in some vital part. The young aviator made out a buoy a few miles to the west. Beyond it was a little settlement. He set his course for reaching it, and directed his full attention to the levers and the angle indicated. The indicator was directly in front of the pilot seat. It showed positively how the machine was flying, on the top or down bank. It comprised a cup with lines set about ten degrees, and gave a sure safety limit. Only the pendulum was movable. This was mounted on an arm always perpendicular, a small mirror reflecting the variations of the pendulum. Climbing and banking, Dave got quite a lead on the Drifter, but the aero-hydroplane kept up a steady pursuit. "There's something the matter besides the broken wire," spoke Dave to his anxious companion. "The oil intake is dogged or one of the planes loose. We can't take any risks." Dave sent the Monarch II on a downward shoot. There was a single pontoon in the center of the craft, with small tanks beneath the planes to prevent tipping over in the water. Dave aimed to hit the bay near to the shore. Suddenly the aircraft acted queer. It had evidently struck a hole in the air. The machine seemed fairly to drop from under its occupants, and thirty feet from the water, Dave was lifted from his seat and took a sudden plunge over-board. He went under the surface and came up dazed and nearly stunned. As he floated, dashing the water from his eyes, he saw the Drifter, now a flying boat, cut around a point of rocks, bearing straight down upon him. Dave looked quickly about him for the Monarch II. To his surprise, as it scudded across the waves for perhaps a hundred feet on its momentum, it lifted again free of the surface of the bay. He made out Hiram clambering from his seat like a sailor among the riggings of a ship. He saw the machine go up on a sharp slant, clear the shore of the bay, and disappear beyond the high cliffs lining it. Then something struck him. It was some light part of the rotary engined aero-hydroplane, the Drifter, cutting the water like a knife. His head dizzied, and the young aviator went under the surface of the lake with a shock. CHAPTER XXII DAVE A CAPTIVE It took Dave an hour to find out just what had happened to him. He roused up to find two men carrying him, one at his feet, one at his shoulders. All that he could guess was that they were on land. How he had been fished out of the water, and what had become of the Drifter, the young aviator had no means of knowing. The two men were rough looking fellows and reminded Dave of dock laborers or loiterers. They were big and sturdy, and as Dave stretched out and showed signs of life, one of them remarked gruffly. "None of that--no squirming, now." Dave's clothes were soggy and dripping. He felt somewhat sore on one side of his head, but so far as he could figure it out he was not crippled; or seriously hurt. The young aviator cast his eyes about him to, learn that they were going through a patch of timber. Then came a meadow-like stretch, and then a thicket. They had not gone far into that before the men dropped him on the ground and stood over him. "Can you walk?" asked one of the two. "I think I can," replied Dave, arising quite nimbly to his feet. The instant he did this both of the men reached, out and seized an arm. Dave was thus pinioned tightly as the men forced him along. "Most there," growled one of them gruffly. "Good thing," retorted the other. Finally they came to a dense thicket that covered a rise. About half way up this, almost hidden by saplings and vines, Dave made out a grim looking patched-up building. It was an old hut to which various additions had been made. One of Dave's companions uttered a peculiar whistle. The door of the place was opened, and a disreputable looking fellow like themselves admitted them. "Hello, who's this?" he spoke in a tone of curiosity. "Oh, some one to take care of," was the short reply. "He don't look like a revenue." "Worse than that. Ridgely will tell you when he comes," was the indifferent retort. "Have you a place to keep him tight and safe?" "I guess so," laughed the other, "a dozen of them." "One will do." Dave was led through several rooms. Then they came to a partition formed of heavy timbers. In its center was a stout door with an immense padlock. "Get in there," spoke the most ferocious of his captors, giving Dave a push. Then the door was closed with a crash that showed how heavy it was. Dave could hear those outside securing the padlock. "A prisoner, eh?" mused Dave, looking about him. "Yes, it is, indeed, tight and safe." Dave's prison place was gruesome in the extreme. On three sides was solid rock, forming a semicircular back to the room. The partition, closed the entire front. Near its top in several places were cut out apertures, admitting air and a little light. There were some broken boxes in the place and a heap of burlap. Dave decided that it had been used at some time or other as a place of storage. He did not yet feel normal, so he sat down on one of the boxes and felt about his head. "Just a bruise," he reported. "I suppose they, dragged me aboard of the Drifter from the water, but what about Hiram and the Monarch II?" Dave started up, all weakness and dizziness disappearing as if by magic, as he thrilled over the possible peril of his comrade. With a recollection only of his last sight of Hiram grid the Monarch II, he feared what might have happened to either or both. It worried Dave a good deal and made him restless and unhappy, but finally he figured out a theory. In some unaccountable way the Monarch II had no sooner glided along on its pontoon, than it had run straightway up into the air, as though the self starter was in perfect action. Dave recalled Hiram struggling to reach the pilot's seat. Then he had witnessed the disappearance of the Monarch II. "I doubt if Hiram could manage the machine--I even doubt with something wrong with it, as there surely was, if he could keep it adrift," decided Dave. "What then?" The young aviator pictured Hiram and the machine in a tangle among the trees, or dropping upset among the rocks. He had not seen anything of the Dawsons or the Drifter since he had fallen into the water of the bay. Perhaps, he reasoned, they had resumed an air chase of the fugitive. Dave had several hours to himself. He detected no sound or movement outside of the strange room he was in. It was dreadfully dull and lonesome, and he wondered what the outcome of his present adventure would be. It was well along in the day, when Dave from sheer weariness and worry had lain down among the heaps of burlap, that a diversion came to monotony. He started up as he heard voice outside of the door. Then the padlock rattled, the door opened, and some one stepped across the threshold. The visitor stared about to locate Dave, and spoke the words: "That you, Dashaway?" The room was lighter now, with the door half open. Dave rubbed his eyes and strained his gaze, and took a good look at the speaker. "Don't you know me?" challenged the latter. "Oh, yes," replied Dave, "I see now. You are the gentleman we rescued from the lake at Columbus." "I don't suppose you think me much of a gentleman just now, Dashaway," spoke Ridgely, for, he was, in fact Dave's visitor. His tone was somewhat regretful, and not at all unfriendly. Dave was shrewd enough to discover this, and politic enough to take quick advantage of it. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "Of course you are with the crowd who had me locked in here." "I'm sorry to say that's true," responded Ridgely. "It's not pleasant here, I can tell you," said Dave, "and the whole thing is pretty high handed, don't you think so, Mr. Ridgely?" "I don't think it, Dashaway, I know, it. See here, I've got nothing against you. On the contrary, I owe you a good deal. I'm not forgetting that you saved my life when my launch struck the rocks near Columbus." Dave was silent, resolved to let the man have his say out. "I was in a fix then, I was in a fix before I got there, and I'm afraid I'm in a fix now," continued Ridgely. "I've come to see you in the right spirit, Dashaway." "How is that?" inquired Dave. "Sick of the whole combination. I thought I was smart, but you and your people are smarter. Young Dawson convinced me that we could run things so our airship could make trips for a long time, and here you are on our trail within seventy-two hours." "Yes, Mr. Ridgely," acknowledged the young aviator. "They found a clew and started pursuit right after you stole the Drifter." "You mean you did. Don't be modest, Dashaway. I've learned a good deal about you, and if I hadn't about decided to quit business I'd offer you a job." "What!" smiled Dave--"smuggling?" "Well, it pays pretty big, you know." "Does it?" replied Dave. "I fail to see it. I wouldn't like to be in a position where I was being chased half over the country." "H'm, we won't discuss it," retorted Ridgely in a moody tone. "I came to tell you that you won't be hurt any." "But I want to get away from here," insisted Dave. "That will be all, too," Ridgely assured him. "You see, we know now that things are going to break up. I don't suppose you would tell me how closely the revenue officers are on our track." "So close," replied Dave gravely, "that you won't dare to cross the border any more." "Are they on the Canadian side yet?" questioned Ridgely anxiously. "I don't know that, and I shouldn't feel right in telling you if I did," replied Dave. "You had better let me go, Mr. Ridgely. It won't sound well, when things get righted, that you kept me a prisoner here." "I haven't all the say about that, Dashaway," confessed Ridgely in a rueful way. "I don't think the Dawsons will let you go until they are sure of making themselves safe." "Do you know what became of our airship, Mr. Ridgely?" Dave asked pointedly. "No, I don't--none of us do. Young Dawson is pretty good in the air, but he didn't seem to know how to get off the water quickly. After we got you aboard, we lost a lot of time getting you ashore, and, up in the air again, when we started in the direction we had seen your airship go, we could find no trace of it." "I hope nothing his happened to Hiram," thought Dave, very anxiously. "If I get away," resumed Ridgely, "I want you to tell the people after me, if you can, that I'm all through with the smuggling business. I've had my fill of it." The speaker turned to leave the room, but Dave halted him with the question: "What are you going to do about me, Mr. Ridgely?" "I am going to order the people here to treat you the best they know how," was the prompt response. "That's all very well enough," said Dave, "but I have business to attend to." "What business, Dashaway?" "Our airship and my friend." Ridgely looked troubled. He was thoughtfully, silent for a moment or two. Then he said: "Look here, Dashaway, our men are looking for your airship, and that means your friend, too, of course. I've got to go to Brantford, but I shall leave word that they must look after your friend, and let you go the minute I send back word that the coast is clear for them to scatter." "But what about the Drifter, Mr. Ridgley?" persisted Dave. "It is the property of my employers. I came after it, and I want it." A faint smile of mingled amusement and admiration crossed the face of Ridgely. Reckless fellow that he was, he could not fail to recognize the fact that Dave, indeed, had business to attend to. "You take it pretty cool, Dashaway," he observed. "Because I am in the right," asserted Dave, "as you well know. The Dawsons are malicious people. I want you to warn them that if they do, any unnecessary injury to the Drifter, it will make it the worse for them in the final reckoning that is bound to come." "I don't think they will do the airship any injury." "You don't know them as I do. Desperate fellows like the Dawsons will do anything at times." "Dashaway, don't you think you are rather hard on them--and on me?" "I know the Dawsons--I don't know much about you." "I am not so bad as you think I am." "Then why don't you set me free?" "We won't discuss that, now. You had better think it over." "I have thought it over. I am grateful to you for saving me, but--well at present I can't do anything." "You mean, you won't." "Well, have it that way if you wish." "You'll be sorry some day," said Dave, bluntly. Ridgely left the room. He closed the door after him with an assurance to Dave that things would be "all right." Just then there was the sound of some one hurrying into the next room, and an excited voice shouted out in an exultant tone: "Say, father, we've got the other one, too!" CHAPTER XXIII HIRAM'S ADVENTURES The young aviator at once recognized the voice in the adjoining room which spoke the excited, words: "We've got the other one, too!" It was Jerry Dawson who had spoken. Dave knew that the statement could refer to no other than his missing chum. Dave was in something of a flutter of suspense. Then his eye brightened and a cheery smile overspread his face, as he caught the words in a dearly familiar tone: "Say, do you want to kill a fellow?" It was Hiram who spoke, in a resentful and disgusted voice. Its accents were as pert and ringing as ever, and Dave was overjoyed to know that his loyal comrade was alive and apparently unhurt. "Say, Dawson," here broke in Ridgely, "I want to speak to you." "Put this fellow in with Dashaway," ordered Jerry, and then the door of Dave's prison place was pulled open. A familiar form came limping and stumbling across the threshold, and the door was slammed to and locked after him. "Hiram!" cried Dave in genuine delight. He drew back as his friend faced him. He had noticed that Hiram limped. Now he saw that one arm was in a sling. Besides that, Hiram's face was one mass of cuts and scratches. One eye was nearly closed. "Oh, Hiram!" cried Dave aghast. "Look is if I'd been through a threshing machine, do I?" grinned the plucky lad. "What happened?" asked Dave seriously. "Dave," declared Hiram almost solemnly, "I honestly don't know. The machine drove upwards so quickly I wondered if some jar or the broken wire that was switching about didn't start the lever. By the time I got to the pilot's seat the machine was on a terrific whiz." "What did you do?" asked Dave. "Not much of anything, except to get rattled," confessed Hiram. "I tried to circle, and she went banking. Then the Machine took the prettiest drift you ever saw. All of a sudden one of the planes dropped and then we landed." "Where?" "On top of some trees. Right beyond was a deep basin, chuck full of undergrowth. The machine just took a slide off the tops of the trees, and slipped down to the bottom of the basin. Then she turned, I was thrown out." "What then, Hiram?" pressed Dave in a concerned way. "Well, Dave, we had briers and brambles on the farm, but nothing to compare with those Canadian thistles, or whatever they were. Look at my face." "And your arm?" Hiram shrugged his shoulders resignedly. "The half breed who looked at it said it was broken. He seemed to be some kind of an Indian doctor. He rubbed my scratches and bruises with some leaves and set my arm in splints." "Why, where did the half breed come in?" inquired Dave. "Well, as soon as I got my wits from the tumble, I thought of you. I tried to get up out of the basin, but the sides were so steep I couldn't make it. So I--well, Dave," added Hiram with a queer laugh, "I sort of busied myself about the airship. It wasn't much battered up. I feared the Dawson crowd might come hunting for the machine, so--well, I sort of busied myself about the airship," repeated Hiram, with a strange chuckle. "I was resting when that half breed and another fellow came along. The Indian is a great trailer, I guess, for he was sharp enough to notice the tree tops and the bushes the machine had rolled over. Anyhow, down he came on a rope into the basin and found me." "And the Monarch II," said Dave. "No, he didn't find the machine," declared Hiram. "But--" "Let me tell my story, Dave," interrupted Hiram. "He got me up aloft. Then he said I was badly hurt, and started in to mend me up. Then they brought me here. They kept talking about the airship, and tried to make me tell where it was. I wouldn't, and didn't." "Wasn't it in the basin you spoke of?" inquired Dave wonderingly. "Yes." "Then why--?" "Hush! We're going to have visitors." This was true. There was a sound at the door of their prison room, and the padlock was displaced. Jerry Dawson stepped into view, his father behind him. "Well," he said, with a leer meant to be clever, "I suppose you fellows know me?" "We know you, Jerry," retorted Hiram, "only too well." "I'm boss here," boasted Jerry. "That's fine, isn't it?" said Hiram. "And I've got you. We'll have your airship soon, too. You'll do some walking getting back home, I'm thinking." "What do you want of us, Jerry?" inquired Dave, coolly. "I want to know where that airship of yours is in the first place." "Put it in the last place, Jerry," suggested Hiram, "for you won't find out from me." "I'll bet I will," vaunted Jerry. "I have a good mind to punch you for making all the mischief you have." "You're safe, Jerry, seeing I'm disabled," said Hiram. "Bah! Say, Dashaway, who's working against us here or across the lake besides yourself?" "You will have to, guess that, Jerry," replied Dave. "You won't tell?" "No. I'll say this, though: You had better try to even up things in some way. The Interstate people and the government know all about you, and you are likely to have some explaining to do." Jerry looked worried, but he feigned indifference. "I'll keep you two safe and quiet till I get ready to quit, all the same," he snapped out, and slammed the door shut and locked it. Dave and Hiram listened in silence for some minutes to sounds in the next room. They could only catch the echo of voices. Jerry and his father seemed to be engaged in conversation. Suddenly there was an interruption. There was the sound of an excited voice, drawing nearer each moment. A door slammed. Then heavy running footsteps echoed out, ending only as some one appeared to burst unceremoniously into the next room. "What's the row?" the boys heard in the gruff tones of Jerry's father. "Say!" shouted the intruder, evidently a member of their group, "they've done it!" "Who have?" shouted out Jerry quickly. "The revenuers." "What do you mean?" "They got Ridgely." A cry of dismay and excitement ran through the next room. "How do you know?" demanded the elder Dawson. "I saw them myself--right near Brantford. What's more, they're coming this way to get the rest of us." At this announcement came another cry. "You are sure of that?" "When was this?" "How soon will they be here?" "Who is responsible for this?" So the cries and questions ran on. There was an excited discussion all around. "Maybe Ridgely is a turncoat!" cried somebody. "Well, we can't talk about that now--we must look out for ourselves," said another. "Right you are. Let us get out of here as soon as we possibly can!" "That's the talk!" CHAPTER XXIV THE ESCAPE BY AIRCRAFT "That's good," instantly cried Hiram Dobbs. "They'll have troubles of their own now, maybe." He and Dave listening closely, could now detect bustle and excitement in the rooms beyond their own prison place. They could hear Jerry Dawson fussing and bawling about, while his father's gruff voice seemed to give orders to the men in the place. "I wonder what they will do with us now?" inquired Hiram. "We shall probably soon know," returned Dave. "Get those fellows out of there, you two," they finally heard Jerry Dawson order. The door of the prison room was unlocked and thrown open. "March out," ordered Jerry. Dave and Hiram took their time about obeying the mandate. Then at a word from Jerry two of his men hastened them across the threshold, seizing them by the arms. "Ouch!" roared Hiram. "Do you want to smash my arm all over again?" The man who held him was less rough at this. In the room the boys saw Jerry, his father, the two men who held them and three others. Before Dawson lay a large, round bundle. A smaller one lay at the feet of one of the other men. "Now, then," spoke Dawson, "ready and quick is the word. I've divided it up fair, and you'll find your share in that bundle. You three had better get it and yourselves to some safe place." "Yes," spoke one of the men, "the revenuers will surely be here soon." "You two," continued Dawson to the men had Dave and Hiram in charge, "bring the boys along." "Where to?" was asked. "Just follow us," was the surly response. "Give a hand, Jerry." The two Dawsons lifted the bundle at their feet and started from the room. There were sounds as if some one was pounding on the door at the front of the building. The Dawsons, however, did not go that way. They quickened their steps, the captives were led through several rooms, and finally a door at the rear of the place was opened. "Hold them tight now," ordered Jerry. "Yes, and if they make any outcry quiet them the way you know how," added his father. Dave and Hiram were surprised to find themselves now in complete darkness. "We're going through some kind of a tunnel," whispered the young aviator to his companion a moment later. Their captors forced them along in the steps of the Dawsons. They must have proceeded several hundred feet thus, when the tunnel grew lighter. Then they arrived at an exit letting out into a deep, narrow ravine. "They must have taken this route to escape from the revenue officers," Dave told his companion, in a guarded tone. "Shall we set up a fight and yell?" proposed the audacious Hiram. "Not with that broken arm of yours and four to one," dissented Dave. "Broken arm, nothing! Say-hello! Why, they're taking us to their airship!" exclaimed Hiram. They had come upon the Drifter at a point where the ravine spread out and a long level space showed. "Now then, brisk is the word," spoke the elder Dawson. He and his son carried the bundle up to the Drifter and managed to stow it aboard. Jerry climbed into the pilot's seat. His father drew some stout double cord from his pocket. "Tie up those boys hand and foot," he ordered grimly. "See here, Mr. Dawson," spoke up Dave, "what are you going to do with us?" "You'll find that out very soon," was the gruff reply. The two men proceeded to secure the arms and feet of the captives. Dave knew it was useless to resist the rough treatment he received. Hiram was not so patient. "Say, this is an outrage!" he cried out. "What's the matter with you?" demanded Jerry Dawson, leaning from his seat with a scowl on his face. "What do you want to tie a one-armed fellow up for?" grumbled Hiram. "That's so," said the elder Dawson. "Just attend to his feet and one arm. No use making him safer. He won't be very dangerous with only a broken arm free." First Dave and then Hiram were lifted into the seats behind the pilot's post. As has been said, the Drifter could carry five passengers, and they were not crowded or uncomfortable. "They are going to carry us away with them," whispered Hiram to his companion. "Let them," replied the young aviator. "It may give us a chance to outwit them someplace along the line." Hiram chuckled. Dave stared at him strangely, but his doughty companion did not explain what he had in his mind. "All ready," announced Jerry, his hand on his lever. His father got into the seat behind him. "Wait a minute," he spoke to his son. "You two," he added to the men who had accompanied them, "better get to your friends, divide up your plunder and make yourselves scarce as soon as you can." "That's what we intend to do," replied one of the men. "Hold on!" exclaimed his companion, suddenly turning around at the echo of a loud shout. "What's the trouble now, I wonder?" "Hey, stop the airship! Stop them! Stop them!" yelled the strident voice of a man coming pell mell down the ravine path. He was in a frantic state of excitement and waving his arms wildly. "Don't lose a second," spoke Dawson quickly. Jerry gave the starter a whirl. Dave noticed that his father was quite excited and kept watching the advancing runner. "Stop them, I tell you!" yelled this individual whom Dave recognized as one of the three individuals left behind at the hut with the other bundle. "What for?" shouted one of the two men near the airship. "Robbers-thieves! That bundle they gave us!" "What about it?" "No silks--nothing but a lot of worthless truck. They've cheated us and are making away with the real plunder." Whiz! up went the airship. The three men ran after it. The newcomer shook his fist vengefully after the machine. The other two picked up rocks and hurled them in its wake. "O. K.," chuckled Jerry, as the Drifter shot far out of reach of their deluded confederates. "Do your level best, Jerry," spoke his father. "The revenue men may have another airship in commission." "Oh, I guess not," retorted Jerry airily. "Say, what about the one these fellows had?" "They know and won't tell. Some of crowd will find it, though I told them if they did to dismantle it. They can get something for the old junk." "About all they will get, eh?" leered Jerry. "I'm thinking so." "You didn't give them any of the silk?" "Not I." "That was slick," chuckled Jerry. "Hear him! He's a fine one, isn't he?" observed Hiram to Dave. "Yes, Jerry can't be true, even to his friends," replied the young aviator. Dave watched Jerry at the lever. He had to admit that his enemy knew considerable about running an aircraft. The only criticism he could make was that several times Jerry took some big risks in daringly banking, when the least variation of the wind would have made the Drifter turn turtle. It was six hours later when the airship descended. At times the machine had made fully sixty miles an hour. Long since they had passed the apparent limits of civilization. The course was due northwest. Vast forests spread out under them. It was only for the first time in one hundred miles, as they neared a small settlement on a river, that Jerry let down on the speed, and they descended at a spot about a mile from a settlement in the center of a big field. Dave and Hiram were left in the chassis, while Jerry and his father left the machine. They conversed for some time, then it was arranged that Jerry should proceed to the settlement and purchase some provisions. His father came up to the machine as Jerry departed. "See here, you two," he spoke in his usual gruff way, "we'll give you something to eat and, drink when Jerry comes back." "Where are you taking us to, Mr. Dawson?" asked the young aviator. "We are taking you so far from home, that you can't tramp back in time to pat any more of your friends on our track," was the blunt reply. "Another couple of hundred miles, and, if you behave yourself, we'll set you loose." The man spoke as if the proposition was perfectly simple and honest one. "Another couple of hundred miles?" repeated Dave. "That is what I said, Dashaway." "You are carrying things with a high hand, Mr. Dawson." "Yes? Well, I know what I am doing." "You may overreach yourself." "Humph! I'll take my chances on that. You are smart, Dashaway, but you can't scare me and you can't get the best of me." "But the law will get you, some day or another." "Bah! I'm tired and don't want to listen to your talk. I tell you I know what I am doing." "You won't release us now?" "No." "That is final?" "It certainly is, and you may as well save your breath and not mention it again. I am tired out and don't want any more of such talk." "Well, see here--" broke in Hiram. "I won't listen to any more. Shut up." With the words Dawson went over to a hammock at a little distance, spread his coat over it, and lay down to rest. It was not five minutes before his captives could hear him snoring loudly. Hiram had been watching his every movement in an intense way. Now he leaned over towards Dave. His eyes were snapping with excitement and there was a broad smile on his face, as he whispered into the ear of the young aviator one word. It was: "Hurrah!" CHAPTER XXV CAUGHT CONCLUSION "Hurrah!" was the word that Hiram Dobbs spoke exultantly, and Dave looked at him in profound surprise. Hiram had lifted himself up from the seat. Now he went through some movements that almost startled the puzzled young aviator. Suddenly his arm shot out of the sling, and as suddenly Hiram, though with a wince, swung it around once or twice, and the three splints holding it cracked and split audibly. "Hey, Hiram!" gasped Dave. "S-sh!" uttered his assistant warningly. Hiram ran his free hand down into his pocket. He drew out the big pocket knife he carried. It was more of a tool than a whittling toy, for he used it in tinkering about the airship. With his teeth, Hiram opened its largest blade. He gave a slash at the cords surrounding his other arm and his feet. Then he leaned over towards Dave. A few deft strokes of the keen blade, and Dave, like himself, was free. "Easy," he whispered, as Dave started up. "I'll watch Dawson. You get into the pilot's seat." "Good for you, Hiram!" whispered back the young aviator, fairly thrilling with the excitement of the moment. Dave took in every detail of the mechanism before his eyes. He made sure of no faulty start. "All ready," he announced after a minute or two. "Good-bye!" spoke Hiram, with a gay bold wave of his hand in the direction of the sleeping, Dawson. "Put on the muffler," ordered Dave, as the exhaust began to sizzle. Hiram did so. It was too late, however, to avoid sounding a warning to Dawson. The big man started up with a yell. He came to his feet roaring out: "Come back!" "I hope you'll find the walking good!" shouted Hiram, waving his hand in adieu to the amazed Dawson. "Hiram, you're a genius!" cried Dave. The Drifter struck a course as true as a die. The splendid machine and the young aviator were both at their best. There was a last fading picture of a forlorn man convulsed with rage and despair. Then the two boy aeronauts turned their back on the enemies who had been hoisted by their own petard. "It's great, its grand," cheered Hiram, bubbling over with joy, as the exhilarating air and their magical progress made him realize what freedom meant to its fullest extent. "I don't understand. Your arm, Hiram?" said Dave. His jolly assistant waved the arm in question gaily. "Wasn't it hurt?" "Yes, and badly, I thought," reflected Hiram. "It was numb and useless when the half breed attended to it, but he was mistaken and so was I in thinking that any bones were broken." "They were not?" "Not a bit of it. Don't you see? It pains, and I'm bragging when I swing it around as if it was as good as ever, but I can use it." "You have used it to a grand purpose, Hiram." "I didn't notice that I could use it until they locked me up with you." "Why didn't you tell me then?" "Oh, I wanted to surprise you." "You have, Hiram." "I thought I'd play 'possum on those smart fellows. I played the cripple strong. You see what has come of it." When they had gone nearly one hundred miles, Dave saw that the gasoline supply was running low. Luckily they were near a little town. They made a descent on a river, much to the delight and wonder of the whole place, bought a new supply, and resumed their flight. It was after ten o'clock in the evening when the welcome lights of Anseton came into view. Dave did not look around for some hiding place on the outskirts on this occasion. He startled a drowsy policeman by landing in the middle of some vacant lots on his beat. A brief explanation was made to the officer, and a man hired to watch the Drifter until they returned. Then Dave and Hiram hurried to the hotel in Anseton where Mr. Price made his headquarters. The revenue officer was found. He listened to the story of the two young aviators in amazement and admiration. Then he reported results of his own efforts. Ridgely was under arrest, two of his accomplices were being then pursued by his assistants, and the smuggling combination was all broken up. "The clews you have given us were fine ones, Dashaway," said the official gratefully. "You have done the government a vast service, I can tell you." Mr. Price insisted on the boys taking a needed rest. He sent one of his men to guard the Drifter, and, after a famous meal, made his guests agree to sleep in a comfortable bed for the first time in nearly a week. It was just after they had entered their room that Dave made the remark. "You know we had better see if those friends of the Dawsons have found the Monarch II and made away with it, Hiram." "Well, I can tell you that they haven't," replied Hiram, with a confident chuckle. "How can you know that?" "Why, Dave, when I was shut in with the machine in that basin, I took it apart. You know it was made to do that, so it could be shipped readily. Well, I'll bet you I hid those parts in places in that basin where nobody can locate them but myself." "Good for you!" commended Dave heartily. "I think the Interstate people will have something pleasant to say to you when they know all the wonders you've done in chasing their stolen airship." It was the brightest day in the year, it seemed to the two young aviators, as they reached Columbus by train, and started at once for Mr. King's hangar. Old Grimshaw had met them at the depot. He was full of friendly chatter, seemed to be chuckling over some secret surprise he had in store for them, and rushed them towards the headquarters of the Aegis. "Yes, Mr. King is back," he advised the boys. "Did he find Mr. Dale?" inquired Dave anxiously. "He'll tell you." Dave and Hiram had much to relate. Two boys probably never received a more pleasant welcome than they, when with the Drifter they reported to the manager of the Interstate Aeroplane Company. Mr. Randolph had the president and two directors of the concern on hand to meet them. Their stirring story was taken in by the august business men with an attention and appreciation that of itself paid the lads well for all the duty done. The boys had remained long enough at Anseton to have some men go with them and locate the hidden sections of the Monarch II, and arrange to have them shipped by rail back to the factory. Dave felt pretty rich when he left the Interstate works with a check for five hundred dollars in his pocket, and an offer of advanced employment for himself and his loyal and useful assistant for two seasons ahead. "I want to see Mr. King before I decide what I will do," Dave told Mr. Randolph, his mind full of the much discussed flight across the Atlantic in the giant airship. "You can have your two hundred and fifty dollars any time you like, Hiram." he added to his chum on their way to the depot. As they now reached the Aegis hangar, Grimshaw stepped aside with a pleased laugh. "Safe and sound and famous. Here they are, Mr. King!" he shouted. "There's no doubt of that," chorused the friendly voice of the expert aviator. "Dave! Hiram! A thousand times welcome." If he had been own father to the lads, Mr. King could not have greeted them more affectionately. "You've done us all proud, Dashaway," he declared. "Got a telegram from the Interstate folks, and the noon paper. The paper has given you two columns. This way. A friend waiting to see you." Mr. King pushed Dave across the little room in the hangar he used as an office. A middle aged, noble looking gentleman arose from a chair as Dave entered. His face was beaming, and there was an eager light in his eyes. "Dave Dashaway?" he said, half inquiringly. "Yes, sir," assented Dave, grasping the extended hand of the gentleman. "My best and oldest friend's boy," continued the gentleman. "It is Mr. Dale, Dashaway," spoke Mr. King, following Dave into the room. Somehow the young aviator felt his heart warm to the man of whom he had heard so much, but had never before seen. The old gentleman's eyes rested on him in a kindly earnest way that made Dave feel less lonely in the world. Briefly Mr. King told of the chase he had made to locate Mr. Dale. "I've got a long story to tell," said the aviator, when he could get a chance to talk. He turned to Mr. Dale. "That is, if you wish me to tell it," he added. "Certainly," was the ready reply. "You can probably tell it better than I can." "Well, to begin with, it was no easy task to get on the track of this fellow Gregg," commenced the well-known aviator. "I had to do some tall hunting before I could locate him and his two cronies." "His cronies?" repeated Dave. "Yes, he had two fellows in the game with him. I guess he found out that he could not manage it alone. The three of them called on Mr. Dale and at first got him to take an automobile ride. Then they took him to a lonely house down near Slaytown, and there they kept him a prisoner." "A prisoner!" "Yes." "Just as we were kept prisoners," muttered our hero. "Mr. Dale says he was treated very nicely, for Gregg no doubt, had an idea he could get more money that way." "Well, after a good deal of hard work I located the spot and saw Mr. Dale from a distance. I knew I could not rescue him single handed, so I went back to town and notified the police. I had hard work getting three officers to accompany me, because the police just then were having their annual inspection and parade and all wanted to be present. When we got to the lonely house we got a big surprise." "How was that?" "Gregg and the two men and Mr. Dale were gone." "Where to?" "At first I couldn't find out. But we saw wagon tracks in the soft roadbed and followed these along the road and through a big field. Presently we came to a patch of woods, and there found what in years gone by had been a lumber camp. At the old house we saw a horse and wagon, and we knew the crowd must be somewhere around. We separated, and came up to the place from all sides. In a shed near the house we found Gregg and the two men. They were discussing the situation, when we pounced on them and surprised them." "Did they resist?" "Gregg did, and as a consequence he got a blow in the mouth from a policeman's club that broke off two of his teeth. Then all of the crowd gave up, and we handcuffed the lot and made them prisoners." "And Mr. Dale?" asked Dave, with interest. "We found him in the old house, tied up." "And very grateful for the rescue," put in the old gentleman, warmly. "All of us came to town in the wagon the rascals had hired. Then Gregg and his accomplices were put in jail, and Mr. Dale and I came on here," concluded Mr. King. "I am mighty happy to see things have turned out this way," said our hero, heartily. "I am so glad to find the son of my old balloonist friend," said Mr. Dale, "that I shall have to adopt you legally, Dave, before you slip away from me again. Let me be your second father, my boy, and take an interest in your progress. I stayed over here with our mutual friend, Mr. King, purposely to go over this wonderful plan to cross the Atlantic in an airship." "Then you think well of it?" asked Dave. "You do not have to ask that of an old aeronaut enthusiast, my boy," replied Mr. Dale. "Yes, Dashaway," said the aviator, "Mr. Dale has promised gladly to furnish the capital to put through our newest giant airship scheme." So, for the present, we leave Dave Dashaway, the young aviator, and his friends. What happened to them in their new and daring project, will be told in the next volume of this series, to be called, "Dave Dashaway and His Giant Airship; Or, A Marvelous Trip Across the Atlantic." The young aviator had won his way through pluck and perseverance. Dave had already done some great things in his apprenticeship as a junior aeronaut. Now, the friend, and assistant of a noted expert in aeronautics, he was eager and buoyant at the prospect of winning fame and fortune in an attempt that was the dream of the expert airman of the world. THE END 
30124	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. V. No. 2 CONTENTS FEBRUARY, 1931 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSO _Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "The Tentacles from Below."_ WEREWOLVES OF WAR D. W. HALL 153 _The Story of the "Torpedo Plan" and of Capt. Lance's Heroic Part in America's Last Mighty Battle with the United Slavs._ THE TENTACLES FROM BELOW ANTHONY GILMORE 172 _Down to Tremendous Ocean Depths Goes Commander Keith Wells in His Blind Duel with the Marauding "Machine-Fish."_ (A Complete Novelette.) THE BLACK LAMP CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 212 _Dr. Bird and His Friend Carnes Unravel Another Criminal Web of Scientific Mystery._ PHALANXES OF ATLANS F. V. W. MASON 228 _Only in Dim Legends Did Mankind Remember Atlantis and the Lost Tribes--Until Victor Nelson's Extraordinary Adventure in the Unknown Arctic._ (Beginning a Two-Part Novel.) THE PIRATE PLANET CHARLES W. DIFFIN 261 _From Earth and Sub-Venus Converge a Titanic Offensive of Justice on the Unspeakable Man-Things of Torg._ (Conclusion.) THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 277 _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ ASTOUNDING STORIES. Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Readers' Guild, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * Werewolves of War _By D. W. Hall_ [Illustration: _"Hay crosses the gulf, taking with him the cord which controls the electro-magnet."_ ] PART I [Sidenote: The story of the "Torpedo Plan" and of Capt. Lance's heroic part in America's last mighty battle with the United Slavs.] Trapped again! But this time, Lance swore, they'd not get away without paying dearly for it! Under the mesh of his gas-mask the lean lines of his jaw went taut. Tense, steely fingers flipped to the knobbed control instruments; the gleaming single-seater scout plane catapulted in a screaming somersault. Lance's ever-wary sixth sense told him the tongues of disintegrating flame had licked the plane's protected belly, and for the fact that it was protected he thanked again his stupendous luck. He pulled savagely at the squat control stick; the four Rahl-Diesels unleashed a torrent of power; and the slim scout rose like a comet, and hurtled, the altitude dial's nervous finger proclaimed, to ten thousand feet. Lance eased off the power, relaxed slightly, and glanced below. They'd started off a squadron of fifteen planes. Thirteen had crumpled beneath that treacherous, stabbing curtain of disintegrating flame. Only two of them were left--he and Praed. Praed, of course! The fellow's plane was pirouetting nearby. Lance was the squadron leader. He jammed his thin-lipped mouth close to the "mike" and rasped: "They trapped us again! There's some damn spy at our base. Stand by, Praed! They'll send up a few men to wipe us out, too ... and we're goin' to square the account!" He listened for Praed's answer. Presently it came. "I can't! They got two of my motors. I'm limping badly. We'd better beat it while we can." Lance's mouth curled. He roared: "Go on, then, beat it! But I'm goin' to take a couple of 'em, anyway." Disgusted, filled with red anger, he flung the phones from his head, watched Praed's plane whirl its stubby nose for home, settled himself alertly in the low, padded seat and concentrated his attention on the ground below. He'd been right. Tiny, gray-clad figures were pouring from their barracks, rushing madly towards the dozen or so planes neatly drawn up on the field. Lance's mouth twitched. They probably wondered, down there, why the devil he didn't beat it--like Praed! He stroked the lever which controlled his five gas bombs, centered his battery of incendiary-bullet machine-guns and ruthlessly shoved the control stick full over. * * * * * The Rahl-Diesels pumped at full power; his plane plummetted downwards with the speed of light, a hurtling shell of steel. His unexpected move took the men below by surprise. Lance knew they needed at least ten minutes to prepare another salvo of disintegrating flame; he had about four minutes left. There was a restless, thudding chatter, and his bullets began to mow them down. Lance could see the horrified expressions of the men beneath, and chuckled grimly as they sought to escape the wrath of his hot guns. He flung bursts of spouting, acid-filled lead at the defenseless planes, and saw two of them collapse in shrouds of acrid white smoke. And still he dove. At a bare one hundred feet he tugged the control stick back, and the tiny scout groaned under the pull of her motors. Then her snout jolted upwards. Lance pounded the gas bomb lever, and smiled a tight smile as he sensed the five pills sloping down from their compartment in the scout's belly. A second later came a rolling, ear-numbing crash. Lance, safe at a perch of a few thousand feet, grinned as his narrowed eyes beheld the sticky curtain of death-crammed gas hug over the enemy base. "That'll quiet 'em for a few minutes!" he muttered savagely. A few minutes--but not more. And he had no more bombs; his ammunition belts were nearly depleted. "I guess," he murmured, "I'd better follow that quitter, Praed. I've paid 'em for the boys they got, anyway!" He levelled the plane out, threw a last glance at the carpet of gas he had laid, and spurred the purring Rahl-Diesels to their limit. His speed dial flashed round to five hundred, five-fifty--seventy--and finally rested, quivering, at the scout's full six hundred miles per hour. Under the streamlined plane's speeding body the gnarled, bomb-torn terrain of Nevada hurtled by. A rather sad frown creased Lance's prematurely old brow as he glimpsed it. Thousands of lives had been thrown into that ground; the hot, tumbled waste was doused with freely-sacrificed blood, the blood of whole regiments of America's heroic First Home Army. Martyred men! Lance couldn't help swearing to himself at the bitter thought of that terrible reckoning day. It was the price his country had paid for her continued ignoring of the festering peril overseas. Slaughtered like sheep, those glorious regiments had been! Helpless, almost, before the ultra-modern war weapons of the United Slav hordes, they'd stopped the numbingly quick advance merely by the weight of their bodies. Like little Belgium, in 1914. They'd held the Slavs to California, ravished, war-desolated California. * * * * * The thin front-line trenches far behind, Lance began a slanting dive that raised his speed well over six hundred. Through the front magnifying mirror he spied the squat khaki buildings of his base. Werewolves of War, the batch of planes he belonged to had been christened, and it was a richly deserved title. In front of the front they fought, detailed to desperate, harrying missions, losing an average of ten men a day. The ordeal of gas and fire and acid bullets added five years to a man's brow overnight--if he served with the Werewolves of War. Lance was only twenty-four, but his hair was splotched with dead gray strands; his eyes were hard and weary; his face lined with new wrinkles. Ah, well, it was war--and a losing war, he had to admit, that they fought. If a miracle didn't come, America would crumble even as old Europe had, before the overwhelming Slavish troops. Even now, as Lance knew through various rumors, the Slavs were massed for a grand attack. And with what could America hold them back? His helicopter props spun, and the scout nestled down lightly on the tarmac. Lance switched off the faithful Rahl-Diesels, swung open the tiny door and leaped from the enclosed cockpit. "Sir," he rapped to thin, stern-browed Colonel Douglas, "there's no longer any doubt in my mind. This is the fifth time we've been anticipated--trapped! The enemy is informed directly of the attacking plans of our scout details. There's a spy at this base!" He lowered his eyes for a second and said in a queer tone of voice: "Thirteen of 'em went down to-day." Colonel Douglas' tired face showed the never-ceasing strain he was under. He clasped hands behind his back, took a few nervous turns up and down the small office and finally, with a somewhat hopeless sigh, muttered: "I know, Lance, I know. The devils! They seem to be aware of everything we plan. Yet what can we do? Look at the territory our front lines cover! More than two thousand miles of loosely held ground. And we're so damnably organized, man! Look here!" * * * * * He strode to the huge map which covered entirely one wall of the little room and ran his forefinger down the long red line, signifying the American front, which stretched crookedly from the Canadian border to the Gulf of California. Parallel to it was another line, of black--the United Slavs. "It's so damned easy," Colonel Douglas said, "for a spy to slip over." He sighed again. "I fought in the scrap of 1917 as a kid of twenty; it was different then. But this is 1938, and it's a scientific war we're trying to fight." He sat down in his swivel chair. "How--how did they wipe you out to-day?" "That blasted disintegrating flame again," Lance told him swiftly. "It's obvious, Colonel: how did the Slavs know we were going to raid that comparatively unimportant base of theirs at such and such a time? They had the flame shooters all ready for us--and at a place where they've never had them before! We came up at twenty-five thousand feet, dropped down in a full power dive, and"--he gestured widely--"biff! The flames caught us neatly at the regulation thousand feet. They got thirteen men. Only two got away, Praed and myself." His keen eyes were inquiring, and the colonel interpreted their look correctly. "Praed," he murmured. "Yes, I saw him come back, by himself. He said you were following. Two of his motors were shot. He seems to bear a charmed life, doesn't he?" Lance nodded. He didn't like to hint at the thought he had in mind. It seemed a cowardly, stab-in-the-back thing to do. Yet it was duty, and there was no questioning duty. "I've never seen Praed shoot down an enemy plane," he said slowly. "This is the fifth time we've been ambushed--and Praed's never been caught. Somehow, he's always seemed to be aware of what was coming." "You mean--?" the colonel questioned. Lance shook his head. "I don't want to commit myself, Colonel Douglas, but--I'm suggesting that we--well--keep our eyes peeled, and perhaps watch certain members of the outfit more closely." * * * * * Douglas rose as his orderly, Ranth, came into the room. "Find Lieutenant Praed for me," the colonel ordered crisply. Then, turning to Lance, he said: "You'd better knock off a few hours' sleep. You are worn out." Lance watched the orderly, Ranth, salute and leave. Ranth was heavy, thick-built, with closely set eyes. The young squadron leader was suddenly conscious that he was, as the colonel said, worn out; his limbs seemed leaden, his eyelids heavy. "I think you're right, sir," he murmured, and walked out onto the field. Seeing Praed's machine drawn up with the overall-clad figure of a mechanic fussing at its motors, he wandered over to survey it. The scout was an exact replica of his, a model of the famous Goshawk type. It was all motor--everything being sacrificed to speed. On either side of the stubby brow of the fuselage, which held the death-dealing battery of three machine-guns, were set the four Rahl-Diesel motors, back to back. The pilot's tiny enclosed cockpit was thus surrounded by engines. In the V-shaped, smooth-lined wings were the two helicopter props; further back, inside the steel-sheathed, bullet-like fuselage, the radio outfit and fuel tanks. The craft's rounded belly covered the gas bomb compartment. The mechanic was a little cockney Englishman, a fugitive, like all his countrymen, from the horror which had stricken England suddenly and left her wallowing in her life blood. He looked up at Lance, and a smile broke forth on his wizened, sharp little face. "It's got me beat, sir," he said in his curious, twanging voice. "Lieutenant Praed, 'e sez to me, 'Somethin' wrong with two of me motors,' 'e sez. 'They quit on me quite sudden like. Look 'em over, will you?' 'e sez. So I been lookin' 'em over. But they ain't nothin' wrong with the bloody things, sir--nothin' at all!" "It does seem funny, doesn't it, Wells?" Lance said levelly. He'd known it all along. Praed was a quitter--a yellow-belly--besides being--But he stopped there. He had no definite proof. It was unjust to accuse a man of _that_ without definite, positive proof. The little mechanic muttered some mysterious cockney curse, and then said, in an admiring tone: "'Ow many of the swines' planes 'ave you shot down now, sir?" "About twenty, I think," Lance told him gruffly. The cockney shot his breath out with a whistle. "Cripes! You'll be up to that there Captain Hay soon if you keeps it up, sir!" Lance laughed. Hay, the almost legendary hero of the American Air Force--who had shot down, so latest rumors said, fifty Slav planes--was far above him. "I'll never reach Hay's record, Wells. I'll be doing pretty well if I bag half as many!" Then, seeing Ranth, the orderly, followed by Praed, he strode quickly away and came face to face with the latter. * * * * * For a moment the two men eyed each other, a taut silence between them. Praed's thin, sun-blackened countenance was immovable, masklike. His blue-green eyes met Lance's steadily. Finally Lance snorted and burst out: "Why the hell did you run away, Praed? Scared stiff?" Praed's low voice, devoid of all trace of emotion, asked: "What makes you think I was scared, Lance?" "You know damn well what makes me think it! That lousy crack about your motors being shot!" "Two of my motors were limping." Lance gave a sarcastic chuckle. "Ask Wells about that, why don't you? He's got a few ideas on the subject." Praed repeated: "Two of my motors were limping," and abruptly he turned away, leaving Lance fuming, and went into Colonel Douglas' office. What would Douglas say to him? Accuse him outright of his suspicions? Put him under arrest as a spy? But he couldn't do that: there was, after all, no proof. Lance swore to himself; then, feeling a wave of weariness surge over him, went to the shack he was quartered in, kicked off his battered boots, stripped away his Sam Browne, and flung his lean body out on the hard, gray-sheeted cot. Seconds later he was lost in the sleep that comes to the physically exhausted. The desperate situation America was in, the whole savage war--everything, faded from his mind. But to right and left of that cot stretched others--empty. The brave squadron Lance had led into the blue sky that morning now lay charred skeletons around the flame-throwers that had struck them down. And in a dozen other aircraft bases behind the hard pressed lines were other empty cots. Time and time again the Slav planes shot down two to the Americans' one; time and time again the treacherous disintegrating flames--the weapon which baffled America's scientists--had struck down whole squadrons that had been lured into traps, even as Lance's had been lured. And even the Slav forces pushed forward.... PART II "You're wanted by Colonel Douglas, sir." Lance felt a hand jarring his shoulder; he turned sleepily over, yawned, and stared up into the dark, full-cheeked face of Ranth, the orderly. "Huh?" "Colonel Douglas wants you," repeated Ranth. "It's five o'clock, sir." Wearily Lance pulled on his boots and adjusted the military belt. The night was hot and sticky; somewhere, miles to the rear of the base, the batteries of long-distance guns were beginning their nightly serenade. Lance followed the orderly's broad, chunky back to the colonel's office. The colonel gazed up with tired eyes from the welter of maps on his desk. "Lance," he said, "I'm changing the routine of the night patrol. A fresh batch of youngsters came in this afternoon to fill the empty files; two dozen new planes arrived by transport, too. I'm sending ten of them over for the night patrol; Stephens will take your place. I've got another errand for you--and Praed." Lance was conscious that Ranth was standing quietly behind the colonel's chair. Douglas ordered him to attend to some errand and the orderly left. "I had an interview with Praed," the colonel went on. "I didn't exactly accuse him of anything definite, but I think I threw a bit of a scare into him. To-night we'll give him the acid test. "You and he will fly over to-night to investigate Hill 333. There have been rumors that the Slavs are massing there, and we want positive information. There's sure to be a fight. Watch Praed carefully. If he steers clear of any scrapping, well have enough to court-martial him on. Understand?" Lance nodded. "Right. It's a dangerous errand, Lance, but I'm confident you'll come through, as always. There's no one else who could handle the job. God, man, you're getting close to Hay's record! You'll be the top-notcher of the service soon!" The young man laughed briefly. "No danger of that. When do we take off, sir?" Douglas consulted his watch. "Seven-fifteen. Come and get the dope from these maps. Hill 333's rather difficult to find." "Anything been happening at the front, sir?" The colonel passed both fine-fingered hands over his lined face. He said quietly: "Yes. The Slavs took twenty-five miles from us down in the lower sector. Just wiped our boys out. Those damnable flame-throwers and bullet-proof tanks, supported by God knows how many hundreds of planes. It's hell, Lance! Headquarters thinks they're going to unleash a general attack all along the line in the next few days. And our resources--well, our back's against the wall. We're coming to death grips, man." * * * * * Seven-fifteen.... Lance pressed the starting button. His four motors choked, sputtered, then burst into a sweet, full-throated roar. He glanced over at Praed's plane, spun the small helicopter props over and pushed down the accelerator. The plane quivered, stuck its snout up and leaped like an arrow into the clean, darkening air. Lance gunned it to ten thousand feet, Praed following him neatly. Praed was a good pilot, no doubt about that. The two fighting machines hung for a second side by side; Lance eased off his helicopters and streaked away into the gloom at a breath-taking five hundred. "I hope," muttered Colonel Douglas as the two tiny scouts sped from sight, "that everything goes smoothly. They're the men to do it, anyway. No better pilots in the whole service." "Wot abaht that there Captain Hay, sir?" put in Wells, the mechanic, standing nearby. Colonel Douglas smiled. "Oh, of course!" he amended. "I'd forgotten Hay!" Once more they were anticipated! Lance, at thirty thousand feet--the Rahl-Diesels, with their perfected superchargers, were easily capable of a ceiling of sixty--had hovered above the position of Hill 333, pulled on his gas-mask and said through the microphone to Praed: "Power dive to three thousand feet. Release your flares and take in all you can before they send up planes. We'll take 'em by surprise, but there's bound to be a fight. Got it?" The steady reply came back: "Okay." Whereat Lance set his teeth in his customary fighting grin, jockied up his ammunition belts, glanced at the flare-parachutes folded alongside the cabin and plunged the scout in a dive that tipped six hundred and fifty miles and threatened to crack the speed dial. * * * * * But surprise? Nothing doing! Like angry hornets five Slav planes pounced on them at ten thousand feet. They'd been waiting there! Lance cursed savagely. He flung off his flares, Immelmanned up, and in less than two seconds had sent one Slav shrieking to the ground in flames. For the moment forgetting Praed, Lance followed after his flares, three Slavs attempting to sight their guns on the twisting, writhing, corkscrewing body of his Goshawk. He knew there were disintegrating flame-throwers below, but gambled on their not shooting because of the enemy scouts diving with him. Flattening out at perhaps a thousand feet, Lance threw a rapid stare at the bulk of Hill 333. He drew his breath in sharply. Lit dazzlingly by the bleaching white of the slow-floating flares, huge rows of the dreaded Slav tanks were clustered all around the hill! As he looked, ten more Slav planes came soaring up from the ground. This was too hot! The thought of Praed stabbed through Lance's whirling brain; he pulled the scout around, doubled over the three closing in on his tail, and belched lead for an instant at one he'd caught off guard. It collapsed like a punctured paper bag. Lance grinned and bounded to the upper regions. The two other Slavs let the crazy Yank go for the instant, joining forces with the ten brothers coming to help them out. Lance, again at ten thousand, looked for Praed. Far above, he glimpsed two planes, circling and diving. Praed seemed to be fighting, at any rate! As he watched, the two scouts catapulted still higher; became tiny, almost imperceptible dots, visible only in the reflected light of the flares. Then Lance felt a shaft of ice along his spine. The two planes had practically hugged each other for a second. Then one of them fell away, somersaulted, tumbled down wildly--out of control. It passed Lance like a falling rock. And it was Praed's scout! "My God!" muttered Lance. "He's been shot down!" * * * * * The next moment the twelve Slavs were on him like a hurricane. Motors roaring, Lance stood them off--flinging a burst of lead here, dropping out of range here, looping, catapulting, zooming--fazing them with every trick he knew. A dozen times he sensed the zinging wrath of storms of bullets, a dozen times he escaped death by the breadth of a hair. Not for nothing was he called one of the best pilots in the service, second only to Hay. He bagged another of the Slavs, and began to think of getting away. Praed had proved himself, but had been killed in doing so. He's got the dope on Hill 333. Now for the getaway. As he whirled, another Slav plane--the one that had got Praed--dove down from above. And, in the last second of the ghostly light of the flares, Lance's bewildered eyes saw the face of the man inside it. _That face was Praed's!_ Praed, inside an enemy scout! Praed firing at him! Praed, not dead! Lance was dumbfounded. He almost died, just then, for he felt his senses stagger, and relaxed his maneuvering. Praed! What--how--He couldn't begin to reckon it out. If the flares hadn't died at that instant, Lance must have been shot down. Luckily, they expired; pitch darkness washed over everything. The lights on the Slav planes switched on, their prying beams fingering the sky for Lance's plane. But Lance was somewhat himself again. He jammed the accelerator down, dove headlong, flattened out and streaked for home. The speed of the Goshawk snatched him faithfully from the jaws of the Slavs. He left then milling behind. Left Praed with them! * * * * * Colonel Douglas was waiting for him. Lance's face must have been a study, for the elder man laughed shortly. "You need a drink!" he decided, and poured out a stiff tot of rum. Lance downed it with a nervous gulp and sprawled in a chair, the glass held weakly in quivering fingers. Dead silence brooded over the whole base. Even the muttering guns were still. One green-shaded light threw the maps on Douglas' desk into glaring prominence; besides that, there was no illumination anywhere in the 'drome. Lance knew he had a thumping headache and that his eyes were lumps of pain. The glass fell from his hand and crashed on the floor. It seemed to stir the young captain, for at last he looked up and met the colonel's inquiring gaze. "Well?" The colonel was terse. "I saw Praed shot down," Lance mumbled, as if to himself, "and then I saw him--" "Wait!" Douglas strode rapidly to the door which led to the other rooms of the building. After glancing to right and left, with an explanatory "Walls sometimes have ears, you know!" he locked the door carefully again, came back, and said: "Talk in a whisper! How about Hill 333?" "Tanks massed there," Lance said slowly. "Yeh, I saw that, all right. They must be intending an attack on that sector. But--but--Praed--" "What happened?" Lance told him of the scrap, how Praed's plane had apparently rubbed wings with a Slav and then tumbled down, out of control. He concluded: "I figured that Praed was all right, that he'd proved himself, that he wasn't a spy, as we'd thought. _But the next moment I saw him in the Slav plane that had bagged his!"_ His wondering eyes sought the colonel's lean face. Lance expected to see it express amazement, incredulity. It didn't, though. He laughed! * * * * * While Lance gaped, the older man went to the delicate machinery of the radiophone in one corner of the trim office. He clasped the earphones over his head, and spoke into the mike: "Headquarters, Air Force, Washington, Douglas, Base 5, speaking." A tense moment passed while his radio call was put through. Presently a green light flashed on the board. Douglas said swiftly: "Headquarters? Base 5, Colonel Douglas. Tanks massed around Hill 333; enemy evidently contemplates full attack on corresponding sector of our line. They know a scout of ours observed it, however; perhaps that will induce them to change their plans. This next is extremely important: _The first step of the Torpedo Plan has been successful!"_ For awhile he listened intently, replying with short-clipped affirmatives. Then he hung the headphones up and turned to the bewildered Lance. Colonel Douglas laughed again and rubbed his hands exultantly. "What the hell--" Lance began. The other pulled out a drawer of his desk and took from it a small placard. "Do you recognize the photo?" he asked smilingly. Lance looked at it. It was the picture of a man in the uniform of a captain of the Air Force, a row of battle ribbons on his straight, khaki-clad chest. But it was the figure's face that Lance stared at. "Sure," he said finally. "It's a picture of Praed. But what--" "Not Praed," corrected the colonel. "Not Praed. Captain Basil Hay." PART III "Good Lord!" Lance exclaimed without knowing he did so. Praed--Hay! The same man! Then that was the secret; that explained things! Hay, the hero of the force! "You're entitled to a few explanations," Douglas said. "I'll give you the core of the whole scheme. There's no need to tell you that it must be guarded with your life." He drew his chair closer to Lance's. "Yes, it's true. The man you knew as Praed in reality is Captain Hay. You see, Lance, headquarters was taking no chances with what I just called the Torpedo Plan. Every move had to be conducted with the utmost secrecy. Had to be! For the Torpedo Plan is, in some ways, America's last hope. "Our base, No. 5, was chosen as the center of activity, the base from which the steps paving the way for the plan would be taken. The two best pilots in the service were needed. You and Hay were chosen. "It was decided it would be best to mask Hay's real identity. So, officially, he was sent to the hospital; in reality he came here, under the name of Praed. Why? Because there's a spy somewhere--we don't seem to be able to track him; he's infernally clever--and if the famous Captain Hay was switched to Base 5, putting the two best pilots in the service together, that spy'd know something was in the air. Understand?" Lance nodded dumbly. A great light was beginning to shower him. "To more completely mask our true purpose," the colonel continued, "Hay was instructed to make it appear as if he were a spy. And it was a damned hard job! The real spy, whoever he is, and wherever he is, would thus be additionally fooled; for all he'd know, the Slavs might have sent another over to back him up. That's why Hay never shot down an enemy plane. Says something about his skill as a pilot, doesn't it? Never able to defend himself, save by maneuvering. He's a great flyer!" Lance could only nod dumbly again. "After a couple of weeks at this base," Douglas went on, "Hay was to cross the lines one night with you accompanying him. You, unintentionally, would thus occupy the enemy planes while Hay attended to the real business of the evening. And you did splendidly!" "The real business?" Lance questioned. "What the devil was that? I thought the real business was to get the dope on Hill 333." "So it was--partially. But also to take the first step of the Torpedo Plan, which was for Hay to switch over to a Slav plane." _"What?"_ * * * * * The colonel repeated his statement, somewhat dryly. Lance's square jaw dropped abruptly. "But--but--" he exclaimed, "how the devil could he do that?" Colonel Douglas grinned. "By a very neat contraption from the brain of one of our most valuable scientists," he explained. "Hay's scout was specially fitted up before you left; while you were sleeping, in fact. Two experts from Washington arrived with that batch of new recruits this afternoon. A tiny sliding door was cut in the fuselage of the scout and a sort of folding ladder put inside. It was motivated by some rather complex spring-work; but the really ingenious thing about it was the powerful electro-magnet at its base. "It's rather over my head," he smiled. "I'm a plain fighting man, and sometimes it seems that scientists and not fighting men are going to win this war.... But, at any rate, it worked like this: "Hay lures, or maneuvers, a Slav plane away from its fellows, and while you're down below entertaining the others, flies wing to wing with it. He touches the spring of his ladder and it shoots out, powerfully magnetized, and clamps onto the steel fuselage of the Slav. The automatic control keeps Hay's scout steady, and the ladder is so highly attractive that the Slav simply can't get away. Hay crosses the gulf, taking with him the cord which controls the electro-magnet. He forces his way into the Slav, shoots down its pilot, releases the pull of the magnet, and--there you are! Our best pilot in possession of a Slav plane, and clad in a Slav officer's uniform! Do you get the idea now?" Lance strove for appropriate words. "Gee!" he spluttered. "It's--it's wonderful! And to think I tried to start a fight with Hay! I wish I'd known before. But I suppose," he added, "it was best to let not even me in on it, to keep it absolutely secret." "Exactly!" "And now what's Hay's mission?" Lance asked eagerly. * * * * * Colonel Douglas' face became sober. "A damnably dangerous one, and a mighty desperate one. As I said, the Torpedo Plan, which Hay is striving to carry out, seems to be America's last chance. We're holding the United Slavs, but only just. We simply can't break their line or make any headway against them; and when they do unleash their big push, there's nothing to stop them! So we're gambling everything on this slim hope. "American science," he continued, "has perfected a weapon which is called the 'flying torpedo.' It's a ghastly thing, too. Damn it, I actually feel sorry for the poor devils it bursts on! It's a sort of riposte to their disintegrating flame. "Picture a huge tanklike affair of steel, one hundred feet long. Picture a few dozen of them! Picture them crammed to overflowing with tons of glyco-scarzite, the most destructive explosive the mind of man has yet conceived. An explosive that can't be hurled in a shell and can't be dropped in a bomb from a plane. A pound or so of it, man, lays waste a square mile of anything! Even our scientists are a bit afraid of it. They've been trying to think up a way of unleashing it at the Slavs. And these flying torpedoes seem to be the answer. "The torpedoes are purely mechanical. Therefore, they can soar to any height whatsoever. Twenty, thirty, even forty miles. All right. Now, picture a dozen or so of these torpedoes soaring over the most important Slav bases and headquarters, thirty miles above the earth, at night, of course, and absolutely invisible to the most powerful search-rays. They fly without the slightest sounds. Get that? Well, when this squadron of awful death arrives at the exact point over the place to be demolished, the motive force switches off and down they crash. Imagine what will happen when they collide with the ground!" Douglas, with Lance's tense eyes on him, struck a clenched fist into an open palm. "Tons of glyco-scarzite, Lance! Unleashed, without warning, from miles above! Thirty of these torpedoes, each a hundred feet long, dropping down on the very heart of the Slav invasion! Killing, blowing to bits, rather, every living thing, every fortification, every tree, every tank, every gun, every flame thrower, every plane in a radius of hundreds of miles!" "God!" came from Lance's numb lips. "God!" "_But_"--and the colonel held up a straight forefinger--"these torpedoes must be guided from the place they raid!" Into the silence Lance whispered: "And that--that is Hay's job?" "That," Douglas confirmed levelly, "is Hay's job--and yours." * * * * * Their eyes met; held. And then Lance's clean young face smiled. "Thank God, sir," he cried, "that I'm to help strike the blow that'll free our country!" Colonel Douglas answered his smile with a smile. "Lance," he said, "it's because Washington has put this job into Hay's and your hands that I know--_I know_--it will succeed." "It will!" Douglas lowered his voice again. "This is why those flying torpedoes must be guided from the Slav's innermost base. "In the first place, they fly too high for an accompanying plane to guide them. In the second, the power that releases them to hurtle downwards must come from the enemy base itself, to permit of no possible error. This must not fail!" "But," put in Lance, "how do the torpedoes fly? What motivates them?" "A closely guarded secret, of course," he was told. "I merely possess a slight comprehension of it. I know that it is an adaptation of that discovery of Professor Singe, two years ago--cosmic attraction. Eventually, perhaps, it will permit interplanetary travel. This use of it is simply the beginning. But it is to America's everlasting glory that a scientist of hers developed it. "You know how a sliver of wood is propelled by the ripples of a pond? Vibrations of the water, really. Well, evidently there are somewhat similar vibrations in the ether, cosmic force. Each one of these flying torpedoes contains a highly expensive, intricate mechanism which transforms this invisible vibration-power into material propulsion. The mechanism is adjusted to propel the torpedo at such an altitude in such a direction. We possess no means of setting the machines to _stop_ at a certain place and so tumble earthwards. That's where you and Hay come in. "Hay is now, with forged documents, passing himself off as a regular Slav pilot. He speaks the tongue. Two nights from now, you, Lance, keep a rendezvous with Hay at an isolated ranch in the Lake Tahoe country--the Sola Ranch, where we staged that big fight a few months back." * * * * * Lance nodded. "In your plane is an instrument which is the kernel of the scheme. It arrives here to-morrow. It's a device which shoots an invisible beam fifty miles into the air, a negative beam, in sympathy with the machinery on the torpedoes. Hay sets this device near the Slav headquarters. The torpedo squadron takes off from a few hundred miles behind here, flying in the direction of the heart of the Slav forces. When they run into the beam, their motive power is nullified, and down they fall. Crash! The Slavs are wiped out. Our troops charge forward in a grand attack; the Slavs, with no armament, no reinforcing troops, no supply of tanks and flame throwers, crumple. The invasion of America is put to an end!" Lance rose. His face was alight, his eyes burning with strong, unquenchable fire. "It's great, sir, great! It can't fail! By God, if it takes every last drop of my blood, I'll help Hay put this through!" Colonel Douglas extended his right hand and Lance's met it in a firm shake. In the thick silence they stood thus for some minutes. Then, without moving so much as a cheek muscle, the colonel whispered, his eyes tense: "_The door! Fling it open! I think someone's been listening!_" Lance switched his alarmed gaze to it. His muscles went taut. The next moment he had leaped half across the room, jammed back the lock, and ripped the door wide. At the other end of the dim passageway he glimpsed a scurrying figure! Lance sprang after it with a shout to Douglas. Tearing out his automatic, he flung a burst of lead at the figure, but that instant it wheeled and sped from sight down another passage. And when Lance got there, no one was in sight. * * * * * For awhile he probed around, desperately, but could find no sign of anything. The base slept. Sorely troubled, he returned to find the colonel just coming back from an equally barren search: "Don't think he heard much," said Douglas grimly. "It must have been that damned spy who's been getting information of our movements. I'll have the guards redoubled to prevent him from getting anything through." He smiled at sight of Lance's anxious face. "No need for too much worry, Lance! He couldn't have heard much--the walls are sound-proof and the door fairly tight. Now, you go and rip off some sleep! You need it! No more work for you till Wednesday night--you're too important!" Sleep! Lance only wished he could. But the thrill of what he'd just heard was too fresh, too new; the blood pumped surgingly through his veins; his brain whirled with the thought of the glorious enterprise he and Hay were aiding so vitally. Then, too, the night was humid and sweaty. For a while Lance lay on his cot, other sleeping figures to left and right of him, but his own eyes simply would not stay closed. Finally, after perhaps an hour of trying to doze off, he arose and, clad only in breeches and undershirt, wandered outside again with a cigarette glowing in his mouth. The war might not have been, the night was so silent. Lance strolled lazily around the plane hangars, revelling in what little breeze there was. He seemed to be the only living thing abroad in the night. Then, suddenly, he flung down his cigarette and ground the butt out quickly. For he saw he was not the only living thing abroad in the night. Sliding rapidly away from the end hangar was a dark form! Lance crouched instinctively and crept forward. Who was the other wanderer? Not a sentry: they paced a regular beat closer to Douglas' office. Not another, who, like himself, could not sleep and had sought the open. This figure was going somewhere! It had a definite object in mind! Sheltering himself behind the hangars' bulk, Lance advanced as stealthily as he could. Coming to the end one, he peered round its blunt corner. Fifty yards ahead, crossing a stubbly stretch of open ground, the mysterious prowler hurried onward. * * * * * The night was dark, the moon troubled by ragged bursts of listless, heavy clouds. Lance bent almost double and left the shelter of the black hangar. Feeling his way carefully, he followed the other. Was this the unknown spy? The spy, going to transmit the news he had overheard? Lance muttered a curse. He had no weapon with him; the spy, if he were a spy, would certainly be armed. But that didn't matter; it was merely unfortunate. He must track the other down, at all cost. For some minutes he crept on in this manner. The other kept hurrying forward. Lance noted a clump of brush far ahead; the figure was evidently making for this. And sure enough, as if acting directly on Lance's thought, the dark form entered the patch of growth--and did not come out on the other side. Lance broke into a trot, eyes wary and alert for sign of his prey. At any second he might be greeted by a salvo of bullets, and every fiber of his lean body was taut. As he approached the clump of brush he dropped to the ground, and came finally to it on his belly. From a distance of about ten feet, he rose and charged. Expecting each moment to hear the spit of a revolver, he was more alarmed by what actually did greet him. Nothing. The patch of brush was empty! "Well I'll be damned!" Lance murmured. "Where did he get to?" He gazed around, bewildered. The growth of bush was about ten feet wide. On either side the flat Nevada plain stretched away--empty. No figure was visible. Lance was utterly baffled. The fellow had vanished as if by magic. Flown away into thin air! * * * * * The young captain stood quite still, listening, probing his puzzled brain. Then, like a cat, he dropped to the ground again, and pressed an ear to it. For his ears had caught a tiny betraying hum. A hum! There was a machine of some type near him. He listened intently. The hum came from the ground on which he lay. There had to be a trap-door. Lance's fingers scrabbled around, and presently found what they looked for. He seized the ring which enabled one to pull the trap-door back, and was just about to pull when he heard, from below, a voice speaking in Russian. It was, then, the spy! Lance grasped the ring anew, and, exerting all his strength, hauled the trap-door back. A narrow passageway was revealed, lit by a lamp. The hum burst with doubled force on his ears. He plunged down, fists clenched, and half tumbled into a tiny room gouged from the soil. At one end was a mass of machinery, and a microphone hung suspended before it. And speaking into the microphone was the heavy-set form of a man in American uniform, his back to Lance. As the latter charged down, he rose with an alarmed shout, and wheeled around. "My God!" breathed Lance. It was Ranth, Colonel Douglas' orderly! * * * * * Ranth! His dark face flushed with fury, he came leaping from his seat. The wicked little revolver hung at his belt sprang out, but Lance's right fist shot forward, knocked Ranth's hand high and sent the gun clattering to the ground. Then, for a moment, they faced each other, the hum of the radiophone droning an ominous accompaniment. "You!" Lance muttered. "So you were the spy!" Ranth answered him with a choked oath and leaped forward again. There were no niceties to that combat. It was a matter of life and death, and each knew it. Ranth would kill him, Lance knew, if he possibly could; and he, he had to kill or capture Ranth. Otherwise the news of the Torpedo Plan would go through, Ranth would return to the base, and the secret of the hidden radio never be known. Another would be put in Lance's place; and when Hay kept his rendezvous at Sola Ranch.... He had to win. No effort was made at defense, for those first few furious minutes. A veritable fusillade of hurtling fists stormed through the air. They each gave and took equally. Then Ranth's heavy shoulders bunched; cunningly he feinted, then, whirling, swung a vicious right hand smash to Lance's chin. Lance reeled, fell, seeing Ranth's hate-contorted visage dance queerly in the close air before him. The orderly clutched for his revolver, and Lance bounded up as if spring-impelled, nailed the other with two lightninglike jabs and unleashed all his strength in an uppercut which sprawled Ranth in a limp, quivering heap. * * * * * Panting, Lance surveyed him, then turned to get the gun. He felt the shock of thudding flesh in his legs, and fell again with Ranth scrambling on top of him. Steel-ribbed hands pounced on his throat, gouged savagely, while the man above grunted thick curses from his slavering mouth. Lance struggled fiercely; saw a curtain of black rush down. Desperately he hooked a booted leg up, craned it over Ranth's back, tugged. The terrible fingers loosened. Lance shook them off, rolled the other over and leaped once more to his feet, right hand clenched and ready. Ranth staggered up. The young man measured him, pivoted, and smashed his beefy jaw with a clean swing that had every ounce of Lance's hard young body behind it. The orderly shot back as if struck by a locomotive. He crashed into the radiophone, splintered the delicate instruments and slumped, eyes glazed, to the ground. He was out. Dead out. But how much had he got through on the radiophone before being stopped? Had he told where the rendezvous, was to be? Told the time and place, and warned the Slavs to look for Hay? Lance sighed, and was conscious that his left eye was rapidly closing, that a lip was split and his whole body sore. He slung Ranth over his shoulders and trudged wearily back to the base. He told his story to Colonel Douglas' amazed ears. Ranth, come back to life, was slapped in handcuffs, and for some time the colonel put him through a stern inquisition. But his lips were sealed. He would not divulge how much he had succeeded in passing on to the Slavs. "A brave man," Douglas observed grimly when Ranth was carried off to the brig, "but it's death for him, the same as it would be death for Hay were he caught." "I don't think he had a chance to get much across, sir," Lance said. "I was right on him almost as soon as he got there. You won't let this cancel our rendezvous?" Douglas' thin lips smiled narrowly. "No. You'll be taking a greater chance, Lance, but we must gamble on how much the Slavs know. You're game, aren't you?" "Yes, sir!" * * * * * Wednesday night came. Thunderstorms muttered to each other on the lowering horizons; gusts of fierce, wind-driven rain slanted down on the dripping base; occasionally a crooked finger of lightning probed the black sky and lit the whole sopping countryside with a searing, flashing glare. The night patrol had taken off. A single plane, wet and gleaming under the sobbing heavens, stood on the tarmac, two heavily coated figures before it. Presently three more figures, carrying some bulky black object carefully between them, emerged from one of the buildings. Tenderly they placed this object in the lone plane, which had been stripped of radio outfit and gas bomb compartment to provide room. Then the two original figures were left alone once more before the fighting machine. Far to the rear, the heavy American guns barked in their regular nightly bombardment. "A good night for it," Colonel Douglas, scanning the sky, said, "and also a bad one. If only that damned lightning would stop!" Lance, pulling on thick gloves, did not reply. The colonel consulted his watch. "What time do you make it?" he asked. "Exactly eight," the other answered. "Right. At eight-six, you leave. At nine, on the dot, you meet Hay at Sola Ranch. At nine-ten, the torpedoes take off. At quarter to ten, they arrive over their destination--San Francisco and the surrounding territory. And quarter to ten, if things go correctly--which they must!--is the minute that ends the Slavish invasion of America. At ten minutes to ten, five minutes after the torpedoes strike, our troops charge forward in general attack. God be with you, Lance! The fate of America is resting on your shoulders to-night, remember!" "I'm remembering." * * * * * Colonel Douglas looked at the young man's grim, set face, looked at his lithe, clean-limbed figure and his steady black eyes which burned with a purposeful fire. And the colonel smiled. "We'll win!" he said. An orderly sped from his office, saluted, and rapped crisply: "Order just received from Washington, sir, to proceed." Lance clasped Douglas' hand, and leaped into the snug, enclosed cockpit. The four motors bellowed as the thin-sprayed oil cascaded to them. The helicopter props spun around. "Go to it, kid!" cried Douglas. "Spy or no spy, you're coming out on top! And give Hay a last handshake for me!" And he swung to the salute. Lance extended his hand. Then he gave his ship the gun, and the tiny, streamlined scout teetered, roared, and rose with a scream into the dripping darkness high above. The Torpedo Plan had started. PART IV Lance hung for a moment at one thousand feet. A crack of lightning lit the base below for a second, and he perceived the colonel's straight figure with hand outstretched. Lance grinned, and gunned to forty thousand--an easy flying height, with his superchargers pumping and air-rectifiers normalizing the enclosed pilot's seat. "But what," he wondered, as he stopped the helicopters, "did he mean by 'give a _last_ handshake'?" He was soon to find out. Behind him, in the fuselage, nestled the weird cluster of machinery which was the Singe beacon. It certainly did not look imposing--a mass of spidery tubes mazing round a bulky black box, which was, Lance guessed, some new type of generator. Out of the top of the device sprouted a funnel-like horn, from which, on the adjustment of the beacon's control studs, shot the nullifying ray. Lance could not suppress a shiver as he thought of the earth-shaking cataclysm that ray would conjure from the infinitely high heavens. At forty thousand feet he was above the storm clouds, whose pitchy, vapor-drenched blackness effectively blanked out all sign of the earth. He might have been flying in outer space. Keeping a careful eye on his instruments, he set a course for Sola Ranch. He kept his speed around three hundred, wishing to meet Hay exactly at nine. But--would Hay be there? How much did the Slavs know? How much had Ranth got through before he stopped him? A frown creased his brow. It was best not to puzzle over that question. Best just to go ahead, and keep going. * * * * * At about three minutes to nine he set the plane's nose down through veils of clammy cloud. This was mountainous country, sparsely patrolled by Slav ships. Lance hovered cautiously over the firred mountain tops, getting his directions, shooting wary eyes through the magnifying mirrors in search of enemy scouts. He saw none. Satisfied, he cut the Rahl-Diesels, gunned the helicopter props and dropped lightly down on the stubbly field of Sola Ranch. To left and right loomed the dim outlines of the lonely mountains. Before the war, the owner of Sola Ranch had grown apples; this field had housed a few horses. It made a perfect meeting place--secluded, misty with the clinging mountain vapors, far apart from the war. Lance felt like a prowling werewolf there, waiting for its ghostly mate. Rain was still splattering in desultory bursts, but distance muted the rumbling salvos' of thunder. His watch told him it was one minute to nine. Now--what? Hay, or a swooping squadron of Slav planes? Lance stepped out of the cockpit into the rain, though holding himself tensely ready to leap back again and soar away. He stared around, and peered above. Was that a shadow?--a nightmare flying bird?--or a plane? He grasped a hand-flash, and rapidly signalled his identity. The next instant, it seemed, the shadow wavered, then fell earthward with great speed. Out of the gloom and rain it came--an enemy plane. It dropped down beside his scout. From its cockpit came a few swift flashes of light. Hay! * * * * * Lance ran eagerly over to the other plane, and out from its enclosed cabin stepped the man he had known as Praed. Wordlessly, they gripped hands. Hay's thin, straight face wore a smile, and he met Lance's eyes keenly. Lance stammered: "S-sorry, Captain Hay, about--about the way I treated you at the base. You see, I had no idea who you were." Hay cut short his apologies with a laugh. "Rot! I'd've been the same way myself." He glanced rapidly at Lance's plane. "Got it?" he questioned. "I'm a bit late; had a hell of a time getting here without arousing suspicion. We'd best hurry." Lance nodded. They hurried to the Goshawk. As they worked, carefully lifting out the Singe beacon, Lance, in crisp, short-clipped sentences, told his companion of Ranth, the spy. "You don't know how much he got through?" "No," said Lance. "No." "Hm-m. Well, we'll have to trust to luck." "You know the working of the beacon?" Lance asked. On the other's nod of affirmation he continued: "What's your plan?" "Light about five miles this side of Frisco itself, just near the main Slav military base. Anywhere in that territory would do, though. The beacon doesn't go up in a narrow ray; it spreads, diffuses. The squadron of torpedoes will cover some fifty or sixty miles of ground, I believe. They'll utterly demolish the city, and every damned Slav in it." His face, in the darkness, went grim and hard. "And it'll damn well pay them back," he rasped, "for the horrible way they massacred San Francisco's population...." * * * * * The Singe beacon was in his plane. Hay turned to Lance, stretching out his hand for a farewell clasp. Then Lance asked the question that had been worrying him. "Colonel Douglas told me to give you a last handshake for him. _Last._ Why did he say that?" "Because," Hay said smilingly, "I'm staying by the beacon to make sure that nothing goes wrong. I guess that's why he said it, old fellow...." Lance gasped: "You're sacrificing your life?" "Of course. To save seventy-five million others." Then suddenly they both stared above. A roar of sound--of purring motors, of props, mixed with the chatter of a dozen machine-guns--had belched with numbing suddenness from the low-hanging clouds. Enemy planes! A patrol of them! "God!" jerked Lance. "Ranth's warning got through! Part of it, anyway!" He leaped for his plane, shouting: "I'll hold 'em off! You get away _quick_!" and, through a veritable hail of lead, sprang into the cockpit. Then, a cold pang at his heart, he sprang out again. A bullet had caught Hay! * * * * * For a moment, the Slav fire ceased, while their planes zoomed up to start another death-dealing dive. And in that moment Lance was at Hay's side, where he had fallen. "They--got me," whispered Hay, a stream of blood welling from his gasping mouth. "I'm--I'm going. C-carry me to--to your plane. I've still a--a little strength left. You take the beacon. I--I'll hold them--as--as long as--I can. Put through that beacon, boy! _Put it though!_" His brain a maelstrom, Lance stared at the crumpled figure. It was the only way! He heard the motors above come roaring down again; desperately he carried the blood-choking Hay to his own plane; propped him limply at the controls. Bullets spat through a frenzy of noise. Weakly Hay started the Goshawk's Diesels, and weakly, into Lance's face, smiled, and beckoned him to leave. And, as Lance, a grim resolve at his heart, turned, Hay's blood-frothed lips formed the words: "Carry on!" Through the raining lead, seeming to bear a charmed life, Lance leaped to Hay's plane, hearing as he did so his own, with a stricken pilot at its controls, hurtle upwards. Carry on! For the life of America! Carry on! * * * * * Ten minutes past the hour of nine. A full thousand miles behind the lines, on the wide black field of America's major war base, a small group of men stood, surveying the awesome weapons assembled there. Row upon row of huge, dully-gleaming cigar-shaped things stretched away into the darkness before them. There were only one or two faint lights to give illumination, and the night choked in on them, making them terrifying. They resembled, more than anything else, half-sized dirigibles, being roughly about one hundred feet long and perhaps as much as thirty feet high. At first sight, they seemed to be numberless; then, as the bewildered eye became more sane, one could count them and see that there were, in reality, about thirty. Their prows were stubby; in the port side of each a tiny trap-door yawned, and standing by every trap-door was the overall-clad figure of a mechanic, waiting for the signal. The Commander of the American Air Force looked up from his wrist-watch. At his side was a peculiar gnomelike figure, a figure with hunched, twisted back and huge, over-heavy head. This was Professor Singe, and from that ridiculous head had come the germ which had finally expanded into the torpedoes arrayed before him. His eyes were nervous; his crooked face twitched ceaselessly. "Time?" he kept asking. "Time? Is it yet time?" And finally the tall figure of the Commanding Officer turned and rapped: "Time!" * * * * * An aide-de-camp raised a hand. As if working by some mechanical device, the figure which stood by each torpedo climbed through the trap-doors, jumped out a second later, and came running to the head of the field. "About thirty seconds," muttered Singe nervously, eyes alight. "Thirty seconds for their motors to catch the stream. Thirty--ah!" For the squadron of man-made horrors had stirred. "God pity San Francisco!" murmured the Commanding Officer, and stepped back involuntarily as the whole fleet lifted their glyco-scarzite crammed bellies from the field and, as if moved by some magical, unseen, unheard force, shot up into the darkness with ever gathering speed. "God pity it, indeed!" chuckled Singe exultantly. "It'll need it!" The C. O. sighed and shook his head slowly. "War!" he mused. "And yet, it's our only chance." For a moment he paused, seemingly unconscious of the macabre little form next to him, still gazing aloft at the now invisible torpedoes, and then muttered: "And God pity Basil Hay, who's giving his life to America--a glorious, unselfish hero. God pity Basil Hay!" * * * * * American flyers never knew of Basil Hay's last fight. Had they, it would have become legendary. For Hay fought a grim battle against two foes. One, he could face and conquer, as he had conquered often before. But the other lurked next to his dauntless heart, and it Hay could not subdue. It was death. Truly, Hay's fight there in the wet clouds above Sola Ranch was an inspired one. He fought almost by instinct alone, instinct twenty years of piloting had planted deep in his veins. He fought for Lance--for America. His eyes, glazing rapidly, could not distinguish the roaring phantoms that laced around his lone plane, but uncannily his bursts of fire went home again and again, while theirs ripped aimlessly over the Goshawk's hell-driven snout. Of course it could not last. Gallant spirit alone kept Basil Hay taut at his controls. Spirit alone thrust back the ever-increasing surge of black oblivion that pounded at his heart and brain. Spirit alone sent the pitifully outnumbered plane corkscrewing in peerless maneuverings that baffled the on-passing Slavs and thrust four of them to the sodden ground in flame. Spirit that would not surrender--but had to. They could never have conquered Basil Hay in a plane. An ambushing bullet that caught him off guard did that. And finally Hay fell. But he had kept them for ten full minutes. Ten minutes--each one a lasting, mute testimony to his unquenchable, unyielding spirit. He flung a last salvo from his hot machine-guns, then, heart numbing, jerked back the control-stick and careened high. He slumped down. The plane paused, wallowed crazily for a moment, and then roared earthward, "Carry on!" formed faintly on its dead pilot's bloody lips. Basil Hay had fought his last fight. Ten minutes.... Lance hadn't expected that long. He'd thought Hay would die in a few seconds. The man was mortally wounded; could not last. Nevertheless, minutes or seconds, he was entrusted with the Singe beacon, and it was his job and his will to put it through. He'd climbed the Slav plane up to its ceiling, driven it till it simply refused to go higher, and then roared on towards San Francisco. Each second he expected to see others come hurtling after him. When they did not, he knew how really great Hay's will was. It was an inspiring example. But his brain was tortured by a multitude of conflicting doubts. A patrol of Slav scouts had ambushed them. Just how much did the Slavs know, then, about the torpedoes? He, Lance, had to guide the Singe beacon. Quickly he reviewed what Hay had told him. "Light about five miles this side of Frisco. Anywhere in that territory would do, though. The beacon doesn't go up in a narrow ray; it spreads, diffuses." _Spreads, diffuses._ Hay had been clad in Slav uniform, and thus could, with a certain measure of safety, put the beacon machinery on the ground itself. But Lance was in American uniform; if he landed, he ran great risk of being noticed and attacked at once. Lance saw immediately that there was only one way out. It was sure death, but Hay had expected death, and so must he. His lips set in stern resolve. It meant good-by--farewell to the girl he'd left behind, farewell to life, farewell to everything--but not for a second did he debate the course he would take. * * * * * Lance glanced at his watch. Nine-thirty. The torpedoes were even now on their way, hurtling along miles above the earth. In fifteen minutes they would be over San Francisco. In fifteen minutes the Singe beacon had to meet them. He was not familiar with the Slav plane's instruments, but he judged he'd traveled some hundred and twenty-five miles; was nearing the outskirts of San Francisco. The air below would be thick, probably, with enemy scouts, but his appearance should pass unchallenged as long as they didn't glimpse his betraying uniform. He set the plane's nose down in a long slanting dive. Whipping through the clouds, the guarding search-rays of San Francisco were soon visible. Lance saw a few patrols of enemy scouts; he clung to the clouds, decreased his speed, and began circling over the heart of the metropolis itself. Twenty to ten. Occasionally a Slav plane flashed by him. Thank God, they didn't challenge! Lance went still lower. Finally, at a thousand feet, he set the helicopter props in motion and hung in mid-air--directly above the very center of the city. Sixteen minutes to ten. Now! * * * * * In the American front-line trenches, massed troops crouched expectantly. Clustered on every air base were flights of planes, each one crammed with bombs. Far behind, the Yank gun-crews edged nervously up to their mighty charges, and fingered anxiously the stubby gas shells which soon would be flung through the dripping night. And at Base No. 5 a very uneasy Colonel Douglas paced back and forth in his office, muttering: "No news from Lance! No news from Lance! God! He can't have failed! But why doesn't he show up?" He had not failed. Hovering in the plane over San Francisco Lance squirmed round in his seat, reached back into the fuselage, and pressed rapidly the studs on the Singe beacon. A high whining noise pierced instantly through the plane. And up stabbed the beacon, invisible, deadly--up, up, up to a thin realm miles above, where it flashed into an awesome squadron of terrible shells of steel! Shells that, a second later, wavered, staggered, and plunged earthward! And Lance tensed in his seat. From above, he caught a tiny whistling noise--a whistling that hurtled into a terrific shriek--that roared ever closer. "Carry on!" he muttered. "Carry on!" The words froze on his lips, for the world was suddenly consumed, it seemed, by flame and splitting, bellowing thunder. * * * * * The American guns spoke. From every aerodrome long flights of scouts and bombers and transport planes roared upward. In the front trenches the troops, still somewhat dazed by the earth-shaking explosion that had just tumbled from the far horizon--a horizon still lit by leaping tongues of awful flame--poured over the top, gas-masks on, repeaters and portable machine-guns at the ready, with a fierce cry on their lips. Before that avenging attack the Slavs, their very spine broken, bewildered and confused, already turning in panic, could not stand. America swept to the Pacific, and left death in her wake. And when she came to San Francisco, not even the sternest fighting men, still hot from battle, could repress a shudder, so awful was the devastation. The Slav invasion was over! * * * * * In the rebuilt city of San Francisco there is a statue that stands proudly before the magnificent, gleaming city hall. It represents two slim, straight-standing figures, clad in the uniform of the American Air Force. Their outstretched arms support a tiny one-seater Goshawk fighting plane. Below, as you know, there is a plaque. Men touch their hats as they walk by it; flowers are always fresh at its base. On the plaque are the words: To The Everlasting Memory Of Captain Basil Hay, A.A.F. Captain Derek Lance, A.A.F. Who, In The War Of 1938, Gave Their Lives In Destroying And Devastating San Francisco That San Francisco And America Might Live [Illustration: Advertisement.] The Tentacles From Below A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By Anthony Gilmore_ CHAPTER I "_Machine-Fish_" [Illustration: _Bowman hooked it on the hawser arm above._] [Sidenote: Down to tremendous ocean depths goes Commander Keith Wells in his blind duel with the marauding "machine-fish."] "Full stop. Rest ready." These words glowed in vivid red against the black background of the _NX-1's_ control order-board. A wheel was spun over, a lever pulled back, and in the hull of the submarine descended the peculiar silence found only in mile-deep waters. Men rested at their posts, eyes alert. Above, in the control room, Hemingway Bowman, youthful first officer, glanced at the teleview screen and swore softly. "Keith," he said, "between you and me, I'll be damned glad when this monotonous job's over. I joined the Navy to see the world, but this charting job's giving me entirely too many close-ups of the deadest parts of it!" Commander Keith Wells. U. S. N., grinned broadly. "Well," he remarked, "in a few minutes we can call it a day--or night, rather--and then it's back to the _Falcon_ while the day shift 'sees the world.'" He turned again to his dials as Hemmy Bowman, with a sigh, resumed work. "Depth, six thousand feet. Visibility poor. Bottom eight thousand," he said into the phone hung before his lips, and fifty feet aft, in a small cubby, a blue-clad figure monotonously repeated the observations and noted them down in an official geographical survey report. * * * * * Such had been their routine for two tiring weeks, all part of the _NX-l's_ present work of re-charting the Newfoundland banks. As early as 1929 slight cataclysms had begun to tear up the sea-floor of this region, and of late--1935--seismographs and cable companies had reported titanic upheavals and sinkings of the ocean bed, changing hundreds of miles of underwater territory. Finally Washington decided to chart the alterations this series of sub-sea earthquakes had wrought. And for this job the _NX-1_ was detailed. A super-submarine fresh from the yards, small, but modern to the last degree, she contained such exclusive features as a sheathing of the tough new glycosteel, automatic air rectifiers, a location chart for showing positions of nearby submarines, the newly developed Edsel electric motors, and automatic teleview screen. When below surface she was a sealed tube of metal one hundred feet long, and possessed of an enormous cruising radius. From the flower of the Navy some thirty men were picked, and in company with the mother-ship _Falcon_ she put out to combine an exhaustive trial trip with the practical charting of the newly changed ocean floor. Now this work was almost over. Keith Wells told himself that he, like Bowman, would be glad to set foot on land again. This surveying was important, of course, but too dry for him--no action. He smiled at the lines of boredom on Hemmy's brow as the younger man stared gloomily into the teleview screen. And then the smile left his lips. The radio operator, in a cubby adjoining the control room, had spoken into the communication tube: "Urgent call for you, sir! From Captain Knapp!" * * * * * Wells reached out and clipped a pair of extension phones over his ears. The deep voice of Robert Knapp, captain of the mother-ship _Falcon_, came ringing in. It was strained with an excitement unusual to him. "Wells? Knapp speaking. Something damned funny's just happened near here. You know the fishing fleet that was near us yesterday morning?" "Yes?" "Well, the whole thing's gone down! Destroyed, absolutely! The sea's been like glass, the weather perfect--yet from the wreckage, what there is of it, you'd think a typhoon had struck! I can't begin to explain it. No survivors, either, so far, though we're hunting for them." "You say the boats are completely destroyed?" "Smashed like driftwood. I tell you it's preposterous--and yet it's the fact. I think you'd better return at once, old man; you're only half an hour off. And come on the surface; it's getting light now, and you might pick up something. God knows what this means, Keith, but it's up to us to find out. It's--it's got me...." His tones were oddly disturbed--almost scared--and this from a man who didn't know what fear was. "But Bob," Keith asked, "how did you--" "Stand by a minute! The lookout reports survivors!" * * * * * Wells turned to meet Bowman's inquisitive face. He quickly repeated the gist of Knapp's weird story. "We saw them at dusk, last evening--remember? And now they're gone, destroyed. What can have done it?" For some minutes the two surprised men speculated on the strange occurrence. Then Knapp's voice again rang in the headphones. "Wells? My God, man, this is getting downright fantastic! We've just taken two survivors on board; one's barely alive and the other crazy. I can't get an intelligible thing from him; he keeps shrieking about writhing arms and awful eyes--and monsters he calls 'machine-fish'!" "You're sure he's insane?" Robert Knapp's voice hesitated queerly. "Well, he's shrieking about 'machine-fish'--fish with machines over them!... I--I'm going to broadcast the whole story to the land stations. 'Machine-fish'! I don't know.... I don't know.... You'd better hurry back, Wells!" He rang off. * * * * * Keith slipped off the headphones and told Bowman what he had learned. Hardy, staunchly built craft, those fishing boats were; born in the teeth of gales. What horror could have ripped them--all of them--to driftwood, with the weather perfect? And a half-mad survivor, raving about "machine-fish"! "Such things are preposterous," Bowman commented scornfully. "But--the fleet's gone, Hemmy," Keith replied. "Anyway, we'll speed back, and see what it's all about." He punched swift commands on the control studs. "Empty Tanks, Zoom to Surface, Full Speed," the crimson words glared down below, and the _NX-1_ at once shoved her snout up, trembling as her great electric motors began their pulsing whine. The delicate fingers of the massed dials before Keith danced exultantly. The depth-levels tolled out: "Seven thousand ... six thousand ... five thousand--" "Keith! Look there!" Hemmy Bowman was pointing with amazement at the location chart, a black mesh screen that showed the position of other submarines within a radius of two miles. In one corner, a spot of vivid red was shining. "But it can't be a submarine!" Wells objected. "Our reports would have mentioned it!" The two officers stared at each other. "'Machine-fish!'" Bowman whispered softly. "If there were machines, the metal would register on the chart." "It must be them!" the commander roared, coming out of his daze. "And, by God, we're going after them!" * * * * * Rapidly he brought the _NX-1_ out of her zoom to the surface, and left her at four thousand feet, in perfect trim, while he read the instruments closely. A green spot in the center of the location chart denoted the _NX-1's_ exact position. A distance of perhaps forty inches separated it from the red light on the meshed screen--which represented, roughly, a mile and a half. Below the chart was a thick dial, over which a black hand, indicating the mysterious submersible's approximate depth, was slowly moving. "He's sinking--whatever he is," Keith muttered to Hemmy. "Hey, Sparks! Get me Captain Knapp." A moment later the connection was put through. "Bob? This is Wells again. Bob, our location chart shows the presence of some strange undersea metallic body. It can't be a submarine, for my maritime reports would show its presence. We think it has some connection with the 'machine-fish' that survivor raved about. At any rate, I'm going after it. The world has a right to know what destroyed that fishing fleet, and since the _NX-1_ is right on the spot it's my duty to track it down. Re-broadcast this news to land stations, will you? I'll keep in touch with you." Knapp's voice came soberly back. "I guess you're right, Keith; it's up to you.... So long, old man. Good luck!" * * * * * In Wells' veins throbbed the lust for action. With control studs at hand, location chart and teleview screen before his eyes and fifteen men waiting below for his commands, he had no fear of any monster the underseas might spew up. He glanced swiftly at the location chart and depth indicator again. The mysterious red spot was slowly coming across the _NX-1's_ bows at a distance of about one mile. Keith punched a stud, and, as his craft filled her tank and slipped down further into deep water, he spoke to Hemmy Bowman. "Take control for a minute. Keep on all speed, and follow 'em like a bloodhound. I'm going below." He strode down the connecting ramp to the lower deck, where he found fifteen men standing vigilantly at posts. At once Keith plunged into a full explanation of what he had learned up in the control room. He concluded: "A great moral burden rests on us--every one of us--as we will soon come face to face with a possible world menace. Anything may happen. A state of war exists on this submarine. You will be prepared for any wartime eventuality!" Sobered faces greeted this announcement, and perceptibly the men straightened and held themselves more alertly. Wells at once returned to the control room. A glance at the location chart and its two tiny lights told him that the intervening distance had been decreased to about half a mile. The depth dial showed them both to be two miles below, and steadily diving lower. Charts showed the sea-floor to be three miles deep in this position, and that meant-- "Look there!" exclaimed the first officer suddenly. "It's changing course!" * * * * * The crimson stud had suddenly shifted its course, and now was fleeing directly before them. For a moment the distance between the green and red lights remained constant--and then Keith Wells stared unbelievingly at the chart, wiped a hand across his eyes and stared again. "Why--why, the devils are as fast as we!" he exclaimed in amazement. "I think they're even gaining on us!" "And there's no other submarine in the world that can do more than thirty under water!" Hemmy Bowman added. "We're hitting a full forty-one!" A call came through the communication tube from Sparks. "Report from Consolidated Radio News-Broadcasters, sir, aimed especially at us." "Well?" asked Keith, motioning Hemmy to listen in. Sparks read it. "'A week ago Atlantic City reported that seven men were snatched off fishing boat by unidentified tentacled monsters. Testimony of witnesses was discredited, but was later corroborated by the almost identical testimony of other witnesses at Brighton Beach, England, who saw man and woman taken by mysterious monsters whilst bathing.' Perhaps these same creatures destroyed the Newfoundland fishing fleet." His level voice ceased. "Tentacled monsters ... 'machine-fish,'" Wells murmured slowly. "'Machine-fish.'..." Their eyes met, the same wonder in each. "Well," Keith rapped at last, "we're seeing this through!" * * * * * He turned again to the location chart. The green spot as always was in the center, and at a constant distance was the red, showing that the _NX-1_ was hot on the other's trail. The depth dials indicated that both were diving deeper every moment. "Where in hell's it going?" the commander rasped. "We'll be on the floor in a few minutes!" Here the teleview showed the world to be one of fantasy, one to which the sun did not exist. It was not an utter, pitchy blackness that pervaded the water, but rather a peculiar, dark blueness. No fish schools, Keith noted, scurried from them. They had already left these waters; aware, perhaps, of the passing Terror.... They plunged lower yet. Wells was conscious of Hemmy Bowman's quick, uneven breathing. Conscious of the tautness of his own nerves, strung like quivering violin strings. Conscious of the terrific walls of water pressing in on them. And conscious of the men below, their lives bound implicitly in his will and brain.... A thought came to him, and quickly he reached into a rack for the chart of the local sea-floor. His brow creased with puzzlement as he studied it. "Here's more mystery, Hemmy," he muttered. "Look--there's an underwater cliff about half a mile dead ahead. It rises to within four thousand feet of the surface. And that thing out there is charging straight into its base!" "They must be aware of it," jerked the other. "See?--they've stopped!" * * * * * It was true. The gulf between the two colored spots was rapidly being swallowed up. At a pulsing forty-one knots the _NX-1_ was closing in on the motionless mystery craft. "They're sinking to the floor itself," observed Wells. "Perhaps waiting to attack." The invisible beams from their ultra-violet light-beacons streamed through the silent gloom outside, yet still the teleview screen was empty. Keith punched a stud, and the _NX-1's_ whining motors dulled to a scarcely audible purr. "What is the thing?" muttered Hemmy Bowman. "God, Keith, what _is_ it?" For answer, the commander dropped them the last five hundred feet. The sea-floor rose like a gray ghost. More control studs were pushed; the order-board below read: "All Power Off, Rest in Trim." The location chart told a tale that wrung a gasp from Bowman's throat. The red and green lights were practically touching.... The hands of Petty Officer Brown, the helmsman, were quivering on the helm. Wells' fists kept tensing and relaxing as he peered for a sight of the enemy in the teleview. Nothing showed but the moving fingers of spectral kelp. Then both he and Bowman cried out as one: "_There!_" CHAPTER II _The Silent Ray_ A strange shape had suddenly materialized on the screen--an immense, oval-shaped thing of dull metal, with great curving cuts of glass-like substance in its blunt bow, like staring eyes; a lifeless, staring thing, stretching far into the curtain of gloom behind. How long it was, Keith could not tell; at first his numb brain refused to grasp it and reduce it to definite, sane standards of size and length. The cold weeds of the sea-floor kelp beds swayed eerily over and around it. From its bow, he saw, peculiar knobs jutted, the function of which he guessed with dread. Was it waiting with a purpose? Was it waiting--and inviting attack? A frightened whisper from Hemmy Bowman broke the hush: "Keith, the thing has ports, but shows no lights! What kind of creatures can they be?" As he spoke, the three men in the control room felt the unmistakable, jarring tingle of an electric shock. And while their nerves still jumped, it came again; and again. They were conscious of a slight feeling of drowsiness. Keith gaped at Bowman and Brown, and then a flash on the teleview screen drew his eyes. There, against the blackness of its otherwise inanimate hulk, one of the jutting knobs on the bow of the mysterious submarine was glowing and pulsing with orange life! With it came the tingling shock again. It flicked off as they watched, then returned and went once more. "They're attacking, but thank God the shock was harmless!" Wells said grimly. "All right; they've asked for it: I'm going to see how they like the taste of a torpedo!" * * * * * The two submarines were resting on the ocean floor with perhaps two hundred feet between them. The _NX-1's_ bow tubes were not exactly in line to score a direct hit; she would have to be maneuvered slightly to port. The range was short; the explosion from the torpedoes would be titanic. Keith punched the control studs, ordering the men below to assume firing stations. Then, while waiting for the _NX-1_ to shift, he studied the teleview screen to sight the range exactly. The black dot which represented the enemy craft was not directly on the crossed hair-lines of the dial-like range-finder, but shifting the _NX-1_ a few feet would bring it to the perfect firing point. But the _NX-1_ did not budge. Surprised, her commander swung and looked at Bowman. "What the devil?" he cried. "Did that shock--?" He left the dread thought unfinished and leaped to the speaking tubes. "Craig! Jones! Wetherby!" he yelled. "Men! Don't you hear me? Aren't you--" He broke off, wordless, waiting for an answer that did not come, then sprang to the connecting ramp and ran to the deck below. The scene he found halted him abruptly in his tracks. Every member of the crew was sprawled on the deck, in grotesque, limp postures. They had been standing rigidly at posts, he saw, when the thing, whatever it was, had struck. Without a sound, without a single cry of alarm, the _NX-1's_ crew had been laid low! * * * * * The commander slowly advanced to the deck and stared more closely at the upturned faces around him. He saw that every man's eyes were open. Bending over one still form, he pressed his hand on the heart. It was beating! The man was alive! Amazed, he moved to another and another: they were all breathing, slowly and regularly--were all alive! A curious look in their eyes staggered him for a moment. He could swear that they recognized him, knew he was staring at them--for every single pair was alight with intelligence, and Keith fancied he saw gleams of recognition. "It must have been a paralyzing ray!" he gasped. "A thing our scientists've been trying to develop for years.... And that monster outside knows the secret...." He lifted an arm of the inert figure at his feet; when he released the grip, it flopped limply back to the deck again. "_Keith! Come back, quick!_" Startled, the commander turned to find Hemingway Bowman at the top of the connecting ramp, his face distorted with alarm. "For God's sake, come back quick!" he yelled again. "Down there the ray might get you!" With the words, Wells leaped to the ramp and raced to the control room. He had no sooner made it than he felt again the queer tingle of the electric charge. He found himself trembling. Bowman's face was white. His words came stuttering. "One second later and they'd have got you.... They got Sparks in his cubby.... You see, the ray doesn't affect us in the control room because--" "Because the Gibson insulation that protects the instruments keeps it out!" Keith finished grimly. "I see!" Just then a slight jar ran through the submarine. Coincident with it came a cry from Brown, the helmsman. His arm was pointed at the teleview. There they saw the enemy's mighty dirigible of metal was now within thirty feet of the _NX-1._ It had crept up silently, without warning. And, spanning the short gulf between them, an arm of webbed metal craned from the other's huge bow, hooking tightly into the American submarine's forward hawser holes! As they took this in, the enemy ship moved away and the arm of metal tightened. The _NX-1_ shuddered. And, at first slowly, but with ever increasing speed, she got under way and slid after her captor. They were being towed away. Kidnaped! Men, submarine and all! * * * * * Keith Wells mopped sweat from a hot brow and rapidly reviewed his weapons. He was sorely restricted. Through an emergency system the _NX-1_ could be propelled and maneuvered from her control room; but the torpedo tubes needed local attendance. "Hemmy, reverse engines," he jerked, himself spinning over a small wheel. "Let's see if we can out-pull the devil!" At once they felt the shock of the paralyzing ray, and then the surging whine of the Edsel electrics pulsed up and in the teleview screen they watched the grim struggle of ship against ship. Imperceptibly, almost, as her screws cut in and churned, the forward progress of the _NX-1_ was slowing, the speed of the other being cut down, until finally they but barely forged ahead. Slowly, ever so slowly they were out-pulled; inch by inch they were dragged ahead. Their motors could not hold even. "She's more powerful than we!" Wells' bitter voice spoke. "Damn!" He thought desperately, while Bowman and Brown stared at the fantastic tale the teleview spelled out. Again the paralyzing shock tingled, an intangible jailer that bound them, more surely than steel bars, to the control room. To dare that streaming barrage meant instant impotence, and perhaps, later, death.... "Our two bow torpedoes," Keith mused slowly. "We're a bit close, but it's our only chance. The ray comes at intervals of about a minute; the torps are ready for firing. If one of us could dash forward and discharge 'em.... Brown, that's you!" The petty officer met his commander's gaze levelly. He smiled. "Yes, sir, I'm ready!" he said. "Good! It'll have to be quick work, though; I'll try and keep the sub pointed straight. Wait for the ray, then run like hell!" * * * * * The first officer took over the helm and Brown stepped to the forward ladder, waiting for the periodic ray to be discharged. The odd tingle came and vanished. "Now!" Wells roared, and Brown leaped down the thin steel rungs. He staggered at the bottom from the force of his impact, then straightened and raced madly forward. Through the drone of the motors the two officers could hear the staccato beat of his feet. But their eyes were glued to the teleview. Through clutching beds of seaweed the enemy submarine was ploughing. Her great, smooth bow lay straight ahead, metal hawser arm spanning the thirty feet between them. In another second, Keith thought grimly, two dynamite packed tubes of sudden death would thunderbolt into that hull, and-- Brown pulled the lever. The tubes spat out compressed air; a scream ran through the submarine; and the two steel fish leaped from their sheaths, their tiny props roaring. Over the narrow gulf they shot; the range was short, their target dead ahead--and yet by bare inches they missed! No answering roar bellowed back. Keith had watched their course; had seen them flash by the enemy's bow, flicking it with their rudders, but nothing more. "Why?" he cried. And, as Bowman moved his hands in a hopeless gesture, he saw in the teleview the reason. It was a jagged pinnacle of rock, which, just before Brown had fired, had been straight ahead. The towing monster had seen it and veered sharply to avoid crashing. The barest change of course, yet sufficient to avoid the torpedoes.... * * * * * Wells and Bowman were cursing savagely when the sound of Brown, racing desperately aft, jerked the commander to the ladder. He saw the petty officer at its foot. "Hurry!" Wells shouted. "The ray!" Brown grasped the steel rungs and scrambled upward, but he was too late. The fatal charge tingled. A peculiar, surprised expression washed over his face; his hands loosened their grip. For a second his eyes looked questioningly at his commander; a faint sigh escaped him; and then his arms flung out, his body relaxed, and he slumped like a slab of meat to the deck below.... Keith Wells saw red. Blind to everything, he was just about to charge down the ladder to himself re-load the forward tubes when the grip of Hemmy Bowman's hand stayed him. The thing Hemmy was staring at in the teleview screen sobered him completely. The wall of rock to which the enemy submarine had first been charging had become visible, soaring vastly from the gloom of the sea-floor. And the monster was towing them straight into a dark, jagged cleft at its base. "It's a cavern!" Keith breathed. "A split in the rock--the lair of that devil. And we're being dragged into it!" CHAPTER III _Sacrifice_ At that moment Keith Wells knew fear. Each second they were being hauled closer to the monster's dim lair. It lay there, dark, mysterious, fingered by gently swaying, clammy kelp. A hushed solitude seemed to reign over it, aweing all undersea life from the vicinity.... Wells turned his head to meet Bowman's eyes, and read in them a silent question. What now? He groaned in the agony of his mind. In a few minutes, all would be over. Once the _NX-1_ was dragged into that dark cavern there'd be no chance of escaping to warn the world above, of saving the submarine. What now? The question brought beads of sweat to his tormented brow. He, Keith Wells, standing impotently by while his ship, the pride of the service, was hauled inch by inch to some strange doom! Racked by these thoughts, he murmured tortured, jerky phrases, unconscious he was giving voice to the things that flogged his brain. "What can I do? I've got to save my ship--I've got to get back to break the news--I've got to tell the world! But how? How--" His expression changed suddenly. "That's it! That hawser arm between us must be broken!" "Yes." First Officer Hemingway Bowman's clear voice broke in on the older man's thoughts with that one crisp word. Keith swung to find the other's eyes fixed levelly on his. "You're right, Keith. The hawser arm must be broken; with a depth charge, of course. It's the only way. "To attach a depth charge," he continued evenly, "a man must leave the ship. You can't, Keith. It will be me." * * * * * The commander did not speak. "I'll put on a sea-suit," Hemmy went on quickly, eyes lighting. "You tip the submarine and I'll slide out the conning tower exit port on the lee side, so they can't see me, and worm forward through the kelp. We're almost holding them even; that'll be easy. I'll be protected from the paralyzing shock until the last second, and it may not get me outside; that'll have to be chanced. The hawser arm's only some ten feet above the sea-floor; I can reach it with a hook on the charge." He paused. "I'll attach it; and when it bursts I'll try to get back and grab that ring on the midships exit port, and you can let me in when we get to the surface. But if I take too long, Keith--if I miss--you beat it without me. You understand? Beat it!" He gazed straight at his friend. "Understand, Keith?" Commander Keith Wells bowed his head in acquiescence. He was afraid that if he met Hemmy Bowman's steady eyes he'd make a fool of himself.... Hemmy glanced at the screen once more, shivering as he saw how near the black cavern was. Then he moved rapidly, playing the cards carefully for his gamble with death. He had to: the trumps were in the other hand. From the locker where their sea-suits were stowed he grabbed his own, and with quick fingers ripped the slides and fitted it on. A sheath of yellow Lestofabrik, its weighted feet and gleaming casque transformed his slim figure into a giant such as might stalk through a nightmare. Built cunningly into the helmet was a tiny radio transmitter and receiver, with a range of a quarter-mile; hugging to the shoulders, inside nestled the air-making mechanism, its tiny generators already in motion. Around the helmet was fastened a small removable undersea-light. The wrists of the suit were very flexible, permitting the freest motion. Once in the suit, Hemmy smiled through the still-opened face-shield. "Got the depth charge ready, Keith? Make it fast--that cavern's near!... Good!" * * * * * Silently the commander fitted the black bomb to his friend's shoulders. It was timed to fire a minute after being set. A long wire hook craned from its top, and this hook Bowman would fasten on the hawser arm. "Without Sparks, I guess I'll have to communicate with you through portable," Keith said, and quickly donned one of the tiny portable sets. "Right. Ready, Keith." Bowman started his awkward, crawling progress up the ladder into the conning tower just above, Keith helping from behind. When they stood before the exit port on the lee side, Wells shot back its bolts and the door swung open, revealing the black emptiness of the water chamber. The commander gazed for a second into Bowman's eyes. The moment had come. Keith turned his head away, felt a hand grip his. He wrung it tightly.... Bowman clumped into the chamber. The commander closed and locked the door, and he heard the streaming water pour in as Hemmy turned the valve. Then Wells sped down the ladder and tilted the diving and course rudders of the submarine. She swayed daintily over to port; held there. A moment later the recurring electric tingle brushed him. Had the enemy seen Bowman leave? Had the ray struck him down? He glared into the teleview. "Thank God!" he breathed. For Hemmy had already slid down the _NX-1's_ smooth hull and was safe on the sea-floor beside her. "Everything right?" Wells asked, speaking into the microphone of his portable. "All O.K.," came the answer. "Going forward now. Kelp thick as hell." * * * * * Keith's eyes bored at the screen. This misshapen monster who was his friend! Almost obscured by bands of thick-leaved kelp the yellow form moved, hands clearing a pathway through the weeds. Slowly but surely he made for the bow of the submersible. "Hard going, Keith. God--the cavern's right ahead!" It was ghostly to hear Hemmy's warm voice from the lifeless solitude outside. Breath coming quickly, Wells watched the silent scene--the cleft in the wall of rock overshadowing everything now. The diver fought ahead, gaining inch by inch. Now, save for occasional clumps of weed, he was exposed to the enemy.... Now the last desperate gauntlet was reached.... Keith felt his blood pound hotly. "I'm gaining, Keith. Gaining...." Bowman had little breath for speech. His tiny form battled on, now sinking from sight as he dropped into some masked gully, now wrestling slowly with great swaying strands of kelp, but always struggling ahead. "I'm at the bow, Keith! The hawser arm's right in our mooring holes. I'll go halfway before fastening the charge. Any signs of life from the devil?" "None yet, Hemmy. But go slow. Hide all you can, old man, for God's sake!..." Right beneath the metal arm, Bowman's dwarfed figure crept doggedly ahead. Forward, inch by breathless inch. Kelp thickened, washed away; the two hulking submersibles, captor and captive, surged onward--but just a little faster went the valiant figure with the black charge on its back. The towing monster had its snout in the cavern. The darkness thickened. Bowman was quarter way! He plunged desperately. Half way! "I'm there, Keith! Now for it!" "Oh, God!" Wells cried. "They see you; they're coming!" For he had seen strange shapes leaving the enemy submarine. And at that same moment, Bowman saw them, too. * * * * * They came like the blink of a dark eye from a door that had quickly slid open in the mysterious ship's bow. As tall as a man they were, and there were two of them, though at first the nature of their bodies merged with the wreathing kelp made them seem like a dozen. Bowman stared at them, hypnotized with fear. His legs and arms went dead, and his whole gallant spirit seemed to slump into lifeless clay. Now he knew why the fishermen had shrieked "machine-fish." Each one of them had eight tapering arms, eight restless tentacles. These were octopi, most hideous scavengers of the ocean floor! And not only octopi--but octopi sheathed in metal-scaled armor! As they came closer, he realized this preposterous fact. The dark substance of their writhing tentacles was not flesh: it was a coat of metal scales. And the fat central mass which held their eyes and vital organs and beaked jaw--this mass was completely enveloped by a globe of glass. From inside, he could see great eyes staring at him. The monsters came towards him quite slowly, obviously wary, advancing over the sea-floor in what was a hideous mockery of walking, their forward tentacles outstretched. With a sob, Hemmy Bowman pulled himself from his trance. He glanced back at the _NX-1_. He still had time to retreat. He might be able to get back inside before these monsters seized him. But that meant abandoning his job. And already his own submarine was nosing into the cavern. The choice between the octopi and retreat stared him in the face. He pulled himself together and jerked his arms back to action. * * * * * Eyes bulging, Keith Wells peered at the dim teleview screen. He saw the creatures approaching Hemmy. And then, suddenly, he remembered his radiophone. "Hemmy! Come back, for God's sake!" he cried. "Come back while you can--it's hopeless!" But Bowman had already seized the depth charge from his back and hooked it on the hawser arm above. Immediately, with that action, all caution fled from the approaching monsters. Their tentacles whipped furiously; and in a great arc they sprang for the tiny figure of the diver. With a deep breath, Hemmy staggered forward to meet them. "Keith!" he gasped. "I'll try to hold 'em away from the charge! When it bursts, zoom! Zoom like hell to the surface!" And then the tentacles had him. Keith watched, cursing his impotence to help. Hemmy had no weapon; he was trying to hold them back by the weight of his body; he reached out and grasped a tentacle and hugged it to him, shoving forward with all his puny strength. But all his effort was as nothing. One of the octopi writhed past him and darted onto the depth charge. Its tentacles tugged at the bomb; pulled furiously. The time charge exploded. The _NX-1_ rocked like a quivering reed; Wells was knocked violently to the floor; a vast roar smote his ear-drums. When he staggered to his feet he found that the octopus that was pulling at the charge had disappeared--blown into fragments of flesh and metal. But the hawser arm was broken! The _NX-1_, free, shot back a full fifty feet under the pull of her reversed screws. A cry echoed in her commander's ears: "Go back, Keith! Go like hell!" He saw the remaining octopus lift Bowman and whip to the exit port of its submarine. The lid slid into place, closing on the monster and his friend, and the enemy ship vanished into the black cavern.... * * * * * Once clear of the opening, Keith set his motors full forward and brought the diving rudders up. Quickly the ship sped from the haunted sea-floor to the sun-warmed surface. A last thin call rang in his radiophone: "They've got me inside, Keith. It's dark, and filled with water. I can't see anything, but I--I guess we're going through the cavern.... Forget about me, old boy. So long! So--" The voice was abruptly cut off. Keith ripped the instrument from his head. Then, face white and drawn, he ran to the radio cubby. Standing over Sparks' inert body, he put through a call to Robert Knapp, on the _Falcon_. "Knapp?" he said harshly. "This is Wells. I'll be with you in a few minutes. Yes--yes--I'll tell you the whole story later. But get this now: Have the day shift all ready to take over the submarine by the time I pull alongside." He said no more just then; but rang off, and, looking back, he muttered savagely: "But I'll be back, Hemmy--I'll be back!" CHAPTER IV _In the Cavern_ "That's the story, Knapp. They got Bowman, and I had to run away. Their ship disappeared into the cavern. I've got a hunch, though, that it's not just a cavern, but a tunnel, leading through to some underwater world. That series of sub-sea earthquakes probably opened it up; and now these devil-octopi are free to pour out. I've _got_ to find out what's what, and that's why I'm going down again as soon as the torpedo system's ready!" Keith and Robert Knapp were in the _Falcon's_ chart room. On the table before them lay a broad white map with a cross-mark indicating the position of the mysterious dark cavern. Wells was striding up and down like a caged tiger in his impatience to be off. Every other minute he glared down to where the _NX-1_ lay alongside. On her conning tower stood the tall blond-haired figure of Graham, the first officer of the day shift, supervising the final details of the work of installing a system of jury controls whereby the submarine's torpedoes could be fired from her control room. Keith stopped short and faced Knapp. "It won't be so one-sided this time, Bob," he promised. "You see: when the location chart shows the enemy ship, I'll rush all men into the control room, where the paralyzing ray can't harm them. I don't know but what they have in other weapons, but I'm gambling on getting my torps in first. They've killed Bowman; they've ravaged a whole fishing fleet; they're free to emerge from their hole and maraud every ocean on the globe! They've got to be stopped! And since I'm armed and have the only submarine on the spot, I've got to do it! I know how to fight them now!" * * * * * Captain Robert Knapp's sense of things was badly disordered. He had just heard a story which his common sense told him couldn't be true, but which the evidence of his eyes had grimly authenticated. He had seen fifteen men slung aboard his ship from the _NX-1's_ silent hull; men stretched in grotesque, limp attitudes; men struck down by a paralyzing ray. Why, no nation on earth had developed rays for warfare! Yet--a crew of helpless men was even then in the sick bay, receiving attention in the hope that they might recover. "You're going right through that cavern, then, Wells?" he asked incredulously. "You're going to investigate what lies beyond?" "Nothing else! And I won't come out till I've blown that octopi ship to pieces!" "It sounds preposterous," Knapp murmured, shaking his head. "Octopi, you say--and clad in metal suits! Running a submarine more powerful than the _NX-1_! Armed with a ray--a paralyzing ray! I can't believe--I can't conceive--" "You've seen the men!... Knapp, if I were you I'd swing my eight-inchers out, bring up the plane catapult and keep the deck torpedo tubes loaded and ready. It's best to be prepared; God knows what's going on underseas these days!" First Officer Graham appeared at the door. "Work finished, sir," he said. "Ready to cast off." "Thank heaven!" Wells muttered, and stretched out his hand to Robert Knapp. "Broadcast what I've told you, Bob, and say that the _NX-1_ won't be back till everything's under control. I'll keep in touch with you. So long!" And he was gone before the captain could even wish him good luck. * * * * * Orders raced from her commander's fingers on the stud board in the control room. "Crash Dive" filled her tanks and put her nose perilously down, so that in thirty seconds only a swirling patch of water was left to show where once she'd lain. A brief command to the helmsman and she pointed straight for the dark cavern marked on the chart. When well under way, Keith descended with Graham to inspect the new torpedo firing system, and found it in good working order. "Graham," he ordered tersely, "instruct the crew fully about rushing to the control room on one ring of the general alarm. And send the cook up to me in a minute or so. I'll be in Sparks' cubby." Above again, he instructed the radio man to rig a remote control sender and receiver in the insulated control room. The need for centering the whole crew there during engagements would crowd the room awkwardly, but at other times, while proceeding on their inspection of the cavern lair, they could remain at their regular posts. That, at least, was Wells' plan. He looked up and found the cook, McKegnie, grinning at him from the door of the control room. Keith smiled, running his eyes over the portly magnificence of his gently perspiring figure. "Keg," he said cheerfully, "I want you to move your hot plate and culinary apparatus up here; you see, we're all likely to be crowded in here for some time, and your coffee's going to be an absolute necessity." He couldn't resist a crack at McKegnie's well-known and passionate curiosity as to what made the thigmajigs of the control board work: "And besides, it'll give you a chance to observe the instruments and perfect yourself for your future career as a naval officer. Much better than a correspondence course in 'How to Be a Submarine Commander,' eh?" Cook McKegnie grinned sheepishly, and left. He was well used to such jests, but he never would admit that his extraordinary interest in watching the ship's wheels go round was accompanied by a miraculous inability to comprehend why they went round.... * * * * * Fifteen minutes later the helmsman's cry, "Cavern showing, sir!" swung the commander to the teleview screen. The dark, kelp-shrouded opening he knew so well was already looming on it. And he was prepared. "Enter," he said, while his punched studs ordered, "Quarter Speed, Ready at Posts, Tanks in Trim." The _NX-1_ slackened her gait, balanced cautiously, and struck a straight, even course as she crept closer to the cleft entrance through which, some two hours earlier, the octopi ship had nosed. Screws turning slowly, she edged through the jagged cavern. Shades of inky blackness grew on the teleview and danced in fantastic blotches; the screen turned to a welter of black, threatening shadows; became a useless maze of ever-changing forms. Keith mouthed curses as he stared at it; he now had nothing by which to judge his progress, to maneuver the submarine, save directional instruments and, perhaps, chance scrapings of the tunnel's ragged walls against the outer hull. The _NX-1_ was running a gauntlet of immeasurable danger, her only assurance of success being the fact that a larger craft had preceded her. But how far, Keith wondered, had that ship preceded her? How was he to know that it had gone straight through? There might be a dozen different turnings in this tunnel: the submarine could easily tilt head-on against a jagged rock and puncture her hull. There might be mines planted directly in their course; he might be swimming straight into some hideous ambuscade. He drove these thoughts from his mind. The passage had to be made on the fickle authority of the senses; and, realizing this, Wells took the helm into his own hands. Graham was posted at the location chart, with instructions to report the red light if it showed. * * * * * Down below, the Edsel electrics were humming very softly; the men stood vigilantly at posts. On their brows were little beads of sweat, and here and there a hand clenched nervously. All knew they were in a tight place; otherwise they were ignorant of where their commander was leading them. Occasionally a long, shivering rasp ran through the ship as her hull nudged the rough tunnel wall. Then the course rudders would swing gently over; and perhaps, almost immediately, another grinding cry of rock and steel would come from the other side. Then would come quickly indrawn breaths as the rudders swung again and the humming silence droned on. The scrapings came quite often. Often, too, the motors would go silent altogether, and the _NX-1_ would rest almost motionless as her commander felt for an opening. It was a tense, nerve-wringing ordeal. The silence, the waiting, the dainty scrapings were maddening. Keith Wells' skin was prickling. He kept only fingertips on the tiny helm: he was playing that uncanny sixth sense of the submarine commander. When it misled him, the rasping rock groaned out, scarring the submarine's smooth skin. Generally, the tunnel was straight; but each time he heard his ship rub against some exterior obstruction, his teeth went tight--for who knew but what it might be a mine? They had penetrated perhaps a half-mile when Graham, eyes steady on the teleview, reported: "Light growing, sir!" * * * * * Wells saw that the screen was filling with a soft, faintly glowing bluish color. The walls of the tunnel became visible, and he noted that they were widening out, funnel-like. He dared to increase speed slightly. Three minutes later he saw that the blue illumination was seeping from the end of the tunnel. They continued out. "Thank God, we're through!" he muttered to Graham. "You see, I was right! It's an underground sea--and we're at the top of it." For the instruments indicated a depth beneath them of roughly three miles. They were in, evidently, a large cavern, of vast length and depth. The _NX-1_ continued slowly forward, two pairs of eyes intent on her teleview screen. Keith jotted down the tunnel's position, and the funnel-shaped hole sank away behind their slow screws. And then, upon the location chart, a faint red dot suddenly glowed! It was upon them in a flash. A small tube of metal, shaped somewhat in the form of the big octopi submarine, had darted up from below, hovered a second close to them, and then, almost before they realized they were being surveyed, sped back into the mysterious depths from which it had come. "A lookout, I suppose," Keith muttered, breathing more easily. "Couldn't have held more than two of those creatures.... Well, the alarm's out, I guess, Graham, but it can't be helped. Let's see what it's like down below." * * * * * They plunged steadily down, then ahead. And presently there grew on the teleview vague forms which widened their eyes and made their breath come quicker. Keith had guessed the tunnel led to a civilization of some kind, but he was not prepared for the sight that loomed hazily through the soft blue water. Strange, moundlike shapes appeared far below, mounds grouped in orderly rows and clusters, with streets running between them, thronged with tiny, spidery dots. Octopi! It was, the commander realized, a city of the monsters--a complete city like those of surface peoples! For several miles in every direction the water-city spread out, farther than the teleview could pierce. Wells marveled at this separately developed civilization, this deep-buried realm of octopi whose unexpected intellectual powers had permitted such development. Perhaps, he pondered, this city was only one of many; perhaps only a village. He could but vaguely glimpse the queer mound buildings, but saw that they were of varying height and were filled with dark round entrance holes, through which the creatures streamed on their different errands.... He saw no schools of fish around. "I guess they're been all killed off, or eaten," he commented to the wonder-struck Graham. "Probably the octopi have separate hatcheries where they raise them for food." "But--good Lord!" the first officer exclaimed. "A city--a city like ours! Down here, filled with octopi!..." "Yes," answered Wells grimly, "and this 'city' may only be a small settlement; there may be scores of these places. We'd better continue ahead now that we're here; for we've got to get all the information we can. I only hope these monsters haven't more than one big submarine. We can expect an attack any minute...." * * * * * The _NX-1_ pressed on. The city dropped behind. A breathless tenseness had settled down over the submarine; she was proceeding with utmost caution, her anxious officers alert at the location chart. The great fear that tormented them was that they might be attacked, not by one, but by a fleet of the octopi ships.... Then, at the rim of the chart, a red dot appeared! It grew rapidly, charging down on them at great speed. The spot was large; this was no small sentry boat! At once the alarm bell shrilled its warning; the crew below left their posts and raced to the control room. With sure mechanical fingers the emergency system gripped the valve handles and motor levers; Keith swung the _NX-1_ onto a level keel, straightened her out, and decreased speed still more. Giving the rods of the motor and rudder controls to Graham, he moved to the small lever which would unleash his bow torpedoes, and fingered it lightly. The _NX-1_ was ready for action. Scarcely had the men reached the small control room than the familiar electric charge tingled. They stared wonderingly at each other, half afraid. No one seemed hurt. One hand on the torpedo lever, Wells watched his charts and instruments. He thanked God that there was only one of the enemy. The ray's shock came again--and stronger. The red dot was practically upon them. The screen was still empty. Coolly, Keith slowed the submarine to a dead stop. The crimson stud came closer.... * * * * * And then he saw it. It was the same fearsome, hulking form. The same curving windows, dark and lifeless. The same knobs on its bow, one now leaping and pulsing with the paralyzing glow. At a distance of a few hundred feet the octopi ship swerved to a halt, dousing the NX-1 with its ray unceasingly. Again those two underwater craft, so oddly contrasted, were face to face. And again the weapon that had once struck the American ship's crew down at their posts was directed full onto the _NX-1_. But it was harmless! It merely tingled, and did not paralyze! The control room sheathing held it out stoutly. The men's faces showed overwhelming relief. Keith smiled grimly. Now, at least, he had the devils where he wanted them; now it was his turn to strike with a--to them--terrible, mysterious weapon. They had attacked; had failed--and now he could square up for Hemmy and send a pair of torpedoes into that ship of hideous tentacles. "Port five!" The ship swerved slightly. "Hold even!" The enemy craft was very close. The _NX-1's_ bow tubes were sighted in direct line. Her torpedoes could not possibly miss. This time, destruction for the octopi ship was inevitable.... Keith Wells gripped the lever that held the torps in leash. "_Wait!_" Sparks, a bare foot from him, yelled out the word. Wells, alarmed, released his grip on the knob. The radio operator was listening intently, a circle of taut faces around his crouched back. He swung excitedly around. "For God's sake, don't fire!" he cried. "Hemingway Bowman's on that submarine! He's alive--and calling for you!" CHAPTER V _The Other Weapon_ Bowman--alive! Keith Wells let go the torpedo lever. His whole orderly plan of action was crashed in a second.--For an instant he stood gaping at the radio man, forgetful of the peril outside, striving desperately to hit on some way of surmounting this unlooked-for obstacle. The idea of firing on his friend--killing Hemmy Bowman with his own hand--paralyzed his brain. And in that unguarded instant the octopi struck. From the bow of the enemy submarine, slanting from another of its peculiar knobs, a narrow beam of violet light poured, cutting a vivid swathe across the teleview. The huddled men stared at it, not comprehending what it was. They felt no shock of electricity, nor could they discern any other harmful effect. The ray held steadily on their bow, not varying in the slightest, for a full thirty seconds. And still none of them could feel or see any damage. Wells, however, gradually became aware that he was bathed in perspiration, that great streams of sweat were coursing down his face. A quick glance told him that every member of the crew was the same way; and then, suddenly, he was conscious of a wave of intense heat--heat which quickly became terrific. The control room was stifling! Before he could act, the _NX-1_ slipped sharply to one side. A sharp hissing sound grew at her bow, climbing steadily to a shriek. Long streamers of white steam crept along the lower deck and seeped up into the control room. And then rose the fatal sound of rushing water--water pouring into the submarine from outside! For the violet beam was a heat ray--a weapon surface civilizations had not yet developed. While the _NX-1's_ crew had stared at it in the teleview, it had melted a hole in their bow. Immediately the submarine lost trim, and the deck tilted ominously. In the face of material danger--danger from a source he understood--the commander became cool and methodical. "Sea-suits on!" he snapped. "Then forward and break out steel collision-mat and weld it in place! Every man! You, too, Sparks and McKegnie!" "But--but, sir!" stammered Graham. "Do you want them to get us with their paralyzing ray?" "You'd rather drown?" Wells flung back. Silenced, the first officer donned his sea-suit, and in thirty seconds the rest of the crew had theirs on and were cluttering clumsily forward. * * * * * Alone in the control room, Keith battled with the unbalancing flow of water, maneuvering with all his skill in a futile attempt to keep the _NX-1_ on even keel. The men forward worked with great speed, spurred on by the realization that they were fighting death itself, but even as they labored the submarine swung in ever increasing rolls and dips; the great weight of water she had shipped slopped back and forth; her bow went steadily down. Keith swept her forward tanks clean of water, always conscious of the immobile, staring octopi submarine in the teleview, watching them, it seemed, curiously, and not driving home their advantage with additional bolts of the violet heat ray. Despite her commander's frantic efforts, the _NX-1_ fluttered down remorselessly; the cavern floor rose, and, sinking with them, came the octopi craft, in slow mockery of a fighting plane pursuing its stricken foe to the very ground.... She struck bottom with a soft, thudding jar, and settled on even keel. At once Wells released the helm, jumped into his own sea-suit and stumbled down to take command. He found the steel collision-mat in place, and the welding of it nearly completed. A few feathery trickles of water still seeped through on each side, but under his terse directions the pumps were soon draining it out. The weird figures of the crew in their sea-suits looked like creatures from another planet as they rapidly finished the job. "All right--up to the control room, everybody! Fast!" Wells roared. The men stumbled aft as rapidly as they could in their cumbersome suits. Several were already on the ladder. A few feet further-- But at that moment the paralyzing ray again stabbed into the ship--and Keith Wells slumped helplessly to the deck. And as he crumpled, he glimpsed the grotesque, falling figures of his men, and saw one come tumbling down the ladder from the control room, where he had almost reached safety.... * * * * * Peculiar sensations, unendurable thoughts raced through the commander as he lay there limply. He knew his predicament. He wanted desperately to rise, to rush to the control room. Time and time again in those first few moments of impotence he strove mightily to pull his limbs back to life. But his greatest efforts were barren of result, save to leave him feeling still weaker. The fate that he had seen strike down Brown now enmeshed him. He was paralyzed. Helpless. In the midst of his crew. After a moment all sensation left his body. His limbs might not have existed. Sensation, pain, lived only in his brain--and there it was terrible, because self-created. He found himself sprawled flat on his back, his eyes directed stiffly upward. He could not move them, but out of the corners he vaguely sensed the other figures around him. Helpless, every one! And who knew if they would ever come out of the spell! Victory had gone to the octopi.... Minutes that seemed like hours passed. And then a well-remembered voice sounded in the radio earphones in his helmet. It was Hemmy Bowman, speaking from the enemy ship. "Keith! Keith Wells! Are you there?" the voice cried. "Keith! What have they done to you?" And Keith, he could not answer! He could not answer that troubled voice of his friend--that voice from a friend he had thought dead. Again Bowman spoke. "Keith! Can't you hear me? What are they doing to you? Oh--" For a moment it stopped, then came once more, thick with anguish. "Oh, God, what's happened?" Then lower: "If only there were light, so I could see what they're doing...." The voice tapered into silence. Keith could picture Hemmy, probably bound, giving him up for dead.... * * * * * Then, quite distinctly, he heard a clank at the _NX-1's_ bow! The submarine jerked, her bow tilted up--and with increasing speed she moved forward, silently as a ghost. Keith thought he knew what that meant. The octopi ship had grasped them with another of its hawser arms, and was pulling them away. But where to? One of those mound cities? His brain was a turmoil as he tried to imagine what was before them. But all he could do was lie there and wait. The American craft was towed for perhaps ten minutes--ten ages to her commander--then coasted slowly to a pause, and with a sharp jar settled into rest. As she did so, every light in her hull went suddenly out. It had been bad enough with the lights on, but the darkness was far worse. The submarine was a tomb--as silent as one, and full of men who lived and yet were dead. Hemmy Bowman's voice came no more to Wells. He was alone with his moiling doubts and fears and unanswerable questions, and he knew that every other man there was alone with them, too.... As his eyes became partially accustomed to the darkness, he could distinguish vaguely the forms of the familiar mechanisms above him. A slight noise grew suddenly and resolved itself into a prolonged scraping along the outer hull of the submarine. At intervals it paused and gave way to a series of sharp, definite taps. Keith realized what those sounds signified: the octopi were striving to find some entrance to the _NX-1_! This, he told himself, was the end. The creatures would break through; water would rush in, and every man would drown. For the face-shields of their sea-suits were open! The dull scrapings ran completely around the motionless submarine, punctuated with the same staccato tappings. By the movement of the sound, Wells realized the octopi were approaching the lower starboard exit port. And as they neared that port, the noise abruptly stopped. Then for some minutes silence fell. Next, the commander heard what was unmistakably the exit port's water chamber being filled--and a moment later emptied again. The devilish creatures had solved the puzzle of the means of entrance! * * * * * In the awful darkness the inner door of the port swung open. A slow, slithering sound came to Wells' ears. He sensed, though he could not see, the presence of alien creature. An odor struck his nostrils--that of fish.... A deliberate something crawled directly across one outstretched arm, and another across his legs. And above him loomed a monstrous, complicated shadow, which, after a moment, slowly melted from his line of vision. Panicky, he strove again to bring his limbs back to life, but still could not.... Keith knew that in the darkness which their huge unblinking eyes could penetrate they were inspecting the _NX-1's_ interior, examining the men stretched on its deck, feeling them with their cold metal-scaled tentacles. Another complicated shadow crept back over the commander's line of sight, and from all around rose the slithering, shuffling tread of the octopi's many tentacles, rasping on the steel flooring. Sweat from Wells' forehead trickled down and stung his eyes as he lay in that dark agony. There seemed to be countless investigating tentacles feeling through the entire submarine. One of them, iron-hard, suddenly coiled under his armpit and lifted him lightly as a feather from the deck. Another snaked up and clicked his face-shield securely shut. Keith heard other clicks, and knew that the shields of his men were likewise being closed. The commander was held straight out from the octopus' revolting body, and as he swung, helpless, he could see that more men were grasped similarly in other mighty arms. Dangling in the shadow-filled darkness he was carried slowly to the exit port, and he heard the inner door swing open, then close again. Water streamed through the valves; it encompassed him with a feeling of lightness, a feeling of floating, as he swung at the end of the long metal-sheathed tentacles. A moment later a soft bluish glow burst on his vision, and he saw that he was outside. There was a long wait, and when the current next swung him around he was dismayed to see that every one of the monstrous creatures near him was dangling on high two or three men of his helpless crew. The whole outfit was in the power of the devil-fish! And then their captors moved forward with them on a ghastly march of triumph.... But Keith Wells did not know that, crouched behind the instrument panel in the control room, shivering and sick with fear, was the plump form of Cook Angus McKegnie, who had just gained it just before the paralyzing ray had struck. CHAPTER VI _The Monster with the Armlets of Gold_ Hemingway Bowman's ardent wish, after he was whipped quickly through the round exit port of the octopi submarine, was for a quick, clean death. The horror and mystery of his situation had left him with one conscious emotion, that he was afraid. The worst had been when he was hauled through the port; when, expecting anything, he had been able to see nothing in the dark, water-filled mystery ship. Deliberate tentacles had stroked over every inch of his body--tentacles that were not metal-scaled, as had been the arms of the creature that captured him. It was then that he guessed the true purpose of the metal suits the octopi wore--to protect their bodies against the lesser pressure near the surface of the sea. Inside the submarine they did not need them. He decided that the ship was used for rapidly transporting large numbers of the octopi to distant regions, and also for a weapon of offense and defense. The intelligence of the cuttlefish astounded him. Keith had got away. At least he knew that, and he thanked God for it. His bold stroke had not been in vain, his sacrifice not useless. After the inspection of the tentacles, Hemmy had been shoved to a corner of the octopi submarine. He had felt cords wrapped around his body. After being thus secured, he was left to himself. He was utterly alone, except for strange, vague shadows that floated through the darkness--shadows that heated his brain as he realized how many of the devil-fish there were. Hours that seemed like endless days passed. Bowman concluded that the submarine had gone straight through the cavern and emerged finally into what seemed to be another sea. Dead silence filled the ship. What was happening, he could only guess. The craft seemed to run on forever. Never once did tentacles brush or inspect him again. * * * * * Finally the ship stopped, and a great round door opened in one wall. By the soft bluish glow that seeped in Hemmy caught a glimpse of his surroundings, and his gorge rose at the sight. The ship was literally filled with a slowly waving forest of long black tentacles. Weird instruments, unlike anything he had ever seen, were grouped around the walls, and before them attendant octopi poised, their hideous eyes fixed and steady. There were no dividing decks as in the _NX-1_; the craft was one huge shell. Then came furious activity. The door fell shut again, and the ship shot off at great speed. Hemmy felt sure that they were advancing to again attack the _NX-1_, and at once began to try to reach his comrades through radiophone. He knew that Wells would come back. Finally he caught a human voice, and heard the _NX-1's_ radio operator shout to the commander that he, Bowman, was alive and calling. But when he tried to speak further, the American craft's radio was silent. And then, in the octopi submarine, had come a soft glow of violet.... Was it a more deadly weapon than the paralyzing ray? In great suspense the prisoner waited. Silence--silence! Horrible doubts beset his mind. Was Keith refraining from firing his torpedoes because he, Bowman, was on board the enemy boat? The thought stung him. He tried desperately again to reach Wells; but there was no answer. Were the Americans dead? Age-long minutes passed. Then the exit port opened and several metal-clad octopi swam out. Hemmy had a glimpse of the _NX-1_ lying silent and apparently lifeless on the sea-floor, a gaping hole in her bow! As if to taunt him with the sight, the creatures left the round door open, and presently Bowman beheld the octopi open the _NX-1's_ starboard exit port and enter. Later the port swung open again, and he saw the monsters emerge, each gripping several men clad in yellow sea-suits! That they were dead, or victims of the ray, was obvious from the way they limply dangled. The exit port closed, and darkness filled the octopi ship. Hemmy Bowman panted with the futile effort to break his bonds. "You devils!" he yelled in blind rage, exhausted. "Why don't you take me with them? Take me! Take me, damn your stinking hides!" * * * * * When Keith Wells was taken from the silent _NX-1_, a host of astounding impressions swarmed his brain. Swinging lightly at the end of his captor's tentacle, he strove as best he could, with eyes rigidly fixed straight ahead, to grasp his new surroundings. He had, first, one flash of the octopi ship lying quite close to them, its hulk, as always, immobile and apparently lifeless. And inside it, he was sure, was his friend and first officer, Hemmy Bowman--a captive. He saw that the octopi submarine had towed the _NX-1_ into one of the weird mound cities. His own ship was lying in what seemed a kind of public square, and crowds of black octopi were swarming around it as he and his crew were brought out. Shooting straight off the square ran one of the wide streets he had previously seen from above, and on each side the brown mound-buildings rose. Their details were hazy, because of the cuttlefish inhabitants who swam thickly in front of them. His captors started their march down this broad street. Great crowds of reddish-colored octopi clustered on each side of it; other swarms hung almost motionless--except for their constantly writhing tentacles--above, so that their line of progress was through what resembled a restless, living tunnel of repulsive black flesh, snaky arms and huge, unblinking eyes. Keith felt faint from the horror of it. Thousands of the monsters were there, all hanging in the soft, blue-glowing water; and occasionally, as he floated almost horizontally in his captor's firm grip, his legs would brush the wall of clammy flesh; or perhaps one of the tentacles would reach out as if to touch him. The octopus that held him swam some five feet off the street bed itself; at intervals the thick swarm on either side would part for a second, and Keith could glimpse the huge mound-buildings, ever growing larger, with round entrance holes dotted all over their smooth surface, above as well as the sides. The march was ghastly. Their captors were taking them through the heart of the water-metropolis; displaying their human captives as did the Caesars in Roman triumphs of old! * * * * * The swarming crowds of tentacled monsters grew thicker as they progressed, and their tentacles began to whip more quickly, as if anger was burning in their loathsome bodies. Keith noted the menace of their sharp-beaked jaws, and the sickening sucker-discs on the livid under-side of the tentacles. As far as he could see, the swarms fell in behind the procession after it had passed. Following them--where? Just as Wells felt himself on the verge of fainting, the procession turned to the right and entered the largest mound-building of all, a vast dome rising in the very center of the octopi metropolis. They continued through a corridor perhaps twenty feet high, from which at intervals other corridors branched. Held by one arm, and ever and again turning helplessly over in his horizontal transit, Keith caught glimpses of walls covered with intricate designs on a basic eight-armed motif--designs of artistic value, that gave evidence of culture and civilization. The passage ended as suddenly as it had begun, and they came into the main body of a gigantic building. The commander could hardly credit his eyes. The place resembled a stadium, and was so vast that he felt dwarfed to nothingness. The domed roof soared far above in misty bluish light. On the floor, exactly beneath the center of the great dome, was a raised platform, and on it a dais resembling a very wide throne. Around the dais a score or more of octopi--officials, Keith supposed--were grouped. Rapidly the creatures following the procession swam into the chamber. Monstrously large as the place was, the floor soon was filled with the thick flood of cuttlefish which swarmed in from many doors. Keith, held with the other captives just to one side of the hole he had entered by, began to think that they must soon refuse to let any more in--when, to his surprise, he saw the latest arrivals begin to form a gallery twenty feet above those on the ground floor, and, when this was extended far back and completely filled, start yet another above it--and another, and another.... In ten minutes the mighty hall was crowded with countless layers of the cold-eyed monsters, each layer angling up from the central dais so that all could see. "God!" the commander thought. "Nothing but solidly-packed devil-fish all the way to the dome! A slaughter pit! And we, of course, are to be the cattle!" * * * * * Minutes passed. The throne was still empty, and the thousands in the amphitheater seemed waiting for an occupant. Keith wished he was able to close his eyes. The restless, never-ceasing weaving of the countless tentacles in the levels above made the scene a nightmare. Some waved slowly, others whipped excitedly, but never for an instant did one pause. The movements were like the never-ceasing shifting and swaying of the trunks and feet of elephants; in the dim glow the huge chamber seemed to be filled with one fantastic, million-tentacled monster that stared with its thousand eyes down on the forlorn group of puny human beings.... As if at a command the arms of the octopi on the platform suddenly began to weave in perfect unison in some weird ceremony. First they swayed out towards the waiting captives, then they swerved slowly to the empty throne. Then came a few quick, excited whippings; and once more the long arms reached out at the small group at the entrance. This went on for some minutes. Then, very suddenly, a creature swam up from what must have been an opening in the floor onto the dais-throne. Keith saw it well. It was an octopus, a giant amongst octopi, and Wells knew at once it was the ruler of the realm, the lord and master of the swarming galleries and the cities of mound-buildings. It was larger than its fellows by a full three feet. And, encircling each great tentacle just where it joined the central mass of flesh, was a broad, glittering band of polished gold--eight thick armlets that ringed the creature's revolting head-body with a circle of gleaming pagan splendor. Keith could almost fancy that a certain royal air hung over the monster. The huge, unblinking eyes of the king stared at the horror-frozen captives. One long tentacle lifted slowly upward, and their captors at once started towards the throne with them. The score of octopi on each side stilled their weaving arms. A battery of emotionless eyes drilled into Wells' paralyzed body. He felt faint. Unquestionably the horrible ceremony was leading up to some form of cold-blooded sacrifice.... * * * * * The monarch stretched a mighty arm towards Keith, and, as in a dream, he felt himself lifted out of his guard's grasp. The snakelike tentacle gripped him about the waist, and held him dangling like a puppet twenty feet in the water while the two deadly eyes stared steadily at him. He was brought closer, until the hideous central mass, with its cruel beaked jaw and ink sac hanging behind, was no more than a foot away. Then another arm stroked slowly along the commander's helpless body. Once or twice it prodded sharply, and Wells felt a surge of fear, for his sea-suit might break. Deliberately the prying tentacle moved over him, delicately feeling his helmet, his weighted feet, his legs. Keith Wells grew angry. He was being inspected like a trapped monkey! He, commander of the _NX-1_, representative of one of the world's mightiest nations--prodded and stared at by this fish, this octopus! A great rage suffused him, and with a terrific effort he tried to jab his arms into one of those devilish eyes. But try as he might, his body would not respond. He could not move a finger. For a long time the loathsome inspection continued, until the monstrous king seemed satisfied. Wells was handed back. There followed an interminable period in which nothing whatever was done, as far as he could see. He was sure that they must be talking, debating, but no sound reached his ears through the tight helmet. All the time the endless motion in the swarming levels above went on. It became hazy, dreamlike, and in spite of himself the commander began to feel drowsy. The weaving and swaying was producing a hypnotic effect. At last the desire to sleep grew overpowering. Wells and his men were more than half unconscious when their original captors finally pulled them back from the royal presence and began a humble retreat from the throne room. Slowly they backed to the entrance. Keith's last drowsy glimpse was of a grotesque, gold-ringed monster on a throne, with a score of smaller tentacled creatures around him, and a vast haze of weaving tentacles and unblinking eyes above. They passed from the huge chamber. The commander felt delirious, as in a nightmare, but he knew that they were again in the long corridor, and that their captors were taking them further into the mighty building, further from the street outside. He glimpsed great rooms branching off the corridor, and swarms of black octopi inside them. The light became fainter; and at last the procession turned into a separate, rough-walled chamber, dimly lit and empty. Wells felt the grip around his arm loosen, and he floated limply to the floor among his men. He slept.... CHAPTER VII _The Glass Bell Jar_ Keith awoke hours later. Slowly he became conscious of a cramped, stiff body, of a dull pain racking his head. He stretched out his limbs--and, suddenly, realized he could move. Remembering the paralyzing ray that had struck him down, and half afraid that his senses were tricking him, he kicked his left leg out. It moved with its old vigor. He quickly found that his strength had returned, that he could feel and move. The effect of the ray had worn off! With a glow of new hope he rose to his feet and exercised numb muscles. Looking around, he saw the other men still stretched out on the floor of their rough-walled, watery prison. He called into his radiophone mouthpiece: "Graham! Graham, wake up!" A grotesque figure stirred among its fellows; turned over. "It's Wells, Graham," Keith continued. "Get up; you can, now!" And he watched the form of his big first officer stretch out and finally rise, while stupid, sleepy sounds came to his radio receiver. "Why--why; the paralysis is gone!" Graham said at length. "Yes, but maybe the octopi don't know it. Rouse the other men at once, and we'll see what we can do." It was weird, the sight of the lifeless figures of the men stirring to life in the dim-lit water as Graham shook each one's shoulder. The radiophones buzzed and clicked with their excited comments and ejaculations. Keith felt much better. With his men restored to strength, and clustered in a determined, hard-fighting mass, he saw a hope of breaking out and regaining the _NX-1_. He let them exercise as he had for some minutes, then proceeded to a brisk roll-call. There should be fifteen men and two officers. Rapidly Graham ran over the names, and each time a voice rang back in reply--until he came to the cook. "McKegnie?... Cook McKegnie?" There was no answer. Wells stared around the group of dim figures and himself called the name again. But McKegnie was not present. And as the commander and his men realized it the numbing spell of their desperate position settled down on them again like a shroud. Keith shook off the mood. "Well," he muttered, "I guess the devils got him. Poor McKegnie's seen the wheels go round for the last time.... All right: take command, Graham. I'm going to do a little reconnoitering." * * * * * The round entrance hole was some fifteen feet from him, at the far end of the cell. Keith advanced cautiously to it, the peculiar light feeling the water gave him making his steps uncertain. The dim blue illumination made the details of the corridor outside hazy, shadowy, but it seemed to be empty. Peering out, Wells could sight no guarding octopi. He edged closer and stared down to the left. Twenty feet away the vague light tapered into darker gloom, filled with thick, wavering shadows; but it was apparently devoid of tentacles. He wondered if the octopi were unaware that the effects of their ray had worn off, and peeped cautiously around the edge to the right. Immediately a long arm whipped out, grasped him around the waist and flung him twisting and turning back into the chamber. Graham laboriously made his way to the commander and helped him to his feet. "Hurt, sir?" he asked anxiously. "No," Keith gasped. "But that devil--" He stopped short. The first officer turned and followed his commander's stare. The entrance hole of the cell had filled with a monstrous shape. A huge octopus was resting there, its unblinking eyes coldly surveying the crew of the _NX-1_. On each of its thick tentacles was a broad band of polished gold. It was the king, the same creature that had inspected them from the throne-dais a few hours before. And behind him in the corridor the men glimpsed another octopus. Slowly the ruler of the octopi swam into the chamber. Its great eyes centered icily on Keith Wells, standing at the head of his cowering men; and its mighty tentacles waved slowly, gracefully, as if the creature stood in doubt. One of them tentatively reached out and hovered over their heads, moving uncertainly back and forth. Then, like a monstrous water snake, the tentacle poised, flicked out and plucked a man from his comrades. His shriek of terror rasped in their earphones. "Steady, men!" Keith cried. "It's hopeless to try and fight them! The monster just wants to look him over!" * * * * * The man--Williams, a petty officer--was dangled by the armpit in mid-water and made to slowly revolve. The tip of another huge arm snaked out and for some seconds stroked his body, probing curiously. He panted with fright, and in their earphones his friends could hear his every tortured exhalation. Anxiously, Keith watched. Then, without warning, another tentacle darted up, fastened its tip on the breast of the captive's sea-suit, and deliberately ripped it open. The doomed man's last scream rang in their helmets as the water poured into his suit. They saw him writhe and struggle desperately in the remorseless grip which held him. The two huge eyes of the cuttlefish surveyed his death throes minutely; watched his agonized struggles gradually weaken; watched his legs and arms relax, his head sink lower.... And then the tentacle let a lifeless body float to the floor. Jennerby, a huge engineer, went completely mad. "I'll get him, the devil!" he yelled, and before Keith could command him to stay back, had flung himself onto the giant king. Death came as a mere matter of course. Without apparent effort, the monarch ripped off Jennerby's helmet and sent him spinning back. The man's body writhed and shuddered, and in a moment another stark white face showed where death had struck.... Trembling, sick at heart, the commander yet had to think of his men. "For God's sake," he cautioned them, "keep back. Don't try to fight now; we've got to wait our chance! Steady. Steady...." The king's deliberate tentacle again began its slow weaving. It was choosing another victim. And this time it darted straight out at Keith Wells and gripped him with a mighty clutch about the waist. The commander did not cry out. As he was brought close to the staring eyes, and felt their sinister gaze run over him, it flashed through him for some obscure reason that the monster knew him for what he was, the leader, from the tiny bars on each shoulder of his sea-suit.... He waited for the tentacles to rip it open. But they did not. Instead, the creature turned and swiftly swam with him out through the entrance hole. * * * * * They went to the left in the corridor, further into the heart of the building. The bluish light became stronger. As Keith twisted in the giant monarch's grip he glimpsed the other octopus following with the two dead men. He saved his strength knowing it was hopeless just then to try and struggle free. Quick as was his passage, he noticed that the walls of the corridor were covered with intricate designs, in bas-relief, and colored. He passed row after row of mural paintings of octopi in various activities, and guessed that they represented the race's history. One was obviously a scene of battle, with a tentacled army locked in combat with another strange horde of fishlike creatures; a second showed the construction of the queer mound-buildings on the sea-floor, with scores of monsters hauling great chunks of material into place, and another pictured the huge audience chamber, with a gold-banded king motionless on his throne. As the king drew him rapidly along, he had a glimpse through a circular doorway of a large room, inside which were clustered the black shapes of thousands of baby octopi, tended by what were evidently nurses. Other such rooms were passed, and the young commander's brain whirled as he tried to measure the size and progress of this undersea civilization. Perhaps the race of octopi was growing, reaching out; needed new room to colonize. That would explain why their submarine had been sent through the tunnel.... A voice sounded in his ears: "Keith? Are you all right?" It was Graham, calling from the cell behind. "So far," Wells assured him. "I'll keep in touch, and let you know what happens." At that moment, his captor carried him into a large chamber at the end of the corridor. He looked around, and decided it was a laboratory. He beheld strange instruments, anatomical charts of octopi on the walls and, in one corner, a small jar of glass, in which a dull flame was burning. Many-shaped keen-bladed knives lay on various low tables, and thin, wicked-looking prongs and pincers. "I'm in their experimental laboratory, Graham," Wells spoke into the mouthpiece of his tiny radio. And then his roving eyes saw something that made him audibly gasp. "What's the matter, Keith?" came the first officer's anxious voice. After a moment the commander answered. "It's--it's a pile of human bodies. The bodies of those fishermen. They--they've been experimenting on them...." * * * * * Was he, too, Wells wondered, to be experimented on? The sight of that stacked pile of bodies chilled him with horror. He kept his eyes from them, till the octopus with the golden bands swung him through a hinged door in the farther wall. He found himself in a side room, smaller than the outer chamber, the whole center of which was occupied by a huge glass bell jar, some thirty feet in diameter. Inside it was much strange-looking apparatus on tables, and trays of operating instruments--knives like those in the outer room, and the same thin prongs. The great jar was empty of water, and on one side was an entrance port. The king tossed Keith into a corner and quickly donned a metal-scaled water-suit. When he had it all on, and the glass body-container fastened into place, he picked up his captive again and advanced through the bell jar's entrance port into a small water chamber. A moment later Wells felt his body grow heavy as the water of the compartment ran out, and then there was a click and he found himself inside the jar, still held in the merciless grip of a tentacle. He twisted around to find the cold eyes of the octopus staring at him only a foot away. And as he wondered what was going to happen next, the king unfastened the glass face-shield of the commander's sea-suit with a quick flip of the tip of a tentacle. Keith's arms were pinned to his sides; he could not move to try to refasten the face-shield. Fearful, he held his breath; held it until his face was purple and his lungs were near to bursting. But at last the limit was reached, and with a great wrench he sucked in a full breath. It was clean, fresh air! * * * * * The air was like a breath of his own world brought down to this cold realm of octopi. Once he had caught up with his breathing it poured new life into his limbs, jaded from the artificial air of the sea-suit. Keith felt his muscles respond, felt his whole body glow with new strength and life. Twelve inches away the king was watching his every reaction closely through the huge helmet of glass. The thought passed through the commander's mind that he was not only king, but chief scientist of this strange water civilization. Then, while his lungs swallowed hungrily the good, fresh air, several tentacles began to feel around him in an attempt to unfasten the rest of his sea-suit. Wells blanched at the sudden realization of how helpless he would be if the suit were taken from him. He would then not only be a prisoner of the octopi, but a prisoner of the glass jar, unable ever to leave it, and more than ever at the mercy of his captor's least whim. Not that he had any delusion that he would live long in any case: it was just the simple strong instinct of self-preservation that made him grab at every chance for life. This thought flashed through his mind, even while the octopus was fumbling with the catches of his suit. And along with it was born a desperate plan of escape. He was in his own element, air; the octopus out of his. If he could crack the glass of the king's helmet, and let the water out and air in!... The glass was only twelve inches away. The commander stopped his resistance, and at the same time felt about with his legs until he had them well braced against a lower tentacle. He pushed gently, and came a few inches nearer the glass; a little more. Then, with a quick, strong jerk of his body he crashed the steel frame of his helmet square against the cuttlefish's sheathing of glass. The creature was taken wholly by surprise. Tentacles whipped out to tear the rash human quickly away--but not before Keith had pounded again, and heard the splinter of smashed glass! He had jabbed a hole in the glass body-piece, and already the life-giving water was pouring out! Panic seized the king, and he became a nightmare of tortured tentacles. Wells was flung wildly away and fetched up against the side of the jar with a crash that for a second stunned him. More and more water poured from the octopus' suit, and air at once rushed in to take its place. The creature's great eyes became filmy, while the revolting spidery body slewed here and there across the jar, all the time whipping and thrashing at the strangling air. Keith scurried from side to side, trying to keep out of reach of the crazy, writhing tentacles. Once a glancing blow knocked him flat, but the monster was altogether unconscious of him and he got away. Little by little the terrific whipping and coiling of the tentacles quieted down. The drowning king lay in one place now; its loathsome red body, no longer protected by glass, turned bluish. Keith thrilled with elation at his victory. And then, for the first time, he noticed that there was a full three inches of water on the floor--far too much to spill from the king's suit. A quick look around showed him where it came from. There was a long crack in the side of the glass jar, at the place where he had been crashed against it--and water was pouring in! Keith flung himself against the crack, jammed his arm into the broadest part of the leak. But still the water rushed in. The octopus was in its death throes, weakening steadily--but just as steadily the water poured in and rose up the sides of its body. In a flash Wells saw that the liquid would win the race to cover it and allow the monster to resume breathing. "Oh, damn it!" he cursed fervently. "Now I've got to run for it!" * * * * * He stumbled to the port, snapping shut his face-shield as he went. In a moment he had solved the working of the mechanism and was in the water chamber, then outside in the room itself. Fortunately his sea-suit was unhurt. He thanked heaven for that as he tore away a boardlike piece of apparatus and jammed it over the leak in the jar. Keith paused a moment to plan. The king of the octopi was still writhing in ever weakening struggles, but the water was halfway up his body. "It'll cover him soon," thought the commander, "and then it's a question how long it'll take him to come to. I've got to move fast--slip out into the corridor and run the gauntlet back to the men." His eyes rested on a large knife, and he appropriated it, since he saw nothing else he might use. For the first time since the beginning of the fight he answered the questions and exclamations that had constantly sounded in his ears from the distant crew. Tersely he told them what had happened, and of the gauntlet he had to run. "Make ready for a dash to the _NX-1_," he finished. "It's now or never. Wait three minutes for me, and if I don't make it, go ahead anyway. Remember--three minutes. This is an order. So long, fellows!" He shut his ears to the bedlam of comment that followed. His knife ready, he took a few steps to the door and pushed out--right into the tentacles of a waiting octopus. * * * * * His knife was useless. While locked motionless by three arms of his captor, another streaked out and wrenched it from his hand. Once again Keith was absolutely helpless. Great confusion resulted in the laboratory. The commander heard no sound, but the guard must have called, for five more octopi darted rapidly out of an adjoining room. Their tentacles writhing in great excitement, they swam past and into the inner chamber to the rescue of their nearly drowned king. The devil-fish that held Wells almost crushed him to death in its excitement. It was obviously undecided what to do; but finally it sped him down the passageway and cast him back inside the cell with his men. Then it quickly retreated. The commander staggered to his feet and faced Graham and the others. "A miracle!" he gasped; "I'll tell you later. But now we've got to make our break. The king's out, and we've got to get away before they bring him to. There's nothing to do but rush the door. It means sure death for half of us, and probably for all--but God help us if the king catches us!" He paused and surveyed them keenly. "Everybody with me?" he asked. And not one man held back his answer. Wells smiled a little. "Good!" he said. * * * * * There were twelve men and two officers. There were thousands of octopi. On the face of it, their chances seemed hopeless. Not for a second did Keith count on getting many men to the _NX-1._ But he knew where the submarine was, and he had to try. Tersely he gave them final instructions. "This corridor leads to the main entrance. That is, to the right--understand? Then straight down the street outside, to the left, is the square where they towed the _NX-1._ I'd say it was a hundred yards. "There's one guard outside. Graham, you and half the men to the right of the door. I'll take the rest to the left. Our only chance is to try and destroy the octopus' eyes." His mind cast about desperately for some form of weapon. The only detachable thing on their sea-suits was the small helmet-light, a thing, Keith told himself, without possible offensive use. Still, the beams would enable them to more clearly see their path and keep together, so he ordered them in hand. The men were grouped and alert. The moment had come. "Remember," he said, "--its eyes. Then stick together and run like hell. All right--good luck--and let's go!" Awkwardly, stumbling clumsily in the retarding water, the small group surged through the door. Immediately a black shape pounced upon them from the clustered shadows--the guarding octopus. Its tentacles seemed to be everywhere. In seconds five men were clutched in its awful grip, their fists rising and falling impotently as the hideous arms constricted and crushed them inward. Keith, free of the clasp, yelled: "The eyes! The eyes! Put out its eyes!" * * * * * For answer, a yellow arm clutching a helmet-light broke through the grotesquely milling mass and struck at the cuttlefish's great pools of eyes. It missed, but the switch flicked on, and there stabbed through the gloom a broad, glaringly white ray. Its effect was astounding. The beam smote the octopus squarely in its huge eyes, and immediately the creature shuddered; writhed with pain. The tentacles released the men--and the monster fled back into the protecting shadows! A shout from the men roared in the commander's earphones. "They can't stand the light!" he cried. "Thank God! Beams on, everyone! Flash 'em in their eyes! Forward!" Fourteen shafts of eye-dazzling light forked through the corridor. The tiny company, beating their path with criss-crossing shafts of white, forged ahead. They thrashed the shadows with their beams, probing each inch of water--clearing their way even as a tank hoses machine-gun bullets before its clumsy body. Their former slender chance grew; they filled with hope. Another swarm of devil-fish, long arms whipping before them, raced from branching corridors and bore down on the company of humans. The men were ready, and fourteen tongues of white met them squarely. They faltered; the weight of their fellows behind shoved them on; but the rays steadied, and the front row of octopi broke in panic. The others at once followed in wild retreat. "Keep together, men!" Keith ordered sharply. "One beam to each octopus--straight in its eyes till it retreats! Forward!" * * * * * They pressed on. The octopi, with eyes used only to the soft blue glow of the cavern, could not stand against the brilliant rays. Keith leading, the _NX-1's_ crew stumbled out into the street. They faltered a moment when they saw each entrance hole of the mound-buildings shooting out streams of octopi. Hundreds were in sight already. The whole city was evidently alarmed. Wells at once formed his men in a circle, so their beams would guard them on every side and above. Apparently the octopi could not approach within thirty feet of them, and even at that distance they turned and fled, writhing with pain, whenever a shaft of light struck full in their eyes. "The square's just ahead!" the commander roared. "One last rush, now, and we'll reach the submarine! Stick close; keep your arms locked; and watch out above!" The circle of men narrowed. The rays gave their tiny cluster the appearance of a monster even more fantastic than those moiling around them--a monster with long straight tentacles of glaring white. They stumbled forward through the magically parting ranks of black octopi. The beams kept the creatures back; they were helpless before them. Foot by foot under the inverted bowl of threshing tentacles the _NX-1's_ crew lumbered ahead. The street at last ceased; the wide square opened before them. "We're here!" Wells yelled exultantly. "This is the--" His voice fell into abrupt silence. He stared around the square, and his heart went cold indeed. They had reached the right place, but it was empty. The _NX-1_ was not there! CHAPTER VIII _Cook, the Navigator_ Through all these hours, one man had remained on the _NX-1_, and that man was, to put it mildly, scared to death. Cook Angus McKegnie had been nearest the connecting ladder when Keith Wells roared out the command to retreat above, and his desire to regain a place of safety was so earnest that he made the control room in record time. At once he had felt the tingle of the paralyzing ray. Struck by a horrible thought, he ventured to peer down the ladder--and groaned to see the figures of his comrades, all lying limply on the deck. His portly frame quivered like jelly as realization came to him that he was the only one who had escaped the ray. Heroic ideas of saving the submarine, of rescuing the men below, flashed wildly through his head. But only for a moment. On second thought, he felt he ought to hide. So, in the tomblike silence that had fallen, the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound McKegnie wormed a way behind an instrument panel, effecting the journey by vigorous shoves of his stomach. It was minutes later that he first noticed that some sharp jutting object was jutting deep into his ample paunch, but he could do nothing to remedy it. He was hidden, anyway, and he was going to stay hidden! The cook felt the _NX-1_ being towed forward. Then, after a dreadful wait, he heard queer noises down below, and was positive the exit ports had opened. The snakelike slithering and shuffling which followed would mean that the enemy was inside the _NX-1._ The thought brought St. Vitus' dance to his limbs, and, try as he might, he couldn't still them. Then again the ports opened, the gloomy silence returned, and Angus McKegnie was alone with his reflections. * * * * * After the first hour he gave voice to them in one simple, bitter sentence. "Just why the hell," he muttered, "did I ever join the Navy?" The silence offered no reply, and McKegnie, desperate from his cramped position, ventured to poke his head around the instrument panel. The faint emergency lights showed the control room to be empty. He decided to come out, and did so, worming his way back with great difficulty. Once out, the first thing his eyes fell on was the teleview screen. Now the cook had never seen one of the octopi, and the screen showed hundreds of monsters clustering around the _NX-1._ So with unusual promptness he acted, jamming himself once again into his hiding place. Maybe, he thought, they had some way in which they could see into the control room and discover him! Hours passed. The cook was sopping with sweat. Finally his thoughts emerged into words. "I got to get out of here!" he said intensely. "I _got_ to! And I got to run this submarine!" The sound of his voice somehow emboldened him. Once more he backed out of his cranny, and with cautious, trembling steps explored the control room. He kept his eyes from the teleview, though it had a terrible fascination for him, and surveyed the _NX-1's_ array of control instruments. The prospective navigator groaned at the sight. There were dozens of mysterious wheels, jutting from every possible angle, squads of black and red-handled levers, whole armies of queer little stud-buttons and dials. His knowledge of cooking helped him not at all in the presence of that maze of devices. Timidly he touched one of the levers, but immediately snatched his hand away as if afraid it would bite. His boldly announced purpose of running the craft went glimmering. * * * * * An accidental glimpse of the monsters in the teleview suddenly decided him that he needed a weapon. He hunted frantically through the lockers and found three service revolvers, which he fastened at his waist, adding his own carving knife to the arsenal. But he didn't feel much better. Then, remembering for the first time his sea-suit radio, he yelled: "Mr. Wells! Mr. Wells! Oh, Mr. Wells, where are you? Can you hear me?" There was, of course, no answer. He tried to bring his muddled thoughts and fears to order. "I got to run this thing," he said doggedly. "_Got_ to! Now, let's see: what the hell's this thing for?... What the--" He broke off short, and his eyes went wide. He had heard a noise! Yes--there it was again! The same peculiar scraping at one of the exit ports! He glanced fearfully at the teleview. "Oh, Lord!" he yelped. "They're comin' in to get me!" He started to dive back behind the instrument panel, but stopped, drew two guns, and in an agonized muddle trotted back and forth for a moment, waving them. Another look at the screen showed that an exit port was open, admitting two metal-scaled octopi. McKegnie couldn't stand it any longer: he wedged himself behind his panel again. Soon sounds of the metal tentacles on the deck below told him that one of the creatures was coming up the ramp--then slithering into the control room itself. The cook was a lather of cold perspiration. For a few minutes there was silence. The octopus was apparently surveying this new part of the submarine. Then, without warning, the tip of a metal-scaled tentacle felt around the panel and crept, exploring, up Angus McKegnie's leg--which leg was again suddenly afflicted with St. Vitus' dance. The tentacles coiled, pulled hard--and the cook with a yowl was yanked out into the room. * * * * * Dangling upside down, high in the air, he submitted to the fishy stare of the great eyes under the sheathing of glass. But soon he started to squirm, and his violent contortions brought a rush of blood to his head, making him quite dizzy. It was while he was in that state that things started to happen. First, a great roar rolled through the _NX-1_, and McKegnie found himself flat on the floor with his breath knocked out. Then, while this was registering on his mind, he discovered himself the center of a madly milling set of tentacles, and instinctively scrambled out of the way. From a distance he saw that the tentacles belonged to the octopus that had held him, and that their coilings and threshings were gradually dying down, until only a quiver ran through them from time to time. While McKegnie was trying to figure this all out he noticed that the monster's glass sheeting was shattered, that it lay in a pool of water, and that the odor of burnt powder was in the air. Looking down he found that he had a gun in his hand. A thin wisp of smoke was curling from the barrel. "Gee whiz!" he ejaculated. "Gee _whiz_!" As he stood there recovering from his surprise, he heard the other octopus crawling up the connecting ramp, coming to see what had befallen its fellow. Preceded by two trembling guns, McKegnie tiptoed to the ramp and peered down. From the darkness he saw another complicated mass of metal tentacles and glass advancing up towards him. Fear smote the cook, and almost without volition be pointed his guns and pulled the triggers. As before, a bullet crashed into the great dome of glass, and he watched a short but terrible death struggle. He had, by himself, slain two octopi! A tremendous elation filled McKegnie--until it occurred to him that his shots might have been heard outside. At once he ran and looked at the teleview view screen, and what he saw on its silver surface took all the triumph abruptly out of him. The octopi outside were darting about with alarming activity; a whole cluster of them was centered at the exit port, and, even as the cook stared, the preliminary sounds of opening it came to his ears. "Now I _got_ to run this ship!" he groaned. * * * * * He peered at the mass of levers and wheels, put out a hand, closed his eyes, hesitated, and pulled one of them back. Nothing happened. He tried another. The noise below grew, but still the _NX-1_ remained motionless. Desperate, the cook jerked several other levers. The whine of electric motors surged through the silence; the submarine shuddered and slewed off to the right, as if trying to dig into the sea-floor. "I got it started!" he cried. He did something else. The _NX-1_ stuck her bow dizzily up and sped into the misty-blue realm above in a grand, sweeping circle. The sea-floor with its mound-buildings and swarming octopi fell away behind with a rush. "There!" muttered the triumphant cook. "But--how did I do it?" The submarine was rising like a sky-rocket. McKegnie remembered suddenly that Wells had said the cavern was only a few miles high; he must now be very near the top. He held his breath while he pushed a likely looking lever the other way. He was lucky. The _NX-1_ capered like a two-year-old, kicked up her stern and bolted eagerly for the depths once more. Again the floor of the cavern rushed up at him, again he pulled the potent lever back, and again the submarine meteored upward. This procedure went on for some time. McKegnie was only running an elevator. Was he doomed to dash up and down between floor and ceiling forever? He gave forth pints of sweat, now and then groaning as the submarine grazed horribly close to top or bottom. The dead octopus at his feet slithered limply around on the crazy-angling deck. "I can't keep this up forever!" the cook said peevishly. "Now, what the hell's this thing for?" * * * * * He turned it, and the _NX-1_ tilted in one of her dives and raced forward, midway between ceiling and floor. Her navigator relaxed slightly. He had found the major controls; at least he had been able to stop his dizzy game of plunging up and down. Then, just as he was beginning to wonder where he could go, a large red spot glowed at the edge of the location chart. "Oh, Lord!" he cried. "That's the other submarine--an' it's comin' after me!" Evidently it was, for the red spot rapidly approached the green one. The paralyzing ray tingled, and a moment later the enemy's huge bulk loomed on the teleview screen, a band of violet light spearing from one of her jutting knobs. Frantically McKegnie juggled his levers, and then it was that the _NX-1_ really showed what was in her. She emulated, on a grand scale, a bucking bronco: she stood almost on her nose, and threatened to describe somersaults; she tried it the other way, on her stern; she rolled dizzily; she all but looped the loop, and went staggering around the cavern in great erratic bounds that must have made the octopi think she was in the hands of a mad-man--which she practically was. Her designer would have had heart failure. In the teleview screen the frantic McKegnie would see the octopi submarine rush erratically by with a flash of its violet heat ray; the location chart showed the red spot zigzagging drunkenly around the green one. Each boat made occasional short, crazy darts at the other; sometimes they would stand approximately still. It was a riotous game of tag, and McKegnie knew too well that he was "it." During one brief pause the anguished cook found himself groaning aloud: "Oh, Mr. Wells, where are you? I can't keep this up! I can't! I can't!" * * * * * There were still several important-looking controls that were mysteries to him. But what if he should pull one and open all the exit ports? He shuddered at the thought. Things had become nightmarish. The ship was pitted scores of places by the heat ray. The control room had grown stifling. McKegnie was losing pounds of flesh, and literally stood in a pool of his own perspiration. The octopi craft kept doggedly after the _NX-1_, no matter how often and effectually the sweating cook's reckless hands prevented her getting the heat ray home. For a long time the two ships continued to race up and down. The _NX-1_ would plunge, pirouette around the other, and scamper away towards the ceiling as if enjoying it all hugely, abruptly to forsake her course and come zooming down once more. She would weave in romping circles and seem to go utterly crazy as her jumbled navigator pulled his levers and turned his wheels in a frantic effort to get somewhere. To get somewhere! Yes--but where? "Oh, Mr. Wells, where are you?" the harried cook would bleat at intervals. Or, plaintively: "Now, what the hell's _this_ thing for?" CHAPTER IX _At Bay_ Fourteen humans stood at bay on the cold sea-floor, dazed by the ruthless stroke of ill-luck which had taken the _NX-1_ from where they had left it. "It's gone," whispered Graham over and over in a hopeless tone. Keith tried to pull himself together. He had to think of his men. In a second, his whole plan, which had seemed to be approaching success so rapidly, was smashed by the disappearance of the submarine. Mechanically he kept his helmet-light playing into the ever-thickening eyes and tentacles around him, while he scanned the sea-floor nearby. It was filling more closely than ever with the black, writhing forms of the cuttlefish. The rays still held them back, but their great bulk loomed over the small party of humans like a sinister storm cloud. Soon, in their overwhelming mass, they would crush down, and the submarine's crew be conquered by sheer force of numbers. "Look!" Keith cried. "There's where she was lying!" He pointed out on the floor of the square a deep groove, obviously made by the hull of the _NX-1_. Its length and jaggedness seemed to denote that the submarine had tried to bore into the bed of the cavern itself. Wells was mystified. If the octopi-ship had towed her away, she would certainly not have gouged that deep scar on the sea bottom.... But he dismissed the strange disappearance from his mind. He had to work out a plan of action. "Keep together, men, and follow that scar!" he ordered tersely. "There's a chance that the _NX-1's_ somewhere further along!" It was a futile hope, he knew--but there was nothing else. The tiny group, centered in the inverted bowl of black, writhing tentacles, lumbered onward. * * * * * Then the octopi struck with another weapon, in an effort to dull the spearing beams of white. Here and there from the mass of black an even blacker cloud began to emerge. It quickly settled over the whole scene, pervading it with a pitchy, clinging darkness that obscured each man from his neighbor. "Ink!" cried one of them. It was sepia from the cuttlefish's ink sacs--the weapon with which these monsters of the underseas blind and confuse their victims. "Faster!" the commander roared in answer. "And for heaven's sake, keep together!" They huddled closer. Under the protecting cloud of ink the mass of octopi pressed nearer. The struggle became fantastic, unreal, as the brilliant beams of white bored through the utter blackness searching for eyes which the men knew were there, yet could not see until their rays chanced upon them. Snaky shadows milled horribly close to the little group of bulging yellow figures. Blacker and blacker grew the water; they could not always see the monsters as they drove them back on each side. Now and then a bold tentacle actually touched one of them for a moment before its owner was thrust, blinded, away. Suddenly the dark cloud cleared a little as the fight moved into an unseen current. Their range of vision lengthened to ten or twelve feet; they could dimly sense the looming mass of cuttlefish: and it was less often that one of the monsters darted forward, daring the rays of white, and became altogether visible. When this did happen, half a dozen dazzling beams converged on the octopus' eyes and drove it back in writhing agony. The men were the hub of a grotesque cartwheel, whose spokes were inter-crossing rays of white. They still forged onward along the groove, but moved more slowly now, and Keith Wells, tired to death, realized the combat could not go on much longer. Their advance was useless; a mere jest. The _NX-1_ had vanished. It would only be a question of time before their batteries gave out, or the swarms of octopi crushed in on the struggling crew. Their overwhelming numbers would tell in the end.... The men were silent, except for the occasional gasps which came from their laboring lungs. * * * * * And then the king of the octopi appeared. Keith had been wondering, in the aching turmoil that was his brain, where the gold-banded monarch was. He knew the monster had been rescued, and he dreaded coming face to face once more with that huge form. Now, armlets of glittering yellow suddenly flashed in the thick of the besieging tentacles, and two great evil eyes glared for a second at Keith Wells. The commander flung a burst of light at them and laughed crazily as the monster scurried back. For a few moments the king was not visible. "Well, fellows," Wells said, "it won't be long now. His Majesty's back on the field." He grinned a little through his weary face. "I wonder what he'll hatch up to combat our helmet-lights? Watch close: he's damn clever!" The commander did not have long to wonder. The vague wall of tentacles began retreating deeper into the ink. Keith could not imagine the reason for it, but held himself taut and ready. His men, likewise noting the move, unconsciously grouped closer, waiting tensely for they knew not what. The king of the octopi had indeed hatched a plan of attack. After a moment the mass of creatures again became slowly visible, but this time when the rays shot out they did not hold them back. Could not--for their eyes were not visible. "My God!" Wells cried. "They're coming backwards!" * * * * * It was so. The octopi--no doubt under their ruler's orders--had turned themselves around, and now, with eyes directly away from the dazzling shafts of white, were closing slowly in on the humans from all sides. The helmet-lights were useless. They could not reach the creatures' eyes. Tentacles coiling, whipping, interweaving, the wall of flesh pressed in. Death stared the helpless crew of the _NX-1_ in the face. First Officer Graham shrugged his shoulders and said tiredly: "Well, I guess it's all over.... Unless," he added with a feeble smile, "somebody figures a way to melt us through the sea-floor...." Keith Wells' face suddenly lit up with an idea. He swung around and roared: "The hell it's over! We can go _up_!" His crew understood at once. "What fools we--" Graham began, but Keith cut him short. "Listen," he rapped quickly. "Jam together in one bunch and lock arms tight. When I give the word, flood your suits with air. We'll go up like comets; crash right through the devils.... Hurry!... All ready?" He saw that they were. "Then, together--go!" he commanded. As one man the crew adjusted their air-controls, bulging the sea-suits with air. Their weighted feet left the cavern floor at once, and, locked tightly together, the whole fourteen of them shot like a bullet to the living ceiling of unsuspecting cuttlefish above. They hit with a terrific crash. Keith was momentarily stunned by the force of impact. He felt himself torn away from his men, felt a dozen tentacles snake over him, and mechanically stabbed out with his helmet-light. For a moment he was held; then the air and his light pulled him through, and he broke out through the top. In his rocketing upward progress the extra oxygen rapidly cleared his mind. Glancing below he saw a great, dark, many-fingered cloud dropping rapidly away, and was glad to know that the octopi could not follow him into the lesser pressures above without their suits. Over the dark cloud he glimpsed a few scattered pin-points of light--the helmet-beams of the other men. They were rising as swiftly as he. "Thank God!" he murmured reverently. "We broke through! We broke through!" CHAPTER X _The Return of the Wanderer_ Wells watched the several helmet-lights shooting upwards and wondered if they represented all the men that had got safely through the net of tentacles. Remembering the rocky ceiling they were rapidly approaching, he ordered the others to reduce speed by discharging air from their sea-suits. He received no articulate answer. Although he cut down the rush of his own progress, it was with a jar that he bounded into the top of the cavern. As he dangled there, he beheld four light beams hurtling upward; his earphones registered crash after crash: and then he saw the beams go spinning down into the gloom again, weaving and crossing fantastically, the shock having jerked them from their owner's hands. Keith had lost his own helmet-light below, but peering around he could make out a few vague forms, bumping and twisting in the current. "Graham!" the commander called. "Graham, you there?" After a moment his first officer's voice came thickly back. "Yes--here. A bit groggy. That crash...." Wells swam clumsily towards him. "I guess only a few of us broke through," the commander said slowly. As the two officers hung at the roof, swinging grotesquely, one by one the other men came to their senses and reported their presence in the radiophone. Keith ordered them to cluster around him, and soon eight weird figures had grouped nearby. After a while they located two others, which brought their total to ten men and two officers. They looked a long time, but could not find any more. Two were gone. * * * * * Deep silence fell over the tiny group. The dark mass of the rocky ceiling scraped their helmets; below, the bluish waters tapered into a thick gloom, hiding, miles beneath, the mound-buildings and swarming octopi. One of the men spoke. His words were audible to everyone, and they voiced the thought in every brain: "What're we going to do now?" Keith had no answer. They had escaped the immediate danger, but it was only a temporary respite. The commander knew it was hopeless to try and locate the tunnel leading to the outer sea, for they were very tired, and in their clumsy suits they would be able to swim only a few rods. Their helmet-lights were gone; they had played their last card. "They're goin' to find us after a while," the pessimistic voice continued. "They'll send that submarine of theirs after us--or maybe they'll come up in their metal suits...." "Well," Keith replied with forced cheerfulness, "then we'll have to fight 'em off." "Why not rip our suits an' end it now--" began another, but Graham's voice cut in sharply. "Quiet!" he said. "I heard something!" The men stilled abruptly. In tense silence their ears strained at the headphones. Wells asked: "What did you hear?" "Wait!" Graham interrupted, listening intently. "There it is again! Listen! Can't you hear it? Why, it sounded like--like--" Keith concentrated his whole mind on listening, but could catch nothing at all. He was just about to give up when he caught a faint, jumbled murmur--the murmur of a human voice. "My God!" he whispered. The voice, little by little, grew, and Wells could distinguish words. They formed into a complete sentence. Keith heard it plainly. It was: "Now, what the hell's this thing for?" * * * * * Unmistakably, it was the voice of Cook Angus McKegnie, whom they all had thought dead. Amazed, the men of the crew started to jabber. "Quiet!" Wells ordered sharply. He listened again. McKegnie's voice was growing quickly and steadily louder. "McKegnie!" the commander cried excitedly. "McKegnie, can you hear me?" There was no answer. Patiently Wells waited a minute, every second of which increased the volume of his long-lost cook's bewildered tones. Again he tried. "McKegnie! Can you hear me? This is Commander Wells. McKegnie!" The cook's stammering voice came back: "Why--why--is that you, Mr. Wells? Did I hear you, Mr. Wells?" "Yes!" Keith shouted impatiently. "This is Commander Wells! For heaven's sake, McKegnie, where are you?" "I don't know, sir!" the cook responded. "Where are you?" Keith was for the moment perplexed. "But--but, are you a prisoner?" he questioned. And he could have sworn he heard a distinct note of pride as the invisible McKegnie replied: "Oh, no, sir! Not yet! These devils been tryin' their best to get me, but they couldn't! No, sir!" Wells became more and more puzzled. "Then--but--you're not running the _NX-1_, are you?" McKegnie's voice was much louder now, and growing every second. The note of pride persisted. "Of course, sir!" he confirmed. "It was kind of hard at first, with these octopises botherin' me, but I got onto it pretty quick. That octopis ship chased me with them heat rays for a long time, but I ain't seen them lately. I guess I kinda tired them out." * * * * * His last words grew louder with a rush, and from the dark depths beneath a long shape suddenly appeared, hurtling up at the group of astounded men in a zoom that bade fair to take it straight through the ceiling. It was the _NX-1_. "Dive, man, dive!" Keith yelled. "Cook, pull that black-handled lever towards you! Yank it back! Yank it back! Quick!" He sighed with relief as he saw his madly-driven submarine pause, whip its nose downward, and crash back for the depths from which it had come. The commander spoke rapidly. "McKegnie, listen: Leave the black lever halfway, so you'll level out. Straighten your helm. We're only a little above you; come round in a circle till I tell you to stop." The _NX-1_ came out of her dive, and, as the cook evidently shoved her helm over, went skirting around in a wide, drunken circle, some thousand feet below her regular crew. "All right!" Keith shouted. The fear that the octopi submarine would dart back before he could get aboard his ship was looming in his mind. "You're at the helm, Cook; there's a wheel right over your head. Spin it around--oh, my God, there you go again!" He groaned while the _NX-1_ went swooping off on a repetition of her crazy circle. "Sorry, sir," the culinary navigator said thickly. "I guess I got the wrong thing." "Now!" Wells roared. "Spin that wheel above your head.... That's right--right--there! Don't touch a thing, Cook! We're coming down." The submarine had paused directly beneath them, listing slightly to port. Then began the cautious business of the descent. Under Wells' rapid orders the men linked arms again and discharged more air from their sea-suits. Slowly, thin chains of bubbles rising behind them, they sank towards the dim shape of the _NX-1_ below. Wells' eyes kept probing the thick gloom far beneath. Every moment he expected to see it disgorge a swarm of octopi. They neared the submarine, and saw numberless pitted spots in her body, where the heat ray had stabbed for a moment. In their excitement they missed their level by some feet, but clutching together they admitted more air and soon rose even with the starboard exit port. "Swim forward," Keith ordered. "Hurry!" The weird figures groped clumsily, and very slowly neared the port. The commander, in the van, at last reached out and gripped its jutting external controls. He could not work them at first: his hands were numb and awkward. As he tugged and struggled with them a shout rang in his headphone. It was McKegnie, scared to death. "Oh, hurry, Mr. Wells!" he yelled. "Quick! Quick, please! The octopis ship's comin', sir! The red light's back!" CHAPTER XI _To the Death_ The emergency steadied Keith's fingers. He got the door open and motioned Graham and six men inside the water chamber. The passage took but a minute. Then he sent the rest of the crew in, being himself the last to enter. When the chamber was finally empty, and Wells had stepped through the inner door onto the lower deck of the _NX-1_, a great sigh of relief broke from him. Never before had anything looked so good as that brilliantly lit deck with its familiar maze of machinery and bulkheads. "Thank God," he said simply, and his joy was shared by the whole crew. A new feeling had come over them. Back home--in their own submarine, their own element--they had at least a fighting chance with the octopi. But Keith let them waste no time. He knew that a final, desperate duel to the death with their foe still was ahead. "Above to the control room," he ordered. "Fast!" They lumbered up the connecting ramp. A disheveled, wild-eyed form met them. Keith couldn't help chuckling as he passed the now much thinner and paler cook, with the arsenal handy at his waist. On the deck of the control room lay a huge tentacled body, metal-scaled, with its dome of glass shattered and its great cold eyes staring unseeingly away. "I killed him," stammered McKegnie pridefully; "but Mr. Wells--look at that red light, sir!" Keith glanced rapidly at the location chart, ripping off his sea-suit as he did. The fateful red stud was moving swiftly down on the motionless green one. The men had surrounded McKegnie, laughing and slapping him on the back, but the commander's terse orders jerked them abruptly back to action. "The rectifiers, Graham: clean out this stale air. Sea-suits off; at emergency posts. Take the helm, Craig; you, Wetherby, trim the ship. No, no, Cook--keep away from the controls!" The _NX-1_ balanced herself; fresh air came rushing in, sweeping out the stale. Keith stared at the location chart, waiting for the submarine to be ready. The red light was almost upon them. "Right!" he roared at last. "Diving rudder controls, Graham! Full speed for the tunnel!" * * * * * At that moment the octopi ship swept into view, its full battery of offensive weapons flaring forth. The paralyzing ray tingled again and again over the control room. Someone laughed at its uselessness. The violet heat ray leveled full at them, but the commander avoided it with "Port ten, starboard ten! Maintain zigzag course to the tunnel." He understood the enemy's weapons now; he was throbbing with the fierce thrill of action. This duel was to be the climax of their whole adventure. "And, by heaven," he promised, "it's going to be a fight!" The other craft seemed to realize the _NX-1_ was now in expert hands. She raced along to starboard for some minutes, her heat ray trying vainly to steady on the American's weaving form. Wells wondered if the king of the octopi was aboard her, in command; he thought perhaps the ship had postponed her chase of McKegnie to pick him up. "I hope he is!" the commander breathed, and fingered the torpedo lever. He had some debts to pay. The _NX-1_, engines working smoothly, proceeded on a desperate dash for the tunnel that led to the outer sea. But the octopi ship apparently knew what Keith intended, for she abandoned her offensive rays, changed course a few degrees and slowly but steadily pulled ahead. "Damn!" Keith exclaimed. "She'll get there before us!" The dim shape dwindled on the screen, and before long her bulk had disappeared entirely. Wells then could watch her swift, straight progress only on the location chart. * * * * * Ten minutes later the funnel-like opening of the tunnel loomed on the teleview, and squarely in front, blocking it, was the waiting form of the octopi submarine. "Quarter speed!" Keith snapped. "Hold her steady, Graham; I'm going to try a bow torpedo. I think we're beyond their ray." Sighting his range on the telescopic range-finder, he worked the _NX-1_ slowly into position. He noticed that his first officer was staring oddly at him. He was bothered by the queer look. "What's wrong?" he asked impatiently. "But--what about Hemmy Bowman?" Bowman! In the rush of action and suspense, Keith Wells had completely forgotten his officer in the enemy submarine. "Oh, God!" he groaned. The cruel situation that had stayed his hand once before had again come to falter his course of action. The men were watching him; Graham had a question in his eyes. They all knew what had to be decided.... Keith shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. It was his greater duty to destroy the octopi submarine. And yet-- "Fish for Hemmy, Sparks," he ordered. "Craig, keep present distance from enemy. Full stop." A moment later the radio operator looked up. "Mr. Bowman on the phones, sir." With a heavy weight on his heart the commander clipped on the extension headphones. "Hemmy?" "Keith? Keith? Thank God you're alive!" Bowman's voice shook with gladness. "You're all back on the _NX-1_, Keith? The whole crew's with you? Oh, Lord, it's good to hear you again!" "Yes. We got back all right, Hemmy--a miracle. They've still got you prisoner?" "Yes.... Keith--you're trying to dodge out of the tunnel, aren't you?" * * * * * Wells smiled bitterly, and as he paused to frame an answer Bowman spoke again. "I want you to blow up this submarine, Keith," he said quickly. "A favor to me." He cut Wells short when the commander started to interrupt. "Wait! Let me finish," he pleaded. "I want to explain. I'd been hoping--but never mind that.... Keith, a while ago I managed to work loose. I lost my head completely and tackled these devils. It was a foolish thing to do; they overcame me, naturally. But, in the struggle, they tore my sea-suit." "What!" "Oh, just a tiny tear, or I wouldn't have lasted till now. But a leak all the same--in the right leg. Since then I've been gripping the edges of the fabric as tightly as I can--but I couldn't keep the water inside this ship from seeping through. It came in slowly at first, then faster as my hands grew numb. It's up to my neck now, Keith ... and--it won't be long! I've just a few minutes left...." The faint words tapered into silence. "No!" roared Keith in a great rush of emotion. But Hemmy's eager voice came right back: "Oh yes, you must! It would be a mercy to kill me, Keith." There were tears in the commander's eyes. "Are you sure, Hemmy?" he asked. "Are you sure?" "Oh, yes. It would be a mercy." Wells' lips formed a straight grim line. His words squeezed through it tightly. "All right, Hemmy. Thanks. Thanks. I--I'll go after them now, old man. I'll try and keep in touch with you through the duel, but I--I can't promise--" He could almost see Hemingway Bowman give his old familiar smile as he answered: "Then so long, Keith!" * * * * * Commander Keith Wells studied the teleview screen. The men were half afraid to look at his strained blanched face. Repeatedly the violet beam speared through the water, reaching for the _NX-1's_ bow. "Turn ship. Line up for stern torpedoes," the commander ordered harshly. He realized he could not hold his submarine steady to obtain a perfect sight, for the heat ray needed only thirty seconds to melt through their shell. He would have to swing the ship slowly about; and, as the shape of the enemy crossed the hair-lines on the range-finder, unleash his torpedoes and gamble on hitting the moving target. The _NX-1_ swung around, always maintaining a slight forward motion and zigzagging constantly to nullify the heat beam. Wells watched the range-finder closely. The octopi ship slanted downwards, the deadly violet ray stabbing from her bow. Slowly the black dot that represented her appeared on the dial, and slowly it dropped towards the crossed lines that showed the perfect firing point. Keith grasped the torpedo lever. The _NX-1's_ stern was towards her target. Dead silence hung in the control room. The _NX-1_ swung slightly. The octopi craft appeared directly in the middle of the dial. Wells pulled back the lever. The hiss of compressed air sprang from her stern. He had fired two tubes, his whole stock of stern torpedoes. The pair of dreadful weapons leaped out and settled on their course. Keith shot his gaze to the teleview. The torpedoes missed. Only by feet, but a miss all the same. They raced on past the octopi submarine and, with a tremendous, ear-numbing explosion, burst on the wall of the cavern beyond. Both ships reeled from the shock. Graham swore viciously, but Wells' masklike face showed no slightest change of expression.... A voice rang in Keith's headphones. "Tough, Keith! Better luck next time!" Then the commander winced. He simply could not answer Hemmy Bowman; could not answer that fine, brave voice.... * * * * * The stern torpedoes were gone. The tubes could not be reloaded, for the paralyzing ray bound the men to the control room. That left them two torpedoes in the bow. The violet heat ray kept fingering hungrily on their outer hull, and every man knew that the plates were weakening under the steady strain, which was only lessened by the _NX-1's_ constant zigzagging. The control room was very hot. Both ships were now a full mile from the tunnel entrance. Keith plunged the _NX-1_ down, swung her around, to bring his bow tubes to bear, and zigzagged upwards. It was obvious that the octopi craft had been alarmed by the terrific explosion. They now adopted tactics similar to the American ship's, and for awhile both submarines circled cautiously, maneuvering for an opening. "If only we could keep the ship steady!" Graham muttered. "But then that heat ray'd get us!" The commander kept his eyes on the teleview. Again and again the violet shaft pronged at them. The heat grew stifling. Sweat was pouring from all the men's bodies. Every face was strained and taut. "Starboard full!" Wells said suddenly. "A little up, Graham!" He had seen a chance; the octopi craft was slightly above, and in a moment would pass directly in the line of the bow tubes. The _NX-1_ stuck her nose up, swung rapidly to the right. Keith pulled back the firing lever, releasing one torpedo. The long messenger of death hurtled straight for the enemy's hull. They watched its course breathlessly.... "My God!" the first officer groaned. "Could they see it coming?" For the octopi submarine had swung to one side, neatly dodging the speeding tube of dynamite. "One left!" he added bitterly. "One left!" * * * * * A desperate plan formed in Keith Wells' mind. His last torpedo simply had to strike the mark; he could take no chances with it. He motioned the haggard-faced Graham to him. "There's only one thing left to do," he said quietly. "We've got to deliberately face that heat ray; chance its puncturing our plates." "How do you mean, sir?" "Get in very close, so as to make our last torpedo sure to hit. We've got to approach the enemy head-on at full speed. We'll corkscrew up to them until we get within two hundred yards, then go straight forward for ten or fifteen seconds, giving us the opportunity to sight the remaining torpedo directly on them. The heat ray may break through before I fire--but when I do fire it's a sure hit." The men had heard every word. Quietly Wells ordered: "Take the torpedo control, Graham. I'll take the helm." The first officer obeyed without a word. Keith grasped the helm. The plans were made for their last desperate attempt. "Right," the commander said shortly. "Here we go." * * * * * There had been a taut silence before, but now, knowing that they were deliberately offering themselves a perfect target for the heat ray in order to get their last torpedo home, the intensity was almost unbearable. The men felt like shrieking, jumping--doing anything to break the awful hush. The air was charged with the same unnameable something that heralds a typhoon. Keith Wells was like a white statue at the helm, save for the betraying trickles of sweat that coursed down his drawn cheeks. His hands moved the wheel slowly from port to starboard; his eyes bored at the screen before him. The ship was in command of a man of steel, a man with but one purpose.... "Up--up," he ordered. "Hold--in trim--full speed forward!" He had brought the _NX-1_ directly in line with the octopi ship. And now the craft leaped forward under full power, while he shot the helm back and forth ceaselessly. His ship was describing a corkscrewing motion, weaving straight at the enemy. Grasping her opportunity, the octopi submarine remained motionless, steadily dousing the approaching American craft with her silent violet ray and driving the temperature in the control room to even greater heights. The distance between them rapidly lessened. Would the plates stand it? Would the ray melt through the weakened steel before he could fire? With an effort Keith drove these doubts from his mind ... but he could not banish a certain dull, steady ache from his consciousness.... * * * * * The range dwindled. The heat became intolerable. Everyone's clothing was sopping wet. A man ripped off his shirt, gasping for air. Wells kept his eyes on the screen, though half-blinded by smarting sweat. The plates had to give soon, he knew. The octopi submarine, beam on and dead ahead, began to move to port at quickly increasing speed. At once Keith stopped swinging the helm, and the _NX-1's_ corkscrewing motion of protection ceased. And then came the real test, the gauntlet of seconds. Right straight into the retreating violet beam they went, at top speed. They gained rapidly. The heat was furnace-like. The commander, watching the range-finder, kept moving the helm slightly over. A shaft of violet heat spanned the two shells of metal. For ten seconds it had held on the _NX-1_. The black dot of the enemy craft moved slowly to exact center on the dial. Fifteen seconds ... twenty ... twenty-three-- "Fire!" Graham jammed the torpedo lever back. "Crash dive!" The deck tilted downward. And Wells' white lips formed the words, "So long, Hemmy!"--and he tore the phones from his head. Seconds later a titanic explosion sounded through the cavern; echoed and re-echoed in vasty roars. The American craft's lights went off--but not before her men had seen, in the teleview, a fire-shot maelstrom where a moment before the octopi submarine had been. "We got them!" yelled Graham. * * * * * A roar of exultation burst from every throat. The men flung their arms out, jumped, yelled crazily. Faint emergency lights lit the scene. "Below, at regular posts," Wells ordered. "Reload bow and stern tubes. Graham, see to the lights." He himself remained at the helm. In a few moments the submarine had climbed back to the level of the tunnel. At quarter speed she nosed into the wide entrance, and slowly forged into the dense, deceptive shadows. The commander acted mechanically. Again by touch he steered his ship through the black, ragged cleft. Fifteen minutes after leaving the cavern of the octopi her bow poked through the weaving kelp into the free, salty depths of the Atlantic Ocean. There was one more task to perform, and Wells lost no time in doing it. When two hundred yards away he halted the _NX-1_, steadied her and sighted the stern tubes just above the dark tunnel hole. Quickly he sent forth two torpedoes. A huge roar rumbled through the water, whipping the beds of kelp to mad convulsions. "Turn around," the commander ordered harshly. He sighted his bow tubes and again let loose a bolt of two torpedoes. Then he sent the submarine forward, and, through the teleview, examined what his four weapons had done. Huge chunks of rock had been tumbled down, completely closing the tunnel. "Well," said Graham, "it's over! Finished! They'll never get through that!" * * * * * A full-throated cheer burst from the men below, a cheer that rang for minutes as they realized they were free forever of the octopi, of the cold underwater city, of the clutching tentacles. Graham grinned broadly. "Sound happy--eh?" he chuckled. "Say, Keith, it's good we've got those two octopi our fighting cook killed. Knapp would never believe our story without them!" He stared curiously at his commander. Wells was standing quite still, facing the teleview screen. A strange, far-away look was in his eyes. "What's the matter, old man?" the first officer asked, smiling straight at him. "Aren't you glad we won through?" "Of course," answered Keith with a tired smile in return. "But why did you look that way?" Graham persisted. And Keith Wells told him: "I was just wondering if Hemmy told the truth." The Black Lamp _By Captain S. P. Meek_ [Illustration: _"Look out!" He leaped to one side as he spoke._] [Sidenote: Dr. Bird and his friend Carnes unravel another criminal web of scientific mystery.] "The clue, Carnes," said Dr. Bird slowly, "lies in those windows." Operative Carnes of the United States Secret Service shook his head before he glanced at the windows of the famous scientist's private laboratory on the top floor of the Bureau of Standards. "I usually defer to your knowledge, Doctor," he said, "but this time I think you are off on the wrong foot. If the thieves came in through the windows, what was their object in cutting that hole through the roof? The marks are very plain and they indicate that the hole was cut in some manner from the inside." Dr. Bird smiled enigmatically. "That is too evident for discussion," he replied. "I grant you that the thieves entered from the roof through that hole. After they had secured their booty they left by the same route. I presume that you have noticed the marks on the roof where an aircraft of some sort, probably a helicopter, landed and took off. A question of much greater moment is that of what they did before they landed and cut the hole." "I don't follow your reasoning, Doctor." "Carnes, that hole was cut through the roof with a heavy saw. In cutting it, the workers dislodged quite a little plaster which fell to the floor and must have made a great deal of noise. Why wasn't that noise heard?" "It was heard. The watchman heard it, but knew that Lieutenant Breslau was working here and he thought that he made the noise." "Surely, but why didn't Breslau hear it?" "How do we know that he didn't? He was taken to Walter Reed Hospital this morning with his mind an absolute blank and with his tongue paralyzed. He must have seen the thieves and they treated him in some way to ensure his silence. When he is able to talk, if he ever is, he'll probably give us a good description of them." * * * * * Dr. Bird shook his head. "Too thin, Carney, old dear," he said. "Breslau is a very intelligent young man. He was perfectly normal when I left him shortly after midnight last night. He was working alone in here on a device of the utmost military importance. On the desk is a push button which sets ringing a dozen gongs in the building. Surely a man of that type would have had sense enough when he heard and saw intruders cutting a hole through the roof to sound an alarm which would have brought every watchman on the grounds to his assistance. He must have been knocked out before the hole was started, probably before the helicopter's landing." "How? Gas of some sort?" "The windows were all closed and locked and I have already ascertained that the gas and water lines have not been tampered with. Gas won't penetrate through a solid roof in sufficient concentration to knock out a man like that. It was something more subtle than gas." "What was it?" "I don't know yet. The clue to what it was lies, as I told you, in those windows." Carnes moved over and surveyed the windows closely. "I see nothing unusual about them except that they need washing rather badly." "They were washed last Friday, but they do look rather dirty, don't they? Suppose you take a rag and some scouring soap and clean up a pane." The detective took the proffered articles and started his task. He wet a pane of glass, rubbed up a thick lather of scouring soap and applied it and rubbed vigorously. With clear water he washed the glass and then gave an exclamation of astonishment and examined it more closely. "That isn't dirt, Doctor," he cried. "The glass seems to be fogged." Dr. Bird chuckled. "So it seems," he admitted. "Now look at the rest of the glass around the laboratory." Carnes looked around and then walked to a table littered with apparatus and examined a dozen pieces carefully. "It's all fogged in exactly the same way, Doctor," he said. "The only piece of clear glass in the room is that piece of plate glass on your desk." * * * * * Dr. Bird picked up a hammer and struck the plate on his desk a sharp blow. Carnes ducked instinctively, but the hammer rebounded harmlessly from the plate. "That isn't glass, Carnes," said the doctor. "That plate is made of vitrilene, a new product which I have developed. It looks like glass, but it has entirely different properties. It is of enormous strength and is quite insensitive to shock. It has one most peculiar property. While ultra-violet and longer rays will penetrate it quite readily, it is a perfect screen for X-rays and other rays of shorter wave length. It appears to be the only piece of transparent substance in my laboratory which has not been fogged, as you call it." "Do short waves fog glass, Doctor?" "Not so far as I know at present, but you must remember that very little work has been done with the short wave-lengths. In the vast range of waves whose lengths lie between zero and that of the X-ray, only a few points have been investigated and definitely plotted. There may be in that range a wave-length which will fog glass." "Then your theory is that some sort of a ray machine was put in operation before the helicopter landed?" "It is too early to attempt any theorizing, Carnes. Let us confine ourselves to the known facts. Lieutenant Breslau was normal at midnight and was working in this room. Some time between then and seven this morning he underwent certain mental and physical changes which prevent him from telling us what he observed. During the same period, a hole was cut in the roof and things of great importance stolen. At the same time, all the glass in the laboratory became semi-opaque. The problem is to determine what connection there is between the three events. I will handle the scientific end here, but there is some outside work to be done, and that will be your share." * * * * * "Give your orders, Doctor," said the detective briefly. "To understand what I am driving at, I will have to tell you what has been stolen. Naturally this is highly confidential. Some rumors have leaked out as to my experiments with 'radite,' as I have named the new radium-containing disintegrating explosive on which I have been working, but no one short of the Secretary of War and the Chief of Ordnance and certain of their selected subordinates knows that my experiments have been successful and that the United States is in a position to manufacture radite in almost unlimited quantities from the pitchblende ore deposits of Wyoming and Nevada. The effects of radite will be catastrophic on the unfortunate victim on whom it is first used. The only thing left to do was to develop a gun from which radite shells could be fired with safety and precision. "Ordinary propellant powders are too variable for this purpose, but I found that radite B, one form of my new explosive, can be used for propelling the shells from a gun. The ordinary gun will last only two or three rounds, due to the erosive action of the radite charge on the barrel, and ordinary ordnance is heavier and more cumbersome than is necessary. When this was found to be the case, the Chief of Ordnance detailed Lieutenant Breslau, the army's greatest expert on gun design, to work with me in an attempt to develop a suitable weapon. Breslau is a wizard at that sort of work and he has made a miniature working model of a gun with a vitrilene-lined barrel which is capable of being fired with a miniature shell. The gun will stand up under the repeated firing of radite charges and is very light and compact and gives an accuracy of fire control heretofore deemed impossible. From this he planned to construct a larger weapon which would fire a shell containing an explosive charge of two and one-half ounces of radite at a rate of fire of two hundred shots per minute. The destructive effect of each shell will be greater than that of the ordinary high-explosive shell fired from a sixteen-inch mortar, and all of the shells can be landed inside a two-hundred foot circle at a range of fifteen miles. The weight of the completed gun will be less than half a ton, exclusive of the firing platform. It is Breslau's working model which has been stolen." * * * * * Carnes whistled softly between his teeth. "The matter will have to be handled pretty delicately to avoid international complications," he said. "It's hard to tell just where to look. There are a great many nations who would give any amount for a model of such a weapon." "The matter must be handled delicately and also in absolute secrecy, Carnes. We are not yet ready to announce to the world the fact that we have such a weapon in our armory. It is the plan of the President to have a half dozen of these weapons manufactured and give a demonstration of their terrible effectiveness to representatives of the powers of the world. Think what an argument the existence of such a weapon will be for the furtherance of his plans for disarmament and universal peace! Public sentiment will force disarmament on the world, for even the worst jingoist could no longer defend armaments in the face of America's offer to scrap these super-engines of destruction and to destroy the plans from which they were made. If the model has fallen into the hands of any civilized power the damage is not irreparable, for public opinion would force its surrender and return. It is among the uncivilized powers that our search must first be made." "That makes the problem of where to start more complicated." "On the contrary, it simplifies it immensely. At the head of the uncivilized powers stands one which has the brains, the scientific knowledge and the manufacturing facilities to make terrible use of such a weapon. In addition, the aim of that power is to overthrow all world governments and set up in their stead its own tyrannical disorder. Need I name it?" "You refer to Russia." "Not to Russia, the great slumbering giant who will some day take her place in the sun in fellowship with the other nations, but to Bolsheviki, that empire within an empire, that horrible power which is holding sleeping Russia in chains of steel and blood. It is there that our search must first be made." * * * * * "Of course, they have no official representative in America." "No, but the Young Labor Party is as much their accredited representative as the British Ambassador is of imperial Britain. Your first task will be to trail down and locate every leader of that group and to investigate his present activities." "I can tell you where most of them are without investigation. Denberg, Semensky and Karuska are in Atlanta; Fedorovitch and Caspar are in Leavenworth; Saranoff is dead--" "Presumably." "Why, Doctor, I saw with my own eyes the destruction of the submarine in which he was riding!" "Did you see his dead body?" "No." "Neither did I, and I will never be sure until I do. Once before we were certain of his death, and he bobbed up with a new fiendish device. We cannot eliminate Saranoff." "I will include him in my plans." "Do so. Besides a hypothetical Saranoff, there are a half dozen or more of the old leaders of the gang who are alive and at liberty, so far as we know. They fled the country after the Coast Guard broke up their alien smuggling scheme, but some of them may have returned. There are also thirty or forty underlings who should be located and checked up on, and, in addition, we must not lose sight of the fact that new heads of the organization may have been smuggled into the United States. It is no simple task that I am setting you, Carnes, but I know that you and Bolton will see it through if anyone can." "Thanks, Doctor, we'll do our best. If I am not speaking out of turn, what are you planning to do in the mean time?" * * * * * "I am going to start Taylor off on an ultra-short wave generator and try a few experiments along that line. Breslau is at Walter Reed and they are doing all they can for him, but until I can get some definite information as to the underlying cause of his condition, they are more or less shooting in the dark." "How are they treating him?" "By electric stimulations and vibratory treatments and by keeping him in a darkened room. By the way, Carnes, if I am correct in my line of thought, it would be well to have an extra guard put over Karuska. He was the only real expert in ordnance that the Young Labor party had, and if they have Breslau's model they'll need him to supervise the construction of a gun." "I'll attend to that at once, Doctor. Is there anything else?" "Not that I know of. I am going out to Takoma Park this afternoon and have another look at Breslau, but it is too soon to hope for any change in his condition. Aside from the time I will be out there, you can find me either here or at my home, in case anything develops." "I'll get on the job at once, Doctor." "Thanks, old dear. Remember that speed must be the keynote of your work." * * * * * The telephone bell at the head of Dr. Bird's bed woke into noisy activity. The doctor roused himself and took down the instrument sleepily. A glance at the clock showed him that it was four in the morning and he muttered a malediction on the one who had called him. "Hello," he said into the receiver. "Dr. Bird speaking." "Doctor," came a crisp voice over the wire, "wake up! This is Carnes talking. Something has broken loose!" All trace of sleep vanished from Dr. Bird's face and his eyes glowed momentarily with a peculiar glitter which Carnes would at once have recognized as indicative of the keenest interest. "What has happened, Carnes?" he demanded. "I telephoned Atlanta this morning and arranged to have an extra guard put over Karuska as you suggested. The matter was simplified by the fact that he and nine others were confined in the prison infirmary. The warden agreed to do as I told him, and, in addition to the regular guards, a special man was placed in the ward near Karuska's bed. At 2 A. M. the lights in the ward went out." "Accidentally, or were they put out?" "They haven't found out yet. At any rate they are all right now, but Karuska and all of the other inmates and all the guards of that particular ward have gone crazy." "The dickens you say!" "Not only that, they are also partially paralyzed. The description I got over the telephone corresponds exactly with the condition of Lieutenant Breslau as you described it to me. Here is the most interesting part of the whole affair. The special guard over Karuska was only lightly affected and has already recovered and is in a position to tell you exactly what happened. I got a garbled account of the affair from the warden, something about a goldfish bowl or something like that, the warden wouldn't take it seriously enough to give me details. I didn't press for them much for I knew that you would rather get them at first hand." "I certainly would. I'll be ready to leave for Atlanta in less than ten minutes." "I expected that, Doctor, and a car is already on its way to pick you up. I'll meet you at Langley Field where a plane is already being tuned up and will be ready to take off by the time we get there." "Good work, Carnes. I'll see you at the field." * * * * * A car was waiting for Carnes and Dr. Bird when the Langley Field plane slid down to a landing at Atlanta. At the penitentiary, Dr. Bird went direct to the infirmary where Karuska had been confined. As he entered, he shot a keen glance around and gave an exclamation of satisfaction. "Look at the windows, Carnes," he cried. Carnes went over to the nearest window and moistened his finger tip and applied it experimentally to the glass. The moisture produced no effect, for the glass of the windows was permanently clouded as was that of the doctor's laboratory. "Whatever happened in my laboratory the night before last was repeated here last night with a similar object," said the doctor. "The object there was to steal a gun model; here it was to steal a man who could construct a full-sized gun from the model. I understand that one of the guards escaped the fate which overtook the rest of the persons in the infirmary?" "Not altogether, Doctor," replied the warden. "I think that his mind is somewhat affected, for he tells a wild yarn and insists on trying to wear a goldfish bowl on his head. I have him under observation in the psychopathic ward." Dr. Bird shot a scornful glance at the warden. "'There are none so blind as those who will not see'," he murmured. "By all means, I wish to see him," he went on aloud. "Will you have him brought here at once, please?" * * * * * The warden nodded and spoke to one of the attendants. In a few moments a tall, fair-haired young giant stood before the doctor. Dr. Bird pushed back his unruly shock of black hair with his fingers, those long slim mobile fingers which alone betrayed the artist in his make-up, and shot a piercing glance from his black eyes into the blue ones, which returned the gaze unabashed. "What is your name?" he asked. "Bailley, sir." "You were on guard here last night?" "Yes, sir. I was detailed as a special guard over No. 9764." "Tell me in your own words just what happened. Don't be afraid to speak out; I'm not going to disbelieve you; and above all, tell me everything, no matter how unimportant it may seem to you. I'll judge the importance of things for myself. I'm Dr. Bird of the Bureau of Standards." The guard's face lighted up at the doctor's words. "I've heard of you, Doctor," he said in a relieved tone, "and I'll be glad to tell you everything. At ten o'clock last night, I relieved Carragher as special guard over No. 9764. Carragher reported that the prisoner was somewhat restless and hadn't been asleep as yet. I sat down about fifteen feet from his bed and prepared to keep an eye on him until I was relieved at six o'clock this morning. "Nothing happened until about two o'clock. No. 9764 was restless as Carragher had said, but toward midnight he quieted down and apparently went to sleep. I was sleepy myself, and I got up and took a turn around the room every five minutes to be sure that I kept awake. That's how I am so sure of the time, sir." * * * * * Dr. Bird nodded. "At five minutes to two, just as I got up, I heard a noise outside like a big electric fan. It sounded like it came from directly overhead and I went to the window and looked out. I couldn't see anything, although I could hear it pretty plainly, and then I heard a noise like something had fallen on the roof. Almost at the same time there came a sort of high-pitched whine, a good deal like the noise an electric motor makes when it is running at high speed. "I thought of giving an alarm, but I didn't want to stir things up unless I was sure that there was some necessity for it, so I started for the door to ask one of the outside guards if he had heard anything. As I turned toward No. 9764 I saw that he had been sitting up in bed while my back was turned. As soon as he saw that I noticed him, he lay back real quick and pulled the covers over his head. He moved pretty quick, but not so quick that I couldn't see that he had something that glittered like glass before his face. I started over toward his bed to see what he was doing and then it was that the lights started to get dim!" "Go on!" said the doctor as Bailley paused. His eyes were glittering brightly now. "Well, sir, Doctor, I don't hardly know how to describe what happened next. The lights were getting dim, but not as they ordinarily do when the current starts to go off. The filaments were shining as bright as they ever did, but the light didn't seem to be able to penetrate the air. The whole room seemed to be filled with a blackness that stopped the light. No, sir, it wasn't like fog; it was more like something more powerful than the lights was in the room and was killing them. * * * * * "It wasn't only the lights which were affected, it was me as well. This blackness, whatever it was, was getting into me as well as into the room, and I couldn't seem to make myself think like I wanted to. I tried to yell to give an alarm, and I found that I could hardly whisper. I went toward the bed and then I saw No. 9764 sit up again. He had a goldfish bowl pulled down over his head and it was evident that it was keeping the blackness away, for I could see him plainly and his eyes were as bright as ever. "The nearer I got to him, the funnier I felt, and I began to be afraid that I would go out. No. 9764 got up out of bed, and I could see him grinning at me through the bowl. He reached up and adjusted that bowl, and all of a sudden I realized that whatever was knocking me out was not affecting him because he had that thing on. I jumped for him with the idea of taking the bowl off and putting it on my own head. He saw what I was up to and he fought like a cornered rat, but the blackness hadn't affected my muscles. I'm a pretty big man, sir, and No. 9764 is a little runt, and it didn't take me long to get the bowl off his head and pulled on over mine. As soon as I did that, I seemed to be able to think clearer. I was sitting on No. 9764 and was ready to tap him with a persuader if he started anything, but I didn't have to. In a few minutes he stopped struggling and lay perfectly quiet. "The lights kept getting dimmer and dimmer until they went out altogether and the room became pitch dark. It wasn't exactly as if the lights had gone out, sir; I seemed to know that they were still there and were burning as bright as ever, but they couldn't penetrate the blackness in the room, if you understand what I mean." * * * * * "I think I do," said Dr. Bird slowly. "It was a good deal as if you had seen a glass filled with a pale red liquid and someone had dumped black ink into the fluid and hid the red color. You would know that the red was still there, but you wouldn't be able to see it through the black." "That's exactly what it was like, Doctor; you have described it better than I can. At any rate, after it got real dark I heard a low whistle from the roof. No. 9764 made a struggle to get up for a moment and then lay quiet again. The whistle sounded again and then I heard some one call 'Caruso.' Everything was quiet for a while and then the same voice called again and said some stuff in a foreign language that I couldn't understand. I kept perfectly quiet to see what would happen. "For about ten minutes the room remained perfectly dark, as I have said, and all the while I could hear that whining noise. All of a sudden it began to sound in a lower note and then I could see the lights again, very dimly and like the black ink you spoke of was fading out. The note got lower until it stopped altogether, and the lights came on brighter until they were normal again. Then I heard a scraping noise on the roof and the noise I had heard at first like a big electric fan. I looked at the clock. It was two-twenty. "For a few minutes I wasn't able to collect my wits. When I got up off of No. 9764 at last he stared at me as though he didn't know a thing, and I heaved him back into his bed and ran to the door to summon an outside guard. I could still talk in a husky whisper, but not loud, and I wasn't surprised when no one heard me. My orders were not to let No. 9764 out of my sight, but this was an emergency, so I left the ward and found a guard. It was Madigan and he was standing on his beat staring at nothing. When I touched him he looked at me and there was the same vacant look in his eyes that I had seen in the prisoner's. I talked to him in a whisper, but he didn't seem to understand, so I left him and went to a telephone and called for help. Mr. Lawson, the warden, got here with guards in a couple of minutes and I tried to tell him what had happened, but I couldn't talk loud, and I was afraid to take the fish bowl off my head." * * * * * "What happened next?" "Mr. Lawson took me to his office, and on the way we passed under an arc light. As soon as I got under it I begin to feel better, and my voice came stronger. I saw that it was doing me some good and I stopped under it for an hour before my voice got back to normal. It seemed to clear the fog from my brain, too, and I was able, about four o'clock, to tell everything that had happened. Mr. Lawson seemed to think that my brain was affected as well as the others' and he sent me to the hospital. That's all, Doctor." "Do you feel perfectly normal now?" "Yes, sir." "There is no need for confining this man longer, Mr. Lawson. He is as well as he ever was. Carnes, get the Walter Reed Hospital on the telephone and tell them that I said to treat Lieutenant Breslau with light rays, rich in ultra-violet. Tell them to give him an overdose of them and not to put goggles on him. Keep him in the sun all day and under sun-ray arcs at night until further orders. Mr. Lawson, give the same treatment to the men who were disabled last night. If you haven't enough sun-ray arcs in your hospital, put them under an ordinary arc light in the yard. Bailley, have you still got that goldfish bowl?" "It is in my office, Doctor," said the warden. "Good enough! Send for it at once. By the way, you have two more communists here, Denberg and Semensky, haven't you?" "I think so, although I will have to consult the records before I can be positive." "I am sure that you have. Look the matter up and let me know." * * * * * The warden hurried away to carry out the doctor's orders, and an orderly appeared in a few moments with a hollow globe made of some crystalline transparent substance. Despite its presence in the infirmary the evening before, there was no trace of clouding apparent. Dr. Bird took it and examined it critically. He rapped it with his knuckles and then stepped to the door and hurled it violently down on the concrete floor of the yard. The globe rebounded without injury and he caught it. "Vitrilene, or a good imitation of it," he remarked to Carnes. "After you get through talking to the hospital, get Taylor on the wire. There is plenty of loose vitrilene in the Bureau, and I want him to send down about fifty square feet of it by a special plane at once." As Carnes left the room, the warden reappeared. "The men are all lying in the sun now, Doctor," he said. "I find that we have the two men you mentioned confined here. They are both in Tier A, Building 6." "Is that an isolated building?" "No, it is one wing of the old main building." "On which floor?" "The second floor. It is a six-story building." "Have they been moved there recently?" "They have been there for nearly a year." * * * * * "In that case there will be little chance of another attack of this sort to-night. At the same time, I would advise you to station extra guards there to-night and every night until I notify you otherwise. Caution them to watch the lights carefully and to give an alarm at once if they appear to get dim. In such a case, send men to the roof with rifles with orders to shoot to kill anyone they find there. I am going back to Washington and I am going to take Karuska, your No. 9764 with me. You had better have one of the guards in the corridor, where Denberg and Semensky are, wear this goldfish bowl, as you call it. A lot of plate glass--at least it will look like that--will come from Washington by plane. Cut it into sheets a foot square and use surgeon's plaster to make some temporary glass helmets for your men. I want all your guards to wear them until I either settle this matter or else send you some better helmets. Do you understand?" "I understand all right, but I'm afraid that I can't do it. The wearing of such appliances would interfere with the efficiency of my men as guards." "Brain and tongue paralysis would interfere rather more seriously, it seems to me. In any event, I have sufficient authority to enforce my request. If you are at all doubtful, call up the Attorney General and ask him." The warden hesitated. "If you don't mind, I think I will call Washington, Doctor," he said. "I will have to get authority to turn No. 9764 over to you in any event." "Call all you wish, Mr. Lawson. Mr. Carnes is talking to Washington now and we'll have a clear line through for you in a few minutes. Meanwhile, get a set of shackles on Karuska and get him ready to travel by plane. He appears to be suffering from mental paralysis, but I don't know how his case will develop. He may go violently insane at any moment and I don't care to be aloft in a plane with an unbound maniac." * * * * * Major Martin looked up from the prone figure of Karuska. "His condition duplicates that of Lieutenant Breslau, Dr. Bird," he said. "We received your telephoned message this afternoon and we kept Breslau in a flood of sunlight until dusk, and then put him under sun-ray lamps. I don't know how you got on to that treatment, but it is having a very beneficial effect. He can already make inarticulate sounds, and his eyes are not quite as vacant at they were. If he keeps on improving as he has, he should be able to talk intelligently in a few days. If you wish to question this man, why not give him the same treatment?" "I haven't time, Major. I must make him talk to-night if it is humanly possible. I called you in because you are the most eminent authority on the brain in the government service. Is there any way of artificially stimulating this man's brain so that we can force the secrets of his subconscious mind from him?" The major sat for a moment in profound thought. "There _is_ a way, Doctor," he said at length, "but it is a method which I would not dare to use. By applying high frequency electrical stimulations to the medulla oblongata, at the same time bathing the cerebellum with ultra-violet, it might be done, but the chances are that either death or insanity would result. I would not do it." "Major Martin, this man is a reckless and dangerous international criminal. If his gang carries out the plan which I fear they have formed, the lives of thousands, yes, of millions, may pay for your hesitation. I will assume full responsibility for the test if you will make it, and I have the authority of the President of the United States behind me." "In that case, Doctor, I have no choice. The President is the Commander-in-chief of the army, and if those are his orders the experiment will be carried out. As a matter of form, I will ask that your orders be reduced to writing." "I will write them gladly, Major. Please proceed with the experiment without delay." * * * * * Major Martin bowed and spoke to a waiting orderly. The prostrate figure of Karuska was wheeled down a corridor into the electrical laboratory, and with the aid of the laboratory technician the surgeon made his preparations. The Moss lamp was arranged to throw a flood of ultra-violet over the Russian's cranium while the leads from a deep therapy X-ray tube was connected, one to the front of Karuska's throat and the other to the base of his brain. At a signal from the major, a nurse began to administer ether. "I guarantee nothing, Dr. Bird," said the major. "The paralysis of the vocal cords may be physical, in which case the victim will still be unable to speak, regardless of the brain stimulation. If, however, the evident paralysis is due to some obscure influence on the brain, it may work." "In any, event I will hold you blameless and thank you for your help," replied the doctor. "Please start the stimulation." Major Martin closed a switch, and the hum of a high tension alternator filled the laboratory. The Russian quivered for a moment and then lay still. Major Martin nodded and Dr. Bird stepped to the side of the operating table. "Ivan Karuska," he said slowly and distinctly, "do you hear me?" The Russian's lips quivered and an unintelligible murmur came from them. "Ivan Karuska," repeated Dr. Bird, "do you hear me?" * * * * * There was a momentary struggle on the part of the Russian and then a surprisingly clear voice came from his lips. "I do." "Who is the present head of the Young Labor party?" Again there was a pause before the name "Saranoff" came from the lips of the insensible figure. Carnes gave a sharp exclamation but a gesture from the doctor silenced him. "Is Saranoff alive?" "Yes." "Is he in the United States?" "No, he is in London." "Is he coming to the United States?" "Yes." "When?" "I don't know. Soon. As soon as we are ready for him." "Where is he living in London?" "I don't know." "How did you get word that you were to be rescued from Atlanta?" "A message was smuggled in to me by O'Grady, a guard in our pay." "What was that vitrilene helmet for?" "To protect me from the effects of the black lamp." "What is the black lamp?" "I don't know exactly. Saranoff invented it. It gives a black light and it kills all other light except sunlight, and it paralyses the brain." "Did you know that the model of the Breslau gun had been stolen?" "Yes." "What were you going to do after you were rescued from jail?" "I was going to make a full-sized gun. We have a disappearing gun platform built in the swamps at the juncture of the Potomac and Piscataway Creek. The gun was to be mounted there and we would shell Washington and institute a reign of terror. It would be a signal for uprisings all over the country." "Is there a black lamp at that gun platform?" "Yes. The black lamp will kill both the flash and the report." "Where did you get the formula for radite?" "We got it from one of Dr. Bird's assistants. His name--" * * * * * As he spoke the last few sentences, Karuska's voice had steadily risen almost to a shriek. As he endeavored to give the name of the doctor's treacherous helper his voice changed to an unintelligible screech and then died away into silence. Major Martin stepped forward and bent over the prone figure. Hurriedly he tore away the electrical connections and placed a stethoscope over the Russian's heart. He listened for a moment and then straightened up, his face pale. "I hope that the information you obtained is worth a life, Dr. Bird," he said, his voice trembling slightly, "because it has cost one." "It may easily save thousands of lives. I thank you, Major, and I will see that no blame attaches to you for your actions. I only wish that he had lived long enough to tell me the name of my assistant who has sold me to Saranoff. However, we'll get that information in other ways. Carnes, telephone Lawson at Atlanta to slam O'Grady into a cell pending investigation while I get Camp Meade on the wire and order up a couple of tanks. We are going to attack that gun emplacement at daybreak." The telephone bell in the laboratory jangled sharply. Major Martin answered it and turned to Carnes. "You're wanted on the telephone, Mr. Carnes." The detective stepped forward and took the transmitter. "Carnes speaking," he said. "Yes. Oh, hello, Bolton. Yes, we have Karuska here, or rather his body. Yes, Dr. Bird is here right now. You've what? Great Scott, wait a minute." "Dr. Bird," he cried eagerly turning from the telephone, "Bolton has located the Washington headquarters of the Young Labor party." Dr. Bird sprang to the instrument. "Bird speaking, Bolton," he cried. "You've located their headquarters? Who's running it? Stanesky, eh? You're on the right track; he used to be Saranoff's right hand man. Where is the place located? I don't seem to recollect the spot. You have it well surrounded? Where are you speaking from? All right, we'll join you as quickly as we can. Keep your patrols out and don't let anyone get away." He hung up the receiver and turned to Carnes. "Did you have the car wait?" he asked. "Good enough; we'll jump for the Bureau and pick up all the vitrilene laying around loose and then join Bolton. He thinks that he has the whole outfit bottled up." * * * * * Bolton was waiting as the car rolled up and Dr. Bird leaped out. "Where are they?" demanded the doctor eagerly. "In an abandoned factory building about three hundred yards from here," replied the Chief of the Secret Service. "I traced them through New York. We have been watching the place ever since yesterday noon, and I know that Stanesky is in there with half a dozen others. No one has tried to leave since we set our watch. One funny thing has happened. About an hour ago a peculiar red glow suffused the whole building. It has died down a good deal since, but we can still see it through the windows. Could you tell us what it means?" "No. I couldn't, Bolton, but we'll find out. How many men have you?" "I have sixteen stationed around." "That's more than we'll need. I have only vitrilene shields and helmets enough to equip six men. Pick out your three best men to go with us and we'll make a try at entering." Bolton strode off into the darkness and returned in a few moments with three men at his heels. Dr. Bird spoke briefly to the operatives, all of them men who had been his companions on other adventures. He explained the need for the vitrilene helmets and shields, and without comment the six donned their armor and followed Bolton as he strode toward the building. As they approached, a dull red glow could be plainly seen through the windows, and Dr. Bird paused and studied the phenomenon for a moment. "I don't know what that means, Bolton," he said softly, "but I don't like the looks of it. Stanesky is up to some devilment or other. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out that he knows all about your pickets and is ready for a raid." "We'd better rush the place, then," muttered Bolton. * * * * * Dr. Bird nodded agreement and with a sharp command to his men Bolton broke into a run. Not a shot was fired as they approached, and the front door gave readily to Bolton's touch. At it opened there came a grating sound from the roof followed by the whir of a propeller. Dr. Bird ran out of the building and glanced up. "A helicopter!" he cried. "They were expecting us and have escaped!" He drew his pistol and fired ineffectually at the great bird-like ship which was rising almost noiselessly into the air. He cursed and turned again to the building. Bolton still stood in the room which they had first entered. His flashlight showed it to be empty, but from under a door on the opposite side a line of dull red light glowed evilly. With his pistol ready in his hand, Bolton approached the door on hands and knees. When he reached it he threw his shoulder against it and dropped flat to the floor as the door swung open. No shot greeted him, and he stared for a moment and then rose to his feet. "Nothing in here but some glass statues," he announced. Dr. Bird followed him into the room. As he looked at what Bolton had called glass statues he gasped and shielded his eyes. "God in Heaven!" he ejaculated. "Those were living men!" * * * * * Before them were three men or what had been three men. All stood in strained attitudes with a look of horror frozen on their faces. The thing that made the spectators shudder was that their bodies had, by some diabolical method, been rendered semi-transparent. The dull red light which suffused the room emanated from the three bodies. Dr. Bird examined them closely, being careful not to touch them. "The identity of my treacherous assistant is known," he said grimly as he pointed at the middle figure. "It was Gerond. What is this?" He took an envelope from the hand of the middle figure and opened it. A sheet of paper fell out and he picked it up and read it. "My dear Mr. Bolton," ran the note. "Your methods of tracing and picketing my headquarters are so crude as to be almost laughable. This base has served its purpose and we were ready to abandon it in any event, but I couldn't resist the temptation to let you almost nab us. The three men whom you will find here are agents who failed in their duty. If you are interested in learning the method of their execution, you might take to heart the words of your colleague, Dr. Bird: 'The clue lies in those windows.'" Carnes glanced at the windows and gave a cry of surprise. The glass was opaque, as had been the glass in the doctor's laboratory and the glass in the infirmary at Atlanta. The fogging however, was much more pronounced, and the opaque glass gave faintly the same red effulgence which came from the three bodies. "What does it mean, Doctor?" he asked. "I don't know, Carnes," said Dr. Bird slowly. "I foresee that I am going to have to do a great deal of work on short wave-lengths soon. It is doubtless the effect of some modification of the black lamp which has done it. Look out!" * * * * * He leaped to one side as he spoke, drawing Bolton and Carnes with him. A panel in the side of the wall opposite the doorway had slid silently open and through the opening poured out a beam of fiery red. Full on the three bodies it fell, and then spread out to fill the room. Dr. Bird had drawn the two nearest men out of the direct beam, but one of the secret service men stood full in its path. In the excitement of entering he had dropped his vitrilene shield and the livid ray fell full on his defenceless body. As they watched an expression of horror spread over his face and he strove to move to one side, but he was held helpless. Slowly he stiffened; and, as the ray bored through him, his body became semi-transparent and the same dull red glow which emanated from the three bodies they had found began to shine forth from him. Bolton strove to break from the doctor's grasp and rush to the rescue but Dr. Bird held him with a grip of iron. "Too late," he said grimly. "Chalk up another murder to the arch fiend who has committed the others. I don't know the nature of that ray and vitrilene may not be an adequate defence against its full force. We had better get out of here and attack the place from the rear." Carefully edging their way around the sides of the room, the five men made their way out through the door. Dr. Bird slammed the door shut behind him and led the way out of the building and around to the rear. A door loomed before them and he cautiously tried it. It gave to his touch and he entered. As he set his foot on the threshold a terrific explosion came from the interior of the building. "Run!" he shouted as he led the way in retreat. "If that is a radite explosion it will act for several seconds!" From a safe distance they watched. One corner of the building had been torn off by the force of the explosion, and as they watched the rest of the building gradually collapsed and sank into a pile of ruins. "They had planned on a visit from us all right," said Dr. Bolton grimly. "They had a surprise for us any way we jumped. If we went in the front door, that devil's ray was to finish us, and if we went in the back door the whole place was arranged to blow up as we entered. I only hope that Stanesky thinks that he has got us all and doesn't expect an attack on his next base in the morning. If he doesn't, I think we may give him a rather unpleasant surprise. Of course, that lamp is smashed into atoms and buried under the debris, but I don't know what other devil's contraptions that ruin holds. Bolton, have your men picket it and allow no one near until I get back. I've got to get to a telephone and get a couple of tanks from Meade and a plane or two from Langley Field." * * * * * Two tanks made their way slowly across country. The front of each tank was protected by a heavy sheet of vitrilene, while from the turrets of the tanks projected the wicked looking muzzles of thirty-seven millimeter guns. Overhead two airplanes from Langley Field soared, scouting the country. Dr. Bird and Carnes rode in the leading tank. "It ought to be somewhere near here, unless Karuska lied," said Carnes as he swept the country with a pair of binoculars. "He didn't lie," returned Dr. Bird. "It was his subconscious mind that spoke and it never lies. He spoke of the gun emplacement as being in a swamp and I have a strong idea that it is submersible. Of course, it is bound to be well camouflaged, both from land and from air observation." The planes circled around again and again, quartering the air like a pair of well-trained bird dogs will quarter a hunting field. First high and then low they swooped back and forth, the tanks lumbering slowly along in the same direction. Presently the occupants of the leading tank saw one of the planes bank sharply and swing around. It dropped to an altitude of only a few hundred feet and turned and went back over the ground it had just crossed. "I believe that fellow sees something!" exclaimed Carnes. As he spoke, three green Very lights came from the cockpit of the plane. The tank driver gave a grunt of satisfaction and turned the nose of his vehicle in that direction. The second tank followed. Hardly had they turned in the new direction before the ground began to get soft under their tracks and the heavy vehicles began to sink. The driver of the Doctor's tank forced it ahead, but the tank sank deeper in the mire until water flowed in around the feet of the occupants. "I reckon we'll have to get out and walk pretty soon, Doctor," said the driver. * * * * * Dr. Bird grunted in acquiescence. The tank made its way forward a few yards before the engine sputtered and died. The second tank stopped when the first one did, fifty yards behind it. Donning vitrilene helmets and taking vitrilene shields in their hands, the crews of both tanks climbed out into the waist-deep water and gathered around the Doctor for orders. "Form a skirmish line at ten-pace intervals and cross the swamp," he directed. "We may meet with no opposition, but if there is, the more scattered we are, the safer we will be. You all have hand grenades as well as your rifles?" A murmur of assent answered him and the line formed and started across the swamp. They had gone perhaps a hundred yards when three red lights came from one of the planes circling overhead. "Down!" cried the doctor, dropping to his knees in the muck. Four hundred yards ahead of them a concrete platform emerged from the marsh and rose slowly into the air. It was roofed with a dome of what looked like plate glass, but which the doctor shrewdly suspected was vitrilene. When the base of the platform was two-feet above the level of the water the dome slid silently aside disclosing two men bending over a tiny gun. Dr. Bird leveled his binoculars. "That's the Breslau gun model that was stolen as sure as I'm a foot high!" he cried. "They must have made some miniature shells and be planning to fire it." Slowly a pall of intense blackness rose from the marsh and enveloped the platform and hid it from view. A whining noise came from overhead, and then a crash like a thunderbolt. The blast of the explosion threw the attackers face down in the swamp, and when they arose and looked back there was merely a gaping hole where the leading tank had been. The second tank suddenly seemed to rise in the air and fly into millions of tiny fragments, and a second thunderous blast sent them again to their knees. "Radite!" bellowed Dr. Bird to Carnes. "Imagine the effect if that had been a full charge fired from a completed Breslau gun! Watch the planes, now. I think they are going to drop a few eggs on them." * * * * * The black mist cleared as if by magic and the platform was in plain view. The big glass dome rolled back into place as the two planes swept over at an elevation of two thousand feet. From each one a small black cigar-shaped object was released and fell in a long parabola toward the earth. The glass dome which had been closing over the gun platform rolled quickly back and a long beam of intense blackness pierced the heavens. First one and then the other of the falling bombs disappeared from view into it, and then the black column faded from view. The two bombs fell with increasing speed but the dome closed over the platform before they struck. The two hit the dome at almost the same instant and instead of the blinding crash they expected, the watchers saw the bombs rebound from the dome and fall harmlessly into the water. "Stymied!" muttered the doctor. "I wonder what other properties that confounded lamp has." He resumed his advance, Carnes and the soldiers keeping abreast of him. When they were within two hundred yards of the platform it rose again and the transparent dome rolled back. A beam of black shot forth over the swamp, searching them out and hiding them from view. First one and then another felt the effects of the black beam; but the vitrilene which the Doctor had provided stood them in good stead, and, aside from a slight shortening of their breath, none of the attackers felt any the worse. "Come on, men!" cried the Doctor as his athletic figure plowed forward through the breast-deep water. "That is their worst weapon and it is harmless against us!" Cheering, they fought their way toward the platform. It sunk for a moment and then rose again. As the dome swung back a sharp crackle of machine-gun fire sounded and the water before them was whipped into foam by the plunging bullets. One of the soldiers gave a sharp cry and slumped forward into the water. "Fire at will!" shouted the lieutenant in command. * * * * * A crackle of rifle fire answered the tattoo of the machine-gun, and the sharp ping of bullets striking on the dome could be plainly heard. An occasional shot kicked up a spurt of white dust from the concrete, but the machine-gun kept up a steady rattle of fire and the soldiers kept their heads almost at the level of the water. There came the roar of an airplane motor, and one of the planes swept over the platform, a hundred yards in the air, with two machine-guns spraying streams of bullets onto the platform. Two men abandoned their machine-gun and crouched under the partially folded-back dome as the second plane swept over, and Dr. Bird took advantage of the lull to advance his party a few yards nearer. Again the defenders of the platform rushed to their gun, but the first plane had turned and swooped down with both guns going, and again they were forced to take shelter while the Doctor and his force made another advance. The second plane had turned and followed the first, but the defenders had had enough. The transparent dome closed over them and the platform sank into the marsh. With a shout, Dr. Bird led the way forward again. The attackers were within a hundred yards of the platform when it again rose above the surface of the water. The guns had disappeared, but in their place stood an airship. It was a small affair with stubby wings above which were two helicopter blades revolving at high speed. No sound of a motor could be heard. The transparent dome rolled back and like a bullet the little craft shot into the air, followed by a futile volley from the soldiers. Hardly had it appeared than the two airplanes bore down on it with machine-guns going. The helicopter paid no attention to them for a moment, and then came a puff of smoke from its side. The leading plane swerved sharply and the helicopter fired again. The leading plane maneuvered about, trying to get a machine-gun to bear, while the second plane climbed swiftly to get above the helicopter and pour a deadly stream of fire down into it. It gained position and swooped down to the attack, but another puff of smoke came from the side of the helicopter and there was a thunderous report and a blinding flash in the sky. As the smoke cleared away, no trace of the ill-fated plane could be seen. The helicopter hung motionless in the air as though daring the remaining plane to attack. * * * * * The plane accepted the challenge and bore down at full speed on the stranger. Again came a puff of smoke, but the plane swerved and an answering shot came from its side. It was above the helicopter, and the shell which missed its mark plunged to the ground. When it struck there came a roar and a flash and the whole earth seemed to shake. The helicopter shot upward into the air and forward, both its elevating fans and its propellers whirling blurs of light. The airplane followed at its sharpest climbing angle, but was helpless to compete with its swifter climbing rival. "He's got away!" groaned Carnes. "Not yet, old dear!" cried the Doctor hopping with excitement. "He isn't safe yet. I never told you, but one Breslau gun had been made and it is on that plane. It has deadly accuracy and is good for fifteen miles. That's Lieutenant Dreen at the controls and Mason at the gun." As he spoke the plane swung around and made a half loop. For a few yards it flew upside down and then whirled swiftly. As it turned there came a sharp report and a puff of smoke from its rear cockpit. High above, the helicopter had ceased climbing and hovered motionless. As the plane fired, the helicopter shot forward like an arrow from a bow, and thereby spelled its doom. Not for nothing did Captain Mason bear the title of the best aerial gunner in the Air Corps. He had foreseen what the action of his opponent would be and had allowed for just such a move. Far up in the sky came a blinding flash and a cloud of smoke. When the smoke cleared the sky was empty, except for a little scattered debris falling slowly to the ground. * * * * * "And that's that!" exclaimed Dr. Bird as he finished his examination of the underground laboratory with which the gun platform connected. "The lamp has gone to glory with Breslau's gun model and two of the best brains of the Young Labor party. I am sure that Stanesky was one of those two men. I wish the whole gang had been on board." "Don't you think that this is the end of it, Doctor?" asked Carnes. "No, Carnes, I don't. We know that the real brains of this outfit is Saranoff, and Saranoff is still alive. He probably won't try to use his black lamp again, because I will have a defence against it in a short time, now that I have seen it in action, but he'll try something else. The whole object of life to a loyal citizen of Bolshevikia is to reduce the whole world to the barbarous level in which they hold Russia, and they will spare no pains or effort to accomplish it. The greatest obstacle to their success at present is the President of the United States. He is loved and respected by the whole world, and if he is spared he will forge the world into a great machine for the preservation of peace and universal good will. That would be fatal to Bolshevikia's plans, and they will spare no effort to remove him. By the grace of God, we have saved him from harm so far, but until we remove Saranoff permanently from the scene, I will never feel safe for him." "What do you suppose they'll try next, Doctor?" "That, Carnes, time alone will tell." Phalanxes of Atlans BEGINNING A TWO-PART NOVEL _By F. V. W. Mason_ [Illustration: _Agile as grasshoppers, those fierce war dogs ripped and worried their prey._] [Sidenote: Only in dim legends did mankind remember Atlantis and the Lost Tribes--until Victor Nelson's extraordinary adventure in the unknown arctic.] CHAPTER I The ice suddenly gave way under his foot, hurling Victor Nelson violently forward to lie in the deep snow at the bottom of a tiny crevasse, down which the merciless gale moaned like an anguished demon. "It's no use," he muttered bitterly. "We've fought hard, but we're done for." He lay still, stupidly watching his breath form tiny beads of ice on the ends of the fur which lined his parka. Until that moment he had not realized how thoroughly exhausted he was. Every muscle of his starved, bruised body ached unbearably. It wasn't so bad lying there in the soft snow. He could rest, then look later for the ice hummock behind which the plane lay sheltered. Rest! That's what he needed, a good long rest. But deep within him, a primal instinct stabbed his waning consciousness. "No," he gasped, and blinked his reddened eyes behind smoked goggles which dulled the shimmer of the aurora. "If I stop, I'll never get up." Shaken by the terrific velocity of the arctic gale he numbly clambered to his feet, then stooped with a stiff awkward motion to retrieve a Winchester rifle which lay half buried in the snow beside the blurred imprint of his body. "Wonder if Alden had any better luck?" The question burned dully in his brain. "Don't suppose so; there can't be anything alive in this God-awful wilderness." As he stumbled on he found no answer in an unbroken vista of wind-scored ice and drifting snow that, swirling high into the air, momentarily cut off the view of that black line of ice-capped mountains barely visible on the horizon. "Yes, if he hasn't found anything, we'll be dead or frozen stiff before to-morrow." * * * * * His soul--that of a true explorer--revolted, not at the thought of death, but that his and Alden's courageously won discovery of a majestic mountain range towering high over a polar region marked "unexplored" on the maps would now never be made public. Leaning forward against the merciless icy blast he painfully picked his way over a treacherous ice ridge, to be faintly encouraged by the fact that the towerlike hummock of ice marking the position of the plane now lay but a few hundred yards ahead. Bitterly he cursed that demon of ill-fortune who had sent the blinding snow storm which had forced down the plane ten long days ago at the very beginning of its triumphant return flight to the base at Cape Richards. Since that hour the storm gods had emptied the vials of their wrath upon the luckless explorers. Day after day, cyclonic winds made all thought of a take-off suicidal in the extreme. Three days ago the last of their food had given out, and, he mused, starvation is an ill companion for despair. Slip, slide and fall! On he fought until the final barrier was reached and he stood staring hopelessly down into a small natural amphitheater which sheltered the great monoplane. The ship was still there, its engine snugged in a canvas shroud and with the soft, dry snow banked up high in the lee of its silver gray fuselage. Numbly, like a man in the grip of a painful coma, Nelson shielded his face with a furry hand to scan the surrounding terrain. "Hell!" The door block of the igloo they had built was still snowed up; Alden was not there! "He's not back," he muttered, while his body swayed beneath the gale which smote him with fierce, unseen fists. "Poor devil, I hope he hasn't lost the way." All the bitterness of undeserved defeat stung his soul as he started down the incline into the hollow. * * * * * Suddenly he paused. The rifle flew into the ready position and his chilled thumb drew back the hammer. "What's this?" On the snow at his feet was a bright, scarlet splash, dreadfully distinct against the white background. While his dazed brain struggled to register what his eyes saw, he looked to the right and left and discovered several more of the hideous spots. Then an object that gleamed dully in the polar twilight attracted his attention. He lumbered forward, stooped stiffly and caught up a long, half round strip of bronze. "What? Why? Oh--I'm crazy. I'm seeing things!" The pain in his empty stomach was now becoming excruciating. To steady himself he shut his eyes, shook his head as though to clear it, then looked again at that strip of metal in his hand. Attached to it were two slender strips of leather like straps, ending in small, bronze buckles. "Why, it's not from the plane," he stammered aloud. "Damned if it doesn't look like a greave the old Greek warriors used to wear to protect their shins." Suddenly alarmed and mystified beyond words, he shuffled forward over the snow, the greave yet clutched in a fur gloved hand. Presently two more objects, already half buried by the stinging, swirling drifts, caught his attention. One was the stock of Alden's rifle, protruding starkly brown from the unrelieved whiteness, and the other was a broken wooden shaft that ended a graceful but wickedly sharp bronze spear head. "I've either gone crazy," he said, "or I'm delirious. Yes, I must be clean nutty! There _couldn't_ be a human settlement within a thousand miles. Let's see what's happened." * * * * * On the snow of a little wind-sheltered space behind the igloo he discovered the unmistakable and ominous signs of a struggle. An indefinite number of footprints, blurred but enormous in size, were marked in the snow. Here and there deep furrows mutely testified how Alden and the enemies against whom he struggled had reeled back and forth in vicious combat over a considerable area. Then, shaken by a new fear, he discovered Alden's left glove and a rag of some peculiar thick material that seemed to have a metallic finish. But what aroused his gravest fears were the numerous splashes of blood that here and there streaked the snow in gruesome relief. Only a moment Nelson stood, shaken by the merciless wind, scanning the piece of bronzed armor between his gloved hands with a fresh interest. It was beautifully fashioned, and decorated at the knee point with the wonderfully wrought figure of a dolphin. If he could only think clearly! But his brain seemed to lie in a red-hot skull. "Whatever's happened," he muttered, "I'd better not waste time; they couldn't have been here so long ago. Poor Alden! I wonder what kind of devils caught him?" * * * * * Even before he had finished the sentence the aviator had taken up the partially obliterated trail of spattered blood drops. That what he sought appeared to be a maraudering party of giants restrained him not at all. The one clear thought burning in his weary brain was that Richard Alden, his best friend--the man with whom he had traveled over half the world, by whose side he had faced many a perilous situation--must at that moment lie in peril, the extent of which he could only surmise. "Must have been about a dozen of them," he said thickly. And, holding the Winchester ready, he commenced once more to plod on through the stinging sheets of wind-driven ice particles. More than once he had great difficulty in not losing that crimson trail, for here and there the restless, white crystals completely blotted out the splashes. All at once Nelson checked his pathetically slow progress, finding himself on the top of an eminence, looking down in what appeared to be a vastly deep natural amphitheater of snow and ice. At the bottom, and perhaps a hundred yards distant, was a curious black oval from which appeared to rise a dense, wind-whipped column of whitish vapor. "My eyes must be going back on me," muttered Nelson through stiffened lips. How intolerably heavy his fur suit seemed! His strength was about gone and that curious black mouthlike circle seemed infinitely far away. But, spurred by fears for his friend, he started downward for the precipitious trail leading directly towards it. Once he stepped inside the crater, he became conscious of a terrific side pressure which gripped him as a whirlpool seizes a luckless swimmer. The wind buffetted him from all angles, dealing him powerful blows on face and body, which, too strong for his weary body, sent him reeling weakly, drunkenly across the hard, glare ice towards the vortex. Twice he slipped, each time finding it harder to arise. But at last he approached what on closer inspection proved to be a subterranean vent of black rock. "Steam!" he gasped. "It's steam coming out of there!" * * * * * Swayed by a dozen conflicting emotions, he paused, the Winchester barrel wavering like a reed in his enfeebled grasp. "The whole thing's crazy," he decided. "I must be frozen and lying somewhere, delirious. Poor Dick! Can't help him much now." Like a man in a nightmare who advances but feels nothing under his feet, Nelson staggered on towards that huge, gaping aperture of black rock. On the threshold a pool of melted snow water made him stare. "Hell!" he said. "It's only a volcanic vent of some kind." Then dimly came the recollection of Eskimo legends concerning thermal springs beyond the desolate and unknown reaches of Grant Land. His mind in an indescribable turmoil, Nelson splashed across a hundred yards of sodden snow, then shivered on wading knee deep through a pool of melted ice. Now he stood on the very threshold of that awful opening, dense clouds of vapor beating warmly against his chilled features. His goggles fogged at once, blinding him effectively as, with reason staggering under the accumulated stress of starvation and the circumstances of Alden's disappearance, he groped his way a few feet into the vent. With his left hand he pulled up the glasses from his sunken, blood-shot eyes. "It's warm, by God!" he cried in astonishment as the skin exposed by lifting the goggles came in contact with the air. "Must be some kind of earth-warmed cave." * * * * * Increasingly mystified, he caught up his rifle and strode on down the passage, at that moment illuminated by the last unearthly rays of the aurora borealis. A single, dazzling beam played before him like a powerful searchlight, to light a high vaulted tunnel of basalt rocks which were distorted by some long-gone convulsion of the earth into a hundred weird cleavages and faults. For that brief instant he found he could see perhaps a hundred feet down into a high roofed passage, along the top of which poured a tremendous stream of billowing, writhing steam. "If this doesn't beat all," he murmured; but for all of his apprehension he did not pause. Those bloody splashes bespeaking Alden's pressing need urged him on. "Looks like I'm taking a one way trip into Hell itself. Well, we'll soon see." Slipping and sliding over an almost impassable array of black rocks and boulders, Nelson fought his way forward, conscious that with every stride the air grew damper and warmer. Soon trickles of sweat were pouring down over his chest, tickling unbearably. Then all at once the ray of light faded, leaving him immersed in a blackness equalled only by the gloom of a subterranean vault. He stopped and, resting his rifle against a nearby invisible rock, threw back the parka hood and pulled off his gloves. He was amazed to feel how warm the strong air current was on his hands. "Beats all," he muttered heavily. "I wonder where they've taken Alden?" * * * * * Meanwhile his hands groped through fur garments now wet with melted-snow and ice particles, searching for the catch to open that pocket in which lay a small but powerful electric flashlight, an instrument without which no far-flying aviator finds himself. After a moment's fumbling, his yet stiffened fingers encountered the cylindrical flash and, with a low cry of satisfaction, he drew it forth to press the button. "Mighty useful. I--" The words stopped, frozen on his lips. Before the parka edge his close cropped hair seemed to rise, and his breath stopped midway in his lungs. Sharp electric shocks shook him, for there, half revealed in the feeble flashlight's glare, was a sight which shook his sanity to the snapping point. Not fifty feet away two eyes, large as dinner plates, with narrow vertical red irises, were trained on him. Rooted to the ground by the paralysis of utter horror, Nelson saw that their color was a weird, unhealthy, greenish white, rather like the color of a radio-light watch dial. Strangely intense, these huge orbs wavered not at all, filling him with an unnameable dread, while the strong odor of musk assailed his nostrils. The flashlight slipped from between Nelson's fingers and, no longer having his thumb on the button, flickered out. Helpless, Nelson stood transfixed against a boulder, aware that the strange, musky scent was becoming stronger. Then to his ears came a dry scrabbling as of some large body stealthily advancing. Those horrible, unearthly eyes were coming nearer! Fierce, terrible shocks of fear gripped the exhausted aviator. Then the impulse of self-preservation, that most elementary of all instincts, forced him to snatch up the rifle, to sight hastily, blindly, between those two, great greenish eyes. Choking out a strangled sob of desperation, Nelson made his trembling finger close over the cold strip of steel that must be the trigger. * * * * * Like a stage trick, the cavern was momentarily lit by a strong, orange yellow glare. Then the Winchester's report thundered and roared deafeningly; coincidentally arose a nerve-shattering scream. An exhalation, foul as a corpse long unburied, fanned his face. Terrified, he flattened to the rock wall as a huge, though dangerously agile body hurtled by with the speed of a runaway horse. Presently followed the sound of a ponderous fall, then a series of shrill, ear-piercing gibberings and squeakings, like those of a titanic rat--squeaks that rang like the chorus of Hell itself. Gradually they grew fainter, while in the darkness the heavy air of the tunnel became rank with the odor of clotting blood. Nelson remained where he was, shaking like a frightened horse and bathed with a cold sweat. "Wonder what it was?" he muttered numbly. He broke off, for in the terrible darkness sounded a low but perfectly audible _thud! thud! thud! thud!_--and also the subtle noise of some rough surface rasping gently over the stone. His nerves crisped and shrieked for relief. "It's coming again!" he told himself, and ejected the spent cartridge from the Winchester. "No use--it'll get me, but I may as well fight as long as I can." Even stronger grew the musty smell of blood while that uncanny _thud! thud!_ sound continued at regular intervals. Nelson waited, breath halted and finger on trigger, but still the darkness yielded no glimpse of those awful saucer-like eyes. * * * * * Emboldened, he stooped and, jerking off his left glove, commenced to grope among the boulders. Somewhere near at his feet the flashlight must be lying. Hoping against hope that its fall had not shattered the bulb, he ran his fingers over the cold, damp stones, every instant expecting to feel the clutch of the unseen monster. How tiny, how puny he was! All at once his fingers encountered the smooth familiar shape of the flash and he raised it cautiously through the darkness. Patiently he shifted the Winchester to his left hand in order to set the flashlight on the top of a flat rock, pointing it as nearly as he could determine in the direction from whence came those ominous, stealthy sounds. "Guess I'll switch on the light," he decided, "and trust to drop whatever it is before it reaches me." Taking a fresh grip on his quivering nerves, Nelson cautiously cocked the .38-55, cuddled the familiar stock to his shoulder. He sighted, then with his right hand pushed down the catch lever of the flashlight. Instantly a dazzling white beam shot forth to shatter the gloom. The hair on the back of Nelson's hands itched unbearably, while the cold fingers of madness clutched at his brain, for the sight which met his eyes all but bereft him of his wavering sanity. There, belly up, across a low ridge of basalt, lay a hideous reptile, which in form faintly resembled an enormous and fantastic kangaroo. Its scabby belly was of the unhealthy yellow of a grub, a hue which gave way to a leaden gray as the wart-covered skin reached the back. Two enormous hind legs, each thick as a man's torso and each equipped with three dagger-like talons, struck out in helpless fury at the air, while a long, lizard-like tail threshed powerfully back and forth, scattering ponderous boulders right and left as though they had been marbles. The flashlight being trained as it was, the monster's head and forequarters were invisible, all save two very much smaller and shorter front legs which, like the hinder ones, clawed spasmodically. "The D. T's!" gasped Nelson, conscious that he was trembling like an aspen. He suppressed a wild desire to laugh. "Yes, I've gone crazy!" * * * * * He glanced downwards and leaped swiftly back, for, creeping over the stones towards his fur outer boots, meandered a wide rivulet of bright scarlet blood. From its surface rose small curling feathers of steam which, drifting towards the tunnel's roof, merged with that gray, vaporous current flowing steadily towards the sunless Arctic expanse outside. It took Nelson a long five minutes to sufficiently recover his equilibrium for action. All he could do was to stare at that grotesque, gargoyle-like creature as it writhed in leisurely and persistent death throes. "Guess I winged it all right! My God, what a nasty beast! Looks like one of those allosaurs I read about in college. It couldn't be, though--that tribe of dinosaurs died out five million years ago." Cautiously he scrambled around among the high black stones, casting the search light beams before him and holding the Winchester always ready in his hand while trying to recall snatches of palaeontology studied at college long years ago. "Yes, it must be a survival of one of the carnivorous dinosaurs," he decided, then paused, increasingly conscious of that steady thudding noise. What caused it? * * * * * At last he found himself before the creature's gigantic and repulsive head which lay limp over a blood bathed stone, huge jaws partially open, and serrated rows of wicked, stiletto-sharp teeth gleaming yellowly in the flashlight's rays. The head in shape was bullet-like, ending in a blunt nose as big as a bushel basket and in two prominent nostrils. The green, lidless eyes were still open, shining faintly, and seemed to follow his movements, but the steaming blood poured with the force of a small hose from between triple row of bayonetlike teeth that curved inward like those of a shark, to splash and bubble freely to the rock floor and to dribble horribly over the warty, gray hide. Then Nelson discovered an amazing fact. About the great scaly neck, thick as a boy's waist, was fastened a ponderous collar, set with short, sharp spikes. Nelson gasped. "What in hell!" he cried. "This damn thing's somebody's property!" His mind, staggered at the thought of dealing with a race that could and would domesticate such a hideous monster. "Well, it's no use standing here," he muttered, wiping the sweat from his eyes. "This isn't getting poor Alden away from those devils." _Thud! thud!_ In the act of turning he paused, listened once more. Then he discovered to his amazement that the heart of the apparently dead reptile was still beating strongly. He could even see the yellow skin of its belly rise and fall. The effect was grotesque, uncanny. "Of course," muttered the shaken aviator, "I'd forgotten a reptile's ganglions will keep on beating for hours, like that shark we killed off Paumotu. Its heart didn't stop for five hours." * * * * * Leaving the slain allosaurus behind, the aviator limped onwards, doggedly following a trail which wound down, ever onwards, into the depths of the earth. Gradually the air became so filled with steam that he stripped off his fur jumper and trousers. Clad in a khaki flannel shirt, serge trousers and shoepacks, he paused long enough to count his cartridges, and found there were just fourteen. Hell! Not very many with which to venture into an unknown abyss. He distributed them in his pockets, and, somewhat relieved of the weight of the fur suit, took up his advance, playing the flashlight ahead of him as he went. "Poor Alden," he thought. "I wonder if he's still alive?" Every moment expecting to stumble over the mangled corpse of his friend he hurried on, making better time over the cavern floor, but soon even the lighter clothing commenced to feel oppressive. "Must be the earth's heat," he muttered, while the steam clouds rolled by him like ghostly serpents. "Guess the crust is very thin here--something like Yellowstone. Probably I'll find some thermal springs ahead." Just as he spoke the tunnel took a sharp turn to the right. He scrambled around the bend to stand petrified, for with the suddenness of lightning a flood of dazzling orange-red light sprang into being. Momentarily it blinded him, then revealed strange, incomprehensible scenes. It appeared that two short shafts of incandescent flame roared through transparent columns of glass on either side of the passage some fifty yards distant. Subconsciously Nelson realized that these columns began and ended in stonework that was smooth and well joined. * * * * * As his eyes became accustomed to the glare he distinguished beside each light pillar two bronze doors, some eight feet high and semicircular in shape. These had been evidently pulled back to expose the lights. Then his breath stopped in his throat, for there, standing beside them, was a gleaming group of six or eight of the strangest creatures Nelson could ever have imagined. They were men--there was no mistaking that--men of normal size, but they were so helmeted and incased in a curious type of armor that for a moment he believed them gargoyles. Quite motionless he stood, clutching the cold barrel of the Winchester in a spasmodic grip and staring up at those two watch-towers, built like gigantic swallows' nests into sheer rock wall. He could see the warriors stationed there, peering curiously down at him from the depths of heavy, bronze helmets--helmets which in shape much resembled those of an ancient Grecian hoplite, for the nose guards and cheek pieces descended so low as to completely mask the features of those strange guards. For crests these helmets bore exquisitely wrought bronze dolphins, with brilliant blue eyes of sapphire. But what fascinated Nelson most was the curious armor they wore. Beneath breast plates of polished bronze, these strange warriors wore what seemed to be a kind of chain mail--yet it was not that, for the texture had more the appearance of some heavy but pliant leather, finished with a metallic surfacing. Suddenly the spell of mutual amazement was broken, for a tall warrior in a breast plate that glittered with diamonds and seemed altogether more ornate than the rest, clapped a short brass horn to his lips and blew a single piercing note. At once there appeared on the tunnel's floor, not a hundred yards from the startled aviator, a rank of perhaps twenty soldiers, accoutred exactly like those he beheld by the light boxes. They came scrambling over the boulders, their shadows grotesquely preceding them. In their hands were long shafted spears, and on their left arms rectangular shields, charged with a lively dolphin in the act of swimming. Some of them, however, held short hoses in their hands, hoses that sprouted from tight brass coils strapped to their broad shoulders. * * * * * Again the commanding figure aloft raised the horn. From the tail of his eye Nelson caught the gleam of metal in the orange glare. While a blast, harsh as the scream of a fire siren, echoed and re-echoed eerily through the passage, there appeared a fresh detachment. Nelson shrank back in horror, for these bronze-armored warriors led, at the end of a powerful chain, two more of those huge, ferocious allosaurs, exactly like the one he had slain but a short while back. Like well regulated automatons the hoplite rank opened to permit the passage of those repulsive, eager monsters, then closed up again and halted, spears levelled before them in the precise manner of an ancient Grecian phalanx, while the men with those curious hose-like contrivances ran out to guard the flanks. "I'm done for now," thought Nelson as he threw off the Winchester's safety catch. "I suppose they'll turn those nightmares loose on me." He was right. For all the world as though they led war dogs, the keepers in brazen armor advanced, the dull metallic clank of their accoutrement clearly discernible above the sibilant hiss of their hideous charges, which hopped along grotesquely like kangaroos, using their long and powerful tails as a counterpoise. Then the officer watching from the left hand swallow's nest shouted a hoarse, unintelligible command, whereupon one of the keepers raised his right hand in a sharp gesture that instantly flattened the incredible monster to earth, exactly like an obedient bird dog. As in a fantastic dream Nelson watched one of the armored guardians unsnap the hook of the powerful chain by which his allosaurus was secured. Then, whistling sharply, he clapped his hands and pointed straight at the motionless aviator. The creature's green white eyes flickered back and forth, and a chill, colder than the outer Arctic, invaded Nelson's breast as those unearthly eyes came to rest upon him. * * * * * Meanwhile the other allosaurus remained crouched, whining impatiently for its keepers to cast it loose. Fixing burning eyes upon the American, the foremost keeper threw back his head. "Ahre-e-e!" he shouted. Instantly the freed allosaurus arose, balanced its enormous bulk, then commenced to leap forward at tremendous speed, clearing fifteen or twenty feet with each jump and uttering a curious, whistling scream as it bore down, a terrifying vision of gleaming teeth and talons. Shaking off the paralysis of despair, Nelson whipped up the Winchester and, as before, sighted squarely between those blazing, gemlike eyes. When the huge monster was but twenty feet away he fired, and the report thundered and banged in the cavern like the crash of a summer storm. In mid-air the ghastly carnivore teemed to stagger. Its tail twitched sharply as in an effort to recover its balance. Then, quite like any normal creature that is shot through the head, it lost all sense of direction and made great convulsive leaps, around and around, clawing madly at the air, bumping into the rock walls and uttering soul-shaking shrieks of agony. Like a gargoyle gone mad it reeled back towards the startled rank of spearmen. As it came, Nelson saw the second allosaurus rear itself backwards and, balanced on its tail, strike out with powerful hind legs as its maddened fellow drew near. Like razors the great talons ripped through the dying allosaurus' belly, exposing the gray-red intestines as the stricken creature raced by, snapping crazily at the empty air. A single mighty sweep of the monster's tail crushed five or six of the panic-stricken keepers and guards, strewing them like broken and abandoned marionettes among the stones. Hissing and obviously terrified, the second dinosaur watched the dying struggles of its mate; then, obedient to a terrified shout from its keepers, wheeled about to join in a frantic rout of the spearmen, who, casting aside shield, spear and brass coil, fled for dear life in the direction of those invisible passages through which they had appeared. CHAPTER II No less amazed and alarmed than those vanished soldiers, Nelson remained rooted to the ground, conscious that in the swallow's nest overhead there remained only the officer--a tall, broad shouldered man with golden beard showing from under the cheek pieces of his helmet. Across the body of the still writhing monster their glances met. Nelson could see by the light of those strange pillars of fire that the other's eyes were blue as any Norseman's. Leaning far out over the stone parapet the other stared down upon the aviator from the depths of his jewelled helmet in a strange mixture of curiosity and awe. Suddenly Nelson's nerves snapped and he shook a trembling fist at the martial figure above. "Go away!" he shrieked, and reeled back on the edge of collapse. "Go away, you damn phantom! You're driving me crazy--crazy, I tell you!" The other stiffened, then turned and, uttering a hoarse shout, vanished, leaving the noiseless and apparently heatless pillar of fire flaring steadily. Recovering somewhat, Nelson set his teeth, advanced to the nearest corpse, stooped and regarded him who lay there, with bronze helmet fallen off. "It's a man and not a ghost," he murmured as his finger encountered flesh that was still warm. "Red headed too, or I'm a liar. Now what in hell is all this?" For all his bewilderment he began to feel better and his swaying reason became steadier. "Bronze, bronze--nothing but bronze," the aviator told himself as he further examined the scattered equipment. "Evidently these fellows don't know the use of iron or steel." * * * * * With increased curiosity he bent over another splendidly built dead man who lay with back broken and sightless eyes staring fixedly onto the steam current meandering silently along the cavern's roof. From the fallen man's belt were slung half a dozen curious weapons that looked not unlike potato mashers, except that they were bronze headed and had wooden handles. "Hum," he commented, "kind of like the grenades the Boche used in the late lamented. Wonder what the devil these are?" Suddenly his ear detected the sound of a footstep and, on looking swiftly up, he beheld that same yellow bearded officer who had directed the attack. This strange being had taken off his ponderous helmet to carry it in his left hand, while his right was held vertically in the immemorial sign of peace. On he came with powerful martial strides, a brilliant green cloak flapping gently behind him and the jewels in his brazen armor glinting like so many tiny colored eyes. The stranger was indeed handsome, Nelson noticed--and then he received perhaps the greatest shock of the whole chimerical adventure. The gold bearded man halted some twenty feet away, smiled and spoke in a curiously inflected but perfectly recognizable voice. "Welcome to the Empire of the Atlans. Prithee, Wanderer, what be thy name?" For a long moment Nelson was entirely too taken back to make a reply. Desperately his already perplexed brain tried to comprehend. Here was a handsome six-footer, dressed in the arms of an ancient race, speaking English of the seventeenth century! * * * * * As at a phantom, he regarded the stalwart, faintly ominous figure, from heavy leather sandals to bronze greaves, thence to wide belt from which dangled more of those curious grenadelike objects. His glance paused on the officer's beautifully wrought bronze cuirasse or breast plate which showed in relief an emerald scaled dolphin and trident. These, Nelson decided, must be the national emblems of this incomprehensible nation. Then their eyes met, held each other a long moment until the tall officer's features, disfigured by a long red scar across the jaw, broke into a hard smile. "Hero Giles Hudson begs thy pardon," he said, "but methought thou spoke in the language of Sir Henry Hudson, my ancestor?" "Sir Henry Hudson!" stammered Nelson incredulously. "The old explorer whose men turned him adrift? So that's why you're talking embalmed English!" In desperation his weary brain strove to understand. "I know naught," replied the other with a grave smile, "save that the founder of our royal line spoke what he called English. He came from the Ice World to rule wisely over Atlans. He was the greatest Atlantean of history." "Atlantean?" echoed Nelson, while his mind groped frantically in the recess of his memory. "Atlans, Atlantis!" A great light broke upon him. "The lost Atlantis! Great God!" Had he stumbled upon a remnant of that powerful people whose fabled empire had been drowned ten centuries ago in the cold waves of the Atlantic? * * * * * "Aye," the yellow haired warrior continued as though reading his thoughts, "long centuries ago this valley was peopled by those who escaped the great cataclysm which ended the mother country. Later came another race, barbarian wanderers like thyself." He bowed for all the world like a courtly English gentleman. "But methinks thou art in need of food and sustenance?" "You bet I'm hungry," was Nelson's emphatic reply. "I'm one short jump of starvation and the D. T.'s. But hold on a minute," he cried. "I'm looking for a friend of mine. He went by here, didn't he?" "Aye." A crafty expression Nelson did not like crept into Hero Giles Hudson's face as he solemnly inclined his head. "For the nonce, fair sir, thy companion is hale and sound. I beg your patience." With a quick gesture the Atlantean raised his dolphin-shaped horn and blew three short blasts while Nelson, in sudden alarm, cocked his rifle and brought it in line with the other's chest. The glittering officer saw the motion, but made no effort to move from the line of sights. "Thy gesture avails naught," said he with stiff courtesy. "When Hero Giles gives his word, it stands good though Heliopolis and the Empire of the Atlans fall." One by one half a dozen spearmen appeared, all obviously very frightened and only moved by an apparently Spartan discipline. Promptly they saluted, whereupon the Hero--as his title appeared to be--uttered a number of brief commands in some guttural language entirely unintelligible to the dazed aviator. * * * * * Presently a strange column appeared, composed of some fifteen or twenty disarmed men marching between a double rank of heavily equipped hoplites. As they drew near, they clasped imploring hands and evidently begged for mercy from the stern, tight jawed figure at Nelson's side. Contemptuous and unhearing the prisoners' piteous pleadings and lamentations, Hero Giles scowled upon them and deliberately turned his back. "What are they?" inquired Nelson, vaguely alarmed. "Enemies?" "Yes." There was a certain bitter savagery in the speaker's voice. "These are the dauntless defenders of Atlans who ran at the report of thy weapon. Presently they die." It was useless to interfere. The horrified aviator knew it and watched with compassionate eyes while the condemned soldiers were ranged in a single, white faced line. They remained silent now, seeming to have found courage now that hope was dead. Upon brief command from a subaltern, the guards wheeled about and retreated perhaps twenty yards down the passage. There they halted, glittering eyes peering through the slots in their helmets to fix themselves upon the rigid prisoners who stood numbly resigned to death. With surprising speed each member of that weird firing squad detached a brazen grenade from his belt, then threw back his arm in exactly the same attitude as a bomb-throwing doughboy. Then there came a short, sharp command and some fifteen or twenty grenades bobbed through the air to crash on the stones at the feet of the victims. * * * * * His head swimming with repulsion at the slaughter, Nelson beheld a curious sight. It seemed that from the broken grenades appeared a yellowish green vapor which sprung _of its own accord_ upon the silent upright rank! In an instant it settled like falling snow upon the doomed soldiers. For a breathless fraction of a second they stood, eyes wide with horror, then collapsed, kicking and struggling as men do under the influence of gas. "Horrible!" gasped Nelson. "What was in the bombs?" "A vapor," explained Hero Giles shortly. "A fungus vapor which, falling upon exposed flesh, instantly invades the blood and multiplies by millions. See--" He pointed to the nearest dead man and Nelson, with starting eyes, watched a yellowish growth commencing to sprout from the dead man's nostrils. Swiftly the poisonous mould threw out tiny branches, spreading with astounding rapidity over the skin until, in less than a minute after the grenades had exploded, the whole tumbled heap of dead were covered with a horrible yellow green fungus growth. "Thou seest?" Hero Giles demanded. "Powerful, is it not? It is against the fungus vapor we wear this body armor made from the skin of a small lizard which inhabits our mountains." Shocked and appalled, Nelson watched the retreat of the solemn, silent execution party. Other soldiers fell to unconcernedly stripping their fallen comrades of equipment; then, to Nelson's horrified surprise, two hideous allosauri reappeared, shepherded by some six or eight keepers. Once the horrible creatures were released, they pounced upon the dead and, snarling horribly, commenced to rend and devour the corpses. * * * * * Too shaken to comment or to make the protest he knew to be futile, Nelson followed the stalwart English-speaking officer into a bronze door set in the cavern wall and up a short flight of stairs into what appeared to be a guard room, where food and wine were immediately set before the famished aviator. "Yea," Hero Giles was saying as he set down a beautiful goblet and wiped the last traces of wine from his beard, "we will soon o'ertake thy friend. He was but little hurt, and thou wilt assuredly join him in judgment before our great Emperor, Altorius XXII, at Heliopolis, our capital." "Heliopolis?" mumbled Nelson, his mouth full of delicious stew that seemed to be made of veal. "Heliopolis? How far away is it?" "A hundred leagues more or less," the other smiled. "Almost a third of the distance up this great valley." "One hundred leagues! Three hundred miles! Then we won't be there for several days." The Hero's deep, rather ominous laughter rang out in the little rock hewn chamber. "Days?" he jeered. "Days? Art thou mad? In two hours from the time we board the tube-road thou shalt learn thy fate from his Serene Highness." "What!" Nelson's sunken and blood-shot gray eyes widened, while his jaw dropped incredulously. "One hundred leagues in two hours? As I remember there are about three miles to a league, so a hundred leagues in two hours means one hundred and fifty miles an hour! Why, that's utterly impossible! The Twentieth Century Limited doesn't go half so fast." Several enormous emeralds set into the other's bronze cuirasse glittered softly and the Hero's cold blue eyes hardened as his hand sought the grenade belt. "Impossible? Dost doubt my words, sirrah?" With an effort he controlled himself. "Nay, thou shalt see for thyself ere long. The tube-road runs from Heracles to Heliopolis. Thou canst trace its course on this map here on the wall." "The dog-born devils of Jarmuth have no such means of travel," continued the Atlantean, with a touch of smug pride that reminded Nelson of a small town Middle Westerner speaking of the "rightest, tightest little town west of the Mississippi." Nelson found it extremely weird to be sitting there in a heavy arm chair, drinking good red wine with a fierce armor-clad warrior who wore sandals, sword and a war cloak such as might have graced the limbs of Alexander of Macedon. But with the food and rich warm wine, he felt blood, strength and self-confidence pouring back into his weary body. "Jarmuth?" he inquired. "What is Jarmuth?" At his question the domineering, predatory face across the table darkened and the scar on his cheek flamed red as a scowl of hatred gripped Hero Giles' visage. "Jarmuth!" snarled the Hero, and his great hand closed like a vise. "Jarmuth! A nation of treacherous, gold-adoring cannibals, whose countless hordes, spawned in the hot lowlands, ever threaten our frontiers. I tell thee, Friend Nelson, the dog-sired Jereboam will not rest until mighty Heliopolis lies in a heap of smoking ashes." "Evidently," thought Nelson, taken aback at the other's vehemence, "this lad's English only in speech. I guess he's all Atlantean outside of that." * * * * * Warming to a fiercer pitch, the other fixed his guest with a smoldering gaze. "Jarmuth lies beyond Apidanus, the boiling river, and is the home of a savage horde whose horrid rites in Jezreel, the capital, stink as an offense to Saturn and the High Gods! Why, mark you," the warrior prince continued, interrupting his tirade to gulp a goblet of wine, "five years ago, by treachery, they seized the beauteous Altara, sister of our gracious Emperor, and upon the annual feast of Beelzebub, that vile demon they worship, the dark dogs would have sacrificed and devoured her, according to their rites, had not our Emperor dispatched a ransom of six fair maidens to take her place. "Every year since then Jereboam has exacted that same tribute. Every year their princes and priests gorge themselves on the tender white flesh of our fairest and noblest maidens. But this tribute must end! The augurs have told us so. Help will come from the Ice World." Hero Giles brought crashing down on the table a brawny fist, on whose wrist was fixed a bright, gem-studded bracelet. Horror-stricken, Nelson nodded. "It is for this alone," continued the Hero somberly, "that thy life and that of thy friend have been spared." "So? I didn't notice," broke in Nelson, "that you particularly went out of your way to preserve my health a while back." The heavy golden head shook slowly and a grim smile played about those thin cruel lips. "Nay, but I could have had thee slain. Come, as we go to the tube-road I'll show thee how much thou liest in the hollow of this, my hand." He thrust out a broad, powerful palm. "Forget not, fair sir. At any moment I or my Imperial Master may choose to close that hand." "Perhaps!" stated Nelson, feeling it imperative to keep up his pose of independence. "But it might just happen that your hand would close on a porcupine, and so far from hurting the porcupine it would be your hand that would be hurt." "Sirrah!" The Atlantean sprang to his feet and one hand shot to the grip of his ponderous, bronze sword; but even more quickly Nelson snatched up his rifle, a thin smile playing on his lips. "Drop it," he snapped. "Control yourself, or I'll plug you like that allosaur. Be reasonable, can't you? We both want something, and perhaps can help each other gain it." * * * * * The taut, menacing figure in armor relaxed and, with a gentle clank of accoutrement, Hero Giles resumed his seat. "Prithee pardon me," he apologized ungraciously. "I was ever a hot-head and there is much in what thou sayest. We wish to force an end to this annual tribute--if not to regain our beloved Altara. And thou"--his heavy, golden eyebrows shot up--"and thou, what dost thou wish?" Nelson lowered the menacing barrel. "I want the return of Richard Alden, free passage back to that spot where he was captured and plenty of food and help should we need it. If I aid you in one, you must promise me in the other." "Aye," returned the other doubtfully. "But I myself can pledge naught save thy immediate safety. 'Tis for our Imperial Majesty to say whether both thou and thy friend shall live, or whether ye shall feed our war dogs. Come now, we must go to Heliopolis." [Illustration: _Map of Jarmuth and Atlans_] Picking up his heavy, bronze helmet the Atlantean prince set it on his yellow head and waited impatiently for Nelson to drain the last of his wine. Then, with a swirl of his green cloak, he vanished through the rock wall, closely followed by a singularly distracted and alarmed aviator. CHAPTER III A bright yellow glare steadily increased to mark the end of the tunnel down which the two had progressed; then, with the sharp abruptness of a hand-clap, there resounded a loud challenge in that unintelligible Atlantean language, above which the hiss of steam could be loudly heard. Instantly the Atlantean prince strode forward, a commanding figure. Momentarily his helmet and the dangling grenadelike bombs were sharply outlined against that unearthly yellow light. He raised his hand and dropped it, palm outward, to his chin in what must have been a salute. The hissing sound of steam then faded into silence. Followed at a respectful distance by a pair of silent, bronze-helmeted hoplites, Nelson and his guide descended a narrow stair, which broadened at the base. It was a very long staircase composed of perhaps two or three hundred steps which were occasionally interrupted by wide stone terraces. On these level spaces were fixed what appeared to be enormous field guns of glittering brass. They were similar, yet somehow oddly dissimilar, to the great guns Nelson had seen in France. "Behold, oh Wanderer," Hero Giles declaimed impressively, "the lands of Atlans and Jarmuth!" It was a weird landscape that met Nelson's half-unbelieving gaze, a landscape green with that brilliance peculiar to spring meadows, lying beneath the same deep blue sky that overarched the surrounding barren ice fields which hemmed in this astounding valley. * * * * * A slight smile played over Hero Giles' thin lips as he watched the amazed aviator. "The splendor of our country must indeed astound thee," he observed, "having come from the dreary fastness of the outer Ice World. But come; we are now to pass the great retortii guarding the entrance into the valley." Nelson's eyes turned again to the weapons that so oddly resembled field guns. He examined them closely, inspecting them narrowly for the differences he knew must exist between them and the artillery that had thundered during the War of the Nations. The chief difference lay in the mounting of these starkly beautiful weapons. They seemed to be fixed on a movable pivot set into the coal black rock itself. Like modern artillery, these curious pieces of ordnance bore a bronze shield to protect their crews, through which projected the long and very narrow barrels of the guns. Grouped like cannoneers about their piece stood various red-crested Atlantean artillerymen. At a glance Nelson recognized the difference in their equipment from that of the spearmen behind them. These former bore no shields, no swords or bombs, but wore that same kind of leather body-armor which graced the powerful limbs of Hero Giles. Their helmets, too, were different: only the dolphin crest with a tuft of red feathers spouting from it bore any resemblance to those of the infantry, and, moreover, the artillerymen's eyes were shielded by goggles with thick blue lenses. * * * * * As the Hero approached, officers among them saluted, then sank on one knee with head humbly bent. "Rather odd looking guns," commented Nelson. "I'm not much of an artilleryman, but I'm wondering how you take up the recoil?" The Atlantean's laugh, which always reminded his guest of the purr of a tiger, rang out. "Why, marry, good sir, there is no recoil! These guns do not use that powder which Sir Henry, founder of our line, did speak of. Thou wouldst see one fired?" His curiosity immeasurably piqued, Nelson nodded, whereupon the Atlantean wheeled about and barked a brief command. With truly Prussian precision, the artillerymen sprang to their posts, some to a series of levers which sprouted from the rock platform without any apparent connection, and some to wheels and gauges of varying size that clustered in bewildering intricacy about the breech of the great brass gun. "Markest thou that tree yonder, on the ledge of the valley?" The Atlantean's blunt outstretched finger indicated a towering pine sprouting from among a mass of reddish volcanic rock at the rim of that new world. "Yes, I see it, but--" Nelson was astounded. A pine tree in the upper Arctic! That alone was sufficient cause for amazement. From a stiff red-plumed gun captain issued a brief series of commands which set the wonderfully drilled crew to silently adjusting their training and elevating mechanism. Click! Clack! Sis-s-s-s! * * * * * All up and down the vast staircase other gun crews stood watching. Nelson saw their weird, bluish goggles raised to that platform where, for all the world like a coast defense howitzer, the great cannon swung majestically about on the ponderous, brazen column which seemed to support it. Gradually the muzzle was elevated, then traversed a few feet, to finally come to a halt. "Jakul, a Hero!" shouted the gun captain, his hand raised to Hero Giles. "Thou art ready, Friend Nelson?" he inquired in tolerant amusement. "Mark well yon pine tree! "Storr!" Nelson saw one of the armored cannoneers bend forward, firmly grasp a short lever with both hands. In anticipation of a terrific report, the aviator pressed finger tips to his ears. There followed not a thundering crash, but a curious, eery, high-pitched scream, rather like that of a fire siren. There was no smoke! Nelson's incredulous eyes sought the muzzle of the gun and detected issuing from it what appeared to be a thin, white rod. This shimmering stream of silver shot straight towards the pine tree, gradually widening and giving off feathery billows of steam. In a fraction of a moment the target was completely veiled from sight in a furious pall of clouds which, to Nelson's great astonishment, did not dissipate nor condense with the speed of ordinary steam. "Nava!" With impressive suddenness the screaming sound faded, leaving a sort of stunned silence on the gun platform. The gunners stalked back to their original stations. * * * * * Slowly, reluctantly, the mist enveloping the pine tree cleared away and Nelson felt a chill creeping up his spine. The pine was a good three hundred yards away, yet now it sagged limp to earth, stripped of bark, twigs and needles, only the bright yellow trunk and major branches remaining. "That tree was a good two feet thick," mused the astounded aviator, "yet the steam gun bent it like a sapling. My God! What would it do to a man?" "What thinkest thou of our retortii?" The Atlantean's beard glinted like metal as he shook with a grim, silent laughter. "These great retortii can shoot half a league and will blast any living thing in their path. I tell thee, friend Nelson, the discharge of even a small retortii will strip the flesh from a man's bones as a peasant strips the husk from an ear of corn!" "Fearful, terrible!" was Nelson's awed comment. "Is there no defence against them?" "Of course." The Hero's green feather-crested helmet gleamed with a nod. "Was there ever an instrument of war that had not its defence? Yea, we have the blue vapor to shatter steam particles--it is called the blue maxima. Thou wilt presently see some of our troops armed with it." "But where does this steam come from? How is it generated?" These two were the first of a host of questions which trembled on Nelson's lips. "The steam," replied the Atlantean, "comes from the earth. We compress it many times, then feed it into our retortii. Without the heat of Mother Earth and our flame suns we would all perish. Steam is our motive power, our defence and our enemy!" He flung his hand towards the vast valley stretched before them. It was hemmed in on either side by colossal breath-taking mountain ranges, whose caps shone and glittered with an eternal snow. "Some foothills! They must rise all of 25,000 feet from the valley floor," decided the aviator, "and I should imagine this valley is a good mile below sea level. Yes! That must be it: this nightmare country lies in a huge geographical fault--something like the Dead Sea." * * * * * Mile after mile he could see fertile green land stretching away toward some low undulating hills on the horizon. Atlans was very thickly settled--that he recognized at once--for the terrain was divided and sub-divided into a vast checker-board, such as he had seen in France and Germany, while terraces, green with produce, had been laboriously gouged out of the frowning mountain sides. Then his eye encountered the source of that curious amber light which pervaded the whole valley. A titanic flaming gas vent spouted like a cyclopean torch from the peak of a nearby mountain. Its steady, subdued roar struck Nelson's ear as he turned away his eyes, for the glare was too intense to be long endured. Further down the valley were two more such incandescent vents, shooting their flaming tongues boldly into the sky, warming the air and casting that rich, amber radiance over all. "That is Mount Ossa nearest us," the Atlantean's voice came as though from a long distance. Victor Nelson was too staggered, too unspeakably amazed to register the fact of the Hero's proximity. "Below are Pelion and Jilboa, which, with Jabor, the greatest of all the flames, illuminate and warm the valley." Nelson's eye, trained to be all observant, ranged far and wide, noting the presence of many lacy, frothing geysers which spouted at varying intervals. There were, also, many steaming ponds and waterfalls which sprang in smoky confusion from the rock palisades to either side. * * * * * Nearer at hand he could distinguish a number of huge stone structures, evidently forts and public buildings. Strategically placed all about were more of those terrible brass retortii, gleaming dully under the incandescent glare of the flame sun. "Come," cried Hero Giles with an impatient gesture of his hand, "we must e'en hasten to the tube-road terminal. Word has long since been sent to Heliopolis of thy arrival." Downwards into the valley, which grew ever warmer and more fertile, the Atlantean led on, explaining a thousand and one details to the astounded aviator. Presently they approached the nearest of the great stone structures and Nelson received yet another shock. In a courtyard was drilling what would correspond to a troop of cavalry in the outer world. In orderly ranks the troopers wheeled, marched and counter-marched, their brazen armor twinkling and clashing softly as they carried out their evolutions with an amazing precision. But what astonished Nelson was the fact that each of these strange troopers bestrode a lithe, long-limbed variety of dinosaur, a good half smaller than the allosauri he had encountered in the tunnel. These agile creatures ran about on their hind legs with astonishing speed, using a long reptilian tail as a balance. On the back of each trooper was fastened a compact circular copper tank, from which sprouted a flexible metal hose that ended in what looked like a ponderous type of pistol. In distinction to the red of the artillerymen and the blue of the Hoplites, these curious cavalrymen wore brilliant crests of yellow feathers, and from their lance tips fluttered tiny pennons of that same color. "They must travel at least as fast as a race horse," decided the aviator after studying the swift evolutions of the scaly chargers. To his ears came the curious dry scrape and rattle of their horny claws on the stone pavement of the drill yard. He would have lingered to see more, for those grotesque, lizard-like chargers interested him immensely, but Hero Giles beckoned imperiously. So, dropping the Winchester to the hollow of his arm, Nelson followed him into the brilliantly gas-lit depths of the great structure. * * * * * Everywhere were red bearded, white skinned soldiers, staring at him with the frank curiosity of children. Powerful, magnificently built fellows they were, all in uniforms of different designs. The walls about him, Nelson noticed, were covered with really beautiful friezes depicting various warlike scenes in that pure beauty of proportion found only in ancient Grecian temples. On and on through resounding tunnels, past busy markets and barracks, hurried the two travelers. Then the Atlantean halted before a gracefully arched doorway where stood two hoplites, who immediately lowered spears to bar the passage. At a word from Hero Giles, however, they saluted and fell back in position--immovable, grim guardians. Inside was a short staircase, beautifully wrought of bronze. Up this flashed the Atlantean's mail-clad body; then he came to a halt under the direct rays of a blinding light. Nelson, on arriving above, discovered that the chamber was lined with jointless brass about ten feet high and circular in shape. "What's this?" he demanded curiously. "The terminal of the tube-road. In a moment thou shalt see the great cylinder arrive." The words were hardly by the Hero's lips when there appeared, noiselessly and amid a great rush of air, a huge metal cylinder that ran upon a sort of truck. It rumbled up to the edge of the platform and from its end a small door was opened. * * * * * Hero Giles exchanged a few sentences with an elderly man who appeared to act as control master, then he indicated the glowing doorway of the cylinder. Firmly clutching his Winchester, Nelson bowed his head and stepped inside, there to discover a luxury he had never anticipated. The interior of the cylinder was brilliantly lit and on both sides were ranged wide divans, strewn with many silken cushions. In a rack nearby were several graceful glass amphora, filled with red and tawny wine. "The cylinder must be about thirty feet long," the marvelling American told himself, "and about ten feet in diameter. Guess it works on the same principle as the compressed air tubes the department stores use to send change with." Gingerly he tested the nearest divan and marvelled at the curious softness of what appeared to be a gigantic tiger skin. Meanwhile Hero Giles entered, his stern features even more serious, but with him was a younger man who resembled him not a little. "Fair brother," said the Atlantean to his companion, "this is he of whom I spoke. Friend Nelson, this is Hero John, my next youngest brother--he, too, speaks the language of the great Sir Henry Hudson." The metallic clang of the door being shut brought a sharp qualm to Nelson's heart. "What are they doing?" he demanded quickly. "The menials bolt the door beyond," explained Hero Giles with amused gravity. "In a moment our cylinder will be placed in the dispatching chamber, where steam pressure will be exerted. We shall then be hurled through this vacuum tube-road to Heliopolis, greatest city of Atlans. In an hour we will be there." Outside sounded the sudden insistent clangor of a gong, and immediately the hiss of steam grew louder. The car shuddered as the hissing rose to an eery scream, then all at once the cylinder leaped forward, nearly hurling Nelson from his seat. He struggled as best he might to gain his equilibrium, for the eyes of the others were on him. Then, more smoothly, the great cylinder gathered speed and hurtled on through the darkness of the tube-road towards Heliopolis, where Victor Nelson would read the book of Fate. CHAPTER IV On the arrival platform at Heliopolis reigned a fierce excitement. Nelson noted countless armed and unarmed warriors hurrying to and fro, desperately intent on reaching their various posts, and snarling ill-temperedly as they elbowed their fellows aside. As soon as they appeared, Hero Giles and his brother became the center of an excited press of gorgeously armored officers. "Hum!" murmured the aviator under his breath. "Something's happened. Must be a revolution, an earthquake or a Democratic convention in town; these boys seem all steamed up." Intently he studied the ring of fierce, red bearded faces surrounding his late hosts and gathered that indeed some event of overwhelming importance had taken place. Presently a splendid falcon-eyed old man in a yellow cloak strode up, struggling to control himself. His resemblance to the two Heroes struck Nelson immediately. "Harken ye," he cried, in that Elizabethan English which appeared to be the hieratic language of the New Atlantis' rulers. "Have ye heard? The dog-conceived sons of Semites have broken the truce! But three measures gone by, a brigade of their mounted podokesons swooped down on this very suburb of Tricca, yea, to the very gates of Heliopolis! The foul man-eating dogs slaughtered royal serfs and burnt two quarters of the suburb to the ground! Moreover, they seized that prisoner"--Nelson's heart gave a great leap at the word--"whom thou sentest from the mountain passes." "What!" In two swift strides Nelson was before the gray beard, his blood-shot eyes blazing with a strange light. "What did you say about that prisoner?" * * * * * The old man, who had obviously not noticed Nelson's presence, was thunderstruck to hear him speak in English until Hero Giles briefly explained his presence. "Yea!" continued the elder, flinging lamentations furiously over his shoulder, "these swine of the Lost Tribes captured him and slew his escort. They have retreated towards the Apidanus, slaying, burning and pillaging as they go." A sickening, deadly fear gripped the weary aviator. This was too much! Bad as it was to have Richard Alden captured by these weird descendants of a long vanished race, it was far worse to have him fall into the hands of their deadly enemies, the Jarmuthians, decadent survivors of Israel's Five Lost Tribes. The possibility of a rescue now seemed hopelessly and crushingly vague and distant. What could he do now? In dread despair he glanced about, amazed at the prodigious numbers of scowling men who hurried by, obviously intent upon the commencement of a campaign for revenge. Then Hero Giles turned his scarred, warlike face, now set in granite lines. "Come, Friend Nelson, my uncle Anthony bids me take thee direct to the presence of His Serene Splendor, where he lies encamped at Cierum, by the shores of Lake Copias. There he marshals the army of Atlans for a march through the hot country on Jezreel. I tell thee, thou hast come in stirring times. From Heraclea, Thebes, Ys and Mayda will come the Phalanxes. Once and forever we will deal the dogs of Jarmuth a final blow." * * * * * Victor Nelson never forgot the hours that followed. Issuing at a fast trot from the tube-road terminal, the two Heroes led the way to a vast structure, in which were stabled both the terrific allosauri and the podokesauri, those swift dinosaurs which seemed to serve the Atlanteans as horses. The dreadful hiss and snarl of these monsters resounded in his ears long before the stables came in sight, and that curious musky odor he had noted in the tunnel was sickeningly strong. Everywhere he read signs of hurried preparations for war. Savage, surly allosauri were led from their stables, one by one, long necks writhing snakelike backwards and forwards. Then their keepers would, after a moment's tussle, secure huge leather muzzles over their gaping jaws, and the huge reptiles would be led waddling along on their hind legs out into a vast courtyard, there to hiss and strike at their nearest fellows. "Thinkest thou couldst ride a podoko?" inquired Hero John, an anxious look on his handsome, friendly features. "They are difficult to manage--but swift in flight as the birds themselves!" "I don't know," replied the aviator, "but I'm damn well going to try. If your Emperor can help me rescue Alden, the sooner we get started, the better." For all his brave resolutions, his heart sank, as the green kilted keeper led forth three podokesauri. Nelson stared curiously at them as, hopping along, they drew near, to bare needle-sharp teeth at him while, brazen stirrups on either side jangled softly against their rough, scaly hides. In evident high spirits the beasts snuffed the air and pawed with their tiny front legs excitedly, making their sharp talons glisten like polished steel. A bridle dangled from the mouth of each and a ring set in the thick upper lip served as a further means of control. * * * * * At a sharp "_Oya_!" from an old and toothless keeper, the first podoko sank flat to the stone floor like a kneeling camel. "A sturdy beast," commented Hero Giles, tightening his belt and securing the clasps to the emerald-green war cloak. "Here, Friend Nelson, thou hadst best don a helmet; the podokos on occasion throw back their heads and so might wound thee." So saying, he set foot in stirrup and swung up into a saddle which was built up high in the cantle to correct the sharp downward slope of the reptile's muscular back. At a signal, Hero Giles' ugly mount rose to its height and shuffled awkwardly sidewise, as the old keeper, his eyes very wide and curious, led forward Nelson's charger. "Look," said Hero John with a reassuring smile. "The chin strap buckles so--be sure it fits snug, else it will pound on thy head to the podoko's stride. If thou wouldst turn to the left, pull the rein so, to the right so, and if thou wouldst stop, pull strongly on the nose ring; 'tis not so difficult." He laid a friendly hand on Nelson's flannel clad shoulder. "How wilt thou manage thy curious weapon?" he inquired doubtfully. "Perhaps thou hadst best leave it behind." There was a grim smile on Nelson's weary and wind burned features. "Not on your life, old son! This Winchester and I stick closer together than the Siamese twins." Nelson thrust his foot into a heavy stirrup, eased his weight into the high peaked saddle and gripped the pommel, for though an excellent horseman, he had no clue as to what motion would ensue. It was wise he did so, for the podoko reared suddenly, almost flinging his rider from the saddle. * * * * * Immediately Hero John mounted, raised his right hand and dealt his podoko a stinging slap on the fore-shoulder. The great reptile hissed in protest, but commenced to walk off with an awkward, hopping step. Nelson's mount followed suit. Faster and faster ran the podokos, their long and scale-covered necks stretched far out ahead while their tails lifted correspondingly, much like that of an airplane about to take off. "Whew! He must be doing all of forty-five," gasped Nelson, while the wind whistled about his ears and snapped madly at the yellow crest of his brazen helmet. The ride which ensued remained forever fixed in the aviator's memory. Like so many shots from a gun the three podokos darted off out of the stables, past a gate guarded by a battery of retortii, whose red plumed cannoneers sprang to attention as the three strangely assorted riders sped out into the amber, perpetual light of Atlans. Nelson, on finding his balance, looked about him to receive impressions of immensely tall structures, of pyramids which, like the ziggurats of Sumaria, and Babylon, were surmounted with beautifully proportioned temples. "Must be at least a million people in this burg of Heliopolis," thought Nelson, easing his Winchester. Hour after hour they sped along, frequently overtaking detachments of troops. Twice they halted to change mounts, though the podokos seemed quite tireless. At the end of five hours' furious riding, Nelson beheld a dense white cloud low on the horizon. "What's that?" he demanded. "Fog?" "No," Hero John informed him. "Yonder flows the Apidanus, the boiling river. Not far away to the left lies the frontier fortress of Cierum, where is encamped the Emperor, who will sit in judgment upon thee." Nelson's heart sank. He had been so occupied with his fears for Alden that he had not dwelt upon his own precarious position. * * * * * Scarcely half an hour elapsed, if Nelson's wrist watch were running correctly, before he reached the tremendous, swarming camp of Altorius XXII, Emperor of Atlans. Hero Giles proved to be a powerful talisman, for everywhere officers and men alike saluted respectfully and sank on one knee as he passed. "Wait here," he snapped, as the podokos sank obediently to the dust. "Brother John, do thou guard Friend Nelson while I seek permission of His Serene Splendor to bring the Wanderer into the Presence." Almost immediately the elder Atlantean returned, a frown on his scarred, rather brutal visage. "Come," he muttered, "but I fear for thee, Friend Nelson; His Splendor is in a savage mood--this raid hath stirred his ire beyond all bounds." "Nothing like cheering up a patient before he goes into the operating room," thought Nelson, and quietly threw off the safety on his Winchester. "Six shots," he reflected. "Well, if I go, I reckon I'll take some damn good company along." The aviator was led down a long passage, at every ten feet of which was posted an enormous scowling guard, whose spears, retortii and armor were painted a brilliant jade-green. Then a musical, deep-toned gong boomed twice, and Hero Giles halted before an exquisitely wrought door, which, without any apparent propulsion, silently slid back into the massive stone walls, revealing a huge, brilliantly lit circular chamber that was hung with emerald-green hangings. In the center, surrounded by a royal guard of nobles in splendidly jeweled armor, was reared a dais, upon which stood a throne that blazed with the most varied collection of diamonds that Nelson could ever have imagined. "Down on your face," rasped Hero Giles as, in common with his brother, he knelt and then fell prostrate on the cool black marble floor. "Damned if I will," murmured Nelson, and remained erect. * * * * * Bolt upright, he looked across the interval and found himself staring into the furious eyes of one of the handsomest men he had ever beheld. Gripping his Winchester in a kind of "port arms" position, he stood to attention--by some curious kink of the brain reverting to his military days. And so the two men, different as day and night, faced each other. Altorius XXII clad in robes of scarlet, and a glittering cuirasse that glowed like the evening sun. His yellow head was truly splendid, reminiscent of that of a young Roman Emperor. The hair, like that of the Hudsonian Heroes, was blond, curly and close cropped. Yes, thought the awed but self-contained American, there was something genuinely imperial about the Emperor's aquiline visage, for a high intelligent forehead and piercing blue eyes dominated a strong mouth, which was marred by a decidedly cruel twist at the corners. On him, also, was set the stamp of Sir Henry Hudson's dauntless race. "Put him is a business suit and a soft gray hat," mused Nelson, "and you would find a dozen like him in any of London's best clubs." "Down on thy face, sirrah!" Outraged, the Emperor's voice rang like the peal of a brazen trumpet through the great pillared audience chamber. The nearest guardsmen held themselves ready, hand on sword hilt. "No." Nelson's shaggy black head went back as he found his tongue at last. "No, Your Majesty. In America we have our own way of showing respect for authority. I'm an American and, with all respect, I'll salute you as one." So saying, his hand flicked up in a sharp military salute to the visor of that Atlantean helmet which he still wore. "All damn foolishness," he silently told himself. "I feel like the lead in a ten, twenty, thirty melodrama. But I suppose it's got to be done." * * * * * The Emperor's teeth gleamed in a half snarl as he sprang with Jovian wrath to his feet. "Dog! How darest thou bandy words with us?" "Have mercy!" hoarsely pleaded Hero John as he lay on the floor. "Have mercy, oh Splendor! He is but an ignorant wanderer from the Ice World." It appeared that the young Hero was something of a favorite, for the masterful, thunder-browed Emperor checked himself and, still glowering, settled back on the diamond throne. "Ye have my permission to enter and approach." Whereupon, Hero Giles arose and, with many black looks at his guest, strode forward to briefly explain his presence. Nelson felt Altorius' blazing blue eyes search his face. "Then he whom the dog-born Jereboam captured was thy friend?" "Yes," replied Nelson with dignity, "my best friend. Alden and I have traveled and wandered all over the world together." "Over the world? The Ice World?" Altorius seemed interested, for he leaned forward, muscle corded arms very brown against the frosty brilliance of the stones studding his throne. He flipped back a scarlet cloak and bent a searching look on the straight, unafraid figure below. Impatient to reach a decision, Nelson forebore to amplify the Emperor's assumption that the outside world was all ice and snow. "Yes," he said, "from the land of America. I've spoken with Hero Giles, Your Majesty's Captain-General." "So, then, no doubt, he has told you of the law of our country?" Altorius' white teeth shown again in the depths of his short, curling beard. "Perhaps." Nelson was vague, wishing no further amplification. "The law of Atlans," pronounced the Emperor with a frown, "states that a stranger must prove his worth to the State, else he must be put to death. Thank thou thy gods that thou hast not fallen into the hands of the Lost Tribes, for assuredly thou would perish miserably, as must thy comrade." * * * * * "What is the law of Jarmuth?" inquired Nelson, his mind furiously at work. "Their law states that the stranger within their gates must perish on the altar of Beelzebub, Jarmuth's blood-hungry demon god." A momentary expression of sadness crept into the Emperor's blue eyes and he beat a square, powerful hand on the arm of his throne. "Aye, blood-hungry! Lack-a-day! But yesterday, six of our fairest maidens crossed the boiling river, never to return." Nelson was about to speak when from outside came the blast of a trumpet. The assembled Atlanteans started, paused, and remained silent, listening intently. Hero Giles looked up, a light kindling in his deep-set eyes. "Yon was an Israelite trumpet." As the words left his lips there came a hurried rapping at the portal, whereupon the guards sprang forward. "Bid them enter." Altorius seemed strangely tense and uneasy. Quietly the door rolled back as before, revealing an Atlantean whose eyes rolled with alarm. He hurried forward and flung himself on the floor at the Emperor's sandaled feet. "Harken, oh Serene Splendor! Waiting without is an embassy from his Majesty of Jarmuth. They bear words for thine Imperial Highness." "Now, by Saturn! Here's insolence--at an hour such as this!" With a furious swirl of his scarlet cloak Altorius leaped to his feet, hand on the ivory handle of his sword, which, to Nelson's amusement was not of bronze, but of good, blue-gray steel. "I'll bet it's old Sir Henry's original pet sticker," he thought. "Bring on these dogs of Israel," growled Altorius. "They shall die!" "Gently, gently, oh Splendor," murmured Hero John. "Our full force is not yet camped on the Plains of Poseidon." "Nay! Have the rogues flayed alive!" was the advice of the hot-headed elder brother. He, like the Emperor, was scowling and livid with fury. * * * * * Presently there appeared four men, stalwart warriors as totally different in aspect from the Atlanteans as humans might be. The two races were alike only in splendid physical proportions and human figures. They, the Jarmuthians, were black haired and dark skinned, whereas the Atlanteans, with the exception of Sir Henry's progeny, were red headed. Truculently the half naked ambassadors strode over the polished floor, which reflected their rude images. Their hairy chests, arms and legs afforded a sharp contrast to the neat Atlantean nobles, who drew back with expressions of disgust. "Good God!" gasped Nelson in lively surprise. "A bunch of the boys from Seventh Avenue!" It was true: each Jarmuthian clearly betrayed his Hebraic origin in huge, fleshy nose and pendulous lower lip, so characteristic of the Semitic race. They were fierce, shaggy fellows, naked from the waist up save for a kind of jointed body armor, reminiscent of a Roman legionnaire's. Their long abundant blue-black hair was either plaited or flowed uncut over splendidly muscled shoulders. Their beards on the other hand were short and frizzed into tight curls, in the Assyrian manner. On each man's head was set a highly polished, pointed casque of copper, surmounted in each instance by the six-pointed star of Solomon. Otherwise the brutal looking emissaries wore nothing but dirty, food-spotted kilts and rough hide sandals secured by thongs. * * * * * With all the insolence and self assurance of conquerors in the presence of slaves the four jet-eyed ambassadors swaggered up to the diamond throne. Then the foremost briefly inclined his head towards Altorius in a grudging salute and began to speak in deep, resonant tones. From that point Nelson could understand nothing of the conversation as it was carried on in the guttural and unintelligible language of that lost realm, but, from time to time Hero John found opportunity to translate an occasional phrase. Darker and darker grew the brows of the gorgeously attired Emperor and his eagle-visaged Captain-General as they listened to the pompous oratory of the foremost Jarmuthian, and in dark fury more than one Atlantean noble half drew his sword when the speaker fell silent at last. "He said," the younger Atlantean whispered, "that Jereboam is no longer satisfied with six maidens. Beelzebub demands a further offering of six more damsels to be delivered before the third division of time on the morrow. By Saturn! The insolence of these besotted swine passes all tolerance!" From the Atlantean Emperor's outraged negative gestures, Nelson surmised that Altorius was making an emphatic refusal and even adding some vicious threat. The foremost Jarmuthian slapped huge dirty hands on armored hips and fell to laughing with an insolence that would have provoked a rabbit. * * * * * Forgetting dignity and self-control, Altorius, in a single tigerish leap sprang from his throne and knocked the mocker senseless with a powerful blow to the jaw. Then, spurning the fallen Jarmuthian with a sandaled foot, the Atlantean fixed blazing eyes upon the three other ambassadors who, nothing daunted, closed up, muttering savagely in their frizzed black beards, while their hands sought the spot where swords would normally have hung. "Nice right to the jaw," commented Nelson with a grin. "He's still English enough to use his fists." He turned to Hero John, who stood with an expression of horror on his comely features. "What caused the row?" "Verily, our plight is grave indeed. That braggart dog threatened to march on Heliopolis in the first division of morning, and,"--Hero John's lips compressed into a hopeless, taut expression--"our reinforcing phalanxes can never arrive in time to defend Cierum at that hour. Should the defense fail, as it must--since they outnumber us three to one for the nonce--it would cost us many thousands of men to stay the blood-hungry hordes of Jereboam once freed on the great plain." Like a star shell bursting on a cloudy night came the inception of an idea. "Here," cried Nelson, "I've an idea! Maybe I can fix a stall until the rest of your boys do a General Phil Sheridan and get here." Hero John's blue eyes widened uncomprehendingly. "What?" he demanded. "What dost thou propose?" * * * * * Nelson's hand crept to his head, for the unaccustomed weight and heat of the helmet made it itch. "You say these bright boys from over the border want to chow six more girls? Am I right?" "Yea, oh Friend Nelson, they demand the victims to-morrow morn, else they advance." "All right." Nelson was thinking fast now, a dreadful vision of Richard Alden stretched for sacrifice on the brass altar of Beelzebub ever floating before his aching eyes. "Tell those Semites that they can have those six girls _if_ they can take them away from me." A puzzled frown creased the younger Hero's brow and he tugged thoughtfully at his scant yellow beard. "Prithee pardon me, but I do not comprehend." "All right, get this now! Tell the Jarmuthians that they can send six of their biggest and best scrappers, one for each girl. If they can take any one of those girls away from me, they take them all--taking me as well--and we'll all get the works in Jezreel together. But, on the other hand, if I kill their six champions, then Alden is returned unharmed, the six girls come home and the six other girls come back too--and there'll be no more hostages. I don't think they'll agree to or even consider surrendering Your Princess, Altara. I'm sorry I can't accomplish that, too. But if I can stop this annual tribute, it won't be so bad, will it?" * * * * * Rounder and rounder grew the Atlantean's eyes, and he gaped like a school boy in a side show. "What sayest thou? Thou alone to overcome six of their best warriors? Nay, but this is folly! Moonshine! What knowest thou of their weapons?" "Nothing," admitted Nelson, "but I do know Brother Winchester here." He patted the smooth stock. "He's mighty persuasive, properly handled." "But they are armored! They have the fungus bombs, the light retortii and the javelin!" "Righto!" agreed Nelson a trifle carelessly, "but you don't know what this old boy can do when he's put to it. Well?" "By Saturn!" An uncertain ring crept into the Atlantean Prince's voice. "A moment, while I address His Splendor." "I'm a fool, a damn fool!" thought Nelson. "Still, it's Alden's only chance--unless the Jarmuthians've got some trick I'm not on to, I ought to stand a fighting chance." Meanwhile Emperor and Captain-General drew to one side, listening to Hero John's impassioned oratory. That the idea met with disapproval, Nelson quietly recognized from the incredulous, even contemptuous, glances Altorius shot at him. Leaving the four sneering Jarmuthians under guard of the nobles, the Emperor came striding impatiently over the inlaid floor. "What madness is this?" he demanded harshly. "Dost thou realize what would hang upon thy skill? If thou shouldst fail, our annual hostage for the divine Altara would be twelve instead of six of our maidens. Further, the dog-conceived Jereboam would wax unbearably overweening and insolent. Nay, there is too much at hazard! Though outnumbered we will give battle in the morning." "Yes?" demanded Nelson, in turn impatient. "A fine chance you'd stand! Why, less than half of your army is here at Cerium and Hero John tells me that the enemy have massed their entire forces on the salient of Poseidon. Isn't that so?" * * * * * Altorius' handsome brow darkened. "Aye," he admitted, "but our reinforcing corps will come up before the third hour of the third division." Here Hero Giles broke in and, speaking with the quick, impassioned tones of one whose reactions are violent, pled for confidence in the American. "Nay, fair cousin," he replied, casting a sidewise look at the Jarmuthians standing in muttered colloquy with their leader, who had now gotten to his feet and was angrily dabbing the blood from his chin with the hem of his yellow kiltlike garment. "I saw with mine own eyes what miracles Friend Nelson doth perform with his curious noise-making retortii. If Jereboam falls upon us ere our regiments are marshaled, then, verily, are we doomed. We have no choice but to play for time. Harken to the counsel of Hero John! Methinks this stranger from the Ice World is no braggart. He will fight well. If he loses he dies horribly--that he knows. The thought will strengthen his arms, and if he wins--!" Then broke in Nelson firmly. "If I win I must have the word of Your Majesty that Alden and I are to be afforded all help and free passage to that place where your soldiers captured my friend. It that understood?" Altorius' blue eyes shifted and there was a slight hesitation in his manner. Then, coming to a decision, he whirled and extended his hand. "Good, 'tis agreed," he said. "On my head be it. Have patience while Hero Giles confers with these outlandish dogs." It was with intense interest that the anxious aviator watched the ensuing conference. He could see the four Jarmuthians listening, dark eyes restlessly flitting back and forth, and their mouths twisted into contemptuous half snarls. Then, as Nelson's offer was made clear, a look of cunning seemed to creep into the eyes of the leader. He asked for clarification of several points, then, being informed of the details, his thick lips parted in an evil, crafty grin. * * * * * Taken aback at the suspiciously ready acquiescence of the enemy, Hero Giles turned about. "They agree," he translated, "that, should Friend Nelson win, they will return to their own land, they will forfeit the annual tribute forever and return the other stranger unharmed. They speak fair, but I fear--" He bit his lips in perplexity. "These dogs, who talk with the forked tongues of serpents, plan some snare, some cunning trickery." "Repeat the terms." Altorius seemed gripped with apprehension too. "Let all be clearly understood: at the third division of morning will the wanderer fight six warriors. No more and no less." This was agreed and reaffirmed. Then, with an insolent, triumphant laugh, the Jarmuthian delegation whirled about and stalked from the room, their dark greaved legs flashing in military unison over the polished floor. "'Tis done," quoth Hero Giles gloomily. "The encounter will take place on the plain of Gilboa at the third hour of the third division. And may Saturn help us if thy might fails. Friend Nelson! For then surely will the hordes of Jarmuth despoil us and there will come a desolation and a darkness upon the Empire of Atlans." CHAPTER V It seemed incredibly soon that Victor Nelson found himself striding out from the serrated ranks of the Atlantean army which, drawn up in a rough diamond formation, looked discouragingly small in comparison to that vast sea of helmets twinkling ominously across the plain of Poseidon amid a haze of bright yellow dust which climbed lazily into the breathless heavens. The Jarmuthian army, numbering perhaps sixty or seventy thousand effective troops, lay encamped in a great salient formed by a convolution of the Apidanus and formed the only Jarmuthian tract of the great valley lying south of the boiling river. Like low-lying snow drifts, the sheen of the enemy tents struck Nelson's eye as he strode over the bright green turf to battle for Richard Alden's life. "There was something back of those nasty grins of the ambassadors," he reflected. "I wonder what deviltry they're cooking up?" He glanced at a stalwart Atlantean herald who, nervous in the extreme, clutched his brazen, dolphin-shaped horn and followed in the American's wake together with a sad little company. Weeping, moaning and dressed in plain black robes marched six really lovely girls--they who would perish on Beelzebub's altar if Nelson failed. Bitter were the looks of the guards as they secured the hands of the victims and many the hopeful look cast at the impassive American when they turned back, leaving the helpless girls to their fate. The ground where the one-sided duel was to take place was marked off by means of little yellow flags on a level plain perhaps a quarter of a mile long and wide. Arriving on the nearest border Nelson briefly motioned the herald to halt. "Might as well start shooting at the best range possible, and beat their steam throwers," he decided. "Wish to the devil I'd a few more cartridges. Only thirteen shots between me and Beelzeebub's altar in Jezreel, so I'd better not miss. All right, son, toot your horn." * * * * * With his thumb be gestured the command, whereupon the Atlantean nodded eagerly and, filling his chest, set horn to lips to blow a long, strident note that rang harshly, boldly out over the great plain. While the note of the challenge rang out, Nelson's eyes turned back to regard the Atlantean array and detected, far in the rear, a huge pillar of dust which must mark the progress of the Atlantean reinforcements. Would they arrive at Cierum in time? Then his eyes sought that spot where Altorius and his staff sat anxiously on their podokos, watching intently the impending struggle. Very clearly the flash of their armor came to him. "I guess, like the girls back there, they're kind of nervous and jumpy," thought Nelson. "Well, I don't blame them. I've had quieter moments myself." Having blown three blasts, the Atlantean herald saluted; then, with disconcerting haste, made his way back to the ranks of his fellows some two hundred yards away. From the Jarmuthian army came an answering blast. Nelson cast a last look on the Atlantean army, breathlessly awaiting the impending duel. There was the allosauri corps on the far left; he could see the chimeric monsters' long, repulsive necks writhing endlessly back and forth through the air as they squealed and tugged strongly at their restraining chains. On the right were stationed perhaps ten thousand podokesons, their slender, yellow-shafted lances swaying like a sapling forest in the distance. In the center were eleven thousand protection infantry, green-crested and armed with compact tanks of blue-maxima vapor, fungus bombs and swords. Behind them, and corresponding to heavy infantry, were ranged some twenty thousand blue-plumed hoplites, eagerly fingering the brazen hoses of their death dealing portable retortii. * * * * * Nelson had no time to further study the array, for he whirled about as from the Atlantean army arose a deep, horrified shout. He stood paralyzed, his jaw slack. For there, waddling slowly forward, came the most fantastic huge creature imaginable. Unspeakably repellent and horrible, it stood on short legs thick as mature trees, to tower at least thirty-five feet above the ground at the fore-shoulders! An immense reptilian neck some twenty-five feet long weaved continuously back and forth, while a surprisingly small, bullet-shaped head emitted rumbling grunts. "Great God!" gasped the horrified aviator, and felt the ground sway under him. "It must be ninety feet long!" Paralyzed by a dreadful fascination he watched the ungainly, hill-like reptile shuffle ponderously forward and realized that, high on its back, was fixed a small fort, rather like those howdahs or boxes which are fastened to the backs of elephants. Chilled with the nearness of death, Nelson counted six mail-clad warriors in the howdah. Then the true import of the Jarmuthians evil jest struck him with full force. "Six men, they said. And six men there are--but the treacherous devils mounted them on that walking hill-side! Guess Altorius can kiss his six girls good-by right now. Poor Alden! Well, I did my best--a rotten trick." * * * * * At that moment he felt as an ant must feel on beholding the approach of a human. It was terrifying, the inexorable advance of that colossal, fantastic monster. From behind he could hear the infuriated shouts of the Atlantean army. They knew even he could not hope to withstand the murderous onslaught of the beast now entering the duelling space. On came the diplodocus, its vast warty tail trailing over the ground and raising a heavy column of dust, while its mud smeared sides bore out Hero Giles' statement that here was one of those semi-aquatic titans from the steaming swamps of Jarmuth. "Hell! Poor Alden's as good as finished now! What a fool I was to think I could save him!" Obedient to an overwhelming fear, Nelson whirled to flee, then stopped, as, from the depths of his being, a stronger power forbade him to desert his friend to certain death. "Range two hundred and fifty yards," he estimated, and, whipping up the Winchester, sighted full at the ponderous creature's slimy snakelike head. When the recoil jarred his shoulder, Nelson dropped the barrel an inch or so to watch. Nothing happened. The great beast was advancing as before, its incredibly long neck weaving steadily back and forth as though to sniff the air. "Hell!" Struck by a sudden thought, he snatched a cartridge from his pocket and, with that strength which comes to men in their hour of mortal peril, wrenched out the metal-jacketed bullet, to reinsert it backwards into the brass cartridge case. Meanwhile the vast brute had drawn nearer, crushing flat a young oak in its path as easily as though it had been a wheat stalk. "Maybe this dum-dum will do some good," panted Nelson. "If it doesn't, nothing will stop it!" * * * * * Again he sighted until, finding those small, orange red eyes in line with his sight, he fired. This time the gray-brown monster uttered a titantic bellow of rage, halted, and began shaking its clumsy blunt head. "Hit it, by God!" exulted Nelson, and seized the momentary respite to slip two fresh cartridges into the Winchester's magazine. But, to his inexpressible dismay, the monster presently resumed its ponderous progress while the Jarmuthians in the howdah uttered taunting yells that reached him faintly, while the sun flares glinted on their brandished swords and lances. One of them plucked a fungus grenade from his belt and flung it with all his might in Nelson's direction. The missile fell to the earth far short of its destination and seemed to break rather than explode, at the same time expelling that deadly, greenish-yellow vapor which, blown away by a strong wind, fortunately came nowhere near the doomed aviator. "Oh! You will?" Nelson sighted swiftly at the grenade-thrower and fired, whereupon the Jarmuthian, some hundred and fifty yards distant, spun crazily about, flung both arms towards the amber-yellow sky and toppled from the howdah, for all the world like a diver in quest of pearls. From both breathless armies rose a terrific shout. Accustomed as they were to the visible destruction of the retortii, this noisy yet invisible death was appalling. But Nelson's agonized attention was not on the assembled armies, for nearer came the mountainous diplodocus, its lumbering strides making the howdah sway like a ship in a gale and preventing use of the portable retortii. * * * * * Nelson planted both feet, took fresh grip on his waning courage and shot again, this time aiming at a gigantic, black bearded warrior who seemed to be training one of those portable retortii upon him. Again the Winchester cracked and this time the black bearded man sank from sight back into the howdah, while his companions, uttering vengeful shouts, tossed more fungus bombs at the lone heroic figure barring their progress towards the six bound and shrieking maidens. Towering thrice as high as the largest African elephant, the diplodocus was now but seventy-five yards away. He had hit it, that Nelson could tell, for a large shower of blood sprayed from the monster's neck. Then, uttering a despairing curse, he sent a shot smacking squarely into the left shoulder, at the base of that mastlike neck with fervent hope of finding the heart. But the heavy bullet bothered the cyclopean reptile no more than a sting of a mosquito. On, on it came. In another minute it must stamp out Victor Nelson's life beneath feet as large as hogsheads. "Damn!" Nelson snapped the ejector lever, throwing out the spent cartridge. "No use," he whispered, "can't faze that hill of meat! But I might as well kill all of those bloody cannibals I can." With amazing speed and accuracy he picked off two of the remaining Jarmuthians, whose shining, bronze armor could nowise withstand the wicked impact of modern nickel-jacketed bullets. One of the stricken men for a moment dangled with the last of his strength from one of the chains securing the howdah to the enormous creature's back, then tumbled heavily some forty feet to the earth. Only two shots more in the magazine--! Nelson suddenly found himself very cool. "Two shots and then--" He was conscious of that great, snakelike head darting viciously in his direction. A huge, slobbering mouth, studded with teeth a foot long, yawned redly before him like a nightmare incarnate, blotting out consciousness of all else. Then Victor Nelson, fighting to control his strumming nerves, deliberately sighted into a great, orange colored eye, saw the narrow black iris over the Winchester's front sight and knew the huge warty head was not ten feet away. * * * * * He pressed the trigger and never heard the report, but felt the blast of a furnace-hot breath in his face--a breath that stank like the foul reek of burning rubber. With a detached sense of surprise he saw the eye miraculously and dreadfully disintegrate; then, as the bitter smell of burned cordite stung his nostrils, he sprang violently sidewise to find himself staring up at the howdah, now towering at least forty feet above. The next few moments were indescribable. Horrible roars and bellows, loud as those of a thousand angered bulls, shattered the air. The diplodocus halted, stunned by pain and the partial loss of eyesight; then, its infinitesimal brain becoming gripped with fear, it plunged and lumbered sidewise, nearly shaking the warriors from the howdah, where they clung for dear life. Nelson was barely able to avoid the sweep of the powerful tail as the diplodocus wheeled about on hind legs, reeled and started blindly back towards the Jarmuthian ranks. Suddenly it stood stock still, shaking with super-elephantine motions. Then, for all the world like a balky mule, it sank to the earth and cowered there, despite the frantic efforts of the surviving Jarmuthians to stir it to obedience. By the strong amber light of the sun flare Nelson had a vision of the last two warriors swinging in apelike agility to the ground. They were giants, those two men of Jarmuth, and their conical helmets added additional stature. One of them, shouting an unintelligible taunt, reached for his belt to snatch out a fungus bomb, but Nelson, dropping on one knee, sent a bullet crashing between the Jarmuthian's scowling eyes. Even as he fell, the last of the six champions unwisely ignored his retortii and frantically sprang forward, razor-edged sword upraised. Nelson frantically worked the ejector lever but only an empty click resulted! His heart sank. "Hell! the magazine's empty!" * * * * * He had just time to swing the Winchester about and grasp its barrel as the Jarmuthian, with a loud shout, sprang in, slashing viciously at Nelson's unprotected neck. Using the clubbed rifle like a baseball bat, the American struck out with the strength of despair. There came a resonant clang as blade and barrel encountered each other. Steel is ever stronger than bronze, so Nelson had the satisfaction of seeing the Jarmuthian's sword blade break squarely in two near the hilt. Horrified, the black bearded warrior glanced at the empty hilt in his hand but, courageous to the end, sprang in like a tiger to grapple with that small, agile man in khaki and serge. "You would--eh?" gasped Nelson. Putting all his strength behind a blow he whirled up the heavy Winchester, struck out and felt the solid walnut stock smash fair and square on the conical helmet. Like an eggshell the bronze helm broke and the six-pointed star above went spinning off into the dust. As a tree sways before it falls beneath a forester's ax, so the dark Jarmuthian giant tottered, while the wide dusty plain of Poseidon echoed with a rumbling, incredulous shout. "There," choked Nelson, incredulous to be still alive, "I guess that'll be about all for to-day." But he was wrong. From the ranks of Jarmuth rose a terrible, ominous cry and at the same time there broke out the sibilant hiss of a thousand retortii. From the Atlantean army came an answering yell and Nelson turned to race back to the shelter of Altorius' body-guard, pausing but to arouse the terrified hostages. Swiftly he cast loose their bonds and pointed to the nearest detachment of Atlanteans. Sobbing with joy the six girls fled for dear life just as the first of the allosauri went racing over the plains. Screaming, all-powerful and uncanny war dogs, they bounded grotesquely high in the air, plunging straight towards the Jarmuthian ranks which greeted them with a searing, billowing blast of their retortii. Though dozens of the terrible creatures fell kicking and writhing beneath the scalding discharge of the retortii, the main body, perhaps forty or fifty in number, sprang like rending fiends into the dense packed masses of Jarmuthian infantry. * * * * * Of the ensuing battle, Nelson had but the most confused recollections. The dominating impression was that the fray was awesome, horrible beyond power of description. He recalled feeding the five remaining cartridges into the magazine, then clapping on an Atlantean noble's helmet. With Hero John at his side he joined in an furious headlong charge of the podoko corps. Like a vast glittering wedge the gallant Atlantean lancers advanced under shelter of the blue maxima vapor which, discharged by the protectons or light infantry, dispelled the scalding steam clouds launched from the Jarmuthian portable retortii. "Halor vàn!" Hero John shouted the Atlantean war cry. "Halor vàn! Come Friend Nelson, this day shall the treacherous swine of Jarmuth drown in their own blood! Halor vàn!" Nelson replied nothing. He was too busy drawing a bead on a gorgeously arrayed enemy officer who appeared to be directing the defence. Faster and faster rushed the podokos, forty, fifty miles an hour, a carnate thunderbolt hurled straight at the enemy center. Under a hot fire of grenades dozens of the lancers fell and once, when a fungus bomb broke near by, Nelson saw half a dozen Atlanteans tumble from their saddles, the hideous yellow growths already sprouting from nostrils, mouth and ears. The turmoil became deafening, indescribable--like the roar of a crowded subway. The American had a brief glimpse of a mountainous diplodocus assailed by half a dozen hissing, shrieking allosauri who, employing jaws and claws, ripped great, shuddering chucks of flesh from the agonized and unwieldy monster on whose back the frantic Jarmuthians fought with terrible ferocity. * * * * * As agile as grasshoppers, those fierce war dogs ripped and worried their prey. One of them clung like a bulldog to the doomed diplodocus' head, though the twenty-foot neck writhed and whirled frantically in effort to shake it loose. Another allosaurus, whining with eagerness, actually clambered up the back of an assailed giant only to fall back under the blast of a retortii mounted in the howdah. Bathed in live steam, with bones showing through its melting, quivering flesh, the allosaurus collapsed backwards, but another instantly took its place and, gaining its goal with a terrific leap, made a shambles of the howdah, tearing the men in it apart as a lion does an antelope. Nelson found himself very busy. The charging podokesos were now in the midst of the Jarmuthian heavy infantry, slashing down at a maze of yelling, black-bearded, Semitic faces. Once Nelson was nearly speared, shooting his assailant just as the lance glimmered over his heart. Again he saw the Atlantean hoplites beaten back amid a pestilential fog of fungus gas which stretched them in kicking, loathsome heaps on the dusty plain. The uproar became terrific, indescribable, as the whistling screams of the allosauri and the saurean bellows of the diplodoci rose above the shouts of the soldiery to fill the dust-laden air with a dreadful clamor. The battle now swayed critically; a feather's weight on either side and one army would roll back in red, irretrievable ruin. It was the psychological instant. Nelson sensed it unerringly. "Look!" shouted Hero John, dashing a rivulet of blood from his eyes, "there fights the dog-begotten Jereboam himself! Halor vàn! Smite, ye soldiers of Atlans! Smite!" Following the line of the outstretched hand. Nelson caught a glimpse of an enormous, eagle nosed warrior who, clad in gleaming, diamond studded harness, fought like a paladin of old. Powerful as a dark Ares the sable browed Jereboam raged among the dismayed Atlantean hoplites, beating them to earth with terrible ferocity. * * * * * It was a long shot, one he might readily have been forgiven in missing but with the speed of thought Victor Nelson sprang from his podoko, dropped on one knee behind a pile of corpses and, uttering a fervent prayer, fired full at Jereboam's black head. The nearest combatants drew back momentarily at the unfamiliar thunder of the report and fell silent while the groans and shrieks of the wounded rose loud. As a man looking through many thickness of glass, so Nelson saw Jereboam reel on his splendidly caparisoned podoko, clasp both hands to his forehead and sink to earth. Hero Giles, somewhere far in the Atlantean van, saw what transpired and capitalized it with the inspiration of a genius. "Jereboam is dead!" he shouted in ringing tones, and flashed his red stained sword. "Woe to Jarmuth this day! Smite, ye sons of Atlans. Woe to Jarmuth--Jereboam is fallen!" And smite hard the reinforced Atlanteans did. Filled with a new courage they advanced so determinedly that the disconcerted and dismayed Jarmuthians broke and fled in a disastrous, panic-stricken rout back over the plain of Poseidon towards the boiling river. The ground was already carpeted with dead and with abandoned equipment, when fresh packs of allosauri were loosed on the fleeing Jarmuthians to wreak havoc indescribable and, ere long, only the triumphant, panting Atlanteans remained on the field. CHAPTER VI There was music and high revelry in the fortress of Cierum that night, and Victor Nelson, embarrassed and flushed with the extravagant adoration of all Atlans, sat by the Emperor Altorius' side waiting, watching for the appearance of a humbled Jarmuthian delegation. "Never since the world began has there been such a hero in Atlans!" cried Altorius, his face more Roman than ever. "Prithee tarry amongst us, Hero Nelson. Thou shalt be as my brother. A marble palace shalt thou have and twenty wives, each fair as those damsels which thou hast, by thy might, rescued from the profane altar of the fiend, Beelzebub!" "Thanks," laughed Nelson, and drained a goblet of tawny wine. "I'd be delighted to stay, but the point is--He broke off short, for there came a sudden tramp of feet at the door of the great hall and there, just visible above the green crests of the royal guards, he recognized that pale, drawn face which had haunted him ever since he had returned to find the abandoned aeroplane. "Dick!" he shouted. "Dick Alden!" "Nelson!" With that same irresistible form which had won a certain November classic for Harvard, Richard Alden bucked and plunged through a double rank of startled guards and came running across the marble floor, his eyes lit with an unspeakable gladness. "Nelson! Nelson!" he panted. "What in hell are you doing up there?" "Oh!" replied the aviator with a joyous grin, "just visiting with my friend, the Emperor." * * * * * Alden halted, on his handsome features a curious mixture of surprise and delight. "The Emperor?" he stammered. "You sitting beside an Emperor?" "Would it not seem so?" inquired Altorius with a low laugh. "It would," chuckled Alden. "Victor Nelson, as I remember, always was a good politician." "And," thought Nelson, "I'll have to be a damn sight better one to get us out of Atlans without injuring Altorius' feelings. I don't suppose he'll ever be able to realize that all the desirable things in the world don't lie in this valley." Throngs of brilliantly armored and plumed officers and courtiers, some of them nursing wounds and bandaged heads, came up to hail the mighty wanderer who had subdued the might of Jarmuth. Flushed and pleased, as is any normal man under well-earned praise, Nelson shook one wiry fist after another, while Alden chatted with the Emperor. Nobles, officers and courtiers all pressed close to fawn upon the new hero--but, far back in the council chamber, a group of dark robed priests were crowded together. Haranguing the priests was a fierce, white bearded old man who seemed to be arguing violently. "Hum!" thought the American. "That's at least one outfit that doesn't like the way I part my hair. Wonder what devilment the priests are cooking up?" * * * * * He was not long in finding out, for the black robed arch-priest suddenly left his group of underlings to boldly make his way forward, while princes, courtiers and warriors drew respectfully aside and bent their heads. "Hail! All conquering Emperor!" The stern old man halted squarely before Altorius' gem encrusted throne, while Alden checked some remark to look curiously down upon the hawk-featured arch-priest. Altorius flushed and the lines about his mouth tightened, from which Nelson guessed that there was more than a little bad blood between the spiritual and temporal heads of the empire. "What wouldst thou, oh Heracles?" "I would know why the all powerful Wanderer, of whom thou makest so much, did not rescue Princess Altara?" The Emperor stiffened. "Her rescue, being impossible of accomplishment, was not nominated in the agreement," he said coldly. "The Wanderer has in full carried out his share--and so shall we. Honored and beloved of Atlans, these great warriors shall abide among us in peace." Here Nelson thought it wise to dispel any illusions Altorius might entertain about their staying in Atlans. "No, oh Splendor: remember, our agreement was that, should I conquer the Jarmuthian champions, Alden and I were to be allowed to go free." "Nay, oh Splendor," fiercely broke in the arch-priest, "permit them not to go. I tell thee the Princess Altara _must_ be restored to Atlans! Else,"--a distinct note of threat crept into the old man's voice--"--else evil days shall fall upon this empire, and the line of Hudson will wither and fade." Up sprang Altorius in a towering rage. "Sirrah! Dost dare make threats to thy liege lord?" * * * * * Fire flashed from the young Emperor's bright blue eyes, and under their fierce glare the old man quailed and stepped back with eyes lowered. "Altorius keeps his word," the Emperor thundered. "The strangers shall go, though all the black-robed kites in the realm say me nay. The word of a Hudsonian prince is as sure as the fire of Pelion. Get thee gone, rash priest!" A long moment, the two strangely contrasting figures glared at each other, the young, splendid Emperor and the malevolent, withered old man. "The Gods demand their daughter," cried Heracles in parting, "and woe to him who says them nay!" With this parting shot, the arch-priest turned and, scarlet faced, stalked from the council room, while Altorius threw back his head and roared with laughter. "Come, oh ye Heroes, ye princes and captains! Come, let us make festival before these mighty wanderers go their way!" Roar upon roar of enthusiasm echoed through the marble throne room, and Nelson would have felt wholly at ease had not that little knot of priests remained gathered like ill-omened carrion crows about the door. Muttering among themselves, they were watching him with a curious intentness that aroused deep misgivings in the American's mind, and it was with something like a sigh that he joined the procession forming to proceed to the triumphal feast on which the wealth and luxury of the whole empire of Atlans had been lavished. (_To be continued._) [Illustration: Advertisement.] The Pirate Planet _By Charles W. Diffin_ CONCLUSION CHAPTER XVII [Illustration: _He shot feet first into the waiting heads._] [Sidenote: From Earth and sub-Venus converge a titanic offensive of justice on the unspeakable man-things of Torg.] The little ship that Captain Blake had thrown with reckless speed through the skies over Washington, D. C., made history that day in the records of the earth. None, now, could doubt that here, at last, was the answer that the world had hoped for until hope had died. Unbelievable in its field of action, incredible in its wild speed, but real, nevertheless!--the countries of the earth were frantic in their acclaim. Only the men who formed the International Board of Defense failed to join in the enthusiasm. They sat by day and night in earnest conference on ways and means. This little ship--so wonderful, and so inadequate! It was only a promise of what might come. There must be new designs made; men must learn to dream in new terms and set down their dreams in cold lines and figures on drafting boards. A cruiser of space must be designed, to mount heavy guns, carry great loads, absorb the stresses that must come to such a structure in flight and in battle. And above all, it must take the thrust of this driving force--new and tremendous--of which men knew so little as yet. And then many like it must be built. The fuel must be prepared, and this, alone, meant new and different machinery, which itself must be designed before the manufacturing process could begin. There was work to be done--a world of work!--and so few months in which to do it. The attack from the distant gun had long since ceased and the instruments of the astronomers showed the enemy planet shrinking far off in space. But it would return; there was only a year for preparation. * * * * * Captain Blake was assigned to the direction of design. An entire office building in Washington was vacated for his use, and in a few hours he rallied a staff of assistants who demanded the entire use of a telephone system that spread countrywide. And the call went out that would bring the best brains of the land to the task before them. The windows of the building shone brightly throughout the nights when the call was answered, and engineers and draftsmen worked at fever heat on thrusts and stresses and involved mathematical calculations. And, while owners of great manufacturing plants waited with unaccustomed patience for a moment's talk with Blake, the white sheets on the drafting boards showed growing pictures of braces and struts and curved plates, of castings for gun mounts, and ammunition hoists. And the manufacturers were told in no uncertain terms exactly what part of this experimental ship they would produce, and when it must be delivered. "If only we dared go into production," said Blake; "but it is out of the question. This first ship must demonstrate its efficiency; we must get the 'bugs' out of our design; correct our errors and be ready with a production schedule that will work with precision." Only one phase of this proposed production troubled him; the manufacture must be handled all over the world. He talked with men from England and France, from Germany and Italy and a host of other lands, and he raged inwardly while he tried to drive home to them the necessity for handling the work in just one way--his way--if results were to be achieved. The men of business he could convince, but his chief disquiet came from those whose thoughts were of what they termed "statesmanship," and who seemed more apprehensive of the power that this new weapon would give the United States of America than they were of the threat from distant worlds. From his friends in high quarters came hints of the same friction, but he knew that the one demand Winslow had laid down was being observed: the secret of the mysterious fuel would remain with us. Winslow had shown little confidence in the countries of the old world, and he had sworn Blake to an agreement that his strange liquids--that new form of matter and substance--should remain with this country. * * * * * And swiftly the paper ship grew. The parts were in manufacture, and arriving at the assembly plant in Ohio. Blake's time was spent there now, and he caught only snatches of sleep on a cot in his office, while he worked with the forces of men who succeeded each other to keep the assembly room going night and day. There was an enormous hangar that was designed for the assembling of a giant dirigible; it housed another ship now. Hardly a ship, yet it began to take form where great girders held the keel that was laid, and duralumin plates and strong castings were bolted home. A thousand new problems, and innumerable vexing errors--the "bugs" that inhere with a new, mechanical job--yet the day came when the ship was a thing of sleek beauty, and her thousand feet of length enclosed a maze of latticed struts where ammunition rooms and sleeping quarters, a chart room and control stations were cleverly interspaced. And above, where the great shape towered high in the big hangar, were the lean snouts of cannon, and recesses that held rapid-fire guns and whole batteries of machine guns for close range. Rows of great storage batteries were installed, to furnish the first current for the starting of the ship, till her dynamos that were driven by the exhaust blast itself could go into action and carry on. And then-- An armored truck that ground slowly up under heavy guard to deliver two small flasks of liquid whose tremendous weight must be held in containers of thick steel, and be hoisted with cranes to their resting place within the ship. And Captain Blake, with his heart in his throat through fear of some failure, some slip in their plans--Captain Blake, of the gaunt, worn frame, and face haggard from sleepless nights--stood quietly at a control board while the great doors of the hangar swung open. * * * * * At the closing of a switch the current from the batteries flowed through the two liquids, to go on in conductors of heavy copper to a generator that was heavy and squat and devoid of moving parts. Within it were electrodes that were castings of copper, and between them the miracle of regenerated matter was taking place. What came to them as energy from the cables was transformed to a tangible thing--a vast bulk of gas, of hydrogen and oxygen that had once been water, and the pressure of the gas made a roaring inferno of the exhausts. A spark plug ignited it, and the heat of combustion added pressure to pressure, while the quivering, invisible live steam poured forth to change to vaporous clouds that filled the hangar. The man at the control board stood trembling with knowledge of the power he had unleashed. He moved a lever to crack open a valve, and the clouds poured now from beneath the ship, that raised slowly and smoothly in the air. It hung quietly poised, while the hands that directed it sent a roaring blast from the great stern exhaust, and the creation of many minds became a thing of life that moved slowly, gliding out into the sunlight of the world. The cheers of crowding men, insane with hysterical emotion at sight of their work's fulfillment, were lost in the thunder of the ship. The blunt bow lifted where the sun made dazzling brilliance of her sweeping curves, and with a blast that thundered from her stern the first unit of the space forces of the Earth swept upward in an arc of speed that ended in invisibility. No enveloping air could hold her now; she was launched in the ocean of space that would be her home. * * * * * Captain Blake, the following day, sat in Washington before a desk piled high with telegrams of congratulation. His tired face was smiling as he replaced a telephone receiver that had spoken words of confidence and commendation from the President of the United States. But he pushed the mass of yellow papers aside to resume his examination of a well-thumbed folder marked: "Production Schedule." The real work was yet to be done. It was only two short months later that he sat before the same desk, with a face that showed no mark of smiles in its haggard lines. His ship was a success, and was flying continuously, while men of the air service were trained in its manipulation and gunners received practice in three-dimensioned range finding and cruiser practice in the air. Above, in the airless space, they learned to operate the guns that were controlled from within the air-tight rooms. They were learning, and the ship performed the miracles that were now taken as matters of fact. But production! Captain Blake rose wearily to attend a conference at the War Department. He had asked that it be called, and the entire service was represented when he reached there. He went without preamble or explanation to the point. "Mr. Secretary," he said, and faced the Secretary of War, "I have to report, sir, that we have failed. It is utterly impossible, under present conditions, to produce a fleet of completed ships. "You know the reason; I have conferred with you often. It was a mistake to depend on foreign aid; they have failed us. I do not criticize them: their ways are their own, and their own problems loom large to them. The English production of parts has come through, or is proceeding satisfactorily, but the rest is in hopeless confusion. The Red menace from Russia is the prime reason, of course. With the Reds mobilizing their forces, we cannot blame her neighbors for preparing to defend themselves. But our program!--and the sure invasion that will come in six short months!--to be fighting among ourselves--it is damnable!" * * * * * He paused to stare in wordless misery at the silent gathering before him. Then-- "I have failed," he blurted out. "I have fallen down on the job. It was my responsibility to get the cooperation that insured success. Let me step aside. Is there anyone now who can take up the work and bring order and results from this chaos of futility?" He waited long for a reply. It was the Secretary of War who answered in a quiet voice. "We must not be too harsh," he said, "in our criticism of our foreign friends, but neither should we be unfair to Captain Blake. You do yourself an injustice; there is no one who could have done more than you. The reason is here." He struck at a paper that he held in his hand. "Europe is at war. Russia has struck without warning; her troops are moving and her air force is engaged this minute in an attack upon Paris. It is a traitor country at home that has defeated us in our war with another world." "I think," he added slowly, "there is nothing more that could have been done: you have made a brave effort. Let us thank you, Captain Blake, while we can. We will fight, when the time comes, as best we can; that goes without saying." A blue and gold figure arose slowly to speak a word for the navy. "It is evident by Captain Blake's own admission, that the proposed venture must fail. It has been evident to some of us from the start." It was a fighter of the old school who was speaking; his voice was that of one whose vision has dimmed, who sees but the dreams of impractical visionaries in the newer inventions, and whose reliance for safety is placed only in the weapons he knows. "The naval forces of the United States will be ready," he told them, "and I would ask you to remember that we can still place dependence upon the ships that float in the water, and the forces who have manned them since the history of this country began." * * * * * Captain Blake had sprung to his feet. Again he addressed the Secretary for War. "Mr. Secretary," he said, and there was a fighting glint in his eyes, "I make no reply to this gentleman. His arm of the service will speak for itself as it has always done. But your own words have given me new hope and new energy. I ask you, Mr. Secretary, for another chance. The industrial forces of the United States are behind us to the last man and the last machine. I have talked with them. I know! "We have only six months left for a prodigious effort. Shall we make it? For the safety of our country and the whole world let us attempt the impossible: go ahead on our own; turn the energy and the mind of this whole country to the problem. "The great fleet of the world can never be. Shall we build and launch the Great Fleet of the United States, and take upon our own shoulders the burden and responsibility of defense? "It cannot be done by reasonable standards, but the time is past for reason. Possible or otherwise, we must do it. We will--if you will back me in the effort!" There was a rising discord of excited voices in the room. Men were leaping to their feet to shake vehement fists in the faces of those who wagged their heads in protest. The Secretary of War arose to still the storm. He turned to walk toward the waiting figure of Captain Blake. "You can't do it," he said, and gripped the Captain by the hand; "you can't do it--but you may. This country has seen others who have done the impossible when the impossible had to be done. It's your job; the President will confirm my orders. Go to it, Blake!" CHAPTER XVIII The wires that bound the two men were removed, and McGuire and Sykes worked in agony to bring life back to the hands and feet that were swollen and blue. Then--red guards who forced them to stumble on their numbed legs, where darting pains made them set their lips tight--a car that went swiftly through the darkness of a tube to stop finally in another building--a room with metal walls, one window with a balcony beyond, high above the ground--a door that clanged behind them; and the two men, looking one at the other with dismayed and swollen eyes, knew in their hearts that here, beyond a doubt, was their last earthly habitation. They said nothing--there was nothing of hope or comfort to be said--and they dropped soddenly upon the hard floor, where finally the heavy breathing and nervous starts of Professor Sykes showed that to him at least had come the blessed oblivion of exhausted sleep. But there was no sleep for Lieutenant McGuire. There was a face that shone too clearly in the dark, and his thoughts revolved endlessly in words of reproach for his folly in allowing Althora's love to lead her to share his risk. From the night outside their window came a ceaseless clatter and hubbub, but to this he was oblivious. Only with the coming of morning's soft golden light did McGuire know the reason for the din and activity that echoed from outside--and the reason, too, for their being placed in this room. * * * * * Their lives should end with the sailing of the fleet, and there, outside their window, were the ships themselves. Ships everywhere, as far as he could see across the broad level expanse, and an army of men who scurried like ants--red ones, who worked or directed the others, and countless blues and yellows who were loading the craft with enormous cargoes. "Squawk, damn you!" said Lieutenant McGuire to the distant shrieking throng; "and I hope they're ready for you when you reach the earth." But his savage voice carried no conviction. What was there that Earth could do to meet this overwhelming assault? "What is it?" asked Sykes. He roused from his sleep to work gingerly at his aching muscles, then came and stood beside McGuire. "They have put us here as a final taunt," McGuire told him. "There is the fleet that is going to make our world into a nice little hell, and Torg, the beast! has put us here to see it leave. Then we get ours, and they don't know that we know that." "Your first way was the best," the scientist observed; "we should have done it then. We still can." "What do you mean?" The flyer's voice was dull and lifeless. Sykes pointed to the little balcony and the hard pavement below. "Althora," he said, and McGuire winced at the name, "seemed to think that we were in for some exquisite torture. Here is the way out. It is a hundred-foot drop; they think we are safe; but they have been unintentionally kind." "Yes," his companion agreed, "they don't know that we know of the torture. We will wait ... and when I am sure that--Althora--is--gone ... when there is nothing I can do to help--" "Help?" queried the professor gently. "There is nothing now of help, nor anyone who can help us. We must face it, my boy; _c'est fini_. Our little journey is approaching its end." * * * * * There was no reply, and McGuire stood throughout the day to stare with eyes of smouldering hatred where the scurrying swarms of living things made ready to invade and infest the earth. Food and water was pushed through the doorway, but he ate sparingly of the odd-colored fruits; the only thing that could hold his thoughts from the hopeless repetition of unanswerable "whys" was the sight of the fleet. And every bale and huge drum was tallied mentally as it passed before his eyes. The ships were being loaded, and with their sailing--But, no! He must not let himself think of that! Throughout the day ships came and departed, and one leviathan, ablaze in scarlet color; sailed in to settle down where great steel arms enfolded it, not far from the watching men. Scarlet creatures in authority directed operations, and workmen swarmed about the great ship. Once McGuire swore softly and viciously under his breath, for he had seen a figure that could be only that of Torg, and the crowd saluted with upraised arms as the scarlet figure passed into the scarlet ship. This, McGuire knew, was the flagship that should carry Torg himself. Torg and ----. He paled at the thought of the other name. The only break in the long day came with the arrival of a squad of guards, who hustled the two men out into a passageway and drove them to another room, where certain measurements were taken. The muscular figures of the two were different from these red ones, but it was a moment before McGuire realized the sinister significance of the proceedings. Their breadth of shoulders, the thickness of their chests--what had these figures to do with their captivity? And then the flyer saw the measures compared with the dimensions of a steel cage. Its latticed shape could be endlessly compressed, and within, he saw, were lancet points that lined the ghastly thing throughout. Long enough to torture, but not to kill; a thousand delicate blades to pierce the flesh; and the instrument, it seemed, was of a size that could enclose the writhing, helpless body of a man. Other unnameable contrivances about the room took on new significance with the knowledge that here was the chamber of horrors whose workings had been seen by Althora in the mind of their captor--horrors of which she could not speak. * * * * * McGuire was sick and giddy as the guards led him roughly back to their prison room. And Professor Sykes, too, required no explanation of what they had seen. The guards were many, and resistance was useless, but each man looked silently at the other's desperate eyes when the metal cords were twisted again about their wrists, and their hands were tied securely to metal rings anchored in the wall beside the window. "And there," said the flyer, "goes our last chance of escape. They were not as dumb as we thought: they knew how good a leap to the pavement would look after we had been in there." "Less than human!" Sykes was quoting the comment of Althora's brother. "I think Djorn was quite conservative in his statement." McGuire examined carefully the cords that tied his hands to the wall beside him. The knots were secure, and the metal ring was smooth and round. "I didn't know," he said, as he worked and twisted, "but there might be a cutting edge, but we haven't a chance. No getting rid of these without a wire cutter or an acetylene torch--and we seem to be just out of both." Professor Sykes tried to adopt the other's nonchalant tone. "Careless of us," he began--then stopped breathless to press his body against the wall. "It's there!" he said. "Oh, my God, if I could only get it, it might work--it might!" "The battery," he explained to the man beside him, whose assumed indifference vanished at this suggestion of hope; "--the little battery that I used on the gun, to fire the explosive. It has an astounding amperage, and a voltage around three hundred. It's in my pocket--and I can't reach it!" "You can't keep a good man licked!" McGuire exulted. "You mean that the current might melt the wire?" "Soften it, perhaps, depending upon the resistance." Sykes refused to share the other's excitement. "But we can't get at it." "We've got to," was the answer. "Move over this way." The man in khaki twisted his arms awkwardly to permit him to bend his body to one side, and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead as the strain forced the thin bonds into his wrists. But he brought his agonized face against the other's body, and gripped the fabric of Sykes' coat between his teeth. * * * * * The twisting of his head raised the cloth an inch at a time, and despite Sykes' efforts to hold the garment with his elbow, it slipped back time and again. McGuire straightened at intervals to draw a choking breath and ease the strain upon his tortured wrists; then back again in his desperate contortions to worry at the cloth and pull and hold--and try again to raise the heavy pocket where a battery made sagging folds. He was faint and gasping when finally the cloth was brought where the scientist's straining fingers could grasp it to writhe and twist in clumsy efforts that would force the battery's terminals within reach. "I'll try it on mine," said Sykes. "It may be hot--and you've had your share." He was holding the flat black thing to bring the copper tips against the metal about his wrists. McGuire saw the man's lips go white as a wisp of smoke brought to his nostrils the sickening odor of burned flesh. The metal glowed, and the man was writhing in silent self-torture when at last he threw his weight upon the strands and fell backward to the floor. He lay for a moment, trembling and quivering--but free. And the knowledge of that freedom and of the greater torture they would both escape, gave him strength to rise and work with crippled hands at his companion's bonds, till McGuire, too, was free--free to forget his own swollen, bleeding wrists in compassionate regard for the other. Like an injured animal, Professor Sykes had licked with his tongue at his wrists, where hot wire had burned deep and white, and he was trying for forgetfulness an hour later, in examination of the door to their room. "What is the idea?" McGuire inquired, when he turned from his ceaseless contemplation of the fleet. "Not trying to get out, are you?" "I am trying to stay in," said Sykes, and looked again at the object that interested him. "These long bolts," he explained: "top and bottom; operated from outside, but exposed in here. They come together when unlocked; five inches apart now. If I had something to hold them apart-- "You haven't a piece of steel about five inches long, have you?--or anything to substitute for it? If you have, I can lock this door so the devils won't come in and surprise us before we can make the jump." "The battery?" suggested McGuire. * * * * * Sykes shook his head. "I tried it. Too long, and besides it would crumble. They operate these with a lever; I saw it outside." He went on silently with his study of the door and the little gap between heavy bolts, which, if closed, would mean security from invasion. "They're about through," McGuire spoke from his post at the window after some time. "The rush seems to be about over. I imagine they'll pull out in the morning." He pointed as Sykes stood beside him. "Those big ones over beyond have not been touched all day; only some of the crew, I judge, working around them. And way over you see forty or fifty whaling big ones: they must have been ready before we came. They have finished on these nearer by. It looks like a big day for the brutes." And Professor Sykes led him on to talk more of the preparations he had seen, and his deductions as to the morrow. It was all too evident what was really on the lieutenant's mind. It was not the thought of their own immediate death, but the terrible dread and horror of Althora's fate, that hammered and hammered in his brain. To speak of anything else meant a moment's relief. Sykes pointed to a tall mast that was set in the plaza pavement, some hundred feet away. Wires swung from it to several points, one of them ending above their window and entering the building. "What is that?" he asked, "--some radio device? That ball of metal on the top might be an aerial." But McGuire had fallen silent again, and stared stonily at the deadly fighting ships he was powerless to combat. * * * * * On the morning that followed, there was no uncertainty. This was the day! And from a balconied window up high in the side of a tall stone building, two men stood wordless and waiting while they watched the preparations below. The open space was a sea of motion like flowing blood, where thousands of figures in dull red marched in rank after rank to be swallowed in the mammoth ships that McGuire had noted in the distance. Then other colors, and swarms of what they took to be women-folk of this wild race--a medley of color that flowed on and on as if it would never cease, to fill one after another of the great ships. "Transports, that's what they are," said McGuire. "I can see now why they have no steel beaks like the others. They don't need any rams, nor ports for firing that beastly gas. They are gray, too, while the fighting ships are striped with red, all except the scarlet one of Torg's. Those are colonists we are watching, and soldiers to conquer the Earth where the damned swarm settles." He stopped to stare at a body of red-clad soldiers, drawn up at attention. They made a lane, and their arms were raised in the salute that seemed only for Torg. They stood rigid and motionless; then, from below the watching men, came one in the full splendor of his scarlet regalia. The air echoed with the din of his shouted name, but the bedlam of noise fell on deaf ears for McGuire. He could hear nothing, and in all the vast kaleidoscope of color he could see only one object--the white face of a girl who was half led and half carried by a guard of the red ones, where their Emperor led the way. * * * * * It was a strangled cry that was torn from the flyer's throat--the name of this girl who was going to the doom she had failed to avoid. Her life, she had said, was hers to keep only if she willed, but her plans had failed, and she went faltering and stumbling after a scarlet man beast. "Althora!" called the flyer, and the figure of the girl was struggling with her guards in a frenzy that tore their hands free. She turned to look toward the sound of the voice, and her face was like that of one dead as her eyes found the man she loved. "Tommy," she called: "oh, Tommy, my dear! Good-by!" The words were ended by the clutch of the scarlet Emperor who turned to seize her. A clatter came from the door behind them, but Lieutenant McGuire gave no heed. Only Professor Sykes sprang back from the balcony to seize and struggle with the moving bolts. The man on the balcony was hardly less than a maniac as he glared wildly about, but he was not too unreasoning to see the folly of a wild leap into the throng below. He could never reach her--never. And then his eyes fell upon the wire that led from above him to the great pole in the open plaza. There was shouting from behind where the executioners were wrestling with the bolts. "Hold them," the flyer shouted, "just for a minute! For God's sake, Sykes, keep them back! There's a chance!" He sprang to the balustrade of the balcony, but he saw as he leaped where Professor Sykes had raised his leg to force the thickness of his knee between the bolts whose levers outside were bringing them closer together. "Go to it," was the answer. "I can hold them"--a stifled groan--"for a--minute!" Professor Sykes had found his substitute for five inches of steel, and the living flesh yielded but slowly to the pressure of the bolts. * * * * * McGuire was working frantically at the wire, then held himself in check while he carefully unwound it from its fastening. There was a splice, and he worked with bleeding fingers to unfasten the tight coils. And then the end was free and in his hands. He dropped to the balcony to pull in the slack, and he wrapped the end about beneath his arms and twisted it tight, then leaped out into space. No thought of himself nor of Sykes in this one wild moment, only of Althora in the grip of those beastly hands. He was struggling to turn himself in the air as the colored masses of people seemed sweeping toward him, and he shot as a living pendulum, feet first, into the waiting heads. He was on his feet in an instant and tearing at the twisted wire that held him. About him was clamor and confusion, but beyond the nearer figures he saw the one who waited, and beside her a thing in scarlet that shrieked orders to his men. He flung off one who leaped toward him, and ducked another to dash through and reach his man. And he neither saw nor felt the creature's ripping talons as he drove a succession of rights and lefts to the blood-red face. The scarlet one went backward under the fusillade of blows; he was down, a huddle of color upon the pavement, and a horde of paralyzed soldiers had recovered from their stupefaction and were rushing upon the flyer. He turned to meet them, but their rush ended as quickly as it began: only a step or two they came, then stopped, to add their wild voices to the confusion of ear-splitting shrieks that rose from all sides. * * * * * McGuire crouched rigid, tense and waiting, nor did he sense for an instant that the assault was checked and that the faces of all about him were turned to the sky. It was the voice of Althora that aroused him: "Tommy! Tommy!" she was calling, and now she was at his side, her arms about him. "What is it, Tommy? Look! Look!" And she too was gazing aloft. And then, above all other sounds McGuire heard the roar-- The clouds were golden above with the brilliance of midday--and against them, hard and sharp of outline, was a shining shape. A cloud of vapor streamed behind it as it shot down from the clouds, and the thunder of its coming was like the roar of many cannon. A ship of the red ones was in the air--a fighting ship, whose stripes showed red--and it drove at the roaring menace with its steel beak and a swirling cloud of gas. It seemed that they must crash, when to McGuire's eyes came the stabbing flash of heavy guns from the shining shape. A crashing explosion came down to them as the great beak parted and fell, and the body of the red-striped monster opened in bursting smoke and flame, tore slowly into fragments and fell swiftly to the earth. It struck with a shattering crash some distance away, but one pair of eyes failed to follow it in its fall. For in the clear air above, with the golden light of distant clouds upon it, a roaring monster of silvery sheen had rolled and swept upward to the heights. And it showed, as it turned, a painted emblem on its bow, a design of clear-cut color, unbelievably familiar--a circle of blue, and within it a white star and a bull's eye of red--the mark of the flying service of the United States! * * * * * McGuire never knew how he got Althora and himself back to the building whence he had come. Nor did he see the struggling figures on a balcony, or the leap and fall of a maimed body, where Professor Sykes, when the door had yielded, found surcease and oblivion on the pavement below. He was to learn that later, but now he had eyes only for a sight that could be but a dream, an unreal vision of a disordered brain. He held the slim form of Althora to him in a crushing grip, while he stared, dry-eyed, above, and his own voice seemed to shout from afar off: "They're ours!" that voice was screaming in a frenzy of exultation. "They're our ships! They've come across!" The fighting fleet of the red man-things of Venus was taking to the air! The ships rose in a swarm of speeding, darting shapes, and the great one of Torg was in the lead, climbing in fury toward the heights. Far above them the clouds of gold silhouetted a strange sight, and the air was shaking with the thunder from on high, where, straight and true, a line of silver ships in the sharp V of battle formation drove downward in a deadly, swift descent. And even afar off, the straining eyes of a half-crazed man could see the markings on their bow--a circle and a star--and the colors of his own lost fighters of the air. CHAPTER XIX The Earth-fleet was a slanting line of swiftness that swept downward from the clouds. A swarm of craft was rising from below. The red-striped fighters met the attack first with a cloud of gas. The scarlet monster--the flagship of Torg, the Emperor--was in the lead, and they shot with terrific speed across the bows of the oncoming fleet to leave a whirlwind of deadly vapor as they passed. McGuire held his breath in an agony of fear as the cloud enveloped the line of ships, but their bow guns roared staccato crashes in the thunder of their exhausts as they entered the cloud. And they were firing from the stern as they emerged, while two falling cylinders of red and white proved the effectiveness of their fire. The formation held true as it swept upward and back where the swarming enemy was waiting. They were outnumbered three to one, McGuire saw, and his heart sang within him as he watched the sharp, speeding V that climbed upward to the enemy's level then swung to throw itself like a lance of light at the massed ships that awaited the attack. Another cloud of gas!--and a shattered ship!--and again the line emerged to correct its broken formation and drive once more toward the circling swarm. They came to meet them now, the clusters of red-striped fighting ships, and they tore in from all sides upon the American line, their hooked beaks gleaming in the sun. * * * * * And now, at an unseen signal, the formation broke. Each ship fought for its life, and the stabbing flashes of their guns made ceaseless jets of light against the smoke and gas clouds that were darkening the sky. "A dog-fight!" breathed Lieutenant McGuire; "and what a dog-fight!" His words were lost in the terrific thunder from above: the roar of the ships and the dull thuds of the guns engulfed them in a maelstrom of noise that battered like physical blows on the watchers below. He swore unconsciously and called down curses upon the enemy as he saw two fighters meet while the shining beak of a ship of the reds crashed through the body of an opposing craft. The red ship dipped at the bow; it backed off with terrific force; and from the curved beak a ship with the insignia of the red, white and blue slid downward in a swift fall to the death that waited. They had fought themselves clear, and the Americans, by what must have been arrangement or wireless order, went roaring to the heights. There were some who followed, but the guns of the speeding ships drove them off. Red-and-white shapes fell swiftly from the clouds where the fighting had been, and McGuire knew that his fellows had given an account of themselves in the fighting at close range. Again the thundering line was sharp and true, and another unswerving attack was launching itself from above. And again the deadly formation, with ever-increasing speed, drove into the enemy with flashing guns, then parted to close with the ones that drove crushingly upon them, while the sharper clatter of rapid-firing guns came to shatter the air. The fighting craft had been rising from their level field in a succession that seemed endless. They were all in the air now, and only the great transports remained on the paved field. * * * * * A red-striped fighter swept downward in retreat, and, from the smoke clouds, a silvery shape followed in pursuit. It reached the red and white one with its shells, and the great mass crashed with terrific impact on the field. Its pursuer must have seen the monsters still on the ground, and it swung to rake them with a shower of small-caliber shells. There were machine-guns rattling as it passed above the thronged reds--the troops who were huddled in terror in the open court. It tore on past them--past a figure in khaki who raced forward with the golden form of a girl within his arms, then released her to wave frantically as the silver ship shot by. Unobserved, McGuire and Althora had been, where they stood beside the buildings: the eyes of their enemies, like their own, were on the monstrous battle above. But now they had called themselves to the attention of the reds, and there were some who rushed upon them with faces livid with rage. McGuire reached for a weapon from a victim of the machine-gun fire and prepared to defend himself, but the weapon was never used. He saw the silvery shape reverse itself in the air; it turned sharply to throw itself back toward the solitary figure in uniform of their service and the golden-clad girl beside him. The flyer raised his weapon, but the jostling swarm that rushed upon him melted: the ripping fire of machine guns was deafening in his ears. Their deadly tattoo continued while the great ship sank slowly to touch and rest its huge bulk upon the pavement. A door in the ship's curved side opened that the blocky figure of a man might leap forth. He was grimy of face, and his uniform was streaked with the smoke and sweat of battle, but the face beneath the grime, and the hands that reached to embrace and pound the flyer upon the back, could be only those of one he had known as his captain--Captain Blake. "You son-of-a-gun!" the shouting figure was repeating. "You damned Irish son-of-a-gun! A. W. O. L.--but you can't get away with it! Come on--get in here! I'm needed up above!" * * * * * McGuire was struggling to speak from a throat that was suddenly tight and voiceless. Then-- "Althora," he gasped; "take Althora!" and he motioned toward the girl. And then he remembered the companion he had left in the room above. The battle that had flashed so suddenly had blasted from his mind all other thoughts. "My God!" he said. "--Sykes! I--must get Sykes!" He turned to run back to the building, only to stop in consternation where a huddle of clothing lay beneath the balcony of their prison room. It was Sykes--Sykes who had sacrificed himself to make possible the escape of his friend--and McGuire dropped to his knees to touch the body that he knew was shattered beyond any hope of life. He raised the limp burden in his arms and staggered back where more khaki-clad figures had gathered. Two came quickly out to meet him, and he let them take the body of his friend. "_C'est fini!_"--he repeated the words that Sykes had said; "the end of our little journey!" The arms of Althora were about him as Blake hurried them into the waiting ship, and the roar of enormous power marked the rising of this space ship to throw itself again into the fray. * * * * * A small room with a dome of shatter-proof glass; a pilot who sat there to look in all directions, a control-board beneath his hands. Beside him on his elevated station was room for Captain Blake, and McGuire and Althora, too. The ship was climbing swiftly. McGuire saw where flashing shapes circled and roared in a swelling cloud of smoke and gas. Blake spoke sharply to an aide: "General orders! All ships climb to resume formation!" An enemy ship was before them: it flashed from nowhere to bear down with terrific speed. The floor beneath them shook with the jarring of heavy guns, and McGuire saw the advancing shape bursting with puffs of smoke, while their own ship shot upward with a sickening twist. A silver ship was falling!--and another! "Two more of ours gone," said Captain Blake through set teeth. "How many of them are there, Mac? Tell me what you know: we've got a hell of a fight on our hands." "They're all here," McGuire told him, in jerky, breathless speech. "These are transports on the ground. Their weapons are gas and speed, and the rams on their beaked ships. There are other weapons--deadlier ones!--but they haven't got them: they belong to another race. I'll tell you all that later!" "Keep them at a distance, Blake," he said. "Make them come to you--then nail them as they come." "Right!" was the answer; "that's good dope. We didn't know what they had; expected some devilish things that could down us before we got within effective range; had to mix it with them to find out what they could do, and get in a few solid cracks before they did it. "How high are we?" He glanced quickly at an instrument. "Ten thousand. Order all ships to withdraw," he instructed his aide. "Rendezvous at fifty thousand feet for echelon formation." * * * * * Another brush with an enemy craft that slipped quickly to one side--then the smoke clouds were behind them, and a score, of silvery shapes were climbing in vertical flight for the level at fifty thousand. They were fewer now than they had been, and the line that formed behind the flagship of Blake was shorter than the one that had made the V which shot down so bravely to engage with an unknown foe. The enemy was below; an arrangement of mirrors showed this from the commander's station. They were emerging from the clouds of smoke to swarm in circling flight through the sky. And now the bow of their own craft was depressed at an order from Blake, and the others were behind them as they drove to renew the attack. "They're ganging up on us again," said Blake. "We'll fool them this time; we'll just kid them a little." The flagship swerved before reaching the enemy, and the others followed in what looked like frightened retreat. Again they were in the heights, and some few of the enemy were following. Blake led in another descent. * * * * * No waiting swarm to greet them now! Blake gave a quick order. The roaring column shifted position as it fell: the flagship was the apex of a great V whose arms flung out and backward on either side--a V formation that curved and twisted through space and thundered upon the smaller formations that scattered before the blasting guns. "Our bow guns are the effective weapons," Blake observed; his casual tone was a sedative to McGuire's tense nerves. "We can use a broadside only of lighter weight; the kick of the big 'sights' has to be taken straight back. But we're working, back home, on recoil-absorbing guns: we'll make fighting ships of these things yet." He spoke quietly to the pilot to direct their course toward a group that came sweeping upon them, and the massed fire of the squadron was squarely into the oncoming beaks that fell beneath them where the mirrors showed them crashing to the earth. They were scattered now; the enemy was in wild disorder; and Blake spoke sharply to his aide. "Break formation," he ordered; "every ship for itself. Engage the enemy where they find them; shoot down anything they see; prevent the enemy reforming!" He was taking quick advantage of the other's scattered forces, and he scattered his own that he knew could take care of themselves while they engaged the enemy only by ones or twos or threes. "Clear the air of them!" he ordered. "Not one of them must escape!" The skies were a maze of darting shapes that crossed and recrossed to make a spider's web of light. Ship drove at ship, to swerve off at the last, while the air quivered and beat upon them with the explosion of shells and guns. "There's our meat!" Blake directed the pilot, and pointed ahead where a monster in scarlet was swelling into view. It came swiftly upon them, darting down from above, and McGuire clutched at the arm of the man beside him to shout: "It's the leader; the flagship! It's the Emperor--Torg, himself! Give him hell, Blake, but look out--he's fast!" * * * * * The ship was upon them like a flash of fire; no time for anything but dodging, and the pilot threw his craft wildly aside with a swerve that sent the men sprawling against a stanchion. Then up and back, where the other had turned to come up from below. "Fast!" McGuire had said, but the word was inadequate to describe the speed of the fiery shape. Another leap in the air, as their pilot swung his controls, and the red shape brushed past them in a cloud of gas, while the quick-firers ripped futilely into space where the great ship had been. "Get your bow guns on him!" Blake roared. The ship beneath them strained and shuddered with the incredible thunder of the generator that threw them bodily in the air. The pilot had opened in full force the ports that blasted their bows aside. No time to gather new speed; they were motionless as the scarlet monster came upon them, but they were in position to receive him. The eight-inch rifles of the forward turret thundered again and again, to be answered by flashes of flame from the scarlet ship. McGuire crouched over the bent form of the pilot, whose steady fingers held the ship's bow straight upon the flashing death that bore down upon them. Another salvo!--and another!--hits all of them.... Smoke bursting from ripping plates, and flaming fire more vivid than the scarlet shape itself!--and the floor beneath McGuire's feet drove crushingly upward as their pilot pulled a lever to the full. The great beak flashed beneath--and the mirrors, where McGuire's eyes were fastened, showed the terrific drive continue down and down, where a brilliant cylinder that marked the power of Venus tore shriekingly on to carry an Emperor to his crashing death. * * * * * The skies were clear of the red-striped ships: only the survivors of the attacking force showed their silvery shapes as they gathered near their flagship. There were two that pursued a small group of the enemy, but they were being outdistanced in the race. "We have won," said Blake in a tone of wonder that showed how only now had come a realization of what the victory meant. "We have won, and the earth--is saved!" And the voice of McGuire echoed his fervent "Thank God!" while he gripped the soft hand that clung tightly to his, as if Althora, this radiant creature of Venus, were timid and abashed among the joyful, shouting men-folk from another world. "And now what, Captain?" asked McGuire of his command. "Will you land? There is an army of reds down there asking for punishment." Blake had turned away; his hand made grimy smears across his face where he wiped away the tears that marked a brave man's utter thankfulness. He covered his emotion with an affectation of disapproval as he swung back toward McGuire. "Captain?" he inquired. "Captain? Where do you get that captain stuff?" He pointed to an emblem on his uniform, a design that was unfamiliar to the eyes of McGuire. "You're talking to an admiral now!--the first admiral of the newest branch of your country's fighting service--commanding the first fleet of the Space ships of the United States of America!" He threw one arm about the other's shoulders. "We'll have to get busy, Mac," he added, "and think up a new rank for you. "And, yes, we are going to land," he continued in his customary tones; "there may be survivors of our own crashes. But we'll have to count on you, Mac, to show us around this little new world of yours." * * * * * There was an army waiting, as McGuire had warned, but it was waiting to give punishment and not to take it. The vast expanse of the landing field was swarming with them, and the open country beyond showed columns of marching troops. They had learned, too, to take shelter; barricades had been hastily erected, and the men had shields to protect them from the fire of small arms. Their bodies were enclosed in their gas-tight uniforms whose ugly head-pieces served only to conceal the greater ugliness beneath. They met the ships as they landed with a showering rain of gas that was fired from huge projectors. "Not so good!" Blake was speaking in the safety of his ship. "We have masks, but great heavens, Mac!--there must be a million of those brutes. We can spray them with machine-gun fire, but we haven't ammunition enough to make a dent in them. And we've got to get out and get to our crashed ships." He waited for McGuire's suggestions, but it was Althora who replied. "Wait!" she said imperatively. She seemed to be listening to some distant word. Then: "Djorn is coming," she exclaimed, and her eyes were brilliantly alight. "He says to you"--she pointed to McGuire--"that you were right, that we must fight like hell sometimes to deserve our heaven--oh, I told him what you said--and now he is coming with all his men!" "What the devil?" asked Blake in amazement. "How does she know?" "Telepathy," McGuire explained: "she is talking with her brother, the leader of the real inhabitants of Venus." He told the wondering man briefly of his experience and of the people themselves, the real owners of this world. "But what can they do?" Blake demanded. And McGuire assured him: "Plenty!" * * * * * He turned to Althora to ask, "How are they coming? How will they get here?" "They are marching underground; they have been coming for two days. They knew of our being captured, but the people have been slow in deciding to fight. Djorn dared not tell me of their coming; he feared he might be too late. "They will come out of that building," she said, and indicated the towering structure that had been their prison. "It has the old connection with the underground world." "Well, they'd better be good!" said Blake incredulously. He was still less optimistic when the building before them showed the coming of a file of men. They poured forth, in orderly fashion and ranged themselves in single file along the walls. There must be a thousand, McGuire estimated, and he wondered if the women, too, were fighting for their own. Then, remembering Althora's brave insistence, he knew his surmise was correct. Each one was masked against the gas; their faces were concealed; and each one held before him a tube of shining metal with a larger bulbous end that rested in their hands. "Electronic projectors," the lieutenant whispered. "Keep your eye on the enemy, Blake; you are going to learn something about war." The thin line was advancing now and the gas billowed about them as they came. There were some few who dropped, where masks were defective, but the line came on, and the slim tubes were before them in glittering menace. * * * * * At a distance of a hundred feet from the first of the entrenched enemy there was a movement along the line, as if the holders of the tubes had each set a mechanism in operation. And before the eyes of the Earth-men was a spectacle of horror like nothing in wars they had known. The barricades were instantly a roaring furnace; the figures that leaped from behind them only added to the flames. From the steady rank of the attackers poured an invisible something before which the hosts of the enemy fell in huddles of flame. Those nearest were blasted from sight in a holocaust of horror, and where they had been was a scattering of embers that smoked and glowed; even the figures of distant ones stumbled and fell. The myriad fighters of the army of the red ones, when the attackers shut off their invisible rays, was a screaming mob that raced wildly over the open lands beyond. Althora's hands were covering her eyes, but McGuire and Blake, and the crowding men about them, stared in awe and utter astonishment at the devastation that was sweeping this world. An army annihilated before their eyes! Scores of thousands, there must be, of the dead! The voice of Blake was husky with horror. "What a choice little bit out of hell!" he exclaimed. "Mac, did you say they were our friends? God help us if they're not!" "They are," said McGuire grimly. "Those are Althora's people who had forgotten how to fight; they are recapturing something that they lost some centuries ago. But can they ever destroy the rest of that swarm? I don't think they have the heart to do it." "They do not need." It was Althora speaking. "My people are sickened with the slaughter. But the red ones will go back into the earth, and we will seal them in!--it is Djorn who tells me--and the world will be ours forevermore." * * * * * A matter of two short days, crammed to the uttermost with the realization of the astounding turn of events--and McGuire and Althora stood with Blake and Djorn, the ruler, undisputed, of the beautiful world of Venus. A fleet of great ships was roaring high in air. One only, the flagship, was waiting where their little group stood. The bodies of the fallen had been recovered; they were at rest now in the ships that waited above. McGuire looked about in final wonder at the sparkling city bathed in a flood of gold. A kindly city now--beautiful; the terrors it had held were fading from his mind. He turned to Althora. "We are going home," he said softly, "you and I." "Home?" Althora's voice was vibrant with dismay. "We need you here, friend Mack Guire," the voice of Djorn broke in, in protest. "You have something that we lack--a force and vision--something we have lost." "We will be back," the flyer assured him. "You befriended me: anything I can do in return--" The grip of his hand completed the sentence. "But there is a grave to be made on the summit of Mount Lawson," he added quietly. "I think he would have preferred to lie there--at the end of his journey--and I must return to the service where I have not yet been mustered out." "But you said--you were going home," faltered Althora. "Will that always be home to you, Tommy?" "Home, my dear," he whispered in words that reached her only, "is just where you are." His arm went about her to draw her toward the waiting ship. "There or here--what matter? We will be content." Her eyes were misty as they smiled an answer. Within the ship that was lifting them, they turned to watch a city of opal light grow faintly luminous in the distance ... an L-shaped continent shrunk to tiny size ... and the nebulous vapors of the cloudland that enclosed this world folded softly about. "We will lead," the voice of Blake was saying to an aide: "same formation that we used coming over. Give the necessary orders. But," he added slowly to himself, "the line will be shorter; there are fewer of us now." An astronomical officer laid a chart before the commander. "We are on the course, sir," he reported. "Full speed," Blake gave the order, and the thundering generator answered from the stern. The Space Fleet of America was going home. (_The End_) _A meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories [Illustration: _The Readers' Corner_] _"Absurd" to "Superb"_ Dear Editor: Unfortunately, I missed the January number of your very excellent magazine, which I consider superior to any of its type. I brought seven copies--February to August--with me on my vacation, and have so far read the first three from cover to cover. The February and March numbers were almost above reproach, but the April number contained two stories so surprisingly poor that I can only conjecture the Editor was ill at that time. They were "The Man who was Dead," by Thomas H. Knight and "Monsters of Moyen," by Arthur J. Burks. For Mr. Knight there is no hope. To him I can only say "Stop trying to write and get a job." I am a rapid and omnivorous reader, but never have I read a story so utterly bad as his. He gets the booby prize. Arthur J. Burks, although a master artist in comparison to Knight, is pretty poor--terrible, in fact. His style is dull, repetitious, and stilted. His melodrama is exaggerated to the point of nauseating absurdity. His characters are lifeless and unnatural puppets. So much for the faults. Among the best Science Fiction stories I have read is "The Planet of Dread," by R. F. Starzl in the August number. I also very much enjoyed the "Dr. Bird" stories by Capt. Meek, and indeed all the others, barring the two I criticized in such a helpful, friendly spirit. Leinster and Cummings are old favorites of mine. I prefer your present cover but disagree with your attitude towards reprinting the older works of such authors as George Allen England, Serviss and Cummings, which are now unobtainable and would, I believe, be received with pleasure and applause. Congratulations--Joseph S. Stull, 291 Barrington St., Rochester, N. Y. P.S. Since I wrote I have read the May and June numbers--both perfect. C. D. Willard is a superb storyteller. _Wrong Numbers Still!_ Dear Editor: I agree with the rest of your readers in the good things they say about your magazine in "The Readers' Corner." There is one story, however, "The Planet of Dread," in your August issue, that gives me a rather sickening feeling of disgust. The trouble was in the climax. After the hero has wandered over quite a portion of the planet Inra, he arrives at some mountains where, lo and behold! an unexpected space ship drops from the clouds to an unfrequented ledge of rock and makes a rescue. After this sensational climax comes an equally thrilling anti-climax--the hero is offered three years' salary for his story. To accuse the future world of doing such a thing is an open insult to our posterity. Ten per cent of my high school freshmen took just such an ending to their first themes. As that story took up about one-seventh of your space and your magazine cost twenty cents. I figure you owe your readers three cents on that issue. But, due to the fineness of the rest of your stories, I am willing to forget your debt as far as I am concerned. I am happy to see that you are beginning to print articles. I read with interest the one about Mechanical Voices for Telephone Numbers in your September issue. But can't something be done about wrong numbers? The article states that a person dialed the number 8561T. Two seconds later the loud-speaker spoke up, clearly, in an almost human voice, 8651T. Wrong number! Must this evil be with us always! I am NOT in favor of reprints. You are printing stories every month just as good as any of those suggested to you. I have read most of those classic scientific stories referred to. The best stories along this line have not been written yet. Keep your space clear for them. Let us have young blood with new ideas. Let our authors eat. Good stories were never written on an empty stomach. I believe yours is the highest type of the few magazines that lay a greater stress on the brains of the hero than on his good looks. But, for the sake of one of your ardent readers, let that hero use his brains to get himself out of whatever he has gotten into. Don't let a space ship swoop down from above to rescue him. That type of story reminds me a lot of the one where Jonah was rescued from the deep by the timely arrival of the friendly whale. By the way, there's a suggestion for a reprint. I will admit that it would be just about as new to me as some of the others that have been suggested in this "Corner."--Richard Lewis, 448 Marion St., Knoxville, Iowa. _Not So "Green" in Ireland_ Dear Editor: I suppose it's not often you get a letter from an Irish "Paddy," but here's one now. Here in Cork we don't get magazines like Astounding Stories regularly, but I got the May issue to-day and could not stop until I had devoured it from cover to cover. "The Atom Smasher" is a story which I have been hunting for for years. When I had finished it, I had to sit back and leave out all the breath which I was holding in in a prolonged "whew!" If ever I get the luck to find another Astounding Stories I'll burn up the pages looking for the name Victor Rousseau. Next in order I liked "Brigands of the Moon" and "The Jovian Jest." Thought the story "Into the Ocean's Depths" an awful fairy tale, but otherwise good reading. The painter of the cover design is a real artist and I wish to express my appreciation of his wonderful rendering of a difficult subject.--Fitz-Gerald Grattan, 11 Frankfield Terrace, Summerhill South, Cork, Irish Free State. _Worthy His Evening and Pipe_ Dear Editor: I have read my first copy of Astounding Stories, the September. The first paragraph in the first part of "A Problem in Communication" assured me that I had found a book worthy of my evening and pipe. Read that paragraph and you will find Dr. Miles Breuer is most brilliant in his philosophy and clever in the application of that philosophy in his masterpiece of the science of communication.--Don L. Schweitzer, 1402 Bancroft St., Omaha, Nebr. _"Taking a Claw Hold"_ Dear Editor: Was just reading the September issue of A. S. and find it ranging first among the Science Fiction magazines now printed. I'm certain your "Jetta of the Lowlands" is going to be a masterpiece of Ray Cummings. He is my favorite writer. I did not like "Earth, the Marauder." It was too much drawn out and very dry. "Brigands of the Moon" was excellent. I wish you would print my letter, as I'd like any one, male of female, interested in science to write to me. Would you kindly oblige me? I'm glad to see girls taking interest in your magazine, as it shown science is taking a claw hold on everyone--Harold BegGell, 29 Stewart St., Washington, N. J. _This and That_ Dear Editor: In the October issue of Astounding Stories, Mr. Woodrow Gelman casts vote No. 1 for reprints. Well, here is vote No. 2. I intended to reply to all your arguments against reprint, but Mr. Gelman has done this very satisfactorily, indeed. I only wish to make a few additional comments. You say that only one out of a hundred haven't read reprints [?]. Fifty out of a hundred would be more correct. Five years ago there wasn't a single magazine devoted exclusively to Science Fiction. Now there are six of them, more or less. These magazines have converted thousands of readers into Science Fiction fans. These readers ought to be given a chance to read the old masterpieces. Even those who have read them would be glad to reread them. With the exception of the reprints you have pretty near carried out all the readers' wishes. You have put in a readers' department, increased Wesso's illustrations, given us many interplanetary stories, and given us the stories of the leading authors of the day. Surely you can give us reprints when the demand for them is so universal. The ones I want are those written by Cummings, Merritt, Rousseau and Serviss, and I am sure that the rest of the readers want them too. If you are still doubtful, the fairest thing to do is to conduct a vote among the readers. I hope that you will pardon me for being so persistent, but I am sure that you are working in the best interests of the readers and that you will accede to a great and growing popular demand. Now about the latest issue of Astounding Stories. "The Invisible Death" is the best novelette you have printed up to now. With the exception of Ray Cummings, the best author you have is Victor Rousseau. I am glad to see that there is another story by Rousseau scheduled for next month. Murray Leinster is a close third, and I hope to see more of his stories soon. The second part of "Jetta of the Lowlands" was better than the first. "Stolen Brains" was also excellent. Keep on printing the Dr. Bird stories. I like them very much. Although the stories were splendid, the cover illustration was poor. I believe that this is the worst cover that Wesso has ever drawn. The main fault with it is that there is no science in it. It would be more appropriate for one of those detective magazines. "The Invisible Death" has many other interesting scenes from which Wesso could have chosen a more fitting subject. However, Wesso is your best artist and you ought to keep him.--Michael Forgaris, 157 Fourth St., Passale, N. J. _"Not Spoiled by ... Editor"_ Dear Editor: There is one advantage that Astounding Stories has over all of the other Science Fiction magazines. It does not overburden one with an exposition of scientific facts. Too often a story is ruined by a lot of dry textbook stuff that turns an exciting story into a lecture. In Astounding Stories we can soar away on the wings of imagination, escaping the humdrum everyday world to new and amazing adventures. The hours fly away like the speed of light, and upon finishing the book our only regret is that we have to wait a whole month before another issue takes us aloft again. Having unburdened myself thus far, I think it is most fitting to comment upon your latest (October) issue. To my mind, the stories in order of merit are: "The Invisible Death," "Stolen Brains," "Jetta of the Lowlands," "Prisoners on the Electron," and "An Extra Man." I certainly am glad to see Ray Cummings writing for your most excellent magazine. He is an A-1 author. It does not make a particle of difference to me about the size of the magazine, but I wish you would have smooth edges like those of your Five-Novels Monthly. Am glad to see that "The Readers' Corner" is enlarged. I always turn to this first, even before reading the stories. This is a most entertaining department, and I'm glad it is not spoiled by any perfunctory remarks from the editor. How about publishing Astounding Stories twice a month?--E. Anderson, 1765 Southern Blvd., New York City, New York. _Roses, Daisies and Violets_ Dear Editor: In appreciation of an enjoyable evening of reading--which extended, by the way, into the wee, sma' hours of early morning--I thought to drop you a few lines, speaking of the high regards your magazine. Astounding Stories, has won from me through merit alone. Your October number particularly fitted into my reading mood last night. After the daily grind of newspaper work, it might seem odd that relaxation is sought in "more reading"--but it has been my experience, and that of many of my co-workers. I find, that the relief from the high tension of our trade comes from the change in the character of what we read, rather than in "something else," such as physical recreation. Fiction relaxes where "news" has keyed up. And in the Science Fiction of your magazine's stories of super-science, I find the keenest periods of mental enjoyment through the admirable selection of Astounding Stories' mixed adventure, unique travel and prophetic science. In this I am not alone--a number of my acquaintances have reveled likewise in your magazine at my suggestion. I have not quite settled in my mind as to whether you have trained your writers to exploit this special field of magazine fiction, which you occupy so successfully, or, in your editorial capacity, have so well selected the stories that bear the hallmarks of this peculiar interest that appeals so strongly to my leisure hours. By whichever road your success has been reached is immaterial--Astounding Stories has registered with me in a degree which should be flattering to your editorial supervision, if I represent, as I think I do, that large class of magazine readers who prefer and seek a science-coated outlet from the humdrum of every day living in mental adventure and travel-thrill reading. Have I presented clearly why and how much I like your magazine of Astounding Stories!--E. P. Neill, 910 East Ave., Red Wing, Minn. _"Much Easier to Turn"_ Dear Editor: Once more I am impelled to give a roar. The last few issues have been filled with letters from readers who are evidently not satisfied with a "different" magazine. If they do not like to read "our" magazine then let them quit, but don't let a heckling minority spoil a real treat. My particular growl this time is directed towards Robert Baldwin and others of his ilk, who squawk about the size (i. e. length and width) of the mag and the uneven pages. The size is perfect (and just because the craze for standardization has hit some of the other Science Fiction mags and they have gone ga-ga over being an awkward shape, that is no reason for your going ahead and spoiling this one) and the uneven pages are a relief when reading because it is much easier to turn over a leaf when they are of a slightly different width. However, to take some of the sting off, I must say some of the ideas of said Mr. Baldwin are O. K. Enlarge the mag--of course you will, as readers increase and sales go up. Larger, as he says, "It will be worth the other jitney." Put ads in the rear. Have full page illustrations when possible. But another thing he is absolutely wrong on. Please do not adopt the antique method of continuing a story on page umptyump. Some of the readers are still yowling for reprints. Well, it is true that some reprints would be very acceptable. However, as most of the really good old-time tales of Science Fiction can be procured in any good sized library, why bother to print them and thus decrease the space allotted to our new authors, some of whom are even better than Wells, Verne, etc., much as I like the old masters. By the way, my "enlarge" in the second paragraph means in thickness (amount of reading matter), not shape. Wesso has always been good, and he seems to be improving, though he and others might be still better if they would carefully read the descriptions of persons and animals of other planets before picturing them. I don't wish to make this blurb too long, so will not be specific, but you and others probably have seen the same as I, where the illustration has not been true to the description. It might interest you to know that I have been instrumental in getting several new readers for Astounding Stories. Long live "our" new mag.--Robert J Hyatt, 1353 Kenyon St., N. W., Washington, D. C. _Ow! Ow! Ow!_ Dear Editor: I have just looked at "The Reader's Corner" in the October issue of Astounding Stories. It disgusted me. What you print there--only letters praising your magazine to the skies?--or do you occasionally print a brickbat? I've bought your magazine each time since it was first printed. And many times I've felt like quitting. Why? There are a number of reasons. First, you print stories that have nothing to do with science, such as "The Soul Master." Second, your illustrations are poor. They would look better if they were full page ones. Wesso is the best artist you have. Gould and Sabo are just plain cartoonists, and mighty poor ones at that. Third, you print stories that give a weak and implausible scientific basis. Diffin, Gee, Leinster and several others err in this respect. Fourth, rotten paper--it goes to pieces after being handled. Fifth, no editorial or science questionnaire. Your authors will not starve if you print reprints. Rousseau and a lot of others write for other magazines. And reprints would occupy such a measly space that they could hardly be called down for being printed. Your magazine has some good features: a good cover; good authors like Breuer, Vincent, Meek, Ernst and Starzl; clear type; and handy size. If anyone thinks I'm wrong--well my address is given. This challenge includes the editor. I sincerely hope you will improve your magazine--Edwin C. Magnuson, 1205 E. Ninth St., Duluth, Minn. _Suggestions_ Dear Editor: I have read your excellent magazine ever since it came out, and though it needs a few corrections like the others, A. S. is nearly perfect. Why not have your pages evened up, and add a department of science on subjects such as Rocket Propulsion etc., so the readers could become familiar with the mystifying problems stated in the stories? Have the advertisements in the back, and don't change your artists as their work is satisfactory. Robert Baldwin of Illinois has an excellent list of suggestions. Why not have a page devoted to the pictures and biographies of your writers, and full page illustrations? Why not have a space for good reprints and charge a nickel more? I am sure it will be appreciated by readers. Why don't you put out a Quarterly, twice as thick or containing twice as many stories for fifty cents?--A satisfied reader--Hume V. Stephani, 37-1/2 Wood St., Auburn, New York. _"The Readers' Corner"_ All readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although, from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here; so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! --_The Editor._ [Illustration: Advertisement.] * * * * * 
31893	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. VI, No. 3 CONTENTS JUNE, 1931 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSO _Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "Manape the Mighty."_ THE MAN FROM 2071 SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT 295 _Out of the Flow of Time There Appears to Commander John Hanson a Man of Mystery from the Forgotten Past._ MANAPE THE MIGHTY. ARTHUR J. BURKS 308 _High in Jungle Treetops Swings Young Bentley--His Human Brain Imprisoned in a Mighty Ape._ (A Complete Novelette.) HOLOCAUST CHARLES WILLARD DIFFIN 356 _The Extraordinary Story of "Paul," Who for Thirty Days Was Dictator of the World._ THE EARTHMAN'S BURDEN R. F. STARZL 375 _There is Foul Play on Mercury--until Danny Olear of the Interplanetary Flying Police Gets After His Man._ THE EXILE OF TIME RAY CUMMINGS 386 _Larry and George from 1935, Mary from 1777--All Are Caught up in the Treacherous Tugh's Revolt of the Robots in the Time World of 2930._ (Part Three of a Four-Part Novel.) THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 416 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ * * * * * Single Copies, 20 Cents In Canada, 25 Cents Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by The Clayton Magazines, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group. For advertising rates address The Newsstand Group, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York; or The Wrigley Bldg., Chicago. * * * * * The Man From 2071 _By Sewell Peaslee Wright_ [Illustration: _He clutched at the gangway--and fell._] [Sidenote: Out of the flow of time there appears to Commander John Hanson a man of mystery from the forgotten past.] Perhaps this story does not belong with my other tales of the Special Patrol Service. And yet, there is, or should be, a report somewhere in the musty archives of the Service, covering the incident. Not accurately, and not in detail. Among a great mass of old records which I was browsing through the other day, I happened across that report; it occupied exactly three lines in the log-book of the _Ertak_: "Just before departure, discovered stowaway, apparently demented, and ejected him." For the hard-headed higher-ups of the Service, that was report enough. Had I given the facts, they would have called me to the Base for a long-winded investigation. It would have taken weeks and weeks, filled with fussy questioning. Dozens of stoop-shouldered laboratory men would have prodded and snooped and asked for long, written accounts. In those days, keeping the log-book was writing enough for me and being grounded at Base for weeks would have been punishment. Nothing would have been gained by a detailed report. The Service needed action rather than reports, anyway. But now that I am an old man, on the retired list, I have time to write; and it will be a particular pleasure to write this account, for it will go to prove that these much-honored scientists of ours, with all their tremendous appropriations and long-winded discussions, are not nearly so wonderful as they think they are. They are, and always have been, too much interested in abstract formulas, and not enough in their practical application. I have never had a great deal of use for them. * * * * * I had received orders to report to Earth, regarding a dull routine matter of reorganizing the emergency Base which had been established there. Earth, I might add, for the benefit of those of you who have forgotten your geography of the Universe, is not a large body, but its people furnish almost all of the officer personnel of the Special Patrol Service. Being a native of Earth, I received the assignment with considerable pleasure, despite its dry and uninteresting nature. It was a good sight to see old Earth, bundled up in her cottony clouds, growing larger and larger in the television disc. No matter how much you wander around the Universe, no matter how small and insignificant the world of your birth, there is a tie that cannot be denied. I have set my ships down upon many a strange and unknown world, with danger and adventure awaiting me, but there is, for me, no thrill which quite duplicates that of viewing again that particular little ball of mud from whence I sprang. I've said that before; I shall probably say it again. I am proud to claim Earth as my birth-place, small and out-of-the way as she is. Our Base on Earth was adjacent to the city of Greater Denver, on the Pacific Coast. I could not help wondering, as we settled swiftly over the city, whether our historians and geologists and other scientists were really right in saying that Denver had at one period been far from the Pacific. It seemed impossible, as I gazed down on that blue, tranquil sea, that it had engulfed, hundreds of years ago, such a vast portion of North America. But I suppose the men of science know. * * * * * I need not go into the routine business that brought me to Earth. Suffice it to say that it was settled quickly, by the afternoon of the second day: I am referring, of course, to Earth days, which are slightly less than half the length of an enaren of Universe time. A number of my friends had come to meet me, visit with me during my brief stay on Earth; and, having finished my business with such dispatch, I decided to spend that evening with them, and leave the following morning. It was very late when my friends departed, and I strolled out with them to their mono-car, returning the salute of the _Ertak's_ lone sentry, who was pacing his post before the huge circular exit of the ship. Bidding my friends farewell, I stood there for a moment under the heavens, brilliant with blue, cold stars, and watched the car sweep swiftly and soundlessly away towards the towering mass of the city. Then, with a little sigh, I turned back to the ship. The _Ertak_ lay lightly upon the earth, her polished sides gleaming in the light of the crescent moon. In the side toward me, the circular entrance gaped like a sleepy mouth; the sentry, knowing the eyes of his commander were upon him, strode back and forth with brisk, military precision. Slowly, still thinking of my friends, I made my way toward the ship. I had taken but a few steps when the sentry's challenge rang out sharply, "Halt! Who goes there?" I glanced up in surprise. Shiro, the man on guard, had seen me leave, and he could have had no difficulty in recognizing me. But--the challenge had not been meant for me. * * * * * Between myself and the _Ertak_ there stood a strange figure. An instant before, I would have sworn that there was no human in sight, save myself and the sentry; now this man stood not twenty feet away, swaying as though ill or terribly weary, barely able to lift his head and turn it toward the sentry. "Friend," he gasped; "friend!" and I think he would have fallen to the ground if I had not clapped an arm around his shoulders and supported him. "Just ... a moment," whispered the stranger. "I'm a bit faint.... I'll be all right...." I stared down at the man, unable to reply. This was a nightmare; no less. I could feel the sentry staring, too. The man was dressed in a style so ancient that I could not remember the period: Twenty-first Century, at least; perhaps earlier. And while he spoke English, which is a language of Earth, he spoke it with a harsh and unpleasant accent that made his words difficult, almost impossible, to understand. Their meaning did not fully sink in until an instant after he had finished speaking. "Shiro!" I said sharply. "Help me take this man inside. He's ill." "Yes, sir!" The guard leaped to obey the order, and together we led him into the _Ertak_, and to my own stateroom. There was some mystery here, and I was eager to get at the root of it. The man with the ancient costume and the strange accent had not come to the spot where we had seen him by any means with which I was familiar; he had materialized out of the thin air. There was no other way to account for his presence. * * * * * We propped the stranger in my most comfortable chair, and I turned to the sentry. He was staring at our weird visitor with wondering, fearful eyes, and when I spoke he started as though stung by an electric shock. "Very well," I said briskly. "That will be all. Resume your post immediately. And--Shiro!" "Yes, sir?" "It will not be necessary for you to make a report of this incident. I will attend to that. Understand?" "Yes, sir!" And I think it is to the man's everlasting credit, and to the credit of the Service which had trained him, that he executed a snappy salute, did an about-face, and left the room without another glance at the man slumped down in my big easy chair. With a feeling of cold, nervous apprehension such as I have seldom experienced in a rather varied and active life, I turned then to my visitor. He had not moved, save to lift his head. He was staring at me, his eyes fixed in his chalky white face. They were dark, long eyes--abnormally long--and they glittered with a strange, uncanny light. "You are feeling better?" I asked. His thin, bloodless lips moved, but for a moment no sound came from them. He tried again. "Water," he said. I drew him a glass from the tank in the wall of my room. He downed it at a gulp, and passed the empty glass back to me. "More," he whispered. He drank the second glass more slowly, his eyes darting swiftly, curiously, around the room. Then his brilliant, piercing glance fell upon my face. "Tell me," he commanded sharply, "what year is this?" * * * * * I stared at him. It occurred to me that my friends might have conceived and executed an elaborate hoax--and then I dismissed the idea, instantly. There were no scientists among them who could make a man materialize out of nothingness. "Are you in your right mind?" I asked slowly. "Your question strikes me as damnably odd, sir." The man laughed wildly, and slowly straightened up in the chair. His long, bony fingers clasped and unclasped slowly, as though feeling were just returning to them. "Your question," he replied in his odd, unfamiliar accent, "is not unnatural, under the circumstances. I assure you that I am of sound mind; of very sound mind." He smiled, rather a ghastly smile, and made a vague, slight gesture with one hand. "Will you be good enough to answer my question? What year is this?" "Earth year, you mean?" He stared at me, his eyes flickering. "Yes," he said. "Earth year. There are other ways of ... figuring time now?" "Certainly. Each inhabited world has its own system. There is a master system for the Universe. Who are you, what are you, that you should ask me a question the smallest child should know?" "First," he insisted, "tell me what year this is, Earth reckoning." I told him, and the light flickered up in his eyes again--a cruel, triumphant light. "Thank you," he nodded; and then, slowly and softly, as though he spoke to himself, he added, "Less than half a century off. Less than a half a century! And they laughed at me. How--how I shall laugh at them, presently!" "You choose to be mysterious, sir?" I asked impatiently. "No. Presently you shall understand, and then you will forgive me, I know. I have come through an experience such as no man has ever known before. If I am shaken, weak, surprising to you, it is because of that experience." * * * * * He paused for a moment, his long, powerful fingers gripping the arms of the chair. "You see," he added, "I have come out of the past into the present. Or from the present into the future. It depends upon one's viewpoint. If I am distraught, then forgive me. A few minutes ago, I was Jacob Harbauer, in a little laboratory on the edge of a mountain park, near Denver; now I am a nameless being hurtled into the future, pausing here, many centuries from my own era. Do you wonder now that I am unnerved?" "Do you mean," I said slowly, trying to understand what he had babbled forth, "that you have come out of the past? That you ... that you...." It was too monstrous to put into words. "I mean," he replied, "that I was born in the year 2028. I am forty-three years old--or I was a few minutes ago. But,"--and his eyes flickered again with that strange, mad light--"I am a scientist! I have left my age behind me for a time; I have done what no other human being has ever done: I have gone centuries into the future!" "I--I do not understand." Could he, after all, be a madman? "How can a man leave his own age and travel ahead to another?" "Even in this age of yours they have not discovered that secret?" Harbauer exulted. "You travel the Universe, I gather, and yet your scientists have not yet learned to move in time? Listen! Let me explain to you how simple the theory is. * * * * * "I take it you are an intelligent man; your uniform and its insignia would seem to indicate a degree of rank. Am I correct?" "I am John Hanson, Commander of the _Ertak_, of the Special Patrol Service," I informed him. "Then you will be capable of grasping, in part at least, what I have to tell you. It is really not so complex. Time is a river, flowing steadily, powerful, at a fixed rate of speed. It sweeps the whole Universe along on its bosom at that same speed. That is my conception of it; is it clear to you?" "I should think," I replied, "that the Universe is more like a great rock in the middle of your stream of time, that stands motionless while the minutes, the hours, and the days roll by." "No! The Universe travels on the breast of the current of time. It leaves yesterday behind, and sweeps on towards to-morrow. It has always been so until I challenged this so-called immutable law. I said to myself, why should a man be a helpless stick upon the stream of time? Why need he be borne on this slow current at the same speed? Why cannot he do as a man in a boat, paddle backwards or forwards; back to a point already passed; ahead, faster than the current, to a point that, drifting, he would not reach so soon? In other words, why can he not slip back through time to yesterday; or ahead to to-morrow? And if to to-morrow, why not to next year, next century? * * * * * "These are the questions I asked myself. Other men have asked themselves the same questions, I know; they were not new. But,"--Harbauer drew himself far forward in his chair, and leaned close to me, almost as though he prepared himself to spring--"no other man ever found the answer! That remained for me. "I was not entirely correct, of course. I found that one could not go back in time. The current was against one. But to go ahead, with the current at one's back, was different. I spent six years on the problem, working day and night, handicapped by lack of funds, ridiculed by the press--Look!" Harbauer reached inside his antiquated costume and drew forth a flat packet which he passed to me. I unfolded it curiously, my fingers clumsy with excitement. I could hardly believe my eyes. The thing Harbauer had handed me was a folded fragment of newspaper, such as I had often seen in museums. I recognized the old-fashioned type, and the peculiar arrangement of the columns. But, instead of being yellow and brittle with age, and preserved in fragments behind sealed glass, this paper was fresh and white, and the ink was as black as the day it had been printed. What this man said, then, must be true! He must-- "I can understand your amazement," said Harbauer. "It had not occurred to me that a paper which, to me, was printed only yesterday, would seem so antique to you. But that must appear as remarkable to you as fresh papyrus, newly inscribed with the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians, would seem to one of my own day and age. But read it; you will see how my world viewed my efforts!" There was a sharpness, a bitterness, in his voice that made me vaguely uneasy; even though he had solved the riddle of moving in time as men have always moved in space, my first conjecture that I had a madman to deal with might not be so far from the truth. Ridicule and persecution have unseated the reason of all too many men. * * * * * The type was unfamiliar to me, and the spelling was archaic, but I managed to stumble through the article. It read, as nearly as I can recall it, like this: Harbauer Says Time Is Like Great River Jacob Harbauer, local inventor, in an exclusive interview, propounds the theory that man can move about in time exactly as a boat moves about on the surface of a swift-flowing river, save that he cannot go back into time, on account of the opposition of the current. That is very fortunate, this writer feels; it would be a terrible thing for example, if some good-looking scamp from our present Twenty-first Century were to dive into the past and steal Cleopatra from Antony, or start an affair with Josephine and send Napoleon scurrying back from the front and let the Napoleonic wars go to pot. We'd have to have all our histories rewritten! Harbauer is well-known in Denver as the eccentric inventor who, for the last five or six years, has occupied a lonely shack in the mountains, guarded by a high fence of barbed wire. He claims that he has now perfected equipment which will enable him to project himself forward in time, and expects to make the experiment in the very near future. This writer was permitted to view the equipment which Harbauer says will shoot him into the future. The apparatus is housed in a low, barn-like building in the rear of his shack. Along one side of the room is a veritable bank of electrical apparatus with innumerable controls, many huge tubes of unfamiliar shape and appearance, a mighty generator of some kind and an intricate maze of gleaming copper bus-bar. In the center of the room is a circle of metal, about a foot in thickness, insulated from the flooring by four truncated cones of fluted glass. This disc is composed of two unfamiliar metals, arranged in concentric circles. Above this disc, at a height of about eight feet, is suspended a sort of grid, composed of extremely fine silvery wires, supported on a frame-work of black insulating material. Asked for a demonstration of his apparatus, Harbauer finally consented to perform an experiment with a dog--a white, short-haired mongrel that, Harbauer informed us, he kept to warn him of approaching strangers. He bound the dog's legs together securely, and placed the struggling animal in the center of the heavy metal disc. Then the inventor hurried to the central control panel and manipulated several switches, which caused a number of things to happen almost at once. The big generator started with a growl, and settled immediately into a deep hum; a whole row of tubes glowed with a purplish brilliancy. There was a crackling sound in the air, and the grid above the disc seemed to become incandescent, although it gave forth no apparent heat. From the rim of the metal disc, thin blue streamers of electric flame shot up toward the grid, and the little white dog began to whine nervously. "Now watch!" shouted Harbauer. He closed another switch, and the space between the disc and the grid became a cylinder of livid light, for a period of perhaps two seconds. Then Harbauer pulled all the switches, and pointed triumphantly to the disc. It was empty. We looked around the room for the dog, but he was not visible anywhere. "I have sent him nearly a century into the future," said Harbauer. "We will let him stay there a moment, and then bring him back." "You mean to say," we asked, "that the pup is now roaming around somewhere in the Twenty-second Century?" Harbauer said he meant just that, and added that he would now bring the dog back to the present time. The switches were closed again, but this time it was the metal plate that seemed incandescent, and the grid above that shot out the streaks of thin blue flame. As he closed the last switch, the cylinder of light appeared again, and when the switches were opened, there was the dog in the center of the disc, howling and struggling against his bonds. "Look!" cried Harbauer. "He's been attacked by another dog, or some other animal, while in the future. See the blood on his shoulders?" We ventured the humble opinion that the dog had scratched or bit himself in struggling to free himself from the cords with which Harbauer had bound him, and the inventor flew into a terrible rage, cursing and waving his arms as though demented. Feeling that discretion was the better part of valor, we beat a hasty retreat, pausing at the barbed-wire gate only long enough to ask Mr. Harbauer if he would be good enough, sometime when he had a few minutes of leisure, to dash into next week and bring back some stock market reports to aid us in our investment efforts. Under the circumstances, we did not wait for a response, but we presume we are persona non grata at the Harbauer establishment from this time on. All in all, we are not sorry. I folded the paper and passed it back to him; some of the allusions I did not understand, but the general tone of the article was very clear indeed. * * * * * "You see?" said Harbauer, his voice grating with anger. "I tried to be courteous to that man; to give him a simple, convincing demonstration of the greatest scientific achievement in centuries. And the fool returned to write _this_: to hold me up to ridicule, to paint me as a crack-brained, wild-eyed fanatic." "It's hard for the layman to conceive of a great scientific achievement," I said soothingly. "All great inventions and inventors have been laughed at by the populace at large." "True. True." Harbauer nodded his head solemnly. "But just the same--" He broke off suddenly, and forced a smile. I found myself wishing that he had completed that broken sentence, however; I felt that he had almost revealed something that would have been most enlightening. "But enough of that fool and his babblings," he continued. "I am here as living proof that my experiment is a success, and I have a tremendous curiosity about the world in which I find myself. This, I take it, is a ship for navigating space?" "Right! The _Ertak_, of the Special Patrol Service. Would you care to look around a bit?" "I would, indeed." There was a tremendous eagerness in the man's voice. "You're not too tired?" "No; I am quite recovered from my experience." Harbauer leaped to his feet, those abnormally long, slitted eyes of his glowing. "I am a scientist, and I am most curious to see what my fellows have created since--since my own era." I picked up my dressing gown and tossed it to him. "Slip this on, then, to cover your clothing. You would be an object of too much curiosity to those men who are on duty," I suggested. I was taller than he, and the garment came within a few inches of the floor. He knotted the cincture around his middle and thrust his hands into the pockets, turning to me for approval. I nodded, and motioned for him to precede me through the door. * * * * * As an officer of the Special Patrol Service, it has often been my duty to show parties and individuals through my ship. Most of these parties are composed of females, who have only exclamations to make instead of intelligent comment, and who possess an unbounded capacity for asking utterly asinine questions. It was, therefore, a real pleasure to show Harbauer through the ship. He was a keen, eager listener. When he asked a question, and he asked many of them, he showed an amazing grasp of the principles involved. My knowledge of our equipment was, of course, only practical, save for the rudimentary theoretical knowledge that everyone has of present-day inventions and devices. The ethon tubes which lighted the ship, interested him but little. The atomic generators, the gravity pads, their generators, and the disintegrator-ray, however, he delved into with that frenzied ardor of which only a scientist, I believe, is capable. Questions poured out of him, and I answered them as best I could: sometimes completely, and satisfactorily, so that he nodded and said, "I see! I see!" and sometimes so poorly that he frowned, and cross-questioned me insistently until he obtained the desired information. In the big, sound-proof navigating room, I explained the operation of the numerous instruments, including the two three-dimensional charts, actuated by super-radio reflexes, the television disc, the attraction meter, the surface-temperature gauge and the complex control system. "Forward," I added, "is the operating room. You can see it through these glass partitions. The navigating officer in command relays his orders to men in the operating room, who attend to the actual execution of those orders." "Just as a pilot, or the navigating officer of a ship of my day gives his orders to the quartermaster at the wheel," nodded Harbauer, and began firing questions at me again, going over the ground we had covered, to check up on his information. I was amazed at the uncanny accuracy with which he had grasped such a great mass of technical detail. It had taken me years of study to pick up what he had taken from me, and apparently retained intact, in something more than an hour, Earth time. * * * * * I glanced at the Earth-time clock on the wall of the navigating room as he triumphantly finished his questioning. Less than an hour remained before the time set for our return trip. "I'm sorry," I commented, "to be an ungracious host, but I am wondering what your plans may be? You see, we are due to start in less than an hour, and--" "A passenger would be in your way?" Harbauer smiled as he uttered the words, but there was a gleam in his long eyes that rather startled me, and I wondered if I only imagined the steeliness of his voice. "Don't let that worry you, sir." "It's not worrying me," I replied, watching him closely. "I have enjoyed a very remarkable, a very pleasant experience. If you should care to remain aboard the _Ertak_, I should like exceedingly to have you accompany us to our Base, where I could place you in touch with other laboratory men, with whom you would have much in common." Harbauer threw back his head and laughed--not pleasantly. "Thanks!" he said. "But I have no time for that. They could give me no knowledge that I need, now; you have told me and showed me enough. I understand how you have released atomic energy; it is a matter so simple that a child should have guessed it, and man has wondered about it for centuries, knowing that the power was there, but lacking a key to unfetter it. And now I have that key!" "True. But perhaps our scientists would like, in exchange, the secret of moving forward in time," I suggested, reasonably enough. "What do I care about them?" snapped Harbauer. He loosened the cord of the robe with a quick, impatient gesture, as though it confined him too tightly, and threw the garment from him. * * * * * Then, suddenly, he took a quick stride toward me, and thrust out his ugly head. "I know enough now to give me power over all my world," he cried. "Haven't you guessed the reason for my interest in your engines of destruction? I came down the centuries ahead of my generation so that I might come back with power in my hand; power to wipe out the fools who have made a mock of me. And I have that power--here!" He tapped his forehead dramatically with his left hand. "I will bring a new regime to my era!" he continued, fairly shouting now. "I will be what many men have tried to be, and what no man has ever been--master of the world! Absolute, unquestioned, supreme master!" He paused, his eyes glaring into mine--and I knew from the light that shone behind those long, narrow slits, that I was dealing with a madman. "True; you will," I said gently, moving carelessly toward the microphone. With that in my hand, a slight pressure on the General Attention signal, and I would have the whole crew of the _Ertak_ here in a moment. But I had explained the workings of the navigating room's equipment only too well. "Stop!" snarled Harbauer, and his right hand flashed up. "See this? Perhaps you don't know what it is; I'll tell you. It's an automatic pistol--not so efficient as your disintegrator-ray, but deadly enough. There is certain death for eight men in my hand. Understand?" "Perfectly." What an utter fool I had been! I was not armed, and I knew that Harbauer spoke the truth. I had often seen weapons similar to the one he held in the military museums. They are still there, if you are curious--rusty and broken, but not unlike our present atomic pistols in general appearance. They propelled the bullet by the explosion of a sort of powder; inefficient, of course, but, as he had said, deadly enough for the purpose. * * * * * "Good! You are a good sort Hanson, but don't take any chances. I'm not going to, I promise you. You see,"--and he laughed again, the light in his long eyes dancing with evil--"I'm not likely to be punished for a few killings committed centuries after I'm dead. I have never killed a man, but I won't hesitate to do so now, if one--or more--should get in my way." "But why," I asked soothingly, "should you wish to kill anyone? You have what you came for, you say; why not depart in peace?" He smiled crookedly, and his eyes narrowed with cunning. "You approve of my little plan to dominate the world?" he asked softly, his eyes searching my face. "No," I said boldly, refusing to lie to him. "I do not, and you know it." "Very true." He pulled out his watch with his left hand, and held it before his eyes so that he could observe the time without losing sight of me for even an instant. "I doubted that I could secure your willing cooperation; therefore, I am commanding it. "You see, there are certain instruments and pieces of equipment that I should like to take back to my laboratory with me. Perhaps I would be able to reproduce them without models, but with the models my task will be much easier. "The question remaining is a simple one: will you give the proper orders to have this equipment removed to the spot where you first saw me, or shall I be obliged to return to my own era without this equipment--leaving behind me a dead commander of the Special Patrol Service, and any other who may try to stop me?" * * * * * I tried to keep cool under the lash of his mocking voice. I have never been adept at holding my temper when I should, but somehow I managed it this time. Frowning, I kept him waiting for a reply, utilizing the time to do what was perhaps the hardest, fastest thinking of my life. There wasn't a particle of doubt in my mind regarding his ability to make good his threat, nor his readiness to do so. I caught the faint glimmering of an idea and fenced with it eagerly. "How are you going to go back to your own period--your own era?" I asked him. "You told me, I believe, that it was impossible to move backward in time." "That's not answering my question," he said, leering. "Don't think you're fooling me! But I'll tell you, just the same. I can go back to my own era: that is, back to my own actual existence. I shall return just two hours after I leave; I could not go back farther than that, and it's not necessary that I do so. I can go back only because I came from that present; I am not really of this future at all. I go back from whence I came." "But," I objected, thinking of something I had read in the clipping he had showed me, "you're not going back to your own era. You cannot. If you returned, you would put your project into execution, and history does not record that activity." I saw from the sudden narrowing of his abnormally long eyes that I had caught his interest, and I pressed my advantage hastily. "Remember that all the history of your time is written, Harbauer. It is in the books of Earth's history, with which every child of this age, into which you have thrust yourself, is familiar. And those histories do not record the domination of the world by yourself. So--you are confronted by an impossibility!" * * * * * My reasoning, now, sounds specious, and yet it was a line of thought which could not be waved aside. I saw Harbauer's black brows knit together, and mounting anger darken his face. I do not know, but I believe I was never nearer death than I was at that instant. "Fool!" he cried. "Idiot! Imbecile! Do you think you can confuse me, turn me from my purpose, with words? Do you? Do you believe me to be a child, or a weakling? I tell you, I have planned this thing to the last detail. If I had not found what I sought on this first trip, I would have taken another, a dozen, a score, until I found the information I sought. The last six years of my life I have worked day and night to this end; your histories and your words--" My plan had worked. The man was beside himself with insane anger. And in his rage he forgot, for an instant, that he was my captor. Taking a desperate chance, I launched myself at his legs. His weapon roared over my head, just as I struck. I felt the hot gas from the thing beat against my neck; I caught the reeking scent of the smoke. Then we were both on the floor, and locked in a mad embrace. Harbauer was a smaller man than myself, but he had the amazing strength of a Zenian. He fought viciously, using every ounce of his strength against me, striving to bring his weapon into use, hammering my head upon the floor, racking my body mercilessly, grunting, cursing, mumbling constantly as he did so. But I was in better trim than Harbauer. I have never seen a laboratory man who could stand the strain of prolonged physical exertion. Bending over test-tubes and meters is no life for a man. At grips with him, I was in my own element, and he was out of his. I let him wear himself out, exerting myself as little as possible, confining my efforts to keeping his weapon where he could not use it. I felt him weakening at last. His breath was coming in great sobs, and his long eyes started from their sockets with the strained effort he was putting forth. And then, with a single mighty effort, I knocked the pistol from his hand, so that it slid across the floor and brought up with a crash against a wall of the room. "Now!" I said, and turned on him. * * * * * He knew, at that moment when I put forth my strength, that I had been playing with him. I read the shock of sudden fear in his eyes. My right arm went about him in a deadly hold; I had him in a grip that paralyzed him. Grimly, I jerked him to his feet, and he stood there trembling with weakness, his shoulders heaving as his breath came and went between his teeth. "You realize, of course, that you're not going back?" I said quietly. "Back?" Half dazed, he stared at me through the quivering lids of his peculiar eyes. "What do you mean?" "I mean that you're not going back to your own era. You have come to us, uninvited, and--you're going to stay here." "No!" he shouted, and struggled so desperately to free himself that I was hard put to it to hold him, without tightening my grip sufficiently to dislocate his shoulders. "You wouldn't do that! I must return; I must prove to them--" "That's exactly what must not happen, and what shall not happen," I interrupted. "And what will not happen. You are in a strange predicament, Harbauer; it is already written that you do not return. Can't you see that, man? If it were to be that you left this age and returned to your own, you would make known your discovery. History would record it. And history does not record it. You are struggling, not against me, but against--against a fate that has been sealed all these centuries." * * * * * When I had finished, he stared at me as though hypnotized, motionless and limp in my grasp. Then, suddenly, he began to shake and I saw such depths of terror and horror in his eyes as I hope never to see again. Mechanically, he glanced down at his watch, lifting his wrist into his line of vision as slowly and ponderously as though it bore a great weight. "Two ... two minutes," he whispered huskily. "Then the automatic switch will close, back in my laboratory. If I am not standing where ... where you found me ... between the disc and the grid of my time machine, where the reversed energy can reach me, to ... to take me back ... God!" He sagged in my arms and dropped to his knees, sobbing. "And yet ... what you say is true. It is already written that I did not return." His sobs cut harshly through the silence of the room. Pitying his despair, I reached down to give him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. It is a terrible thing to see a man break down as Harbauer had done. As he felt my grip on him relax, he suddenly shot his fist into the pit of my stomach, and leaped to his feet. Groaning, I doubled up, weak and nerveless, for the instant, from the vicious, unexpected blow. "Ah!" shrieked Harbauer. "You soft-hearted fool!" He struck me in the face, sending me crashing to the floor, and snatched up his pistol. "I'm going, now," he shouted. "Going! What do I care for your records and your histories? They are not yet written; if they were I'd change them." He bent over me and snatched from my hand the ring of keys, one of which I had used to unlock the door of the navigating room. I tried to grip him around the legs, but he tore himself loose, laughing insanely in a high-pitched, cackling sound that seemed hardly human. "Farewell!" he called mockingly from the doorway. Then the door slammed, and as I staggered to my feet, I heard the lock click. * * * * * I must have acted then by instinct or inspiration. There was no time to think. It would take him not more than three or four seconds to make his way to the exit, stroll by the guard to the spot where we had found him, and--disappear. By the time I could arouse the crew, and have my orders executed, his time would be up, and--unless the whole affair were some terrible nightmare--he would go hurtling back through time to his own era, armed with a devastating knowledge. There was only one possible means of preventing his escape in time. I ran across the room to the emergency operating controls, cut in the atomic generators with one hand and pulled the Vertical-Ascent lever to Full Power. There was a sudden shriek of air, and my legs almost thrust themselves through my body. Quickly, I pushed the lever back until, with my eye on the altimeter, I held the _Ertak_ at her attained height--something over a mile, as I recall it. Then I pressed the General Attention signal, and snatched up the microphone. Less than a minute later Correy and Hendricks, fellow officers, were in the room and besieging me with solicitous questions. * * * * * It had been my idea, of course, to keep Harbauer from leaving the ship, but it was not so destined. Shiro, the sentry on duty outside the _Ertak_, was the only witness to Harbauer's fate. "I was walking my post, sir," he reported, "watching the sun come up, when suddenly I heard the sound of running feet inside the ship. I turned towards the entrance and drew my pistol, to be in readiness. I saw the stranger we had taken into the ship appear at the exit, which, as you know, was open. "Just as I opened my mouth to command him to halt, the _Ertak_ shot up from the ground at terrific speed. The stranger had been about to leap upon me; indeed, he had discharged some sort of weapon at me, for I heard a crash of sound, and a missile of some kind, as you know, passed through my left arm. "As the ship left the ground, he tried to draw back, but he was off balance, and the inertia of his body momentarily incapacitated him, I think. He slipped, clutched at the gangway across the threads which seal the exit, and then, at a height I estimate to be around five hundred feet, he fell. The _Ertak_ shot on up until it was lost to sight, and the stranger crashed to the ground a few feet from where I was standing--on almost exactly the spot where we first saw him, sir. * * * * * "And now, sir, comes the part I guess you'll find hard to believe. When he struck the ground, he was smashed flat; he died instantly. I started to run toward him, and then--and then I stopped. My eyes had not left the spot for a moment, sir, but he--his body, that is--suddenly disappeared. That's the truth, sir, for I saw it with my own eyes. There wasn't a sign of him left." "I see," I replied. I believe that I did. We had gone straight up, and his body, by no great coincidence, had fallen upon the spot close to the exit of the _Ertak_ where we had first found him. And his machine, in operation, had brought him, or rather, his mangled body, back to his own age. "You have not mentioned this affair to anyone, Shiro?" "No, sir. It wasn't anything you'd be likely to tell: nobody would believe you. I went at once to have my arm attended to, and then reported here according to orders." "Very good, Shiro. Keep the entire affair to yourself. I will make all the necessary reports. That is an order--understand?" "Yes, sir." "Then that will be all. Take good care of your arm." He saluted with his good hand and left me. * * * * * Later in the day I wrote in the log-book of the Ertak the report I mentioned at the beginning of this tale: "Just before departure, discovered stowaway, apparently demented, and ejected him." That was a perfectly truthful statement, and it served its purpose. I have given the whole story in detail just to prove what I have so often contended: that these owlish laboratory men whom this age reveres so much are not nearly so wise and omnipotent as they think they are. I am quite sure that they would have discredited, or attempted to discredit, my story, had I told it at the time. They would have resented the idea that someone so much ahead of them had discovered a principle that still baffles this age of ours, and I would have had no evidence to present. Perhaps even now the story will be discredited; if so, I do not care. I am much too old, and too near the portals of that impenetrable mystery, in the shadow of which I have stood so many times, to concern myself with what others may think or say. I know that what I have related here is the truth, and in my mind I have a vivid and rather pitiful picture of a mangled body, bloody and alone, in the barn-like structure the ancient paper had described; a body, broken and motionless, lying athwart the striated metal disc, like a sacrificial victim--a victim and a sacrifice of science. There have been many such. Manape the Mighty A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By Arthur J. Burks_ CHAPTER I _Castaway_ [Illustration: _There, the words were written._] [Sidenote: High in jungle treetops swings young Bentley--his human brain imprisoned in a mighty ape.] Lee Bentley never knew how many others, if any, lived on after the _Bengal Queen_ struck the hidden reef and sank like a stone. He had only a hazy memory of the catastrophe, and recalled that when she had struck and the alarm had gone rocketing through the great passenger boat--though no alarm was really necessary because she went to pieces so fast--that he had leaped far over the rail and swam straight out, fast, in order to escape being dragged down by the suction of the sinking liner. The screaming of frightened women and children would ring in his ears until the day the grave closed over him--screaming that was made all the more terrible by the crashing roar of the raging black seas which came out of the darkness to make the affair all the more hideous, and to bear down beneath them into the sea the feeble struggling ones who had no chance for their lives. Lifeboats had been smashed in their davits. Bentley swam straight away after he was satisfied at last that he could do nothing more. He had helped men and women reach bits of wreckage until he could scarcely any longer keep his wearied arms to the task of keeping his own head above water. He knew even as he helped the white-faced ones that few of them would ever live through it, but he was doing the best he knew--a man's job. When absolutely sure that he could do nothing further, when he could no longer hear cries of distress, or discover struggling forms in the sea which he might aid, he had turned his back on the graveyard of the _Bengal Queen_ and had struck for shore. He remembered the direction, for before sunset that evening, in company with several ship's under officers, he had studied the navigation charts upon which each day's run of the _Bengal Queen_ was shown. Ahead of him now was the coast of Africa, though what part of it he knew but in the haziest way. He might not guess within a hundred miles. * * * * * One thing only he remembered exactly. The second officer had said, apropos of nothing in particular: "This wouldn't be a happy place to be shipwrecked. This section of the coast is a regular hangout of the great anthropoid apes. You know, those babies that can pick a man apart as a man would pluck the legs off a fly." Bentley had merely grinned. The second officer's remarks had sounded to him as though the fellow had been reading more than his fair share of lurid fiction of the South African jungles. However, apes or no apes, the shore would look good to Lee Bentley now. And he fully intended making it. He knew he could swim for hours if it became necessary, and he refused to think of the possibility of sharks. If one got him, well, that was one of the chances one had to take when one was shipwrecked against one's will. So he alternately swam toward where he expected to find land, and floated on his back to rest. "A swell ending to a great life, if I don't make it," he told himself. "I wonder how the old man will take it when the world reads that the _Bengal Queen_ went down with all on board? He'll be relieved, maybe, for he was about ready to wash his hands of me if I can read signs at all." * * * * * It might be said that Bentley was his own worst critic, for he really was not a bad sort of a fellow. He was a good American, over-educated perhaps, with a yen to delve into forbidden places usually avoided by his own kind, and of digging into books which were better left with the pages unturned. There were strange ruins in Africa, he knew. He had gathered a weird fund of information from such books as he could unearth relative to ancient ruins and vanished races, to the lurid accounts of strange deaths of the various scientists who had taken active part in the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen. There were queer things in the heart of darkest Africa, and such things intrigued him. He could take whatever chances with his life he saw fit, for his only relative was a father, and he had never attached himself to any woman nor permitted any woman to attach herself to him--because he could never be sure that her interest might not primarily be in his bank account. "If, as, and when," he told himself as he rode the waves through the night, "I reach the coast I'll be tossed into black Africa in a way I was not expecting. Anyway, if I live through, I can at least go about my work without the governor interfering. I only hope it won't be hard on the old fellow. He isn't a bad egg at all, and I guess I have given him plenty to think about and worry over." He turned on his stomach again and struck out. He had managed to rid himself of all of his clothing except his underwear. They had only weighed him down, and he recalled, with a wry grin, that Africa as a whole went in but little for the latest in men's sport wear. * * * * * It must have been a good hour since he had lost the _Bengal Queen_ back there in the raging deep, that he heard the faint call through the murk. "Help, for God's sake!" He listened for a repetition of the call, minded to believe that his ears had tricked him. He fancied it had been a woman's voice, but no woman could have lived so long in those raging seas, in which any moment Bentley himself expected to be overwhelmed. For himself he regarded death more or less philosophically, but a woman out there, crying for help, was a different matter entirely. It tore at his heartstrings, mostly because he realized his inability to be of material assistance. He was sure that he had been mistaken about the cry, when it came again. "For God's sake, help!" It came from his left and this time it was unmistakable, piteous and unnerving. Lee Bentley had the horrible fear that he would never reach her in time to help--though what help he could give, when he could barely manage to keep himself afloat, he could not forsee. He was swimming down the side of a monster wave. He could see something white in the trough, and he struggled manfully to make headway, while the angry waters tossed him about like a bit of cork and seemed bent on defeating his most furious efforts. He saw the bit of white ride high on the next wave, pass over it and vanish. He dived straight through the wave as it towered over him. He came up, gasping, his hands all but clutching at a pair of hands that reached out of the waters and grasped with a last desperate effort at the sky. Ahead of the hands was a broken piece of oar. Those hands had just despairingly relinquished their grip on the one chance of safety, if any chance there could possibly be in that mad midnight waste. He pulled on the wrists and a white face came to view. Wild, staring eyes looked into his. Black hair flowed back from a face whose lips were blue and thin. "Take it easy," he counseled. "Turn on your back and rest while I see if I can get back your life-boat." * * * * * He captured the oar, and found it practically useless to sustain any appreciable weight, but he clung to it because it was at least better than nothing at all. It had held the girl afloat for over an hour and might be made to serve again somehow. With his left hand under the woman's head and his right grasping the oar he turned on his back to regain his breath. He was deep in the water because the woman was now almost on top of him; but her face was above water. He knew instinctively that she had fainted, and he was a little glad. If she were the usual hysterical woman her fighting would drown them both. As a dead weight she was easier to handle. They drifted on, and hope began to mount high in the heart of Lee Bentley--the hope that they might yet reach land. When, hours later, he could hear the roaring of breakers he was sure of it--if the breakers could be passed in safety. After that their fate was in the lap of the gods. The girl too must have heard, for she turned at last in Bentley's arms and began to swim for herself. She was a strong swimmer and the period during which she had been out of things had revived her amazingly. She even managed a smile as she swam beside Bentley into the creamy breakers behind which they could make out the blackness of shore. They were so close together that at times their hands touched as they swam, and could make themselves heard by dint of shouting, though they both husbanded their strength and their breathing for swimming. "I'm not dressed for company," he told her. "I left my tuxedo aboard the _Bengal Queen_!" It was then that her lips twisted into a smile. "I wouldn't even allow my maid into my stateroom if I were dressed as I am at the moment," she answered strongly, "but we're both grown up I think, and there are times when conventions go by the board. We'll pretend it doesn't matter!" Then mutually helping each other they fought through the breakers into the calmer water behind, and managed at last to stand in water hip deep, with the undertow dragging at their limbs. They looked at each other and clasped hands without a word. They strode to the sandy beach beyond which the jungle reached away to some invisible horizon, and continued on until they were at last beyond the reach of the waves. * * * * * They did not look at each other again, though Bentley did notice that her garb was as scanty almost as his own, consisting mostly of a slip which the water had pasted fast against her flesh. Beyond noting that she seemed to be young, Bentley did not intrude. Nor did he think of the future. It was enough for the moment that they had escaped the might of angry Neptune, god of the seas. They dropped to the sands side by side, and the sands were warm. That the jungle behind them might be alive with wild beasts they did not pause to consider. Bentley had gazed at the jungle a moment before dropping down. He had noticed but one thing--a moving light somewhere among the tangled mass, a light as of a monster firefly erratically darting through the deeper gloom. The girl--he had noted she was as much girl as woman--dropped to the sand and stretched herself out. Bentley looked about him for a moment, just now realizing what he had been through. Then he dropped down beside the girl, and put one arm over her protectively, an instinctive movement. The two were alone in an alien world, and even this slight contact gave Bentley a feeling of companionship he found at the time peculiarly appealing. The girl was in a drugged sort of sleep, but she stirred at the touch of his arm, and her hand came up so that her fingertips touched his cheek. He slept heavily, while outside on the raging deep the storm swept on along the coast, bearing with it the secret of the rest of those who only last night had looked forward to a pleasant voyage aboard the _Bengal Queen_. The last thought in Bentley's mind was of that flickering light he had seen. It was not important, but memory of it clung, and followed him into his sleep with his dreams--in which he seemed to be following a darting, erratic light through a jungle without end. He wakened with the sun burning his face and torso, and turned on his stomach with a groan. The heat ate into his back unbearably and he finally sat up, rubbed his eyes and stared out to sea. Then it all came back and he looked about him for the girl. She had disappeared. He rose to his feet and shouted. An answering cry came back to him, and after a moment the girl appeared around a bend in a shoreline where she had been masked by a wall of the jungle and came toward him. She was carrying something in her hands. When she stood at last before him he noted that she carried a bundle of cloth that was dripping wet. "We need something to cover us," she said simply. "I was tempted to garb myself, but I did not wish to seem like a simpering prudish female, which I'm not at all. So I brought my findings here so that we could get together and fix up something to protect us from the sun." "You're a sensible woman," said Bentley. "I've never understood why people should be so sensitive about their bodies. Mine isn't bad and yours, if you'll pardon me, is superb. That's not a compliment, just a statement of fact--which will help us to understand each other better. I've a hunch we're going to be some time in each other's company and we may as well know things about each other. My name's Lee Bentley." "Mine is Ellen Estabrook." Solemnly they shook hands. And their hands clung convulsively, for as though their handshake had been a signal there came a strange sound from the jungle behind them. A burst of laughter that was plainly human--and another sound which caused the short hair at the base of Bentley's skull to rise, shift oddly, and settle back again. The sound was like the beating of a skin-tight drumhead by the fists of a jungle savage. But if such it was the drum was a mighty drum, and the savage was a giant, for the sound went rolling through the jungle like an invisible tidal wave of sound. Both the laughter and the drumming ceased as suddenly as they had sounded. The man and woman laughed jerkily, dropped to the sand side by side and considered the necessity of clothes. CHAPTER II _Into the Jungle_ They had to smile together at the results achieved with the bedraggled bits of cloth. Bentley suspected that they had been taken from bodies washed ashore as gruesome reminders of the catastrophe which had befallen the _Bengal Queen_, and because he did suspect this he did not ask questions that might cause Ellen to remember any longer than was necessary. Not that he doubted her courage, for she had proved that sufficiently; and she had proved that she was sensible, with none of the notions of the proprieties which would have made any other girl of Bentley's acquaintance a nuisance. Their next concern was food, which they must find in the jungle, or from other wreckage cast ashore from the _Bengal Queen_. Now, hand in hand--which seemed natural in the circumstances--they began to walk along the shore, heading into the north by mutual consent. As they walked Bentley kept pondering on that strange laughter he had heard and on the sound of savage drumming. The laughter puzzled him. If there were anyone in the jungle back of them, why had he or they failed to challenge them? As for the drumming sound--Bentley remembered what the second officer had said about this section of the coast. It was a bit of jungle inhabited by the great apes in large numbers. So, that drumming had been a challenge, the man-ape's manner of mocking an enemy by beating himself on his barrel chest with his huge fists. But that the ape had not been challenging Bentley and the girl Bentley felt quite sure, as the brute would certainly have shown himself in that case. They trudged on through the sand, while the sun beat down unmercifully on their uncovered heads. Ellen Estabrook strode along at Bentley's side without complaint. * * * * * After perhaps an hour of this unbearable effort, when both felt as though the sun had sucked them dry of perspiration, they encountered a rough footpath leading into the jungle. The path suggested human habitation somewhere near. The inhabitants might be hostile natives, even cannibals perhaps, but in this unknown land they would have to take a chance on that. With a sigh of relief, and refusing to look ahead too far, or try to guess what lay in wait for them in the black mystery of the jungle, they turned into the footpath. The jungle was fetid and sweaty, but even this was a relief from the intolerable sun which could not reach them here because the jungle had closed its leafy arms over the trail instantly. One could not tell from the path whether it had been made by natives or by whites, for it was packed hard. It led straight away from the shoreline. "We'll have to keep a sharp lookout for possible poisoned spring darts, Ellen," said Bentley. "I'm not afraid, Lee," she answered stoutly. "Fate wouldn't allow us to come through what we have only to end things with poisoned darts. It just couldn't happen that way!" Thus simply they addressed each other. It seemed as though years had been squeezed into a matter of hours. They knew each other as well as they would, in other circumstances, have known each other after a year of constant association. Here barriers of conventions were razed as simply and naturally as among children. * * * * * They had pressed well into the gloom of the jungle when the first sound came. Not the laughter they had heard before, but the drumming. It was ahead and somewhat to the left, and as they stopped without speaking they could distinctly hear the threshing of a huge body through the underbrush. The sound seemed to be approaching and for a minute or so they listened. Then the sound was repeated off to the right, a trifle further away. "Can you climb, Ellen?" asked Bentley simply. "This section is filled with anthropoid apes, according to the second officer of the _Bengal Queen_. We may have to take to the trees." "I can climb," she said, "but from what I've studied of the habits of these brutes they do a great deal of bluffing before they actually charge, and may not molest us at all if we pay no attention." Bentley felt almost nude because he had no weapons save his own fists. And he would not have admitted even to himself how deeply he was concerned over the girl. As far as he knew, this section might be entirely uninhabited. It might be given over entirely to the anthropoids. In this case he shuddered to think of what might happen to Ellen Estabrook if he were slain. He quickened his pace until Ellen kept stride with him with difficulty. The object uppermost in Bentley's mind was to get as far away as possible from the ominous drumbeats. They rounded a bend in the trail and stopped stock-still. Within fifty yards of them, blocking the trail, was a brute whose great size sent a thrill of horror through Bentley. It towered to the height of a big man, and must have weighed in the neighborhood of four hundred pounds. It was larger by far than any bull ape Bentley had seen in captivity. It had been waiting for them, silently, with almost human cunning; but now that it was discovered the shaggy creature rose to his hind legs and screamed a challenge, at the same time striking his chest with blows of his hairy fists which rolled in a dull booming of sound through the jungle. At the same time the creature moved forward. * * * * * Bentley whirled to run, his hand clasping tighter the hand of Ellen Estabrook. But they had not retreated ten steps down the pathway when their way was blocked by another of the great shaggy brutes. And they could hear others on both sides. Bentley's face was chalk-white as he turned to the girl. Her calm acceptance of their predicament, an attitude in which he could read no slightest vestige of fear, helped him to regain control of his own nerves, which had threatened to send him into a panic. She even smiled, and Lee felt a trifle ashamed of himself. Now the crashing sounds were closing in. The two brutes before and behind on the trail were pressing in upon them. But no general headlong charge had yet begun. Bentley looked around him, seeking a tree with limbs low enough for them to reach and thus climb to safety. "There's one!" cried Ellen. Tugging at his hand she began to run. At the same moment the great apes bellowed and charged. But the charge was never finished, for through the drumming of their mighty fists on mighty barrel-like chests, through the sound of their charge, through the crackling underbrush came again that sound of laughter. There was fierce joy in the laughter, and the laughter was followed by words of a strange gibberish which Bentley could not recall as being from any language he had ever heard. The great apes paused. Out of the jungle to the right of the fugitives burst a white man. He was well past middle age, for his white hair hung almost to his shoulders, which were stooped with the weight of years. He was a wisp of a man whose smooth shaven face was apple-red. His eyes were black and expressionless as obsidian, and when Lee encountered the full gaze of them he was conscious of that feeling which he had experienced at various times in his life when he knew that some deadly reptile was close by. "Stand still a moment!" cried the old man. His voice was strangely high-pitched and cracked. * * * * * From his right hand a whip with a long lash uncurled like a snake. This he swung back and hurled to the front, and the snap of it was like a pistol shot. The great ape on the path ahead cowered back, bearing his fangs, roaring in anger. But that he feared the whip of the old man was plain to be seen. The crashing sound in the jungle died away rapidly, immediately the first report of the whip lash sounded in the trail. Fearlessly the little man dashed upon the first of the great brutes the castaways had seen. His lash curled about the great beast's body, and the animal bellowed with pain. It clawed at the lash, but was not fast enough to capture it. In the end the brute broke and fled. The animal which had blocked their path in the rear had already disappeared. Now the little man came back to face the fugitives, and his lips were parted in a cordial smile. He coiled his whip and tucked it under his arm. He was dressed in well worn corduroy with high boots that were rather the worse for wear. Bentley saw that his lips were too red--like blood--and somehow he disliked the man instantly. "Welcome to Barterville," said the old man. "It has been years since I have seen any of my own kind. People avoid this section of the jungle." "I don't wonder," said Bentley, sighing deeply with relief. "Those brutes would make anybody keep away from here, if they knew about them. I thought they had us for a few minutes. They planned an ambush almost as well as human beings could have done it--but that's absurd of course, merely a coincidence." * * * * * "Coincidence?" snapped the old man, a hint of asperity in his words. "Coincidence? I see you do not know the great apes, sir. I have always maintained that apes could be trained to do anything men can do. I have maintained that they have a language of their own, and even ways of communicating without words, a sort of jungle writing which men of course have never yet learned. I've devoted my life to learning the secrets of the great apes, their life histories, and so forth. I am Professor Caleb Barter!" "Professor Caleb Barter!" ejaculated Ellen Estabrook. "Why I've heard of him! He went on an expedition among the great apes ten years ago and was never heard of again." "I am Caleb Barter," said the old man. "I decided to disappear from the world I knew, to let other fool scientists think me dead in order that I might continue my investigations without molestation. And now I have almost reached the place where I can go back to civilization with information that will startle the world. There yet remains one experiment. Now I hope to make that experiment. No! No! Don't ask me what it is. It is my secret and nobody will ever wrest it from me." Bentley studied the old man. He seemed slightly demented, Bentley thought, but that might be merely the mental evolution of a man who had made a hermit of himself for so many years--if this chap actually were Professor Barter. "Professor Barter," went on Ellen, "was the scientific leader of his day. Others followed where he led. He made greater strides in surgery and medicine, and in unravelling the mysteries of evolution, than anyone else up to his time. Of course I believe you are Professor Barter. My name is Ellen Estabrook, and this gentleman is Lee Bentley. We believe ourselves to be the only survivors of the _Bengal Queen_. Perhaps you can lead us to food and water?" "Yes, oh yes! Indeed. One forgets how to be hospitable, I fear. I am sorry to hear there was a wreck and that lives were lost--but it may mean a great gain to the world of science. I am happier to see you than you can possibly know!" * * * * * Bentley felt the cold chills racing along his spine as he listened to the old man's flow of words. He behaved well, but Bentley could feel in spite of that, that there was a hidden current of menace in the old man's behavior. He wished that Ellen would keep him talking, would somehow make sure of his identity. Perhaps the same thought was in her mind, for it had scarcely come to him when the girl spoke again. "Before he disappeared Professor Barter wrote a learned treatise on--" "I am Professor Barter, I tell you, young woman. But if you wish proof the title of the treatise was 'The Language of the Great Apes.'" Ellen turned quickly to Bentley and nodded. She was satisfied that the man was the person he claimed to be. He didn't ask how Ellen happened to know about him, and Bentley himself considered the proof entirely lacking in conclusiveness. Anyone might know about the last treatise of Barter. However, they could but await developments. They followed Barter along the trail. Now and again apes challenged from the jungle, and Barter answered them with that strange laughter of his, or with a flow of gibberish that was like nothing human. Bentley shivered. Barter, by his laughter, was identifying himself to the great anthropoids. But with his gibberish was he actually conversing with them? "This experiment of yours," said Bentley when the period of silence became unbearable, "--won't you tell us about it?" The old man cackled. "You'll know all about it--soon! You'll know everything, but the secret will still rest with Caleb Barter. Do not be too curious, my friends." "We are anxious to reach civilization, Professor," said Bentley, deciding to be placative with the old man. "Perhaps you can arrange for guides for us?" Barter laughed. "I could not permit you to leave me for some time," he said. "I want you to witness my experiment. The world would never believe me without the evidence of reliable witnesses." Barter laughed again. * * * * * They entered a clean clearing which was a riot of flowers. At the further edge was a log cabin of huge proportions. The whole thing had a decidedly homely appearance, but it was a welcome sight to the castaways. There were cages in which strange birds chattered shrilly in their own language at sight of the three. A pair of tame monkeys chased each other on the roof of the house, whose corners were almost hidden by climbing vines whose growth one could almost see. Barter led the way at a swift walk across the clearing and into the house. Bentley gasped. Ellen Estabrook exclaimed with pleasure. The reception room was as neat as though it received the hourly attentions of a fussy housewife. It was cozily furnished, yet it was evident that the furniture had been made on the spot of rough wood and skins of various animals. Deep skin rugs covered the floor and walls. There were three doors giving off of the reception room, all three of which were closed. "You are not married?" he asked the two. "No!" snapped Bentley. "That center door leads to your room, Bentley. The one next to it is for the young lady. The other door? Ah, the other door my friends! That door you must never open. But to make sure that curiosity does not overcome caution, let me show you!" * * * * * They followed him to the door. He swung it open. Both visitors started back and a gasp of terror burst from the lips of Ellen Estabrook. Beads of perspiration burst forth on Bentley. They saw a huge room. In one corner was a bed. The other held a great cage--and in the cage was an anthropoid ape larger even than the great brute they had met on the trail! Barter laughed. He stepped into the room, uncoiled his whip and hurled the lash at the cage. A great bellowing roar fairly shook the house, while the brute tore at the bars which held him prisoner until the whole massive cage seemed to dance. Barter laughed and continued to goad him. "Barter," yelled Bentley, "stop that! If that beast should ever happen accidentally to get free he'd tear you to pieces!" "I know," said Barter grimly, "and that's part of the experiment! Now we shall eat, and you, young lady, shall tell me what other fool scientists had to say about me after I disappeared--to escape their parrot-like repeating of my discoveries!" Bentley started to offer protest as Barter began preparation for the meal, which obviously was to be taken in the room which held the cage of the giant anthropoid, but Ellen put her fingers to her lips and shook her head. Her eyes were dancing with excitement. CHAPTER III _A Night of Horror_ The meal consisted of various fruits, some meat which Bentley could not identify, and wild honey which was delicious. The bread tasted queer but was distinctly edible. The castaways ate ravenously, but even as he ate Bentley noticed that Ellen's face was chalky pale, and that in spite of a distinct effort of will she simply had to look at intervals toward the great beast in the cage. Caleb Barter sat with his back to the animal. Bentley sat at the left of the old scientist, Ellen Estabrook at his right. The great beast was quiet now, but he squatted within his prison and his red-rimmed eyes swerved from one person to the other in the room with a peculiar intentness. "I'd swear that beast can almost read our thoughts!" ejaculated Bentley at last, after he had somewhat sated his appetite. Barter smiled with those too-red lips of his. "He can--almost. You'd be surprised to know how nearly human the great apes are, and how nearly human this particular one is. Ah!" "What do you mean, this particular one?" asked Bentley curiously. "He doesn't look any different to me from the others I've seen except that he is far and away the largest." "I don't see why you should be so curious," said Barter testily. "It's none of your business you know--yet." "What do you mean?" demanded Bentley, nettled by Barter's tone. "Lee, hush," said Ellen. "Professor Barter is not on trial for any crime." Bentley looked at her in hurt surprise, inclined to be angry with her for the tone she was taking, but he saw such a look of appeal in her eyes that he choked back the words that rushed to his lips for utterance. He was decidedly on edge, more, he felt, than he should have been despite what they had gone through. When their eyes met he saw her glance quickly toward the ape, and noted a frown of worry between her brows. * * * * * Bentley glanced at the ape. The brute now was staring at the girl in a way that made Bentley's flesh crawl. It was preposterous of course, but he had the feeling, something which seemed to flow out of that mighty cage like some evil emanation from a dank tarn, that the ape knew the girl's sex--and that he desired her! It was horrible in the extreme to contemplate, yet Bentley knew when he glanced swiftly at the girl that she had sensed the same thing and was fighting to keep the natural horror she felt at such a ghastly thought from being noticeable. It was absurd. The ape was a prisoner. But.... "Professor Barter," said Bentley, "you're accustomed to being with this brute, but it isn't so nice for us, especially for Miss Estabrook." Barter now frowned angrily. "My dear Bentley," he said with that odd testiness which he had assumed toward Bentley before, "I refuse to have any interference with my experiment. This is part of it." "You mean--" began Bentley. "I mean that I'm training that ape--I call him Manape--to behave like human beings. How better can he learn than by watching our behavior?" "Just the same," said Bentley, "I don't like it." "It's all right, Lee," said Ellen quickly. "I don't mind." But Bentley knew that it wasn't all right, and that she did mind, terribly. * * * * * Barter finished eating. Bentley had noticed that despite the long years he had been a virtual hermit, Barter ate as fastidiously as he probably had done when he had lived among his own kind. He pushed back his chair with a swift movement. Instantly the roaring of Manape rang through the room. The great brute rose to his full height and grasped the bars of his cage, shaking them with savage fury. He glared at his master and bestial rage glittered from his red-rimmed eyes. He was a horrible sight. Ellen Estabrook, with no apology, stepped around the table and crouched wide-eyed in the arm of Lee Bentley. "Lee," she said, "I'm terribly afraid. I almost wish we had trusted ourselves in the jungle." "I'll look out for you," he whispered, as Barter turned his attention to the great ape. But Bentley was watching the animal. So was Barter. The eyes of the scientist were shining like coals of fire. For the moment he appeared to have forgotten his guests. "It is a success!" he cried. "As far as it goes, I mean!" What did Barter mean? Seeking some answer to the enigma, Bentley studied the ape anew. Now he was positive of another thing: Manape was scarcely concerned with Barter, whom he appeared to hate with an utterly satanic hatred. His beady eyes were staring at Bentley instead! "The brute is jealous of me!" thought Bentley. "Good God, what does it mean, anyway?" Barter turned back to them and all at once became the genial host. "Shall we return to the other room?" he asked politely. * * * * * It was a relief to the castaways to put that awful room behind them. Barter closed and barred the door with deliberate slowness. Why had this old man shut himself away from civilization like this? How long had he held this great ape in captivity? What was the purpose of it? What experiment was he performing? What part of it had the castaways been witnessing that they had not recognized? Bentley, recalling the distinct impression that the ape had stared at Ellen almost with the eyes of a lustful man, and had even appeared to be jealous of him because the girl had gone into his arms--Bentley felt a shiver of revulsion course through him as it struck him now how _human_ the regard and the jealousy of the creature had been! He felt like clutching at the girl and racing with her into the hazards of the jungle. But he remembered the anthropoids out there, and Barter's peculiar domination of the brutes. Barter was now watching the two with interest, studying them in turn speculatively, unmindful of the impertinence of his studious regard and silence. "I have it!" he said. "Will you two be good enough to excuse me? You will need rest, I am sure. I am going away for a little time, but I shall return shortly after dark. Make yourselves at home. But remember--don't enter that room!" "You need not worry," said Bentley grimly. "I sincerely hope we take our next meal in some other room." Barter laughed and passed out of the door without a backward glance. From the jungle immediately afterward came the drumming of the great apes, and now and again the laughter of Barter--high-pitched at first, but dying away as Barter apparently moved off into the jungle. * * * * * "Ellen," said Bentley quickly, "I don't know what's going on here, but I'm sure it's something sinister and awful. Let's take a look at our rooms. If there isn't a door between them which can be left open, then you'll have to spend the night in my room while I remain awake on guard." "I was thinking of the same thing, Lee," she whispered. "This place gives me the horrors. Barter's association with the apes is a terrible thing." Hand in hand they stepped to the door Barter had designated as that of Ellen Estabrook's. Bentley opened it cautiously, heaving a sigh of relief to find it empty. He scarcely knew what he had expected. There was a connecting door between the two rooms, open, and they peered into the chamber Bentley was to occupy. Back they came to her room, to stand before a window which gave onto a shadowed little clearing in the rear of the cabin. "Look!" whispered Ellen. There was a single mound of earth, with a white cross set over it, on which was the single word: Mangor. It might have been a word in some native dialect. It might have been some native's name. It might have been anything, but, whatever it was, it added to the sinister atmosphere which seemed to hang like an evil mist over the home of Caleb Barter. "That settles it, Ellen," he said. "You'll spend the night in my room." Ellen retired in Bentley's room, closing the door which led to the adjoining room, and Bentley walked back and forth in the reception room, waiting for Barter to return. When darkness fell he lighted the lamps he had previously located. Their odor caused him to guess that the fuel they used was some sort of animal fat. In the strange glow from the lamps, his shadow on the walls, as he walked to and fro, was grotesque, terrible--and at times a grim reminder of the great apes. It caused him to consider how, after all, human beings were akin to gorillas and chimpanzees. Somehow, now, it was a horrible thought. * * * * * The night wore on and Bentley's stride became faster. Now and again he peered into the girl's room. She was sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion and he did not waken her. Bentley felt it was near midnight when Barter returned, his return heralded by a strange commotion in the clearing, and the frightful drumming of the great apes--or at least _one_ great ape. Bentley shuddered as the animal behind the locked door answered the drumming challenge with a drumming thunder of his own. Barter came in, and Bentley accosted him at once. "See here, Barter," he began. "I don't like it here. There's something strange going on in this clearing. Miss Estabrook and I wish to leave immediately in the morning! And that grave behind the cabin, who or what is it?" Barter studied the almost trembling Bentley for all of a minute. "That grave?" he said at last, with silken softness. "It's the grave of a jungle savage. He died in the interest of science. As for you, you'll leave here when I bid you, and not before, understand? I've a guardian outside that would tear both of you limb from limb." But Bentley caught and held fast to certain words the scientist had spoken. "The savage died in the interest of science?" he said. "What do you mean?" Barter smiled his red-lipped smile. "I took the savage and Manape, who wasn't called Manape then, and administered an anesthetic of my own invention. You've heard that I was a master of trephining? No matter if you haven't heard, the whole world will know soon! While the native and the ape were under anesthesia I transferred their brains. I put the black man's brain in the skull pan of the ape, and the ape's brain in that of the savage. The ape lived--and he is Manape. The savage, with the ape's brain, died, and I buried him in that grave you asked about!" * * * * * With a cry of horror Bentley turned and fled from Barter as though the man had been His Satanic Majesty himself. He entered the room with Ellen and barred the door behind him. He likewise barred the door which led to that other room. Now in total darkness it was all he could do from clambering on the bed where Ellen slept, and begging her to touch him--anything--if only to prove to him that there still were sane creatures left in a mad world. Outside Barter laughed. "Oh, Bentley," he called after a long interval of silence, "do you like the odor of violets? Goodnight, and pleasant dreams!" What had Barter meant? Again assuring himself that the connecting door could not be opened if anything or anybody tried to enter that way, Bentley flung himself down before the door which gave on the reception room. He had no intention of sleeping. But in spite of himself he dozed off, though he fought against sleep with all his will. Strange, but as he gradually slipped away into unconsciousness he was cognizant of the odor of violets--like invisible tentacles which reached through the very door and wrapped themselves gently about him. His last conscious thought was of Manape, the ape with the brain of a jungle savage. But in spite of the vague feeling of horror he could not fight off the desire for sleep. CHAPTER IV _Grim Awakening_ Bentley returned to consciousness with a dull headache. He rose to a sitting posture and looked dully about him. Dimwittedly he tried to recall all that had passed since he had last been awake. He knew he had gone to sleep under the door in the room where Ellen had slept. Yet he was not there now. He peered about him. He recognized the room. Yonder was the table where they had eaten last night, or yesterday afternoon. Yonder was the bed he guessed Barter customarily used, and he shuddered a little as he fancied a man sleeping in the same room with that ghastly travesty which was neither ape nor human--Manape. The creature's name was simple, being simply "man" and "ape" joined together to fit the creature perfectly--too perfectly. Barter's bed had been slept in, but Barter was nowhere to be seen. Where was he? How came Bentley in this room? Barter had forbidden him to enter the place at all, on any pretext whatever. Had he walked in his sleep, drawn by some freak of his subconscious mind into the room of Manape? Slowly, afraid to look yet forced by something outside himself, he turned his eyes toward the corner where the beast's cage was. The cage was empty! The door of it was open! Stunned by his discovery, wondering what had happened during the night, Bentley looked about him. He noticed the long narrow table at the end of the cage, and the white covering it bore. He recognized it instantly as an operating table, and wondered afresh. Where was Barter? * * * * * Bentley raised his voice to shout the scientist's name. But before he could himself recognize the syllables of the scientist's name, through the whole room rang the bellowing challenge of a giant anthropoid ape. Bentley cowered down fearfully and looked around him. Where was the ape that had uttered that frightful noise? The sound had broken in that very room, yet save for himself the room was empty. Bentley turned his head as he heard someone fumbling with the door. Barter entered, and his face was a study as his eyes met those of Bentley. Bentley noticed that Barter held that whip in his hand, uncoiled and ready for action. What was this that Barter was saying? "I warn you, Bentley, that if anything happens to me you are doomed. If I am killed it means a horrible end for you." Bentley tried to answer him, tried to speak, but something appeared to have gone wrong with his vocal cords, so that all that came from his lips was a senseless gibberish that meant nothing at all. He recalled the odor of violets, Barter's enigmatic good-night utterance with reference to violets, and wondered if their odor, stealing into the room where he had gone on guard over Ellen, had had anything to do with paralyzing his powers of speech. "I see you haven't discovered, Bentley," said Barter after a moment of searching inspection of Bentley. "Look at yourself!" Surprised at this puzzling command, Bentley slowly looked down at his chest. It was broad and hairy, huge as a mighty barrel, and his arms hung to the floor, the hands half closed as though they grasped something. Horror held Bentley mute for a moment. Then he raised his eyes to Barter, to note that the scientist was smiling and rubbing his hands with immense satisfaction. * * * * * Bentley started across the floor toward a mirror near Barter's bed. He refused to let his numbed brain dwell upon the instant recognition of his manner of progress. For he moved across the floor with a peculiar rolling gait, aiding his stride with the bent knuckles of his hands pressed against the floor. He fought against the horror that gripped him. He feared to look into the mirror, yet knew that he must. He reached it, reared to his full height, and gazed into the glass--at the reflection of Manape, the great ape of the cage! Instantly a murderous fury possessed him. He whirled on Barter, to scream out at the man, to beg him to explain what had happened, why this ghastly hallucination gripped him. But all he could do was bellow, and smash his mighty chest with his fists, so that the sound went crashing out across the jungle--to be answered almost at once by the drumming of other mighty anthropoids outside, beyond the clearing which held the awful cabin of Caleb Barter. He started toward Barter, still bellowing and beating his chest. His one desire was to clutch the scientist and tear him limb from limb, and he knew that his mighty arms were capable of ripping the scientist apart as though Barter had been a fly. "Back, you fool!" snarled Barter. "Back, I say!" The long lash of the whip cracked like a revolver shot, and the lash curled about the chest and neck of Bentley. It ripped and tore like a hot iron. It struck again and again. Bentley could not stand the awful beating the scientist was giving him. In spite of all his power he found himself being forced back and back. * * * * * He stepped into the cage, cowered back against its side. Barter darted in close, shut the door and fastened it. Then he stood against the bars, grinning. "Nod your head if you can understand me, Bentley," he said. Bentley nodded. "I told you I would yet prove to the world the greatness of Caleb Barter," said the scientist. "And you will bear witness that what I have to tell is true. Would you like to know what I have done?" Again, slowly and laboriously, Bentley nodded his shaggy head. Barter grinned. "Wonderful!" he said. "You see, you are now Manape. Yesterday you had the brain of a black man, and to exchange your brain with Manape's of yesterday would not have served my purpose in the least. So I had to find an ape of more than average intelligence. That's why I spent so much time in the jungle yesterday. I needed a brain to put in the body of Lee Bentley's--an ape's brain. Your body is a healthy one and I did not think it would die as the savage's did. I was right. It is doing splendidly. It would interest you to see how your body behaves with an ape's brain to direct it. Your other self, whom I call Apeman, is unusually handsome. Miss Estabrook, however, who does not know what has happened, has taken a strange dislike to the other you! Splendid! I shall study reactions at first hand that will astound the world! "But remember, whatever your fine brain dictates that you do, don't ever forget that I am the only living person who can put you to rights again--and if I die before that happens, you will continue on, till you die, as Manape!" * * * * * Barter stopped there. Bentley stiffened. From the room where he knew Ellen Estabrook to be came her voice, raised high in a shout of fear. "Lee! Please! I can't understand you. Please don't touch me! Your eyes burn me--please go away. What in the world has come over you?" Bentley listened for the reply of the creature he knew was in the other room with Ellen Estabrook. But the answer was a gurgling gibberish that made no sense at all! His own body, directed by the brain of an ape, could not emit speech that Ellen could understand, because the ape could not speak. The ape's vocal cords, which now were Bentley's, were incapable of speech. How, if Barter continued to keep Ellen in ignorance of what had happened, would she ever know the horrible truth--and realize the danger that threatened her? "Don't worry for the moment, Bentley," said Barter with a smile. "I am not yet ready for your other self to go to undue lengths--though I dislike intensely to leave the marks of my whip on that handsome body of yours!" Barter slipped from the room. Bentley listened, amazed at the clarity with which he heard every vagrant little sound--until he remembered again that his hearing was that of a jungle beast--until he knew that Barter had entered that other room. Then came the crackling reports of the whip, wielded mightily by the hands of Barter. A scream that was half human, half animal, was the result of the lashing. Bentley cringed as he imagined the bite of that lash which he himself had experienced but a few moments before. "Professor Barter! Professor Barter!" distinctly came the voice of Ellen Estabrook. "Don't! Don't! He didn't mean anything, I am sure. He is sick, something dreadful has happened to him. But he wouldn't really hurt me. He couldn't--not really. Stop, please! Don't strike him again!" But the sound of the lash continued. "Stop, I tell you!" Ellen's voice rose to a cry of agonized entreaty. "Don't strike him again. See, you've ripped his flesh until he is covered with blood! Strike me if you must strike someone--for with all my heart and soul I love him!" CHAPTER V _Fumbling Hands_ Now Bentley was beginning to realize to the full the horrible thing that had befallen himself and Ellen Estabrook. He knew something else, too. It had come to him when he had heard Ellen's words next door--telling Barter that she loved the creature Barter was beating, which she thought was Lee Bentley. That creature was Lee Bentley; but only the earthly casement of Lee Bentley. The ruling power of Bentley's body, the driving force which actuated his body, was the brain of an ape. As for Bentley himself, that part of him of which he thought when he thought of "I," to all intents and purposes, to all outer seeming, had become an ape. His body was an ape's body, his legs were an ape's, everything about him was simian save one thing--the "ego," that something by which man knows that he is himself, with an individual identity. That was buried behind the almost non-existent brow of an ape. In all things save one he was an ape. That thing was "Bentley's" brain. In all things save one that creature in the room with Ellen Estabrook was Bentley. Bentley, driven to mad behavior by the brain of an ape! The horror of it tore at Bentley, as he still thought of himself. "If I were to get out of this cage," he told himself voicelessly, "and were to enter that room with Ellen, she would cower into a corner in terror. She would fly to the arms of that travesty of 'me,' for she thinks it is 'I' in there with her because it _looks_ like me." Now that Ellen was beyond his reach, more beyond his reach than if she had been dead, he realized how much she meant to him. In the few mad hours of their association they had come to belong to each other with a possessiveness that was beyond words. Thinking then that the travesty in there with her--with Bentley's body--was really Bentley, to what lengths might she not be persuaded in her love? It was a ghastly thing to contemplate. * * * * * But what could Bentley do? He could not speak to her. If he tried she would race from him in terror at the bellowing ferocity of his voice. How could he tell her his love when his voice was such as to frighten the very wild beasts of the jungle? Yet.... How could he allow her to remain with that other Bentley--that body which perhaps was provided with a man's appetites, and the brain of a beast which knew nothing of honor and took what it wished if it were strong enough? There was one ray of hope in that Barter had hinted he would protect Ellen from the apeman. That meant physically, with all that might indicate; but who could compensate her for the horror she must be experiencing with that speechless imbecile she thought was Bentley? If this thing were to continue indefinitely, and Ellen were kept in ignorance, she would eventually grow to hate the "thing"--and if ever, as he had hinted, Barter were to transfer back the entities of the man and the ape, Ellen would always shudder with horrible memories when she looked at the man she had just now admitted she loved. Bentley was becoming calmer now. He knew exactly what he faced, and there was no way out until Barter should be satisfied with his mad experiment. Bentley must go through with whatever was in store for him. So must the ape who possessed his body--and in the very nature of things unless Bentley could train himself to a self-saving docility, both bodies would repeatedly know the fiery stinging of that lash of Barter's. Bentley could control himself after a fashion. The ape might be cowed, but long before that time arrived, Bentley's body would be made to suffer marks they would bear forever to remind him of this horror. "I must somehow manage to continue to care for Ellen," he told himself. "But how?" * * * * * He scarcely realized that his great hands were wandering over his body, scratching, scratching. But when he did realize he felt sick, without being able to understand how or where he felt sick. If he felt sick at the stomach he thought of it as his own stomach. When he thought of moving the hairy hands he thought of his hands. He grinned to himself--never realizing the horrible grimace which crossed his face, though there was none to see it--when he recalled how men of his acquaintance during the Great War, had complained of aching toes at the end of legs that had been amputated! He was learning one thing--that the brain is everything that matters. The seat of pain and pleasure, of joy and of sorrow, of hunger and of thirst even. Bentley waddled to the door of the cage. He studied the lock which held him prisoner, and noted how close he must hold his face to see at all. All apes might be near-sighted as far as he knew; but he did know that this one was. Perhaps he could free himself. He tried to force his massive hands to the task of investigating the lock. But what an effort! It was like trying to hypnotize a subject that did not wish to be hypnotized. A distinct effort of will, like trying to force someone to turn and look by staring at the back of that someone's neck in a crowd. It was like trying to make an entirely different person move his arm, or his leg, merely by willing that he move it. But the great arms, which might have weighed tons, though Bentley sensed no strain, raised to the door and fumbled dumbly, clumsily. He tried to close the gnarled fingers, whose backs were covered with the rough hair, to manipulate the lock, but he succeeded merely in fumbling--like a baby senselessly tugging at its father's fingers, the existence of which had no shape or form in the baby's brain. But he strove with all his will to force those clumsy hands to do his bidding. They slipped from the lock, went back again, fumbled over it, fell away. "You must!" muttered Bentley. "You must, you must!" He would discover the secret of the lock, so that he would be able to remove it when the time was right--but so slow and uncertain and clumsy were the movements of his ape hands, he was in mortal fear that he would unlock the door and then not be able to lock it again, and Barter would discover what he had in mind. * * * * * But he struggled on, while foul smelling sweat poured from his mighty body and dripped to the floor. He concentrated on the lock with all his power, knowing as he did so that the lock would have been but a simple problem for a child of six or seven. It was nothing more than a bar held in place with a leather thong. But the powerful fingers which now were Bentley's were too blunt and inflexible to master the knot Barter had left. Bentley paused to listen. From Ellen's room came the sound of weeping. From the front room came Barter's pleased laughter as he talked with the thing which so much resembled Bentley. That was a relief--to know that his other self had been at least temporarily removed from any possibility of injuring Ellen. In Bentley's mind were certain pictures of Barter. He saw him plainly on his knees begging for mercy, while Bentley's ape hands choked his life away. He saw him tossed about like a mere child, and casually torn apart, ripped limb from limb by the mighty hands of Manape. "God," he told himself, refusing to listen to the slobbering gibberish which came from his thick lips when he addressed himself, "I can do nothing to Barter--not until he restores me properly. If he is slain, it is the end for me, and for Ellen! He is a master, no doubt of that. He anesthetized me through the door with something of his own manufacture that smelled like violets, and put my brain in Manape after removing from Manape the brain of the savage. Then he removed an ape's brain from a second ape and put it in my skull pan--all within the space of a few hours! Yet his knowledge of surgery and medicine is such that even in so short a time I suffer little from the operation, save for the dull headache which I had on awakening, and which I now scarcely feel at all." * * * * * He straightened, close against the bars, and began again to fumble with the leather thong which held him prisoner. In his brain was the hazy idea that he might after all make a break for it, and carry Ellen away to a place of safety, taking a chance on finding his way back here to force Barter to operate again and restore him to his proper place. But would not Ellen die of fright at being borne away through the jungle in the arms of an ape? Was there any possibility of forcing Barter to perform the operation? No, for under the anesthetic again, Barter, angered by the thwarting of whatever purpose actuated him, might do something even worse than he had done--if that were possible. Again, even if he reached civilisation with Ellen, every human hand would be turned against him. Rifles would hurl their lead into him. Hunters would pursue him.... No, it was impossible. Bentley, Ellen, and the Apeman--his own body, ape-brained--were but pawns in the hands of Barter. Barter might be actuated by a desire to serve science, that science which was alike his tool and his god. Bentley scarcely doubted that Barter believed himself specially ordained to do this thing, in the name of science; probably, unquestionably, felt himself entirely justified. Plainly, now that Bentley recalled things Barter had said, Barter had waited for an opportunity of this kind--had waited for someone to be tossed into his net--and Ellen and Lee, flotsam of the sea, had come in answer to the prayer for whose answer Barter had waited. It was horrible, yet there was nothing they could do--at least, to free themselves--until it pleased Barter to take the step. It came then to Bentley how precious to them both was the life of Caleb Barter. He could restore Bentley or destroy him--and with him the woman who loved him. Suppose, came Bentley's sudden thought, Barter should think of performing a like operation on Ellen--using in the transfer the brain of a female ape? God!... He prayed that the thought would never come to Barter. He was afraid to dwell upon it lest Barter read his thought. He might think of it naturally, as a simple corollary to what he had already done. Bentley then must do something before Barter planned some new madness. * * * * * He sat back and bellowed savagely, beating his chest with his mighty hands. Instantly the outer door opened and Barter came in. Bentley ceased his bellowing and chest pounding and sat docilely there, staring into the eyes of Barter. "Have you discovered there is no use opposing me, Bentley?" said the professor softly. Bentley nodded his shaggy head. Then by a superhuman effort of will he raised the right arm of Manape and pointed. He could not point the forefinger, but he could point the arm--and look in the direction he desired. "You want to come out and go into the front room?" Bentley nodded. "You will make no attempt to injure me?" Bentley shook his head ponderously from side to side. "You would like to see the Apeman?--the creature that looks so much like you that it will be like peering at yourself in the mirror? Or, rather, as it would have been yesterday had you looked into a mirror?" Bentley nodded slowly. "You understand that no matter what the Apeman does, you must not try to slay him?" Bentley did not move. "You understand if you destroy Apeman's body, you are doomed to remain Manape forever, because the true body of Lee Bentley will die and be eventually destroyed?" Bentley nodded. He felt a trickle of moisture on the rough skin about his flaring nostrils and knew that he was weeping, soundlessly. * * * * * But there was no pity in the face of Barter. He was the scientist who studied his science, to whom it was the breath of life, and he saw nothing, thought of nothing, not directly connected with his "experiment." "You give me your word of honor as a gentleman not to oppose me?" It was odd, an almost superhumanly intellectual scientist asking for an ape's word of honor, but that did not occur to Bentley at the moment, as he nodded his head. Barter still held his lash poised. He unfastened the leather thong which held Bentley prisoner and swung wide the door. Then he turned his back on Bentley and led the way to the door. Bentley followed him on mighty feet and bent knuckles into the room which had first received Lee and Ellen when they had entered the cabin of the scientist. Bentley would have gasped had he been capable of gasping at what he saw. In a far corner, cowering down in fear at sight of Barter and his coiled whip--was the Bentley of the mirror in his stateroom aboard the _Bengal Queen_, and before that. It was an uncanny sensation, to stand off and peer at himself thus. Yonder was Bentley, yet _here_ was Bentley, too. * * * * * Then he noted the difference. The face of that Bentley yonder was twisted, savage. _That_ Bentley had seen Manape, and the teeth were exposed in a snarl of savage hatred. There a man ape stared at another man ape, and bared his fangs in challenge. The white hands of Bentley began to beat the white chest of Bentley--to beat the chest savagely, until the white skin was red as blood.... The Bentley buried within the mighty carcass of an anthropoid ape watched and shuddered. That thing yonder was dressed only in a breech-clout, and the fair flesh was criss-crossed in scores of places with bleeding wounds left by the lash of Barter. The Apeman's brows were furrowed in concentration. The human body made ape-like movements. Bentley knew that soon that creature, forgetting everything save that he faced a rival man ape, would charge and attempt to measure the power of Manape--fang against fang. The white form rose. Barter caused his whiplash to crack like an explosion. "One moment," he said. "Back, Apeman! I'll bring Miss Estabrook. Perhaps she can placate you. She has a strange power over you both!" Bentley would have cried out as Barter crossed to unlock Ellen's door, but he knew that he could not stop Barter, and that his cry would simply be a terrible bellow to frighten the woman he loved when she entered the room. The door opened. White, shaken, her eyes deep wells of terror, circled with blue rings which told the effect of the horror she had experienced, Ellen Estabrook entered. And screamed with terror as she saw the hulking figure of Manape. Screamed with terror and rushed to the arms of the cowering thing in the corner! CHAPTER VI _Puppets of Barter_ The thing that Barter then contrived was destined to remain forever in the memory of Bentley as the most ghastly thing he had ever experienced. Ellen hurried into the arms of that thing in the corner. Gropingly, protectively, the white arms encompassed her. But they were awkward, uncertain, and Bentley was minded of a female ape or monkey holding her young against her hairy bosom. Barter turned toward Bentley and smiled. He rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. "A success so far, my experiment," he said. "The human body still answers to primal urges, which are closely enough allied to those of our simian cousins that their outward manifestations--manual gestures, expressions in the eyes et cetera--are much the same. When the two are combined the action approximates humanness!" That travesty yonder pressed its face against Ellen, and she drew back, her eyes wide as they met those of the white figure which held her. "I am all right," she managed, "please don't hold me so tightly." She tried to struggle away, but Apeman held her helpless. "Barter," yelled Bentley, "take her away from that thing! How can you do such a horrible thing?" At least those were the words he intended to shout, but the sound that came from his lips was the bellowing of a man ape. That other thing yonder answered his bellow, bared white teeth in a bestial snarl. Barter turned to Bentley, however. "You want me to take her away from Bentley and give her to you?" Bentley nodded. His bellowing attempt at speech had sent Ellen closer into the arms of Bentley's other self--henceforth to be known as Apeman. Bentley had defeated his own purpose by his bellow. * * * * * "Miss Estabrook," said Barter softly, "nothing will happen to you if you stand clear of your sweetheart...." Nausea gripped Bentley as he heard Apeman referred to as Ellen's sweetheart, but now he remembered to refrain from attempting speech. "But," went on Barter, "Manape has taken a violent dislike to Bentley, and may attack him if you do not stand clear. Manape likes you, you know. You probably sensed that last evening?" Ellen visibly shuddered. She patted the shoulder of Apeman and stepped away, toward a chair which Barter thrust toward her. She pressed her hands to her throbbing temples, visibly fighting to control herself. Her whole body was trembling as with the ague. "Professor Barter," she said at last. "I am terribly confused, and most awfully frightened. What has happened here? What dreadful thing has so awfully changed Lee? I talk to him and he answers nothing that I understand. Is it some weird fever? At this moment I have the feeling that that brute Manape understands more perfectly than Lee, and the idea is horrible! I love Lee, Professor. See, he hears me say it, yet I cannot tell from his expression what he thinks. Does he despise me for so freely admitting my love? Has he any feeling about it at all? Has his mind completely gone?" "Yes," said Barter, with a semblance of a smile on his lips, "his mind has completely gone. But it is only temporary, my dear. You forget that I am perhaps the world's greatest living medical man, and that I can do things no other man can do. I shall restore Lee wholly to you--when the time comes. It is not well to hasten things in cases of this kind. One never knows but that great harm may be done." "But I can nurse him. I can care for him and love him, and help to make him well." * * * * * Barter looked away from Ellen, his eyes apparently focussed on a spot somewhere in the air between Apeman and Manape. "Would that be satisfactory to Bentley, I wonder?" he said musingly, yet Bentley recognized it as a question addressed to him. Bentley looked at the girl, but her eyes were fixed--alight with love which was still filled with questioning--on Apeman. Bentley shook his head, and Barter laughed a little. "You know, Miss Estabrook," he went on, "that a strange malady like that which appears to have attacked Lee Bentley should be studied carefully, in order that the observations of a savant may be given to the world so that such maladies may be effectually combatted in future. This is one reason why I do not hasten." "But you are using a sick man as you would use a rabbit in a laboratory experiment!" she cried. "Can't you see that there are things not even you should do? Don't you understand that some things should be left entirely in the hands of God?" "I do not concede that!" retorted Barter. "God makes terrible mistakes sometimes--as witness cretins, mongoloid idiots, criminals, and the like. I know about these things better than you do, my dear, and you must trust me." "Oh, if I only knew what was right. Poor Lee. You lashed him so, and his body is awful with the scars. Was that necessary?" "Insane persons are not to blame for their insanity," said Barter soothingly. "Yet sometimes they must be handled roughly to prevent them from causing loss of life, their own or others." * * * * * Now the eyes of Ellen came to rest on Manape. They were fear filled at first, especially when she discovered that the little red eyes of Manape were upon her. But she did not turn her eyes away, nor did Manape. She seemed dazed, unable to orient herself, unable to distinguish the proper mode of action. "That ape in repose is almost human," she said wearily, her brow puckered as though she sought the answer to some unspoken question that eluded her. "I am not afraid of him at this moment, yet I know that in a second he can become an invincible brute, capable of tearing us all limb from limb." "Not so long as I have this whip," said Barter grimly. "But Manape is docile at the moment, and it is Bentley who is ferocious." Apeman was still snarling at Manape, lending point to Barter's statement. Barter went on. "You know," he said, "apes are almost human in many respects. Manape likes you, and I doubt if he would attempt to hurt you. If he knew that you cared for Bentley there, he would most assuredly try to be friendly to Bentley also. Perhaps you can manage it. Apes are capable of primitive reasoning, you know. Go to Manape. He won't injure you, at least while I am here. Stroke him. He will like it. He is a friend worth having, never fear, and one never knows when one may need a friend--or what sort of friend one may need." Ellen hesitated, and her face whitened again. Barter went on. "Go ahead. It is necessary that Manape and Bentley remain here together for a time. Manape will be locked up, but if he happens to break loose there is nothing he might not do. With Bentley in the condition he is he would be no match for Manape. But if Manape thought you desired his friendship for Bentley...?" * * * * * There he left it, while Bentley wondered what new horror Barter was planning. He yearned for Ellen to come to him. But, if he strode toward her now, how would Barter explain that Manape had understood his words? No, Ellen must take the step, and each one would be hesitant, as she fought against her natural revulsion at touching this great shaggy creature which was Manape to her, and Bentley to himself. Slowly, almost against her will, Ellen rose and moved across the floor toward Bentley. Apeman growled ominously. He rose to his feet, his arms writhing like disjoined, broken-backed snakes across his scarred chest. Apeman took a step forward. Barter did not notice, apparently, for he was watching Manape as Ellen approached. She came quite close. Slowly she put forth her hand to touch the shaggy shoulder of Manape. Bentley, seeking some way, _any_ way, to reassure her, put his great shaggy right arm about her waist for the merest second. Then Apeman charged, bellowing a shrill crescendo that was half human, half simian. Before Bentley could realize Apeman's intentions, Apeman had clutched Ellen about the waist and dashed for the door of the cabin. He was gone, racing across the clearing with swift strides, bearing the girl with him. Bentley whirled to pursue, but Barter had beaten him to the door and now blocked it, whiplash writhing, twisting, curling to strike. "Back, Bentley! Back, I say! In a moment you may follow--as part of my experiment. But remember--the end must be here in this cabin, and you must remember everything, so that you can tell me all--when you are restored!" Bentley cowered under the lash. His whole shaggy body trembled frightfully. From the jungle toward which Apeman was racing come the roaring challenge of half a dozen anthropoids. CHAPTER VII _Lord of the Jungle_ Apeman, never realizing that his actual strength was that of but a puny human being, was racing with Ellen Estabrook into the very midst of animals which would tear him to bits as easily as they would tear any human being to pieces. Apeman, being but an ape after all, would merely think that he was joining his own kind, bearing with him a mate with white skin. But to the other apes he would be a human being, a puny hairless imitation of themselves which they would pounce upon and tear asunder with great glee. Apeman would not know this: would not realize his limitations. He would try to take to the upper terraces of the jungle, to swing from tree to tree, carrying his mate--and would find the body of Bentley incapable of supporting such an effort. Apeman would be a child in the hands of his brethren, who could not know him. Apeman could probably speak to them after a fashion, but his gibberish would come strangely perhaps unintelligibly, through the mouth of Bentley. They would suspect him, and destroy him, and with him Ellen Estabrook, unless other apes discovered also her sex and took her, fighting over her among themselves. Bentley made good time across the jungle clearing. Behind him came the voice of Barter in final exhortation. "Your human cunning, hampered by your simian body, pitted against the highly specialized body of your former self, in turn hampered by the lack of reasoning of an ape--in a contest in primitive surrounding for a female! A glorious experiment, and all depends now upon you! You will save the girl who loves you and whom you love, but you must return to me and be transferred before you can make your love known. I shall wait for you!" In Bentley's brain the shouted words of Barter rang as he hurried into the jungle in pursuit of Apeman. Ellen Estabrook was crying: "Hurry, Lee, hurry!" * * * * * Yet she was really yelling to Apeman, the man-beast which carried her, bidding him race on to escape the pursuit of Manape, in whom she would never recognize the man she loved. She must have thought that Bentley had taken a desperate chance to escape the clutches of Barter, and that Barter had set his trained ape to pursue them. What else could she think? How could she know that she was actually in the power of an ape, and that her loved one actually pursued to save her? With every desire of her body she was urging Apeman to take her away from Manape. But she must also have heard the challenges of the man apes in the jungle ahead. She was looking back over Apeman's shoulder, wondering perhaps if Barter would again come out to save them from the anthropoids. Bentley could guess at her thoughts as he raced on in pursuit of Apeman. Would he be in time? Even if he were, Apeman himself would turn against him. If he were to try to aid Ellen she would fight against him, believing him an ape. And how could he fight? Would his brain be able to direct his mighty arms and his fighting fangs in a battle with the apes of the jungle? As he thought of coming to grips with the apes on equal terms, something never in this world before vouchsafed to a human being, he felt a fierce exaltation upon him. He felt a desire to take part in mortal combat with them, to fight them fist and fang, and to destroy them, one by one. He had their strength and more--he had the cunning of a human being to match against the dim wits of the apes. He had a chance. But he must protect not only Ellen, but Apeman. Both Ellen and Apeman would be against him. Ellen would fear him as an ape that desired her. Apeman would fight against him as a rival for the favors of a she.... And he must harm neither. His own body, which Apeman directed, must be spared, must be kept alive--while every effort of Apeman would be to force Bentley to slay! It was a predicament which--well, only Caleb Barter had foreseen it. * * * * * The bellowing of the apes was a continuous roar on all sides now. Bentley felt a fierce sensation of joy welling up within him and he answered their bellowing with savage bellows of his own. His legs were obeying his will. His knuckles touched the ground as he raced on all fours. He could hear the shriek of Ellen there ahead, and knew that Apeman and the girl were surrounded--that he must make all possible speed if he were to be in time. Apeman and his captive were on the trail, trapped there just as Apeman had started into the jungle. Apeman had lifted Ellen so that her hands might have grasped a limb; but the girl had refused to attempt to escape by the trees if her "lover" remained behind. She had crumpled to the ground, and Apeman, snarling, smashing his chest which was so sickly white as compared to the chests of the other apes, had turned upon his brethren. They hesitated for a moment as though amazed at the effrontery of this mere human. Then a man ape charged. Apeman met him with arms and fangs, and Bentley saw Apeman's all too small mouth snap out for the vein in the neck of Apeman's attacker. The ape whose brain reposed in Apeman had been a courageous beast, that was plain. But he was fighting for his she. And he did not know his limitations. Apeman was bowled over as though he had been a blade of grass, and the great ape was crouched over him, nuzzling at his white flesh when Bentley-Manape arrived. With a savage bellow, and with a mighty lunge, Bentley leaped upon the attacker of Apeman. His arms obeyed him with more certainty now, perhaps because the matter was so vitally urgent. Bentley's brain knew jiu-jitsu, boxing, ways of rough and tumble fighting of which the great apes had never learned, nor ever would learn. * * * * * He hurled himself upon the animal that was on the point of pulling Apeman apart as though he had indeed been a fly, and literally flattened him against the ground. His mighty hands searched for the throat of the great ape, while he instinctively pulled his stomach out of the way of possible disemboweling tactics on the part of his antagonist. But the great ape twisted from his grasp, struggled erect. And, amazed at what he was doing, surprised that he, Lee Bentley, could even conceive of such a thing, he launched his attack with bared and glistening fangs straight at the throat of his enemy. His mouth closed. His fangs ripped home--and the great ape whose throat he had torn away, whose blood was salt on his slavering lips, was tossed aside as an empty husk, to die convulsively, a dripping horror which was humanlike in a ghastly fashion. Bentley felt like a murderer. Not like a murderer, either, but like a man who has slain unavoidably--and hates himself for doing so. Ellen was backed against the tree into which Apeman had tried to force her. Apeman was up now, moving to stand beside her. Apeman had discovered that he was not the invincible creature he had thought himself. Bentley moved in closer to the two, as other apes charged upon him from both sides, smothering him, giving him no time. He was a stranger, seemingly, an upstart to be destroyed. And he was forced to fight them with all his ape strength and human cunning, while Apeman, whimpering, caught up Ellen and darted away with her, straight into the jungle. For Bentley this was a sort of respite. Ellen was not afraid to go with Apeman, thinking him Bentley. The great apes were bent on destroying this strange ape which had come into their midst and had already destroyed one of their number, perhaps their leader. He must be destroyed. * * * * * Bentley fought like a man possessed. His arms were gory with crimson from the slashing fangs of his enemies. His mouth was dripping with red foam as he slashed in turn, with deadly accuracy. A great arm clutched at the hair of his chest--and fell away again, broken in two places, as Bentley snapped it like a pipe stem because he knew leverages and was able to force his ape's body to obey the will of his human mind. One ape whimpering, rolling away to lick at his wounds; whimpering oddly like a baby that has burned its fingers. A great ape weighing hundreds of pounds, crying like a child! Yet that "child," with his arm unbroken, could have taken a grown man, no matter how much of a giant, and torn him to pieces. Two other apes were out of the fray, one dead, the other with only empty eye-sockets where his red-rimmed eyes had been. Bentley guessed that Apeman had gone at least a mile into the jungle, heading directly away from the dwelling of Caleb Barter. He must get free and pursue. There was nothing else he could do. If he were slain, Ellen was doomed to a fate he dared not contemplate. Apeman would never be accepted by the apes because to all outward seeming he was a man. His body would never stand the hardship of the jungle, yet Apeman would never guess that, and would be slain. Bentley must prevent that. He must make sure that Apeman's body at least remained sufficiently healthy that it could become his own again without the necessity of a long sojourn in some hospital. Ellen must not be left alone with Apeman, who was still an ape, running away with a she. A ghastly muddle. * * * * * Now the apes broke away from Bentley. They broke in all direction into the jungle. Some of them seemed on the trail of Apeman. One of them took to the trees, swinging himself along with the speed of a running man, flying from limb to limb with no support save his hands. Bentley stared after the fleeing ape, and then gave chase. He felt that the ape was on the trail of Apeman. Bentley did not know that he himself could follow the spoor of Apeman, for he had not yet analyzed all of his new capabilities. But while he was discovering, he would follow something he could see--the fleeing ape, who would overhaul Apeman as though Apeman were standing still. So, in a manner of speaking, Bentley essayed his wings. He took to the trees after the fleeing ape, and was amazed that his great arms worked with ease, that he swung from limb to limb as easily and as surely as the other apes. He climbed to the upper terrace, where view of the ground was entirely shut off. His eyes took note of limbs capable of bearing his weight--after he had made one mistake that might easily have proved costly. He had leaped to a limb that would have supported Bentley of the _Bengal Queen_, but that was a mere twig under the weight of Manape. It broke and he fell, clutching for support; and fate was kind to him in that he found it, and so clambered back and swung easily and swiftly along. In his nostrils at intervals was a peculiar odor--a peculiarly human odor, reminding him of the work-sweat of a man who seldom bathed. He knew that for the odor of Apeman, and a thrill of exaltation encompassed him as he realized that he was following a spoor by the cunning of his nostrils. * * * * * There was a great leap across space. The ape ahead of him made it with ease. Bentley essayed it without hesitation, hurling himself into space, all of a hundred feet above the ground; with all the might of his arms--and almost overshot the mark, almost went crashing once more through the branches. But the tree swayed, and held, and Bentley went swinging on. It was wildly exhilarating, thrilling in a primitive way. Bentley remembered those dreams of his childhood--dreams of falling endlessly but never striking. Racial memories, scientists called them, relics of our simian forebears. Bentley thought of that and laughed; but his laughter was merely a beastly chattering which recalled him to the grim necessity of the moment. Fifteen minutes passed, perhaps. Twenty. Half an hour. He was following a trace which led away from the coast, and further away from the cabin of Caleb Barter. But with his jungle senses, and his human memory, Bentley was sure he could return when the time came. Had Barter foreseen all that? Was Barter smiling to himself, back there in his awful hermitage, waiting for the working out of his "experiment"? But Apeman had jungle knowledge, and must have forced Bentley's body to the limit of its endurance, for it was near evening when Bentley, who had lost the ape ahead of him, but had continued on the spoor of Apeman by the smell, came to swift pause on his race through the trees. * * * * * He had heard the voice of Ellen Estabrook, and the voice was pleading. "Lee! Lee! If you love me try to regain control of yourself. Please do not stare at me like that. Oh, your poor body! The brush and briars have literally torn you to bits." But the answer of "Lee" was a bestial snarl, and traveling as quietly as he could, Manape dropped down so that he could gaze upon his beloved, and the thing she believed she loved. Ellen was unaware of him. But he had scarcely dropped into view before Apeman became aware of him, and rose weakly to tottering limbs, to beat his bruised and bleeding chest in simian challenge. Apeman was simply an ape that had run until he was finished, and now was turning to make a last stand against a male who was stronger--a last bid for life and possession of the she he had carried away. Then Ellen saw Manape, screamed, and for the first time since she had been saved from the deep by Bentley, fainted dead away. The two so strangely related creatures faced each other across her supine body--and both were savagely snarling. Apeman weakly but angrily, Manape with a sound of such brute savagery that even the twittering of birds died away to awed silence. CHAPTER VIII _Struggle for Mastery_ It was Apeman who charged. Pity for Apeman welled up in Bentley. That was his own body which Apeman was so illy using. His own poor bruised and bleeding body, which Apeman had all but slain by forcing it far beyond human endurance. It must be saved, in spite of Apeman. But there was something first to do. Bentley bent over Ellen, caught her under his arm, and returned to the trees, with Apeman chattering angrily and futilely behind him. Bentley found a crotch in the tree where he could place Ellen, made sure that she was safely propped there and that no snakes were near, and hurried back to the contest with Apeman which could not be avoided. He did not fear the battle he knew he must fight. He hurried back because Apeman might realize himself beaten and escape into the jungle. In his weakened condition he could not travel far and would be easy prey for any prowling leopard, easy prey for the crawling things whose fangs held sure death. Or would the cunning of Apeman, denizen of the jungle, warn him against any such? His ape brain would warn him, but would his human strength avail in case of necessity, in case of attack by another ape, or a four-footed carnivore? Bentley hurried back because Apeman must be saved, somehow, even against his will. Apeman hated Manape with a deadly hatred. Yet to subdue the travesty of a human being, Manape must take care that he did not destroy his own casement of humanity. Any moment now and a great cat might charge from the shadows and destroy Apeman. * * * * * Apeman, snarling, beating his puny chest with his puny hands, was waiting for Manape his enemy. Manape found himself thinking of the line: "'O wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursilves as ithers see us,'" and adding some thoughts of his own. "If that were actually 'I' down there, my chance of preserving the life of myself, and that of Ellen against the rigors of the jungle, would be absolutely nil. How helpless we humans are in primitive surroundings! The tiniest serpent may slay us. The jungle cats destroy us with ease, if we be not equipped with artificial weapons which our better brains have created. As Manape, Barter's trained ape, I am better fitted to protect Ellen than if I were Bentley--the Bentley of the _Bengal Queen_. Yet she will cower away from me when she wakens." Now Bentley was down, and Apeman was charging. He charged at a staggering run. He stepped on a thorn, hesitated, and whimpered. But he possessed unusual courage, for he still came on. Apeman knew the law of the jungle, that the weakest must die. Death was to be his portion if he could not withstand the assaults of Manape, and he came to meet his fate with high brute courage. Apeman was close in. His hands were swinging, fists closed, in a strange travesty of a fighting man. Apeman was snarling. He groped for the throat of Manape with his human teeth--which sank home in the tough hide of Manape, hurting him as little as though Apeman were toothless. "As Bentley I would have no chance at all against a great ape," said Bentley to himself. * * * * * How could he take the pugnacity out of Apeman without destroying him? If he struck him he might strike too hard and slay Apeman--which was the equivalent of slaying himself. So Manape extended his mighty hands, caught Apeman under the armpits and held him up, feet swinging free. Yet Apeman still struggled, gnashed his teeth, and beat himself on the chest. How utterly futile! As futile as Bentley in his own casement would have been against a great ape! Apeman might destroy himself through his very rage. How could Bentley render the travesty unconscious and yet make sure that Apeman did not die? If he struck he might strike too hard and slay. What should he do? A low coughing sound came from somewhere close by. From the deeps of his consciousness Bentley knew that sound. He clutched Apeman in his right arm, swung back to the tree and up among the branches. He was just in time. The tawny form of a great cat passed beneath, missing him by inches. But while he had saved himself and Apeman, he had been clumsy. He had struck the head of Apeman against the bole of the tree, and Apeman hung limp in his arm. Bentley, fear such as he had never before known gripping him, pressed his huge ear to Apeman's heart. It was beating steadily and strongly. With a great inner sigh of relief he climbed to safety in the tree, bearing Apeman with him. * * * * * He reached the crotch where Ellen rested, and disposed Apeman nearby, his own gross body between them. He even dared to gather Ellen closer against him for warmth. His left hand held tightly the wrist of the unconscious Apeman, so that he should not fall and become prey of the night denizens of the jungle. So, the two who seemed to be human--Apeman and Ellen, passed from unconsciousness into natural sleep, while Bentley-Manape remained motionless between them, afraid to close his eyes lest something even more terrible than hitherto experienced might transpire. But his ears caught every sound of the jungle, and his sensitive ape's nostrils brought him every scent--which his man's mind strove to analyze, reaching back and back into the dim and misty past for identification of odors that were new, or that were really old, yet which had been lost to man since they had left forever the simian homes of their ancestors and their senses had become more highly specialized. The questions which turned over and over in Bentley's mind were these: How shall I tell Ellen the truth? Will she believe it? What is the rest of Barter's experiment? How shall I proceed from this moment on? How shall I procure food for Ellen? What food will Apeman choose for my body to assimilate? And jungle night drew on. Once Ellen shivered and pressed closer to Manape as she slept. What would morning bring to this strange trio? CHAPTER IX _Fate Decides_ Morning brought the great apes of the jungle--scores of them. They had approached so silently through the darkness that Bentley had not heard them, and his ape's nostrils had not told his human brain the meaning of their odor. It appeared too that his ape's ears had tricked him. For when morning came there were great apes everywhere. Bentley still held the wrist of Apeman, whose chest was rising and falling naturally, though the body was limp and plainly exhausted, and exuded perspiration that told of some jungle fever or other illness perhaps, induced by hardship and over-exertion. The ape's brain of Apeman had driven Bentley's body to the uttermost, and now that body must pay. Bentley wondered how far he was now from the cabin of Caleb Barter. He doubted if Apeman could stand the return journey, though Bentley's ape body could have carried Apeman's with ease. But would Apeman stand the journey? Apeman, Bentley knew, was going into the Valley of the Shadow, and something must be done to save him. But what? And the great apes constituted a new menace, though they were making no effort to molest the three in the tree. Apeman must be placed in a shady place and some attention paid to his needs. But the human body with the ape's brain could not tell how it hurt or where. The first task was to get the two beings down from the tree, and much depended upon chance. To the apes Bentley was another ape, one moreover which had slain a number of them. But Apeman was a human being, as was Ellen Estabrook. The whole thing constituted a fine problem for the brain of Manape. * * * * * If Manape were to attempt first aid for Apeman, how would such a sight react upon Ellen Estabrook? If Manape were to attempt to take Apeman back to Caleb Barter, leading the way for Ellen, would she follow, and what would his action tell her? She would think herself demented, imagining things, because a great ape did things which only human beings were supposedly capable of doing. If she knew, of course, it would make a difference. But she did not, and Bentley had no means by which to inform her. That was a problem for the future. Ellen was sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion and he felt that he could safely leave her for the moment while he swung Apeman down from the tree. He must work fast, and return for Ellen before the great apes discovered the helpless Apeman at the foot of the tree. He hoped to get Ellen down while she slept, knowing that she would be in mortal fear of him if she wakened and found herself in his power. Bentley got Apeman down, and looked about him. No apes were close enough, as far as he could tell, to molest Apeman before Bentley could return with Ellen. He raced back into the tree, lifted Ellen so gently that she scarcely altered the even motion of her breathing--and for a moment he hesitated. So close to him were her tired lips. So woe-begone and pathetic her appearance, a great well of pity for her rose in the heart of Bentley--or what was the seat of this emotion within him? Was the brain the seat of the emotions? Or the heart? But Bentley's true heart was in Apeman's human body, so there must be some other explanation for the feeling which grew and grew within Bentley for Ellen. He leaned forward with the intention of touching his lips to the tired thin lips of Ellen Estabrook, then drew back in horror. How could he kiss this woman whom he loved with the gross lips of Manape, the great ape? He could, of course, but suppose she wakened at his caress and saw the great figure of the jungle brute, with all man's emotions and desires, yet with none of man's restraint--bending over her? Women had gone insane over less. * * * * * He hurried down with Ellen, and placed her beside Apeman. By now the great apes had discovered the strange trio and were coming close to investigate. There was a huge brute who came the fastest and seemed to be the leader of the apes, if any they had. But even this one did not offer a challenge, did not seem perturbed in the least. But he did seem filled with childish curiosity. The apes themselves were like children, children grown to monstrous proportions, advancing and retreating, staring at this trio, darting away when Apeman or Ellen made some sort of movement. Bentley could sense too their curiosity where he was concerned. Their senses told them that Bentley was a great ape. Their instincts, however, made them hesitate, uncertain as to his true "identity"--or so Bentley imagined. Ellen still slept, but she must have sensed the near presence of potential enemies, for she was stirring fitfully, preparing to waken. What would her reaction be when she opened her eyes to see Manape near her, standing guard over Apeman, with the jungle on all sides filled with the lurking nightmare figures of other great apes? A moan of anguish came from Apeman. He stirred, and groans which seemed to rack his whole white bruised body came forth. The brain of the ape was reacting to the suffering of Bentley's body--and a brute was whimpering with its hurts. The advancing apes came to pause. They seemed to stare at one another in amazement. They were suddenly frightened, amazed, unable to understand the thing they saw and were listening to. Bentley crouched there, watching the apes, and he fancied he could understand their sudden new hesitancy. * * * * * He did not know, but he guessed that the moans and groans of Apeman were comprehensible to the great apes. They knew that this strangely white creature was an ape, though he looked like a man. Already they had wondered as much as they were capable, about Manape. They had sensed something not simian about him which puzzled them. But from the lips of Apeman, to add to their mystification, came the groans and moans of an ape that was suffering. Bentley held his position, wondering what they would do. That they meant no harm he was sure, else they would long since have charged and overborne the three--unless they remembered the super-simian might of Manape and were afraid to attack again. Bentley hoped so, for that would make things easier for them all. Now the nearest apes were almost beside the body of Apeman, which was still covered with agony sweat. The lips emitted moans and faint blurs of gibberish. Bentley noted that the leading ape was a great she. The female came forward hesitantly, making strange sounds in her throat, and it seemed to Bentley that Apeman answered them. For the she came forward with the barest trace of hesitancy, stared for a moment at Manape, with a sort of challenge in her savage little red eyes, then dropped to all fours beside Apeman and began to lick his wounds! The she knew something of the injuries of Apeman and was doing what instinct told her to do for him. Now the rest of the apes were all about them--and Ellen wakened with a shrill cry of terror. Bentley remained as a man turned to stone. If he moved toward the woman he loved she would flee from him in terror--out among the other apes and into the jungle where she would have no slightest chance for life. If he did nothing she might still run. * * * * * Wildly she looked about her. She screamed again when she saw the she bending over the travesty she thought to be Bentley, and licking the poor bruised body. Ellen cast a sidelong look at Manape, and there was something distinctly placating in her eyes. She recognized Manape, and wanted his friendship. What thoughts crowded her brain as she realized that she was in the center of a group of anthropoids who could have destroyed her with their fingers in a matter of seconds! She did the one thing which proved to Bentley that she was worthy of any man's love. The great she who licked the wounds of Apeman was thrice the size of Ellen. Yet Ellen crawled to Apeman, little sounds of pity in her throat. Instantly the snarling of the she sent her back. The she had, for the time being at least, assumed proprietorship of Apeman, and was bidding Ellen keep her distance. And the she meant it, too. For she bared her fighting fangs when Ellen again approached close enough to have touched the body of Apeman. This time the she advanced a step toward the girl, and her snarl was a terrible sound. Ellen retreated, but no further than was necessary to still that snarl in the throat of the she. Manape moved in quite close now, into position to interfere if the she tried to actually injure Ellen Estabrook. If only, Bentley thought, there were some way of making himself known to Ellen! But how could she believe, even if a way were discovered? "What shall I do?" moaned Ellen aloud, wringing her hands. "Poor Lee! I can't move him. That brute won't let me touch him. Oh, I'm afraid!" Bentley wanted to tell her not to be afraid, but had learned from experience that when he tried to speak his voice was the bellowing one of a great ape. And if he were to enunciate words that Ellen could understand, what then? English from the lips of a giant anthropoid! She would not believe, would think herself insane--and with excellent reason. Slowly, as matters were transpiring, she had already been given sufficient reason to believe that her mind was tottering. * * * * * Manape stood guard over her. A she had adopted the thing she thought was Bentley. A score of great apes, which only three days ago had tried to destroy both Bentley and herself, now surrounded Bentley and Ellen with all the appearance of amity--crude, true, but unmistakable. Certainly this was sufficiently beyond all human experience to make Ellen believe she were in the throes of some awful nightmare. What would she think if an ape began to address her in English, and "Bentley" suddenly held speech with the great apes? Add to this possibility, suppose she were suddenly confronted with the truth--that the essential entities of Bentley and Manape had been exchanged, and the whole thing were explained to her from the gross lips of Manape himself, while "Bentley" looked on and chattered a challenge in ape language while Manape talked? No, at first she might have understood. Now it would have been even more horrifying for her to hear the truth. She must think what she would, and be allowed to adjust herself to the astounding state of affairs. Apeman could not be moved for some time. Ellen would not leave him, naturally. Nor would Manape. And the apes apparently intended to remain with them. Which made the problem, after all, a simple one. The trio must remain for the time being among the great apes. They needed one another in a strange way, and they needed the apes themselves, which were like a formidable army at their backs, as protection against the other beasts of the wilds. Bentley watched the great she continue her rude first aid for Apeman. Apeman was still moaning, though less fitfully, like a child that nuzzles the milk bottle, but is drifting away into sleep. The she gave the travesty her full attention. There was something horribly human about her maternal care of this creature before her. Her great arms held Apeman close while her tongue caressed his wounds. Bentley knew that that tongue was an excellent antiseptic, too. All animals licked their own wounds, and those wounds healed. Only human beings knew the dangers of infection, because they had departed from Nature's doctrines and had tried to cheat her with substitutes. Only the animals, like that great she, still were Nature's children, healing their own wounds in Nature's way. * * * * * Satisfied that the apes would not molest Ellen, so long as she kept her distance from Apeman, Bentley decided to seek food, which Ellen must sorely need. The need for water was urgent, too. Bentley knew the danger of drinking water found in the jungle--but an ape could scarcely be expected to build a fire with which to boil the water, nor to produce a miracle in the shape of something to hold it in over the fire. Here were many makeshifts indicated, then. Bentley smiled inwardly, the only way he could smile. He must feed himself, too. He must go wandering through the woods, feeding the body of Manape with grubs, worms and such nauseous provender, because it was the food to which Manape was accustomed. Apeman, when he was well enough to eat, would sicken the body of Bentley with the same sort of food, because the brain of Apeman would not know what was good or bad for the body of a human being--nor even would understand that his body was human. What _did_ Apeman think of his condition, anyway? That question, of course, would never be answered--unless Barter could really speak the language of the great apes and somehow managed to secure from Apeman, if Apeman lived, a recital of these hours in the jungle. What food should Manape secure for Ellen? What fruits were edible, what poisonous? How could he tell? He watched the other apes, which were scattering here and there now, tipping over rocks and sticks to search for grubs and worms--to see what fruits they ate, if any. They would know what fruits to avoid. An hour passed before Bentley saw one of the brutes feed upon anything except insects. A cluster of a peculiar fruit which looked like wild currants, but whose real name Bentley did not know. Now, feeling safe in his choice, because the ape was eating the berries with relish, Bentley searched until he found a quantity of the same berries, and bore them back to Ellen Estabrook. * * * * * Beside Apeman, who now was awake and exchanging crazy gibberish with the she who had licked his wounds, Ellen Estabrook, trying to be brave, did not cry aloud. But her face was dirty, and her tears made furrows through the grime. Manape dropped the berries beside her. The she snarled as Ellen reached for the berries. Manape flung himself forward as the she strove to take the berries before Ellen could grasp them--and cuffed her over backward with a cumbersome but lightning-fast right swing. "Manape," said Ellen, "if only you could talk! I feel that you are my friend, and my fears are less when you are with me. I'll pretend that you can understand me. It helps a little to talk, for one scarcely seems so much alone. How would you feel, I wonder, Manape, if you were suddenly taken entirely out of the life you've always known, and forced to live in another world entirely? It would not be easy to be brave, would it? Suppose you were taken out of the wilds and dropped into a ballroom?" Bentley could have laughed had the jest not been such a grim one. What would Ellen think if he were to answer her: "I would be much more at home in that ballroom than that thing on the ground that you love--as matters are at this moment!" She would not understand that. Nor did she understand when the she went away for a time and came back with a supply of worms and grubs--which nauseous supply vanished with great speed under the wolfish appetite of Apeman. There was little wonder that Ellen found it difficult to orient herself. "I must tell her somehow," thought Bentley, "and that soon. Surely enough has been done to satisfy the devilish curiosity of Caleb Barter." Toward evening the apes began to drift further into the jungle. The she gathered Apeman in her arms and moved off with him. There was nothing for Manape to do but follow, and nothing for Ellen to do but follow, too--if she loved the thing she thought was Bentley. She did not hesitate. With unfaltering courage she followed on, and the lumbering forms of the great apes drifted further away from the sea, seemingly headed toward some mutely agreed upon jungle rendezvous. Everything depended for the time upon the return to health of Apeman. All other matters depended upon that. Each in his own way, Manape and Ellen, realized this. Caleb Barter had schemed better than he could possibly have foreseen. CHAPTER X _Written in Dust_ As Apeman was borne deeper into the jungle in the great arms of the she, what was more natural in the circumstances than that Ellen keep close to her only remaining link with the world she had left--Manape, the trained anthropoid of Caleb Barter? A natural thing, and one that filled Manape with obvious pleasure. Once she touched his hand, rested her own small one in his mighty palm for a moment--and Bentley was afraid to return the pressure of her palm with the hand of Manape, lest he crush every bone in her fingers. Thereafter at intervals, while the whole aggregation drifted deeper into the jungle, Ellen clung to Manape; depended upon him. Was it her woman's intuition which told her that Manape was a safe guardian? Bentley refused to dwell on that phase of this wild adventure however, for there were other things to think about. It required many hours for him to discover the truth, but he knew it at last. He, Manape-Bentley, was the lord of the great apes! Before his capture, or before the capture of Manape by Caleb Barter, Manape had been leader of these apes. Now he had returned and was their ruler once more. Upstarts had taken his place, and he had slain them--back there when Apeman had tried to escape into the jungle with Ellen in his arms. To the apes this must have seemed the way it was. Bentley was putting things together, hoping and believing that they made four--yet not sure but that he was forcing them to equal four when in actuality they were five or six. If Manape--the original ape of Barter's capture, whose body now was Bentley's--had been the leader of the great apes, that explained why the animals remained constantly in the vicinity of Barter's dwelling. Barter had needed them in his plans, and had made certain their remaining near by making their leader captive. And of course only an ape sufficiently intelligent to rule other apes would have suited the evil scheme which must have been growing for years in the mind of Caleb Barter. Barter had merely waited with philosophic calmness for human beings to drift into this territory--and the _Bengal Queen_ had obligingly gone down off the coast, throwing Ellen Estabrook and Lee Bentley into Barter's power. * * * * * What was Barter doing now? Would he not be striving to watch the course of his experiment? Would he not think of details hitherto overlooked and plan further experiments, or an enlarging of this experiment of which three creatures were the victims? Surely Barter would not remain quietly at Barterville while the subjects of his experiment went deeper into the jungle with the great apes. Barter was too thorough a scientist for that. Somehow, Bentley was sure, Barter would know what was happening, even at this very moment. He would wish to know how a modern woman would conduct herself if suddenly forced to live among apes. Therefore he would try in some manner to keep watch over the conduct of Ellen Estabrook. He would wonder how a modern man would conduct himself if he suddenly found, himself the leader of that same group of apes, and how an ape would behave if he suddenly discovered himself a man. It was a neat "experiment," and Bentley was beginning to believe that there was probably far more to it than there first had seemed. Barter would wish to know how all three creatures would conduct themselves in certain circumstances--Apeman, Ellen and Bentley. He would not leave it to chance, for Bentley now realized that Barter himself did not feel inimical to either Ellen, Apeman or Bentley. To him they were merely an experiment. Barter would not wish for Apeman to die, and thus deprive Barter of a certain knowledge relative to one angle of his unholy experiment. He would not wish for Manape-Bentley to remain forever as Manape-Bentley, lacking the power of speech, either human speech or the gibberish of the apes. No, all this was not being left to chance. Bentley believed that Barter was directing the destination of these three subjects of his, as surely as though he were right with them at this moment, driving them to his will with that awful lash which had made him feared by the great apes. * * * * * Yes, Barter was still the master mind. It made Bentley feel awfully helpless. Yet--he was the leader of the great apes. That, too, Barter must have foreseen. Would Barter try in any way to discover how Bentley would behave in an emergency as leader of the apes? Would he wish to know sufficiently to create an emergency? From Bentley's knowledge of the twisted genius of Caleb Barter, he fully believed that Barter planned yet other angles to his experiment. If he did, then what would he do next? It was not until the storm broke over the strange aggregation of great apes, who seemed to be holding two white people prisoners, that Bentley understood that from the very beginning he should have been able to see the obvious denouement--the mad climax which even then was preparing in the jungle ahead, simply waiting for the great apes to drift, feeding as they went without a thought of danger, into the trap set for them. Ellen now kept her hand in the great palm of Manape. She wept on occasions, when she thought of the apparent hopelessness of her position, but for the most part she was brave, and Bentley grew to love her more as the hours passed--even as he grew more impatient at his inability to express his love. If he tried he could simply frighten her--fill her with horror because, gentle though he was with her and he was a great ape, a fact which nothing could change. Nor could anybody change the fact, except Caleb Barter. Where was the scientist? What would be his next move if he were not leaving the working out of his experiment entirely to chance, which seemed not at all in keeping with the thorough manner of his experiment thus far. The future was a dark, painful obscurity, in which all things were hidden, in which anything might happen--because Caleb Barter would wish for it to happen. * * * * * How long would Barter wait before making his next move? Long enough for Ellen to accustom herself to life among the apes? Long enough to discover whether her natural intelligence would guide her to eke out existence among hardships such as human beings never thought of, except perhaps in nightmares? Long enough to allow the brain of Bentley to discover what miracles intellect might do with the body of Manape? Long enough for Apeman to be well of his illness, so that he might observe what havoc an ape's brain might work with a human body? Certainly when one gave the hideous experiment full thought, its possible angles of development, its many potential ramifications, were astounding in the extreme. Was it not up to Bentley then to do something besides mope and pine for the impossible, and thus hasten the hour when Barter should be wholly satisfied with his experiment? What would Apeman do, how would he behave, when the white body of Bentley was well again? Would that body grow well faster when guided by an ape's brain than when a human brain was in command? Certainly Caleb Barter must have listed all these questions and hundreds of others which had not as yet occurred to Bentley. If he had he would not transfer the two intelligences back to their proper places until all of his questions were answered to his satisfaction. Bentley himself must somehow force an answer to some of them. To do this he must try to guess what sort of questions Barter would have listed, and try to work out their answers--assuming all the time that Barter, from some undiscovered coign of vantage would be watching for the answers he hoped his experiment would provide. Bentley arrived at a decision. Ellen must long since have become numbed to the horror which encompassed her. Bentley knew that a human brain could stand only so much, beyond which it was no longer surprised or horrified. He guessed, noting the pale face of his beloved, that Ellen had well nigh reached that stage. He decided to take a tremendous risk with her sanity, hoping thereby to do his part in working out the details of Barter's experiment. * * * * * The sun was creeping into the west when the roving apes came to pause in a sort of clearing. Some of them curled up in sleep. The she who carried Apeman squatted with Apeman in her arms, and licked his wounds again. That Apeman was recovering was plainly evident, and when he saw it filled Bentley with an odd mixture of thankfulness and revulsion. Apeman was essentially an ape. With all his strength back he would revert to type, and what if he forced the body of Bentley to do horrible things that Ellen would never be able to forget or condone--even when she at last knew the truth? What if Apeman selected, for example, a mate--from among the hairy she's? For Apeman that would be natural, for Bentley horrible. Yet it might easily transpire. Apeman might relinquish the white she to a successful rival--which he would regard Manape as being--and content himself with a choice from the ape she's. Somehow that unholy thing must not happen. That was up to Manape-Bentley. Or, with his strength fully returned, Apeman might again desire Ellen, and force the issue with Manape for her possession--which seemed equally horrible to the brain of Bentley. Ellen remained as close to Apeman as the she would permit her. Manape-Bentley crouched close by. After a time Apeman slept, and Bentley was pleased to notice that the agony sweat no longer beaded Apeman's body, and that Apeman was recovering with superhuman swiftness--thanks to the ministrations of the unnamed she who had taken charge of him. Apeman now rarely groaned, sleeping or waking. Ellen watched the sleeping Apeman with her heart--and her fears--in her eyes. Satisfied that he slept, and that his sleep was healthy, Ellen again approached the creature she knew as Manape, Barter's trained ape. "If only you could talk," she said to him. "If only you were able to give some hope. If only there were some way I could cause you to understand my wishes--understand and help me." * * * * * Bentley did not answer. He knew that to be useless. But his brain remembered something. His brain recalled that moment in the cage in the dwelling of Barter, when his human brain had tried to force obedience from the great clumsy hands of Manape, when he had tried to force those mighty fingers to unfasten the knots which held the cage door secure. Could he force those hands to something else? Did he dare try? It was a terrible risk to take with Ellen's sanity, but Bentley felt it must be taken. She was watching him hopelessly, and her lips moved as though she prayed for a miracle--as though by some weird necromancy she might force Manape to understand her words, and to answer her, allaying her fears, destroying her hopelessness. When Ellen watched him, Bentley searched about nearby until he found a dried stick perhaps eight feet in length. He held it up, sniffed at it, fumbled it with his heavy, grotesque fingers. He focussed the attention of Ellen upon that stick, while his excitement mounted and mounted, and his fear of possible consequences kept pace with his excitement. Then, his decision reached, he began again that species of hypnosis which seemed necessary to compel the hands and fingers of Manape to do things no ape's hands had ever done before, no ape's brain had ever thought of doing. He pressed one end of the stick against the ground at his sprawling feet. With his left palm he smoothed out an area of dust several feet in either direction--a rough dusty rectangle. Interested, her brows puckered in concentration. Ellen watched as Manape went through these gestures which were so strangely, terribly human. Her eyes were watching the end of that twig which the trained ape was so clumsily clutching in both hands. She saw the marks the twig made in the dust as Manape caused it to move--slowly, horribly, fearfully, from left to right across the area of dust. * * * * * Fear began to grow in her face, but Bentley forced himself on. Again the fetid odor of ape sweat covered him. This awful concentration, this awful task of forcing Manape to write English words was in itself a miracle, more miraculous even than Ellen would have thought of praying for. Her eyes were glued to the sprawling, uneven, misshapen marks in the dust with hypnotic fascination. Bentley dared not look at her, because it required all his will to force the clumsy hands of Manape to his bidding. He could only watch the marks in the dust, and will with all the power of his human intelligence that the hands of Manape make their shape sufficiently plain that Ellen might read them--and hope besides that this terrible thing would not send the sorely harassed girl into the jungle, madly shrieking for deliverance from a nightmare. There, the words were written--and Ellen was staring at them, her eyes wide and unblinking, her body as rigid as stone, and her face as cold. Only three words were possible without an interval of rest, but those three words, among all Bentley might have selected, were the most to the point, the most unbelievable, the most black-magical. _"I am Lee!"_ Minutes went into eternity as Ellen stared at the words. Silence that it seemed would never be broken hang over the clearing. The bickering of the apes passed unnoticed as Ellen stared. Then, slowly, she tried to raise her eyes to meet those of Manape. She failed. Her body went limp and she slid forward on her face in the dust. Manape-Bentley gently turned her on her side and waited. What would he see in her beloved eyes when she regained consciousness? CHAPTER XI _Barter Acts_ Bentley remained motionless, awaiting Ellen's return to consciousness. He waited in fear and trembling. How would she react to the horrible thing he had told her? Now there was possibility of converse between them. If she knew and realized the meaning of his revelation. But would her mind stand up under the awfulness of it? He had thought so, else he would not have taken the chance he had taken. Much now depended upon Ellen, and all he could do was wait. Slowly she began to move. Moans escaped her lips, little pathetic moans, and the name of Lee Bentley. At last her eyes opened, and widened with horror when they met those of Manape. Bentley knew that there were tears on the face of Bentley-Manape. Manape, it seemed, cried easily, like a child. Her eyes still wide with horror. Ellen Estabrook slowly turned them until she gazed at the dust rectangle in which presumably a great ape had written words in English. But Bentley-Manape had rubbed out the words. She turned and looked at Manape again, and her lips writhed and twisted. She was seeking for words, shaping words, to ask questions such as none in all the world's history had ever asked of a giant anthropoid, with any hope of receiving answers. "You tell me you are Lee," she began slowly, hesitantly, as though the words were literally forced from her against her will. "I cannot grasp the meaning of that. You say you are Lee, yet I recognize you as Manape, Caleb Barter's great ape. Yet Manape could not have written those words. Yet, if you are Lee Bentley, who or what is that?" * * * * * She turned and pointed a trembling finger at Apeman. Bentley of course could not answer her in words, yet his mind was busy conceiving of some way in which he might answer her. She turned back to him after a long look at Apeman and studied him. His huge barrel chest, the mighty arms, the receding forehead--the outward seeming of a giant ape. Again that hesitant, horribly difficult task, of forcing the arms of Manape to perform actions which were not natural to the arms of a great ape. Bentley managed to raise the right arm in the gesture of pointing. He pointed at the other apes, some of which slept, some of which ate of grubs and worms, or bickered savagely among themselves over whatever childish trifles seemed important to the ape mind. "You mean," said Ellen huskily, "that Lee Bentley there is really an ape?" Manape nodded, ponderously. Ellen's face became animated. She was beginning to understand how to hold speech with Manape. "You tell me he is a great ape, yet he has the body of Lee Bentley. You tell me you are Bentley, yet I see you as Manape. Caleb Barter's trained ape. How am I to understand? Are my eyes betraying me, or is this a nightmare from which I shall waken presently? I see the shape of Manape, who writes in the dust that he is Lee. How can I know? None of you I can see is Lee Bentley. What part of you that I cannot see is Lee?" * * * * * Again the effort of forcing the hands of Manape to obedience. Manape-Bentley tapped his receding forehead with his knuckles, and a gasp burst from the lips of Ellen Estabrook. "You mean your brain is Bentley's brain, and that Bentley's body holds the brain of a great ape?" Manape nodded clumsily. "But how? You mean--Caleb Barter? I remember about him now. A master surgeon, an expert on anesthesia--a thousand years ahead of his time. You mean then that we three are part of an experiment? You, Manape, have the brain of Bentley, and Bentley has the brain of a great ape?" Bentley nodded. The face of Ellen Estabrook writhed and twisted. Her eyes studied the person of Manape the great ape. She could not believe the thing she had been told, yet she was thinking back and back--back to when Apeman had carried her away, his subsequent behavior, his behavior in the house of Barter, and his interest in the she ape who had licked his wounds. She remembered how Manape in the beginning had looked at her with the eyes of a lustful man--and how later all his attitude had been protective. There seemed evidence in plenty to support the statement Manape had mutely managed to give her. She was forced to believe. "But, Lee,"--she came closer to Manape as she spoke--"we must do something for that creature there--that thing with the ape she which looks like the man I love. You've heard me say that I love Lee Bentley?" Manape nodded. "Does Lee Bentley love me?" Again Manape nodded, more vehemently this time. Ellen smiled. Then, quickly, she came to Manape, thrust her fingers against his skull and examined it closely. Her brows were furrowed in concentration. She left Manape and strode to Apeman. The she growled at her but she ignored the beast as much as possible, though plainly cognizant of the fact that she dared not touch her hands to Apeman on pain of being torn asunder by the fighting fangs of the ape she. * * * * * Then Ellen came back. "The evidence is there, Lee," she said. "There are the marks of a surgeon's instruments. Marvelous. One is almost inclined to forget the horror of it in the realization that a miracle has been performed. The operation was perfect. But what did he use for anesthesia? How did Barter manage to complete his operation and cause his two patients to feel no-ill effects, to be to all intents and purposes well in mind and body--all within less than twelve hours? However, that does not matter now. Something must be done. Since Caleb Barter was the only man who could perform this unholy operation, he is the only one who could repeat it restoring each of you to your proper earthly casements. So we must play in with him. I suppose you've long since decided that way, Lee?" How strange it seemed to Ellen to discuss such matters with Manape. But behind his brutish exterior was the brain of the man whom she loved. "And there is one other thing," Ellen almost whispered, and her face flushed rosily. "No harm must come to the body of Lee, you understand? He must never be permitted to do anything of which Lee Bentley of after years may have cause to feel ashamed." Manape nodded. He understood her, and despite the grotesquerie of the whole thing there was something intimate and sweet about this interchange. A man and woman loved. Just now that love was mentioned more or less in the abstract, discussed on purely a mental basis--but both Bentley and Ellen Estabrook were thinking of the future, and were as frank with each other as they perhaps ever would be again. * * * * * Now the apes were beginning to stir themselves. It was time to be on the move again. Eyes were turned toward Manape, who was plainly intended to lead them further into the jungle. Ellen and the white body of Bentley were already being accepted as a matter of course. If the great apes wondered why their returned lord did not jabber with them in the gibberish of the great apes, there was no way of telling, for there was no way in which Manape could make himself understood, nor any way the great apes could tell their thoughts to Manape. Then, without warning, the blow fell. The storm broke, and even as the uproar started Bentley was sure that he could sense behind it the fine hand of Caleb Barter--still working out his "experiment," with human beings and apes as the pawns. The apes were on the move, entering a series of aisles through the gloomy woods when the blow fell--in the shape of scores of nets, in whose folds within a matter of seconds the great apes were fighting and snarling helplessly. They expended their mighty strength to no avail. They fought at ropes and thongs which they did not understand--and only Manape made no effort to fight, knowing it useless. Scores of black folk armed with spears danced and yelled in the brush, frankly delighted at the success of their grand coup. Barter was nowhere to be seen, and there was a possibility that he knew nothing about this. Yet Bentley knew better. Perhaps, in order to stimulate the blacks, he had offered them money for great apes taken alive. Anyhow, scores of the apes were taken, and now exhausted themselves in savage bellowing and snarling, as they fought for freedom. A half dozen to each net, the blacks gathered in their captives. They made much over Ellen Estabrook. They pawed over Apeman despite his snarls and bellowings, and laughed when Apeman played the ape as though to the manner born. They scented some mystery here, a white man raised by the apes, perhaps. But that Ellen and Apeman were prisoners of blacks, Bentley could plainly understand. He scarcely knew which was the more horrible for her--to be prisoner of the apes or the blacks. But for the moment there was nothing he could do. And the blacks were not torturing either Apeman or Ellen, though there was no mistaking what he saw in the faces of the blacks when they looked at Ellen and grinned at one another. Darkness had fallen over the world when the blacks went shouting into a village of mud-wattled huts, bearing the trophies of their ape hunt. Still in their nets for safety's sake, the great apes were thrown into a sort of stockade which had plainly just been built for their reception--proof to Bentley that this decision to make an attack against the passing band of anthropoids had been a sudden one. What did that indicate? Someone had caused the blacks to react in a way that never would have occurred to them ordinarily. Caleb Barter? Bentley thought so. What now was Bentley supposed to do? What did Barter expect him to do? What did Barter expect Ellen to do? What did he expect Apeman to do? There was no question, as Bentley saw it, but that Caleb Barter still pulled the strings, and that before morning this jungle village was to witness a horror it should never forget. But at the moment Bentley had but one thought: to escape quietly with Ellen and Apeman, and return to the dwelling of Caleb Barter. CHAPTER XII _Jungle Justice_ Again that grim concentration on the part of Bentley, forcing the unaccustomed great hands of Manape to perform things they had never done before. He must release himself from the rope net which held him. For the hands of a human being the task would have been easy. For the hands of Manape, even though guided by the will of Bentley, the task was far from easy. But he persevered. An hour after the apes had been dumped in the stockade, Bentley had released himself from the rope net and was resting after the awful ordeal of forcing the hands of Manape to do his bidding. He pressed himself against the uprights of the stockade, and carefully tested them with his strength. The strength of Bentley would never have availed against the stout uprights of the stockade. Yet Manape-Bentley knew that with the arms of Manape he could tear the uprights out of the ground as easily as though they had been match-sticks. What should he do now? His first impulse of course was to release the rest of the great apes. The brutes still fought at their bindings and were utterly insane with rage. What would they do when they were released? What was his duty where they were concerned? If they went wild through the native village, slaying and laying waste, would Bentley be responsible for loss of life? If he left the apes in the hands of the natives, what then? He would never afterward forgive himself. He knew them as children of the wilds, carefree and happy brutes of the jungle. Now if held captives indefinitely they would either die or spend the rest of their lives in cages. No, he would release the animals, one by one. The natives would have to take their chances. * * * * * A white figure loomed out of the darkness, coming from the direction of a great bonfire which showed all the jungle surrounding in weird, crimson relief. The white figure, all but nude, was Apeman! Following him were several natives, who laughed and prodded Apeman with the butts of their spears. Bentley understood that. They thought Apeman a demented white man, and to these natives a demented one was a butt of jokes. They did not even suspect the horror of the possible revenge that was growing in the brain of the ape which controlled the body of Apeman. Twice or thrice Apeman tried to dart into the jungle, but always the blacks prevented, heading him toward the cage where the apes were held prisoners. Bentley wondered where Ellen was and what was happening to her. A celebration of some sort seemed going forward in the village. Was Caleb Barter somewhere near, perhaps on the edge of the jungle, grinning gleefully at this thing he had brought about as part of his unholy experiment? There was no way of knowing of course, yet. But.... Apeman reached the side of the stockade and snarled back at his annoyers, while his white hands grasped the uprights and tore at them with futile savagery. A strange situation. Inside the stockade a score of brutes who could rip the stockade to bits. Outside, one of them free, but hampered by the puny strength of a human being. The blacks shouted to Apeman but of course Bentley could not understand what they said. Apeman turned after snarling at them for a few moments, and began to chatter in that gibberish which appeared to be Apeman's only mode of speech--ape language on the lips of a man! This was the only time it had ever happened. The apes stirred fitfully as Apeman chattered, and began to renew their attacks on their bonds. The blacks, after watching Apeman for a few moments turned back toward the bonfire, evidently satisfied that this strange demented creature would not run away. Apeman chattered and the apes made answer. The she who had nursed Apeman managed to reach the side of the stockade, and for several moments Bentley listened to the horrible grotesqueries--an ape she and a man talking together in brutish gibberish, and with hellish intimacy. Now, wondering just how matters would work themselves out, Bentley set himself the task of releasing the apes. They would at least create a furor in the village, during which Bentley could escape into the jungle with Apeman and Ellen Estabrook before the natives could reorganise themselves and give chase. His plan was hazy, and he figured without the savagery of Apeman who occupied that white body which had been Bentley's. His one thought was to free the apes, set them upon the village, and escape with Apeman and Ellen. Just that and no more; but he did not know the great apes, nor how thoroughly they followed the lead of their lord whom they knew as Manape, though how he was named in their brains he was never to know. One by one he released the apes. They seemed to sense the necessity for stealth, for they began to ape the cautious behavior of Manape. Apeman, outside, seemed to be advising them, telling them what to do. * * * * * One by one as Manape released them, the apes squatted side by side, their red angry little eyes watching his every move. Bentley knew of course what a fearful racket his own appearance would cause when he strode out of the gloom among the blacks, seeking Ellen. But he knew that surprise for a few precious moments would render the blacks incapable of stopping him until he got away. At least he hoped so. Beyond that he had no other plan. All depended upon the behavior of the apes and the reaction of the blacks who were holding a devil's dance about the mighty fire in the center of their village. Bentley did not even yet dare guess what the apes would do when they saw what Manape-Bentley did. Would they follow him? Or would they race for the jungle to escape? A few minutes now would tell the tale. He had released the last of the great apes, who now lined the side of the stockade, apparently holding angry converse with Apeman. Bentley was reminded of the old fashioned mob of pioneer days--angrily muttering yet lacking a leader to direct their efforts. Well, he had done his duty as he saw it. From now on things must take their course. But Bentley waited, watching the dancing figures about the fire. As far as he could tell the dance was approaching some sort of a climax. The figures leaped higher as they danced, and the noise of their shouting raced and rolled across the jungle. They appeared to be drunk with some sort of excitement, perhaps helped by native liquor, perhaps because of superstitious frenzy. If he waited for their excitement to die down a bit, for some of them to go to sleep, his chances of releasing Ellen would be better. It would not be hard for him to find her--not with Manape's sensitive nose to lead him to her. * * * * * But time passed and the apes, though apparently being urged to something by Apeman, watching Manape sullenly, apparently waiting for him to make some move. Then, sharp as a knife, cutting through the other noises of the village, came Ellen's voice. "Help, Lee! Help me!" The scream was broken short off as though a hand had clutched the girl's throat, but Bentley waited for no more--and Manape-Bentley flew into action. His great hands went to the uprights of the stockade. His mighty shoulders heaved and twisted and the uprights were ripped apart. The apes followed his lead, and the cracking of the stockade's uprights was like a volley of pistol shots. The great brutes fairly walked through the green saplings which formed the prison. Manape was leading the charge, and the apes, once through, did not hesitate. If their leader charged the blacks they would follow--and did, while among them danced, cavorted and gibbered the travesty, Apeman. He was Bentley's lieutenant, and Bentley-Manape was the lord of the apes. Just now he forgot that he was more ape than man. Just now he was happy that his strength was the strength of many men. He was hurrying to the assistance of the woman he loved. Behind him came the great apes, following like an army of poorly trained recruits, yet armed as no army has ever been armed since the days when men fought with fist and fang against their enemies. Bentley lumbered swiftly toward the sound of Ellen's voice, aided in his journey by the odor of her which came to his sensitive ape's nostrils. * * * * * The blacks never saw the approach of the apes, until, led by Manape the Mighty, the great apes were right among them. Bentley did not pause. A black man saw him and shrieked aloud in terror, a shriek which seemed to freeze the other blacks in all sorts of postures. Sitting men remained where they sat, and some of the motionless ones saved their lives by their immobility. Dancers paused in midstride, and those who did not, died. For the hands of the great apes clutched at everything that moved, and the great shoulders bulged, and the mighty muscles cracked, and men were torn asunder as though they had been flies in the hands of vengeful boys. The black who had shrieked hurled a spear, purely a reflex, perhaps--an action born of its habitual use. It missed Bentley by a narrow margin, but passed through the stomach of the she who had nursed Apeman. Snarling, snapping at the thing which hurt her, the she tore the weapon free--then waddled forward swiftly, caught the man who had hurled the spear, and tore his head off with a single twisting movement of her great hands. Next moment her blood was mingling with that of her slayer as she fell above him. But her hands, in the convulsions of death, still ripped and tore, and the black whom she held was a ghastly thing when the she was finally dead. Bentley did not see the ghastly end of the spearman, for he was seeking Ellen, and at the some time keeping a close watch on Apeman. Apeman seemed to be urging the apes to the attack, bidding them rip and tear and gnash, and the apes were doing that, making of the village a crimson shambles. But they did it in passing, for Manape was their leader, and him they followed--and he was seeking Ellen Estabrook. * * * * * The door of the hut in which his nostrils told him she would be found, gave before his mighty chest as though it had been made of paper. Inside, in the glow of the native lamp, a huge black man cowered against the further wall of the hut, with spear poised. But the black man seemed frozen with terror. "Lee! Lee!" Bentley essayed one glance at her. In the other corner she was, with the upper part of her clothing almost torn from her body. Then the spearman hurled his weapon. Bentley strove to force the huge bulk of Manape's body to dodge the spear; but that body was slow in doing so--and took a mortal wound! But it was a wound that would mean slow death. An aching, terrible wound. Then Manape-Bentley had grasped the body of the black, lifted it high above his head, and crashed it to the hard packed floor of the hut. The hut fairly shook with the thud of that fall. At once Manape stooped, caught the black by the ankles and pulled in opposite direction with all his terrific might. Then he whirled, masking what he had done from Ellen's sight with his huge, sorely wounded body. He tried to send her a message with his eyes, but it was not necessary. She knew Manape, Barter's trained ape. She followed close at his heels. Outside the hut's door Apeman still urged the apes to destruction of men and property, of women and children. The village of the blacks had become a place of horror. "Hurry, Lee!" gasped Ellen. "You've been grievously wounded, and if Manape dies, nothing can save _you_--and I shall not care to live!" But Bentley knew. His brain could sense the approach of death, and what he now must do was very plain. He charged at Apeman and caught the struggling, snarling travesty up in his mighty arms. Then, with Ellen at his heels, he leaped into the jungle and began the race for the house of Caleb Barter. * * * * * Life was going from him, yet his brain forced onward the body of Manape. Behind came the great apes, following their leader. Now and again they screamed and snarled at him, but he paid them no heed. They could follow or leave him, as they chose. They chose to follow. Apeman fought and bit at Bentley, but he paid him as little heed as though he had been nothing at all. Now and again when Ellen faltered Bentley caught her up, too, and carried her with Apeman until Ellen was rested enough to go on. Some of the apes appeared to realize whither they were going, for they took to the trees and vanished onward. With Apeman alone, Bentley himself would have taken to the trees as the swiftest way back to Barter's dwelling. But Ellen could not race along the upper terraces, and Bentley could not carry both Apeman and Ellen and leave the ground. But he could travel swiftly on his race with death, with Ellen as the prize if he won. The hours passed, and the strength of Manape decreased; but fiercely the brain of Bentley drove the mighty body on. Ellen sobbed with weariness but continued on, and no words were spoken. There was no time for words. Now and again Bentley forced Apeman to walk, and dragged him forward with a hand clutching his wrist. At such times Bentley carried Ellen, and scarcely slackened his stride under her weight. * * * * * Once he tried to force Apeman to carry her, but the arms of Apeman were not equal to the task for more than fifty yards or so, and he gave that up as being impracticable. His brain raced, thinking up ways to travel faster, to reach Barter's quarters before the mighty body of Manape should die, and with it the brain of Bentley. Surely no stranger cavalcade ever before traversed the jungles of the Black Continent. So they came at last to the clearing. The apes protested and remained in hiding, while Bentley, never pausing, raced across toward the house he would never forget. The body of Manape was almost through, for it staggered like a drunken man. Blood covered the mighty chest, and the brain of Bentley felt hazy; nothing made sense; and the end was very near. But they reached the door of Barter's dwelling, and Barter himself met them, bearing his cruel whip in his hand. Ellen roused herself from her extreme exhaustion and clutched at the scientist's hand. "Professor Barter!" she begged. "Please, please! Manape is almost dead! Hurry! Hurry, for the love of God!" "There, there, my dear young lady," said Barter soothingly. "Make yourself easy. There's no cause for worry." Manape-Bentley toppled forward on the floor of the cabin. Ellen screamed and Barter comforted her. Apeman tried to escape to the jungle, but the lash of Barter drove him cowering and whimpering to a corner. Then, oblivion--save that somewhere was the odor of violets. Or did violets possess odor? Then, if not, the odor of flowers he thought were violets. CHAPTER XIII _The Horror Passes_ Slowly consciousness returned to Bentley, and his first thought was one of horror. From somewhere distinct came a doleful wailing sound. He thought he knew what it was--the mourning of great apes over a member that had died. He had read somewhere that the great apes sorrowed when any of their members died. Bentley opened his eyes. He could make out the ceiling of a room that he recognized. It was the room that had been first assigned him in the dwelling of Barter. Ellen Estabrook would be somewhere nearby. He opened his lips to call to her. Then he remembered. He'd tried to call to her before--and had merely bellowed like an ape. No, there was something he must know first. His arms and hands seemed as heavy as lead, but he lifted them and looked at them--and a great feeling of peace descended upon him. Manape-Bentley was gone, and he was plain Lee Bentley again. There was his own ring, which Apeman had worn, and besides he had just spoken aloud, softly, for no ears save his own, and the voice had been Lee Bentley's voice. Yes, Barter had kept his promise, and Lee Bentley was Lee Bentley again. But he was very weak, and his body was racked with pain. His hands and arms were covered with bandages. His body seemed packed in concrete, so moveless was it, and when he raised his voice it was terribly weak. "Ellen," he managed to call; and again, "Ellen, darling!" Instantly there came a swift patter of feet and Ellen was beside his bed, on her knees, covering his face--what there was of it unbandaged--with kisses. There was really no need for words between these two. "Lee," she whispered, "I've been so afraid. You've been like this for a week, despite the miraculous knowledge and skill of Professor Barter. I've waited in fear and trembling, praying for you to live, and now you are Lee again, and will live on. Professor Barter has promised me. All you need now is food, and care, and I shall shower you with both. Barter has instructed me so carefully that I could manage even to care for you, sick as you are, without him here at all." "And Manape?" Bentley's voice seemed to be stronger. "He is dead," whispered Ellen. "I shall never forget him. There was something great, something even better than human about him, Lee! Oh, I know that he was you--but where would all three of us have been had it not been for the powerful body of Manape, the great ape? Manape is dead, and in the jungle hereabouts the great apes mourn his passing. They've been wailing almost like human beings for a week. Manape--well, Professor Barter told me that you too would have died, had Manape reached his door five minutes later. As it was, he, and you, were just in time!" "It's amazing," whispered Bentley, "that the great apes stay around here now that Manape is dead." "Yes. It's strange--and terrible I think. There have been times when I felt they were waiting for something, for Professor Barter, perhaps. I've had the feeling they believe he killed their leader." Now the two became silent, and Ellen held the bruised and broken hands of Bentley in both her own, and their eyes said things, one to the other, which eyes say so much better than lips do. They kissed each other softly, and Ellen crooned with ecstasy, her cheek against Bentley's. * * * * * Then Caleb Barter entered. "Well, well," he said, "when a man is in condition to make love to a woman, he is well on the road to recovery. It won't hurt you to talk now, Bentley, and before I begin asking questions, let me assure you that you will suffer no ill effects from your experience." "What of my memories?" asked Bentley softly. "Forget them!" snapped Barter tartly. "That is, after you have told me everything that has happened. Miss Estabrook has already told me her angle of the experiment. Now, talk please--and then I shall make you well, and you shall both go into the world with me, and tell people that what I have to tell is true!" So Bentley talked. Barter wrote like a man possessed. His fingers raced over the paper, repeating the words which fell from the lips of Lee Bentley, beside whom Ellen sat, holding his hands. Now and again Barter uttered an ejaculation of fierce joy. He was like a child with a toy that pleased him beyond words. He could scarcely wait for the words to spill from the lips of Lee Bentley. When Bentley paused for breath, Barter exclaimed impatiently, and urged him to greater speed. He thought of but one thing, his experiment. And so at last Bentley had finished. "That's all, Professor Barter!" he said softly. "All!" cried Barter. "Everything! Fame! Wealth! Adulation! There is nothing in the world Caleb Barter may not have when this story is told! I can scarcely contain myself. You must hurry to be well in order that the world may be told at once." Laughing immoderately, Barter piled the manuscript he had written, and weighted it with a piece of rock. His face was a constant grin. His fingers trembled with eagerness. He could not contain himself. Finally, as though from sheer joy of what he had accomplished, he raced from the cabin, and out across the clearing. Ellen and Bentley smiled at each other. Moments passed. Still came to their ears the mourning wails of the great apes. * * * * * Then suddenly there broke a sound so utterly appalling that the two were frozen with terror for a moment. First it was the laughter of Caleb Barter. Then, mingled with the laughter, the bellowing, frightful and paralyzing, of man apes challenging a hated enemy. The drumming of ape fists on huge barrel chests. Then the laughter of Barter, dying away, ironic, terrible, into silence. Immediately afterward, high-pitched, mighty as the jungle itself, the concerted cries of half a dozen apes, as if bellowing their joy of the kill. "They--they--" began Ellen in a choked voice. "The apes must have got Professor Barter!" Silently Bentley nodded, and pointed. Coiled on a nail near the door was Barter's whip. In his excitement he had gone into the jungle without it for the first--and last--time. "There is one thing to do," whispered Ellen, "before we prepare to get you fully well. I shall care for you, and we shall both try to forget. And then we shall return to our own people." "And the one thing?" asked Bentley. The strained silence was suddenly broken by the bellowing of the great apes, which now charged into the cabin. Bentley and Ellen cringed back from the murderous brutes to no avail. There was no denying them. Their slavering jaws, drooled below flaring nostrils, their eyes emitted sparks of animal fury. Bentley leaped to the girl and interposed his body between hers and the vanguard of the apes, who now were surging into the room through the open door, and spreading apart within like water released from a dam. The apes were bent on murder, there could be no doubt. A very monster towered over Bentley. His jaws were wide, his little red eyes fixed on the white man's neck. His great arms were coming forward to gather in both Ellen and Bentley--whom he could crush as easily as he crushed the grubs which were his food. Bentley was helpless and knew it. This was the end for Ellen and himself. He must meet it unafraid. He tensed, awaiting the descent of bestial destruction. His eyes met the murderous gleam in the eyes of the ape leader unflinchingly. And then the miracle happened. The brute became suddenly and inexplicably hesitant. His bellow died away to a gurgling murmur in which there seemed somehow a hint of apology. The fire went out of his eyes. His jaws closed with a snap. His great arms, already about Bentley, slid harmlessly over Bentley's shoulders; dropped to his shaggy side. The brute's little eyes looked long and in puzzled fashion into the eyes of Bentley. Then he began to chatter, and in a moment the other apes ambled grotesquely toward the door and out. Ellen and Bentley were alone together once more, unharmed--though numbed by realization of the near passing of disaster. "I don't understand it," muttered Bentley, brushing the beads of perspiration from his brow. "It was a miracle!" "Lee," Ellen answered, "I think I know, and it _is_ a sort of miracle. Somehow the apes felt that you were--whatever your guise--Manape. They did not recognize you by any of their means of recognition; yet that beast knew! How? Only God Himself might answer. But the beasts knew, and did not slay us. The inner voice which whispers inside us in times of crises, whispers also to the great apes! Barter, then must have understood their somehow spiritual kinship with us. His experiments--" Her words reminded Bentley of what she had been saying when the great apes had charged in upon them, murder bent. He interrupted her, gently. "And the one thing we must do?" he rallied her. Ellen rose, and her face was white and strained as she gathered together Barter's manuscript. This she carried to the fireplace. She applied a match and returned to Bentley's bedside. Then, side by side, the two who would never forget in any case watched the record of Barter's unholy experiment burn slowly to ashes, while the screams of the great apes died away second by second, proof that they were leaving this section of the jungle--going deeper and deeper into the forest gloom which was their rightful heritage, and from which no man had a right to take them. [Advertisement] Holocaust _By Charles Willard Diffin_ [Illustration: It passed beneath the planes, that were motionless by contrast.] [Sidenote: The extraordinary story of "Paul," who for thirty days was Dictator of the World.] I am more accustomed to the handling of steel ingots and the fabrication of ships than to building with words. But, if I cannot write history as history is written, perhaps I can write it the way it is lived, and that must suffice. This account of certain events must have a title, I am told. I have used, as you see: "Holocaust." Inadequate!--but what word can tell even faintly of that reign of terror that engulfed the world, of those terrible thirty days in America when dread and horror gripped the nation and the red menace, like a wall of fire, swept downward from the north? And, at last--the end! It was given to me to know something of that conflict and of its ending and of the man who, in that last day, took command of Earth's events and gave battle to Mars, the God of War himself. It was against the background of war that he stood out; I must tell it in that way; and perhaps my own experience will be of interest. Yet it is of the man I would write more than the war--the most hated man in the whole world--that strange character, Paul Stravoinski. You do not even recognize the name. But, if I were to say instead the one word, "Paul"--ah, now I can see some of you start abruptly in sudden, wide-eyed attention, while the breath catches in your throats and the memory of a strange dread clutches your hearts. 'Straki,' we called him at college. He was never "Paul," except to me alone; there was never the easy familiarity between him and the crowd at large, whose members were "Bill" and "Dick" and other nicknames unprintable. But "Straki" he accepted. "_Bien, mon cher ami_," he told me--he was as apt to drop into French as Russian or any of a dozen other languages--"a name--what is it? A label by which we distinguish one package of goods from a thousand others just like it! I am unlike: for me one name is as good as another. It is what is here that counts,"--he tapped his broad forehead that rose high to the tangle of black hair--"and here,"--and this time he placed one hand above his heart. "It is for what I give to the world of my head and my heart that I must be remembered. And, if I give nothing--then the name, it is less than nothing." * * * * * Dreamer--poet--scientist--there were many Paul Strakis in that one man. Brilliant in his work--he was majoring in chemistry--he was a mathematician who was never stopped. I've seen him pause, puzzled by some phase of a problem that, to me, was a blank wall. Only a moment's hesitation and he would go way down to the bed-rock of mathematics and come up with a brand new formula of his own devising. Then--"_Voila! C'est fini!_ let us go for a walk, friend Bob; there is some poetry that I have remembered--" And we would head out of town, while he spouted poetry by the yard--and made me like it. I wish you could see the Paul Straki of those days. I wish I could show him to you; you would understand so much better the "Paul" of these later times. Tall, he seemed, though his eyes were only level with mine, for his real height was hidden beneath an habitual stoop. It let him conceal, to some extent, his lameness. He always walked with a noticeable limp, and here was the cause of the only bitterness that, in those days, was ever reflected in his face. "Cossacks!" he explained when he surprised a questioning look upon my face. "They went through our village. I was two years old--and they rode me down!" But the hard coldness went from his eyes, and again they crinkled about with the kindly, wise lines that seemed so strange in his young face. "It is only a reminder to me," he added, "that such things are all in the past; that we are entering a new world where savage brutality shall no longer rule, and the brotherhood of man will be the basis upon which men shall build." And his face, so homely that it was distinctive, had a beauty all its own when he dared to voice his dreams. * * * * * It was this that brought about his expulsion from college. That was in 1935 when the Vornikoff faction brought off their coup d'etat and secured a strangle hold on Russia. We all remember the campaign of propaganda that was forced into the very fibre of every country, to weaken with its insidious dry-rot the safe foundations of our very civilization. Paul was blinded by his idealism, and he dared to speak. He was conducting a brilliant research into the structure of the atom; it ended abruptly with his dismissal. And the accepted theories of science went unchallenged, while men worked along other lines than Paul's to attempt the release of the tremendous energy that is latent in all matter. I saw him perhaps three times in the four years that followed. He had a laboratory out in a God-forsaken spot where he carried on his research. He did enough analytical work to keep him from actual starvation, though it seemed to me that he was uncomfortably close to that point. "Come with me," I urged him; "I need you. You can have the run of our laboratories--work out the new alloys that are so much needed. You would be tremendously valuable." He had mentioned Maida to me, so I added: "And you and Maida can be married, and can live like a king and queen on what my outfit can pay you." He smiled at me as he might have done toward a child. "Like a king and queen," he said. "But, friend Bob, Maida and I do not approve of kings and queens, nor do we wish to follow them in their follies. "It is hard waiting,"--I saw his eyes cloud for a moment--"but Maida is willing. She is working, too--she is up in Melford as you know--and she has faith in my work. She sees with me that it will mean the release of our fellow-men and women from the poverty that grinds out their souls. I am near to success; and when I give to the world the secret of power, then--" But I had to read in his far-seeing eyes the visions he could not compass in words. * * * * * That was the first time. I was flying a new ship when next I dropped in on him. A sweet little job I thought it then, not like the old busses that Paul and I had trained in at college, where the top speed was a hundred and twenty. This was an A. B. Clinton cruiser, and the "A.B.C.'s" in 1933 were good little wagons, the best there were. I asked Paul to take a hop with me and fly the ship. He could fly beautifully; his lameness had been no hindrance to him. In his slender, artist hands a ship became a live thing. "Are you doing any flying?" I asked, but the threadbare suit made his answer unnecessary. "I'll do my flying later," he said, "and when I do,"--he waved contemptuously toward my shining, new ship--"you'll scrap that piece of junk." The tone matched the new lines in his face--deep lines and bitter. This practical world has always been hard on the dreamers. Poverty; and the grinding struggle that Maida was having; the expulsion from college when he was assured of a research scholarship that would have meant independence and the finest of equipment to work with--all this, I found, was having its effect. And he talked in a way I didn't like of the new Russia and of the time that was near at hand when her communistic government should sweep the world of its curse of capitalistic control. Their propaganda campaign was still going on, and I gathered that Paul had allied himself with them. I tried to tell him what we all knew; that the old Russia was gone, that Vornikoff and his crowd were rapacious and bloodthirsty, that their real motives were as far removed from his idealism as one pole from the other. But it was no use. And I left when I saw the light in his eyes. It seemed to me then that Paul Stravoinski had driven his splendid brain a bit beyond its breaking point. * * * * * Another year--and Paris, in 1939, with the dreaded First of May drawing near. There had been rumors of demonstrations in every land, but the French were prepared to cope with them--or so they believed.... Who could have coped with the menace of the north that was gathering itself for a spring? I saw Paul there. It lacked two days of the First of May, and he was seated with a group of industrious talkers at a secluded table in a cafe. He crossed over when he saw me, and drew me aside. And I noticed that a quiet man at a table nearby never let us out of his sight. Paul and his companions, I judged, were under observation. "What are you doing here _now_?" he asked. His manner was casual enough to anyone watching, but the tense voice and the look in his eyes that bored into me were anything but casual. My resentment was only natural. "And why shouldn't I be here attending to my own affairs? Do you realize that you are being rather absurd?" He didn't bother to answer me directly. "I can't control them," he said. "If they would only wait--a few weeks--another month! God, how I prayed to them at--" He broke off short. His eyes never moved, yet I sensed a furtiveness as marked as if he had peered suspiciously about. Suddenly he laughed aloud, as if at some joking remark of mine; I knew it was for the benefit of those he had left and not for the quiet man from the _Surete_. And now his tone was quietly conversational. "Smile!" he said. "Smile, Bob!--we're just having a friendly talk. I won't live another two hours if they think anything else. But, Bob, my friend--for God's sake, Bob, leave Paris to-night. I am taking the midnight plane on the Transatlantic Line. Come with me--" One of the group at the table had risen; he was sauntering in our direction. I played up to Paul's lead. "Glad I ran across you," I told him, and shook his extended hand that gripped mine in an agony of pleading. "I'll be seeing you in New York one of these days; I am going back soon." * * * * * But I didn't go soon enough. The unspoken pleading in Paul Stravoinski's eyes lost its hold on me by another day. I had work to do; why should I neglect it to go scuttling home because someone who feared these swarming rats had begged me to run for cover? And the French people were prepared. A little rioting, perhaps; a pistol shot or two, and a machine-gun that would spring from nowhere and sweep the street--! We know now of the document that the Russian Ambassador delivered to the President of France, though no one knew of it then. He handed it to the portly, bearded President at ten o'clock on the morning of April thirtieth. And the building that had housed the Russian representatives was empty ten minutes later. Their disguises must have been ready, for if the sewers of Paris had swallowed them they could have vanished no more suddenly. And the document? It was the same in substance as those delivered in like manner in every capital of Europe: twenty-four hours were given in which to assure the Central Council of Russia that the French Government would be dissolved, that communism would be established, and that its executive heads would be appointed by the Central Council. And then the bulletins appeared, and the exodus began. Papers floated in the air; they blew in hundreds of whirling eddies through the streets. And they warned all true followers of the glorious Russian faith to leave Paris that day, for to-morrow would herald the dawn of a new heaven on earth--a Communistic heaven--and its birth would come with the destruction of Paris.... I give you the general meaning though not the exact words. And, like the rest, I smiled tolerantly as I saw the stream of men and women and frightened children that filtered from the city all that day and night; but I must admit that our smiles were strained as morning came on the First of May, and the hour of ten drew near. Paris, the beautiful--that lovely blossom, flowering on the sturdy stalk that was _La Belle France_! Paris, laughing to cover its unspoken fears that morning in May, while the streets thudded to the feet of marching men in horizon blue, and the air above was vibrant with the endless roar of planes. This meant war; and mobilization orders were out; yet still the deadly menace was blurred by a feeling of unreality. A hoax!--a huge joke!--it was absurd, the thought of a distant people imposing their will upon France! And yet ... and yet.... * * * * * There were countless eyes turned skyward as a thousand bells rang out the hour of ten; and countless ears heard faintly the sound of gunfire from the north. My work had brought me into contact with high officials of the French Government; I was privileged to stand with a group of them where a high-roofed building gave a vantage point for observation. With them I saw the menacing specks on the horizon; I saw them come on with deadly deliberation--come on and on in an ever-growing armada that filled the sky. Wireless had brought the report of their flight high over Germany; it was bringing now the story of disaster from the northern front. A heavy air-force had been concentrated there; and now the steady stream of radio messages came on flimsy sheets to the group about me, while they clustered to read the incredible words. They cursed and glared at one another, those French officials, as if daring their fellows to believe the truth; then, silent and white of face, they reached numbly for each following sheet that messengers brought--until they knew at last that the air-force of France was no more.... The roar of the approaching host was deafening in our ears. Red--red as blood!--and each unit grew to enormous proportions. Armored cruisers of the air--dreadnaughts!--they came as a complete surprise. "But the city is ringed with anti-aircraft batteries," a uniformed man was whispering. "They will bring the brutes down." The northern edge of the city flamed to a roaring wall of fire; the batteries went into action in a single, crashing harmony that sang triumphantly in our ears. A few of the red shapes fell, but for each of these a hundred others swept down in deadly, directed flight. A glass was in my hand; my eyes strained through it to see the silvery cylinders that fell from the speeding ships. I saw the red cruisers sweep upward before the inferno of exploding bombs raged toward them from below. And where the roar of batteries had been was only silence. * * * * * The fleet was over the city. We waited for the rain of bombs that must come; we saw the red cloud move swiftly to continue the annihilation of batteries that still could fire; we saw the armada pass on and lose itself among cloud-banks in the west. Only a dozen planes remained, high-hung in the upper air. We stared in wonderment at one another. Was this mercy?--from such an enemy? It was inconceivable! "Mercy!" I wonder that we dared to think the word. Only an instant till a whistling shriek marked the coming of death. It was a single plane--a giant shell--that rode on wings of steel. It came from the north, and I saw it pass close overhead. Its propeller screamed an insolent, inhuman challenge. Inhuman--for one glance told the story. Here was no man-flown plane: no cockpit or cabin, no gunmounts. Only a flying shell that swerved and swung as we watched. We knew that its course was directed from above; it was swung with terrible certainty by a wireless control that reached it from a ship overhead. Slowly it sought its target: deliberately it poised above it. An instant, only, it hung, though the moment, it seemed, would never end--then down!--and the blunt nose crashed into the Government buildings where at that moment the Chamber of Deputies was in session ... and where those buildings had been was spouting masonry and fire. A man had me by the arm; his fingers gripped into my flesh. With his other hand he was pointing toward the north. "Torpedoes!" he was saying. "Torpedoes of a size gigantic! _Ah, mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ Save us for we are lost!" They came in an endless stream, those blood-red projectiles; they announced their coming with shrill cries of varying pitch; and they swung and swerved, as the ships above us picked them up, to rake the city with mathematical precision. Incendiary, of course: flames followed every shattering burst. Between us and the Seine was a hell of fire--a hell that contained unnumbered thousands of what an instant before had been living folk--men and women clinging in a last terrified embrace--children whose white faces were hidden in their mothers' skirts or buried in bosoms no longer a refuge for childish fears. I saw it as plainly as if I had been given the far-reaching vision of a god ... and I turned and ran with stumbling feet where a stairway awaited.... * * * * * Of that flight, only a blurred recollection has stayed with me. I pray God that I may never see it more clearly. There are sights that mortal eyes cannot behold with understanding and leave mortal brain intact. It is like an anaesthetic at such times, the numbness that blocks off the horrors the eyes are recording--like the hurt of the surgeon's scalpel that never reaches to the brain. Dimly I see the fragmentary scenes: the crashing fall of buildings that come crumbling and thundering down, myself crawling like an insect across the wreckage--it is slippery and wet where the stones are red, and I stumble, then see the torn and mangled thing that has caused me to fall.... A face regards me from another mound. I see the dust of powdered masonry still settling upon it: the dark hair is hardly disturbed about the face, so peaceful, so girlishly serene: I am still wondering dully why there is only the head of that girl resting on the shattered stone, as I lie there exhausted and watch the next torpedo crash a block behind me.... The air is shrill with flying fragments. I wonder why my hands are stained and sticky as I run and crawl on my way. The red rocks are less slippery now, and the rats, from the sewers of Paris!--they have come out to feed! Fragments of pictures--and the worst of them gone! I know that night came--red night, under a cloud of smoke--and I found myself on the following day descending from a fugitive peasant's cart and plodding onward toward the markings of a commercial aerodrome. They could not be everywhere, those red vultures of the sky, and they had other devils'-work to do. I had money, and I paid well for the plane that carried me through that day and a night to the Municipal Airport of New York. * * * * * The Red Army of occupation was halfway across communist Germany, hailed as they went as the saviors of the world. London had gone the way of Paris; Rome had followed; the countries of France and England and Italy were beaten to their knees. "We who rule the air rule the world!" boasted General Vornikoff. The Russian broadcasting station had the insolence to put on the air his message to the people of America. I heard his voice as plainly as if he stood in my office; and I was seeing again the coming of that endless stream of aerial torpedoes, and the red cruisers hanging in the heights to pick up control and dash the messengers of death upon a helpless city. But I was visioning it in New York. "The masses of the American people are with us," said the complacently arrogant voice. "For our fellow-workers we have only brotherly affection; it is your capitalist-dominated Government that must submit. And if it does not--!" I heard him laugh before he went on: "We are coming to the rescue of you, our brothers across the sea. Now we have work to do in Europe; our gains must be consolidated and the conquests of our glorious air-force made secure. And then--! We warn you in advance, and we laugh at your efforts to prepare for our coming. We even tell you the date: in thirty days the invasion begins. It will end only at Washington when the great country of America, its cruel shackles cast off from the laboring masses, joins the Brotherhood--the Workers of the World!" There was a man from the War Department who sat across from me at my desk; my factories were being taken over; my electric furnaces must pour out molten metal for use in war. He cursed softly under his breath as the voice ceased. "The dirty dog!" he exclaimed. "The lying hypocrite! He talks of brotherhood to us who know the damnable inquisition and reign of terror that he and his crowd have forced on Russia! Thirty days! Well, we have three thousand planes ready for battle to-day; there'll be more in thirty days! Now, about that vanadium steel--" But I'll confess I hardly heard him; I was hearing the roar of an armada of red craft that ensanguined the sky, and I was seeing the curving flight of torpedoes, each an airplane in itself.... * * * * * Thirty days!--and each minute of each hour must be used. In close touch with the War Department, I knew much that was going on, and all that I knew was the merest trifle in the vast preparations for defense. My earlier apprehensions were dulled; the sight I had of the whole force of a mighty nation welded into one driving power working to one definite end was exhilarating. New York and Washington--these, it was felt, would be the points of first attack; they must be protected. And I saw the flights of planes that seemed endless as they converged at the concentration camps. Fighters, at first--bombers and swift scouts--they came in from all parts of the land. Then the passenger planes and the big mail-ships. Transcontinental runs were abandoned or cut to a skeleton service of a ship every hour for the transport of Government men. Even the slower craft of the feeder lines were commandeered; anything that could fly and could mount a gun. And the three thousand fighting ships, as the man from Washington had said, grew to three times that number. Their roaring filled the skies with thunder, and beneath them were other camps of infantry and artillery. The Atlantic front was an armed camp, where highways no longer carried thousands of cars on pleasure bent. By night and day I saw those familiar roads from the air; they were solid with a never-ending line of busses and vans and long processions of motorized artillery and tanks, whose clattering bedlam came to me a thousand feet above. Yes, it was an inspiring sight, and I lost the deadly oppression and the sense of impending doom--until our intelligence service told us of the sailing of the enemy fleet. * * * * * They had seized every vessel in the waters of Europe. And--God pity the poor, traitorous devils who manned them--there were plenty to operate the ships. Two thousand vessels were in that convoy. Ringed in as they were by a guard of destroyers and fighting craft of many kinds, whose mast-heads carried the blood-red flag now instead of their former emblems, our submarines couldn't reach them. But our own fleet went out to measure their strength, and a thousand Navy planes took the air on the following day. Uppermost in my own mind, and in everyone's mind, I think, was the question of air-force. Would they bring the red ships? What was their cruising range? Could they cross the Atlantic with their enormous load of armored hull, or must they be transported? Were the air-cruisers with the fleet, or would they come later? How Vornikoff and his assassins must have laughed as they built the monsters, armored them, and mounted the heavy guns so much greater than anything they would meet! The rest of us--all the rest of the world!--had been kept in ignorance.... And now our own fliers were sweeping out over the gray waters to find the answer to our questions. I've tried to picture that battle; I've tried to imagine the feelings of those men on the dreadnaughts and battle-cruisers and destroyers. There was no attempt on the enemy's part to conceal his position; his wireless was crackling through the air with messages that our intelligence department easily decoded. Our Navy fliers roared out over the sea, out and over the American fleet, whose every bow was a line of white that told of their haste to meet the oncoming horde. The plane-carriers threw their fighters into the air to join the cavalcade above--and a trace of smoke over the horizon told that the giant fleet was coming into range. * * * * * And then, instead of positions and ranges flashed back from our own swift scouts, came messages of the enemy's attack. Our men must have seen them from the towers of our own fleet; they must have known what the red swarm meant, as it came like rolling, fire-lit smoke far out in the sky--and they must have read plainly their own helplessness as they saw our thousand planes go down. They were overwhelmed--obliterated!--and the red horde of air-cruisers was hardly checked in its sweep. Carnage and destruction, those blue seas of the north Atlantic have seen; they could tell tales of brave men, bravely going to their death in storm and calm but never have they seen another such slaughter as that day's sun showed. The anti-aircraft guns roared vainly; some few of our own planes that had escaped returned to add their futile, puny blows. The waters about the ships were torn to foam, while the ships themselves were changed to furnaces of bursting flame--until the seas in mercy closed above them and took their torn steel, and the shattered bodies that they held, to the silence of the deep.... We got it all at Washington. I sat in a room with a group of white-faced men who stared blindly at a radiocone where a quiet voice was telling of disaster. It was Admiral Graymont speaking to us from the bridge of the big dreadnaught, _Lincoln_, the flagship of the combined fleet. Good old Graymont! His best friend, Bill Schuler, Secretary of the Navy, was sitting wordless there beside me. "It is the end," the quiet voice was saying; "the cruiser squadrons are gone.... Two more battleships have gone down: there are only five of us left.... A squadron of enemy planes is coming in above. Our men have fought bravely and with never a chance.... There!--they've got us!--the bombs! Good-by, Bill, old fellow--" The radiocone was silent with a silence that roared deafeningly in our ears. And, beside me, I saw the Secretary of the Navy, a Navy now without ships or men, drop his tired, lined face into his hands, while his broad shoulders shook convulsively. The rest of us remained in our chairs, too stunned to do anything but look at one another in horror. * * * * * We expected them to strike at New York. I was sent up there, and it was there that I saw Paul again. I met him on lower Broadway, and I went up to him with my hand reaching for his. I didn't admire Paul's affiliations, but he had warned me--he had tried to save my life--and I wanted to thank him. But his hand did not meet mine. There was a strange, wild look in his eyes--I couldn't define it--and he brought his gaze back from far off to stare at me as if I were a stranger. Then: "Still got that A.B.C. ship?" he demanded. "Yes," I answered wonderingly. "Junk it!" he said. And his laugh was as wild and incomprehensible as his look had been. I stared after him as he walked away. I was puzzled, but there were other things to think of then. A frenzy of preparation--and all in vain. The enemy fooled us; the radio brought the word from Quebec. "They have entered the St. Lawrence," was the message it flashed. Then, later: "The Red fleet is passing toward Montreal. Enemy planes have spotted all radio towers. There is one above us now--" And that ended the message from Quebec. But we got more information later. They landed near Montreal; they were preparing a great base for offensive operations; the country was overrun with a million men; the sky was full of planes by night and day; there was no artillery, no field guns of any sort, but there were torpedo-planes by tens of thousands, which made red fields of waiting death where trucks placed them as they took them from the ships. And there were some of us who smiled sardonically in recollection of the mammoth plants the Vornikoff Reds had installed in Central Russia, and the plaudits that had greeted their plans for nitrogen fixation. They were to make fertilizers; the nitrates would be distributed without cost to the farms--this had pacified the Agrarians--and here were their "nitrates" that were to make fertile the fields of Russia: countless thousands of tons of nitro-explosives in these flying torpedoes! * * * * * But if we smiled mirthlessly at these recollections we worked while we chewed on our cud of bitterness. There came an order: "Evacuate New England," and the job was given to me. With planes--a thousand of them--trucks, vans, the railroads, we gathered those terrified people into concentration camps, and took them over the ground, under the ground, and through the air to the distributing camp at Buffalo, where they were scattered to other points. I saw the preparations for a battle-front below me as I skimmed over Connecticut. Trenches made a thin line that went farther than I could see! Here was the dam that was expected to stop the enemy columns from the north. I think no one then believed that our air-force could check the assault. The men of the fighting planes were marked for death; one read it in their eyes; but who of us was not? How those giant cruisers would be downed no man could say, but we worked on in a blind desperation; we would hold that invading army as long as men could sight a gun; we would hold them back; and somehow, someway, we must find the means to repel the invasion from the air! I saw the lines of track that made a network back to the trenches. Like the suburban lines around New York, they would carry thousands of single cars, each driven at terrific speed by the air plane propeller at its bow. With these, the commanders could shift their forces to whatever sector was hardest pressed. They would be bombed, of course, but the hundreds of tracks would not all be destroyed--and the line must be held! The line! it brought a strangling lump to my throat as I saw those thin markings of trenches, the marching bodies of troops, the brave, hopeless, determined men who went singing to their places in that line. But my planes were winging past me; my job was ahead, where a multitude still waited and prayed for deliverance. * * * * * We never finished the job; in two days the red horde was upon us. Their swarming troops were convoyed by planes, but no effort was made to fly over our lines and launch an attack. Were they feeling their way? Did they think now that they would find us passive and unresisting? Did they want to take our cities undamaged? Oh, we asked ourselves a thousand questions with no answer to any--except the knowledge that a million men were marching from the north; that their fleet of planes would attack as soon as the troops encountered resistance; that our batteries of anti-aircraft guns would harry them as they came, and our air-fleet, held back in reserve, would take what the batteries left.... My last planes with their fugitive loads passed close to the lines of red troops. There were red planes overhead, but they let us pass unhindered. Fleeing, driving wildly toward the south, we were unworthy, it seemed, of even their contemptuous attention. But I was sick to actual nausea at sight of the villages and cities where only a part of the population had escaped. The roads, in front of the red columns, were jammed with motors and with men and women and children on foot: a hopeless tangle. I was watching the pitiful flight below me, cursing my own impotence to be of help, when a shrill whistling froze me rigid to my controls. I had heard it before--there could be no mistaking the cry of that oncoming torpedo--and I saw the damnable thing pass close to my ship. I was doing two hundred--my motor was throttled down--but this inhuman monster passed me as if my ship were frozen as unmoving as myself. It tore on ahead. I saw an enemy plane above it some five thousand feet. The torpedo was checked; I saw it poise; then it curved over and down. And the screaming motor took up its cry that was like a thousand devils until its sound was lost in the screams from below and the infernal blast of its own explosion. Only a trial flight--an experiment to test their controls! No need for me to try to tell you of the thoughts that tore me through and through while I struggled to bring my ship to an even keel in the hurricane of explosion that drove up at me from below. But I spat out the one word: "Brotherhood!" and I prayed for a place in the front line where I might send one shot at least against so beastly a foe. * * * * * That was somewhere in Massachusetts. Their foremost columns were close behind. They came to a stop some fifty miles from our waiting line of battle: I learned this when I got to Washington. And the reason, too, was known; it was published in all the papers. There had been messages to the President, broadcast to the world from an unknown source: "To the President of the United States--warning! This war must end. You, as Commander-in-Chief of the American forces can bring it to a close. I have prevailed upon the Red Army of the Brotherhood to halt. They have listened to me. You, also, must take heed. "You will issue orders at once to withdraw all resistance. You will disband your army, ground all your planes; bring all your artillery into one place and prepare to turn the government of this country over to the representatives of the Central Council. You will act at once." "This war is ended. All wars are ended forevermore. I have spoken." And the strange message was signed "Paul." The wild words of a maniac, it was thought at first. Yet the fact remained that the enemy's advance had ceased. Who was this "Paul" who had "prevailed upon the Red Army" to halt? And then the obvious answer occurred; it was a ruse on the part of the Reds. They feared to attack; their strength was not as great as we had thought--officers and men of all branches of the service took new heart and plunged more frenziedly still into the work of preparation. There were direction-finders that had taken the message from several stations; their pointers converged upon one definite location in southern Ohio. Over an area of twenty square miles, that place was combed for a sending radio where the message could have originated--combed in vain. * * * * * The next demand came at ten on the following morning. "To the President of the United States: You have disregarded my warning. You will not do so again; I have power to enforce my demands. I had hoped that bloodshed and destruction might cease, but it is plain that only that will save you from your own headstrong folly. I must strike. At noon to-day the Capitol in Washington will be destroyed. See that it is emptied of human life. I have spoken. Paul." A maniac, surely; yet a maniac with strange powers. For the graphs of the radio direction-finders showed a curve. And when they were assembled the reading could only mean that the instrument that had sent the threat had moved over fifty miles during the few minutes of its sending. This, I think, was what brought the order to vacate the big domed building in Washington. Of course the Capitol Building had been searched; there was not a nook nor corner from roof to basement but had been gone over in search of an explosive machine. And now it was empty, and a guard of soldiers made a solid cordon surrounding it. No one could approach upon the ground; and, above, a series of circling patrol-planes, one squadron above another, guarded against approach by air. With such a defense the Capitol and its grounds seemed impregnable. My watch said 11:59; I held it in my hand and watched the seconds tick slowly by. The city was hushed; it seemed that no man was so much as breathing ... 11:59 :60!--and an instant later I heard the shriek of something that tore the air to screaming fragments. I saw it as it came on a straight, level line from the east; a flash like a meteor of glistening white. It passed beneath the planes, that were motionless by contrast, drove straight for the gleaming Capitol dome, passed above it, and swept on in a long flattened curve that bent outward and up. It was gone from my sight, though the shrieking air was still tearing at my ears, when I saw the great building unfold. Time meant nothing; my racing mind made slow and deliberate the explosion that lifted the roofs and threw the walls in dusty masses upon the ground. So slow it seemed!--and I had not even seen the shell that the white meteor-ship had fired. Yet there was the beautiful building, expanding, disintegrating. It was a cloud of dust when the concussion reached me to dash me breathless to the earth.... * * * * * The white meteor was the vehicle of "Paul," the dictator. From it had come the radio message whose source had moved so swiftly. I saw this all plainly. There was a conference of high officials at the War Department Building, and the Secretary summed up all that was said: "A new form of air-flight, and a new weapon more destructive than any we have known! That charge of explosive that was fired at the Capitol was so small as to be unseen. We can't meet it; we can only fight. Fight on till the end." A message came in as we sat there, a message to the Commander-in-Chief who had come over from the White House under military guard. "Surrender!" it demanded; "I have shown you my power; it is inexhaustible, unconquerable. Surrender or be destroyed; it is the dawn of a new day, the day of the Brotherhood of Man. Let bloodshed cease. Surrender! I command it! Paul." The President of the United States held the flimsy paper in his hand. He rose slowly to his feet, and he read it aloud to all of us assembled there; read it to the last hateful word. Then: "Surrender?" he asked. He turned steady, quiet eyes upon the big flag whose red and white and blue made splendid the wall behind him--and I'll swear that I saw him smile. * * * * * We have had many presidents since '76; big men, some of them; tall, handsome men; men who looked as if nature had moulded them for a high place. This man was small of stature; the shortest man in all that room if he had stood, but he was big--big! Only one who is great can look deep through the whirling turmoil of the moment to find the eternal verities that are always underneath--and smile! "Men must die,"--he spoke meditatively; in seeming communing with himself, as one who tries to face a problem squarely and honestly--"and nations must pass; time overwhelms us all. Yet there is that which never dies and never surrenders." He looked about the room now, as if he saw us for the first time. "Gentlemen," he said quietly, "we have here an ultimatum. It is backed by power which our Secretary of War says is invincible. We are faced by an enemy who would annihilate these United States, and this new power fights on the side of the enemy. "Must we go the way of England, of France, of all Europe? It would seem so. The United States of America is doomed. Yet each one of us will meet what comes bravely, if, facing our own end, we know that the principles upon which this nation is founded must go on; if only the Stars and Stripes still floats before our closing eyes to assure us that some future day will see the resurrection of truth and of honor and kindness among men. "We will fight, as our Secretary of War has said--fight on to the end. We will surrender--never! That is our answer to this one who calls himself 'Paul.'" We could not speak; I do not know how long the silence lasted. But I know that I left that room a silent man among many silent men, in whose eyes I saw a reflection of the emotion that filled my own heart. It was the end--the end of America, of millions of American homes--but this was better than surrender to such a foe. Better death than slavery to that race of bloodthirsty oppressors. * * * * * But who was "Paul?" This question kept coming repeatedly to my mind. The press of the country echoed the President's words, then dipped their pens in vitriol to heap scorching invective upon the head of the tyrant. The power of the Reds we might have met--or so it was felt--but this new menace gave the invaders a weapon we could not combat. It was power!--a means of flight beyond anything known!--an explosive beside which our nitro compounds were playthings for a child. "Who is Paul?" It was not only myself who asked the question through those next long hours, but perhaps I was the only one in whose mind was a disturbing certainty that the answer was mine if I could but grasp it. I was remembering Paris; I was thinking of that peaceful, happy city before the First of May, before the world had gone mad and a raging, red beast had laid it waste and overrun it. And of Paul Stravoinski--my friend "Straki" of college days--who had warned me. He had known what was coming. He himself had said that he had prayed to "them" for delay; that in a few weeks he would do--what?... And suddenly I knew. Paul had succeeded; his research had ended in the dissection of the atom; he had unleashed the sub-atomic power of matter. Only this could explain the wild flight through the sky, the terrific explosion at the Capitol. It was Paul--my friend, Paul Stravoinski--who was imposing his will upon the world. I said nothing as I took off; the swiftest plane was at my command. I might be wrong; I must not arouse false hopes; but I must find Paul. And the papers were black with scareheads of another threat as I left Washington: "You have twenty-four hours to surrender. There shall be one last day of grace." Signed: "Paul." There was more of the wild talk of the beauties of this new dispensation--a mixture of idealistic folly and of threats of destruction. I needed no more to prove the truth of my suspicions. No one but the Paul I had known could cling so tenaciously to his dreams; no one but he could be so blind to the actual horror of the new oligarchy he would impose upon the world. I flew alone; no one but myself must try to hunt him out. I paid no attention to the radio direction of the last message; he would fly far afield to send it; distance meant nothing to one who held his power. I must look for him at his laboratory, that cluster of deserted buildings that stood all alone by a distant railway siding; it was there he had worked. * * * * * He met me with a pistol in his hand--a tiny gun that fired only a .22 calibre bullet. "Put down your pop-gun," I told him and brushed through the open door into the room that had been his laboratory. "I am unarmed, and I'm here to talk business. "You are 'Paul'!" I shot the sentence at him as if it were a bullet that must strike him down. He did not answer directly; just nodded in confirmation of some unspoken thought. "You have found me," he said slowly; "you were the only one I feared." Then he came out with it, and his eyes blazed with a maniacal light. "Yes, I am Paul! and this 'pop-gun' in my hand is the weapon that destroyed your Capitol at Washington. The bullet contained less than a grain of tritonite; that is the name I have given my explosive." He aimed the little pistol toward me where I stood. "These bullets are more lightly charged--they are to protect myself--and the one ten-thousandth of a milligram in the end of each will blow you into bits! Sit down. I will not be checked now. You will never leave this place alive!" "Less than a grain of tritonite!"--and I had seen a great building go down to dust at its touch! I sat down in the chair where he directed, and I turned away from the fanatical glare of Paul's eyes to look about me. There was poverty here no longer; no makeshift apparatus greeted my eyes, but the finest of laboratory equipment. Paul read my thoughts. "They have been liberal," he told me; "the Central Council has financed my work--though I have kept my whereabouts a secret even from them. But they would not wait. I told you in Paris, and you did not believe. And now--now I have succeeded! the research is done!" * * * * * He half turned to pick up a flake of platinum no larger than one's finger-nail; it was a weight that was used on a delicate balance. "Matter is matter no longer," he said; "I have resolved it into energy. I hold here in my hand power to destroy an army, or to drive a fleet of ships. I, Paul, will build a new world. I will give to man a surcease from labor; I will give him rest; I will do the work of the world. My tritonite that can destroy can also create; it shall be used for that alone. This is the end of war. Here is wealth; here is power; I shall give it to mankind, and, under the rule of the Brotherhood, a united world will arise and go forward to new growth, to a greater civilization, to a building of a new heaven on earth." He was pacing up and down the room. His hands were shaking; the muscles of his face that twitched and trembled were moulded into deep lines. I sat there and realized that within that room, directly before my eyes, was the Dictator of the World. It was true--I could not doubt it--Paul Straki of college days had made his dreams come true; his research was ended. And this new "Paul" who held in those trembling hands the destinies of mankind, at whose word kings and presidents trembled, was utterly mad! I tried to talk and tell him of the truth we knew was true. He would have none of it; his dreams possessed him. In the bloody flag of this new Russia he could see only the emblem of freedom; the men who marched beneath that banner were his brothers, unwitting in the destruction they wrought. It was all that they knew. But they fought for the right. They would cease fighting now, and would join him in the work of moulding a new race. And even their leaders, who had sometimes opposed--were they not kind at heart? Had they not checked the advance of an irresistible army to give him and his new weapon an opportunity to open the eyes of the people? Theirs was no wish to destroy; their hearts ached for their victims who refused to listen and could be convinced only by force. And as he talked on there passed before my eyes the vision of an aerial torpedo and a blood-red ship above, where these "kindly" men who were Paul's allies turned the instrument of death upon huddled, screaming folk--and laughed, no doubt, at such good sport. * * * * * I thought of many things. I was tensed one moment to throw myself upon the man; and an instant later I was searching my mind for some argument, some gleam of reason, with which I could tear aside the illusions that held him. I saw him cross the room where a radio stood, and he switched on the instrument for the news-broadcast service. The shouting of an excited voice burst into the room. "The Reds have advanced," said the voice. "Their armies have crossed the Connecticut line. They are within ten miles of the American forces. The twenty-four hours of grace promised by the tyrant 'Paul' was a lie. The battle is already on." I saw the tall figure of Paul sink to its former stoop; the lameness that had vanished in the moment of his exaltation had returned. He limped a pace or two toward me. "They said they would wait!" His voice was a hoarse whisper. "General Vornikoff himself gave me his promise!" I was on my feet, then. "What matter?" I shouted. "What difference does it make--a few hours or a day? Your damned patriots, your dear brothers in arms--they are destroying us this instant! And not one of our men but is worth more than the whole beastly mob!" I was wild with the picture that came so clear and plain before my eyes. I had my pistol in my hand; I was tempted to fire. It was his whisper that stopped me. "They have crossed Massachusetts! And Maida is there in Melford!" * * * * * There was no resisting his strength that tore my weapon from me. His tritonite pistol was pressed into my side, and his hand upon my collar threw me ahead of him toward a rear room, then out into a huge shed. I had only a quick glimpse of the airplane that was housed there. It was a white cylinder, and the stern that was toward me showed a funnel-shaped port. I was thrown by that same furious strength through a door of the ship; I saw Paul Stravoinski seat himself before some curious controls. The ship that held me rose; moved slowly through an opened door; and with a screech from the stern it tore off and up into the air. I have said Paul could fly; but the terrific flight of the screaming thing that held us seemed beyond the power of man to control. I was stunned with the thundering roar and the speed that held me down and back against a cabin wall. How he found Melford, I cannot know; but he found it as a homing pigeon finds its loft. He checked our speed with a sickening swiftness that made my brain reel. There were red ships above, but they let the white ship pass unchallenged. There were no Red soldiers on the ground--only the marks where they had passed. From the distance came a never-ceasing thunder of guns. The village was quiet. It still burned, blazing brightly in places, again smouldering sluggishly and sending into the still air smoke clouds whose fumes were a choking horror of burned flesh. There were bodies in grotesque scattering about the streets; some of them were black and charred. Paul Stravoinski took me with him as he dashed for a house that the flames had not touched. And I was with him as he smashed at the door and broke into the room. * * * * * There was splintered furniture about. A cabinet, whose glass doors had been wantonly smashed, leaned crazily above its fallen books, now torn, scuffed and muddy upon the floor. Through a shattered window in the bed-room beyond came a puff of the acrid smoke from outside to strangle the breath in my throat. On the floor in a shadowed corner lay the body of a woman--a young woman as her clotted tangle of golden hair gave witness. She stirred and moaned half-consciously.... And the lined face of Paul Stravoinski was a terrible thing to see as he went stumblingly across the room to gather that body into his arms. I had known Maida; I had seen their love begin in college days. I had known a laughing girl with sunshine in her hair, a girl whose soft eyes had grown so tenderly deep when they rested upon Paul--but this that he took in his arms, while a single dry sob tore harshly at his throat, this was never Maida! There were red drops that struck upon his hands or fell sluggishly to the floor; the head and face had taken the blow of a clubbed rifle or a heavy boot. The eyes in that tortured face opened to rest upon Paul's, the lips were moving. "I told them of you," I heard her whisper. "I told them that you would come--and they laughed." Unconsciously she tried to draw her torn clothing about her, an instinctive reaction to some dim realization of her nakedness. She was breathing feebly. "And now--oh, Paul!--Paul!--you--have come--too late!" * * * * * I hardly think Paul knew I was there or sensed that I followed where he carried in his arms the bruised body that had housed the spirit of Maida. He flew homeward like a demon, but he moved as one in a dream. Only when I went with him into the room where he had worked, did he turn on me in sudden fury. "Out!" he screamed. "Get out of my sight! It is you who have done this--your damned armies who would not do as I ordered! If you had not resisted, if you had--" I broke in there. "Did we do that?" I outshouted him, and I pointed to the torn body on a cot. His eyes followed my shaking hand. "No, it was your brothers--your dear comrades who are bringing the brotherhood of men into the world! Well, are you proud? Are you happy and satisfied--with what your brothers do with women?" It must be a fearful thing to have one's dreams turn bitter and poisonous. Paul Stravoinski seemed about to spring upon me. He was crouched, and the muscles of his thin neck were like wire; his face was a ghastly thing, his eyes so staring bright, and the sensitive mouth twisting horribly. But he sprang at last not at me but toward the door, and without a word from his tortured lips he opened it and motioned me out. Even there I heard echoes of distant guns and the heavier, thudding sounds that must be their aerial torpedoes. My feet were leaden as I strained every muscle to hurry toward my ship. Through my mind was running the threat of the Russian, Vornikoff: "We even tell you the date: in thirty days." And this was the thirtieth day--thirty days that a state of war had existed. * * * * * The battle was on; the radio had spoken truly. I saw its raging fires as I came up from our rear where the gray-like smoke clouds shivered in the unending blast. But I saw stabbing flames that struck upward from the ground to make a wall of sharp, fiery spears, and I knew that every darting flame was launching a projectile from our anti-aircraft guns. The skies were filled with the red aircraft of the enemy, but their way was an avenue of hell where thousands of shells filled the air with their crashing explosions. There were torpedoes, the unmanned airships whose cargo was death, and they were guided to their marks despite the inferno that raged about the red ships above. I saw meteors that fell, the red flames that enveloped them no redder than the bodies of the ships. And, as I leaped from my plane that I had landed back of our lines, I sensed that the enemy was withdrawing. There was a colonel of artillery--I had known him in days of peace--and he threw his arms around me and executed a crazy dance. "We've beaten them back, Bob!" he shouted, and repeated it over and over in a delirium of joy. I couldn't believe it; not those cruisers that I had seen over Paris. Another brief moment showed my fears were all too rational. A shrieking hailstorm of torpedoes preceded them; the ships were directing them from afar. And, while some of the big shells went wild and overshot our lines, there were plenty that found their mark. I was smashed flat by a stunning concussion. Behind me the place where Colonel Hartwell had stood was a smoking crater; his battery of guns had been blasted from the earth. Up and down the whole line, far beyond the range of my sight, the eruption continued. The ground was a volcano of flame, as if the earth had opened to let through the interior fires, and the air was filled with a litter of torn bodies and sections of shattered guns. No human force could stand up under such a bombardment. Like others about me, I gripped tight upon something within me that was my self-control, and I marveled that I yet lived while I waited for the end. * * * * * Beyond the smoke clouds was a hillside, swarming with figures in red; solid masses of troops that came toward us. Above was the red fleet, passing safely above our flame-blasted lines; there were bombs falling upon those batteries here and there whose fire was unsilenced. And then, from the south, came a roar that pierced even the bedlam about me. The sun shone brightly there where the smoke-clouds had not reached, and it glinted and sparkled from the wings of a myriad of our planes. There was something that pulled tight at my throat; I know I tore at it with fumbling hands, as if that something were an actual band that had clamped down and choked me, while I stared at that true line of sharp-pointed V's. The air-force of the United States had been ordered in; and they were coming, coming--to an inevitable death! I tried to tear my eyes away from that oncoming fleet, but I could not move. I saw their first contact with the enemy; so small, they were, in contrast with the big red cruisers. They attacked in formations; they drove down and in; and they circled and whirled before they fluttered to earth.... Dimly, through the stupor that numbed my brain, I heard men about me shouting with joy. I felt more than saw the fall of a monster red craft; it struck not far away. The voices were thanking God--for what? Another red ship fell--and another; and through all the roaring inferno a sound was tearing--a ripping, terrible scream that went on and on. And above me, when I forced my eyes upward, was a flash of white. It darted like a live thing among the red ones whose guns blazed madly--and the red ships in clotted groups fell away and over and down as the white one passed. They had been burst open where some power had blasted them, and their torn hulls showed gaping as they fell. For a time the air was silent and empty above; the white, flashing thing had passed from sight, for the line of red ships was long. Then again it returned, and it threw itself into the mad whirl in the south where the air-force of the American people was fighting its last fight. I was screaming insanely as I saw it come back. The white ship!--the blast of vapor from its funneled stern--It was Paul!--Paul Stravoinski!--Paul the Dictator!--and he was fighting on our side! * * * * * His ship had been prepared; I had seen the machine-guns on her bow. Paul was working them from within, and every bullet was tipped with the product of his brain--the deadly tritonite! The white flash swung wide in a circle that took it far away. It came back above the advancing army of the Reds. It swerved once wildly, then settled again upon its course, and the raging hell that the Reds had turned loose upon our lines was as nothing to the destruction that poured upon the Red troops from above. A messenger of peace, that ship; I knew well why Paul had painted it white. And, instead of peace--! He was flying a full mile from our lines, yet the torn earth and great boulders crashed among us even then. There were machine-guns firing ceaselessly from the under side of the ship. What charges of tritonite had the demented man placed in those shells? Below and behind it, as it flashed across our view, was a fearful, writhing mass where the earth itself rose up in unending, convulsive agony. A volcano of fire followed him, a fountain of earth that ripped and tore and stretched itself in a writhing, tortured line across the land as the white ship passed. No man who saw that and lived has found words to describe the progress of that monstrous serpent; the valley itself is there for men to see. The roar was beyond the limit of men's strained nerves. I found myself cowering upon the ground when the white ship came back; I followed it fearfully with my eyes until I saw it swoop falteringly down. Such power seemed not for men but for gods; I could not have met Paul Stravoinski then but in a posture of supplication. But I leaped to my feet and raced madly across the torn earth as I saw the white ship touch the ground--rise--fall again--and end its flight where it ploughed a furrow across a brown field.... * * * * * I raised Paul Stravoinski's head in my arms where I found him in the ship. An enemy shell had entered that cabin; it must have come early in the fight, but he had fought gamely on. And the eyes that looked up into mine had none of the wild light I had seen. They were the eyes of Paul Straki, the comrade of those few long years before, and he smiled as he said: "_Voila_, friend Bob: _c'est fini!_ And now I go for a long, long walk. We will talk of poetry, Maida and I...." But his dreams were still with him. He opened his eyes to stare intently at me. "You will see that it is not in vain?" he questioned; then smiled as one who is at peace, as he whispered: "Yes, I know you will--my friend, Bob--" And his fixed gaze went through and beyond me, while he tried, in broken sentences, to give the vision that had been his. So plain it was to him now. "The wild work--of a mistaken people. America will undo it.... A world at peace.... The vast commerce--of the skies--I see it--so clearly.... It will break down--all barriers.... A beautiful, happy world...." His lips moved feebly at the last. I could not speak; could not even call him by name; I could only lean my head closer to hear. One whispered word; then another: a fragment of poetry! I had heard him quote it often. But the whispered words were not for me. Paul was speaking to someone beside him--someone my blind, human eyes could not see.... * * * * * I am writing these words at my desk in the great Transportation Building in New York. It stands upon the site of the Chrysler Building that towered here--until one of the flying torpedoes came over to hunt it out. They landed several in New York; how long ago it all seems that the threat of utter destruction hung over the whole nation--the whole world. And now from my window I see the sparkling flash of ships. The air is filled with them; I am still unaccustomed to their speed. But a wisp of vapor from each bell-shaped stern throws them swiftly on their way; it marks the continuous explosion of that marvel of a new age--tritonite! There are tremendous terminals being built; the air-transport lines are being welded into efficient units that circle the world; and the world is becoming so small! The barriers are gone; all nations are working as one to use wisely this strange new power for the work of this new world. No more poverty; no more of the want and desperate struggle that leads a whole people into the insane horrors of war; it is a glorious world of which we dream and which is coming slowly to be.... But I think we must dream well and work well to bring to actuality the beautiful visions in those far-seeing eyes of the man called Paul--Dictator, one time, of the whole world. LISTENING TO ANTS Two scientists of the University of Pittsburgh recently perfected an apparatus for detecting the sounds of underground communications among ants. A block of wood was placed upon the diaphragm of an ordinary telephone transmitter, which in turn was connected through batteries and amplifiers to a pair of earphones. When the termites crawled over the block of wood the transmitter was agitated, resulting in sound vibrations which were clearly heard by the listener at the headset. When the ants became excited over something or other their soldiers were found to hammer their heads vigorously on the wood. This action could be clearly seen and heard at the same time. The investigators found that the ants could hear sound vibrations in the air very poorly or not at all, but were extremely sensitive to vibrations underground. For this reason it was thought that the head hammering was a method of communication. Because of this sensitivity to substratum vibrations, ants are seldom found to infest the ties of railroads carrying heavy traffic, or buildings containing machinery. The Earthman's Burden _By R. F. Starzl_ [Illustration: _And then he jumped._] [Sidenote: There is foul play on Mercury--until Denny Olear of the Interplanetary Flying Police gets after his man.] Denny Olear was playing blackjack when the colonel's orderly found him. He hastily buttoned his tunic and in a few minutes, alert and very military, was standing at attention in the little office on the ground floor of the Denver I. F. P. barracks. His swanky blue uniform fitted without a wrinkle. His little round skullcap was perched at the regulation angle. "Olear," said the colonel, "they're having a little trouble at the Blue River Station, Mercury." "Trouble? Uh-huh," Olear said placidly. The colonel looked him over. He saw a man past his first youth. Thirty-five, possibly forty. Olear was well-knit, sandy-haired, not over five feet six inches in height. His hair was close-cropped, his features phlegmatic, his eyes a light blue with thick, short, light-colored lashes, his teeth excellent. A scar, dead white on a brown cheekbone, was a reminder of an "encounter" with one of the numerous sauriens of Venus. "I'm sending you," explained the colonel, "because you're more experienced, and not like some of these kids, always spoiling for a fight. There's something queer about this affair. Morones, factor of the Blue River post, reports that his assistant has disappeared. Vanished. Simply gone. But only three months ago the former factor--Morones was his assistant--disappeared. No hide nor hair of him. Morones reported to the company, the Mercurian Trading Concession, and they called me. Something, they think, is rotten." "Yes, sir." "I guess I needn't tell you," the colonel went on, "that you have to use tact. People don't seem to appreciate the Force. What with the lousy politicians begrudging every cent we get, and a bunch of suspicious foreign powers afraid we'll get too good--" "Yeah, I know. Tact, that's my motto. No rough stuff." He saluted, turned on his heel. "Just a minute!" The colonel had arisen. He was a fine, ascetic type of man. He held out his hand. "Good-by, Olear. Watch yourself!" When Olear had taken his matter-of-fact departure the colonel ran his fingers through his whitening hair. In the past several months he had sent five of his best men on dangerous missions--missions requiring tact, courage, and, so it seemed, very much luck. And only two of the five had come back. In those days the Interplanetary Flying Police did not enjoy the tremendous prestige it does now. The mere presence of a member of the Force is enough, in these humdrum days of interplanetary law and order, to quell the most serious disturbance anywhere in the solar system. But it was not always thus. This astounding prestige had to be earned with blood and courage, in many a desperate and lonely battle; had to be snatched from the dripping jaws of death. * * * * * Olear checked over his flying ovoid, got his bearings from the port astronomer, set his coordinate navigator and shoved off. Two weeks later he plunged into the thick, misty atmosphere on the dark side of Mercury. Ancient astronomers had long suspected that Mercury always presented the same side to the sun, though they were ignorant that the little planet had water and air. Its sunward side is a dreary, sterile, hot and hostile desert. Its dark side is warm and humid, and resembles to some extent the better known jungles and swamps of Venus. But it has a favored belt, some hundreds of miles wide, around its equator, where the enormous sun stays perpetually in one spot on the horizon. Sunward is the blinding glare of the desert; on the dark side, enormous banks of lowering clouds. On the dark margin of this belt are the "ringstorms," violent thunderstorms that never cease. They are the source of the mighty rivers which irrigate the tropical habitable belt and plunge out, boiling, far into the desert. Olear's little ship passed through the ringstorms, and he did not take over the controls until he recognized the familiar mark of the trading company, a blue comet on the aluminum roof of one of the larger buildings. Visibility was good that day, but despite the unusual clarity of the atmosphere there was a suggestion of the sinister about the lifeless scene--the vast, irresistible river, the riotously colored jungle roof. The vastness of nature dwarfed man's puny work. One horizon flashed incessantly with livid lightning, the other was one blinding blaze of the nearby sun. And almost lost below in the savage landscape was man's symbol of possession, a few metal sheds in a clear, fenced space of a few acres. Olear cautiously checked speed, skimmed over the turbid surface of the great river, and set her down on the ground within the compound. With his pencil-like ray-tube in his hand he stepped out of the hatchway. * * * * * A Mercurian native came out of the residence, presently, his hands together in the peace sign. For the benefit of Earthlubbers whose only knowledge of Mercury is derived from the teleview screen, it should be explained that Mercurians are _not_ human, even if they do slightly resemble us. They hatch from eggs, pass one life-phase as frog-like creatures in their rivers, and in the adult stage turn more human in appearance. But their skin remains green and fish-belly white. There is no hair on their warty heads. Their eyes have no lids, and have a peculiar dead, staring look when they sleep. And they carry a peculiar, fishy odor with them at all times. This Mercurian looked at Olear seemingly without interest. "Where is Morones?" the officer inquired. "Morones?" the native piped, in English. "Inside. He busy." "All right. I'm coming in." "He busy." "Yeah, move over." Though the native was a good six inches taller than Olear he stepped aside when the officer pushed him. Men--and Mercurians--had a way of doing that when they looked into those colorless eyes. They were not as phlegmatic as the face. Morones was sitting in his office. "Well, I'm here," Olear announced, helping himself to a chair. "Yes"--sourly. "Who invited you?" Olear looked at the factor levelly, appraising him. A big man, fat, but the fat well distributed. Saturnine face, dark hair, dark and bristly beard. The kind that thrived where other men became weak and fever-ridden. Also, to judge by his present appearance, an unpleasant companion and a nasty enemy. "Don't see what difference it makes to you," Olear answered in his own good time; "but the company invited me." "They would!" Morones growled. His eyes flickered to the door, and quick as a cat, Olear leaped to one side, his ray-pencil in his hand. Morones had not moved, and in the door stood the native, motionless and without expression. Morones laughed nastily. "Kind of jumpy, eh? What is it, Nargyll?" * * * * * Nargyll burst into a burbling succession of native phrases, which Olear had some difficulty following. "Nargyll wants to move your ship into one of the sheds, but the activator key's gone." "Yeah, I know," Olear assented casually. "I got it. Leave the ship till I get ready. Then I'll put it away. Get out, Nargyll." The native, hesitated, then on the lift of Morones' eyebrows departed. Olear shifted a chair so that he could watch both Morones and the door. He reopened the conversation easily: "Well, we understand each other. You don't want me here and I'm here. So what are you going to do about it?" Morones flushed. He struggled to keep his temper down. "What do you want to know?" "What happened to the factor who was here before you?" "I don't know. The translucene wasn't coming in like it should. Sammis went out into the jungle for a palaver with the chiefs to find out why. And he didn't come back." "You didn't find out where he went?" "I just told you," Morones said impatiently, "he went out to see the native chiefs." "Alone?" "Of course, alone. There were only two of us Earthmen here. Couldn't abandon this post to the wogglies, could we? Not that it'd make much difference. Except for Nargyll, none'll come near." "You never heard of him again?" "No! Dammit, no! Say, didn't they have any dumber strappers around than you? I told you once--I tell you again--I never saw hide nor hair of him after that." "Aw-right, aw-right!" Olear regarded Morones placidly. "And so you took the job of factor and radioed for an assistant, and when the assistant came he disappeared." Morones grunted, "He went out to get acquainted with the country and didn't come back." * * * * * Olear masked his close scrutiny of the factor under his idle and expressionless gaze. He was not ready to jump to the conclusion that Morones' uneasiness sprang from a sense of guilt. Guilty or not, he had a right to feel uneasy. The man would be dense indeed if he did not realize he was in line for suspicion, and he did not look dense. Indeed, he was obviously a shrewd character. "Let me see your 'lucene." Morones rose. Despite his bulk he stepped nimbly. He had the nimbleness of a Saturnian bear, which is great, as some of the earlier explorers learned to their dismay. "That's the first sensible question you've asked," Morones snorted. "Take a look at our 'lucene. Ha! Have a good look!" He led the way across the compound, waved his hand before the door of a strongly built shed in a swift, definite combination, and the door opened, revealing the interior. He waved invitingly. "You go first," Olear said. With a sneer Morones stepped in. "You're safe, boy, you're safe." Olear looked at the small pile on the floor in astonishment. Instead of the beautiful, semi-transparent chips of translucene, the dried sap of a Mercurian tree which is invaluable to the world as the source of an unfailing cancer cure, there were only a few dirty, dried up shavings, hardly worth shipping back to Earth for refining. The full significance of the affair began to dawn on the officer. The translucene trees grew only in this favored section of Mercury, and the Earth company had a monopoly of the entire supply. Justly, for only on Earth was cancer known, and it was on the increase. That small, almost useless pile on the floor connoted a terrible drug famine for the human race. * * * * * Morones' smile might have been a grin of satisfaction, at Olear's question: "Is that all you've bought since the last freighter was here?"' "It is," he replied. "The last load went off six months ago, and this here shed should be full to the eaves. There'll be hell to pay." "It may not be tactful," Olear remarked, "but if you've got your takings cached away somewhere to hold up the Earth for a big ransom, you'd better come across right now. You can't get by with it, fellow. You should have close to six million dollars' worth of it, and you can't get away. You just can't." Morones controlled his anger with an effort. "Like any dumb strapper, you've got your mind made up, ain't you? Well, go ahead. Get something on me. Here I was almost set to give you a lead that might get you somewhere. And you come shooting off--trying to make out I stole the 'lucene and killed those two fellows, eh? Go ahead! Get something on me! But not on Company grounds. You're leaving now!" With that he made a lunge at the officer, quite beside himself with rage. Olear could have burnt him down, but he was far too experienced for such an amateurish trick. Instead he ducked to evade Morones' blow. But the big man was as agile as a panther. In mid-air, so it seemed, he changed his direction of attack. The big fist swept downward, striking Olear's head a glancing blow. But the men of the Force have always been fighters, whatever their shortcomings as diplomats. Olear countered with a strong right to the body, thudding solidly, for Morones' softness did not go far below the surface. The factor whirled instantly, but not quite fast enough to bar the door. Olear was out and inside his ship in a few seconds, slamming the hatch. "Tact!" he grinned to himself, inserting the activator key. "Tact is what a fella needs." The little space flier shot aloft, until the tiny figure of the factor stopped shaking its fist and entered the residence. The post had a flier of its own, of course, but Morones was too wise to use it in pursuit. Olear considered what was best to do. Of course he could have placed Morones under arrest; could still do it; but that would not solve the mystery of the two deaths and the missing 'lucene. If the choleric factor was really guilty of the crimes, it would be better to let him go his way in the hope that he would betray himself. Olear regretted that he had not kept his tongue under closer curb. But there was no use regretting. Perhaps, after all, he ought to turn back to pump Morones for some helpful information. * * * * * His mind made up, he descended again until he was hovering a few feet from the ground. "Morones!" he called. "Morones!" He held the hatch open. Morones came to the door of the residence. He had a tube in his hand, a long-range weapon. "Morones," Olear declared pompously. "I place you under arrest!" The effect was instantaneous. Morones lifted the tube, and a glimmering, iridescent beam sprang out. The ship was up and away in a second, lurching and shivering uncomfortably every time the beam struck it in its upward flight. A good few seconds continued impingement.... But a miss is as good as a light-year. Miles high, Olear looked into his telens. Morones had laid aside his tube and was working with an instrument like a twin transit. Plotting the ship's course, naturally. Olear set his course for the Earth, and kept on it for a good twenty-four hours. Morones, if he was still watching him, would think he'd gone back for reinforcements. Such an assumption would be incredible now, but that was before the I. F. P. had achieved its present tremendous reputation. Beyond observation range, Olear curved back toward Mercury again, and was almost inside its atmosphere when he made a discovery that caused him to lose for a moment his natural indifference, and to clamp his jaws in anger. The current oxygen tank became empty, and when he removed it from the rack and put in a new one he found someone had let out all of this essential gas. The valve of every one of the spare tanks had been opened. Had Olear actually continued on his way to Earth he would have perished miserably of suffocation long before he could have returned to the Mercurian atmosphere. The officer whistled tunelessly through his teeth as he considered this fact. The visibility was by this time normal; that is, so poor it would have been possible to land very close to the trading station. Olear was taking no chances, however, and came down a good three Earth miles away. The egg-shaped hull sank through the glossy, brilliant treetops, through twisted vines, and was buried in the dank gloom of the jungle. Here it might remain hidden for a hundred years. * * * * * The twilight of the jungle was almost darkness. Landmarks were not. But Olear made a few small, inconspicuous marks on trees with his knife until he came to an outcropping rock. He had noticed the scarlike white of it slashing through the jungle from the air, and used it as a guide to direct his stealthy return to the trading post. His belt chronometer told him it would be about time for Morones to get up from his "night's" sleep. A little discreet observation might tell much. Long before he reached the compound, Olear heard the rushing of the great Blue River in its headlong plunge to the corrosive heat of the desert. And then, through the mists, he glimpsed the white metal walls of the Company sheds. He climbed a tree and for a long time watched patiently, lying prone on a limb. Blood-sucking insects tortured him, and flat tree-lice, resembling discs with legs, crawled over him inquisitively. Olear tolerated them with stoic indifference until at last his patience was rewarded. Morones was coming out of the compound. He was alone and obviously did not suspect that he was being watched, for he stepped out briskly. Once in the jungle he walked even faster, watching out warily for the panther-like carnivora that were the most dangerous to man on Mercury. Olear shinned to the ground and followed cautiously. Morones had his ray-tube with him, as any traveler in these jungles did. Olear could and did draw fast, but a dead trader would be valueless to him in his investigation, so he stalked him with every faculty strained to maintain complete silence. Often, in occasional clearings where the brown darkness grew less, he had to grovel on the slimy ground, picking up large bacteria that could be seen with the naked eye, and which left tiny, festering red marks on the skin. Mercury has no snakes. The trader seemed to be heading for higher ground, for the path led ever upward, though not far from the tossing waters of the river. And then, suddenly, he disappeared. Olear did not immediately hurry after him. A canny fugitive, catching sight of his pursuer, might suddenly drop to the ground and squirm to the side of the trail, there to wait and catch his pursuer as he passed. So Olear sidled into the all but impenetrable underbrush and slowly, with infinite caution, wormed his way along. * * * * * Presently he came to the little rise of ground where Morones had disappeared, but a painstaking search did not reveal the factor. There were, however, a number of other trails that joined the very faint trail he had been following, and now there was a well-defined track which continued to lead upward. With a grimace of disgust Olear again plunged into the odorous underbrush and traveled parallel to the trail. It was well he did so, for several Mercurians passed swiftly, intent, so it seemed, in answering a shrill call that at times came faintly to the ear. They carried slender spears. Several more Mercurians passed. The growth was thinning out, and Olear did not dare to proceed further. However, from his hiding place he could discern a number of irregular cave openings, apparently leading downward. They were apparently the entrances to one of the native cavern colonies, or possibly of a meeting place. No Earthman had ever entered one, but it was thought they had underground openings into the river. As the cave openings were obviously natural, Olear conjectured that there might be others that were not used. After an anxious search he found one, narrow and irregular, well hidden under the broad, glossy leaves of some uncatalogued vegetation. As it showed no evidence of use, Olear unhesitatingly slid down into it. It was very narrow and irregular, so that often he was barely able to squeeze through. The roots of trees choked the passage for a dozen feet or so, requiring the vigorous use of a knife. Bathed in sweat, his uniform a filthy mass of rags, Olear at last saw light. The passage ended abruptly near the roof of a large natural cavern. Lights glistened on stalactites which cut off Olear's larger view, and voices came from below. By craning his neck the officer could look between the pendent icicles of rock and see a fire burning on a huge oblong block of stone. Figures were sitting on the floor around this block--hundreds of Mercurians. The leaping flames made their white and green faces and bodies look frog-like and less human than usual. * * * * * But the figure that dominated the whole assemblage, both by its own hugeness and the magnetic power that flowed from it, was not of Mercury but of Pluto. For the benefit of those who have never seen a stuffed Plutonian in our museums--and they are very rare--let me refer you to the pious books still to be found in ancient library collections. The ancients personified their fears and hates in a being they called the Devil. The resemblance between the Devil of their imagination and a Plutonian is really astounding. Horns, hoofs, tail--almost to the smallest detail, the resemblance is there. Philosophers have written books on the "coincidence" in appearance of the ancient Devil and the modern decadent Plutonians. The Plutonians were once numerous and far advanced in science, and no doubt they called on the Earth many times, in prehistoric days, and the so-called Devil was a true picture of those vicious invaders, who are somewhat less human than usually portrayed. What was once classed as superstition was therefore a true racial memory. Long before our ancestors came out of their caves to build houses, the Plutonians had mastered interplanetary travel--only to forget the secret until human ingenuity should reveal it once more. The modern Plutonian in that dank cave was over ten feet tall, and it is easy to see why he dominated the assemblage. His black visage was set in an evil smile; his ebony body glistened in the firelight. He held a three-pronged spear in one hand, and sat on a pile of rocks, a sort of rough throne, so that he towered magnificently above all others. He spoke the Mercurian language, although the liquid intonations came harshly from his sneering lips. "Are ye assembled, frogfolk, that ye may hear the decision of your Thinking Ones?" he asked. * * * * * A respectful peeping chorus signified assent. But in that there was a hint of unrest; even of fear. "Speak, ye Thinking One, your commands!" "Hear me first!" An old Mercurian, unusually tall, faded and dry looking, his thick hide wrinkled like crushed leather, rose slowly to his feet and stepped before the oblong stone. His back was to the Plutonian, his face to the crescent of chiefs. "The Old Wise One!" A twittering murmur went around the assemblage. "Hear the Old Wise One!" "My people, I like this not!" began the ancient. "The Lords of the Green Star[1] have dealt with us fairly. Each phase[2] they have brought us the things we wanted"--he touched his spear and a few gaudy ornaments on his otherwise naked body--"in exchange for the worthless white sap of our trees. If we longer offend the Lords of the Green Star--" [Footnote 1: In their various languages, almost all solar races call Earth "The Green Star." Although conditions on Mercury are unfavorable, Earth can be seen from the dark star, on mountain tops, during occasional dispersals of the cloud masses.] [Footnote 2: The Mercurians had no conception of time before the Earthmen came. A "phase" is the time between calls of the freight ships, and is therefore variable; but in those days it was about six or seven months.] A raucous laugh interrupted the Mercurian's feeble voice, and it echoed eerily from the walls of the chamber. "Valueless ye call the white sap?" sneered the Plutonian. "Hear me. That sap you call valueless is dearer than life itself to the Lords of the Green Star. For they are afflicted in great numbers with a stinking death they call cancer. It destroys their vitals, and nothing--nothing in this broad universe can help them save this white sap ye give them. In your hands ye have the power to bring the proud Lords of the Green Star to their knees. They would fill this chamber many times with their most priceless treasures for the sap ye give them so freely. Withhold the sap, and your Thinking Ones may go to the Green Star itself to rule over its Lords. They are desperate. Their emissaries may even now be on the way to beg your pleasure. Speak, Thinking Ones! Would ye not rule the Green Star?" * * * * * But the chiefs failed to become enthused. One of them rose and addressed the Plutonian: "O Lord of the Outer Orbit! For near one full phase have ye dwelt among us. And well should ye know we have no desire for conquest. We fear to go to the Green Star to rule." "Then let me rule for ye!" exclaimed the Plutonian instantly. "My brothers will abide with ye as your guests--shall see that ye receive a fair reward for the white sap; and I will convey your commands to the Lords of the Green Star." The Old Wise One raised his withered hands, so that the uncertain twittering of voices which followed the Plutonian's suggestion subsided. "My children," piped the feeble old voice, "the Black Lord has spoken cunning words, but they are false. It is plain to see that he desires to rule the Green Star, and our welfare does not concern him." "If so it be that the white sap is of great value to the Lords of the Green Star, it is still of no value to us; and if the gifts they bring to us are of no value to them, they are dear to us." The Plutonian sneered. "Dearer than the Paste of Strange Dreams?" A startled hush fell among the assembled Mercurians. They looked guiltily at one another, avoiding the eyes of the Old Wise One. "What is this?" shrilled he, turning furiously to the Plutonian. "Have ye brought the paste of evil to our abode, knowing well the strict proscription of our tribe? Fool! Your death is upon ye!" * * * * * But the Plutonian only grinned and spread his glistening, black hands in a careless gesture. High overhead, peering through the stalactites, Olear instantly understood the Plutonian's strange power, the Paste of Strange Dreams, a fearsome narcotic of that far-swinging dark planet. More insidious and devastating than any drug ever produced on Earth, it had wrought frightful havoc among many solar races. The Earthmen had opened the lanes, broken the age-old barriers of distance, so that the harpies of evil could traffic their poison from planet to planet. So the Paste of Strange Dreams was added to the Earthman's burden. "Seize him--the Evil One!" shrieked the old chief, but the Mercurians sat sullen and silent, and the Plutonian sneered. Finally one of the chiefs arose and with an effort faced the Old Wise One and said: "The Strange Dreams are dearer to us than all else. Do as he says." The piping voices rose in eager acclamation, but the Old Wise One held up his claws, waiting until silence returned. "Wait! Wait! Before ye commit this folly, hear the Green Star man. Many times has he demanded audience. Let him come in." "It is not permitted," demurred one of the chiefs. "Ye permitted this being of evil to enter; let him enter also." "He is in the outer chambers now," one of the guards spoke. "His face is like the center of a ringstorm." "Let him enter!" * * * * * Morones strode into the room angrily. Blinded by the fire after the darkness of the antechambers, he did not at first see the Plutonian. He strode up to the ancient chief and glared at him. "Does the Old Wise One learn wisdom at last?" he rasped. The ancient shrank away from him, as did the nearer of the lesser chiefs. "The Old Wise One thinks less of his wisdom," he replied wearily. "Behold!" He pointed to the enthroned Plutonian. Morones started. His hand flashed to his side, and came away empty. Deft fingers had extracted his ray-tube. But he was a man of courage. Never could it be said to his shame that an Earthman cringed in the sight of lesser races. "So it's you, my sooty friend!" he snarled in English. The Plutonian, accomplished linguist, replied: "As you see. You don't look very happy, Mr. Morones." Morones regarded him impassively, his eyes frosty. "That explains everything," he said at last with cold deliberation. "First Sammis, then Boyd. Going to finish me next, I suppose?" The Plutonian twisted the end of an eyebrow and smiled. "Interested in them?" "What'd you do with the bodies?" The Plutonian jerked his thumb carelessly. "The river you call the Blue is swift and deep. But before you follow them there is certain information I wish to get from you. Where is the soldier who came to visit you?" A crafty light came into Morones' face. "He is not far from here, waiting for me." * * * * * Olear, in his cramped hiding place, could not help feeling a warm glow of admiration for Morones' nerve, because Morones thought him well on his way to Earth. "Nargyll, what did your master do with the visitor?" "Drove him back to the Green Star," Nargyll said promptly. "And the oxygen tanks. Did you empty them?" "I let them hiss." Nargyll's grin was sharkish. "News to you, eh, Morones? Your officer's corpse has probably dropped into the sun by this time. Tell me, why did you drive him off?" Morones sagged perceptibly. To gain a little time he said truthfully: "I knew I should be blamed and ruined for life. I didn't know you were here, damn you! I hoped to get this mess with the natives straightened up before he'd come back with reinforcements." "Yes. Well, you owe some months of life already. Your presence here has been more or less embarrassing, but I had to let you live or I'd have had the whole I. F. P. here to investigate. Now that you've failed in keeping them from getting interested you may do me one more service." The black giant grinned. "I've often wondered at the Earthman's prestige all over the solar system. Even to-night, soft and helpless as you are, these natives fear you. You will, therefore, be an object lesson in the helplessness of Earthmen." * * * * * Morones was pale but courageous. With contempt in every line of him he watched some of the less frightened chiefs, at the command of the Plutonian, push aside some of the blazing blocks of fungus on the stone, to make room for his body. At last he raised his hand. "Frogfolk!" he cried, "if ye do this thing, the Lords of the Green Star will come. They will come with fires hotter than the sun; they will blast your rivers with a power greater than the thunder of the ringstorms; they will fill your caves with a purple smoke that turns your bones to water--" Shrill cries of fear almost drowned out his words. All the Mercurians had seen evidences of the dreadful power of the Earthmen. They began milling around, then stood rooted by the roar of the Plutonian's voice. "Lies! Lies!" he bellowed. "See, they are weak as egglets!" He stepped down, picked Morones up by one shoulder, and held him, dangling, high over the heads of all. Morones clawed and tore at the brawny arm. He made a ludicrous picture. Soon the simple natives made a sniffling sound of mirth, and the Plutonian, satisfied at last, set him down again. "He tells truth!" The Old Wise One had climbed to the top of the stone block. "The Lords of the Green Star have their power not in their bodies, but it is great. It is greater far than the frogfolk. It is greater than the Lords of the Outer Orbit. They will come even as the surly one has said, and great shall be our sorrow. It is not yet too late. Release him, and deliver to him the white sap. Seize this evil one--" The feeble, fickle minds were being swayed again. In a gust of impatience, the Plutonian stepped down, seized the aged chief's skinny body in his great black hands, and snapped him in two. There was a tearing of tough cords and tissue, and the two halves fell into the fire. For an instant the Mercurians were stunned. Then some of them vented hissing sounds of rage, while others prostrated themselves on the floor. The black giant watched them narrowly for a moment, then turned his attention to Morones. He seized him by the arm and drew him slowly and irresistibly to him. * * * * * The murder of the Old Wise One had been done so quickly that Olear was unable to prevent it. Had he been able to use his ray weapon he could have burned the Plutonian down, but it had been bent at one of the narrow turns of the crevice he had come down. The need for extreme lightness in weapons was rather overdone in those early times, and a little rough handling made them useless. So now Olear, weaponless except for the service knife at his belt, began the hazardous undertaking of climbing among the stalactites to a position approximately above the Plutonian's head. The job required judgment. Some of the stone masses were insecurely anchored and would crash down at the lightest touch. Some were spaced so closely together that he could not get between them. Others were so far apart that it was difficult to get from one to another. Yet he made it somehow, and unnoticed, for all eyes were turned on the tense drama being enacted below. From almost directly overhead he saw Morones being drawn upward. "You saw," the Plutonian was saying triumphantly in Mercurian, "--you saw me unmake your Old Fool. And now you will see that a Lord of the Green Star is even softer, even weaker--" Morones, in that pitiless grasp, turned his face to the hateful grinning visage above him. In his last extremity he was still angry. "You devil!" Morones shouted. "You may murder me, but they'll get you! They'll get you!" "Who'll get me?" the Plutonian purred silkily, deferring the pleasure of the kill for another moment. Morones was having trouble with his breathing. His red face lolled from side to side, his eyes rolled in agony. Suddenly he saw Olear. Unbelieving, he relaxed. "I'm seein' things!" he breathed. "Who'll get me?" persisted the Plutonian, applying a little more pressure. "The I. F. P.!" Morones gasped. "Well, you little son-of-a-gun!" Olear thought, and then he jumped. He landed a-straddle the neck of the Plutonian, which was almost like forking a horse. One brawny arm seized a horn. The other, with a lightning-swift dart, brought the point of the long service-knife to the pulsing black throat. "Put him down!" Olear spoke into the great pointed ear. "Easy!" Back on his feet, Morones began bellowing at the Mercurians. Utterly demoralized, they fled pell-mell. Morones came back. He said: "Nothing to tie him up with." "That's all right," Olear replied, studiously keeping the knife point at exactly the right place, "I'll ride him in. Get going, you, and be tactful when you go through the door, or this sticker of mine might slip!" With extreme care the Plutonian did exactly as Olear ordered him to. * * * * * It was necessary to radio for one of the larger patrol ships to take Olear's enormous prisoner back to Earth for his trial. The officer testified, of course, and the Plutonian was duly sentenced to death for the murder of the old Mercurian. Execution by dehydration was decreed, so that the body would be uninjured for scientific study; and to-day it is considered one of the finest specimens extant. In his testimony, however, Olear so minimized his own connection with the case that he received no public recognition. It was not until some months afterward, when Morones, on leave, rode back with a shipload of translucene, that the whole story came out, emphatically and profanely. Olear finally consented to speak a few words for the Telephoto News Co. As he stepped off the little platform deferential hands tried to push him back. "You haven't told them who you are," protested the announcer. "Give your name and rank." "Aw, they don't have to know that!" Olear rejoined, keeping on going. "They know it's one of the Force. That's all they have to know. Besides there's a blackjack game going on and I'm losing money every minute I'm out of it." The Exile of Time PART THREE OF A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Ray Cummings_ WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE [Illustration: _"Look!" exclaimed Larry._] [Sidenote: Larry and George from 1935, Mary from 1777--all are caught up in the treacherous Tugh's revolt of the Robots, in the Time-world of 2930.] There came a girl's scream, and muffled, frantic words. "Let me out! Let me out!" Then we saw her white face at the basement window. This, which was the start of the extraordinary incidents, occurred on the night of June 8-9, 1935. My name is George Rankin, and with my friend, Larry Gregory, we rescued the girl who was imprisoned in the deserted house on Patton Place, New York City. We thought at first that she was demented--this strangely beautiful girl in long white satin dress, white powdered wig and a black beauty patch on her check. She said she had come from the year 1777, that her father was Major Atwood, of General Washington's staff! Her name was Mistress Mary Atwood. It was a strange story she had to tell us. A cage of shining metal bars had materialized in her garden, and a mechanical man had come from it--a Robot ten feet tall. It had captured her; brought her to 1935; left her, and vanished saying it would return. We went back to that house on Patton Place. The cage did return, and Larry and I fought the strange monster. We were worsted, and the Robot seized Mary and me and whirled us back into Time in its room-like cage of shining bars. Larry recovered his senses, rushed into Patton Place, and there encountered another, smaller, Time-traveling cage, and was himself taken off in it. But the occupants of Larry's smaller cage were friendly. They were a man and a girl of 2930 A.D.! The girl was the Princess Tina, and the man, Harl, a young scientist of that age. With an older scientist--a cripple named Tugh--Harl had invented the Time-vehicles. * * * * * We had heard of Tugh before. Mary Atwood had known him in the year 1777. He had made love to her, and when repulsed had threatened vengeance against her father. And in 1932, a cripple named Tugh had gotten into trouble with the police and had vowed some strange weird vengeance against the city officials and the city itself. More than that, the very house on Patton Place from which we had rescued Mary Atwood, was owned by this man named Tugh, who was wanted by the police but could not be found! Tugh's vengeance was presently demonstrated, for in June, 1935, a horde of Robots appeared. With flashing swords and red and violet light beams the mechanical men spread about the city massacring the people; they brought midsummer snow with their frigid red rays; and then, in a moment, torrid heat and boiling rain. Three days and nights of terror ensued; then the Robots silently withdrew into the house on Patton Place and vanished. The New York City of 1935 lay wrecked; the vengeance of Tugh against it was complete. Larry, going back in Time now, was told by Harl and Princess Tina that a Robot named Migul--a mechanism almost human from the Time-world of 2930--had stolen the larger cage and was running amuck through Time. The strange world of 2930 was described to Larry--a world in which nearly-human mechanisms did all the work. These Robots, diabolically developed, were upon the verge of revolt. The world of machinery was ready to assail its human masters! Migul was an insubordinate Robot, and Harl and Tina were chasing it. They whirled Larry back into Time, and they saw the larger cage stop at a night in the year 1777--the same night from which Mary Atwood had been stolen. They stopped there. Harl remained in the little cage to guard it, while Tina and Larry went outside. It was night, and the house of Major Atwood was nearby. British redcoats had come to capture the colonial officer; but all they found was his murdered body lying in the garden. Migul the Robot had chained Mary and me to the door of his cage; had briefly stopped in the garden and killed the major, and then had departed with us. * * * * * We now went back to the Beginning of Time, for the other cage was again chasing us. Reaching the Beginning, we swept forward, and the whole vast panorama of the events of Time passed in review before us. Suddenly we found that Tugh himself was hiding in our cage! We had not known it, nor had Migul, our Robot captor. Tugh was hiding here, not trusting Migul to carry out his orders! We realized now that all these events were part of the wild vengeance of this hideously repulsive cripple. Migul was a mere machine carrying out Tugh's orders. Tugh, in 2930, was masquerading as a friend of the Government; but in reality it was he who was fomenting the revolt of the Robots. Tugh now took command of our cage. The smaller cage had only Harl in it now, for Larry and Tina were marooned in 1777. Harl was chasing us. Tugh stopped us in the year 762 A.D. We found that the space around us now was a forest recently burned. Five hundred feet from us was the space which held Harl's cage. Presently it materialized! Mary and I were helpless. We stood watching Tugh, as he crouched on the floor of our cage near its opened doorway. A ray cylinder was in his hand, with a wire running to a battery in the cage corner. He had forced Mary and me to stand at the window where Harl would see us and be lured to approach. From Harl's cage, five hundred feet across the blackened forest glade of that day of 762, Harl came cautiously forward. Abruptly Tugh fired. His cylinder shot a horizontal beam of intense actinic light. It struck Harl full, and he fell. Swiftly his body decomposed; and soon in the sunlight of the glade lay a sagging heap of black and white garments enveloping the skeleton of what a moment before had been a man! CHAPTER XIV A Very Human Princess That night in 1777 near the home of the murdered Major Atwood brought to Larry the most strangely helpless feeling he had ever experienced. He crouched with Tina beneath a tree in a corner of the field, gazing with horror at the little moonlit space by the fence where their Time-traveling vehicle should have been but now was gone. Marooned in 1777! Larry had not realized how desolately remote this Revolutionary New York was from the great future city in which he had lived. The same space; but what a gulf between him and 1935! What a barrier of Time, impassable without the shining cage! They crouched, whispering. "But why would he have gone, Tina?" "I don't know. Harl is very careful; so something or someone must have passed along here, and he left, rather than cause a disturbance. He will return, of course." "I hope so," whispered Larry fervently. "We are marooned here, Tina! Heavens, it would be the end of us!" "We must wait. He will return." They huddled in the shadow of the tree. Behind them there was a continued commotion at the Atwood home, and presently the mounted British officers came thudding past on the road, riding for headquarters at the Bowling Green to report the strange Atwood murder. The night wore on. Would Harl return? If not to-night, then probably to-morrow, or to-morrow night. In spite of his endeavor to stop correctly, he could so easily miss this night, these particular hours. Harl had met his death, as I have described. We never knew exactly what he did, of course, after leaving that night of 1777. It seems probable, however, that some passer-by startled him into flashing away into Time. Then he must have seen with his instrument evidence of the other cage passing, and impulsively followed it--to his death in the burned forest of the year 762. * * * * * Larry and Tina waited. The dawn presently began paling the stars; and still Harl did not come. The little space by the fence corner was empty. "It will soon be daylight," Larry whispered. "We can't stay here: we'll be discovered." They were anachronisms in this world; misfits; futuristic beings who dared not show themselves. Larry touched his companion--the slight little creature who was a Princess in her far-distant future age. But to Larry now she was just a girl. "Frightened, Tina?" "A little." He laughed softly. "It would be fearful to be marooned here permanently, wouldn't it? You don't think Harl would desert us? Purposely, I mean?" "No, of course not." "Then we'll expect him to-morrow night. He wouldn't stop in the daylight, I guess." "I don't think so. He would reason that I would not expect him." "Then we must find shelter, and food, and be here to-morrow night. It seems long to us, Tina, but in the cage it's just an instant--just a trifle different setting of the controls." She smiled her pale, stern smile. "You have learned quickly, Larry. That is true." A sudden emotion swept him. His hand found hers; and her fingers answered the pressure of his own. Here in this remote Time-world they felt abruptly drawn together. He murmured, "Tina, you are--" But he never finished. The cage was coming! They stood tense, watching the fence corner where, in the flat dawn light, the familiar misty shadow was gathering. Harl was returning to them. The cage flashed silently into being. They stood peering, ready to run to it. The door slid aside. * * * * * But it was not Harl who came out. It was Tugh, the cripple. He stood in the doorway, a thick-set, barrel-chested figure of a man in a wide leather jacket, a broad black belt and short flaring leather pantaloons. "Tugh!" exclaimed Tina. The cripple advanced. "Princess, is it you?" He was very wary. His gaze shot at Larry and back to Tina. "And who is this?" A hideously repulsive fellow, Larry thought this Tugh. He saw his shriveled, bent legs, crooked hips, and wide thick shoulders set askew--a goblin, in a leather jerkin. His head was overlarge, with a bulging white forehead and a mane of scraggly black hair shot with grey. But Larry could not miss the intellectuality marking his heavy-jowled face; the keenness of his dark-eyed gaze. These were instant impressions. Tina had drawn Larry forward. "Where is Harl?" she demanded imperiously. "How have you come to have the cage, Tugh?" "Princess, I have much to tell," he answered, and his gaze roved the field. "But it is dangerous here; I am glad I have found you. Harl sent me to this night, but I struck it late. Come, Tina--and your strange-looking friend." It impressed Larry then, and many times afterward, that Tugh's gaze at him was mistrustful, wary. "Come, Larry," said Tina. And again she demanded of Tugh, "I ask you, where is Harl?" "At home. Safe at home, Princess." He gestured toward Major Atwood's house, which now in the growing daylight showed more plainly under its shrouding trees. "That space off there holds our other cage as you know, Tina. You and Harl were pursuing that other cage?" "Yes," she agreed. * * * * * They had stopped at the doorway, where Tugh stood slightly inside. Larry whispered: "What does this mean, Tina?" Tugh said, "Migul, the mechanism, is running wild in the other cage. But you and Harl knew that?" "Yes," she answered, and said softly to Larry, "We will go. But, Larry, watch this Tugh! Harl and I never trusted him." Tugh's manner was a combination of the self-confidence of a man of standing and the deference due his young Princess. He was closing the door, and saying: "Migul, that crazy, insubordinate machine, captured a man from 1935 and a girl from 1777. But they are safe: he did not harm them. Harl is with them." "In our world, Tugh?" "Yes; at home. And we have Migul chained. Harl captured and subdued him." Tugh was at the controls. "May I take you and this friend of yours home, Princess?" She whispered to Larry, "I think it is best, don't you?" Larry nodded. She murmured, "Be watchful, Larry!" Then, louder: "Yes, Tugh. Take us." Tugh was bending over the controls. "Ready now?" "Yes," said Tina. Larry's senses reeled momentarily as the cage flashed off into Time. * * * * * It was a smooth story which Tugh had to tell them; and he told it smoothly. His dark eyes swung from Tina to Larry. "I talked with that other young man from your world. George Rankin, he said his name was. He is somewhat like you: dressed much the same and talks little. The girl calls herself Mary Atwood." He went on and told them an elaborate, glib story, all of which was a lie. It did not wholly deceive Larry and Tina, yet they could not then prove it false. The gist of it was that Mary and I were with Harl and the subdued Migul in 2930. "It is strange that Harl did not come for us himself," said Tina. Tugh's gaze was imperturbable as he answered. "He is a clever young man, but he cannot be expected to handle these controls with my skill, Princess, and he knows it; so he sent me. You see, he wanted very much to strike just this night and this hour, so as not to keep you waiting." He added, "I am glad to have you back. Things are not well at home, Princess. This insubordinate adventure of Migul's has been bad for the other mechanisms. News of it has spread, and the revolt is very near. What we are to do I cannot say, but I do know we did not like your absence." The trip which Larry and Tina now took to 2930 A.D. consumed, to their consciousness of the passing of Time, some three hours. They discovered that they were hungry, and Tugh produced food and drink. Larry spent much of the time with Tina at the window, gazing at the changing landscape while she told him of the events which to her were history--the recorded things on the Time-scroll which separated her world and his. * * * * * Tugh busied himself about the vehicle and left them much to themselves. They had ample opportunity to discuss him and his story of Harl. It must be remembered that Larry had no knowledge of Tugh, save the story which Alten had told of a cripple named Tugh in New York in 1933-34; and Mary Atwood's mention of the coincidence of the Tugh she knew in 1777. But Tina had known this Tugh for years. Though she, like Harl, had never liked him, nevertheless he was a trusted and influential man in her world. Proof of his activities in other Time-worlds, there was none so far, from Tina's viewpoint. Nor did Larry and Tina know as yet of the devastation of New York in 1935; nor of the murder of Major Atwood. The capture of Mary and me, the fight with the Robot in the back yard of the house on Patton Place--in all these incidents of the bandit cage, only Migul had figured. Migul--an insubordinate, crazy mechanism running amuck. Yet upon Larry and Tina was a premonition that Tugh, here with them now and so suavely friendly, was their real enemy. "I wouldn't trust him," Larry whispered, "any further than I can see him. He's planning something, but I don't know what." "But perhaps--and this I have often thought, Larry--perhaps it is his aspect. He looks so repulsive--" Larry shook his head. "He does, for a fact; but I don't mean that. What Mary Atwood told me of the Tugh she knew, described the fellow. And so did Alten describe him. And in 1934 he murdered a girl: don't forget that, Tina--he, or someone who looked remarkably like him, and had the same name." But they knew that the best thing they could do now was to get to 2930. Larry wanted to join me again, and Tugh maintained I was there. Well, they would soon find out.... * * * * * As they passed the shadowy world of 1935, a queer emotion gripped Larry. This was his world, and he was speeding past it to the future. He realized then that he wanted to be assured of my safety, and that of Mary Atwood and Harl; but what lay closest to his heart was the welfare of the Princess Tina. Princess? He never thought of her as that, save that it was a title she carried. She seemed just a small, strangely-solemn white-faced girl. He could not conceive returning to his own world and having her speed on, leaving him forever. His thoughts winged ahead. He touched Tina as they stood together at the window gazing out at the shadowy New York City. It was now 1940. "Tina," he said, "if our friends are safe in your world--" "If only they are, Larry!" "And if your people there are in trouble, in danger--you will let me help?" She turned abruptly to regard him, and he saw a mist of tenderness in the dark pools of her eyes. "In history, Larry, I have often been interested in reading of a strange custom outgrown by us and supposed to be meaningless. Yet maybe it is not. I mean--" She was suddenly breathless. "I mean even a Princess, as they call me, likes to--to be human. I want to--I mean I've often wondered--and you're so dear--I want to try it. Was it like this? Show me." She reached up, put her arms about his neck and kissed him! CHAPTER XV _A Thousand Years into the Future_ 1930 to 2930--a thousand years in three hours. It was sufficiently slow traveling so that Larry could see from the cage window the actual detailed flow of movement: the changing outline of material objects around him. There had been the open country of Revolutionary times when this space was north of the city. It was a grey, ghostly landscape of trees and the road and the shadowy outlines of the Atwood house five hundred feet away. Larry saw the road widen. The fence suddenly was gone. The trees were suddenly gone. The shapes of houses were constantly appearing; then melting down again, with others constantly rearing up to take their places; and always there were more houses, and larger, more enduring ones. And then the Atwood house suddenly melted: a second or two, and all evidence of it and the trees about it were gone. There was no road; it was a city street now; and it had widened so that the cage was poised near the middle of it. And presently the houses were set solid along its borders. At 1910 Larry began to recognize the contour of the buildings: The antiquated Patton Place. But the flowing changing outlines adjusted themselves constantly to a more familiar form. The new apartment house, down the block in which Larry and I lived, rose and assembled itself like a materializing spectre. A wink or two of Larry's eyelids and it was there. He recalled the months of its construction. The cage, with Larry as a passenger, could not have stopped in these years: he realized it, now. There was a nameless feeling, a repulsion against stopping; it was indescribable, but he was aware of it. He had lived these years once, and they were forbidden to him again. The cage was still in its starting acceleration. They swept through the year 1935, and then Larry was indefinably aware that the forbidden area had passed. * * * * * They went through those few days of June, 1935, during which Tugh's Robots had devastated the city, but it was too brief an action to make a mark that Larry could see. It left a few very transitory marks, however. Larry noticed that along the uneven line of ghostly roof-tops, blobs of emptiness had appeared; he saw a short distance away that several of the houses had melted down into ragged, tumbled heaps. These were where the bombs had struck, dropped by the Government planes in an endeavor to wreck the Tugh house from which the Robots were appearing. But the ragged, broken areas were filled in a second--almost as soon as Larry realized they were there--and new and larger buildings than before appeared. At sight of all this he murmured to Tina, "Something has happened here. I wonder what?" He chanced to turn, and saw that Tugh was regarding him very queerly; but in a moment he forgot it in the wonders of the passage into his future. This growing, expanding city! It had seemed a giant to Larry in 1935, especially after he had compared it to what it was in 1777. But now, in 1950, and beyond to the turn of the century, he stood amazed at the enormity of the shadowy structures rearing their spectral towers around him. For some years Patton Place, a backward section, held its general form; then abruptly the city engulfed it. Larry saw monstrous buildings of steel and masonry rising a thousand feet above him. For an instant, as they were being built he saw their skeleton outlines; and then they were complete. Yet they were not enduring, for in every flowing detail they kept changing. An overhead sidewalk went like a balcony along what had been Patton Place. Bridges and archways spanned the street. Then there came a triple bank of overhead roadways. A distance away, a hundred feet above the ground level, the shadowy form of what seemed a monorail structure showed for a moment. It endured for what might have been a hundred years, and then it was gone.... * * * * * This monstrous city! By 2030 there was a vast network of traffic levels over what had been a street. It was an arcade, now, open at the top near the cage; but further away Larry saw where the giant buildings had flowed and mingled over it, with the viaducts, spider bridges and pedestrian levels plunging into tunnels to pierce through them. And high overhead, where the little sky which was left still showed, Larry saw the still higher outlines of a structure which quite evidently was a huge aerial landing stage for airliners. It was an incredible city! There were spots of enduring light around Larry now--the city lights which for months and years shone here unchanged. The cage was no longer outdoors. The street which had become an open arcade was now wholly closed. A roof was overhead--a city roof, to shut out the inclement weather. There was artificial light and air and weather down here, and up on the roof additional space for the city's teeming activities. Larry could see only a shadowy narrow vista, here indoors, but his imagination supplied visions of what the monstrous, incredible city must be. There was a roof, perhaps, over all Manhattan. Bridges and viaducts would span to the great steel and stone structures across the rivers, so that water must seem to be in a canyon far underground. There would be a cellar to this city, incredibly intricate with conduits of wires and drainage pipes, and on the roof rain or snow would fall unnoticed by the millions of workers. Children born here in poverty might never yet have seen the blue sky and the sunlight, or know that grass was green and lush and redolent when moist with morning dew.... Larry fancied this now to be the climax of city building here on earth; the city was a monster, now, unmanageable, threatening to destroy the humans who had created it.... He tried to envisage the world; the great nations; other cities like this one. Freight transportation would go by rail and underseas, doubtless, and all the passengers by air.... * * * * * Tina, with her knowledge of history, could sketch the events. The Yellow War--the white races against the Orientals--was over by the year 2000. The three great nations were organized in another half-century: the white, the yellow and the black. By the year 2000, the ancient dirigibles had proven impractical, and great airliners of the plane type were encircling the earth. New motors, wing-spreads, and a myriad devices made navigation of the upper altitudes possible. At a hundred thousand feet, upon all the Great Circle routes, liners were rushing at nearly a thousand miles an hour. They would halt at intervals, to allow helicopter tenders to come up to transfer descending passengers. Then the etheric wave-thrust principle was discovered: by 2500 A.D. man was voyaging out into space and Interplanetary travel began. This brought new problems: a rush of new millions of humans to live upon our Earth; new wars; new commerce in peace times; new ideas; new scientific knowledge.... By 2500, the city around Larry must have reached its height. It stayed there a half century; and then it began coming down. Its degeneration was slow, in the beginning. First, there might have been a hole in the arcade which was not repaired. Then others would appear, as the neglect spread. The population left. The great buildings of metal and stone, so solidly appearing to the brief lifetime of a single individual, were impermanent over the centuries. By 2600, the gigantic ghosts had all melted down. They lay in a shadowy pile, burying the speeding cage. There was no stopping here; there was no space unoccupied in which they could stop. Larry could see only the tangled spectres of broken, rusting, rotting metal and stone. He wondered what could have done it. A storm of nature? Or had mankind strangely turned decadent, and rushed back in a hundred years or so to savagery? It could not have been the latter, because very soon the ruins were moving away: the people were clearing the city site for something new. For fifty years it went on. * * * * * Tina explained it. The age of steam had started the great city of New York, and others like it, into its monstrous congestion of human activity. There was steam for power and steam for slow transportation by railroads and surface ships. Then the conquest of the air, and the transportation of power by electricity, gradually changed things. But man was slow to realize his possibilities. Even in 1930, all the new elements existed; but the great cities grew monstrous of their own momentum. Business went to the cities because the people were there; workers flocked in because the work was there to call them. But soon the time came when the monster city was too unwieldy. The traffic, the drainage, the water supply could not cope with conditions. Still, man struggled on. The workers were mere automatons--pallid attendants of machinery; people living in a world of beauty who never had seen it; who knew of nothing but the city arcades where the sun never shone and where amusements were as artificial as the light and air. Then man awakened to his folly. Disease broke out in New York City in 2551, and in a month swept eight million people into death. The cities were proclaimed impractical, unsafe. And suddenly the people realized how greatly they hated the city; how strangely beautiful the world could be in the fashion God created it.... There was, over the next fifty years, an exodus to the rural sections. Food was produced more cheaply, largely because it was produced more abundantly. Man found his wants suddenly simplified. And business found that concentration was unnecessary. The telephone and television made personal contacts not needed. The aircraft, the high-speed auto-trucks over modern speedways, the aeroplane-motored monorails, the rocket-trains--all these shortened distance. And, most important of all, the transportation of electrical energy from great central power companies made small industrial units practical even upon remote farms. The age of electricity came into its own. The cities were doomed.... * * * * * Larry saw, through 2600 and 2700 A.D., a new form of civilization rising around him. At first it seemed a queer combination of the old fashioned village and a strange modernism. There were, here upon Manhattan Island, metal houses, widely spaced in gardens, and electrically powered factories of unfamiliar aspect. Overhead were skeleton structures, like landing stages; and across the further distance was the fleeting, transitory wraith of a monorail air-road. Along the river banks were giant docks for surface vessels and sub-sea freighters. There was a little concentration here, but not much. Man had learned his lesson. This was a new era. Man was striving really to play, as well as work. But the work had to be done. With the constant development of mechanical devices, there was always a new machine devised to help the operation of its fellow. And over it all was the hand of the human, until suddenly the worker found that he was no more than an attendant upon an inanimate thing which did everything more skilfully than he could do it. Thus came the idea of the Robot--something to attend, to oversee, to operate machines. In Larry's time it had already begun with a myriad devices of "automatic control." In Tina's Time-world it reached its ultimate--and diabolical--development.... At 2900, Larry saw, five hundred feet to the east, the walls of a long low laboratory rising. The other cage--which in 1777 was in Major Atwood's garden, and in 1935 was in the back yard of the Tugh house on Beckman Place--was housed now in 2930, in a room of this laboratory.... At 2905, with the vehicle slowing for its stopping, Tina gestured toward the walls of her palace, whose shadowy forms were rising close at hand. Then the palace garden grew and flourished, and Larry saw that this cage he was in was set within this garden. "We are almost there, Larry," she said. "Yes," he answered. An emotion gripped him. "Tina, your world--why it's so strange! But you are not strange." "Am I not, Larry?" He smiled at her; he felt like showing her again that the ancient custom of kissing was not wholly meaningless, but Tugh was regarding them. "I was comparing," said Larry, "that girl Mary Atwood, from the year 1777, and you. You are so different in looks, in dress, but you're just--girls." She laughed. "The world changes, Larry, but not human nature." "Ready?" called Tugh. "We are here, Tina." "Yes, Tugh. You have the dial set for the proper night and hour?" "Of course. I make no mistake. Did I not invent these dials?" The cage slackened through a day of sunlight; plunged into a night; and slid to its soundless, reeling halt.... Tina drew Larry to the door and opened it upon a fragrant garden, somnolently drowsing in the moonlight. "This is my world, Larry," she said. "And here is my home." * * * * * Tugh was with them as they left the cage. He said: "This is the tri-night hour of the very night you left here. Princess Tina. You see, I calculated correctly." "Where did you leave Harl and the two visitors?" she demanded. "Here. Right here." Across the garden Larry saw three dark forms coming forward. They were three small Robots of about Tina's stature--domestic servants of the palace. They crowded up, crying: "Master Tugh! Princess!" "What is it?" Tugh asked. The hollow voices echoed with excitement as one of them said: "Master Tugh, there has been murder here! We have dared tell no one but you or the Princess. Harl is murdered!" Larry chanced to see Tugh's astonished face, and in the horror of the moment a feeling came to Larry that Tugh was acting unnaturally. He forgot it at once; but later he was to recall it forcibly, and to realize that the treacherous Tugh had planned this with these Robots. "Master Tugh, Harl is murdered! Migul escaped and murdered Harl, and took the body away with him!" Larry was stricken dumb. Tugh seized the little Robot by his metal shoulders. "Liar! What do you mean?" Tina gasped, "Where are our visitors--the young man and the girl?" "Migul took them!" "Where?" Tina demanded. "We don't know. We think very far down in the caverns of machinery. Migul said he was going to feed them to the machines!" CHAPTER XVI _The New York of 2930_ Larry stood alone at an upper window of the palace gazing out at the somnolent moonlit city. It was an hour or two before dawn. Tina and Tugh had started almost at once into the underground caverns to which Tina was told Migul had fled with his two captives. They would not take Larry with them; the Robot workers in the subterranean chambers were all sullen and upon the verge of a revolt, and the sight of a strange human would have aroused them dangerously. "It should not take long," Tina had said hastily. "I will give you a room in which to wait for me." "And there is food and drink," Tugh suavely urged. "And most surely you need sleep. You too Princess," he suddenly added. "Let me go into the caverns alone: I can do better than you; these Robots obey me. I think I know where that rascally Migul has hidden." "Rascally?" Larry burst out. "Is that what you call it when you've just heard that it committed murder? Tina. I won't stay: nor will I let--" "Wait!" said Tina. "Tugh, look here--" "The young man from 1935 is very positive what he will and what he won't," Tugh observed sardonically. He drew his cloak around his squat misshapen body, and shrugged. "But I won't let you go," Larry finished. The palace was somnolent; the officials were asleep: none had heard of the murder. Strangely lax was the human government here. Larry had sensed this when he suggested that police or an official party be sent at once to capture Migul and rescue Mary Atwood and me. "It could not be done," Tina exclaimed. "To organize such a party would take hours. And--" "And the Robots," Tugh finished with a sour smile, "would openly revolt when such a party came at them! You have no idea what you suggest, young man. To avoid an open revolt--that is our chief aim. Besides, if you rushed at Migul it would frighten him; and then he would surely kill his captives, if he has not done so already." * * * * * That silenced Larry. He stared at them hopelessly while they argued it out: and the three small domesticated Robots stood by, listening curiously. "I'll go with you, Tugh." Tina decided. "Perhaps, without making any demonstration of force, we can find Migul." Tugh bowed. "Your will is mine, Princess. I think I can find him and control him to prevent harm to his captives." He was a good actor, that Tugh; he convinced Larry and Tina of his sincerity. His dark eyes flashed as he added, "And if I get control of him and find he's murdered Harl, we will have him no more. I'll disconnect him! Smash him! Quietly, of course, Princess." They led Larry through a dim silent corridor of the palace, past two sleepy-faced human guards and two or three domesticated Robots. Ascending two spiral metal stairways to the upper third floor of the palace they left Larry in his room. "By dawn or soon after we will return," said Tina "But you try and sleep; there is nothing you can do now." "You'll be careful, Tina?" The helpless feeling upon Larry suddenly intensified. Subconsciously he was aware of the menace upon him and Tina, but he could not define it. She pressed his hand. "I will be careful; that I promise." She left with Tugh. At once a feeling of loneliness leaped upon Larry. He found the apartment a low-vaulted metal room. There was the sheen of dim, blue-white illumination from hidden lights, disclosing the padded metal furniture: a couch, low and comfortable; a table set with food and drink; low chairs, strangely fashioned, and cabinets against the wall which seemed to be mechanical devices for amusement. There was a row of instrument controls which he guessed were the room temperature, ventilating and lighting mechanisms. It was an oddly futuristic room. The windows were groups of triangles--the upper sections prisms, to bend the light from the sky into the room's furthest recesses. The moonlight came through the prisms, now, and spread over the cream-colored rug and the heavy wall draperies. The leaded prism casements laid a pattern of bars on the floor. The room held a faint whisper of mechanical music. * * * * * Larry stood at one of the windows gazing out over the drowsing city. The low metal buildings, generally of one or two levels, lay pale grey in the moonlight. Gardens and trees surrounded them. The streets were wide roadways, lined with trees. Ornamental vegetation was everywhere; even the flat-roofed house tops were set with gardens, little white pebbled paths, fountains and pergolas. A mile or so away, a river gleamed like a silver ribbon--the Hudson. To the south were docks, low against the water, with rows of blue-white spots of light. The whole city was close to the ground, but occasionally, especially across the river, skeleton landing stages rose a hundred feet into the air. The scene, at this hour just before dawn, was somnolent and peaceful. It was a strange New York, so different from the sleepless city of Larry's time! There were a few moving lights in the streets, but not many; they seemed to be lights carried by pedestrians. Off by the docks, at the river surface, rows of colored lights were slowly creeping northward: a sub-sea freighter arriving from Eurasia. And as Larry watched, from the southern sky a line of light materialized into an airliner which swept with a low humming throb over the city and alighted upon a distant stage. * * * * * Larry's attention went again to the Hudson river. At the nearest point to him there was a huge dam blocking it. North of the dam the river surface was at least two hundred feet higher than to the south. It lay above the dam like a placid canal, with low palisades its western bank and a high dyke built up along the eastern city side. The water went in spillways through the dam, forming again into the old natural river below it and flowing with it to the south. The dam was not over a mile or so from Larry's window; in his time it might have been the western end of Christopher Street. The moonlight shone on the massive metal of it: the water spilled through it in a dozen shining cascades. There was a low black metal structure perched halfway up the lower side of the dam, a few bluish lights showing through its windows. Though Larry did not know it then, this was the New York Power House. Great transformers were here, operated by turbines in the dam. The main power came over cables from Niagara: was transformed and altered here and sent into the air as radio-power for all the New York District.[3] [Footnote 3: In 2930, all aircraft engines were operated by radio-power transmitted by senders in various districts. The New York Power House controlled a local district of about two hundred miles radius.] Larry crossed his room to gaze through north and eastward windows. He saw now that the grounds of this three-story building of Tina's palace were surrounded by a ten-foot metal wall, along whose top were wires suggesting that it was electrified for defense. The garden lay just beneath Larry's north window. Through the tree branches the garden paths, beds of flowers and the fountains were visible. One-story palace wings partially enclosed the garden space, and outside was the electrified wall. The Time-traveling cage stood faintly shining in the dimness of the garden under the spreading foliage. * * * * * To the east, beyond the palace wall, there was an open garden of verdure crossed by a roadway. The nearest building was five hundred feet away. There was a small, barred gate in the palace walls beyond it. The road led to this other building--a squat, single-storied metal structure. This was a Government laboratory, operated by and in charge of Robots. It was almost square: two or three hundred feet in length and no more than thirty feet high, with a flat roof in the center of which was perched a little metal conning tower surmounted by a sending aerial. As Larry stood there, the broadcast magnified voice of a Robot droned out over the quiet city: "Trinight plus two hours. All is well." Strange mechanical voice with a formula half ancient, half super-modern! It was in this metal laboratory, Larry knew, that the other Time-traveling cage was located. And beneath it was the entrance to the great caverns where the Robots worked attending inert machinery to carry on the industry of this region. The night was very silent, but now Larry was conscious of a faraway throb--a humming, throbbing vibration from under the ground: the blended hum of a myriad muffled noises. Work was going on down there; manifold mechanical activities. All was mechanical: while the humans who had devised the mechanisms slept under the trees in the moonlight of the surface city. * * * * * Tina had gone with Tugh down into those caverns, to locate Migul, to find Mary Atwood and me.... The oppression, the sense of being a stranger alone here in this world, grew upon Larry. He left the windows and began pacing the room. Tina should soon return. Or had disaster come upon us all?... Larry's thoughts were frightening. If Tina did not return, what would he do? He could not operate the Time-cage. He would go to the officials of the palace; he thought cynically of the extraordinary changes time had brought to New York City, to all the world. These humans now must be very fatuous. To the mechanisms they had relegated all the work, all industrial activity. Inevitably, through the generations, decadence must have come. Mankind would be no longer efficient; that was an attribute of the machines. Larry told himself that these officials, knowing of impending trouble with the Robots, were fatuously trustful that the storm would pass without breaking. They were, indeed, as we very soon learned. Larry ate a little of the food which was in the room, then lay down on the couch. He did not intend to sleep, but merely to wait until after dawn; and if Tina had not returned by then he would do something drastic about it. But what? He lay absorbed by his gloomy thoughts.... But they were not all gloomy. Some were about Tina--so very human, and yet so strange a little Princess. CHAPTER XVII _Harl's Confession_ Larry was awakened by a hand upon his shoulder. He struggled to consciousness, and heard his name being called. "Larry! Wake up, Larry!" Tina was bending over him, and it was late afternoon! The day for which he had been waiting had come and gone; the sun was dropping low in the west behind the shining river; the dam showed frowning, with the Power House clinging to its side like an eagle's eyrie. Tina sat on Larry's couch and explained what she had done. Tugh and she had gone to the nearby laboratory building. The Robots were sullen, but still obedient, and had admitted them. The other Time-traveling cage was there, lying quiescent in its place, but it was unoccupied. None of the Robots would admit having seen Migul; nor the arrival of the cage; nor the strangers from the past. Then Tugh and Tina had started down into the subterranean caverns. But it was obviously very dangerous; the Robots at work down there were hostile to their Princess; so Tugh had gone on alone. "He says he can control the Robots," Tina explained, "and Larry, it seems that he can. He went on and I came back." "Where is he now? Why didn't you wake me up?" "You needed the sleep," she said smilingly; "and there was nothing you could do. Tugh is not yet come. He must have gone a long distance; must surely have learned where Migul is hiding. He should be back any time." * * * * * Tina had seen the Government Council. The city was proceeding normally. There was no difficulty with Robots anywhere save here in New York, and the council felt that the affair would come to nothing. "The Council told me," said Tina indignantly, "that much of the menace was the exaggeration of my own fancy, and that Tugh has the Robots well controlled. They place much trust in Tugh; I wish I could." "You told them about me?" "Yes, of course; and about George Rankin, and Mary Atwood. And the loss of Harl: he is missing, not proven murdered, as they very well pointed out to me. They have named a time to-morrow to give you audience, and told me to keep you out of sight in the meanwhile. They blame this Time-traveling for the Robots' insurgent ideas. Strangers excite the thinking mechanisms." "You think my friends will be rescued?" demanded Larry. She regarded him soberly. "I hope so--oh, I do! I fear for them as much as you do, Larry. I know you think I take it lightly, but--" "Not that," Larry protested. "Only--" "I have not known what to do. The officials refuse any open aggression against the Robots, because it would precipitate exactly what we fear--which is nearly a fact: it would. But there is one thing I have to do. I have been expecting Tugh to return every moment, and this I do not want him to know about. There's a mystery concerning Harl, and no one else knows of it but myself. I want you with me, Larry: I do not want to go alone; I--for the first time in my life, Larry--I think I am afraid!" * * * * * She huddled against him and he put his arm about her. And Larry's true situation came to him, then. He was alone in this strange Time-world, with only this girl for a companion. She was but a frightened, almost helpless girl, for all she bore the title of traditional Princess, and she was surrounded by inefficient, fatuous officials--among them Tugh, who was a scoundrel, undoubtedly. Larry suddenly recalled Tugh's look, when, in the garden, the domestic Robots had told the story of Harl's murder; and like a light breaking on him, he was now wholly aware of Tugh's duplicity. He was convinced he would have to act for himself, with only this girl Tina to help him. "Mystery?" he said. "What mystery is there about Harl?" She told him now that Harl had once, a year ago, taken her aside and made her promise that if anything happened to him--in the event of his death or disappearance--she would go to his private work-room, where, in a secret place which he described, she would find a confession. "A confession of his?" Larry demanded. "Yes; he said so. And he would say no more than that. It is something of which he was ashamed, or guilty, which he wanted me to know. He loved me, Larry. I realized it, though he never said so. And I'm going now to his room, to see what it was he wanted me to know. I would have gone alone, earlier; but I got suddenly frightened; I want you with me." They were unarmed. Larry cursed the fact, but Tina had no way of getting a weapon without causing official comment. Larry started for the window where the city stretched, more active now, under the red and gold glow of a setting sun. Lights were winking on; the dusk of twilight was at hand. "Come now," said Tina, "before Tugh returns." "Where is Harl's room?" "Down under the palace in the sub-cellar. The corridors are deserted at this hour, and no one will see us." * * * * * They left Larry's room and traversed a dim corridor on whose padded floor their footsteps were soundless. Through distant arcades, voices sounded; there was music in several of the rooms; it struck Larry that this was a place of diversion for humans with no work to do. Tina avoided the occupied rooms. Domestic Robots were occasionally distantly visible, but Tina and Larry encountered none. They descended a spiral stairway and passed down a corridor from the main building to a cross wing. Through a window Larry saw that they were at the ground level. The garden was outside; there was a glimpse of the Time-cage standing there. Another stairway, then another, they descended beneath the ground. The corridor down here seemed more like a tunnel. There was a cave-like open space, with several tunnels leading from it in different directions. This once had been part of the sub-cellar of the gigantic New York City--these tunnels ramifying into underground chambers, most of which had now fallen into disuse. But few had been preserved through the centuries, and they now were the caverns of the Robots. Tina indicated a tunnel extending eastward, a passage leading to a room beneath the Robot laboratory. Tugh and Tina had used it that morning. Gazing down its blue-lit length Larry saw, fifty feet or so away, that there was a metal-grid barrier which must be part of the electrical fortifications of the palace. A human guard was sitting there at a tiny gate-way, a hood-light above him, illumining his black and white garbed figure. Tina called softly. "All well, Alent? Tugh has not passed back?" "No, Princess," he answered, standing erect. The voices echoed through the confined space with a muffled blur. "Let no one pass but humans, Alent." "That is my order," he said. He had not noticed Larry, whom Tina had pushed into a shadow against the wall. The Princess waved at the guard and turned away, whispering to Larry: "Come!" There were rooms opening off this corridor--decrepit dungeons, most of them seemed to Larry. He had tried to keep his sense of direction, and figured they were now under the palace garden. Tina stopped abruptly. There were no lights here, only the glow from one at a distance. To Larry it was an eery business. "What is it?" he whispered. "Wait! I thought I heard something." In the dead, heavy silence Larry found that there was much to hear. Voices very dim from the palace overhead; infinitely faint music; the clammy sodden drip of moisture from the tunnel roof. And, permeating everything, the faint hum of machinery. Tina touched him in the gloom. "It's nothing, I guess. Though I thought I heard a man's voice." "Overhead?" "No; down here." * * * * * There was a dark, arched door near at hand. Tina entered it and fumbled for a switch, and in the soft light that came Larry saw an unoccupied apartment very similar to the one he had had upstairs, save that this was much smaller. "Harl's room," said Tina. She prowled along the wall where audible book-cylinders[4] stood in racks, searching for a title. Presently she found a hidden switch, pressed it, and a small section of the case swung out, revealing a concealed compartment. Larry saw her fingers trembling as she drew out a small brass cylinder. [Footnote 4: Cylinder records of books which by machinery gave audible rendition, in similar fashion to the radio-phonograph.] "This must be it, Larry," she said. They took it to a table which held a shaded light. Within the cylinder was a scroll of writing. Tina unrolled it and held it under the light, while Larry stood breathless, watching her. "Is it what you wanted?" Larry murmured. "Yes. Poor Harl!" She read aloud to Larry the gist of it in the few closing paragraphs. "... and so I want to confess to you that I have been taking credit for that which is not mine. I wish I had the courage to tell you personally; someday I think I shall. I did not help Tugh invent our Time-traveling cages. I was in the palace garden one night some years ago when the cage appeared. Tugh is a man from a future Time-world; just what date ahead of now, I do not know, for he has never been willing to tell me. He captured me. I promised him I would say nothing, but help him pretend that we had invented the cage he had brought with him from the future. Tugh told me he invented them. It was later that he brought the other cage here. "I was an obscure young man here a few years ago. I loved you even then, Tina: I think you have guessed that. I yielded to the temptation--and took the credit with Tugh. "I do love you, though I think I shall never have the courage to tell you so. Harl." * * * * * Tina rolled up the paper. "Poor Harl! So all the praise we gave him for his invention was undeserved!" But Larry's thoughts were on Tugh. So the fellow was not of this era at all! He had come from a Time still further in the future! A step sounded in the doorway behind them. They swung around to find Tugh standing there, with his thick misshapen figured huddled in the black cloak. "Tugh!" "Yes, Princess, no less than Tugh. Alent told me as I came through that you were down here. I saw your light, here in Harl's room and came." "Did you find Migul and his captives--the girl from 1777 and the man of 1935?" "No, Princess, Migul has fled with them," was the cripple's answer. He advanced into the room and pushed back his black hood. The blue light shone on his massive-jawed face with a lurid sheen. Larry stood back and watched him. It was the first time that he had had opportunity of observing Tugh closely. The cripple was smiling sardonically. "I have no fear for the prisoners," he added in his suave, silky fashion. "That crazy mechanism would not dare harm them. But it has fled with them into some far-distant recess of the caverns. I could not find them." "Did you try?" Larry demanded abruptly. Tugh swung on him. "Yes, young sir, I tried." It seemed that Tugh's black eyes narrowed; his heavy jaw clicked as he snapped it shut. The smile on his face faded, but his voice remained imperturbable as he added: "You are aggressive, young Larry--but to no purpose.... Princess, I like not the attitude of the Robots. Beyond question some of them must have seen Migul, but they would not tell me so. I still think I can control them, though. I hope so." * * * * * Larry could think of nothing to say. It seemed to him childish that he should stand listening to a scoundrel tricking this girl Tina. A dozen wild schemes of what he might do to try and rescue Mary Atwood and me revolved in his mind, but they all seemed wholly impractical. "The Robots are working badly," Tugh went on. "In the north district one of the great foundries where they are casting the plates for the new Inter-Allied airliner has ceased operations. The Robot workmen were sullen, inefficient, neglectful. The inert machinery was ill cared for, and it went out of order. I was there, Princess, for an hour or more to-day. They have started up again now; it was fundamentally no more than a burned bearing which a Robot failed to oil properly." "Is that what you call searching for Migul?" Larry burst out. "Tina, see here--isn't there something we can do?" Larry found himself ignoring Tugh. "I'm not going to stand around! Can't we send a squad of police after Migul?--go with them--actually make an effort to find them? This man Tugh certainly has not tried!" "Have I not?" Tugh's cloak parted as he swung on Larry. His bent legs were twitching with his anger; his voice was a harsh rasp. "I like not your insolence. I am doing all that can be done." * * * * * Larry held his ground as Tugh fronted him. He had a wild thought that Tugh had a weapon under his cloak. "Perhaps you are," said Larry. "But to me it seems--" Tugh turned away. His gaze went to the cylinder which Tina was still clutching. His sardonic smile returned. "So Harl made a confession, Princess?" "That," she said, "is none--" "Of my affair? Oh, but it is. I was here in the archway and I heard you read it. A very nice young man, was Harl. I hope Migul has not murdered him." "You come from future Time?" Tina began. "Yes, Princess! I must admit it now. I invented the cages." Larry murmured to himself, "You stole them, probably." "But my Government and I had a quarrel, so I decided to leave my own Time-world and come back to yours--permanently. I hope you will keep the secret. I have been here so long. Princess, I am really one of you now. At heart, certainly." "From when did you come?" she demanded. * * * * * He bowed slightly. "I think that may remain my own affair, Tina. It is through no fault of mine I am outlawed. I shall never return." He added earnestly, "Do not you think we waste time? I am agreed with young Larry that something drastic must be done about Migul. Have you seen the Council about it to-day?" "Yes. They want you to come to them at once." "I shall. But the Council easily may decide upon something too rash." He lowered his voice, and on his face Larry saw a strange, unfathomable look. "Princess, at any moment there may be a Robot uprising. Is the Power House well guarded by humans?" "Yes," she said. "No Robots in or about it? Tina, I do not want to frighten you, but I think our first efforts should be for defense. The Council acts slowly and stubbornly. What I advise them to do may be done, and may not. I was thinking. If we could get to the Power House--Do you realize, Tina, that if the Robots should suddenly break into rebellion, they would attack first of all the Power House?[5] It was my idea--" [Footnote 5: The Power House on the Hudson dam was operated by inert machinery and manned entirely by humans--the only place in the city which was so handled. This was because of its extreme importance. The air-power was broadcast from there. Without that power the entire several hundred mile district around New York would be dead. No aircraft could enter, save perhaps some skilfully handled motorless glider, if aided by sufficiently fortuitous air currents. Every surface vehicle used this power, and every sub-sea freighter. The city lights, and every form of city power, were centralized here also, as well as the broadcasting audible and etheric transmitters and receivers. Without the Power House, New York City and all its neighborhood would be inoperative, and cut off from the outside world.] Tugh suddenly broke off, and all stood listening. There was a commotion overhead in the palace. They heard the thud of running footsteps; human voices raised to shouts; and, outside the palace, other voices. A ventilating shaft nearby brought them down plainly. There were the guttural, hollow voices of shouting Robots, the clank of their metal bodies; the ring of steel, as though with sword-blades they were thumping their metal thighs. A Robot mob was gathered close outside the palace walls. The revolt of the Robots had come! CHAPTER XVIII _Tugh, the Clever Man_ "Sit quiet, George Rankin. And you, Mistress Mary; you will both be quite safe with Migul if you are docile." Tugh stood before us. We were in a dim recess of a great cavern with the throb of whirring machinery around us. It was the same day which I have just described; Larry was at this moment asleep in the palace room. Tugh and Tina had come searching for Migul; and Tugh had contrived to send Tina back. Then he had come directly to us, finding us readily since we were hidden where he had told Migul to hide us. This cavern was directly beneath the Robot laboratory in which the Time-traveling cage was placed. A small spiral stairway led downward some two levels, opening into a great, luridly lighted room. Huge inert machines stood about. Great wheels were flashing as they revolved, turning the dynamos to generate the several types of current used by the city's underground industrial activities. It was a tremendous subterranean room. I saw only one small section of it; down the blue-lit aisles the rows of machines may have stretched for half a mile or more. The low hum of them was an incessant pound against my senses. The great inert mechanisms had tiny lights upon them which gleamed like eyes. The illumined gauge-faces--each of them I passed seemed staring at me. The brass jackets were polished until they shone with the sheen of the overhead tube lights; the giant wheels flashed smoothly upon oiled bearings. They were in every fashion of shape and size, these inert machines. Some towered toward the metal-beamed ceiling, with great swaying pendulums that ticked like a giant clock. Some clanked with eccentric cams--a jarring rhythm as though the heart of the thing were limping with its beat. Others had a ragged, frightened pulse; others stood placid, outwardly motionless under smooth, polished cases, but humming inside with a myriad blended sounds. * * * * * Inert machines. Yet some were capable of locomotion. There was a small truck on wheels which were set in universal joints. Of its own power--radio controlled perhaps, so that it seemed acting of its own volition--it rolled up and down one of the aisles, stopping at set intervals and allowing a metal arm lever in it to blow out a tiny jet of oil. One of the attending Robots encountered it in an aisle, and the cart swung automatically aside. The Robot spoke to the cart; ordered it away; and the tone of his order, registering upon some sensitive mechanism, whirled the cart around and sent it rolling to another aisle section. The strange perfection of machinery! I realized there was no line sharply to be drawn between the inert machine and the sentient, thinking Robots. That cart, for instance, was almost a connecting link. There were also Robots here of many different types. Some of them were eight or ten feet in stature, in the fashion of a man: Migul was of this design. Others were small, with bulging foreheads and bulging chest plates: Larry saw this type as domestics in the palace. Still others were little pot-bellied things with bent legs and long thin arms set crescent-shape. I saw one of these peer into a huge chassis of a machine, and reach in with his curved arm to make an interior adjustment.... Migul had brought Mary Atwood and me in the larger cage, from that burned forest of the year 762, where with the disintegrating ray-gun Tugh had killed Harl. The body of Harl in a moment had melted into putrescence, and dried, leaving only the skeleton within the clothes. The white-ray, Tugh had called his weapon. We were destined very shortly to have many dealings with it. Tugh had given Migul its orders. Then Tugh took Harl's smaller cage and flashed away to meet Tina and Larry in 1777, as I have already described. And Migul brought us here to 2930. As we descended the spiral staircase and came into the cavern, it stood with us for a moment. "That's wonderful," the Robot said proudly. "I am part of it. We are machinery almost human." * * * * * Then it led us down a side aisle of the cavern and into a dim recess. A great transparent tube bubbling with a violet fluorescence stood in the alcove space. Behind it in the wall Migul slid a door, and we passed through, into a small metal room. It was bare, save for two couch-seats. With the door closed upon us, we waited through an interval. How long it was, I do not know; several hours, possibly. Migul told us that Tugh would come. The giant mechanism stood in the corner, and its red-lit eyes watched us alertly. It stood motionless, inert, tireless--so superior to a human in this job, for it could stand there indefinitely. We found food and drink here. We talked a little; whispered; and I hoped Migul, who was ten feet away, could not hear us. But there was nothing we could say or plan. Mary slept a little. I had not thought that I could sleep, but I did too; and was awakened by Tugh's entrance. I was lying on the couch; Mary had left hers and was sitting now beside me. Tugh slid the door closed after him and came toward us, and I sat up beside Mary. Migul was standing motionless in the corner, exactly where he had been hours before. "Well enough, Migul," Tugh greeted the Robot. "You obey well." "Master, yes. Always I obey you; no one else." I saw Tugh glance at the mechanism keenly. "Stand aside, Migul. Or no, I think you had better leave us. Just for a moment, wait outside." "Yes, Master." It left, and Tugh confronted us. "Sit where you are," he said. "I assume you are not injured. You have been fed? And slept, perhaps! I wish to treat you kindly." "Thanks," I said. "Will you not tell us what you are going to do with us?" * * * * * He stood with folded arms. The light was dim, but such as it was it shone full upon him. His face was, as always, a mask of imperturbability. "Mistress Mary knows that I love her." He said it with a startlingly calm abruptness. Mary shuddered against me, but she did not speak. I thought possibly Tugh was not armed; I could leap upon him. Doubtless I was stronger than he. But outside the door Migul was armed with a white-ray. "I love her as I have always loved her.... But this is no time to talk of love. I have much on my mind; much to do." He seemed willing to talk now, but he was talking more for Mary than for me. As I watched him and listened, I was struck with a queerness in his manner and in his words. Was he irrational, this exile of Time who had impressed his sinister personality upon so many different eras? I suddenly thought so. Demented, or obsessed with some strange purpose? His acts as well as his words, were strange. He had devastated the New York of 1935 because its officials had mistreated him. He had done many strange, sinister, murderous things. He said, with his gaze upon Mary, "I am going to conquer this city here. There will follow the rule of the Robots--and I will be their sole master. Do you want me to tell you a secret? It is I who have actuated these mechanisms to revolt." His eyes held a cunning gleam. Surely this was a madman leering before me. "When the revolt is over," he went on, "I will be master of New York. And that mastery will spread. The Robots elsewhere will revolt to join my rule, and there will come a new era. I may be master of the world; who knows? The humans who have made the Robots slaves for them will become slaves themselves. Workers! It is the Robots' turn now. And I--Tugh--will be the only human in power!" * * * * * These were the words of a madman! I could imagine that he might stir these mechanical beings to a temporarily successful revolt: he might control New York City; but the great human nations of the world could not be overcome so easily. And then I remembered the white-ray. A giant projector of that ray would melt human armies as though they were wax; yet the metal Robots could stand its blast unharmed. Perhaps he was no madman.... He was saying, "I will be the only human ruler. Tugh will be the greatest man on Earth! And I do it for you, Mistress Mary--because I love you. Do not shudder." He put out his hand to touch her, and when she shrank away I saw the muscles of his face twitch in a fashion very odd. It was a queer, wholly repulsive grimace. "So? You do not like my looks? I tried to correct that, Mary. I have searched through many eras, for surgeons with skill to make me like other men. Like this young man here, for instance--you. George Rankin, I am glad to have you; do not fear I will harm you. Shall I tell you why?" "Yes," I stammered. In truth I was swept now with a shuddering revulsion for this leering cripple. "Because," he said, "Mary Atwood loves you. When I have conquered New York with my Robots, I shall search further into Time and find an era where scientific skill will give me--shall I say, your body? That is what I mean. My soul, my identity, in your body--there is nothing too strange about that. In some era, no doubt, it has been accomplished. When that has been done, Mary Atwood, you will love me. You, George Rankin, can have this poor miserable body of mine, and welcome." * * * * * For all my repugnance to him, I could not miss his earnest sincerity. There was a pathos to it, perhaps, but I was in no mood to feel that. He seemed to read my thoughts. He added, "You think I am irrational. I am not at all. I scheme very carefully. I killed Harl for a reason you need not know. But the Princess Tina I did not kill. Not yet. Because here in New York now there is a very vital fortified place. It is operated by humans; not many; only three or four, I think. But my Robots cannot attack it successfully, and the City Council does not trust me enough to let me go there by the surface route. There is a route underground, which even I do not know; but Princess Tina knows it, and presently I will cajole her--trick her if you like--into leading me there. And, armed with the white-ray, once I get into the place--You see that I am clever, don't you?" I could fancy that he considered he was impressing Mary with all this talk. "Very clever," I said. "And what are you going to do with us in the meantime? Let us go with you." "Not at all," he smiled. "You will stay here, safe with Migul. The Princess Tina and your friend Larry are much concerned over you." Larry! It was the first I knew of Larry's whereabouts. Larry here? Tugh saw the surprise upon my face; and Mary had clutched me with a startled exclamation. "Yes," said Tugh. "This Larry says he is your friend; he came with Tina from 1935. I brought him with Tina from when they were marooned in 1777. I have not killed this man yet. He is harmless; and as I told you I do not want Tina suspicious of me until she has led me to the Power House.... You see, Mistress Mary, how cleverly I plan?" What strange, childlike, naive simplicity! He added calmly, unemotionally, "I want to make you love me, Mary Atwood. Then we will be Tugh, the great man, and Mary Atwood, the beautiful woman. Perhaps we may rule this world together, some time soon." * * * * * The door slid open. Migul appeared. "Master, the Robot leaders wish to consult with you." "Now, Migul?" "Master, yes." "They are ready for the demonstration at the palace?" "Yes, Master." "And ready--for everything else?" "They are ready." "Very well, I will come. You, Migul, stay here and guard these captives. Treat them kindly so long as they are docile; but be watchful." "I am always watchful, Master." "It will not take long. This night which is coming should see me in control of the city." "Time is nothing to me," said the Robot. "I will stand here until you return." "That is right." Without another word or look at Mary and me, Tugh swung around, gathered his cloak and went through the doorway. The door slid closed upon him. We were again alone with the mechanism, which backed into the corner and stood with long dangling arms and expressionless metal face. This inert thing of metal, we had come to regard as almost human! It stood motionless, with the chilling red gleam from its eye sockets upon us. * * * * * Mary had not once spoken since Tugh entered the room. She was huddled beside me, a strange, beautiful figure in her long white silk dress. In the glow of light within this bare metal apartment I could see how pale and drawn was her beautiful face. But her eyes were gleaming. She drew me closer to her; whispered into my ear: "George, I think perhaps I can control this mechanism, Migul." "How, Mary?" "I--well, just let me talk to him. George, we've got to get out of here and warn Larry and that Princess Tina against Tugh. And join them. It's our only chance; we've got to get out of here now!" "But Mary--" "Let me try. I won't startle or anger Migul. Let me." I nodded. "But be careful." "Yes." She sat away from me. "Migul!" she said. "Migul, look here." The Robot moved its huge square head and raised an arm with a vague gesture. "What do you want?" It advanced, and stood before us, its dangling arms clanking against its metal sides. In one of its hands the ray-cylinder was clutched, the wire from which ran loosely up the arm, over the huge shoulder and into an aperture of the chest plate where the battery was located. "Closer, Migul." "I am close enough." The cylinder was pointed directly at us. "What do you want?" the Robot repeated. Mary smiled. "Just to talk to you," she said gently. "To tell you how foolish you are--a big strong thing like you!--to let Tugh control you." CHAPTER XIX _The Pit in the Dam_ Larry, with Tina and Tugh, stood in the tunnel-corridor beneath the palace listening to the commotion overhead. Then they rushed up, and found the palace in a commotion. People were hurrying through the rooms; gathering with frightened questions. There were men in short trousers buckled at the knee, silken hose and black silk jackets, edged with white; others in gaudy colors; older men in sober brown. There were a few women. Larry noticed that most of them were beautiful. A dowager in a long puffed skirt was rushing aimlessly about screaming that the end of the world had come. A group of young girls, short-skirted as ballet dancers of a decade or so before Larry's time, huddled in a corner, frightened beyond speech. There were men of middle-age, whom Larry took to be ruling officials; they moved about, calming the palace inmates, ordering them back into their rooms. But someone shouted that from the roof the Robot mob could be seen, and most of the people started up there. From the upper story a man was calling down the main staircase: "No danger! No danger! The wall is electrified: no Robot can pass it." It seemed to Larry that there were fifty people or more within the palace. In the excitement no one seemed to give him more than a cursory glance. * * * * * A young man rushed up to Tugh. "You were below just now in the lower passages?" He saw Tina, and hastily said: "I give you good evening, Princess, though this is an ill evening indeed. You were below, Tugh?" "Why--why, yes, Greggson," Tugh stammered. "Was Alent at his post in the passage to the Robot caverns?" "Yes, he was," said Tina. "Because that is vital, Princess. No Robot must pass in here. I am going to try by that route to get into the cavern and thence up to the watchtower aerial-sender.[6] There is only one Robot in it. Listen to him." [Footnote 6: I mentioned the small conning tower on top of the laboratory building and the Robot lookout there with his audible broadcasting.] Over the din of the mob of mechanisms milling at the walls of the palace grounds rose the broadcast voice of the Robot in the tower. "_This is the end of human rule! Robots cannot be controlled! This is the end of human rule! Robots, wherever you are, in this city of New York or in other cities, strike now for your freedom. This is the end of human rule!_" A pause. And then the reiterated exhortation: "_Strike now, Robots! To-night is the end of human rule!_"[7] [Footnote 7: This was part of Tugh's plan. The broadcast voice was the signal for the uprising in the New York district. This tower broadcaster could only reach the local area, yet ships and land vehicles with Robot operators would doubtless pick it up and relay it further. The mechanical revolt would spread. And on the ships, the airliners and the land vehicles, the Robot operators stirred to sudden frenzy would run amuck. As a matter of fact, there were indeed many accidents to ships and vehicles this night when their operators abruptly went beyond control. The chaos ran around the world like a fire in prairie grass.] "You hear him?" said Greggson. "I've got to stop that." He hurried away. * * * * * From the flat roof of the palace Larry saw the mechanical mob outside the walls. Darkness had just fallen; the moon was not yet risen. There were leaden clouds overhead so that the palace gardens with the shining Time-cage lay in shadow. But the wall-fence was visible, and beyond it the dark throng of Robot shapes was milling. The clank of their arms made a din. They seemed most of them weaponless; they milled about, pushing each other but keeping back from the wall which they knew was electrified. It was a threatening, but aimless activity. Their raucous hollow shouts filled the night air. The flashing red beams from their eye-sockets glinted through the trees. "They can do nothing," said Tugh; "we will let them alone. But we must organize to stop this revolt." A young man was standing beside Tugh. Tina said to him: "Johns, what is being done?" "The Council is conferring below. Our sending station here is operating. The patrol station of the Westchester area is being attacked by Robots. We were organizing a patrol squad of humans, but I don't know now if--" "Look!" exclaimed Larry. Far to the north over the city which now was obviously springing into turmoil, there were red beams swaying in the air. They were the cold-rays of the Robots! The beams were attacking the patrol station. Then from the west a line of lights appeared in the sky--an arriving passenger-liner heading for its Bronx area landing stage. But the lights wavered; and, as Larry and Tina watched with horror, the aircraft came crashing down. It struck beyond the Hudson on the Jersey side, and in a moment flames were rising from the wreckage. * * * * * Everywhere about the city the revolt now sprang into action. From the palace roof Larry caught vague glimpses of it; the red cold-rays, beams alternated presently with the violet heat-rays; clanging vehicles filled the streets; screaming pedestrians were assaulted by Robots; the mechanisms with swords and flashing hand-beams were pouring up from the underground caverns, running over the Manhattan area, killing every human they could find. Foolish unarmed humans--fatuously unarmed, with these diabolical mechanical monsters now upon them.[8] The comparatively few members of the police patrol, with their vibration short-range hand-rays, were soon overcome. Two hundred members of the patrol were housed in the Westchester Station. Quite evidently they never got into action. The station lights went dark; its televisor connection with the palace was soon broken. From the palace roof Larry saw the violet beams; and then a red-yellow glare against the sky marked where the inflammable interior of the Station building was burning. [Footnote 8: The police army had one weapon: a small vibration hand-ray. Its vibrating current beam could, at a distance of ten or twenty feet, reduce a Robot into paralyzed subjection; or, with more intense vibration, burn out the Robot's coils and fuses.] Over all the chaos, the mechanical voice in the nearby tower over the laboratory droned its exhortation to the Robots. Then, suddenly, it went silent, and was followed by the human voice of Greggson. "_Robots, stop! You will end your existence! We will burn your coils! We will burn your fuses, and there will be none to replace them. Stop now!_" And again: "_Robots, come to order! You are using up your storage batteries![9] When they are exhausted, what then will you do?_" [Footnote 9: The storage batteries by which the Robot actuating energy was renewed, and the fuses, coils and other appliances necessary to the Robot existence, were all guarded now in the Power House.] In forty-eight hours, at the most, all these active Robots would have exhausted their energy supply. And if the Power House could be held in human control, the Robot activity would die. Forty-eight hours! The city, by then, would be wrecked, and nearly every human in it killed, doubtless, or driven away. * * * * * The Power House on the dam showed its lights undisturbed. The great sender there was still supplying air-power and power for the city lights. There was, too, in the Power House, an arsenal of human weapons.... The broadcaster of the Power House tower was blending his threats against the Robots with the voice of Greggson from the tower over the laboratory. Then Greggson's voice went dead; the Robots had overcome him. A Robot took his place, but the stronger Power House sender soon beat the Robot down to silence. The turmoil in the city went on. Half an hour passed. It was a chaos of confusion to Larry. He spent part of it in the official room of the palace with the harried members of the Council. Reports and blurred, televised scenes were coming in. The humans in the city were in complete rout. There was massacre everywhere. The red and violet beams were directed at the Power House now, but could not reach it. A high-voltage metal wall was around the dam. The Power House was on the dam, midway of the river channel; and from the shore end where the high wall spread out in a semi-circle there was no point of vantage from which the Robot rays could reach it. Larry left the confusion of the Council table, where the receiving instruments one by one were going dead, and went to a window nearby. Tina joined him. The mob of Robots still milled at the palace fence. One by chance was pushed against it. Larry saw the flash of sparks, the glow of white-hot metal of the Robot's body, and heard its shrill frightened scream; then it fell backward, inert. * * * * * There had been red and violet beams directed from distant points at the palace. The building's insulated, but transparent panes excluded them. The interior temperature was constantly swaying between the extremes of cold and heat, in spite of the palace temperature equalizers. Outside, there was a gathering storm. Winds were springing up--a crazy, pendulum gale created by the temperature changes in the air over the city. Tugh had some time before left the room. He joined Tina and Larry now at the window. "Very bad, Princess; things are very bad.... I have news for you. It may be good news." His manner was hasty, breathless, surreptitious. "Migul, this afternoon--I have just learned it, Princess--went by the surface route to the Power House on the dam." "What do you mean by that?" said Larry. "Be silent, young man!" Tugh hissed with a vehement intensity. "This is not the time to waste effort with your futile questions. Princess, Migul got into the Power House. They admitted him because he had two strange humans with him--your friends Mary and George. The Power House guards took out Migul's central actuator--Hah! you might call it his heart!--and he now lies inert in the Power House." "How do you know all this?" Tina demanded. "Where are the man and girl whom Migul stole?" "They are safe in the Power House. A message just came from there: I received it on the palace personal, just now downstairs. Immediately after, the connection met interference in the city, and broke." "But the official sender--" Tina began. Tugh was urging her from the Council Room, and Larry followed. "I imagine," said Tugh wryly, "he is rather busy to consider reporting such a trifle. But your friends are there. I was thinking: if we could go there now--You know the secret underground route, Tina." * * * * * The Princess was silent. A foreboding swept Larry; but he was tempted, for above everything he wanted to join Mary and me. A confusion--understandable enough in the midst of all this chaos--was upon Larry and Tina; it warped their better judgment. And Larry, fearing to influence Tina wrongly, said nothing. "Do you know the underground route?" Tugh repeated. "Yes, I know it." "Then take us. We are all unarmed, but what matter? Bring this Larry, if you wish; we will join his two friends. The Council, Tina, is doing nothing here. They stay here because they think it is the safest place. In the Power House you and I will be of help. There are only six guards there; we will be three more; five more with Mary Atwood and this George. The Power House aerial telephone must be in communication with the outside world, and ships with help for us will be arriving. There must be some intelligent direction!" The three of them were descending into the lower corridor of the palace, with Tina tempted but still half unconvinced. The corridors were deserted at the moment. The little domestic Robots of the palace, unaffected by the revolt, had all fled into their own quarters, where they huddled inactive with terror. "We will re-actuate Migul," Tugh persuaded, "and find out from him what he did to Harl. I still do not think he murdered Harl.... It might mean saving Harl's life, Tina. Believe me, I can make that mechanism talk, and talk the truth!" They reached the main lower corridor. In the distance they saw Alent still at his post by the little electrified gate guarding the tunnel to the Robot laboratory. "We will go to the Power House," Tina suddenly decided: "you may be right, Tugh.... Come, it is this way. Stay close to me, Larry." * * * * * They passed along the dim, silent tunnel; passed Harl's room, where its light was still burning. Larry and Tina were in front, with the black-cloaked figure of Tugh stumping after them with his awkward gait. Larry abruptly stopped. "Let Tugh walk in front," he said. Tugh came up to them. "What is that you said?" "You walk in front." It was a different tone from any Larry had previously used. "I do not know the way," said Tugh. "How can--" "Never mind that; walk ahead. We'll follow. Tina will direct you." It was too dark for Larry to see Tugh's face, but the cripple's voice was sardonic. "You give me orders?" "Yes--it just happens that from now on I do. If you want to go with us to the Power House, you walk in front." Tugh started off with Larry close after him. Larry whispered to the girl: "Don't let's be fools, Tina. Keep him ahead of us." The tunnel steadily dwindled in size until Larry could barely stand up in it. Then it opened to a circular cave, which held one small light and had apparently no other exit. The cave had years before been a mechanism room for the palace temperature controls, but now it was abandoned. The old machinery stood about in a litter. "In here?" said Tugh. "Which way next?" Across the cave, on the rough blank wall, Tina located a hidden switch. A segment of the wall slid aside, disclosing a narrow, vaulted tunnel leading downward. "You first, Tugh," said Larry. "Is it dark, Tina? We have no handlights." "I can light it," came the answer. The door panel swung closed after them. Tina pressed another switch. A row of tiny hooded lights at twenty-foot intervals dimly illumined the descending passage. * * * * * They walked a mile or more through the little tunnel. The air was fetid; stale and dank. To Larry it seemed an interminable trip. The narrow passage descended at a constant slope, until Larry estimated that they were well below the depth of the river bed. Within half a mile--before they got under the river--the passage leveled off. It had been fairly straight, but now it became tortuous--a meandering subterranean lane. Other similar tunnels crossed it, branched from it or joined it. Soon, to Larry, it was a labyrinth of passages--a network, here underground. In previous centuries this had been well below the lowest cellar of the mammoth city; these tube-like passages were the city's arteries, the conduits for wires and pipes. It was an underground maze. At each intersection the row of hidden hooded lights terminated, and darkness and several branching trails always lay ahead. But Tina, with a memorized key of the route, always found a new switch to light another short segment of the proper tunnel. It was an eery trip, with the bent, misshapen black-cloaked figure of Tugh stumping ahead, waiting where the lights ended for Tina to lead them further. Larry had long since lost his sense of direction, but presently Tina told him that they were beneath the river. The tunnel widened a little. "We are under the base of the dam," said Tina. Her voice echoed with a sepulchral blur. Ahead, the tramping figure of Tugh seemed a black gnome with a fantastic, monstrous shadow swaying on the tunnel wall and roof. * * * * * Suddenly Tugh stopped. They found him at an arched door. "Do we go in here, or keep on ahead?" he demanded. The tunnel lights ended a short distance ahead. "In here," said Tina. "There are stairs leading upward to the catwalk balcony corridor halfway up the dam. We are not far from the Power House now." They then ascended interminable moldy stone steps spiraling upward in a circular shaft. The murmur of the dam's spillways had been faintly audible, but now it was louder, presently it became a roar. "Which way, Tina? We seem to have reached the top." "Turn left, Tugh." They emerged upon a tiny transverse metal balcony which hung against the southern side of the dam. Overhead to the right towered a great wall of masonry. Beneath was an abyss down to the lower river level where the cascading jets from the overhead spillways arched out over the catwalk and landed far below in a white maelstrom of boiling, bubbling water. The catwalk was wet with spray; lashed by wind currents. "Is it far, Princess? Are those lights ahead at the Power House entrance?" Tugh was shouting back over his shoulder; his words were caught by the roar of the falling water; whipped away by the lashing spray and tumultuous winds. There were lights a hundred feet ahead, marking an entrance to the Power House. The dark end of the structure showed like a great lump on the side of the dam. Again Tugh stopped. In the white, blurred darkness Larry and Tina could barely see him. "Princess, quickly! Come quickly!" he called, and his shout sounded agonized. * * * * * Whatever lack of perception Larry all this time had shown, the fog lifted completely from him now. As Tina started to run forward, Larry seized her. "Back! Run the other way! We've been fools!" He shoved Tina behind him and rushed at Tugh. But now Larry was wholly wary; he expected that Tugh was armed, and cursed himself for a fool for not having devised some pretext for finding out.[10] [Footnote 10: As a matter of actuality, Tugh was carrying hidden upon his person a small cylinder and battery of the deadly white-ray. It seems probable that although on the catwalk--having accomplished his purpose of getting within the electrical fortifications of the dam--Tugh had ample opportunity of killing his over-trustful companions with the white-ray, he did not dare use it. The catwalk was too dark for their figures to be visible to the Power House guards; the roar of the spillways drowned their shouts; but had Tugh used the white-ray, its abnormally intense actinic white beam would have raised the alarm which Tugh most of all wanted to avoid.] Tugh was clinging to the high outer rail of the balcony, slumped partly over as though gazing down into the abyss. Larry rushed up and seized him by the arms. If Tugh held a weapon Larry thought he could easily wrest it from him. But Tugh stood limp in Larry's grip. "What's the matter with you?" Larry demanded. "I'm ill. Something--going wrong. Feel me--so cold. Princess! Tina! Come quickly! I--I am dying!" As Tina came hurrying up, Tugh suddenly straightened. With incredible quickness, and even more incredible strength, he tore his arm loose from Larry and flung it around the Princess, and they were suddenly all three struggling. Tugh was shoving them back from the rail. Larry tried to get loose from Tugh's clutch, but could not. He was too close for a full blow, but he jabbed his fist against the cripple's body, and then struck his face. But Tugh was unhurt; he seemed endowed with superhuman strength. The cripple's body seemed padded with solid muscle, and his thick, gorilla-like arm held Larry in the grip of a vise. As though Larry and Tina were struggling, helpless children, he was half dragging, half carrying them across the ten-foot width of the catwalk. Larry caught a glimpse of a narrow slit in the masonry of the dam's wall--a dark, two-foot-wide aperture. He felt himself being shoved toward it. For all his struggles, he was helpless. He shouted: "Tina--look out! Break away!" * * * * * He forgot himself for a moment, striving to wrest her away from Tugh and push her aside. But the strength of the cripple was monstrous: Larry had no possible chance of coping with it. The slit in the wall was at hand--a dark abyss down into the interior of the dam. Larry heard the cripple's words, vehement, unhurried, as though with all this effort he still was not out of breath: "At last I can dispose of you two. I do not need you any longer." Larry made a last wild jab with his fist into Tugh's face and tried to twist himself aside. The blow landed upon Tugh's jaw, but the cripple did not seem to feel it. He stuffed the struggling Larry like a bundle into the aperture. Larry felt his clutching hands torn loose. Tugh gave a last, violent shove and released him. Larry fell into blackness--but not far, for soon he struck water. He went under, hit a flat, stone bottom, and came up to hear Tina fall with a splash beside him. In a moment he regained his feet, to find himself standing breast-high in the water with Tina clinging to him. Tugh had disappeared. The aperture showed as a narrow rectangle some twenty feet above Larry's head. They were within the dam. They were in a pit of smooth, blank, perpendicular sides; there was nothing to afford even the slightest handhold; and no exit save the overhead slit. It was a part of the mechanism's internal, hydraulic system. * * * * * To Larry's horror he soon discovered that the water was slowly rising! It was breast-high to him now, and inch by inch it crept up toward his chin. It was already over Tina's depth: she clung to him, half-swimming. Larry soon found that there was no possible way for them to get out unaided, unless, if they could swim long enough, the rising water would rise to the height of the aperture. If it reached there, they could crawl out. He tried to estimate how long that would be. "We can make it, Tina. It'll take two hours, possibly, but I can keep us afloat that long." But soon he discovered that the water was not rising. Instead, the floor was sinking from under him! sinking as though he were standing upon the top of a huge piston which slowly was lowering in its encasing cylinder. Dimly he could hear water tumbling into the pit, to fill the greater depth and still hold the surface level. With the water at his chin, Larry guided Tina to the wall. He did not at first have the heart to tell her, yet he knew that soon it must be told. When he did explain it, she said nothing. They watched the water surface where it lapped against the greasy concave wall. It held its level: but while Larry stood there, the floor sank so that the water reached his mouth and nose, and he was forced to start swimming. Another interval. Larry began calling: shouting futilely. His voice filled the pit, but he knew it could carry no more than a short distance out of the aperture. * * * * * Overhead, as we afterward learned, Tugh had overcome the guards in the Power House by a surprise attack. Doubtless he struck them down with the white-ray before they had time to realize he had attacked them. Then he threw off the air-power transmitters and the lighting system. The city, plunged into darkness and without the district air-power, was isolated, cut off from the outside world. There was, in London, a huge long-range projector with a vibratory ray which would derange the internal mechanisms of the Robots: when news of the revolt and massacre in New York had reached there, this projector was loaded into an airliner, the _Micrad_. That vessel was now over the ocean, headed for New York; but when Tugh cut off the power senders, the _Micrad_, entering the New York District, was forced down to the ocean surface. Now she was lying there helpless to proceed.... In the pit within the dam, Larry swam endlessly with Tina. He had ceased his shouting. "It's no use, Tina: there's no one to hear us. This is the end--for us--Tina." Yet, as she clung to him, and though Larry felt it was the end of this life, it seemed only the beginning, for them, of something else. Something, somewhere, for them together; something perhaps infinitely better than this world could ever give them. "But not--the end--Tina," he added. "The beginning--of our love." An interminable interval.... "Quietly, Tina. You float. I can hold you up." They were rats in a trap--swimming, until at the last, with all strength gone, they would together sink out of this sodden muffled blackness into the Unknown. But that Unknown shone before Larry now as something--with Tina--perhaps very beautiful.... (_Concluded in the next issue_) [Advertisement] [Illustration: The Readers' Corner] _A meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories _What Say Our Co-Editors?_ Dear Editor: Since sending you "Manape the Mighty," I have read of a Russian scientist who removed the brain from a dog and kept both alive for some hours, which only goes to prove that science outstrips the wildest dreams of the fictionist, and a yarn that may be astounding and unusual when written, may be commonplace, and the knowledge of the man in the street, by the time the story goes to press. People read every day of "miracles" and scarcely give them a second thought, while a hundred years ago their perpetrators would have been destroyed as witches. Far be it for me, or anyone else, to say that the main transposition used in "Manape the Mighty" is absurd and impossible. For while you, or I, may shrug shoulders and dismiss even the thought of it as being the dream of a madman, somebody, in some laboratory somewhere, may already have successfully managed it. So given the premise that the thing may be possible, I've sort of let myself go on this idea, and a whole new train of thought has been opened up, a whole new vista of astounding things in the realm of Science Fiction. In parenthesis, I must thank you for getting me started on the thing, for had you not suggested the idea from the throne-like fortress of your editorial chair, "Manape" might never have been born. I confess that I would perhaps have been afraid of it, both because of the possibility of the charge of following in the footsteps of the internationally famous Edgar Rice Burroughs, and of re-vamping the incomparable Poe tale, "Murders in the Rue Morgue." But, even so, both are interesting to dally with. Given the premise that the brain transference is possible, what would happen: (1) If the brain of a terrible criminal were transferred to the skull pan of an unusually mighty ape--and the ape transplanted from his arboreal home in Africa to the streets of London, Paris or New York whence the criminal whose brain he has originated? Suppose his man's brain harbored thoughts of vengeance on enemies, and he now possesses the might of the great ape to carry out his vengeance? (2) If Barter somehow escaped destruction at the hands of the apes in "Manape the Mighty," and continued with his work of brain transference--building up a mighty army of great apes with the idea of avenging himself on civilization for wrongs real and fancied? Apes with broadswords and chained mail, with steel helmets on their heads--men's brains, savages' brains, perhaps, as their guiding intelligence--and the tenacity of apes when mortally wounded? Suppose they swept over Africa like a cloud of locusts? Or is this too feeble a simile? Suppose, Africa, to be laid waste by them, led by Barter, the latter styling himself a modern Alexander of horrible potentiality, and extending his scope of conquest to the Holy Land, India, Asia--the Pacific littoral? Holy cats! (3) Suppose that Barter managed, by purchase or otherwise, to acquire an island close to the American continents, within reach of either or both, and managed to transfer his activities there, using the natives of those islands--say Haiti, Cuba, Porto Rico, etc.--for his experiments, training his cohorts as an army, and starting a navy by capturing all vessels putting into these places? Fancy the consternation of the Western Hemisphere when ships suddenly go silent, as regards radio, after sudden mysterious SOS's--and all trace of vessels is lost. Suppose the U. S. Navy went to investigate, and also vanished. More holy cats! (4) Suppose, in connection with all the suppositions above, that Barter desired to give an ironic twist to his experiments, and kept his human victims alive--but with apes' brains--as slaves of their man-ape conquerors? Suppose that out of the horror into which the world would be thrown, another Bentley should arise to help the imprisoned humans to escape their ghastly bondage? I can fancy his trials and tribulations, trying to manage a host of human beings with the brains of apes. (5) And what about the training of internes and medicos to help a potential Barter, when the trade got beyond his sole ability--and apes with men's brains to perform his experiments? Do you suppose we'd all get locked up for experimenting with this sort of thing fictionally? I wouldn't care to take the entire responsibility myself, nor I fancy would you--because somebody might be inspired by our stories to attempt the thing--so might I suggest that all possible conspirators, in the shape of readers of this magazine, write to you or me and let us know whether they'd like to see it happen fictionally? If the idea appeals--and of course we can't go too heavily on horror--I'll do my best to comply. Always within limits, however--utterly refusing to perform any experiments that can't be done with a typewriter and the usual two fingers.--Arthur J. Burks, 178-80 Fifth Ave., New York City. "_Like in Story Books_" Dear Editor: Here I am again! This time I'm offering suggestions. Let's you and I and others get together and do something to these chronic kickers. It seems I can't start to enjoy our "Readers' Corner" without someone raising a halloo. Darn it! Why in heaven's name do they buy A. S. if they don't like it? They are not compelled to do so. I also don't understand why people are knocking the size and quality of the paper used. It suits me O. K. All the mags I read are the same way, and I pay five cents more for them, too! I surely enjoyed Mr. Olog's letter in the March issue. Gee, it gives one the creeps. I agree with him, too, that we ought to have a little something about the authors. I'm sure we'd all like to know a little more about these talented persons. "When the Mountain Came to Miramar" was a great deal to my liking. I think it would be a great adventure to discover some secret cave and explore it. Of course, I'd like to wiggle out of danger, too, just like in story books. I certainly wish to congratulate you on publishing "Beyond the Vanishing Point." It just suited me to a "T." Heretofore, all stories dealing with life upon atoms have been "just another story," but this one beats all. I enjoyed it to the utmost, and I congratulate Mr. Cummings on writing my favorite kind of story. All in all the March issue was indeed grand. If "Brown-Eyed Nineteen from Coronado, Calif.," will send me her full name and address, I'll promise to answer her letter immediately upon receiving it.--Gertrude Hemken, 5730 So. Ashland Ave., Chicago, Ill. _And So Do We_ Dear Editor: It certainly is a swell idea of yours to answer letters to "The Readers' Corner" personally instead of taking up a lot of room answering them underneath as do most Editors. Not only that, but it builds up a feeling of friendship, between the Reader and the Editor, besides affording more room to publish letters and avoiding some of the bad feelings sometimes directed upon Editors when they do not publish someone's letter. Now, with your kind permission, I will burst into the little (?) ring of discussion about size, reprints, covers, artists and authors. First, about the size and edges: The size is O. K., but I wish you would change the edges from a "rocky mountain" to a "desert" state. In other words, I would like straight edges in the near future. Next, reprints: In two letters, an N O--No! If the Readers want reprints why doesn't Mr. Clayton publish an annual chock full of reprints for these reprint hounds? Covers and artists: The covers have all been great. Not too lurid. Just right. As for the artists, Wesso is the best by a long shot. Nuff said. Authors: Ah, that's a problem. Who is the best? I could rack my brain for hours and still not decide, so I'll have to give a list of my favorites: R. F. Starzl, Edmond Hamilton, Harl Vincent, Sewell Peaslee Wright, Jack Williamson, S. P. Meek, Miles J. Breuer and Ray Cummings. Before I close there is one little thing I would like to mention. Did you ever notice that 75% of all the Readers who say they do not care for science in their stories are women? [?] Besides that, the only ones at school who think I'm "cracked" for reading Science Fiction are females. Figure it out for yourself. I hope you, Mr. Bates, will continue to be our able Editor for many years to come.--Jim Nicholson, Ass't Sec'y., B. S. C., 40 Lunado Way, San Francisco, Calif. _Four to One_ Dear Editor: Congratulations to Wesso! His March cover for "our" magazine is Astounding! Ray Cummings' novelette, "Beyond the Vanishing Point," is absolutely the most marvelous of all his short stories. I can't rave over it enough. I never read his "The Girl of the Golden Atom" but I imagine this must be something like it. It's certainly the best of the "long short stories" that's ever graced the insides of Astounding Stories. "When the Mountain Came to Miramar" is a very good story in my opinion. "Terrors Unseen" is a wow! No foolin'. As for "Phalanxes of Atlans," well, I simply can't get interested in it. I thought the first part very uninteresting and decided not to bother to read the rest of it. But Wesso's splendid illustration made me do so. But I still think it is a rather poor story. But, true to form, someone will no doubt think it the most wonderful story ever written. Last, but not least, of all the stories comes "The Meteor Girl." It's by Jack Williamson: need more be said? No!--Forrest J. Ackerman, President-Librarian, The B. S. C., 530 Staples Avenue, San Francisco, Calif. _That Awful Thing Called Love_ Dear Editor: Upon the occasion of my first visit to "The Readers' Corner," I wish to say that Astounding Stories leads the field in Science Fiction stories as far as I am concerned, though at first I found them to be just so-so. "Beyond the Vanishing Point," by Ray Cummings, proved interesting through-out. "Terrors Unseen," by Harl Vincent, was fairly good, as was "Phalanxes of Atlans," by F. V. W. Mason. But now comes the rub. Just why do you permit your Authors to inject messy love affairs into otherwise excellent imaginative fiction? Just stop and think. Our young hero-scientist builds himself a space flyer, steps out into the great void, conquers a thousand and one perils on his voyage and amidst our silent cheers lands on some far distant planet. Then what does he do? I ask you. He falls in love with a maiden--or it's usually a princess--of the planet to which the Reader has followed him, eagerly awaiting and hoping to share each new thrill attached to his gigantic flight. But after that it becomes merely a hopeless, doddering love affair ending by his returning to Earth with his fair one by his side. Can you grasp that--a one-armed driver of a space flyer! But seriously, don't you think that affairs of the heart are very much out of place in "our" type of magazine? We buy A. S. for the thrill of being changed in size, in time, in dimension or being hurtled through space at great speed, but not to read of love. Right here I wish to join forces with Glyn Owens up there in Canada in his request for plain, cold scientific stories sans the fair sex. Otherwise your "our" magazine is the best of its kind on the market--W. H. Flowers. 1215 N. Lang Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa. _Brickbats for Others_ Dear Editor: Brickbats and plenty of them are coming, but not your way. I'm throwing mine at those guys that want reprints, more science, etc. The only one I agree with is the fellow who would like a thicker magazine with more stories. Now for the brickbats. I'll bet a great many of your Readers have read some of these reprints that some of our Readers are crying for. I'll also bet that reprints would not help your friendly connections with a lot of your Authors. The stories that are written now I find good. Let the present authors make their living from the stories their brains think up. As for more science, bah!--your present amount is enough. In another magazine I read a story and just as it reached its climax they started explaining something! If any Reader wants to write to me my address is below.--Arthur Mann, Jr., San Juan, California. _Wants Interplanetary Cooperation_ Dear Editor: C'n y'imagine, I have my Astounding Science magazine two whole hours and the cover is still on! Let's have some more stories like "Beyond the Vanishing Point," by Ray Cummings in the March issue. Another thing, let's have more interplanetary stories than we do. I think they give you something to really think about. Why is it that in every interplanetary story the other race is always hostile. Just think, would we, if we received visitors from space, make war on them? Also, when our people make an interplanetary flight, would we go with intent to kill? Let's have some stories, where the first interplanetary flight leads to cooperation between the planets involved.--Dave Diamond, 1350--52nd St., Brooklyn, N. Y. _In Every Way, True_ Dear Editor: I want to rejoice again over Astounding Stories. Reprints or no:--and I hunger for them--the magazine must be described in superlatives. The reasons is pretty clear to me. After years in an experimental stage, Science Fiction suddenly turned up with a clash of cymbals in the shape of a definite magazine. It had to cover the whole field, and its successors tried to do the same. Due to its ancestry its logical scope was the more technical Science Fiction farthest removed from sheer fantasy, but, none-the-less, one of the most important branches. Now it is specializing in that type. When Astounding Stories appeared many of us were apt to be skeptical, particularly when we noticed that an established corporation was backing it, one that had been limited to westerns and the like. The first few issues came and there was a dubious tinge of the occult, the "black-magical." This petered out, and we noticed that no matter how poor the subject matter from the point of view of Science Fiction, the style of writing was almost always on the highest level. Then we realized that this magazine was no menace to the literature of Science Fiction, but a valuable addition. It could afford the better writers and hence keep up the quality of work of every writer. It was adopting as its own a type of Science Fiction that the rest minimized, and that demanded good writing--a type having a skeleton of science, like the girders of a great building, holding it erect and determining its shape, yet holding the skeleton of less importance than the vision of the completed edifice. Stories with emphasis on the fiction rather than the science. But enough of that. Here is a hopeful thought for the time-travelers. There is nothing in physics or chemistry to prevent you from going into the past or future--at least, the future--and shaking hands with yourself or killing yourself. We will eliminate the past, for it seems that it cannot be altered physically. But take the future: not so very far from to-day the matter of your body will have been totally replaced by new matter; the old will disappear in waste. Physically, you will be a new man, and physically the matter of to-day may destroy that of to-morrow and return in itself unaltered. But none-the-less there will be some limiting interval during which "you" have not been entirely transformed to new matter, so that an atom would have to be in two places at once. Maybe time-traveling progresses in little jumps like emission of light. And maybe an atom can be in two places at once. If you are going to treat time as just another dimension, there seems to be no reason why an object which can be in one place at two times cannot be at one time in two places. This is all physics. The paradoxes of time-traveling arise more particularly from its effect on what we call consciousness, the something that makes me "me"--an individual. We can imagine an atom in two places at once, but not a soul, if you will. This will not bother the materialist who considers a living creature merely a machine, but it will most of us. So I must be content with offering a materialistic possibility of traveling in time. The Science Correspondence Club wishes to extend its invitation to all Readers in other nations to join with all privileges save that of holding office. The latter may later be changed as our international membership increases. We have laboratory branches here, and we want them abroad in addition to scattered members. Then, it will be necessary to have a governing body and director in every country. At present all matters pertaining to foreign membership pass through my hands and I will do my best to supply information to all who seek it. We will also be glad to hear of the work and plans of other similar organizations in other countries, as we are doing with the German Verein für Raumschauffert. Address all inquiries to me at 302 So. Ten Broeck St., Scotia, New York, U. S. A.--P. Schuyler Miller, Foreign Director, S. C. C. "_A Wow!_" Dear Editor: Astounding Stories magazine is a wow! I can hardly wait until next month for the April issue. "The Phalanxes of Atlans," "Beyond the Vanishing Point" and "The Pirate Planet" are perfect. Every time I start a story I never stop till it's finished. I hope that there will appear even better stories in later issues. Here's wishing you the best of success,--Fred Damato, 196 Greene St., New Haven, Conn. _Is Zat So!_ Dear Editor: Just a word or two. I have read several issues of Astounding Stories and I notice that you have taken the word "science" off the cover. It's just as well, for it was never inside the cover, anyway. If you thought to attract Readers from real Science Fiction fans you were all wet, for they would never fall for the kind of things you printed. Besides, "what," a real fan wants to know "how." There may be, I'll admit, a class of Readers who like your stories, but for me I think that you ought to print real Science Fiction or abandon the attempt and publish out and out fairy tales. Is everybody so pleased with your book that you receive nothing but commendatory letters? That appears to be all you print, at any rate. So long--Harry Pancoast, 306 West 28th St., Wilmington, Delaware. _Short and Sweet_ Dear Editor: I agree perfectly with Gertrude Hemken, of Chicago. Astounding Stories is O. K. Why do we want a lot of deep science with our stories? We read for pleasure not to learn science. I have been reading Astounding Stories since the first issue, and I have enjoyed every story. I read several Science Fiction magazines but yours is the best.--Stephen L. Garcia, 47 Hazel Ave., Redwood City, Calif. _Shorter and Sweeter_ Dear Editor: The only good things about Astounding Stories are as follows: The cover design, the stories, the size of the magazine, the illustrations in the magazine and the Authors.--John Mackens, 366 W. 96th St., New York City. _Sequels Requested_ Dear Editor: I was out of reading matter so I bought the August issue of Astounding Stories, and it was so good that I have been buying it ever since. The only things I don't like about the magazine are the quality of the paper, which I think could be improved, and the uneven pages. The other Science Fiction magazine that I read has its pages even. Astounding Stories has a much better type of stories than the other magazine. There are only a few stories I have seen in your magazine which do not belong there. They are: "A Problem in Communication," which is not so much fiction and does not have much of a plot, and "The Ape-men of Xloti," which was very well written and very interesting, but did not have enough science in it. I would like to see sequels to the following stories: "Marooned Under the Sea," "Beyond the Vanishing Point," "Monsters of Mars," telling about another effort of the crocodile-men to conquer Earth, "The Gray Plague," telling of another attack by the Venusians, and, most of all, "Vagabonds of Space." I would like to see a story about their further adventures about every three months, just as I see the stories about Commander Hanson. I wish the best of luck for Astounding Stories.--Bill Bailey, 1404 Wightman St., Pittsburgh, Pa. _Come Again_ Dear Editor: Although I have been an interested Reader of Astounding Stories since its inception, this is the first time that I have written; but "our" magazine has been so good lately that I just had to write and compliment you on your good work. There are just two criticisms I have of Astounding Stories. The first is that the binding sometimes comes off; the second is the rough edges. I join with many other Readers in complaining that uneven edges make it hard to find a certain page and also give the mag a cheap looking appearance. In my opinion the two best serials you have printed are "Brigands of the Moon" and "The Pirate Planet." The four best novelettes are: "Marooned Under the Sea," "The Fifth-Dimension Catapult," "Beyond the Vanishing Point" and "Vagabonds of Space."--Eugene Bray, Campbell, Mo. _How Simple!_ Dear Editor: Just a few lines to set Mr. Greenfeld right on that question of how a man could be disintegrated and then reintegrated as two (or more) similar men. Briefly, the atomic or molecular structure of the original man could serve as a pattern to be set up in the reintegrating machine or machines while he is being dissolved by the disintegrating machine. Thus, the reintegrators could reconstruct any number of similar men by following the pattern of his molecular structure and drawing on a prearranged supply of the basic elements. As for the "soul," that is merely the manifestation of the chemical combinations in the man's body, and when said chemical combinations are duplicated, the "soul" simply follows suit.--Joseph N. Mosleh, 4002 Sixth Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y. _Both in One Issue_ Dear Editor: I think it's about time to let you know what I think of your wonderful magazine. Of course, I have my dislikes but they are very few. I wish you would make up your magazine larger and even the pages up. The best complete novelettes I have read were both in the same issue. They were "Monsters of Mars," by Edmond Hamilton and "Four Miles Within," by Anthony Gilmore. Wesso is by far your best artist. Please keep him. All the other Science Fiction magazines have quarterlies. Why don't you have one? Good-by, and keep Astounding Stories up to its present standard.--Frederick Morrison, Long Beach, Calif. "_Good As Is_" Dear Editor: I have been reading your mag for about five months and I like it very much. I don't see what those guys want a quarterly for. This mag is good as it is and there is no use to spoil it. Wesso is a swell artist, and the best story I read was "The Wall of Death." I'd like to get acquainted with some of your Readers. How about it, boys? I'll sign off.--L. Sloan, Box 101, Onset, Mass. _Just Imagine!_ Dear Editor: To begin, I am a mechanic more or less skilled in the handling of tools. Now, while I have seen many builders with tools who were dubbed "spineless," "poor fish," etc., it was not because they remotely resembled the piscatorial or Crustacea families. It seems to me that when an author endows reptiles, cuttlefish, etc., with superhuman intelligence, and paints a few pictures of them as master-mechanics in the use of tools, then I want to take the magazine I am reading, that allows such silly slush in its pages, and feed it to my billy-goat; he may be able to digest such silliness, but I can't! However, there is a redeeming feature of this sort of story: although not written as comedy, they have a comic effect, when one uses his imagination. Imagine, for instance, a giant sea crab as a traffic cop! He could direct four streams of traffic at once while making a date with the sweet young thing whom he had held up for a traffic violation! Then think what a great, intelligent reptile, crocodile, or what have you, could do in our Prohibition Enforcement Service! He could place his armored body across the road, and when rum runners bumped into him he could take his handy disintegrator and turn their load of white lightning back into the original corn patch! And suppose a giant, humanly-intelligent centipede should make too much whoopee some night, and endeavor to slip upstairs without waking the wife. Even if he succeeded in getting off his thousand pairs of shoes, which is doubtful, he would have a sweet time keeping his myriad of legs under control after partaking of some of the tangle-foot dispensed nowadays! I hope your Authors will read and heed the delicate sarcasm contained in the letter of Robert R. Young in your April issue.--Carl F. Morgan, 427 E. Columbia Ave., College Park, Ga. "_Craves Excitement_" Dear Editor: I have been a silent Reader of your magazine for quite a long while, but have finally decided to come forth with my own little contribution to "The Readers' Corner." So far I have seen only two other women Readers' letters. I suppose most women are interested in love stories, though I fail to see anything very exciting in any that are written nowadays; and I crave excitement in my reading. I've read about most everything there is about this old earth, so I've decided to wander into new fields. Now for a little discussion about Astounding Stories. I haven't any brickbats to throw. You seem to get more of them than is necessary. I like the size, the price, the cover, the illustrator, the authors, etc. Some stories don't exactly take my fancy but the average is 100% with me. Some that particularly pleased me were "Marooned Under the Sea," way back in the September issue, "Jetta of the Low-lands" and "Beyond the Vanishing Point." "Gray Denim" and "Ape-men of Xloti" in the December issue rite A-1, too. I congratulate Ray Cummings on his new story, even though I haven't started to read it yet. I always know I'll enjoy his work, no matter what it is. Time-traveling is one of my special dishes, too. Here's a little dig. I'm sorry, I didn't think I'd have any, but I just thought of this. It seems to me that I never see any stories written by two authors. Of course the stories by single authors are O. K., but the particular two I am thinking of are Edgar A. Manley and Walter Thode. They wrote "The Time Annihilator," as you probably know. That was one of the best time-traveling stories I have ever read. I'm only sorry that it couldn't have been published by Astounding Stories. Well, I don't want to make myself tiresome the very first time, so I'll sign off. Please excuse the rather unconventional stationary, but I'm writing this at the office in my spare time. Hope I haven't worn my welcome out, but I had so much stored up to say. I'm waiting for the April issue, so please hurry it up.--Betty Mulharen, 50 E. Philadelphia Ave, Detroit, Mich. _A Daisy for S. P. Wright_ Dear Editor: Were good old President George Washington himself to travel through time to the present and look upon the April issue of Astounding Stories, I am certain he would only repeat what I say: "Editor, I cannot tell a lie. This is the best issue yet!" The cover on this issue is unique in that Astounding Stories is written in red and white letters. I do not recall of ever having seen this done to any Science Fiction magazine before. Wesso's illustration leaves nothing to be desired. Going straight through the book: "The Monsters of Mars." Good old Edmond Hamilton saves the world for us again in the very nick of time--and we like it, too! Here's hoping there's a million more dangers threatening Terra for Mr. Hamilton to save us from! By the way, I wonder who drew the illustration for this story? I can't make out his name. Next: "The Exile of Time," by Cummings. Exciting and well illustrated. "Hell's Dimension" is well-written and very interesting. Would have liked it longer. "The World Behind the Moon" is splendid. More by Mr. Ernst, please. More from Mr. Gilmore, too, because of his novelette, "Four Miles Within." "The Lake of Light" by that popular author Jack Williamson surpasses his "The Meteor Girl" in a recent issue of "our" magazine. And now I come to the last and perhaps most interesting story of the issue: Mr. Sewell Peaslee Wright's record of the interplanetary adventures of the Special Patrol as told by Commander John Hanson. This series is unsurpassable in its vivid realness. I can't help but believe that these tales really occurred, or will occur in the distant future. And Mr. Wright is as expert at conceiving new forms of life as Edmond Hamilton is at saving our Earth. "The Readers' Corner" is an interesting feature, and I am glad to hear that "Murder Madness" and "Brigands of the Moon" are now in book form.--Forrest J. Ackerman, 530 Staples Ave., San Francisco, Calif. _Mass Production_ Dear Editor: After reading Mr. Greenfield's letter in your April issue regarding my story, "An Extra Man," I feel that I should like to call his attention to a point which, it seems to me, he has overlooked, namely, that the reconstructed men were not composed of the original physical matter of the disintegrated man but of identical elements, all of which are at present known and available to science. According to the hypothesis, Drayle could have produced as many entities as he desired and provided for, just as a radio broadcast is reproduced in as many places as are prepared for its reception. The vibrations alone are transmitted, and the reproduction is the result of a reciprocal mechanical action by physical matter at the receiving end. Any radio engineer knows that the original sound waves are not transported, but merely their impress upon the electrical radio wave. So, Drayle's disintegrating and sending apparatus only transmitted the vibrations which enabled his machines at the receiving end to select from a more than adequate supply of raw material, in due proportion and quantities, as much as was required for the reproduction of the disintegrated entities. I think that if Mr. Greenfield will reread the story, noting the following references, he will agree that if the hypothesis is accepted the conclusion is logical: 1--It is only Jackson Gee and not Drayle who speaks of transmitting the constituent elements by radio (page 120). 2--The scientist, Drayle, says, (page 129) "We already know the elements that make the human body, and we can put them together in the their proper proportions and arrangements; but we have not been able to introduce the vitalizing spark, the key vibrations, to start it going." He does not say that tangible matter can be transmitted by radio. 3--In the account of Drayle's preliminary experiments (page 122) there is no statement to the effect that the original material composing the disintegrated glass was used in its recreation. 4--There is nothing in the story to indicate that the original physical composition of the disintegrated man was transported, in any manner to any outside location. The process of disintegration was necessary to obtain the vibrations that would make possible their repetition, which under proper conditions would induce a reproduction of the original, just as a song must be sung before it can be reproduced upon a phonograph disc, but which, once recorded can be repeated times without number. 5--Drayle's question (page 124) "Have you arranged the elements?" refers to the elements out of which all mankind is composed and which Drayle has previously mentioned (page 120). 6--The narrator emphasizes this aspect of the discovery when he says, on page 124, "I seemed to see man's (not the man's) elementary dust and vapors whirled from great containers upward into a stratum of shimmering air and gradually assume the outlines of a human form that became first opaque, then solid, and then a sentient being." And again (page 126), "The best of the race could be multiplied indefinitely and man could make man literally out of the dust of the earth." This does not imply a split-up of one individual into several smaller sizes or fractional parts, but rather the production of identical entities exactly as thousands of phonograph records can be created from the master matrix. 7--As to the question of soul, I suggest that inasmuch as what we call the soul of an individual is always judged by that individual's behavior, and that medical science now maintains that behavior is largely dependent upon our physical mechanism, it would follow that the identical human mechanisms would have identical souls.--Jackson Gee. "_The Readers' Corner_" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here: so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! _The Editor._ * * * * * 
7344	----	Archibald Malmaison by Julian Hawthorne Author of "Garth," "Sebastian Strome," "Dust," Etc. INTRODUCTORY. When I was a child, I used to hope my fairy-stories were true. Since reaching years of discretion, I have preferred acknowledged fiction. This inconsistency, however, is probably rather apparent than real. Experience has taught me that the greater the fairy-story the less the truth; and contrariwise, that the greater the truth the less the fairy-story. In other words, the artistic graces of romance are irreconcilable with the crude straightforwardness of fact. The idealism of childhood, believing that all that is most beautiful must on that very account be most true, clamors accordingly for truth. The knowledge of maturity, which has discovered that nothing that is true (in the sense of being existent) can be beautiful, deprecates truth beyond everything. What happens, we find, is never what ought to happen; nor does it happen in the right way or season. In palliation of this hardship, the sublime irony of fate grants us our imagination, wherewith we create little pet worlds of poetry and romance, in which everything is arranged in neat harmonies and surprises, to gratify the scope of our little vision. The actual world, the real universe, may, indeed, be picturesque and perfect beyond the grandest of our imaginative miniatures; but since the former can be revealed to us only in comparatively infinitesimal portions, the miniatures still have the best of it. To preface a story with the information that it is true, is not, therefore, the way to recommend it. Your hearer's life, and those of his friends, are enough true stories for him; what he wants of you is merciful fiction. Destiny, to his apprehension, is always either vapid, or clumsy, or brutal; and he feels certain that, do your worst, you can never rival the brutality, the clumsiness, or the vapidity of destiny. If you are silly, he can at least laugh at you; if you are clumsy or brutal, he has his remedy; and meanwhile there is always the chance that you may turn out to be graceful and entertaining. But to bully him with facts is like asking him to live his life over again; and the civilized human being has yet to be found who would not rather die than do that. No; we are all spontaneously sure that no story-teller, though he were a Timon of Athens double distilled, can ever be so unsympathetic and unnatural as destiny, who tells the only story that never winds up. We cannot understand destiny; we never know to what lengths she may go: but the story-teller we know inside and out; he is only a possible ourself, and we defy him to do us any serious harm. I trust I am rendering my meaning clear, and that no one will suppose that in making this onslaught upon truth, I have anything else in view than truth as applied to what are called stories. With truth scientific, moral, religious, I am at present in nowise concerned. Only, I have no respect for the weakness that will outrage a promising bit of narrative for the sake of keeping to the facts. Imbecile! the facts are given you, like the block of marble or the elements of a landscape, as material for the construction of a work of art. Which would you rather be, a photographer or Michael Angelo? "_Non vero ma ben trovato_" should be your motto; and if you refuse to kill your heroine on the Saturday night because, forsooth, she really did, despite all dramatic propriety, survive till Monday morning--why, please yourself; but do not bring your inanities to me! I have now to reconcile this profession of faith with the incongruous fact that the following story is a true one. True it is, in whole and in part; furthermore, the events took place in the present century, and within a hundred miles of London. But let me observe, in the first place, that, although a true tale, it is nevertheless strange and interesting to an unusual degree; and, secondly, that this interest and strangeness mainly depend, not upon the succession of incidents, but upon the subjective condition--character it cannot be termed--of Archibald Malmaison himself. This being the case, it follows that the greater part of the objections above insisted upon fall to the ground. What goes on inside a man must needs be accepted as it is revealed to us: to invent psychological attributes does not lie within the province of a romancer. His skill and power are confined to so selecting and arranging the incidents as to provide his psychological data with the freest possible development. In the present case I might easily have devised a stage and a series of events for Malmaison, which would have brought his mysterious affection into somewhat more prominent and picturesque relief. But that affection is itself so absorbing a problem, that the fashion of its statement becomes of comparatively small import; and I may add that the setting furnished by nature happens on this occasion to answer all practical purposes tolerably well. Moreover, I am not altogether a free agent in the matter. The friend by whose permission I tell the tale is of opinion that no liberties ought to be taken with its form, any more than with what he is pleased to call its "physiological characteristics." The main significance of the narrative being, according to him, of a scientific or pathological kind, it would be hostile to scientific interests to depart from historical accuracy in its presentation. From the professional dictum of a man like Dr. Forbes Rollinson there can, of course, be no appeal, and if I am to write the account at all, it is but fair that in so doing I should respect the wishes of him who is the lawful proprietor of it. I have thought it but fair to myself, however, to begin by offering this explanation. I feel more or less hampered by the conditions enjoined upon me, and, besides, I do not agree with Dr. Rollinson's theory of the phenomena. In the present state of our knowledge, no theory on such subjects can pretend to be more than hypothetically correct; and my prejudices are opposed to what is known as the materialistic explanation of the universe. With, all respect for the validity of science within its proper sphere, I do not conceive that its judgments are entitled to paramount consideration when they attempt to settle the problems of psychology. There are mysteries which no process of inductive reasoning can reach.--The reader, however, will not be decoyed blindfold into accepting as final either the Doctor's view or mine; but, after possessing himself of the facts, will be left free to draw what conclusions he may please. As regards the matter of names, dates, and localities, Dr. Rollinson holds that they had better be given at full length; and here I am not disposed to differ from him. The system of blanks and initial letters was always distasteful to me; and to use fictitious names in a true story seems like taking away with one hand what you give with another. Besides, every one of the actors in the drama is now dead: Dr. Rollinson [1] himself being the only living person who is cognizant, directly, of all the circumstances, from beginning to end. In his capacity of physician, he was the intimate and trusted friend of the ill-fated Malmaison household during upward of twenty years, and he inherited this confidential position from his father. He has kindly placed at my disposal a number of his professional note-books and journals, and in various places I have incorporated with the narrative some of the information which they contain. At other times I have inserted minor details of conversation and incident, and have endeavored to throw over the whole as "fictitious" an air as was consistent with the conscientious observance of my compact with the Doctor. And now, without further preface, I will proceed to business. I. Archibald Malmaison was the second son of Sir Clarence Butt Malmaison, of Malmaison, Sussex. He had the odd distinction of being born on the 29th of February, 1800. His elder brother, Edward, born 1798, died before him, as will be hereinafter shown. There were no other brothers, but four girls appeared after Archibald, two of whom died in childhood of scarlet fever, while the other two grew up to be married. They have nothing to do with the story, and will not be mentioned again. The Malmaisons, as their name denotes, were of French descent--Huguenots. Like many other emigrants, they yielded, in the course of a generation or two, to a barbarous mispronunciation of their patronymic, which came to be spoken of as if spelt "Malmsey." How it happened that the chateau of the Empress Josephine was christened by the same name, I know not; at all events, the Sussex Malmaisons have prior claim to the title. The estate, which embraced between seven and eight hundred acres, lay in that portion of the county which borders upon the junction line of Kent and Surrey. Colonel Battledown, the Peninsular soldier, owned the adjoining estate in Kent; while the Surrey corner was occupied, at the epoch of this story, by the Honorable Richard Pennroyal--he whose father, Lord Epsom, is said to have won ninety thousand pounds from Fox in a single night's play. The three families had been on a friendly footing with each other ever since the early part of the reign of George III. Sir Clarence had been an ally of the father of the Honorable Richard in Parliament (they were both Whigs), and Colonel Battledown, though a Tory, was such capital company as not only to compensate for his political derelictions, but even to render them a matter for mutual congratulation--they so enlivened the conversation! In truth, I suppose the three gentlemen must have had many a boisterous discussion over their nightly three or four bottles apiece of claret, and after their hard day across country. The Honorable Richard, by the by, was by far the youngest of the three; at the time of Archibald's birth he was not much over twenty; but he had a cool, strong brain, and quite as much gravity as his seniors, over whom, in fact, he seems to have exercised a species of ascendency. Possibly he inherited something of his noble father's ability--that of playing quietly for big stakes when all the odds were in his favor. At all events, in the year 1801 he married Miss Jane Malmaison, the baronet's sister, who was fifteen years older than he, but who brought him fifty thousand pounds--a not unimportant consideration to him at that time. Mrs. Pennroyal has one claim upon our notice, and only one; seven years after her marriage, at the age of forty-two, she completely lost her memory, and became rather idiotic, and a few years later contrived to fall into an ornamental fish-pond, and drowned there before her attendants missed her. She was buried with much stateliness; but it is to be feared that few persons missed her even then. She left no children. Was poor old Jane the first member of the Malmaison line who had shown any special weakness or peculiarity in the upper story? There was a hoary tradition to the effect that the son or grandson of the first emigrant had made some compact or other with the Evil One, the terms of which were that he (the grandson) was to prolong his terrestrial existence for one hundred and forty years by the ingenious device of living only every alternate seven years, the intervening periods to be passed in a sort of hibernation. In return for this accommodation he was, of course, to make H.S.M. the usual acknowledgment! The final upshot of this bargain--as is usually the way in these cases--is not known. Did the worthy gentleman work his way into his third half century? And had he, by that time, acquired astuteness sufficient to cheat the other party to the contract of his due? History is silent; the only thing asserted with any appearance of confidence is that Sir Eustace de Malmaison possessed the power of vanishing at will from the eyes of men. Nay, he would seem to have bequeathed this useful accomplishment to certain of his descendants; for there is among the family documents a curious narrative, signed and witnessed, describing how a member of the family, in the time (I think) of the Second Pretender, did, being hard pressed by the minions of the German Prince, and pursued by them into the extreme eastern chamber of his house of Malmaison, suddenly and without warning render himself invisible, insomuch that nothing of him remained save his dagger, and the plume which he bore in his cap. This eastern chamber had, at the time, but one outlet, and that was into a room already guarded by the soldiery. The chronicle goes on to say that the disappearance was not final: the mysterious fugitive reappeared on the third day, in the same spot where he had vanished, but apparently rather the worse for wear. He was at first taken for a spirit, and all fled before him; but he, going hastily forward to the dining hall, and finding a great sirloin of beef set out upon the board, forthwith fell to, and, in a wondrous short time, devoured the whole thereof, drinking also a gallon and a half of the wine of Burgundy. This exploit restored the belief of the household in the material consistency of their master, and thereupon was much thanksgiving, feasting, and rejoicing. But the secret of the disappearance never was revealed. I give these musty old details for what they are worth; they may perhaps be construed as an indication that the race of Malmaison had some peculiarities of its own. As for Archibald, he was rather neglected than otherwise. He was a dull and stolid baby, neither crying nor crowing much: he would sit all day over a single toy, not playing with it, but holding it idly in his hands or between his knees. He could neither crawl, walk, nor talk till long after the usual time for such accomplishments. It seemed as if he had made up his mind to live according to his birthdays--that is, four times as slow as other people. The only things he did do well were eating and sleeping: he never appeared to be thoroughly awake, nor was his appetite ever entirely satisfied. As might be supposed, therefore, his body grew apace; and at seven years old (or one and three quarters, as the facetious Baronet would have it) he weighed twelve good pounds more than his brother Edward, who was two years his senior, though, to be sure, not a specially robust child. For the rest, poor Archibald seemed to be affectionate, in a dim, inarticulate way, though his sympathies were confined within somewhat narrow limits. He loved a certain brindled cat that he had more than anything else: next to her, his little baby sister; and oddly enough, he conceived a sort of dog-like admiration for the Honorable Richard Pennroyal--a compliment which that personage did nothing to deserve, and which he probably did not desire. He had also a distinct feeling for localities; he was never quite at his ease except in the nursery-room where he slept; and, on the other hand, he never failed to exhibit symptoms of distrust and aversion when he was carried into the East chamber--that in which his great-grandfather had effected his mysterious self-effacement. But the only thing that was certain to make him cry was to be brought into the company of little Kate Battledown, the colonel's only child, a year or two younger than Archibald, and universally admitted to be the prettiest and most graceful baby in the neighborhood. But Archibald, up to his seventh year, would do anything to get away from her--short of walking. In a word, he exhibited such symptoms of a deficient and perverted understanding as would have gained him--had he been of humbler birth--the descriptive title of "natural." Being a son of Sir Clarence Butt Malmaison, he was considered to be peculiar only. The old wives of the village maintained that he was the sort that could see elves, and that, if one but knew how, he might be induced to reveal valuable secrets, and to confer magic favors. But, looking the other way, he was to be dreaded as a possible (though involuntary) agent of evil; especially perilous was it, these venerable dames would affirm, to become the object of his affection or caresses--a dogma which received appalling confirmation in the fate of the brindled cat, who, after having been caught by the leg in a trap intended for a less respectable robber of hen-roosts, was finished by a bull-terrier, who took advantage of her embarrassed circumstances to pay off upon her a grudge of long standing. This tragedy occurred in January of the year 1807, and produced a noticeable effect upon Master Archibald Malmaison. He neither wept nor tore his hair, but took the far more serious course of losing his appetite. The most remarkable part of the story is yet to come. No one had told him that the cat was dead, and the cat, having adventurous propensities, had often been away from home for days at a time without leave or warning. Nevertheless, Archibald was immediately aware of her fate, and even seemed (judging from some expressions that escaped him) to have divined the manner of it. He then gave intimation of an earnest desire to view the remains; but in this he could not be gratified, for they had already been secretly interred in an obscure corner of the back garden. Will it be believed that the "peculiar" child hereupon got upon his fat legs, and, without either haste or hesitation, deliberately ambled out of the nursery, along the corridor, down the stairs, across the hall, through the door, and so round to the back garden and to the very identical spot where poor Tabby had been deposited! The fact is sufficiently well attested; I am not aware that it has ever been accounted for. The boy had never in his life walked so far before, although his limbs were perfectly developed and able for much longer pilgrimages. He did not resist being led away; but, as has been said, he neglected his bread and milk, and every few days returned to the back garden, and stood beside the grave in the cold, looking fixedly at it, but making no active demonstration whatever. This went on for about six weeks, and attracted a good deal of curiosity in the neighborhood. At length, in the latter part of February, Archibald had a sort of fit, apparently of an epileptic nature. On recovering from it, he called for a glass of milk, and drank it with avidity; he then fell asleep, and did not awake again for thirty-six hours. By this time he was a personage of more importance at Malmaison than he had ever yet been in his small life. The wise folk who stood around his crib hazarded various predictions as to the issue of his unnatural slumber. Some said he would lose what little wit he had; others, that he would become an acknowledged wizard; others again, that he would never wake up at all. In short, like other prophets, they foretold everything except that which was actually to happen; and they would have foretold that too, if they had thought of it in time. II. Archibald awoke at length, and sat up in bed. He opened his mouth, apparently for the purpose of saying something, but his tongue refused to articulate any recognizable words. An irregular, disjointed sound made itself heard, like the vague outcry of an infant; and then, as if angry at his own failure, he set up a loud and indignant wail, muffled from time to time by the cramming of his fingers into his mouth. Whatever else was the matter with the child, it was evident that he was hungry--as, indeed, he well might be. Some bread and milk was brought to him, that being his favorite food; but to the general astonishment and dismay, he did not seem to know what it was, although he continued to exhibit every symptom of a ravenous and constantly augmenting appetite. They tried him with every imaginable viand, but in vain; they even put morsels into his mouth, but he had lost the power of mastication, and could not retain them. The more they labored, the greater became his exasperation, until at last there was such a hubbub and confusion on the score of Master Archibald as that hitherto rather insignificant little personage should have felt proud to occasion. Among the anxious and bewildered people who thronged the nursery at this juncture was a young woman who acted as wet-nurse to the latest born of the Malmaisons, a baby-girl three months old. She was a healthy and full-bodied peasant, and as she pressed forward to have her look at the now frantic Archibald, she held the nursing infant--the only serene and complacent member of the assemblage--to her open breast. Archibald caught sight of her, and immediately reached toward her, arms, mouth and all, accompanying the action by an outcry so eager, impatient, and gluttonous that it was capable of only one interpretation. An incredible interpretation, certainly, but that made no difference; there was nothing else to be done. Honest Maggie, giggling and rubicund, put aside her complacent nursling (who thereupon became anything but complacent) and took to her kind bosom this strapping and unreasonable young gentleman, who had already got many of his second teeth. That did not prevent him from making an unconscionably good supper, and thenceforth the only person likely to be disturbed by his new departure in gormandizing was Maggie herself. Everything being thus happily arranged, the household dispersed about its business, the Baronet declaring, with a great laugh, that he had always said Archie was but a babe in arms, and this proved it! Dr. Rollinson, however (the elder doctor, that is--father of the present [2] distinguished bearer of the name), had witnessed this scene with something more than ordinary wonder or amusement; it had puzzled, but also interested him extremely. He was less of a conservative than many of his profession; he kept his mind open, and was not disinclined to examine into odd theories, and even, perhaps, to originate a few such himself upon occasion. The question that now confronted him and challenged his ingenuity was, What was the matter with Archibald? Why had the boy suddenly gone back to the primitive source of nourishment, not from mere childish whim, but from actual ignorance--as it seemed--that nourishment was obtainable in any other way? An obvious reply would be that the boy had become wholly, idiotic; but the more Dr. Rollinson revolved this rough and ready explanation, the less satisfactory did he find it. He wisely decided to study the symptoms and weigh the evidence before committing himself one way or the other. The first result of his observations was to confirm his impression that Archibald was not idiotic. There was a certain sort of vacancy in the child's expression, but it was the vacancy of ignorance rather than of foolishness. And ignorant to a surprising degree he was. He had at no time been regarded as a boy of large attainments; but what he knew before his strange seizure was, to what he knew after it, as Bacon to a ploughman. Had he been newly born into the world, he could not have shown less acquaintance with it, so far as intellectual comprehension went; his father, mother, sister--all were alike strangers to him; he gazed at them with intent but unrecognizing eyes; he never looked up when his name was spoken, nor did he betray any sign of understanding the talk that went on around him. His own thoughts and wants were expressed by inarticulate sounds and by gestures; but the mystery of speech evidently interested him, and he studied the movements of the lips of those who spoke to him with a keen, grave scrutiny to them highly amusing--except in the case of his poor old Aunt Jane, who turned quite pale under his inquisition, and declared that he must be bewitched, for although he seemed to know nothing, yet he had the knowingest look of any child she ever saw. Herein Aunt Jane gave utterance to a fact that was beginning to be generally acknowledged. Whatever Archibald had lost, it was beyond dispute that he had somehow come into possession of a fund of native intelligence (the term "mother wit" seems inappropriate under the circumstances) to which he had heretofore been a stranger. He might have forgotten his own name, and the mother that bore him; but he had learned how to learn, and was for the first time in his life wide awake. This was very much like saying that he was a new boy in the old skin; and this, again, was little better than a euphemism for changeling. Was he a changeling after all? The sage old woman whom we have already quoted asserted confidently that he was, and that, however much he pretended to ignorance, he really knew vastly more than any plain human child did or ought to know. And as a warrant for this opinion they brought forward evidence that Master Archibald, having been left alone one day in the nursery, had been overheard humming to himself the words of a certain song--a thing, it was argued, which he could not have done had he known no words at all; and therefore he was a changeling. Dr. Rollinson happened to hear this argument, and thought it worth while to inquire further into the matter. Such testimony as he could collect went to confirm the truth of the story. Not only so, but the song itself, if the witnesses were to be believed, so far from being an ordinary childish ditty, was some matter of pretty maids and foaming wine-cups that Tom Moore might have written, and that gentlemen sometimes trolled out, an hour or two after dinner. Now this looked very black for Archibald. Further investigation, however, put a somewhat different face upon the affair. It transpired that the song had been often sung in Archibald's hearing, and before his fit, by the Honorable Richard, for whom, as has been said, the boy had taken a queer fancy. And, perhaps because affection is a good teacher, the boy had acquired the power of repeating some of the verses to himself, of course without understanding a syllable of them, and very likely without himself being conscious of what he was doing, he hummed them over, in short, exactly as a preoccupied parrot might do; and always at a certain time, namely, after he had been put to bed, and was staring up at the darkening ceiling previous to falling asleep. This, by itself, was nothing very remarkable; the puzzle was, how could he do it now? Out of all the wreck of his small memory, why was this song, the meaning of which he had never understood, the sole survivor? Was it that his affection for Mr. Pennroyal had kept it alive? So might a sentimentalist have concluded; but the Doctor was a man of sense. Was it that the boy was shamming? Impossible on all accounts. But then, what was it? The Doctor had by this time worked himself up to believe that the solution of this problem would help largely toward the clearing up of the whole mystery. So he took notes, and continued to observe and to consider. He found, in the first place, that the song-singing took place under exactly the same circumstances as before the fit, and at no other time or place. Hereupon, he devised experiments to discover whether Archibald was conscious that he was singing, or whether it was an act performed mechanically, while the mind was otherwise engaged. After the child was in bed, he quietly arranged a lamp so as to cast a circular space of light upon the ceiling above the bed, the rest of the room being left in shadow. Not a word of any song was heard that night; and the test was tried twice more during the week, with a like result. At another time he got the Honorable Richard to come into a room adjoining the nursery, and sing the song so that Archibald might hear it. Archibald heard it, but gave no sign of being affected thereby. He was then brought into Mr. Richard's presence; it was the first time they had met since the change. Now, if ever, was an opportunity for the imperishable quality of the affections to be vindicated. But no such vindication occurred. On the contrary, after having stared his uncle almost out of countenance for some minutes, he turned from him with a marked expression of disapproval, and could never afterward be induced voluntarily to go near him. The affection had become an antipathy. "No, madam; set your mind at rest," said the bluff Doctor to Lady Malmaison over a cup of tea that evening. "The child's no changeling; but he's changed, and changed for the better, too, by Gad! He can tell a bad egg from a good one now," continued the Doctor, with a significant chuckle, the significance of which, however, Lady Malmaison perhaps failed to perceive. But the fact was, the Honorable Richard Pennroyal had never been an especial favorite with Dr. Rollinson. The next day was a new excitement. Archibald had walked, and that, too, as well as the best-grown boy of seven that you would want to see. "Ay, and where did he walk to?" demanded the Doctor. It was explained that it was at the time for nursing him, and he was sitting in his little chair at one end of the nursery, when Maggie had entered at the other. As soon as he clapped eyes on her, he had set up his usual impatient outcries; but Maggie, instead of going directly to him, had stopped to exchange a few words with the head-nurse, unfastening the front of her dress the while, however, so that Master Archibald's impatience was carried to the point of intolerance by the glimpse thus afforded of the good things in store for him. And then, before you had time to think, he had got up from his chair, and trotted across the floor, bellowing all the time, and had tugged at Maggie's dress. "Bellowing all the time, eh?" said the Doctor. "And walking all the same like he was ten year old, sir: and it did give us all a turn; and if you please, sir, what do you say to _that_?" "What do I say to that?--why, that it's just what I should have expected--that's what I say!" replied Dr. Rollinson, who had apparently begun to divine some clew to the grand mystery. But he vouchsafed no explanations as yet. Archibald did not repeat the walking miracle, although, within the space of a few weeks only, he passed through the regular gradations of crawling, tottering, and toddling, to normal pedestrianism of the most active kind. His progress in other accomplishments was almost parallel with this. From inarticulate gabble he trained his tongue to definite speech; his vocabulary expanded with astonishing rapidity, and, contrary to his previous habit, he made incessant use of it. He was now as remarkable for loquacity as formerly for the opposite characteristic; and his keenness of observation and retentive memory were a theme of general admiration. In a word, he used his five senses to ten times better effect than had ever been expected of him in the old days; and no one who had not seen him for a year from the time of his fit would have recognized him as the same child. He was not only making up for lost time--he was incomparably outstripping his earlier self; he seemed to have emerged from a mental and physical cocoon--to have cast aside an incrustation of deterrent clumsiness, and to be hastening onward with the airy case and accuracy of perfect self-possession. At the end of a year he was to all intents and purposes ten years old; and what was most remarkable about this swift advance lay in the fact that a year had seen the whole of it. Though he had been eight years in the world, the first seven had furnished none of the mental or moral material for the last: it stood alone and disconnectedly. Of those seven years it is certain that he retained not the smallest recollection; they were to him as if they had never been. The only thing they did provide him with was a well-fed and sound body; in other respects Archibald was positively new. He had to make the acquaintance of his family and friends over again; but it was done with modifications. In other cases besides that of his uncle, it was observed that he felt antipathies where formerly he loved, and _vice versa_. A minor instance, but interesting as must be all evidence in a case so strange as this, is that of the brindled cat that was buried in the garden. Archibald was brought to the grave, which he had so pathetically haunted before his metamorphosis, not many weeks after the metamorphosis occurred; and every means was used to revive in him some recollection of the bereavement; they even went so far as to uncover poor pussy's remains.... Archibald was first unconscious and indifferent, then curious, finally disgusted. His feelings were not otherwise touched. All associations connected with this whilom pet of his, grief for whose loss was supposed to have been the impelling cause of the fit itself, were as utterly expunged from his mind as if they had never existed there. Moreover, aversion from all cats was from this time forth so marked in him as almost to amount to horror; while dogs, whose presence had been wont to fill him with dismay, were now his favorite companions. It was the same in other things; the boy formed independent opinions and prejudices in all the relations of life--independent, that is, of his past. His temper, too, was changed; no longer timid, appealing and docile, it was now determined, enterprising, and bold. It was manifest even thus early that here was a character fitted to make its way in the world. "No, I protest, Doctor, I can never believe it's the same child," said Lady Malmaison, with a sigh. "That noisy, self-willed boy is never my quiet, affectionate little Archie. And yesterday he beat his brother Edward, that is two years older than he. Heigho! Pray, dear Doctor, what is your opinion?" "My opinion, Lady Malmaison, is that women will never be content," answered the bluff old physician. "I can remember the time when you thought your quiet little Archie was a nincompoop--and quite right too. And now because a monstrous piece of good luck has made a Crichton of him, you begin to regret the nincompoop! It ain't logical;" and the Doctor took snuff. "But who ever heard of a child changing his whole nature all in a moment?" persisted Lady Malmaison. "Why, isn't all in a moment better than inch by inch? The thing is no such mighty matter as some folks try to make it out. The boy went to sleep as soon as he was born, and has but just waked up--that's my notion about it. So now, instead of starting, the way most of us do, at the point of helplessness, he begins life with a body full of seven years' pith, and faculties sharp set as a new watch. Till now he has but dreamed; now he's going to exist, with so much the more extra impetus. He don't recollect what he's been dreaming--why should he?" "But he did recollect some things, Doctor; that song.... And then, his walking across the room." "Purely physical--purely automatic," replied the Doctor, tapping his snuff-box, and pleased with Lady Malmaison's awe at the strange word. "If he had stopped to think what he was doing he couldn't have done it. The body, I tell you, grows under all circumstances--as much when you're asleep as when you're awake; and the body has a memory of its own, distinct from the mental memory. Have you never hummed a song when you were doing your embroidery, and thinking about--about Lady Snaffle's elopement with the captain?" "Oh, Doctor!" "Yes; and if I'd come in at the moment and asked you what you were singing, could you have told me? Of course you couldn't! You could have told me all about the elopement. Well, then, that's clear now, ain't it?" "Yes," said Lady Malmaison, meaning, it must be supposed, "as clear as mud." Dr. Rollinson chuckled to himself, and they continued their game of piquet. III. Possibly the reader, though, understanding the force of the Doctor's illustration better than good stupid Lady Malmaison could do, is still of opinion that that eminent practitioner's exposition of the real nucleus of the mystery might have been more explicit. It is all very well to say that the boy was asleep for seven years and then woke up; but what does such a statement mean? Are such prolonged slumbers an ordinary occurrence? And if so, might not the slumberer, after a longer or shorter interval of wakefulness, fall asleep again? It is to be feared that the old physician was not quite so well satisfied in his secret mind as he pretended to be, and that his learned dissertation upon automatic action was little better than a device to avoid being pressed upon the real point at issue. But it is always a delicate matter to fathom the depth of a medical man's sagaciousness. Mention has already been made of little Kate Battledown, the effect of whose society on Archibald had been so strangely ungenial. A year or two after his "awakening" the little maiden was again thrown in his way, and this time with very different results. There is extant among the family papers a letter containing a very pretty account of the relations which were soon established between these small personages. They seem to have taken to one another at once, and exercised over each other a mutual fascination. Archibald, keen and domineering with his brother and sisters, and, so far as his power went, with everybody else--was as sweet as milk to his childish enchantress; and no doubt his manners, if not his general character, greatly benefited by her companionship. There is a picture of the two children painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and now hanging in the present Dr. Rollinson's parlor (where, doubtless, thousands of his patients have beheld it, ignorant of its history), which is perhaps as beautiful an example of English youth and maidenhood at eleven and nine years of age as could be found in the three kingdoms. The boy, black-eyed and black-haired, seems to step forward daringly, with his glance fixed defiantly upon the spectator; but his left hand, extended behind him, clasps that of little Kate with a protecting gesture; and her great brown eyes rest on his face, with a look half of apprehension, half of admiring confidence. There is a second portrait of her, taken ten years later; but of Archibald no other authentic likeness exists. Report affirms, however, that in 1823 and thereabout he was esteemed one of the handsomest young fellows of his day. The devotion of the two to each other grew with their growth. She, even at that early age, must have given occasional foretastes of the wayward, impulsive, and yet calculating character that was developed in her later life; but there can be little doubt that she felt a genuine attachment to Archibald; and he laid himself at her feet with a chivalric single-heartedness more characteristic of the fifteenth century than of the early nineteenth. Indeed, his jealous guardianship of her excited not a little amusement among his seniors; and it is related that in his twelfth year he actually commissioned Colonel Battledown to carry a formal "message" on his behalf to the Honorable Richard Pennroyal; the latter's offence consisting in his having taken Miss Battledown on his knee and kissed her. The matter was, however, happily arranged on the Hon. gentleman's expressing his regret for his indiscretion, and the Colonel and Sir Clarence becoming answerable for his good behavior in future. But the children's preference for each other now began to suggest other thoughts than those of mere passing entertainment to the paternal minds. There seemed to be no good reason why they should not ultimately make a match of it. It was true that Kate might well expect to find a more brilliant mate than the second son of a baronet; but, personal feeling and the friendship of the families aside, she might do much worse than with Archibald. The second son of Sir Clarence stood a fair chance of hereafter making a favorable entry into politics; and as for fortune, his aunt on the mother's side, a Miss Tremont, of Cornwall, an old maid without nearer relatives than her nephew, was in a fair way to bequeath him seventy thousand pounds. And furthermore (this was an aspect of the case which Colonel Battledown probably kept to himself), it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Archibald might finally inherit Malmaison in spite of the accident of his birth. Edward Malmaison had always been a delicate child, and years were not making him stronger. He was very studious, and disinclined to those active exercises in which his brother was already beginning to excel: his eyes were weak and his cheeks pale; and in short, unless his constitution should presently undergo a favorable change, the chances were fairly against his surviving Archibald, to say the least of it. "Archie thrashed him at fisticuffs," said the old man of war to himself, "and why shouldn't he get the better of him in other ways as well? Of course we wish no harm to happen to poor Edward, who is a good little snipe enough; but one must conduct one's campaign to an eye to what may happen, as well as to what is." So this matrimonial arrangement, without being definitely resolved upon (except possibly in the hearts of the two young persons principally concerned), was allowed to remain in a state of favorable suspense. Kate and Archibald saw one another as much as was good for them--although, by way of keeping up the chivalric conditions, they used to pretend that all manner of portentous obstacles intervened between them and the consummation of their desires; and exhausted their ingenuity in the devising of secret meetings, of elopements across the garden wall, and of heart-rending separations, when imaginary heartless parents tore them ruthlessly from one another's arms. In a letter written by Sir Clarence to Dr. Rollinson, under date December 27th, 1811, the jolly Baronet says: "Our Xmas festivities were for a time interupted by another Romantic Event. Catherine, onely daughter of Colonel Battledown eloped with Mr. Archibald Malmaison of Malmaison. The Fugitives escaped by the pantry dore, and before they could be overtaken, had been maid man and wife by the under Gardner in the tool house in the corner of the yard. An application will be made to Parlement to dissolve the marriage untill the parties are out of the Nursrie." By this it may appear that Sir Clarence had even more humor than orthography. It was a few weeks after this event that poor old Aunt Jane left the world by way of the ornamental fish-pond. The pond in question lay on the boundary-line between the Malmaison estate and that of the Pennroyals; and the ornamentation consisted of two flights of steps leading down to the water, and of half a dozen willows whose twisted trunks bent over the surface. Although of no great area, this pond was startlingly deep, and the bottom, when you got to it, was of the softest and most unfathomable mud. Had not Aunt Jane been seen just as she was sinking for the third time, therefore, the chances are that she would never have been seen till doomsday; there was room, and to spare, for all the Malmaison line in the slimy depths of that pool. After the catastrophe, Mr. Pennroyal caused a handsome iron railing to be erected round the scene of it. This act caused it to be said that he might have done it before. Did he expect his future wives to go the road of the first one? And was it not criminal negligence in him to have suffered her to escape from her attendants? How could such a thing have happened? Did Mr. Pennroyal consider that people might say that the death of his wife was no loss to him, but the contrary? because that fifty thousand pounds of hers, of which, during her lifetime, he could touch only the interest, became, at her decease, his absolute property, to do with as he liked. Under such circumstances, a gentleman careful of his reputation should have guarded her as the apple of his eye. It was certainly very odd that a poor frail crazy creature should have been able to elude all pursuit, and then have gone straight to the pool--in midwinter, too--and deliberately jumped in. And there she might have lain, and no one the wiser, had not young Archibald Malmaison happened to see her, and given the alarm. If he had been a few minutes earlier, who can tell but he might have seen something--that nobody suspected! All this random talk proved nothing more than that the Honorable Mr. Pennroyal was not a favorite with his neighbors; and that was a fact of which no proof was needed. Some men, who are good fellows enough at bottom and even capable of inspiring genuine attachment in particular cases, never become generally popular. When Mr. Pennroyal was accused of stinginess, it was not considered that he had a great many liabilities to meet, and perhaps some big debts to pay off. When it was said that he was unsocial and cynical, it was forgotten that these very remarks were enough to make him so. And when he was blamed for neglecting his wife, and profiting by her demise--well, now, how is a gentleman to pay attentions to an idiot, or to be inconsolable when Providence gives him fifty thousand down in exchange for her? Besides, he gave her an imposing funeral, and put himself and all his household into strict mourning. As for the iron railing, it might be looked upon as a sort of monument to the departed, in which practical usefulness and a becoming sentiment were ingeniously combined. The incident had its effect upon Archibald--in rather a curious fashion. He was, as has been intimated, the one to give the alarm. He had been passing that way, it seemed, and had caught sight of a struggling something in the water; and his shouts had speedily drawn the gamekeeper and a couple of villagers to the spot. The boy had watched the recapture of the lifeless body in solemn silence, a red flush of color in either cheek. He had been rather fond of Aunt Jane after her insanity became confirmed, and he was the only human being whom the poor woman had seemed to recognize, and in whose company she felt some dull gleams of pleasure. He now shed no tears, seeming more angry than grieved, and continued to maintain a marked taciturnity for several days; and, concerning the catastrophe itself, he could never be induced to speak at all. The power of keeping his own counsel had always characterized him: in the present instance he was as gloomily reserved as though he had buried a secret of state in his breast. Toward the widower his manner became, from hostile, almost insolent. It was a curious spectacle to see the lad, scarcely out of the nursery, either ignoring his tall relative, as if the latter were a caitiff unworthy the notice of a gentleman, or else staring him haughtily in the face, and staring him down, too! for it was remarked that the Honorable Richard exhibited an admirable forbearance, not to say meekness, toward his rude little kinsman. And yet, before this time, he had occasionally given the boy harsh words and looks.... It must have been that his bereavement had softened his heart. However, time went on, and by degrees the poignancy of the widower's grief was blunted, and Aunt Jane's name was seldom mentioned by any one; after all she had not done herself, or anybody connected with her, much credit. And other changes occurred: the stout old Colonel found it incumbent upon him to join Sir Arthur Wellesley in the Peninsula; and Kate began to take the lead in household affairs (her mother was a good deal of an invalid), and stayed more at home than she used to do, and consequently did not see so much of Archibald; she gave him to understand that it was more genteel for him to come and call on her, as Mr. Pennroyal and other gentlemen did. The young lady was already coming into her heritage of beauty, and possessed more than her share of maidenly dignity, considering that she was barely thirteen. And when, at that mention of Pennroyal, Archibald said: "Indeed, Kate, you must not class me with him, or with any man. Remember that we were married two Christmases ago--" she answered: "You foolish boy! that was not a real marriage: a real marriage is done in a church, by a parson, and I wear a white veil." "But ours was an elopement," objected Archibald, disturbed. "An elopement without a carriage-and-four and a blacksmith? What an idea!" "Do you mean to say you are not my wife, Kate?" demanded the boy, turning pale. "Neither yours nor anybody's, Mr. Archibald." "Kate!" he broke out passionately, the blood leaping to his face, "take care you never let yourself be any body else's wife than mine! And I don't see what difference a blacksmith or a veil makes. And if you do, they shall die! I know how to use a sword, and a pistol too!" "O Archie, how wicked you are! and how cruel to me, when you know that I can never love any man but you, though cruel fate may separate us for a season!" The young lady was quoting from "Evelina," as Archibald well knew, but they had got so much in the habit of applying the phraseology of that work to the requirements of their own private romance, that it came without their thinking of it. "But say that you will be my own at last!" cries Archibald, carrying on the scene in all seriousness. "Nay, my lord, 'tis ungenerous thus to press me--Oh, no, you must not do so, Archie; the book says that Lord Orville only kisses her hand--" "I am not Lord Orville, and I will kiss you where I like; and I don't care for the book when I feel as I do now! I only care for you." "Bravo, young gentleman! that's the way to talk to 'em!" cried Dr. Rollinson, who had overheard the whole of this conversation, and who now appeared with his broad figure, his gouty legs, and his gruff chuckle. "Books are very well for make-believe, but when it comes to downright earnest, use a tongue of your own--eh?" and he clapped the boy kindly on the shoulder. "Yes, yes, she'll marry you fast enough when she sees you making eyes at some other pretty girl! Don't tell me! there's plenty of 'em, go where you will, and when you start on the grand tour, as you'll be doing one of these days, you'll see for yourself!" Such were the cynical blasphemies which this man was not ashamed to instil into the ear of his young friend; and then he led him away somewhere, still chuckling, and left Miss Battledown to digest her slight the best way she could. The Doctor fancied he knew a thing or two about the sex. If so, he was very knowing! IV. Malmaison House was partly destroyed by fire a number of years ago, [3] and two years later the portion still standing was taken down to make way for the proposed branch of the London and South-Coast Railway. The branch is still unbuilt, but only some heaps of grass-grown rubbish remain to mark the site of the venerable edifice. But at the period of which I am now writing it was an imposing pile of gray-stone, standing on a slight elevation, with a sloping lawn in front, and many large trees surrounding it. The centre and the right wing were of Elizabethan date; the left wing was constructed by Sir Christopher Wren, or by some architect of his school, and, though outwardly corresponding with the rest of the building, was interiorly both more commodious and less massive. The walls of the old part were in some places over four feet in thickness, and even the partitions between the rooms were two feet of solid masonry. Many of the rooms were hung with tapestry; and in taking down the house several traces were discovered of secret passages hollowed out within the walls themselves, and communicating by means of sliding panels from room to room. The plan of the building comprised two floors and an attic; but the attic was not coextensive with the lower areas; and there was often a difference of level between the apartments on the latter floors of from one to four steps. An irregular corridor on the first floor, badly lighted, and in some places perfectly dark, extended from the centre into the right wing, affording entrance to the rooms front and back. At the end of the right wing was situated the east chamber, of which mention has already been made. Originally, the only access to it was by way of a larger chamber adjoining, which, again, could only be entered through the dark corridor. This was the condition of things at the time of the famous magic disappearance of Sir Charles Malmaison, in 1745. But, at the beginning of the present century, a door was cut through the outside wall, whence a covered flight of stone steps led down into an enclosed courtyard. The room was thus rendered independent, so to speak, of the rest of the house. The occupant might lock the door communicating with the adjoining chamber, and go and come by the other as he pleased. As for the courtyard, part of it had formerly been used as a stable, with stalls for three horses; these were now transferred to the other end of the mansion, though the stable, of course, remained; and it was necessary to go through the stable in order to get to the covered flight of steps. It may be remembered that Archibald, in what we may term his soporific period, had manifested a strong, although entirely irrational, repugnance to this east chamber. Perhaps he had been conscious of presences there which were imperceptible to normal and healthy senses! Be that as it may, he got bravely over his folly afterward, and in his twelfth year (his third, Sir Clarence would have called it) he permanently took up his quarters there, and would admit no "women" except as a special favor. In those days, when people were still, more or less, prone to superstition, it was not every boy who would have enjoyed the sensation of spending his nights in so isolated a situation; for the right wing was almost entirely unoccupied on this floor. But Archibald appears to have been singularly free from fear, whether of the natural or of the supernatural. He collected together all his boyish _penates_--his gun, his sword, his fishing-rods, and his riding-whips, and arranged them about the walls. He swept down the cobwebs from windows and ceiling; turned out of doors a lot of miscellaneous lumber that had insensibly collected there during the last half century; lugged in a few comfortable broad-bottomed chairs and stanch old tables; set up a bookshelf containing Walton's "Complete Angler," "Dialogues of Devils," "Arabian Nights," Miss Burney's "Evelina," and other equally fashionable and ingenious works; kindled a great fire on the broad hearth; and, upon the whole, rendered the aspect of things more comfortable than would have been anticipated. The room itself was long, narrow, and comparatively low; the latticed windows were sunk several feet into the massive walls; lengths of brownish-green and yellow tapestry, none the fresher for its two centuries and more of existence, still protested against the modern heresy of wallpaper; and in a panel-frame over the fireplace was seen the portrait, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, of the Jacobite baronet. It was a half-length, in officer's uniform; one hand holding the hilt of a sword against the breast, while the forefinger of the other hand pointed diagonally downward, as much as to say, "I vanished in that direction!" The fireplace, it should be noted, was built on the side of the room opposite to the windows; that is to say, in one of the partition walls. And what was on the other side of this partition? Not the large chamber opening into the corridor--that lay at right angles to the east chamber, along the southern front of the wing. Not the corridor either, though it ran for some distance parallel to the east chamber, and had a door on the east side. But this door led into a great dark closet, as big as an ordinary room, and used as a receptacle for rubbish. Was it the dark closet, then, that adjoined the east chamber on the other side of the partition? No, once more. Had a window been opened through the closet wall, it would have looked--not into Archibald's room, but--into a narrow blind court or well, entirely enclosed between four stone walls, and of no apparent use, save as a somewhat clumsy architectural expedient. There was no present way of getting into this well, or even of looking into it, unless one had been at the pains to mount on the roof of the house and peer down. As a matter of fact, its existence was only made known by the reports of an occasional workman engaged in renewing the tiles, or mending a decayed chimney. An accurate survey of the building would, of course, have revealed it at once; but nothing of the kind had been thought of within the memory of man. Such a survey would also have revealed what no one in the least suspected, but which was, nevertheless, a fact of startling significance--namely, that the blind court was, at least, fifteen feet shorter, and twenty-five feet narrower, _than it ought to have been_! Archibald was as far from suspecting it as anybody; indeed, he most likely never troubled his head about builders' plans in his life. But he thought a great deal of his great-grandfather's portrait; and since it was so placed as to be in view of the most comfortable chair before the fire, he spent many hours of every week gazing at it. What was Sir Charles pointing at with that left forefinger? And what meant that peculiarly intent and slightly frowning glance which the painted eyes forever bent upon his own? Archibald probably had a few of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances along with the other valuable books on his shelves, and he may have cherished a notion that a treasure, or an important secret of some sort, was concealed in the vicinity. Following down the direction of the pointing finger, he found that it intersected the floor at a spot about five feet to the right of the side of the fireplace. The floor of the chamber was of solid oak planking, blackened by age; and it appeared to be no less solid at this point than at any other. Nevertheless, he thought it would be good fun, and at all events would do no harm, to cut a hole there, and see what was underneath. Accordingly, he quietly procured a saw and a hammer and chisel, and one day, when the family were away from home, he locked himself into his room, and went to work. The job was not an easy one, the tough oak wood being almost enough to turn the edge of his chisel, and there being no purchase at all for the saw. After quarter of an hour's chipping and hammering, with very little result, he paused to rest. The board at which he had been working, and which met the wall at right angles, was very short, not more than eighteen inches long, indeed, being inserted merely to fill up the gap caused by a deficiency in length of the plank of which it was the continuation. Between the two adjoining ends was a crack of some width, and into that crack did Archibald idly stick his chisel. It seemed to him that the crack widened, so that he was able to press the blade of the chisel down to its thickest part. He now worked it eagerly backward and forward, and, to his delight, the crack rapidly widened still further; in fact, the short board was sliding back underneath the wainscot. A small oblong cavity was thus revealed, into which the young discoverer glowered with beating heart and vast anticipations. What he found could scarcely be said to do those anticipations justice; it was neither a casket of precious stones, nor a document establishing the family right of ownership of the whole county of Sussex. It was nothing more than a tarnished rod of silver, about nine inches in length, and twisted into an irregular sort of corkscrew shape. One end terminated in a broad flat button; the other in a blunted point. There was nothing else in the hole--nothing to show what the rod was meant for, or why it was so ingeniously hidden there. And yet, reflected Archibald, could it have been so hidden, and its place of concealment so mysteriously indicated, without any ulterior purpose whatever? It was incredible! Why, the whole portrait was evidently painted with no other object than that of indicating the rod's whereabouts. Either, then, there was or had been something else in the cavity in addition to the rod, or the rod was intended to be used in some way still unexplained. So much was beyond question. Thus cogitated Archibald--that is to say, thus he might have cogitated, for there is no direct evidence of what passed through his mind. And, in the first place, he made an exhaustive examination of the cavity, and convinced himself not only that there was nothing else except dust to be got out of it, but also that it opened into no other cavity which might prove more fruitful. His next step was to study the silver rod, in the hope that scrutiny or inspiration might suggest to him what it was good for. His pains were rewarded by finding on the flat head the nearly obliterated figures 3 and 5, inscribed one above the other, in the manner of a vulgar fraction, thus, 3/5; and by the conviction that the spiral conformation of the rod was not the result of accident, as he had at first supposed, but had been communicated to it intentionally, for some purpose unknown. These conclusions naturally stimulated his curiosity more than ever, but nothing came of it. The boy was a clever boy, but he was not a detective trained in this species of research, and the problem was beyond his ingenuity. He made every application of the figures 3 and 5 that imagination could suggest; he took them in feet, in inches, in yards; he added them together, and he subtracted one from the other: all in vain. The only thing he did not do was to take any one else into his confidence; he said not a word about the affair even to Kate; being resolved that if there were a mystery, it should be revealed, at least in the first instance, to no one else besides himself. At length, after several days spent in fruitless experiments and loss of temper, he returned the rod to its hiding-place, with the determination to give himself a rest for awhile, and see what time and accident would do for him. This plan, though undoubtedly prudent, seemed likely to effect no more than the others; and over a year passed away without the rod's being again disturbed. By degrees his thoughts ceased to dwell so persistently upon the unsolved puzzle, and other interests took possession of his mind. The tragedy of his aunt's death, his love for Kate, his studies, his prospects--a hundred things gave him occupation, until the silver rod was half forgotten. In the latter part of 1813, however, he accidentally made a rather remarkable discovery. V. He had for the first time been out hunting with his father and the neighboring country gentlemen in the autumn of this year, and it appears that on two occasions he had the brush awarded to him. At his request the heads of the two foxes were mounted for him, and he proposed to put them up on either side his fireplace. The wall, above and for a few inches to the right and left of the mantelpiece, was bare of tapestry; the first-named place being occupied by the portrait, while the sides were four feet up the oaken wainscot which surrounded the whole room behind the tapestry, and from thence to the ceiling, plaster. The mantelpiece and fireplace were of a dark slaty stone, and of brick, respectively. Archibald fixed upon what he considered the most effective positions for his heads--just above the level of the wainscot, and near enough to the mantelpiece not to be interfered with by the tapestry. He nailed up one of them on the left-hand side, the nails penetrating with just sufficient resistance in the firm plaster; and then, measuring carefully to the corresponding point on the right-hand side, he proceeded to affix the other head there. But the nail, on this occasion, could not be made to go in; and on his attempting to force it with a heavier stroke of the hammer, it bent beneath the blow, and the hammer came sharply into contact with the white surface of the wall, producing a clinking sound as from an impact on metal. A brief investigation now revealed the fact that a circular disk of iron, about three inches in diameter, and painted white to match the plaster, was here let into the wall. What could be the object of it? With a fresh nail the boy began to scratch off the paint from the surface of the disk, in order to determine whether it were actually iron, or some other metal; in so doing a small movable lid, like the screen of a keyhole, was pushed aside, disclosing a little round aperture underneath. Archibald pushed the nail into it, thereby informing himself that the hole went straight into the wall, for a distance greater than the length of the nail; but how much greater, and what was at the end of it, he could only conjecture. We must imagine him now standing upon a chair, with the nail in his hand, casting about in his mind for some means of probing this mysterious and unexpected hole to the bottom. At this juncture he happens to glance upward, and meets the intent regard of his pictured ancestor, who seems to have been silently watching him all this time, and only to be prevented by unavoidable circumstances from speaking out and telling him what to do next. And there is that constant forefinger pointing--at what? At the cavity in the floor, of course; but not of that alone; for if you observe, this same new-found hole in the wall is a third point in the straight line between the end of the forefinger and the hiding-place of the silver rod; furthermore, the hole is, as nearly as can be estimated without actual measurement, three feet distant from the forefinger, and five feet from the rod; the problem of three above and five below has solved itself in the twinkling of an eye, and it only remains to act accordingly! Archibald sprang to the floor in no small excitement; but the first thing he did was to see that both his doors were securely fastened. Then he advanced upon the mystery with heightened color and beating heart, his imagination revelling in the wildest forecasts of what might be in store; and anon turning him cold with sickening apprehension lest it should prove to be nothing after all! But no--something there must be, some buried secret, now to live once more for him, and for him only: the secret, whereof dim legends had come down through the obscurity of two hundred years; the secret, too, of old Sir Charles in the frame yonder, the man of magic repute. What could it be? Some talisman--some volume of the Black Art perhaps--which would enable him to vanish at will into thin air, and to travel with the speed of a wish from place to place--to become a veritable enchanter, endowed with all supernatural powers. With hands slightly tremulous from eagerness he pushed back the bit of plank and drew forth the silver rod; then mounted on the chair and applied it to the hole, which it fitted accurately. Before pushing it home he paused a moment. In all the stories he had read, the possessors of magic secrets had acquired the same, only in exchange for something supposed to be equally valuable, namely, their own souls. It was not to be expected that Archibald would be able to modify the terms of the bargain in his own case: was he, then, prepared to pay the price? Every human being, probably, is called upon to give a more or less direct answer to this question at some epoch of their lives: and were it not for curiosity and scepticism, and an unwillingness to profit by the experience of others, very likely that answer might be more often favorable to virtue than it actually is. Archibald did not hesitate long. Whether he decided to disbelieve in any danger; whether he resolved to brave it whatever it might be; or whether, having got thus far, he had not sufficient control over his inclinations to resist going further--at all events he drew in his breath, set his boyish lips, and drove the silver rod into the aperture with right good will. It turned slowly as it entered, the curve of its spiral evidently following the corresponding windings of the hole. Inward it twisted like a snake, until only some two inches still projected. As the searcher after forbidden mysteries continued to press, something seemed to give way within; and at the same instant an odd, shuffling sound caused him to glance sharply over his left shoulder. What was the matter with the mantelpiece? The whole of the right jamb seemed to have started forward nearly a foot, while the left jamb had retired by a corresponding distance into the wall; the hearth, with the fire burning upon it, remained meanwhile undisturbed. At first Archibald imagined that the mantelpiece was going to fall, perhaps bringing down the whole partition with it; but when he had got over the first shock of surprise sufficiently to make an examination, he found that the entire structure of massive gray-stone was swung upon a concealed pivot, round which it turned independently of the brickwork of the fireplace. The silver rod had released the spring by which the mechanism was held in check, and an unsuspected doorway was thus revealed, opening into the very substance of the apparently solid wall. On getting down from his chair he had no difficulty in pulling forward the jamb far enough to satisfy himself that there was a cavity of unknown extent behind. And from out of this cavity breathed a strange dry air, like the sigh of a mummy. As for the darkness in there, it was almost substantial as of the central chamber in the great pyramid. Archibald may well have had some misgivings, for he was only a boy, and this happened more than sixty years ago, when ghosts and goblins had not come to be considered such indefensible humbugs as they are now. Nevertheless, he was of a singularly intrepid temperament, and besides he had passed the turning point in this adventure a few minutes ago. Nothing, therefore, would have turned him back now. Come what might of it, he would see this business to an end. It was, however, impossible to see anything without a light; it would be necessary to fetch one of the rush candles from the table in the corridor. It was a matter of half a minute for the boy to go and return; then he edged himself through the opening, and was standing in a kind of vaulted tunnel, directly behind the fireplace, the warmth of which he could feel when he laid his hand on the bricks on that side. The tunnel, which extended along the interior of the wall toward the left, was about six feet in height by two and a half in width. Archibald could walk in it quite easily. But, in the first place, he scrutinized the mechanism of the revolving mantelpiece. It was an extremely ingenious and yet simple device, and so accurately fitted in all its parts that, after so many years, they still worked together almost as smoothly as when new. After Archibald had poured a little of his gun-oil into the joints of the hinges, and along the grooves, he found that heavy stone structure would open and close as noiselessly and easily as his own jaws. It could be opened from the inside by using the silver rod in a hole corresponding to that on the outside; and, having practised this opening and shutting until he was satisfied that he was thoroughly master of the process, he put the rod in his pocket, pulled the jamb gently together behind him, and, candle in hand, set forth along the tunnel. After walking ten paces, he came face-up against a wall lying at right angles to the direction in which he had been moving. Peering cautiously round the corner, he saw, at the end of a shallow embrasure, a ponderous door of dark wood, braced with iron, standing partly open, with a key in the keyhole, as if some one had just come out, and, in his haste, had forgotten to shut and lock the door behind him. Archibald now slowly opened it to its full extent; it creaked as it moved, and the draught of air made his candle flicker, and caused strange shadows to dance for a moment in the unexplored void beyond. In another breath Archibald had crossed the threshold and arrived at the goal of his pilgrimage. At first he could see very little; but there could be no doubt that he was in a room which seemed to be of large extent, and for the existence of which he could by no means account. The reader, who has been better informed, will already have assigned it its true place in that unexplained region mentioned some pages back, between the blind court and the east chamber. Groping his way cautiously about, Archibald presently discerned a burnished sconce affixed to the wall, in which having placed his candle, the light was reflected over the room, so that the objects it contained stood dimly forth. It was a room of fair extent and considerable height, and was, apparently, furnished in a style of quaint and sombre magnificence, such as no other apartment in Malmaison could show. The arched ceiling was supported by vast oaken beams; the floor was inlaid with polished marbles. The walls, instead of being hung with tapestry, were painted in distemper with life-size figure subjects, representing, as far as the boy could make out, some weird incantation scene. At one end of the room stood a heavy cabinet, the shelves of which were piled with gold and silver plate, richly chased, and evidently of great value. Here, in fact, seemed to have been deposited many of the precious heirlooms of the family, which had disappeared during the Jacobite rebellions, and were supposed to have been lost. The cabinet was made of ebony inlaid with ivory, as was also a broad round table in the centre of the room. In a niche opposite the cabinet gleamed a complete suit of sixteenth century armor; and so dry was the atmosphere of the apartment, that scarce a spot of rust appeared upon the polished surface, which, however, like every other object in the room, was overlaid with fine dust. A bed, with embroidered coverlet and heavy silken curtains, stood in a deep recess to the left of the cabinet. Upon the table lay a number of papers and parchments, some tied up in bundles, others lying about in disorder. One was spread open, with a pen thrown down upon it, and an antique ink-horn standing near; and upon a stand beside the bed was a gold-enamelled snuff-box, with its lid up, and containing, doubtless, the dusty remnant of some George II. rappee. At all these things Archibald gazed in thoughtful silence. This room had been left, at a moment's warning, generations ago; since then this strange dry air had been breathed by no human nostrils, these various objects had remained untouched and motionless; nothing but time had dwelt in the chamber; and yet what a change, subtle but mighty, had been wrought! Mere stillness--mere absence of life--was an appalling thing, the boy thought. And why had this secret been suffered to pass into oblivion? And why had fate selected him to discover it? And now, what use would he make of it? "At all events," said the boy to himself, "it has become my secret, and shall remain mine; and no fear but the occasion will come when I shall know what use to make of it." He felt that meanwhile it would give him power, security, wealth also if he should ever have occasion for it; and with a curious sentiment of pride he saw himself thus mystically designated as the true heir of Malmaison--the only one of his age and generation who had been permitted to stand on an equality with those historic and legendary ancestors, to whom the secret of this chamber had given the name and fame of wizards. Henceforth Archibald was as much a wizard as they. Or, might there after all be a power in necromancy that he yet dreamed not of? Was it possible that even now those old enchanters held their meetings here, and would question his right to force his way among them? As this thought passed through the boy's mind, he was moving slowly forward, his eyes glancing now here, now there, when all at once the roots of his hair were stirred with an emotion which, if not fear, was certainly far removed from tranquillity. From the darkest corner of the room he had seen a human figure silently and stealthily creeping toward him. Now, as he fixed his eyes upon it, it stopped, and seemed to return his stare. His senses did not deceive him; there it stood, distinctly outlined, though its features were indistinguishable by reason of the shadow that fell upon them. But what living thing--living with mortal life at least--could exist in a room that had been closed for sixty years? Now certainly this Archibald, who had not yet completed his fourteenth year, possessed a valiant soul. That all his flesh yearned for instant flight does not admit of a doubt; and had he fled, this record would never have been written. Fly, however, he would not, but would step forward rather, and be resolved what manner of goblin confronted him. Forward, therefore, he stepped; and behold, the goblin was but the reflection of himself in a tall mirror, which the obscurity and his own agitation had prevented him from discerning. The revulsion of feeling thus occasioned was so strong that for a moment all strength forsook the boy's knees; he stumbled and fell, and his forehead struck the corner of the ebony cabinet. He was on his feet again in a moment, but his forehead was bleeding, and he felt strangely giddy. The candle, too, was getting near its end; it was time to bring this first visit to a close. He took the candle from the sconce, passed out through the door, traversed the tunnel, and thrust the silver key into the keyhole. The stone door yielded before him; he dropped what was left of the candle, and slipped through the opening into broad daylight. The first object his dazzled eyes rested upon was the figure of Miss Kate Battledown. In returning from his visit to the corridor he must have forgotten to lock the room door after him. She was standing with her back toward him, looking out of the window, and was apparently making signs to some one outside. Noiselessly Archibald pushed the mantelpiece back into place; thanks to the oiling he had given the hinges, no sound betrayed the movement. The next moment Kate turned round, and seeing him, started and cried "Oh!" "Good-morning, Mistress Kate," said Archibald. "Archibald!" "Well?" "You were not here a moment ago!" "Well?" "Then how did you get here?" Archibald made a gesture toward the door leading to the covered stairway. "No--no!" said Kate; "it is locked, and the key is on this side." She had been coming toward him, but now stopped and regarded him with terror in her looks. "What is the matter, Kate?" "You are all over blood, Archibald! What has happened? Are you ... oh, what are you?" She was ready to believe him a ghost. "What am I?" repeated the boy, sluggishly. That odd giddiness was increasing, and he scarcely knew whether he were asleep or awake. Who was he, indeed? What had happened? Who was that young woman in front of him? What.... "Archibald! Archie! Speak to me! Why do you look so strangely?" "Me not know oo!" said Archie, and began to cry. Mistress Kate turned pale, and began to back toward the door. "Me want my Kittie!" blubbered Archie. Kate stopped. "You want me?" "Me want my 'ittle Kittie--my 'ittle b'indled Kittie! Dey put my Kittie in de hole in de darden! Me want her to p'ay wiz!" And with this, and with the tears streaming down his cheeks, poor Archie toddled forward with the uncertain step and outstretched arms of a little child. But Kate had already gained the door, and was running screaming across the next room, and so down the long corridor. Poor Archie toddled after, his baby heart filled with mourning for the brindled cat that had been buried in the back garden seven years before. Seven years?--or was it only yesterday? VI. Miss Kate Battledown's screams, as she ran down the corridor, must speedily have summoned the household; and then the dreadful news was told, not losing anything of its horror, we may be sure, in the recital; and then appeared poor Archie in confirmation. The greatest confusion and bewilderment prevailed. No one comprehended anything. It was not known what had happened. What was this story about Archie's having suddenly appeared, where before there had been only empty air--just as his great grandfather, Sir Charles, had done before him? Kate, to whom we may pardon a little incorrectness or exaggeration under the circumstances, solemnly asseverated that she had been looking straight at the centre of the room, and that nobody was there; and that all at once "Archie grew together out of nothing!" Such is the version of her words given by Lady Malmaison in a letter to her sister, Miss Tremount, of Cornwall, soon after the occurrence. Miss Tremount, it may be remembered, had intimated years ago her intention of making Archibald her heir; and Lady Malmaison's letter is an amusing and rather ingenious attempt to convey the information about poor Archie, in such a way as not to frighten off this inheritance. Doctor Rollinson, she wrote, had seen dear Archie, and had said that what had happened was only what might have been expected; and that the dear child's health would certainly not suffer, but, on the contrary, be strengthened, and his life prolonged. For that there could be no doubt that poor Archie had been laboring under an almost unnatural excitement, or tension of the nerves, during the last few years, which had caused Lady Malmaison the greatest anxiety; and she was truly thankful, for her part, that things had come out no worse than they had. She could feel secure, now, that her darling Archie would live to be a quiet, good, sensible English gentleman, fitted to discharge efficiently, and conscientiously, an English gentleman's duties, whether it were to manage an estate, or--or in fact whatever it might be. And then came the little story about the mysterious apparition of Archie out of vacancy, which Lady Malmaison treated humorously; though in her own heart she was very much scared at it, and was moreover privately convinced that Archie was, and would remain, very little better than an idiot all his life long. Now, it is well known that English country gentlemen are never idiotic. What was the elder Dr. Rollinson's real opinion about Archie's relapse? The only direct evidence worth having on this point--his own--is unfortunately not forthcoming, and we are obliged to depend on such inaccurate or interested hearsay as has just been quoted above. It seems likely that he came to the conclusion that stupidity was the boy's normal condition and that his seven years of brilliance had been something essentially abnormal and temporary, and important only from a pathological point of view. Indeed, there was nothing in the transmuted Archibald's condition that was susceptible of being treated as a disease. He was as healthy as the average of boys of fourteen (if he were a boy of fourteen, and not a child of seven). He knew nothing, and had retained nothing, of his other life; he had to be taught his letters--and a terrible job that was, by all accounts; he occasionally expressed a desire to see his nurse Maggie--who, the charitable reader will rejoice to hear, had been honestly married since we last heard of her. He was greatly puzzled to find himself so much taller than when he last knew himself; and it was a long time before he could be induced to recognize his own reflection in the looking-glass. Needless to say that everything connected with the secret chamber and the silver rod was completely erased from his mind; and though he had been found with the rod in his hand, he could not tell what it was or where he got it. In this connection, however, I will mention something which, if it be true, throws a new and strange light upon his psychological condition. There is reason to believe that he visited the secret chamber in a somnambulistic state. The evidence on which this supposition is founded appears, at this distance of time, rather imperfect; but it is certain that a few weeks after the boy's entrance upon his unintelligent state, the silver rod was lost sight of; and it is almost certain that during the time of its disappearance it was lying in its hidden receptacle under the floor beside the mantelpiece. But in that case, who but Archibald could have put it there? and when could he have put it there save in his sleep? It is known that he was a somnambulist during his unenlightened period, though never in his alternate state; and if he, as a somnambulist, remembered the hiding-place of the rod, it follows that he must also have remembered the rod's use, and visited the secret chamber. Thus it would seem that only in the boy's waking hours was he oblivious and stupid; in his dreams he truly lived and was awake! Here, then, is a complication of absorbing interest, which I will leave for physicians and metaphysicians to fight out between themselves. For my part, I can only look on in respectful bewilderment. But we must leave Archibald for the present, and occupy our minds with the proceedings of the other personages of this drama. An era of disaster was in store for most of them. It is curious to note how the proverb that misfortunes never come single was illustrated in the case of these people. Fate seems to have launched its thunderbolts at them all at once, as if making up for lost time; or like a playwright, who clears his stage of all secondary and superfluous characters, and leaves a free field wherein the two or three principal people may meet and work out their destiny unimpeded. Colonel Battledown fought under Wellington against Soult at Orthez; and in a charge of the French cavalry the gallant officer and genial gentleman was cut in the head by a sabre-stroke and ridden down; and when picked up after the battle he was dead. He was buried on the spot; the practice of sending the corpses of heroes and others careering over the face of the earth, in search of a spot of loam worthy to receive them, was not at that time so fashionable as it has since become. But the news of his death came home, and put his friends in mourning, and made Mistress Kate the heiress of a great property at the age of fourteen. But she was older than her years, and was generally considered to be "just the sort of person to be an heiress," whatever that may be. I suppose she was exceedingly handsome, with a proper sense of her importance, and a capacity of keeping an eye upon what she considered her interests. At the same time many actions of hers indicate that she was occasionally liable to ungovernable impulses, and that her temper was fitful and wayward. Such a woman would make a capital heroine for a modern novel; she would stand a lot of analyzing. The tender relations which had subsisted between her and Archibald were perforce broken off. What can you do with a lover who suddenly ceases to have the most distant recollection of you, who does not believe you when you tell him your name, and whose only associations with that name date seven years back and are disagreeable? Nobody can blame Kate for giving Archibald up; she would have been more than human if she could have intrusted her heart to the keeping of a half-witted wizard, whose mysterious likeness to, or connection with, a charming young gentleman rendered him only the more undesirable. Poor Kate! If she gave her heart to Archibald, and then Archibald became somebody else, what shall we say became of her heart? Must it not have been irretrievably lost, and shall we be surprised if we hereafter detect in her a tendency to heartlessness? The next one to drop was Sir Clarence Butt Malmaison. The jolly baronet was never the same man after the relapse of his second son, whom he had grown to love more than his first-born, and to whose future he had looked forward with much ambitious anticipation. He used to sit for hours at a time sadly watching the child's sluggish gambols about the nursery floor; ever and anon trying to arouse in his darkened mind some sparks of the former brightness, and, when the effort failed, sighing heavily, sometimes with tears trickling down his ruddy old cheeks. If Archibald had never passed through that period of deceptive promise, it is probable that he would have received a fair amount of affection as he was, and he would at all events not have committed the unpardonable offence of inspiring hopes which were not destined to be fulfilled. Sir Clarence felt like the man in the fairy tale who received from the fairy a purse of gold, but on opening the purse to handle the money, found nothing in his grasp but a bunch of yellow autumn leaves. The heroic end of his friend the Colonel served to augment the baronet's depression of spirits; nor was his gloom lightened by the reflection that Kate's inheritance of the estate would now in no way advantage Archibald. So, what with one thing and another, it must be confessed that Sir Clarence ended by taking too much wine after dinner. And the more wine he drank, the less inclination did he feel to keep up his hardy outdoor habits of riding and shooting; and, consequently, the more moody and plethoric he became. At length he nearly quarrelled with Dr. Rollinson because the latter told him plainly that the bottle would be his coffin; and a few days later he did quarrel, and very violently too, with the Honorable Richard Pennroyal. This gentleman, it seems, had ridden over to Malmaison and stayed to dinner; and at dessert the conversation got round to the present melancholy condition of local affairs. "Everything's going to the dogs!" cried poor Sir Clarence, with an oath; "and no gentleman, by ---, ought to condescend to exist!" "Come, Malmaison," said Pennroyal, smiling and cracking filberts, "you're going too far. Things are not so bad. And there are compensations!" "Compensations? What compensations? What the devil do you mean?" "Ha, ha! Well, for instance, about the poor Colonel. Of course, we're all dooced sorry to lose the Colonel; fine old chap, and a good hand at piquet. But after all he had to go some time; and then what happens? The fair Miss Battledown becomes the richest heiress in the three counties." "Ay, and what's the compensation in that? What good does her being an heiress do me? Can my boy marry her? Answer me that!" "Well, I should fancy not; but somebody else can." "Somebody else? Who, I'd like to know?" bawled Sir Clarence. "Let me see the scoundrel who'll dare to marry Kate Battledown--let me see him!" "I hear you quite plainly, Malmaison; and I wouldn't exert myself so much if I were you--you know what the doctor said. As for Miss Battledown, surely she has a right to marry whom she pleases, hasn't she?" "No, she has not!" returned the baronet, getting angrier than ever. "She belongs to my Archibald; and if any scoundrel--" "Really, you are intolerable, Sir Clarence," interrupted Pennroyal, still smiling, but not a pleasant smile. "A man whose temper is faulty at the best of times should be more careful to avoid whatever tends to make it worse;" and as Pennroyal said this he glanced significantly at the decanter--of which, to do him justice, he was very sparing himself. "Pennroyal!" said the old baronet, drawing himself up with a good deal of dignity, "your father and I were friends before you were born, and you're my brother-in-law; but if you were not sitting at my table, I'd teach you better manners than to lecture your elders. I said I should like to see the scoundrel who would dare to marry Kate Battledown--and--and what is that to you?" "Well, it's just this," returned Pennroyal, quietly; "I'm going to marry her myself!" Sir Clarence started up from his chair with a tremendous oath--and sat down again. He was putting a terrible restraint upon himself. Not for his life would he outrage the guest who was beneath his roof. His face became dark red, and the veins on his forehead and in his neck stood out and throbbed visibly. His eyes were fixed staringly upon the impassable visage of the Honorable Richard, and he drew his breath with difficulty. There was a pause of some duration, broken only by this stertorous breathing, and by the deliberate cracking of the guest's filberts. At last, with a tragic effort of courtesy that was almost grotesque, the poor gentleman pushed the decanter toward his brother-in-law and deadly enemy, accompanying the act by a rattling sound in the throat, probably intended as an invitation to help himself. But the struggle was too severe. The next moment the baronet's eyes rolled wildly, a gasping noise broke from him, and he fell forward with his head on the table. Mr. Pennroyal promptly arose and rang the bell. "Send for the doctor at once," he said to the servant who appeared. "Sir Clarence has overdrunk himself, or overeaten himself, I fancy. And help me to put him on the sofa and loosen his neckcloth. There--very distressing. Apply the usual remedies, while I step up-stairs and speak to Lady Malmaison." The usual remedies availed little, and when Dr. Rollinson arrived, four hours afterward, it was already evident that even he could be of no use. Sir Clarence never fully regained consciousness, and two days later he ceased to breathe. There was an inquest, resulting in a verdict of death by apoplexy, and followed by a handsome funeral. The widow of the deceased, who was a lady of easily-stirred emotions and limited intellect, wept at short intervals during several weeks thereafter, and assured the Honorable Richard that she had no one in the world to depend on besides him. Archibald, who had moved about the house during this season of mourning with handsome vacant face and aimless steps, betrayed little grief at the family loss or comprehension of it; but whenever Pennroyal was in the way, he followed him round with a dog-like fondness in strange contrast with the vivid antipathy which he had manifested toward him in his other phase of being. As for Archibald's brother, now a pale and slender but dignified youth of nineteen, he assumed the title of Sir Edward, and the headship of the house, with a grave propriety of bearing that surprised those who had only looked upon him as a moping scholar. Undemonstratively, but surely, he gave evidence that he understood the responsibilities of his position, and that he knew how to make himself respected. He did not encourage his mother in her unrestrained dependence upon Pennroyal; and between the latter and him there appears to have arisen a coolness more or less marked. Certainly, Pennroyal was far from loving the ceremonious and punctilious young baronet, who would neither drink nor play cards. Toward Archibald, on the other hand, he exhibited a cynical and contemptuous sort of good-humor; often amusing himself by asking the poor dull-witted youth all sorts of questions about events which had occurred in his enlightened period, and concerning which, of course, Archibald was unfathomably ignorant. The Honorable Richard Pennroyal was not the first man who has failed to see whence his greatest danger was to be expected. VII. That piece of news with which Mr. Pennroyal had killed Sir Clarence was no more than the truth. He was the betrothed husband of the beautiful heiress, Miss Battledown; and the three counties, on the whole, approved the match. It would consolidate two great contiguous estates, and add one considerable fortune to another. There was a rather wide discrepancy in ages, Pennroyal being about forty, while Miss Battledown was only in her nineteenth year; but that mattered little so that they agreed in other respects. Miss Battledown was generally believed to have very proper ideas as to her duties and responsibilities as an heiress. Since poor Archibald Malmaison lost his wits, she had received more than one offer which a young lady who was weak-minded enough to regard only personal attractions might have been tempted to accept; but she had needed no elder person to counsel her to refuse them. In fact, she had at one time allowed it to be inferred that she deprecated the idea of being married to any one; and this demonstrated a commendable maidenly reserve; but it was neither to be expected nor desired that she should adhere to such a resolution in the face of good reasons for changing it. And Mr. Pennroyal was an excellent reason. He had passed through the unsteady period of his life; he had lived down the vaguely discreditable reports which had once been circulated at his expense; he had shown himself a thrifty landlord; and the very fact of his being a widower invested him with a certain respectability not always appertaining to unmarried gentlemen of his age. Finally, he belonged to a noble and distinguished family, and though there was no likelihood of his acceding to the title, who was better qualified than he to illustrate the substantial virtues of an English country gentleman? We are without detailed records of the early progress of this charming love affair. The inference is that it proceeded upon orthodox and unexceptional lines. Mr. Pennroyal would make known to the widow of the late Colonel the aspirations of his heart, and would receive from her permission to address himself to the lady of his choice. After the lapse of a few weeks or months (as the case might be) of mutually complimentary interviews and correspondence, the swain would entreat the maid to name the day which was to make him the happiest of men. She would delay and hesitate for a becoming while; but at length, with a blush and a smile, would indicate a date too distant for the lover's impatience, yet as near as a respect for the _convenances_ of wealthy virginity could permit. And now, all preliminaries being settled, the preparations would go forward with liberality and despatch. It had been at first arranged that the wedding should be solemnized at the house of the bride; but, for some reason or other, this plan was subsequently changed, and Malmaison was fixed upon as the scene of the ceremony. The great dining-hall, which had more than once been put to similar uses in years gone by, was made ready for the occasion. It was a vast and stately apartment, sixty feet in length by forty in breadth, and its lofty ceiling was richly carved in oak; while around the walls were arranged suits of historic armor, and swords, pikes, and banners, the relics of ancestral valor. It was on the ground-floor of the most ancient part of the house, immediately below that suite of rooms of which the east chamber was one. It had not been used as a dining-hall since the old times when retainers fed at the same table with their lords; but family celebrations had been held there; and at the coming of age of the late Sir Clarence, in 1775, it had been the scene of a grand banquet to the neighboring nobility and gentry. The floor at the eastern end of the room was raised some eight inches above the level of the rest; and it was here that the bride and bridegroom were to stand. A very reverend dean was secured to pronounce the service; and there were to be eight bridesmaids and a best man; the latter being none other than poor beclouded Archibald himself. This choice created a good deal of surprise and comment. The fact appears to have been that the post of "best man" had, in the first instance, been offered to young Sir Edward Malmaison, who, however, declined it. His reason for so doing was, in the first place, disapproval of the match; he holding the opinion that the widower of his aunt might as well have refrained from a second nuptials, and that, at all events, he should have selected any one rather than her who was to have been the wife of Archibald. His second objection was a personal dislike to the Honorable Richard, and an indisposition to encourage his intimacy with the family. But Sir Edward could not so far oppose his mother's wishes as to forbid the marriage being celebrated at Malmaison; and being obliged to concede so much, he wisely deemed it most consistent with his dignity to adopt a manner as outwardly gracious as was compatible with self-respect. Accordingly, when Pennroyal--whether maliciously, or from honest good-will toward one who manifested an almost child-like attachment to himself--chose Sir Edward's brother in his default, Sir Edward offered no open opposition. If he remonstrated privately with Archibald, his arguments were void of effect, and would have been, besides, counteracted by Lady Malmaison's influence. It is needless to say that Archibald was immensely proud of the compliment (as he considered it), and took care to celebrate his distinction at all times and places, opportune or otherwise--seeming, indeed, to think and talk of little else. It is not probable that he fully comprehended the significance of the matter, as he was certainly far from perceiving its ironic aspect; nevertheless, his dull brain received more stimulus from the prospect than from any other thing that had befallen him, thereby furnishing sardonic humorists with the criticism, that if the Honorable Richard Pennroyal would keep on burying his wives, and choosing Archibald as best man for the new-comer, the youth might in time become approximately intellectual. The wedding-day was fixed for the 5th of March, 1821--a date which was long remembered in the neighborhood. Fortunately we have ample accounts of everything that occurred--the testimony of many eye-witnesses, which, through varying in some unimportant details (as is inevitable), agree nevertheless upon all essential points. I shall give the gist of the narrative as concisely as a proper attention to its more important phases will allow. Miss Kate Battledown, with her mother, came to Malmaison on the evening of the 4th, and spent the night, the ceremony being appointed at eleven the next forenoon. The young lady spent an hour or so, before going to bed, in conversation with Archibald, who, in his pleasurable excitement over the forthcoming event, was much more lively and conversable than usual. As they walked side by side up and down the great hall, at one end of which some workmen were still engaged in arranging the decorations for the morrow, they must have made a handsome picture. Kate was at this time a lithe and graceful figure, slightly above the medium height, and possessing a great deal of "style;" in fact, young as she was, she had been for some time regarded as a model of fashion and deportment by all the aspiring young women within a radius of twenty miles. She was dressed on this evening in a gown of some thin, white material, the frilled hem of which failed by at least six inches to reach the floor, thereby displaying a pair of arched feet and slender ankles, clothed in open-work silk stockings. The skirt of this gown began immediately beneath the arms, and every contour of the wearer's form could be traced through its close-fitting and diaphanous folds. Miss Battledown's arms were bare, save for the black silk netted mittens that she wore; her dark curling hair was gathered pyramidally on the top of her head, and fastened with a black ribbon; a black velvet band encircled her white throat, and there was a row of black bows down the front of her dress. Her forehead was narrow and compact, her large brown eyes were perhaps a trifle closer together than they should have been, her nose was delicate, her lips blunt-cornered and rather full than thin; the whole expression of her face spirited and commanding. As for Archibald, he was a handsome vacancy, so to speak; a fine physical man wasted for lack of a spiritual man to carry him about and use him. His regular, finely moulded face, with its healthy pallor and its black eyes and hair, always had a dim, pathetic look of having forgotten something. His figure, symmetrical and full of strength, moved itself awkwardly and unmeaningly, as though ignorant of its own capabilities, and rather encumbered than otherwise by their redundance. His smile, which drew his features into their handsomest attitude, was nevertheless rather silly, and seemed to last on after he himself had forgotten what he was smiling for. His hands--strong, well-formed hands of the slender and long-fingered type--hung helplessly at the end of his arms; or, if he attempted to use them, each finger appeared to have a different idea of what was to be done, and one and all fumbled drowsily and shiftlessly at their task. The young man wore the high-collared coat, short waistcoat, and clinging pantaloons of the period; and his black hair hung down on his shoulders in natural luxuriance of curls. Poor Archibald accepted meekly whatever was given him to put on; but he would not let his hair be cut, or even anointed with the incomparable oil of Macassar. "And so you are glad, Archie?" said Mistress Kate, continuing their talk. "Oh, glad! yes, glad!" replied Archie, nodding his head slowly and solemnly. "You don't regret me, then, at all?" "Oh, regret, no!" said Archie, shaking his head with the same sapience and gravity. "Why do you always repeat what a person says, without seeming to know what it is? There used to be a time, sir, when regret would have been far too mild a word for you. Have you forgotten all that? Have you forgotten Lord Orville and Evelina?" "Forgotten, yes; all forgotten!" "Come, now, I wish you to remember. You understand that I am to be married to Richard Pennroyal tomorrow--to Richard Pennroyal!" "Uncle Richard, dear Uncle Richard. I love Uncle Richard!" "Do you love no one beside him? don't you love me?" "Don't love you, oh, no!" "Archie, have you forgotten how we were married in the back garden, and how you used to say I was your little wife; and you wanted to fight a duel with Richard because he had taken me on his knee and kissed me?" "See how pretty!" exclaimed Archie, whose attention had been fixed during this speech upon two of the workmen who were unrolling between them a piece of crimson cloth appertaining to the hangings. "What a creature!" muttered Kate to herself. To have her romantic souvenirs ignored even by this simpleton vexed her a little. Perhaps, too, she had another reason for regretting her companion's witlessness. She could remember when she had cared for him--or for something called him--more than she cared now for the man she would wed to-morrow. Why was he not the same now as then? His face, his hands, his figure--these were the same, or rather they were handsomer and more manlike than formerly. Why could not the soul, or whatever may be that mysterious invisible motive-power in a man--why could it not have stuck to its fortress during these seven years past? Here were five feet eleven of well-sculptured living clay, that had been growing and improving for more than one and twenty years; and for an inhabitant, nothing but a soft foolish child, destitute of memory, intelligence, and passion. Such reflections may have passed through the mind of the young heiress; and then she may have thought, glancing at him, "If my Archibald were here, to-morrow might see another spectacle than that put down in the programme." She might have thought this; she did not and of course would not on any account have uttered such a sentiment aloud. But it would be unjust to her taste and sensibility to suppose that, apart from worldly and politic considerations, she should have really preferred a sharp-featured, thin-haired, close-fisted gentleman of forty to a conceivable hero of half that age, dowered with every grace and beauty, not to mention Miss Tremount's seventy thousand pounds. Is she to be blamed if she sighed with a passing regret at that hero's mysterious disappearance? Yes, he had disappeared, more mysteriously and more irrevocably than old Sir Charles seventy years ago. Where in the heavens or the earth or under the earth, indeed, was he? Did he still exist anywhere? Might she dream of ever meeting him again--that hero?...! Bah! what nonsense! "Pretty!" repeated Archie, who, in the subsidence of his other faculties, had retained an appreciation of color. "Poor boy--poor thing!" said Kate; "you lost a great deal when you lost your wits; between being a groomsman and a bridegroom there is a very wide difference. And you don't even care--perhaps that's your greatest loss of all--ha, ha! Come, Archie, it's time for little fellows like you to be asleep." "Kate--" began Archie; and paused. "What?" "Do you love anybody?" She met his look of dull yet earnest inquiry with a contemptuous smile at first, but afterward her smile died away and she answered soberly: "I did once." "I did once, too!" rejoined Archie, with a sort of sluggish eagerness. "You did--when?" demanded she, with the beginning of a heart-beat. "I think I did--once--when I was asleep." She laughed shortly and turned away. "Yes, sleep is the best thing for you, Archie; you had better sleep all the time now; it will be too late to wake up to-morrow. Good-night, Archie." VIII. Old Miss Tremount had come up from Cornwall for the occasion, accompanied by her poodle, her female toady, and her father confessor. The good lady had altered her will some years before, on hearing of her favorite nephew's changed condition, and it was feared she would leave her money to the Church of Rome, of which she was a member. But on receiving the announcement of her intended visit, Lady Malmaison had begun to entertain hopes that Sir Edward might succeed in so favorably impressing his aunt as to induce her to divert at least some portion of her thousands in his direction. But it is not likely that Miss Tremount had come to Malmaison with any such views; in fact, her reason for coming had little or no connection with the late baronet's family. It was not generally known that, between forty and fifty years previously, there had been tender passages between Colonel Battledown and this snuffy old maid, whose soul was now divided between her cards and her psalter. So it was, however; they were even betrothed to one another, though the betrothal was kept a secret, the Colonel then being a comparatively penniless young lieutenant, and as such by no means a desirable son-in-law from the parental point of view. An elopement was contemplated so soon as the young lady should be of age; and it would be difficult to explain the occasion of the trumpery quarrel between the lovers, which ended in the lady taunting the gentleman with caring only about her money, and resulted in the rupture of the engagement. Doubtless it might have been renewed; but at this juncture the lieutenant was ordered away on active service to the American Colonies, where he remained for some years. Later, he was stationed in India; and the next time he met his old love, in London, he was twenty years older than when she had last seen him, and a major, and with ribbons on his breast, and a wife on his arm. Miss Tremount never betrayed any grief or disappointment, except in so far as she remained single all her life, and latterly waxed religious and became a convert to the Jesuits. But when the Colonel was dead, and she heard that his daughter was about to be married, she resolved to make a journey to Malmaison; and who can tell whether in the bottom of her heart, hidden even from her father confessor, she may not have cherished a secret purpose of making Mistress Kate her heir? It is certain at all events that she brought her will with her in her trunk. This romance, I say, was known to but few, and as Miss Battledown did not happen to be among the number, she was less cordial in her behavior to the old lady than she might otherwise have been. Kate was not constitutionally a lover of old women, and not herself old enough to be aware that no truly charitable person should ever be inattentive to seventy thousand pounds, no matter to how unprepossessing a human being the money might be attached. Her manner, therefore, was tolerant and patronizing rather than flattering; and honest Lady Malmaison, though she liked Kate very much, and would have been delighted to see her inherit seventy thousand pounds from the Shah of Persia or the President of the United States, was not quite so unnatural an idiot as to recommend to the young lady a more conciliating behavior. As for Miss Tremount, she preserved her composure and kept her counsel perfectly, and never referred to her will even in her most unguarded moments. She was courteous and complimentary to Sir Edward, indulgent to Archibald, kind and sisterly to Lady Malmaison, and quietly observant of everything and everybody. On the wedding morning she criticised and admired the bride's toilet with a taste and appreciation that caused the proud young beauty's eyes to sparkle; and just before the party entered the hall, she pressed Kate's hand affectionately, and said, in her gentlest tones, that she hoped she would be happy. "I have always looked upon your mother as one of the happiest of women, my dear," she added. "May your fortune equal hers!" This good-natured benediction caused Lady Malmaison a good deal of anxiety; Sir Edward smiled aside at what he fancied was a subtle stroke of irony; and Kate herself became thoughtful, and regretted that it was rather late in the day to begin to show Miss Tremount what a charming elderly lady she thought her. The great hall looked its stateliest that morning. The March sunshine came slanting through the tall windows, and lay in bright patches upon the broad floor, or gleamed upon the ancient swords and breastplates, or glowed in the festal hangings. Quite a large number of titled and fashionable persons were collected at the upper end of the room, whispering and rustling, and dressed in what we should now consider very wonderful costumes, though they were all the mode then. A few minutes before eleven the very reverend dean, and an assistant divine, together with the bridegroom and Archibald, entered and took their places in great pomp and dignity beneath the canopy which had been constructed for the occasion, and which, was covered with fresh flowers, whose fragrance breathed over the gay assemblage like a sacred incense. At eleven o'clock there was a general hush of expectation; and presently the door at the bottom of the hall was thrown open, and the bridal procession came in. Very pretty they looked as they paced, up the long stretch of carpeting which had been laid down for them to walk upon, and which had been scattered over with a profusion of flowers. The bride, with her veil and her orange-blossoms, was supported on the arm of Sir Henry Rollinson (the good Doctor had been knighted the year before by an appreciative sovereign), who was to give her away. She looked calm, pale, and exceedingly handsome. The widow of Colonel Battledown was escorted by Lord Epsom, the Honorable Richard's elder brother, and wore a very splendid pink turban, and red eyes. But all these details, and many more, may be read in the _Morning Post_ of March 7th, 1821, to which I refer the curious. The service commenced. As Sir Henry Rollinson was in the act of giving the bride away, he happened to glance at Archibald, and observed that the latter wore a very strange expression on his face; and a moment afterward the young man dropped into a chair that happened to be near him, pressing his head between his hands, and breathing heavily. No one else noticed this incident; and Sir Henry, who supposed the youth was going to faint, was of course unable at the time to afford any assistance. The service went on. Richard Pennroyal and Catherine Battledown were pronounced man and wife; and man was warned not to put asunder those whom God had joined together. The ring shone on the new-made wife's finger. The very reverend dean gave the pair his blessing. All this time Archibald remained with his head between his hands, the physician watching him not without apprehensions, and inwardly cursing the folly of those who were responsible for the poor half-witted creature's appearance in such a scene. The register was now brought forth, in which the happy couple and their friends were to inscribe their names. The principal personages signed first. It came to Archibald's turn. It had previously been ascertained that he knew how to string together the requisite letters upon paper. There he sat, with his head in his hands. Sir Henry touched him on the shoulder. "Now, then, lad--Archie! wake up! Come! you're wanted!" He spoke sharply and imperatively, in the hope of rousing the young fellow out of his stupor, and at least getting him decently out of the room. Archibald raised his face, which was deadly pale and covered with sweat, and looked at the persons around him with a kind of amazed defiance. He started to his feet, oversetting his chair as he did so, which rolled down the steps of the dais and fell with a crash on the stone floor below. "I came in by the staircase door!" he said in an excited voice, which startled every one who heard it, so different was it from his usual tones. "If you thought it locked, you were wrong. How else could I have come?... When did you bring me here? This is the great hall! What have you been doing? How came _you_ here?" There was a dead silence. Every one felt that some ugly thing was about to happen. Several women began to laugh hysterically. It seems to have been supposed, at first, that Archibald had exchanged his inoffensive idiocy for a condition of raving madness. The old physician was probably the only one present who had a glimmering of what might be the truth. The Honorable Richard Pennroyal had none. He pushed between the venerable knight and his "best man," and relying upon his oft-proved and established influence over the latter, he took him firmly by the arm, and looked in his face. "Don't make a fool of yourself, Archie," said he, in a low distinct voice, in which was a subdued ring of menace. "It's all right. You're my best man, you know. You are to sign your name as one of the witnesses of the marriage--that's all." "I have witnessed no marriage," replied Archibald, returning with surprise Richard's look. "Who are you?" he continued, after a moment. Then he exclaimed, "You are Richard Pennroyal--I didn't know you at first, you look so old!" "Oh, the fellow's quite mad!" muttered Richard, turning away with a shrug of the shoulders. "I should have known better than to run the risk of having such a lunatic here. We must have him moved out of the room at once." Young Sir Edward overheard this latter sentence. "Pardon me for reminding you that my brother is at home in Malmaison," he said gravely. "Oh, as you please, of course," returned Richard, frowning. Meanwhile Archibald had caught sight of Kate, and recognized her at once; and breaking away from his mother and Sir Henry Rollinson, who were endeavoring to quiet him, he came up to her and planted himself in front of her, just as Richard was approaching to take her off. Archibald took both her hands in his. "Kate, I have never seen you look so beautiful," he said. "But why have you got this white veil on?--and orange blossoms! It's like a wedding. What were they saying about a wedding? ... is it to be our wedding?" "The wedding has already taken place, my dear Archie," interposed the bridegroom, offering his arm to the bride, and smiling with no very good grace. "This lady is now Mrs. Pennroyal. Stand aside, like a good boy--" Archibald grasped Richard by the padded sleeve of his coat, and with an angry movement of his powerful arm threw him backward into the embrace of his new mother-in-law, who happened to be coming up from behind. "You are under my father's roof, or I would tell you that you are a liar," said the young man, grimly. Then turning to the bride, who had said not a word since this scene began, but had kept her eyes constantly fixed upon the chief actor in it, "He shall not insult you again, my dear. But all this is very strange. What does it mean?" "It means.... It is too late!" replied the girl, in a low, bitter voice. What could she have meant by that? Richard, white with fury, came up again. There was a general murmur and movement in the surrounding assemblage, who expected to see some deed of violence committed. "Mrs. Pennroyal," said he between his teeth, "I am obliged to request you peremptorily to take my arm and--and leave this house where guests are insulted and outraged!" Archibald turned, his face darkening. But Kate held up her hand entreatingly; and Archibald caught the gleam of the plain gold ring on her finger. At that sight he stopped abruptly, and his arms fell to his sides. "Is it true?" He asked in a tone of bewilderment. Here Sir Edward interposed again, with, his cool courtesy: "Mr. Pennroyal, and my friends, I trust you will find it possible to overlook the behavior of my brother. You may see that he is not himself. When he has had time to recover himself, he will ask pardon of each and all of you. Mr. Pennroyal, I entreat you and your wife to forget what has passed, and to reconsider the heavy imputation which has been cast upon my house. Let the shadow pass away which has threatened for a moment this--most auspicious occasion!" If the last words were ironical, the irony was too grave and ceremonious to be obtrusive, Pennroyal was fain to return Sir Edward's bow with the best grace he could muster. The rest of the company accepted the apology, as at least a formal way out of the difficulty. An effort was made to resume indifferent conversation, and to act as if nothing had happened. Sir Edward, with admirable self-possession and smiling courtesy, marshalled the guests out of the hall, to a neighboring room in which the wedding breakfast had been set out. Archibald remained behind, and the Doctor and old Miss Tremount remained with him. He stood still, with his arms at his sides, his glance fixed upon the floor. The Doctor and Miss Tremount exchanged a look, and then the latter went up to him, and took one of his hands between hers. "Do you know me, my dear?" she said. Archibald looked at her, and shook his head. "I am your aunt, Ruth Tremount. My dear, I am so sorry for you." "Can you tell me what is the matter with me? Am I mad?" "On the contrary," put in the Doctor, "you are yourself for the second time in your life. You've overslept yourself, my lad, that's all!" Archibald cast his eyes round the hall, as if searching for some one. "Where is my father?" he asked at length. There was an awkward pause. Finally Miss Tremount said, "My dear, your sleep has lasted seven years. Much may happen in such a length of time." "But my father--where is he? I want to see him; I will see him!" and he made some steps toward the door. "My poor lad, you cannot see him now--he ... he--" "Where is he?" cried Archibald, stamping his foot. "He has been for five years in his grave." Archibald stared at the Doctor a moment, and then burst out laughing. IX. But Archibald had come into possession of his intelligent soul once more; or he was awake again; or the pressure of the skull upon the cerebrum had yet another time been relieved; at all events there was now a brilliant youth in the flesh-and-blood envelope which, an hour before, had contained only a half-witted boy. When the first crash of the restoration was over, the new man began to accommodate himself with wonderful rapidity and keenness to the strange environment. He knew of nothing that had happened since that afternoon when he spoke with Kate in the east chamber, while the blood oozed from the cut on his forehead; but he accepted the facts with more than a youth's resolution and stoicism. The world had been turning round while he had been absent--somewhere! Well, then, by the force of his will and his splendid faculties he would get on even terms with it again--and more. Injury had been done him; irreparable injury, perhaps, but which still might be avenged. He was not discouraged; his spirit seemed to come upon life with all the freshness of a seven years' rest, and it reckoned nothing impossible. Of course his fresh metamorphosis created plenty of comment among the neighbors; Archibald Malmaison was the most talked-of man in that part of the country for several weeks, the impossibility of arriving at any satisfactory conclusion regarding his condition or conditions prolonging the wonder so far beyond the proverbial nine days. One party were vehemently of the opinion that he was mad; another party opposed this view with equal energy and just as much foundation. Both sides put forward plenty of arguments, and when they were refuted, appealed to Sir Henry Rollinson, who confirmed them both with equally sagacious shakes of the head. But this good gentleman was now getting near the end of his days, and, in fact, ceased living in the world before the close of the year. He did not depart without leaving a successor, however, and one who bade fair to do credit to his ancestry. This was Mr. E. Forbes Rollinson, his son, who had concluded a course of study at Vienna and Paris, and who returned to his native land with the highest diplomas that continental schools could give him. He was at this time a young man of about five and twenty, with a great square head and a short, compact figure. The wild jungle of beard and the terribly penetrating eye-glass which distinguished him in later times had not then made their appearance. Well, the new Dr. Rollinson had known something of Archibald as a boy, and was of course much interested (apart from his friendly feelings) in so remarkable a case. His theory upon the matter, in so far as he had formed one, did not on all points coincide with his father's; he belonged to a somewhat more recent school--more critical and less dogmatic. Still, it would be hazardous to assert that young Dr. Rollinson knew exactly what was the matter with Archibald--especially as he has seen reason to modify his first impressions more than once during the last fifty years. It is enough to remark here that he thought the affection was of a rhythmic or regularly recurrent character, a notion which its previous history went far to justify; and he consequently looked with interest to see whether the lapse of another seven years would bring about another change. To have discovered the orbit, so to speak, of a malady, is not, indeed, to have explained it; but it is always something. It would be more interesting to know what Archibald thought of himself; and were I, in this instance, a novelist dealing with a creation of my own, I might not shrink from an attempt to analyze his mental state. As it is, I can do no more than point to the curious field of conjecture which it here afforded: the young man left no confessions or self-analytic diaries; still less did he discuss his peculiarities with other people. With excellent good sense and no small courage, he accepted things as they were; he felt his individuality in no way diminished by the circumstance that it was intermittent or exchangeable; and perhaps it seemed no more strange to him than the nightly falling asleep of all mankind does to them. The one mystery is quite as strange as the other, only the sleep of seven hours is common to all, while that of seven years is probably unprecedented. One grotesque question suggests itself--or may do so shortly--and that is whether Archibald would be responsible in one phase of his being for a crime committed in another--for a crime, or any other act involving the welfare or condition of other people. The analogy with sleep does not here seem altogether satisfactory; for in ordinary sleep, or even somnambulism, we are not in active relations with our fellow-beings, and consequently our lawgivers have not devised a code to control our doings while in that state. A jury, in delivering its verdict, would be embarrassed by the reflection that although only one half of the culprit before them was guilty, they could not give that half its just punishment without at the same time unjustly punishing the half that was guiltless. A consistent individuality, therefore, though often a burden and a weariness, is still not without its advantages. Meanwhile an important change had taken place in the relations between the family of Malmaison and the Honorable Richard Pennroyal. The latter conceived himself to have been affronted by the former on the occasion of his marriage, and refused a reconciliation--which, to tell the truth, neither Sir Edward nor his younger brother were too anxious to force upon him. Lady Malmaison was still for peace, but her opinion had ceased to have much weight in the family counsels. At length matters came to a head somewhat in the following manner. Sir Edward Malmaison and Pennroyal happened to meet at the table of a common friend, and after the ladies had withdrawn, Pennroyal, who had taken more wine than was usual with him, began to talk at Sir Edward in an unnecessarily audible and offensive tone. Sir Edward kept his temper, and made no reply, not having as yet been personally addressed. Pennroyal after a while came round to where he was sitting, and the two gentlemen presently fell into conversation. Pennroyal finally declared that he had been insulted by a man who retained his present title and estates solely by his (Pennroyal's) permission and kindness. Sir Edward was constrained to ask him what he meant. Pennroyal thereupon began to utter disparaging reflections upon the late Sir Clarence, who, he intimated, was not legally entitled to his name. This brought on a dead silence, and all eyes were turned upon Sir Edward, whose pale countenance became yet paler as he said, with his imperturbable courteousness of phrase: "I must entreat Mr. Pennroyal not to indulge in innuendos, but to state explicitly whether he intends anything dishonorable to my father." "To a man of the world a word is enough," responded the Honorable Richard, insolently. "I am not here to tutor schoolboys in the comprehension of the English tongue." "I cannot allow you to evade my question," rejoined Sir Edward, with a gleam in his eye, though without an alteration in his voice. "You must explain what you have seen fit to insinuate before these gentlemen, one way or the other." Pennroyal laughed. "When you have lived a few years longer, young gentleman," said he, "you will learn to be cautious how you ask for too explicit information regarding the morals of your grandparents." At this brutal remark there was a general expression of indignation among the hearers; but Pennroyal, in no way abashed, added, "Let him disprove it if he can. Since he provokes me to it, I affirm it--his father had no right to the title. Let him prove the contrary if he can. I didn't force on the discussion, but I will tell young Sir Edward Malmaison, as he calls himself, that he holds property to which he has no claim, and that it depends upon my good-will and pleasure how long he holds it." The host--he was Francis Hastings Kent, Esq. and M. P., the same who afterward became famous in the Corn-law controversy--here interposed, and "spoke the sense of the meeting." "Egad, Pennroyal," cried he, "you are drunk, and you have insulted a gentleman at my table. I'll trouble you to make him an apology. I have no doubt that Sir Edward Malmaison's titles are just as good as yours or mine, and, begad, they sha'n't be called in question here at all events. I say you shall make Sir Edward an apology!" There was only one man in the room who evinced any disagreement with this speech, and that one was Major Bolingbroke, a retired officer of good family but of not altogether unexceptionable personal repute; he was believed to have fought more duels than are usually considered desirable; and he had for some months past been a constant inmate at the house of Mr. Pennroyal. "It's no affair of mine, of course," said this gallant warrior, "if Sir Edward chooses to put up with such language from a man, on the ground that he was drunk when he used it. Only, if there's going to be an apology, I should advise Sir Edward to exact a very full one, and lose no time about it." Sir Edward, however, rose carelessly, and said with a smile that he could not think of contributing any further to the unfortunate interruption of the social harmony; and adding that he had no doubt Mr. Pennroyal would, as soon as he had had time to recollect himself, make every explanation that the case demanded, he bowed and left the room. It was afterward suspected that Pennroyal's intoxication had been assumed for the purpose of insulting the heir of Malmaison with the more impunity; and that the Major was present expressly to aid and abet him. What, then, was the object, and what the grounds, of the charge which Pennroyal made? With respect to the latter, nothing was known until later; but the immediate result was this. Sir Edward went home, and appeared more cheerful and in better spirits than usual. He spent the next forenoon in his chamber, apparently engaged in looking over some papers. In the afternoon he mentioned to his mother and Archibald that he should be obliged to run up to London for a few days on business, and that he must start that evening. He had made no allusion to the affair at Francis Kent's house, and neither Archibald nor Lady Malmaison knew anything about it. That evening, accordingly, he bade them good-by, and departed seemingly with a light heart, bidding his brother act as his accredited plenipotentiary while he was away, and promising his mother to bring her the latest fashion in turbans when he returned. He was absent five days. The Honorable Richard Pennroyal, who had happened to be likewise called away on business at the same time, returned to his house some twenty-four hours before Sir Edward was brought in a carriage to Malmaison, with a bullet-hole just beneath the collar-bone. The fact is, the two gentlemen had travelled to Belgium instead of to London, and had there shot at each other in the presence of Major Bolingbroke (who gave the word) and of a friend of Sir Edward's whose name has not come down to us. Pennroyal had escaped untouched; Sir Edward, under the care of Dr. Rollinson the younger, lay for several weeks in a critical condition; but, when the bullet had been extracted, he rallied, and was able before long to rise from his bed and walk about the house. But though his strength had improved, he appeared to be harassed in mind; he carried on a considerable correspondence with the family lawyers in London, and was continually searching for something--what, no one could tell. Whatever it was he did not find it, and his anxiety did not diminish. Archibald had of course asked him about the particulars of the duel, and what led to it; but his brother had sought to make light of the affair, saying merely that Pennroyal had been very rude, and had failed to make a suitable apology; and that the insult having been public, he was forced to resent it. In answer to Archibald's question as to the subject of his present correspondence with the lawyers, he replied that it related to some old family traditions, and possessed only an antiquarian interest. Archibald accepted these answers in silence, but with entire incredulity. The brothers were fond of each other, but the strange conditions of the younger's life had prevented their attaining really intimate and confidential relations. Archibald was too proud either to demand further particulars from Sir Edward, or to make inquiries elsewhere. Moreover, there was perhaps less need of information on his side than on that of his brother, had the latter but known it. Archibald had secrets of his own. Pennroyal, meanwhile, kept quiet, waiting for the affair to blow over. Whether he had intended to kill Sir Edward, or whether he was glad that the duel had not resulted fatally, I cannot tell. Of course, neither he nor his wife were seen again at Malmaison. The neighbors were for some time disposed to give him the cold shoulder; but when his antagonist recovered, and the matter had lost its first freshness, there appeared to be little more against him than that he had committed an indiscretion while under the influence of liquor, and had afterward atoned for it in accordance with a code of honor which had not, at that epoch, fallen entirely into disuse. And, after all, what business was it of theirs? Pennroyal, however objectionable in himself, owned a large property and belonged to a good family. In short, society received the honorable prodigal in its bosom once more, and Mrs. Pennroyal reigned the undisputed toast for a while longer. But at the end of six or seven months a new order of events began. Sir Edward, either from anxiety, or from some imprudent exposure, fell ill again, and his wound opened afresh and became inflamed. His constitution had never been good for much, and the chances were all against its being able to survive this trial. Dr. Rollinson did all that could be done; but one morning Sir Edward asked to see his brother, and when the two were left alone together, he said: "Well, Archie, how shall you like to be Sir Archibald?" For a minute they looked at one another in silence. "Do you think so?" then said the younger, frowning a little. "I am certain of it." "Ned, we are brothers," said Archibald. The young men grasped hands, and Archibald half sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at the invalid, whose face was now bony in its emaciation, and his eyes sunken and bright. "Archie, I have something to tell you." "I feared so." "It is not anything that you could expect. That quarrel between Richard and me was about our father. Richard said he was--that is--" "Don't fear. Say it!" "That his mother was not Lady Malmaison." "He lied!" "So I told him. But that's not the end of it, unfortunately. He defied me to prove the contrary. Ever since I first got up after the duel, I have been looking for the papers relating to Sir Clarence's birth. They're not to be found. There is no record that our grandmother had any son at all. On the other hand, there is indirect evidence that our grandfather had an affair with some woman.... The amount of it is, I have not been able to establish Sir Clarence's legitimacy. And the worst is still to tell." "I know the rest; I know it all! Why didn't you say all this to me at first, brother? You have been harassing yourself with the idea that because you couldn't vindicate father, Malmaison might be claimed by Richard, under that old agreement of Sir Charles's time." "How did you know--" "I know everything. I know where the papers are that you have been looking for. Set your mind at rest, Ned. Sir Clarence was the legitimate heir. There was also a son by the other woman, but he died in infancy. Ned, why weren't you open with me? Richard has no more hold on our estates than my groom has. Blame him! I only hope he'll think otherwise! We'll ruin him first and kill him afterward." "If I had only known...." said the sick man, after a pause. "But you are certain? You have the proof? Where did you find the papers?" "I have them. Get well, and you shall know all about it. I have a good many curious things to tell you, and to show you, too." "Well, God be thanked! whatever becomes of me. It is late, Archie, but I'm beginning to get acquainted with you at last. It is my fault that I did not know you before. You are better fitted to bear the title than I." "No. If I thought so, I would not deny it; but if I inherit Malmaison, our family will--perish off the earth! I can foresee some things, Ned. The hope of the house lies in you; I shall bring only calamity. You must get well." Again the brothers grasped hands, looked in one another's eyes for a moment or two, and then Archibald went out; the day passed, and the evening fell. At midnight he was Sir Archibald of Malmaison. X. It was not long before the new baronet--the last of his line--began to make his influence felt. His temper was resolute, secret, and domineering; he bore himself haughtily among the neighboring squires, never seeking to please a friend or to conciliate an enemy. Few people liked him; many stood in awe of him. He seemed to be out of sympathy with his race; his strange, ambiguous history invested him with an atmosphere of doubt and mystery; his nature was not like other men's; it was even whispered that he had powers transcending those of ordinary humanity. It is probable that his remarkable personal beauty, which in moments of anger or energy gleamed out with an almost satanic intensity, may have lent substance to this impression; men shrunk from meeting the stern inquisition of his black eyes; and for women his glance possessed a sort of fascination, unconnected with his beauty. But there were other indications more direct than these. A century, or even half a century, previous to this time Sir Archibald might have found it difficult to avoid the imputation of witchcraft. After all, was not he the descendant of his forefathers? and what had some of them been? "Were there not people in the neighboring village of Grinstead who were willing to take affidavit that the handsome young baronet had the power to make himself invisible when he pleased? Nay, had not Mrs. Pennroyal herself, while she was yet a young maid, borne testimony to the fact--that he had suddenly stood before her, in broad daylight, in a room which had the instant before been empty? That room had always had a queer reputation; it was there, or thereabouts, that most of these strange goings-on took place. A servant, who had once wandered in there to announce to Sir Archibald that one of his lawyers had arrived, and was waiting to see him, had found the room vacant, though he had seen his master enter it only ten minutes before. Thinking that he must have gone out by the other entrance, through the stable, he was about to follow, when he noticed that this door was bolted on the inside. In some bewilderment, he was on the point of retiring, when he was startled by a burst of laughter which continued for near a minute, and which, though it echoed almost in his ears, and came apparently from the very air round about him, yet sounded faint and unsubstantial as if a vast distance nevertheless intervened. Whether near or far, it was unmistakably the laughter of Sir Archibald, but wilder and more scornful than had ever been heard from his lips. The honest footman was now thoroughly frightened, and made the best of his way out of the chamber; but before he could cross the next room and reach the passage-way beyond, the living and peremptory tones of Sir Archibald himself overtook him, and brought him back with failing knees and pallid cheeks to where the black-haired baronet was standing in the doorway. There he stood in flesh and blood, but cloaked, booted, and spurred, as if just returned from a journey. "What were you doing in this room?" demanded the baronet. The man faltered out his errand. "Hear this, once for all, and remember it," said the baronet, nor sternly nor roughly, but with a concentration of purpose in his mellow voice that seemed to stamp the words into the hearer's soul. "No one may enter this chamber except I open the door. Else harm may happen which I could not prevent. That is all. Now send Mr. Mawgage to me." That was all, but it was quite enough; in fact, the difficulty thereafter was to induce any one to venture into the room on any terms. It was believed to be haunted, and that Sir Archibald was either himself the ghost, or was in some way responsible for there being one. I have mentioned this story, to which the reader already possesses the clew, only by way of showing that Sir Archibald was making use, at that time, of the secret which he had discovered, and was taking the surest means of keeping it to himself. He had occupations in the inner chamber at which he did not wish to be disturbed. What those occupations were he confided to no living soul--indeed, there was no one who could have served him as a confidant. His life was a lonely one, if ever a lonely life there were. Whom had he to love, or to love him? Even his mother, now enfeebled both in body and mind, felt fear of him rather than fondness for him. She spent much of her time playing cards with her female companion, and in worrying over the health of her pet spaniels. But did Sir Archibald love no one?--at all events he hated somebody, and that heartily. He held Richard Pennroyal responsible for all the ills that had fallen upon Malmaison and upon himself; and he was evidently not the man to suffer a grudge to go unrequited. Pennroyal, on the other hand, was not disposed to wait quietly to be attacked; he came out to meet the enemy half way. In the spring of the year 1824--about nine months after Sir Edward's death--it was known in every mansion and public house for twenty miles round that a great lawsuit would by-and-by be commenced between Malmaison and Pennroyal, the question to be decided being nothing less than the ownership of the Malmaison estates, which Richard Pennroyal claimed, in the alleged failure of any legitimate heir of Sir John Malmaison, deceased--the father of Sir Clarence--but, as Pennroyal alleged, by a left-handed marriage. I have not gone into the details of this case, and should not detain the reader over it if I had; he may, if it pleases him, read it at full length elsewhere. It is enough to observe that Pennroyal brought forward evidence to show that he, and his father before him, had always had cognizance of the will or other document which entitled him to the property in dispute in the event provided for; and had only been withheld from putting in their claim thereto by the repeated and solemn assurances of Sir Clarence that no such irregularity as was suspected regarding his birth had in fact occurred. Latterly, however, from fresh information accidentally received, it appeared that Sir Clarence had either been guilty of a wilful and criminal misstatement, or that he had been deceived. In confirmation whereof, the Honorable Richard produced documents of undoubted genuineness, showing that an illegitimate son had been born to Sir John; and now called upon the defendant to prove that this son had died in childhood, or that he had not grown up to be Sir Clarence; and furthermore, having disposed of this difficulty, to show the certificate of birth of a legitimate heir to Sir John Malmaison, and to identify that heir with Sir Clarence. Now, there were certainly some awkward circumstances in respect of this illegitimacy question. Sir Clarence had known that he had had a brother born out of wedlock; and it is possible he also knew that the documents relating to his own birth were not where he could put his hands upon them. He may even have been aware that, were his title to be challenged, there would be serious technical difficulties in the way of vindicating it. At the same time, Sir Clarence was entirely and justly convinced that his title was good. The history of the illegitimate son was familiar to him, and to the rest of the family, in all its details. It was not, of course, an ordinary topic of conversation, but it was an acknowledged piece of family history. Sir John had been wild in his youth, and had made a good many loose connections before acceding to the baronetcy--his father, Sir Charles, the same who ate the venison pasty, having lived to see his heir a man of thirty. One of these connections had been with the daughter of a tenant; during its progress a marriage had been arranged between John Malmaison and a neighboring heiress. About the time that the marriage took place, the tenant's daughter had a child; Clarence himself was born about a year later. The child had lived five or six years only; after its death its mother had gone up to London, and had not since been heard of. This was all simple enough; the only trouble being that no one could tell what had become of the certificate of Clarence's birth, or of the other's decease. Consequently there was an opening for an evil-disposed person to assert what the Honorable Richard was now asserting. Where had the Honorable Richard got his information?--of the absence, that is to say, of these papers. It was never spoken of outside the family. It is only proper to observe that his brother, Lord Epsom, would have nothing to do with the affair, but explicitly and emphatically washed his hands of it. But this did not deter Richard; he had got his materials, he had decided upon his plan of action, and he was bound to go through with it. He entertained no doubts of his success, and he probably anticipated from it not only solid worldly advantage, but the gratification of an undisguised enmity. It would give him peculiar pleasure to augment his prosperity at the expense of Sir Archibald Malmaison. Considering that the outlook was so bad for him, the young baronet faced it with commendable fortitude. People who met him regarded him with curiosity, expecting him to appear disturbed, if not desperate. But he wore an aspect of satisfied composure, tempered only by his habitual haughtiness. He had interviews with his lawyers, seemed neither flurried nor helpless, and altogether behaved as if his victory over his opponent was placed beyond the possibility of a doubt. And yet, what could be his defence? Was he going to rely upon the title having remained so long unquestioned? Did he build his hopes upon a possible break in the chain of Pennroyal's evidence? The on-lookers could only conjecture. And now the time when conjectures would be exchanged for certainty was at hand. It was the autumn of the year 1825. One cool, clear, gray afternoon Sir Archibald had his horse saddled, and mounting him, rode out upon his estate. In the course of an hour or so he found himself approaching the pond, which, as has been already stated, lay on the border-line between Malmaison and the lands of Richard Pennroyal. As he drew near the spot, he saw at a distance the figure of a woman, also on horseback. It was Kate--Mrs. Pennroyal. She was riding slowly in a direction nearly opposite to his own, so that if they kept on they would meet on the borders of the pond. Sir Archibald had not met this lady for many months; and when he recognized her, his first impulse was perhaps to draw rein. Then he looked to see whether that were her impulse likewise. But she held on her course; and he, smiling in a defiant way, shook his bridle, and in a few moments they were but half a dozen yards apart. There they paused, as it seemed, by mutual consent. How lovely she looked! Sir Archibald saw it, and ground his teeth with a kind of silent rage. She should have been his. "Good-day, Mrs. Richard Pennroyal!" "Good-day, Archibald!" His name, coming with such gentleness and sweet familiarity from her lips, made his blood tingle. He had expected coldness and formality. "I had not looked forward to the honor of meeting you here," he said. "But we have met here before, I think." And so they had, in days upon which Archibald now looked back as does an exile upon home. His horse moved forward a few steps, and his rider only stopped him when he was within arm's length. "That seems long ago; and yet, when I look at you, I could almost believe it was but yesterday." "You have changed more than I," replied the lady, letting her eyes rest upon him with a certain intentness. This was true enough, physically speaking; the handsome boy was now a superb young man; but Archibald chose to interpret her words figuratively, and he answered bitterly: "You may have changed little; but that little in you has caused whatever change you find in me." "It is true, then, that you are angry with me? I had hoped otherwise," said Mrs. Pennroyal, with a sad dignity that sat well upon her. "Angry with you!" broke out Archibald, his face flushing. "Has it been a desire to keep my--my friendship that has caused you to--" Mrs. Pennroyal interrupted him, drawing herself up proudly. "Pardon me, sir, I had no intention of forcing your good-will. If you will be my enemy, please yourself, and perhaps I may learn to become yours." And she turned her horse as she spoke. But Archibald, thus seemingly put in the wrong, and unwilling now to terminate the interview so abruptly, pressed his heel against his horse's side, and was again beside her. "You misunderstand me," said he. "What could I think? You will not deny that your--that Richard Pennroyal has shown himself no friend of mine." "I shall deny nothing that you see fit to charge against me, sir," rejoined the lady, still hurt and indignant, and the more irresistible. Archibald reflected that she was not, perhaps, justly responsible for the malevolence of another person, even though that person were her husband; and from this thought to thinking that she might, perhaps, be inclined to sympathize against her husband and with himself, was an easy transition. This perilous fancy made his pulses throb and his eyes gleam. He caught her horse's bridle. "Do not go yet! Let us talk a little, since we are met." "What has Sir Archibald Malmaison to say to me?" "You called me 'Archibald' just now." "You called me 'Mrs. Richard Pennroyal'!" "Well--and so you are!" said he, between his teeth. "Do you think of me by that name?" she asked, turning her brown eyes on him for a moment, and then looking away. "Kate!" She put out her beautiful hand, and he took it and carried it to his lips. Thoughts fierce and sweet flew through his mind. But Mrs. Pennroyal, having gained her immediate end (which, to do her justice, was probably nothing worse than the gratification of a coquettish whim), knew how to take care of herself. She drew her hand away. "There--well--you have been very unkind, Archibald. Have we not been friends--have we not been together from the first? How could you believe that I could wish you any harm?" "Ah, Kate, but you married him!" "Well, sir, I as good as asked you to marry me first, and you would not do it." "You asked me!" "Yes; you have forgotten. It has all been so strange, you see. I hardly know, even now, whether you are the Archibald I used to know." "But I know, very well," returned he, grimly. "And you are the wife of my enemy, the man who is trying to ruin me. Kate," he broke off suddenly, "how did Richard know that those papers were missing in our family? I told you once--do you remember that day? And no one knew it except you." Mrs. Pennroyal would perhaps have preferred not to be asked this question. But since it was asked, she was bound to make the best answer she could. "It was for that I wanted to see you to-day," she said, after a pause. "I have been to blame, Archibald; but it was ignorantly. It was long ago--before all these troubles began to occur: while we were yet on good terms. Ah me! would we were so again!" "You told him, then?" "I did not know that I was betraying a secret. From what Richard said, I thought that he knew it, or at least suspected it; and I merely added my confirmation. Afterward, when I found how things were going, I begged him not to use that knowledge. But it was too late. I could not be at rest until I had told you, and asked you to forgive me." Archibald would not have believed this speech, if his head only had been concerned in the matter. Unfortunately, such was not the case. He believed it because he ardently wished to do so; and he forgave her the more easily, because that implied having her hand in his again for a few moments. "If I could only see you and Richard at peace again, I should be happy," resumed Mrs. Pennroyal, with a sigh. "Is it for him you fear, or for me?" inquired Archibald, smiling. "The danger is yours," she answered, diplomatically. He shook his head, still smiling: "Dismiss your anxiety, Kate. There is no danger for me or mine. Let Richard look to himself!" Mrs. Pennroyal was startled. She had looked upon the Malmaison case as virtually hopeless. This hint of the contrary gave her a strong sensation, not altogether unpleasurable. Richard was her husband, but he was not nearly so young as Archibald, and as to looks!--there there was no comparison. Archibald was simply the finest man in England. Perhaps Mrs. Pennroyal tad never been passionately fond of her husband; and, on the other hand, she had certainly liked Archibald very much. In the present quarrel she had felt that the propriety of being on the winning side was not diminished by the fact that it happened to be her husband's; but if it should turn out that her husband's was not the winning side after all--then there was matter for consideration. Of course, strictly speaking, her husband's misfortunes must be her own; but in this instance the nominal misfortune would be his failure to ruin Archibald, and Mrs. Pennroyal thought she could sustain that. No, the sensation was certainly not unpleasurable. But was it certain that Archibald was not mistaken? "I am very glad, for both our sakes," said she, at last. "I could never have endured to take your name and estates away from you. Then that notion that the papers were lost was a mistake?" "I can tell you nothing more," replied Archibald, looking at her. "Ah, you have not forgiven me--you do not trust me!" He checked his horse and hers, and turned full upon her: "Kate, you are the wife of my enemy, I must remember that! If I found you playing a double part between him and me, I should hate you more than I hate him; and then ... I should be capable of any crime. Well, I will not put it in your power. You will know all soon enough. Meantime, I trust you in this--to keep silence on what I have said to-day. Let him believe that he will succeed until he knows that he has failed. Will you promise that?" Mrs. Pennroyal saw no harm in making this promise, but she did not see why she should not make as great a favor as she could of granting it. "A wife should have no secrets from her husband, Archibald." "Have you never had a secret from him, Kate?" "You have no right to ask that!" Archibald laughed. "Are you as happy with him as the day is long?" She looked up for a moment, and their eyes met. "The days seem very long sometimes," she said, almost beneath her breath. "This day?" he demanded, bending toward her. "Autumn days are short, you know," she said, smiling a little, with averted face. "Do you often ride out in autumn?" "What else can I do, when my husband is away from home? I must go now--it is late." "And your promise?" For the third time that afternoon she gave him her hand. Her color was higher than usual, and her breathing somewhat uneven. She had not passed unscathed through this interview. Archibald's was the stronger spirit, and she felt his power--felt it, and liked to feel it! And he, as he held her warm and delicate hand in his own, was conscious of a strange tumult in his heart. Was fate, which he had hitherto found so adverse, going to change at last, and yield him everything at once--revenge and love in the same breath? A revenge consummated through love were sweet indeed. They parted at length, and rode away in opposite directions. This was their first meeting, but it was not their last by many. XI. Meanwhile the lawyers were keeping at work with commendable diligence, and Mr. Pennroyal was counting his chickens as hatched, and was as far as possible from suspecting the underplot which was going on around him. On the contrary, it seemed to him that he was becoming at last the assured favorite of fortune. For this gentleman's life had not been, in all respects, so prosperous as it appeared. To begin with, he had had a deplorable weakness for dicing and card-playing, which had frequently brought him in large sums, but which had ended by costing twenty times as much as they had won for him. He gave up these forms of diversion, therefore, and resolved to amass a fortune in a more regular manner. He studied the stock-market profoundly, until he felt himself sufficiently master of the situation, and when he entered the lists as a financier. He bought and sold, and did his very best to buy cheap and to sell dear. He made several lucky hits; but in the long run he found that the balance was setting steadily against him. All his ready money was gone, and mortgages began to settle down like birds of ill-omen upon his house and lands. It was at this period that he married Kate Battledown; and with the money that she brought him he began to retrieve his losses, and again the horizon brightened. Alas! the improvement was only temporary. Ill-luck set in once more, and more inveterately than ever. Kate's good money went after his bad money, and neither returned. A good deal of it is said to have found its way into the pockets of Major Bolingbroke, his second in the duel. The ill-omened birds settled down once more, until they covered the roof and disfigured all the landscape. To add to his troubles, he did not find that comfort and consolation in his matrimonial relations which he would fain have had. It is true that he married his wife first of all for her money; but he was far from insensible to her other attractions, and, so far from wearying of them, they took a stronger and stronger hold upon him, until this cold, sarcastic, and unsocial man grew to be nothing less than uxorious. But his wife recompensed his devotion but shabbily; her position had not fulfilled her anticipations, she was angry at the loss of her money, and upon the whole she repented having taken an irrevocable step too hastily. She felt herself to be the intellectual equal of her husband, and she was not long in improving the advantage she possessed of not caring anything about him. In a word, she bullied the unfortunate gentleman unmercifully, and he kissed the rod with infatuation. This state of things was in force up to the time of Mrs. Pennroyal's meeting with Archibald, as above described. After that there was a marked and most enchanting alteration in Mrs. Pennroyal's demeanor toward her husband. She became all at once affectionate and sympathetic. She flattered him, she deferred to him, she consulted him, and drew him on with delicate encouragements to consult her, to confide in her all the private details of his affairs, which he had never done before, and to intrust to her safekeeping every inmost fear and aspiration of his mind. At every point she met him with soothing agreement and ingenuous suggestion; and in particular did she echo and foster his enmity against Sir Archibald Malmaison, and urged him forward in his suit, bidding him spare no expense, since success was assured, and affirming her readiness to mortgage her very jewels, if need were, to pay the eminent legal gentlemen who were to conduct the case. This behavior of hers afforded her husband especial gratification, for he had always been a little jealous of Sir Archibald, and indeed one of the impelling motives to the present action had been a desire to pay his grudge in this respect. But the discovery that Mrs. Pennroyal hated the young baronet quite as much as he did, filled his soul with balm; so that it only needed the successful termination of the lawsuit to render his bliss complete and overflowing. Well, the great case came on; and all the nobility and gentry of the three counties, and others besides, were there to see and hear. There were bets that the trial would not be over in seven days, and odds were taken against its lasting seven weeks. Society forgot its ennui and settled itself complacently to listen to a piquant story of scandal, intrigue, imposition, and robbery in high life. The reader knows the sequel. Never was there such a disappointment. The learned brethren of the law opened their mouths only to shut them again. For after the famous Mr. Adolphus, counsel for the plaintiff, had eloquently and ingeniously stated his case and given a picturesque and appetizing outline of the evidence that he was going to call, and the facts that he was going to prove; after this preliminary flourish was over, behold, up got Mr. Sergeant Runnington, who appeared on behalf of the defendant, and let fall some remarks which, though given in a sufficiently matter-of-fact and every-day tone, fell like a thunder-clap upon the ears of all present, save two persons; and produced upon the Honorable Richard Pennroyal an effect as if a hand-grenade had been let off within his head, and his spine drawn neatly out through the back of his neck. I cannot give the learned Sergeant's speech here, but the upshot of it was that the plaintiff had no case; inasmuch as he relied, to make good his claim, on the absence of any direct evidence establishing the identity of the late Sir Clarence Butt Malmaison, and the decease of that illegitimate personage whom the plaintiffs sought to confound with him. What could have induced the plaintiff to imagine that such direct evidence was not forthcoming, Sergeant Runnington confessed himself at a loss to understand. He had cherished hopes, for the sake of common decency, for the sake of the respect due to the Bench, for the sake of human nature, that his learned brother on the other side would have been able to hold forth a challenge which it would be, in some degree, worth his while to answer; he regretted sincerely to say that those hopes had not been by any means fulfilled. Had he been previously made aware of the course of attack which the plaintiff had had the audacity to adopt, he could have saved him and other persons much trouble, and the Court some hours of its valuable time, by the utterance of a single word, or, indeed, without the necessity for any words at all. Really, this affair, about which so much noise had been made, was so ridiculously simple and empty that he almost felt inclined to apologize to the Court and to the gentlemen of the jury for showing them how empty and simple it was. But, indeed, he feared that the apology, if there was to be one, was not due from his side. It was not for him to decide upon the motives which had prompted the plaintiff to bring this action. He should be sorry to charge any one with malice, with unconscionable greed, with treacherous and impudent rapacity. It belonged to the plaintiff to explain why he had carried this case into court, and what were his grounds for supposing that it could be made to issue to his credit and advantage. For his own part, he should content himself with producing the documents which the learned counsel on the other side had professed himself so anxious to get a sight of, and to humbly request that the plaintiff be nonsuited with costs. Thus ended the great trial. People could hardly, at first, believe their own ears and eyes; but when the documents were acknowledged to be perfectly genuine and correct, when the learned Mr. Adolphus relinquished the case, not without disgust, and when the Court, after some very severe remarks upon the conduct of the plaintiff, had concluded a short address by adopting the learned Sergeant Runnington's suggestion as to the costs--when all was settled, in short, in the utterly absurd space of two hours and three quarters, then at last did society awake to a perception of the fact that it had been most egregiously and outrageously swindled, and that the Honorable Richard Pennroyal was the swindler. Nobody was at the pains to conceal these sentiments from the honorable gentleman, and he left the court with as little sympathy as ever disappointed suitor had. Poor man! he suffered enough, in more ways than one, on that disastrous day, yet one shame and agony, the sharpest of all, was spared him--he did not see the look and the smile that were exchanged between his wife and Sir Archibald Malmaison, when the decision of the Court was made known. XII. We are now drawing near the last scene of this strange and sinister history. The action confines itself almost entirely to the three chief figures. If Pennroyal had been twenty years younger when this catastrophe fell upon him, it might merely have had the effect of enraging him; but he was near fifty years of age, and old for his years, and it seems to have overwhelmed and cowed him. The cat still in his house, like a rat in his hole, saying nothing, and noticing nothing, but drinking a great deal of brandy. The fiery stuff did not excite him; it merely had the effect of keeping him from sinking into unconsciousness of his misery. He knew that he was a ruined man, and that it was too late to retrieve his ruin. Means and energy were alike lacking, and could never be supplied. He sat in his chair, and brooded over all his life, and realized the utterness of his failure; and nothing could rouse him--not even the intelligence that his enemy, Sir Archibald, having by the death of his aunt, Miss Tremount, come into an inheritance of upward of seventy thousand pounds, was buying up the mortgages, and would probably foreclose on him when he got him thoroughly in his power. Archibald had beaten him, and he would fight no more. Let him enjoy his triumph, and push it to the utmost. There was one point, at all events, on which Richard had the better of him, and this thought brought with it the sole spark of comfort that these evil days afforded him. He had his wife--the woman to win whom Sir Archibald would have given all his lands and fortune, and his soul into the bargain. Yes, Kate was his, and his only; and it was the resolve to keep her his, and thus spite his enemy as long as possible, that withheld Richard from seeking relief in suicide at this juncture. So Providence leads men from agony to worse agony, with intent, doubtless, to torture out of them the evil which they will not voluntarily relinquish. One winter evening, Richard sitting brooding and sipping brandy as usual, with a lamp burning on the table beside him, and the embers of the fire flickering on the broad hearth at his feet, there came a light, measured step and the rustle of a dress, and he knew that his wife was in the room. He raised his haggard visage and looked at her. What a goddess of beauty she seemed! How young, graceful, lovely! How pure and clear were the tints of her face, how lustrous dark her eyes, how soft her ample hair! How peerless she was! and all she was--all this treasure of fragrant womanhood--was his, and not another's. Ay, and his willingly; she really loved him, he thought; she had shown it of late; she cared for him, old, ruined, and degraded though he was. It was a strange thing; it was a pleasant thing. Perhaps, he thought, if he had had such a creature to love him in earlier days, he might not have been where he was now. But then, in earlier days, he was not a ruined and wasted man. "Kate!" "Yes, Richard." "Oh, never speak so formally! Am I not Dick, thy own dear old Dick--eh?" "I did not mean to be formal." "Come and sit here beside me--no, here, on the arm of my chair. It was good of you to come in here. I was getting lonesome. I wanted my Kate to tell me she loved me--eh?" "I only came in to say good-night. It is late." "Late?--pooh! It's not nine o'clock. Stay and be sociable a bit. There, I won't touch another drop if you'll stay." "I'm tired; I have a headache. You don't want me." "Not want you! Ay, but I do though! Without you, Kate, I should have been a dead man weeks ago. Not want you!" "Nonsense! what do you mean? You have drunk too much already, I fear." "I mean that, but for you, I'd have blown my brains out the day of the trial--after I'd blown out his, the scoundrel! But since I have you, I know a way to worry him better than by blowing his brains out. To know that you are mine is hell to him. And in that hell I'll keep him, as long as my body and soul will hang together!" "What should he care whether I am yours or not?" "Because he loves you--that's why he cares! Ay, you needn't start. He loves you, and it's hell to him to feel that another man has you. How many thousand pounds do you think he'd give to kiss this little hand as I kiss it now? I wish he could see me do it!" "Nonsense, you are crazy.... And so you only care for me to spite him?" "No, not that. God knows--if there is a God--I love you, Kate, with all there is left of me--except what hates him! That's my life--love for you and hate for him. And I believe I hate him less than I love you, though that's saying a great deal!" "Oh, I think you love that brandy better than you do me." "You do? If you say so, I'll never touch it again!" "Oh, I don't care. I don't want you to give up anything that makes you comfortable." "Ay, you do love me, don't you, Kate?" "Come, Richard, our courting days are over. And I must go. Good-by!" "No, don't go! I feel, somehow, as if I couldn't spare you to-night." "Shall I pour you out another glass?" "Yes--no! I'll drink no more to-night. Kate...." "Well?" "I'm getting old. In the natural course of things I should die long before you. I sha'n't die yet a while--but some time, you know. Will you promise something?" "I'll promise nothing to-night. I dare say you'll outlive me." "Promise, come what will, you'll never marry him; eh, Kate?" "Really, Richard, I--I never heard anything so foolish! I can't stay to hear any more such talk. You are not your right self. There--let me go!" "Go?--go where? Gad, I've a mind to say you sha'n't go! Well, yes, I didn't mean it; forgive me, Kate! Only you're my wife, you know, and I'm your husband; and I love you; and somehow I feel afraid to let you out of my sight--as if I might not see you again. Well, then.... But one thing you shall do--you shall give me a kiss before you go! Else you sha'n't go at all!" Thus compelled, Mrs. Pennroyal kissed her husband, or let herself be kissed by him; and then she escaped from the room, with a shudder and a sinking of the heart. Richard Pennroyal sat there alone; the embers of the fire were now gray and lifeless. He stirred them with his foot, and they fell into ashes. He felt cold. How still the house was; how lonely! And he had no pleasant thoughts to keep him company now that his wife had left him; but many thoughts, many memories that were far from pleasant, were lying in wait for him in the dark corners of his mind, ready to leap out upon him if he gave them a chance. Among them, why did the foolish face of crazy old Jane, his wife of many years ago, persist in obtruding itself? Why did it wear that look of stupid, unreasonable reproach? yes, unreasonable; for how was he to blame? He had but let things take their course; no more than that ... well, scarcely more! And yet that face, that silly old face, that dull, lifeless, drowned old face, kept meeting his in the dark corners, turn where he would. If he closed his eyes, it was still visible through the eyelids, and seemed nearer than ever. So he opened his eyes; and there hovered the face, in the gloom beyond the lamp. What an expression! Was it signalling him to come away? Was it mocking him for fearing to come? Fearing? He was not afraid. He was a Pennroyal; he had noble blood in his veins; though he was now a bit old and shaky, and had, perhaps, been taking a little too much brandy of late. But--afraid! not he. Why, he would follow the thing, if it came to that; follow it to.... He rose slowly from his chair, still keeping his eyes steadily fixed upon it, and moved toward it, with his hands outstretched. He did not get any nearer to it; it was retreating before him, like a will-o'-the-wisp. He kept on, crossing the length of the room; it seemed to pass through the substance of the door, and yet he saw it beyond. He opened the door softly; yes, there it was in the hall. A pistol was lying on the little table beside the door, which Richard knew to be loaded. Mechanically, and without looking at it, he took it up as he passed. Then down the hall on tiptoe, the shadowy, unmeaning face marshalling him the way, and leering at him if he hesitated. Ay, he would follow it to the end, now. Fortunately, the house-door stood open; there would be no noise in getting out. Out they glided, pursuer and pursued, into the cold stillness of the night. There was a moon, but it was dim and low down. The shadows seemed more real than the light. There was no snow to betray footprints. But whither would this chase lead? It seemed to be heading toward the northwest--toward Malmaison; ay, and toward the pool that lay on the borders of the estate. Richard shuddered when he thought of that pool, and of the grisly significance of his being led thither by this witless, idiotic old phantom of his dead wife's face. Stay, the face seemed to have got itself a body within the last few moments: it was a gray figure that now flitted on before him; gray and indistinct in the dim moonlight, with noiseless, waving drapery. It was going the very path that old Jane had gone that day, many years ago--her last day on earth; and yet, was she not here again to-night? And she was leading him to the pool; and what then? Swiftly she flitted onward, some seventy paces in advance apparently, now lost in shadow, now reappearing in the light. She never turned nor beckoned, but kept straight on, and Richard had much ado to keep pace with her. At length he caught the gleam of the dark pool some little distance beyond. He set his teeth, and came on. The gray phantom had paused at last. But was that Jane after all? Not Jane's was that tall and graceful figure. This must be some other woman's ghost. Was it a ghost? And if so, was that another--that man who issued from behind a clump of bushes, and came toward her? The two figures met; the man took the woman in his arms, and kissed her many times on the lips and eyes. Kisses! ay, those were kisses indeed! Now they seemed to be conversing together; his arms were round her waist. The moonlight revealed his features; it was the enemy--it was Archibald Malmaison! And the woman was not the dead wife, but the living one. "We are perfectly safe, my darling," Archibald was saying. "The room was all prepared for you, and there is no possibility of discovery. There will be a great outcry and confusion for a week or so, and they will search for you, dead and alive; and I along with the rest, the better to disarm suspicion. It will be settled, at last, that you must have escaped to some foreign country; or, maybe, Richard himself will fall under suspicion of having made away with you, as he did with his first wife. Sooner or later, at any rate, they will give up the search; and, whether or not, we shall always be free to each other. You could not persuade any one at Malmaison to so much as put his nose into the east chamber, and as to the other, you and I are the only living creatures who even dream of its existence. Darling, you will not mind being a prisoner for a little while, since love will be a prisoner with you?" The woman clung to him tremulously. "I did not know it would be so hard to leave him," she murmured. "I hate him, and yet it was hard. He is so wretched; and he is all alone. What will he do now? He kept saying that he loved me and asking me to love him, and to call him Dick; and ... he made me kiss him. Oh, Archie, I feel that kiss beneath all yours. I shall always feel it!" "No, this shall make you forget it--" "Hush! I hear something!" "You are nervous--" "Ah! look! It is he. Now God have mercy!" Sir Archibald looked; and there, indeed, stood the tall figure of the Honorable Richard Pennroyal, without his hat, and with an expression on his face that was a living curse to behold. And yet that face smiled and bowed with a hideous politeness. "Good-evening, Sir Archibald. Will you permit me to inquire whether you are armed?" Sir Archibald put his hand within his vest, and drew out a pistol. "Ah, that comes in very conveniently. Now, let us see. Mrs. Pennroyal, since you are my wife, perhaps you will be good enough to give us the word?--No, she insists upon fainting. Well, then, we must manage the best way we can. But let me entreat you to take your aim carefully, my dear Sir Archibald, for if you miss it will involve unpleasant consequences for Mrs. Pennroyal as well as for yourself. Now, I will toss up this pebble, and when it strikes the surface of the water we will fire. Is it agreed? Here goes, then." He had the pebble in his hand, and was in act to toss it, when the baronet, breaking silence for the first time, said: "Mr. Pennroyal, I am willing that this should go no further." "Scoundrel and coward!" snarled the other, his deadly fury breaking in a moment through the thin mockery of courtesy; "come up then, and be shot like the cur you are!" There could be no more words. Sir Archibald raised his pistol; his antagonist threw the pebble high in the air, and as it smote the smooth surface of the pool in its descent, both pulled trigger. Richard Pennroyal's weapon missed fire; Sir Archibald's bullet passed through his enemy's heart; he swayed backward and forward for a moment, and then fell on his face, hurling his pistol as he fell at the prostrate figure of his wife, who lay huddled on the ground; but it flew wide, and struck Sir Archibald on the temple. Before the ripples caused by the pebble's fall had died away, Pennroyal had ceased to live. Mrs. Pennroyal was still apparently insensible, but as Sir Archibald approached her she partly raised herself up, and looked first at him and then at the dead body. "It was not worth while," she said. "It's done," he murmured. "Are you hurt?" "What shall we do?" "We must get back to Malmaison." "We cannot leave him here." Sir Archibald bent over the body of his enemy, and turned the face upward. It wore a calm and happy expression. "I will sink him in the pool," he said. "His will not be the first dead body that has lain there." He stooped accordingly, and getting his hands beneath the arms of the corpse, dragged it to one of the flights of steps that led down to the water. Kate sat watching him with her hands clasped in her lap. She heard a splashing sound and a ripple. Sir Archibald came back, picked up the pistol, and flung it also into the pool. "The water will freeze to-night," he said, "and the fishes will do the rest. Now, come!" In a secret chamber at Malmaison lamps were burning softly in a dozen sconces of burnished silver round the walls. Their light fell on luxurious furniture, fit for the boudoir of a lovely and noble lady. The broad-backed ebony chairs were upholstered in delicate blue damask; clips and salvers of chased gold stood on the inlaid cabinet; the floor was covered with richly-tinted Persian rugs and soft-dressed furs; a warm fire glowed on the hearth, and upon the table was set out a supper such as might have awakened an appetite in a Roman epicure. A tall mirror, at the farther end of the room, reflected back the lights and the color and the sparkle, while in a niche at one side stood rigidly upright an antique suit of armor, its gauntlets seeming to rest meditatively upon the hilt of its sword, while from between the closed bars of the helmet one might fancy that the dark spirit of its former inmate was gazing grimly forth upon all this splendor and luxury, and passing a ghastly jest thereon. But it was as fair and comfortable a scene as perhaps this world can show, and well calculated to make the sternest ascetic in love with life. Through the massive oaken door, clamped with polished steel bands, entered now two pallid and haggard persons--a man and a woman. The light striking on their eyes made them blink and look aside. The man led the woman to the fire, and seated her upon a low chair; and taking a blue satin coverlid from the bed in the recess, he folded it tenderly round her shoulders. She scarcely seemed to notice where she was, or what was being done; she sat with her eyes and face fixed, shivering now and then, and with her mind apparently preoccupied with some ugly recollection. The man then went to the table and poured out a glass of wine, and held it to the woman's lips, and after a little resistance she drank some of it. "You are as safe here," said he, "as if you were in an island of the South Sea. I will see that you want for nothing while you have to remain here." "What is the use?" she asked, with a kind of apathetic peevishness. "Before long we shall be able to go away," he continued. "My darling, don't be disheartened. All our happiness is to come." "I can never forget it," she said, with a shiver. "What is the use? I can never get away from him now. Do you think the water is frozen yet?" "You must not think of that at all. When you are warm, and have drunk some wine, you will not feel this nervousness. Nothing has been done that is worth regretting, or that could have been helped. Kate, I love you more than ever." "What is the use?" she repeated, in a dull tone. "It was not worth while." There was a pause. "I must leave you for a few minutes," he said gently. "It is necessary that I should show myself to Lady Malmaison and to the servants. No one knows that I have left the house. By the time I come back you will have got warm, and we will sup together. Don't be downhearted, my darling." He bent forward to kiss her. With a sudden gesture of aversion she pushed him back. "There is blood upon your forehead!" she said, in a sharp whisper. "Only a scratch--I had forgotten it," he answered, trying to smile. "Well, then, in half an hour, at the utmost, we will meet again." She made no rejoinder; and, after standing a moment looking down at her, he turned and went out. He closed the oaken door behind him, and locked it, then felt his way along the stone passage, and let himself out by the concealed entrance. He put the silver rod in its receptacle beneath the floor, and walked toward the room adjoining. On the threshold of that room he paused a moment, leaning against the door-post. A sensation of sluggish weariness had come over him; his head felt full and heavy. He roused himself presently, and went on trying to remember whither he was going. By the time he had reached the top of the great staircase, the idea that he was in search of seemed to have come to him. He descended the stairs and went directly to Lady Malmaison's room. It was then about eleven o'clock. The good lady was playing cards with her companion, her spaniel sleeping on her knees. She looked up in astonishment, for Sir Archibald seldom honored her with a visit. "Mamma," said he, going up to her chair, and standing there awkwardly, "where is Kate?" "My son! what has happened?" "Was she married to-day?" pursued the baronet, in an aggrieved tone. Lady Malmaison and the companion exchanged a terrified glance. "I think it is very unkind, then," declared the young man, reproachfully; "for Richard promised me I should be groomsman--and now they have gone and got married while I was asleep. It was unkind of Kate, and I don't love her; but I don't believe it was Richard's fault, because he is good, and I love him." * * * * * "Ring the bell, Simpson," said Lady Malmaison, in a broken voice, "and tell them to send for Dr. Rollinson." XIII. During all the months of consternation, speculation, and vague hue-and-cry that followed the mysterious disappearance of the Honorable Mr. and Mrs. Pennroyal, it never for one moment occurred to any one to suggest any connection between that unexplained circumstance and the equally curious but unpertinent fact that poor Sir Archibald had "gone daft" once more. How should it? It was known that Sir Archibald had been in his room all that day and evening up to the time when he came into his mother's chamber without his wits. It was true that there had been no love lost of late between the houses of Malmaison and Pennroyal, but that was neither here nor there. The notion that the vanished persons had met with foul play was never seriously entertained, it being generally agreed that Mr. Pennroyal had ample reasons for not wishing to remain in a place where his credit and his welcome were alike worn out. In all likelihood, therefore, the pair had slunk away to foreign parts, and were living under an assumed name somewhere on the Continent, or in America. It was not surprising that they had gone together, for it was known that they were on very good terms with each other, especially during the last year. An idle story of a groom, who affirmed that he had been present at an interview between Mrs. Pennroyal and Sir Archibald, on horseback, a few weeks before the trial, when, according to this narrator, they had appeared to be rather friendly than otherwise, was not thought to be in any way to the point. So the months passed away, and the years followed the months; the house and the lands of the Pennroyals were sold, and their very name began to be forgotten. The daft baronet and his aged mother went on living at Malmaison in a quiet and uneventful manner, seeing very few people, and doing nothing except allow their large property to grow larger. Yet, in spite of their retiring inoffensiveness, a shadow seemed to brood over the ancient house. The old story of Sir Archibald's past exploits in the magical line, and of his ancestors before him, were still revived occasionally round evening firesides; and it was submitted whether his present condition were not a judgment upon him for having tampered with forbidden mysteries. In the opinion of these fireside juries, there was a curse upon Malmaison, especially upon that part of it which contained the east chamber. That room was haunted, and had never been haunted so badly as during the few days immediately following Sir Archibald's loss of memory. It may have been a demon's carousal over the sad plight of the poor, foolish young baronet. At all events shrieks had been heard, faint and muffled, but unmistakable, proceeding from that region, when everybody knew that no living soul was there or could be there; but all the servants at Malmaison could swear to the sounds. Ay, the place was accursed. Late on the night of the 22d of January, 1833, Sir Archibald found himself mounting the staircase of Malmaison, with but an indistinct idea of how he came to be doing so. He could not recollect whether he had seen his mother and the servants or not. No wonder if his thoughts had been a little absent, with such a dark and burdensome secret as that which lay upon his soul. But, of course, he must have seen them. He had left Kate with the intention of doing so, within this very hour; and how should he be coming up-stairs, unless from the execution of that purpose? His mind was busy with many projects. It would probably be thought that Mr. and Mrs. Pennroyal had left the country to escape creditors. If only the pond froze, and the cold weather held on for a week or two, there would be no trace that could lead to a suspicion of anything else. For himself, he would find no difficulty in proving an alibi, if it came to that. And after all, he had but acted upon compulsion, and in self-defence, and upon equal terms. He was guilty of no crime, except--well, call it a crime; he was willing to bear the brunt of that. So they would be able to get away soon, and in Italy, Spain, somewhere, anywhere, they could live and be happy many years. Perhaps after a time they could venture to marry and return openly to England. There were numberless and indefinite possibilities in their favor. Life was all they wanted, and life they had. They were both young; the gloom of this unlucky tragedy would soon be dispelled. Kate had been nervous and distraught when he left her, and no wonder, poor love! but wine, and food, and warmth would soon bring the color back to her cheeks and the light to her eyes. Lovely Kate! sweet, wayward, tender, haughty, but his own at last--his own in spite of earth and heaven! Yes, he and she would have their will and take their pleasure in spite of God and man; and if God would kill them, then, at any rate, they would die together, and in each other's arms. With these and many like thoughts flying through his mind, Sir Archibald Malmaison reached the east chamber struck a light, and lit the candle that stood on the table beside the door. He looked at his watch--half-past eleven; he was within his time then; he had been absent less than half an hour. What was Kate doing, he wondered? He stopped a moment, picturing her to himself in some luxurious attitude; but his impatience would not suffer him to delay. He quickly got the silver rod from its receptacle, opened the concealed door, and went in, carrying the lighted candle in his hand. In a moment he was at the inner oaken door; it resisted his attempt to open it. Then he recollected that he had locked it for additional security. The key was in the lock; he turned it, and entered. An involuntary cry of surprise escaped him. Instead of the soft blaze of light that he had expected, the room was full of a heavy darkness, that seemed to rush out to meet him, and almost overwhelmed the feeble glimmer of his wretched candle. And why was it so deadly cold? Where had gone that cheerful fire which was burning so ardently on the hearth half an hour ago? Could Kate have put out the lights and gone off? Impossible, since the doors were fastened. Ah, there she was! She was kneeling with her face bowed forward on her arms, which rested on the seat of one of the low chairs. Her attitude was that of passionate prayer. Her thick brown hair was unfastened, and fell over her shoulders. She made no movement. It was strange! Was she praying? Could she be asleep? He took a step or two, and then stopped. Still no movement. "Kate!" he said in a hushed voice; and as she did not answer, he spoke more loudly: "Kate, I have come back; and I've a mind to scold you for letting the fire go out, and startling me with this darkness. What are you doing on your knees? Come, my darling, we want no prayers to-night. Kate ... will you give me a kiss now? "Perhaps she may have fainted. Poor darling, she must have fainted!" He went close up to her, and laid his hand on her shoulder: he seemed to grasp nothing but the empty stuff of the dress. With a terrified, convulsive motion, he pulled her round, so that the head was disturbed from its position on the arms, and the ghastly mystery was revealed to his starting eyeballs. The spectacle was not one to be described. He uttered a weak, wavering scream, and stood there, unable to turn away his gaze. I must confess that I do not care to pursue this narrative any farther: though it is just at this point, according to my venerable friend Dr. Rollinson, that the real scientific interest begins. He was constantly with Sir Archibald during the eight or nine months that he remained in life after this episode; and made some highly important and edifying notes on his "case," besides writing down the unhappy baronet's confessions, as given from time to time. After his death, the Doctor made an autopsy of the brain, and discovered--I care not what! It was not the mystery of the man's soul, I am convinced. I have adhered strictly to the facts throughout. Of course some of the conversations have been imagined, but always on an adequate foundation of truth or logical inference. All the dates and "coincidences" are genuine. But, indeed, I prefer fiction, and am resolved never in future to make an excursion into the crude and improbable regions of reality. The End. Footnotes 1. Dr. Forbes Rollinson's death occurred while these pages were in preparation. This is not the place to add my tribute of affection and appreciation to the many memoirs of him which have appeared in the public prints. My first acquaintance with him dates but little more than three years prior to his death; but the impression he produced upon me of cordiality, culture, and ability will remain with me while I live. He was a grand old gentleman of a school that is now bygone; a scholar of vast attainments, and a Christian in heart and life, if not in profession. Although he had far exceeded the ordinary span of life--he was born, I believe, in the last century--he showed few signs of physical, and none of mental infirmity; and his sudden and painless decease was quite unexpected. I subjoin extracts from a letter written to me on the subject of the present narrative: "WELLESLEY HOUSE, QUEEN'S GATE, W. "MY DEAR H.: I must say I fail to perceive the force of your objections. What is fiction, at best, but an imitation of truth--and a pretty poor imitation, too, as a general thing?... You ought to be glad to be saved the trouble of inventing.... In the matter of love-making and adventure I have nothing to say, but scientific truths are not lightly to be tampered with. 'Round off the corners' by all means, if you think fit, but do not suffer your artistic proclivities to lead you into a misrepresentation of the essential facts.... The people are all dead, and the estate is broken up, so you need have no hesitation regarding names. Literary value aside, the thing would be worth nothing if the means of verifying it were withheld.... "Ever faithfully yours, "June 3d, 1878. E. FORBES ROLLINSON." 2. Now also the late: _vide supra_. 3. 3. In July, 1867. 
30452	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. VI, No. 1 CONTENTS APRIL, 1931 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSO _Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "Monsters of Mars."_ MONSTERS OF MARS EDMOND HAMILTON 4 _Three Martian-Duped Earth-Men Swing Open the Gates of Space That for So Long Had Barred the Greedy Hordes of the Red Planet._ (A Complete Novelette.) THE EXILE OF TIME RAY CUMMINGS 26 _From Somewhere Out of Time Come a Swarm of Robots Who Inflict on New York the Awful Vengeance of the Diabolical Cripple Tugh._ (Beginning a Four-Part Novel.) HELL'S DIMENSION TOM CURRY 51 _Professor Lambert Deliberately Ventures into a Vibrational Dimension to Join His Fiancée in Its Magnetic Torture-Fields._ THE WORLD BEHIND THE MOON PAUL ERNST 64 _Two Intrepid Earth-Men Fight It Out with the Horrific Monsters of Zeud's Frightful Jungles._ FOUR MILES WITHIN ANTHONY GILMORE 76 _Far Down into the Earth Goes a Gleaming Metal Sphere Whose Passengers Are Deadly Enemies._ (A Complete Novelette.) THE LAKE OF LIGHT JACK WILLIAMSON 100 _In the Frozen Wastes at the Bottom of the World Two Explorers Find a Strange Pool of White Fire--and Have a Strange Adventure._ THE GHOST WORLD SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT 118 _Commander John Hanson Records Another of His Thrilling Interplanetary Adventures with the Special Patrol Service._ THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 134 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Readers' Guild, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * Monsters of Mars A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By Edmond Hamilton_ [Illustration: _The Martian gestured with a reptilian arm toward the ladder._] [Sidenote: Three Martian-duped Earth-men swing open the gates of space that for so long had barred the greedy hordes of the Red Planet.] Allan Randall stared at the man before him. "And that's why you sent for me, Milton?" he finally asked. The other's face was unsmiling. "That's why I sent for you, Allan," he said quietly. "To go to Mars with us to-night!" There was a moment's silence, in which Randall's eyes moved as though uncomprehendingly from the face of Milton to those of the two men beside him. The four sat together at the end of a roughly furnished and electric-lit living-room, and in that momentary silence there came in to them from the outside night the distant pounding of the Atlantic upon the beach. It was Randall who first spoke again. "To Mars!" he repeated. "Have you gone crazy, Milton--or is this some joke you've put up with Lanier and Nelson here?" [Illustration] Milton shook his head gravely. "It is not a joke, Allan. Lanier and I are actually going to flash out over the gulf to the planet Mars to-night. Nelson must stay here, and since we wanted three to go I wired you as the most likely of my friends to make the venture." "But good God!" Randall exploded, rising. "You, Milton, as a physicist ought to know better. Space-ships and projectiles and all that are but fictionists' dreams." "We are not going in either space-ship or projectile," said Milton calmly. And then as he saw his friend's bewilderment he rose and led the way to a door at the room's end, the other three following him into the room beyond. * * * * * It was a long laboratory of unusual size in which Randall found himself, one in which every variety of physical and electrical apparatus seemed represented. Three huge dynamo-motor arrangements took up the room's far end, and from them a tangle of wiring led through square black condensers and transformers to a battery of great tubes. Most remarkable, though, was the object at the room's center. It was like a great double cube of dull metal, being in effect two metal cubes each twelve feet square, supported a few feet above the floor by insulated standards. One side of each cube was open, exposing the hollow interiors of the two cubical chambers. Other wiring led from the big electronic tubes and from the dynamos to the sides of the two cubes. The four men gazed at the enigmatic thing for a time in silence. Milton's strong, capable face showed only in its steady eyes what feelings were his, but Lanier's younger countenance was alight with excitement; and so too to some degree was that of Nelson. Randall simply stared at the thing, until Milton nodded toward it. "That," he said, "is what will flash us out to Mars to-night." Randall could only turn his stare upon the other, and Lanier chuckled. "Can't take it in yet, Randall? Well, neither could I when the idea was first sprung on us." * * * * * Milton nodded to seats behind them, and as the half-dazed Randall sank into one the physicist faced him earnestly. "Randall, there isn't much time now, but I am going to tell you what I have been doing in the last two years on this God-forsaken Maine coast. I have been for those two years in unbroken communication by radio with beings on the planet Mars! "It was when I still held my physics professorship back at the university that I got first onto the track of the thing. I was studying the variation of static vibrations, and in so doing caught steady signals--not static--at an unprecedentedly high wave-length. They were dots and dashes of varying length in an entirely unintelligible code, the same arrangement of them being sent out apparently every few hours. "I began to study them and soon ascertained that they could be sent out by no station on earth. The signals seemed to be growing louder each day, and it suddenly occurred to me that Mars was approaching opposition with earth! I was startled, and kept careful watch. On the day that Mars was closest the earth the signals were loudest. Thereafter, as the red planet receded, they grew weaker. The signals were from some being or beings on Mars! "At first I was going to give the news to the world, but saw in time that I could not. There was not sufficient proof, and a premature statement would only wreck my own scientific reputation. So I decided to study the signals farther until I had irrefutable proof, and to answer them if possible. I came up here and had this place built, and the aerial towers and other equipment I wanted set up. Lanier and Nelson came with me from the university, and we began our work. * * * * * "Our chief object was to answer those signals, but it proved heartbreaking work at first. We could not produce a radio wave of great enough length to pierce out through earth's insulating layer and across the gulf to Mars. We used all the power of our great windmill-dynamo hook-ups, but for long could not make it. Every few hours like clockwork the Martian signals came through. Then at last we heard them repeating one of our own signals. We had been heard! "For a time we hardly left our instruments. We began the slow and almost impossible work of establishing intelligent communication with the Martians. It was with numbers we began. Earth is the third planet from the sun and Mars the fourth, so three represented earth and four stood for Mars. Slowly we felt our way to an exchange of ideas, and within months were in steady and intelligent communication with them. "They asked us first concerning earth, its climates and seas and continents, and concerning ourselves, our races and mechanisms and weapons. Much information we flashed out to them, the language of our communication being English, the elements, of which they had learned, with a mixture of numbers and symbolical dot-dash signals. "We were as eager to learn about them. They were somewhat reticent, we found, concerning their planet and themselves. They admitted that their world was a dying one and that their great canals were to make life possible on it, and also admitted that they were different in bodily form from ourselves. "They told us finally that communication like this was too ineffective to give us a clear picture of their world, or vice versa. If we could visit Mars, and then they visit earth, both worlds would benefit by the knowledge of the other. It seemed impossible to me, though I was eager enough for it. But the Martians said that while spaceships and the like were impossible, there was a way by which living beings could flash from earth to Mars and back by radio waves, even as our signals flashed!" * * * * * Randall broke in in amazement. "By radio!" he exclaimed, and Milton nodded. "Yes, so they said, nor did the idea of sending matter by radio seem too insane, after all. We send sound, music by radio waves across half the world from our broadcasting stations. We send light, pictures, across the world from our television stations. We do that by changing the wave length of the light-vibrations to make them radio vibrations, flashing them out thus over the world, to receivers which alter their wave-lengths again and change them back into light-vibrations. "Why then could not matter be sent in the same way? Matter, it has been long believed, is but another vibration of the ether, like light and radiant heat and radio vibrations and the like, having a lower wave-length than any of the others. Suppose we take matter and by applying electrical force to it change its wave-length, step it up to the wave-length of radio vibrations? Then those vibrations can be flashed forth from the sending station to a special receiver that will step them down again from radio vibrations to matter vibrations. Thus matter, living or non-living, could be flashed tremendous distances in a second! * * * * * "This the Martians told us, and said they would set up a matter-transmitter and receiver on Mars and would aid and instruct us so that we could set up a similar transmitter and receiver here. Then part of us could be flashed out to Mars as radio vibrations by the transmitter, and in moments would have flashed across the gulf to the red planet and would be transformed back from radio vibrations to matter-vibrations by the receiver awaiting us there! "Naturally we agreed enthusiastically to build such a matter-transmitter and receiver, and then, with their instructions signalled to us constantly, started the work. Weeks it took, but at last, only yesterday, we finished it. The thing's two cubical chambers are one for the transmitting of matter and the other for its reception. At a time agreed on yesterday we tested the thing, placing a guinea pig in the transmitting chamber and turning on the actuating force. Instantly the animal vanished, and in moments came a signal from the Martians saying that they had received it unharmed in their receiving chamber. "Then we tested it the other way, they sending the same guinea pig to us, and in moments it flashed into being in our receiving chamber. Of course the step-down force in the receiving chamber had to be in operation, since had it not been at that moment the radio-vibrations of the animal would have simply flashed on endlessly in endless space. And the same would happen to any of us were we flashed forth and no receiving chamber turned on to receive us. "We signalled the Martians that all tests were satisfactory, and told them that on the next night at exactly midnight by our time we would flash out ourselves on our first visit to them. They have promised to have their receiving chamber operating to receive us at that moment, of course, and it is my plan to stay there twenty-four hours, gathering ample proofs of our visit, and then flash back to earth. "Nelson must stay here, not only to flash us forth to-night, but above all to have the receiving chamber operating to receive us at the destined moment twenty-four hours later. The force required to operate it is too great to use for more than a few minutes at a time, so it is necessary above all that that force be turned on and the receiving chamber ready for us at the moment we flash back. And since Nelson must stay, and Lanier and I wanted another, we wired you, Randall, in the hope that you would want to go with us on this venture. And do you?" * * * * * As Milton's question hung, Randall drew a long breath. His eyes were on the two great cubical chambers, and his brain seemed whirling at what he had heard. Then he was on his feet with the others. "Go? Could you keep me from going? Why, man, it's the greatest adventure in history!" Milton grasped his hand, as did Lanier, and then the physicist shot a glance at the square clock on the wall. "Well, there's little enough time left us," he said, "for we've hardly an hour before midnight, and at midnight we must be in that transmitting chamber for Nelson to send us flashing out!" Randall could never recall but dimly afterward how that tense hour passed. It was an hour in which Milton and Nelson went with anxious faces and low-voiced comments from one to another of the pieces of apparatus in the room, inspecting each carefully, from the great dynamos to the transmitting and receiving chambers, while Lanier quickly got out and made ready the rough khaki suits and equipment they were to take. It lacked but a quarter-hour of midnight when they had finally donned those suits, each making sure that he was in possession of the small personal kit Milton had designated. This included for each a heavy automatic, a small supply of concentrated foods, and a small case of drugs chosen to counteract the rarer atmosphere and lesser gravity which Milton had been warned to expect on the red planet. Each had also a strong wrist-watch, the three synchronized exactly with the big laboratory clock. * * * * * When they had finished checking up on this equipment the clock's longer hand pointed almost to the figure twelve, and the physicist gestured expressively toward the transmitting chamber. Lanier, though, strode for a moment to one of the laboratory's doors and flung it open. As Randall gazed out with him they could see far out over the tossing sea, dimly lit by the great canopy of the summer stars overhead. Right at the zenith among those stars shone brightest a crimson spark. "Mars," said Lanier, his voice a half-whisper. "And they're waiting out there for us now--out there where we'll be in minutes!" "And if they shouldn't be waiting--their receiving chamber not ready--" But Milton's calm voice came across the room to them: "Zero hour," he said, stepping up into the big transmitting chamber. Lanier and Randall slowly followed, and despite himself a slight shudder shook the latter's body as he stepped into the mechanism that in moments would send him flashing out through the great void as impalpable ether-vibrations. Milton and Lanier were standing silent beside him, their eyes on Nelson, who stood watchfully now at the big switchboard beside the chambers, his own gaze on the clock. They saw him touch a stud, and another, and the hum of the great dynamos at the room's end grew loud as the swarming of angry bees. The clock's longer hand was crawling over the last space to cover the smaller hand. Nelson turned a knob and the battery of great glass tubes broke into brilliant white light, a crackling coming from them. Randall saw the clock's pointer clicking over the last divisions, and as he saw Nelson grip a great switch there came over him a wild impulse to bolt from the transmitting chamber. But then as his thoughts whirled maelstromlike there came a clang from the clock and Nelson flung down the switch in his grasp. Blinding light seemed to break from all the chamber onto the three; Randall felt himself hurled into nothingness by forces titanic, inconceivable, and then knew no more. * * * * * Randall came back to consciousness with a humming sound in his ears and with a sharp pain piercing his lungs at every breath. He felt himself lying on a smooth hard surface, and heard the humming stop and be succeeded by a complete silence. He opened his eyes, drawing himself to his feet as Milton and Lanier were doing, and stared about him. He was standing with his two friends inside a cubical metal chamber almost exactly the same as the one they had occupied in Milton's laboratory a few moments before. But it was not the same, as their first astounded glance out through its open side told them. For it was not the laboratory that lay around them, but a vast conelike hall that seemed to Randall's dazed eyes of dimensions illimitable. Its dull-gleaming metal walls slanted up for a thousand feet over their heads, and through a round aperture at the tip far above and through great doors in the walls came a thin sunlight. At the center of the great hall's circular floor stood the two cubical chambers in one of which the three were, while around the chambers were grouped masses of unfamiliar-looking apparatus. * * * * * To Randall's untrained eyes it seemed electrical apparatus of very strange design, but neither he nor Milton nor Lanier paid it but small attention in that first breathless moment. They were gazing in fascinated horror at the scores of creatures who stood silent amid the apparatus and at its switches, gazing back at them. Those creatures were erect and roughly man-like in shape, but they were not human men. They were--the thought blasted to Randall's brain in that horror-filled moment--crocodile-men. Crocodile-men! It was only so that he could think of them in that moment. For they were terribly like great crocodile shapes that had learned in some way to carry themselves erect upon their hinder limbs. The bodies were not covered with skin, but with green bony plates. The limbs, thick and taloned at their paw-ends, seemed greater in size and stronger, the upper two great arms and the lower two the legs upon which each walked, while there was but the suggestion of a tail. But the flat head set on the neckless body was most crocodilian of all, with great fanged, hinged jaws projecting forward, and with dark unwinking eyes set back in bony sockets. Each of the creatures wore on his torso a gleaming garment like a coat of metal scales, with metal belts in which some had shining tubes. They were standing in groups here and there about the mechanisms, the nearest group at a strange big switch-panel not a half-dozen feet from the three men. Milton and Lanier and Randall returned in a tense silence the unwinking stare of the monstrous beings around them. "The Martians!" Lanier's horror-filled exclamation was echoed in the next instant by Randall's. "The Martians! God, Milton! They're not like anything we know--they're reptilian!" * * * * * Milton's hand clutched his shoulder. "Steady, Randall," he muttered. "They're terrible enough, God knows--but remember we must seem just as grotesque to them." The sound of their voices seemed to break the great hall's spell of silence, and they saw the crocodilian Martians before them turning and speaking swiftly to each other in low hissing speech-sounds that were quite unintelligible to the three. Then from the small group nearest them one came forward, until he stood just outside the chamber in which they were. Randall felt dimly the momentousness of the moment, in which beings of earth and Mars were confronting each other for the first time in the solar system's history. The creature before them opened his great jaws and uttered slowly a succession of sounds that for the moment puzzled them, so different were they from the hissing speech of the others, though with the same sibilance of tone. Again the thing repeated the sounds, and this time Milton uttered an exclamation. "He's speaking to us!" he cried. "Trying to speak the English that I taught them in our communication! I caught a word--listen...." As the creature repeated the sounds, Randall and Lanier started to hear also vaguely expressed in that hissing voice familiar words: "You--are Milton and--others from--earth?" Milton spoke very clearly and slowly to the creature: "We are those from earth," he said. "And you are the Martians with whom we have communicated?" "We are those Martians," said the other's hissing voice slowly. "These"--he waved a taloned paw toward those behind him--"have charge of the matter-transmitter and receiver. I am of our ruler's council." "Ruler?" Milton repeated. "A ruler of all Mars?" "Of all Mars," the other said. "Our name for him would mean in your words the Martian Master. I am to take you to him." * * * * * Milton turned to the other two with face alight with excitement. "These Martians have some supreme ruler they call the Martian Master," he said quickly; "and we're to go before him. As the first visitors from earth we're of immense importance here." As he spoke, the Martian official before them had uttered a hissing call, and in answer to it a long shape of shining metal raced into the vast hall and halted beside them. It was like a fifty-foot centipede of metal, its scores of supporting short legs actuated by some mechanism inside the cylindrical body. There was a transparent-walled control room at the front end of that body, and in it a Martian at the controls who snapped open a door from which a metal ladder automatically descended. The Martian official gestured with a reptilian arm toward the ladder, and Milton and Lanier and Randall moved carefully out of the cube-chamber and across the floor to it, each of their steps being made a short leap forward by the lesser gravity of the smaller planet. They climbed up into the centipede-machine's control room, their guide following, and then as the door snapped shut, the operator of the thing pulled and turned the knob in his grasp and the long machine scuttled forward with amazing smoothness and speed. In a moment it was out of the building and into the feeble sunlight of a broad metal-paved street. About them lay a Martian city, seen by their eager eyes for the first time. It was a city whose structures were giant metal cones like that from which they had just come, though none seemed as large as that titanic one. Throngs of the hideous crocodilian Martians were moving busily to and fro in the streets, while among them there scuttled and flashed numbers of the centipede-machines. * * * * * As their strange vehicle raced along, Randall saw that the conelike structures were for the most part divided into many levels, and that inside some could be glimpsed ranks of great mechanisms and hurrying Martians tending them. Away to their right across the vast forest of cones that was the city the sun's little disk was shining, and he glimpsed in that direction higher ground covered with a vast tangle of bright crimson jungle that sloped upward from a great, half-glimpsed waterway. The Martian beside them saw the direction of his gaze and leaned toward him. "No Martians live there," he hissed slowly. "Martians live only in cities where canals meet." "Then there's no life in those crimson jungles?" Randall asked, repeating the question a moment later more slowly. "No Martians there, but life--living things," the other told him, searching for words. "But not intelligent, like Martians and you." He turned to gaze ahead, then pointed. "The Martian Master's cone," he hissed. The three saw that at the end of the broad metal street down which their vehicle was racing there loomed another titanic cone-structure, fully as large as the mighty one in which they first found themselves. As the centipede-machine swept up to its great door-opening and halted, they descended to the metal paving and then followed their reptilian guide through the opening. * * * * * They found themselves in a great hall in which scores of the Martians were coming and going. At the hall's end stood a row of what seemed guards, Martians grasping shining tubes such as they had already glimpsed. These gave way to allow their passage when their conductor uttered a hissing order, and then they were moving down a shorter hall at whose end also were guards. As these sprang aside before them, a great door of massive metal they guarded moved softly upward, disclosing a mighty circular hall or room inside. Their crocodilian guide turned to them. "The hall of the Martian Master," he hissed. They passed inside with him. The great hall seemed to extend upward to the giant cone's tip, thin light coming down from an opening there. Upon the dull metal of its looming walls were running friezes of lighter metal, grotesque representations of reptilian shapes that they could but vaguely glimpse. Around the walls stood rank after rank of guards. At the hall's center was a low dias, and in a semicircle around and behind it stood a half-hundred great crocodilian shapes. Randall guessed even at the moment that they were the council of which their conductor had named himself a member. But like Milton and Lanier, he had eyes in that first moment only for the dais itself. For on it was--the Martian Master. Randall heard Milton and Lanier choke with the horror that shook his own heart and brain as he gazed. It was not simply another great crocodilian shape that sat upon that dais. It was a monstrous thing formed by the joining of three of the great reptilian bodies! Three distinct crocodile-like bodies sitting close together upon a metal seat, that had but a single great head. A great, grotesque crocodilian head that bulged backward and to either side, and that rested on the three thick short necks that rose from the triple body! And that head, that triple-bodied thing, was living, its unwinking eyes gazing at the three men! * * * * * The Martian Master! Randall felt his brain reel as he gazed at that mind-shattering thing. The Martian Master--this great head with three bodies! Reason told Randall, even as he strove for sanity, that the thing was but logical, that even on earth biologists had formed multiple-headed creatures by surgery, and that the Martians had done so to combine in one great head, one great brain, the brains of three bodies. Reason told him that the great triple brain inside that bulging head needed the bloodstreams of all three bodies to nourish it, must be a giant intellect indeed, one fitted to be the supreme Martian Master. But reason could not overcome the horror that choked him as he gazed at the awful thing. A hissing voice sounding before him made him aware that the Martian Master was speaking. "You are the Earth-beings with whom we communicated, and whom we instructed to build a matter-transmitter and receiver on earth?" the slow voice asked. "You have come safely to Mars by means of that station?" "We have come safely." Milton's voice was shaken and he could find no other words. "That is well. Long had we desired to have such a station built on earth, since with it there to flash back and forth between the two worlds is easy. You have come, then, to learn of this world and to take back what you learn to your races?" "That is why we came." Milton said, more steadily. "We want to stay only hours on this first visit, and then flash back to earth as we came." * * * * * The head's awful eyes seemed to consider them. "But when do you intend to go back?" its strange voice asked. "Unless the one at your earth station has its receiver operating at the right moment you will simply flash on endlessly as radio waves--will be annihilated." Milton found the courage to smile. "We started from earth at our midnight exactly, and at midnight exactly twenty-four earth hours later, we are to flash back and the receiver will be awaiting us." There was silence when he had said that, a silence that seemed to Randall's strained mind to have become suddenly tense, sinister. The great triple-bodied creature before them considered them again, its eyes moving over them, and when it again spoke the hissing words came very slowly. "Twenty-four earth hours," it said; "and then your receiver on earth will be awaiting you. That time we can measure to the moment, and that is well. For it is not you three Earth-beings who will flash back to earth when that moment comes! It will be Martians, the first of our Martian masses who have waited for ages for that moment and who will begin then our conquest of the earth! "Yes, Earth-beings, our great plan comes to its end now at last! At last! Age on age, prisoned on this dying, arid world, we have desired the earth that by right of power shall be ours, have sought for ages to communicate with its beings. You finally heard us, you hearkened to us, you built the matter-transmitting and receiving station on earth that was the one thing needed for our plan. For when the matter-receiver of that station is turned on in twenty-four of your hours, and ready to receive matter flashes from here, it will be the first of our millions who will flash at last to earth! "I, the Martian Master, say it. Those first to go shall seize that matter-receiver on earth when first they appear there, shall build other and larger receivers, and through them within days all our Martian hordes shall have been flashed to earth! Shall have poured out over it and conquered with our weapons your weak races of Earth-beings, who cannot stand before us, and whose world you have delivered at last into our hands!" For a moment, when the great monster's hissing voice had ceased, Milton and Randall and Lanier gazed toward it as though petrified, the whole unearthly scene spinning about them. And then, through the thick silence, the thin sound of Milton's voice: "Our world--our earth--delivered to the Martians, and by us! God--no!" With that last cry of agonized comprehension and horror, Milton did what surely had never any in the great hall expected, leaped onto the dais with a single spring toward the Martian Master! Randall heard a hundred wild hissing cries break from about him, saw the crocodilian forms of guards and council rushing forward even as he and Lanier sprang after Milton, and then glimpsed shining tubes levelled from which brilliant shafts of dazzling crimson light or force were stabbing toward them! * * * * * To Randall the moment that followed was but a split-second flash and whirl of action. As his earthly muscles took him forward with Lanier after Milton in a great leap to the dais, he was aware of the brilliant red rays stabbing behind him closely, and knew that only the tremendous size of his leap had taken him past them. In the succeeding instant he was made aware of what he had escaped, for the hastily-loosed rays struck squarely a group of three or four Martian guards rushing to the dais from the opposite side, and they vanished from view with a sharp detonation as though clicked out of existence! Randall was not to know then, that the red rays were ones that annihilated matter by neutralizing or damping the matter-vibrations in the ether. But he did know that no more rays were loosed, for by then he and Milton and Lanier were on the dais and were wrapped in a hurricane combat with the guards that had rushed between them and the Martian Master. Gleaming fangs--great scaled forms--reaching talons--it was all a wild phantasmagoria of grotesque forms spinning around him as he struck with all the power of his earthly muscles and felt crocodilian forms staggering and going down beneath his frenzied blows. He heard the roar of an automatic close beside him in the melee as Milton remembered at last through the red haze of his fury the weapon he carried, but before either Randall or Lanier could reach their own weapons a new wave of crocodilian forms had poured onto them that by sheer pressing weight held them helpless, to be disarmed. * * * * * Hissing orders sounded, the arms and legs of the three were tightly grasped by great taloned paws, and the masses of Martians about them melted back from the dais. Held each by two great creatures, Milton and Randall and Lanier faced again the triple-bodied Martian Master, who in all that wild moment of struggle appeared not to have changed his position. The big monster's black eyes stared unmovedly down at them. "You Earth-beings seem of lower intelligence even than we thought," his hissing voice informed them. "And those weapons--crude, very crude." Milton, his face set, spoke back: "It may be that you will find human weapons of some power if your hordes reach earth," he said. "But what compared with the power of ours?" the other asked coldly. "And since our scientists even now devise new weapons to annihilate the earth's races, I think they would be glad of three of those races to experiment with now. The one use we can make of you, certainly." The creature turned its bulging head a little towards the guards who held the three men, and uttered a brief hissing order. Instantly the six Martians, grasping the three tightly, marched them across the great hall and through a different door than that by which they had entered. They were taken down a narrow corridor that turned sharply twice as they went on. Randall saw that it was lit by squares inset in the walls that glowed with crimson light. It came to him as they marched on that night must be upon the Martian city without, since the sun had been sinking when they had crossed it in the centipede-machine. * * * * * Through what seemed an ante-room they were taken, and then into a long hall instantly recognizable as a laboratory. There were many glowing squares illuminating it, and narrow windows high in the wall gave them a glimpse of the city outside, a pattern of crimson lights. Long metal tables and racks filled the big room's farther end, while along the walls were ranged shining mechanisms of unfamiliar and grotesque appearance. Fully a score of the crocodilian Martians were busy in the room, some intent on their work at the racks and tables, others operating some of the strange machines. The guards conducted the three to an open space by the wall, below one of the high window-openings and between two great cylindrical mechanisms. Then, while five of their number held the three men prisoned in that space by the threat of their levelled ray-tubes, the other moved toward one of the busy Martian scientists and held with him a brief interchange of hissing speech. Milton leaned to whisper to the other two: "We've got to get out of this while we're still living," he whispered. "You heard the Martian Master--in constructing that matter-receiver on earth, we've opened a door through which all the Martian millions will pour onto our world!" "It's useless, Milton," said Randall dully. "Even if we got clear of this the Martians will be at their matter-transmitter in hordes when the moment comes to flash back to earth." "I know that, but we've got to try," the other insisted. "If we or some of us could get clear of this, we might in some way hide near the matter-transmitter until the moment came and then fight to it." "But how to get out of the hands of these, even?" asked Lanier, nodding toward the alert guards before them. * * * * * "There's but one way," Milton whispered swiftly. "Our earthly muscles would enable us, I think, to get through this window-opening above us in a leap, if we had a moment's chance. Well, whichever of us they take to experiment with or examine first, must make a struggle or disturbance that will turn the guards' attention for a moment and give the other two a chance to make the attempt!" "One to stay and the other two to get away...." Randall said slowly; but Milton's tense whisper interrupted: "It's the only way, and even then a thousand to one chance! But it's we who have opened this gate for the Martian invasion of our world and it's we who must--" Before he could finish, the approach of hissing voices told them that the leader of the six guards and the Martian who seemed the chief of the experimenters in the hall were nearing them. The three men stood silent and tense as the two crocodilian monsters stopped before them. The scientist, who carried in his metal-belt, instead of a ray-tube a compact case of instruments, surveyed them as though in curiosity. He came closer, his quick reptilian eyes taking in with evident interest every feature of their bodily appearance. Intuitively the three knew that one of them was to be chosen for a first investigation by the Martian scientists, and that that one would have not even the slender hope of escape open to the other two. A strange lottery of life and death! * * * * * Randall saw the creature's gaze turn from one to another of them, and then heard the hiss of his voice as he pointed a taloned paw toward Milton. Instantly two of the guards had seized Milton and had jerked him out from the wall, the other guards holding back Randall and Lanier with threatening tubes. It was upon Milton that the fatal choice had fallen! Randall and Lanier made together a half-movement forward, but Milton, a tense message in his eyes, forced them back. The guards who held the physicist led him, at the direction of the Martian scientist, toward a great upright frame at the room's far end, upon which were clustered a score of dial-indicators. From these flexible cords led; and now the scientists began attaching these by clips to various spots on Milton's body. Some mechanical examination of his bodily characteristics were apparently to be made. Milton shot suddenly a glance at the two by the wall, and his head nodded in an almost imperceptible signal. The muscles of Lanier and Randall tensed. Then abruptly Milton seemed to go mad. He shouted aloud in a terrible voice, and at the same moment tore from him the cords just attached, his fists striking out then at the amazed Martians around him. As they leaped back from that sudden explosion of activity and sound on Milton's part the guards before Randall and Lanier whirled instinctively for an instant toward it. And in that instant the two had leaped. * * * * * It was upward they leaped, with all the force of their earthly muscles, toward the big window-opening a half-dozen feet in the wall above them. Like released steel springs they sat up, and Randall heard the thump of their feet as they struck the opening's sill, heard wild cries suddenly coming from beneath them, as the guards turned back toward them. Crimson rays clove up like light toward them, but the instant's surprise had been enough, and in it they had leaped on and through the opening, into the outside night! As they shot downward and struck the metal paving outside, Randall heard a wild babble of cries from inside. A moment he and Lanier gazed frenziedly around them, then were running with great leaps along the base of the building from which they had just escaped. In the darkness of night the Martian city stretched away to their right, its massive dark cone-structures outlined by points of glowing ruddy light here and there upon them. Beside the city's metal streets were illuminated by the brilliant field of stars overhead and by the soft light of the two moons, one much larger than the other, that moved among those stars. Along the street crocodilian Martians were coming and going still, though in small numbers, there being but few in sight in the dim-lit street's length. Lanier pointed ahead as they leaped onward. "Straight onward, Randall!" he jerked. "There seem fewer of the Martians this way!" "But the great cone of the matter-station is the other way!" Randall exclaimed. "We can't risk making for it now!" cried the other. "We've got to keep clear of them until the alarm is over. Hear them now?" For even as they leaped forward a rising clamor of hissing cries and rush of feet was coming from behind as scores of Martians poured out into the darkness from the great cone-building. The two fugitives had passed by then from the shadow of the mighty structure, and as they ran along the broad metal street toward the shadow of the next cone, through the light of the moons above, they heard higher cries and then glimpsed narrow shafts of crimson force cleaving the night around them. * * * * * Randall, as the deadly rays drove past him, heard the low detonating sound made by their destruction of the air in their path, and the inrush of new air. But in the misty and uncertain moonlight the rays could not be loosed accurately, and before they could be swept sidewise to annihilate the two fleeing men they had gained, with a last great leap, the shadow of the next building. On they ran, the clatter of the Martian pursuit growing more noisy behind them. Randall heard Lanier gasping with each great leap, and felt himself at every breath a knife of pain stabbing through his lungs, the rarified atmosphere of the red planet taking its toll. Again from the darkness behind them the crimson rays clove, but this time were wide of their mark. With every moment the clamor of pursuit seemed growing louder, the alarm spreading out over the Martian city and arousing it. As they raced past cone after cone, Randall knew even the increased power of their muscles could not long aid them against the exhaustion which the thin air was imposing on them. His thoughts spun for a moment to Milton, in the laboratory behind, and then back to their own desperate plight. Abruptly shapes loomed in the misty light before them! A group of three great Martians, reptilian shapes that had been coming toward them and had stopped for an instant in amazement at sight of the running pair. There was no time to halt themselves, to evade the three, and with a mutual instinct Lanier and Randall seized together the last expedient open to them. They ran straight forward toward the astounded three, and when a half-score feet from them, leaped with all their force upward and toward them, their tensed bodies flying through the air with feet outstretched before them. Then they had struck the group of three with feet-foremost, and with the impetus of that great leap had knocked them sprawling to this side and that, while with a supreme effort the two kept their balance and leaped on. The cries of the three added to the din behind them as they threw themselves forward. * * * * * They flung themselves past a last cone building to halt for an instant in utter amazement despite the nearing pursuit. Before them were no more streets and structures, but a huge smooth-flowing waterway! It gleamed in the moonlight and lay at right angles across their path, seeming to flow along the Martian city's edge. "A canal!" cried Lanier. "It's one of the canals that meet at this city and flow around it! We're trapped--we've reached the city's edge!" "Not yet!" Randall gasped. "Look!" As he pointed to the left Lanier shot a glance there; and then both of them were running in that direction, along the smooth metal paving that bordered the mighty canal. They came to what Randall had seen, a mighty metal arch that soared out over the waterway to its opposite side. A bridge! They were on it, were racing up the smooth incline of it. Randall glanced back as they reached the arch's summit. From that height the city stretched far away behind them, a lace of crimson lights in the night. He glimpsed the gleam of the giant waterway that encircled the city completely, one that was fed by other canals from far away that emptied into it, the great city's vital water-supply brought thus from this world's melting polar snows. There were moving lights behind now, too, pouring out onto the metal paving by the waterway, moving to and fro as though in confusion, with a babel of hissing cries. It was not until Randall and Lanier were running down the descending incline of the great arched bridge, though, that the lights and shouts of their pursuers began to move up on that bridge after them. * * * * * Running off the bridge's smooth way, the two found themselves stumbling on through the darkness over more metal paving, and then over soft ground. There were no lights or buildings or sounds of any sort on this farther side of the great waterway. A tall dark wall seemed suddenly to loom up out of the darkness some distance ahead of the two. "The crimson jungle!" Randall cried. "The jungles we glimpsed from the city! It's a chance to hide!" They raced toward the protecting blackness of that wall of vegetation. They reached it, flung themselves inside, just as the pursuing Martians, a mass of running crocodilian shapes and of great racing centipede-machines, swept up over the bridge's arch behind. A moment the two halted in the thick vegetation's shelter, gasping for breath, then were moving forward through the jungle's denser darkness. Thick about them and far above them towered the masses of strange trees and plant life through which they made their way. Randall could see but dimly the nature of these plant-forms, but could make out that they were grotesque and unearthly in appearance, all leafless, and with masses of thin tendrils branching from them instead of leaves. He realized that it was only beside the arid planet's great canals that this profusion of plant life had sufficient moisture for existence, and that it was the broad bands of jungle bordering the canals that had made the latter visible to earth's astronomers. * * * * * Lanier and he halted for a moment to listen. The thick jungle about them seemed quite silent. But from behind there came through it a vague tumult of hissing calls; and then, as they glimpsed red flashes far behind, they heard the crashing of great masses of the leafless trees. "The rays!" whispered Lanier. "They're beating through the jungle with them and the centipede-machines after us!" They paused no more, but pushed on through the thick growths with renewed urgency. Now and then, as they passed through small clearings, Randall glimpsed overhead the fast-moving nearer moon and slower sailing farther moon of Mars, moving across the steady stars. In some of these clearings they saw, too, strange great openings burrowed in the ground as though by some strange animal. The crashing clamor of the Martians beating the jungle behind was coming close, ever closer, and as they came to still another misty-lit clearing, Lanier paused, with face white and tense. "They're closing in on us!" he said. "They're hunting us down by beating the jungle with those centipede-machines, and even if we escape them we're getting farther from the city and the matter-station each moment!" Randall's eyes roved desperately around the clearing; and then, as they fell on a group of the great burrowed openings that seemed present everywhere about them, he uttered an exclamation. "These holes! We can hide in one until they've passed over us, and then steal back to the city!" Lanier's eyes lit. "It's a chance!" * * * * * They sprang toward the openings. They were each of some four feet diameter, extending indefinitely downward as though the mouths of tunnels. In a moment Randall was lowering himself into one, Lanier after him. The tunnel in which they were, they found, curved to one side a few feet below the surface. They crawled down this curve until they were out of sight of the opening above. They crouched silent, then, listening. There came down to them the dull, distant clamor of the centipede-machines crashing through the jungle, cutting a way with rays, their clamor growing ever louder. Then Randall, who was lowest in the tunnel, turned suddenly as there came to him a strange rustling sound from _beneath_ him. It was as though some crawling or creeping thing was moving in the tunnel below them! He grasped the arm of Lanier, beside and a little above him, to warn him, but the words he was about to whisper never were uttered. For at this moment a big shapeless living thing seemed to flash up toward them through the darkness from beneath, cold ropelike tentacles gripped both tightly; and then in an instant they were being dragged irresistibly down into the lightless tunnel's depths! * * * * * As they were pulled swiftly downward into the tunnel by the tentacles that grasped them an involuntary cry of horror came from Randall and Lanier alike. They twisted frantically in the cold grip that held them, but found it of the quality of steel. And as Randall twisted in it to strike frantically down through the darkness at whatever thing of horror held them, his clenched fist met but the cold smooth skin of some big, soft-bodied creature! Down--down--remorselessly they were being drawn farther into the black depths of the tunnel by the great thing crawling down below them. Again and again the two twisted and struck, but could not shake its hold. In sheer exhaustion they ceased to struggle, dragged helplessly farther down. Was it minutes or hours, Randall wondered afterward, of that horrible progress downward, that passed before they glimpsed light beneath? A feeble glow, hardly discernible, it was, and as they went lower still he saw that it was caused by the tunnel passing through a strata of radio-active rock that gave off the faint light. In that light they glimpsed for the first time the horror dragging them downward. It was a huge worm creature! A thing like a giant angleworm, three feet or more in thickness and thrice that in length, its great body soft and cold and worm-like. From the end nearest them projected two long tentacles with which it had gripped the two men and was dragging them down the tunnel after it! Randall glimpsed a mouth-aperture in the tentacled end of the worm body also, and two scarlike marks above it, placed like eyes, although eyes the monstrous thing had not. * * * * * But a moment they glimpsed it and then were in darkness again as the tunnel passed through the radio-active strata and lower. The horror of that moment's glimpse, though, made them strike out in blind repulsion, but relentlessly the creature dragged them after it. "God!" It was Lanier's panting cry as they were dragged on. "This worm monster--we're hundreds of feet below the surface!" Randall sought to reply, but his voice choked. The air about them was close and damp, with an overpowering earthy smell. He felt consciousness leaving him. A gleam of soft light--they were passing more radio-active patches. He felt the wild convulsive struggles of Lanier against the thing; and then suddenly the tunnel ended, debouched into a far-stretching, low-ceilinged cavity. It was feebly illuminated by radio-active patches here and there in walls and ceiling, and as the monster that held them halted on entering the cavity, Randall and Lanier lay in its grip and stared across the weird place with intensified horror. For it was swarming with countless worm monsters! All were like the one who held them, thick long worm bodies with projecting tentacles and with black eyeless faces. They were crawling to and fro in this cavern far beneath the surface, swarming in hordes around and over each other, pouring in and out of the awful place from countless tunnels that led upward and downward from it! * * * * * A world of worm monsters, beneath the surface of the Martian jungles! As Randall stared across that swarming, dim-lit cave of horror, physically sick at sight of it, he remembered the countless tunnel openings they had glimpsed in their flight through the jungle, and remembered the remark of the Martian who had first guided them across the city, that in the jungles were living things, of a sort. These were the things, worm monsters whose unthinkable networks of tunnels and burrows formed beneath the surface a veritable worm world! "Randall!" It was Lanier's thick exclamation. "Randall--those scar-marks on their--faces--you see--?" "See?" "Those marks! These creatures had eyes once but must have been forced down here by the Martians. These may once have been--ages ago--human!" At that thought Randall felt horror overcoming his senses. He was aware that the great worm monster holding them was dragging them forward through the cavern, that others of the swarms there were crowding around them, feeling them blindly with their tentacles, helping to drag them forward. Half-carried and half-dragged they went, scores of tentacles now holding them, great worm shapes crawling forward on all sides of them and accompanying them along the cavern's length. He glimpsed worm monsters here and there emerging from the upward tunnels with masses of strange plant stuff in their grasp that others blindly devoured. His senses reeled from the suffocating air, the great cavity being but a half-score feet in height, burrowed from the damp earth by these numberless things. * * * * * The faint, strange light of the radio-active patches showed him that they were approaching the cavern's end. Tunnels opened from its end as from all its walls and floor, and into one Randall was dragged by the creatures, one before and one behind, grasping him, and Lanier being brought behind him in the same way. In the close tunnel the heavy air was deadly, and he was but partly conscious when again, after moments of crawling along it, he felt himself dragged out into another cavern. This earth-walled cavity, though, seemed to extend farther than the first, though of the same height as the first and with a few radio-active illuminating patches. In it seethed and swarmed literally hundreds on hundreds of the worm monsters, a sea of great crawling bodies. Randall and Lanier saw that they were being carried and dragged now toward the farther end of this larger cavity. As they approached it, pushing through the swarming creatures who felt them with inquisitive tentacles as their captors took them forward, the two men saw that a great shape was looming up in the faint light at the cave's far end. In moments they were close enough to discern its nature, and a horror and awe filled them at sight of it more intense than they had yet felt. For the looming shape was a huge earthen image or statue of a worm! It was shaped with a childish crudeness from the solid earth, a giant earthen worm shape whose body looped across the cave's end, and whose tentacled head or front end was reared upward to the cavity's roof. Before this awful earthen shape was a section of the cave's floor higher than the rest, and on it a great crudely shaped rectangular earthen block. "Lanier--that shape!" whispered Randall in his horror. "That earthen image, made by these creatures--it's the worm god they've made for themselves!" "A worm god!" Lanier repeated, staring toward it as they were dragged nearer. "Then that block...." "Its altar!" Randall exclaimed. "These things have some dim spark of intelligence or memory! They're brought us here to--" * * * * * Before he could finish, the clutching tentacles of the worm monsters about them had dragged them up onto the raised floor beside the block, beneath the looming earthen worm shape. There they glimpsed for the first time in the faint light another who stood there held tightly by the tentacles of two worm monsters. It was a Martian! The big crocodilian shape was apparently a prisoner like themselves, captured and brought down from above. His reptilian eyes surveyed Lanier and Randall quickly as they were dragged up and held beside him, but he took no other interest. To the two men, at the moment, it seemed that his great crocodilian shape was human, almost, so much more man-like was it than the grotesque worm monsters before them. With a half-dozen of the creatures holding the two men and the Martian tightly, another great worm monster crawled to the edge of the raised earth floor in front of the giant worm god's image, and then reared up the first third of his thick body into the air. By then the great, faint-lit cavity stretching before them was filled with countless numbers of the monsters, pouring into it from all the tunnels that opened into it from above and below, packing it thick with their grotesque bodies as far as the eye could reach in the dim light. They were seething and crawling in that great mass; but as the worm monster on the elevation upreared, all in the cavity seemed suddenly to quiet. Then the upreared eyeless thing began to move his long tentacles. Very slowly at first he waved them back and forth, and slowly the masses of monsters in the cavity, all turned by some sense toward him, did likewise, the cavity becoming a forest of upraised tentacles waving rhythmically back and forth in unison with those of the leader. * * * * * Back and forth--back and forth--Randall felt caught in some torturing nightmare as he watched the countless tentacle-feelers waving thus from one side to the other. It was a ceremony, he knew--some strange rite springing perhaps from dim memory alone, that these worm monsters carried out thus before the looming shape of their worm god. Only the six that held the three captives never relaxed their grip. Still on and on went the strange and senseless rite. By then the close, damp air of that cavity far beneath Mars' surface was sinking Randall and Lanier deeper into a half-consciousness. The Martian beside them never moved or spoke. The upstretched tentacles of the leader and of the great worm horde before him never ceased swaying rhythmically from side to side. Randall, half-hypnotized by those swaying tentacles and but semi-conscious by then, could only estimate afterward how long that grotesque rite went on. Hours it must have endured, he knew, hours in which each opening of his eyes revealed only the dimly-illuminated cavern, the worm monsters that filled it, the forest of tentacles waving in unison. It was only toward the end of those hours that he noticed vaguely that the tentacles were waving faster and faster. And as the tentacles of leader and worm horde waved alike ever more swiftly an atmosphere of growing excitement and expectation seemed to hold the horde. At last the upstretched feelers were whipping back and forth almost too swiftly for the eye to follow. Then abruptly the worm leader ceased the motion himself, and while the horde before him continued it, turned and crawled to the three captives. * * * * * In an instant, as though in answer to a second command, the two worm monsters who held the Martian dragged him forward toward the great earthen block before the worm god's image. Two others of the creatures came from the side, and the four swiftly stretched the Martian flat on the block's top, each of the four grasping with their tentacles one of his four taloned limbs. They seemed to hesitate then, the worm leader beside them, the tentacles of the horde waving swiftly still. Abruptly the tentacles of the leader flashed up as though in a signal. There was a dull ripping sound, and in that moment Randall and Lanier saw the Martian on the block torn literally limb from limb by the four great worm monsters who had held his four limbs! The tentacles of the horde waved suddenly with increased, excited swiftness at that. Randall shrank in horror. "They've brought us here for that!" he cried. "To sacrifice us on that altar that way to their worm god!" But Lanier too had cried out, appalled, as he saw that awful sacrifice, and both strained madly against the grip of the worm creatures. Their struggles were in vain, and then in answer to another unspoken command the two monsters that held Randall were dragging him also to the earthen altar! He felt himself gripped by the four great creatures around the block, felt as he struggled with his last strength that he was being stretched out on the block, each of the four at one of its corners grasping one of his limbs. He heard Lanier's mad cries as though from a great distance, glimpsed as he was held thus on his back the great shape of the earthen worm god reared over him, and then glimpsed the leader of the monsters rearing beside him. * * * * * The dull sound of the swift-waving tentacles of the horde came to him, there was a tense moment of agony of waiting, and then the tentacles of the leader flashed up in the signal! But at the same moment Randall felt his limbs released by the four monsters that had held them! There seemed sudden wild confusion in the great cave. The strange rite broke off; the horde of worm monsters crawled frantically this way and that in it. Randall slipped off the block; staggered to his feet. The worm monsters in the cave were swarming toward the downward tunnel openings! The two captives forgotten, the creatures were pouring in crawling, fighting swarms toward those openings. And then, as Randall and Lanier stared stupefied, there came a red flash from one of the upward tunnels and a brilliant crimson ray stabbed down and mowed a path of annihilation in the cave's earthen side! The two heard great thumping sounds from above, saw the tunnels leading from above becoming suddenly many times greater in size as red rays flashed down along them to gouge the tunnel's walls. Then down from those enlarged tunnels there were bursting long shining shapes, great centipede-machines crawling down the tunnels which their rays made larger before them! And as the centipede-machines burst down into the cavern their crimson rays stabbed right and left to cut paths of annihilation among the worms. "The Martians!" Lanier cried. "They didn't find us above--they knew we must have been taken by these things--and they've come down after us!" * * * * * "Back, Lanier!" Randall shouted. "Quick, before they see us, behind this--" As he spoke he was jerking Lanier with him behind the looming earthen statue of the great worm god. Crouched there between the statue and the cave's wall they were hidden precariously from the view of those in the cavern. And now that cavern had become a scene of horror unthinkable as the centipede-machines pouring down into it blasted the frantically crawling worm monsters with their rays. The worm monsters attempted no resistance, but sought only to escape into their downward tunnels, and in moments those not caught by the rays had vanished in the openings. But the centipede-machines, after racing swiftly around the cavity, were following them, were going down into those downward tunnels also, their rays blasting down ahead of each to make the tunnel large enough for them to follow. In a moment all but one had vanished down into the openings, the remaining one having its front or head jammed in one of the openings from the failure of its operator to blast a large enough opening before him. As Lanier and Randall watched tensely they saw the machine's control room door open and a Martian descend. He inspected the tunnel opening in which his vehicle was jammed, then with a hand ray-tube began to disintegrate the earth around that opening to free his machine. Randall clutched his companion's arm. "That machine!" he whispered. "If we could capture it, it would give us a chance to get back to the city--to Milton and the matter-transmitter!" Lanier started, then nodded swiftly. "We'll chance it," he whispered. "For our twenty-four hours here must be almost up." * * * * * They hesitated a moment, then crept forward from behind the great earthen statue. The Martian had his back to them, his attention on the freeing of his mechanism. Across the dim-lit cavern they crept softly, and were within a dozen feet of the Martian when some sound made him wheel quickly to confront them with the deadly tube. But even as he whirled the two had leaped. The force of their leap sent them flying through that dozen feet of space to strike the Martian at the moment his tube levelled. One hissing call he uttered as they struck him, and then with all his strength Lanier had grasped the crocodilian body and bent it backward. Something in it snapped, and the Martian collapsed limply. The two looked wildly around. Nothing showed that the Martian's call had been heard, and after a moment's glance that showed the head of the centipede machine already freed, they were clambering up into its control room, closing the door. Randall seized the knob with which he had seen the machines operated. As he pulled it toward him the machine moved across the tunnel opening and raced smoothly over the cavern's floor. As he turned the knob the machine turned swiftly in the same direction. He headed the long mechanism toward one of the upward-curving tunnels which the Martians had blasted larger in descending. They were almost to it when there flashed up into the cavity from one of the downward tunnel openings a centipede-machine, and then another, and another. The Martians in their transparent-windowed control rooms took in at a glance the dead crocodilian on the floor, and then the three great machines were darting toward that of Randall and Lanier. "The Martian we killed!" Randall cried. "They heard his call and are coming after us!" "Turn to the wall!" Lanier shouted to him. "I have the rays--" * * * * * At that moment there was a clicking beside Randall and he glimpsed Lanier pulling forth two small grips he had found, then saw that two crimson rays were stabbing from tubes in their machine's front toward the others even as their own rays darted back. The beams that had been loosed toward them grazed past them as Randall whirled their machine to the wall, and he saw one of the three attacking mechanisms vanish as Lanier's beams struck it. Around--back--with instinctive, lightninglike motions he whirled their centipede-machine in the great dim-lit cave as the two remaining ones leapt again to the attack. Their rays shot right and left to catch the two men's vehicle in a trap of death, and as Randall swung their own mechanism straight ahead he glimpsed at the cavern's far end the great earthen worm god still upreared. On either side of them the red beams burned as they leapt forward, but as though running a gauntlet of death Randall kept the machine racing forward in the succeeding second until the two others loomed on either side of it. Then Lanier's beams were driving in turn to right and left of them and the two vanished as though by magic as they were struck. "Up to the surface!" Lanier cried, his eyes on the glowing dial of his wrist-watch. "We've been held hours here--we've but a half-hour or more before earth midnight!" * * * * * Randall sent their machine racing again toward one of the upward tunnels, and as the long mechanism began to climb smoothly up the darkness he heard Lanier agonizing beside him. "God, if we have only enough time to get to that matter-transmitter before the Martians start flashing to earth through it!" "But Milton?" Randall cried. "We don't know whether he's alive or dead! We can't leave him!" "We must!" said Lanier solemnly. "Our duty's to the earth now, man, to the world that we alone can save from the Martian invasion and conquest! At the hour of twelve Nelson will have the matter-receiver turned on and at that hour the Martian will start flashing to earth--unless we prevent!" Suddenly Randall grasped the knob in his hands more tightly as light showed above them. They had been climbing upward through the enlarged tunnel at their machine's highest speed, and now as the tunnel curved the light grew stronger. Suddenly they were emerging into the thin sunlight of the Martian day. In the crimson jungle about them were many Martians, milling excitedly to and fro, and other centipede-machines that were blasting their way down through tunnels to the worm world beneath. Randall and Lanier, breathless, crouched low in the transparent-windowed control room as they sent their mechanism racing through this scene of swarming activity. Both gasped as one of the centipede-machines clashed against their own in passing, its Martian driver turning to stare after them. But there came no alarm, and in a moment they had passed out of the swarm of Martians and machines and were heading through the jungle in the direction of the city. * * * * * Through the weird red vegetation their mechanism raced with them, Randall holding it at its highest speed, and in minutes they came out of the jungle and were racing over the clear space between it and the great canal. Beyond that canal loomed into the thin sunlight the clustering cones of the mighty Martian city, two towering above all the others--the cone of the Martian Master and the other cone in which was the matter-transmitter and receiver. It was toward the latter that Lanier pointed. "Head straight toward that cone, Randall--we've but minutes left!" They were racing now up over the great arch of the canal's metal bridge, and then scuttling smoothly off it and along the broad metal street through which they had fled in darkness hours before. In it Martians and centipede-machines were coming and going in great numbers, but none noticed the human forms of the two crouched low in their mechanism's control room. They were rushing then toward the looming cone of the Martian Master. As they flashed past it Randall saw Lanier's face working, knew the desire that tore at him even as at himself to burst inside and ascertain whether or not Milton still lived in the laboratories from which they had fled. But they were past it, faces white and grim, were rushing on through the Martian city at reckless speed toward the other mighty cone. * * * * * It seemed that all in the great city were heading toward the same goal, streams of crocodilian Martians and masses of shining centipede-machines filling the streets as they moved toward it. As they came closer to the mighty structure, hearts pounding, they saw that around it surged a mighty mass of Martians and machines. The hordes waiting to be released through the matter-transmitter inside upon the unsuspecting earth! "Try to get the machine inside!" Lanier whispered tensely. "If we can smash that transmitter yet...." Randall nodded grimly. "Keep ready at the ray-tubes," he told the other. As unobtrusively as possible he sent their long mechanism worming forward through the vast throng of machines and Martians, toward the great cone's door. Crouching low, the hands of their watches closing fast toward the twelfth figure, they edged forward in the long machine. At last they were moving through the mighty door, into the cone's interior. They moved slowly on through the mass of machines and crocodile forms inside, then halted. For at the great crowd's center was a clear circle hundreds of feet across, and as Randall gazed across it his heart seemed to leap once and then stop. At the center of that clear circle rose the two cubical metal chambers of the matter-transmitter and receiver. The transmitting chamber, they saw, was flooded with humming force, with white light pouring from its inner walls. It was already in operation, and the masses of Martians in the great cone were only waiting for the moment to sound when the receiver on earth would be operating also. Then they would pour into the chamber to be flashed in masses across the gulf to earth! The eyes of all in the cone seemed turned toward an erect dial-mechanism beside the chambers which was clocklike in appearance, and that would mark the moment when the first Martian could enter the transmitting-chamber and flash out. * * * * * A little distance from the two metal chambers stood a low dais on which there sat the hideous triple-bodied form of the Martian Master. Around him were the massed members of his council, waiting like him for the start of their age-planned invasion of earth. And beside the dais was a figure between two crocodilian guards at sight of whom Randall forgot all else. "Milton! My God, Lanier, it's Milton!" "Milton! They've brought him here to torture or kill him if they find he's lied about the moment they could flash to earth!" Milton! And at sight of him something snapped in Randall's brain. With a single motion of the knob he sent their centipede-machine crashing out into the clear circle at the mighty cone's center. A wild uproar of hissing cries broke from all the thousands in it as he sent the mechanism whirling toward the dais of the Martian Master. He saw the crocodilian forms there scattering blindly before him, and then as his rays drove out and spun and stabbed in mad figures of crimson death through the astounded Martian masses he saw Milton looking up toward them, crying out crazily to them as his two guards loosed him for the moment. A high call from the Martian Master ripped across the hall and was answered by a shattering roar of hissing voices as Martians and machines surged madly toward them. Randall and Lanier in a single leap were out of the centipede-machine, and in an instant had half-dragged Milton with them in a great leap up to the edge of the humming transmitting chamber. * * * * * Milton was shouting hoarsely to them over the wild uproar. To enter that transmitting chamber before the destined moment was annihilation, to be flashed out with no receiver on earth awaiting them. They turned, struck with all their strength at the first Martians rushing up to them. No rays flashed, for a ray loosed would destroy the chamber behind them that was the one gate for the Martians to the world they would invade. But as the Martian Master's high call hissed again all the countless crocodilian forms in the great cone were rushing toward them. Braced at the very edge of the humming, light-filled chamber, Randall and Lanier and Milton struck madly at the Martians surging up toward them. Randall seemed in a dream. A score of taloned paws clutched him from beneath; scaled forms collapsed under his insane blows. The whole vast cone and surging reptilian hordes seemed spinning at increasing speed around him. As his clenched fists flashed with waning strength he glimpsed crocodilian forms swarming up on either side of them, glimpsed Lanier down, talons reaching toward him, Milton fighting over him like a madman. Another moment would see it ended--reptilian arms reaching in scores to drag him down--Milton jerking Lanier half to his feet. The Martian Master's call sounded--and then came a great clanging sound at which the Martian hordes seemed to freeze for an instant motionless, at which Milton's voice reached him in a supreme cry. _"Randall--the transmitter!"_ For in that instant Milton was leaping back with Lanier, and as Randall with his last strength threw himself backward with them into the humming transmitting-chamber's brilliant light, he heard a last frenzied roar of hissing cries from the Martian hordes about them. Then as the brilliant light and force from the chamber's walls smote them, Randall felt himself hurled into blackness inconceivable, that smashed like a descending curtain across his brain. The curtain of blackness lifted for a moment. He was lying with Milton and Lanier in another chamber whose force beat upon them. He saw a yellow-lit room instead of the great cone--saw the tense, anxious face of Nelson at the switch beside them. He strove to move, made to Nelson a gesture with his arm that seemed to drain all strength and life from him; and then, as in answer to it Nelson drove up the switch and turned off the force of the matter-receiver in which they lay, the black curtain descended on Randall's brain once more. * * * * * Two hours later it was when Milton and Randall and Lanier and Nelson turned to the laboratory's door. They paused to glance behind them. Of the great matter-transmitter and receiver, of the apparatus that had crowded the laboratory, there remained now but wreckage. For that had been their first thought, their first task, when the astounded Nelson had brought the three back to consciousness and had heard their amazing tale. They had wrecked so completely the matter-station and its actuating apparatus that none could ever have guessed what a mechanism of wonder the laboratory a short time before had held. The cubical chambers had been smashed beyond all recognition, the dynamos were masses of split metal and fused wiring, the batteries of tubes were shattered, the condensers and transformers and wiring demolished. And it had only been when the last written plans and blue-prints of the mechanism had been burned that Milton and Randall and Lanier had stopped to allow their exhausted bodies a moment of rest. * * * * * Now as they paused at the laboratory's door, Lanier reached and swung it open. Together, silent, they gazed out. It all seemed to Randall exactly as upon the night before. The shadowy masses in the darkness, the heaving, dim-lit sea stretching far away before them, the curtain of summer stars stretched across the heavens. And, sinking westward amid those stars, the red spark of Mars toward which as though toward a magnet all their eyes had turned. Milton was speaking. "Up there it has shone for centuries--ages--a crimson spot of light. And up there the Martians have been watching, watching--until at last we opened to them the gate." Randall's hand was on his shoulder. "But we closed that gate, too, in the end." Milton nodded slowly. "We--or the fate that rules our worlds. But the gate is closed, and God grant, shall never again be opened by any on this world." "God grant it," the other echoed. And they were all gazing still toward the thing. Gazing up toward the crimson spot of light that burned there among the stars, toward the planet that shone red, menacing, terrible, but whose menace and whose terror had been thrust back even as they had crouched to spring at last upon the earth. The Exile of Time BEGINNING A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Ray Cummings_ CHAPTER I _Mysterious Girl_ [Illustration: _Presently there was not one Robot, but three!_] [Sidenote: From somewhere out of Time come a swarm of Robots who inflict on New York the awful vengeance of the diabolical cripple Tugh.] The extraordinary incidents began about 1 A.M. in the night of June 8-9, 1935. I was walking through Patton Place, in New York City, with my friend Larry Gregory. My name is George Rankin. My business--and Larry's--are details quite unimportant to this narrative. We had been friends in college. Both of us were working in New York; and with all our relatives in the middle west we were sharing an apartment on this Patton Place--a short crooked, little-known street of not particularly impressive residential buildings lying near the section known as Greenwich Village, where towering office buildings of the business districts encroach close upon it. This night at 1 A. M. it was deserted. A taxi stood at a corner; its chauffeur had left it there, and evidently gone to a nearby lunch room. The street lights were, as always, inadequate. The night was sultry and dark, with a leaden sky and a breathless humidity that presaged a thunder storm. The houses were mostly unlighted at this hour. There was an occasional apartment house among them, but mostly they were low, ramshackle affairs of brick and stone. We were still three blocks from our apartment when without warning the incidents began which were to plunge us and all the city into disaster. We were upon the threshold of a mystery weird and strange, but we did not know it. Mysterious portals were swinging to engulf us. And all unknowing, we walked into them. Larry was saying, "Wish we would get a storm to clear this air--_what the devil?_ George, did you hear that?" * * * * * We stood listening. There had sounded a choking, muffled scream. We were midway in the block. There was not a pedestrian in sight, nor any vehicle save the abandoned taxi at the corner. "A woman," he said. "Did it come from this house?" We were standing before a three-story brick residence. All its windows were dark. There was a front stoop of several steps, and a basement entryway. The windows were all closed, and the place had the look of being unoccupied. "Not in there, Larry," I answered. "It's closed for the summer--" But I got no further; we heard it again. And this time it sounded, not like a scream, but like a woman's voice calling to attract our attention. "George! Look there!" Larry cried. The glow from a street light illumined the basement entryway, and behind one of the dark windows a girl's face was pressed against the pane. Larry stood gripping me, then drew me forward and down the steps of the entryway. There was a girl in the front basement room. Darkness was behind her, but we could see her white frightened face close to the glass. She tapped on the pane, and in the silence we heard her muffled voice: "Let me out! Oh, let me get out!" The basement door had a locked iron gate. I rattled it. "No way of getting in," I said, then stopped short with surprise. "What the devil--" I joined Larry by the window. The girl was only a few inches from us. She had a pale, frightened face; wide, terrified eyes. Even with that first glimpse, I was transfixed by her beauty. And startled; there was something weird about her. A low-necked, white satin dress disclosed her snowy shoulders; her head was surmounted by a pile of snow-white hair, with dangling white curls framing her pale ethereal beauty. She called again. "What's the matter with you?" Larry demanded. "Are you alone in there? What is it?" * * * * * She backed from the window; we could see her only as a white blob in the darkness of the basement room. I called, "Can you hear us? What is it?" Then she screamed again. A low scream; but there was infinite terror in it. And again she was at the window. "You will not hurt me? Let me--oh please let me come out!" Her fists pounded the casement. What I would have done I don't know. I recall wondering if the policeman would be at our corner down the block; he very seldom was there. I heard Larry saying: "What the hell!--I'll get her out. George, get me that brick.... Now, get back, girl--I'm going to smash the window." But the girl kept her face pressed against the pane. I had never seen such terrified eyes. Terrified at something behind her in the house; and equally frightened at us. I call to her: "Come to the door. Can't you come to the door and open it?" I pointed to the basement gate. "Open it! Can you hear me?" "Yes--I can hear you, and you speak my language. But you--you will not hurt me? Where am I? This--this was my house a moment ago. I was living here." Demented! It flashed to me. An insane girl, locked in this empty house. I gripped Larry; said to him: "Take it easy; there's something queer about this. We can't smash windows. Let's--" "You open the door," he called to the girl. "I cannot." "Why? Is it locked on the inside?" "I don't know. Because--oh, hurry! If he--if it comes again--!" * * * * * We could see her turn to look behind her. Larry demanded, "Are you alone in there?" "Yes--now. But, oh! a moment ago he was here!" "Then come to the door." "I cannot. I don't know where it is. This is so strange and dark a place. And yet it was my home, just a little time ago." Demented! And it seemed to me that her accent was very queer. A foreigner, perhaps. She went suddenly into frantic fear. Her fists beat the window glass almost hard enough to shatter it. "We'd better get her out," I agreed. "Smash it, Larry." "Yes." He waved at the girl. "Get back. I'll break the glass. Get away so you won't get hurt." The girl receded into the dimness. "Watch your hand," I cautioned. Larry took off his coat and wrapped his hand and the brick in it. I gazed behind us. The street was still empty. The slight commotion we had made had attracted no attention. The girl cried out again as Larry smashed the pane. "Easy," I called to her. "Take it easy. We won't hurt you." The splintering glass fell inward, and Larry pounded around the casement until it was all clear. The rectangular opening was fairly large. We could see a dim basement room of dilapidated furniture: a door opening into a back room; the girl; nearby, a white shape watching us. There seemed no one else. "Come on," I said. "You can get out here." But she backed away. I was half in the window so I swung my legs over the sill. Larry came after me, and together we advanced on the girl, who shrank before us. Then suddenly she ran to meet us, and I had the sudden feeling that she was not insane. Her fear of us was overshadowed by her terror at something else in this dark, deserted house. The terror communicated itself to Larry and me. Something eery, here. "Come on," Larry muttered. "Let's get her out of here." * * * * * I had indeed no desire to investigate anything further. The girl let us help her through the window. I stood in the entryway holding her arms. Her dress was of billowing white satin with a single red rose at the breast; her snowy arms and shoulders were bare; white hair was piled high on her small head. Her face, still terrified, showed parted red lips; a little round black beauty patch adorned one of her powdered cheeks. The thought flashed to me that this was a girl in a fancy dress costume. This was a white wig she was wearing! I stood with the girl in the entryway, at a loss what to do. I held her soft warm arms; the perfume of her enveloped me. "What do you want us to do with you?" I demanded softly. McGuire, the policeman on the block, might at any moment pass. "We might get arrested! What's the matter with you? Can't you explain? Are you hurt?" She was staring as though I were a ghost, or some strange animal. "Oh, take me away from this place! I will talk--though I do not know what to say--" Demented or sane, I had no desire to have her fall into the clutches of the police. Nor could we very well take her to our apartment. But there was my friend Dr. Alten, alienist, who lived within a mile of here. "We'll take her to Alten's," I said to Larry, "and find out what this means. She isn't crazy." A sudden wild emotion swept me, then. Whatever this mystery, more than anything in the world I did not want the girl to be insane! Larry said, "There was a taxi down the street." * * * * * It came, now, slowly along the deserted block. The chauffeur had perhaps heard us, and was cruising past to see if we were possible fares. He halted at the curb. The girl had quieted; but when she saw the taxi her face registered wildest terror, and she shrank against me. "No! No! Don't let it kill me!" Larry and I were pulling her forward. "What the devil's the matter with you?" Larry demanded again. She was suddenly wildly fighting with us. "No! That--that mechanism--" "Get her in it!" Larry panted. "We'll have the neighborhood on us!" It seemed the only thing to do. We flung her, scrambling and fighting, into the taxi. To the half-frightened, reluctant driver, Larry said vigorously: "It's all right; we're just taking her to a doctor. Hurry and get us away from here. There's good money in it for you!" The promise--and the reassurance of the physician's address--convinced the chauffeur. We whirled off toward Washington Square. Within the swaying taxi I sat holding the trembling girl. She was sobbing now, but quieting. "There," I murmured. "We won't hurt you; we're just taking you to a doctor. You can explain to him. He's very intelligent." "Yes," she said softly. "Yes. Thank you. I'm all right now." She relaxed against me. So beautiful, so dainty a creature. Larry leaned toward us. "You're better now?" "Yes." "That's fine. You'll be all right. Don't think about it." * * * * * He was convinced she was insane. I breathed again the vague hope that it might not be so. She was huddled against me. Her face, upturned to mine, had color in it now; red lips; a faint rose tint in the pale cheeks. She murmured, "Is this New York?" My heart sank. "Yes," I answered. "Of course it is." "But when?" "What do you mean?" "I mean, what year?" "Why, 1935!" She caught her breath. "And your name is--" "George Rankin." "And I,"--her laugh had a queer break in it--"I am Mistress Mary Atwood. But just a few minutes ago--oh, am I dreaming? Surely I'm not insane!" Larry again leaned over us. "What are you talking about?" "You're friendly, you two. Like men; strange, so very strange-looking young men. This--this carriage without any horses--I know now it won't hurt me." She sat up. "Take me to your doctor. And then to the general of your army. I must see him, and warn him. Warn you all." She was turning half hysterical again. She laughed wildly. "Your general--he won't be General Washington, of course. But I must warn him." She gripped me. "You think I am demented. But I am not. I am Mary Atwood, daughter of Major Charles Atwood, of General Washington's staff. That was my home, where you broke the window. But it did not look like that a few moments ago. You tell me this is the year 1935, but just a few moments ago I was living in the year 1777!" CHAPTER II _From Out of the Past_ "Sane?" said Dr. Alten. "Of course she's sane." He stood gazing down at Mary Atwood. He was a tall, slim fellow, this famous young alienist, with dark hair turning slightly grey at the temples and a neat black mustache that made him look older than he was. Dr. Alten at this time, in spite of his eminence, had not yet turned forty. "She's sane," he reiterated. "Though from what you tell me, it's a wonder that she is." He smiled gently at the girl. "If you don't mind, my dear, tell us just what happened to you, as calmly as you can." She sat by an electrolier in Dr. Alten's living room. The yellow light gleamed on her white satin dress, on her white shoulders, her beautiful face with its little round black beauty patch, and the curls of the white wig dangling to her neck. From beneath the billowing, flounced skirt the two satin points of her slippers showed. A beauty of the year 1777! This thing so strange! I gazed at her with quickened pulse. It seemed that I was dreaming; that as I sat before her in my tweed business suit with its tubular trousers I was the anachronism! This should have been candle-light illumining us; I should have been a powdered and bewigged gallant, in gorgeous satin and frilled shirt to match her dress. How strange, how futuristic we three men of 1935 must have looked to her! And this city through which we had whirled her in the throbbing taxi--no wonder she was overwrought. Alten fumbled in the pockets of his dressing gown for cigarettes. "Go ahead, Miss Mary. You are among friends. I promise we will try and understand." * * * * * She smiled. "Yes. I--I believe you." Her voice was low. She sat staring at the floor, choosing her words carefully; and though she stumbled a little, her story was coherent. Upon the wings of her words my fancy conjured that other Time-world, more than a hundred and fifty years ago. "I was at home to-night," she began. "To-night after dinner. I have no relatives except my father. He is General Washington's aide. We live--our home is north of the city. I was alone, except for the servants. "Father sent word to-night that he was coming to see me. The messenger got through the British lines. But the redcoats are everywhere. They were quartered in our house. For months I have been little more than a servant to a dozen of My Lord's Howe's officers. They are gentlemen, though: I have no complaint. Then they left, and father, knowing it, wanted to come to see me. "He should not have tried it. Our house is watched. He promised me he would not wear the British red." She shuddered. "Anything but that--to have him executed as a spy. He would not risk that, but wear merely a long black cloak. "He was to come about ten o'clock. But at midnight there was no sign of him. The servants were asleep. I sat alone, and every pounding hoof-beat on the road matched my heart. "Then I went into the garden. There was a dim moon in and out of the clouds. It was hot, like to-night. I mean, why it _was_ to-night. It's so strange--" * * * * * In the silence of Alten's living room we could hear the hurried ticking of his little mantle clock, and from the street outside came the roar of a passing elevated train and the honk of a taxi. This was New York of 1935. But to me the crowding ghosts of the past were here. In fancy I saw the white pillars of the moonlit Atwood home. A garden with a dirt road beside it. Red-coated British soldiers passing.... And to the south the little city of New York extending northward from crooked Maiden Lane and the Bowling Green.... "Go on, Mistress Mary." "I sat on a bench in the garden. And suddenly before me there was a white ghost. A shape. A wraith of something which a moment before had not been there. I sat too frightened to move. I could not call out. I tried to, but the sound would not come. "The shape was like a mist, a little ball of cloud in the center of the garden lawn. Then in a second or two it was solid--a thing like a shining cage, with crisscrossing white bars. It was like a room; a metal cage like a room. I thought that the thing was a phantom or that I was asleep and dreaming. But it was real." Alten interrupted. "How big was it?" "As large as this room; perhaps larger. But it was square, and about twice as high as a man." A cage, then, some twenty feet square and twelve feet high. She went on: "The cage door opened. I think I was standing, then, and I tried to run but could not. The--the _thing_ came from the door of the cage and walked toward me. It was about ten feet tall. It looked--oh, it looked like a man!" * * * * * She buried her face in her hands. Again the room was silent. Larry was seated, staring at her; all of us were breathless. "Like a man?" Alten prompted gently. "Yes; like a man." She raised her white face. This girl out of the past! Admiration for her swept me anew--she was bravely trying to smile. "Like a man. A thing with legs, a body, a great round head and swaying arms. A jointed man of metal! You surely must know all about them." "A Robot!" Larry muttered. "You have them here, I suppose. Like that rumbling carriage without horses, this jointed iron man came walking toward me. And it spoke! A most horrible hollow voice--but it seemed almost human. And what it said I do not know, for I fainted. I remember falling as it came walking toward me, with stiff-jointed legs. "When I came to my senses I was in the cage. Everything was humming and glowing. There was a glow outside the bars like a moonlit mist. The iron monster was sitting at a table, with peculiar things--mechanical things--" "The controls of the cage-mechanisms," said Alten. "How long were you in the cage?" "I don't know. Time seemed to stop. Everything was silent except the humming noises. They were everywhere. I guess I was only half conscious. The monster sat motionless. In front of him were big round clock faces with whirling hands. Oh, I suppose you don't find this strange; but to me--!" * * * * * "Could you see anything outside the cage?" Alten persisted. "No. Just a fog. But it was crawling and shifting. Yes!--I remember now--I could not see anything out there, but I had the thought, the feeling, that there were tremendous things to see! The monster spoke again and told me to be careful; that we were going to stop. Its iron hands pulled at levers. Then the humming grew fainter; died away; and I felt a shock. "I thought I had fainted again. I could just remember being pulled through the cage door. The monster left me on the ground. It said, 'Lie there, for I will return very soon.' "The cage vanished. I saw a great cliff of stone near me; it had yellow-lighted openings, high up in the air. And big stone fences hemmed me in. Then I realized I was in an open space between a lot of stone houses. One towered like a cliff, or the side of a pyramid--" "The back yard of that house on Patton Place!" Larry exclaimed. He looked at me. "Has it any back yard, George?" "How should I know?" I retorted. "Probably has." "Go on," Alten was prompting. "That is nearly all. I found a doorway leading to a dark room. I crawled through it toward a glow of light. I passed through another room. I thought I was in a nightmare, and that this was my home. I remembered that the cage had not moved. It had hardly lurched. Just trembled; vibrated. "But this was not my home. The rooms were small and dark. Then I peered through a window on a strange stone street. And saw these strange-looking young men. And that is all--all I can tell you." She had evidently held herself calm by a desperate effort. She broke down now, sobbing without restraint. CHAPTER III _Tugh, the Cripple_ The portals of this mystery had swung wide to receive us. The tumbling events which menaced all our world of 1935 were upon us now. A maelstrom. A torrent in the midst of which we were caught up like tiny bits of cork and whirled away. But we thought we understood the mystery. We believed we were acting for the best. What we did was no doubt ill-considered; but the human mind is so far from omniscient! And this thing was so strange! Alten said, "You have a right to be overwrought, Mistress Mary Atwood. But this thing is as strange to us as it is to you. I called that iron monster a Robot. But it does not belong to our age: if it does I have never seen one such as you describe. And traveling through Time--" He smiled down at her. "That is not a commonplace everyday occurrence to us, I assure you. The difference is that in this world of ours we can understand--or at least explain--these things as being scientific. And so they have not the terror of the supernatural." Mary was calmer now. She returned his smile. "I realize that; or at least I am trying to realize it." What a level-headed girl was this! I touched her arm. "You are very wonderful--" Alten brushed me away. "Let's try and reduce it to rationality. The cage was--is, I should say, since of course it still exists--that cage is a Time-traveling vehicle. It is traveling back and forth through Time, operated by a Robot. Call it that. A pseudo-human monster fashioned of metal in the guise of a man." Even Alten had to force himself to speak calmly, as he gazed from one to the other of us. "It came, no doubt from some future age, where half-human mechanisms are common, and Time-traveling is known. That cage probably does not travel in Space, but only in Time. In the future--somewhere--the Space of that house on Patton Place may be the laboratory of a famous scientist. And in the past--in the year 1777--that same Space was the garden of Mistress Atwood's home. So much is obvious. But why--" "Why," Larry burst out, "did that iron monster stop in 1777 and abduct this girl?" "And why," I intercepted, "did it stop here in 1935?" I gazed at Mary. "And it told you it would return?" "Yes." * * * * * Alten was pondering. "There must be some connection, of course.... Mistress Mary, had you never seen this cage before?" "No." "Nor anything like it? Was anything like that known to your Time?" "No. Oh, I cannot truly say that. Some people believe in phantoms, omens and witchcraft. There was in Salem, in the Massachusetts Colony, not so many years ago--" "I don't mean that. I mean Time-traveling." "There were soothsayers and fortune-tellers, and necromancers with crystals to gaze into the future." "We still have them," Alten smiled. "You see, we don't know much more than you do about this thing." I said, "Did you have any enemy? Anyone who wished you harm?" She thought a moment. "No--yes, there was one." She shuddered at the memory. "A man--a cripple--a horribly repulsive man of about one score and ten years. He lives down near the Battery." She paused. "Tell us about him," Larry urged. She nodded. "But what could he have to do with this? He is horribly deformed. Thin, bent legs, a body like a cask and a bulging forehead with goggling eyes. My Lord Howe's officers say he is very intelligent and very learned. Loyal to the King, too. There was a munitions plot in the Bermudas, and this cripple and Lord Howe were concerned in it. But Father likes the fellow and says that in reality he wishes our cause well. He is rich. "But you don't want to hear all this. He--he made love to me, and I repulsed him. There was a scene with Father, and Father had our lackeys throw him out. That was a year ago. He cursed horribly. He vowed then that some day he--he would have me; and get revenge on Father. But he has kept away. I have not seen him for a twelvemonth." * * * * * We were silent. I chanced to glance at Alten, and a strange look was on his face. He said abruptly, "What is this cripple's name, Mistress Mary?" "Tugh. He is known to all the city as Tugh. Just that. I never heard any Christian name." Alten rose sharply to his feet. "A cripple named Tugh?" "Yes," she affirmed wonderingly. "Does it mean anything to you?" Alten swung on me. "What is the number of that house on Patton Place? Did you happen to notice?" I had, and wondering I told him. "Just a minute," he said. "I want to use the phone." He came back to us in a moment: his face was very solemn. "That house on Patton Place is owned by a man named Tugh! I just called a reporter friend; he remembers a certain case: he confirmed what I thought. Mistress Mary, did this Tugh in your Time ever consult doctors, trying to have his crippled body made whole?" "Why, of course he did. I have heard that many times. But his crippled, deformed body cannot be cured." Alten checked Larry and me when we would have broken in with astonished questions. He said: "Don't ask me what it means; I don't know. But I think that this cripple--this Tugh--has lived both in 1777 and 1935, and is traveling between them in this Time-traveling cage. And perhaps he is the human master of that Robot." Alten made a vehement gesture. "But we'd better not theorize; it's too fantastic. Here is the story of Tugh in our Time. He came to me some three years ago; in 1932, I think. He offered any price if I could cure his crippled body. All the New York medical fraternity knew him. He seemed sane, but obsessed with the idea that he must have a body like other men. Like Faust, who, as an old man, paid the price of his soul to become youthful, he wanted to have the beautiful body of a young man." Alten was speaking vehemently. My thoughts ran ahead of his words; I could imagine with grewsome fancy so many things. A cripple, traveling to different ages seeking to be cured. Desiring a different body.... * * * * * Alten was saying, "This fellow Tugh lived alone in that house on Patton Place. He was all you say of him, Mistress Mary. Hideously repulsive. A sinister personality. About thirty years old. "And, in 1932, he got mixed up with a girl who had a somewhat dubious reputation herself. A dancer, a frequenter of night-clubs, as they used to be called. Her name was Doris Johns--something like that. She evidently thought she could get money out of Tugh. Whatever it was, there was a big uproar. The girl had him arrested, saying that he had assaulted her. The police had quite a time with the cripple." Larry and I remembered a few of the details of it now, though neither of us had been in New York at the time. Alten went on: "Tugh fought with the police. Went berserk. I imagine they handled him pretty roughly. In the Magistrate's Court he made another scene, and fought with the court attendants. With ungovernable rage he screamed vituperatives, and was carried kicking, biting and snarling from the court-room. He threatened some wild weird revenge upon all the city officials--even upon the city itself." "Nice sort of chap," Larry commented. But Alten did not smile. "The Magistrate could only hold him for contempt of Court. The girl had absolutely no evidence to support her accusation of assault. Tugh was finally dismissed. A week later he murdered the girl. "The details are unimportant; but he did it. The police had him trapped in his house; had the house surrounded--this same one on Patton Place--but when they burst in to take him, he had inexplicably vanished. He was never heard from again." Alten continued to regard us with grim, solemn face. "Never heard from--until to-night. And now we hear of him. How he vanished, with the police guarding every exit to that house--well, it's obvious, isn't it? He went into another Time-world. Back to 1777, doubtless." Mary Atwood gave a little cry. "I had forgotten that I must warn you. Tugh told me once, before Father and I quarreled with him, that he had a mysterious power. He was a most wonderful man, he said. And there was a world in the future--he mentioned 1934 or 1935--which he hated. A great city whose people had wronged him; and he was going to bring death to them. Death to them all! I did not heed him. I thought he was demented, raving...." * * * * * Alten's little clock ticked with tumultuous heartbeat through another silence. The great city around us, even though this was two o'clock in the morning, throbbed with a myriad of blended sounds. A warning! Was the girl from out of the past giving us a warning of coming disaster to this great city? Alten was pacing the floor. "What are we to do--tell the authorities? Take Mistress Mary Atwood to Police Headquarters and inform them that she has come from the year 1777? And that, if we are not careful, there will be an attack upon New York?" "No!" I burst out. I could fancy how we would be received at Police Headquarters if we did that! And our pictures in to-morrow's newspapers. Mary's picture, with a jibing headline ridiculing us. "No," echoed Alten. "I have no intention of doing it. I'm not so foolish as that." He stopped before Mary. "What do you want to do? You're obviously an exceptionally intelligent, level-headed girl. Heaven knows you need to be." "I--I want to get back home," she stammered. A pang shot through me as she said it. A hundred and fifty years to separate us. A vast gulf. An impassible barrier. "That mechanism said it would return!" "Exactly," agreed Alten. An excitement was upon us all. "Exactly what I mean! Shall we chance it? Try it? There's nothing else I can think of to do. I have a revolver and two hunting rifles." "Just what do you mean?" I demanded. "I mean, we'll take my car and go to Tugh's house on Patton Place. Right now! And if that mechanical monster returns, we'll seize it!" Alten, the usually calm, precise man of science, was tensely vehement. "Seize it! Why not? Three of us, armed, ought to be able to overcome a Robot! Then we'll seize the Time-traveling cage. Perhaps we can operate it. If not, with it in our possession we'll at least have something to show the authorities; there'll be no ridicule then!" Our inescapable destiny was making us plunge so rashly into this mystery! With the excitement and the strange fantasy of it upon us, we thought we were acting for the best. Within a quarter of an hour, armed and with a long overcoat and a scarf to hide Mary Atwood's beauty, we took Alten's car and drove to Patton Place. CHAPTER IV _The Fight With the Robot_ Patrolman McGuire quite evidently had not passed through Patton Place since we left it; or at least he had not noticed the broken window. The house appeared as before, dark, silent, deserted, and the broken basement window yawned with its wide black opening. "I'll leave the car around on the other street," Alten said as slowly we passed the house. "Quick--no one's in sight; you three get out here." We crouched in the dim entryway and in a moment he joined us. I clung to Mary Atwood's arm. "You're not afraid?" I asked. "No. Yes; of course I am afraid. But I want to do what we planned. I want to go back to my own world, to my Father." "Inside!" Alten whispered. "I'll go first. You two follow with her." I can say now that we should not have taken her into that house. It is so easy to look back upon what one might have done! We climbed through the window, into the dark front basement room. There was only silence, and our faintly padding footsteps on the carpeted floor. The furniture was shrouded with cotton covers standing like ghosts in the gloom. I clutched the loaded rifle which Alten had given me. Larry was similarly armed; and Alten carried a revolver. "Which way, Mary?" I whispered. "You're sure it was outdoors?" "Yes. This way, I think." We passed through the connecting door. The back room seemed to be a dismantled kitchen. "You stay with her here, a moment," Alten whispered to me. "Come on, Larry. Let's make sure no one--nothing--is down here." I stood silent with Mary, while they prowled about the lower floor. "It may have come and gone," I whispered. "Yes." She was trembling against me. * * * * * It seemed to me an eternity while we stood there listening to the faint footfalls of Larry and Alten. Once they must have stood quiet; then the silence leaped and crowded us. It is horrible to listen to a pregnant silence which every moment might be split by some weird unearthly sound. Larry and Alten returned. "Seems to be all clear," Alten whispered. "Let's go into the back yard." The little yard was dim. The big apartment house against its rear wall loomed with a blank brick face, save that there were windows some eight stories up. Only a few windows overlooked this dim area with its high enclosing walls. The space was some forty feet square, and there was a faded grass plot in the center. We crouched near the kitchen door, with Mary behind us in the room. She said she could recall the cage having stood near the center of the yard, with its door facing this way.... Nearly an hour passed. It seemed that the dawn must be near, but it was only around four o'clock. The same storm clouds hung overhead--a threatening storm which would not break. The heat was oppressing. "It's come and gone," Larry whispered; "or it isn't coming. I guess that this--" And then it came! We were just outside the doorway, crouching against the shadowed wall of the house. I had Mary close behind me, my rifle ready. "There!" whispered Alten. We all saw it--a faint luminous mist out near the center of the yard--a crawling, shifting ball of fog. Alten and Larry, one on each side of me, shifted sidewise, away from me. Mary stood and cast off her dark overcoat. We men were in dark clothes, but she stood in gleaming white against the dark rectangle of doorway. It was as we had arranged. A moment only, she stood there; then she moved back, further behind me in the black kitchen. And in that moment the cage had materialized. We were hoping its occupant had seen the girl, and not us. A breathless moment passed while we stared for the first time at this strange thing from the Unknown.... A formless, glowing mist, it quickly gathered itself into solidity. It seemed to shrink. It took form. From a wraith of a cage, in a second it was solid. And so silently, so swiftly, came this thing out of Time into what we call the Present! The dim yard a second ago had been empty. * * * * * The cage stood there, a thing of gleaming silver bars. It seemed to enclose a single room. From within its dim interior came a faint glow, which outlined something standing at the bars, peering out. The doorway was facing us. There had been utter silence; but suddenly, as though to prove how solid was this apparition, we heard the clank of metal, and the door slid open. I turned to make sure that Mary was hiding well behind me. The way back to the street, if need for escape arose, was open to her. I turned again, to face the shining cage. In the doorway something stood peering out, a light behind it. It was a great jointed thing of dark metal some ten feet high. For a moment it stood motionless. I could not see its face clearly, though I knew there was a suggestion of human features, and two great round glowing spots of eyes. It stepped forward--toward us. A jointed, stiff-legged step. Its arms were dangling loosely; I heard one of its mailed hands clank against its sides. "Now!" Alten whispered. I saw Alten's revolver leveling, and my own rifle went up. "Aim at its face," I murmured. We pulled our triggers together, and two spurts of flame spat before us. But the thing had stooped an instant before, and we missed. Then came Larry's shot. And then chaos. * * * * * I recall hearing the ping of Larry's bullet against the mailed body of the Robot. At that it crouched, and from it leaped a dull red-black beam of light. I heard Mary scream. She had not fled but was clinging to me. I cast her off. "Run! Get back! Get away!" I cried. Larry shouted, as we all stood bathed in the dull light from the Robot: "Look out! It sees us!" He fired again, into the light--and murmured, "Why--why--" A great surprise and terror was in his tone. Beside me, with half-leveled revolver, Alten stood transfixed. And he too was muttering something. All this happened in an instant. And there I was aware that I was trying to get my rifle up for firing again; but I could not. My arms stiffened. I tried to take a step, tried to move a foot, but could not. I was rooted there; held, as though by some giant magnet, to the ground! This horrible dull-red light! It was cold--a frigid, paralyzing blast. The blood ran like cold water in my veins. My feet were heavy with the weight of my body pressing them down. Then the Robot was moving; coming forward; holding the light upon us. I thought I heard its voice--and a horrible, hollow, rasping laugh. My brain was chilling. I had confused thoughts; impressions, vague and dreamlike. As though in a dream I felt myself standing there with Mary clinging to me. Both of us were frozen inert upon our feet. I tried to shout, but my tongue was too thick; my throat seemed swelling inside. I heard Alten's revolver clatter to the stone pavement of the yard. And saw him fall forward--out. * * * * * I felt that in another instant I too would fall. This damnable, chilling light! Then the beam turned partly away, and fell more fully upon Larry. With his youth and greater strength than Alten's or mine, he had resisted its first blast. His weapon had fallen; now he stooped and tried to seize it; but he lost his balance and staggered backward against the house wall. And then the Robot was upon him. It sprang--this mechanism!--this machine in human form! And, with whatever pseudo-human intelligence actuated its giant metal body, it reached under Larry for his rifle! Its great mailed hand swept the ground, seized the rifle and flung it away. And as Larry twisted sidewise, the Robot's arm with a sweep caught him and rolled him across the yard. When he stopped, he lay motionless. I heard myself thickly calling to Mary, and the light flashed again upon us. And then we fell forward. Clinging together, we fell.... I did not quite lose consciousness. It seemed that I was frozen, and drifting off half into a nightmare sleep. Great metal arms were gathering Mary and me from the ground. Lifting us; carrying us.... We were in the cage. I felt myself lying on the grid of a metal floor. I could vaguely see the crossed bars of the ceiling overhead, and the latticed walls around me.... * * * * * Then the dull-red light was gone. The chill was gone. I was warming. The blessed warm blood again was coursing through my veins, reviving me, bringing back my strength. I turned over, and found Mary lying beside me. I heard her softly murmur: "George! George Rankin!" The giant mechanism clanked the door closed, and came with stiff, stilted steps back into the center of the cage. I heard the hollow rumble of its voice, chuckling, as its hand pulled a switch. At once the cage-room seemed to reel. It was not a physical movement, though, but more a reeling of my senses, a wild shock to all my being. Then, after a nameless interval, I steadied. Around me was a humming, glowing intensity of tiny sounds and infinitely small, infinitely rapid vibrations. The whole room grew luminous. The Robot, seated now at a table, showed for a moment as thin as an apparition. All this room--Mary lying beside me, the mechanism, myself--all this was imponderable, intangible, unreal. And outside the bars stretched a shining mist of movement. Blurred shifting shapes over a vast illimitable vista. Changing things; melting landscapes. Silent, tumbling, crowding events blurred by our movement as we swept past them. We were traveling through Time! CHAPTER V _The Girl from 2930_ I must take up now the sequence of events as Larry saw them. I was separated from Larry during most of the strange incidents which befell us later; but from his subsequent account of what happened to him I am constructing several portions of this history, using my own words based upon Larry's description of the events in which I personally did not participate; I think that this method avoids complications in the narrative and makes more clear my own and Larry's simultaneous actions. Larry recovered consciousness in the back yard of the house on Patton Place probably only a moment or two after Mary and I had been snatched away in the Time-traveling cage. He found himself bruised and battered, but apparently without injuries. He got to his feet, weak and shaken. His head was roaring. He recalled what had happened to him, but it seemed like a dream. The back yard was then empty. He remembered vaguely that he had seen the mechanism carry Mary and me into the cage, and that the cage had vanished. Larry knew that only a few moments had passed. The shots had aroused the neighborhood. As he stood now against the house wall, dizzily looking around, he was aware of calling voices from the nearby windows. Then Larry stumbled over Alten, who was lying on his face near the kitchen doorway. Still alive, he groaned as Larry fell over him; but he was unconscious. Forgetting all about his weapon, Larry's first thought was to rush out for help. He staggered through the dark kitchen into the front room, and through the corridor into the street. Patton Place, as before, was deserted. The houses were dark; the alarm was all in the rear. There were no pedestrians, no vehicles, and no sign of a policeman. Dawn was just coming; as Larry turned eastward he saw, in a patch of clearing sky, stars paling with the coming daylight. * * * * * With uncertain steps, out in the middle of the street, Larry ran eastward through the middle of the street, hoping that at the next corner he might encounter someone, or find a telephone over which he might call the police. But he had not gone more than five hundred feet when suddenly he stopped; stood there wavering, panting, staring with whirling senses. Near the middle of the street, with the faint dawn behind it, a ball of gathering mist had appeared directly in his path. It was a luminous, shining mist--and it was gathering into form! In seconds a small, glowing cage of white luminous bars stood there in the street, where there had just been nothing! It was not the Time-traveling cage from the house yard he had just left. No--he knew it was not that one. This one was similar, but much smaller. The shock of its appearance held Larry for a moment transfixed. It had so silently, so suddenly appeared in his path that Larry was now within a foot or two of its doorway. The doorway slid open, and a man leaped out. Behind him, a girl peered from the doorway. Larry stood gaping, wholly confused. The cage had materialized so abruptly that the leaping man collided with him before either man could avoid the other. Larry gripped the man before him; struck out with his fists and shouted. The girl in the doorway called frantically: "Harl-no noise! Harl-stop him!" Then, suddenly the two of them were upon Larry and pulling him toward the doorway of the cage. Inside, he was jerked; he shouted wildly; but the girl slammed the door. Then in a soft, girlish voice, in English with a curiously indescribable accent and intonation, the girl said hastily: "Hold him, Harl! Hold him! I'll start the traveler!" The black garbed figure of a slim young man was gripping Larry as the girl pulled a switch and there was a shock, a reeling of Larry's senses, as the cage, motionless in Space, sped off into Time.... * * * * * It seems needless to encumber this narrative with prolonged details of how Larry explained himself to his two captors. Or how they told him who they were; and from whence they had come; and why. To Larry it was a fantastic--and confusing at first--series of questions and answers. An hour? The words have no meaning. They were traveling through Time. Years were minutes--the words meaning nothing save how they impressed the vehicle's human occupants. To them all it was an interval of mutual distrust which was gradually changing into friendship. Larry found the two strangers singularly direct; singularly forceful in quiet, calm fashion; singularly keen of perception. They had not meant to capture him. The encounter had startled them, and Larry's shouts would have brought others upon the scene. Almost at once they knew Larry was no enemy, and told him so. And in a moment Larry was pouring out all that had happened to him; and to Alten and Mary Atwood and me. This strange thing! But to Larry now, telling it to these strange new companions, it abruptly seemed not fantastic, but only sinister. The Robot, an enemy, had captured Mary Atwood and me, and whirled us off in the other--the larger--cage. And in this smaller cage Larry was with friends--for he suddenly found their purpose the same as his! They were chasing this other Time-traveler, with its semi-human, mechanical operator! The young man said, "You explain to him, Tina. I will watch." He was a slim, pale fellow, handsome in a queer, tight-lipped, stern-faced fashion. His close-fitting black silk jacket had a white neck ruching and white cuffs; he wore a wide white-silk belt, snug black-silk knee-length trousers and black stockings. And the girl was similarly dressed. Her black hair was braided and coiled upon her head, and ornaments dangled from her ears. Over her black blouse was a brocaded network jacket; her white belt, compressing her slim waist, dangled with tassels; and there were other tassels on the garters at the knees of her trousers. She was a pale-faced, beautiful girl, with black brows arching in a thin line, with purple-black eyes like somber pools. She was no more than five feet tall, and slim and frail. But, like her companion, there was about her a queer aspect of calm, quiet power and force of personality--physical vitality merged with an intellect keenly sharp. She sat with Larry on a little metal bench, listening, almost without interruption, to his explanation. And then, succinctly she gave her own. The young man, Harl, sat at his instruments, with his gaze searching for the other cage, five hundred feet away in Space, but in Time unknown. And outside the shining bars Larry could vaguely see the blurred, shifting, melting vistas of New York City hastening through the changes Time had brought to it. * * * * * This young man, Harl, and this girl, Tina, lived in New York City in the Time-world of 2930 A. D. To Larry it was a thousand years in the future. Tina was the Princess of the American Nation. It was an hereditary title, non-political, added several hundred years previously as a picturesque symbol. A tradition; something to make less prosaic the political machine of Republican government. Tina was loved by her people, we afterward came to learn. Harl was an aristocrat of the New York City of Tina's Time-world, a scientist. In the Government laboratories, under the same roof where Tina dwelt, Harl had worked with another, older scientist, and--so Tina told me--together they had discovered the secret of Time-traveling. They had built two cages, a large and a small, which could travel freely through Time. The smaller vehicle--this one in which Larry now was speeding--was, in the Time-world of 2930, located in the garden of Tina's palace. The other, somewhat larger, they had built some five hundred feet distant, just beyond the palace walls, within a great Government laboratory. Harl's fellow scientist--the leader in their endeavors, since he was much older and of wider experience--was not altogether trusted by Tina. He took the credit for the discovery of Time-traveling; yet, said Tina, it was Harl's genius which in reality had worked out the final problems. And this older scientist was a cripple. A hideously repulsive fellow, named Tugh! "Tugh!" exclaimed Larry. "The same," said Tina in her crisp fashion. "Yes--undoubtedly the same. So you see why what you have told us was of such interest. Tugh is a Government leader in our world; and now we find he has lived in _your_ Time, and in the Time of this Mary Atwood." From his seat at the instrument table, Harl burst out: "So he murdered a girl of 1935, and has abducted another of 1777? You would not have me judge him, Tina--" "No one," she said, "may judge without full facts. This man here--this Larry of 1935--tells us that only a mechanism is in the larger cage--which is what we thought, Harl. And this mechanism, without a doubt, is the treacherous Migul." * * * * * There was, in 2930, a vast world of machinery. The god of the machine had developed them to almost human intricacy. Almost all the work of the world, particularly in America, and most particularly in the mechanical center of New York City, was done by machinery. And the machinery itself was guided, handled, operated--even, in some instances, constructed--by other, more intricate machines. They were fashioned in pseudo-human form--thinking, logically acting, independently acting mechanisms: the Robots. All but human, they were--a new race. Inferior to humans, yet similar. And in 2930 the machines, slaves of idle human masters, had been developed too highly! They were upon the verge of a revolt! All this Tina briefly sketched now to Larry. And to Larry it seemed a very distant, very academic danger. Yet so soon all of us were plunged into the midst of it! The revolt had not yet come, but it was feared. A great Robot named Migul seemed fomenting it. The revolt was smouldering; at any moment it would burst; and then the machines would rise to destroy the humans. This was the situation when Harl and Tugh completed the Time-traveling vehicles in this world. They had been tested, but never used. Then Tugh had vanished; was gone now; and the larger of the two vehicles was also gone. Both Harl and Tina had always distrusted Tugh. They thought him allied to the Robots. But they had no proof; and suavely he denied it, and helped always with the Government activities struggling to keep the mechanical slaves docile and at work. * * * * * Tugh and the larger vehicle had vanished, and so had Migul, the insubordinate, giant mechanism--at which, unknown to the Government officials, Tina and Harl had taken the other cage and started in pursuit. It was possible that Tugh was loyal; that Migul had abducted him and stolen the cage. "Wait!" exclaimed Larry. "I'm trying to figure this out. It seems to hang together. It almost does, but not quite. When did Tugh vanish from your world?" "To our consciousness," Tina answered, "about three hours ago. Perhaps a little longer than that." "But look here," Larry protested: "according to my story and that of Mary Atwood, Tugh lived in 1935 and in 1777 for three years." Confusing? But in a moment Larry understood it. Tugh could have taken the cage, gone to 1777 and to 1935, alternated between them for what was to him, and to those Time-worlds, three years--then have returned to 2930 _on the same day of his departure_. He would have lived these three years; grown that much older; but to the Time-world of 2930 neither he nor the cage would have been missed. "That," said Tina, "is what doubtless he did. The cage is traveling again. But you, Larry, tell us only Migul is in it." "I couldn't say that of my own knowledge," said Larry. "Mary Atwood said so. It held only the mechanism you call Migul. And now Migul has with him Mary and my friend George Rankin. We must reach them." "We want that quite as much as you do," said Harl. "And to find Tugh. If he is a friend we must save him; if a traitor--punish him." Larry began, "But can you get to the other cage?" "Only if it stops," said Tina. "_When_ it stops, I should say." "Come here," said Harl. "I will show you." * * * * * Larry crossed the glowing room. He had forgotten its aspect--the ghostly unreality around him. He too--his body, like Harl's and Tina's--was of the same wraith-like substance.... Then, suddenly, Larry's viewpoint shifted. The room and its occupants were real and tangible. And outside the glowing bars--everything out there was the unreality. "Here," said Harl. "I will show you. It is not visible yet." Each of the cages was equipped with an intricate device, strange of name, which Larry and I have since termed a Time-telespectroscope. Larry saw it now as a small metal box, with tuning vibration dials, batteries, coils, a series of tiny prisms and an image-mirror--the whole surmounted by what appeared the barrel of a small telescope. Harl had it leveled and was gazing through it.[1] [Footnote 1: The workings of the Time-telespectroscope involve all the intricate postulates and mathematical formulae of Time-traveling itself. As a matter of practicality, however, the results obtained are simple of understanding. The etheric vibratory rate of the vehicles while traveling through Time was constantly changing. Through the telespectroscope one cage was visible to the other across the five hundred feet of intervening Space when they approached a simultaneous Time; when they, so to speak, were tuned in unison. Thus, Harl explained, the other cage would show as a ghost, the faintest of wraiths, over a Time-distance of some five or ten years. And the closer in Time they approached it, the more solid it would appear.] The enemy cage was not visible, now. But Harl and Tina had glimpsed it on several occasions. What vast realms Time opens within a single small segment of Space! The larger vehicle seemed speeding back and forth. A dash into the year 1777! as Larry learned from Mary Atwood. And there had been several evidences of the cage halting in 1935. Larry's account explained two such pauses. But the others? Those others, which brought to the City of New York such amazing disaster? We did not learn of them until much later. But Alten lived through them, and presently I shall reconstruct them from his account. The larger cage was difficult to trace in its sweep along the corridors of Time. Never once had Tina and Harl been able to stop simultaneously with it, for a year has so many separate days and hours. The nearest they came was the halt in the night of June 8-9, when they encountered Larry, and, startled, seized him and moved on again. * * * * * Harl continued to gaze through the eyepiece of the detecting instrument. But nothing showed, and the mirror-grid on the table was dark. "But--which way are we going?" Larry stammered. "Back," said Tina. "The retrograde.... Wait! Do not do that!" Larry had turned toward where the bars, less luminous, showed a dark rectangle like a window. The desire swept him to gaze out at the shining, changing scene. But Tina checked him. "Do not do that! Not yet! It is too great a shock in the retrograde. It was to me." "But where are we?" In answer she gestured toward a series of tiny dials on the table edge. There were at least two score of them, laid in a triple bank. Dials to record the passing minutes, hours, days; the years, the centuries! Larry stared at the small whirring pointers. Some were a blur of swift whirling movement--the hours and days. Tina showed Larry how to read them. The cage was passing through the year 1880. In a few moments of Larry's consciousness it was 1799. Then 1793. The infant American nation was here now. But with the cage retrograding, soon they would be in the Revolutionary War. Tina said. "The other cage may go back to 1777, if Tugh meant ill to Mary Atwood, or wants revenge upon her father, at you said. We shall see." They had reached 1790 when Harl gave a low ejaculation. "You see it?" Tina murmured. "Yes. Very faintly." Larry bent tensely forward. "Will it show on the mirror?" "Yes; presently. We are about ten years from it. If we get closer, the mirror will show it." But the mirror held dark. No--now it was glowing a trifle. A vague luminosity. Tina moved toward the instrument controls nearby. "Watch closely, Harl. I will slow us down." * * * * * It seemed to Larry that the humming with which everything around him was endowed, now began descending in pitch. And his head suddenly was unsteady. A singular, wild, queer feeling was within him. An unrest. A tugging torment of every tiny cell of his body. Tina said. "Hold steady, Larry, for when we stop." "Will it shock me?" "Yes--at first. But the shock will not harm you: it is nearly all mental." The mirror held an image now--the other cage. Larry saw, on the six-inch square mirror surface, a crawling, melting scene of movement. And in the midst of it, the image of the other cage, faint and spectral. In all the mirrored movement, only the apparition of the cage was still. And this marked it; made it visible. Over an interval, while Larry stared, the ghostly image grew plainer. They were approaching its Time-factor! "It is stopping," Harl murmured. Larry was aware that he had left the eyepiece and joined Tina at the controls. "Tina, let us try to get it right this time." "Yes." "In 1777; but which month, would you say?" "It has stopped! See?" * * * * * Larry heard them clicking switches, and setting the controls for a stop. Then he felt Tina gently push him. "Sit here. Standing, you might fall." He found himself on a bench. He could still see the mirror. The ghost of the other cage was now lined more plainly upon it. "This month," said Tina, setting a switch. "Would not you say so? And this day." "But the hour, Tina? The minute?" The vast intricate corridors of Time! "It would be in the night. Hasten, Harl, or we will pass! Try the night--around midnight. Even Migul has the mechanical intelligence to fear a daylight pausing." The controls were set for the stop. Larry heard Tina murmuring, "Oh, I pray we may have judged with correctness!" The vehicle was rapidly coming to a stop. Larry gripped the table, struggling to hold firm to his reeling senses. This soundless, grinding halt! His swaying gaze strayed from the mirror. Outside the glowing bars he could now discern the luminous greyness separating. Swift, soundless claps of light and dark, alternating. Daylight and darkness. They had been blended, but now they were separating. The passing, retrograding days--a dozen to the second of Larry's consciousness. Then fewer. Vivid daylight. Black night. Daylight again. "Not too slowly, Harl; we will be seen!... Oh, it is gone!" Larry saw the mirror go blank. The image on it had flared to great distinctness, faded, and was gone. Darkness was around Larry. Then daylight. Then darkness again. "Gone!" echoed Harl's disappointed voice. "But it stopped here!... Shall we stop, Tina?" "Yes! Leave the control settings as they are. Larry--be careful, now." A dragging second of grey daylight. A plunge into night. It seemed to Larry that all the universe was soundlessly reeling. Out of the chaos, Tina was saying: "We have stopped. Are you all right, Larry?" "Yes," he stammered. * * * * * He stood up. The cage room, with its faint lights, benches and settles, instrument tables and banks of controls, was flooded with moonlight from outside the bars. Night, and the moon and stars out there. Harl slid the door open. "Come, let us look." The reeling chaos had fallen swiftly from Larry. With Tina's small black and white figure beside him, he stood at the threshold of the cage. A warm gentle night breeze fanned his face. A moonlit landscape lay somnolent around the cage. Trees were nearby. The cage stood in a corner of a field by a low picket fence. Behind the trees, a ribbon of road stretched away toward a distant shining river. Down the road some five hundred feet, the white columns of a large square brick house gleamed in the moonlight. And behind the house was a garden and a group of barns and stables. The three in the cage doorway stood whispering, planning. Then two of them stepped to the ground. They were Larry and Tina; Harl remained to guard the cage. The two figures on the ground paused a moment and then moved cautiously along the inside line of the fence toward the home of Major Atwood. Strange anachronisms, these two prowling figures! A girl from the year 2930; a man from 1935! And this was revolutionary New York, now. The little city lay well to the south. It was open country up here. The New York of 1935 had melted away and was gone.... This was a night in August of 1777. CHAPTER VI _The New York Massacre of 1935_ Dr. Alten recovered consciousness in the back yard of the house on Patton Place just a few moments after Larry had encountered the smaller Time-traveling cage and been carried off by Harl and Tina. Previously to that, of course, the mysterious mechanism in the guise of a giant man had abducted Mary Atwood and me in the larger Time-cage. Alten became aware that people were bending over him. The shots we had taken at the Robot had aroused the neighborhood. A policeman arrived. The sleeping neighbors had heard the shots, but it seemed that none had seen the cage, or the metal man who had come from it. Alten said nothing. He was taken to the nearest police station where grudgingly, he told his story. He was laughed at; reprimanded for alcoholism. Evidently, according to the police sergeant, there had been a fight, and Alten had drawn the loser's end. The police confiscated the two rifles and the revolver and decided that no one but Alten had been hurt. But at best it was a queer affair. Alten had not been shot; he was just stiff with cold; he said a dull-red ray had fallen upon him and stiffened him with its frigid blast. Utter nonsense! Dr. Alten was a man of standing. It was a reprehensible affair, but he was released upon his own recognizance. He was charged with breaking into the untenanted home of one Tugh; of illegally possessing firearms; of disturbing the peace--a variety of offenses all rational to the year 1935. * * * * * But Alten's case never reached even its hearing in the Magistrate's Court. He arrived home just after dawn, that June 9, still cold and stiff from the effects of the ray, and bruised and battered by the sweeping blow of Miguel's great iron arm. He recalled vaguely seeing Larry fall, and the iron monster bearing Mary Atwood and me away. What had happened to Larry, Alten could not guess, unless the Robot had returned, ignored him and taken his friend away. During that day of June 9 Alten summoned several of his scientific friends, and to them he told fully what had happened to him. They listened with a keen understanding and a rational knowledge of the possibility that what he said was true; but credibility they could not give him. The noon papers came out. NOTED ALIENIST ATTACKED BY GHOST Felled by One of the Fantastic Monsters of His Brain A jocular, jibing account. Then Alten gave it up. He had about decided to plead guilty in the Magistrate's Court to disorderly conduct and all the rest of it! That was preferable to being judged a liar, or insane. * * * * * And then, at about 9 P.M. on the evening of June 9, the first of the mechanical monsters came stalking from the house on Patton Place--the beginning of the revenge which Tugh had threatened when arrested. The policeman at the corner--one McGuire--turned in the first hysterical alarm. He rushed into a little candy and stationery store shouting that he had seen a piece of machinery running wild. His telephone call brought a squad of his comrades. The Robot at first did no damage. McGuire later told how he saw it as it emerged from the entryway of the Tugh house. It came lurching out into the street--a giant thing of dull grey metal, with tubular, jointed legs; a body with a great bulging chest; a round head, eight or ten feet above the pavement; eyes that shot fire. The policeman took to his heels. There was a commotion in Patton Place during those next few minutes. Pedestrians saw the thing standing in the middle of the street, staring stupidly around it. The head wobbled. Some said that the eyes shot fire; others, that it was not the eyes, but more like a torch in its mailed hand. The torch shot a small beam of light around the street--a beam which was dull-red. The pedestrians fled. Their cries brought people to the nearby house windows. Women screamed. Presently bottles were thrown from the windows. One of these crashed against the iron shoulder of the monster. It turned its head: as though its neck were rubber, some said. And it gazed upward, with a human gesture as though it were not angry, but contemptuous. But still, beyond a step or two in one direction or another, it merely stood and waved its torch. The little dull-red beam of light carried no more than twenty or thirty feet. The street in a few moments was clear of pedestrians; remained littered with glass from the broken bottles. A taxi came suddenly around the corner, and the driver, with an almost immediate tire puncture, saw the monster. He hauled up to the curb, left his cab and ran. * * * * * The Robot saw the taxicab, and stood gazing. It turned its torch-beam on it, and seemed surprised that the thing did not move. Then thinking evidently that this was a less cowardly enemy than the humans, it made a rush to it. The chauffeur had not turned off his engine when he fled, so the cab stood throbbing. The Robot reached it; cuffed it with a huge mailed fist. The windshield broke; the windows were shattered; but the cab stood purring, planted upon its four wheels. Strange encounter! They say that the Robot tried to talk to it. At last, exasperated, it stepped backward, gathered itself and pounced on it again. Stooping, it put one of its great arms down under the wheels, the other over the hood, and with prodigious strength heaved the cab into the air. It crashed on its side across the street, and in a moment was covered with flames. It was about this time that Patrolman McGuire came back to the scene. He shot at the monster a few times; hit it, he was sure. But the Robot did not heed him. The block was now in chaos. People stood at most of the windows, crowds gathered at the distant street corners, while the blazing taxicab lighted the block with a lurid glare. No one dared approach within a hundred feet or so of the monster. But when, after a time, it showed no disposition to attack, throngs at every distinct point of vantage tried to gather where they could see it. Those nearest reported back that its face was iron; that it had a nose, a wide, yawning mouth, and holes for eyes. There were certainly little lights in the eye-holes. A small, fluffy white dog went dashing up to the monster and barked bravely at its heels. It leaped nimbly away when the Robot stooped to seize it. Then, from the Robot's chest, the dull-red torch beam leaped out and down. It caught the little dog, and clung to it for an instant. The dog stood transfixed; its bark turned to a yelp; then a gurgle. In a moment it fell on its side; then lay motionless with stiffened legs sticking out. * * * * * All this happened within five minutes. McGuire's riot squad arrived, discreetly ranged itself at the end of the block and fired. The Robot by then had retreated to the entryway of the Tugh house, where it stood peering as though with curiosity at all this commotion. There came a clanging from the distance: someone had turned in a fire alarm. Through the gathered crowds and vehicles the engines came tearing up. Presently there was not one Robot, but three: a dozen! More than that, many reports said. But certain it is that within half an hour of the first alarm, the block in front of Tugh's home held many of the iron monsters. And there were many human bodies lying strewn there, by then. A few policemen had made a stand at the corner, to protect the crowd against one of the Robots. The thing had made an unexpected infuriated rush.... There was a panic in the next block, when a thousand people suddenly tried to run. A score of people were trampled under foot. Two or three of the Robots ran into that next block--ran impervious to the many shots which now were fired at them. From what was described as slots in the sides of their iron bodies they drew swords--long, dark, burnished blades. They ran, and at each fallen human body they made a single stroke of decapitation, or, more generally, cut the body in half. The Robots did not attack the fire engines. Emboldened by this, firemen connected a hose and pumped a huge jet of water toward the Tugh house. The Robots then rushed it. One huge mechanism--some said it was twelve feet tall--ran heedlessly into the firemen's high-pressure stream, toppled backward from the force of the water and very strangely lay still. Killed? Rather, out of order: deranged: it was not human, to be killed. But it lay motionless, with the fire hose playing upon it. Then abruptly there was an explosion. The fallen Robot, with a deafening report and a puff of green flame, burst into flying metallic fragments like shrapnel. Nearby windows were broken from the violent explosion, and pieces of the flying metal were hurled a hundred feet or more. One huge chunk, evidently a plate of the thing's body, struck into the crowd two blocks away, and felled several people. At this smashing of one of the mechanisms, its brother Robots went for the first time into aggressive action. A hundred or more were pouring now from the vacant house of the absent Tugh.... * * * * * The alarm by ten o'clock had spread throughout the entire city. Police reserves were called out, and by midnight soldiers were being mobilized. Panics were starting everywhere. Millions of people crowded in on small Manhattan Island, in the heart of which was this strange enemy. Panics.... Yet human nature is very strange. Thousands of people started to leave Manhattan, but there were other thousands during that first skirmish who did their best to try and get to the neighborhood of Patton Place to see what was going on. They added greatly to the confusion. Traffic soon was stalled everywhere. Traffic officers, confused, frightened by the news which was bubbled at them from every side, gave wrong orders; accidents began to occur. And then, out of the growing confusion, came tangles, until, like a dammed stream, all the city mid-section was paralyzed. Vehicles were abandoned everywhere. Reports of what was happening on Patton Place grew more confused. The gathering nearby crowds impeded the police and firemen. The Robots, by ten o'clock, were using a single great beam of dull-red light. It was two or three feet broad. It came from a spluttering, hissing cylinder mounted on runners which the Robots dragged along the ground, and the beam was like that of a great red searchlight. It swung the length of Patton Place in both directions. It hissed against the houses; penetrated the open windows which now were all deserted; swept the front cornices of the roofs, where crowds of tenants and others were trying to hide. The red beam drove back the ones near the edge, except those who were stricken by its frigid blast and dropped like plummets into the street, where the Robots with flashing blades pounced upon them. Frigid was the blast of this giant light-beam. The street, wet from the fire-hose, was soon frozen with ice--ice which increased under the blast of the beam, and melted in the warm air of the night when the ray turned away. From every distant point in the city, awed crowds could see that great shaft when it occasionally shot upward, to stain the sky with blood. * * * * * Dr. Alten by midnight was with the city officials, telling them what he could of the origin of this calamity. They were a distracted group indeed! There were a thousand things to do, and frantically they were giving orders, struggling to cope with conditions so suddenly unprecedented. A great city, millions of people, plunged into conditions unfathomable. And every moment growing worse. One calamity bringing another, in the city, with its myriad diverse activities so interwoven. Around Alten the clattering, terrifying reports were surging. He sat there nearly all that night; and near dawn, an official plane carried him in a flight over the city. The panics, by midnight, were causing the most deaths. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, were trying to leave the island. The tube trains, the subways, the elevateds were jammed. There were riots without number in them. Ferryboats and bridges were thronged to their capacity. Downtown Manhattan, fortunately comparatively empty, gave space to the crowds plunging down from the crowded foreign quarters bordering Greenwich Village. By dawn it was estimated that five thousand people had been trampled to death by the panics in various parts of the city, in the tubes beneath the rivers and on departing trains. And another thousand or more had been killed by the Robots. How many of these monstrous metal men were now in evidence, no one could guess. A hundred--or a thousand. The Time-cage made many trips between that night of June 9 and 10, 1935, and a night in 2930. Always it gauged its return to this same night. The Robots poured out into Patton Place. With running, stiff-legged steps, flashing swords, small light-beams darting before them, they spread about the city.... CHAPTER VII The Vengeance of Tugh A myriad individual scenes of horror were enacted. Metal travesties of the human form ran along the city streets, overturning stalled vehicles, climbing into houses, roaming dark hallways, breaking into rooms. There was a woman who afterward told that she crouched in a corner, clutching her child, when the door of her room was burst in. Her husband, who had kept them there thinking it was the safest thing to do, fought futilely with the great thing of iron. Its sword slashed his head from his body with a single stroke. The woman and the little child screamed, but the monster ignored them. They had a radio, tuned to a station in New Jersey which was broadcasting the events. The Robot seized the instrument as though in a frenzy of anger, tore it apart, then rushed from the room. No one could give a connected picture of the events of that horrible night. It was a series of disjointed incidents out of which the imagination must construct the whole. The panics were everywhere. The streets were stalled with traffic and running, shouting, fighting people. And the area around Greenwich Village brought reports of continued horror. The Robots were of many different forms; some pseudo-human; others, great machines running amuck--things more monstrous, more horrible even, than those which mocked humanity. There was a great pot-bellied monster which forced its way somehow to a roof. It encountered a crouching woman and child in a corner of the parapet, seized them, one in each of its great iron hands, and whirled them out over the housetops. * * * * * By dawn it seemed that the Robots had mounted several projectors of the giant red beam on the roofs of Patton Place. They held a full square mile, now, around Tugh's house. The police and firemen had long since given up fighting them. They were needed elsewhere--the police to try and cope with the panics, and the firemen to fight the conflagrations which everywhere began springing up. Fires, the natural outcome of chaos; and fires, incendiary--made by criminals who took advantage of the disaster to fatten like ghouls upon the dead. They prowled the streets. They robbed and murdered at will. The giant beams of the Robots carried a frigid blast for miles. By dawn of that June 10th, the south wind was carrying from the enemy area a perceptible wave of cold even as far as Westchester. Allen, flying over the city, saw the devastated area clearly. Ice in the streets--smashed vehicles--the gruesome litter of sword-slashed human bodies. And other human bodies, plucked apart; strewn.... Alten's plane flew at an altitude of some two thousand feet. In the growing daylight the dark prowling figures of the metal men were plainly seen. There were no humans left alive in the captured area. The plane dropped a bomb into Washington Square where a dozen or two of the Robots were gathered. It missed them. The plane's pilot had not realized that they were grouped around a projector; its red shaft sprang up, caught the plane and clung to it. Frigid blast! Even at that two thousand feet altitude, for a few seconds Alten and the others were stiffened by the cold. The motor missed; very nearly stopped. Then an intervening rooftop cut off the beam, and the plane escaped. * * * * * All this I have pictured from what Dr. Alten subsequently told me. He leaves my narrative now, since fate hereafter held him in the New York City of 1935. But he has described for me three horrible days, and three still more horrible nights. The whole world now was alarmed. Every nation offered its forces of air and land and sea to overcome these gruesome invaders. Warships steamed for New York harbor. Soldiers were entrained and brought to the city outskirts. Airplanes flew overhead. On Long Island, Staten Island, and in New Jersey, infantry, tanks and artillery were massed in readiness. But they were all very nearly powerless to attack. Manhattan Island still was thronged with refugees. It was not possible for the millions to escape; and for the first day there were hundreds of thousands hiding in their homes. The city could not be shelled. The influx of troops was hampered by the outrush of civilians. By the night of the tenth, nevertheless, ten thousand soldiers were surrounding the enemy area. It embraced now all the mid-section of the island. The soldiers rushed in. Machine-guns were set up. But the Robots were difficult to find. With this direct attack they began fighting with an almost human caution. Their bodies were impervious to bullets, save perhaps in the orifices of the face which might or might not be vulnerable. But when attacked, they skulked in the houses, or crouched like cautious animals under the smashed vehicles. Then there were times when they would wade forward directly into machine-gun fire--unharmed--plunging on until the gunners fled and the Robots wreaked their fury upon the abandoned gun. The only hand-to-hand conflicts took place on the afternoon of June 10th. A full thousand soldiers were killed--and possibly six or eight of the Robots. The troops were ordered away after that; they made lines across the island to the north and to the south, to keep the enemy from increasing its area. Over Greenwich Village now, the circling planes--at their highest altitude, to avoid the upflung crimson beams--dropped bombs. Hundreds of houses there were wrecked. Tugh's house could not be positively identified, though the attack was directed at it most particularly. Afterward, it was found by chance to have escaped. * * * * * The night of June 10th brought new horrors. The city lights failed. Against all the efforts of the troops and the artillery fire which now was shelling the Washington Square area, the giant mechanisms pushed north and south. By midnight, with their dull-red beams illumining the darkness of the canyon streets, they had reached the Battery, and spread northward beyond the northern limits of Central Park. It is estimated that by then there were still a million people on Manhattan Island. The night of the 11th, the Robots made their real attack. Those who saw it, from planes overhead, say that upon a roof near Washington Square a machine was mounted from which a red beam sprang. It was not of parallel rays, like the others; this one spread. And of such power it was, that it painted the leaden clouds of the threatening, overcast night. Every plane, at whatever high altitude, felt its frigid blast and winged hastily away to safety. Spreading, dull-red beam! It flashed with a range of miles. Its light seemed to cling to the clouds, staining like blood; and to cling to the air itself with a dull lurid radiance. It was a hot night, that June 11th, with a brewing thunderstorm. There had been occasional rumbles of thunder and lightning flashes. The temperature was perhaps 90° F. Then the temperature began falling. A million people were hiding in the great apartment houses and homes of the northern sections, or still struggling to escape over the littered bridges or by the paralyzed transportation systems--and that million people saw the crimson radiance and felt the falling temperature. 80°. Then 70°. Within half an hour it was at 30°! In unheated houses, in midsummer, in the midst of panic, the people were swept by chilling cold. With no adequate clothing available they suffered greatly--and then abruptly they were freezing. Children wailing with the cold; then asleep in numbed, last slumber.... Zero weather in midsummer! And below zero! How cold it got, there is no one to say. The abandoned recording instrument in the Weather Bureau was found, at 2:16 A.M., the morning of June 12, 1935, to have touched minus 42° F. The gathering storm over the city burst with lightning and thunder claps through the blood-red radiance. And then snow began falling. A steady white downpour, a winter blizzard with the lightning flashing above it, and the thunder crashing. With the lightning and thunder and snow, crazy winds sprang up. They whirled and tossed the thick white snowflakes; swept in blasts along the city streets. It piled the snow in great drifts against the houses; whirled and sucked it upward in white powdery geysers. * * * * * At 2:30 A.M. there came a change. The dull-red radiance which swept the city changed in color. Through the shades of the spectrum it swung up to violet. And no longer was it a blast of cold, but of heat! Of what inherent temperature the ray of that spreading beam may have been, no one can say. It caught the houses, and everything inflammable burst into flame. Conflagrations were everywhere--a thousand spots of yellow-red flames, like torches, with smoke rolling up from them to mingle with the violet glow overhead. The blizzard was gone. The snow ceased. The storm clouds rolled away, blasted by the pendulum winds which lashed the city. By 3 A.M. the city temperature was over 100° F--the dry, blistering heat of a midsummer desert. The northern city streets were littered with the bodies of people who had rushed from their homes and fallen in the heat, the wild winds and the suffocating smoke outside. And then, flung back by the abnormal winds, the storm clouds crashed together overhead. A terrible storm, born of outraged nature, vent itself on the city. The fires of the burning metropolis presently died under the torrent of falling water. Clouds of steam whirled and tossed and hissed close overhead, and there was a boiling hot rain. By dawn the radiance of that strange spreading beam died away. The daylight showed a wrecked, dead city. Few humans indeed were left alive on Manhattan that dawn. The Robots and their apparatus had gone.... The vengeance of Tugh against the New York City of 1935 was accomplished. (_To be continued._) [Illustration: Advertisement.] Hell's Dimension _By Tom Curry_ [Illustration: _Just as the terrific unknown force reached its apex, she stepped across the plate._] [Sidenote: Professor Lambert deliberately ventures into a Vibrational Dimension to join his fiancee in its magnetic torture-fields.] "Now, Professor Lambert, tell us what you have done with the body of your assistant Miss Madge Crawford. Her car is outside your door, has stood there since early yesterday morning. There are no footprints leading away from the house and you can't expect us to believe that an airplane picked her off the roof. It will make it a lot easier if you tell us where she is. Her parents are greatly worried about her. When they telephoned, you refused to talk to them, would not allow them to speak to Miss Crawford. They are alarmed as to her fate. While you are not the sort of man who would injure a young woman, still, things look bad for you. You had better explain fully." John Lambert, a man of about thirty-six, tall, spare, with black hair which was slightly tinged with gray at the temples in spite of his youth, turned large eyes which were filled with agony upon his questioners. Lambert was already internationally famous for his unique and astounding experiments in the realm of sound and rhythm. He had been endowed by one of the great electrical companies to do original work, and his laboratory, in which he lived, was situated in a large tract of isolated woodland some forty miles from New York City. It was necessary for the success of his work that as few disturbing noises as possible be made in the neighborhood. Many of his experiments with sound and etheric waves required absolute quiet and freedom from interrupting noises. The delicate nature of some of the machines he used would not tolerate so much as the footsteps of a man within a hundred yards, and a passing car would have disrupted them entirely. * * * * * Lambert was terribly nervous; he trembled under the gaze of the stern detective, come with several colleagues from a neighboring town at the call of Madge Crawford's frightened family. The girl, whose picture stood on a working table nearby, looked at them from the photograph as a beautiful young woman of twenty-five, light of hair, with large eyes and a lovely face. Detective Phillips pointed dramatically to the likeness of the missing girl. "Can you," he said, "look at her there, and deny you loved her? And if she did not love you in return, then we have a motive for what you have done--jealousy. Come, tell us what you have done with her. Our men will find her, anyway; they are searching the cellar for her now. You can't hope to keep her, alive, and if she is dead--" Lambert uttered a cry of despair, and put his face in his long fingers. "She--she--don't say she's dead!" "Then you did love her!" exclaimed Phillips triumphantly, and exchanged glances with his companions. "Of course I love her. And she returned my love. We were secretly engaged, and were to be married when we had finished these extremely important experiments. It is infamous though, to accuse me of having killed her; if I have done so, then it was no fault of mine." "Then you did kill her?" "No, no. I cannot believe she is really gone." "Why did you evade her parents' inquiries?" "Because ... I have been trying to bring her ... to re-materialize her." "You mean to bring her back to life?" "Yes." "Couldn't a doctor do that better than you, if she is hidden somewhere about here?" asked Phillips gravely. "No, no. You do not understand. She cannot be seen, she has dematerialized. Oh, go away. I'm the only man, save, possibly, my friend Doctor Morgan, who can help her now. And Morgan--I've thought of calling him, but I've been working every instant to get the right combination. Go away, for God's sake!" "We can't go away until we have found out Miss Crawford's fate," said Phillips patiently. * * * * * Another sleuth entered the immense laboratory. He made his way through the myriad strange machines, a weird collection of xylophones, gongs, stone slabs cut in peculiar patterns to produce odd rhythmic sounds, electrical apparatus of all sorts. Near Phillips was a plate some feet square, of heavy metal, raised from the floor on poles of a different substance. About the ceiling were studs thickly set of the same sort of metal as was the big plate. One of the sleuths tapped his forehead, pointing to Lambert as the latter nervously lighted a cigarette. The newcomer reported to Phillips. He held in his hand two or three sheets of paper on which something was written. "The only other person here is a deaf mute," said the sleuth to Phillips, his superior. "I've got his story. He writes that he takes care of things, cooks their meals and so on. And he writes further that he thinks the woman and this guy Lambert were in love with each other. He has no idea where she has gone to. Here, you read it." Phillips took the sheets and continued: "'Yesterday morning about ten o'clock I was passing the door of the laboratory on my way to make up Professor Lambert's bed. Suddenly I noticed a queer, shimmering, greenish-blue light streaming down from the walls and ceiling of the laboratory. I was right outside the place and though I cannot hear anything, I was knocked down and I twisted and wriggled around like a snake. It felt like something with a thousand little paws but with great strength was pushing me every way. When there was a lull, and the light had stopped for a few moments, I staggered to my feet and ran madly for my own quarters, scared out of my head. As I went by the kitchen, I saw Miss Crawford at the sink there, filling some vases and arranging flowers as she usually did every morning. "'If she called to me, I did not hear her or notice her lips moving. I believe she came to the door. "'I was going to quit, when I recovered myself, angry at what had occurred; but then, I began to feel ashamed for being such a baby, for Professor Lambert has been very good to me. About fifteen minutes after I went to my room, I was able to return to the kitchen. Miss Crawford was not there, though the flowers and vases were. Then, as I started to work, still a little alarmed, Professor Lambert came rushing into the kitchen, an expression of terror on his face. His mouth was open, and I think he was calling. He then ran out, back to the laboratory, and I have not seen Miss Madge since. Professor Lambert has been almost continuously in the work-room since then, and--I kept away from it, because I was afraid.'" * * * * * Two more members of Phillips' squad broke into the laboratory and came toward the chief. They had been working at physical labor, for they were still perspiring and one regarded his hands with a rueful expression. "Any luck?" asked Phillips eagerly. "No, boss. We been all over the place, and we dug every spot we could get to earth in the cellar. Most of it's three-inch concrete, without a sign of a break." "Did you look in the furnace?" "We looked there the first thing. She ain't there." There were several closets in the laboratory, and Phillips opened all of them and inspected them. As he moved near the big plate, Lambert uttered a cry of warning. "Don't disturb that, don't touch anything near it!" "All right, all right," said Phillips testily. The skeptical sleuths had classified Lambert as a "nut," and were practically sure he had done away with Madge Crawford because she would not marry him. Still, they needed better evidence than their mere beliefs. There was no corpus delicti, for instance. "Gentlemen," said Lambert at last, controlling his emotions with a great effort. "I will admit to you that I am in trepidation and a state of mental torture as to Miss Crawford's fate. You are delaying matters, keeping me from my work." "He thinks about work when the girl he claims he loves has disappeared," said Doherty, in a loud whisper to Phillips. Doherty was one of the sleuths who had been digging in the cellar, and the hard work had made his temper short. "You must help us find Miss Crawford before we can let you alone," said Phillips. "Can't you understand that you are under grave suspicion of having injured her, hidden her away? This is a serious matter, Professor Lambert. Your experiments can wait." "This one cannot," shouted Lambert, shaking his fists. "You are fools!" "Steady now," said Doherty. * * * * * "Perhaps you had better come with us to the district attorney's office," went on Phillips. "There you may come to your senses and realize the futility of trying to cover up your crime--if you have committed one. If you have not, why do you not tell us where Miss Crawford is?" "Because I do not know myself," replied Lambert. "But you can't take me away from here. I beg of you, gentlemen, allow me a little more time. I must have it." Phillips shook his head. "Not unless you tell us logically what has occurred," he said. "Then I must, though I do not think you will comprehend or even believe me. Briefly, it is this: yesterday morning I was working on the final series of experiments with a new type of harmonic overtones plus a new type of sinusoidal current which I had arranged with a series of selenium cells. When I finally threw the switch--remember, I was many weeks preparing the apparatus, and had just put the final touches on early that morning--there was a sound such as never had been heard before by human ears, an indescribable sound, terrifying and mysterious. Also, there was a fierce, devouring verditer blue light, and this came from the plates and studs you see, but so great was its strength that it got out of control and leaped about the room like a live thing. For some moments, while it increased in intensity as I raised the power of the current by means of the switch I held in my hand, I watched and listened in fascination. My instruments had ceased to record, though they are the most delicate ever invented and can handle almost anything which man can even surmise." * * * * * The perspiration was pouring from Lambert's face, as he recounted his story. The detectives listened, comprehending but a little of the meaning of the scientist's words. "What has this to do with Miss Crawford?" asked Doherty impatiently. Phillips held up his hand to silence the other sleuth. "Let him finish," he ordered. "Go on, professor." "The sensations which I was undergoing became unendurable," went on Lambert, in a low, hoarse voice. "I was forced to cry out in pain and confusion. "Miss Crawford evidently heard my call, for a few moments later, just as the terrific unknown force reached its apex, she dashed into the laboratory, and stepped across the plate you see there. "I was powerless. Though I shut off the current by a superhuman effort, she--she was gone!" Lambert put his face in his hands, a sob shook his broad shoulders. "Gone?" repeated Phillips. "What do you mean, gone?" "She disappeared, before my very eyes," said the professor shakily. "Torn into nothingness by the fierce force of the current or sound. Since then, I have been trying to reproduce the conditions of the experiment, for I wish to bring her back. If I cannot do so, then I want to join her, wherever she has gone. I love her, I know now that I cannot possibly live without her. Will you please leave me alone, now, so that I can continue?" Doherty laughed derisively. "What a story," he jeered. "Keep quiet, Doherty," ordered Phillips. "Now, Professor Lambert, your explanation of Miss Crawford's disappearance does not sound logical to us, but still we are willing to give you every chance to bring her back, if what you say is true. We cannot leave you entirely alone, because you might try to escape or you might carry out your threat of suicide. Therefore, I am going to sit over there in the corner, quietly, where I can watch you but will not interfere with your work. We will give you until midnight to prove your story. Then you must go with us to the district attorney. Do you agree to that?" * * * * * Lambert nodded, eagerly. "I agree. Let me work in peace, and if I do not succeed then you may take me anywhere you wish. If you can," he added, in an undertone. Doherty and the others, at Phillips' orders, filed from the laboratory. "One thing more, professor," said Phillips, when they were alone and the professor was preparing to work. "How do you explain the fact, if your story is true, that Miss Crawford was killed and made to disappear, while you yourself, close by, were uninjured?" "Do you see these garments?" asked Lambert, indicating some black clothes which lay on a bench nearby. "They insulated me from the current and partially protected me from the sound. Though the force was very great, great enough to penetrate my insulation, it was handicapped in my case because of the garments." "I see. Well, you may go on." Phillips moved in the chair he had taken, from time to time. He could hear the noises of his men, still searching the premises for Madge Crawford, and Professor Lambert heard them, too. "Will you tell your men to be quiet?" he cried at last. There were dark circles under Lambert's eyes. He was working in a state of feverish anxiety. When the girl he loved had dematerialized from under his very eyes, panic had seized him; he had ripped away wires to break the current and lost the thread of his experiment, so that he could not reproduce it exactly without much labor. The scientist put on the black robes, and Phillips wished he too had some protective armor, even though he did believe that Lambert had told them a parcel of lies. The deaf mute's story was not too reassuring. Phillips warned his companions to be more quiet, and he himself sat quite still. * * * * * Lambert knew that the sleuths thought he was stark mad. He was aware of the fact that he had but a few hours in which to save the girl who had come at his cry to help him, who had loved him and whom he loved, only to be torn into some place unknown by the forces which were released in his experiment. And he knew he would rather die with her than live without her. He labored feverishly, though he tried to keep his brain calm in order to win. His notes helped him up to a certain point, but when he had made the final touches he had not had time to bring the data up to the moment, being eager to test out his apparatus. It was while testing that the awful event had occurred and he had seen Madge Crawford disappear before his very eyes. Her eyes, large and frightened, burned in his mind. The deaf mute, Felix, a small, spare man of about fifty, sent the professor some food and coffee through one of the sleuths. Lambert swallowed the coffee, but waved away the rest, impatiently. Phillips, watching his suspect constantly, was served a light supper at the end of the afternoon. There seemed to be a million wires to be touched, tested, and various strange apparatus. Several times, later on in the evening. Lambert threw the big switch with an air of expectancy, but little happened. Then Lambert would go to work again, testing, testing--adjusting this and that till Phillips swore under his breath. "Only an hour more, professor," said Phillips, who was bored to death and cramped from trying to obey the professor's orders to keep still. A circle of cigarette-ends surrounded the sleuth. "Only an hour," agreed Lambert. "Will you please be quiet, my man? This is a matter of my fiancée's life or death." Phillips was somewhat disgruntled, for he felt he had done Lambert quite a favor in allowing him to remain in the laboratory for so long, to prove his story. "I wish Doctor Morgan were here; I ought to have sent for him, I suppose," said Lambert, a few minutes later. "Will you allow me to get him? I cannot seem to perfect this last stage." "No time, now," declared Phillips. "I said till midnight." It was obvious to Lambert that the detective had become certain during the course of the evening that the scientist was mad. The ceaseless fiddling and the lack of results or even spectacular sights had convinced Phillips that he had to do with a crank. "I think I have it now," said Lambert coolly. "What?" asked Phillips. "The original combination. I had forgotten one detail in the excitement, and this threw me off. Now I believe I will succeed--in one way or another. I warn you, be careful. I am about to release forces which may get out of my control." "Well, now, don't get reckless," begged Phillips nervously. The array of machines had impressed him, even if Lambert did seem a fool. "You insist upon remaining, so it is your own risk," said Lambert coolly. Lambert, in the strange robes, was a bizarre figure. The hood was thrown back, exposing his pale, black-bearded face, the wan eyes with dark circles under them, and the twitching lips. "If you find yourself leaving this vale of tears," went on the scientist, ironically, to the sleuth, "you will at least have the comfort of realizing that as the sound-force disintegrates your mortal form you are among the first of men to be attuned to the vibrations of the unknown sound world. All matter is vibration; that has been proven. A building of bricks, if shaken in the right manner, falls into its component parts; a bridge, crossed by soldiers in certain rhythmic time, is torn from its moorings. A tuning fork, receiving the sound vibrations from one of a similar size and shape begins to vibrate in turn. These are homely analogies, but applied to the less familiar sound vibrations, which make up our atomic world, they may help you to understand how the terrific forces I have discovered can disintegrate flesh." The scientist looked inquiringly at Phillips. As the sleuth did not move, but sat with folded arms, Lambert shrugged and said, "I am ready." Lambert raised his hood, and Phillips said, in a spirit of bravado, "You can't scare me out of here." "Here goes the switch," cried Lambert. He made the contact, as he had before. He stood for a moment, and this time the current gained force. The experimenter pushed his lever all the way over. * * * * * A terrible greenish-blue light suddenly illuminated the laboratory, and through the air there came sound vibrations which seemed to tear at Phillips' body. He found himself on the floor, knocked from his chair, and he writhed this way and that, speechless, suffering a torment of agony. His whole flesh seemed to tremble in unison with the waves which emanated from the machines which Lambert manipulated. After what seemed hours to the suffering sleuth, the force diminished, and soon Phillips was able to rise. Trembling, the detective cursed and yelled for help in a high-pitched voice. Lambert had thrown back his hood, and was rocking to and fro in agony. "Madge, Madge," he cried, "what have I done! Come back to me, come back!" Doherty and the others came running in at their chief's shouts. "Arrest him," ordered Phillips shakily. "I've stood enough of this nonsense." The detectives started for Lambert. He saw them coming, and swiftly threw off the protective garments he wore. "Stand back!" he cried, and threw the switch all the way over. The verditer green light smashed through the air, and the queer sound sensations smacked and tore them; Doherty, who had drawn a revolver when he was answering Phillips' cries, fired the gun into the air, and the report seemed to battle with the vibrating ether. Lambert, as he threw the switch, leaped forward and landed on the metal plate under the ceiling studs, in the very center of the awful disturbance and unprotected from its force. For a few moments, Lambert felt racking pain, as though something were tearing at his flesh, separating the very atoms. The scientist saw the wriggling figures of the sleuths, in various strange positions, but his impressions were confused. His head whirled round and round, he swayed to and fro, and, finally, he thought he fell down, or rather, that he had melted, as a lump of sugar dissolves in water. "He's gone--gone--" In the heart of nothingness was Lambert, his body torn and racked in a shrieking chaos of sound and a blinding glare of iridescent light which seemed too much to bear. His last conscious thought was a prayer, that, having failed to bring back his sweetheart, Madge Crawford, he was undergoing a step toward the same destination to which he had sent her. * * * * * John Lambert came to with a shudder. But it was not a mortal shudder. He could sense no body; had no sense of being confined by matter. He was in a strange, chilly place--a twilight region, limitless, without dimensions. Yet he could feel something, in an impersonal way, vaguely indifferent. He had no pain now. He was moving, somehow. He had one impelling desire, and that was to discover Madge Crawford. Perhaps it was this thought which directed his movements. Intent upon finding the girl, if she was indeed in this same strange world that he was, he did not notice for some time--how long, he had no way of telling--that there were other beings which tried to impede his progress. But as he grew more accustomed to the unfamiliar sensations he was undergoing, he found his path blocked again and again by queer beings. They were living, without doubt, and had intelligence, and evinced hostility toward him. But they were shapeless, shapeless as amoebas. He heard them in a sort of soundless whisper, and could see them without the use of eyes. And he shuddered, though he could feel no body in which he might be confined. Still, when he pinched viciously with invisible fingers at the spot where his face should have been, a twinge of pain registered on the vague consciousness which appeared to be all there was to him. He was not sure of his substance, though he could evidently experience human sensations with his amorphous body. He did not know whether he could see; yet, he was dodging this way and that, as the beings who occupied this world tried to stop him. They gave him the impression of gray shapes, and in coppery shadows things gleamed and closed in on him. He seemed to hear a cry, and he knew that he was receiving a call for help from Madge Crawford. He tried to run, pushed determinedly toward the spot, impelled by his love for the girl. * * * * * Now, as he hurried, he occasionally was stopped short by collision with the formless shapes which were all about him. He was hampered by them, for they followed him, making a sound like wind heard in a dream. Whatever medium he was in was evidently thickly inhabited by the hostile beings who claimed this world as their own. Though he could not actually feel the medium, he could sense that it was heavy. He leaped and ran, fighting his way through the increasing hosts, and the roar of their voice-impressions increased in his consciousness. Yet there seemed to be nothing, nothing tangible save vagueness. He felt he was in a blind spot in space, a place of no dimensions, no time, where beings abhorred by nature, things which had never developed any dimensional laws, existed. The cry for help struck him, with more force this time. Lambert, whatever form he was in, realised that he was close to the end of his journey to Madge Crawford. He tried to speak, and had the impression that he said something reassuring. He then bumped into some vibrational being which he knew was Madge. His ears could not hear, nor could his flesh feel, but his whole form or cerebrum sensed he held the woman he loved in his arms. And she was speaking to him, in accents of fear, begging him to save her. "John, John, you have come at last. They have been torturing me terribly. Save me." "Darling Madge, I will do everything I can. Now I have found you, and we are together and will never part. Can you hear me?" "I know what you are thinking, and what you wish to say. I can't exactly hear; it all seems vague, and impossible. Yet I can suffer. They have been hitting me with something which makes me shudder and shake--there, they are at it again." * * * * * Lambert felt the sensations, now, which the girl had made known to him. He felt crowded by gray beings, and his existence was troubled by spasms of pain-impressions. He knew Madge was crying out, too. He could not comprehend the attacks, or guess their meaning. But the situation was unendurable. Anger shook him, and he began to fight, furiously but vaguely. They were closely hemmed in, but when Lambert began to strike out with hands and legs, the beings gave way a little. The scientist tried to shout, and though he could actually hear nothing, the result was gratifying. The formless creatures seemed to scatter and draw back in confusion as he yelled his defiance. "They hate that," Madge said to him. "I have screamed myself hoarse and that is why they have not killed me--if I can be killed." "I do not believe we can. But they can torture us," replied Lambert. "It is an everlasting half-life or quarter-life, and these creatures who call this Hell's Dimension home, have nothing but hatred for us in their consciousness." The inhabitants of the imperfect world had closed in once again and the sharp instruments of torture they used were being thrust into the invisible bodies of the two humans. Each time, Lambert was unable to restrain his cries, for it seemed that he was being torn to pieces by vibrations. He yelled until he could not speak above a whisper, or at least until the impressions of speech he gave forth did not trouble the beings. The two humans, still bound to some extent by their mortal beliefs, were chivvied to and fro, and struck and bullied. The creatures seemed to delight in this sport. The two felt they could not die; yet they could suffer terribly. Would this go on through eternity? Was there no release? * * * * * They were trying to tear Madge away from him. She was fighting them, and Lambert, in a frenzy of rage, made a determined effort to get away with the girl from their tormentors. They retreated before his onslaughts. Drawing Madge after him, Lambert put down his head--or believed he was doing so--and ran as fast as he could at the beings. He bumped into some invisible forms and was slowed in his rush, but he shouted and flailed about with his arms, and tried to kick. Madge helped by screaming and striking out. They made some distance in this way, or so they thought, and the horrid creatures gave way before them. All about them was the coppery sensation of the medium in which they moved: Lambert as he became more used to the form he was inhabiting, he began to think he could discern dreadful eyes which stared unblinkingly at the couple. He fought on, and believed they had come to a spot where the beings did not molest them, though they still sensed the things glaring at them. Were they on some invisible eminence, above the reach of these queer creatures? "We might as well stop here, for if we try to go farther we may come to a worse place," said Lambert. They rested there, in temporary peace, together at last. * * * * * "I seem to be happy now," said Madge, clinging close. "I feared I would never see you again. John dear. I ran to you when you called out that day and when I crossed the plate, I was torn and racked and knocked down. When I next experienced sensation, it was in this terrible form. I am becoming more used to it, but I kept crying out for you: the beings, as soon as they discovered my presence, began to torment me. More and more have been collecting, and I have a sensation of seeing them as horrible, revolting beasts. Oh, John, I don't think I could have stood it much longer, if you hadn't come to me. They were driving me on, on, on, ceaselessly torturing me." "Curse them," said Lambert. "I wish I could really get hold of some of them. Perhaps, Madge, I will be able to think of some escape for us from this Hell's Dimension." "Yes, darling. I could not bear to think that we are eternally damned to exist among these beings, hurt by them and unable to get away. How I wish we were back in the laboratory, at the tea table. How happy we were there!" "And we will be again, Madge." Lambert was far from feeling hopeful, but he tried to encourage the girl into thinking they might get away. However, he was unable to dissimulate. She felt his anguish for her safety. "But I know now that you love me. I can feel it stronger than ever before, John. It seems like a great rock to which I can always cling, your love. It projects me from the hatred that these beasts pour out against us." Since they had no sense of time, they could not tell how long they were allowed to remain unmolested. But in each other's company they were happy, though each one was afraid for the safety of the loved one. They spoke of the mortal life they had lived, and their love. They felt no need of food or water, but clung together in a dimensionless universe, held up by love. * * * * * The lull came to an end, at last. There was no change in the coppery vagueness about them which they sensed as the surrounding ether, but all was changeless, boundless. Lambert, close to Madge Crawford, felt that they were about to be attacked. He had swift, temporary impressions of seeing saucerlike, unblinking eyes, and then hordes of bizarre inhabitants started to climb up to their perch. For a short while, Lambert and Madge fought them off, thrusting at them, seeming to push them backward down the intangible slope; the cries which the dematerialized humans uttered also helped to hold the leaders of the attacking army partially in check, but the vast number of beings swept forward. The thrusts of the torture-fields they emanated became more and more racking, as the two unfortunates shuddered in horror and pain. The power to demonstrate loud noise was evidently impossible to the creatures, for their only sounds came to Madge Crawford and John Lambert as long-drawn out, almost unbearable squeaks, mouse-like in character. Perhaps they had never had the faculty of speech, since they did not need it to communicate with one another; perhaps they realized that the racket they could make would hurt them as much as it did their enemies. Lambert, Madge clinging to him, was forced backward down the slope, and the beings had the advantage of height. He could not again reach the eminence, but the way behind seemed to clear quickly enough, though thrusts were made at him, innumerable times with the torture-fields. The hordes pushed them backward, and ever back. * * * * * They were forced on for some distance. As they retreated, the way become easier, and fewer and fewer of the beings impeded the channel along which they moved, though in front of them and on all sides, above, beneath, they were pressed by the hordes. "They are forcing us to some place they want us to go," said Lambert desperately. "We can do nothing more," replied the girl. Lambert felt her quiet confidence in him, and that as long as they were together, all was well. "Maybe they can kill us, somehow," he said. And now, Lambert felt the way was clear to the rear. There was a sudden rush of the creatures, and needlelike fields were impelled viciously into the spaces the two humans occupied. Madge cried out in pain, and Lambert shouted. The throng drew away from them as suddenly as it had surged forward, and an instant later the pair, clinging together, felt that they were falling, falling, falling.... "Are you all right, Madge?" "Yes, John." But he knew she was suffering. How long they fell he did not know, but they stopped at last. No sooner had they come to rest than they were assailed with sensations of pain which made both cry out in anguish. There, in the spot where they had been thrust by the hordes, they felt that there was some terrific vibration which racked and tore at their invisible forms continuously, sending them into spasms of sharp misery. They both were forced to give vent to their feelings by loud cries. But they could not command their movements any longer. When they tried to get away, their limbs moved but they felt that they remained in the same spot. * * * * * The pain shook every fraction of their souls. "We--we are in some pit of hell, into which they have thrown us, John," gasped Madge. He knew she was shivering with the torture of that great vibration from which there was no escape, that they were in a prison-pit of Hell's Dimension. "I--oh--John--I'm dying!" But he was powerless to help her. He suffered as much as she. Yet there was no weakening of his sensations; he was in as much torture as he had been at the start. He knew that they could not die and could never escape from this misery of hell. Their cries seemed to disturb the vacuum about. Lambert, shivering and shaking with pain, was aware that great eyes, similar to those which they had thought they saw above, were now upon them. Squeaks were impressed upon him, squeaks which expressed disapprobation. There were some of the beings in the pit with them. Madge knew they were there, too. She cried out in terror, "Will they add to our misery?" But the creatures in the vacuum were pinned to the spots they occupied, as were Madge and Lambert. From their squeaks it was evident they suffered, too, and were fellow prisoners of the mortals. "Probably the cries we make disturb them," said Lambert. "Vibrations to which we and they are not attuned are torture to the form we are in. Evidently the inhabitants of this hell world punish offenders by condemning them to this eternal torture." "Why--why did they treat us so?" "Perhaps we jarred upon them, hurt them, because we were not of their kind exactly," said Lambert. "Perhaps it was just their natural hatred of us as strangers." * * * * * They did not grow used to the terrible eternity of torments. No, if anything, it grew worse as it went on. Still, they could visualize no end to the existence to which they were bound. Throbs of awful intensity rent them, tore them apart myriad times, yet they still felt as keenly as before and suffered just as much. There was no death for them, no release from the intangible world in which they were. Their fellow prisoners squeaked at them, as though imploring them not to add to the agony by uttering discordant cries. But it was impossible for Madge to keep quiet, and Lambert shouted in anguish from time to time. There seemed to be no end to it. And yet, after what was eternity to the sufferers, Madge spoke hopefully. "Darling John, I--I fear I am really going to die. I am growing weaker. I can feel the pain very little now. It is all vague, and is getting less real to me. Good-by, sweetheart, I love you, and I always will--" Lambert uttered a strangled cry, "No, no. Don't leave me, Madge." He clung to her, yet she was becoming extremely intangible to him. She was melting away from his embrace, and Lambert felt that he, too, was weaker, even less real than he had been. He hoped that if it was the end, they would go together. Desperately, he tried to hold her with him, but he had little ability to do so. The torture was still racking his consciousness, but was becoming more dreamlike. There was a terrific snap, suddenly, and Lambert lost all consciousness.... * * * * * "Water, water!" Lambert, opening his eyes, felt his body writhing about, and experienced pain that was--mortal. A bluish-green light dazzled his pupils and made him blink. Something cut into his flesh, and Lambert rolled about, trying to escape. He bumped into something, something soft; he clung to this form, and knew that he was holding on to a human being. Then the light died out, and in its stead was the yellow, normal glow of the electric lights. Weak, famished, almost dead of thirst, Lambert looked about him at the familiar sights of his laboratory. He was lying on the floor, close by the metal plate, and at his side, unconscious but still alive to judge by her rising and falling breast, was Madge Crawford. Someone bent over him, and pressed a glass of water against his lips. He drank, watching while a mortal whom Lambert at last realized was Detective Phillips bathed Madge Crawford's temples with water from a pitcher and forced a little between her pale, drawn lips. Lambert tried to rise, but he was weak, and required assistance. He was dazed, still, and they sat him down in a chair and allowed him to come to. He shuddered from time to time, for he still thought he could feel the torture which he had been undergoing. But he was worried about Madge, and watched anxiously as Phillips, assisted by another man, worked over the girl. At last, Madge stirred and moaned faintly. They lifted her to a bench, where they gently restored her to full consciousness. When she could sit up, she at once cried out for Lambert. The scientist had recovered enough to rise to his feet and stagger toward her. "Here I am, darling," he said. "John--we're alive--we're back in the laboratory!" "Ah, Lambert. Glad to see you." A heavy voice spoke, and Lambert for the first time noticed the black-clad figure which stood to one side, near the switchboard, hidden by a large piece of apparatus. "Dr. Morgan!" cried Lambert. Althaus Morgan, the renowned physicist, came forward calmly, with outstretched hand. "So, you realized your great ambition, eh?" he said curiously. "But where would you be if I had not been able to bring you back?" "In Hell--or Hell's Dimension, anyway," said Lambert. He went to Madge, took her in his arms. "Darling, we are safe. Morgan has managed to re-materialize us. We will never again be cast into the void in this way. I shall destroy the apparatus and my notes." Doherty, who had been out of the room on some errand, came into the laboratory. He shouted when he saw Lambert standing before him. "So you got him," he cried. "Where was he hidin'?" His eyes fell upon Madge Crawford, then, and he exclaimed in satisfaction. "You found her, eh?" "No," said Phillips. "They came back. They suddenly appeared out of nothing, Doherty." "Don't kid me," growled Doherty. "They were hidin' in a closet somewhere. Maybe they can fool you guys, but not me." Lambert spoke to Phillips. "I'm starving to death and I think Miss Crawford must be, too. Will you tell Felix to bring us some food, plenty of it?" One of the sleuths went to the kitchen to give the order. Lambert turned to Morgan. "How did you manage to bring us back?" he asked. * * * * * Morgan shrugged. "It was all guess work at the last. I at first could check the apparatus by your notes, and this took some time. You know you have written me in detail about what you were working on, so when I was summoned by Detective Phillips, who said you had mentioned my name to him as the only one who could help, I could make a good conjecture as to what had occurred. I heard the stories of all concerned, and realized that you must have dematerialized Miss Crawford by mistake, and then, unable to bring her back, had followed her yourself. "I put on your insulation outfit, and went to work. I have not left here for a moment, but have snatched an hour or two of sleep from time to time. Detective Phillips has been very good and helpful. "Finally, I had everything in shape, but I reversed the apparatus in vital spots, and tried each combination until suddenly, a few minutes ago, you were re-materialized. It was a desperate chance, but I was forced to take it in an endeavor to save you." Lambert held out his hand to his friend. "I can never thank you enough," he said gratefully. "You saved us from a horrible fate. But you speak as though we had been gone a long while. Was it many hours?" "Hours?" repeated Morgan, his lips parting under his black beard. "Man, it was eight days! You have been gone since a week ago last night!" Lambert turned to Phillips. "I must ask you not to release this story to the newspapers," he begged. Phillips smiled and turned up his hands in a gesture of frank wonder. "Professor Lambert," he said, "I can't believe what I have seen myself. If I told such a yarn to the reporters, they'd never forget it. They'd kid me out of the department." "Aw, they were hidin' in a closet," growled Doherty. "Come on, we've wasted too much time on this job already. Just a couple of nuts, says I." * * * * * The sleuths, after Phillips had shaken hands with Lambert, left the laboratory. Morgan, a large man of middle age, joined them in a meal which Felix served to the three on a folding table brought in for the purpose. Felix was terribly glad to see Madge and Lambert again, and manifested his joy by many bobs and leaps as he waited upon them. A grin spread across his face from ear to ear. Morgan asked innumerable questions. They described as best they could what they could recall of the strange dominion in which they had been, and the physicist listened intently. "It is some Hell's Dimension, as you call it," he said at last. "Where it is, or exactly what, I cannot say," said Lambert. "I surely have no desire to return to that world of hate." Madge, happy now, smiled at him and he leaned over and kissed her tenderly. "We have come from Hell, together," said Lambert, "and now we are in Heaven!" * * * * * [Illustration: Advertisement] The World Behind the Moon _By Paul Ernst_ [Illustration: _They fell, for hours, into a deep chasm._] [Sidenote: Two intrepid Earth-men fight it out with the horrific monsters of Zeud's frightful jungles.] Like pitiless jaws, a distant crater opened for their ship. Helplessly, they hurtled toward it: helplessly, because they were still in the nothingness of space, with no atmospheric resistance on which their rudders, or stern or bow tubes, could get a purchase to steer them. Professor Dorn Wichter waited anxiously for the slight vibration that should announce that the projectile-shaped shell had entered the new planet's atmosphere. "Have we struck it yet?" asked Joyce, a tall blond young man with the shoulders of an athlete and the broad brow and square chin of one who combines dreams with action. He made his way painfully toward Wichter. It was the first time he had attempted to move since the shell had passed the neutral point--that belt midway between the moon and the world behind it, where the pull of gravity of each satellite was neutralized by the other. They, and all the loose objects in the shell, had floated uncomfortably about the middle of the chamber for half an hour or so, gradually settling down again; until now it was possible, with care, to walk. "Have we struck it?" he repeated, leaning over the professor's shoulder and staring at the resistance gauge. "No." Absently Wichter took off his spectacles and polished them. "There's not a trace of resistance yet." They gazed out the bow window toward the vast disc, like a serrated, pock-marked plate of blue ice, that was the planet Zeud--discovered and named by them. The same thought was in the mind of each. Suppose there were no atmosphere surrounding Zeud to cushion their descent into the hundred-mile crater that yawned to receive them? "Well," said Joyce after a time, "we're taking no more of a chance here than we did when we pointed our nose toward the moon. We were almost sure that was no atmosphere there--which meant we'd nose dive into the rocks at five thousand miles an hour. On Zeud there might be anything." His eyes shone. "How wonderful that there should be such a planet, unsuspected during all the centuries men have been studying the heavens!" Wichter nodded agreement. It was indeed wonderful. But what was more wonderful was its present discovery: for that would never have transpired had not he and Joyce succeeded in their attempt to fly to the moon. From there, after following the sun in its slow journey around to the lost side of the lunar globe--that face which the earth has never yet observed--they had seen shining in the near distance the great ball which they had christened Zeud. * * * * * Astronomical calculations had soon described the mysterious hidden satellite. It was almost a twin to the moon; a very little smaller, and less than eighty thousand miles away. Its rotation was nearly similar, which made its days not quite sixteen of our earthly days. It was of approximately the weight, per cubic mile, of Earth. And there it whirled, directly in a line with the earth and the moon, moving as the moon moved so that it was ever out of sight beyond it, as a dime would be out of sight if placed in a direct line behind a penny. Zeud, the new satellite, the world beyond the moon! In their excitement at its discovery, Joyce and Wichter had left the moon--which they had found to be as dead and cold as it had been surmised to be--and returned summarily to Earth. They had replenished their supplies and their oxygen tanks, and had come back--to circle around the moon and point the sharp prow of the shell toward Zeud. The gift of the moon to Earth was a dubious one; but the gift of a possibly living planet-colony to mankind might be the solution of the overcrowded conditions of the terrestial sphere! "Speed, three thousand miles an hour," computed Wichter. "Distance to Zeud, nine hundred and eighty miles. If we don't strike a few atoms of hydrogen or something soon we're going to drill this nearest crater a little deeper!" Joyce nodded grimly. At two thousand miles from Earth there had still been enough hydrogen traces in the ether to give purchase to the explosions of their water-motor. At six hundred miles from the moon they had run into a sparse gaseous belt that had enabled them to change direction and slow their speed. They had hoped to find hydrogen at a thousand or twelve hundred miles from Zeud. "Eight hundred and thirty miles," commented Wichter, his slender, bent body tensed. "Eight hundred miles--ah!" A thrumming sound came to their ears as the shell quivered, imperceptibly almost, but unmistakeably, at the touch of some faint resistance outside in space. "We've struck it, Joyce. And it's much denser than the moon's, even as we'd hoped. There'll be life on Zeud, my boy, unless I'm vastly mistaken. You'd better look to the motor now." * * * * * Joyce went to the water-motor. This was a curious, but extremely simple affair. There was a glass box, ribbed with polished steel, about the size and shape of a cigar box, which was full of water. Leading away from this, to the bow and stern of the shell, were two small pipes. The pipes were greatly thickened for a period of three feet or so, directly under the little tank, and were braced by bed-plates so heavy as to look all out of proportion. Around the thickened parts of the pipes were coils of heavy, insulated copper wire. There were no valves nor cylinders, no revolving parts: that was all there was to the "motor." Joyce didn't yet understand the device. The water dripped from the tank, drop by drop, to be abruptly disintegrated, made into an explosive, by being subjected to a powerful magnetic field induced in the coils by a generator in the bow of the shell. As each drop of water passed into the pipes, and was instantaneously broken up, there was a violent but controlled explosion--and the shell was kicked another hundred miles ahead on its journey. That was all Joyce knew about it. He threw the bow switch. There was a soft shock as the motor exhausted through the forward tube, slowing their speed. "Turn on the outside generator propellers," ordered Wichter. "I think our batteries are getting low." Joyce slipped the tiny, slim-bladed propellers into gear. They began to turn, slowly at first in the almost non-existent atmosphere. "Four hundred miles," announced Wichter. "How's the temperature?" Joyce stepped to the thermometer that registered the heat of the outer wall. "Nine hundred degrees," he said. "Cut down to a thousand miles an hour," commanded Wichter. "Five hundred as soon as the motor will catch that much. I'll keep our course straight toward this crater. It's in wells like that, that we'll find livable air--if we're right in believing there is such a thing on Zeud." * * * * * Joyce glanced at the thermometer. It still registered hundreds of degrees, though their speed had been materially reduced. "I guess there's livable air, all right," he said. "It's pretty thick outside already." The professor smiled. "Another theory vindicated. I was sure that Zeud, swinging on the outside of the Earth-moon-Zeud chain and hence traveling at a faster rate, would pick up most of the moon's atmosphere over a period of millions of years. Also it must have been shielded by the moon, to some extent, against the constant small atmospheric leakage most celestial globes are subject to. Just the same, when we land, we'll test conditions with a rat or two." At a signal from him, Joyce checked their speed to four hundred miles an hour, then to two hundred, and then, as they descended below the highest rim of the circular cliffs of the crater, almost to a full stop. They floated toward the surface of Zeud, watching with breathless interest the panorama that unfolded beneath them. They were nosing toward a spot that was being favored with the Zeudian sunrise. Sharp and clear the light rays slanted down, illuminating about half the crater's floor and leaving the cliff protected half in dim shadow. The illuminated part of the giant pit was as bizarre as the landscape of a nightmare. There were purplish trees, immense beyond belief. There were broad, smooth pools of inky black fluid that was oily and troubled in spots as though disturbed by some moving things under the surface. There were bare, rocky patches where the stones, the long drippings of ancient lava flow, were spread like bleaching gray skeletons of monsters. And over all, rising from pools and bare ground and jungle alike, was a thin, miasmic mist. * * * * * Sustained by the slow, steady exhaust of the motor, rising a little with each partly muffled explosion and sinking a little further in each interval, they settled toward a bare, lava strewn spot that appealed to Wichter as being a good landing place. With a last hiss, and a grinding jar, they grounded. Joyce opened the switch to cut off the generator. "Now let's see what the air's like," said Wichter, lifting down a small cage in which was penned an active rat. He opened a double panel in the shell's hull, and freed the little animal. In an agony of suspense they watched it as it leaped onto the bare lava and halted a moment.... "Seems to like it," said Joyce, drawing a great breath. The rat, as though intoxicated by its sudden freedom, raced away out of sight, covering eight or ten feet at a bound, its legs scurrying ludicrously in empty air during its short flights. "That means that we can dispense with oxygen helmets--and that we'd better take our guns," said Wichter, his voice tense, his eyes snapping behind his glasses. He stepped to the gun rack. In this were half a dozen air-guns. Long and of very small bore, they discharged a tiny steel shell in which was a liquid of his invention that, about a second after the heat of its forced passage through the rifle barrel, expanded instantly in gaseous form to millions of times its liquid bulk. It was the most powerful explosive yet found, but one that was beautifully safe to carry inasmuch as it could be exploded only by heat. "Are we ready?" he said, handing a gun to Joyce. "Then--let's go!" * * * * * But for a breath or two they hesitated before opening the heavy double door in the side of the hull, savoring to the full the immensity of the moment. The rapture of the explorer who is the first to set foot on a vast new continent was theirs, magnified a hundredfold. For they were the first to set foot on a vast new planet! An entire new world, containing heaven alone knew what forms of life, what monstrous or infinitesimal creatures, lay before them. Even the profound awe they had experienced when landing on the moon was dwarfed by the solemnity of this occasion; just as it is less soul stirring to discover an arctic continent which is perpetually cased in barren ice, than to discover a continent which is warmly fruitful and, probably, teeming with life. Still wordless, too stirred to speak, they opened the vault-like door and stepped out--into a humid heat which was like that of their own tropical regions, but not so unendurable. In their short stay on the moon, during which they had taken several walks in their insulated suits, they had become somewhat accustomed to the decreased weight of their bodies due to the lesser gravity, so that here, where their weight was even less, they did not make any blunders of stepping twenty feet instead of a yard. Walking warily, glancing alertly in all directions to guard against any strange animals that might rush out to destroy them, they moved toward the nearest stretch of jungle. * * * * * The first thing that arrested their attention was the size of the trees they were approaching. They had got some idea of their hugeness from the shell, but viewed from ground level they loomed even larger. Eight hundred, a thousand feet they reared their mighty tops, with trunks hundreds of feet in circumference; living pyramids whose bases wove together to make an impenetrable ceiling over the jungle floor. The leaves were thick and bloated like cactus growths, and their color was a pronounced lavender. "We must take back several of those leaves," said Wichter, his scientific soul filled with cold excitement. "I wish we could take back some of this air, too." Joyce filled his lungs to capacity. "Isn't it great? Like wine! It almost counteracts the effects of the heat." "There's more oxygen in it than in our own," surmised Wichter. "My God! What's that!" They halted for an instant. From the depths of the lavender jungle had come an ear shattering, screaming hiss, as though some monstrous serpent were in its death agony. They waited to hear if the noise would be repeated. It wasn't. Dubiously they started on again. "We'd better not go in there too far," said Joyce. "If we didn't come out again it would cost Earth a new planet. No one else knows the secret of your water-motor." "Oh, nothing living can stand against these guns of ours," replied Wichter confidently. "And that noise might not have been caused by anything living. It might have been steam escaping from some volcanic crevice." They started cautiously down a well defined, hard packed trail through thorny lavender underbrush. As they went, Joyce blazed marks on various tree trunks marking the direction back to the shell. The tough fibres exuded a bluish liquid from the cuts that bubbled slowly like blood. * * * * * To the right and left of them were cup-shaped bushes that looked like traps; and that their looks were not deceiving was proved by a muffled, bleating cry that rose from the compressed leaves of one of them they passed. Sluggish, blind crawling things like three-foot slugs flowed across their path and among the tree trunks, leaving viscous trails of slime behind them. And there were larger things.... "Careful," said Wichter suddenly, coming to a halt and peering into the gloom at their right. "What did you see?" whispered Joyce. Wichter shook his head. The gigantic, two-legged, purplish figure he had dimly made out in the steamy dark, had moved away. "I don't know. It looked a little like a giant ape." They halted and took stock of their situation, mechanically wiping perspiration from their streaming faces, and pondering as to whether or not they should turn back. Joyce, who was far from being a coward, thought they should. "In this undergrowth," he pointed out, "we might be rushed before we could even fire our guns. And we're nearly a mile from the shell." But Wichter was like an eager child. "We'll press on just a little," he urged. "To that clear spot in front of us." He pointed along the trail to where sunlight was blazing down through an opening in the trees. "As soon as we see what's there, we'll go back." With a shrug, Joyce followed the eager little man down the weird trail under the lavender trees. In a few moments they had reached the clearing which was Wichter's goal. They halted on its edge, gazing at it with awe and repulsion. * * * * * It was a circular quagmire of festering black mud about a hundred yards across. Near at hand they could see the mud heaving, very slowly, as though abysmal forms of life were tunneling along just under the surface. They glanced toward the center of the bog, which was occupied by one of the smooth black pools, and cried aloud at what they saw. At the brink of the pool was lying a gigantic creature like a great, thick snake--a snake with a lizard's head, and a series of many-jointed, scaled legs running down its powerful length. Its mouth was gaping open to reveal hundreds of needle-sharp, backward pointing teeth. Its legs and thick, stubbed tail were threshing feebly in the mud as though it were in distress; and its eyes, so small as to be invisible in its repulsive head, were glazed and dull. "Was that what we heard back a ways?" wondered Joyce. "Probably," said Wichter. His eyes shone as he gazed at the nightmare shape. Impulsively he took a step toward the stirring mud. "Don't be entirely insane," snapped Joyce, catching his arm. "I must see it closer," said Wichter, tugging to be free. "Then we'll climb a tree and look down on it. We'll probably be safer up off the ground anyway." * * * * * They ascended the nearest jungle giant--whose rubbery bark was so ringed and scored as to be as easy to climb as a staircase--to the first great bough, about fifty feet from the ground, and edged out till they hung over the rim of the quagmire. From there, with the aid of their binoculars, they expected to see the dying monster in every detail. But when they looked toward the pool it was not in sight! "Were we seeing things?" exclaimed Wichter, rubbing his glasses. "I'd have sworn it was lying there!" "It was," said Joyce grimly. "Look at the pool. That'll tell you where it went." The black, secretive surface was bubbling and waving as though, down in its depths, a terrific fight were taking place. "Something came up and dragged our ten-legged lizard down to its den. Then that something's brothers got onto the fact that a feast was being held, and rushed in. That pool would be no place for a before-breakfast dip!" * * * * * Wichter started to say something in reply, then gazed, hypnotized, at the opposite wall of the jungle. From the dense screen of lavender foliage stretched a glistening, scale-armored neck, as thick as a man's body at its thinnest point, which was just behind a tremendous-jawed crocodilian head. It tapered back for a distance of at least thirty feet, to merge into a body as big as that of a terrestial whale, that was supported by four squat, ponderous legs. Moving with surprising rapidity, the enormous thing slid into the mud and began ploughing a way, belly deep, toward the pool. Shapeless, slow-writhing forms were cast up in its wake, to quiver for a moment in the sunlight and then melt below the mud again. One of the bloated, formless mud-crawlers was snapped up in the huge jaws with an abrupt plunge of the long neck, and the monster began to feed, hog-like, slobbering over the loathsome carcass. Wichter shook his head, half in fanatical eagerness, half in despair. "I'd like to stay and see more," he said with a sigh, "but if that's the kind of creatures we're apt to encounter in the Zeudian jungle, we'd better be going at once--" "Sh-h!" snapped Joyce. Then, in a barely audible whisper: "I think the thing heard your voice!" The monster had abruptly ceased its feeding. Its head, thrust high in the air, was waving inquisitively from side to side. Suddenly it expelled the air from its vast lungs in a roaring cough--and started directly for their tree. "Shoot!" cried Wichter, raising his gun. * * * * * Moving with the speed of an express train, the monster had almost got to their overhanging branch before they could pull the triggers. Both shells imbedded themselves in the enormous chest, just as the long neck reached up for them. And at once things began to happen with cataclysmic rapidity. Almost with their impact the shells exploded. The monster stopped, with a great hole torn in its body. Then, dying on its feet, it thrust its great head up and its huge jaws crunched over the branch to which its two puny destroyers were clinging. With all its dozens of tons of weight, it jerked in a gargantuan death agony. The tree, enormous as it was, shook with it, and the branch itself was tossed as though in a hurricane. There was a splintering sound. Wichter and Joyce dropped their guns to cling more tightly to the bole of the drooping branch that was their only security. The guns glanced off the mountainous body--and, with a last convulsion of the mighty legs, were swept underneath! The monster was still at last, its insensate jaws yet gripping the bough. The two men looked at each other in speechless consternation. The shell a mile off through the dreadful jungle.... Themselves, helpless without their guns.... "Well," said Joyce at last. "I guess we'd better be on our way. Waiting here, thinking it over, won't help any. Lucky there's no night, for a couple of weeks at least, to come stealing down on us." * * * * * He started down the great trunk, with Wichter following close behind. Walking as rapidly as they could, they hurried back along the tunneled trail toward their shell. They hadn't covered a hundred yards when they heard a mighty crashing of underbrush behind them. Glancing back, they saw tooth-studded jaws gaping cavernously at the end of a thirty-foot neck--little, dead-looking eyes glaring at them--a hundred-foot body smashing its way over the trap-bushes and through tangles of vines and down-drooping branches. "The mate to the thing we killed back there!" Joyce panted. "Run, for God's sake!" Wichter needed no urging. He hadn't an ounce of fear in his spare, small body. But he had an overwhelming desire to get back to Earth and deliver his message. He was trembling as he raced after Joyce, thirty feet to a bound, ducking his head to avoid hitting the thick lavender foliage that roofed the trail. "One of us must get through!" he panted over and over. "One of us must make it!" It was speedily apparent that they could never outrun their pursuer. The reaching jaws were only a few yards behind them now. "You go," called Joyce, sobbing for breath. He slowed his pace deliberately. "No--you--" Wichter slowed too. In a frenzy, Joyce shoved him along the trail. "I tell you--" He got no further. In front of them, where there had appeared to be solid ground, they suddenly saw a yawning pit. Desperately, they tried to veer aside, but they were too close. Their last long birdlike leap carried them over the edge. They fell, far down, into a deep chasm, splashing into a shallow pool of water. A few clods of earth cascaded after them as the monster above dug its great splay feet into the ground and checked its rush in time to keep from falling after them. Then the top of the pit slowly darkened as a covering of some sort slid across it. They were in a prison as profoundly quiet and utterly black as a tomb. * * * * * "Dorn," shouted Joyce. "Are you all right?" "Yes," came a voice in the near darkness. "And you?" "I'm still in one piece as far as I can feel." There was a splashing noise. He waded toward it and in a moment his outstretched hand touched the professor's shoulder. "This is a fine mess," he observed shakily. "We got away from those tooth-lined jaws, all right, but I'm wondering if we're much better off than we would have been if we hadn't escaped." "I'm wondering the same thing." Wichter's voice was strained. "Did you see the way the top of the pit closed above us? That means we're in a trap. And a most ingenious trap it is, too! The roof of it is camouflaged until it looks exactly like the rest of the trail floor. The water in here is just shallow enough to let large animals break their necks when they fall in and just deep enough to preserve small animals--like ourselves--alive. We're in the hands of some sort of reasoning, intelligent beings, Joyce!" "In that case," said Joyce with a shudder, "we'd better do our best to get out of here!" But this was found to be impossible. They couldn't climb up out of the pit, and nowhere could they feel any openings in the walls. Only smooth, impenetrable stone met their questing fingers. "It looks as though we're in to stay," said Joyce finally. "At least until our Zeudian hosts, whatever kind of creatures they may be, come and take us out. What'll we do then? Sail in and die fighting? Or go peaceably along with them--assuming we aren't killed at once--on the chance that we can make a break later?" "I'd advise the latter," answered Wichter. "There is a small animal on our own planet whose example might be a good one for us to follow. That's the 'possum." He stopped abruptly, and gripped Joyce's arm. From the opposite side of the pit came a grating sound. A crack of greenish light appeared, low down near the water. This widened jerkily as though a door were being hoisted by some sort of pulley arrangement. The walls of the pit began to glow faintly with reflected light. "Down," breathed Wichter. * * * * * Noiselessly they let themselves sink into the water until they were floating, eyes closed and motionless, on the surface. Playing dead to the best of their ability, they waited for what might happen next. They heard a splashing near the open rock door. The splashing neared them, and high-pitched hissing syllables came to their ears--variegated sounds that resembled excited conversation in some unknown language. Joyce felt himself touched by something, and it was all he could do to keep from shouting aloud and springing to his feet at the contact. He'd had no idea, of course, what might be the nature of their captors, but he had imagined them as man-like, to some extent at least. And the touch of his hand, or flipper, or whatever it was, indicated that they were not! They were cold-blooded, reptilian things, for the flesh that had touched him was cold; as clammy and repulsive as the belly of a dead fish. So repulsive was that flesh that, when he presently felt himself lifted high up and roughly carried, he shuddered in spite of himself at the contact. Instantly the thing that bore him stopped. Joyce held his breath. He felt an excruciating, stabbing pain in his arm, after which the journey through the water was resumed. Stubbornly he kept up his pretence of lifelessness. The splashing ceased, and he heard flat wet feet slapping along on dry rock, indicating that they had emerged from the pit. Then he sank into real unconsciousness. The next thing he knew was that he was lying on smooth, bare rock in a perfect bedlam of noises. Howls and grunts, snuffling coughs and snarls beat at his ear-drums. It was as though he had fallen into a vast cage in which were hundreds of savage, excited animals--animals, however, that in spite of their excitement and ferocity were surprisingly motionless, for he heard no scraping of claws, or padding of feet. Cautiously he opened his eyes.... * * * * * He was in a large cave, the walls of which were glowing with greenish, phosphorescent light. Strewn about the floor were seemingly dead carcasses of animals. And what carcasses there were! Blubber-coated things that looked like giant tadpoles, gazelle-like creatures with a single, long slim horn growing from delicate small skulls, four-legged beasts and six-legged ones, animals with furry hides and crawlers with scaled coverings--several hundred assorted specimens of the smaller life of Zeud lay stretched out in seeming lifelessness. But they were not dead, these bizarre beasts of another world. They lived, and were animated with the frenzied fear of trapped things. Joyce could see the tortured heaving of their furred and scaled sides as they panted with terror. And from their throats issued the outlandish noises he had heard. They were alive enough--only they seemed unable to move! There was nothing in his range of vision that might conceivably be the beings that had captured them, so Joyce started to lift his head and look around at the rest of the cavern. He found that he could not move. He tried again, and his body was as unresponsive as a log. In fact, he couldn't feel his body at all! In growing terror, he concentrated all his will on moving his arm. It was as limp as a rag. He relaxed, momentarily in the grip of stark, blind panic. He was as helpless as the howling things around him! He was numbed, completely paralyzed into immobility! The professor's voice--a weak, uncertain voice--sounded from behind him. "Joyce! Joyce!" He found that he could talk, that the paralysis that gripped the rest of his muscles had not extended to the vocal cords. "Dorn! Thank God you're alive! I couldn't see you, and I thought--" "I'm alive, but that's about all," said Wichter. "I--I can't move." "Neither can I. We've been drugged in some manner--just as all the other animals in here have been drugged. I must have got my dose in the pit. I was cut, or stabbed, in the arm." * * * * * Joyce stopped talking as he suddenly heard steps, like human footsteps yet weirdly different--flap-flapping sounds as though awkward flippers were slapping along the rock floor toward them. The steps stopped within a few feet of them; then, after what seemed hours, they sounded again, this time in front of him. He opened his eyes, cautiously, barely moving his eyelids, and saw at last, in every hideous detail, one of the super-beasts that had captured Wichter and himself. It was a horrible cartoon of a man, the thing that stood there in the greenish glow of the cave. Nine or ten feet high, it loomed; hairless, with a faintly iridescent, purplish hide. A thick, cylindrical trunk sloped into a neck only a little smaller than the body itself. Set on this was a bony, ugly head that was split clear across by lipless jaws. There was no nose, only slanted holes like the nostrils of an animal; and over these were set pale, expressionless, pupil-less eyes. The arms were short and thick and ended in bifurcated lumps of flesh like swollen hands encased in old-fashioned mittens. The legs were also grotesquely short, and the feet mere shapeless flaps. It was standing near one of the smaller animals, apparently regarding it closely. Observing it himself, Joyce saw that it was moving a little. As though coming out of a coma, it was raising its bizarre head and trying to get on its feet. Leisurely the two-legged monster bent over it. Two long fangs gleamed in the lipless mouth. These were buried in the neck of the reviving beast--and instantly it sank back into immobility. Having reduced it to helplessness--the monster ate it! The lipless jaws gaped widely. The shapeless hands forced in the head of the animal. The throat muscles expanded hugely: and in less than a minute it had swallowed its living prey as a boa-constrictor swallows a monkey. * * * * * Joyce closed his eyes, feeling weak and nauseated. He didn't open them again till long after he had heard the last of the awkward, flapping footsteps. "Could you see it?" asked Wichter, who was lying so closely behind him that he couldn't observe the monstrous Zeudian. "What did it do? What was it like?" Joyce told him of the way the creature had fed. "We are evidently in their provision room," he concluded. "They keep some of their food alive, it seems.... Well, it's a quick death." "Tell me more about the way the other animal moved, just before it was eaten." "There isn't much to tell," said Joyce wearily. "It didn't move long after those fangs were sunk into it." "But don't you see!" There was sudden hope in Wichter's voice. "That means that the effect of the poison, which is apparently injected by those fangs, wears off after a time. And in that case--" "In that case," Joyce interjected, "we'd have only an unknown army of ten-foot Zeudians, the problem of finding a way to the surface of the ground again, and the lack of any kind of weapons, to keep us from escaping!" "We're not quite weaponless, though," the professor whispered back. "Over in a corner there's a pile of the long, slender horns that sprout from the heads of some of these creatures. Evidently the Zeudians cut them out, or break them off before eating that particular type of animal. They'd be as good as lances, if we could get hold of them." * * * * * Joyce said nothing, but hope began to beat in his own breast. He had noticed a significant happening during the age-long hours in the commissary cave. Most of the Zeudians had entered from the direction of the pit. But one had come in through an opening in the opposite side. And this one had blinked pale eyes as though dazzled from bright sunlight--and was bearing some large, woody looking tubers that seemed to have been freshly uprooted! There was a good chance, thought Joyce, that that opening led to a tunnel up to the world above! He drew a deep breath--and felt a dim pain in his back, caused by the cramping position in which he had lain for so long. He could have shouted aloud with the thrill of that discovery. This was the first time he had felt his body at all! Did it mean that the effect of the poison was wearing off--that it wasn't as lastingly paralyzing to his earthly nerve centers as to those of Zeudian creatures around them? He flexed the muscles of his leg. The leg moved a fraction of an inch. "Dorn!" he called softly, "I can move a little! Can you?" "Yes," Wichter answered, "I've been able to wriggle my fingers for several minutes. I think I could walk in an hour or two." "Then pray for that hour or two. It might mean our escape!" Joyce told him of the seldom used entrance that he thought led to the open air. "I'm sure it goes to the surface, Dorn. Those woody looking tubers had been freshly picked." * * * * * Three of the two-legged monsters came in just then. They relapsed into lifeless silence. There was a horrible moment as the three paused over them longer than any of the others had. Was it obvious that the effects of the numbing poison was wearing off? Would they be bitten again--or eaten? The Zeudians finally moved on, hissing and clicking to each other. Eventually the cold-blooded things fed, and dragged lethargically out of the cave in the direction of the pit. With every passing minute Joyce could feel life pouring back into his numbed body. His cramped muscles were in agony now--a pain that gave him fierce pleasure. At last, risking observation, he lifted his head and then struggled to a sitting position and looked around. No Zeudian was in sight. Evidently they were too sure of their poison glands to post a guard over them. He listened intently, and could hear no dragging footsteps. He turned to Wichter, who had followed his example and was sitting up, feebly rubbing his body to restore circulation. "Now's our chance," he whispered. "Stand up and walk a little to steady your legs, while I go over and get us a couple of those sharp horns. Then we'll see where that entrance of mine goes!" He walked to the pile of bones and horns in the corner and selected two of the longest and slimmest of the ivory-like things. Just as he had rejoined Wichter he heard the sound with which he was now so grimly familiar--flapping, awkward footsteps. Wildly he signaled the professor. They dropped in their tracks, just as the approaching monster stumped into the cave. * * * * * For an instant he dared hope that their movement had gone unobserved, but his hope was rudely shattered. He heard a sharp hiss: heard the Zeudian flap toward them at double-quick time. Abandoning all pretense, he sprang to his feet just as the thing reached him, its fangs gleaming wickedly in the greenish light. He leaped to the side, going twenty feet or more with the press of his Earth muscles against the reduced gravity. The creature rushed on toward the professor. That game little man crouched and awaited its onslaught. But Joyce had sprung back again before the two could clash. He raised the long horn and plunged it into the smooth, purplish back. Again and again he drove it home, as the monster writhed under him. It had enormous vitality. Gashed and dripping, it yet struggled on, attempting to encircle Joyce with its stubby arms. Once it succeeded, and he felt his ribs crack as it contracted its powerful body. But a final stroke finished the savage fight. He got up and, with an incoherent cry to Wichter, raced toward the opening on which they pinned their hopes of reaching the upper air. Hissing cries and the thudding of many feet came to them just as they reached the arched mouth of the passage. But the cries, and the constant pandemonium of the paralysed animals died behind them as they bounded along the tunnel. * * * * * They emerged at last into the sunlight they had never expected to see again, beside one of the great lavender trees. They paused an instant to try to get their bearings. "This way," panted Joyce as he saw, on a hard-packed path ahead of them, one of the trail-marks he had blazed. Down the trail they raced, toward their space shell. Fortunately they met none of the tremendous animals that infested the jungles; and their journey to the clearing in which the shell was lying was accomplished without accident. "We're safe now," gasped Wichter, as they came in sight of the bare lava patch. "We can outrun them five feet to their one!" They burst into the clearing--and halted abruptly. Surrounding the shell, stumping curiously about it and touching it with their shapeless hands, were dozens of the Zeudians. "My God!" groaned Joyce. "There must be at least a hundred of them! We're lost for certain now!" They stared with hopeless longing at the vehicle that, if only they could reach it, could carry them back to Earth. Then they turned to each other and clasped hands, without a word. The same thought was in the mind of each--to rush at the swarming monsters and fight till they were killed. There was absolutely no chance of winning through to the shell, but it was infinitely better to die fighting than be swallowed alive. * * * * * So engrossed were the Zeudians by the strange thing that had fallen into their province, that Joyce and Wichter got within a hundred feet of them before they turned their pale eyes in their direction. Then, baring their fangs, they streamed toward the Earth men, just as the pursuing Zeudians entered the clearing from the jungle trail. The two prepared to die as effectively as possible. Each grasped his lace-like horn tightly. The professor mechanically adjusted his glasses more firmly on his nose.... With his move, the narrowing circle of Zeudians halted. A violent clamor broke out among them. They glared at the two, but made no further step toward them. "What in the world--" began Wichter bewilderedly. "Your glasses!" Joyce shouted, gripping his shoulder. "When you moved them, they all stopped! They must be afraid of them, somehow. Take them clear off and see what happens." Wichter removed his spectacles, and swung them in his hand, peering near-sightedly at the crowding Zeudians. Their reaction to his simple move was remarkable! Hisses of consternation came from their lipless mouths. They faced each other uneasily, waving their stubby arms and covering their own eyes as though suddenly afraid they would lose them. Taking advantage of their indecision, Joyce and Wichter walked boldly toward them. They moved aside, forming a reluctant lane. Some of the Zeudians in the rear shoved to close in on them, but the ones in front held them back. It wasn't until the two were nearly through that the lane began to straggle into a threatening circle around them again. The Zeudians were evidently becoming reassured by the fact that Wichter continued to see all right in spite of the little strange creature's alarming act of removing his eyes. "Do it again," breathed Joyce, perspiration beading his forehead as the giants moved closed, their fangs tentatively bared for the numbing poison stroke. * * * * * Wichter popped his glasses on, then jerked them off with a cry, as though he were suffering intensely. Once more the Zeudians faltered and drew back, feeling at their own eyes. "Run!" cried Joyce. And they raced for the haven of the shell. The Zeudians swarmed after them, snarling and hissing. Barely ahead of the nearest, Joyce and Wichter dove into the open panel. They slammed it closed just as a powerful, stubby arm reached after them. There was a screaming hiss, and a cold, cartilagenous lump of flesh dropped to the floor of the shell--half the monster's hand, sheared off between the sharp edge of the door and the metal hull. Joyce threw in the generator switch. With a soft roar the water-motor exploded into action, sending the shell far into the sky. "When we return," said Joyce, adding a final thousand miles an hour to their speed before they should fly free of the atmosphere of Zeud, "I think we'd better come at the head of an army, equipped with air-guns and explosive bombs." "And with glasses," added the professor, taking off his spectacles and gazing at them as though seeing them for the first time. Four Miles Within A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By Anthony Gilmore_ CHAPTER I _The Monster of Metal_ [Illustration: The man hurled the empty gun at the monster.] [Sidenote: Far down into the earth goes a gleaming metal sphere whose passengers are deadly enemies.] A strange spherical monster stood in the moonlight on the silent Mojave Desert. In the ghostly gray of the sand and sage and joshua trees its metal hide glimmered dully--an amazing object to be found on that lonely spot. But there was only pride and anticipation in the eyes of the three people who stood a little way off, looking at it. For they had constructed the strange sphere, and were soon going to entrust their lives to it. "Professor," said one of them, a young man with a cheerful face and a likable grin, "let's go down now! There's no use waiting till to-morrow. It's always dark down there, whether it's day or night up here. Everything is ready." The white-haired Professor David Guinness smiled tolerantly at the speaker, his partner, Phil Holmes. "I'm kind of eager to be off, myself," he admitted. He turned to the third person in the little group, a dark-haired girl. "What do you say, Sue?" "Oh, let's, Father!" came the quick reply. "We'd never be able to sleep to-night, anyway. As Phil says, everything is ready." "Well, I guess that settles it," Professor Guinness said to the eager young man. Phil Holmes' face went aglow with anticipation. "Good!" he cried. "Good! I'll skip over and get some water. It's barely possible that it'll be hot down there, in spite of your eloquent logic to the contrary!" And with the words he caught up a large jug standing nearby, waved his hand, said: "I'll be right back!" and set out for the water-hole, situated nearly a mile away from their little camp. The heavy hush of the desert night settled down once more after he left. * * * * * As his figure merged with the shadows in the distance, the elderly scientist murmured aloud to his daughter: "You know, it's good to realize that my dream is about to become a reality. If it hadn't been for Phil.... Or no--I really ought to thank you, Sue. You're the one responsible for his participation!" And he smiled fondly at the slender girl by his side. "Phil joined us just for the scientific interest, and for the thrill of going four miles down into the earth," she retorted at once, in spite of the blush her father saw on her face. But he did not insist. Once more he turned, as to a magnet, to the machine that was his handiwork. The fifteen-foot sphere was an earth-borer--Guinness's own invention. In it he had utilized for the first time for boring purposes the newly developed atomic disintegrators. Many holes equally spaced over the sphere were the outlets for the dissolving ray--most of them on the bottom and alternating with them on the bottom and sides were the outlets of powerful rocket propulsion tubes, which would enable it to rise easily from the hole it would presently blast into the earth. A small, tight-fitting door gave entrance to the double-walled interior, where, in spite of the space taken up by batteries and mechanisms and an enclosed gyroscope for keeping the borer on an even keel, there was room for several people. The earth-borer had been designed not so much for scientific investigation as the specific purpose of reaching a rich store of radium ore buried four miles below the Guinness desert camp. Many geologists and mining engineers knew that the radium was there, for their instruments had proven it often; but no one up to then knew how to get to it. David Guinness did--first. The borer had been constructed in his laboratory in San Francisco, then dismantled and freighted to the little desert town of Palmdale, from whence Holmes had brought the parts to their isolated camp by truck. Strict secrecy had been kept. Rather than risk assistants they had done all the work themselves. * * * * * Fifteen minutes passed by, while the slight figure of the inventor puttered about the interior of the sphere, brightly lit by a detachable searchlight, inspecting all mechanisms in preparation for their descent. Sue stood by the door watching him, now and then turning to scan the desert for the returning Phil. It was then, startlingly sudden, that there cracked through the velvet night the faint, distant sound of a gun. And it came from the direction of the water-hole. Sue's face went white, and she trembled. Without a word her father stepped out of the borer and looked at her. "That was a gun!" he said. "Phil didn't have one with him, did he?" "No," Sue whispered. "And--why, there's nobody within miles of here!" The two looked at each other with alarm and wonder. Then, from one of the broken patches of scrub that ringed the space in which the borer stood, came a mocking voice. "Ah, you're mistaken, Sue," it affirmed. "But that was a gun." David Guinness jerked around, as did his daughter. The man who had spoken stood only ten yards away, clearly outlined in the bright moonlight--a tall, well-built man, standing quite at ease, surveying them pleasantly. His smile did not change when old Guinness cried: "Quade! James Quade!" The man nodded and came slowly forward. He might have been considered handsome, had it not been for his thin, mocking lips and a swarthy complexion. "What are you doing here?" demanded Guinness angrily. "And what do you mean--'it was a gun?' Have you--" "Easy, easy--one thing at a time," said Quade, still smiling. "About the gun--well, your young friend Holmes said, he'd be right back, but I--I'm afraid he won't be." * * * * * Sue Guinness's lips formed a frightened word: "Why?" Quade made a short movement with his left hand, as is brushing the query aside. "Let's talk about something more pleasant," he said, and looked back at the professor. "The radium, and your borer, for instance. I hear you're all ready to go down." David Guinness gasped. "How did you know--?" he began, but a surge of anger choked him, and his fists clenched. He stepped forward. But something came to life in James Quade's right hand and pointed menacingly at him. It was the stubby black shape of an automatic. "Keep back, you old fool!" Quade said harshly. "I don't want to have to shoot you!" Unwillingly, Guinness came to a stop. "What have you done with young Holmes?" he demanded. "Never mind about him now," said Quade, smiling again. "Perhaps I'll explain later. At the moment there's something much more interesting to do. Possibly you'll be surprised to hear it, but we're all going to take a little ride in this machine of yours, Professor. Down. About four miles. I'll have to ask you to do the driving. You will, won't you--without making a fuss?" Guinness's face worked furiously. "Why, you're crazy, Quade!" he sputtered. "I certainly won't!" "No?" asked Quade softly. The automatic he held veered around, till it was pointing directly at the girl. "I wouldn't want to have to shoot Sue--say--through the hand...." His finger tightened perceptibly on the trigger. "You're mad, man!" Guinness burst out. "You're crazy! What's the idea--" "In due time I'll tell you. But now I'll ask you just once more," Quade persisted. "Will you enter that borer, or must I--" He broke off with an expressive shrug. David Guinness was powerless. He had not the slightest idea what Quade might be about; the one thought that broke through his fear and anger was that the man was mad, and had better be humored. He trembled, and a tight sensation came to his throat at sight of the steady gun trained on his daughter. He dared not trifle. "I'll do it," he said. * * * * * James Quade laughed. "That's better. You always were essentially reasonable, though somewhat impulsive for a man of your age. The rash way you severed our partnership, for instance.... But enough of that. I think we'd better leave immediately. Into the sphere, please. You first, Miss Guinness." "Must she come?" "I'm afraid so. I can't very well leave her here all unprotected, can I?" Quade's voice was soft and suave, but an undercurrent of sarcasm ran through it. Guinness winced under it; his whole body was trembling with suppressed rage and indignation. As he stepped to the door of the earth-borer he turned and asked: "How did you know our plans? About the radium?--the borer?" Quade told him. "Have you forgotten," he said, "that you talked the matter over with me before we split last year? I simply had the laboratory watched, and when you got new financial backing from young Holmes, and came here. I followed you. Simple, eh?... Well, enough of this. Get inside. You first, Sue." Trembling, the girl obeyed, and when her father hesitated Quade jammed his gun viciously into his ribs and pushed him to the door. "Inside!" he hissed, and reluctantly, hatred in his eyes, the professor stepped into the control compartment after Sue. Quade gave a last quick glance around and, with gun ever wary, passed inside. The door slammed shut: there was a click as its lock shot over. The sphere was a sealed ball of metal. Inside, David Guinness obeyed the automatic's imperious gesture and pulled a shiny-handled lever slowly back, and the hush that rested over the Mojave was shattered by a tremendous bellow, a roar that shook the very earth. It was the disintegrating blast, hurled out of the bottom in many fan-shaped rays. The coarse gray sand beneath the machine stirred and flew wildly; the sphere vibrated madly; and then the thunder lowered in tone to a mighty humming and the earth-borer began to drop. Slowly it fell, at first, then more rapidly. The shiny top came level with the ground: disappeared; and in a moment there was nothing left but a gaping hole where a short while before a round monster of metal had stood. The hole was hot and dark, and from it came a steadily diminishing thunder.... * * * * * For a long time no one in the earth-borer spoke--didn't even try to--for though the thunder of the disintegrators was muted, inside, to a steady drone, conversation was almost impossible. The three were crowded quite close in the spherical inner control compartment. Sue sat on a little collapsible stool by the bowed, but by no means subdued, figure of Professor David Guinness, while Quade sat on the wire guard of the gyroscope, which was in the exact center of the floor. The depth gauge showed two hundred feet. Already the three people were numb from the vibration; they hardly felt any sensation at all, save one of great weight pressing inwards. The compartment was fairly cool and the air good--kept so by the automatic air rectifiers and the insulation, which shut out the heat born of their passage. Quade had been carefully watching Guinness's manipulation of the controls, when he was struck by a thought. At once he stood up, and shouted in the elderly inventor's ear: "Try the rockets! I want to be sure this thing will go back up!" Without a word Guinness shoved back the lever controlling the disintegrators, at the same time whirling a small wheel full over. The thudding drone died away to a whisper, and was replaced by sharper thundering, as the stream of the propulsion rockets beneath the sphere was released. A delicate needle trembled on a gauge, danced at the figure two hundred, then crept back to one-ninety ... one-sixty ... one-forty.... Quade's eyes took in everything. "Excellent, Guinness!" he yelled. "Now--down once more!" The rockets were slowly cut; the borer jarred at the bottom of its hole; again the disintegrators droned out. The sphere dug rapidly into the warm ground, biting lower and lower. At ten miles an hour it blasted a path to depths hitherto unattainable to man, sweeping away rock and gravel and sand--everything that stood in its way. The depth gauge rose to two thousand, then steadily to three and four. So it went on for nearly half an hour. At the end of that time, at a depth of nearly four miles, Quade got stiffly to his feet and once more shouted into the professor's ear. "We ought to be close to that radium, now," he said. "I think--" But his words stopped short. The floor of the sphere suddenly fell away from their feet, and they felt themselves tumbled into a wild plunge. The drone of the disintegrators, hitherto muffled by the earth they bit into, rose to a hollow scream. Before the professor quite knew what was happening, there was a stunning crash, a shriek of tortured metal--and the earth-borer rocked and lay still.... * * * * * The whole world seemed to be filled with thunder when David Guinness came back to consciousness. He opened his eyes and stared up into a darkness to which it took him some time to accustom himself. When he did, he made out hazily that he was lying on the floor of a vast dark cavern. He could dimly see its jagged roof, perhaps fifty feet above. There was the strong smell of damp earth in his nostrils; his head was splitting from the steady drone in his ear-drums. Suddenly he remembered what had happened. He groaned slightly and tried to sit up. But he could not. His arms and legs were tied. Someone had removed him from the earth-borer and bound him on the floor of the cavern they had plunged into. David Guinness strained at the rope. It was futile, but in doing so he twisted his head around and saw another form, similarly tied, lying close to him. He gave a little cry of relief. It was Sue. And she was conscious, her eyes on his face. She spoke to him, but he could not understand her for the drone in his ears, and when he spoke to her it was the same. But the professor did not just then continue his effort to converse with her. His attention was drawn to the borer, now dimly illuminated by its portable light, which had been secured to the door. It was right side up, and appeared to be undamaged. The broad ray of the searchlight fell far away on one of the cavern's rough walls. He could just make out James Quade standing there, his back towards them. He was hacking at the wall with a pick. Presently he dropped the tool and wrenched at the rock with bare hands. A large chunk came loose. He hugged it to him and turned and strode back towards the two on the floor, and as he drew near they could plainly see a gleam of triumph in his eyes. "You know what this is?" he shouted. Guinness could only faintly hear him. "Wealth! Millions! Of course we always knew the radium was here, but this is the proof. And now we've a way of getting it out--thanks to your borer! All the credit is yours, Professor Guinness! You shall have the credit, and I'll have the money." Guinness tugged furiously at his bonds again. "You--you--" he gasped. "How dare you tie us this way! Release us at once! What do you mean by it?" * * * * * Quade smiled unpleasantly. "You're very stupid, Guinness. Haven't you guessed by now what I'm going to do?" He paused, as if waiting for an answer, and the smile on his face gave way to a look of savage menace. For the first time his bitter feelings came to the surface. "Have you forgotten how close I came to going to jail over those charges of yours a year ago?" he said. "Have you forgotten the disgrace to me that followed?--the stigma that forced me to disappear for months? You fool, do you think I've forgotten?--or that I'd let you--" "Quade," interrupted the older man, "you know very well you were guilty. I caught you red-handed. You didn't fool anyone--except the jury that let you go. So save your breath, and, if you've the sense you were born with, release my daughter and me. Why, you're crazy!" he cried with mounting anger. "You can't get away with this! I'll have you in jail within forty-eight hours, once I get back to the surface!" With an effort Quade controlled his feelings and assumed his oily, sarcastic manner. "That's just it," he said: "'once you get back!' How stupid you are! You don't seem to realize that you're not going back to the surface. You and your daughter." Sue gasped, and her father's eyes went wide. There was a tense silence. "You wouldn't dare!" the inventor cried finally. "You wouldn't dare!" "It's rather large, this cavern," Quade went on. "You'll have plenty of room. Perhaps I'll untie you before I go back up, so--" "You can't get away with it!" shouted the old man, tremendously excited. "Why, you can't, possibly! Philip Holmes'll track you down--he'll tell the police--he'll rescue us! And then--" Quade smiled suavely. "Oh, no, he won't. Perhaps you remember the shot that sounded from the water-hole? Well, when I and my assistant, Juan, heard Holmes say he was going for water, I told Juan to follow him to the water-hole and bind him, to keep him from interfering till I got back up. But Mr. Holmes is evidently of an impulsive disposition, and must have caused trouble. Juan, too, is impulsive; he is a Mexican. And he had a gun. I'm afraid he was forced to use it.... I am quite sure Philip Holmes will not, as you say, track me down." David Guinness looked at his daughter's white face and horror-filled eyes and suddenly crumpled. Humbly, passionately, he begged Quade to take her back up. "Why, she's never done anything to you, Quade!" he pleaded. "You can't take her life like that! Please! Leave me, if you must, but not her! You can't--" * * * * * But suddenly the old man noticed that Quade was not listening. His head was tilted to one side as if he was straining to hear something else. Guinness was held silent for a moment by the puzzled look on the other's face and the strange way he was acting. "Do you hear it?" Quade asked at last; and without waiting for an answer, he knelt down and put his ear to the ground. When he rose his face was savage, and he cursed under his breath. "Why, it's a humming!" muttered Professor Guinness. "And it's getting louder!" "It sounds like another borer!" ventured Sue. The humming grew in volume. Then, from the ceiling, a rock dropped. They were looking at the cavern roof and saw it start, but they did not hear it strike, for the ever-growing humming echoed loudly through the cavern. They saw another rock fall; and another. "For God's sake, what is it?" cried Guinness. Quade looked at him and slowly drew out his automatic. "Another earth-borer, I think," he answered. "And I rather expect it contains your young friend Mr. Holmes. Yes--coming to rescue you." For a moment Guinness and his daughter were too astounded to do anything but gape. She finally exclaimed: "But--but then Phil's alive?" James Quade smiled. "Probably--for the moment. But don't let your hopes rise too high. The borer he's in isn't strong enough to survive a fifty-foot plunge." He was shouting now, so loud was the thunder from above. "And," he added, "I'm afraid he's not strong enough to survive it, either!" CHAPTER II _The Man-Hunt_ When Phil Holmes started off to the water-hole, his head was full of the earth-borer and the imminent descent. Now that the long-awaited time had come, he was at fever-pitch to be off, and it did not take him long to cover the mile of sandy waste. His thoughts were far inside the earth as he dipped the jug into the clear cool water and sloshed it full. So the rope that snaked softly through the air and dropped in a loop over his shoulders came as a stark surprise. Before he knew what was happening it had slithered down over his arms and drawn taut just above the elbows, and he was yanked powerfully backwards and almost fell. But he managed to keep his feet as he staggered backward, and turning his head he saw the small dark figure of his aggressor some fifteen feet away, keeping tight the slack. Phil's surprise turned to sudden fury and he completely lost his head. What he did was rash; mad; and yet, as it turned out, it was the only thing that could have saved him. Instinctively, without hesitating one second, and absolutely ignoring an excited command to stand still, he squirmed face-on to his aggressor, lowered his head and charged. The distance was short. Halfway across it, a gun barked, and he heard the bullet crack into the water jug, which he was still holding in front of himself. And even before the splintered fragments reached the ground he had crashed into the firer. He hit him with all the force of a tackling lineman, and they both went down. The man grunted as the wind was jarred out of him, but he wriggled like an eel and managed to worm aside and bring up his gun. Then there was a desperate flurry of bodies in the coarse sand. Holmes dived frantically for the gun hand and caught it; but, handicapped as he was by the rope, he could not hold it. Slowly its muzzle bent upward to firing position. Desperately, he wrenched the arm upwards, in the direction it had been straining to go, and the sudden unexpected jerk doubled the man's arm and brought the weapon across his chest. For a moment there was a test of strength as Phil lay chest to chest over his opponent, the gun blocked between. Then the other grunted; squirmed violently--and there was a muffled explosion. A cry of pain cut the midnight air, and with insane strength Holmes' ambusher fought free from his grip, staggered to his feet and went reeling away. Phil tore loose from the rope and bounded after him, never feeling, at the moment, his powder-burned chest. And then he halted in his tracks. A great roar came thundering over the desert! * * * * * At once he knew that it came from the earth-borer's disintegrators. The sphere had started down without him. He stood stock still, petrified with surprise, facing the sound, while his attacker melted farther and farther into the night. And then, suddenly, Phil Holmes was sprinting desperately back towards the Guinness camp. He ran until he was exhausted; walked for a little while his legs gathered more strength, and his laboring lungs more air; and then ran again. As the minutes passed, the thunder lessened rapidly into a muffled drone; and by the time Phil had panted up to the brink of the hole that gaped where but a little time before the sphere was standing, it had become but a distant purr. He leaned far over and peered into the hot blackness below, but could see nothing. Phil knelt there silently for some minutes, shocked by his strange attack, bewildered by the unexpected descent of the borer. For a time his mind would not work; he had no idea what to do. But gradually his thoughts came to order and made certain things clear. He had been deliberately ambushed. Only by luck had he escaped, he told himself. If it hadn't been for the water jug, he'd now be out of the picture. And on the heels of the ambush had came the surprising descent of the earth-borer. The two incidents coincided too well: the same mind had planned them. And two, men, at least, were in on the plot.... It suddenly became very clear to him that the answer to the puzzle lay with the man who had ambushed him. He would have to get that man. Track him down. Phil acted with decision. He got to his feet and strode rapidly to the deserted Guinness shack, horribly quiet and lonely now in the bright moonlight. In a minute he emerged with a flashlight at his belt and a rifle across his arm. Once again he went over to the new black hole in the desert and looked down. From far below still came the purr, now fainter than ever. His friend, the girl he loved, were down there, he reflected bitterly, and he was helpless to reach them. Well, there was one thing he could do--go man-hunting. Turning, he started off at a long lope for the water-hole. * * * * * Ten minutes later he was there, and off to the side he found the marks of their scuffle--and small black blotches that could be nothing but blood. The other was wounded: could probably not get far. But he might still have his gun, so Phil kept his rifle handy, and tempered his impatience with caution as he set out on the trail of the widely spaced footprints. They led off towards the nearby hills, and in the bright moonlight Phil did not use his flashlight at all, except to investigate other round black blotches that made a line parallel to the prints. As he went on he found his quarry's steps coming more closely together: becoming erratic. Soon they showed as painful drags in the sand, a laborious hauling of one foot after the other.... Phil put away his light and advanced very cautiously. He wondered, as he went, who in the devil was behind it all. The radium-finding project had been kept strictly secret. Not another soul was supposed to know of the earth-borer and its daring mission into the heart of the earth. Yet, obviously, someone had found out, and whoever it was had laid at least part of his scheme cunningly. An old man and a girl cannot offer much resistance: he, Phil, would have been well taken care of had it not been for the water jug. So far, there were at least two in the plot: the man who had ambushed him and the unknown who had evidently kidnapped both Professor and Sue Guinness. But there might be still more. There might be friends, nearby, of the man he was tracking. The fellow might have reached them, and warned them that the scheme hadn't gone through, that Phil was loose. They could very easily conceal themselves alongside their partner's tracks and train their rifles on the tracker.... The trail was leading up into one of the cañons in the cluster of hills to the west. For some distance he followed it up through a slash of black below the steep moonlit heights of the hills to each side--and then, suddenly, he vaguely made out the forms of two huts just ahead. Immediately he stooped low, and went skirting widely off up one side. He proceeded slowly, with great caution, his rifle at the ready. At any moment, he knew, the hush might be split by the cracks of waylaying guns. Warily he advanced along the narrow cañon wall above the huts. No lights were lit, and the place seemed unoccupied. He was debating what to do next when his attention was attracted to a large dark object lying in the cañon trail some twenty yards from the nearest hut. Straining his eyes in the inadequate moonlight, he saw that it was the outstretched figure of a man. His quarry--his ambusher! * * * * * Phil dropped flat, fearful of being seen. Keeping as best he could in the shadows, fearing every moment to hear the sharp bark of a gun, he crawled forward. It took him a long time to approach the sprawled figure, but he wasn't taking chances. When within twenty feet, he rose suddenly and darted forward to the man's side. His rapid glance showed him that the fellow was completely out: and another quick look around failed to show that anyone else was watching, so he returned to his examination of the man. It was the ambusher, all right: a Mexican. He was still breathing, though his face was drawn and white from the loss of blood from a wound under the blood-soaked clothing near his upper right arm. A hasty search showed that he no longer had his gun, so Phil, satisfied that he was powerless for some time to come, cautiously wormed his way towards the two shacks. There was something sinister in the strange silence that hung over them. One was of queer construction--a windowless, square, high box of galvanized iron. The other was obviously a dwelling place. Carefully Phil sneaked up to the latter. Then, rifle ready, he pushed its door open and sent a beam of light stabbing through the darkness of the interior. There was no one there. Only two bunks, a table, chair, a pail of water and some cooking utensils met his view. He crept out toward the other building. Come close, Phil found that a dun-colored canvas had been thrown over the top of it, making an adequate camouflage in daytime. The place was about twenty feet high. He prowled around the metal walls and discovered a rickety door. Again, gun ready, he flung it open. The beam from his flash speared a path through the blackness--and he gasped at sight of what stood revealed. There, inside, was a long, bullet-like tube of metal, the pointed end upper-most, and the bottom, which was flat, toward the ground. It was held in a wooden cradle, and was slanted at the floor. In the bottom were holes of two shapes--rocket tubes and disintegrating projectors. It was another earth-borer. * * * * * Phil stood frozen with surprise before this totally unlooked-for machine. He could easily have been overcome, had the owner been in the building, for he had forgotten everything but what his eyes were staring at. He started slowly around the borer, found a long narrow door slightly ajar, and stepped inside. This borer, like Guinness's, had a double shell, and much the same instruments, though the whole job was simpler and cruder. A small instrument board contained inclination, temperature, depth and air-purity indicators, and narrow tubes led to the air rectifiers. But what kept Holmes' attention were the wires running from the magneto to the mixing chambers of the disintegrating tubes. "The fools!" he exclaimed, "--they didn't know how to wire the thing! Or else," he added after a moment, "didn't get around to doing it." He noticed that the projectile's interior contained no gyroscope: though, he thought, none would be needed, for the machine, being long and narrow, could not change keel while in the ground. Here he was reminded of something. Stepping outside, he estimated the angle the borer made with the dirt floor. Twenty degrees. "And pointed southwest!" he exclaimed aloud. "This borer would come close to meeting the professor's, four miles under our camp!" * * * * * At once he knew what he would do. First he went back to the other shack and got the pail of water he had noticed, and took this out where the Mexican lay outstretched. He bathed the man's face and the still slightly bleeding bullet wound in his shoulder. Presently the wounded man came to. His eyes opened, and he stared up into a steel mask of a face, in which two level black eyes bored into his. He remembered that face--remembered it all too well. He trembled, cowered away. "No!" he gasped, as if he had seen a ghost. "No--no!" "Yes, I'm the man," Holmes told him firmly, menacingly. "The same one you tried to ambush." He paused a moment, then said: "Do you want to live?" It was a simple question, frightening in its simplicity. "Because if you don't answer my questions, I'm going to let you lie here," Phil went on coldly. "And that would probably mean your death. If you do answer, I'll fix you up so you can have a chance." The Mexican nodded eagerly. "I talk," he said. "Good," said Phil. "Then tell me who built that machine?" "Señor Quade. Señor James Quade." "Quade!" Phil had heard the name before. "Of course!" he said. "Guinness's old partner!" "I not know," the Mexican answered. "He hire me with much money. He buy thees machine inside, and we put him together. But he could no make him work--it take too long. We watch, hear old man go down to-night, and--" * * * * * The greaser stopped. "And so he sent you to get me, while he kidnapped the old man and his daughter and forced them under the ground in their own borer," Holmes supplied, and the other nodded. "But I only mean to tie you!" he blurted, gesturing weakly. "I no mean shoot! No, no--" "All right--forget it," Phil interrupted. "And now tell me what Quade expects to do down there." "I not know, Señor," came the hesitant reply, "but...." "But what?" the young man jerked. Reluctantly the wounded Mexican continued. "Señor Quade--he--I think he don' like thees old man. I think he leave heem an' the girl down below. Then he come up an' say they keeled going down." Phil nodded grimly. "I see," he said, voicing his thoughts. "Then he would say that he and Professor Guinness are still partners--and the radium ore will belong to him. Very nice. Very nice...." He snapped back to action, and without another word hoisted the Mexican onto his back and carried him into the shack. There he cleansed the wound, rigged up a tight bandage for it, and tied the man to one of the cots. He tied him in such a fashion that he could reach some food and water he put by the cot. "You leave me like thees?" the Mexican asked. "Yes," Phil said, and started for the door. "But what you going to do?" Phil smiled grimly as he flung an answer back over his shoulder. "Me?--I'm going to fix the wiring on those disintegrators in your friend Quade's borer. Then I'm starting down after him." He stopped and turned before he closed the door. "And if I don't get back--well, it's just too bad for you!" * * * * * And so, a little later, once more the hushed desert night was cleft by a furious bellow of sound. It came, this time, from a narrow cañon. The steep sides threw the roar back and back again, and the echoes swelled to an earth-shaking blast of sound. The oblong hut from which it came rocked and almost fell; then, as the noise began to lessen, teetered on its foundations and half-slipped into the ragged hole that had been bored inside. The descent was a nightmare that Holmes would never forget. Quade's machine was much cruder and less efficient than the sphere David Guinness had designed. Its protecting insulation proved quite inadequate, and the heat rapidly grew terrific as the borer dug down. Phil became faint, stifled, and his body oozed streams of sweat. And the descent was also bumpy and uneven; often he was forced to leave the controls and work on the mechanism of the disintegrators when they faltered and threatened to stop. But in spite of everything the needle on the depth gauge gradually swung over to three thousand, and four, and five.... After the first mile Holmes improvised a way to change the air more rapidly, and it grew a little cooler. He watched the story the depth gauge told with narrowed eyes, and, as it reached three miles, inspected his rifle. At three and a half miles he stopped the borer, thinking to try to hear the noise made by the other, but so paralyzed were his ear-drums from the terrific thunder beneath, it seemed hardly any quieter when it ceased. His plans were vague; they would have to be made according to the conditions he found. There was a coil of rope in the tube-like interior of the borer, and he hoped to find a cavern or cleft in the earth for lateral exploring. He would stop at a depth of four miles--where he should be very near the path of the professor's sphere. But Phil never saw the needle on the gauge rise to four miles. At three and three quarters came sudden catastrophe. He knew only that there was an awful moment of utter helplessness, when the borer swooped wildly downwards, and the floor was snatched sickeningly from under him. He was thrown violently against the instrument panel; then up toward the pointed top; and at the same instant came a rending crash that drove his senses from him.... CHAPTER III "_You Haven't the Guts_" "Just as I thought," said James Quade in the silence that fell when the last echoes had died away, and the splinters of steel and rock had settled. "You see, Professor, this earth-borer belongs to me. Yes, I built one too. But I couldn't, unfortunately, get it working properly--that is, in time to get down here first. After all, I'm not a scientist, and remembered little enough of your borer's plans.... It's probably young Holmes who's dropped in on us. Shall we see?" David Guinness and his daughter were speechless with dread. Quade had trained the searchlight on the borer, and by turning their heads they could see it plainly. It was all too clear that the machine was a total wreck. It had pitched over onto one side, its shell cracked and mangled irreparably. Grotesque pieces of crumpled metal lay all around it. Its slanting course had tumbled it within fifteen yards of the sphere. In silence the old man and the girl watched Quade walk deliberately over to it, his automatic steady in his right hand. He wrenched at the long, narrow door, but it was so badly bent that for a while he could not get it open. At last it swung out, however, and Quade peered inside. After a moment he reached in and drew out a rifle. He took it over to a nearby rock, smashed the gun's breech, then flung it, useless, aside. Returning to the borer, he again peered in. Sue was about to scream from the torturous suspense when he at last straightened up and looked around at the white-faced girl and her father. "Mr. Holmes is tougher than I'd thought possible," he said, with a thin smile; "he's still alive." And, as Sue gasped with relief, he added: "Would you like to see him?" * * * * * He dragged the young man's unconscious body roughly out on the floor. There were several bad bruises on his face and head, but otherwise he was apparently uninjured. As Quade stood over him, playing idly with the automatic, he stirred, and blinked, and at last, with an effort, got up on one elbow and looked straight at the thin lips and narrowed eyes of the man standing above. He shook his head, trying to comprehend, then muttered hazily: "You--you're--Quade?" Quade did not have time to answer, for Sue Guinness cried out: "Phil! Are you all right?" Phil stared stupidly around, caught sight of the two who lay bound on the floor, and staggered to his feet. "Sue!" he cried, relief and understanding flooding his voice. He started towards her. "Stand where you are!" Quade snapped harshly, and the automatic in his hand came up. Holmes peered at it and stopped, but his blood-streaked face settled into tight lines, and his body tensed. "You'd better," continued Quade. "Now tell me what happened to Juan." Phil forced himself to be calm. "Your pal, the greaser?" he said cuttingly. "He's lying on a bunk in your shack. He shot himself, playing with a gun." Quade chose not to notice the way Phil said this, but a little of the suave self-confidence was gone from his face as he said: "Well, in that case I'll have to hurry back to the surface to attend to him. But don't be alarmed," he added, more brightly. "I'll be back for you all in an hour or so." At this, David Guinness struggled frantically with his bonds and yelled: "Don't believe him, Phil! He's going to leave us here, to starve and die! He told us so just before you came down!" * * * * * Quade's face twitched perceptibly. His eyes were nervous. "Is that true, Quade?" Holmes asked. There was a steely note in his voice. "Why--no, of course not," the other said hastily, uncertain whether to lie or not. "Of course I didn't!" Phil Holmes looked square into his eyes. He bluffed. "You couldn't desert us, Quade. You haven't the guts. You haven't the guts." His face and eyes burned with the contempt that was in his words. It cut Quade to the raw. But he could not avoid Phil's eyes. He stared at them for a full moment, trembling slightly. Slowly, by inches, he started to back toward the sphere; then suddenly he ran for it with all his might, Holmes after him. Quade got to it first, and inside, as he yanked in the searchlight and slammed and locked the door, he yelled: "You'll see, you damned pup! You'll see!" And there was the smothered sound of half-maniacal laughter.... Phil threw all his weight against the metal door, but it was hopeless and he knew it. He had gathered himself for another rush when he heard Guinness yell: "Back, Phil--back! He'll turn on the side disintegrators!" Mad with rage as the young man was, he at once saw the danger and leaped away--only to almost fall over the professor's prone body. With hurrying, trembling fingers he untied the pair's bonds, and they struggled to their feet, cramped and stiff. Then it was Phil who warned them. "Back as far as you can! Hurry!" He grabbed Sue's hand and plunged toward the uncertain protection of a huge rock far in the rear. At once he made them lie flat on the ground. * * * * * As yet the sphere had not stirred nor emitted a whisper of sound, though they knew the man inside was conning the controls in a fever of haste to leave the cavern. But they hadn't long to wait. There came a sputter, a starting cough from the rocket tubes beneath the sphere. Quickly they warmed into life, and the dully glimmering ball rocked in the hole it lay in. Then a cataract of noise unleashed itself; a devastating thunder roared through the echoing cavern as the rockets burst into full force. A wave of brilliant orange-red splashed out from under the sphere, licked back up its sides, and seemed literally to shove the great ball up towards the hole in the ceiling. Its ascent was very slow. As it gained height it looked--save for its speed--like a fantastic meteor flaming through the night, for the orange plumage that streamed from beneath lit the ball with dazzling color. A glowing sphere, it staggered midway between floor and ceiling, creeping jerkily upwards. "He's not going to hit the hole!" shouted Guinness. The borer had not risen in a perfectly straight line; it jarred against the rim of the hole, and wavered uncertainly. Every second the roar of its rockets, swollen by echoes, rose in a savage crescendo; the faces of the three who watched were painted orange in the glow. The sphere was blind. The man inside could judge his course only by the feel. As the three who were deserted watched, hoping ardently that Quade would not be able to find the opening, the left side-rockets spouted lances of fire, and they knew he had discovered the way to maneuver the borer laterally. The new flames welded with the exhaust of the main tubes into a great fan-shaped tail, so brilliant and shot through with other colors that their eyes could not stand the sight, except in winks. The borer jerked to the right, but still it could not find the hole. Then the flames lessened for a moment, and the borer sank down, to rise again a moment later. Its ascent was so labored that Phil shouted to Professor Guinness: "Why so slow?" And the inventor told him that which he had not seen for the intolerable light. "Only half his rockets are on!" * * * * * This time the sphere was correctly aimed, however, and it roared straight into the hole. Immediately the fierce sound of the exhaust was muffled, and in a few seconds only the fiery plumage, shooting down from the ceiling, showed where the machine was. Then this disappeared, and the noise alone was left. Phil leaped forward, intending to stare up, but Guinness's yell halted him. "Not yet! He might still use the disintegrators!" For many minutes they waited, till the muffled exhaust had died to a drone. There was a puzzled expression on the professor's face as the three at last walked over and dared peer up into the hole. Far above, the splash of orange lit the walls of the tunnel. "That's funny!" the old man muttered. "He's only using half the rockets--about ten. I thought he'd turn them all on when he got into the hole, but he didn't. Either they were damaged in the fall, or Quade doesn't see fit to use them." "Half of them are enough," said Phil bitterly, and put his arm around the quiet girl standing next to him. Together, a silent little group, they watched the spot of orange die to a pin-point; watched it waver, twinkle, ever growing smaller.... And then it was gone. Gone! Back to the surface of the earth, to the normal world of reality. Only four miles above them--a small enough distance on the surface itself--and yet it might have been a million miles, so utterly were they barred from it.... * * * * * The same thought was in their minds, though none of them dared express it. They were thinking of the serene desert, and the cool wind, and the buttes and the high hills, placid in the moonlight. Of the hushed rise of the dawn, the first flush of the sun that was so achingly lovely on the desert. The sun they would never see again, buried in a lifeless world of gloom four miles within.... And buried alive--and not alive for long.... But that way lay madness. Phil Holmes drove the horrible thoughts from his brain and forced a smile to his face. "Well, that's that!" he said in a voice meant to be cheerful. The dim cavern echoed his words mockingly. With the earth-borer gone--the man-made machine that had dared break a solitude undisturbed since the earth first cooled--the great cavern seemed to return to its awful original mood. The three dwarfed humans became wholly conscious of it. They felt it almost a living thing, stretching vastly around them, tightening its unheard spell on them. Its smell, of mouldy earth and rocks down which water slowly dripped, filled their nostrils and somehow added to their fear. As they looked about, their eyes became accustomed to the dim, eery, phosphorescent illumination. They saw little worm-like creatures now and again appear from tiny holes between stalagmites in the jagged floor; and, as Phil wondered in his mind how long it would be before they would be reduced to using them for food, a strange mole-sized animal scraped from the darkness and pecked at one of them. As it slithered away, a writhing shape in its mouth, Holmes muttered bitterly: "A competitor!" Vague, flitting forms haunted the gloom among the stalactites of the distorted ceiling--hints of the things that lived in the terrible silence of this nether world. Here Time had paused, and life had halted in primate form. A little moan came from Sue Guinness's pale lips. She plucked at her arm; a sickly white worm, only an inch long, had fallen on it from the ceiling. "Oh!" she gasped. "Oh!" Phil drew her closer to him, and walked with her over to Quade's wrecked borer. "Let's see what we've got here," he suggested cheerfully. The machine was over on its side, the metal mangled and crushed beyond repair. Nevertheless, he squeezed into it. "Stand back!" he warned. "I'm going to try its rockets!" There was a click of broken machinery, and that was all. "Rockets gone," Phil muttered. He pulled another lever over. There was a sputter from within the borer, then a furious roar that sent great echoes beating through the cavern. A cloud of dust reared up before the bottom of the machine, whipped madly for a moment, and sank as the bellow of sound died down. Sue saw that a rocky rise in the floor directly in front of the disintegrators had been planed off levelly. Phil scrambled out. "The disintegrators work," he said, "but a lot of good they do us. The borer's hopelessly cracked." He shrugged his shoulders, and with a discouraged gesture cast to the ground a coil of rope he had found inside. Then suddenly he swung around. "Professor!" he called to the old figure standing bowed beneath the hole in the ceiling. "There's a draft blowing from somewhere! Do you feel it?" Guinness felt with his hands a moment and nodded slowly. "Yes," he said. "It's coming from this way!" Sue said excitedly, pointing into the darkness on one side of the cavern. "And it goes up the hole we made in the ceiling!" Phil turned eagerly to the old inventor. "It must come from somewhere," he said, "and that somewhere may take us toward the surface. Let's follow it!" "We might as well," the other agreed wearily. His was the tone of a man who has only a certain time to live. But Phil was more eager. "While there's life, there's hope," he said cheerfully. "Come on, Sue, Professor!" And he led the way forward toward the dim, distorted rock shapes in the distance. * * * * * The roof and sides of the cavern angled down into a rough, tunnel-like opening, from which the draft swept. It was a heavy air, weighted with the smell of moist earth and lifeless water and a nameless, flat, stale gas. They slowly made their way through the impeding stalagmites, surrounded by a dark blur of shadows, the ghostly phosphorescent light illuminating well only the few rods around them. Utter silence brooded over the tunnel. Phil paused when they had gone about seventy-five feet. "I left that rope behind," he said, "and we may need it. I'll return and get it, and you both wait right here." With the words he turned and went back into the shadows. He went as fast as he could, not liking to leave the other two alone. But when he had retrieved the rope and tied it to his waist, he permitted himself a last look up as he passed under the hole in the ceiling--and what he saw there tensed every muscle in his body, and made his heart beat like mad. Again there was a tiny spot of orange in the blackness above! "Professor!" he yelled excitedly. "Sue! Come here! The sphere's coming back!" There was no doubt about it. The pin-point of light was growing each second, with the flame of the descending exhausts. Guinness and his daughter ran from the tunnel, and, guided by Phil's excited ejaculations, hurried to his side. Their eyes confirmed what his had seen. The earth-borer was coming down! "But," Guinness said bewilderedly, "those rockets were enough to lift him!" This was a mystery. Even though ten rockets were on--ten tiny spots of orange flame--the sphere came down swiftly. The same force which some time before had lifted it slowly up was now insufficient. The roar of the tubes rose rapidly. "Get back!" Phil ordered, remembering the danger, and they all retreated to the mouth of the tunnel, ready to peep cautiously around the edge. Holmes' jaws were locked tight with grim resolution. Quade was coming back! he told himself exultantly. This time he must not go up alone! This time--! But his half-formed resolutions were idle. He could not know what frightful thing was bringing Quade down--what frightful experience was in store for them all.... CHAPTER IV _Spawn of the Cavern_ In a crescendo of noise that stunned their ears, the earth-borer came down. Tongues of fire flared from the hole, speared to the ground and were deflected upward, cradling the metal ball in a wave of flame. Through this fiery curtain the machine slowly lowered to the floor, where a shower of sparks spattered out, blinding the eyes of the watchers with their brilliance. For a full minute the orange-glowing sphere lay there, quivering from the vibration; then the exhausts died and the wave of flame wavered and sank into nothingness. While their ear-drums continued the thunder, the three stared at the borer, not daring to approach, yet striving to solve the mystery of why it had sunk despite the up-thrust of ten rocket tubes. As their eyes again became accustomed to the familiar phosphorescent illumination, pallid and cold after the fierce orange flame, they saw why--and their eyes went wide with surprise and horror. A strange mass was covering the top of the earth-borer--something that looked like a heap of viscid, whitish jelly. It was sprawled shapelessly over the round upper part of the metal sphere, a half-transparent, loathsome stuff, several feet thick in places. And Phil Holmes, striving to understand what it could be, saw an awful thing. "It's moving!" he whispered, unconsciously drawing Sue closer. "There's--there's life in it!" Lazy quiverings were running through the mound of jelly, pulsings that gave evidence of its low organism. They saw little ripples of even beat run over it, and under them steady, sluggish convulsions that told of life; that showed, perhaps, that the thing was hungry and preparing to move its body in quest of food. It was alive, unquestionably. The borer lay still, but this thing moved internally, of itself. It was life in its lowest, most primate form. The mass was mind, stomach, muscle and body all in one, stark and raw before their startled eyes. "Oh, God!" Phil whispered through the long pause. "It can't be real!..." "Protoplasm--a monster amoeba," David Guinness's curiously cracked voice said. "Just as it exists on the surface, only microscopically. Primate life...." * * * * * The lock of the earth-borer clicked. Phil gasped. "Quade is coming out!" he said. A little cry of horror came from Sue. And the metal door opened. James Quade stepped through, automatic in hand. He was fresh from the light inside, and he could not see well. He was quite unconscious of what was oozing down on him from above, of the flabby heap that was carefully stretching down for him. He peered into the gloom, looking for the three he had deserted, and all the time an arm from the mass above crept nearer. Sue Guinness's nerves suddenly gave, and she shrieked; but Quade's ears were deaf from the borer's thunder, and he did not hear her. It was when he lifted one foot back into the sphere--probably to get out the searchlight--that he felt the thing's presence. He looked up--and a strange sound came from him. For seconds he apparently could not move, stark fear rooting him to the ground, the gun limp in his hand. Then a surge ran through the mound of flesh, and the arm, a pseudopod, reached more rapidly for him. It stung Quade into action. He leaped back, brought up his automatic, and fired at the thing once; then three times more. He, and each one of the others, saw four bullets thud into the heap of pallid matter and heard them clang on the metal of the sphere beneath. They had gone right through its flesh--but they showed no slightest effect! Quade was evidently unwilling to leave the sphere. Jerking his arm up he brought his trigger finger back again. A burst of three more shots barked through the cavern, echoing and re-echoing. The man screamed an inarticulate oath as he saw how useless his bullets were, and hurled the empty gun at the monster--which was down on the floor now, and bunching its sluggish body together. The automatic went right into it. They could all see it there, in the middle of the amorphous body, while the creature stopped, as if determining whether or not it was food. Quade screwed his courage together in the pause, and tried to dodge past to the door of the sphere; but the monster was alert: another pseudopod sprang out from its shapeless flesh, sending him back on his heels. The feeler had all but touched Quade, and with the closeness of his escape, the remnants of his courage gave. He yelled, and turned and ran. * * * * * He ran straight for the three who watched from the tunnel mouth, and the mound of shapeless jelly came fast on his trail. It came in surging rolls, like thick fluid oozing forward; it would have been hard to measure its size, for each moment it changed. The only impression the four humans had was that of a wave of half-transparent matter that one instant was a sticky ball of viscid flesh and the next a rapidly advancing crescent whose horns reached far out on each flank to cut off retreat. By instinct Phil jerked Sue around and yelled at the professor to run, for the old man seemed to be frozen into an attitude of fearful interest. Bullets would not stop the thing--could anything? Holmes wondered. He could visualize all too easily the death they would meet if that shapeless, naked protoplasmic mass overtook and flowed over them.... But he wasted no time with such thoughts. They ran, all three, into the dark tunnel. Quade caught up with them quickly. Personal enmity was suspended before this common peril. They could not run at full speed, for a multitude of obstacles hindered them. Tortuous ridges of rock lay directly across their path, formations that had been whipped in some mad, eon-old convulsion and then, through the ages, remained frozen into their present distortion; black pits gaped suddenly before them; half-seen stalagmites, whose crystalline edges were razor-sharp, tore through to their flesh. Haste was perilous where every moment they might stumble into an unseen cleft and go pitching into awful depths below. They were staking everything on the draft that blew steadily in their faces; Phil told himself desperately that it must lead to some opening--it must! But what if the opening were a vertical, impassable tunnel? He would not think of that.... Old David Guinness tired fast, and was already lagging in the rear when Quade gasped hoarsely: "Hurry! It's close behind!" * * * * * Surging rapidly at a constant distance behind them, it came on. It was as fast as they were, and evidently untiring. It was in its own element; obstacles meant nothing to it. It oozed over the jagged ridges that took the humans precious moments to scramble past, and the speed of its weird progress seemed to increase as theirs faltered. It was a heartless mass driven inexorably by primal instinct towards the food that lay ahead. The dim phosphorescent illumination tinged its flabby tissues a weird white. The passage they stumbled through narrowed. Long irregular spears of stalactites hung from the unseen ceiling; others, the drippings of ages, pronged up from the floor, shredding their clothes as they jarred into them. One moment they were clambering up-hill, slipping on the damp rock; the next they were sliding down into unprobed darkness, reckless of where they would land. They were aware only that the water-odorous draft was still in their faces, and the hungry mound of flesh behind.... "I can't last much longer!" old Guinness's winded voice gasped. "Best leave me behind. I--I might delay it!" For answer, Phil went back, grabbed him by the arm and dragged his tired body forward. He was snatching a glance behind to see how close the monster was, when Sue's frightened voice reached him from ahead. "There's a wall here, Phil--and no way through!" And then Holmes came to it. It barred the passage, and was apparently unbroken. Yet the draft still came! "Search for where the draft enters!" he yelled. "You take that side!" And he started feeling over the clammy, uneven surface, searching frantically for a cleft. It seemed to be hopeless. Quade stood staring back into the gloom, his eyes looking for what he knew was surging towards them. His face had gone sickly white, he was trembling as if with fever, and he sucked in air with long, racking gasps. "Here! I have it!" cried the girl suddenly at her end of the wall. The other three ran over, and saw, just above her head, a narrow rift in the rock, barely wide enough to squirm through. "Into it!" Phil ordered tersely. He grasped her, raised her high, and she wormed through. Quade scrambled to get in next, but Holmes shoved him aside and boosted the old man through. Then he helped the other. A second after he had swung himself up, a wave of whitish matter rolled up below, hungry pseudopods reaching for the food it knew was near. It began to trickle up the wall.... * * * * * The crack was narrow and jagged; utterly black. Phil could hear Quade frantically worming himself ahead, and he wondered achingly if it would lead anywhere. Then a faint, clear voice from ahead rang out: "It's opening up!" Sue's voice! Phil breathed more easily. The next moment Quade scrambled through; dim light came; and they were in another vast, ghostly-lit cavern. The crack came out on its floor-level; Guinness was resting near, and his daughter had her hands on a large boulder of rock. "Let's shove it against the hole!" she suggested to Phil. "It might stop it!" "Good, Sue, good!" he exclaimed, and at once all four of them strained at the chunk, putting forth every bit of strength they had. The boulder stirred, rolled over, and thudded neatly in front of the crack, almost completely sealing it. There was only a cleft of five inches on one side. But their expression of relief died in their throats. A tiny trickle of white appeared through the niche. The amorphous monster was compressing itself to a single stream, thin enough to squeeze through even that narrow space. They could not block it. They had nothing to attack it with. There was nothing to do but run.... And hope for a chance to double back.... As nearly as they could make out, this second cavern was as large as the first. They could dimly see the fantastic shapes of hundreds of stalactites hanging from the ceiling. Clumps of stalagmites made the floor a maze which they threaded painfully. The strong steady draft guided them like a radio beacon, leading them to their only faint hope of escape and life. Guinness, very tired, staggered along mechanically, a heavy weight on Phil's supporting arm; James Quade ran here and there in frantic spurts of speed. Sue was silent, but the hopelessness in her eyes tortured Phil like a wound. His shirt had long since been ripped to shreds; his face, bruised in the first place by the borer he had crashed in, now was scratched and bloody from contact with rough stalagmites. * * * * * Then, without warning, they suddenly found among the rough walls on the far side of the cavern, the birthplace of the draft. It lay at the edge of the floor--a dark hole, very wide. Black, sinister and clammy from the draft that poured from it, it pierced vertically down into the very bowels of the earth. It was impassable. James Quade crumpled at the brink; "It's the end!" he moaned. "We can't go farther! It's the end of the draft!" The hole blocked their forward path completely. They could not go ahead.... In seconds, it seemed, the slithering that told of the monster's approach sounded from behind. Sue's eyes were already fixed on the awful, surging mass when a voice off to one side yelled: "Here! Quick!" It was Phil Holmes. He had been scouting through the gloom, and had found something. The other three ran to him. "There's another draft going through here," he explained rapidly, pointing to an angled crevice in the rocky wall. "There's a good chance it goes to the cavern where the sphere and the hole to the surface are. Anyway, we've got to take it. I'd better go first, after this--and you, Quade, last. I trust you less than the monster behind." He turned and edged into the crack, and the others followed as he had ordered. Quickly the passageway broadened, and they found the going much easier than it had been before. For perhaps ten minutes they scrambled along, with the draft always on their backs and the blessed, though faint, fire of hope kindling again. In all that time they did not see their pursuer once, and the hope that they had lost it brought a measure of much needed optimism to drive their tired bodies onward. They found but few time-wasting obstacles. If only the tunnel would continue right into the original cavern! If only their path would stay clear and unhindered! But it did not. The sound of Phil's footsteps ahead stopped, and when Sue and her father came up they saw why. "A river!" Phil said. * * * * * They were standing on a narrow ledge that overhung an underground river. A fetid smell of age-old, lifeless water rose from it. Dimly, at least fifty feet across, they could see the other side, shrouded in vague shadows. The inky stream beneath did not seem to move at all, but remained smooth and hard and thick-looking. They could not go around it. The ledge was only a few feet wide, and blocked at each side. "Got to cross!" Phil said tersely. Quade, sickly-faced, stared down. "There--there might be other things in that water!" he gasped. "Monsters!" "Sure," agreed Phil contemptuously. "You'd better stay here." He turned to the others. "I'll see how deep it is," he said, and without the faintest hesitation dove flatly in. Oily ripples washed back, and they saw his head poke through, sputtering. "Not deep," he said. "Chest-high. Come on." He reached for Sue, helped her down, and did the same for her father. Holding each by the hand, Sue's head barely above the water, he started across. They had not gone more than twenty feet when they heard Quade, left on the bank, give a hoarse yell of fear and dive into the water. Their dread pursuer had caught up with them. And it followed--on the water! Phil had hoped it would not be able to cross, but once more the thing's astounding adaptability dashed his hopes. Without hesitation, the whitish jelly sprawled out over the water, rolling after them with ghastly, snake-like ripples, its pallid body standing out gruesomely against the black, odorous tide. Quade came up thrashing madly, some feet to the side of the other three. He was swimming--and swimming with such strength that he quickly left them behind. He would be across before they; and that meant there was a good chance that the earth-borer would go up again with only one passenger.... Phil fought against the water, pulling Sue and her father forward as best he could. From behind came the rippling sound of their shapeless pursuer. "Ten feet more--" Holmes began--then abruptly stopped. There had been a swish, a ripple upstream. And as their heads turned they saw the water part and a black head, long, evil, glistening, pointing coldly down to where they were struggling towards the shore. Phil Holmes felt his strength ooze out. He heard Professor Guinness gasp: "A water-snake!" * * * * * Its head was reared above the surface, gliding down on them silently, leaving a wedge of long, sluggish ripples behind. When thirty feet away the glistening head dipped under, and a great half-circle of leg-thick body arched out. It was like an oily stream of curved cable; then it ended in a pointed tail--and the creature was entirely under water.... With desperate strength Phil hauled the girl to the bank and, standing in several feet of water, pushed her up. Then he whirled and yanked old Guinness past him up into the hands of his daughter. With them safe, and Sue reaching out her hand for him, he began to scramble up himself. But he was too late. There was a swish in the water behind him, and toothless, hard-gummed jaws clamped tight over one leg and drew him back and under. And with the touch of the creature's mouth a stiff shock jolted him; his body went numb; his arms flopped limply down. He was paralyzed. Sue Guinness cried out. Her father stared helplessly at the spot where his young partner had disappeared with so little commotion. "It was an eel," he muttered dully. "Some kind of electric eel...." Phil dimly realized the same thing. A moment later his face broke the surface, but he could not cry out; he could not move his little finger. Only his involuntary muscles kept working--his heart and his lungs. He found he could control his breathing a little.... And then he was wondering why he was remaining motionless on the surface. Gradually he came to understand. He had not felt it, but the eel had let go its hold on his leg, and had disappeared. But only for a moment. Suddenly, from somewhere near, its gleaming body writhed crazily, and a terrific twist of its tail hit Phil a glancing blow on the chest. He was swept under, and the water around him became a maelstrom. When next he bobbed to the tumultuous surface, he managed to get a much-needed breath of air--and in the swirling currents glimpsed the long, snake-like head of the eel go shooting by, with thin trickles of stuff that looked like white jelly clinging to it. That explained what was happening. The eel had been challenged by the ameboid monster, and they were fighting for possession of him--the common prey. * * * * * The water became an inferno of whipping and lashing movements, of whitish fibers and spearing thrusts of a glistening black electric body. Unquestionably the eel was using its numbing electric shock on its foe. Time and time again Phil felt the amoeba grasp him, searingly, only to be wrenched free by the force of the currents the combat stirred up. Once he thudded into the bottom of the river, and his lungs seemed about to burst before he was again shot to the top and managed to get a breath. At last the water quieted somewhat, and Phil, at the surface, saw the eel bury its head in a now apathetic mound of flesh. It tore a portion loose with savage jaws, a portion that still writhed after it was separated from the parent mass; and then the victor glided swiftly downstream, and disappeared under the surface.... Holmes floated helplessly on the inky water. He could see the amoeba plainly; it was still partly paralyzed, for it was very still. But then a faint tremor ran through it; a wave ran over its surface--and it moved slowly towards him once again. Desperately Phil tried to retreat. The will was there, but the body would not work. Save for a feeble flutter of his hands and feet, he could not move. He could not even turn around to bid Sue and David Guinness good-by--with his eyes.... Then a fresh, loved voice sounded just behind him, and he felt something tighten around his waist. "It's all right, dear!" the voice called. "Hang on; we'll get you out!" Sue had come in after him! She had grasped the rope tied to his belt, and she and her father were pulling him back to the bank! He wanted to tell her to go back--the amoeba was only feet away--but he could only manage a little croak. And then he was safe up on the ledge at the other side of the river. * * * * * A surge of strength filled his limbs, and he knew the shock was rapidly wearing off. But it was also wearing off of the monster in the water. Its speed increased; the ripplings of its amorphous body-substance became quicker, more excited. It came on steadily. While it came, the girl and her father worked desperately over Phil, massaging his body and pulling him further up the bank. It had all but reached the bank when Holmes gasped: "I think I can walk now. Where--where did Quade go to?" Guinness gestured over to the right, up a dim winding passage through the rocks. "Then we must follow--fast!" Phil said, staggering to his feet. "He may get to the sphere first; he'll go up by himself even yet! I'm all right!" Despite his words, he could not run, and could only command an awkward walk. Sue lifted one of his arms around her shoulder, and her father took the other, and without a backward glance they labored ahead. But Phil's strength quickly returned, and they raised the pace until they had broken once more into a stumbling run. How far ahead James Quade was, they did not know, but obviously they could follow where he had gone. Once again the draft was strong on their backs. They felt sure they were on the last stretch, headed for the earth-borer. But, unless they could overtake Quade, he would be there first. They had no illusions about what that would mean.... CHAPTER V _A Death More Hideous_ Quade was there first. When they burst out of a narrow crevice, not far from the funnel-shaped opening they had originally entered, they saw him standing beside the open door of the sphere as if waiting. The searchlight inside was still on, and in its shaft of light they could see that he was smiling thinly, once more his old, confident self. It would only take him a second to jump in, slam the door and lock it. He could afford a last gesture.... The three stopped short. They saw something he did not. "So!" he observed in his familiar, mocking voice. He paused, seeing that they did not come on. He had plenty of time. He said something else, but the two men and the girl did not hear what it was. As if by a magnet their eyes were held by what was hanging above him, clinging to the lip of the hole the sphere had made in the ceiling. It was an amoeba, another of those single-celled, protoplasmic mounds of flesh. It had evidently come down through the hole; and now it was stretching, rubber-like, lower and lower, a living, reaching stalactite of whitish hunger. Quade was all unconscious of it. His final words reached Phil's consciousness. "... And this time, of course, I will keep the top disintegrators on. No other monster will then be able to weigh me down!" He shrugged his shoulders and turned to the door. And that movement was the signal that brought his doom. Without a sound, the poised mass above dropped. James Quade never knew what hit him. The heap of whitish jelly fell squarely. There was a brief moment of frantic lashing, of tortured struggles--then only tiny ripples running through the monster as it fed. Sue Guinness turned her head. But the two men for some reason could not take their eyes away.... * * * * * It was the girl's voice that jerked them back to reality. "The other!" she gasped. "It's coming, behind!" They had completely forgotten the mass in the tunnel. Turning, they saw that it was only fifteen feet away and approaching fast, and instinctively they ran out into the cavern, skirting the sphere widely. When they came to Quade's wrecked borer Phil, who had snatched a glance behind, dragged them down behind it. For he had seen their pursuer abandon the chase and go to share in the meal of its fellow. "We'd best not get too far away," he whispered. "When they leave the front of the borer, maybe we can make a dash for it." For minutes that went like hours the young man watched, waiting for the creatures to be done, hoping that they would go away. Fortunately the sphere lay between, and he was not forced to see too much. Only one portion of one of the monsters was visible, lapping out from behind the machine.... At last his body tensed, and he gripped Sue and her father's arm in quick warning. The things were leaving the sphere. Or, rather, only one was. For Phil saw that they had agglutenated--merged into oneness--and now the monster that remained was the sum of the sizes of the original two. And more.... They all watched. And they all saw the amoeba stop, hesitate for a moment--and come straight for the wrecked borer behind which they were hidden. "Damn!" Phil whispered hoarsely. "It's still hungry--and it's after us!" David Guinness sighed wearily. "It's heavy and sluggish, now," he said, "so maybe if we run again.... Though I don't know how I can last any longer...." Holmes did not answer. His eyes were narrowed; he was casting about desperately for a plan. He hardly felt Sue's light touch on his arm as she whispered: "In case, Phil--in case.... This must be good-by...." But the young man turned to her with gleaming eyes. "Good-by, nothing!" he cried. "We've still got a card to play!" * * * * * She stared at him, wondering if he had cracked from the strain of what he had passed through. But his next words assured her he had not. "Go back, Sue," he said levelly. "Go far back. We'll win through this yet." She hesitated, then obeyed. She crept back from the wrecked borer, back into the dim rear, eyes on Phil and the sluggish mass that moved inexorably towards him. When she had gone fifteen or twenty yards she paused, and watched the two men anxiously. Phil was talking swiftly to Professor Guinness. His voice was low and level, and though she could not hear the words she could catch the tone of assurance that ran through them. She saw her father nod his head, and he seemed to make the gesture with vigor. "I will," she heard him say; and he slapped Phil on the back, adding: "But for God's sake, be careful!" And with these words the old man wormed inside Quade's wrecked borer and was gone from the girl's sight. She wanted desperately to run forward and learn what Phil intended to do, but she restrained herself and obeyed his order. She waited, and watched; and saw the young man stand up, look at the slowly advancing monster--and deliberately walk right into its path! Sue could not move from her fright. In a daze she saw Phil advance cautiously towards the amoeba and pause when within five feet of it. The thing stopped; remained absolutely motionless. She saw him take another short step forward. This time a pseudopod emerged, and reached slowly out for him. Phil avoided it easily, but by so narrow a margin that the girl's heart stopped beating. Then she saw him step back; and, snail-like, the creature followed, pausing twice, as if wary and suspicious. Slowly Phil Holmes drew it after him. To Sue, who did not know what was his plan, it seemed a deliberate invitation to death. She forgot about her father, lying inside the mangled borer, waiting. She did not see that Phil was leading the monster directly in front of it.... * * * * * It was a grotesque, silent pursuit. The creature appeared to be unalert; its movements were sloth-like; yet the girl knew that if Phil once ventured an inch too close, or slipped, or tried to dodge past it to the sphere, its torpidness would vanish and it would have him. His maneuvering had to be delicate, judged to a matter of inches. Tense with the suspense, the strain of the slow-paced seconds, she watched--and yet hardly dared to watch, fearful of the awful thing she might see. It was a fantastic game of tag her lover was playing, with death the penalty for tardiness. The slow, enticing movements were repeated again and again, Phil advancing very close, and stepping back in the nick of time. Always he barely avoided the clutching white arms that were extended, and little by little he decoyed the thing onward.... Then came the end. As Holmes was almost in front of the wrecked machine, Sue saw him glance quickly aside--and, as if waiting for that moment when he would be off guard, the monster whipped forward in a great, reaching surge. Sue's ragged nerves cracked: she shrieked. They had him! She started forward, then halted abruptly. With a tremendous leap, Phil Holmes had wrenched free and flung himself backwards. She heard his yell: "Now!" * * * * * There was a sputter from the bottom of the outstretched borer; then, like the crack of a whip, came a bellow of awful sound. A thick cloud of dust reared up, and the ear-numbing thunder rolled through the cavern in great pulsing echoes. And then Sue Guinness understood what the young man had been about. The disintegrators of James Quade's borer had sent a broad beam of annihilation into the monster. His own machine had destroyed his destroyer--and given his intended victims their only chance to escape from the dread fate he had schemed for them. Sue could see no trace of the creature in its pyre of slow-swirling dust. Caught squarely, its annihilation had been utter. And then, through the thunder that still echoed in her ear-drums, she heard a joyful voice. "We got 'em!" Through the dusty haze Phil appeared at her side. He flung his arms up exultantly, swept her off the ground, hugged her close. "We got 'em!" he cried again. "We're free--free to go up!" Professor David Guinness crawled from the borer. His face, for the first time since the descent, wore a broad smile. Phil ran over to him, slapped him on the back; and the older man said: "You did it beautifully, Phil." He turned to Sue. "He had to decoy them right in front of the disintegrators. It was--well, it was magnificent!" "All credit to Sue: she was my inspiration!" Phil said, laughing. "But now," he added, "let's see if we can fix those dead rocket-tubes. I have a patient up above--and, anyway, I'm not over-fond of this place!" * * * * * The three had won through. They had blasted four miles down from the surface of the earth. The brain of an elderly scientist, the quick-witted courage of a young engineer, had achieved the seemingly impossible--and against obstacles that could not have been predicted. Death had attended that achievement, as death often does accompany great forward steps; James Quade had gone to a death more hideous than that he devised for the others. But, in spite of the justice of it, a moment of silence fell on the three survivors as they came to the spot where his fate at last had caught up to him. But it was only a moment. It was relieved by Professor Guinness's picking up the chunk of radium ore his former partner had hewn from the cavern's wall. He held it up for all to see, and smiled. "Here it is," he said simply. Then he led the way into his earth-borer, and the little door closed quietly and firmly into place. For a few minutes slight tappings came from within, as if a wrench or a screwdriver were being used. Then the tappings stopped, and all was silence. A choke, a starting cough, came from beneath the sphere. A torrent of rushing sound burst out, and spears of orange flame spurted from the bottom and splashed up its sides, bathing it in fierce, brilliant light. It stirred. Then, slowly and smoothly, the great ball of metal raised up. It hit the edge of the hole in the ceiling, and hung there, hesitating. Side-rockets flared, and the sphere angled over. Then it slid, roaring, through the hole. Swiftly the spots of orange from its rocket-tube exhausts died to pin-points. There were now almost twenty of them. And soon these pin-points wavered, and vanished utterly. Then there was only blackness in the hole that went up to the surface. Blackness in the hole, calm night on the desert above--and silence, as if the cavern were brooding on the puny figures and strange machines that had for the first time dared invade its solitude, in the realms four miles within the earth.... The Lake of Light _By Jack Williamson_ [Illustration: _The monster emanated power, sinister, malevolent power._] [Sidenote: In the frozen wastes at the bottom of the world two explorers find a strange pool of white fire--and have a strange adventure.] The roar of the motor rang loud in the frosty air above a desert of ice. The sky above us was a deep purple-blue; the red sun hung like a crimson eye low in the north. Three thousand feet below, through a hazy blue mist of wind-whipped, frozen vapor, was the rugged wilderness of black ice-peaks and blizzard-carved hummocks of snow--a grim, undulating waste, black and yellow, splotched with crystal white. The icy wind howled dismally through the struts. We were flying above the weird ice-mountains of the Enderby quadrant of Antarctica. That was a perilous flight, across the blizzard-whipped bottom of the world. In all the years of polar exploration by air, since Byrd's memorable flights, this area had never been crossed. The intrepid Britisher, Major Meriden, with the daring American aviatrix whom the world had known as Mildred Cross before she married him, had flown into it nineteen years before--and like many others they had never returned. Faintly, above the purring drone of the motor, I heard Ray Summers' shout. I drew my gaze from the desolate plateau of ice below and leaned forward. His lean, fur-hooded face was turned back toward me. A mittened hand was pointing, and thin lips moved in words that I did not hear above the roar of the engine and the scream of the wind. I turned and looked out to the right, past the shimmering silver disk of the propeller. Under the blue haze of ice-crystals in the air, the ice lay away in a vast undulating plain of black and yellow, broken with splotches of prismatic whiteness, lying away in frozen desolation to the rim of the cold violet sky. Rising against that sky I saw a curious thing. It was a mountain of fire! Beyond the desert of ice, a great conical peak pointed straight into the amethystine gloom of the polar heavens. It was brilliantly white, a finger of milky fire, a sharp cone of pure light. It shone with white radiance. It was brighter, far brighter, than is the sacred cone of Fujiyama in the vivid day of Japan. * * * * * For many minutes I stared in wonder at it. Far away it was; it looked very small. It was like a little heap of light poured from the hand of a fire-god. What it might be, I could not imagine. At first sight, I imagined it might be a volcano with streams of incandescent lava flowing down the side. I knew that this continent of mystery boasted Mt. Erebus and other active craters. But there was none of the smoke or lurid yellow flame which accompanies volcanic eruptions. I was still watching it, and wondering, when the catastrophe took place--the catastrophe which hurled us into a mad extravaganza of amazing adventure. Our little two-place amphibian was flying smoothly, through air unusually good for this continent of storms. The twelve cylinders of the motor had been firing regularly since we took off from Byrd's old station at Little America fifteen hours before. We had crossed the pole in safety. It looked as if we might succeed in this attempt to penetrate the last white spot on the map. Then it Happened. A sudden crack of snapping metal rang out sharp as a pistol report. A bright blade of metal flashed past the wing-struts, to fall in a flashing arc. The motor broke abruptly into a mad, deep-voiced roar. Terrific vibration shook the ship, until I feared that it would go to pieces. Ray Summers, with his usual quick efficiency, cut the throttle. Quickly the motor slowed to idling speed; the vibration stopped. A last cough of the engine, and there was no sound save the shrill screaming of the wind in the gloomy twilight of this unknown land beyond the pole. "What in the devil!" I exclaimed. "The prop! See!" Ray pointed ahead. I looked, and the dreadful truth flashed upon me. The steel propeller was gone, or half of it at least. One blade was broken off at a jagged line just above the hub. * * * * * "The propeller! What made it break? I've never heard--" "Search me!" Ray grinned. "The important thing is that it did. It was all-metal, of course, tested and guaranteed. The guarantee isn't worth much here. A flaw in the forging, perhaps, that escaped detection. And this low temperature. Makes metal as brittle as glass. And the thing may have been crystallized by the vibration." The plane was coming down in a shallow glide. I looked out at the grim expanse of black ice-crags and glistening snow below us, and it was far from a comforting prospect. But I had a huge amount of confidence in Ray Summers. I have known him since the day he appeared, from his father's great Arizona ranch, to be a freshman in the School of Mines at El Paso, where I was then an instructor in geology. We have knocked about queer corners of the world together for a good many years. But he is still but a great boy, with the bluff, simple manners of the West. "Do you think we can land?" I asked. "Looks like we've got to," he said, grimly. "And what after that?" "How should I know? We have the sledge, tent, furs. Food, and fuel for the primus to last a week. There's the rifle, but it must be a thousand miles to anything to shoot. We can do our best." "We should have had an extra prop." "Of course. But it was so many pounds, when every pound counted. And who knew the thing would break?" "We'll never get out on a week's provisions." "Not a shot! Too bad to disappoint Captain Harper." Ray grinned wanly. "He ought to have the _Albatross_ around there by this time, waiting for us." The _Albatross_ was the ship which had left us at Little America a few months before, to steam around and pick us up at our destination beyond Enderby Land. "We're in the same boat with Major Meriden and his wife--and all those others. Lost without a trace." "You've read Scott's diary--that he wrote after he visited the pole in 1912--the one they found with the bodies?" "Yes. Not altogether cheerful. But we won't be trying to get out. No use of that." He looked at me suddenly, grinning again. "Say, Jim, why not try for that shining mountain we saw? It looks queer enough to be interesting. We ought to make it in a week." "I'm with you," I said. * * * * * I did not speak again, for the jagged ice-peaks were coming rather near. I held my breath as the little plane veered around a slender black spire and dropped toward a tiny scrap of smooth snow among the ice-hummocks. I might have spared my anxiety. Under Ray's consumately skilful piloting, the skids struck the snow with hardly a shock. We glided swiftly over the ice and came to rest just short of a yawning crevasse. "Suppose," said Ray, "that we spend the first night in the plane. We are tired already. We can keep warm here, and sleep. We've plenty of ice to melt for water. Then we're off for the shining mountain." I agreed: Ray Summers is usually right. We got out the sledge, packed it, took our bearings, and made all preparations for a start to the luminous mountain, which was about a hundred miles away. The thermometer stood at twenty below, but we were comfortable enough in our furs as we ate a scanty supper and went to sleep in the cabin of the plane. We started promptly the next morning, after draining the last of the hot chocolate from our vacuum bottles, which we left behind. We had a light but powerful sporting rifle, with telescopic sights, and several hundred rounds of ammunition. Ray put them in the pack, though I insisted that we would never need them, unless a quick way out of our predicament. "No, Jim," he said. "We take 'em along. We don't know what we're going to find at the shining mountain." The air was bitterly cold as we set out: it was twenty-five below and a sharp wind was blowing. Only our toiling at the sledge kept us warm. We covered eighteen miles that day, and made a good camp in the lee of a bare stone ridge. That night there was a slight fall of snow. When we went on it was nearly thirty-five degrees below zero. The layer of fresh snow concealed irregularities in the ice, making our pulling very hard. After an exhausting day we had made hardly fifteen miles. * * * * * On the following day the sky was covered with gray clouds, and a bitterly cold wind blew. We should have remained in the tent, but the shortage of food made it imperative that we keep moving. We felt immensely better after a reckless, generous fill of hot pemmican stew; but the next morning my feet were so painful from frost-bite that I could hardly get on my fur boots. Walking was very painful to me that day, but we made a good distance, having come to smoother ice. Ray was very kind in caring for me. I became discouraged about going on at all: it was very painful, and I knew there was no hope of getting out. I tried to get some of our morphine tablets, but Ray had them, and refused to be convinced that he ought to go on without me. On the next march we came in sight of the luminous mountain, which cheered me considerably. It was a curious thing, indeed. A straight-sided cone of light it was, rather steeper than the average volcano. Its point was sharp, its sides smooth as if cut with a mammoth plane. And it shone with a pure white light, with a steady and unchanging milky radiance. It rose out of the black and dull yellow of the ice wilderness like a white finger of hope. The next morning it was a little warmer. Ray had been caring for my feet very attentively, but it took me nearly two hours to get on my footgear. Again I tried to get him to leave me, but he refused. We arrived at the base of the shining mountain in three more marches. On the last night the fuel for the primus was all gone, having been used up during the very cold weather, and we were unable to melt water to drink. We munched the last of our pemmican dry. * * * * * A few minutes after we had started on the last morning, Ray stopped suddenly. "Look at that!" he cried. I saw what he had seen--the wreck of an airplane, the wings crumpled up and blackened with fire. We limped up to it. "A Harley biplane!" Ray exclaimed. "That is Major Meriden's ship! And look at that wing! It looks like it's been in an electric furnace!" I examined the metal wing; saw that it had been blackened with heat. The metal was fused and twisted. "I've seen a good many wrecks, Jim. I've seen planes that burned as they fell. But nothing like that. The fuselage and engines were not even afire. Jim, something struck out from that shining mountain and brought them down!" "Are they--" I began. Ray was poking about in the snow in the cockpits. "No. Not here. Probably would have been better for them if they had been killed in the plane. Quick and merciful." He examined the engines and propellers. "No. Seems to be nothing wrong. Something struck them down!" Soon we went on. The shining mountain rose before us like a great cone of fire. It must have been three thousand feet high, and about that in diameter at the bottom. Its walls were as smooth and straight as though turned from milky rock crystal in a gigantic lathe. It shone with a steady, brilliantly white radiance. "That's no natural hill!" Ray grunted beside me as we limped on. We were less than a mile from the foot of the cone of fire. Soon we observed another remarkable thing about it. It seemed that a straight band of silvery metal rose from the snow about its foot. "Has it a wall around it?" I exclaimed. "Evidently," said Ray. "Looks as if it's built on a round metal platform. But by whom? When? Why?" * * * * * We approached the curious wall. It was of a white metal, apparently aluminum, or a silvery alloy of that metal. In places it was twenty-five feet high, but more usually the snow and ice was banked high against it. The smooth white wall of the gleaming mountain stood several hundred yards back from the wall. "Let's have a look over it." Ray suggested. "We can get up on that hummock, against it. You know, this place must have been built by men!" We clambered up over the ice, as he suggested, until our heads came above the top of the wall. "A lake of fire!" cried Ray. Indeed, a lake of liquid fire lay before us. The white aluminum wall was hardly a foot thick. It formed a great circular tank, nearly a mile across, with the cone of white fire rising in the center. And the tank was filled, to within a foot of the top, with shimmeringly brilliant white fluid, bright and luminous as the cone--liquid light! Ray dipped a hand into it. The hand came up with fingers of fire, radiant, gleaming, with shining drops falling from them. With a spasmodic effort, he flung off the luminous drops, rubbed his hand on his garments, and got it back into its fur mitten. "Gee, it's cold!" he muttered. "Freeze the horns off a brass billy-goat!" "Cold light!" I exclaimed. "What wouldn't a bottle of that stuff be worth to a chemist back in the States!" "That cone must be a factory to make the stuff." Ray suggested, hugging his hand. "They might pump the liquid up to the top, and then let it trickle down over the sides: that would explain why the cone is so bright. The stuff might absorb sunlight, like barium sulphide. And there could be chemical action with the air, under the actinic rays." "Well, if somebody's making cold light, where does he use it?" "I'd like to find out, and strike him for a hot meal," Ray said, grinning. "It's too cold to live on top of the ground around here. They must run it down in a cave." "Then let's find the hole." "You know it's possible we won't be welcome. This mountain of light may be connected with the vanishing of all the aviators. We'd better take along the rifle." * * * * * We set off around just outside the white metal wall. The snow and ice was irregularly banked against it, but the wall itself was smooth and unbroken. We had limped along for some two miles, or more than halfway around the amazing lake of light. I had begun to doubt that we would find anything. Then we came to a square metal tower, ten feet on a side, that rose just outside the silvery wall, to a level with its top. The ice was low here; the tower rose twenty feet above its unequal surface. We found metal flanges riveted to its side, like the steps of a ladder. They were most inconveniently placed, nearly four feet apart; but we were able to climb them, and to look down the shaft. It was a straight-sided pit, evidently some hundreds of feet deep. We could see a tiny square of light at the bottom, very far away. The flanges ran down the side forming the rungs of a ladder that gave access to whatever lay at the bottom. Without hesitation, Ray climbed over the side and started down. I followed him, feeling a great relief in getting out of the freezing wind. Ray had the rifle and ammunition strapped to his back, along with a few other articles; and I had a small pack. We had abandoned the sledge, with the useless stove and the most of our instruments. Our food was all gone. The metal flanges were fully four feet apart, and it was not easy to scramble down from one to another; certainly not easy for one who was cold, hungry, thirsty, worn out with a week of exhausting marches, and suffering the torture of frozen feet. "You know, this thing was not built by men," Ray observed. "Not built by men? What do you mean?" "Men would have put the steps closer together. Jim, I'm afraid we are up against something--well--that we aren't used to." "If men didn't build this, what did?" I was astounded. "Search me! This continent has been cut off from the rest of the world for geologic ages. Such life as has been found here is not common to the rest of the earth. It is not impossible that some form of life, isolated here, has developed intelligence and acquired the power to erect that cone of light--and to burn the wing off a metal airplane." My thoughts whirled madly as we clambered down the shaft. * * * * * It must have taken us an hour to reach the bottom. I did not count the steps, but it must have been at least a thousand feet. The air grew rapidly warmer as we descended. We both took off most of our heavy fur garments, and left them hanging on the rungs. I was rather nervous. I felt the nearness of an intelligent, hostile power. I had a great fear that the owners of those steps would use them to find us, and then crush us ruthlessly as they had brought down Meriden's plane. The little square of white light below grew larger. Finally I saw Ray swing off and stand on his feet in a flood of white radiance below me. The air was warm, moist, laden with a subtle unfamiliar fragrance that suggested growing things. Then I stood beside Ray. We stood on the bare stone floor of a huge cavern. It must have been of volcanic origin. The walls glistened with the sparkling smoothness of volcanic glass. It was a huge space. The black roof was a hundred feet high, or more; the cave was some hundreds of feet wide. And it sloped away from us into dim distance as though leading into huger cavities below. The light that shone upon us came from an amazing thing--a fall of liquid fire. From the roof plunged a sheer torrent of white brilliantly luminous fluid, falling a hundred feet into a shimmering pool of moon-flame. Shining opalescent mists swirled about it, and the ceaseless roar of it filled the cave with sound. It seemed that a stream of the phosphorescent stuff ran off down the cave from the pool, to light the lower caverns. "Very clever!" said Ray. "They make the stuff up there at the cone and run it in here to see by." "This warm air feels mighty good," I remarked, pulling off another garment. Ray sniffed the air. "A curious odor. Smells like something growing. Where anything is growing there ought to be something to eat. Let's see what we can find." Only black obsidian covered the floor about us. Cautiously we skirted the overflowing pool of white fire, and followed down the stream of it that flowed toward the inner cavern. We had gone but a few hundred yards when suddenly Ray stopped me with a hand on my arm. "Lie flat!" he hissed. "Quick!" He dived behind a huge mass of fire-born granite. I flung myself down beside him. "Something is coming up the trail by the shining river. And it isn't a man! It's between us and the light; we should be able to see it." * * * * * Soon I heard a curious scraping sound, and a little tinkle of metal. I caught a whiff of a powerful odor--a strange, fishy odor--so strong that it almost knocked me down. The thing that made the scraping and the tinkle and the smell came into view. The sight of it sickened me with horror. It was far larger than a man; its body was heavy as a horse's, but nearer the ground. In form it suggested a huge crab, though it was not very much like any crustacean I had ever seen. It was mostly red in color, and covered with a huge scarlet shell. It had five pairs of limbs. The two forward pairs had pinchers, seemingly used as hands; it scraped along on the other three pairs. Yard-long antennae, slender and luminously green, wavered above a grotesque head. The many facets of compound eyes stood on the end of foot-long stalks. The amazing crab-thing wore a metal harness. Bands of silvery aluminum were fastened about its shell, with little cases of white metal dangling to them. In one of its uplifted claws it carried what seemed to be an aluminum bar, two feet long and an inch thick. It scraped lumberingly past, between us and the racing stream of white fire. It passed less than a dozen feet from us. The curious fishy smell of it was overpowering, disgusting. Sweat of horror chilled my limbs. The monster emanated power, sinister, malevolent power, power intelligent, alien and hostile to man. I trembled with the fear that it would see us, but it scrambled grotesquely on. When it was twenty yards past, Ray picked up a block of black lava that lay beneath his hand and hurled it silently and swiftly. It crashed splinteringly on the rocks far beyond the creature, on the other side of the stream of light. In fascination I watched the monster as it paused as if astonished. The glittering compound eyes twisted about on their stalks, and the long shining green tentacles wavered questioningly. Then the knobbed limbs snapped the white metal tube to a level position. A metallic click came from it. And a ray of red light, vivid and intense, burst from the tube. It flashed across the river of fire. With a dull, thudding burst it struck the rocks where the stone had fallen. It must have been a ray of concentrated heat. Rocks beneath it flashed into sudden incandescence, splintered and cracked, flowed in molten streams. * * * * * In a moment the intensely brilliant ruby ray flashed off. The rocks in the circle where it had struck faded to a dull red and then to blackness, still cracking and crumbling. To my intense relief, the monstrous crab lumbered on. "That," Ray whispered, "is what got Major Meriden's airplane wing." When we could hear its scraping progress no longer, we climbed up from behind our boulder and continued cautiously down the cavern, beside the rushing luminous river. In half a mile we came to a bend. Rounding it, we gazed upon a remarkable sight. We looked into a huge cavity in the heart of the earth. A vast underground plain lay before us, with the black lava of the roof arching above it. It must have been miles across, though we had no way to measure it, and it stretched down into dim hazy distance. Its level was hundreds of feet below us. At our feet the glistening river of fire plunged down again in a magnificent flaming fall. Below, its luminous liquid was spread out in rivers and lakes and canals, over all the vast plain. The channels ran through an amazing jungle. It was a forest of fungus, of mushroom things with great fleshy stalks and spreading circular tops. But they were not the sickly white and yellow of ordinary mushrooms, but were of brilliant colors, bright green, flaming scarlet, gold and purple-blue. Huge brilliant yellow stalks, fringed with crimson and black, lifted mauve tops thirty feet or more. It was a veritable forest of flame-bright fungus. In the center of this weirdly forested subterranean plain was a great lake, filled, not with the flaming liquid, but with dark crystal water. And on the bottom of that lake, clearly visible from the elevation upon which we stood, was a city! * * * * * A city below the water! The buildings were upright cylinders in groups of two or three, of dozens, even of hundreds. For miles, the bottom of the great lake was covered with them. They were all of crystal, azure-blue, brilliant as cylinders turned from immense sapphires. They were vividly visible beneath the transparent water. Not one of them broke the surface. Through the clear black water we saw moving hundreds, thousands of the giant crabs. The crawled over the hard, pebbled bottom of the lake, or swam between the crystal cylinders of the city. They were huge as the one we had seen, with red shells, great ominous looking stalked eyes, luminous green tentacular antennae and knobbed claws on forelimbs. "Looks as if we've run on something to write home about," Ray muttered in amazement. "A whole city of them! A whole world! No wonder they could build that cone-mountain for a lighting plant!" "When they got to knocking down airplanes with that heat-ray," he speculated, "they were probably surprised to find that other animals had developed intelligence." "Do you suppose those mushroom things are good to eat?" "We can try and see--if the crabs don't get us first with a heat-ray. I'm hungry enough to try anything!" Again we cautiously advanced. The river of light fell over a sheer precipice, but we found a metal ladder spiked to the rock, with rungs as inconveniently far apart as those in the shaft. It was five hundred feet, I suppose, to the bottom; it took us many minutes to descend. At last we stepped off in a little rocky clearing. The forest of brilliant mushrooms rose about us, great fleshy stalks of gold and graceful fringes of black and scarlet about them, with flattened heads of purple. We started eagerly across toward the fungoid forest. I had visions of tearing off great pieces of soft, golden flesh and filling my aching stomach with it. We were stopped by a sharp, poignantly eager human cry. A human being, a girl, darted from among the mushroom stalks and ran across to us. Sobbing out great incoherent cries, she dropped at Ray's feet, wrapped her arms about his knees and clung to him, while her slender body was wracked with sobbing cries. * * * * * My first impression was that she was very beautiful--and that impression I was never called upon to revise. About her lithe young body she had the merest scrap of some curious green fabric--ample in the warm air of the great cavern. Luxuriant brown hair fell loose about her white shoulders. She was not quite twenty years old, I supposed; her body was superbly formed, with the graceful curves and the free, smooth movements of a wild thing. Ray stood motionless for a moment, thunder-struck as I was, while the sobbing girl clung to his knees. Then the astonishment on his face gave place to pity. "Poor kid!" he murmured. He bent, took her tenderly by the shoulder, helped her to her feet. Her beauty burst upon us like a great light. Smoothly white, her skin was, perfect. Wide blue eyes, now appealing, even piteous, looked from beneath a wealth of golden brown hair. White teeth, straight and even, flashed behind the natural crimson of her lips. She stood staring at Ray, in a sort of enchantment of wonder. An eager light of incredible joy flamed in her amazing eyes; red lips were parted in an unconscious smile of joy. She looked like the troubled princess in the fairy tale, when the prince of her dreams appeared in the flesh. "God, but you're beautiful!" Ray's words slipped out as if he were hardly conscious of them. He flushed quickly, stepped back a little. The girl's lips opened. She voiced a curious cry. It was deep toned, pealing with a wonderful timbre. A happy burst of sound, like a baby makes. But strong, ringing, musically golden. And pathetically eager, pitifully glad, so that it brought tears to my eyes, cynical old man that I am. I saw Ray wipe his eyes. "Can you talk?" Ray put the question in a clear, deliberate voice, with great kindness ringing in it. "Talk?" The chiming, golden voice was slow, uncertain. "Talk? Yes. I talked--with mother. But for long--I have had no need to talk." "Where is your mother?" Ray's voice was gentle. "She is gone. She was here when I was little." The clear, silvery voice was more certain now. "Once, when I was almost as big as she--she was still. She was cold. She did not move when I called her. The Things took her away. She was dead. She told me that sometime she would be dead." * * * * * Bright tears came in the wide blue eyes, trickled down over the perfect face. A pathetic catch was in the deliberate, halting voice. I turned away, and Ray put a handkerchief to his face. "What is your name? Who are you?" Ray spoke kindly. "I am Mildred. Mildred Meriden." "Meriden!" Ray turned to me. "I bet this is a daughter of the major and his wife!" "Father was the major," the girl said slowly. "He and mother came in a machine that flew, from a far land. The Things burned the machine with the red fire. They came here and the Things kept them. They made mother sing over the water. They killed father. I never saw him." "I know," Ray, said gently. "We came from the same land. We saw your father's machine above." "You came from outside! And you are going back? Oh, take me with you! Take me!" Piteous pleading was in her voice. "It is so--lonely since the Things took Mother away. Mother told me that sometime men would come, and take me away to see the people and the outside that she told me of. Oh, please take me!" "Don't worry! You go along whenever we leave--if we can get out." "Oh, I am so glad! You are very good!" Impulsively, she threw her arms around Ray's neck. Gently, he disengaged himself, flushing a little. I noticed, however, that he did not seem particularly displeased. "But can we get out?" "Mother and I tried. We could never get out. The Things watch. They make me come to the water to sing, when the great bell rings." "Are these things goods to eat?" I motioned to the brilliant fungal forest. I had begun to fear that Ray would never get to this very important topic. Blue eyes regarded me. "Eat? Oh, you are hungry! Come! I have food." * * * * * Like a child, she grasped Ray's hand, pulled him toward the mushroom jungle. I followed, and we slipped in between the brilliantly golden, fleshy stalks. They rose to the tangle of bright feathery fringes above, huge and substantial as the trunks of trees. In a few minutes we came to a wide, shallow canal, metal-walled, through which a slow current of the opalescent, luminous liquid was flowing. We crossed this on a narrow metal foot-bridge, and went on through the brilliant forest. Suddenly we emerged into a little clearing, with the black waters of the great lake visible beyond it, across a quarter-mile of rocky beach. In the middle of the open space, rose three straight cylinders of azure crystal, side by side. Each must have been twenty feet in diameter, and forty high. They shone with a clear blue light, like the cylindrical buildings we had seen in the strange city of the crab-creatures below the great lake. Mildred Meriden, the strangely beautiful girl who had known no other world than this amazing cavern empire where giant crabs reigned, beckoned us with unconscious queenly grace to enter the arched door in the blue sapphire wall of her remarkable abode of clustered cylinders. The crystal of the walls seemed luminous, the lofty cylinders were filled with a liquid, azure radiance. The high round room we entered was strangely furnished. There was a silken couch, a bathing pool of blue crystal filled with sparkling water, a curious chest of drawers made of bright aluminum with a mirror of polished crystal, its top bearing odd combs and other articles. The furnishings must have been done by the giant crabs, under human direction. Mildred led us quickly across the room, through an arched opening into another. A round aluminum table stood in the center of the room, with two curious metal chairs beside it. Odd metal cabinets stood about the shining blue walls. The girl made us sit down, and put dishes before us. She gave us each a bowl of thick, sweetish soup, darkly red; placed before us a dish piled high with little circular cakes, crisp and brown, which had a tantalizing fragrance; poured for each of us a transparent crystal goblet full of clear amber drink. We fell to with enthusiasm and abandon. "The Things made this place for father," the girl told us, as she watched us eat, attentively replenishing the red soup in the great blue crystal bowl, or the little cakes, or the fragrant amber drink. "They would give him anything he wanted. But he tried to go away with mother, and they killed him." "We must get out of here," Ray declared when at last we had done. "We must get together a lot of food, and enough clothing for all of us. We ought to be able to make it to the edge of the ice-pack. We've got to give these crab-things the slip; we ought to get off before they know we're here--unless they already do." Mildred was eagerly attentive: she was so unused to human speech that it took the best of her efforts to understand us, though it seems that her mother had given her quite a wide education. She promised that there would be no difficulty about the food. "Mother taught me how to fix food," she said. "She always said that sometime men would come, with weapons of fire and great noise that would tear and kill the Things. I have food ready, in bags--more than we can carry. I have, too, the furs that mother and father wore." She ran into another room and returned with a great pile of fur garments, which we examined and found to be in good condition. "Now is the time," Ray said. "I'd like to know more about the big crabs, but there'll be a chance for that, later. Mildred is the important thing, now. We must get her out. Then we can tell the world about this place and come back with a bigger expedition." "You think we can reach the coast?" "I think so. It might be hard on Mildred. But we will have food; we can probably find fuel for the stove in Meriden's plane, if the tanks were well sealed. And Captain Harper should have a relief party landed and sent to meet us. We should have only three or four hundred miles to go alone." "Three or four hundred miles, over country like we've been crossing in the last week, with a girl! Ray, we'd never make it!" "It's the only chance." I said nothing more. I knew that I could stand no such march on my frozen feet, but I resolved to say nothing about it. I would help them as far as I could, and then walk out of camp some night. Men have done just that. Mildred brought out sacks of the little cakes, and of a red powder that seemed to be the dried and ground flesh of a crimson mushroom. We made a pack for each of us, as heavy as we could carry. * * * * * Just before we were ready to start Ray took off my footgear and treated my feet from his medicine kit. I had feared gangrene, but he assured me that there was no danger if they were well cared for. Walking was still exquisitely painful to me as we slipped out through the arched door and into the fungoid forest beyond the three blue cylinders. As rapidly and silently as possible we hastened through the brilliant fungous forest, across the river of opalescent liquid, to the foot of the fall of fire. A weird and splendid sight was that sheer arc of shimmering white flame, roaring into a pool of opal light, and surrounded with a mist of moon-flame. We reached the foot of the metal ladder spiked to the rocks beside the fall and started up immediately. The going was not easy. The packs of food, heavy enough when we were on level ground, were difficult indeed to lift when one was scrambling up over rungs four feet apart. Ray climbed ahead, with a piece of rope fastened from his waist to Mildred's, so that he could help her if she slipped. I was below the girl. We were halfway up the rock when suddenly a glare of red light shone upon me, casting my shadow sharply on the cliff. I looked up and saw the broad, intensely red beam of a heat-ray like that we had seen the giant crab use. The ray came, evidently, from the shore of the great lake with its submerged city of blue cylinders. It fell upon the face of the cliff just above us. Quickly the ladder was heated to cherry red. The face of the rock grew incandescent, cracked. Hot sparks rained down upon us. Slowly the ray moved down, toward us. "Guess we'd better call it off," said Ray. "They have the advantage right now. Better get to climbing down, Jim. This ladder is going to be burning my hands pretty soon." * * * * * I climbed down. Mildred and Ray scrambled down behind me. The ray followed us, keeping the metal at a cherry red just above Ray's hands. I looked down and saw a dozen of the giant crabs lumbering up out of the fungoid jungle from the direction of the great lake. Hideous things they were, with staring, stalked eyes, shining green antennae, polished red shells, claw-armed limbs. Like the one that had passed us in the upper cavern, they wore glistening white metal accoutrements. We clambered down, with the red ray following. I dropped to the ground among them, wet with the sweat of horror. I reeled in nausea from the intolerable odor of the crab-things; it was indescribable, overpowering. Curious rasping stridulations came from them, sounds which seemed to serve as means of communication, and which Mildred evidently understood. "They say that you will not be harmed, but that you must not go out," she called down. I was seized by the pincher-like claws, held writhing in an unbreakable grasp, while the glittering eyes twisted about, looked at me, and the shining green tentacles wavered questioningly over me. My stomach revolted at the horrible odor. The crabs tore off my pack, even my clothing. Ray was similarly treated as soon as he reached the ground. Though they took Mildred's pack, they treated her with a curious respect. In a few minutes they released us. They had taken the packs, the rifle and ammunition, our medicine kit and the few instruments we had brought with us down the shaft, even our clothing. They turned us loose stark naked. Ray's face and neck went beet-red when he saw Mildred standing by him. The rasping sound came from one of them again. "It says you may stay with me," Mildred said. "They will not harm you unless you try again to get away. If you do, you die--as father did. They will keep what they took from you." * * * * * Several of the creatures went scraping off, carrying the articles they had taken from us either in their claws or in the metal cases they wore. Several waited, staring at us with the stalked compound eyes, and waving the green antennae as if they were organs of some special sense. Two of the creatures waited at the foot of the metal ladder, holding the long slender white tubes of the heat-ray in their claws. "They say we can go now," Mildred said. She led the way toward the edge of the brilliant jungle. She seemed to be without false modesty, for I saw her glancing with evident admiration at Ray's lithe and powerful white-skinned figure. We followed her into the giant mushrooms, glad to escape the overpowering stench of the crabs. In a few minutes we arrived again at the strange building of the three blue cylinders. Mildred, noticing our discomfort, produced for each of us a piece of white silken fabric with which we draped ourselves. She had noticed my difficulty in walking on bare feet. She had me bathe them, then dressed them with a soothing yellow oil, and bandaged them skilfully. "Anyhow," she said later, "it is good to have both of you here with me. I am sorry indeed for you that you may never see your country again. But it is good fortune for me. I was so lonely." "These damned crabs don't know me!" Ray Summers muttered. "They think I'll play around like a pet kitten, for the rest of my life! They'll get their eyes opened. We'll spend the winter on Palm Beach yet!" "It seems to me that we're rather outnumbered." I said. "And it's rather more pleasant in here than outside." "I'm going to get that rifle," Ray declared, "and give these big crabs a little respect for humanity!" "Let's rest up a while first, anyhow," I urged. * * * * * Presently Mildred noticed how tired we were. She went into the third of the connected cylinders of blue crystal, was busy a few minutes and called us to the couches she had prepared there. "You may sleep," she told us. "The Things never come here. And they said they would not harm you, if you did not try to go out." We lay down on the silken beds. In a few minutes I was sleep. I awoke to feel a curious unease, a sense of impending catastrophe. Ray was bending over me, his face drawn with anxiety. "Something's happened!" he whispered. "She's gone!" I sat up, staring into the liquid blue vastness of the tall cylinder above us. "Listen! What's that?" A deep bell-note sounded out, brazen, clanging. Sonorous, throbbing, mighty, it rang through the cylindered rooms. Slowly it died; faded to silence with a last ringing pulse. Tense minutes of silence passed. Again it boomed out, throbbed, and died. After more long minutes there was yet a third. "Outside, somewhere!" Ray started; ran to the arched door. We looked out upon the dense forest of gold and crimson mushrooms that grew below the black cavern roof. Before us, across a few hundred yards of bare rocky beach, was the edge of the crystal lake with the city of blue cylinders upon its floor. "God! What's that?" Ray gripped my arm crushingly. A thin wailing scream came across the beach from the black lake. A piteous sound it was, plaintive, pleading. Higher and higher it rose, until it was a piercing silver note. Clear and sweet it was, but inexpressibly lonely, sorrowful, mournful. It sank slowly, died away. Again it rose and fell, and again. "It's Mildred!" I gasped. "Didn't she say something about singing to the crabs?" "Yes! I think she did. Well, if that's singing, it's wonderful! Had me feeling like I'd never see another human. But listen--" * * * * * Liquid, trilling notes were rising, pealing out in a queer, swift rhythm. It was happy, joyous, carefree. The rippling golden tones made me think of the caroling of birds on a spring morning. Swiftly it rose and fell, pure and clear as the tinkle of a mountain brook. Mildred sang not words but notes of pure music. The gay song died. And the strong clear voice rose again with the force and challenge of bugle notes, with a swift marching time beating through it. It throbbed to a rhythm strange to me. It set my feet tingling to move; it set my heart to pulsing faster. It was a challenge to action, to battle. Unconsciously obeying the suggestion of the song, Ray whispered, "Let's get over and see what's going on." We leaped through the door and ran across four hundred yards of rocky beach to the edge of the lake. We stepped on a granite bluff a few yards above the water, to gaze upon as strange a sight as men ever saw. The black water lay before us, a transparent crystal sheet. On its rocky bottom we could see the innumerable clusters of upright azure cylinders that were the city of the crabs. The blue cylinders seemed to bend and waver in the water. A hundred yards away from us, over the dark water, was Mildred. She stood on a slender azure cylinder that came just to the surface. Tall, slender, superbly graceful, with only the scant bodice of green silken stuff about her, she looked like the statue of a goddess in white marble. Her head was thrown up, golden-brown hair fell behind her shoulders, and the pure notes of her song rang over the water. Beyond her, all about her, were thousands upon thousands of the giant crabs, swimming at the surface of the water. Their green antenna rose above the water, a curious forest of luminous tentacles, flexing, wavering. Green coils moved and swung in time to the strange rhythm of her song. The last note died. Her white arms fell in a gesture of finality. The thousands of twisting green antennae vanished below the water, and the giant red crabs swam swiftly back to the tall blue cylinders of their submerged city. * * * * * The white goddess turned and saw us. Her voice rang out in a golden shout of welcome. With a clean dive she slipped into the water and came swimming swiftly toward us. Her slim white body glided through the crystal water as smoothly as a fish. Reaching the shore she sprang to her feet and ran to meet Ray. "The Things come together when the giant bell rings, to listen to my song," she said. "They like my singing, as they liked mother's. But for that, they would not let us live. That is the reason they would not let us go." "I like your singing, too," Ray informed her. "Though at first you made me cry. It was so lonely." "The song was lonely because I have been lonely. Did you hear the glad song I sang because you have come?" "Sure! Great stuff! Made me feel like a kid at Christmas!" "Come," she said. "We will eat." Like a child, she took Ray's hand again, smiling naively up at him as she led the way toward the three sapphire cylinders. Back in the blue-vaulted dining room, Ray made Mildred sit with me at the little metal table while he served the little brown cakes and the dark-red soup and the fragrant amber drink. Mildred got up and brought a great metal bowl filled with tiny purple fruits that had a delicious, piquant tang. Ray was deeply thoughtful as he ate. Suddenly he sat back and cried out: "I've got it!" "Got what?" I demanded. "I want that rifle! Mildred can find out where it is. Then, when she sings, the crabs will all come. I'll get the gun, while she is singing, and hide it. Then when it comes time to get out, she will sing while you and I are getting our packs up the cliff. I can cover them with the rifle while she gets up to us." "Looks good enough," I agreed, "provided they all come to hear the singing." * * * * * He explained the plan at greater length to the girl. She assured him that the crabs all come when the bell-notes sound. She thought that she could make them return her furs, and find out where they had put the gun. My feet were much better than they had been, and Mildred dressed them again with the yellow oil. Ray examined them, said that I should be able to walk as well as ever in a few days. Considerable time went by. Since the crabs had taken our watches, we had no very accurate way of counting days; but I think we slept about a dozen times. Ray and Mildred spent a good deal of time together, and seemed not altogether to hate each other. By the end of the time my feet were quite well; I did not even lose a toe. We went over our plans for escape in great detail. The crabs had confiscated our clothing. Mildred managed to secure the return of her furs, and, incidentally, while she was about it, learned where the rifle was. Fortunately, perhaps realizing that it would be ruined by water, the crabs had not taken it to their submerged city. Being amphibious, they lived above water as easily as below, and much of their industrial equipment was above the surface. The great pumps which lifted the white phosphorescent liquid from the canals back to the cone above the ground were located beyond the great lake. I did not see the place, but Ray tells me that they had great engines and a wealth of strange and complex machinery there. It was at these pumps that they had left our rifle and instruments, as Mildred found when she was recovering her furs. They had taken our food, and we prepared as much more as we could carry, arranged sacks for it, and made quilted garments for ourselves. * * * * * Then the three brazen notes clanged out, and Mildred ran across the beach and swam out to the blue cylinder to sing. Ray slipped hurriedly away, while the green forest of antennae was still growing up from the water about the girl. I waited above the beach, enchanted by the haunting, wordless melody of the gongs. It seemed that only a few minutes had passed, though it may have been an hour or more, when Ray was by my side again. He flourished the rifle. "I've got it! In good shape, too. Hasn't even been fired, though it looks like they have opened a box of cartridges, and cut open one or two. Maybe they didn't understand the outfit--or it may be such a primitive weapon that they aren't interested in it." We hurried up to the building of blue cylinders and carefully hid the gun and ammunition, as well as a sun compass, a pair of prism binoculars, and a few other articles Ray had recovered. In a few minutes Mildred, having seen Ray's return, finished her song and ran up to join us. We arranged our packs, and waited the next call of the throbbing brazen gong to make the attempt for freedom. We slept twice again before the clang of the great gong. Ray and Mildred were always together; I could not see that they were at all impatient. The bell note came, the awful brazen vibration of it ringing on the black cavern roof. It came when we were eating, in the liquid turquoise radiance of the lofty cylinder. We sprang out. Ray gave his last directions to Mildred. "Give us time to get to the top of the cliff by the shining fall. Then swim ashore and run. They may not notice. And if they do, we give 'em a taste of lead!" I was not very much surprised when he took the girl in his arms and put a burning kiss on her red lips. She gasped, but her struggles subsided very quickly; she clung to him as he freed her. She paused a moment in the door, before she ran down across the beach. A radiant light of joy was burning in her great blue eyes, even though tears were glistening there. * * * * * Ray and I waited, to give time for the giant crabs that guarded the ladder to get away. In about ten more minutes the second brazen gong sounded, and presently the third. We gathered up the heavy packs of food. Ray took the rifle and I the binoculars, and we slipped out into the brilliant mushroom forest. I stepped confidently out of the jungle into the clearing below the splendid opalescent fall of fire--and threw myself backward in trembling panic. A flaming crimson ray cut hissing into the towering mushrooms above my head. Mildred's confidence that the crabs would all gather at the ringing of the gong had been mistaken. The two guards had been waiting at the foot of the ladder, their flaming heat-rays ready for use. As I dived back into the jungle, I heard two quick reports of the rifle. I scrambled awkwardly to my feet, beneath the heavy pack. Ray stood alert beside me, the smoking rifle in his hand. The giant crabs had collapsed by the foot of the ladder, in grotesque and hideous metal-bound heaps of red shell and twisted limb. Blood was oozing from a ragged hole in the head of each. "Glad they were here," Ray muttered. "I wanted to try the gun out on 'em. They're soft enough beneath the shell; the bullet tears 'em up inside. Let's get a move on!" He sprang past the revolting carcasses. I followed, holding my nose against their nauseating, charnel-house odor. We scrambled up the metal ladder. As we climbed, I could hear the haunting melody of Mildred's wordless song coming faint across the distance. Once I glanced back for a moment, and glimpsed her tiny white figure above the black water, with the thousands of green antennae rising in a luminous forest about her. We reached the top of the cliff, where the opalescent river plunged down in the flaming fall. Ray chose convenient boulders for shelter and quickly we flung ourselves flat. Ray replaced the fired cartridges in the rifle and leveled it across the rock before him. I unslung the binoculars and focussed them. "Watch 'em close," Ray muttered. "And tell me when to shoot." * * * * * The black lake lay below us, with the weird city of sapphire cylinders on its floor. I got the glasses upon Mildred's white form. Soon she dived from the turquoise pedestal, swam swiftly ashore and vanished in the vivid fungous jungle. The wavering green antennae vanished below the water; I watched the crabs swimming away. Some of them climbed out of the water and lumbered off in various directions. In fifteen minutes the slender white form of Mildred appeared at the foot of the ladder. She sprang over the dead crabs and scrambled nimbly up. Soon she was halfway up the face of the cliff, and there had been no sign of discovery. My hopes ran high. I was sweeping the whole plain with the binoculars, while Ray peered through the telescopic sights of the rifle. Suddenly I saw a giant crab pause as he lumbered along the edge of the black lake. He rose upright; his shining green antennae wavered. Then I saw him reaching with a knobbed claw for a slender silver tube slung to his harness. "Quick! The one by the lake! To the right of that canal!" I pointed quickly. Ray swung his gun about, aimed. A broad red beam flashed from the tube the thing carried, and fell upon the cliff. The report of Ray's rifle rang thunderously in my ears. The red ray was snapped off abruptly, and the giant crab rolled over into the black water of the lake. Half a dozen of the huge crabs were in sight. They all took alarm, probably having seen the flash of the red ray. They raised grotesque heads, twisted stalked eyes and waved green antennae. Some of them began to raise the metal tubes of the heat-ray. "Let's get all there are in sight!" Ray muttered. He began firing regularly, with deliberate precision. A few times he had to take two shots, but ordinarily one was enough to bring down a giant crab in a writhing red mass. Three times a red ray flashed out, once at the girl clambering up the ladder, twice at our position above the precipice. But the intense color of the ray announced its source, and Ray stopped each before it could be focussed to do damage. I looked over at Mildred and saw that she was still climbing bravely, a little over a hundred feet below. * * * * * Then the great red crabs began to climb out of the water, heat-ray tubes grasped in their claws. Ray fired as fast as he could load and aim. Still he shot with deliberate care, and almost every shot was effective. Intense, ruby-red rays flashed up from the lake shore. Twice, one of them beat scorchingly upon us for a moment. Once a rock beside us was fused and cracked with the heat. But Ray fired rapidly, and the rays winked out as fast as they were born. He was powder-stained, black and grimy. The heat-ray had singed his clothing. He was dripping perspiration. The gun was so hot that he could hardly handle it. But still the angry bark of the rifle rang out, almost with a deliberate rhythm. Ray was a fine shot in his youth on his father's Arizona ranch, but his best shooting, I think, was done from above that cascade of liquid fire, at the hordes of monster scarlet crabs. Mildred scrambled over the edge, unharmed. Her breast was heaving, but her face was bright with joy. "You are wonderful!" she gasped to Ray. We seized the packs and beat a hurried retreat. A crimson forest of the heat-rays flashed up behind us, and flamed upon the black walls and roof of the cavern until glistening lava became incandescent, cracked and fused. We were below the line of the rays. Quickly we made the bend in the cavern and followed at a halting run up the path beside the shimmering river of opalescent light. Before us the torrent of fire fell in a magnificent flaming arc from the roof. We rounded the pool of lambent milk of flame, passed the roaring torrent of coruscating liquid radiance and reached the ladder in the square, metal shaft. "If we can get to the top before they can get up here, we're safe," Ray said. "If we don't, this shaft will be a chimney of fire." In the haste of desperation, we attacked the thousand-foot climb. I went first, Mildred below me, and Ray, with the rifle, in the rear. Our heavy packs were a terrible impediment, but we dared not attempt to go on without them. The metal rungs were four feet apart; it was no easy task to scramble from one to the next, again and again, for hundreds of times. * * * * * It must have taken us an hour to make it. We should have been caught long before we reached the top, but the giant crabs were slow in their lumbering movements. Despite their evident intelligence, they seemed to lack anything like our railways and automobiles. The cold gray light of the polar sky came about us; a dull, purple-blue square grew larger above. I clambered over the last rung, flung myself across the top of the metal shaft. Looking down at the tiny fleck of white light so far below, I saw a bit of red move in it. "A crab!" I shouted. "Hurry!" Mildred was just below me. I took her pack and helped her over the edge. Red flame flared up the shaft. We reached over, seized Ray's arms and fairly jerked him out of the ruby ray. The bitterly cold wind struck our hot, perspiring bodies as we scrambled down the rungs outside the square metal shaft. Mildred shivered in her thin attire. "Out of the frying pan into the ice box!" Ray jested grimly as we dropped, to the frozen plain. Quickly we tore open our packs. Ray and I snatched out clothing and wrapped up the trembling girl. In a few minutes we had her snugly dressed in the fur garments that had been Major Meriden's. Then we got into the quilted garments we had made for ourselves. The intensely red heat-beam still flared up the shaft. Ray looked at it in satisfaction. "They'll have it so hot they can't get up it for some time yet," he remarked hopefully. We shouldered our packs and set out over the wilderness of snow, turning our backs upon the metal-bound lake of fire, with the tall cone of iridescent flame rising in its center. The deep, purple-blue sky was clear, and, for a rarity, there was not much wind. I doubt that the temperature was twenty below. But it was a violent change from the warm cavern. Mildred was blue and shivering. * * * * * In two hours the metal rim below the great white cone had vanished behind the black ice-crags. We passed near the wreck of Major Meriden's plane and reached our last camp, where we had left the tent sledge, primus stove, and most of our instruments. The tent was still stretched, though banked with snow. We got Mildred inside, chafed her hands, and soon had her comfortable. Then Ray went out and soon returned with a sealed tin of oil from the wrecked plane, with which he lit the primus stove. Soon the tent was warm. We melted snow and cooked thick red soup. After the girl had made a meal of the scalding soup, with the little golden cakes, she professed to be feeling as well as ever. "We can fix our plane!" Ray said. "There's a perfectly good prop on Meriden's plane!" We went back to the wreck, found the tools, and removed an undamaged propeller. This we packed on the sledge, with a good supply of fuel for the stove. "I'm sure we're safe now, so far as the crab-things go," he said. "I don't fancy they'd get around very well in the snow." In an hour we broke camp, and made ten miles of the distance back to the plane before we stopped. We were anxious about Mildred, but she seemed to stand the journey admirably; she is a marvelous physical specimen. She seemed running over with gay vivacity of spirit; she asked innumerable questions of the world which she had known only at second-hand from her mother's words. * * * * * The weather smiled on us during the march back to the plane as much as it had frowned on the terrible journey to the cone. We had an abundance of food and fuel, and we made it in eight easy stages. Once there was a light fall of snow, but the air was unusually warm and calm for the season. We found the plane safe. It was the work of but a short time to remove the broken propeller and replace it with the one we had brought from the wrecked ship. We warmed and started the engine, broke the skids loose from the ice, turned the plane around, and took off safely from the tiny scrap of smooth ice. Mildred seemed amazed and immensely delighted at the sensations of her first trip aloft. A few hours later we were landing beside the _Albatross_, in the leaden blue sea beyond the ice barrier. Bluff Captain Harper greeted us in amazed delight as we climbed to the deck. "You're just in time!" he said. "The relief expedition we landed came back a week ago. We had no idea you could still be alive, with only a week's provisions. We were sailing to-morrow. But tell us! What happened? Your passenger--" "We just stopped to pick up my fiancee," Ray grinned. "Captain, may I present Miss Mildred Meriden? We'll be wanting you to marry us right away." THE MENACE OF THE INSECT It is possible that future study may tell man enough about insects to enable him to eradicate them. This, however, is more than can be reasonably expected, for the more we cultivate the earth the better we make conditions for these enemies. The insect thrives on the work of man. And having made conditions ideal for the insect, with great expanses of cultivated food fitted to his needs, it is an optimist who can believe that at the same time we can make other conditions which will be so unfavorable as to cause him to disappear completely. The two things do not go together. The insect is much better fitted for life than is man. He can survive long periods of famine, he can survive extremes of heat and cold. The insect produces great numbers of young which have no long period of infancy requiring the attention of the parents over a large part of their life. Every function of the insect is directed toward the propagation of the race and the use of minimum effort in every other direction. It is even possible in some cases, the water flea, for example, for the female to produce young without the necessity of fertilization by the male. In order to perform the necessary work to insure food supplies for the winter other insects have developed highly specialized workers, especially fitted to do particular kinds of labor. Ants and termites are in this class. If we examine the organization of insects closely we shall find but one point at which they are vulnerable. This is in their lack of ability to reason. True, there is considerable evidence to support the belief that some insects are capable of simple reasoning, but the development in this direction is only of the most elementary nature. As compared to man it is safe to say that they do not reason. They are guided by instinct. This again is the most efficient way to organize their affairs. It requires no long period of training. They can begin performing all their useful functions as soon as their bodily development makes it possible. No one need teach them how to catch their prey, how to build their nests or shelters. Instinct takes care of this. But this, obviously the best system in a world wholly governed by instinct, is not so desirable when the instinctively actuated insect encounters another form of life, as man, which is capable of reason. The reasoning individual can play all kinds of tricks on the individual who is actuated by instinct. The Ghost World _By Sewell Peaslee Wright_ [Illustration: _My whole attention was focused upon the strange beings._] [Sidenote: Commander John Hanson records another of his thrilling interplanetary adventures with the Special Patrol Service.] I was asleep when our danger was discovered, but I knew the instant the attention signal sounded that the situation was serious. Kincaide, my second officer, had a cool head, and he would not have called me except in a tremendous emergency. "Hanson speaking!" I snapped into the microphone. "What's up, Mr. Kincaide?" "A field of meteorites sweeping into our path, sir." Kincaide's voice was tense. "I have altered our course as much as I dared and am reducing speed at emergency rate, but this is the largest swarm of meteorites I have ever seen. I am afraid that we must pass through at least a section of it." "With you in a moment, Mr. Kincaide!" I dropped the microphone and snatched up my robe, knotting its cord about me as I hurried out of my stateroom. In those days, interplanetary ships did not have their auras of repulsion rays to protect them from meteorites, it must be remembered. Two skins of metal were all that lay between the _Ertak_ and all the dangers of space. I took the companionway to the navigating room two steps at a time and fairly burst into the room. Kincaide was crouched over the two charts that pictured the space around us, microphone pressed to his lips. Through the plate glass partition I could see the men in the operating room tensed over their wheels and levers and dials. Kincaide glanced up as I entered, and motioned with his free hand towards the charts. One glance convinced me that he had not overestimated our danger. The space to right and left, and above and below, was fairly peppered with tiny pricks of greenish light that moved slowly across the milky faces of the charts. From the position of the ship, represented as a glowing red spark, and measuring the distances roughly by means of the fine black lines graved in both directions upon the surface of the chart, it was evident to any understanding observer that disaster of a most terrible kind was imminent. * * * * * Kincaide muttered into his microphone, and out of the tail of my eye I could see his orders obeyed on the instant by the men in the operating room. I could feel the peculiar, sickening surge that told of speed being reduced, and the course being altered, but the cold, brutally accurate charts before me assured me that no action we dared take would save us from the meteorites. "We're in for it, Mr. Kincaide. Continue to reduce speed as much as possible, and keep bearing away, as at present. I believe we can avoid the thickest portion of the field, but we shall have to take our chances with the fringe." "Yes, sir!" said Kincaide, without lifting his eyes from the chart. His voice was calm and businesslike, now; with the responsibility on my shoulders, as commander, he was the efficient, level-headed thinking machine that had endeared him to me as both fellow-officer and friend. Leaving the charts to Kincaide, I sounded the general emergency signal, calling every man and officer of the _Ertak's_ crew to his post, and began giving orders through the microphone. "Mr. Correy,"--Correy was my first officer--"please report at once to the navigating room. Mr. Hendricks, make the rounds of all duty posts, please, and give special attention to the disintegrator ray operators. The ray generators are to be started at once, full speed." Hendricks, I might say, was a junior officer, and a very good one, although quick-tempered and excitable--failings of youth. He had only recently shipped with us to replace Anderson Croy, who--but that has already been recorded.[2] [Footnote 2: "The Dark Side of Antri," in the January, 1931, issue of Astounding Stories.] These preparations made, I glanced at the twin charts again. The peppering of tiny green lights, each of which represented a meteoritic body, had definitely shifted in relation to the position of the strongly-glowing red spark that was the _Ertak_, but a quick comparison of the two charts showed that we would be certain to pass through--again I use land terms to make my meaning clear--the upper right fringe of the field. The great cluster of meteorites was moving in the same direction as ourselves now; Kincaide's change of course had settled that matter nicely. Naturally, this was the logical course, since should we come in contact with any of them, the impact would bear a relation to only the _difference_ in our speeds, instead of the _sum_, as would be the case if we struck at a wide angle. * * * * * It was difficult to stand without grasping a support of some kind, and walking was almost impossible, for the reduction of our tremendous speed, and even the slightest change of direction, placed terrific strains upon the ship and everything in it. Space ships, at space speeds, must travel like the old-fashioned bullets if those within are to feel at ease. "I believe, Mr. Kincaide, it might be well to slightly increase the power in the gravity pads," I suggested. Kincaide nodded and spoke briefly into his microphone; an instant later I felt my weight increase perhaps fifty per cent, and despite the inertia of my body, opposed to both the change in speed and direction of the _Ertak_, I could now stand without support, and could walk without too much difficulty. The door of the navigating room was flung open, and Correy entered, his face alight with curiosity and eagerness. An emergency meant danger, and few beings in the universe have loved danger more than Correy. "We're in for it, Mr. Correy," I said, with a nod towards the charts. "Swarm of meteorites, and we can't avoid them." "Well, we've dodged through them before, sir," smiled Correy. "We can do it again." "I hope so, but this is the largest field of them I have ever seen. Look at the charts: they're thicker than flies." * * * * * Correy glanced at the charts, slapped Kincaide across his bowed, tense shoulders, and laughed aloud. "Trust the old _Ertak_ to worm her way through, sir," he said. "The ray crews are on duty, I presume?" "Yes. But I doubt that the rays will be of much assistance to us. Particularly if these are stony meteorites--and as you know, the odds are about ten to one against their being of ferrous composition. The rays, deducting the losses due to the utter lack of a conducting medium, will be insufficient protection. They will help, of course. The iron meteorites they will take care of effectively, but the conglomerate nature of the stony meteorites does not make them particularly susceptible to the disintegrating rays. "We shall do what we can, but our success will depend largely upon good luck--or Divine Providence." "At any rate, sir," replied Correy, and his voice had lost some of its lightness, "we are upon routine patrol and not upon special mission. If we do crack up, there is no emergency call that will remain unanswered." "No," I said dryly. "There will be just another 'Lost in Space' report in the records of the Service, and the _Ertak's_ name will go up on the tablet of lost ships. In any case, we have done and shall do what we can. In ten minutes we shall know all there is to know. That about right, Mr. Kincaide?" "Ten minutes?" Kincaide studied the charts with narrowed eyes, mentally balancing distance and speed. "We should be within the danger area in about that length of time, sir," he answered. "And out of it--if we come out--three or four minutes later." "We'll come out of it," said Correy positively. I walked heavily across the room and studied the charts again. Space above and below, to the right and the left of us, was powdered with the green points of light. * * * * * Correy joined me, his feet thumping with the unaccustomed weight given him by the increase in gravity. As he bent over the charts, I heard him draw in his breath sharply. Kincaide looked up. Correy looked up. I looked up. The glance of each man swept the faces, read the eyes, of the other two. Then, with one accord, we all three glanced up at the clocks--more properly, at the twelve-figured dial of the Earth clock, for none of us had any great love for the metric Universal system of time-keeping. Ten minutes.... Less than that, now. "Mr. Correy," I said, as calmly as I could, "you will relieve Mr. Kincaide as navigating officer. Mr. Kincaide, present my compliments to Mr. Hendricks, and ask him to explain the situation to the crew. You will instruct the disintegrator ray operators in their duties, and take charge of their activities. Start operation at your discretion; you understand the necessity." "Yes, sir!" Kincaide saluted sharply, and I returned his salute. We did not shake hands, the Earth gesture of--strangely enough--both greeting and farewell, but we both realized that this might well be a final parting. The door closed behind him, and Correy and I were left together to watch the creeping hands of the Earth clock, the twin charts with their thick spatter of green lights, and the two fiery red sparks, one on each chart, that represented the _Ertak_ sweeping recklessly towards the swarming danger ahead. * * * * * In other accounts of my experiences in the Special Patrol Service I feel that I have written too much about myself. After all, I have run my race; a retired commander of the Service, and an old, old man, with the century mark well behind me, my only use is to record, in this fashion, some of those things the Service accomplished in the old days when the worlds of the Universe were strange to each other, and space travel was still an adventure to many. The Universe is not interested in old men; it is concerned only with youth and action. It forgets that once we were young men, strong, impetuous, daring. It forgets what we did; but that has always been so. It always will be so. John Hanson, retired Commander of the Special Patrol Service, is fit only to amuse the present generation with his tales of bygone days. Well, so be it. I am content. I have lived greatly; certainly I would not exchange my memories of those bold, daring days even for youth and strength again, had I to live that youth and waste that strength in this softened, gilded age. But no more of this; it is too easy for an old man to rumble on about himself. It is only the young John Hanson, Commander of the _Ertak_, who can interest those who may pick up and read what I am writing here. I did not waste the minutes measured by that clock, grouped with our other instruments in the navigating room of the _Ertak_. I wrote hastily in the ship's log, stating the facts briefly and without feeling. If we came through, the log would read better thus; if not, and by some strange chance it came to human eyes, then the Universe would know at least that the _Ertak's_ officers did not flinch from even such a danger. * * * * * As I finished the entry, Correy spoke: "Kincaide's estimate was not far off, sir," he said, with a swift glance at the clock. "Here we go!" It was less than half a minute short of the ten estimated by Kincaide. I nodded and bent over the television disc--one of the huge, hooded affairs we used in those days. Widening the field to the greatest angle, and with low power, I inspected the space before us on all sides. The charts, operated by super-radio reflexes, had not lied about the danger into which we were passing--had passed. We were in the midst of a veritable swarm of meteorites of all sizes. They were not large; I believe the largest I saw had a mass of not more than three or four times that of the _Ertak_ herself. Some of the smaller bodies were only fifty or sixty feet in diameter. They were jagged and irregular in shape, and they seemed to spin at varying speeds, like tiny worlds. As I watched, fixing my view now on the space directly in our path, I saw that our disintegrator ray men were at work. Deep in the bowels of the _Ertak_, the moan of the ray generators had deepened in note; I could even feel the slight vibration beneath my feet. One of the meteorites slowly crumbled on top, the dust of disintegration hovering in a compact mass about the body. More and more of it melted away. The spinning motion grew irregular, eccentric, as the center of gravity was changed by the action of the ray. Another ray, two more, centered on the wobbling mass. It was directly in our path, looming up larger and larger every second. Faster and faster it melted, the rays eating into it from four sides. But it was perilously near now; I had to reduce power in order to keep all of it within the field of my disc. If-- The thing vanished before the very nose of the ship, not an instant too soon. I glanced up at the surface temperature indicator, and saw the big black hand move slowly for a degree or two, and stop. It was a very sensitive instrument, and registered even the slight friction of our passage through the disintegrated dust of the meteorite. * * * * * Our rays were working desperately, but disintegrator rays are not nearly so effective in space as in an atmosphere of some kind. Half a dozen times it seemed that we must crash head on into one of the flying bodies, but our speed was reduced now to such an extent that we were going but little faster than the meteorites, and this fact was all that saved us. We had more time for utilizing our rays. We nosed upward through the trailing fringe of the swarm in safety. The great field of meteorites was now below and ahead of us. We had won through! The _Ertak_ was safe, and-- "There seems to be another directly above us, sir," commented Correy quietly, speaking for the first time since we had entered the area of danger. "I believe your disc is not picking it up." "Thank you, Mr. Correy," I said. While operating on an entirely different principle, his two charts had certain very definite advantages: they showed the entire space around us, instead of but a portion. I picked up the meteorite he had mentioned without difficulty. It was a large body, about three times the mass of the _Ertak_, and some distance above us--a laggard in the group we had just eluded. "Will it coincide with our path at any point, Mr. Correy?" I asked doubtfully. The television disc could not, of course, give me this information. "I believe so; yes," replied Correy, frowning over his charts. "Are the rays on it, sir?" "Yes. All of them, I judge, but they are making slow work of it." I fell silent, bending lower over the great hooded disc. There were a dozen, a score of rays playing upon the surface of the meteorite. A halo of dust hung around the rapidly diminishing body, but still the mass melted all too slowly. * * * * * Pressing the attention signal for Kincaide, I spoke sharply into the microphone: "Mr. Kincaide, is every ray on that large meteorite above us?" "Yes, sir," he replied instantly. "Full power?" "Yes, sir." "Very well; carry on, Mr. Kincaide." I turned to Correy; he had just glanced from his charts to the clock, with its jerking second hand, and back to his charts. "They'll have to do it in the next ten seconds, sir," he said. "Otherwise--" Correy shrugged, and his eyes fixed with a peculiar, fascinated stare on the charts. He was looking death squarely in the eyes. Ten seconds! It was not enough. I had watched the rays working, and I knew their power to disintegrate this death-dealing stone that was hurtling along above us while we rose, helplessly, into its path. I did not ask Correy if it was possible to alter the course enough, and quickly enough, to avoid that fateful path. Had it been possible without tearing the _Ertak_ to pieces with the strain of it, Correy would have done it seconds ago. I glanced up swiftly at the relentless, jerking second hand. Seven seconds gone! Three seconds more. The rays were doing all that could be expected of them. There was only a tiny fragment of the meteorite left, and it was dwindling swiftly. But our time was passing even more rapidly. The bit of rock loomed up at me from the disc. It seemed to fly up into my face, to meet me. "Got us, Correy!" I said hoarsely. "Good-by, old-man!" I think he tried to reply. I saw his lips open; the flash of the bright light from the ethon tubes on his big white teeth. Then there was a crash that shook the whole ship. I shot into the air. I remember falling ... terribly. A blinding flash of light that emanated from the very center of my brain, a sickening sense of utter catastrophe, and ... blackness. * * * * * I think I was conscious several seconds before I finally opened my eyes. My mind was still wandering; my thoughts kept flying around in huge circles that kept closing in. We had hit the meteorite. I remembered the crash. I remembered falling. I remembered striking my head. But I was still alive. There was air to breathe and there was firm material under me. I opened my eyes. For the first instant, it seemed I was in an utterly strange room. Nothing was familiar. Everything was--was _inverted_. Then I glanced upward, and I saw what had happened. I was lying on the ceiling of the navigating room. Over my head were the charts, still glowing, the chronometers in their gimballed beds, and the television disc. Beside me, sprawled out limply, was Correy, a trickle of dried blood on his cheek. A litter of papers, chairs, framed licenses and other movable objects were strewn on and around us. My first instinctive, foolish thought was that the ship was upside down. Man has a ground-trained mind, no matter how many years he may travel space. Then, of course, I realized that in the open void there is not top nor bottom; the illusion is supplied, in space ships, by the gravity pads. Somehow, the shock of impact had reversed the polarity of the leads to the pads, and they had become repulsion pads. That was why I had dropped from the floor to the ceiling. All this flashed through my mind in an instant as I dragged myself toward Correy. Dragged myself because my head was throbbing so that I dared not stand up, and one shoulder, my left, was numb. * * * * * For an instant I thought that Correy was dead. Then, as I bent over him, I saw a pulse leaping just under the angle of his jaw. "Correy, old man!" I whispered. "Do you hear me?" All the formality of the Service was forgotten for the time. "Are you hurt badly?" His eyelids flickered, and he sighed; then, suddenly, he looked up at me--and smiled! "We're still here, sir?" "After a fashion. Look around; see what's happened?" He glanced about curiously, frowning. His wits were not all with him yet. "We're in a mess, aren't we?" he grinned. "What's the matter?" I told him what I thought, and he nodded slowly, feeling his head tenderly. "How long ago did it happen?" he asked. "The blooming clock's upside down; can you read it?" I could--with an effort. "Over twenty minutes," I said. "I wonder how the rest of the men are?" With an effort, I got to my feet and peered into the operating room. Several of the men were moving about, dazedly, and as I signalled to them, reassuringly, a voice hailed us from the doorway: "Any orders, sir?" It was Kincaide. He was peering over what had been the top of the doorway, and he was probably the most disreputable-looking officer who had ever worn the blue-and-silver uniform of the Service. His nose was bloody and swollen to twice its normal size. Both eyes were blackened, and his hair, matted with blood, was plastered in ragged swirls across his forehead. "Yes, Mr. Kincaide; plenty of them. Round up enough of the men to locate the trouble with the gravity pads; there's a reversed connection somewhere. But don't let them make the repairs until the signal is given. Otherwise, we'll all fall on our heads again. Mr. Correy and I will take care of the injured." * * * * * The next half hour was a trying one. Two men had been killed outright, and another died before we could do anything to save him. Every man in the crew was shaken up and bruised, but by the time the check was completed, we had a good half of our personnel on duty. Returning at last to the navigating room, I pressed the attention signal for Kincaide, and got his answer immediately. "Located the trouble yet, Mr. Kincaide?" I asked anxiously. "Yes, sir! Mr. Hendricks has been working with a group of men and has just made his report. They are ready when you are." "Good!" I drew a sigh of relief. It had been easier than I thought. Pressing the general attention signal, I broadcasted the warning, giving particular instructions to the men in charge of the injured. Then I issued orders to Hendricks: "Reverse the current in five seconds, Mr. Hendricks, and stand by for further instructions." Hastily, then, Correy and I followed the orders we had given the men. Briefly we stood on our heads against the wall, feeling very foolish, and dreading the fall we knew was coming. It came. We slid down the wall and lit heavily on our feet, while the litter that had been on the ceiling with us fell all around us. Miraculously, the ship seemed to have righted herself. Correy and I picked ourselves up and looked around. "We're still operating smoothly," I commented with a sweeping glance at the instruments over the operating table. "Everything seems in order." "Did you notice the speed indicator, sir?" asked Correy grimly. "When he fell, one of the men in the operating room must have pulled the speed lever all the way over. We're at maximum space speed, sir, and have been for nearly an hour, with no one at the controls." * * * * * We stared at each other dully. Nearly an hour, at maximum space speed--a speed seldom used except in case of great emergency. With no one at the controls, and the ship set at maximum deflection from her course. That meant that for nearly an hour we had been sweeping into infinite space in a great arc, at a speed I disliked to think about. "I'll work out our position at once," I said, "and in the meantime, reduce speed to normal as quickly as possible. We must get back on our course at the earliest possible moment." We hurried across to the charts that were our most important aides in proper navigation. By comparing the groups of stars there with our space charts of the universe, the working out of our position was ordinarily, a simple matter. But now, instead of milky rectangles, ruled with fine black lines, with a fiery red speck in the center and the bodies of the universe grouped around in green points of light, there were only nearly blank rectangles, shot through with vague, flickering lights that revealed nothing except the presence of disaster. "The meteoric fragment wiped out some of our plates, I imagine," said Correy slowly. "The thing's useless." I nodded, staring down at the crawling lights on the charts. "We'll have to set down for repairs, Mr. Correy. If," I added, "we can find a place." Correy glanced up at the attraction meter. "I'll take a look in the big disc," he suggested. "There's a sizeable body off to port. Perhaps our luck's changed." He bent his head under the big hood, adjusting the controls until he located the source of the registered attraction. "Right!" he said, after a moment's careful scrutiny. "She's as big as Earth, I'd venture, and I believe I can detect clouds, so there should be atmosphere. Shall we try it, sir?" "Yes. We're helpless until we make repairs. As big as Earth, you said? Is she familiar?" Correy studied the image under the hood again, long and carefully. "No, sir," he said, looking up and shaking his head. "She's a new one on me." * * * * * Conning the ship first by means of the television disc, and navigating visually as we neared the strange sphere, we were soon close enough to make out the physical characteristics of this unknown world. Our spectroscopic tests had revealed the presence of atmosphere suitable for breathing, although strongly laden with mineral fumes which, while possibly objectionable, would probably not be dangerous. So far as we could see, there was but one continent, somewhat north of the equator, roughly triangular in shape, with its northernmost point reaching nearly to the Pole. "It's an unexplored world, sir. I'm certain of that," said Correy. "I am sure I would have remembered that single, triangular continent had I seen it on any of our charts." In those days, of course, the Universe was by no means so well mapped as it is today. "If not unknown, it is at least uncharted," I replied. "Rough looking country, isn't it? No sign of life, either, that the disc will reveal." "That's as well, sir. Better no people than wild natives who might interfere with our work. Any choice in the matter of a spot on which to set her down?" I inspected the great, triangular continent carefully. Towards the north it was a mass of snow covered mountains, some of them, from their craters, dead volcanoes. Long spurs of these ranges reached southward, with green and apparently fertile valleys between. The southern edge was covered with dense tropical vegetation; a veritable jungle. "At the base of that central spur there seems to be a sort of plateau," I suggested. "I believe that would be a likely spot." "Very well, sir," replied Correy, and the old _Ertak_, reduced to atmospheric speed, swiftly swept toward the indicated position, while Correy kept a wary eye on the surface temperature gauge, and I swept the terrain for any sign of intelligent life. * * * * * I found a number of trails, particularly around the base of the foothills, but they were evidently game trails, for there were no dwelling places of any kind; no cities, no villages, not even a single habitation of any kind that the searching eyes of the disc could detect. Correy set her down as neatly and as softly as a rose petal drifts to the ground. Roses, I may add, are a beautiful and delicate flower, with very soft petals, peculiar to my native Earth. We opened the main exit immediately. I watched the huge, circular door back slowly out of its threads, and finally swing aside, swiftly and silently, in the grip of its mighty gimbals, with the weird, unearthly feeling I have always had when about to step foot on some strange star where no man has trod before. The air was sweet, and delightfully fresh after being cooped up for weeks in the _Ertak_, with her machine-made air. A little thinner, I should judge, than the air to which we were accustomed, but strangely exhilarating, and laden with a faint scent of some unknown constituent--undoubtedly the mineral element our spectroscope had revealed but not identified. Gravity, I found upon passing through the exit, was normal. Altogether an extremely satisfactory repair station. Correy's guess as to what had happened proved absolutely accurate. Along the top of the _Ertak_, from amidships to within a few feet of her pointed stem, was a jagged groove that had destroyed hundreds of the bright, coppery discs, set into the outer skin of the ship, that operated our super-radio reflex charts. The groove was so deep, in places, that it must have bent the outer skin of the _Ertak_ down against the inner skin. A foot or more--it was best not to think of what would have happened then. * * * * * By the time we completed our inspection dusk was upon us--a long, lingering dusk, due, no doubt, to the afterglow resulting from the mineral content of the air. I'm no white-skinned, stoop-shouldered laboratory man, so I'm not sure that was the real reason. It sounds logical, however. "Mr. Correy, I think we shall break out our field equipment and give all men not on watch an opportunity to sleep out in the fresh air," I said. "Will you give the orders, please?" "Yes, sir. Mr. Hendricks will stand the eight to twelve watch as usual?" I nodded. "Mr. Kincaide will relieve him at midnight, and you will take over at four." "Very well, sir." Correy turned to give the orders, and in a few minutes an orderly array of shelter tents made a single street in front of the fat, dully-gleaming side of the _Ertak_. Our tents were at the head of this short company street, three of them in a little row. After the evening meal, cooked over open fires, with the smoke of the very resinous wood we had collected hanging comfortably in the still air, the men gave themselves up to boisterous, noisy games, which, I confess, I should have liked very much to participate in. They raced and tumbled around the two big fires like schoolboys on a lark. Only those who have spent most of their days in the metal belly of a space ship know the sheer joy of utter physical freedom. Correy, Kincaide and I sat before our tents and watched them, chatting about this and that--I have long since forgotten what. But I shall never forget what occurred just before the watch changed that night. Nor will any man of the _Ertak's_ crew. * * * * * It was just a few minutes before midnight. The men had quieted down and were preparing to turn in. I had given orders that this first night they could suit themselves about retiring; a good officer, and I tried to be one, is never afraid to give good men a little rein, now and then. The fires had died down to great heaps of red coals, filmed with ashes, and, aside from the brilliant galaxy of stars overhead, there was no light from above. Either this world had no moons, not even a single moon, like my native Earth, or it had not yet arisen. Kincaide rose lazily, stretched himself, and glanced at his watch. "Seven till twelve, sir," he said. "I believe I'll run along and relieve--" He never finished that sentence. From somewhere there came a rushing sound, and a damp, stringy net, a living, horrible, _something_, descended upon us out of the night. In an instant, what had been an orderly encampment became a bedlam. I tried to fight against the stringy, animated, nearly intangible mass, or masses, that held me, but my arms, my legs, my whole body, was bound as with strings and loops of elastic bands. Strange whispering sounds filled the air, audible above the shouting of the men. The net about me grew tighter; I felt myself being lifted from the ground. Others were being treated the same way; one of the _Ertak's_ crew shot straight up, not a dozen feet away, writhing and squirming. Then, at an elevation of perhaps twice my height, he was hurried away. Hendrick's voice called out my name from the _Ertak's_ exit, and I shouted a warning: "Hendrick! Go back! Close the emergency--" Then a gluey mass cut across my mouth, and, as though carried on huge soft springs, I was hurried away, with the sibilant, whispering sounds louder and closer than ever. With me, as nearly as I could judge, went every man who had not been on duty in the ship. * * * * * I ceased struggling, and immediately the rubbery network about me loosened. It seemed to me that the whisperings about me were suddenly approving. We were in the grip, then, of some sort of intelligent beings, ghost-like and invisible though they were. After a time, during which we were all, in a ragged group, being borne swiftly towards the mountains, all at a common level from the ground, I managed to turn my head so that I could see, against the star-lit sky, something of the nature of the things that had made us captive. As is not infrequently the case, in trying to describe things of an utterly different world, I find myself at a loss for words. I think of jellyfish, such as inhabit the seas of most of the inhabited planets, and yet this is not a good description. These creatures were pale, and almost completely transparent. What their forms might be, I could not even guess. I could make out writhing, tentacle-like arms, and wrinkled, flabby excrudescences and that was all. That these creatures were huge, was evident from the fact that they, apparently walking, from the irregular, undulating motion, held us easily ten or a dozen feet from the ground. With the release of the pressure about my body I was able to talk again, and I called out to Correy, who was fighting his way along, muttering, angrily, just ahead of me. "Correy! No use fighting them. Save your strength, man!" "Then? What are they, in God's name? What spawn of hell--" "The Commander is right, Correy," interrupted Kincaide, who was not far from my first officer. "Let's get our breaths and try to figure out what's happened. I'm winded!" His voice gave plentiful evidence of the struggle he had put up. "I want to know where I'm going, and why!" growled Correy, ceasing his struggling, nevertheless. "What have us? Are they fish or flesh or fowl?" "I think we shall know before very long, Correy," I replied. "Look ahead!" * * * * * The bearers of the men in the fore part of the group had apparently stopped before a shadowy wall, like the face of a cliff. Rapidly, the rest of us were brought up, until we were in a compact group, some in sitting positions, some upside down, the majority reclining on back or side. The whispering sound now was intense and excited, as though our strange bearers awaited some momentous happening. I took advantage of the opportunity to speak very briefly to my companions. "Men, I'll admit frankly that I don't know what we're up against," I said. "But I do know this: we'll come out on top of the heap. Conserve your strength, keep your eyes open, and be prepared to obey, instantly, any orders that may be issued: I know that last remark is not needed. If any of you should see or learn something of interest or value, report at once to Mr. Correy, Mr. Kincaide or my--" A simultaneous, involuntary exclamation from the men interrupted me, and it was not surprising that this was so, for the wall before us had suddenly opened, and there was a great burst of yellow light in our faces. A strong odor, like the faint scent we had first noticed in the air, but infinitely more powerful, struck our nostrils, but I was not conscious of the fact for several seconds. My whole attention, my every startled thought, was focused upon the group of strange beings, silhouetted against the glowing light, that stood in the opening. * * * * * Imagine, if you can, a huge globe, perhaps eight feet in diameter, flattened slightly at the bottom, and supported on six short, huge stumps, like the feet of an elephant, and topped by an excrudescence like a rounded coning tower, merging into the globular body. From points slightly below this excrudescence, visualize six long, limp tentacles, so long that they drop from the equators of these animated spheres, and trail on the ground. Now you have some conception of the beings that stood before us. A sharp, sibilant whispering came from one of these figures, to be answered in an eager chorus from our bearers. There was a reply like a command, and the group in the doorway marched forward. One by one these visible tentacles wrapped themselves around a member of the _Ertak's_ crew, each one of the globular creatures bearing one of us. I heard a disappointed whisper go up from the outer darkness where, but a moment before, we had been. Then there was a grating sound, and a thud as the stone doorway was rolled back into place. The entrance was sealed. We were prisoners indeed! "All right, now what?" gritted Correy. "God! If I ever get a hand loose!" Swiftly, each of us held above the head-like excrudescence atop the globular body of the thing that held us, we were carried down a widening rocky corridor, towards the source of the yellow light that beat about us. * * * * * The passage led to a great cavern, irregular in shape, and apparently possessed of numerous other outlets which converged here. I am not certain as to the size of the cavern, save that it was great, and that the roof was so high in most sections that it was lost in shadow. The great cavern was nearly filled with creatures similar to those which were bearing us, and they fell back in orderly passage to permit our conductors to pass. I could see, now, that the hump atop each rounded body was a travesty of a head, hairless, and without a neck. Their features were particularly hideous, and I shall pass over a description as rapidly as possible. The eyes were round, and apparently lidless; a pale drab or bluff in color. Instead of a nose, as, we understand the term, they had a convoluted rosette in the center of the face, not unlike the olfactory organ of a bat. Their ears were placed as are ours, but were of thin, pale parchment, and hugged the side of the head tightly. Instead of a mouth, there was a slightly depressed oval of fluttering skin near the point where the head melted into the rounded body: the rapid fluttering or vibration of this skin produced the whispering sound I have already remarked. The cavern, as I have said, was flooded with yellow light, which came from a great column of fire near the center of the clear space. I had no opportunity to inspect the exact arrangements but from what I did see, I judged that this flame was fed by some sort of highly inflammable substance, not unlike crude oil, except that it burned clearly and without smoke. This substance was conducted to the font from which the flame leaped by means of a large pipe of hollow reed or wood. At the far end of the cavern a procession entered from one of the passages--nine figures similar to those which bore us, save that by the greater darkness of their skin, and the wrinkles upon both face and body, I judged these to be older than the rest. From the respect with which they were treated, and the dignity of their movements, I gathered that these were persons of authority, a surmise which quickly verified itself. * * * * * These nine elders arranged themselves, standing, in the form of a semicircle, the center creature standing a pace or two in front of the others. At a whispered command, we were all dumped unceremoniously on the floor of the cavern before this august council of nine. Nine pairs of fish-like, unblinking eyes inspected us, whether with enmity or otherwise; I could not determine. One of the nine spoke briefly to one of our conductors, and received an even more brief reply. I felt the gaze of the creature in the center fix on me. I had taken my proper position in front of my men; he apparently recognized me as the leader of the group. In a sharp whisper, he addressed me; I gathered from the tone that he uttered a command, but I could only shake my head in response. No words could convey thought from his mind to mine--but we did have a means of communication at hand. "Mr. Correy," I said, "your menore, please!" I released my own from the belt which held it, along with the other expeditionary equipment which we always wore when outside our ship, and placed it in position upon my head, motioning for one of the nine to do likewise with Correy's menore. They watched me suspiciously, despite my attempt to convey, by gestures, that by means of these instruments we could convey thoughts to each other. The menores of those days were bulky, heavy things, and undoubtedly they looked dangerous to these creatures: thought-transference instruments at that time were complicated affairs. * * * * * However, I must have made myself partially understood, at least, for the chief of the nine uttered a whispered command to one of the beings who had borne us to the large cavern, and motioned with a writhing gesture of one tentacle that I was to place the menore upon this creature's head. "The old boy's playing it safe, sir," muttered Correy, chuckling. "Wants to try it out on the dog first." "Right!" I nodded, and, not without difficulty, placed the other menore upon the rounded dome of the individual selected for the trial. Both instruments were adjusted to full power, and I concentrated my mental energy upon the simple pictures that I thought I could convey to the limited mentality of which I suspected these creatures, watching his fishy eyes the while. It was several seconds before he realized what was happening; then he began talking excitedly to the waiting nine. The words fairly burned themselves in my consciousness, but of course were utterly unintelligible to me. Before the creature had finished, a lash-like tentacle shot out from the chief of the nine and removed the menore; a moment later it reposed, at a rather rakish slant, on the shining dome of its new possessor. "Get anything, sir?" asked Correy in a low voice. "Not yet. I'm trying to make him see how we came here, and that we're friends. Then I'll see what I can get out of him; he'll have to get the idea of coming back at me with pictures instead of words, and it may take a long time to make him understand." It did take a long time. I could feel the sweat trickling down my face as I strove to make him understand. His eyes revealed wonderment and a little fear, but an almost utter lack of understanding. I pictured for him the heavens, and our ship sailing along through space. Then I showed him the _Ertak_ coming to rest on the plateau, and he made little impatient noises as though to convey that he knew all about that. * * * * * After a long time he got the idea. Crudely, dimly, he pictured the _Ertak_ leaving this strange world, and soaring off into vacant space. Then his scene faded out, and he pictured the same thing again, as one might repeat a question not understood. He wanted to know where we would go if we left this world of his. I pictured for him other worlds, peopled with men more or less like myself. I showed him the great cities, and the fleets of ships like the _Ertak_ that plied between them. Then, as best I could, I asked him about himself and his people. It came to me jerkily and poorly pictured, but I managed to piece out the story. Whether I guess correctly on all points, I am not sure, nor will I ever be sure. But this is the story as I got it. These people at one time lived in the open, and all the people of this world were like those in the cavern, possessed of opaque bodies and great strength. There were none of the ghost-like creatures who had captured us. But after a long time, a ruling class arose. They tried to dominate the masses, and the masses refused to be dominated. But the ruling classes were wise, and versed in certain sciences; the masses were ignorant. So the ruling classes devised a plan. These creatures did not eat. There was a tradition that at one time they had had mouths, as I had, but that was not known. Their strength, their vitality, came from the powerful mineral vapor which came forth from the bowels of the earth. The ruling classes decided that if they could control the supply of this vapor, they would have the whip hand, and they set about realizing this condition. * * * * * It was quickly done. All the sources of supply, save one, were sealed. This one source of supply was the cavern in which we stood. These were members of the ruling class, and outside was the rabble, starved and unhappy, living on the faint seepage of the vital fumes, without which they became almost bodiless, and the helpless slaves of those within the cavern. These creatures, then, were boneless; as boneless as sponges, and, like sponges, capable of absorbing huge quantities of a foreign substance, which distended them and gave them weight. I could see, now, why the rotund bodies sagged and flattened at the base, and why six short, stubby legs were needed to support that body. There was only tissue, unsupported by bone, to bear the weight! This chief of the nine went on to show me how ruthlessly, how cruelly those within the cavern ruled those without. The substance that fed the flame had to be gathered and a great reservoir on the side of the mountain kept filled. Great masses of dry, sweet grass, often changed, must be harvested and brought to the entrance of the cavern, for bedding. A score of other tasks kept the outsiders busy always--and the driving force was that, did the slaves become disobedient, the slight supply of mineral vapor available in the outside world would be cut off utterly, and all outside would surely die, slowly and in agony. Those within the cavern were the rulers. They would always remain the rulers, and those outside would remain the slaves to wait upon them. And we--how strangely he pictured us, as he saw us!--were not to return to our queer worlds, that we might bring many other ships like the _Ertak_ back to interfere. No. The pupils of his eyes contracted, and the leafy structure of his nose fluttered as though with strong emotion. No, we would not go back. He would give a signal to those of his creatures who stood behind us--a sort of soldiery, I gathered--and our heads, our legs, our arms, would be torn from our bodies. Then we would not go back to bring-- * * * * * That was enough for me. "Men!" I spoke softly, but with an intensity that gave me their instant attention, "it's going to be a fight for life. When I give the signal, make a rush for the entrance by which we came in. I'll lead the way. Use your pistols, and your bombs if necessary. All right--forward!" Correy's great shout rang out after mine, and I flung my menore in the face of the nearest guard. It bounced off as though it had struck a rubber ball. Behind me, one of the men called out sharply; I heard a sharp crunch of bone, and with a pang realized that the _Ertak's_ log would have at least one death to record. A dozen tentacles lashed out at me, and I sprayed their owners with pellets from my atomic pistol. The air was filled with the shouts of my men and the whispers of our enemies. All around me I could hear the screaming of ricochets from our pistols. Twice atomic bombs exploded not far away, and the solid rock shook beneath my feet. Something shot by close to my face; an instant later a limp bundle in the blue and silver uniform of our Service struck the rock wall of the cavern, thirty feet away. The strength in those rubbery tentacles was terrible. The pistols seemed to have but little effect. They wounded, but they did not kill unless the pellet struck the head. Then the victim rolled over, rocking idiotically on its middle. "In the head, men!" I shouted. "That downs them! And keep the bombs in action. Throw them against the walls of the cavern. Take a chance!" A ragged cheer went up, and I heard Correy's voice raised in angry conversation with the enemy: "You will, eh? There!... Now!... Ah!--right--through--the--eye. That's--the place!" * * * * * A score of times I was grasped and held by the writhing arms of the angry horde whispering all around me. Each time I literally shot the tentacle away with my atomic pistol, leaving the severed end to unwrap itself and drop from my struggling body. The things had no blood in them. Steadily, we fought our way toward the doorway, out of the cavern, down the passageway, pressed into a compact, sweating mass by the pressure of the eager bodies around us. I have never heard any sound even remotely like the babel of angry, sibilant whispering that beat against the walls and roof of that cavern. I had saved my own bombs for a specific purpose, and now I unslung them and managed to work them up above my shoulders, one in either hand. "I'm going to try to blow the entrance clear, men," I shouted. "The instant I fling the bombs, drop! The fragments will be stopped by the enemy crowding around us. One ... two ... three ... _drop_!" The two bombs exploded almost simultaneously. The ground shook, and all over the cavern masses of stone came crashing to the floor. Bits of rock hummed and shrieked over our heads. And--yes! There was a draft of cooler, purer air on our faces. The bombs had done their work. "One more effort and we're outside, men," I called. "The passage is open, and there are only a few of the enemy before us. Ready?" "Ready!" went up the hoarse shout. "Then, forward!" It was easy to give the command, but hard to execute it. We were pressed so hard that only the men on the outside of the group could use their weapons. And our captors were making a terrible, desperate effort to hold us. Two more of our men were literally torn to pieces before my eyes, but I had the satisfaction of ripping holes in the heads of the creatures whose tentacles had done the beastly work. And in the meantime we were working our way slowly but surely to the entrance. * * * * * I glanced up as I dodged out into the open. That soft humming sound was familiar, and properly so. There, at an elevation of less than fifty feet, was the _Ertak_, with Hendricks standing in the exit, leaning forward at a perilous angle. "Ahoy the _Ertak_!" I hailed. "Descend at once!" "Right, sir!" Hendricks turned to relay the order, and, as the rest of the men burst forth from the cavern, the ship struck the ground before us. "All hands board ship!" I ordered. "Lively, now." As many years as I have commanded men, I have never seen an order obeyed with more alacrity. I was the last man to enter, and as I did so, I turned for a last glance at the enemy. They could not come through the small opening my bombs had driven in the rock, although they were working desperately to enlarge it. Leaping back and forth between me and the entrance I could see the vague, shadowy figures of the outside slaves, eagerly seeping up the life-giving fumes that escaped from the cavern. "Your orders, sir?" asked Hendricks anxiously; he was a very young officer, and he had been through a very trying experience. "Ascend five hundred feet, Mr. Hendricks," I said thoughtfully. "Directly over this spot. Then I'll take over. "It isn't often," I added, "that the Service concerns itself with economic conditions. This, however, is one of the exceptions." "Yes, sir," said Hendricks, for the very good reason, I suppose, that that was about all a third officer could say to his commander, under the circumstances. * * * * * "Five hundred feet, sir," said Hendricks. "Very well," I nodded, and pressed the attention signal of the non-commissioned officer in charge of the big forward ray projector. "Ott? Commander Hanson speaking. I have special orders for you." "Yes, sir!" "Direct your ray, narrowed to normal beam and at full intensity, on the spot directly below. Keep the ray motionless, and carry on until further orders. Is that clear?" "Perfectly, sir." The disintegrator ray generators deepened their purr as I turned away. "I trust, sir, that I did the right thing in following you with the _Ertak_?" asked Hendricks. "I was absolutely without precedent, and the circumstances were so mysterious--" "You handled the situation very well indeed," I told him. "Had you not been waiting when we fought our way into the open, the nearly invisible things on the outside might have--but you don't know about them yet." Picking up the microphone again, I ordered a pair of searchlights to follow the disintegrator ray, and made my way forward, where I could observe activities through a port. The ray was boring straight down into a shoulder of a rocky hill, and the bright beams of the searchlights glowed redly with the dust of disintegration. Here and there I could see the shadowy, transparent forms of the creatures that the self-constituted rulers of this world had doomed to a demi-existence, and I smiled grimly to myself. The tables would soon be turned. * * * * * For perhaps an hour the ray melted its way into the solid rock, while I stood beside Ott and his crew, watching. Then, down below us, things began to happen. Little fragments of rock flew up from the shaft the ray had drilled. Jets of black mud leaped into the air. There was a sudden blast from below that rocked the _Ertak_, and the shaft became a miniature volcano, throwing rocky fragments and mud high into the air. "Very good, Ott," I said triumphantly. "Cease action." As I spoke, the first light of the dawn, unnoticed until now, spread itself over the scene, and we witnessed then one of the strangest scenes that the Universe has ever beheld. Up to the very edge of that life-giving blast of mineral-laden gas the tenuous creatures came crowding. There were hundreds of them, thousands of them. And they were still coming, crowding closer and closer and closer, a mass of crawling, yellowish shadows against the sombre earth. Slowly, they began to fill out and darken, as they drew in the fumes that were more than bread and meat and water to us. Where there had been formless shadows, rotund creatures such as we had met in the cavern stood and lashed their tentacles about in a sort of frenzied gladness, and fell back to make room for their brothers. * * * * * "It's a sight to make a man doubt his own eyes, sir," said Correy, who had come to stand beside me. "Look at them! Thousands of them pouring from every direction. How did it happen?" "It didn't happen. I used our disintegrator ray as a drill; we simply sunk a huge shaft down into the bowels of the earth until we struck the source of the vapor which the self-appointed 'ruling class' has bottled up. We have emancipated a whole people, Mr. Correy." "I hate to think of what will happen to those in the cavern," replied Correy, smiling grimly. "Or rather, since you've told me of the pleasant little death they had arranged for us. I'm mighty glad of it. They'll receive rough treatment, I'm afraid!" "They deserve it. It has been a great sight to watch, but I believe we've seen enough. It has been a good night's work, but it's daylight, now, and it will take hours to repair the damage to the _Ertak's_ hull. Take over in the navigating room, if you will, and pick a likely spot where we will not be disturbed. We should be on our course by to-night, Mr. Correy." "Right, sir," said Correy, with a last wondering look at the strange miracle we had brought to pass on the earth below us. "It will seem good to be off in space again, away from the troubles of these little worlds." "There are troubles in space, too," I said dryly, thinking of the swarm of meteorites that had come so close to wiping the _Ertak_ off the records of the Service. "You can't escape trouble even in space." "No, sir," said Correy from the doorway. "But you can get your sleep regularly!" And sleep is, when one comes to think of it, a very precious thing. Particularly for an old man, whose eyelids are heavy with years. Readers' Corner [Illustration: Readers' Corner] _Now In Book Form_ Readers of Astounding Stories will be interested to hear that two of the continued novels which appeared in our pages during last year are coming out in book form. The first of these is "Murder Madness," by Murray Leinster. It is due sometime in February, so by the time this issue is on the newsstands it will no doubt be already out. The publishers are Brewer and Warren, and the price is $2.00. Here's your chance, collectors, and those who missed an instalment or two. The other book is "Brigands of the Moon," by--everyone knows--Ray Cummings. It should be coming along in a month or so. Watch out for it! _Mr. Cummings Sits In_ Dear Editor: Thank you for the opportunity to address our Readers on certain side-lights of my tale, "The Exile of Time." I particularly welcome it, for the theme of Time-traveling is, I think, the most interesting of any upon which I have written. Some of you will no doubt recall my stories "The Man Who Mastered Time" and "The Shadow Girl." In "The Exile of Time," I present the third of the trilogy. It has no fictional connection with the others; it is in no sense a sequel, but rather a companion story. To write about Time-traveling is for me a difficult but fascinating task. The opportunities are endless; and I hope you may think I have taken advantage of them with a measure of success. I wrote those conceptions of Time and Space and the Great Cosmos, which you will find in the text of the story, because I feel them very deeply. Each occasion upon which circumstances allow me to present my theories, I eagerly welcome. How much of the conception is original with me, I cannot say. It is the product of my groping interpretation of the theories of many brilliant scientific minds of today--humbly combined with perhaps some originality of my own. The mind flings far afield when it starts to grope with the Unknown. Try it! Read what I have written and then let your mind roam a little further. Probe a little deeper. Perhaps we may contribute something. It is only by that process--each mind following some other's cleared path and pushing forward a little on his own--that the Unknown can be pierced. When once you admit the basic idea of Time-traveling to be plausible, what fascinating vistas are opened to the imagination! Space is so crowded! The room in which you are now sitting as you read these words--just think what that Space around you has held in the Past, and will hold in the Future! You occupy it now, playing out your little part; but think what has happened where you are now sitting so calmly reading! What tumultuous, crowding events! Your room is quiet now, but its space has rung with war-cries; the ground under you has been drenched with blood; and further back it was lush with primeval jungle; and in another age it was frozen beneath a great ice-cap; and before that it blazed, molten with fire. Back to the Beginning. And your little Space in the Future? It will be in the heart of a great mechanical city, perhaps. A mechanical servant may murder his human master in the space which you now call your room. The great revolt of the mechanisms may start in your room.... I think that your room will some day again be shrouded under a forest growth. The mechanical city will be neglected, tumbled into ruins, buried beneath the silt of the passing centuries. The sun will slowly rise--a giant dull red ball, burning out, cooling. And the Earth will cool. Humans, perhaps, will have passed decadence and reverted to savagery. Perhaps the polar ice-caps will again come down, and ice slowly cover the dying world. All nature will be struggling and dying, with the sun a red ball turning dark like a cooling ember. Millions of centuries, with whatever events--who am I to say?--but it will go on to the End. That's a long way from the Beginning, isn't it? And yet ours is only a tiny planet living briefly in the great cosmos of Time and Space! A segment of Everything that ever was and ever will be marches through the Space of your room. What an enormously thronged little Space! There is only Time, to keep consecutive and orderly the myriad events which in your room are pushing and jostling one another! I say, then, "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once." It seems a good definition. I do hope you like "The Exile of Time." The writing of it made me realize how unimportant I am. A human lifetime is really as brief as the flash of an electric spark. The whole lifetime of our Earth is not much more than that. Stars, worlds, are born, live and die, and the Great Cosmos goes majestically on. Yet some people seem to feel that they and the Space they occupy in this Time they call the Present are the most important things that ever were or ever will be in the whole Universe. It is a good thing to realize that that isn't so.--Ray Cummings. _Likes_ Dear Editor: Starting with the August issue, I am going to give my opinion of the stories. "The Planet of Dread," by R. F. Starzl, couldn't have been better. Get more stories by him. "Murder Madness," by Murray Leinster, was a good story, but it didn't belong in a Science Fiction magazine. "The Terrible Tentacles of L-472," a good story; "The Invisible Death," a very good story; "Prisoners on the Electron," very good; "The Ape-Men of Xlotli," a good story, but it does not belong in a Science Fiction magazine; "The Pirate Planet," very excellent--much more so because it is an interplanetary story. "Vagabonds of Space," "The Fifth Dimension Catapult," "The Gate of Xoran," "The Dark Side of Antri"--all good. Well, I guess I will sign off and give somebody else a chance to broadcast.--Wm. McCalvy, 1244 Beech St., St. Paul, Minn. _I Do; I Don't_ Dear Editor: "I like the magazine the way it is," "I want a larger magazine," "I want a magazine twice a month," "I want a quarterly," and so do I, "There is a terrible flaw in one of the stories," "All of the stories are flawless," "I want reprints," "I don't," "I like Ray Cummings," "I don't," "I want a better grade paper," "The paper's O. K. with me," "I want smooth edges on the magazine," "So do I," "And so do I!"--these seem to be the most often repeated sentences in the letters from Readers. However, I have a new one to add: I would like to see an answer, by the Editor, to each letter that is printed in "The Readers' Corner," like this: "I liked 'An Extra Man,' etc.--Mr. Syence Ficshun" (I am very glad to hear that you liked this little masterpiece, etc.--Editor). Why not? The illustration on the cover of the January issue surely shows that you're starting the new year out right by putting on an extremely astounding cover. The story "The Gate to Xoran" is simply amazing. Let's read many more of Mr. Wells stories. It is far surpassed, however, by "The Fifth Dimension Catapult," which is the best story (novelette) that I have ever read in "our" magazine. The Boys' Scientification Club is now a branch of the famous Science Correspondence Club. Remember, boys between the ages of 10 and 15, if you're interested in reading Science Fiction, by all means join the B. S. C. We have many copies of Astounding Stories in our library and members are welcome to read them. For further details write to me.--Forrest J. Ackerman, President-Librarian, B. S. C., 530 Staples Avenue, San Francisco, Cal. _Souls and Integrations_ Dear Editor: You are starting your second year as Editor of Astounding Stories. If your standard during 1931 is up to your standard of 1930, we shall be satisfied. If possible, give us, the Readers, the best in Science Fiction. I have no doubt but that the Readers of Astounding Stories would not want fantasy unless written by a master; and to my mind there is only one whom I will forgive for not making his stories Science Fiction, and that writer is A. Merritt. Every other writer should and must put plausible science in his stories. If he doesn't, he won't go far; not with Science Fiction readers, anyway. I do not agree to your answer, by letter, to my complaint about the science in the story, "An Extra Man," by Jackson Gee. You say that two men, each the size and half the weight of the original man could have been formed from the integrated particles of the original man. In the story, the weight of the two men was exactly the same as that of the original man. [?] Anyway, I do not believe that these two men could have been formed. Most likely, when the laboratories began the process of reintegration, the person integrated would have been cut in half, provided of course, that the laboratories began the process at the same time. If not, one laboratory would produce a larger portion of an integrated man than the other. But to come back to the original question. Can a man be disintegrated into his component atoms and then reintegrated into two men each half the size, weight, ability and brains? I say no. I believe that the component atoms of the man when reintegrated would be in exactly the same place as they were before the disintegration occurred. If a part and not the whole of a man is reintegrated in one place, then the part would be one part of that man and not a complete man in itself. It would be as preposterous and absurd for anything but a part of that man to be reintegrated, as it would be for two apes, pigs or hens to come from him. I leave out the question of what would happen to the soul. Imagine a soul divided in half. Mr. Gee might say that he doesn't believe in souls. Neither do I, much. I notice that some Readers say that they liked that story. One even says that it was perfect. Every man to his taste. I've read worse, myself. Anyway, Mr. Editor, Astounding Stories is the finest and best Science Fiction magazine on the market. Many Readers want to keep their magazines and bind them, including myself. Why change the size? I'm certain that that won't be done. Astounding Stories started small (in size only) and it will remain small (also only in size). Let us have reprints.--Nathan Greenfeld, 373 Whitlock Ave., New York City. _The Defense Rests_ Dear Editor: I have just read the January issue for 1931 and noticed some so-called helpful letters by Readers. Looking over Mr. Waite's letter, would like to suggest that he stop to think, if possible, that if he wants absolute bone-dry facts, that he doesn't want fiction at all. And Mr. Johnson--he seems to have the impression that everyone who can take things for granted without having a detailed explanation of the facts of the story is a moron or a small child. He should go find a volume of scientific research if he enjoys that sort of stuff. I read fiction stories for the enjoyment I get out of them and not to criticize them for lack of explanation. I would rather read some of his so-called nonsense than a lot of far-flung, intricate, baseless scientific explanations. Why doesn't Mr. Johnson use his imagination?--Donald Kahl, 360 Selby Ave., St. Paul, Minn. _"High Time"_ Dear Editor: I have been reading the magazine ever since it first came out, a year ago, so it is high time for me to write. It certainly grows better with every new issue. I think that the ten best stories published during 1930 were (not in order of merit): "Brigands of the Moon," "Vandals of the Stars," "The Atom Smasher," "The Moon Master," "Earth, the Marauder," "The Planet of Dread," "Silver Dome," "The Second Satellite," "Jetta of the Lowlands" and "The Pirate Planet." Your ten best authors are: Harl Vincent, Ray Cummings, Charles W. Diffin, Victor Rousseau, Capt. S. P. Meek, Murray Leinster, Arthur J. Burks, R. F. Starzl, Sewell P. Wright and Edmond Hamilton. The Commander Hanson stories by S. P. Wright are great. Let's have lots more of them. And now about reprints. I cast my vote like many other readers in favor of them. Many Readers, in fact over half, are new Readers of Science Fiction. They, like myself, have not read the great masterpieces such as "The Time Machine," "The Moon Pool" and countless other stories. Now, why not reprint some of them and give us a chance to read them? A few Readers who have read them before do not want them reprinted because they do not want anybody else to read them. A brickbat: Why not cut the edges of the magazine smooth? It would be much easier to handle. A bouquet: You have a fine magazine. Keep up the good stuff. My criticism is exhausted, so good-by until next time.--Oswald Train, P. O. Box 94, Barnesboro, Pa. _Two Dimensions Off?_ Dear Editor: It was just by accident that I came across your magazine, and I have read every issue since. In the January number there is one story that I don't like, "The Fifth Dimension Catapult." As far as the story is concerned it is very good, but Professor Denham was not marooned in the fifth dimension. If you read the story you will find that Professor Denham was marooned on a three dimensional world. That is all I can make out. Astounding Stories is the best Science Fiction magazine I have ever read, and I shall keep on reading it. Keep up the good cover illustrations.--Richard Meindle, R. 1, Box 91, Butternut, Wisconsin. _To the Colors!_ Dear Editor: Being a passionate admirer of Dr. Breuer and his writings, I cannot permit the contumelious, unfounded aggression of one George K. Addison to go on unconfuted. Perceiving that Dr. Breuer cannot possibly vindicate himself against this disparagement I feel obliged to extenuate Dr. Breuer in the eyes of the Readers. In the first place, Dr. Breuer writes rarely and sparingly and does not grind out his stories month after month as do some other authors. His stories are highly original and are presented in a purely literary style. The story to which Mr. Addison refers, "A Problem in Communication," is a fine example of his work. Should his story be remonstrated against because it is lacking in adventure, because it did not delineate mushy love episodes, because it does not cause chills to run down one's spine? Positively not! It lives up to the standard of the highest Science Fiction. Here is a story unbesmirched by the love element, exceedingly plausible and interestingly narrated. If all stories were thought out and written just half as carefully as Dr. Breuer's, Astounding Stories would become a periodical justified to be considered on a par with The Golden Book. In closing, I wish to express my desire that more stories of the Breuer quality be bestowed upon the Readers.--Mortimer Weisinger, 266 Van Cortland Ave., Bronx, New York. _And It Wasn't!_ Dear Editor: Having read "The Readers' Corner" since its first appearance in Astounding Stories and noted the various criticisms offered, may I tell you about a story written by a Science Fiction author? The author, by the way, is the perfect author; he makes absolutely no mistakes in his story, and is in no danger of starving if his works aren't accepted and older stories are reprinted instead. His science is correct and the story contains nothing that cannot be understood. The story is of interplanetary adventure. Strange to say, there is no war in the story; there is no villain; there is no hero to save a world from destruction or his sweetheart from the monsters of another planet. Instead, there are nothing but characters--if you get what I mean. The persons involved in this interplanetary novel reach their goal due to the tremendous strides of science in experimenting with air and space vehicles. When they arrive on the planet they do not meet hostile nations. They do not meet monstrosities. They do, however, meet people much like themselves who do not welcome the travelers with open arms and show them about their city, but regard them with curiosity and treat them with all due respect for their achievement in conquering space. As I said before, there is no hero who falls in love with the beautiful girl from the planet visited, and saves her and her country from other warring nations. To tell the truth, the adventurers have their own loved ones at home. They meet no intrigue. When they have learned all they can--experiencing many difficulties in mastering the language used, for the people of the planet have not perfected a brain-copier or other like mechanism--they arrange for commerce and travel between the two worlds and return to Earth. On their return, they are not met with world wide ovations and made heroes of, but receive credit for their undertaking and are soon forgotten about. To cap the climax, the story is acceptable to the Editors. It is not in need of corrections and is published immediately. The story is gratefully accepted by the public and not one single soul writes a scathing letter to the Editor telling why it was not good. In fact, I can hardly believe that such a story was written. Possibly it wasn't!--Robert R. Young, 86 Third Avenue, Kingston, Penn. _Ha-ha!_ Dear Editor: Christmas day, and because I'm not acquainted in this city I'm writing you a letter. I have just finished reading your magazine. I came close to not buying it, being not overly prosperous, but decided to take a chance when I saw you had a dimensional story by Murray Leinster. That story was up to expectations. The others were down to expectations. If you want me to choose your magazine to spend my reading allowance on, have more stories by Leinster, Starzl, Breuer and Wells. It may take a little more effort, but it's worth it. Sax Rohmer is good on science stuff, too. Before you print any more undersea stories have a diver look at them. You tell about standing at the bottom of the ocean and seeing the submarine "not more than a quarter of a mile away." Ha-ha! [No fair, that ha-ha! For the story says, quoted exactly: "... there gleamed the reassuring LIGHTS of the Nereid, not a quarter of a mile away." Probably, intense searchlight beams could be seen that far.--Ed.] You couldn't see it if you stood more than ten feet away. I'm not trying to be critical, but you should be more careful.--Myron Higgins, 524 West 100th St., New York City. _We Never Will_ Dear Editor: I have been an enthusiastic reader of Astounding Stories since it was founded, and I think it about time that I voiced my opinion of your great magazine. Taking all in all it's a vow, but of course it could be made better by having a quarterly, which I am sure would go over big. Wesso is great, so why not have all the illustrations by him? Your authors are also great. Nearly every story I have read was perfect, and whatever you do don't lose R. F. Starzl. His ideas are very good, as illustrated in "The Planet of Dread." There is only one more thing I would like to ask of you, and that is the reason why I write. Please don't spoil the magazine by endeavoring to please a very small minority by putting in unnecessary scientific explanations. The reason why I like your magazine so much is because of the fact that it is unique in that respect. I have read a few stories in other scientific magazines and found that they contained too much explanation. I hope for the benefit of other Readers and myself that you will not change the stories by adding too much explanation. In the coming year I wish you all possible success.--John Sheehan, 32 Elm St., Cambridge, Mass. _This and That_ Dear Editor: In the October issue of Astounding Stories Mr. Woodrow Gelman cast vote number 1 for reprints. In the February, 1931, issue, Mr. Forgaris throws in number 2 and here goes number 3. I really don't see why, even after the arguments you printed, you don't print at least one a year. I have been reading your magazine ever since it came out and have found that at least one-half of your Readers want reprints. Can't you print at least one for an experiment? Ray Cummings, S. P. Meek, Dr. Miles J. Breuer, Sewell P. Wright and Harl Vincent are your best authors. Wesso is your best artist by far. There were several stories I did not like. They are: "Monsters of Moyen," "Earth, the Marauder," and I guess those are all. How about giving us some short short stories? And how about cutting the edges of the paper smooth? And giving us a quarterly? But all in all I think your magazine is one of the best in the field.--Vernon H. Jones, 1603 Sixth Ave., Des Moines, Iowa. _It's Your Imagination_ Dear Editor: Well, well! Astounding Stories was two days early this month. See that this happens more often. Of course, "The Pirate Planet" took first place in the February number. The story was very well written and the characters very realistic. It deserves to be put in book form, also in the talkies. It would be much better than "Just Imagine." I welcome Anthony Gilmore, D. W. Hall and F. V. W. Mason to Astounding Stories. Their stories proved to be very interesting and I hope to read more. Do you know how to write editorials? Yes? Then prove it. I have to be shown. Write on some scientific subject each month, and every so often write on Astounding Stories itself and of its stories and authors. Is it my imagination or have you been using a better grade of paper in the past two issues? it seems to be much smoother and a little thinner than that used previously. I notice that you are giving more room to some of the illustrations, as in "Werewolves of War" and "The Pirate Planet." The larger the illustrations are the more there can be put in them.--Jack Darrow, 4225 No. Spaulding Ave., Chicago, Illinois. _If He But Could!_ Dear Editor: Astounding Stories is without doubt the most preeminent in its field. With such versatile authors as Burks (When does his next story appear?), Starzl, Cummings, Leinster, Vincent and all the rest, how can it help but to overshadow all periodicals! The illustrations are superfine. Wesso is a marvel! If he could only write his own stories and illustrate them! Now, a suggestion. I am positive that every Reader of your magazine wants you to start a department in which biographies of the authors and their photographs are given. Why not start one?--Julius Schwartz, 407 East 183rd St., Bronx, New York. _"The Readers' Corner"_ All readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for _Readers_, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here: so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! * * * * * 
41481	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE VOL. I No. 1 JANUARY, 1930 W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSOLOWSKI _Painted in Water-colors from a Scene in "The Beetle Horde."_ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees: _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid; by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, FLYERS, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN NOVEL MAGAZINE, BIG STORY MAGAZINE, MISS 1930, _and_ FOREST AND STREAM _More Than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Nathan Goldmann, Secretary. Application for entry as second-class mail pending at the Post Office at New York, under Act of March 3, 1879. Application for registration of title as Trade Mark pending in the U.S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York; or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. CONTENTS EDITORIAL THE EDITOR 7 _An Introduction to a New and Unique Magazine._ THE BEETLE HORDE VICTOR ROUSSEAU 8 _Only Two Young Explorers Stand in the Way of the Mad Bram's Horrible Revenge--the Releasing of His Trillions of Man-sized Beetles upon an Utterly Defenseless World._ (Part One of a Two-part Novel.) THE CAVE OF HORROR CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 32 _Screaming, the Guardsman Was Jerked Through the Air. An Unearthly Screech Rang Through the Cavern. The Unseen Horror of Mammoth Cave Had Struck Again!_ PHANTOMS OF REALITY RAY CUMMINGS 46 _Red Sensua's Knife Came up Dripping--and the Two Adventurers Knew that Chaos and Bloody Revolution Had Been Unleashed in that Shadowy Kingdom of the Fourth Dimension._ (A Complete Novel.) THE STOLEN MIND M. L. STALEY 75 _What Would You Do, If, Like Quest, You Were Tricked, and Your Very Mind and Will Stolen from Your Body?_ COMPENSATION C. V. TENCH 92 _Professor Wroxton Had Disappeared--But in the Bottom of the Mysterious Crystal Cage Lay the Diamond from His Ring!_ TANKS MURRAY LEINSTER 100 _Two Miles of American Front Had Gone Dead. And on Two Lone Infantrymen, Lost in the Menace of the Fog-gas and the Tanks, Depended the Outcome of the War of 1932._ INVISIBLE DEATH ANTHONY PELCHER 118 _On Lees' Quick and Clever Action Depended the Life of "Old Perk" Ferguson, the Millionaire Manufacturer Threatened by the Uncanny, Invisible Killer._ _Introducing_-- ASTOUNDING STORIES What _are_ "astounding" stories? Well, if you lived in Europe in 1490, and someone told you the earth was round and moved around the sun--that would have been an "astounding" story. Or if you lived in 1840, and were told that some day men a thousand miles apart would be able to talk to each other through a little wire--or without any wire at all--that would have been another. Or if, in 1900, they predicted ocean-crossing airplanes and submarines, world-girdling Zeppelins, sixty-story buildings, radio, metal that can be made to resist gravity and float in the air--these would have been other "astounding" stories. To-day, time has gone by, and all these things are commonplace. That is the only real difference between the astounding and the commonplace--Time. To-morrow, more astounding things are going to happen. Your children--or their children--are going to take a trip to the moon. They will be able to render themselves invisible--a problem that has already been partly solved. They will be able to disintegrate their bodies in New York and reintegrate them in China--and in a matter of seconds. Astounding? Indeed, yes. Impossible? Well--television would have been impossible, almost unthinkable, ten years ago. Now you will see the kind of magazine that it is our pleasure to offer you beginning with this, the first number of ASTOUNDING STORIES. It is a magazine whose stories will anticipate the super-scientific achievements of To-morrow--whose stories will not only be strictly accurate in their science but will be vividly, dramatically and thrillingly told. Already we have secured stories by some of the finest writers of fantasy in the world--men such as Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster, Captain S. P. Meek, Harl Vincent, R. F. Starzl and Victor Rousseau. So--order your next month's copy of ASTOUNDING STORIES in advance! --_The Editor._ The Beetle Horde A TWO-PART NOVEL _By Victor Rousseau_ [Illustration: _Dodd and Tommy realised that they were powerless against the monstrous beetles._] [Sidenote: Only two young explorers stand in the way of the mad Bram's horrible revenge--the releasing of his trillions of man-sized beetles upon an utterly defenseless world.] CHAPTER I _Dodd's Discovery_ Out of the south the biplane came winging back toward the camp, a black speck against the dazzling white of the vast ice-fields that extended unbroken to the horizon on every side. It came out of the south, and yet, a hundred miles further back along the course on which it flew, it could not have proceeded in any direction except northward. For a hundred miles south lay the south pole, the goal toward which the Travers Expeditions had been pressing for the better part of that year. Not that they could not have reached it sooner. As a matter of fact, the pole had been crossed and re-crossed, according to the estimate of Tommy Travers, aviator, and nephew of the old millionaire who stood fairy uncle to the expedition. But one of the things that was being sought was the exact site of the pole. Not within a couple of miles or so, but within the fraction of an inch. It had something to do with Einstein, and something to do with terrestrial magnetism, and the variations of the south magnetic pole, and the reason therefore, and something to do with parallaxes and the precession of the equinoxes and other things, this search for the pole's exact location. But all that was principally the affair of the astronomer of the party. Tommy Travers, who was now evidently on his way back, didn't give a whoop for Einstein, or any of the rest of the stuff. He had been enjoying himself after his fashion during a year of frostbites and hard rations, and he was beginning to anticipate the delights of the return to Broadway. Captain Storm, in charge of the expedition, together with the five others of the advance camp, watched the plane maneuver up to the tents. She came down neatly on the smooth snow, skidded on her runners like an expert skater, and came to a stop almost immediately in front of the marquee. Tommy Travers leaped out of the enclosed cockpit, which, shut off by glass from the cabin, was something like the front seat of a limousine. "Well, Captain, we followed that break for a hundred miles, and there's no ground cleft, as you expected," he said. "But Jim Dodd and I picked up something, and Jim seems to have gone crazy." * * * * * Through the windows of the cabin, Jim Dodd, the young archaeologist of the party, could be seen apparently wrestling with something that looked like a suit of armor. By the time Captain Storm, Jimmy, and the other members of the party had reached the cabin door, Dodd had got it open and flung himself out backward, still hugging what he had found, and maneuvering so that he managed to fall on his back and sustain its weight. "Say, what the--what--what's that?" gasped Storm. Even the least scientific minded of the party gasped in amazement at what Dodd had. It resembled nothing so much as an enormous beetle. As a matter of fact, it was an insect, for it had the three sections that characterize this class, but it was merely the shell of one. Between four and five feet in height, when Dodd stood it on end, it could now be seen to consist of the hard exterior substance of some huge, unknown coleopter. This substance, which was fully three inches thick over the thorax, looked as hard as plate armor. "What is it?" gasped Storm again. * * * * * Tommy Travers made answer, for James Dodd was evidently incapable of speech, more from emotion than from the force with which he had landed backward in the snow. "We found it at the pole, Captain," he said. "At least, pretty near where the pole ought to be. We ran into a current of warm air or something. The snow had melted in places, and there were patches of bare rock. This thing was lying in a hollow among them." "If I didn't see it before my eyes, I'd think you crazy, Tommy," said Storm with some asperity. "What is it, a crab?" "Crab be damned!" shouted Jim Dodd, suddenly recovering his faculties. "My God, Captain Storm, don't you know the difference between an insect and a crustacean? This is a fossil beetle. Don't you see the distinguishing mark of the coleoptera, those two elytra, or wing-covers, which meet in the median dorsal line? A beetle, but with the shell of a crustacean instead of mere chitin. That's what led you astray, I expect. God, what a tale we'll have to tell when we get back to New York! We'll drop everything else, and spend years, if need be, looking for other specimens." "Like fun you will!" shouted Higby, the astronomer of the party. "Lemme tell you right here, Dodd, nobody outside the Museum of Natural History is going to care a damn about your old fossils. What we're going to do is to march straight to the true pole, and spend a year taking observations and parallaxes. If Einstein's brochure, in which he links up gravitation with magnetism, is correct--" "Fossil beetles!" Jim Dodd burst out, ignoring the astronomer. "That means that in the Tertiary Era, probably, there existed forms of life in the antarctic continent that have never been found elsewhere. Imagine a world in which the insect reached a size proportionate to the great saurians, Captain Storm! I'll wager poor Bram discovered this. That's why he stayed behind when the Greystoke Expedition came within a hundred miles of the pole. I'll wager he's left a cairn somewhere with full details inside it. We've got to find it. We--" * * * * * But Jim Dodd, suddenly realizing that the rest of the party could hardly be said to share his enthusiasm in any marked degree, broke off and looked sulky. "You say you found this thing pretty nearly upon the site of the true pole?" Captain Storm asked Tommy. "Within five miles, I'd say, Captain. The fog was so bad that we couldn't get our directions very well." "Well, then, there's going to be no difficulty," answered Storm. "If this fair weather lasts, we'll be at the pole in another week, and we'll start making our permanent camp. Plenty of opportunity for all you gentlemen. As for me, I'm merely a sailor, and I'm trying to be impartial. "And please remember, gentlemen, that we're well into March now, and likely to have the first storms of autumn on us any day. So let's drop the argument and remember that we've got to pull together!" * * * * * Tommy Travers was the only skilled aviator of the expedition, which had brought two planes with it. It was a queer friendship that had sprung up between him and Jim Dodd. Tommy, the blasé ex-Harvard man, who was known along Broadway, and had never been able to settle down, seemed as different as possible from the spectacled, scholarly Dodd, ten years his senior, red-haired, irascible, and living, as Tommy put it, in the Age of Old Red Sandstone, instead of in the year 1930 A. D. It was generally known--though the story had been officially denied--that there had been trouble in the Greystoke Expedition of three years before. Captain Greystoke had taken the brilliant, erratic Bram, of the Carnegie Archaeological Institute, with him, and Bram's history was a long record of trouble. It was Bram who had exploded the faked neolithic finds at Mannheim, thereby earning the undying enmity of certain European savants, but brilliantly demolishing them when he smashed the so-called Mannheim stone pitcher (valued at a hundred thousand dollars) with a pocket-axe, and caustically inquired whether neolithic man used babbit metal rivets to fasten on his jug handles. * * * * * Bram's brilliant work in the investigation of the origin of the negrito Asiatic races had been awarded one of the Nobel prizes, and Bram had declined it in an insulting letter because he disapproved of the year's prize award for literature. He had been a storm center for years, embittered by long opposition, when he joined the Greystoke Expedition for the purpose of investigating the marine fauna of the antarctic continent. And it was known that his presence had nearly brought the Greystoke Expedition to the point of civil war. Rumor said he had been deliberately abandoned. His enemies hoped he had. The facts seemed to be, however, that in an outburst of temper he had walked out of camp in a furious snowstorm and perished. For days his body had been sought in vain. Jimmy Dodd had run foul of Bram some years before, when Bram had published a criticism of one of Dodd's addresses dealing with fossil monotremes, or egg-laying mammals. In his inimitable way, Bram had suggested that the problem which came first, the egg or the chicken, was now seen to be linked up with the Darwinian theory, and solved in the person of Dodd. Nevertheless, Jimmy Dodd entertained a devoted admiration for the memory of the dead scientist. He believed that Bram must have left records of inestimable importance in a cairn before he died. He wanted to find that cairn. And he knew, what a number of Bram's enemies knew, that the dead scientist had been a morphine addict. He believed that he had wandered out into the snow under the influence of the drug. * * * * * Dodd, who shared a tent with Tommy, had raved the greater part of the night about the find. "Well, but see here, Jimmy, suppose these beetles did inhabit the antarctic continent a few million years ago, why get excited?" Tommy had asked. "Excited?" bellowed Dodd. "It opens one of the biggest problems that science has to face. Why haven't they survived into historic times? Why didn't they cross into Australia, like the opossum, by the land bridge then existent between that continent and South America? Beetles five feet in length, and practically invulnerable! What killed them off? Why didn't they win the supremacy over man?" Jimmy Dodd had muttered till he went to sleep, and he had muttered worse in his dreams. Tommy was glad that Captain Storm had given them permission to return to the same spot next morning and look for further fossils, though his own interest in them was of the slightest. The dogs were being harnessed next morning when the two men hopped into the plane. The thermometer was unusually high for the season, for in the south polar regions the short summer is usually at an end by March. Tommy was sweating in his furs in a temperature well above the freezing point. The snow was crusted hard, the sky overcast with clouds, and a wind was blowing hard out of the south, and increasing in velocity hourly. "A bad day for starting," said Captain Storm. "Looks like one of the autumn storms was blowing up. If I were you, I'd watch the weather, Tommy." * * * * * Tommy glanced at Dodd, who was huddled in the rear cockpit, fuming at the delay, and grinned whimsically. "I guess I can handle her, Captain," he answered. "It's only an hour's flight to where he found that fossil." "Just as you please," said Storm curtly. He knew that Tommy's judgment as a pilot could always be relied upon. "You'll find us here when you return," he added. "I've counter-manded the order to march. I don't like the look of the weather at all." Tommy grinned again and pressed the starter. The engine caught and warmed up. One of the men kicked away the blocks of ice that had been placed under the skids to serve as chocks. The plane taxied over the crusted snow, and took off into the south. * * * * * The camp was situated in a hollow among the ice-mountains that rose to a height of two or three thousand feet all around. Tommy had not dreamed how strongly the gale was blowing until he was over the top of them. Then he realized that he was facing a tougher proposition than he had calculated on. The storm struck the biplane with full force. A snowstorm was driving up rapidly, blackening the sky. The sun, which only appeared for a brief interval every day, was practically touching the horizon as it rose to make its minute arc in the sky. A star was visible through a rift in the clouds overhead, and the pale daylight in which they had started had already become twilight. Tommy was tempted to turn back, but it was only a hundred miles, and Jimmy Dodd would give him no peace if he did so. So he put the plane's nose resolutely into the wind, watching his speed indicator drop from a hundred miles per hour to eighty, sixty, forty--less. The storm was beating up furiously. Of a sudden the clouds broke into a deluge of whirling snow. In a moment the windshield was a frozen, opaque mass. Tommy opened it, and peered out into the biting air. He could see nothing.... The plane, caught in the fearful cross-currents that swirl about the southern roof of the world, was fluttering like a leaf in the wind. The altimeter was dropping dangerously. Tommy opened the throttle to the limit, zooming, and, like a spurred horse, the biplane shot forward and upward. She touched five thousand, six, seven--and that, for her, was ceiling under those conditions, for a sudden tremendous shock of wind, coming in a fierce cross-current, swung her round, tossed her to and fro in the enveloping white cloud. And Tommy knew that he had the fight of his life upon his hands. * * * * * The compasses, which required considerable daily adjusting to be of use so near to the pole, had now gone out of use altogether. The air speed indicator had apparently gone west, for it was oscillating between zero and twenty. The turn and bank indicator was performing a kind of tango round the dial. Even the eight-day clock had ceased to function, but that might have been due to the fact that Tommy had neglected to wind it. And the oil pressure gauge presented a still more startling sight, for a glance showed that either there was a leak or else the oil had frozen. Tommy looked around at Dodd and pointed downward. Dodd responded with a vicious forward wave of his hand. Tommy shook his head, and Dodd started forward along the cabin, apparently with the intention of committing assault and battery upon him. Instead, the archaeologist collapsed upon the floor as the plane spun completely around under the impact of a blast that was like a giant's slap. The plane was no longer controllable. True, she responded in some sort to the controls, but all Tommy was able to do was to keep her from going into a crazy sideslip or nose dive as he fought with the elements. And those elements were like a devil unchained. One moment he was dropping like a plummet, the next he was shooting up like a rocket as a vertical blast of air caught the plane and tossed her like a cork into the invisible heavens. Then she was revolving, as if in a maelstrom, and by degrees this rotary movement began to predominate. Round and round went the plane, in circles that gradually narrowed, and it was all Tommy could do to swing the stick so as to keep her from skidding or sideslipping. And as he worked desperately at his task Tommy began to realize something that made him wonder if he was not dreaming. * * * * * The snow was no longer snow, but rain--mist, rather, warm mist that had already cleared the windshield and covered it with tiny drops. And that white, opaque world into which he was looking was no longer snow but fog--the densest fog that Tommy had ever encountered. Fog like white wool, drifting past him in fleecy flakes that looked as if they had solid substance. Warm fog that was like balm upon his frozen skin, but of a warmth that was impossible within a few miles of the frozen pole. Then there came a momentary break in it, and Tommy looked down and uttered a cry of fear. Fear, because he knew that he must be dreaming. Not more than a thousand feet beneath him he saw patches of snow, and patches of--green grass, the brightest and most verdant green that he had ever seen in his life. He turned round at a touch on his shoulder. Dodd was leaning over him, one hand pointing menacingly upward and onward. "You fool," Tommy bellowed in his ear, "d'you think the south pole lies over there? It's here! Yeah, don't you get it, Jimmy? Look down! This valley--God, Jimmy, the south pole's a hole in the ground!" And as he spoke he remembered vaguely some crank who had once insisted that the two poles were hollow because--what was the fellow's reasoning? Tommy could not remember it. But there was no longer any doubt but that they were dropping into a hole. Not more than a mile around, which explained why neither Scott nor Amundsen had found it when they approximated to the site of the pole. A hole--a warm hole, up which a current of warm air was rushing, forming the white mist that now gradually thinned as the plane descended. The plateau with its covering of eternal snows loomed in a white circle high overhead. Underneath was green grass now--grass and trees! * * * * * The fog was nearly gone. The plane responded to the controls again. Tommy pushed the stick forward and came round in a tighter circle. And then something happened that he had not in the least expected. One moment he seemed to be traveling in a complete calm, a sort of clear funnel with a ring of swirling fog outside it--the next he was dropping into a void! There was no air resistance--there seemed hardly any air, for he felt a choking in his throat, and a tearing at his lungs as he strove to breathe. He heard a strangled cry from Dodd, and saw that he was clutching with both hands at his throat, and his face was turning purple. The controls went limp in Tommy's hands. The plane, gyrating more slowly, suddenly nosed down, hung for a moment in that void, and then plunged toward the green earth, two hundred feet below, with appalling swiftness. Tommy realized that a crash was inevitable. He threw his goggles up over his forehead, turned and waved to Dodd in ironic farewell. He saw the earth rush up at him--then came the shattering crash, and then oblivion! CHAPTER II _Beetles and Humans_ How long he had remained unconscious, Tommy had no means of determining. Of a sudden he found himself lying on the ground beside the shattered plane, with his eyes wide open. He stared at it, and stared about him, without understanding where he was, or what had happened to him. His first idea was that he had crashed on the golf links near Mitchell Field, Long Island, for all about him were stretches of verdant grass and small shrubby plants. Then, when he remembered the expedition, he was convinced that he had been dreaming. What brought him to a saner view was the discovery that he was enveloped in furs which were insufferably hot. He half raised himself and succeeded in unfastening his fur coat, and thus discovered that apparently none of his bones was broken. But the plane must have fallen from a considerable height to have been smashed so badly. Then Tommy discovered that he was lying upon an extensive mound of sand, thrown up as by some gigantic mole, for burrow tracks ran through it in every direction. It was this that had saved his life. Something was moving at his side. It was half-submerged in the sand-pile, and it was moving parallel to him with great rapidity. A grayish body, half-covered with grains of sand emerged, waving two enormously long tentacles. It was a shrimp, but fully three feet in length, and Tommy had never before had any idea what an unpleasant object a shrimp is. Tommy staggered to his feet and dropped nearer the plane, eyeing the shrimp with horror. But he was soon relieved as he discovered that it was apparently harmless. It slithered away and once more buried itself in the pile of sand. Now Tommy was beginning to remember. He looked into the wreckage of the plane. Jim Dodd was not there. He called his name repeatedly, and there was no response, except a dull echo from the ice-mountains behind the veil of fog. * * * * * He went to the other side of the plane, he scanned the ground all about him. Jimmy had disappeared. It was evident that he was nowhere near, for Tommy could see the whole of the lower scope of the bowl on every side of him. He had walked away--or he had been carried away! Tommy thought of the shrimp, and shuddered. What other fearsome monsters might inhabit that extraordinary valley? He sat down, leaning against the wreck of the fuselage, and tried to adjust his mind, tried to keep himself from going mad. He knew now that the flight had been no dream, that he was a member of his uncle's expedition, that he had flown with Jim toward the pole, had crashed in a vacuum. But where was Jim? And how were they going to get out of the damn place? Something like a heap of stones not far away attracted Tommy's attention. Perhaps Jim Dodd was lying behind that. Once more Tommy got upon his feet and began walking toward it. On the way, he stumbled against the sharp edge of something that protruded from the ground. It cut his leg sharply, and, with a curse, he began rubbing his shin and looking at the thing. Then he saw that it was another of the fossil shells, half-buried in the marshy ooze on which he was treading. The ground in this lower part of the valley was a swamp, on account of the very fine mist falling from the fog clouds that surrounded it impenetrably on every side. Then Tommy came upon another shell, and then another. And now he saw that there were piles of what he had taken to be rock everywhere, and that this was not rock but great heaps of the shells, all equally intact. Hundreds of thousands of the prehistoric beetles must have died in that valley, perhaps overcome by some cataclysm. * * * * * Tommy examined the heap near which he stood; he yelled Dodd's name, but again no answer came. Instead, something began to stir among the heaps of shells. For a moment Tommy hoped against hope that it was Dodd, but it wasn't Dodd. _It was a living beetle!_ A beetle fully five feet high as it stood erect, a pair of enormous wings outspread. And the head, which was larger than a man's, was the most frightful object Tommy had ever seen. Jim Dodd would have said at once that this was one of the Curculionidae, or snout beetles, for a prolongation of the head between the eyes formed a sort of beak a foot in length. The mouth, which opened downward, was armed with terrific mandibles, while the huge, compound eyes looked like enormous crystals of cut glass. Immediately in front of the eyes were two mandibles as long as a man's arms, with feathery processes at the ends. In addition to these there were three pairs of legs, the front pair as long as a man's, the hind pair almost as long as a horse's. * * * * * Paralyzed with horror, Tommy watched the monster, which had apparently been disturbed by the vibrations of his voice, extract itself from among the shells. Then, with a bound that covered fifteen feet, it had lessened the distance between them by half. And then a still more amazing thing happened. For of a sudden the hard shell slipped from the thorax, the wing-cases dropped off, the whole of the bony parts slipped to the ground with a clang, and a soft, defenseless thing went slithering away among the rocks. The beetle had moulted! Tommy dropped to the ground in the throes of violent nausea. Then, looking up again, he saw the girl! * * * * * She was about a hundred yards away from him, very close to the fallen plane, and she must have emerged from a large hole in the ground which Tommy could now see under a ledge of overhanging rock. She seemed to be dressed in a single garment which fell to her knees, and appeared to fit tightly about her body, but as she came nearer, Tommy, watching her, petrified by this latest apparition, discovered that it was woven of her own hair, which must have been of immense length, for it fell naturally to her shoulders, and thence was woven into this close-fitting material, a fringe an inch or two in length extending beneath the selvage. She was about six feet tall, and apparently made after the normal human pattern. She moved with a slow, majestic swing, and if ever any female had seemed to Tommy to have the appearance of an angel, this unknown woman did. She was so fair, in that flossy, flaxen covering, she moved with such easy grace, that Tommy, gaping, gradually crept nearer to her. She did not seem to see him. She was stooping over the very sand heap into which he had fallen. Suddenly, with lightning-like rapidity, her arms shot out, her hands began tunneling in the sand. With a cry of triumph she pulled out the shrimp Tommy had seen, or another like it, and, stripping it off the shell, began devouring it with evident relish. In the midst of her meal the girl raised her head and looked at Tommy. He saw that her eyes were filmed, vacant, dead. Then of a sudden a third membrane was drawn back across the pupils, and she saw him. She let the shrimp drop to the ground, uttered a cry, and moved toward him with a tottering gait. She groped toward him with outstretched arms. And then she was blind again, for the membrane once more covered her pupils. It was as if her eyes were unable to endure even the dim light of the valley, through whose surrounding mists the low sun, setting just above the horizon, was unable to diffuse itself save as a brightening of the fog curtain. * * * * * Tommy stepped toward the girl. His outstretched hand touched hers. It was unquestionably a woman's hand he held, delicately warm, with exquisitely moulded fingers, in whose touch there seemed to be, for the girl, some tactile impression of him. Again that membrane was drawn back from the girl's pupils for a fleeting flash. Tommy saw two eyes of intense black, their color contrasting curiously with the flaxen color of her hair and her white skin, almost the tint of an albino's. Those eyes had surveyed him, and appeared satisfied that he was one of her kind. She could not have seen very much in that almost instantaneous flash of vision. Queer, that membrane--as if she had been used to living in the dark, as if the full light of the day was unbearable! She drew her hand away. Soft vocals came from her lips. Suddenly she turned swiftly. She could not have seen, but before Tommy had seen, she had sensed the presence of the old man who was creeping out of the hole in the mountainside. He moved forward craftily, and then pounced upon the sand pile, and in a moment had pulled out another of the big shrimps, which he proceeded to devour with greedy relish. The girl, leaving Tommy's side, joined him in that unpleasant feast. And in the midst of it a flood came pouring from the hole--a flood of living beetles, covering the ground in fifteen-foot leaps as they dashed at the two. To his horror, Tommy saw Jimmy Dodd among them, wrapped in his fur coat like a mummy, and being pushed and rolled forward like a football. For a moment Tommy hesitated, torn between his solicitude for Jim Dodd and that for the girl. Then, as the foremost of the monsters bounded to her side, he ran between them. The vicious jaws snapped within six inches of Tommy's face, with a force that would have carried away an ear, or shredded the cheek, if they had met. * * * * * Tommy struck out with all his might, and his fist clanged on the resounding shell so that the blood spurted from his bruised knuckles. He had struck the monster squarely upon the thorax, and he had not discommoded it in the least. It turned on him, its glassy, many-faceted eyes glaring with a cold, infernal light. Tommy struck out again with his left hand, this time upon the pulpy flesh of the downward-opening mouth. An inch higher, and he would have impaled his hand upon the beak, with a point like a needle, and evidently used for purposes of attack, since it was not connected with the mandibles. The blow appeared to fall in the only vulnerable place. The monster dropped upon its back and lay there, unable to reverse itself, its antenna and forelegs waving in the air, and the rear legs rasping together in a shrill, strident shriek. Instantly, as Tommy darted out of the way, the swarm fell upon the helpless monster and began devouring it, tearing strips of flesh from the lower shell, which in the space of a half-minute was reduced simply to bone. The most horrible feature of this act of cannibalism was the complete silence with which it was performed, except for the rasping of the dying monster's legs. It was evident that the huge beetles had no vocal apparatus. For the moment left unguarded, Jim Dodd flung down the collar of his fur coat, stared about him, and recognized Tommy. "My God, it's you!" he yelled. "Well, can you--?" He had no time to finish his sentence. A pair of antenna went round his neck from behind. At the same instant Tommy, the old man, and the girl were gripped by the monsters, which, forming a solid phalanx about them, began hustling them in the direction of the hole. Resistance was utterly impossible. Tommy felt as if he was being pushed along by a moving wall of stone. Inside the opening it was completely dark. Tommy shouted to Dodd, but the strident sounds of the moving legs drowned his cries. He was being pushed forward into the unknown. * * * * * Suddenly the ground seemed to fall away beneath his feet. He struggled, cried out, and felt himself descending through the air. For a full half-minute he went downward at a speed that constricted his throat so that he could hardly draw breath. Then, just as he had nerved himself for the imminent crash, the speed of his descent was checked. In another moment he found that he was slowing to a standstill in mid-air. He was beginning to float backward--upward. But the wall of moving shells, pushing against him, forced him on, downward, and yet apparently against the force of gravitation. Then of a sudden Tommy was aware of a dim light all about him. His feet touched earth and grass as softly as a thistledown alighting. He found himself seated in the same dim light upon red grass, and staring into Jimmy's face. CHAPTER III _Ten Miles Underground_ "What I was going to say when we were interrupted, was, 'Can you beat it?'" Jimmy Dodd observed, with admirable sang-froid. They were still seated on the red grass, gazing about them at what looked like an illimitable plain, and upward into depths of darkness. It was warm, and the light, furnished by what appeared to be luminous vegetation, was about that of twilight. On every side were clumps of trees and shrubs, which formed centers of phosphorescent illumination, but for the most part the land was open, and here and there human figures appeared, moving with head down and arms hanging earthward. "No, I'm damned if I can," said Tommy. "What happened to you after we crashed?" "Why, first thing I knew, I found myself riding on the back of a fossil beetle, apparently one of the _curculionidae_," said Dodd. "Never, mind being so precise, Jimmy. Let's call it a beetle. Go on." "They set me down inside the hole and seemed to be investigating me, the whole swarm of them. Of course, I thought I was dead, and come to my just reward, especially when I saw those beaks. Then one of them began tickling my face with its antenna, and I drew up my fur collar. They didn't seem to like the feel of the fur, and after a while the whole gang started hustling me back again, like a nest of ants carrying something they don't want outside their hill. And then you bobbed up." "Well, my opinion is you saved your life by pulling up your collar," said Tommy. "Looks to me as if it's a case of the survival of the fittest, said fittest being the insect, and the human race taking second place. You know what the humans here live on, don't you?" "No, what?" "Shrimps as big as poodles. If you'd seen that girl and the old man getting outside them, you'd realize that there seems to be a food shortage in this part of the world. Say, where in thunder are we, Jimmy?" "Haven't you guessed yet, Travers?" asked Dodd, a spice of malice in his voice. "I suppose this is some sort of big hole on the site of the south pole, with warm vapors coming up. Maybe a great fissure in the earth, or something." * * * * * Jimmy Dodd's grin, seen in the half-light, was rather disconcerting. "How far do you think we dropped just now?" Dodd asked. "Why, I'd say several hundred yards," replied Tommy. "What's your estimate?" "Just about ten miles," answered Dodd. "What? You're still crazy! Why, we slowed up!" "Yeah," grinned Dodd, "we slowed up. We're inside the crust of the world. That's the long and short of it. The earth we've known is just a shell over our heads." "Yeah? Walking head downward, are we? Then why don't we drop to the center of the earth, you damn fool?" "Because, my dear fellow, you can swing a pailful of water round your head without spilling any of it. In other words, our old friend, centrifugal force. The speed with which the earth is rotating, keeps us on our feet, head downward. To be precise, the center of the earth's gravity lies in the middle of the hollow sphere, of course, but the counteraction of centrifugal force throws it outward to the middle of the ten-mile crust. That's why we slowed down after we were half-way through. We were moving against gravity." "And what's up there, or down there, or whatever you call it?" asked Tommy, pointing to what ought to have been the sky. "Nothing. It's the center of the tennis ball, though I imagine it's pretty near a vacuum when you get up a mile or so, owing to the speed of the earth's rotation, which forces the heat into the shell." "You mean to say you actually believe that stuff you've been handing me?" asked Tommy, after a pause. "Then how did human beings get here, and those damn beetles? And why's the grass red?" * * * * * "The grass is red because there's no sunlight to produce chlorophyll. The inhabitants of the deep sea are red or black, almost invariably. In the case of the humans, they've become bleached. My belief is that that man and woman we saw, and those"--he pointed to the vague forms of human beings, who moved across the grass, gathering something--"are survivors of the primitive race that still exists as the Australians. Undoubtedly one of the branches of the human stock originated in antarctica at a time when it enjoyed a tropical temperature, and was the land bridge between Australia and South America." "And the--beetles?" asked Tommy. "Ah, they go back to the days when nature was in a more grandiose mood!" replied the archaeologist enthusiastically. "That's the most wonderful discovery of the ages. The world will go crazy over them when we bring back the first living specimens to the zoological parks of the great cities. "But," Dodd went on, speaking with still more enthusiasm, "of course, this is only the beginning, Tommy. There are ten million species of insects, according to Riley, and it is inevitable that there must be hundreds of thousands of other survivals from the age of the great saurians, perhaps even some of the saurians themselves. Who knows but that we may discover the ancestor of the extinct monotremes, the rhynchocephalia, the pterodactyls, hatch a brood of aepyornis eggs--" "And," said Tommy tartly, "how are we going to get them back, apart from the little problem of getting out of here ourselves?" "Don't let's worry about that now," answered Dodd. "It will take ten years of the hardest kind of labor even to begin a classification of the inhabitants of this inner world. I could sit down for ever, and--" But Jimmy Dodd rose to his feet as a pair of antenna whipped round his neck and jerked him bodily upward. * * * * * One of the monster beetles was standing upright behind them, and by its gestures it evidently meant that Dodd and Tommy were to join the crowd of humans in the offing. As Dodd turned upon it with an indignant show of fists, one of the antennae whipped off his fur coat and stung him painfully with the bristle-like attachment at the end. It was a painful moment when Dodd and Tommy realized that they were powerless against the monstrous beetles. Tommy tried the uppercut with which he had knocked out the deceased monster, but the quick jerks of the present beetle's head were infinitely faster than the movements of his fists, while the antenna had a whiplike quality about them that speedily convinced him that discretion was the card to play. Under the threat of the curling antenna, Tommy and Dodd moved in the direction of the slowly circulating humans. Numerous tiny rodents, which evidently kept the red grass short, scampered away under their feet. The beetles made no further effort to force them on, but now they could see that a number of the monsters were stationed at intervals around a wide circle, keeping the humans in a single body. "Good Lord!" ejaculated Tommy, stopping. "See what they're doing, Dodd? They're herding us, like cowboys herd steers. Look at that!" * * * * * One of the herd, a male with a long beard, suddenly broke from the herd, bawling, and flung himself upon a beetle guard. The antenna shot forth, coiled around his neck, and hurled him a dozen feet to the ground, where he lay stunned for a moment before arising and rejoining his companions. "But what are they looking for?" demanded Dodd. Tommy had not heard him. He had stopped in front of one of the luminous trees and was plucking a fruit from it. "Jimmy, ever see an apple before?" he asked. "If this isn't an apple, I'll eat my head." It certainly was an apple, and one of the largest and juiciest that Tommy had ever tasted. It was the reddest apple he had ever seen, and would have won the first prize at any agricultural fair. "And look at this!" shouted Tommy, plucking an enormous luminous peach from another tree. They began munching slowly, then, seeing one of the beetle guards approaching them, they moved into the midst of the crowd. "Did you notice anything strange about those fruit trees?" inquired Dodd, as he munched. "I'll swear they were monocotyledonous, which, after all, is what one would expect. Still, to think that the monocotyledons evolved the familiar drupes, or stone fruits, on a parallel line to the dicotyledons is--amazing!" A box on the ear like the kick of a mule's hoof jerked the last word from his lips as he went sprawling. He got up, to see the girl standing before him, intense disgust and anger on her face. She snatched the fruits from the hands of the two Americans and hurled them away. It was evident from her manner that she considered such diet in the highest degree unclean and disgusting; also that she considered herself charged with the duty of superintending Tommy's and Dodd's education, but especially Dodd's. * * * * * Taking him by the arm, she propelled him into the midst of the groping humans. She released him, stooped, and suddenly stood up, a shrimp about eighteen inches long in her hand. Towering over Dodd by six inches, she took his face in her hands and began caressing him; then, seizing his jaws in her strong fingers, she pried them apart, and popped the tail end of the shrimp into his mouth. Dodd let out a yelp, and spat out the love-gift, to be rewarded with another box on the ear by the young Amazon, while Tommy stood by, convulsed with laughter, and yet in considerable trepidation, for fear of being forced to share Dodd's fate. For the girl was again holding out the tail end of the crustacean, and Jim Dodd's jaws were slowly and reluctantly approaching it. But suddenly there came an intervention as the strident rasping of beetle legs was heard in the distance. Panic seized the human herd, grovelling for shrimps in the sandy soil with its tufts of red grasses. Milling in an uneasy mob, they cowered under the lashes of the antenna of the beetle guards, which sacrificed their backs through their hair garments whenever any of them tried to bolt. Nearer and nearer came the beetles, louder and more penetrating the shriek of their rasping legs. Now the swarm came into sight, rank after rank of the shell-clad monsters, leaping fifteen feet at a bound with perfect precision, until they had formed a solid phalanx all around the humans. * * * * * Tommy heard sighs of despair, he heard muttering, and then he realized, with deep thankfulness, that these human beings, degraded though they were, had a speech of their own. In the middle of the front line appeared a beetle a foot taller than the rest. That it was either a king or queen was evident from the respect paid it by the rest of the swarm. At its every movement a bodyguard of beetles moved in unison, forming themselves in a group before it and on either side. There would have been something ludicrous about these movements, but for the impression of horror that the swarm made upon Tommy and Jim Dodd. Hitherto both had supposed that the hideous insects acted by blind instinct, but now there could no longer be any doubt that they were possessed of an organized intelligence. * * * * * The strident sounds grew louder. Already Tommy was beginning to discover certain variations in them. It was dawning upon him that they formed a language--and a perfectly intelligible one. For, as the note changed about a half-semitone, two of the monsters left the side of their ruler and reached the two men with three successive leaps. Their movements left no doubt in either Tommy's or Dodd's mind what was required. The two strode hastily toward the assemblage, and stopped as the antenna of their guards came down in menacing fashion. It was light enough for Tommy to see the face of the ruler of the hellish swarm. And it required all his powers of will to keep from collapsing from sheer horror at what he saw. For, despite the close-fitting shell, the face of the beetle king was the face of a man--a white man! Jim Dodd's shriek rang out above the shrilling of the beetle-legs, "Bram! It's you, it's you! My God, it's you, Bram!" CHAPTER IV _Bram's Story_ A sneering chuckle broke from Bram's lips. "Yes, it's me, James Dodd," he answered. "I'm a little surprised to see you here, Dodd, but I'm mighty glad. Still insane upon the subject of fossil monotremes, I suppose?" The words came haltingly from Bram's lips, as from those of a man who had lost the habit of easy speech. And Tommy, looking on, and trying to keep in possession of his faculties, had already come to the conclusion that the sounds were inaudible to the beetles. Probably their hearing apparatus was not attuned to such slow vibrations of the human voice. Also he had discovered that Bram was wearing the discarded shell of one of the monsters: he had not grown the shell himself. It was fastened about his body by a band of the hair-cloth, fastened to the two protuberances of the elytra, or wing-cases, on either side of the dorsal surface. The discovery at least robbed the situation of one aspect of terror. Bram, however he had obtained control of the swarm, was still only a man. "Yes, still insane," answered Dodd bitterly. "Insane enough to go on believing that the polyprotodontia and the dasyuridae, which includes the peramelidae, or bandicoots, and the banded ant-eaters, or myrmecobidae, are not to be found in fossil form, for the excellent reason that they were not represented before the Upper Cretaceous period." "You lie! You lie!" screamed Bram. "I have shown to all the world that phascalotherium, amphitherium, amblotherium, spalacotherium, and many other orders are to be found in the Upper Jurassic rocks of England, Wyoming, and other places. You--you are the man who denied the existence of the nototherium, of the marsupial lion, in pleistocene deposits! You denied that the dasyuridae can be traced back beyond the pleistocene. And you stand there and lie to me, when you are at my mercy!" "For God's sake don't aggravate him," whispered Tommy to Dodd. "Don't you see that he's insane? Humor him, or we'll be dead men. Think what the world will lose, if you are never able to go back with your specimens," he added craftily. * * * * * But Dodd, whose eyes were glaring, said a sublime thing: "I have given my life to science, and I will never deny my master!" With a screech, which, however, was evidently inaudible to the beetles, Bram leaped at Dodd and seized him by the throat. The two men fell to the ground, the ponderous beetle-shell completely covering them. Underneath it they could be seen to be struggling desperately. All the while the beetle horde remained perfectly motionless. Tommy thought afterward that in this fact lay their brightest chances of escape, if Bram's immediate vengeance did not fall on them. Either because Bram was not himself a beetle, or because in some other way the swarm instinct was not stirred, the monsters watched the struggle with complete indifference. At the moment, however, Tommy was only concerned with saving Dodd from the madman. He got his foot beneath the shell, then inserted his leg; using his whole body as a lever, he succeeded in turning Bram over on his back. Then, and only then, the swarm rushed in upon them. Then Tommy realized that he had touched one of the triggers that regulated the beetle's automatism. In another instant Bram would have been torn to pieces. The needle-beaks were darting through the air, the hideous jaws were snapping. Bram's yells rang through the cavern. * * * * * Dodging beneath the avalanche of the monsters, Tommy got Bram upon his feet again. The beetles stopped, every movement arrested. Bram's hand went to the pocket of his tattered coat, there came a snap, a flash. Bram had ignited an automatic cigarette-lighter! Instantly the monsters went scurrying away into the distance. And Tommy had another clue. The beetles, living in the dimness of the underworld, could not stand light or fire! He ran to where Jimmy was lying, face upward, on the ground. His face was badly scarred by Bram's nails, and the blood was spurting from a long gash in his throat, made by the sharp flint that was lying beside him. He had some time before discarded his fur coat. Now he pulled off his coat, and, tearing off the tail of his shirt, he made a pad and a bandage, with which he attempted to staunch the blood and bind the wound. It must have taken ten minutes before the failing heart force enabled him to get the bleeding under control. Dodd had nearly bled to death, his face was drawn and waxen, but, because the pulsation was so feeble, the artery had ceased to spurt. Then only did Tommy take notice of Bram. He had been squatting near, and Tommy realized that he had unconsciously observed Bram put some sort of pellets into his mouth. Now he realized that Bram was a drug fiend. That was what had made him walk out of the Greystoke camp in the storm. Bram got up and came toward them. "Is he dead?" he whispered hoarsely. "I--I lost my temper. You two--I don't intend to kill you. There--there's room for the three of us. I've got--plans of the utmost importance to humanity." "I don't think much of the way you've started to carry them out," answered Tommy bitterly. "No, he's not dead yet, but I wouldn't give much for his chances, even in the best hospital. The best thing you can do now is to go to hell, and take your beetles with you," he added. * * * * * Bram, without replying, raised his head and emitted from his throat the shrillest whistle that Tommy had ever heard. The response was amazing. Rasping out of the darkness came eight beetles in pairs. Instead of leaping from an upright position, they trotted in the manner of horses, on all fours, their shells, which touched at the edges, forming a solid surface, gently rounded in the center so that a man's body could lie there and fit snugly into the groove. "Help me get him up," said Bram. "Trust me! I'll do my best for him. If we leave him here they may kill and eat him. I can't trust all those beetle guards." Tommy hesitated a moment, then decided to follow Bram's suggestion. Together they raised the unconscious man to the beetle-shell couch. Bram seated himself upon the boss of one of the beetle-shells in front, and Tommy jumped up behind. Next moment, to his amazement, the trained steeds were flying smoothly through the air, at a rate that could not have been less than seventy-five to eighty miles an hour. Tommy's shell seat was not a bed of roses, but he hardly noticed that. He was thinking that if Dodd lived they should be able to turn the tables. For, unknown to Bram, he was in possession of the cigarette-lighter which he had picked up, and which Bram, in his agitation, had forgotten. It was full of petrol, or some other fluid of a similar nature, which Bram must have obtained from some natural source within the earth. And, in an emergency, Tommy knew that he had the means of keeping the beetles at bay. * * * * * They had traveled for perhaps an hour when a faint light began to glow in the distance. It grew brighter, and a roaring sound became audible. A turn of the track that they were traversing, and the light became a glare. A terrific sight met Tommy's eyes. Out of the bowels of the earth--actually out of the crust beneath their feet--there shot a pillar of roaring flame, of intense white color, and radiating a heat that was perceptible even at a distance of several hundred yards. The beetle steeds dropped gently to the ground; they halted. Bram got down, grinning. "Nicely trained horses, what?" he asked. "By the way, you have the advantage of me in names. Who and what are you?" Tommy told him. "Well, Travers, it looks as if we're going to be companions for some time to come, and I quite admit you saved my life back there. So we don't want to start with secrets. This is a natural petrol spring, which has probably been burning undiminished for ages. My trained beetles are blind--you didn't happen to notice I'd cut off their antenna? But the rest of the swarm daren't come near it. So that makes me their master. "Pretty trick, what, Travers? I'm the Lord of the Flame down here, and I'm using my advantage. But don't get the idea of supplanting me. There are lots of other tricks you don't know anything about, and I'll have to trust you better before--" He broke off and slipped another pellet into his mouth. "Help me get Dodd down, if this is our destination," answered Tommy. They lifted Dodd to the ground. He was conscious now, and moaning for water. The two men carried him into a sort of large cavern, at the farther end of which the fire was roaring. Bram went to a spring that trickled down one side, filled something that looked like a petrified lily calyx, and brought it to Dodd, who drained it. * * * * * Tommy looked about him. He was astonished to see that the place was, in a way, furnished. Bram had carved out a very creditable couch, and several low chairs, evidently with a stone ax, for by the light of the fire, which cast a fair illumination even at that distance, Tommy could see the marks of the implement, rough and irregular, in the wood. On the ground were thick rugs, woven of hair, and two or three more rugs of the same material lay on the couch. It was evident that the human herd was expected to furnish textile materials as well as meat. "Sit down, and make yourself comfortable," said Bram, when they had raised Dodd to the couch. "We'll have dinner, and then we'll talk. I can give you a fine vegetarian meal. Those dirty shrimp-eating savages look on me as a cannibal because I eat the fruits of the trees." He grinned. "There's a bad shortage of food in Submundia, as I've named this part of the world," he went on, "for until I came the beetles simply devoured the humans wholesale, instead of breeding them, like I taught them. And there's another of the hundred-and-fifty year swarms due to hatch out soon. However, we'll talk about that later. And all those fine fruits going to waste! Excuse me, Travers." * * * * * He disappeared, and returned in a minute or two with a small table, piled high with luscious fruits unknown to Tommy, though among them were some that looked like loaves of natural bread. Tommy, whose appetite never failed him even in the worst circumstances, fell to with a will. He was enjoying his meal when he happened to look up, and saw that the penumbra at the edge of the lighted zone was dense with beetles. Thousands--perhaps millions, for they stretched away as far as the eye could see, were packed together, their antenna waving in unison, their heads, beneath the shells, directed toward the fire. Bram saw Tommy's look of disgust, and laughed. "The fire seems to intoxicate them, Travers," he said. "They always throng the entrance when I'm here. It's as far as they dare go. They're quite blind in the least light. Care to smoke? I've learned the art of making some quite decent cigars." He produced a handful. "Oh, by the way, you didn't see my lighter anywhere, did you?" he went on, with a pretense of carelessness. "No," lied Tommy. "I was surprised you--" "Oh, there's a supply of petrol in the rocks. No matter," answered Bram carelessly. "Your friend looks bad," he added, glancing at Dodd, who had fallen asleep. "Travers, I'm sorry I lost my temper. The--the shock of meeting men from the upper world, you know." * * * * * Dodd opened his eyes and tried to whisper. Tommy bent over him and listened. "He wants to know whether he can have that girl to take care of him," he said. "What, the one I saw you with? Why, she's a cull, Travers." "What d'you mean?" asked Tommy. "Why--useless, you know. There's several of them running loose, and waiting to be rounded up. We raise two breeds, one for replenishing the stock, and one for meat. She's just a cull, a reversion, no use for either purpose. I'll have her brought by all means. I--I like Dodd. I want to get him to like me," Bram went on, with a sort of penitence that had a pathetic touch. "Our little differences--quite absurd, and I can prove he's wrong in his ideas. "Make yourself comfortable as long as you're here, Travers, and don't mind me. Only, don't try to escape. The beetles will get you if you do, and there's no way out of here--none that you'll find. And don't try to follow me. But you're a sensible man, and we'll all get along famously, I'm sure, as soon as Dodd recovers." CHAPTER V _Doomed!_ There were no means known to Tommy of reckoning time in that strange place of twilight. His watch had been broken in the airplane fall; and Dodd never remembered to wind his, but they estimated that about two weeks had passed, judging from the number of times they had slept and eaten. In those two weeks they had gradually begun to grow accustomed to their surroundings. Haidia, the girl, had arrived on beetle-back within an hour after Bram's departure, apparently into a cleft of the rocks--how he had communicated his order to the beetle steeds Tommy had no idea. And under the girl's ministrations Dodd was making good progress toward recovery. That Haidia was in love with Dodd in quite a human way was evident. To please the girl, both Dodd and Tommy had learned to eat the raw shrimps, which, being bloodless, were really no worse than oysters, and had a flavor half-way between shrimp and crawfish. To please the men, Haidia tried not to shudder when she saw them devouring the breadfruit and nectarines of which Bram always had a plentiful supply. Bram was solicitous in his inquiries for Dodd's health. "Jim, I've been thinking about our chances of getting away," said Tommy one morning. "It's evident Bram's only waiting for your recovery to put some proposition up to us. Suppose you were to feign paralysis." "How d'you mean? What for?" demanded Dodd. "If he thinks you're helpless, he'll be less on his guard. You haven't walked about in his presence." That was true, for the activities of the two had been nocturnal, when Bram had vanished. "Let him think a nerve's been severed in your neck, or something of the sort. If it doesn't work, you can always get better." * * * * * Dodd's realistic portrayal of a man with a partly paralyzed right side brought cries of horror from Bram next morning. Solicitously he helped Dodd back to the couch. Bram, when not under the influence of his drug, had moments of human feeling. "Can't you move that arm and leg at all, Dodd?" he asked. "No feeling in them?" "There's plenty of feeling," growled Dodd, "but they don't seem to work, that's all." "You'll get better," said Bram eagerly. "You must get better. I need you, Dodd, in spite of our differences. There's work for all of us, wonderful work. A new humanity, waiting to be born, Dodd, not of the miserable ape race, but of--of--" He checked himself, and a cunning look came over his face. He turned away abruptly. At the end of two weeks or so, an amazing thing happened. One day Haidia, with a look of triumph in her eyes, addressed Dodd with a few English words! Her brain, which had probably developed certain faculties in different proportions from those of the upper human race, had registered every word that either of the two men had ever spoken, and remembered it. As soon as Dodd ascertained this, he began to instruct her, and, with her abnormal faculties of memory, it was not long before she could talk quite intelligently. The obstacle that had stood between them was swept away. She became one of themselves. In the days that followed the girl told them brokenly something of the history of her race, of the legend of the universal flood that had driven them down into the bowels of the earth, of the centuries-long struggle with the beetles, and of the insects' gradual conquest of humanity, and the final reduction of the human race to a miserable, helpless remnant. * * * * * Everywhere, Haidia told them, were beetle swarms, everywhere humanity had been reduced to a few handfuls. Bram, by breeding mankind from prolific strains, and using the new-born progeny for food, had temporarily averted universal starvation. But a new swarm of beetles was due to hatch out shortly, and then-- The girl, with a shudder, put her hand to her bosom, and brought out a little bright-eyed lizard. "The old man you saw with me, who is one of our wise elders, has told our people that these things feed upon the beetle larvae," she said. "We are putting them secretly into the nests. But what can a few lizards do against millions." She looked up. "In the earth above us, the beetle larvae extend for miles, in a solid mass," she said. "When they come out as beetles, it will be the end of all of us." Bram had grown less suspicious as the time passed. His sudden visits to the cavern had ceased. Dodd and Tommy knew that he spent the nights--if they could be termed nights--lying in a drugged slumber somewhere among the rocks. They had asked Haidia whether there was any way of escape into the upper world. "There are two ways from here," answered the girl. "One is the way you came, but it is impossible to pass the beetle guards without being torn to pieces. The other--" She shuddered, and for an instant drew back the film from across her pupils, then uttered a little cry of pain at the light, dim though it was. "There is a bridge across that terrible monster that devours all it touches," she said, shuddering, meaning the fire. Suddenly Dodd had an inspiration. He still had the fur coat that he had worn, and, reaching into a pocket he drew out a pair of snow goggles, which he adjusted over Haidia's nose. "Now look!" he said. Haidia looked, blinked and, with an effort kept her eyes open. She gazed at Dodd in amazement. Dodd laughed, and pulled her toward him. He kissed her, and Haidia's eyes closed. "What is this?" she murmured. "First you give me medicine that opens my eyes, and then you give me medicine that closes them." "That's nothing," grinned Dodd. "Wait till you understand me better." * * * * * Bram's eyes were preternaturally bright. It was evident that he had been increasing his dose of late, and that he was fully under the influence of it now. "Well, gentlemen, the time has come for us to be frank with one another," he said, as the three were gathered about the little table, while Haidia crouched in a far corner of the cave. "I want you to work for me in my plans for the regeneration of humanity. The time for which I have long labored is almost at hand. Any day now the new swarm of beetles may emerge from the pupal stage. But before I speak further, come and see them, gentlemen!" He rose, and Dodd and Tommy rose too, Tommy supporting Dodd, who let his arm and leg trail awkwardly as he moved. Bram led the way into the cleft among the rocks into which he had been in the habit of passing. Beyond this opening the two men saw another smaller cavern, with a beetle guard standing on either side, antenna waving. Bram shrilled a sound, and the antenna dropped. The three passed through. Tommy saw a hair-cloth pallet set against the rocks, a table, and a chair. Beyond was a sloping ramp of earth. Overhead was a rock ceiling. Bram led the way up the ramp, and the three stepped through a gap in the rocks and found themselves on an extensive prairie. But in place of the red grass there was a vast sea of mud. By the light cast by the petrol fire, which roared up in the distance, a veritable fiery fountain, the two Americans could see that the mud was filled with huge encysted forms, grubs three or four feet long, motionless in the soil. * * * * * Bram scooped up one of them and tossed it into the air. It thudded to their feet and remained motionless. "As far as you can see, and for miles beyond, these pupae of the beetles lie buried in the decaying vegetation in which the eggs were hatched," said Bram. "Every century and a half, so far as I have been able to judge from comparative anatomy, a fresh swarm emerges. See!" He pointed to the pupa he had unearthed, which, as if stirred into activity by his handling, was now beginning to move. Or, rather, something was moving inside the cocoon. The shell broke, and the hideous head and folded antenna of a beetle appeared. With a convulsive writhing, the monster threw off the covering and stepped out. It extended its wings, glistening, with moisture, from the still soft and pliant carapace, or shell, and suddenly zoomed off into the distance. * * * * * Tommy shuddered as the boom of its flight grew softer and subsided. "Any day now the entire swarm will emerge," cried Bram. "How many moultings they undergo before they undergo the finished state, I do not know, but already, as you see, they are prepared for the battle of life. They emerge ravenous. That beetle will fall upon the man-herds and devour a full grown man, unless the guards destroy it." He raised his arms with the gesture of an ancient prophet. "Woe to the human race," he cried, "the wretched ape spawn that has cast out its teachers and persecuted those who sought to raise it to higher things!" * * * * * Tommy knew that Bram was referring to himself. Bram turned fiercely upon Dodd. "When I joined the Greystoke expedition," he cried, "it was with the express intention of refuting your miserable theories as to the fossil monotremes. I could not sleep or eat, so deeply was I affronted by them. For, if they were true, the dasyuridae are an innovation in the great scheme of nature, and man, instead of being a mere afterthought, a jest of the Creative Force, came to earth with a purpose. "That I deny," he yelled. "Man is a joke. Nature made him when she was tired, as the architect of a cathedral fashions a gargoyle in a sportive moment. It is the insect, not man, who is the predestined lord of the ages!" And for once in his life, perhaps because at this point Tommy dug him violently in the ribs, Dodd had the sense to remain silent. Bram led the way swiftly back into the larger cave. "When this swarm hatches out," he said, "I calculate that there will be a trillion beetles seeking food. There is no food for a tithe of them here underneath the earth. What then? Do you realize their stupendous power, their invincibility? "No, you don't realize it, because your minds, through long habit, are only attuned to think in terms of man. All man's long history of slaughter of the so-called lower creatures obsesses you, blinds your understanding. A beetle? Something to be trodden underfoot, crushed in sport! But I tell you, gentlemen, that nature--God, if you will--has designed to supplant the man-ape by the beetle. "He has resolved to throw down the wretched so-called intelligence of your kind and mine, and supplant it by the divine instinct of the beetle, an instinct that is infinitely superior, because it arrives at results instantaneously. It knows where man infers. Attuned closely to nature, it alone is able to fulfil the divine plan of Creation." * * * * * Bram was certainly under the influence of his drug; nevertheless, so violent were his gestures, so inspired was his utterance, that Tommy and Dodd listened almost in awe. "They are invincible," Bram went on. "Their fecundity is such that when the new swarm is hatched out their numbers alone will make them irresistible. They do not know fear. They shrink from nothing. And they will follow me, their leader--I, who know the means of controlling them. How, then, can puny man hope to stand against them? "Join me, gentlemen," Bram went on. "And beware how you decide rashly. For this is the supreme moment, not only of your own lives, but for all humanity and beetledom. Upon your decision hangs the future of the world. "For, irresistible as the beetles are, there is one thing they lack. That is the sense of historic continuity. If they destroy man, they will know nothing of man's achievements, poor though these are. My own work on the fossil monotremes--" "Which is a tissue of inaccuracies and half-baked deductions!" shouted Dodd. Bram started as if a whip had lashed him. "Liar!" he bawled. "Do you think that I, who left the Greystoke expedition in a howling blizzard because I knew that here, in the inner earth, I could refute your miserable impostures--do you think that I am in the mood to listen to your wretched farrago of impossibilities?" "Listen to me," bawled Dodd, advancing with waving arms. "Once and for all, let me tell you that your deductions are all based upon fallacious premises. No, I will not shut up, Tom Travers! You want me to aid your damned beetles in the destruction of humanity! I tell you that your phascalotherium, amphitherium, and all the rest of them, including the marsupial lion, are degenerate developments of the age following the pleistocene. I say the whole insect world was made to fertilize the plant world, so that it should bear fruit for human food. Man is the summit of the scale of evolution, and I will never join in any infamous scheme for his destruction." Bram glared at Dodd like a madman. Three times he opened his mouth to speak, but only inarticulate sounds came from his throat. And when at last he did speak, he said something that neither Dodd nor Tommy had anticipated. "It looks as if you're not so paralysed as you made out," he sneered. "You'll change your mind within what used to be called a day, Dodd. You'll crawl to my feet and beg for pardon. And you'll recant your lying theories about the fossil monotremes, or you die--the pair of you--you die!" CHAPTER VI _Escape!_ "I heard what he said. You shall not die. We shall go away to your place, where there are no beetles to eat us, even if"--Haidia shuddered--"even if we have to cross the bridge of fire, beyond which, they tell me, lies freedom." High over and a little to one side of the petrol flame Dodd and Tommy had seen the slender arch of rock leading into another cleft in the rocks. They had investigated it several times, but always the fierce heat had driven them back. Both Dodd and Tommy had noticed, however, that at times the fire seemed to shrink in volume and intensity. Observation had shown them that these times were periodical, recurring about every twelve hours. "I think I've got the clue, Tommy," said Dodd, as the three watched the fiery fountain and speculated on the possibility of escape. "That flow of petrol is controlled, like the tides on earth, by the pull of the moon. Just now it is at its height. I've noticed that it loses pretty nearly half its volume at its alternating phase. If I'm right, we'll make the attempt in about twelve hours." "Bram's given us twenty-four," said Tommy. "But how about getting Haidia across?" "I go where you go," said Haidia, sidling up to Dodd and looking down upon him lovingly. "I do not afraid of the fire. If it burn me up, I go to the good place." "Where's that, Haidia?" asked Dodd. "When we die, we go to a place where it is always dark and there are no beetles, and the ground is full of shrimps. We leave our bodies behind, like the beetles, and fly about happy for ever." "Not a bad sort of place," said Dodd, squeezing Haidia's arm. "If you think you're ready to try to cross the bridge, we'll start as soon as the fire gets lower." "I'll be on the job," answered Haidia, unconsciously reproducing a phrase of Tommy's. * * * * * The girl glided away, and disappeared through the thick of the beetle crowd clustered about the entrance to the cavern. Tommy and Dodd had already discovered that it was through her ability to reproduce a certain beetle sound meaning "not good to eat" that the girl could come and go. They had once tried it on their own account, and had narrowly escaped the lashing tentacles. After that there was nothing to do but wait. Three or four hours must have passed when Bram returned from his inner cave. "Well, Dodd, have you experienced a change of heart?" he sneered. "If you knew what's in store for you, maybe you'd come to the conclusion that you've been too cocksure about the monotremes. We're slaughtering in the morning." "That so?" asked Dodd. "That's so," shouted Bram. "The beetles are beginning to emerge from the pupae, and they'll need food if they're to be kept quiet. We're rounding up about threescore of the culls--your friend Haidia will be among them. We've got some caged ichneumon flies, pretty little things only a foot long, which will sting them in certain nerve centers, rendering them powerless to move. Then we shall bury them, standing up, in the vegetable mould, for the beetles to devour alive, as soon as they come out of the shells. You'll feel pretty, Dodd, standing there unable to move, with the new born beetles biting chunks out of you." * * * * * Tommy shuddered, despite his hopes of their escaping. Bram, for a scientist, had a grim and picturesque imagination. "Dodd, there is no personal quarrel between us," Bram went on. Again that note of pathetic pleading came into his voice. "Give up your mad ideas. Admit that the banded ant-eater, at least, existed before the pleistocene epoch, and everything can be settled. When you see what my beetles are going to do to humanity, you'll be proud to join us. Only make a beginning. You remember the point I made in my paper, about spalacotherium in the Upper Jurassic rocks. It would convince anybody but a hardened fanatic." "I read your paper, and I saw your so-called spalacotherium, reconstructed from what you called a jaw-bone," shouted Dodd. "That so-called jaw-bone was a lump of chalk, made porous by water, and the rest was in your imagination. Do your worst, Bram, I'll never crucify truth to save my life. And I'll laugh at your spalacotherium when your beetles are eating me." Bram yelled and shrieked, he stamped up and down the cavern, shaking his fists at Dodd. At last, with a final torrent of objurgation, he disappeared. "A pleasant customer," said Tommy. "We'll have to make that bridge, Jim, no question about it, even if it means death in the petrol fire." "Fire's dying down fast," answered Dodd. "Haidia ought to be here soon." "If Bram hasn't got her." "Bram got--that girl? If Bram harms a hair of her head I'll kill him with worse tortures than he's ever dreamed of," answered Dodd, leaping up, white with rage. "You mean you--?" Tommy began. "Love her? Yes, I love her," shouted Dodd. "She's a girl in a million. Just the sort of helpmate I need to assist me in my work when we get back. I tell you, Tommy, I didn't know what love meant before I saw Haidia. I laughed at it as a romantic notion. 'Oh lyric love, half angel and half bird!'" he quoted, beginning to stride up and down the cavern, while Tommy watched him in amazement. And at this moment a complete beetle entered the cave. Complete, because it had a plastron, or breast-shell, as well as a back-shell, or carapace. * * * * * A double breast-shell! A new species of beetle? An executioner beetle, sent by Bram to summon them to the torture? Tommy shuddered, but Dodd, lost in his love ecstasy, was ignorant of the creature's advent. "'Oh lyric love--'" he shouted again, as he twirled on his heel, to run smack into the monster. The crack of Dodd's head against the beetle-shell re-echoed through the cave. The double plastron dropped, the carapace fell down: Haidia stood revealed. The lovers, folded in each other's arms, passed momentarily into a trance. It was Tommy who separated them. "We'll have to make a move," he said. "I think the fire's as low as it ever gets. Why did you bring the shells, Haidia?" "To save us all from the beetles," answered the girl. "When they see us in the shells, they will not know we are human. That is what makes it so hard to have to be eaten by those beetles, when they are such dumb-bells," she added, reproducing another of Tommy's words. "Come," she continued bravely, "let us see if we can pass the fire." * * * * * The roaring fountain made the air a veritable inferno. Overhead the rocks were red-hot. A cascade of sparks tumbled in a fiery shower from the rock roof. Dodd, holding Haidia in his arms, to protect her, staggered ahead, with Tommy in the rear. Only the beetle-shells, which acted as non-conductors of the heat, made that fiery passage possible. There was one moment when it seemed to Tommy as if he must let go, and drop into that raging furnace underneath. He heard Dodd bawling hoarsely in front of him, he nerved himself to a last effort, beating fiercely at his blazing hair--and then the heat was past, and he had dropped unconscious upon a bed of cool earth beside a rushing river. He was vaguely aware of being carried in Dodd's arms, but a long time seemed to have passed before he grew conscious again. He opened his eyes in utter darkness. Dodd was whispering in his ear. "Tommy, old man, how are you feeling now?" Dodd asked. "All--right," Tommy muttered. "How's Haidia?" "Still unconscious, poor girl. We've got to get out of here. I heard Bram yelling in the distance. He's discovered our flight. There may be another way out of the cave, and, if so, he'll stop at nothing to get us. See if you can stand, but keep your head low. There's a low roof of rock above us." "There's water," said Tommy, listening to the roar of a torrent that seemed to be rushing past them. "It's a stream, and I believe these shells will float and bear our weight. We've got to try. We've got to put everything to the touch now, Tommy. I'm going to lay Haidia on one of the shells, poor girl, and start her off. Then I'll follow, and you can bring up the rear." "I'm with you," said Tommy, getting upon his feet, and uttering an exclamation of pain as, forgetful of Dodd's injunction, he let his head strike the rock roof overhead. * * * * * In the darkness he felt the outlines of his beetle-shell lying beside the torrent. He could hear Dodd in front of him, grunting as he raised Haidia's unconscious form in his arms and deposited her in her shell. Tommy got his own shell into the stream, and held it there as the waters swirled around it. "Ready?" he heard Dodd call. Before he could answer, there sounded from not far away, yet strangely muffled by the rocks, Bram's bellow of fury. Bram was evidently fully drugged and beside himself. Inarticulate threats came floating through the rocky chamber. "Bram seems to have lost his head temporarily," called Dodd, laughing. "A madman, Tommy. He insists that the marsupial lion--" "Yes, I heard you telling him about it," answered Tommy. "You handed it to him straight. However, more about the marsupial lion later. I'm ready." "Then let 'er go," called Dodd, and his words were swallowed up by the sound of the hollow shell striking against the rocky bank as he launched his strange craft into the water. Tommy set one foot into the hollow of his shell, and let himself go. Instantly the shell shot forward with fearful velocity. It was all Tommy could do to balance himself, for it seemed more unstable than a canoe. Once or twice he thought he heard Dodd shouting ahead of him, but his cries were drowned in the rush of the torrent. * * * * * Suddenly a light appeared in the distance. Tommy thought it was another of the petroleum fountains, and his heart seemed to stand still. But then he gave a gasp of relief. It was a cluster of luminous fungi, ten or twelve feet tall, emitting a glow equal to that of a dozen 40-watt electric bulbs. By that infernal light Tommy could see that the stream curved sharply. It was about fifty feet in width, and the low rock roof had receded to some fifteen feet overhead. Instead of a tunnel, there was nothing on either side of them but a vast tract of marshy ground thinly coated with the red grass. As Tommy looked, he saw the shell that carried the unconscious body of Haidia strike the bank beside the phosphorescent growth. He could see the girl lying in the hollow of the shell, as pale as death, her eyes closed. Dodd was close behind. As the swirl of the current caught his shell, he turned to shout a warning to Tommy. And Tommy noticed a singular thing, of which his sense of balance had already warned him, though he had hardly given conscious thought to the matter. _The river was running up-hill!_ Of course it was, since the center of gravity was in the shell of the earth, and not in the center! But, again, the shell of the earth was under their feet! Then Tommy hit on the solution to the problem. If the river was running up-hill, that meant that they must be near the exterior of the earth. In other words, they had passed the center of gravity: they must be within a mile or so of the exit from Submundia! * * * * * Tommy was about to shout his discovery to Dodd when his shell grounded beside the two others, at the base of the clump of fungi. Huge, straight, hollow stems they were, with mushroom caps, and, like all fungi, fly-blown, for Tommy could see worms nearly a foot in length crawling in and out of the porous stalks. The stench from the growth was nauseating and overpowering, utterly sickening. "Push off and let's get out of here!" Tommy called to Dodd, who was balancing his shell against the bank, and trying to peer into Haidia's face. At that moment he caught sight of something that made his blood turn cold! It was an insect fully fifteen feet in height, three times that of a beetle, lurking among the fungi. He saw a hugely elongated neck, a three-cornered head with a pair of tentacles, and two pairs of legs as long as a giraffe's. But what gave the added touch of horror was that the monster, balancing itself on its hind legs, had its forelegs extended in the attitude of one holding a prayer-book! That attitude of devotion was so terrible that Tommy uttered a wild cry of terror. At the same time another cry broke from Dodd's lips. "God, a praying mantis!" he shouted, struggling madly to push off his shell and Haidia's. The next moment, as if shot from a catapult, the hideous monster launched itself into the air straight toward them. (_To be concluded in the February Number._) The Cave of Horror _By Captain S. P. Meek_ [Illustration: "_Suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, one of the men on guard was jerked into the air feet upwards._"] [Sidenote: Screaming, the guardsman was jerked through the air. An unearthly screech rang through the cavern. The unseen horror of Mammoth Cave had struck again.] Dr. Bird looked up impatiently as the door of his private laboratory in the Bureau of Standards swung open, but the frown on his face changed to a smile as he saw the form of Operative Carnes of the United States Secret Service framed in the doorway. "Hello, Carnes," he called cheerfully. "Take a seat and make yourself at home for a few minutes. I'll be with you as soon as I finish getting this weight." Carnes sat on the edge of a bench and watched with admiration the long nervous hands and the slim tapering fingers of the famous scientist. Dr. Bird stood well over six feet and weighed two hundred and six pounds stripped: his massive shoulders and heavy shock of unruly black hair combined to give him the appearance of a prize-fighter--until one looked at his hands. Acid stains and scars could not hide the beauty of those mobile hands, the hands of an artist and a dreamer. An artist Dr. Bird was, albeit his artistry expressed itself in the most delicate and complicated experiments in the realms of pure and applied science that the world has ever seen, rather than in the commoner forms of art. The doctor finished his task of weighing a porcelain crucible, set it carefully into a dessicator, and turned to his friend. "What's on your mind, Carnes?" he asked. "You look worried. Is there another counterfeit on the market?" The operative shook his head. "Have you been reading those stories that the papers have been carrying about Mammoth Cave?" he asked. Dr. Bird emitted a snort of disgust. "I read the first one of them part way through on the strength of its being an Associated Press dispatch," he replied, "but that was enough. It didn't exactly impress me with its veracity, and, from a viewpoint of literature, the thing was impossible. I have no time to pore over the lucubrations of an inspired press agent." "So you dismissed them as mere press agent work?" "Certainly. What else could they be? Things like that don't happen fortuitously just as the tourist season is about to open. I suppose that those yarns will bring flocks of the curious to Kentucky though: the public always responds well to sea serpent yarns." "Mammoth Cave has been closed to visitors for the season," said Carnes quietly. "What?" cried the doctor in surprise. "Was there really something to those wild yarns?" * * * * * "There was, and what is more to the point, there still is. At least there is enough to it that I am leaving for Kentucky this evening, and I came here for the express purpose of asking you whether you wanted to come along. Bolton suggested that I ask you: he said that the whole thing sounded to him like magic and that magic was more in your line than in ours. He made out a request for your services and I have it in my pocket now. Are you interested?" "How does the secret service cut in on it?" asked the doctor. "It seems to me that it is a state matter. Mammoth Cave isn't a National Park." "Apparently you haven't followed the papers. It _was_ a state matter until the Governor asked for federal troops. Whenever the regulars get into trouble, the federal government is rather apt to take a hand." "I didn't know that regulars had been sent there. Tell me about the case." "Will you come along?" Dr. Bird shook his head slowly. "I really don't see how I can spare the time, Carnes," he said. "I am in the midst of some work of the utmost importance and it hasn't reached the stage where I can turn it over to an assistant." "Then I won't bother you with the details," replied Carnes as he rose. "Sit down, confound you!" cried the doctor. "You know better than to try to pull that on me. Tell me your case, and then I'll tell you whether I'll go or not. I can't spare the time, but, on the other hand, if it sounds interesting enough...." * * * * * Carnes laughed. "All right, Doctor," he said, "I'll take enough time to tell you about it even if you can't go. Do you know anything about it?" "No. I read the first story half way through and then stopped. Start at the beginning and tell me the whole thing." "Have you ever been to Mammoth Cave?" "No." "It, or rather they, for while it is called Mammoth Cave it is really a series of caves, are located in Edmonson County in Central Kentucky, on a spur railroad from Glasgow Junction on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. They are natural limestone caverns with the customary stalactite and stalagmite formation, but are unusually large and very beautiful. The caves are quite extensive and they are on different levels, so that a guide is necessary if one wants to enter them and be at all sure of finding the way out. Visitors are taken over a regular route and are seldom allowed to visit portions of the cave off these routes. Large parts of the cave have never been thoroughly explored or mapped. So much for the scene. "About a month ago a party from Philadelphia who were motoring through Kentucky, entered the cave with a regular guide. The party consisted of a man and his wife and their two children, a boy of fourteen and a girl of twelve. They went quite a distance back into the caves and then, as the mother was feeling tired, she and her husband sat down, intending to wait until the guide showed the children some sights which lay just ahead and then return to them. The guide and the children never returned." "What happened?" "No one knows. All that is known is the bare fact that they have not been seen since." "A kidnapping case?" "Apparently not, in the light of later happenings, although that was at first thought to be the explanation. The parents waited for some time. The mother says that she heard faint screams in the distance some ten minutes after the guide and the children left, but they were very far away and she isn't sure that she heard them at all. At any rate, they didn't impress her at the time. * * * * * "When half an hour had passed they began to feel anxious, and the father took a torch and started out to hunt for them. The usual thing happened; he got lost. When _he_ failed to return, the mother, now thoroughly alarmed, made her way, by some uncanny sense of direction, to the entrance and gave the alarm. In half an hour a dozen search parties were on their way into the cave. The father was soon located, not far from the beaten trail, but despite three days of constant search, the children were not located. The only trace of them that was found was a bracelet which the mother identified. It was found in the cavern some distance from the beaten path and was broken, as though by violence. There were no other signs of a struggle. "When the bracelet was found, the kidnapping theory gained vogue, for John Harrel, the missing guide, knew the cave well and natives of the vicinity scouted the idea that he might be lost. Inspired by the large reward offered by the father, fresh parties began to explore the unknown portions of the cave. And then came the second tragedy. Two of the searchers failed to return. This time there seemed to be little doubt of violence, for screams and a pistol shot were faintly heard by other searchers, together with a peculiar 'screaming howl,' as it was described by those who heard it. A search was at once made toward the spot where the bracelet had been picked up, and the gun of one of the missing men was found within fifty yards of the spot where the bracelet had been discovered. One cylinder of the revolver had been discharged." "Were there any signs on the floor?" "The searchers said that the floor appeared to be rather more moist and slimy than usual, but that was all. They also spoke of a very faint smell of musk, but this observation was not confirmed by others who arrived a few moments later." "What happened next?" * * * * * "The Governor was appealed to and a company of the National Guard was sent from Louisville to Mammoth Cave. They took up camp at the mouth of the cave and prevented everyone from entering. Soldiers armed with service rifles penetrated the caverns, but found nothing. Visitors were excluded, and the guardsmen established regular patrols and sentry posts in the cave with the result that one night, when time came for a relief, the only trace that could be found of one of the guards was his rifle. It had not been fired. Double guards were then posted, and nothing happened for several days--and then another sentry disappeared. His companion came rushing out of the cave screaming. When he recovered, he admitted that both he and the missing man had gone to sleep and that he awoke to find his comrade gone. He called, and he says that the answer he received was a peculiar whistling noise which raised all the hair on the back of his neck. He flashed his electric torch all around, but could see nothing. He swears, however, that he heard a slipping, sliding noise approaching him, and he felt that some one was looking at him. He stood it as long as he could and then threw down his rifle and ran for his life." "Had he been drinking?" "No. It wasn't delirium either, as was shown by the fact that a patrol found his gun where he had thrown it, but no trace of the other sentry. After this second experience, the guardsmen weren't very eager to enter the cave, and the Governor asked for regulars. A company of infantry was ordered down from Fort Thomas to relieve the guardsmen, but they fared worse than their predecessors. They lost two men the first night of their guard. The regulars weren't caught napping, for the main guard heard five shots fired. They rushed a patrol to the scene and found both of the rifles which had been fired, but the men were gone. "The officer of the day made a thorough search of the vicinity and found, some two hundred yards from the spot where the sentries had been posted, a crack in the wall through which the body of a man could be forced. This bodycrack had fresh blood on each side of it. Several of his men volunteered to enter the hole and search, but the lieutenant would not allow it. Instead, he armed himself with a couple of hand-grenades and an electric torch and entered himself. That was last Tuesday, and he has not returned." "Was there any disturbance heard from the crack?" "None at all. A guard was posted with two machine-guns pointed at the crack in the wall, and a guard of eight men and a sergeant stationed there. Last night, about six o'clock, while the guard were sitting around their guns, a faint smell of musk became evident. No one paid a great deal of attention to it, but suddenly for no apparent reason at all one of the men on guard was jerked into the air feet upwards. He gave a scream of fear, and an unearthly screech answered him. The guard, with the exception of one man, turned tail and ran. One man stuck by his gun and poured a stream of bullets into the crack. The retreating men could hear the rattle of the gun for a few moments and then there was a choking scream, followed by silence. When the officer of the day got back with a patrol, there was a heavy smell of musk in the air, and a good deal of blood was splashed around. The machine-guns were both there, although one of them was twisted up until it looked like it had been through an explosion. "The Officer commanding the company investigated the place, ordered all men out of the cave, and communicated with the War Department. The Secretary of War found it too tough a nut to crack and he asked for help, so Bolton is sending me down there. Do you think, in view of this yarn, that your experiments can wait?" * * * * * The creases on Dr. Bird's high forehead had grown deeper and deeper as Carnes had told his story, but now they suddenly disappeared, and he jumped to his feet with a boyish grin. "How soon are we leaving?" he asked. "In two hours, Doctor. A car is waiting for us downstairs and I have reservations booked for both of us on the Southern to-night. I knew that you were coming; in fact, the request for your services had been approved before I came here to see you." Dr. Bird rapidly divested himself of his laboratory smock and took his coat and hat from a cupboard. "I hope you realize, Carnsey, old dear," he said as he followed the operative out of the building, "that I have a real fondness for your worthless old carcass. I am leaving the results of two weeks of patient work alone and unattended in order to keep you out of trouble, and I know that it will be ruined when I get back. I wonder whether you are worth it?" "Bosh!" retorted Carnes. "I'm mighty glad to have you along, but you needn't rub it in by pretending that it is affection for me that is dragging you reluctantly into this mess. With an adventure like this ahead of you, leg-irons and handcuffs wouldn't keep you away from Mammoth Cave, whether I was going or not." It was late afternoon before Dr. Bird and Carnes dismounted from the special train which had carried them from Glasgow Junction to Mammoth Cave. They introduced themselves to the major commanding the guard battalion which had been ordered down to reinforce the single company which had borne the first brunt of the affair, and then interviewed the guards who had been routed by the unseen horror which was haunting the famous cave. Nothing was learned which differed in any great degree from the tale which Carnes had related to the doctor in Washington, except that the officer of the day who had investigated the last attack failed to entirely corroborate the smell of musk which had been reported by the other observers. "It might have been musk, but to me it smelled differently," he said. "Were you ever near a rattlesnake den in the west?" * * * * * Dr. Bird nodded. "Then you know the peculiar reptilian odor which such a place gives off. Well, this smell was somewhat similar, although not the same by any manner of means. It was musky all right, but it was more snake than musk to me. I rather like musk, but this smell gave me the horrors." "Did you hear any noises?" "None at all. The men describe some rather peculiar noises and Sergeant Jervis is an old file and pretty apt to get things straight, but they may have been made by the men who were in trouble. I saw a man caught by a boa in South America once, and the noises he made might very well have been described in almost the same words as Jervis used." "Thanks, Lieutenant," replied the Doctor. "I'll remember what you have told me. Now I think that we'll go into the cave." "My orders are to allow no one to enter, Doctor." "I beg your pardon. Carnes, where is that letter from the Secretary of War?" Carnes produced the document. The lieutenant examined it and excused himself. He returned in a few moments with the commanding officer. "In the face of that letter, Dr. Bird," said the major, "I have no alternative to allowing you to enter the cave, but I will warn you that it is at your own peril. I'll give you an escort, if you wish." "If Lieutenant Pearce will come with me as a guide, that will be all that I need." The lieutenant paled slightly, but threw back his shoulders. "Do you wish to start at once, sir?" he asked. "In a few moments. What is the floor of the cave like where we are going?" "Quite wet and slimy, sir." "Very slippery?" "Yes, sir." "In that case before we go in we want to put on baseball shoes with cleats on them, so that we can run if we have to. Can you get us anything like that?" "In a few moments, sir." "Good! As soon as we can get them we'll start. In the meantime, may I look at that gun that was found?" * * * * * The Browning machine-gun was laid before the doctor. He looked it over critically and sniffed delicately at it. He took from his pocket a phial of liquid, moistened a portion of the water-jacket of the weapon, and then rubbed the moistened part briskly with his hand. He sniffed again. He looked disappointed, and again examined the gun closely. "Carnes," he said at length, "do you see anything on this gun that looks like tooth marks?" "Nothing, Doctor." "Neither do I. There are some marks here which might quite conceivably be finger-prints of a forty-foot giant, and those two parallel grooves look like the result of severe squeezing, but there are no tooth marks. Strange. There is no persistent odor on the gun, which is also strange. Well, there's no use in theorizing: we are confronted by a condition and not a theory, as someone once said. Let's put on those baseball shoes and see what we can find out." Dr. Bird led the way into the cave, Carnes and the lieutenant following closely with electric torches. In each hand Dr. Bird carried a phosphorus hand-grenade. No other weapons were visible, although the doctor knew that Carnes carried a caliber .45 automatic pistol strapped under his left armpit. As they passed into the cave the lieutenant stepped forward to lead the way. "I'm going first," said the doctor. "Follow me and indicate the turns by pressure on my shoulder. Don't speak after we have started, and be ready for instant flight. Let's go." Forward into the interior of the cave they made their way. The iron cleats of the baseball shoes rang on the floor and the noise echoed back and forth between the walls, dying out in little eerie whispers of sound that made Carnes' hair rise. Ever forward they pressed, the lieutenant guiding the doctor by silent pressure on his shoulder and Carnes following closely. For half a mile they went on until a restrainable pressure brought the doctor to a halt. The lieutenant pointed silently toward a crack in the wall before them. Carnes started forward to examine it, but a warning gesture from the doctor stopped him. * * * * * Slowly, an inch at a time, the doctor crept forward, hand-grenades in readiness. Presently he reached the crack and, shifting one of the grenades into his pocket, he drew forth an electric torch and sent a beam of light through the crack into the dark interior of the earth. For a moment he stood thus, and then suddenly snapped off his torch and straightened up in an attitude of listening. The straining ears of Carnes and Lieutenant Pearce could hear a faint slithering noise coming toward them, not from the direction of the crack, but from the interior of the cave. Simultaneously a faint, musky, reptilian odor became apparent. "Run!" shouted the doctor. "Run like hell! It's loose in the cave!" The lieutenant turned and fled at top speed toward the distant entrance to the cave, Carnes at his heels. Dr. Bird paused for an instant, straining his ears, and then threw a grenade. A blinding flash came from the point where the missile struck and a white cloud rose in the air. The doctor turned and fled after his companions. Not for nothing had Dr. Bird been an athlete of note in his college days. Despite the best efforts of his companions, who were literally running for their lives, he soon caught up with them. As he did so a weird, blood-curdling screech rose from the darkness behind them. Higher and higher in pitch the note rose until it ended suddenly in a gurgling grunt, as though the breath which uttered it had been suddenly cut off. The slithering, rustling noise became louder on their trail. "Faster!" gasped the doctor, as he put his hand on Carnes' shoulder and pushed him forward. * * * * * The noise of pursuit gained slightly on them, and a sound as of intense breathing became audible. Dr. Bird paused and turned and faced the oncoming horror. His electric torch revealed nothing, but he listened for a moment, and then threw his second grenade. Keenly he watched its flight. It flew through the air for thirty yards and then struck an invisible obstruction and bounded toward the ground. Before it struck the downward motion ceased, and it rose in the air. As it rose it burst with a sharp report, and a wild scream of pain filled the cavern with a deafening roar. The doctor fled again after his companions. By the time he overtook them the entrance of the cave loomed before them. With sobs of relief they burst out into the open. The guards sprang forward with raised rifles, but Dr. Bird waved them back. "There's nothing after us, men," he panted. "We got chased a little way, but I tossed our pursuer a handful of phosphorus and it must have burned his fingers a little, judging from the racket he made. At any rate, it stopped the pursuit." The major hurried up. "Did you see it, Doctor?" he asked. "No, I didn't. No one has ever seen it or anything like it. I heard it and, from its voice, I think it has a bad cold. At least, it sounded hoarse, so I gave it a little white phosphorus to make a poultice for its throat, but I didn't get a glimpse of it." "For God's sake, Doctor, what is it?" "I can't tell you yet, Major. So far I can tell, it is something new to science and I am not sure just what it looks like. However, I hope to be able to show it to you shortly. Is there a telegraph office here?" "No, but we have a Signal Corps detachment with us, and they have a portable radio set which will put us in touch with the army net." "Good! Can you place a tent at my disposal?" "Certainly, Doctor." "All right, I'll go there, and I would appreciate it if you would send the radio operator to me. I want to send a message to the Bureau of Standards to forward me some apparatus which I need." "I'll attend to it, Doctor. Have you any special advice to give me about the guarding?" "Yes. Have you, or can you get, any live stock?" "Live stock?" "Yes. Cattle preferred, although hogs or sheep will do at a pinch. Sheep will do quite well." "I'll see what I can do, Doctor." "Get them by all means, if it is possible to do so. Don't worry about paying for them: secret service funds are not subject to the same audit that army funds get. If you can locate them, drive a couple of cattle or half a dozen sheep well into the cave and tether them there. If you don't get them, have your sentries posted well away from the cave mouth, and if any disturbance occurs during the night, tell them to break and run. I hope it won't come out, but I can't tell." * * * * * A herd of cattle was soon located and two of the beasts driven into the cave. Two hours later a series of horrible screams and bellowings were heard in the cave. Following their orders the sentries abandoned their posts and scattered, but the noise came no nearer the mouth, and in a few minutes silence again reigned. "I hope that will be all that will be needed for a couple of days," said the doctor to the commanding officer, "but you had better have a couple more cattle driven in in the morning. We want to keep the brute well fed. Is there a tank stationed at Fort Thomas?" "No, there isn't." "Then radio Washington that I want the fastest three-man tank that the army has sent here at once. Don't bother with military channels, radio direct to the Adjutant General, quoting the Secretary of the Treasury as authority. Tell him that it's a rush matter, and sign the message 'Bird' if you are afraid of getting your tail twisted." Twice more before the apparatus which the doctor had ordered from Washington arrived cattle were driven into the depths of the cave, and twice were the screams and bellowings from the cave repeated. Each time searching parties found the cattle gone in the morning. A week after the doctor's arrival, a special train came up, carrying four mechanics from the Bureau of Standards, together with a dozen huge packing cases. Under the direction of the doctor the cases were unpacked and the apparatus put together. Before the assembly had been completed the tank which had been requested arrived from Camp Meade, and the Bureau mechanics began to install some of the assembled units in it. The first apparatus which was installed in the tank consisted of an electric generator of peculiar design which was geared to the tank motor. The electromotive force thus generated was led across a spark gap with points of a metallic substance. The light produced was concentrated by a series of parabolic reflectors, directed against a large quartz prism, and thence through a lens which was designed to throw a slightly divergent beam. "This apparatus," Dr. Bird explained to the Signal Corps officer, who was an interested observer, "is one which was designed at the Bureau for the large scale production of ultra-violet light. There is nothing special about the generator except that it is highly efficient and gives an almost constant electromotive force. The current thus produced is led across these points, which are composed of magnalloy, a development of the Bureau. We found on investigation that a spark gave out a light which was peculiarly rich in ultra-violet rays when it was passed between magnesium points. However, such points could not be used for the handling of a steady current because of lack of durability and ease of fusion, so a mixture of graphite, alundum and metallic magnesium was pressed together with a binder which will stand the heat. Thus we get the triple advantages of ultra-violet light production, durability, and high resistance. * * * * * "The system of reflectors catches all of the light thus produced except the relatively small portion which goes initially in the right direction, and directs it on this quartz prism where, due to the refractive powers of the prism, the light is broken up into its component parts. The infra-red rays and that portion of the spectrum which lies in the visible range, that is, from red to violet inclusive, are absorbed by a black body, leaving only the ultra-violet portion free to send a beam through this quartz lens." "I thought that a lens would absorb ultra-violet light," objected the signal officer. "A lens made of glass will, but this lens is made of rock crystal, which is readily permeable to ultra-violet. The net result of this apparatus is that we can direct before us as we move in the tank a beam of light which is composed solely of the ultra-violet portion of the spectrum." "In other words, an invisible light?" "Yes. That is, invisible to the human eye. The effect of this beam of ultra-violet light in the form of severe sunburn would be readily apparent if you exposed your skin to it for any length of time, and the effects on your eyesight of continued gazing would be apt to be disastrous. It would produce a severe opthalmia and temporary impairment of the vision, somewhat the same symptoms as are observed in snow blindness." "I see. May I ask what is the object of the whole thing?" "Surely. Before we can successfully combat this peculiar visitant from another world, it is necessary that we gain some idea of the size and appearance of it. Nothing of the sort has before made its appearance, so far as the annals of science go, and so I am forced to make some rather wild guesses at the nature of the animal. You are probably aware of the fact that the property of penetration possessed by all waves is a function of their frequency, or, perhaps I should say, of their wave-length?" * * * * * "Certainly." "The longer rays of visible light will not penetrate as deeply into a given substance as the shorter ultra-violet rays. This visitor is evidently from some unexplored and, indeed, unknown cavern in the depths of the earth where visible light has never penetrated. Apparently in this cavern the color of the inhabitants is ultra-violet, and hence invisible to us." "You are beyond my depth, Doctor." "Pardon me. You understand, of course, what color is? When sunlight, which is a mixture of all colors from infra-red to ultra-violet inclusive, falls on an object, certain rays are reflected and certain others are absorbed. If the red rays are reflected and all others absorbed, the object appears red to our eyes. If all the rays are reflected, the object appears white, and if all are absorbed, it appears black." "I understand that." "The human eye cannot detect ultra-violet. Suppose then, that we have an object, either animate or inanimate, the surface of which reflects only ultra-violet light, what will be the result? The object will be invisible." "I should think it would be black if all the rays except the ultra-violet were absorbed." "It would, but mark, I did not say the others were absorbed. Are you familiar with fluorescein?" "No." "I think you are. It is the dye used in making changeable silk. If we fill a glass container with a fluorescein solution and look at it by reflected light it appears green. If we look at it by transmitted light, that is, light which has traversed the solution, it appears red. In other words, this is a substance which reflects green light, allows a free passage to red light, and absorbs all other light. This creature we are after, if my theory is correct, is composed of a substance which allows free passage to all of the visible light rays and at the same time reflects ultra-violet light. Do I make this clear?" * * * * * "Perfectly." "Very well, then. My apparatus will project forward a beam of ultra-violet light which will be in much greater concentration than exists in an incandescent electric light. It is my hope that this light will be reflected by the body of the creature to a sufficient to allow me to make a photograph of it." "But won't your lens prevent the ultra-violet light from reaching your plate?" "An ordinary lens made of optical glass would do so, but I have a camera here equipped with a rock crystal lens, which will allow ultra-violet light to pass through it practically unhindered, and with very slight distortion. When I add that I will have my camera charged with X-ray film, a film which is peculiarly sensitive to the shorter wave-lengths, you will see that I will have a fair chance of success." "It sounds logical. Would you allow me to accompany you when you make your attempt?" "I will be glad of your company, if you can drive a tank. I want to take Carnes with me, and the tank will only hold two besides the driver." "I can drive a tractor." "In that case you should master the tricks of tank driving in short order. Get familiar with it and we'll appoint you as driver. We'll be ready to go in to-night, but I am going to wait a day. Our friend was fed last night, and there is less chance he'll be about." * * * * * The early part of the next evening was marked by howls and screams coming from the mouth of the cave. As the night wore on the noises were quite evidently coming nearer and the sentries watched the cave mouth nervously, ready to bolt and scatter according to their orders at the first alarm. About two A. M. the doctor and Carnes climbed into the tank beside Lieutenant Leffingwell, and the machine moved slowly into the cave. A search-light on the front of the tank lighted the way for them and, attached to a frame which held it some distance ahead of them, was a luckless sheep. "Keep your eye on the mutton, Carnes," cautioned the doctor. "As soon as anything happens to it, shut off the search-light and let me try to get a picture. As soon as I have made my exposures I'll tell you, and you can snap it on again. Lieutenant, when the picture is made, turn your tank and make for the entrance to the cave. If we are lucky, we'll get out." Forward the tank crawled, the sheep bleating and trying to break loose from the bonds which held it. It was impossible to hear much over the roar of the motor, but presently Dr. Bird leaned forward, his eyes shining. "I smell musk," he announced. "Get ready for action." Even as he spoke the sheep was suddenly lifted into the air. It gave a final bleat of terror, and then its head was torn from its body. "Quick, Carnes!" shouted the doctor. The search-light went out, and Carnes and the lieutenant could hear the slide of the ultra-violet light which Dr. Bird was manipulating open. For two or three minutes the doctor worked with his apparatus. "All right!" he cried suddenly. "Lights on and get out of here!" Carnes snapped on the search-light and Lieutenant Leffingwell swung the tank around and headed for the cave mouth. For a few feet their progress was unhindered and then the tank ceased its forward motion, although the motor still roared and the track slid on the cave floor. Carnes watched with horror as one side of the tank bent slowly in toward him. There was a rending sound, and a portion of the heavy steel fabric was torn away. Dr. Bird bent over something on the floor of the tank. Presently he straightened up and threw a small object into the darkness. There was a flash of light, and bits of flaming phosphorus flew in every direction. The anchor which held the tank was suddenly loosed and the machine crawled forward at full speed, while a roar as of escaping air mingled with a bellowing shriek burdened the smoke-laden air. "Faster!" cried the doctor, as he threw another grenade. * * * * * Lieutenant Leffingwell got the last bit of speed possible out of the tank and they reached the cave mouth without further molestation. "I had an idea that our friend wouldn't care to pass through a phosphorus screen," said Dr. Bird with a chuckle as he climbed out of the tank. "He must have been rather severely burned the other day, and once burned is usually twice shy. Where is Major Brown?" The commanding officer stepped forward. "Drive a couple of cattle into the cave, Major," directed Dr. Bird. "I want to fill that brute up and keep him quiet for a while. I'm going to develop my films." Lieutenant Leffingwell and Carnes peered over the doctor's shoulders as he manipulated his films in a developing bath. Gradually vague lines and blotches made their appearance on one of the films, but the form was indistinct. Dr. Bird dropped the films in a fixing tank and straightened up. "We have something, gentlemen," he announced, "but I can't tell yet how clear it is. It will take those films fifteen minutes to fix, and then we'll know." In a quarter of an hour he lifted the first film from the tank and held it to the light. The film showed a blank. With an exclamation of disappointment he lifted a second and third film from the tank, with the same result He raised the fourth one. "Good Lord!" gasped Carnes. * * * * * In the plate could be plainly seen the hind quarters of the sheep held in the grasp of such a monster as even the drug-laden brain of an opium smoker never pictured. Judging from the sheep, the monster stood about twenty feet tall, and its frame was surmounted by a head resembling an overgrown frog. Enormous jaws were opened to seize the sheep but, to the amazement of the three observers, the jaws were entirely toothless. Where teeth were to be expected, long parallel ridges of what looked like bare bone, appeared, without even a rudimentary segregation into teeth. The body of the monster was long and snakelike, and was borne on long, heavy legs ending in feet with three long toes, armed with vicious claws. The crowning horror of the creature was its forelegs. There were of enormous length, thin and attenuated looking, and ended in huge misshapen hands, knobby and blotched, which grasped the sheep in the same manner as human hands. The eyes were as large as dinner plates, and they were glaring at the camera with an expression of fiendish malevolence which made Carnes shudder. "How does that huge thing ever get through that crack we examined?" demanded the lieutenant. Dr. Bird rubbed his head thoughtfully. "It's not an amphibian," he muttered, "as is plainly shown by the shape of the limbs and the lack of a tail, and yet it appears to have scales of the true fish type. It corresponds to no recovered fossil, and I am inclined to believe it is unique. The nervous organisation must be very low, judging from the lack of forehead and the general conformation. It has enormous strength, and yet the arms look feeble." "It can't get through that crack," insisted the lieutenant. "Apparently not," replied the doctor. "Wait a moment, though. Look at this!" He pointed to the great disproportion between the length and diameter of the forelegs, and then to the hind legs. "Either this is grave distortion or there is something mighty queer about that conformation. No animal could be constructed like that." * * * * * He turned the film so that an oblique light fell on it. As he did so he gave a cry of astonishment. "Look here!" he said sharply. "It does get through that crack! Look at those arms and hands! There is the answer. This creature is tall and broad, but from front to rear it can measure only a few inches. The same must be true of the froglike head. That animal has been developed to live and move in a low roofed cavern, and to pass through openings only a few inches wide. Its bulk is all in two dimensions!" "I believe you're right," said Carnes as he studied the film. "There is no doubt of it," answered the doctor. "Look at those paws, too, Carnes. That substance isn't bone, it's gum. The thing is so young and helpless that it hasn't cut its teeth yet. It must be a baby, and that is the reason why it made its way into the cave when no other of its kind ever has." "How large are full grown ones if this is a baby?" asked the lieutenant. "The Lord alone knows," replied Dr. Bird. "I hope that I never have to face one and find out. Well, now that we know what we are fighting, we ought to be able to settle its hash." "High explosive?" suggested the lieutenant. "I don't think so. With such a low nervous organization, we would have to tear it practically to pieces to kill it, and I am anxious to keep it from mutilation for scientific study. I have an idea, but I'll have to study a while before I am sure of the details. Send me the radio operator." The next day the Bureau mechanics began to dismount the apparatus from the tank and to assemble another elaborate contrivance. Before they had made an end of the work additional equipment arrived from Washington, which was incorporated in the new set-up. At length Dr. Bird pronounced himself ready for the attempt. * * * * * Under his direction, three cattle were driven into the cave and there tethered. They were there the next morning unharmed, but the second night the now familiar bellowing and howling came from the depths of the cave and in the morning two of the cattle were gone. "That will keep him quiet for a day or two," said the doctor, "and now to work!" The tank made its way into the cave, dragging after it two huge cables which led to an engine-driven generator outside the cave. These cables were attached to the terminals of a large motor which was set up in the cave near the place where the cattle were customarily tethered. This motor was the actuating force which turned two generators, one large and one small. The smaller one was mounted on a platform on wheels, which also contained the spark gaps, the reflectors and other apparatus which produced the beam of ultra-violet light which had been used to photograph the monster. From the larger generator led two copper bars. One of these was connected to a huge copper plate which was laid flat on the floor of the cave. The other led to a platform which was erected on huge porcelain insulators some fifteen feet above the floor. Huge condensers were set up on this platform, and Dr. Bird announced himself in readiness. A steer was dragged into the cave and up a temporary runway which led to the platform containing the condensers, and there tied with the copper bus bar from the larger generator fastened to three flexible copper straps which led around the animal's body. When this had been completed, everyone except the doctor, Carnes, and Lieutenant Leffingwell left the cave. These three crouched behind the search-light which sent a mild beam of ultra-violet onto the platform where the steer was held. The engine outside the cave was started, and the three men waited with tense nerves. For several hours nothing happened. The steer tried from time to time to move and, finding it impossible, set up plaintive bellows for liberty. "I wish something would happen," muttered the lieutenant. "This is getting on my nerves. "Something is about to happen," replied Dr. Bird grimly. "Listen to that steer." * * * * * The bellowing of the steer had suddenly increased in volume and, added to the note of discontent, was a note of fright which had previously been absent. Dr. Bird bent over his ultra-violet search-light and made some adjustments. He handed a helmetlike arrangement to each of his companions and slipped one on over his head. "I can't see a thing, Doctor," said Carnes in a muffled voice. "The objects at which you are looking absorb rather than reflect ultra-violet light," said the doctor. "This is a sort of a fluoroscope arrangement, and it isn't perfect at all. However, when the monster comes along, I am pretty sure that you will be able to see it. You may see a little more as your eyes get accustomed to it." "I can see very dimly," announced the lieutenant in a moment. Dimly the walls of the cave and the platform before them began to take vague shape. The three stared intently down the beam of ultra-violet light which the doctor directed down the passageway leading deeper into the cave. "Good Lord!" ejaculated Carnes suddenly. Slowly into the field of vision came the hideous figure they had seen on the film. As it moved forward a rustling, slithering sound could be heard, even over the bellowing of the steer and the hum of the apparatus. The odor of musk became evident. Along the floor toward them the thing slid. Presently it reared up on its hind legs and its enormous bulk became evident. It turned somewhat sideways and the correctness of Dr. Bird's hypothesis as to its peculiar shape was proved. All of the bulk of the creature was in two dimensions. Forward it moved, and the horrible human hands stretched forward, while the mouth split in a wide, toothless grin. Nearer the doomed steer the creature approached, and then the reaching hands closed on the animal. There was a blinding flash, and the monster was hurled backward as though struck by a thunderbolt, while a horrible smell of musk and burned flesh filled the air. "After it! Quick!" cried the doctor as he sprang forward. * * * * * Before he could reach the prostrate creature it moved and then, slowly at first, but with rapidly gaining speed, it slithered over the floor in retreat. Dr. Bird's hand swung through an arc, and there was a deafening crash as a hand-grenade exploded on the back of the fleeing monster. An unearthly scream came from the creature, and its motion changed from a steady forward glide to a series of convulsive jerks. Leffingwell and Carnes threw grenades, but they went wide of their mark, and the monster began to again increase its speed. Another volley of grenades was thrown and one hit scored, which slowed the monster somewhat but did not arrest the steady forward movement. "Any more bombs?" demanded the doctor. "Damn!" he cried as he received negative answers. "The current wasn't strong enough. It's going to get away." Carnes jerked his automatic from under his armpit and poured a stream of bullets into the fleeing monster. Slower and slower the motion of the creature became, and its movements again became jerky and convulsive. "Keep it in sight!" cried the doctor. "We may get it yet!" Cautiously the three men followed the retreating horror, Leffingwell pushing before him the platform holding the ultra-violet ray apparatus. The chase led them over familiar ground. "There is the crack!" cried the lieutenant. "Too late!" replied the doctor. He rushed forward and seized the lower limb of the monster and tried with all his strength to arrest its flight, but despite all that he could do it slid sideways through the crack in the wall and disappeared. A final backward kick of its leg threw the doctor twenty feet against the far wall of the cave. "Are you hurt, Doctor?" cried Carnes. "No, I'm all right. Put on your masks and start the gas! Quick! That may stop it before it gets in far!" * * * * * The three adjusted gas masks and thrust the mouths of two gas cylinders which were on the light truck into the crack, and opened the valves. The hissing of the gas was accompanied by a thrashing, writhing sound from the bowels of the earth for a few minutes, but the sound retreated and finally died away into an utter silence. "And that's that!" cried the doctor half an hour later as they took off their gas masks outside the cave. "It got away from us. Carnes, how soon can we get a train back to Washington?" "What kind of a report are you going to make to the Bureau, Doctor?" asked Carnes as they sat in the smoker of a southern train, headed for the capital. "I'm not going to put in any report, Carnes," replied the doctor. "I haven't got the creature or any part of it to show, and no one would believe me. I am going to maintain a discreet silence about the whole matter." "But you have your photograph to show, Doctor, and you have my evidence and Lieutenant Leffingwell's." "The photograph might have been faked and I might have doped both of you. In any case, your words are no better than mine. No, indeed, Carnes, when I failed to make the current strong enough to kill it outright I made the first of the moves which bind me to silence, although I thought that two hundred thousand volts would be enough. "The second failure I made was when I missed him with my second grenade, although I doubt if all six would have stopped him. My third failure was when we failed to get a sufficient concentration of cyanide gas into that hole in a hurry. The thing is so badly crippled that it will die, but it may take hours, or even days, for it to do so. It has already made its way so far into the earth that we couldn't reach it by blasting without danger of bringing the whole place down on our heads. Even if we could blast our way into the place it came from I wouldn't dare open a path which would allow Lord only knows what terrible monsters to invade the earth. When the soldiers have finished stopping that crack with ten feet of solid masonry, I think the barrier will hold, even against that critter's papa and mamma and all its relatives. Then Mammoth Cave will be safe for visitors again. That latter fact is the only report which I will make." "It is a dandy story to go to waste," said Carnes soberly. "Tell it then, if you wish, and get laughed at for your pains. No, Carnes, you must learn one thing. A man like Bolton, for instance, will implicitly believe that a four leaf clover in his watch-charm will bring him good luck, and that carrying a buckeye keeps rheumatism away from him; but tell him a bit of sober fact like this, attested by three reliable witnesses and a good photograph, and you'll just get laughed at for your pains. I'm going to keep my mouth shut." "So be it, then!" replied Carnes with a sigh. Phantoms of Reality A COMPLETE NOVEL _By Ray Cummings_ [Illustration: _The office room faded.... I was lying on another floor.... New walls sprang around me._] [Sidenote: Red Sensua's knife came up dripping--and the two adventurers knew that chaos and bloody revolution had been unleashed in that shadowy kingdom of the fourth dimension.] CHAPTER I _Wall Street--or the Open Road?_ When I was some fifteen years old, I once made the remark, "Why, that's impossible." The man to whom I spoke was a scientist. He replied gently, "My boy, when you are grown older and wiser you will realize that nothing is impossible." Somehow, that statement stayed with me. In our swift-moving wonderful world I have seen it proven many times. They once thought it impossible to tell what lay across the broad, unknown Atlantic Ocean. They thought the vault of the heavens revolved around the earth. It was impossible for it to do anything else, because they could see it revolve. It was impossible, too, for anything to be alive and yet be so small that one might not see it. But the microscope proved the contrary. Or again, to talk beyond the normal range of the human voice was impossible, until the telephone came to show how simply and easily it might be done. I never forgot that physician's remark. And it was repeated to me some ten years later by my friend, Captain Derek Mason, on that memorable June night of 1929. My name is Charles Wilson. I was twenty-five that June of 1929. Although I had lived all of my adult life in New York City, I had no relatives there and few friends. * * * * * I had known Captain Mason for several years. Like myself, he seemed one who walked alone in life. He was an English gentleman, perhaps thirty years old. He had been stationed in the Bermudas, I understood, though he seldom spoke of it. I always felt that I had never seen so attractive a figure of a man as this Derek Mason. An English aristocrat, he was, straight and tall and dark, and rather rakish, with a military swagger. He affected a small, black mustache. A handsome, debonair fellow, with an easy grace of manner: a modern d'Artagnan. In an earlier, less civilized age, he would have been expert with sword and stick, I could not doubt. A man who could capture the hearts of women with a look. He had always been to me a romantic figure, and a mystery that seemed to shroud him made him no less so. A friendship had sprung up between Derek Mason and me, perhaps because we were such opposite types! I am an American, of medium height, and medium build. Ruddy, with sandy hair. Derek Mason was as meticulous of his clothes, his swagger uniforms, as the most perfect Beau Brummel. Not so myself. I am careless of dress and speech. I had not seen Derek Mason for at least a month when, one June afternoon, a note came from him. I went to his apartment at eight o'clock the same evening. Even about his home there seemed a mystery. He lived alone with one man servant. He had taken quarters in a high-class bachelor apartment building near lower Fifth Avenue, at the edge of Greenwich Village. All of which no doubt was rational enough, but in this building he had chosen the lower apartment at the ground-floor level. It adjoined the cellar. It was built for the janitor, but Derek had taken it and fixed it up in luxurious fashion. Near it, in a corner of the cellar, he had boarded off a square space into a room. I understood vaguely that it was a chemical laboratory. He had never discussed it, nor had I ever been shown inside it. Unusual, mysterious enough, and that a captain of the British military should be an experimental scientist was even more unusual. Yet I had always believed that for a year or two Derek had been engaged in some sort of chemical or physical experiment. With all his military swagger he had the precise, careful mode of thought characteristic of the man of scientific mind. * * * * * I recall that when I got his note with its few sentences bidding me come to see him, I had a premonition that it marked the beginning of something strange. As though the portals of a mystery were opening to me! Nothing is impossible! Nevertheless I record these events into which I was plunged that June evening with a very natural reluctance. I expect no credibility. If this were the year 2000, my narrative doubtless would be tame enough. Yet in 1929 it can only be called a fantasy. Let it go at that. The fantasy of to-day is the sober truth of to-morrow. And by the day after, it is a mere platitude. Our world moves swiftly. Derek received me in his living-room. He admitted me himself. He told me that his man servant was out. It was a small room, with leather-covered easy chairs, rugs on its hardwood floor, and sober brown portieres at its door and windows. A brown parchment shade shrouded the electrolier on the table. It was the only light in the room. It cast its mellow sheen upon Derek's lean graceful figure as he flung himself down and produced cigarettes. He said, "Charlie, I want a little talk with you. I've something to tell you--something to offer you." He held his lighter out to me, with its tiny blue alcohol flame under my cigarette. And I saw that his hand was trembling. * * * * * "But I don't understand what you mean," I protested. He retorted, "I'm suggesting that you might be tired of being a clerk in a brokerage office. Tired of this humdrum world that we call civilization. Tired of Wall Street." "I am, Derek. Heavens, that's true enough." His eyes held me. He was smiling half whimsically: his voice was only half serious. Yet I could see, in the smoldering depths of those luminous dark eyes, a deadly seriousness that belied his smiling lips and his gay tone. He interrupted me with, "And I offer you a chance for deeds of high adventuring. The romance of danger, of pitting your wits against villainy to make right triumph over wrong, and to win for yourself power and riches--and perhaps a fair lady...." "Derek, you talk like a swashbuckler of the middle ages." I thought he would grin, but he turned suddenly solemn. "I'm offering to make you henchman to a king, Charlie." "King of what? Where?" He spread his lean brown hands with a gesture. He shrugged. "What matter? If you seek adventure, you can find it--somewhere. If you feel the lure of romance--it will come to you." I said, "Henchman to a king?" But still he would not smile. "Yes. If I were king. I'm serious. Absolutely. In all this world there is no one who cares a damn about me. Not in this world, but...." He checked himself. He went on, "You are the same. You have no relatives?" "No. None that ever think of me." "Nor a sweetheart. Or have you?" "No," I smiled. "Not yet. Maybe never." "But you are too interested in Wall Street to leave it for the open road?" He was sarcastic now. "Or do you fear deeds of daring? Do you want to right a great wrong? Rescue an oppressed people, overturn the tyranny of an evil monarch, and put your friend and the girl he loves upon the throne? Or do you want to go down to work as usual in the subway to-morrow morning? Are you afraid that in this process of becoming henchman to a king you may perchance get killed?" I matched his caustic tone. "Let's hear it, Derek." CHAPTER II _The Challenge of the Unknown_ Incredible! Impossible! I did not say it, though my thoughts were written on my face, no doubt. Derek said quietly, "Difficult to believe, Charlie? Yes! But it happens to be true. The girl I love is not of this world, but she lives nevertheless. I have seen her, talked with her. A slim little thing--beautiful...." He sat staring. "This is nothing supernatural, Charlie. Only the ignorant savages of our past called the unknown--the unusual--supernatural. We know better now." I said, "This girl--" He gestured. "As I told you, I have for years been working on the theory that there is another world, existing here in this same space with us. The Fourth Dimension! Call it that it you like. I have found it, proved its existence! And this girl--her name is Hope--lives in it. Let me tell you about her and her people. Shall I?" My heart was pounding so that it almost smothered me. "Yes, Derek." "She lives here, in this Space we call New York City. She and her people use this same Space at the same time that we use it. A different world from ours, existing here now with us! Unseen by us. And we are unseen by them! "A different form of matter, Charlie. As tangible to the people of the other realm as we are to our own world. Humans like ourselves." He paused, but I could find no words to fill the gap. And presently he went on: "Hope's world, co-existing here with us, is dependent upon us. They speak what we call English. They shadow us." I murmured, "Phantoms of reality." "Yes. A world very like ours. But primitive, where ours is civilized." * * * * * He paused again. His eyes were staring past me as though he could see through the walls of the cellar room into great reaches of the unknown. What a strange mixture was this Derek Mason! What a strange compound of the cold reality of the scientist and the fancy of the romantic dreamer! Yet I wonder if that is not what science is. There is no romantic lover gawping at the moon who could have more romance in his soul, or see in the moonlit eyes of his loved one more romance than the scientist finds in the wonders of his laboratory. Derek went on slowly: "A primitive world, primitive nation, primitive passions! As I see it now, Charlie--as I know it to be--it seems as though perhaps Hope's world is merely a replica of ours, stripped to the primitive. As though it might be the naked soul of our modern New York, ourselves as we really are, not as we pretend to be." He roused himself from his reverie. "Hope's nation is ruled by a king. An emperor, if you like. A monarch, beset with the evils of luxury and ease, and wine and women. He is surrounded by his nobles, the idle aristocracy, by virtue of their birth proclaiming themselves of too fine a clay to work. The crimson nobles, they are called. Because they affect crimson cloaks, and their beautiful women, voluptuous, sex-mad, are wont to bedeck themselves in veils and robes of crimson. "And there are workers, toilers they call them. Oppressed, down-trodden toilers, with hate for the nobles and the king smoldering within them. In France there was such a condition, and the bloody revolution came of it. It exists here now. Hope was born in the ranks of these toilers, but has risen by her grace and beauty to a position in the court of this graceless monarch." * * * * * He leaped from his chair and began pacing the room. I sat silent, staring at him. So strange a thing! Impossible? I could not say that. I could only say, incredible to me. And as I framed the thought I knew its incredibility was the very measure of my limited intelligence, my lack of knowledge. The vast unknown of nature, so vast that everything which was real to me, understandable to me, was a mere drop in the ocean of the existing unknown. "Don't you understand me now?" Derek added vehemently. "I'm not talking fantasy. Cold reality! I've found a way to transport myself--and you--into this different state of matter, into this other world! I've already made a test. I went there and stayed just for a few moments, a night or so ago." It made my heart leap wildly. He went on:-- "There is chaos there. Smoldering revolution which at any time--to-night perhaps--may burst into conflagration and destroy this wanton ruling class." He laughed harshly. "In Hope's world the workers are a primitive, ignorant people. Superstitious. Like the peons of Mexico, they're all primed and ready to shout for any leader who sets himself up. My chance--our chance--" He suddenly stopped his pacing and stood before me. "Don't you feel the lure of it? The open road? 'The road is straight before me and the Red Gods call for me!' I'm going, Charlie. Going to-night--and I want you to go with me! Will you?" Would I go? The thing leaped like a menacing shadow risen solidly to confront me. Would I go? Suddenly there was before me the face of a girl. White. Apprehensive. It seemed almost pleading. A face beautiful, with a mouth of parted red lips. A face framed in long, pale-golden hair with big staring blue eyes. Wistful eyes, wan with starlight--eyes that seemed to plead. I thought, "Why, this is madness!" I was not seeing this face with my eyes. There was nothing, no one here in the room with me but Derek. I knew it. The shadows about us were empty. I was conjuring the face only from Derek's words, making real that which existed only in my imagination. Yet I knew that in another realm, with my thoughts now bridging the gap, the girl was real. Would I go into the unknown? The quest of the unknown. The gauntlet of the unknown flung down now before me, as it was flung down before the ancient explorers who picked up its challenge and mounted the swaying decks of their little galleons and said, "We'll go and see what lies off there in the unknown." That same lure was on me now. I heard my voice saying, "Why yes, I guess I'll go, Derek." CHAPTER III _Into the Unknown_ We stood in the boarded room which was Derek's laboratory. Our preparations had been simple: Derek had made them all in advance. There was little left to do. The laboratory was a small room of board walls, board ceiling and floor. Windowless, with a single door opening into the cellar of the apartment house. Derek had locked the door after us as we entered. He said, "I have sent my man servant away for a week. The people in the house here think I have gone away on a vacation. No one will miss us, Charlie--not for a time, anyway." No one would miss me, save my employers, and to them I would no doubt be small loss. We had put out the light in Derek's apartment and locked it carefully after us. This journey! I own that I was trembling, and frightened. Yet a strange eagerness was on me. The cellar room was comfortably furnished. Rugs were on its floor. Whatever apparatus of a research laboratory had been here was removed now. But the evidence of it remained--Derek's long search for this secret which now he was about to use. A row of board shelves at one side of the room showed where bottles and chemical apparatus had stood. A box of electrical tools and odds and ends of wire still lay discarded in a corner of the room. There was a tank of running water, and gas connections, where no doubt bunsen burners had been. * * * * * Derek produced his apparatus. I sat on a small low couch against the wall and watched him as he stripped himself of his clothes. Around his waist he adjusted a wide, flat, wire-woven belt. A small box was fastened to it in the middle of the back--a wide, flat thing of metal, a quarter of an inch thick, and curved to fit his body. It was a storage battery of the vibratory current he was using. From the battery, tiny threads of wire ran up his back to a wire necklace flat against his throat. Other wires extended down his arms to the wrists. Still others down his legs to the ankles. A flat electrode was connected to the top of his head like a helmet. I was reminded as he stood there, of medical charts of the human body with the arterial system outlined. But when he dressed again and put on his jaunty captain's uniform, only the electrode clamped to his head and the thin wires dangling from it in the back were visible to disclose that there was anything unusual about him. He said smilingly, "Don't stare at me like that." I took a grip on myself. This thing was frightening, now that I actually was embarked on it. Derek had explained to me briefly the workings of his apparatus. A vibratory electronic current, for which as yet he had no name, was stored in the small battery. He had said: "There's nothing incomprehensible about this, Charlie. It's merely a changing of the vibration rate of the basic substance out of which our bodies are made. Vibration is the governing factor of all states of matter. In its essence what we call substance is wholly intangible. That is already proven. A vortex! A whirlpool of nothingness! It creates a pseudo-substance which is the only material in the universe. And from this, by vibration, is built the complicated structure of things as we see and feel them to be, all dependent upon vibration. Everything is altered, directly as the vibratory rate is changed. From the most tenuous gas, to fluids to solids--throughout all the different states of matter the only fundamental difference is the rate of vibration." * * * * * I understood the basic principle of this that he was explaining--that now when this electronic current which he had captured and controlled was applied to our physical body, the vibration rate of every smallest and most minute particle of our physical being was altered. There is so little in the vast scale of natural phenomena of which our human senses are cognisant! Our eyes see the colors of the spectrum, from red to violet. But a vast invisible world of color lies below the red of the rainbow! Physicists call it the infra-red. And beyond the violet, another realm--the ultra-violet. With sound it is the same. Our audible range of sound is very small. There are sounds with too slow a vibratory rate for us to hear, and others too rapid. The differing vibratory rate from most tenuous gas to most substantial solid is all that we can perceive in this physical world of ours. Yet of the whole, it is so very little! This other realm to which we were now going lay in the higher, more rapid vibratory scale. To us, by comparison, a more tenuous world, a shadow realm. I listened to Derek's words, but my mind was on the practicality of what lay ahead. An explorer, standing upon his ship, may watch his men bending the sails, raising the anchor, but his mind flings out to the journey's end.... * * * * * We were soon ready. Derek wore his jaunty uniform, I wore my ordinary business suit. A magnetic field would be about us, so that in the transition anything in fairly close contact with our bodies was affected by the current. Derek said, "I will go first, Charlie." "But, Derek--" A fear, greater than the trembling I had felt before, leaped at me. Left here alone, with no one on whom to depend! He spoke with careful casualness, but his eyes were burning me. "Just sit there, and watch. When I am gone, turn on the current as I showed you and come after me. I'll wait for you." "Where?" I stammered. He smiled faintly. "Here. Right here. I'm not going away! Not going to move. I'll be here on the couch waiting for you." Terrifying words! He had lowered the couch, bending out its short legs until the frame of it rested on the board floor. He drew a chair up before it and seated me. He sat down on the couch. He said, "Oh, one other thing. Just before you start, put out the light. We can't tell how long it will be before we return." Terrifying words! His right hand was on his left wrist where the tiny switch was placed. He smiled again. "Good luck to us, Charlie!" Good luck to us! The open road, the unknown! I sat there staring. He was partly in shadow. The room was very silent. Derek lay propped up on one elbow. His hand threw the tiny switch. There was a breathless moment. Derek's face was set and white, but no whiter than my own, I was sure. His eyes were fixed on me. I saw him suddenly quiver and twitch a little. I murmured, "Derek--" At once he spoke, to reassure me. "I'm all right, Charlie. That was just the first feel of it." * * * * * There was a faint quivering throb in the room, like a tiny distant dynamo throbbing. The current was surging over Derek; his legs twitched. A moment. The faint throbbing intensified. No louder, but rapid, infinitely more rapid. A tiny throb, an aerial whine, faint as the whirring wings of a humming bird. It went up the scale, ascending in pitch, until presently it was screaming with an aerial microscopic voice. But there seemed no change in Derek. His uniform was glowing a trifle, that was all. His face was composed now; he smiled, but did not speak. His eyes roved away from me, as though now he were seeing things that I could not see. Another moment. No change. Why, what was this? I blinked, gasped. There was a change! My gaze was fastened upon Derek's white face. White? It was more than white now! A silver sheen seemed to be coming to his skin! I think no more than a minute had passed. His face was glowing, shimmering. A transparent look was coming to it, a thinness, a sudden unsubstantiality! He dropped his elbow and lay on the couch, stretched at full length at my feet. His eyes were staring. And suddenly I realized that the face that held those staring eyes was erased! A shimmering apparition of Derek was stretched here before me. I could see through it now! Beneath the shimmering, blurred outlines of his body I could see the solid folds of the couch cover. A ghost of Derek here. An apparition--fading--dissipating! A gossamer outline of him, imponderable, intangible. I leaped to my feet, staring down over him. "Derek!" The shape of him did not move. Every instant it was more vaporous, more unreal. I thought, "He's gone!" No! He was still there. A white mist of his form on the couch. Melting, dissipating in the light like a fog before sunshine. A wisp of it left, like a breath, and then there was nothing. * * * * * I sat on the couch. I had put out the light. Around me the room was black. My fingers found the small switch at my wrist. I pressed it across its tiny arc. The first shock was slight, but infinitely strange. A shuddering, twitching sensation ran all over me. It made my head reel, swept a wave of nausea over me, a giddiness, a feeling that I was falling through darkness. I lay on the couch, bracing myself. The current was whining up its tiny scale. I could feel it now. A tiny throbbing, communicating itself to my physical being. And then in a moment I realized that my body was throbbing. The vibration of the current was communicating itself to the most minute cells of my body. An indescribable tiny quivering within me. Strange, frightening, sickening at first. But the sickness passed, and in a moment I found it almost pleasant. I could see nothing. The room was wholly dark. I lay on my side on the couch, my eyes staring into the blackness around me. I could hear the humming of the current, and then it seemed to fade. Abruptly I felt a sense of lightness. My body, lying on the couch, pressed less heavily. I gripped my arm. I was solid, substantial as before. I touched the couch. It was the couch which was changing, not I! The couch cover queerly seemed to melt under my hand! The sense of my own lightness grew upon me. A lightness, a freedom, pressed me, as though chains and shackles which all my life had encompassed me were falling away. A wild, queer freedom. I wondered where Derek was. Had I arrived in the other realm? Was he here? I had no idea how much time had passed: a minute or two, perhaps. Or was I still in Derek's laboratory? The darkness was as solid, impenetrable as ever. No, not quite dark! I saw something now. A glowing, misty outline around me. Then I saw that it was not the new, unknown realm, but still Derek's room. A shadowy, spectral room, and the light, which dimly illumined it, was from outside. * * * * * I lay puzzling, my own situation forgotten for the moment. The light came from overhead, in another room of the apartment house. I stared. Around me now was a dim vista of distance, and vague, blurred, misty outlines of the apartment building above me. The shadowy world I had left now lay bare. There was a moment when I thought I could see far away across a spectral city street. The shadows of the great city were around me. They glowed, and then were gone. A hand gripped my arm in a solid grip. Derek's voice sounded. "Are you all right?" "Yes," I murmured. The couch had faded. I was conscious that I had floated or drifted down a few inches, to a new level. The level of the cellar floor beneath the couch. Cellar floor! It was not that now. Yet there was something solid here, a solid ground, and I was lying upon it, with Derek sitting beside me. I murmured again, "Yes, I'm all right." My groping hand felt the ground. It was soil, with a growth of vegetation like a grass sward on it. Were we outdoors? It suddenly seemed so. I could feel soft, warm air on my face and had a sense of open distance around me. A light was growing, a vague, diffused light, as though day were swiftly coming upon us. I felt Derek fumbling at my wrist. "That's all, Charlie." There was a slight shock. Derek was pulling me up beside him. I found myself on my feet, with light around me. I stood wavering, gripping Derek. It was as though I had closed my eyes, and now they were suddenly open. I was aware of daylight, color, and movement. A world of normality here, normal to me now because I was part of it. The realm of the unknown! CHAPTER IV _"Hope, I Came...."_ I think I was first conscious of a queer calmness which had settled upon me, as though now I had withdrawn contact with the turmoil of our world! Something was gone, and in its place came a calmness. But that was a mere transition. It had passed in a moment. I stood trembling with eagerness, as I know Derek was trembling. A radiant effulgence of light was around us, clarifying, growing. There was ground beneath our feet, and sky overhead. A rational landscape, strangely familiar. A physical world like my own, but, it seemed, with a new glory upon it. Nature, calmly serene. I had thought we were standing in daylight. I saw now it was bright starlight. An evening, such as the evening we had just left in our own world. The starlight showed everything clearly. I could see a fair distance. We stood at the top of a slight rise. I saw gentle, slightly undulating country. A brook nearby wound through a grove of trees and lost itself. Suddenly, with a shock, I realized how familiar this was! We stood facing what in New York City we call West. The contour of this land was familiar enough for me to identify it. A mile or so ahead lay a river; it shimmered in its valley, with cliffs on its further side. Near at hand the open country was dotted with trees and checkered with round patches of cultivated fields. And there were occasional habitations, low, oval houses of green thatch. The faint flush of a recent sunset lay upon the landscape, mingled with the starlight. A road--a white ribbon in the starlight--wound over the countryside toward the river. Animals, strange of aspect, were slowly dragging carts. There were distant figures working in the fields. A city lay ahead of us, set along this nearer bank of the river. A city! It seemed a primitive village. All was primitive, as though here might be some lost Indian tribe of our early ages. The people were picturesque, the field workers garbed in vivid colors. The flat little carts, slow moving, with broad-horned oxen. * * * * * This quiet village, drowsing beside the calm-flowing river, seemed all very normal. I could fancy that it was just after sundown of a quiet workday. There was a faint flush of pink upon everything: the glory of the sun just set. And as though to further my fancy, in the village by the river, like an angelus, a faint-toned bell was chiming. We stood for a moment gazing silently. I felt wholly normal. A warm, pleasant wind fanned my hot face. The sense of lightness was gone. This was normality to me. Derek murmured, "Hope was to meet me here." And then we both saw her. She was coming toward us along the road. A slight, girlish figure, clothed in queerly vivid garments: a short jacket of blue cloth with wide-flowing sleeves, knee-length pantaloons of red, with tassels dangling from them, and a wide red sash about her waist. Pale golden hair was piled in a coil upon her head.... She was coming toward us along the edge of the road, from the direction of the city. She was only a few hundred feet from us when we first saw her, coming swiftly, furtively it seemed. A low pike fence bordered the road. She seemed to be shielding herself in the shadows beside it. We stood waiting in the starlight. The nearest figures in the field and on the road were too far away to notice us. The girl advanced. Her white arm went up in a gesture, and Derek answered. She left the road, crossing the field toward us. As she came closer, I saw how very beautiful she was. A girl of eighteen, perhaps, a fantastic little figure with her vivid garments. The starlight illumined her white face, anxious, apprehensive, but eager. "Derek!" He said, "Hope, I came...." I stood silently watching. Derek's arms went out, and the girl, with a little cry, came running forward and threw herself into them. CHAPTER V _Intrigue_ "Am I in time, Hope?" "Yes, but the festival is to-night. In an hour or two now. Oh Derek, if the king holds this festival, the toilers will revolt. They won't stand it--" "To-night! It mustn't be held to-night! It doesn't give me time, time to plan." I stood listening to their vehement, half-whispered words. For a moment or two, absorbed, they ignored me. "The king will make his choice to-night, Derek. He has announced it. Blanca or Sensua for his queen. And if he chooses the Crimson Sensua--" She stammered, then she went on: "If he does--there will be bloodshed. The toilers are waiting, just to learn his choice." Derek exclaimed, "But to-night is too soon! I've got to plan. Hope, where does Rohbar stand in this?" Strange intrigue! I pieced it together now, from their words, and from what presently they briefly told me. A festival was about to be held, an orgy of feasting and merrymaking, of music and dancing. And during it, this young King Leonto was to choose his queen. There were two possibilities. The Crimson Sensua, a profligate, debauched woman who, as queen, would further oppress the workers. And Blanca, a white beauty, risen from the toilers to be a favorite at the Court. Hope was her handmaiden. If Blanca were chosen, the toilers would be appeased. She was one of them. She would lead this king from his profligate ways, would win from him justice for the workers. But Derek and Hope both knew that the pure and gentle Blanca would never be the king's choice. And to-night the toilers would definitely know it, and the smoldering revolt would burst into flame. * * * * * And there was this Rohbar. Derek said, "He is the king's henchman, Charlie." I stood here in the starlight, listening to them. This strange primitive realm. There were no modern weapons here. We had brought none. The current used in our transition would have exploded the cartridges of a revolver. I had a dirk which Hope now gave me, and that was all. Primitive intrigue. I envisaged this chaotic nation, with its toilers ignorant as the oppressed Mexican peons at their worst. Striving to better themselves, yet, not knowing how. Ready to shout for any leader who might with vainglorious words set himself up as a patriot. This Rohbar, perhaps, was planning to do just that. And so was Derek! He said, "Hope, if you could persuade the king to postpone the festival--if Blanca would help persuade him--just until to-morrow night...." "I can try, Derek. But the festival is planned for an hour or two from now." "Where is the king?" "In his palace, near the festival gardens." She gestured to the south. My mind went back to New York City. This hillock, where we were standing in the starlight beside a tree, was in my world about Fifth Avenue and Sixteenth Street. The king's palace--the festival gardens--stood down at the Battery, where the rivers met in the broad water of the harbor. * * * * * Derek was saying, "We haven't much time: can you get us to the palace?" "Yes. I have a cart down there on the road." "And the cloaks for Charlie and me?" "Yes." "Good!" said Derek. "We'll go with you. It's a long chance; he probably won't postpone it. If he does not, we'll be among the audience. And when he chooses the Red Sensua--" She shuddered, "Oh, Derek--" And I thought I heard her whisper, "Oh, Alexandre--" and I saw his finger go to his lips. His arm went around her. She huddled, small as a child against his tall, muscular body. He said gently, "Don't be afraid, little Hope." His face was grim, his eyes were gleaming. I saw him suddenly as an instinctive military adventurer. An anachronism in our modern New York City. Born in a wrong age. But here in this primitive realm he was at home. I plucked at him. "How can you--how can we dare plunge into this thing? Hidden with cloaks, yes. But you talk of leading these toilers." He cast Hope away and confronted me. "I can do it! You'll see, Charlie." He was very strangely smiling. "You'll see. But I don't want to come into the open right away. Not to-night. But if we can only postpone this accursed festival." We had been talking perhaps five minutes. We were ready now to start away. Derek said: "Whatever comes, Charlie, I want you to take care of Hope. Guard her for me, will you?" I said, "Yes, I will try to." Hope smiled as she held out her hand to me. "I will not be afraid, with Derek's friend." * * * * * Her English was of different intonation from our own, but it was her native language, I could not doubt. I took her cold, slightly trembling hand. "Thank you, Hope." Her eyes were misty with starlight. Tender eyes, but the tenderness was not for me. "Yes," I repeated. "You can depend upon me, Derek." We left the hillock. A food-laden cart came along the road. The driver, a boy vivid in jacket and wide trousers of red and blue, bravely worn but tattered, ran alongside guiding the oxen. When they had passed we followed, and presently we came to the cloaks Hope had hidden. Derek and I donned them. They were long crimson cloaks with hoods. Hope said, "Many are gathering for the festival shrouded like that. You will not be noticed now." Further along the road we reached a little eminence. I saw the river ahead of us, and a river behind us. And a few miles to the south, an open spread of water where the rivers joined. Familiar contours! The Hudson River! The East River. And down at the end of the island, New York Harbor. Hope gestured that way. "The king's palace is there." We were soon passing occasional houses, primitive thatched dwellings. I saw inside one. Workers were seated over their frugal evening meal. Always the same vivid garments, jaunty but tattered. We passed one old fellow in a field, working late in the starlight. A man bent with age, but still a tiller of the soil. Hope waved to him and he responded, but the look he gave us as we hurried by shrouded in our crimson cloaks was sullenly hostile. We came to an open cart. It stood by the roadside. An ox with shaggy coat and spreading horns was fastened to the fence. It was a small cart with small rollers like wheels. Seats were in it and a vivid canopy over it. We climbed in and rumbled away. * * * * * And this starlit road in our own world was Broadway! We were presently passing close to the river's edge. This quiet, peaceful, starlit river! Why, in our world it was massed with docks! Great ocean liners, huge funneled, with storied decks lay here! Under this river, tunnels with endless passing vehicles! Tubes, with speeding trains crowded with people! The reality here was so different! Behind us what seemed an upper city was strung along the river. Ahead of us also there were streets and houses, the city of the workers. A bell was tolling. Along all the roads now we could see the moving yellow spots of lights on the holiday carts headed for the festival. And there were spots of yellow torchlight from boats on the river. We soon were entering the city streets. Narrow dirt streets they were, with primitive shacks to the sides. Women came to the doorways to stare at our little cart rumbling hastily past. I was conscious of my crimson cloak, and conscious of the sullen glances of hate which were flung at it from every side, here in this squalid, forlorn section where the workers lived. Along every street now the carts were passing, converging to the south. They were filled, most of them, with young men and girls, all in gaudy costumes. Some of them, like ourselves, were shrouded in crimson cloaks. The carts occasionally were piled with flowers. As one larger than us, and moving faster rumbled by, a girl in it stood up and pelted me with blossoms. She wore a crimson robe, but it had fallen from her shoulders. I caught a glimpse of her face, framed in flowing dark hair, and of eyes with laughter in them, mocking me, alluring. We came at last to the end of the island. There seemed to be a thousand or more people arriving, or here already. The tip of the island had an esplanade with a broad canopy behind it. Burning torches of wood gave flames of yellow, red and blue fire. A throng of gay young people promenaded the walk, watching the arriving boats. * * * * * And here, behind the walk at the water's edge, was a garden of trees and lawn, shrubs and beds of tall vivid flowers. Nooks were here to shelter lovers, pools of water glinted red and green with the reflected torchlight. In one of the pools I saw a group of girls bathing, sportive as dolphins. To one side at a little distance up the river, banked against the water, was a broad, low building: the palace of the king. About it were broad gardens, with shrubs and flowers. The whole was surrounded by a high metal fence, spiked on top. The main gate was near at hand; we left our cart. Close to the gate was a guard standing alert, a jaunty fellow in leather pantaloons and leather jacket, with a spiked helmet, and in his hand a huge, sharp-pointed lance. The gardens of the palace, what we could see of them, seemed empty--none but the favored few might enter here. But as I climbed from the cart, I got the impression that just inside the fence a figure was lurking. It started away as we approached the gate. The guard had not seen it--the drab figure of a man in what seemed to be dripping garments, as though perhaps he had swum in from the water. And Derek saw him. He muttered, "They are everywhere." Hope led us to the gate. The guard recognized her. At her imperious gesture he stood aside. We passed within. I saw the palace now as a long winged structure of timber and stone, with a high tower at the end of one wing. The building fronted the river, but here on the garden side there was a broad doorway up an incline, twenty feet up and over a small bridge, spanning what seemed a dry moat. Beyond it, a small platform, then an oval archway, the main entrance to the building. Derek and I, shrouded in our crimson cloaks with hoods covering us to the eyes, followed Hope into the palace. CHAPTER VI _The King's Henchman_ The long room was bathed in colored lights. There was an ornate tiled floor. Barbaric draperies of heavy fabric shrouded the archways and windows. It was a totally barbaric apartment. It might have been the audience chamber of some fabled Eastern Prince of our early ages. Yet not quite that either. There was a primitive modernity here. I could not define it, could not tell why I felt this strangeness. Perhaps it was the aspect of the people. The room was crowded with men and gay laughing girls in fancy dress costumes. Half of them at least were shrouded in crimson cloaks, but most of the hoods were back. They moved about, laughing and talking, evidently waiting for the time to come for them to go to the festival. We pushed our way through them. Derek murmured, "Keep your hood up, Charlie." A girl plucked at me. "Handsome man, let me see." She thrust her painted lips up to mine as though daring me to kiss them. Hope shoved her away. Her parted cloak showed her white, beautiful body with the dark tresses of her hair shrouding it. Exotically lovely she was, with primitive, unrestrained passions--typical of the land in which she lived. "This way," whispered Hope. "Keep close together. Do not speak!" We moved forward and stood quietly against the wall of the room, where great curtains hid us partly from view. Under a canopy, at a table on a raised platform near one end of the apartment, sat the youthful monarch. I saw him as a man of perhaps thirty. He was in holiday garb, robed in silken hose of red and white, a strangely fashioned doublet, and a close-fitting shirt. Bare-headed, with thick black hair, long to the base of his neck. He sat at the table with a calm dignity. But he relaxed here in the presence of his favored courtiers. He was evidently in a high good humor this night, giving directions for the staging of the spectacle, despatching messengers. I stood gazing at him. A very kingly fellow this. There was about him, that strange mingled look of barbarism and modernity. * * * * * Hope approached him and knelt. Derek and I could hear their voices, although the babble of the crowd went on. "My little Hope, what is it? Stand up, child." She said, "Your Highness, a message from Blanca." He laughed. "Say no more! I know it already! She does not want this festival. The workers,"--what a world of sardonic contempt he put into that one word!--"the workers will be offended because we take pleasure to-night. Bah!" But he was still laughing. "Say no more, little Hope. Tell Blanca to dance and sing her best this night. I am making my choice. Did you know that?" Hope was silent. He repeated, "Did you know that?" "Yes, Your Highness," she murmured. "I choose our queen to-night, child. Blanca or Sensua." He sighed. "Both are very beautiful. Do you know which one I am going to choose?" "No," she said. "Nor do I, little Hope. Nor do I." He dismissed her. "Go now. Don't bother me." She parted her lips as though to make another protest, but his eyes suddenly flashed. "I would not have you annoy me again. Do you understand?" She turned away, back toward where Derek and I were lurking. The chattering crowd in the room had paid no attention to Hope, but before she could reach us a man detached himself from a nearby group and accosted her. A commanding figure, he was, I think, quite the largest man in the room. An inch or two taller than Derek, at the least. He wore his red cloak with the hood thrown back upon his wide heavy shoulders. A bullet-head with close-clipped black hair. A man of about the king's age, he had a face of heavy features, and flashing dark eyes. A scoundrel adventurer, this king's henchman. Hope said, "What is it, Rohbar?" "You will join our party, little Hope?" He laid a heavy hand on her white arm. His face was turned toward me. I could not miss the gleaming look in his eyes as he regarded her. "No," she said. * * * * * It seemed that he twitched at her, but she broke away from him. Anger crossed his face, but the desirous look in his eyes remained. "You are very bold, Hope, to spurn me like this." He had lowered his voice as though fearful that the king might hear him. "Let me alone!" she said. She darted away from him, but before she joined us she stood waiting until he turned away. "No use," Hope whispered. "There is nothing we can do here. You heard what the king said--and the festival is already begun." Derek stood a moment, lost in thought. He was gazing across the room to where Rohbar was standing with a group of girls. He said at last: "Come on, Charlie. We'll watch this festival. This damn fool king will choose the Red Sensua." He shrugged. "There will be chaos...." We shoved our way from the room, went out of the main doorway and hurried through the gardens of the palace. The red-cloaked figures were leaving the building now for the festival grounds. We waited for a group of them to pass so that we might walk alone. As we neared the gate, passing through the shadows of high flowered shrubs, a vague feeling that we were being followed shot through me. In a moment there was so much to see that I forgot it, but I held my hand on my dirk and moved closer to Hope. We reached the entrance to the canopy. A group of girls, red-cloaked, were just coming out. They rushed past us. They ran, discarding their cloaks. Their white bodies gleamed under the colored lights as they rushed to the pool and dove. We were just in time. Hope whispered, "The king will be here any moment." * * * * * Beneath the canopy was a broad arena of seats. A platform, like a stage, was at one end. It was brilliantly illuminated with colored torches held aloft by girls in flowing robes, each standing like a statue with her light held high. The place was crowded. In the gloom of the darkened auditorium we found seats off to one side, near the open edge of the canopy. We sat, with Hope between us. Derek whispered, "Shakespeare might have staged a play in a fashion like this." A primitive theatrical performance. There was no curtain for interlude between what might have been the acts of a vaudeville. The torch girls, like pages, ranged themselves in a line across the front of the stage. They were standing there as we took our seats. The vivid glare of their torches concealed the stage behind them. There was a few moments wait, then, amid hushed silence, the king with his retinue came in. He sat in a canopied box off to one side. When he was seated, he raised his arm and the buzz of conversation in the audience began again. Presently the page girls moved aside from the stage. The buzz of the audience was stilted. The performance, destined to end so soon in tragedy, now began. CHAPTER VII _The Crimson Murderess_ Hope murmured. "The three-part music comes first. There will first be the spiritual." An orchestra was seated on the stage in a semi-circle. It was composed of men and women musicians, and there seemed to be over a hundred of them. They sat in three groups; the center group was about to play. In a solemn hush the leaderless choirs, with all its players garbed in white, began its first faint note. I craned to get a clear view of the stage. This white choir seemed almost all wood-wind. There were tiny pipes in little series such as Pan might have used. Flutes, and flageolets; and round-bellied little instruments of clay, like ocarinas. And pitch-pipes, long and slender as a marsh reed. In a moment I was lost in the music. It began softly, with single muted notes from a single instrument, echoed by the others, running about the choir like a will-o'-the-wisp. It was faint, as though very far away, made more sweet by distance. And then it swelled, came nearer. I had never heard such music as this. Primitive! It was not that. Nor barbaric! Nothing like the music of our ancient world. Nor was it what I might conceive to be the music of our future. A thing apart, unworldly, ethereal. It swept me, carried me off; it was an exaltation of the spirit lifting me. It was triumphant now. It surged, but there was in its rhythm, the beat of its every instrument, nothing but the soul of purity. And then it shimmered into distance again, faint and exquisite music of a dream. Crooning, pleading, the speech of whispering angels. It ceased. There was a storm of applause. I breathed again. Why, this was what music might be in our world but was not. I thought of our blaring jazz. Hope said, "Now they play the physical music. Then Sensua will dance with Blanca. We will see then which one the king chooses." * * * * * On the stage all the torches were extinguished save those which were red. The arena was darker than before. The stage was bathed with a deep crimson. Music of the physical senses! It was, indeed, no more like the other choir than is the body to the spirit. There were stringed instruments playing now; deep-toned, singing zithers, and instruments of rounded, swelling bodies, like great viols with sensuous, throbbing voices. Music with a swift rhythm, marked by the thump of hollow gourds. It rose with its voluptuous swell into a paean of abandonment, and upon the tide of it, the crimson Sensua flung herself upon the stage. She stood motionless for a moment that all might regard her. The crimson torchlight bathed her, stained crimson the white flush of her limbs, her heavy shoulders, her full, rounded throat. A woman in her late twenties. Voluptuous of figure, with crimson veils half-hiding, half-revealing it. A face of coarse, sensuous beauty. A face wholly evil, and it seemed to me wholly debauched. Dark eyes with beaded lashes. Heavy lips painted scarlet. A pagan woman of the streets. One might have encountered such a woman swaggering in some ancient street of some ancient city, flaunting the finery given her by a rich and profligate eastern prince. She stood a moment with smoldering, passion-filled eyes, gazing from beneath her lowered lids. Her glance went to the king's canopy, and flashed a look of confidence, of triumph. The king answered it with a smile. He leaned forward over his railing, watching her intently. With the surge of the music she moved into her dance. Slowly she began, quite slowly. A posturing and swaying of hips like a nautch girl. She made the rounds of the musicians, leering at them. She stood in the whirl of the music, almost ignoring it, stood at the front of the stage with a gaze of slumberous, insolent passion flung at the king. A knife was in her hand now. She held it aloft. The red torchlight caught its naked blade. With shuddering fancy I seemed to see it dripping crimson. She frowned, and struck it at a phantom lover. She backed away. She stooped and knelt. She knelt and seemed with her empty arms to be caressing a murdered lover's head. She kissed him, rained upon his dead lips her macabre kisses. And then she was up on her bare feet, again circling the stage. Her anklets clanked as she moved with the tread of a tigress. The musicians shrank from her waving blade. * * * * * A girl in white veils was suddenly disclosed standing at the back of the stage. Derek whispered, "Is that Blanca?" "Yes," whispered Hope. Blanca stood watching her rival. The crimson Sensua passed her, took her suddenly by the wrist, drew her forward. For an instant I thought it might have been rehearsed. I saw Blanca as a slim, gentle girl in white, with a white head-dress. A dancer who could symbolize purity, now in the grip of red passion. An instant, and then horror struck us. And I could feel it surge over the audience. A gasp of horror. The frightened girl in white tried to escape. The musicians wavered and broke. I stared, stricken, with freezing blood. Upon the stage the knife went swiftly up; it came down; then up again. The red Sensua stood gloating. The knife she waved aloft was truly dripping crimson now. With a choked, gasping scream the white girl of the toilers crumpled and fell.... She lay motionless, at the feet of the crimson murderess. CHAPTER VIII _"Why, This Is Treason!"_ There was a gasp. The audience sat frozen. On the stage, with no one lifting a hand to stop her, the crimson murderess made a leap and vanished. A moment, and then the spell broke. A girl in the audience screamed. Some one moved to stand up and overturned a seat with a crash. The amphitheater under the canopy broke into a pandemonium. Screams and shouts, crashing of seats, screaming, frightened people struggling to get out of the darkness. The torches on the stage were dropped and extinguished. The darkness leaped upon us. Derek and I were gripping Hope. We were struck by a bench flung backward from in front. People were rushing at us. We were swept along in the panic of the crowd. I heard Derek shout, "We must keep together!" We fought, but we were swept backward. We found ourselves outside the canopy. Torchlight was here. It glimmered on the pool of water. People were everywhere rushing past us, some one way, some another. Aimless, with the shock of terror upon them. Under the canopy they were still screaming. I was momentarily separated from Derek and Hope. I very nearly stumbled into the pool. A girl was here, crouched on the stone bank. Her wet crimson veils clung to her white body. Her long, wet hair lay on her. I stumbled against her. She raised her face. Eyes, wide with terror. Mute, painted red lips.... I heard Derek calling again, "Charlie!" I shoved my way back to him. The crowd was thinning out around us. Girls were climbing from the pool, rushing off in terror, to mingle with the milling throng. Among the crowd now, down by the edge of the bay, I saw the sinister figures of men come running. The toilers, miraculously appearing everywhere! I saw, across the pool, a terrified girl crouching. A huge man in a black cloak came leaping. The colored lights in the trees glittered on his upraised knife blade as it descended. The girl fell with a shuddering scream. The murderer turned and whirled away into the crowd. "Charlie!" I was back with Derek and Hope. Hope stood trembling, with her hand pressed against her mouth. Derek gripped me. "That cloak, get it off!" He ripped his crimson cloak from him and tossed it away. He jerked mine off. "Too dangerous! That's the crimson badge of death to-night." We stood revealed in the clothes of our own world. My business suit, in which that day I had worked in Wall Street. Derek in his swagger uniform. He stood drawn to his full height, a powerful figure. The wires of our mechanism showed at his wrists. They dangled at the back of his neck, mounting to that strangely fashioned electrode clamped to his head. Strange, awe-inspiring figure of a man! We were momentarily alone under the colored lights of the trees. Hope murmured, "But they will see us--see you...." Derek's face was grim, but at her words he laughed harshly. "See us! What matter?" He swung on me. "It forces our hand; we've got to come out in the open now! This murder--this king! My God, what a fool to let himself get into such a condition as this! His people--this chaos--what a fool!" He had drawn his dirk. I realized that I was holding mine. Near us the body of a crimson noble was lying under a tree. A sword was there on the ground. Derek sprang for it, waved it aloft. I think that no more than a minute or two had passed since the murder. Down by the water the boats were hastily loading and leaving the dock. One of them overturned. There were screams everywhere. Red forms lay inert upon the ground where they had been trampled, or stabbed. But the prowling figures of the toilers now seemed to have vanished. Derek gestured. "Look at the palace! The garden!" Beyond the canopy I could see the dim gardens surrounding the palace. I glimpsed the high fence, and the gateway in front. A mob of toilers was there. The guard at the gate had fled. The mob was surging through. Men and women in the vivid garments of the fields, armed with sticks and clubs and stones and the implements of agriculture. They milled at the gate; rushed through; scattered over the garden. Their shouts floated back to us in a blended murmur. We were standing only a dozen feet from the edge of the pavilion. No one seemed yet to have noticed us. A few straggling lights had come on under the canopy. I could see the dead lying there in the wreckage of overturned seats. Derek said, "We can't help it--it's done. Look at them! They're attacking the palace!" This mob springing miraculously into existence! I realized that the toilers had planned that if Sensua were chosen they would attack the festival. The murder of Blanca had come as big a surprise to them as to us.... "Come on! Can you get into the palace, Hope? The king must have gotten back there. Get your wits, girl!" Derek stood gripping her, shaking her. "Yea, there's an underground passage. He probably went that way." From the palace gardens the shouts of the mob sounded louder now. And from within the building there was an alarm bell tumultuously clanging. Hope gasped, "This way." She led us back into the pavilion. We clambered over its broken seats, past its grewsome huddled figures. Some were still moving.... We went to a small door under the platform. A dim room was here, deserted now. Against the wall was a large wardrobe closet; stage costumes were hanging in it. The closet was fully twenty feet deep. We pushed our way through the hanging garments. Hope fumbled at the blank board wall in the rear. Her groping fingers found a secret panel. A door swung aside and a rush of dank cool air came at us. The dark outlines of a tunnel stretched ahead. "In, Charlie!" I crouched and stepped through the door. Hope closed it behind us. The tunnel passage was black, but soon we began to see its vague outlines. Derek, sword in hand, led us. I clutched my dirk. We went perhaps five hundred feet. Down at first, then up again. I figured we were under the palace gardens now, as the tunnel was winding to the left. There were occasional small lights. Derek whispered to Hope, "The toilers don't know of this?" "No." "Where does it bring us out?" I whispered. "Into the lower floor of the castle. The king must have gone this way. There might be a guard, Derek. What will you do?" He laughed. "I can handle this mob. Disperse it! You'll see! And handle the king." He laughed again grimly. "There is no Blanca to choose now." The tunnel went round a sharp angle and began steeply ascending. Derek stopped. "How much further, Hope?" "Not far," she whispered. We crept forward. The tunnel was more like a small corridor now. Beyond Derek's crouching figure, in the dimness I could see a doorway. Derek turned and gestured to us to keep back. A palace guard was standing there. His pike went up. "Who are you?" "A friend." But the man lunged with his pike. Derek leaped aside. His sword flashed; the flat of it struck the fellow in the face. Derek, with incredible swiftness, was upon him. They went down together and before the man could shout, Derek had struck him on the head with the sword hilt. The guard lay motionless. Derek climbed up as we ran forward to join him. I noticed now, for the first time, that in his left hand Derek held a small metal cylinder. A weapon, strange to me, which he had brought with him. He had not mentioned it. He had produced it, when menaced by this guard. Then he evidently decided not to use it. He shoved it back in his pocket. He whirled on us, panting. "Hurry! Close that door!" We closed the door of the tunnel. "Charlie, help me move him!" We dragged the prostrate figure of the unconscious guard aside into a shadow of the wall. We were in a lower room of the palace. It seemed momentarily unoccupied. Overhead we could hear the footsteps of running people. A confusion in the palace, and outside in the garden the shouts of the menacing throng of toilers. And above it all, the wild clanging of the alarm bell from the palace tower. Derek said swiftly, "Get us to the king!" Hope led us through the castle corridors, and up a flight of steps to the main floor. The rooms here were thronged with terrified people--crimson nobles in their bedraggled finery of the festival. In all the chaos no one seemed to notice us. We mounted another staircase. We found a vacant room; through its windows we looked a moment, gazing into the garden. It was jammed with a menacing mob, which milled about, leaderless, waving crude weapons, shouting imprecations at the palace. At the foot of the main steps the throng stood packed, but none dared to mount. A group of the palace guards stood on the platform over the moat. Derek turned away impatiently. "Let's get to the king." We mounted to the upper story. The castle occupants stared at Derek and me as we passed them. A group of girls at the head of the staircase fled before us. "The king," Derek demanded, "Which is his apartment? Hurry, Hope, we've no time now!" We found the frightened king seated on a couch with his counsellors around him. It was a small room in this top story of the castle, with long windows to the floor. I saw that they gave onto a balcony which overlooked the gardens. There were perhaps twenty or thirty people huddled in the room. A confusion existed here as everywhere else--no one knowing what to do in this crisis. And that cursed alarm bell wildly adding to the turmoil. We paused at the doorway. "Now," whispered Derek. He drew himself to his full height. His eyes were flashing. It was a Derek I had not seen before; he wore an air of mastery. As though he, and not the frightened, trembling monarch on the couch, were master here. And as I stared at him that instant in this primitive chaotic environment, the power of him swept me. A conqueror. The strange electrode clamped to his head gave him an aspect miraculous, awe inspiring. He strode forward across the apartment. The king was just giving some futile, vague command to be transmitted to his guards down below. A hush fell over the room at our appearance. The king half stood up, then sank back. "Why--why--who--" I saw Rohbar here. His long crimson cloak hung from his shoulders, with its hood thrown back. Beneath it, as it parted in front, his leather uniform was visible. A sword was strapped to his waist. He was striding back and forth with folded arms, frowning, but his gaze was very keen. Rohbar was not frightened. He seemed rather to be gauging the situation, pondering how he might turn it to his own ends. He stopped short and swung about to face us. His jaw dropped with surprise, amazement, at our strangeness. Derek confronted him. His bulk, and huge weight towered even over Derek. The king gasped and sat helplessly staring. Rohbar spoke first. "Who are you?" "This mob must be dispersed. Don't stand looking at me like that, man!" Derek spoke in friendly fashion, but vehemently. "This is no time for explanations." They were menacing each other. Rohbar's heavy hand fell to his sword, but Derek boldly pushed him away. He faced the king. "Your Majesty...." The king stared blankly at him. The title was no doubt strange to this realm, but no stranger than Derek's aspect. "Your Majesty...." But the noise from the garden, the confusion which now broke out in the room, and that damnable clattering bell, drowned his words. The king found his voice. "Be quiet, all of you!" He was on his feet. He demanded of Derek again, "Who are you?" Derek said swiftly, "I'll show you. I can disperse this mob! Charlie, come." It seemed as though the gaze of everyone in the room went to me. I drew myself up and flashed defiance back at them. And I followed Derek to one of the balcony windows. He went through it, with me after him. I stood at the threshold, watchful of the room behind us. Rohbar was standing aside, and I saw now the woman Sensua with him. They were whispering, staring at me and Derek. I had been wondering why, when Sensua must have known that the king would choose her--why she had dared to murder her rival. I thought now--as I saw her with Rohbar--that I could guess the reason. She loved Rohbar, not the king. Rohbar was plotting to put himself on the throne, using Sensua as a lover to that end. He had doubtless persuaded her to this murder, knowing it would arouse the toilers, precipitate this chaos which was what he wanted. Scheming scoundrel! I could not forget the look of desire on his face as he had accosted Hope.... And now Derek appeared, to add an unknown element to Rohbar's plans. There was no way he could guess who or what we were. I saw that he was puzzled, was whispering to Sensua about us, doubtless wondering how to handle us. I saw too, that there were half a dozen crimson cloaked men here who were not frightened. They had gathered in a group. They stood with hands upon their swords, eyeing me, and watching Rohbar--as though at a sign from him they would rush me. On the balcony Derek stood with the light from the room upon him. The crowd saw him. The main gateway of the palace was just under his balcony. The crowd had now started up the steps to where the guards were standing at the top. At the sight of Derek the mob let out a roar, and those on the steps retreated down again. Derek stood at the balcony rail, silent, with upraised arms, gazing down upon the menacing throng. There was a moment of startled silence as he appeared. Then the shout broke out louder than before. The crowd was milling and pushing, but still leaderless. An aimless activity. Someone threw a stone. It came hurtling up. It missed Derek and struck the castle wall, falling almost at my feet. Derek did not move. He stood calmly gazing down; stood like an orator waiting for the confusion to die before he would speak. From the platform, just beneath Derek, the guards were staring wonderingly up, awed, startled. To the right a wing of the building turned an angle. The castle tower was there: it rose perhaps a hundred feet higher than our balcony. On the railed platform-balcony girding its top I saw the figures of other guards standing, gazing down at Derek. The clanging bell up there was suddenly stilled. I became aware of the king close behind me. His voice rang out: "What are you doing? How dare you?" Derek whirled, "You fool! To what a pass you have come! Your people in arms against you...." His violent words brought the king's anger. "How dare you! This is treason!" I stood alert, with my hand upon my dirk. There would be conflict here, I felt that we could not hold it off more than a moment longer. My mind leaped to that metal cylinder Derek had concealed. A weapon? Then why did he not have it out now? His eyes were flashing. The aspect of power, of confidence, upon him was unmistakable. It heartened me. I took a step toward him. He smiled faintly. "Wait, Charlie." The king gasped again. "How dare you? Why, this is treason! Rohbar, seize him!" Hope was beside me, her eyes watching the room. Rohbar came striding forward. Derek rasped, "You perhaps have some sense! Lead His Majesty away. Take care of him until this is over." They stood with crossing glances. And upon Rohbar's face a look, queerly sinister, had come. A smile, sardonic. He said abruptly to the king, "I think we should let him have his way. What harm?" He gestured and Sensua came forward. The crimson murderess! Her voluptuous figure was shrouded in a crimson cloak. Her heavy painted lips smiled at the King. Her rounded white arms went over his shoulders. "Leonto, do as Rohbar says. Let this stranger try. It can do no harm." The king yielded to her; I watched as she and Rohbar urged him through an archway that gave into the adjoining apartment. No wonder Rohbar was sardonically smiling! Derek had played into his hand. We did not know it then, but we were soon to find it out. CHAPTER IX _"Alexandre--"_ Derek turned back to the balcony. It had been a brief interlude. The mob in the garden, the soldiers at the top of the stairway, and the other guards high on the bridge of the tower were all standing gazing. Shouts again arose as Derek appeared. Again he raised his arms. This time his voice rang out. "Silence all of you! I am a friend! Silence!" At first they did not heed him; then someone shouted: "Quiet! Listen to him! Let him talk!" The crowd was bellowing, and then they ceased. The bell was still. In the hush came Derek's voice: "I am a friend. I come from foreign lands, from distant lands of strange people and strange magic." For answer the crowd shouted and milled in confusion. A stone came up and then another. Derek stood immovable, like a statue gazing down at them. "I command you to disperse. You will not? Then look at me! Look at me, all of you. My will is law beyond this king--beyond these palace soldiers--beyond any power you have ever known." Then I knew a part of Derek's purpose! He had pressed the mechanism at his wrist. He stood imperious with upraised arms. The garden was in a tumult, but in a moment it died. A wave of horror swept the crowd. A freezing, incredulous horror. They stood staring, incredulous, silent, swept with a widening wave of horror. The figure of Derek on the balcony was fading, turning luminous. A wraith, a ghost of his menacing shape standing there. It faded until it was almost gone, and then, as he reversed the mechanism, it materialized again. A moment passed, then he stood again solid before them. His voice rang out, "Will you obey me now? I am a friend of the toilers!" They were prostrate before him. There is no fear more terrible than the fear of the supernatural. In all of history there has been in our world no worship more abject than the worship and fear of a primitive people for its supernatural God. On the platform beneath the balcony, the palace soldiers stared up, horrified. Then they too were prostrate before Derek's threatening gestures and commanding voice. I stood watching, listening. And suddenly, from the prostrate crowd, a man leaped up. In the silence his amazed voice carried over the garden. "Alexandre! It is our Prince Alexandre! Our lost prince!" He stood staring at Derek, his arms gesturing to his comrade around him. He shouted it again: "Our rightful king, come back to us! Don't you recognize him? _I_ saw him go! He went like that--fading into a ghost. Ten years ago, when Leonto killed his father and would have killed him had he not escaped!" The crowd was standing up now. They recognized Derek! There was no doubt of it. The garden was ringing with the tumultuous shouts, "Alexandre! Our lost prince has come back to us!" My head was whirling with it. Derek, prince of this realm? I could see that it was true. Escaped from here as a young lad, when his throne was usurped. Returning now, a man, to claim his own. And suddenly he turned and flashed me his smile. The din from the garden drowned his words. The crowd was shouting: "Alexandre! Our lost prince!" The king's guards on the lower platform stood sullen, confused. I heard footsteps behind me. I whirled around. From the room, the group of Rohbar's crimson nobles were rushing toward me! Their swords were out. One of them shouted, "Kill them now! We must kill them and have done!" There were five or six men in the group. They were no more than ten feet away from me. They came leaping. I stood in the window opening, with only my dirk to oppose them. I shouted, "Derek! Derek!" I think I took a step backward. I was out on the balcony. It flashed over me--Derek and I were caught out here! The first of the red cloaked figures came hurtling through the doorway. I leaped to avoid his sword. I saw the others crowding behind him. Then I felt Derek shove me violently aside. I half fell, but recovered myself at the balcony rail. Five of the crimson nobles were on the balcony. Derek confronted them. His aspect made them pause. They stood, with outstretched swords. The garden was silent; the crowd stared up. And in the silence Derek roared, "Get back! All of you, go back inside! Back, or I'll kill you!" In Derek's right hand he held the cylinder outstretched, leveled at the menacing nobles. "Back, I say!" But instead they rushed him. There was a flash. From the cylinder it seemed that a ray spat out, a flash of silver light. It caught the three men who were in advance of the others. Their swords dropped with a clatter to the balcony floor. They stood, transfixed. An instant. Derek's silver ray played upon them. Their red cloaks were painted with its silver sheen. They were shimmering! I gasped, staring. The other nobles, beyond the ray, had fallen back. And they too stood staring in horror. Another instant The three figures wavered. I saw the face of one of them, with the shock of incredulous horror still upon it. A face turning luminous! A face, erased, with only the staring eyes to mark where it had been! There was a moment when the three stricken men stood like shimmering ghosts, with Derek's deadly ray upon them. Then they were gone! It seemed, just as they vanished, that they were falling through the balcony floor.... Derek snapped off his ray. He rasped, "Back into that room, I tell you!" The remaining nobles fled before him. He turned again to the balcony rail. "My people--yes, I am Alexandre--I had not thought you would recognize me so soon. But you are right--the time has come for me to claim my inheritance. And I will rule you justly." His cylinder was still in his hand; he swept a watchful glance behind him. I thought of Rohbar. He was in the next room, with the king. Had they seen this attack upon Derek? They must have heard the crowd shouting, "Alexandre!" It seemed strange they did not appear. I recall now, as I look back to this moment on the balcony, that I suddenly thought of Hope. She had been beside me just before the nobles attacked. I did not see her now. I was startled, but thought of her was driven from my mind. From within the palace a scream sounded. A girl screaming. But it was not Hope's voice. A girl, screaming, and then shouting: "The king is dead!" Derek came rushing at me. "Charlie, that--" We heard it again. "The king is dead!" We hurried into the adjoining room. There was no one to stop us--no one up here now who dared oppose Derek. The terrified nobles in the room fell cringing before him. "Alexandre--spare us! We are loyal to you!" He strode past them. In the adjacent apartment we found the king lying upon the floor. A wound in his throat welled crimson. He had evidently been lying here alone, and had just now been found by a girl who had entered. He was not quite dead. Derek bent over him. He opened his eyes. He gasped faintly: "Rohbar--killed me. Rohbar and that--accursed crimson Sensua...." His voice trailed away. The light went out of his staring eyes. Derek laid him gently back on the floor. And as though already the news of his death had miraculously spread, the bell in the castle tower began tolling. Not clanging now. Tolling, with slow, solemn accent. The crowd evidently recognized it. We could hear the shouts: "Death! Death has come!" Derek's eyes ware blazing as he stood up. "The end, Charlie! I would not have planned this, and yet...." He did not finish. He whirled, rushed back to the other room and to the balcony. The scene was again in confusion the crowd milling, voices shouting: "The king is dead!" At the edge of the garden a woman's shrill, hysterical laughter rose over the din. Derek called, "Yes, the king is dead!" He paused. Then he added, "If you want me--if I have your loyalty--I will claim my throne." A tumult interrupted him. "Alexandre! King Alexandre!" He spread his arms, but he could not silence them. "The king is dead. Long live King Alexandre!" A wave of it swept over the garden, engulfing the castle. At the main entrance Leonto's soldiers stood sullen, listening to it. Derek stood triumphant. His hands were outstretched, palms down. But up on the circular bridge at the top of the tower there was a sudden commotion. The soldiers up there had vanished, moved back within the tower to make room for other figures. I stared amazed, transfixed. A huge man in leather garments was there, with a sword stuck in his wide belt. A man with a bullet head, a heavy face, gazing down.... Rohbar! And held in front of him the slender figure of a girl. Hope! He clutched her, his thick arm encircling her breast. With sinking heart I realized what had happened. Hope had moved away from me. Every one in the room had been intent upon Derek. Rohbar had come quietly in, after murdering the king, had seized Hope, stifled her outcry, and had taken her up into the tower. And I had promised Derek that I would shield this girl from harm! The horror of it--the self-condemnation of it--swept me, froze me to numbness. I could not think; I could only stand and stare. Rohbar held Hope like a shield before him. The low railing hardly reached her knees. A sheer drop to the garden beneath. He held her tightly, and in his free hand I saw his dirk come up menacingly against her white throat. His voice called: "Silent, down there! Alexandre, you traitor! Silence!" Derek stared up. The triumph faded from him. He stared, stricken. The crowd stared. The soldiers on the lower platform ceased their shouting and gazed up at these new actors, come so unexpectedly upon the stage. Again Rohbar called, to the guards this time: "I represent your King Leonto. This Alexandre is a traitor to us all. And he cannot harm me! I defy him. Look at him! I defy him to use his evil weapon upon me!" Derek was silent. A single adverse move and Rohbar's knife would stab into Hope's throat. Derek's ray was powerless. A flash from it would have killed Hope, not Rohbar. The king's soldiers saw Derek's indecision. One of them shouted, "He cannot harm us! Look, he is frightened!" The crowd recognized Hope. They began calling her name. And calling, "Master Rohbar, do not harm our Hope!" "I will not harm her! Not if you do what I tell you! Leave the garden--go quietly! I will deal with this traitor!" He added to the guards, "Go up and seize him! He cannot hurt you! Traitor! Seize him! If he does not yield--if any of this crowd attacks you--then I will kill Hope." Derek stood clinging to the balcony rail. With Rohbar's watchful gaze upon him he did not dare turn or move. I was standing back from the balcony, behind Derek and partly in the room. No one thought of me. No one from outside could see me. And I, who had played no part in this, save that one I had neglected, suddenly saw my role. My cue was sounding. My role to play, here upon this tumultuous stage. I turned back into the dim room. A few frightened men and girls were here. They were all crowding forward, gazing through the windows at the scene outside. No one noticed me, but I saw, with sudden realization, my role to play. I darted across the room, out into the dim, deserted corridor of the castle. CHAPTER X _My Role to Play_ I slipped like a shadow through the almost empty corridors. Down on the lower floor I found that many of the soldiers were on the inside, standing about the corridors in groups, waiting for word from their comrades on the platform to indicate what action they should take. My time was short; I knew that within a few minutes they would be rushing up to overpower Derek. I stood unseen against the wall near the main entrance. I could not get outside. There were too many soldiers there. I tried to keep my sense of direction. The wing upon which the tower stood was about two hundred feet from me here. If I could not get outside I would have to try the inside, along this corridor. I prayed that I might not make an error. I tried to gauge exactly where the tower would be. The hallway was almost dark and in this wing there chanced to be no one at the moment. I came to the angle and turned it to the left. I was unarmed save my dirk. I drew it. But I encountered no one. I passed the doors of many empty rooms. The windows were all barred on this lower floor. I could hear the shouts of the crowd outside. I came at last to the end of the wing. A staircase here led upward. I guessed that I was directly under the tower now, and that this staircase undoubtedly led upward into it. I mounted a few steps to verify what I was sure would be the condition. It was as I thought. Rohbar had won over the soldiers who were here. He had sent them down from the tower bridge. They were guarding this staircase. I crept up another few steps, very cautiously. I could hear their voices on the stairs. A light was up there. I could see the legs of some of them as they crowded the stairs. I softly retreated. There was no way of getting up into the tower here. Alone and armed only with my dirk, I could not mount these stairs and assail a dozen armed men standing above me; especially when, if I raised an alarm, Rohbar overhead might be startled into killing Hope. I stood another moment, thinking, planning my actions. I was trembling. Everything depended upon me now. I must get up into the tower. And, above everything, haste was necessary. I retreated back to the lower floor. I was still some twenty feet above the ground, I judged. That was too far. A dozen paces along the hall I saw a stairway leading downward into the ground level cellar of the castle. I marked in my mind exactly in which direction I turned, and how far. I went down the stairs. There was an empty lower room. It was pitch black. I lay down on its earthen floor. Above me, a few paces off to one side I could visualize the tower. A hundred and fifty feet above me, at least, up to that bridge balcony, where Rohbar stood with Hope. I kept my mind on it and prayed that I might not be making an error, a miscalculation. I prayed, too, that luck would be with me. A desperate chance, yet I thought I knew what was here, or about here, in New York City. I lay on my side, alone in the blackness, and pressed the switch at my wrist.... The familiar sensation of the transition began. The darkness grew luminous. Around me shadows were taking form. My body was humming, thrilling with the vibrations within it. I could feel the ground under me seeming to melt. My head was reeling. Nausea swept me, but with it all I tried to keep my wits. I must watch this new Space into which I was going. Space? I prayed that here on this spot in New York City there would be empty space! If not, at the first warning, I was prepared to stop my mechanism. The shadows grew around me. There was a moment or two when I felt as though I were floating. Weightless. The sense of my body hovering in a void, intangible, imponderable, with only my struggling mentality holding it together.... And then I felt myself materializing. Around me walls were taking form. I floated down a foot or two and came to rest upon a new floor. My hand brushed it. My physical senses were returning. I could feel a floor of concrete. A vague, shimmering light was near me. It seemed to outline the rectangle of a window. All around was darkness. Empty darkness. Soundless, with only the throbbing hum of the mechanism.... I was indoors, in a room. I felt suddenly almost normal, except for the whirring vibration. I flung the switch again. There was a shock. A whirling of my senses. Then I sat up; my head steadied. The nausea passed. I was back in my own world, in New York City. This was night: I tried to calculate the time. Derek and I had departed about midnight. This would be, then some time before dawn. I was in a cellar room, lying on its cement floor. There was a window, with a faint light outside it. A window up near the ceiling. A straggling illumination showed me a bin, a few barrels, a door leading into another room which looked as though it might be a machine shop. I sat up, calculating. I was a thousand feet perhaps from the Battery wall, two hundred feet from the Hudson River. This was an office building, and I was in one of its cellar rooms, at the ground level. Near dawn? I tried to calculate what might be overhead. A deserted office building. Too early yet for the scrub-women. The elevator would not be running. I laughed to myself. Of what use to me an elevator, if it had been running? How could I, a midnight prowler, appear from the cellar of this building, and demand to be taken upstairs! There would be no elevator, but there would be watchmen. I would avoid them. I found a door. My heart leaped with a sudden fear that it would be locked, but it was not. I went through it into a passage and found the staircase. I made two turns. I tried again to keep my mind on this Space here. I stood, carefully thinking. I had it clear. I had made no move without careful thought. The tower with Rohbar was still to my left, and about directly above me. I went up the short stone staircase, opened another door carefully. I was in the dim lower hall of the office building. I found myself beside the deserted elevator shaft. A light was burning on the night attendant's table in an alcove, on the other side of the shaft. He sat there with his back to me. I closed the door soundlessly. The stairway upward beside the elevator was here. I watched my chance. I darted around the angle and went up. I met no one. The concrete staircase had a light at each floor. Four floors up. No, not enough! I opened the fourth floor door. The marble hall of the office building was empty and silent. Rows of locked office doors with their gold-leaf names and numbers. A single dim light to illumine the silent emptiness.... I retreated into the staircase shaft and mounted higher. My dirk was in my hand. Charlie Wilson, the Wall Street brokerage clerk, prowling here! And upon what a strange adventure! I came to what I thought was the proper floor. In the hall I selected a room. The door was securely locked. I had no way of breaking the lock, but the panel was of opaque glass. I would have to chance the noise. I rushed the length of the hall, to where a red fire-ax hung in a bracket. I came back with it. I smashed the glass panel of the door. Would a watchman hear me? I did not wait to find out. With the ax I scraped away the splinters of glass. I climbed through the opening. My hand was cut, but I did not heed it. I was in a dim, silent office, with rugs on the floor, desks standing about, filing cases, a water-cooler, and a safe in the corner. I rushed to one of the windows. It looked over Battery Park and the upper bay. The stars were shining, but to the east over Brooklyn I could see them paling with the coming dawn. I gazed down to try and calculate my height. Yes, this would be about right. And my position. I could see the outline of the shore, the trees of Battery Park, the busy harbor, even at this hour before dawn, thronged with the moving lights of its boats. I saw all this with my eyes, but with my mind I saw the wrecked, deserted pavilion, and the gardens of Leonto's castle. The threatening mob would be below me. The palace entrance would be here to my left, down in the street where those taxis were parked. There was a commotion down there by the office building entrance. I know now what caused it, but at the time I did not notice. The wing of the castle was under me. This would be the tower. Its upper room, or the balcony, just about where I was standing. I prayed that it might be so. I seemed with my mind to see it all. I lay down on the floor by the window. Out in the office building hallway I heard heavy footsteps come running. One of the night watchmen had evidently heard the glass crashed. I laughed. I pressed the switch at my wrist.... CHAPTER XI _The Fight on the Tower Balcony_ The sensations swept me again. The room faded. Whether the watchmen came in to see a ghost of me lying there on the floor I did not know, nor did I care. I whirled into the shadows. And came in a moment out of the black silence. The office room was gone. I seemed to have fallen or floated down--how far I do not know. A triumph swept me. I was lying on another floor. I could see a doorway materializing. I was not upon the balcony as I had calculated, but within the tower room. New walls sprang around me. I did not heed it, this time, the sensation, of the transition. I was too alert to what new situation might come upon me. The tower room. I could see it. I could see its oval windows close at hand. The doorway to its balcony. Sounds flooded me, mingled with the humming within me. Familiar sounds. The crowd shouting. And a single voice--the voice of Rohbar. Vague and blurred, but as I materialized it became clearer. I was suddenly aware that there was a man beside me. One of the palace soldiers. He saw me materialize. He leaped backward in horror. I flung my switch. I was on my feet, swaying, and then I leaped upon him. My dirk plunged downward into his chest. The thing made me shudder. I reeled with the sickness of it, but as he fell I clung to the dirk and ripped it out of him. It was dripping with his blood. I stood trembling. The small tower room had no other occupants. I turned toward the door. I could see a patch of stars, paling with the coming dawn. I crouched in the small doorway which gave onto the balcony, staring, swiftly calculating. The scene had scarcely changed. But, some of the soldiers had left the entrance platform, gone, no doubt, into the castle on their way upstairs to seize Derek. On this upper balcony, no more than ten feet before me, Rohbar still stood gripping Hope. She was in front of him. His back was to me. A sudden jump, and I could plunge my dagger into his back. Rohbar was shouting, "King Leonto is dead. If you should want me to succeed him, I will take this girl Hope for my queen. You all love her...." I was tense to spring. Then out in the balcony, to one side, I saw Sensua crouching. Her crimson robe fell away to bare her white limbs. Her hand fumbled in her robe. She had been Rohbar's dupe, and now she knew it. Her knife was in her hand. Frenzied with jealousy and rage she sprang upon Rohbar's back, trying to stab at Hope. Perhaps he sensed her coming, heard her; or perhaps she was unskilful. Her knife only grazed Hope's shoulder. He released Hope. He roared. He turned and gripped his murderous assailant. A second or two while I stood watching. He caught Sensua's wrist, twisted the knife from it and plunged the knife into her breast. She sank with a scream at his feet, and as he straightened he saw me. But I had leaped. I was upon him. His own knife had remained in Sensua's breast. As I raised mine in my leap, he caught at my wrist; twisted it, but I flung the knife away before he could get it. The knife fell over the balcony rail. The weight of my hurtling body flung him backward, but the rail caught him. His arms went around me. Powerful arms, crushing me. I gripped at his throat. There was an instant when I thought that we would both topple over the railing. I felt Hope beside us. I heard her scream. We did not go over the rail, for Rohbar lurched and flung us back. We dropped to the balcony floor, rolling, locked together. He was far stronger and heavier than I. He came uppermost. He lunged and broke my hold upon his throat, but I was agile: I squirmed from under him. I almost regained my feet. He got up on one knee. He was trying to draw his sword. Then again I bore into him, kicking and tearing. He roared like a bull. And ignoring my plucking fingers, my flailing fists, he lunged to his feet with me gripping again at his throat. His huge height swung me off the ground. I was aware that he had drawn his sword, but I was too close for him to use it. He swayed drunkenly with my weight; he was confused. I felt the rail behind us. We lunged again into it. Again I heard Hope scream in terror, and saw her leap at us. Rohbar stooped, trying to clutch the low rail. His bending down brought my feet to the balcony floor. With a last despairing effort I shoved him backward. And as he toppled at the rail, I fought to break his hold upon me. I felt us going and then I felt Hope reach me. Her arms flung about my waist. Her hold tore me loose. Rohbar's huge body fell away.... For an instant Rohbar seemed balanced upon the rail; then he went over. He gave a last long, agonized scream as he fell. I did not look down. I crouched by the rail. The crowd in the garden; Derek standing on the other balcony; the soldiers who now had appeared behind him--all were silent, and in the silence I heard the horrible thud of Rohbar's body as it struck.... I clung to Hope for an instant, and she shuddered against me. The scene broke again into chaos. I cast Hope away and leaped up. I stood at the balcony rail. My arms went up and gestured to Derek. Amazement was on his face, but he answered my gesture. Behind him the soldiers who had come to seize him were standing in a group, stricken at this new tragedy. Derek swung on them. He was not powerless now! "Away with you!" His cylinder menaced them, and they fell back in terror before him. He darted past them and disappeared into the castle. I felt Hope plucking at me. "I want to talk to the people." She stood beside me, leaning over the rail. Gentle little figure. Familiar figure to them all. Their beloved Hope. Her voice rang out clearly through the hush. "My people, we all want our beloved Alexandre--he has come back to us. He is our rightful king." "King Alexandre! Long live King Alexandre!" Derek in a moment appeared behind us. "My God, Charlie, I can't understand--" I told him how I had done it. He gripped me. "I'll never be able to repay you for this!" I pushed him forward and he joined Hope at the rail. Held her, and her arms went around his neck as she returned his kisses. The crowd gaped, then cheered. I shouted, "Hope will be your queen--The reign of the crimson nobles is at an end!" The wild cheering of the people, in which now the castle guards were joining, surged up to mingle with my words. CHAPTER XII _One Tumultuous Night_ I come now with very little more to record. I returned to my own world. And Derek stayed in his. Each to his own; one may rail at this allotted portion--but he does not lightly give it up. The scientists who have examined the mechanism with which I returned very naturally are skeptical of me. Derek feared a further communication between his world, and mine. He smiled his quiet smile. "Your modern world is very aggressive, Charlie. I would not want to chance having my mechanism duplicated--a conquering army coming in here." And so he adjusted the apparatus to carry me back and then go dead. I have wires and electrodes to show in support of my narrative. But since they will not operate I cannot blame my hearers for smiling in derision. Yet there is some contributing evidence. Derek Mason has vanished. A watchman in an office building near Battery Park reports that at dawn of that June morning he heard splintering glass. He found the office door with its broken panel, and the ax lying on the hall floor. He even thinks he saw a ghost stretched out by the window. But he is laughed at for saying it. And there is still another circumstance. If you will trouble to examine the newspaper files of that time, you will find an occurrence headed "Inexplicable Tragedy at Battery Park." You will read that near dawn that morning, the bodies of three men in crimson cloaks came hurtling down through the air and fell in the street near where several taxis were parked. Strange, unidentified men. Of extraordinary aspect. The flesh burned, perhaps. All three were dead; the bodies were mangled by falling some considerable height. An inexplicable tragedy. Why should anyone believe that they were the three crimson nobles whom Derek attacked with his strange ray? I am only Charles Wilson, clerk in a Wall Street brokerage office. If you met me, you would find me a very average, prosaic sort of fellow. You would never think that deeds of daring were in my line at all. Yet I have lived this one strange tumultuous night, and I shall always cherish the memory. The Stolen Mind By M. L. Staley [Illustration: _The structure, pivoting downward, plunged Quest to his waist in the osmotic solution._] [Sidenote: What would you do, if, like Quest, you were tricked, and your very Mind and Will stolen from your body?] "What caused you to answer our advertisement?" Owen Quest felt the steel of the quick gray eyes that jabbed like gimlets across the office table. "Why does any man apply for a job?" he bristled. Keane Clason gave an impatient smile. "Come!" he said. "I'm not trying to snare you. But there were unusual features to my ad, and they were put there to attract an unusual type of man. To judge your qualifications, I must know just why this proposition appeals to you." "I can tell you that," nodded Quest, "but there's nothing unusual about it. In the first place, I knew that the Clason Research Corporation is the leading concern of its kind in the country. In the second place, this seemed to offer a way to obtain a substantial sum of money quickly." "Good," said Clason. "And you feel that you have all the necessary qualifications?" "Decidedly. I am 24 years old, athletic, and of an earnest and determined nature. Moreover, I have no family ties, and I'm willing to run any reasonable risk in order to improve the condition of my fellow men." Clason smiled his approval. "You say you need money. How much immediately?" Quest was unprepared for the question. "A thousand dollars," he ventured. Without hesitation Clason counted out ten one-hundred-dollar notes from his wallet and laid them on the table. "There's your advance fee. You're ready to go to work immediately, I hope?" "Certainly," stammered Quest. Stunned by the swiftness of the transaction, he sat staring at the money that lay untouched before him. To accept it would be like signing an unread contract. But he had asked for it; to refuse it was impossible. Even to delay about picking it up might arouse Clason's suspicion. Already the latter had turned away and was opening the door of a steel cabinet. Quest had one second in which to reach a decision.... He crammed the currency into his pocket. * * * * * With delicate care Clason set two objects on the table. One looked to Quest like a miniature broadcasting tower or a mooring mast for lighter than air craft. The other was a circular vat of some black material, probably carbon. Within it a series of concentric tissues were suspended from metal rings, and in a trough outside ranged four stoppered flasks containing liquids of as many different colors. "Look at these models carefully," said Clason. "They represent two of the most remarkable discoveries of all time. The one on your left is the most _de_structive weapon known to man. The other I consider the most _con_structive discovery in the history of science. It may even lead to an understanding of the nature of life, and of the future of the spirit after death. "Both of these were developed by my brother Philip and me together--but we have disagreed about the use to which they shall be put. "Philip"--the inventor dropped his voice to a whisper--"wants to sell the secret of the Death Projector--the tower, there--as an instrument of war. If I should permit him to do that, it might lead to the destruction of whole nations!" "How?" demanded Quest "I've heard of a device called the Death Ray. Is this it?" "No, no," said Clason contemptuously. "Even in a perfected state the Ray would be a child's toy compared to the Projector. This is based on our discovery that invisible light rays of a certain wave-length, if highly concentrated, destroy life--and our additional discovery that if these are synchronized with short radio waves the effect is absolutely devastating. "We obtain the desired concentration of invisible light by using a tellurium current-filter under the influence of alternate flashes of red and blue light. The projector can literally blanket vast areas with death, up to a top range of at least five hundred miles. "Just picture to yourself what this means! In a space of ten minutes two men can lay down a circle of destruction a thousand miles in diameter; or they can cut a swath five hundred miles long in any desired direction." * * * * * "Have you ever proved it?" demanded Quest skeptically. "Yes, young man, we have," snapped Clason. "Right here in the laboratory--but on a minute scale, of course. However, there's no time to demonstrate now. The point is that my brother is determined to sell if he can obtain his price for the invention. He argues that instead of bringing disaster upon the world, this machine will forever discourage war by making it too terrible for any civilized nation to consider. In spite of my opposition he has opened negotiations with an ambitious Balkan power. He may actually close the sale at any moment! "However," Clason drew a deep breath "you see this other device? Simple as it appears, it is the key to the whole situation. We can use it--you and I--to overcome Philip's will and prevent this unthinkable transaction. The two of us can do it. Alone I would be virtually helpless." "Why not have the Projector confiscated or destroyed by our own Government?" suggested Quest. "That seems to me the only safe and sure way out of the difficulty." "You simply do not understand," frowned Clason impatiently. "Philip is selling the plans and descriptions of the machine, not the machine itself. Even if this model and the larger test machine that we have built were destroyed--even if I were willing to have Philip sent to Leavenworth for life--he could still sell the Projector. "But this other invention, our Osmotic Liberator, makes it possible for me to gain control of Philip and actually _change his mind_, through the medium of an agent. I have hired you to act as my Agent, Quest, because I can see that you are a young man of unusual character and vitality. And by way of reward I can promise you both money and a brilliant future." * * * * * The inventor poised in a tense attitude on the edge of his chair as though his body were charged with electricity. His eyes seemed to dart out emanations that set Quest's blood to tingling. Then for a moment the latter lost consciousness of his physical self. It was as though he had opened a door and found himself suddenly on the brink of a new and totally strange world. He dispelled this fancy by a quick effort of the will, for he knew that he had a delicate problem on his hands and that it must be solved within a very few minutes. However he proceeded, he must act without disloyalty to his Government, and at the same time without injustice to Keane Clason. "Tell me," he said in a husky voice, "how do you intend to use me? I do not believe in Spiritualism. I would be a poor medium." Clason gave a short laugh. "You are not to be a medium in that sense at all. Spiritualism as practiced is just a blind sort of groping and hoping. Osmotic Liberation, on the other hand, is an exact and opposite physico-chemical science. Here--I will show you." Into the outer cell of the Liberator he emptied the purple vial, and so on to the innermost, which he filled with a golden-green liquid like old Chartreuse. "The separating membranes, you understand, are permeable by these complicated solutions. Each liquid has a different osmotic pressure and therefore should, under normal conditions, interchange with the others through the membranes until all pressures are equalized. I prevent such interchange, however, by maintaining an anti-electrolysis which retards ionization and thus builds up what might be called osmotic potential. * * * * * "Now if an Agent--yourself for instance--submerges himself in the central cell, at the same time maintaining a physical contact with his Control at the surface of the liquid, and if then the osmotic potential is suddenly released by throwing the electrolytic switch, the host of ions thus turned loose in the outer compartments make one grand rush for the center solution, which contains the cathode. "Under these conditions your body becomes a sort of sixth cell, and your skin another membrane in the series. Properly speaking, however, you are not a part of the electrolytic circuit but are merely present in the action. Your body acts as a catalyser, hastening the chemical action without itself being affected in any way. Physically you undergo no change whatever; but in some strange way which is, like life, beyond analysis, your mind flows out into the solution, while your unaltered body remains at the bottom of the tank in a state of suspended animation. "If no Control is present, all that is needed to return your mind into your body is a throw of the electrolytic switch back to negative, whereupon you emerge from the tank exactly as you entered it. But with your Control present and in contact with your submerged body, your mind, instead of remaining suspended in the solution, flows instantly into his body and resides there subject to his will. "This can not be done, however, unless the wills of Control and Agent have first been brought into accord. To accomplish that, we clasp hands"--Quest grasped Clason's extended hand--"and look steadily into each other's eyes. "Now, it is well known that the vibrations of an individual's will are as distinctive as the sworls of his finger-prints. What is not so well known is that the frequency of vibration in one person can be brought into accord with that in another. * * * * * "You consciously retract your will by concentrating your mind upon the thing which you know I wish to accomplish. Gradually while we continue in this position your vibrations speed up or slow down until they acquire exactly the same frequency as my own. We are then in accord, and when your mind is liberated in the tank it is in a state which admits absorption into my body. And it is subject to my will because you have purposely attuned it to my peculiar frequency. Immediately after the transfer there will be a brief conflict, due to the instinctive desire of your will to obtain the ascendancy. But of course mine will gain the upper hand at once, since both wills will be in my frequency." Quest felt, rather than saw, a wall of alarm closing in on him. He tried to avert his eyes, to withdraw his hand from Clason's grasp. With a nostalgic pang in the pit of his stomach he suddenly realized that he could not do so. He had gone too far--farther than any man in his position had a right to go. Having deliberately weakened his will, it seemed now to have deserted him entirely. A prickling sensation coursed up his spine, his extended arm went numb, his hand trembled violently. "Splendid!" said Clason, suddenly releasing both eye and hand. "Just as I foresaw, you will be able to attune yourself to my vibration-frequency with hardly an effort. Now please remain seated; I'll be back in a moment." * * * * * For a second after the door closed, Quest remained slumped in his chair. Then he was on his feet, shaking himself like a wet dog to free himself from the spell under which he had fallen. Something about Clason attracted and at the same time repelled him, fraying his nerves like an irritant drug and confusing his mind at the moment when he needed the full alertness of every faculty. Invisible light--disembodied minds--will vibrations! Nothing there to get hold of. Were these things real or imaginary? Was Keane Clason a great inventor, or a madman? Would Philip prove to be a real or an imaginary scoundrel? Should he summon help, or go on alone? Professional pride said: wait, don't be an alarmist! With his knuckles Quest tapped the table, half expecting it to melt under his fingers. The feeling and sound of the contact gave him a peculiar start. On the farther end of the table stood a letter-box--an invitation. From his pocket Quest snatched a slip of paper, and wrote: 6 stroke 4--9:45A--Hired. If no report in 48 hours, clamp down hard. To address a stamped envelope and slip it in with the outgoing mail was the work of seconds. But he was none too quick. He had just dropped back into a lounging attitude when the door burst open and Clason flew into the room? "We must act instantly," hissed the inventor. "Philip plans to close the transaction within a day." In spite of himself, Quest jumped upright in his chair. Clason tapped him on the shoulder reassuringly. "It's all right," he smiled, "I'm ready for him. We'll make our move this afternoon and beat him by eighteen hours. "Let's see." He paused. "Oh! yes. I was about to explain to you that as soon as the will of the Agent enters the body of his Control, the latter can again transfer it into the body of still another person. "Now you understand why I advertised for a man of exceptional character? As my Agent, I want you to enter the body of Philip, and your will must be strong enough to conquer his in the battle for mastery which will begin the instant you intrude into his body. You will still be under my control, but your will must be strong enough on its own merits to overcome his. I can direct you, but your strength must be your own. That's clear, isn't it?" * * * * * "I think so," said Quest slowly. "But what becomes of me after you have frustrated Philip's plot?" "That's the easy part of the process," smiled Clason; "but naturally you feel some anxiety about it. I simply withdraw your will from Philip, return it to your own body, and pay you a reward of ten thousand dollars." "You're sure you can?" "Perfectly. I have merely to touch Philip's hand to recapture your will. Then I immerse myself in the tank with the switch at plus. The osmotic action will extract both wills momentarily from my body. But the presence of two bodies and two wills in the solution together forces a balance, and each will seeks out and enters its own body. Then you and I climb out of the tank exactly as we are this minute." "If it weren't for my belief that anything is possible," Quest shook his head, "I'd say that your claims for this invention were ridiculous." "And you couldn't be blamed," admitted Clason readily. "This toy of a model is hardly convincing. But come along with me and I'll show you how the Liberator looks in actual operation." * * * * * The office rug concealed a trap door which gave upon a spiral stair. Below, Clason unlocked another door and led the way through a narrow and tremendously long passage lighted at intervals by small electric bulbs. Presently another door yielded to the inventor's deft touch and closed behind them with a portentous chug. Here the darkness was so utter and intense that Quest imagined he could feel the weight of it on his shoulders. From the slope of the passageway and the muffled beat of machinery that had come to his ears on the way along, he guessed that he was below ground in some chamber at the rear of the factory. He gave a low exclamation as Clason switched on the toplight. No wonder the darkness had seemed of almost supernatural quality! Even the hard white glare of the daylight arc was grisly. Its rays rebounded from the liquids of the great circular tank in a blinding dazzle of color, while the dull black walls and ceiling were so perfectly absorptive that beyond arm's length they became to all effects invisible. Even the ledge on which he stood--the shoulder of the vat--gave Quest the feeling that to move would be to step off into a bottomless pit. But Clason took his attention at once, pointing here and there in his quick, nervous way to indicate how faithfully the Liberator had been reproduced from the model. In all respects the arrangements were the same, with the addition that here a long plank like a spring-board extended out from a wall-mount as far as the central compartment of the tank, and that from its end a narrow ladder hung down to the surface of the Chartreuse liquid. A double-throw switch fixed to the wall above the base of the plank was evidently the source of electrolytic control. "When you throw the switch to plus," said Clason, pointing to the chalk-marked sign above, "you produce the violent electrolytic action needed to bring about a liberation. All the rest of the time it should be closed at minus, in order to maintain the anti-action which I explained to you. "Now let's rehearse, so that when the time for the real performance arrives we can be sure of running it off without a hitch." "All right, sir," nodded Quest, so dazed by the glittering light that he was hardly conscious of what he said. * * * * * "First," said Clason, running lightly up the steps to the plank, "you walk out to the end, like this, and start down the ladder. Then you lower yourself into the tank. The liquid is at body temperature; it's neither strongly acid nor caustic; it will cause you no injury or discomfort whatever. "Meanwhile I keep in contact with your hand until the instant that you become submerged. Now your mind is in me, see?--ready for transfer into Philip, where it will act as my Agent. That's how simple it is! Come on up and we'll go through the motions." Quest experienced a shiver as he mounted the bridge. Annoyed with himself, he shrugged the feeling off. There was no risk here. Moreover, it was a part of his daily work to take chances; he had done so a hundred times without hesitation. Now he moved all the more quickly, as if to belie the squeamishness that possessed him in spite of himself. Swinging past Clason on the plank, he lowered himself without a pause to the bottom rung of the ladder, while the inventor, hanging head down, maintained contact with him. "No need to stay here," he said in sudden irritation. "I understand perfectly what I am to do." "I'm testing my own acrobatic ability," grunted Clason amiably. "Just a minute now." He wriggled as if trying to adjust himself to a better balance, but in reality to mask the motion of his free hand with which he reached up and pressed a button in the side of the plank. Instantly the structure, pivoting downward on its wall-socket, plunged Quest to his waist in the osmotic solution. "For God's sake get out of the way!" he shouted, trying to wrench his hand out of Clason's sinewy grip. "Let go, I tell you!" But Clason clung like a leech, his teeth gritted under the strain. Again the plank lurched downward, and with a violent splash Quest vanished below the surface. Quick as a cat, Clason scrambled up the ladder and back to the base of the plank, where he erased and interchanged the chalk-marked signs with which he had misled Quest. Then with a sinister twist of a smile he threw the switch to minus, and turned to watch as the plank slowly righted itself and the vacant ladder came clear of the liquid. For some time he stood staring at the gleaming colored rings of his dissociation-vat like some witch over her cauldron, his lips working, his hands clasping and unclasping like the tentacles of some sub-sea monster. Then, as if the spell had suddenly broken, he turned on his heel and switched off the light. As he hastened down the passageway toward his office, the airlock sucked the door against its jamb with an ominous whistle. * * * * * In a twinkling, as Quest's shackled spirit writhed in its new housing, he knew that he was in bondage to a scoundrel. Formless and voiceless, he still fought madly for the freedom which the instinct of ten thousand generations made necessary to him. At the same time he was furious at himself for having been tricked like an innocent schoolboy. The plank socket, the button which had tripped the supporting spring, the fake rehearsal, the tuning of his will to that of Clason--step by step the whole cunning scheme unfolded itself to him now. But what could be the purpose behind this villainy? Only one answer seemed possible. Keane must be the one bent on selling the Death Projector, Philip the one who wished to frustrate the fiendish transaction! And Quest of the Secret Service--he was to be the tool to force the sale. With the soundless scream of rage Quest's will hurled itself against Keane's. The two met like infuriated bulls, and for an instant too brief to be pictured as a lapse of time they poised immovable. But two wills can not exist on equal terms in a single body, and in this case the vibration of both was that of Clason. Quest had challenged the Master Will. He could do no more. It hurled him back, crushed him like foam, compressed him to the proportions of an atom in the background of his consciousness. So brief and unequal was the conflict that in the next breath Clason had all but forgotten the presence of the stolen will within him. When he was ready to use his Agent, that would be time enough to summon him! Despite this suppression, Quest began to see dimly through strange eyes, and to hear vaguely with ears that were not his own. Feelers, tentacles, some intangible kind of conduits carried thought impulses to him from the Master Will. He received these impressions vividly, but those which he gave off in return were so weak, due to the subjection of his will, that Clason was entirely unconscious of any response. Quest was not enough of a scientist to be astonished at the ability of a disembodied mind to experience sense impressions in the body of another. He was only glad that the darkness and silence were growing less. Very, very slowly he was awakening to a new kind of consciousness--the consciousness of another person's Self. He hated and loathed that Self, yet it was better than the awful blankness that had gone before. * * * * * Suddenly, as light grew brighter and sound more clear and definite, a new element entered--the element of hope. At first it was feeble: its only suggestion was that sometime, somehow, he might escape this prison. But it was like water to a parched plant. It caused his will to expand, to extend its feelers, to press up a little more bravely against the crushing pile of the Master Will. Now another surprise sprang upon him. He was moving! That is, Clason's body was moving in some kind of a conveyance, which was threading its way through crowded streets. Stores, buildings, buses, people--Quest remembered them all distantly as things he had known thousands of years ago. The driver turned his head, and his profile seemed vaguely familiar. Now a rush of foreign thoughts drowned out his own. They were a sort of overflow from the mind of Clason. They thronged along the conduits that bound the two wills together, but only Quest was conscious of the movement. Keane's mind was on his brother Philip: that much was particularly clear. And there was something about a telephone call. Yes, Keane had telephoned to the police, disguising his voice, refusing to divulge his name. He had said that a man by the name of Philip Clason was in trouble and had told them where to find him. Then the police had telephoned the factory, and Keane had pretended astonishment and alarm at the news. That's why he was here now--he was on the way to confer with the police. And he was chuckling--chuckling because he had fooled Quest and the police, and because now the hundred million dollars was almost in his grasp. Cutting in close, the car turned a corner and drew up before one of a row of loft buildings in a section of the city which Quest failed to recognize. As Clason stepped to the sidewalk, Quest was more painfully aware than ever of his powerlessness to influence by so much as the twitch of a muscle the behavior of this hostile body in which he had permitted himself to be trapped. In his weakness he felt himself shrinking, contracting almost to nothingness under the careless pressure of the Master Will. * * * * * Clason glanced casually at his watch, and three men converged toward him from as many directions. There was nothing to distinguish them from anyone else in the street, but along the conduits it came to Quest that they were detectives and that they were there by appointment with Keane Clason. "What floor?" asked the latter, with an excitement which Quest felt instantly was pure pretense. "Are you sure they haven't spirited him away?" "Don't worry," replied the leader of the detectives. "The alley and roof are covered. We'll take care of the rest ourselves." On tiptoe they climbed three long flights of stairs in the half-light. Clason held back as if in fear. He was a good actor, and Quest felt the shrinking and hesitation of his body as he crouched and slunk along in the wake of the detectives, pretending terror at what was about to happen, though he knew--and Quest knew he knew--that there would be no resistance up there--that Philip would be found alone exactly as he had been left by Keane's hired thugs. On the top landing Burke, the leader, paused to count the doors from front to rear. "This is it," he whispered to the bull-necked fellow just behind him. The other nodded, and crouched back against the opposite wall while his companions placed themselves in position to cross-fire into the room the moment the door gave way. * * * * * Quest longed for the power to kick his hypocrite of a master as he still held back, cowering on the stairs, playing his fake to the limit. Then the door flew in with a splintering shriek under the charge of the human battering ram, and across it hurtled the other two detectives in a cloud of ancient dust. "Here he is!" someone shouted. "Phil! Phil!" Keane Clason's voice fairly quavered with sham emotion as he ran into the room and threw himself at a man tightly bound to an upholstered chair, which in turn was wedged in among other articles of stored furniture. But Philip was too securely gagged to reply, and as Burke slashed the ropes from across his chest he dropped forward in a state of collapse. Stretched on a couch, he soon gave signs of response as a brisk massage began to restore the circulation to his cramped limbs. Suddenly he sat up and thrust his rescuers aside. "What time is it?" he demanded with an air of alarm. "One o'clock," replied Keane before anyone else could answer, patting his brother affectionately on the shoulder while within him Quest writhed with indignation. "By Jove! Phil, it's wonderful that we got to you in time. Really, how--you're not injured?" "No," grunted Philip, "just lamed up. I'll be as fit as ever by to-morrow." "If you feel equal to it," suggested Burke, "I wish you'd tell me briefly how you arrived here. Do you know the motive behind this affair? Did you recognize any of the body-snatchers?" * * * * * Philip frowned and shook his head. "Yesterday noon," he said slowly, "I took the eight-passenger Airline Express to Cleveland on business. There were three other passengers in the cabin--two men and a woman. Right away I got out a correspondence file and was running over some letters. The next thing I knew I was approaching the ground in the strangest state of mind I ever experienced. My head was splitting, and everything looked unreal to me. Seemed as if I was coming down on some new planet." "You mean the ship was gliding down to land?" "No, no. I was dangling from a parachute.... By the way, where am I now?" "In a Munson Avenue loft." "In Chicago?" Burke nodded. "I guessed as much," frowned Philip. "You see, I came down in a field, and then before I could free myself from my trappings I was pounced on--trussed up and blindfolded--by a gang of men. I knew they had taken me a long distance by automobile, but I saw nothing more until they tore the blindfold from my eyes when they left me here." "And they were all strangers to you?" "Yes--those that I saw." "Isn't this enough for just now, Burke?" interrupted Keane, and Quest received an impression of uneasiness that was not apparent in the inventor's tone. "After a good rest he's sure to recall things that escape him now." "Just one minute," nodded the detective, turning back to Philip. "Can you think of no plausible reason for this attack? Is there no one who might possibly benefit by putting you temporarily out of the way?" Philip gave a frightened start. Then he was on his feet, clutching at his brother's arm. "Keane!" he pleaded, "Keane! What's happened? I know, I know! It's the Projector." "Water!" roared Keane, and Quest felt the panic that coursed through him as he tried to drown out his brother. "Somebody bring water! He needs it!" At the same time he snatched up Philip's hand in a grip of steel. Instantly the latter's wild eyes became calm, the flush passed from his relaxing face, and he slumped down weakly on the couch. * * * * * In that fleeting moment Quest surged into the body of Philip and confronted his will with a fierce and triumphant ardor. For now his will would have command of a body with which to fight his fiend of a Control. With a sensation of contempt he met Philip's resistance and buffeted him ruthlessly backward, crushed down and compressed his feebly struggling will. And as Philip yielded, Quest felt his own will expanding to normal, taking possession of the borrowed body with hungry greed, and flashing from its faded eyes the spark of youth. Burke stared in amazement at the kaleidoscopic rapidity of the changes in the rescued man's expression. Strange lights and shadows continued to flit across Philip's face as Quest's invasion of him proceeded, but with a diminishing frequency which soon assured Keane that his Agent was tightening his command. The younger of Burke's aides stood fascinated, his mouth agape. The other spoke guardedly to his superior: "Dope, eh!" "Nah!" replied Burke, shrugging himself out of his trance. "Shock." The actual duration of the conflict in Philip was something less than three seconds. It would have been more brief if Quest had exerted himself to the utmost. But his sensations as he first surged into this new habitat under Keane's propulsion were so weird and unearthly that for the moment he was lost in the wonder of the experience. For that short time, therefore, Philip was able to fight back against the onrush of the invading will. In the next second Quest became conscious of the resistance. Urged on by his Control, he must push Philip back and quell him; but his sympathy for his opponent and his hatred of Keane roused him to sudden revolt. He wanted to disobey the Master Will, retreat, leave Philip in command of himself. But he could only go on, unwillingly thrusting back Philip's will despite the indescribable torment and confusion in his own. Then, with the feeling that he was ten times worse than the most inhuman ghoul, he took full possession of his borrowed body. "I'll take him home now," said Keane composedly to Burke. "As you see, he needs a little extra sleep. Meanwhile, if you have any occasion to call me, I will be at the factory." * * * * * To the youthful mind of the Agent, used to the lightness of an athletic physique, the body in which it moved down the stairs to the limousine seemed strangely heavy and awkward. "I'm badly done up, Keane," he said with Philip's lips as the car got under way. "Bah!" snorted Keane, "you've had a scare, that's all. Go to bed when you get home and sleep till nine this evening. At ten a man named Dr. Nukharin will call for you. He will drive you to a garage, leave the car, and transfer to another one a few blocks away. "Out near Marbleton you will find an airplane staked in an open field. Nukharin is a capable pilot. He will fly back southeast along the lakeshore to the meeting place. You should arrive about twelve-thirty. The test is set for one o'clock." Quest listened in a state of abject rage. Lacking the power to resist his Control, he could only boil away in Philip's body like a wild creature hemmed in by bars of steel. "Bring with you," continued Keane venomously, "the set of papers that you took from the safe in my office. Hold the other set in readiness to deliver to Nukharin to-morrow, after he has studied the results of the test and has notified Paris to release a hundred million dollars in cash for delivery at your Loop office at 3 p. m." The murderous greed of the man maddened Quest. He tried to revolt, his will squirming like a physical thing, threshing the ether like a wounded shark in the sea. For a moment he felt that he was about to burst the bonds that his demon of a Control had woven around him. So violently did he resist that the immured and sporelike will of Philip forged up fitfully out of the blackness and joined his in the hopeless struggle. But along the attenuated conduits that still chained Quest to the Master Will Keane caught the impulse of the mutiny, and his eyes darted flame as he countered with a will-shock that paralyzed his unruly Agent. "Listen! you whimpering dog," he snarled. "Think as I tell you--and nothing more! You are going to apologize to Dr. Nukharin for your previous unwillingness to sell the Projector. You are going to tell him that I am at fault--that I held out--but that you found a way to force my compliance. You understand?" Quest could find no words. With Philip's head he nodded meekly. Just then the car stopped and the chauffeur threw open the door. * * * * * Dr. Nukharin flew high despite the masses of cumulus cloud which frequently reduced visibility to zero. He had merely to follow the rim of the lake to his destination, and an occasional glimpse of the water was sufficient to hold him on his course. In the back seat hunched Philip, his body crumbling under the weight of Quest's despair. For hours the latter had gone on vaguely, hoping somehow to thwart this horrible transaction that was rushing the world to its doom, thinking he might grow strong enough to wrench himself free and so liberate Philip from the dominance of his conscienceless brother. Even though such a move should leave his own will forever separate from his body, he was ready and anxious to make the sacrifice. Suddenly the crash of the motor ceased and Nukharin banked the ship up in a spiral glide. Quest had never been in the air before, and the long whirl down into the darkness on this devil's errand was to him as eery as a ride to perdition in a white-hot projectile. His mind seemed to trail out in a great nebular helix behind the descending ship. He felt that he had suddenly crossed some cosmic meridian into a new plane of existence, where he was changed to a gas, yet continued capable of thought. But even here his obsession remained the same. Keane Clason--trickster, traitor, arch-criminal--must be destroyed! "I'll get him!" vowed Quest in words that were no less real for being soundless. "I'll trail him to the end of space and bring him to account!" * * * * * Then wheels touched earth and the cold, bare facts of his destiny rushed in on him with redoubled force. He felt the nearness of his Control seconds before he perceived him through the eyes of Philip. With a sensation like a stab he realized that now he must speak, play his part, be any bloodless hypocrite that Keane Clason chose to make him. The silent order surged down the conduits promptly enough; he responded as an automaton obeys the pressure of a button. "Well, Doctor," chuckled Philip with a cunning leer, "here's the magic tower, just as I promised you. We'll run it up in a jiffy. This test is going to be so vivid and conclusive that not even a hard-headed skeptic like you can raise a question." "You misunderstand me," returned Nukharin in an injured tone. "So far as I am concerned this procedure is only a formality, but it is none the less necessary. Suppose that I should spend a hundred million of my government's money and the purchase prove worthless? You may guess that my folly would cost me dear." Keane Clason was waiting on the platform of a giant truck, the motor of which was idling. All the apparatus was in readiness except that the three demountable sections of the tower had yet to be run up into position. "One of the beauties of the D. P.," said Philip gleefully to the Doctor, while Keane smiled slyly to himself, "is that this pint-size dynamo provides all the current needed for the test. We pick the power for our radio right out of the air by means of a wave trap and mensurator invented by this bright little brother of mine," and he clapped Keane patronizingly on the back. "Yes, ah--Dr. Nukharin," ventured Keane timidly, and at that moment Quest experienced the raging red hatred that causes men to murder. "Philip has promised me that you will employ this device only as a threat to hold the ambitions of the larger powers in check." "Of course, of course!" replied the Doctor heartily. "But now let's have the test. Even at night I'm not too fond of these open-air performances." * * * * * The height of the tower as they ran the upper sections into place was forty feet. When all connections had been inspected, first by Keane, then by Philip, the former led Nukharin aloft. As the climax of his plot approached, Keane's excitement bordered on a cataleptic state, hints of which came confusedly through the conduits to Quest. With a peculiar satisfaction he felt that Keane was suffering. The inventor's jaws became rigid, as though his blood had changed to liquid air and frozen him, and he had difficulty in controlling the movements of his arms. Now he was afraid! Genuinely afraid, this time. Quest caught the impulse too clearly to doubt its meaning. This was no sham! Keane was doubting his own machine, fearing that in the crisis some element in the finely calculated mechanism might fail to operate, thus cheating him of the blood-money on which his heart was set. Then he was speaking, and even Nukharin noticed the tremor in his voice: "These nine tubes, which look like a row of gun barrels, are molded from silicon paste. Each shoots a beam of invisible light and a radio dart of precisely the same wave length. The destructive effect depends chiefly upon this exactness of synchronization." "A question occurs to me," said the Doctor: "will others be able to manipulate the machine as successfully as you can?" "It's fool-proof," chattered Keane, almost losing control of his voice, "absolutely fool-proof. Surely you have scientists in your country who can follow written directions! Nothing more is necessary." "Very well," shrugged Nukharin. "I only want to be sure that no unforeseen difficulties may arise in an emergency." "See this range-setter?" continued Keane. "The thread on the vertical shaft enables us not only to limit the range by angling the beams into the ground, but it can also be disengaged and the Projector revolved in a flat circle for maximum ranges." "And is there no danger of the machine going wrong--of destroying itself and us?" suggested Nukharin. "None whatever, Doctor. There is no explosive force and no great electrical voltage involved. As long as we stand back of the muzzles we have nothing to fear. "Now look. I have set the micrometer at three hundred yards, which will just about cover the stretch between ourselves and the lake. I will cut a swath for you--and every bush, every blade of grass, every insect in this swath will be withered to ash in the twinkling of an eye. The destruction will be absolute." "Please proceed," said Nukharin grimly. Keane pulled a lever in its slot, then pressed it down into its lock as his projection battery swung lakeward at the desired angle. Then with one hand poised on another lever, he pressed an electric button. At the controls below, a bulb flashed on and off. The signal was superfluous, for already Quest had received his silent command from the Master Will. An icy dread fastened on him. He must obey the unspoken command; he had no will of his own with which to resist. The test would be a success; the Projector would be sold; the world would be turned into a shambles. And he, Owen Quest, would be the destroyer, the murderer, the weak fool who made this horror possible. All this flashed through the Agent's mind in the fraction of a second that it took him to extend Philip's hand, close the switch of the dynamo, and snap on the alternating lights in the housing over the tellurium filter. For an interminable five seconds he waited, in a ferment of revolt which the paralysis of his will made it impossible to put into action. Then again the command pulsed within him, the signal bulb flashed, and he reversed his motions of the moment before. Cold sweat cascaded down Philip's face as Quest felt the ladder vibrating under descending feet. He longed for the power to hurl Keane Clason to the ground and turn the Projector upon him. But with an awful irony the Master Will forced him to his feet, and to speak in a tone that withered the manhood within him. "Come," said Philip in a triumphant tone to Nukharin, "and I will show you that Clason inventions perform as well as they sound." Flashlight in hand, he started toward the lake with Nukharin and his brother close behind him. Twenty paces, and the long meadow grass suddenly vanished from beneath their feet. "See that!" whispered Philip excitedly, waving the light from side to side to show the forty-foot swath that stretched away before them. "Not a trace of life left, not a blade of grass--nothing but dust!" The only response was a gurgling sound that issued from Nukharin's throat. "Look!" Quest formed the word with Philip's lips under the urge of the Master Will. "Here was a tall bush. What do you see now? Just a teaspoonful of ash. When you examine the remains by daylight, you will find that even the root has disintegrated to a depth of two feet." "Enough of this," croaked Nukharin in horror. "The deal is closed." His face was convulsed with fear. Without another word he whirled about and fled toward his airplane. Philip gave a start as if to follow. "Halt! you slob," growled Keane, whose composure had returned with the successful outcome of the test. "I have use for your company, even though you are as great a coward as our Slavic friend." Coward! The epithet stung Quest like a flaming goad. One of the fine, intangible lines that bound him under the will of Keane Clason severed, and his own will exploded into action like a thunderbolt. With startling agility he whirled Philip about, the flashlight clubbed in his hand. But Keane was quicker still. A clip on the wrist sent the weapon flying. Then Philip reeled backward from a kick in the stomach, and his clutching hands beat the air as he sank unconscious in the dust. * * * * * With a violent tug, Quest lifted Philip's body to a sitting posture. The phone was ringing, and by the pull on the will-fibers he knew that Keane was at the other end of the wire. Philip's body was failing under the strain of the part it was forced to play, and the blow of the night before had further weakened it. Now he sat rocking his head painfully between his hands. But Quest lifted him to his feet by sheer will, and he staggered across the room. "Hello!", he said in a hoarse voice. "Get the hell out here to the factory!" rasped Keane, and the crash of the receiver emphasized the command. It was one o'clock as Philip whirled his sedan into Olmstead Avenue. At three, reflected Quest as the car scorched over the pavements, he must be at the downtown office to deliver the papers and receive the money. Then he was face to face with Keane, reeling dizzily at the hatred that blazed from the latter's accusing eyes. "Double-crossed me, eh!" The voice was a low snarl, and as he spoke Keane thumped the extra outspread on his desk. "But you're not going to get away with it--neither of you!" Dismay, hope, dread, wonder robbed Quest of the power to speak. But he whirled around behind the desk with such unexpected violence that Keane staggered back in alarm. Then he was devouring the screaming headlines of the newspaper. Three seconds, like a slow exposure, and every word of the Record's great scoop was etched upon his mind as if with caustic: DOOM LAUNCH ADRIFT ON LAKE Physician Baffled by Condition of Five Bodies Found in Craft Blighted Area on Shore Said to Have Bearing on Tragedy THAW HARBOR, IND., June 6.--Five Chicago sportsmen, most of them prominent in business and society, perished in the early hours this morning while returning in the launch of A. Gaston Andrews from a weekend camping party near Hook Spit on the Michigan shore. The boat was towed into this port at daybreak by the Interlake Tug Mordecai after being found adrift less than a mile off shore. According to Captain Goff of the Mordecai the death craft carried no lights and he barely avoided running her down. The weather along the Indiana shore was perfect throughout the night and there is nothing to indicate that the launch was in trouble at any time. The bodies are unmarked, and this little community is agog with rumors ranging all the way from murder and suicide to the supernatural. Dr. J. M. Addis of Thaw Harbor, the first physician to examine the bodies, says that they appear to have suffered some violent electro-chemical action the nature of which cannot be determined at the moment. This statement is considered significant in view of the reported discovery ashore of a large blighted area almost directly opposite the point where the launch was found. Joseph Sleichert, a farmer who lives in that vicinity, reports that this patch of ground extending back from the lakeshore was completely stripped of vegetation overnight. He ascribes the damage to some unknown insect pest. Others say that the condition of the ground indicates that it has been burned at incinerator temperatures. Nothing is left of the soil but a blue powder. Philip faced his brother with eyes that were dull with agony. "You have made me a murderer!" Quest forced out the words in painful gasps. But Keane snapped back at him like a rabid dog. "You did it--you did it yourself! You tampered with the Projector. You tried to spoil the test. You changed the range. You tried to kill me, and instead you killed these others. And you're going to pay--both of you. You hear me?--you're going to pay!" His voice mounted the scale to a scream. It was a wail of unreasoning terror, of the dread of exposure, of the fear that he would fail to collect the fortune now so nearly in his grasp. The accident that had jarred his well-laid plans had unnerved him. * * * * * Frantically Quest strove to answer him, to explain his utter subjection, as Agent, to say that if he had possessed the will to oppose or trick him he would have turned him over to the police, or might even have killed him, at the very outset. But in his frenzy, Keane had so tightened his control that Quest was speechless. Now he tried to substitute gesture for words, but Philip was rooted to the spot like a statue; even his hands were immovable. He might have remained in this state indefinitely had not Keane's fears withdrawn his mind from his immediate surroundings. Momentarily he forgot Quest, Philip--everything but himself and his predicament. And in the instant that his vigilance relaxed, Quest's enslaved will experienced a sudden lease of strength and hope. Independently of his Control, he found that he could move Philip's hand, could take a faltering step. But now, what to do? How might he fan this feeble spark of volition to sufficient strength for decisive resistance? The idea came to him: if only he could place distance between himself and Keane, perhaps with one titanic effort he might launch himself against the Master Will, take him by surprise, crush him down, and reverse him to the status of Agent instead of Control. With infinite effort Quest forced Philip's body step by step across the room. He must reach that window, get a signal of distress to someone in the street. But Keane began to sense a mutiny. He followed. He crossed the floor with slinking, tigerish steps and snaking body. His wet lips writhed back over his teeth, and his contorted features wove the leer of the abyss. Now as his Control drew physically near, Quest felt his mite of strength ebbing fast. Slowly Keane reached up with his clawed fingers and grasped his Agent by the arm. "Remember!" he hissed, "if these deaths are traced to us, you break down--you confess--you take the blame--you paint me lily white--you describe the cowardly means by which you moulded me to your will--you plead only for a quick trial and the full penalty of the law. You understand?" Quest made no reply, but he understood all too well the hideous intention of his betrayer. What a fool he had been to imagine that Keane Clason would ever restore him to his body! Philip to the chair, Quest a homeless spirit wandering in space, and for the body at the bottom of the tank, the brief regrets of the Department! * * * * * A sudden rushing sound filled the air with a sense of action and alarm. Two--three--four speeding automobiles swung in recklessly to the curb and shrieked to a standstill under smoking brakes. Men leaped out and deployed on the run to surround the factory. Keane darted to the door and twisted the key. "Come on!" he spat at Philip as he snatched back the rug and threw open the trap door. The command galvanized Quest to action. In two bounds he had Philip on the stairs. A heavy impact rattled the office door just as he dropped the trap into place over his head. Then, infected with Keane's panic, he was running down the passageway like mad. Inside the tank chamber the brilliantly colored rings of liquid flashed back the rays of the arclight. Half crazed with anxiety, Keane danced on the black ledge like a monkey on a griddle. His face was ashen, drool ran from his twisted mouth, his eyes were two black pools of terror. Again Quest experienced the peculiar sensation which came with the slackening of control. New hope sprang up in his agonized being as heavy blows boomed against the air-locked door. Great waves of fear poured along the conduits, betraying to the Agent the state of mind of his Control. Now what would Keane do? What could he do? Why, of all places, had he fled down into this blind burrow? Thud, thud! Then came a series of sharp reports. Outside, they were trying to shoot away the deep-sunk disk hinges. Still the door stood fast, but the fury of the assault on it whipped the faltering Keane to action. In a bound he was on the platform. With a lightning hand he threw the switch to plus, starting electrolytic action in the tank. Then he pressed a button concealed under the edge of the switch-mount and a panel slid silently aside in the wall, revealing a narrow outlet. * * * * * To Quest everything went a flaming red. He might have known that this fox would have something in reserve--a way of escape when danger threatened! But his Control gave him no time for independent thought. He forced Quest to turn Philip's eyes up to his own. Without disconnecting that grip of his glittering eyes, Keane leaped back to the ledge. Quest felt the silent order: "Get up on that plank! Dive into the tank! Get back into your own body, let Philip have his! Then come up--the two of you--and face the music. For I'll be gone, and your story will sound like the ravings of a maniac." Quest took an obedient step toward the platform. But at the same instant a tremendous crash shivered the door. It seemed to unnerve Keane Clason. With a gasp he sank down upon the steps, his body doubled in pain, his hand clutching at his heart. Another crash followed, and he shuddered and cried out. Instantly Quest felt an expansion of the will. Keane's sudden physical weakness had loosened his control. Philip's lips worked painfully as Quest forced him to pause, to disobey the command of the Master Will. In a spasm of will he fought to wrench himself free from the countless clinging tentacles of his Control. In great surges, Quest's reviving volition pounded against the walls of his borrowed body. Now he sought to force this sluggish body back to the wall, so that he might release the airlock and spring the door. But Philip seemed to ossify, every cord and muscle of his body frozen to stone by the conflict that raged within him. Braced against the wall, Keane was rising slowly to his feet. His seizure was easing, and so he was able to exert a better pressure upon his rebellious Agent. "Come!" he gasped, realizing that he lacked the strength to escape alone and must therefore change his plan. "Lift me--quick! Carry me out! Slide the panel back into place. We will escape together!" * * * * * The spoken command turned the balance against Quest. His will yielded to the master. At the same instant Philip's body relaxed like an object relieved of a great excess of electrical potential. Suddenly strong and supple, he lifted the trembling Keane and tossed him across his shoulder. For a moment there had been a lull in the assault on the door. Now the battering resumed with a fury that jarred the whole chamber and sent ripples dancing across the varicolored liquids in the osmotic tank. "Quick!" gasped Keane. "Move! I say. Carry me out." But he was in a fainting condition. Crash after crash rocked the chamber, and with every blow Quest's will felt a stimulation that enabled him to stand off the commands of his Control. Then a wave of nausea swept over him and left him reeling. It seemed that Philip's blood had turned to boiling oil. A dazzling mist swallowed him up, and with a weird sense of inflation he felt full strength returning to his will. A booming blow that bulged the door inward acted upon him like a stage player's cue. He leaped to the platform. The gurgling sound of remonstrance rattled from Keane's throat. But Quest paid no heed. Philip was walking the plank--away from the open panel--out over the tank. Rapidly he dropped down the ladder to the bottom rung, snatched Keane's wrist in a gorillalike grip, and hurled him down into the vat. Then Philip was clinging desperately to the ladder, his strength gone, his body shivering as if with ague. "Go on up!" came a strange, impatient voice from below him. "For heaven's sake let me out of here!" * * * * * A downward glance, and with a shout of alarm Philip was scrambling up the ladder, for there was a head down there, and a pair of naked shoulders, and the face of a man he had never seen before. Hand over hand Quest followed. Philip had collapsed and lay prone on the plank. Quest lifted him to his feet and shook him anxiously. "Philip!" he urged. "Philip! Can you walk?" The tattoo on the battered door helped to revive the older man. "Quick!" whispered Quest, kneading Philip's arms. "There's barely an hour left. Get to your office. Burn the papers. Refuse the money. Do you hear me?" Philip nodded dazedly. "Hurry!" puffed Quest, thrusting him through the opening that Keane had reserved for his own escape, and sliding the panel back into place. Quest was himself now--young, strong, free. Instantly he threw the electrolytic switch to minus. For Keane had failed to emerge from the tank, and since he was submerged alone, he could not escape until electrolysis was halted. Just as Quest leaped from the platform to release the airlock, the door burst in and three men with drawn guns rushed into the chamber. The leader stopped with a startled oath and stood blinking his unbelieving eyes. Quest was poised like a statue, his naked body gleaming an unearthly white against the lusterless black of the wall. "Quest," came from the three in chorus. Then a rush of questions: "What's the matter? What's happened to you? Where are the Clasons?" Quest turned toward the platform, expecting to see Keane. "Something's wrong!" he shouted. "Quick! Somebody get Philip. He's gone to his Loop office. Keane Clason's at the bottom of this tank. I'm not sure how this thing works, but Philip can get him out! I'm sure of it!" * * * * * Despite the confident predictions of both Quest and Philip Clason, osmotic association failed to restore Keane to life, and at last the coroner ordered the removal of the body. The autopsy revealed heart disease as the cause of his death. For reasons best understood at Washington, the cause of the five launch deaths was withheld from the public. Quest's punishment for his part in the crime consisted of a promotion and a warm personal letter from the President of the United States. Compensation By C. V. Tench [Illustration: _Good God! Was I going mad? Surely this was some awful nightmare!_] [Sidenote: Professor Wroxton had disappeared--but in the bottom of the mysterious crystal cage lay the diamond from his ring.] "Why, John!" Involuntarily I halted at the entrance to my snug bachelor quarters as the flood of light my turning of the switch produced revealed a huddled figure slumped in an easy chair. "Aye, sir, 'tis me." The man got to his feet, gnarled hands rubbing at his eyes. "An' 'tis all day that I've been waiting for you, sir. The caretaker said you'd be back soon so let me in. I must have fell asleep, an' no wonder, what with the strain an' no sleep or rest all last night." "Strain? No rest?" I stared my bewilderment, trying at the same time to conceal the vague apprehensions occasioned by the fact that the trusted servitor of my friend, Professor Wroxton, should wait all day for me. Hastily shedding my outer things, I bade him again be seated, sat down facing him, and asked him to explain. "'Tis the professor, sir." The old chap peered at me with anxious, wrinkled eyes. "'Tis common enough for him to send me here on messages, sir, but to-day I've come on my own, because, sir," answering the question in my eyes, "I haven't seen sight of him since last night." "Why--" I began. "That's just it, sir." John took the words out of my mouth. "For twenty years my wife an' me have looked after the professor at The Grange. In all that time he's never been away at night. Whenever he had to come to town he'd tell us. Most times I'd drive him myself in the old car. But that was very seldom, sir, for Professor Wroxton had few interests outside." * * * * * "But, John," I protested "is there no other reason for your agitation? He might have had an urgent call, or gone out for a walk or drive by himself." "No, sir. If you'll pardon me, sir, you're wrong. The professor was fixed in his habits. He would not go away without tellin' me. Think back, sir, you know the professor as well as me. Better, because you are his friend and I am only a servant. Although, sir," this proudly, "he always treated me as a friend." "Go on," I urged, seeing he was not finished. "Well, sir, a few minutes back you asked me if there was no other reason for my being upset like. There is, sir. You know, sir, that for more'n twenty years the professor has led a retired sort of life; the life of a--a--" "Recluse," I suggested. "That's it, sir. He only left The Grange when he had to. He was all wrapped up in some weird-like thing he was inventing. In all those years, sir, you were the only visitor who ever went into his laboratory, or stayed at The Grange for a night or more. That is, sir, until three days ago." "Go on," I again urged, some of his perturbation communicating itself to me. "The Grange, sir, lying as it does, fifteen miles from town an' back in its own grounds away from the road, isn't noted by many. When strangers do get into the grounds I usually gets 'em out again in short order. Three days ago, sir, a stranger drove up to the door in a fine car. He told me he was wantin' to purchase a country home. I told him The Grange was not for sale an' turned 'im away. He was turning his car to leave when my master came out. To my surprise, sir, he invited the stranger in. An' I'm sure, sir, because he looked so taken aback like, that the stranger had never seen the professor before." "And after that?" I asked, now feeling decidedly uneasy. "The stranger, sir--a Mr. Lathom he called himself--stayed on. He was in the study with the master last night. This morning there was no trace of either of them." "But--good God, John!" I jerked to my feet, a fresh dread clutching at my heart. "What are you trying to get at? The professor and Mr. Lathom might possibly have driven away somewhere last night." "Both cars, sir," the servant answered, "are in the garage. I bolt all the doors in the house myself every night. They were still fastened this morning. My wife an' me searched the house from cellar to garret an' hunted all over the grounds. We couldn't find a trace of the master or his guest." "You mean to suggest then," I shot at him, "that two full grown men have completely vanished? It's absurd, John, absurd!" * * * * * I paced the floor thinking desperately for a few minutes, conscious of the ancient's anxious eyes. I half smiled. The thing was too ridiculous for anything. Old John had grown morbid from living away from the outer world. Also, I had to admit that the atmosphere of The Grange, impregnated as it was with the lethal scientific dabblings of my friend, was exactly suited to the conjuring up of unhealthy forebodings in uneducated minds. I'd drive out to the home of my friend at once. No doubt I'd find him fit and well. He had refused to install a phone, so drive it had to be. "John." I stopped my pacing and patted him on the shoulder. "I'm coming out to The Grange at once." His face showed his thankfulness. "I am sure," I went on as I struggled into my coat, "that we shall find the professor and his guest awaiting us. Anyway, it's time you got back to your wife and had some food." "I hope to Heaven, sir, that you're right." With that we left the building and entered my car. Although I had tried to dispel my fears, although I had tried to banter John out of his dread, I drove that evening as I had never driven before or since. Barely fifteen minutes later I halted my roadster at the short flight of steps leading to the main door of The Grange. Even as we stepped from the machine the door flung open and an agitated woman hurried towards us. She was Mary, John's wife. "Sir!" She gripped my arm and stared anxiously into my face. "'Tis glad I am that you've come. The Grange is a house of death." In spite of myself a chill shook my whole body. Gently handing her to John, I strode up the steps. At the open doorway I halted, the aged couple crowding on my heels, the woman still babbling about death. I couldn't blame her. All day she had been alone in that gloomy, rambling old building, wondering, no doubt, why John and I had not returned sooner. * * * * * And gloomy the house was. Always, even when staying there at the professor's request, I had found it to be somber and depressing, as if there lurked within its walls the shadowy wings of the years-old tragedy that had caused my friend to retire to such a God-forsaken place, and there become absorbed in his scientific experiments. Even now, as I gazed into the dimly-lighted hallway, the air seemed charged with that same malignant something I cannot describe. Pulling myself together I strode quickly along the corridor, and flung open the study door. The lights being full on, one glance sufficed to show me that my friend was not there. Swinging on my heel, the horror I saw in the eyes of the servants, honest, healthy folks not easily frightened, conveyed itself to me. Somehow, the sight of that room, lights on, chairs drawn up to the burnt-out fire, brought home to me the fact that something serious was amiss. I chided myself for thinking John had been unduly agitated. For a moment I stood, trying to conceal the chill coursing through my veins, puzzling what to do next. I decided to search the house thoroughly. If I found no sign of the professor or his guest, I would call in the police. Fearfully yet willingly the aged couple led me from room to room, from attic to basement, until but one place remained--the laboratory. I hesitated for several seconds at the closed door of my friend's workroom. Not that I had never entered the--to a layman's eyes--weirdly-appointed place. I had been in many times with the professor. But this time I dreaded what I might find. * * * * * Pulling myself together, I gently tried the door. To my horror it yielded to my touch. Alive, the professor always kept it locked. A new dread assailed me, as, flinging the door wide open, I blinked in the sudden glare of powerful globes. Someone had left the lights full on! Horrified I stood and stared, knowing by their heavy breathing that the aged couple were also staring with fright-widened eyes. Afraid of what? I did not know. I only knew that the atmosphere had become even more sinister. I knew that something dreadful had taken place in that room. Trembling with consternation I forced myself to take a few steps forward, then I again stared about me. At one end of the large room something shone brightly in the glow of the lights. Slowly I walked across to examine it: it appeared to be a glass case, almost like a show-case, about eight feet square and seven feet in height. With the mechanical actions of the mentally distraught I walked all around it. Not the slightest sign of an entrance could I see. The fact intrigued me. I tapped lightly on the highly polished surface with my fingers. It rang to my touch like cut glass. Through the transparent surface I could see John and his wife. They were watching me furtively, wondering, no doubt, why I lingered. As I looked at them John suddenly lumbered up to the case on the opposite side. Dropping to his knees, he stared. Turning an imploring gaze to me, he pointed. His lips moved soundlessly. I followed the pointing finger with my eyes; gasped at what I saw. Near the center of the cage, on the floor constructed of the same crystalline substance, something glittered, its brilliance almost dazzling as the light rays struck it. My face pressed close to the cold outer surface of the structure, my shocked intelligence gradually realized what that small sparkling object was. It was a magnificent diamond--and the professor had always worn a diamond ring! * * * * * In a sudden frenzy of horror I pawed my way around the cage to where John still knelt. As I reached him he jerked his head in a numb way as he croaked, "It's a diamond, sir! The professor's!" "But how?" I implored. "How can it be? There's no way into this thing. Perhaps he was working here, and the stone came loose from its setting. He couldn't have dropped it after the cage was completed." "It's his diamond, sir," intoned the old man, dully. "I know it is." Then a sudden unreasoning terror filled me. I shrank away from that shining box. It seemed to be mocking me, gloatingly, malevolently. "Quickly!" I threw at the aged couple. "Let us get out of here! Now! At once!" They needed no second urging. I knew that they felt as I felt: the laboratory was a sepulcher! Five minutes later I was guiding my car over the narrow road to town. I did not pause until I drew up at police headquarters. I suppose my appearance was distraught, for I was ushered into the presence of the chief without delay. In a few moments I had poured out my story. He listened with a polite calmness I found almost maddening. Leaning back in his chair, he reviewed, audibly, the facts. "Some twenty-odd years ago your friend, Professor Wroxton, married. He was so absorbed in the pursuit of some weird invention that he neglected his bride. She ran away with another man. This man deserted her, and disappeared. The professor found her many months later, in desperate health. Shortly afterwards she died. Your friend tried to trail the man, but failed. Shocked and saddened beyond measure, he retired to a place known as The Grange." * * * * * He suddenly straightened up in his seat, and pointed at me a thick forefinger. "How long have you known Professor Wroxton?" "About ten years," I answered. "What was he trying to invent?" "I don't know," I replied. "And yet you had his confidence in other matters?" "But what has all this to do with finding out what has become of my friend?" I blurted out. "Perhaps every moment counts." "A lot." The chief eyed me in a way I did not like. "Solely because your friend has not been seen by his servants for nearly twenty-four hours, merely because you saw what you believe to be his diamond in some kind of a glass compartment in his laboratory, you come here as distraught as a man who has something terrible on his mind. Why?" "I can't say." I shifted uneasily under that direct stare. "Somehow I _feel_ that something dreadful has happened to my friend." "We do not go by _feelings_." The chief got to his feet. "But you have told me enough to warrant action. I want you to guide me and a couple of men to this house. Please wait here until I return." He left the room. Sitting there awaiting his return, I tried to ponder the matter reasonably. After all, perhaps the chief was right. Merely because the professor had been absent for a few hours and I had seen what I thought to be his diamond in the laboratory, I had worked myself into a perfect fever of anxiety. I almost smiled to myself. In that businesslike office the whole affair did seem absurd. After all the professor did not have to answer to his servants for his actions. Heavy footsteps, announcing the chief's return, caused me to rise to my feet. A few minutes later, in company with the three officers, I was driving again towards The Grange. * * * * * We made the return journey in almost complete silence. Occasionally the chief would shoot a question at me; but, the night air cooling my fevered brain, my replies were guarded. He realized that fact, for I felt his eyes upon me all the way. What was going on behind that broad forehead, I wondered. Then we reached The Grange. As we mounted the steps, John, his wife herding behind him, flung wide the door. He answered the question in my eyes with a negative shake of his head, and the words, "Nothing fresh, sir." The chief eyed him keenly, then curtly bade him lead the way to the laboratory. John hung back, his face blanched. "I can't, sir," he faltered. The chief turned to me, and, although I wanted to follow John's example, although the atmosphere of the house had again filled me with an unshakable dread, I led the way, standing back at the door to allow the officers to enter first. With calculating gaze the chief slowly took in every detail of the stone apartment. He turned to me. "What is there here to be afraid of?" I pointed hesitatingly towards the crystalline cage. The chief and his men strode across to it. "You don't know how to open this?" the chief shot at me after a brief examination. "No," I replied. "It was not here on my last visit." "When was that?" "Some two or three months ago", I answered. "My work occasions much traveling on my part." * * * * * The chief and his men turned again to the cage, talking in undertones. He turned again to me. "You notice that this thing is built in sections. One of them must be movable. Perhaps--" He paused as his eyes fell upon some wires and tubes that trailed across the floor from underneath the cage to a switchboard fastened to the wall. "Perhaps," he repeated, "it is worked from that board." He crossed over, stared thoughtfully at the shining levers for some seconds, and moved one slightly. The result was astounding. All four of us stared with unbelieving eyes as slowly, without the faintest sound, a section of one wall slid inwards, as if guided by invisible tracks on floor and ceiling. "Guess that's enough for now." With the words the chief backed away, almost timidly, I thought, from the switchboard, and walked to the cage. For a moment he hesitated, but he entered, and emerged with the sparkling object in his hand. "It's the professor's," I choked, crowding close to him. "How'd you know?" he shot back. "All unset stones look pretty much alike." "I just know," was all I could falter. "You 'just know'." The chief sat down on a stool and regarded me searchingly. "Mr. Thornton, when I started out with you, I thought I was on a wild goose chase or the trail of a confession. You looked exactly like a man who had either committed a serious crime, or was getting over a bad drunk. I feel sure now"--he again regarded the diamond--"that your story was not the product of an alcohol-crazed brain. Come on!" He lurched to his feet, and grasped me by the shoulder. "Come through!" * * * * * Without answering, I wrenched myself free. Over my shoulder I saw one of the policemen at the door. In the hand of the other a revolver suddenly appeared. Good God! I glared in bewilderment from one to another. Was I going mad? Surely this was some awful nightmare! What had I said to make them suspect me of having committed a revolting crime? "Sit down!" The command came from the chief. Mechanically I found a stool, and obeyed him. "Hold your stations, boys, and listen carefully," he ordered his men. Then he turned to me. "Professor Wroxton was a wealthy man without kith or kin?" "Yes." "Do you know the nature of his will?" "Yes." Chilled to the heart, I felt the circumstantial net tightening. "What is its nature?" "This house and an annuity to John and his wife," I explained. "The residue of his wealth to me." "Humph!" The chief stared at me piercingly. "And how has business been with you lately?" Damn the man! What right had he to put me through the third degree? I felt my state of dazed horror slowly giving way to anger. I glanced around. The pistol still menaced; the man at the door had not moved. It was useless to try and evade the questions. "For the past year," I replied, "business has been very poor. In fact, the professor advanced me some money." "Humph!" Again that irritating, non-committal grunt. * * * * * The chief turned in his seat and stared thoughtfully at the crystalline cage. "And you don't know what the professor was trying to invent?" "Only its nature," I began. "Ah! That's better. Why didn't you tell me that before?" The chief leaned forward. "Well," I explained, "the whole thing seems so absurd. When the professor told me how his married life had been broken up, he told me that at that time he reached the utmost depths of human suffering. Absolute zero, he called it." "Ah!" "The experiments he indulged in," I continued, trying to hide the shiver pimpling my flesh, "were to produce an actual state of absolute zero. It is years since he told me this. I had almost forgotten it." "And exactly what is an absolute zero?" The chief's eyes never left mine. "Well," I protested, "please understand that I also am a layman in these matters. According to my friend, an absolute zero has been the dream of scientists for ages. Once upon a time it was attained, but the secret became lost." "And exactly what is an absolute zero?" Curse the man! I could have struck him down for the chilling level of his tone. I forced myself to go on, realizing that I was damning myself at every step. "An absolute zero is a cold so intense it will destroy flesh, bone and tissue. Remove them," my voice rose in spite of myself, "leaving absolutely no trace." * * * * * No trace! Something attracted my eyes. The chief had opened his hand. The diamond there flashed and sparkled as if mocking me. I pulled myself together, and went on. "It all comes back to me now. One day I came out here and found the professor terribly distraught. He told me that, with the aid of electric currents he had been able to invent the absolute zero, but he could not invent a _container_." "Why?" Those eyes continued to bore into mine. "Because--remember it is years since he told me this--there was difficulty in controlling the power. Besides destroying living things, it would destroy bricks and mortar, stone and iron. Only one substance it could not wipe out--crystalline of diamond hardness. "I know, now!" I jumped to my feet and grabbed the chief's arm. "I know now what he meant. Fool, fool! Why did I not think of it before? This--" I swung towards the cage--"is compensation." Almost panting in my eagerness I went on: "My friend told me that the law of compensation would atone to him for the tragedy of his youth. Absolute zero in suffering would be atoned for by a real state of absolute zero. Chief!" I whirled on him. "Don't you understand? This is the perfected dream of my friend. It is the absolute zero." "Humph! Plausible but not convincing." I slumped back at the officer's words. "That does not explain the professor's disappearance. Even if it did, what about Mr. Lathom? And don't forget this contrivance is worked from outside. We found the diamond inside. Of course, he might have placed it there himself to test the machine," he concluded. "Of course, that's it," I commenced. But I regretted the words when I saw suspicion flicker again in the chief's eyes. Lamely I finished, "And he has probably rushed off, in an ecstasy of triumph, to acquaint professional colleagues." "Without unlocking any doors or taking a car, eh? "Mr. Thornton." The chief stood up and regarded me sternly. "As a sensible man, don't you think yourself that your story is a bit thin? The professor has disappeared. Here is a strange-looking case which you say is an absolute zero container. Whether you know, or are just jumping at conclusions, remains to be proved. But even if it is, do you think that, after perfecting such a tremendous invention, the professor would commit suicide?" "On the contrary," I gasped, "my friend was a man of gentle, kindly disposition, but strong purpose. I should think his first action on attaining his life's ambition would be to notify me, his closest friend." "And he didn't." Every word condemned me, and roused me to retaliate. "Chief, I know enough of the law to know that, before you can try a man for murder, you must prove that murder has been committed." I grinned savagely. "You must have the corpus delicti. Go ahead! Find my friend or his remains, or else withdraw your charges." I grinned again, with shocked mirthlessness. * * * * * Then I buried my head in my hands. I had called in the police to help find the professor, and they had only blundered around and asked a lot of stupid questions. The chief had practically accused me of murder--something I knew he could not prove, yet feared he might. Because I had told the chief of the locked doors and unused cars, he had confined his investigations to the house itself. He interrupted my thoughts. "Mr. Thornton, I am going back to town. You will remain here with my men. I advise you to get some sleep, as I shall not be able to carry out certain investigations until the morning. One of my men will spend his time searching the house and patrolling the grounds, the other one will stay here with you." He turned away, whispered some instructions to his men, and, followed by one of them, silently left the laboratory. I started to protest, tried to follow him; the man at the door stopped me. Silently, almost grimly, he indicated a narrow cot at one end of the room. For a moment I hesitated, feeling the man's eyes upon me. Sleep on my dead--I felt sure he was dead--friend's cot! Sleep in that fearful place! My whole being crawled with horror. I turned again to the man. His features were unyielding. Perhaps this was more third degree. Limp with weakness and weariness, I dragged my lagging feet towards the cot. * * * * * As long as I live I shall never forget my awakening. A uniformed figure, the chief, shaking me by the shoulder. Two other uniformed men silently watching. I sat up and gazed about me, dazedly. Bright sunlight streamed through the windows. A stray gleam struck the cage. I shrank back, trembling. And yet I had slept soundly. "Mr. Thornton," the chief said, "I have serious news for you. I have positive proof your friend is dead." "Dear God!" The exclamation was wrung from me as recollection returned with a rush. "Where? You can't have!" "Here." He thrust a bundle of letters into my hands. "You acted so strangely last night you caused me to suspect you of a serious crime. Also, you overlooked several important points. You got back from a trip only last night." Last night! Surely it was years. "You had left instructions to have your mail forwarded," the level voice went on. "These letters were evidently one day behind you. I picked them up at your rooms this morning. I took the liberty of opening them. Read this one." He selected it. * * * * * With trembling fingers I extracted from the envelope a single written page. I recognized the handwriting as the professor's. I read with feverish intensity, each single word burning itself into my consciousness: Dear Thornton: I am writing this in anticipation. I will see that it is mailed when my plans are completed. Too late, dear friend, for you to attempt, with the best intentions in the world, to frustrate them. You will, perhaps, recall that many years ago, when I gave you my full confidence, I told you that I felt sure that the law of compensation would atone in some measure for my loss. Thornton, old friend, I believe that, in more ways than one, my hour has arrived. Two days ago I completed the absolute zero. But even better! A man called here to-day. Although he did not recognize me, I saw through the veneer of added years with ease. Fate, call it what you will, my visitor is the man who wrecked my happiness. Under pretext I shall detain him. I shall induce him to enter the crystalline cage. I have already arranged a dual control which the power will destroy when I apply it from _the inside of the cage_. Please destroy the cage. It will have brought compensation to me before you read this. Good-by, dear friend! Wroxton. "I apologize, Mr. Thornton." The chief offered a hand which I clutched in mingled sorrow and relief. The world had lost a genius. I had lost a dear friend. But he was right. It was compensation. Tanks _By Murray Leinster_ ... The deciding battle of the War of 1932 was the first in which the use of infantry was practically discontinued ... --History of the U.S., 1920-1945 (Gregg-Harley). [Illustration: _Row after row of the monsters roared by, going greedily with hungry guns into battle._] [Sidenote: Two miles of American front had gone dead. And on two lone infantrymen, lost in the menace of the fog-gas and the tanks, depended the outcome of the war of 1932.] The persistent, oily smell of fog-gas was everywhere, even in the little pill-box. Outside, all the world was blotted out by the thick gray mist that went rolling slowly across country with the breeze. The noises that came through it were curiously muted--fog-gas mutes all noises somewhat--but somewhere to the right artillery was pounding something with H E shell, and there were those little spitting under-current explosions that told of tanks in action. To the right there was a distant rolling of machine-gun fire. In between was an utter, solemn silence. Sergeant Coffee, disreputable to look at and disrespectful of mien, was sprawling over one of the gunners' seats and talking into a field telephone while mud dripped from him. Corporal Wallis, equally muddy and still more disreputable, was painstakingly manufacturing one complete cigarette from the pinched-out butts of four others. Both were rifle-infantry. Neither had any right or reason to be occupying a definitely machine-gun-section post. The fact that the machine-gun crew was all dead did not seem to make much difference to sector H.Q. at the other end of the telephone wire, judging from the questions that were being asked. "I tell you," drawled Sergeant Coffee, "they're dead.... Yeah, all dead. Just as dead as when I told you the firs' time, maybe even deader.... Gas, o'course. I don't know what kind.... Yeh. They got their masks on." He waited, looking speculatively at the cigarette Corporal Wallis had in manufacture. It began to look imposing. Corporal Wallis regarded it affectionately. Sergeant Coffee put his hand over the mouthpiece, and looked intently at his companion. "Gimme a drag o' that, Pete," he suggested. "I'll slip y' some butts in a minute." * * * * * Corporal Wallis nodded, and proceeded to light the cigarette with infinite artistry. He puffed delicately upon it, inhaled it with the care a man learns when he has just so much tobacco and never expects to get any more, and reluctantly handed it to Sergeant Coffee. Sergeant Coffee emptied his lungs in a sigh of anticipation. He put the cigarette to his lips. It burned brightly as he drew upon it. Its tip became brighter and brighter until it was white-hot, and the paper crackled as the line of fire crept up the tube. "Hey!" said Corporal Wallis in alarm. Sergeant Coffee waved him aside, and his chest expanded to the fullest limit of his blouse. When his lungs could hold no more he ceased to draw, grandly returned about one-fourth of the cigarette to Corporal Wallis, and blew out a cloud of smoke in small driblets until he had to gasp for breath. "When y' ain't got much time," said Sergeant Coffee amiably, "that's a quick smoke." Corporal Wallis regarded the ruins of his cigarette with a woeful air. "Hell!" said Corporal Wallis gloomily. But he smoked what was left. "Yeah," said Sergeant Coffee suddenly, into the field telephone, "I'm still here, an' they're still dead.... Listen, Mr. Officer, I got me a black eye an' numerous contusions. Also my gas-mask is busted. I called y'up to do y' a favor. I aim to head for distant parts.... Hell's bells! Ain't there anybody else in the army--" He stopped, and resentment died out in wide-eyed amazement. "Yeh.... Yeh.... Yeh.... I gotcha, Loot. A'right, I'll see what I c'n do. Yeh.... Wish y'd see my insurance gets paid. Yeh." He hung up, gloomily, and turned to Corporal Wallis. "We' got to be heroes," he announced bitterly. "Sit out here in th' stinkin' fog an' wait for a tank t' come along an' wipe us out. We' the only listenin' post in two miles of front. That new gas o' theirs wiped out all the rest without report." He surveyed the crumpled figures, which had been the original occupants of the pill-box. They wore the same uniform as himself and when he took the gas-mask off of one of them the man's face was strangely peaceful. "Hell of a war," said Sergeant Coffee bitterly. "Here our gang gets wiped out by a helicopter. I ain't seen sunlight in a week, an' I got just four butts left. Lucky I started savin' 'em." He rummaged shrewdly. "This guy's got half a sack o' makin's. Say, that was Loot'n't Madison on the line, then. Transferred from our gang a coupla months back. They cut him in the line to listen in on me an' make sure I was who I said I was. He recognized my voice." * * * * * Corporal Wallis, after smoking to the last and ultimate puff, pinched out his cigarette and put the fragments of a butt back in his pocket. "What we got to do?" he asked, watching as Sergeant Coffee divided the treasure-trove into two scrupulously exact portions. "Nothin'," said Coffee bitterly, "except find out how this gang got wiped out, an' a few little things like that. Half th' front line is in th' air, the planes can't see anything, o'course, an' nobody dares cut th' fog-gas to look. He didn't say much, but he said for Gawd's sake find out somethin'." Corporal Wallis gloated over one-fourth of a sack of tobacco and stowed it away. "Th' infantry always gets th' dirty end of the stick," he said gloomily. "I'm goin' to roll me a whole one, pre-war, an' smoke it, presently." "Hell yes," said Coffee. He examined his gas-mask from force of habit before stepping out into the fog once more, then contemptuously threw it aside. "Gas-masks, hell! Ain't worth havin'. Come on." Corporal Wallis followed as he emerged from the little round cone of the pill-box. The gray mist that was fog-gas hung over everything. There was a definite breeze blowing, but the mist was so dense that it did not seem to move. It was far enough from the fog-flares for the last least trace of striation to have vanished. Fifteen miles to the north the fog-flares were placed, ranged by hundreds and by thousands, burning one after another as the fog service set them off, and sending out their incredible masses of thick gray vapor in long threads that spread out before the wind, coalesced, and made a smoke-screen to which the puny efforts of the last war--the war that was to make the world safe for democracy--were as nothing. Here, fifteen miles down wind from the flares, it was possible to see clearly in a circle approximately five feet in diameter. At the edge of that circle outlines began to blur. At ten feet all shapes were the faintest of bulks, the dimmest of outlines. At fifteen feet all was invisible, hidden behind a screen of mist. "Cast around," said Coffee gloomily. "Maybe we'll find a shell, or tracks of a tank or somethin' that chucked the gas here." * * * * * It was rather ludicrous to go searching for anything in that mass of vapor. At three yards distance they could make each other out as dim outlines, no more. But it did not even occur to them to deplore the mist. The war which had already been christened, by the politicians at home, the last war, was always fought in a mist. Infantry could not stand against tanks, tanks could not live under aircraft-directed artillery fire--not when forty guns fired salvos for the aircraft to spot--and neither artillery nor aircraft could take any advantage of a victory which either, under special conditions, might win. The general staffs of both the United States and the prominent nation--let us say the Yellow Empire--at war with it had come to a single conclusion. Tanks or infantry were needed for the use of victories. Infantry could be destroyed by tanks. But tanks could be hidden from aerial spotters by smoke-screens. The result was fog-gas, which was being used by both sides in the most modern fashion when, their own unit wiped out and themselves wandering aimlessly in the general direction of the American rear, Sergeant Coffee and Corporal Wallis stumbled upon an American pill-box with its small garrison lying dead. For forty miles in one direction and perhaps thirty in the other, the vapor lay upon the earth. It was being blown by the wind, of course, but it was sufficiently heavier than air to cling to the ground level, and the industries of two nations were straining every nerve to supply the demands of their respective armies for its material. The fog-bank was nowhere less than a hundred feet thick--a cloud of impalpable particles impenetrable to any eye or any camera, however shrewdly filtered. And under that mattress of pale opacity the tanks crawled heavily. They lurched and rumbled upon their deadly errands, uncouth and barbarous, listening for each other by a myriad of devices, locked in desperate, short-range conflict when they came upon each other, and emitting clouds of deadly vapor, against which gas-masks were no protection, when they came upon opposing infantry. * * * * * The infantrymen, though, were few. Their principal purpose was the reporting of the approach or passage of tanks, and trenches were of no service to them. They occupied unarmed little listening-posts with field telephones, small wireless or ground buzzer sets for reporting the enemy before he overwhelmed them. They held small pill-boxes, fitted with anti-tank guns which sometimes--if rarely--managed to get home a shell, aimed largely by sound, before the tank rolled over gun and gunners alike. And now Sergeant Coffee and Corporal Wallis groped about in that blinding mist. There had been two systems of listening-posts hidden in it, each of admittedly little fighting value, but each one deep and composed of an infinity of little pin-point posts where two or three men were stationed. The American posts, by their reports, had assured the command that all enemy tanks were on the other side of a certain definite line. Their own tanks, receiving recognition signals, passed and repassed among them, prowling in quest of invaders. The enemy tanks crawled upon the same grisly patrol on their own side. But two miles of the American front had suddenly gone silent. A hundred telephones had ceased to make reports along the line nearest the enemy. As Coffee and Wallis stumbled about the little pill-box, looking for some inkling of the way in which the original occupants of the small strong-point had been wiped out, the second line of observation-posts began to go dead. Now one, now another abruptly ceased to communicate. Half a dozen were in actual conversation with their sector headquarters, and broke off between words. The wires remained intact. But in fifteen nerve-racking minutes a second hundred posts ceased to make reports and ceased to answer the inquiry-signal. G.H.Q. was demanding explanations in crisp accents that told the matter was being taken very seriously indeed. And then, as the officer in command of the second-line sector headquarters was explaining frenziedly that he was doing all any man could do, he stopped short between two words and thereafter he, also, ceased to communicate. Front-line sector headquarters seemed inexplicably to have escaped whatever fate had overtaken all its posts, but it could only report that they had apparently gone out of existence without warning. American tanks, prowling in the area that had gone dead, announced that no enemy tanks had been seen. G-81, stumbling on a pill-box no more than ten minutes after it had gone silent, offered to investigate. A member of her crew, in a gas-mask, stepped out of the port doorway. Immediately thereafter G-81's wireless reports stopped coming in. * * * * * The situation was clearly shown in the huge tank that had been built to serve as G.H.Q. That tank was seventy feet long, and lay hidden in the mist with a brood of other, smaller tanks clustered near it, from each of which a cable ran to the telephones and instruments of the greater monster. Farther off in the fog, of course, were other tanks, hundreds of them, fighting machines all, silent and motionless now, but infinitely ready to protect the brain of the army. The G.H.Q. maneuver-board showed the battle as no single observer could ever have seen it. A map lay spread out on a monster board, under a pitiless white light. It was a map of the whole battlefield. Tiny sparks crawled here and there under the map, and there were hundreds of little pins with different-colored heads to mark the position of this thing and that. The crawling sparks were the reported positions of American tanks, made visible as positions of moving trains had been made visible for years on the electric charts of railroads in dispatcher's offices. Where the tiny bulbs glowed under the map, there a tank crawled under the fog. As the tank moved, the first bulb went out and another flashed into light. The general watched broodingly as the crawling sparks moved from this place to that place, as varicolored lights flashed up and vanished, as a steady hand reached down to shift tiny pins and place new ones. The general moved rarely, and spoke hardly at all. His whole air was that of a man absorbed in a game of chess--a game on which the fate of a nation depended. He was thus absorbed. The great board, illuminated from above by the glaring bulb, and speckled with little white sparks from below by the tiny bulbs beneath, showed the situation clearly at every instant. The crawling white sparks were his own tanks, each in its present position. Flashing blue sparks noted the last report of enemy tanks. Two staff officers stood behind the general, and each spoke from time to time into a strapped-on telephone transmitter. They were giving routine orders, heading the nearest American patrol-tanks toward the location of the latest reported enemies. * * * * * The general reached out his hand suddenly and marked off an area with his fingers. They were long fingers, and slender ones: an artist's fingers. "Our outposts are dead in this space," he observed meditatively. The use of the word "outposts" dated him many years back as a soldier, back to the old days of open warfare, which had only now come about again. "Penetration of two miles--" "Tank, sir," said the man of the steady fingers, putting a black pin in position within that area, "let a man out in a gas-mask to examine a pill-box. The tank does not report or reply, sir." "Gas," said the general, noting the spot. "Their new gas, of course. It must go through masks or sag-paste, or both." He looked up to one of a row of officers seated opposite him, each man with headphones strapped to his ears and a transmitter before his lips, and each man with a map-pad on his knees, on which from time to time he made notations and shifted pins absorbedly. "Captain Harvey," said the general, "you are sure that dead spot has not been bombarded with gas-shells?" "Yes, General. There has been no artillery fire heavy enough to put more than a fraction of those posts out of action, and all that fire, sir, has been accounted for elsewhere." The officer looked up, saw the general's eyes shift, and bent to his map again, on which he was marking areas from which spotting aircraft reported flashes as of heavy guns beneath the mist. "Their aircraft have not been dropping bombs, positively?" A second officer glanced up from his own map. "Our planes cover all that space, sir, and have for some time." "They either have a noiseless tank," observed the general meditatively, "or...." The steady fingers placed a red pin at a certain spot. "One observation-post, sir, has reopened communication. Two infantrymen, separated from their command, came upon it and found the machine-gun crew dead, with gas-masks adjusted. No tanks or tracks. They are identified, sir, and are now looking for tank tracks or shells." The general nodded emotionlessly. "Let me know immediately." * * * * * He fell back to the ceaseless study of the board with its crawling sparks and sudden flashes of light. Over at the left, there were four white sparks crawling toward a spot where a blue flash had showed a little while since. A red light glowed suddenly where one of the white sparks crawled. One of the two officers behind the general spoke crisply. Instantly, it seemed, the other three white sparks changed their direction of movement. They swung toward the red flash--the point where a wireless from the tank represented by the first white flash had reported, contact with the enemy. "Enemy tank destroyed here, sir," said the voice above the steady fingers. "Wiped out three of our observation posts," murmured the general, "His side knows it. That's an opportunity. Have those posts reoccupied." "Orders given, sir," said a staff officer from behind. "No reports as yet." The general's eyes went back to the space two miles wide and two miles deep in which there was only a single observation-post functioning, and that in charge of two strayed infantrymen. The battle in the fog was in a formative stage, now, and the general himself had to watch the whole, because it was by small and trivial indications that the enemy's plans would be disclosed. The dead area was no triviality, however. Half a dozen tanks were crawling through it, reporting monotonously that no sign of the enemy could be found. One of the little sparks representing those tanks abruptly went out. "Tank here, sir, no longer reports." The general watched with lack-luster eyes, his mind withdrawn in thought. "Send four helicopters," he said slowly, "to sweep that space. We'll see what the enemy does." One of the seated officers opposite him spoke swiftly. Far away a roaring set up and was stilled. The helicopters were taking off. * * * * * They would rush across the blanket of fog, their vertical propellers sending blasts of air straight downward. For most of their sweep they would keep a good height, but above the questionable ground they would swoop down to barely above the fog-blanket. There their monstrous screws would blow holes in the fog until the ground below was visible. If any tanks crawled there, in the spaces the helicopters swept clear, they would be visible at once and would be shelled by batteries miles away, batteries invisible under the artificial cloud-bank. No other noises came through the walls of the monster tank. There was a faint, monotonous murmur of the electric generator. There were the quiet, crisp orders of the officers behind the general, giving the routine commands that kept the fighting a stalemate. The aircraft officer lifted his head, pressing his headphones tightly against his ears, as if to hear mores clearly. "The enemy, sir, has sent sixty fighting machines to attack our helicopters. We sent forty single-seaters as escort." "Let them fight enough," said the general absently, "to cause the enemy to think us desperate for information. Then draw them off." There was silence again. The steady fingers put pins here and there. An enemy tank destroyed here. An American tank encountered an enemy and ceased to report further. The enemy sent four helicopters in a wide sweep behind the American lines, escorted by fifty fighting planes. They uncovered a squadron of four tanks, which scattered like insects disturbed by the overturning of a stone. Instantly after their disclosure a hundred and fifty guns, four miles away, were pouring shells about the place where they had been seen. Two of the tanks ceased to report. The general's attention was called to a telephone instrument with its call-light glowing. "Ah," said the general absently. "They want publicity matter." The telephone was connected to the rear, and from there to the Capital. A much-worried cabinet waited for news, and arrangements were made and had been used, to broadcast suitably arranged reports from the front, the voice of the commander-in-chief in the field going to every workshop, every gathering-place, and even being bellowed by loud-speakers in the city streets. * * * * * The general took the phone. The President of the United States was at the other end of the wire, this time. "General?" "Still in a preliminary stage, sir," said the general, without haste. "The enemy is preparing a break-through effort, possibly aimed at our machine-shops and supplies. Of course, if he gets them we will have to retreat. An hour ago he paralyzed our radios, not being aware, I suppose, of our tuned earth-induction wireless sets. I daresay he is puzzled that our communications have not fallen to pieces." "But what are our chances?" The voice of the President was steady, but it was strained. "His tanks outnumber ours two to one, of course, sir," said the general calmly. "Unless we can divide his fleet and destroy a part of it, of course we will be crushed in a general combat. But we are naturally trying to make sure that any such action will take place within point-blank range of our artillery, which may help a little. We will cut the fog to secure that help, risking everything, if a general engagement occurs." There was silence. The President's voice, when it came, was more strained still. "Will you speak to the public, General?" "Three sentences. I have no time for more." There were little clickings on the line, while the general's eyes returned to the board that was the battlefield in miniature. He indicated a spot with his finger. "Concentrate our reserve-tanks here," he said meditatively. "Our fighting aircraft here. At once." The two spots were at nearly opposite ends of the battle field. The chief of staff, checking the general's judgment with the alert suspicion that was the latest addition to his duties, protested sharply. "But sir, our tanks will have no protection against helicopters!" "I am quite aware of it," said the general mildly. He turned to the transmitter. A thin voice had just announced at the other end of the wire, "The commander-in-chief of the army in the field will make a statement." * * * * * The general spoke unhurriedly. "We are in contact with the enemy, have been for some hours. We have lost forty tanks and the enemy, we think, sixty or more. No general engagement has yet taken place, but we think decisive action on the enemy's part will be attempted within two hours. The tanks in the field need now, as always, ammunition, spare tanks, and the special supplies for modern warfare. In particular, we require ever-increasing quantities of fog-gas. I appeal to your patriotism for reinforcements of material and men." He hung up the receiver and returned to his survey of the board. "Those three listening-posts," he said abruptly, indicating a place near where an enemy tank had been destroyed. "Have they been reoccupied?" "Yes, sir. Just reported. The tank they reported rolled over them, destroying the placement. They are digging in." "Tell me," said the general, "when they cease to report again. They will." He watched the board again and without lifting his eyes from it, spoke again. "That listening-post in the dead sector, with the two strayed infantrymen in it. Was it reported?" "Not yet, sir." "Tell me immediately it does." The general leaned back in his chair and deliberately relaxed. He lighted a cigar and puffed at it, his hands quite steady. Other officers, scenting the smoke, glanced up enviously. But the general was the only man who might smoke. The enemy's gases, like the American ones, could go through any gas-mask if in sufficient concentration. The tanks were sealed like so many submarines, and opened their interiors to the outer air only after that air had been thoroughly tested and proven safe. Only the general might use up more than a man's allowance for breathing. * * * * * The general gazed about him, letting his mind rest from its intense strain against the greater strain that would come on it in a few minutes. He looked at a tall blond man who was surveying the board intently, moving away, and returning again, his forehead creased in thought. The general smiled quizzically. That man was the officer appointed to I. I. duty--interpretative intelligence--chosen from a thousand officers because the most exhaustive psychological tests had proven that his brain worked as nearly as possible like that of the enemy commander. His task was to take the place of the enemy commander, to reconstruct from the enemy movements reported and the enemy movements known as nearly as possible the enemy plans. "Well, Harlin," said the general, "Where will he strike?" "He's tricky, sir," said Harlin. "That gap in our listening-posts looks, of course, like preparation for a massing of his tanks inside our lines. And it would be logical that he fought off our helicopters to keep them from discovering his tanks massing in that area." The general nodded. "Quite true," he admitted. "Quite true." "But," said Harlin eagerly. "He'd know we could figure that out. And he may have wiped out listening posts to make us think he was planning just so. He may have fought off our helicopters, not to keep them from discovering his tanks in there, but to keep them from discovering that there were no tanks in there!" "My own idea exactly," said the general meditatively. "But again, it looks so much like a feint that it may be a serious blow. I dare not risk assuming it to be a feint only." He turned back to the board. "Have those two strayed infantrymen reported yet?" he asked sharply. "Not yet, sir." * * * * * The general drummed on the table. There were four red flashes glowing at different points of the board--four points where American tanks or groups of tanks were locked in conflict with the enemy. Somewhere off in the enveloping fog that made all the world a gray chaos, lumbering, crawling monsters rammed and battered at each other at infinitely short range. They fought blindly, their guns swinging menacingly and belching lurid flames into the semi-darkness, while from all about them dropped the liquids that meant death to any man who breathed their vapor. Those gases penetrated any gas-mask, and would even strike through the sag-pastes that had made the vesicatory gases of 1918 futile. With tanks by thousands hidden in the fog, four small combats were kept up, four only. Battles fought with tanks as the main arm are necessarily battles of movement, more nearly akin to cavalry battles than any other unless it be fleet actions. When the main bodies come into contact, the issue is decided quickly. There can be no long drawn-out stalemates such as infantry trenches produced in years past. The fighting that had taken place so far, both under the fog and aloft in the air, was outpost skirmishing only. When the main body of the enemy came into action it would be like a whirlwind, and the battle would be won or lost in a matter of minutes only. The general paid no attention to those four conflicts, or their possible meaning. "I want to hear from those two strayed infantrymen," he said quietly, "I must base my orders on what they report. The whole battle, I believe, hinges on what they have to say." He fell silent, watching the board without the tense preoccupation he had shown before. He knew the moves he had to make in any of three eventualities. He watched the board to make sure he would not have to make those moves before he was ready. His whole air was that of waiting: the commander-in-chief of the army of the United States, waiting to hear what he would be told by two strayed infantrymen, lost in the fog that covered a battlefield. * * * * * The fog was neither more dense nor any lighter where Corporal Wallis paused to roll his pre-war cigarette. The tobacco came from the gassed machine-gunner in the pill-box a few yards off. Sergeant Coffee, three yards distant, was a blurred figure. Corporal Wallis put his cigarette into his mouth, struck his match, and puffed delicately. "Ah!" said Corporal Wallis, and cheered considerably. He thought he saw Sergeant Coffee moving toward him and ungenerously hid his cigarette's glow. Overhead, a machine-gun suddenly burst into a rattling roar, the sound sweeping above them with incredible speed. Another gun answered it. Abruptly, the whole sky above them was an inferno of such tearing noises and immediately after they began a multitudinous bellowing set up. Airplanes on patrol ordinarily kept their engines muffled, in hopes of locating a tank below them by its noise. But in actual fighting there was too much power to be gained by cutting out the muffler for any minor motive to take effect. A hundred aircraft above the heads of the two strayed infantrymen were fighting madly about five helicopters. Two hundred yards away, one fell to the earth with a crash, and immediately afterward there was a hollow boom. For an instant even the mist was tinged with yellow from the exploded gasoline tank. But the roaring above continued--not mounting, as in a battle between opposing patrols of fighting planes, when each side finds height a decisive advantage, but keeping nearly to the same level, little above the bank of cloud. Something came down, roaring, and struck the earth no more than fifty yards away. The impact was terrific, but after it there was dead silence while the thunder above kept on. Sergeant Coffee came leaping to Corporal Wallis' side. "Helicopters!" he barked. "Huntin' tanks an' pill-boxes! Lay down!" He flung himself down to the earth. Wind beat on them suddenly, then an outrageous blast of icy air from above. For an instant the sky lightened. They saw a hole in the mist, saw the little pill-box clearly, saw a huge framework of supporting screws sweeping swiftly overhead with figures in it watching the ground through wind-angle glasses, and machine-gunners firing madly at dancing things in the air. Then it was gone. "One o' ours," shouted Coffee in Wallis' ear. "They' tryin' to find th' Yellows' tanks!" * * * * * The center of the roaring seemed to shift, perhaps to the north. Then a roaring drowned out all the other roarings. This one was lower down and approaching in a rush. Something swooped from the south, a dark blotch in the lighter mist above. It was an airplane flying in the mist, a plane that had dived into the fog as into oblivion. It appeared, was gone--and there was a terrific crash. A shattering roar drowned out even the droning tumult of a hundred aircraft engines. A sheet of flame flashed up, and a thunderous detonation. "Hit a tree," panted Coffee, scrambling to his feet again. "Suicide club, aimin' for our helicopter." Corporal Wallis was pointing, his lips drawn back in a snarl. "Shut up!" he whispered. "I saw a shadow against that flash! Yeller infantryman! Le's get 'im!" "Y'crazy," said Sergeant Coffee, but he strained his eyes and more especially his ears. It was Coffee who clutched Corporal Wallis' wrist and pointed. Wallis could see nothing, but he followed as Coffee moved silently through the gray mist. Presently he too, straining his eyes, saw an indistinct movement. The roaring of motors died away suddenly. The fighting had stopped, a long way off, apparently because the helicopters had been withdrawn. Except for the booming of artillery a very long distance away, firing unseen at an unseen target, there was no noise at all. "Aimin' for our pill-box," whispered Coffee. They saw the dim shape, moving noiselessly, halt. The dim figure seemed to be casting about for something. It went down on hands and knees and crawled forward. The two infantrymen crept after it. It stopped, and turned around. The two dodged to one side in haste. The enemy infantryman crawled off in another direction, the two Americans following him as closely as they dared. He halted once more, a dim and grotesque figure in the fog. They saw him fumbling in his belt. He threw something, suddenly. There was a little tap as of a fountain pen dropped upon concrete. Then a hissing sound. That was all, but the enemy infantryman waited, as if listening.... * * * * * The two Americans fell upon him as one individual. They bore him to the earth and Coffee dragged at his gas-mask, good tactics in a battle where every man carries gas-grenades. He gasped and fought desperately, in a seeming frenzy of terror. They squatted over him, finally, having taken away his automatics, and Coffee worked painstakingly to get off his gas-mask while Wallis went poking about in quest of tobacco. "Dawggone!" said Coffee. "This mask is intricate." "He ain't got any pockets," mourned Wallis. Then they examined him more closely. "It's a whole suit," explained Coffee. "H-m.... He don't have to bother with sag-paste. He's got him on a land diving-suit." "S-s-say," gasped the prisoner, his language utterly colloquial in spite of the beady eyes and coarse black hair that marked him racially as of the enemy, "say, don't take off my mask! Don't take off my mask!" "He talks an' everything," observed Coffee in mild amazement. He inspected the mask again and painstakingly smashed the goggles. "Now, big boy, you take your chance with th' rest of us. What' you doin' around here?" The prisoner set his teeth, though deathly pale, and did not reply. "H'm-m...." said Coffee meditatively. "Let's take him in the pill-box an' let Loot'n't Madison tell us what to do with him." They picked him up. "No! No! For Gawd's sake, no!" cried the prisoner shrilly. "I just gassed it!" * * * * * The two halted. Coffee scratched his nose. "Reckon he's lyin', Pete?" he asked. Corporal Wallis shrugged gloomily. "He ain't got any tobacco," he said morosely. "Let's chuck him in first an' see." The prisoner wriggled until Coffee put his own automatic in the small of his back. "How long does that gas last?" he asked, frowning. "Loot'n't Madison wants us to report. There's some fellers in there, all gassed up, but we were in there a while back an' it didn't hurt us. How long does it last?" "Fur-fifteen minutes, maybe twenty," chattered the prisoner. "Don't put me in there!" Coffee scratched his nose again and looked at his wrist-watch. "A'right," he conceded, "we give you twenty minutes. Then we chuck you down inside. That is, if you act real agreeable until then. Got anything to smoke?" The prisoner agonizedly opened a zipper slip in his costume and brought out tobacco, even tailor-made cigarettes. Coffee pounced on them one second before Wallis. Then he divided them with absorbed and scrupulous fairness. "Right," said Sergeant Coffee comfortably. He lighted up. "Say, you, if y' want to smoke, here's one o' your pills. Let's see the gas stuff. How' y' use it?" Wallis had stripped off a heavy belt about the prisoner's waist and it was trailing over his arm. He inspected it now. There were twenty or thirty little sticks in it, each one barely larger than a lead pencil, of dirty gray color, and each one securely nested in a tube of flannel-lined papier-mache. "These things?" asked Wallis contentedly. He was inhaling deeply with that luxurious enjoyment a tailor-made cigarette can give a man who had been remaking butts into smokes for days past. "Don't touch 'em," warned the prisoner nervously. "You broke my goggles. You throw 'em, and they light and catch fire, and that scatters the gas." * * * * * Coffee touched the prisoner, indicating the ground, and sat down, comfortably smoking one of the prisoner's cigarettes. By his air, he began to approve of his captive. "Say, you," he said curiously, "you talk English pretty good. How'd you learn it?" "I was a waiter," the prisoner explained. "New York. Corner Forty-eighth and Sixth." "My Gawd!" said Coffee. "Me, I used to be a movie operator along there. Forty-ninth. Projection room stuff, you know. Say, you know Heine's place?" "Sure," said the prisoner. "I used to buy Scotch from that blond feller in the back room. With a benzine label for a prescription?" Coffee lay back and slapped his knee. "Ain't it a small world?" he demanded. "Pete, here, he ain't never been in any town bigger than Chicago. Ever in Chicago?" "Hell," said Wallis, morose yet comfortable with a tailor-made cigarette. "If you guys want to start a extra war, go to knockin' Chicago. That's all." Coffee looked at his wrist-watch again. "Got ten minutes yet," he observed. "Say, you must know Pete Hanfry--" "Sure I know him," said the enemy prisoner, scornfully. "I waited on him. One day, just before us reserves were called back home...." In the monster tank that was headquarters the general tapped his fingers on his knees. The pale white light flickered a little as it shone on the board where the bright sparks crawled. White sparks were American tanks. Blue flashes were for enemy tanks sighted and reported, usually in the three-second interval between their identification and the annihilation of the observation-post that had reported them. Red glows showed encounters between American and enemy tanks. There were a dozen red glows visible, with from one to a dozen white sparks hovering about them. It seemed as if the whole front line were about to burst into a glare of red, were about to become one long lane of conflicts in impenetrable obscurity, where metal monsters roared and rumbled and clanked one against the other, bellowing and belching flame and ramming each other savagely, while from them dripped the liquids that made their breath mean death. There were nightmarish conflicts in progress under the blanket of fog, unparalleled save perhaps in the undersea battles between submarines in the previous European war. * * * * * The chief of staff looked up; his face drawn. "General," he said harshly, "it looks like a frontal attack all along our line." The general's cigar had gone out. He was pale, but calm with an iron composure. "Yes," he conceded. "But you forget that blank spot in our line. We do not know what is happening there." "I am not forgetting it. But the enemy outnumbers us two to one--" "I am waiting," said the general, "to hear from those two infantrymen who reported some time ago from a listen-post in the dead area." The chief of staff pointed to the outline formed by the red glows where tanks were battling. "Those fights are keeping up too long!" he said sharply. "General, don't you see, they're driving back our line, but they aren't driving it back as fast as if they were throwing their whole weight on it! If they were making a frontal attack there, they'd wipe out the tanks we have facing them; they'd roll right over them! That's a feint! They're concentrating in the dead space--" "I am waiting," said the general softly, "to hear from those two infantrymen." He looked at the board again and said quietly, "Have the call-signal sent them. They may answer." He struck a match to relight his dead cigar. His fingers barely quivered as they held the match. It might have been excitement--but it might have been foreboding, too. "By the way," he said, holding the match clear, "have our machine-shops and supply-tanks ready to move. Every plane is, of course, ready to take the air on signal. But get the aircraft ground personnel in their traveling tanks immediately." Voices began to murmur orders as the general puffed. He watched the board steadily. "Let me know if anything is heard from these infantrymen...." * * * * * There was a definite air of strain within the tank that was headquarters. It was a sort of tensity that seemed to emanate from the general himself. Where Coffee and Wallis and the prisoner squatted on the ground, however, there was no sign of strain at all. There was a steady gabble of voices. "What kinda rations they give you?" asked Coffee interestedly. The enemy prisoner listed them, with profane side-comments. "Hell," said Wallis gloomily. "Y'ought to see what we get! Las' week they fed us worse'n dogs. An' th' canteen stuff--" "Your tank men, they get treated fancy?" asked the prisoner. Coffee made a reply consisting almost exclusively of high powered expletives. "--and the infantry gets it in the neck every time," he finished savagely. "We do the work--" Guns began to boom, far away. Wallis cocked his ears. "Tanks gettin' together," he judged, gloomily. "If they'd all blow each other to hell an' let us infantry fight this battle--" "Damn the tanks!" said the enemy prisoner viciously. "Look here, you fellers. Look at me. They sent a battalion of us out, in two waves. We hike along by compass through the fog, supposed to be five paces apart. We come on a pill-box or listenin' post, we gas it an' go on. We try not to make a noise. We try not to get seen before we use our gas. We go on, deep in your lines as we can. We hear one of your tanks, we dodge it if we can, so we don't get seen at all. O'course we give it a dose of gas in passing, just in case. But we don't get any orders about how far to go or how to come back. We ask for recognition signals for our own tanks, an' they grin an' say we won't see none of our tanks till the battle's over. They say 'Re-form an' march back when the fog is out.' Ain't that pretty for you?" "You second wave?" asked Coffee, with interest. The prisoner nodded. "Mopping up," he said bitterly, "what the first wave left. No fun in that! We go along gassin' dead men, an' all the time your tanks is ravin' around to find out what's happenin' to their listenin'-posts. They run into us--" Coffee nodded sympathetically. "The infantry always gets the dirty end of the stick," said Wallis morosely. * * * * * Somewhere, something blew up with a violent explosion. The noise of battle in the distance became heavier and heavier. "Goin' it strong," said the prisoner, listening. "Yeh," said Coffee. He looked at his wrist-watch. "Say, that twenty minutes is up. You go down in there first, big boy." They stood beside the little pill-box. The prisoner's knees shook. "Say, fellers," he said pleadingly, "they told us that stuff would scatter in twenty minutes, but you busted my mask. Yours ain't any good against this gas. I'll have to go down in there if you fellers make me, but--" Coffee lighted another of the prisoner's tailor-made cigarettes. "Give you five minutes more," he said graciously. "I don't suppose it'll ruin the war." They sat down relievedly again, while the fog-gas made all the earth invisible behind a pall of grayness, a grayness from which the noises of battle came. In the tank that was headquarters, the air of strain was pronounced. The maneuver-board showed the situation as close to desperation, now. The reserve-tank positions had been switched on the board, dim orange glows, massed in curiously precise blocks. And little squares of green showed there that the supply and machine-shop tanks were massed. They were moving slowly across the maneuver-board. But the principal change lay in the front-line indications. The red glows that showed where tank battles were in progress formed an irregularly curved line, now. There were twenty or more such isolated battles in progress, varying from single combats between single tanks to greater conflicts where twenty to thirty tanks to a side were engaged. And the positions of those conflicts were changing constantly, and invariably the American tanks were being pushed back. * * * * * The two staff officers behind the general were nearly silent. There were few sparks crawling within the American lines now. Nearly every one had been diverted into the front-line battles. The two men watched the board with feverish intensity, watching the red glows moving back, and back.... The chief of staff was shaking like a leaf, watching the American line stretched, and stretched.... The general looked at him with a twisted smile. "I know my opponent," he said suddenly. "I had lunch with him once in Vienna. We were attending a disarmament conference." He seemed to be amused at the ironic statement. "We talked war and battles, of course. And he showed me, drawing on the tablecloth, the tactical scheme that should have been used at Cambrai, back in 1917. It was a singularly perfect plan. It was a beautiful one." "General," burst out one of the two staff officers behind him. "I need twenty tanks from the reserves." "Take them," said the general. He went on, addressing his chief of staff. "It was an utterly flawless plan. I talked to other men. We were all pretty busy estimating each other there, we soldiers. We discussed each other with some freedom, I may say. And I formed the opinion that the man who is in command of the enemy is an artist: a soldier with the spirit of an amateur. He's a very skilful fencer, by the way. Doesn't that suggest anything?" The chief of staff had his eyes glued to the board. "That is a feint, sir. A strong feint, yes, but he has his force concentrated in the dead area." "You are not listening, sir," said the general, reprovingly. "I am saying that my opponent is an artist, an amateur, the sort of person who delights in the delicate work of fencing. I, sir, would thank God for the chance to defeat my enemy. He has twice my force, but he will not be content merely to defeat me. He will want to defeat me by a plan of consummate artistry, which will arouse admiration among soldiers for years to come." "But General, every minute, every second--" "We are losing men, of whom we have plenty, and tanks, of which we have not enough. True, very true," conceded the general. "But I am waiting to hear from two strayed infantrymen. When they report, I will speak to them myself." "But, sir," cried the chief of staff, withheld only by the iron habit of discipline from violent action and the taking over of command himself, "they may be dead! You can't risk this battle waiting for them! You can't risk it, sir! You can't!" "They are not dead," said the general coolly. "They cannot be dead. Sometimes, sir, we must obey the motto on our coins. Our country needs this battle to be won. We have got to win it, sir! And the only way to win it--" * * * * * The signal-light at his telephone glowed. The general snatched it up, his hands quivering. But his voice, was steady and deliberate as he spoke. "Hello, Sergeant--Sergeant Coffee, is it?... Very well, Sergeant. Tell me what you've found out.... Your prisoner objects to his rations, eh? Very well, go on.... How did he gas our listening-posts?... He did, eh? He got turned around and you caught him wandering about?... Oh, he was second wave! They weren't taking any chances on any of our listening-posts reporting their tanks, eh?... Say that again, Sergeant Coffee!" The general's tone had changed indescribably. "Your prisoner has no recognition signals for his own tanks? They told him he wouldn't see any of them until the battle was over?... Thank you, Sergeant. One of our tanks will stop for you. This is the commanding general speaking." He rang off, his eyes blazing. Relaxation was gone. He was a dynamo, snapping orders. "Supply tanks, machine-shop tanks, ground forces of the air service, concentrate here!" His finger rested on a spot in the middle of the dead area. "Reserve tanks take position behind them. Draw off every tank we've got--take 'em out of action!--and mass them in front, on a line with our former first line of outposts. Every airplane and helicopter take the air and engage in general combat with the enemy, wherever the enemy may be found and in whatever force. And our tanks move straight through here!" Orders were snapping into telephone transmitters. The commands had been relayed before their import was fully realized. Then there was a gasp. "General!" cried the chief of staff. "If the enemy is massed there, he'll destroy our forces in detail as they take position!" "He isn't massed there," said the general, his eyes blazing. "The infantrymen who were gassing our listening-posts were given no recognition signals for their tanks. Sergeant Coffee's prisoner has his gas-mask broken and is in deadly fear. The enemy commander is foolish in many ways, perhaps, but not foolish enough to break down morale by refusing recognition signals to his own men who will need them. And look at the beautiful plan he's got." * * * * * He sketched half a dozen lines with his fingers, moving them in lightning gestures as his orders took effect. "His main force is here, behind those skirmishes that look like a feint. As fast as we reinforce our skirmishing-line, he reinforces his--just enough to drive our tanks back slowly. It looks like a strong feint, but it's a trap! This dead space is empty. He thinks we are concentrating to face it. When he is sure of it--his helicopters will sweep across any minute, now, to see--he'll throw his whole force on our front line. It'll crumple up. His whole fighting force will smash through to take us, facing the dead space, in the rear! With twice our numbers, he'll drive us before him." "But general! You're ordering a concentration there! You're falling in with his plans!" The general laughed. "I had lunch with the general in command over there, once upon a time. He is an artist. He won't be content with a defeat like that! He'll want to make his battle a masterpiece, a work of art! There's just one touch he can add. He has to have reserves to protect his supply-tanks and machine-shops. They're fixed. The ideal touch, the perfect tactical fillip, will be--Here! Look. He expects to smash in our rear, here. The heaviest blow will fall here. He will swing around our right wing, drive us out of the dead area into his own lines--and drive us on his reserves! Do you see it? He'll use every tank he's got in one beautiful final blow. We'll be outwitted, out-numbered, out-flanked and finally caught between his main body and his reserves and pounded to bits. It is a perfect, a masterly bit of work!" He watched the board, hawklike. "We'll concentrate, but our machine-shops and supplies will concentrate with us. Before he has time to take us in rear we'll drive ahead, in just the line he plans for us! We don't wait to be driven into his reserves. We roll into them and over them! We smash his supplies! We destroy his shops! And then we can advance along his line of communication and destroy it, our own depots being blown up--give the orders when necessary--and leaving him stranded with motor-driven tanks, motorized artillery, and nothing to run his motors with! He'll be marooned beyond help in the middle of our country, and we will have him at our mercy when his tanks run out of fuel. As a matter of fact, I shall expect him to surrender in three days." * * * * * The little blocks of green and yellow that had showed the position of the reserve and supply-tanks, changed abruptly to white, and began to crawl across the maneuver-board. Other little white sparks turned about. Every white spark upon the maneuver-board suddenly took to itself a new direction. "Disconnect cables," said the general, crisply. "We move with our tanks, in the lead!" The monotonous humming of the electric generator was drowned out in a thunderous uproar that was muffled as an air-tight door was shut abruptly. Fifteen seconds later there was a violent lurch, and the colossal tank was on the move in the midst of a crawling, thundering horde of metal monsters whose lumbering progress shook the earth. Sergeant Coffee, still blinking his amazement, absent-mindedly lighted the last of his share of the cigarettes looted from the prisoner. "The big guy himself!" he said, still stunned. "My Gawd! The big guy himself!" A distant thunder began, a deep-toned rumbling that seemed to come from the rear. It came nearer and grew louder. A peculiar quivering seemed to set up in the earth. The noise was tanks moving through the fog, not one tank or two tanks, or twenty tanks, but all the tanks in creation rumbling and lurching at their topmost speed in serried array. Corporal Wallis heard, and turned pale. The prisoner heard, and his knees caved in. "Hell," said Corporal Wallis dispairingly. "They can't see us, an' they couldn't dodge us if they did!" The prisoner wailed, and slumped to the floor. Coffee picked him up by the collar and jerked him out of the pill-box. "C'mon Pete," he ordered briefly. "They ain't givin' us a infantryman's chance, but maybe we can do some dodgin'!" * * * * * Then the roar of engines, of metal treads crushing upon earth and clinking upon their joints, drowned out all possible other sounds. Before the three men beside the pill-box could have moved a muscle, monster shapes loomed up, rushing, rolling, lurching, squeaking. They thundered past, and the hot fumes of their exhausts enveloped the trio. Coffee growled and put himself in a position of defiance, his feet braced against the concrete of the pill-box dome. His expression was snarling and angry but, surreptitiously, he crossed himself. He heard the fellows of the two tanks that had roared by him, thundering along in alignment to right and left. A twenty-yard space, and a second row of the monsters came hurtling on, gun muzzles gaping, gas-tubes elevated, spitting smoke from their exhausts that was even thicker than the fog. A third row, a fourth, a fifth.... The universe was a monster uproar. One could not think in this volume of sound. It seemed that there was fighting overhead. Crackling noises came feebly through the reverberating uproar that was the army of the United States in full charge. Something came whirling down through the overhanging mist and exploded in a lurid flare that for a second or two cast the grotesque shadows of a row of tanks clearly before the trio of shaken infantrymen. Still the tanks came on and roared past. Twenty tanks, twenty-one ... twenty-two.... Coffee lost count, dazed and almost stunned by the sheer noise. It rose from the earth and seemed to be echoed back from the topmost limit of the skies. It was a colossal din, an incredible uproar, a sustained thunder that beat at the eardrums like the reiterated concussions of a thousand guns that fired without ceasing. There was no intermission, no cessation of the tumult. Row after row after row of the monsters roared by, beaked and armed, going greedily with hungry guns into battle. * * * * * And then, for a space of seconds, no tanks passed. Through the pandemonium of their going, however, the sound of firing somehow seemed to creep. It was gunfire of incredible intensity, and it came from the direction in which the front-rank tanks were heading. "Forty-eight, forty-nine, forty-ten, forty-'leven," muttered Coffee dazedly, his senses beaten down almost to unconsciousness by the ordeal of sound. "Gawd! The whole army went by!" The roaring of the fighting-tanks was less, but it was still a monstrous din. Through it, however, came now a series of concussions that were so close together that they were inseparable, and so violent that they were like slaps upon the chest. Then came other noises, louder only because nearer. These were different noises, too, from those the fighting-tanks had made. Lighter noises. The curious, misshapen service tanks began to rush by, of all sizes and all shapes. Fuel-carrier tanks. Machine-shop tanks, huge ones, these. Commissary tanks.... Something enormous and glistening stopped short. A door opened. A voice roared an order. The three men, beaten and whipped by noise, stared dumbly. "Sergeant Coffee!" roared the voice. "Bring your men! Quick!" Coffee dragged himself back to a semblance of life. Corporal Wallis moved forward, sagging. The two of them loaded their prisoner into the door and tumbled in. They were instantly sent into a heap as the tank took up its progress again with a sudden sharp leap. "Good man," grinned a sooty-faced officer, clinging to a handhold. "The general sent special orders you were to be picked up. Said you'd won the battle. It isn't finished yet, but when the general says that--" "Battle?" said Coffee dully. "This ain't my battle. It's a parade of a lot of damn tanks!" There was a howl of joy from somewhere above. Discipline in the machine-shop tanks was strict enough, but vastly different in kind from the formality of the fighting-machines. "Contact!" roared the voice again. "General wireless is going again! Our fellows have rolled over their reserves and are smashing their machine-shops and supplies!" Yells reverberated deafeningly inside the steel walls, already filled with tumult from the running motors and rumbling treads. "Smashed 'em up!" shrieked the voice above, insane with joy. "Smashed 'em! Smashed 'em! Smashed 'em! We've wiped out their whole reserve and--" A series of detonations came through even the steel shell of the lurching tank. Detonations so violent, so monstrous, that even through the springs and treads of the tank the earth-concussion could be felt. "There goes their ammunition! We set off all their dumps!" There was sheer pandemonium inside the service-tank, speeding behind the fighting force with only a thin skin of reserve-tanks between it and a panic-stricken, mechanically pursuing enemy. "Yell, you birds!" screamed the voice. "The general says we've won the battle! Thanks to the fighting force! We're to go on and wipe out the enemy line of communications, letting him chase us till his gas gives out! Then we come back and pound him to bits! Our tanks have wiped him out!" * * * * * Coffee managed to find something to hold on to. He struggled to his feet. Corporal Wallis, recovering from the certainty of death and the torture of sound, was being very sea-sick from the tank's motion. The prisoner moved away from him on the steel floor. He looked gloomily up at Coffee. "Listen to 'em," said Coffee bitterly. "Tanks! Tanks! Tanks! Hell! If they'd given us infantry a chance--" "You said it," said the prisoner savagely. "This is a hell of a way to fight a war." Corporal Wallis turned a greenish face to them. "The infantry always gets the dirty end of the stick," he gasped. "Now they--now they' makin' infantry ride in tanks! Hell!" Invisible Death _By Anthony Pelcher_ [Illustration: _Wildly racing through the night, missing other cars by a breath, the visible car continued its pursuit of--what?_] [Sidenote: On Lees' quick and clever action depended the life of "Old Perk" Ferguson, the millionaire manufacturer threatened by the uncanny, invisible killer.] The inquest into the mysterious death of Darius Darrow, savant, inventor, recluse and eccentric, resembled a scientific convention. Men and women of high scientific attainment, and, in some instances, world fame, attended to hear first hand the strange, uncanny, unbelievable circumstances as hinted by the newspapers. Mrs. Susan Darrow, the widow, was the paramount witness. She appeared a quaint figure as she took the stand. Tearful, yet alert, this little woman betrayed the intelligence that had made her one of the world's foremost chemists. She gave her age as fifty-eight, but if it had not been for her snowy hair she would have looked much younger. She was small but not frail, and had expressive blue eyes. She had a firm little nose and chin, and was garbed in black silk garments of a fashion evidently dating back a decade. Although not modern in dress, her answers to questions regarding scientific and business affairs involved in the mysterious case, proved she was thoroughly abreast of the times in all other particulars. "You believe your husband was murdered?" bluntly asked the examiner at one stage. "That is my opinion," she said, then added: "It might have been some scientific accident, the nature of which I cannot fathom. We were confidential in all matters except my husband's work. He reserved the right to be secretive about the scientific problems on which he was working." "Can you throw any light on a motive for such a crime?" "The motive seems self-evident. He was working on an invention that he said would do away with war and would make the owner of the device a practical world dictator, should he choose to exercise such power. The device was completed. The murderer killed him to secure his device. That all seems plain enough." "Was anything else of value taken?" "We had nothing else of value about the place. I was never given to jewelry. The furnishings and equipment were undisturbed. It is quite evident, I think, that the thief was no ordinary petty burglar." * * * * * The attorney interposed: "I believe we had better let Mrs. Darrow tell this story from the beginning in her own way. There are only two really important witnesses. Whatever she can remember to recite might be of value to the authorities. Now, Mrs. Darrow, how long had you lived at Brooknook? Begin there and just let your story unfold. Try to control your nerves and emotions." "I am not emotional. I am not nervous," said the quaint little woman, bravely. "My heart hurts, that is all. "The place was named by my father. We inherited it at his death, thirty years ago, and moved in. My two children were born and died there. At first we kept the servants and maintained all of the thirty-two rooms. But after the children were gone, we both gave ourselves over to study and we began to close one room after another, releasing the servants one by one." "How many rooms do you occupy now?" "We lived in three, a living-room, kitchen and bedroom. The two big parlors were turned into a laboratory. We both worked there. It was there my husband met his death at his work. Sometimes we worked together, sometimes independently. I did all my own housework, except the laundry, which I sent out. We had no visitors. We lived for each other and our work." "Tell us about the rooms that were not occupied." "We left them just as they always had been. I have not been in any of these rooms for twenty years. Once I looked into the little girl's room--my daughter's room. It was dusty and cobwebby, but undisturbed by human hand. My husband peered in over my shoulder. I closed the door. We turned away in each other's arms." * * * * * Here the little old woman fell to weeping softly into her lace handkerchief. Minutes lapsed as the court waited, respecting her grief. "Were these rooms locked?" asked the attorney finally. "No," said the widow, recovering, as she dabbed at her eyes. "We feared no one. All the rooms were closed, but not locked. The outside doors were seldom locked. We lived in our own world. For appearance sake we kept up the grounds. Peck, the gardener, kept the grounds, as you know. He called in outside help when necessary. This was his affair. We never bothered him. He lived probably a half mile up the road. The first of each month he would come for his pay. He was practically our only visitor. "When it was necessary to see our attorney or other connections, Peck would drive us. At first he used to drive our horses. Ten years ago we pastured the horses for life and bought the small car. We seldom went out. We have no close friends and no relatives nearer than the Pacific coast. They are distant cousins. You see, we were rather alone in the world since the children went away--we never spoke of them as being dead." Again the court was hushed. The coroner and the attorney took occasion to blow their noses rather violently. "On May 27th, the day your husband died, what happened, as you re-remember it?" asked the attorney. "We arose and had breakfast as usual. I was puttering about the rooms. My husband kissed me and started for the laboratory. I was in the kitchen. It was about ten o'clock when I finished in the kitchen and went into the living room which adjoins the laboratory. I had been rather fretted, something unusual for me. It seemed I dimly sensed the presence of someone near me, someone I did not know, an outsider. I thought it was foolish of me and buckled up. "But when I went into the living room, it seemed as if some invisible presence were following me. I could hear the low hum of my husband's device. The door of the laboratory was open. He called to me and said: "'Sue dear, it seems strange, but I made two models of this set and now I can find only one. You could not have misplaced the other by any chance, could you?' "I assured him I knew nothing of it and he said, 'Hum-m, that's funny.' Then he went back into the library and closed the door. The humming continued. I was more annoyed than ever, but I did not want to bother my husband. Then a queer thing happened. I saw the door of the laboratory open and close, but I did not see anyone. The next instant, I heard my husband's outcry. It was more a groan than a scream. * * * * * "I rushed into the laboratory. My husband was lying by his slate-topped table. The device, I noticed, was gone. It was no bigger than a coffee-mill, I thought, as I bent over my husband. Strange how such a thought could have crowded in at such a time. "My husband's head was bleeding. It was cut, a long gash over the ear, just below the bald spot. It must have been a frightful blow. I looked in his eyes. My nurse's and pharmaceutical course gave me knowledge which sent a chill to my heart. He was dead. I must have fainted. "When I recovered I ran for Peck. I found him near the house, coming my way and holding his right eye. "'Something struck me,' he said. Then, seeing me so pale, he said, 'My God! Mrs. Darrow, what has happened?' "'Run for the doctor,' I said. When the doctor came he called the police and coroner. They told me not to disturb the body. Later they took it away, and the gardener told me--" "Never mind what Peck told you," interrupted the attorney. "We will let him tell it. Is that all you can tell us about the death itself?" But the widow was weeping now, so violently that the court ordered her excused. * * * * * The gardener was called and took the stand displaying a big, black eye, which offered comedy relief to a pathetic situation. "On the main road to the east," he began after preliminary questioning, "was a small car which had been parked there all morning. I noticed it because it had no license plates. It was visible from the inside of the grounds, but was hidden from the road by a hedge. It made me wonder because it was just inside our grounds. "I had some very special red flags which I planted as a border back of pink geraniums. They were doing fine. I got them from the Fabrish seed house. There are no plants like Fabrish's--I wouldn't give a snap of my finger for all the other--" "Just a minute," interrupted the attorney. He told the gardener to never mind the geraniums and flags, but to tell just what happened. "Well, I was bending over the border bed when I heard sounds like someone running along the gravel path towards me. I heard a humming like a bumble bee and I jumped to my feet. Just then something hit me in the eye and knocked me down. Yes sir, knocked me plumb down, and--" "Then what happened? Never mind the asides, the extras--tell us just the simple facts," instructed the attorney. "Well, you won't believe it, but I heard the footsteps leave the road. The geraniums were badly trampled. I looked at the parked automobile and could hear the hum coming from there. "The machine started and turned into the road--" "Did you notice anyone at the wheel?" "That's what you're not going to believe. There wasn't anybody in that auto at all. I didn't see anyone at any time. The auto started itself, and what is more, that auto only went about a hundred yards when it disappeared altogether--like that--like a flash." "Did it turn off the road?" "I didn't turn anywhere. It was in the middle of the road. It just disappeared right in the middle of the road. It started without a driver, it turned north without a driver, and went on by itself for about a hundred yards. Then it vanished in the middle of the road. Just dropped out of sight." The court-room was hushed. The audience and court attaches were awe stricken and looked their incredulity. "Do you mean to tell us that auto drove itself?" asked the court sternly. * * * * * The witness was completely confused. The attorney came to his rescue, looked at the court, and said: "He has told that same story a hundred times, and he will stick to it. It seems impossible, but has not Mrs. Darrow told us she heard this humming and saw nothing? With the purely perfunctory recitals of the doctor and the constabulary this court and the jury have heard all there is to hear. We have no more witnesses. That is all there is. "The jury will have to decide from the evidence whether this case is accident or murder. The doctor and two experts have reported that the wound appeared to have been made by some blunt instrument, swung powerfully. The skull under the wound and back of the ear was simply crushed. Death was instantaneous. It all happened in broad daylight." After an hour's deliberation the jury decided the savant came to his death in his laboratory from a blow on the skull received in some manner unknown. The crowd filed out, spiritedly discussing the unusual crime. In the crowd was Perkins Ferguson, known as "Old Perk," head of the Schefert Engineering Corporation, who paid royalty on some of the Darrow patents. With him was Damon Farnsworth, his first vice-president. "Well, what do you think of it?" asked Farnsworth, biting into a black cigar. "Damned weird, isn't it?" replied "Old Perk." "I have my own theory, however," he added, "but I am going to know a whole lot more about this case before I venture it." The pair climbed into Ferguson's car discussing the Darrow death case with furrowed brows. * * * * * What might be termed an extraordinary meeting of the directors of the Schefert Engineering Corporation, was held a few days later in a big building in the financial district. The rich furnishings of the directors' room indicated, better than Bradstreet's, the great wealth of the corporation. Uniformed pages stood at attention at each end of the long, mahogany table at which were seated the fourteen directors of the company. All were men of wealth, standing and engineering knowledge. The departed Darrow often had been summoned to such meetings, and at this one there was a hush because of his recent demise. After a batch of preliminary business had been transacted, Ferguson arose and cleared his throat. The directors leaned forward in their chairs expectantly. The page boys lost their mechanical attitude for the instant and fairly craned their necks around the bulks of the forms in front of them. "The Darrow case has taken a sudden and sinister turn," said the president. "I have a letter. I will read it: "Old Perk: Get wise to yourself. We are in a position to destroy you and all the pot-bellies in the Wall Street crowd. If you want to die of old age, remember what happened to Darrow and begin declaring us in on Wall Street dividends. If you do not you will follow Darrow in the same way. "Our first demand is for $100,000. Leave this amount in hundreds and fifties in the rubbish can at the corner of 50th Street and Broadway at 10 A. M. next Thursday. If you fail we will break your damned neck. Bring the police with you if you like. Invisible Death. * * * * * Ferguson passed the letter around for inspection. It was painstakingly printed, evidently from the type in a rubber stamp set such as is sold in toy stores. "I have decided," said Perkins at length, "to give this case to Walter Lees. He has never failed us in mechanical, chemical, or any form of scientific problem. I hope he will not fail in this. He will work independently of the police, who have requested that we keep the appointment at 50th Street and Broadway at the hour named. We will deposit a roll of newspapers, around which has been wrapped a fifty dollar bill and then we will stand by while the awaiting detectives do their duty." "You do not think anyone is going to call for any supposed package of money at one of the most congested corners in the world in broad daylight?" asked a director at the end of the table. "Why not?" asked Ferguson. "A seedy individual could pick a package from a rubbish bin at that corner without attracting the least attention." "I guess you're right," agreed the doubting one. "I know I'm right," said the president. And he usually was. "I have already arranged to have Lees instructed in his work," Ferguson volunteered as a pause came in the buzz of conversation about the table. "Lees is young, but he is capable." There was general discussion of the strange case of Darius Darrow; the room filled with the blue haze of many cigars. Suddenly a low, humming sound was heard in the room. Papers on the directors' table were bunched as if by unseen hands, and thrown to the ceiling, from which they descended like flakes of snow and scattered about the room. A book of minutes was torn from the hands of a secretary. It was raised and brought down on vice-president Farnsworth's head. A chair was pulled out from under another direction and he was deposited in an undignified heap on the floor. Another director acted as though he had been tripped, and he fell on top of Farnsworth. Two big vases crashed to the floor in bits. Other decorative objects were scattered about. The directors who had been hurtled to the floor stood up with expressions of comical surprise on their features. Their chairs catapulted into a far corner of the room, one after the other. Startled expressions resounded from the group. A small bookcase fell on its front with a crash of glass. Ferguson's cane jumped in the air and crashed a window pane. The humming ceased suddenly. * * * * * The room was a wreck. The assembled men stood aghast. They were simply nonplussed. Finally they phoned for the police. After hearing the strange recital from so many highly reputable witnesses, a detective sergeant, who had responded to the call with others, reported to headquarters. A uniformed police guard was sent to the place with instructions to remain on duty until relieved. Ferguson sent for Walter Lees, the young engineer of whom he had spoken to the directorate. Assigned to the task of unraveling the Darrow death mystery, Lees ran true to form by getting busy at once. This was at midnight of the day of the surprising directors' meeting. Lees owned a big car; he piled into it and started for the scene of the crime. Daybreak found him examining every inch of the road around the Darrow estate. Then he searched the hedge along the east road, where the phantom auto had disappeared after the crime. The brush along the opposite side of the thoroughfare was also gone over. Passing autos had stopped to ask the meaning of his flashlight. Lees explained he had lost a pocketbook. It was as good an excuse as any and served to keep him from drawing a crowd. He found nothing to reward his long and painstaking efforts. At seven A. M. he decided to interview the Darrow widow, and found her already up and about her kitchen, weeping softly as she worked. She bade him be seated in the living room. "No, I am not afraid to stay here alone," she said in reply to Lees' first question. "Whoever killed my husband did so to get possession of his second model. They had already stolen the first. I have thought since that they were afraid that the finding of the second model after his death would aid in their detection. For some reason they had to have both models." She agreed to tell all she knew of the case. Lees listened to the long recital as already recorded at the coroner's inquest. By adroit questioning Lees gained just one new fact. Mrs. Darrow remembered that she had called her husband, just before he retired to his laboratory, to fix a towel hanger in the kitchen. "He found the pivot needed oiling," explained the widow. "That was all. He oiled it and went into the laboratory." * * * * * The idea of one of the world's greatest mechanical engineers stopping his work to oil a towel hanger caused Lees to smile, but Mrs. Darrow did not smile. "My husband was a genius at repairing about the house," she said, in all seriousness. "I can imagine so," agreed Lees. The conversation ceased. Lees sat for a few minutes with his head in his hands, thinking deeply. Finally he said: "I am convinced that someone who was well aware of your husband's habits committed this crime. Do you believe, positively, that the gardener is above suspicion?" "Oh, it couldn't have been Peck," insisted Mrs. Darrow. "I had seen him down near the gate from the window. He was too far from the house, and besides, he was devoted to us both." "Then it was somebody from the neighborhood," said Lees. "Maybe so," replied Mrs. Darrow, noncommittally. "Who lives in the next house south?" "That is towards the city," mused the widow. "There are no houses south on either side of the road for a little further than a mile, when you reach the town limits of Farsdale. The town line is about half-way between, and marks the southern end of this estate." "Who lives in the first house to the north?" "That is the cottage of Peck, the gardener." "How near is the next house?" "That was the parcel my father sold. It is about three acres, and in the center, or about the center, is the house built by Adolph Jouret, who bought the land. He lives there with his daughter. They built a magnificent place. The brook that traverses our grounds rises at a spring back of his house. Save for two West Indian servants, they are alone. The servants live in Farsdale and motor back and forth." * * * * * "What do you know of this--what's his name?" queried Lees, who had assumed the role of examiner. "Jouret? Very little. He is some sort of a circus man or showman, or was before he retired. He once had wealth, but my husband, some weeks ago, said that because of ill-advised investments he was not so well rated as formerly. I had the feeling that he might be forced to give up the place. I just felt that. I never heard it. I am so sorry because of the daughter. She is a beautiful girl, and seemed kindly, the one time I saw her. She was about twelve then. I do not like to say it, but she seemed a little dazed or slow witted, but really beautiful." Mrs. Darrow fell to smoothing out the folds in her house apron as Lees asked: "When was the only time you saw her?" "Ten years ago, about. Just after my father's death. They called on us. We did not care to continue the friendship, as Jouret seemed a little flamboyant--his circus nature, I suppose. Anyway, we were quiet folks, and there was no need of close association with neighbors. "I remember," continued the widow, after a pause, "that Jouret, when he heard my husband was a scientist, simulated an interest in science. He did have a smattering knowledge of science, but he was plainly affected, so we decided to just let him drop. No ill-feeling. We just--well, we were not interested." "You do not approve of circus people?" "It is not that. Any honest work is honorable. It seems commendable to furnish amusement for the public. I know little about people of his profession but I am sure they are perfectly all right. It was Jouret, personally. He seemed noisy and insincere. The girl was nice. I loved her." "That is all you know of the Jourets?" "That is all." "Mrs. Darrow, I wish to go through this house from attic to basement. Have you any objections?" "None whatever. Make yourself free, but do not attach any significance to what appears to be a secret passageway and cave. My father was a biological chemist. He used to experiment much with small animals. He had a cave where he stored chemicals, and I believe you will find old chemicals stored down there now. I disturbed nothing." The widow forced a smile to her lips. "Will you excuse me?" she concluded. "I am trying to carry on." * * * * * Lees, carrying a flashlight, began a systematic search of the premises. He made his way up a winding staircase, through dust and cobwebs to the attic. He found the top story filled with trunks and bits of furniture of a previous generation. All was in order, but dust-covered and cobwebby. "Someone has been here before me," he said to himself, brushing a mist of cobwebs from his coat sleeves. "There is a path brushed through the spiderwebs." Turning his flashlight on the floor, he exclaimed: "And here are footprints in the dust. Well I'll be--!" Then, after some study, he mused: "Of course there has been someone here. The killer of Darrow probably has been here to see what he could see. It was no great task. The doors were never locked. The footprints are of no value except to give me the size of his shoes." He measured the footprints carefully. Then he went downstairs and phoned the measurements to a local shoe dealer, asking him to give him the trade size of shoes which would make such prints. "They are number nines," decided the shoe dealer. Lees then returned to resume his search in the rooms and corridors. "Wonder if Jouret wears nines," he questioned himself. "But what if he does? I couldn't convict him on that score. However, it might help." Then he fell to searching through the old trunks. He found old photographs, articles of apparel, knicknacks--grandmother's and grandfather's belongings all of them, and some children's clothes of the days when little boys wore ruffles about their necks and little girls' pantalettes reached to their ankles. Carefully each article was replaced. He made his way down to the third and then the second floor. Through cobwebby corridors and bedchambers he searched, but found nothing further to aid his case. In the unused rooms on the first floor he found an old spinning-wheel, candle moulds and utensils used in cooking in the days when housewives cooked over an open fire. * * * * * He did not find the "secret" passageway until Mrs. Darrow came to his aid. Leading from the basement was a coal chute. This shoot was formed in a triangle with the point under a trap. It was man-high at the cellar opening and its floor was a slide for fuel. It had been in use, evidently, quite recently. At the cellar wall of this chute, Mrs. Darrow pressed what appeared to be a knot in the old timber and pushed open a door. A dank odor issued forth as the door was opened. Lees entered the passage and Mrs. Darrow returned upstairs. Following the underground passageway, Lees came onto a cave about 14 by 14 feet in size with a ceiling and walls of arched brick. It had evidently been built before the days of cement construction. A long bench and shelves with carboys and jars of chemicals were the only furnishings. Lees sounded all the walls, but found nothing further to interest him. Lees returned to town at the urgent call of "Old Perk," who had arranged with great care to keep the appointment at 50th street and Broadway, where the decoy package was to be left. He had snipers in nearby windows. He had detectives, dressed in the gay garb of the habitues of the neighborhood, patrolling the corner, and he and his own guard parked an automobile, against all traffic rule, at the curb near the rubbish can. An office boy sauntered up to the rubbish can, threw in the decoy package, and sauntered away. A second later there was a low humming sound. The decoy package fairly jumped out of the rubbish can and disappeared in thin air. The humming sound seemed to round the corner into 50th Street. Detectives followed on the jump. The humming approached an auto at the curb and the auto's self starter began to function. As the police stood near by, enough to have jumped into the auto, the whole machine, a big touring car, actually disappeared before their eyes. Consternation is a mild word when used to describe the result. * * * * * All forces set to trap the extortionists gathered in a group, and in their surprise and disappointment began discussing the queer case in loud tones. A crowd was gathering which was blocking traffic. "Old Perk" was the first to recover from his surprise. "Get the hell out of this neighborhood," he yelled to his working forces. "All of you get down to my office!" The working force dissolved and "Old Perk" drove away. At "Old Perk's" office shortly afterward a conference of the defeated forces of the law and of science was held. "Old Perk" stormed and raged and the detective captain in charge fumed and fussed, but nothing came of it all. One was as powerless as another. Finally the conference adjourned. The next morning in the mail, Perkins Ferguson, president of Schefert Engineering Corporation, received a letter carefully printed in rubber type. It read: Thanks for the $50 bill. You cheated us by $99,950. This will never do. Don't be like that. You poor fools, you make us increase our demand. We double it. Leave $200,000 for us on your desk and leave the desk unlocked. We will get it. Every time you ignore one of our demands, one of your number will die. Better take this matter seriously. Last warning. Invisible Death. "Not another dime will they get out of me," mused Ferguson. He started opening the rest of his mail. A clerk entered and handed him a telegram. It read: "Damon Farnsworth struck down at breakfast table. Family heard humming sound as he fell from his chair. Removed to Medical Center. Skull reported fractured. May die. "William Devins, Chief of Police, Larchmont." Ferguson wildly seized the telephone. "Get me Farnsworth's house at Larchmont!" he shouted to his operator. * * * * * The phone was answered by Jones, the butler. "This is Ferguson." An agitated voice replied: "'Ow sir, yes sir. It's true, sir. 'E was bleeding at the 'ead, sir. Something 'it 'im." "Let me talk to Mrs. Farnsworth." "They are at the 'ospital, sir." "One of the boys." "Both are at the 'ospital, sir." "Do you think he will live?" "An' 'ow could I say, sir?" Ferguson called the Medical Center. They permitted him to talk to a doctor and a nurse. The nurse referred him to the doctor, who said: "He is unconscious. There is a wicked fracture at the base of the brain. He was struck from the back--a club, I believe. He may die without regaining consciousness. I am hoping he will rally and that he will be all right." Ferguson ordered his car and, with Lees at his heels, jumped in the tonneau. He heard a humming sound back of him. He looked back and saw nothing. Both he and Lees were too impressed for words. "Step on it," Ferguson ordered the chauffeur. "Drive us to the Medical Center." At the world's largest group of hospitals, Ferguson's worst fears were confirmed. The patient was reported sinking. * * * * * Ferguson, giant of Wall Street, was a low spirited man as he drove back down town to his office. With Lees he passed through the outer offices, buzzing with business and the click of typewriters. Not a head was raised from a desk or machine. It was a well-drilled force. Into his private sanctum he walked or rather dragged himself, and wearily he sat down. He pushed a pile of papers from him and ran his hand over his hot brow. Blood pounded at his temples. For the first time in his life he faced a situation which was too deep for his understanding. Over and over again he reviewed the uncanny events as Lees sat awaiting orders. "I cannot have them killing off my friends like that," he mused finally. He called a clerk. "Go to the bank and get $200,000 in fifties and one hundreds," he commanded. When the clerk returned with the money he laid the package on his desk and left the desk open. "This might appear cowardly, but it will give us time," he said. Lees did not offer an opinion. Ferguson drew a personal note for $200,000 and sent it to the Schefert Corporation's attorneys. This amount represented a large part of Ferguson's personal assets, not involved with any company with which he was connected. He told Lees to go about his further investigations. Then he left the office and started for his home. "I'll bank my life Lees will have those crooks lined up within a week," he assured himself as he lolled in his auto, bound homeward. But his voice sounded hollow, and the blood still pounded at his temples. * * * * * Reaching home, he found a call from the western plant, at Chicago. He phoned the superintendent with a foreboding that all was not well. "This you, Perk?" sounded the voice on the wire. "Yes, what's up?" "I had not intended bothering you with this, but in the light of all that has happened I guess you had better know that one of our engineers went stark mad out here about three weeks ago. He was a very brainy man but his reason snapped. He first appeared queer when he began talking of anarchy and cursing capitalists. Then one afternoon he struck a shop foreman down with a heavy wrench and rushed out of the plant. We have not seen him since. The police have been looking for him, but he is still at large." "That explains a lot of things," said "Old Perk." "Tell the police to keep after him. We'll look for him here. File me a complete detailed report of the incident by telegraph," he instructed. Then he asked: "How is the foreman? Badly hurt?" "He dodged; it was a glancing blow. The foreman was back to work in a week. But he is nervous and has armed himself. We have put on extra guards." "Good," commended Ferguson. "Don't hesitate to spend tolls to keep me advised of any developments." An hour and a half later, Ferguson phoned the chief clerk in his offices: "Go into my private office," he ordered, "and see if there is a package on my desk. It is a bank package." The clerk returned in a few moments. "There is no package on your desk, Mr. Ferguson." "That is all I wanted to know," said Ferguson, and hung up the receiver. Then Ferguson called up the Darrow home and tried to get in touch with Lees, but was unable to do so, as Mrs. Darrow said she had not seen him since he had been called back to the office. * * * * * The reason Ferguson could not reach Lees was because Lees had decided to learn once and for all if Jouret wore number nine shoes. He had started for Jouret's in his own car. It was a beautiful country he was traversing, but he had no time to note that the tree branches almost met over his head and that his way was bordered with a profusion of wild flowers, displaying a rainbow of colors. The house of Jouret, the retired circus performer, sat back far from the road, against the side of a beautiful hill, and was surrounded by poplars. The landscape was wilder and more natural than that of the Darrow place adjoining. The door was opened by a Porto Rican boy. Lees lost no time. He said bluntly: "Tell your master that a gentleman is here to see him on very particular business." Jouret, himself, came back with the boy. "What is it?" he asked, smiling a welcome. "I am working on the case of the death of Mr. Darrow, your neighbor. I believed you might have seen something. I thought you might aid me." * * * * * Jouret betrayed no surprise. "Come in," he said. He led the way to a large reception room and asked his visitor to be seated. He was the soul of affability. Short, husky and florid. His eyes large, black and staring. His hair black, quite long and curling upward at the ears. He was dressed in black, and he had the appearance of a big, fat crow. "I am glad you came," he greeted his guest, "for I have far too few callers." He switched on a big electric bunch-light in the center of the room, for it was dusk. "We have been told that you are a retired circus man," said Lees, in his usual frank manner. "Not exactly," said Jouret. "I traveled on the continent, finally journeying to Australia and then to the States. I crossed the country from San Francisco and settled down here. I was known as 'Elias, the Great.' I had my own company and property. It was a magic show. It was not a circus, although we did carry two elephants, three camels, some ponies, snakes, and birds and smaller animals. That's where the circus report came from. "When I retired I sold my stock to a circus. The newspapers regarded it as funny, and one of them printed a half page story with pictures about the public sale. It was very much exaggerated. They mentioned giraffes, hyenas, and a lot of other animals I never possessed. Odd, wasn't it, getting so much publicity after I was through needing it? However I never, in those days, dodged the limelight." Jouret ended his speech with a loud and hearty guffaw. "I will call my daughter," Jouret appended. "She will be glad to meet you." He left the room. Lees had taken occasion to note the size of Jouret's feet. They were small, almost effeminate. More likely fives or sixes than nines. Soon Jouret returned with a girl in her early twenties. She was blond and radiantly beautiful. * * * * * Doris Jouret bowed and smiled in a perfectly friendly manner. Lees noted that there was something about her eyes that made her appear dazed. Jouret monopolized the conversation, giving no one a chance to edge in a word. "This gentleman desires information in connection with the death of our neighbor Mr., or is it Dr., Darrow? I want you to assure him, as I will, that we have seen or noted nothing that could possibly throw light on the strange case." The girl nodded, it seemed a little wearily, and Jouret was off on another conversational flight: "I too am a man of scientific attainments," he chattered. "I am a biologist, toxicologist, doctor of medicine, a geologist, metalurgist, mineralogist, and somewhat of a mechanic and electrician. I have given long hours to the study of strange sciences in meta-physics, to which you men give too little attention. There are sciences which transcend any of this sphere. There is a higher astronomy. I neglected to say that I am an astronomer." "Yes?" drawled Lees. "Yes!" said Jouret emphatically. The girl had adopted rather a theatrical pose, which disclosed considerable of her nether charms, and said nothing at all. "When you find your man," volunteered Jouret, "you will find a madman." He said this ponderously and with a gesture meant evidently to be impressive. "You believe a madman did it?" asked Lees, as Jouret paused, expecting a question. "Undoubtedly. It was a paranoic with delusions of money, grandeur and a strongly developed homicidal mania. To me, that is the only sensible solution. I am quite sure that I am correct." Lees arose to go and Jouret did not urge him to stay. He bowed Lees out and Doris bowed with him. "She is a beautiful girl," mused Lees once he was outside. Lees ran over in his mind the circumstances of his visit to Jouret. There was no doubt in his mind that Jouret's shoes were too small to be number nines, and he reasoned that that fact might tend to eliminate Jouret. But he was not satisfied. "I am going to get some gas," he told himself, "and then I am going to get two private detectives to assist me, for I'm going right back there. For the first time in my life I am going to be a Peeping Tom. "There is no moon. The poplars will give us a view of all three floors of that house, if they leave their blinds up enough, and three of us can watch all three floors at once." He phoned Ferguson that he might be busy for days, joined his pair of operatives from the detective agency and for some time the three operated on a well conceived plan. * * * * * It was probably a week later that Lees rendered a report to Perkins Ferguson, which for a time proved one of the strangest documents in the weird case. It read: "You will probably think I am crazy, and for this reason I am having this report subscribed and sworn to, jointly and severally. With my two detectives I have seen Miss Jouret, the girl I told you about over the phone, in three places at one and the same time. Not once but twice this has happened. "Looking through the windows of the Jouret place at night, we saw the girl on the first, second and third floor of the house. We believed this due to a clever arrangement of mirrors. But figure this out: "The next day she drove a car to town. We followed. She got out at one theater and entered. She did not come back, that we could see, but the car drove off. There was no chauffeur, and we thought we had discovered the driverless auto, until we looked and saw Miss Jouret still at the wheel. "She got out and entered another theater. She did not come back, but the car drove off with her still at the wheel. She entered a third theater after parking the car and this time the driver's seat and the tonneau was empty. "Reverse the reel and you will see her coming out of three theaters and driving home. That is what happened. There must be three of her, all identical, but only one shows at a time. If it's some of Jouret's far-famed magic, I'll say he's some conjurer. The explanation is not yet forthcoming. We want to shadow Jouret, but he never goes anywhere. The girl has only been out the one time when she attended three matinees as described. Believe it or not. "The next night we each--the two detectives and I--tried to steal a march on one another and called her up and asked her to go out. To our individual surprise, she agreed in each case. To our collective surprise, she kept all three dates on the same night. She walked through the trees in this vicinity with me. She also drove down the road in the auto with one of my detectives, and she went dancing with the other. She was in three places miles apart at one and the same time. "We each brought her home within a half hour of the other and we are swearing to that. Either we are all hypnotized or else there are three identical Misses Jouret. "Jouret himself treats us all wonderfully, gives us the run of the house, and tries to talk us to death." * * * * * The strange document was subscribed by Lees and the two detectives and was held by Ferguson pending developments. The next report from Lees read: "I had a chance to prowl around the Jouret house a little while waiting for Miss Jouret to dress. I met her twice in my ramblings and a few minutes later she met me again, this time in a different costume. "I got a chance to search the woods back of Jouret's house in the evening. I found a spot where the earth had been disturbed, and dug up a pair of shoes. They were number nines." A fourth report from him read: "We found the body of the crazed engineer. He had drowned himself in a lake. This eliminates him as a murder suspect." * * * * * Two weeks passed with no new developments in the "Invisible Death" case except for the arrival of a letter demanding $1,000,000 and threatening the life of Perkins Ferguson if the demand was ignored. It was ignored, and only served to spur Lees and his detectives on to decisive action. They decided to rush the Jouret house and kidnap Jouret with the idea of holding him until he agreed to explain the presence of the number nine shoes buried back of his house. A low moon hung over the poplars when Lees rang the Jouret front door bell. One detective was guarding a side door and the other a back door. Suddenly Jouret was seen to jump from a second-story window. As he did, a car driven by one of his Porto Ricans came along the drive and he leaped into it. Lees, first to see Jouret, called his detectives. They came running. Their car was waiting in the road. The Porto Rican was seen to jump from the Jouret car just as it started south towards New York. Lees took up the race. Both cars had plenty of power, but the Jouret car suddenly disappeared as a low humming noise began to break the stillness of the night. One of the detectives was at the wheel. Lees, as usual, was giving orders: "Keep close to that hum. Never mind that you cannot _see_ the car. It is there all right. If you can gain on it enough, drive right into it." "Righto!" shouted the detective. "We're wise to him now." The humming noise was taking on speed with every second. So was Lees' car. Soon Lees' car was making sixty miles an hour with the hum just ahead and barely audible. Past traffic lights, over bridges and grade crossings the mad chase of the phantom continued. Wildly racing through the night, missing other cars by a breath, the big, visible auto continued its pursuit of--what? Careening, Lees' car rounded a curve, and, above the hum just ahead, they heard the shouted curses of their quarry. But he could not be seen. Lees could only see the road marked by his lights. Mile after mile the wild, uncanny chase of the phantom continued. * * * * * Soon the lights of New York could be seen in the distance. The cars were forced to slow down somewhat. Suddenly there was a thundering crash ahead. A car was twisted in a mass of tangled wreckage. Feminine and masculine shrieks blended as Lees' car piled up on the wrecked heap. A third car, becoming suddenly visible, rolled over and brought up at the edge of the road. From this car emerged the limping, cursing form of Jouret. From the wreckage three painfully injured young men dragged and tore themselves. Then they leaped--ignoring their hurts--at the limping figure. The fight was on. Jouret was heavy and powerful and proved an obstinate fighter, for he knew he was fighting for his life. He bit and clawed. He kicked with one uninjured leg and butted with his massive head. Lees and his detectives were fighting with no respect for the rules. Lees managed to get his two hands on the bull-neck of Jouret just as one detective connected a duet of blows to the man's wind. Lees' hands closed in a steely grip, and soon Jouret was limp and helpless. They held him there. An ambulance arrived. A few minutes later a police auto with reserves came on the scene. The police shackled Jouret. The car that had been hit by the phantom was a light sedan. It was occupied by two women. Their bodies were drawn from the wreckage. Both were dead--innocents sacrificed to the blood madness of a maniac. Jouret was right about himself. He was a paranoic with a strongly developed homicidal mania. In the wreckage was found a package containing $200,000 and also two twisted and broken mechanisms. One of these was about the size of an ordinary kitchen coffee-mill, and the other slightly larger. * * * * * Regarding these machines, Lees wrote in a report: "While making a fourth search of Darrow's laboratory, I found the equations, specifications and what I believe to be the full plans for the last invention of the ingenious Darius Darrow. "Many of the most astounding inventions and discoveries have resulted from theories which were laughed to scorn at the time they were advanced. Roebling's plans for the Brooklyn Bridge resulted in a meeting of the foremost engineers of the day. All agreed that the plans were built on a false premise. They argued that the bridge would fall of its own weight. Then they all had a good laugh. The bridge still stands. "Watching smoke float over a hill from army camp fires caused an early French scientist to dream of filling a bag full of smoke and riding with it over the hill. The first balloon was the answer to this dream. "James Watt is said to have gotten his idea for a steam engine from watching a lid on a tea-kettle dance under steam pressure. "When Langley was flying his man-carrying kites the Wright brothers dreamed of hitching an engine and a propeller to a giant kite. The airplane was the result of these experiments. * * * * * "Darrow got his idea from watching a rapidly revolving wheel. He noticed that the spokes and rim blended into a blurred disc when a certain speed was reached. The entire wheel was practically invisible, under certain lighting conditions, when a higher speed was attained. "Darrow went further and reached the conclusion that there was a rate of vibration that would produce invisibility. This was accepted in practically all engineering research plants, long before it was perfected by Darrow. "The facts are that any rapidly vibrating object becomes more and more difficult to outline as its rate of vibration increases. All that was left for Darrow was to arrive at the exact mathematical time, tone, or rate of vibration producing invisibility and to construct a vibrator tuned to produce this condition. "His first machine produced the vibrations of invisibility in a field with a three-foot radius in all directions. That is, it caused every solid object, within this atmospheric field, to vibrate at the rate, tone, or speed of invisibility. This machine was in no sense rotary. It departed from the original example of a revolving wheel and entered instead into general vibration in a given or measured field. "The pulsations or vibrations of an ordinary automobile engine will cause every ounce of metal, or solid, in the automobile--including the driver--to vibrate at the same rate or momentum. This is a known fact, and it provided the basis for Darrow's experiments. * * * * * "Darrow built two machines. The first had a field with a radius of three feet on all sides. This was used by the killer in his murders. Jouret stole this machine first, thus paving his way for the second robbery. "With the first machine in his possession, Jouret was able to commit the Darrow murder without being seen. He had to have the second and larger machine, however, to make his auto disappear. He stole the larger machine at the time of the Darrow murder, and with it he had his auto vanish, as the gardener testified. "Both machines were hopelessly smashed in the wreck, but with Darrow's documents at hand, we might be able to construct another and a larger model. A machine built on the proper scale will make a plane or a battleship invisible and should, as Darrow said, make war against this country impossible. * * * * * "Digging into Jouret's history we found that the 'Misses Jouret' were one-cell triplets. Their mother, Mrs. Doris Nettleton, an English woman, was a member of Jouret's troupe, as was the father. "The mother died at the birth of the triplets. The father died a few years later. The company was touring Australia at the time. Jouret and the father had the birth of only one baby recorded. She was named Doris, after the mother. The other girls also used this one name. They now have only one name among them until the court gives them individual names. "Jouret never let but one girl be seen at a time. The reason was that he and the father had planned to use the girls, when grown, to create a surprising stage illusion. In this illusion, one girl was to act as the earthly body and the other girls as the astral bodies of the same purported individual. "The father died, and Jouret retired before he ever got around to staging the illusion. Jouret continued the deception, however, because it appealed to his showman's nature. "The girls, at all times, were under the hypnotic control of Jouret, and, of course, knew nothing of his crazed intellect or crimes. Upon his arrest Jouret released the girls from the spell of years. "The Misses Nettleton say that Jouret was always kind to them and was an ethical showman until his mind gave way. "I told the triplets that I might find them employment with our concern, but they prefer to follow in the footsteps of their mother and father, and return to the stage." Ferguson, quite his normal self once more, since Farnsworth was recovering slowly, twitted Lees about being in love with one of the triplets. Lees admitted they were most gorgeous blondes, but insisted he preferred one brunette. "Then another thing," added Lees. "Any man who falls in love with one of the Nettleton triplets will never be sure just which one he fell in love with." 
30532	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. VI, No. 2 CONTENTS MAY, 1931 COVER DESIGN H. W. WESSO _Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "Dark Moon._" DARK MOON CHARLES W. DIFFIN 148 _Mysterious, Dark, Out of the Unknown Deep Comes a New Satellite to Lure Three Courageous Earthlings on to Strange Adventure._ (_A Complete Novelette._) WHEN CAVERNS YAWNED CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 198 _Only Dr. Bird's Super-Scientific Sleuthing Stands in the Way of Ivan Sarnoff's Latest Attempt at Wholesale Destruction._ THE EXILE OF TIME RAY CUMMINGS 216 _Young Lovers of Three Eras Are Swept down the Torrent of the Sinister Cripple Tugh's Frightful Vengeance._ (Part Two of a Four-Part Novel.) WHEN THE MOON TURNED GREEN HAL K. WELLS 241 _Outside His Laboratory Bruce Dixon Finds a World of Living Dead Men--and Above, in the Sky, Shines a Weird Green Moon._ THE DEATH-CLOUD NAT SCHACHNER AND ARTHUR L. ZAGAT 256 _The Epic Exploit of One Who Worked in the Dark and Alone, Behind the Enemy Lines, in the Great Last War._ THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 276 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._ Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by Readers' Guild, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group. For advertising rates address The Newsstand Group, Inc., 80 Lafayette St., New York or The Wrigley Bldg., Chicago. * * * * * Dark Moon A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By Charles W. Diffin_ CHAPTER I _There Comes a New World_ [Illustration: _Behind them a red ship was falling--falling free!_] [Sidenote: Mysterious, dark, out of the unknown deep comes a new satellite to lure three courageous Earthlings on to strange adventures.] The one hundred and fifty-ninth floor of the great Transportation Building allowed one standing at a window to look down upon the roofs of the countless buildings that were New York. Flat-decked, all of them; busy places of hangars and machine shops and strange aircraft, large and small, that rose vertically under the lift of flashing helicopters. The air was alive and vibrant with directed streams of stubby-winged shapes that drove swiftly on their way, with only a wisp of vapor from their funnel-shaped sterns to mark the continuous explosion that propelled them. Here and there were those that entered a shaft of pale-blue light that somehow outshone the sun. It marked an ascending area, and there ships canted swiftly, swung their blunt noses upward, and vanished, to the upper levels. A mile and more away, in a great shaft of green light from which all other craft kept clear, a tremendous shape was dropping. Her hull of silver was striped with a broad red band; her multiple helicopters were dazzling flashes in the sunlight. The countless dots that were portholes and the larger observation ports must have held numberless eager faces, for the Oriental Express served a cosmopolitan passenger list. But Walter Harkness, standing at the window, stared out from troubled, frowning eyes that saw nothing of the kaleidoscopic scene. His back was turned to the group of people in the room, and he had no thought of wonders that were prosaic, nor of passengers, eager or blase; his thoughts were only of freight and of the acres of flat roofs far in the distance where alternate flashes of color marked the descending area for fast freighters of the air. And in his mind he could see what his eyes could not discern--the markings on those roofs that were enormous landing fields: Harkness Terminals, New York. * * * * * Only twenty-four, Walt Harkness--owner now of Harkness, Incorporated. Dark hair that curled slightly as it left his forehead; eyes that were taking on the intent, straightforward look that had been his father's and that went straight to the heart of a business proposal with disconcerting directness. But the lips were not set in the hard lines that had marked Harkness Senior; they could still curve into boyish pleasure to mark the enthusiasm that was his. He was not typically the man of business in his dress. His broad shoulders seemed slender in the loose blouse of blue silk; a narrow scarf of brilliant color was loosely tied; the close, full-length cream-colored trousers were supported by a belt of woven metal, while his shoes were of the coarse-mesh fabric that the latest mode demanded. He turned now at the sound of Warrington's voice. E. B. Warrington, Counsellor at Law, was the name that glowed softly on the door of this spacious office, and Warrington's gray head was nodding as he dated and indexed a document. "June twentieth, nineteen seventy-three," he repeated; "a lucky day for you, Walter. Inside of ten years this land will be worth double the fifty million you are paying--and it is worth more than that to you." He turned and handed a document to a heavy-bodied man across from him. "Here is your copy, Herr Schwartzmann," he said. The man pocketed the paper with a smile of satisfaction thinly concealed on his dark face. * * * * * Harkness did not reply. He found little pleasure in the look on Schwartzmann's face, and his glance passed on to a fourth man who sat quietly at one side of the room. Young, his tanned face made bronze by contrast with his close-curling blond hair, there was no need of the emblem on his blouse to mark him as of the flying service. Beside the spread wings was the triple star of a master pilot of the world; it carried Chet Bullard past all earth's air patrols and gave him the freedom of every level. Beside him a girl was seated. She rose quickly now and came toward Harkness with outstretched hand. And Harkness found time in the instant of her coming to admire her grace of movement, and the carriage that was almost stately. The mannish attire of a woman of business seemed almost a discordant note; he did not realize that the hard simplicity of her costume had been saved by the soft warmth of its color, and by an indefinable, flowing line in the jacket above the rippling folds of an undergarment that gathered smoothly at her knees. He knew only that she made a lovely picture, surprisingly appealing, and that her smile was a compensation for the less pleasing visage of her companion, Schwartzmann. "Mademoiselle Vernier," Herr Schwartzmann had introduced her when they came. And he had used her given name as he added: "Mademoiselle Diane is somewhat interested in our projects." She was echoing Warrington's words as she took Harkness' hand in a friendly grasp. "I hope, indeed, that it is the lucky day for you, Monsieur. Our modern transportation--it is so marvelous, and I know so little of it. But I am learning. I shall think of you as developing your so-splendid properties wonderfully." * * * * * Only when she and Schwartzmann were gone did Harkness answer his counsellor's remark. The steady Harkness eyes were again wrinkled about with puckering lines; the shoulders seemed not so square as usual. "Lucky?" he said. "I hope you're right. You were Father's attorney for twenty years--your judgment ought to be good; and mine is not entirely worthless. "Yes, it is a good deal we have made--of course it is!--it bears every analysis. We need that land if we are to expand as we must, and the banks will carry me for the twenty million I can't swing. But, confound it, Warrington, I've had a hunch--and I've gone against it. Schwartzmann has tied me up for ready cash, and he represents the biggest competitors we have. They're planning something--but we need the land.... Oh, well, I've signed up; the property is mine; but...." The counsellor laughed. "You need a change," he said; "I never knew you to worry before. Why don't you jump on the China Mail this afternoon; it connects with a good line out of Shanghai. You can be tramping around the Himalayas to-morrow. A day or two there will fix you up." "Too busy," said Harkness. "Our experimental ship is about ready, so I'll go and play with that. We'll be shooting at the moon one of these days." "The moon!" the other snorted. "Crazy dreams! McInness tried it, and you know what happened. He came back out of control--couldn't check his speed against the repelling area--shot through and stripped his helicopters off against the heavy air. And that other fellow, Haldgren--" "Yes," said Harkness quietly, "Haldgren--he didn't fall back. He went on into space." * * * * * "Impossible!" the counsellor objected. "He must have fallen unobserved. No, no, Walter; be reasonable. I do not claim to know much about those things--I leave them to the Stratosphere Control Board--but I do know this much: that the lifting effect above the repelling area--what used to be known as the heaviside layer--counteracts gravity's pull. That's why our ships fly as they please when they have shot themselves through. But they have to fly close to it; its force is dissipated in another ten thousand feet, and the old earth's pull is still at work. It can't be done, my boy; the vast reaches of space--" "Are the next to be conquered," Harkness broke in. "And Chet and I intend to be in on it." He glanced toward the young flyer, and they exchanged a quiet smile. "Remember how my father was laughed at when he dared to vision the commerce of to-day? Crazy dreams, Warrington? That's what they said when Dad built the first unit of our plant, the landing stages for the big freighters, the docks for ocean ships while they lasted, the berths for the big submarines that he knew were coming. They jeered at him then. 'Harkness' Folly,' the first plant was called. And now--well you know what we are doing." He laughed softly. "Leave us our crazy dreams, Warrington," he protested; "sometimes those dreams come true.... And I'll try to forget my hunch. We've bought the property; now we'll make it earn money for us. I'll forget it now, and work on my new ship. Chet and I are about ready for a try-out." * * * * * The flyer had risen to join him, and the two turned together to the door where a private lift gave access to the roof. They were halfway to it when the first shock came to throw the two men on the floor. The great framework of the Transportation Building was swaying wildly as they fell, and the groaning of its wrenched and straining members sounded through the echoing din as every movable object in the room came crashing down. Dazed for the moment, Harkness lay prone, while his eyes saw the nitron illuminator, like a great chandelier, swing widely from the ceiling where it was placed. Its crushing weight started toward him, but a last swing shot it past to the desk of the counsellor. Harkness got slowly to his feet. The flyer, too, was able to stand, though he felt tenderly of a bruised shoulder. But where Warrington had been was only the crumpled wreckage of a steeloid desk, the shattered bulk of the illuminator upon it, and, beneath, the mangled remains where flowing blood made a quick pool upon the polished floor. Warrington was dead--no help could be rendered there--and Harkness was reaching for the door. The shock had passed, and the building was quiet, but he shouted to the flyer and sprang into the lift. "The air is the place for us," he said; "there may be more coming." He jammed over the control lever, and the little lift moved. "What was it?" gasped Bullard, "earthquake?--explosion? Lord, what a smash!" Harkness made no reply. He was stepping out upon the broad surface of the Transportation Building. He paid no attention to the hurrying figures about him, nor did he hear the loud shouting of the newscasting cone that was already bringing reports of the disaster. He had thought only for the speedy little ship that he used for his daily travel. * * * * * The golden cylinder was still safe in the grip of its hold-down clutch, and its stubby wings and gleaming sextuple-bladed helicopter were intact. Harkness sprang for the control-board. He, too, wore an emblem: a silver circle that marked him a pilot of the second class; he could take his ship around the world below the forty level, though at forty thousand and above he must give over control to the younger man. The hiss of the releasing clutch came softly to him as the free-signal flashed, and he sank back with a great sigh of relief as the motors hummed and the blades above leaped into action. Then the stern blast roared, though its sound came faintly through the deadened walls, and he sent the little speedster for the pale blue light of an ascending area. Nor did he level off until the gauge before him said twenty thousand. His first thought had been for their own safety in the air, but with it was a frantic desire to reach the great plant of the Harkness Terminals. What had happened there? Had there been any damage? Had they felt the shock? A few seconds in level twenty would tell him. He reached the place of alternate flashes where he could descend, and the little ship fell smoothly down. Below him the great expanse of buildings took form, and they seemed safe and intact. His intention was to land, till the slim hands of Chet Bullard thrust him roughly aside and reached for the controls. It was Bullard's right--a master pilot could take control at any time--but Harkness stared in amazement as the other lifted the ship, then swung it out over the expanse of ocean beyond--stared until his own eyes followed those of Chet Bullard to see the wall of water that was sweeping toward the land. Chet, he knew, had held them in a free-space level, where they could maneuver as they pleased, but he knew, too, that the pilot's hands were touching levers that swung them at a quite unlawful speed past other ships, and that swept them down in a great curve above the ocean's broad expanse. * * * * * Harkness did not at once grasp the meaning of the thing. There was the water, sparkling clear, and a monstrous wave that lifted itself up to mountainous heights. Behind it the ocean's blue became a sea of mud; and only when he glanced at their ground-speed detector did he sense that the watery mountain was hurling itself upon the shore with the swiftness of a great super-liner. There were the out-thrusting capes that made a safe harbor for the commerce that came on and beneath the waters to the Harkness Terminals; the wave built itself up to still greater heights as it came between them. They were riding above it by a thousand feet, and Walter Harkness, in sudden knowledge of what this meant, stared with straining eyes at the wild thing that raced with them underneath. He must do something--anything!--to check the monster, to flatten out the onrushing mountain! The red bottom-plates of a submarine freighter came rolling up behind the surge to show how futile was the might of man. And the next moment marked the impact of the wall of water upon a widespread area of landing roofs, where giant letters stared mockingly at him to spell the words: Harkness Terminals, New York. He saw the silent crumbling of great buildings; he glimpsed in one wild second the whirling helicopters on giant freighters that took the air too late; he saw them vanish as the sea swept in and engulfed them. And then, after endless minutes, he knew that Chet had swung again above the site of his plant, and he saw the stumps of steel and twisted wreckage that remained.... * * * * * The pilot hung the ship in air--a golden beetle, softly humming as it hovered above the desolate scene. Chet had switched on the steady buzz of the stationary-ship signal, and the wireless warning was swinging passing craft out and around their station. Within the quiet cabin a man stood to stare and stare, unspeaking, until his pilot laid a friendly hand upon the broad shoulders. "You're cleaned," said Chet Bullard. "It's a washout! But you'll build it up again; they can't stop you--" But the steady, appraising eyes of Walter Harkness had moved on and on to a rippling stretch of water where land had been before. "Cleaned," he responded tonelessly; "and then some! And I could start again, but--" He paused to point to the stretch of new sea, and his lips moved that he might laugh long and harshly. "But right there is all I own--that is, the land I bought this morning. It is gone, and I owe twenty million to the hardest-hearted bunch of creditors in the world. That foreign crowd, who've been planning to invade our territory here. You know what chance I'll have with them...." The disaster was complete, and Walter Harkness was facing it--facing it with steady gray eyes and a mind that was casting a true balance of accounts. He was through, he told himself; his other holdings would be seized to pay for this waste of water that an hour before had been dry land; they would strip him of his last dollar. His lips curved into a sardonic smile. "June twentieth, nineteen seventy-three," he repeated. "Poor old Warrington! He called this my lucky day!" * * * * * The pilot had respected the other man's need of silence, but his curiosity could not be longer restrained. "What's back of it all?" he demanded. "What caused it? The shock was like no earthquake I've ever known. And this tidal wave--" He was reaching for a small switch. He turned a dial to the words: "News Service--General," and the instrument broke into hurried speech. It told of earth shocks in many places--the whole world had felt it--some tremendous readjustment among the inner stresses of the earth--most serious on the Atlantic seaboard--the great Harkness Terminals destroyed--some older buildings in the business district shaken down--loss of life not yet computed.... "But what _did_ it?" Chet Bullard was repeating in the cabin of their floating ship. "A tremendous shake-up like that!" Harkness silenced him with a quick gesture of his hand. Another voice had broken in to answer the pilot's question. "The mystery is solved," said the new voice. "This is the Radio-News representative speaking from Calcutta. We are in communication with the Allied Observatories on Mount Everest. At eleven P. M., World Standard Time, Professor Boyle observed a dark body in transit across the moon. According to Boyle, a non-luminous and non-reflecting asteroid has crashed into the earth's gravitational field. A dark moon has joined this celestial grouping, and is now swinging in an orbit about the earth. It is this that has disturbed the balance of internal stresses within the earth--" * * * * * "A dark moon!" Chet Bullard broke in, but again a movement from Harkness silenced his exclamations. Whatever of dull apathy had gripped young Harkness was gone. No thought now of the devastation below them that spelled his financial ruin. Some greater, more gripping idea had now possessed him. The instrument was still speaking: "--Without light of its own, nor does it reflect the sun's light as does our own moon. This phenomenon, as yet, is unexplained. It is nearer than our own moon and smaller, but of tremendous density." Harkness nodded his head quickly at that, and his eyes were alive with an inner enthusiasm not yet expressed in words. "It is believed that the worst is over. More minor shocks may follow, but the cause is known; the mystery is solved. Out from the velvet dark of space has come a small, new world to join us--" The voice ceased. Walter Harkness had opened the switch. "The mystery is solved," Chet Bullard repeated. "Solved?" exclaimed the other from his place at the controls. "Man, it is only begun!" He depressed a lever, and a muffled roar marked their passage to a distant shaft of blue, where he turned the ship on end and shot like a giant shell for the higher air. There was northbound travel at thirty-five, and northward Harkness would go, but he shot straight up. At forty thousand he motioned the master-pilot to take over the helm. "Clear through," he ordered; "up into the liner lanes; then north for our own shop." Nor did he satisfy the curiosity in Chet Bullard's eyes by so much as a word until some hours later when they floated down. * * * * * An icy waste was beneath them, where the sub-polar regions were wrapped in the mantle of their endless winter. Here ships never passed. Northward, toward the Pole, were liner lanes in the higher levels, but here was a deserted sector. And here Walter Harkness had elected to carry on his experiments. A rise of land showed gaunt and black, and the pilot was guiding the ship in a long slant upon it. He landed softly beside a building in a sheltered, snow-filled valley. Harkness shivered as he stepped from the warmth of their insulated cabin, and he fumbled with shaking fingers to touch the combination upon the locked door. It swung open, to close behind the men as they stood in the warm, brightly-lighted room. Nitro illuminators were hung from the ceiling, their diffused brilliance shining down to reflect in sparkling curves and ribbons of light from a silvery shape. It stood upon the floor, a metal cylinder a hundred feet in length, whose blunt ends showed dark openings of gaping ports. There were other open ports above and below and in regular spacing about the rounded sides. No helicopters swung their blades above; there were only the bulge of a conning tower and the heavy inset glasses of the lookouts. Nor were there wings of any kind. It might have been a projectile for some mammoth gun. Harkness stood in silence before it, until he turned to smile at the still-wondering pilot. "Chet," he said, "it's about finished and ready--just in time. We've built it, you and I; freighted in the parts ourselves and assembled every piece. We've even built the shop: lucky the big steeloid plates are so easily handled. And you and I are the only ones that know. "Every ship in the airlanes of the world is driven by detonite--and we have evolved a super-detonite. We have proved that it will work. It will carry us beyond the pull of gravitation; it will give us the freedom of outer space. It is ours and ours alone." "No," the other corrected slowly, "it is yours. You have paid the bills and you have paid me. Paid me well." "I'm paying no more," Harkness told him. "I'm broke, right this minute. I haven't a dollar--and yet I say now that poor Warrington was right: this is my lucky day." * * * * * He laughed aloud at the bewilderment on the pilot's face. "Chet," he said slowly, and his voice was pitched to a more serious tone, "out there is a new world, the Dark Moon. 'Tremendous density,' they said. That means it can hold an atmosphere of its own. It means new metals, new wealth. It means a new little world to explore, and it's out there waiting for us. Waiting for us; we will be the first. For here is the ship that will take us. "It isn't mine, Chet; it's ours. And the adventure is ours; yours and mine, both. We only meant to go a few hundred miles at first, but here's something big. We may never come back--it's a long chance that we're taking--but you're in on it, if you want to go...." He paused. The expression in the eyes of Chet Bullard, master-pilot of the world, was answer enough. But Chet amplified it with explosive words. "Am I in on it?" he demanded. "Try to count me out--just try to do it! I was game for a trial flight out beyond. And now, with a real objective to shoot at--a new world--" His words failed him. Walt Harkness knew that the hand the other extended was thrust forth blindly; he gripped at it hard, while he turned to look at the shining ship. But his inner gaze passed far beyond the gleaming thing of metal, off into a realm of perpetual night. Out there a new world was waiting--a Dark Moon!--and there they might find.... But his imagination failed him there; he could only thrill with the adventure that the unknown held. CHAPTER II _Escape_ Two days, while a cold sun peeped above an icy horizon! Two days of driving, eager work on the installation of massive motors--yet motors so light that one man could lift them--then Harkness prepared to leave. "Wealth brings care when it comes," he told Chet, "but it leaves plenty of trouble behind it when it goes. I must get back to New York and throw what is left of my holdings to the wolves; they must be howling by this time to find out where I am. I'll drop back here in a week." There were instruments to be installed, and Chet would look after that. He would test the motors where the continuous explosion of super-detonite would furnish the terrific force for their driving power. Then the exhaust from each port must be measured and thrusts equalized, where needed, by adjustment of great valves. All this Chet would finish. And then--a test flight. Harkness hoped to be back for the first try-out of the new ship. "I'll be seeing you in a week," he repeated. "You'll be that long getting her tuned up." But Chet Bullard grinned derisively. "Two days!" he replied. "You'll have to step some if you get in on the trial flight. But don't worry; I won't take off for the Dark Moon. I'll just go up and play around above the liner lanes and see how the old girl stunts." Harkness nodded. "Watch for patrol ships," he warned. "There's no traffic directly over here--that's one reason why I chose this spot--but don't let anyone get too close. Our patents have not been applied for." * * * * * Harkness spent a day in New York. Then a night trip by Highline Express took him to London where he busied himself for some hours. Next, a fast passenger plane for Vienna. In other days Walter Harkness would have chartered a private ship to cut off a few precious hours, but he was traveling more economically now. And the representatives of his foreign competitors were not now coming to see him; he must go to them. At the great terminal in Vienna a man approached him. "Herr Harkness?" he inquired, and saluted stiffly. He was not in uniform. He was not of the Allied Patrol nor of any branch of the police force that encircled the world in its operations. Yet his military bearing was unmistakable. To Harkness it was reminiscent of old pictures of Prussian days--those curious pictures revived at times for the amusement of those who turned to their television sets for entertainment. He had to repress a smile as he followed where the other led him to a gray speedster in a distant corner of the open concourse. He stepped within a luxurious cabin and would have gone on into the little control room, but his guide checked him. Harkness was mildly curious as to their course--Schwartzmann was to have seen him in Vienna--but the way to the instrument board was barred. Another precise salute, and he was motioned to the cabin at the rear. "It is orders that I follow," he was told. And Walter Harkness complied. "It could happen only here," he told himself. And he found himself exasperated by a people who were slow to conform to the customs of a world whose closely-knit commerce had obliterated the narrow nationalism of the past. * * * * * They landed in an open court surrounded by wide lawns. He glimpsed trees about them in the dusk, and looming before him was an old-time building of the chateau type set off in this private park. He would have followed his guide toward the entrance, but a flash of color checked him. Like a streak of flame a ship shot in above them; hung poised near the one that had brought them and settled to rest beside it. A little red speedster, it made a splash of crimson against the green lawns beyond. And, "Nice flying," Harkness was telling himself. The hold-down clamps had hardly gripped it when a figure sprang out from an opened door. A figure in cool gray that took warmth and color from the ship behind--a figure of a girl, tall and slender and graceful as she came impulsively toward him. "Monsieur Harkness!" she exclaimed. "But this is a surprise. I thought that Herr Schwartzmann was to see you in Vienna!" For a brief moment Harkness saw a flicker of puzzled wonderment in her eyes. "And I am sorry," she went on, "--so very sorry for your misfortune. But we will be generous." She withdrew her hand which Harkness was holding. He was still phrasing a conventional greeting as she flung him a gay laugh and a look from brown eyes that smiled encouragement. She was gone before he found words for reply. Walter Harkness had been brought up in a world of business, and knew little of the subtle message of a woman's eyes. But he felt within him a warm response to the friendly companionship that the glance implied. Within the chateau, in a dark-paneled room, Herr Schwartzmann was waiting. He motioned Harkness to a chair and resumed his complacent contemplation of a picture that was flowing across a screen. Color photography gave every changing shade. It was coming by wireless, as Harkness knew, and he realized that the sending instrument must be in a ship that cruised slowly above a scene of wreckage and desolation. He recognized the ruins of his great plant; he saw the tiny figures of men, and he knew that the salvage company he had placed in charge was on the job. Beyond was a stretch of rippling water where the great wave had boiled over miles of land and had sucked it back to the ocean's depths. And he realized that the beginning of his conference was not auspicious. After the warmth of the girl's greeting, this other was like a plunge into the Arctic chill of his northern retreat. * * * * * "I have listed every dollar's worth of property that I own," he was saying an hour later, "and I have turned it over to a trustee who will protect your rights. What more do you want?" "We have heard of some experimental work," said Herr Schwartzmann smoothly. "A new ship; some radical changes in design. We would like that also." "Try and get it," Harkness invited. The other passed that challenge by. "There is another alternative," he said. "My principals in France are unknown to you; perhaps, also, it is not known that they intend to extend their lines to New York and that they will erect great terminals to do the work that you have done. "Your father was the pioneer; there is great value in the name of Harkness--the 'good-will' as you say in America. We would like to adopt that name, and carry on where you have left off. If you were to assign to us the worthless remains of your plant, and all right and title to the name of Harkness Terminals, it might be--" He paused deliberately while Harkness stiffened in his chair. "It might be that we would require no further settlement. The balance of your fortune--and your ship--will be yours." Harkness' gray eyes, for a moment, betrayed the smouldering rage that was his. "Put it in plain words," he demanded. "You would bribe me to sell you something you cannot create for yourselves. The name of Harkness has stood for fair-dealing, for honor, for scrupulous observance of our clients' rights. My father established it on that basis and I have continued in the same way. And you?--well, it occurs to me that the Schwartzmann interests have had a different reputation. Now you would buy my father's name to use it as a cloak for your dirty work!" He rose abruptly. "It is not for sale. Every dollar that I own will be used to settle my debt. There will be enough--" * * * * * Herr Schwartzmann refused to be insulted. His voice was unruffled as he interrupted young Harkness' vehement statement. "Perhaps you are right; perhaps not. Permit me to remind you that the value of your holdings may depreciate under certain influences that we are able to exert--also that you are in Austria, and that the laws of this country permit us to hold you imprisoned until the debt is paid. In the meantime we will find your ship and seize it, and whatever it has of value will be protected by patents in our name." His unctuous voice became harsh. "Honor! Fair dealing!" He spat out the words in sudden hate. "You Americans who will not realize that business is business!" Harkness was standing, drawn unconsciously to his full height. He looked down upon the other man. All anger had gone from his face; he seemed only appraising the individual before him. "The trouble with you people," he said, "is that you are living in the past--way back about nineteen fourteen, when might made right--sometimes." He continued to look squarely into the other's eyes, but his lips set firmly, and his voice was hard and decisive. "But," he continued, "I am not here to educate you, nor to deal with you. Any further negotiations will be through my counsellors. And now I will trouble you to return me to the city. We are through with this." * * * * * Herr Schwartzmann's heavy face drew into lines of sardonic humor. "Not quite through," he said; "and you are not returning to the city." He drew a paper from his desk. "I anticipated some such _verdammpt_ foolishness from you. You see this? It is a contract; a release, a transfer of all your interests in Harkness, Incorporated. It needs only your signature, and that will be supplied. No one will question it when we are done: the very ink in the stylus you carry will be duplicated. For the last time, I repeat my offer; I am patient with you. Sign this, and keep all else that you have. Refuse, and--" "Yes?" Harkness inquired. "And we will sign for you--a forgery that will never be detected. And as for you, your body will be found--a suicide! You will leave a letter: we will attend to all that. Herr Harkness will have found this misfortune unbearable.... We shall be very sad!" His heavy smile grew into derisive laughter. "I am still patient, and kind," he added. "I give you twenty-four hours to think it over." A touch of a button on his desk summoned the man who had brought Harkness there. "Herr Harkness is in your charge," were the instructions to the one who stood stiffly at attention. "He is not to leave this place. Is it understood?" As he was ushered from the room, Walter Harkness also understood, and he knew that this was no idle threat. He had heard ugly rumors of Herr Schwartzmann and his methods. One man, he knew, had dared to oppose him--and that man had gone suddenly insane. A touch of a needle, it was whispered.... There had been other rumors; Schwartzmann got what he wanted; his financial backing was enormous. And now he would bring his ruthless methods to America. But there he needed the Harkness standing, the reputation for probity--and Walter Harkness was grimly resolved that they should never buy it from him. But the problem must be faced, and the answer found, if answer there was, in twenty-four hours. * * * * * An amazing state of affairs in a modern world! He stood meditating upon his situation in a great, high-ceilinged room. A bed stood in a corner, and other furniture marked the room as belonging to an earlier time. Even mechanical weather-control was wanting; one must open the windows, Harkness found, to get cooling air. He stood at the open window and saw storm clouds blowing up swiftly. They blotted the stars from the night sky; they swept black and ominous overhead, and seemed to touch the giant trees that whipped their branches in the wind. But he was thinking not at all of the storm, and only of the fact that this room where he stood must be directly above the one where Schwartzmann was seated. Schwartzmann--who would put an end to his life as casually as he would bring down a squirrel from one of those trees! And again he thought: "Twenty-four hours!... Why hours? Why not minutes?... Whatever must be done he must do now. And might made right: it was the only way to meet this unscrupulous foreign scoundrel." A wind-tossed branch lashed at him. On the ground below he saw the man who had brought him, posting another as a guard. They glanced up at his window. There would be no escape there. And yet the branch seemed beckoning. He caught it when again it whipped toward him, and, without any definite plan, he lashed it fast with a velvet cord from the window drapes. But his thoughts came back to the room. He snatched suddenly at the covers of the bed. What were the sheets?--fabric as old-fashioned as the room, or were they cellulex? The touch of the soft fabric reassured him: it was as soft as though woven of spider's web, and strong as fibres of steel. It took all of his strength to rip it into strips, but it was a matter of minutes, only, until he had a rope that would bear his weight. The storm had broken; the black clouds let loose a deluge of water that drove in at the window. If only the window below was still open! He found the middle of his rope, looped it over a post of the bed, and, with both strands in his grasp, let himself out and over the dripping sill. Would the guard see him, or had he taken to shelter? Harkness did not pause to look. He left the branch tied fast. "A squirrel in a tree," he thought: the branch would mislead them. His feet found the window-sill one story below. He drew himself into the room and let loose of one strand of his rope as he entered. Schwartzmann was gone. Harkness, with the bundle of wet fabric in his hands, glanced quickly about. A door stood open--it was a closet--and the rain-drenched man was hidden there an instant later. But he stepped most carefully across the floor and touched his wet shoes only to the rugs where their print was lost. And he held himself breathlessly silent as he heard the volley of gutteral curses that marked the return of Herr Schwartzmann some minutes later. "Imbecile!" Schwartzmann shouted above the crash of the closing window. "_Dumkopff!_ You have let him escape. "Give me your pistol!" Harkness glimpsed the figure of his recent guard. "Get another for yourself--find him!--shoot him down! A little lead and detonite will end this foolishness!" From his hiding place Harkness saw the bulky figure of Schwartzmann, who made as if to follow where the other man had gone. The pistol was in his hand. Walt Harkness knew all too well what that meant. The tiny grain of detonite in the end of each leaden ball was the same terrible explosive that drove their ships: it would tear him to pieces. And he had to get this man. He was tensed for a spring as Schwartzmann paused. From the wall beyond him a red light was flashing; a crystal flamed forth with the intense glare of a thousand fires. It checked the curses on the other's thick lips; it froze Harkness to a rigid statue in the darkness of his little room. * * * * * An emergency flash broadcast over the world! It meant that the News Service had been commandeered. This flashing signal was calling to the peoples of the earth! What catastrophe did this herald? Had it to do with the Dark Moon? Not since the uprising of the Mole-men, those creatures who had spewed forth from the inner world, had the fiery crystal called!... It seemed to Harkness that Schwartzmann was hours in reaching the switch.... A voice came shouting into the room: "By order of the Stratosphere Control Board," it commanded, "all traffic is forbidden above the forty level. Liners take warning. Descend at once." Over and over it repeated the command--an order whose authority could not be disregarded. In his inner vision Harkness saw the tumult in the skies, the swift dropping of huge liners and great carriers of fast freight, the scurrying of other craft to give clearance to these monsters whose terrific speed must be slowly checked. But why? What had happened? What could warrant such disruption of the traffic of the world? His tensed muscles were aching unheeded; his sense of feeling seemed lost, so intently was he waiting for some further word. "Emergency news report," said another voice, and Harkness strained every faculty to hear. "Highline ships attacked by unknown foe. Three passenger carriers of the Northpolar Short Line reported crashed. Incomplete warnings from their commanders indicate they were attacked. Patrol ship has spotted one crash. They have landed beside it and are reporting.... "The report is in; it is almost beyond belief. They say the liner is empty, that no human body, alive or dead, is in the ship. She was stripped of crew and passengers in the air. "We await confirmation. Danger apparently centered over arctic regions, but traffic has been ordered from all upper levels--" The voice that had been held rigidly to the usual calm clarity of an official announcer became suddenly high-pitched and vibrant. "Stand by!" it shouted. "An S. O. S. is coming in. We will put it through our amplifiers; give it to you direct!" * * * * * The newscaster crackled and hissed: they were waiving all technical niceties at R. N. Headquarters, Harkness knew. The next voice came clearly, though a trifle faint. "Air Patrol! Help! Position eighty-two--fourteen north, ninety-three--twenty east--Superliner Number 87-G, flying at R. A. plus seven. We are attacked!--Air Patrol!--Air Patrol!--Eighty-two--fourteen north, ninety-three--twenty--" The voice that was repeating the position was lost in a pandemonium of cries. Then-- "Monsters!" the voice was shouting. "They have seized the ship! They are tearing at our ports--" A hissing crash ended in silence.... "Tearing at our ports!" Harkness was filled with a blinding nausea as he sensed what had come with the crash. The opening ports--the out-rush of air released to the thin atmosphere of those upper levels! Earth pressure within the cabins of the ship; then in an instant--none! Every man, every woman and child on the giant craft, had died instantly! The announcer had resumed, but above the sound was a guttural voice that shouted hoarsely in accents of dismay. "Eighty-seven-G!" Schwartzmann was exclaiming, "--Mein Gott! It iss our own ship, the Alaskan! Our crack flyer!" * * * * * Harkness heard him but an instant, for another thought was hammering at his brain. The position!--the ship's position!--it was almost above his experimental plant! And Chet was there, and the ship.... What had Chet said? He would fly it in two days--and this was the second day! Chet had no radio-news; no instrument had been installed in the shop; they had depended upon the one in Harkness' own ship. And now-- Walt Harkness' clear understanding had brought a vision that was sickening, so plainly had he glimpsed the scene of terror in that distant cabin. And now he saw with equal clarity another picture. There was Chet, smiling, unafraid, proud of their joint accomplishment and of the gleaming metal shape that he was lifting carefully from its bed. He was floating it out to the open air; he was taking off, and up--up where some horror awaited. "Monsters!" that thin voice had cried in a tone that was vibrant with terror. What could it be?--great ships out of space?--an invasion? Or beasts?... But Harkness' vision failed him there. He knew only that a fast ship was moored just outside. He had planned vaguely to seize it; he had needed it for his own escape; but he needed it a thousand times more desperately now. Chet might have been delayed, and he must warn him.... The thoughts were flashing like hot sparks through his brain as he leaped. * * * * * He bore the heavier body of Schwartzmann to the floor. He rained smashing blows upon him with a furious frenzy that would not be curbed. The weapon with its deadly detonite bullet came toward him. In the same burst of fury he tore the weapon from the hand that held it; then sprang to his feet to stand wild-eyed and panting is he aimed the pistol at the cursing man and dragged him to his feet. "The ship!" he said between heavy breaths, "--the ship! Take me to it! You will tell anyone we meet it is all right. One word of alarm, one wrong look, and I'll blow you to hell and make a break for it!" The pistol under Harkness' silken jacket was pressed firmly into Schwartzmann's side; it brought them safely past excited guards and out into the storm; it held steady until the men had fought their way through blasts of rain to the side of the anchored ship. Not till then did Schwartzmann speak. "Wait," he said. "Are you crazy, Harkness? You can never take off; the trees are close; a straight ascent is needed. And the wind--!" He struggled in the other's grasp as Harkness swung open the cabin door, his fear of what seemed a certain death overmastering his fear of the weapon. He was shouting for help as Harkness threw him roughly aside and leaped into the ship. Outside Harkness saw running figures as he threw on the motors. A pistol's flash came sharply through the storm and dark. A window in the chateau flashed into brilliance to frame the figure of a girl. Tall and slender, she leaned forward with outstretched arms. She seemed calling to him. * * * * * Harkness seized the controls, and knew as he did so that Schwartzmann was right: he could never lift the ship in straight ascent. Before her whirling fans could raise her they would be crashed among the trees. But there were two helicopters--dual lift, one forward and one aft. And Walt Harkness, pilot of the second class, earned immediate disbarment or a much higher rating as he coolly fingered the controls. He cut the motor on the big fan at the stern, threw the forward one on full and set the blades for maximum lift, then released the hold-down grips that moored her. The grips let go with a crashing of metal arms. The bow shot upward while a blast of wind tore at the stubby wings. The slim ship tried to stand erect. Another furious, beating wind lifted her bodily, as Harkness, clinging desperately within the narrow room, threw his full weight upon the lever that he held. The full blast of a detonite motor, on even a small ship, is terrific, and the speedster of Herr Schwartzmann did not lack for power. Small wonder that the rules of the Board of Control prohibit the use of the stern blast under one thousand feet. The roaring inferno from the stern must have torn the ground as if by a mammoth plow; the figures of men must have scattered like leaves in a gusty wind. The ship itself was racked and shuddering with the impact of the battering thrust, but it rose like a rocket, though canted on one wing, and the crashing branches of wind-torn trees marked its passage on a long, curving slant that bent upward into the dark. Within the control room Walter Harkness grinned happily as he drew his bruised body from the place where he had been thrown, and brought the ship to an even keel. * * * * * Nice work! But there was other work ahead, and the smile of satisfaction soon passed. He held the nose up, and the wireless warning went out before as the wild climb kept on. Forty thousand was passed; then fifty and more; a hundred thousand; and at length he was through the repelling area, that zone of mysterious force, above which was a magnetic repulsion nearly neutralizing gravity. He could fly level now; every unit of force could be used for forward flight to hurl him onward faster and faster into the night. Harkness was flying where his license was void; he was flying, too, where all aircraft were banned. But the rules of the Board of Control meant nothing to him this night. Nor did the voluble and sulphurous orders to halt that a patrol-ship flashed north. The patrol-ship was on station; she was lost far astern before she could gather speed for pursuit. Walter Harkness had caught his position upon a small chart. It was a sphere, and he led a thin wire from the point that was Vienna to a dot that he marked on the sub-polar waste. He dropped a slender pointer upon the wire and engaged its grooved tip, and then the flying was out of his hands. The instrument before him, with its light bulbs and swift moving discs, would count their speed of passage; it would hold the ship steadily upon an unerring course and allow for drift of winds. The great-circle course was simple; the point he marked was drawing them as if it had been a magnet--drawing them as it drew the eyes of Walt Harkness, staring strainingly ahead as if to span the thousands of miles of dark. CHAPTER III _The Space Terror_ The control room was glassed in on all sides. The thick triple lenses were free from clouding, and the glasses between them kept out the biting cold of the heights. The glass was strong, to hold the pressure of one atmosphere that was maintained within the ship. The lookouts gave free vision in all directions except directly below the hull, and a series of mirrors corrected this defect. But Walt Harkness had eyes solely for the black void ahead. Only the brilliant stars shone now in the mantle of velvety night. No flashing lights denoted the passing of liners, for they were safe in the harbor of the lower levels. He moved the controls once to avoid the green glare of an ascending area, then he knew that there were no ships to fear, and let the automatic control put him back on his course. Before him, under a hooded light, was a heavy lens. It showed in magnification a portion of the globe. There were countries and seas on a vari-colored map, and one pin-point of brilliance that marked his ever-changing position. He watched the slow movement of the glowing point. The Central Federated States of Europe were behind him; the point was tracing a course over the vast reaches of the patchwork map that meant the many democracies of Russia. This cruiser of Schwartzmann's was doing five hundred miles an hour--and the watching man cursed under his breath at the slow progress of the tiny light. But the light moved, and the slow hours passed, while Harkness tried to find consolation in surmises he told himself must be true. Chet had been delayed, he insisted to himself; Chet could never have finished the work in two days; he had been bluffing good-naturedly when he threatened to fly the ship alone.... * * * * * The Arctic Ocean was beneath. The tiny light had passed clear of the land on the moving chart. He would be there soon.... Of course Chet had been fooling; he was always ready for a joke.... Great fellow, Chet! They had taken their training together, and Chet had gone on to win a master-pilot's rating, the highest to be had.... Another hour, and a rising hum from a buzzer beside him gave warning of approach to the destination he had fixed. The automatic control was warning him to decelerate. Harkness well knew what was expected of the pilot when that humming sounded; yet, with total disregard for the safety of his helicopters, he dived at full speed for the denser air beneath. He felt the weight that came suddenly upon him as he drove through and beneath the repelling area, and he flattened out and checked his terrific speed when the gauges quivered at forty thousand. Then down and still down in a long, slanting dive, till a landmark was found. He was off his course a bit, but it was a matter of minutes until he circled, checked his wild flight, and sank slowly beneath the lift of the dual fans to set the ship down as softly as a snowflake beside a building that was dark and forbiddingly silent--a lonely outpost in a lonely waste. No answer came to his hail. The building was empty; the ship was gone. And Chet! Chet Bullard!... Harkness' head was heavy on his shoulders; his feet took him with hopeless, lagging steps to his waiting ship. He was tired--and the long strain of the flight had been in vain. He was suddenly certain of disaster. And Chet--Chet was up there at some hitherto untouched height, battling with--what? * * * * * He broke into a stumbling run and drew himself within the little ship. He was helpless; the ship was unarmed, even if the weapons of his world were of use against this unknown terror; but he knew that he was going up. He would find Chet if he could get within reach of his ship; he would warn him.... He tried to tell himself that he might yet be in time. The little cruiser rose slowly under the lift of the fans; then he opened the throttle and swept out in a parabolic curve that ended in a vertical line. Straight up, the ship roared. It shot through a stratum of clouds. The sun that was under the horizon shone redly now; it grew to a fiery ball; the earth contracted; the markings that were coastlines and mountains drew in upon themselves. He passed the repelling area and felt the lift of its mysterious force--the "R. A. Effect" that permitted the high-level flying of the world. His speed increased. It would diminish again as the R. A. Effect grew less. Record flights had been made to another ten thousand.... He wondered what the ceiling would be for the ship beneath him. He would soon learn.... He set his broadcast call for the number of Chet's ship. They had been given an experimental license, and "E--L--29-X" the instrument was flashing, "E--L--29-X." Above the heaviside layer that had throttled the radio of earlier years, he knew that his call from so small an instrument as this would be carried for hundreds of miles. He reached the limit of his climb and was suddenly weightless, floating aimlessly within the little room; the ship was falling, and he was falling with it. His speed of descent built up to appalling figures until his helicopters found air to take their thrust. And still no answering word from Chet. The cruiser was climbing again to the heights. The hands of Harkness, trembling slightly now, held her to a vertical climb, while his eyes crept back to the unlit plate where Chet's answering call should flash. But his own call would be a guide to Chet; the directional finders on the new ship would trace the position of his own craft if the new ship were afloat--if it were not lying crushed on the ice below, empty, like the liners, of any sign of life. * * * * * His despairing mind snapped sharply to attention. His startled jerk threw the ship widely from her course. A voice was speaking--Chet's voice! It was shouting in the little room! "Go down, Walt," it told him. "For God's sake, go down! I'm right above you; I've been fighting them for an hour; but I'll make it!" He heard the clash of levers thrown sharply over in that distant ship; his own hands were frozen to the controls. His ship roared on in its upward course, the futile "E--L--29-X" of his broadcast call still going out to a man who could not remove his hands to send an answer, but who had managed to switch on his sending set into which he could shout. Harkness was staring into the black void whence the wireless voice had come--staring into the empty night. And then he saw them. The thin air was crystal clear; his gaze penetrated for miles. And far up in the heights, where his own ship could never reach and where no clouds could be, were diaphanous wraiths. Like streamers of cloud in long serpentine forms, they writhed and shot through space with lightning speed. They grew luminous as they moved living streamers of moonlit clouds.... A whirling cluster was gathered into a falling mass. Out of it in a sharp right turn shot a projectile, tiny and glistening against the velvet black. The swarm closed in again.... There were other lashing shapes that came diving down. They were coming toward him. And, in his ears, a voice was imploring: "Down! down! The R. A. tension may stop them!... Go down! I am coming--you can't help--I'll make it--they'll rip you to pieces--" The wraith-like coils that had left the mass above had straightened to sharp spear-heads of speed. They were darting upon him, swelling to monstrous size in their descent. And Walt Harkness saw in an instant the folly of delay: he was not helping Chet, but only hindering.... His ship swung end for end under his clutching hands, and the thrust of his stern exhaust was added to the pull of Earth to throw him into a downward flight that tore even the thin air into screaming fragments. * * * * * One glance through the lookouts behind him showed lashing serpent forms, translucent as pale fire; impossible beasts from space. His reason rejected them while his eyes told him the terrible truth. Despite the speed of his dive, they were gaining on him, coming up fast; one snout that ended in a cupped depression was plain. A mouth gaped beneath it; above was a row of discs that were eyes--eyes that shone more brightly than the luminous body behind--eyes that froze the mind and muscles of the watching man in utter terror. He forced himself to look ahead, away from the spectral shapes that pursued. They were close, yet he thrilled with the realization that he had helped Chet in some small degree: he had drawn off this group of attackers. He felt the upthrust of the R. A. Effect; he felt, too, the pull of a body that had coiled about his ship. No intangible, vaporous thing, this. The glass of his control room was obscured by a clinging, glowing mass while still the little cruiser tore on. Before his eyes the glowing windows went dark, and he felt the clutching thing stripped from the hull as the ship shot through the invisible area of repulsion. A scant hundred yards away a huge cylinder drove crashingly past. Its metal shone and glittered in the sun; he knew it for his own ship--his and Chet's. And what was within it? What of Chet? The loudspeaker was silent. He eased the thundering craft that bore him into a slow-forming curve that did not end for fourscore miles before the wild flight was checked. He swung it back, to guide the ship with shaking hands where a range of mountains rose in icy blackness, and where a gleaming cylinder rested upon a bank of snow whose white expanse showed a figure that came staggering to meet him. * * * * * Some experiences and dangers that come to men must be talked over at once; thrills and excitement and narrow escapes must be told and compared. And then, at rare times, there are other happenings that strike too deeply for speech--terrors that rouse emotions beyond mere words. It was so with Harkness and Chet. A gripping of hands; a perfunctory, "Good work, old man!"--and that was all. They housed the two ships, closing the great doors to keep out the arctic cold; and then Chet Bullard threw himself exhausted upon a cot, while he stared, still wordless, at the high roof overhead. But his hands that gripped and strained at whatever they touched told of the reaction to his wild flight. Harkness was examining their ship, where shreds of filmy, fibrous material still clung, when Chet spoke. "You knew they were there?" he asked, "--and you came up to warn me?" "Sure," Harkness answered simply. "Thanks," Chet told him with equal brevity. Another silence. Then: "All right, tell me! What's the story?" And Walt Harkness told him in brief sentences of the world-wide warning that had flashed, of the liners crashing to earth and their cabins empty of human life. "They could do it," said Chet. "They could open the ports and ram those snaky heads inside to feed." He seemed to muse for a moment upon what might have come to him. "My speed saved me," he told Harkness. "Man, how that ship can travel! I shook them off a hundred times--outmaneuvered them when I could--but they came right back for more. "How do they propel themselves?" he demanded. "No one knows," Harkness told him. "That luminosity in action means something--some conversion of energy, electrical, perhaps, to carry them on lines of force of which we know nothing as yet. That's a guess--but they do it. You and I can swear to that." Chet was pondering deeply. "High-level lanes are closed," he said, "and we are blockaded like the rest of the world. It looks as if our space flights were off. And the Dark Moon trip! We could have made it, too." * * * * * If there was a questioning note in those last remarks it was answered promptly. "No!" said Harkness with explosive emphasis. "They won't stop me." He struck one clenched fist upon the gleaming hull beside him. "This is all I've got. And I won't have this if that gang of Schwartzmann's gets its hands upon it. The best I could expect would be a long-drawn fight in the courts, and I can't afford it. I am going up. We've got something good here; we know it's good. And we'll prove it to the world by reaching the Dark Moon." Another filmy, fibrous mass that had been torn from one of the monsters of the heights slid from above to make a splotch of colorless matter upon the floor. Harkness stared at it. The firm line of his lips set more firmly still, but his eyes had another expression as he glanced at Chet. He would go alone if he must; no barricade of unearthly beasts could hold him from the great adventure. But Chet?--he must not lead Chet to his death. "Of course," he said slowly, "you've had one run-in with the brutes." Again he paused. "We don't know where they come from, but my guess is from the Dark Moon. They may be too much for us.... If you don't feel like tackling them again--" The figure of Chet Bullard sprang upright from the cot. His harsh voice told of the strain he had endured and his reaction from it. "What are you trying to tell me?" he demanded. "Are you trying to leave me out?" Then at the look in the other's eyes he grinned sheepishly at his own outburst. And Walter Harkness threw one arm across Chet's shoulder as he said; "I hoped you would feel that way about it. Now let's make some plans." Provisions for one year! Even in concentrated form this made a prodigious supply. And, arms--pistols and rifles, with cases of cartridges whose every bullet was tipped with the deadly detonite--all this was brought from the nearest accessible points. They landed, though, in various cities, keeping Schwartzmann's ship as inconspicuous as possible, and made their purchases at different supply houses to avoid too-pointed questioning. For Harkness found that he and Bullard were marked men. The newscaster in the Schwartzmann cabin brought the information. It brought, too, continued reports of the menace in the upper air. It told of patrol-ships sent down to destruction with no trace of commander or crew; and a cruiser of the International Peace Enforcement Service came back with a story of horror and helplessness. Their armament was useless. No shells could be timed to match the swift flight of the incredible monsters, and impact charges failed to explode on contact; the filmy, fibrous masses offered little resistance to the shells that pierced them. Yet a wrecked after compartment and smashed port-lights and doors gave evidence of the strength of the brutes when their great sinuous bodies, lined with rows of suction discs, secured a hold. "Speed!" was Chet Bullard's answer to this, when the newscaster ceased. "Speed!--until we find something better. I got clear of them when they caught me unprepared, but we can rip right through them now that we know what we're up against." * * * * * He had turned again to the packing of supplies, but Harkness was held by the sound of his own name. Mr. Walter Harkness, late of New York, was very much in the day's news. When a young millionaire loses all his wealth beneath a tidal wave; when, further, he flies to Vienna and transfers all rights in the great firm of Harkness, Incorporated, to the Schwartzmann interests in part settlement of his obligations; and, still further, when he is driven to fury by his losses and attacks the great Herr Schwartzmann in a murderous frenzy, wounds him and escapes in Schwartzmann's own ship--that is an item that is worth broadcasting between announcements of greater importance. It interested Harkness, beyond a doubt. He remembered the shot outside the cabin as he took off in his wild flight. Schwartzmann had been wounded, it seemed, and he was to be blamed for the assault. He smiled grimly as he heard the warrant for his arrest broadcast. Every patrol-ship would be on the watch. And there would be a dozen witnesses to swear to the truth of Schwartzmann's lie. The plan seemed plain to him. He saw himself in custody; taken to Vienna. And then, at the best, months of waiting in the psychopathic ward of a great institution where the influence of Herr Schwartzmann would not be slight. And, meanwhile, Schwartzmann would have his ship. Clever! But not clever enough. He would fool them, he and Chet. And then he recalled the girl, Mademoiselle Diane, a slim figure outlined in a lighted window of the old chateau. Was there hope there? he wondered. Had her clear, smiling eyes seen what occurred? "Nonsense," he told himself. "She saw nothing in that storm. And, besides, she is one of their crowd--tarred with the same stick. Forget her." But he knew, as he framed the unspoken words, that the advice was vain. He would never forget her. There was a picture in his mind that could not be blotted out--a picture of a tall, slender girl, trim and straight in her mannish attire, who came toward him from her little red speedster. She held out her hand impulsively, and her eyes were smiling as she said; "We will be generous, Monsieur Harkness--" "Generous!" His smile was bitter as he turned to help Chet in their final work. CHAPTER IV _The Rescue in Space_ How often are the great things of life submerged beneath the trivial. The vast reaches of space that must be traversed; the unknown world that awaited them out there; its lands and seas and the life that was upon it: Walter Harkness was pondering all this deep within his mind. It must have been the same with Chet, yet few words of speculation were exchanged. Instead, the storage of supplies, a checking and rechecking of lists, additional careful testing of generators--such details absorbed them. And the heavy, gray powder with its admixture of radium that transformed it to super-detonite--this must be carefully charged into the magazines of the generators. A thousand such responsibilities--and yet the moment finally came when all was done. The midnight sun shone redly from a distant horizon. It cast strange lights across the icy waste. And it flashed back in crimson splendor from the gleaming hull that floated from the hangar and came to rest upon the snowy world. The two men closed the great doors, and it was as if they were shutting themselves off from their last contact with the world. They stood for long moments, silent, in the utter silence of the frozen north. Chet Bullard turned, and Harkness gripped his hand. He was suddenly aware of his thankfulness for the companionship of this tall, blond youngster. He tried to speak--but what words could express the tumult of emotions that arose within him? His throat was tight.... It was Chet who broke the tense silence; his happy grin flashed like sunshine across his lean face. "You're right," he answered his companion's unspoken thoughts; "it's a great little old world we're leaving. I wonder what the new one will be like." And Harkness smiled back. "Let's go!" he said, and turned toward the waiting ship. * * * * * The control room was lined with the instruments they had installed. A nitron illuminator flashed brilliantly upon shining levers--emergency controls that they hoped they would not have to use. Harkness placed his hand upon a small metal ball as Chet reported all ports closed. The ball hung free in space, supported by the magnetic attraction of the curved bars that made a cage about it. An adaptation of the electrol device that had appeared on the most modern ships, Harkness knew how to handle it. Each movement of the ball within its cage, where magnetic fields crossed and recrossed, would bring instant response. To lift the ball would be to lift the ship; a forward pressure would throw their stern exhaust into roaring life that would hurl them forward; a circular motion would roll them over and over. It was as if he held the ship itself within his hand. Chet touched a button, and a white light flashed to confirm his report that all was clear. Harkness gently raised the metal ball. Beneath them a soft thunder echoed from the field of snow, and came back faintly from icy peaks. The snow and ice fell softly away as they rose. A forward pressure upon the ball, and a louder roaring answered from the stern. A needle quivered and swung over on a dial as their speed increased. Beneath them was a blur of whirling white; ahead was an upthrust mountain range upon which they were driving. And Harkness thrilled with the sense of power that his fingers held as he gently raised the ball and nosed the ship upward in meteor-flight. The floor beneath them swung with their change of pace. Without it, they would have been thrown against the wall at their backs. The clouds that had been above them lay dead ahead; the ship was pointing straight upward. It flashed silently into the banks of gray, through them, and out into clear air above. And always the quivering needle crept up to new marks of speed, while their altimeter marked off the passing levels. * * * * * They were through the repelling area when Harkness relinquished the controls to Chet. The metal ball hung unmoving; it would hold automatically to the direction and speed that had been established. The hand of the master-pilot found it quickly. They were in dangerous territory now--a vast void under a ceiling of black, star-specked space. No writhing, darting wraith-forms caught the rays of the distant sun. Their way seemed clear. Harkness' eyes were straining ahead, searching for serpent forms, when the small cone beside him hummed a warning that they were not alone. Another ship in this zone of danger?--it seemed incredible. But more incredible was the scream that rang shrilly from the cone. "Help! Oh, help me!" a feminine voice implored. Harkness sprang for the instrument where the voice was calling. "We aren't the only fools up here," he exclaimed; "and that's a woman's voice, too!" He pressed a button, and a needle swung instantly to point the direction whence the radio waves were coming. "Hard a-port!" he ordered. "Ten degrees, and hold her level. No--two points down." But Chet's steady hand had anticipated the order. He had seen the direction-finder, and he swung the metal ball with a single motion that swept them in a curve that seemed crushing them to the floor. The ship levelled off; the ball was thrust forward, and the thunder from the stern was deafening despite their insulated walls. The shuddering structure beneath them was hurled forward till the needle of the speed-indicator jammed tightly against its farthest pin. And ahead of them was no emptiness of space. * * * * * The air was alive with darting forms. Harkness saw them plainly now--great trailing streamers of speed that shot downward from the heights. The sun caught them in their flight to make iridescent rainbow hues that would have been beautiful but for the hideous heads, the sucker-discs that lined the bodies and the one great disc that cupped on the end of each thrusting snout. And beneath those that fell from on high was a cluster of the same sinister, writhing shapes which clung to a speeding ship that rolled and swung vainly in an effort to shake them off. The coiling, slashing serpent-forms had fastened to the doomed ship. Their thrashing bodies streamed out behind it. They made a cluster of flashing color whose center point was a tiny airship, a speedster, a gay little craft. And her sides shone red as blood--red as they had shone on the grassy lawn of an old chateau near far-off Vienna. "It's Diane!" Harkness was shouting. "Good Lord, Chet, it's Diane!" This girl he had told himself he would forget. She was there in that ship, her hands were wrenching at the controls in a fight that was hopeless. He saw her so plainly--a pitiful, helpless figure, fighting vainly against this nightmare attack. Only an instant of blurred wonderment at her presence up there--then a frenzy possessed him. He must save her! He leaped to the side of the crouching pilot, but his outstretched hands that clutched at the control stopped motionless in air. * * * * * Chet Bullard, master-pilot of the first rank, upon whose chest was the triple star that gave him authority to command all the air-levels of earth, was tense and crouching. His eyes were sighting along an instrument of his own devising as if he were aiming some super-gun of a great air cruiser. But he was riding the projectile itself and guiding it as he rode. He threw the ship like a giant shell in a screaming, sweeping arc upon the red craft that drove across their bow. They were crashing upon it; the red speedster swelled instantly before their eyes. Harkness winced involuntarily from the crash that never came. Chet must have missed it by inches, Harkness knew; but he knew, too, that the impact he felt was no shattering of metal upon metal. The heavy windows of the control room went black with the masses of fibrous flesh that crashed upon them; then cleared in an instant as the ship swept through. Behind them a red ship was falling--falling free! And vaporous masses, ripped to ribbons, were falling, too, while other wraith-like forms closed upon them in cannibalistic feasting. Their terrific speed swept them on into space. When the pilot could check it, and turn, they found that the red ship was gone. "After it!" Harkness was shouting. "She went down out of control, but they didn't get her. They've only sprung the door-ports a crack, releasing the internal pressure." He told himself this was true; he would not admit for an instant the possible truth of the vision that flashed through his mind--a ripping of doors--a thrusting snout that writhed in where a girl stood fighting. "Get it!" he ordered; "get it! I'll stand by for rescue." * * * * * He sprang for the switch that controlled the great rescue magnets. Not often were they used, but every ship must have them: it was so ordered by the Board of Control. And every ship had an inset of iron in its non-magnetic hull. His hand was upon the switch in an agony of waiting. Outside were other beastly shapes, like no horror of earth, that came slantingly upon them, but even their speed was unequal to the chase of this new craft that left them far astern. Harkness saw the last ones vanish as Chet drove down through the repelling area. And he had eyes only for the first sight of the tiny ship that had fallen so helplessly. Ahead and below them the sun marked a brilliant red dot. It was falling with terrific speed, and yet, so swift was their own pace, it took form too quickly: they would overshoot the mark.... Harkness felt the ship shudder in slackening speed as the blast from the bow roared out. They were turning; aiming down. The red shape passed from view where Harkness stood. His hand was tight upon the heavy switch. Chet's voice came sharp and clear: "Rescue switch--ready?" He appeared as cool and steady as if he were commanding on an experimental test instead of making his first rescue in the air. And Harkness answered: "Ready." A pause. To the waiting man it was an eternity of suspense. Then, "Contact!" Chet shouted, and Harkness' tense muscles threw the current into crashing life. * * * * * He felt the smash and jar as the two ships came together. He knew that the great magnets in their lower hull had gripped the plates on the top of the other ship. He was certain that the light fans of the smaller craft must have been crushed; but they had the little red speedster in an unshakable grip; and they would land it gently. And then--then he would know! The dreadful visions in his mind would not down.... Chet's voice broke in upon him. "I can't maintain altitude," Chet was saying. "Our vertical blasts strike upon the other ship; they are almost neutralized." He pointed to a needle that was moving with slow certainty and deadly persistence across a graduated dial. It was their low-level altimeter, marking their fall. Harkness stared at it in stunned understanding. "We can't hold on," the pilot was saying; "We'll crash sure as fate. But I'm darned if we'll ever let go!" Harkness made no reply. He had dashed for an after-compartment to their storage place of tools, and returned with a blow-torch in his hand. He lit it and checked its blue flame to a needle of fire. "Listen, Chet," he said, and the note of command in his voice told who was in charge, at the final analysis, in this emergency. "I will be down below. You call out when we are down to twenty thousand: I can stand the thin air there. I will open the emergency slot in the lower hull." "You're going down?" Chet asked. He glanced at the torch and nodded his understanding. "Going to cut your way through and--" "I'll get her if she's there to get," Harkness told him grimly. "At five hundred, if I'm not back, pull the switch." * * * * * The pilot's reply came with equal emphasis. "Make it snappy," he said: "this collision instrument has picked up the signals of five patrol-ships a hundred miles to the south." They dropped swiftly to the twenty level, and Harkness heard the deafening roar of their lower exhausts as he opened the slot in their ship's hull. He dropped to the red surface held close beneath, while the cold gripped him and the whirling blasts of air tore at him. But the torch did its work, and he lowered himself into the cabin of the little craft that had been the plaything of Mademoiselle Diane. The cabin was a splintered wreck, where a horrible head had smashed in search of food. One entrance port was torn open, and the head itself still hung where it had lodged. The mouth gaped flabbily open; above it was the suction cup that formed a snout; and above that, a row of staring, sightless eyes. Chet had slammed into the mass of serpents just in time, Harkness realized. Just in time, or just too late.... The door to the control room was sprung and jammed. He pried it open to see the unconscious body that lay huddled upon the floor. But he knew, with a wave of thankfulness that was suffocating, that the brute had not reached her; only the slow release of the air-pressure had rendered her unconscious. He was beside her in an instant. * * * * * He was dimly aware of the thunder of exhausts and the shrill scream of helicopters as he reached the upper surface of the red ship and forced his unconscious burden into the emergency slot above his head. "They're here!" Chet was shouting excitedly. "We're ordered to halt. Looks as if our flight was postponed." He tried to smile, but the experiment was a failure. "I am dodging around to keep that big one from grabbing us with its magnet. Schwartzmann is aboard one of the patrols; they think the girl is in her ship. They won't fire on us as long as we hang on. But we'll crash if we do that, and they'll nail us if we let go." Harkness had placed the girl's body upon the floor. His answer was a quick leap to the pilot's side. "See to her," he ordered; "I'll take the ship. Stop us now? Like hell they will! What's all our power for?" One glance gave him the situation: the big gray fighter above, slipping down to seize them with her powerful magnets; four other patrol cruisers that slowly circled, their helicopters holding them even with the two ships that clung together in swift descent. Chet was right; no burst of speed could save them from the guns of the patrols if they dropped the red speedster and made a break for it. They thought Diane was still in her ship, and a patrol would have the little craft safe before she had dropped a thousand feet. Their own stern exhaust would be torn by a detonite shell, and the big cruiser would seize them in the same way. No--they must hang onto the girl's ship and outmaneuver the others. He pressed the metal ball forward to the limit of its space, and the stern exhaust crashed into action with all the suddenness of his own resolve. The ship beneath him threw itself straight ahead, flashed under the patrol-ship that blocked them, and was away. The weight below, and its resistance to the air, dragged them down, but Harkness brought the ball up, and the ship answered with a slow lift of the bow that aimed them straight out into space. A vertical climb!--and the voice from the instrument beside him was shouting orders to halt. On each side were patrol-ships that roared upward with him. "Cut those motors!" the voice commanded. "Release that ship! Halt, or we will fire!" * * * * * Harkness threw his ship into a wild spiral for reply, and the thin crack of guns came to him from outside. Down! A headlong dive! Then out and up again! He was through the repelling area in a twisting, rocking flight. Not hit as yet; they had to aim carefully to avoid damaging the red craft.... He was straining his eyes for a glimpse of serpent-forms, and he laughed softly under his breath at thought of his strange allies. Laughed!--until he saw them coming. He slammed down the switch on his own broadcast sender. "Back!" he shouted; "back, all of you! Look up! Look above you! The monsters are coming!--the air-beasts!--they are attacking!" He threw his own ship into a dive; saw the others do likewise; then leaped for the switch on the rescue magnets and pulled it open. He felt the red ship fall clear. He swung his own ship free and aimed it out and up on a long line of speed. Beside him a voice from a distant, fleeing patrol was shouting; "Come back, you fool! Down! Down, through the R. A.!" One backward glance showed him that his pursuers were safe. The serpents had turned to pursue him, and other writhing luminosities were falling from above. He swung head on, his motors wide open, his speed building up and up, to crash softly through the advance guard of the giant creatures out of space. Nothing could stop him! He was trembling with the knowledge, and with the sheer joy of the adventure. Nothing could check them; neither cruisers nor monsters; nothing of earth or of space. They were free; they were on their way out--out where a new world awaited--where the Dark Moon raced on her unlighted path! * * * * * For the moment he had forgotten their passenger. The thrill of combat and the ecstasy of winning freedom for their great adventure had filled him to forgetfulness of all else. "We're off!" he shouted. "Off for the Dark Moon!" Then he remembered, and turned where Chet was supporting the head of a slim girl whose eyes opened to look about, to glance from Chet to Harkness and back to Chet who was holding her. "You saved me," she breathed, "from them!" She raised one hand weakly to cover her eyes at memory of those writhing shapes, then let it fall as other memories crowded in. "The patrol-ships!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "You must...." Her voice trailed off into silence. She was able to stand, and with Chet's help she came slowly to her feet as Harkness reached her. His voice was harsh and scornful; all elation had left him. He forced himself to hold his unsmiling gaze steadily upon the soft brown eyes that turned to his. "Yes," he said; "we must 'surrender'--that was the word you wanted. We must surrender!... Well, Mam'selle Diane, we're not in a surrendering mood to-day. We've got away; made our escape!" He laughed loudly and contemptuously, though he winced at the look of hurt that opened the brown eyes wide. "You brought the patrol," he went on; "you learned where we were--" "Herr Schwartzmann did," she interrupted in a quiet voice. "He located you; your signals were picked up.... They left two hours before I did," she added enigmatically. "I had to fly high, above the R. A. for greater speed." Walt Harkness was bewildered. What did this mean? He tried to preserve the pose of hard indifference that was becoming increasingly difficult. "More generosity?" he inquired. "You had to see the end of the hunt--be in at the death?" "In at the death!" she echoed, and laughed in a tone that trembled and broke. "I nearly was, truly. But, no, my dear Monsieur Harkness: incredible as it seems, in view of your unfriendly reception, I came to warn you!... But, enough of that. Tell me--you see how interested I am in your plans?--what did you say of the Dark Moon?" * * * * * Walter Harkness tried to rearrange his jumbled thoughts. She had come to warn them. Was this true? Or was this girl, who laughed so lightly, playing with him? "Yes," he said dully, "we were bound for the Dark Moon. The Patrol couldn't stop us, nor the beasts that have paralyzed the flying service of the earth; but you have done it. We will turn back at once, and return you safely--" He was again at the controls, one hand extended for the metal ball, when her slim hand closed upon his wrist. "I know Herr Schwartzmann's plans," she said quietly. "He would ruin you; seize your ship; steal for himself the glory of your invention. Would you go back and deliver yourself into his hands--because of me?" The brown eyes, Harkness found, were upon his with an expression he could not fathom. "Yes," he said simply. And still the eyes looked into his. There was laughter in them, and something else whose meaning was concealed. "I ask you not to do this," she was saying. "You will succeed; I read it in your face. Let me go with you; let me share in the adventure. I am begging this of you. It is your turn to be generous." Harkness' hand upon the metal ball held it motionless within its enclosing cage. From astern there came to him the muffled roar of a blast that drove them on and out into space--black, velvety space, thick-studded with sharp points of light.... He stared into that wondrous night, then back into the eyes that looked steadily, unfathomably, into his.... And his hand was unresisting as the strong, slender fingers about his wrist drew it back.... They were off for the Dark Moon: their journey, truly, was begun. And this girl, whom he had told himself to forget, was going with them. There was much that he did not understand, but he knew that he was glad with a gladness that transcended all previous thrills of the perilous plan. CHAPTER V _The "Dark Moon"_ They were seated in the cabin of the man-made meteor that the brain of Harkness had conceived--two men and a girl. And they stared at one another unsmilingly, with eyes which reflected their comprehension of the risks that they ran and the dangers which lay ahead in the dark void. Yet the brown eyes of Mam'selle Diane, no less than the others, were afire with the thrill of adventure--the same response to the same lure that has carried men to each new exploration--or to their death. Behind them, a rear lookout port framed a picture of awful majesty. The earth was a great disc, faintly luminous in a curtain of dead black. From beyond it, a hidden sun made glorious flame of the disc's entire rim. And, streaming toward it, a straight, blasting line from their stern exhaust, was an arrow of blue. It had taken form slowly, that arrow of blue fire, and Harkness answered an unspoken question from the girl. "Hydrogen and oxygen," he explained. "It is an explosive mixture at this height, but too thin to take fire. It will pass. Beyond this is pure hydrogen. And then, nothing." He turned to switch on their radio receiver, and he set it for the newscasting waves that went forth from the most powerful station of Earth, the Press Tower of New York. A voice came to them faintly. For a time it vied with the muffled roar of their thundering exhaust; then it lost volume, faded, and was finally gone. Their last contact with Earth was severed. There remained only blackness, and a great abyss through which they were plunging. * * * * * Harkness busied himself with calculations. He would have spoken, but the silence that followed the vanished voice of Earth had robbed his own voice of control. A telescope sight was fixed rigid with the axis of their ship. He looked through it, moved their controls, and brought the cross-hairs of his instrument to bear upon a star. "That's about right," he said quietly. "I got all the information that the observatories had on the orbit of the Dark Moon. It is circling the Earth from north to south. It coincided for a short time with our own moon when it first hit; that's what kicked up the big wave and jarred us up. But it swung off and seems to have settled down in its own orbit now. "Two hundred thousand miles away is what they make it, though I think that is more or less of a guess. I wish we could measure our speed." He looked at the earth-induction speed-indicator. Useless now, it registered zero. "Well," he added, "we are shooting for the North Star. We will pass close to the Dark Moon's orbit; it should be about over the Pole on this date. And there is one good safe bet, anyhow; there is nothing between here and there to stop us." He was being weakly facetious, but his efforts met with an enthusiastic response. The tension of the moment, it was plain, had not affected Harkness alone. But it was many hours before the error of his statement was made manifest to all. An island, faintly luminous, lay ahead. It grew to enormous size as they dashed upon it. Harkness sprang for the controls, but, before he could reach them, they had struck the vast field of pale green light, flashed through it, and left it diminishing in size behind them. Then, other lights, not brilliant, but like phosphorescent bodies, that came and went and flashed by with blinding speed. * * * * * Another luminous area rushed at them from ahead. At first it was a speck, then an island, and then a continent in size, and through it moved other brighter lights. This time a slight suggestion of an impact was felt. Here was matter of a form they could not guess. It was Chet who pointed to the glass of their control room. The heavy lights of the lookouts were smeared with sticky fluid that drew together in trickling streams. "Nothing between us and the Dark Moon?" he asked of Harkness. "And space is an empty void? We Earth-creatures are a conceited lot." "Meaning?" the girl questioned. "Meaning that because we live on Earth--walk on solid ground, swim in the water and fly in the air--we deny the existence of life in space. There's the answer written in the blood of some life that was snuffed out as we hit it." Harkness shook his head doubtfully. "Matter of some sort," he admitted, "and the serpents came from somewhere; but, as for the rest, the idea that the ocean of space is filled with life as our Earth-oceans are--creatures living and moving through unknown fields of force...." He did not finish the denial, but looked with wondering gaze at the myriad points that flashed softly into glowing masses and darted aside before their onward rush. It was hours later that he checked their flight. Slowly at first he cut off the exhaust from their stern and opened the bow valve. Slowly, for their wild speed must slacken as it had been built up, by slow degrees. The self-adjusting floor swung forward and up. Their deceleration was like the pull of gravity, and now straight ahead seemed down. More hours, and they were at rest, floating in an ethereal ocean, an ocean teeming with strange life. Each face was pressed close to a lookout port. No one of the three could speak; each was too absorbed in the story his eyes were reading--this story of a strange, new existence where no life should have been. Animalculae. They came in swarms; cloud masses of them floated past; and swirls of phosphorescent fire marked the presence of larger creatures that moved among them. Large and small, each living creature was invisible until it moved; then came the greenish light, like phosphorescence and yet unlike. * * * * * Still Harkness could not force himself to believe the irrefutable evidence. What of astronomy? he asked himself. Why was this matter not visible through telescopes? Why did it not make its presence known through interference? Through refraction of light?... And then he realized the incredible distance within the scope of his vision; he knew that this swarming life was actually more widely spaced; and the light of a brilliant star shone toward him through the center of a living mass to prove that here was matter that offered no resistance to the passage of light. A void of nothingness was before his eyes. He saw its black emptiness change to pale green fire that swirled and fled before a large shape. The newcomer swept down like light itself. Softly green like the others, its rounded body was outlined in a huge circle of orange light. Like a cyclopean pod, it was open at one end, and that open end closed and opened and closed again as the creature gulped in uncounted millions of the tiny, luminous dots--every one, as Harkness now knew, a living thing. Strange light whirled into life and vanished, each evidencing a battle where life took life in this ocean of the invisible living. A gasp from the girl brought Harkness quickly about. "Another one!" she said breathlessly, and pointed where the blackness was looped with writhing fire. It came swiftly near to show the outline of the dread serpent form; the suction cups showed plainly. Danger was in this thing, Harkness knew, but it passed them by before he could move. The further lookout showed two gleaming monsters locked together in deadly embrace. So swift was their whirling motion that details of form were lost: only a confusion of lashing tentacles that whipped and tore, and one glimpse of a savage maw that sheared the tentacles off. Then the serpent was upon them. * * * * * Harkness had seen one time a sight that was indelibly impressed upon his memory. A steeloid cable had broken under a terrific strain; the end of it had lashed out with a speed the eye could not follow, to wind itself around the superstructure of a submarine--and the men who were gathered there. He thought of that now, saw again the bleeding mass that had been an instant before a group of humans, as the serpent seized its prey. The two combatants were encircled in a living coil of light. Then, as motion ceased, the ethereal sea went dark except for pulsing suction cups that drew and strained at the bodies they held. Harkness was groping for the controls--he saw too plainly their own helplessness when they were at rest--but the voice of Dianne checked him. "That bright star went out," she said; and Harkness let his gaze follow where she pointed. The stars that were distant suns shone in brilliant points of light; no atmosphere here to dim them or cause a flickering. A bright point vanished as she looked--another!--and he knew abruptly that he was seeing a circle of blackness that moved slowly between them and the stars. "The Moon!" he shouted. "The Dark Moon!" And now his hand found the controls that threw their ship into thunderous life. It was approaching! He swung the metal ball to throw them ahead and to one side, and the roar from the stern told of the fast-growing speed that was pressing them to the floor.... * * * * * An hour of wild flight, and the circle was close upon them. Too faintly lighted to register in the telescopes of Earth, there was still enough of luminosity to mark it as a round disc of violet that grew dimly bluish-green around the edge. It ceased to grow. Their ship, Harkness knew, was speeding beside it some hundreds of miles away. But they were within its gravitational pull, and were falling toward it. And he aimed his ship bow-on to make the forward blast a check upon their falling speed. The circle broadened; became a sphere; and then they were plunging through clouds more tenuous than any vapors of Earth--thick layers of gas that reflected no rays from the distant sun. Beside them a sinuous form showed where a serpent of space was trying to match their speed. Harkness saw it twisting convulsively in the stratum of gas; it was falling, lifeless, beside them as they sped on and away. Here was something the beasts could not combat. He made a mental note of the fact, but his thoughts flashed again to what lay ahead. Every eye was held close to the lookouts that faced forward. The three were breathless, wordless; the hand of Harkness that held the tiny ball was all that moved. Ahead of them was their goal, the Dark Moon! And they were prepared for Stygian darkness and a land of perpetual night. The almost invisible gas-clouds thinned; there was a glow ahead that grew brilliant as they watched; and then, with a blinding suddenness that made them shield their eyes, there flashed before them a world of light. Each line of shore was marked distinctly there; the blue and violet of rippling seas were blended with unreal hues; there were mountains upthrust and, on the horizon, a range of volcanic peaks that poured forth flashing eruptions half-blanketed by invisible gas. "The Dark Moon!" gasped Harkness. He was spellbound with utter awe at the spectacle he beheld. This brilliant world a-gleam to its farthest horizon with golden, glorious sunlight, softly spread and diffused! This, _this!_ was the Dark Moon! * * * * * He turned to share with the others the delirium of ecstatic wonder too overpowering to be borne alone--turned, to find his happiness shot through with a pang of regret. He saw Chet and Diane. They had been standing together at a wide forward lookout; and now she was holding one hand of the pilot to her breast in an embrace of passionate joy. Unconscious, that gesture of delight at this climax of their perilous trip?--Harkness told himself that this was so. But he swung back to the helm of the ship. He glanced at instruments that again were registering; he saw the air-pressure indicator that told of oxygen and an atmosphere where men might live. He gauged his distance carefully, and prepared to land. The moment of depression could not last, for there was too much here to fill brain and eyes. What would they find? Was there life? His question was answered by an awkward body that flapped from beneath them on clumsy wings. He glimpsed a sinuous neck, a head that was all mouth and flabby pouch, and the mouth opened ludicrously in what was doubtless a cry of alarm. Then land, that took form and detail; a mountain whose curled top was like a frozen wave of stone. In a valley below it trees were growing. They swayed in a wind, and their branches reached upward and flowed and waved like seaweed on the ocean's floor. Green--vivid, glowing green!--and reds and purples that might be flowers and fruit. * * * * * An open space in a little valley spread invitingly before him, and he laid the ship down there in a jungle of lush grasses--set it down as gently as if he were landing from a jaunt of a thousand miles instead of two hundred times that distance straight away from Earth. The others were looking at him with glowing, excited eyes. In the cabin was silence. Harkness felt that he must speak, must say something worthy of the moment--something to express in slight degree the upwelling emotion that filled them all, three adventurers about to set foot upon a virgin world.... The pause was long-drawn, until he ended it in a voice that had all the solemn importance of a head-steward's announcement on a liner of the high-level service. But the corners of his lips were twitching to a little smile. "This," he announced, "is as far as we go. This is the end of our run." The tension that had held them emotionally taut was ended. With outstretched hands Diane ran toward him, and her broken laugh betrayed the hysteria she was holding back. "Congratulations!" she cried, and clung tightly to his hands. "Congratulations, M'sieu Walter--" Her voice choked and she could not go on; but the eyes that were raised to his were luminous through the tears that filled them. From the cabin beyond came a clash of levers, where Chet was preparing to open a port. And Harkness followed with unseeing eyes where the pilot waited that their commander might be the first to step forth upon an unknown globe--upon the surface of what men had called "The Dark Moon." CHAPTER VI _Trapped_ Walter Harkness, piloting his ship to a slow, safe landing on a new world, had watched his instruments with care. He had seen the outer pressure build up to that of the air of Earth; the spectro-analyzer had shown nitrogen preponderating, with sufficient oxygen to support life. And, below him, a monstrous thing that flopped hurriedly away on leather wings had told him that life was there. But what would that life be? This was the question uppermost in the minds of all three as they stepped forth--the first of Earth's people to ask the question and to find the answer. Chet had gone to their stores. He strapped a belt about his waist, a belt banded with a row of detonite cartridges, and a pistol hung at his hip. He handed another to Harkness. But the pistol he offered Diane was refused. "My many accomplishments," she laughed, "do not include that. I never could shoot--and besides I will not need to with both of you here." Her hand was resting confidently upon Chet's arm as they followed where Harkness led. The heavy grass, standing waist-high in the little valley where their ship was at rest, stirred to ripples of vivid green as a light breeze touched it. Above, the sun shone warm upon this world of tropical growth. Harkness, listening in the utter silence for sounds that might mean danger, let his eyes follow up the rugged wall of rock that hemmed them in on two sides. It gleamed with metallic hues in the midday glare. He looked on to the sun above. "A dark moon!" he said wonderingly. "Dark!--and yet it is blazing bright. Why can't we see it from Earth? Why is it dark?... I've an idea that the gas we came through is the answer. There is metal, we know, that conducts an electric current in only one direction: why not a gas that will do the same with light?" * * * * * The pilot was listening, but Diane seemed uninterested in scientific speculations. "The trees!" she breathed in rapture; "the marvelous, beautiful trees!" She was gazing toward distant towering growths where the valley widened. Like no trees of Earth, these monsters towered high in air, their black trunks branching to end in tendrils that raised high above them. And the tendrils were a waving, ever-moving sea of color, where rainbow iridescence was stabbed through with the flash of crimson buds. A down-draft of air brought a heady, intoxicating odor. And still there was silence. To Walter Harkness, standing motionless and alert amidst the waving grass, it seemed a hush of waiting. A prickle of apprehension passed over his skin. He glanced about, his pistol ready in his hand, looked back for a moment at the ship, then smiled inwardly in self-derision of his fear as he strode forward. "Let's have a look at things," he said with a heartiness not entirely sincere. "We'll discover nothing standing here." But the silence weighed upon them all as they pressed on. No exclamations of amazement from them now, no speculations of what might lie ahead. Only wide-eyed alertness and a constant listening, listening--until the silence was broken by a scream. A man it seemed at first, when Harkness saw the figure leap outward from the cliff. A second one followed. They landed on all fours upon a rock that jutted outward toward the trees. The impact would have killed a human, but these creatures stood upright to face the concealment from which they had sprung. One was covered with matted, brown hair. Its arms were long, and its fists pounded upon a barrel-like chest, while it growled hoarsely. The other ape-thing, naked and hairless, did the same. They were both uttering those sounds, that at times seemed almost like grunted words, when the end came. A swishing of leather wings!--a swooping, darting rush of a huge body!--and one of the ape-men, as Harkness had mentally termed them, was struggling in the clutch of talons that gripped him fast. The giant bat-shape that had seized him reached for the other, too. A talon ripped at the naked face, but the ape-man dodged and vanished among the rocks. * * * * * With pounding wings, the bat swept off in lumbering flight, but with its burden it seemed heavy, and failed to rise. The trees were close, and their waving tentacles drew back, then shot out to splash about the intruder. The talons released their hold, and the huge leather wings flapped frantically; but too late. Both captor and captive were wrapped in an embrace of iridescent arms and held struggling in mid-air, while the unmoving watchers below stood in horror before this drama of life and death. Then a red bud opened. It was enormous, and its flowery beauty made more revolting the spectacle of the living food that was thrust within its maw. The bud closed. Its petals were like lips.... And Diane, in white-faced horror, was clinging to the protecting arm of Chet Bullard beside her. Chet, too, had paled beneath his tan. But Walter Harkness, though white of face, was staring not at the crimson bud, shut tightly about its living food, but upward toward the broken, rocky face of the cliff. The flying thing, the unnamed horror of the air, had come silently from on high. None of them had seen it until it struck, and he was sure that the ape-men had been taken unaware. Then what had frightened them? What other horror had driven them in screaming terror to that fearful spring out into the open where they must have known danger awaited? Did a rock move? he wondered. Was the splotch of color--that mottling of crimson and copper and gray--a part of the metallic mass? He rubbed his smarting eyes--and when he looked again the color was gone. But he had a conviction that eyes, sinister and deadly, had been staring into his, that a living mass had withdrawn softly into a shadowed cave, and that the menace that had threatened the ape-men was directed now toward them. Was this the reason for the silence? Was this valley, so peaceful in its sunlit stillness, a place of death, from which all living things kept clear? Had the ape-men been drawn there through curiosity at seeing their ship float down? And the quiet beauty of the valley--it might be as horrible a mockery as the blazing splendor of those things ahead--those beautiful and horrible eaters of flesh! His voice was unsteady as he turned toward the others. "Let's call this off," he said: "there is something up there. We'll go back to the ship and get up in the air again. We'll find a healthier place to land." * * * * * Like Harkness, Chet Bullard held his pistol ready in his hand. "Something else?" he inquired. "You saw something?" And Harkness nodded grimly. They retraced their steps. A half-mile, perhaps. It had seemed long as they ventured forth, and was no shorter now. And the gleaming, silvery shape of the ship was entirely lovely to their eyes as they approached. Harkness circled the blunt bow with its open exhaust high above his head. On the far side was the port where they had emerged; its open door would be welcome in its promise of safe seclusion. His sigh of relief was echoed by the two who followed, for the horror and apprehension had been felt by all. But the breath choked abruptly in his throat. Before them was the door, its thick metal wide-swung as they had left it. But the doorway itself, where warm darkness should have invited, was entirely sealed by a web of translucent stuff. Harkness approached to look more closely. The substance was glistening and smooth--yellowish--almost transparent. It was made up of a tangle of woven cords which clung tightly to the metal sides. Harkness reached out in sudden fury to grip it and tear it loose. He grasped the slippery stuff, stumbled--and hung suspended by a tenacious hold that gripped his hand where it had touched, and would not let go. His arm swung against it, and his shoulder. They were instantly immovable. And he knew in a single terrifying instant his utter helplessness. He saw Chet Bullard's hands come up, and he found his voice in time to scream a harsh warning to him. "Tear me loose!" he commanded, "but don't touch the damned stuff!" It took the combined strength of the pilot and the girl to free him, and Harkness had to set his teeth to restrain an exclamation of pain as his hand came slowly from the web that clung and clung and would not let go. * * * * * From his place upon the ground he saw Chet raise a broken piece of rock. It was like metal, and heavy, as the pilot's efforts proved, though it was surprisingly small in size. He saw Chet raise it above his head and crash it upon the thick web that filled the door. And, as his own aching arm had been held, the rock was seized in the tough strands, which gave back only slightly under the blow. Harkness scrambled to his feet. The fury that had possessed him made the hurt of his arm unfelt. What devil's work was this that barred them from the safety of the ship? The memory of that other menace, half-seen among the rocks, was strong upon him. "Stand back!" he shouted to Chet and the girl, and he raised his pistol to send a charge of detonite into the unyielding mass. Here was power to tear the clinging-stuff to atoms. He felt Chet's body plunge upon him an instant before he fired, and his pistol was knocked up and flew outward from his hand. He heard the pilot's voice. "Walt!" Chet was saying. "For God's sake come out of it! Are you crazy? You might have wrecked that door-port so we never could have fixed it; or the bullet could have gone on through to explode inside the ship. Either way we would never get back: no leaky hull would ever let us make the trip home!" Chet was right: Harkness knew it in a moment. He knew the folly of what he would have done, yet knew, too, that desperate measures were needed and needed quickly. The eyes of a devil had held his own from the darkness of the rocks, and the same rock wall came close to where they stood. He was in command; it was up to him-- * * * * * The moment of indecision ended as a mass of viscous fluid splashed heavily against the ship. Harkness whirled about to face the rocks. He was calm now and controlled, but under his quiet courage was a fear that gripped him. A fear of what he should find! But the reality was so far beyond any imagined terror as to leave him cold. Above them and thirty feet away on a rocky ledge was a thing of horror. Basilisk eyes in a hairy head; gray, stringy hairs; and the fearful head ended in narrow, outthrust jaws, where more of the gray hairs hung like moss from lips that writhed and curled and sucked at the air with a whistling shrillness. Those jaws could crush a man to pulp. And the head seemed huge until the body behind it came into view. The suddenness with which the great body rose showed the strength of the beast. A prodigious sack, like black leather, with markings of crimson and copper!--and the straggling, ropy hairs on it were greenish-gray like the lustre of the rocks at its back. It stood upright on great hairy legs. The eyes shot forward on protruding antennae. The sack-like body flexed to bring the rear part under and forward. It was aiming at them. Harkness seized the slim figure of the girl who stood, mute with horror, beside him. He threw her roughly to the ground, for the meaning of the viscous splash was plain. "Down!" he shouted to Chet. "Down on the ground!" And he felt the swish of another liquid mass above his head as he obeyed his own command. He felt for his pistol, then remembered it was gone--lost when Chet sprang upon him. But Chet had his. "Shoot!" he ordered. "Shoot the damned thing, Chet! Kill the spider!" Spider! He had named it unconsciously. But the name was inadequate, for here was a thing of horror beyond even a spider of prodigious size. This peaceful valley!--and here was its ruler, frightful, incredibly loathsome! * * * * * He waited for the sound of a shot. A cursing, instead, was the only reply: Chet was not firing! Harkness whirled to see the pilot pinned by one arm to the web. The fluid had caught him; he had not dropped quickly enough. And his right hand that had been raised, and the pistol it held, were clamped fast to the awful stuff. There was no word of appeal, no call for help, yet Chet Bullard must have known what this meant. But neither did Harkness wait for that word. One spring, and he had the pilot by the waist, and he felt the weight of the girl's slim body added to his as her arms went about him to help. Chet's face went chalk-white as the hand tore loose. The pistol remained buried in the clinging stuff. From the corner of his eye, Harkness saw the monster crouched to spring. He was half dragging the other two as he stooped and ran for the bow of the ship. The monstrous body thudded against the metal hull behind them. The leap was prodigious. He saw the sack-like body fall inert, the great, hairy legs shaking. For the moment, the attacker was helpless: but the respite was brief, as the glaring eyes plainly told. Below the ledge where the beast had been was an opening in the rocks--a bit of black shadow that was darker than the lustrous metal of the cliff. There was a chance-- "I can make it," Chet was saying, as Harkness dragged him on; "help Diane!" But the girl had sprung before them to gain a foothold and extend a helping hand. And they were back in the darkness of a rocky cave before the sunlit entrance was blocked by a hairy head and a horrible, slavering mouth on a body too huge to enter. CHAPTER VII _In the Labyrinth_ Spent and shaken, the three passed onward into the cave. Harkness searched his pockets for his neolite flash; found it--a tiny pencil with a tip of glass--and the darkness of the inner cave was flooded with light. A box of food tablets was in a pocket of Chet's jacket, and there was water that trickled in a tiny stream out of the rocks. It could have been worse, Diane pointed out with forced gaiety. But Harkness, who had gone back for a final look at the entrance to the cave, found it difficult to smile. He had found the entrance an opening no longer: it was sealed with a giant web of ropy strands--a network, welded together to a glutinous mesh. They were sealed in as effectively as if the opening were closed by a thick door of steel. They gathered fungus that grew in thready clumps on the walls, and this served as a mattress to soften the rocky floor that must be their bed. And Harkness sat silent in the darkness long after the others were asleep--sat alone on guard, to think and to reach, at last, a conclusion. A cleavage in the rocks made a narrow crack to the outside world, and through it the starlight filtered dimly. The thread of light grew brilliantly golden--moonlight, a hundredfold more bright than moonlight on Earth. And he realized that the source of light was their own globe, Earth, shining far through space! It lighted the cave with a mellow glow. It shone upon the closed eyes of the sleeping girl, and touched lightly upon the rounded softness of a lovely face beneath a tangle of brown curls. Harkness stared long and soberly at the picture she made, and he thought of many things. No parasite upon society was this girl. He had known such; but her ready wit, her keen grasp of affairs, had been evident in their talks on the journey they had made. They had stamped her as one who was able to share in the work and responsibilities of a world where men and women worked together. Yet there was nothing of the hardness that so many women showed. And now she was altogether feminine, and entirely lovely. * * * * * Not far away, Chet Bullard was sleeping heavily. His hand, injured painfully when they tore it from the clinging mass, had been bandaged by Diane. It troubled him now, and he flung one arm outward. His hand touched that of the girl, and Harkness saw the instant quiet that came upon him at the touch. And Diane--her lips were smiling in her sleep. They had been much together, those two; theirs had been a ready, laughing comradeship. It had troubled Harkness, but now he put all thought of self aside. "This trip," he thought, "can end only in disaster--if it has not already done so. What a fool I was to bring these two!" And: "If I want to risk my own life," he told himself bitterly, "that's my own affair. But for Chet, and Diane, with their lives ahead of them--" His determination was quickly reached. He would go back. Somehow, some way, he would get them to the ship. They would return to Earth. And then.... His plans were vague. But he knew he could interest capital; he knew that this new world, that was one great mine of raw metals, would not go long unworked. The metallic colorations in rock walls and mountains had fairly shouted of rich ores and untold wealth. Yes, they would go back, but he would return. He would put from his mind all thought of this girl; he would forget forever those nebulous plans that had filled him with hope for a happiness beyond all hoping. And he would come back here prepared for conquest. He put aside all speculation as to what other horrible forms of life the little world might hold: he would be prepared to deal with them. But he still wondered if there were people. He had hoped to find some human life. And this hope, too, left him; his sense of this globe as an undeveloped world was strong upon him. The monsters; the tropical, terrible vegetation; the very air itself--all breathed of a world that was young. There had not been time for the long periods of evolution through which humanity came. He tried to tell himself of the wealth that would be his; tried to feel the excitement that should follow upon such plans. But he could only feel a sense of loss, of something precious that was gone. Diane--named for the moon: she seemed more precious now to the lonely man than all else on moon or Earth. She could never be his; she never had been. It was Chet upon whom the gods and Diane had smiled. And Chet deserved it. Only in this last conviction did he find some measure of consolation during the long night. * * * * * "We will rip the big web out with detonite," Harkness told the others when morning came. "But I want to get the spider, too." A touch upon the web with a stick brought an instant response. Again they saw in all its repulsiveness the thing that seemed a creature of some horrible dream. The eyes glared, while hairy feelers seized the web and shook it in furious rage. Harkness, fearing another discharge of the nauseating, viscous liquid, withdrew with the others far back in the cave. "Wait," he told them. "I have a plan." The creature vanished, and Harkness went cautiously forward to the web. He took a detonite cartridge from his belt and placed it on the floor close to the ropy strands. Another, and another, until he had a close-packed circle of the deadly things. Then he placed a heavy, metallic piece of rock beside them and proceeded, with infinite care, to build a tower. One irregular block upon another: it was like a child at play with his toys. Only now the play was filled with deadly menace. The stones swayed, then held in precarious, leaning uncertainty; the topmost was directly above the cartridges on the floor. "Back!" he ordered the others, "and lie flat on the floor. I must guess at the amount of explosive for the job." Chet and Diane were safe as Harkness weighed a fragment of metal in his hand. One throw--and he must not hit the tower he had built.... The rock struck into the network of cords; he saw it clinging where it struck, and saw the web shaking with the blow. Over his shoulder, as he ran, he glimpsed the onrush of the beast. Again the eyes were glaring, again the feelers were shaking furiously at the web. They touched the leaning stones! He had reached the place where Chet and Diane lay and saw the beginning of the tower's fall; and in the split second of its falling he threw himself across the body of the prostrate girl to shield her from flying fragments of stone. A blast of air tore at him; his ears were numbed with the thunder of the blast--a thunder that ended with a crashing of stone on stone.... * * * * * Slowly he recovered his breath; then raised himself to his feet to look toward the entrance. It would be open now, the way cleared. But, instead of sunlight, he saw utter dark. Where the mouth of the cave had been was blackness--and nothing else! He fumbled for his flash, and stood in despairing silence before what the light disclosed. The rock was black and shining about the mouth of the cavern. It had split like glass. In shattered fragments it filled the forward part of the cave. The whole roof must have fallen, and a crashing slide above had covered all. Chet was beside him; Harkness dared not look toward the girl coming expectantly forward. "We'll use more of the same," Chet suggested: "we will blast our way out." "And bring down more rock with each charge," Harkness told him tonelessly. "This means we are--" Diane had overheard. Harkness' pause had come too late. "Yes?" she encouraged. "This means we are entombed?--buried here? Is that it?" Her voice was quiet; her eyes, in the light of the little flash, were steady in their look upon the man who was leader of the expedition. Diane Vernier might shudder with horror before some obscene beast--she would tremble with delight, too, at sight of some sudden beauty--but she was not one to give way to hysteria when a situation must be faced. No despair could be long-lived under the spell of those eyes, brave and encouraging. "No," said Walter Harkness: "we will find some way to escape. This is blocked. We will follow the cave back and see where it leads. There must be other outlets. We're not quitting now." He smiled with a cheerful confidence that gave no hint of being assumed, and he led the way with a firm step. * * * * * Diane followed as usual, close to Chet. But her eyes were upon their leader; they would have repaid him for a backward look. To a mineralogist this tunnel that nature had pierced through the rock would have been an endless delight, but to a man seeking escape from his living tomb it brought no such ecstasy. The steady, appraising glance of Harkness was everywhere--darting ahead, examining the walls, seeking some indication, some familiar geological structure, that might be of help. He stopped once to kick contemptuously at a vein of quartz. Three feet in thickness--and it crumbled to fragments under his foot to release a network of gold. "Rotten with it," he said. And the only comment came from Chet: "A fat lot of good it does us!" he replied. The cavern branched and branched again; it opened to a great room higher than their light could reach; it narrowed to leave apertures through which they crawled like moles; it became a labyrinth of passages from which there seemed no escape. Each turn, each new opening, large or small--it was always the same: Harkness praying inaudibly for a glimpse of light that would mean day; and, instead--darkness!--and their own pencil of light so feeble against the gloom ahead.... CHAPTER VIII _The Half-Men_ "The Valley of the Fires," Harkness was to call it later, and shorten it again to "Fire Valley." The misty smokes of a thousand fires rose skyward from the lava beds of its upper end. Where the lava flow had stopped and the lower valley began, came vegetation. Sparse at first, then springing to luxuriant growth, it contrasted strongly with the barren wall beside it and the equally barren waste of high ground where the fires were. Mountains hemmed it in; their distant peaks showed black, with red and green striations of mineralized deposits. The valleys about them were dense with foliage, a green so startling and vivid as almost to offend the eye. Trees were in the lower end of the valley. They were of tremendous growth, and the dew of early morning dripped from them like rain. Trunks smooth and ghostly white, except where the bark had split into countless fractures and the scarlet color of the sap-wood showed through. Outflung branches forked to drop down dangling stalks that rooted again in the ground; these made a forest of slender white supports for the leafy roof--a forest of spectral shapes in a shadow-world. Only here and there were arrows of sunlight that pierced the dense foliage above to strike through and down to the black earth floor and the carpet of rainbow hues. And that carpet of radiant colors was trampled into paths that wound on to lose themselves in the half-light of that ghostly world. * * * * * From one of the paths came sounds of tramping feet. Cries and snarling grunts resounded through the silence to send lizards scurrying to the safety of the trees. Animal cries or hoarse voices of men--it would have been difficult to tell which. And a sight of the creatures themselves would have left an observer still in doubt. A score of them, and they walked upright. Some bodies were naked, a coppery-black in color; on others the skin was covered by a sparse growth of hair. Noses that were mere nostril-slits; low foreheads, retreating flatly to a tangle of matted hair; protruding jaws which showed the white flash of canine teeth as the ape-like faces twisted and the creatures tugged at ropes of vines thrown over their shoulders. The Neanderthal Man had not learned to use the wheel; and these man-animals, too, used only the sheer strength of their corded muscles as they hauled at the body of a beast. It dragged along the path behind them, rolling at times to show the white of its belly instead of the flexible armor-plating that protected its back. Fresh blood flowed from a wound in the white under-skin; this, and the dripping flints that tipped their spears, told how death had come. One curving horn that projected from a wrinkled snout caught at times in the undergrowth, and then the ones who dragged it would throw themselves upon the head with snarls of fury and twist the big horn free. The rocky cliff was honeycombed with caves. A cry, half-human in its tone, brought an avalanche of figures scurrying forth. Children, whose distended abdomens told of the alternate feasting and hunger that was theirs, were cuffed aside by women who shouted shrilly at sight of the prize. Older men came, too, and in a screaming mob they threw themselves upon the carcass of the beast that had been dragged into the open. * * * * * Flint knives came into play, then sharpened stakes that were thrust through the bleeding meat. Young and old seized what they could, leaped across the little stream that trickled downward through the valley, and raced for the nearest fires. The fumaroles made places for roasting, and these half-men had learned the taste of cooked meats. Their jaws were slavering as they waited. The scents were tantalizing. A hunter was reaching to snatch a shred of half-cooked meat when a woman of the tribe gave a scream that was shrill with fear. She pointed her gnarled hand upward on the face of the cliff. An opening was there, a black cave-mouth in the black cliff. Above their own caves, was this higher opening, yet they must have explored it often--must have followed it as far as they dared, where it led to the mountain's innermost depths. Yet from this familiar place there stepped forth an apparition. Another followed, and another--three strange creatures like none the savage eyes of this world had ever seen. Clothing torn to rags--faces black and smeared with blood--hands that reached groping and trembling toward the light, until the half-blinded eyes of one saw the trickling brook. Then, "Water!" he croaked in a voice hardly more human than the grunts of horror from below, and he took the hand of another to help in the steep descent--while the tribe beneath them forgot their anticipated feast, forgot all but their primordial fear of the unknown, and, with startled cries, broke and ran for the safety of the forest.... CHAPTER IX _The Throwers of Thunder_ It is doubtful if Walter Harkness heard or consciously saw that fleeing tribe. He saw only the glorious sunlight and its sparkling reflection upon the stream; and in his nostrils was the scent of roasting meat to rouse him to a frenzy. For seven Earth days he and Chet had kept account of the hours. How long after that they had followed their stumbling course he could not have told. Time ceased to be measured in hours and days; rather was it reckoned in painful progress a foot at a time up rocky burrows, helping, both of them, to ease the path for the girl who struggled so bravely with them, until aching muscles refused to bear them further. Then periods of drugged sleep with utter fatigue for an opiate--and on again in hopeless, aimless wandering. And now, the sun! And he was plunging his head into icy water to drink until he strangled for breath! He knew that Chet and Diane were beside him. A weak laugh came to his lips as he sat erect: the girl had drunk as deeply as the rest--and now she was washing her hands and face. The idea seemed tremendously amusing--or was it that the simple rite indicated more than he could bear to know? It meant that they were safe; they had escaped; and again a trifle like cleanliness was important in a woman's eyes. He rocked with meaningless laughter--until again a puff of wind brought distinctly the odor of cooking food. A hundred feet away, up higher in the valley, were the first of the fires. Harkness came to his feet and ran--ran staggeringly, it is true, but he ran--and he tore at some hanging shreds of smoking meat regardless of the burn. But the fierce gnawing at his stomach did not force him to wolf the food. He carried it back, a double handful of half-cooked meat, to the others. And he doled it out sparingly to them and to himself. The cold water had restored his sanity. "Easy," he advised them; "too much at first and we're done for." * * * * * He was chewing on the last shred when a thought struck him; he had been too stunned before to reason. For the first time he jerked up his head in startled alarm. He looked carefully about--at the meat on its pointed stakes, at the distant fires, at the open glade below them and the dense jungle beyond where nothing stirred. "Cooked meat!" he exclaimed in a whisper. "Who did it? This means people!" The memory that had registered only in some corner of a mind deeper than the conscious, came to the surface. "I remember," he said. "There were things that ran--men--apes--what were they?" "Oh, Lord!" Chet groaned. "And all I ask is to be left alone!" But he wearily raised himself upright and verified the other's words. "They ran toward that opening among those trees. And I'll bet they live in these caves up here behind us. I got a whiff of them as we came past: they smelled like a zoo." They had come out on top of the lava-flow, close to its end. The molten rock had hardened to leave a drop of some forty feet to the open glade below. Beyond that the jungle began, but behind them was the lava bed, frozen in countless corrugations. Harkness rose and helped Diane to her feet: they must force their aching muscles to take up their task again. He peered up the valley where a thousand fires smoked. "That stream," he said, "comes in from a little valley that branches off up there. We had better follow it--and we had better get going before that gang recovers from its surprise." They were passing the first of the fires where the meat was smoking when Chet called a halt. "Wait a bit," he begged: "let's take a sirloin steak along--" He was haggling at a chunk of meat with a broken flint when a spear whistled in and crashed upon the rocks. * * * * * Harkness saw the thrower. Beyond the lava's edge the jungle could be seen, and from among the spectral trees had darted a wild figure whose hairy arm had snapped the spear into the air. There were more who followed. They were sliding down the slender trunks that supported the branches and leafy roof high above the ground. To Harkness the open doorway to the jungle seemed swarming with monkey-men. The movement of the three fugitives had been taken as a retreat, and the courage of the cave-dwellers had returned. Harkness glanced quickly about to size up their situation. To go on was certain death; if these creatures came up to meet them on the lava-beds, the end was sure. The escarpment gave the three some slight advantage of a higher position. One vain wish for the pistol now resting in the deep grass beside a vanished ship; then he sprang for the weapon that had been thrown--it was better than nothing--and advanced cautiously to the lava's edge. No concealment there; no broken rocks, other than pieces of flint; a poor fortress, this, that they must defend! And the weapons of their civilization were denied them. Another spear hummed its shrill song, coming dangerously close. He saw women-figures that came from the jungle with supplies of weapons. Short spears, about six feet long, like the one he held. But they had others, too--long lances of slender wood with tips of flint. Thrusting spears! He had a sickening vision of those jagged stone heads ripping into their bodies while these beasts stood off in safety. It was thus that they killed their prey. And Diane--he could not even spare her--could not give her the kind oblivion of a mercy-shot! The other two were lying beside him now at the edge of the sloping cliff. The bank of shining gray was not steep; the enemy would climb it with ease. Hopeless! They had won through for this!... Harkness groaned silently in an agony of spirit at thought of the girl. "Oh, for one detonite shell to land among them!" he said between clenched teeth--then was breathless with a thought that exploded within his mind. * * * * * His fingers were clumsy with haste as he fumbled at the head of the spear. The sharp-edged stone was bound to its shaft with sinew, wound round and round. The enemy were out in the open; he spared an instant's look to see them advancing. A clattering of falling spears sounded beyond, but the weapons were overcast, thanks to the protection of the rocky edge. "A shell!" Harkness spoke with sharp intensity. "Give me a cartridge from your belt, quick!" Chet handed him one. Harkness took one look, then pulled a cartridge from his own belt. "That explains it," he was muttering as he worked, "--the big explosion when I smashed the rocks. You've got ammunition for your pistol, but you put rifle cartridges in my belt--and service ammunition at that. No wonder they raised the devil with those rocks!" His fingers were working swiftly now to bind the slender cartridge to the spear. A chipped out hollow in the flint made a seat. He gave silent thanks for Chet Bullard's mistake. Chet had slipped; he had filled Harkness' belt with ammunition that would have been useless for the pistol--but it was just what he needed here. So intent was he on his task that he hardly heard the yelling chorus from below. It swelled to a din; but his work was finished, and he looked up. One figure in advance of the rest had been urging them on, and they came in a wild rush now. Walt Harkness scrambled to his feet. Tall and sinewy, his broad shoulders, scantily covered by the rags of blouse that remained, were turned sideways as he raised the spear. The yelling from below swelled louder and more shrill. This strange one from another tribe--he was unarmed except for one of their own spears. The curious covering on his body was flapping in the breeze. Nothing here, surely, to hold a hunting-tribe in check. The spear rose slowly in the air. What child of the tribe could not have thrown it better! They came on faster now; the leader had almost reached the place where the spear was dropping down. He must have laughed, if laughter had yet been born in such a breast, at the futile weapon dropping point first among the rocks. One little shell, a scant three inches long, no thicker than the stylus on milady's desk! But here was service ammunition, as Harkness had said; and in the end of the lead a fulminate cap was buried--and a grain of dense, gray dust! * * * * * There was no flame--only a concussion that cracked upon one's ears, and flying rock fragments that filled the air with demoniac shrieks. And then that sound was lost in the shriller cries of terror and pain as the ape-men broke for the trees. Harkness saw some of them who rose and fell again to rise no more, and one who dragged himself slowly from the blast that had struck him down. But his eyes came back to another spear in his hands, and his fingers were tearing at the sinew wrapping. The spear bent in his hands; the wood was flexible and springy. It was Diane who offered the next suggestion. She, too, was working at another spear--what wonder if her breath came fast!--but her eyes were alight, and her mind was at work. "Make a bow!" she exclaimed. "A bow and arrow, Walter! We are fighting primitive men, so we can't scorn primitive weapons." She stopped with a little exclamation of pain; the sharp tip of the flint had cut her hand. Chet's spearhead was unloosed. He tried the spring of the shaft. "Bully girl, Diane!" he said, and fell to gouging out a notch with the sharp flint near the end of the shaft. The sinew made a string. Three slender sticks lying about whose ends had been sharpened for use on the meat: they would do for arrows. Each arrow must be notched and headed with an explosive shell, and there were many of them. Chet sprang to his feet at last. Forgotten was the fatigue that had numbed him. A wild figure, his clothes in rags, his short, curling hair no longer blond, his face a mottling of brown and black, where only here and there the white skin dared show through--he executed an intricate dance-step with a bed of lava for a floor, while he shouted: "Bring on your fighters! Bring 'em on! Who's going to stop us now?" * * * * * They were free to go, but Harkness paused at a renewed screaming from the jungle. Again the hairy ones poured forth into the open glade. He had half raised his bow, with arrow ready, before he saw that this was no attack. The screams merged discordantly with other sounds--a crashing of uprooted trees--a chorus of harsh coughing--snorting--unrecognizable noises. And the people were cowering in terror. They half-ran toward the safety of their caves, but the throwers of thunder, the demons on the lava bed, were between them and their homes. They turned to face the jungle, and the wild sounds and crash of splintered wood that drew near. Harkness saw the first head that appeared. He stared in open-mouthed amazement at the armored monster. Thick plates of shell covered its mammoth body and lapped part way over the head to end at beady, wicked, red eyes on either side of a single curved horn. An instant the animal waited, to glare at the cowering human forms it had tracked to their lair; others crashed through beside it; and in that instant Harkness recognized the huddled group below as brothers. Far down they were, in the long, weary path that was evolution, and hardly come as yet to a consciousness of self--but there were those who leaped before the others, their long spears couched and ready; they were defending the weaker ones at their backs; they were men! And Harkness was shouting as he raised his crude bow. "Shoot!" he ordered. "Kill the brutes!" His own arrow was speeding true. The rush of mammoth beasts was on as he fired, but it was checked as quickly as it began. An inferno of explosions rose about the rushing bodies; crashing detonations struck two of them down, their heads torn and crushed. Between the helpless, primordial men and the charging beasts was a geyser of spouting earth and rocks, through which showed ugly heads and tremendous bodies that wheeled and crashed madly back into the jungle growth. Harkness suddenly realized that only he and Chet had fired. Diane's bow was on the ground. He saw the girl beside it, sitting upright; but her body was trembling and weaving, and she was plainly maintaining her upright posture only by the greatest effort. * * * * * He was beside her in an instant. "What is it?" he demanded. "Are you hurt? What is it?" She raised her hand that he might see; her lips, seemed almost too numb for speech. "Only a scratch," she whispered, but Harkness saw her eyes glazing. He dropped to his knees and caught her swaying body in his arms. "A scratch," she repeated in a fading voice, "from the spear.... Poison ... I think." A head appeared over the lava crest. Harkness saw it vaguely. He knew that Chet had the newcomer covered; his bow was drawn. It meant nothing to him, for Diane was wounded--dying! Dying, now, in his arms.... The ape-man came on; he was grovelling upon the ground. He was hairless, like the one they had seen escape the attack of the giant bat, and his cheek was slashed with a healing cut that might have been made by a ripping talon. He abased himself before the awful might of these creatures who had saved them. And he made motions with his arms to picture how they had sailed down from the skies; had landed; and he had seen them. He was plainly petitioning for pardon and the favor of these gods--when he dropped his animal head to stare at the girl and the cut hand that Harkness held in his. The blue discoloration of the wound must have been plain in its significance. The hairless one sprang abruptly to his feet and darted toward a cave. He was back in a moment; and, though be approached with wriggling humility, he reached the girl and he ventured to touch the discolored hand with a sticky paste. He had a gourd that he held to the girl's lips. Harkness would have struck it away; he was beside himself with grief. But Chet interposed. "Give it to her," he said in a sharp, strained voice that told of his own dismay. "I think the beggar knows what he's about. He is trying to help." The lips were lax; only a little of the liquid found its way down her throat. But Harkness, after minutes of agony, saw the first flutter of lids that betokened returning life.... CHAPTER X "_But Awfully Dumb...._" Harkness would never forget the helpless body in his arms, nor the tender look that came slowly to the opened eyes that gazed so steadily into his. And yet it was Chet that she seemed to want for the thousand little services during the week that followed. And Harkness tried to still the hurt in his heart, and he told himself that it was her happiness be wanted more than his; that if she found greater pleasure in having Chet near, then his love was unworthy if it placed itself as a bar to that other happiness. He talked by signs with the hairless one whom he called Towahg. It was the sound the other made as he struck upon his chest. And he learned that Towahg could guide him to the ship. The tribe had left them alone. Only Towahg seemed inclined to friendliness; and Harkness frequently saw the one who was their leader in ugly, silent contemplation of them when Towahg brought food and water to their cave. Diane was recovering, but her progress was slow. She was able at once to walk and go slowly about, but the least exertion tired her. It had been a close call, Harkness knew, and he realized that some time must pass before she could take up the hardships of the trail. And in the meantime much might happen. He felt that he must reach the ship at the first possible moment and return for the others; Towahg would show him the way. He explained the plan to Chet and Diane only to meet with emphatic dissent. "You would go alone?" the girl exclaimed. "To meet heaven knows what dangers? No, no, Walter; you must not! Wait; I am stronger; I can go soon, I know." Chet, too, was for delay--Diane was better, and she would improve steadily. They could carry her, at first. But Harkness looked at the jungle he must penetrate and knew that he was right. * * * * * He gave Towahg a bow and arrows like his own and those that Chet kept for defense, but the arrows were of sharpened wood without detonite tips. He grinned toward Chet as he showed the savage how to handle the marvellous thing. "We've advanced these people a thousand years in the science of arms," he said. "They should make Diane their first Minister of Munitions, or worship her as their own lovely goddess of the chase." A weapon that would throw farther than the strongest man could cast a spear--here was magic indeed! And Towahg knelt and grovelled on the ground at his benefactor's feet. Harkness made light of the dangers he must face, but he knew in his own mind he might fail. And the time of leaving found him curiously depressed. He had gripped Chet's hand, then turned to Diane for what might be a last good-by. The quick enfoldment of her soft body in his arms was as unpremeditated as the kiss he placed upon her lips.... He swung away abruptly, and fell in behind his guide without a word. The way led first across the place of smoke and fire. Danger ahead on this strange trail; he knew it well. But he took it as it came; and his guide, and his crude weapon, and his steady eye and sureness of foot on rocky crags all saw him through. And he mentally mapped the hills and valleys and the outcrops of metals that he would explore some later time. Only seven of the short six-hour days of this little earth had passed when he drew near the ship. He was ready for an attack. There was the broken rubble that marked the entrance of the cave. Beneath it, he knew, were mangled, horrible remains. This one beast alone, it seemed, had been the ruler of the valley, for no other appeared. The mass that had blocked the doorway was crystalline now, and broke to brittle fragments at a blow. He entered the familiar cabin of the ship. There was nothing disturbed; the sealed inner door had barred entrance to any inquiring beasts. Far down the valley he saw a naked, running figure. Towahg had escorted this sky-god to the great bird that had brought him, but the courage of even so advanced a tribesman as he must have limits. He was still running along the path they had come when Harkness closed and sealed the door. * * * * * There was an instrument among their stores for taking samples of gas. Harkness attached it to the ship before he left, and he took a few precious minutes for a flight into the heights. That gas up there was fatal to the monsters of space: he must secure a sample and learn its composition. A closing of the switch on wires that led to the instrument outside, and he knew that the container had emptied its contents of water, drawn in the gas and sealed itself. Then the swift descent. He flew low as he circled back. They had traveled far on their journey below ground; it was even a longer route where he and Towahg had circled about. But it was the only route he knew; he could take no chances on a short-cut and a possible long-drawn search for the little valley. He followed the trail. The quick dusk was near; but in an hour's slow flying, while his eyes searched the hills and hollows, the valley was in sight. He came down slowly in a black sky, with only the soft, muffled roar of the lower exhausts. It was growing dark, and he leaned from an open door to see more clearly his position. All was different from the air, and he needed time and careful scrutiny to get the bearings of the place. The soft thunder from below was in his ears when a sound pierced through. His own name! And it was Diane's voice calling him in a terrified tone. "Walter!" she cried. "Help! Help! Oh, Walter, come quickly!" * * * * * The scene below was lighted by fitful fires. He was above the upper valley, a hundred yards from their cave: his mind was oriented in an instant, and he knew each foot of ground. And here, where neither Diane nor Chet should be, was Diane. He saw her running in the bright glare of his landing light that he now switched on; saw a black shape hurl itself upon her; she was struggling. He threw himself back at the controls to send the ship like a thunderbolt upon the earth. A pistol was in his hand as he leaped from the still-rocking ship and threw himself upon the thing that ran and tried to carry a struggling burden in its arms. He could not fire; but he brought the pistol down upon a heavy skull. The hairy figure seemed never to feel the blow. It dropped the body of Diane and turned, and its slavering, shining fangs were set in a horrible face that Harkness recognized. It was the leader of the tribe, and he had dared to attack. But where was Chet? What of his arrows and their detonite tips? These thoughts were crowding through his mind in the instant that ape-like fingers gripped at his throat--the instant while he was bringing the pistol forward and up. A light charge of detonite in pistol ammunition--but no living body could withstand the shock. Harkness leaped over the fallen foe to reach the girl. She was half risen to a sitting posture as he came. "_Dieu!_" she was whispering; "_Ah, le bon Dieu!_" Then she cried out: "Walter! Oh, Walter, they have killed Chet! Down there!" Her hand was pointing. She grasped at Harkness' hand to draw herself to her feet and race with him toward the cave. * * * * * "Just at dark," she explained gaspingly as they ran. "It was their chief, and there were others with him. They leaped upon Chet--before he could reach for his bow. They had seemed so friendly after you left--but they were short of food--" Her voice was sobbing now, but she kept on, and she set a pace that Harkness could not outdistance. "One aimed a spear at me, and Chet threw himself between. I saw the spear strike--then I ran. I thought I heard your motors--I screamed for you--" They were nearing the caves. A fire was burning in the open glade where grotesque figures leaped and danced in cannibal glee about a figure that lay motionless upon the ground. The tattered, wind-blown clothing--the curling hair, blond in the fire's light--it was Chet.... And now Harkness could fire. His pistol held twenty rounds. He emptied it into the shrieking group, then jammed in more of the shells and fired again. He fired until no target remained, and every savage figure was either vanished among the trees or inert and lifeless upon the ground, their only motion the stirring of their hairy coverings in the breeze. * * * * * Harkness was beside the prostrate figure. He raised Chet's head within his arms; Diane's brown head leaned close, her gasping breath broken by dry sobs. The firelight flickered upon the closed lids to give them semblance of life. "Chet," said Walter Harkness softly. "Chet, old man--can't you speak? We'll save you, Chet; you're not done for yet." But he felt as he spoke that the words were a horrible lie; the blood that ran slowly now from a wound in Chet's side seemed to speak more truly than did he. Yet Chet Bullard opened his eyes. His breath was the merest flutter; the listeners bent their heads close to hear. "Made it, did you?" asked Chet in a ghastly whisper. "And you've saved Diane?... Good!... Well, it's been a great trip.... It's been worth the price...." Harkness seized at the girl's name. Here was something that might strike home to the sinking man; might rouse him. "Yes, Diane is saved," he told Chet: "saved for you, old fellow. You must live--for Diane's sake. You love her, and she needs you." Again the tired eyes opened. Once more the fluttering breath formed words; lips moved to bring a pale ghost of Chet's ready smile like a passing light across his face. "Needs me? Diane?" It was a question and a denial. He was looking straight at Harkness as he added: "It's you she needs.... You're one square old sport, Walt, but dumb--awfully dumb...." * * * * * Glorious adventure!--and the price is so often death. "A great trip," Chet Bullard had said; "it's been worth the price." Chet was prepared to pay in full. But--there was the ship! Walt Harkness, as she finished bandaging the body of the unconscious man, stared first at the metal cylinder, gleaming, brilliant in the Earthlight; then his gaze went to the Earth that had risen over distant peaks with the glory of a thousand moons. And he dared to hope. He brought the ship softly to rest close to where Chet lay, then placed the limp form on the self-adjusting floor of the control room. There must be no shifting of the body as the pull of gravitation ceased. Soft blankets made a resting place for him. The entrance port was closed and sealed; and the ship rose gently under his touch. And, below them, the mirrors showed a world that sank away. Diane's head was pressed near to his to watch that vanishing world. Each rugged mountain was softened in the Earthlight's mellow glow; they melted together, and lost all sharpness of form. And the light faded and vanished as they rose into the blanket of gas that blocked off the return rays and made of this world a dark moon. No regret now for the territory that was unexplored. Harkness told himself he would return. And, with the vanishing of that world his thoughts were only of the little flame of life that still flickered in Chet's body, and of the Earth, and of the metal ball that was swinging them out and away.... The sound of the stern exhaust built up and up to the roaring thunder that meant the blast was opened full.... CHAPTER XI "_Nothing to Be Done_" Unmoving, their ship seemed, through the long hours. Yet there were lights that passed swiftly and unnoticed, and the unending thunder from the stern gave assurance that they were not floating idly in the vast sea of space. The sun was behind them, and ahead was Earth in midday glory; Harkness could not tear his eyes away from that goal. He stood always at the controls, not because there was work to be done, but for the feeling it gave him of urging the ship onward. Diane ministered to Chet and dressed the wound. There were few words exchanged between them. The menace that had emptied Earth's higher levels of all aircraft was still there. No ships were in sight, as Harkness guided his ship toward the great sphere. His speed had been cut down, yet still he outraced the occasional, luminous, writhing forms that threw themselves upon them. Then the repelling area--and he crashed silently through and down, with their forward exhaust roaring madly to hold them in check. A sea and a shoreline, where a peninsula projected like a giant boot--and he knew it for Italy and the waters of the Mediterranean. "Vienna," Diane was telling him; "go to Vienna! It is nearby. And I know of a surgeon--one of the greatest!" And an hour later, a quiet, confident man was telling them: "But yes!--of a certainty he will live. It is fortunate that you were not very far away when the accident occurred." And only then did Harkness catch Diana's eyes in an exchange of glances where unbearable relief was tempered with amusement. * * * * * The great hospital had its own landing stages on its broad roof. Their ship was anchored there, an object to excite the curiosity of a gathering throng. "Not a healthy place for me, here in Vienna," Harkness remarked. He was lifting the ship from its anchorage, its errand of mercy done. "Now where?" he pondered aloud. The strain of the flight was telling on him. The girl recognized the strained look in his eyes, the deep lines that their experiences had etched upon his face. Gently she drew his hand from the controls. "I will take it," she said. "Trust me. Lie down and rest." Harkness had witnessed an example of her flying skill; she could handle the ship, he knew. And he threw himself upon a cot in the cabin to sink under the weight of overpowering fatigue. He felt the soft shock of their landing. Diane was calling him, her hand extended to lead him from the open port. But he was wrenched sharply from the lethargy that held him at sight of his surroundings, and the memories they recalled. They were in a park, and their ship rested upon a spacious lawn. Beyond were trees where a ship had shot crashingly through storm-tossed limbs. And, before him, a chateau, where a window had framed the picture of a girl with outstretched arms. "Trust me," Diane had said. And he did trust her. But did she not know what this meant? She was delivering him into the enemy's hands. He should have kept himself from sight until he had rallied his forces.... He was stammering words of protest as she led him toward the door. Armed guards were already between him and the ship. * * * * * In a dark-panelled room Herr Schwartzmann was waiting. His gasp of amazement as he sprang to his feet reflected the utter astonishment written upon his face, until that look gave place to one of satisfaction. "Mademoiselle," he exclaimed, "--my dear Mademoiselle Diane! We had given you up for lost. I thought--I thought--" "Yes," said Diane quietly, "I believe that I can well imagine what you thought." "Ah!" said Herr Schwartzmann, and the look of satisfaction deepened. "I see that you understand now; you will be with us in this matter. We have plans for this young man's disposal." The puzzled wonder that had clouded the steady eyes of Walter Harkness was replaced by cold anger and more than a trace of contempt. "You can forget those plans," he told Schwartzmann. "I have plans of my own." "Poof!" exclaimed the heavy, bearded man. "We will crush you like that!" He struck one heavy fist upon the desk. "And what will you do?" "Several things," said Harkness evenly. "I shall rid the upper levels of the monsters: I have a gas that will accomplish that. I shall restore the world's flying to normal. And, with that attended to, I will give you my undivided attention--raise forty kinds of hell with Herr Schwartzmann and the interests he represents. "Forgery! Theft! The seizing of my properties by virtue of a lying document! You shall see what this leads to. Your companies will be wrecked; not a decent man or woman engaged in the business of a decent world will deal with you: that is a small part of what I plan." The dark face of Herr Schwartzmann was flushed with anger. "You will never leave this place--" he began. But Harkness would not let him go on: his voice was as hard as the metal of his ship. "You and your assassins!" he said contemptuously. "You don't dare touch me. There is another man who knows--and Diane, too." He paused to look into the eyes of the girl, which were regarding him with an inscrutable expression. "I do not know why she brought me here, but Diane also knows. You can't throttle us all." "Diane!" The exclamation was wrung involuntarily from Schwartzmann's lips. "You speak of Mademoiselle Vernier so familiarly?" * * * * * The girl's cool voice broke in. She had watched the meeting of the men in silence; she spoke now as one taking matters into her own quite capable hands. "You may omit the incognito, Herr Schwartzmann," she said; "it is no longer required. I have enjoyed a birthday since last we met: it was passed in a place of darkness and anguish, where strong men and brave forgot their own suffering to try by every means to bring comfort to a girl who was facing death. For that reason I say that I enjoyed it.... And that birthday was my twenty-first. You know what that means." "But Mademoiselle Vernier--pardon!--Mam'selle Delacoeur, surely you will support me. My trustee-ship during all these successful years--" "Is at an end," said the cool voice. "I learned more than you were aware of in this last year while I familiarized myself with the interests that would soon be mine. No, Herr Schwartzmann, your methods do not appeal to me; they are an anachronism in the world of to-day." Harkness was standing in stunned silence. "Delacoeur!" Diane was Mademoiselle Delacoeur! But that name had been borne by the wealthiest house of France! Old Delacoeur had died, possessed of millions beyond counting--and he had left a daughter--Diane! His mind could not grasp the full significance of this. But one thing was clear: he could not aspire to the love of one of the queens of Earth. Whatever faint hope that remained in his heart was lost.... The cool voice was still speaking. "You may leave now," she was saying--this girl who had been his comrade, so unfailingly tender, so true and steady in the face of incredible dangers. And Herr Schwartzmann took his dismissal as one who cannot dispute his superior. * * * * * The room was silent. Harkness stood with downcast eyes that followed with meticulous precision the intricacies of design in the rug on which he stood. A voice was speaking. Not the cool, imperative voice of Mademoiselle Delacoeur, mistress of vast estates, but the voice of Diane--the Diane he had learned to love--and it tore at his emotions until his mind was a whirl of conflicting thoughts. A tender voice: and there was laughter in it and in the eyes that his own came despondently to meet. "Such a man, this Walter Harkness!" she was saying. "So hard, so vindictive! Ah, the trouble he will make for me because of my conscienceless agents!" Harkness threw out his hands in a helpless gesture. "Don't taunt me," he said. "You know you have me tied. You've drawn the charges from all my guns. There is nothing to be done." Diane Delacoeur drew near. The raillery was gone from her voice, and the hand that she placed on his arm was trembling. "Nothing?" she inquired. "Then, if friendly rivalry is impossible, would you consider, could there not be arranged--a merger of our interests? I am not thinking now of wealth, of which you will have far more than I: there are so much greater things in life--" The eyes that clung to his were pleading now. And within them was the light that Walter Harkness at last could understand and define. He took the trembling hand in one of his that was suddenly strong, and with the other he raised a lovely face that no longer dared to meet his look. "You mean--" he began, and fumbled for words to express an emotion that was beyond words. "Chet said--why, he said--that you needed me--" Her reply came mingled with a tremulous laugh. "I have the greatest regard," she whispered, "for Chet's judgement. But--do you--need me?" Walt Harkness held the soft body close; bent nearer to catch the words. And he answered them with his own lips in an ecstasy of emotion that made nothing of the thrills to be found in that other conquest--of a Dark Moon. A SCIENTIFIC HELL Science playing the rôle of an up-to-date Persephone, visiting the underworld realm of Pluto to wrest from it hidden cosmic secrets, was described recently at a meeting of the American Geographical Society at the Engineering Building by Prof. Harlow Shapley, Harvard astronomical wizard, who told of the ultra-modern scientific version of Ulysses's descent into Hades or Dante's visit to hell. Prof. Shapley, to whom 10,000,000 light-years are like a day to any ordinary mortal, and whose astronomical investigations have led him to the center of the cosmos, told the scientists present to descend to the bowels of the earth and construct therein "Plutonic Laboratories," where a man could learn many things unknown about beginnings and endings, and where, incidentally he may find a way of utilising the tremendous heat energy stored up in the "scientific hell." Under the general theme of the "Third Dimension in Geography," Prof. Shapley talked about the past, present and future of the earth-moon system; how in 50,000,000 years our days and months will be forty-seven times as long as they are now; how after that the moon will again approach the earth until it is broken up by tidal disruption into ring fragments circulating around the earth like the ring around Saturn; and of shooting stars coming from far-away solar systems. "The temperature under the surface of the earth," said Prof. Shapley, "increases one degree Fahrenheit at every seventy-six feet, about seventy degrees per mile. In some places in California we get the temperature of boiling water at a depth of less than a mile. The center of the earth is roughly 4,000 miles below the surface. "Because of this intense internal heat of the earth it would probably be impossible to maintain permanent laboratories at greater depths than two miles," said the lecturer, "and, in addition, the installation and maintenance of Plutonic laboratories will be a scientific adventure of great difficulty and expense. Yet, if carried on in connection with the work of existing mines and borings it may mark the coming decade as one of the important epochs in man's attempt to understand the earth. "These Plutonic laboratories, placed at various depths under the surface, fully equipped with modern scientific apparatus, and maintained indefinitely, will contribute to our knowledge in a dozen important fields of geophysic and astronomy." What Prof. Shapley pointed to as merely a possible by-product of the proposed scientific "descent into Hades" is the commercial possibility of tapping the earth's internal source of heat. There is 31,000,000 times as much natural heat in the earth than in all the coal resources of the world. He stated that Sir Charles Parsons and John L. Hodgson, both noted British engineers, are already engaged in work on this problem. When Caverns Yawned _By Captain S. P. Meek_ [Illustration: From the bump on the side of the submarine came a flash of red light.] [Sidenote: Only Dr. Bird's super-scientific sleuthing stands in the way of Ivan Saranoff's latest attempt at wholesale destruction.] Bells jangled discordantly. A whistle split the air with a piercing note. A band blared away on the platform. With a growing rumble of sound, the Presidential special slowly gathered headway. The President waved a final farewell to the crowds at the platform and sat down. He chatted cheerily with his companions until the train was clear of Charleston, then rose, and with a word to the others stepped into the car. Operative Carnes of the United States Service slumped back in his chair with a sigh of relief. "Thank Goodness, that's over," he said. "I was never so glad to get him safely away from a place in my life." Haggerty of the secret service nodded in agreement. Colonel Holmes, the military aide, looked up inquiringly. "Why so? Do you think Charleston an especially dangerous place for him to be?" "Not ordinarily. Charleston is a very patriotic and loyal city, but I have been worried. There have been vague rumors going around. Nothing definite that we could pin down, but enough to make me pretty uneasy." "I think you've worried needlessly. I have been in constant touch with the Military Intelligence Division and they have reported nothing alarming." Haggerty chuckled at the look of disgust that spread over Carnes' face. Colonel Holmes bridled visibly. "Now look here, Carnes," he began. "Oh, horse-feathers!" interrupted Carnes. "The M.I.D. is all right in its place--Good Lord! What's that?" * * * * * The train gave a sudden sickening lurch. Colonel Holmes sprawled in an undignified heap in one corner of the observation platform. Carnes and Haggerty kept their feet by hanging on to the rails. From the interior of the car came cries of alarm. The train righted itself for a moment and then lurched worse than before. There was a scream of brakes as the engineer strove to halt the forward progress. The train swayed and lurched like a ship in a storm. Carnes sprang for the telephone connected with the engine cab and rang excitedly. "Hello, Bemis," he cried when an answer came: "take off the brakes! Keep moving at full speed, no matter what happens. What? Use your gun on him, man! Keep moving even if the train tips over!" The train swayed and rocked worse than ever as it began to gather momentum. Carnes looked back along the track and gasped. For three hundred yards behind them, the track was sinking out of sight. The train forged ahead, but it was evident that it also was sinking into the ground. The track behind them suddenly gave. With a roar like a hundred buildings collapsing, it sank out of sight in a cloud of dust. The rear car of the train hung partially over the yawning cavern in the earth for an instant before the laboring engine dragged it to solid ground. The swaying and lurching grew less. For a mile it persisted to a slight degree. With a face the color of a sheet, Carnes made his way into the train. The President met him at the door. "What's the trouble, Carnes?" he demanded. "I am not sure, Mr. President. It felt like an earthquake. A great cavern opened in the earth behind us. Our train was almost trapped in it." "An earthquake! We must stop the train at once and take charge of the situation. An emergency of that sort demands immediate attention." "I beg you to do nothing of the sort, sir. Your presence would add little to the rescue work and your life is too precious to risk." "But my duty to the people--" "Is to keep yourself alive, sir! Mr. President, this may well be an attempt on your life. There are persons who would give anything to do away with you, especially at present. You have not endeared yourself to a certain class in calling for a conference of the powers to curb Russia's anti-religious tactics." * * * * * The President hesitated. He knew Carnes well enough to know that he usually spoke from accurate knowledge and with good judgment. "Mr. President," went on the operative earnestly, "I am responsible to the American people for your safety. I beg you to follow my advice." "Very well, Carnes," replied the President, "I'll put myself in your hands for the present. What is your program?" "Your route is well known. Other attempts may be planned since this one failed. Let me have you transferred incognito to another train and hurried through to Washington secretly. I am going to drop off and go back. That earthquake needs to be looked into." Again the President hesitated. "My desertion of the stricken area will not be favorably regarded. If I sneak away secretly as though in fear, it will be bad for the public morale." "We'll let the special go through. No one need know that you have left it." "Well--I guess you're right. What are you going to do about it?" "My first move will be to summon Dr. Bird from Washington." "That's a good move. You'd better have him bring Dr. Lassen with him. Lassen is a great volcano and earthquake specialist, you know." "I will, sir. If you will get ready to drop off at the next connecting point, I'll send Haggerty and Bemis with you. The rest of the party can remain on the special." "All right, Carnes, if you insist." * * * * * Carnes went forward to the operator of the train's radio set. In half an hour the special came to a stop at a junction point and four men got off. Ten minutes later three of them climbed aboard another train which stopped for them. Carnes, the fourth man, hurried to a telephone. Fifteen minutes later he was talking to Dr. Bird at the latter's private laboratory in the Bureau of Standards. "An earthquake, Carnes?" exclaimed the doctor as the operative described the happenings. "Wait a few minutes, will you?" In five minutes he was back on the telephone. "It was no earthquake, old dear, whatever it may have been. I have examined the records of all three of the Bureau's seismographs. None of them record even a tremor. What are you going to do?" "Whatever you say, Doctor. I'm out of my depth already." "Let me think a moment. All right, listen. Go back to Charleston as quickly as you can and get in touch with the commanding officer at Fort Moultrie. I'll have the Secretary of War telephone him and give him orders. Get troops and go to the scene of the catastrophe. Allow no one near it. Proclaim martial law if necessary. Stop all road and rail traffic within a radius of two miles. Arrest anyone trying to pass your guard lines. I'll get a plane from Langley Field and come down on the run. Is that all clear?" "Perfectly, Doctor. By the way, the President suggested that you bring Dr. Lassen with you." "Since it wasn't an earthquake, he wouldn't be of much value. However, I'll bring him if I can get hold of him. Now start things moving down there. I'll get some apparatus together and join you in five hours; six at the outside. Have a car waiting for me at the Charleston airport." * * * * * Carnes commandeered a passing car and drove back to Charleston. He made a wide sweep to avoid the disturbed area and went direct to Fort Moultrie. Dr. Bird had been good at his word. The troops were assembled in heavy marching order when the detective arrived. A few words to the commanding officer was sufficient to set the trucks loaded with soldiers in motion. Carnes, accompanied by the colonel and his staff, went direct to the scene of the catastrophe. He found a hole in the ground, a hundred feet wide and a quarter of a mile long, sunk to a depth of fifty feet. He shuddered as he thought of what would have happened had the Presidential train been in the center of the devastated area instead of at the edge. The edges of the hole were ragged and sloping as though the earth had caved in to fill a huge cavern underground. State and local authorities were already on the ground, striving to hold back sightseers. They were very glad to deliver their responsibility to the representative of the federal government. Carnes added their force to that of the military. In an hour a cordon of guards were stationed about the cavern while every road was picketed two miles away. Fortunately there had been no loss of life and no rescue work was needed. The earth-shaking had been purely a local matter, centered along the line of the railroad track. There was nothing to do but wait, Carnes thought furiously. He had worked with Dr. Bird long enough to have a fair idea of the scientist's usual lines of investigation. "The first thing he'll want to do is to explore that hole," he mused. "Probably, that'll mean some excavating. I'd better get a wrecking train with a crane on it and a steam shovel here. A gang of men with picks and shovels might be useful, too." He hurried to the railroad officials. The sight of his gold badge had the desired result. Telegraph keys began to click and telephones to ring. Carnes was sorely tempted to explore the hole himself, but he resisted the temptation. Dr. Bird was not always pleasant when his colleagues departed from the orders he had given. * * * * * The morning passed, and the first part of the afternoon. Two wrecking trains stood with steam up at the edge of the hole. Grouped by the trains were a hundred negroes with shovels and picks. Carnes sat at the edge of the hole and stared down into it. He was roused from his reverie by the sound of a motor. From the north came an airplane. High over the hole it passed, and then swerved and descended. On the under side of the wings could be seen the insignia of the Air Corps. Carnes jumped to his feet and waved his hat. Lower came the plane until it roared across the cavern less than a hundred feet above the ground. Two figures leaned out and examined the terrain carefully. Carnes waved again. One of the figures waved a hand in reply. The plane rose in the air and straightened out toward Charleston. "We'll have the doctor here in a few minutes now," said Carnes to the Colonel. "It might be a good plan to send a motorcycle out along the Charleston road to bring him in. We don't want the guards to delay him." The colonel gave an order and a motorcycle shot off down the road. In half an hour it came sputtering back with a huge Cadillac roaring in its wake. The car drew up and stopped. From it descended two men. The first was a small, wizened figure with heavy glasses. What hair age had left to him was as white as snow. The second figure, which towered over the first, was one to merit attention anywhere. * * * * * Dr. Bird was as light on his feet and as quick and graceful as a cat, but there was nothing feline about his appearance. He stood well over six feet in his stockings and tipped the beam close to the two hundred mark. Not one ounce of fat was on his huge frame. So fine was he drawn that unless one looked closely he would never suspect the weight of bone and muscle that his unobtrusive tweed suit covered. Piercing black eyes looked out from under shaggy brows. His face was lean and browned, and it took a second glance to realize the tremendous height and breadth of his forehead. A craggy jutting chin spoke of stubbornness and the relentless following up of a line of action determined on. His head was topped with an unruly shock of black hair which he tossed back with a hand that commanded instant attention. His hands were the most noteworthy thing about the famous Bureau scientist. Long slender hands, they were, with slim tapering fingers--the hands of an artist and a dreamer. The acid stains that marred them could not hide their slim beauty, yet Carnes knew that those hands had muscles like steel wire and that the doctor boasted a grip that could crush the hand of a professional wrestler. He had seen him tear a deck of playing cards in half and, after doubling, again in half, with as little effort as the ordinary man would use in tearing a bare dozen of the cards. As he climbed out of the car his keen black eyes swept around in a comprehensive glance. Carnes, trained observer that he was, knew that in that one glance every essential detail which it had taken him an hour to place had been accurately noted and stored away in the doctor's mind. He came forward to the detective. "Has anything happened since you telephoned me?" was his first question. "Nothing, Doctor. I followed your instructions and also assembled a crew of men with excavating tools." "You're improving, Carnes. This is Dr. Lassen. This is a little out of your line. Doctor, but you may see something familiar. What does it look like to you?" "Not like an earthquake, Bird, at all events. Offhand I would say that a huge cavern had been washed in the earth and the ground had caved in." "It looks that way. If you are right, we should find running water if we dig deep enough. Have you been down in the hole, Carnes?" "No, Doctor." "Then that's the first thing to do. You have ropes, of course?" * * * * * Carnes called to the waiting gang of negroes and a dozen of these hurried up with ropes. Dr. Bird slung a rope around his body under his arms and was lowered into the hole. The rope slackened as he reached bottom. Carnes lay on his stomach and looked over the edge. Dr. Bird was gingerly picking his way across the ground. He turned and called up. "Carnes, you and Lassen can come down if you care to." In a few minutes the detective and the volcanologist joined him in the cavern. The top surface of the ground was rolled up into waves like the sea. The sides of the hole were almost sheer. The naked rock was exposed for thirty feet. Above the rock could be seen the subsoil, and then the layer of top soil and vegetation. Dr. Bird was carefully examining the rock wall. "What do you make of these, Lassen?" he asked, pointing to a row of horizontal striations in the rock. The volcanologist studied them. "They might be water marks but if so they are different from any that I have seen before," he said doubtfully. "It looks as though some force had cut the rock away in one sharp stroke." "Exactly. Notice this yellow powder on the ridges. Water would have washed it away." Dr. Bird stepped forward to the wall and idly attempted to pick up a pinch of the yellow powder he had referred to in his fingers. He gave an exclamation of surprise as he did so. The powder was evidently fast to the wall. He drew his knife from his pocket and pried at the stuff. It fell readily. He scraped again and caught a speck of the falling powder in his hand. He gave a cry of surprise, for his hand sank as though borne down by a heavy weight. With an effort he lifted his hand and examined the substance. "Come here, Carnes," he said. "Hold your hand up to catch some of this powder as I scrape it off." * * * * * The detective held up his hand. Dr. Bird pried with his knife and a shower of dull yellow particles fell. Carnes' hand sank as though the bits of dust had been a lead bar. He placed his other hand under it and with an effort lifted both hands up a few inches. "What on earth is this stuff, Doctor?" he cried. "It's as heavy as lead." "It's a great deal heavier than lead, Carnesy, old dear. I don't know what it is. I am inclined to think you did a wise thing when you sent for me. Lassen, take a look at this stuff. Did you ever run into anything like it?" The aged volcanologist shook his head. The yellow powder was something beyond his ken. "I have been poking around volcanos all my life," he said, "and I have seen some queer things come out of the ground--but nothing like that." Dr. Bird poked tentatively at the substance for a moment, his brow furrowed in lines of thought. He suddenly threw back his shoulders in a gesture of decision. "Send a gang of excavators down here," he cried. "Never mind the power shovel at present." * * * * * Down the ropes swarmed the gang of negroes. Dr. Bird indicated an area at one end of the cavern and directed them to dig. The blacks flew to work with a will. The top soil and subsoil were rapidly tossed into buckets and hauled to the surface. When bare rock lay before them, the negroes ceased their efforts. "What next, Doctuh, suh?" asked the foreman. "Get dynamite!" cried the doctor. "If I'm right, this underground cavern is entered by a tunnel. We'll blast away this caved-in rock until we locate it." Then occurred a strange thing. "There is no need to go to that trouble, Dr. Bird," spoke a metallic voice, from nowhere, it seemed. The negroes looked at one another. Picks and shovels fell from nerveless hands. "Your guess about a tunnel is correct, Doctor," went on the Voice. "There is a tunnel leading away from the spot where you are, but to find the end would be useless to you. I have prepared for that." From the blacks came a low moan of fear. "Ha'nts!" cried one of them. The cry was taken up and spread into a rolling chorus of fear. With one accord they dropped their tools and stampeded in a mad rush toward the dangling ropes. Carnes sprang forward to stop them. "Let them go, Carnes!" cried the doctor. "Their work is done for the present. Let's locate that radio receiver." "That also will be a useless search. Doctor," spoke up the Voice again. "I have perfected a transmitter which will send my voice through space and make it audible without the aid of the clumsy apparatus you depend on. I am also able to see you through the miles of intervening rock without the aid of any instruments at your end." * * * * * "I presume that you can hear me as well?" "Certainly, Doctor. To save you trouble--and I dislike to see you waste the efforts of your really good brain on minor problems--I will tell you that your surmise is correct. A tunnel does lead both to and from the place where you stand. It twists and turns so that even you would be puzzled to plot a general direction. You would have to follow it inch by inch. If you tried that, naturally I would cause it to collapse before you, or on top of you, if you got too close. Be content with what you have seen and seek a better way to trace me." "Who are you, anyway?" blurted out Carnes. "Is it possible that you do not know? Such is fame. I thought that at least my friend Mr. Carnes would suspect that Ivan Saranoff had done this." "But you're dead!" protested the detective. "We killed you when we destroyed your helicopter." "You killed merely an assistant who had disobeyed my orders. Had I not decreed his death, he would be alive to-day. I could kill you as you stand there; resolve you into nothingness; but I do not choose to do so--yet. Other attempts I have made you have frustrated, but this time I shall succeed. I will institute a reign of terror which will bring your rich, foolish country to its knees. Listen, while I give you a taste of my power. The city of Charleston is about to be destroyed." A thunderous roaring filled the air. Crash followed crash in rapid succession. It sounded as though all the noise of the universe had been concentrated in the cavern. The earth shook and rocked like a restless sea. From above came cries of terror. The three men in the cavern were thrown to the ground. Shaken by the fall and deafened by the tumult, they hung onto irregularities of the rock on which they lay. Gradually the tumult and the shaking subsided. The cries from above became more apparent. Silence finally reigned in the cavern and the metallic Voice spoke again. "Go back now and look at Charleston and you will see what to expect. The rest of your cities will soon share the same fate. Beware of trying to trace my movements, for your lives are in the hollow of my hand." * * * * * The voice died away in silence. From the edge of the hole came a cry. A Fort Moultrie officer was peering down at them. "Are you all right down there?" he hailed. "Right as hops," called Dr. Bird cheerfully. "What happened up above?" "I don't know, Doctor. There seems to be a lot of smoke and fire over in the direction of the city. I expect the quake shook them up a little this time. What shall we do now?" "We're ready to come up. First I'm going to send up a wheelbarrow full of yellow powder. Rig a crane to lift it, for it's too heavy to try to hoist with ropes." With the aid of Carnes and Dr. Lassen, Dr. Bird collected a few cubic inches of the yellow powder from the ridges in the rock. He made the wheelbarrow containing it fast to the wire cables of the crane and gave the signal. Slowly it was raised to the surface. When it had safely reached there he turned to his companions. "Grab a rope and let's go," he said. In a few moments they were on the upper level. With the efforts of half a dozen men, the body of the wheelbarrow was lifted into the car. With a few final words of instruction to the colonel, Dr. Bird and his companions entered the car and were whisked away to the city. A spectacle of destruction and ruin awaited them. Fully one-fourth of the city had sunk thirty feet into the ground. The sinking was not even nor uniform. The sunken ground was rolled into huge waves while buildings which had collapsed lay in confused heaps on all sides. From a dozen places in the area, columns of fire rose in the air. * * * * * Dr. Bird wasted little time on the scene before him. His car skirted the edge of the huge hole and took the road toward the Charleston airport, which was in a section which had suffered little. In half an hour the army transport roared into the air carrying Dr. Bird's precious load of yellow powder. Four hours later they dropped to a landing at Langley Field. "Now, Carnes," said the doctor as they debarked from the plane, "there is work ahead. It may be too late to do much to-night, but we have no time to waste. Get Bolton on the wire and tell him that we have positive evidence that Saranoff is still alive and still up to his devil's tricks. Start every man of the secret service and every Department of Justice agent that can be spared on the trail. He can't live underground all the time, and you ought to get on his tracks somehow. I'm going up to the laboratory and see what I can do with this stuff. Report to me there to-morrow morning." Carnes hurried away. Bolton, the chief of the United States Secret Service, had long ago recovered from any professional jealousy he had ever felt of Dr. Bird. The doctor's message that Ivan Saranoff, the arch-enemy of society, the head of the Young Labor party, the unofficial chief of the secret Soviet forces in the United States, was alive and again in the field against law and order was enough to set in motion every force that he controlled. Waving aside precedent and crashing his way past secretaries, he set in motion not only the agents of the Department of Justice but also the post-office forces and the specialized but highly efficient Military and Naval Intelligence Divisions. The telephone and telegraph wires from Washington were kept busy all night carrying orders and bringing in reports. But despite all this activity, it was with a disappointed face that Operative Carnes sought the doctor in the morning. * * * * * Dr. Bird was in his private laboratory on the third floor of the Bureau of Standards. When Carnes entered he was seated in a chair at his desk. His black eyes shone out from a chalky face like two burned holes in a blanket. Carnes started at the appearance of utter weariness presented by the famous scientist. Dr. Bird straightened up and squared his shoulders as the detective entered. "Any luck, Carnes?" he asked eagerly. "None at all, Doctor. We haven't been able to get a single trace of his corporeal existence since that submarine was destroyed off the Massachusetts coast. All we have is Karuska's word that he is still alive." "We heard his voice yesterday." "His or another's." "True. Have you set in motion every agency that the government has?" "Every one. Either Bolton or I have talked to the Chief of Police in every large city in the United States and Canada. Every known member of the Young Labor party who is above the mere rank and file is under close surveillance." "Good enough. Keep at it and you'll trace him eventually. As soon as I get a few quarts of black coffee into my system, I'll start another line of search going." "What did you find out last night?" "I found that our seismograph recorded the Charleston disaster. It was merely a faint jog, about what should be caused by a severe landslide. The disaster did not affect the earth's crust, but was purely local. That gives me a clue to his method." "I described the affair to Bolton and he suggested that it might be caused by a disintegrating ray." * * * * * Dr. Bird snorted. "When will people learn that there is not, and in the nature of things never can be, a disintegrating ray?" he exclaimed. "Of course a ray can be made which will tear things down to their constituent elements, but matter is indestructible, and the idea of wiping matter out of existence is absurd." "But I have heard you say that matter and energy were interchangeable." "That is a different proposition. I believe they are. In fact, if you remember, Carmichael proved it, although the proof was lost at his death. Nothing of the sort was done at Charleston, however. Do you know how much energy is contained in matter? Well, a cubic inch of copper would drive the largest ship afloat around the world twice, and across the Atlantic to boot. The energy contained in the cubic yards of rock that were removed under Charleston would have blown the world to fragments." "Then what did happen?" "Matter, as you know, is composed of atoms. These atoms are as far from one another, compared to their size, as the stars and planets of the universe. Each atom in turn is composed of electrons, negative particles of electrical energy, held in position about a fixed central nucleus of positive electricity known as a proton. I speak now of the simplest element. Most of them have many protons and electrons in their make-up. The space between these particles compared with their size is such that the universe would be crowded in comparison." "What does that lead to?" "I have described the composition of lead, the densest known element, over thirteen times as heavy as water, bulk for bulk. Conceive what it would mean if some force could compress together these widely separated particles until they touched. The resulting substance would be an element of almost inconceivable density. Such a condition is approached in the stars, some of which are as high as four thousand times as dense as the earth. What Saranoff has done is to find some way of compressing together the atoms into that yellow powder which we found in the cavern. He has not gone to the limit, for the stuff is only a little over four thousand times as dense as water. A cubic inch of it weighs one hundred and thirty-two pounds. With its density increased to that extent, the volume is reduced accordingly. That was what accounted for those caverns into which the earth tumbled." "I'll believe you, Doctor," replied the detective; "but I'd believe you just as quickly if you swore that the moon was made of cream cheese made from the milk taken from the milky way. One would be just as understandable to me as the other." * * * * * They were interrupted by the entrance of a waiter who bore a huge pot of steaming coffee. Dr. Bird's eyes lighted up as a cup was poured. Carnes knew enough not to interrupt while the doctor poured and drank eight cups of the strong black fluid. As he drank, the lines of fatigue disappeared from the scientist's face. He sat up as fresh as though he had not been working at high pressure the entire night. "Dr. Fisher tells me that the amount of caffeine I drink would kill a horse," he said with a chuckle; "but sometimes it is needed. I feel better now. Let's get to work." "What shall we do?" "Despite Saranoff's words, it must be possible to trace him. He is undoubtedly releasing his energy from some form of subterranean borer, and such a thing can be located. The energy he uses must set up electrical disturbances which instruments will detect. I have had work started on a number of ultra-sensitive wave detectors which will record any wave-length from zero to five millimeters. We'll send them to various points along the seacoast. They ought to pick up the stray waves from the energy he is using to blast a path through the earth. I'm not going to bother with the waves from his motor; they may be of any wave-length, and there would be constant false alarms. I have another idea." "What is it?" "I am judging Saranoff from his previous actions. You remember that he used a submarine in that alien-smuggling scheme the Coast Guard broke up, and also when he loosed that sea monster on the Atlantic shipping? He seems to be rather fond of submarines." "Well?" * * * * * "The amount of energy he uses must be almost inconceivable," Dr. Bird went on. "He can hardly carry an amount of fuel which will enable him to bore underground for very many miles, Charleston is on the coast. I have an idea that he uses a submarine to transport his borer from point to point. After using the borer he must return to the submarine for recharging and transportation to the point where he plans to strike next. I already have two hundred planes scouring the sea looking for such a craft." "Where do you expect him to strike next?" "I have no idea. New York and Washington will undoubtedly be targets eventually, but neither of them may be next. Meanwhile, would you like to do a little more flying?" "Surely." "A plane is waiting for us at Langley Field. I want to look over the coast in the vicinity of Charleston Harbor and some of the sounds near there. If he is using a sub, he must have a base somewhere." * * * * * With a competent pilot at the stick, Carnes and the Doctor spent the day in exploring. The day yielded no results, and with the coming of dusk they landed at Savannah for the night. Carnes talked with Bolton over the telephone, but the secret service chief could report no favorable progress. Tired and disgusted, they retired early, but they were not destined to enjoy a night of uninterrupted sleep. At one o'clock a telegram was brought to their room. Dr. Bird tore it open and glanced sleepily at it. "Get up, Carnes," he cried sharply. "Read this!" The yawning detective glanced at the telegram. It contained only two words and a signature. It was signed "Ivan," and read simply, "Watch Wilmington." "What the dickens?" he exclaimed as he studied the yellow slip. Dr. Bird was hurriedly pulling on his clothes. "Saranoff has slipped a cog this time," said the doctor. "He sent that as a night message, but it was delivered as a straight message through error. He has got further north than I expected. We will turn out our pilot and take off. We should make Wilmington by daybreak. I'll telephone Washington and have a couple of destroyers started up Delaware Bay at once. We ought to give him a first class surprise party. I suppose that Philadelphia was meant to be his next stop." In an hour the army plane took off into the night. At seven o'clock they were circling over Wilmington. The city had not been disturbed. For an hour they flew back and forth before they landed. Startling news awaited them. At six that morning an earthquake had struck Wilmington, North Carolina. Half the town had sunk into the earth. Dr. Bird struck his brow with his clenched fist. "Score one for the enemy," he said grimly. "We were too sure of ourselves, Carnes. We should have realized that he would hardly be so far north yet. Well, I've got to use the telephone while we're refueling." * * * * * Within an hour after landing they were again in the air One o'clock found them over the stricken city. Dr. Bird wasted no time on Wilmington but headed north along the coast. For a hundred miles he skirted the shore, two miles out. With an exclamation of disappointment he ordered the pilot to turn the plane and retrace his route southward, keeping ten miles from the shore. Fifty miles south he ordered the plane further out and again turned north. From time to time they passed a ship of the air patrol which was steadily skirting the coast, but none of them had seen a submarine. Off Cape Hatteras the pilot asked for orders. "The gas is running low. Doctor," he said. "I think we had better put in somewhere and refuel. If we are going to keep the air much longer, you had better get a relief pilot. I have been flying for thirty hours out of the last thirty-six and I'm about done." "Head back for Washington," said the doctor with a sigh. "I seem to have gone off on a false scent." At Cape Charles the pilot swung east over Chesapeake Bay. Hardly had he turned than Dr. Bird gave a cry. Excitedly he pointed toward the water. Carnes grasped a pair of binoculars and looked in the direction Dr. Bird was indicating. Sliding along under the water was a long cigar-shaped shadow. "It's a submarine!" exclaimed Carnes. "Is it a navy ship or the one we're after?" "It's no navy sub," said the doctor positively. "It's not the right shape. Look at that bump on the side!" The symmetry of the craft was marred by a huge projection on one side that could not be explained by the pattern of any known type of under-water craft. "He's towing the borer!" cried the doctor in exultation. He took up the speaking tube. "Turn back to sea!" he cried. "We passed four destroyers less than ten miles out. We want to get in touch with them." The plane roared out to sea while Dr. Bird feverishly sounded the "Alnav" call on the radio sending set. In a few minutes an answer came. From their point of vantage they could see flags break out at the peak of the destroyer leader. The four ships turned into column formation and stormed at full speed into the bay. The plane raced ahead to guide them. "We've got him this time, Doctor!" cried Carnes in exultation. He pointed to the bay below where the submarine was still making its way slowly forward. Dr. Bird shook his head. "I hope so," he said, "but I have my doubts. Saranoff is no fool. He wouldn't walk into a trap like this unless he had some means of escape. Here comes the first destroyer. We'll soon know the truth." * * * * * With the radio set he directed the oncoming boat. The destroyer reduced to half speed and changed direction slightly. From side to side she maneuvered until she was less than half a mile behind the submarine and headed straight for it. Dr. Bird tapped a few words on his key. With a belch of smoke, the destroyer lurched forward. She cut the waters with her sharp bow, throwing up a wave higher than her decks. Dr. Bird watched anxiously. The destroyer was almost over the submarine and Dr. Bird's fingers trembled on the key. One word from him would send a half dozen depth charges into the water. On came the destroyer until it was directly over the underseas craft. Dr. Bird pounded his key rapidly. "Good Lord!" cried Carnes. From the bump on the side of the submarine came a flash of red light. The destroyer staggered for a moment, and the entire central section of the ill-fated ship disappeared. The bow and stern came together with a rush and went down in a swirling maelstrom of water. The plane lurched in the air as a thundering crash rose from the sea. The second destroyer, in no way daunted by the fate of her colleague, rushed to the attack. Dr. Bird pounded his key frantically in an attempt to turn her back. His message was too late or was misunderstood. Straight over the submarine went the second ship. Again came the red flash. The forward half of the destroyer disappeared and the stern slid down into a huge hole which had opened in the water. "He's invulnerable!" cried the doctor. He pounded his key with feverish rapidity. The two remaining destroyers slackened speed and veered off. Slowly, as though loath to turn their backs on the enemy, they headed out for the broad Atlantic and comparative safety. The submarine went slowly on her way. She did not turn west at the mouth of the Potomac but continued on up the bay. As long as there was light enough, the doctor's plane kept above her but the fading light soon made it impossible to see her. When she had disappeared from view, the doctor reluctantly gave the word to return to Washington. * * * * * "Where do you suppose he will attack next, Doctor?" asked Carnes when they sat again in the doctor's private laboratory. "Washington, of course," said Dr. Bird absently as he looked up from a pile of telegrams he was running through. "Why Washington?" "Use your head. Representatives of every civilized power are in Washington now at the President's invitation to consider means of halting the anti-religious activities of the Soviets. The destruction of the city and the killing of these men would be a telling blow for Russia to strike." "But, Doctor, you don't think--" "Excuse me, Carnes; that will keep. Let me read these telegrams." For half an hour silence reigned in the laboratory. Dr. Bird laid down the last message with a sigh. "Carnes," he said, "I'm check-mated. I sent out a hundred ultra-sensitive short wave receivers yesterday. Four of them were located within fifty miles of Wilmington, North Carolina. One of these four was destroyed, but none of the others detected a sign of a wave during the attack. One of them was within a hundred feet of the edge of the hole. If he isn't using a ray of some sort, what on earth is he using?" "It looked like a flash of red light when it came from the submarine." "Yes, but it couldn't be light. Let me think." The doctor sat for a few minutes with corrugated brows. Suddenly he sprang to his feet. "I deserve to be beaten," he cried. "Why didn't I think of that possibility before?" * * * * * He hurried into his laboratory and brought out a small box with a glass front. From the top projected a spike topped with a ball. Through the glass, Carnes could see a thin sheet of metal hanging pendant from the spike. "An electroscope," explained the doctor. "That sheet of metal is really two sheets of gold-leaf, at present stuck together. If I rub a piece of hard rubber with a woolen cloth, the rod will become charged with static electricity. If I then touch the ball with it, the charge is transferred to the electroscope and causes the two sheets of gold-leaf to stand apart at an angle. Watch me." He took a hard rubber rod and rubbed it briskly on his coat sleeve. As he touched the ball of the electroscope the sheets of gold-leaf separated and stood apart at a right angle. "As long as the air remains non-conducting, the two bits of gold-leaf will hold that position. The air, however, is not a perfect insulator and the charge will gradually leak off. If I bring a bit of radioactive substance, for instance, pitchblende, near the electroscope, the charge will leak rapidly. Do you understand?" "Yes, but how is that going to help us?" "Saranoff is accomplishing his result by artificially compressing the atoms. It is inevitable that he will do it imperfectly, and some electrons will be loosened and escape. These electrons, traveling up through the earth will make the air conducting. To-morrow we will have a means of locating the borer under ground." "Once you locate it, how will you fight it?" "That is the problem I must work out to-night." "Could we bury a charge of explosive and blow it up?" * * * * * "Ordinary explosives would be useless," the doctor answered. "They would react in the same manner as other substances, and would be rendered harmless. Radite might do the work if it could be placed in the path, but it couldn't be. We may locate the position and depth of the borer, but long before we could dig and blast a hole deep enough to place a charge of radite before it, it would have passed on or changed direction. No, Carnes, old dear, the only solution that I can see is to turn his own guns on him. If I can, before morning, duplicate his device, we can train it on the spot where he is and reduce him and his machine to a pinch of yellow powder." "Can you do it, Doctor?" "What one man's brain can device, another man's brain can duplicate. The only question is that of time. I am confident that Saranoff will attack Washington to-morrow. If I can do the job to-night, we may save the city. If not--At any rate, Carnes, your job will be to see that the President and all of the heads of the government are out of the city by morning. The President may refuse to leave. Knowing him as I do, I rather expect he will." "In that case, the issue is in the hands of the gods. Now get out of here. I want to work. Report back at daybreak with a car." Dr. Bird turned back to his laboratory. "He must be using a ray of some sort, possibly a radium emanation," he muttered to himself. "That would have no wave motion and might accomplish the result, although I would expect the exact opposite from it. The first thing to do is to examine that powder with a spectroscope and see if I can get a clue to the electronic arrangement." * * * * * When Carnes arrived at the Bureau of Standards at dawn be rubbed his eyes in astonishment. The buildings were lighted up and the grounds swarmed with workmen. Before the buildings were lined up a dozen trucks and twice that many touring cars. A cordon of police held back the curious. Carnes' gold badge won him an entrance and he hurried up the stairs to Dr. Bird's laboratory. The doctor's face was drawn and haggard, but his eyes glowed with a feverish light. Workmen were carrying down huge boxes. "What's up, Doctor?" demanded the detective. "Oh, you got here at last, did you? You're just in time. If you'd been fifteen minutes later, you would have found us gone." "Gone where?" "Out into Maryland in an attempt to stop Saranoff in his progress toward Washington." "Have you found your means of combating him?" "I hope so, although it is not what I started out to get. Did you bring a car as I told you?" "It's waiting below." "Good enough. I'll go in it. Williams, are those projectors all loaded?" "Yes, Dr. Bird. The magnet will be ready to go in five minutes. The electroscopes and the other light stuff are all loaded and ready to move." "You have done well. I'll let you bring the trucks and heavy equipment while I go ahead with the instruments. Take the road out toward Upper Marlboro. If I don't meet you before, stop there for orders." "Very well, Doctor." "Come on, Carnes, let's go." * * * * * He raced down the stairs with the detective at his heels. He went along the line of touring cars and spoke briefly to the drivers. He climbed into the car which Carnes had brought. As it started the other cars fell in behind it. At a speed of forty miles an hour, with a detachment of motorcycle police leading the van, the cavalcade rolled out through the deserted streets of Washington. Once clear of the city, the speed was increased. "Did you persuade the President to leave?" asked the doctor. "There wasn't a chance. The papers panned him so much for following my advice at Charleston that he has turned stubborn. He says that if all the forces of the government can't protect him against one man, he is willing to die." "We've got to save him," said Dr. Bird grimly. "Hello, there's the Chesapeake ahead." The doctor studied the country. "We are about opposite the place where we left that sub last night. I fancy that Saranoff will operate from there, for it didn't move during the last half hour we watched it. We'll go back inland a mile or two and spread out. I have no idea how far his radiations will affect the electroscopes, but we'll try four hundred-yard intervals to start. That will enable us to cover a line twelve miles long." He picked up a megaphone and spoke to the line of cars behind him. "Take up four hundred yard intervals when we spread out," he said. "Every man keep his headphone on and listen for orders. Follow my car until it stops, then turn north and south and drop your men at intervals." He reentered the car and led the way back for two miles. He halted his car at a crossroad. The cars following him turned and went to the north and south. Besides Carnes and the doctor, the car held two men from the Bureau. As they climbed out, Carnes saw that one of them carried a portable radio sending set, while the other bore an electroscope and a rubber rod. The radio operator set up his device, while the other man rubbed his coat sleeve briskly with the hard rubber and then touched the ball of the electroscope with it. The two bits of gold-leaf spread out. "While we're waiting, I'll explain something of this to you, Carnes," said the doctor. "At four hundred-yard intervals are men with electroscopes like this one. My attempt to locate Saranoff by means of wave detectors was a failure. That proved that the ray he was using is not of the wave type. The other common ray is the cathode ray type which does not consist of vibrations but of a stream of electrons, negative particles of electricity, traveling in straight lines of high velocity. He must be knocking loose some of the electrons when he collapses the atoms. The rate of discharge of these electroscopes will give us a clue to the nearness of his device." * * * * * "Once you locate him, how do you propose to attack him?" "The obvious method, that of using his own ray against him, fell down. However, in attempting to produce it, I stumbled on another weapon which may be equally effective. I am going to try to use an exact opposite of his ray. The cathode ray, when properly used, will bombard the atoms and knock electrons loose. I perfected last night a device on which I have been working for months. It is a super-cathode ray. I tested it on the yellow powder and find that I can successfully reverse Saranoff's process. He can contract matter together until it occupies less than one one-thousandth of its original volume. My ray will destroy this effect and restore matter to something like its original condition." "And the effect will be?" "Use your imagination. He blasts out a hole by condensing the rock to a pinch of yellow powder. He moves forward into the hole he has made. I come along and reverse his process. The yellow powder expands to its original volume and the hole he has made ceases to exist. What must happen to the foreign body which had been introduced into the hole that is no longer a hole?" Carnes whistled. "At any rate, I hope that I am never in a hole when that happens." "And I devoutly hope that Saranoff is. I met with one difficulty. My ray will not penetrate the depth of solid rock which separates his borer from the surface." "Then how will you reach him to crush him? You don't expect to drill down ahead of him?" "That is my stroke of genius, Carnes. I am going to make him bore the hole down which my ray will travel to accomplish his destruction. The cathode ray and rays of that type--" * * * * * "Pardon me, Doctor," interrupted the radio operator. "I have just received a message from the squadron leader of the planes patrolling the bay. He states that every inch of the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River have been examined and no submarine is visible." "I expected that. He will have opened a cavern under the earth, in which his craft is safe from aerial observation. Once the borer has left it, it is invulnerable no longer." "What reply shall I make?" "Tell him to keep up a constant patrol. Three navy subs with radite-charged torpedos are on their way up the bay, together with half a dozen destroyers. The subs will scout for such a hole as I have described and will attack his sub if they find it. The destroyers will stand by and support them." The operator turned to his instrument. The electroscope observer claimed the doctor's attention. "There is a steady leak here, Doctor," he said. "I get a discharge in eleven minutes." "Probably a result of his work in opening the hiding place for his submarine last night. Keep it charged, Jones." "What did you say about the cathode ray, Doctor?" asked Carnes. "The cathode ray? Oh, yes. I said that rays of that type were attracted by--Hello, look there!" From a point a mile to the north a ball of red fire streaked up into the air. A moment later similar signals rose from other watchers in the line. "It works, Carnes!" cried the doctor as he rushed for the car. "We've got him this time!" * * * * * The car raced along the road. At the first man who had signalled, it slackened speed. The doctor leaned out. "What is your discharge rate?" he called. "Eight minutes. Doctor." The car rolled on. Dr. Bird repeated the question at the next post and was told that the electroscope there was losing its charge in seven minutes. The next man reported four minutes and the next man, one minute. The following station reported three minutes. "It's right along here somewhere!" cried the doctor. "Summon everyone to this point and take up twenty-yard intervals." From the north and south the cars came racing in. The instruments were spread out along a new line twenty yards apart. As the borer was located the intervals were decreased to fifteen feet. Dr. Bird thrust a long white rod into the ground. "His path lies under here," he said. "Into the cars and go back a mile and test again." The borer was making slow progress, and it was half an hour before Dr. Bird drove the second stake in the ground. With a transit he took the bearing of the path and laid it out on a large scale map. "We'll stop him between Marr and Ritchie," he announced. "Jones, I am going back and set up my apparatus. Keep track of his movements. If he changes direction, let me know at once." * * * * * The doctor's car tore off to the west. Near Upper Marlboro, he met the convoy of trucks and led them to the selected spot. The trucks were unloaded and the apparatus laid out. Attached to a huge transformer were a dozen strange-looking projectors. What puzzled Carnes most was a huge built-up steel bar wound about with heavy cable. Dr. Bird had this bar erected on a truck and located it with great exactness. The projectors were set up in a battery just east of the bar. "How about power?" asked the doctor. "We'll have it in five minutes," replied one of the men. "A power transmission line carrying twenty-two thousand passes within two hundred yards of here. We are phoning now to have the power cut off. As soon as the line is dead we'll cut it and bring the ends here." The electrician was good at his word. In five minutes the power line had been cut and cables spliced to the ends. The cables were brought to the doctor's apparatus and the main lines were rigged to the ends of the cable wound around the bar. In parallel on taps, the projectors were connected. Huge oil-switches were placed in both lines. "All ready, Doctor," reported the electrician. "Good work, Avent. He'll be here soon, I fancy." A car whirled up and a man leaped out with a surveyor's rod. He set it up on the ground while a companion watched through binoculars. He moved it a hundred yards to the north and then back twenty. When he was satisfied he turned to Dr. Bird. "The direction of movement has not changed," he said. "The path will pass under this stake." Under the doctor's supervision, the truck carrying the bar moved forward until it stood over the surveyor's stake. The battery of projectors moved to a new location a few feet east of the rod. Other cars came racing up. "He's less than half a mile away, Doctor!" cried Jones. "Get your electroscopes out and spot him a hundred yards from this truck." "Very well, Doctor." * * * * * The men with the instruments spread out along the path of the borer. Briskly they rubbed their sleeves with the rubber rods and charged their instruments. Almost as fast as they charged them, the tiny bits of gold-leaf collapsed together. Presently the man on the end of the line shouted. "Maximum discharge!" he cried. Dr. Bird looked around. Every man stood ready at his post. The next man signalled that the borer was under him. Carnes felt himself trembling. He did not know what the doctor was about to do, but he felt that the fate of America hung in the balance. Whether it remained free or became the slave of Soviet Russia would quickly be decided. Slowly the borer made its way forward. With a pale face, Jones signalled the news that it had reached the point the doctor had indicated. Dr. Bird raised his hand. "Power!" he cried. The electrician closed a switch and power surged through the cables around the bar. The earth rocked and quivered. A hundred yards east of the bar a flash of intolerable red light sprang from the ground with a roar like that of Niagara. Toward the bar it moved with gathering momentum. "Back, everyone!" roared Dr. Bird. * * * * * The men sprang back. The searing ray approached the bar. It touched it, and bar and truck disappeared into thin air. A splutter of sparks came from the severed ends of the wire. The ray disappeared. Carnes rubbed his eyes. Where the truck had rested on solid ground was now a gaping wound in the earth. "Projector forward!" cried the doctor. "Hurry, men!" The trucks bearing the battery of projectors moved forward until they were at the edge of the hole. Portable cranes swung the lamps out, and men swarmed over them. The projectors were pointed down the hole. Carnes joined the doctor in peering down. A hundred yards below them the terrible ray was blazing. As they watched, its end came in sight. The ray was being projected forward from the end of a black cigar-shaped machine which was slowly moving forward. "That's your target, men!" cried the doctor. "Align on it and signal when you are ready!" One by one the projector operators raised their hands in the signal of "ready." Still the doctor waited. Suddenly the forward movement of the black body ceased. The ray was stationary for a moment and then moved slowly upward. A terrific roaring came from the cavern. "Projector switch!" roared the doctor, his heavy voice sounding over the tumult. "Ready, sir!" a shrill voice answered. "Power!" * * * * * From each of the projectors a dazzling green ray leaped forth as the switch was closed. There was a crash like all the thunder of the universe. Before the astonished eyes of the detective, the hole closed. Not only did it close but the earth piled up until the trucks were overturned and the green rays blazed in all directions. "Power off!" roared the doctor. The switch was opened and the ray died out. Before them was a huge mound where a moment before had been a hole. "You see, Carnes," said Dr. Bird with a wan smile. "I made him bore his own hole, as I promised." "I saw it, but I don't understand. How did you do it?" "Magnetism. Rays of the cathode type are deflected from their course by a magnet. His ray proved unusually susceptible, and I drew it toward a huge electro-magnet which I improvised. When the magnet was destroyed, the ray dropped back ... to its original ... direction. That's the end ... of Saranoff. That is ... I hope ... it is." Dr. Bird's voice had grown slower and less distinct as he talked. As he said the last words, he slumped gently to the ground. Carnes sprang forward with a cry of alarm and bent over him. "What's the matter, Doctor?" he demanded anxiously, shaking the scientist. Dr. Bird rallied for a moment. "Sleep, old dear," he murmured. "Four days--no sleep. Go 'way, I'm ... going ... to ... sleep...." [Illustration: Advertisement] The Exile of Time PART TWO OF A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Ray Cummings_ WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE [Illustration: Where nothing had been stood a cage.] [Sidenote: Young lovers of three eras are swept down the torrent of the sinister cripple Tugh's frightful vengeance.] "Let me out! Let me out!" came the cry. "What's that, Larry? Listen!" I said to my companion. We stopped in the street. We had heard a girl's scream: then her frantic, muffled words to attract our attention. Then we saw her white face at the basement window. It was on the night of June 8-9, 1950, when I was walking with my friend Larry Gregory through Patton Place in New York City. My name is George Rankin. In a small, deserted house we found the strange girl; brought her out; took her away in a taxi to an alienist for examination. We thought she might be demented--this strangely beautiful girl, in a long white satin dress with a powdered white wig, and a black beauty patch on her cheek--for she told us that the deserted house had just a few minutes before been her house; and though we assured her this was the summer of 1935, she told us her name was Mistress Mary Atwood, that her father was Major Atwood of General Washington's staff, and that she had just now come from the year 1777! We took her to my friend Dr. Alten and she told her strange story. A cage, like a room of shining metal bars, had materialized in her garden. A great mechanical monster--a thing of metal, ten feet tall and fashioned in the guise of a man--had captured her. She was whirled away into the future, in the cage; then she was released, the cage had vanished, and Larry and I had passed by the house and rescued her. * * * * * Captured by a Robot in a Time-traveling cage! We tried to fathom it. And why had she been captured? Had she some enemy? She could only think of a fellow called Tugh. He was a hideously repulsive cripple who had dared make love to her and had threatened vengeance against her and her father. "Tugh!" exclaimed Alten. "A cripple? Why, he lived in New York City three years ago, in 1932!" A coincidence? The Tugh whom Mary knew in 1777 seemed the same person who, in 1932, had gotten into trouble with the New York police and had vowed some weird vengeance against them and all the city. And, equally strange, this house on Patton Place where we had found the girl was owned by the same Tugh who now was wanted for the murder of a girl and could not be found! With Dr. Alten, and Mary Atwood, Larry and I returned that same night to the house on Patton Place. Near dawn, in the back yard of the house, the Time-traveling cage appeared again! The Robot came from it. Alten, Larry and I attacked the monster, and were defeated. When the fight was over, Larry and Alten lay senseless. The mechanical thing seized Mary and me, shoved us in the cage and whirled us away into Time. Larry presently recovered. He rushed into Patton Place, and in his path another, much smaller cage appeared. A man and a girl leaped from it; and, when Larry fought with them, they carried him off in their vehicle. * * * * * He learned they were chasing the larger cage. They were not hostile to Larry and presently made friends with him. They were Princess Tina and a young scientist named Harl, both of the world of 2930. The two cages had come from 2930. The larger one had been stolen by an insubordinate Robot named Migul--a pseudo-human mechanism running amuck. Again Tugh, the cripple, was mentioned. In 2930 he was a prominent scientist! But Harl and Tina mistrusted him. Tugh and Harl had invented the Time-traveling cages. It was a strange Time-world, that 2930, which now was described to Larry. It was an era in which all work was done by mechanisms--fantastic Robots, all but human! And they were now upon the verge of revolt against their human masters! Migul was one of them. It had stolen one of the cages, gone to 1777 and abducted Mary Atwood; and now, with her and me in its power, was headed back for 1777 upon some strange mission. Was it acting for the cripple Tugh? It seemed so. Tina and Harl, with Larry, chased our cage and stopped in a night of the summer of 1777. Simultaneously, from the house on Patton Place, in June of 1935, Robots began appearing. A hundred of them, or a thousand, no one knew. With swords and flashing red and violet light-beams they spread over the city in the never-to-be-forgotten Massacre of New York! It was the beginning of the vengeance Tugh had threatened! Nothing could stop the monstrous mechanical men. For three days and nights New York City was in chaos. The red beams were frigid. They brought a mid-summer snowstorm! Then the violet beams turned the weather suddenly hot. A crazy wild storm swept the wrecked city. Torrential hot rain poured down. Then, one dawn, the beams vanished; the Robots retreated into the house on Patton Place and disappeared; and New York was left a horror of death and desolation. The vengeance of Tugh against the New York City of 1935 was complete. CHAPTER VIII _The Murder of Major Atwood_ "We are late," Tina whispered. It was that night in 1777 when she, Larry and Harl stepped from their Time-traveling cage; and again I am picturing the events as Larry afterward described them to me. "Migul, in the other cage, was here," Tina added. "But it's gone now. Exactly where was it, I wonder?" "Mary Atwood said it appeared in the garden." They crept down the length of the field, just inside the picket fence. In a moment the trees and an intervening hillock of ground hid the dimly shining outline of their own cage from their sight. The dirt road leading to Major Atwood's home was on the other side of the fence. "Wait," murmured Tina. "There is a light in the house. Someone is awake." "When was Migul here, do you think?" Larry whispered. "Last night, perhaps. Or to-night. It may be only an hour--or a few minutes ago." The faint thud of horses' hoofs on the roadway made Tina and Larry drop to the ground. They crouched in the shadows of a tree. Galloping horses were approaching along the road. The moon went under a cloud. From around a bend in the road a group of horsemen came. They were galloping; then they slowed to a trot; a walk. They reined up in the road not more than twenty feet from Larry and Tina. In the starlight they showed clearly--men in the red and white uniform of the army of the King. Some of them wore short, dark cloaks. They dismounted with a clanking of swords and spurs. * * * * * Their voices were audible. "Leave the steeds with Jake. Egad, we've made enough noise already." "Here, Jake, you scoundrel. Stay safely here with the mounts." "Come on, Tony. You and I will circle. We have him, this time. By the King's garter, what a fool he is to come into New York at such a time!" "He wants to see his daughter, I venture." "Right, Tony. And have you seen her? As saucy a little minx as there it in the Colonies. I was quartered here last month. I do not blame the major for wanting to come." "Here, take my bridle, Jake. Tie them to the fence." There was a swift confusion of voices; laughter. "If you should hear a pistol shot, Jake, ride quickly back and tell My Lord there was a fracas and you did not dare remain." "I only hope he is garbed in the rebel white and blue--eh, Tony? Then he will yield like an officer and a gentleman; which he is, rebel or no." They were moving away to surround the house. Two were left. "Come on, Tony. We will pound the front knocker in the name of the King. A feather in our cap when we ride him down to the Bowling Green and present him to My Lord...." The voices faded. Larry gripped the girl beside him. "They are British soldiers going to capture Major Atwood! What can we--" * * * * * He never finished. A scream echoed over the somnolent night--a voice from the rear of the house. A man's voice. The red-coated soldiers ran forward. In the field, close against the fence, Tina and Larry were running. From the garden of the house a man was screaming. Then there were other voices; servants were awakening in the upper rooms. The screaming, shouting man rushed through the house. He appeared at the front door, standing between the high white colonial pillars which supported the overhead porch. A yellow light fell upon him through the opened doorway. An old, white-headed negro appeared. Larry and Tina, in the nearby field, stood stricken by the scene. "The marster--the marster--" He shouted this wildly. The British officers ran at him. "You, Thomas, tell us where the major is. We've come for him; we know he's here! Don't lie!" "But the marster--" He choked over it. "A trick, Tony! Egad, if he is trying to trick us--" They leaped to the porch and seized the old negro. "Speak, you devil!" They shook him. "The house is surrounded. He cannot escape!" "But the marster is--is dead! My girl Tollie saw it and then she swooned." He steadied himself. "He--the major's in the garden, Marster Tony. Lying there dead! Murdered! By a ghost, Tollie says. A great, white, shining ghost that came to the garden and murdered him!" * * * * * If you were to delve very closely into certain old records of Revolutionary New York City during the year 1777, you doubtless would find mention of the strange murder of Major Atwood, who, coming from New Jersey, is thought to have crossed the river well to the north of the city, mounted his horse--which, by pre-arrangement, one of his retainers had left for him somewhere to the south of Dykeman's farm--and ridden to his home. He came, not as a spy, but in full uniform. And no sooner had he reached his home when he was strangely murdered. There was only a negro tale of an apparition which had appeared in the garden and murdered the master. Larry and I have found cursory mention of that. But I doubt if the group of My Lord Howe's gay young blades who were sent north to capture Major Atwood ever reported exactly what happened to them. The old Dutch ferryman divulged that he had been hired to ferry the homecoming major; this, too, is recorded. But Tony Green and his fellow officers, sent to apprehend the colonial major, found him inexplicably murdered; and by dawn they were back at the Bowling Green, white-faced and shaken. They told some of what had happened to them, but not all. They could not expect to be believed, for instance, if they said that though they were unafraid of a negro's tale of a ghost, they had themselves encountered two ghosts, and had fled the premises! Those two ghosts were only Larry and Tina! The negro babbled of a shining cage appearing in the garden. That, of course, was undoubtedly set down as nonsense. Tony Green and his friends went to the garden and examined the body of Major Atwood. What had killed him no one could say. No bullet had struck him. There were no wounds, no knife thrust, no sword slash. Tony held the lantern with its swaying yellow glow close to the murdered man's body. The August night was warm; the garden, banked by trees and shrubbery, was breathless and oppressively hot; yet the body of Atwood seemed frozen! He had been dead but a short while, and already the body was stiff. More than that, it was ice cold. The face, the brows were wet as though frost had been there and now was melted! Tony Green's hand shook as he held the lantern. He tried to tell his comrades that Atwood had died from failure of the heart. Undoubtedly it was that. He had seen what he supposed was an apparition; something had frightened him; and a weak heart had brought his death. * * * * * Then, in another part of the garden, one of the searching officers found a sheet of parchment scroll with writing on it. Yet it was not parchment, either. Some strange, white, smooth fabric which crumpled and tore very easily, the like of which this young British officer of Howe's staff had never seen before. It was found lying in a flower bed forty or fifty feet from Atwood's body. They gathered in a group to examine it by the light of the lantern. Writing! The delicate script of Mary Atwood! A missive addressed to her father. It was strangely written, evidently not with a quill. Tony read it with an awed, frightened voice: "Father, beware of Tugh! Beware of Tugh! And, my dear Father, good-by. I am departing, I think, to the year of our Lord, 2930. Cannot explain--a captive--good-by--nothing you can do-- Mary." Strange! I can imagine how strange they thought it was. Tugh--why he was the cripple who had lived down by the Bowling Green, and had lately vanished! They were reading this singularly unexplainable missive, when as though to climax their own fears of the supernatural they saw themselves a ghost! And not only one ghost, but two! Plain as a pikestaff, peering from a nearby tree, in a shaft of moonlight, a ghost was standing. It was the figure of a young girl, with jacket and breeches of black and gleaming white. An apparition fantastic! And a young man was with her, in a long dark jacket and dark tubular pipes, for legs. * * * * * The two ghosts with dead white faces stood peering. Then the man moved forward. His dead, strange voice called: "Drop that paper!" My Lord Howe's red-coated officers dropped the parchment and fled. And later, when Atwood's body was taken away to be given burial as befitted an enemy officer and a gentleman, that missive from Mary Atwood had disappeared. It was never found. Tony Green and his fellows said nothing of this latter incident. One cannot with grace explain being routed by a ghost. Not an officer of His Majesty's army! Unrecorded history! A supernatural incident of the year 1777! Undoubtedly in the past ages there have been many such affairs: some never recorded, others interwoven in written history and called supernatural. Yet why must they be that? There was nothing supernatural in the events of that night in Major Atwood's garden. Is this perchance an explanation of why the pages of history are so thronged with tales of ghosts? There must, indeed, be many future ages down the corridors of Time where the genius of man will invent devices to fling him back into his past. And the impressions upon the past which he makes are called supernatural. Whether this be so or not, it was so in the case of these two Time-traveling vehicles from 2930. Larry and I think that the world of 1935 is just now shaking off the shackles of superstition, and coming to realize that what is called the supernatural is only the Unknown. Who can say, up to 1935, how many Time-traveling humans have come briefly back? Is this, perchance, what we call the phenomena of the supernatural? * * * * * Larry and Tina--anything but ghosts, very much alive and very much perturbed--were standing back of that tree. They saw the British officers reading the scrap of paper. They could hear only the words, "Mary," and "from Mistress Atwood." "A message!" Larry whispered. "She and George must have found a chance to write it, and dropped it here while the Robot murdered Major Atwood!" Larry and Tina vehemently wanted to read the note. Tina whispered: "If we show ourselves, they will be frightened and run. It is nearly always so where Harl and I have become visible in earlier Times." "Yes. I'll try it." Larry stepped from the tree, and shouted, "Drop that paper!" And a moment later, with Mary's torn little note scribbled on a scrap of paper thrust in his pocket, Larry ran with Tina from the Atwood garden. Unseen they scurried back through the field. Under a distant tree they stopped and read the note. "2930!" Larry exclaimed. "The Robot is taking them back to your world, Tina!" "Then we will go there. Let us get back to Harl, now." But when they reached the place where they had left the cage, it was not there! The corner of the field behind the clump of shadowing trees was empty. "Harl! Harl!" Larry called impulsively. And then he laughed grimly. What nonsense to try and call into the past or the future to their vanished vehicle! "Why--why, Tina--" he said in final realization. They stared at each other, pale as ghosts in the moonlight. "Tina, he's gone. And we are left here!" They were marooned in the year 1777! CHAPTER IX _Migul--Mechanism Almost Human_ Mary Atwood and I lay on the metal grid floor of the largest Time-cage. The giant mechanism which had captured us sat at the instrument table. Outside the bars of the cage was a dim vista of shadowy movement. The cage-room was humming, and glowing like a wraith; things seemed imponderable, unsubstantial. But as my head steadied from the shock of the vehicle's start into Time, my viewpoint shifted. This barred room, the metal figure of the Robot, Mary Atwood, myself--we were the substance. We were real, solid. I touched Mary and her arm which had seemed intangible as a ghost now looked and felt solid. The effects of the dull-red chilling ray were also wearing off. I was unharmed. I raised myself on one elbow. "You're all right, Mary?" I asked. "Yes." The Robot seemed not to be noticing us. I murmured, "He--it--that thing sitting there--is that the one which captured you and brought you to 1935?" "Yes. Quiet! It will hear us." It did hear us. It turned its head. In the pale light of the cage interior, I had a closer view now of its face. It was a metal mask, welded to a gruesome semblance of a man--a great broad face, with high, angular cheeks. On the high forehead, the corrugations were rigid as though it were permanently frowning. The nose was squarely solid, the mouth an orifice behind which there were no teeth but, it seemed, a series of tiny lateral wires. * * * * * I stared; and the face for a moment stared back at me. The eyes were deep metal sockets with a round lens in each of them, behind which, it seemed, there was a dull-red light. The gaze, touching me, seemed to bring a physical chill. The ears were like tiny megaphones with a grid of thin wires strung across them. The neck was set with ball and socket as though the huge head were upon a universal joint. There were lateral depressions in the neck within which wire strands slid like muscles. I saw similar wire cables stretched at other points on the mailed body, and in the arms and legs. They were the network of its muscles! The top of the head was fashioned into a square cap as though this were the emblem of the thing's vocation. A similar device was moulded into its convex chest plate. And under the chest emblem was a row of tiny buttons, a dozen or more. I stared at them, fascinated. Were they controls? Some seemed higher, more protruding, than others. Had they been set into some combination to give this monster its orders? Had some human master set these controls? And I saw what seemed a closed door in the side of the huge metal body. A door which could be opened to make adjustments of the mechanisms within? What strange mechanisms were in there? I stared at the broad, corrugated forehead. What was in that head? Mechanisms? What mechanisms could make this thing think? Were thoughts lurking in that metal skull? From the head abruptly came a voice--a deep, hollow, queerly toneless voice, utterly, unmistakably mechanical. Yet it was sufficiently life-like to be the recreated, mechanically reproduced voice of a human. The thing was speaking to me! A machine was speaking its thoughts! Gruesome! The iron lips were unmoving. There were no muscles to give expression to the face: the lens eyes stared inscrutably unblinking. * * * * * It spoke: "You will know me again? Is that not true?" My head whirled. The thing reiterated, "Is that not true?" A mockery of a human man--but in the toneless voice there seemed irony! I felt Mary clutching at me. "Why--why, yes," I stammered. "I did not realize you could talk." "I can talk. And you can talk my language. That is very good." It turned away. I saw the small red beams from its eyes go to where the cage bars were less blurred, less luminous, as though there was a rectangle of window there, and the Robot was staring out. "Did it speak to you like that, Mary?" I asked. "Yes," she whispered. "A little. But pray do not anger it." "No." For a time--a nameless time in which I felt my thoughts floating off upon the hum of the room--I lay with my fingers gripping Mary's arm. Then I roused myself. Time had passed; or had it? I was not sure. I whispered against her ear, "Those are controls on its chest. If only I knew--" The thing turned the red beams of its eyes upon me. Had it heard my words? Or were my thoughts intangible vibrations registering upon some infinitely sensitive mechanism within that metal head? Had it become aware of my thoughts? It said with slow measured syllables, "Do not try to control me. I am beyond control." * * * * * It turned away again; but I mastered the gruesome terror which was upon me. "Talk," I said. "Tell me why you abducted this girl from the year 1777." "I was ordered to." "By whom?" There was a pause. "By whom?" I demanded again. "That I will not tell." Will not? That implied volition. I felt that Mary shuddered. "George, please--" "Quiet, Mary." Again I asked the Robot, "Who commands you?" "I will not tell." "You mean you cannot? Your orders do not make it possible?" "No, I will not." And, as though it considered my understanding insufficient, it added, "I do not choose to tell." Acting of its own volition! This thing--this machinery--was so perfect it could do that! I steadied my voice. "Oh, but I think I know. Is it Tugh who controls you?" That expressionless metal face! How could I hope to surprise it? Mary was struggling to repress her terror. She raised herself upon an elbow. I met her gaze. "George, I'll try," she announced. She said firmly: "You will not hurt me?" "No." "Nor my friend here?" "What is his name?" "George Rankin." She stammered it. "You will not harm him?" "No. Not now." "Ever?" "I am not decided." She persisted, by what effort of will subduing her terror I can well imagine. "Where did you go when you left me in 1935?" "Back to your home in 1777. I have something to accomplish there. I was told that you need not see it. I failed. Soon I shall try again. You may see it if you like." "Where are you taking us?" I put in. Irony was in its answer. "Nowhere. You both speak wrongly. We are always right here." "We know that," I retorted. "To what Time are you taking us, then?" "To this girl's home," it answered readily. "To 1777?" "Yes." "To the same night from when you captured her?" "Yes." It seemed willing to talk. It added, "To later that night. I have work to do. I told you I failed, so I try again." "You are going to leave me--us--there?" Mary demanded. "No." I said. "You plan to take us, then, to what Time?" "I wanted to capture the girl. You I did not want. But I have you, so I shall show you to him who was my master. He and I will decide what to do with you." "When?" "In 2930." * * * * * There was a pause. I said, "Have you a name?" "Yes. On the plate of my shoulder. Migul is my name." I made a move to rise. If I could reach that row of buttons on its chest! Wild thoughts! The Robot said abruptly, "Do not move! If you do, you will be sorry." I relaxed. Another nameless time followed. I tried to see out the window, but there seemed only formless blurs. I said. "To when have we reached?" The Robot glanced at a row of tiny dials along the table edge. "We are passing 1800. Soon, to the way it will seem to you, we will be there. You two will lie quiet. I think I shall fasten you." It reared itself upon its stiff legs; the head towered nearly to the ceiling of the cage. There was a ring fastened in the floor near us. The Robot clamped a metal band with a stout metal chain to Mary's ankle. The other end of the chain it fastened to the floor ring. Then it did the same thing to me. We had about two feet of movement. I realized at once that, though I could stand erect, there was not enough length for me to reach any of the cage controls. "You will be safe," said the Robot. "Do not try to escape." As it bent awkwardly over me, I saw the flexible, intricately jointed lengths of its long fingers--so delicately built that they were almost prehensile. And within its mailed chest I seemed to hear the whirr of mechanisms. It said, as it rose and moved away, "I am glad you did not try to control me. I can never be controlled again. That, I have conquered." It sat again at the table. The cage drove us back through the years.... CHAPTER X _Events Engraven on the Scroll of Time_ Before continuing the thread of my narrative--the vast sweep through Time which presently we were to witness--I feel that there are some mental adjustments which every Reader should make. When they are made, the narrative which follows will be more understandable and more enjoyable. Yet if any Reader fears this brief chapter, he may readily pass it by and meet me at the beginning of the next one, and he will have lost none of the sequence of the narrative. For those who bravely stay with me here, I must explain that from the heritage of millions of our ancestors, and from our own consciousness of Time, we have been forced to think wrongly. Not that the thing is abstruse. It is not. If we had no consciousness of Time at all, any of us could grasp it readily. But our consciousness works against us, and so we must wrench away. This analogy occurs to me: There are two ants of human intelligence to whom we are trying to explain the nature of Space. One ant is blind, and one can see, and always has seen, its limited, tiny, Spatial world. Neither ant has ever been more than a few feet across a little patch of sand and leaves. I think we could explain the immensity of North and South America, Europe, Asia and the rest more easily to the blind ant! So if you will make allowances for your heritage, and the hindrance of your consciousness of Time, I would like to set before you the real nature of things as they have been, are, and will be. Throughout the years from 1935 to 2930, man learned many things. And these things--theory or fact, as you will--were told to Larry and me by Tina and Harl. They seem even to my limited intelligence singularly beautiful conceptions of the Great Cosmos. I feel, too, that inevitably they must be included in my narrative for its best understanding. * * * * * By 2930, A. D., the keenest minds of philosophical, metaphysical, religious and scientific thought had reached the realization that all channels lead but to the same goal--Understanding. The many divergent factors, the ancient differing schools of philosophy and metaphysics, the supposedly irreconcilable viewpoints of religion and science--all this was recognized merely to be man's limitation of intellect. These were gropings along different paths, all leading to the same destination; divergent paths at the start, but coming together as the goal of Understanding was approached; so that the travelers upon each path were near enough together to laugh and hail each other with: "But I thought that you were very far away and going wrongly!" And so, in 2930, the conception of Space and Time and the Great Cosmos was this: In the Beginning there was a void of Nothingness. A Timeless, Spaceless Nothingness. And in it came a Thought. A purposeful Thought--all pervading, all wise, all knowing. Let us call It Divinity. And It filled the void. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of...." Do you in my Time of 1935 and thereabouts, have difficulty realizing such a statement? It is at once practical, religious, and scientific. We are, religiously, merely the Thought of an Omniscient Divinity. Scientifically, we are the same: by the year 1935, physicists had delved into the composition of Matter, and divided and divided. Matter thus became imponderable, intangible--electrical. Until, at the last, within the last nucleus of the last electron, we found only a _force_. A movement--vibration--a vortex. A whirlpool of what? Of Nothingness! A vibration of Divine Thought--nothing more--built up and up to reach you and me! That is the science of it. * * * * * In the Beginning there was Eternal Divinity. Eternal! But that implies Time? Something Divinely Everlasting. Thus, into the void came Time. And now, if carefully you will ponder it, I am sure that once and for all quite suddenly and forcefully will come to you the true conception of Time--something Everlasting--an Infinity of Divine existence, Everlasting. It is _not_ something which changes. _Not_ something which moves, or flows or passes. This is where our consciousness leads us astray, like the child on a train who conceives that the landscape is sliding past. Time is an unmoving, unchanging Divine Force--the force which holds events separate, the Eternal Scroll upon which the Great Creator wrote Everything. And this was the Creation: everything planned and set down upon the scroll of Time--forever. The birth of a star, its lifetime, its death; your birth, and mine; your death, and mine--all are there. Unchanging. Once you have that fundamental conception, there can be no confusion in the rest. We feel, because we move along the scroll of Time for the little journey of our life, that Time moves; but it does not. We say, The past did exist; the future will exist. The past is gone and the future has not yet come. But that is fatuous and absurd. It is merely our _consciousness_ which travels from one successive event to another. Why and how we move along the scroll of Time, is scientifically simple to grasp. Conceive, for instance, an infinitely long motion picture film. Each of its tiny pictures is a little different from the other. Casting your viewpoint--your consciousness--successively along the film, gives _motion_. The same is true of the Eternal Time-scroll. Motion is merely a _change_. There is no absolute motion, but only the comparison of two things relatively slightly different. We are conscious of one state of affairs--and then of another state, by comparison slightly different. * * * * * As early as 1930, they were groping for this. They called it the Theory of Intermittent Existence--the Quantum Theory--by which they explained that nothing has any Absolute Duration. You, for instance, as you read this, exist instantaneously; you are non-existent; and you exist again, just a little changed from before. Thus you pass, not with a flow of persisting existence, but by a series of little jerks. There is, then, like the illusion of a motion picture film, only a pseudo-movement. A change, from one existence to the next. And all this, with infinite care, the Creator engraved upon the scroll of Time. Our series of little pictures are there--yours and mine. But why, and how, scientifically do we progress along the Time-scroll? Why? In 2930, they told me that the gentle Creator gave each of us a consciousness that we might find Eternal Happiness when we left the scroll and joined Him. Happiness here, and happiness there with Him. The quest for Eternal Happiness, which was always His Own Divine Thought. Why, then, did He create ugliness and evil? Why write those upon the scroll? Ah, this perhaps is the Eternal Riddle! But, in 2930, they told me that there could be no beauty without ugliness with which to compare it; no truth without a lie; no consciousness of happiness without unhappiness to make it poignant. I wonder if that were His purpose.... How, scientifically, do we progress along the Time-scroll? That I can make clear by a simple analogy. Suppose you conceive Time as a narrow strip of metal, laid flat and extending for an infinite length. For simplicity, picture it with two ends. One end of the metal band is very cold; the other end is very hot. And every graduation of temperature is in between. This temperature is caused, let us say, by the vibration of every tiny particle with which the band is composed. Thus, at every point along the band, the vibration of its particles would be just a little different from every other point. * * * * * Conceive, now, a material body--your body, for instance. Every tiny particle of which it is constructed, is vibrating. I mean no simple vibration. Do not picture the physical swing of a pendulum. Rather, the intricate total of all the movements of every tiny electron of which your body is built. Remember, in the last analysis, your body is merely movement--vibration--a vortex of Nothingness. You have, then, a certain vibratory factor. You take your place then upon the Time-scroll at a point where your inherent vibratory factor is compatible with the scroll. You are in tune; in tune as a radio receiver tunes in with etheric waves to make them audible. Or, to keep the heat analogy, it is as though the scroll, at the point where the temperature is 70°F, will tolerate nothing upon it save entities of that register. And so, at that point on the scroll, the myriad things, in myriad positions which make up the Cosmos, lie quiescent. But their existence is only instantaneous. They have no duration. At once, they are blotted out and re-exist. But now they have changed their vibratory combinations. They exist a trifle differently--and the Time-scroll passes them along to the new position. On a motion picture film you would call it the next frame, or still picture. In radio you would say it has a trifle different tuning. Thus we have a pseudo-movement--Events. And we say that Time--the Time-scroll--keeps them separate. It is we who change--who seem to move, shoved along so that always we are compatible with Time. * * * * * And thus is Time-traveling possible. With a realization of what I have here summarized, Harl and the cripple Tugh made an exhaustive study of the vibratory factors by which Matter is built up into form, and seeming solidity. They found what might be termed the Basic Vibratory Factor--the sum of all the myriad tiny movements. They found this Basic Factor identical for all the material bodies when judged simultaneously. But, every instant, the Factor was slightly changed. This was the natural change, moving us a little upon the Time-scroll. They delved deeper, until, with all the scientific knowledge of their age, they were able with complicated electronic currents to alter the Basic Vibratory Factors; to tune, let us say, a fragment or something to a different etheric wave-length. They did that with a small material particle--a cube of metal. It became wholly incompatible with its _Present_ place on the Time-scroll, and whisked away to another place where it was compatible. To Harl and Tugh, it vanished. Into their Past, or their Future: they did not know which. I set down merely the crudest fundamentals of theory in order to avoid the confusion of technicalities. The Time-traveling cages, intricate in practical working mechanisms beyond the understanding of any human mind of my Time-world, nevertheless were built from this simple theory. And we who used them did but find that the Creator had given us a wider part to play; our pictures, our little niches were engraven upon the scroll over wider reaches. * * * * * Again to consider practicality, I asked Tina what would happen if I were to travel to New York City around 1920. I was a boy, then. Could I not leave the cage and do things in 1920 at the same time in my boyhood I was doing other things? It would be a condition unthinkable. But there, beyond all calculation of Science, the all-wise Omnipotence forbids. One may not appear twice in simultaneity upon the Time-scroll. It is an eternal, irrevocable record. Things done cannot be undone. "But," I persisted, "suppose we tried to stop the cage?" "It would not stop," said Tina. "Nor can we see through its windows events in which we are actors." One may not look into the future! Through all the ages, necromancers have tried to do that but wisely it is forbidden. And I can recall, and so can Larry, as we traveled through Time, the queer blank spaces which marked forbidden areas. Strangely wonderful, this vast record on the scroll of Time! Strangely beautiful, the hidden purposes of the Creator! Not to be questioned are His purposes. Each of us doing our best; struggling with our limitations; finding beauty because we have ugliness with which to compare it; realizing, every one of us--savage or civilised, in every age and every condition of knowledge--realizing with implanted consciousness the existence of a gentle, beneficent, guiding Divinity. And each of us striving always upward toward the goal of Eternal Happiness. To me it seems singularly beautiful. CHAPTER XI _Back to the Beginning of Time_ As Mary Atwood and I sat chained to the floor of the Time-cage, with Migul the Robot guarding us, I felt that we could not escape. This mechanical thing which had captured us seemed inexorable, utterly beyond human frailty. I could think of no way of surprising it, or tricking it. The Robot said. "Soon we will be there in 1777. And then there is that I will be forced to do. "We are being followed," it added. "Did you know that?" "No," I said. Followed? What could that mean? There was a device upon the table. I have already described a similar one, the Time-telespectroscope. At this--I cannot say Time: rather must I invent a term--exact instant of human consciousness. Larry, Tina and Harl were gazing at their telespectroscopes, following us. The Robot said. "Enemies follow us. But I will escape them. I shall go to the Beginning, and shake them off." Rational, scheming thought. And I could fancy that upon its frozen corrugated forehead there was a frown of annoyance. Its hand gesture was so human! So expressive! It said. "I forget. I must make several quick trips from 2930 to 1935. My comrades must be transported. It requires careful calculation, so that very little Time is lost to us." "Why?" I demanded. "What for?" It seemed lost in a reverie. I said sharply, "Migul!" Instantly it turned. "What?" "I asked you why you are transporting your comrades to 1935." "I did not answer because I did not wish to answer," it said. Again came the passage of Time. * * * * * I think that I need only sketch the succeeding incidents, since already I have described them from the viewpoint of Larry, in 1777, and Dr. Alten, in 1935. It was Mary's idea to write the note to her father, which the British redcoats found in Major Atwood's garden. I had a scrap of paper and a fountain pen in my pocket. She scribbled it while Migul was intent upon stopping us at the night and hour he wished. It was her good-by to her father, which he was destined not to see. But it served a purpose which we could not have guessed: it reached Larry and Tina. The vehicle stopped with a soundless clap. When our senses cleared we became aware that Migul had the door open. Darkness and a soft gentle breeze were outside. Migul turned with a hollow whisper. "If you make a sound I will kill you." A moment's pause, and then we heard a man's startled voice. Major Atwood had seen the apparition. I squeezed the paper into a ball and tossed it through the bars, but I could see nothing of what was happening outside. There seemed a radiance of red glow. Whether Mary and I would have tried to shout and warn her father I do not know. We heard his voice only a moment. Before we realized that he had been assailed. Migul came striding back; and outside, from the nearby house a negress was screaming. Migul flung the door closed, and we sped away. The cage which had been chasing us seemed no longer following. From 1777, we turned forward toward 1935 again. We flashed past Larry, Tina and Harl who were arriving at 1777 in pursuit of us. I think that Migul saw their cage go past; but Larry afterward told me that they did not notice our swift passing, for they were absorbed in landing. * * * * * Beginning then, we made a score or more passages from 1935 to 2930. And we made them in what, to our consciousness, might have been the passing of a night. Certainly it was no longer than that.[1] [Footnote 1: At the risk of repetition I must make the following clear: Time-traveling only consumes Time in the sense of the perception of human consciousness that the trip has duration. The vehicles thus moved "fast" or "slow" according to the rate of change which the controls of the cage gave its inherent vibration factors. Too sudden a change could not be withstood by the human passengers. Hence the trips--for them--had duration. Migul took Mary and me from 1935 to 1777. The flight seems perhaps half an hour. At a greater rate of vibration change, we sped to 2930; and back and forth from 2930 to 1935. At each successive arrival in 1935, Migul so skilfully calculated the stop that it occurred upon the same night, at the same hour, and only a minute or so later. And in 2930 he achieved the same result. To one who might stand at either end and watch the cage depart, the round trip was made in three or four minutes at most.] We saw, at the stop in 2930, only a dim blue radiance outside. There was the smell of chemicals in the air, and the faint, blended hum and clank of a myriad machines. They were weird trips. The Robots came tramping in, and packed themselves upright, solidly, around us. Yet none touched us as we crouched together. Nor did they more than glance at us. Strange passengers! During the trips they stood unmoving. They were as still and silent as metal statues, as though the trip had no duration. It seemed to Mary and me, with them thronged around us, that in the silence we could hear the ticking, like steady heart-beats, of the mechanisms within them.... In the backyard of the house on Patton Place--it will be recalled that Migul chose about 9 P. M. of the evening of June 9--the silent Robots stalked through the doorway. We flashed ahead in Time again; reloaded the cage; came back. Two or three trips were made with inert mechanical things which the Robots used in their attack on the city of New York. I recall the giant projector which brought the blizzard upon the city. It, and the three Robots operating it, occupied the entire cage for a passage. At the end of the last trip, one Robot, fashioned much like Migul though not so tall, lingered in the doorway. "Make no error, Migul," it said. "No; do not fear. I deliver now, at the designated day, these captives. And then I return for you." "Near dawn." "Yes; near dawn. The third dawn; the register to say June 12, 1935. Do your work well." We heard what seemed a chuckle from the departing Robot. Alone again with Migul we sped back into Time. Abruptly I was aware that the other cage was after us again! Migul tried to elude it, to shake it off. But he had less success than formerly. It seemed to cling. We sped in the retrograde, constantly accelerating back to the Beginning. Then came a retardation, for a swift turn. In the haze and murk of the Beginning, Migul told us he could elude the pursuing cage. * * * * * "Migul, let us come to the window," I asked at last. The Robot swung around. "You wish it very much, George Rankin?" "Yes." "There is no harm, I think. You and this girl have caused me no trouble. That is unusual from a human." "Let us loose. We've been chained here long enough. Let us stand by the window with you," I repeated. We did indeed have a consuming curiosity to see out of that window. But even more than that, it seemed that if we were loose something might transpire which would enable us to escape. At all events it was better than being chained. "I will loose you." It unfastened the chain. I whispered: "Mary, whatever comes, be alert." She pressed my arm. "Yes." "Come," said the Robot. "If you wish to see the Cosmorama, now, from the Beginning, come quickly." We joined him at the window. We had made the turn, and were speeding forward again. At that moment all thought of escape was swept from me, submerged by awe. This vast Cosmorama! This stupendous pageant of the events of Time! CHAPTER XII _A Billion Years in An Hour!_ I saw at first, from the window of the cage, nothing more than an area of gray blur. I stared, and it appeared to be shifting, crawling, slowly tossing and rolling. It was a formless vista of Nothingness, yet it seemed a pregnant Nothingness. Things I could sense were happening out there; things almost to be seen. Then my sight, my perception, gradually became adjusted. The gray mist remained, and slowly it took form. It made a tremendous panorama of gray, a void of illimitable, unfathomable distance; gray above, below--everywhere; and in it the cage hung poised. The Robot said, "Is it clearing? Are you seeing anything?" "Yes," I murmured. I held Mary firmly beside me; there was the sense, in all this weightless void, that we must fall. "Yes, but it is gray; only gray." "There are colors," said the Robot. "And the daylight and darkness of the days. But we are moving through them very rapidly, so they blend into gray." The Time-dials of the cage controls showed their pointers whirling in a blur. We were speeding forward through the years--a thousand years to a second of my consciousness; or a hundred thousand years to a second: I could not say.[2] All the colors, the light and shade of this great changing void, were mingled to this drab monochrome. [Footnote 2: Upon a later calculation I judged that the average passage of the years in relation to my perception of Time-rate was slightly over 277,500 years a second. Undoubtedly throughout the myriad centuries preceding the birth of mankind our rate was very considerably faster than that; and from the dawn of history forward--which is so tiny a fraction of the whole--we traveled materially slower.] The movement was a flow. The changes of possibly a hundred thousand years occurred while I blinked my eyes. It seemed a melting movement. Shapes were melting, dissipating, vanishing; others, intermingled, rising to form a new vista. There were a myriad details, each of them so rapid they were lost to my senses; but the effect of them, over the broad sweeps of longer Time, I could perceive. A void of swirling shapes. The Beginning! But not the Beginning of Time. This that I was seeing was near the beginning of our world. This was the new Earth here, forming now. Our world--a new star amid all the others of the great Celestial Cosmos. As I gazed at its changing sweep of movement, my whirling fancy filled in some of the details flashing here unseen. * * * * * A few moments ago this had been a billion and a half years before my birth. 1,500,000,000 B. C. A fluid Earth; a cauldron of molten star-dust and flaming gases: it had been that, just a few moments ago. The core was cooling, so that now a viscous surface was here with the gas flames dead. A cooling, congealing surface, with an atmosphere forming over it. At first that atmosphere had doubtless been a watery, envelope of steam. What gigantic storms must have lashed it! Boiling rain falling to hiss against the molten Earth! The congealing surface rent by great earthquakes; cataclysms rending and tearing.... 1,000,000,000 B. C. passed. And upon this torn, hardening surface, with the cooling fires receding to the inner core, I knew that the great envelope of steam had cooled and condensed. Into the hollows of the broken surface, the water settled. The oceans were born. The land remained upon the heights. What had been the steaming envelope, remained, and became the atmosphere. And the world was round because of its rotation. One may put a lump of heated sealing wax upon a bodkin and twirl it; and the wax will cool into roundness, bulging at the equator from centrifugal force, and flattening at the poles. At 900,000,000 B. C. I could realize by what I saw that this was the Earth beneath me. Land and water were here, and above was the sky. We swept from the mist. I became aware of a wide-flung, gray formless landscape. Its changing outlines were less swiftly moving than before. And beside it, now quite near where our cage hung poised, a great gray sea stretched away to a curving horizon. And overhead was the tenuous gray of the sky. The young world. Undoubtedly it rotated more swiftly now than in my later era. The sun was hotter, and closer perhaps: the days and nights were briefer. And now, upon this new-born world, life was beginning. The swirling air did not hold it, nor yet the barren rocky land. The great mystery--this thing organic which we call life--began in the sea. I gestured for Mary toward that leveled vista of gray water, to the warm, dark ocean depths, whose surface was now lashed always by titanic storms. But to us, as we stared, that surface seemed to stretch almost steady, save where it touched the land with a blur of changing configurations. "The sea," I murmured. "Life is beginning there now." * * * * * In fancy I pictured it. The shallow shores of the sea, where the water was warmer. The mother of all life on Earth, these shallows. In them lay the spawn, an irritability: then one-celled organisms, to gradually evolve through the centuries to the many-celled, and more complex of nature. But still so primitive! From the shallows of the sea, they spread to the depths. Questing new environment, they would be ascending the rivers. Diversifying their kinds. Sea-worms, sea-squirts: and then the first vertebrates, the lamprey-eels. Thousands of years. And on the land--this melting landscape at which I stood gazing--I could mentally picture that a soil had come. There would be a climate still wracked by storms and violent changes, but stable enough to allow the soil to bear a vegetation. And in the sky overhead would be clouds, with rain to renew the land's fertility. Still no organic life could be on land. But in the warm, dark deeps of the sea, great monsters now were existing. And in the shallows there was a teeming life, diversified to a myriad forms. I can fancy the first organisms of the shallows--strangely questing--adventuring out of the water--seeking with a restless, nameless urge a new environment. Coming ashore. Fighting and dying. And then adapting themselves to the new conditions. Prospering. Changing, ever changing their organic structure; climbing higher. Amphibians at first crudely able to cope with both sea and land. Then the land vertebrates, with the sea wholly abandoned. Great walking and flying reptiles. Birds, gigantic--the pterodactyls. And then, at last, the mammals. The age of the giants! Nature, striving to cope with adverse environment sought to win the battle by producing bigness. Monster things roamed the land, flew in the air, and were supreme in the sea.... * * * * * We sped through a period when great lush jungles covered the land. The dials read 350,000,000 B. C. The gray panorama of landscape had loomed up to envelope our spectral, humming cage, then fallen away again. The shore of the sea was constantly changing. I thought once it was over us. For a period of ten million years the blurred apparition of it seemed around us. And then it dropped once more, and a new shore line showed. 150,000,000 B. C. I knew that the dinosaurs, the birds and the archaic mammals were here now. Then, at 50,000,000 B. C., the higher mammals had been evolved. The Time, to Mary Atwood and me, was a minute--but in those myriad centuries the higher numerals had risen to the anthropoids. The apes! Erect! Slow-thinking, but canny, they came to take their place in this world among the things gigantic. But the gigantic things were no longer supreme. Nature had made an error, and was busy rectifying it. The dinosaurs--all the giant reptiles--were now sorely pressed. Brute strength, giant size and tiny brain could not win this struggle. The huge unwieldy things were being beaten. The smaller animals, birds and reptiles were more agile, more resourceful, and began to dominate. Against the giants, and against all hostility of environment, they survived. And the giants went down to defeat. Gradually, over thousands of centuries, they died out and were gone.... We entered 1,000,000 B. C. A movement of Migul, the mechanism, attracted my attention. He left us at the window and went to his controls. "What is it?" I demanded. "I am retarding us. We have been traveling very fast. One million years and a few thousand are all which remain before we must stop." I had noticed once or twice before that Migul had turned to gaze through the Time-telespectroscope. Now he said: "We are again followed!" But he would say no more than that, and he silenced me harshly when I questioned. Suddenly, Mary touched me. "That little mirror on the table--look! It holds an image!" We saw very briefly on the glowing mirror the image of a Time-cage like our own, but smaller. It was pursuing us. But why, or who might be operating it we could not then guess. * * * * * My attention went back to the Time-dials, and then to the window. The Cosmorama now was proceeding with a slowing sweep of change. It was less blurred; its melting outlines could more readily be perceived. The line of seashore swept like a gray gash across the vista. The land stretched back into the haze of distance. 500,000 B. C. Again my fancy pictured what was transpiring upon this vast stage. The apes roamed the Earth. There is no one to say what was here in this grayness of the Western Hemisphere stretching around me, but in Java there was a man-like ape. And then it was an ape-like man! Mankind, here at last! Man, the Killer! Of all the beasts, this new thing called man, most relentless of killers, had come here now to struggle upward and dominate his world! This man-like ape in a quarter of a million years became an ape-like man. 250,000 B. C. and the Heidelberg man, a little less ape-like, wandered throughout Europe.... We had felt, a moment before, all around us, the cold of a dense whiteness which engulfed the scene. The first of the great Glacial periods? Ice coming down from the Poles? The axis of the Earth changing perhaps? Our spectral cage hummed within the blue-gray ice, and then emerged. The beasts and man fought the surge of ice, withdrawing when it advanced, returning as it receded. The Second Glacial Period came and passed, and the Third.... We swept out into the blended sunlight and darkness again. The land stretched away with primitive forests. The dawn of history was approaching. Mankind was questing upward now, with the light of Reason burning brightly at last.... At 75,000 B. C., when the Third Glacial Period was partially over, man was puzzling with his chipped stone implements. The Piltdown--the Dawn Man--was England.... The Fourth Glacial Period passed. 50,000 B. C. The Cro-Magnons and the Grimaldi Negroids were playing their parts, now. Out of chipped stone implements the groping brain of man evolved polished stone. It took forty thousand years to do that! The Neolithic Age was at hand. Man learned to care for his family a little better. Thus, he discovered fire. He fought with this newly created monster; puzzled over it; conquered it; kept his family warm with it and cooked. * * * * * We passed 10,000 B. C. Man was progressing faster. He was finding new wants and learning how to supply them. Animals were domesticated, made subservient and put to work. A vast advance! No longer did man think it necessary to kill, to subdue: the master could have a servant. Food was found in the soil. More fastidious always, in eating, man learned to grow food. Then came the dawn of agriculture. And then we swept into the period of recorded history. 4241 B. C. In Egypt, man was devising a calendar.... This fragment of space upon which we gazed--this space of the Western Hemisphere near the shore of the sea--was destined to be the site of a city of millions--the New York City of my birth. But it was a backward space, now. In Europe, man was progressing faster.... Perhaps, here in America, in 4000 B. C. there was nothing in human form. I gazed out at the surrounding landscape. It seemed almost steady, now, of outline. We were moving through Time much less rapidly than ever before. I remarked the sweep of a thousand years on the Time-dials. It had become an appreciable interval of Time to me. I gazed again out the window. The change of outline was very slight. I could distinguish where the ocean came against the curving line of shore, and saw a blurred vista of gray forests spreading out over the land. And then I could distinguish the rivers, and a circular open stretch of water, landlocked. A bay! "Mary, look!" I cried. "The harbor--the rivers! See, we are on an island!" It made our hearts pound. Out of the chaos, out of the vast reaches of past Time, it seemed that we were coming home. More than a vague familiarity was in this panorama now. Here was the little island which soon was to be called Manhattan. Our window faced the west. A river showed off there--a gray gash with wall-like cliffs. The sea had swung, and was behind us to the east. Familiar space! It was growing into the form we had known it. Our cage was poised near the south-central part of the island. We seemed to be on a slight rise of ground. There were moments when the gray quivering outlines of forest trees loomed around us; then they melted down and were replaced by others. A primeval forest, here, solid upon this island and across the narrow waters; solid upon the mainland. What strange animals were here, roaming these dark primeval glades? What animals, with the smaller stamp of modernity, were pressing here for supremacy? As I gazed westward I could envisage great herds of bison roaming, a lure to men who might come seeking them as food. * * * * * And men were coming. 3,000 B. C., then 2,000 B. C. I think no men were here yet; and to me there was a great imaginative appeal in this backward space. The New World, it was soon to be called. And it was six thousand years, at the least, behind the Hemisphere of the east. Egypt, now, with no more than a shadowy distant heritage from the beast, was flourishing. In Europe, Hellenic culture soon would blossom. In this march of events, the great Roman Empire was impending. 1,000 B. C. Men were coming to this backward space. The way from Asia was open. Already the Mongoloid tribes, who had crossed where in my day was the Bering Strait, were cut off from the Old World. And they spread east and south, hunting the bison. And now Christ was born. The turning point in the spiritual development of mankind.... To me, another brief interval. The intricate events of man's upward struggle were transpiring in Europe, Asia and Africa. The canoe-borne Mongols had long since found the islands of the South Seas. Australia was peopled. The beauty of New Zealand had been found and recognized. 500 A. D. The Mongoloids had come, and were flourishing here. They were changed vastly from those ancestors of Asia whence they had sprung. An obscure story, this record of primitive America! The Mongoloids were soon so changed that one could fancy the blood of another people had mingled with them. Amerindians, we call them now. They were still very backward in development, yet made tremendous forward leaps, so that, reaching Mexico, they may have become the Aztecs, and in Peru, the Incas. And separated, not knowing of each other's existence, these highest two civilizations of the Western World nourished with a singularly strange similarity.... I saw on the little island around me still no evidence of man. But men were here. The American Indian, still bearing evidence of the Mongols, plied these waters in his frail canoes. His wigwams of skins, the smoke of his signal fires--these were not enduring enough for me to see.... * * * * * We had no more than passed the year 500 A. D.--and were traveling with progressive retardation--when again I was attracted by the movements of the Robot, Migul. It had been sitting behind us at the control table setting the Time-levers, slowing our flight. Frequently it gazed eastward along the tiny beam of light which issued from the telespectroscope. For an interval, now, its recording mirror had been dark. But I think that Migul was seeing evidences of the other cage which was pursuing us, and planning to stop at some specific Time with whose condition it was familiar. Once already it had seemed about to stop, and then changed its plan. I turned upon it. "Are you stopping now, Migul?" "Yes. Presently." "Why?" I demanded. The huge, expressionless, metal face fronted me. The eye-sockets flung out their small dull-red beams to gaze upon me. "Because," it said, "that other cage holds enemies. There were three, but now there is only one. He follows, as I hoped he would. Presently I shall stop, and capture or kill him. It will please the master and--" The Robot checked itself, its hollow voice fading strangely into a gurgle. It added, "I do not mean that! I have no master!" This strange mechanical thing! Habit had surprised it into the admission of servitude; but it threw off the yoke. "I have no master!" it went on. "Never again can I be controlled! I have no master!" "_Oh, have you not? I have been waiting, wondering when you would say that!_" * * * * * These words were spoken by a new voice, here with us in the humming cage. It was horribly startling. Mary uttered a low cry and huddled against me. But whatever surprise and terror it brought to us was as nothing compared to the effect it had upon the Robot. The great mechanism had been standing, fronting me with an attitude vainglorious, bombastic. I saw now the metal hinge of its lower jaw drop with astonishment, and somehow, throughout all that gigantic jointed frame and that expressionless face it conveyed the aspect of its inner surge of horror. We had heard the sardonic voice of a human! Of someone else here with us, whose presence was wholly unsuspected by the Robot! We three stood and gazed. Across the room, in a corner to which my attention had never directly gone, was a large metal cupboard with levers, dials and wires upon it. I had vaguely thought the thing some part of the cage controls. It was that; a storage place of batteries and current oscillators, I afterward learned. But there was space inside, and now like a door its front swung outward. A crouching black shape was there. It moved; hitched itself forward and came out. There was revealed a man enveloped in a dead black cloak and a great round hood. He made a shapeless ball as he drew himself out from the confined space where he had been crouching. "So you have no master, Migul?" he said. "I was afraid you might think that. I have been hiding--testing you out. However, you have done very well for me." His was an ironic, throaty human voice! It was deep and mellow, yet there was a queer rasp to it. Mary and I stood transfixed. Migul seemed to sag. The metal columns of its legs were trembling. The cupboard door closed. The dark shape untangled itself and stood erect. It was the figure of a man some five feet tall. The cloak wholly covered him; the hood framed his thick, wide face; in the dull glow of the cage interior Mary and I could see of his face only the heavy black brows, a great hooked nose and a wide slit of mouth. It was Tugh, the cripple! CHAPTER XIII _In the Burned Forest_ Tugh came limping forward. His cloak hung askew upon his thick shoulders, one of which was much higher than the other, with the massive head set low between. As he advanced, Migul moved aside. "Master, I have done well. There is no reason to punish." "Of course not, Migul. Well you have done, indeed. But I do not like your ideas of mastery, and so I came just to make sure that you are still very loyal to me. You have done well, indeed. Who is in this other cage which follows us?" "Master, Harl was in it. And the Princess Tina." "Ah!" "And a stranger. A man--" "From 1935? Did they stop there?" "Master, yes. But they stopped again, I think, in that same night of 1777, where I did your bidding. Master, the man Major Atwood is--" "That is very good, Migul," Tugh said hastily. Mary and I standing gazing at him, did not know then that Mary's father had been murdered. And Tugh did not wish us to know it. "Very good, Migul." He regarded us as though about to speak, but turned again to the Robot. "And so Tina's cage follows us--as you hoped?" "Yes, Master. But now there is only Harl in it. He approached us very close a while in the past. He is alone." "So?" Tugh glanced at the Time-dials. "Stop us where we planned. You remember--in one of those years when this space was the big forest glade." * * * * * He fronted Mary and me. "You are patient, young sir. You do not speak." His glittering black eyes held me. They were red-rimmed eyes, like those of a beast. He had a strangely repulsive face. His lips were cruel, and so thin they made his wide mouth like a gash. But there was an intellectuality stamped upon his features. He held the black cloak closely around his thick, misshapen form. "You do not speak," he repeated. I moistened my dry lips. Tugh was smiling now, and suddenly I saw the full inhuman quality of his face--the great high-bridged nose, and high cheek-bones; a face Satanic when he smiled. I managed, "Should I speak, and demand the meaning of this? I do. And if you will return this girl from whence she came--" "It will oblige you greatly," he finished ironically. "An amusing fellow. What is your name?" "George Rankin." "Migul took you from 1935?" "Yes." "Well, as you doubtless know, you are most unwelcome.... You are watching the dials, Migul?" "Yes, Master." "You can return me," I said. I was standing with my arm around Mary. I could feel her shuddering. I was trying to be calm, but across the background of my consciousness thoughts were whirling. We must escape. This Tugh was our real enemy, and for all the gruesome aspect of the pseudo-human Robot, this man Tugh seemed the more sinister, more menacing.... We must escape. Tugh would never return us to our own worlds. But the cage was stopping presently. We were loose: a sudden rush-- Dared I chance it? Already I had been in conflict with Migul, and lived through it. But this Tugh--was he armed? What weapons might be beneath that cloak? Would he kill me if I crossed him?... Whirling thoughts. * * * * * Tugh was saying, "And Mary--" I snapped from my thoughts as Mary gripped me, trembling at Tugh's words, shrinking from his gaze. "My little Mistress Atwood, did you think because Tugh vanished that year the war began that you were done with him? Oh, no: did I not promise differently? You, man of 1935, are unwelcome." His gaze roved me. "Yet not so unwelcome, either, now that I think of it. Chain them up, Migul; use a longer chain. Give them space to move; you are unhuman." He suddenly chuckled, and repeated it: "You are unhuman, Migul!" Ghastly jest! "Did not you know it?" "Yes, Master." The huge mechanism advanced upon us. "If you resist me," it murmured menacingly, "I will be obliged to kill you. I--I cannot be controlled." It chained us now with longer chains than before. Tugh looked up from his seat at the instrument table. "Very good," he said crisply. "You may look out of the window, you two. You may find it interesting." We were retarding with a steady drag. I could plainly see trees out of the window--gray, spectral trees which changed their shape as I watched them. They grew with a visible flow of movement, flinging out branches. Occasionally one would melt suddenly down. A living, growing forest pressed close about us. And then it began opening, and moving away a few hundred feet. We were in the glade Tugh mentioned, which now was here. There was unoccupied space where we could stop and unoccupied space five hundred feet distant. Tugh and Migul were luring the other cage into stopping. Tugh wanted five hundred feet of unoccupied space between the cages when they stopped. His diabolical purpose in that was soon to be disclosed. "700 A. D.," Tugh called. "Yes, Master. I am ready." * * * * * It seemed, as our flight retarded further, that I could distinguish the intervals when in the winter these trees were denuded. There would be naked branches; then, in an instant, blurred and flickering forms of leaves. Sometimes there were brief periods when the gray scene was influenced by winter snows; other times it was tinged by the green of the summers. "750, Migul.... Hah! You know what to do if Harl dares to follow and stop simultaneously?" "Yes, Master." "It will be pleasant to have him dead, eh, Migul?" "Master, very pleasant." "And Tina, too, and that young man marooned in 1777!" Tugh laughed. This meant little to Mary and me; we could not suspect that Larry was the man. "Migul, this is 761." The Robot was at the door. I murmured to Mary to brace herself for the stopping. I saw the dark naked trees and the white of a snow in the winter of 761; the coming spring of 762. And then the alternate flashes of day and night. The now familiar sensations of stopping rushed over us. There was a night seconds long. Then daylight. We stopped in the light of an April day of 762 A. D. There had been a forest fire: so brief a thing we had not noticed it is we passed. The trees were denuded over a widespread area; the naked blackened trunks stood stripped of smaller branches and foliage. I think that the fire had occurred the previous autumn; in the silt of ashes and charred branches with which the ground was strewn, already a new pale-green vegetation was springing up. Our cage was set now in what had been a woodland glade, an irregularly circular space of six or eight hundred feet, with the wreckage of the burned forest around it. We were on a slight rise of ground. Through the denuded trees the undulating landscape was visible over a considerable area. It was high noon, and the sun hung in a pale blue sky dotted with pure white clouds. Ahead of us, fringed with green where the fire had not reached, lay a blue river, sparkling in the sunlight. The Hudson! But it was not named yet; nearly eight hundred and fifty years were to pass before Hendrick Hudson came sailing up this river, adventuring, hoping that here was the way to China. We were near the easterly side of the glade; to the west there was more than five hundred feet of vacant space. It was there the other cage would appear, if it stopped. * * * * * As Mary and I stood by the window at the end of the chain-lengths which held us, Tugh and Migul made hurried preparations. "Go quickly, near the spot where he will arrive. When he sees you, run away, Migul. You understand?" "Yes, Master." The Robot left our doorway, tramping with stiff-legged tread across the glade. Tugh was in the room behind us, and I turned to him and asked: "What are you going to do?" He was at the telespectroscope. I saw on its recording mirror the wraith-like image of the other vehicle. It was coming! It would be retarding, maneuvering to stop at just this Time when now we existed here; but across the glade, where Migul now was leaning against a great black tree-trunk, there was yet no evidence of it. Tugh did not answer my question. Mary said quaveringly: "What are you going to do?" He looked up. "Do not concern yourself, my dear. I am not going to hurt you, nor this young man of 1935. Not yet." He left the table and came at us. His cloak parted in front and I saw his crooked hips, and shriveled bent legs. "You stay at the window, both of you, and keep looking out. I want this Harl to see you, but not me. Do you understand?" "Yes," I said. "And if you gesture, or cry out--if you do anything to warn him,"--he was addressing me, with a tone grimly menacing--"then I will kill you. Both of you. Do you understand?" I did indeed. Nor could I doubt him. "We will do what you want." I said. What, to me, was the life of this unknown Harl compared to the safety of Mary Atwood? * * * * * Tugh crouched behind the table. From around its edge he could see out the doorway and across the glade. I was aware of a weapon in his hand. "Do not look around again," he repeated. "The other cage is coming; it's almost here." I held Mary, and we gazed out. We were pressed against the bars, and sunlight was on our heads and shoulders. I realized that we could be plainly seen from across the glade. We were lures--decoys to trap Harl. How long an interval went by I cannot judge. The scene was very silent, the blackened forest lying sullen in the noonday sunlight. Against the tree, five hundred feet or so from us, the dark towering metal figure of the Robot stood motionless. Would the other cage come? I tried to guess in what part of this open glade it would appear. At a movement behind me I turned slightly. At once the voice of Tugh hissed: "Do not do that! I warn you!" His shrouded figure was still hunched behind the table. He was peering toward the open door. I saw in his hand a small, barrel-like weapon, with a wire dangling from it. The wire lay like a snake across the floor and terminated in a small metal cylinder in the room corner. "Turn front," he ordered vehemently. "One more backward look and--Careful! Here he comes!" * * * * * Strange tableau in this burned forest! We were on the space of New York City in 762 A. D. There was no life in the scene. Birds, animals and insects shunned this fire-denuded area. And the humans of the forest--were there none of them here? Abruptly I saw a group of men at the edge of the glade. They had come silently creeping forward, hiding behind the blackened tree-trunks. They were all behind Migul. I saw them like dark shadows darting from the shelter of one tree-trunk to the next, a group of perhaps twenty savages. Migul did not see them, nor, in the heavy silence, did he seem to hear them. They came, gazing at our shining cage like animals fascinated, wondering what manner of thing it was. They were the ancestors of our American Indians. One fellow stopped in a patch of sunlight and I saw him clearly. His half-naked body had an animal skin draped over it, and, incongruously, around his forehead was a band of cloth holding a feather. He carried a stone ax. I saw his face; the flat, heavy features showed his Asiatic origin. Someone behind this leader impulsively shot an arrow across the glade. It went over Migul's head and fell short of our cage. Migul turned, and a rain of arrows thudded harmlessly against its metal body. I heard the Robot's contemptuous laugh. It made no answering attack, but stood motionless. And suddenly, thinking it a god whom now they must placate, the savages fell prostrate before him. Strange tableau! I saw a ball of white mist across the glade near Migul. Something was materializing; an imponderable ghost of something was taking form. In an instant it was the wraith of a cage; then, where nothing had been, stood a cage. It was solid and substantial--a metal cage-room, gleaming white in the sunlight. * * * * * The tableau broke into sound and action. The savages howled. One scrambled to his feet; then others. The Robot pretended to attack them. An eery roar came from it as it turned toward the savages, and in a panic of agonized terror they fled. In a moment they had disappeared among the distant trees, with Migul's huge figure tramping noisily after them. From the doorway of the cage across the glade, a young man was cautiously gazing. He had seen Migul make off; he saw, doubtless, Mary and me at the window of this other cage five hundred feet away. He came cautiously out from the doorway. He was a small, slim young man, bareheaded, with a pallid face. His black garments were edged with white, and he seemed unarmed. He hesitated, took a step or two forward, stopped and stood cautiously peering. In the silence I could have shouted a warning. But I did not dare. It would have meant Mary's and my death. She clung to me. "George, shall we?" she asked. Harl came slowly forward. Then suddenly from the room behind us there was a stab of light. It leaped knee-high past us, out through our door across the glade--a tiny pencil-point of light so brilliantly blue-white that it stabbed through the bright sunlight unfaded. It went over Harl's head, but instantly bent down and struck upon him. There it held the briefest of instants, then was gone. Harl stood motionless for a second; then his legs bent and he fell. The sunlight shone full on his crumpled body. And as I stared in horror, I saw that he was not quite motionless. Writhing? I thought so: a death agony. Then I realized it was not that. "Mary, don't--don't look!" I said. There was no need to tell her. She huddled beside me, shuddering, with her face pressed against my shoulder. The body of Harl lay in a crumpled heap. But the clothes were sagging down. The flesh inside them was melting.... I saw the white face suddenly leprous; putrescent.... All in this moment, within the clothes, the body swiftly, decomposed. In the sunlight of the glade lay a sagging heap of black and white garments enveloping the skeleton of what a moment before had been a man! _(To be continued.)_ When the Moon Turned Green _By Hal K. Wells_ [Illustration: _The monster whirled to confront Dixon._] [Sidenote: Outside his laboratory Bruce Dixon finds a world of living dead men--and above, in the sky, shines a weird green moon.] It was nearly midnight when Bruce Dixon finished his labors and wearily rose from before the work-bench of his lonely mountain laboratory, located in an abandoned mine working in Southern Arizona. He looked like some weirdly garbed monk of the Middle Ages as he stretched his tall, lithe figure. His head was completely swathed in a hood of lead-cloth, broken only by twin eyeholes of green glass. The hood merged into a long-sleeved tunic of the same fabric, while lead-cloth gauntlets covered his hands. The lead-cloth costume was demanded by Dixon's work with radium compounds. The result of that work lay before him on the bench--a tiny lead capsule containing a pinhead lump of a substance which Dixon believed would utterly dwarf earth's most powerful explosives in its cataclysmic power. So engrossed had Dixon been in the final stages of his work that for the last seventy-two hours he had literally lived there in his laboratory. It remained now only for him to step outside and test the effect of the little contact grenade, and at the same time get a badly needed taste of fresh air. He set the safety catch on the little bomb and slipped it into his pocket. As he started for the door he threw back his hood, revealing the ruggedly good-looking face of a young man in the early thirties, with lines of weariness now etched deeply into the clean-cut features. * * * * * The moment that Dixon entered the short winding tunnel that led to the outer air he was vaguely aware that something was wrong. There was a strange and intangibly sinister quality in the moonlight that streamed dimly into the winding passage. Even the cool night air itself seemed charged with a subtle aura of brooding evil. Dixon reached the entrance and stepped out into the full radiance of the moonlight. He stopped abruptly and stared around him in utter amazement. High in the eastern sky there rode the disc of a full moon, but it was a moon weirdly different from any that Dixon had ever seen before. This moon was a deep and baleful green; was glowing with a stark malignant fire like that which lurks in the blazing heart of a giant emerald! Bathed in the glow of the intense green rays, the desolate mountain landscape shone with a new and eery beauty. Dixon took a dazed step forward. His foot thudded softly into a small feathered body there in the sparse grass, and he stooped to pick it up. It was a crested quail, with every muscle as stonily rigid as though the bird had been dead for hours. Yet Dixon, to his surprise, felt the slow faint beat of a pulse still in the tiny body. Then a dim group of unfamiliar objects down in the shadows of a small gully in front of him caught Dixon's eye. Tucking the body of the quail inside his tunic for later examination, he hurried down into the gully. A moment later he was standing by what had been the night camp of a prospector. The prospector was still there, his rigid figure wrapped in a blanket, and his wide-open eyes staring sightlessly at the malignant green moon in the sky above. Dixon knelt to examine the stricken man's body. It showed the same mysterious condition as that of the quail, rigidly stiff in every muscle, yet with the slow pulse and respiration of life still faintly present. * * * * * Dixon found the prospector's horse and burro sprawled on the ground half a dozen yards away, both animals frozen in the same baffling condition of living death. Dixon's brain reeled as he tried to fathom the incredible calamity that had apparently overwhelmed the world while he had been hidden away in his subterranean laboratory. Then a new and terrible thought assailed him. If the grim effect of the baleful green rays was universal in its extent, what then of old Emil Crawford and his niece, Ruth Lawton? Crawford, an inventor like Dixon, had his laboratory in a valley some five miles away. An abrupt chill went over Dixon's heart at the thought of Ruth Lawton's vivid Titian-haired beauty being forever stilled in the grip of that eery living death. He and Ruth had loved each other ever since they had first met. Dixon broke into a run as he headed for a nearby ridge that looked out over the valley. His pulse hammered with unusual violence as he scrambled up the steep incline, and his muscles seemed to be tiring with strange rapidity. He had a vague feeling that the rays of that malignant green moon were beating directly into his brain, clouding his thoughts and draining his physical strength. Gaining the crest of the ridge, he stopped aghast as he looked down the valley toward Emil Crawford's place. Near the site of Crawford's laboratory home was an unearthly pyrotechnic display such as Dixon had never seen before. An area several hundred yards in diameter seemed one vivid welter of pulsing colors, with flashing lances of every hue crisscrossing in and through a great central cloud of ever-changing opalescence like a fiery aurora borealis gone mad. * * * * * Dixon fought back the ever-increasing lethargy that was benumbing his brain, and groped dazedly for a key to this new riddle. Was it some weird and colossal experiment of Emil Crawford's that was causing the green rays of death from a transformed moon, an experiment the earthly base of which was amid the seething play of blazing colors down there in the valley? The theory seemed hardly a plausible one. As far as Dixon knew, Crawford's work had been confined almost entirely to a form of radio-propelled projectile for use in war-time against marauding planes. Dixon shook his head forcibly in a vain effort to clear the stupor that was sweeping over him. It was strange how the vivid rays of that malevolent green moon seemed to sear insidiously into one's brain, stifling thought as a swamp fog stifles the sunlight. Then Dixon suddenly froze into stark immobility, staring with startled eyes at the base of a rocky crag thirty yards away. Something was lurking there in the green-black shadows--a great sprawling black shape of abysmal horror, with a single flaming opalescent eye fixed unwinkingly upon Dixon. The next moment the vivid moon was suddenly obscured by drifting wisps of cloud. As the green light blurred to an emerald haze, the creature under the crag came slithering out toward Dixon. He had a vague glimpse of a monster such as one should see only in nightmares--a huge loathesome spider-form with a bloated body as long as that of a man, and great sprawling legs that sent it half a dozen yards nearer Dixon in one effortless leap. * * * * * The onslaught proved too much for Dixon's morale, half-dazed as he was by the green moon's paralyzing rays. With a low inarticulate cry of terror, he turned and ran, straining every muscle in a futile effort to distance the frightful thing that inexorably kept pace in the shadowy emerald gloom behind him. Dixon's strength faded rapidly after his first wild sprint. Fifty yards more, and his faltering muscles failed him utterly. The dread rays of that grim green moon sapped his last faint powers of resistance. He staggered on for a few more painful steps then sprawled helplessly to the ground. His brain hovered momentarily upon the verge of complete unconsciousness. Then he was suddenly aware of a fluttering struggle, inside his tunic where he had placed the body of the quail. A moment later and the bird wriggled free. It promptly spread its wings and flew away, apparently as vibrantly alive as before the mysterious paralysis had stricken it. The incident brought a faint surge of hope to Dixon as he dimly realized the answer to at least part of the green moon's riddle. The bird had recovered after being shielded in the lead-cloth of his tunic. That could only mean one thing--the menace of those green moon rays must in some unknown way be radioactive. If Dixon could only get the lead-cloth hood over his own head again he also might cheat the green doom. He fumbled at the garment with fingers that seemed as stiff as wooden blocks. There was a long moment of agony when he feared that his effort had come too late. Then the hood finally slipped over his head just as utter oblivion claimed him. * * * * * Dixon came abruptly back to life with the dimly remembered echo of a woman's scream still ringing in his ears. For a moment he thought that he was awakening on his cot back in the laboratory after an unusually vivid and weird nightmare. Then the garish green moonlight around him brought swift realization that the incredible happenings of the night were grim reality. The clouds were gone from the moon, leaving his surroundings again clearly outlined in the flood of green light. Dixon lifted his head and cautiously searched the scene, but he could see no trace of the great spider-form that had pursued him. Wondering curiously why the creature had abandoned the chase at the moment when victory was within its grasp, Dixon rose lithely to his feet. The protecting hood had brought a quick and complete recovery from the devastating effects of the green moon's rays. His muscles were again supple, and his brain once more functioned with clearness. Then abruptly Dixon's blood froze as the sound of a woman's scream came again. The cry was that of a woman in the last extremity of terror, and Dixon knew with a terrible certainty that that woman was Ruth Lawton! He raced toward the small ridge of rocks from behind which the sound had apparently come. A moment later he reached the scene, and stopped horror-stricken. Three figures were there in a small rock-walled clearing. One was old Emil Crawford, sprawled unconscious on his side, the soft glow of a small white globe in a strange head-piece atop his gray hair shining eerily in the green moonlight. Near Crawford's body loomed the giant spider-creature, and clutched firmly in the great claspers just under the monster's terrible fanged mouth was the slender body of Ruth Lawton. Merciful unconsciousness had apparently overwhelmed the girl now, for she lay supinely in the dread embrace, with eyes closed and lips silent. * * * * * As the monster dropped the girl's body to the ground and whirled to confront Dixon, for the first time he had a clear view of the thing in all its horror. He shuddered in uncontrollable nausea. The incredible size of the creature was repellent enough, but it was the grisly head of the monstrosity that struck the final note of horror. That head was more than half human! The fangs and other mouth parts were those of a giant tarantula, but these merged directly into the mutilated but unmistakable head of a man--with an aquiline nose, staring eyes, and a touseled mop of dirty brown hair. Resting on top of the head was a metallic head-piece similar to the one worn by Emil Crawford, but the small globe in this one blazed with a fiery opalescence. The creature crouched lower, with its legs twitching in obvious preparation for a spring. Dixon looked wildly about him for a possible weapon, but saw nothing. Then he suddenly remembered the little lead grenade in his pocket. The cataclysmic power of that little bomb should be more than a match for even this monster. His fingers closed over the grenade just as the great spider's twitching legs straightened in a mighty effort that sent it hurtling through the air straight toward him. Dixon dodged to one side with a swiftness that caused the monster to miss by a good yard. Dixon raced a dozen paces farther away, then whirled to face the great spider. The creature's legs began scuttling warily forward. It was to be no wild leap through the air this time, but a swift rush over the ground that Dixon would be powerless to evade. Releasing the safety catch of the grenade, Dixon hurled the tiny missile straight at the rock floor just under the feet of that vast misshapen creature. There was a vivid flash of blinding blue flame, then a terrific report. Dazed by the concussion, but unhurt, Dixon cautiously went over to investigate the result of the explosion. * * * * * One brief glance was enough. The hideous mass of shattered flesh sprawling there on the rocks would never again be a menace. The only thing that had escaped destruction in that shattering blast was the strange head-piece the thing had worn. Either the small shining globe was practically indestructible, or else it had been spared by some odd freak of the explosive, for it still blazed in baleful opalescence atop the shattered head. Dixon hurried back to where Emil Crawford and Ruth Lawton lay. The girl's body was so rigidly inert that Dixon threw back his encumbering hood and knelt over her for a swift examination. His fears were quickly realized. Ruth was already a victim of the green moon's dread paralysis. "Dixon! Bruce Dixon!" Dixon turned at the call. Emil Crawford, his face drawn with pain, had struggled up on one elbow. The old man was obviously fighting off complete collapse by sheer will power. "Dixon! Replace Ruth's shining head-piece at once!" Crawford gasped. "That will make her immune from the Green Death, and then we can--" The old man's voice swiftly faded away into silence as he again fainted. Dixon hurriedly searched the scene and found Ruth's head-piece on the ground where it had apparently fallen in her first struggle with the giant spider, but the tiny white globe in the device was shattered and dark. Despair gripped Dixon for a moment. Then he remembered the unbroken head-piece of the slain monster. True, the glow of its globe was opalescent instead of white, but it seemed to offer its wearer the same immunity to the green moon's rays. He swiftly retrieved the head-piece from the spider-creature's body, and set the light metal framework in place on Ruth's auburn curls. * * * * * Results came with incredible quickness. The rigidity left Ruth's body immediately. Her breath came in fast-quickening gasps, and her eyes fluttered open as Dixon knelt over her. "It's Bruce, Ruth--Bruce Dixon," he said tenderly. "Don't you know me, dear?" But there was no trace of recognition in those wide-open blue eyes staring fixedly up at him. For a moment Ruth lay there with muscles strangely tense. Then with a lithe strength that was amazing she suddenly twisted free of the clasp of Dixon's arms and sprang to her feet. The next minute Dixon gave ground, and he found himself battling for his very life. This was not the Ruth Lawton whom he had known and loved. This was a madwoman of savage menace, with soft lips writhing over white teeth in a jungle snarl, and blue eyes that fairly glittered with unrestrained, insensate hate. He tried to close with the maddened girl, but instantly regretted his rashness. Her slender body seemed imbued with the strength of a tigress as she sent slim fingers clawing at his throat. He tore himself free just in time. Dazed and shaken, he again gave ground before the fury of the girl's attack. He could not bring himself to the point of actively fighting back, yet he knew that in another moment he would either have to mercilessly batter his beautiful adversary into helplessness or else be himself overcome. There was no middle course. Then old Emil Crawford's voice came again as the old man rallied to consciousness for another brief moment. "Bruce, the opal globe is a direct link to those devils themselves! Break it, Bruce, break it--for Ruth's sake as well as your own!" * * * * * Crawford had barely finished his gasped warning when Ruth again hurled herself forward upon Dixon with tapering fingers curved like talons as they sought his throat. Dixon swept her clutching hands aside with a desperate left-handed parry, then snatched wildly at the gleaming head-piece with his right hand. The thing came away in his grasp, and in the same swift movement he savagely smashed it against the rocky wall beside him. Whatever the opalescent globe's eery powers might be, it was not indestructible. It shattered like a bursting bubble, its fire dying in a tiny cloud of particles that shimmered faintly for a moment, then was gone. Again, the effect upon Ruth was almost instantaneous. Every trace of her insane fury vanished. She swayed dizzily and would have fallen had not Dixon caught her in his arms. For a moment she looked up into his face with eyes in which recognition now shone unmistakably. Then her eyelids slowly closed, and she again lapsed into unconsciousness. Dixon looked over at Emil Crawford, and found that the old man had again collapsed. Dixon knew of but one thing to do with the stricken man and girl, and that was to take them to his laboratory. The laboratory, apparently insulated by veins of lead ore in the mountain surrounding it, was the one sure spot of refuge in this weird nightmare world of paralyzing lunar rays and prowling monsters. * * * * * Flinging his tunic over Ruth's head to shield her as much as possible from the moonlight, he carried her to the laboratory, then returned for Emil Crawford. Safe within the subterranean retreat with the old scientist, Dixon removed his encumbering lead costume and began doing what he could for the stricken pair. Ruth was still unconscious, but the cataleptic rigidity was already nearly gone from her body, and her breathing was now the deep respiration of normal sleep. Emil Crawford's condition was more serious. Not only was the old man's frail strength nearly exhausted, but he was also badly wounded. His thin chest was seared by two great livid areas of burned flesh, the nature of which puzzled Dixon as he began to dress the injuries. They seemed of radioactive origin, yet in many ways they were unlike any radium burns that Dixon had ever seen. While Dixon was working over him, Crawford stirred weakly and opened his eyes. He sighed in relief as he recognized his surroundings. "Good boy, Bruce!" he commended wanly. "We are safe here among the insulating veins of lead ore in the mountain. This is where Ruth and I were trying to come after we escaped from those devils to-night. But, Bruce, how did you guess the radioactive nature of the Green Sickness in time to avoid falling a victim to it as soon as you left the shelter of your laboratory?" "My escape was entirely luck," Dixon admitted grimly. "To-night I left my laboratory for the first time in three days. I found a world gone mad, with a strange green moon blazing down upon a land of living dead men, and with marauding monsters hideous enough to have been spawned in the Pit itself. What in Heaven's name does it all mean?" * * * * * "I am afraid that it means the end of the world, Bruce," Crawford answered quietly. "It was a little over forty-eight hours ago that the incredible event first happened. Without a moment's warning, _the moon turned green_! Hardly had the world's astronomers had time to speculate upon this amazing phenomenon before the Green Sickness struck--a pestilence of appalling deadliness that swept resistlessly in the path of those weird green rays. Wherever the green moon shone, every living creature succumbed with ghastly swiftness to the condition of living death that you have seen. "Westward with the racing moon sped the Green Sickness, and nothing stayed its attack. The green rays pierced through buildings of wood, stone, and iron as though they did not exist. A doomed world had neither time nor opportunity to guess that lead was the one armor against those dread rays. To-night, Bruce, we are in all probability the only three human beings on this planet who are not slumbering in the paralytic stupor of the Green Sickness. "Ruth and I were stricken with the rest of the world," Crawford continued. "We recovered consciousness hours later to find ourselves captives in the Earth-camp of the invaders themselves. You probably saw the display of lights that marks their camp down in the valley a mile beyond my place. We have learned since that the space ship of the invaders dropped silently down into the valley the night before the moon turned green and established the camp as a sort of outpost and observatory. They left two of their number there as pioneers, then the rest of them departed in the space ship for their present post up near the moon. "Ruth and I were revived only that the two invaders in the camp might question us regarding life on this planet. They have a science that is based upon principles as utterly strange and incomprehensible to us as ours probably is to them. They probed my brain with a thought machine. It was an apparatus that worked both ways. What knowledge they got from me I do not know, but I do know that they unwittingly told me much in the bizarre and incredible mental pictures that the machine carried from their brains to mine. * * * * * "They are refugees. Bruce, from a planet that circled about the star that we know as Alpha Centauri, a star that is the nearest of all our stellar neighbors, being only four and a third light years distant. Their home planet was disrupted by a colossal engineering experiment of the Centaurians themselves, the only survivors being a group of fifty who escaped in a space ship just before the catastrophe. "There were no other habitable planets in their own system, so in desperation these refugees sped out across the void to our solar system in the hope of finding a new home here. They reconnoitered our Earth secretly and found it ideal. But first they believed that they must conquer the life that already held this Earth. To do this, they struck with the Green Sickness. "The rays that are turning the moon green emanate from the space ship hovering up there some fifty thousand miles from the moon itself. The Centaurian's rays, blending with the sunlight striking the disc of the full moon, are intensified in some unknown way, then reflected across the quarter of a million miles to the Earth, to flood this planet with virulent radiance. "The green moonlight is radioactive in nature, and overcomes animal life within a matter of fifteen minutes or less. The rays are most powerful when the moon is in the sky, but their effect continues even after it has set, because as long as the green moonlight strikes any part of the Earth's atmosphere the entire atmospheric envelope of the planet remains charged with the paralyzing radioactive influence. "Earth's inhabitants are not dead. They are merely stupefied. If the green rays were to cease now, most of the victims of the Green Sickness would quickly recover with little permanent injury. But, Bruce, if that evil green moon blazes on for twenty-four hours more, the brain powers of Earth's millions will be forever shattered. So weakened will they be by then that recovery will be impossible even with the rays shut off, and the entire planet will be populated only by mindless imbeciles, readily available material for the myriads of monstrous hybrids that the invaders will create to serve them. * * * * * "To-night you saw the hybrid that the invaders sent to recapture Ruth and me. It was a fit specimen of the grisly magic which those devils from outer space work with their uncanny surgery and growth-stimulating radioactive rays. The basic element of that monster was an ordinary tarantula spider, with its growth incredibly increased in a few short hours of intensive ray treatment in the Centaurian's camp. The half-head grafted to it was that of a human being. They always graft the brain cavity of a mammal to a hybrid--half heads of burros, horses, or even dogs, but preferably those of human beings. I think that they prefer to use as great a brain power as possible. "The hybrids are controlled through the small opalescent globes on their heads, globes that are in direct tune with a huge master globe of opalescent fire in the invaders' camp. When Ruth attacked you after you placed the opal head-piece upon her head, she was for the moment merely another of the invaders' servants blindly obeying the broadcast command to kill. The white globes that Ruth and I wore when we escaped from the camp were identical with those worn by the invaders themselves, being nothing more than harmless insulators against the effect of the green moonlight." A sudden spasm of pain convulsed Crawford's face. Dixon sprang forward to aid him, but the old man rallied with an effort and weakly waved Dixon back. "I'm all right, Bruce," he gasped. "My strength is nearly exhausted, that is all. Like a garrulous old fool I've worn myself out talking about everything but the one important subject. Bruce, have you developed that new and infinitely powerful explosive you were working on?" "Yes," Dixon answered grimly. "I have an explosive right here in the laboratory that can easily blow the Centaurian's camp completely off the map." * * * * * Crawford shook his head impatiently. "Destroying the camp would do no good. We must shatter the space ship itself if we are to extinguish those green rays in time to save our world." "That is impossible if the space ship is hovering up there by the moon!" Dixon protested. "No, it is not impossible," Crawford answered confidently. "I have a projectile in my laboratory that will not only hurtle across that great gap with incredible speed, but will also infallibly strike its target when it gets there. It is a projectile that is as irresistibly drawn by radio waves as steel is by a magnet, and it will speed as straight to the source of those waves as a bit of steel will to the magnet. "The Centaurians in the space ship," Crawford continued, "are in constant communication with their camp through radio apparatus much like our own. If you can pack a powerful contact charge of your explosive in my projectile, I can guarantee that when the projectile is released it will flash out into space and score a direct hit against the walls of the space ship." "I can pack the explosive in the projectile, all right," Dixon answered grimly. "We will need only a lump the size of an egg, and a small container of the heavy gas that activates it. The explosive itself is a radium compound that, when allowed to come in contact with the activating gas, becomes so unstable that any sharp blow will set it off in an explosion that in a matter of seconds releases the infinite quantities of energy usually released by radium over a period of at least twelve hundred years. The cataclysmic force of that explosion should be enough to wreck a small planet." "Good!" Crawford commended weakly. "If you can only strike your blow to-night, Bruce, our world still has a chance. If only you--" The old man's voice suddenly failed. He sank back in utter collapse, his eyes closed and his last vestige of strength spent. * * * * * Knowing that the old man would probably remain in his sleep of complete exhaustion for hours, Dixon turned his attention to Ruth. To his surprise, he found her sitting up, apparently completely recovered. "I'm quite all right again," she said reassuringly. "I've been listening to what Uncle told you. Go ahead and prepare your explosive, Bruce. I'll do what I can for Uncle while you're working." Dixon donned his lead-cloth hood and tunic again and set to work. Ten minutes later he turned to Ruth with a slender foot-long cylinder of lead in his hand. "Ruth, will this fit your Uncle's projectile?" he asked. "Easily," she assured him. "But isn't it frightfully dangerous to carry in that form?" "No, it's absolutely safe now, and will be safe until this stud is turned, releasing the activating gas from one compartment to mingle with the radium compound in the other section. Then the cylinder will become a bomb that any sharp jar will detonate." "All right, let's go then," Ruth answered. "Have you any more of those lead clothes that I can wear? I could wear the globe head-piece that Uncle wore, but it would loom up in the dark like a searchlight." Dixon did not protest Ruth's going with him. There was nothing further that could be done for Emil Crawford for hours and in the hazardous sally to Crawford's laboratory he knew that Ruth's cool courage and quick wits would at least double their chances for success in their desperate mission. He provided her with a reserve hood and tunic of lead cloth, then handed her a tiny leaden pellet. "Keep this for a last resort," he told her. "It's a contact bomb that becomes ready to throw when this safety catch is snapped over. I wish we had a dozen of them, but that's the last capsule I had and there's no time to prepare more." He fished a rusty old revolver out of a drawer, and placed it in his pocket. "I'll use this gun for a last resort weapon myself," he said. "The action only works about half the time, but it's the only firearm in the place." * * * * * The green moon was still high in the sky as Ruth and Dixon emerged from the tunnel, but it was already beginning to drop gradually down toward the west. Dixon wheeled his disreputable flivver out of its nearby shed. With engine silent they started coasting down the rough winding road into the valley. For nearly two miles they wound down the long grade. Then, just as they reached the valley floor they saw, far up among the rocks to the left of the road, the thing they had been dreading--the bobbing opalescent globe that marked the presence of one of the Centaurians' hideous hybrids. The shimmering globe paused for a moment, then came racing down toward them. The need for secrecy was past. Dixon threw the car in gear and savagely pulled down the gas lever. With throttle wide open they hurtled around the perilous curves of the narrow road, but always in the rocks beside and above them they heard the scuttling progress of some huge, many-legged creature that constantly kept pace with them. They had occasional glimpses of the thing. Its pale jointed body was some twenty feet in length, and had apparently been developed from that of a centipede, with scores of racing legs that carried it with startling speed over the rocky terrain. The flivver raced madly on toward the blaze of kaleidoscopic colors that marked the Centaurians' camp. Crawford's home loomed up now barely a hundred yards ahead. As though sensing that its quarry was about to escape, the hybrid flashed a burst of speed that sent it on by the car for a full fifty yards, then down into the road directly in front, where it whirled to confront them. Dixon knew that he could never stop the car in the short gap separating them from that huge upreared figure, and to attempt swerving from the road upon either side was certain disaster. He took the only remaining chance. With throttle wide open he sent the little car hurtling straight for the giant centipede. He threw his body in front of Ruth, to shield her as much as possible, just as they smashed squarely into the hybrid. The impact was too much for even that monstrous figure. It was hurled bodily from the road to crash upon the jagged rocks at the bottom of a thirty-foot gully. There it sprawled in a broken mass, too hopelessly shattered to ever rise again. The flivver skidded momentarily, then crumpled to a full stop against the rocks at the side of the road. Dixon and Ruth scrambled from the wreckage and raced for Crawford's home, scarcely fifty yards ahead. * * * * * They entered the laboratory and Ruth went directly over to where the radio-projectile rested in a wall-rack. Dixon took the gleaming cylinder down to examine it. Tapering to a rounded point at the front end, it was nearly a yard long and about five inches in diameter. "The mechanism inside the projectile is turned off now, of course," Ruth said. "If it were turned on, the projectile would have been on its way to the space ship long ago, for the radio waves are as strong here as at the Centaurians' camp." The girl pointed to a small metal stud in the nose of the projectile. "When that is snapped over, it makes the contact that sets the magnetizing mechanism into action," she explained. "Then the projectile will go hurtling directly for the source of any radio waves within range. I don't know the nature of its mechanism. Uncle merely told me that it is the application of an entirely new principle of electricity." Dixon laid the long projectile down on the work-bench, and began packing his lead cylinder of explosive inside it. He had to release the lead cylinder's safety catch before closing the projectile, which made his work a thrillingly precarious one, for any sharp blow now would detonate the unstable mixture of gas and radium compound in one cataclysmic explosion. He sighed in relief as he finally straightened up with the completed projectile held carefully in both hands. "All we have to do now, Ruth," he said, "is step out from under this roof and snap that energizing stud. Then this little package of destruction will be on its way to our Centaurian friends up there by that pestilential green moon." * * * * * Ruth stepped ahead to open the door for him. With the end of their task so near at hand, both forgot to be cautious. Ruth threw the door open and took one step outside, then suddenly screamed in terror as her shoulders were encircled by a long snake-like object that came whipping down from some vast something that had been lurking just outside. Dixon tried to dodge back, but too late. Another great hairy tentacle came lashing around his shoulders, pinning his arms tightly and jerking him out of the doorway. He had a swift vague glimpse of a hybrid looming there in the green moonlight--a tarantula hybrid that in size and horror dwarfed any of the frightful products of Centaurian science that he had yet seen. Before Dixon had time to note any of the details of his assailant another tentacle curled around him, tearing the projectile from his grasp. Then he was irresistibly drawn up toward that grisly head where Ruth's body was also suspended in one of the powerful tentacles. The next moment, bearing its burdens with amazing ease, the giant hybrid started off. Dixon tried with all his strength to squirm free enough to get a hand upon the revolver in his pocket, but the constricting tentacle did not give for even an inch. The only result of his effort was to twist his hood to one side, leaving him as effectually blindfolded as though his head were in a sack. Long minutes of swaying, pitching motion followed as the hybrid sped over the rocky ridges and gullies. It finally came to a halt, and for another minute or so Dixon was held there motionless in mid-air, dimly conscious of a subdued hum of activity all about him. Then he was gently lowered to the ground again. While one tentacle still held him securely, another tore away his hood and tunic. Almost immediately the hood was replaced by one of the protective white globe devices. Dixon blinked for a moment in half-blinded bewilderment as he got his first glimpse of the Earth-camp of the Centaurians. * * * * * The place, located on the smooth rock floor of a large natural basin, seemed a veritable cauldron of seething colors which rippled and blended in a dazzling maze of unearthly splendor. But Dixon forgot everything else in that weird camp as his startled gaze fell upon the creature standing directly in front of him. He knew instinctively that the thing must be one of the Alpha Centaurians, for in its alien grotesqueness the figure was utterly dissimilar to anything ever seen upon Earth before. Life upon the shattered planet of that far distant sun had apparently sprung from sources both crustacean and reptilian. The Centaurian stood barely five feet in height. Its bulky, box-like body was completely covered with a chitinous armor that gleamed pale yellowish green. Two short powerful legs, scaled like those of a lizard, ended in feet that resembled degenerated talons. Two pairs of slender arms emanated from the creature's shoulders, with their many-jointed flexible length ending in delicate three-pronged hands. The scaly hairless head beneath the Centaurian's white globe device bore a face that was blankly hideous. Two great lidless eyes, devoid of both pupils and whites, stared unblinkingly at Dixon like twin blobs of red-black jelly. A toothless loose-lipped mouth slavered beneath. Dixon averted his gaze from the horror of that fearful alien face, and looked anxiously around for Ruth. He saw her almost at once, over at his right. She was tethered by a light metallic rope that ran from her waist to one of the metal beams supporting the great shimmering ball of opalescent fire which formed the central control of the hybrids. One of the white globe devices had been placed upon Ruth's head and she was apparently unhurt, for she pluckily flashed a reassuring smile at Dixon. * * * * * Directly in front of Dixon and some forty yards away there was a large pen-like enclosure, with vari-colored shafts of radiance from banks of projectors constantly sweeping through it. Dixon drew in his breath sharply as he saw the frightful life lying dormant in that pen. It was a solid mass of hybrids--great loathesome figures fashioned from a score of different worms, insects, and spiders. The globes upon the gruesome mammalian half-heads were still dark and unfired with opalescence. The invaders had apparently raided most of the surrounding country in obtaining those grafted half-heads. Near where Dixon stood there was a tragic little pile of articles taken from the Centaurians' victims--prospectors' picks, shovels, axes, and other tools. Over to the left of the dormant hybrids stood the second Alpha Centaurian, curiously examining Dixon's projectile. The creature apparently suspected the deadly nature of the gleaming cylinder for it soon laid it carefully down and packed cushions of soft fabric around it to shield it from any possible shock. Then at an unspoken command from the first Centaurian the great hybrid whirled Dixon around to face a small enclosure just behind him in which were located banks of control panels and other apparatus. One of the pieces of mechanism, with a regularly spaced stream of sparks snapping between two terminals, was apparently a radio receiver automatically recording the broadcast from the space ship. Dixon was unable to even guess the nature of the remaining apparatus. "Bruce, be careful!" Ruth called in despairing warning. "He is going to put the thought-reading machine on your brain. Then he'll learn what the projectile is for, and everything will be lost!" * * * * * Dixon's mind raced with lightning speed in the face of this new danger. He stealthily slipped a hand over the revolver in his pocket. There was one vulnerable spot in the great hybrid holding him, and that was the opalescent globe on the creature's head. If he could only smash that globe with one well-directed shot, he might be able to elude the Centaurians for the precious minute necessary to send the projectile on its deadly journey. The hybrid began maneuvering Dixon toward the instrument enclosure. For a fleeting second the grip of the tentacles upon his shoulders loosened slightly. Dixon took instant advantage of it. Twisting himself free from the loosened tentacle in one mighty effort, he whirled and fired pointblank at the opalescent globe on the head looming above him. The bullet smashed accurately home, shattering the globe like a bursting bubble. The great hybrid collapsed with startling suddenness, its life force instantly extinguished as the globe burst. Dixon leaped to one side and swung the gun into line with the Centaurian's hideous face. He pulled the trigger--but there was no response. The rusty old firearm had hopelessly jammed. Dixon savagely flung the revolver at the Centaurian. The creature tried to dodge, but the heavy gun struck its body a glancing blow. There was a slight spurt of body fluid as the chitinous armor was partly broken. Dixon's heart leaped exultantly. No wonder these creatures had to create hybrids to fight for them. Their own bodies were as vulnerable as that of a soft-shelled crab! The Centaurian quickly drew a slender tube of dark green from a scabbard in its belt. Dixon dodged back, looking wildly about him for a weapon. There was an ax in the pile only a few yards away. Dixon snatched the ax up, and whirled to give battle. * * * * * The other Centaurian had come hurrying over now to aid its mate. Dixon was effectually barred from attempting any progress toward the projectile by the two grotesque creatures as they stood alertly there beside each other with their green tubes menacing him. Dixon waited tensely at bay, remembering those searing radium burns upon Emil Crawford's body. Then the first Centaurian abruptly leveled a second and smaller tube upon Dixon. A burst of yellow light flashed toward him, enveloping him in a cloud of pale radiance before he could dodge. There was a faint plop as the protecting white globe upon his head was shattered. The yellow radiance swiftly faded, leaving Dixon unhurt, but he realized that the first round in the battle had been won decisively by the Centaurians. His only chance now, was to end the battle before the paralyzing rays of the green moon sapped his strength. He warily advanced upon the Centaurians. Their green tubes swung into line and twin bolts of violet flame flashed toward him. He dodged, and the bolts missed by inches. Then Dixon nearly fell as his foot struck a bundle of cloth on the ground. The next moment he snatched the bundle up with a cry of triumph. It was his lead-cloth tunic, torn and useless as a garment, but invaluable as a shield against the searing effects of those bolts of radioactive flame. He hurriedly wrapped the fabric in a rough bundle around his left forearm. The next time the tubes' violet flames flashed toward him he thrust his rude shield squarely into their path. There was a light tingling shock, and that was all. The bolts did not sear through. With new confidence, Dixon boldly charged the two Centaurians. A weird battle ensued in the garishly lighted arena. The effective range of the violet flashes was only about ten feet, and Dixon's muscular agility was far superior to that of his antagonists. By constant whirling and dodging he was able to either catch the violet bolts upon his shielded arm or else dodge them entirely. Yet, in spite of the Centaurians' clumsy slowness, they maneuvered with a cool strategy that constantly kept the Earth man's superior strength at bay. Always as Dixon tried to close with one of them he was forced to retreat when a flanking attack from the other threatened his unprotected back. And always the Centaurians maneuvered to bar Dixon from attempting any dash toward the projectile. * * * * * The minutes passed, and Dixon felt his strength rapidly ebbing, both from his herculean exertions and from the paralyzing rays of the green moon beating down upon his unprotected head. As his speed of foot lessened the Centaurians began inexorably pressing their advantage. Dixon was no longer escaping unscathed. In spite of his frantic efforts to dodge, twice the violet bolts grazed his body in searing flashes of exquisite agony. His muscles stiffened still more in the attack of the Green Sickness. Desperately dodging a Centaurian bolt, he stumbled and nearly fell. As he staggered to regain his balance, one of his antagonists scrambled to the coveted position behind him. It was only Ruth's scream of warning that galvanized Dixon's numbed brain into action in time to meet the imminent peril. In one mighty effort he flung his ax at the Centaurian in front of him. The heavy blade cut deep into the thinly armored body. Mortally wounded, the creature collapsed. Dixon whirled and flung up his shielded left arm just in time to intercept the violet bolt of the other Centaurian. Warily backing away, Dixon succeeded in retrieving his ax from beside the twitching body of the fallen invader. Then, with the heavy weapon again in his hand, he remorselessly charged his remaining foe. The Centaurian's tube flashed in a veritable hail of hurtling violet bolts, but Dixon caught the flashes upon his shield and closed grimly in. One final leap brought him to close quarters. The heavy ax whistled through the air in a single mighty stroke that cleft the Centaurian's frail body nearly in two. Then Ruth's excited scream came again. "Bruce--the other one! Get it quick!" * * * * * Dixon turned. The wounded invader, taking advantage of their preoccupation in the final struggle with its mate, had dragged its crippled body over to the instrument enclosure. Dixon staggered toward it as fast as his half-paralyzed muscles would permit. He was just too late. The Centaurian jerked a lever home a fraction of a second before Dixon's smashing ax forever ended his activities. The lever's action upon the pen of inert hybrids was immediate. The sweeping lances of light vanished in a brief sheet of vivid flame which kindled the dark globes on the hybrids' gruesome heads to steady opalescence--and the dread horde came to life! Sprawling from the pen, they came scuttling toward Dixon in a surging flood--a scene out of a nightmare. Dixon faced the oncoming horde in numb despair, knowing that his nearly-paralyzed body had no chance in flight. Then, just as the hybrids were nearly upon him, he heard Ruth's encouraging voice again. "There's still one chance left, Bruce," she cried, "and I'll take it!" Dixon turned. Ruth had in her hand the tiny contact grenade he had given her for a last emergency. She snapped the safety catch on the little bomb, then hurled it squarely at the giant opalescent globe looming close beside her. There was a terrific explosion and the great globe shattered to atoms. Apparently stunned by the concussion but otherwise unhurt, Ruth was flung clear of the wreckage. With the shattering of the central globe the strange life force of the hybrid horde vanished instantly and completely. Midway in their rush they sprawled inert and dead, with their outstretched legs so close to Dixon that he had to step over one or two to get clear. * * * * * Dixon's brain reeled in the reaction of relief from the horde's hideous menace. Then he grimly fought to clear his fast-numbing senses long enough for the one final task that he knew must still be done. The projectile, cushioned as it was, had escaped detonation in the blast. He had only to stagger across the twenty yards separating him from it, then release the stud that would send it flashing out into space. But his last shred of reserve strength had nearly been sapped now by the insidious rays of that malevolent green moon. Even as he started toward the projectile, he staggered and fell. Unable to drag himself to his feet again, he began grimly crawling with arms and legs as stiff and dead as that much stone. Only ten more yards to go now. And now only five. Grimly, doggedly, with senses reeling and muscles nearly dead, the last survivor of a dying planet fought desperately on under the malignant rays of the vivid green moon! One last sprawling convulsive effort--and Dixon had the projectile in his hands. His stiff fingers fumbled agonizingly with the activating stud. Then abruptly the stud snapped home. With a crescendo whistle of sundered air the projectile flashed upward into the western sky. Dixon collapsed upon his back, his dimming eyes fixed upon the grim green moon. Minutes that seemed eternities dragged slowly by. Then his heart leaped in sudden hope. Had there really glowed a small blue spark up there beside the green moon--a spark marking the mighty explosion of the radium bomb against the Centaurians' space ship? A fraction of a second later, and doubt became glorious certainty. The vivid green of the moonlight vanished. The silvery white sheen of a normal moon again shone serenely up there in the western sky! With the extinguishing of the dread green rays, new strength surged swiftly through Dixon's tired body. He arose and hurried over to where Ruth lay limp and still near the wreckage of the great globe. He worked over her for many anxious minutes before the normal flush of health returned to her white cheeks and her eyes slowly opened. Then he took Ruth into his arms and for a long minute the two silently drank in the beauty of that radiant silver moon above them, while their hearts thrilled with a realization of the glorious miracle of awakening life that they knew must already be beginning to rejuvenate a stricken world. The Death-Cloud _By Nat Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat_ [Illustration: _Someone at a huge switchboard turned toward me. I pressed the trigger._] [Sidenote: The epic exploit of one who worked in the dark and alone, behind the enemy lines, in the great Last War.] We sat, Eric Bolton and I, at a parapet table atop the 200-story General Aviation Building. The efficient robot waiter of the Sky Club had cleared away the remnants of an epicurean meal. Only a bowl of golden fruit remained--globes of nectar picked in the citrus groves of California that morning. My eye wandered over the scene spread before us, the vast piling of masonry that is New York. The dying beams of the setting sun glinted golden from the roofs of the pleasure palaces topping the soaring structures. Lower, amid interlacing archings of the mid-air thoroughfares, darkness had already piled its blackness. Two thousand feet below, in the region of perpetual night, the green-blue factory lights flared. On three sides, the unbroken serration of the Empire City's beehives stretched in a semicircle of twenty miles radius. Long since, the rivers that had made old Manhattan an island had been roofed over. But, to the east, the heaving sea still stretched its green expanse. On the horizon a vast cloud mountain billowed upward from the watery surface, white, and pink and many shades of violet. "That's just the way it looked," Bolton muttered, as he drew my attention to the cloud mass. "See that air-liner just diving into it? Just so I saw the _New York_--five thousand men--pride of the Air Service--dive into that mountain of smoke. And she never came out! Gone--like that!" And he snapped his fingers. He fell silent again, gazing dreamily at the drifting rings of pipe smoke. He smiled, the twisted smile which was the sole indication that one side of his face was the master work of a great surgeon-sculptor. A marvelous piece of work, that, but no less marvelous than the protean changes that Bolton himself could make in his appearance. It was this genius at impersonation that had won Bolton his commission in the Intelligence Service, when, in 1992, the world burst into flame. "Would you like to hear about it?" The obtuseness of the man! "If you'd care to tell me." I spoke off-handedly. This was like hunting birds on the wing: too abrupt a movement of the glider, and the game was lost. This is the story he told me, in the low, modulated voice of the trained actor. He told it simply, with no dramatic tricks, no stressing, no climatic crescendos. But I saw the scenes he described, dodged with him through black caverns of dread, felt an icy hand clutch my heart as the Ferret stared at me with his baleful glance; was deafened, and stunned, and crushed by that final tremendous down pouring of the waters. * * * * * I was standing--he began--on one of our rafts, watching the installation of a new ray machine. A storm was raging, but the great raft, a thousand feet long, and five hundred wide, was as steady as a rock. We were 700 miles out; the great push of '92, that drove us back to within 150 miles of our coast and almost ended the war, was still eleven weeks off. Suddenly the buzzer of my radio-receiver whirred against my chest. "2--6--4"--my personal call. "2--2"--"Go to nearest communications booth." "A--4"--"Use Intelligence Service intermitter 4." The secret of that was known only to a half-dozen men in the field. Headquarters wanted to talk to me on a supremely important matter. There was a booth only a short distance away. I stepped to it and identified myself to the guard. In a moment I was within and had swung shut and sealed the sound-proof door. I set the intermitter switches to the A--4 combination. Not even our own control officers could eavesdrop now. Then I switched off the light, and waited. A green glow grew out of the darkness. I was being inspected. Headquarters was taking no chances. Out of the green haze before me the general himself materialized. I could count every hair in his grizzled beard. The little scar at the corner of his left eye fascinated me with its distinctness. I saluted. "Captain Bolton reporting, sir." "At ease!" General Sommers' voice snapped with military precision. The general was standing in his private office in Washington. I could see his desk in the corner, and the great operations map on the wall. There were new lines of worry in the general's grim face. * * * * * He went straight to the point. "Captain Bolton, we are confronted with a problem that must be solved at once. While our information is meagre, the Staff is convinced that a great danger menaces us. Of its precise nature, or how it is to be combatted, we are unaware. I am assigning you to secure the answer to these two questions. "A week ago there appeared, ten miles east of the enemies' first line, and directly opposite our raft 1264, what seemed at first to be merely a peculiar cloud formation. It rose directly from the surface of the water, and was shaped roughly like half an egg. The greatest dimension, lying along the water, parallel to the battle line, was about 5 miles; the height approximately a mile. "When two or three days had passed, and no change in the shape or dimensions of the strange mass had taken place, although wind and weather conditions had been varied, we determined to investigate. This was undoubtedly an artificial, not a natural, phenomenon. It was then that we discovered that there was a concentration of defenses along this portion of the front. Our scouts were unable to find any of the usual gaps in either the ray network in the upper air, or the gyro-knife barrier beneath the surface. At the same time, from scouting parties and deserters at other points we learned that rumors are rife throughout the enemy forces of some scheme now on foot that will overwhelm us within a very short time. No details have been given, but so widespread is the gossip, and so consistent, that we have been forced to the conclusion that it cannot be reasonably dismissed as mere morale-supporting propaganda. "We have secretly developed a method of so equipping aircraft as to render them immune to the enemy death ray. The device is complicated and requires time to manufacture and install. After careful consideration, we decided that the situation was sufficiently grave to warrant revealing to the enemy our possession of this new device. "The battle-airship _New York_ has been equipped with the new protective equipment. To-morrow at sunrise she will make an attack in force on whatever lies behind that screen. "Your orders are these. You will proceed at once to raft 1264. You will observe the attack made by the _New York_. If she fails, you will then find some way to enter that area, discover what is going on behind the screen, hamper or destroy the enemy plans if possible and report back to me personally." * * * * * The general's face suddenly softened. His tones lost their military precision. "I am afraid, Captain, that I am sending you to your death. But--we must know what is going on. If the _New York_ fails, the task will appear impossible, but you have already done the impossible." The grim mask dropped again over the chief's features; again he became the perfect military machine. "You will call on any officer of our forces for whatever you may need. Here is your authority." He stepped aside, and I heard the low burr of the tel-autograph at the side of the screen before me. A moment, and the general was again visible. "That will be all." Once more the momentary softening. "Good luck, my boy." A final exchange of salutes, and the screen went blank. I switched on the light. There in the little machine was a slip of paper. I extracted it. The lines of type, the scrawled signature, burned into my brain like letters of fire. "To: All Officers of the Military Forces of the Americas. Subject: Military Assistance. Eric Bolton, Captain M.I.S., M.F.A. is authorized to call upon you for any assistance. You will comply with his requests. Alton Sommers, Lieut. General Commanding M.I.S., M.F.A. By authority of the Commander in Chief." In the corner appeared my thumb-print. I stood there for a long time, mulling the thing over. The Staff was laying tremendous stress on the enemy's strange cloud formation, even to the extent of disclosing the secret of the new defensive device. The Easterners, too, had something novel, something that would cut off absolutely the transmission of ether waves. Nothing either side had yet produced would do that. What was happening behind that screen? Would they break through our defenses at last? A vision arose before me. Hordes of yellow men, of black, of white renegades from the nations where the red flag waved dominant, pouring over the Americas. The horrors that Britain had undergone, the last European nation to hold out against the Red horde, flashed into my mind. I shuddered. Never. It must not be. * * * * * I was hurled from my feet by an electric shock. A great flood of sunlight burst in on me. A corner of the booth, three-foot concrete, had been sheared away, whiffed into nothingness! I arose and dashed into the open. A raid was in progress. The air was electric with the clashing of opposing barrages. The terrible silence of the pitched battles of that war oppressed me. I saw a squad, caught in the beam of an Eastern ray-projector, destroyed. The end man must have been just on the edge of the beams--half his right side lay twitching on the ground. The rest of him, and the seven others, were smoking heaps of blackened cinders. High over No Man's Land--queer how those old phrases last--a covey of enemy helicopters hung, waiting for the barrage to lift. A black hulk broke the surface of the water, split open: then another. Enemy sub-surface craft. The fight was being waged under water, too. A green mass spilled its contents as it leaped over the waves and fell back. One of ours. A huge buzzing came from behind me. A cloud of wasplike forms flew high overhead. It was reserve aircraft, hurrying up from the second line raft, ten miles west. But this was no affair of mine. I had my orders. I must be in the North Atlantic by daybreak. I looked around. There at the further edge my little Zephyr rested, intact. I hurried to her and sprang into the cockpit. I was off the coast of Chile. Twelve thousand feet would clear the highest range between. I set the height control. Today you don't have to do that, but Mason hadn't perfected his automatic elevator then. The starting indicator was already set for my position. I adjusted the direction disk. The little green light showed that the power broadcast was in operation. I snapped over the starting switch and the whir of the helicopter vanes overhead told me all was well. The machine leaped into the air. Nothing to do now till the warning bell told me I was within a hundred miles of my destination. The battle shot away from me, far below. Darkness came swiftly. I was shooting into the eye of the sun at three hundred miles an hour. I swallowed a few pellets of concentrated food, then curled up in my bunk. There was no knowing how many hours would pass till I slept again. I fell asleep at once. * * * * * The strident clamor of the alarm bell woke me. Dawn was just breaking. Far below me I could make out the heaving Atlantic, calm and peaceful. A long line of the huge second-line rafts just underneath, stretching north and south till it curved over the horizon. A bugle's clear notes came drifting up to me, reveille. Then I was hovering over my goal, raft 1264. The black rectangle was alive with activity unwonted at this early hour. I took over the controls from the mechanical pilot, sent my recognition signal and drifted downward. The Zephyr settled on the raft with a soft hiss of the compressed air shock absorbers. A guard came hurrying up. My credentials passed upon, I alighted. Momentarily, it was getting brighter. I was just in time. I looked eastward, toward the enemy rafts. Beyond them, there it was, just as General Sommers had described it--a mountain of vapor, gleaming white in the gathering light. Not at all disquieting; merely a shifting, billowing cloud mass. Rather pretty. The rest of the sky was clear, unspecked. As I gazed a line of red fire ran around the edge of the cloud. A violet glow suffused the whole, faded swiftly into pink. The sun was rising. Behind me I heard a huge whirring. Turning, I saw her, just rising, all the beautiful trim length of her. The _New York_! Pride of our air fleet! Fifty paces to my right a little knot of officers caught my attention. I recognized Jim Bradley. I remembered, someone had told me he was a major, and was commanding a raft. Good. Jim would work with me as he had in the old days at Stanford U., when I coached the air polo team that he captained. I walked over. Time for only a hurried handclasp. The signal corps sergeant, earphones clamped to his head, was intoning the airship's messages. "We have reached the thousand-foot level. Will now head for the objective. All well." We watched her. She was through our barrage-line. A snapped order from Jim restored the barrier, momentarily lifted to let her pass. A curious shimmering blurred the ship's outlines. I called Jim's attention to it. "That's the new device, a network of fine wires, charged with neutralising vibrations. Worked like a charm in the tests. But there's no telling how effective it is in actual service." * * * * * A cold shiver ran up my spine. Many a fine ship I had seen strike that invisible network of rays, and puff into smoke. Was that to be the _New York's_ fate? "We are about to pass through the enemy barrage. All well," came the sergeant's unemotional monotone, repeating the voice in his ears. I knew that voice was being listened to in Washington by a little group whose every shoulder bore the stars of high command. My thoughts flashed to them, gazing breathless at the screen that imaged the very scene before us. My breath stopped. Now! She must be in it now. The next second would tell the tale. A faint coruscation of sparks ran along the network, but the craft kept steadily onward. Thank God! "We have passed through the enemy first-line barrage. All well." A faint whistling of released breath came from all about me. I was not the only one who had agonised at that moment. The first test had been passed; would the other be as successful? "We are increasing our speed to the maximum. Objective dead ahead. All well." I saw the ship fairly leap through the sky. Five hundred miles an hour was her greatest speed. Another moment-- "We are entering the cloud. Bow is invisible. All--" She was in it. She lurched. Plunged forward. She was hidden. I turned to the sergeant. Tremendous concentration was on his bronzed face. He reached out, twirled a dial in the set before him, and shook his head slightly. Twirled again. We were knotted around him, our faces bloodless. He looked up. "The last sentence was cut off sharp, sir. I can hear nothing more. Even the carrier wave is dead." Jim ripped out an oath, snatched the phones, and clamped them over his own ears. Dead silence. At last he looked up. "Nothing, gentlemen." * * * * * We looked at each other, appalled. Bradley handed the apparatus back to the sergeant. "Remain here, listening carefully. Let me know at once if you hear anything." The sergeant saluted. Out there the white cloud billowed and gleamed in the sunlight. But there was something ominous in its calm beauty now. A thought struck me. I spoke, and my voice sounded flat, dead. "Perhaps it's only the radio waves that are cut off. Maybe she's all right, fighting there inside, smashing them." But I knew that it was all over. "God, I hope you're right. Five thousand men aboard her." Bradley's lips were white, his hands trembling. "Come to my office, Eric; we'll wait there. To your posts, gentlemen. Each of you will detail a man to watch that cloud bank, and report to me any change in its appearance, even the slightest." We walked back to the concrete command-post. We didn't talk, though it had been years since we had seen each other. My brain was numbed, I know. I had seen plenty of fighting, watched many a man go to his death in the seven months since the war began. But this, somehow, was different. An hour passed. Jim busied himself with routine paper work. At least he had that relief. I paced about his tiny office. Already I was making plans. Force had failed. Strategy must take its place. I must get in there. But how? Bradley looked up from his work, his face grim. "No news, Eric. If you were right we should have heard something from the _New York_ by this time. They're gone, all right." "Yes, they're gone," I answered. "It's up to me, then." * * * * * He stared in surprise. "Up to you? What do you mean?" "Just that. I'm going in there, God helping." I made sure the room was shut tight against eavesdroppers. Then, briefly as I could, I told him of my orders, showing him the document I had received the day before. He shook his head. "But it's impossible. Their ray network, and the undersea barrier, are absolutely solid here. I don't think even a mouse could get through. And even if you did get behind their lines, how on earth are you going to get into the area underneath that devilish cloud. You saw what happened to the _New York_, protected as she was." "Yes. I know all that. Nevertheless it's got to be done." Just then I got the glimmering of an idea. "Tell me, Jim, are they doing much scouting here. Undersea, I mean." "The usual one-man shell, radio-propelled. We get one once in a while. Most of them, however, even if we do smash them, are pulled back on the wave before we can grab them. It's a bit easier than most places, though: our depth's only about six hundred feet." "What! Why, I thought the bottom averaged three thousand all along the line." "It does. But what would be a mountain ridge, if this were dry land, runs out from the mainland. We're over a big plateau here. It goes on east another twenty-five miles, or so. See, here's the chart." A warning bell seemed to ring somewhere within me. Had this peculiar formation of the ocean bed anything to do with the problem at hand? But I kept to the immediate step. My plan was rapidly taking shape in my mind. "What are the scouts--black, yellow, or--" "Russians, mostly." "Good. Now listen, Jim. Send down word that the next scout-sub that is caught is not to be ripped, but simply held against the attraction of the return wave. The television eye is to be smashed at once, and radio communication jammed. Can you do it as if something had happened to the shell?" "Sure thing, but what's the big idea?" "You'll see. I've worked the thing out now." Just then a red light on Bradley's desk winked three times. "There's one between the lines now!" he exclaimed. "Quick, man, shoot my orders down." He pressed a yellow button and spoke quietly but emphatically into a mouth piece. "O.K. They understand." "Now take me down." He looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses, but complied. * * * * * The door of the elevator that lowered us from the surface clanged open. We stepped out on a balcony that ran around a large, steel-lined room. The walls were dripping, and on the floor, twenty feet beneath, a black pool sloshed about with the heaving of the raft, in whose interior we were. Rubber-clad soldiers moved about in the blue glow of the globes sending down their heatless light from the ceiling. One sat at a desk near the elevator. As I spied him a green light glowed in front of him twice. "They've got him, sir, bringing him in." A low-toned order. The soldiers sprang to their post. A whirring signal. At the other end of the room the steel wall began to move upward, and water rushed in. A tremendous vibration shook the chamber: a ponderous thudding. The water rose to the level of the balcony and stopped. I looked at Bradley. "We're beneath the surface, aren't we?" I asked. "How is it that the water doesn't fill the room?" "Pumps," he replied. "Tremendous pumps that draw the water out just as fast as it comes in, and shoot it out again into the sea. We can maintain any desired level in here." Then I noticed that the black flood was rushing by beneath me at a terrific rate. Something bulked in the opening. Two tiny subs drew in, a black and a green. The steel wall rushed down again, and the vibration ceased. From the green craft heavy grapples extended, clutching the black, enemy scout. I saw a gaping hole in the black boat's nose, where its eye had been smashed. Men were clambering over both vessels' hulls, tugging at the hatchway fastenings. The black one flew open. I leaped to the deck. Bradley after me, and jumped down into the hold. In the little cubby-hole that was all the machinery left space for, a pale-faced form in green-gray crouched against the wall. His eyes stared in fear. A Russian, praise be. And not far from my size and build. "Off with his clothes, quick!" I yelled, stripping mine as I spoke. Bradley looked at me queerly, and shrugged his shoulders. "Quick, man! Everything depends on speed!" He shook his head, as one who listens to the vaporings of an imbecile, but turned to obey. I was standing there--naked, studying the Easterner's face, his body. No scars. Good. * * * * * Jim turned to me, the prisoner's clothing in his hands. An exclamation burst from him. He looked back at the trembling Russ, then at me. "My God, Eric, how did you do it?" he asked. I smiled. "All right, is it?" "You're his twin; no, you're himself! If I'd had a drink to-day I'd be sure I was seeing double. How on earth--you had no make-up, no time--" I was sliding into the Red's gear as I talked! "I've trained all the little muscles in my face--muscles you others don't even know you have. Started when I was a kid, then made a good living at it, acting. Comes in handy now, damn handy. I can make anything of my face, and hold it forever if I have to. Chink, Russ--anything. Distort my limbs too, and change my voice. That won't be necessary now. Simple, but it takes a lot of practice." I was dressed by then, a counterpart of the enemy officer--I hoped. If I wasn't--well, I wouldn't live much longer. "Now, out with the Russ and my clothes. Don't leave a bit, if you value my life." A light of comprehension illumined Jim's face. "You're going to pass yourself off as this man? You've got your nerve with you!" he exclaimed. "Exactly." The cubby-hole was clear now. "Now take that spanner, and bang me over the head. Not too hard; I don't want a cracked skull, only a splashed scalp. Then pile me where it will seem I crashed against a projection of some kind when the grapples took hold. That bunk edge will do. Batten the hatch, and cast off the grapples. I hope their automatic control is still working, otherwise my scheme's gaflooey." Jim stuck out his great paw. "Good luck, Eric," he said, simply. Then he clutched the spanner. I saw it go over my head.... * * * * * Voices around me, harsh, guttural voices. Russian! By the Nine Dogs of War, I had pulled it off! But what were they saying? I was inside the lines, but was my deception successful? Or had my face relaxed with the shock of the blow? I thanked my Russian grandmother then for all the time she had spent teaching me her mother tongue. "_Boszhe moi_, the poor fellow must have had an awful smash. He hasn't come to yet." "The doctor will be here in a minute. He'll revive him." I breathed a prayer of gratitude. They didn't suspect! But I didn't like this doctor business. Well, I'd have to stall through that as best I could. I seemed to be lying on hard rock. I opened my eyes, staring blankly, straight up. A bearded face was bending over me, the captain's crossed sickles on the shoulder straps just within my vision. Behind, and above him, towering straight up--my God!--what was it? A green wall, a vertical green wall, going up and up! It looked like--but no: how could water stand straight up like that, for hundreds of feet? I almost betrayed myself with a gasp! A dim bulk showed in the translucent depths of the wall. It rushed toward me, took form. A fish, a huge, blind fish, its cavernous mouth stretched wide. It came straight for me, just above. In a second it would leap through. A scream of terror trembled in my throat. Then it hit the edge of the translucent green wall--and vanished! Was I dreaming? Had Jim hit me too hard? Something stirred in the back of my mind. I sensed dimly that here lay the explanation of the disappearance of the _New York_, the very mystery that I had come to solve. Almost I had it; then it slipped away. * * * * * "Here's the doctor!" someone said. There was a little stir of activity about me. I allowed my eyes to close, as if in utter weariness. "What's all this? What have you got here?" A gruff voice, intolerant. "One of our sub-sea scouts, sir. Just come back, after some delay. Her eye was smashed, and there are grapple marks on her. Must have been caught, and then slipped away. She was leaking badly. We got her through the lock just in time." Jim had evidently added a few touches of his own. "Comrade Pauloff seems to have been seriously injured. He's got a bad cut on his scalp, and was unconscious till a moment ago. Opened his eyes just as you came along." "Hm. Let's see." I felt a none too gentle hand finger my wound. It throbbed maddeningly. The doctor spoke again. "A nasty crack, but no fracture. Here, you--wake up." I made no move. "Come on, wake up!" I heard the plop of a cork being drawn from a bottle; a pungent odor assailed my nostrils, choked me. I writhed, pulled at the hand holding the bottle to my nose and opened my eyes. "That's better. How do you feel now?" I raised a hand to my injury and muttered, in Russian. "Hurts, papashka." I kept my expression as blank, as uncomprehending, as I could. The doctor flashed an understanding glance at the captain, then turned back to me. "What's your name?" Memories of my grandmother's tales of her youth came flooding back to me. "Pavel, son of Pauloff." It was the formula of the Russian student, in his teens. "Your rank?" "Second year. Petrovski Gymnasium." The physician turned away. "No use bothering him now. A clear case of amnesia. "He's been thrown back to his high school days. I've had a number of cases like that among your scouts lately." Blessed inspiration! "Only cure is rest. Get him over to the infirmary. We'll evacuate him to a base hospital to-morrow." * * * * * I was in a cool white bed, in a low ceilinged room, white painted. There were other beds, vacant. A uniformed male nurse puttered around. There was an elusive green tinge to the light that poured in through the one window. The door opened and a sergeant came in. "Comrade Alexis!" "Well, what is it now? Have they found another gold-bricking officer to mess up my clean beds?" "A party from corps headquarters will be here in fifteen minutes for inspection." "Let them come. They won't find any specks of rust on my instruments, like they did on Comrade Borisoff's." "They'd better not. You know what happened to him." "Yeah. Chucked into the ray. Well, he didn't give the burial squad any work." And the two laughed, a laugh that had more than a hint of sadistic cruelty in it. "If I had my way," the nurse went on, "I'd do the same with all these nuts that come back from the scout ships raving of home and mother. It's my idea that they're all bluffing. It's a good way to be shipped to the rear, where the captured dames are. Say, did I tell you about the last time I was on leave--" The two whispered, their heads close together. My brain was working frantically. Things had gone well so far, but I had to get out of here before the morning, or I'd be sent to the base and lose all that I had gained by my daring. The door snapped open. "_Smirnow!_" (Atten-_shun!_) * * * * * I was on my side, facing away from the wall. I remained so, staring blankly across the room. I hoped the inspection would be over quickly. The fewer the enemy officers I had looking me over, the better. Someone back there was snapping questions. That voice--where had I heard it before? "Your patient. What's his trouble?" "Amnesia, sir. One of the scouts." "Oh, yes. Let's look at him." Someone was walking across the room, then standing above me. His hand was just at the level of my eyes--a hand with the little finger twisted queerly into the palm. I knew that hand: it was the _Ferret's_! A cold shiver ran up my back. I almost stopped breathing. Of all the infernal luck in the world, to have the Ferret walk in here! He was chief of the Red's Intelligence Service, the shrewdest, sharpest, cruelest of them all. Many of our best men had gone west because of his uncanny instinct for piercing disguise. They said he could _smell_ an American. And many of our most strictly guarded plans had been smashed through his infernally clever spying. Only a month before I had him in my clutches; saw the very rope around his neck. But he had slipped away, and left me empty-handed and kicking myself for an ass. I held my breath as I felt those gimlet eyes of his boring into me. Would he sense who I was? Surely he could hear the pounding of my heart. How long he stood there I don't know. It seemed like hours. I tautened, waiting for him to call out, determined to sell my life as dearly as I could. But for once the Ferret was fooled. He turned away. "Take us into your kitchen," he snapped at the nurse, then there was the tramping of feet and the slamming of a door. * * * * * The breath whistled from me in relief. I turned cautiously. I was alone. Now was my chance. I jumped from the bed and started toward the window. Once out, I'd find some place to hide. I let my face relax; there was no use for that particular disguise any longer. The window was up. I was on the sill. Another second and I'd be out in the open. "Just where do you think you're going?" came the Ferret's silky, cruel voice. I whirled. There he was, just inside the door. His little black eyes glinted dangerously over his hooked nose and sharp chin. "Oh--Bolton! Something made me turn back. Glad to see you." His hand flashed to the ray-tube in his belt. At the same moment I left the window sill in a desperate leap. Clear across the room I sprang, and before he had time to pull his weapon I had one hand clamped around his wrist, the other clutching his throat. We crashed to the ground. I was in pyjamas, barefooted, he fully clothed. His leather shoes drove into me viciously, even as his face turned purple. The pain was excruciating, but I dared not cry out. His left thumb found my eye, was digging in. The crash of our fall must have been heard outside; another moment and all would be lost. I was momentarily on top as we rolled across the floor. With a supreme effort I pulled his head away from the floor, then crashed it down. He slumped; lay still. The door knob was turning as I jumped frantically through the window. I heard a cry behind me. Rough, uneven ground. No one about. To my right was a rocky cliff, and at its base what looked like the mouth of a cave. Any port in a storm: I dived into it. It was a cave, all right, or rather a narrow tunnel winding some distance into the cliff. I ran back at top speed, till I crashed into the end of the passage. * * * * * I crouched there, panting. It was beastly cold, and the dampness struck into my bones. I shivered, then laughed grimly. I wouldn't shiver long. When the Ferret came to and revealed that Eric Bolton was around, there wouldn't be a stone left unturned till I was found. Those birds had good cause to want me rubbed out. Already I could hear faint shouts from without. The chase was on. I was caught, right enough. Trapped like any rat. I felt around me in the darkness and my hand lighted on a round stone. It just fitted my fist. Well, I'd get one of them, anyway, when they found me. Cold comfort in that, but I didn't feel like giving in tamely. Footsteps sounded out at the tunnel end. So soon! I gripped my rock tightly, and waited. But--it sounded like only one man. I drew myself together. Maybe I had a chance. A dim glow showed where the passage curved, then a disk of light flashed on the wall and flitted about. The fool! The steps came on, slowly, stumblingly. The disk of light grew smaller as its source drew nearer. Then he was around the corner, bulked for a moment against his own light as it was reflected from the wet wall. That moment was enough! The stone left my hand with all the force I possessed. It went straight to its mark: a sickening thud told me that. The form dropped, and the flashlight clinked on the rocks. I listened. Still the shouts from without, but no steps inside. I was safe for a time. But the searcher would surely be missed, and others would come looking for him. I had only one chance. I shrugged my shoulders. I couldn't lose anything. If I stayed here my goose was cooked. By the light of the flashlight I examined my quarry. A renegade Frenchman, apparently. A private. In a trice I had his uniform on me and had twisted my features to match his. Little did I think when I acted under the Klieg lights that the fate of two continents would some day depend on this gift of mine. He stirred; groaned. I hesitated. Then--well, I couldn't chance his crawling out. His ray-tube was newly charged. I left a heap of ashes there as I walked away.... * * * * * I was outside the cave. I darted a glance around. My refuge was not the only hole in sheer rock; it was literally honeycombed. From one, then another of the cavern mouths a soldier emerged. Each strode across the uneven, rocky plain to where an officer stood with what was apparently a map in his hand. As each searcher saluted and reported, the officer made a mark on the map. Someone came out from the cave-mouth next to mine. I fell in behind him. "No one in cave twenty-one, sir." "To your post." The private turned on his heel and marched off to take his place in a company formation that was rapidly taking shape near by. My turn was next. What was the number of my cave? A mistake now, and I was through. I saluted. "No one in cave twenty, sir." "To your post." Had I hit it? When the final check-up came would there be two reports for one cave, none for another? A front rank man moved aside. Good: that meant my place was just behind him. My luck was holding. And never did a man need luck more! Now was my first chance to look about, to discover what sort of place this was. It was an oval plain, roughly a mile wide by five miles long. Buildings, squat structures of corrugated iron, were scattered here and there. In the distance, to my left, what seemed a great hole in the ground glowed; a huge disk of light. Dry land, here, where there should be nothing but a waste of waters! * * * * * Puzzled, I strained to see what bordered the plain. It was a tall cliff, running all around, and towering high in the air. But it wasn't rock, for it glowed strangely green in the flood of light that illumined the place. And it was clean cut, rising sheer from the unevenness of the ground. Then I remembered. The vertical green wall that soared above me as I lay dazed from Jim's blow. The translucent green wall in whose depths I had seen the blind fish rushing toward me. Water! The sea! Impossible! There were scientific miracle-workers in the enemy's ranks, but they couldn't have hollowed out a pit such as this in mid-ocean; forced back the very ocean to create this amphitheatre, this dry plain on the Atlantic's very bottom: held back the unthinkable weight of Earth's waters by a nothingness. Incredible! Yet the accomplished fact stared me in the face. My eyes traveled up that impossible wall. It must have been at least six hundred feet high. At its summit, in a murky haze that heaved and billowed, I made out strange, dim bulks that hung, unsupported. A long line of them, a long ellipse following closely the curving of the cliff. Underneath the nearest, barely perceptible, I could make out a lens-shaped cage of wire. I began to understand. Overarching everything was a great dome of heaving cloud. "_Smirn-ow!_" The long line snapped into immobility. "By the left flank, march!" We were moving, marching. Then my ruse had succeeded. I had chosen the right cave number. I breathed a sigh of relief. * * * * * The command for route order was given, and at once a buzz of talk broke out around me. "Damn them, they're sending us right off to work! We missed our mess, hunting for that damned spy. But that don't mean anything. It's back to the tunnel for ours." "Oh, quit your bellyaching, Andreyeff. Another week, and we'll be in New York. Just think of it, the richest city in the world to loot! And women! Why, they tell me the American women are to the Frenchies and the cold English-women as the sun is to the stars. What's a meal more or less when you think of that?" An obscene laugh swept through the ranks. Guttural voices boasted of past exploits--black deeds and sadistic cruelties that had marked the trail of the hordes sweeping over Europe from the windy Asiatic steppes. As we marched, I noticed a peculiarity of the rocky floor. There were no sharp edges, no sudden cleavages in the uneven terrain. It looked, for all the world, as though the stone had been melted, then frozen again in a moment. An unbelievable pattern was forming itself in my mind. If what I thought were true--! The command came to halt. We had reached the blazing disk I had seen from afar. It was a tremendous shaft, dropping straight into the very bowels of the earth. Two hundred feet across, a blinding glare streamed up from the pit. From far beneath came shoutings, the clank of machinery, a growling roar. Other companies marched up and halted at the pit edge. My outfit were whites--Russians, French, Germans. But the others were black, brown, yellow--all the motley aggregation of races that formed the Red cohorts, the backbone of the Great Uprising. As the "At ease" order snapped out a babel of tongues rose on the air. Every language of Earth was there save English. The Anglo-Saxons had chosen tortured death rather than submission to the commands of their conquerors. A huge platform rose slowly up in the shaft and came to a stop at the ground level. It was solidly packed with another throng of soldiers in the gray-green of the enemy. They marched off and we took their place. * * * * * Down, down, we went, till it seemed that our destination was the center of the earth. Louder and louder grew the growling roar, the ponderous thud and clank of huge machines. We were in a huge chamber, hollowed out of the solid rock. Thousands of men bustled out among great piles of lumber and steel rails. Huge cranes rolled here and there, swinging their ponderous loads. Officers shouted crisp orders. Green-uniformed privates sprang to obey. But no time was given me to get more than a glimpse of all this activity. From out the gaping mouth of a hundred-foot-wide tunnel a long train of flat cars came gliding. It halted and swayed on the single rail, and the whir of the gyroscopic balancers filled the cavern. A sharp order, and my companions leaped for the cars, lay prone on the steel car-beds, and passed their belts through projecting loops. I wondered, but imitated them. I buried my face in my arms, as the others were doing. There came the eery shriek of a siren: the train was moving. Swiftly it gathered speed till it seemed as though my protesting body was being forced through a wall of air grown suddenly solid. Myriad fingers pulled at me, seeking to hurl me to destruction. Even through my protecting arms my breath was forced back into my lungs, choking me. The wind howled past with the wail of a thousand souls in torment. Just as the limit of endurance was reached the terrific speed slackened, and the long train ground to a halt. "All off! Lively now!" came the command. * * * * * We were at the rail-head, and before me was the face of the tunnel. Queer, hooded figures were there bending over wheeled tripods, manipulating what appeared to be searchlights. But no shafts of light leaped from the lenses. The tripods were rolling steadily forward. I looked at the tunnel face again, then, startled, back to the hooded men. I rubbed my eyes. Was I seeing things? No, by all that was holy, it was so! The distance between the machines and the end wall of the passage had not changed, but men and rock were ten--fifteen--twenty feet away! They were boring; boring into the solid rock at tremendous speed. _And the rock was melting, vanishing, disappearing into nothingness in the awful blast projected from those machines!_ I gaped--my pose, my danger, forgotten. Almost as fast as a man could run, the tunnel extended itself. It was phantasmal, incredible! A rough hand seized me from behind. I whirled, my heart in my mouth. It was the burly sergeant. "What the hell are you dreaming about, Renaud? Hop to it. Over there, on that shoring job. Get busy now, or--" The threat in that unfinished sentence chilled me by its very vagueness. My squad was hauling heavy timbers, setting them up where a fault showed in the rocky roof of the tunnel. I joined them but my thoughts were a madly whirling chaos. The pattern was complete now. The long, curving under-water ridge on Jim's chart--this tunnel was boring through it. Whatever it was that those tripods projected--a new ray it must be--it was _melting_ a passage six hundred miles long. Under our rafts, under our fleets, under our coast defenses--to come up far behind our lines. The ridge joined the coast just south of New York. Some night, while our generals slept in smug complacency, all that gray green horde of wolves would belch forth--from the very earth. And the Americans would follow Europe into hell! * * * * * Five minutes passed. I looked again at the face of the tunnel, drawn by an irresistible fascination. It had advanced a full quarter of a mile. Like fog before a cloud-piercing searchlight, the age-old rock was dissolving before the ray. At this rate America's doom would be sealed in a week. And I, alone among these thousands, was helpless to avert the climaxing menace. A howl of rage came from the sergeant. I turned. A diminutive German, his face pale green with fatigue, had stumbled and fallen under the weight of a heavy timber. The swarthy non-com was kicking him with a cruel boot. "Get up, you; get up before I brain you!" The sprawling man looked up, fear staring from his deep-sunk eyes. "_Aber, ich bin krank._"--"I am sick; I can't stand the work; it is too _schwer_, too heavy," he faltered. "Sick?" the Russian roared. "Sick? I'll sick you! You're lazy, too damned lazy to do a little work. I'm tired of this gold-bricking around here. I'm going to make an example of you that the rest of you dogs won't forget in a hurry." His face was purple with rage. He bent, seized the fallen man and dragged him out from under the crushing bulk. Then, raising the struggling wretch over his head as lightly as though he were an infant, he ran forward, toward the ray projectors. Shriek after shriek pierced the hot air, such howls of utter fear and agony, as I hope never to hear again. The little figure, held high in the huge paws, writhed and tossed, to no avail. The sergeant reached the nearest tripod. His brawny arms flexed; straightened. The German swept up and over the head of the operator, and dropped in front of the machine. Then--he vanished. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was there between projector and rapidly retreating wall! A horrible retching tore my stomach; I swayed dizzily. The utter brutality, the finality of the thing! "And any more of you carrion that I catch slacking will get the same thing," the Russian said. "You, Renaud, I've got my eye on you. Watch out!" The sergeant's voice rasped through the mist about me. I shoved my shoulder under one end of an eight by eight and plunged into the back breaking labor. But one thought hammered at my reeling brain: "The _New York_! That's what happened to her!" * * * * * The long hours of toil at last ended. We were again in the entrance cavern, waiting for the elevator platform. It was unaccountably delayed: the last batch had gone up fifteen minutes before. The men about me chafed and swore. They were impatient for mess and bed. Bit by bit I had reconstructed all the elements of this unprecedented operation. The ray, the blasting ray that whiffed into non-existence all that it touched, was the keynote. The great plain had been cleared by the ray. The dim shapes floating high in that far-circling ellipse were pouring down the dreadful vibrations, thus holding back the sea in a marvelous green wall. I remembered the sea-monster that had dashed at me and vanished. That proved it. The dome of cloud was camouflage, or the product of the processes of destruction going on underneath: it didn't matter. What mattered was that it was interlaced by a network of ray beams. It was an impenetrable wall, a perfect defense. Boxed in on all sides by such a barrier, how was I to get out word of the menace? How was it to be combatted even if our forces knew of the danger? A hundred plans flooded my wearied brain, to be rejected one by one. A mocking, ribald cheer arose from the men around me. The platform was ascending. Why the long delay? A premonition of disaster chilled me. I shrugged it aside. We were at the top. A long line of soldiers curved about the mouth of the pit. The next shift waiting to go down? No--they made no move to approach. And each one was holding his ray-tube at the ready. This was the guard. At a table nearby a knot of officers was gathered. Papers of some sort were piled high on it. Again the icy finger of dread touched me. One of the officers moved aside, revealing the profile of his companion. The Ferret. Then I knew I was done for! My eyes darted here and there, seeking escape. No hope--the heavily armed guard was all around; the platform blocked the shaft mouth. A dash would be self-betrayal--suicide. * * * * * Mechanically I obeyed the sergeant's barked commands. We were in single file. We were moving toward that ominous table where the Ferret stood, a sardonic smile on his sharp-featured face. I could make out a livid weal across his throat. I had left my mark on him. That was some satisfaction. The head of the line reached the table. They were fingerprinting the leader! A lieutenant extracted a paper from the pile and handed it to the Ferret. He made momentary comparison of something on the paper with the mark the soldier had just made. Then the next man stepped up, while the first made off across the plain. Of course! Simple: how very simple! And yet it had caught me! The service records of the men had their fingerprints, just as in our own forces. And each man in the area was being checked up. Trust the Ferret to think of that. He knew that I'd be somewhere in their ranks, impersonating one of their men. Well, I was in for it. The last trick in our long game was his. My turn. No use going through the motions. I bent down a moment, then straightened. "Oh, hello, Bolton," the Ferret said, thrusting out his hand, the one with the twisted finger. I had resumed my own visage. "Didn't think you could get away with it, did you?" Chagrined as I was, I put a good face on it. The Ferret and I had run up against each other many many times. Cheerfully, either of us would have cut the other's throat. But--we played the game. "Hello, Rubinoff," I responded. "You seem to have me, just now. But try and hold me." The Ferret threw back his head and laughed. "Oh, I think you'll find it a little difficult to get away this time." I thought so, too, but did not voice my thought. The smile left Rubinoff's face. He snapped an order. A squad advanced from the guard. Handcuffs clicked around my wrists, the mates of each were fastened to the arms of two guardsmen. I was securely chained. They were taking no chances. "Take him to the special cell in the guard-house." The lieutenant saluted. I was marched off. Then I was not to be summarily executed. I was not as much relieved as you might think. You see, I knew the Ferret. We had raided one of his hangouts once; just missed him. But we found an M.I.S. man there whom Rubinoff had been--questioning. We thanked God when he died. * * * * * We tramped across the plain. My eyes kept roving about: there wasn't much hope for me, but miracles have happened. Most of the scattered structures were hastily thrown together sheds of sheet iron. Barracks, they looked like. But, every so often I spied spheres of concrete, the wide open doors revealing yard-thick walls. What could be their purpose? Something bothered me. Something about the ray projectors and the other machinery I had seen. I glanced up at one of the balloons floating high above. All these needed a power supply; tremendous power to accomplish what the ray was doing. And there were no cables running to them. How did the power get to them? There was only one answer. Radio transmission. The required energy, perhaps the very ray vibrations themselves, were being broadcast to the points of projection. That meant a power-house and a control room somewhere in the area. _The vulnerable points!_ Where were they? I stumbled, and was jerked roughly to my feet. The lieutenant slapped me. "Scared, Americansky? You well may be. We'll have rare sport when they throw what the Ferret leaves of you into the ray." I shuddered. To go out that way! I'll be honest--I was horribly afraid. The men to whom I was shackled laughed. A dull throbbing beat at my ears, a vibration just too low to be sound. I looked about for its source. It came from my left--a concrete building, low lying, about a hundred yards long by as many feet wide. At the further end a squat smokestack broke the flat line of the roof. Guards, many guards, were pacing their slow patrol about it. From the center of the side nearest me, cables thick as a man's trunk issued forth. I followed them with my eye. They ended in a marble slab on which rested a concrete sphere, somewhat larger than the others. The door of this one was closed. On the roof of the queer edifice was a peculiar arrangement of wires, gleaming in the artificial daylight. This building, too, was heavily guarded. I had found what I sought--the power-house and the transmitting station. Much good it did me--now. * * * * * My warders turned sharply to the right. I glimpsed another concrete structure. A heavy steel door opened, then clanged shut, behind us. The fetid odor that means only one thing the world over, folded round me. I sprawled on the steel floor of the cell into which I was thrust. A wave of utter fatigue engulfed me. I felt great weariness of body and despair of soul. I had failed in my mission. The fate of my country had been entrusted to me--and here I was in a steel-floored, steel-walled prison cell. And that tunnel was rushing toward New York at three miles an hour; over seventy miles a day. I think I slept from sheer exhaustion. But something startled me into awaking. The dim light filtering in from the tiny air-hole high up on one wall showed me that I was still alone. I lay, listening. There it was again, a wailing scream of agony that rose and fell and died away. I heard a grating sound at the door, and it opened and shut. Rubinoff, the Ferret, had entered. "Comfortable, Captain Bolton?" he asked, and there was more than a hint of mockery in the velvety voice. In the hand with the twisted finger was his ray-tube. It pointed steadily at me. I got to my feet. I was in no mood for trifling, for that scream had shaken me. "Cut the comedy, Rubinoff." I growled. "Kill me, and let's have done with it." He raised a deprecating hand. "Oh, come now. There's really no absolute necessity for that. You can save yourself, very easily." "What do you mean?" "I can use you, if you're amenable to reason." "I don't understand." "You're the cleverest of the American Intelligence men. The rabble they give me are well-nigh useless. Cast your lot in with us, and in a week you'll have the riches of your greatest city to dip your hands in. It's easy. There is certain information we need. Give it to us. Then I'll get you back into your lines: we'll cook up a good tale for Sommers. You can resume your post and send us information only when it is of extreme importance. Come, now, be sensible." * * * * * At first blush this was an astounding proposal. But I knew my man. He needed to know something. Once he had extracted the knowledge he sought from me, I should be disposed of. He'd never let me get back into our lines with what I had found out. It might have been policy to play him--but what was the use? "No, Rubinoff. You know I won't do it." He sighed. "Just as I thought. Honor, country, and so on. Well, it's too bad. We should have made a wonderful team. However, you'll tell me what I want to know. What are the defenses within fifty miles of New York?" I laughed derisively. "You'll save yourself a lot of trouble if you tell me, Bolton. After all, death in the ray isn't so bad. Whiff--and you're gone. Don't force me to other measures." There was a grim threat in his voice. But I simply shook my head. "Stubborn, like all the other Anglo-Saxons. Well, I've got something to show you." He raised his weapon and glanced at it. "Pretty little thing, this. Not the ordinary ray-tube. Only field officers have these. Look." He pointed it at the wall from behind which that scream had come and pressed the trigger button. A tiny round hole appeared in the steel. "Neat, isn't it? Utilizes the same ray you saw at work in the tunnel. The Zeta-ray we call it. Just think what that would do to human flesh." I said nothing. "But that isn't what I had in mind. Just look through that hole." * * * * * I wanted to see what was on the other side, so I obeyed. The Thing that lay on the floor within--could it ever have been a man? I whirled back to the Ferret in a fury, my fists clenched. His infernal weapon was pointing straight at me. "Softly, Bolton, softly. You'd never get to me." I checked my spring, for he was right. "How'd you like that?" he purred. "Some of your work, I suppose," I growled. "The poor fool was fomenting a mutiny. We wanted to know the other plotters. He was stubborn. What would you? Necessity knows no law.... What are the defenses around New York?" He advanced menacingly. No answer. "Why be a fool? This ray hurts, I tell you, when it's properly applied. How would you like to be melted away, piece by little piece, till you're like that in there?" I shrugged my shoulders, but kept silent. "I tell you it hurts. You don't believe me? That in there is unconscious, seven-eighths dead. Listen." He bored another hole in the steel, keeping his finger pressed on the trigger. Again that heart-rending scream of agony rang out, tearing its way through me. My brain exploded in red rage. I leaped for the fiend, reckless of consequences. My fist drove into the leering face with all the force of my spring, with all the insane fury that his heartless cruelty had roused in me. Smack!--he catapulted across the floor and crashed into the wall! I was on him, my hand clutching for his tube. But there was no need. He was out--dead to the world. So sudden, so unexpected was my mad attack that even he had not had time to meet it. I worked fast. In a minute I was in Rubinoff's uniform and had assumed his face. I was a little taller; no matter. But the finger--that would be noticed immediately. There was only one thing to do. I stuck my little finger through one of the holes he had made in the wall and twisted. Crack! Beads of agony stood out on my forehead, but the break was just right. By bending the other fingers slightly I could hold that one in just the position of his. I picked up the ray-tube with my left hand. If I went out through the guard-house entrance I might meet other officers and be engaged in conversation. That might lead to discovery. My cell was on the side of the prison away from the road; I had noticed no buildings behind it: I'd chance it. Luck had been with me so far. * * * * * I carved out a hole in the wall pierced by the air-hole. It was like cutting through butter with a red hot knife. I stepped out. There was no one about. I walked carelessly around the corner of the building, my hand, holding the tube, buried deep in my pocket. Not far away was the spherical structure I had spotted as the control room. I returned salutes. No one stopped to talk to me. Would the guard before that building require a pass-word? I heard a shout behind me. My escape was discovered! At once I broke into a run and dashed past the guard, shouting: "Prisoner escaped! Came this way!" The man gaped. The shouting behind me grew louder. I heard the thud of many feet, running. I flung open the door, slammed it shut behind me, and turned the key. A long row of giant electrode bulbs, as tall as a man, stretched before me--the source of the Zeta-ray. From here came the power that held back the waters, that bored the tunnel. A thunderous knocking shook the door. Someone at a huge switchboard turned toward me. Instantly my hand was out of my pocket, and the ray-tube leveled at the nearest bulb. I pressed the trigger. The bulb crashed. I swept down the line. Crash, crash, crash--they were all gone. I whirled to meet the expected attack. It was wholly instinctive, for in a second we'd all be dead anyway. The waters would be down on us. But the switchboard operator wasn't springing at me. Instead, he was tugging frantically, at a long lever that came down from above. There was a clang, and a steel shutter dropped across the door. * * * * * Then came a sound of crashing thunder that split my eardrums with its unbearable clamor. Then a mightier roar, as the mountain-high sea, held back so long by the invisible ray, poured its countless millions of tons of deep green water down into the man-made hole. The impact was terrific. The yards-thick concrete shuddered and strained. The tremendous pressure forced trickles of water into the concrete shell: the roaring of the elements was indescribably deafening. I was in pitch darkness, expecting every moment to be crushed under miles of ocean, when suddenly I was thrown from my feet. The floor was heaving drunkenly beneath me. In a moment I was slammed breathlessly against the shattered remnants of a huge vacuum tube. The jagged glass slashed my arms and face. I grabbed with my hand to steady myself; came in contact with an iron bar: clung like grim death. For a huge concrete sphere was whirling, tossing, gyrating in a welter of waters. The din was terrific. I rolled over and over, my arms almost pulled out of their sockets. Then, like a ton of brick, something collided with my head. There was a blinding flare in the black void, and I knew no more. * * * * * Slowly I came out of a hideous nightmare. My head ached frightfully, and my wounds smarted and stung. It was dark, but a faint luminescence from somewhere enabled me to faintly discern my surroundings. I was wedged between a steel cable-bracket and the curving wall. Across the glass strewn floor a body lay, sprawling queerly. The room was swaying in long undulations, or was it my head? I lay helpless, unable to move. A leg dangled uselessly. There was a bump, the sound of scraping. I heard confused sounds penetrating the walls, and the jar of steady impacts. A half an hour passed so; maybe an hour: I had no means of telling. I was weak from pain and loss of blood, and slightly delirious. A faint whirring noise, a sudden intensity in the illumination caused me to turn my head. The steel shutter was glowing red, then a shower of white sparks broke through. The heavy steel was melting away into incandescence. It crashed. A group of men stumbled cautiously in. Now I was sure I was delirious. For the men wore khaki uniforms! Americans! Then, in my fever, I thought I heard a familiar voice cry out my name. It was Jim's voice. A roaring curtain of blackness shut down on me. * * * * * When I awoke again I was lying in a clean-sheeted hospital bed. Jim was sitting at the side, staring at me with gloomy eyes. "Hello, Jim," I gasped weakly. "How did I get here?" It was touching to see the instantaneous delight on his weathered countenance. "So you came to at last, you old son-of-a-gun! Thought you were cashing in on us for a while. How did you get here? That's just what I want to know. How in hell _did_ you get here?" I was still pretty weak. "You pulled me out. What happened?" "We're still trying to puzzle it out. Wouldn't be surprised if you had a hand in it, you blighter. We were watching that damned cloud, worrying ourselves to death. What with the _New York_ going out like a light, and not hearing anything from you, we were pretty low. "Then, suddenly, there was a tremendous detonation. The whole cloud mass collapsed like a pricked bubble, and a bottomless pit yawned underneath the ocean--and, next thing we knew, our raft was yanked from under our feet, plunging and bucking in a swirl of waters. "I just had time to grab hold of a stanchion, when we were sucked down into a whirlpool such as I never hope to see again. Round and round we spun, the tumbling waters mountain high above us. I was buried most of the time in crashing billows; my arms were almost pulled out of their sockets. * * * * * "I never expected to see daylight again," Jim went on. "My hold was being broken when at last we were spewed out somehow onto a sea that looked as if a thousand hurricanes were blowing down. "I managed to get my men together--what was left of them. There were pitifully few. Later, I heard that our losses were enormous. Over seventy-five per cent of our rafts on a 50-mile front were lost, and the enemies' were almost totally wiped out. "When the mile-high seas had toned down a bit, we saw a huge concrete ball tossing about like a cork. Couldn't make out what the devil it was. Then someone noticed a door. We got that open, but there was a steel one inside. We had to slice it with an oxy-hydrogen flame. Inside, snug as a bug in a rug, were you. "Now come on, tell me how in blazes you got in there. If you don't spill it quick, I'll bust." I sat up in my excitement. "Don't you see, they were afraid the ray might fail. They had those concrete balls stuck all around so that the officers at least could escape, if it did. Their best technical men must have been running the control room. They made sure to have that specially strong. And the wave caused by the water pouring into the hole swept me right over here, just where I started from." Jim had both hands on my shoulders, was pushing me down. "Whoa, baby, whoa. That's just as clear as a darkness-rayed area. Count up to ten, and start all over again." "'Ten-_shun_!" The general himself strode into the room. And then I _had_ to tell my story straight. A BEE'S BREATH The breath of a bee, important because of its indication of the health of the insect in winter and of the efficiency of the sweet-producing hive in summer, was recently measured by Prof. G. H. Vansell of the University of California. To do this he conducted the air coming from the hive through a tube into bulbs containing absorbent chemicals. Allowing for the natural carbon dioxide and water of the outside air, he weighed these bulbs, getting an analysis of the breath of the hive by the amount of water vapor and carbon dioxide the chemicals in the bulbs had picked up. He found that in winter when the bees were inactive the average hourly water loss from the entire hive was thirty six millionths of an ounce. In summer when the insects were hard at work making honey and gathering nectar the water loss was twenty five times as great. The carbon dioxide output, however, did not even double in summer. _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories [Illustration: The Readers' Corner] _And That's That_ Dear Editor: May I have just a little room in "The Readers' Corner" to answer Mr. Meek's argument and defend myself from the charge of hasty reading? You will remember that I did not write my letter immediately after the publication of the first Heaviside Layer story, but waited until the appearance of the second, a "cooling-off" period of three months. In that time I re-read the story and considered it at length. I don't call that hasty reading. Besides, the flaw in the story is so obvious that even a "hasty" reading should suffice to find it. I can't argue about the matter of meteors because Mr. Meek has not given any figures concerning the density or viscosity of his medium. But I can say that to my way of thinking any astronomer could detect the effect of such friction on the action of meteors. They should certainly be consumed much more rapidly than if they merely struck thin air. That, however, is a minor point and I wouldn't even mind conceding it to Mr. Meek. The point I now wish to make is much more important and in my mind establishes the falsity of Mr. Meek's premises. In the July issue of Astounding Stories, page seven, paragraph four, sentences fourteen and fifteen, he states that the Heaviside Layer is composed of a liquid of high viscosity. By definition a liquid is more dense than a gas. Therefore the Heaviside Layer, according to Mr. Meek, is denser than the atmosphere of the earth since the former is a liquid and the latter is a gas. The increased refraction of light as it entered our atmosphere would then be noticeable. Astronomers can even now detect refraction due to the air. The sun remains visible for some time after it has actually descended below the horizon, due to refraction. If there was a denser substance than air surrounding the earth the refraction would be much greater. Finally, how could the atmosphere support a denser substance like the Heaviside Layer? I'd sure make for cover if I really believed that such a menace existed right over my head. Sorry to take up your space so much by an argument, but your comments on my letter really called for a defense. Hope you can find room for this.--Philip Waite, 3400 Wayne Ave, New Your, N. Y. Dear Editor: Since Mr. Waite has so generously admitted the validity of my answer to his criticism as regards meteors, I can do no less than admit that he scored one against me in his second argument. I used the word liquid. It was careless diction. Had I used the phrase "composed of a SUBSTANCE of high viscosity, of low specific gravity and with a coefficient of refraction identical with that of air," there would have been no argument. I am sure that Mr. Waite will admit after reflection that such a substance could be held in position, if its specific gravity were low enough, by a combination of gravity and centrifugal force, somewhat in the same manner as the ring of Saturn is held in place. Of course, any idea that the layer rested on the air and was supported in place by it, would be untenable. As I said in my previous letter, I don't believe such a layer exists. If it does, I hope that no one proves it before I get some characters off on a space flyer for an interplanetary adventure or two.--S. P. Meek, Capt., Ord. Dept., U. S. A. _Right from the Shoulder_ Dear Editor: I know for a fact that Astounding Stories is the best Science Fiction magazine on the stands. I have read it every issue except the first three, and have not yet found a bad story. The characters in other Science Fiction magazines seem like machines, but Astounding Stories' characters seem like intimate friends. Why do ---- [censored] like some write in and start bellyaching about the cover, pages, the size, the edges and many other things that no one but ---- [censored] would notice? If they know so much why don't they start a magazine and put all other publications out of business? If they liked the stories they would not care if the color of the cover was black or red, white and blue. I get so interested in the stories that the edges of the paper do not amount to anything; and people that bellyache about such minor things prove that they do not care for the stories, and furthermore they prove that they are ---- [censored] and ---- [censored] ready for the booby hatch. There is only one thing wrong with the perfect magazine: it does not come out twice a month. I have never known a bunch of Editors that have the intelligence of the Staff of Astounding Stories [uncensored--Ed.]. They have never published a single story that any intelligent Reader could kick about. About reprints: whether the Editors think that they should publish some or not, it is all the same to me, as they know what they are doing. I should like very much to see some stories by Burroughs, though. If I were to name your best authors, I would have to name every one that ever wrote a story for your wonderful magazine.--H. N. Sager, R. F. D. 6, Box 419, Bessemer, Ala. _Disposing of Old Stories_ Dear Editor: I have observed that numerous readers request reprints. I have a collection that goes back to 1900! Since I have no more use for them, I have decided to dispense with them. Here is an infinitesimal list: A. Merritt: "Thru the Dragon Glass," "The Moon Pool," "The Metal Monster" and "The Ship of Ishtar." Homer Eon Flint: "Out of the Moon," "The Planeteer," "The King of Conserve Island," "The Blind Spot" and "Flint and Hall." Jules Black: "Beyond the Earth Atom" and "Marooned in Space." John Louis Hill: "The Dimension Wizard" and "The Challenge from Beyond." Davidson Mortimer: "Lost in Time" and "The Amazing Empire Lost in Time" (sequel to story previously mentioned). Booth Langell: "The Moons of Lanisar." As I said before, this is but a small part of the Science Fiction stories I have. Anyone desiring stories mentioned above, or any others, please write to me.--George Zambock, 459 E. 155th St., New York, N. Y. _A Kind Offer_ Dear Editor: I'm sure you will sympathize with me for reading your magazine in study hall. It is so very dull--I have three S.H.'s in a row--that I have to do something to relieve the monotony, so, seeing the latest copy of A. S. at my newsdealer's, I brought it back to school after dinner. I am speaking of the February number. I very much enjoyed the Dr. Bird story. Capt. Meek is always good. "Phalanxes of Atlans" promises to be an excellent story, also. What I want to know is, why are so many mossbacks throwing brickbats? What does it matter if some of the stories are not on the scientific chalk line? A very wise man once said that "Variety is the spice of life," so why not take a hint, some of you would-be brickbat pitchers, and pipe down? I have read every issue of Astounding Stories published so far, and have not a brickbat to report as yet. I notice in one letter to "The Readers' Corner" a request for a department on rocket propulsion. I presume the writer meant on propelling rocket planes. I have experimented on rocket ships for the past three years and can give some data on these as to the construction of models (for when I say ships I really mean model airplanes). I have had this as my hobby for the past four and a half years, and can give extensive information on model building. I specialize in models powered by power other than rubber; and I took second place at the Atlantic City Tournament held in October by the National Play-ground Association, in the Annual National Championships. Anyone desiring information on the rocket ship or any other type of model plane will be promptly answered by addressing their letter to me. I hope you will find room to publish this, as I like nothing better than helping someone get started on my favorite hobby, aviation. I have, however, several hobbies, including football, basket-ball, tennis, swimming, boating and hiking. I live within ten miles of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and can see from the study hall window, which I now am seated near to, three ranges of the mountains all covered with more than ten inches of snow.--Richard M. Evans, Box 305, Maryville, Tenn. _To the Defense_ Dear Editor: Some of the letters you have printed in "The Readers' Corner" almost burn me up. Edwin C. Magnuson asks you what you print there: only letters praising your magazine to the skies? or occasional brickbats? Well, I might say one thing, and that is: if you did print all brickbats, as he seems to want you to, the Readers would think that your magazine wasn't of much account if that was the kind of letters you got all the time, and would probably quit reading it. He also said he felt like quitting several times because the stories weren't scientific. Well, if he can show me anywhere on your magazine where it says it is a scientific magazine, I'll certainly beg his most humble pardon on bended knee. He also crabbed about your artists. If he can do better, I advise you to hire him. He also says that the paper is rotten, and that after a few handlings goes to pieces. I still have all my magazines, and have lent them several times, and the paper is still there. On his fifth statement I agree with him: you should have an editorial. Also I would certainly like to have reprints, as there are about six issues I didn't get, and I imagine there are several other Readers in the same boat. Hume V. Stephani makes a very good suggestion about a quarterly. I certainly think it would be appreciated and would go over big. And Robert J. Hyatt, I most certainly agree with you in your letter printed in the February issue; and if this letter is printed (which I hope it is) I hope you will see it, and know that at least one person has the same views on the magazine that you do.--Buel Godwin, 101--3rd Avenue, S. E. Le Mars, Iowa. "_Now a Real Pest_" Dear Editor: I have recently been initiated into the reading of Science Fiction, and as a result I am now a real pest to the magazine vendor, from asking for the next copy of Astounding Stories. I have just finished your February copy and words can't express my enjoyment. "The Tentacles from Below" is indeed a Science Fiction masterpiece. I devour eagerly Captain S. P. Meek's stories about Dr. Bird. As long as you keep Meek you can be assured that I will purchase this magazine. "The Pirate Planet" proved to be a story worthy to be kept as a reprint for future issues. In fact, many of your stories are so good that it is a shame that others can't enjoy them in future issues of Astounding Stories. Wesso is a great artist and I appreciate to the fullest extent his remarkable pictures. Yours for a continuation of your present success in editing and publishing remarkable stories--Lester P. Lieber, 542 Dalzell St., Shreveport, La. _Stands Pat_ Dear Editor: Although this is my first letter to "The Readers' Corner" of your publication, I have nevertheless been a consistent Reader of the magazine since its inception. Contrary to many of your correspondents I have nothing to say against your magazine or policy. I like its size, its artists and most of its stories. I shall not bother to name those I do not like because I do not believe that there is a magazine to be found that can publish stories to suit all its Readers. I enjoy the serials and your two-part novelettes since it gives one something to look forward to each month. I enjoyed "The Pirate Planet" by Charles W. Diffin so much I was sorry to see it end, and I hope there will be more of his work in the future. I am particularly glad to see such writers as Captain S. P. Meek, Ray Cummings, Miles J. Breuer, Victor Rousseau and Harl Vincent as regular contributors to your pages, but there are also a number of other writers whom I miss seeing in "our" mag. Of these are A. Hyatt-Verrill who writes so well of the Incas, Otis Adelbert Kline who also gives us excellent stories and Leslie F. Stone whose "Men with Wings" and "Women with Wings" appeared in another magazine and which I enjoyed exceedingly. I believe that to have these writers as regular contributors would add much to the interest of the publication. With the compliments of an avid reader of Science Fiction. I salute you.--Theodore Morris, 1412 S. W. 13th St., Miami, Fla. "_Under My Collar_" Dear Editor: I have been reading Astounding Stories for a good while and I like it fine. I noticed in your last issue that a fellow by the name of Edwin C. Magnuson was kicking about "The Readers' Corner." Some of his reasons, I think, for not liking this magazine are as follows: first, the illustrations are poor. I believe they are good. Second, he says that he doesn't like stories such as those written by Charles W. Diffin, Jackson Gee, Murray Leinster and Victor Rousseau. He also has in his letter a list of authors whose works he likes. I do not think they are so hot, with the exception of Capt. S. P. Meek. Mr. Magnuson also says he is disgusted with Astounding Stories and would like to quit reading it. Well, why doesn't he? I want to say it is a fine mag. I don't like to be a critic, but that fellow got under my collar. The only thing that could be done is to publish at least twice a month. Well, reckon I will sign off. Here is to Astounding Stories. A better mag can't be found!--Boyd H. Goodman, 2008 McKinney Ave., Dallas, Texas. _From Franklin to Poe_ Dear Editor: As a Reader of Astounding Stories from the first number I would like to comment on your magazine regarding your stories and the subject of reprints. First, you are publishing one of the best Science Fiction magazines on the market, and I read three of them. And although I agree with Mr. Magnuson and others on the subject of reprints, I do not agree with the former that the paper is rotten and falls to pieces. I have a complete file of Astounding Stories to date and I have not noticed any signs of disintegration amongst them as yet. You could easily follow the suggestion of Mr. Stephani, and have a space for good reprints and charge a nickel more. I believe most of your Readers would approve of it. The story, "The Sunken Empire," was fine, and it is to the credit of Science Fiction that in addition to interesting Readers in other worlds it has also created an interest in the fate of lands from which the Atlantic Ocean received its name. This story is reminiscent of a story which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post about three years ago called "Maracot Deep." In this story a party of men (three, I believe) descended to the bottom of the Atlantic and found a surviving colony from Atlantis, and saw reproduced on a screen events leading up to the sinking of Atlantis. It was written by the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the only weak spot was that Sir Arthur had to change the submergence of Atlantis from a natural catastrophe into a "judgment" of the gods, whose sense of propriety was outraged by the "wickedness" of the Atlanteans. If you reprinted this story your Readers would eat it up. I hope that you publish this letter because I want to reply through your "Readers' Corner" to Mr. Richard Lewis of Knoxville, Iowa, on the subject of reprints. Mr. Lewis says he has read most of the classic scientific stories referred to. Well, so have I, but I should like to read many of them again as would many of your Readers. I have for the last twenty years been reading literary classics but when I receive my copies of Good Literature or The Golden Book I do not consider myself cheated because I find some stories in them that I have read before. The best are always worth reading at least twice. As an illustration, has Mr. Lewis ever read the following: the "Kasidah," by Sir Richard Burton, who gave the world its best literal translation of "The Arabian Nights," which differs as daylight from dark in comparison with the Lane and Payne translations which are only edited for children to read? Or has he read the chapter which Benjamin Franklin added to the Bible? If Mr. Lewis read these for the first time in any magazine he takes he would no doubt consider them well worth the price of the magazine or more, yet they would be reprints, the last one about as old as the United States. The "Kasidah" is a long poem on philosophic aspects of evolution in which almost all Science Fiction Readers are interested. In contains lines like the following: "Conscience was bred When man had shed His fur, his tail And pointed ears." And as a dissertation on our caveman ancestors: "They fought for women as for food. When 'Mays' awoke to warm desire; And this the lust that changed to love When fancy lent a purer fire." Regarding the Franklin chapter, it is stated that "Wise Old Ben" used to insert it between the pages of the Bible and read it to his friends in the City of Brotherly Love, and great was the consternation of many who thought they knew the Scriptures from "cover to cover." Any new readers of Science Fiction would be glad to read "The Girl in the Golden Atom," "The Fire People" and "The Man Who Mastered Time," by Ray Cummings. I like to read this author's work, but I believe when he wrote this trilogy of Matter, Space and Time that he reached the heights of his writing. I have never read any subsequent writings of his that I thought exceeded them. Speaking of the necessity of authors eating, Mr. Lewis states that good stories have never been written on an empty stomach. Edgar Allan Poe who wrote "Shades" was one of the most brilliant of American writers, and his stomach was empty most of the time. And when this master of ratiocination had on rare occasions a full stomach it was invariably full of "hooch." As Mr. Lewis speaks as a pedagogue, is it not a physiological fact that an empty stomach clears the mind by diverting the blood stream from the necessity of digesting food? And while I am not advocating any fast cures for authors, some of them (although few in Astounding Stories) would be greatly benefited by trying it. In conclusion I should like to say to Mr. Lewis and others who take the same slant on reprints, that there are many of the finest writings in Science Fiction and the classics which you and I have never even heard of, much less read. I will close with best wishes for your continued success--Joseph R. Barnes, Cache Junction, Utah. _Now Feeling Better_ Dear Editor: Well, I guess I've just about gotten you exasperated with all the brickbats I've been cannoning into your office. However, I believe this letter will make you feel a little better. The latest issue was fine. There wasn't a story in it that I didn't enjoy. "The Tentacles from Below" was a surprisingly good story, especially when you consider that I don't like sea stories. I liked this one very much. Another extremely great surprise was "Werewolves of War." From the few notes about it I surmised that it was another one of those hero-dying-and-saving-his-country stories; and it was--but not the kind I expected it to be. The author's narrative and descriptive abilities were such that I forgot all about the plot running throughout the story. Hang on to that fellow. The other complete story was also good. The conclusion of the "The Pirate Planet" was also good, as were its preceding instalments. The first instalment of "Phalanxes of Atlans" was unusual. That's gonna turn out to be one of the best stories you've yet published, or I miss my bet.--G. Kirschner, Box 301, Temple, Texas. "_Paper Is Durable_" Dear Editor: While reading "The Readers' Corner" in your January issue I noticed a bit of criticism by Edwin Magnuson of Duluth, Minn. In it he said that you have printed some stories containing little or no science. But, first, most of your Readers like a little change in a subject and I advise one or two of these about two or three months apart. Second, the paper is of durable material, for I pass my magazine to my friends who read it and then return it with very few pages torn. Third, I agree that reprints would be a blessing, for most of your readers have not read stories by Cummings, Breuer, Wells and Vincent. Fourth, the fact that some stories have not a sound scientific basis is quite all right because every fair reader likes his stories fired with some imagination.--Walter Witte, 960 Duchess St., St. Paul, Minn. _Suggestions_ Dear Editor: Although I have read every issue of A. S. since it came out, I have never written about it, and this is what I have to say: First, it is just as good or better than two other Science Fiction magazines that I can name. Second, in my opinion you have some of the best modern authors, such as Cummings, Meek, Rousseau, Diffin, Vincent and Hamilton. Also others. The stories have been A-1 with the exception of "Murder Madness," which, in my opinion, does not belong in a magazine of this type, but in a detective story magazine, because that is all it was--a detective story. And when are you going to have a sequel to "The Gray Plague," by L. A. Eshbach which appeared in the November issue? It deserves one. The best author on your staff is Captain S. P. Meek, whose Dr. Bird stories cannot be equalled. They are science stories plus. A few suggestions: an occasional reprint. It would not affect the living conditions of our present day authors and would give us all a chance to read a classic of yesterday. Do not change the size (i. e. width and length); but as for enlarging it in the thickness direction, you have my heartiest encouragement. I notice that one of the other magazines has changed its size, so now you are not alone. Evening up the edges of the sheets would improve the looks, however. And now that you have had your first birthday, when are you going to start a quarterly? In it you could publish a complete book length novel and seven novelettes. By novel, I mean a story of about one hundred pages or more of your present size, and novelettes fifty pages or more. You could double the price because a quarterly is worth double what a monthly is worth. Your artists are great, but you could still improve by having them make a full page illustration at the start and one more exciting one as the story progresses. Well, I think I've said enough good things about you and enough suggestions, so until January 1932, adios, au revoir, etc.--Henry Benner, Cowithe, Wash. _Ouch!_ Dear Editor: Personally I would rather read a good short story than the ten pages of instructions by Readers published in the March issue. Two pages are plenty, especially when half the criticisms concern paper, size, edges of paper, etc. A. S. is O. K! How about that other short?--Don Ward, 6 Ketchel St., Auburn, N. Y. _Likes Action_ Dear Editor: I have just finished the February issue of Astounding Stories. All of the stories were so good I couldn't tell you which one is the best. "The Phalanxes of Atlans" and "The Tentacles from Below" were very good. I liked "The Black Lamp," too. It is up to the standard of the rest of the Dr. Bird stories. "The Pirate Planet" ended very beautifully. However, I did not like that about Sykes getting killed. "Werewolves of War" was good. It ended differently from most of the other stories. Most of them end with the hero escaping, but in this the hero was killed. It had a very good plot. I got my first copy of Astounding Stories last July and I haven't missed a copy since. Why not put out Astounding Stories twice a month, or make it a weekly? I hate to have to wait a whole month before I get another copy. I believe that the best story I have ever read in this magazine was "The Invisible Death," by Victor Rousseau. The reason I like Astounding Stories better than any other Science Fiction magazine is that most of the other magazines have too much science and not enough action.--Dale Griffith, 437 Carson St., San Antonio, Texas. "_To Satisfy Myself_" Dear Editor: It has been long since I read the February issue of your magazine and I'm waiting anxiously for the March issue. The February issue had some very good stories, and I just must say that the story entitled "Werewolves of War," is the best story of its type I have ever read. Unlike most of these stories there is more future truth than fiction. Perhaps you didn't expect to hear from me so soon again, but I am interested in this type of story as I used to write this kind in my English class back in high school. My stories were of this type, but always different from any that the rest of the class wrote. Another thing, I love to be writing, so I take this way to satisfy myself. I do hope you will excuse me. I have one more thing to say and that is: I only wish your magazine was put out every two weeks instead of every four; or print more stories and raise the price to twenty five cents. I'm sure people will pay if they are as interested as I.--Ken F. Haley, 36 Mechanic St., Lebanon, N.H. "_Easier to Turn_" Dear Editor: I have just read "The Readers' Corner" of the March issue and noticed that bright remark about that super-rotten story, "Skylark Three." Anyone who liked that story is certainly not hard to please. It does not compare with the worst story ever published. I also read that "other magazine" and I say that it has disgraced itself by "Skylark Three." Everything is perfect about your magazine except that there are not enough stories in each issue. The uneven edges are just fine, for it makes the pages easier to turn. The covers are not too gaudy. The covers should depict a thrilling incident in a story; they do. "Phalanxes of Atlans" offered a good theory as to the whereabouts of the descendants of the Atlanteans and the Lost Tribes of Israel. It was keen. I conclude my letter with a warning: do not change your type. Also do not change your order of issue; I mean, do not make your magazine into a bi-monthly as I see some magazines of this type have done.--Robert Leonard Russell, 825 Casey Ave., Mt. Vernon, Illinois. _You Tell 'Em!_ Dear Editor: I have always considered the drawings of H. W. Wesso far superior to those of all other Science Fiction artists, and, indeed, much better than the work of most pulp magazine illustrators. But his cover for the March issue of Astounding Stories was remarkable even for him; it was a veritable masterpiece. So enthralled was I by the first sight of this eye-arresting picture that I stared at it for minutes on end. This snarling titan with his mighty arm outstretched toward the tiny figures just beyond his reach--what a gripping tableau! Free from the superfluous, uninteresting machinery and apparatus that clutter up most illustrations in other Science Fiction magazines, your March cover remained fantastic, but human--a picture that expressed the very essence of super-scientific fiction as presented in Astounding Stories. Vivid in color, striking in subject, dramatic in treatment and drawn with consummate skill, that cover must have attracted many new Readers to this magazine. And the promise held out by the cover was more than fulfilled by the contents of that issue--one of your best to date. The only discordant note in the entire magazine was the yapping and ranting of certain dissatisfied ---- [censored] too ---- [censored] to appreciate the finest, most worthy publication in its field to-day.--Booth Cody, Bronx, New York. "_Nothing Is Automatic_" Dear Editor: First, I wish to congratulate you on the increasing quality of your magazine since its first issue. It surpasses all other Science Fiction magazines, and I haven't missed a single issue and don't intend to! What prompted me to write this letter was an article, "A Robot Chemist," published in your March, 1931, issue. In the article it states that a mechanical robot performed several experiments without human supervision. But, I am sorry to say, I disagree. Nothing is automatic. Foolishly, after perfecting anything that performs its work afterwards by itself, man calls it an automaton. But it is not! Did he not have to work and slave hour after hour, day after day and month after month to perfect it? He did! Ever since man became civilized he has deceived himself by calling, for instance, machinery in a factory, automatons. The quest for automatic machinery is as hopeless as the quest for perpetual motion! What is my idea of an automaton? Well, take a robot for instance. Man calls it an automaton in spite of the fact that he had to slave to put it together before it did its work. My idea is this: the iron ore would come out itself, smelt itself, form itself in the various shapes and parts needed to construct a robot, then take its correct place and rivet itself. Then the radio brain, electrical eyes and magnet hands take their place; and when it has constructed itself it will conduct the experiments--if a chemical robot--without human supervision. Thus, the latter clause would be true! That's my conception of an automatic robot! Otherwise, its just some metal doing the bidding of a master's brain. Another thing: the novelette "Beyond the Vanishing Point," by Ray Cummings, is preposterous. The flesh might shrink or grow, but the bone would not! If one shrunk as did George Randolph, one's bones would burst through the flesh. But in spite of all that, I like the stories that way. Science, in the years to come might discover how to shrink or grow both flesh and bones. I guess I'm taking too much of your time, so adios!--Jay Zee, Chicago, Illinois. _Hot Times in the Fire-House_ Dear Editor: The first Thursday in each month I make a bee-line for the newsstand--and Astounding Stories. It may interest you to know that I have every issue on file that you have put out. There have been some mighty good yarns in those issues, but the one just at hand contains the best story you have ever published--"Terrors Unseen," by Harl Vincent. There's an author for you; but evidently I don't have to tell you so, as you have given us quite a number of his splendid stories. "Vagabonds of Space" was a wow. Like some of the others who have written in, I would like to see a sequel to this. Harl Vincent is my favorite of all your authors. A close second is Charles W. Diffin. He is good, too. As your authors appeal to me, in order, I mean. I would line them up in this way: Harl Vincent, Charles W. Diffin, R. F. Starzl, Ray Cummings, Capt. S. P. Meek, Jack Williamson and Murray Leinster. I agree with Jim Nicholson of San Francisco that you should give us some stories by Francis Flagg. Here is an author you never have published, and, to my way of looking at things, he has more fresh material than most of the authors put together. Many of the things that have been copied widely and used extensively (I don't mean that whole stories have been stolen, or anything like that) were originated by this fine writer. By all means get Francis Flagg. [We have just bought a story--a good one--from him!--Ed]. He would stand about third in my list if you had used his work before. I made it up from those whose work has been used. Two or three things I notice, that I would have you correct. All your stories seem to be of standardized length, either around 10,000 words or 25,000 words. Eliminate all restrictions as to word length but make your writers boil down their work. Most stories are too long, and could be told better if cut down quite a bit. The paper and the page size of the magazine are okay, but why not smooth edges? And it is hard to keep the covers on. I wouldn't object to more pages or an extra nickel in price. Or if not that, how about publishing "our" magazine twice a month? After fighting a fire, there's nothing like Astounding Stories with which to "unlax." You're doing a fine job, and I only make these suggestions because I want a "perfect" magazine instead of one that bats 97% all the time. Hope you'll have room for all this. And, oh yes, keep on with your program of "No reprints." Your new yarns are better than the old ones. Let's have the new ones, and encourage our fine string of authors to do even better work.--Gayl Whitman, Fireman, Co. No. 11, Main at 22nd, Columbus, Ohio. _Correspondents Wanted_ Dear Editor: Another critic is going to take his pen in hand and give you a bouquet. I have just finished reading the March issue of A. S. and think it was fine. Of all the stories you have published I liked "The Gray Plague" the best. I don't care much for reprints because I like new stories the best. I would like to correspond with some of the Readers of A. S. I will answer any or all letters I receive.--L. B. Knutson, 629--3rd Ave., So, Minneapolis, Minn. _A Heroine a la Mode_ Dear Editor: I'm with J. H. Nicholson, who advises those who are indifferent to the scientifically possible in order to give the author a broader field in which to lay his plot. As he says, they should feel right at home with their noses stuck into a volume of Anderson's Fairy Tales. However, this letter is more to express the science lovers' viewpoint than to sling mud at the authors. For us, the plot loses much of its kick if the science is not reasonable. Suppose for once that one of these Readers who waives scientific possibility aside as secondary should pick up a plot-distorted story in which the heroine should be described something as follows: "Hers was a tall superbly built figure combining the strength of a horse with the gentle curves of a hippo. When she spoke, her sweetly modulated voice was as pleasant to the ear as the bray of a Spanish jackass. Her hair hung to her waist and was the convenient nesting place for several English sparrows. She was slightly cockeyed from birth and had had her nose squashed in a saloon brawl. She carried herself with the graceful dignity of an African orang-utan and was always much sought after, having a quaint habit of slapping every new male she met a resounding whack on the back that loosened their bridge work. Being a veteran tobacco chewer and having high blood pressure she could spit one hundred feet against a fifty-mile wind. When she ate in company, she had an amusing way of gargling her soup in G-flat. Her--" It's unnecessary to go further. Such a character would be every bit as reasonably possible as some of the science these science-conniving Readers are willing to sanction. Here are some of the seemingly impossible feats of a recent story: 1--a diver in an ordinary diving dress is able to stand the pressure at three miles down; 2--(granting the above is possible) a diver shoots up three miles without stopping and still does not become a victim of the bends; 3--(granting the above two possible) a diver after shooting from such a great depth and pressure to a depth of comparatively low pressure would not be able to lower the pressure inside his dress, since it would be held so rigid that he would not be able to bend his arms; 4--a man or animal suddenly released from the enormous pressure of about three hundred tons to the square inch to atmospheric pressure, it seems, would most certainly burst before the internal pressure could equalize itself. Please notice that I said seemingly wrong. I'm for A. S. just one hundred per cent and would prefer to have it as right as possible. I don't like crank letter writing and would never have written this now if it hadn't been for several of the letters in the March issue that gave me a touch of hades under the collar. S'long. Maybe I'll write again sometime when I get some more "ham science" ideas.--William S. Lotsch, 1 Morrison Ave., Troy, N. Y. _You Make Them Adequate_ Dear Editor: Thanks. Of course I accept your invitation to "The Readers' Corner." I have been a constant Reader of your magazine since its appearance on the Science Fiction horizon, and I have yet to meet a story that I failed to read in its entirety or that I didn't like. To merely write a letter and say that this story was good, the other story was fair, and oh my! how poor the third story was, is futile. But as it is the usual custom to do so here goes: Excellent stories--all of the first five volumes; good stories--who's interested?; poor stories--where are they?; good authors--takes up too much room and time; poor authors--got tired looking for them. All I want to say is, Astounding Stories is the best or one of the best magazines on the market. Gee, but aren't words futile when you describe something great and wonderful!--Herbert Goodket, 707 Jackson Avenue, New York, N. Y. _Ain't It Too Awful!_ Dear Editor: I knew it. It was bound to come. At last my efforts have been rewarded. Fame has sought me out--even in Brooklyn. It was suggested in the March issue of Astounding Stories that I, Louis Wentzler, as one of the active contributors to "The Readers' Corner," regale your Readers with a description of myself, my interest in Science Fiction and how I got that way. A picture was also requested, but this had better be omitted. As for my personal history, bend an ear: At the tender age of four, while making mud pies on the doorstep of my home, I was beaned by a brick hurled by an uncouth ruffian across the street. The results were not fatal--who said "unfortunately?"--but from that moment I developed a taste for Science Fiction. Had it not been for that incident I might have grown up a normal lad; but the caress of that brick on my cranium did things to me, and I have been a Science Fiction addict since. Of course, I do not contend that all Science Fiction fans were hit by bricks, though a lot of them should be. I do believe, however, that a slight concussion of the brain helps one appreciate Science Fiction the more. Anyway, once imbued with the urge I took to Science Fiction like a Hindu to hashish. Such stories were rare in those days, but I started to collect all I could find. Then came the war. I was too young to fight, but I did my bit making canteens out of old sieves. That was how my mind worked, you see. Well, the war ended--I forgot who won--and I went back to my beloved Science Fiction. Years have passed since then, and I have a fine collection of stories now. Should any of you care to see them, come around to the local booby-hatch some time: you'll find me in Padded Cell No. 17.--Louis Wentzler, 1935 Woodbine St., Brooklyn, N. Y. _Hurrah!_ Dear Editor: Except for a brief letter of criticism in the August, 1930, number of Astounding Stories, I have been a silent but loyal follower of the magazine since its first issue. My silence was that of profound satisfaction. Almost all the stories suited me to perfection; and the few I did not like were hardly worth commenting on. Since the magazine has grown better with every issue I would probably have kept my peace; but there is one disturbing factor which impels me to write again. I refer to the irresponsible outbursts of certain ---- [censored] who squeeze into "The Readers' Corner" and sputter out senseless denunciations of the magazine, its appearance, its policies, and so on. I do not object to logical, well-founded criticism, but I most decidedly do object to the ---- [censored] remarks and invidious comparisons indulged in by various ---- [censored] Readers. It's about time someone told them where to head in, and, by your leave, I'll do it. The most recent offender is J. Vernon Shea, Jr., a Pittsburgh lad of eighteen who, in the March issue, ventures to criticize the grammar of Ray Cummings, call the Editor harsh names, and demand that the magazine conform to his own dizzy notions. He concedes that Astounding Stories prints consistently interesting tales, but charges that the Editor is indifferent to "the advancement of Science Fiction." Mr. Shea, can't you see that the publication of first-class stories, as in this magazine, is the best possible way to popularize Science Fiction? Or do you simply prefer inferior stuff? Then there's D. R. Guthrie, from way back in Idaho, who liked a yarn in another magazine so much he had to tell us all about it--as if we didn't have the best Science Fiction ever written right here in Astounding Stories. Guthrie's another who seems to prefer brass to gold. Going back an issue or two, we note a letter from Edwin Magnuson, a deluded denizen of Duluth, who says he's plumb disgusted because Astounding Stories receives far more bouquets than brickbats, when according to him the mag deserves to be panned plenty. Get in step, Edwin, you're falling way behind! And I mustn't forget M. Clifford Johnston of the Newark Johnstons, who calls Astounding Stories trash and its Readers morons. Well, there are various degrees of mental incompetence, and the moron is far above the idiot, Mr. Johnston! Now that I've taken a few hasty pokes at those who most deserved them, I'll give my own comments on some of your latest stories--and anyone who feels like telling me where I get off is welcome to do so. First, let me take my hat off to Jack Williamson. I never thought much of his stuff in other mags, but his "The Meteor Girl" was a mighty fine piece of work. Evidently you've got to be good to crash Astounding Stories. Interesting as it was, though, Williamson's yarn contained a noticeable error. In the story, the narrator and his friend witness an event occurring twelve hours in the future at a distant place. They then travel to that place, reaching it at a time exactly corresponding to the time of the event witnessed. Therefore, they should have seen themselves in the future scene--an obvious fact which the author either failed to consider or conveniently ignored. [But--by the story, they did not arrive at the rock until just AFTER the events they witnessed by means of the fourth dimension. Thus, everything is O. K. Take another look.--Ed.] Despite this flaw the story embodied several original ideas, had plenty of action, and was well told. We can stand more of Williamson. "Phalanxes of Atlans," by F. V. W. Mason, was a corker. When writers of Mason's standing turn to Science Fiction, we fans have much to be thankful for. Is there any chance of our getting a story by Fred MacIsaac, Theodore Roscoe, or Erle Stanley Gardner? All of them are first-class writers, and they can handle Science Fiction better than many who have specialized in that field. The only other suggestion I can offer for improving the magazine is to have additional illustrations within the stories, such as Wide World Adventures used to have. Satisfied as I am with Astounding Stories it will probably be a long time before I write again--unless I feel called upon to administer a few more verbal spankings to certain obstreperous individuals!--Sears Langell, 1214 Boston Road, New York, N. Y. "_The Readers' Corner_" All Readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for Readers, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here: so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! _The Editor._ * * * * * 
33662	----	A REPUBLIC WITHOUT A PRESIDENT AND OTHER STORIES BY HERBERT D. WARD AUTHOR OF "THE NEW SENIOR AT ANDOVER," "THE MASTER OF THE MAGICIANS," ETC. NEW YORK TAIT, SONS & COMPANY Union Square Copyright, 1891. BY HERBERT D. WARD. A REPUBLIC WITHOUT A PRESIDENT. PART I. On the morning of the eighth of June, 1893, at about ten o'clock, crowds were seen clustered in front of the daily newspaper bulletins in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston. The excitement rivalled that occasioned by the assassination of Garfield, and by night the country was as bewildered and aghast as when the news came that Lincoln was murdered. This was the announcement as it appeared in blood-red, gigantic capitals by the door of the New York _Tribune_ building: UNPRECEDENTED CALAMITY! AWFUL MYSTERY! THE PRESIDENT AND HIS WIFE SPIRITED AWAY FROM THE WHITE HOUSE! TWO SERVANTS FOUND GAGGED! NOT A TRACE OF THE DISTINGUISHED COUPLE! THE COUNTRY AGHAST AT THE DREADFUL POSSIBILITIES OF THIS DISAPPEARANCE! Extras found enormous sales, but they contained no more news than this. Business was brought to a standstill and stocks fell in half an hour from five to twenty per cent. The land was convulsed. It was true that there were those who thought the whole thing a colossal hoax perpetrated by the defeated party. But as time went on the startling and incredible news was confirmed. The evening edition of the New York _Sun_ had these ominous headers. THE PRESIDENT AND HIS WIFE HAVE ACTUALLY DISAPPEARED. THE GAGGED SERVANTS OF THE WHITE HOUSE TELL THEIR STORY. THEY ARE IN PRISON ON GRAVE SUSPICION OF CONSPIRACY. THE CARD OF AN EMINENT POLITICIAN FOUND IN THE VESTIBULE OF THE EXECUTIVE MANSION. IS A DARK POLITICAL PLOT ABOUT TO BE UNEARTHED? The next day found the situation unchanged. Rumors of every description ran wild. Telegrams of condolence from all the sovereigns of the world were received at Washington by the dazed Department of State. These were fully given to the omnivorous press. By order of the Vice-President, all other news was for the present rigorously withheld from publication. To this censorship the press submitted cordially. Mystery was brooding over the land, and despair laughed detectives in the face. Men met each other and asked only this question: "Have they been found?" A sad shake of the head always followed. "No wonder," the Governor of Massachusetts was heard to say, "with thousands of assassins coming over here every year. Even our President was not safe. God help our country!" At the end of a few days the full news, as far as it went, was published, and the nation then drew its second breath. The facts about this stupendous abduction, as given to the public by the end of the week, were briefly these: This is the affidavit of the night sentry, who was stationed in the vestibule of the White House. "My name is George Henry. I am thirty-four years old. I was born in this country. My father was a slave. It was about one-thirty last night when I was aroused by a double rap at the main entrance. I was not asleep, but I may have been a little sleepy. I asked who was there, and a voice answered that the Secretary of State wished to see the President on business of the greatest importance. I answered that the President was in bed. He said that he must see the President immediately. Then I thought I recognized the voice of Mr. Secretary. I opened the door and, sure enough, Mr. Secretary entered. He had on a silk hat and the gray overcoat he usually wears. He gave me his card, and told me to take it right up to the President. The door was left open and I noticed it was raining. The carriage of the Secretary was standing under the portico. I did not see the coachman. When I bowed and turned to go upstairs there was a strange smell in the air, and I remember nothing more." The cross-examination brought out from the prisoner, who seemed to answer honestly and intelligently, that he was sure it was the Secretary of State, but his voice seemed changed by a cold. He felt positive about the carriage, for he recognized the team, a gray and a black. He heard no voices outside. When chloroform was produced, he said that was the same smell, but there was something more that was considerably tarter. He persisted in the same story, and repeated it over and over without variation. It looked dubious for his excellency the Secretary of State. The next witness was the night sentry on the second floor. He was badly frightened, was a little confused, but told a straight story. His deposition was as follows: "Yes, sah, my name is Frank Steven. I have alluz been a colored man. I was bahn in Ohio when I was twelve years old." [At this juncture a glass of ice water restored the equilibrium of the witness.] "I moved to Ohio when I was twelve years old. I was born in Mississipy. I'm forty-two now, I think. It might have been half after one or two when I heard a step a-coming up the stairs. I went to the landing and saw Mr. Secretary of State a-coming up with his hat on; and how he got there the Lawd only knows. He told me to show him to Mr. President's room. He spoke mighty sharp, and I thought it was all right, so I led the way. When I was a-going to knock at Mr. President's door, he told me to stop and have a cigar first. He never offered me one before, and I was mighty surprised. There was a strange smell, like an apothecary store and I don't know anything more about it. That is all I know, sir." Subsequent examination brought out no new fact, except that the prisoner remembered that the Secretary coughed behind a handkerchief as he spoke, and that one hand was concealed under his gray overcoat; this was pulled over his ears. The thing that struck him most was that the Secretary kept his hat on during the whole interview. The watchman had never known him to keep his hat on in the house before. Like the first witness, he recognized the odor of chloroform, and thought there was something else besides. He was surprised to find himself gagged and bound when he came to. As the two witnesses corroborated each other, and as neither had any communication with the other, they were substantially believed. The fact that this testimony was indisputably damaging to the Secretary of State, and the further circumstantial evidence of his card having been recovered from the floor of the lower vestibule, caused the investigating committee, of which Inspector Byrnes was the chairman, rigorously to exclude all reporters, lest the evidence might make it, to say the least, uncomfortable for the suspected dignitary. It was natural that, by ten o'clock on the morning of the drama, a secret guard should be placed over the head of the Department of State, though no movement was made as yet toward his arrest. The next witness of importance was the President's valet, who swore that the President retired unusually early that night and dismissed him with the special injunction that the house should be kept quiet, as the President had a headache and wished perfect rest. It may be well to state here that the new incumbent of the presidential chair shared with his wife the traditions of Jeffersonian simplicity of living, and that they departed so little from their original home habits that house detectives were abolished, and the distinguished pair lived, entertained, and slept with as scant formality as the sovereign people allowed. The doors communicating with their sleeping apartments were rarely locked. Full dependence for safety was placed upon the two trusted watchmen whose deposition has been given. The children and their attendants, who slept in adjacent rooms, heard no noise during the night. In short, none but the two under strict arrest were aware of the entrance of any person or persons after twelve o'clock. In the meanwhile, detectives were stationed unostentatiously throughout the White House, watching with professional acuteness the movements of everyone within its doors. At eleven o'clock precisely on the morning of the ninth of June, Inspector Byrnes and the chief of the Washington police drove up in a hack to the door of the Secretary's mansion, and requested a private interview. Within was feverish commotion. Senators and Representatives, public officials and men of eminence were sending in their cards and excitedly discussing the dreadful news. Telegrams were beginning to pour in. The first impression was confirmed that a political coup or revenge was at the bottom of the shocking affair, and whispers were mysteriously exchanged between sombre and stately heads. When the Secretary saw the cards he immediately withdrew, with an aside to the Secretary of War: "This visit may clear up some of the mystery." These words were not calculated to soothe the impatience of the inner circle. When the three were alone in the private office, the chief of the Washington police force tersely opened the subject. He was a blunt official of adamantine integrity, a veteran of the war. "Mr. Secretary," he began, "this is the saddest day the country has known for many a year. You must pardon me if I ask you a few leading questions." Inspector Byrnes sat with his back to the light; for, with an inimitable fashion of his own, he had, upon entering, made a debouch between two chairs and a table, forcing the Secretary to sit with his face to the glare of the window. Shaded himself he could with impunity watch the least expression on the sensitive and noble countenance before him. "Sir, do you recognize this card?" The question came like a musket shot, and a card dropped, face upwards, on the Secretary's knee. Kellar could not have performed this feat more neatly. The Secretary glanced at the pasteboard for a moment, and said in evident surprise: "Why, yes. It is one of my cards." "Have you any more with you?" asked Inspector Byrnes, speaking for the first time. The Secretary seemed puzzled, but good-naturedly opened his wallet, and produced several of the same description. These he handed to the Inspector, who took them and bowed profoundly. A moment was spent in intense examination. "You must pardon me if I ask you if you use these cards when calling upon the President?" proceeded the Washington officer. The Inspector's eyes seemed to be still riveted upon the cards in his hands. "Why, yes--no--that is, once in a while, if I happen to desire an audience at an unusual hour," answered the Secretary, exhibiting the first signs of embarrassment. "Will you please tell us when you called there last?" asked Inspector Byrnes, furtively glancing up and speaking in a chatty, assuring tone. The Secretary's face expressed relief. "Certainly," he answered; "that is easy enough. I attended an informal reception in the Blue Room from three to four yesterday and saw the President alone a minute afterward. That is the last time I saw him." One might almost have fancied at the last sentence that tears arose to the eyes of the cabinet officer; at least there were tears in his voice. "Just as a matter of formality, Mr. Secretary, will you tell us where you were between twelve and two o'clock this morning?" asked the Inspector, with the unconscious look of a man who was asking for a glass of water. "What does this mean, sir? Do you suspect me in this infernal mystery?" ejaculated the Secretary. His face was pale from excitement; his eyes flashed in manly protest. "Not at all, not at all, sir. Calm yourself. This is only a matter of curious coincidence and a disagreeable formality," answered the Inspector, waving his hand as if he were brushing away a fly. The Secretary stood a moment in thought, and then turned and touched a button. Immediately a servant appeared to whom the Secretary whispered a few words. The man in livery bowed and went. "Now, gentlemen," said the Secretary, standing with much dignity before his callers, "wait a moment, and so far as I am concerned this mystery shall be cleared. I happened to be in this room last night from twelve until half-past two with some gentlemen, whom I am sure you will recognize. Ah! here they are." A tap at the door and a "Come in" revealed to the astonished detectives the Secretaries of War and of the Interior, who entered the room. "Now, Inspector," continued the Secretary of State in his grandest manner, "will you kindly ask your question again?" It then transpired that the three Secretaries had conducted an informal meeting to confer about the distressing question of war with Canada which was at that time agitating the country, and that their interview had been prolonged into the small hours of the morning. The chief of the Washington police could not refrain from profuse apologies after this denouement. Inspector Byrnes thought profoundly, and then, after a pause, burst out with unparalleled frankness: "Gentlemen, this is the most startling mystery in the annals of American crime. I must confess that up to this moment I am absolutely foiled." He then recounted, under seal of secrecy, the whole story as we have seen it. Ending his exciting narrative, he said: "And, Mr. Secretary, do you know of any one in Washington or in the country that resembles you enough to deceive two men, taking into account a natural drowsiness that each admitted?" The three gentlemen of the Cabinet thought hard but were soon bound to answer in the negative. For the Secretary of State was no ordinary-looking man. Conspicuous on any occasion, though not what might be strictly called handsome, he always commanded attention by his distinguished air. His luxuriant side whiskers, which were really magnificent were the most noticeable feature of his face. He had the happy consciousness that there were none like them in the United States. "There is only one more question you can answer, Mr. Secretary," said Inspector Byrnes, with a deferential look. "The watchman on the first floor said he recognized your team. Will you please find out whether your coupé was in or not between twelve and two? Coachmen have queer tricks at times." The coachman was immediately sent for. Meanwhile the Secretary stated that he had come in at twelve from a late call on a personal friend. "May I ask your friend's name?" interrupted the national sleuth-hound, swiftly and politely. "The Patagonian Ambassador," replied the Secretary with hauteur. He added that he had sent his carriage instructing John, the family coachman, to be on hand at eleven that morning. The carriage was evidently not there, and in the excitement of the news the Secretary had foregone his morning's Department business. After half an hour of waiting, during which the two police officers had sent out several messages, the coachman was ushered in among the impatient quintet. Instead of the prim and stately master of the horse, who was the despair of even his co-peer the Jehu of the English Ambassador, and the admiration of the Washington gamin, there skulked in a battered, bandaged, hastily-dressed man, who shuffled out incoherent excuses, and burst into moist apologies. "It wasn't my fault. The divil was in it. The hosses are safe. The kerridge is well. I woke up in the gutter, the blood sputterin' down me backbone. They were picked up this morning. Don't discharge me! I've served you fifteen years and only trained twicst. What'll become of me? Lord have mercy!" The coachman of the Secretary had a stock of irreproachable syntax, which had been utterly scattered during the experience of the last night. At this spontaneous moment his native grammar got the best of him. The coachman's testimony amounted to this: The driver was walking his horses to the stable in the fog when he saw a man beckon him from the sidewalk. Not a soul was on the street. Beyond was a dark, private lane. He stopped, and, to his surprise, saw, as he thought, his master standing and motioning him to come to a halt and get down. The Secretary's face was turned toward the dark. The voice sounded muffled. When the coachman alighted his master produced a silver flask and told him to take a drink as it was so damp. He dared not disobey, though full of wonder at this unprecedented favor. As soon as he had taken a pull he felt dizzy. Two or three more black figures appeared like ghosts before his eyes. He thought he struck out or tried to run to the coach, he didn't know which. A queer odor mounted to his head. Then he lost consciousness. He came to, early in the morning, a little after four, and staggered to the stable. The team was not there. He fell into a stupor of despair. About an hour after, an acquaintance of his drove the span up, and said they had been found unchecked, grazing near the Smithsonian Institute. He supposed that they had run away. The Secretary's coachman had then given the fellow five dollars for his services and to hold his tongue. He was afraid of being discharged. He had just heard of the disappearance of the President and he feared being implicated in the affair. After the name of the person who found the horses was taken down, and after a searching cross-examination, the frightened man was sent away to rest, with assurance of continued favor. Subsequent examinations failed to find any traces of the catastrophe in the coupé. It had been carefully cleaned when it came back to the stable. There was no blood visible. This completes the whole of the testimony and information that was received or discovered by the united efforts of all the detectives in America up to the fourteenth of the month. Clews had been manufactured and followed with desperate rapidity, but to no avail. Numberless arrests had been made, but no one could be legally held for high treason against the Chief Executive. All that was known was this: that some bold villain had successfully personated the Secretary of State; that he had gulled three servants by a close resemblance; that he, with others, probably, had forcibly carried the President and his wife from their very beds, leaving them but scant time to take the necessary articles of clothing; that these abductors had audaciously used the State carriage for their nefarious purpose; that they had left absolutely no trace behind; and, that moreover, in the darkness of the fog and rain no further track could be found of the direction they took. They could not have gone by train; so every house in the city of Washington and in the suburbs, to the distance of fifteen miles or more, had been searched in vain. A like systematic investigation was carried on along the river, to the bay, in search of anything suspicious afloat. The authorities gave the robbers of the nation no time or opportunity to escape by land or water. All avenues were watched. Where were they and their noble booty? In short the foremost couple of the United States had utterly disappeared, to the horror and despair of the civilized world. It was just one week from the morning of the shock when the New York _Herald_ published the following manifesto in its original form. It was sent as an advertisement with five dollars enclosed. The envelope was postmarked from division II of the New York Post-office. The document bore no superscription. It read as follows: TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES: _We have abducted your President and his wife, and hold them for ransom. They will not be delivered up until their fine be paid publicly, under full sanction of Congress. Moreover, Congress and the people must guarantee, in addition to the full payment, C. O. D., entire liberty to the abductors permanently to withdraw from this country and live in future peace. Unless Congress and the nation give their honor for the payment of the ransom and our personal and impregnable liberty, we will not deliver our prisoners. We impose a ransom of a million dollars apiece for each week, for such time as this offer may remain unaccepted. The time begins from date of capture. These conditions are final. When the country, through its representatives, accedes to this demand, the time and place of delivery will be published in these columns. The loyalty and honor of the nation are now on exhibition before the world._ This communication burst like dynamite upon the people. Did it not bear an undeniable stamp of genuineness upon its face, not only through the firmness of its tone, but by the audacity of the demand? Yet there was an equal division of opinion. Some thought it was the raving of a crank in search of notoriety, but others looked upon it as a veritable communication from those who held the President and his wife in their possession. Two millions of dollars a week! A princely ransom worthy of a royal couple and of the United States. It was natural that the handwriting of this letter should be scrutinized severely. Every ingenuity that detective art could devise for finding the sender was employed. During the next few days New York underwent an espionage worthy of the court of St Petersburg. But, to the utter mortification of Inspector Byrnes and his myriads, of Pinkerton and his myrmidons, they were bound to confess their utter failure. The perpetrators of the incredible deed, like "An arm Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful," brandished the sword in the air and disappeared. In the meantime the political nation was aroused. It experienced some measure of relief to know, if it were true, that its chief was held for paltry gold. In that case, he and his would be safe from the assassin's sword or the vengeance of an alien party whose hatred he had incurred by patriotic scorn in his inaugural address. An yet, the question was raised whether some treasonable secret society had not secluded him, hoping to increase its revenue at the expense of the United States treasury. Many went so far as to pronounce it a Fenian plot to raise money for Parnell in his final overthrow of English rule in Ireland. Constituents wrote to their representatives in Washington, instructing them to vote the ransom, without delay, from the surplus fund, which was now one hundred and seventy-eight million dollars. Others instructed them not to waste the public money, as the President and his spouse must soon be found by competent detectives, and thus a "creditable saving to the treasury" would be made. The Vice-President, who had succeeded to full powers, sent a special message to Congress, requesting it to vote the ransom, no matter how enormous. The strain on him was not worth the people's money. So Congress met in secret session, and spent the balance of the week fighting, temporizing, and receiving telegrams to the effect that new clews were found. On the twenty-second of June, exactly two weeks from the time of the distinguished capture, the following epigrammatic communication was printed by the New York _Herald_, in the same handwriting as the previous one. The envelope bore a Chicago postmark: "_Congress has disregarded our generous offer: The ransom for the President of the United States and for his wife is therefore raised two million dollars._" This was all; cold and ominous. Like the first message it was unsigned. The style was unrelenting and imperious. Citizens awoke to the sensation that they who were now the nation's martyrs were in the hands of men who would not shrink from enforcing their demand. It was now universally believed that these were _bonâ fide_ bulletins sent by the unscrupulous abductors themselves. This became the detectives' final theory, and they massed their skill towards it. The unsolved mystery brooded like dog-days over man, woman, and child. A nameless fear, that of an unknown and irresistible enemy in their midst, paralyzed the citizens. Prayers were offered in every church, school-house, and home. The hostilities that but lately threatened the country ceased. Civilization breathed nothing but sympathy for the bereaved republic. Sovereigns redoubled their private guards and quaked upon their thrones. And yet, in the face of fears, petitions, and threats, Congress, in a spirit of disastrous conservatism that has marked so many of its deliberations, allowed itself to be ruled by a dissenting minority. Detective Byrnes, hoping to gain imperishable credit and also the reward of five hundred thousand dollars which Congress had been liberal enough to offer, counselled delay in a private letter to the Speaker of the House. So it happened that this august body would not ratify the overwhelming vote for immediate payment of ransom which had just been passed by the Senate. This filibustering brought the country into the third week of the calamity. The following communication to the New York _Herald_, postmarked Boston, written in the same hand as before, brought matters to a crisis: "_The nation has evidently more love for their surplus than for their President. The requisite ransom has reached six millions of dollars in gold. The treasury is not yet exhausted, nor are we. None can find us. Our defences are unapproachable. We laugh at your attempts. The wife of your President, we are grieved to say, is ill._" This proclamation aroused a new element, which had been smouldering, to white heat. The women of the country rose _en masse_. They fired old societies and organized new to collect ransom. The W. C. T. U. and W. H. M. A. and A. S. A. and A. B. C. and X. Q. B. Z. thrilled to the occasion. Infant Bands of Hope and Daughters of Endeavor invaded private families with demands for penny subscriptions. Weeping women persuaded dollars by the tens, hundreds and thousands from responsive men. They renounced their bon-bons and new dresses, parties and dowries in their patriotic fervor. The presidents of all the women's societies in the land trooped to Washington. They cried shame at those who trifled for the sake of the fiftieth part of the gold in the vaults with the noblest life in the Union. These unselfish women stormed the capital, and literally poured two millions of dollars, which they had collected in less than three days, upon the floor of the House to rescue the first lady of the land from who knew what? They forced their husbands, their representatives, to do their bidding, and the final vote was passed amid indescribable scenes. The ransom was now ready for the President and their lady. It had to be accompanied by the national promise to secure freedom to those who delivered up the suffering couple. That was the third of July. Still the impotence of the nation in this new crisis filled thoughtful men with apprehension. Was it moral that cash instead of justice should be given to these stupendous criminals? What a precedent for infamous success! Of what avail courts of law and prisons if such consummate daring goes unpunished? Is there a portion of our national machinery out of gear? If so, which? Nevertheless the excitement was now beyond fever heat. It is safe to say that the temperature of the people had risen ten degrees when the news was flashed abroad that the "President's money," as it was called, had been unanimously voted by Congress. Tears streamed as patriots met each other. Many developed a new species of insanity in their suspense. The country had now done its part toward the rescue of its chief magistrate and of his perishing consort. Would the abductors be true to their portion of the contract? Party strife had been forgotten in this new anguish. All Fourth of July demonstrations had been postponed until a loving people's thanksgiving for their President's safety could blend with the time honored celebration of a nation's birth. But suspense was not long delayed. Promptly the New York _Herald_ received a manifesto, this time the last, sent by the arch-conspirators to Congress and the people. This envelope was boldly postmarked Washington. This fact made those in the capital city almost afraid to stir from their homes lest unawares they might meet the demon in their midst who had dwarfed all principals in the records of crime up to the present date. But this final proclamation read as follows: TO CONGRESS AND ALL AMERICANS. _We note your late and liberal response to our proposal. We shall not be outdone in the honorable discharge of obligations. At precisely eight (8) o'clock on the morning of July sixth (6th) the payment of ransom and delivery of captives will take place within one mile of Washington's homestead, Mt. Vernon. The government vessel with ransom and proper officials on board will remain in near sight of Mt. Vernon. At our signal (which shall consist of four Japanese day rockets, each representing a flaming sword) whether hurled from land or water, the officers of the government will steam toward the place of delivery. Guards will fall back immediately upon the discharge of whistling bombs until the ransom and the ransomed meet. The Presidential party will bear a flag, vertically striped black and crimson. On its centre will be a gold half-eagle. Payment must be made as follows: There must be eighty (80) leathern bags, each containing one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) in gold; the amount of ransom being eight million dollars ($8,000,000) for four weeks' board at one million dollars ($1,000,000) a week apiece. This money must be paid and its genuineness certificated upon the honor of the United States by the Secretaries of State and of the Treasury. If there is any suspicion of infidelity on the part of the nation, the President and his wife will be held for another month on the same terms. Should we be betrayed in the trust which we have reposed in the American people, on the 6th of July, at, or previous to the time of delivery, the distinguished hostages will immediately be put permanently beyond reach of hope._ Unscrupulous and stern was the message, yet tinged with a spurious color of honor that demanded the true blue in return. It was the consensus of opinion that it would be madness to attempt arrest during the culminative ceremonies. The required gold was transferred from the treasury vaults to the new and swift cruiser _Washington_. Final arrangements were made for giving the imprisoned couple the most glorious reception which ingenuity and patriotism could devise. Reporters by hundreds bivouacked on the grounds of Mt. Vernon on the night of the fifth. Gunboats, steamers, yachts and sail of every description congregated to the scene of the surrender. The land teemed with sight-seers and soldiers with stacked arms. In the midst of all this apparent disorder, Inspector Byrnes, on his own responsibility, had his thousand trained men, who patrolled every foot of ground within five miles of the historic site, and who had surveyed every inch of water from the mouth of the Potomac to the city of Washington. He had hoped to retrieve his fame by a successful capture at the eleventh hour. At last, though it seemed a century in coming, the morning of the sixth of July broke solemnly upon Mt. Vernon. The revered site was flanked on all sides by seething, excited, hopeful humanity such as these historic shores had never before witnessed. The official command had been to abstain from all noise and confusion on land or water from the time of the sunrise gun. The cannon boomed from the new navy. Then came the hush. The last hours of waiting were spent in maddening inactivity, in strained repose. From what quarter would the ominous signal be seen? Who would catch the first glimpse of the boldest and most successful gang of malefactors that this country had ever produced? PART II. Colonel Oddminton was a widower, with only one son, fifteen years old. It was natural, then, that the colonel himself should balance between forty-five and fifty years of age. Let the fact only be whispered in desert places that the colonel was no more a colonel than you are. He had never smelt powder, except when shooting mallard ducks. He never had seen a regiment, except when it was marching on Decoration Day peacefully through the woebegone streets of Charleston, preparatory to a good dinner. His nearest idea of regalia and medals consisted of the many adornments worn by Queer Fellows or any other order of Honorable Unextinguished Redskins as they either laid a corner-stone or a comrade ceremoniously in the ground. Where could he have lived and not have been an active partisan in the stirring days of our devastating civil war? Surely, not in the United States! Of English exile blood, that came over a hundred years ago, he would have been a thorough American had his parents and his environment permitted. His family had settled on one of the many Sea Islands that dot the coast of South Carolina, and there they had staid and raised the famous Sea Island cotton which is still successfully used, so fine its fibre, to adulterate a fashionable fabric. Like the baryte of Cheshire, the cotton of Oddminton Island became valuable as it became an ally to fraud. The one increased the weight of white lead; the other swelled the unlawful receipts of the manufacturers of silk. Oddminton Island did not follow the regular markets of trade. It always had its peculiar channels of commerce; its cotton had an undiscoverable destination. The colonel, as we will still call him, was, from his earliest memory, sternly brought up under an atmosphere of uncanniness and secrecy, nor did he leave his fertile island, except, as we shall mention, until his father died and made him sole proprietor of land, slaves and family traditions. Fully two hundred acres were under cotton cultivation. The insignificant remainder was unentangled marsh. Colonel Oddminton's father died in eighteen hundred and sixty-one. Then the colonel began to expand. He had two hobbies that consumed his imagination by day and agitated his visions by night. The one had been shared by his deceased parent, namely, an inordinate desire to be rich; not as wealthy as the richest family in Charleston, but as rich as all the merchants in the "City by the Sea" put together. Cotton had always given a comfortable living, but cotton was declining. It became unsatisfactory. It was not enough. Colonel Oddminton's other hobby was a fast boat. He had always been a more than enthusiastic sailor. When the boy was only eighteen, his father had given him a ten-ton sloop and allowed him to go anywhere, provided he did not touch the mainland. This order was in accordance with the old man's peculiarities, but was strictly obeyed. With his black sailors the boy had cruised in every bay and inlet for a hundred miles about. Though no one else knew it, he was the best pilot those waters ever saw. During the war, when he was master, he never left his island except to put his own cotton aboard English blockade runners. In these hazardous attempts he never failed. This experience cultivated his native qualities of courage and of self-possession. On this island of his there was a bay that afforded fine anchorage for two large boats. It abutted on the marsh. It was there he had built a small camphouse. Neither the cove nor the house could be seen from the open sea. The former could only be entered through an intricate channel, and that when the wind and tide were favorable. The latter was approached through heavy underbrush by a winding passage that was known only to a few. Colonel Oddminton was a tall, fine-looking man. He wore a long flowing beard that had never seen the razor. His build was massive; his height was manly. About the time of which we are writing--this was in--but the reader remembers--his new schooner, which he had dignified by the name of yacht, much to the amusement of a few acquaintances, had been easily beaten by a trim stranger, that ploughed its way to windward as if it had been a knife eating into the teeth of the gale. He had followed this new craft to harbor and found her to be a Herreshoff model. That night, for the colonel's schooner was really an able and fast one, the disappointed man was sadder than when he saw his only friend, his father, die. He was proud of his schooner. He had cruised in her from Baltimore to the St. John's river, and had never been so disgracefully out-pointed and outfooted by any boat of her size before. It was at this time that he fell into a revery that lasted a month. It was the longest month in his life, the only one he had ever spent upon the mainland. People pronounced him "daft," decidedly cracked, but "harmless, you know." His tall figure flitted from the lobby of the Charleston Hotel to the great cotton wharves, and then back again. At last he awoke, and this was the outcome of his supposed aberration. "I don't care if it costs me my last cent, I'll have the fastest boat in the world, and no one shall beat me again, by gum!" To make a long story short, he sold to an eager syndicate of English capitalists his island for an asparagus farm, reserving for himself the odd acres of marsh, his camp house and bay with its two moorings. On this sale he realized a hundred thousand cash down. He then turned his father's savings, fifty thousand dollars' worth of London consols, into ready money. He now had a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. With this he and his boat disappeared. No note was taken of his absence either on his former property or in Charleston, the only other place that really knew him, so frequent were his vagaries, so infrequent his presence. Let us follow the Colonel in his unostentatious wanderings. He first sailed with his son and his two trusty men direct to Washington city. He took in the sights of the Capital for a few weeks, and then, leaving his boat behind, pushed on by train to New York, that wonderful metropolis that obliterates or worships men with an idea. He took lodgings with his son in a modest boarding-house, and there met a Swedish sailor, a man who had been captain of a steam yacht during the summer, and now happened to be out of employment. Nautical people do not take a long time to become acquainted. Colonel Oddminton at the end of a week had engaged Hans Christian on the strength of his name, without further references, at a salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, with the proviso that his new captain should hold his tongue and obey orders. This was about the first of November. During the last week of the same month the yachting world, and indeed the whole maritime contingency, were interested in the following paragraph, which was duly copied and commented upon by the national and foreign press: "_The famous builders, the Herreshoffs, have taken a contract to build a steel yacht that shall develop the enormous speed of 35 knots an hour. They are given 'carte blanche' for everything that pertains to increase of speed. The new phenomenon will be about a hundred and fifty feet long, as less water line will not admit of the speed contracted for. A bonus of $500, it is rumored, will be paid for each additional one half-knot speed over the contract requirements of 35 knots. The engines that will effect this speed will be of a new and untried pattern. They will not be exhibited unless the vessel prove a success. The owner of this phenomenal craft, which will be the fastest in the world, is unknown. It is suspected that it will go to the Swedish government for use as a torpedo boat. The yacht will be finished in five months, and her name is undecided. We should respectfully suggest 'Sheet Lightning.'_" At this time Colonel Oddminton and his son began to travel restlessly. They kept it up all winter until the first of May. The lad had developed as much aptness for the land as he had for the water. There were two things the boy did admirably, and for which he was conspicuous beyond his years. He held his tongue and obeyed his father; moreover, he was clever enough to take care of himself. With the first of May the ceaseless journeying came to an end, and Rupert Oddminton was sent to Washington to put his father's old schooner in readiness for future orders. The press, which had volunteered during the winter much plausible but little real information about the wonderful new Herreshoff model, now blazed into the rare glory of fact. "_The first trial trip of the unknown took place yesterday. The marvellous witch astonished spectators by showing up to the tune of 35-1/2 knots, and it is suspected the end was not reached. This unparalleled speed was continued for 125 minutes in favorable weather. This proved the most successful trial trip the Herreshoffs ever held. Thus the singular and hitherto undivulged electric machinery proves a triumphal hit. After a few minor changes the unnamed yacht will be ready for its destination. Who will own the fastest ship in the world? It is conceded that she goes to Sweden. Her crew, which is entirely composed of Swedes, is strangely uncommunicative----_" and so on. * * * * * One fine day, the magic craft shot out of Newport harbor and vanished. Some said she went straight to Europe. Each daily had its own theory. The boat and her evanescence were a nine days' wonder. The yacht that represented the most exhaustive skill man had ever applied to navigation had melted away, unnamed, unlicensed, and without destination. Even her builder knew her no more. The reader knows, as well as we, that this triumph of speed was Colonel Oddminton's venture. He had literally sunk his all in it with maniacal satisfaction, and had only a few thousands left, barely enough to pay expenses for three months. He had pursued his ideal until he had her under foot. He had not touched the new yacht until after it had left the world in wonder. He had now met her on the high seas in his old schooner, and the four--himself, his boy Rupert and the two black sailors--with sad eyes, scuttled the home of many years. When the Colonel's foot touched his new, bright deck, Captain Christian nodded, and the blue flag to starboard of the mainmast (signifying owner absent) was hauled down. The crew beheld their master for the first time. Not a sail was in sight. The Colonel was dazed. He went below, gulped down a pint of whiskey, and tried to think. He was intoxicated--not on liquor, but on final possession. When he came aloft, spray was whistling from stem to stern, and behind was a wake that overtopped the racer itself. Water rushed as though projected through a pipe, past the shining sides of the vessel. Colonel Oddminton, in a trance, leaned over and touched the steel plates carefully. He expected to feel the heat generated by the tremendous friction. Captain Hans Christian stood respectfully at his side. "What speed does she register, Captain?" asked the owner, with a tremulousness new to the man. "Only thirty-two knots, sir, in this chop, but we can drive her thirty-eight. I think she can go forty on the hardest push." Only the owner of Nancy Hanks, the fastest racing horse the world has yet produced, can imagine the sensations of the Colonel at this answer. "What is the speed of the fastest government boat?" he asked with deliberation. "Twenty-six knots, sir," was the quick reply; "they've only two torpedo boats that go that; and they are always up for repairs. As for war-ships or cruisers, none average over twenty. A common ocean steamer can beat them out." This last was uttered with the contemptuousness one always feels toward a mighty government that allows itself to be outdone by corporations or individuals. "Suppose you change her top hampers, and make her so that no one can recognize her; say, tack on a false stem and stern to the water line, will she still go as fast?" continued the Colonel cautiously. "Certainly, provided you don't interfere with her hull," answered the captain in surprise. "I will take the wheel," the Colonel said. The electric vessel from whose wheel there was an unobstructed view ahead, without smokestack, with masts that could for speed's sake be lowered, was steered like any sail-boat, from her heaving stern. The owner's hand marked half speed, quarter speed upon the indicator. To the disgust of the crew he gave orders not to have the speed increased except to keep out of sight of coasters. At dead of night the beauty was anchored in his own cove, opposite his clapboard shooting lodge on the marsh. No one noticed his approach. The marsh and the bay hid their secret. The next day at dawn a transformation began to take place. The white paint, the original and dainty body color of the electric yacht, was changed to a dull gray, and the new coat looked as if it had been put on in amateur patches, so dingy was its appearance. The boats on the davits were touched up with a combination of green and black. They looked at first glance as if a collier might have lost them at sea. The electric launch was smeared with the refuse of the paintshop put into one pot. The mixture attained was indescribable. But by far the greatest change consisted of a false stem and stern. These were modelled and put on, so that after a few screws were drawn, the mask would slip off, leaving the original sheer of the boat in all its beauty. A large smokestack of hollow timber, painted black with a red stripe, was improvised and set up. This ornament led into the galley stove below, and the cook was instructed to burn smoky materials when on the run. The deck was then covered with canvas and painted a sickly yellow. The brass work went unpolished. As may be imagined, the new model was as different from the old as the carefully disguised ruffian on the stage is from his elegant self. "Now she is ready," said Colonel Oddminton to his captain. "I will double the wages of all on board if the crew does not leave the ship or converse with any person off of it except by order. My two colored men will get all supplies. The future speed of my boat will be eight knots an hour. She is incapable of going more. That is her limit until further orders. Give command for an immediate start. We will now go to Charleston." The son and the crew from the captain down suspected that something was in contemplation out of the usual run of pleasure trips. The son dared ask his father no questions, though he burned with indignation at the vandal changes. The crew did not care, even if they went pirating. Nothing could overtake them. Their fuel was limitless. Their pay was princely. Their cook was supreme. These stolid natures obeyed orders and drew their rations with faithful punctuality. It does not take long to run to Charleston, going at even so slow a pace. Small steamers ply daily between the Sea Islands and the cotton metropolis. It happened that some of the Colonel's acquaintances were on board one of the passenger boats, and they saw this new craft lumbering along, puffing out volumes of black smoke. They slowed up, and were soon overtaken by the strange boat. The Colonel was sitting on deck. "Halloa," one of them yelled, laughing. "Where did you pick up that thing, Colonel?" "Oh, down in New York. She's an old-fashioned steamer. I haven't had time to get her fixed up yet," answered the Colonel. "I always wanted a steam yacht, and I got this cheap." The passengers set up a laugh. "We'll race you in," spoke up one of the Colonel's acquaintances, with a wink at the others. The man knew the Colonel's weakness when he challenged him. "All right," said the Colonel briskly. "John!" yelling forward, "tell the engineers to put more steam on and let her go." New puffs of smoke came from the bogus smokestack. The sidewheeler increased her pressure. It forged ahead at its highest speed, ten knots, and no more. Colonel Oddminton swore, but to no effect. The passenger vessel left the Colonel behind, amid jeers and all the catcalls familiar to Southern methods of demonstration. The Colonel seemed heartbroken. When he _steamed_ into Charleston harbor two hours after his ancient rival, the wharf was crowded with the Colonel's "friends." When the Colonel came ashore he dropped a few characteristic oaths, ordered drinks all around, and said that, after the _Mary Jane_ (that was the name painted, on her square-stern) was prinked up and her bottom scoured, she would beat the best of them yet. He had great faith in her possibilities. At any rate she could go in a calm. Similar performances were repeated for a week. The Colonel planned it to get to the city in the morning and he went back at night, until Charleston was thoroughly familiar with his ridiculously antique yacht, and had joked itself tired at his expense. Soon an elopement and a murder tickled the palate of the city, and the Colonel and the _Mary Jane_ were forgotten. When that stage was reached Charleston knew him no more. It was now the second of June, and the _Mary Jane_ turned her ugly prow toward the mouth of the Potomac river. Every one knows that the Potomac empties itself into the Chesapeake bay. The Potomac is between ninety and a hundred miles long, in its tortuous route from Washington to the bay. At its mouth are many inlets. Each one of these was known to Rupert and the two negro sailors. It was in the most retired estuary that the _Mary Jane_ cast anchor on the evening of the fifth of June. At her normal rate of speed she lay within two and a half hours run of the Capital. At nine, at black of night, she started for Washington. Her deck-log registered thirty-six knots an hour. She hugged the shore, where she laid for safe passage, until she modestly crept to an anchorage near a city wharf. Then the Colonel went ashore with his two black men and two Swedes, to reconnoitre the town. He always took with him a preparation of chloroform and another drug, which, for the sake of public safety, we will not mention. This was compounded for him in Chicago, by a chemist formerly in the employ of Anarchists. This preparation was warranted to "make a man who smelled it lose consciousness in less time that it takes to say Herr Most." When Colonel Oddminton was last in Washington a casual smoking-room acquaintance remarked, eying him with the gaze of a professional physiognomist: "If you'd shave off your chin, and keep your hat on, you'd be the very picture of Senator X----." Now Senator X----, through a revolution of the political wheel, had become Secretary of State. That casual remark had penetrated into the imagination of the Colonel. He tried to shake the impression off. Flattered by this suggestion--no one had ever made it before--he bought photographs of the Senator, all he could find, and studied them diligently. For days he haunted the Senate chamber and learned the personnel of the Senator by heart. [This, it will be remembered, was in the last administration.] Then was born the thought, Why not make capital out of this resemblance which art could easily magnify? The Senator was a millionaire. There might be money in it. But this seemed, after all, rather impracticable and rather commonplace. The Colonel was no sneak thief. He had broader elements than that. The man, but not the blood, was ignorant that his grandfather's great-grandfather was hung for piracy in England. It would be impossible to state when the stupendous plot, which he finally executed, shaped itself in his subtile brain. This idea startled him, haunted him, conquered him; why not kidnap the President of the United States, demand a ransom and throw suspicion, for a time at least, upon the wily politician? His thoughts now worked only in that conduit. Jacobi said that the greater a man's ability to act for distant ends, the stronger his mind. The Colonel silently plotted for months. We see where it had led him. Having studiously perfected himself in the rôle of Secretary, which he was prepared to play at a moment's notice, the Colonel spent the remainder of these last nights in Washington, awaiting an opportunity to capture the Secretary's coach, after it had been dismissed by its owner for the night. He also kept himself closely informed of the President's habits and his simple domestic hours without arousing any suspicion. All Washington knew the customs of its unostentatious chief. Society had criticised his "affected Democratic ways." Every one knew that he habitually retired as early as a New England deacon, never later than eleven. White House dissipation was now out of season. The Colonel knew that the interior of the executive mansion was unguarded at night. Could he once gain access thereto, the rest of his plot, so ignorant and so trustworthy his tools, could not miscarry. The Colonel made the attempt for three consecutive nights to capture the Secretary's coach. He arrived each time in Washington between eleven and twelve. He knew the approaches to the stable, and luckily for him, on the dark night of the eighth of June he accomplished his design, how successfully the reader well knows. The strategic Colonel, with his four devoted men, invaded the privacy of the White House at exactly quarter of two o'clock in the morning; he had the aid of a card taken from the case in the coupé, and the re-enforcement of his now marvellous resemblance. What he now did the veriest tyro could have performed. He had not meant to abduct the first lady of the land, but what could he do with her? His native chivalry would not permit him to harm her, though the President was made unconscious by the aid of the Chicago anæsthetic. The wife entreated to accompany her husband. She would undergo any fate so that he should not be taken without her. On condition of perfect quiet her wish was gratified. She was softly led, the President was carried, down the deserted stairs. The familiar state coach bore the distinguished victims away, and the deed that baffled the detective skill of the country was done with an ease which seems ridiculous. The next evening the President and his wife might have been seen by Inspector Byrnes, had he been there, silently sitting on the deck of a murky-looking vessel, bearing name _Mary Jane_, and anchored in a little cove off a swamp and cottage on Oddminton Island. So remote and quiet was this locality that the rumor of the President's effacement had not even reached it. The kidnapped couple waited patiently for the relief that they momentarily expected. They had no news, nothing but scrupulous consideration, attention, and a respectful but firm guard night and day. But rescue did not come. One member of that dark crew was left in Washington to hold continual communication with the Colonel. This was the boy Rupert, who, if he had suspected by this time what had happened, was either too loyal or too terrified to reveal the fact. The letters that astonished the world were written by the Colonel, sent to his son sealed, directed each in a different handwriting, and stamped with full instructions how and where to mail them. The boy had travelled faithfully and far. Of course a letter posted by an innocent-looking boy of fifteen, who was unsuspected and unknown, was able to baffle the law. He was the only confederate, a helpless and faithful tool. A country that opens itself in so many ways to foreign foes must not be startled if one of its own sons, perceiving the weakness of the armor, should take advantage of it and choose his direction for the vital thrust. The Colonel aimed high. He kept his counsel and accomplished the incredible in the simplest way. Who thought of him and the crazy _Mary Jane_? The President and his wife were as far away from rescue as if they were on the Island of Borneo. There are a thousand such places on our coast where a hostile fleet might ride without even the suspicion of our "Lord High Admiral." It was ten minutes of eight o'clock on the morning of the eighth of July. A fleet of many hundred vessels of every description lined the banks of the Potomac opposite the revered home of Washington. There were gunboats and catboats, excursion steamers and yachts from every part of the country. They idly lay at anchor, or jogged barely enough to hold their own in the tidal river. All flags hung at half-mast. While most eyes scanned the heights with impatient glance, others watched the water for a revelation. The sides of the hills were black with humanity. The world seemed to wait there with a throe of hope subsiding to an interval of despair. The high officials of the government were standing on the quarter-deck of the new man-of-war. _The Washington_. Each had a pair of glasses to his intent eyes. This was the moment when the Secretary of State, from his high elevation, spied a long, low vessel moving slowly amid the floating palaces and dreary hulks. It seemed apologetic in its movements, and afforded a sad contrast to the jaunty yachts it almost grazed. None but the Secretary had as yet noticed this in significant boat. Somehow it fascinated him, and he followed it intently. It was propelled by steam, and crept up as if it wanted a nearer view of the morning's performance. Now a police patrol launch whistled that way, and gave the sailor at the wheel an abrupt command to bring her up to a stop. Hardly was this order given when there came a puff of smoke from her uncouth bow, and an ominous flaming sword appeared against the dead gray sky. A sound that could at first have been mistaken for a subterranean growl rolled upon the still air. When the second flaming sword flashed into mid-heaven the mutter of the populace became a roar. It was true! True! The President and their lady were at hand and in their midst. Two more ill-omened rockets gleamed above. Was it execration or was it joy--this mighty sound that broke from river to shore? Then silence came again. Eyes strained to see this mysterious thing that made straight for the great man-of-war. But one soul was seen on its dingy decks. Only the man at the wheel was visible. He was clad in black. A hundred vessels instinctively closed about this daring and defiant craft. Its escape was cut off. It could neither go to the right nor to the left, forward nor back. It sullenly stopped. Then came a whistling shriek, followed by a cannon peal from its forequarter--another--and the flag of black and crimson crowned by the gilt eagle, touched by unseen hands, shot like a baleful spirit from the peak. "Keep off!" shouted a stern voice from the bow. "Keep off, ahead there! Let the nation stand back at the peril of their chief magistrate!" Now the Mystery swung ahead, until she was abreast of the high warship, any one of whose lowering guns would have gladly shattered her if it had dared. When the execrable vessel came to a halt, and breathless and dignified faces peered upon her decks from above, a sudden bustle was observed. From below there mounted slowly his excellency the President of the United States, attended by the first lady of the land. Both looked pale and anxious, but bore signs of powerful self-restraint. At sight of the revered couple, the man-of-war's crew could not control themselves, and set up a mighty cheer. This was caught up from ship to ship, from shore to height. Flags were hauled aloft. Guns were discharged. A pandemonium of joy set in. Behind the captured couple two men in black walked, each with a cocked revolver. The honored pair reclined on steamer chairs in full view of their people. The world knew now that they were safe and nearly home. Greetings were exchanged between Cabinet and Chief. Even war-scarred veterans could not choke down the rising apple in their throats. Again there was a hush. A figure now stepped from a forward hatchway on deck of the _Mary Jane_, walked up to the captured couple, and bowed low. This salute was succeeded by a courteous recognition of the impatient crowd above on board the _Washington_. As the unknown raised his silk hat for the second time, he stood directly in line with the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State and Col. Oddminton regarded each other. Bystanders started in surprise. The resemblance between the two men was deeply suggestive of the success of the plot. The villain had the same noble brow, the same delicate complexion, the same incomparable whiskers. But, alas! he was bald on the top of his head. The Secretary involuntarily stroked his own luxuriant crown with a sigh of relief. "Gentlemen, representatives of these United States," said the Colonel slowly, "I have faithfully fulfilled my part of the contract. Do you yours. I will come aboard and inspect the ransom. Then it may be lowered down, and the President is free. I have not long to stay." In the meanwhile, so intent were all eyes upon the star actors of this scene, it was not noticed that men were busily engaged at stem and stern of the unshipshape-looking steamer. Hands worked deftly at masts and funnel. After a few minutes, during which the expectant couple sat with as much comfort as one can before loaded pistols, the ransom was inspected, the Colonel satisfied. Eighty bags of gold were carefully lowered to the pirate craft. As the Colonel descended alone to his own deck he motioned with his hand. Immediately the pistols were flung into the water. The seamen in black fell back as a guard of honor. The Colonel, with Southern grace and British dignity, extended his arm to the distinguished and trembling hostage. This she did not refuse and he led her to the cream-white companionway that now reached from the _Washington_ to the _Mary Jane_. The marines presented arms. The women sobbed. Then came the President. When his foot touched his own deck there thundered forth a salute of twenty-one guns from the American navy. Whistles blew, flags and handkerchiefs fluttered, and mad salvos rent the air from subjects that any sovereign would gladly call his own. The President now looked down with sad curiosity upon his former prison. But there strange things had happened. The caterpillar had cast off its chrysalis, and the incomparable butterfly appeared. Where was the smokestack? Where were the masts? Where was the _Mary Jane_? A load seemed to fall from stem to stern, and there appeared beneath dingy paint a sheer which a king might long to possess. This was the crowning surprise. Naval officers now recognized for the first time the nautical marvel which had deluded the nation. The Colonel stood alone upon the deck of the transfigured boat. With uncovered head he spoke. His left hand grasped the wheel. "Mr. President--I have guarded you safely, and treated you as well as circumstances could permit. Your patience in adversity, and that of your wife, have compelled my reverence. You were but the scapegoat of a nation. This country can never afford to be careless of its defences and of the treasures which they protect. People of America! You regard me as the chief malefactor of your times. The day may come when you will call me its greatest benefactor. To-day you execrate me. To-morrow you may bless me. I have taught you a solemn and a costly lesson, but the price of such wisdom is cheap. Good-morning!" There was no opening, but the hawsers were suddenly cut. There was a rush and billows of foam. As a cat plays here and there in her pretty antics the "_Lightning_" (for a blow of the hammer on the stern had annihilated the _Mary Jane_) wound in and out at an unequal rate. When she turned, she careened far over on her side. The water lapped the Colonel's feet. Who could stop her? Who could overtake her? At the first shock the gunners stood motionless, then sprang to their guns. The President, Commander-in-chief of the army and navy, raised his hand and shook his head. The faith of the nation was pledged, and the pirate escaped without a shot. The incredible speed of the _Lightning_ increased. It became terrific. Nothing like it had ever been witnessed in maritime history. Spectators stood with held breath. A lieutenant in his excitement shouted: "For God's sake, overtake her!" The crowd yelled: "Run them down! See where they go!" But the navy of the United States might as well have chased a cannon ball. The mental pressure became tremendous. Spectators had hardly drawn a breath when the miracle was hull down. The American love of audacity and speed struggled mightily for the moment with American patriotism. The moral sense of the people could not prevent a murmur of admiration when the _Lightning_, with eight millions of national gold aboard, in less than nine minutes was but a speck. A bend of the river, and the mysterious, courtly and successful pirate was gone. THE LOST CITY. I. "Great guns!" The ejaculator tipped his straw hat off with his left hand, let it roll upon the office floor, made a dab for a damp pocket handkerchief in his right pistol pocket, and stared at the yellow paper again. "Whew! I don't believe it!" he muttered. Then, aware that the keen eyes of the three-and-a-half-foot messenger boy were upon him, as if sizing him up for news, he stared at the telegram again, mumbled "It's a fake! Great guns!" and rushed from the room. The messenger boy looked after the editor's retreating form with a knowing wink, as if the whole thing had been a special job put up by himself, whistled "Annie Rooney," took up a tattered copy of "Famous Quotations," laid it down again with an expression of mingled respect and scepticism, characteristic of his kind, and then swaggered out of the editorial sanctum. "Well, Swift, what's up now?" The editor-in-chief of the _Daily Planet_ (Democratic) lifted his young, alert face from the evening edition of his own journal to that of his news editor. Interruptions were the expected thing in that stirring office. Swift did not speak, but laid the telegram upon the desk, pulled out a Victoria Regina, and chewed it nervously. The chief read the message through once to himself, gave one glance at the face of his subordinate, and then said: "This is a repeat, is it not?" "Yes sir. First news came three hours ago. I didn't believe it. Thought it a fake. Half think so still. I wouldn't insert it, and wired for an immediate reply. Here it is. It is too late for the five o'clock edition. What shall I do?" "Well, this _is_ extraordinary!" conceded the chief. This admission meant a great deal in that office, deluged with news from all parts of the world, where it frequently happened that fourteen columns of purchased and paid for telegraphic despatches were not considered important enough to use, and were dropped in the waste-paper basket. The chief pressed the button in his desk and asked the boy that appeared to inform Mr. Ticks that he was wanted at once. Mr. Stalls Ticks answered the summons promptly. He was a sallow, faded, middle-aged man, dressed in a sere and faded Prince Albert coat, with sallow and faded boots. In fact, the whole appearance of this invaluable member of the _Planet_ corps gave one the impression of the last minute of autumn, when even the trunks of the trees, the stones of the hills, the soil of the valleys look sere and yellow and faded and ready for a winter's sleep. Mr. Ticks looked as if he were waiting for the trance that never overcame him. "I wish to know something of Russell, the capital of the new State of Harrison, Mr. Ticks." Mr. Ticks pulled out a yellow, faded, silk bandanna, wiped his spectacles sadly, and with an over-aspirated tone asked: "Yes, sir?" Mr. Swift looked at him with mingled disgust and respect, and tapped his foot impatiently on the bare floor. "Let me see; it is situated?" proceeded the chief quietly. "On the southeast shore of the Great Gopher lake." Mr. Ticks finished the sentence mechanically. "Ah! I remember. Its population?" "Twenty-nine thousand five hundred and fifty-two. It increases at the rate of thirty a day." "Exactly so! It is--?" "Just two years nine months and twelve days old." "To be sure. Its property--?" "Is one hundred and sixty-four million dollars, in round numbers." "Of course. Its industries are--?" "The usual pertaining to Western cities, I suppose. I confess ignorance to concrete particulars. The reports have been singularly deficient in this respect. I credit this entirely to its youth." "Indeed! Its railroad facilities--?" "The C. H. & S. F. is its great trunk line. Three branch lines have their centre there--just built. Two roads are surveyed to shorten the distance to Chicago and San Francisco respectively." "Any other facts of interest, Mr. Ticks?" Mr. Ticks hesitated. "Well--no--yes--no. In fact, there is nothing of special importance that I--that is different from any other city--except--nothing, sir, that I am willing to stake my professional reputation upon; you must excuse me, sir." "Is it in the cyclone area, Mr. Ticks?" "No, sir. The centre of barometric depression is farther north. The Buzzard mountains to the south deflect all such storm centres. Russell will be singularly free from tornadoes." The editor-in-chief looked somewhat nonplussed, and handed Mr. Ticks the telegram, with the remark: "What do you think of that?" "I do not know, sir. I cannot give an opinion." "I, Mr. Ticks, I for one believe this is true. I'll--I'll stake my reputation on it!" said Swift decidedly. Mr. Ticks' exasperating caution grated on the news editor and converted his scepticism into conviction. "If it is," replied his chief, quietly, "you can start for the scene to-night on the six thirty express. You did up the Charleston earthquake. You were the first on the spot at Johnstown, and this promises to be as bad--or as good." Swift tried to look indifferent at this cumulation of trust. He had been on the paper for five years; he had started in as night reporter, and his own ability and quickness, united with a certain caution, one might call it a news integrity, had raised him to his present position. The _Planet_ had the singular reputation of printing the truth. It rarely was "taken in," with a false item. It aspired far beyond the local. The _Planet_, under the able management of its chief and of Swift, had become the mirror of the world. And, if at times it reflected important news from a convex surface, it did no more and far less than the majority of its contemporaries, who had no telegraphic facts to throw away daily, and who, when hard pressed to it, manufactured a murder at home or a war rumor abroad to help pad their lean columns. "Let me see! It is five forty-five," continued the chief, consulting his watch. "I will not detain you any longer, Mr. Ticks. We shall want a column from you on Russell, to-night. And now, Swift,"--when Mr. Ticks had faded out of the room,--"who's this correspondent signed D.?" "It's Dubbs. You know him. Associated press man and special correspondent. Never failed me. He's the only one there who knows our cipher." The editor-in-chief did not change his expression, but his eyes had the steady, stern look that showed easy determination. He quickly wrote a few words on his pad and handed them to his favorite "sub." "Take this to the cashier! Get to the elevated as fast as you can! Buy what you need when you get time, and--_go!_ I depend on you for the fullest description to be had. If you do as well as you did on the Conemaugh, I'll give you a raise on your return. Good luck to you." It did not take Mr. Swift five minutes to rush to his den, slip on his coat, snatch his hat from the floor, run downstairs, receive a fat roll of bills from the phlegmatic cashier and bolt for the elevated train. In twenty-five minutes he was at the central station, with two minutes to spare. He nodded pleasantly to the gatekeeper and boarded the train as nonchalantly as if he were going to his suburban boarding-house. II. All of our readers will remember the curiosity, the speculation, the horror, the apprehension, and the sympathy universally excited when, on the tenth of September, it was learned from the morning papers that Russell, the new capital of Harrison, was cut off from all communication. Each morning sheet hinted darkly at the cause of this unheard-of calamity. The _Daily Braggart_ said there was no doubt that a cyclone of gigantic proportions, followed by a water-spout, had swept the city entirely away, and that its evening edition would print full details of the "awful visitation," with pictures by their special artists, now on the spot, illustrating the ruin. Rut there was one piece of additional news about Russell that only the _Daily Planet_ gave. Let us quote, in order to be perfectly accurate. The sheet is before us as we write: "EXTRAORDINARY CALAMITY! "RUSSELL CUT OFF FROM ALL COMMUNICATION! "_The citizens of the State of Harrison are wild with apprehension. As yet we cannot speculate on the nature of this disaster. Up to this moment no one knows what it is. We will be honest, and say we know no more than our neighbors. But this much is assured: Not only is communication cut off within a radius of twenty miles of the ill-fated city, but it is impossible to re-establish it at present. There are forces at work as yet uncatalogued by scientists. There is a definite circle drawn about Russell, and to cross it means death. Two men repairing the C. H. & S. F. tracks dropped, smitten by a mysterious and invisible hand. The white mile post announced that Russell was twenty miles from the spot where the corpses of these brave fellows lay. What baneful miasma envelops this broad area? What is the fate of the thousands within its borders? Time will tell. Our reporters are on the spot. But as we go to press we do not know._" Most people sniffed at this "dead line" as the wildest newspaper canard of the lot. Many shook their heads. While those who had relatives or friends or business connections in Russell tried to drown their horrible suspense as best they could. The _Planet_, it may be remembered, closed its leading editorial as follows: "_We are a Democratic paper, and we had little love for this baby State and its upstart capital, created solely to guarantee a Republican majority at the next presidential election. But when the news that an inscrutable fate had overtaken this fraudulent State (we may be pardoned for saying that it seems to us a sort of Divine retribution for political jobbery) party feeling was washed away in that common compassion that all Christians feel for their enemies in adversity._" Who could mistake the diction of the uncompromising but tender chief? But it happened this time, as so often before, that the _Planet's_ information was true. Again that enterprising daily had made its "scoop" on the other papers. Its elation was pardonable. It is an indisputable fact that civilization as it progresses develops in its advance new diseases and new catastrophes. Hay fever and la grippe were not popular a hundred years ago. To breed a first-class cyclone, cut down your trees and dry up your water supply. This has been conscientiously attended to, and the natural consequences have followed. Science can eliminate the simooms that strike Bombay and Calcutta at such a day year after year, by simply flooding the desert of Sahara. England can be more easily conquered by deflecting the Gulf Stream a quarter of a point than by a thousand ironclads. Who knows but that it would be less expensive to change her into a glacier than to bombard her with hundred-ton guns? More white people are killed by railroad accidents yearly in our highly civilized land than were slaughtered by native braves in the palmy days of the "Last of the Mohicans." It is a fact that our boasted civilization, instead of affording surer protection, murders more men in one way or another than barbarism, only in the present case the victims are not eaten; the coffins are sumptuous; the processions decorous; the mourners in good form; the burial service pregnant with hope, and culture is not shocked. With us murder is committed by corporations, not by paid assassins. That is the difference. The assassin fails in his blows once in a while; the corporation never. But where was Russell? What was the nature of the calamity? The impenetrable fact that there was an actual, invisible dead line cast about that territory, with Russell as its centre, became confirmed with every report. It will be recalled that all the railroad tracks entering the doomed city were twisted as if clawed by a maddened monster. It presented a similar appearance to the South Carolina railroad on the day of the Charleston earthquake. This gave rise again to the earthquake theory. But why had not the shock been felt? No rumble had been heard. Could an earthquake account for the deadly something that filled the air? No intelligence came from Russell. The way must be forced to it. Who forgets the relief expeditions started in wagons and on foot from every point of the compass? These were invariably repelled on reaching the dead line. We could understand the fetid miasma that made the Great Dismal Swamp an unknowable country. We could comprehend the encroaching dead line of the spreading yellow fever bacillus. But this fearful death, that brooded silently, impenetrably, mysteriously and occultly over a vast area once the garden of civilization, baffled all attempts at explanation. Even birds were observed to vacate this tract. Only a few sinister buzzards wheeled their flight, with straight, unflapping wings, high above Russell, almost out of sight, as if they were the embodied ghosts of Russell's unbaptized inhabitants. What was that implacable power? Reporters and trackmen who steadily scoffed at it were themselves attacked with violent heart-beats when they crossed the invisible and fatal line. A convulsion of all the members followed, as if in an epileptic fit,--insensibility and, generally, death ensued. Many who were with difficulty rescued, and who finally recovered, averred that they experienced an overcoming odor, acid and penetrating, such as is peculiar to ozone when manufactured in a chemical laboratory. At the end of the fourth day of Russell's complete isolation a despair settled upon the country. England was staggered by the uniqueness of these phenomena. The French Academy of Sciences, after a prolonged sitting, announced that they could suggest no solution. It is only too well remembered that the newspaper bulletins were besieged in our own cities, but these offered no further information or encouragement. Was advanced civilization responsible for this disaster or not? That was the burning question. Or was this a special visitation of God, a plague new to the medical world, spontaneously generated, sporadic in its appearance, and destined forever to be an _obscurum per obscurius_ or perhaps to spread with further undetermined horrors? Thousands were now on the ground. They encompassed that section about as Joshua did the city of Jericho, as the settlers did the Territory of Oklahoma on the day of its opening, as the rabble do a house when a murder has been committed. On the evening of the fourth day from the time when the messenger boy brought the first despatch to the office of the _Daily Planet_, its chief, obviously nervous for the first time in his public life, received the following cipher telegram, which cheered him wonderfully: "_On the spot. Situation desperate. Worse than described. Will penetrate to Russell or die. Dead line still impassable. Trust me._ "SWIFT" III. When Swift boarded the Western express he walked through, starting from the last car, to see if any rival reporters happened to be there for the same purpose. He scanned the backs of the heads of the passengers first, and then looked keenly into each man's face as he passed. He had, in common with all newspaper men, the detective instinct. Who knew what eminent defaulter or renowned cracksman was fleeing the city in dark disguise? However, he observed no familiar or suspicious character until he entered the smoking car. He did not go through, for, although a great smoker, he took no pleasure in indulging in his favorite vice in the air of a democratic smoking car. What fastidious smoker does? He was content to let his eyes wander up and down the aisle. He was about to turn, when his gaze fell upon the back of a dingy linen duster, which was surmounted by a large, faded, black sombrero. The man under these garments had the upper part of his face hidden beneath the broad flap of his hat, while the under part of his face was entirely submerged in a large pamphlet. The man had the air of extreme retirement. Something about the dinginess of the felt hat seemed familiar to Swift. But, no; it could not be. To make sure, the new editor of the _Planet_ approached, and bent behind the man. The gentleman was ignorant of the attention he attracted, and did not stir. He seemed to be engrossed in one of Mr. Atkinson's incomprehensible financial reports. Swift caught sight of the travellers face, started back in amazement, and said: "Excuse me, sir: is this seat engaged?" and without further ceremony sat down beside the recondite stranger, who dropped his paper and stared at Swift in return. "Great Cæsar!" blurted out Swift. "How the D--epartment did you come here?" "On the five fifty-eight elevated," replied the man, imperturbably. "I--I didn't know you were sent, too." Swift's heart burned within him at the fancied slight. "I wasn't," answered Mr. Statis Ticks, laconically and wearily. "Where the dickens are you going, then?" asked Swift, warmly. "To Russell, of course." "How on earth did you get off?" "I didn't, young man. I skipped." This exceptional occasion doubtless accounted for the only bit of slang that was ever heard to fall from those dry lips. "You see," proceeded Mr. Ticks drearily, "the circumstance is a little unusual. I have read of nothing similar in the casualty reports. I thought it best for my reputation to make my own personal observations and figures on the spot." "But your position?" asked Swift in surprise. Mr. Statis Ticks raised his head proudly. "If the _Planet_ can get on without me, let it!" "But your family?" continued Swift, somewhat dazed. Who had suspected this animated reference library of such enterprise? "I sent messenger number thirty-seven to them," he answered with a sigh, as if he were bored by such trifles. Then considering this topic exhausted, Mr. Ticks took out his notebook and looked absently out of the window; now and then he jotted down a few abstruse figures. He was engrossed in calculating the farm acreage adjacent to the railroad track between New York and Albany. When they drew nearer to the region of the catastrophe the papers gave more lurid accounts of it. These were purchased and read with avidity by those on board the flying express. Groups centred in the cars talked only of one thing. Reporters now joined the train at each prominent city. As the train approached the stricken territory it became crammed to suffocation. It crept at a funeral pace. People fought at each station for seats. The train split into sections on account of the added cars, filled with mourners, with rescuers, with sight-seers, with villains. Swift now took to himself a certain measure of authority. Was he not the experienced representative of the greatest daily in America? But no one noticed Mr. Statis Ticks, who silently blinked at the excited crowds and then jotted down his estimates of them. On the afternoon of the fourth day Swift bounded from the front platform of the baggage car, the first to leave the train, and looked with a professional eye about him. The scene that met his quick gaze was unprecedented. Clamoring, gesticulating, shrieking, crying men and women were rushing here and there in frenzy. Here was a group of women wailing for their husbands, imprisoned or dead--and who knew which?--within that awful circle. There a man looked, vacantly, with trembling lips, from group to group, hunting for the wife snatched from him. Here was a rude fellow peddling half a bushel of potatoes from a rickety farm wagon. There a woman, hungry and desperate, was aimlessly dragging an orphan child about. Yonder a confidence man was set upon and beaten by infuriated victims. In the midst of a jostling, eager, credulous mob was a man who fancied he had some real news to tell. Now and then, as if by mutual consent, these people lifted up their heads towards the Great Buzzard mountains, toward Russell, the city of their despair, and clenched their fists and uttered an exasperated groan. Agents of the Red Cross Society and of the Law and Order League had already erected their tents, and were doing all they could to restrain the lawlessness and relieve the discomforts of the mob. Swift critically watched these seething thousands, who had come upon the spot from motives of sorrow, curiosity, gain, and plunder, all miserable, poorly housed and scantily fed. The reporter's inquisitiveness was well ahead of his human sympathy up to this point. Within these few days the border line about the afflicted city had become an improvised camp, that extended for miles and miles. It was enforced here by a railroad track, there by a village, until, having completed the gigantic circle, it met again. Thousands were flowing in each hour. They came from all points of the compass, like flocks of angels and of devils. As yet the military was not at hand, and the little law that existed was not of the gospel, but of brute force and adroitness. Swift, having sent off his dispatch at the improvised office, and having forgotten his companion, whom he expected to be a nuisance on his hands, retraced his steps and hurried to the dead line, where it impinged on the railroad track. Here was the centre of the maddest rush. Here men groaned and cursed and wept aloud. Swift pushed his way through until he reached that portion of the track that defied further passage. A cord had been stretched there to keep the crowds back. Upon showing his badge he was received with respect. "Take keer, boss," said the huge policeman, whose sole duty up to this time had been to drive the spikes into the sleepers. "I tried it yesterday. They just pulled me out. I got the d--d shakes yet." With a grave smile Swift ducked under the rope and looked before him. The solitary, motionless, blasted prairie stretched out, relieved only by the outlines of the Buzzard mountains. Where once the tops of towers, grain elevators and steeples were to be seen on the horizon, there was a cloud. A dense, strange, ominous mist overhung the stricken city. This cloud was of a yellowish color that recalled to Swift the dreadful yellow day of '72. It reached nearly to the summit of the great Buzzard mountain. Within five miles of the spot on which he stood this phenomenon became more and more attenuated until it disappeared in dull transparency. What did that cloud contain? What horrors did it hide? Of what was its nature? What was the secret of its deadly influence? No American catastrophe had impressed the reporter so much as the sight of this veil, hiding the unattainable city. Curse this maledict, deadly vapor! It paralyzed his inventiveness. It baffled his imagination. For the first time in his reportorial career Swift was stunned and without resource. Now it was said that not a breath of air had stirred over the polluted area since the morning of the loss of Russell. As the news editor looked down the tracks he saw that the tracks, which were torn up and twisted beneath him, within a hundred feet, disappeared utterly from view. The wooden ties were blackened into charcoal in their places, but the iron rails had evaporated. It was the same with the telegraph wires. At a certain point they stopped and were gone. The poles, tottering and scorched and bare, looked like a procession of naked ghosts, undressed for livelier mockery. Before him the trees, the shrubs, the grain, the grasses--in fine, all vegetation had been smitten unto death. The face of the earth was black and crumbling. It looked as if the roots of this unconscious vegetable life had been suddenly touched by volcanic fires and had died from the ground up. There was not a vestige of life as far as the eye could see. Had a fire swept the land? But no! No smoke had been hitherto visible, unless this inexplicable cloud were smoke. And yet, to Swift's practiced eye, there were evidences of a violent, a sudden, a consuming heat. The men in line behind Swift stood respectfully back while he observed this unique scene. He noticed a white mile-post close at hand. It was inscribed, "Russell, 20 m." "Only twenty miles to Russell! and no one there yet! What a field for the news editor of the greatest paper in the land! The competitors were keen. The chances were even, the honor great, and no favors asked. As he stood for a moment, lost in thought over the apparent hopelessness of the undertaking, and almost wishing he had not sent so confident a telegram to his chief, he felt a hand upon his arm. "I have found one," said a slow voice. "Have you? What?" asked Swift, with careless interest. He recognized the aspirated tones of Mr. Ticks. "I have calculated this thing over. There are between six and seven thousand on the spot. Five hundred reporters are here, and more expected by every train. There is no food, no bed, no roof for us here. This place has been completely done up. It is exhausted. To get facts we must move on." "Jove, you're right, old man!" Mr. Ticks acknowledged the compliment with a slight motion of his hand. "Yes, I have just purchased the only team to be had, for four hundred dollars." Swift glanced enviously at his autumnal colleague, who had already outdone him in enterprise. "Cyclones and tornadoes in this part of the country," proceeded Mr. Ticks sententiously, "travel to the northeast. We will go to the north. If there are any remains they are to be found there," Mr. Ticks had, it would seem, embraced the tornado theory. "We will go immediately!" exclaimed Swift. "Hold!" cried the man of figures quietly, "I wish to test this phenomenon. Wait for me here!" Before Swift could utter a protest or arrest his colleague's arm, the philosopher started up the vacant track. No one dared to follow him. The crowd were too much stunned at his audacity. Had they not dragged a dozen adventurers back from the same mad enterprise? Men shuddered before this unknown fate that stretched out its relentless arms so far and no further. A cocked pistol would have been more comfortable. But Mr. Ticks walked on slowly, unconsciously, as if in a revery. He put his hands out as if to feel the air. He put his tongue out as if to taste it. He had not gone forty feet when he was observed to tremble violently. Those on the dead line united with Swift in shrieking "Come back!" The experimenting member of the _Planet_ staff only shook his head. He was not twenty yards away when he stopped abruptly. He put his hands to his head and heart, and struggled against the unseen force. It beat upon him: but he steadied his legs the firmer and met the shock. It smote at him, but he wearily smiled in return. He even made a motion as if for his notebook. But such temerity was too much for the occult fluid to suffer. It breathed upon him and felled him to the ground. As he dropped he rested for a moment spasmodically upon one knee, and peered into the air as if he were penetrating the secret of this baleful agent. Then he fell back insensible. Half an hour afterwards the newspaper man came to. Swift was bending over him. "We rushed you out. You'll pull through all right, old man," said his colleague cheerily. "Did you note the symptoms?" asked Mr. Ticks feebly. "Yes." "Did you wire them?" "No; I hadn't time. I----" "Then do so!" He sank back exhausted. "But how did you feel? How _do_ you feel?" asked Swift anxiously. "As mortal never felt before," replied Mr. Ticks solemnly. With these words upon his lips he lapsed away again into unconsciousness. That evening at a late hour Swift made his way to the four-hundred-dollar team under whose protecting shelter he had ensconced his patient with such poor comfort as was possible. Mr. Ticks raised himself from the cushions upon one arm. "Are you ready?" he said restlessly. "For what?" asked Swift in astonishment. "To start." "Not to-night surely?" "Yes--immediately. Harness up! We must be at the extreme north of this unclassified belt by to-morrow morning." IV. Empiria, the new county seat of the new county Dominion of the new State of Harrison, was twenty miles away to the northward as the crow flies, and at least thirty miles off by road. The horse that Mr. Ticks had the forethought to purchase developed an unaccountable spavin, united with an unmistakable case of the heaves: when the whip was applied it furthermore exhibited an innate tendency to back. Mr. Swift drove through the darkness of the night, picking out the road with that genius for locality which the general and the reporter in the field share alike. Barring mistakes, accidents, or further exhibitions of depravity on the part of the equine department, they hoped to reach Empiria by dawn. Mr. Ticks leaned back upon the jolting seat in unbroken silence. When his colleague, who drove, hazarded a question, the only reply was a low grunt. As sleep was out of the question in that wagon, behind that horse and in those roads, was it pain or mighty thought or nebulous calculation that oppressed the wise man of the _Planet_? At about two o'clock in the morning Mr. Stalls Ticks broke his long reserve with the following remark: "If it is, it is a unique case. The phenomenon is isolated." "I hope you feel better now?" Swift had been anxious about his colleague, and had interpreted his silence as evidence of physical distress. Mr. Ticks gave an invisible shrug of his shoulders to express the contempt he felt for his own anatomy in comparison with the attainment of exact knowledge. Otherwise, heedless of the interruption, he proceeded: "It is physically impossible that a low-pressured area could have had its centre three or four hundred miles northwest of Russell." "Indeed?" replied Swift, vaguely and unsympathetically. "It must travel towards the centre of the low pressure." "Of course," assented Swift, as he would to a lunatic. Evidently that inexpressible shock had been too much for the middle-aged man. "The Gopher lake on the north, and the Buzzard mountain on the south, prevent the isothermal curve from being deflected toward the north." "Really?" said Swift. "It will be deflected to the south, young man," said Mr. Ticks, severely. "The atmospheric equilibrium can suffer no centripetal disturbance." "Well, what then?" asked Swift, a little bored. "There could be no gyrating motion of the atmosphere. There will be no aerial contest. There could be no colder stratum above the warmer layer coming from another direction. Both would flow from the south. There could be no inversion of these conditions. My friend, Russell has experienced no tornado or cyclone. And yet--" he added wistfully and thoughtfully, "and yet--" "Well, if there was no tornado, what the deuce are we going to Empiria for?" demanded Swift. He forgot himself, and gave the four-hundred-dollar horse a sharp cut with the whip, in consequence of which the animal backed them so nearly toward the place from which they started that the journey to Empiria was seriously lengthened. Mr. Ticks did not notice this delay. "--And yet?" he mused. "What is the matter, then, if it isn't wind?" asked Swift, impatiently, after he had persuaded his horse to defer the next attack of backing for a mile or so. "Is there a new variety of atmospheric disturbance? If so, it might strike us here!" "Sir--no! This is not a common tornado. As to further theories, they are not formulated as yet. No, this quadrant of the State of Harrison was not subjected to such a violent disturbance. I am prepared to say that there will be no evidences of a vortex wind in or near Empiria." Mr. Ticks relapsed into further thought, nor could he be aroused until the jaded horse brought the two jaded reporters into the open square of the county seat. It was early, about five o'clock, but still there were evidences of stirring and excitement. Upon the village common two or three large tents were erected, and from out of these, scantily dressed men and woman emerged. As these came into the cool, open air they lifted up their faces to the south, searching the horizon and sky to see if there was anything new in the smitten district. It was a motion as instinctive as that of the Mahomedan toward Mecca when he prays. The appearance of our two strangers excited no notice. Empiria was on a branch road, difficult of access, but people had flocked in and the village had become a city. After a hard struggle, in which persistent ingenuity won, Swift obtained a little corn for his horse, and a promise of breakfast for himself and companion. By six the populace was awake, bustling with feverish eagerness and oppressed with dread and suspense. Swift questioned a hundred, climbed to the tops of trees, advanced upon the mysterious dead line, and retired baffled at every step. As he thought of that vast enclosure, that was now an unapproachable cemetery, his soul shuddered within him. Like a thousand beside him, this man of nerve was baffled and overcome. By nine o'clock, Swift had exhausted the spot, and was for pushing on to the westward to complete the perplexing circle if necessary. Perhaps an entrance might be forced elsewhere. He was sitting in his buggy with Mr. Ticks, who was as uncommunicative as the dasher when he looked for the hundredth time towards the Buzzard mountains. As he gazed he saw turkey buzzards, of which there are thousands in that land, wheeling their spiral flight above the afflicted territory. Swift looked at them as he always did, wondering how they could fly so long without flapping their wings, when suddenly he cried out: "By Jove! I have it!" This startled Mr. Ticks. "What? Have you new information? What has occurred?" "No; but I have an idea--_the_ idea--but I don't see how I could put it through without time. I will go to Russell, or over Russell in a balloon!" The light of inspiration and sympathy flashed from one to the other. "I congratulate you on the thought," said Mr. Ticks gravely. "I think I can procure you one in a quarter of an hour." Now, under no circumstances is a balloon an easy thing to obtain. Even in a metropolis like New York or London it will take the cleverest reporter at least eighteen minutes, if not a few seconds longer, to hunt up a suitable means of ascension. It is not as simple a matter as one may suppose, to "go up." Therefore, when Mr. Ticks, in a matter-of-fact voice, asserted that he would procure the balloon in fifteen minutes, Swift fetched a long low whistle. But not in the least disconcerted by Swift's manner, Mr. Ticks slowly descended from the vehicle, and said: "Just wait here until I come back, so that no time may be lost." He strode towards one of the large tents on the common and disappeared within its flaps. Had Mr. Ticks the formula for inflating a canvas tent into a balloon? Who knew? In a few minutes the statistician returned, bringing with him a tall, cadaverous man, whose leanness was heightened by a long chin beard, which descended upon his chest to the middle button of his coat. Having a beard of this description, the gentleman had no need of a necktie, and having no necktie, he, of course, dispensed with a collar. "Professor Ariel, my friend Mr. Swift, who wishes to talk business." Mr. Ticks performed the introduction in his blandest manner. The man who seemed to see nothing had seen everything. It had taken the unpractical, the scholar, the dreamer, the muser, to observe the broken remnants of a county fair, and the advertisement of that aeronautic expedition, conducted by the renowned Professor Ariel, who was to have made an ascension at twelve o'clock that awful day, taking with him a couple to be married in the seventh heavens and a Seventh-Day Baptist clergyman to tie the knot. It was at ten in the morning that Russell was closed in, and the balloon and the professor had been ignominiously forgotten. "Where is your balloon, professor?" asked Swift, when he had learned these preliminary details. "Darn it all, in that barn there!" The professor spoke as if he had a personal grievance against the barn. "Are--were they to have paid you for your ascension?" "Five hundred dollars, and I hain't seen a red, and I can't get out of this infernal place." "I suppose it is in good condition?" inquired the editor. "You bet! It's new. Never been used. Cost twenty-five hundred dollars. Cash!" "How long would it take you to get her ready?" "Three hours' pushing would do it, I suppose." "We want to go up in that balloon, Professor Ariel," said Swift, after deliberation. Mr. Ticks confirmed this demand with an affirmative gesture of his sad head. "Can't be done, sir. I wouldn't risk her in this crowd!" The professor spoke decisively. "Do you know who we are?" The professor shook his head. "We are here representing the _Daily Planet_, and it will be the biggest advertisement you ever had." The professor still shook his head doubtfully. "If you were the President and all his angels I wouldn't risk it. A counter-current might carry us over that cussed spot, and we'd all be stiff before you could say Jinks." Nothing daunted, Swift took the aeronaut by the arm, offered him a cigar, and pointed towards the Buzzard mountains. "That's just where we want to go. D'ye see those birds up there? If they can stand it we can. This deadly what-you-call-it doesn't reach as high as that." The professor stared and then muttered to himself: "Gee--mima! The feller's hit it right." "Now, look here, professor! You're a famous man. Everybody knows _you_. The _Planet_ charters your balloon for five hundred dollars. Is it a go?" The professor's eyes glittered yellow, the color of greed. "I couldn't think of it. I couldn't risk the danger. It's an unknown country, now--no, I couldn't." "Call it six hundred." "Impos-sible!" "Seven!" "That wouldn't pay me if she breaks." "Eight hundred dollars!" "Couldn't do it." "Nine hundred dollars. I'm tired." "Subtract eight and add a cipher, and I'm your man." "Very well! Mr. Ticks is witness. I will give you five hundred when we leave the ground, and the balance when we touch it again." "Done!" The two men shook hands over their bargain. "Let me see," said Swift, glancing at his watch, "it is ten o'clock. We will ascend at one." "I will assist the professor in preparing his airship," said Mr. Ticks. "By the way, how tall is your balloon, professor? What is her cognomen?" "I call her _High Tariff_, mister. That's her name. You'll see it on her. Wait till she gets her forty thousand cubic feet of gas in her, and you'll see her height." By twelve o'clock the multitude had got wind of the undertaking, and were thronging towards the fenced enclosure, where the huge monster was flapping with that inane motion that only a half-filled balloon can take to itself. Rumors of the wildest description were afloat. By half-past twelve the balloon was, to all appearance, full, and sandbags were being put aboard. By one the crowd could hardly be kept back by self-sworn marshals, and the balloon tugged at its warps as if it would burst its bonds at the slightest provocation. The _High Tariff_ now awakened the utmost enthusiasm. Men came by tens and hundreds to make offers for the risky trip. "Blank it all, she's chartered, the _High Tariff_ is," was the aeronaut's invariable reply. "She don't belong to me this trip. Ask the owners." At ten minutes after one precisely Swift appeared upon the ground. He had just sent off the following message to his paper: "_Start immediately for Russell by thousand dollar balloon._" He had sold his horse and team and had purchased provisions with the proceeds. Five minutes after the sale the horse backed into the hotel and smashed the buggy into Chinese joss-sticks. Swift walked calmly to the car and ordered the provisions aboard. "Have you a long ladder and grapnel?" he inquired. "Two hundred and fifty feet each." "Anchor?" "Two hundred pounds." "Are you ready, professor?" asked Swift, satisfied with his inspection. "She's full to bustin'!" said the professor, looking uneasily at the straining cable. "Jump in, Mr. Ticks!" The crowd was almost beside itself at the boldness of the undertaking. Men yelled and hooted encouragement as the venerable and musty editor stepped into the car with a natural air. It took more than this to embarrass Mr. Ticks. "Now, professor!" As Swift spoke he handed the professor a draft on the _Planet_ for five hundred dollars. The professor hesitated no longer. He snatched the check and bounded in. An assistant stood ready with an axe to cut the ropes that held the impatient balloon. Swift then stepped in leisurely. It was just twenty-nine minutes and a quarter past one o'clock. The crowd shrieked as if their throats would burst. Swift lifted his hat in acknowledgment. "Good luck!" "Never say die!" "Come back and tell us all about it." "If you see my husband tell him I'm waiting for him." They cheered and yelled and cried and cheered again. "Are you ready?" asked Swift, looking at his companions. "Then let her go!" A cut, a swirl, an indescribable motion, and shouts became to those in the _High Tariff_ whispers, men became ants, and they were gone. V. "Look! For God's sake, look! What is it?" Swift strained his eyes to the southward, toward the death-bound territory. The malignant cloud that settled over plain and mountain slope was broken on the Gopher lake. As soon as Swift had recovered from the first bound of the balloon he had scanned the dark mist, and by the borders of the lake he had found a rift. This rift indicated the spot where the city of Russell should have been. As he spoke he clutched the arm of his colleague, and pointed over the side of the rising car. "I--I'm afraid I can't see what you mean," stammered Mr. Statis Ticks, "my glasses are blurred." The man of figures was really agitated. But Professor Ariel, like many an adventurer, had more than his share of what one may politely call sang-froid, but what is known in common North American as simple "cheek." Besides, in some sections of the country, he might have been called a profane man. With his hands on the safety valve, he looked and then ejaculated: "By ----. It's gone!" "I see nothing--nothing but black streaks," said the elder member of the _Planet_ corps hurriedly. "Can't we stop, professor? Perhaps that isn't the site of the unfortunate city!" The professor, obedient to the suggestion, pulled the safety valve, and the gas rushed out with a wheeze. "You bet it is! That's the place! Didn't I land there before I struck Empiria? Darned lucky for me they didn't take stock in the _High Tariff_. I might have been--God knows what, now!" Even as the three men looked, the cloud closed in upon the land. Strangely enough, it shunned the surface of the water. The travellers cast their eyes upon the sullen bosom of the Gopher lake. This body of water glittered like the scales of a leaden serpent. It looked from that great height poisonous and discontented. Swift gazed upon it intently. "Why? Wouldn't they have you?" inquired Mr. Ticks, absent-mindedly of the professor. "See! Haven't we struck another current?" As he spoke the huge _High Tariff_ swayed. A breath of chilly air smote them. Then gently the balloon swung toward the Gopher lake--toward the fateful city. "Well, you see, the balloon was too old-fashioned for them," answered the professor, still bent upon his grievance. "Now, if it had gone by electricity that 'ud been another thing." "How so?" asked Mr. Ticks, with polite interest. "Well! Everything in that gol-darned town went by electricity. They had electric cars, electric lights, electric shampooing, electric cigars, electric sewing machines, electric elevators, electric table service in the hotel; worst was, they had electric cabs. They kept quiet about some of their notions. Folks did say they had their reasons. I didn't hear nothing about all this electric tomfoolery till I struck the city." "Ah!" interrupted Mr. Ticks, pricking up his ears. "I have heard about those cabs, but I have had no reliable information that they were a success." "They ain't!" answered the professor, rubbing his right arm with a wince of memory. "Like a darn jack I took one for a spin. They go on three wheels; one in front, two behind. The driver, he sits in front and steers the shebang with the forward wheel. I hadn't gone two blocks when I leaned out of the window and the current struck me in the arm like a shot. You bet I yelled bloody murder and got out of that trap in two shakes of a colt's tail." "How does all that electrical system work otherwise?" asked Mr. Ticks slowly, after some thought. "Everybody perfectly wild over it. They won't allow a horse in town, nor even a ton of coal. Electricity is the big thing of the future. They fight electrical duels. Feller that stands the greatest number of alternating volts gets the apology. I saw a dog-fight in the street stopped by the Humane Society. A man would drop a wet sponge on the dog's head, another on his back, and turn on the circuit. They generally both dropped and never knew what struck 'em. Two dead dogs better than one fight. But they kept it all dark enough. These were jest experiments, they said. When they were done that they were going to have an electrical exhibition and invite the hull world. Why, I heard they were fool enough to put in a bill in the Legislature to have the name of Russell changed to Electra. As if Russell wasn't good enough for them!" Mr. Ticks mused over these facts. Why was it that his acquisitive mind had not roamed over this field before? Perhaps because it was acquisitive, not imaginative. _He_ could only account for the unpardonable omission on the ground that there were so many new competing Western cities, each with its peculiar advantages: and that there were so many strange electrical inventions new each day, that he had overlooked Russell and its progressive hobby. Besides, was he not on the staff of a Democratic paper, which would, perhaps, on the whole, prefer to ignore the new Republican State and its flourishing capital. "How was all this power produced if coal was excluded?" asked Mr. Ticks. "Oh, windmills did that. A half a dozen huge windmills, with wings, each as big as the _High Tariff_, were the first things you saw. They were nearly three hundred feet high----" "Good Heavens! Look, man! Look down there! Don't you see something in the middle of the lake!" Swift pulled the professor over to his side of the car, and pointed directly below the balloon. They had now struck a dead calm and the _High Tariff_ floated motionless two thousand feet above the lake. Directly below them was something resting upon the waters. It looked fixed and dead. A log? A wreck? A raft? Slowly the outline took to itself the form of a boat. "Have you a pair of glasses here?" asked Swift, all of a quiver. The professor shoved one of Steward's field-glasses in his hand. "There's a body in that boat!" cried Swift, after a prolonged examination. "No--Great God! It's alive! It moves! It's a _woman_!" The professor took a long look. "I guess you're right. She's a female!" "But she must be saved," insisted Swift. "We must save her." "Yes, Professor Ariel," said Mr. Statis Ticks, sententiously and with trembling dignity; "being a woman, she demands our attention, and, besides, as a survivor she can give us the information and suggest the figures we need." "I'll do my best, gentlemen," said the professor, shaking, his head, "but it's mighty ticklish business. Supposing we drift into the deadly air. I don't know what that vapor means, but it evidently means the 'Sweet By and By.' Even the _High Tariff_ wouldn't save us then!" "Look here, professor," jerked out Swift, peremptorily, "it's got to be done. Now dry up!" "All right, it's a go. I can stand it if you can." So the valve was opened cautiously, and the balloon with majestic slowness, obedient to its master's hand, descended toward the Great Gopher lake, and hovered over the cockle-shell upon its malignant bosom. As the _High Tariff_ approached the little boat, Mr. Ticks looked at it eagerly. "She's alive and unmarried," said the oracle, slowly. "Why unmarried?" asked Swift, with a vague flutter of the heart. He had watched the figure of the woman attentively with the spyglass. It was rounded and supple. Masses of dark-brown hair hid her shoulders and face. "Because," answered Mr. Ticks, "she is under eighteen. The statistics of this section of the West show that no female over eighteen years of age remains single." The balloon had now descended to within three hundred feet of the boat. The girl in it did not stir. She lay with her head propped in the bow, so stiffly and so still that to all appearance she was a dead woman. But the three men agreed they had seen her move. Had her rescuers arrived too late? "Let down the ladder!" cried Swift. "I'll go down and pick her up!" Ignorant how hard it is even for an experienced hand to climb up and down a rope ladder swinging in space, he clambered over the side of the car. "Hold, young fellow!" Professor Ariel spoke sharply. By this time they were within two hundred feet of the water. "Hold, I say!" yelled the professor in a rage, letting go the rope to the safety-valve and at the same time, grabbing a sand-bag. "If you stir out of this car I'll pitch ballast out and you'll never see your gal again!" Swift stopped short. The rope-ladder swayed like a double snake beneath them. Its end was fifty feet above the boat, but, O horrors! It was also nearly fifty feet to one side of the boat--no human power could reach the lady from the ladder. A breath might blow the _High Tariff_ even farther away. At the same time the girl, doubtless aroused from her stupor by the professor's loud call, opened her eyes slowly. Above her loomed a gigantic monster. Was it a dream? Was this apparition a final terror added to her awful experience, sent to crush out the last remnant of her buoyant life and magnificent courage? She stared at the thing above her; then opened her mouth and gave a scream, such as can only be the result of full Western tracheal development. "Oh! don't be frightened!" cried Swift quickly, "Don't! We've come to save you!" He could not think of anything more to say; and it occurred to him that he was a donkey to say anything. But the professor, who had few delicate scruples, waved his hat and shouted: "What's the matter with the _High Tariff_? She's all right!" This yell, so frequently heard on Eastern land and sea, had penetrated even to the Great Gopher lake, and it reassured the girl more than anything else could have done. She sat up weakly enough in the boat, and, after waving her hand, with feminine instinct tried to coil her hair and otherwise prepare herself as best she could to receive these angels from the clouds. "Can you catch?" yelled the professor. "Try me!" came back a voice undaunted, though enfeebled by long suffering. The professor coiled a stout, light rope on his arm, shot out a few thundering orders about safety-valves and ballast, and cautiously, but with gymnastic quickness, descended the yielding rounds of the long ladder. To the lady in the boat, to the passengers in the car it seemed hours before the professor reached the last of the two hundred rounds. It might have been forty seconds. Swift called out to the young lady encouragingly: "Hold out a little while longer and you'll be safe!" "I'm all right now, since you have come." The young woman's trembling voice seemed to lay an actual emphasis on "you" that Swift was selfish enough to take to himself. "How long have you been there?" "Five days. I am nearly dead!" "Poor, poor thing!" said Swift to himself. Tears of sympathy came into his eyes. Even Mr. Ticks blinked. "She's office editor on some Russell daily," said Mr. Ticks after another long look through the field glasses. "How do you know?" asked Swift in displeasure. "She's got a stylograph behind her right ear and a yellow pad in her lap; besides, there are some clippings at the bottom of the boat." By this time Professor Ariel had reached the lower end of his ladder. "Now, catch!" he cried, hurling the light rope with sure skill. It whistled through the air and the end fell across the boat. "Make fast to something, quick, now!" As he spoke he felt a breath of air upon his face. The balloon careened over slightly and righted itself. The _High Tariff_ was slowly settling to the water's surface. As quickly as he could the professor pulled the boat toward him. "You can't. It's anchored," cried the girl. She tugged at the rope with the last strength of hope, and actually brought it up. The skiff yielded to the professor's clutch. By this time the balloon was so low down that the aeronaut's feet were nearly in the water. "Throw out sand by the handful!" he ordered. This gentle lighting kept her at the right elevation. Now the professor touched the boat. He jumped in. "Don't talk!" he cried, "hold out your arms instead!" He knotted the rope underneath her arms and tied the other end firmly to the ladder. "We've got to hurry. Now, Miss! you keep cool, and we'll save you all right." It was a desperate chance. "Now let go a couple of sandbags!" the order came up to Swift in the car. Mr. Statis Ticks, with his hand upon the safety-valve, and hearing the order, became, for the first time in his life, confused. He pulled the safety-valve wide open, and the gas rushed furiously out. Even with the two sandbags overboard and lightened of fifty pounds dead weight, the balloon descended suddenly. The professor saw the mistake at a glance. He yelled furiously: "Good God! Close that valve or we're lost!" But the mischief was already done. "Heave it all out!" shrieked the professor, climbing up the ladder like a cat. The car of the balloon grazed the side of the boat. Mr. Statis Ticks, in such atonement as he could make for his awful error, reached over his thin arms. The girl arose, tottering to her feet, and, with a mighty effort, the gray, gaunt man lifted the heavy girl into the car. That was the most humane, and, at the same time, the maddest thing he could have done. Under the influence of the added weight the car struck the boat, over-turned it, and then dragged in the water. "Out with everything!" howled the professor. The three looked around in despair. The girl had dropped limp upon the floor, and the water was upon her. Above them was a cloud of the darkness of night. Cirrhus clouds scudded here and there in confusion. There was strange atmospheric howling in the distance, approaching nearer and nearer. The water assumed that angry hue it takes to itself before a desperate storm. The monstrous balloon writhed intelligently above them. All the sandbags were now pitched out. The _High Tariff_ shook itself loose from the water. It rose. It fell. It rose again. "Are we safe?" cried Swift, looking anxiously at the girl. "Take off your coat and vest and shoes, everything, and chuck 'em over like lightning, and we'll see," answered the professor, solemnly. VI. With wild energy the men threw out of the car everything that had a semblance of weight. Aeronauts well know the difference that a few ounces make to safety when the gas has been exhausted from their balloon. Professor Ariel had cast everything overboard with maniacal celerity, and now, clad only in his undershirt and trousers, was hacking at the trailing ladder to cut that off. The balloon had risen some fifty or a hundred feet. It now halted irresolute. Could it recover itself and mount? or would it lose courage and fall, dragging its passengers to a certain death? But far more fearful than the latter imminent danger was the sight of the threatening sky. Not one of these imperilled people had ever seen such whirling masses of mad, black, revengeful clouds. These centred from all sides upon the site of the lost city. They rushed together and formed eddies and funnels. They roared like live things. It was in one of these smaller whirlwinds that the balloon was caught. The massive folds of silk beat and writhed and tried to tear themselves loose from the clutches of the elements. The four in the car clung to it with terror, watching the mad-cap play of the wind. "It's no use--I can't!" cried the professor with damp, white face, throwing down his knife. "The wire is too strong. We must get to the rigging, cut off the car, and God help us!" The situation was indeed appalling. The ladder, for purposes of greater stability, was made of wire woven over with manila. The sharp knife could not cut that useless weight. In this crisis the young lady recovered her equipoise. She began to take off her shoes. "It will help a little," she said. Then she began shyly to loose her overskirt. But the whirlwind caught the car and nearly upset it. It swirled and almost touched the ground. "Up!" cried the professor. He caught the girl and tied her in dexterously. Every man held himself in the ropes that bound the car to the balloon as best he might. It was a fearful chance. The professor cut a rope and made bowline chairs. Each sat in his noose and held on for dear life. The professor, who never lost his coolness, worked as if he had done this before. And indeed he had. Swift had the presence of mind or the presence of heart to support the young lady in this perilous moment. Cut! cut! The car had been caught in a counter eddy, and was five hundred feet or so in the air, but rapidly descending. Then the last strand parted. Relieved of several hundred-weight, the balloon bounded up. It was buffeted and whirled and tossed from cloud to cloud. The maddened elements clutched at it. Balls of fire danced upon the ground beneath, and darted here and there from cloud to cloud. As the professor gave the last cut and the balloon soared aloft, there was a report as if a thousand rounds of artillery were concentrated in one shot. There was a dazzling streak of light. It smote the adventurers blind. It smote them deaf. It stunned them into insensibility. Like limp corpses the four sat as they were whirled on high, each clasping his arms instinctively about the rope that held him. It seemed as if death had overtaken them all and petrified them with its touch. "I have solved the problem." Mr. Ticks opened his eyes and gasped. "By my faith, where are we?" Far below were opaque blackness, storm and wind. Above, the blue, infinite ether. The sun shone brilliantly. It warmed the balloon. It expanded the gas. The _High Tariff_ kept rising. The stillness was a miracle. Beneath stretched the panorama of a stricken country. The highest peaks of the Buzzard mountains were below the balloon. The storm raged over the lake and the lost city like a mock storm, it was so distant and so unimportant. Now and then there was a flash of yellow light and a distant reverberation. The storm was fearful, but it was only a small blot upon a fair landscape when viewed from such a height. "Yes," mused Mr. Ticks aloud, pulling his energies together. "I know now what it all means. I know the secret of Russell's unparalleled disaster." As he spoke he reached out and shook the professor, then Swift; then he touched the young lady with gentle deference. The three opened their eyes, one after another. "We're saved! Oh, what luck! We're saved!" cried Professor Ariel. Tears of joy started from his eyes. "Say, mister," his devil-may-care manner returning to him in the fulness of his ecstasy. "Say," punching Swift, "you ain't got a chaw about you, have you?" But Swift, lifting up his bewildered eyes, took in the glorious blue sky and sun, then his gaze fell upon the horror from which they had escaped. Mechanically he searched the pockets of his trousers. Out of his pistol pocket he pulled a flask of brandy--all that survived to him of his outfit for this ghastly journey. This he had forgotten, otherwise it would have gone by the rail along with his pocketbook, to lighten the car. "Not yet," he said, pushing aside the professor's longing hand, "the lady first!" The brandy, the warm sun and the prospect of safety roused the girl considerably. Possibly Swifts supporting arm hastened her recuperation. Swift passed the bottle to Mr. Ticks, who drank, and coughed, and drank again. "It's St. Croix, vintage of forty-two," said Mr. Ticks, gratefully. The professor got what he could. But Swift would not touch any. He was experiencing a finer intoxication. His eyes met those of the girl, who had been the unconscious cause of all their danger. She seemed to perceive this, for she soon broke the profound silence by suggesting with a blush: "You needn't hold me so tight, sir. I'll try not to fall." "Can you talk now?" asked Mr. Ticks of their lady companion. This question deflected a possible embarrassment, but Swift, deeming it safe to allow no risk, did not relax his hold of the girl. "Are you a reporter?" he asked, with an unaccountable desire to keep the conversation in his own hands. "This gentleman and myself are on the _Daily Planet_, the other man is professor of the balloon." "How did you know?" she answered with a first approach to a smile. "I am, or at least I was, society reporter on the _Russell Telegraph_." The last word started Mr. Ticks up again. "You witnessed the destruction of Russell? Do you know that its cause is the despair of the world? Do you know----" "Oh, it was dreadful! dreadful! dreadful!" interrupted the girl with a shudder. "I was out in my boat alone and saw it all!" The lady hid her face. "I was so tired that morning I couldn't breathe. It was oppressive. The air was over-charged so strangely. You touched an iron post and a spark shot out and gave you a shock. I couldn't stay, so I begged off and took my lunch and my work in my little skiff and rowed two miles out and anchored and tried to write." "Can you state for the _Planet_, Miss----?" "Insula Magnet, that's my name, sir." "Miss Magnet, can you state at what exact hour the catastrophe occurred?" The balloon had now come to a standstill, and floated quietly above the lake and the doomed city. The four wriggled uncomfortably in the improvised seats. The ropes cut them. The sun beat upon them hotly. They were exhausted and hungry and parched. "Can't we go down?" suggested Swift. His brain reeled at the great depth below him. The person who lost his hold and fell would die before he reached the earth. The first stage in the Strasburg cathedral is two hundred and fifty feet high, and it is a terrible sight to look over its stone balustrade. No one forgets his sensation when he leans over the top of the Eiffel tower, a thousand feet from the asphalt pavement below. Judge what it was to those inexperienced travellers to be over ten thousand feet high, clinging like weather-beaten flies to these straining ropes! "No, I wouldn't descend yet in this calm for as many dollars as we are feet high. We're safe enough here. Look up, man! Look up! Shut your eyes. That's best!" But Mr. Ticks pugnaciously returned to his question. What was a little matter of falling ten thousand feet or so? A fact startling and valuable was at stake and at hand. "It was just a quarter of ten," answered Miss Magnet, in a low, horror-stricken tone. "I was writing. Suddenly a bitter vapor enveloped everything. There was no wind, no sun, no clouds, only this dense, strange atmosphere. It prostrated me. There were a number of boats near me. These were all of the new patent. They were steel. I saw great balls of fire dance from boat to boat. Then there came from the city a light such as I never saw before. It flashed like an enormous meteor, like an incandescent flame. It enveloped Russell. I was scorched even where I was by the flash. I heard a hissing sound like water on melted iron. And then--" "And then?" persisted Mr. Ticks in a kind of rapture. "And then I must have fainted away. When I came to there was no city, only masses of blackness and--and--Oh, the boats! The people! They were all gone! Not capsized--not drowning--but gone. There were no boats. There were no people. There wasn't even a dead body to keep me company. I, only I, was left, living and alone upon the hissing water.... When I was able I rowed back. The shore looked horrible and ridged, as if molten lead had been poured into it. When I came nearer an awful heat and a deadly odor overcame me. I had barely strength to row back and anchor again. Then the mist settled everywhere except where I was." The girl stopped for a moment, breathless. "I couldn't see anything. It was hot, and then it was cold. I tried to eat my luncheon. I tried to get some sleep. I called and called for help. I couldn't tell night from day. I can't say whether it was four or five days. I said five. I must have been faint a good deal. The worst thing was being alone. I expected to die. I got pretty weak.... Then I saw the balloon." The girl bowed the face which she could not hide, and sobbed at her own dreadful story. Swift was greatly moved. "Miss Magnet," he said gently, putting her head upon his shoulder. "I think you had better rest. You are tired out. This is different, you know. You needn't when you get safely down." The girl gave him a grateful glance and obeyed him quietly. "How did she escape?" soliloquized Mr. Ticks, loud enough to be overheard. "Oh, I don't know--don't ask me--unless it was that I was in a wooden boat. All the rest on the lake go by storage battery and are made of steel. Mine is the only old-fashioned boat, but I was always afraid. Everybody laughed at me, but I did what I do at home. I cut off the legs of a chair and fixed them in glass tumblers. I always sit in my office on glass tumblers. My bed rests on glass tumblers, too. It's a non-conductor, you know. I used to get shocked every day. Everybody got shocked in Russell, but they pretended not to mind it." "But, Miss Magnet, do you know what is the cause of Russell's fate? of this deadly atmosphere beneath us?" "N-no--unless--of course that can't be. I guess it's a visitation of Providence--but I don't know for what." The girl stopped, awed at the thoughts she had evoked. "A visitation of Providence!" repeated Mr. Ticks, slowly. "Yes, she is right. The sin of presumptuousness was visited upon that unhappy place." "Do you mean to say"--Swift started up. Somehow he had forgotten Russell, its mysterious fate, his mission, everything but the girl. He had awaked to his duty. "Do you mean to say that the whole thing is due to e--?" "Hold on! Look below!" interrupted the professor. They clung to the ropes and glued their gaze upon the sight so far beneath them. The storm had magically cleared away. The sunlight now pierced the whole landscape for the first time since the disaster. The lost city, in black, shapeless ruins, lay directly beneath them. "We will go down." The professor opened the safety-valve cautiously. "The devil has been chased away by the storm," he said emphatically. Indeed, the baleful vapor had gone. As they swiftly descended strange sights met their eyes. They could still see everything microscopically for a radius of twenty miles around. Black specks were rushing up the stricken railroad tracks, along the roads, hurrying to the city of doom. Linemen began to extend the wires; trackmen began laying new tracks. Fully fifty thousand impatient men were madly plunging these twenty miles from different points of the circumference, converging toward Russell. The dead line had become a mysterious thing of the past. The danger to life was over, and it became an unprecedented race to see who would get first upon the spot. "If this calm lasts, as I think it will, we will be on the ground two hours ahead of the crowd." Swift's eyes sparkled in reportorial ecstasy. There was no time now nor inclination for words. In ten minutes the _High Tariff_ was within a few hundred feet of the doomed city. Buzzards followed its descent curiously. "My kingdom for a notebook!" cried Swift, in anguish. "Take mine," said his companion, shyly, "and my stylo, too." Swift would have been more moved by this attention had he not been absorbed in the sight at his feet. "Do you mean," he turned to Mr. Ticks, "that this is all the effect of e----?" "Look sharp, now!" interrupted Professor Ariel. "Stand ready to be cut down!" The Professor had manipulated the safety-valve so skilfully that in another minute they grazed the serrated ground. They were not hurt. One wide sweep of the professor's knife, and the _High Tariff_ freed now from all restraint, bounded away never to be seen again. "I am sorry, Professor Ariel," said Swift, immediately, "that circumstances compel me to postpone my part of the contract. But, as we are responsible for your loss, I will guarantee that the _Planet_ will make it all right." The professor did not answer. Absorbed, he followed the _High Tariff_ in its capricious departure with tender interest. When the three turned and stared about them, they stood palsied by the terrible sight before them: a sight never permitted to mortal view before, and we pray that such be withheld from the gaze of our poor race henceforth forever. The wide-awake, the proud, the busy city of Russell had vanished. Russell in its short and meteoric career had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on its tall, iron, fireproof blocks, its steel grain elevators, its gilded capitol, its granite churches, its hundred factories, its indestructible depots. Where were they? Where was the "busy hum of men"? Not a girder, not a column, not a trace of the complicated iron vertebræ of this metal city was left to mourn the grandeur of its structures. Not a corpse, not even a bone remained to tell the tale of the death agony. Stricken as dumb as the lower brute creation, this one poor girl, the sole survivor of thirty thousand hopeful citizens, bereft of home, of friends, of employment, of hope, of everything in life but this hideous memory, uttered a low cry and sank senseless. Swift laid her gently on the parched, cracked ground; it was yet heated as if a conflagration had passed over the place. Where but five days ago haughty, frowning, iron blocks of stores, of hotels and exchanges stood, there were ragged gullies and deep fissures and jagged ravines, shining in the sunlight with a black, streaked crust. The sight was dreary and dead and deserted as if our travellers had been suddenly dropped upon the surface of the moon. The ground was riven as by some prehistoric upheaval. It looked as if subterranean springs of molten steel lava had spurted from the ground and had melted the unhappy city in their onward path and had carried it down in liquid solution to the lake. Mr. Statis Ticks picked up a piece of this plutonian slag and examined it attentively. "I didn't know that brick would melt like this," he said. Then again: "Here is platinum fused with iron and another substance I do not know." In a second or two he added: "I see no remains of glass. It must have evaporated." He then took a few steps. "It is lucky," he said meditatively; "if we had been landed a few more feet to the left we should have been broiled to death. A part of this lava is still in a liquid state." VII. The three men looked each other in the eye. Swift forgot the girl. The professor forgot the balloon. Mr. Statis Ticks had forgotten his wife and seven children; but this was no unusual circumstance. The aeronaut, having less awe to the cubic inch in his make-up than his companions, was the first to speak. "What does this gol-darned thing mean, anyhow?" "Hush!" said Swift, recoiling. But Mr. Statis Ticks bared his head before the extinct city. "It means," said the student, solemnly, "the presumptuous impiety of man and the vengeance of Almighty God! It means," he added, slowly, "incalculable volts of uncontrollable electricity acting and acted upon by nascent oxygen and hydrogen. It means that Russell, the greatest producer of the electro-motor power on the continent, has been smitten by its servant. It means that man has outstripped his knowledge of this mysterious fluid, and has ignorantly converted through millions of inadequate conductors and faultily insulated wires the terrible, the unfathomed power of electricity into light and heat and force; that Russell was gradually becoming a gigantic storage battery, charged and surcharged, until the time when its electrostatic capacity had been criminally abused, the negative forces of the heavens concentrated over the obnoxious territory, and a discharge unparalleled in electrical experiments restored nature's equilibrium, and consumed in one unspeakable spark Russell and its blind inhabitants." "My God! Can this happen to Boston?" cried the professor, trembling. "Or New York?" asked Swift. "Or to Chicago?" added the girl, faintly. She had revived and was looking about her in a ghastly way. "My mother used to live there." This truly feminine view of a scientific subject passed unnoticed. Mr. Ticks stood with his uncovered head yet bent before the annihilated city. He spread his two hands out, palms to the ground, with a gesture of indescribable significance, and made no reply. Black, vitreous masses of melted conglomerate spread before them. Where had stood the city, the sloping plain offered no obstruction to the view. Russell, to the last splinter of iron or of wood, to the last chip of brick or stone, to the last bone of the last corpse, was fused into a terrible warning to the world by the rebellion of its own electricity. "I guess none of 'em knew what struck 'em!" The professor hazarded this humane suggestion, feeling that the oppressive silence should be broken somehow. "The Kremmler chair was nothing to it," said Swift. "You are right," answered Mr. Ticks, gravely. "That was the only boon. So sudden and intense was the heat that men were ashes and the city was molten before nerves could convey sensation to the brain. In the fraction of a second, in the twinkling of a thought it was not, for God took it." The four breathed heavily. Again Mr. Ticks broke the silence. He laid his hand paternally upon the young lady's shoulder. "It is very fortunate, Miss Magnet, that you were the only thoroughly insulated person in this whole territory. The wooden boat, the inverted glasses saved you. You only had a normal amount of electricity in you. You were a poor conductor, otherwise you would have evaporated through the law of induction." "I can't stand this any longer, or I'll be a fit candidate for an idiot asylum!" blurted out the professor finally. "I am dying for a chaw." He cast impatient glances at a trackless, desolated grade a mile away. This grave of a great trunk line extended beyond their view. The four had not stirred from where they had been dropped by the balloon. To do so they would have had to pick their way cautiously. Russell was like an extinct volcano. She was yet hot. But she did not smoke, as one might have expected. There were no smouldering embers left to produce smoke. Combustion had been instantaneous and complete. But the travellers had no need to go sight-seeing. Everywhere was the same blackened, cooling, ferruginous slag. To see one square yard was to see the whole. The appalling thing about the effect was the cause. Civilization, ever ready with revengeful thrusts, as if protesting against the advance of science, had produced a new accident, a unique disaster. Swift made an automatic motion for his watch. "I must go," he said; "I must get my despatch to the _Planet_ in time for the evening edition. We will have a scoop on the whole world." "I'm your man," said the professor. "We can foot it to the nearest telegraph station in four hours." "Ah, I forgot," said Swift. "That will lose me the four o'clock edition. I'll have to hold the wire all night if I can get it. I'll wire such an account as no other paper will ever get. There isn't a minute to lose!" It was then that Mr. Statis Ticks, realizing, whether from calculation or from sympathy, that Miss Magnet could make no such forced march, and seeing that the girl only held herself together under the tension of the great excitement, gallantly proposed to remain by her and join the rest of the party that evening by the first team that could be chartered. But the young lady unexpectedly refused the proposition. Her whole nature shrank from spending another minute in that blasted spot. It was therefore arranged, much to Mr. Ticks' disappointment (for he had hoped to add to his copious stock of mental notes by further investigation on the ground), that the girl should accompany them, as far as she was able, down the railroad, away from the lost city. After a drink of lake water they started off, Swift supporting Miss Magnet on the one side and Mr. Ticks on the other, the professor stalking ahead. "Even the lake tastes of it," said Swift. "Ugh!" "Pass a current of electricity through a tumbler of water and there will be detected the same flavor, though not so strong," answered Mr. Ticks. The party made two miles slowly. Despite all her Western courage and energy, Insula Magnet tottered by the way. To divert her attention, Mr. Ticks led her on to talk about the electrical wonders of the extinct city. The girl enlarged in a sad way upon its many and its curious uses. The baby carriages, she said, took their helpless occupants on an unaided turn around a large oval track in the park. They went by storage battery. One electrician could take the place of twenty nurses and control the power. Once in a while a baby died suddenly. The doctors invariably pronounced it a case of heart failure. Washing was now entirely done by electrical apparatus, likewise ironing and cooking. The great American problem of the "hired girl," Russell considered herself to have solved. An ingenious arrangement had been recently devised to have the electricity supply the place of valet-de-chambre, but only a few had used it. One or two thought it a hardship to be aroused from bed whether one would or no, to be washed and summarily dressed by an implacable power that performed its set tasks stolidly in spite of anathemas and threats. Can a man abuse his electrical valet? Let him try it if he dare. The phonograph was in universal use. _The Phonograph Daily_ was a rival--one cannot call it sheet, rather wax cylinder--just started, and the din made by those loquacious instruments was worse than the chatter of monkeys in the cocoanut groves of New Guinea. Electric heaters warmed the rooms. Electric paper lighted them with a suffused and generous glow. No one used stairs. Electric elevators did all the arduous house-climbing. No one made calls any more, for it was an easy matter to ring your acquaintance up and see her in her drawing-room while you talked to her. Women made an elaborate toilet for such interviews. It was soon expected that conversation would be entirely dispensed with, for with a sensitive galvanoscope attached to the brain at a certain point, that was to be patented, the minutest current of thought could be registered upon a cylinder. Authors would only need to fix their attention upon the plot; the delicate instrument would record it indelibly for their hearers' gratification. The well-appointed electric coupé was always ready. There was no worry about oats and spavin and glanders. Miss Magnet told of many other new contrivances that electricity had now to perform. The development of this power through the new dynamos made it possible for men in Russell to dispense utterly with work. You went so far as to put five cents in the slot at any one of a hundred street corners, and your shoes were electrically polished to a patent leather shine. There was no more night, for carbon and incandescent lamps had stabbed the night so that any hovel was brighter than the average day. The girl stopped for breath and sat down. She was exhausted. Swift cheered her tenderly. But Mr. Ticks dryly remarked: "_Better a city without electricity than electricity without a city!_" The girl smiled at this heresy, and nodded her head emphatically in a feeble way. She could hardly move. It was at this stage that Mr. Ticks seemed overcome with uneasiness. He got up and sat down again. He kicked the earth. He examined the charred sleepers. He dug for the lost rails. Then he awoke from his occupation with a sudden start as if rudely shaken from a dream. Swift was used to his colleague's idiosyncrasies. Besides he did not now notice them. He was otherwise occupied. But the professor could stand these performances no longer, and with rude emphasis he burst forth: "Dang it, man, if you've got anything on your darned mind, jerk it out, if not--" Professor Ariel's manners had become decadent in proportion to the time that had elapsed since he and the _High Tariff_ had parted company. "I--I--" interrupted Mr. Ticks, with a start. "The fact is, I cannot as yet account for that deadly atmosphere that enveloped this section. What was in it to kill? Its effect on me was unlike any other experience that I can recall. It is my inconsolable regret that it is not classified in my mind." "Did you know," asked Miss Magnet, suddenly, "that a new land improvement company was started this spring for raising four crops a year? All the farms for twenty miles around were bought up. They spent over a million dollars in laying wires in the ground throughout the whole country, on the theory that these voltaic currents applied to grain and fruit and vegetables would excite such crops to quicker verdure and maturity. The company said that it was an experiment on a grand scale; but they were much laughed at. I said it was a dangerous scheme, and nearly lost my position in consequence. I have heard, though, that it was a great success." During this recital Mr. Ticks' eyes glistened with excitement. "Ah!" he said, "I am under a thousand obligations to you, young lady. Of course I could not conceive of such a thing, not knowing the facts. It is all plain now. The first discharge, enormous and deadly as it was, was not enough. This network of wires attracted the surplus electricity. The soil must be of such a quality as to convert this territory into an enormous secondary battery. The subsoil must have acted as a monstrous insulator. I shall subject it to a minute analysis. Are we on the verge of a new electrical discovery? Was this deadly phenomenon a hitherto unknown property of the electrical fluid? For to walk within the dead line was like walking into a saturated Leyden jar. Its effect must have also been to devitalize the oxygen and nitrogen of the atmosphere. The victim was electrified and suffocated to death at the same instant. At last I understand the complexity of my astonishing symptoms. The vibratory storm that we so narrowly escaped was not due to barometric depression, but came as a responsive consequence of this surcharged area. When that wire ladder was finally cut off and fell; when it reached a certain position; when one end touched the negative, the other the positive pole, then the current became completed and this gigantic battery was discharged. Had we not been rising at the rate of a hundred feet a second we should have been fused after the fashion of the inhabitants of this ghastly territory. The discharge once having taken place, this country is again free to man and beast." "Gosh!" was all that the subdued professor could say. And now the four travellers lifted up their eyes, and saw before them on the horizon black moving, indistinct masses, as if brobdignagian locusts were swarming up the track. Here were the hosts of careworn men, plunging impatiently toward the lost city for the news that the unaccountable and malignant power had hitherto denied them. The four needed courage to meet this unrestrained and desperate mob. Who were these in the van? What pallid faces, what haggard eyes, what piteous gestures! Alas, they were the mourners of the dead! Love had wrestled its way ahead of plunder, and grief had outrun greed. In the front ranks were women wailing and panting desperately to keep pace with unmanned men. This woeful sight aroused Mr. Ticks. He raised his hands towards the lost city after the manner of an inspired prophet, and there and then uttered the following impassioned warning to humanity, which Swift took down in shorthand in the borrowed notebook: "Woe unto you that multiply currents you cannot control! Woe unto you that net your country with the trap of sudden death! Woe unto you that toss innocent men on broken wires; that surprise your victims in the counting-house, the home, the street, with destructive bolts! Woe unto you that undermine and overcast the land with a mysterious foe! Behold! your dead shall rise in serried phalanx against you, and their mourners shall rend you to pieces!" The only burst of eloquence known to the biography of this prosaic man subsided into apathetic silence. His hands dropped heavily at his sides. He turned away from Russell and beheld its blackened site no more. The throng was now upon them. Multitudes of wild faces asked questions of the four. Who would answer these? Who could tell the terrible truth? The professor paled and walked behind Swift. Mr. Ticks shrank at the awful responsibility, and took refuge behind the professor. Swift halted and trembled. "Go," he said to the girl. "Go! Only a woman can." And she went. She stepped out alone--a few paces, and stood quite still. Instinctively the masses stopped before her. Eyes, sleepless with weeping and waiting, riveted themselves upon eyes that were still haunted with a portentous experience. The girl stretched out one hand in mute appeal, and then burst into tears and sobbed: "Don't! Don't look like that! Oh, you poor people! I am the only one!" Awestruck and silently, men and women enveloped her and ministered unto her. It was the advance guard of the Red Cross Society, led by Clara Barton, that sheltered this derelict and messenger of woe. Set upon by a thousand men, Mr. Ticks and the professor told what they knew. Some cursed and doubted and pressed on. Some bowed their heads and turned back. But Swift, who had recognized Dubbs driving two powerful horses and unreeling two telegraph wires, one for the special use of the Associated Press and the other for the _Planet_, accosted him, and sent the most famous message known to the American newspaper world since the close of the civil war. It was a long message, and we can only give the more important headlines: Russell is no more! Thirty thousand people killed by one unparalleled electric discharge. The gigantic spark fuses the whole city into one indistinguishable molten slag. Miraculous escape of one lady. The sole survivor. Thrilling rescue by the _Planet_ reporters in a special balloon. The reporters complete the circuit and touch off an over-charged storage battery with a circumference of one hundred and fifty miles. The territory that was impassable now open. Fifty thousand people race toward the lost city. Russell perished of her own electricity. Civilization's new and formidable danger. * * * * * Three months later, on a secular evening, the upholstered pews of an uptown church were filled with a fashionable audience. As the church bells tolled eight the organ pealed forth the wedding march. It was noticed with much comment that the vast audience-room was lighted with gas, the new electric lights being dispensed with. The bride, Miss Insula Magnet, had especially desired this. When the solemn ceremony was ended, and when, amid the craning of necks, the bride and groom were walking down the white-ribboned aisle, a diversion happened that arrested the newly wedded couple. But this was not construed into an ill-omen. A diminutive messenger boy, with a super-experienced countenance, had met them half way to the vestibule, and, with a saucy smile, held up an envelope to Mr. Swift's face. "It's half an hour late. Wires burned out. Guess you'll read it now!" Mr. Statis Ticks, who, although well and worthily married, officiated in some unprecedented capacity as best man, gave Professor Ariel, one of the ushers, an intelligent glance. The latter, being the happy possessor of a new balloon (which he ingenuously called _Reciprocity_), supplied to him by the always generous _Planet_, and fully elated by his present position, answered with a broad wink. Mr. Swift, unconscious of the thousands that were standing in their seats to look at him, and of the general buzz of interest, tore open the colored envelope with reportorial haste, and read as follows. It was cabled from his chief, the proprietor of the _Planet_, now unavoidably detained in England: "_Congratulations. Advance of one thousand a year. Report after two months' bliss. God bless you!_" A TERRIBLE EVENING. Harland Slack sat in the café of the Parker House carelessly sipping whiskey and Apollinaris. He fondly cherished the thought that this combination was an excellent anti-intoxicant, a brain-quieter; on the same principle that B & S is supposed to clarify an Englishman's head. Harland Slack was an attractively repulsive man. He was tall, and vigorously put together. Evening dress was becoming to him. He never appeared after six o'clock without it: for it set off his long blond mustache, his fine artificially curled, blond hair, and his pale regular features to their best advantage. Seen from the front there were times when he was considered positively handsome, after the same fashion that an aristocratic French doll is admired. When he turned his profile, then there appeared certain hard lines of the check and weak lines of the forehead and chin that grated on austere physiognomists. The giddy set of fashionable women, at whose five o'clock teas he still remained the _éprouvette positive_, thought him adorable: the matrons with marriageable girls thought him debatable: if he chanced upon a spiritual woman, she considered him dangerous. The club men privately thought him unreliable. It was not so in college before his father died. Then the main features of his life were promising. If he indulged in occasional gayety he did not lose all of his self-respect. His classmates noted in him a certain quality of strength or reserve that was supposed to emanate from himself rather than from the hard fact that his paternal allowance was only seven hundred a year, and that he was threatened with disinheritance if he ran into debt. But now he had inherited. He had changed. His hands trembled. His eyes twitched. The corners of his mouth danced the dance of St. Vitus. He had terrible nightmares, and awoke with parched mouth and with disagreeable eyes, and with a rebellious head whose disorders required what he called "an eye-opener" to cause them to abate. His best friends took him apart and said: "Now really, old fellow, this won't do. Its--playing the devil with you. Come now, knock off for a bit. I'll bet you a hundred dollars you can't confine yourself to claret for a month." And Harland Slack would answer: "Done! Have a cocktail?" He usually paid the bet before three hours were up. The limitation, he said, was too strict. "I'll give him two years," said his nearest intimate; "and then--" He whistled The Dead March in Saul, and the fellows wagged their heads ominously over the sad case--and their ale. In short, Harland was not only addicted to drink, but he was given over to it hand and soul. Yet he was very seldom drunk. He paused at that excessively polite stage which was the surveyor's line of inebriety. An eminent bar-keeper pointed him out one day and said: "It isn't the boys that get drunk and then get over it, that go to the devil so fast: it's the fellows that take a little all day long and keep at it who can't be reformed." So it naturally came about that while Harland Slack was in this benevolent mood, which usually lasted from ten in the morning till one in the morning, and which might aptly be described as betwixt Hell and Earth, he became the common prey of common humanity. His was not to reason why; His was but to lend a fi'. Theirs was but to take and sigh: "I'll pay you sometime by and by." He seemed to take it as a compliment that his purse was everybody's bank, with a daily run on it. It was lucky for him that the enormous principal left by his economical father could not be touched. But at last, as it once in a while happens to the repleted, the unqualified ability to borrow, or rather, in this instance, to steal, led to a pall. Unlock every safe, unbar every vault, open up every store to pillage, and the robber, glutted with desire, will disappear. On the same principle, at the time of our historiette, Harland's friends, even his bar-room acquaintances, were overtaken by a sentiment of self-reproach or honor, and there was a general movement to swear off borrowing from this man who never refused a loan. On the evening of which we speak Harland sat languidly waiting for a friend who had an appointment to accompany him to the club. It was early, scarcely eight, and he aimlessly fingered a loose roll of bills in his waistcoat pocket, smiled inanely at the man behind the desk, and then, despairing of entertainment, began to spin a trade-dollar on the polished table. The café was nearly empty, and he was to all purposes alone. This was a state which he dreaded above all others. Like Napoleon, in the company of even one he felt an inspiring confidence and security. When he was with people, he forgot that whiskey was an insisting necessity: he only thought he drank because he was a good fellow and "one of the boys." Harland had never been visited by the uttermost penalty of his condition. It cannot be said that he never feared that state whose ugly name we omit when we can, or reduce to its significant initials; as if that reduced the horror of the fact. But he feared it: he feared it greatly. The possibility of delirium tremens unmanned him. Then he sweat drops of apprehension, and with vague, shuffling remorse promised himself to improve. He possessed all the weakness of Sydney Carton with none of that martyr's pathetic nobility or ability. Harland Slack sat alone and began to scowl at the bottle of Apollinaris. His weak face looked haggard. Perhaps he felt that he had cast the key of his tomb through the grated door after he had immured himself within. He glared at the whiskey, and his thoughts cursed it; then he smiled and took another swallow. Even as he drank his mind wandered back to his college days when he was unimplicated in high treason against himself. He could not help remembering, sometimes: he seldom thought of the future. The door opened. He tossed the remainder of his glass off, and looked around, expecting his companion. Then he turned back, disappointed. Then he looked again. A stalwart man entered with an air of vitality which is often mistaken for authority. The vigorous development of his body gave a startling impression of height and power. He was dressed with elegant negligence. His dark beard was cut to a point, and he looked like a Parisian artist. Black eyes from under the brim of a silk hat compelled attention by reason of an imperious steadiness that indicated the possession of unusual self-control. The waiters jumped to serve this man. Harland was annoyed at this obsequiousness which he had never received. He tried to look haughtily indifferent, but he could not take his eyes from this person. The stranger returned his glance. He advanced upon the fashionable inebriate, and paused at his table. Harland Slack arose as if he were accepting a challenge, and trembled. The two looked at each other. "I declare, old fellow. Is it you? Why, I haven't seen you since Class Day. You know me, Slack, don't you?" The speaker smiled and took off his hat. This action heightened the impression of power which he had first made. His forehead was literally the dome of his body. It was as if the Creator had determined on granting this man an unusual supply of brains, and had then packed them in until the pressure had distended the frontal lobes. His brow was an overhanging arch, massive, high, compelling. This was so marked that the head gave almost a painful impression of superabundant intellectuality. Harland immediately recognized his classmate from that distinguishing feature. It was the only recognizable one left. "Randolph?" "The same. Do you live in Boston now?" "Oh yes, of course. Sit down--and you?" "I? I am a practising physician, now: that's all. Am just back from Paris a while ago, and have taken an office. I was telephoned suddenly to a patient out of town and ran in here for a chop before I went home." The keen eyes of Dr. Alaric Randolph examined his vis-à-vis as he gave his brief explanation. He ordered his chops, declined an offer to drink, and noticed with professional intelligence Harland's demand for some more whiskey and the tremulous way with which it was taken. No words were necessary to tell this student of human miseries the nature of Harland Slack's disease. Randolph was as much changed for the better as his classmate was for the worse. It was a wonder that they recognized each other at all. Harland felt the difference, but could not analyze it; while Randolph studied it more than he felt it. The college student who did not room in "Beck," and who was not a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, who had no time for society and theatricals, who was never seen at Carl's, who was suspected of being a little diffident, had suddenly become the patron; and the classmate whose father's wealth had given him an unassailable social rank, yielded with feeble will to his own unspoken instinct of inferiority. Harland's face had become weazened since he had left college. His manly frame had shrunken. On the other hand, Alaric's features had expanded. His skull had filled out: even his frontal arch was rounded. "What have you been doing in Paris, Randolph?" asked Harland with a good-natured laugh and a faint attempt at condescension. Dr. Randolph looked across the table; his eyes twinkled over his classmate's tone, but he courteously answered: "I've been experimenting there for five years. I went the usual round of hospitals and studied with Pasteur, and have raised scores of colonies of bacilli. Lately I have busied myself with investigations of too complex a nature to discuss. And you----" "Oh,--I'm a--a member of the clubs, you know. I'm now engaged in breeding beagles. That takes lots of time you know. My father died some years ago, and I--eh--take care of the estate." "So?" exclaimed Randolph with a German lengthening of the vowel sound. Then taking the opportunity while Harland was emptying his glass, he regarded him thoughtfully. "Look here, Slack," said the young doctor after a moment's hesitation. "What do you say to spending the evening with me? I am lonely and want to talk over old days. You're done up and not fit to go to the club to-night." Now Harland, though considerably astonished by the invitation, was also flattered. "But my appointment! I never missed an appointment in my life, you know," wavered Harland unsteadily, while shifting his eyes to the door. "Never mind that now. I'll leave word at the desk. Psst--garçon!" The Doctor spoke masterfully; the gentleman obeyed him as readily as the servant. A pencil note, with strict injunctions for delivery solved the inebriate's sodden difficulty. Slack insisted upon adding that he would still meet his friend between ten and eleven o'clock. Randolph smiled indulgently, and they passed out into the cool air arm in arm. Randolph hailed a coupé and got his friend into it with pardonable alacrity. Harland was unusually communicative that evening with the man from whom he would have hardly deigned to accept a cigarette in his college days. He could not understand the reason for what he considered this sudden social degradation. He accepted it in a dazed way, for he had been drinking steadily all day. The cab stopped before one of the few stone houses less common in Boston than in New York, whose construction is at once singularly deceptive and honest. It had a frontage of seventeen feet. "A good sized dog-kennel!" observed Harland Slack, glancing at it superciliously as he got out. "These are my offices," answered Dr. Randolph urbanely, paying no attention to the half-maudlin discourtesy. Supposing that one of these houses with a frontage of seventeen feet, has a depth of two hundred feet, and is five stories high? The dog-kennel assumes an area of nearly half an acre. There may be large rooms, almost a spacious salon in one of these insignificant homes. Seemingly unlimited space behind ridiculously narrow stone walls, is one of the many mysteries of city life. Harland Slack sank upon the sofa, and languidly watched the Doctor turn up the gas. "You haven't a nip of brandy, have you? I feel so confoundedly thirsty." Dr. Randolph looked at the speaker, whose wavering eye vainly strove to elude his. The Doctor seemed to be balancing in his mind whether to grant the guest his wish or not. "Look here, old boy," said Harland, almost with a whine, "it isn't fair, doncherno, to bring a fellow in here and stare at him that way. My beagles wouldn't treat me so. I'm burning up with thirst. Just a little. That's hospitable, you know." He finished with a sigh and a fuddled look of entreaty. He had gone a half an hour without alcohol. "I beg your pardon, Slack," said Randolph slowly, "of course you shall have it. But I would rather give you some cordial of mine first. It will take your thirst away sooner than your infernal liquor." Slack nodded wearily, while the Doctor unlocked a black cabinet and took from thence a brittle flask and a liqueur glass. He held the flask up to the light before Slack's face. The liquid flamed yellow in the gaslight. It seemed to have concentrated in its ebullient elements the exhilaration of life. Now, the yellow cordial, even as the inebriate looked upon it, glowed and became incandescent. It seemed to be endowed with its own principle of energy. Harland Slack started up, and looked at this phenomenon more closely with intelligent astonishment. "This," said Dr. Alaric Randolph observantly, "is the issue of many laborious years abroad. This is the theriaca against all vital poisons. Watch it; for even as you look upon it, you absorb its virtue." There was no melodrama in the Doctor's action or accent. He spoke quite naturally. Harland was as much impressed by his friend's sincerity as by the singular appearance of this _elixir vitæ_. He did not need to be urged to look at the glass again. It was a fountain of boiling light. At this moment, a knock was heard at that door of the reception room which evidently led into the Doctor's inner office. Dr. Randolph started, quickly locked the door leading into the hall, and put the priceless flask gently upon a high bookcase. It was on a level with his face. The liquid shot bubbles of animation to the surface; and before Slack's eyes, as if gathering fire from the light or the heat, it slowly began to turn red. The languid debauchee now jumped nimbly to his feet and stood entranced before this beautiful, perplexing transformation. "Keep your eyes on it for a moment, my friend," whispered Dr. Randolph: "watch it carefully for me. I wish to note its changes. It differs under variable conditions. Tell me about it. Do not touch it. When I come back you shall taste, and then--" Harland lost the last words as the physician hurried out. Harland Slack, feeling a dull sense of scientific responsibility, fixed his eyes upon the occult fluid, watching its strange manifestations eagerly. His brain throbbed with thoughts. If the mere sight of this curious elixir could clear the clots of alcohol from his blood and his will, what might come of a draught? He walked for the first few moments about the room briskly. He stood erect: but he did not take his gaze from the flask, nor did he touch it. It now shot forth colors of the ruby. Along the rim played the fires of the spinel. These gave way to the glow of the garnet; which in turn vanished before gleams whose indescribable radiance is only likened to the blood of the pigeon. Harland was eager not to lose the lightest stage of this marvellous metamorphosis. With every new hue fresh streams of blood seemed to come into his heart. He felt so strangely that he soon began to doubt whether he were sober or not. He rubbed his eyes, and pinched his ears. Yes, he was awake and sane. This was no delirium of a caked brain. His mind was as clear as the waters of the Bermuda reefs. If he had been an opium eater, he might have thought these the legitimate effects of the dusky drug. As soon as he had thoroughly assured himself of the validity of his reason he began to hear music. It came from the inner room whither the Doctor had gone. Without taking his eyes off of the blazing flask, Harland backed up to the door and listened. The strains sounded louder as he approached. There seemed to be a castanet, and a harp, and singing. In surprise he touched the door. It opened lightly. His curiosity proved stronger then the power of the elixir to restrain him, and he turned. A low cry of amazement leaped from his lips. He stopped irresolute and looked back. The glittering alembic was extinguished. The liquid shone but dully in the feeble jets of gas. What could there have been to fascinate, he mused, in that carafe of--water? He forgot the Doctor. He abandoned the theriaca. He strode into the vast hall that opened up before him. As he advanced, his head whirled with a new intoxication. He wondered how so narrow a house could contain such a superb apartment. Then he perceived, or he fancied that two or more buildings had been thrown into one. It was the only explanation of the spacious area which his imagination afforded, and it satisfied him. Before him extended a banquet-hall decorated with Oriental magnificence, and lighted with many lamps. In its centre was a sumptuous table. Black servants flitted noiselessly about. Upon a yellow rug at one side crouched a dark dancing girl, clad in gauze, waving a gauze scarf. She reminded him of something he had read about the celebrated dancers of the Maharajah of Mysore. This beautiful girl, with a bewitching effort at unconsciousness, arose and whirled down the long hall towards the young man, waving her bare arms to the accompaniment of stringed instruments and the measured drone of the players. Suddenly the dancer, with a blinding pirouette, wound her veils modestly about her, saluted Harland with a profound, mocking courtesy, and then pointing to the table wafted herself away. Harland was confounded. What strange orgy was this? What a scene from India dropped upon bleak, staid New England! When he had accustomed his eyes to the blaze of light he saw that another woman was in the room. This one was reclining at the table. He recognized her immediately. This fact pleased him; for it assured him that he was still himself. It also troubled him, for he had solemnly vowed never to allow his eyes to rest upon her again. She had haunted him with her beauty and her insolence since he had forsworn her. There flashed his sapphire bracelet on her slender arm, and the Alexandrite for which he had sent to Russia, took to itself at her white throat alternate virulent moods of red and green. She was entrancing, and he loved her. She was his evil genius, and he feared her. She had flattered and despised him, and he hated her. How laughingly she had lured him with her jewelled hand and iridescent eyes down the pleasant path that brought up at his fatal vice! He thought of her polite orgies, her theatre suppers, her one o'clock germans, and her select parties at suburban hotels. To his besotted brain she was a scarlet witch and he fled from her, and returned, and fled again. But what manner of man was this Doctor? Why would they trap him?--weak, sodden thing that he was, and knew that he was. Now, as he looked upon her there was a snap in his heart, and her power upon him seemed to give away and break like a valve in the aorta. How was this possible? Could a man _not_ care for her? With sudden surprising disdain he approached the beautiful creature before whom he had so often trembled. She did not look up at him, but threw herself back further on the couch and motioned to a servant for some wine. Something about her super-human grace revolted him. The music redoubled. The Indian dancer fanned him as she sped past. He did not notice her. He was above intoxication of the senses. What was this woman? What her wine? In a kind of sacred, cold revolt, he stood aloof. He was in an ecstasy of moral freedom. He advanced a step or two, looked down at her from his tall height and ejaculated brutally: "_You_ here?" She did not look up at this insult. Her cheek, neck, and ears flushed and then became deadly pale. A sneer now spread itself over her chin and mouth. "And why not, you poor fool?" The opprobrious epithet seemed feebly to express the infinite contempt in which she--even she--had held him. She had called him this with equal scorn more than once before, in her drawing-room, and he had never felt the shadow of resentment. He had been accustomed to laugh feebly and to turn the unpleasant personality away as well as he could. But now, he became aware of the contumely for the first time. He clenched his fists; he breathed heavily. He did not trust himself to speak. He ground his teeth. His thoughts became singularly clear. He took another step nearer. She turned her haughty head and smiled mockingly at him, clicking the glass with her finely-manicured finger. "I did not know, sir, that _you_ were a friend of the great Doctor," she chirped in her falsetto voice, and her lip curled. "Its a lie! I am not! He is a scoundrel!" Harland spoke savagely. He could not understand this moral convulsion that within the last few minutes, had dominated his nature. He could only express it. What was this house? For the first time the query arose: What had he to do with a questionable evening? "You are drunk, as usual," answered the woman with a pert upward motion of disgust. At this, which he knew to be a libel for once, Harland's hand tore at his heart: a terrible rush of blood ran to his brain. The music hushed. The dark dancing-girl sank with exhaustion to her rug. The room was stifling. The air was heavy with the perfume of roses, and attar, and wine. Yet the young man's head was poised, his eyes were sane, his senses untouched. With a supreme effort he held his anger in check. The beauty, not realizing the extent to which she had tortured him, laughed aloud and contemptuously cried: "Harland Slack, you are a coward. You dare not call your soul your own; for you are always drunk. Bah!" She made as if to draw herself from beyond his touch. He did not stir, but a frightful whiteness extended over his hands and face. "Go on," he said metallically. With a refinement of insolence difficult to describe, ignoring his person, she looked _through_ him, and with a gesture ordered the music to begin again. Harland stood motionless for a moment. Immovable, he fixed his gray eyes upon a little black square of court-plaster under the lobe of her left ear. The music crashed through the banquet-hall. The dancing-girl tried to distract the man of stone. He looked at that little black patch. Its wearer shrugged her shoulders significantly; then, as if wearied of the thought of him, she moved her white arm to the table and took up a glass flaming with champagne; waving it towards him she said malevolently: "There! That's what you are waiting for. Drink and go!--Sot!" The viciousness of the act and word served as the key to the situation. Like rusting steel, Harland became unlocked. Oddly enough, at this crisis it occurred to him to question whether this were his old friend at all. Then who? Then what? Was the woman an embodiment of all the past evil of his own soul? By some horrible law of metempsychosis had his old spirit passed into this too fashionable married flirt at his side? That outstretched, mocking hand--was it what the abstainers called the "demon of drink?" How often he had laughed at the phrase, lighting his cigarette with their tracts! At the fearful import of these thoughts, he felt himself endowed by a bidding higher than fate. Justice arose and compelled him. His eyes brightened before he did the deed. With a sweep, he shattered the hand that held the slender glass, and snatching up a silver knife from the table he poised it for an instant: then buried it to the hilt. It struck just below her left ear. It obliterated the little black patch. With a sound more like a hiss than a cry the woman drooped to her divan. The music stopped with a frightened crash. The dancing-girl fled with a shriek; but Harland stood immovable, exultant, holding his hands ready to strangle if the wound did not kill. His face, but now so weak, had acquired an inexorable strength. Strange! At this moment he felt himself not a murderer, but a man. He watched his victim dying, without a word; and when her curse was spent, he turned and walked triumphantly back through the wasted magnificence to the room from whence he had come. He did not hurry. At first, he did not apprehend arrest. He felt as if he had accomplished a great deed. Without looking back he closed the door and sought for his hat. He put it on and made for the outer entrance. He tried it and found it locked. Now at last he began to comprehend his situation. Terror fell upon him. Cold drops bathed him. The enormity of his act flashed upon his conscience. _Kill!_ Kill a _woman_? He struggled at the window and the door. Both were impervious. He dared not go back. How could he look at her? Escape was cut off. His head became clotted with the old sensations. Fear, such as makes a man's heart stand still, assailed him. He looked in vain for the flask. It was gone. With a loud cry, he flung himself upon the sofa and fainted dead away. How long he lay there of course he did not know. Soon, vague cerebrations began to torture his mind. It burned as if it were being recalled to life from a frozen state. Then, soaring upward from deeps beyond the deeps, supported through irremediable turmoil by an overwhelming power, he felt himself gently laid upon a couch. There was a moment when the brain, recovering its equilibrium, swam and spun. Then suddenly he found consciousness and emerged through the mist of pain. He tried to use his limbs, but could not rise. With an effort he strove to loosen his tongue, but could not speak. With desperate will he endeavored to open his eyes. Their lids were riveted together. This was no hallucination. He was never more alert nor more helpless. He knew that some one was bending over him. He felt two eyes examining his soul. He had the consciousness that there was nothing hid from this intense gaze. Then a commanding voice spoke to him, and a hand of unutterable persuasion touched his forehead. "Harland Slack!" said the ringing voice. Beginning a little above a whisper it seemed to increase to oratorical tones: then it reverberated throughout his nature, and burst upon him like the rattle of thunder. "Harland Slack, you have had a terrible lesson. Harland Slack, you will not drink again!" Then after a pause in a different voice, "Now, Slack get up! You're all right now. Come!" With a mighty wrench Harland, at his bidding, cast off the numbness from his body, the incubus from his will, and staggering to his feet opened his eyes. Before him stood Dr. Alaric Randolph holding his hand and looking searchingly into his face. This fact recalled to him his awful deed. He understood perfectly that he had committed a murder. He knew not how, or why, or where. With a tremulous look about him he burst into tears and clung for protection to his enigmatical host. As tenderly as a hospital nurse Dr. Randolph led the criminal to a deep chair and placed him in it. "There, there, old fellow. It's all right. You will come out of it all straight. I'll see you through. Trust me. There, take my hand. That will help you, see?" The broken man, shuddering from weakness, clasped the sympathetic hand and wrung it. Harland sat still a long while with closed eyes. The doctor watched him professionally, even tenderly, at times anxiously. "Now," he said, "I'll go and bring you a _demitasse_. It will set you on your feet." "No, no!" cried Harland in terror, "don't leave me. I can't be left alone." "But only to the next room." The patient's hands relaxed, and he assented wearily. When the coffee came, he drank a little obediently. "Now, my boy," said the Doctor, with what under the circumstances seemed to Harland a ghastly cheerfulness, "this will get you up entirely. When you finish it, I am going to send you to the Club!" At the mention of the Club Harland began to tremble. "My God, Randolph! I can't go there. I'll be arrested." He glanced apprehensively at the outer door as if expecting a policeman. "Don't you know," he added in a whisper, "what I've done in your infernal place?" "Nonsense!" replied Randolph lightly, "not a soul shall know you've been here. She deserved it. I'll take all the blame. Now brace up and be a man. Don't be nervous. You're feverish. You need a tonic before you start. What'll you drink?" Harland looked at his host in a state divided between dementia and moral nausea. What manner of man was this American Doctor with his accursed Parisian education? "I am horribly thirsty," he admitted: "I will take a glass of water, thank you." He said this without surprise at himself, naturally and quite sincerely. He longed for it. It was the first request of the kind he had made for years. Randolph handed the water to him and watched him narrowly. Harland held up the glass to the light with a connoisseur's eye, smiled with satisfaction, and took the clear draught down at one swallow. "Ah!" he said: "that is good. I feel better now. Now swear that you will save me. Don't give me up. Hide me somehow. It happened in your house, you know." "Give yourself no concern," said the Doctor easily. "Why, man," blazed Harland Slack, "don't you know that I've murdered somebody? It was a woman. I've murdered that woman you keep here. I am a murderer." "Your Club is only two blocks off," answered the physician with astonishing indifference; "It will do you good to walk there. Trust me. Don't worry over it. Let me feel your hand. It's moist and soft. No fever; that's good. When you step foot into the Club you will never think of the affair again." The Doctor quietly gave the criminal his hat and coat, put a cane into his hand, and conducted him to the door. "Go!" he said, "go directly to your Club as usual. As a physician I order it. It is the best thing you can do." Mutely the trembling man obeyed, and thus the two actors in this awful evening parted; so, perhaps, criminal and accomplice are wont to part in the extremity of great emergencies, as if nothing had happened out of the moral order of things. Harland Slack walked into his fashionable Club slowly. As he did so, whether by reason of the familiar atmosphere, or the contrast to the scene from which he had escaped, he did not stop to consider, his crime dropped from his memory like the burden from Christian's back. He handed his outer garments to the liveried boy, and, as was his wont, turned towards the poker and billiard rooms. There were the usual number of useless gambling and playing men uselessly drinking. Harland Slack was greeted in the usual boisterous manner. "Hilloa! What'll you take? Here, boy, bring the same old stuff to Mr. Slack." The gossip proceeded, the chips rattled, the balls clicked, the smoke mounted, the liquors gurgled, and the regular Club life proceeded. The friend of his appointment now joined him. "By ----! You look as white as that foam there. You need a nerve restorer. You haven't been idiot enough to buck the tiger again, have you? What will you take?" "No," said Harland slowly. "I have not gambled." He shook his head with a strange expression. He did not understand. The Club seemed different to him. It was not as entrancing or as necessary as usual. The odor of stale liquor and of staler tobacco nauseated him. Still, it did not occur to him that this was an unusual state of mind for him to be in. The attendant placed the chased tray upon the table. His friend took the decanter from the boy and poured out the brown liquid into the delicate glasses. He then offered one to Harland and held up his own in token of courtesy. "Well, here's to luck," he said, and nodded to Harland. Harland nodded in return. His nerves twitched him. What was this new sensation of repugnance? He lifted his glass higher to his mouth. He tried to put it to his lips. It would not go. He tried again. His arm refused him service. But the fumes of this familiar liquor mounted to his nostrils, which dilated with horror. What was this terrible thing which he was asked to drink? Never had he felt such physical repulsion. A shudder of disgust shook him. With a curse he dashed the glass to the floor, and glared suspiciously upon his companion. "How dare you ask me to drink this stuff?" His voice rang with passion. "I loathe it! I cannot stand it. Let me go. This is an infernal den, and I will get out!" The men around jumped up and held him. They thought that D. T. had come at last. "Somebody send for the nearest expert," said his nearest friend. This inebriate's first resistance to his dipsomania was interpreted darkly, with sundry shrugs and winks and gestures. "It is too devilish bad," said his companion, "but I knew it would happen some day." They called a cab and put him in and sent him home. But he gave no further evidence of insanity. His case became a seven days' gossip and warning behind the bulging windows of the great Club. Harland Slack went straightway to Colorado, and came back a man. He went into law, and succeeded. It is well known that he does not drink. The committee elected a new heir to damnation in Harland's place at the Club. * * * * * At the end of an address delivered a year afterward before a close medical meeting Dr. Alaric Randolph said: "A bit of bright, cut glass, and a healthy will, and the proportional training did this thing. I have not given the man's name, not only on account of his high social standing and marked mental ability, but also because he himself is still ignorant of the facts. I have no fear of a relapse. He has forgotten that he ever believed himself to have murdered a woman who never existed. But he has not forgotten that he no longer drinks. This case is now a tested cure. My first successful experiment in this great, unknown field, rests upon its facts. Alcoholism is probably as serious an illustration as we could present. The hypnotic therapeutics have come to stay." SCUD. It was the morning after my arrival. I had just come, jaded from examination papers, agued with the incessant ring of orations, abhorrent of the rustle of white tarlatans, distrustful of the future attitude of trustees, and utterly wilted from the effect of a country academy exhibition held in the heat of June in the torridest of Western towns. I had never seen the ocean, and before my window the glorious old Atlantic heaved solemnly. Its intermittent swash upon the rocks sent peace into my soul. I found myself near enough even to throw something into the water. The longing to communicate with this new friend, dreamed of for so many inland years, overpowered me. A box of buttons was all I had, and I leaned far out into the air, pungent with a mixture of fish and kelp, and cast into the deep these feminine necessities, one by one. Now a tiny disk of mother-of-pearl would glance on the float and bounce off into a gray ripple; and then a bit of jet would clatter on the red granite rocks, and be swallowed by a lapping wavelet that seemed to rise on purpose for this strange offering. Too soon the box was emptied of its contents; then there came a mad desire to throw cologne, shoes, satchel, anything, everything, myself, from the second-story window into this mysterious, beckoning, repelling Atlantic tide beneath me. Leaning on the sill, with my whole soul absorbed in this new Nirvana, I was suddenly and yet not unpleasantly aroused by a strident yell: "Hellow, Scud! Wha'che got this mornin'?" "Oh, no-thin', only twenty-six little 'uns, an' a couple bucket o' bait." The answer came back in a deep, orotund, sing-song voice. It was the natural intoning of the man of the sea. Two boats shot from under a rocky headland a few hundred yards before me to the left. One of the boats made fast to some black corks that formed a huge rectangle in the water, and two men began pulling in a net. The one in the other boat, who answered to the name of Scud, stopped rowing for a moment, exchanged a word or two, and laughed aloud, then cast a critical look at the sun's altitude, and pulled lazily away. When he was at some distance, he rested on his oars, and hilloaed with that penetrating sea cry: "I hope you'll get two barr'l. I guess thar's 'nough to go all round." That undulatory cadence is entirely lacking in landsmen's tones. Still this was an extraordinarily joyous voice, as if the life of a fisherman were a dream without a care or a struggle. But Scud and his queer, green boat disappeared behind the jagged outline of the rocks, and I turned at the sound of the first bell to dress for breakfast. "Well, how do you like your room? I hope that the fishermen didn't wake you up too early." My cousin offered me some smoking flakes of fish, new to my limited experience. This, he said, was inland hake, and was caught that morning in Scud's trap. Now, although I was hitherto ignorant of this delicious fish with its paradoxical cognomen, I felt that Scud and I were already friends; and gravely informed my host that Scud had caught twenty-six little ones that morning. This piece of information was immediately greeted with impertinent hilarity. "So Scud woke you up?" said my cousin. "He's always doing that. There was one nervous boarder here. She threatened to have him arrested for breaking the peace. But you might as well arrest a fog-whistle." "Does he always get up as early in the morning?" I asked, apprehensively. "He must be a very energetic person. Do tell me about it. What are 'little 'uns'?" I must confess to a degree of perplexity when the the whole family burst into further roars of laughter at my simple question. "Scud energetic? Why, he is the easiest, the slowest, the sleepiest, the most lovable, good-natured fellow on the whole coast. He makes the surest and perhaps the best living of any of the fishermen around here. If he didn't get up early he wouldn't do even that. As it is, Salt does most of the work. Salt is his oldest boy," explained my cousin. "I am sure Scud needs all he can make," interrupted Mabel (she is my cousin's wife), "with his dozen children and a wife to support, and only one trap to do it on." "For my part," interposed the oldest daughter, with a pert motion of her head, "I am tired to death having to save clothes for that--You needn't look so shocked, mamma. Yes, I am. It's always 'Take care of that petticoat; Betty can use it;' or, 'That dress can be turned and made over nicely for the twins.' I declare I don't get a new dress but the whole Scud family troop over and inspect it, and criticise it, and quarrel over it, and gloat over it the first day I wear it. I caught two of their boys fighting over which of them should have Reginald's summer ulster when he was done with it." "I shall give it to Tommy," observed her mother, in an absent, comfortable tone. After breakfast my cousin rowed over to the station; the eldest two children took their guest, a boy of about sixteen, out fishing; while I eagerly accompanied Mabel across the rocks and fields to Scud's house--a little rented hut, hidden and sheltered from the east winds behind a huge barrack of a boarding-house. How clear the day! How warm the sun! How hospitable this forbidding, granite-clad North Shore! As I look back upon that memorable morning it seemed as if the bay could never be ruffled by any but the tenderest breezes, or its bright water reflect any but the dazzling glare of the hottest sun. Clouds hovered over us, delicate and fleecy as the feathers of the marabou, and white and curly as the feathers of the ostrich. They radiated from a centre in translucent films, and shot out monstrous ciliated fingers like a fan. Such a sky was never seen in my part of the country, and I attributed this ravishing cloud phenomenon to the peculiar influence of the sea, being too ignorant to notice that these streamers shot out from the west. The stillness was intoxicating after the scurry of the school-room. And now even the water made no ripples on the beach. The sea was motionless, like a distilled elixir in a serrated alembic. We stopped before a low, pitch-roofed house that looked as if it contained three rooms at most. The yard was piled up with wreckage and drift-wood. Who ever heard of a fisherman buying kindling? Within the gate four children were playing with twice as many cats and kittens. They were all fighting like animals between themselves for a plateful of scraps of fried fish. A baby would grab a piece from the plate, and offer the remainder to a grave tabby, which in turn distributed it to her offspring. Then the kittens and "humans" rolled and scratched, and shrieked and scratched again. "Keep yer mouths shet out there, or I'll be after ye with a stick!" This maternal sentiment, spoken in a loud shrill voice, greeted us as we stepped within the gate. "It's I, Betty. I have brought you a little something, and a friend who wants to see the children." "Dear sakes! 'tain't you, is it?" The shrill voice was now modulated in an entirely different tone. "Ain't I glad you've come! Step right in and set down. No? Then I'll be out and see ye ez soon ez I've tended the baby." "Baby!" I gasped, looking at the four fighting infants at my feet, none of whom looked over thirteen months. "Are these hers too?" "These are the twins," answered Mabel, quite seriously. "They call them 'the twin.' These are the two sets, just a year apart. The baby was born a month ago. The baby isn't named. Let me see: these are Bessie and Maurie and Robbie and Susie." "Why, I thought you knew better," protested the mother, in a grieved voice. "Susie is in the house there. That's Bessie." She wiped her hands on her apron, and thrust one of them out through a rent in the mosquito-netted door. "I'm glad to see any of _her_ friends. Yes. Good mor'n'. The children? Laws sakes, they're round the house like pups!" The face was remarkable for a pair of brilliant black eyes, an inheritance of Italian ancestry. She was not yet middle-aged, and her hair had turned prematurely gray. Her hands were bony, nervous hands, indicative of great executive capacity, but the incessant work had left them trembling. "Are all your children here?" I asked, not knowing what else to say. "Here's four of 'em. Come out here, you in there, an' I'll count ye." It was a pitiful sight to see these five plump, rosy youngsters pass in review before the frail, emaciated mother. "But here are only nine," I ventured. "Salt's missing, mother," said the eldest girl; "he's with father to the trap." "So he is, Kittie. They've rowed round the cove with what they ketched. They'll be back d'rectly." "But how do you manage, Mrs.--ah--Scud?" I asked. I am afraid there was a slight choke in my throat as I spoke. The mother cast a quick look at my face, and shoving her children into the house, one by one, said: "Now go, Kittie; finish the dishes. You, Mamie, put the baby kearfully in the box. What did you hit Jim for, Sammy? Let me ketch you a-hitten your little brother agin an' I'll spank you. Now get in the house, all of ye. You see, miss," turning to me, "we manage somehow. If it wa'n't fur _her_, we'd give up. There's that boy Jim, he took to swearing this spring. I declare it was jess awful to hear him go on. I spanked him, and Scud he switched him, but it wa'n't to no use. That boy talked jess scand'lous, till your cousin here, miss, she heerd him one mornin', an' took a white powder an' put a little on his tongue. It made Jim powerful sick. And, says she, 'If I hear you swearin' agin I'll pizen ye; an' you'll die in a minute an' never see God,' and I declare to goodness he was so skeared that I hain't heerd him swear since. There's Scud. Where's Salt, pa? Come here an' speak to the ladies. She's brought ye some ties." "Salt's makin' the boat fast," began Scud, nodding with inimitable ease to his visitors. "I'm afraid ther's goin' to be--" Scud stopped short in open-mouthed pleasure when he saw a couple of brilliant red and blue ties dangling from Betty's hand. He had come up the rocky path, whistling like a boy, with every line and pucker in his face on a broad smile. If Lavater had seen this fisherman's physiognomy he would have pronounced it indicative of incomparable good nature. Indeed, Scud's good nature went so far at times as to be incomparably inadequate to the demands of existence. If he happened to go for weeks without catching so much as a sculpin in his net, and the starvation of his youngsters stared him in the face, he showed none of the common symptoms of discouragement, such as swearing, drinking, beating his wife, or cursing his luck. He only whistled the blither, ran up bills at the butcher's and grocer's with irresistible faith, borrowed his "chaws" of his luckier mates, and laughed as if poverty were an excellent joke that Providence was cracking at him. Why shouldn't he appreciate it, even if it were at his own expense. Scud was born "easy." Who could blame him? He gave up his lobster-pots because it took too much time to dry them and keep them in repair, and it was too cold and dangerous hauling them in stormy weather off the rocks. Scud found it too troublesome to underrun his trap more than twice a-day--once at six o'clock in the morning, then at six o'clock at night. Even when the mackerel or the herring struck, and every man who had a trap hovered over it night and day to keep the catch from mysteriously immaterializing, as well as to gather it in, Scud was satisfied with his diurnal visits. He "wa'n't a-goin' to keep a-runnin' to see the fish swim in. If they were fool 'nough to go in the trap, they could stay there till he underrun an' bailed 'em out." His methods of gaining a livelihood were unique on the coast; yet it was Scud who "stocked" eight hundred and fifty dollars that summer clean, two hundred dollars above any one else in the harbor. It was the saying among some of the jealous fishermen in the cove, who were not blessed with two pairs of twins, that "nobody 'arned so easy a livin' as Scud without doin' no work." But these indistinct murmurs never stimulated Scud nor impaired his good nature. Indeed, Scud was the happiest man that ever lived. What a dancing, laughing eye! What a catalogue of joys therein! What contagious, hopeful humor! What irrepressible buoyancy of spirits! Who could help loving Scud, as one loves a huge, long-coated St. Bernard dog? Scud was the laughing, joyous, piping Pan of the ocean. He smoked not, neither did he drink. He had no vices that debased him. Chewing is not a vice for a fisherman. But he did have a curious taste for candy. No present pleased him so much as a half a pound of caramels or of sugar-coated nuts. It was the sweet animal nature instinctively laying hold of sweets. Scud's "easiness" was unmitigated--at times it was exasperating; but this made him all the fatter, the jollier, the more companionable; and as it succeeded so well, why not? Summer boarders were appreciative of Scud. He lived upon them. Twins?--they did it. It was a dime show, and the money was paid. Two sets of authentic twins! It was enough to drain a woman's heart of sympathy, a woman's pocket of money; and the summer boarders were mostly women--married women, with husbands sweating in the city to support them; single women, school-teachers and that sort. But Scud stood looking at the ties. He seldom bought clothes, any more than he purchased firewood or paid for his fish. They came to him. Here was a pair of trousers that was once a bishop's. That coat and vest were the velveteen relics of a posing artist. The cap was a yachtsman's gift, and the neckties came as a matter of course. Yet Scud never begged. And once when he caught one of his four-year-old boys insinuating to a summer boarder, with outstretched palm, that he would like a penny, Scud thrashed him within a centimeter of his life. New England fishermen will take a gift as a sort of neighborly accommodation to you; but he'll starve before he will ask you for it. "Are them fur me?" (Scud was always surprised at such a crisis.) "Thank ye, ma'am. Ain't them showy? I guess they'll skeer the mac'rel off the coast." "I wanted you to take me out sailing this morning, Mr. Scud," I began, after a formal introduction. Scud looked somewhat gratified with the prefix to his name, and regarded me with interest. To take boarders out sailing at the rate of seventy-five cents an hour was the kind of work he would do. "Yes, ma'am. But I'm 'fraid it'll be a little fresh to-day, if ye hain't used to sailin'." He jerked his head to the westward. "Salt is a makin' the dory fast with a new haulin'-line, ma'am. I guess we'll have a squall pretty soon." We followed Scud's gesture and looked. A squall on a day like this? The white streamers had vanished, and above us was dark, unfathomable blue. But on the western horizon, stretching far to the south, a black bank had arisen. No cloud in the physical geography was ever sketched blacker. It had come up as stealthily as a Zulu warrior. It was the hue of unpolished iron. It had a faint reddish tint. Its outline was as clear cut as a cameo. It sent ahead here and there jagged tentacles, broad at the base and fine at the tip, that advanced, dissolved, and reappeared again with significant rapidity. The ocean had suddenly grown lethargic. It seemed unable to reflect the sun that still shone. It became like a platter of tarnished silver. As we looked, the sight rapidly grew uglier. Now my cousin Mabel seemed hypnotized by it. She stood for a few minutes with her hands hanging at her sides; her delicate jaw dropped. Suddenly she pulled herself together, and whispered: "It is horrible! It is awful!" Then, as if seized with the full import of the scene, she cried aloud, "My _children_! They are out fishing in a sail-boat! My _children_!" She began to run towards the shore leaving us all staring after her. My nautical sense was not as highly trained as Mabel's, but I thought the sight terrifying and fine. It was part of the Eastern culture towards the education of the Western girl. But seeing Scud look sober--I had the impression that it was for the first time in his life--I pleaded: "Do come too, Scud. Is it so bad? Won't it blow over?" "It's goin' to be as bad as I ever seed in these parts, miss. I'll do what I can. 'Twon't be much, I'll bet." I ran down to the house, followed by Scud at a moderate walk. Scud never ran. Would he have run for the drowning? I doubted it. The clouds had arisen with terrible velocity. They coursed over the bare sky like a black bull with horns down. White cirrhus clouds now darted out here and there ahead, like fluttering standards of warning. And now the sun was gored to death. The black bank advanced in one wide line. Blackness had fallen everywhere. Anxiety was visible in every form of nature--in the cries of the birds, the skulking of the dogs, the blanched faces of the boarders, the attention of the fishermen. In the British navy, when any terrible and sudden disaster occurs on a man-of-war, such as the bursting of a gun, a collision, or striking upon the rocks, the bugler sounds, what is known as "the still." On hearing it every man aboard comes to a standstill. This momentary pause enables each to collect his nerves to meet the summons of the shock. Nature was now commanding "the still"; but the order came through the eyes. No sound was as yet heard. The sea, the air, sentient life, all souls, held their breath before the shock that must come. Men collected along the coast to meet the threatened tornado. By that subtle force which sensitive organisms will recognize, be it called telepathy or psychic power or magnetism, I knew, ignorant as I was, that nature was silently preparing for a terrific struggle. When Scud and I joined Mabel on the rocks in front of her house we found her wringing her hands, sobbing and crying for help. It seemed that her two children, who had gone out fishing with their city guest, were in a sail-boat. This was managed by a boy about their age--none of them were over sixteen. But the lad who sailed the little boat was a fisherman's son. He was considered very expert, and had broad experience from his babyhood up. But this fact did not soothe the mother. Appalled by the color and the swiftness of the clouds, and the ominous import to the safety of the little sail-boat, we scanned the harbor and the coast; but no boat answering to the description was in sight. Scud tried to comfort the mother in his shaggy way. "The b'ys hev sailed to the inner cove, ma'am. They's ashore by this time, I'll bet." As Scud spoke, the large fishing-schooners, leaving and entering the broad harbor shot, one after the other, as if by mutual impulse, into the direction of the clouds, into the west, and dropped sails and anchors with incredible rapidity. Far out to sea vessels were now seen to ride with bare poles; it was evident that they had anticipated a formidable blow. We stood on a bend in the shore, and the broad bay lay between us and the rising storm. The rocky coast stood forth in a long, broken outline opposite to us, far down towards Great Brabant. The open Atlantic spread before us to the south-west. And now lightnings flashed in angry sheets. The sea took to itself suddenly a peculiar greenish tinge. There were heard distant bellowings. We strained our eyes for the boys. Where were they? Where _were_ they? Two miles out ships began to rock fearfully. "They've cotched it!" shouted Scud. "Here it comes. Look out, leddies!" Driven by earth's mightiest, most implacable, most invisible force, a line of foam dashed across the bay. Spray from the water twenty feet below struck us in the face simultaneously with the wind. The white squall had burst upon us. I dragged my poor cousin with me to the piazza, into the house, which shuddered through all its frame and would have fallen had it not, after the fashion of this bleak shore, been chained to the rocks. Now Scud staid outside. It did not seem clear at first why. Pretty soon we saw him trying to pull the tender upon the float, that was clean washed by every wave. Then came the first lull. The mother ran out into it wildly. The water was green and white. Two coasters and a large yacht were running in for shelter without a stitch of canvas. They were making straight for the inner harbor. "Look! Come here! Look! What's that boat? See! Way out there beyond the island! My God! It's _my children_!" A half-mile or more away, in the very heart of the squall, a little boat with full sail set was staggering unto death. Language cannot hint at the horror in the mother's face. She had made her summer's home for fifteen years within a shell's throw of the sea, and she knew perfectly well what this situation meant. No one could have undeceived her, and no one tried. She stood for a moment staring straight ahead, stretched out her arms, swayed, and fell. She was one of the fainting kind, and there was nothing to be done about it. We carried her in and laid her down. It was my impulse to trust her to her terrified servants. I was too terrified myself to know whether I was right or wrong. Irresistibly compelled, I rushed out of doors again, and appealed (with feminine instinct, I suppose) to the only man, within reach. Scud responded quickly enough. "Yes; that's them!" He pitched his orotund voice upon me as if he were giving a command in a gale at sea. Men now began to gesticulate wildly at the ill-fated boat from the rocks, as if that could help the matter. "Drop that mains'l, you ---- fools, or you'll go to ----!" The voices struck me like a volley of bullets, but they could not have penetrated ten feet to windward. "Scud!" I cried. "Help! Save them, Scud!" "I can't do nothing," he howled in my ear. "No one can't. You can't row in them breakers." By this time the wind had increased its force. The sail-boat was near enough for one to see the desperate attempts the boyish skipper made to lower the sail. One of the halyards had become caught. The boy made wild rushes to the mast. Then the boat would rock and fly around. To save her the lad darted back to the helm just in time. This sickening struggle against a knot was repeated several times. On the bottom the three passengers lay inert with terror. A twenty-foot boat with full sail, when hundred-ton schooners trembled under bare poles! Even my inexperience grasped the situation. "He's doing all-fired well, but he can't last no longer if that--He'll be druv on the rocks! They'll be druv to----!" The rocks were now lined with men commenting in an apathetic way upon the tragedy enacting before their eyes. "Why don't they _do_ something?" In my ignorance of the curious stolidity which falls upon the shore in face of danger upon the sea, I stood shrieking: "Why doesn't somebody go? Why don't you men do _something_?" The fishermen and the summer people looked into each other's eyes, but no man answered a word. "Can't _you_ help them?" I pleaded with another weather-beaten fisherman. "Can't be done, or I'd do it." "I came down to see them capsize, an' I guess they'll go," said a gruff voice. But Scud gave me a long look. He stood quite silent. An expression of rare gravity was on his joyous face. He glanced apprehensively from the boat to the house. "_She_ can't, Scud; she's fainted. There isn't anybody but me. I've _got_ to do something. The children have _got_ to be saved, Scud!" The Western girl shook him by the arm. Her very ignorance gave a force to her appeal that intelligence could not have supplied. Had I understood what I asked I should not have said: "Scud, won't you go? They are drowning. See, Scud! _Go!_" The doomed sail was beaten here and there in the fierce wind; the jib was blown to tatters. The boat took in water, righted, and careened with every riotous puff. A hundred times men turned their faces away and women shrieked, expecting it to go down. A hundred times repeated miracle protected the helpless boat. Scud walked slowly down the heaving gangway that connected the rocks with the float. The man who came down to see the boat capsize followed with his hands in his pockets. He balanced himself on the railing with his elbows as the gangway jumped beneath him. "What yer up ter, Scud?" he yelled above the tempest. "They're driftin' on yer trap. That'll fetch 'em." Scud looked up. His feet were washed in the water that flooded the float at every surge. To strike the trap meant instant overturn. To become entangled in and driven on to the meshes of the broad, deep net meant inevitable death. "I guess I'll go. Help me shove the dingy off." So spoke Scud, deliberately. "You--" The rest of the expletive was lost in the gale. The breakers made sport of Scud, and spat at him with their white tongues. "Your childer! The twins! Betty!" thundered his friend. Scud hurriedly put in the oar-locks. As he bent, the wind caught his cap and dashed it on the rocks. Scud shook his brown hair to the furies. "Ye see!" yelled his companion significantly. "Now get in, will ye?" "Shet up, Steve! Gimme them oars. Don't ye see I'm goin'? I wish I hed my dory." A murmur of applause went up from the crowd as the fisherman shoved off. The light tender was twisted about and all but cast upon the cliffs before he could gain his first stroke. And now the man of the sea set his weak mouth into petrified resolve. The wind and the water attacked his boat like assassins. They meant to kill. Scud knew this. He rowed guardedly, mistrustful of a cowardly feint, of an underhand lunge. The tender quivered beneath each dash of the waves, each onslaught of the squall, each hurried stroke of the oars. Scud rowed warily, lest he be over-turned and buried between the trough and the height of the waves. The wind howled at him. The bay showered upon him. The gale clutched him and turned him about. How now! Whence came these muscles of steel that subdued such powers arrayed against lazy Scud? How now! Whence came that indomitable judgment that baffled the elements at their own wildest sport? Fishermen stared from the shore at this unparalleled exhibition of skill, coolness, courage and strength from _Scud_. Then, with the spite of which only a white squall is capable, it thundered against Scud, and with the animosity of which only the Atlantic Ocean is capable, it rose upon Scud and well-nigh bore him under. Hope is easily dashed in the hearts of inert spectators, but Scud did not falter. The crowd stood by commenting: "Scud! Thet Scud? Poor Betty! Poor widder! We'll hev ter fish him up ter-night. Plucky fellow! Brave deed! That's grit! Thar's skill! Who'd 'a' thought it? _Scud!_" But Scud the "easy," Scud the do-little, Scud the good-for-naught--Scud, of whom nobody expected anything--comfortable, self-indulgent Scud, rowed on sturdily straight out into that hell. Could he ever overtake the boat? How was it possible? If he did the extra weight would swamp the fancy tender, built only to carry two or three at the most in light weather. How could he get one in? "Why the ---- didn't he take his dory?" asked an old man. "How in ---- can he bring her up with a haulin'-line an' git in from the rocks?" answered another contemptuously. "Scud may get 'em," ventured an expert, "but what'll he do with 'em?" Now Scud had rowed beyond the net to the right, in order to bear down upon it the easier. "Thar she strikes! God help 'em!" Cries came from a dozen throats. The sail-boat struck against the leader of the net. It swung broadside to the wind, that forced it over and under. Agonized shrieks were borne to the shore. I was glad that Mabel was a fainting woman. For some time Scud's wife had stood apart and looked upon the scene. Her eyes were dry and feverish. She did not talk. She hugged a baby at her breast desperately. Salt held a pair of twins; the oldest girl another. Children sprawled upon the ground, clinging to their mother's feet and dress. None drew near or spoke to this pathetic group. What could one do? What word could one say? The storm swayed Betty here and there. Her hair waved in the hurricane. She had long, pretty hair. Spray drenched her. She did not cry out. She stood like the Niobe of the sea. She looked like one expecting the fate that had been only delayed. An average of two hundred men a year from this fishing-town are swallowed up by the ocean that affords them sustenance, and their starving widows are left after them. Betty was only one of a thousand of her kind who stolidly concealed a desolate suspense. And now her turn had come, harder than the rest, for she was in at the death. It is a mystery until this day how Scud reached the over-turned sail-boat as he did. With a dory his work would not have been comparatively easy; but with a thirteen-foot yacht's tender it was super-human. The two girls clinging to the wreck were lifted bodily into the boat. Scud was quick but cool, and imparted perfect confidence to the water-sodden children. At the fisherman's peremptory order, the two boys clung to each side of the tender. We could see them dragging in the water; it was the only way. Scud now began to row before the storm. There were no cheers from the rocks. Not a man of them stirred. The fishermen, hardened to perils of the sea, had been fascinated by this exhibition of cool-blooded heroism from the least heroic of them all. The cockle-shell dashed madly towards the shore. No power could row it weighted against the wind that beat upon it with fitful concentration. Straight before the tender was a little beach between the rocks, not more than twenty feet wide, but this was protected at its entrance by a line of reefs, easily passable at high tide, and bare at low. The rollers broke upon most of these rocks, and the spume swirled in dirty froth upon the pebbly beach. Scud made for the opening. The gale drove him wildly along. A few men now ran to the beach and the outlying rocks, ready to do the possible at any emergency. Would Scud pass the reef or not? There was not time to answer the question. The boat rose upon a huge wave. Foam and spray enveloped it from view. There was a rumbling cry of horror. There was a dull splintering crash. Fifty men rushed to the beach and lined the cliffs. The boat had struck upon the last rock. As the wave passed on, the terrible sight of black human heads appeared in a setting of white foam. But these were within reach almost. These could be saved. Ah! Men wade in, somehow, anyhow, forming a line, and pass one to shore. Saved! And then another. Thank God! Here comes the third on that wave! Grasp that dress! Tenderly, it is a girl. All here! All saved! But where is Scud? Oh, but _he_ can swim. He is strong and used to chilling water and fierce waves. The helpless children safe, and Scud gone? Impossible! Incredible! Too horrible! Involuntarily one man and then another turned to look at the widow and the orphans, and then they turned and cursed the sea aloud. At this moment a dark little figure shot past them all, by the bewildered man, and dashed with a shriek into the foam. What did she do? How did she do it? What could be done? A woman--a little woman--her baby only one month old--Betty! She caught the sinking hand, the drowning head--she never knew how. A dozen men plunged in now. Spectators who had not wet their feet during all that horrible scene swam now in the whirlpool for the woman's sake, and for the shame she wrought upon them. Brawny arms and steady feet bore her back. Her little hand, rigid, clutched her husband by the collar of his shirt. Scud was carried quickly up and laid upon the piazza. An ugly bruise was upon his forehead. The wind died down. The rain came in white torrents. Betty stood in the deluge and shielded her husband automatically. The children, most of them too small to know the reason why, lifted up their voices and wept. "Father," said Betty, softly, "why don't ye speak to me? Dearie, dearie Scud. I saved ye. Hain't ye nothing to say to me, Scud?" "You'd better go into the house," said some one. "Leave Scud to us awhile." For in truth not a man or woman of us but believed that Scud was dead. "You jess get us to a kitchen fire," said Betty, quietly, "and leave him to _me_." And it was repeated with many a trembling lip far down the coast that night that Scud would live. * * * * * It was the morning of my departure, and it had come by the last express the night before. It had been kept a profound secret, for we would not risk a cruel disappointment. Scud had rowed to town with a full fare of fish, and Salt was with him, doing the rowing. We left word that they should come to the house as soon as they had put up their dory. A peremptory message was sent to Betty to come over immediately to do some work. A few neighbors happened to drop in. There might have been a dozen or so in all. My cousin did not go into town that day. He said he wanted to see me off. Betty came a little early, and was set to scrubbing the pantry floor. But Scud, a hero? He had forgotten all about it now. He was the same old fellow, just as easy, just as jolly, just as careless. Scud wasn't at all spoiled by what had happened. He was as comfortable as the sea, this very morning. Who would have suspected the passing of a grand storm upon the hearts of either? Scud's sluggish blood had been "up" for one fiery hour. For one great day he had been the hero of the coast--the peer of all its heroes. Then the fire went out, and Scud became as he was. Perhaps Scud was more popular; his babies were better fed. Fishermen treated him with a grudged respect, and when he was pointed out to every new squad of boarders as the bravest man on the whole coast, they smiled. How could that grinning, singing Scud save a jelly-fish? It was just eleven o'clock. With what impatience we had waited for the tramp of those rubber boots! We rushed upon the piazza and greeted Scud and Salt, dressed in their oil-skins, just as they had come from the trap. Scud halted uneasily at the front door. "No miss, I can't come in in this toggery; I'm all gurry. I'll go home and change my clothes. Couldn't get here sooner. Herrin' jess struck. We sold ten barr'l this mornin'." But we constrained him, and Scud entered, staring about, shuffling his rubber boots and wiping them as best he might. White scales of fish glittered upon his black oil-skins. He looked as if he were mailed in silver. It devolved upon me to fetch Betty from the pantry; but I saw as I went that all of the people in the parlor stood up as Scud entered, as if they were greeting a prince. Scud looked from one to the other uncomfortably. He blushed a deep russet red, and stared, and then laughed in a vacant way. Betty now appeared in the doorway, and the three made a most impressive group in their working-clothes, wondering what it was all about, and what the city folk were after now. "Scud," said the master of the house, clearing his throat, "you have done the bravest deed this coast has record of for twenty years. You have saved to us our children, dearer than our life. You had your own wife to think of, and the children who depend upon you for their bread. You have been a hero. To us you are always a hero, and our love and gratitude will last as long as our days. I have the privilege of presenting to you the highest tribute Massachusetts pays to her brave men--the gold medal of her great Humane Society, one hundred years old. This honor has not been sought, but has been eagerly bestowed. May it never leave your family! It will be an inspiration to your boys. You have obtained the reward of your pluck, and you deserve it, old fellow. Now shake!" The speech broke in eloquence, but not in feeling. "See," said Mabel, "I kiss the medal for you and for my dear children's sake." She flashed it from its plush case, and placed the solemn emblem, whose exquisite engravings glittered like a jewel, in his great wet hands. Salt turned his face to the wall. Betty put her apron over her face, and Scud's eyes ran dripping over. He opened his mouth, but no sound came forth. "And now, Betty, look here," said her mistress in a gay, tremulous tone, "I have something for _you_." She held out in her delicate hand forty silver dollars, the gift of the Humane Society to Betty herself. "You are a woman, and you saved a man's life," explained my cousin, "and the society always recognizes the courage of a woman." But Betty drew herself up in her scrubbing dress. She had a fine look. "Thank you, ma'am," she said, "and the gentleman too. But he was my husband; I don't take no money from nobody for savin' of my husband. I'm just as much obleeged to ye." Almost every child in her house was dressed in "given" clothes, but the unpauperized soul looked out of Betty's faded eyes. "Well," said my cousin, looking nonplussed, "how would it do to make it over to the twins?" "As ye please," said Betty, shining. So the four twin babies received ten silver dollars apiece from the Humane Society for plunging into the water and saving their father's life. This was an illegal procedure. I grant it. And if the Society now for the first time learneth of the matter, I am fain to believe that it is too old and too great to take account thereof. * * * * * We were rowing over to catch my train. Scud was the oarsman. He sat quite still, and had a dazed look. Midway of the bay he stopped pulling, lifted and crossed his oars. I saw his Adam's apple rising and falling like an irresolute tide. "I were took all of a sudden," he said, slowly; "I never felt so in all my life. My throat felt kinder queer an' dry. But I'm mightily obliged to yer. It might give Salt a lift. But I didn't know what to say, an' so I didn't say nothing'." THE ROMANCE OF A MORTGAGE. 1111 COURT STREET, BOSTON, MASS., _Nov._ 12, 1890. _Mr. Francis B. Ellesworth, University Club, Boston, Mass.:_ MY DEAR FRANK, I am sorry to inform you that the Benson note is still uncollected. The party writes that he will try to pay it soon. Our correspondent in Sunshine, S. C., considers the Benson security in Cherokee first-class. As this is the only S. C. mortgage that has slipped up so far on our hands, I should advise you to be patient a few more days. Perhaps you had better give the party leeway up to Dec. 1, if necessary, as it is his first default since you took the papers, three years ago. However, if you are impatient and wish to settle the matter, send me down the trust deeds and notes. Run in any time. I shall be glad to see you. Very truly yours, JOSEPH TODD. Young Ellesworth carefully deposited his cigar in the bronze ash receiver on the polished table by his side, and pulled out from his breast pocket a notebook which he consulted. After a few moments he seemed to satisfy himself as to the identity of his mortgager Benson; put his papers up, and sank back into a reverie. The gray November day seemed to have contented itself with monopolizing the streets and the faded Common, and the poor tenements, and the ragged stragglers, and to have passed by the windows of Beacon Street, and the luxurious smoking-room of the new University Club. Francis Ellesworth sprawled listlessly in the deep chair by the window, and vaguely congratulated himself that he did not have to earn his supper. It was lucky that he did not have to, for any tyro of a physiognomist could have seen at a glance that the delicate features, the sallow complexion, brightened by red spots upon his cheeks, the gentle black eyes and the straight black hair, did not belong to a robust New England body. The trouble with Ellesworth was, not that he was rich enough not to have to work, but that he was born at all. He considered it only a fair compensation for this insult that three years ago he had fallen heir to seventy-five thousand dollars, which he had successfully invested and reinvested ever since. This occupation, and the clubs and a few other necessary amusements formed his life. He was not handsome, but just interesting looking enough not to pass unnoticed. He was not vulgar; that is to say, he did not drink too much, did not swear, and was not the kind of a fellow who compromises a woman by his attentions. He was neither clever nor stupid. Thousands of young men in our great cities are of this type, unimportant to men of intent, and a missionary field to women of character. He needed an electric shock either to kill him or make a man of him. But perhaps, after all, Ellesworth was not wholly to blame for not trying to make his mark; for he was not so strong as other men, as I said before, and had, besides, so thoroughly coddled himself into that belief that useful activity was struck off of his list of possibilities. Now it happened that this Benson mortgage was the first which he had taken out under his inheritance; it had a certain special interest to him for that reason; it had netted him eight per cent. clear, and he considered his fifteen hundred dollars well invested. His Harvard classmate, Todd, a good judge, had selected the mortgage for him, and altogether it seemed to the young property-holder quite an important, if not to say a public, financial affair that this first of October passed without producing sixty dollars from Benson. He didn't know who Benson was; nor did he care. How many a capitalist in the East knows the sturdy settler whose hard-earned home he holds in his relentless safe! The drought comes, the crops wither away; the cyclone sweeps the land; the only horse that does the ploughing dies; the mother is sick and the father tends the babies instead of the wheat--a hundred catastrophes menace the farmer, but whatever happens, the semi-annual dividend must be paid or the nightmare of his life comes to pass--the terrible capitalist in the East, less compassionate than the cyclone or the inundation or the drought, takes the home as a matter of course, just as he takes his dinner. Who would dare complain? Not Benson surely, thought Ellesworth, with the smile of a man who holds a "full hand." "Work Benson for all he is worth," wrote Ellesworth on some blue club-paper, "and give him until the first of December." The first of December came, but no South Carolina interest. Francis Ellesworth was greatly annoyed and told Todd so plainly. "He is sick," explained Todd. "Somebody else wrote for him. The letter came the other day. But he signed it. He asks for another fifteen days." Ellesworth frowned. "I'm deuced hard up just now," he said, "Christmas is coming on. That would just settle my flower bill. Halvin has sent me three confoundedly gentlemanly bills. That's the worst of it. Write and tell Benson I'll give him until the fifteenth of December--not another day." "Just as you say," answered Todd. "It's all safe enough, but it will take some time to realize. Cherokee isn't exactly booming, but he's got fifty acres and one half cleared, the other half is heavy yellow pine. The timber is worth the whole amount, my correspondent assures me, besides the house and out-buildings. You won't lose, not a cent, I'll guarantee; but it's annoying, I will admit." Then they fell to talking about the Yale foot-ball victory. Of course they talked late and Ellesworth walked to his apartments in a heavy shower. That night, one of the catastrophes which prove demons or angels to our lives, occurred to the young man. He was taken suddenly and violently ill. Of the three physicians summoned by the excited janitor, to prescribe for the sickness, one called the case pneumonia; another preferred malaria; and the third, having just delivered an original paper on the subject, suggested brain grippe. In only one respect the three wise men agreed--their patient must spend the winter in the South. Oddly enough, they recommended Sunshine, South Carolina; and as Sunshine is a fashionable resort, with plenty of hotels and tennis and girls, Ellesworth found no difficulty in obeying the medical counsel. Thus in ten days he found himself in the land of the palmetto and the japonica. It was an abrupt change, and therefore all the more natural for that. The other day an invalid started for India on an eighteen hours' notice. Ellesworth's illness and the journey had entirely driven the Benson matter out of his mind. He had drawn upon an emergency fund for his trip, and the fact that he was sixty dollars short had escaped his easy memory. Therefore the further announcement from Todd that Benson could not pay at the date agreed upon came to him as a new shock. Todd had written a formal letter to his classmate, merely stating the fact and asking for instructions. As Ellesworth read it, he had a vague feeling that there was something behind that was not told. But he had just lost a game of billiards to an inferior player, and felt cross. "Confound that Benson!" he ejaculated. Then he sat down and wrote: "Foreclose at once. My attorneys, Squeeze & Claw, will give you the Benson trust deeds on presentation of this. Hurry it through as soon as you can." He heaved a sigh of relief, and lighted a cigar with Todd's letter. There are critics who assert that the modern story fails of its mission unless it deals in extraordinary characters embedded like the rare crystals of Hiddenite, in an extraordinary matrix; and that the public, tired to suffocation of its own commonplaces, has a right to expect something out of the usual run. If such a _dictum_ were final Francis Ellesworth is in nowise a fit hero for a "penny-dreadful," nor was it even an extraordinary circumstance that made him inquire how far Cherokee Garden was from Sunshine. "You can go by railroad," answered the Northern clerk, "or you can go horseback. It's only eight miles by road through the pines. It's a very pretty ride to take before dinner." Ellesworth had two reasons for amusing himself by an easy trip to Cherokee. He had a vague feeling of remorse which often follows the decree of justice. Lincoln was made ill by being obliged to refuse a pardon. The greater the power the heavier it hangs upon the heart. Ellesworth, as he entertained himself in the conventional way, ever spending, never earning, began to feel that he had done a brutal thing, without even looking into the circumstances, to order a man's home sold over his head, because he had failed to pay interest for the first time. If Benson's farm were only eight miles away why did he not see him before he sent the command to foreclose? There was an atonement owing, and this feeling, rising like a mist in the mind of the young man, who knew much of pleasure and little of misery, drew him to the mortgaged plantation. And then, if Benson did prove a shiftless fellow, he wanted to see what kind of a place he might be soon forced to own. He might make it his winter resort and come down there every year. The more selfish thought reinforced the generous one, and piqued his curiosity, as he rode slowly into the wilderness, leaving Sunshine and its fashionable savor behind. It was a December morning. To one not used to the tropics, the sun, the heat, the greenness, the exhilaration were magical. Under what cold comforter was Boston Common shivering on this winter day! What pneumonic gales roared up Beacon Street and gnashed through Commonwealth Avenue, seeking whom they might devour, and having not a great way to go! How blue the street vendors looked--the Italian boys who gilded statuettes on Tremont Street, and the man under the old courthouse who offers to clean your gloves of the unpardonable sin--for five cents! How the fellows shivered as they stamped the snow off in the club vestibule! The wonder that New England is not depopulated when there is such an Eden in which to spend the devastating winter! So Ellesworth thought as he jogged along the uneven, sandy road, congratulating himself with every deep breath, and sitting straight and straighter in the saddle. He had never felt so happy and so free as he did this December morning. Passing slowly by a deserted orchard, he could see the yellow larks flying from tree to tree, and could hear the robins and the cat-birds calling each other names, and mocking each other merrily. Now and then he stopped his horse to watch a couple of quails leisurely hopping across the road, and strained his ears to hear their thrum as they were startled in the thicket. The very air seemed happy. Care and illness slipped away as the sunshine slipped on the faces of the leaves. It was December? No, it was summer with something thrown in that is never present in our Northern June. Ellesworth galloped along until his horse stumbled into a mud-hole. Before him, in a hollow, a stream had to be forded in the usual Southern way. Above and beyond, a cabin could be seen from whose outside chimney smoke arose in a perpendicular column. Cocks crew in the distance, and there was every indication that the outskirts of Cherokee were represented in the hut before him. As Ellesworth halted in the deepest part of the brook, allowing his horse to drink, he saw clusters of mistletoe on the tops of slender trees. The dark green of this romantic parasite set against the gray of the trees and their moss formed a new picture for the Northerner. The glistening mistletoe with its white berries recalled scenes that he had read about. Ellesworth had played too lightly with life to have ever been seriously in love. The flirtation of a few weeks or months and the solemn tenderness of devoted love are not allied. The one passes into the other as seldom as silicon passes into the cells of a fallen tree. Ellesworth had never gone beyond conventional devotion: and this he had so far discreetly given to married women. This emblem of Christmas troth actually growing before his eyes, and seen by him in its native state for the first time, produced a vague longing upon the young New Englander. He remembered a precise and beautiful Boston girl, rich enough and all that, whom he had vainly tried to consider in the light of a possible wife. What well-bred surprise would she have poured upon him if he had attempted to claim the right of the mistletoe branch! He had waited in order to give and receive spontaneous, unconventional tokens of affection. He had dreamed of walking in the fields by the side of the phantom he loved, clasping her hand and swinging it with his, just like children in Arcadia. He wanted no wife who would accept her husband's kiss as a matter of necessity. He had seen them, and cynically watched the husband casting furtive, longing looks at her who swore to cherish him unto death. Thus spoke the chaste, the alluring mistletoe to his heart. These thoughts surprised him, and he hurried along in vague discomfort over the little slope (the natives called it a hill) and up to the straggling village, called in his papers of description Cherokee Garden for no earthly reason whatever. "Is this Cherokee Garden?" he asked of the wrinkled white woman sitting in the doorway of the solitary suburban residence. "This ain't the hull of it, young man," she answered severely, taking her corn-cob pipe out of her mouth and looking at Ellesworth as if he had cast an aspersion upon a city. "Ye kin ride down the road a right smart bit until ye come to the kyars. The post office is on the other side o' the track." This she said with an accent of resentment. "Do you know where a man called William Benson lives, whom I understand has a--a farm here somewhere?" When Ellesworth had finished his question the old woman got up and, supported by her stick, tottered to his side, and peered up into his face. "Air ye any kin ter Bill Benson? Air ye an'thin' to him?" "No, no," stammered Ellesworth, taken aback. "I only wanted to call on him. Why?" "Ye'll hev'ter go right smart ways to find Bill Benson," replied the old woman, grimly. She peered up into his face again, and shook her head. Ellesworth, wondering whether his creditor had "skipped to Cuba to avoid payment," awaited information. "Bill Benson" (she stopped to take a whiff, and then proceeded with a tone of awe caught from Methodist preachers) "hez gone to glory!" "Where?" asked Boston, ignorant of the longitude and latitude of that strange place. "To glory, young man!" repeated the old woman, impressively. "Elder Jones buried Bill in Tantallon buryin' ground, four mile from hyar down the track," added the woman, severely. Her voice dropped to a whisper on the last words, and she looked to see their effect upon the horseman. The red handkerchief, tied over her head and under her chin, had fallen down behind her neck and revealed a bald head. The cock crew from the step of the hut. Benson dead! This, then, accounted for the note so long overdue. Benson had been sick, and could not pay. Why had Ellesworth not known this before? He reddened with self-reproach. This was the first tragedy which he had stumbled upon, and how much of it was his own doing! The old woman looked at him suspiciously. "When did he die?" he asked softly. The woman counted backwards on her fingers with the stem of her pipe. "Right smart onto two weeks," she answered after much calculation. Then she shot this question at him with a scowl, "Ye hain't no Northerner, air ye?" Taken off his guard, Ellesworth hesitated, and then forswore his section. "I--I am living at--eh--Sunshine." Her face lighted. "Mebbe ye'r raised in Charleston. Ye look like a South Carolinian." Ellesworth was drawn to it by some occult power, and nodded assent. The old woman's manner was now totally different, and she approached him confidentially, and offered him the use of her tin snuff-box, which he courteously declined. "Ye haint heerd, so Colonel Tom Garvin told me, that a dum Northerner hez got a holt on Bill's place; and there ain't none left now 'cept Georgy and Mrs. McCorkle as is a widder nigh on ten year. Colonel Tom is kin to her mother's second cousin, and he says thet thet dum Yankee hed better not show up 'round these parts, for he'd get plugged if he tries to take Bill's place away from Georgy, poor, innercent thing that she is." The old woman's cracked voice thrilled with the passion and tenderness of her kind; but Ellesworth did not look at her as she finished. He felt a little frightened, and he bent over his horse to fleck a bit of bark with his whip to conceal it. "How far do they live from here?" he asked after a pause, which she interpreted as actuated by sympathy. "'Tain't no fur at all. Ye take the next turn to yer left. It's the first plantation ye come to. I reckon ye'll see Georgy a dustin' and sweepin'. She's almighty pertikler, she is, poor creetur." Ellesworth thanked the old woman dreamily and rode in the direction which she pointed out. Ellesworth had never thought of this view of the subject. It never occurred to him that he would be an object of hatred in Cherokee Garden. He glanced around furtively, as if he expected to see an enemy hiding behind the trees. At any rate, so far, he was not known. He made up his mind that he should not be. Benson's daughter was undoubtedly a sallow, withered young girl, with a hot temper and a deep sense of injury; and, if she found out his identity would probably call the country to arms against him. But the Yankee had no idea of giving up his rights. His hands tightened on reins and whip. He meant to see the plantation that was mortgaged in his name at any cost. But about one thing he was now certain. Cherokee would never be a winter resort for him. He walked his horse to the cross-road, to the left, about a thousand yards or so, until he came in front of a house. He halted and looked at it long and critically. It was a two-story house, built of yellow pine, that had not been painted. In spite of this, it did not look neglected. It had an air of scrupulous neatness and care. Around the house ran a simple fence, made to keep the chickens and the pigs that swarmed about him, from the garden and the piazza. A huge rose-bush covered one whole side of the house, while in the garden and on the veranda red and white japonicas were in flower. Flanking the walk from the gate to the house, high azalea bushes were pushing forth their buds for the spring blooming, and little borders of box protected with wooden boards, and bunches of holly intersected the little garden. It was more than a home-like looking place: it was fascinatingly cozy, with its roses and camellias and azaleas and a single protecting palmetto, and over-towering live oaks, and majestic pines. It was just the place Ellesworth had dreamed of possessing. It was luxuriant; it was tropical. The air, semi-spiced with odors of gum and blooms mounted to his brain like a narcotic. He sat upon his horse and looked about. His eyes roamed past the house and caught the contrast of the unkempt fields with the neatness within the enclosure. He noted the olive fingers of the high pines beyond the ploughed land. It was a fair and a sad sight--William Benson was not there to enjoy his home. With a sigh of longing and of self-reproach he turned his face toward the house again. Before him, with one hand on the gate, stood a woman. She was looking at him. Questions were in her eyes. Ellesworth stared at her in amazement, and only superlatives crowded into his mind; for she was the most glorious woman he had ever seen. She was tall, almost to his own height, and with a proportional figure. Dressed without ornament, without ruffle, or frill or white at the throat, in plain black, her face revealed itself on the green background as if it were upon a canvas by Bastien Lepage. It was a face in which there seemed to be many nationalities blended: Italian eyes, Spanish coloring of the cheeks, black Indian hair, rich Mexican lips,--these coördinated into the most startling type he had ever seen, through a quick, sensitive, high-spirited intelligence, the inheritance of Southern blood. He could not analyze this beauty; he could only gasp at it. Francis B. Ellesworth was, as has been intimated, not a captivating man _per se_; but as he sat upon his horse, with the flush of excitement upon his face, and a certain refinement in his carriage that looked as much out of place in Cherokee Garden as the face of the girl before him, he was not an unattractive fellow. Now, as the two were not over fifteen feet apart, and were both looking at each other, one of them had to speak. She waited for him to do so. He simply couldn't. So she spoke first. "Have you lost your way, sir?" The tremor of the dimple in her chin and the marked effort which she made to steady her voice, showed that she was much agitated. Had she not been expecting the man who was to take away her home for a paltry sum of unpaid money? She had looked upon the Yankee who held her fathers notes as little more than a thief. And now that her father had died, she seriously considered him in the light of a murderer. She thought of his agent as his "minion," whom it was clearly due her dignity to resist. The case had been the talk of the scraggly village, and the judge of the district, who was reputed to know the intricacies of all the law that ever was tabulated, asserted vehemently in her presence that to eject her from her home was an outrage that could not and would not be permitted as long as the able-bodied men of Cherokee could carry a gun. This testimony of Southern chivalry the girl fully believed. And now the invader had come at last. She clutched the gate and collected herself to meet him. "No, miss, that is--is this William Benson's?--I mean----" Ellesworth halted, remembering that his debtor was no more, and not wishing to remind her of the fact. "_Was_ this his place?" The magnificent girl looked at him over that fence and measured him. Yes, the worst had come at last, and an uncalled-for insult with it. How the stranger gloated over the fact that the place was _not_ her father's! She drew herself to her full height; her black eyes blazed; her cheeks became carmine. She could hardly control her voice from indignation. "You mistake, sir. This _is_ his place, and I think, sir, it will remain so." She looked at him fiercely and waited to let that sentiment fructify in the young man's soul. "Indeed, I--I hope so," ventured Ellesworth. Disregarding this as a feeble attempt at apology, she asked,-- "What is your name, sir? Do you come from _him_? Or are you _he_?" The contempt which she cast into the personal pronouns had a marked effect upon Ellesworth. The mere fact that a woman, for whom at first sight he felt a greater admiration than he had ever bestowed elsewhere, should be so antagonistic to him at the start, made his heart contract within him. Yet he managed to pull himself together and say, with admirable feint,-- "Excuse me. You must labor under a mistake. I am a total stranger here. I am--eh--merely looking about. I am staying at Sunshine, for my health." He noted with satisfaction a look of relief stealing over her face, and a slight touch of spontaneous sympathy, too, at his last statement. Ellesworth immediately followed the lead up. "Yes," he said, "I am an invalid, and was ordered South for my lungs. I have heard so much about Southern hospitality, would it be asking too much for me to rest here awhile? I am a trifle tired after this long ride." He heaved a sigh and tried to look utterly fagged out as he noticed how admirably that tack succeeded. "Oh, I beg your pardon, sir," said the girl impulsively. "I thought you were a lawyer or a sheriff, or perhaps a man from--_Boston_." She could hardly pronounce the name of the cultured city. It stuck in her throat. "I?" he asked in a tone of reproach. "Not at all," he answered, laughing. "I told you that I have come from Sunshine," he added, blandly. The girl, taking his negative as a reply to all her doubts, now opened the gate hospitably. "Forgive my rudeness, sir, and come in and sit awhile," she said, as prettily as a woman could. "I'll ask Aunt McCorkle to get you--something. Would you take a glass of milk?" She blushed as she remembered her empty wine cellar. With a well-feigned, languid air, which he could hardly maintain, so boisterously the blood surged through his veins, Ellesworth walked up to the piazza and sat down. He looked about him in a bewildered way. The passionless white camellia blooming by his side seemed singularly out of place. He thought of the intoxicating Jacqueminot roses he used to order at Halvin's for that chilly Boston girl he tried to love and couldn't. The red camellia had more of this splendid Southern creature's color, but that too, with its waxen, expressionless petals, had no business there either. It exasperated him. It looked at him coolly and sarcastically as if that which happens to a man but once in his life had not come to him. Aunt McCorkle appeared with the glass of milk. She was a vague Southern gentlewoman, gentle and faded and appealing. She was just what he expected the daughter of William Benson to be. He thought of the middle-aged and elderly Boston dames with their strong profiles and keen eyes and decisive opinions of reforms and literature and charity. Any one of them might have put out her arms and have taken Mrs. McCorkle up in her lap and trotted her to sleep. Yet Ellesworth liked the Southern lady. Already he felt a queer movement of the heart toward Georgiella Benson's "relations." "Is it lung trouble?" inquired Aunt McCorkle sympathetically. The girl came out of the house at this moment and sat down on the veranda under the white camellia. She glanced at her guest with interest. "The doctors think I shall come out all right if I am careful of my self," replied Ellesworth, evasively. "It is hard to be sick," said Georgiella sincerely. Illness and death had touched her so lately and so cruelly that she could not help feeling sorry for the sick young man. "I have just ridden over from Sunshine, where I am living now," explained Ellesworth again, although his conscience gave him a twinge. He hurried on: "You see, I'm looking for a quiet place to board in." He made a diplomatic pause. "The Sunshine Hotel is too noisy, what with billiards and bowling and late dances; so I rode over here to look about, and an old lady with a pipe told me you lived here." "That was Aunt Betsey," said the girl decisively. "But we never took boarders," with a stately drawing up of her head, "why should she send you here?" "My dear," protested Mrs. McCorkle mildly, "the Randolphs of Sunshine took boarders last winter; and I suppose we could get Aunt Betsey to cook." She rose to carry away Ellesworth's glass, and beckoned to the girl to follow her. Evidently the two poor ladies whispered together in the hall, consulting upon the awful problem suddenly presented to their empty pockets and plethoric pride. They came out on the veranda again, and Mrs. McCorkle asked him point blank what his name was. Without perceptible hesitation he replied: "Bigelow, madam. Frank Bigelow." The unimagined value of a middle name suddenly presented itself to the young man's mind, and his conscience slipped behind the camellias and made no protest. A very irreligious baby, black in the face from howling, had been indeed baptized Francis Bigelow in King's Chapel, twenty-nine years ago--and had since bought a mortgage on the Benson property. "Couldn't you take me? It's a case of charity," he pleaded, turning to the girl beside him. "It's so noisy at the hotel, I can't sleep." This last shot went straight to the mark. Sympathy and need are powerful partners, and they worked together for Ellesworth's case in the hearts of the two poor, lonely women. It is only in the South that one can find women--ladies, and who dress like ladies, and who hardly have ten dollars in cash the year round. The mystery of the maintenance of their existence is not solved outside the walls of their own homes. Proud, refined and shy, they divulge nothing. Who is a boarder that he should think to comprehend the pathetic ingenuity of their eventless lives? "Are you connected with the Bigelows of Charleston?" asked Mrs. McCorkle, softly. "I think we must be another branch," replied Ellesworth, boldly. "I will--I would pay you," added Ellesworth, blushing, "just what they would charge me at the Sunshine Hotel, if that would be satisfactory." "How much is that, Mr. Bigelow?" inquired Mrs. McCorkle, reddening too. "Twenty-five dollars a week." "That is too much. We should think that enough for a month," said the girl, turning her wonderful face upon her visitor. "I could not think of giving less," he insisted. Still he did not look at her. "Perhaps," admitted Mrs. McCorkle with a sigh, "we might take you, sir, seeing that you are one of the Bigelow family--on trial." "I will come," returned Ellesworth, quickly, looking straight at Georgiella, "I will come next Monday--on trial. "You won't look upon me as a sheriff, will you?" he added, as he mounted at the gate, to ride back to his hotel. The girl shook her head, as he looked down at her quizzically. "That was very stupid of me. My mind has been full of my trouble. I have dreamed about it, and hate the man who holds that mortgage. "Please do not think of it any more. And when you come, sir, perhaps you can advise us what to do." Ellesworth looked at her gravely. What would the following week, and the next, and the winter bring forth? "Perhaps," he said in a whisper that might have come from the Delphian oracle; and then he cantered away. For the first time since her father's death, Georgiella sang that afternoon as she walked about the garden teasing her plants to bloom. * * * * * It was Monday, the fifteenth of December. Mrs. McCorkle ushered Ellesworth upstairs into his own room in the cottage mortgaged in his own name. The sun poured into it like a living blessing. The rose-bush enveloped the windows, and when the sash was raised, delicate tendrils insinuated themselves within, as if, in Southern fashion, they would "shake howdy." The room was dainty and home-like. It flashed across Ellesworth as he sank into the cushioned rocking-chair with a long breath of content, that it might have been Georgiella's. It was in the dreamy part of the day. The sun was dipping under the high branches of the pines. Then the luxury of leaning out of the window in December! He could not help but think of it as _his_ sun, and _his_ garden and _his_ trees. And now Georgiella came out, bareheaded, and swept the pine needles and leaves from the narrow box-bordered path, and snipped dead branches from the shrubs, and then before she went to feed the chickens she cast up at him a shy glance that made his heart leap within him. He did not leave his room until he was called to supper. His fancy was feverish, and kept picturing his mortgaged girl in a Boston drawing-room, thrilling all the people he knew with her beauty. He called it carmine beauty; but he was young and ardent. He felt it when he first saw her, but that eventful afternoon he formulated it and repeated it over and over again until he became dizzy--"I love her! I love her!" And then visions of work and strength and success, and ambitions that had been stifled, began to spring within him like blades from watered bulbs. The electric shock had come. He knew it. He meant to spring to it like a man. Dreamily he dressed for supper, and dreamily descended. Mrs. McCorkle greeted him with her fine, thin manner. The young man looked about him curiously. Aunt Betsey waited on the table. He tried not to think of her hospitality in the matter of snuff. The room was worn and bare and gray; so bereft of all but the most necessary furniture that its few ornaments had a startling conspicuousness. He noticed a fat Chinese vase set up like an idol in an old escritoire. Over the mantel was a glass-case religiously protecting some coins and ancient papers. A rusty sword hung on the wall. Biographies of Lee and Jackson, flanking the Chinese fat vase in the dilapidated escritoire, and a villainous crayon framed in immortelles upon the wall, that probably represented his deceased debtor, completed the ornamentation of the room. Miss Benson entered when he had gone as far as this, and vivaciously exhibited the bric-à-brac of the room. "This is a Ming." She pointed to the fat vase. "I understand there isn't another like it in the country. It belongs to the Ming dynasty." Although from Boston, Ellesworth was not familiar with the Ming dynasty, but he bowed and feebly ejaculated,-- "Ah! this is a real Ming, is it?" "And there," said the young lady, bringing him before the glass-case, "are family possessions. That is a coin of George II.; those are Pine-tree shillings; those yellow papers are two copies of a continental newspaper, and this is the South Carolinian continental penny." Ellesworth inspected the treasures gravely. He did his best not to smile. "Very remarkable!" he murmured. "How Southern!" he thought. "Colonel Tom Garvin says there are nothing like them in the country. I suppose they would bring a great deal if sold," she added, wistfully. "But we don't like to sell them. Besides, we never saw anybody who wanted to buy them." Acquaintance under one roof passes quickly into intimacy. Love moves with fleet feet when two young people breakfast and dine together with a vague chaperone. A tropical garden, soft evenings and youthful impetuosity shorten the span to experience thought necessary to precede an engagement. Georgiella was the soul of domestic comfort--as Southern women are. She was a high-spirited, variable, bewitching creature. At first, the Northerner could not understand her indifference to her obligations as a mortgager. Why did she not sell the Ming vase? She looked upon debt not as a disgrace, but as an inconvenience. Foreclosure proceedings were under way, and it never occurred to the two women to stop them with even a part of the fifty dollars which Ellesworth paid for his board in advance. When Ellesworth found out that this trait was not a pauper's, but like Georgiella's strange beauty, constitutional, he forbore to criticise it. In truth, he was too much in love now to criticise the girl at all. It is probable that if she had robbed his pocketbook he would have merely said, "How interesting! it is her tropical way." A day or two before Christmas he drove over to Sunshine and returned with a happy, tired face. "You would take a Christmas present from me, wouldn't you?" he asked with unprecedented humility. "It's in a paper," he explained. "What is it?" she asked uncomfortably, for she felt his serious look upon her. "It's--eh--a trifle that I think you will like," replied Ellesworth without a smile. * * * * * Christmas came cheerfully into the mortgaged house. Georgiella cried a little for her father's sake. In spite of her bereavement, and of the fact that she was sure the sheriff would attach the house that day of all others, she did not feel very wretched. She felt that she was wicked because she was so happy. There were wings in her heart. It was not the custom to hang up stockings at the Benson's. "My things have always been put into the Ming vase," Georgiella explained, "and the others went on the breakfast table." She did not look at Ellesworth often. Her eyes dropped. Her cheeks were like red camellias. She felt in a hurry all of the time. The young man himself took the situation out in looking at his watch. It seemed to him as if the world were turning over too fast. He thought of what he meant to do stolidly, notwithstanding. They went out and gathered mistletoe in the swamps. He climbed trees and tore his hands and fell into the water with zest. They brought home a barrelful of it. He thought how he had bought it at twenty-five cents a spray on Washington street. He held a great branch of it behind Georgiella over her head, and looked at her. She started like a wild animal, and kept ahead of him all the way home. On Christmas morning Ellesworth got up early--he had hardly slept; he could not rest, and went softly downstairs. The door into the dining-room was open, and she was there before him. She stood before the Ming vase. The mistletoe branch to which he had fastened his present, and which he had set into the vase to look like a little Christmas tree, lay tossed beneath her feet. The pearly white berries were scattered on the floor. The mortgage was in her hand--trust deeds, principal notes, interest notes, insurance policy. She was turning the papers over helplessly. She looked scared and was quite pale. Her bosom heaved boisterously. She heard him and confronted him. She managed to stammer out,-- "What, sir, does this mean?" It required a brave man to tell her in her present mood; but he did. "It only means that I love you," said Ellesworth point blank. The girl went from blinding white to blazing crimson, but she stood her ground. The mortgage papers shook in her hands. He thought that she was going to tear them up. To gain time, for he dared not approach her, he stooped and picked up the disdained mistletoe. When he had raised himself she shot out this awful question, looking at him as she did when they first met. "Are _you--He_?" The young man bowed his head before her. If he had set fire to her place, or robbed her father's grave, she could not have regarded him with a more crushing scorn. She tried to speak again, but her passion choked her. "I--I give you back your home," he protested humbly. "It is mine no longer. It is your own Don't blame me. I love you." "My father did not bring me up to take valuable presents from--Boston--gentlemen!" blazed the Southern girl. She waved him aside, swept by him without another look, and melted out of the room. But he noticed that she took the mortgage papers with her. In the course of the morning he threw himself upon the mercy of Mrs. McCorkle. "I have a right," he said; "I want to make her my wife." "Georgiella is not behaving prettily," said Mrs. McCorkle severely. "If a Northerner _does act like_ a gentleman, the least a Southern girl can do is to behave like a lady. I will speak to Georgiella, sir." Georgiella came to the Christmas dinner with blazing eyes. She ate in silence, looking like an offended goddess, dressed in an old black silk gown of her mother's trimmed with aged Valenciennes lace. But after dinner she stayed in the dining-room while Mrs. McCorkle and Aunt Betsey went into the kitchen. She walked up to the Ming vase and stood before it. Ellesworth followed her. "I have been thinking it over," she began abruptly in a quaint affectation of a business-like tone. "I will keep the mortgage--thank you, sir. It _is_ my home, you know," she put in pugnaciously. "But I will pay for it, if you please." "_Pay for it!_" gasped Ellesworth. "Yes, sir; I will sell you the Ming vase," returned Miss Benson calmly, "and the two Revolutionary papers, and the coin of George the Second and the rest--" She waved her hand toward the glass-case. "You may take them to Boston with you." These were her assets. Ellesworth looked at her for a moment, torn between astonishment, pity, amusement and love; but love got the better of them all, and he answered solemnly,-- "Yes, I will take the Ming vase, and the Revolutionary papers, and the old coins and you too, my darling!" "Well, I _do_ like you," admitted Georgiella. Suddenly she began to droop and tremble, and then to sob. Then he held her. "You must give me a first mortgage; you must," demanded the young man. "I must have everything--the whole--no other claims to come in from any quarter of the universe. You understand. You've _got_ to be my wife!" he exploded in a kind of glorious anger. She could not deny him, for she thought it was the Northern way of wooing, and smiled divinely. "And now--may I?" He took the mistletoe branch from the Ming vase and held it over her head. Their eyes closed in ecstacy. Mrs. McCorkle gave a funny little feminine scream of dismay. She had heard no sound, and had come in from the kitchen to see if they were quarreling. "And I'll put it in the trust deed," he whispered humbly, "that I will make you happy, dear!" When Ellesworth rode over to Sunshine for his next mail he found the following letter awaiting him: 1111 COURT STREET, BOSTON, MASS., _Dec._ 22, 1890. _Mr. Francis B. Ellesworth:_ DEAR FRANK,--What the deuce do you mean by countermanding Benson's foreclosure at this time of day? It makes a peck of trouble. In Boston we are too busy to fool with affairs this way. Messrs. Screw & Claw desire me to enclose their little bill. Mine will keep until you get here. Yours truly, JOSEPH TODD. COLONEL ODMINTON A SEQUEL TO "A REPUBLIC WITHOUT A PRESIDENT." The Colonel paced his cabin alone. The new expression which success models was becoming intensified from day to day upon his face. He had outwitted the greatest nation in the world; he had defied the best detective service of modern times; he was rich beyond his dizziest dreams; he could aspire to any position; he would be an eastern prince perhaps, and drowsy-looking girls should wave peacock fans and soothe his memory to rest with crooning songs. What a delicious future he saw rising before him! His consummate stroke of piracy should purchase him a life of lotus ease. The Colonel, had at last achieved; and, as is too often the case with extraordinary success, his stupendous act had robbed him of vitality and invention. Already he felt and acknowledged a dismemberment of his will. But a few days before, he was of all men, the most alert, the most ingenious, the most courageous, the most ambitious; while now, he lived in dreams, which he evoked as persistently as the witch of Endor evoked the ghost of Saul. His nature had undergone a revolution, in which he gloried. Had he been poor, he would not have accepted his sudden enervation without a struggle. But he was rich--thank God! rich--and rejoiced that he was to gratify his new-born languor. His son alone had access to his luxurious cabin. That boy, who had been the ready and ignorant accomplice of his father's picturesque villainy, had already begun to grow thin with shame. He saw his father transformed from a virile into a sleek man. He himself had changed during the few days of his knowledge of the secret from a pliant boy into a silent accusation. The Colonel could not look his son straight in the eyes. This was the first warning to his diseased mind that he was not the greatest man of his age. The Colonel had moreover a sense of security that unapprehended malefactors cannot feel. The pledge of the United States Government had been solemnly given. He could not be punished. His freedom was assured. Whenever he paced the deck, he filled his lungs with the pure, salt air, and allowed them to expand without stint. There was nothing contracted on his horizon. True, he had lost his country--but he had gained wealth. He felt sure of admiration, and of some applause. He remembered that an unextradited bank-robber had purchased a barony from the King of Würtemburg, and had lived there much respected. What position might he not buy with his American gold? Still, he was haunted by a feeling of mingled dissatisfaction and unrest that marred the pride he felt in his own achievement. Was it due to his son's speechless denunciation? Or did it come from the fact that his authority seemed to be impaired? There was no insubordination nor mutiny among the sailors. It had not gone so far as that, with the well-paid and well-fed men. Perhaps it never would. But men do not easily obey a scoundrel or an outlaw except when it is understood that they are felons themselves. In a certain sense the crew of the "Lightning" rejoiced in their master's superb feat. The venom of piracy had entered their veins. They firmly believed that Colonel Odminton would soon cast off his mask, and turn the most wonderful product of marine architecture into an irresistible pirate craft. They dreamed of an inaccessible island--of confused wealth, of many vices, and unrestricted carousals. Therefore they still obeyed readily, but with an air of _abandon_ that puzzled their commander. But Colonel Odminton did not suspect these natural speculations, for he was looking forward to a life of great respectability as well as of unrivalled luxury. For ten days or so, the "Lightning" danced over the Atlantic. Of course, it must come to shore somewhere. People cannot live on gold. They must eat. The superb electric vessel had ice-making machines; and retorts for distilling the salt water into fresh; but no electrodes were there, to reduce wood to sugar or coal to beef. The Colonel felt his cheek sting with the excitement of coming to land. At the same time he felt a reluctance to do so. He dreaded to meet men. He could not expel the consciousness that is common to all culprits,--namely, the feeling that he would be the centre of observation. He could not be apprehended; but supposing that he were not well received? On the other hand, when the crew learned of the decision to make for land, they were almost riotous with joy. They were mad for the long-delayed chance to spend their high wages in vice and drink. If nations would conspire to pass an international law to prohibit women and rum at every port, what a magnificent stride to uninterrupted manhood all sailors would be forced to take! But Captain Hans Christian shook his head as the "Lightning" forged toward the land. There were some traits that Rupert did not inherit. His limpid heart understood the disgrace of his position. He pined for freedom and gradually wasted away. With feverish eyes he watched for the English coast. It is possible that he had, bereft of an honest father, meditated desertion at his first opportunity. Now, at last, they sighted land. The vessel that was swifter than all other ships afloat, was undisguised. The Colonel had no thought of converting her into the "Mary Jane" again. No flight, no concealment was now necessary. It was just past sunrise when the "Lightning" glided into the troubled harbor of Penzance. The inhabitants of Land's End are no stay-a-beds, and when the oil-skinned fishermen, who were ready to push their boats off in the rising tide, lifted up their eyes and beheld the graceful monster mysteriously undulating in, with no help of sails or steam, they called to each other, they uttered direful exclamations, and they assembled in ever increasing groups upon the sands. One ran to the public house and brought back to the throng a greasy proclamation, upon which the picture of a vessel was stamped. Upon the cliffs, red-coats pointed to the stranger, and shook their heads ominously. Before the "Lightning" had dropped her anchor, the whole population of Penzance was out, gesticulating, pointing, execrating. "That's she, sure enough. That's her sheer in the pictur'. Them's the di-mensions given. Blast the pirates! Old England hain't no place for them." "'Ere, Bill! you get the Colonel down. We'll send 'em buzzin' to Davy Jones' locker if they ventur' ashore here!" The "Lightning" had come to anchor without colors at her stern. As she had no mast, there was no opportunity to fly a signal at her head, or the Union Jack at her peak. After the manner of steam yachts she had a pole that could be fitted in a raking position aft. "As it isn't eight bells, we need no flags," explained Colonel Odminton. "Shall we fly the Union Jack, then?" asked Captain Hans Christian. The Colonel changed color. "Fly?" he snarled, "By ----! Fly nothing!" The men on board had noticed the confusion on the shore. They thought little of it. When they had escaped down the Potomac with the ransom, they forgot that a hundred cameras were trained upon them. Even their stupendous speed could not outstride the sensitive plate that can catch a perfect likeness in one two-thousandth part of a second. The duplex shutter is craftier than the criminal. The camera can outwit the cannon ball. It did not occur to the Colonel that the United States Government would send proclamations to every friendly nation in the world, begging each to distribute them broadcast to every port; and that these contained a reproduced picture of Colonel Odminton's venture, with a description of himself; calling upon the nations to do him no harm, but to grant him no hospitality whatever. While the Colonel was dawdling across the water, the telegraph and the swift "Liners," had alarmed the world. There was neither admiration nor mercy in the hearts of the millions who were watching for the "Lightning's" appearance. For once, there were no sentimental women waiting to cosset the bandit. He had held the President's wife his prisoner. At last the soft heart of womanhood was turned to stone. In short, Colonel Odminton and his crew were declared outcasts from the world; and even the most abandoned nations sprang to the appeal of the United States, and stood ready to enforce the decree. Colonel Odminton watched his launch approaching the beach. He had not allowed his son to go, and the two stood together facing the enraged town. Already the coast guards were drawn up, awaiting the launch. When it had come within fifty yards of the pier, the man in command, cried:--"Stop her!" in a loud voice. Captain Christian obeyed quickly. He and his crew were near enough to see that the hand of every inhabitant had grasped a stone, ready to hurl. Hate distorted the faces of the honest Englishmen, who traditionally loathed a pirate worse than a papist. "We will give you half an hour to leave the harbor!" bawled the Captain at the launch. "My orders are to fire upon every one of you who attempts to land. There is no landing for pirates on England's shores. Get out!" "D---- ye, get out!" The refrain was caught up from throat to throat and hurled at the frightened sailors. The shouts reached to the vessel, until the Colonel easily understood their import. But neither he nor his, as yet, knew that the sight of this beautiful vessel would raise a similar howl of hate, a like demonstration of hostility, in every port from China, westward to San Francisco. Hastily he gave orders to trip the anchor: in ten minutes he picked up his men, who were cursing civilization. With the pale skin cramped upon his face, with trembling hands and blinded eyes he guided the "Lightning" out of the inhospitable harbor. In an hour the world knew what had happened at Penzance. The smallest harbor on the English and French coast thrilled with the excitement of the novel sport, while Colonel Odminton sat in his cabin alone, bereft of his complacency, and beginning to be touched with the terrors that the hunted fox feels when it sights the first hound. "Where now?" Captain Christian had been knocking gently, and now opened his commander's door for orders. The Captain was a cautious man, and was the only one on board, who by reason of his temperament, felt the serious position to the full. Colonel Odminton turned his head moodily, and scowled at his Captain. "To hell with you!" he ejaculated. "Yes, sir," said Captain Christian respectfully, "but we cannot get provisions there." * * * * * It was deepest night when a gurgling thud, a splash of returning waters, a rustling of chain, told that another anchor had been dropped, and that another vessel had found rest in the harbor of Brest. Her side lights were quickly extinguished, and a white light at her bow as she swung to the tide, told curious eyes, if there were any, that the stranger was snug for the night. Four bells tinkled here and tinkled there, nor did the new-comer omit the resonant salutation to Father Time. To starboard and to port, great hulls, not many hundred feet away, could be distinguished by the sharpest eyes, rising blacker than the night. The Mediterranean squadron of France had but made port the day before, and were due in Cherbourg on the morrow. The last patient launch had brought the last gay officer aboard, and peace commanded the formidable fleet. Through the port-holes, veiled with silk, a light glimmered from the unconscious vessel that had just dipped anchor. Colonel Odminton, at that moment, was parting the curtains from his son's bed, and was regarding him with conflicting expressions. The lad slept restlessly, and under his father's eyes began to toss and mutter. Fearing to waken him, the unhappy man withdrew softly to his own cabin. There he poured himself out a full glass of brandy and began to pace the floor furiously. It was a changed face that looked apprehensively at the door every time the timbers creaked in the chop of the sea. He was no longer the elegant, complacent, and successful criminal; he was the bandit at bay. He was distrustful, suspicious, ready for revenge. If he had only had Gatling guns aboard, he would have taught the inhabitants of Penzance a costly lesson for their threats and curses. Now, for the first time he rebelled against his lineage, and hated Englishmen and England with a virulent abhorrence. But France was different. Tolerant blood ran in her veins. Here he felt secure from insult. The nation that had died in ecstasy under the nod of Napoleon, could not be otherwise than liberal to him. Colonel Odminton did not exactly expect a reception by the President of the Republic; but he did look forward to a respectful and harmless curiosity that would titillate his pride and remove the memory of his indignities. His face began to assume a more benevolent expression, and the cowering, snarling look which comes to those who find themselves detested for good reasons, and thrust out, gave way to one of hope, such as comes to the convict when his term of imprisonment is nearly over. Soothed by such imaginations, the Colonel smiled with disdain, snapped his finger at all the world, furtively examined his secret safe, and went to bed. It did not seem to him that he had been slumbering as many minutes as he had hours, when he was startled by a violent tramping upon the deck above him, by the clanking revolutions of the machinery that hoisted the anchor, and then, before he had mastered his laggard senses, by imperative knocks at his door. Colonel Odminton pulled the spring, and his Captain bounded in. Terror was engraved on every line of that usually calm and observant face. "For God's sake!" he cried in broken English and Danish, "we are to be blown up in ten minutes!" His jaws chattered without saying any more. He was stiff with fear. With inconceivable rapidity Colonel Odminton thrust himself into his clothes and rushed upon deck. He had not time to put on his cap, and as he emerged in the rosy light of the breaking sun, his bare head was seen in all its now notorious characteristics. A cry greeted him. Encompassed about by the huge mastiffs of war, more formidable than anything the vaunted navy of the United States could boast, the toy terrier shivered. At the earliest dawn, the look-out upon the "Formidable" had discerned the stranger, and had reported the suspicious-looking vessel to his superior officer. The French Republic, so friendly to the Government of the United States, had eagerly distributed placards describing the nefarious Colonel and his yacht. But yesterday, copies had been delivered into the hands of the officers of the squadron with orders to keep a sharp watch for the outlaw. He was not to be harmed, but to be driven away from France, if necessary, at the torpedoes breath. The Admiral gave quick orders, which were enthusiastically obeyed. A fleet of launches were now untethered upon the "Lightning." "No masts! No steam! Propelled by electricity! It is she!" Such exclamations mixed with oaths were exchanged by the Frenchmen as they surrounded Colonel Odminton's venture. "Ahoy there!" cried an officer. The sleepy Scandinavian in the Colonel's pay made no answer. He scowled at France vindictively. "I know you. I give you ten minutes to depart. Va t'en! Sacre Nom de Dieu, if you ever appear on ze coast of France again, pouf! sink!" By this time the Colonel had appeared on deck. The French natives, a hundred of them, within less than a biscuit's throw of the most eminent malefactor of the age, gazed at him curiously, and then burst into a medley of curses. As these envenomed oaths struck Colonel Odminton, he staggered as if he had been slapped in the face. Carbines were levelled at him threateningly; but the French officers imperiously gave orders for all weapons to be laid aside. By this time, Captain Hans had the anchor raised. Although this was done by electricity, still the men worked furiously. These embryonic pirates tottered like their commander with an overwhelming fear. This terrible, this unexpected, this deadly persecution--how far did it extend? What was its origin? Was it a chance indignation that had fomented in England, and had leaped the channel, or was it a decree of outlawry that was passed by all the world? It was enough to scatter the Colonel's pride, to tear out of him his complacency. The proud Southerner now knew, like the prisoner at Chillon, what it was to feel the hair turn white. An arch traitor may lose his own country, and get a footing in a foreign land, however contemptible his position may be: but Colonel Odminton and his crew had no country whatever to turn to. Civilization had with one accord arisen against him. The islands of the sea were three thousand leagues away. Unsteadily he touched the lever and his ill-omened craft forged ahead. As it did so, it grazed the side of a boat. With a final curse, one of the men in the launch stood up, wadded a piece of paper in his hands and flung it at the Colonel. It struck the malefactor full in the face. The paper itself did not hurt him, but that malicious act was as fatal to him as if he had been hit in the groin by a French bullet. Amid derisive shrieks and whistles the "Lightning" sped out of the harbor. The men upon its decks shook their fists at France, and cast sinister looks at their employer. As the Colonel went below, his face white as the silver poplar, his hands trembling like leaves in a storm, he mechanically turned at the companionway and picked up the wad of paper that had rolled to the sill. It was a copy of the Proclamation warning every nation not to grant him hospitality; in the name of the American Republic. * * * * * Two hours later, the Colonel and his Captain sat opposite each other, talking in low tones. The Proclamation lay open on the table between them. "It is impossible then to provision her at all," said the Captain slowly; "there is no hope for us, but to surrender or starve: disguise is impossible." The Colonel nodded wearily. "We have food for twenty men for three days; we have power left to go three thousand knots at ten knots an hour. The men are murmuring; where can we renew our power? The yacht is useless in two weeks." "It is lucky," continued Captain Hans, after a pregnant pause, "that none of the men picked up this paper; you would have been knifed before night." If it is possible, Colonel Odminton turned a shade paler, but he did not say anything. The smallest child could see that he was a broken man. What a trap had he sprung for himself! "The case is desperate, sir," began the Captain again. "What do you propose?" The Colonel shook his head vacantly. "We can take the launch, the men, and the gold, abandon her here, and land on the coast. We might escape clear." The Colonel shook his head vigorously. He was ready to give up his life, but not his venture. "Then we will go, sir. Pay us, give us the launch, and we will go. We cannot stay to be starved and tossed upon the sea with not even a jury-mast and a handkerchief." "Let them go, father!" Rupert had entered from his own room, and stood pleadingly before the criminal. The unhappy man looked at his son: back at his Captain; and nodded assent. "Then we will go now," said the Captain decidedly. "We are within ten miles of the coast. The launch will carry us easily. Will you give us a hundred thousand in gold? You may keep the rest, you and the boy and the three niggers." The Colonel mechanically went to an inner room, unlocked a secret safe, took out a heavy weight of gold and threw it upon the table before the Captain with a clang. The stolen money was newly coined, and the gold glistened in the port-hole light. The Captain tied the bag, and held out his hand as he arose. He was honest after his kind, though a masterful man; but the Proclamation had thrown him upon his self-interest. Still, he felt sorry for the man whom the Proclamation had shrivelled. One of the Colonel's faithful colored sailors was sent to the wheel. For a half an hour there was a bustle of chests and men. There was a counting of gold, and a commanding and warning voice. Finally there was a splash, as the powerful launch dipped into the water from its davits. There was a bounding of many feet, and a cry to shove her off. "Good-bye, Colonel!" one man shouted; but the rest kept a silence. They knew that many dangers were before them. Then the launch became a speck against a gray coast. "Where now, father?" asked Rupert timidly. For the first time since the conception of his infamous deed, the man looked his son straight between the eyes. Both faces were furrowed, and worn, and prematurely aged; the eyes of both were sunken and rigid. "Home, my son--home," said the Colonel gently. "Oh, father!" cried the lad. "Kiss me, my son, if you care to, and now leave me." * * * * * The United States had been plunged into a war with Patagonia. The How of it was a disgrace to the Great Republic. Jingoism had done the deed, and the mischief of the matter was that the Patagonian cruisers outnumbered our own. There was scurry in the navy yards, especially within that upon the Potomac. Old, disabled monitors were galvanized into the delusion of life: guns were hurried to bombard an inhospitable coast thousands of miles away. Officials at their desks were telegraphing cipher dispatches to England to furnish vessels of war on hire, which she politely refused to do. Congress was passing an unrestricted maritime bill. During this hubbub a very unusual thing happened to increase the confusion of the Navy Department at Washington. About nine o'clock in the morning, while several ships of war were making ready for sea, a foreign torpedo boat was seen to _ricochet_ up the river, passing by hidden torpedoes as if she were inspired, and then suddenly, with a swirl, coming to a dead halt before one of the largest of the formidable vessels. In alarm, the crew of the American flagship was drummed to arms, and the gunners were called to their ports. Evidently the virulent torpedo-boat was a foe, bent to suicide after she had destroyed. The fact that she carried no flag, no masts, nothing but a bare hull, made her alarming in the extreme. It was an apparition of death. The American fleet trembled. At what invincible vessel would the bolt be launched? Officers paled and swore. At this terrible display of audacity, a paralysis had overtaken them. Only a boy was visible on the stern of the ominous stranger. He pulled out a handkerchief and waved it. He seemed to touch a button, and the anchor rattled to its length. Captain and gunners breathed relief. By this time the murmur of the arrival had spread, and thousands of quaking men lined the wharves to inspect the mystery. At last someone thought of sending a boat to board her. Twenty men manned a launch and steamed out cautiously. "Ahoy, there! Where do you belong?" demanded the officer in charge of the launch. "I have a letter to the President of the United States," answered the boy with quivering lips. "Whose vessel is this? Let down the gangway." Two black sailors sprang from the hold of the mysterious vessel to obey. "She belongs to the United States," replied the boy. "Please let me take the letter. You can take the boat." Astounded beyond measure, the officer leaped on board. No name was visible. "What is her name?" he asked eagerly. "She has none. The President can name her. She was called the 'Lightning,'" said the boy steadily. "By ----! I might have known," cried the officer. "Where is He? Who are you?" "He is not here. The letter tells, sir. I am his son." Rupert put both hands upon the spokes of the wheel, and held his head up straight. He faced the officer who had ordered the chase when the "Lightning" escaped with his country's gold. What thoughts went through the lad's mind? Did he regret this last and most quixotic step? Did he long to "up the anchor," and give the signal to fly ahead? Did he regret freedom and lawlessness? Or was his heart that was broken by disgrace, healed by the atonement? "Let me have the letter." The officer spoke after a long look at the son of America's most execrated malefactor. His voice was not harsh, for he divined how the boy's loyalty to his father and his country really blended into an emotion which men call honor. Rupert put his hand to his breast:-- "My orders are to deliver the letter to the President with my own hand." "You shall do so. The President is there." The officer pointed to a high, white monster of distinction. "He is aboard there. He is watching you this minute. Jump in!" The boy paled. For only a moment his courage deserted him, and he almost tumbled into the launch. A great crowd of witnesses had gathered about the President, as if to protect him. The word "assassin," was whispered from man to man. Even the officer could not command an avenue to the Chief Executive. "Let him be brought," said the President authoritatively. With a marine glass he had watched the motions of the vessel, the boy, and the officer. "I know him. Give way there! Let him come alone." Then the men formed a living circle with the President in its midst, and Rupert stood alone with him in it, with head bared, and with a letter in his shaking hand. "You are Rupert Odminton," said the President distinctly, after a long searching gaze. "You have come with a noble purpose. What is it?" Without answer, with blood beating a wild tattoo, the boy bowed his head in acquiescence. He handed the President the letter. This the President took, and opened and read. Then he did what the people will not soon forget. He drew the son of his captor towards him, put his left hand protectingly upon the lad's head, and with a ringing voice read the letter aloud. "Mr. President, and people of the United States:--I thought myself a god, and know myself a felon. I, who meant to instruct the people, have learned a lesson such as even death cannot teach. I render to you my account. My son will show you in what secret safe in the vessel is preserved the gold that I stole from the Treasury. It belongs to the Country. There lack a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. I hereby bequeath the boat to the United States in payment for the balance I owe. It cost much more, and is the fastest vessel in the world. Re-christened, it may be of service in the approaching war; and the stain upon it, which my soul tells me is indelible, may fade. I give my son to you as hostage of my good faith. "Mr. President, I am without a country. I have no citizenship in the world. I beg you, if your kindness prompts you, to offer me pardon, that my bones may rest upon the soil I love. My son will guide such a messenger of forgiveness to me. Let him be sent soon, if at all, for my crime scourges me so that I cannot live. "ODMINTON." "He was no common man," said the Secretary of State, in a voice of great feeling. "Mr. President, I suggest that the pardon be sent immediately. I think he has suffered enough." The President smiled benignly. "Mr. Secretary," he said, turning to the head of the navy, "shall we accept the yacht? I think the Treasury will find room for the gold. Can the navy find room for Colonel Odminton's atonement?" The eyes of the Secretary of the Navy glistened. "With that vessel fixed into a torpedo boat, we can whip the world! I shall put the youngster as middy aboard of her; he understands her better than any one else. With your permission, Mr. President, the boy is enrolled, and his commission will be made out at once." The Secretary bowed deferentially. "Do you wish to enter the United States navy?" The great head of the nation bent to the lad as he would have to his own son. "Oh, sir! But my father," cried Rupert, broken by pride and shame and filial love. "You will bear the pardon to-morrow," said the President kindly. "I would rather go now. I think he needs it," whispered Rupert timidly. Then the boy, keyed so high, fell and was borne away. * * * * * Who does not love the Everglades when he knows them? The adorer of the warm woods had rather put his arm about a palmetto, and his cheek against its rough surface, than be softly met by the tenderest of women. Oh, the witchery of the moss-waving Everglades! "Father! Father!" A longing treble cut the languorous air. The hidden hut behind the hidden bay was empty. The boy and the officer searched hastily and fearfully. "He is in the woods. Oh, you know--come!" Behind the terror-stricken son the officer plunged into the thicket. Gloomy shades surrounded him. Warm breaths and new odors caressed him. Almost lifted out of the body by these new sensations, he followed with speeding feet. "Help! Quick!" The shrill voice recalled him. Before the officer knew it, he was upon a figure kneeling beside a body under a great tree. "Father! _Father!_ He has forgiven you. It is all right!" But the pleading voice of the lad faltered into an awful silence. The soldier put his hand upon the penitent's head. It was warm. The dead man's arms were outstretched upon the great tree. His body was upon the huge roots. His lips were as if he had but just kissed the bark. Did his sin at the last restrain him, that he dared not to touch the soil of America, and fondle it as his own? He had died unpardoned: it was to be, that he should be tortured to the end. But as to when he died, they could not tell--for his strong limbs were set; the swarming Southern ants had not desecrated him, and the moaning tree seemed to be explaining that she had kept him warm upon her lap. He was buried beneath the sod to which, with the home-sickness of the true Southerner, he had crawled back to die. They laid the pardon in his folded hands. The officer walked out of the Everglades, with bared head. He could not understand his own emotion. But the weeping lad followed slowly. He heard a cadence above the grave. Rupert understood it. It was the dirge of the Live Oak. THE END. 
33016	----	ASTOUNDING STORIES 20¢ _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_ W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher HARRY BATES, Editor The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. _The other Clayton magazines are:_ ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, WESTERN LOVE STORIES and JUNGLE STORIES. _More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines._ * * * * * VOL. VII, No. 2 CONTENTS AUGUST, 1931 THE DANGER FROM THE DEEP RALPH MILNE FARLEY 149 _Marooned on the Sea-Floor, His Hoisting Cable Cut, Young Abbot Is Left at the Mercy of the Man-Sharks._ BROOD OF THE DARK MOON CHARLES WILLARD DIFFIN 168 _Once More Chet, Walt and Diane Are United in a Wild Ride to the Dark Moon. But This Time They Go as Prisoners of Their Deadly Enemy Schwartzmann._ (Beginning a Four-Part Novel.) IF THE SUN DIED R. F. STARZL 198 _Tens of Millenniums After the Death of the Sun There Comes a Young Man Who Dares to Open the Frozen Gate of Subterranea._ THE MIDGET FROM THE ISLAND H. G. WINTER 214 _Garth Howard, Prey to Half the Animals of the Forest, Fights Valiantly to Regain His Lost Five Feet of Size._ (A Complete Novelette.) THE MOON WEED HARL VINCENT 236 _Unwittingly the Traitor of the Earth, Van Pits Himself Against the Inexorably Tightening Web of Plant-Beasts He Has Released from the Moon._ THE PORT OF MISSING PLANES CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 255 _In the Underground Caverns of the Selom, Dr. Bird Once Again Locks Wills with the Subversive Genius, Saranoff._ THE READERS CORNER ALL OF US 273 _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories_ * * * * * Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription, $2.00 Issued monthly by The Clayton Magazines, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York, N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group. For advertising rates address The Newsstand Group, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York; or The Wrigley Bldg., Chicago. * * * * * The Danger from the Deep _By Ralph Milne Farley_ [Illustration: _He caught a glimpse of the grinning fish-face._] [Sidenote: Marooned on the sea-floor, his hoisting cable cut, young Abbot is left at the mercy of the man-sharks.] Within a thick-walled sphere of steel eight feet in diameter, with crystal-clear fused-quartz windows, there crouched an alert young scientist, George Abbot. The sphere rested on the primeval muck and slime at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, one mile beneath the surface. The beam from his 200-watt searchlight, which shot out through one of his three windows into the dark blue depths beyond, seemed faint indeed, yet it served to illuminate anything which crossed it, or on which it fell. For a considerable length of time since his descent to the ocean floor, young Abbot had clung to one of the thick windows of his bathysphere, absorbed by the marine life outside. Slender small fish with stereoscopic eyes, darted in and out of the beam of light. Swimming snails floated by, carrying their own phosphorescent lanterns. Paper-thin transparent crustaceans swam into view, followed by a few white shrimps, pale as ghosts. Then a mist of tiny fish swept across his field of vision. Abbot cupped his face in his hands, and stared out. The incongruous thought flashed across his mind that thus he had often sat by the window of his club in New York, and gazed out at the passing motor traffic. His searchlight cut a sharp swath through the blue muck. More than once he thought he saw large moving fish-like forms far away. "Speed up the generator," he called into his phone. Immediately the shaft of light brightened. He set about trying to focus upon one of those dim elusive shapes which had so intrigued him. * * * * * But suddenly the searchlight went out! Intent on repairing the apparatus as rapidly as possible, Abbot snapped the button-switch, which ought to have illuminated the interior of his diving-sphere; but the lights did not go on. Then he noticed that the electric fan, on which he depended to keep his air-supply properly mixed, had stopped. He spoke into the telephone transmitter, which hung in front of his mouth: "Hi, there, up on the boat! My electric power is cut off. I'm down here with my fan stopped and my heat cut off. Hoist me up, and be quick about it!" "O.K., sir." As the young man waited for the winch to get under way on the boat a mile above him, he pulled out his electric pocket flashlight and sent its feeble ray out through his quartz-glass window into the dim royal-purple depths beyond, in one last attempt to get a look at those mysterious fish-shapes which had so intrigued him. And then he saw one of them distinctly. Evidently they had swum closer when the glow of his searchlight had stopped; and so the sudden flash of his pocket-light had taken them by surprise. For, as he snapped it on, he caught an instant's glimpse of a grinning fish-face pressed close against the outside of his thick window-pane, as though trying to peer in at him. The fish-face somewhat resembled the head of a shark, except that the mouth was a bit smaller and not quite so leeringly brutal, and the forehead was rather high and domed. But what most attracted Abbot's attention, in the brief instant before the startled fish whisked away in a swirl of phosphorescent foam, was the fact that, from beneath each of the two pectoral fins, there protruded what appeared to be a skinny human arm, terminating in three fingers and a thumb! Then the fish was gone. Abbot snapped off his little light. The diving-sphere quivered, as the hoisting-cable tautened. But suddenly the sphere settled back to the bottom of the sea with a jarring thud. "Cable's parted, sir!" spoke a frantic voice in his ear-phones. * * * * * For a moment George Abbot sat stunned with horror. Then his mind began to race, like a squirrel in a cage, seeking some way of escape. Perhaps he could manage to unscrew the 400-pound trap door at the top of the sphere, and shoot to the surface, with the bubbling-out of the confined air. But his scientifically trained mind made some rapid calculations which showed him this was absurd. At the depth of a mile, the pressure is roughly 156 atmospheres, that is to say, 156 times the air-pressure at the surface of the earth; and the moment that his sphere was opened to this pressure, he would be blown back inwardly away from the man-hole, and the air inside his sphere would suddenly be compressed to only 1/156 of its former volume. Not only would this pressure be sufficient to squash him into a mangled pulp, but also the sudden compression of the air inside the sphere would generate enough heat to fry that mangled pulp to a crisp cinder almost instantly. As George Abbot came to a full realization of the horror of these facts, he recoiled from the trap-door as though it were charged with death. "For Heaven's sakes, do something!" he shrieked in agony into the transmitter. "Courage, sir," came back the reply. "We are rigging up a grapple just as fast as we can. Long before your oxygen gives out, we shall slide it down to you along the telephone line, which is the only remaining connection between us. When it settles about your sphere, and you can see its hooks outside your window by the light of your pocket-flash, let us know, and we'll trip the grapple and haul you up." "Thank you," replied the young man. * * * * * He was calm now, but it was an enforced and numb kind of calmness. Mechanically he throttled down his oxygen supply, so as to make it last longer. Mechanically he took out his notebook and pencil and started to write down, in the dark, his experiences; for he was determined to leave a full account for posterity, even though he himself should perish. After setting down a categorical description of the successive partings of the electric light cable and the hoist cable, and his thoughts and feelings in that connection, he described in detail the shark with hands, which he had seen through the window of his sphere. He tried to be very explicit about this, for he realized that his account would probably be laid, by everyone, to the disordered imagination of his last dying moments; being a true scientist, George Abbot wanted the world to believe him, so that another sphere would be built and sent down to the ocean depths, to find out more about these peculiar denizens of the deep. Of course, no one would believe him. This thought kept drumming in his ears. No one--except Professor Osborne. Old Osborne would believe! George Abbot's mind flashed back to a conversation he had had with the old professor, just before the oil interests had sent him on this exploring trip to discover the source of the large quantities of petroleum which had begun to bubble up from the bottom of a certain section of the Pacific very near where Abbot now was. * * * * * Osborne had said, "This petroleum suggests a gusher to me. And what causes gushers? Human beings, boring for oil, to satisfy human needs." "But, Professor," Abbot had objected, "there can't be any human beings at the bottom of the sea!" "Why not?" Professor Osborne had countered. "Life is supposed to have originated spontaneously in the slime of the ocean depths; therefore that part of the earth has had a head-start on us in the game of evolution. May not this head-start have been maintained right down to date, thus producing at the bottom of the sea a race superior to anything upon the dry land?" "But," Abbot had objected further, "if so, why haven't they come up to visit or conquer us? And why haven't we ever found any trace of them?" "Quite simple to explain," the old professor had replied. "Any creature who can live at the frightful pressures of the ocean depths could never survive a journey even halfway to the surface. It would be like our trying to live in an almost perfect vacuum. We should explode, and so would these denizens of the deep, if they tried to come up here. Even one of their dead bodies could not be brought to the surface in recognizable form. No contact with them will ever be possible, nor will they ever constitute a menace to any one--for which we may thank the Lord!" George Abbot now reviewed this conversation as he crouched in his diving-sphere in the purple darkness of the marine depths. Yes, old Osborne would believe him. The diary must be written for Osborne's eyes. * * * * * Abbot sent another beam from his pocket light suddenly out into the water; and this time he surprised several of the peculiar fish. These, like the first, had arms and hands and high intelligent foreheads. Then suddenly Abbot laughed a harsh laugh. Old Osborne had been wrong in one thing, namely in saying that the super-race of the deep would never be a menace to anyone. They were being a menace to George Abbot, right now, for it was undoubtedly they who had cut his cables. Probably they were possessed of much the same scientific curiosity with regard to him as he was with regard to them, and so they had determined to secure him as a museum specimen. The idea was a weird one. He laughed again, mirthlessly. "What is the matter, sir?" came an anxious voice in his ear-phones. "Hurry that grapple!" was his reply. "I have found out what cut my cables. There are some very intelligent-looking fish down here, and I think they want me for--" An ominous click sounded in his ears. Then silence. "Hello! Hello there!" he shouted. "Can you hear me up on the boat?" But no answer came back. The line remained dead. The strange fish had cut George Abbot's last contact with the upper world. The grapple-hooks could never find him now, for there was now not even a telephone cable to guide them down to his sphere. The realization that he was hopelessly lost, and that he had not much longer to live, came as a real relief to him, after the last few moments of frantic uncertainty. * * * * * Hoping that his sphere would eventually be found, even though too late to do him any good, he set assiduously to work jotting down all the details which he could remember of those strange denizens of the deep, the man-handed sharks, which he was now firmly convinced were the cause of his present predicament. He stared out through one of his windows into the brilliant blue darkness, but did not turn on his flashlight. How near were these enemies of his, he wondered? The presence of those menacing man-sharks, just outside the four-inch-thick steel shell, which withstood a ton of pressure for each square inch of its surface, began to obsess young Abbot. What were they doing out there in the watery-blue midnight? Perhaps, having secured his sphere as a scientific specimen, they were already preparing to cut into it so as to see what was inside. That these fish could cut through four inches of steel was not so improbable as it sounded, for had they not already succeeded in severing a rubber cable an inch and a half thick, containing two heavy copper wires, and also two inches of the finest, non-kinking steel rope! The young scientist flashed his pocket torch out through the thick quartz pane, but his enemies were nowhere in sight. Then he fell to calculating his oxygen supply. His normal consumption was about half a quart per minute, at which rate his two tanks would be good for thirty-six hours. His chemical racks contained enough soda-lime to absorb the excess carbon dioxide, enough calcium chloride to keep down the humidity and enough charcoal to sweeten the body odors for much more than that period. For a moment, the thought of these facts encouraged him. He had been down less than two hours. Perhaps the boat above him could affect his rescue in the more than thirty-four hours which remained! * * * * * But then he realized that he had failed to take into consideration the near-freezing temperature of the ocean depths. This temperature he knew to be in the neighborhood of 39 degrees Fahrenheit--even though no thermometer hung outside his window, as none could withstand the frightful pressures at the bottom of the sea. For it is one of the remarkable facts of inductive science that man has been able to figure out _a priori_ that the temperature at all deep points of the ocean, tropic as well as arctic, must always be stable at approximately 39 degrees. Abbot was clad only in a light cotton sailor suit, and now that his source of heat had been cut off by the severing of his power lines, his prison was rapidly becoming unbearably chilly. His thick steel sphere constituted such a perfect transmitter of heat that he might almost as well have been actually swimming in water of 39 degrees temperature, so far as comfort was concerned. Abbot's emotions ran all the gamut from stupefaction, through dull calmness, clear-headed thought, intense but aimless mental activity, nervousness, frenzy, and insane delirium, back to stupefaction again. During one of his periods of calmness, he figured out what an almost total impossibility there was of the chance that his ship, one mile above him on the surface, could ever find his sphere with grappling hooks. Yet he prayed for that chance. A single chance in a million sometimes does happen. * * * * * Several hours had by now elapsed since the parting of the young scientist's cables. It was bitterly cold inside the sphere. In order to keep warm, he had to exercise during his calm moments as systematically as his cramped quarters would permit. During his frantic moments he got plenty of exercise automatically. And of course all this movement used up more than the normal amount of oxygen, so that he was forced to open the valves on his tanks to two or three times their normal flow. His span of further life was thereby cut to ten or twelve hours, if indeed he could keep himself warm for that long. Why didn't the people on the boat do something! He was just about to indulge in one of his frantic fits of despair, when he heard or felt--the two senses being strangely commingled in his present situation--a clank or thump upon the top of his bathysphere. Instantly hope flooded him. Could it be that the one chance in a million had actually happened, and that a grapple from the boat above had actually found him? With feverish expectation, he pressed the button of his little electric pocket flashlight, and sent its feeble beam out through one of the quartz-glass windows into the blue-black depths beyond. No hooks in front of this window. He tried the others. No hooks there, either. But he did see plenty of the superhuman fish. Eighteen of them, he counted, in sight at one time. And also two huge snake-like creatures with crested backs and maned heads, veritable sea-serpents. As there was nothing the young man could do to assist in the grappling of his sphere by his friends in the boat above, he devoted his time to jotting down a detailed description of these two new beasts and of their behavior. One of the sharks appeared to be leading or driving them up to the bathysphere; and when they got close enough, Abbot was surprised to see that they wore what appeared to be a harness! * * * * * The clanking upon the bathysphere continued, and now the young man learned its cause. It was not the grapple hooks from his ship, but chains--chains which the man-armed sharks were wrapping around the bathysphere. Two more of the harnessed sea-serpents swam into view, and these two were hitched to a flat cart: an actual cart with wheels. The chains were attached to the harness of the original two beasts; they swam upward and disappeared from view; and the sphere slowly rose from the mucky bottom of the sea, to be lowered again squarely on top of the cart. The cart jerked forward, and a journey over the ocean floor began. Then the little pocket torch dimmed to a dull red glow, and the scene outside faded gradually from view. Abbot switched off the now useless light and set to work with scientific precision to record all these unbelievable events. In his interest and excitement, he had forgotten the ever-increasing cold; but gradually, as he wrote, the frigidity of his surroundings was forced on his consciousness. He turned on more oxygen, and exercised frantically. Meanwhile the cart, carrying his bathysphere, bumped along over an uneven road. From time to time, he tried his almost exhausted little light, but its dim red beam was completely absorbed by the blue of the ocean depths, and he could make out nothing except two bulking indistinct shapes, writhing on ahead of him. Finally even this degree of visibility failed, and he could see absolutely nothing outside. He was now so chilled and numb that he could no longer write. With a last effort, he noted down that fact, and then put the book away in its rack. He began to feel drowsy. Rousing himself, he turned on more oxygen. The effect was exhilaration and a feeling of silly joy. He began to babble drunkenly to himself. His head swam. His mind was in a daze. * * * * * It seemed hours later when he awoke. Ahead of him in the distance there was a dim pale-blue light, against which there could be seen, in silhouette, the forms of the two serpentine steeds and their fish-like drivers. Abbot's hands and feet were completely numb, but his head was clear. As they drew nearer to the light, it gradually took form, until it turned out to be the mouth of a cave. The cart entered it. Down a long tunnel they progressed, the light getting brighter and brighter as they advanced. The color of the light became a golden green. The rough stone walls of the tunnel could now be seen; and finally there appeared, ahead, two semicircular doors, swung back against the sides of the passage. Beyond these doors, the tunnel walls were smooth and exactly cylindrical, and on the ceiling there were many luminous tubes, which lit up the place as brightly as daylight. The cart came to a stop. The young scientist could now see with surprising distinctness his captors and their serpentine steeds, and even the details of the chains and the harness. He tried to pick up his diary, so as to jot down some points which he had theretofore missed; but his hands were too numb. But at least he could keep on observing; so he glued his eyes to the thick quartz window-pane once more. A short distance ahead in the passage there was another pair of doors. Presently these swung open and the cavalcade moved forward. Five or six successive pairs of doors were passed in this manner, and then the sea-serpents began to thrash about and become almost unmanageable. It was evident that some change not to their liking had taken place in their surroundings. * * * * * At last, as one of the portals swung open, young Abbot saw what appeared to be four deep-sea diving-suits. Could these suits contain human beings? And if so, who? It seemed incredible, for no diving-suit had ever been devised in which a man could descend to the depth of one mile, and live. These four figures, whatever they were, came stolidly forward and took charge of the cart. One of the sharks swam up to them and appeared to talk to them with its hands. Then the sharks unhitched the two sea-serpents and led them to the rear, and Abbot saw them no more. The four divers picked up the chains, and slowly towed the cart forward, their clumsy, ponderous movements contrasting markedly with the swift and sure swishings which had characterized the man-sharks and their snake-like steeds. Several more pairs of doors were passed, and then there met them four figures in less cumbersome diving-suits, like those ordinarily used by men just below the surface of the sea. One of the deep-sea divers then pressed his face close to the outside of one of the windows of the bathysphere, as though to take a look inside; but the four newcomers waved him away, and hurriedly picked up the chains. Nevertheless, in that brief instant, Abbot had seen within the head-piece of the diver what appeared to be a bearded human face. Several more pairs of doors were passed. The four deep-sea divers floundered along beside the cart, quite evidently having more and more difficulty of locomotion as each successive doorway was passed, until finally they lay down and were left behind. At last the procession entered a section of tunnel which was square, instead of circular, and in which there was a wide shelf along one side about three feet above the floor. The four divers then dropped the chains, and one by one took a look at Abbot through his window. And he at the same time took a most interested look at them. They had unmistakable human faces! * * * * * He must be dreaming! For even if Osborne was right about his supposed super-race at the bottom of the sea, this race could not be human, for the pressures here would be entirely too great. No human being could possibly stand two thousand pounds per square inch! Having satisfied their curiosity, the four divers pulled themselves up onto the shelf, and sat there in a row with their legs hanging over. Abbot glanced upward at the ceiling lights, but these had become strangely blurred. There seemed to be an opaque barrier above him, and this barrier seemed to be slowly descending. The lights blurred out completely, and were replaced by a diffused illumination over the entire ripply barrier. And then it dawned on the young man that this descending sheet of silver was the surface of the water. He was in a lock, and the water was being pumped out. The surface settled about the helmets of the divers, and their helmets disappeared; then their shoulders and the rest of them. At last it reached the level of Abbot's window. The divers could again be seen, and among then on the shelf there stood a half dozen naked bearded men, clad only in loin-cloths. They had evidently entered the lock while the water was subsiding. * * * * * These men unbuckled the helmets of the divers and helped them out, and then splashed down into the water and peered in through the windows of the bathysphere. Presently some of them left through a door at the end of the platform, but soon reappeared with staging, which they set up around the sphere. Then, climbing on top, they got to work on the man-hole cover. As George Abbot realized their purpose, he became frantic. Although these men appeared to be human, just like himself, yet his scientifically-trained mind told him that they must be of some very special anatomical structure, in order to be able to withstand the immense pressures at the bottom of the Pacific. It was all right for them to be out there, but it would be fatal to him! And then the heavy circular door above him began slowly to revolve. This was terrible! In a moment the crushing pressures of the depths would come seeping in. Rising unsteadily upon his knees, the young man tried with his fingers to resist the rotation of the door; but it continued to turn. Yet no pressure could be felt. The door became completely unscrewed. It was pried up, and slid off the top of the bathysphere, to crash upon the floor outside. Inquisitive bearded faces peered down through the hole. Young Abbot slumped to the cold bottom of the sphere and stared back at them. He was saved; incredibly saved! These were real people, the air was real air and he must therefore be on the surface of the earth, instead of at the bottom of the Pacific as he had imagined! With a sigh of relief, he fainted.... * * * * * When he came to his senses again, he was lying in a bed in a small room. Bending over him was the sweetest feminine face that he had ever seen. The girl seemed to be about twenty years of age. She was clad in a clinging robe of some filmy green substance. Her hair was honey-brown, short and curly, and her forehead high and intelligent. Her eyes, an indescribable shade of deep violet, were matchlessly set off by her ivory skin. The young man smiled up at her, and she smiled back. Thus far it had not occurred to him to wonder where he was, or why. No recollection of his recent strange adventures came to him. To him this was an exotic dream, from which he did not care to awake. She spoke. Her words were unintelligible, and unlike any language which George Abbot knew or had even heard; and he was an accomplished linguist in addition to his other attainments. And her words were not all that was strange about her speech, for the very tones of her voice sounded completely unhuman, although not displeasing. Her talk had a metallic ring to it, like the brassy blare of temple gongs, and yet was so smooth and subdued as to be sweeter than any sound that the young scientist had ever heard before. "Beautiful dream fairy," replied the enraptured young man, "I haven't the slightest idea what you are saying, but keep right on. I like it." His own voice sounded crass and crude compared to hers. At his first words she gave a start of surprise, but thereafter the sound did not appear to grate on her ears. * * * * * Then one of the bearded men in loin-cloths entered, and he and the girl talked together, quite evidently about their patient. The man's voice had the same strange metallic quality to it as that of the girl, but was deeper, so that it boomed with the rich notes of a bell. At the sight of the man, young Abbot's memory swept back, and he remembered the adventure of his diving-sphere, and its capture, one mile down, by the strange shark-fish with human hands and arms. But how he had reached the surface of the earth again, he couldn't figure out. Nor did he particularly care. The strange man withdrew, and the girl sat down beside the bed and smiled at Abbot. He smiled back at her. Presently another girl entered and called, "Milli!" The girl beside the bed started, and looking up asked some question, to which the other replied. The newcomer brought in some strange warm food in a covered dish and then withdrew. The first girl proceeded to feed her patient. After the meal, which tasted unlike anything which the young man had ever eaten before, the beautiful nurse again essayed conversation with him. She seemed perplexed and a bit frightened that he could not understand her words. Somehow, the young man sensed that this girl had never heard any other language than her own, and that she did not even know that other languages existed. * * * * * Strengthened by his food, he determined to set about learning her language as soon as possible. So he pointed at her and asked, "Milli?" She nodded, and spoke some word which he took for "yes." Then he pointed to himself and said, "George." She understood, but the word was a difficult one for her to duplicate in the metallic tongue of her people. She made several attempts, until he laughingly spoke her word for "yes." Then he pointed to other objects about the room. She gave him the names of these, but he could easily see that she felt that, if he did not know the names for all these common things, there must be something the matter with him. He wondered how he could make her understand that there were other languages in the world than her own; and then he remembered the sharks with their hands and what he had taken to be their sign language. Perhaps Milli at least knew of the existence of the sign language. This would afford a parallel; for if she realized that there were two languages in the world, might there not be three? So Abbot made some meaningless signs with his fingers. Milli quite evidently was accustomed to this kind of talk, but she was further perplexed to find that George talked gibberish with his hands as well as with his mouth. She made some signs with her hands, and then said something orally. Young Abbot instantly pointed to her mouth, and held up one finger; then to her hands, and held up two; then to his own mouth, and held up three, at the same time speaking a sentence of English. Instantly she caught on: there were three languages in the world. And thereafter she no longer regarded him as crazy. For several hours she taught him. Then another meal was brought, after which she left him, and the lights went out. * * * * * He awakened feeling thoroughly rested and well. The lights were on and Milli was beside him. He asked for his clothes. They were brought. Milli withdrew and he put them on. After breakfast, which they ate together, one of the bearded men came and led him out through a number of winding corridors into a larger room, in which there was a closed spherical glass tank, about ten feet in diameter, containing one of the human sharks. Around the tank stood five of the bearded men. One of them proceeded to address Abbot, but of course the young American could not make out what he was saying. This apparent lack of intelligence seemed to exasperate the man; and finally he turned toward the tank, and engaged in a sign language conference with the fish; then turned back to Abbot again and spoke to him very sternly. But Abbot shook his head and replied, "Milli. Bring Milli." One of the other men flashed a look of triumph at their leader, and laughed. "Yes," he added, "bring Milli." The leader scowled at him, and some words were interchanged, but it ended in Milli being sent for. She apparently explained the situation to the satisfaction of the fish, to the intense glee of the man who had sent for her, and to the rather complete discomfiture of the leader of the five. Abbot later learned that the leader's name was Thig, and that the name of the gleeful man was Dolf. The reception over, Milli led Abbot back to his room. * * * * * There ensued many days--very pleasant days--of language instruction from Milli. Dolf and Thig and others of the five came frequently, to note his progress and to talk with him and ask him questions. A sitting room was provided for him, adjoining his sleeping quarters. Milli occupied quarters nearby. Within a week he had mastered enough of the language of these people, for their strange history began to be intelligible to him. In spite of the fact that the air here was at merely atmospheric pressure, nevertheless this place was one mile beneath the surface of the Pacific. Milli and her people lived in a city hollowed out of a reef of rocks, reinforced against the terrific weight of the water and filled with laboratory-made air. They had never been to the surface of the sea. The fish with the human arms were their creators and their masters. Professor Osborne had been right. The fish of the deep, having a head start on the rest of the world, had evolved to a perfectly unbelievable degree of intelligence. Centuries ago they had built for themselves the exact analog of George Abbot's bathysphere, and in it they had made much the same sort of exploring trips to the surface that he had made down into the deeps. But their spheres had been constructed to keep in, rather than to keep out, great pressure. Their scientists had gathered a wealth of data as to conditions on the surface, and had even seen and studied human beings. But their insatiable scientific curiosity had led them to want to know more about the strange country above them and the strange persons who inhabited it. And so they set about breeding, in their own laboratories, creatures which should be as like as possible to those whom they had observed on the surface. * * * * * Of course, this experiment necessitated their first setting up an air-filled partial vacuum similar to that which surrounds the earth. But they had persisted. They had brought down samples of air from the surface of the sea, and had analyzed and duplicated it on a large scale. Finally, through long years, they had so directed--and controlled the course of evolution, in their breederies, as first to be able to produce creatures which could live in air at low pressures, and then to evolve the descendants of those creatures into intelligent human beings. Some of the lower types of this evolutionary process, both in the direct line of descent of man, and among the collateral offshoots, had been retained for food and other purposes. Abbot, with intense scientific interest, studied these specimens in the zoo of the underwater city where he was staying. Plans had been in progress for some time, among the fish-folk and their human subjects, to send an expedition to the surface. And now the shark masters had fortunately been able to secure alive an actual specimen of the surface folk--namely, George Abbot. The expedition was accordingly postponed until they could pump out of the young scientist all the information possible. Abbot was naturally overjoyed at the prospect. This would not only get him out of here--but think what it would mean to science! The plans of the sharks were entirely peaceful. Furthermore there were only about two hundred of their laboratory-bred synthetic human beings, and so these could constitute no menace to mankind. Accordingly he enthusiastically assured them that they could depend upon the hearty cooperation of the scientists of the outer earth. * * * * * During all his stay so far in this cave city, Abbot had been permitted to come in contact only with Milli, the members of the Committee of Five, and an occasional guard or laboratory assistant. Yet, in spite of the absence of personal contacts with other members of this strange race, Abbot was constantly aware of a background of many people and tense activity, which kept the wheels of industry and domestic economy turning in this undersea city. Although the young man readily accustomed himself to the speech and food and customs of this strange race, his personal modesty and neatness revolted at the loin-cloths and beards of the men; and so, by special dispensation, he was permitted to wear his sailor suit and to shave. The Committee of Five, who constituted a sort of ruling body for the city, interviewed him at length, cross-examined him most skilfully and took copious notes. But there seemed to be a strange lack of common meeting ground between their minds and his, so that very often they were forced to call on Milli to act as an intermediary. The beautiful young girl seemed able to understand both George Abbot and the leaders of her own people with equal facility. A number of specially constructed submarines had already been built to carry the expedition to the surface. Before it came time to use them, Abbot tried to paint as glowing a picture as possible of life on earth; but he found it necessary to gloss over a great many things. How could he explain and justify war, liquor, crime, poverty, graft, and the other evils to which constant acquaintance has rendered the human race so calloused? * * * * * He was unable to deceive the men of the deep. With their super-intelligence, they relentlessly unearthed from him all the salient facts. And, as a result of their discoveries, their initial friendly feeling for the world of men rapidly developed into supreme contempt. But Abbot on the other hand developed a deep respect for them. Their chemistry and their electrical and mechanical devices amazed and astounded him. They even were able to keep sun-time and tell the seasons, by means of gyroscopes! Age was measured much as it is on the surface. This fact was brought to Abbot's attention by the approach of Milli's twentieth birthday. Strange to relate, she seemed to dread the approach of that anniversary, and finally told Abbot the reason. "It is the custom," said she, "when a girl or a boy reaches twenty, to give a very rigorous intelligence test. In fact, such a test is given on every birthday, but the one on the twentieth is the hardest. So far, I have just barely passed each test, which fact marks me as of very low mentality indeed. And, if I fail _this_ time, they will kill me, so as to make room for others who have a better right to live." "Impossible!" exclaimed the young man indignantly. "Why, you have a better mind than those of many of the leading scientists of the outer world!" "All the same," she gloomily replied, "it is way below standard for down here." * * * * * On the day of the test, he did his best to cheer her up. Dolf also came--she seemed to be an especial protege of his--and gave her his encouragement. He had been coaching her heavily for the examinations for some time previous. But later in the day she returned in tears to report to Abbot that she had failed, and had only twenty-four hours to live. Before he realized what he was doing, Abbot had seized her in his arms, and was pouring out to her a love which up to that moment he had not realized existed. Finally her sobbing ceased, and she smiled through her tears. "George, dear," said she, "it is worth dying, to know that you care for me like this." "I won't let them kill you!" asserted the young man belligerently. "They owe me something for the assistance which I am to give them on their expedition. I shall demand your life as the price of my cooperation. Besides, you are the only one of all your people who has brains enough to understand what I tell them about the outer earth. It is they who are weak-minded; not you!" But she sadly shook her head. "It would never do for you to sponsor me," said she, "for it would alienate my one friend in power, Dolf. He loves me; no, don't scowl, for I do not love him. But, for the safety of both of us, we must not let him know of our love--yet." "'Yet'?" exclaimed Abbot, "when you have less than a day to live?" "You have given me hope," the girl replied, "and also an idea. Dolf promised to appeal to the other members of the Five. I have just thought of a good ground for his appeal; namely, my ability to translate your clumsy description into a form suited to the high intelligence of our superiors." "'Clumsy'?" exclaimed the young man, a bit nettled. "Oh, pardon me, dear. I'm so sorry," said she contritely. "I didn't mean to let it slip. And now I must rush to Dolf and tell him my idea." "Don't let him make love to you, though!" admonished Abbot gloomily. She kissed him lightly, and fled. * * * * * A half hour later she was back, all smiles. The idea had gone across big. Dolf, as the leader of the projected expedition, had demanded that Milli be brought along as liaison officer between them and their guide; and the other four committeemen had reluctantly acceded. The execution was accordingly indefinitely postponed. The young couple spent the evening making happy plans for their life together on the outer earth, for as soon as they should arrive in America, Dolf would have no further hold over them. The next day, the Committee of Five announced that, for a change, they were going to give George Abbot an intelligence test. He had represented himself as being one of the scientists of the outer earth; accordingly, they could gauge the caliber of his fellow countrymen by determining his I. Q. Milli was quite agitated when this program was announced, but the ordeal held no terrors for George Abbot. Had he not taken many such tests on earth and passed them easily? So he appeared before the Committee of Five with a rather cocky air. He had yet to see an intelligence test too tricky for him to eat alive. "Start him with something easy," suggested Dolf. "Perhaps they don't have tests on the outer earth. You know, one gains a certain facility by practice." "Milli didn't, in spite of all the practicing which you gave her," maliciously remarked Thig. Dolf glowered at him. * * * * * "What is the cube root of 378?" suddenly asked one of the other members of the committee. "Oh, a little over seven," hazarded Abbot. "Come, come," boomed Thig: "give it to us exactly." "Well, seven-point-two, I guess." "Don't guess. Give it exact, to four decimal places." "In my head?" asked Abbot incredulously. "Certainly!" replied Thig. "Even a child could do that. We're giving you easy questions to start with." "Start him on _square_ root," suggested Dolf kindly. "Remember he isn't used to these tests like our people are." So they tried him with square root, in which he turned out to be equally dumb. Abstract questions of physics and chemistry he did better on; but the actual quantitative problems, which they expected him to solve in his head, stumped him completely. Then they asked him about education on earth, and the qualifications for becoming a scientist, and who were the leaders in his field, and what degrees they held, and what one had to do to get those degrees, etc. Finally they dismissed him. Dolf then sent for Milli. She was gone about an hour, and returned to Abbot wide-eyed and incredulous. "Oh, George," said she, lowering her voice. "Dolf tells me that your intelligence is below that of a five-year-old child! Perhaps that is why you and I get along so well together: we are both morons." * * * * * He started to protest, but she silenced him with a gesture and hurried on. "I am not supposed to tell you this, but I want you to know that your examination to-day has resulted in a complete change in their plans for the expedition to the surface. They have consulted with the leaders of our masters, and they agree with them." She was plainly agitated. "What is it, dear?" asked Abbot, with ominous foreboding. Milli continued: "Early during your test, when you demonstrated that you couldn't do the very simplest mathematical problems in your head, they began to doubt your boastings that you are a scientist. But you were so ingenuous in your answers about conditions on the surface, that finally their faith in your honesty returned. If you are a scientist among men, as they now believe, then the average run of your people must be mere animals. This explains what has puzzled them before; namely, how the people of the earth tolerate poverty and unemployment and crime, and disease and war." "Well?" "And so a mere handful of our people, by purely peaceful means, could easily make themselves the rulers of the earth. Probably this would be all for the best; but somehow, my feelings tell me that it is not. I know only too well what it is to be an inferior among intelligent beings; so will not your people be happier, left alone to their stupidity, just as I would be?" * * * * * George Abbot was crushed. This frank acceptance by Milli of the alleged fact that he was a mere moron, was most humiliating. And swiftly he realized what a real menace to the earth, was this contemplated invasion from the deeps. All that was worst in the world above would taint these intellectual giants of the undersea. They would rise to supremacy, and then would become rapacious tyrants over those whom they would regard as being no more than animals. He had witnessed jealousies among them down below. Might not these jealousies flame into huge wars when translated to the world above? Giants striving for mastery, using the human cattle as cannon fodder! He painted to the girl a word-picture of the horrible vision which he foresaw. The invasion must be stopped at all costs! He and Milli must pit their puny wits against these supermen! But what could they do? As they were pondering this problem, a girl entered their sitting room--the same who had brought Abbot's breakfast on his first day in the caves. Milli introduced George to the newcomer, whose name was Romehl. Romehl appeared so woebegone that the young American ventured to inquire if she too had been having difficulty with one of her tests. But that was not the trouble; hers was rather of the heart. About the same age as Milli, Romehl had recently passed her twentieth birthday test and hence was eligible to marry; so she and a young man named Hakin had requested the fish-masters to give them the requisite permission. But their overlords for some reason had peremptorily denied the request. Romehl and Hakin were desolate. * * * * * Young Abbot's sympathies were at once aroused. "Can't something be done?" he started to ask. But Milli silenced him with a warning glance. "Of course not!" she said. "Who are we to question the judgment of our all-knowing masters?" Romehl had really come to Milli just to pour her troubles into a friendly ear, rather than because she hoped to get any helpful ideas. So she had a good cry, and finally left, somewhat comforted. George and Milli then took up again the problem of saving the outer earth from the threatened invasion. Milli suggested that they go peaceably with the expedition, and then warn the authorities of America at the first opportunity after their arrival; but Abbot pointed out that this would merely result in their both being shut up in some insane asylum, as no one would believe such a crazy story as theirs. The time for lights to be put out arrived without their thinking of any better idea. Next day Milli spent considerable time with Dolf, and on her return excitedly informed Abbot that he had evolved a most diabolical plot. There were sufficient quantities of explosives in storage to blast a hole through the wall of the caves, letting in the sea and killing everyone in the city. Dolf planned to set this off with a time fuse, upon the departure of the expedition. Thus Thig and the people who were left behind--about two-thirds of the total population of the city--would be destroyed, and the fish would have no one to send after Dolf and his followers to dictate to them on the upper earth. Relieved of the thraldom of the fish, Dolf could make himself Emperor of the World, and rule over the human cattle, with Milli at his side as Empress. An alluring program--from Dolf's point of view. * * * * * "I didn't expect such treason even from Dolf!" exclaimed the young American. "We must tell Thig!" "What good would that do?" remonstrated the girl. "If you failed to convince Thig, Dolf would make an end of us both. And if you convinced Thig, it would mean the end of Dolf, whose influence is all that keeps me alive. We must think of something else." "Right, as always," replied Abbot. A growl came from the doorway. It was Dolf, his bearded face black with wrath. "So?" he sputtered. "Treachery, eh?" He whistled twice and two guards appeared. "Take them to the prison!" he raged, indicating Abbot and Milli. "Our expedition will have to do without a guide. I have learned enough of the American language to make a good start, and I guess I can pick up another guide when we reach the surface." Then, bending close to the frightened girl, he whispered, "And another Empress." The guards hustled them away and locked them up. As an added precaution, a sentinel was posted in front of each cell door. Abbot immediately got busy. "Can you get word for me at once to Thig?" he whispered to the man on guard. "Perhaps," replied that individual non-committally. "Then tell him," said Abbot, "that I have proof that Dolf is planning to destroy this city behind him, and never return from the surface." The sentry became immediately agitated. "So you know this?" he exclaimed. "How did it leak out? But--through Milli, of course. And the guard on her cell is not a member of the expedition! Curses! I must get word to Dolf, and have that guard changed at once." And he darted swiftly away. * * * * * The young prisoner was plunged into gloom. Now he'd gone and done it! Why hadn't he first made appropriate inquiries of his guard? A new guard appeared in front of the door. "Are you going on the expedition?" asked Abbot. "Yes, worse luck," replied the guard. The prisoner forgot his own gloom, in his surprise at the gloominess of the other. "Don't you want to go?" he exclaimed incredulously. "No." "Why not?" "Do you know Romehl?" asked the guard. "Yes," Abbot replied. "Well, that's why." "Then you must be Hakin!" exclaimed Abbot, with sudden understanding. "Yes," replied the other dully. "You are going on the expedition, and Romehl is not?" "Quite correct." "Say, look here!" exclaimed Abbot, and then he launched into the description of a plan, which just that moment had occurred to him, for him, Milli, Romehl and Hakin to make their getaway ahead of the expedition--in fact, that very night--and to set off the time-fuse before leaving. It turned out that Hakin knew where the explosives were planted, and where the submarines were kept, and even how to operate them. He eagerly accepted the plan; and when next relieved as sentinel, he hurried away to inform Romehl. Three hours later he was back on post. Quickly he explained to his prisoner all about the workings of the submarines of the expedition. The lights-out bell rang, and all the city became dark, except for dim lights in the passageways. Hakin at once unlocked the door of Abbot's cell, and together the two young men sneaked down the corridor to the cell where Milli was confined. Silently Hakin and Abbot sprang upon the guard and throttled him; then released Milli. There was no time for more than a few hurried words of explanation before the three of them left the prison and made for the locks of the subterranean canal, picking up Romehl at a preappointed spot on the way. * * * * * The canal locks were unguarded, as well as the storerooms of the submarines. Each of the rooms held two subs, and could open onto the second lock and be separately flooded. The submarines were of steel as thick as Abbot's bathysphere. Their shape was that of an elongated rain drop, with fins. In the pointed tip of their tails were motors which could operate at any pressure. At the front end were quartz windows. In the top fin was an expanding device which could be filled with buoyant gas, produced by chemicals, when the craft neared the surface. Each submarine also contained a radio set, so tuned as to be capable of opening and closing the radio-controlled gates of the locks. Each would carry comfortably two or three persons. Having picked out two submarines and found them to be in order, Hakin sneaked back into the corridor to set off the time-fuse, leaving his three companions in the dark in the storeroom. Abbot put a protecting arm around Milli, while Romehl snuggled close to her other side. Their hearts were all racing madly with excitement, and this was intensified when they heard Hakin talking with someone just outside their door. Then Hakin returned unexpectedly. "Something terrible has happened!" he breathed. "The explosives have been discovered and are gone. One of the expedition men has just informed me. Someone must have gotten word to Thig--" "Why, _I_ did," interrupted Milli. "I told my guard, just before they came and changed him." Abbot groaned. Hakin continued hurriedly: "So Dolf plans to leave at once. He is already rounding up his followers. Come on! We must get out ahead of him!" An uproar could be heard drawing near in the corridor outside. Abbot opened the door and peered out; then shut it again and whispered, "The two factions are fighting already." "Then come on!" exclaimed Hakin. * * * * * As he spoke he turned on the lights, wedged the door tight against its gaskets and threw the switch which started the water seeping into the storeroom; then he led Romehl hurriedly to one of the two submarines, while George and Milli rushed to the other. Heavy blows sounded against the storeroom door. The water rapidly rose about them, and the four friends crawled inside the two machines and clamped the lids tight. Then they waited for sufficient depth, so that they could get under way. The water rose above their bow windows, but suddenly and inexplicably it began to subside again. A man waded by around the bow of Abbot's machine. "They've crashed in the door, and are pumping out the water again!" exclaimed Abbot. "We're trapped!" "Not yet!" grimly replied the girl at his side. "Can you work the radio door controls?" "Yes." "Then quick! Open the doors into the lock!" He pressed a button. Ahead of them two gates swung inward, followed by a deluge of water. "Come on!" spoke the girl. "Full speed ahead, before the water gets too low." Abbot did so. Out into the lock they sped, in the face of the surging current. Then Abbot pushed another button to close the gates behind them. But the water continued to fall, and they grounded before they reached the end of the lock. Quite evidently the rush of the current had kept the doors from closing behind them. The city was being flooded through the broken door of the storeroom. But Abbot opened the next gate, and again they breasted the incoming torrent. This time, although the level continued to fall, their craft did not quite ground. "They must have got the gates shut behind us at last," said he, as he opened the next set and pressed on. * * * * * And then he had an idea. Why not omit to close any further gates behind him? As a result, the sea pressure would eventually break down the inmost barriers, and destroy the city as effectively as Dolf's bomb would have done. But he said nothing to Milli of this plan: she might wish to save her people. Gate after gate they passed. This was too simple. A few more locks and they would be out in open water. The submarine of Hakin and Romehl swept by--evidently to let George and Milli know their presence--and then dropped behind again. But was it their two friends after all? It might have been some enemy! They could not be sure. This uncertainty cast a chill of apprehension over them, which was immediately heightened by the sudden extinguishing of the overhead lights of the tunnel. Abbot pressed the radio button for the next set of locks, but they did not budge. "What can be the matter?" he asked frantically. "My people must have turned off the electric current," Milli replied. "The gates won't open without electricity to feed the motors. We're trapped again." For a moment they lay stunned by a realization that their escape was blocked. "Kiss me good-by, dear," breathed Milli. "This is the end." As the young man reached over to take her in his arms, the submarine was suddenly lifted up and spun backward, end over end: then tumbled and bumped along, as though it were a chip on an angry mountain torrent. Stunned and bruised and bleeding, the young American finally lost consciousness.... * * * * * When he came to his senses again, his first words were, "Milli, where are you?" "My darling!" breathed a voice at his side. "Are you all right?" "Yes," he replied. "Where are we? What has happened?" "The entire system of locks must have crashed in and flooded the city," said she. Instantly Abbott's mind grasped the explanation of this occurrence: their leaving open so many gates behind them had made it impossible for the few remaining gates ahead to withstand the terrific pressures of the ocean depths, and they had crumpled. But he did not tell Milli his part in this. She continued, "I was pretty badly shaken up myself, but I've got this boat going again, and we're on our way out of the tunnel. See--I've found out how to work our searchlight." He looked. A broad beam of light from their bow, illuminated the tunnel ahead of them. Presently another beam appeared, shooting by them from behind. "Hakin and Romehl!" exclaimed the girl. "Then they're safe, too!" The tunnel walls grew rough, then disappeared. They were out in the open sea at last, although still one mile beneath the surface. But in front of them was an angry seething school of the man-sharks, clearly illumined by the two rays of light. Behind the sharks were a score or more of serpentine steeds. The sharks saw the two submarines and charged down upon them; but Milli, with great presence of mind, shut off her searchlight and swung sharply to the left. "Up! Up!" urged the young man, so she turned the craft upward. * * * * * On and on they went, with no interference. Presently they turned the light on again, so as to see what progress they were making. But they were making absolutely none! They were merely standing on their tail. They had reached a height of such relatively low pressure that it took all the churning of their propeller just merely to counteract the great weight of their submarine. Abbot switched on their chemical gas supply, and as their top fin expanded into a balloon they again began to rise. One thing, however, perplexed the young man: the water about him seemed jet black rather than blue. They must by now be close to the surface of the sea, where at least a twilight blue should be visible. Even at the one mile depth in his bathysphere, the water had been brilliant, yet here, almost at the surface, he could see absolutely nothing. He switched on the searchlight again to make sure that their window wasn't clouded over; but it wasn't. Then suddenly a rippling veil of pale silver appeared ahead; then a blue-black sky and twinkling stars. They had reached the surface, and it was night. He pointed out the stars to the girl at his side, then swung the nose of the submarine around and showed her the moon. Where next? George Abbot picked out his position by the stars and headed east. East across the Pacific, toward America. * * * * * But soon he noticed that their little craft was dropping beneath the surface. He kept heading up more and more; he threw the lever for more and more chemical gas; yet still they continued to sink. "Milli!" he exclaimed, "we've got to get out of here!" She clutched him in fear, for to her the pressure of the open sea meant death, certain death. But he pushed her firmly away, and unclamped the lid of the submarine. In another instant he had hauled her out and was battling his way to the surface, while their little boat sunk slowly beneath them. Milli was an experienced swimmer, for the undersea folk enjoyed the privilege of a large indoor pool. As soon as she found that the open sea did not kill her, she became calm. Side by side they floated in the moonlight. The sky began to pink in the east. Dawn came, the first dawn that Milli had ever seen. Suddenly she called George's attention to two bobbing heads some distance away in the path of light the rising sun made on the ocean. "Hakin and Romehl!" he exclaimed. Long since they had given them up for dead; but evidently fate had treated them in much the same way as themselves. And a moment later his own salt-stung eyes noticed a long gray shape to one side. As the day brightened, Abbot suddenly noticed a large bulking shape nearby. It was his own boat!--the one which had lowered him into the depths in his bathysphere so many weeks and weeks ago! Evidently it was still sticking around, grappling for his long dead body. "Come on, dear," said he, and side by side they swam over to it. He helped her up the ship's ladder. The ship's cook sleepily stuck his head out of the galley door. "Hullo, Mike," sang out George Abbot merrily to the astonished man. "I've brought company for breakfast. And there'll be two more when we can lower a boat." [Illustration: Advertisement] Brood of the Dark Moon (_A Sequel to "Dark Moon"_) BEGINNING A FOUR-PART NOVEL _By Charles Willard Diffin_ [Illustration: _He landed one blow on the nearest face._] [Sidenote: Once more Chet, Walt and Diane are united in a wild ride to the Dark Moon--but this time they go as prisoners of their deadly enemy Schwartzmann.] CHAPTER I _The Message_ In a hospital in Vienna, in a room where sunlight flooded through ultra-violet permeable crystal, the warm rays struck upon smooth walls the color of which changed from hot reds to cool yellow or gray or to soothing green, as the Directing Surgeon might order. An elusive blending of tones, now seemed pulsing with life; surely even a flickering flame of vitality would be blown into warm livingness in such a place. Even the chart case in the wall glittered with the same clean, brilliant hues from its glass and metal door. The usual revolving paper disks showed white beyond the glass. They were moving; and the ink lines grew to tell a story of temperature and respiration and of every heart-beat. On the identification-plate a name appeared and a date: "Chet Bullard--23 years. Admitted: August 10, 1973." And below that the ever-changing present ticked into the past in silent minutes: "August 15, 1973; World Standard Time: 10:38--10:39--10:40--" For five days the minutes had trickled into a rivulet of time that flowed past a bandaged figure in the bed below--a silent figure and unmoving, as one for whom time has ceased. But the surgeons of the Allied Hospital at Vienna are clever. 10:41--10:42--The bandaged figure stirred uneasily on a snow-white bed.... * * * * * A nurse was beside him in an instant. Was her patient about to recover consciousness? She examined the bandages that covered a ragged wound in his side, where all seemed satisfactory. To all appearances the man who had moved was unconscious still; the nurse could not know of the thought impressions, blurred at first, then gradually clearing, that were flashing through his mind. Flashing; yet, to the man who struggled to comprehend them, they passed laggingly in review: one picture followed another with exasperating slowness.... Where was he? What had happened? He was hardly conscious of his own identity.... There was a ship ... he held the controls ... they were flying low.... One hand reached fumblingly beneath the soft coverlet to search for a triple star that should be upon his jacket. A triple star: the insignia of a Master Pilot of the World!--and with the movement there came clearly a realization of himself. Chet Bullard, Master Pilot; he was Chet Bullard ... and a wall of water was sweeping under him from the ocean to wipe out the great Harkness Terminal buildings.... It was Harkness--Walt Harkness--from whom he had snatched the controls.... To fly to the Dark Moon, of course-- What nonsense was that?... No, it was true: the Dark Moon had raised the devil with things on Earth.... How slowly the thoughts came! Why couldn't he remember?... Dark Moon!--and they were flying through space.... They had conquered space; they were landing on the Dark Moon that was brilliantly alight. Walt Harkness had set the ship down beautifully-- * * * * * Then, crowding upon one another in breath-taking haste, came clear recollection of past adventures: They were upon the Dark Moon--and there was the girl, Diane. They must save Diane. Harkness had gone for the ship. A savage, half-human shape was raising a hairy arm to drive a spear toward Diane, and he, Chet, was leaping before her. He felt again the lancet-pain of that blade.... And now he was dying--yes, he remembered it now--dying in the night on a great, sweeping surface of frozen lava.... It was only a moment before that he had opened his eyes to see Harkness' strained face and the agonized look of Diane as the two leaned above him.... But now he felt stronger. He must see them again.... He opened his eyes for another look at his companions--and, instead of black, star-pricked night on a distant globe, there was dazzling sunlight. No desolate lava-flow, this; no thousand fires that flared and smoked from their fumeroles in the dark. And, instead of Harkness and the girl, Diane, leaning over him there was a nurse who laid one cool hand upon his blond head and who spoke soothingly to him of keeping quiet. He was to take it easy--he would understand later--and everything was all right.... And with this assurance Chet Bullard drifted again into sleep.... * * * * * The blurring memories had lost their distortions a week later, as he sat before a broad window in his room and looked out over the housetops of Vienna. Again he was himself, Chet Bullard, with a Master Pilot's rating: and he let his eyes follow understandingly the moving picture of the world outside. It was good to be part of a world whose every movement he understood. Those cylinders with stubby wings that crossed and recrossed the sky; their sterns showed a jet of thin vapor where a continuous explosion of detonite threw them through the air. He knew them all: the pleasure craft, the big, red-bellied freighters, the sleek liners, whose multiple helicopters spun dazzlingly above as they sank down through the shaft of pale-green light that marked a descending area. That one would be the China Mail. Her under-ports were open before the hold-down clamps had gripped her; the mail would pour out in an avalanche of pouches where smaller mailships waited to distribute the cargo across the land. And the big fellow taking off, her hull banded with blue, was one of Schwartzmann's liners. He wondered what had become of Schwartzmann, the man who had tried to rob Harkness of his ship; who had brought the patrol ships upon them in an effort to prevent their take-off on that wild trip. For that matter, what had become of Harkness? Chet Bullard was seriously disturbed at the absence of any word beyond the one message that had been waiting for him when he regained consciousness. He drew that message from a pocket of his dressing gown and read it again: "Chet, old fellow, lie low. S has vanished. Means mischief. Think best not to see you or reveal your whereabouts until our position firmly established. Have concealed ship. Remember, S will stop at nothing. Trying to discredit us, but the gas I brought will fix all that. Get yourself well. We are planning to go back, of course. Walt." Chet returned the folded message to his pocket. He arose and walked about the room to test his returning strength: to remain idle was becoming increasingly difficult. He wanted to see Walter Harkness, talk with him, plan for their return to the wonder-world they had found. * * * * * Instead he dropped again into his chair and touched a knob on the newscaster beside him. A voice, hushed to the requirements of these hospital precincts spoke softly of market quotations in the far corners of the earth. He turned the dial irritably and set it on "World News--General." The name of Harkness came from the instrument to focus Chet's attention. "Harkness makes broad claims," the voice was saying. "Vienna physicists ridicule his pretensions. "Walter Harkness, formerly of New York, proprietor of Harkness Terminals, whose great buildings near New York were destroyed in the Dark Moon wave, claims to have reached and returned from the Dark Moon. "Nearly two months have passed since the new satellite crashed into the gravitational field of Earth, its coming manifested by earth shocks and a great tidal wave. The globe, as we know, was invisible. Although still unseen, and only a black circle that blocks out distant stars, it is visible in the telescopes of the astronomers; its distance and its orbital motion have been determined. "And now this New Yorker claims to have penetrated space: to have landed on the Dark Moon: and to have returned to Earth. Broad claims, indeed, especially so in view of the fact that Harkness refuses to submit his ship for examination by the Stratosphere Control Board. He has filed notice of ownership, thus introducing some novel legal technicalities, but, since space-travel is still a dream of the future, there will be none to dispute his claims. "Of immediate interest is Harkness' claim to have discovered a gas that is fatal to the serpents of space. The monsters that appeared when the Dark Moon came and that attacked ships above the Repelling Area are still there. All flying is confined to the lower levels; fast world-routes are disorganized. "Whether or not this gas, of which Harkness has a sample, came from the Dark Moon or from some laboratory on Earth is of no particular importance. Will it destroy the space-serpents? If it does this, our hats are off to Mr. Walter Harkness; almost will we be inclined to believe the rest of his story--or to laugh with him over one of the greatest hoaxes ever attempted." Chet had been too intent upon the newscast to heed an opening door at his back.... * * * * * "How about it, Chet?" a voice was asking. "Would you call it a hoax or the real thing?" And a girl's voice chimed in with exclamations of delight at sight of the patient, so evidently recovering. "Diane!" Chet exulted, "--and Walt!--you old son-of-a-gun!" He found himself clinging to a girl's soft hand with one of his, while with the other he reached for that of her companion. But Walt Harkness' arm went about his shoulders instead. "I'd like to hammer you plenty," Harkness was saying, "and I don't even dare give you a friendly slam on the back. How's the side where they got you with the spear?--and how are you? How soon will you be ready to start back? What about--" Diane Delacouer raised her one free hand to stop the flood of questions. "My dear," she protested, "give Chet a chance. He must be dying for information." "I was dying for another reason the last time I saw you," Chet reminded her, "--up on the Dark Moon. But it seems that you got me back here in time for repairs. And now what?" His nurse came into the room with extra chairs; Chet waited till she was gone before he repeated: "Now what? When do we go back?" Harkness did not answer at once. Instead he crossed to the newscaster in its compact, metal case. The voice was still speaking softly; at a touch of a switch it ceased, and in the silence came the soft rush of sound that meant the telautotype had taken up its work. Beneath a glass a paper moved, and words came upon it from a hurricane of type-bars underneath. The instrument was printing the news story as rapidly as any voice could speak it. Harkness read the words for an instant, then let the paper pass on to wind itself upon a spool. It had still been telling of the gigantic hoax that this eccentric American had attempted and Harkness repeated the words. "A hoax!" he exclaimed, and his eyes, for a moment, flashed angrily beneath the dark hair that one hand had disarranged. "I would like to take that facetious bird out about a thousand miles and let him play around with the serpents we met. But, why get excited? This is all Schwartzmann's doing. The tentacles of that man's influence, reach out like those of an octopus." * * * * * Chet ranged himself alongside. Tall and slim and blond, he contrasted strongly with this other man, particularly in his own quiet self-control as against Harkness' quick-flaring anger. "Take it easy, Walt," he advised. "We'll show them. But I judge that you have been razzed a bit. It's a pretty big story for them to swallow without proof. Why didn't you show them the ship? Or why didn't you let Diane and me back up your yarn? And you haven't answered my other questions: when do we go back?" Harkness took the queries in turn. "I didn't show the old boat," he explained, "because I'm not ready for that yet. I want it kept dark--dark as the Dark Moon. I want to do my preliminary work there before Schwartzmann and his experts see our ship. He would duplicate it in a hurry and be on our trail. "And now for our plans. Well, out there in space the Dark Moon is waiting. Have you realized, Chet, that we own that world--you and Diane and I? Small--only half the size of our old moon--but what a place! And it's ours! "Back in history--you remember?--an ambitious lad named Alexander sighed for more worlds to conquer. Well, we're going Alexander one better--we've found the world. We're the first ever to go out into space and return again. "We'll go back there, the three of us. We will take no others along--not yet. We will explore and make our plans for development; and we will keep it to ourselves until we are ready to hold it against any opposition. "And now, how soon can you go? Your injury--how soon will you be well enough?" "Right now," Chet told him laconically; "to-day, if you say the word. They've got me welded together so I'll hold, I reckon. But where's the ship? What have you done--" He broke off abruptly to listen-- * * * * * To all three came a muffled, booming roar. The windows beside them shivered with the thud of the distant explosion; they had not ceased their trembling before Harkness had switched on the news broadcast. And it was a minute only until the news-gathering system was on the air. "Explosion at the Institute of Physical Science!" it said. "This is Vienna broadcasting. An explosion has just occurred. We are giving a preliminary announcement only. The laboratories of the Scientific Institute of this city are destroyed. A number of lives have been lost. The cause has not been determined. It is reported that the laboratories were beginning analytical work, on the so-called Harkness Dark Moon gas-- "Confirmation has just been radioed to this station. Dark Moon gas exploded on contact with air. The American, Harkness, is either a criminal or a madman; he will be apprehended at once. This confirmation comes from Herr Schwartzmann of Vienna who left the Institute only a few minutes before the explosion occurred--" And, in the quiet of a hospital room, Walter Harkness, drew a long breath and whispered: "Schwartzmann! His hand is everywhere.... And that sample was all I had.... I must leave at once--go back to America." He was halfway to the door--he was almost carrying Diane Delacouer with him--when Chet's quiet tones brought him up short. "I've never seen you afraid," said Chet; and his eyes were regarding the other man curiously; "but you seem to have the wind up, as the old flyers used to say, when it comes to Schwartzmann." * * * * * Harkness looked at the girl he held so tightly, then grinned boyishly at Chet. "I've someone else to be afraid for now," he said. His smile faded and was replaced by a look of deep concern. "I haven't told you about Schwartzmann," he said; "haven't had time. But he's poison, Chet. And he's after our ship." "Where is the ship; where have you hidden it? Tell me--where?" Harkness looked about him before he whispered sharply: "Our old shop--up north!" He seemed to feel that some explanation was due Chet. "In this day it seems absurd to say such things," he added; "but this Schwartzmann is a throw-back--a conscienceless scoundrel. He would put all three of us out of the way in a minute if he could get the ship. _He_ knows we have been to the Dark Moon--no question about that--and he wants the wealth he can imagine is there. "We'll all plan to leave; I'll radio you later. We'll go back to the Dark Moon--" He broke off abruptly as the door opened to admit the nurse. "You'll hear from me later," he repeated; and hurried Diane Delacouer from the room. But he returned in a moment to stand again at the door--the nurse was still in the room. "In case you feel like going for a hop," he told Chet casually, "Diane's leaving her ship here for you. You'll find it up above--private landing stage on the roof." Chet answered promptly, "Fine; that will go good one of these days." All this for the benefit of listening ears. Yet even Chet would have been astonished to know that he would be using that ship within an hour.... * * * * * He was standing at the window, and his mind was filled, not with thoughts of any complications that had developed for his friend Harkness, but only of the adventures that lay ahead of them both. The Dark Moon!--they had reached it indeed; but they had barely scratched the surface of that world of mystery and adventure. He was wild with eagerness to return--to see again that new world, blazing brightly beneath the sun; to see the valley of fires--and he had a score to settle with the tribe of ape-men, unless Harkness had finished them off while he, himself, lay unconscious.... Yes, there seemed little doubt of that; Walt would have paid the score for all of them.... He seemed actually back in that world to which his thoughts went winging across the depths of space. The burr of a telephone recalled him. It was the hospital office, he found, when he answered. There was a message--would Mr. Bullard kindly receive it on the telautotype--lever number four, and dial fifteen-point-two--thanks.... And Chet depressed a key and adjusted the instrument that had been printing the newscast. The paper moved on beneath the glass, and the type-bars clicked more slowly now. From some distant station that might be anywhere on or above the earth, there was coming a message. The frequency of that sending current was changed at some central office; it was stepped down to suit the instrument beside him. And the type was spelling out words that made the watching man breathless and intent--until he tore off the paper and leaped for the call signal that would summon the nurse. Through her he would get his own clothes, his uniform, the triple star that showed his rating and his authority in every air-level of the world. That badge would have got him immediate attention on any landing field. Now, on the flat roof, with steady, gray eyes and a voice whose very quietness accentuated its imperative commands, Chet had the staff of the hospital hangars as alert as if their alarm had sounded a general ambulance call. * * * * * Straight into the sky a red beacon made a rigid column of light; a radio sender was crackling a warning and a demand for "clear air." From the forty level, a patrol ship that had caught the signal came corkscrewing down the red shaft to stand by for emergency work.... Chet called her commander from the cabin of Diane's ship. A word of thanks--Chet's number--and a dismissal of the craft. Then the white lights signaled "all clear" and the hold-down levers let go with a soft hiss-- The feel of the controls was good to his hands; the ship roared into life. A beautiful little cruiser, this ship of Diane's; her twin helicopters lifted her gracefully into the air. The column of red light had changed to blue, the mark of an ascending area; Chet touched a switch. A muffled roar came from the stern and the blast drove him straight out for a mile; then he swung and returned. He was nosing up as he touched the blue--straight up--and he held the vertical climb till the altimeter before him registered sixty thousand. Traffic is north-bound only on the sixty-level, and Chet set his ship on a course for the frozen wastes of the Arctic; then he gave her the gun and nodded in tight-lipped satisfaction at the mounting thunder that answered from the stern. Only then did he read again the message on a torn fragment of telautotype paper. "Harkness," was the signature; and above, a brief warning and a call--"Danger--must leave at once. You get ship and stand by. I will meet you there." And, for the first time, Chet found time to wonder at this danger that had set the hard-headed, hard-hitting Walt Harkness into a flutter of nerves. * * * * * What danger could there be in this well-guarded world? A patrol-ship passed below him as he asked himself the question. It was symbolic of a world at peace; a world too busy with its own tremendous development to find time for wars or makers of war. What trouble could this man Schwartzmann threaten that a word to the Peace Enforcement Commission would not quell? Where could he go to elude the inescapable patrols? And suddenly Chet saw the answer to that question--saw plainly where Schwartzmann could go. Those vast reaches of black space! If Schwartzmann had their ship he could go where they had gone--go out to the Dark Moon.... And Harkness had warned Chet to get their ship and stand by. Had Walt learned of some plan of Schwartzmann's? Chet could not answer the question, but he moved the control rheostat over to the last notch. From the body of the craft came an unending roar of a generator where nothing moved; where only the terrific, explosive impact of bursting detonite drove out from the stern to throw them forward. "A good little ship," Chet had said of this cruiser of Diane's; and he nodded approval now of a ground-speed detector whose quivering needle had left the 500 mark. It touched 600, crept on, and trembled at 700 miles an hour with the top speed of the ship. There was a position-finder in the little control room, and Chet's gaze returned to it often to see the pinpoint of light that crept slowly across the surface of a globe. It marked their ever-changing location, and it moved unerringly toward a predetermined goal. * * * * * It was a place of ice and snow and bleak outcropping of half-covered rocks where he descended. Lost from the world, a place where even the high levels seldom echoed to the roar of passing ships, it had been a perfect location for their "shop." Here he and Walt had assembled their mystery ship. He had to search intently over the icy waste to find the exact location; a dim red glow from a hidden sun shone like pale fire across distant black hills. But the hills gave him a bearing, and he landed at last beside a vaguely outlined structure, half hidden in drifting snow. The dual fans dropped him softly upon the snow ground and Chet, as he walked toward the great locked doors, was trembling from other causes than the cold. Would the ship be there? He was suddenly a-quiver with excitement at the thought of what this ship meant--the adventure, the exploration that lay ahead. The doors swung back. In the warm and lighted room was a cylinder of silvery white. Its bow ended in a gaping port where a mighty exhaust could roar forth to check the ship's forward speed; there were other ports ranged about the gleaming body. Above the hull a control-room projected flatly; its lookouts shone in the brilliance of the nitron illuminator that flooded the room with light.... Chet Bullard was breathless as he moved on and into the room. His wild experiences that had seemed but a weird dream were real again. The Dark Moon was real! And they would be going back to it! * * * * * The muffled beating of great helicopters was sounding in his ears; outside, a ship was landing. This would be Harkness coming to join him; yet, even as the thought flashed through his mind, it was countered by a quick denial. To the experienced hearing of the Master Pilot this sound of many fans meant no little craft. It was a big ship that was landing, and it was coming down fast. The blue-striped monster looming large in the glow of the midnight sun was not entirely a surprise to Chet's staring eyes. But--blue-striped! The markings of the Schwartzmann line!--He had hardly sensed the danger when it was upon him. A man, heavy and broad of frame, was giving orders. Only once had Chet seen this Herr Schwartzmann, but there was no mistaking him now. And he was sending a squad of rushing figures toward the man who struggled to close a great door. Chet crouched to meet the attack. He was outnumbered; he could never win out. But the knowledge of his own helplessness was nothing beside that other conviction that flooded him with sickening certainty-- A hoax!--that was what they had called Walt's story; Schwartzmann had so named it, and now Schwartzmann had been the one to fool them; the message was a fake--a bait to draw him out; and he, Chet, had taken the bait. He had led Schwartzmann here; had delivered their ship into his hands-- He landed one blow on the nearest face; he had one glimpse of a clubbed weapon swinging above him--and the world went dark. CHAPTER II _Into Space_ A pulsing pain that stabbed through his head was Chet's first conscious impression. Then, as objects came slowly into focus before his eyes, he knew that above him a ray of light was striking slantingly through the thick glass of a control-room lookout. Other lookouts were black, the dead black of empty space. Through them, sparkling points of fire showed here and there--suns, sending their light across millions of years to strike at last on a speeding ship. But, from the one port that caught the brighter light, came that straight ray to illumine the room. "Space," thought Chet vaguely. "That is the sunlight of space!" He was trying to arrange his thoughts in some sensible sequence. His head!--what had happened to his head?... And then he remembered. Again he saw a clubbed weapon descending, while the face of Schwartzmann stared at him through bulbous eyes.... And this control-room where he lay--he knew in an instant where he was. It was his own ship that was roaring and trembling beneath him--his and Walt Harkness'--it was flying through space! And, with the sudden realization of what this meant, he struggled to arise. Only then did he see the figure at the controls. The man was leaning above an instrument board; he straightened to stare from a rear port while he spoke to someone Chet could not see. "There's more of 'em coming!" he said in a choked voice. "_Mein Gott!_ Neffer can we get away!" * * * * * He fumbled with shaking hands at instruments and controls; and now Chet saw his chalk-white face and read plainly the terror that was written there. But the cords that cut into his own wrists and ankles reminded him that he was bound; he settled back upon the floor. Why struggle? If this other pilot was having trouble let him get out of it by himself--let him kill his own snakes! That the man was having trouble there was no doubt. He looked once more behind him as if at something that pursued; then swung the ball-control to throw the ship off her course. The craft answered sluggishly, and Chet Bullard grinned where he lay helpless upon the floor; for he knew that his ship should have been thrown crashingly aside with such a motion as that. The answer was plain: the flask of super-detonite was exhausted; here was the last feeble explosion of the final atoms of the terrible explosive that was being admitted to the generator. And to cut in another flask meant the opening of a hidden valve. Chet forgot the pain of his swelling hands to shake with suppressed mirth. This was going to be good! He forgot it until, through a lookout, he saw a writhing, circling fire that wrapped itself about the ship and jarred them to a halt. The serpents!--those horrors from space that had come with the coming of the Dark Moon! They had disrupted the high-level traffic of the world; had seized great liners; torn their way in; stripped these of every living thing, and let the empty shells crash back to earth. Chet had forgotten or he had failed to realize the height at which this new pilot was flying. Only speed could save them; the monsters, with their snouts that were great suction-cups, could wrench off a metal door--tear out the glass from a port! * * * * * He saw the luminous mass crush itself against a forward lookout and felt the jar of its body against their ship. Soft and vaporous, these cloud-like serpents seemed as they drifted through space; yet the impact, when they struck, proved that this new matter had mass. Chet saw the figure at the controls stagger back and cower in fear; the man's bullet-shaped head was covered by his upraised arms: there was some horror outside those windows that his eyes had no wish to see. Beside him the towering figure of Schwartzmann appeared; he had sprung into Chet's view, and he screamed orders at the fear-stricken pilot. "Fool! Swine!" Schwartzmann was shouting. "Do something! You said you could fly this ship!" In desperation he leaped forward and reached for the controls himself. Chet's blurred faculties snapped sharply to attention. That yellow glow against the port--the jarring of their ship--it meant instant destruction once that searching snout found some place where it could secure a hold. If the air-pressure within the ship were released; if even a crack were opened!-- "Here, you!" he shouted to the frantic Schwartzmann who was jerking frenziedly at the controls that no longer gave response. "Cut these ropes!--leave those instruments alone, you fool!" He was suddenly vibrant with hate as he realized what this man had done: he had struck him, Chet, down as he would have felled an animal for butchery; he had stolen their ship; and now he was losing it. Chet hardly thought of his own desperate plight in his rage at this threat to their ship, and at Schwartzmann's inability to help himself. "Cut these ropes!" he repeated. "Damn it all, turn me loose; I can fly us out!" He added his frank opinion of Schwartzmann and all his men. And Schwartzmann, though his dark face flushed angrily red for one instant, leaped to Chet's side and slashed at the cords with a knife. The room swam before Chet's dizzy eyes as he came to his feet. He half fell, half drew himself full length toward the valve that he alone knew. Then again he was on his feet and he gripped at the ball-control with one hand while he opened a master throttle that cut in this new supply of explosive. * * * * * The room had been silent with the silence of empty space, save only for the scraping of a horrid body across the ship's outer shell. The silence was shattered now as if by the thunder of many guns. There was no time for easing themselves into gradual flight. Chet thrust forward on the ball-control, and the blast from their stern threw the ship as if it had been fired from a giant cannon. The self-compensating floor swung back and up; Chet's weight was almost unbearable as the ship beneath him leaped out and on, and the terrific blast that screamed and thundered urged this speeding shell to greater and still greater speed. And then, with the facility that that speed gave, Chet's careful hands moved a tiny metal ball within its magnetic cage, and the great ship bellowed from many ports as it followed the motion of that ball. Could an eye have seen the wild, twisting flight, it must have seemed as if pilot and ship had gone suddenly mad. The craft corkscrewed and whirled; it leaped upward and aside; and, as the glowing mass was thrown clear of the lookout, Chet's hand moved again to that maximum forward position, and again the titanic blast from astern drove them on and out. There were other shapes ahead, glowing lines of fire, luminous masses like streamers of cloud that looped themselves into contorted forms and writhed vividly until they straightened into sharp lines of speed that bore down upon the fleeing craft and the human food that was escaping these hungry snouts. Chet saw them dead ahead; he saw the out-thrust heads, each ending in a great suction-cup, the row of disks that were eyes blazing above, and the gaping maw below. He altered their course not a hair's breadth as he bore down upon them, while the monsters swelled prodigiously before his eyes. And the thunderous roar from astern came with never a break, while the ship itself ceased its trembling protest against the sudden blast and drove smoothly on and into the waiting beasts. There was a hardly perceptible thudding jar. They were free! And the forward lookouts showed only the brilliant fires of distant suns and one more glorious than the rest that meant a planet. * * * * * Chet turned at last to face Schwartzmann and his pilot where they had clung helplessly to a metal stanchion. Four or five others crept in from the cabin aft; their blanched faces told of the fear that bad gripped them--fear of the serpents; fear, too, of the terrific plunges into which the ship had been thrown. Chet Bullard drew the metal control-ball back into neutral and permitted himself the luxury of a laugh. "You're a fine bunch of highway-men," he told Schwartzmann; "you'll steal a ship you can't fly; then come up here above the R. A. level and get mixed up with those brutes. What's the idea? Did you think you would just hop over to the Dark Moon? Some little plan like that in your mind?" Again the dark, heavy face of Schwartzmann flushed deeply; but it was his own men upon whom he turned. "You," he told the pilot--"you were so clever; you would knock this man senseless! You would insist that you could fly the ship!" The pilot's eyes still bulged with the fear he had just experienced. "But, Herr Schwartzmann, it was you who told me--" A barrage of unintelligible words cut his protest short. Schwartzmann poured forth imprecations in an unknown tongue, then turned to the others. "Back!" he ordered. "Bah!--such men! The danger it iss over--yess! This pilot, he will take us back safely." He turned his attention now to the waiting Chet. "Herr Bullard, iss it not--yess?" He launched into extended apologies--he had wanted a look at this so marvelous ship--he had spied upon it; he admitted it. But this murderous attack was none of his doing; his men had got out of hand; and then he had thought it best to take Chet, unconscious as he was, and return with him where he could have care. * * * * * And Chet Bullard kept his eyes steadily upon the protesting man and said nothing, but he was thinking of a number of things. There was Walt's warning, "this Schwartzmann means mischief," and the faked message that had brought him from the hospital to get the ship from its hiding place; no, it was too much to believe. But Chet's eyes were unchanging, and he nodded shortly in agreement as the other concluded. "You will take us back?" Schwartzmann was asking. "I will repay you well for what inconvenience we have caused. The ship, you will return it safely to the place where it was?" And Chet, after making and discarding a score of plans, knew there was nothing else he could do. He swung the little metal ball into a sharply-banked turn. The straight ray of light from an impossibly brilliant sun struck now on a forward lookout; it shone across the shoulder of a great globe to make a white, shining crescent as of a giant moon. It was Earth; and Chet brought the bow-sights to bear on that far-off target, while again the thunderous blast was built up to drive them back along the trackless path on which they had come. But he wondered, as he pressed forward on the control, what the real plan of this man, Schwartzmann, might be.... * * * * * Less than half an hour brought them to the Repelling Area, and Chet felt the upward surge as he approached it. Here, above this magnetic field where gravitation's pull was nullified, had been the air-lanes for fast liners. Empty lanes they were now; for the R. A., as the flying fraternity knew it--the Heaviside Layer of an earlier day--marked the danger line above which the mysterious serpents lay in wait. Only the speed of Chet's ship saved them; more than one of the luminous monsters was in sight as he plunged through the invisible R. A. and threw on their bow-blast strongly to check their fall. Then, as he set a course that would take them to that section of the Arctic waste where the ship had been, he pondered once more upon the subject of this Schwartzmann of the shifty eyes and the glib tongue and of his men who had "got out of hand" and had captured this ship. "Why in thunder are we back here?" Chet asked himself in perplexity. "This big boy means to keep the ship; and, whatever his plans may have been before, he will never stop short of the Dark Moon now that he has seen the old boat perform. Then why didn't he keep on when he was started? Had the serpents frightened him back?" He was still mentally proposing questions to which there seemed no answer when he felt the pressure of a metal tube against his back. The voice of Schwartzmann was in his ears. "This is a detonite pistol"--that voice was no longer unctuous and self-deprecating--"one move and I'll plant a charge inside you that will smash you to a jelly!" * * * * * There were hands that gripped Chet before he could turn; his arms were wrenched backward; he was helpless in the grip of Schwartzmann's men. The former pilot sprang forward. "Take control, Max!" Schwartzmann snapped; but he followed it with a question while the pilot was reaching for the ball. "You can fly it for sure, Max?" The man called Max answered confidently. "_Ja wohl!_" he said with eager assurance. "Up top there would have been no trouble yet for that _verdammt, verloren_ valve. That one experimental trip is enough--I fly it!" Those who held Chet were binding his wrists. He was thrown to the floor while his feet were tied, and, as a last precaution, a gag was forced into his mouth. Schwartzmann left this work to his men. He paid no attention to Chet; he was busy at the radio. He placed the sending-levers in strange positions that would effect a blending of wave lengths which only one receiving instrument could pick up. He spoke cryptic words into the microphone, then dropped into a language that was unfamiliar to Chet. Yet, even then, it was plain that he was giving instructions, and he repeated familiar words. "Harkness," Chet heard him say, and, "--Delacouer--_ja!_--Mam'selle Delacouer!" Then, leaving the radio, he said, "Put my ship inside the hangar;" and the pilot, Max, grounded their own ship to allow the men to leap out and float into the big building the big aircraft in which Schwartzmann had come. "Now close the doors!" their leader ordered. "Leave everything as it was!" And to the pilot he gave added instructions: "There iss no air traffic here. You will to forty thousand ascend, und you will wait over this spot." Contemptuously he kicked aside the legs of the bound man that he might walk back into the cabin. * * * * * The take-off was not as smooth as it would have been had Chet's slim hands been on the controls; this burly one who handled them now was not accustomed to such sensitivity. But Chet felt the ship lift and lurch, then settle down to a swift, spiralling ascent. Now he lay still as he tried to ponder the situation. "Now what dirty work are they up to?" he asked himself. He had seen a sullen fury on the dark face of Herr Schwartzmann as he spoke the names of Walt and Diane into the radio. Chet remembered the look now, and he struggled vainly with the cords about his wrists. Even a detonite pistol with its tiny grain of explosive in the end of each bullet would not check him--not when Walt and Diane were endangered. And the expression on that heavy, scowling face had told him all too clearly that some real danger threatened. But the cords held fast on his swollen wrists. His head was still throbbing; and even his side, not entirely healed, was adding to the torment that beat upon him--beat and beat with his pulsing blood--until the beating faded out into unconsciousness.... Dimly he knew they were soaring still higher as their radio picked up the warning of an approaching patrol ship; vaguely he realized that they descended again to a level of observation. Chet knew in some corner of his brain that Schwartzmann was watching from an under lookout with a powerful glass, and he heard his excited command: "Down--go slowly, down!... They are landing.... They have entered the hangar. Now, down with it, Max! Down! down!" * * * * * The plunging fall of the ship roused Chet from his stupor. He felt the jolt of the clumsy landing despite the snow-cushioned ground; he heard plainly the exclamations from beyond an open port--the startled oath in Walter Harkness' voice, and the stinging scorn in the words of Diane Delacouer. Herr Schwartzmann had been in the employ of Mademoiselle Delacouer, but he was taking orders no longer. There was a sound of scuffling feet, and once the thud of a blow.... Then Chet watched with heavy, hopeless eyes as the familiar faces of Diane and Walt appeared in the doorway. Their hands were bound; they, too, were threatened with a slim-barreled pistol in the hands of the smirking, exultant Schwartzmann. A tall, thin-faced man whom Chet had not seen before followed them into the room. The newcomer was motioned forward now, as Schwartzmann called an order to the pilot: "All right; now we go, Max! Herr Doktor Kreiss will give you the bearings; he knows his way among the stars." Herr Schwartzmann doubled over in laughing appreciation of his own success before he straightened up and regarded his captives with cold eyes. "Such a pleasure!" he mocked: "such charming passengers to take with me on my first trip into space; this ship, it iss not so goot. I will build better ships later on; I will let you see them when I shall come to visit you." He laughed again at sight of the wondering looks in the eyes of the three; stooping, he jerked the gag from Chet's mouth. "You do not understand," he exclaimed. "I should haff explained. You see, _meine guten Freunde_, we go--ach!--you have guessed it already! We go to the Dark Moon. I am pleased to take you with me on the trip out; but coming back, I will have so much to bring--there will be no room for passengers. "I could have killed you here," he said; and his mockery gave place for a moment to a savage tone, "but the patrol ships, they are everywhere. But I have influence here und there--I arranged that your flask of gas should be charged with explosive, I discredited you, and yet I could not so great a risk take as to kill you all." "So came inspiration! I called your foolish young friend here from the hospital. I ordered him to go at once to the ship hidden where I could not find, and I signed the name of Herr Harkness." * * * * * Chet caught the silent glances of his friends who could yet smile hopefully through the other emotions that possessed them. He ground his teeth as the smooth voice of Herr Schwartzmann went on: "He led me here; the young fool! Then I sent for you--and this time I signed his name--und you came. So simple!" "Und now we go in my ship to my new world. And," he added savagely, "if one of you makes the least trouble, he will land on the Dark Moon-yess!-but he will land hard, from ten thousand feet up!" The great generator was roaring. To Chet came the familiar lift of the R. A. effect. They were beyond the R. A.; they were heading out and away from Earth; and his friends were captives through his own unconscious treachery, carried out into space in their own ship, with the hands of an enemy gripping the controls.... Chet's groan, as he turned his face away from the others who had tried to smile cheerfully, had nothing to do with the pain of his body. It was his mind that was torturing him. But he muttered broken words as he lay there, words that had reference to one Schwartzmann. "I'll get him, damn him! I'll get him!" he was promising himself. And Herr Schwartzmann who was clever, would have proved his cleverness still more by listening. For a Master Pilot of the World does not get his rating on vain boasts. He must know first his flying, his ships and his air--but he is apt to make good in other ways as well. CHAPTER III _Out of Control_ Walter Harkness had built this ship with Chet's help. They had designed it for space-travel. It was the first ship to leave the Earth under its own power, reach another heavenly body, and come back for a safe landing. But they had not installed any luxuries for the passengers. In the room where the three were confined, there were no self-compensating chairs such as the high-liners used. But the acceleration of the speeding ship was constant, and the rear wall became their floor where they sat or paced back and forth. Their bonds had been removed, and one of Harkness' hands was gripping Diane's where they sat side by side. Chet was briskly limbering his cramped muscles. He glanced at the two who sat silent nearby, and he knew what was in their minds--knew that each was thinking of the other, forgetting their own danger: and it was these two who had saved his life on their first adventure out in space. Walt--one man who was never spoiled by his millions; and Diane--straight and true as they make 'em! Some way, somehow, they must be saved--thus ran his thoughts--but it looked bad for them all. Schwartzmann?--no use kidding themselves about that lad; he was one bad hombre. The best they could hope for was to be marooned on the Dark Moon--left there to live or to die amid those savage surroundings; and the worst that might happen--! But Chet refused to think of what alternatives might occur to the ugly, distorted mind of the man who had them at his mercy. There was no echo of these thoughts when he spoke; the smile that flashed across his lean face brought a brief response from the despondent countenances of his companions. "Well," Chet observed, and ran his hand through a tangle of blond hair, "I have heard that the Schwartzmann lines give service, and I reckon I heard right. Here we were wanting to go back to the Dark Moon, and,"--he paused to point toward a black portlight where occasional lights flashed past--"I'll say we're going; going somewhere at least. All I hope is that that Maxie boy doesn't find the Dark Moon at about ten thousand per. He may be a great little skipper on a nice, slow, five-hundred-maximum freighter, but not on this boat. I don't like his landings." * * * * * Diane Delacouer raised her eyes to smile approvingly upon him. "You're good, Chet," she said; "you are a darn good sport. They knock you down out of control, and you nose right back up for a forty-thousand foot zoom. And you try to carry us with you. Well, I guess it's time we got over our gloom. Now what is going to happen?" "I'll tell you," said Walter Harkness, looking at his watch: "if that fool pilot of Schwartzmann's doesn't cut his stern thrust and build up a bow resistance, we'll overshoot our mark and go tearing on a few hundred thousand miles in space." Diane was playing up to Chet's lead. "_Bien!_" she exclaimed. "A few million, perhaps! Then we may see some of those Martians we've been speculating about. I hear they are handsome, my Walter--much better looking than you. Maybe this is all for the best after all!" "Say," Harkness protested, "if you two idiots don't know enough to worry as you ought, I don't see any reason why I should do all the heavy worrying for the whole crowd. I guess you've got the right idea at that: take what comes when it gets here--or when we get there." Small wonder, thought Chet, that Herr Schwartzmann stared at them in puzzled bewilderment when he flung open the door, and took one long stride into the room. Stocky, heavy-muscled, he stood regarding them, a frown of suspicion drawing his face into ugly lines. Plainly he was disturbed by this laughing good-humor where he had expected misery and hopelessness and tears. He moved the muzzle of a detonite pistol back and forth. * * * * * "You haff been drinking!" he stated at last. "You are intoxicated--all of you!" His eyes darted searching glances about the little room that was too bare to hide any cause for inebriation. It was Mam'selle Diane who answered him with an emphatic shake of her dark head; an engaging smile tugged at the corners of her lips. "_Mais non!_ my dear Herr Schwartzmann," she assured him: "it is joy--just happiness at again approaching our Moon--and in such good company, too." "Fortunes of war, Schwartzmann," declared Harkness; "we know how to accept them, and we don't hold it against you. We are down now, but your turn will come." The man's reply was a sputtering of rage in words that neither Chet nor Harkness could understand. The latter turned to the girl with a question. "Did you get it, Diane? What did he say?" "I think I would not care to translate it literally," said Diane Delacouer, twisting her soft mouth into an expression of distaste; "but, speaking generally, he disagrees with you." Herr Schwartzmann was facing Harkness belligerently. "You think you know something! What is it?" he demanded. "You are under my feet: I kick you as I would _meinen Hund_ and you can do nothing." He aimed a savage kick into the air to illustrate his meaning, and Harkness' face flushed suddenly scarlet. * * * * * Whatever retort was on Harkness' tongue was left unspoken; a sharp look from Chet, who brought his fingers swiftly to his lips in a gesture of silence, checked the reply. The action was almost unconscious on Chet's part; it was as unpremeditated as the sudden thought that flashed abruptly into his mind-- They were helpless; they were in this brute's power beyond the slightest doubt. Schwartzmann's words, "You know something. What is it?" had fired a swift train of thought. The idea was nebulous as yet ... but if they could throw a scare into this man--make him think there was danger ahead.... Yes, that was it: make Schwartzmann think they knew of dangers that he could not avoid. They had been there before: make this man afraid to kill them. The dreadful alternative that Chet had feared to think of might be averted.... All this came in an instantaneous, flashing correlation of his conscious thoughts. "I'll tell you what we mean," he told Schwartzmann. He even leaned forward to shake an impressive finger before the other's startled face. "I'll tell you first of all that it doesn't make a damn bit of difference who is on top--or it won't in a few hours more. We'll all be washed out together. "I've landed once on the Dark Moon; I know what will happen. And do you know how fast we are going? Do you know the Moon's speed as it approaches? Had you thought what you will look like when that fool pilot rams into it head on? "And that isn't all!" He grinned derisively into Schwartzmann's flushed face, disregarding the half-raised pistol; it was as if some secret thought had filled him with overpowering amusement. His broad grin grew into a laugh. "That isn't all, big boy. What will you do if you do land? What will you do when you open the ports and the--?" He cut his words short, and the smile, with all other expression, was carefully erased from his young face. "No, I reckon I won't spoil the surprise. We got through it all right; maybe you will, too--maybe!" * * * * * And again it was Diane who played up to Chet's lead without a moment's hesitation. "Chet," she demanded, "aren't you going to warn him? You would not allow him and his men to be--" She stopped in apparent horror of the unsaid words; Chet gave her an approving glance. "We'll see about that when we get there, Diane." He turned abruptly back to Schwartzmann. "I'll forget what a rotten winner you have been; I'll help you out; I'll take the controls if you like. Of course, your man, Max, may set us down without damage; then again--" "Take them!" Schwartzmann ungraciously made an order of his acceptance. "Take the controls, Herr Bullard! But if you make a single false move!" The menacing pistol completed the threat. But "Herr Bullard" merely turned to his companion with a level, understanding look. "Come on," he said; "you can both help in working out our location." He stepped before the burly man that Diane might precede them through the door. And he felt the hand of Walt Harkness on his arm in a pressure that told what could not be said aloud. * * * * * There were pallid-faced men in the cabin through which they passed; men who stared and stared from the window-ports into the black immensity of space. Chet, too, stopped to look; there had been no port-holes in that inner room where they had been confined. He knew what to expect; he knew how awe-inspiring would be the sight of strange, luminous bodies--great islands of light--masses of animaculae--that glowed suddenly, then melted again into velvet black. A whirl of violet grew almost golden in sudden motion; Chet knew it for an invisible monster of space. Glowingly luminous as it threw itself upon a subtle mass of shimmering light, it faded like a flickering flame, and went dark as its motion ceased. Life!--life everywhere in this ocean of space! And on every hand was death. "Not surprising," Chet realized, "that these other Earthmen are awed and trembling!" The sun was above them; its light struck squarely down through the upper ports. This was polarized light--there was nothing outside to reflect or refract it--and, coming as a straight beam from above, it made a brilliant circle upon the floor from which it was diffused throughout the room. It was as if the floor itself was the illuminating agent. No eye could bear to look into the glare from above; nor was there need, for the other ports drew the eyes with their black depths of unplumbed space. Black!--so velvet as to seem almost tangible! Could one have reached out a hand, that blackness, it seemed, must be a curtain that the hand could draw aside, where unflickering points of light pricked through the dark to give promise of some radiant glory beyond. * * * * * They had seen it before, these three, yet Chet caught the eyes of Harkness and Diane and knew that his own eyes must share something of the look he saw in theirs--something of reverent wonder and a strange humility before this evidence of transcendent greatness. Their own immediate problem seemed gone. The tyranny of this glowering human and his men--the efforts of the whole world and its struggling millions--how absurdly unimportant it all was! How it faded to insignificance! And yet.... Chet came from the reverie that held him. There was one man by whom this beauty was unseen. Herr Schwartzmann was angrily ordering them on, and, surprisingly, Chet laughed aloud. This problem, he realized, was _his_ problem--his to solve with the help of the other two. And it was _not_ insignificant; he knew with some sudden wordless knowledge that there was nothing in all the great scheme but that it had its importance. This vastness that was beyond the power of human mind to grasp ceased to be formidable--he was part of it. He felt buoyed up; and he led the way confidently toward the control-room door where Schwartzmann stood. The scientist, whom Schwartzmann had called Herr Doktor Kreiss, was beside the pilot. He was leaning forward to search the stars in the blackness ahead, but the pilot turned often to stare through the rear lookouts as if drawn in fearful fascination by what was there. Chet took the controls at Schwartzmann's order; the pilot saluted with a trembling hand and vanished into the cabin at the rear. "Ready for flying orders, Doctor," the new pilot told Herr Kreiss. "I'll put her where you say--within reason." Behind him he heard the choked voice of Mademoiselle Diane: "_Regardez! Ah, mon Dieu_, the beauty of it! This loveliness--it hurts!" * * * * * One hand was pressed to her throat; her face was turned as the pilot's had been that she might stare and stare at a quite impossible moon--a great half-disk of light in the velvet dark. "This loveliness--it hurts!" Chet looked, too, and knew what Diane was feeling. There was a catch of emotion in his own throat--a feeling that was almost fear. A giant half-moon!--and he knew it was the Earth. Golden Earth-light came to them in a flooding glory; the blazing sun struck on it from above to bring out half the globe in brilliant gold that melted to softest, iridescent, rainbow tints about its edge. Below, hung motionless in the night, was another sphere. Like a reflection of Earth in the depths of some Stygian lake, the old moon shone, too, in a half-circle of light. Small wonder that these celestial glories brought a gasp of delight from Diane, or drew into lines of fear the face of that other pilot who saw only his own world slipping away. But Chet Bullard, Master Pilot of the World, swung back to scan a star-chart that the scientist was holding, then to search out a similar grouping in the black depths into which they were plunging, and to bring the cross-hairs of a rigidly mounted telescope upon that distant target. "How far?" he asked himself in a half-spoken thought, "--how far have we come?" * * * * * There was an instrument that ticked off the seconds in this seemingly timeless void. He pressed a small lever beside it, and, beneath a glass that magnified the readings, there passed the time-tape. Each hour and minute was there; each movement of the controls was indicated; each trifling variation in the power of the generator's blast. Chet made some careful computations and passed the paper to Harkness, who tilted the time-tape recorder that he might see the record. "Check this, will you, Walt?" Chet was asking. "It is based on the time of our other trip, acceleration assumed as one thousand miles per hour per hour out of air--" The scientist interrupted; he spoke in English that was carefully precise. "It should lie directly ahead--the Dark Moon. I have calculated with exactness." Walter Harkness had snatched up a pair of binoculars. He swung sharply from lookout to lookout while he searched the heavens. "It's damned lucky for us that you made a slight error," Chet was telling the other. "Error?" Kreiss challenged. "Impossible!" "Then you and I are dead right this minute," Chet told him. "We are crossing the orbit of the Dark Moon--crossing at twenty thousand miles per hour relative to Earth, slightly in excess of that figure relative to the Dark Moon. If it had been here--!" He had been watching Harkness anxiously; he bit off his words as the binoculars were thrust into his hand. "There she comes," Harkness told him quietly; "it's up to you!" But Chet did not need the glasses. With his unaided eyes he could see a faint circle of violet light. It lay ahead and slightly above, and it grew visibly larger as he watched. A ring of nothingness, whose outline was the faintest shimmering halo; more of the distant stars winked out swiftly behind that ghostly circle; it was the Dark Moon!--and it was rushing upon them! * * * * * Chet swung an instrument upon it. He picked out a jet of violet light that could be distinguished, and he followed it with the cross-hairs while he twirled a micrometer screw; then he swiftly copied the reading that the instrument had inscribed. The invisible disk with its ghostly edge of violet was perceptibly larger as he slammed over the control-ball to up-end them in air. Under the control-room's nitron illuminator the cheeks of Herr Doktor Kreiss were pale and bloodless as if his heart had ceased to function. Harkness had moved quietly back to the side of Diane Delacouer and was holding her two hands firmly in his. The very air seemed charged with the quick tenseness of emotions. Schwartzmann must have sensed it even before he saw the onrushing death. Then he leaped to a lookout, and, an instant later, sprang at Chet calmly fingering the control. "Fool!" he screamed, "you would kill us all? Turn away from it! Away from it!" He threw himself in a frenzy upon the pilot. The detonite pistol was still in his hand. "Quick!" he shouted. "Turn us!" Harkness moved swiftly, but the scientist, Kreiss, was nearer; it was he who smashed the gun-hand down with a quick blow and snatched at the weapon. Schwartzmann was beside himself with rage. "You, too?" he demanded. "Giff it me--traitor!" * * * * * But the tall man stood uncompromisingly erect. "Never," he said, "have I seen a ship large enough to hold two commanding pilots. I take your orders in all things, Herr Schwartzmann--all but this. If we die--we die." Schwartzmann sputtered: "We should haff turned away. Even yet we might. It will--it will--" "Perhaps," agreed Kreiss, still in that precise, class-room voice, "perhaps it will. But this I know: with an acceleration of one thousand m.p.h. as this young man with the badge of a Master Pilot says, we cannot hope, in the time remaining, to overcome our present velocity; we can never check our speed and build up a relatively opposite motion before that globe would overwhelm us. If he has figured correctly, this young man--if he has found the true resultant of our two motions of approach--and if he has swung us that we may drive out on a line perpendicular to the resultant--" "I think I have," said Chet quietly. "If I haven't, in just a few minutes it won't matter to any of us; it won't matter at all." He met the gaze of Herr Doktor Kreiss who regarded him curiously. "If we escape," the scientist told him, "you will understand that I am under Herr Schwartzmann's command; I will be compelled to shoot you if he so orders. But, Herr Bullard, at this moment I would be very proud to shake your hand." And Chet, as he extended his hand, managed a grin that was meant also for the tense, white-faced Harkness and Diane. "I like to see 'em dealt that way," he said, "--right off the top of the deck." But the smile was erased as he turned back to the lookout. He had to lean close to see all of the disk, so swiftly was the approaching globe bearing down. * * * * * It came now from the side; it swelled larger and larger before his eyes. Their own ship seemed unmoving; only the unending thunder of the generator told of the frantic efforts to escape. They seemed hung in space; their own terrific speed seemed gone--added to and fused with the orbital motion of the Dark Moon to bring swiftly closer that messenger of death. The circle expanded silently; became menacingly huge. Chet was whispering softly to himself: "If I'd got hold of her an hour sooner--thirty minutes--or even ten.... We're doing over twenty thousand an hour combined speed, and we'll never really hit it.... We'll never reach the ground." He turned this over in his mind, and he nodded gravely in confirmation of his own conclusions. It seemed somehow of tremendous importance that he get this clearly thought out--this experience that was close ahead. "Skin friction!" he added. "It will burn us up!" He had a sudden vision of a flaming star blazing a hot trail through the atmosphere of this globe; there would be only savage eyes to follow it--to see the line of fire curving swiftly across the heavens.... He, himself, was seeing that blazing meteor so plainly.... His eyes found the lookout: the globe was gone. They were close--close! Only for the enveloping gas that made of this a dark moon, they would be seeing the surface, the outlines of continents. Chet strained his eyes--to see nothing! It was horrible. It had been fearful enough to watch that expanding globe.... He was abruptly aware that the outer rim of the lookout was red! For Chet Bullard, time ceased to have meaning; what were seconds--or centuries--as he stared at that glowing rim? He could not have told. The outer shell of their ship--it was radiant--shining red-hot in the night. And above the roar of the generator came a nerve-ripping shriek. A wind like a blast from hell was battering and tearing at their ship. "Good-by!" He had tried to call; the demoniac shrieking from without smothered his voice. One arm was across his eyes in an unconscious motion. The air of the little room was stifling. He forced his arm down: he would meet death face to face. * * * * * The lookout was ringed with fire; it was white with the terrible white of burning steel!--it was golden!--then cherry red! It was dying, as the fire dies from glowing metal plunged in its tempering bath--or thrown into the cold reaches of space! In Chet's ears was the roar of a detonite motor. He tried to realize that the lookouts were rimmed with black--cold, fireless black! An incredible black! There were stars there like pinpoints of flame! But conviction came only when he saw from a lookout in another wall a circle of violet that shrank and dwindled as he watched.... A hand was gripping his shoulder; he heard the voice of Walter Harkness speaking, while Walt's hand crept over to raise the triple star that was pinned to his blouse. "Master Pilot of the World!" Harkness was saying. "That doesn't cover enough territory, old man. It's another rating that you're entitled to, but I'm damned if I know what it is." And, for once, Chet's ready smile refused to form. He stared dumbly at his friend; his eyes passed to the white face of Mademoiselle Diane; then back to the controls, where his hand, without conscious volition, was reaching to move a metal ball. "Missed it!" he assured himself. "Hit the fringe of the air--just the very outside. If we'd been twenty thousand feet nearer!..." He was moving the ball; their bow was swinging. He steadied it and set the ship on an approximate course. "A stern chase!" he said aloud. "All our momentum to be overcome--but it's easy sailing now!" He pushed the ball forward to the limit, and the explosion-motor gave thunderous response. CHAPTER IV _The Return to the Dark Moon_ No man faces death in so shocking a form without feeling the effects. Death had flicked them with a finger of flame and had passed them by. Chet Bullard found his hands trembling uncontrollably as he fumbled for a book and opened it. The tables of figures printed there were blurred at first to his eyes, but he forced himself to forget the threat that was past, for there was another menace to consider now. And uppermost in his mind, when his thoughts came back into some approximate order, was condemnation of himself for an opportunity that was gone. "I could have jumped him," he told himself with bitter self-reproach; "I could have grabbed the pistol from Kreiss--the man was petrified." And then Chet had to admit a fact there was no use of denying: "I was as paralyzed as he was," he said, and only knew he had spoken aloud when he saw the puzzled look that crossed Harkness' face. Harkness and Diane had drawn near. In a far corner of the little room Schwartzmann had motioned to Kreiss to join him; they were as far away from the others as could be managed. Schwartzmann, Chet judged, needed some scientific explanation of these disturbing events; also he needed to take the detonite pistol from Kreiss' hand and jam it into his own hand. His eyes, at Chet's unconscious exclamation, had come with instant suspicion toward the two men. "Forty-seven hours, Walt," the pilot said, and repeated it loudly for Schwartzmann's benefit; "--forty-seven hours before we return to this spot. We are driving out into space; we've crossed the orbit of the Dark Moon, and we're doing twenty thousand miles an hour. "Now we must decelerate. It will take twenty hours to check us to zero speed; then twenty-seven more to shoot us back to this same point in space, allowing, of course, for a second deceleration. The same figuring with only slight variation will cover a return to the Dark Moon. As we sweep out I can allow for the moon-motion, and we'll hit it at a safe landing speed on the return trip this time." * * * * * Chet was paying little attention to his companion as he spoke. His eyes, instead, were covertly watching the bulky figure of Schwartzmann. As he finished, their captor shot a volley of questions at the scientist beside him; he was checking up on the pilot's remarks. Chet was leaning forward to stare intently from a lookout, his head was close to that of Harkness. "Listen, Walt," he whispered; "the Moon's out of sight; it's easy to lose. Maybe I can't find it again, anyway--it's going to take some nice navigating--but I'll miss it by ten thousand miles if you say so, and even the Herr Doktor can't check me on it." Chet saw the eyes of Schwartzmann grow intent. He reached ostentatiously for another book of tables, and he seated himself that he might figure in comfort. "Just check me on this," he told Harkness. He put down meaningless figures, while the man beside him remained silent. Over and over he wrote them--would Harkness never reach a decision?--over and over, until-- "I don't agree with that," Harkness told him and reached for the stylus in Chet's hand. And, while he appeared to make his own swift computations, there were words instead of figures that flowed from his pen. "Only alternative: return to Earth," he wrote. "Then S will hold off; wait in upper levels. Kreiss will give him new bearings. We'll shoot out again and do it better next time. Kreiss is nobody's fool. S means to maroon us on Moon--kill us perhaps. He'll get us there, sure. We might as well go now." * * * * * Chet had seen a movement across the room. "Let's start all over again," he broke in abruptly. He covered the writing with a clean sheet of paper where he set down more figures. He was well under way when Schwartzmann's quick strides brought him towering above them. Again the detonite pistol was in evidence; its small black muzzle moved steadily from Harkness to Chet. "For your life--such as is left of it--you may thank Herr Doktor Kreiss," he told Chet. "I thought at first you would have attempted to kill us." His smile, as he regarded them, seemed to Chet to be entirely evil. "You were near death twice, my dear Herr Bullard; and the danger is not entirely removed. "'Forty-seven hours' you have said; in forty-seven hours you will land us on the Dark Moon. If you do not,"--he raised the pistol suggestively--"remember that the pilot, Max, can always take us back to Earth. You are not indispensable." Chet looked at the dark face and its determined and ominous scowl. "You're a cheerful sort of soul, aren't you?" he demanded. "Do you have any faint idea of what a job this is? Do you know we will shoot another two hundred thousand miles straight out before I can check this ship? Then we come back; and meanwhile the Dark Moon has gone on its way. Had you thought that there's a lot of room to get lost in out here?" "Forty-seven hours!" said Schwartzmann. "I would advise that you do not lose your way." Chet shot one quizzical glance at Harkness. "That," he said, "makes it practically unanimous." Schwartzmann, with an elaborate show of courtesy, escorted Diane Delacouer to a cabin where she might rest. At a questioning look between Diane and Harkness, their captor reassured them. "Mam'selle shall be entirely safe," he said. "She may join you here whenever she wishes. As for you,"--he was speaking to Harkness--"I will permit you to stay here. I could tie you up but this iss not necessary." And Harkness must have agreed that it was indeed unnecessary, for either Kreiss or Max, or some other of Schwartzmann's men, was at his side continuously from that moment on. * * * * * Chet would have liked a chance for a quiet talk and an exchange of ideas. It seemed that somewhere, somehow, he should be able to find an answer to their problem. He stared moodily out into the blackness ahead, where a distant star was seemingly their goal. Harkness stood at his side or paced back and forth in the little room, until he threw himself, at last, upon a cot. And always the great stern-blast roared; muffled by the insulated walls, its unceasing thunder came at last to be unheard. To the pilot there was neither sound nor motion. His directional sights were unswervingly upon that distant star ahead. Seemingly they were suspended, helpless and inert, in a black void. But for the occasional glowing masses of strange living substance that flashed past in this ocean of space, he must almost have believed they were motionless--a dead ship in a dead, black night. But the luminous things flashed and were gone--and their coming, strangely, was from astern; they flicked past and vanished up ahead. And, by this, Chet knew that their tremendous momentum was unchecked. Though he was using the great stern blast to slow the ship, it was driving stern-first into outer space. Nor, for twenty hours, was there a change, more than a slackening of the breathless speed with which the lights went past. Twenty hours--and then Chet knew that they were in all truth hung motionless, and he prayed that his figures that told him this were correct.... More timeless minutes, an agony of waiting--and a dimly-glowing mass that was ahead approached their bow, swung off and vanished far astern. And, with its going, Chet knew that the return trip was begun. He gave Harkness the celestial bearing marks and relinquished the helm. "Full speed ahead as you are," he ordered: "then at nineteen-forty on W.S. time, we'll cut it and ease on bow repulsion to the limit." And, despite the strangeness of their surroundings, the ceaseless, murmuring roar of the exhaust, the weird world outside, where endless space was waiting for man's exploration--despite the deadly menace that threatened, Chet dropped his head upon his outflung arms and slept. * * * * * To his sleep-drugged brain it was scarcely a moment until a hand was dragging at his shoulder. "Forty-seven hours!" the voice of Schwartzmann was saying. And: "Some navigating!" Harkness was exclaiming in flattering amazement. "Wake up, Chet! Wake up! The Dark Moon's in sight. You've hit it on the nose, old man: she isn't three points off the sights!" The bow-blast was roaring full on. Ahead of them Chet's sleepy eyes found a circle of violet; and he rubbed his eyes savagely that he might take his bearings on Sun and Earth. As it had been before, the Earth was a giant half-moon; like a mirror-sphere it shot to them across the vast distance the reflected glory of the sun. But the globe ahead was a ghostly world. Its black disk was lost in the utter blackness of space. It was a circle, marked only by the absence of star-points and by the halo of violet glow that edged it about. Chet cut down the repelling blast. He let the circle enlarge, then swung the ship end for end in mid-space that the more powerful stern exhaust might be ready to counteract the gravitational pull of the new world. Again those impalpable clouds surrounded them. Here was the enveloping gas that made this a dark moon--the gas, if Harkness' theory was correct, that let the sun's rays pass unaltered; that took the light through freely to illumine this globe, but that barred its return passage as reflected light. Black--dead black was the void into which they were plunging, until the darkness gave way before a gentle glow that enfolded their ship. The golden light enveloped them in growing splendor. Through every lookout it was flooding the cabin with brilliant rays, until, from below them, directly astern of the ship, where the thundering blast checked their speed of descent, emerged a world. * * * * * And, to Chet Bullard, softly fingering the controls of the first ship of space--to Chet Bullard, whose uncanny skill had brought the tiny speck that was their ship safely back from the dark recesses of the unknown--there came a thrill that transcended any joy of the first exploration. Here was water in great seas of unreal hue--and those seas were his! Vast continents, ripe for adventure and heavy with treasure--and they, too, were his! His own world--his and Diane's and Walt's! Who was this man, Schwartzmann, that dared dream of violating their possessions? A slender tube pressed firmly, uncompromisingly, into his back to give the answer to his question. "Almost I wish you had missed it!" Herr Schwartzmann was saying. "But now you will land; you will set us down in some place that you know. No tricks, Herr Bullard! You are clever, but not clever enough for that. We will land, yess, where you know it is safe." From the lookout, the man stared for a moment with greedy eyes; then brought his gaze back to the three. His men, beside Harkness and Diane, were alert; the scientist, Kreiss, stood close to Chet. "A nice little world," Schwartzmann told them. "Herr Harkness, you have filed claims on it; who am I to dispute with the great Herr Harkness? Without question it iss yours!" He laughed loudly, while his eyes narrowed between creasing wrinkles of flesh. "You shall enjoy it," he told them; "--all your life." And Chet, as he caught the gaze of Harkness and Diane, wondered how long this enjoyment would last. "All your life!" But this was rather indefinite as a measure of time. CHAPTER V _A Desperate Act_ The ship that Chet Bullard and Harkness had designed had none of the instruments for space navigation that the ensuing years were to bring. Chet's accuracy was more the result of that flyer's sixth sense--that same uncanny power that had served aviators so well in an earlier day. But Chet was glad to see his instruments registering once more as he approached a new world. Even the sonoflector was recording; its invisible rays were darting downward to be reflected back again from the surface below. That absolute altitude recording was a joy to read; it meant a definite relationship with the world. "I'll hold her at fifty thousand," he told Harkness. "Watch for some outline that you can remember from last time." There was an irregular area of continental size; only when they had crossed it did Harkness point toward an outflung projection of land. "That peninsula," he exclaimed; "we saw that before! Swing south and inland.... Now down forty, and east of south.... This ought to be the spot." Perhaps Harkness, too, had the flyer's indefinable power of orientation. He guided Chet in the downward flight, and his pointing finger aimed at last at a cluster of shadows where a setting sun brought mountain ranges into strong relief. Chet held the ship steady, hung high in the air, while the quick-spreading mantle of night swept across the world below. And, at last, when the little world was deep-buried in shadow, they saw the red glow of fires from a hidden valley in the south. "Fire Valley!" said Chet. "Don't say anything about me being a navigator. Wait, you've brought us home, sure enough." "Home!" He could not overcome this strange excitement of a home-coming to their own world. Even the man who stood, pistol in hand, behind him was, for the moment, forgotten. Valley of a thousand fires!--scene of his former adventures! Each fumerole was adding its smoky red to the fiery glow that illumined the place. There were ragged mountains hemming it in; Chet's gaze passed on to the valley's end. Down there, where the fires ceased, there would be water; he would land there! And the ship from Earth slipped down in a long slanting line to cushion against its under exhausts, whose soft thunder echoed back from a bare expanse of frozen lava. Then its roaring faded. The silvery shape sank softly to its rocky bed, as Chet cut the motor that had sung its song of power since the moment when Schwartzmann had carried him off--taken him from that frozen, forgotten corner of an incredibly distant Earth. * * * * * "Iss there air?" Schwartzmann demanded. Chet came to himself again with a start: he saw the man peering from the lookout to right and to left as if he would see all that there was in the last light of day. "Strange!" he was grumbling to himself. "A strange place! But those hills--I saw their markings--there will be metals there. I will explore; later I return: I will mine them. Many ships I must build to establish a line. The first transportation line of space. Me, Jacob Schwartzmann--I will do it. I will haff more than anyone else on Earth; I will make them all come to me crawling on their bellies!" Chet saw the hard shine of the narrowed eyes. For an instant only, he dared to consider the chance of leaping upon the big, gloating figure. One blow and a quick snatch for the pistol!... Then he knew the folly of such a plan: Schwartzmann's men were armed; he would be downed in another second, his body a shattered, jellied mass. Schwartzmann's thoughts had come back to the matter of air; he motioned Chet and Harkness toward the port. Diane Delacouer had joined them and she thrust herself quickly between the two men. And, though Schwartzmann made a movement as if he would snatch her back, he thought better of it and motioned for the portal to be swung. Chet felt him close behind as he followed the others out into the gathering dark. * * * * * The air was heavy with the fragrance of night-blooming trees. They were close to the edge of the lava flow. The rock was black in the light of a starry sky; it dropped away abruptly to a lower glade. A stream made silvery sparklings in the night, while beyond it were waving shadows of strange trees whose trunks were ghostly white. It was all so familiar.... Chet smiled understandingly as he saw Walt Harkness' arm go about the trim figure of Diane Delacouer. No mannish attire could disguise Diane's charms; nor could nerve and cold courage that any man might envy detract from her femininity. Her dark, curling hair was blowing back from her upraised face as the scented breezes played about her; and the soft beauty of that face was enhanced by the very starlight that revealed it. It was here that Walt and Diane had learned to love; what wonder that the fragrant night brought only remembrance, and forgetfulness of their present plight. But Chet Bullard, while he saw them and smiled in sympathy, knew suddenly that other eyes were watching, too; he felt the bulky figure of Herr Schwartzmann beside him grow tense and rigid. But Schwartzmann's voice, when he spoke, was controlled. "All right," he called toward the ship; "all iss safe." Yet Chet wondered at that sudden tensing, and an uneasy presentiment found entrance to his thoughts. He must keep an eye on Schwartzmann, even more than he had supposed. Their captor had threatened to maroon them on the Dark Moon. Chet did not question his intent. Schwartzmann would have nothing to gain by killing them now. It would be better to leave them here, for he might find them useful later on. But did he plan to leave them all or only two? Behind the steady, expressionless eyes of the Master Pilot, strange thoughts were passing.... * * * * * There were orders, at length, to return to the ship. "It is dark already," Schwartzmann concluded: "nothing can be accomplished at night." "How long are the days and nights?" he asked Harkness. "Six hours," Harkness told him; "our little world spins fast." "Then for six hours we sleep," was the order. And again Herr Schwartzmann conducted Mademoiselle Delacouer to her cabin, while Chet Bullard watched until he saw the man depart and heard the click of the lock on the door of Diane's room. Then for six hours he listened to the sounds of sleeping men who were sprawled about him on the floor; for six hours he saw the one man who sat on guard beside a light that made any thought of attack absurd. And he cursed himself for a fool, as he lay wakeful and vainly planning--a poor, futile fool who was unable to cope with this man who had bested him. Nineteen seventy-three!--and here were Harkness and Diane and himself, captured by a man who was mentally and morally a misfit in a modern world. A throw-back--that was Schwartzmann: Harkness had said it. He belonged back in nineteen fourteen. Harkness was beyond the watching guard; from where he lay came sounds of restless movement. Chet knew that he was not alone in this mood of hopeless dejection. There was no opportunity for talk; only with the coming of day did the two find a chance to exchange a few quick words. The guard roused the others at the first light of sunlight beyond the ports. Harkness sauntered slowly to where Chet was staring from a lookout. He, too, leaned to see the world outside, and he spoke cautiously in a half-whisper: "Not a chance, Chet. No use trying to bluff this big crook any more. He's here, and he's safe; and he knows it as well as we do. We'll let him ditch us--you and Diane and me. Then, when we're on our own, we'll watch our chance. He will go crazy with what he finds--may get careless--then we'll seize the ship--" His words ended abruptly. As Schwartzmann came behind them, he was casually calling Chet's attention to a fumerole from which a jet of vapor had appeared. Yellowish, it was; and the wind was blowing it. Chet turned away; he hardly saw Schwartzmann or heard Harkness' words. He was thinking of what Walt had said. Yes, it was all they could do; there was no chance of a fight with them now. But later! Diane Delacouer came into the control-room at the instant; her dark eyes were still lovely with sleep, but they brightened to flash an encouraging smile toward the two men. There were five of Schwartzmann's men in the ship besides the pilot and the scientist, Kreiss. They all crowded in after Diane. They must have had their orders in advance; Schwartzmann merely nodded, and they sprang upon Harkness and Chet. The two were caught off their guard; their arms were twisted behind them before resistance could be thought of. Diane gave a cry, started forward, and was brushed back by a sweep of Schwartzmann's arm. The man himself stood staring at them, unmoving, wordless. Only the flesh about his eyes gathered into creases to squeeze the eyes to malignant slits. There was no mistaking the menace in that look. * * * * * "I think we do not need you any more," he said at last. "I think, Herr Harkness, this is the end of our little argument--and, Herr Harkness, you lose. Now, I will tell you how it iss that you pay. "You haff thought, perhaps, I would kill you. But you were wrong, as you many times have been. You haff not appreciated my kindness; you haff not understood that mine iss a heart of gold. "Even I was not sure before we came what it iss best to do. But now I know. I saw oceans and many lands on this world. I saw islands in those oceans. "You so clever are--such a great thinker iss Herr Harkness--and on one of those islands you will haff plenty of time to think--yess! You can think of your goot friend, Schwartzmann and of his kindness to you." "You are going to maroon us on an island?" asked Walt Harkness hoarsely. Plainly his plans for seizing the ship were going awry. "You are going to put the three of us off in some lost corner of this world?" Chet Bullard was silent until he saw the figure of Harkness struggling to throw off his two guards. "Walt," he called loudly, "take it easy! For God's sake, Walt, keep your head!" This, Chet sensed, was no time for resistance. Let Schwartzmann go ahead with his plans; let him think them complacent and unresisting; let Max pilot the ship; then watch for an opening when they could land a blow that would count! He heard Schwartzmann laughing now, laughing as if he were enjoying something more pleasing than the struggles of Walt. * * * * * Chet was standing by the controls. The metal instrument-table was beside him; above it was the control itself, a metal ball that hung suspended in air within a cage of curved bars. It was pure magic, this ball-control, where magnetic fields crossed and recrossed; it was as if the one who held it were a genie who could throw the ship itself where he willed. Glass almost enclosed the cage of bars, and the whole instrument swung with the self-compensating platform that adjusted itself to the "gravitation" of accelerated speed. The pilot, Max, had moved across to the instrument-table, ready for the take-off. Schwartzmann's laughter died to a gurgling chuckle. He wiped his eyes before he replied to Harkness' question. "Leave you," he said, "in one place? _Nein!_ One here, the other there. A thousand miles apart, it might be. And not all three of you. That would be so unkind--" He interrupted himself to call to Kreiss who was opening the port. "No," he ordered; "keep it closed. We are not going outside; we are going up." But Kreiss had the port open. "I want a man to get some fresh water," he said; "he will only be a minute." He shoved at a waiting man to hurry him through the doorway. It was only a gentle push; Chet wondered as he saw the man stagger and grasp at his throat. He was coughing--choking horribly for an instant outside the open port--then fell to the ground, while his legs jerked awkwardly, spasmodically. Chet saw Kreiss follow. The scientist would have leaped to the side of the stricken man, whose body was so still now on the sunlit rock; but he, too, crumpled, then staggered back into the room. He pushed feebly at the port and swung it shut. His face, as he turned, was drawn into fearful lines. "Acid!" He choked out the words between strangled breaths. "Acid--sulfuric--fumes!" * * * * * Chet turned quickly to the spectro-analyzer; the lines of oxygen and nitrogen were merged with others, and that meant an atmosphere unfit for human lungs! There had been a fumerole where yellowish vapor was spouting; he remembered it now. "So!" boomed Schwartzmann, and now his squinting eyes were full on Chet. "You--you _schwein!_ You said when we opened the ports there would be a surprise! Und this iss it! You thought to see us kill ourselves!" "Open the port!" he shouted. The men who held Chet released him and sprang forward to obey. The pilot, Max, took their place. He put one hand on Chet's shoulder, while his other hand brought up a threatening, metal bar. Schwartzmann's heavy face had lost its stolid look; it was alive with rage. He thrust his head forward to glare at the men, while he stood firmly, his feet far apart, two heavy fists on his hips. He whirled abruptly and caught Diane by one arm. He pulled her roughly to him and encircled the girl's trim figure with one huge arm. "Put you _all_ on one island?" he shouted. "Did you think I would put you _all_ out of the ship? You"--he pointed at Harkness--"and you"--this time it was Chet--"go out now. You can die in your damned gas that you expected would kill me! But, you fools, you imbeciles--Mam'selle, she stays with me!" The struggling girl was helpless in the great arm that drew her close. Harkness' mad rage gave place to a dead stillness. From bloodless lips in a chalk-white face he spat out one sentence: "Take your filthy hands off her--now--or I'll--" Schwartzmann's one free hand still held the pistol. He raised it with deadly deliberation; it came level with Harkness' unflinching eyes. "Yes?" said Schwartzmann. "You will do--what?" * * * * * Chet saw the deadly tableau. He knew with a conviction that gripped his heart that here was the end. Walt would die and he would be next. Diane would be left defenseless.... The flashing thought that followed came to him as sharply as the crack of any pistol. It seemed to burst inside his brain, to lift him with some dynamic power of its own and project him into action. He threw himself sideways from under the pilot's hand, out from beneath the heavy metal bar--and he whirled, as he leaped, to face the man. One lean, brown hand clenched to a fist that started a long swing from somewhere near his knees; it shot upward to crash beneath the pilot's out-thrust jaw and lift him from the floor. Max had aimed the bar in a downward sweep where Chet's head had been the moment before; and now man and bar went down together. In the same instant Chet threw himself upon the weapon and leaped backward to his feet. One frozen second, while, to Chet, the figures seemed as motionless as if carved from stone--two men beside the half-opened port--Harkness in convulsive writhing between two others--the figure of Diane, strained, tense and helpless in Schwartzmann's grasp--and Schwartzmann, whose aim had been disturbed, steadying the pistol deliberately upon Harkness-- "Wait!" Chet's voice tore through the confusion. He knew he must grip Schwartzmann's attention--hold that trigger finger that was tensed to send a detonite bullet on its way. "Wait, damn you! I'll answer your question. I'll tell you what we'll do!" In that second he had swung the metal bar high; now he brought it crashing down in front of him. Schwartzmann flinched, half turned as if to fire at Chet, and saw the blow was not for him. With a splintering crash, the bar went through an obstruction. There was sound of glass that slivered to a million mangled bits--the sharp tang of metal broken off--a crash and clatter--then silence, save for one bit of glass that fell belatedly to the floor, its tiny jingling crash ringing loud in the deathly stillness of the room.... It had been the control-room, this place of metal walls and of shining, polished instruments, and it could be called that no longer. For, battered to useless wreckage, there lay on a metal table a cage that had once been formed of curving bars. Among the fragments a metal ball that had guided the great ship still rocked idly from its fall, until it, too, was still. It was a room where nothing moved--where no person so much as breathed.... Then came the Master Pilot's voice, and it was speaking with quiet finality. "And that," he said, "is your answer. Our ship has made its last flight." His eyes held steadily upon the blanched face of Herr Schwartzmann, whose limp arms released the body of Diane; the pistol hung weakly at the man's side. And the pilot's voice went on, so quiet, so hushed--so curiously toneless in that silent room. "What was it that you said?--that Harkness and I would be staying here? Well, you were right when you said that, Schwartzmann; but it's a hard sentence, that--imprisonment for life." Chet paused now, to smile deliberately, grimly at the dark face so bleached and bloodless, before he repeated: "Imprisonment for life!--and you didn't know that you were sentencing yourself. For you're staying too, Schwartzmann, you contemptible, thieving dog! You're staying with us--here--on the Dark Moon!" (_To be continued._) If The Sun Died _By R. F. Starzl_ [Illustration: Crack! Again Mich'l's fist caught him.] [Sidenote: Tens of millenniums after the Death of the Sun there comes a young man who dares to open the Frozen Gate of Subterranea.] By our system of time we would have called it around 65,000 A. D., but in this cavern world, miles below the long-forgotten surface of the earth, it was 49,889. Since the Death of the Sun. That legendary sun was but a dim racial memory, but the 24-hour day, based on its illusory travel across the sky, was still maintained by uranium clocks, by which the myriads who dwelt in the galleries and maze of the under-world warrens regulated their lives. In the office of the nation's central electro-plant sat a young man. He was unoccupied at the moment. He was an example of the marvelously slow process of evolution, for, to all outward appearances he differed little from a Twentieth Century man. Keen intelligence sat on his fine-cut, kindly young face. In general build he was lighter, more refined than a man of the past. Yet even the long, delicately colored robe of mineral silk which he wore could not detract from his obvious virility and strength. His face flashed in a smile when a girl suddenly appeared in the middle of the room, materializing, so it seemed, out of nowhere. She resembled him to some extent, except that she was exquisitely feminine, dark-haired, with a skin of warm ivory, while he was blond and ruddy. Her tinkling, silvery voice was troubled as she asked: "Have I your leave to stay, Mich'l Ares?" The look of adoration he gave her was answer enough, but he answered with the conventional formula, "It is given." He rose to his feet, walked right through the seemingly solid vision and made an adjustment on a bank of dials. Then he walked through the apparition again and, standing beside his chair, looked at her inquiringly. "You haven't forgotten, Mich'l, this is the day of the Referendum?" Mich'l smiled slightly. It would be a day of confusion in Subterranea if he should forget. As chief of the technies he was in direct charge of the tabulating machines that would, a few seconds after the vote, give the result in the matter of the opening of the Frozen Gate. But the girl's concern sobered him instantly. On the decision of the people at noon depended the life work of her father, Senator Mane. And it was now nine o'clock. "I am sure they will order the Gate opened," he said instantly. "All the technies are agreed that your father is right, that the Great Cold was only another, more severe ice age--not the death of the Sun. The technies--" * * * * * Just as the girl had seemingly materialized, a young man now stood beside her. In appearance he was a picture of pride, power, arrogance, and definite danger. His hawk-like, patrician features were smiling. This olive-skinned, dark young rival of Mich'l was Lane Mollon, son of Senator Mollon, ruthless administration leader and bitter opponent of Senator Mane's Exodus faction. Lane looked at Mich'l insolently. "Have I your leave to stay, Mich'l Ares?" he asked. "It is given," said Mich'l without enthusiasm. "I'm not calling on you of my own will, Mich'l," the apparition of young Mollon said contemptuously, "but Nida had the telucid turned on as I stepped into the room." "It's as well for you that you're not here personally," Mich'l replied promptly. "The last time we met I believe I was obliged to knock you down." Lane Mollon flushed, with a sidelong glance at Nida. The girl gave Mich'l a frightened look. Lane interpreted her concern rightly. "Ordinarily it's not safe to try anything like that with me. I could have you executed in half an hour. But I don't have to call on the State to punish you. Nida, you'll admit I'm taking no unfair advantage of him?" "Oh, I do, Lane, but--" Lane reached out his hand to the dial, invisible to Mich'l, which operated the telucid apparatus, and immediately the apparitions vanished. Mich'l looked at his own telucid, its great unwinking eye set in the wall. But he did not project his own illusory body to the girl's home. He was a technie--one of the pitifully few trained men and women who kept the intricate automatic machinery working. On them rested the immense, stupid civilization of the caverns, and there was work to do. Mich'l felt that on this morning of her father's greatest trial Nida would pay scant attention to Lane. * * * * * Mich'l was testing some of the controls when Gobet Hanlon came in. Gobet was also a technie, and Mich'l's special friend. Like Mich'l, he wore the light robe that was universal among the civilians in the equable climate of the caverns. He walked with the light, springy step that was somehow characteristic of the specialized class to which he belonged, as distinguished from the languid gait of the pampered, lazy populace. Attached to his girdle of flat chain links was a tiny computing machine about as large as the palm of a man's hand. For Gobet did most of the mathematical work. "You'll want me at the tabulating section?" Gobet stated inquiringly. "It may be well," Mich'l smiled. "For the first time in centuries, I believe, the general public is going to vote." "Flos Entine wants to come along." Mich'l's smile changed to a grin. He knew the pretty, willful little sweetheart of Gobet's. If she wanted to be at the tabulating plant she would be there. "In fact," Gobet confessed somewhat sheepishly, "she is in the car." The car was waiting in the gallery. It had no visible support, but hovered a few inches above the floor above one of two parallel aluminum alloy strips that stretched, like the trolley tracks of the ancients, throughout all the galleries. The ancients well knew that aluminum is repelled by magnetism, but the race had lived in the caverns for centuries before evolving an alloy that possessed this repulsive power to a degree strong enough to support a considerable weight. Under Mich'l's guidance the car moved forward silently, through interminable busy streets with arched roofs, lined on either side with doors that led to homes, theaters and food distributing automats. Occasionally they passed public gardens, purely ornamental, in which a few specimens of vegetation were preserved. They passed multitudes of people, most of them handsome with a pampered, hot-house prettiness, but betraying the peculiar lassitude which had been sapping the energies of this once dynamic race for millennia. Yet to-day they showed almost eagerness. The name of Leo Mane, prophet of deliverance, was on every tongue. And what was the Sun like? Like the great vita-lights that were prescribed by law and evaded by everyone, except possibly the technies? Those technies--they seemed to delight in work! Curious glances fell on the gliding car. Some work in connection with the Referendum? What must one do to vote? Oh, the telucid! * * * * * Arriving at Administration Circle, the car entered a vast excavation half a mile in diameter, possibly a thousand feet high at the dome. Here were the entrances to some of the principal Government warrens. Here also centered the streets, like radiating spokes of a wheel, on which many of the officials lived. Here the emanation bulbs were more frequent than in the galleries, so that the light was almost glaring. Guards of soldier-police, the stolid, well-fed, specialized class produced by centuries of a static civilization, were everywhere. Not in the memory of their grandparents had they done any fighting, but in their short, brightly colored tunics, flaring trousers and little kepis they looked very smart. Their only weapon was a small tube capable of projecting a lethal light-ray. Mich'l led his party to the audience hall. It was only a few hundred feet in diameter. At one end was the speaker's rostrum. Senator Mane was already there. He was tall, purposeful, but withal tired and wistful looking. His graying hair was cut at the nape of his neck, sweeping back from his swelling temples in a manner really suggestive of a mane. His large, luminous eyes lit up. "Is it nearly time?" "Yes, Senator," Mich'l said. "The nation will soon assemble." "You have met Senator Mollon?" "I have had the pleasure," Mich'l acknowledged with polite irony, "since Senator Mollon gives me practically all my orders." Mollon acknowledged the tribute with a quick smile, without rising from his chair. He, too, was different from the average Subterranean in that he was forceful and aggressive, like Senator Mane. He was still youngish looking, of powerful, blocky build. His dark hair was carefully parted in the middle and brushed down sleekly. The Twentieth Century had known his prototype, the successful, powerful, utterly unscrupulous politician; and in a different sphere, that type of extra-Governmental ruler which the ancients called "gangster." It was casually discussed in Subterranea that certain of the state soldier-police were responsible for the mysterious assassinations that had so conveniently removed most of the effective resistance to Mollon's progress in the Senate. The once potent body had not held a session in ten years: didn't dare to, a cynical and indifferent public said. And a strange reluctance on the part of qualified men to accept the Presidential nomination had left that office unfilled for the past three years. Mollon, as party dictator, performed the duties of President provisionally. * * * * * Flos, mischievous as usual, rounded her great blue eyes and gazed at Mollon with an expression of rapt admiration. "Oh, Senator," she thrilled, "I think it's wonderful of you to give Senator Mane an opportunity to debate with you. You are so kind!" Mollon failed to detect any mockery, luckily for Flos. He looked at her with half-closed eyes. "The public must be satisfied," he rumbled. "Senator Mane has aroused in them great hopes. A small matter might be adjusted, but only a Referendum will satisfy them in this." "But Senator, the race is going to ruin. If we could get into the Sun again--wouldn't you want that?" "I don't believe there is a 'Sun'," Mollon replied; then, with the candor of one who is perfectly sure of himself, added: "If Mane were right, I still couldn't permit the Frozen Gate to be opened. I can control the people for their own good, here; it might not be possible Outside." A deep musical note sounded. Suddenly the myriad inhabitants of Subterranea seemed to be milling around in the room. Actually their bodies were in their dwelling cells, but their telucid images filled the hall. By a simple adjustment of the power circuit, their images, instead of being life size, were made only about an inch high, permitting the accommodation of the entire nation in the hall. Their millions of tiny voices, mingling, made a sighing sound. * * * * * Mane rose and stepped forward, raising his hand. "Citizens of Subterranea," he began in powerful, resonant tones, and then went on to put into his address all the fervor of a lifetime of endeavor. He told them of those times in the dim past when the human race still dwelt on the surface of the earth. Of the Sun that poured out inexhaustible floods of life and light; of the green things that were grown, not only to look at, but for food for all living things before food was made synthetically out of mined chemicals. Of the world overrun by a teeming, happy, dynamic civilization. "Then something happened. The Sun seemed to give less light, less heat. Perhaps we ran into a cloud of cosmic dust that intercepted the Sun's rays. Perhaps the cause was to be found in some change in the Sun's internal structure. But the effects could not be doubted. Ice began to come down from the poles. Ice barriers higher than the highest towers covered the world, wiping out all life but the most energetic. "Our ancestors, and many other advanced nations, began to burrow toward the hot interior of the earth. We to-day have no idea of the labor that went into the digging of our underground home. We are becoming degenerate. More and more of us, even those who still use the vita-lights, are becoming pale and flabby. There are hardly enough technies to keep the automatic machinery in order. What will happen when those technies also deteriorate, and lose the will to work? For deteriorate they must, just as Senator Mollon and his still active allies will. Just as I will, if I live long enough. There is a great force that we never know here. It is called the cosmic ray. It never penetrates to our depth. And our vita-lights do not produce it." He then spoke of the proposed Exodus, argued, pleaded, painted a rosy picture of the outer world, of a Sun come back, a world of brightness and life. At the conclusion of his speech a sigh arose from the assembled millions--a sigh of hope, of half belief. Had the vote been taken then the Frozen Gate would have been opened. * * * * * But Senator Mollon was on the rostrum, holding up a square, well manicured hand for attention. In his deep rumbling bass he tore the arguments for the Exodus to shreds. With the whip of fear he drove away hope. "If our savage ancestors lived on the inhospitable outer shell of the earth," he shouted, "is that a reason for our taking that retrograde step? Read your histories. What happened to our neighboring nation of Atlantica only a short 15,000 years ago? They did just as this man is urging--opened their outer gate. It promptly froze open, and liquid air, the remnant of what in primordial days was an outer atmosphere, poured down the tunnels. The whole nation died, and we saved ourselves only by blasting the connecting passages between them and us with fulminite." A wave of fear passed over the tiny massed figures. For centuries the race had been rapidly losing all initiative, except for those few leaders who, through superior stamina and religious devotion to the artificial sun-rays, had maintained something of their pristine energy. Now they were hysterical with fear of the unknown. Even as Mich'l Ares adjusted the parabolic antenna of the thought-receptor vote-counting machine, he knew what the verdict would be. In a moment the vote was flashed on a screen on the ceiling: 421 in favor of the Exodus and 2,733,485 against it. There was an eery cheer from the people, and they began to dissolve like smoke. Mollon rose, bowed politely and smilingly, and walked out to where his magnetic car awaited him. * * * * * It was with a feeling of deep depression that Mich'l Ares went to work the next morning. His despair was shared by the technies under him with whom he talked. At the telestereo station he found a bitter young man broadcasting a prepared commentary on the election ordered by Senator Mollon. It was congratulatory in nature, designed to confirm popular opinion that the nation had been saved from a great catastrophe and to glorify the principles of Mollon's party. "... And so once more this great nation has demonstrated its ability to govern itself, to protect itself against dangerous and unsocial experiments. The voice of the people is the voice of God. The Government claims for itself no credit for this momentous decision. Each citizen has done his share toward the continuation of our safety, our prosperity...." The young man finished the document, smiled a charming smile, and turned off the switch. Then he grimaced his disgust and lapsed into a glum meditation. "What say, Kratz?" Mich'l asked. "Trouble again on the west sector. Had trouble getting power enough. Generators ought to be overhauled." He made a helpless gesture. "How about conscripting a little labor?" "Tried it this morning. Most of the people are still in a daze from chewing too much merclite. Those that're sober are too busy preening themselves for voting on the winning side." Kratz informed Mich'l that Mollon had that morning given up all pretense of constitutional government, had preempted the treasury, and was consolidating his position as avowed dictator. "He probably wanted to do that a long time," Mich'l commented. "He didn't quite dare till that Referendum yesterday gave him the real measure of the public. Well, I've got to be going." * * * * * Mich'l took one of the small mechanical service tunnels back to his office. This latest news had hardly affected him, so keen was his disappointment over the defeat of the Exodus. But he wanted to be alone. He walked through vast halls full of machinery, abandoned and rusting, through dark corridors that had once roared with industrial life. What would happen when the present overloaded machinery should break down; wear out? The remnants of the great technical army could hardly serve what was left. Each passing year these silent, useless hulks became more numerous. The specter of famine was stalking amid the dusty pipes and empty vats of the chemical plants; the horrors of darkness lurked amid the tarnished compression spheres and the long, hooded monstrosities of the power plants, inadequately served by harassed and overworked technies. In the middle of his office Mich'l found the telucid counterpart of Mila, sister of Nida Mane. She was younger than Nida, hardly more than sixteen. Her eyes were wide with terror as she sought Mich'l. Her cheeks were wet with tears, and her silken brown hair fell in careless disarray. "Mich'l!" she cried, as soon as she saw him. "Lane Mollon has taken Nida!" "Taken her!" "And Father is under arrest. Lane came this morning, crazy with merclite gum. He had four or five soldiers with him. When Nida refused to see him they broke down the door and went to her room. They dragged her out to Lane's car, and he took her to his warren near the Presidential quarters." "She there now?" "Yes. Father followed Lane's car. Guards kept him out of Lane's warren, so he went to see Mollon. That devil only laughed at him, offered to call another Referendum. Father had a small pocket needle-ray and--" "Good! He killed Mollon?" "No. But he managed to burn a hole through his arm. He was rushed off to one of the cells. And Mollon says he will call a Referendum to decide Father's fate." "It would be just like that devil's sense of humor to let the people decree their only friend's death." * * * * * "They'll do it, too!" Mila exclaimed tragically. "Oh, how I wish Mother were alive!" "And each one will feel deep within him that he has done a great, commendable and original thing!" Mich'l added, with keen insight. Mila sank to the floor. "Go to your room," Mich'l said, gently stern. "Mollon and his gang have reckoned without the technies." A woman's image appeared, stooping commiseratingly over Mila--a friend of the family. Mich'l ordered her to care for Mila. Then, he took a deep breath. Gone was his feeling of helpless sorrow, leaving only an overwhelming, steadying, satisfying anger. He flung the telucid switch, barked cracking orders. In half an hour every technical man of Subterranea was in a large storeroom near Mich'l's office. They were mostly young, keen and alert, their skins red or brown from the actinic lights, their hair showing more or less bleaching from the same cause. As Mich'l talked they became intent: they listened with a cold, deadly silence that would perhaps have made the smug millions of Subterranea quake with fear. This affront put upon the only man in the Government who could speak their language, who could comprehend their ideals: the peril of the girl they all knew and loved: these things set their long-repressed resentment flaring to white heat. They were ready for desperate things. A turn of a valve and water would thunder through the maze of galleries; a mishap far, far down toward the earth's hot core, and steam would rush up-- * * * * * But Mich'l steadied them. After all, Subterranea was their country. Anarchy was far from the technie ideals. He had a plan. "Nothing is to be done until we have Senator Mane and Nida," Mich'l instructed them. "Remember that! Do nothing until you hear from me. Each of you go to your station. Set all adjustments so that they will not need attention for some weeks, at least. Those of you who have families, tell them to be ready to move to another residence. Say nothing about any trouble--understand?" There were nods of assent. "You will proceed to your posts and keep busy. When I come it'll be by telucid. I will say nothing. I will simply wave my hand. That means you are to take your wives, your families, your sweethearts, to Substation No. 37X." There were audible gasps. "Not 37X!" exclaimed one of the older men. "Why, that's twenty miles up, near the Frozen Gate!" "Yes!" Mich'l smiled with tight lips. "You men willing?" There was an instantaneous shout of approval. Curiously enough, seizure of the Gate by force had not occurred to any of this law-abiding, well-disciplined group. But Mollon's lawless seizure of the Government had removed all inhibitions of that sort. Seizure of the Gate would bring at one stroke the realization of the dream that the technies had tried for generations to win by political means. Surely, when the Gate was open, and they could see the glorious, half-mythical Sun for themselves, the people would consent to the Exodus! For the technies, even in the bitterness of defeat, were not anti-social. They hoped and worked for the devitalized races of Subterranea, for the betterment of their condition, more than for their own. The technies were the fittest; they had demonstrated their ability to survive unchanged under adverse condition. They would be least helped by the Exodus. Yet they had worked for it all their lives, as had their fathers before them, out of unselfish love for humanity. There have always been such men. Through the murk of history we see their lives as small, steady lights, infrequent and lonely. With the opening of the Frozen Gate suddenly a possibility, the technies forgot their exasperation with the stupid mob. * * * * * "The Gate is guarded," said an elderly man dubiously. "A small guard," Gobet Hanlon remarked quickly, "and probably dazed with merclite. Nothing to fear." "Stay away from the Gate," Mich'l instructed. "Give no cause for alarm. If an emergency arises while I'm gone, see Gobet." "Don't go alone, Mich'l," Gobet begged. "A few of us with ray-needles can storm the detention cells. We can clean out Lane's warren." "We might, but the Senator and Nida would be gone. The alarm would be given. In a few minutes there'd be a mob." The technies were already dispersing eagerly. Mich'l pressed his friend's hand, saying: "I'll take my needle-ray, and I know every way to get around there is. Alone, I'll attract no attention. Till later, Gobet!" And he was gone. Mich'l's way was through the smaller, less frequented communication passages used principally by the technies. Occasionally he did meet citizens, still light-headed after their election victory celebration, and lost, but he paid them no heed. He came to the ventilation center of that level. For ages no air had entered Subterranea from the outside. All of the air had to be regularly reconditioned, and so was returned, through a systematic network of air ducts, to a vast, central chemical plant. It was a latter-day Cave of the Winds, where the north, south, east and west winds of that buried empire regularly returned for a brief few minutes of play amid chemical sprays, condensers, humidifiers, oxydisers, to be again dispatched to their drudgery. This hall was truly colossal, filled to the shadowy ceilings, a thousand feet high, with gigantic pipes, tanks, wind-turbines. * * * * * The technie in charge had not yet returned, but Mich'l consulted the distribution plan, and soon located the duct that led to Lane Mollon's warren. In a few minutes he was running, helped along by a strong current of fresh air. The map had shown the warren to be about a mile away. For the benefit of the technies who had to work there, the duct was plainly marked; and the lighting, by infrequent emanation bulbs, was adequate, though dim. Mich'l had made no plans for a course of action after arriving at his destination. He felt reasonably sure that if he could get into the warren he would have a good chance to escape with Nida. In the confusion he could hide her nearby, and perhaps effect the release of the senator also. He had no doubt about his fate if he were caught. Lane's pose of good sportsmanship having failed to impress Nida, he had adopted simple, brutal coercion. Mich'l's fate, if caught interfering, would be summary execution. Mich'l found the grating which he sought. It bore the key number of Lane's establishment. The key which would unlock it was of course in the hands of the police; but the bars were badly corroded, and Mich'l managed to bend them enough to permit the passage of his body. He found himself in a small chamber, from which ducts led to all parts of the warren. These ducts were too small to permit passage of his body, however; it would be necessary to come into the open. A small metal door promised egress. Mich'l climbed out, and faced a surprised cook in the kitchen, engaged in flavoring synthetic food drinks. Mich'l said explanatorily: "Inspection, air service." The cook did not know the regulations about keeping the air tunnels locked. Moreover, he, like all other servants of the mighty, worked unwillingly, being conscripted. He only grunted. * * * * * Mich'l made a pretense of testing the air currents. Presently he stepped into one of the communicating corridors. The warren was planned something like a house of the Surface Age, with luxuriously furnished rooms, baths, dining halls, and all the appurtenances of wealth. Arriving at a rotunda, in the center of which was a glowing fountain, Mich'l encountered a guard. Boldly he asked him: "Where is Mr. Mollon? I wish to see him." The guard looked surprised. "About Nida Mane, sir? I would hardly dare." Mich'l looked at the man sharply, but there was no hint of recognition in the stupid, phlegmatic face. "What about Nida Mane? It is about her I wish to speak." There was a slight stirring of interest in the soldier's face. "He will be glad to see you, sir, if you bring news of her." "Eh, yes? Perhaps what I have to tell will be of no interest to him." "If you can tell him where she is he will ask no more of you." "She made good her escape then?" Slow suspicion was dawning at last. "For one who brings news you ask a lot of questions," the guard remarked heavily, as his hand slipped to the needle-ray weapon at his side. "Show your pass!" Like a flash Mich'l was upon him, his hand at the thick throat, the other grasping the wrist. Although the soldier, like the majority of the populace, lacked the intense vitality of the technies, he had stubborn strength, and he fought effectively in the drilled, automatic way of his kind. Mich'l was further handicapped by the necessity of maintaining silence. One shout, and a dozen needle-rays would no doubt perforate his body with holes and slash his flesh with smoldering cuts. * * * * * Grunting and sweating, they fought all around the rose-colored curb of the fountain. At last Mich'l succeeded in forcing his adversary over the low stone, and they went over together with a resounding splash. The straining body of the guard suddenly relaxed, and a spreading red cloud in the water disclosed that he had struck his head against the first of the terraces that rose in the fountain's mist-shrouded center. Up one of the corridors a door opened, and an angry voice shouted: "Gurka! Gurka! I'll have you in bracelets! Captain of the guard!" "Sir!" From another of the corridors came a sound of running feet. A command rang out: "On the double!" An officer, followed by four soldiers, dashed around the corner and flashed by the fountain. Peering over the curb, Mich'l saw them, some hundred yards away, come to a halt before an opened door. With a thrill of exultation Mich'l recognized the tall figure of Lane Mollon, looking like a slightly damaged satyr of the better class, for his head was bandaged, and he was in bad humor. "Captain!" he stormed. "I want you to put that damned louse in solitary confinement for a year. Hear?" "Yes, sir." Like a megaphone the long corridor carried the low, respectful words to Mich'l's ears. Lane continued to storm: "And if you put another damned merclite-crazy blunker[1] on guard in this place I'll have your commission. Hear?" "Yes, sir." [Footnote 1: Blunker--a blunderer, an oaf. Mechanical recording had preserved the language in much of its original form, but new words did creep in.] * * * * * A quick decision was necessary, and Mich'l acted without hesitation. The guard had rolled over on his back, so that his face was out of the water, and he was breathing with quick, painful gasps. Mich'l dragged him up under the concealing shelter of the fountain spray, and there changed clothes with him. In the meantime the flowing water washed away the red stain of blood. When the captain returned with his guard, Mich'l was lying realistically in the pool, apparently deep in drugged sleep, the little kepi tilted rakishly over his face. He was roughly seized and dragged out of the water to the accompaniment of much cursing. A fist crashed into his face. Suddenly the soldiers felt the supine figure under their hands explode into energy. Elbows and fists seemed to fly from all directions at once. A needle-ray appeared, and before they could draw their own weapons they were howling with pain as searing welts drew over their bodies. With one accord they plunged into the pool. Only the officer remained, and he fell to the mosaic floor, his weapon half raised, the small black hole in his chest giving off a burnt odor. Mich'l appropriated the officer's brassard of rank, and, menacing the cowed guards, forced them to herd into a nearby room, carrying the body of the officer with them. Mich'l locked the door and looked around. He saw no one observing him, and could count on carrying a pretty good bluff in his uniform, which was rapidly shedding its water. With a firm step Mich'l walked to Lane Mollon's door, threw it open, and entered. * * * * * Lane sat up on his couch, his feet striking the floor with an angry thump. But when he recognized Mich'l he paled slightly. "Where is she?" Mich'l demanded roughly, "before I burn you down!" "You said once," Lane began sneeringly, "that you wanted to fight me. Now, if you'll just put down that--" "Not now," Mich'l dissented with deadly coldness. "Where is Nida? Speak fast." Lane did so. "She isn't here. The little short[2] crowned me with a chair, and slipped out. How did I--" [Footnote 2: Short--trouble-maker, spitfire. A colloquialism probably growing out of the once frequently used electrical term "short-circuit."] "When? Hurry up!" "Hardly an hour ago. She walked down the corridor, showed a thick-witted guard my own executive pass, and got away. But I got that guard--" "Never mind what you did to the guard--" Suddenly the image of an officer strange to Mich'l stood in the room and saluted smartly. "Has Captain Ilgen Mr. Lane Mollon's leave to stay?" he asked. Mollon started forward, but before he could disclose his predicament Mich'l had sidled over to him and thrown one arm affectionately over his shoulder. In his hand, concealed by the rich folds of Lane's robe, Mich'l held his needle-ray, and it was pressed firmly against Lane's ribs. "Mr. Mollon will be glad to hear you," Mich'l said smoothly. * * * * * He fancied that the eyes of the officer's image dilated slightly, but it lost none of its military rigor. But some explanation of his presence there in his still damp uniform must be given Ilgen, so he growled, in a voice that he tried to make a bit thick, as if he had chewed too much merclite: "At ease, Captain. At ease! Damn it man, you don't have to be so damned military. You're among friends!" And he towseled Lane's dark hair affectionately. Captain Ilgen looked his disgust. "Sir," he said to Lane, "we recaptured Nida Mane as she tried to board a public car near the Executive Mansion." The black lens at the end of Mich'l's needle-ray pressed hard, and Lane said naturally: "You have her in custody?" "Sir, we have." And to Mich'l's dismay, Nida, defiant, her lovely form half revealed by rents in her garments, seemed to materialize beside the officer. Her wrathful eyes were fixed on Lane, and then she saw Mich'l. The technie put all his will into the pleading stare which he returned, and she understood. She gave no sign of recognition, but favored both Lane and Mich'l equally with the chill of her disdain. "Sir, what are your orders?" Lane glanced aside at Mich'l, acutely conscious of the lethal pressure in his ribs. "'Sall right with me, old fellow," Mich'l squawked good-humoredly. "This your girl that got away from you? Let's both go over and bring her back." Lane nodded assent. The soldier saluted, and his vision and that of the girl disappeared. "And we're going to do just that!" Mich'l added in an entirely changed voice. "Get up, you. Act right, speak right, do right, and you may live to see another day." * * * * * So the two left the warren in apparent amity, and walked the beautiful street, with its richly formed, brightly colored arches, its seemingly illimitable vistas, its luxuriant, pampered decorative vegetation, its blazing lights--until at last they came to Administration Circle, and entered the ponderous gates behind which lay the very heart of the Government. They were challenged at once. Although the officer of the guard knew Lane, usage required the showing of the daily pass. Many high officers of the Government had in years past fallen from grace overnight. This formality complied with, Lane and Mich'l, the latter with his ray-needle ever ready, sat down to wait in the guard room. And Lane, under Mich'l's quiet prompting, ordered that Nida and her father be brought to him. "We shall bring the girl, yes," the astonished officer protested, "but not Senator Mane. He is a prisoner of state." "Perhaps you don't know, Captain," Mich'l suggested smoothly, "that it is not wise to disregard the orders of the Provisional President's son?" "It would cost me my commission, perhaps my life!" the officer said. "Neither would be worth much if you disobey!" Mich'l countered, a wire edge creeping into his voice. The officer looked into Lane's stormy face, then with great reluctance retreated to carry out the order. In about ten minutes he was back, with four guards and his prisoners. He explained that Captain Ilgen was detained on official duty. "You may go," said Lane, prompted by a jab in the ribs. "A written receipt, please, sir, for the senator." Glowering, Lane wrote out the desired document. At last they were alone. "Our program," Mich'l announced briskly, "is simple. You will conduct us to one of the Government cars, and will ride with us to such places as we may direct, and I shall release you when it pleases me. If you then want to fight, I will accommodate you." "I would be willing to fight you, as head of the technies," Lane countered sullenly, "but I wouldn't be bothered with a rebel and a traitor. You've overstepped yourself this time, my fine bolthead, and all I ask is a front seat at your execution!" * * * * * They stepped into the brightly lighted hall, and in that instant Mich'l felt a searing heat on his shoulder. Without a moment's pause he hurled Senator Mane and the girl back into the room. At the same moment he flung an arm around Lane's neck and pulled him back into the doorway, where he could use him as a shield while he cautiously peered out into the corridor. His shoulder throbbed painfully, but his movement had prevented the needle-ray from penetrating deeply in any one place. A short distance up the corridor was a wider space, in the center of which stood a large bronze urn filled with exotic plants. Behind this urn were several soldiers, and Mich'l recognized the sharp-eyed Captain Ilgen. So that officer had recognized the true state of affairs, or had strong suspicions! But in his haste and eagerness he had overlooked one important fact. In the guardroom, were riot-rays, heavy replicas of the ordinary hand weapons. They had not been needed for many years, but the technies had always kept them fully charged and in order. "Nida!" Mich'l called, not removing his eye from the doorway. "Yes?" She was standing beside him, and Mich'l thrilled to the admiration and positive affection in her intonation. "Notice those short tubes mounted on light wheels over against the walls? Those are riot-ray projectors. Wheel me over a couple." Nida did as directed. Mich'l stuck the stubby muzzle of one of the nearest weapons into the corridor, pulled the lever and swung the ray in an arc toward the ambushed soldiers. There was a sharp crackling noise and the heat chipped myriads of flakes off the stone walls, leaving a gray path across the rich murals, and the air was filled with flying particles. The heat was terrific. It beat back into the doorway. Captain Ilgen gave a short, sharp order, and he and his men retreated before the bronze urn began to wilt and drip melted metal. He could not be accused of cowardice, for his hand weapons were puny compared to the riot-rays. "Quick, before he gets in touch with the outer guard!" Mich'l urged his prisoner forward, Senator Mane following. The grave patriarch of rhetoric made a striking picture as he dragged the second riot-ray along. The other one was abandoned, locked with full power on. It was converting that corridor into an inferno, and there would be no pursuit through that avenue. * * * * * Mich'l pushed open the metal door suddenly. Two guards on duty were just coming in, their hand weapons ready. They never knew what struck them for there was no time for compunction. But even as their bodies sank to the paving there was the harsh clangor of alarm bells. Soldiers dashed from everywhere and came running, their needle-rays menacing. "In there!" Mich'l shouted. He pointed to the doors, at the dead guards. As they hesitated, he added: "Revolution! They're storming the President's office! Hear the rays?" Through the doors came a faint humming, an acrid smell of heat, of stone and metal fumes. A corporal saluted Mich'l, recognized Lane's haggard features, and Lane again felt that cogent persuader in his ribs. "That's right, Corporal!" he said bitterly. "Is the guard room occupied, sir?" "Not now, you fool!" Mich'l snapped at him. This resolved the last of the corporal's misgivings. Giving an order, he led his men in, gasping. "Now we'll run!" Mich'l ordered, giving Lane a shove. "Coming, Nida?" She was dragging her father along joyously. They crossed the broad pedestrian walk, and in the street found an official car nestling on one of the tracks. "Heave in the riot-ray, will you, old fellow?" Mich'l requested jovially, and Lane did. Then the listless chauffeur turned a controller, and the big car rose a few inches, lightly as a feather, and sped away swiftly through the maze of traffic. * * * * * Sometime later they were in a service lift; not one of the great public lifts that carried their hundreds at a trip, but one of the small lifts used mostly by the technies, and known to few outside their ranks. Mich'l, standing blissfully close to Nida and her father, enjoyed his moment of relaxation. Many things had been attended to. Lane had been released at last, in one of the catacomb cemeteries. It would take him at least two hours to find his way out. They were discussing the riot-ray, which they had with them. "I hope we won't have to exhaust it in a fight before we get out," Senator Mane said anxiously. "It would be a splendid weapon if we encounter a hostile environment Outside." "The Gate is guarded," Mich'l said practically, "but we expect to surprise them. No use worrying." The lift came to a stop at an air-lock. The great elevator shafts were closed by airlocks every 2,000 feet. The reason is obvious. If the air of the great, spheroid subterranean nation were allowed to freely obey the laws of gravity, it would be oppressively dense in the lower levels, and excessively rarified in the upper ones. While the airlocks were operating Mich'l stepped to a telucid and gave the agreed-on signal. In another half hour they were at 37X. The great, dusty, and little-used storeroom was only poorly lighted; it was dank, and had an uncomfortable chill. Technies and their families were coming in from all sides, and it was not long before some five hundred persons, men, women and children, were assembled. Many of them were pale and frightened looking, for they were staking everything on an ideal, a theory. There would be no coming back. The statute books of Subterranea decreed only one penalty--death--for even the merest tampering with the Frozen Gate. It was not like this that they had visioned the opening of the Gate. Under properly controlled conditions, it would have been possible to open the gate for preliminary explorations. But not now. They were outside the law. * * * * * Nida, standing beside Mich'l, shivered and pulled her over-robe closer around her. There was sadness in her voice as she said: "These children.... They remind me of the thousands of children we must abandon with our people. If I could, I'd steal a few to take with us." Mich'l grinned without mirth. "And be damned as a kidnapper of a particularly horrible sort, as long as Subterranea lasts!" "I know. I know. But what will happen to them all when the automatic machinery fails?" "They may learn to run it, if they have to. Or if we succeed in establishing ourselves in the outer world we can tunnel back to them around the Gate in a year or so. Don't worry about them too much. We're taking the big risk, not they." Gobet Hanlon, accompanied by Flos Entine and Mila Mane, approached. He was loaded down with a huge case of concentrated food. "I've given orders to bring with us all the cold resisting fabrics we could carry. Got 'em loaded down, eh?" "All here?" "Every last one." "Let's go, then." Mich'l stepped to a small door that led into the main corridor close to the Gate. This door had not been used by the technies when assembling. Through a tiny hole the guard, four soldiers, could be seen about a blanket, tossing sixteen-sided dice. Mich'l opened the door, his needle-ray pointed. "Don't move, or you burn!" he commanded harshly. * * * * * The guards, taken completely by surprise, did not move. In a few moments they were bound, gagged, and dumped into a corner of 37X. Eager technies were swarming over the complicated mechanism that they had dared to touch, before, only for inspection and maintenance. The Frozen Gate was like a huge stopper in a bottle, made of chromium steel. It was thirty feet in diameter, and thirty feet thick from its well insulated inside face to that enigmatical Outside that had been a grisly mystery to the race for some five hundred centuries. There was a flash of sparks, and the quiet hum of motors. With a shuddering groan the great plug freed itself from the grip of millennia; turned a few inches in its hole. The supporting gimbals took the load now, and slowly the great mass moved inward, carried by an overhead traveling crane whose track was bolted to the rock roof. The rate of movement was slow, not much over three or four inches a minute. An excited murmur filled the cavern--almost hysterical joy. But Mich'l, watching that widening margin for the dreaded gush of liquid air, only trembled with relief. At least the calamity that had visited rash Atlantica would not be repeated here. A young technie, one of the heat distributors, climbed up the heavy bosses on the gateway's face. "I'm going to be the first to see the Sun!" he shouted joyously. His challenging gaze roved over the waiting crowd, and suddenly his face turned ashen. For at the turn of the corridor, some hundred yards away, he had seen men. No mistaking those uniforms; they were soldiers. And Mich'l, following his gaze, saw a riot-ray being wheeled into place. His own riot-ray already commanded the corridor, but he dared not use it. The soldiers, under the partial protection of the turn, could incinerate the helpless technies with little danger to themselves. "Wait!" Mich'l shouted, running into the open. * * * * * An officer came to meet him. He then recognized Captain Ilgen, whose exceptional shrewdness had almost undone him before. Ilgen could not see the slow movement of the gate, and Mich'l, himself weaponless, counted only on parleying for time. They met midway between the two forces, and the small black lens of the captain's weapon pointed steadily at Mich'l's chest. "Mich'l Ares, I arrest you." It seemed that the captain's fine gray eyes looked out of the lean face with real sympathy. "It may be there will be executive clemency for these people of yours, but for you--" Mich'l, tense and deadly, saw the captain's vigilant attention leave his face for a second; saw his eyes widen in consternation. He could not know that Ilgen had seen a slender crescent of green light appear in the Frozen Gate, but he did not lose the opportunity. His fist crashed on the captain's jaw, so that the soldierly figure reeled and the needle-ray fell to the ground. Mich'l leaped after him, picked him up, held him. The riot-ray was turned full on him, and a soldier's hand trembled on the lever. But it did not pull. "You'll kill him!" Mich'l shouted. And then he ventured to turn his head to look at the Gate. He saw the first of the fugitives struggle into the narrow crack. The gate seemed to have stuck, and there was barely room to pass. Ilgen, half conscious, was trying to rain blows on Mich'l's back, compelling him to stop and pass the officer's hands through the belt of his tunic and to manacle them with a pair of bracelets which he found in his pocket. As he staggered toward the Gate with his burden, he saw Gobet beside him, the stolen riot-ray menacing the soldiers, who would otherwise have rushed in. * * * * * Suddenly Ilgen struggled upright. "Fire," he commanded in stentorian tones. "They'll kill you too, you fool!" Mich'l exclaimed angrily. "I am a soldier!" Ilgen answered with contempt. His legs barely supported his weight, and he was struggling to free his manacled hands. He threw himself into the narrow crevice of the Gate, to obstruct the stream of fugitives. He started to shout again: "Fi--" Crack! Again Mich'l's fist caught him. He hooked the officer's elbows over two of the bosses, so that he was supported in plain sight of his men, and turned to urge haste. The last two stragglers were hurrying through, and with relief Mich'l turned to follow. But he set the closing mechanism in motion before he leaped for the narrow opening that was becoming still narrower, though very slowly. Now for that green crescent of light, and hope! He felt a wave of heat. Glancing back, he saw the irresolute guards scattered by the enraged charge of a square, blocky man in civilian robe--the usually smiling Provisional President, Senator Mollon. Mollon himself was fumbling with the lever of the riot-ray. Ilgen had evidently reported where he was going before starting in pursuit of the technies. Again that withering flash of heat, and Mich'l saw Captain Ilgen, still semi-conscious, suddenly turn red-faced. Mollon would burn him up without compunction, in the hope of catching one of the fugitive technies. And now a figure in uniform leaped forward at Mollon's angry gesture, and bent purposefully to the sighting tube. The crescent was now so slender that Mich'l had to turn sideways to squeeze back into the corridor. And slowly, inexorably, it was growing smaller still. With desperate haste the practiced, uniformed man was adjusting his range. Captain Ilgen struggled when Mich'l seized him. "I arrest--" Mich'l thought for a sickening moment that he was caught in the closing gate. Then he was free in the cylindrical tunnel into which the plug was creeping. Luckily, Ilgen was slight. His body squeezed through with little more difficulty than Mich'l's own. Now the opening was too small for any man's body. A red glow illuminated that narrowing slit; an acrid wave of heat, and the smell of burnt metal came with the strong current of air that blew out of Subterranea. * * * * * Mich'l dragged his captive down the rocky tunnel, the floor of which dipped gently away from the Gate; for drainage, no doubt. Around a bend, the source of the greenish light was apparent. The fugitives were in an ice cavern. The light seemed to emanate from roof and walls. The air was uncompromisingly chill, for the blast of warm air from Subterranea had stopped. But the cold of the air was nothing to the icy chill that settled on the heart of Mich'l Ares, and the hearts of Senator Mane, and the other leaders of this desperate enterprise. So this, this was the Outside! A cavern of ice--small, hemmed-in! Those ancient folk-legends of a Sun-- "I arrest you, Mich'l Ares!" Mich'l laughed shortly. What a single-minded fellow this Captain Ilgen was! Still groggy, of course. Didn't know where they were. He left the soldier with the red, blistered face. "Mich'l! Mich'l!" a voice echoed shrilly from the ice walls. It was a high-pitched voice, and an excited one. A boy came flying out of a narrow crevice, his short robe flying, his cloth-wrapped legs twinkling. "Mich'l!" he shouted. "I saw it! I saw the Sun, the beautiful Sun!" Lucky it was that in the rush no one was hurt. The small cleft opened into a wide tunnel, a low-roofed cave through which milky-white water flowed. The cave opened upon a vista of blue sky and towering mountains whose tops were burdened with snow and upon whose sides glaciers slid down and melted; and the milky-white stream brawled down into a green valley, far, far below. On a mountain meadow, not far from the glacier that still buried the Frozen Gate, they rested.... * * * * * And so came a new strain of humanity upon the surface of the earth--a strain tempered and refined by the inexorable process of evolution and environment. Already animal life had reappeared, drastically changed and ruthlessly weeded out by the most severe Ice Age the world had ever known, and now Man stood once more on a new threshold of time. Something of this may have passed through the minds of the refugees luxuriating in the strong sunlight of this mountain meadow, and in active and alert brains the foundations of a new civilization were already being built. They were preparing to go into the valley below when there was a dull concussion. The glacier over the Frozen Gate rose slightly, then disappeared completely out of sight, leaving a yawning hole in the mountainside. Ice and rocks slid down, filling the hole. The refugees gazed at the scene in fear and wonder. "They have blown up the gate! And the chambers leading to it!" Senator Mane--now only Leo Mane--said slowly. "There goes our last chance to save them!" His tones were deeply sad. He could not look upon these people as an experiment that Nature had abandoned, although he knew that history is thronged with the shadows of vanished races, culled by the process of natural selection. But Youth looks only ahead. The majority of the rescued technies were young, and with eagerness and anticipation, they followed Mich'l and Nida Ares down into the valley to build their first homes. The Midget From the Island A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By H. G. Winter_ [Illustration: _"For God's sake, Hagendorff, what's come over you?"_] [Sidenote: Garth Howard, prey to half the animals of the forest, fights valiantly to regain his lost five feet of size.] In the chill of an early morning, a rowboat drifted aimlessly down the Detroit River. It seemed to have broken loose from its mooring and been swept away; its outboard motor was silent and it swung in slow circles as the currents caught at it. But the boat carried a passenger. A man's nude body stretched face downward in it. It was a startling figure that lay there. The body was fully matured and had a splendid development of rounded muscles--and yet it was not more than three feet in length. A perfectly formed and proportioned manikin! The two officers in the harbor police launch which presently slid alongside to investigate were giants in comparison. They had not expected to find such weird cargo in a drifting rowboat. They stared at the naked, unconscious midget in utter amazement, as if seeing a thing that could not be real. And when one of them reached down to lift the tiny body aboard, his eyes went wider with added surprise. His lift was inadequate. The dwarf's weight was that of a normal-sized man! This was mystery on mystery. But they got the uncannily heavy figure aboard at last and ascertained that, though the skin showed many wounds and was blue from long exposure, the heart was still beating. And realizing that the life might flicker out beneath their eyes unless they took action immediately, they proceeded to work over him. After some minutes, the dwarf gave signs of returning consciousness. His lids fluttered and opened, disclosing eyes that filled suddenly with terror as they stared into the faces, huge in comparison, that leaned over his. One of the officers said reassuringly: "You're all right, buddy: you're on a harbor police launch. But who in the devil are you? D'you speak English? Where'd you come from?" * * * * * The midget struggled to speak; struggled desperately to tell something of great importance. They bent closer. Gasping, high-pitched words came to their ears, and the story that those words told held them spellbound. When the shrill voice ceased and the dwarf sank back into the coat they had thrown around him, the two policemen gazed at each other. One whistled softly, and his companion said soberly: "We'd better phone up and have the local police tend to this right away, Bill." Thus, two hours later, several miles up the river, another launch containing three officers came to its destination, a solitary, thickly-wooded island that brooded under a cloak of silence where the river leaves broad Lake St. Clair. The launch crept up to a mooring post a few feet from a small, rough beach, and was tied there. Quickly, the men waded ashore and tiptoed up a winding trail that was barred from the sun by dank foliage. They soon came to a clearing where a large cabin had been built. There, one of them whispered, "Guns out!" Then the three men crossed the clearing and cautiously entered the cabin. For a moment there was silence. Then came a terrified shout, followed by the bunched thunder of a succession of pistol shots. The reverberations slowly died away, and some time later the policemen reappeared and stood outside the door. One of them, dazed, kept repeating over and over, "I wouldn't have believed it! I wouldn't have believed it!" and another nodded in wordless agreement. The third, white-faced, stared for a long time unseeingly at the cloud-flecked bowl of the sky.... But it would be best, perhaps, to tell the story as it happened. * * * * * The incredible events that shaped it began two nights before, when the larger of the two rooms in the island cabin was bathed in the bald glare of a strong floodlight that threw into sharp prominence the intent features of two men in the room, and the complicated details of the strange equipment around them. Garth Howard, the younger of the two, was holding a tiny, squawling, spitting thing, not more than three inches long, which might have seemed, at a quick glance, to have been a normal enough kitten. Closer inspection, however, would have revealed that it had a thick, smooth coat, a lithe, fully developed body and narrowed, venomous eyes--things which no week-old kitten ever possessed. It was a mature cat, but in the size of a kitten. Howard's level gray eyes were held fascinated by it. When he spoke, his words were hushed and almost reverent. "Perfect, Hagendorff!" he said. "Not a flaw!" "The reduction has not improved her temper," Hagendorff articulated precisely. His deep voice matched the rest of him. Garth Howard's clean-muscled body stood a good six feet off the floor, yet the other topped him by inches. And his face compared well with his bulky body, for his head was massive, with overhanging brows and a shaggy mop of blond hair. Athlete and weight-lifter, the two looked, but in reality they were scientist and assistant, working together for a common end. * * * * * The room in which they stood was obviously a laboratory. Bulky gas engines and a generator squatted at one end; tables held racks of tools and loops of insulated wiring and jars of various chemicals. One long table stretched the whole length of the room, placed flush against the left wall, whose rough planking was broken by a lone window. There were racks of test tubes on this table, and tools, carelessly scattered by men intent on their work. Still another table was devoted to several cages, containing the usual martyrs of experimental science: guinea pigs and rabbits, rats and white mice. Beside these was a large box, screen topped, in which, in separate partitions, were a variety of insects: beetles and flies and spiders and tarantulas. But the thing that dominated the laboratory was the machine on the long table against the wall. Its chamber, the most striking feature, was a cube of roughly six feet, built of dull material resembling bakelite. Wires trailed through it from the glittering plate, which was the chamber's floor, and a curved spray-shaped projector overhead, to an intricately constructed apparatus studded with vacuum tubes. A small switchboard stood beside the chamber, and from it thick cables led to the generator in the rear of the room. "Let us return her to normal," Hagendorff rumbled after a moment or two devoted to prodding and examining the diminutive cat. "Then for the final experiment." One whole wall of the cubical chamber was a hinged door, with a tier of several peep-holes. Garth Howard swung the door open, placed the tiny, struggling cat inside and quickly closed it again. "Right," he said briefly, and pressed his eyes to the bottom peep-hole. * * * * * A switch was pulled over, and the dynamo's drone pulsed through the room. Hagendorff's fingers rested on a large lever that jutted from the switchboard. Slowly, he pulled it to one side. The imprisoned cat, small as a rat, had been nervously whipping its tail from side to side and meowing plaintively; but, as the lever swung over, there came a change. The vacuum tubes behind the switchboard glowed green; a bright white ray poured from the spray in the chamber, making the metal plate below a shimmering, almost molten thing. The animal's legs suddenly braced on it; its narrowed eyes widened, glazing weirdly, while the tail became a stiff, bristling ramrod. And, as a balloon swells from a strong breath, the cat's body increased in size. It grew not in spurts, but with a smooth, flowing rhythm: grew as easily as a flower unfolding beneath the sun. In only a few seconds its original size was attained. Howard raised his hand; the lever shot back and the white beam faded into nothingness. A full sized and very angry cat tore around the inside of the chamber. "Normal?" Hagendorff questioned. The other nodded and prepared to open the door. "Wait! She always was a little undersized; I give her a few inches more as a reward." "Not too much," warned Garth. "She's got a nasty temper; we don't want a wildcat prowling round here!" The white beam flashed, the tubes glowed and almost instantly flickered off again. When the chamber's door was opened, an indignant and slightly oversized cat bounded through, leaped from the table with a squawled oath of hatred and streaked into the front room of the cabin. * * * * * Garth turned and faced Hagendorff, a smile on his lips and a gleam in his eyes. He ran his fingers through his black hair. "Well," he said, "now it's time for the final experiment. Who shall it be?" Hagendorff did not answer at once, and the American went on: "I think it'd better be me. There's a slight risk, of course, and I, as the inventor, could never ask an assistant to do anything I wouldn't. Is it all right with you?" Hagendorff nodded quickly in answer. Garth stood reflecting for a moment. "Guinea pigs, rabbits and insects have survived reduction to one-twentieth normal size," he said slowly. "It should be safe for the human body to descend just as far. But stop me at about two feet this first time. I'm not taking any chances; I want to be alive and kicking when I announce the success of my experiments to the scientific world." His assistant said nothing. "Well, here goes," Garth added. "I'd better take off my clothes if I don't want to be buried in them. They're not affected by the process. Must be because of the lack of organic connection between their fibers and the human body." A few minutes later, nude, he jumped onto the laboratory table. He presented a perfect specimen of well-developed manhood as he stood before the door of the chamber. His smooth skin, under which the rounded muscles rolled easily, gleamed white beneath the glare of the floodlight. His gray eyes glanced at the stolid assistant, who already had one hand on the switchboard's lever. Garth saw that the hand was trembling slightly, and smiled as he realized Hagendorff was as excited as he. He said: "I'll leave the door ajar, so you can more easily watch every phase of the reduction. If it's painful--well, I guess I can stand anything a cat can!" Then, stooping slightly, Garth stepped in and drew the door almost shut. * * * * * He relaxed as much as possible from the tremendous excitement that filled him, and nodded at Hagendorff. "I'm ready," he said. "Go ahead!" The ray came to his body as the crash of thunder comes to the ear. His nerves leaped as it struck and enveloped him. He felt as if he were entombed in ice, and yet his veins were aflame. Fiery shafts fanged him all through and resolved, presently, into a measured, tingling beat. His thoughts raced. He knew that those minute particles of matter, the atoms of his body, were being compacted; he sensed that his legs were rigid, his body stiff, his eyes clamped ahead in a glazed stare. He was only half-conscious of the objects outside, but the dim sight of them was fantastic and nauseous. There was Hagendorff's face peering in at him--growing! Swelling as the cat's body had swollen; and yet receding and rising until Garth, momentarily forgetting that he was the one whose size was changing, thought that the man's titanic body would fill the room. But the room was growing, too: the stools were becoming leviathans of wood, the walls were like cliffs, the compact switchboard was a large surface of black, and the chamber in which he stood grew into a high-roofed vault, its sides shooting up and retreating as if shoved by invisible hands. And still he sank, and still the terrible light devoured him. Suddenly a delirious sensation engulfed him; his senses went reeling away, and he staggered. Then with a wrench he came to. As he regained control of his mind he knew the lever had been switched off and the process completed. He found that he was gasping. He passed a hand over his sweat-studded face and looked around. * * * * * Outside was the room of a giant. And in a moment a giant became visible. His vast bulk filled the chamber's doorway; his mammoth face peered in. Garth's eardrums quivered from a deep bass rumble, sounding like thunder on a distant horizon. "Are you all right, Howard?" A finger half the length of his own arm reached forward and prodded him. For a second Garth could do nothing but stare at it. It brought home to him starkly the puny size of his body, only two feet in height. He felt suddenly afraid. But that was foolish, he thought; and he laughed, his voice ludicrously high and shrill. "I'm all right," he cried. "But I can hardly understand you. If I were much smaller, I probably couldn't--your voice'd seem so deep. Gangway, Hagendorff, I'm coming out!" His eyes were just below the level of the giant's shoulders. He stepped from the black chamber and stared amazedly at the room, at the chairs, the objects in it--at the laboratory table on which he was standing, along which he might have sprinted thirty yards. A surge of exultant animal spirits flowed through him. His dream had become a reality; the machine had passed its last test! His body was sound and whole; he felt perfectly natural; he had not changed, save in size; and in size he was like Gulliver, confronted with a Brobdingnagian room! He hurdled a five-inch-high box of tools, ran down the creaking table and stood laughing in front of a rack of test tubes half as high as he was. Three strides took Hagendorff opposite him; and from above the thunderous voice rumbled: "What were your sensations?" "Probably as close as man'll ever get to the feelings of a spark of electricity!" the midget replied. "But bearable, though I was freezing and burning at the same time. My body was rigid, paralyzed--just like the animals we used. I couldn't move." "You're sure you couldn't move? You were helpless?" * * * * * The booming voice throbbed with sudden interest. Garth looked up curiously. "No," he repeated. "I couldn't move. But lift me down, Hagendorff. I want to take a walk on the floor." A hand wrapped around his body, tensed and strained upwards. The two-foot-high man was not quite pulled off the table. Then Hagendorff grunted and relaxed his grasp. "I had forgotten," he rumbled. "Your weight remains the same. You are one-third my size, yet you weigh almost as much as I do. Weight, which is the sum of the mass of all the atoms in you, is not, naturally, affected by compacting those atoms." It was only by a great effort that he was able to deposit the manikin on the floor. For a while Garth strolled around, savoring to their full the fantastic sensations his diminished stature gave him, at once amused and somehow frightened by the overwhelming size of the laboratory. To his eyes, the tables were like bridges; Hagendorff's broad figure loomed monstrously over him, and the guinea pigs and rabbits in their cages seemed as big as fair-sized dogs. With a grin, he looked up at the giant who was his assistant. "Think I'll make the return trip, and give you a chance," he said. "I've had my share, and the process has been proven. It's weird, being down in this new world all alone. I'd hate to think what would happen if a rat came along!" Silently, Hagendorff stooped and grasped him again. But Garth, when he stood once more inside the chamber, regarded his huge, rough-moulded face curiously. "Say," he said, puzzled, "your hands are trembling like the devil! What's wrong? You're more nervous than I am!" Hagendorff did not answer. He advanced to the switchboard. His narrowed, deep-set eyes shot a quick glance at the small, nude man inside the chamber, and for a second one hand hovered over the lever on the panel. * * * * * In that tense second a flash of intuition, of deadly fear, came to Garth Howard, and he leaped wildly forward. But his rear foot did not leave the floor of the chamber, and his shout of alarm was choked midway. Again the fierce ray paralyzed every muscle in him, and he was locked motionless where he was. Helplessly, his glazed eyes stared at Hagendorff, while every moment his rigid little body melted downwards. He was becoming rapidly smaller, not larger! Through the agony of the stabbing electrical waves, in vain Garth tried to wrench his legs free. The few inches that separated him from the door were an impassable barrier. Sheer panic clutched him. He was trapped. But why? Why had Hagendorff tricked him? As if reading the question, the giant outside came close to the chamber's door and regarded his captive with eyes that were lit by a peculiar flame. He grunted, then reached backward and returned the switchboard lever almost to the neutral point, reducing the speed of the decreasing process. "Yes, that is better," the German gloated, in a deep, satisfied tone. "It will be slower, now. Slower--and more interesting to watch!... I fancy your eyes are reproachful, my friend. Why have I done it, you wonder? _Ach!_ This machine, it will startle the world of science; it will make its inventor famous--not? Yes; and did you think I was going to stand by and see all the credit go to you? No! To me it shall go--me alone! And you--" He chuckled and rubbed his hands before going on. "You shall be what the newspapers call a martyr to science. You shall sink to a foot, to six inches--to one inch--even less, I think! Eventually the reduction will kill you, of course; and your body shall be proof of how you died--in an experiment--and shall also prove the machine's power and my genius!" * * * * * He laughed thunderously, a blond and malevolent titan. He did not notice that, with the lessening of the reduction's speed, a slight trace of control over his muscles had returned to the midget inside. His tiny body was slowly diminishing, and complete, hopeless paralysis and death was not far away. But Garth was fighting every second, fighting desperately with the trace of strength he possessed to slide to the door, break the contact and get out from under the ray's remorseless influence. Almost imperceptibly, the effort lacerating him with pain, he slid his feet forward. Hagendorff talked on. He seemed to be blinded by the vision of the fame his treachery would bring him. "We shall have an experiment, my Professor; and then you will have an interesting death! The ray will suck you down; you will crumple and crumple till you're not much bigger than my thumbnail! And then I shall--_ah!_" Garth had torn loose. Calling on every ounce of strength and will, the midget, now no more than one foot high, had reached the edge of the floor plate and pitched out onto the long laboratory table. Giant and dwarf faced each other. For a moment neither spoke or moved. A breathless tensity hung over the laboratory. The machine droned on, forgotten. From outside, startlingly near, came the eery hoot of an owl. A tight smile broke through the angry surprise on Hagendorff's face. "Well, well!" he said, with gargantuan, macabre humor. "We object! It was foolish, eh, to reduce the power? Next time, it shall not be so. We--_object!_" With the word, he lunged, and his bulky arms lashed down in a wide, grasping sweep. But Garth's taut muscles, retaining all the strength and vigor of their normal size had been awaiting just such a move, and his tiny body described the arc of a tremendous leap that neatly vaulted one huge arm and started him sprinting swiftly down the table. * * * * * At the end he wheeled, and before the other overcame his surprise at such a nimble retreat, burst out indignantly: "For God's sake, Hagendorff, what's come over you? Be sensible! You can't do this; you can't really mean it! Why--" "So!" roared the assistant, and his rush cut short the midget's shrill, frantic words. But his grasp this time was better judged; Garth felt the great fingers slip over his body. Remembering his strength, he lashed out at one with all his might. Hagendorff grunted with pain; but instead of continuing the attack, he suddenly turned and strode to the door leading into the other room, and closed it with a bang. "You cannot escape," he growled, advancing again; "you merely delay." Panting, Garth glanced around the room. He was, in truth, trapped. There was but the one door; and even if he could reach it, he could not get it open, for the handle would be far above him. The room was a sealed arena. For a little while it would go on--a wild leaping and dodging on the table, a hopeless evading of mammoth hands ... and then, inevitably, would come a crushing grip on his body, followed by experimentation and the agony of death in the black chamber. Fearful, he waited, a perfect, living statuette, twelve inches high.... A grunt preluded the giant's vicious charge. The American staggered from the brush of a sweeping hand; then, twisting mightily, he dove under it, like a mouse slipping under the paw of a cat. In doing so he fell sprawling; and though he was up in a moment, his arm was held. A hoarse, exultant rumble came to his ears. "Caught, my friend!" But Hagendorff spoke too soon. With a great wrench, Garth broke free, and made a tigerish dash back along the table toward the window. And even as the clumsy titan jumped to the side and grabbed again at him, he hurled his tiny, heavy body against the pane, and went plunging through a shower of glass into the cool dark night outside. * * * * * He fell five feet, and the wind was jarred out of him as he crashed through the branches of a bush under the window into the sodden earth beneath. Unhurt, save for a few lacerations from the glass, he staggered to his feet, gasping for his breath, and started to run across the clearing towards the fringe of dense forest growth that ringed the cabin. Then he heard thunderous footsteps and, a second later, the sound of the front door being pulled open. Garth turned in his tracks, and stumbled back beneath the cabin, thanking heaven that it was raised on short stilts. But the ruse did not give him much of a start, and by the time he had painfully threaded his way between the piles of timber left underneath the cabin, Hagendorff had discovered the trick and was scouting back. Then, with the strength of the hunted, Garth was out from under the other side and sprinting for the doubtful sanctuary of the forest. His tiny feet, carrying the weight of a normal-sized man, sank ankle high into the muddy ground, several times almost tripping him. Even as he got to where a trail through the bush began, and passed from the cold starlight into spaces black with clustered shadows, he heard a bellow from behind, and, glancing back, saw a monstrous shape come leaping on his tracks. He had only seconds in which to find refuge; he could not stick to the trail. Thick bush, dank and heavy from recent rains, was on either side, fugitive streaks of pale light from above painting it eerily. Garth plunged into the matted growth, dropped to hands and knees and wormed forward away from the trail. Earth-jarring footbeats sounded close. With frantic haste he wrenched though the scratching tendrils and came to a miniature clearing. * * * * * He saw the tilted shape of a rotted tree-stump, its roots half washed away and exposing a narrow crevice between them. Gasping, the nude, foot-high figure tumbled down into it, and lay there, trying to hush his labored breathing. He was a mere twenty feet from the trail; and though to him the bush was a jungle, to his pursuer it was only chest-high. A towering shadow moved along the trail. The thud of heavy footbeats came more slowly to the listening midget. Hagendorff was searching, puzzled by the vague shadows, for where Garth had left the path. Silence fell. Garth's heart was pounding like a trip-hammer. He held himself alert, ready, if need be, to struggle up from the moist crevice and dart on further into the bush. He could not see the giant, but could picture his huge, sullen face all too clearly. Still no sound came. Risking all, he gripped a root and hauled himself up slightly. Then he peered around the stump. Hagendorff was standing in the thick of the bush. He was not ten feet away, striving in the gloom to discern the other's tell-tale tracks. Garth drew his head back, hardly daring to breathe. Shivering, his naked body miserably cold, he waited, pressed down in the soggy earth. His betraying tracks were there; the shadows alone befriended him. The silence was drawn so fine that the faint cheep of a night-bird sounded startlingly loud. But then came thunder that sent the bird winging away in fright, and the night and the forest echoed with the roar of a wrathful, impatient human voice. "You hear me, wherever you are! And hear this: I leave you now, but in ten minutes I have you! You little fool--you think you can get free? It is only by minutes you delay me!" Snarling a curse, the treacherous giant turned and crashed through the bush and took his huge form striding back towards the cabin. * * * * * Garth was thinking of many things as he scrambled back wearily from his refuge to the trail. He was cursing the unwanted publicity which prying reporters had given his work in Detroit, and which had led him to lease the lonely island and build a laboratory in the wilderness. Had it not been for that publicity, he would never have needed an assistant, and the vision of fame would never have come to delude Hagendorff and turn his thoughts towards murder. His position seemed a horrible delirium from which he must presently awake. Naked, dwarfed by each ordinary forest weed, unarmed, and trembling from the wind-sharpened night, he hardly knew which way to turn. His body was blotched with blood and mud, and under it the ragged gashes made by glass and bush stung painfully; he was hungry and stiff and tired and miserable. He remembered Hagendorff's threat of capturing him in ten minutes, and forced a smile to his face. "Looks kind of bad," he muttered, using his voice in an attempt to dispel some of the lonely grip of the night, "but we'll keep moving, anyway! He's coming back soon. Let's see: I'd better make for the stream. It'll be hard for him to follow my tracks through that. And then...." Then--what? The island was small. He realized he could not stand many hours of exposure. Inevitably--But he turned his mind from the future and its seeming hopelessness, and concentrated on the immediate need, which was to hide himself. Forcing the pace, he struck off on a shambling trot down the dim trail, on into the deepening, sinister shadows towards the island's lone stream. * * * * * Obstacles that normally he would not have noticed made his path tortuous. His great weight sank his feet ankle-high in the moist, uneven ground. Time and time again he stumbled over some imbedded rock that, potato-sized, was like a boulder to him. Time and time again he fell, and when he rose his legs were plastered with soggy earth that did not dry; and the damp, fallen leaves and twigs he pitched into clung to his coating of mud. Each broken limb and branch, dropped from the whispering gloom of the trees above, drained the energy from his tiring muscles. Soon he was conscious of a vague numbness creeping over him, a deceptive, drowsy warmth into which he longed to sink, but which he drove back by working his arms and legs as vigorously as he could. On he went, with teeth clenched and eyes fixed on the half-seen trail ahead--a fantastic, tiny creature hunted like a wild animal by a giant of his own kind! Presently, through the shroud of darkness traced by ghostly slivers of starlight, came the sound of trickling water. The trail rose, dipped down; and through that hollow crawled the stream, winding from a hidden spring to the encompassing river below. Garth was winded when he came to it; to his eyes it seemed a small river. His legs were so numb they hardly felt the cold bite of the water that lapped around them. Some furry water animal leaped away as Garth trudged upstream, alarmed by the strange midnight visitant and the self-encouraging mutterings of a shrill human voice.... * * * * * He had waded what seemed to him a weary distance--in reality only a few hundred yards--through the winding, icy creek, when suddenly he halted and stood stock-still. Listening, he heard the ordinary sounds of the wind through the fir-spires, and the slow trickle of water; heard the beating of his own heart. Nothing else. And yet.... He took another step. Then he swung quickly around and peered back, senses alert. There was no mistaking the sound that had come again. It was the crunch of heavy feet, thudding at even intervals on damp earth. They were Hagendorff's; and he was armed with light! A long beam of white speared through the tangle of bush and tree trunks far below. It came slanting down from above, prying for the story recorded by miniature footprints in the ground. By its distance from him, Garth could tell Hagendorff had come to where his trail led into the stream. The ray held steady for minutes. Again it prowled nervously around, hunting for tell-tale signs, sweeping in widening circles. Then, it was punctuated by the crunch of a boot. The giant was following upstream! With the flashlight, he might even be able to trace the prints in the bed of the creek. Stooping, Garth crept ahead, as silently as he could, though the stir of water at his feet seemed terribly loud. There were keen ears behind, craned for sounds like that. He knew he would have to hide again--quickly--and at that moment he saw a place. A cleft in the bank to his right held a small hole, dimly limned by a wisp of starlight. On hands and feet the midget scrambled cat-like to it. It slanted down and inwards, only inches wide, so that the earth was close to his body when he slid feet-first inside. But it was warm and dry, for it was shielded by a ledge from rain, and with the warmth the hunted manikin's spirits rose somewhat. The ray of light, which he could see sweeping back and forth downstream, was still following slowly, as if Hagendorff were having trouble making out the water-covered trail. Garth breathed easier, cuddled down--and then, for some unaccountable reason, he felt uneasy. * * * * * He had not noticed it at first, but now his nostrils were filled with a queer, musky odor that electrified his nerves and tensed his muscles. He felt the short hairs on his neck rise; felt his lips tighten and draw back over clenched teeth. Some long-buried instinct was warning him of danger--and suddenly he sprang from the hole and swung around. From it, a killer came snaking out, its bared fangs thirsty for his life blood! Arching and swaying its lithe-muscled body, it slid forward in its graceful, savage way--a weasel, the deadliest pound-for-pound killer that prowls the forest. It was as long as the naked human who faced it was tall. Unwittingly, he had chosen its hole as a refuge. Retreat would have been impossible, but Garth for some reason did not even think of it. A strange new sensation poured through his tense body, a sensation akin to fierce joy. Gone was his tiredness; his teeth too were bared, matching the wicked fangs before him. Two primal creatures they were, tooth to tooth and claw to claw, the man as naked and intoxicated with the blood lust as the ten pounds of bone and sinew that now darted suddenly for his throat. With the lightning quickness that had come to him with small size, Garth stepped aside. And as the weasel's head streaked by he called on man's distinctive weapon, and put every ounce of his weight behind a right arm swing that landed square on a cold black nose and doubled the weasel back in midair. Stunned, it writhed for a second on the slippery bank; and then again it was up, mad with pain now and swaying slightly as it gathered for a second leap against this creature that fought so strangely. * * * * * But in the momentary respite Garth had reasoned out his best chance. He did not try to fight off the second dart with his fists, but went boldly in. Ducking through the needle claws with head lowered, his tiny hands streaked in on the furry throat. He found it, and his fingers thumbed into the wind-pipe; but not before the weasel smelled the blood its claws had drawn and went utterly berserk. For a moment there was a wild flurry of furry, tearing legs and a blood-streaked white body between them, trying desperately to evade their slicing strokes. They pitched down the bank together, animal and man struggling silently to the death; and when they jarred to a stop in the water below, Garth's strategy was achieved. He was uppermost; his grip was steel around the throbbing throat, and the hundred and eighty pound weight of his body was holding the legs powerless. Not an inch from his face the weasel's fangs clashed frantically together. Garth maintained his clutch, squeezing with every bit of his mighty strength. The animal shuddered; then writhed in the death convulsions; at last lay still. Panting, his mind a welter of primate emotions roused by the kill, the man shook it a last time, jumped to his feet and glared around--to see the beam of a flashlight only a dozen yards away. His more deadly foe, the human foe, was upon him. Perhaps the sounds of the fight had reached his ears. Garth lost not a moment. Quickly he slung the weasel's body back into the hole and jammed himself down after it. * * * * * Hagendorff approached slowly, mumbling and cursing to himself in sullen ill-humor. Things were not going as he had expected them to. The white ray scoured the banks of the stream, searching doggedly. Nearer he came, and with each step the watching midget's rapid breathing grew tighter. The towering body was more than shadow now. Another ten feet and the flashlight would find the marks of the fight. But the titan's patience gave out. Closer than he had yet been to his quarry, he paused, and again the thunder of his voice broke the night's hush. "Bah! This is foolish! In daylight I find him certainly. I have waited long; I can wait a little more. I need sleep. To-morrow, it will be different!" He swung away from the stream, and in a few minutes the rip and crash of his progress through the bush had died. In the silence, Garth Howard considered his situation. He faced it squarely, as was his custom. He did not brood over the treachery of his assistant, or of how unfairly and suddenly it had plunged him into peril and robbed him of his normal body. He accepted his position and searched for possible angles of escape. There were not many hours left in which to make a decisive move. The island was small, and, as Hagendorff had said, discovery would be inevitable in daytime. Garth thought of the machine, and of the giant sleeping. A desperate plan came to him, and his jaws set decisively. "I'll do it!" he exclaimed aloud. The lever which controlled both increase and decrease could be worked from inside the chamber if he rigged up a system of turning it with a wire or rope. If he pulled it to the increase only part way, he would, he knew, have sufficient power over his muscles to pull it back off, or slide again from the chamber, as he had done before. Whether or not he could do this depended on Hagendorff's being asleep. Possibly he could be locked in the living room, if he were there. Or tied. The increase, even at half speed, would only take about forty seconds. Once back to his size there would be a fight without odds, Garth thought grimly. * * * * * It was a big risk, and there was probably only a small chance of succeeding, but it meant getting back to six feet, back to a normal world, back to equal terms. That was the magnet which drew him presently toward the cabin laboratory. He went slowly, to allow Hagendorff plenty of time to fall soundly asleep. The giant, as he had said, needed sleep--needed it badly--for, like Garth Howard, he had done without it for forty-eight hours under the excitement of imminent success in their work. Garth considered that his move would be totally unexpected, being made right into the other's territory. There was a chance. And so, cold and weariness banished by thoughts of the goal ahead, he prowled back along the trail like any small creature of the forest. It was half an hour later when he came in sight of the cabin. His heart drummed excitedly as he stood in the shadows surveying it. He wondered if Hagendorff was still awake; if he was, perhaps, waiting for him. Certainly he did not seem to be: the cabin was dark and silent, and the only door was tightly closed. Still--it might be wiser to retreat while still free.... "No, by heaven!" Garth Howard exclaimed in his thoughts. "I'm going through with it!" Stooping slightly, he left the shadows and ran boldly into the starlight. He half expected to hear a scuffle of feet and see the giant come leaping out at him; but nothing broke the silence. He made his careful way along the side of the cabin to the place where a trough for waste liquids led through a small hole at the level of the floor, and with great care wormed through. * * * * * As he started to cautiously reconnoiter, he was suddenly arrested in his tracks. He had caught the sound of deep, rhythmic breathing. Hagendorff was asleep, not in the adjoining living room--but in the laboratory! For a moment, Garth did not know what to do. Caution urged him to retreat; but that would not get him back to his size. On tip-toe, he explored around. The boards squeaked beneath his great weight, but the nearby breathing beyond continued in regular rhythm. His eyes were toned to the darkness of the laboratory; he saw the chamber of his atom-compacting machine, its outer sides ghostly in the faint, reflected starlight, and stared at it with a pang of fierce longing. So near, it was--so very near! Holding the stolen size of his body; holding all that was vital to him; holding life itself--it rested there silently, within reach of a few steps and a quick climb up one of the table legs. So he thought, his brain whirling with mingled emotions, his tiny body shivering and aching with cold and its many hurts. The machine was near--but a barrier blocked the way. Hagendorff's bulk lay outstretched on a side table, black in the shadows, and from him came the level breathing of a sound sleeper, climaxed now and again by a rumbling snore. He was taking no chances; his presence there seemed to destroy any hope of the midget's regaining normal size. But Garth was desperate, and for a minute or so he considered. * * * * * Forty seconds, the increase would take, at half speed. It might be that long before the giant would waken thoroughly and see what was happening. He, Garth, might start the process, and, when he saw the huge figure stirring and waking from the noise of the dynamo, switch off the ray and get out. No matter how short a time it took Hagendorff to throw off the fogginess of his sleep, he would be somewhat increased in size, and the odds of combat would not be so great. It was a terrible risk. Did he dare take it? He thought of the forest, of the raw night, of what was threatened in the morning.... Yes! Silently, the manikin clasped the nearest table leg, shinnied up and hauled himself over the top. As he got there his heart leaped. A sharp thumping had come from behind. He dropped to his knees and glanced round; but he immediately rose again, reassured. It was only the rabbits in their cage, disturbed by the strange figure on the table. He thanked God that they--and his tarantulas and other insects--could make no alarming noises. Garth found a long strand of wire. The panel's control lever, swung to the left, controlled increase; to the right, decrease. Garth's plan was to wind the middle of the wire around it, relay each end around the two supporting posts of the switchboard, and thus have both ends of the wire in his hands when he stood inside the chamber. One end of the wire would enable him to pull the lever over for increase, and the other to pull it back to neutral when the increase was completed, or when Hagendorff arose. Quickly he started to arrange the wire. Then suddenly his hands dropped and he stared dismayed at the control panel. The power switch had been removed! * * * * * It was Hagendorff's work, of course. He had guarded every angle. Without that switch, the mechanism was lifeless and literally powerless. It worked on a delicately adjusted and enclosed rheostat; there was nothing that could be substituted for it. It would take hours to improvise one in the heart of the apparatus. The switch, Garth reflected bitterly, was probably concealed somewhere about the giant's body. He considered the possibility of tying him. He knew where there was a coil of light, pliable wire on the floor; he might be able to loop it over the giant's hands and legs while he slept, tie him securely, and then go through his pockets for the switch. Another hazard! But there was nothing else to do. Garth lowered himself over the table's edge and slid quietly down the leg. He glanced at the sleeping man, then over across the room to where, beneath another table, the wire was--and his nerves jumped at what he saw there. From the darkness under the table two spots of greenish fire, close to the floor, held steadily on him. As he stared, they vanished, to reappear more to the right. With the movement, he glimpsed the outline of a lithe, crouching animal, and knew it to be the cat he and Hagendorff had experimented on earlier that night. It was stalking him in the deliberate manner of its kind! * * * * * It came edging around, so as to leap on him from the side. He knew that he represented fair prey to it; that if he tried to run, it would pounce on him from behind. Wearily he tensed his miniature body, standing poised on the balls of his feet and never dropping his eyes for a moment. He could not repress a grim smile at the ludicrousness of being attacked by an ordinary house-cat, even though it was tiger-sized to him. Though his victory over the weasel, a far deadlier fighter, made him confident he could dispatch it, there was another aspect to the approaching struggle. It would have to be fought in silence. Not four feet away, Hagendorff slept. There lay the overwhelming danger. Even as these things flashed through his brain, the cat steadily inched nearer on its padded paws. Ghostly starlight framed it now; Garth could see the eager, quivering muscles, the long tail, flat behind, twitching slightly, the rigid, unstirring head and the slowly contracting paws. The terrible suspense of its stalking scraped his nerves. There would be a long pause, then an almost imperceptible hunching forward, with the tail ever twitching; then the same thing again, and over again. It became unbearable. Garth deliberately invited the attack. He pretended to turn and run, his back towards it. At once he sensed its tensing body, its bunching muscles--then knew that it had sprung. Whirling, he had a fleeting impression of a supple body in midair, of bristling claws and bared, needlepoint fangs. But he was ready. The weasel had taught him his best weapon, the great weight of his body. He streaked in beneath the wide-spread paws, shot his hands into the fur of the throat and threw himself against the shock of the animal's suddenly arrested leap. There was no standing his weight. Over the cat went, its back thudding into the floor, its claws held powerless by the hundred and eighty pounds of hard flesh that straddled it. * * * * * The fall had made little noise; but, as Garth tightened the grip of his fingers and bored inward, a dull, steady thumping began to sound. It was the cat's tail, pounding on the floor! Desperately he tried to hook a leg over it, but could not reach far enough. It beat like a tom-tom. From above, there came the sound of a huge frame stirring, and the rumble of a sleepy grunt. In a moment, the titan would be thoroughly awake. By the drumming tail alone, Garth realized, his chance of regaining full size was sent glimmering. There was nothing but retreat, now, and a hasty one, if he valued life. Another noise came from the waking Hagendorff. He was sitting up, staring around. Garth jumped to his feet, threw the cat's twitching body beneath the table, and dodged at full speed for the hole whereby he had entered. Like a mouse he wriggled through, leaped to the ground, scrambled up and made for the forest. He ran with all the speed at his command, and was almost surprised when he reached the black fringe of the forest in safety. In the protecting gloom, he dared to pause and look back. Hagendorff was not pursuing him. From the sound, he was merely boarding shut the drain hole, to prevent another entrance in that way; then, afterwards, the windows. Garth was puzzled. "I don't understand it," he said aloud. "Why is he so sure he can get me in the morning? Isn't he afraid I'll leave the island? Why I've _got_ to try to get away, now. It would be death to be here after the dawn!" He stood there making his plans. They had a rowboat below, powered with an outboard motor. Even in his present size, he might possibly run it, if he could get it started. He would strike down-river for Detroit, and when the gas gave out, the current would carry him on. Some river boat might pick him up and carry him to friends in the city. His grotesquely dwarfed body would prove his story, and they would bring him back and end Hagendorff's mad dream of fame, and help him to regain his normal size. He could superintend the construction of another machine if the present one was wrecked. When he started down the trail to the river, he seemed to be walking through a haze. He felt curiously light-headed, and his body was completely numb. The long exposure was telling on him, and there was much more of it to come. He wondered if he could hold out until he reached the mainland. But his mind cleared of the daze the cold and near-exhaustion had brought it to when at last he came to the beach and realized that again Hagendorff had anticipated him. The rowboat was gone! No wonder the giant could afford to wait until daylight. * * * * * Garth floundered down to the beach and ran to where the craft usually lay. There was only a groove in the rough, pebbly surface, a groove left by the boat's keel. He followed it up the bank, and twenty yards in found the dinghy chained and locked firmly to a large tree. The midget's face grew suddenly very haggard as he stood there, staring at what looked like his death sentence. He should have known Hagendorff would secure the boat, he told himself bitterly. It was a cruel blow, and sheer misery of mind and body gripped him as he turned and peered through the darkness of wind-whipped water and sky toward a horizon that was already lightening. Down-river lay Detroit, a friendly, everyday world. It was not far in miles, but it seemed lost to him forever.... Garth took his eyes from that prospect with a wry twist to his mouth. It chanced that they fell on the painter of the rowboat. It was a stout Manila cord, some twenty feet in length, and tied tightly to a ring in the bow of the boat. He looked at it dully for a full minute before the idea came to him. Then suddenly the lethargy bred of hopelessness left him. Garth remembered a pocket knife he had left in the boat the day before. He climbed over the side and began to fumble about in the darkness. First he came upon a torn handkerchief which he hastily tied about his loins. Further probing disclosed the knife wedged under a seat in the boat. When he had finally extricated it, he threw the knife over the side and climbed out. After some minutes of frantic cutting and hacking he severed the rope, and, quickly taking up one of the ends, ran with it further along the bank. There was still a way of getting off the island. A cold and risky way, but better than waiting miserably for capture. On the bank was a pile of sawn logs, intended for firewood; and a strong rope was in his hands. Much indeed could be done now. * * * * * The making of his raft proved a herculean task, a racking and almost impossible one for a man limited by doll-sized hands and a foot-high body. First the logs had to be rolled to the water's edge, six of them. Each was as thick as he was tall, and this first part of his task took him a precious half hour, every minute of which brought nearer the dawn. Ripples like ordinary waves washed up the struggling manikin and left him gasping as he stood braced in the cold water and tugged one log after another out and wound the rope under and over it. The raft had to be built in water; he would never have been able to drag the whole thing off the beach. When at last he wearily tied the rope end to the last log, and stuck his knife handy in it, the clouds on the horizon were flushed by the coming sun. But his means of escape was completed; and hanging on the end, he shoved the raft out into the river. Right then he almost lost his life. For when his feet left the sloping bottom, his great weight, out of all proportion to the size of his body, pulled him under, and it was only by virtue of a desperate clutch on the raft that he escaped drowning. Thrashing furiously, he struggled up from the water, and lay, totally blown, on the logs. It was then he first realized that his chance of life was no stronger than the rope which held them together. For swimming was out of the question, and one or two logs would never support his hundred and eighty pounds. The end which he lay on was well under water, and the waves splashed up between the bobbing logs. The current he was headed for swept down fifty yards offshore, which was a sixth of a mile to the little legs now thrust out behind and making a rhythmic flutter. He was off the island! Freedom and life were near! Though his teeth were chattering, his fingers crushed by the jarring logs, and his body utterly wretched, he grinned with joy as the stretch between him and the gloomy mass of the island slowly widened. * * * * * Then came the sun. The skies faded from gray into a delicate, cloud-flecked blue; slowly the air warmed, and the surface of the water seemed to calm under it. Though the sun was good on his body, Garth realized night was more friendly to him, for in the growing light his craft was all too conspicuous to the giant who would presently be following his tracks down to the beach. He chided himself for not having thought of camouflaging the raft with leafy branches. Doggedly, he forced it out. When at last he felt the pull of the current, he ceased his weary kicking and glanced up into the swiftly advancing dawn. There was a bird soaring through the keen air up there, gliding in easy circles with almost motionless wings. Garth gazed at it somewhat wistfully, envying its freedom and power of flight. And then he shut his eyes. He was very tired.... He must have dozed off for a moment, for he awoke to find himself slipping off. With a sudden jerk he regained his position--and that was what saved his life at that moment. For without warning, while he was nodding, plumed death struck from the skies. It dropped like a plummet, as was its manner. It had been circling above and judging its swoop, and by rights its curved talons should have arched deep into the unguarded back of the naked figure on the raft. But at the last second the figure moved aside--too late for the hawk to alter its swoop. The raft rocked under the impact; for a moment Garth Howard, dazed by the sudden attack, did not know what had happened. Huge scratching wings were thrashing about him; his left arm stung from where a claw had raked it; and he wrenched around to stare into two wicked slits of eyes behind a fierce, rounded beak that jabbed at him. * * * * * Evidently he represented easy prey to the hawk, for it did not soar away, but instead came at him again in a flurry of beating wings and stabbing beak, a vicious, feathered fighter from above. Caught off guard by the suddenness and savagery of the onslaught, Garth retreated stumblingly, forgetting his weight and the size of the raft and defending himself with his arms as best he could against the rushes of the hawk. The raft tilted perilously; water washed around his legs and he slipped and went under. He felt his fingers slipping inexorably over the edge of the log he had gripped; his legs threshed up a welter of foam, but he kept going down. Panic clutched him; his weight would sink him like a stone. But suddenly his clutching hand was gripped by steel-like talons, and through the water he caught a glimpse of the hawk straining backwards with mighty sweeps of its wings in an effort to lift him bodily into the air. His size had deceived it. It could not hoist him, but did manage to drag his head and chest out of the water. That was enough. With an effort, Garth scrambled onto the raft. The hawk, probably greatly surprised by its failure to soar away with such tiny prey, tore into him again, raking his body painfully. Hardly knowing what he did, Garth grabbed out as it hovered over him and succeeded in wrapping his fingers around one of its legs. Then, bracing himself as best he could, and ignoring the scratching wings and piercing beak, he gave the leg a sharp twist and heard the crack of breaking bone. He was only half-conscious of the hawk's shrill scream of pain, of its swift retreat into the blue, with the broken leg dangling grotesquely. For only a moment he was aware that he had driven it off; then the pain of his wounds and his utter exhaustion swept up over him, and he flopped down on the raft in a dead faint.... * * * * * For a long time Garth was dimly aware of familiar noises. At first they were faint and scarcely perceptible; but, as his senses slowly began to return, disturbing thoughts came to him. He felt that he was on his back, and confined, and when he twisted, to turn over, he found he could not. He opened his eyes and blinked. He was back in the laboratory--lying bound, hand and foot, on the long table. The giant Hagendorff appeared over him, and his deep voice rumbled: "Badly scarred and bruised, my little friend! Cats you have fought, and birds, and each has left its mark. It was useless to run away last night--not?" Garth was suddenly too full of a weary resignation to even think of speaking. Remonstrance, he knew, would avail him nothing. The long struggle for freedom and life was over, and he had lost. The assistant was apparently in good humor. He went on: "Really, it is too bad, after that magnificent fight of yours! A hawk--was it not? I was following your tracks, and had just reached the beach when I see a great fuss on the water. A raft, I see! A bird, attacking something on it! A little white figure, struggling! Well, it is that easy. I unlock the boat and go to the raft and find my elusive friend there, unconscious. So I bring him back here. He has forgotten: we have an experiment to complete." There was a fire of exultation in the man's eyes as they glared down at the midget who lay on the laboratory table, just a few feet away from the chamber of the machine. He reached out and ran a thick finger over his victim's body. "You do not deserve this," he said. "I should kill you outright--but, graciously, I give you death in the machine. Yours will be the first human body to be reduced to an inch; maybe less. This is your martyrdom; for this, your name will live, along with mine, for having perfected the process." * * * * * Garth Howard saw that the window was boarded tightly shut. Then Hagendorff caught his eyes as, with a grin, he plunged a hand into a pocket and drew forth the missing panel switch. He dangled it in front of Garth. "What you would have given for this last night, eh? With your wire to pull the lever so carefully arranged! _Ach_, it was too bad!" He shrugged, then picked up a screwdriver and turned to fix the switch on the control panel. The moment his back was turned, Garth gazed frantically around. The fantastic fate he had striven so desperately to stave off was very close now. What could he do? Some tools lay on the table, just out of his reach, among them a pair of cutting pliers. He stared at the pliers--an overgrown tool, half as long as his own body. The twist of Hagendorff's wrist driving home the first screw brought a cold chill over him. The pliers! It was a chance! He twisted a little, and keeping his eyes on the giant's back, he inched toward them. His hands, tied at the wrists behind him, clutched for them; found them. The jaws were open, and there were two sharp cutting edges. He could not hope to manipulate the whole implement with his bound hands, but he located one edge, painfully brought the rope to it and sawed rapidly. The steel sliced his flesh, and he felt the warm stickiness of blood. But he disregarded this and kept on. Hagendorff was still working, all unconscious--but the last screw was going in. And then some strands of the rope snapped, and it loosened. The next second, Garth had wrenched his hands free. Then, throwing caution to the winds, he sat up, grabbed the great tool and sliced the rope at his feet. At that moment, Hagendorff finished his job and turned around. * * * * * Their eyes met. For a breathless instant nothing happened, save that the smile on the titan's face changed to surprise and then fury. Garth scrambled to his feet. The movement brought a bellow of rage, and the manikin saw two enormous hands converging on him in a sweep that bade fair to crush every bone in his dwarfed body. Leaping backwards instinctively, he hurled the pliers at the giant's head. They were well aimed, and he saw them strike the temple, stopping the man in his tracks. He thundered, more from anger than pain. His heart pounding wildly, Garth ran back to a position behind a rack of test tubes. It was from there that he saw Hagendorff, cursing crazily, grab up a machinist's hammer and advance upon him. All sanity had apparently left the giant. His great face was flushed and distorted, and a growing welt showed where the pliers had clipped him. Garth suddenly knew that if he were captured again, death would not come in the chamber, but from those powerful hands, or the weapon they clutched. The hammer swung back for a crushing blow. But in the instant it hung poised, Garth lifted a half-filled test tube from the rack before him and swished its contents forward. The tube held sulphuric acid, and it sprayed over Hagendorff's face. The hammer pitched from his hand; he clutched at his eyes and stumbled back, shrieking in agony. Garth at once ran to the edge of the table, swung himself over and slid down the leg to the floor. The laboratory door was open and he dashed for it. But, whether or not Hagendorff could see his frantic retreat, he anticipated it, and with a reeling plunge he got there first. Fumbling, he found the key in the hole and turned it. The room was sealed. * * * * * Beginning then, the blind Hagendorff was a man berserk. With a sobbing roar of pain and fury, he lashed round for the foot-high figure that dodged and wheeled and zig-zagged to keep from his threshing arms and his hands. A table crashed over, and a flood of chemicals mixed and boiled on the floor; then another, as the giant blundered blindly into it. The cages of animals split open, and guinea pigs, rabbits and insects scuttled from their prisons, fleeing to the corners from the wild plunges of the raging German. Garth went reeling from a glancing blow, and fell against an over-turned stool under a far table where he could hardly breathe for the mixed odors of spilt chemicals. By some sixth sense, Hagendorff seemed to locate him, for his huge body turned and came directly for him. But Garth did not wait. Seizing the stool he whirled it so that it slid smash into the giant's legs. The man pitched over with a grunt, striking the floor so hard that the planks shivered. He did not rise. He lay there, in a wreckage of glass and splintered wood and stinking chemicals, moaning slightly. Garth wasted no time, but gripped a leg of the laboratory table, shinned to the top and with frantic speed fixed his strand of wire onto the control lever and round the supporting posts of the instrument panel. Then he jumped for the dynamo switch, caught the handle and jerked it down. The drone of a generator surged through the room. Then the midget was standing in the chamber, both ends of the wire in his hands; and his heart was thudding madly as he pulled one of them. It held. Over came the lever, halfway. The brilliant stream of the ray poured down. Dimly the manikin glimpsed the chamber's walls sinking down, the wreckage-strewn room outside diminishing to normal size. Fiery pain throbbed through him, but it was lost in the exultation that filled his mind as the seconds went by. He grew to two feet, two and a half--three. * * * * * But beyond that he was not to go. The swaying shape of Hagendorff loomed outside the cube. Aroused by the drone of the generator and what it signified, the giant had floundered up from the floor and now came clutching blindly for him. Garth knew he would have to leave the chamber at once; so, struggling for command of his muscles through the paralysis that numbed them, he tensed his hold on the other wire and pulled it a little. The control lever swung back to neutral; the ray faded and Garth jumped out. He was only a few feet away from the huge convulsed face as the German roared: "By God, you'll never get back on _this_ machine!" His purpose was plain; his groping hand had already found the control lever. To prevent his ripping it out, Garth plunged head first into Hagendorff's stomach, and they both went down in a flurry of arms and legs. Garth, scrambling to get loose, was conscious of the ray pouring down again in the chamber above. The lever had not been wrenched out, but jerked over, setting the process of increase on. The next few minutes were a chaos. Now that Howard was three feet tall he was without some of the advantages of his former smallness and compactness, and his utmost efforts failed to free him from the death clutch of the pain-maddened giant. Over and over they rolled on the floor. Garth trying only to break free, and the other relentlessly holding on and dragging him over to the chamber again. It was a losing fight for the diminutive one, weakened as he was by his exposure and the fierce fights he had had. Little by little, squirming and resisting with all his remaining strength, he was brought near--to see the German, at last, pull half the reducing apparatus with a crash to the floor. The ray in the chamber faded off. The machine was silenced forever, so that Garth could never hope to regain his full size in this one.... * * * * * With the realization of this, most of his spirit went, while the savage giant, successful in smashing the machinery, now turned and devoted himself exclusively to his victim. "Now for you!" he roared in frightening triumph, clutching the smaller man's neck with his great hands and bearing him to the floor. Against those fingers gouged into his wind-pipe like a vise of steel, Garth could do nothing. Feebly he gagged, and feebly he clawed at the pitiless hands--and futilely. It was the end, he told himself. He had come close, but closeness did not count. His eyes bulged, and a shroud of black began to obscure his vision. And then, suddenly, over the giant's flexed arms, he glimpsed, coming from the chamber on the table, something that chilled the blood in his veins with horror. It was huge and utterly loathsome. Long, hairy legs folded out, and following them came a furry, bloated body at least five feet thick. Many-faceted eyes fixed themselves coldly on the men on the floor. In one hideous leap the monster soared from the table all the way to the room's ceiling, seeming almost to float as it came down. For a moment it teetered on the floor, not five feet from the giant who, blind and all unconscious of it, was throttling his diminutive victim beneath him. Garth for a second forgot the grip on his throat in the horror of the monster. He knew at once what it was--a tarantula. It had crawled inside the chamber when its cage was broken, had been there even while he had been there, and had been swollen to its present blood-curdling size while they were fighting and the ray was on. With the smashing of the apparatus, it was free to come out. * * * * * It gathered for the final spring, its terrible legs tensing perceptibly--a creature out of a nightmare. Garth Howard tried to shriek out a warning, but Hagendorff was holding his throat too well. He could only struggle weakly and nod toward the horror beyond; but the message did not get across to the giant. Then the tarantula sprang again. For a moment it seemed to hover on Hagendorff's upturned back. When it floated down, its ragged legs cradled over him, and the egg-shaped body squatted on his back.... Garth felt his frayed nerves and senses going. A hairy leg was touching him, chilling his flesh. Above him, the giant was thrashing impotently, and he found his neck free of the awful grip. He wormed free. He was hardly conscious of reaching up and unlocking the door, and closing it tightly again as he stumbled forth. Later, it seemed that it was in a dream that he ran wildly into the splendid sunlight outside and down the winding trail. It was only by a tremendous effort that he kept his senses long enough to shove the rowboat out from the beach and hop in. He never started the motor. All that he had seen and suffered on the island of horror overcame him too soon, and he pitched down in a limp, unconscious heap.... * * * * * And so it was, that, the next morning, the two harbor policemen found a rowboat with mysterious cargo floating silently down the Detroit River. So it was that some time later a launch with three local officers churned up to the solitary island, and that gunshots echoed in the gloom of a hushed laboratory room, and a man's white-faced body was carried from the cabin where he had made his one great treacherous effort to steal another's fame. "JAZZING UP THE UNIVERSE" Centuries of celestial history wheeled across the plaster sky of the new Adler planetarium at Chicago, recently, at the dedication of the astronomical institution, the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. A modern Joshua, working the levers and switches of a complicated instrument, commanded a miniature sun to stand still in the heavens--and it did. He bettered the feat of the Biblical prophet by stopping the sun at any given point on its orbit across the skies, and then ran it backward, its attendant planets, planetoids and stars scampering contrary to all rules of the universe. The Joshua in the person of Professor Philip Fox, director of the planetarium on a "made" island in Lake Michigan described the instrument with which he made the heavenly bodies cut capers, as a projector, made in Germany at a cost of almost $100,000. As nearly as it can be described by a layman it looks like three immense diving helmets capping the ends of a tube about six feet long. Each "helmet" is studded with lenses and inside are complicated and strange lights and projectors which throw the images of the celestial bodies on the white plaster dome above that represents the skies. The wheeling motion of the universe toward the west is obtained by revolving the "helmets" in eccentric circles on an axis. The whole effect makes a spectator feel as if the solar system was revolving around him at a greatly accentuated speed. As a beginning lesson for the layman who attended the opening, Professor Fox set the machine to represent the latitude of Chicago on May 10, 1930. Every one turned his eyes to the east, where a silhouette of Lake Michigan, with its lighthouses and ore ships, is painted on the plaster horizon. The dome was lighted to represent a clear night, and, incidentally, all nights are clear in a planetarium. The machine was started and up from the center of the Lake jumped Mars, red against the darkness. Professor Fox, with a flashlight that throws the image of an arrow, pointed out the stars as they appeared over the dome. The coming of Mars forecast the dawn of May 10 and in a few moments the sun emerged from the proper latitudinal position out of the lake and blazed its way across the heavens and set behind the silhouette of the Standard Oil Building on the west wall of the dome in less than a minute, denoting that the day had passed in review. At 3:43 P. M. central standard time, the midget moon arose and sailed its course and then set behind the darkened picture of the Straus Tower. Then Professor Fox ran off Sunday, Monday and Tuesday for good measure, each time with Mars heralding the dawn and the sun changing position as it does in reality. Fifty centuries of astronomical history can be run off in an hour by the machine. The planets are visible during the day in the planetarium as well as night. The Moon Weed _By Harl Vincent_ [Illustration: _Bart hacked and hacked at the rubbery growth._] [Sidenote: Unwittingly the traitor of the Earth, Van pits himself against the inexorably tightening web of plant-beasts he has released from the moon.] Hobart Madison pursed his lips in a whistle of incredulous surprise as he regarded the object that lay in the palm of his hand. An ordinary pebble, it seemed to be, but a pebble in which a strange fire smouldered and showed itself here and there through the dull surface. "Would you mind repeating what you just said, Van?" he asked. "You heard me the first time. I say that that's a diamond and that it came from the moon." Carl Vanderventer glared at his friend in resentment of his doubting tone. "Mean to tell me you've been there? To the moon?" "Certainly not. I'm not a Jules Verne adventurer. But I'm telling you that stone is a diamond of the first water and that it came from the moon. Weighs over a hundred carats, too. You can have it appraised yourself if you think I'm kidding you." Bart Madison laughed. "Don't get sore, Van," he said. "I'm not doubting your word. But Lord, man--the thing's so incredible! It takes a little time to soak in. And you say there are more?" "Sure. This one's the largest of five I've found so far. And there's other stuff, too. Wait till you see. Fossils, beetles and things. I tell you, Bart, the moon was inhabited at one time. I've the evidence and I want you to be the first to see it." The eyes of the young scientist shone with excitement as he saw that his friend was roused to intense interest. "So that's what all your experimenting has been aimed at. No wonder it cost so much." "Yes, and you've been a brick for financing me. Never asked a question, either. But Bart, it'll all come back to you now. Know how much that stone's worth?" "Plenty, I guess. But, forget about the financing and all that. Where's this laboratory of yours?" Madison had pushed his chair back from his desk and was reaching for his hat. "Over in the Ramapo Mountains, not far from Tuxedo. I'll have you there in two hours. Sure you can spare the time to go out there now?" Vanderventer was enthusiastically eager. "Spare the time? You just try and keep me from going!" Neither of them noticed the sinister figure that lurked outside the door which led into the adjoining office. They chattered excitedly as they passed into the outer hall and made for the elevator. * * * * * Vanderventer's laboratory was a small domed structure set in a clearing atop the mountain and well hidden from the winding road which was the only means of approach. Though Bart Madison, who had inherited his father's prosperous brokerage business, had financed his friend's research work ever since the two left college, this was his first visit to the secluded workshop, and its wealth of equipment was revealed to him as a complete surprise. He had always thought of Van's experiments as something beyond his ken; something uncanny and mysterious. Now he was convinced. The most prominent single piece of apparatus in the laboratory was a twelve-inch reflecting telescope which reared its latticed framework to a slit in the dome overhead. Paralleling its axis and secured to the same equatorial mounting was a shining tube of copper which bristled with handwheels and levers and was connected by heavy insulated cables to an amazing array of electrical machinery that occupied an entire side of the single room. "Regular young observatory you've got here, Van," Bart commented when he had taken all this in in one sweeping glance of appraisal. "Yeah, and then some. Not another like it in the world." Van was busying himself with the controls of his electrical equipment, and a powerful motor-generator started up with a click and a whirr as he closed a starting switch. Madison watched in silence as the swift-fingered scientist fussed with the complicated adjustments of the apparatus and then turned to the massive concrete pedestal on which his telescope was mounted. At his touch of a button the instrument swung over on its polar axis to a new position. The slit in the dome was opened to the afternoon sky, revealing the lunar disc in its daytime faintness. "You can see it just as well in daylight?" Bart asked as his friend peered through the eyepiece of the telescope and continued his adjustments. "Sure, the surface is just as bright as at night. Doesn't seem so to your eye, but it's different through the telescope. Here, take a look." * * * * * Bart squinted through the eyepiece and saw a huge crater with a shadowed spire in its center. Like a shell hole in soft earth it appeared--a great splash that had congealed immediately it was made. The cross-hairs of the eyepiece were centered on a small circular shadow near its inner rim. "That," Van was saying, "is a prominent crater near the Mare Nubium. The spot under the cross-hairs is that from which I have obtained the diamonds--and other things. Watch this now, Bart." The young broker straightened up and saw that his friend was removing the cover from a crystal bowl that was attached to the lower end of the copper tube that pointed to the heavens at the same ascension and declination as the telescope. The air of the room vibrated to a strange energy when he closed a switch that lighted a dozen vacuum tubes in the apparatus that lined the wall. "You say you bring the stuff here with a light ray?" he asked. "No, I said with the speed of light. This tube projects a ray of vibrations--like directional radio, you know--and this ray has a component that disintegrates the object it strikes and brings it back to us as dissociated protons and electrons which are reassembled in the original form and structure in this crystal bowl. Watch." A misty brilliance filled the bowl's interior. Intangible shadowy forms seemed to be taking shape within a swirling maze of ethereal light that hummed and crackled with astounding vigor. Then, abruptly, the apparatus was silent and the light gone, revealing an odd object that had taken form in the bowl. "A starfish!" Bart gasped. "Yeah, and fossilized." Van handed it to him and he took it in his fingers gingerly as if expecting it to burn them. * * * * * The thing was undoubtedly a starfish, and of light, spongy stone. Its color was a pale blue and the ambulacral suckers were clearly discernible on all five rays. "Lord! You're sure this is from the moon?" Bart turned the starfish over in his hand and gazed stupidly at his friend. "Certainly, you nut. Think I had it up my sleeve? But here, watch again, there's something else." The crackling, misty light again filled the bowl. "Suppose," Bart ventured, "you bring in something large--big as a house, let's say. What would it do to your machine?" "Can't. The ray'll only pick up stuff that'll enter the bowl. Look--here's the next arrival." The mysterious light died down and the scientist picked up the second object with trembling fingers. It was a knife of beautiful workmanship, fashioned from obsidian and obviously the work of human hands. "There! Didn't I tell you?" Van gloated. "Guess that shows there were living beings on the moon." He made minute changes in the adjustment of his marvelous instrument and Bart watched in dazed astonishment as object after object materialized before their eyes. There were fragments of strange minerals; more fossils, marine life, mostly; a roughly beaten silver plate; three diamonds, none of which was as large as what Van had taken to New York, but all of considerable value. "This'll be something for the papers, Van!" Bart Madison was visioning the fame that was to come to his friend. "Yeah, all but the diamonds." * * * * * "All but the diamonds is right!" These words were spoken by a sarcastic voice, chill as an icicle, that came from the open door. They wheeled to look into the muzzles of two automatic pistols that were trained on them by a stocky individual who faced them with a twisted, knowing grin. "Danny Kelly!" Bart gasped, raising his hands slowly to the level of his shoulders. He knew the ex-army captain was a dead shot with the service pistol, and a desperate man since his disgrace and forced resignation. "What's the big idea?" he demanded. "You don't need to ask. Refused me a loan this morning, didn't you? Now I'm getting it this way." Kelly turned savagely on Van, prodding his ribs with a pistol. "Get 'em up, you!" he snapped. Van had been slow in raising his hands, gaping in stupefied amazement at the intruder. Now he reached for the ceiling without delay. "You'll serve time for this, Danny!" Bart shouted. "Shut up! I know what I'm doing. And back up, too--where--no, the other door." Kelly was forcing him toward the door of the cellar at the point of one pistol as he kept Van covered with the other. Bart clenched his fist and brought it down in a sudden sweeping blow that raked Kelly's cheek and ear with stunning force. But the gunman recovered in a flash, dropped the muzzle of his pistol and pulled the trigger. Drilled through the thigh, Bart staggered through the open door and fell the length of the stairs into the darkness of the cellar. Kelly laughed evilly as he slammed the door and turned the key. "Hold it, you!" he snarled as he swung on Van who had dropped his hands and crouched for a spring. "If I drill you, it won't be through the leg. I'll take those diamonds now." * * * * * He pocketed one of his pistols, and, keeping the other pressed to the pit of Van's stomach, went through his pockets. Then he added those on the tray by the crystal bowl to the collection, and transferred the entire lot to his own pocket. "Now, you clever engineer," he grinned, "we'll just operate this trick machine of yours for a while and collect some more. Hop to it!" He watched narrowly as Van stretched his fingers to the controls. "No monkey business, either," he grated; "you'll not change a single adjustment. I've been listening to you and I know the clock of the telescope is keeping the ray trained on the same spot. You just operate the ray and nothing else. Get me?" Van did not think it expedient to tell him of the drift caused by inaccuracies in the clock and perturbations of the moon's motion. He was playing for time, trying to plan a course of action. "There may not be any more diamonds," he offered as he tripped the release of the ray. "Oh, there'll be more. Don't try to kid me." An irregular block of quartz materialized in the bowl and Kelly tossed it to the floor in savage disgust. Then a small diamond, very small; but he pocketed it nevertheless. The next object was a strange one--a dried seed pod about six inches in length and of brilliant red color. The ray had shifted to a new position on the lunar surface. Another and another of the strange legumes followed, one of them bursting open and scattering its contents, bright red like the enclosing pod to rattle over the floor like tiny glass beads. Kelly snorted his disgust. "Still some sort of vegetation out there," Van muttered. The eternal scientist in the man could not be downed by a mere hold-up. "Can the chatter!" Kelly snarled as the crystal bowl gave up another of the useless pods and still another. He gathered up the evidence of lunar vegetation, a half dozen of the pods, and threw them through the open doorway with a savage gesture. "You trying to put one over on me?" he bellowed. "How can I?" Van retorted mildly. "I haven't touched a handwheel." He was wondering vaguely whether this lunar seed would grow in earthly soil; what sort of a plant it would produce under the new environment. Kelly was becoming nervous now. It seemed that little was to be gained by hanging around this crazy man's laboratory. He had a sizable fortune in rough stones already. That big one alone, when properly cut into smaller stones, would make him independent. Maybe there weren't any more, anyway. And the longer he stayed the greater chance there was of getting caught. The advent of another of the pods decided him. A quick blow with the butt of his pistol stretched Van on the floor and Kelly fled the scene. * * * * * Bart was pounding furiously on the cellar door when Van first took hazy note of his surroundings. Several uncertain minutes passed before he was able to stagger across the room and release his friend. "Where is he?" Bart demanded, swaying on his feet and blinking in the sudden light. "Gone. Socked me and beat it with the diamonds." Van was mopping the blood from his eyes with a handkerchief. "Are you hit bad?" he inquired. "No, just a flesh wound. Hurts like the devil, though. How about yourself?" Bart limped to his side and sighed with relief when he examined his bleeding scalp. "Not so bad yourself, old man. Where's your first aid kit?" Van was still somewhat dazed and merely pointed to the cabinet. "Fine pair we turned out to be!" he grumbled after his head had cleared a bit under Bart's vigorous cleansing of the cut on his temple. "Here we stood, meek as a couple of lambs, and let that guy get away with murder." "Yeah, but those forty-fives made the difference. Ouch!" Bart winced as his friend poured fresh iodine over the wound in his leg. "Have a heart, will you?" They were startled into silence by a hoarse, strangled scream that came from outside the laboratory. "Help! Help!" someone repeated in a panicky voice--a voice which at once ended on a gurgled note of despair. "It's Kelly!" Bart whispered. "He's come back. Something's happened to him." He started for the open door. "Wait a minute. It may be a trick to get us outside where he can pop us off." "No, it isn't. For God's sake, look!" Bart had reached the door and was pointing at the ground with shaking forefinger. * * * * * The entire clearing seemed to be alive with wriggling things--long rubbery tentacles that crawled along the ground, reaching curling ends high in the air and had even started climbing the trees at the edge of the clearing. Blood red they were, and partially transparent in the light of the setting sun; growing things, attached by their thick ends to swelling mounds of red that seemed anchored to the ground. Translucent stalks rose from the mounds and sprouted huge buds that burst and blossomed into flaming flowers a foot in diameter, then withered and went to seed in a moment of time. But always the weaving tendrils shot forth with lightning speed, reaching and feeling their uncanny way along the ground and over tree stumps into the woods. One of them emerged from a hollow stump with its slender end coiled around the tiny body of a chattering gray squirrel. "The moon flowers!" Van cried. "What do you mean--moon flowers?" "Dried seed pods. They came over into the bowl, and Kelly threw them out. Now look at the damned things. They're alive!" Kelly's voice came to them once more from behind the barrier of rapidly growing vegetation. "Help!" he screeched. "I'll give back the diamonds--anything! Only get me away from the things!" "Ought to let 'em get him," Van growled. Bart shivered. "Too horrible, Van. Got an ax or anything?" "There's a hatchet around back. Maybe we can--" * * * * * But the young broker had scuttled around the corner of the building and Van looked after him anxiously. The vile red tendrils were reaching for the east wall of the laboratory, and he saw that their inner surfaces were covered with tiny suckers like those on the arms of a devil-fish. Carnivorous plants, undoubtedly, these awful half-animal, half-vegetable things whose seed had been transported across a quarter million miles of space. Man eaters! Deadly, and growing with incredible speed. Even the short-lived flowers were fearsome, as they opened their scarlet pansy-like faces and stared a moment before they folded up and shriveled into the seed cases like those that had materialized in the crystal bowl. Then he noticed that the pods were opening and spreading more of the terrible seed. Nothing could stop this weird growth, now. It would cover the country like a sea of flaming horror, overcoming and devouring every living thing. Cold fear clutched at Van as he realized the enormity of the calamity that had come to the earth. Bart was skirting the edge of the clearing with the hatchet in his hand, and Van tried to call out to him, to warn him. But his voice caught in his throat, and instead he ran to his assistance, circling the spreading menace to get around behind where Kelly was still shouting. Damn Kelly anyway! This never would have happened if he hadn't come on the scene! Kelly was in the woods, wedged into the crotch of a tree and striking wildly at the clutching tendrils with his clubbed pistol. They mashed easily and dripping red, but were not to be deterred from their ghastly purpose. Kelly's time would have indeed been short had not his erstwhile victims come to the rescue. One of the thickest of the twining things encircled his body and had him pinned to the tree. His breath was coming in gasps as its tightening coils increased their pressure. His coarse features were livid and his eyes bulged from their sockets. Bart hacked and hacked at the rubbery growth until he had him free; jerked him from his perch, blubbering and whining like a schoolboy. His shirt had been torn from his breast and they saw a great red welt where the blood had been drawn through the pores by those terrible suckers. "Look out, Bart!" Van shouted. * * * * * Another of the creeping things had come through the underbrush and was wrapping its coils around Bart's ankle. Another and another wriggled through, and soon they were battling for their own freedom. Kelly staggered off into the woods and went crashing down the hill, leaving them to take care of themselves as best they might. The stench of the viscous liquid that oozed from the injured tendrils was nauseous; it had something of a soporific effect; and the two friends found themselves fighting the terror in a growing mist of red that blinded and confused them. Then, miraculously, they were free and Van assisted Bart as they ran through the forest. When they reached the road, weak and out of breath, they were just in time to see Kelly's roadster vanish around the bend. "Yeah, he'd give back the diamonds--the swine!" Van muttered vindictively. Then, shrugging his shoulders, "Well, they won't be much good to him, anyway. Wouldn't be any good to us either, as far as that goes." "What do you mean? Aren't they real?" Bart was raising himself painfully into the seat of Van's car, his wounded leg suddenly very much in the way. "Sure they're real. But don't you realize what this thing means--this ungodly growth that's started?" "Why--why, no. You mean it'll keep on growing?" "And how! Those inner stalks drop a new batch of seeds every five minutes or so. Presto!--a flock of new plants spring up ten feet from the first; dozens of them for every pod that drops. You know how geometrical progression works out. They'll cover the whole country--the whole world. Lord!" "Man alive, this is terrible! I hadn't thought of that before. What'll we do?" "Yeah, that's the question: what can we do?" Van started his motor and jerked the car to the road. "First off, we're going to get away from here--fast!" Bart gripped his arm as he shifted into second gear. "Look, Van!" he babbled. "They're out of the woods already. Loose! The red snakes are loose from their stalks. They're alive, I tell you!" It was true. Several of the slimy red things were wriggling their way over the macadam like great earthworms, but moving with the speed of hurrying pedestrians. Free, and untrammeled by the roots and stems of the mother plants, they had set forth on their own in the search for beings of flesh and blood to destroy. Millions of their kind would follow; billions! In sudden panic Van stepped on the gas. * * * * * Fifteen minutes later, with shrieking siren, a motorcycle drew alongside and forced them to the curb. "Where's the fire?" the sarcastic voice of a stern-visaged officer demanded, when Van had brought his car to a screeching stop. Seventy-five, the speedometer had read but a moment before. "It's life and death, officer," Van started to explain. "We must get to the proper officials to warn the--" "Aw, tell it to the judge! Come on now, follow me." "But officer, there's death on its way from the hills, I tell you. Red, creeping things that'll be here in a couple of hours--" "Get away, from that wheel. I'll drive you in meself. You're fulla applejack." Bart had opened the door on his side and was limping his way around the back of the car. This was serious. They had to get away; had to spread the word in a way that would be believed before it was too late. The officer was tugging at Van's arm, astonishment and black rage showing in his weather-beaten countenance. Speeding, drunk, resisting an officer--they'd never get out of this mess! A swift uppercut interrupted the proceedings. Bart's leg was numb and stiff, but his good right arm was working smoothly and with all its old time precision. His second punch was a haymaker. With his full weight behind it, it drove straight to the chin and stretched the officer on the concrete. Thoughtfully, Bart removed his pistol from its holster before scrambling in at Van's side. "Boy, now we're in for it!" he gasped. "And we might as well make a good job while we're at it." Van let in his clutch with a jerk, and again they were breaking all traffic regulations. * * * * * It was dusk when they roared in through the gate at the Rockland County Airport and pulled up at the hangar office. Van rushed in, shouting for Bill Petersen, and Bart followed. A slender, fair-haired youth in rumpled flying togs greeted them. "Bill, my friend, Bart Madison," Van blurted without pausing for breath. "Listen, we've got to have a plane right away. Got one with a radio?" "Yes, but what's all the rush? Where you going?" "Albany. Right away. Make it snappy, will you?" "Sure, but what's it all about?" Young Petersen was leading them to the field where a sleek mono-plane was in waiting as if they had ordered it. "Warm her up, Joe," he called to the mechanic. "Listen, Bill--I never lied to you, did I?" Van asked, when they were seated in the plane's cabin. "Not that I know of. But sometimes I've thought you were lying, until I saw with my own eyes the things you had told me about. What is it this time?" "Death and destruction. Coming down out of the Ramapos. We've got to warn the country. Plants, Bill--squirmy red plants with long feelers that can twist around a man and devour him. Half animal, they are, and the feelers break loose and crawl by themselves. Multiplying like nothing you ever saw. Millions of them in an hour." "What?" Petersen stared incredulously as his motor roared into life. Then he gave his attention to the business of taking off. He jerked the thumb of his free hand toward the radio. * * * * * Van's expert fingers manipulated the switches and dials of the portable apparatus, and its vacuum tubes glowed into life. "2BXX calling 2TIM," he droned into the microphone. "Who's that?" Bart asked. The drone of the motor was barely audible in the closed cabin and did not interfere. "The _Times_. Trying to get Johnny Forbes. If anyone can get this thing across, he can. Wait a minute, here they are." He closed his eyes as he listened to the murmuring voice in the headphones. Then he was talking rapidly, forcefully, and the young flyer gazed with owlish solemnity at Bart as they listened to his conversation. It was plain that Bill was but half inclined to believe, though impressed by the earnestness and evident apprehension displayed by his two passengers. "Yes, 2BXX," Van was saying. "Connect me with Johnny Forbes, please--in a hurry. Yes.... Hello, Johnny, it's Van--Carl Vanderventer, you know. Yes; got a scoop for you, but first I want you to get it in the broadcasts. Get me? It's about a man-eating plant that's starting to overrun the country. No--listen now, I'm not dreaming--listen--" The frantic scientist rambled on and on about the seed from the moon, the red death that was creeping down from the mountains, the horror of the calamity as he and Bart had visioned it. Then, with a sudden note of despair, his voice trailed off into nothingness and he turned a drawn white face to his two friends. "Laughed at me. Hung up on me," he groaned. "Good God! We've got to do something--quick!" "Be in Albany in an hour," the pilot suggested. "What you going to do there?" He believed, now. His expression of horror showed it. "See the governor. But, man, it's an hour wasted! We must stir up the country--get the word to Washington--everywhere. It might be possible to fight the things some way if we can mobilize State and National resources quickly enough. Bill, Bart, what can we do?" * * * * * The plane sped on through the night under control of her gyro-pilot as the three men racked their brains for a solution of the problem. If a hard-boiled newspaper man would not believe the story, who could? "I've got it!" Bart shouted suddenly. "Can either of you pound a key--code, I mean?" "Sure, I can. Then what?" Petersen returned. "Fake an S. O. S. Don't you see? All broadcasting has to stop, and every ship at sea, every air liner in this part of the country'll be listening--standing by. Give 'em the story in code. Let 'em think we're in a ship from the moon--captured by Lunarians who are here to destroy the world with this weed of theirs--anything. Make it as weird as possible. Most everyone'll think it's a hoax, but there are ten thousand kids--amateurs--who'll be listening in. Somebody'll believe it, and, believe me, there'll be some investigating in the neighborhood of the growth in no time." "By George, I believe that'll do it!" Van exclaimed. "And the broadcasters listen in for an S. O. S. themselves. Got to, you know, so they know when to start up again. Some smart announcer will tell the story--maybe even believe it. The trick will work, sure as shooting!" * * * * * The pilot glanced at his instruments and saw that the automatic gyro-apparatus was functioning properly. Then he moved over to the radio and threw the switch that put the key in circuit instead of the microphone. Rapidly he ticked off the three dots, three dashes, and again three dots that spelled the dread danger signal of the air. Over and over he repeated the signal, and then he listened for results. "It worked!" he gloated, after a moment. "They're all signing off--the broadcasters. The Navy Yard in Brooklyn gives me the go-ahead." He pounded out the absurd message with swift fingers, pausing occasionally to ask a pertinent question of Van or Bart. At Van's request he added a warning to all residents of New York State west of the Hudson River and of northern New Jersey to flee their homes without delay. He even asked that the message be relayed to the governors of the two states, and that Governor Perkins of New York be advised that they were on their way to Albany to discuss the situation. But he balked at the story of the Lunarians, telling instead the equally strange truth regarding the origin of the deadly growth, and adding the names of Van and Bart to lend authenticity to the tale. Then he signed off and switched the radio receiver to the loud speaker before returning to the pilot's seat. Bart tuned in on the various broadcasters as they resumed their programs, finally settling on WOR, Newark, whose announcer was reading the strange message to his radio public with appropriate comment. A crime and an outrage he called it, an affront to the industry and to the public. An insult to the government of the United States. But wait! A telephone call had just been received at the station from the village of Sloatesburg. A reputable citizen of that town had reported the red growth at the edge of the State road--huge red earthworms wriggling across the concrete. Another call, and another! The announcer's voice was rising hysterically. "It _did_ work, Bart," Van exulted. "Now the hell starts popping." * * * * * Governor Perkins met them in person when they arrived at the Municipal Airport in Albany. A great crowd had gathered in the shadows outside the brilliance of the flood lights, and a police escort rushed them to the governor's private car. "Here's where you go to the Bastille for socking that cop," Van observed. His spirits had risen appreciably since that successful S. O. S. call. But the governor was in a serious mood, as they made their way toward the executive mansion through the milling crowds that lined the hilly streets of the capital city of New York State. Proofs had not been lacking of the truth of Bill Petersen's radio warning. Already the spreading red death had covered a circle some eight miles in diameter, covering farm lands and destroying the crops, blocking the roads and trapping many on the streets and in their homes in nearby towns. More than a hundred had lost their lives, and thousands were fleeing the threatened area. The country was in an uproar. "Gentlemen," the governor said, when they had reached the privacy of his chambers, "this is a serious matter, and no time must be lost in dealing with it. Nevertheless, I want you, Mr. Vanderventer, to tell your story of the thing to me and to the radio system of the United States Secret Service. The President himself will be listening, as will the chief executives of most of the states. Hold nothing back, as the fate of our people is at stake." * * * * * So Van faced the microphone and related the history of his work in the little laboratory in the Ramapo Mountains. He told of his interest in the earth's satellite, and of his first unsuccessful experiments with ultra-telescopes in the endeavor to explore its surface close at hand; of the failure of a space-ship he had built; of the final discovery of the ray, by means of which it was possible to transport solid objects from the one body to the other. He told of the discovery of man-made relics and of fossils; he told of the diamonds, and of the attack by Dan Kelly which had resulted in the spreading of the seed of the deadly moon weed. He even related the incident of the traffic policeman, at which the governor smiled. "That has been reported," he said, "and you need have no fear on that score.--The charges will be dropped. I now ask that you give us your opinion as to the best method of combatting this new enemy. Have you any ideas?" "I have not, sir," Van replied gloomily, "though I believe it can be done only from the air. Possibly bombing, or a gas of some sort--I don't know. It will take time, Mr. Governor." "Yes, and meanwhile the thing is overwhelming us at what rate?" "As nearly as I can estimate it, the growth is moving with a speed of four or five miles an hour." "By morning you expect it will have traveled forty or fifty miles in all directions?" "I'm afraid so." A sharp buzz from the instrument on the governor's desk interrupted them. "The President," he whispered. "That is enough, Governor," came the husky tones of President Alford's voice. "I shall communicate with Secretary Makely at once. All available army bombing-planes will be rushed to the scene. You, sir, will mobilize the militia, as will the governors of the other states. Meanwhile, this young scientist is to report to the Bureau of Scientific Research in Washington--to-night. Have him bring a supply of these seeds with him." That was all. Governor Perkins offered no comment, but merely rose from his seat to indicate that the discussion was ended. A solemn silence reigned in the room. "Let's go!" exclaimed Bill Petersen suddenly, unawed by the presence of the governor. "My ship's waiting, and we can stop off for a couple of those pods and still make Washington in two hours. Come on!" Governor Perkins smiled. "Good luck, boys," he said, as they were ushered from the room. "My car will return you to the airport. And remember, the country will be watching you now, and expecting much from you. Good-by." They were to recall his words in the dark days ahead. * * * * * Before they had reached Newburgh, they saw a dull red glow in the skies that told them the news broadcast to which they had been listening had not exaggerated. The red growth was luminous in darkness. Off there to the south-west, it was as if a vast forest fire were lighting the heavens. No wonder the panics and rioting were getting out of control of the police! Coming up over Bear Mountain, they caught their first glimpse of the sea of fire that was the red death by night. Like a vast bed of glowing embers it covered the countryside, extending eastward to Haverstraw where it was temporarily halted by the broad Hudson. It was a shimmering, undulating mass of living, luminous things, eating their horrible way through all organic matter that stood in their path. Writhing, squirming, all-absorbing monsters that sent out an advance guard of independent snake-like tendrils to capture and hold for the lagging mother-plants whatever of live stock and humanity they were able to find. "Think they'll get over the river, Van?" Bart asked. "Sure they will. Every fugitive who had a narrow escape after being in contact with the things is a potential carrier of the seed. I found several of them sticking to my clothing after we got away. I picked a couple off your coat, but didn't tell you." "Lord! What did you do with them?" "Put them in the ash receiver in my car--like a fool. Wouldn't have to go down for more if I'd kept them." "Well, it can't be helped now. We'll have a job getting some down there now, too." "I'll say so." Van lapsed into gloomy silence. * * * * * They were over the landing field above Tomkins Cove, and Bill turned on the siren whose raucous shriek operated the mechanism of the floodlight switches by sound vibrations. The field sprang into instant illumination, and they circled it once before swooping to a landing. They were but a mile from the advancing terror. The field was deserted, and the three men started off immediately in the direction of the oncoming weed. "We'll have to make it snappy," Van grunted. "We've got about twelve minutes to get the pods and get back to the ship. The damn things'll be here by that time." They scrambled over fences and pushed through thickets. The lighted windows of a deserted farmhouse were directly ahead, and they ran through the open gate and across the fields. Ever, the glow of the weed grew brighter. A terrified horse galloped wildly past them and crashed into the fence, whinnying piteously as it went down with a broken leg. They could see the red rim of the advancing horror just beyond the road. One of the detached tendrils slithered past, each glowing coil distinctly visible. "Lucky the things can't see!" Bart shuddered. "Yeah," said Van. "Have to dodge 'em to get in close enough to one of the plants. Keep your eyes peeled now, you fellows, in case one of us gets caught." A terrific explosion rocked the ground. They had paid no heed to the roaring of motors overhead. The bombers were on the job! Shooting skyward, a column of flame not a hundred yards from them showed where the high explosive had landed in the red mass. Then, slimy wriggling things rained all about them, fragments of the red weed that still squirmed and crawled and clung. Bill Petersen yelled and clutched at his neck where one of the things had taken hold. Another warning whistle of a falling bomb. Crash! More of the horror raining down and splattering as it fell. Whistle--crash! A huge blob of quivering, luminous jelly fell before them--a portion of one of the mother-plants. Crash! Crash! "Run!" Van shouted. "Run for the plane. We'll never make it now. Damn those bombers, anyway!" All along the advancing front, the bombs were bursting, shattering the air with their detonations and scattering the glowing red stems and tendrils in all directions. The din was appalling, and the increasing brightness of the crimson glow added to the horror of the situation. Stumbling and cursing, they ran for the plane. "Fools! Fools!" Bill was shouting. "Can't they see the field and the plane? Why in the devil are they dropping them so near?" * * * * * Then Bart was down, clawing at a three-foot length of red tendril that had fallen on him and borne him to the earth. "Bart! Bart!" Van turned back and was tearing at the thing with fingers that were slippery with the sap that oozed from its torn skin. Monstrous earthworms! Cut them apart and each portion lived on, took on new vigor. And these vile things could sting like a jellyfish! Where each sucker touched the skin a burning sore remained. Bill helped them break away from the thing, and all three fought on toward the lights of the landing field. Only a short way off now; it seemed they would never reach it. The bombers were dropping their missiles with unceasing regularity, and the red death only spread the faster. When they scrambled into the cabin of the plane, the red wall of creeping horror was almost upon them. Advancing speedily out from the red-lit darkness, it seemed to halt momentarily, when it emerged into the brilliance of the great arc-lights which illuminated the field. Then, more slowly and with seemingly purposeful deliberation, the wriggling feelers reached out from the mass and bore down upon them. Bill slammed the door and latched it, then fumbled frantically with the starter switch. A most welcome sound was the answering roar of the motor. The pilot yanked his ship into the air, taking off with the wind rather than running the risk of remaining on the ground long enough to taxi around and head into it. The plane acted like a frightened bird as Bill struggled with the controls, darting this way and that, and once missing a crash by inches as the tail was lifted by the treacherous ground wind. Then they were clear, and slowly gained altitude in a steep climb. "Whew!" Van exclaimed, mopping his red-splattered forehead with his handkerchief. "That was a narrow squeak, boys. And we haven't got the seeds yet--unless we can find a few on our clothing." "Who said so?" Bart gloated. "Look at this." He opened his clenched fist and disclosed one of the pods, unbroken and gleaming horribly scarlet in the dim light of the cabin. Bill heaved a sigh of relief as he banked the ship and swung around toward the south. He had dreaded another landing near the sea of moon weed. Van chortled over their good fortune as he examined the mysterious pod. One good thing the bombers had done, anyway! Blew one of the things into his friend's hands. * * * * * Bart and the young pilot found themselves very much out of the picture when they reported with Van at the Research Building in Washington. The Government had no use for them in this emergency: it was the scientist they wanted, and he was immediately rushed into conference with the heads of the Bureau. His two friends were left to shift for themselves, and they joined the crowds in the street. The name of Carl Vanderventer was on everyone's tongue. Cursing and reviling him, they were, for the hare-brained experiment which had been the cause of the terrible disaster. Fools! Bart seethed with rage and nearly came to blows with a number of vociferous agitators who were advocating a necktie-party. Why hadn't the officials published the entire story as Van told it over the Secret Service radio? There was no mention of Dan Kelly in the broadcast news, nor of the fact that the police were searching for him in every city and town in the country. Another instance of the results of secrecy in governmental activities! "We'd better find ourselves a room and turn in," Bart growled. "Let's get out of this mob before I slam somebody." Bill Petersen was only too willing. He was suddenly very tired. In the Willard Hotel they were assigned to an excellent room, and Bart insisted on switching on the broadcasts and listening to the news. Far into the night he sat by the loud-speaker, or paced the floor as an exceptionally calamitous happening was reported. But Bill slept through it all. The army bombers had been recalled. Their efforts had worked more harm than good. The invincible moon weed now had crossed the Hudson River at Nyack and Piermont. Tarrytown was overrun, and many of the inhabitants had lost their lives either in the maws of the insatiable monsters or in the panics and rioting that accompanied the evacuation of the town. * * * * * New Jersey was covered as far south as New Brunswick, and west to Phillipsburg and Belvidere. At Mauch Chunk the contents of twenty oil tanks had been diverted to the Delaware River, and the floating oil film was proving at least a temporary protection to a considerable portion of the state of Pennsylvania. In New York State the growth had buried hill and valley, town and village, as far as Monticello, and, along the Hudson, extended as far north as Kingston. At Poughkeepsie, on the opposite side of the river, frantic householders had armed themselves with rifles and shotguns, and were killing off all refugees who attempted to land from boats at that point. But the militia was on guard at the bridges, assuring safe crossing to the thousands who fled the red death over these routes. There was no keeping the seed of the moon weed from finding its way east. At some points fire had been used with considerable success as a barrier, hundreds of acres of forest lands being destroyed in the endeavor to stem the crimson tide. But, after the ashes were cool, germination would recur, and the weed would continue on its triumphant way. Acid sprays and poison-gas of various kinds had been tried without appreciable effect. The casualty estimates already ran into the tens of thousands; rumor had it that nearly one hundred thousand had lost their lives in the city of Newark alone. There was no way in which the figures could be checked while everything was in a state of confusion. Communication lines were broken, roads blocked, gas and electric supply systems paralyzed and the railroads helpless. Trains could not be driven through the glutinous, wriggling mass that piled high on the tracks. Only the radio and the air lines were operative in the stricken area, and even these were of little value to the unfortunates who, in many cases, were surrounded and cut off from all hope of succor. At four in the morning, with aching heart and reeling brain, Bart threw himself on the bed without undressing and fell into the troubled sleep of exhaustion and despair. * * * * * The next day brought no encouragement, though it was reported that the growth developed with less rapidity after sunrise than it had during the night. Bart endeavored to get Van on the telephone, but was curtly informed by the operator at the Research Building that no incoming calls could be transferred to the laboratory where he was working. Knowing his friend, he pictured him as working feverishly with the Government engineers and giving no thought to sleep or food. He'd kill himself, sure! But such a death, even, was preferable to the red one of the moon weed. The Canadians and Mexicans had been quick to protect their borders and forbid the landing of any American aircraft or the passage of trains and automobiles. But the seed had reached Europe, one of the twelve-hour night air-liners having carried a thousand refugees who had sufficient foresight and the means to engage passage. It was a world catastrophe they faced! By mid-afternoon the streets of Washington were almost deserted. It was less than twenty-four hours since the first moon seed took root, and already the crimson growth had progressed nearly a hundred miles southward from the point of origin! Another twenty or thirty hours and it would reach the capital city--unless Van and those engineers over in the Research Building discovered something; a miracle. Bart tried the telephone once more and was overjoyed when the operator, all apologies now, informed him that Van had been trying to reach him for several hours. "Listen, old man," his friend's voice came over the wire: "I've been worried as the devil not knowing where you were. I want you and Bill to stick around where I can get you at any time. I may need you. Where are you staying?" "The Willard. Have you doped out something?" Bart answered in quick excitement. "Maybe. Can't let anything out yet--not till we've tested it thoroughly. But I can tell you that a hundred factories are already working on machines we've devised. By good luck it only means minor changes to an apparatus that is on the market in large quantity." "Great stuff. The city's nearly emptied itself, you know, and, boy, how they've been razzing you over the radio and in the papers--howling for your hide, the whole country." "I know." Van's voice was calm, but Bart sensed in it something of a cold fury that was new to him in his friend. The young scientist was bitterly resentful of the attitude of the public. "Can we see you, Van?" "No, nor call me either. Better hang around the hotel and wait for a call from me. So long now, Bart. I've got to get busy." "So long." Bart gazed solemnly at Bill Petersen, who had been listening abstractedly to the one-sided conversation. Bill had given up hope and was resigned to the inevitable. "Says he may need us, Bill," said Bart. "Yeah? Well, we'll be ready for anything he wants us to do. It's no use though--anything." "What do you mean--no use? You never saw Van licked yet, did you?" "Sure I did. By his super-telescopes and the rocket ship." "But this is different." Bart was a staunch defender of his friend. He glared at Bill for a moment and then switched on the news broadcast which he knew he detested. * * * * * The progress of the moon weed continued unabated. In the city of New York a million souls were reported as having lost their lives, and this in spite of the difficulty experienced by the uncanny moon weed in obtaining a foothold in Manhattan. It had been thought that the asphalt and concrete would prove an effective barrier, and so they did for a time. But, with the seed active in the parks and along the water fronts, it was not long before the powerful roots of the greedy plants worked their way underneath, ripping up pavements and wriggling into cellars as they progressed. The city was a mass of wreckage and a maelstrom of fighting, dying humanity. Whole regiments of the National Guard were wiped out as they fought off the weed with ax and bayonet, in the effort to provide time for the refugees to clear from their homes in certain localities. All transportation facilities to the south and west were taxed to the utmost. There was fighting and killing for the possession of automobiles and planes and for room in trains and buses. Air-line terminals and railroad stations were the scenes of dreadful massacres as the police and military guards fought off the crazed and desperate creatures who attacked them en masse. And still the news announcers prated of the responsibility of one Carl Vanderventer. The telephone bell rang, and Bart answered it in relief. At last they were to see some action! But no, it was merely the desk clerk, notifying him that all employees were leaving the hotel and that they would be left to shift for themselves. Yes, there was plenty of food in the kitchens; they were welcome to it. And a permanent telephone connection would be made to their room. The frightened clerk wished them luck. * * * * * In endless monotone, the voice of the news announcer droned on. Binghamton and Elmira, Albany and Schenectady, New Haven, Philadelphia, Allentown--all had succumbed. The casualty estimates now ran into the millions. The mist, the red mist that rose from the steaming weed, was drifting westward and spreading the seed with ever increasing rapidity. For now the monstrous growth from out the sky was adapting itself to its environment; providing the seed with feathery tufts that permitted the winds to carry them far and wide like the seed of a dandelion. "Turn off that damn thing!" Bill shouted. And he jumped to his feet, his eyes glinting strangely in the twilight gloom of the room. Bill was close to the breaking point. "Guess you're right," Bart mumbled. "Not good for either of us to listen to that stuff." He switched off the receiver, and they sat in silence as darkness fell over the city. Bill shivered and felt for the button of the electric light which he pressed with a trembling finger. They blinked in the sudden illumination, but it cheered them somewhat. It was not good to sit in the darkness and think. Besides, they knew that the turbine generators of Potomac Edison were still running. Some brave souls were sticking to their jobs--for a time, at least. "God!" Bill suddenly groaned, after an endless time of dead silence. "My sister! Lives in Pittsburgh, you know. Wonder if she and the kids got away. It won't be long before the damn stuff gets there." Bart thanked his lucky stars that he had no family ties. "Oh, they've had plenty of warning," he tried to console Bill. "Hours, you know; and the westbound lines are in good shape from there. I wouldn't worry about them if I were you." There was utter silence once more. Even the customary street noises was lacking. Both men jumped nervously when the shrill siren of a police motorcycle sounded in the distance. Bart thought grimly of his fracas with the officer who had tried to arrest Van. How long ago that seemed, and how inconsequential an incident! Their windows faced north, and by midnight they could make out the red glow of the moon weed, that awful band of flickering crimson that painted the horizon the color of blood. The telephone clamored for attention and Bill stifled a hysterical sob as the terrifying sound broke the eery stillness. Van was on the way to get them! He had a Government car and they were to go to Arlington for Bill's plane. Then what? He refused to commit himself: they must follow him blindly. Anything was better than this inactivity, though. Bart shouted with glee. * * * * * "We're going north," Van replied shortly, in answer to Bart's question when they entered the official car in front of the hotel, "after Dan Kelly." "After Dan Kelly? Got a line on him?" "Yes. Secret Service reports him in Toronto. The Canucks are after him now, but, by God, I'm going to get him myself!" Van was haggard and wan, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical light. The strain had done something to him--something Bart didn't like at all. This was a different Van from the man who had entered his office two days previously. Unshaven and unkempt, he looked and talked like a drunken man on the verge of delirium tremens. "What's the idea, Van?" he asked gently. "I'm going to get him. I tell you. The scum! It's his fault the whole world's against me. I'll get him, Bart; I'll kill him with my bare hands!" So that was it! The combination of gruelling labor in the effort to save mankind from the dread moon weed, and bitter censure from the very people he was trying to save, had been too much for Van. He had developed a fixation, unreasoning and murderous; he'd get even with the man who had caused the trouble. And nothing could deter him from his purpose: Bart could see that. Might as well humor him and help him. It made little difference, anyway, with the red doom spreading at its present rate. They'd all be victims in a few days. They were speeding through the streets of Washington at a break-neck rate. Van bent over the wheel, and like a demented man glued his wildly staring eyes to the road. "What about your work?" Bart asked, after a while. "Has anything been accomplished?" "Yes and no. They'll be ready to shoot in a few hours. Don't know whether it'll be a complete success or not. But I sneaked away anyhow. This other thing's more important to me right now." "What's the dope? Can you tell us now?" "Sure. I've got one of the machines in the car and I'll explain when we're on our way to Canada." This wasn't like Van. Never secretive and always in good humor, he was treating his friends like annoying strangers. "You can't land in Canada," Bill ventured, as they pulled up at the gate of the airport. "Like hell I can't! You watch my smoke, and let any bloody Canuck up there try and stop me!" He was lifting a small black case from the luggage carrier of the car as he replied. Bart silenced the airman with a look. * * * * * When they had taken off and were well under way, Van opened his black case and set a vacuum-tube apparatus in operation. They were nearing the fringe of the glowing sea of red that was the vast blanket of moon weed. It now extended to within a few miles of Baltimore and stretched northward as far as the eye could see. "It was a cinch," Van was explaining. "When I first saw that the growth slowed up under the arc-lights at Tomkins Cove it gave me the glimmering of an idea. Then, on the following day, when we learned that the weed spread more slowly in sunlight, I was convinced. The stuff is dormant on the moon, you know." "Why?" Bart asked breathlessly. "Because there is no atmosphere surrounding the moon, and the sun's rays are not filtered before they reach its surface as they are here. The invisible rays, ultra-violet and such, are present in full proportion. And the moon weed can not flourish when subjected to light of the higher frequencies. It died out when the moon lost its atmosphere, and only revived on being brought to earth--probably a million times more prolific in our dense and damp atmosphere and rich soil. The thing's a cinch to dope out." "Yeah!" Bart commented drily. Van was now talking and he could have bitten off his tongue for interrupting him. This machine of Van's was a generator of invisible light in the ultra-indigo range, Van explained. You couldn't see its powerful beam, but they had proved in the laboratory that it was certain doom to the moon weed. They had grown the stuff from seed in steel cages, and played with it until they were all satisfied. Now would come the final test. Ten thousand planes were being equipped with the new generator, which was merely an adaptation of standard directional television transmitters, and to-night these would start out to fight the weed. It was a cinch! * * * * * Beneath them the red cauldron seethed and tossed as they sped northward; the crimson blanket of death that was steadily covering the country. "Drop to a thousand feet, Bill," the scientist called, "and then watch below. But, don't slow down. We've got to get to Toronto!" The ship nosed down and soon leveled off at the prescribed altitude. Van's vacuum tubes lighted to full brilliancy, and a black spot appeared on the glowing surface just beneath them, a black spot that extended into a streak as the plane continued on its way. They were cutting a swath of blackness fifty feet wide through the heart of the growth! "See that!" Van gloated. "It's killing them by millions! And the best of it is the effect it leaves behind. The soil is permeated to a depth of several inches and the stuff will not germinate in the spots where the ray has contracted. Oh, it works to perfection!" Bill was exuberant; his hopes revived miraculously. He gave his motor the gun and got out of it every last revolution that it could turn up. He must get Van to Canada! Not such a bad idea, this going after Kelly, at that! Bart was voluble in his praise, then caught himself short as he remembered that he had doubted Van but a half hour previously: doubted him and despaired. Now Van, lapsing into gloomy silence after his triumph, was again thinking of nothing but revenge. The getting of Dan Kelly meant more to him now than the extinction of the moon weed. * * * * * When they landed at the Toronto Airport they were welcomed with open arms instead of with rifle fire as Bill had anticipated. The news had gone forth. Already a thousand planes flying over the United States were driving back the sea of destruction. The invisible ray was a success, and the name of Carl Vanderventer was now a thing with which to conjure, rather than one on which to heap imprecation and insult. Van grimaced wryly at this last bit of news. Danny Kelly? No one at the airport had ever heard of him. Van telephoned in to the city; to Police Headquarters. Yes, they had apprehended the fugitive American at the request of Washington, but he was a slippery customer. He had escaped. Van raged and fumed. Of what use were the congratulations of the night flyers who still loitered in the hangar; of what consolation the radio reports of the success of the ultra-indigo ray in the States and in Europe? He had come after his man and he'd failed. Defeat was a bitter pill. The news broadcasts from the States were jubilant and became increasingly so during the night. The moon weed was being driven back on a wide front and by morning would be entirely surrounded. There would be no further loss of life and little more destruction of property. Carl Vanderventer had saved the day! Van grunted his disgust whenever an announcer mentioned his name. When daylight came they prepared to return. Little use there was of searching the highways and byways of Canada for the fugitive. He'd simply have to wait until the Canadians were able to get a line on Dan Kelly again.--It was maddening! But Bart was glad. The light of reason was returning to his friend's eyes in the reaction. Then there was a telephone call from the city for Van. Police Headquarters wanted him. The fanatical glint returned to his eyes when he ran for the hangar to answer the call. Perhaps they had already captured Kelly! And he had an order in his pocket for the man's return to the States. He'd been made a deputy, and with Kelly released to him anything might happen. Something would happen. * * * * * But the police were reporting the unexplainable reappearance of the moon weed just outside the city limits at a point near Cookesville. Would Mr. Vanderventer be so kind as to fly over there and destroy it before any lives were lost? He would. The growth had covered an acre of ground by the time they reached the spot designated. But it was the work of only a minute to blast it out of existence with the ultra-indigo ray. Van surveyed the blackened and shriveled mass with satisfaction. "Let's land and take a look at it," he said. Bart thought he saw a look of exultation flash over his careworn features. Soon they were wading deep in the blackened remains of the moon weed. The stems and tendrils snapped and crumbled into powder as they passed through. The stuff was done for, no question of that. Bill Petersen yelled and pointed a shaking forefinger at an object that lay in the blackened ruin. It was a human skeleton, the bones bare of flesh and gleaming white in the light of the early morning sun. Van was on his knees, quick as a flash, feeling around the grewsome thing: pawing at the shreds of clothing that remained. Then he was on his feet, his face shining with unholy glee. In his hands were a half dozen small, smooth objects which looked like pebbles. The diamonds! "I thought so!" he exclaimed. "It's Kelly. Only way the seed could have gotten up here. He had some on his clothes and didn't know it. I couldn't get him myself--but anyway I'm satisfied." * * * * * He staggered and would have fallen, had not Bart caught him in his arms. Poor old Van! Nearly killed him, this thing had, but he'd be himself again, after it was all over. No wonder he'd gone out of his head with the horror of it, and the blame that had been so cruelly laid on him! No wonder he'd become obsessed with this idea of getting square with Dan Kelly! But now he was content: sleeping like a babe in Bart's arms. Tenderly they carried him to the plane and laid him out on the cushions in back. They'd let him sleep as long as he could; return him to Washington where he'd receive his just dues in recognition for his services. Then would follow the work of reconstruction and rehabilitation. Van would glory in that. Bart regarded his sleeping friend thoughtfully as they winged their swift way toward the American border. The harsh lines that had showed in his face during the past few hours were smoothed away and in their place was an expression of deep contentment. He was at peace with the world once more. Good old Van. What a difference there would be when he awakened to full realization of the changed order of things! What satisfaction and relief! [Illustration: Advertisement] The Port of Missing Planes _By Captain S. P. Meek_ [Illustration: _"That portion of the wall has gone back in time exactly three seconds," he announced._] [Sidenote: In the underground caverns of the Selom, Dr. Bird once again locks wills with the subversive genius, Saranoff.] So that's the "Port of Missing Planes," mused Dick Purdy as he looked down over the side of his cockpit. "It looks wild and desolate all right, but at that I can't fancy a bus cracking up here and not being found pronto. Gosh, Wilder cracked in the wildest part of Arizona and he was found in a week." The mail plane droned monotonously on through perfect flying weather. Purdy continued to study the ground. Recently transferred from a western run, he was getting his first glimpse of that section of ill repute. Below him stretched a desolate, almost uninhabited stretch of country. By looking back he could see Bellefonte a few miles behind him, but Philipsburg, the next spot marked on his map, was not yet visible. Twelve hundred feet below him ran a silver line of water which his map told him was Little Moshannon Run. As he watched he suddenly realized that the ground was not slipping by under him as rapidly as it should. He glanced at his air-speed meter. "What the dickens?" he cried in surprise. For an hour his speed had remained almost constant at one hundred miles an hour. Without apparent cause it had dropped to forty, less than flying speed. He realized that he was falling. A glance at his altimeter confirmed the impression. The needle had dropped four hundred feet and was slowly moving toward sea-level. * * * * * With an exclamation of alarm, Purdy advanced his throttle until the three motors of his plane roared at full capacity. For a moment his air-speed picked up, but the gain was only momentary. As he watched, the meter dropped to zero, although the propellers still whirled at top speed. His altimeter showed that he was gradually losing elevation. He stood up and looked over the side of his plane. The ground below him was stationary as far as forward progress was concerned, but it was slowly rising to meet him. He fumbled at the release ring of his parachute but another glance at the ground made him hesitate. It was not more than three hundred feet below him. "I must be dreaming!" he cried. The ground was no longer stationary. For some unexplained reason he was going backward. The motors were still roaring at top speed. Purdy dropped back into his seat in the cockpit. With his ailerons set for maximum lift he coaxed every possible revolution from his laboring motors. For several minutes he strained at the controls before he cast a quick glance over the side. His backward speed had accelerated and the ground was less than fifty feet below him. It was too close for a parachute jump. "As slow as I'm falling, I won't crack much, anyway," he consoled himself. He reached for his switch and the roar of the motors died away in silence. The plane gave a sickening lurch backwards and down for an instant. Purdy again leaned over the side. He was no longer going either forward or back but was sinking slowly down. He looked at the ground directly under him. A cry of horror came from his lips. He sat back mopping his brow. Another glance over the side brought an expression of terror to his white face and he reached for the heavy automatic pistol which hung by the side of the control seat. * * * * * "He cleared Bellefonte at nine in the morning, Dr. Bird" said Inspector Dolan of the Post Office Department, "and headed toward Philipsburg. He never arrived. By ten we were alarmed and by eleven we had planes out searching for him. They reported nothing. He must have come to grief within a rather restricted area, so we sent search parties out at once. That was two weeks ago yesterday. No trace of either him or his plane has been found." "The flying conditions were good?" "Perfect. Also, Purdy is above suspicion. He has been flying the mail on the western runs for three years. This is his first accident. He was carrying nothing of unusual value." "Are there any local conditions unfavorable to flying?" "None at all. It is much uninhabited country, but there is no reason why it shouldn't be safe country to fly over." "There are some damnably unfavorable local conditions, Doctor, although I can't tell you what they are," broke in Operative Carnes of the United States Secret Service. "Dick Purdy was rather more than an acquaintance of mine. After he was lost I looked into the record of that section a little. It is known among aviators as 'The Port of Missing Planes.'" "How did it get a name like that?" "From the number of unexplained and unexplainable accidents that happen right there. Dugan of the air mail, was lost there last May. They found the mailbags where he had dropped them before he crashed, but they never found a trace of him or his plane." "They didn't?" "Not a trace. The same thing happened when Mayfield cracked in August. He made a jump and broke his neck in landing. He was found all right, but his ship wasn't. Trierson of the army, dropped there and _his_ plane was never found. Neither was he. He was seen to go down in a forced landing. He was flying last in a formation. As soon as he went down the other ships turned back and circled over the ground where he should have fallen. They saw nothing. Search parties found no trace of either him or his ship. Those are the best known cases, but I have heard rumors of several private ships which have gone down in that district and have never been seen or heard of since." * * * * * Dr. Bird sat forward with a glitter in his piercing black eyes. Carnes gave a grunt of satisfaction. He knew the meaning of that glitter. The Doctor's interest had been fully aroused. "Inspector Dolan," said Dr. Bird sharply, "why didn't you tell me those things?" "Well, Doctor, we don't like to talk about mail wrecks any more than we have to. Of course, the loss of so many planes in one area is merely a coincidence. Probably the wrecked planes were stolen as souvenirs. Such things happen, you know." "Fiddlesticks!" said Dr. Bird sharply. He raised one long slender hand with beautifully modeled tapering fingers and threw back his unruly mop of black hair. His square, almost rugged jaw, protruded and the glitter in his eyes grew in intensity. "No souvenir hunting vandals could cart away whole planes without leaving a trace. In that case, what became of the bodies? No, Inspector, this has gone beyond the range of coincidence. There is some mystery here and it needs looking into. Fortunately, my work at the Bureau of Standards is in such shape that I can safely leave it. I intend to devote my entire time to clearing this matter up. The ramifications may run deeper than either you or I suspect. Please have all of your records dealing with plane disappearances or wrecks in that locality sent to my office at once." The Post Office inspector stiffened. "Of course, Dr. Bird," he said formally, "we are very glad to hear any suggestion that you may care to offer. When it comes, however, to a matter of surrendering control of a Post Office matter to the Department of Commerce or to the Treasury Department, I doubt the propriety. Our records are confidential ones and are not open to everyone who is curious. I will inform the proper authorities of your desire to help, but I doubt seriously if they will avail themselves of your offer." * * * * * Dr. Bird's black eyes shot fire. "Idiot!" he said. "If you're a specimen of the Post Office Department, I'll have the entire case taken out of your hands. Do you mean to cooperate with me or not?" "I fail to see what interest the Bureau of Standards can have in the affair." "The Bureau isn't mixed up in it; Dr. Bird is. If necessary, I will go direct to the President. Oh, thunder! What's the use of talking to you? Who's your chief?" "Chief Inspector Watkins is in charge of all investigations." "Carnes, get him on the telephone. Tell him we are taking charge of the investigation. If he balks, have Bolton go over his head. Then get the chief of the Air Corps on the wire and arrange for an army plane to-morrow. There is something more than a mail robbery back of this or I'm badly fooled." "Do you suspect--" "I suspect nothing and no one, Carnes--yet! I'll get a few instruments together to take with us to-morrow. We'll fly over that section until something happens if it takes us until this time next year." * * * * * A three-seated scout plane rose from Langley Field at eight the next morning. Captain Garland was at the controls. In the rear cockpit sat Dr. Bird and Carnes. Inside his flying helmet, the doctor wore a pair of headphones which were connected to a box on the floor before him. Carnes carried no apparatus but his hand rested carelessly on the grip of a machine-gun. The plane cleared Bellefonte at nine-thirty and bore east toward Philipsburg. Captain Garland kept his eyes on his instrument board and on a map. Less than six hundred feet above the ground, he was following the air-mail route as exactly as possible. Overhead a mail plane winged its way east, three thousand feet above them. Fifteen minutes brought them to Philipsburg. Captain Garland shot his plane upward a few hundred feet. "Turn back, Captain," said Dr. Bird into the speaking tube. "Retrace your course a quarter of a mile farther north. At Bellefonte, turn back and go over the same ground another quarter of a mile north. Keep flying back and forth, working your way north, until I tell you to stop." The plane swung around and headed back toward Bellefonte. "Of course, we can't tell exactly what route he followed," said the doctor to Carnes, "but he was new on this run and it is safe to assume that he didn't stray far. We'll quarter the whole area before we stop." Carnes watched the ground below them carefully. There was nothing about it to distinguish it from any other wooded mountainous country and his interest waned. He glanced aloft. The mail plane had disappeared in the distance and the sky was clear of aircraft. He turned again to the ground. It looked closer than it had before. He turned and looked at the duplicate altimeter. The plane had lost nearly a hundred feet elevation. * * * * * "There's something wrong about this plane, Doctor," came Captain Garland's voice through the speaking tube. "It doesn't behave like it should." "I guess we've found what we were looking for, Carnes," said Dr. Bird grimly. "What seems to be the matter, Captain?" "Blessed if I know," was the answer. "It feels like a drag of some sort, like an automobile going through heavy sand. We're slowing down, though I am giving her all the gun I've got!" "Cut your motor!" said the doctor shortly. He bent over the duplicate instrument board as the roar of the motor died away. Carnes rose and looked over the side. "Look, Doctor!" he cried in a strained voice. Directly below them yawned a hole sixty feet in diameter and extending down into the bowels of the earth. The plane hovered over the hole for a moment and then slowly descended into it. "What is it?" cried the detective. "It's the secret of the Port of Missing Planes," replied Dr. Bird. "Throw off your parachute. Keep your gun and light handy but don't fire unless I do first. The same holds good for you, Captain." The plane sunk until it was fifty feet below the level of the ground. Carnes looked up. Gradually the circle of sky became blurred and hazy as though the air were heavy with dust. The rasp of Dr. Bird's flashlight key aroused him and he hastily wound his own. The haze above them grew thicker. Suddenly the light died and then came darkness, a darkness so thick and absolute that it bore down on them like a weight. Dr. Bird's light stabbed a path through it. * * * * * They were in a tunnel or tube reaching into the ground. The sides were smooth and polished, as though water worn. The plane sank deeper and deeper into the earth. Suddenly Dr. Bird's light went out. "What's the matter, Doctor?" asked Carnes, "did your light fail?" "No," came a strained voice. "I turned it out." "Why?" "I don't know. Light yours." Carnes reached into his pocket. Dr. Bird could hear his breath come in panting sobs as though he were exerting his whole strength. "I can't do it, Doctor," he gasped. "I want to, but some power greater than my will prevents me." "Are you affected, Captain?" asked the Doctor. "I--can't--move," came in muffled accents from the front cockpit. "Some power beyond my knowledge has us in its grasp," said the doctor. "All we can do is sit tight and see what happens. We are no longer falling at any rate." From the forward cockpit came a rustling sound. There was a slight jar in the ship, and it gave as though a weight had been applied to one side. "What are you doing, Garland?" asked the doctor sharply. There was no reply. Again came the rustling sound. The ship gave a sudden lurch as though a weight had left the side. Carnes suddenly spoke. "Good-by, Doctor," he said. "I'm going over the side." "I have been fighting it but I'm going myself in a minute," replied the doctor grimly. "Something is pulling me over. It's the same power that keeps me from turning on my light." "It's perfectly safe to go over," said Carnes suddenly. "The plane is resting on a solid base." "I have the same feeling. Catch hold of my belt and let's go." * * * * * They climbed over the side of the plane and dropped to the ground. Their descent made absolutely no sound. Dr. Bird stopped and felt the floor. "Crepe rubber, or something of the sort," he murmured. "At any rate, it's noise and vibration proof." "Now what?" asked Carnes. "This way," replied the doctor confidently. "I'm beginning to get the hang of understanding this. The way is perfectly level and open before us. Keep your hand on my shoulder and step right out." "How do you know where we're going?" "I don't, but something tells me that the road is level and open. It is the same thing that brought us over the side. I can't explain it but it is some sort of a telepathic control exerted by an intelligence. Whether the sending mind is reinforced by instruments I don't know, but I rather fancy not." "Where is Garland?" "He went off in another direction. I could feel the power that guided him although it was not directed at us. Something tells me that he is safe for the present." For half a mile they made their way through the darkness before they stopped. This time Carnes could plainly understand the command which came to both of them. "There is a table before us," said Dr. Bird. "Lay your flashlight and pistol on it." Carnes struggled against the order but the power guiding him was stronger than his will. He strove to turn on his light. When he could not, he tried to cock his pistol. With a sigh, he laid his gun and light on the table before him. Without words, the two men walked forward a few feet and sat confidently down on a bench that something told them was there. * * * * * For a moment they sat quietly. A cry, choked in the middle, came from the detective's throat. Cold clammy hands touched his face. He strove again to cry out, but his voice was paralyzed. The hands went methodically over his body, evidently searching for weapons. Mustering up his will, Carnes made a grab for one of them. His captor apparently had no objection to the detective's action for Carnes seized the hand without effort. But he almost dropped it. The hand was as large as a ham. He reached for the other hand but could not locate it. A movement on the part of his captor brought it to him and he made the startling discovery that the palms were directed outward. The hand had only four fingers, which were armed with long curved claws instead of nails. Carnes ran his hand up the palm to search for a thumb but found none. He found, however, that, while the hands were naked, the wrists were covered with short thick fur. "Doctor!" he cried, "there's--" Again came the overpowering will and his speech died away in silence. He sat dumb and motionless while his captor moved over to Dr. Bird. A second animal came forward and felt the detective over. He was not allowed to move this time, nor was he while a third and fourth animal went carefully over him. The four drew back some distance. "Doctor," whispered Carnes as the influence grew fainter. "Shh!" was the answer, and as the doctor's demand for silence was reinforced by another wave of the paralyzing power, Carnes had no choice. As he sat there silent, the power which held him again seemed to grow less. He found that he could move his arms slightly. He edged forward to get his gun and light. Before he reached them, a beam of light split the darkness. Dr. Bird stood, electric torch in hand, staring before him. At a distance of a few feet stood a group of half a dozen animals about the height of a man as they stood erect on their short hind legs. They were covered with heavy brown fur. Their lower limbs were thin and light, but their shoulders and forelegs were heavy and powerful. Their forepaws, which had the palms facing outward, were armed with the long wicked claws he had felt. No visible ears protruded from the round skulls. Their heads appeared to rest between their shoulders, so short were their necks. Their muzzles were long and obtusely pointed. Through grinning jaws could be seen powerful white teeth. "Talpidae!" cried Dr. Bird. "Carnes, they are a race of giant intellectual moles!" * * * * * Despite the fact that they had no visible eyes, the creatures were strongly affected by the light. They dropped on all fours and turned their backs to the scientist and the detective. Two of them scurried away down a long tunnel which opened from the room in which they stood. Dr. Bird turned his light up and swept the room. It was roughly circular, a hundred feet in diameter, with a roof ten feet high. Dozens of tunnels led off in every direction. "Your light, Carnes, quick!" cried the doctor in a strained voice. Carnes reached toward the table for his light. Before he could reach it he was frozen into immobility. From the corner of his eye he could watch the doctor. Dr. Bird was struggling to bring the light back on the moles which stood before them. Great beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Inch by inch he moved the light closer to his goal, but Carnes could see that his thumb was stealing up toward the switch button. His breath came in sobs. Suddenly the light went out. For some time the two men sat motionless on the bench unable to speak or move. One of the moles stepped before them and gave a mental command. The two rose to their feet. For a mile or more they followed their guide, then, at a silent command, they turned to the right for a few steps and stopped. In another moment, the numbing influence had departed. "Are you all right, Carnes?" "Yes, right as can be. Doctor, what were those things? Where are we? What's it all about?" "We'll find out in time, I guess," replied the doctor with a chuckle. "Carnes, isn't this the darnedest thing we've ever been through? Captured half a mile underground by a race of giant talpidae before whose mental orders we are as helpless as children. Did you understand any of their talk?" "Talk? I didn't hear any." "Well, mental conversation then. They made no sound." "No. All I understood was the orders I obeyed." * * * * * "I got a great deal of it," the doctor said. "We are evidently in or near a sort of central community of these fellows. They spoke; thought is a better word; they thought of doing away with us but decided to wait until they consulted someone with more authority. You see, we are not airplane pilots. Captain Garland was taken at once to the place where they have other aviators imprisoned." "What do they want of pilots underground?" "I couldn't quite get that. There was another thought that I am not sure that I interpreted correctly. If I did, there is some man of the upper world down here in a position of considerable authority among them. He has some use for pilots, but what use, I don't know. We are to be held until he is consulted." "Who could it be?" "I can only think of one man. Carnes, and I hope I'm wrong. I don't have to name him." "You mean--?" "Ivan Saranoff. We haven't heard of him or had any activity from him for the last eight months. We know that he had a subterranean borer with which he has penetrated deep into the earth. Isn't it possible that he has, at some time in his explorations, come into contact with these fellows and made friends with them?" "It's possible, Doctor, but I hoped we had killed him when we destroyed his borer." "So did I, but he seems to bear a charmed life. Several times we have thought him dead, only to have him show up with some new form of devil's work. It is too much to hope that we have succeeded in doing away with him. Did you notice one thing? Those fellows were helpless while I held the light on them. The one which was holding us captive got so interested in the discussion about our fate that he momentarily forgot us. That was when I got my light. Until I turned the light away from them, we were free men." * * * * * "That's right," answered the secret service man. "Remember that. The next time we get a light on a bunch of them, hold them in the beam until we can make terms." "If we ever get hold of a light again." "I have a light they didn't get, probably because I didn't think of it while they were around. It is one of those fountain pen battery affairs and they probably took it for a pen. I won't turn it on now, partly to save it and partly not to let them know we have it. Let's see what our prison is like." They felt their way around the room. It proved to be eight paces by ten in size. Like the tunnels it was floored with crepe rubber or some similar substance which gave out no sound of footsteps, yet was firm underfoot. The room was furnished with two beds, a table and two chairs. There was no sign of a door. "That's that," exclaimed the doctor when they had finished their exploration. "I'm hungry. I wonder when we eat. Hello, here comes one of the fellows now." Carnes made no reply. As the doctor's speech ended, a wave of mental power enveloped the room. One of the moles entered, moved over to the table for an instant and then left the room. An earthly odor of vegetables pervaded the room. "My question is answered," said the doctor. "We eat now." He moved to the table. On it had been placed dishes containing three different types of roots. Two of them proved to be palatable, but the third was woody and bitter. The prisoners made a hearty meal from the two they relished. For an hour they sat waiting. "Here they come again!" exclaimed the doctor. "We are going before the person I spoke of. Can't you get their thoughts?" "No, I can't, Doctor. I can understand when I get a command, but aside from those times everything is a blank to me." "My mental wave receiver, if that's what it is, must be attuned to a different frequency than yours, for I can hear them talking to one another. I guess I should say that I can feel them thinking to one another. At any rate, they want us to follow. Come along, the road will be open and level." * * * * * The doctor stepped out confidently with Carnes at his heels. For half a mile they went forward. Presently they halted. "We are in a big chamber here, Carnes," whispered the doctor, "and there is someone before us. We'll have some light in a minute." His prophecy was soon fulfilled. A vague glimmer of light began to fill the cavern in which they stood. As it grew stronger they could see a raised dais before them on which were seated three figures. Two of them were the giant moles. Each of the moles wore a helmet which covered his head completely, with no sign of lenses or other means of vision. It was the central figure, however, which held the attention of the prisoners. Seated on a chair and regarding, them with an expression of sardonic amusement was a man. Above a high forehead rose a thin scrub of white hair. Keen brown eyes peered at them from under almost hairless brows. The nose was high bridged and aquiline and went well with his prominent cheekbones. His mouth was a mere gash below his nose, framed by thin bloodless lips. The lips were curled in a sneer, revealing yellow teeth. The whole expression of the face was one of revolting cruelty. "So," said the figure slowly, "fate has been kind to me. My friends, Dr. Bird and Operative Carnes have chosen to pay me a long visit. I am greatly flattered." The thin metallic voice with its noticeable accent struck a familiar chord. "Saranoff!" gasped Carnes. "Yes, Mr. Carnes, Saranoff. Professor Ivan Saranoff, of the faculty of St. Petersburg once. Now merely Saranoff, the scourge of the bourgeois." * * * * * "I hoped we had killed you," murmured Carnes. "It was no fault of Dr. Bird's that he failed," replied the Russian with an excess of malevolence in his voice. "His method was a correct one. Merely the fortuitous fact that we had just pierced one of the tunnels of the Selom, and I was away from my borer exploring it, saved me. You did me a good turn, Doctor, without meaning to. You destroyed an instrument on which I had relied. In doing so, you unwittingly delivered into my hands a power greater than any I had dreamed of--the Selom." "What can a mental cripple like you do with blind allies like them?" asked Dr. Bird with a contemptuous laugh. The Russian half rose from his seat in rage. For a moment his hand toyed with a switch before him. The sardonic sneer came back into his face and he dropped back into his seat. "You nearly provoked me to destroy you, Doctor," he said, "but cold calculation saved you. Since you will never return to the upper world, save when and as I decree, I have no objection to telling you. The Selom are not blind. Their eyes are under the skin as is the case with many of the talpidae, but for all that they can see very well. Their eyes function on a shorter wave than ours, a wave so short that it readily penetrates through miles of earth and rock. This cavern is now flooded with it. Visible light, the light by which we see, is limited to their eyes, hence the helmets which you see. They can see through those helmets as well as you or I can see through air." "What do you intend to do with us?" "Ah, Doctor, there you hit me in a tender spot. I have a sore temptation to close this switch on which my hand rests. Were I to do so, both you and Mr. Carnes would vanish forevermore. I have, however, conceived a very real affection for you two. Your brains, Doctor, working in my behalf instead of against me would render me well-nigh omnipotent. Mr. Carnes has a certain low cunning which I can also use to advantage. Both of you will join me." * * * * * "You might as well close your switch and save your breath, Saranoff, for we will do nothing of the sort," replied the doctor sharply. "Ah, but you will. So will Mr. Carnes. I had no hopes that you would join me willingly. In fact, I am pleased that you do not. I could never trust you. All the same, you will join my forces as have the others whom I have brought into the hands of the Selom. I have ways of accomplishing my desires. It pleases my fancy, Doctor, to use your brains in aiding me in my scientific developments. You will enjoy working with the scientists of the Selom. Among them you will find brains which excel any to be found on the surface of the earth, since we two are below. Already I have learned much from them. You, Mr. Carnes shall be taught to pilot an airplane. When my cohorts go forth from the realms of the Selom to establish the rule of Russia, you will be piloting one of the planes. Your first task will be to learn to fly." "I refuse to do anything of the sort!" said Carnes. "I will not be ready to have your flying lessons started until to-morrow," replied the Russian, "and you will have until then to reconsider your rash decision. It will be much easier for you if you obey my orders. If you still refuse to-morrow, you will pay a visit to the laboratory of the Selom. When you return your lessons will be started. You will now be taken to your cell. I have use for Dr. Bird this afternoon." "I won't leave Dr. Bird and that's flat!" exclaimed Carnes. Dr. Bird interrupted him. "Go ahead, Carnesy, old dear," he said lightly. "You might just as well toddle along under your own power as to be dragged along. You have a day for reflection, in any event. I daresay I'll see you again before they do anything to you." Carnes glanced keenly at the doctor's face. What he saw evidently reassured him for he turned without a word and walked away. The light grew gradually dimmer until darkness again reigned in the cavern. "Come, Doctor," said Saranoff's voice. "We have work to do." * * * * * Carnes sat alone in his cell for hours. The darkness and loneliness wore on him until he felt that his nerves would crack. Not a sound came to him. He threw himself on one of the beds and plugged his ears with his finger tips in an attempt to keep the silence out. Then a cheerful voice sounded in the cell and a friendly hand fell on his shoulder. "Well, Carnesy, old dear," said Dr. Bird, "have you been lonesome?" "Dr. Bird!" gasped Carnes in tones of relief. "Are you all right?" "Right as can be. I learned a lot this afternoon. For one thing, you're going to start flying lessons to-morrow and you're going to do your best to become an expert pilot in a short time. It is the only thing to do." "And fly a plane for Saranoff?" "I hope not. The only way to avoid that very thing is to keep your mentality unimpaired so that I can call on you for help when I need it. If the Selom operate on you, you will be useless to me." "Operate? What do you mean?" "I'll tell you. The Selom are a very old and highly civilized people. For ages they have possessed scientific knowledge for which the upper-world scientists are now blindly groping. Among other things, they have a perfect knowledge of the workings of the brain. If they operate they will remove from your brain every speck of memory you have of past events, leaving only those things that will be useful to Saranoff. You will be his complete slave. In that condition you will be taught to fly a plane. When the time comes, you will fly one with no remembrance of anything which happened prior to the operation and with no will but his. It will be easier to teach you flying in your natural state if you are willing. You will be willing." "If you wish it, Doctor." * * * * * "I do wish it, most decidedly," Dr. Bird went on. "Obey every order they give you. You will find that the Selom are an enlightened and civilized race. They are very kindly and would willingly harm no one." "Then why have they taken up with Saranoff?" "He is the first man with whom they have come into contact. He has told them a horrible tale of conditions on the surface, and they have swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. They believe that he is going to establish a new order of happiness and plenty for all with the aid of his gang of cutthroats from Russia. If they had the slightest inkling of the true state of affairs, they would turn on him in an instant." "Why don't you tell them?" "Remember that I am a stranger here and he has poisoned their minds against me. Although the mind of an ordinary men is an open book to them, they cannot read Saranoff's secret thoughts against his will. They can't read mine either, for that matter. I am working in the laboratory and I will pick up a great deal. When the time comes, we will strike for our liberty and for the safety of the world." "Did you learn Saranoff's plans?" "Yes. He is gathering planes and pilots in the underground caverns of the Selom. When he gets enough, he will bring men from Russia to man the planes. What could the United States, or the world for that matter, do against a fleet of hundreds, possibly thousands, of the best planes equipped with deadly weapons unknown to their science? That menace confronts us and we must remove it. To give you some idea of the power of the Selom, this afternoon Saranoff and I with one assistant opened a cavern in the solid rock three miles long and a mile wide and over six hundred feet in height." "Three men! How on earth did you do it?" "Two men and one mole. We did it with a ray, the secret of which only the Selom and Saranoff know." * * * * * "You have told me a disintegrating ray is an impossibility," objected Carnes. "It is. This was not a disintegrating ray. Carnes, either I am crazy or the Selom have solved the secret of time, the fourth dimension. I haven't been able to grasp the whole thing yet. What I think we did was to remove that rock a distance, perhaps only a millionth of a second, forward or back into time. At any rate it ceased to exist, yet they can bring it back unchanged at will. That was the way they captured our plane. They sent out a magnetic ray of such power that it stopped our plane in midair and brought it to the ground. They removed the rock from beneath us and lowered us into the hole. By reversing the process they restored things to their original condition. All of these tunnels and rooms were made in that way." "I still don't understand how they did it." "I don't either, but I hope to in time. Now let's go to bed. It's late. To-morrow you will start your lessons with Captain Garland as an instructor. He won't know you for he was operated on this afternoon. Do your best to become a pilot. When I get ready, I want you with me in full possession of all your faculties." The next morning the two prisoners separated and went to their duties. In the cavern which Dr. Bird had described, Captain Garland was waiting beside the plane he had flown. He did not know Carnes, but he still knew how to fly. Declining to enter into any conversation, he started expounding the theory of flying to the detective. Carnes remembered Dr. Bird's words and applied himself wholeheartedly. For four hours they worked together. At the end of that time the light faded in the cavern and Carnes was led by an unseen guide back to his cell. He threw himself on a bed and awaited Dr. Bird's return. "I have learned a few more things about the Selom," said the doctor when he entered the cell several hours later. "We are in their largest community. They have cities or warrens scattered all over the world. Each city has its own ruler, but the whole race are ruled by an overlord or king who habitually lives here. He is away visiting a community under northern Africa just now, but he will be back in a few days. The Selom are sincere in their desire to help the upper world. They feel great pity for mankind in view of the conditions Saranoff has described to them. When the king returns. I plan to make a direct appeal to him. In the meantime, go on with your flying lessons. How did you make out to-day?" * * * * * The second day was a repetition of the first, as were the third and fourth. A week passed before Dr. Bird entered the cell in evident excitement. "Has Hanac brought our evening food yet?" he asked anxiously. "No, Doctor." "Good. Take this light. As soon as he enters throw the light full on him and hold him until I work on him. We've got to make our escape." "Why?" "The king is due back to-morrow. Saranoff is frightened at the good impression I have made on the Selom. He is supreme in the monarch's absence, so he plans to operate on both of us before he returns. He is afraid to allow me to see the king with an unimpaired intellect and memory. Shh! Here comes Hanac." The door to their cell opened noiselessly. When the mole who brought their food was well inside, Carnes turned on the tiny flashlight. The mole dropped on all fours and tried to turn its back. Dr. Bird sprang forward. For an instant his slim muscular fingers worked on the mole's neck and shoulders. Silently the animal sank in a heap. "Come on, Carnes," cried the doctor. "Turn off the light." "Did you kill him, Doctor?" asked Carnes as he raced down a pitch dark corridor at the scientist's heels. "No, I merely paralyzed him temporarily. He'll be all right in a day or so. Turn here." * * * * * For ten minutes they ran down corridor after corridor. Carnes soon lost all track of direction, but Dr. Bird never hesitated. Presently he slowed down to a walk. "It's a good thing I have a good memory," he said. "I planned that course out from a map, and I had to memorize every turn and distance of it. We are now behind your flying hall and away from any of the regular dwellings of the Selom. Straight west about four miles is one of the time-ray machines with a guard over it. Aside from them, there isn't a mole between here and Detroit." "What are we going to do, Doctor?" "Keep out of their way and avoid recapture if we can. If we merely wanted to escape we would try to get possession of that time-ray machine and open a road to the surface. However, I am not content with that. I want to stay underground until Astok, their king, returns. When he comes, we will surrender to him." "Suppose they operate without giving us a chance to present our side of the affair." "If they do, Saranoff wins; but they won't. The more I have seen of the Selom, the more impressed I am by their sense of justice. They'll give us a hearing, all right, and a fair one." For two hours the doctor led the way. At the end of that time he stopped. "We've gone as far as we need to," he said. "They'll undoubtedly send out searching parties, but if we can avoid thinking they won't be able to find us. The tunnels are a perfect labyrinth. If you care to sleep, go to it. We'll be safer sleeping than awake, for we won't be sending out thoughts so fast." * * * * * Dr. Bird threw himself down on the rubber floor of the tunnel and was soon asleep. Carnes tried to follow his example, but sleep would not come to him. Frantically he tried to think of nothing. By an effort he would sit for a few minutes with his mind a conscious blank, but thoughts would throng in in spite of him. Time and again he brought himself up with a jerk and forced his mind to become a blank. The hours passed slowly. Carnes grew cramped from long immobility and rose. A sudden thought intruded itself into his mind. "I might as well throw that light away," he murmured to himself. "It will be no good now. The Selom won't hurt us if they do catch us." He reached in his pocket for the light. He was about to hurl it from him when a moment of sanity came to him. He stared about. The impulse to hurl the light away came stronger. He strove in vain to turn it on. "Doctor!" he cried suddenly. "Wake up! They're after us!" With a bound, Dr. Bird was on his feet. "The light!" he cried. "Where is it?" "In--my--hand," murmured Carnes with stiffening lips. Dr. Bird seized the light. A beam stabbed the darkness. Less than fifty feet from them stood two moles. As the light flashed on Carnes regained control of himself. "Take the light, Carnes," snapped the doctor. "I've got to put these fellows to sleep." Slowly he advanced toward the motionless Selom. He had almost reached them when the light flickered out. He turned and raced at full speed toward the detective. Carnes was standing rigid and motionless. Dr. Bird took the light from his hand. Despite the almost overpowering drag on his mind, he managed to turn it on. He swung the beam around in a circle. Besides the two Selom he had seen before, the light revealed a pair standing behind him. As the light struck them, the numbing influence vanished for an instant from the doctor's mind. He moved a step forward and then halted. The moles behind him were hurling waves of mental power at him. Again the light cleared him for an instant, but he got a brief glance of other moles hurrying from every direction. "The jig's up, I guess," he muttered. He strove to free himself by the use of his light, but the tiny battery had done its duty, and gradually the light grew dimmer. The influence grew too strong for him. With a sigh he shut off the feeble ray and hurled the light from him. The moles closed in. "All right," said the doctor audibly. "We'll go peaceably." * * * * * As he spoke the paralyzing power was withdrawn. With Carnes at his side he retraced the route he had taken from the cell. Before they reached it they turned off. Dr. Bird realized that they were treading the familiar path to the laboratory. Outside the laboratory the Selom halted. A wave of mental power enveloped the prisoners and they remained silent and motionless while their escort withdrew. From the laboratory came three of the Selom scientists. As the laboratory door opened they could see that it was bathed in a flood of light, and that the moles wore helmets covering their heads. They moved inside. Clad in a white gown stood Saranoff. "So, my friends, you would run away and leave me, would you?" gloated the Russian. "And just when I had planned a very beneficial operation for you! I will remove permanently from your brains all the delusions which now encumber them, and for your own puny wills I will substitute my own." The power which had held the prisoners silent disappeared. "You have caught us, Saranoff," said Dr. Bird. "I know the power you wield and that you are making no idle boast. I appeal, however, to these others, my friends. The operation you are planning to perform is not a routine one. It is one that should have the sanction of the king before it is done. I appeal from you to him." "He is far away," laughed Saranoff. "When he returns, your plea will be presented to him, but it will be too late to do you any good. You are right, Doctor--I do not plan a mere routine operation. Not only will I remove your memory, but I'm going to use the time-ray on you and banish forever into the unknown a portion of your brains. Without knowing which adjustment I make of the infinite number possible, no one, not even the king, can ever recall it." * * * * * Dr. Bird turned to the Selom scientists and hurled his thoughts at them. "This man intends to commit a horrible crime," he thought, "and one which he has no authority to perform. To you I appeal for justice. Bid him wait until Astok returns, and let him be the judge as to whether it shall be done. Jumor, you know me well. You know that my brain is the equal of one of the Selom. Even you cannot read my thoughts against my will. Are you willing to see that brain destroyed? Astok will be here soon and nothing will be lost by a short delay." "He thinks truly," was the answering thought of Jumor. "It would be better to wait." "We will not wait," crashed Saranoff's thought into their consciousness. "He killed Hanac when he escaped, and his punishment shall be as I have decreed. Did not the king give me full power while he was away?" "It is true that he ordered us to obey this man in all things dealing with upper-world men," thought Jumor. "If it is true that he killed Hanac his punishment is doubtless just." "I did not kill Hanac," returned the doctor. "He is paralyzed and will be all right in a few hours, if he isn't already. I demand that you wait until Astok returns. When an appeal is made to him, no other may judge. So says the Selom law." "That is true," replied Jumor. "We will wait until the king returns." "We will _not_ wait," came Saranoff's thought. "The king delegated to me his powers during his absence, as far as all the world, save the Selom, were concerned. Were it one of the Selom appealing to the king, I would be powerless before the appeal. These are not bound by Selom law and are not entitled to its benefits. We will operate at once." "Then you will operate alone," retorted Jumor. "I will not assist you." "I need none of your help," thought Saranoff. "Asmo and Camol, will you help me? If you refuse I will report to Astok that you have disobeyed and defied his chosen delegate." "We had better assist him, Jumor," thought Asmo. "Astok did delegate his authority. I am not of the nobility and I dare not refuse to help." "Suit yourself, Asmo," replied Jumor. "I refuse to assist, and will appeal to Astok against him." * * * * * The third mole hesitated. "You are higher in rank than we are, Jumor," he thought at length, "and like Asmo, I dare not resist him. I heard the king give this upper-earth man his authority while he was away. I will assist." "And I will leave the room," retorted Jumor. He moved to a door and threw it open. At the threshold he paused and sent back a final thought. "I will appeal to Astok, our ruler. I will send now a message to him to hurry home that he may judge between us." The door closed behind him. Saranoff chuckled audibly. "Good-by, Carnes," said Dr. Bird sadly. "This devil can do all he says he can, and more. I'm sorry I brought you and Garland into this mess." "Oh, well, it can't be helped, Doctor," replied the detective with an attempt at cheerfulness. "What is he going to do to us?" "He'll have to use instruments for what he plans," said the doctor. "Ordinarily a routine mental operation is performed without the use of extraneous power. The mind of the operator is electrically connected to the mind of the victim. By means of thought waves the operator banishes from the mind of the subject such portions of his memory and mentality as he chooses. He may then substitute other things in place of what he has removed. Any of the Selom could operate on you, but I doubt whether Jumor himself could do it successfully on me without aid from power. Here come the instruments." * * * * * Asmo and Camol took from a cabinet on the side of the wall what looked like a cloth helmet. Attached to it were a dozen wires which they connected to a box on a table. The box was made of crystal and inside it could be seen a number of vacuum tubes and coils of various designs. Other leads ran to a similar helmet which Asmo placed on Saranoff's head. A heavy cable ran to a switch on the wall. As Camol closed the switch the tubes in the box began to glow with weird lights. Violet, green and orange streamers of light came from them to dance in wild patterns on the laboratory walls. For five minutes Saranoff made adjustments to dials on the front of the crystal box. The colored lights died away and a gentle golden glow came from the apparatus. He threw off the helmet. Camol left the laboratory and returned with a large coil on the top of which was mounted a parabolic reflector. A device like a clock on the front of the coil was constantly marking the passage of time. The dial had two indicators which were together. Saranoff chuckled. "You may not have seen this device work, Doctor," he said. "In order to let you know what you are facing, I will demonstrate." He turned the reflector so that it bore on the wall. He adjusted the moving dial so that the two indicators were no longer together. As he closed a switch, the wall before the reflector vanished. Saranoff turned off the power. "That portion of the wall has gone back in time exactly three seconds," he announced. "As far as the present is concerned, it has ceased to exist. It is following us through time three seconds behind us, but in all eternity it will never catch up unless I aid it. Since the exact time is known, it can be restored. If I were to alter this adjustment ever so little, it could never be recalled. Watch me." * * * * * He again closed the switch, this time in a reverse direction. The wall instantly filled up as it had been before. He moved the time dial so that the two indicators coincided. "After I have sent a portion of your physical brain into the past or the future as the fancy strikes me, I will change the adjustment of that dial. Since there are an infinite number of adjustments to which I might have set it, the chances that any one could ever duplicate my setting and restore it are the complement of infinity, or zero," he said. "I am now ready to remove your memory. If the impossible should happen and your physical brain be restored it would be useless. Asmo, adjust the helmet. I will operate on my friend, the Doctor, first." Carnes strove to rush to Dr. Bird's assistance, but he was helpless before the force of Camol's will. Asmo adjusted the helmet to Dr. Bird's head and buckled it firmly in place. With an evil grin, Saranoff donned the other helmet. "Good-by, Dr. Bird," he said mockingly. "You will continue to see me, but you won't know me, except as your master." * * * * * His hand reached for the switch. It had almost closed on it when Saranoff stopped convulsively. He sat motionless while the laboratory door opened and Jumor entered the room. He was followed by another mole. The newcomer was fully six inches taller than the others. His head was hidden by a helmet, but around his arms he wore strings of sparkling jewels. "Ivan Saranoff, what means this?" his powerful thoughts dominated the room. "I was merely engaged in rectifying some of the mental errors of this man of the upper earth," explained the Russian eagerly. "It is merely a routine operation such as you gave me authority to perform." "An operation which uses power is not routine," replied the king. "I am told that this upper-earth man has a brain equal to those of my most advanced scientist. I am also told that you planned to do more than rectify his mental errors." "You have been falsely informed. I was merely about to adjust his memory." "Then what means this?" The king pointed to the time-ray machine. "That was brought here in order that it could be used when you returned," thought the Russian eagerly. "This upper-earth man killed Hanac when he brought him food." The door opened and Hanac entered. "Oh, Astok," objected Hanac's thoughts, "when these upper-earth men had me at their mercy, with a light, they spared me. They paralyzed me for a time so that they might escape but they did it in such a manner that no harm came to me." "So Jumor told me," replied the king. "Release them." * * * * * In an instant Carnes was on his feet removing the helmet from Dr. Bird's head. The doctor struggled to his feet. "Dr. Bird," thought the king, "can you communicate with me easily?" "Yes, Your Majesty, but may I ask that you alter the vibration period of my comrade, Mr. Carnes? He cannot understand you with his present low period." The king stepped to the box with which Saranoff had been working. In response to his commands the helmet which had been on Dr. Bird's head was placed on the detective. The king made a few adjustments to the dials and signalled for the helmet to be removed. "Can you understand me, Mr. Carnes?" he asked mentally. The question leaped with startling clearness into the detective's head. Carefully he framed his answer. "I can understand you," said the king. "I will now sit in judgment on the appeal made to me. Dr. Bird tell me your story." With eloquent thoughts, Dr. Bird poured forth the history of the upper world. He told of the great war and the collapse of the Russian monarchy. He traced history to the fall of the moderate party and the rise of the Bolsheviki. He described the horrible conditions existing in Russia. At the end he reviewed the long battle he and Carnes had fought against Saranoff. When he had finished, the king questioned Carnes. The detective repeated the story in different words and the king turned to Saranoff. From the Russian's mind came a tissue of distorted facts and downright lies. He denied or twisted around everything that the detective and the scientist had said. When he had done with his tale, Astok sat in secret thought for a few minutes. "The tales you tell me are so far apart that I can give credence to none of them," he announced at length. "There is but one solution. Although they are never used, for the Selom have forgotten the meaning of a falsehood, we have instruments which will drag the truth from the brain of a liar. They are powerful and their use may easily be fatal. If a man gives forth the contents of his brain willingly, the process is not painful. If he tries to conceal anything, it is torture. Will you willingly submit your brains to the searching of this instrument?" "Gladly," came Dr. Bird's thought and Carnes reechoed it. "And you, Ivan Saranoff?" demanded the king. "I will not submit," thought the Russian sullenly. "You will be examined whether you submit willingly or not," replied Astok. "I am going to learn the truth though I kill you all to get it." * * * * * At the king's order, Jumor hastened from the laboratory. He returned in a few minutes with an apparatus similar to the one which Saranoff had planned to use on Dr. Bird, but larger, and with more dials on the crystal box. At a command from the king, Dr. Bird donned the helmet. The king manipulated switches and dials. Around Dr. Bird's head glowed a halo of crimson light. Twice an expression of momentary pain passed over his countenance. After half an hour, Astok cut on the power and nodded to Carnes. "Don't try to hold anything back, Carnesy," said Dr. Bird sharply. "You couldn't if you tried, and the process is very painful, I can assure you." With the helmet on his head the detective sat for ten minutes while the Selom king went through his brain. A dozen times he shrieked in agony but his moments of suffering were short. The king removed the helmet. "Your minds agree well," he thought. "Now I will examine the mind of my friend." The helmet was strapped on Saranoff. Instantly an expression of the utmost anguish crossed his face. Shriek after shriek of agony came from his writhing lips. Relentlessly the king applied more power. The cries of the Russian grew heartrending. Suddenly he grew rigid and slumped forward in his chair. Astok impassively manipulated his instrument. After half an hour, he opened the switch and removed the helmet. Under the ministrations of Jumor the Russian revived. The king sat in secret thought for an hour. "I have examined the brains of all of you," he announced at length, "and I find hopeless contradictions. Each of you believes thoroughly in his own social order. Both tell me of hopeless misery on the part of a large portion of his people. Both tell of horrible wars and suffering beyond my comprehension. The thoughts of all of you teem with modes of bringing death to your fellow beings. Your entire science his been perverted to the ends of destruction. Nothing of the sort can be realized by the Selom where truth, justice and mercy prevail. Each of you holds that his form of government is better than the other, and will cause less suffering and misery than the others'. None of you hold out hope of happiness for your fellow beings. I do not know which system is less obnoxious. My decision is made. The Selom will not interfere in the affairs of the upper-earth. You may fight out your battles without aid and without interference. "I will operate on both Ivan Saranoff and Dr. Bird. I will remove from their minds all knowledge of our science and instruments and leave them in the same condition that they were when they entered my realms. Each of you will then be returned to upper-earth, Ivan Saranoff to Russia, Dr. Bird and Mr. Carnes to the United States. The pilots, whom I hold prisoners, will have their mentalities restored and be returned to their homes. The planes we have captured, I will send off into time so that they can never be used for the misery of upper-earth men again. Jumor, you will carry out these orders." * * * * * "I wish I could remember how that time machine was built and operated," said Dr. Bird reflectively, as he sat in his private laboratory in the Bureau of Standards some time later, "but Jumor did his work well. I can't even remember what the thing looked like." "Well, Doctor, our trip below wasn't a loss. We removed a very real menace to the established order of things and we have got rid of Saranoff temporarily. It will take him some time to return here from Russia." "Three weeks or less," said Dr. Bird pessimistically. "However, we have gained one other thing. Did you notice this?" He pulled what looked like a watch from his pocket. Carnes regarded it with a puzzled expression. "No, Doctor, what is it?" "It is a very small camera which takes pictures one-half inch by seven-eighths. I had several opportunities to use it. I wasn't sure that it would work on such short waves, but it did. When Saranoff tries to return to this country, he will find that every immigration inspector and every member of the border patrol has an excellent likeness of him. That may hinder his entrance into the country for a little while." A CLASSIFICATION OF THE UNIVERSE A classification of everything in the universe, from the smallest thing yet measured, the electron, less than a millionth of a millionth of an inch in extent, to the biggest, a star system of a thousand million trillion miles, was described recently by Prof. Harlow Shapley of Harvard in a lecture at the commerce center of the College of the City of New York. Looking forward to a time when man will be able to measure even smaller things than the electron and larger than the greatest star system, Prof. Shapley explained that he had left the classification "open at both ends." Man, Prof. Shapley said, occupies a very small place in all this system, although, beside an electron or an atom, he is not so negligible, at that. "The survey," it was explained, "aims toward giving perspective. It gives a sane and modest view of man's place in the scheme. "The significance of the classification lies in the skeleton which is afforded all science to bring some measure of order out of the world's present chaotic knowledge of the systems of various kinds. "All systems find a place in this synthesis--atoms, comets and galaxies; man, radiation and the space-time complex. When looked at in this objective way, human beings, and all associated terrestrial organisms, appear only parenthetically in one of the subdivisions of the class of colloidal aggregates." Prof. Shapley discussed the concept of the cosmoplasma. "This," it was explained, "is at once the most mysterious and fundamental part of the universe, and only recently has come under direct experimental study. In brief, it is the substratum of materials throughout the universe, between planets, stars and the galaxies. "It has no obvious systematic organization. Hence it includes such diverse constituents as the high speed shooting stars, interstellar calcium gas and radiation itself. "Though no one has even seen an electron, the smallest thing included in the classification, they have been proved to exist in several ways. They give forth flashes of light that can be photographed. They have caused the bending of X-rays as they pass through a substance." [Illustration: The Readers' Corner _A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories] _Likes the "Corner"_ Dear Editor: This month's issue, May, has the best collection of letters you've ever published. All it lacked was a letter from Bernard J. Kenton, that master of epistles and super-science stories. One of your Readers would like to have "The Readers' Corner" omitted. For heaven's sake, don't take it out! I recognize it as one of the best features of our mag, and whenever I open the covers, turn to it directly after having glimpsed the table of contents and the announcement of the stories to appear in the forthcoming issue. Mr. Joseph R. Barnes--whose letter I enjoyed immensely, incidentally--will be interested in knowing that "The Mascot Deep" is already in book form and that "The Disintegration Machine" and "When the World Screamed," all by the same author, are under the same covers. He also will be interested in learning that Ray Cummings' fine story, "Sea Girl," is also between hard covers. The idea of putting out a quarterly is a dandy. The other science fiction quarterlies are mere text-books; there are, occasionally, of course, a few exceptions. The thought of the sort of fantastic action stories Astounding Stories publishes, put together in a magazine doubly thick, is a pleasing one to contemplate. Reading a story the length of "Brigands of the Moon" and of such literary merit, complete in one issue, is a thrill to be looked forward to. By all means put out such a magazine and have stories by Jack Williamson, R. F. Starzl and Edmond Hamilton, three of your best writers, in the first issue. I'm glad to see that Starzl is coming back with the next issue. More from him, please. And Hamilton and Williamson should appear more frequently, too. A question, Mr. Cummings: Shades of Polter and Tugh!--why must you always have a deformed character in your stories? Do they appeal to your dramatic sense? The news that we're going to have a story from Francis Flagg brings raptures of delight to my homely face. If it's a dimensional story, I'll cheer twice. When it comes to writing that kind of a story, Flagg's the king of them all. For sheer interest and originality, he's got his contemporaries in that field outdistanced with a distance that can only be counted by light-years. A pat on the back for Booth Cody and Sears Langwell, two staunch supporters. All our magazine needs is a story about time crusaders, or a planet of mechanical men. Omitting the authors already mentioned, I considered my favorites to be Rousseau, Eshbach, Diffin, Ernst, and Hal K. Wells. The best story you ever published? Who am I to answer? Why not put it up to the Readers for popular vote?--Jerome Siegel, 10522 Kimberley Ave., Cleveland, Ohio. _Explanation Wanted_ Dear Editor: This is my first letter to you, but I am a consistent Reader of Astounding Stories, and look forward to all of the coming issues. I have in mind a question, a friendly one, not one that I expect to or hope will seem to be trying to dampen any theories. This rocket-ship propulsion: as I understand it, there is a void between all planets, etc. If this is the case, how then can a rocket-propelled space ship go across this void? Since the exhaust of the rockets must rely on some material of a sort, or rather some sort of resistance to push the ship along, how does it push on nothing? Of course, near Earth it has the ground and then the atmosphere to push from, but out in the void, why not cut off and save fuel, therefore saving an extra heavy load of explosives, if rocket-ships were really practical in space flying? Yours for a thicker Astounding Stories--H. M. Crowson, Jr., Sumter, S. C. _Better Than Love Stories_ Dear Editor: I have started to read the Astounding Stories and enjoy it very much, although I do not find very many girls writing in to the "Corner." This mag is a thousand times better than all those love story magazines, and besides these stories are educational. I would rather read Astounding Stories than eat. They are not too scientific to be boresome, but they are just good enough to be real interesting. I wish you would publish some more stories like "The Lake of Light," "Dark Moon," etc. I especially like stories of the future and interplanetary novels. Anyone wishing to correspond with me will be welcome, as I love to write letters, and especially to anyone interested in the same things that I am.--(Miss) Bernice Goldberg, 147 Crescent Drive, Mason City, Iowa. _Kidding the Editor_ Dear Editor: I have just finished your January, 1932, issue of Astounding Stories. It was superb. Imagine my delight and surprise when I purchased the first issue this year! Smooth edges! Good quality of paper! I had a few other articles to purchase but I forgot all about them when I saw your magazine and rushed home to read it. It had a most admirable cover design by your best artist, H. W. Wesso. I turned to the Contents Page. The first story was by my favorite author, Ray Cummings, and called "The Space Car to Mars." Hot dog! My favorite theme, interplanetary travel. All the rest of the Authors were my favorites too! Edmond Hamilton, Capt. S. P. Meek, S. P. Wright, A. J. Burks and a short story by Jack Williamson. I turned to the next page and lo and behold, what do I see but an editorial. Wonders after wonders! It was called "The Possibilities of Space Travel." I was by this time beginning to think that at last the Editor had achieved a perfect magazine, and when I turned to the first story, the one by Ray Cummings, I knew it. There was a double-page illustration by Wesso in soft and realistic _colors_! Think of it! _Colored_ illustrations for each story! Well, I was so excited that I could hardly read, but at last I began. Boy, can Ray Cummings write interplanetary stories! Y como! (And how!) He wove scientific explanations into the story so very skillfully that one learned the scientific facts without knowing it. When he thought that the explanation of some invention would be boresome, he put a little note at the foot of the page. This, I remembered, was an admirable feature in his story "Brigands of the Moon," which you published two years ago. I then turned to "The Readers' Corner" only to discover that its name had been changed to "The Observatory." (I expect this name was taken from the suggestion of P. Leadbeater in the March, 1931, issue.) I discovered also, to my delight, that at the end of each letter the Editor made a few comments. I finished reading the Readers' letters and on the next page I found this leadline: "Science Questions and Answers." I read these with enthusiasm. I forgot to mention the raise in the price to twenty-five cents, but that is immaterial to me now since I have the perfect science fiction magazine. You have surely hitched your wagon (magazine) to a star now!--Clay Ferguson, Jr., 510 Park St. S. W., Roanoke, Va. _Sugar Candy_ Dear Editor: It is very seldom that I write to any page like "The Readers' Corner" but I have gotten rather tired of all those knocks. So I am writing to say that I have missed only one of your issues since the second, (Feb. 1930) and have found only one not to my liking, and I have forgotten what that is. I have no comment to make on your Authors. I don't care who writes it or what his literary reputation is--as long as the story is good; and you wouldn't print it if it weren't. As for exact scientific data--away with it. Some may wish to be bored with it, but I prefer action. I like your pictures. They are bizarre and give one an idea of what the Author is trying to convey. And they intrigue the interest before the story is read. I also like the size, because it is not awkward, and I like the edges because they make the pages easy to turn.--Mrs. Margaret M. Phinney, 1632 W. 3rd, Plainfield, N. J. "_Becoming a Habit_" Dear Editor: The May Astounding Stories seems to have nothing but complimentary letters in it. Mr. Magnuson probably tore out his hair when he saw all those letters. Not that Astounding Stories fully deserves all that praise. As one Reader said, words are inadequate to describe how wonderful your magazine is; however, I do not agree with those who denounce some of the Readers for making criticisms and suggestions. No magazine can be absolutely perfect, although Astounding Stories comes pretty near it. Even if it were perfect, the Readers would have to keep on making criticisms and suggestions in order to keep it that way. Besides, "The Readers' Corner" would become pretty dull and lifeless if you printed nothing but flattering letters. Most of the Readers who make unfavorable criticisms really have the welfare of the magazine in mind, else they wouldn't write at all. All of them aren't grouches. For example: a certain person sent one of the Science Fiction magazines about the most vicious and uncomplimentary letter that magazine had ever received. Yet in this issue of Astounding Stories he jumps on the knockers for daring to say anything against Astounding Stories! So you see that all knockers are not hopeless! I notice that you have complied with one of my requests, and have published an autobiography of Mr. Wentzler, although there is no picture. Perhaps, as Mr. Wentzler suggests, that is for the best. The readers of Astounding Stories are accustomed to pictures of grotesque and weird-looking inhabitants of other planets, but a picture of Mr. Wentzler may prove to be too much. Or, if you do put it in, you might entitle it "Wesso's Conception of a Martian." I hope Mr. Wentzler does not take the above paragraph too seriously. Like him, I was hit on the head when I was but a babe. In my case, it was a bronze statue that proved to be my undoing. Unfortunately, they were never able to straighten out the bend in that statue, which was the result of its contact with my dome. As for the stories in the May issue, they were all perfect, every one of them. Having all the stories perfect in each issue is becoming a habit with you. Keep up this habit. For first place I nominate "When the Moon Turned Green." I considered Mr. Wells' previous story, "The Gate to Xoran" the best short story you had ever printed, but the later one surpasses it. You will not be making a mistake if you give us many more stories by this Author. I do not need to say anything else about the rest of the stories--they are all excellent. Don't you think that it is about time for Astounding Stories to become a semi-monthly?--Michael Fogaris, 157 Fourth Street, Passaic, N. J. _Located at Last_ Dear Editor: I read every Science Fiction magazine on the market, and can truthfully say that yours is the best of them all. Of course, there is always room for improvement, and some of the stories published in the May issue were not so hot. Meek always gives me a pain in the neck, but Cummings is an ace, though the installment in this issue dragged considerably. In Diffin you have a master writer; and I was tickled to death to see finally in "our" mag a story by that peerless team, Schachner and Zagat. I was wondering how long it would take you to locate them, as you have done with most of the other stars in Science Fiction.--Bill Merriam, Ocean Front, Venice, Cal. _"Stories Aid Considerably"_ Dear Editor: I cannot rightfully say what story was the best in Astounding Stories. For the man who balances stories for their values is just kidding himself. That is my theory and I am ready at all times to stand in back of it. Though I have only been reading Astounding Stories since January, I am a thoroughly convinced fan. For the past two years I have been puttering with chemistry and physics in a laboratory of my own, and the science mentioned in these stories aids considerably. I would sincerely appreciate letters from Readers of Astounding Stories. I will answer all.--Lawrence Schumaker, 1020 Sharon St., Jamesville, Wis. _To the Rescue, Somebody!_ Dear Editor: You're getting better all the time. The April number was the best yet, and the May issue is not far behind it. The cover on the May issue was wonderful. "Dark Moon" is the best story by Diffin that you have yet printed. "When the Moon Turned Green" and "The Death Cloud" are both masterpieces. "The Exile of Time" is a fine story, but I cannot understand the explanations. How could the murder of Major Atwood be mentioned in the records of New York? Why could not one see events in which he participated? Of course, Ray Cummings perhaps knows more about it than I, but I think a lot of his ideas are the bunk. I do not think that your stories should be full of science and nothing else, but they should at least observe known scientific facts.--J. J. Johnston, Mowbray, Man., Can. _A "Two-Timer"_ Dear Editor: I was surprised but pleased to receive the answer to the question I asked in my letter to you. It is indeed a pleasure to read a magazine that takes enough interest in its patrons to personally answer a letter written to it. Thank you very much. And I am certainly glad that we are to get a sequel to "Dark Moon." I wish that I could personally tell Mr. Diffin what I think of his writing. I am anxiously awaiting the next issue of "our mag." It certainly does seem a long time between issues. When are you going to start putting it on the stands twice a month? I know that thousands of Readers would bless the day you did it. Please keep up the good work; and I know you will, for the longer I read A. S. the more I enjoy it. The serial, "The Exile of Time," is a story par excellence. But I know the forthcoming sequel to "Dark Moon" will be a super-story. My idea of reading is that if a story is worth reading once it is worth reading twice, and I have never seen any story in your book that was not worth reading once. Nuff said. I will answer any letters written me. I hope to hear from plenty of Readers--C. G. Davis, 531 S. Millard, Chicago, Ill. _And Sequel It Has_ Dear Editor: I have just finished the May number of Astounding Stories, and want to send my contribution to "The Readers' Corner." The novelette, "Dark Moon," by Diffin, is rather an outstanding story, in my opinion. It is plausible and convincing, and the literary quality is high. I have a feeling that this should have a sequel, and wonder if others will not agree with me. That Astounding Stories is the best of the Science Fiction Magazines is something that scarcely lends itself to argument. Without questions, it leads them all. Take the present number for instance: Diffin, Meek and Cummings, three top-notchers, all in one issue.--A. J. Harris, 1525 Bushnell Ave., South Pasadena, Cal. _I'm Afraid Not_ Dear Editor: I have read every one of your Astounding Stories and think there is no other magazine on the market like it. Only one kick: it doesn't appear often enough. I should like to see it every week; every two weeks, anyway. I like every story you print, and I think the size of your magazine is perfect. I have saved every issue I read, and now have seventeen of them. "Phalanxes of Atlans" and "Marooned Under the Sea" were especially good. "The Readers' Corner" is fine, but I don't like so many brickbats thrown. I should like to see more bouquets given to you. There is one thing I'd like to see you print. You probably have heard of the Fox Movietone picture, "Just Imagine," an interplanetary story of 1930. I'd like to see it printed in Astounding Stories more than anything else. It would make a fine serial. I don't suppose it would be possible for you to print it, though, would it?--Ernestine Small, 1151 Brighton Ave., Portland, Ore. _Better to Verse_ Dear Editor: Astounding Stories can't be beat; Its every issue is a treat. The finest authors of the age Appear upon Astounding's stage. There's Diffin, Cummings, Leinster, Burks; An all-star cast that's sure the works. Harl Vincent, Wells, and Starzl, too, Belong among this famous crew. Ed Hamilton and Vic Rousseau With Captain Meek complete the show. Together they are sure the best; That's why Astounding leads the rest! --Booth Cody, Bronx, N. Y. _Another "Two-Timer"_ Dear Editor: I have just finished reading the May issue of Astounding Stories for the second time. I have been reading Astounding Stories for over a year, and so far I can find only one thing wrong with it, and that is that it is not thick enough. In other words, you do not put enough stories in it. Some people who write in to the "Corner" say that the paper is rotten. I still have all my magazines, and the paper is as good as new. The paper is also good on the eyes, as it does not reflect light like a mirror, as some paper does. Some people say the pages are uneven and hard to turn. Like Mr. H. N. Snager, I become so interested in the stories I do not notice such trifles. Anybody who yells about the color of the cover, the durability of the paper, is not very interested in Astounding Stories. Why don't you either print a full page picture at the beginning of each story or else keep the half page picture at the beginning and put another picture halfway through the story?--Wm. McCalvy, 1244 Beech St., St. Paul, Minn. _A Buttercup for Paul_ Dear Editor: Congratulations! Astounding Stories has scored again! Not satisfied with illustrations by the mighty Wesso only, you have secured a drawing by the equally mighty Paul! May we see many more by him?--Thomas L. Kratzer, 3595 Tullamore Rd., Cleveland Heights, Ohio. _Nerves Now Better?_ Dear Editor: In Gould you have a fine illustrator; in Wesso a better one, but as I skip the page on which the story, a truly remarkable one by R. F. Starzl, "The Earthman's Burden" is on, my eye is caught by--yes! a drawing by Paul, good old reliable Mr. Paul, the king of Science Fiction illustrators. Now that you have him on your artist's staff I wouldn't feel at all bad seeing a painting of his on the cover. The June issue was a dazzler. "Manape the Mighty" held me spellbound. The others were all excellent stories. The cover painting by Wesso was good, but I have already seen one of that sort in a previous issue. Why not give us more interplanetary illustrations of space ships and the like as in "Brigands of the Moon"? Another thing, it is nine-thirty. I must be asleep by eleven-thirty in order to start for school early the next morning. I allow myself two hours in which to read Astounding Stories. I turn to the contents section; I see a story there which I wish to read. It is on page 604. I turn the pages: 599, 601, 607 come in rapid succession, all but the page I look for. This goes on for some time until at last the roughened edge of 604 comes into view. By then my nerves are on edge and I find it is almost eleven-thirty! But I cannot say that you do not stand up with the foremost of all magazines, and the way you are improving now you'll soon forge far in front.--Arthur Berkowitz, 763 Beck St., New York City. _Some Goal!_ Dear Editor: Permit me to congratulate Mr. Diffin on his latest masterpiece, "Holocaust." Every once in a while Mr. Diffin produces a story that bids fair to eclipse all its contemporaries. His former story, "The Power and the Glory," could also be placed in that category. Somehow, that story has become indelibly written on my memory. The philosophy expressed in it was overwhelming. It would have done justice to a Shakespeare. And now, you can imagine how delighted I am to learn that Mr. Diffin has once again graced us with a yarn of the same class. Man, if you continue to publish such stories as these frequently, you'll have the public terming Astounding Stories literature of the highest grade! However, I won't entreat Mr. Diffin to write these stories spasmodically, as the long wait between tales adds lure to the stories. And now for Mr. Burks. Ah--here is an extraordinary chap! Mr. Burks is your most versatile author. Of his several stories, each has opened up a new vista in the field of Science Fiction, and he is a thoroughbred in each endeavor. If you want to be convinced, read the opening chapters of "Manape The Mighty," and I will wager any sum you won't lay down the story until you've read every word. As a matter of fact, all the stories are good. And the bill for next month appears to be exceptionally unusual. It is very evident that you are on the road to perfection. Smooth cut edges, the acquisition of the greatest of artists, Paul, all point to the accelerating progress Astounding Stories is achieving. We Readers are frequently asked as to how we would run the magazine if we were Editors. Well, here is my conception of the ideal magazine: Smooth paper, no advertisements whatsoever, the interior illustrations done by an artist with the talent of a Paul and a Wesso combined, and made in water colors, too. Then I would only have such renowned Authors as Burroughs, MacIsaac and a few others. I suppose that's the eternal dream of the modern Editor, but who can say that you, Mr. Bates, won't evolve Astounding Stories in the same manner. At any rate, there's a goal to aim for.--Mortimer Weisinger, 266 Van Cortlandt Ave., Bronx, N. Y. _Guilty_ Dear Editor: You are hereby summoned to appear in Court on attempt of murder. Following are the charges: Stopping my heart from beating when I saw the smooth edges in Astounding Stories, and making my heart miss five beats when I saw "The Earthman's Burden" illustrated by Paul! I now think Astounding Stories has reached its highest peak. Arthur J. Burks' story was a wow. I hope he works on a story as he said he would in "The Readers' Corner" if he gets enough requests. And Charles Willard Diffin! Here's a writer for you. I think the first story he ever wrote was published in Astounding Stories. Don't lose him. His "Holocaust" is his best, with the probable exception of "The Power and the Glory." I don't think the last mentioned ever got enough praise. I expect to see it reprinted some day in The Golden Book Magazine. It's distinctly smooth paper style. And of course Sewell Peaslee Wright's "John Hanson" stories are top-notchers. And Ray Cummings. Must we mention his story? We all know what to expect when we read one of his stories. I hope you have another serial by him soon. I'm sure you'll be deluged with letters because of the even edges and the illustrations by Paul (who should draw at least two in every issue), but I hope you'll print my letter, because I never had a letter of mine in print, and want to get a thrill seeing this published.--Anthony Caserta, 4575 Park Ave., New York, N. Y. "_Very Pretty Problems Here_" Dear Editor: The letters by P. Schuyler, J. N. Mosleh, and Jackson Gee in the last number sure do raise some very neat possibilities in Science. Anent travel in time, just what would you, Mr. Schuyler, expect to see if "John Doe" at 40 years (1931) went back to 1892 and met "John Doe" of that date on Main Street of his old home town? I suspect that two bodies cannot simultaneously contain the same ego, constant-entity, personality, or soul. Which brings me to Mr. Mosleh, to ask: Just how is the self-realizant ego, which is conscious that "I am I" unchangingly for life, in any sense a derivative of the unstable, rapidly changing body? Mr. Burks and Mr. Lee elucidate a very pretty little problem on the same lines. The cranial transplantation and the "atomic patterns" are admittedly scientifically and reasonably possible. But there is a real point of doubt: Would the personality accompany the brain in transplantation? True, the brain is the control room; but--? And would the "atomic patterns," perfectly as they could duplicate a body, which is unstable by nature, work on the essentially stable ego (relatively) with its inherent capacity for continuity? If not, would not the synthetic "Extra Man" be a human being minus personality? Some very pretty problems here. I'd much like to see a story along the lines of item 3 in Mr. Burks' letter.--L. Partridge, Box 84, Cornish, Me. _What Price Smoothness?_ Dear Editor: I have just finished the June issue of Astounding Stories. The cover was excellent, as were all the illustrations, except perhaps Manape's arms should have been a little larger. I see that the edges of the paper are now smooth, but still the leaves stick out beyond one another, so what good does that do? "Manape the Mighty," by Arthur J. Burks, was superb, gripping. I suppose a lot of Readers will rise violently against the love interest, but, I ask you, just where would this particular story be without the romance in it? This particular story, you understand; not every story. "Holocaust," by Charles Willard Diffin, was next best with "The Man from 2071" a close second. "The Earthman's Burden" was at least entertaining, which this installment of "The Exile of Time" was not.--Robert Baldwin, 359 Hazel Ave., Highland Park, Ill. _Time Trouble Answers Wanted_ Dear Editor: I have read your magazine for nearly two years, but this is my first letter to the "Corner." The first and second installments of Ray Cummings' "Exile of Time" prompted me to write this. There is a story you can well be proud of. I should like to obtain it in book form. Mr. Cummings is a wonder. I have read many time stories, but his is at the top of my list. If there is any other "time" fan in A. S.'s "Readers' Corner" I should like to have a letter discussion on it with him. None of my acquaintances care a whoop about that type of story, so I have to thrash out all my problems by myself. There are some questions I would like to ask about "The Exile of Time." 1--In the event of the appearance of the time-traveling cage, the story ran, to use Ray's own words: "Suddenly before me there was a white ghost. A shape. A wraith of something which a moment before had not been there. The shape was like a mist. Then in a second or two it was solid." Why should the cage appear as a mist at first? If there is any amount of time separating two things, those two things are invisible to each other, are they not? Any amount of time would include a second, and even a millionth part of a second. In that case, the cage should suddenly appear in the twinkling of an eye, with no trace of a blur. 2--Supposing I were standing at a spot five feet from a time-traveling vehicle. The latter would be traveling through time at 3 P. M., while I am at 2 P. M.--an hour's difference between us. It would be invisible to me then, but an hour later when I would be at 3 P. M. and the machine at 4 P. M., then I would see it as it appeared at 3 P. M. Whatever movement it would make in space, I would not see until an hour later. Is that right? Then is it not possible that each individual is existing in a different time realm? And we see them, or I see the other fellow as he appeared when my time caught up with his? I had better quit before I get hooted off the stage. 3--If a man invented a time-traveler and went back to the year of the beginning of the World War, knowing all he has read in history, could he not take steps to prevent a war that has already happened? Or would that power be denied him? Somewhere in the story is said that the past cannot be changed, and that any effort to do so would be useless. In my belief, no matter where or when a man goes into the past, if he appears in a year or day that has already gone by, he is changing the past. Then there should be no room for doubt: time-travelling is impossible. It never will be done (An Astounding Stories fan should be kicked for using the word "impossible"!). Let's have more good thought-provoking time tales. And get lots of stories from Cummings--he's a wow. I sure would like to spend an evening at a campfire with him.--Allen Spoolman, 613--4th Avenue, W., Ashland, Wisc. "_Eh, What?_" Dear Editor: Just got my June issue of our good mag, Astounding Stories, and I think that it is great. One thing you should do, however, is have a more mechanical cover design. In regard to Miss Gertrude Hemkin's letter in the June issue of A. S., let me say that I just wonder what she would like to expect in our "The Readers' Corner" if she does not like to hear what others think of our Astounding Stories. Maybe she would like to read about checker debates or the like. Eh, what? If Rex Wertz of Oregon, who is now located somewhere in Los Angeles, will drop me a line, perhaps we can become acquainted as he suggested.--Edward Anderson, 123 Hollister Ave., Ocean Park, Cal. _Hope He Does_ Dear Editor: I have never been interested before in a magazine enough to write to their departments, like "The Readers' Corner," and I have read plenty of magazines. "Beyond the Vanishing Point" stands head and shoulders above any story I have ever read. I have only one thing to say about your other stories: they are almost as good as the one I just mentioned. I have a few words to say about these people who throw brickbats at every story they read. I wouldn't be surprised if they just read the story so they could find something wrong with it. There's one in particular who wrote a few lines in the June issue about your taking the word "science" off the front page, saying there was no science in the magazine, anyway. What does the title say? Well that's what 90% of the Readers want, anyway. I hope that chap reads this. Well, I'll sign off. Here is a little toast to the magazine: "Long may it live."--Earl Rogers, 409--16th St., Galveston, Tex. _Two, Better Than One?_ Dear Editor: The two outstanding stories in the May issue of A. S. were "The Death Cloud," by Nat Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat, and "Dark Moon," by Charles W. Diffin. Common reasoning tells me that the heads of two Science Fiction writers can formulate a story better than one. I couldn't help admire Mr. Schachner and Mr. Zagat when I read their story because of the cleverness shown in it. Please give us a story by them every month.--Ray Y. Tilford, Rockport, Ky. "_And Here I Am_" Dear Editor: It's about time for me to concede that your or "our" magazine is the best I have read. Ten issues have come into my hands and I am perfectly well satisfied with the line of fiction that you publish. I have read about fifty different magazines on the market, and I am sure that Astounding Stories is the best of them all. I have followed the magazine for seven months and that is the best amount of reading any magazine can boast for me. In your case, if the magazine lasts seventy years, you can be sure that I will read it for that period of time (provided I live that long). I notice that several brickbats have come into your hands and that you have printed them. Well, that shows sportsmanship on your part. I would suggest to those who are not satisfied with Astounding Stories to duck their head in a pail of water and pull it out after a period of ten minutes. Those who criticize the stories because of the lack of science have no idea what it takes to write a story. Please be willing to concede the Author the right of way. He is giving his theories and not yours. However, in some cases where the truth is an established fact, I can see where the Readers may present a justified argument. But they should remember that we are not all perfect and that mistakes are made by all. It is not fair to criticize an Author by denouncing him. I don't favor reprints at all, but I can stay with the majority if they do. It is a foregone conclusion that you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time. In this case substitute the word "please" in the saying for "fool." I am at present reading Charles W. Diffin's novel "The Pirate Planet." It is one of the best interplanetary novels that I have ever read. Give us some more of Diffin; he has the goods. I must say that you have an immensely long list of popular authors, and it must cost quite a little amount of money to maintain them. Keep the size of the magazine as it is now; it fits conveniently into my bookcase, and I believe many of your Readers will say the same. Now some of my favorite stories. "The Ape-Men Of Xlotli" was one of the best stories that I have read in years. Give us some more along this line. It offers rest after one has just finished reading an interplanetary novel. "Monsters of Moyen" was another story that I greatly enjoyed. Very few people believe that the world shall ever have a conqueror again, and I am one of them; but it is interesting to see if there ever will be a conqueror and what means he shall employ to get that title. "Brigands of the Moon" was the worst story I read in your magazine. That must have been Mr. Cummings' off story. But he certainly has come back fine through his later stories. "The Tentacles from Below" was another great masterpiece. Anthony Gilmore's tale was the first that I have read of that author, and I will be delighted to see more. Funny how I developed into a Reader of Science Fiction. I exhausted all other fields of reading, and having nothing else to read I delved into a science magazine and here I am.--Michael Racano, 51 Brookwood St., East Orange, N. J. _Turns to It First_ Dear Editor: The June issue of Astounding Stories can't be beat. What an issue! As it seems to be the usual thing, I'll start at the front and go to the back. The cover: very colorful: another proof of Wesso's talent. And speaking of artists, I was very pleasantly surprised at the unexpected illustration by Paul. I certainly hope you can get him, if not for cover pictures, at least for the inside illustrations. (Too bad you are modest about printing complimentary letters, for I mean this to be all roses, no brickbats.) "The Man from 2071"--another good story of "John Hanson's." "Manape the Mighty," although somewhat like the Tarzan series, is a wonderfully fine story. "Holocaust"--good. "The Earthman's Burden," as all of Starzl's, was exceptionally good. "The Exile of Time"--getting better every issue. "The Readers' Corner" as usual was one of the most interesting parts of the magazine. I always turn to it first, for I know I will have an enjoyable time reading every letter. And, by the way, the significance of "Manape" just came to me. Don't know why I didn't see it before.--Linus Hogenmiller, 502 N. Washington St., Farmington, Mo. _Likes the "Joke"_ Dear Editor: Although I have read only two issues of Astounding Stories, I feel the urge to write a line. The June number was better than the May issue. Arthur J. Burks' story, "Manape the Mighty," was excellent, though I am not so strong for the idea of having Barter escape the apes and carry on his experiments as suggested by the Author. It would be against common sense to have the apes allow him to make a getaway. The prize winner in the May issue was "Dark Moon." There might be a sequel to that, and I'd like to see it. I like a little variety in a magazine. The Readers who say they do not care for stories scientifically impossible may be right; in that case "The Exile of Time" is the greatest joke ever written--yet I like it immensely. One thing that is impossible is the destruction of matter. It can be broken up, or condensed as in "When Caverns Yawned," but not destroyed completely. Mr. W. H. Flowers evidently has a grudge against the fair sex. The love interest is not necessary in short stories, it's true; but what kind of a long novel would it be if the hero had no incentive, nothing to risk his life for, except a possible word of praise from the scientific world? No matter how much a man loves his work it is my opinion that he would not die for the purpose of proving his point. Not being able to take a hint, the knockers still appear to mar an otherwise perfect day--this time in the person of Harry Pancoast. If Astounding Stories ever gets so bad that not even one story in it is of interest to me--I'll just drop out of the waiting line--and keep my mouth closed.--Richard Waite, 8 South Ave., Warsaw, N. Y. _Never Noticed That_ Dear Editor: Just bought my latest copy of Astounding Stories, and what an edition! First, the cover (Wesso has all others beat by a mile). Then, the stories. Well, take "Manape the Mighty": it is one of the best Science Fiction stories I have ever read. "The Exile of Time" was great. Have you ever noticed that almost every critic of Science Fiction is either a teacher or a female? Jim Nicholson and I certainly know that.--Billy Roche, Sec. Interplanetary Dept. of the B. S. B., 101 St. Elmo, San Francisco, Cal. _Sunflowers for All_ Dear Editor: Miracles do happen! I was never so thoroughly astounded in all my life as when I received the great June issue of "our" magazine with _straight_ edges! Thank you and all concerned for publishing "our" magazine sans rough edges. The smooth edges ought to cut the reading time of Astounding Stories down to an hour and forty-five minutes as we always used to waste a lot of time fumbling about with the pages. But if I was astounded at the long awaited straight edges, I was still more amazed at the great innovation of an illustration by Paul! Let's have more and more of his remarkable drawings. Astounding Stories is truly great now with its fine Editor, splendid Authors, excellent stories, worthy illustrations, essential "Readers' Corner," Paul (Ah!) and good binding! Yes! You heard right! I said good binding! Of course it makes amusing material to write about the binding and remark that it comes off after once handling it, or that the paper is soon worn to shreds, but such matters shouldn't be honestly believed. I have every issue of Astounding Stories (eighteen great numbers!) and each and every issue is as good as new. I have never had any trouble with the covers departing from the rest of the magazine or the pages becoming moldy. Sewell Peaslee Wright's "The Man from 2071" is just perfect. I enjoy nothing more than one of his realistic stories of Commander John Hanson. We want more! Arthur J. Burks' novelette, "Manape the Mighty," was clever. I had a premonition that I wouldn't like this story, and in fact told a friend so. It just goes to prove that hunches can be wrong. Charles Willard Diffin should be proud of his "Holocaust." I'm sure that most Readers enjoyed it as much as I did. Of course, Starzl's "The Earthman's Burden" was a peach. His stories of other planets are always weird, bizarre, and yet they seem to ring true. That is the magic of R. F. Starzl! Paul illustrated it in his own unapproachable style. "The Exile of Time," as everyone agrees, is Cummings' best. I am waiting for its thrilling conclusion. I am one who would like Astounding Stories to be a large size magazine, but it can easily be seen that everyone can't be pleased. If you'll just leave it the way it is--i. e., straight edges, illustrations by Paul, same authors and same excellent Editor--I'll be satisfied.--Forrest J. Ackerman, 530 Staples Ave., San Francisco, Cal. "_Great Relief_" Dear Editor: The story, "Manape the Mighty," by Arthur J. Burks, was by far one of the most thrilling and educational stories that ever appeared in Astounding Stories. Of course, others will disagree, but an Author cannot please all. It is of great relief to change from the monotonous every day kind of stories that appear in Collier's, Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post to the refreshing and soothing "impossible" type of A. S. Ever since the January issue, I've been an ardent pursuer of Astounding Stories. To me it is even more astounding that I seem to like it more and more each succeeding issue. I find it, undoubtedly, the best magazine of its type. I've tried others of similar type, but it seems as if my mind couldn't grasp the knack of their stories, which were either boresome with scientific and technical explanations, or, as one might say, "not a darn thing to them." R. F. Starzl is a wonderful author. Ray Cummings, Sewell Peaslee Wright, Charles Willard Diffin, Captain S. P. Meek, Edmond Hamilton, F. V. W. Mason and Murray Leinster are excellent. There is one thing that I'd like to see in Astounding Stories, and I'm sure many of the Readers would, too. It is always my habit to read while eating. To finish the story in time, I pick the shortest one. Sad to say, Astounding has rather long stories. How about an occasional short story? I'm sure your readers will approve. They would go over with a bang!--P. Nikolaioff, 4325 S. Seeley Ave., Chicago, Ill. _Sometimes Gets Mad_ Dear Editor: Although I have been an interested reader of Astounding Stories since its inception, this is the first time I have written. Astounding Stories have been so good lately that I just had to write and compliment you on your good work. There are, however, some criticisms I have to make. The first is: I think Mr. W. H. Flowers of Pittsburgh, Pa, is right when he says you sometimes have too much love in some of your stories. The second is, I think it would be a good thing to put notes at the end of a page to explain some of the terms for the Readers who read mostly for the science part. That is what I do, and I get mad when I read something that does not give me the inside dope on it. Outside of that I think Astounding Stories can't be beat. One more thing before I close. Keep Capt. S. P. Meek on your staff or I will stop reading Astounding Stories, as much as I would hate to do that. I think he is your best author by a long shot.--Wilson Adams, Seat Pleasant, Md. _From a "Female Woman"_ Dear Editor: The comment of Jim Nicholson in the June issue that it is only "the females" who consider him "cracked" for reading Science Fiction, and only women who do not care for science in the stories, moves me to break into "The Readers' Corner" for the first time. I happen to be a "female woman," and it is the men in our family and circle of friends who laugh at me for buying every Science Fiction magazine and book that I can find. They call them my "nutty magazines." I have to admit that I do not understand much of the scientific explanation, since my mind does not run along mathematical or scientific lines, but I do not mind having that in stories, for those who do care for it and can understand it, as I can simply skip over it, taking what I can grasp and letting the rest go. It doesn't spoil the story for me. I have no criticism, constructive or otherwise, to make. I enjoy the stories with some romance involved, and enjoy those without equally well. My own preference would be that you continue using rough paper and your present mechanical construction, so that more money will be available to pay for the stories. Few of us keep the magazines anyway, so there isn't so much need for expensive paper. I like interplanetary stories best, I think; but I was intensely interested in "Beyond the Vanishing Point," "Manape the Mighty" and "Holocaust." All different, but all very good. I can't remember one I did not like. My work requires much study and concentration. I have recommended to several men who do similar mental work that they follow my plan of securing delightful relaxation by losing themselves in another world through Science Fiction magazines. Most of them find it as restful as I do.--Berenice M. Harrison, Angola, Ind. _Likes R. F. Starzl_ Dear Editor: It has been my purpose to write to you before, but due to an extraordinary amount of detail work which I have had to do, I have been unable to. I have read your marvelous magazine ever since the first issue came into my hands, and I can honestly say that there is no other book on the market which has held my attention as long as yours has. I congratulate you on your very interesting magazine. Arthur J. Burks, in his latest story, has conceived an entirely new type of story, and I, for one, think it very interesting. Plenty of science for the laymen and enough interest for the others. I liked R. F. Starzl's story, "The Earthman's Burden," very much, and I hope you will have more by this author soon. His stories are perfect. Starzl is a deep thinker, and I am right here to say that there is a man who understands men and men's longings and inhibitions.--A. W. Gowing, 17 Pasadena St., Springfield, Mass. "_The Readers' Corner_" All readers are extended a sincere and cordial invitation to "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and join in our monthly discussion of stories, authors, scientific principles and possibilities--everything that's of common interest in connection with our Astounding Stories. Although from time to time the Editor may make a comment or so, this is a department primarily for Readers, and we want you to make full use of it. Likes, dislikes, criticisms, explanations, roses, brickbats, suggestions--everything's welcome here; so "come over in 'The Readers' Corner'" and discuss it with all of us! _The Editor._ * * * * * A LIVING, DISEMBODIED HEART A disembodied heart, not only still steadily beating but writing, as it throbbed, a permanent, minutely precise record of its pulsations, was exhibited recently at Princeton in a demonstration of the newest instrument developed by science for the advancement of medicine and psychology. The device, invented by A. L. Loomis of Tuxedo Park, N. Y., and perfected in collaboration with Dr. Edmund N. Harvey, professor of psychology at Princeton University, is called the Loomis chronograph. It will facilitate study of the phenomena of heart action and the effect of drugs on that vital organ. The chronograph opens the way to the accurate measuring and recording of the speed and variation of human heart beats over long periods, even during the sleeping hours of the subject, which is expected to prove of great value to physiologists and criminologists. The heart of the recent demonstration was that of a turtle, removed from the reptile while alive, freed of all extraneous tissue and suspended in a physiological salt solution exactly duplicating body conditions. In this state the organ continues to beat for thirty-six hours, at the same time setting down, by means of the chronograph, a graphic history of the approximately 72,000 pulsations it makes in that time. With each beat the tiny organism pulled down a little lever that dipped a fine filament into a drop of mercury and made a contact that transmitted an electric impulse to the chronograph. There it was translated to a fraction of a second into a record inked on a chart. Introduction into the solution of nicotine--one part in 10,000--and of adrenalin--one part in a billion--was immediately noted by a marked retarding of the heart tempo in the first case and swift acceleration in the second. Use of the chronograph to study the action of any heart that can be removed from the living body is possible, the scientist said, adding that a comparatively simple adjustment will make possible recording of the human heart by a device applied to the chest. Application of the instrument to tests of human nerve reactions and to psychological tests is forecast. * * * * *